studia universitatis babeş – bolyai dramatica teatru, film, media 2

THE MORPHOLOGY OF THE SPECTATOR (2)
intercultural re-structuring processes of the urban communities, and, of
course, unfair competition of the entertainment industries – like cinema, the
first half of the last century, like television the second half of it.
In fact, not only the theatre had to endure this accelerated
transformation of practices, structures and functions. All the artistic/creative
forms of expression had and did. It is not only a Logos/literature issue here;
it is a complex and nearly complete shifting of the deep motivations and
expectations of audiences, concerning the art’s object and the representation
values. The gulf between a consumerist perspective and the nineteenth
century concept art’s “chef d’oeuvre”, the gulf between the popular star system
and the elitist “high culture” became more or less impossible to cross over.
Caught in the middle, first of all because it used to be, for many centuries, a
fundamentally popular – even vulgar – practice, theatre invented several kinds
of “therapies of response”. The playwrights were the first to attack: Pirandello
emphasized the illusionist dimension of everyday life (the fake authenticity
syndrome), opposed to the conceptual-exemplary counter-proposal of theatre
representations. The expressionist theatre selected the archetypical situations
and characters in crisis and tried to embody social and individual phenomena
like in a distanced mirror. Brecht and his epigones dreamed about stimulating
social and ideological reflection of common people, by means of distanced
agreeable entertaining theatre forms, as popular fiestas, with profound
dramatic and propagandistic impact instead. One step further, the
Beckett/Ionesco generation invented the tragicomical farce, philosophically
exposing the absurd-incomprehensible condition of human being.
But the acceleration processes of separating the destiny of drama
from the one of theatre shows are managed by stage people, mainly
directors. And this came not by accident. The central importance received
by the “profession” of theatre making, namely directing the entire process of
staging/producing the show, entailed a long series of consequences. (That
is a fact, but only if we still want to see the theatre’s contemporary history
from the stage perspective offered to the audience, and not as relationlinked
processes between theatre products and audiences). The “masters”
of modern-contemporary theatre staging struggled to define what theatre
does - in terms of action, psychological effect, system of representation or
even meaning construction. From Stanislavski to Meyerhold, from Copeau
to Brook, each experimental journey became, step by step, a current
technology of “how theatre has to work” with the goal of producing both
intellectual and emotional effects on audiences. Others took a different path,
focusing on what theatre has to be – in terms of a nostalgic replacement of the
universalistic values that humanity was loosing in a hemorrhage-like way.
Craig fantasized about a late Wagnerian theatre banquet, with the director in a
complete “auteur” position towards the theatrical production. Artaud and
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