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

THE MORPHOLOGY OF THE SPECTATOR (2)
vehicle was the play. The spectator was supposed to discover, by means of
a narrative situational support, in which way he/she fits in the actual real
world, and how could he/she react to the social environment by an
adequate-dynamic reflection and behavior. Tragedies, as well as comedies,
were for a really long time operational devices of the social mythology,
which could give the communities body’s some consistency and coherence;
in other words, which built systematical strategies of insertion. The
competition with cinema works, the constant bombardment with media
“here and now” discourses deprived theatre, step by step, day after day, of
these traditional functions. These long series of phenomena were amplified
by the lack of trust , shared by both groups - theatre artists and audiences -
in the traditional narrative/dramatic support, seen mainly as an obscure
slavery towards propaganda or even as provincial-uneducated reflex.
The psychological point of view is even more complex. For, what
could theatre do, and what would it be, if its inner condition - as a secure
place for identification and temporary transfer - is undermined by other
collective celebrations, like the popular culture ones (going to movies,
participation to pop music concerts and so on)? The key concept here was
given to us by both Grotowski and Brook. And the concept is meeting in
presence. Theatre could and would celebrate the face to face, person to
person exchange of emotional/understanding material. Its discourses could
and would conserve the identification transfer by means of the most deep
mutual motivation: being together as witnesses/participants to the most
unusual communicational journey: the symbolic one.
But, in this respect, the dialectical balance between the play and the
performance based on it, between the “dramatic text” and “text of
representation” (the latest being the actualization of the first, see Ubersfeld,
1971) became more than delicate, nearly unimportant. The logic and the
grammar of being together smashed into thousand of small and fragmented
images the strong – and restrictive – narrative/dialogical traditional literary
structure. The inner “dramatic text”, presumed now as completely subordinated
to the “text of representation”, became in the same time a commentary/essay
embodied by actors, and also a (very much like) lyrical confession. The work of
the most prominent and talented theatre directors after 1980 is – if we are brave
and honest enough to admit it – such a mixture of high scholarship thinking
with poetical self-fiction. The Romanian theatre is not an exception, but mainly
the perfectly conserved theatrical space for his “truth or dare” game, with the
accent on the confession/provocation half. The addressee of this psychological
inter-personal provocation is the co-author-spectator.
In fact, la latest decades produced two types of profound change
regarding our practices and values as spectator. And both these types
imply a deep but powerful process of undermining the co-author’s spectator
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