Practising the Real on the Contemporary Stage

By José A. Sánchez and Charlie Allwood

An analysis of reality and ‘the real’ as presented in contemporary artistic creation, Practising the Real on the Contemporary Stage examines the responses given by performing arts to the importance placed on reality beyond representation. This book proposes four historic itineraries defined by the ways in which the issue of the real is addressed: the representation of the visible reality and its paradoxes, the place of the real on the lived body, the limits placed on representation by experiences of pain and death, and those practices that denounce the real. Practising the Real on the Contemporary Stage will be warmly welcomed by scholars of aesthetics and contemporary artistic practice.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Intellect Books
• Release date: Jan 9, 2014
• ISBN: 9781783204182

José A. Sánchez

José A. Sánchez is professor in the Faculty of Fine Arts and head of the Art History department at the University of Castilla-La Mancha. He is also director of the research group Artea (www.arte-a.org). 

Book preview

Introduction

Contemporary performance was impacted by the renewed necessity of confronting the real that manifested itself in every area of culture over course of the last decades. This necessity first materialised in productions that once again dealt with the representation of reality, thus assuming the controversy brought about by ‘representation’ and the complexity of reality. It also created the space for works in which the real bursts onto the stage, challenging not only representation, but also the construction of reality. Finally, this necessity of confronting the real produced works that challenged initiatives of intervention, whether in the form of actions that attempted to turn the spectator into the participant of a formal, collective construction, or in the form of direct actions on a space not delimited by artistic institutions.

The turn towards ‘realism’ on the European stage signalled the end of an era marked by a certain melancholy, in which postmodern critics focused their attention on condemning the mechanisms used by structures of power and mass media to produce a ‘simulacral’ (Baudrillard 1981) or ‘transparent’ society (Vattimo 1989). Meanwhile, many artists and arts institutions were more inclined to join in with the criticism of culture, but not to consider the decidedly complex task of constructing realities that complied with tensions of the real.

It is not about a naïve return to the past. Over the last few centuries both experimental and social sciences have shown that what we call reality is always a construction. Here, what is sought is not ontological coherence, whereby reality is identical to its representation; what is important is that reality works according to physics calculations or social laws. Furthermore, the act of exclusion inherent in all representation must be taken into account. To represent reality without denying all its complexity might require, just as in quantum mechanics, to consider four or more dimensions. The fourth dimension – regarding the image – could be time; regarding text, it could be the body; regarding movement, language, and so on and so forth.

Throughout the essay, there is an attempt to maintain the difference between ‘reality’ as a consensual or imposed construction, and ‘the real’, which resists construction while simultaneously being the material and object of representation itself. Obviously, when reality is not consensual, but rather imposed, the real returns in a more violent way in the form of political or traumatic resistance. The Return of the Real was the title of the influential essay published by Hal Foster in 1996. Departing from a disqualification of the ‘simulacral’ reading of Warhol undertaken by Barthes, Foucault, Deleuze and Baudrillard, Foster approached the study of the work from the idea of the traumatic (as formulated by Lacan) to suggest a new interpretation of hyperrealism, appropriationism, and art of the obscene and the abject.

In recent years, numerous authors have looked at the problematics of the real on the modern stage. Maryvone Saison (1998) raised French directors’ and dramaturgists’ concerns in the 1990s by recovering the capacity to relate to the real. This is an ambivalent concern, since many of the examples cited by Saison seem to respond to the reaction effect described by Baudrillard – i.e. the search for the immediate experience – rather than to the effort to construct realities that once again include the hidden real. Hans-Thies Lehman considered ‘the real’ as a distinctive feature of ‘post-dramatic theatre’, in opposition to the ‘exclusion of the real’ established by Hegel as a minimum condition of tragedy (Lehman 1999: 64). The real is a constituent element of artistic creation, although it normally exists isolated in the sign; when it reappears in artistic practice, it does so to put pressure on the representation, the fiction and convention, and not as a paralyzing, deeply affecting apparition (as may happen in popular or televisual dramatic forms). Lehman studied ‘the irruption of the real’ on the 1990s stage via several modes, including: concretion; the corporality of the actors and animals onstage; deliberate breaks in continuity; an emphasis on presence, the event and the current situation; and the development of a hypernaturalism coherent with the age of the media. Erika Fischer-Lichte (2008) used real and concrete action to reflect on what she called ‘the performative change of direction in the arts’. In order to achieve this, she meticulously analysed the transformation of the situation of ‘co-presence’ in the theatrical event, the tensions generated by the ‘corporisation’ in the concepts of ‘presence’ and ‘representation’, and the consequences of the centrality of Aufführung as event in contemporary stage practice. Over the last few years, Helga Finter (2003), Borowski and Sugiera (2007), Ileana Diéguez (2007), Beatriz Catani (2007) and others have studied different topics related both to ‘theatres of the real’ and ‘social theatricalities’. I shall return to the contributions made by these and other writers and artists on the subject, as well as establishing genealogies and historical paths in relation to them. I attempt to do this in a text that feeds off a dialogue with literature, visual arts and the cinema in particular, although without disregarding the specificity of the theatrical and performative.

In Through Theatre to Cinema (1928), Sergei Eisenstein reminds us that one of the motivations that led him to follow this path was his search for the real. Even in his stagings with the Proletkult, he attempted to introduce real elements that stretched works marked by eccentricity and grotesque stylisation. In his theatre production of The Mexican (1923), Eisenstein suggested moving the boxing match to the centre of the auditorium and offering the spectators a ‘completely realistic’ fight: ‘The fictitious stage gave way to a real boxing ring, and the extras closed the circle around it’ (Eisenstein 1923: 61–62). Soon afterwards, he had the idea of staging Tretyakov’s Gas Masks (1923–24) in a real gas factory: this, as he notes, ‘took us very close to cinema’ (Eisenstein 1923: 63).

Eisenstein appears to identify theatre with artifice and cinema with reality, though such an identification should be understood within the framework of the director’s creative trajectory and the theatrical context in which he was educated. Nevertheless, one cannot doubt that he uses a very extended concept of the theatre as a place of representation and falseness, as opposed to cinema’s potential of recording images of reality. The fact that reality as recorded by the cinema is always a construction, is something that Eisenstein himself would demonstrate in his approach to montage; however, he would also make clear that, on many occasions, reality appears more theatrically than a constructed or reconstructed appearance would.

Anticipating the contributions of sociology and anthropology to social theatricality, Eisenstein was interested in the use of social gestures and the staging of power as a way to cinematographically depict the real. The clearest example of this contribution is in the second act of his Battleship Potemkin (1925), when the commander calls all the sailors and officials to fall in on the deck at the forecastle. The camera takes in the scene from the mast, as if in a royal box, and the shot takes in two cannons that are later identified as the face of the ship, the face of the machine. The commander ‘enters’ through a hatch, and sailors and officials fall in symmetrically around him. The staging of the sailors and officers is used to represent power – a guarantor and affirmation of the order in force. The revolution starts as a questioning of appearance and of the theatricality of power. The power resists, and during the preparations for the shooting of the sailors, the parallel, symmetric composition is replaced by a zig-zagging linearity. Finally, the soldiers’ disobedience will give way to the shattering of the linearity, and the installation of a new order that precedes the construction of a new reality. At the end of the fourth act, the war machine, now in the hands of the sailors, points its guns at the theatre in Odessa – the headquarters of the Tsarist army – and fires on them with the aim of destroying it.

The theatre is destroyed for being a site that represents an order, a reality that has become incompatible with the real, which in this case is incompatible with the needs and desires of the revolutionary public. Hierarchised theatricality is substituted for a celebratory, mass theatricality. The intrusion of the real leads to a theatre-less theatricality, here recorded cinematographically.

Eisenstein was not the only one to propose the destruction of theatre. Two of the great directors of the early twentieth century did so in their search for the real, albeit with different emphases. Bertolt Brecht searched for the real beyond appearance in social and economic structures, challenging himself to make the abstract visible in the specific by using the gestures of performance. Antonin Artaud did not search for the specific but for the unique, and found it in an immanent kind of spirituality, which created its universality in the uniqueness of the ‘organless body’. Both attacked the theatre from the inside, and, as with Eisenstein, their pursuit of the real led them to search for new models of constructions (or realities) beyond the theatre building, as well as beyond the institution, e.g. in street scenes or rituals integrated in social life.

Both Brecht and Artaud were interested in cinema, but neither found it a satisfactory medium. Brecht did not achieve what he set out to with Kuhle Wampe (1932) – and certainly not with Dreigroschenoper / Threepenny Opera (1931) – and was unable to break into the North American film industry. This was also the case with Artaud, who did manage to work as an actor and scriptwriter, but was not satisfied with his collaboration with Dulac on La coquille et le clergyman / The Seashell and the Clergyman (1926). Brecht’s dramaturgical approaches were incompatible with cinema’s means of production, or the construction of audio-visual discourses that were deprived of the physical and verbal power of the gestus. For Artaud, the impossibility of making the body present constituted an impassable obstacle, even more so when taking into account the technical limitations and the type of linguistic explorations popular in French cinema at that time, which was obsessed with dynamism, overprinting and fade-ins, which contributed even more to the dematerialisation of the work.

These two anti-film productions (which were nonetheless greatly influenced by film) opened the door to various performative attempts to approach the construction of reality or the presentation of the real during the second half of the twentieth century. Following on from Brecht’s work were documentary theatre, collective dramaturgies, a use of montage and alienation in theatre; following on from Artaud’s work were theatre for living, physical art and iconoclastic theatre.

So what happened to cinema in this search for the real? The alliance of cinema and the real in Eisenstein’s work was as short-lived as the alliance of avant-garde artists and Soviet cinema. As a hegemonic medium, cinema gave into the temptation offered by its own technical possibilities, i.e. the creation of the appearance of a parallel reality, the suspension of disbelief, and the offer to momentarily submerge the spectator into a second, parallel life. Evidently, there are many exceptions to this, some of them clearly marked by the search for the real: neorealism and its replicas all around the world; the exploration of a physical or improvisational cinema (using ‘free cinema’, ‘direct cinema’ and cinema verité as a starting point); or the various forms of documentary cinema, including the emergence and popularisation of social, political and essay films. All of the above must resist the medium of film itself, in the same way that theatres of the real had to – and still should – fight the artificial condition of their own medium.

The interesting thing is that theatre was, in many cases, one of the measures used to reclaim the real on-screen: this can be seen in the work of Shirley Clark (The Connection, 1961), Joaquín Jordá (Númax presenta / Númax Presents, 1979) and Peter Watkins (La Commune 1871 / The Commune 1871, 1999). In the film Monos como Becky / Monkeys like Becky (Joaquín Jordá & Nuria Villazán, 1999), the directors use theatre as a tool for documentary investigation (seen in the sequences about the life and work of the scientist António Egas Moniz), as a medium of representation (in the dramatisation of scenes from the scientist’s life, but also of the process of investigation itself), and as a relational medium (the work of rehearsals in the play about Moniz’s assassination by the interns of the Malgrat de Mar Therapeutic Community). However, theatre within cinema is also used by the directors to consider the medium itself, as well as to question the mechanisms of constructing reality both in cinema and in television. In a way, Jordá and Villazán are following Eisenstein’s path backwards. Indeed, the concepts of ‘theatre’, ‘cinema’, ‘reality and ‘body’, amongst many others, underwent radical transformations during the twentieth century.

The dynamism of these concepts and their manifestation in the artistic (i.e. performative, film and literary) works of the twentieth century is the central thesis of this work. The first two chapters, ‘Reality and the Visible’ and ‘Real and Virtual’, suggest a revision of the different modes of realism, as well as the articulation of the terms ‘the real’ and ‘reality’ within these modes. The ways in which image has been represented throughout history in various media (photography, cinema, television, virtual reality) are used as a point of departure to analyse different conceptions of realism: Antoine’s photographic realism, Stanislavski’s impressionism, Brecht’s dialectic dramaturgy (and its visual actualisation in William Kentridge’s work), the critical baroque style of the Wooster Group, or the ironic hyperrealism of directors such as Ostermeier and Platel.

‘The Irruption of the Real’ and ‘Iconoclastic Theatre’ consider the centrality of the body, from Artaud’s reflections on the body as a dramatic space, to the theses put forward by The Living Theatre of an actor that does not abandon his reality. The Living Theatre’s style would influence some of Georg Tabori’s and Albert Vidal’s works, which both draw, consciously or not, on the radical practices of body art. These practices might also be connected with the corporeal, iconoclastic cinema of Lars von Trier. Given how it is associated with the search for the real as something traumatic, iconoclasm would reappear in the work of Óskar Gómez Mata and his idiosyncratic version of ‘embodied thought’, as well as in Reza Abdoh’s iconoclastic performances, in the pre-tragic theatre of the Socìetas Raffaello Sanzio and its questioning of representation, and the abject plays and stagings by Rodrigo García and Angélica Liddell.

‘At the Limits of Representation’ approaches this question in the face of death and illness. The representation of private death, as addressed by Wim Wenders in Lightning Over Water (1980), was the start of a journey through images of illness and death in contemporary art and theatre. The question of the relationship between private and public came with an inevitable theme: the AIDS epidemic would multiply the reasons for transferring private experiences of the disease into the sphere of political discussion, as Reza Abdoh would do, especially in his New York works. The chapter closes with a reference to Antônio Araùjo’s Teatro da Vertigem and his treatment of Paradise and Hell in site-specific locations.

In ‘Genocides’, the viewpoints of Atom Egoyan in Ararat (2002), and Peter Weiss and Erwin Piscator in Die Ermittlung / The Investigation (1965) – which deal with the Armenian genocide and the Holocaust respectively – introduce a study of works that bring together many questions about the real, the construction of reality, the understanding of otherness and the comprehension of another’s pain. An example of this is Rwanda 94 (1999) by Groupov, a work that came out of the creators’ reaction to the Tutsi genocide. Next to this monumental work one could juxtapose two questionings of representation with different takes on the individual versus whole articulation: Ong Keng Sen and Rabih Mroué.

The layering of ‘History and Memory’, together with the layering of public and private, constitutes a common starting point for the performances of many Latin American collectives created in the Sixties and Seventies (e.g. TEC, La Candelaria, Escambray, Yuyachkani). For these groups, the reinstatement of past events is in itself a tool of social intervention. Military dictatorships, internal wars and violence during the last three decades of the twentieth century urged a new confrontation with these issues. Collaborations with activist groups and social movements (e.g. Las yeguas del apocalipsis, grupo Etcétera) has been followed in the recent years by a more performative and personal appropriation of history / histories, as can be seen in the works of Lola Arias and Lagartijas tiradas al sol.

The next two chapters, ‘The Performance of Others’ and ‘The Real is Relational’, approach those practices that shatter the idea of representation, and which intend to provoke a dialogue or conflict with the spectator. The will to give voice to others is continued in the work of those who directly attempted to make others act by means of revolutionary participative practices, or through subversive games thought up as exercises in affirmation or resistance. Boal’s proposals introduce a study of a series of authors that engaged themselves in participatory and game practices that are guided by a political or social aim, including Armand Gatti, Sara Molina, Ann Carlson, Maris Bustamante and other performance artists.

The concept of a ‘relational aesthetic’ is used to study C’undua (2002–04) by Mapa Teatro, a project that redevelops the ideas of representation, social engagement and participation, and that was followed by the construction of a ‘living archive’ in Testigo de las ruinas (2005–12). Relational and participative performance are also studied in some contemporary film works by José Luis Guerin, Mercedes Álvarez and Joaquín Jordá, in which social encounter is privileged over spectacularity.

The final chapter, ‘Essayism and Representation’, is concerned with the new stage genres that have come out of the conjunction of film documentaries, relational practices, literary essay and social / political activism. ‘Essayism’, as practised by Roger Bernat, Héctor Bourges or René Pollesch, has led to new forms of documentary theatre executed by the directors of collectives like Rimini Protokoll and Teatro Ojo, or works of relation-action by Jesusa Rodríguez, Angélica Liddell, Leo Bassi or Roger Bernat. One piece of work by this last creator, Amnesia de fuga / Flight Amnesia (2004), could be understood as an irreverent recovery of nineteenth-century realism from both a social and visual point of view.

‘Theatre and Reality’ works as an attempt at a conclusion. The first section examines how the transformation of the ‘reality criteria’ alongside advances in technological media can produce and reproduce reality. The second section focuses on the consciousness of the body and the growth of an integral idea of the human being over the past century. The third section proposes a reflection on times and temporalities, and how our experience of time affects our concepts of reality in performance. The last section focuses on relations, returns to the idea of reality as a series of intersubjective relationships, and recovers the concept of ‘theatricality’ as a tool for the study of the social field.

The book closes with an appendix, ‘Ethics of Representation’, unpublished in the Spanish version. The first version of this text was presented at the ‘2nd International Theatre Studies Conference’ as ‘Indisponer la escena’ / ‘Upsetting the stage’, organised by the University of Antioquia (Medellín, Colombia, 16th March 2012), and resumes some of the topics explored in the previous chapters. Departing from an analysis of the naïve representation of ‘social theatricality’ undertaken by Jean Renoir in La carrose d’or / The Golden Coach (1952), the differing concepts of ‘representation’ that meet in stage work and social and political life are analysed. The question that guides the text is: ‘Under what conditions does an actor earn the right to representation?’ and ‘What can they do with this representation?’ The analysis of a production by Angélica Liddell is used to introduce the final topic of reflection: the renouncing of representativity in the work of Rabih Mroué and Lina Saneh, and the appearance of an ‘ethics of care’ in Mapa Teatro’s stage proposals.

Reality and the Visible

In western culture, the problem of reality is approached within the shift from idealism to realism. Romantic philosophers attempted to invent a godless religion – a new mythology that could come up against the less transcendental but much more ambitious projects of bourgeois capitalism – and also with the subsequent criticism of materialist philosophers. At that moment, the traditional philosophical reflection is followed by a new reflection on reality itself.

Realism is more than just a style: it is an attempt to attain coherence between the real and its representation; an endeavour to make objective reality the only acceptable criterion of truth. Underneath the realist attitude there is an ethical commitment and a political will; the cleansing of representations and the setting of an objective reality constitute the prerequisites for any attempt at action or effective transformation.

The preoccupation with the real was present in the Romantic period in various ways: in Géricault’s anatomic studies; in Stendhal’s psychological analysis; and in Balzac’s artistic description. Nevertheless, the ‘real’ remained secondary to a narrative representation of a reality construction that agreed with idealistic or rational criteria. This in turn allowed the representation of the real to be read dually, and thereby made the coexistence of reproduction and allegory possible.

The distance between Géricault’s drawings and paintings of corpses and the representation of Le Radeau de la Méduse / The Raft of the Medusa (1818) clearly shows the conflict between the impact of the real and the construction of an image. This is a composition mediated by ideology, into which observational data is introduced. Opposed to this ideological reconstruction of reality, realism tries to reduce the distance between the real and its representation, reducing the composition as far as possible, and at times even doing away with the theme in order to point towards the moment, the naked fragment, without the literary or philosophical conditions of the capturing and embodying gaze.

Nineteenth-century realism is inseparable from the advances of experimental science that make way for the abandonment of idealism. The confidence in methodology and in scientific discoveries affects not only the criterion of truth as applied to the tangible, but also the models of social organisation. Gustave Flaubert would apply this approach to the real to his literature, which before then had solely been reserved for scientists. This approach entailed impartiality, impassivity and scrupulous objectivity. Flaubert was ahead of his time, doing something literarily that sociological methods would later put into practice, the first rule of which was, according to Durkheim, ‘considering social facts as things’ (Durkheim 1919: 20). Flaubert also saw the writing of his novels as a new concept of the writer’s responsibility to history, and responded to the Romantic historicist tendencies with an attention to the present time that echoed painters’ interest in capturing a moment. Flaubert also resisted the temptation to convert the narrative event into a historical one (a trait evident in Stendhal or Balzac) through the forced selection of characters who have little bearing on, or even anything to do with, the events of the political history of the novel, but who nevertheless clearly display their inscription on an historically determined social context.

The theoretical justification of the so-called realist theatre is found in the writings of Zola. In his essay Le Naturalisme au théâtre / Naturalism in the Theatre (1881), Zola denounces the conventionalism of the well-executed play and the idealist theatre, and demands a theatre of observation that follows the steps of the naturalist novel in the search and attainment of ‘scientific rigour’. After calling for a rereading of Diderot’s Paradoxe sur le comédien / The Paradox of Acting (1883), Zola encouraged the staging of ‘men of skin and bone’ to be taken from reality and analysed scientifically. The reader will undoubtedly be surprised by the apparent contradiction between the intention of staging ‘men of skin and bone’ and the consideration of them as ‘human documents’, whose actions are articulated according to the ‘logic’ of the facts and temperament.

The person responsible for putting these ideas into practice was André Antoine, who opened his Théâtre Libre in Paris on the 30th March 1887 with four one-act plays, amongst which was an adaptation of one of Zola’s own novels, Thérèse Raquin. Antoine, however,

went further: the staging of ‘men [and women] of skin and bone’ demanded that the production take place in a space where painted curtains and papier-mâché sets were of no use. The effect of reality should be made visible in the visual construction of the stage, and to this end, Antoine introduced real elements and exact reproductions of the spaces that were being shown. Antoine’s ‘crudeness’ was coherent with his wish to conserve