IN SEARCH
FOR THE NULLE PART KINGDOM
Tania Patricia Maza
Translated by Hernando Pareja
Theatre won’t be mirror any longer. It will turn into non reflected substantiality.
The image will be it’s own replica: what was part of chaos will be visible,
what was part of the darkness of infirmity, what was impossible will be made possible. That’s creation.
Juan Carlos de Petre
A Isabelle Randrianatoavina
The great man of theatre Eugenio Barba in his doctor honoris causa reception speech, bestowed on him by The University of Varsovia, on May 28 2003, posed the question about what to do with theatre. His answer was: “A drifting island, an island of freedom. Neglibe, because it is a grain of sand in the turmoil of history. And because it doesn’t change the world, but it is sacred, because it changes us”.In his speech Barba also decries the kingdom of null part (no were), this place, no place, from the time space coordinates in which the theatre promises acceptation, inspires a sense of isolation, exhales chimeras, and some times, pushes down to profundity. In the nulle part kingdom, it happens that paths originating from distant places would meet and merge, while others, parting from the same point and seemingly inseparable, would sunder. We can discover ladders which would explore up and down the vertical geography.In this sense in the search of the nulle part kingdom, we meet wind walls, fortresses in which technique and ideal tension invent strategies that allow us to live in our time without being from our time. In this paradoxical time of theatre it’s possible to build parallel histories to this history that engulfs us and drags us, and transforms in firm human relations what seems at first only dreams and ingenuousness.A new and better theatre will be possible when we observe again closely that theatre is a science; the creation of the first institutes of theatrical sciences took place in the first third of the 20th century. At first theatrical science founded it’s analysis on the scene fact, gradually it started introducing more intensely a variety of cultural, anthropological and social aspects. So it was that in the course of time theatrical science strengthens itself and nurtures from the study of the dramatic text, analysing theatre as a literary object. In the late 80’s, particularly in the early 90’s, theatrical science begins to work with the theory of culture and cultural studies, which leads to looking into post modern philosophy and philosophy of history. With history the trend toward a new theatre is stressed, a scientific theatre that bends over post modernity; a postmodernist theatrical concept in which, as Bob Wilson and Lauri Anderson assert: “a total theatre is not a hybridization of scenic and no scenic arts (painting, sculpture, movies, arquitecture and derivatives) but the complete development of theatricality as an addition of languages that coincide on the staging without any of them overriding the others; in such a way that their interaction gives forth the so called total work, or more appropriately, the true theatrical work, we talk of interdisciplinarity, not hybridization.This interdisciplinarity is the present postmodernist bestow on us from the hand of Adreas Huysen, as what appears at a certain level as the last cry, commercial launching, and false spectacle. It makes part of a cultural transformation that rises up slowly in western societies, a change of sensitivity for which the expression on post modernity is really, at leas provisionally, completely appropriate. The nature and depth of this transformation are disputable, but the transformation itself is an undeniable fact. Transformation which theatre people are to meet and which involves proposals that need at least to consider the advances time provides for us and whose actuality makes flow.We are dealing with a new model of spectacular staging based a nonverbal language and a renewal of the scenic languages and their elements of signification. It is the rising of the so called “fragile drama”, in which the problem does not lies in words, nor images, but in the use we give to the elements of signification, because neither the word nor the image are good or bad in themselves. They are means, and their greater good will depend on their use, the objective and function they serve. The denial of the word leads to the use of an altogether different language: movement, gesture, music, and space on way of transformation, scenic effects, voice, bodies and ideas by which to construct or deconstruct a story, and image, a set of random pulses, instincts.Along with novelty in scenic languages, there must prevail an absence of isolation of the scenic art which in words of José A. Sanchez wont be overcome with the consecration of the theatrical action as an alternative, but with theatrical policies which take into account the variety of audiences which form the social body and, consequently, promote the production, distribution and exhibition of the most diverse scenic creations, including performances. All theatres are necessary, (even the ones we dislike).The dramatist from the beginning of the xxi century is summoned to contrive symbolic- imaginative languages by which theatre is conceived as a show and in which every theatrical text is considered incomplete; there drama springs as the creation of a whole, as a process in which the dynamics of actions, including the one of the public, their interpellations, in their infinite way of articulations and transformations, can be compared with tectonic plates and their permanent accommodation and reaccomodation.In this process the search for a dramaturgy would be the way by which we would come up with thinking and feeling a rhythm, with a technique which would allow us to organize the materials in such a way that we can specify and reveal relations. Arriving at this dramaturgy leads us to a poetics teeming with meanings. Differently from Stanislasky, for whom verbal expression is a subtext, Artaud understands it as a countentext, swimming upstream what the text is saying, counter pointing it’s contents and the plastic image aiming at enhancing the meaning.This kind of dramaturgy is explained satisfactorily by Pactrice Pavis in his studies on a post-modern staging, where he comments that it is not a matter any more of hitorizing the text or the times of the characters or making a socioeconomic analysis of that history or actualizing the ideological contradictions of the text, or adopting the ambiguities of the text to the scene showing and solving them, nor alluding to our own reality through a classical text. No. instead of this dramatical analysis, whose Brechtian model is the best example, we would have to talk about a theory of significant practice. Which is to say, it has to do with giving the spectator the opportunity of building a system of sense from the inside of what is received, e. g., introducing a plurality of readings, instead of a staging which tries to highlight contradictions of an obvious line of thought, you get a plurality of readings. It is necessary to yield to finite variations tightly related to each other. Not only show a text of several different forms, but showing on the same staging all of these interpretations and bonds.Indispensable to arrive at our theatrical nulle part, wont be achieved without what Eduard Pavloski has called “the space time ground zero”, which comprises not only action but the characters as well.Within this abstraction what is represented is not changed into something semantically neutral, but is made universal and gives way to theoretical reflection and theatrical experimentation.Pavlouski unbinds the theatre as traditionally conceived to bind it again within a post-modern context, which’s to say, parting from an inner stage, contrary to what’s usual, with no apparent ethical stand, but producing an effect that goes beyond the mere message.We will inhabit the ground zero coordinate in as much as we unfold at all levels, where gesture is turned into sign and sing is something bodily, where the voice is a sound that produces a state, which can only be received at the absolute moment of acting. This implies inhabiting the post-modern theatre, boundless, undetermined, unauthoritarian, but a point of debate and reflection, of re-writing, we are talking about works that exist before the text or originate from an interaction between text and acting.We are dealing with the “poetical function of the scene”, from which at the same time, according to Juan C. de Peter, springs “an impossible actor, the one we look for, that who is wanted, the impossible actor is that who is not yet, the one who will become, the one that will reveal himself by appearing, taking up his identical form occupying the space originally. He owns a different will, not the ordinary one, determined by a doing result relation, instead he is pray to an impulse beyond his control, exacting, overwhelming, that humiliates him beyond the worn theatrical routine, obliging him to the impossible. An the actor that was not, who had a presentiment, who carried the impossible burden, will be revealed and finally will consummate his reality”.The consolidation of the search for the impossibilities of the actor will arrive as an offspring of the group creation process. Artaud described the form of idolatry theatre is subject to in our time. Theatrical producers are engaged mostly in the worship of the golden calf, building images of deceiving gods, expecting to be acknowledged as relatives of these gods, it is necessary that theatric producers of our time, following Robert Barthe’s advice, break down the image framework, the play of the forms, lines, colours and a “punctum” (our null part”, a bountiful place that draws the attention of the spectator and is crucial to the meaning of the image.According to this, Barthes suggests that the director, actor and artist technician commit themselves to the task of translating the text into a tridimensional image and their work will be enriched. The dramatic text wont be his only weapon, but it will be used as an emergent from a dynamic intermingling of forms in space originating from the book. But also from the text referent and even from forms alien to the text, through which the director has arrived through free association. This creative process will nurture on the actor’s ideas, without whom it would be impossible to organize the significant systems parting from situations and actions, then it would be possible to create on the stage a very dynamic compositional play, from which it night spring an element of great gravitational attraction called “the puncture”. […]The post modern director doesn’t worship the text and represents it to the letter on the scene, but turns it into a material useful to the actor and himself, which is to say, it is open for setting it up and isn’t but a pretext that will only be legitimized at the moment it becomes theatre, this feature stems from the fact that he doesn’t claim an authoritative actorship.Let’s try to get close to the nulle part kingdom, let’s find the coordinates of the theatrical Cartesian plane to locate ourself at the origin or zero point.In the VII Festival of University Art organized by the university welfare network of Cartagena the Theatre workshop group of the university San Buenaventura presented to the public of Cartagena the collective work Cuaderno de Bitacora (Log), a path undertaken by the group and the director aiming at recreating theatrical post modernity.As freytat assert, “drama is related to a particular way of spiritual life as a whole: with the acting human being, and a beautiful consequence of this principle is that theatre is linked to a determined level of cultural evolution, because the inimical predisposition for this process only arises at that level.At last I want to point out that the image theatre claims for actors and actresses that can go beyond the cry, mechanical movement, bodily contortion or anodyne recital of the text, finding the nulle part is complex but not impossible; we face a theatrical and vital challenge with the public consisting in whatever we write on the stage as actors , director and even as public is a play, paraphrasing pandousley, in which we have to cross the scene with our entire bodies, to be able to find the multiplicities of senses hidden in the dramatic presentation.We are all invited as theatrical movement to approach as collective utopia this drifting island, this theatrical “punctum”, this nulle part kingdom, this grain of sand in the turmoil of history, which doesn’t change the world because it changes us, it is perhaps what Octavio Paz says: “Maybe Latin American’s identify consist in not having any identity or at least having several diffused ones. So diffused that they world form a labyrinth of shared solitudes and at the same time individually irreducible”; let us dare to find the nulle part, let us plunge onto the zero dimension.BIBLIOGRAPHY:•Fernando Duque Mesa. Investigación y praxis teatral en Colombia. Bogotá, Colcultura, 1994.
•Joseph Picó (Compilador). Modernidad y postmodernidad. Madrid, Alianza, 1998.
•Patrice Pavis. Hacia una puesta en escena postmoderna. Buenos Aires, Simposio Teatral, 2000.
•Revista Teatrología Nos. 24 y 25. Técnicas y reflexión sobre la práctica teatral iberoamericana. Buenos Aires, CELCIT, 2003.
•Gilberto Martinez. Teatro Alquímico. Medellín, Universidad de Antioquia, 2002.
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© Tania Patricia Maza
© Hernando Pareja (Traducción)
LA CASA DE ASTERIÓN
La Cuerda
ISSN: 0124 - 9282
Revista Trimestral de Estudios Literarios
Volumen VI – Número 24
Enero-Febrero-Marzo de 2006
DEPARTAMENTO DE IDIOMAS
FACULTAD DE CIENCIAS HUMANAS - FACULTAD DE EDUCACIÓN
UNIVERSIDAD DEL ATLÁNTICO
Barranquilla - Colombia
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