Urban Research Theater Newsletter - September, 2006
I was deeply surprised to discover recently a piece of writing I did in the summer of 2003, before I moved to Poland. Here are some excerpts:
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outside the music box: experimental performance work
One of the actors got punched in the face today. Like a juggling trick or a spilled glass of milk, like animals or children, unplanned-for blood cannot be faked. Nudity also cannot be faked. Because of their uniquely physical reality, these elements always force questions about the nature of theater. Nudity or food or real blood in a Broadway show is always jolting and disorienting, because it reminds you of the actor behind the character. (Even stage blood reminds you of the need to fake it.) When the character eats, the actor also eats. When the character is naked, the actor is also naked.
I told my actors to improvise. In my first play, violence and aggression were themes. In my second play, they were not intentional themes but came anyway of their own accord. I told my actors to think of the work as mask work using invisible masks. I wanted them to be possessed by their characters, drowned in their roles. This is what I meant by not faking anything. I did not want them to split their mind, reserving a part of them to censor their actions and take care of the audience. I decided that if the actor's experience was powerful then the audience's experience would take care of itself. I decided not to design the experience of the audience, but to design the experience of the actor, and see what followed.
What followed was confusion. I wanted the actors to experience something powerful, not because they were playing a role that was significant to them in society but because they were actually performing actions onstage that were transformational to them. This would be the next step of the legendary theater of cruelty: cruel (meaning actual experience rather than representation) not only for the audience but for the actors too! My inspiration was possession rituals, which are obviously "cruel" in this sense to all involved. There is no showing in a possession ritual, nor being shown. There is only doing and witnessing.
As long as the event is a genuine experiment, the element of danger (physical or emotional) will be present. But if it were just pain we wanted to see then a fight club or a boxing match would do. Theater is made of character and story and body, and these are the elements that we want to collide inside the reactor. Perhaps this is the original purpose of mask work, even before it becomes performative as in the Commedia. In any case, I am looking now for some hungry souls who want to jump inside this kind of theatrical experiment. I do not want to know if there will be blood or tears, anger or joy, nudity or common sense. The rules will be determined by the questions, and only by doing it can we know the results.
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The two sentences in bold print are the ones that it shocked me to find. The first describes the method of the Workcenter, which I have so many times tried to explain to people since encountering their work: "I decided not to design the experience of the audience, but to design the experience of the actor, and see what followed." The second is striking because it uses the actual terminology of the Workcenter long before I knew about them: "There is only doing and witnessing." I did not realize that I had articulated this intention so clearly before going to Poland.
Perhaps it is not so uncommon for people working in theater to ache for the kind of "realness" they perceive to exist in possession rituals. Probably many actors today feel that the constraints of production, as well as their own atheistic or agnostic worldviews, prevent them from having the kind of "total" experience that can exist in cultures where the sacred and the performative are assumed to be related.
Grotowski seems to have believed that for a person in this predicament (one who is not connected to any performative sacrament) the only possible route towards such experience is through work on technique. The heart of his work was the profoundly uncommon assertion that "every spiritual teaching can be translated into the language of master techniques." In other words, rigorous technical work can lead to a recuperation of the experience of innocence, not because religion and craft are themselves related but because both provide ways to approach the nondiscursive, nonrational, nonjudgmental parts of the human soul.
In Grotowski's work, the details of Stanislavski-based acting work take the place of religious belief. The rational mind cannot understand this, because it would separate acting and religion according to whether the participants believe that their visions are "true" or "real". People who call themselves religious might also dislike the idea, because it seems to suggest that their theology is merely a construct of fantasy; while working actors might take such an assertion as an attack on the professionality and sanity of their work. Perhaps only the clinically insane would agree immediately that the world is not as simple as the categories of "real" and "imaginary" suggest.
Undoubtedly, there is a part of the human being which does not analyze the rational or objective truth of things; which does not care whether its experience is widely communicable; and for which imagination and theology are not significantly different. The question is: What do we do with this part of ourselves? What role does it play in our lives, and where can it take root? The difficulty comes with language itself: As soon as we say "it is only my imagination" we become mere artists, disengaged from the real world. But if we say "no, it is real," then we risk that a church will be founded on our visions and used to suppress those of others.
We must find another way to talk about these things, or else not speak of them at all.
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Exercises for the reader:
What visions, imaginary or sacred, play in your heart? What have you striven for since before you learned that some things are not realistic? What would you believe if you were not concerned with being right?
How does your current life align with that vision? Has becoming realistic amounted to a turning away from this vision, or to its realization through different means? Have you achieved your vision, either momentarily or permanently, or does it still lie in the future? Have you stopped thinking in these terms, or do they come less often than in the past? Or do your dreams still permeate your waking life? What about these visions could be dangerous?
What kind of dialogue exists between your dreaming self and the adult you have become?
Ben Spatz
New York City