by Ben Spatz
I want to make a distinction between literal and narrative truth. I am bothered when literal truth appears in the middle of a performance. For me, it messes things up. Here are some examples of literal truth in performance:
- Children or animals onstage.
- Imperfect jugglers.
- When you can't tell if something was an accident.
- When you don't know if you're watch improv or scripted.
It kind of bothers me when people want to make "invisible theater." Augusto Boal has his actors stage an argument in a restaurant, to engage the audience more immediately than would be possible in a theatrical setting. This is a worthy kind of performance I supposed, but I want a word for performance which is established as performance. I think I will use the word "theater."
Peter Brook mentions (I think it's in _The Empty Space_) a curious paradox: When someone dies onstage, why doesn't anyone call the paramedics or the police? Artaud says that death on stage should be as traumatic as real death. Yes, it should be as traumatic, but in a very different way. Death on stage should be very powerful, in some sense as powerful as real death. But it should NOT seem literally real. If it does, the fundamental convention of theater pops like a balloon.
The idea of a "storyteller" is that you know they are not a messenger. It's "just" a story. This knowledge that the story is not literally real allows the story to get to very deep places. For example, we can experience the death of someone as a philosophical question, without having to worry about paramedics and the stress of the moment. We are detached from the literal truth. We know we are not watching a documentary. This allows us to get at certain things that we can't get to otherwise. It's like watching a locomotive hurtle towards you on a movie screen. You can experience the thrill right up to the moment of impact, without sacrificing your life.
When a juggler is perfect, we perceive magical forces, forces that go against gravity. We know they don't exist, but we perceive them anyway. This is worthwhile. Once the juggler drops a ball, the illusion is broken, and we now know that at any time another ball could be dropped. We no longer perceive the forces, at least for a little while, until we recover the illusion.
I believe in the contract of performative illusion, in which the audience agrees to watch a story being told by people who have trained to tell it. I am interested in working with actors of all kinds, including people who have never been on stage before, people who cannot read, people who do not speak my language. My definition of "actor" here is a person who is willing to dedicate some time to rehearsing a performance. I am NOT interested in working with people who do not want to be part of a performance. Tricking people into participating in invisible theater feels to me like a lie, a falsehood. I would be angry at him if I were to be tricked like that. I use the data I collect from the world to shape my worldview. In the case of the restaurant scene above, I would be fed false data. My worldview will be misaligned.
Some post-colonial theorists believe that the model in which the audience is passive is part of the imperialist ideal, in the sense that a passive audience is an indoctrinated one. But I want to point out that the contract between performer and audience is not imperialist or even Western. All performative art has always been this way, and basically every culture has performative art. In fact, the idea of involving the audience in doing things "performatively" strikes me as somewhat new-age and cheesy, like a kind of group therapy. Group therapy is fine, but you can't trick people into it when they thought they were going to get a performance.
Audience participation in a ritualized way is different, and still fulfills the contract. If a performer says "Krik?" and the audience shouts "Krak!" that is still inside the bounds of the story/ritual. It's like saying "Should I go on?" and the audience says "Yes, go on." This is very different from asking audience members to display their own feelings or ideas or bodies or whatever.
I guess I just mean that the contract needs to be understood by both parties before the storytelling begins. If a group of people want to be part of the story in terms of jumping around and dancing and talking and performing, that is fine. But then they themselves are actors--everyone is an actor--and you no longer have theater.
I've noticed this problem with video installations. Most of them don't tell you how long to watch the video. You don't know if you're watching a ten-second loop or a ninety-minute loop. You don't know how long to watch in order to get the "whole" thing. The same goes for websites that tell you dive in and explore and not try to see the whole thing. I think this stuff is part of a a postmodern phase that we will soon pass through. The essential contract art is that the audience knows the dimensions of the work: They know who the actors are, roughly how long it will last, what kind of sensations to expect. It is this convention that defines art. You can mess with it and go outside it, but you lose something in the process. The convention of art allows you to discuss and play with reality, precisely because it is not real.