Revista Dramatica PDF
Revista Dramatica PDF
Revista Dramatica PDF
MIND
BODY
VOICE:
WAYS OF THEATRICALITY
STUDIA
UNIVERSITATIS BABEŞ-BOLYAI
DRAMATICA
2/2014
October
STUDIA UNIVERSITATIS BABEŞ-BOLYAI
DRAMATICA
EDITOR-IN-CHIEF:
ŞTEFANA POP-CURŞEU, Babeş-Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca, Romania
EDITORIAL BOARD:
ION VARTIC, Babeş-Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca, Romania
LIVIU MALIŢA, Babeş-Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca, Romania
MIRUNA RUNCAN, Babeş-Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca, Romania
ANCA MĂNIUŢIU, Babeş-Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca, Romania
LAURA PAVEL, Babeş-Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca, Romania
VISKY ANDRÁS, Babeş-Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca, Romania
DORU POP, Babeş-Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca, Romania
ANDREA TOMPA, Babeş-Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca, Romania
PETER P. MÜLLER, University of Pécs, Hungary
TOM SELLAR, Editor of Theatre Journal, Duke University Press, Yale University, USA
IOAN POP-CURŞEU, Babeş-Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca, Romania
ANCA HAŢIEGAN, Babeş-Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca, Romania
INTERNATIONAL REFEREES:
GEORGE BANU, Université Paris 3-Sorbonne Nouvelle
DOMNICA RĂDULESCU, Washington and Lee University, USA
JEAN-PIERRE SARRAZAC, Université Paris 3-Sorbonne Nouvelle
GILLES DECLERCQ, Université Paris 3-Sorbonne Nouvelle
MICHAEL PAGE, Calvin College, USA
PATRIZIA LOMBARDO, Geneva University
EDITORIAL OFFICE: 4th Kogălniceanu Street, Cluj-Napoca, RO, Phone: +40 264 590066,
Web site: http://studia.ubbcluj.ro/serii/dramatica,
Contact: [email protected]
Cover Design: Lucia MĂRNEANU
STUDIA UBB EDITORIAL OFFICE: B.P. Hasdeu no. 51, 400371 Cluj-Napoca, Romania,
Phone + 40 264 405352, [email protected]
YEAR Volume 59 (LIX) 2014
MONTH OCTOBER
ISSUE 2
Thematic issue
CONTENT / SOMMAIRE
6
STUDIES AND ARTICLES
STUDIA UBB DRAMATICA, LIX, 2, 2014, p. 9 - 16
(Recommended Citation)
MARIAN POPESCU*
Abstract: Sound, voice and attention are considered from both acknowledged
artistic practices in theatre but also from a reflexive point of view about how the
actors’ training might benefit from a reconsideration of own vocal experience.
Issues such as the aural context in which theatre audiences live and the practical
questions of getting their attention point to a necessary reconsideration of how
actor’s training could restore a real sense of vocal experience of the body in
our world.
when urging the actor to know what makes his/her voice sound in this or
that way. More, she is keen on how to release “the terror of deeper habits”
we all have and discover our own right to speak. (Rodenburg 86-109)
However, number of exercises, ideas in books by theatre directors
and actors point to the importance of commanding the attention of the
people in theatre to what’s being said on stage. It is not only the voice, the
action, the lights or the set but also the quality of the attention targeted by
the director and the actors. Attention is an intellectual act subject to the law
of rhythm, as Théodule Ribot wrote more than a century ago (Ribot 21).
And a theatre production is essentially centered on that. Training attention
is, as well as training the voice, a physical act where muscles are
concentrated to hold on for a temporary period. It has also to do with the
aural concentration and training. Many points to the idea that we loose
gradually the contact with the oral culture and the naturally-produced
noise and sound context of our everydaylife and become more acquainted
with the artificially sound and noise production both in indoor and
outdoor contexts. In fact, sound became more or less a major characteristic
of a postproduction human activity where natural sound is being mixed,
altered ad re-created as to fit into the many of its usage’s levels.
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REFLECTIONS ON SOUND, VOICE AND ATTENTION
mountains, tending farm animals after dark, navigating noisy towns with low
illumination, or, in more recent centuries, attending dozens of opera and concert
performances. Our children are acquiring their aural attitudes from the spatial and
sensory legacy of now several generations of aurally impoverished listeners. It is
up to us enrich that legacy.
11
MARIAN POPESCU
Greek audiences were trained to listen to a play in a way that modern audiences are not.
The plays, like the Homeric poems, are interwoven with intricate verbal patterns. A line
at the end of a speech will pick up a thought at the beginning. A scene late in the play
mirrors one from early on. Modern scholars trace these patterns by close application to
the written text. An ancient audience was expected to attain the same results by hearing
the play, and hearing it only once. (Arnot 79)
Most of the vocal techniques in theatre focus on the need to look for
an improved performance of actor’s voice on stage. Exercises are conceived
from the body’s perspective not from the spectator’s aural context. Techniques
to exercise the listening are not so many even if they are important. Their
description shows that interactivity is at the level of actors’ working groups
rather than at the one of audience’s being present as part of an aural context. A
Romanian practitioner will look in his work for the connection between
imagination, body and voice (Odangiu 155) in terms of a specific stage
behaviour which should finally reach a way body and voice “function together”
in the goal to be different aspects of the same message. The question is
whether in this kind of behaviour one could be sure that the “difference” is
given by the nature of the physical acts or by the audience’s imagination.
12
REFLECTIONS ON SOUND, VOICE AND ATTENTION
13
MARIAN POPESCU
14
REFLECTIONS ON SOUND, VOICE AND ATTENTION
References
Arnott, Peter D. Public and Performance in the Greek Theatre. London: Routledge, 1989.
Blesser, Barry, and Linda-Ruth Salter. Spaces Speak, Are You Listening? Experiencing
Aural Architecture. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2007.
Cummins, F. “Voice, (Inter-) Subjectivity, and Real Time Recurrent Interaction”.
Front. Psychol. 5:760. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2014.00760, 2014.
Li, X., and R. J. Logan & R. E. Pastore. “Perception of acoustic source characteristics:
Walking sounds.” Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 90 (1991): 3036-3049.
Linklater, Kristin. Freeing Shakespeare's Voice: An Actor's Guide to Talking the Text.
New York: Theatre Communications Group, 1992.
Odangiu, Mihai Filip. Praxis. Exercițiul strategic. [Praxis. Strategic Exercise.] Cluj-Napoca:
Casa Cărții de Știință, 2013.
Pensalfini, Rob. “Re-Imagining the Actor's Quartet.” Mosaic (Winnipeg), March 2011.
Ribot, Théodule. Atenția și patologia ei. [Orig. ed. Psychologie de l’Attention, 1889]
București: Iri, 2000.
Rodenburg, Patsy. The Right to Speak. Working with the Voice. London: Methuen, 1992.
Sacks, Oliver. Văzând glasuri. O călătorie în lumea surzilor. [Orig. ed. Seeing Voices, 1989]
București: Humanitas, 2013.
Spolin, Viola (2008). Improvizație pentru teatru. [Improvisation for Theatre, 1999; orig.
ed. 1963] București: U.N.A.T.C. Press, 2008.
Tieghem, Philippe van. Technique du théâtre. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1963.
15
MARIAN POPESCU
On-line references
Bybee, Joan. “Chapter 5: Cognitive Processes in Grammaticalization” in Michael
Tomasello (ed.). The New Psychology of Language: Cognitive and Functional
Approaches to Language Structure. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates,
1998. 28 Jul. 2017. <www.questia.com/read/107085079>.
Grassi, Massimo. “Do We Hear, Size or Sound? Balls Drop on Plates.” Perception
and Psychophysics 67.2 (2005). 27 Jul. 2014.
<http://www.questia.com/read/1P3-846393311>.
Ihde, Don. Listening and Voice: A Phenomenology of Sound. Athens, OH: Ohio
University Press, 1976. 24 Jul. 2014.
<http://www.questia.com/read/10276940 >.
16
STUDIA UBB DRAMATICA, LIX, 2, 2014, p. 17 - 26
(Recommended Citation)
FILIP ODANGIU**
I.
Jean-Louis Barrault, in his memoirs (Amintiri pentru mâine/ orig. ed.
Souvenirs pour demain, 1972), suggests that at each moment of our existence we
are living on at least three planes: we are, we think we are, we want to seem.
That which we are? We don’t know. That which we think we are? We are
delusional. That which we want to seem – we are mistaken. The French theatre
man tends to see the human being as a society, an inner, noisy population
amidst which each of us feels alone. Whether the number of the man’s/actor’s
levels of existence is limited to three, as Barrault believed, or to some higher
value is a matter approached differently by philosophy, psychology and other
fields, depending on the system of ideas they suggest. What is definite,
however, is that this “inner population” mentioned by the French scholar,
communicates mostly through verbal behavior, through speech: “Word forms
and creates man…” said Rudolf Steiner to his student (Steiner, and Steiner-
Von Sivers 270), operating, since 1924, a link that the current studies of
linguistics, philosophy and psychology altogether confirm, namely the
enduring connection between word and body.
homonymous paper (qtd. in Zarrilli 656), i.e. the relationship or rather the
non-relationship the common man has with his own body. Leder describes
a case where, for example, we read a book or ponder or are engaged in
sports/physical effort/even stage acting: at such times, the condition of our
body is far from being in our focus. Our senses are fully captivated by the
experience provided by the world of ideas; thus, we ignore physical
sensations or the position of the body. Sensory and motor organs become
“transparent”, they fade, when we use them.
The first cycle of the actor’s training in school focuses on self-(re-)
discovery, on the reassessment of the organic harmony between body and
imagination, on the relisting of bodily parts and, most of all, on the study of
body-mind (imagination) interactions. The learner is revealed that theatre
means communication1, first with oneself, then with the outer worlds.
Communication between stage and theatre hall can be seen as a blending of
languages through which the actor leads the spectator to his own situation, to
the understanding of the fact that he, the beholder, communicated, via a story,
with his/her own story.
In his book, Synaptic Self: How our Brains Become Who We Are, neuro-
researcher Joseph LeDoux suggests the concept of “narrative self”, stating
that, consciously, “who we are” relies largely on the linguistic reading of
our experiences. (Le Doux 271-272)
“Who” we are relies largely on the linguistic interpretation of our
experience, translated in the stories we tell ourselves about us and about our
place in the world. These “stories” make the narrative self (or the
autobiographical self, at Antonio Damasio). It includes the references, the mental
constructs, the imaginary scenarios we create incessantly. In Synaptic Self: How
our Brains Become Who We Are, Joseph LeDoux warns that stories which make
the “narrative self” or the “autobiographical self”) could improve or restrict
the human being’s creative ability. How can the “stories” people (characters)
tell of themselves be inferred? By observing how they speak.
II.
“The body and the voice are the actor’s laboratory”, said actress
Sarah Jones, author of an exciting theatrical approach that makes exclusive
1 Patrice Pavis defines “theatrical communication” as the exchange of information between the
hall and the stage. The French scholar also notes some researchers’ opinion that “theatre is the
art and the prototype of communication (…) theatre represented its object, human
communication, by human communication” (Ivo Osolsobe, “Cours de théâtristique générale”, in
J. Savona, 1980: 427, qtd. in Pavis 73.)
19
FILIP ODANGIU
2 While, in the current perception, body language accounted only for how the others perceive us,
social psychologist Amy Cuddy shows how our corporeal behavior can also change how we
see ourselves. The scholar shows how “power-related body positions” – stand in a way that
suggests self-confidence, even when we aren’t really confident – may influence the brain
levels of testosterone and cortisol and may have an impact on our success rate.
(http://www.ted.com/talks/amy_cuddy_your_body_language_shapes_who_you_are?
language=ro)
20
ON THE ACTOR’S SPEECH
III.
The meaning of a verbal speech can be obliterated by the very words
that make it. One of the most efficient and recurrent techniques of stage
practice of checking or emphasizing the intentional contents of some lines
is, paradoxically, the emptying of their meanings, by replacing the text with
invented words. Tagged “gibberish”, or in French-origin literary terms
“galimatias”, the speech in nonsensical words is far from being a confusing
language. The procedure, which involves vocal articulation through
onomatopoeias, interdependently with the physical action, ensures the
transmission of the subtext, of the intentions, thus clarifying the purpose of
accurate communication. The meaning of a gibberish message can be received
only by the organic integration of all the nonverbal means (position of the
body, movement, gestures, vocal expression). A thought is rendered in an
invented language spontaneously, by engaging the actor’s entire equipment
and its imaginary as well as expressive elements. The removal of the
dependence on words frees the physical expression. Gibberish uses language
sounds, but excludes signs (words). Thus the issue of communication as pure
experience is tackled.
The worth of gibberish to training and to rehearsals lies in the stimulation
of spontaneity and genuineness, in the improvement of the imaginary-
corporeal expression-vocal expression link via full corporeal reaction, in the
increase of the ability to be in contact with the partner, in the “release” of
actors who rely mostly on words, intellect and reason (reluctant types can
express freely, protected by the vocal and corporeal mask) etc.
The significance and the efficacy of the gibberish technique have been
proven by the conversion of these means of rehearsals in performance
expression. One of the best known examples is “grammelot”, language
invented by Dario Fo. The well-known playwright, in an attempt to further
the tradition of the “giulari” (travelling folk storytellers) and of the commedia
21
FILIP ODANGIU
22
ON THE ACTOR’S SPEECH
IV.
In our theatre schools, speech is often considered a secondary,
auxiliary discipline, which relies on the difficult transit of an infertile field.
On the other hand, the professional environment complains about the
increasing presence of severe deficiencies in young actors’ speech; they
“cannot be heard”, they “lack diction”, “do not know the literary Romanian
language” etc. This situation is attributed to the lack of practice, to the
teacher’s low professional level and even to the favoring of “stage movement”
training to the detriment of the vocal one. While the first claims could be valid
or not, the last assertion (imbalance between focus on movement and focus
on voice) should consider the viewpoint of those who make these claims.
The curriculum of traditional theatre schools has always separated the
training of the actor’s voice and the training of the body. As stated by
acting researchers and teacher Richard J. Kemp, Pittsburgh University, the
training methods that focused on a psychological approach tended to
neglect the mechanics of expression, with the exception of voice exercises.
The belief was that increased attention to corporeal techniques would have
led to anti-naturalist, atypical stage behavior. From this perspective,
approaches of creators such as Jerzy Grotowski, Jaques Lecoq seemed “exotic”,
states Kemp. (31) In the American researcher’s opinion, the current training of
the actor cannot ignore the scientific findings of the last thirty years on the
23
FILIP ODANGIU
operation of the brain and on its relationship with the body. According to
the new paradigm, the body has a key role and its education during training is
fundamental to the configuration of mind. Conventional dichotomies, for
example cognition versus emotion, objective knowledge versus imagination,
reason versus feeling are to be reconsidered. Remarkably, advanced sciences
now confirm the insights of great theatre experts.
Speech is action, in no way less palpable or less efficient than any
other physical action, said C. S. Stanislavski. Speech, meant to express/
support intentions, is, according to Jerzy Grotowski, like a hand that comes
out of one’s mouth and performs actions. Therefore, a speech improvement
exercise executed without intention will not reach its purpose; words will
be mere strings of numb letters. At best, the underlying intention will be
only to pronounce according to grammatical, phonetic rules etc.
The discipline that dealt with the “education of stage speech” in the
traditional acting school was concerned with the concentration of the
student’s attention in two main directions: voice (resonators, registers,
intensity) and diction (correction of articulation mechanisms, speed etc.).
Now, the most recent and most educated theories in the field of the actor’s
vocal training (e.g. studies by Kristin Linklater, Cicely Berry, David Zinder
and so on and so forth) approach the one-to-one relationship between voice
and body, the way in which speech is generated in and through body. The
aforementioned research by Mark Johnson and George Lakoff is an
argument that supports this new type of approach.
On the other hand, words are the squarest expression of “life
experience”, of a person’s “universe”, of his/her level of civilization, of the
existence (or absence) of some interests in the cultural field (books read,
performances seen, music listened to, meetings etc.). When, as an acting
teacher, you commit to “cleansing” the novice’s speech, a fallow mind, a mind
that lacks “cultural experiences” will always be an insurmountable obstacle,
irrespective of the student’s technical skill. Thus, stage speech experts are
required to emphasize to beginners the necessity of a constant concern for the
expansion of their cultural “universe”. Although it is obvious that quality
language (both at content and at form level) is conditioned by a matching
level of knowledge, few seem ready to consider this fact. Therefore,
unpleasant situations occur: student-actors speak words whose meanings
they cannot grasp or at which they guess based on phonetic similarities
with other words; even worse, they ascribe completely erroneous meanings
to them. Performance should brighten the text rather than obscure it,
would say director Andrei Șerban. Constantly pressured by limited time or
24
ON THE ACTOR’S SPEECH
by the requirement to get in line with the exterior “image” of the character,
student-actors sometimes get to a point where they accept the illusion that
meaning should be discerned by spectators. Psychology studies, some of
them very recent, confirm the existence of the so-called “mirror neurons”. It
has been found that, in human interactions (hence, even more in theatre), a
“mirroring” phenomenon occurs: the spectator executes, unconsciously, the
same actions as the subject of his/her observation. Even reactions are
mirrored. Therefore, an actor who ignore, who is passive in front of the
challenge posed by the decoding of textual meanings, will transmit,
unwillingly, the same attitude to and, sometimes, will annoy the spectator.
Here, the audience’s position of partner, of co-author to the completion of
theatrical image meaning is damaged.
To conclude, “speech” cannot be considered a secondary, auxiliary
discipline. As an essential manner of self-modelling and main means of
recognition/depiction of a character, speech alone can become a persuasive
instrument in some social, cultural, political situations, as it happens with
certain exceptional artists such as Anna Deveare Smith, Sarah Jones, Robin
Williams and others.
Perhaps the arguments of this paper for a more integrating approach
of stage speech have been selected from theatrical fields that may be
considered peripheral: documentary theatre, storytelling, stand-up comedy
etc. However, this type of performances can now validate the existence of
theatre in a world where the performer’s art can no longer be justified as
mere entertainment. Dario Fo, Meryl Streep, Robin Williams, Ben Haggarty,
Sarah Jones, Anna Deveare Smith, highly concerned with the power of words,
are only several examples of intelligent actors who possess the rare ability of
making their spectators feel more intelligent and, perhaps, more human.
References
Barrault, Jean-Louis. Amintiri pentru mâine. [Orig. Souvenirs pour demain.] Preface by
Radu Beligan. Translated from French and notes by Sanda Diaconescu.
Bucharest: Editura Meridiane, 1978.
Berry, Cicely. Voice and The Actor. Foreword by Peter Brook. London: Virgin Books
Ltd, 2000.
Donnellan, Declan. Actorul şi Ţinta. Reguli şi instrumente pentru jocul teatral [Orig.
The Actor and the Target]. Translated in Romanian by Saviana Stănescu and
Ioana Ieronim. Bucharest: Editura Unitext, 2006.
25
FILIP ODANGIU
Fo, Dario, and Franca Rame. Manuale minimo dell'attore. [The Actor's Minimum
Manual]. 2 vols. Milano: Fabbri Editori, 2005.
Goleman, Daniel. Focus. Motivația ascunsă a performanței. [Orig. Focus: The Hidden
Driver of Excellence] Translated by Iustina Cojocaru and Bogdan Georgescu.
Bucharest: Curtea Veche Publishing, 2013.
Kemp, Richard J. Embodied Acting: Cognitive Foundations of Performance (doctoral thesis).
Pittsburg: University Of Pittsburgh, School Of Arts And Sciences, 2010.
Lakoff, George, and Mark Johnson. Philosophy in the Flesh: the Embodied Mind and its
Challenge to Western Thought. New York: Basic Books, 1999.
Le Doux, Joseph. Synaptic Self: How Our Brains Become Who We Are. New York:
Viking, 2002.
Marcus, Solomon, and Gheorghe Neacşu. “Probleme ale tipologiei specific umane
la actorii dramatici”. [Issues Concerning the Human Typology of Dramatic
Actors] Revista de psihologie 2 (1963): 291-310.
Pavis, Patrice. Dicţionar de teatru. [Orig. Dictionnaire du théâtre] Translated from
French by Nicoleta Popa-Blanariu and Florinela Floria. Iaşi: Fides, 2012.
Toporkov, Vasili. Stanislavski in Rehearsal. Translated and introduced by Jean
Benedetti. London: Menthuen Drama, 2001.
Steiner, Rudolf, and Marie Steiner-Von Sivers. Modelarea vorbirii și arta dramatică.
[Orig. Speech and Drama] Translated by Diana Sălăjanu. Cluj-Napoca: Editura
Triade, 1999.
Zarrilli, Philip B. “Toward a Phenomenological Model of the Actor's Embodiment
Modes of Experience.” Theatre Journal. 56.4 (2004): 653-666.
Zinder, David. Body Voice Imagination: A Training for the Actor. 2nd ed. New York:
Routledge, 2009.
Online references
Blair, Rhonda. “Theatre and Cognitive Neuroscience - Sciences Impact on Ideas of
the Actor.” Symposium on the 150th anniversary of the publication of Charles
Darwin’s Origin of Species. 12 Sept. 2009. 2 Oct. 2014.
<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ba-5SF3EHYc>.
Cuddy, Amy. “Your Body Language Shapes Who You Are.” TedGlobal. Jun. 2012.
Transcribed by Joseph Geni. Reviewed by Morton Bast. 2 Oct. 2014.
<http://www.ted.com/talks/amy_cuddy_your_body_language_shapes_who_
you_are?language=ro>.
MIHAI FILIP ODANGIU has been teaching acting at the Theatre and Television Faculty
since 2003. In 2013, he obtained his PhD degree with a thesis on the use of metacognitive
strategies in the actor’s training. He graduated from the Faculty of Theatre as an actor (BBU,
Cluj, 2002) and the Faculty of Arts, his major being Painting (West University, Timisoara,
1999). He holds a Master degree in Philosophy of Culture and Performing Arts (BBU, 2003).
His artistic activity includes acting, stage directing, puppetry, visual arts and publishing.
26
STUDIA UBB DRAMATICA, LIX, 2, 2014, p. 27 - 46
(Recommended Citation)
ANCA HAŢIEGAN**
Abstract: The present paper draws an analogy between oral thought and
acting (stage) thought. As Walter J. Ong pointed out in his classic work
Orality and Literacy (1982), orality shapes an empathic, relational, situational,
operational, concrete, polemic and committed thought, which presents striking
similarities with the mental processes of an actor while trying to convert a text
into oral communication. Thus the stage becomes the privileged space where
the terms of the reconciliation between the written word and speech are
negotiated. Could this coexistence of written culture and of orality in theatre
allow us to think the stage is the field on which “secondary orality” appeared
first, a lot earlier than Ong believes? Doesn’t theatre generate, with the actor’s
swing between the written part and the word spoken on stage, “a more
deliberate and self-conscious orality, based permanently on the use of
writing and print”? In order to sustain the said analogy, the second part of
this paper consists of a short presentation and discussion of several testimonies
by Romanian actors.
Motto: (...) with the advent of the print and after Luther,
the printed book enacted the rule of interiorized reading. We,
the theatre scholars and practitioners, seek to see the voice
reemerge from the text. No wonder that dramatic texts are
deemed illegible; theatre needs a voice.
I.
Traditionally, from its Greek origins, Western theatrical performance
has relied on a pre-established text which the actors are to memorize
accurately and perform on stage by vocal and extra-linguistic means. In his
classic work Orality and Literacy (1982), Walter J. Ong claims that the very
structure of the first plays preserved, of the Greek tragedies, is indicative of
their literary nature, i.e. texts written and established in writing, before
they were performed on stage. The closely knit and linear, concise plot,
whose main events (exposition, rising action, climax and denouement)
were described in Aristotle’s Poetics, is a relatively late invention, says Ong
(139-148), as it is the creation of a culture that was beginning to disengage
from the mental universe shaped by orality, with its penchant for the much
looser episodic narrative (see Homer’s poems). The partially improvised
scenarios of the Commedia dell’Arte or the modern and postmodern
theatrical experiments, based on materials created by the performers
themselves, the visual, gestural theatre performances, a fruit of the 20th
century transition from the “logocentric” and “text-centric” theatre (which
relied on the articulated word) to the theatre conceived as conspicuously
physical language have not managed to shatter the foundation and to replace
this tradition of the work on a pre-written text. The method continues to be
successful in most of the theatre institutions, as well as in television or on the
big screen, and an actor’s talent is assessed to a great extent depending on the
ability to enliven a foreign text, a text read or learnt by heart, and to make the
spectator “forget” that a reply said on stage, on screen or from a microphone
(for the radio drama) is seldom an act of the actor’s spontaneity: “Olga
Tudorache taught us how to treasure and how to contemplate the text, so that
we should be able to improvise in unforeseen circumstances. She said anyone
can talk in their own words, few can convey feelings and be genuine by using the
words of others!” (our emphasis), Carmen Tănase, a former student, evokes
the lesson taught by the great artist and teacher, a real legend of the
Romanian theatre, recently retired, at the venerable age of 83 (in an
interview taken for this paper by the author, A.H.).
28
THE RETRIEVAL OF ORALITY. ACTORS’ EXPERIENCES IN REHEARSAL
1 In the work cited, Sacks offers information on the origin and the place the syntagm
occupies in Henry Head’s work– see Sacks 105.
29
ANCA HAŢIEGAN
While with living speech the words seem to be the sum of their
linguistic (articulated sounds) and paralinguistic elements (quality, tone,
intensity, inflection, intentionality etc.), that which is said being intimately
linked to how it is said, in writing the paralinguistic traits are kept only at
the level of suggestion, of underlying contents, allowing various
interpretations. The reader is the one who reconstructs, reactivates or
envisages them, according to the textual or graphic clues (see emoticons
inserted in computer typed texts), in other words, the one who assigns a
possible voice to the words. Quick vertical reading abandons, however, the
entirety of this type of reconstruction/ assignment, losing the paralinguistic
elements and keeping only the instructive aspect of the words. We might
say that the greater the interest in the “chasing” of the sensitive tones
during a live conversation, the more insensitive we are to hem via the
writing technology – and particularly printing.
Metaphorically, writing and reading put us in a state of “tonal
agnosia”, while oral communication draws us closer to the position of the
“tonal aphasia” subject in Oliver Sacks’ meaningful recount. Tonal aphasia
is the alteration or loss of the ability to understand words, linked with an
exacerbated sensitivity to “‘tone’ and ‘feeling’”, to the vocal-bodily
expressiveness attached to the words in the act of speech. The individual
who suffers from aphasia “cannot grasp your words, and so cannot be
deceived by them; but what he grasps he grasps with infallible precision,
namely the expression that goes with the words, that total, spontaneous,
involuntary expressiveness which can never be simulated or faked, as
words alone can, all too easily”. In particular, he has “an infallible ear for
every vocal nuance, the tone, the rhythm, the cadences, the music, the
subtlest modulations, inflections, intonations, which can give – or remove –
verisimilitude to or from a man’s voice”.
On the contrary, the man who suffers from tonal agnosia can
decipher words, but he is immune to the “color of tone” or the “evocative”
tone (terms Sacks borrowed from Frege): “typically, the expressive qualities
of voices disappear – their tone, their timbre, their feeling, their entire
character – while words (and grammatical constructions) are perfectly
understood.” The atonal claims accuracy of speech, while word connotations,
meanings of poetical phrases, of suggestive speech evade him. Sacks talks
about a patient suffering from tonal agnosia: “She could less and less follow
loose speech or slang – speech of an allusive or emotional kind – and more and
more required of her interlocutors that they speak prose – ‘proper words in
30
THE RETRIEVAL OF ORALITY. ACTORS’ EXPERIENCES IN REHEARSAL
proper places’. Prose, she found, might compensate, in some degree, for lack
of perceived tone or feeling.” (104-107) Furthering our analogy, we could
conclude that the technology of writing, mainly the printing press, with its
penchant for “atony”, encourages the use of denotative language – the accurate
language of sciences rather than of fiction.
In fact, we have seen how the rapid eye of the “printing man”, which
races on the paper, scanning it vertically, is not likely to linger on a
particular word, to feel its flavor: it requires the quick grasp of information.
In the end, the main message received with this (quick, vertical) reading is
speed – “speed is the message”, would say philosopher Paul Virilio. However, if
we had to name a sound equivalent, it would be, now, the news anchors’
“white”, prompter-guided voice, the robot voice that sacrifices intonation and
even logical emphases, lending its own dynamism to the guiding mechanism.
Both types of reading – silent vertical reading, for information
purposes, and loud reading like in newscast – are fueled by the myth of
objectivity – another product of the writing technology; in writing, the
voice seems to detach from the subject, to obtain autonomy, to become
depersonalized, while in the act of speech it is always attached to the
source. Inexpressiveness is promoted when the intent is that the voice
sound more credible: an uninvolved, impersonal, submissive voice would
seem the bearer of a disinterested message – the objectivity of a piece of
news delivered in such a voice would never be questioned… However, the
white, flat voice, flatus voci, often emerges intrusively, usually in front of a
numerous audience: it is the literal voice that cannot detach from the
written page and stays captive in its lines. How many times have we
witnessed mechanical, monotonous loud readings or recitals? How many
times, even on professional stages, could we hear dull, stiff voices, with the
text passing by the actor instead through him?!
The retrieval of orality or the “pulling/squeezing” of words from the
written page occurs somewhat despite the text, by assaulting it, by coercing
its tongue, because the writing technology tends to dampen the voice and
even to mute it. Oral expressiveness is not easy to obtain, not even when
you read one of your own texts. Your own words, once put on paper, seem
to resist your attempt to remove them from there. “I was sometimes dazed
by some poets’ inability to recite well their poetry (at times, not even the
logical emphasis would be appropriate); they were unable to retrace their
inspiration starting from the final form”, said once actor Ion Caramitru (see
Băleanu, and Dragnea 70), as a (probably unaware) echo of one of his
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ANCA HAŢIEGAN
2 To this end, Ong invokes a 1981 study of neurophysiology by Kerckhove, which shows
that writing, and most of all writing in a phonetic alphabet system, intensifies the activity
of the left brain hemisphere, in charge of abstract, analytical thinking (89). Sacks notes that
tonal aphasia adds to disorders of this area, more exactly of the left temporal lobe, while
tonal agnosia or atony associates with disorders of the right temporal lobe (106).
32
THE RETRIEVAL OF ORALITY. ACTORS’ EXPERIENCES IN REHEARSAL
33
ANCA HAŢIEGAN
34
THE RETRIEVAL OF ORALITY. ACTORS’ EXPERIENCES IN REHEARSAL
35
ANCA HAŢIEGAN
3 According to historian Neagu Djuvara, at the beginning of the 20th century, peasants were
still more than 80% of the Romanian population (194). In communism, rural population
decreased abruptly, given the forced industrialization of the country, and until nowadays
it remains at about 50% of the country’s population.
4 The National Institute of Statistics (INS) reported, based on the 2011 Romanian population
census, that there were 245,400 analphabet people in approximately 20 million inhabitants
(the highest rate of analphabetism in the European Union). Other statistics show that 40%
of the Romanians lack good reading skills or do not know how to read.
36
THE RETRIEVAL OF ORALITY. ACTORS’ EXPERIENCES IN REHEARSAL
paper can easily seem – even if they aren’t at all! – “blunt” abstractions,
exclusive products of our rational minds: a mere list of graphical signs,
lacking, at the core, in form, particularly in alphabetic writing (the most
abstract), the strength of poetic suggestion (apparently, pictograms are an
exception). In other words, in writing, poetry doesn’t look too dissimilar
from statistics. This trompe l’oeil effect, given by the possibility to contemplate
words on paper as if they were foreign bodies, has deceived even some of the
representatives of a subtle field such as psychology – words were associated
exclusively with rationality, while feelings, sensations were linked strictly with
the area of non-verbal expression: “Just as the mode of the rational mind is
words, the mode of the emotions is nonverbal. Indeed, when a person’s words
disagree with what is conveyed via his tone of voice, gesture or other
nonverbal channel, the emotional truth is in how he says something rather than
in what he says” (Goleman 139). The previous Manichean dissociation ignores
that the existence of the abstract, analytical, “diurnal” (see Gilbert Durand, The
Anthropological Structures of the Imaginary, 1960) word can be doubled, writing
included, at the level of the contents, by the “nocturnal” conditions of
synesthesia – see the poetic word, the evocative word, the “heavy” word of
connotations (which the atonal person can barely understand). It also ignores
the possibility of the interaction between word and gesture and, most of all,
their potential interdependence.
Aren’t the rather unfortunate awareness of the body-word duality and
the divergent visions of one’s alleged or expected superiority over the other
owed to the illusion of our doubling in writing: gestural man versus Homo
sapiens loquans?! To the same end, we should also look at the impression
effected by the man engaged in reading (in silent reading, to be more exact) as
compared to the speaker, for, unlike oral communication, which engages the
speaker’s whole being, gestures and face expressions included, to a wider
extent than writing (which involves the movement of the hand and may
trigger some nervous reactions), it seems to pin the reader in a purely cerebral,
reflexive activity – hence the static, meditative image projected on the man of
letters, on the “intellectual”. In paleo-anthropology, the dispute between the
two different vision on the extent to which the gesture and the speech
contributed to man’s emancipation is articulated by whether speech owes
something – and to what extent – to gesture, if, in the formation of Homo
sapiens, speech developed early and gradually, from some gestures, as an
extension of body language (the gestural model) or if it appeared later and
downright replaced gestural language (the nominalist model)?
37
ANCA HAŢIEGAN
38
THE RETRIEVAL OF ORALITY. ACTORS’ EXPERIENCES IN REHEARSAL
39
ANCA HAŢIEGAN
What’s interesting is that the urge to gesture does not leave the actor
on the radio, in front of the microphone, nor in front of the written page.
Thus, director Mihai Zirra, considered father of the Romanian radio drama,
notes in his memoirs the moment he understood that: “actors act in front of
the microphone and they do it with all the gestures and movements of the
stage, but the microphone is the filter, to say so, through which an actor
replies to his partner” (23). Another radio inside perspective is offered by
actress Maia Morgenstern: “In radio drama, the voice and sometimes even
the movement are important; we joke and sometimes we tell one another
how the movement should look, there are such cues among us…” (Răboj
et al., eds. 76).
Despite this gestural bias, we must emphasize, however, that the
speaking actor is ill-at-ease when there’s excessive stress on movements.
Some do push to extremes the gestural model. Olga Tudorache recounted
that the work at the Effect of Gamma Rays on Man-in-the-Moon Marigolds, by
Paul Zindel, directed by Cătălina Buzoianu (1977) had been very challenging
as to the many physical actions that had to be done in a brief time interval
on the stage. This mad bustle was jamming the actress’s natural rhythm of
speech linked to thought and feeling:
I thought the play with objects in the Effect of Gamma… was a huge hindrance. This
innumerable actions were also the reason of some kind of misunderstanding between
me and director Cătălina Buzoianu; I was asking, `Alright, and when do I get to act?
I’m used to an action in three sentences and you’re asking me to do six actions in
three words? I don’t get to feel what I’m acting, because I’m whipped like a horse,
I’m to get both on and under the ladder and under the table and spread those words,
to make them feel thought and felt; to squeeze them like you do a harmonic, so that,
while I speak them, I should also do so many things: put on a shawl, brush my teeth,
take the shawl off – and all these in three words!. I need to digest a line, a situation,
to catch it, swallow it, give it time to turn in me...`. Cătălina Buzoianu told me,
however, that we had to mirror the American world and its hectic beat (which could
not be obtained with ‘Moldavian measures’) and I did my best to accomplish
everything she asked me to; in the end, I understood that, indeed, on the stage, there
was a rhythm of life different from those to which we are used. It was a success, but
the effort had been tremendous! (...) I had encountered a standpoint very different
from mine, but I tried to do what was asked of me and it turned out alright; which
means she was right. (Băleanu, and Dragnea 295-296)
“Oral thought”
In very strict terms, of course, radio theatre is the most in-built in
orality; Romanian director Liviu Ciulei compared it with the “sessions” of
stores typical to the rural world: “I don’t know about a form of oral theatre
before the appearance of radio theatre. Perhaps it is very slightly related to
the so-called bee; most of the times, however, apart from ballads and lyrics,
it made use of epic rather than dramatic formulae” (Răboj et al., eds. 35).
Orality, in Ong’s opinion, is not the prevalence of sound elements; it also
means a particular way of thinking. Director Peter Brook, states George
Banu, would say: “to rehearse is to think loud”. In theatre, this “oral
41
ANCA HAŢIEGAN
thought”, claims Banu, is geared from the first collective reading of the text,
from its first loud reading. (Banu, ed. 113) Stage directions are also given in
loud voice. In theatre, everybody talks, louder, soft or whispering, from
actors and director to technicians or prompters. Surrounded by an ocean of
orality, the text itself speaks when the performance is a success. Otherwise,
the stage is governed by that mechanical, flat and colorless speech, which
frustrates the spectators.
II.
I will try in this second part of the paper to support the analogy
between oral thought and acting (stage) thought outlined in the first part
with a series of statements from Romanian actors. Most of them are
excerpts from two volumes of interviews by Andrei Băleanu and Doina
Dragnea at the beginning of the 1980s, with very explicit references to the
actor’s work and relation with the text during rehearsals; I have also used
some opinions from acquaintances or friends who are actors.
As shown previously, orality shapes an empathic, relational, situational,
operational, concrete, polemic and committed thought. Thus, the profound
affinity of the actor’s thought with oral thought is best described by how
the relationship and the situation were, in Irina Petrescu’s opinion, the main
pillars of the dramatic structure:
I think the real acting work is in the building of a situation on the stage, the building
of a relationship;
I believe truth on stage comes out only in the relationship. At Bulandra, I was lucky
to act in the company of ideal partners: Clody Bertola, Petre Gheorghiu, Ileana
Predescu, Gina Patrichi, Mariana Mihuț… Actors who, not only during rehearsals,
but also during the performances, enhance the relationship and keep it constantly
alive. Like in ping pong, where each hit launched is received and returned.
(Interview with Irina Petrescu – see Dragnea 160-161)
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THE RETRIEVAL OF ORALITY. ACTORS’ EXPERIENCES IN REHEARSAL
43
ANCA HAŢIEGAN
References
44
THE RETRIEVAL OF ORALITY. ACTORS’ EXPERIENCES IN REHEARSAL
Berlogea, Ileana, and George Muntean, eds. Pagini din istoria gândirii teatrale
românești. [Pages from the History of Romanian Theatrical Thought] Bucharest:
Editura Meridiane, 1972.
Cazimir, Șt., ed. Amintiri despre Caragiale. [Remembering Caragiale] Bucharest:
Editura Minerva, 1972.
Djuvara, Neagu. O scurtă istorie a românilor povestită celor tineri. [A Brief History of the
Romanians Narrated for the Young] 4th ed. Bucharest: Editura Humanitas, 2002.
Dragnea, Doina, and Andrei Băleanu. Actorul între adevăr și ficțiune. 28 de convorbiri
inedite despre arta scenică. [The Actor between Truth and Fiction. 28 Original
Conversations about Stage Acting] Bucharest : Editura Meridiane, 1984.
Duvignaud, Jean. Sociologie du théâtre. Sociologie des ombres collectives. [Sociology of
Theatre. Sociology of Collective Shadows]. Paris : Quadrige/ PUF, 1999.
Goleman, Daniel. Inteligenţa emoţională. [Emotional Intelligence] Transl. from English
by Irina-Margareta Nistor. 3rd ed. Bucharest: Editura Curtea Veche, 2008.
Livescu, Ioan I. Arta de a vorbi. Arta de a citi. Arta de a tăcea – Trei prelegeri la
Universitatea „Radio”. [The Art of Speech. The Art of Reading. The Art of Being
Silent – Three Lectures at the “Radio” University] 2nd ed. Bucharest :
“UNIVERSUL” Printing Office, 1937.
McLuhan, Marshall. Texte esenţiale. [Essential Writings] Edited by Eric McLuhan
and Frank Zingrone. Translation from English by Mihai Moroiu. 2nd ed.,
revised. Bucharest: Editura Nemira, 2006.
Noice, Tony, and Helga Noice. “The Expertise of Professional Actors: a Review of
Recent Research.” High Abilities Studies 13.1 (2002): 7-17.
Ong, Walter J. Orality and Literacy, The Technologizing of the Word. 2nd ed. London &
New York: Routledge, 2002.
Răboj Georgeta, Dan Oprina, Monica Patriciu, Magda Duțu, Domnica Țundea-
Gheorghiu, and Vasile Manta, eds. Teatrul Național Radiofonic. [The National
Radio Theatre] Vol. 2. Bucharest: Editura Casa Radio, 1998.
Sacks, Oliver. Omul care își confunda soția cu o pălărie. [The Man who Mistook His Wife
for a Hat] Translated from English by Dan Rădulescu. Bucharest: Editura
Humanitas, 2005.
Vianu, Tudor, “Responsibilitatea actorului.” [The Actor’s Responsibility] Revista
Teatrul 2 (1956): 3-5.
Zamfirescu, Florin. Actorie sau magie. Aripi pentru Ycar. [Acting or Magic. Wings for
Ycarus] Bucharest: Editura Privirea, 2003.
Zirra, Mihai. Am ales Teatrul Radiofonic... [I Chose the Radio Theatre…] Foreword and
notes by Victor Crăciun. Afterword by Iulia Popovici. Bucharest: Editura
Casa Radio, 2009.
Online references:
Kimbrough, Andrew McComb. The Sound of Meaning: Theories of Voice in Twentieth-
Century Thought and Performance. 2002. 2 Oct. 2014.
<http://etd.lsu.edu/docs/available/etd-0405102-074904/unrestricted/
Kimbrough_dis.pdf>.
45
ANCA HAŢIEGAN
46
STUDIA UBB DRAMATICA, LIX, 2, 2014, p. 47 - 58
(Recommended Citation)
CHRISTOFI CHRISTAKIS*
Abstract: The original use of the voice in Beckett's dramatic work constitutes
a reflection on the boundaries of dramatic art and theatre and proposes a
dynamic relationship of the elements brought to the stage. It is connected to
the play and stage, reinforcing the enigmatic presence of the character and
questioning the limits of narrative and performance. It is carefully
orchestrated to bring about new questions.
Theories of Voice in the Twentieth Century. Cambria Press, 2011 2. Richardson, Brian. "Voice
and narration in postmodern drama." New Literary History 32.3 2001, p. 681-694 3. West,
Sarah. Say it: The Performative Voice in the Dramatic Works of Samuel Beckett. Rodopi, 2008),
en se focalisant sur le principe de la voix en-jeu scénique.
2 Pour ce mot, l’emploi de la majuscule, adopté par Beckett, indique dans son œuvre
48
S. BECKETT ET VOIX EN JEU SCENIQUE
paroles I et II, Film, Souffle), Minuit, p. 44. Ce titre est abrégé comme CA dans le texte.
11 Beckett, Oh les beaux jours suivi de Pas moi, Minuit, p. 82, 86, 91, 93.
12 Beckett, Oh les beaux jours, op.cit., p. 81.
49
CHRISTOFI CHRISTAKIS
13 La voix est également source d’identité qui différencie le même personnage. Dans Fin de
partie, par exemple, apparaissent également deux récits où la différentiation de la voix
joue avec l’implication des personnages, des rôles différents, c’est pourquoi les trois voix
doivent se différencier. C’est l’histoire du tailleur et le récit de Hamm vers la fin de la
pièce. Beckett lui-même supervisant la mise en scène de cette pièce au Schiller explique
que : «[c]hez Hamm alternent respectivement la voix du narrateur, sa propre voix et la
voix du mendiant […]. Cette concordance et cet écho doivent être clairs pour le public».
La voix participe alors à la tension de ce qui est mis en scène. C’est ce qui se radicalise
dans Oh les beaux jours, où la différentiation de la voix de Winnie se fait sentir dans le
désert, et c’est la voix qui motive le jeu scénique. Haerdter, Michaël. « Samuel Beckett
répète Fin de Partie», Revue d'Esthétique 1986, op.cit., p. 313.
14 « Une voix qui dit d’une façon impersonnelle ce qu’il en est pour elle de plus personnel. Une
voix qui met à nu la souffrance et, avec la même sobriété, le rire. Une voix qui dit son
incertitude sur le temps, le lieu, les personnages, les frontières de l’esprit et du corps, du passé
et du présent, du jour et de la nuit, de l’animé et de l’inanimé ». Anzieu, Didier. « Sur Beckett »,
Créer/ Détruire, Paris, Dunon, coll. Psychismes, 1997, p. 177.
15 Marie-Claude Hubert affirme que « [l]a voix, lancinante, apparaît comme un stimulus extérieur
1996, p. 157.
17 Beckett, Catastrophe et autres dramaticules (Cette fois, Solo, Berceuse, Impromptu d’Ohio, Quoi
50
S. BECKETT ET VOIX EN JEU SCENIQUE
Voix, même si elle appartient au personnage qu’on voit sur scène, provient
de trois sources différentes (selon la didascalie : bribes d'une seule et même
voix, la sienne, ABC lui arrivent des deux côtés et du haut respectivement. Elles
s'enchaînent sans interruption CAT 9). Le thème majeur est le souvenir,
incarné par le visage éclairé du Souvenant et sa réaction minimale à sa voix.
Chaque histoire racontée représente une autre temporalité et est différente.
« L’histoire de B, affirme Beckett, porte sur le jeune homme, l’histoire de C
est celle du vieillard, l’histoire de A celle de l’homme d’âge mûr »18. Pour
l’histoire de A, c’est l’hiver, toujours la pluie (CAT 19), pour celle de B, le
printemps ou l’été, et pour celle de C, l’hiver et la pluie, encore. Celle de A
se déroule à la ruine où enfant il se cachait quand la journée était grise, avec
le 11 jusqu’au bout de la ligne, les tramways abandonnés, des vieux rails
(CAT 9-10)… celle de C, au musée des portraits (lieu de mort), bureau de
poste, bibliothèque municipale… celle de B, au soleil sur la pierre à l’orée
du petit bois et à perte de vue les blés blondissants (CAT 10). La notion de
souvenir y régit tous les composants dramatiques : personnage
(Souvenant), temps (trois périodes différentes de sa vie qui correspondent à
des expériences différentes), lieux (trois pays différents) et actions. Le
personnage a apparemment une fonction passive : il entend ses expériences
de trois périodes différentes de sa vie. Ce qui dessine le portrait de ce
personnage à travers sa voix et ses histoires propres. La scène, en effet,
constitue le lieu d’une histoire, la seule qui peut ancrer l’histoire elle-même,
parce que d’autres histoires et d’autres lieux sont évoqués. La fragmentation
d’histoires rend leur localisation difficile. Les interférences des lieux, des
histoires (d’une même histoire ? d’une même personne ?) accordent à cette
pluralité étrange une dimension fragmentaire, ou mieux le fragmentaire
engendre une pluralité étrange, provoque une interaction plurielle et renforce
le jeu scénique. Sans le conflit du souvenir, le Souvenant ne peut exister.
L’identification du personnage à la voix émise de trois sources différentes est
claire, l’enjeu du souvenir et de la présence physique est indéniable. Voix et
souvenir s’entremêlent.
Par ailleurs, dans Pas, une jeune femme, May, parcourt l’espace, ses
pas sont audibles ; elle va et vient. Dans la première partie, May et sa mère
maintiennent un dialogue. La mère est absente de la scène, mais on entend
sa voix. Dans la deuxième partie, la voix de la mère raconte une histoire, et,
dans la troisième partie, May rapporte probablement son histoire propre.
18 Knowlson, James, Beckett, tr. en français par Bonis, Oristelle, Actes Sud, 1999, p. 758.
51
CHRISTOFI CHRISTAKIS
Beckett résume cette pièce : elle «se compose de trois parties : d’abord la
fille parle à sa mère malade, puis la mère parle à sa fille qui n’est pas
vraiment là ; enfin la fille évoque le souvenir d’une autre mère et d’une
autre fille. Elle ne parle que des souvenirs qu’elle a de cette mère et de cette
fille »19. Le parti pris concerne l’espace scénique et la dis/jonction de la
parole de/avec la scène. C’est un va-et-vient rythmé dans le noir où tout
demeure confus : personnes mouvements voix.
La voix de femme y acquiert un statut particulier : il ne s’agit pas d’une
présence scénique, mais elle est clairement identifiable : elle sort du fond de
la scène, dans le noir20. D’après le texte, le personnage principal, May, se
trouve dans un état de trouble. « Dans sa pauvre tête » (P 17) se passe
quelque chose qu’elle ne peut contrôler. Elle marche sans cesse. Les
rapports de May avec la Voix sont multiples et complexes. Dans les trois
parties du texte, leurs relations sont confuses. Dans la première partie, la
Voix dialogue avec May, dans la deuxième, la Voix entame son discours à
la première personne du singulier : « [j]e rôde ici à présent », et la Voix
poursuit, en utilisant la troisième personne du singulier, « elle s’imagine
être seule » (P 11), ou la Voix raconte l’histoire confuse d’une personne,
« May – nom de baptême de l’enfant » (P 12), qui n’a ni la notion de lieu
(« [o]ù est – elle, peut- on se demander ? P 11), ni celle du temps (« quand
commença ceci ? P 11). Ce personnage ne peut qu’errer. Dans la troisième
partie du texte, c’est May qui prend la parole. Cependant, elle continue à
raconter probablement la même histoire, c’est-à-dire l’histoire de May
toujours à la troisième personne du singulier, « lorsqu’elle était tout à fait
oubliée » (P 13). May poursuit son monologue en rapportant une autre
histoire, celle d’une mère et de sa fille, Mme Winter et Amy (anagramme de
May). May rapporte leur conversation lorsqu’elles se mettent à table après
l’office, et pendant laquelle la mère interroge la fille si elle a « remarqué
quelque chose… d’étrange aux vêpres ? » (P 15), mais Amy n’a rien
remarqué, elle n’était, peut-être, pas là (P 16).
Dans Pas, ces « personnages » et leur statut se confondent constamment :
la juxtaposition des fragments d’histoires interdit la construction d’un portrait
clair, et elle ne permet pas au récepteur de se situer clairement. Dans la
première partie du texte, le dialogue des deux « personnages » montrent deux
émetteurs de paroles et d’actions distinctes : la Voix parle / May parle et
52
S. BECKETT ET VOIX EN JEU SCENIQUE
53
CHRISTOFI CHRISTAKIS
s'enchaînent sans interruption sauf aux endroits indiqués. Silence 7 secondes. Yeux
ouverts. Respiration audible, lente et régulière. 2) (les yeux se ferment, légère baisse de
l'éclairage CAT 9) 3) Silence 3 secondes. Les yeux s'ouvrent. Légère montée de
l'éclairage. Respiration audible. 7 secondes (CAT 14) 4) (les yeux se ferment, légère
baisse de l'éclairage CAT 14) 5) Silence 3 secondes. Les yeux s'ouvrent. Légère montée
de l'éclairage. Respiration audible. 7 secondes (CAT 19) 6) (les yeux se ferment, légère
baisse de l'éclairage CAT 19) 7) (Silence 3 secondes. Les yeux s'ouvrent. Légère
montée de l'éclairage. Respiration audible. Sourire, édenté de préférence. 7 secondes.
L'éclairage s'éteint lentement. Rideau CAT 25). L’obscurité ouvre et clôt la pièce.
Le jeu avec l’éclairage marque les trois parties de l’œuvre. La lumière suit et
crée l’action, à la fois. Tout devient amalgame, c’est un ensemble sans début,
sans milieu, sans fin, sans personnage, sans histoire, sans temporalité. Bref,
c’est une action dépourvue de tout ce qu’il pourrait lui rendre une unité. Les
différentes provenances d’une même voix amplifient la pauvreté scénique,
constituée d’un seul visage éclairé, seul dans le noir. Ce qui suggère
indéniablement une présence scénique, mais l’action est réduite au minimum,
fragmentée par la multiplicité et la complexité des souvenirs du Souvenant.
Les différentes provenances, A B C, de la même voix remplissent l’espace
obscure de la scène. La tête, comme spectateur/témoin/acteur, entend et
réagit peu. Pour le spectateur, aussi, il y a peu à voir, beaucoup à entendre.
Les structures de ce texte sont particulières et pointent l’intérêt
beckettien pour la composition musicale. Il faut néanmoins préciser que,
par composition musicale, nous entendons toute composition valorisant la
forme et le jeu dramatique. La composition musicale est l’hyperonyme,
exemple matrice d’une recherche formelle. La même voix du Souvenant,
différenciée par la source d’émission, relate, en trois parties, trois histoires
différentes, concernant la même personne, de la manière suivante : PARTIE I :
ACB, ACB, ACB, CAB PARTIE II CBA, CBA, CBA, BCA PARTIE III BAC,
BAC, BAC, BAC. Beckett va jusqu’au bout de cette recherche formelle.
Etant donné qu’une même Voix, provenant de localisations diverses
(A/B/C), raconte trois histoires différentes de manière fragmentée, avec
des reprises, des répétitions… et que la ponctuation est absente, le sens
s’obscurcit, et le contenu se musicalise. Sur scène, le jeu avec l’image
demeure. Les différentes permutations des voix matières créent le plaisir et
posent indéniablement « des limites à l’égalité de la partie avec le tout »21.
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S. BECKETT ET VOIX EN JEU SCENIQUE
Par ailleurs, dans Comédie, ce sont des visages impassibles des voix
atones sauf aux endroits où une expression est indiquée22 (CA 10). Les personnages
parlent seuls à leur tour ou ensemble comme un chœur. Ce qui contribue à
la musicalité de la voix, puisqu’il n’est pas facile de distinguer des mots.
Il s’agit des voix, qui ne peuvent être définies, ce qui constitue un mouvement
confus. La structure de cette œuvre est aussi liée au sens (direction et
signification). La structure ternaire, répétée deux fois, est indissociable du
triangle amoureux. Le chœur (selon Beckett, moment où les personnages
parlent en même temps) montre ce qui se passe dans ce type de situations,
c’est-à-dire : la confusion. Et en fin de compte, la non communication entre les
personnages se confirme par le désordre du discours.
Dans Berceuse, la forme du texte nous berce, la voix aussi. La femme en
noir, assise dans un rocking-chair, se balance toujours au même rythme.
Pourtant, elle reste immobile, et le rythme du balancement épouse celui
du texte, celui de sa voix enregistrée. À certains intervalles, cette femme
répète avec sa propre voix enregistrée : « temps qu’elle finisse », « autre âme
vivante », « berce-la d’ici », suit un silence, un arrêt, et cela recommence
jusqu’à la fin de la pièce où tout arrive à son terme : la Voix cesse, le
balancement aussi, et la femme (F) incline la tête sur la poitrine. L’obscurité
domine à nouveau. La Voix est blanche, sourde, monotone. Et lorsque, à quatre
reprises Femme se joint à Voix, c’est chaque fois un peu plus bas et l’ « encore» de
F chaque fois un peu plus bas. Vers la fin, la Voix s’affaiblit progressivement (CAT
55). La Voix devient échos, parce que l’on ne sait pas d’où cette voix sort et la
relation exacte entre le personnage et la voix. Et là où la Voix est captivante,
elle disparaît. Cette femme est présente sur scène, agit et subit l’histoire ; cette
histoire montre et la mort et le balancement. Le rapport du mouvement
in/cessant à ce qui est censé représenter la fin de tout mouvement (la mort)
rend la question de la séparation porteuse de plusieurs interrogations et
irrésolutions. La mise en scène de ce balancement est valorisée, une berceuse.
Le mouvement des voix, des lumières et des matières acquiert alors
un rôle essentiel dans cette œuvre. La montée de l’éclairage trouve la scène
dans une parfaite immobilité. D’abord, c’est la Voix et balancement ensemble/
écho, fin du balancement, légère baisse de l’éclairage (CAT 41-44), ensuite,
Voix et balancement vont ensemble/écho, fin du balancement, légère
baisse de l’éclairage (CAT 44-46), puis, même fait (CAT 46-49), enfin écho et
22 Beckett, Comédie et actes divers (Va-et-vient, Cascando, Paroles et Musique, Dis Joe, Actes sans paroles
I et II, Film, Souffle), Minuit, p. 10. Par la suite le titre est abrégé dans le texte comme CA.
55
CHRISTOFI CHRISTAKIS
56
S. BECKETT ET VOIX EN JEU SCENIQUE
23 Hunkeler, Thomas, Échos de l’ego dans l’œuvre de Samuel Beckett, Paris, Harmattan, 1997,
p. 160-169.
24 Ovide, Les métamorphoses, GF- Flammarion, Paris, 1966, p. 98-103.
25 T. Hunkeler, op. cit., p. 65.
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CHRISTOFI CHRISTAKIS
Bibliographie
58
STUDIA UBB DRAMATICA, LIX, 2, 2014, p. 59 - 78
(Recommended Citation)
CÉLINE TORRENT*
Abstract: The aim of this paper (The body, medium-mirror between poetry’s writing
and choreography? Body’s lines of Wilfride Piollet, between poetry and dance) is to
show how the body, reflecting poetry and dance in the French contemporary
era, allows us to approach these two arts in a new way. Since their respective
codes imploded at the end of the XIX's century, dance and poetry seem more
and more involved with one another, but the link between them might not be
very obvious. Therefore we will assume that poetry and choreography are two
ways of writing that converse and redefine each other through the body, this
one being the medium and the mirror of the two. We will demonstrate this
hypothesis with the work of the French dance theorist and dancer, Wilfride
Piollet. First we will see how dancing can be considered as Mallarmé's ''écriture
corporelle'', through Wilfride Piollet's technique called ''barres flexibles''. Then
we shall see how poetry can appear as a textual body, with the example of a
choreographic adaptation, a "lecture corporelle", a corporeal reading of a poem
by René Char. From there, and as a conclusion, we will try to define the concept
of "corpoéticité", combining body and poetry. At a time where dance and poetry
can't be defined by very specific forms, we propose to use "corpoéticité" as a tool
to identify today's dance and poetry, yet not one the parallel of the other but one
through the other, likewise dance through poetry and poetry through the body.
The precise characteristics of this concept and its uses still have to be defined.
For now, the paper's interest resides in considering the body as a new way to
comprehend, further than the usual aesthetic categories they're confined in,
what potential poetry and dance can have nowadays.
1 « (…) la danse moderne a banni l’argument, cette scène verbale virtuelle, ce texte “extérieur”
(…) qui “gère” le déroulement mimétique d’une dramaturgie gestuelle, telle qu’elle perdurait
depuis le “ballet en action” théorisé par Noverre [au XVIIIe siècle] », Laurence Louppe,
« Ecriture littéraire, écriture chorégraphique au XXe siècle : une double révolution », Littérature
n°112, « La littérature et la danse », Paris, décembre 1998, p. 88.
2 Ibid., p. 89.
3 A la fin du XIXe siècle, la poésie française connaît ce que Mallarmé nomme en 1886 une « crise
de vers ». Le vers, forme qui pendant des siècles s’est confondue avec le genre poétique, est
soudain remis en question. Les expérimentations menées sur ce dernier suite à la fin de son âge
d’or romantique ont brouillé ses limites avec la prose (vers libre, poème en prose…). Dès lors, il
apparaît que la poésie peut exister hors du cadre formel strict du vers, ce qui remet en cause la
définition même du genre poétique.
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LE CORPS, MEDIUM-MIROIR ENTRE LA GRAPHIE DU POEME ET LA CHOREGRAPHIE?
une manière d’être en relation avec les corps [mais] doit être le corps »4. De
l’autre côté, la danse prend peu à peu conscience de la possibilité de s’écrire
non plus seulement sur le corps, mais à partir du corps, à travers son propre
langage qui, se basant sur le corps, soudain n’est plus nécessairement
tributaire des autres arts auxquels elle a pu être pendant longtemps inféodée,
qu’il s’agisse de la musique ou de la littérature à travers le livret de ballet.
Ainsi souhaitons-nous envisager le corps comme un « medium-
miroir » entre la chorégraphie et la graphie poétique qu’est le poème. Le
corps serait en effet à la fois un miroir à travers lequel danse et poésie
pourraient se reconnaître l’une dans le reflet de l’autre, et un medium, qui
pourrait assurer le passage de l’une à l’autre et de l’une dans l’autre,
passage dont elles ressortiraient mutuellement redéfinies. Car à une époque
où il est difficile de savoir précisément ce que l’on entend par danse
« contemporaine » et poésie « contemporaine », poésie et danse pourraient
retrouver une identité, non pas l’une parallèlement à l’autre mais bien l’une
à travers l’autre, à travers le corps comme medium-miroir.
Nous prendrons appui sur l’exemple de la danseuse et théoricienne
de la danse Wilfride Piollet, et de son travail autour des textes de Stéphane
Mallarmé et René Char. Dans un premier temps, nous verrons d’une part
que la danse peut être conçue, selon l’expression de Mallarmé, comme une
« écriture corporelle »5, à travers l’exemple de la technique des « barres
flexibles » de Wilfride Piollet. Dans un second temps, nous verrons que ;
réciproquement, la poésie peut se révéler comme corps dansant, en nous
appuyant sur l’adaptation chorégraphique du poème de René Char,
« Lettera amorosa », par Wilfride Piollet. Ceci nous amènera à esquisser en
conclusion la notion de « corpoéticité », comme intermédiaire à la fois
corporel et poétique entre les deux arts à l’heure contemporaine.
4 Hugues Marchal, Corpoèmes : L’inscription textuelle du corps dans la poésie en France au XXe siècle,
thèse dirigée par Michel Collot, soutenue à l’université Paris 3 le 18 décembre 2002, p. 4.
5 Mallarmé, « Ballets », Œuvres complètes I et II, éd. présentée et annotée par Bertrand
Marchal, Paris, Gallimard, Bibliothèque de La Pléiade, 1998, p. 171.
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CÉLINE TORRENT
…suggérant, par le prodige de raccourcis ou d’élans, avec une écriture corporelle ce qu’il
faudrait des paragraphes en prose dialoguée autant que descriptive, pour exprimer, dans
la réaction : poème dégagé de tout appareil du scribe.6
6 Ibid.
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LE CORPS, MEDIUM-MIROIR ENTRE LA GRAPHIE DU POEME ET LA CHOREGRAPHIE?
7 Wilfride Piollet, Les barres flexibles, exercices, Paris, éd. L’une et l’autre, 2008, p. 18.
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CÉLINE TORRENT
8 Michèle Aquien, Dictionnaire de poétique, Librairie générale française, coll. « Le livre de poche »,
1993, 5ème édition, 2001, p. 177.
9 Wilfride Piollet, entretien du 26 avril 2013, Poissy.
10 « A savoir que la danseuse n’est pas une femme qui danse, pour ces motifs juxtaposés qu’elle
n’est pas une femme, mais une métaphore résumant un des aspects élémentaires de notre
forme, glaive, coupe, fleur, etc. ; et qu’elle ne danse pas, suggérant, par le prodige de
raccourcis ou d’élans, avec une écriture corporelle ce qu’il faudrait des paragraphes en prose
dialoguée autant que descriptive, pour exprimer dans la rédaction : poème dégagé de tout
appareil du scribe. », Mallarmé, op. cit., p. 171
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LE CORPS, MEDIUM-MIROIR ENTRE LA GRAPHIE DU POEME ET LA CHOREGRAPHIE?
11 Ibid.
12 Wilfride Piollet, entretien du 13 mars 2014, à Poissy.
13 « la ballerine illettrée se livrant aux jeux de sa profession. », Mallarmé, op. cit., p. 174
14 Wilfride Piollet, Rendez-vous sur tes barres flexibles, Entretiens avec Gérard-Georges Lemaire,
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Impulsée par ces catalyseurs d’imaginaire que sont les mots, les symboles
de Mallarmé par exemple, la danse est une poésie écrite par l’intermédiaire
silencieux du corps, dans l’éphémère du mouvement.
15 René Char, lettre adressée à Wilfride Piollet et Jean Guizerix, le 27 octobre 1986, reprise dans le
poème « Nous étions dans l’Août d’un clair matin peu sûr », dans Eloge d’une soupçonnée, Paris,
Gallimard, vol.1, 1988, p. 190.
16 René Char, Lettera amorosa (première édition par Edwin Engelberts, Genève, 1963), illustrations
66
LE CORPS, MEDIUM-MIROIR ENTRE LA GRAPHIE DU POEME ET LA CHOREGRAPHIE?
qui donc cherche à creuser sa propre forme dans la prose en même temps
qu’il cherche la figure absente de l’amoureuse, ne pourrait-il pas être
considéré comme la mise en abyme de la quête de la poésie elle-même par
le poète ? Ce poème écrit en 1963 par René Char semble pleinement
s’inscrire dans la quête qui est celle de la poésie contemporaine « dé-vers-
tébrée », une poésie qui ayant fait éclater la forme clairement définie du
vers fait de son écriture-même la quête de sa propre forme. Aussi, dans la
prose de la « lettera amorosa », l’amoureuse absente à laquelle s’adresse le
texte de la lettre pourrait être considérée comme étant la poésie que le
poète cherche dans les lettres du texte. Le texte de Char pourrait alors être
compris comme un poème en quête de son propre corps, de sa propre
forme, de sa propre plastique sur la page. Tandis que l’amant cherche le
corps absent de l’amoureuse, le poète cherche le corps du poème, ou plutôt
tisse son poème autour de ce corps encore absent. Les paragraphes du texte
se déploient en effet sur une cinquantaine de pages, entre lesquelles
s’intercalent, outre les illustrations de Georges Braque, de larges espaces
blancs. Ces derniers semblent figurer la brèche, la faille entre le poète et
l’amoureuse, entre les mots du poète et la poésie qui échappe aux mots. Ils
creusent dans le texte un espace pour l’indicible, pour ce qui ne peut être
dit par les mots du poète – ce que Mallarmé nomme l’« appareil du scribe » –
mais qui en revanche pourrait peut-être être exprimé par les lignes sans
lettre du corps dansant, de la ballerine « illettrée ». Tout se passe en quelque
sorte comme si, par son interprétation chorégraphique, Wilfride Piollet mettait
en volume la corporéité présente en creux dans le texte, le corps absent de
l’amoureuse, symbole du corps encore absent du poème en quête de lui-
même. La mise en évidence de la corporéité du texte par la chorégraphie se
fait ainsi mise en volume « corporégraphique ».
18 Claudio Monteverdi, « Lettera amorosa », cité par René Char dans sa « Lettera amorosa »,
ibid., p. 9 (traduction : « Il n’est pas une partie de vous qui ne m’entraîne vers elle avec la
force invincible de l’amour ».)
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CÉLINE TORRENT
Ainsi, de même que Mallarmé parle d’« instinct » pour expliquer ce que
la danseuse révèle au poète de son propre travail créatif, Wilfride Piollet
qualifie le processus d’adaptation chorégraphique du texte de René Char de
« non intellectualisé ». Dans les deux cas, l’« instinct », aussi bien du poète que
de la danseuse, prime sur l’intellect. En somme, lorsque Wilfride Piollet
ré« écri(t) (la) vision » de Char à travers son solo, c’est bien dans une entente
tacite entre son « instinct » et celui du poète, une intuition qui révèle sans
68
LE CORPS, MEDIUM-MIROIR ENTRE LA GRAPHIE DU POEME ET LA CHOREGRAPHIE?
les mots ce qui se cache sous les mots du poète. Le rôle du silence, auquel
renvoient les blancs laissés entre les paragraphes du texte de René Char, est à
ce titre très intéressant. Le poète semble presque lancer un appel à la
danseuse, à la danse, lorsqu’au cœur de la « Lettera amorosa », il clame :
Qui n’a pas rêvé, en flânant sur le boulevard des villes, d’un monde qui, au lieu de
commencer par la parole, débuterait avec les intentions ?22
En somme, c’est donc bien comme ballerine « illettrée » au sens que lui
donne selon nous Mallarmé, que Wilfride Piollet lit chorégraphiquement ce
texte de René Char. Elle réécrit le poème dans les lignes sans lettre de son
corps, et donne corps non pas tant à la lettre – autrement dit au sens littéral
du texte – qu’au non-dit situé entre les lettres : « (…) ce que je voulais, c’était
réveiller quelque chose, rentrer dans l’imaginaire des mots de Char »24.
69
CÉLINE TORRENT
70
LE CORPS, MEDIUM-MIROIR ENTRE LA GRAPHIE DU POEME ET LA CHOREGRAPHIE?
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CÉLINE TORRENT
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LE CORPS, MEDIUM-MIROIR ENTRE LA GRAPHIE DU POEME ET LA CHOREGRAPHIE?
33 Wilfride Piollet, Rendez-vous sur tes barres flexibles, op. cit., p. 105.
34 Wilfride Piollet, entretien du 25 juillet 2013, Poissy.
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CÉLINE TORRENT
74
LE CORPS, MEDIUM-MIROIR ENTRE LA GRAPHIE DU POEME ET LA CHOREGRAPHIE?
à la fois légère et ancrée dans le sol, ou plutôt légère parce qu’ancrée dans le
sol. Ce que dit Wilfride Piollet de l’ambition du danseur classique se retrouve
ainsi pleinement dans cette chorégraphie atypique :
Le danseur classique est mû par le désir pressant de la hauteur, par le vertige de
l’altitude. Il veut intensément vivre la tête dans les nuages. A mon sens, plus on veut
s’élever dans le ciel, plus on doit avoir de relation avec le sol.36
36 Wilfride Piollet, Rendez-vous sur tes barres flexibles, op. cit., p. 105.
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CÉLINE TORRENT
par la quête de la femme aimée absente. Cette lettre blanche dessine ainsi
l’indicible entre présence et absence, pesanteur et gravité. Ce corps-lettre
est ainsi bien medium-miroir, révélant ce que nous nommerons la
« corpoéticité » du texte de René Char.
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LE CORPS, MEDIUM-MIROIR ENTRE LA GRAPHIE DU POEME ET LA CHOREGRAPHIE?
77
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Références
78
STUDIA UBB DRAMATICA, LIX, 2, 2014, p. 79 - 96
(Recommended Citation)
SORIN CRIŞAN*
the ones looking for its image to return to the resources of fiction, phantasy
and the imaginary. Nowadays, after a few centuries of questions and
debatable answers, the inversion of roles, the reshaping of moral and social
priorities, the paradox generated by the relationship between order and
carnivalesque, de-theatralization (in its deepest psychoanalytical significance
or, quite the contrary, in its rather discouraging manifestation of losing
contact with reality), the reflected image (sometimes of an anamorphic
nature) and the image of theatre-within-theatre consolidate features of this
world so much inclined to psychodramatic representation.
While, by means of the theatre, fiction is restored as an artistic,
speculation inclined form, by means of therapeutic theatre or psychodrama,
the participants plunge into a universe of immediate necessity-related fiction, a
utopian universe, able to offer protection – even if for a short period of time –
from the “asperities” of the real world. The psychodramatic stage aims to be –
as shown elsewhere – “a protective place, a spiritualis uterus (Thomas
D’Aquino), thus allowing access to a private world” (Crişan, 2007, 141). In
theatre, the reason for utopia resides in the capacity of its creators to
imagine another “slice of life”, in fact another world, ex-novo, situated
outside the narrow borders of the real. The reason of utopia resides also in
the necessity to show the perspectives of a recovered “republic”, a
construction which is good for all. In this particular case, we shall not rely
on the interpretation of the relationship between utopia and psychodrama
based on the frail hope into the social good or for psychological comfort,
but on the in-depth judgements of the being and on the activation of
conscience acts (cf. Cioranescu, 1972, 12). Nevertheless, this does not
exclude the connection to the contingent and also to an actually lived
material reality. It only signals the incongruence between its exegetical form
and the evolutional form of manifestation, to the extent that “there is a
previous staging, which situates and focuses the action. Psychodrama does not
happen in a vacuum, but in a place that can be described, a time that can be
defined and it takes place between full-bodied beings, which have their ways
of living together” (Schützenberger, 2003, 80).
possibility), hard to identify with/ or estranged from the real world, a world
which is oftentimes so very dramatic. And then, which is the meaning of such
an undertaking which derives from the effort of revery, rather than from
concrete application? The redirectioning of an undignified past and of a
shapeless future towards a manifest present (the one related to scenical time
and space, as shaped before the beginning of the psychodramatic play) warns
us about those “interstitia” of existence, which satisfy the human dream of
touching the ideal horizons. As a rule, the critical comment of the utopian (be
it theatrical or otherwise), refers to the world of here and now. And if, at the
moment of their first manifestations (i.e. in the past), affects find words or
representations useless, they are being carried to the present that invokes
them, thus making them the utopian manifestation of emotional discharge. A
radical alternative is also brought into discussion, and the possible solutions
take their distance from both the actual state of the protagonist and the social
“order” that one has to consider. By means of the utopia of the staging itself,
the participants in the psychodramatic play relate to events of be-ing, which
makes them prone to subjectivity, and therefore dreaming about a world that
needs to be born again. Nevertheless, that which makes theatrical (scenical)
action differ from psychodramatic play (or simulation play, which is basically
defined as therapeutical attempt), beyond all aesthetic, artistic, ideological and
directorial issues, is that, in the first case, the ontic truth is stated clearly – in
other words, it is given concrete shape, describing a precisely designated
space, while, in the other case, the subject is free of any constraints and drives
and allowed to manifest itself through complete “flight”.
Remember that theatre is the manifestation of the human being while
waiting – a paradox of this art, which has its roots in the relationship between
man and the transcendental. Therefore why (and how) does that which-does-
not-exist yet, exist?! – this is, in fact, the question that the individual who is
bereft of his own peace of mind is asking himself, while living the anxiety of
the narrowing of perspectives, alongside with the great dilemma that utopia is
faced with in the theatre, and which is taken over by psychodrama. The
starting point of the individual who has already reached the state of crisis is
marked by the moment when, as observed by Sorin Antohi, he “fights any
type of becoming, denying the present, as well as the change by transfer
projections, replacing real time with the obsessive image of several past
experiences, to which neither remembrance, nor conscience keep him
connected. To him, real time is only the background for several subjective
scenarios, thus losing any trace of ontological consistency” (Antohi, 2005, 149).
82
PSYCHODRAMA AND THE UTOPIAN PLAYING
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SORIN CRIŞAN
86
PSYCHODRAMA AND THE UTOPIAN PLAYING
(or of a civitas imaginalis, with Sorin Antohi) that “an invasion of the sacred on
the realm of thinking” actually happens (cf. Liiceanu, 1992, 102), which places
the un-knowledge in proximity, in opposition with knowledge by distancing,
transcending the real and „the discovery of a sense of ascension at the level of
spiritual experience” (ibidem, 104). The distance between here and there allows
the utopian to “dislocate” and imagine another world, “a world of images”
(ibidem, 99). Through the “good life” that the protagonists of psychodrama are
dreaming about, they offer themselves to the others, thus renouncing their
private life, which leads us to the idea of identifying its origins in the
principles of equality belonging to the ancient polis. In this context, making an
in-depth analysis of the Greek polis, Hannah Arendt wrote: “Equality,
therefore, far from being connected with justice, as in modern times, was the
very essence of freedom: tobe free meant to be free from the inequality present
in rulership and to move in a sphere where neither rule nor being ruled
existed” (Arendt, 1958, 32-33).
Not paying attention, though, to the manner in which classical Greece
imagined the freedom of the individual, the first creators of utopias conceived,
in addition to all this, an order and a hierarchy that should maintain the state
of “goodness” of the citizens, once again turning the “shadow” into the
privileged storage space for all unallowed manifestations, thus enlarging the
life-absorbing darkness.
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SORIN CRIŞAN
limits the field of fantasy and of the speculative discourse; and this
happens as the psychodramatic utopia, just like any other utopia, is not
sufficiently separated from the real, is not surreal enough, so as to be able
to express the powers of the imaginary (cf. Wunenburger, 1979, 11). Taking
care of itself, before all, so as to see “how the future rises from the past it
detests” (Cioranescu, 1972, 14), it shows its meta-expressive function,
explaining and justifying itself, using its self-defence strategies and, thus,
bringing to front the real society and all the barriers built in front of the
person. Transformed into therapeutical strategy, via the utopia it claims,
psychodrama turns all social habits into tabula rasa, throwing away, into the
waste bin of history, all rules, necessities, rigours of everyday life; it
develops as a trans-historical reality, if we were to use one of the
conclusions of Karl Mannheim’s work, “Ideology and Utopia” (1929).
The majority of those who turned towards utopia observed its feature
as a “propelling engine” of life. This is how Herbert Marcuse put it in one
of his works (a round table) in 1968, thus signaling the possibility of utopia
to leave the fields of illusion and to turn into a way of denying the existing
order and to be reborn right at the core of a new anthropology (Marcuse,
1968, 10). Even Cioran, the skeptical by definition, has observed the
capacity of utopia to dynamise action and to wake everybody up to
“reality”, despite the fact that it is oftentimes associated with the
“fascination of the impossible”. In psychodrama, the “reality” which
concerns us is a special one, related to the psyche and, for that reason, a
screen is built in the playing space, where the subject projects all that is
forbidden by consciousness and thinking (cf. Villa, 2009, 53). Moreover,
beyond the disturbance that sometimes utopian movements may create,
one can learn a lot, even if this means surrounding ourselves with ideas
about things and not with the things themselves. Let us return to Cioran
and observe that, as far as he is concerned, a society which is “not able to
create a utopia and to be dedicated to it, is threatened by sclerosis and ruin.
Wisdom, which cannot be fascinated by anything, recommends the
existing, present happiness; man rejects it, and this makes him a historic
animal, which is in fact a creator of imagined happiness” (Cioran, 1960, 104).
Nevertheless, the same Cioran quickly reconsiders his opinions,
observing that there are utopias and then there are degenerated versions of
them, misrepresenting the reason for being and limiting the chances of
“modern illusion”. As an exhibition of powerlessness, this would breach
the principles of becoming and of vitality, while being no more than the
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PSYCHODRAMA AND THE UTOPIAN PLAYING
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SORIN CRIŞAN
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PSYCHODRAMA AND THE UTOPIAN PLAYING
and logical manner”, but also to “acknowledge the fact that the world we
live in does not allow us to ignore subjectivity, chance, chaos, contradiction,
ambiguity […]” (Cornea, 2006, 565). It is necessary to make this correction
for the realm of utopia as well (including theatrical or psychodramatic
utopia, by means of spontaneity as a connection element for all the parts of
this gameand even with the risk that utopia itself may be affected by
dissolution), so as not to “suffocate” the chances of representation or the
ones of ideatic affirmation of “action patterns”, i.e. “patterns” which are
taken over during the whole process, starting with the interview phase and
ending with the post-drama analysis.
One may observe the same level of refinement in theatre, as well.
Shakespeare (see “The Tempest”) and Cervantes (see “Don Quijote”) discuss
utopia as a manifest form of human aspirations and not as a social levelling
out target. As a rule, with these authors, but also with many more others,
the recovery of the utopian space is conditioned by a shipwreck or by their
wandering on land or on water. Quite often, the spectator witnesses an
imaginary journey, a dream or a revery of the characters, which leads to
transformations of the thus created image, in relation with the world that
we live in, by means of an aestheticizing control of the stage directions (see
L’an 2440 by Louis-Sebastien Mercier). We may say that theatre fully
reflects what Tudor Vianu called “the eternity and ephemerality of art”.
The handiest tool of the heroes of this kind of theatre (and subsequently of
the “characters” and “spectators” of psychodrama) is to short-circuit
reality, the present loaded with anxiety, which may, in its turn, lead, just as
in the works of the middle of the 19th century, to a description of utopia as a
means of manifestation of unattainable anxieties. This approach has, to a
certain extent, been explained by Mannheim. In his writings, utopia avoids
the present, connecting the past (i.e. history, of any kind) to a future where
reality is excavated from. Later on, Raymond Boudon and François
Bourricaud would amend Mannheim’s description, stating that utopia is
the connector between the present world and the world as it should be – i.e.
the world as we want it to be (Boudon&Bouricaud, 2000, 661). In
conclusion, we favour the idea that, in psychodrama, by means of the play
it builds, utopia is the answer given by the participants to the real world, to
its gallery of images, to the logic and reason of the everyday world. It
cannot escape the psychodramatic stage, with all it includes, the careful
“(re)reading” of the dramatic past and an oftentimes fundamental change
in the composition of the image that it represents. If, in theatre, “the stage is
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SORIN CRIŞAN
1992, 97). Therefore, let us not forget that theatre remains the loyal partner
of psychodrama, with its input of creative spontaneity (in other words,
with its share of fiction), despite all restrictive rationalizations imposed by
any type of representation. The world imagined by the protagonist and by
his partners is described without any claim of immediate recovery outside
the playing/acting space. And, even if the utopian statement, according to
Gabriel Liiceanu, “does not claim anything, but only describes a world
which, in principle, does not exist” (ibidem, 97), the world of psychodrama
opens several ways favourable to self-transformation. By re-presenting, the
psychodramatic play does not pretend to have the function of traditional
utopian discourses, as, for instance, the one “related to the expansion of the
ideal into the real” (ibidem, 97); dramatic action, staging, acting make up for
the impossible embodiment into something real, thus living the dream of
“being” within the boundaries of the stage chronotope and in the context of
the crisis of that person’s status. Being and remaining only a dream (or
revery), they do not aim at the virtues of the “complete being” (ibidem, 98),
but rather at the ones of self-knowledge. Thus, by means of the utopia,
psychodrama will choose to represent the image thesaurus of this world, and
not the narrow and objectified real that we all inhabit.
References
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PSYCHODRAMA AND THE UTOPIAN PLAYING
95
SORIN CRIŞAN
SORIN CRIŞAN, Ph.D. in Arts, Drama field (2001). Ph.D. in History (2011). Ph.D.
Coordinator in Theatre and Performing Arts. Editor in chief of Symbolon Journal. Professor
and Rector of University of Arts Târgu-Mureş. Teacher of Aesthetics and Directors' Doctrine.
Member of the International Association of Theatre Critics, UNITER and The Writers' Union
of Romania. Author of studies and articles in the field of drama and culture in dedicated
national and international journals. National Critics' Award (2003). Books of aesthethics and
theatre theory: Circul lumii la D.R. Popescu/World circus at D.R. Popescu (2002), Jocul
nebunilor/ Fools game (2003), Teatru, viaţă şi vis. Doctrine regizorale/ Theatre, life and
dream. Directors' doctrine (2004), Teatrul de la rit la psihodramă/ Theatre from rite to
psychodrama (2007), Teatru şi cunoaştere/ Theatre and knowledge (2008), Sublimul
trădării/ The sublime of betrayal (2011).
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(Recommended Citation)
* Psychologist and theatre critic (IATC member). Currently a PhDc in Theatre at the Faculty of Theatre
and Television, Babeș-Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca. E-mail: [email protected].
OZANA BUDĂU TUNYAGI
1 In-yer-face theatre is the kind of theatre which grabs the audience by the scruff of the neck and
shakes it until it gets the message. In-yer-face theatre shocks audiences by the extremism of its
language and images; unsettles them by its emotional frankness and disturbs them by its acute
questioning of moral norms. It not only sums up the Zeitgeist, but criticises it as well. Most in-
yer-face plays are not interested in showing events in a detached way and allowing audiences
to speculate about them; instead, they are experiential - they want audiences to feel the
extreme emotions that are being shown on stage. In-yer-face theatre is experiential theatre. (in
http://www.inyerface-theatre.com/what.html)
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THE PSYCHOLOGICAL MECHANISM OF TRAUMA AND ITS EFFECTS …
2 Sarah Kane has commited suicide after finishing her last theater play: 4.48 Psychosis. The play
approaches the themes of existential crisis, despair, depression, suicide, the presence of the
Divine, the tantrums of romantic relationships, love and death. Even if the mainstream critics
have precociously avoided toconsider the play a suicidal note, there is a statement made by the
author herself to her literary agent, Mel Kenyon, in which she says that writing the play had a
direct influence towards her decision to take her life: Do with it whatever you like. Just know that
writing it killed me. (Sarah Kane in http://www.danrebellato.co.uk/sarah-kane-documentary/ )
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OZANA BUDĂU TUNYAGI
She also problematises the issue of the adequate distance between the
personal, safe space of the spectator and the fictional, theatrical space of the
fictional worls and characters, presenting her theatre as a place of meeting
and confrontation of both actors and spectators with trauma, psychological
disconfort and overwhelming emotion.
The scene ends with her kicking, punching and dragging him naked around the stage;
and during that scene people in the audience actually cried out: Stop this! And that was
Sarah Kane’s main interest in that people would want to stop something happening on
stage because it was too real. (Jeremy Weller in Saunders 123)
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THE PSYCHOLOGICAL MECHANISM OF TRAUMA AND ITS EFFECTS …
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OZANA BUDĂU TUNYAGI
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THE PSYCHOLOGICAL MECHANISM OF TRAUMA AND ITS EFFECTS …
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OZANA BUDĂU TUNYAGI
6. The esthetic distance might reappear after the event: the event is
cognitively proccesed, then denied or accepted.
7. A change in the belief system of the spectator might occur.
The Sarah Kane’s traumatic truth theatre needs the presence of the
public in order to exist. It depends upon the public and it forces the public
to constantly position themselves differently, to consider and identify with
muliptle points of view within the power relationshiop of a traumatic event. I
believe its main purpose is not to make the public have a reaction, but to open
the limits of perception, to change perspectives, minds and personalities.
Kane does not ponder upon a single dramatic form; the structure and
form of her plays evolve and change constantly as if they were laboratories
where the creator experimented with forms, tested and invented new
structures, new images, new ways of saying. The author’s dramatic quest is
guided by the author’s will to find the perfect form, the performative text,
capable to authentically express the essential truth and to induce
epiphanies and changes into the person who sees it and hears it perform.
Kane gives to the text an important role in the context of theater, yet she
doesn’t choose to do so due to her belief that the writer of the text is the
only true creator of the performance; she does it as she thinks that the text
embodies the essence of the performance, the text SHOWS the FORM of the
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THE PSYCHOLOGICAL MECHANISM OF TRAUMA AND ITS EFFECTS …
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OZANA BUDĂU TUNYAGI
his arms and legs and finally his genitals and Grace loses herself while
physically transforms into Graham.
Crave and 4.48 Psychosis continue to virulently attack the validity
and the legitimacy of the organic, coherent character that has to live and
adapt to a world of fragmented, dissolute, multiple selves as they present
to the public abstract, unindentified characters, worn down by personal,
psychological crises whose voices express, nonetheless, radical states of
mind and extreme emotions.
Therefore, one could see that the first three plays are more
incompatible with the traditional theatrical conventions then the last two
plays, which, due to a beckettian-like framework, language and esthetics,
were more easily integrated within the theatre tradition and history.
The last and the most radical form of violence and trauma appears in
4.48 Psychosis and takes the form of self-destruction. Despite the obvious
connection between her last text and her last actions in her real life, the
author’s suicide have always been perceived strictly as a personal gesture,
justified and triggered by the presence and the manifestation of a psychiatric
disturbance, and not as an artistic gesture of an artist or a public statement
of self-transfiguration triggered by the exposure to the traumatic truth.
Someone said to me this thing (...) because I was going on about how important is to
tell the truth and how depressing life is because nobody really does and you can’t
have honest relationships. And they said, but that’s because you’ve got your values
wrong. You take honesty as an absolute. And it isn’t. Life is an absolute. And within
that you accept that there is dishonesty. And if you can accept that you’d be fine.
And I thought that’s true. If I can accept that not being completely honest doesn’t
matter, then I’d feel better. But somehow I couldn’t and so Hyppolytus can’t. And
that’s what kills him in the end. (Kane in Saunders 80)
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THE PSYCHOLOGICAL MECHANISM OF TRAUMA AND ITS EFFECTS …
read and witness 4.48 Psychosis (Creig in Saunders 6) and has certainly changed
the way the critics and the public perceive her performances (Saunders 22).
However, could her last work be considered a radical form of body
art, an artistic act created by a performer who succeeds in turning
CONTENT-FORM and AUTHOR into ONE?
Aleks Sierz comments that this kind of interpretation of 4.48
Psychosis is rather restrictive, as her artistic inheritance is encapsulated
within the limits of her suicide act. (Tycer 24) The artist, he also explains,
would be found to be a more authentic creator, while the symbolism of the
play would be blured away.
I believe this line of thought is also limiting. To exlude the
autobiographical dimension of 4.48 Psychosis is to take away the truthness of
the play. Yes, 4.48 Psychosis is a text about a person struggling in the middle of
a crisis to make peace with the world, with God, with herself and, who, at the
end, loses the fight or wins the fight. Yes, this is a play about the trauma of not
being in the world, in the right time or in the right body, it is a play about love
and suffering, about identity loss and radical lucidity, but it is also a play
based on real facts. The realness and the truthness of the struggle, is, in my
opinion, the foundation and the essence which give intensity to the play.
“I’ve only written to escape from hell – and it’s never worked – but at
the other end of it when you sit there and watch something and think that’s
the most perfect expression of the hell I felt then maybe it was worth it.”
(Kane in Saunders 1)
The final act is a theatrical act, says Edward Bond (23). While she
plunges within her own self, she discovers the face and the mind of the
world; as she describes intimate, personal, intense experiences, the author
is describing the way of the world: the failure of the moral, social man in
front of his selfish driving instincts.
Aleks Sierz’ fear that people will not get passed the melodrama of
Sarah Kane’s suicide note and that, due to that, they will be incapable to go
deeper inside the play to indentify and to understand more important
issues, such as loss and trauma, undermines, in my opinion, the emotional
intelligence of the public and the amazing potential of the play.
Kane writes 4.48 Psychosis with The Suicide Mind of Edwin Shneidman
on her night table, while diving in and exploring her own mind for more
specific, authentic details of depression and of how it feels like to lose one’s
interst to live. She uses her own trauma and suffering to give life to a text
as powerful and alive as the real life experience, emphasing the emotional
involvement of the public.
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THE PSYCHOLOGICAL MECHANISM OF TRAUMA AND ITS EFFECTS …
The author, nonetheless, does not drop out totally the notion of
character. Tinker, Ian and Cate reduce themselves to the abstract A, B, C, D,
who, at their turn, reduce themselves to the voices in 4.48 Psychosis. Yet,
they stil have traces of recognizable identities. The kanian voices can live in
a body and be disembodied at the same time.
Kane systematically destroys the time-space-character referrals in
relation to which the traditional spectators of the traditional theatre play take
on a position and formulate an opinion that helps them place themselves
outside the esthetic object. Using different forms of trauma as dramatic
mechanisms, the author forces the public to be open and vulnerable to the
changing experience.
Powerful emotions create the necessary conditions for change. The
main objective of the kanian traumatizing mechanism is not to shock but to
expose the public to deadly truths about the human condition, such as the
pathological, yet natural fascination for violence, the indifference towards
its consequences, the guilt of not taking any responsibility.
I believe it is impossible to create powerful artistic experiences
without taking on them personally. Kane’s theatre takes on to tell the truth
in order to transfigurate. As she explores deep within her inner crises,
towards the most authentic emotions and experiences, her dramatic world
and discourse transgress the sphere of personal crises and takes on a
universal meaning. Responsible to her own truth, the author shows, at the
end, the performance of a decaying psychic and offers to the public one of
the most intimate experiences, death as a performance.
Trauma, exposure to radical truth and emotional involvement imply
and aim at a resetting of the moral values of the spectator. While in ancient
theatre, the spectators, cleansed of extreme emotions, returned to their
town to live a much more rational life, in kanian theatre, the spectators,
exposed to deadly truths of the human condition, experience extreme
emotions and return to their town to recreate it.
References
Aragay, Mireia, and Hildegard Klein. British Theatre of the 1990s. Interviews with
Directors, Playwrights, Critics and Academics. New York: Macmillan 2007.
Bond, Edward. Lexi/textes 3. Paris: L’Arche, 1999.
Caruth, Cathy. On Trauma: Explorations in Memory. Baltimore & London: Johns Hopkins
University Press, 1995.
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OZANA BUDĂU TUNYAGI
OZANA BUDĂU TUNYAGI is a Clinical Psychologist and Art Therapist with BA and
MA studies in Theatre studies at the Babeș-Bolyai University of Cluj and Sorbonne
Nouvelle, Paris. She is now a PhD student in Theatre at Babeș-Bolyai University. Her
artistic and research activities include several theatre performances as a dramaturge,
theater books translations and theatre criticism.
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(Recommended Citation)
ALEXANDRA SOFONEA*
characters, managing expressed and felt emotions and so on. In the following
article I will try to take this particular subject in hand and see how often this
dualism has actually proved to be the general view of performers throughout
different moments in history, focusing on the last century.
and thoughts hold when it comes to influencing the physical world. From
here on it's a matter of getting in touch with the proper information or the
curiosity and intellect each has to get to the level of philosophical analysis.
As for the equivalent of this moment in human history and evolution,
we can safely say that "practice" came before theory, in a sense that believing
came before analyzing. Before naming and theorizing the connection between
body and mind (rather body and soul at that time), people tested the powers of
both elements and also the influences they had on each other. Healing rituals,
martial arts, war dances are all testimonies of the strong beliefs people had
in the power of mind-body connection. We can conclude that, at that point
or later on, ideas about whether the two elements were actually different or
more like two sides of the same coin started to emerge.
When imagining the way that the mind-body problem was presented
millenniums ago, one more general view leads me to picture man trying to
limit and define the "outer" world from his own "inner" world, in terms of
the "seen" and the "unseen" universe. This is a purely intuitive and most
probably an inexact perspective of the birth of the mind-body issue, but it
proved of much help to me in connecting both religious and non-religious
views concerning the subject and its development. Back in the early times
of mankind, the "unseen" might have been considered the sum of all things
that were either unreachable through any of the five senses, or unexplained
by that era's knowledge. Part of this unseen world was surely considered to
be the inner psychological self of each individual. With the passing of the
ages and the progress of mankind in all fields of knowledge, what was once
obscure started being "logical" and the ampleness of the "unseen" started
reducing itself. The knowledge brought by biology reshaped the "inner"
universe by demystifying so many of the once un-understood behaviors of
the body and of man in general. I imagine that soul became the word
describing everything about man that wasn't understood or couldn't be
explained by any other means than metaphor. People would intuitively see
the soul as the part of a living being that could not be controlled and
reproduced by man. The mystical part of man started getting narrower and
narrower as anatomy, medicine, psychology, sociology, neurosciences,
explained more about human life. Yet, the mystery never stopped existing.
Table 1.
The different categories of the main mind-theories – based on the description made
by William Jaworski (2011).
Emergentism
Dual-Attribute Organismic
Epiphenomenalism
Theory
DUALISM Non-organismic
Substance
Dualism
MIND Idealism
Neutral Monism
Eliminative
MONISM
Behaviorism
Physicalism Reductive
Identity Theory
Nonreductive
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MIND AND BODY IN PERFORMANCE: REAL OR FAKE DUALISM?
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ALEXANDRA SOFONEA
relation between mind and body (or between thought and physical action)
is a fundamental aspect in the way we perceive the world and interact with
it. For example, we will either neglect or give a lot of attention to the way
we look (to the way our body is seen, presuming others around us see the
same that we do) depending on how society judges us (our inner selves,
meaning our aptitudes, believes, personality etc.) based on our physical
appearance. We will either attentively take care of our bodies’ health and
wellbeing or neglect its needs depending on how much we believe that the
body's state influences mental performance, our aptitudes or social abilities.
We might chose to work on personal growth and becoming a more positive
and radiant person if we strongly feel that perceived physical beauty is more a
reflection of our personality than the appreciation of a given physical attribute
(idea popularly stated in the saying "beauty comes from within") etc.
The areas of life in which this question has most impact on are those
of spiritual beliefs, social interaction, self-development, self-image, creative
expression, communication in general and personal health. The main area I
wish to further focus on is that of creative expression (concentrating on the
performing art of theatre). It is important to mention from the start that,
since the mind-body question connects different parts of one's self and all
the different aspects of life are already intermingled, it is almost impossible
to thoroughly select the elements of a single field being influenced.
Through creative expression humans communicate, self-regulate
emotions, personalize abstractions, affect attitudes at an emotional and
intellectual level, introspect, learn. It is only natural that such a complex
issue upon which social, mental, emotional and physical health and well-being
of a person hang on will quite often appear as an element in a creative
process. It can be source of a creative act, motivation, subject of a work as
well as a barrier.
theories, others use the actual “power” of Theatre and generate new ones,
guided by their role as spectators or actors being enlightened through
catharsis. Despite its highly variable status – ranging from privileged form
of communicating with gods in a ritual-like process to a disregarded
activity in the Middle Ages – theatre has always been a useful tool in the
examination of mankind and in the education of the public. Therefore, we
expect theatre to enable an insight into mankind's greatest dilemmas, both
from the point of view of subject and the theatre-making process. Since
Theatre has been the "rebel sibling" of science, philosophy and most fields
of knowledge, and, for a long time, the renegade of Religion, it has allowed
itself its own rules. And when not accepted by censorship of any kind, it
has taken the underground path. That is why we can find, throughout
history, examples of theatre productions that “try out” all sorts of
principles, ideas, beliefs (through political and social theatre, experimental
theatre, acrobatic performances etc.).
There is more than one possible approach in making a correlation
between philosophical paradigms and performance methods. We have the
analysis of the philosophical motivation behind different performance
styles and acting techniques; the chronological approach and the investigation
of performance methods, their contemporaneous philosophical theories and
possible influences between them; the geographical approach related to both
performance and philosophy, making a distinction between Western and
Eastern culture; there are also the two more performance-focused and
philosophy-focused approaches, creating a two pole "scale" view of either
performing techniques or theories on the mind-body issue and then finding
the equivalent in the philosophy/art area. Some require more research and
space than proposed here. In particular, a philosophy-focused view would
require an addition of specific information, terms and definitions that
might suppress a wider and more useful view on performance forms.
Therefore, I will use a less strict performance-focused approach, both in
format and content, using examples of some canonical acting methods, as well
as a few examples of perhaps less known methods that help make a point.
Performing arts were born out of rituals and so they are in many
ways correlated to religious beliefs. After the Middle Ages, Western
tradition separated performance arts, like dance and theatre, from religious
practices. Asian cultures on the other hand kept them closer together and
still have various religions that include complex and esthetically appreciated
performances, viewed both as ceremonies and art forms (Miettien, 2010).
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ALEXANDRA SOFONEA
All arts started with a liminal status of act/work placed in between human
and supernatural, animal-like and human-like, mortal and eternal, material
and immaterial. This transformed them into the perfect "playground" for
anything in a man's life that is too difficult to integrate in any other area,
that can't be explained, that is paradoxical, difficult to understand or cope
with. Monaghan, in his article on Theatre and Philosophy, cites Lepage in a
metaphorical but very relevant statement about Theatre's liminal status and
almost supermundane character that reminds us of its religious roots:
I think theatre has a lot to do with putting the audience in contact with the gods …
Theatre is very close to the Olympics … [which are] about mankind trying to surpass the
human body, human endurance, gravity … It’s all about this transfiguration of the man
into a god (Lepage, in Delgado, and Heritage 1996:143-4, qtd. in Monaghan 2007)
Performance art is one step closer to “real” life (everyday life, easily
accessible to mind and senses) than other arts because it makes use of the
same elements as life does: time, space, matter and energy. And so performing
art duplicates life in a certain degree, by borrowing its tools, and fills it in
with different content.
All this brings us to a first element correlating mind-body paradigms
with theatre (including dance-theatre, or related forms of dance that are
based on dramatic effect).
Grotowski
By trying to reproduce and reconstruct the world, theatre started as
and continues to be an example of man's attempt to overcome his condition
of mortal, material and instinctive being, by acceding to the superior form
of a world-controlling deity. This is especially true for ritualistic theatre,
some traditional forms of performing arts and for some more modern types
of performing arts, which sought personal spiritual growth before aesthetical
value (like the Japanese Butoh performances, Grotowski's theatre as a
vehicle towards transformation, or Mary Wigman's dance philosophy).
Clearly, these performing arts have been guided by the belief in what
philosophy calls dualism (in these cases property and substance dualisms).
With no actual temporal connection, only the sharing of a belief in the
spiritual power of performance, people have used theatre (in its many
forms) to (self) develop in a spiritual and deep way, both in ancient and
modern times. It is not by coincidence that all modern or contemporary
initiators of performing art forms focusing on this type of self-growth make a
case out of studying old traditional practices. Grotowski mentions kathakali
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MIND AND BODY IN PERFORMANCE: REAL OR FAKE DUALISM?
theatre methods in his works and adopts elements of exercise from Indian
theatre in his routines. Mary Wigman and Isadora Duncan have included in
the philosophy and practice of their art ideas and elements derived right from
ancient Greek customs and beliefs. This element of “historical” inspiration
might be seen as a “primitive effect”, an awakening of senses in a manner that
is more persistent precisely because of its ancient source. But in order to
perform this kind of theatre and understand it, one needs to believe in a power
that is unseen. One needs to accept that an action that might basically be
viewed as saying lines on a stage and moving the body in an expressive
manner while being watched has more to it than what is seen. Not only that,
but one also has to believe that man can reach a higher point, and that there is
an ideal soul to aspire to, both unreachable and unearthly. By this description
a person that enjoys the kind of performance I mentioned before might be
considered religious, but that is definitely not a necessary condition. Believing
in the distinct material nature of mind/soul and body, does not equal
believing in a god. However, it does imply believing in something unseen.
And in this case, it also implies that this “unseen” is also unexplained by
material scientific rules (like in the case of epiphenomenalism). We might say,
with the appropriate reluctance, that this kind of performing art is one made
by and for “spiritual” individuals.
If we went further with the correlation, we would have to assess
whether this artistic approach is consistent with either interactionism,
occasionalism, double aspectism, inverted epiphenomenalism or psychophysical
parallelism, which are all different kinds of dualism. This art did not profit
in any way from having figured out the details, concepts and notions
behind it. Therefore, I believe none of the artists involved ever used up
precious energy and time to establish some of the small and precise details
about their work needed for a proper classification under the abovementioned
philosophical theories. We can only approximate and guess an interactionist
view, this implying the belief that both mind and body, being different
substances, have a reciprocal influence. These artists train their body for a
mental and spiritual growth. But we might as well consider that they also
believe that an actor who is “above” others in this particular aspect will
perform better than the rest, thus having changed his body's expressivity.
Stanislavski
No discussion about performing methodology is ever complete
without mentioning Stanislavski. It is already a known fact that he had an
interest in the field of psychology and had read the works of Théodule
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Ribot, William James, and Carl Lange. His theories on acting practice hold
various suggestions extracted from the works of these researchers. This is a
perfect example on how the field of performing art is influenced by
scientific discoveries, philosophical theories and cultural beliefs. Stanislavski
used the findings of cognitive psychologists to help actors embody characters
in a more naturalistic way. When saying that he used psychology in his
practice we should not assume a psychoanalytical perspective. Although he
does mention consciousness and other related elements in his later work,
his theories began from a perspective much closer to behaviorist method.
What he underlined was that the feelings that an actor wishes to enact
should be thought of and reached by the means of his actions. Rhonda Blair
mentions this shift of focus as an act that can “simplistically be called an
‘outside-in’, as opposed to ‘inside out’, technique early in his thinking”
(Blair 2008: 31). This means that the focus was on action, on gesture,
ultimately on body in action. This body would justify and also generate the
emotions depicted. We can therefore argue that, although there is a clear
belief in the existence of two elements, material body and mental/
emotional side, the emphasis is on the power of the material to influence
the less palpable. This makes the Stanislavskian method a property dualistic
approach. Of course, depending on the interpretation of his words, his
exact work (early or later one) and the approach and execution of the actor,
we may find different kinds of dualism, and also monism, in his views. The
purpose is not to label a certain performing method, but to see the different
reflections that philosophical theories have shed onto them. So it is only fair
to say that a complex and varied method such as Stanislavski's has more
than one philosophical equivalent for the mind-body issue.
Dualisms of various kinds are taught as a basic premise in various Stanislavsky-
influenced acting classes (“get out of your head”, “don’t think, do”), even though
Stanislavsky himself was an early twentieth-century version of a monist who would
likely have agreed more with Spinoza than Descartes, at least in terms of the premise
that mind and feeling can’t be separated from body. (Blair 2008: 26)
We can conclude that the accent of this performing method falls on the
interaction between body and mind/emotion, not on depicting the nature of
these elements. Also, mind and emotion seemed to be understood as not only
connected to the body but dependent on it and, at some point, generated by it.
This is the monistic aspect mentioned earlier. Joseph Roach goes further and
correlates the Stanislavskian view to behaviorist approach of Pavlov:
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Meyerhold
To remain in the same area of interest and see an even more
emphasized scientifically based approach in performance, we can discuss
Meyerhold's Biomechanics. Biomechanics is a technique, a cumulus of
exercises and theories based mainly on behaviorist psychology, aiming at
maximum responsiveness and efficiency for the actor on stage.
Whatever Stanislavski included in his methods from James-Lange's
theories and from the rising mechanization procedures in the industry,
Meyerhold pushed much further. Studies on labor efficiency were in bloom
at that time and the published works of F.W. Taylor, bringing forward the
concept and method of the assembly line, added to the influences that
shaped Meyerhold performance and training methods. He strived for
efficiency of the actor’s task and brought forward the question of physical
preparation. Not only did he insist on physical training, he believed that
done correctly, this kind of training was all that was needed from an actor.
His connections with Behaviorism were much deeper than in the case of
Stanislavski. Meyerhold even stated that “all psychological states are
determined by specific physiological processes” (Meyerhold 1969: 199). What
better proof of monism is there? He was uninterested in the inner emotional
aspect of acting and also believed that any emphasis on emotions in an actor is
too much. The theories of Pavlov and conditional reflexes were all that
Meyerhold considered was needed to create the technique which assured
an adequate performance fit to express and reach its audience.
Various detailed aspects of Meyerhold's theory might also bring out
elements of dualism into the light, just as Pavlov himself had moments
inclining away from monism. It may well be that Meyerhold didn't rejected
the importance and force of mental and emotional states, but he strongly
believed that theatre should not be built on them. He saw physical aspects as
being more reliable and clear.
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His views were also consistent with the Communist paradigm of the
time. His materialist perspective may be attributed to this social, cultural
and political context. He might not have denied the existence of the soul, but
he "hid" this spiritual aspect in the depth of the complex nature of the body.
Barba
To comment on the theories of Eugenio Barba is quite a challenge.
They incorporate a great deal of information and knowledge about a kind of
performance that leads back to the East, therefore to a ground of philosophy
and religion very different from what we are used to, incorporating much
more variety, historical facts and a mixture of something barely understandable
to Occidentals: a perfectly balanced combination of historical, social, political,
cultural and spiritual. With no claim to capture more than just fragments of
the philosophy behind the performances he makes, I will mention a few
relevant elements of his practical and theoretical work, in an attempt to
illustrate the mind-body approach used in this case.
First of all, no matter what physical technique is adopted in a
performance of Barba, it is important to know that the purpose of the act lies
not in educating (like in the Ancient Greek theatre), criticizing (like in the epic
theatre of Brecht), nor in amazing the viewer (like in all forms of dances and
shows that thrive on virtuosity alone), but in giving the performer and
spectator a chance to find a meaning. “To make theatre means practicing an
activity in search of meaning. [...] We can adopt the values of the spirit of the
times and of the culture in which we live. Or we can search for our own values”
(Barba 1995: 36). There is a similarity here with the first method of performing
we mentioned, the one used as a vehicle for self-growth. Meaning and values
stand for moral, for ethics, for an inner truth. Put into the context of Oriental
tradition, they exceed civic mind and enter the field of spirituality. There is no
need to mention soul here. It is already included in the essence of the act.
A very important element in Barba's work is that of the pre-expressive
level. It is the basic “biological” element of a performance that transcends
cultural barriers, determines scenic presence, creates “the body in-life able
to make perceptible that which is invisible: the intention” (Barba 1995: 7).
The pre-expressive level focuses on that which has not reached the form of
a statement but is still a message.
The pre-expressive principles of the performer’s life are not cold concepts
concerned only with the body’s physiology and mechanics. They also are based on a
network of fictions and ‘magic ifs’ which deal with the physical forces that move the
body. What the performer is looking for, in this case, is a fictive body, not a fictive person.
(Barba 1995: 34)
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MIND AND BODY IN PERFORMANCE: REAL OR FAKE DUALISM?
ALBA Emoting
In the 18th century, Diderot's The Paradox of Acting brought forth a
problem that had long been kept silent in Western theatre, that of the risks
and disadvantages of experiencing real emotions on stage. What Diderot
argued was that, for actors, feeling the actual emotions they wanted to
evoke on stage makes them hysterical and not necessarily expressive. He
noted that the most important element and also most influential for the
spectators, is the actor's objective expression of an emotion.
A modern acting technique that offers a middle way between the
“emotionally immersed” method of acting and the above mentioned idea of a
“cold-hearted” performance is the ALBA Emoting technique. It is a tool
elaborated by Susan Bloch and her team of researchers in order to help actors
create and control emotions at will on stage. It is based on psychophysiological
data obtained in laboratory conditions. “It mediates the famous actor's
paradox by providing actors with precise technical control of the expressive
components of emotion while, at the same time, allowing them to experience
as much of the feeling component as they desire.” (Bloch 1993: 123)
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ALEXANDRA SOFONEA
Throughout its history, theatre has had its share of attempts of separating
itself from the performer's body. Puppet Theatre and Shadow Theatre are
ancient forms of performing. Yet, they always keep man close. In more
recent times, the form of live1 radio theatre distanced the performer's body
from its audience even more. But only through the experimental Object
Theatre did the performer actually manage to distance his body from the
actual stage. With these variations of performance the audience is placed in
front of an increasingly difficult question: what is a performance and what
are its limits? We may call a “performance” any live presentation that has
an artistic attribute (either an esthetic aspect or a statement at its core that
justifies its artistic nature), but we will find it difficult to name it theatre or
dance in the absence of the actor and dancer. We were used for too many
centuries with the idea that the actor/dancer is what makes a performance
and in an intuitive and “naturalistic” way this is actual truth.
Performers know the importance of their bodies. They are aware of
how something as quotidian and natural as their everyday bodies becomes
an element of art in the moment of performance. Depending on the chosen
theory, we can state that the body on stage and the body on the street are
the same object, different objects, or elements that share substance but not
all properties. However, no actor or dancer will ever will think that he can
both perform on stage and not use his body. The quotidian body cannot be
physically left backstage while the performing body steps into the limelight.
Whether they consider their performance an example of a dualistic or
monist “act”, it is very unlikely any performer will leave out the materiality
of their body when analyzing it. It is in the nature of a performer's job to deal
with his bodies limitations. Even the most aerial ballerina, experiencing a
trance-like moment in the peak of a majestical execution of a movement, is
still beautifully shaped matter as long as a wrong step and a sudden muscle
cramp can break the magic. Time may feel like standing still, weight like
disappearing, space like infinitely expanding; we may all decide to agree
that a certain moment is pure magic; but as long as it is ephemeral and
uncontrollable, we cannot talk about it as being “ours”, “us”, “real”,
“present”. Not yet. The rules we made for ourselves – through laws of
science, philosophy, public behavior – are the ones stopping us.
1 I specified the characteristic of live theatre here to avoid leaving the performative area of
these arts. Although a recorded radio theatre play broadcasted to an audience is not less
of a theatre show for its listeners than a live one, it does send it into a different category of
performance that needs different approaches when analyzed and pushes us away from
the subject treated here.
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Artaud
The Impossible Theatre is not the name assigned by Artaud himself
to his theoretical form of theatre, but a version coined by its successors. The
form of performance Artaud spent his time to imagine, describe, promote and
materialize is the Theatre of Cruelty. His manifesto requested a form of theatre
that contained the necessity, effectiveness and power of a ritual, of a sacred
and magical form of art. He believed in theatre's ability to influence and
convert anything it reaches. Every word he spoke and wrote about this art
form supported the idea that it is just as powerful as life itself, that it should be
considered a magical and therapeutic tool, a force as strong as both life and
death. His opinion on the theatre of his days – much like today's theatre – was
that it lacked any intensity, any strength; he saw it as a lamentable piece of art
in a dusty museum, an inanimate object with no potency.
Many beautiful words have been said about theatre and many poets
have wrote lines on what theatre once was and it should be, but only
Artaud believed in his lyrical definitions so strongly that actually thought
they would be possible to materialize. He searched for a way to take theatre
out of the intellect and forcefully project it into the sub-consciousness.
The uniqueness of his theory was the joining of the carnal with the
magical. In his view, Theatre was the ground where the absolute physical,
the flesh, the blood, could have the supernatural, magical impact of spirit.
His ideas talked about infinity and transcendence in terms of possibility
and reality. We can state that his view united body with the burning spirit
– a monist statement, an Idealist view. By this, he “reject[ed] man’s usual
limitations and powers and infinitely extend[ed] the frontiers of what we
call reality” (Artaud 1994: 7).
As a truly idealistic form of art – although Artaud himself would
have probably disagreed with this statement – the Theatre of Cruelty
remains a theory. Peter Brook saw Artaud as a prophet and stated that “the
power of his vision is that it is the carrot in front of our noses, never to be
reached” (Brook 1997: p79).
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Today's way
The few examples mentioned so far give us an idea on how different
eras influenced general beliefs, specific philosophical approaches and
methods of creating art, or, rather, how these aspects are correlated. A view
of today's trend is a little bit more difficult to give since a complete
overview is much harder to attain given the unfolding of numerous
processes. And it is true that we can only be objective about facts if we step
outside them.
What I would like to point out here is simply a personal observation
and some conclusions that it generated. It is, therefore, a view that
encounters the issues of subjectivity, cultural and temporal bias and should
be regarded as such.
With the technological boom of the last two decades, most of us have
been projected into a world with a lot more information than we were used
to handle. Having so many different and distant sources of information can
be both benefic and overwhelming. We eventually manage to adapt to this
flow of information (by learning to control and filter it), but in first instance
we appeal to some sort of adaptive behaviors. Some of these behaviors
refer to being skeptical towards anything that comes from outside the
range of our controllable field (for example our field of expertise, or maybe
information from our own country or written in our own language, it being
easier to verify). Some refer to being very unstable in our own opinions,
basing our every idea on what has been stated most recently, which,
nowadays, is virtually every minute. Some might refer to – and this is the
aspect I would like to underline – a tendency to include every piece of
information that appeals to us and create a very chequered and multivalent
perspective. This is both an admirable and risky action. It is useful because
it allows more than one perspective on one issue and allows comparison
and a more general view, usually considered closer to actual facts. On the
other hand, distant sources are difficult to check – and so we run the risk of
being misinformed – and are themselves culturally biased at times, or taken
out of their cultural context and thus presenting a deformed notion.
Any activity today has a more universal approach than it had a
century ago, be it the effect of global communication, globalization, the interest
for everything foreign etc. Also, there seems to be an intense tendency to mix
influences: old and new, occidental and oriental, classic and contemporary. It
may be the effect of reaching a saturation that requires a look back to the
“classical”, or the fascination with the exotic that is now reachable. Alternative
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The Eastern views brought into Western art and culture have also
created a connection between a more Occidental scientifically based
perspective on mind and body and a spiritual and traditional Oriental
view. I think the mind-body issue is at one of its highest instability
moments. Western culture has psychology and neuroscience on one side
and spiritual approaches on the other, gaining more ground each day.
Practices brought into the Occidental daily life like meditation, yoga or
martial arts focus on a more unified approach towards mind and body.
All these elements bear an influence on performing arts. “It is
impossible to separate views of the actor’s process from the dominant
scientific views of any given historical period. How we understand acting
is contingent, even if only implicitly, on how we understand basic human
functioning” (Blair 2010: 23). What method is then best suited for a creating
a performance today, for training actors and dancers for today's audience,
expectations, knowledge? Lecoq, Yoshi Oida, or better ALBA Emoting? The
already classical Method Acting or experimental improvisations? Is it better
to go through all of them when training or to adhere to one from the start
and master it? It is not so much a question of “which chapter of my acting
manual should I use?”. It is more of “which general perspective on life,
body, mind, art should I take as my own truth?”. When performing, we learn.
Once we've learned we become a certain person. It is not the same thing to
practice Butoh for years or street dancing. Their different ideals, their
philosophies become your own and they end up shaping your personality. It
is not an easy choice and all performers should be aware of this fact.
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References
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132
STUDIA UBB DRAMATICA, LIX, 2, 2014, p. 133 - 146
(Recommended Citation)
IULIU RAŢIU*
In the critical reception of her work, the dialectic good / bad functions as
the framework through which Stein’s writing backfires on its author’s public
image and cultural relevance. The person overshadowed the work to such an
extent that Stein’s work (whose complexity had been read as laxity) lost the
aesthetic value and suffered the imposition of a moral predicament. Both Stein
and her work became either good or bad, tertium non-datum. Too obedient to the
moral convention, Stein did not want to shock her contemporaries by publicly
confessing her lesbianism, which made her good and liked as an extravagant
person during her lifetime. Because of this goodness, people accepted her work,
even though they referred to it as bad. In the hindsight, her work became good
(it challenged the literary codes of that time), while the author got bad (she did
* Iuliu Ratiu, PhD, Marion L. Brittain Postdoctoral Fellow, Writing and Communication Program,
School of Literature, Media, and Communication, Georgia Tech, Atlanta, Georgia, USA, E-mail:
[email protected]
IULIU RAŢIU
not come out in public). The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, the book that made
Stein famous, is also the book that started the good / bad controversy. As
Catherine Stimpson considers in Gertrude Stein and the Lesbian Lie, Stein did lie,
for the sake of fame and recognition, but, at the same time, she told the truth
because, even though it does not spell it right out, the book celebrates her
relationship with Alice B. Toklas and it does it in a way which is both
appealing to the public and it gives the author freedom for literary experiment.
In this way, Stein is the author of a transgression of both literary and sexual
codes. Regarding the literary codes and models of the time, her writing
professed change, innovation, and linguistic performance to such an extent
that only a few proved capable of acknowledging her work beyond the
customary echoes like interesting, cubist, different. As far as the sexual codes, in
a time and a society that did not offer women anything else but marriage,
Stein’s sexual orientation and life style let her no choice but to move to France
and live with her brother for some years, even after Alice B. Toklas had
entered her life. For the modern audience, these subtle forms of passing
divided Stein into the Good Stein whom the public liked, and the Bad Stein
whom the public hated and ridiculed. For the postmodern audience, influenced
by the second wave of feminism, the situation is reversed. Stimpson argues
that “The Old Good Stein is the New Bad Stein: she is too obedient to
convention. The Old Bad Stein is the New Good Stein: her transgressions are
exemplary deeds.”(152) Consequently, Stein succeeded in The Autobiography of
Alice B. Toklas to put together both obedience to and subversion of literary and
sexual codes in a way that broke the dialectic good / bad.
For Stein, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas represents the much-
needed public recognition. Even though critics, prompted by her, consider the
book as part of her audience writing, the other works that might encompass a
PR type of writing, such as Everybody’s Autobiography or Paris, France, are
entirely different from what Stein presumably advocated in her 1933 book. As
a capricious writer, with an exact sense of her value, talent, and capabilities,
Stein played along her success without really giving in to the public’s
expectations as far as her difficult style was concerned. Once she made it clear
for everybody, but most importantly, for herself, that she can really have an
appeal to her readership, she returned to her old style. In this respect, The
Autobiography represents the much-needed compromise to have the public’s
attention turned toward the remaining of her writing. Unlike other women
writers, whose biographies play a minor role in their reception, Stein become
well known exactly because of her hoax biography. Almost over night, the
literary ideas, the cultural and social activism that Stein professed for the last
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PLAYING GENIUS AND PERFORMING GENDER …
three decades get the necessary recognition and assure her a prominent role in
both the propagation and the reception of modernism. The fact that Stein’s
public recognition took such a painful and long birth can only reiterate the
singularity this strange book plays in Stein’s work.1 Because of that, the extent
of obedience to literary and social conventions and the amount of subversion
of linguistic and sexual codes, as they are both written and read in The
Autobiography become the framework of Stein’s recognition.
Moreover, this hoax autobiography also set the standard for a moral
evaluation of Stein’s work. In fact, the moral judgment predicated by
Stimpson’s essay tends to impose itself as the real analysis of Stein’s work, by
mixing together both ethics and aesthetics, even though the analysis falls short
in unprovoked and harsh criticism and critique of a too conventional and too
subversive way of writing that undermines the function, position and
understanding of literature itself. If the conventionalism, easily dubbed cubism,
secures the author the prominence she openly claims in a fervent époque of
imaginative experimentalism and endless configurative performance of the
interplay between form and content, the subversion Stein obsessively pursues
during her prodigious carrier questions the famous woman’s literary value
and cultural insight. Grandmother of modernism and aunt of feminism, Stein
divides her critics between those (herself included) who praise her work for
originating a new epistemological cultural cycle (Stein gave birth to the 20th
century’s literature) and those who pay tribute to her for being a seminal force
of feminism. While the modernists encourage the convention, the feminists
promote the subversion. The Autobiography satisfies, as well as undermines,
both of these claims.
An outline of the époque would prove the convention that there are
no conventions as long as any work bears the fruit of a genius’ mind. The
maler the mind, the better the work. Joyce, Hemingway, Picasso and others
easily fall in this category and help Stein develop for herself the status of a
genius. The interplay good / bad, with reference to her peers, this time, mirrors
the fundamental dialectic that underscored her work. For her, those famous
male writers and artists could only play the role that Leo had played when the
two got along. Either good brothers or bad brothers, Joyce, Hemingway,
1 It can be argued that Everybody’s Autobiography, the lecture tours, and other autobiographical
writings like Paris, France are part of the audience writing strategy, but it is not necessarily true,
since in these later works Stein returned to her style, experimenting again with the
metanarratives of writing or portraiture, without actually exposing herself and her private life,
the way she did, no matter how veiled, in The Autobiography.
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IULIU RAŢIU
Picasso, and a few others help Stein assess the advantages that were
traditionally assigned exclusively to men. At this level, the gender role the
author assumed proves to work as long as writing dose not come between the
two geniuses. Even though they respected each other to such an extent that
they publicly ignored each other, Stein and Joyce play, at least from Stein’s
perspective, the roles of bad-brothers. Picasso, in contrast to Joyce, plays the
role of the good-brother, until they have their differences once Picasso starts
writing poetry and Stein considers that an affront to her status. Hemingway,
on the other hand, functions either as the son or as the brother, both good and
bad, until their unsentimental breakup. But this opposition good / bad loses
interest once Alice B. Toklas gives Stein the opportunity to actually assume the
role and status of a male figure. In fact, and this is camouflaged in the text of
The Autobiography, once the two women find the benefits of a conventional
marriage together, Stein is suddenly free to consider herself a genius,
because now she can reflect herself, as the husband, in Toklas, the wife,
who is permitted to talk only to the wives of geniuses, thus making Stein
Picasso’s equal. The fact that feminists blame her for passing as a man fades
once that is clear that Stein assumes that position in order to be considered
a genius (traditionally a male prerogative) and thus legitimize her work.
In the second chapter of Women of the Left Bank, entitled Settlements with
a good reason, Shari Benstock dedicates a section to Gertrude Stein and Alice
B. Toklas and their life together in Rue de Fleurus, where the critic points out
the importance that Toklas played in Stein’s creative enterprise. Benstock’s
argument is that Toklas, through her presence, support, and love finally gave
Stein the much needed intellectual space and motivation to pursue her literary
goals. Once their relationship had been settled, Stein found in the dedication of
her significant other the necessary energy to undertake, from a secure and
invulnerable position, the major task of innovating and, at the same time,
subverting the literary and sexual codes of that time. Becoming the man, that is
a genius, of their couple, Stein started the most fruitful period of her life. With
respect to The Autobiography, and to the conventions of biography and
autobiography, Stein’s persona emerges as a central character whose ideas,
deeds, ironies and capricious moods are plainly presented, in a manner not
different from the traditional biographies that concentrate mostly on the
importance of a famous character. It also can be argued, like Estelle C. Jelinek
does in The Traditions of Women’s Autobiography, that Stein herself, through
omission of mainstream political commentary, camouflage, diverting
anecdotes and fragmented narrative, contributed to the affirmation of
women’s biographies, but her main concern had been to break, from the inside
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PLAYING GENIUS AND PERFORMING GENDER …
2 Moreover, the formal arrangement of the seven chapters and their titles invites to a
contextualization of Stein’s self-awareness about writing and the incorporating, almost
suffocating, power of the narrative. In this respect, The Autobiography starts as an innocent
personal story of a woman (Alice B. Toklas) only to slowly become the story of another woman
(Gertrude Stein), then a story of a couple (Stein – Toklas), then a story of a cultural movement
(Stein’s salon), and in the end, these stories become history (War World I). This encompassing
nature of writing is well expressed in the remarks Stein makes in Toklas’s voice about her most
ambitious work, The Making of the Americans “it was to be the history of a family. It was a
history of a family but by the time I came to Paris it was getting to be a history of all human
beings, all who ever were or are or could be living.” (69)
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PLAYING GENIUS AND PERFORMING GENDER …
3 In The Autobiography Picasso is recorded to have said about his painting “everybody says
that she does not look like it but that does not make any difference, she will” (14). The
same holds true for The Autobiography, the power of art and Pound’s adage that life
imitates art. Also, the biblical power of the word has its share in Stein’s endeavor, since
literature is a matter of will. The final sentence of the book enforces the image of Stein as
“Deux ex machina”. Once she takes the decision to write, the work is already conceived
“And she has [written it] and this is it” (310).
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Stein the chance to meditate on the valences of the language the American
soldiers fighting in France utilize. Even the charitable works that shows
Stein’s and Toklas’s involvement, valuable because of the war and caused by
the war, fades in momentary notes that describe an activity like any other.4
Yet, Stein obeys the modern convention because by avoiding the direct
treatment of such an important event, she accentuates the moral and
existential void of an event that does nothing more than circumscribing the
modern world and its loss of meaning. In the same manner, outstanding
cultural figures of modernism, who all intersected in Stein’s salon, even if
they take the center stage and engage in innumerable important
conversations, do not play crucial roles in the book. Like the famous
paintings covering the walls in the residence in rue de Fleurus 27, they are
exhibited in the book.
Chronology, character development and history hinder Stein’s effort
to write the conventional autobiography, even though she tries deliberately
to have them in place. These three elements, along with others, assumed by
the audience to be in her text led to the public success of The Autobiography,
and, as seen before, they are in the text. In fact, Stein’s mastery in dealing
with history and famous men emphasizes at the same time both the
obedience to and the subversion of convention, which proved in the end
the winning card. The question, then, still unanswered, that raised the
4 The way Stein portrays the war (or as some critics might object, the way she does not portray it)
defines her writing. In Narration, the book that collects the four lectures she delivered at the
University of Chicago in 1934, Stein makes a distinction between poetry and prose depending
on whether a noun is used or not and comes to the conclusion that “poetry was a calling an
intensive calling upon the name of anything and that prose was not the using the name of
anything as a thing in itself but the creating of sentences that were self-sufficient and following
one after the other made of anything a continuous thing which is paragraphing and so a
narrative that is a narrative of anything” (25-6). Thus, writing about war means writing about
it without naming it. Even if she affirms its importance, considering the war as the limit for the
nineteenth century (1), Stein spends no time describing it. For her, the paragraphing of narrative
bears more fruit than the actual account of the great event. In The Autobiography, Stein’s and
Toklas’s decision “to get into war” is facilitated not by the crude development of the hostilities,
but by their chance encounter with an ambulance of the American Fund for French Wounded.
The war is not named, but invoked by the name of the charity and the ambulance (207).
Similarly, the battle of the Marne is not properly described, but rather invoked by both Nellie
Jacot and Alfy Maurer. The first complains about the difficulty of finding a taxi during the
curfew, while the other remembers the “pale absinthe” of the sky and the soldiers guarding the
treasury which “was going away just like that before the battle of the Marne” (184-5).
Narrative, like history, detective stories, and even biography, as subgenera of prose, describe
events, situations, and characters, in a way in which denotation loses ground to connotation.
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PLAYING GENIUS AND PERFORMING GENDER …
5 The novel, written before the two women met, was only published posthumously. The
titles, because there have been two, are in themselves rather transparent allusions to
Stein’s lesbianism: Things As They Are (the first edition published by Alice B. Toklas in
1950) and QED (probably the initial title, 1971).
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one.6 At the same time, the book is a celebration of the romantic period in
their life, in the sense Stein discussed the importance of the second country,
the one in which writers live, even if they do not belong there. Moreover,
the book represents the fruit of the long awaited encounter of the two
women and their future relationship because once Toklas arrives in
Steinland the author finally acquires the status of a figurative man of
genius. The first issue of The Autobiography features a famous photograph
by Man Ray, “Alice B. Toklas at the door”, in which Toklas enters the
chamber where Stein writes at her desk. Engulfed in her writing, Stein does
not seem to realize that Toklas is about to enter the room, but the opening
door clearly brings new light inside, that is new opportunities and new
ways of expression, making the viewer and the reader imagine that Stein is
actually writing Toklas’s entrance into the room. The fact that this photo
mirrors the title page means that Stein is the author of the hoax
autobiography and that this writing is not going to be about Toklas or
Stein, but about their life together. In this respect, The Autobiography
narrates events happening in that second symbolic country that permits the
two women to set their own rules and transgress the conventions of the
time, when women were not at all free to live the way they wanted and did
not get the deserved recognition in the absence of a man that legitimized
their work to his benefit. In contrast, the two women legitimized one
another by being equally important and equally sharing the consequences
of their symbolic actions. Here lies a paradox that still puzzles and confuses
the reader, because Stein would not have written a book that assumed for
its author, until the end, a different identity, if it were not for the fact that
the other person’s identity helped the author assume her real identity;
similarly, Toklas would not have accepted to play along Stein’s game, had
she not realized the importance she had in Stein’s creative and real life.
If the metaphor of the ventriloquist7 is not specifically spelled out in
the text, there are other examples that Stein alludes to when she refers to
6 In Narration, when glossing on history and the way it might be written, Stein ponders on the
epistemological supposition that all entities can be eventually reduced to one, which in turn
can encompass the other/s. To prove her point, she argues that in mysticism, inside the
Trinity, three can be one, while in marriage, two can be one. Then, she concludes that “one is
not one because one is always two that is one is always coming to a recognition of what the
one who is one is writing that is telling” (57). This conclusion functions as an oblique reference
to her “marriage” and also to the narrative strategy of The Autobiography in which the one who
is telling (Toklas) and the one who is writing (Stein) are the same.
7 Considering that Toklas had been Stein’s secretary, typist and publisher, communicating
thus the latter’s work, the metaphor might have some positive relevance.
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PLAYING GENIUS AND PERFORMING GENDER …
her work. Two of them draw on similar cases, mixing the fiction with
nonfiction. The first one, Boswell’s Johnson, as Stein calls it in Narration, is
an interesting one because “Boswell conceived himself as an audience an
audience achieving recognition at one and the same time that Johnson
achieved recognition” (60), implying that Toklas, as Stein’s first audience or
because of that, becomes famous once the author herself does. The second
example refers to Defoe and Robinson Crusoe. The enigmatic sentence at
the end of The Autobiography, “I am going to write it [the autobiography] as
simply as Defoe did the autobiography of Robinson Crusoe” (310) is decoded
in Narration, “Think of Defoe, he tried to write Robinson Crusoe as if it
were exactly what did happen and yet after all he is Robinson Crusoe and
Robinson Crusoe is Defoe and therefore after all it is not what is happening
it is what is happening to him to Robinson Crusoe that makes what is
exciting every one.” (45) In other words, like Defoe writing the life of
Robinson Crusoe wrote about himself, Stein writing the autobiography of
Toklas wrote about herself. By conceding Toklas the prerogatives of
authorship for more than 300 hundred pages, just to take them back in the
end, Stein outplays the audience: she gives the public an affordable, yet
problematic work; she makes clear to put in as much as she lets out; and,
most importantly, inside her couple with Toklas clarifies who the writer is,
because Stein’s “love with a b” (as she calls Toklas in Narration) is a “pretty
good” everything except a “pretty good author.” Moreover, Stein’s
declaration, “I love my love with a b because she is peculiar” (39), opens up
to different interpretations. First of all, in a pure example of Steinian verse,
the author encrypts what she has never made public, her love for Alice B.
Toklas, but has suggested this in several of her poems and, probably, most
explicitly in The Autobiography. Then, by naming her lover only with reference
to the middle initial, Stein plays along the first letters of the alphabet,
where a might stand for herself, the man in the couple, while b is reserved
for Toklas, in a symbolism that hints to the priorities inside their couple, but
also to the author’s literary efforts to assign to letters, and consequently, to
words new meanings. Finally, their union and identification with one another
is once more asserted at a subtle syntactic level that almost escapes analysis.
Downplaying the ambiguity of a transitive verb (love) with an internal direct
object (my love), Stein references, almost unconsciously, even though her
egotism is well known, the love for herself. This self-reference can be
validated by considering the fact that Toklas used to call Stein Lovey,
meaning that when the author assesses the love for her lover actually
professes love for herself thus implying that Toklas and herself are one.
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IULIU RAŢIU
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PLAYING GENIUS AND PERFORMING GENDER …
issues like lesbianism and women’s role in society, on the other she encodes
them in a language that is no different from the language she dedicated her
life to conceive. The harsh moral judgments concerning her work proved
invalid. When discussing and analyzing her writing the moral balance good
/ bad is highly flawed. Stein wrote for the public, therefore she lied, seems
to be the moral verdict that feminists came with just to deny the real value
of The Autobiography. Because Stein had in mind the audience when she
wrote about herself and Alice B. Toklas and because she did not fess up her
lesbianism, she deserves no consideration as far as this unparalleled
worked is concerned. A closer look at some formal aspects of the book as
well as at the formal aspects of (auto)biographical writing showed that
Stein did indeed came out in this book. First of all, the book is a celebration
of her life with Toklas. Even though, the chronology starts before the two
women met, the actual interest and development draws on their
relationship. In fact, Toklas provided Stein with a chance to take a gender
role, that of a man, that both appealed to her and to the society of the time
that cherished everything that was made by a genius. Once Toklas took the
formal role of a wife in their couple and entertained the wives of famous
geniuses like Picasso or Hemingway, Stein immediately adopted the status
of a genius herself by engaging in sophisticated and endless conversations
with her peers. Second, The Autobiography uses a refined narrative and
point of view that legitimize in the end the assertion that Stein and Toklas
identified with each other to such an extent that the identity of the author
becomes secondary. The accusation that Stein used Toklas as a
ventriloquist would use a puppet is in itself useless, since the author
certainly did not intend to do that, but rather she intended to have Toklas
narrate events that changed their lives because undoubtedly they shared
the same opinion. Finally, by undermining the conventional structure of
any biography, when dealing with the chronology, the development or the
characters, Stein only stresses out the importance Toklas’s arrival in her life
had on her literary creativity. In The Autobiography, these three elements
merge in order to transgress the margins of literary, as well as sexual codes,
and realize a hoax autobiography that presents, with the appearance of
subversion, much more than it was expected. It was Stein’s way of
imposing herself both as a modernist writer and as a feminist precursor,
struggling with the problems of language and tradition.
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IULIU RAŢIU
References
Primary Sources:
Stein, Gertrude. The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas. Illustrated. First Edition. New York:
Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1933.
Stein, Gertrude. Everybody’s Autobiography. New York: Vintage Books, 1964.
Stein, Gertrude. Narration. Four Lectures with An Introduction by Thornton Wilder.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1969.
Stein, Gertrude. Paris France. New York: Scribner’s, 1940.
Secondary Sources:
Benstock, Shary. Women of the Left Bank 1900-1940. Austin: University of Texas Press,
1986.
Jelinek, Estelle C. The Tradition of Women’s Autobiography: From Antiquity to the Present.
Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1986.
Neuman, S.C. Gertrude Stein: Autobiography and the Problem of Narration. English
Literary Studies: University of Victoria, 1979.
Neuman, Shirley, and Ira B. Nadel. Gertrude Stein and the Making of Literature. Boston:
Northeastern University Press, 1988.
Stanton, Domna C., ed. The Female Autography. Theory and Practice of Autobiography from
the Tenth to the Twentieth Century. Chicago and London: The University of
Chicago Press, 1987.
Stimpson, Catharine R. “Gertrice / Altrude. Stein, Toklas, and the Paradox of the
Happy Marriage.” Mothering the Mind. Twelve Studies of Writers and Their Silent
Partners. Edited by Ruth Perry and Martine Watson Brownley. New York:
Holmes and Meier, 1984.
Stimpson, Catharine. “Gertrude Stein and the Lesbian Lie.” American Women’s
Autobiography: Fea(s)ts of Memory. Edited by Margo Culley. Madison: The
University of Wisconsin Press, 1992.
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STUDIA UBB DRAMATICA, LIX, 2, 2014, p. 147 - 167
(Recommended Citation)
ELIZA DEAC*
Abstract: The aim of this paper is to explore the shift in the understanding of
textuality brought about by the advent of the computer and by its use for the
generation of what is generally termed “electronic literature”. The starting point
of this analysis is Shelley Jackson’s hypertext fiction Patchwork Girl, which
resuscitates and gives a new twist to the old metaphor of bibliographical
terminology – the body of text. Written in Storyspace, this hypertext makes
deliberate use both of the possibilities and of the limitations of the programme
by representing itself as a human body, more specifically as the feminine
counterpart of Victor Frankenstein’s monster, whose severed body parts –
corresponding to the hypertext’s lexias – are stitched together by the hypertext
links. Such works both confirm and challenge the post-structuralist perspective
on the text as illustrated most conspicuously in Derrida’s Of Grammatology, in
which he proclaims “The end of the book and the beginning of writing”. The
hypertextual forms of writing exemplify a breach with the established view
of the book as a symbolic form of organic totality; however, their surface of
inscription cannot be stripped of materiality as Derrida, despite his insistence on
the corporeality of writing, suggests. Therefore, this paper will compare and
contrast the book and the hypertext as two mechanisms that have developed
specific means of employing their physical characteristics in the production of
meaning with the aim of finding the middle ground between the two pitfalls of
the discourse on the new media: the technological determinism of media
essentialism (Espen Aarseth) and medial ideology (Matthew Kirschenbaum),
which regards the electronic text (or any kind of text) as disembodied.
for its content: the header contains headlines, while the footer may include footnotes. The
French terminology does not depart from this metaphorical pattern, except that its
referents differ: the body text is placed inside the text area called le rectangle
d’empagement for which the typographer must choose the size of the letters – le corps.
This textual space is delimited at the top and at the bottom by two blank margins: le
blanc de tête and le blanc de pied.
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<html>
<head>
[...]
</head>
<body>
[...]
</body>
</html>
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ELIZA DEAC
the Greek verse bears witness, but a womanish and luxurious dress, instead of adorning
the body, exposes the mind within. In the same way, the translucent and many-coloured
style of some speakers emasculates subjects which are clothed in this kind of verbal dress.
What I want is care for words, but deep concern (emphasis in the original) for the subject.
Most commonly, the best words are bound up with the subject, and are discovered by
their own light; and yet we go on searching for them as though they were always hiding
and taking themselves out of the way! We never think they are to be found where the
subject of our speech is to be found, but prefer to seek them elsewhere and do violence to
the results of our Invention. Eloquence should be approached in a higher spirit; if her
whole body is healthy, she will not think that polishing her nails or styling her hair has
anything to do with her well-being (317-319).
The target of his attack is the pursuit of discursive beauty for its own
sake, to the detriment of the topic of the discourse – the backbone of any
speech. The critical view of the figural language is expressed through its
association with the artificial and shallow effects created by means of
cosmetics or luxurious clothing, as opposed to the natural beauty of the plain
speech, which resembles the healthy muscular body dressed in simple and
appropriate clothes. In its second phase, rhetoric obviously and somewhat
contradictorily favours the plain speech over the figural one in the name of a
certain ideal of social morality and efficacy (Todorov 78-79). When this
mindset is brought to a close in the 18th century, allowing the individual to
pursue the idea of beauty irrespective of any ethical and commonly shared
regulations, the romantics reverse this hierarchy and equate their art –
poetry – with the production of figural discourse, which they continue to
describe in terms of bodily metaphors, as Paul de Man’s investigation of
The Rhetoric of Romanticism brings into relief: “The language of tropes (...) is
indeed like the body, which is like its garments, the veil of the soul as the
garment is the sheltering veil of the body” (80). Nevertheless, the analogy still
carries a negative connotation. This time, the figural language is not
condemned from a moral perspective, but because of its incapacity to embody
ideas completely. The use of figures implies the perpetual displacement or
postponement of literal meaning: “To the extent that language is figure (...) it is
indeed not the thing itself but the representation, the picture of the thing and,
as such, it is silent, mute as pictures are mute” (80). This critique of the
limits of representation and of the actual muteness of the discourse – which
cannot name except indirectly – recalls Plato’s main reproach to writing.
And soon enough, de Man’s analysis reveals explicitly that it is the
representative power of the vehicular means that the romantic poets bring
into question: “To the extent that, in writing, we are dependent on this
language we all are (…) deaf and mute – not silent, which implies the
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possible manifestation of sound at our own will, but silent as a picture, that
is to say eternally deprived of voice and condemned to muteness” (80).
Such criticism signals a new turn in the evolution of the metaphor: from
speech to writing, from the figurative language to its medium. Thus,
although Wordsworth’s famous 1802 preface to Lyrical Ballads presents the
poet as “a man speaking to men” (255), what he realizes is the fact that the
poet of his times no longer speaks, but actually writes:
The paradox of the human soul and its body as the metaphor for that on which it is
modeled, the relation of the immortal intellect to nature, is made more problematical
by the introduction, at first surreptitiously, of a second metaphor, that of the book. If
nature is the bodily image of a deathless spirit, the things man has wrought for
commerce of his nature with itself are not vocal or bodily expressions, but books. The
articulation of the deathless spirit behind nature into the signs on the speaking face
of earth is like the articulation of man’s spirit in the words stamped on the printed
page. The book replaces the human body as the incarnation of the otherwise
undifferentiated power of the human spirit. Body and book are the same, and vocal
and written speech are seen as performing a similar differentiating function. (…) The
traditional metaphor describing the body as the garment of the soul (…) is here
transferred to the books men write (Miller 86)3.
3 Both Miller and de Man’s comments are inspired by those texts of Wordsworth’s which overtly
show his preoccupation with various forms of written language: epitaphs, monuments,
memorial plaques or other forms of inscription, proving that even the most idealist of the
romantic poets were not oblivious to the role of different material means in the embodiment of
their visions.
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ELIZA DEAC
poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from
emotion recollected in tranquility: the emotion is contemplated till by a species of
reaction the tranquility gradually disappears, and an emotion, similar to that which
was before the subject of contemplation, is gradually produced, and does itself actually
exist in the mind (266, emphasis added).
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ELIZA DEAC
In textual criticism, this attitude is implicit in the very strategy that distinguishes a text
from the manuscripts in which it is imperfectly embodied; in contemporary literary
criticism, it is expressed by the privileging of interpretation, that act that discovers in the
poem a meaning that transcends both the words in which it is expressed and the
historical context of its enunciation. It is an attitude that at least in part undergirds the
entire literary enterprise and that has been an element of literary culture since the time of
Plato (e.g. the Ion and Phaedrus). But it is also quintessentially Romantic, and certainly it is
as enunciated by Wordsworth and especially Coleridge that it has entered into
contemporary Anglo-American thinking in the form of New Criticism (McGann, A
Critique of Modern Textual Criticism 76).
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155
ELIZA DEAC
The first pair – phrenology/ body of text – reveals the analogy that
informs the system of links connecting the main units of this work: the
hypertext is modelled on the physical structure of the human figure – each
image is (at) the head of the specific body of text it introduces. It is the
section entitled body of text that constitutes what Miller would call the
linguistic moment of Patchwork Girl as most of the fragments of which it is
composed have a self-reflective quality. The first lexia to which the reader
gains access by clicking on the image of the brain map bears a self-
referencing name – “this writing”:
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Assembling these patched words in an electronic space, I feel half-blind, as if the entire
text is within reach, but because of some myopic condition I am only familiar with from
dreams, I can see only that part most immediately before me, and have no sense of how
that part relates to the rest. When I open a book I know where I am, which is restful. My
reading is spatial and even volumetric. I tell myself, I am a third of the way down
through a rectangular solid, I am a quarter of the way down the page, I am here on the
page, here on this line, here, here, here. But where am I now? I am in a here and a present
moment that has no history and no expectations for the future.
Or rather, history is only a haphazard hopscotch through other present moments. How I
got from one to the other is unclear. Though I could list my past moments, they would
remain discrete (and recombinant in potential if not in fact), hence without shape, without
end, without story. Or with as many stories as I care to put together. (this writing)
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ELIZA DEAC
4 This point is clearly made in a supplementary specification that Quintilian adds after his
elaborate comparison between human and discursive appearance: “So let us give as much
attention to Elocution as possible, so long as we understand that nevertheless nothing should
be done for the sake of (emphasis in the original) words, because words were invented for the
sake of things, and those words are most acceptable which best express our thoughts and lead
to the effect we want in the minds of judges. They must of course produce speech which arouses
admiration and delight, but an admiration very different from that which we bestow on monsters
(emphasis added), and a delight derived not from unseemly pleasure but from pleasure
combined with honour and dignity” (323-325).
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159
ELIZA DEAC
(Melot 57). At the other end, the hypertext abandons this bird’s-eye view,
together with the restricting limits it necessarily sets, and encourages its
readers to engage in a circuitous progress through trial and error. Once again,
the hypertext takes the side of the monster: “our infinitely various forms are
composed from a limited number of similar elements, a kind of alphabet, and
we have guidelines as to which arrangements are acceptable, are valid words,
legible sentences, and which are typographical or grammatical errors:
‘monsters’” (bodies too). To put it differently, Derrida’s distinction between
book and text (18) may be reformulated in this context as the distinction
between book and hyper-text. What this hypertextual arrangement reveals
is something that poets like Shelley already intuited, namely that there is
no essential totality which precedes the text and to which it can be returned
once it becomes subject to dismemberment. Instead, its sectioning allows
potential links to become visible. The web-like structure of the hypertext is
actually the embodiment of this conceptual realisation:
When I take something apart that once seemed whole I make an unnerving discovery.
You might think I am left with a kind of kit over which the dream of the whole hovers as
reassuringly as the picture on the front of the box, whispering that the whole already
exists, that I am not making something new and subject to accident but returning
scrambled elements to an order they already yearn towards because it is their essence.
That I am painting by number, I am pouring wax into a mold; I am filling up an abstract
vessel with matter so the vessel may be visible to all. Instead, I find that the picture on the
box has changed too. I see only a slew of colored bits.
I prise the parts apart at the cleavage zones and discover no resistance; when I press the
cut ends together they don’t recognize each other. Chasms gape between paragraphs and
between ideas, chasms I stepped across without looking down. I didn’t know they were
there. Now when I want to join them again – not to restore their original wholeness, but to
establish a relationship – I can’t easily justify the link. That a head attaches to a neck and not a
wrist seems less obvious when the pieces lie in a jumble on the laboratory floor, and there is no
skeleton hanging in the corner to sneak a look at (emphasis added). Even joined I feel the
fragments swimming farther apart. The links hold, stretching with me, and I can still
reel them in, but when I let them go again they begin immediately to drift. (cuts)
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ELIZA DEAC
Secondly, it includes maps of each story section which display all the
lexias that compose it and indicates the way they are connected.
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Fig. 4. Patchwork Girl. Screenshot of the Storyspace map of the section entitled
“body of text”.
Using these hypertext maps is not very different from scanning through
a table of contents in a book.
The second issue that the hypertext readers may raise regards the
manner in which they should interpret the claim to nonlinearity, which can be
seriously brought into question once they get accustomed to its mechanisms.
For instance, even if sometimes the number of links that the readers may
choose from can be as many as twenty-four, it is very often that on clicking on
a fragment of text they are given only one option to follow. In fact, as Aarseth
shows, such limitations are not necessarily attributable to the work itself, but
are inherent in the design of the software used for their creation:
When Ted Nelson first coined the word hypertext in 1965, he was thinking of a new way
of organising text so that it could be read in a sequence chosen by the reader, rather than
followed only in the sequence laid down by the writer. However, since codex texts can
also be read in sequences determined by the reader, what he in fact suggested was a
system in which the writer could specify which sequences of reading would be available
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ELIZA DEAC
to the reader. Later, implementations of such systems, for example, Storyspace, embodied
this suggestion so fully that readers could follow only (emphasis in the original) the
sequences laid down by the writer. Hyperfictions written in Storyspace, like Afternoon [or
Patchwork Girl], do not allow its readers free browsing, unlike any codex fiction in
existence. The reader’s freedom from linear sequence, which is often held up as the
political and cognitive strength of hypertext, is a promise easily retracted and wholly
dependent on the hypertext system in question (77).
But then it dissociates itself from this consecrated view: “This if you
adhere to the traditional separation of body and soul, form and content”
(bodies). In the perspective it adopts, the relation between form and content is
one of mutual engendering. The meaning can be produced by moving both
ways: from content to form or from form to content. As Hayles has shown
(152), Patchwork Girl is one of the most illustrative examples of the latter case: it
was the effort to understand how the constraints of the Storyspace medium
(consisting of linked and nested rectangular boxes) worked that inspired the
key metaphors of this hypertext – the graveyard, the quilt and, ultimately, the
patched body. The fact that the reader accesses the text through various
images of this body indicates an inversion of “the usual hierarchy that puts
mind first” (Hayles 150) and points to one of the key conceptual changes
resulting from the interaction with the new media – an integrative perspective
on the means of communication and the departure from a strictly
informational view postulating that these are simply channels through which
the information passes unhindered. In sum, the linguistic moment of
Patchwork Girl reflects in nuce the evolution of the critical thinking on literature
as illustrated by the particular history of the body/text metaphor:
We are inevitably annexed to other bodies: human bodies, and bodies of knowledge.
We are coupled to constructions of meaning, we are legible, partially; we are
cooperative with meanings, but irreducible to any one. The form is not absolutely
malleable to the intentions of the author; what may be thought is contingent on the means of
expression (emphasis added).” (bodies too)
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ELIZA DEAC
2.3. Conclusions
At the end of this excursion following the meanderings of a rhetorical
figure, the question arises how this metaphor contributes to a better
understanding of the conceptual issues raised with the advent of hypertext
and how this knowledge compares with the theoretical investigations. In the
first place, it provided a link with similar debates in the literary domain and
served as a starting point for a comparative approach which brought the
commonalities and differences into focus in a more objective manner.
Secondly, it developed an awareness of the physical peculiarities of its
environment which helped avoiding the pitfall of what Matthew
Kirschenbaum calls medial ideology, namely the claim that digital texts exist
in a purely immaterial world (39). Also, as a corollary to the extensive
exploration of the metaphor of the body in Patchwork Girl, the hypertext
reaches the conclusion that, ultimately, it is not the analogy with the human
body that constitutes the best metaphor for approximating its own nature, but
the metaphor in itself:
I am a mixed metaphor. Metaphor, meaning something like ‘bearing across’, is itself a
fine metaphor for my condition. Every part of me is linked to other territories alien to
it but equally mine. Shin bone connected to the thigh bone, thigh bone connected to
the hip bone: borrowed parts, annexed territories. I cannot be reduced, my
metaphors are not tautologies, yet I am equally present in both poles of a pair, each
end of the wire is tethered to one of my limbs. The metaphorical principle is my true
skeleton. (metaphor me)
Thus, on a metaphorical level, the hypertext inverts the place that the
figures occupied in the ancient system of rhetoric and moves them from the
marginal position of ornaments to the central position of structural principles.
References
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167
CREATION, INTERVIEWS, MISCELLANEA
STUDIA UBB DRAMATICA, LIX, 2, 2014, p. 171 - 175
(Recommended Citation)
LAETITIA CHAZOTTES*
* Responsable de rubriques et critique d’art pour le site internet www.paris-art.com, Paris, France,
e-mail: [email protected]
LAETITIA CHAZOTTES
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LAETITIA CHAZOTTES
sans éclat ne met pas en avant un événement plutôt qu’un autre. Cet aspect
un peu monotone n’atténue pas la portée, au contraire, car paradoxalement
l’émotion du spectateur monte en puissance par le contenu de ce qu’il
entend, y compris le silence entre chaque brouillon de lettre. Épurer au
maximum matérialise le propos et amplifie l’impact.
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175
STUDIA UBB DRAMATICA, LIX, 2, 2014, p. 177 - 185
(Recommended Citation)
DELIA ENYEDI*
Delia Enyedi: For someone who has not yet heard the name, what would
you respond to the question of who was Irén Lengyel?
D. E.: By “that ill-fated word” you refer to the famous moment of her saying
the name of her country of birth on stage. Why was that such a risk?
G. I.: You see, she truly was an extremely courageous young woman.
In 1931, she was a prima donna of Hungarian origin beloved by the public,
employee of the Hungarian Theatre of Cluj (the name of the city was
changed in 1974 into Cluj-Napoca - A/N). She was performing in The Bride
from Hamburg (A hamburgi menyasszony), an operetta with music composed
by Zsigmond Vincze and lyrics by Ernő Kulinyi. Circumstances
surrounding it had already been delicate, because of one particular verse
that went “Hungary, you are beautiful and splendid” (“Szép vagy,
gyönyörű vagy, Magyarország” - A/N). Now, you must understand that
both Vincze and Kulinyi were Jewish. In the general state of anti-Semitism
that accompanied the Hungarian radical political regimes following World
War I, censorship immediately intervened and in order for the operetta to
be staged the word “Magyarország” was substituted with “Meseország”.
So instead of the reference to Hungary, the verse suddenly referred to a
fairytale land, a cloudland, thanks to the similar spelling of the two words.
However, in the case of the Transylvanian Hungarian speaking theatres,
the province shifting under Romanian authority after the signing of the
Treaty of Trianon in 1920, keeping this replacement of terms carried an
additional stake, as it was forbidden for Hungarian artists to openly
encourage the nationalism of their public. After all, only a decade had
passed since they had suddenly found themselves as a minority living
outside the borders of their native country. Despite all these circumstances,
during her performance my mother chose to respect the original verse and
praised the beauty and splendor of Hungary in front of the hall packed
with audience.
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“MY MOTHER, IRÉN LENGYEL”
D. E.: So there is no doubt that her gesture was premeditated, but out of these
two possible potential motivations behind such a dangerous decision what was her own?
D. E.: What were the consequences of her assumed act of freedom of speech?
G. I.: It was the same Jenő Janovics who, while he was not able to
save her career, testified in her defense and saved her. He was an
incredibly educated man and, it seems, of great influence. My mother
remained grateful to him up to the end of her life.
G. I.: Without any doubt! The two parts of her life revolve around
that moment. Up to that day, she was a successful prima donna, starting
with the day after she was a loving wife and mother, leaving the stage
forever behind.
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DELIA ENYEDI
D. E.: If we were to follow her becoming up to that day, how did Irén
Lengyel built her prima donna career?
D. E.: Where did she make her debut and in what theatres din she play before
coming to Cluj?
G. I.: Since this part of her life ended before my brother and I were born,
I don’t have much information to complement the facts that she made her
debut in Ungvár, nowadays a city in Ukraine, and performed in Hungarian
theatres from Timișoara and Arad. For our family, what reenacts that period of
her life are less the actual details, but the dozens of photos she left behind,
displaying her graceful beauty costumed for different parts, whether alone or
with her stage partners, or seated backstage receiving the appraisal of her
public. That is how her children and nephews came to know Irén Lengyel, the
prima donna. She herself did not used to speak much about those days.
D. E.: In what ways did her life change after leaving the theatrical scene?
G. I.: She had married my father, Victor Ilieș, before the end of her
career, on 9 July 1929. He was the single heir to the wealthy fortune of an
aristocrat family. At the time, the Ilieș family owned two mansions in Cluj
counting a total of about fifty apartments, a summer residence in the village of
Recea-Cristur (located forty five kilometers north of Cluj-Napoca - A/N), as
well as extended pieces of land in the region. The main business they ran was
located in that village and consisted of an industrial alcohol factory and a mill.
So at least from a financial point of view, she had no worries.
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“MY MOTHER, IRÉN LENGYEL”
G. I.: Truth be told, for short periods of time it actually was. But the
first tragedy that struck the family came early. In 1935, my mother gave
birth to a child, whom my parents named Victor, after his father. Tragically,
he died from diphtheria at the age of five, a disease with no cure at that
time. The following year I was born, and in 1941 my brother followed, also
named Victor.
D. E.: How did your mother use to spend her days, what were her interests?
D. E.: How did the Communist regime intervene in the life of your family?
G. I.: Ever since the Communists had subdued the political power in
Romania, in 1945, their ideology casted a threatening shadow upon the
lives of the wealthy upper class. Many chose the exile, as it was the case of
Glück and Moskowits who sold everything they owned and moved to
Switzerland. We never heard of them again. But my father, an educated
man, owning a Ph.D. degree in Law, could not conceive that any vicious
measures could alter his social and financial status.
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DELIA ENYEDI
D. E.: When did the Communist measures aimed at the wealthy citizens
actually struck?
G. I.: It was the infamous Decree 92 that was put into effect in 1950 by
which the state nationalized private houses and lands. Overnight,
everything we owned was taken away from us. We found ourselves being
escorted in a horse drawn wagon to the nearby city of Turda, with just a
suitcase of personal belongings. Once arrived, we were ordered to take up
forced residence in the city of Aiud where we ended up living for years, in
one small room, with our presence there being verified on a weekly basis.
D. E.: Did your family suffer additional persecution, as it was the case of
many illustrious personalities wrongfully imprisoned?
G. I.: Oh, yes. I remember many sleepless nights haunted by the fear
that the agents of the Securitate (the Romanian Communist secret police -
A/N) would barge in and take my father to another session of questioning.
But he was never imprisoned. He was lucky to have one huge advantage.
He never ever got involved into politics. In the end, they could not charge
him of anything and dropped his case. It’s interesting they never
speculated on mother’s so-called irredentist act. They probably did not
know who she was, being identified as Iren Ilieș. But that doesn’t mean we
did not suffer. My father, the former aristocrat, was forced to earn our
austere living by tending cattle and swine. I often wonder what mental
strength had prevented him from going mad, you know, being robbed of
everything and humiliated in that manner…
D. E.: What happened to your family’s estates during the Communist period?
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“MY MOTHER, IRÉN LENGYEL”
D. E.: Did your family benefit from the coming to power of Nicolae
Ceaușescu, in 1974, and his first phase relatively moderate rule?
GI: Not really. I mean, my brother and I were able to leave Aiud in
1966 and moved to the small city of Luduș, but this was possible due to
being forced to undertake specific jobs according to the field of study we
graduated, as it was the habit in those days. Obviously, this was not quite a
privilege and had nothing to do with getting our confiscated assets back.
Despite having to bear those difficult years of our life, both our parents
encouraged us to look beyond the immediate future and get an education.
Even as a housewife, my mother exuded a cultivated distinction and gave a
lot of attention to learning to speak correctly Romanian and German.
D. E.: Unfortunately, she did not live long enough to see all the estates being
returned back to the family, after the fall of the Communism.
G. I.: No, she didn’t. She died on 16 January 1980, in Aiud. It was
incredible how fast the sad news reached a significant number of people
that attended to her funeral. They were not only relatives and friends, but
also her admirers who had not forgotten her years spent on stage. My
mother was buried in Cluj, in the Hajongard Cemetery, alongside her
eldest son, where she rests under her married name, as Ilieș Iren Carolina.
183
DELIA ENYEDI
184
“MY MOTHER, IRÉN LENGYEL”
The burial place of the Ilieș family in the Hajongard Cemetery of Cluj-Napoca,
where Irén Lengyel was laid to rest under her married name, as Ilieș Iren Carolina.
(Photo Credit: Delia Enyedi)
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STUDIA UBB DRAMATICA, LIX, 2, 2014, p. 187 - 194
(Recommended Citation)
IULIA URSA*
Abstract: This series of interviews with Doctor Rodica Pavel and Doctor
Rodica Mureșan, both specialized in phoniatrics and active in hospitals from
Cluj-Napoca, Romania, sheds some light on the nature of this medical field,
as well as on how it relates to our daily life and on how associated diseases
can be prevented and diagnoses and treatments can be reached.
* Actor’s Art specialty teacher at the “Octavian Stroia” Choreography and Dramatic Art High
School, Cluj-Napoca, E-mail: [email protected]
1 ENT (otorhinolaryngology) specialist, supra-specialized in Phoniatrics, Infectious Diseases
Hospital, Cluj-Napoca
IULIA URSA
R. P.: Given their economic options, they are way, way more developed,
especially in research. Since phoniatrics can also include patients with
pharyngeal neoplasms, who, after surgery, lose their ability to speak, these
patients have the chance at recovery and at social inclusion.
I. U.: Do you think that a performing artist can have a career without
working with a phoniatrics specialist?
R. P.: Sure he can have a career (as it happened until now, in our
country) because artistic qualities are not set by a phoniatrics specialist; but
performance improves when the artist works with a phoniatrics specialist.
R. P.: There are two ENT physicians who also work in this field of
supra-specialization, the only doctors apart from those in Bucharest, but
they only have videostroboscopy equipment, and that’s about it.
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VOICE REHABILITATION AND VOICE HYGIENE FROM A PHONIATRICS SPECIALIST’S …
I. U.: And what happened with the partnership with the Academy of
Music....and the phoniatric center you were trying to start?
I. U.: What do you think is needed in the process of phonatory education for
highschool students?
***
I. U.: What are the diagnoses and what treatment do you use?
R. M.: In diagnosis, first we need to study the larynx with the help of
a stroboscope. This is how we can see the vocal chords while the patient
talks, the movement of the chords in regular light as well as in stroboscopic
light, how they vibrate and the curling of the mucous membrane of the
chords. This investigation allows us to see some subtle things that go
unseen without the right equipment. Then we evaluate the voice. It is a
perceptive evaluation that focuses on several criteria: sound intensity,
fundamental frequency of the sound, and pitch. The voice is evaluated
based on the patient and on his/her pathology.
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IULIA URSA
I. U.: Looking at all of these analyses a specialist can do, what do you think
the connection between a phoniatrics specialist and a performing artist, an actor or
a lyricist should be?
R. M.: This should be a strong link. For example, I work with the
“Gheorghe Dima” Music Academy, where I teach vocal hygiene to the
students. I resumed this partnership this year, after a rather long break.
During these lessons, I teach concepts of anatomy, physiology, and how to
produce a voice. It is important that you know the rules of vocal hygiene,
what you have to do to maintain your voice healthy, the techniques of
vocal therapy, not necessarily for fixing vocal problems, but for improving
the qualities and the resistance of the voice (flexibility, expressivity). And
unlike the techniques the actor learns in stage speech classes, phoniatric
techniques of voice therapy follow the function of the larynx, rather than
the articulation. We don’t focus on articulation, we focus on the correct
placement of the voice, the proper use of vibration, of the larynx and of the
resonators. We see vocal exercises from a different point of view.
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VOICE REHABILITATION AND VOICE HYGIENE FROM A PHONIATRICS SPECIALIST’S …
R. M.: That would be too much. Before the admission exam, the
candidates for the vocal pedagogy section are bound to take a phoniatrics
exam, but I’ve never seen a situation where there is a slight contraindication.
There are other contraindications referring to congenital changes or acquired
diseases that are incompatible with the activity of vocal performance. However,
if we do encounter an intercurrent problem, we don’t recommend giving up
the artistic career. The candidate may suffer from functional dysphonia caused
precisely by the effort to prepare for the admission exam.
R. M.: Yes, absolutely. He was Dr. Constantin Bogdan; there was also
my mentor, professor Emil Tomescu, who showed me the way into this field.
I. U.: Reading your thesis I found references to a phoniatrics center that works
in partnership with the “Gheorghe Dima” Music Academy. Does it still exist?
192
VOICE REHABILITATION AND VOICE HYGIENE FROM A PHONIATRICS SPECIALIST’S …
I. U.: What should performing art teachers who work with teenagers emphasize,
considering the fact that they also have to take care of their voice?
R. M.: They have to consider the fact that their voice is changing; here,
things get delicate. It is likely that they also study singing, since an actor at that
point has to have developed skills in a number of fields. Because the voice is
changing, the larynx is more fragile and therefore their voice power and
stamina are reduced. Moreover, because of those changes, the voice fluctuates,
especially in boys. Girls do suffer from a voice mutation as well, even if it is
not obvious. It decreases by a few tones (for boys it can decrease by a whole
octave). It is really important for them not to burden themselves. Excessive
vocal effort affects the voice, regardless of age. I have many teenager patients,
not only from the music school, who have artistic potential and willpower. It is
a delicate period, more delicate than when they are in college (because they
start to be mature and serious). It is important for them not to show off. This is
actually the most important thing during this period, because showing off can
lead to serious health issues such as laryngitis and nodules. Slowly and gently,
while trying not to yell or talk very loud. Boys get nodules not because of
crying, but because of shouting too loud when they are 5-6 years old. In time,
because the vocal cords ligament only develops during puberty, those with
small nodules may see them disappear without complications. Unfortunately,
those with bigger nodules need surgery, which will eventually leave a scar.
The method of recovery is relevant, yet the surgery methods are not. The idea
is that if a scar appears, due to the vibrations of the vocal cords, that person
may not be able to go on with their musical career; or at least they could
193
IULIA URSA
require a year off. Also they should not smoke. Anyone who wants a career in
this area should give up smoking, and also understand that smoking and this
career are incompatible. The reason is that smoking irritates the larynx.
I. U.: Is the book3 that you published in 2010 to be user’s manual for voice
professionals?
IULIA URSA is an Actor’s Art specialty teacher at the “Octavian Stroia” Choreography and
Dramatic Art High School, Cluj-Napoca. Starting from 2011 she has been a doctoral student at
the Faculty of Theatre and Television, “Babeş-Bolyai” University. Research topic: Methodology
of teaching the Actor’s Art in artistic vocational high schools. She is involved in the didactic and
research activity in the field of the theatrical education for teenagers.
3 Mureșan, Rodica. Reabilitarea şi igiena vocii. [Voice Rehabilitation and Hygiene] Cluj-Napoca:
Alma Mater, 2010.
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STUDIA UBB DRAMATICA, LIX, 2, 2014, p. 195 - 200
(Recommended Citation)
OANA POCAN*
“In the past, the king needn’t have but look respectably in the
uniform and not fall off the horse. Now we must invade people’s houses
and ingratiate them. This family has been reduced to the lowest and most
primary of the creatures. We have become actors”. George V (played by
Michael Gambon) states the above in the film The King’s Speech; a statement
also applicable to the impact that the culture development of media
technology (radio, television) has had even on the most conservative
institutions, like the one of British royalty. Thanks to the appearance of
sound film and to radio practice, a new world of sounds and noises
becomes available. Acoustic means stand for a viable form of reception,
giving the spoken text an unmistakable shape through rhythm, escalations
of tempo, tones, accents, while also revealing the performer. Because “vocal
performance is also, in its way, an interpretation” (Olaru, and Năstase).
The King’s Speech captures a moment in the history of British royalty
when, just because of the need to adapt and assimilate media culture to
royal conservatism, prince Albert (Colin Firth), the future king George VI
* Teaching Fellow, Faculty of Theatre and Television, UBB, Cluj-Napoca, e-mail: [email protected]
OANA POCAN
196
REFLECTIONS ON BODY AND VOICE AS ELEMENTS OF INTERCULTURAL DIALOGUE IN …
197
OANA POCAN
2 In her study “Grotowski şi Barba: pe calea teatrului–dans. Între teatru şi dans: antrenamentul
actorului grotowskian” (Grotowsky and Barba: On the Path of Dance-Theatre. Between Theatre and
Dance: the Training of Grotowski’s Actor), the author, Monique Borie, analyzes the training
technique of Grotowski’s actor. (See Borie 95-100.)
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REFLECTIONS ON BODY AND VOICE AS ELEMENTS OF INTERCULTURAL DIALOGUE IN …
Grotowski’s ideas regarding the actor and the director and the
relationship between them can also be applied to the film The King’s Speech,
because Logue appears as a director who shapes and coordinates the actor
(Prince Albert) and, thus, prepares him for the role of his life. By following
the aforementioned comparison, we can say that Prince Albert – as an
actor- “reveals himself by sacrificing his most private part – the one which
is not made for the eyes of the world” (Grotowski 21). He must be able to
eliminate all “the disturbing elements in order to surpass all imaginable
limits” (Ibid.). At Logue – just like at a director – “Being warm is essential–
an understanding of the human contradictions, as man is a creature who
suffers and who is not to be despised” (30). Logue’s “warm opening” (so
necessary when work with an actor is involved) allows Albert to show
himself in all his privacy, “to make the most extreme efforts without being
afraid that he is mocked or humiliated”. In the end, Albert – from a man
“governed by fear”, inhibited by his own speaking disorder, will become “a
mature and self-possessed man” and “will be a really good king”, as stated
by a satisfied Logue.
The recovery of his voice and the fact that he is aware of it (the scene
from Westminster Cathedral) obviously contribute to the (re)construction
of Prince Albert’s own identity, as well as the social and political one. “The
consciousness of a symptom, which has been persisting for years or since
childhood, raises besides strictly pathological problems also a problem
regarding the changes made by the consciousness in the personality
structure which has integrated this ‘adaptive answer’. Thus, the symptom
tends to become a component of the feeling of identity.” (Goglează 416) In
fact, Logue’s role is to bring to light a nations’ leader who must rule a quarter
of the world’s population. Logue will show Albert who he is in fact, by
teaching him self-confidence, by showing him how to control his emotions,
how to come out a winner from the battle with his own fears.
Theatrical practices that are used and assimilated as treatment techniques
in the pathology of communication, by borrowing and integrating the
technologies specific to the media as well as to royal traditionalism, a subject’s
acceptance and ascent to the rank of personal adviser and friend of the royal
family, and the voice of royal authority that speaks to a multicultural empire
are important intercultural elements we can identify in the film.
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OANA POCAN
References
The King’s Speech. Director: Tom Hooper, Screenwriter: David Seidler, Cast: Colin
Firth, Geoffrey Rush, Helena Bonham Carter, 2010.
Avram, Luize. Catharsis muzical sau despre efectele benefice ale muzicii asupra finite umane.
[Musical Catharsis or On the Beneficial Effects of Music on the Human Being]
Bucharest: UNMB, 2007.
Borie, Monique. “Grotowski şi Barba: pe calea teatrului–dans. Între teatru şi dans:
antrenamentul actorului grotowskian.” [Grotowsky and Barba: On the Path of
Dance-Theatre. Between Theatre and Dance: the Training of Grotowski’s Actor]
Revista Teatrul Azi 11-12 (2009): 95-100.
Brook, Peter. Împreună cu Grotowski. Teatrul e doar o formă. [In Company of Grotowski.
Theatre Is Just a Form] Edited by George Banu and Grzegorz Ziółkowski.
Prefaced by George Banu. Translated from English by Anca Măniuțiu, Eugen
Wohl, and Andreea Iacob. Bucharest: Cheiron, 2009.
Goglează, Dan. Viața ca autosugestie. [Life as Autosuggestion] Bucharest: Editura
Humanitas, 2009.
Grotowsky, Jerzy. Spre un teatru sărac. [Towards a Poor Theatre] Translated by George
Banu, and Mirella Nedelcu-Pătureanu. Bucharest: Editura Unitext, 1998.
Lecoq, Jacques, in collaboration with Jean-Gabriel Carasso, and Jean-Claude Lallias.
Corpul poetic. O pedagogie a creației teatrale. [The Poetic Body. The Pedagogy of
Theatrical Creativity] Translated by Raluca Vida. Oradea: ArtSpect, 2009.
Oida, Yoshi, and Lorna Marshall. Actorul invizibil. [The Invisible Actor] Prefaced by
PeterBrook. Translated by Maia Tezler. Oradea: ArtSpect, 2009.
Online references
Olaru, Adina, and Ruxandra Năstase. “Reinhart Meyer-Kalkus – Vocea şi arta
vorbirii în secolul 20.” [Reinhart Meyer-Kalkus – The Voice and the Art of
Speech in the XXth century.] România literară 16 (2002). 10 Oct. 2014.
<http://www.romlit.ro/reinhart_meyer-kalkus_-
_vocea_i_arta_vorbirii_n_secolul_20>.
OANA POCAN graduated in 1999 the Acting Class and obtained a Master’s Degree in the
Art of Performance and Spectacology, at Babeş-Bolyai University in Cluj-Napoca. As a
Teaching Assistant she teaches “Improvisation” and “Voice Expression” at the Faculty of
Theatre and Television. In present she’s also a student in doctoral studies, interested in the
part of movement on stage, body and voice in the process of building and developing a
character. As an actress she has worked at Baia Mare Theatre, at Turda Theatre and at the
National Theatre in Cluj.
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PERFORMANCE AND BOOK REVIEWS
STUDIA UBB DRAMATICA, LIX, 2, 2014, p. 203 - 207
(Recommended Citation)
Photo 1. Kathryn Hunter (Left), Jared McNeill (Center), Marcello Magni (Right)
in The Valley of Astonishment
© Warwick Arts Center, University of Warwick, Coventry, UK
Sammy Costas is not the only such story presented on stage, although
it is the central and most poignant one. Two other stories of personal
struggles with similar illnesses are briefly presented. Effortlessly switching
between several roles, both Marcelo Magni and Jared McNeill portray
individuals which had to find ways of understanding, accepting and living
with their medical conditions. Marcelo Magni’s character tells his doctors (in
this case played by Kathryn Hunter and Jared McNeill) about his inability to
sense his own body, a disease known as proprioception, while the character
played by Jared McNeill associates the letters of the alphabet with colors.
They are stories of personal struggles, of learning how to live with such
illnesses, without being completely subjugated by them.
The Valley of Astonishment does not desire to offer any answers, does
not present solutions, but rather it aims to be an incursion into the infinite
realm of the human mind, bringing together a series of stories that
emphasize, through extreme situations, the limitlessness of, in Peter Brook’s
words, “the mountains and the valleys of the brain”. And it is the search that
is central to this production, a search which is both personal – each
character’s drama –, scientific – the doctors who record both the
manifestations of the illness and their patients’ individual struggle – and, at
the same time and equally important, public – thus involving, observing and
relying on the audience’s active or passive reactions. This last aspect is even
more intriguing as it tests the immediate reactions of the spectators of the
performance, thus managing to offer a general pattern of the audience’s
reactions when faced with such strange “phenomena”. In this respect, the
scene towards the end of the performance in which Marcello Magni plays a
one-handed magician engaging the audience in his card tricks is essential in
understanding, and experiencing first hand, how, in the case of Sammy
Costas’ mnemonic stage act the audiences might have responded. Is her
drama relevant to the spectators, or are they more concerned with the
peculiarity, the strangeness of a character that is there solely to entertain
them? Mutatis mutandis, do we stand to wonder why the magician in front of
us only has only one hand, are we interested in his personal drama, or is this
“detail” lost, irrelevant, in the wider context of the entertainment act? This is
of course, for every spectator to discover.
206
SECRET LIVES IN THE VALLEY OF ASTONISHMENT
Eugen WOHL
Teaching Assistant at the Faculty of Letters,
Babeș-Bolyai University, IATC member,
E-mail: [email protected]
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STUDIA UBB DRAMATICA, LIX, 2, 2014, p. 209 - 215
(Recommended Citation)
America means, above all, a utopia we all dream about at some point
in our lives; a fragmented society of “the future” filled with naturalized
individuals and whose past is based on the histories of each immigrant.
How can freedom of speech still be perceived when we are continuously
monitored by statistics and messages, designed to draw our attention to a
standardized way of life, in which the social networks and media create a
parallel universe where hypermarkets represent the image of a capitalist
existence? As far as culture is concerned, mass media represents a primary
source for defining the images of our social reality and the most impactful
representation of common identity. More correctly, it establishes a dominant
order of rules, discourses, ideologies and capitalist values.
I would gladly defend your freedom of expression if I thought it were in danger. I
would defend your freedom of speech if you told racist, frustrated, political or
homophobic jokes just because they made you feel good! But no, you do this because
that is what the audience requires. I do not think you can go lower. We are the OMG-
Generation for which an acid remark has a higher value than the truth. No one has
respect for anything and we celebrate that. People film themselves tormenting
animals and post the videos on YouTube just for the views. Politicians today are
anxious for a tragedy to happen so that they can exploit it for electoral purposes. I
mean, why do we have a civilization if we are not civilized?
But what matters most is Who we are. We have become a cruel and vicious country. We
reward superficiality, stupidity, wickedness and depravity. We have no common sense or
decency. We do not have a sense of shame. We do not distinguish between right and
wrong. The worst of qualities are admired and displayed on television. It's okay to lie and
to inspire fear - as long as you make money from doing it. We have become a country of
slogans, hatred – we are the country where stupidity is praised every four years. We have
lost our kindness. We have lost our soul. What has become of us? We take the weakest
men and put them under a spotlight and we mock them for our sole amusement.
Nobody speaks anything. They just repeat what they see on TV, hear on the radio or
read online.
When was the last time you had a real conversation with someone without them
scrolling on Facebook or endlessly rubbing a touchscreen?
That's the problem of our generation. We do not enjoy anything anymore and we
have quit living truly. We are too busy recording everything.
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SNAP & XMM FROM YKM – IMAGES OF REALITY
and has now acquired the name of “political correctness”. We ask ourselves: is
our life much different than that of our parents? Indeed, we have more
resources, but the way we use them can either oppress or set us free. We
have a freedom of choice that we are not entirely aware of.
Snap is conceived as a television show, oscillating between a live and
recorded register, the studio being the link between all the sketches presented to
the public: Pastor Phil and his “Inner Baby” theory, the nostalgic Junior, Mary
Kelly, TV ads, The Psychologist’s Corner (couple problems), casting for a
beer advertisement in Alaska, an actor and a fan and a life insurance agent.
An important moment for the show and the message it conveys is the
“Ad Break”, repeated twice live in perfect detail. Brands do not just sell a
product. They sell a possible dream come true for buyers. “Change your life”
is the repetitive line of the ads. In The Philosophy of Andy Warhol, the artist
recalls: “Some company recently was interested in buying my ‘aura’. They
didn’t want my product. They kept saying ‘We want your aura’. I never
figured out what they wanted. But they were willing to pay a lot for it.” (77)
“Aura” is the equivalent of the term “brand”, meaning a quality and
a slogan that potential customers would like to be associated with. The
casting director for the beer advertisement in Alaska says the following
representative line: “We sell virility”.
Why are all these relevant for today’s Romanian society? Because
after 1989, Romania joined the capitalist ideology, trying to forget its past, and
became a hybrid community – we adopted a new form, on an unchanged
background. This relationship between essence and appearance is specific for
the contemporary Romanian society and this concept is also present in Snap.
As a means of representation, Cristian Pascariu, Diana Buluga and
Mihail Onaca opted for a fully assumed, apparently simple, yet thoroughly
difficult, minimalist method.
Based on texts written by Eric Bogosian, the two actors have made their
own script driven by the belief that a playwright cannot provide a fully
objective view on the suggested topics. Therefore, the entire team was
involved in conceiving the script of the performance, a work strategy similar to
that deployed during the rehearsals for A toast with the Devil/ Un toast cu
Diavolul. “A playwright will never think the same way as his thousands of
readers. The ideal reader is a reverie of the writer, on which he secretly relies,
but in reality, he is the sum of thousands of reading identities.” (Popescu 170)
The methods of work used for achieving this kind of performances are
to some extent based on devising theatre. Testing, recording, writing/
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ALEXANDRA FELSEGHI
212
SNAP & XMM FROM YKM – IMAGES OF REALITY
213
ALEXANDRA FELSEGHI
redistribution, they have a clear structure which is generally-valid for all who
will interpret. To do this, visual signs defining each character are used, which
aid the interpretation and are then passed on to another actor: a fur cap and a
checked scarf for the character Nicolae Croitoru, a gray and red scarf agenda
for D. R. Popescu and a video camera for the Stenographist. This last sign has a
triple function. First, it is a defining sign for the Stenographist; the camera is
the eye of the Secret Police, capable of seeing everything, but which chooses to
see only what it wants, by skipping what is not in accordance with the “Party
and State factors”. In addition, it has a practical function: it transmits on the
two panels the live scenes that take place, thus creating a hybrid between
theatre and film (an overlay of conventions). This helps visibility (considering
the fact that actors change their place around the room throughout the
performance) and increases the dramatic effect of some moments, capturing
details which would otherwise be invisible without the zoom effect of the
camera. The sign is, somehow, linked to the presence of a microphone caught
under the table. Its significance is very strong, driven by the fact that it
captures certain phrases that are important to the System. The video camera
and microphone are two powerful signs in the performance, suggesting a lack
of intimacy, control and censorship, three of the causes that generated an ill
System. The management sees and hears everything and influences the
decisions and behaviour of the comrades.
Let us return to the moment where the audience sits as desired. This
generates a new convention, different from one performance to the other: it
becomes part of the scene taking place. In this case, language is reduced to
its phatic function and the individual chosen from the audience comes out
from his anonymous state for a few moments. Again, we are witnessing a
new negotiation of conventions: the performers are at the boundary between
actor-character-role, leaving ambiguity in this regard. There is also a moment
of free improvisation, which leads us more into the sphere of performance art.
The most powerful of all these signs is the one that also has a great
visual impact on the spectator as he enters the studio. The floor is full of
messages written in chalk. Different types of handwriting expose different
situation that refer to a corrupt society, bearing the title of a condemned
nation. The audience step on the phrases and the performance begins with
the actors writing more messages, trying to fill the empty spaces. We can read
a profound line: “We all bear the seal; half of Romania should apologize to the
other half.” These notes represent a cause, which is explained at the end of the
performance. A quote from The Myth of Sisyphus by Camus summarizes the
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SNAP & XMM FROM YKM – IMAGES OF REALITY
structure of the performance: “the feeling of absurdity can strike any man
in the face at any street corner. (...) The absurd is one man’s divorce from
his life ... ”. This is what Dorin Tudoran, the character of the play, is trying
to do, driven by a lucidity which surpasses fear.
References
Alexandra FELSEGHI
PhDc, Faculty of Theatre and Television,
Babeș-Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca,
E-mail: [email protected]
215
STUDIA UBB DRAMATICA, LIX, 2, 2014, p. 217 - 220
(Recommended Citation)
218
LES MYSTERES DE LA PEINTURE ET DE LA SCENE
219
DARIA IOAN
Daria IOAN
Teaching Assistant, Cinematography and Media Department,
Faculty of Theatre and Television, BBU Cluj-Napoca,
e-mail: [email protected]
220
STUDIA UBB DRAMATICA, LIX, 2, 2014, p. 221 - 224
(Recommended Citation)
The 2012 edition of the Interferences Festival from Cluj was centred
around the theme „voices in dialogue”, namely the relationship between
theatre and music. The shows participating led the viewer to theatrical
territories where sounds such as human speech and singing, musical
instruments or even something as trivial as unsnapping a cork from a bottle
became relevant parts of the performance. It was then fitting to have the
FERENCZ CSUSZNER
222
A LEPORELLO ON SINGING AND SPEECH
and Grotowski’s work, the book itself also showcases different artists who
share their artistic visions and personal experiences on this extremely
contemporary subject.
The next chapter is entitled Beyond speech and singing and discusses
one of the main themes of the volume, namely the relationship between the
sound uttered and the text brought to life. For this the commenters (Helene
Delavault, Veronique Dietschy, Susan Manhoff, Vincent Leterme) share
their experiences and thoughts regarding operas directed by Peter Brook.
Alain Zaepffel in his aforementioned text finds that one of the joys of
singing consists in the possibility of being able to escape the constraint of
making sense. Contrarily, the commenters on Brook’s work see words and
speech, respectively the restraint of the body and voice when singing as a
possible take-off for a layered and organic meaning.
Similarly to the tension in theatrical acting, music also comes from
the differences that define the succession of states and sounds. Banu says
that music is „the existential lack of words”, whereas words stand for
„the intellectual lack of singing”. His phrasing goes back to the desire
formulated in the first sentence of the book: the wish to achieve a
primordial state where tensions between speech and singing can be
reconciled over and over again. In this state of origo speech, singing and
the theatrical performance represent perpendicular spindles that form the
basis of a frame of reference where all the other commenters sit. This is the
same space where the lands of the Interferences Festival reveal themselves.
The book’s 22 comments become 22 spots that may be insufficient to cover
this infinite area but that nonetheless hold relevant information about some
of its landscapes.
For example, Ariane Mnouchkine talks about a cave (A sound on the
shore of songs by Ariane Mnouchkine and Jean-Jacques Lemêtre) from
which we can dig out a raw diamond that looks like a pebble stone and
whose value we can only appreciate if burnished. In Mnouchkine’s work
music helps both the surfacing and the shaping of a given mood. Another
example would be Jean-Louis Hourdin who says that „[...] the actor is a bag
full of tears and if shaken, tears start falling [...]” (An actor shedding songs by
223
FERENCZ CSUSZNER
Ferencz CSUSZNER,
Ph.D candidate at the Faculty of Theatre and Television,
Babeş-Bolyai University,
e-mail: [email protected]
224
STUDIA UBB DRAMATICA, LIX, 2, 2014, p. 225 - 227
(Recommended Citation)
226
THE ART OF SPEECH
we must note that the purpose of artistic speech is different from the
function of ordinary speech. The former does more than merely inform; it
represents characters; through it, we may be given the performer’s role in
society and mentality. To achieve this, in some cases while using ‘informal
language’ such as slang or dialect, the performer should be perfectly aware
of language and speech techniques.
As a poem reader, I particularly enjoyed this book, because it
emphasizes from the very beginning – from the title –, the importance of
reciting poetry. I had to pause after I read the third chapter which discusses
the relationship between an actor and a poem. The title suggested to me
that more emphasis would be put on recitation and I thought non-actor
performers like reciters would be approached. This book is mainly for
future actors but, as Papp Éva states, it is not for actors alone. She believes
recitation is a theatrical instrument, but she also gives examples of performers
who are not actors, such as Tessitori Nóra, György Dénes or Brassai Viktor.
At the same time, recitation undoubtedly has or can have an important role
in the actor’s training. The following excerpt has become (almost) an idiom
among reciters: “a playwright writes pieces of art, a poet writes full ones”.
A poem may include tragedies and great joy; to express those, the wide
scale of figures of speech is needed. As Papp Éva states:
Therefore, poetry can help unconditionally the actor’s training. Empathy, emotional
education, the ability to express feelings and to understand texts are prerequisites to
recitation, and, of course, they are vital when applied in the theatrical environment. When
he approaches a poem, the actor is prompted to make a proper analysis of the text, to
carefully create a related interpretation, to establish tempo, rhythm, and dynamics, and
uncover intertextual meaning. When this method becomes routine practice, it prevents
the risk of mechanized performance. (91)
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