In and Out of Love with Theater
In an earlier issue of artpress (406, December 2013), Georges Banu observed that theater, caught between two opposite poles—the long duration of text and the short duration of representation—seems to be suffering a certain disaffection, a loss of aura, in
“You can prefer Mozart to Bach, Dostoyevsky to Tolstoy, but no one would dare revile music or literature. You can prefer Manet to Courbet without calling painting itself into question,” wrote Georges Banu. Theater, in contrast, is inevitably called into question, and the debate remains perpetually unresolved. Loved or unloved as an art closely embedded in life, in fact life’s exhilarating and dubious double, performed by human beings on a stage that constitutes a microcosm, theater has been the topic of polemics from the ancient Greeks and the early Church Fathers to today. Shakespeare elevated it to the status of a metaphor and called all the world a stage; Plato called it deceit. Such debate is inherent in this impure art that has always been torn between its partisans and prosecutors, whether they be actors or theatergoers. Banu interrogates the reasons for this discord, examining the arguments of theater-makers themselves, the artists who love and those who reprove this “bastard” practice. There are no answers, but the questions keep returning, since “you can wake up in the morning as a theater lover and end the day as its diehard adversary,” Banu says. Then there is Peter Handke’s strikingly ambiguous attitude: “When I was feeling that there’s nothing as strange as the theater, I decided to write a play to say goodbye to it. The result was Insulting the Audience.”
SEEING, NOT SEEING
The Théâtre de l’Odéon was the venue for a conversation among artists whose relationship with theater is complex but whose hunger for it is never sated and who put it at the center of their practice without ever resolving this tension. This conflicted relationship defines them and makes them unique. Neither entirely won over to it nor completely opposed to it, they have decided not to decide. They tackled four themes that constitute the dialectical core of theater in a series of discussions in a theater hall named after Roger Blin, the actor and director who, unlike Jean- Louis Barrault, never let excessive love for the stage cloud his judgment, and recognized Beckett as emblematic of the binomial relationship affection/disaffection. Following are excerpts from these discussions, meant not as judgments but food for thought. Yves Bonnefoy famously wrote that the best conditions for viewing a Shakespeare play would be total darkness. The playwright and director Valère Novarina offers a more nuanced approach to the question. “I don’t think we can talk about the visible and the invisible as entirely distinct. There is no dichotomy between them. The invisible is just another layer of reality, one that adds complexity to what is seen. It’s something that makes us see something else besides what’s in front of us. I’m looking for a ‘logosgraph’ that would reveal language, the ballistics of language. I want to observe language as a kind of dark matter in space that can blow
us away.” For Laure Adler, a writer and assiduous theater buff, “We go to the theater to communicate, to share, to be part of a community, because that community can give rise to something that is essential for our personal stock of mental images. When we are together like that, as our minds wander, mental images arise. That’s the invisible produced by what’s visible onstage.”
LETTING IN A BREATH OF FRESH AIR
Theater today is less inward-looking than ever before, and instead of purity what it seeks is to recover is all the love it used to enjoy. It does so by broadening its scope to allow alluvium to flow in from outside and let in a reviving breath of fresh air. Pippo Delbono has made this a guiding principle. “I find things brought in from outside theater nourishing when they turn out to be what I need. Nothing is foreign to me, I explore other fields, I work with other people, but at the end of the day it’s the gut feeling that counts. Theater is my gut, in the Oriental sense of the stomach being the radiant source of the powers within us all. Theater is like my mother, in that it gave me the strength to travel elsewhere. I always come back to it to pose the basic questions like death and redemption. We’re lifelong students in theater. We have to be always seeking, always traveling.” The novelist Laurent Gaudé admits, “I write far away from theater… I like to get away from theater and go out into the world to find things to bring back to the stage, to amplify it, or to find forms that twist tradition. That’s what might make it possible to find the right answers to the essential question of plot. Writing novels has helped me get beyond theater fashions and the whole milieu and be able to sustain my desire and hope. I’m not running away from theater; rather, I’m exploring other lands of writing. I’m happy to inhabit the bastard region between novels and theater.” Nietzsche’s celebrated words are often taken up by adversaries of the theater who deplore the presence of living human beings, considering them a raw material unsuitable for the exigencies of art in terms of mastery and endurance. To this day the best known of such critics is still Gordon Craig, who eulogized the actor as marionette, a utopian conception shared to some degree by modern stage directors like Robert Wilson and Tadeusz Kantor. René de Ceccaty, a writer who worked with Alfredo Arias, explains, “For me, the human presence and death are connected. Anyone who finds themselves on stage is in great danger and sometimes the tools of the theater, such as the mask and the marionette, can protect them. Alfredo asks his actors not to dehumanize themselves but, once on stage, to abandon their personal anxieties and focus on bringing order to chaos. Wilson wants that too, but he also needs the human vibration, which is what makes him irreplaceable.”
HUMAN, ALL TOO HUMAN
Is it because they find human beings lacking that many directors resort to using machines and other cutting-edge technologies? “The question is not the re- lationship between the living and the dead,” but between the human and the mechanical, suggests Jean- François Peyret, who readily uses computers and synthesized images in his productions. The stage is a privileged site for the interaction between very human actors and technology. It’s good to achieve order, but not at the expense of the human. Marionettes and puppets may seem alive, but they also add an element of strangeness, which is exactly why they are used. Theater is a domain f or experimentation, and the dividing line between the living and everything that belongs to the domain of the mechanical is an essential question that remains to be resolved.”
FLEEING THEATER
A desire to flee often afflicts uneasy stage directors who do not feel at home in theater but continue to practice it anyway. They find themselves in a strained and even tense relationship characterized by falling in and out of love. The late Patrice Chéreau was an excellent example. He was invited to take part in the discussions and his absence due to terminal illness was strongly felt. He had been slated for a dialogue with Krszystof Warlikowski, his younger doppelganger. The latter confides, “At first I wasn’t particularly in love with theater. In my studies, I wanted to know about philosophy and aesthetics. But I discovered that I could learn more rapidly in theater than in college. Later I realized the danger posed by familiarity in theater, so I’ve increasingly rejected repertory theater. It’s a lie, and you have to flee from it.” Accidents are more interesting than perfection in theater. That’s the humanity of it. “Every time I do theater I ask myself how I can shake people up. Consequently, I get more and more lost; I don’t know what reality I’m in anymore. What worries me is that I’m addressing a society that doesn’t know how to let go. Theater should be a space for total freedom, but for it to survive society has to wake up.” Love and disillusionment? It’s the lack of resolution to that contradiction that keeps theater alive.
Alissone Sinard is a doctoral student in theater studies. The professor and essayist Georges Banu’s latest books are Shakespeare, le Monde est une scène. Métaphores et pratiques théâtrales ( Gallimard, 2009), Des murs... au Mur (Gründ, 2009), Amour et désamour du théâtre (Actes Sud, 2013), Les Voyages du comédien (Gallimard, 2013).