The theatre of the theatrical

Spring is nearly upon us and it seems that theatre is the common theme amongst the art institutions in Stockholm. At Tensta Konsthall we are preparing to welcome the dance performance Secret Instructions by Alexander Bachzetsis and Julia Born, the world premiere of Öyvind Fahlström’s Det hårda och det mjuka (The Hard and The Soft) presented by Alice Kollektiv, and later in May Trio ABC a reinterpretation of Yvonne Rainer’s Trio A by Tanja Tuurala

Bonniers Konsthall have also declared that their major autumn theme as being art and the stage with a seminar program to introduce their Tableaux Vivants, kicking off at Dramaten with Marie-Louise Ekman and Miriam Bäckström in attendance. Moderna Museet in conjunction with Index have also hosted discussions in the area and presented Dora García in performance earlier this month. Not to be left out IASPIS organised their first Open House for the year “New Beginnings” organised by Sinziana Ravini in full theatrical regalia with the two days divided into prologues, acts and epilogues and the written program designed as a proscenium.

One quality that seems to return in these ‘stagings’ is the way that theatre itself rather than being treated as a self-contained drama or as “the seeing place” or theatron of its origin, is instead used to bring forward theatricality in both the positive and pejorative sense. Theatricality reads as overstatement and excess and necessarily invokes the Greek sense of dramatic irony. Divorced from the performative it becomes its own deus ex machina and as such comes across at best as parody and at worst as sarcasm or cliché. It is an enormous pity that when theatre meets contemporary art it is reread as anachronism rather than as practice. So to use the trappings of classic theatre with all the social and historical baggage that comes with them, would be comparable to viewing contemporary art as being only a rereading of painting or a question of aesthetics.

In Ravini’s text that accompanied the seminar at Iaspis for example, she mixes two Shakespearean quotes - the seven ages of man speech that the melancholy Jacques gives at the beginning of As You Like it with its opening line “All the world’s a stage” with Macbeth’s mourning over his wife’s death, the famous “Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow” speech. There is implication here that Shakespeare is writing about the same ‘thing’. To quote Ravini in full, “If the world, as Shakespeare says is nothing but a stage, and life nothing but a tale signifying nothing – then it is up to each and every one of us to decide whether New Beginnings is a tragedy or a comedy”. But the problem is that neither Shakespeare nor Jacques suggest that life is nothing but a stage. Jacque’s melancholy is just that, Elizabethan melancholia, an aspect of the four humours and if anything an Elizabethan would humorously see it as an excess of black bile. The point is that theatre here, is something already understood by his audience and the stage is not the ‘classic stage’ we might invent for it, but the very particular form of staging that grew out of mediaeval and essentially religious traditions. All the world’s a ‘very particular type of stage’ not a generic one and certainly not the stage of the proscenium that was used in the presentation of the texts at Iaspis. The point can be extended, in that for Shakespeare and his audience the concept ‘the world is a stage’ was a cliché and the character Jacques is the perfect foil for the author to use to suggest the triteness of the metaphor. Jacques is the sour-puss, full of old saws not the metaphysician!

Macbeth of course says something very different.
“Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more: it is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.”

Macbeth’s words can be seen as diametrically opposed to Jacques’. Macbeth has already passed into a state beyond reason, this is not Jacques’ retrospective and hackneyed view of life but the ravings of a man who so obsessed by his own destiny has lost all grasp of reality. Macbeth’s stage is an empty one. So when Ravini says that we might choose between tragedy and comedy she might have better asked us to nominate cliché or psychosis or even plenitude and the empty stage. By conflating Jacques and Macbeth we are not really presented with theatre as dramatis personae but as a theatrical prop. Shakespeare’s stage was not a simple soap opera, a fictional narrative or recognition that life and fantasy converge, rather it is existence framed within its temporal bonds. As is most clearly articulated in his 15th sonnet.

“When I consider every thing that grows
Holds in perfection but a little moment,
That this huge stage presenteth nought but shows
Whereon the stars in secret influence comment;
When I perceive that men as plants increase,
Cheered and cheque'd even by the self-same sky,
Vaunt in their youthful sap, at height decrease,
And wear their brave state out of memory;
Then the conceit of this inconstant stay
Sets you most rich in youth before my sight,
Where wasteful Time debateth with Decay,
To change your day of youth to sullied night;
And all in war with Time for love of you,
As he takes from you, I engraft you new.”

It may sound that I am being alarmingly picky in my analysis of a fragment of a long text but my point is quite serious and not directed at Ravini of course. What I am trying to get across is a sense that the trope of theatre is not a form of window dressing, or a dressing up. In Shakespeare’s sonnet the stage is the empty page “…nought but shows whereon the stars in secret influence comment.” The stars may dictate fate but the poet can declare war against Time because of love. The use of theatre simply as backdrop, costume, prop seems painfully weak when compared to these poetic musings published four hundred years ago. But it is equally important to add that the theatre of Shakespeare is not the main focus, rather it is the recognition of theatre in all its contemporary diversity that should be held in view. Theatre treated as anachronism is a straw target. The idea of the tableau vivant as a meeting of ‘art’ and theatre in the frame of Bonniers Konsthall might be equally problematic. It will be interesting to see how Camilla Larsson will negotiate a term that for many would seem as the denigration of theatrical value. Tableau vivant, a theatre without words, and without actors can be seen as a trivialisation of drama. Although one can trace the concept of the ‘living picture’ to religious spectacle or the origins of photography it is as equally linked to the pornographic and the purely sensationalistic. It is again an empty theatre. To present theatre without words as a paradigm for theatre, eliminates politics, abjures circumspection and renders the dramatic as simply affect. To paraphrase we might look at art as being only a visual medium, another cliché! But perhaps it will be presented with irony?

It was heartening to see the artists included in the Open House at Iaspis very much at work with modern theatre. The current residents at Iaspis are those chosen by Cecilia Widenheim in the last part of her tenure that ends this year and they are indeed a wonderfully eclectic and intriguing group. The works of Lina Issa I have already written about on this blog and she certainly addresses questions that have been central to theatre theory in the last few years. Hans Rosenströms installation Mikado is a great work with its Bergmanesque text and sound-scape drama. The drama is played out with the full voice of text and the plenitude of image. Mako Ishizuka is making outstanding work at the moment, the gentlest of touch, the most intimate and generous of gestures and invitations to participate.