The challenge of performance art - or live art, or contemporary theatre practice or whatever name it gives itself this week - is the same to both the enthusiast and the sceptic: what the hell was that? RoseLee Goldberg, one of the first writers to grapple with its history, offers a definition that is pretty much her hands thrown in the air: a 'permissive, open-ended medium with endless variables, executed by artists impatient with the limitations of more established art forms.'"Something is not avant-garde unless it is provocative and a challenge. This is certainly what the general public in America believe. The last performance to confirm this golden rule was that of Anne Bean and the Kipper Kids. Bodies painted in the most obscene fashion: vulgarity in every form, savage cries, nauseous smells: songs taken to the level of paroxysm, and guttural sounds were the clue to this show, which broke every record at the box office and has achieved a large following."
The Avant Garde Savaged by Anne Bean, translated article from Playmen, May 1979
Goldberg gets cited in Marvin Carlson's Performance: a critical introduction. I guess the point is that any attempt to define 'live art' is going to run into trouble, either by being too vague (live art is art that happens live, huh?) or too prescriptive (does it have to be by impatient artists?).
"Live Art is the radical, vital and creative force behind some of the UK's most exciting, innovative and important artists, and home live art, as a company of creative producers, is privileged to be part of the sector's development." - Home Live Art
My irritation at performance art - and I speak as a believer - is that it too readily falls into this Western European idea of 'the artist' as a being distinct from the general run of the species. That can be through the mystification of the creative process (all that banter about 'the genius' of Shakespeare or Pina Bausch), or the professionalisation of an artist class (a degree does not entitle a graduate to a life pass as an 'artist'). Since whatever phrase is used - performance or live - includes the word art, it runs headlong into the basic problem common to dance, music, whatever: is there a quality, a vital spark that makes something art rather than anthropology, craft or scientific experiment?
What is live art? Well, at its most fundamental, Live Art is when an artist chooses to make work directly in front of the audience in space and time. So instead of making an object, or an environment (a painting for example) and leaving it for the audience to encounter in their own time, Live Art comes into being at the actual moment of encounter between artist and spectator. Or at least even if they are not physically present, the artist sets up a situation in which the audience experience the work in a particular space and time, and the notion of ‘presence’ is key to the concerns of the work.
Here's where Carlson, and the other books littering my floor, come in handy. The field of performance studies, which overlaps with but is not the same as theatre studies, offers an examination of many different social activities as 'performance.' Admittedly, they are frequently written in a jargon heavy style (why use the word 'theatrical' when 'performativity' can mean the same thing and give the essay a pseudo-sociological flavour?).
But they break down the idea that 'art' is something that only happens in a sacred space,and that the gap between theatre (let's pretend for grown-ups) and life is huge. It does for the idea that anybody who participates in any social event, or indulges a solitary vice, doesn't like theatre. They are constantly performing.
Live art, an artistic discipline that "defies all definition", is experiencing a remarkable renewal, it is, however, still little known to the world at large. To bridge this gap and strengthen the position of new forms of live art in Europe, eight cultural structures have come together as partners in a five-year European project entitled A space for live art. Through each partner’s programming and the different forms of exchange – co- productions, dissemination, residences, international symposia – the diversity of the artistic approaches will be highlighted. Meetings on theory and practice, the constitution of a critical corpus written by professionals and documentation of projects in sound and/or images will strengthen the reflexive and documentary aspect of live art. There will also be room for mediation and transmission, through an infiltration of the public area and a teaching strand, in particular in art schools where young talent will be encouraged.
Performance artists have often been happy to collect the catch-phrases of performance studies, without recognising that it undermines their right to claim special privileges as 'artists.' Falling back on the idea of training, they reduce the status of artist to the same as accountant: have the relevant qualifications been passed? And I flutter in doubt between ideas of 'genius' defining the artist - I might accept this, on the condition that the full meaning of genius, which includes an almost supernatural quality, is respected - and a rejection that the artist is a status which is anything more than the product of particular attention to a skill.
The National Review of Live Art (NRLA) Archive is primarily a video archive that holds footage of performances from the prestigious NRLA festival. The footage covers the period from 1986 (when the festival was first documented on film) to 2010 when the festival closed. As well as the recordings of performances, there are also tapes of installations, discussions, and interviews with participating artists.
What made me think that the theories of Jerzy Grotowski would make an interesting blog post? I'm struggling with his essay Towards a Poor Theatre and I am only on the first paragraph.
Jerzy Grotowski was a revolutionary in theatre because he caused a rethink of what theatre actually was and its purpose in contemporary culture. One of his central ideas was the notion of the 'poor' theatre. By this he meant a theatre in which the fundamental concern was the work of the actor with the audience, not the sets, costumes, lighting or special effects. In his view these were just trappings and, while they may enhance the experience of theatre, were unnecessary to the central core the meaning that theatre should generate.
Mind you, Jerzy has a nice anger: he's getting annoyed by people asking about the 'origins' of his 'experimental' theatre. He's not experimental, he says. He's just trying to work out what the relationship between audience and actor might be.
'Poor' meant the stripping away of all that was unnecessary and leaving a 'stripped' and vulnerable actor. Applying this principle in his 'laboratory' in Poland, Jerzy Grotowski jettisoned all costume and staging and preferred to work with all black sets and actors in plain black rehearsal costumes, at least in the rehearsal process. He made the actors go through rigorous exercises so that they had full control over their bodies.
I keep moving through the article with my usual inattention to the whole and preoccupation with detail - the detail that backs up this week's obsession. For the record, it's 'dialectic,' the shifting word that I translate as conversation, in which two parties aim for a higher truth through comparing their parts of the puzzle. As usual, that's not a good translation. As usual, I've found my phrase: Jerzy saying that he likes Stanislavki's approach to acting because of 'his dialectical relationship to his own earlier work.'
What was important to Jerzy Grotowski was what the actor could do with his or her body and voice without aids and with only the visceral experience with the audience. In this sense he overturned the traditions of exotic costumes and stunning staging that had driven much European theatre from the 19th century. This is not to say that in public theatrical performances he completely disregarded lights and sets, but these were secondary and tended to complement the already existing excellence of the actors. Indeed he wrote:
After discounting every other model he can think of as definitive, without saying their processes are useless or that he doesn't borrow bits from here and there, Jerzy explains the essence of his approach: 'without the least trace of egotism or self-enjoyment... the actor makes a gift of himself... the body vanishes, burns and the spectator sees only a series of visible impulses.'
By gradually eliminating whatever proved superfluous, we found that theatre can exist without make-up, without autonomic costume and scenography, without a separate performance area (stage), without lighting and sound effects, etc. (Jerzy Grotowski, Towards a Poor Theatre. Simon & Schuster, 1968, p.19)
That's all very zen, breaking down the division between reactions in the actor's mind and the actions of the body, making the actor a sort of perfect expression of their internal state. While Grotowski is heralded as part of the avant-garde (a status he probably dismisses in the first paragraph), there is something ancient and spiritual in his process. It's exactly the opposite of what Noel Coward and his gang thought up, that acting was a series of physical tricks (can't cry? blink three times or get out the onion).
I get lost in the next bit, where he talks about the spiritual process, but my attention gets called back when he says 'we compose... the dialectics of humour behaviour.' I'm less than half-way through the article, but I have my bone to chew. 'A sign, not a common gesture, is the elementary integer of expression for us.'
That's enough for me. If Grotowski's process has anything in it, he is basing it on something that is intrinsic to theatre... that is, if his training for actors is going to work, it has to connect with some quality within the theatre. A sign suggests that theatre is a sign system (well, yeah), that it is a symbolic drama that strips away the common-place, guarded actions of real life (whatever that is) and replaces them with movements that express their meaning perfectly.
Sure, I'm busking now, but here's how I think this works. If, in daily life, a ghost turns up, the emotional experience of seeing the ghost (I'm thinking terror, but it might be delight, depending on the situation), social codes and upbringing transform that emotion into a mediated expression.On stage, the actor's sign represents an unmediated emotional response - something authentic.
So when I bump into a spirit the next time I am in a haunted house, my exclamation 'I think I've shat myself' is merely a conditioned response - and a bid for a cheap laugh in a macabre situation. When Hamlet sees his father on the battlements, the Grotowski-trained actor does something that is more expressive - possibly symbolic of an inner state.
So what? I'm poking around at the importance of theatre as 'a lie that tells the truth,' trying to find a solution for the problem that, in the society of the spectacle, theatre is just another distraction. This might help - it might not. It might help the reading of a performance.
It strikes me that Grotowski is putting the actor at the front of the theatrical experience - not the script, but the embodied person doing (or pretending to do) stuff. It's another step towards devised theatre (dropping the script as template), a move towards 'physical' theatre. And another inconclusive blog post, presented by The Vile Arts.
C Carr's collection of essays On Edge covers the art scene of America in the 1980s and 1990s, particularly focussing on the performance art scenes: she covers the emerging cross-border experiments of Guillermo Gomez-Pena and the Kipper Kids unique slapstick vaudeville. Throughout the collection, Carr identifies the rawness and brutality of the performances, echoing the dynamism of the No Wave scene in New York, with bands like Sonic Youth and Swans adding a punishing volume and art-school aesthetics to the British punk template. Indeed, two artists she reviews, Diamanda Galas and Lydia Lunch, have their roots in No Wave.
While the rage of the 1980s precludes much of the playful joy of the happenings of the 1960s -
No comments :
Post a Comment