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

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drama, script, theater, and performance
Figure 3.2
occasionally: ancient Greek drama, the Sanskrit drama of India, various
Chinese and Japanese traditions, the modern drama of Europe and its
cultural extensions from the Renaissance on. Even among these, only
“modern drama” since the late nineteenth century has so privileged
the written text as to almost exclude theater–performance altogether.
And since the early twentieth century a strong non-western influence
has worked its way through western theater from the avant-garde to
the mainstream.
But however strong the counter-emphasis on theater–performance,
drama–script still dominates western performances, even in the avantgarde.
What is happening is an increasing attention to the seams that
apparently weld one disc to the others. Illusionistic mimetic theater is
based on hiding the seams joining drama to script to theater to performance.
Stanislavsky went so far as to deny the existence of the performance
altogether; that is the import of his famous assertion that
going to see Chekhov’s The Three Sisters ought to be like visiting the
Prozorof household, with the fourth wall removed. Many years, and
much theatrical activity, has intervened between Stanislavsky’s assertion
and now; at least since Meyerhold and Vakhtangov, performance has
been readmitted to western theaters. Brecht, influenced both by documentary
films and Chinese acting, exposed the seam between the
theater and the script: his V-effekt is a device revealing the script as of a
different conceptual order than the theater event containing it. Artists
like Richard Foreman and Robert Wilson explore the disjunctions
between script and drama.
Why are the seams, which traditionally held the four elements