Two forms of collaboration and complicity in total theatre and playing Beckett

Two forms of collaboration and complicity in total theatre and playing Beckett; a dramaturgs view.
by John Keefe

Introduction All theatre is a collaboration: between the actors, and between the actors and non-acting contributors; together these make a ‘mise-en-scène’ with which the spectator collaborates. All theatre is a complicity or a pact of knowing acceptance: between the actors who accept the fiction and figures they present as ‘real’ and behave as if these are ‘real’; between the real fictional world created (the ‘mise-en-scène’) and the spectator who accepts that fiction as a real representative of their world whilst knowing it is a fiction. The spectator is always reading the ‘mise-en-scène’ to a lesser or greater degree but I do not accept they are always constructing an image; rather it is a question of how complete is the image presented. The more complete the image the less work the spectator has to do; at its worst a form of infantilising the spectator.

I wish to examine and contrast two particular forms of collaboration-complicity; between that demanded by the unsustainable ideology of the ‘Gesamtkunstwerk’ with its attempt to construct and give a complete image which subsumes the spectator (as an ideal), and that of Beckett’s ‘mise-en-scène’ which rests on his performance dramaturgy that both shows us the world of the play yet keeps us slightly detached from that world as we laugh and cry at what we recognize in ourselves. Where we do have to play our part in the play, in constructing our image and experience of the human condition from the images presented to and confronting us.

To suggest, as I am, that Beckett represents a model more truthful to the human experience, means relocating his work in that amorphous area we call ‘total theatre’, arguing his importance as a key but overlooked practitioner in a form not associated with him but which is fundamental to his performance dramaturgy. This represents a rejection of the Romantic ‘Gesamtkunstwerk’ (here, a sublimation of the parts into the whole) in favour of a ‘gestual mise-en-scène’ that is spiritual, corporeal, liminal; a dialectic of tension and harmony between body-voice-sound-space.

My aim is to outline the terms ‘Gesamtkunstwerk’ and ‘total theatre’ and to argue the distinction that must be drawn between these. By doing so I aim to make some observations regarding our approach to Beckett’s performance dramaturgy and the resultant collaboration-complicity it rests on and demands. If a certain degree of provocation is felt here then I hope that is merely seen as a means to the end of re-looking at Beckett. I spend some time discussing the concept of the ‘Gesamtkunstwerk’ and playing with the term ‘R(r)omanticism’ as a means of establishing the ongoing (arguably insidious and distorting) influence of Romanticism and neo-romanticism in modern art. When mixed with the continuing domination of realism-naturalism, this hybrid forms the backdrop to the alternative collaboration based on challenge and confrontation with which the spectator engages that Beckett (and others) offer. Thus, I feel certain formal terms are necessary to capture the full sense of the observations being made but I hope these are given sufficient explanation and exposition to allow access to the levels of meaning intended. Some ideas are only touched on but in ways I hope both make sense and serve to open up further lines of discussion.

The misguided paths of R(r)omanticism

This paper draws on two previous papers given on Edward Gordon Craig and Samuel Beckett where I, as a theatre scientist, readily admitted to being seduced by Craig’s ideal of a performance text that speaks at many levels; at its purest centred on the dynamic still figure in bare metaphoric space. I still remain open to the resonant radicalism at the heart of this image, especially given its centrality to the styles of total theatre and performance with which we work. But as a theatre scientist who uses the methods of the dialectics of Verfremdung, I find this notion is both a chimera and dangerous as an ideal in certain guises. This is the GESAMTKUNSTWERK, graphically here in capitals to represent the Ideal it is evoking and yearning for. Pavis introduces the term from Wagner’s coinage circa 1850 (see 1) and translates it as ‘the global or whole work of art’ (Pavis 1998: 159) but in his entry also, confusingly, calls it ‘total theatre’; confusingly because I believe these to be different things, the issue I shall return to below. As an Ideal of art, Wagner’s theatre, like that of Craig, Artaud, Beck and many others is predicated on a theatrical nihilism:

[Craig’s] theatre could not be realised until the great incubus of the present theatre is destroyed leaving clear space (Duncan, 1911, quoted in Innes 1983: 4)

The roots of this nihilism lie in a cultural atavism; what I have titled the misguided paths of R(r)omanticism (the small ’r’ denoting the later manifestations of the concept). Whilst radicalising art it also rejects a perceived debased modern culture in favour of a seeming alternative; a reunification that the mediated and romanticised pre-modern represents. But this reunification is merely an ‘imago’ of the pre-modern constructed from 18/19/20th-century material and ideologies. The ‘new’ discovery of Nature, the revealing of buried cave paintings, the discovery and display of non-European or Paleolithic art forms, objects, and cultures; these came to represent an existential ‘other’ characterized by two key terms: the ‘Aufbruch’-‘Ausbruch’ (spiritual or existential breaking away from the everyday) and the ‘Sehnsucht’ (a yearning for the unattainable ideal). This ‘other’ is the grail of the undivided existence that is both the source and misguided path of R(r)omanticism.

The false premise

This existence characterized by the ‘Aufbruch’-‘Ausbruch’ and ‘Sehnsucht’ is simply no longer possible in what Eliade characterizes as ‘living in a desacralized cosmos’ (Eliade 1959: 17). The return to “clear space” demanded by R(r)omanticism requires a return to what (again following Eliade), I would characterise as ‘a cosmic mode of existence in symbiosis’, which I here define as a society-culture which does not attempt to systematically refashion Nature but lives in a sacralised relationship with Nature according to perpetuated customs, totems, taboos and conventions. A return to this is simply not possible except as R(r)omantic mythic which is a false premise. (As an aside, it is the excluding from this symbiosis that is the ultimate social sanction, and the breaking or loss of this symbiosis that we mythologise as The Fall; the mythic of a pre-lapsarian existence.) The GESAMTKUNSTWERK or “whole work” can only exist in such a pre-lapsarian, sacralised culture.

The whole object

Such a ‘whole work’ as object or artifact is exemplified by the Paleolithic axe head; a total object whereby the functional axe (survival) is at the same time an object of magic (liminal) is at the same time an object of beauty (aesthetic). An object that represents physical and spiritual survival, where the corporeal and the metaphysical are all part of the one reality. Any phenomenon of this kind can only exist in this way in an unbifurcated or undivided cosmic society and culture (Eliade) which is not alienated in its view of itself from Nature; where the greatest existential fear is to become ‘outcast’, made ‘other’ and thus living in a world of existential chaos. In the light of the theme of collaboration such a theatre work demands not collaboration by the audience but a state of immersion and submission. How often have we heard of the desire to become lost in the work of art- my point is that such an immersion is in fact a desire to return to the state of existence outlined above. Because of this demand and desire to become ‘lost’ the act of collaboration is made void and thus it cannot be theatre, which demands and is defined by the presence of the signifying actor, the reading audience and a non-Platonic/non-Hegelian dialectic between the two which is a collaborative contract. It is a false premise because of the nature of theatrical looking; a state that rests on the suspension of disbelief by the spectator, and on a form of psychical distance. In other words it is a dramaturgical complicity by which the spectator knows he/she is looking at a fiction but which is accepted as a real event depicting a recognisable and identifiable reality. We move in and out of a certain psychical state but never forget that it is a fiction we are watching. Thus theatre is a complicity predicated on knowingness. The GESAMTKUNSTWERK seeks to invoke a psychical state where that knowingness is overturned and the spectators give themselves up to and into the vision; theatre is no longer theatre but becomes ritual. It is not a knowing complicity between equal agents but a vision that the spectator is required to give themselves up to. The GESAMTKUNSTWERK is simply an ideal of its era located in specific political and cultural circumstances. But it has become a theatrical chimera chased in many ways; as Artaud’s ‘ritual theatre’ or Beck’s ‘transcendent ritual’ or Craig’s ‘state beyond theatre’ or Miskin’s ‘ontological street theatre’ (see Keefe: 2002; 2003). What I would see as a neo-romantic style where staging is often a triumph of form over content, of conception over execution. There are other possibilities.

So not ‘Gesamtkunstwerk’ but forms of ‘total theatre

I believe we have to look to Beckett, Brecht and others to give us an understanding of such alternatives, as opposition to the false Ideal, as a statement of political intent. Again I start from Pavis where these entries do provide a useful grounding for my observations. Schlemmer in 1925:

total theatre must be an artistic creation, an organic set of bundles of relationships between light, space, surface, movement, sound, and human being (Schlemmer 1925, quoted in Pavis, 1998: 405)

To Pavis’s entry I would add Benjamin:

the following relationships are dialectical: that of the gesture to the situation and vice versa; that of the actor to the character represented and vice versa; that of the attitude of the actor, as determined by the authority of the text, to the critical attitude of the audience and vice versa; that of the specific action represented to the action implied in any theatrical representation (Benjamin 1973: 25)

I want to suggest that this points us to ‘total theatre’ as the opposite of the ‘Gesamtkunstwerk’. Just as we are still caught in the mistranslation and misuse of ‘Verfremdung’ as ‘alienation’ so we should not allow the mistranslation of ‘Gesamtkunstwerk’ as ‘total theatre’, but talk of this, as Pavis first suggests, as the ‘global or whole work of art’. Rather than a synthesized dialectic of parts we have a dialectic of autonomous parts in what Aristotle calls a ‘harmonious whole’. Meyerhold in 1907:

Words alone cannot say everything. Hence there must be a pattern of movement on the stage to transform the spectator into a vigilant observer. Words catch the ear, plasticity the eye. Each are subordinated to their own separate rhythms and the two do not necessarily coincide (Meyerhold 1969: 56)

At the centre of such a dramaturgy are two key elements or concepts, and here I again follow but also develop Pavis:

* ‘gestuality’: the relationship of one body and mind to each other; to another’s body and mind; to its and their milieu or environment.
* ‘mise-en-scène’: the totality of everything in the frame (including the effects of the frame itself) in a harmony, whether coinciding or not.

Thus I suggest we look for a Beckettian gestuality and a Beckettian mise-en-scène to distinguish Beckett’s performance dramaturgy, drawing on the principles of physical and movement theatre mixed with a political humanism. This is a particular form of collaboration, one based on the spectator having a cool detachment whilst engaged in an intense emotional recognition of the human condition. This becomes a complicity between consenting, aware adults.

Beckett’s total theatre

From the perspective not only of an academic but equally of a theatre-maker and performance dramaturg, I begin to characterise Beckett’s total theatre as follows. In the beginning is not the word for Beckett but the potential word from a non-speaking (but not silent) still, plastic figure in metaphorical space; potential because we recognise the figure as human whatever its condition and thus as a sentient speaking being i.e. human. Once speech begins the words not only have semantic meaning but also other connotative significance derived from the plastic (silent or not silent) space around the words and the figure(s).
Beckett insists on the equality of word-sound-body-space, not word over plasticity or movement over word; these must always be acting on each other and all having a physical quality. Thus the physical act of speaking or sounding as well as of movement, or the physical act of not speaking or sounding and of stillness, or speaking or sounding and stillness, or not speaking or sounding and movement, within plastic space. Not only the performative word but also the performative body and space as complete composite image, as total theatre; Beckett’s own version of the “dynamic still figure in bare metaphoric space”. Thus the body and the space it inhabits must be formed (out of the evidence of the play text) within the performance space before utterance begins. This becomes Beckett’s own form of Decroux’s dictum, ‘to be onstage you must have something to say’ (Dennis 1995: 7). For Beckett everything onstage is a deliberately placed signifier speaking to the complicit, reading spectator saying.……..
Beckett’s particular performance dramaturgy demands to be released through the principles of total theatre we normally associate with Meyerhold, Decroux, Lecoq and others, as a complex plasticity of word-sound-body-space. Thus Beckett’s very particular liminality evoked by such a gestual mise-en-scène; where both figures and spectators are taken to their respective points of spiritual and corporeal threshold: the figure fixed at that point as delineated in the play text, the spectator standing on that threshold as they read the figure at that point from their own existential condition.
The spectator is both at a point of distance recognizing the theatrical nature of the image and at a point of collaboration as the reader of that total image recognizing it as a statement about his or her own existential fragility. This is not a metaphysical threshold as the ‘Aufbruch’-‘Ausbruch’ or ‘Sehnsucht’, implying an escape from the human condition, but a threshold of humanist, spiritual awareness that is a confronting of that condition. A collaboration of recognition and confrontation of despair.

....one day we were born, one day we shall die, the same day, the same second, is that not enough for you? (Calmer) They give birth astride of a grave, the light gleams an instant, then it’s night once more.
(He jerks the rope)
On. (Beckett 1956: 89)

The human figure not as the Romantic ‘Übermensch’,

[…] great historical men, whose own particular aims involve those larger issues which are the will of the world-spirit (Hegel 1956: 30) (see 2)

(Hegel of course represents one of the great statements of the demands of the GESAMTKUNSTWERK as a ‘giving up to’).
Not as a sentimentalised hero but the ‘Untermensch’, the everyman or everywoman who is heroic simply by living; by accepting in a non-fatalistic manner that life is death and is to be lived for itself in the face of death.
Hence Beckett’s profound demand and exhortation that we go “On”.

In this, Beckett’s total theatre is a provoking and evocative mix of the modern and pre-modern sensibility; I suggest a number of images in the end notes which represent and evoke this intertwining taken both from Beckett’s stage work and other artists.
Images of the angst of the modern presented through a sensibility of the pre-modern; the unglossed condition of the transience and fragility of life presented as a modern alienation from identity and self-biography yet with the inherent paradox of self-awareness that is medieval in its brutal reality.
Images that are not given to us, that do not infantilise us but which we have to work at to become complicit with.
Through the very order and rigour of his dramaturgy Beckett opens the threshold of a gaze or a glimpse of the immanence of the chaos beyond; that laps always at the edge of order. Complex, plastic images of loss, reflecting the resonances and echoes of a non-romanticised pre-modern sensibility presented with the rigour of the Enlightenment, the modernist project. Images that are liminal, which represents the anger, brittleness, multilayered fragility of Beckett’s worlds, our worlds.
Beckett’s unique mixing of pre-modern and modern sensibility is also found in the liminality of intensive reading and extensive reading. The continual repeating of passages of word or movement (both gestural and walking patterns) is resonant of the pre-modern emphasis on immersed knowledge of a limited number of books or existential patterns set against the modern trend of extensive newness and novelty as an escape from such repetition. Beckett’s figures and spectators are caught between the comfort of repetition and the hell of life cycles these patterns give glimpses of:

You say we have to come back tomorrow
Yes. (Beckett 1956: 14)

fuck life
stop her eyes
rock her off
rock her off. (Beckett 1984: 282)

Will you never have done? (Pause) Will you never have done… revolving it all? (Beckett 1984: 240)

This is Beckett’s divine comedy of existence as total theatre. A total theatre which provokes, confronts the spectator yet draws him or her him into a complicity of recognition of the simple humanity portrayed and evoked. It is to preserve the uniqueness of this image and insight that Beckett so fiercely defends his play text; his defence against the misguided paths of R(r)omanticism. However, this leaves me with an ambiguity of feeling where I own up to a great ambivalence regarding the inalterability of the Beckett play text. Their integrity is their strength but also their weakness; if we follow the textual demands to the apparent letter we would see the same play each time merely with different actors. I’m not sure I see the point of such dramaturgical clones except as displays of actorly skills. But of course if we read the play text carefully we see an ordered mix of explicit directions to be followed and points of openness to be interpreted. In this sense the plays are both constructions of a Beckettian ‘mise-en-scène’ (a total theatre with a deliberate incompleteness) and are to be constructed by the spectator as a collaboration of detached recognition and intense understanding.
So I suggest we need to distinguish between the play text to be followed and the performance text to be realised through the principles of total theatre.
The role of the performance dramaturg is to simply to collaborate on this realization, using their skills as theatre scientist within the creative ensemble yet sitting between the performance text and the audience.

Play

In 2003 I created a production of Play with 3 theatre students.
We performed the play as written but not as directed.
We kept the words; we had 2 women and 1 man.
We had neither resources for creating urns nor any theatre lighting.
We had an interesting performance space to use.
The audience were seated in a fragmented pattern through which the actors moved giving a variety and fragmentation of sightlines, demanding a particular form of complicity.
So I kept the words and the three figures but restaged the performance text, replacing the plasticity of the tableau with a plasticity of movement in space derived from the movement principles of Pina Bausch.
We had no sound except that made by the actors’ voices and bodies, the space, the audience. This speaking movement was played around and between the seated audience.
The spectator saw a construction but was complicit in reading and understanding that construction as they constructed their own images from that which is incomplete; what is not said or shown.
We played with Play.
I believe we created a performance text through a staging that recast Beckett’s ‘gestuality’ and ‘mise-en-scène’ as a piece of Beckettian total theatre.

Notes

* 1 The concept is referred to by Wagner in his “Artwork of the Future” (1849), and “Opera and Drama” (1851).
* 2 Hegel also talks of the ‘agents of the world-spirit’ in section 33 of this work.

Works cited

Beckett, Samuel (1956), Waiting for Godot, London: Faber and Faber. (1984), Footfalls (1975) and Rockaby (1981), in Collected Short Plays, London: Faber and Faber.

Benjamin, Walter (1973), ‘Studies for a theory of epic theatre’ (date unknown) in Understanding Brecht, trans. Anna Bostock, London: NLB.

Dennis, Anne (1995), The Articulate Body, New York: Drama Book Publishers.

Duncan, Isadora, ‘Marginalia to Craig’s “On the art of theatre”’ (1911), in Christopher Innes, Edward Gordon Craig.

Eliade, Mircea (1957), The Sacred and The Profane, San Diego: Harcourt Brace.

Hegel, Georg (1956), The Philosophy of History (1837), trans. J. Sibree, New York: Dover.

Innes, Christopher (1983), Edward Gordon Craig, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Keefe, John, (1) “Totality and chimera”; paper given at the colloquium, ‘The Legacy of Edward Gordon Craig’, Central School of Speech & Drama, London, July 2002.

Keefe, John, (2) “Play Beckett: Beckett’s performance dramaturgy as total theatre” paper given at the conference, ‘Page and Stage: 50 years of performing Beckett’ University of Leeds, June 2003

Lecoq, Jacques (2000), The Moving Body, London: Methuen. Meyerhold, Vsevolod (1969), ‘First attempts at a stylised theatre’ (1907), in Meyerhold on Theatre, ed. and trans. Edward Braun, London: Methuen.

Moholy-Nage, L. and Oskar Schlemmer, ‘The theatre of Bauhaus’ (1925) in Patrice Pavis, Dictionary of Theatre.

Pavis, Patrice (1996), Dictionary of Theatre, trans. C. Shantz, Toronto: University of Toronto Press.

Masaccio’s ‘The Expulsion’ (1425-27), Gill, Michael (1989), Image of the Body, NewYork: Doubleday.

The pictures (and suggested sources)

Footfalls (1976), J. Haynes and J. Knowlson (2003), Images of Beckett, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
‘Eve’ (detail from Masaccio’s ‘The Expulsion’), Gill.
Play (1964), J. Fletcher and J. Spurling (1985), Beckett, London: Methuen. Grünewald’s ‘Isenheim Crucifixion’(1509-11), Gill.
Rockaby (1981), Charles R. Lyons (1983), Samuel Beckett, London: Methuen.
Fin de Partie (1957) and Endgame (1964), Fletcher and Spurling.
Rothko’s ‘Black on Maroon’ (1959), Tate Modern London

Copyright: John Keefe, April 2005

Posted by Hanna at 03:44 PM in Articles | Email this entry

Comments:

No comments yet.

Post a Comment:

<< Back to main