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

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ethology and theater
modern and postmodern performance, new “ideograms” have to be
invented or discovered for each production. As Grotowski says:
It is not, however, a question of seeking fixed ideograms as, for
example, in the Peking Opera in which, in order to portray a particular
flower, the actor makes a specific unchangeable gesture inherited from
centuries of tradition. New ideograms must constantly be sought and
their composition appear immediate and spontaneous. . . . The final
result is a living form possessing its own logic.
(Grotowski 1968a: 142)
The first fruits of this method were the stiff biomechanics of Meyerhold;
next came the carefully arranged, though ordinary-appearing,
compositions of Brecht (available for study in his model books). Then
Grotowski developed exercises that helped actors “confront” texts, discovering
meeting places between their own psychophysical impulses
and the logic of the texts. The framed, pictorial exactness of Richard
Foreman’s theater is different, there is nothing spontaneous about it.
Foreman consciously emphasizes the thought-out-before quality of his
productions. But in Wilson’s super-slow imagery spectators can predict
moves and follow their trajectories through time–space. Also some
actions are repeated so many times that the spectator is forced to look at
different aspects of the action. Similarly, in the postmodern dances of
Dunn, Forti, Jonas, Paxton, and others, 2 as well as in the performance
art of Allan Kaprow and many others, ordinary human actions are
isolated, displaced, stopped, slowed or accelerated, repeated: all
ritualizations ethologically speaking.
The movie camera has given artists the ability to stop action, examine
gesture frame by frame, go forward and backward, repeat, and
study compositions as they condense and evaporate; these techniques
have reshaped theatrical imagination. A theoretical basis for these
examinations exists in the work of “human ethologists” such as Eibl-
Eibesfeldt, Birdwhistell, and Ekman. 3 The kind of ritualization they
study does not focus on social organization so much as on microgestures:
glances, eyebrow flashes, smiles, hand gestures, shoulder
lurches, pelvic thrusts, etc. To be alive is to dance.
Chimpanzee Mike probably didn’t have a strategy or a goal in mind