4 from ritual to theater and back: the efficacy ... - AAAARG.ORG

ethology and theater 239
This is the way Grotowski worked during his poor theater phase
(1959–68), the way Peter Brook and Joseph Chaikin developed their
works. I used this method in all of my productions with The Performance
Group (1967–80). Rehearsals are no longer what they were in
Max Reinhardt’s day when the director marched in with all the actions
inscribed in a Regiebuch. Rehearsals have become centers of psychophysical,
sociological, and personal research. The only thing known in
advance is that maybe a performance will happen sometime during,
not after, the process, and that an audience will enter the space to watch
or interact with the performers. Working this way puts a new burden
on the performers. They are intermediaries, masters of ceremony,
inventors; they must show themselves even as they interpret their roles.
And interpretation is more complicated when performance texts are
radically deconstructed–reconstructed.
All this has been implicit in western theater since the end of the
nineteenth century. Stanislavsky was the first to put the training of the
performer at the top of the theatrical agenda, a training that finally led
to the deconstruction of performance texts. During the more than
ninety-year course of this development western theater became
increasingly ritualized, moving into areas of human interaction once
reserved for religion. As society cyberneticizes, programming the contacts
people make with each other, theater gains importance as a live
activity, oscillating between relatively unstructured interactions, say at
a party, and totally formalized or mediated exchanges, say a job interview.
Theater can be semi-formal, narrative, personal, direct, and fun.
Its methods encourage audience participation on many levels, some
not so obvious. This aspect of theater has heavily influenced politics,
sports, and religious ceremony, all of which have become more theatricalized
in recent years. On the other hand, movies, despite their
apparent immediacy, are a flat, framed medium, projected into a darkened
room, ineluctable and non-participatory. Environmental theater –
implicit in the “fourth wall” of Antoine and Stanislavsky, explicit since
Meyerhold’s productions of the early 1920s – needs performers
trained in semiotics, that is, in consciously managing the representational
signs of their trade. This kind of training is intrinsic to the
traditional performance genres I studied in India, Java, Bali, and Papua
New Guinea. It is also there in Africa and native America. But in