33 turns
33 turns
In the time of lost sensibility, audiences increasingly base their lives on impoverished past experience which they try to revive with "fresh" rational explanations and imitations of images. Thus, they are mostly "deprived" of the genuine experience of art and reflection. Be it the experience of an image, object, sound, space or body. And it is experience that is one of the objectives of the project 33 turns, which at the very start aims to blur the limits of media representation and, for the most part, to abolish the distance from the audience. In a way, the project 33 turns aims, in a completely Brechtian fashion, to pull down "the fourth wall" of the theatre stage and through this free the audience and include them in the whole process. A bipolar relationship between the audience and the observed transforms into a complex relationship of tension that arises between the audience - object - sound - space - body. It is about the establishing of a relation between the material and the immaterial, the coexistence of the seen, idea and experience. And all this points to an absolute reciprocal equality and through this to the surpassing of the question what art is and what is not, what is material reality and what is it not, or what is the imaginary and what is the real. The project 33 turns aims to involve the audience in a double game since on the one hand the montage of situations on the stage gives them the feeling of certainty but on the other the very same situations, staged in a different context, pose new questions about their perception.
Tev¾ Logar
To the female athletes of body and heart
In his fundamental work about the new art of theatre which will provoke a seisure that will transform perception codes and transpose them into a new era, Antonin Artaud wrote what is today still the most lucid vision of modern performative art. The texts collected in his book The Theatre and Its Double are like a source which enables us to refresh our view and free our thought. Every now and then it is necessary to return to sources so we do not forget from where we come and to where we are headed.
Artaud repeatedly says that the stage is "a concrete physical place which asks to be filled and to be given its own concrete language to speak".
"We abolish the stage and the auditorium," he says, "and replace them by a single site, without partition or barrier of any kind, which will become the theater of the action. A direct communication will be re-established between the spectator and the spectacle, between the actor and the spectator, from the fact that the spectator, placed in the middle of the action, is engulfed and physically affected by it." From this fundamental vision all endeavours of performative and performing arts of the second half of the 19th century appeared and apparently, as the only form corresponding to them, they sprout also in the 21st century.
Artaud advocates attacking "the spectator's sensibility on all sides", therefore in a performance, "a revolving spectacle which, instead of making the stage and auditorium two closed worlds, without possible communication, spreads its visual and sonorous outbursts over the entire mass of the spectators".
"I say that this concrete language," claims Artaud again, "intended for the senses and independent of speech, has first to satisfy the senses."
He speaks of metaphysical fear, of the sediments of dreams, of the discarding of masks and of nearing. And, "over and beyond the music's broad, overpowering rhythm there is another extremely fragile, hesitant, and sustained music in which, it seems, the most precious metals are being pulverized, where springs of water are bubbling up as in the state of nature, and long processions of insects file through the plants, with a sound like that of light itself, in which the noises of deep solitudes seem to be distilled into showers of crystals, etc."
Even now, the radicalness of his statements seems more than blasphemous to many. Do the sentences like the one about the place of the psychological in theatre art not still have the power to cause an actual war: "It must be said that the domain of the theater is not psychological but plastic and physical (...) Masterpieces of the past are good for the past: they are not good for us. We have the right to say what has been said and even what has not been said in a way that belongs to us ..."
And when we reach the descriptions of his perceptions of the Balinese theatre, floating bodies from another time, very similar to the romantic vision of a ballet dancer, appear before us. Artaud speaks of the play of muscles which is a part of thoughtful mathematics, of the muscular play of changing which is a systematic depersonalisation, of the physics of "absolute gesture which is the idea itself". "A kind of terror seizes us at the thought of these mechanized beings, whose joys and griefs seem not their own but at the service of age-old rites, as if they were dictated by superior intelligences." He is fascinated by doubled limbs and a doubled body, the solemnity of a consecrated rite, priestesses and "clothes (...), giving them the look of huge butterflies pinned in the air" which "prolong each of their leaps into a flight", "utter satisfaction from these dance gestures, from these turning feet mingling with states of the soul, from these little flying hands, these dry and precise tappings". What can be said about the vision of a dancer, squeezed into her costume, who "seems to be nothing more than her own effigy"? He is enchanted by "the women's stratified, lunar eyes: Eyes of dreams which seem to absorb our own, eyes before which we ourselves appear to be fantome".
The theatre Atraud strives for is "the theater of quintessences in which things perform a strange about-face before becoming abstractions again".
In reading Artaud amazing possibilities of transformations in the classical ballet can be found. The audience is invited to a journey for which they have to make their own itineraries that do not match any real and actual land. Heroines - ballerinas, caught in the outlines of their tutus which are like spells they cannot break or coffins in which they have been closed, willingly surrender to the audience in a rite that enables the latter to devour them with its eyes, well aware that a few millennia ago they would actually be devoured by its teeth.
Jana Pavlič
Translation: Polona Prodnik
Note: All quotations are from The Theater and Its Double by Antonin Artaud, Grove Press, translated by Mary Caroline Richards.