From national to global
By Richard Schechner (1)
I first wrote this essay in 1992 as part of the introduction to my book, The Future of Ritual (1993). Since then, I have tinkered with it a few times for its appearance in various renditions. Here it is again, updated slightly for 2006. What is significant, I think, is how little updating the essay needed. This indicates that we are in the midst of a period in theatre, if not in all the arts, of relative stasis (no matter how turbulent that stasis) — so much so that “avantgarde”, that expectedly most volatile of categories, has remained constant for at least two decades, probably three, since the start of the 1980s. This is curious, because the world at large is changing very rapidly. A big question, which this essay does not address, is why hasn’t theatre kept up?
What the avantgarde has become during the past 100 years or so is much too complicated to be organized under one heading. There is the historical avantgarde, the current avantgarde (always changing), a forward-looking avantgarde, a tradition-seeking avantgarde, and an intercultural avantgarde. A single work can belong to more than one of these categories. The five avantgardes have emerged as separable tendencies because “avantgarde” meaning “what's in advance of” — a harbinger, an experimental prototype, the cutting edge--no longer describes the multiple activities undertaken by performance artists, auteurs, directors, designers, actors, and scholars operating in one or more of the various “worlds” the planet has been partitioned into — first, second, and third worlds that have largely dissolved into an even more turbulent, mutable, and problematic “global” entity. The categories “first, second, and third world” are clumsy and outdated, even as people continue to use them.
The end of the Cold War dissolved the opposition between the first world and the second. The collapse of Soviet hegemony over Eastern Europe and many of the territories and peoples of the USSR was a lot more than a temporary spasm of 1989-91. Unleashed was an ongoing infiltration of possibilities and alternatives accompanied and forced by the failure of Soviet Communism to deliver the goods or permit an open play of ideas. For example, the Chinese leadership learned how to hitch its own brand of Communism to the market economy, a kind of Commucapitalism. Ongoing historical processes are at work eliding and topsy-turvying many systems in Europe, Asia, Africa, and the Americas. Not only, or even mostly, political systems. More accurately, economic and information systems — these are rapidly evolving, even as political systems have relatively frozen in place. If by “new world order” President George W. Bush means American hegemony (as he surely does), he is mistaken — as the bitter experience of American forces in Iraq demonstrate. The third world is no longer boundaried geographically speaking. Third world enclaves and ghettoes are everywhere. The pressures from the south are steadily increasing in the USA, the U.K. France, and other northern European countries. The 2005 riots in France showed how explosive the situation is. Change is coming to China, India, Japan, the USA, and Europe forced on them by circumstances working through historical rather than journalistic time. As for the third world, it is marked by tumult and often uncontrollable transformations. The task for cultural workers is to express as clearly as we can both the emotional and the logical sense of the changes taking place. We need to find ways to perform and even celebrate individual and group differences as people struggle towards economic, political, and cultural parity. Is such a differential egalitarianism possible?
The historical avantgarde took shape in Europe during the last decades of the 19th century. It soon spread to many places around the world. The plays of Ibsen, and the naturalistic style of presenting them, for example, affected the modernization of Japan and the liberation of China from the Qing Dynasty. But the first great modern avantgarde, naturalism, soon evoked its opposites in an explosion of heterodoxies: symbolism, futurism, cubism, expressionism, dada, surrealism, constructivism ... and many more with names, manifestos, and actions that came and went with such speed as to suggest their true aim: the propagation of artistic difference. Along with this was a political agenda, one of sharp opposition. Poggioli is near right when he detects in the historical avantgarde a “prevalence of the anarchistic mentality [...] an eschatological state of mind, simultaneously messianic and apocalyptic” (1968:99-100). Avantgardists were on the left because the right was in power. When the left came to power, in the USSR for example, experimentalists were treated like kulaks, ripe for repression and extermination. Look what happened to Mayakovsky and Meyerhold, who, among a host of others, were reclassified from “revolutionary comrades” to “enemies of the people”. Stalin protected remnants of bourgeois culture, Stanislavsky among them, and fostered the dullest kind of “socialist realism”. Decades later, marching under the authority of Mao Zedong's “little red book”, China's Cultural Revolution, orchestrated by Jiang Qing, actress and Mao's second wife, razed Chinese culture both traditional and modern. What Jiang produced were “model operas”, brilliant but wooden performances expressing her own political and aesthetic values. At present, categories like “left” and “right” have lost much of their meaning; they are useful only in very particular historical circumstances, not as general principles.
Regarding the historical avantgarde, Michael Kirby is on the mark when he says that
'avant-garde' refers specifically to a concern with the historical directionality of art. An advanced guard implies a rear guard or at least the main body of troops following behind. [...] Some artists may accept the limits of art as defined, as known, as given; others may attempt to alter, expand, or escape from the stylistic aesthetic rules passed on to them by the culture. This impulse to redefine, to contradict, to continue the sensed directionality of art (1969:18-19)
is the energy source and connecting link holding together the disparate movements of the historical avantgarde.
The historical avantgarde was characterized by the twin tendency to make something new that was also in opposition to prevailing values. Since Romanticism, these values have been social and political as well as aesthetic. The Romantics introduced the idea that artists lived their lives in terms of their art — that experience, display, and expression were inextricably linked, each one functioning in terms of the others. “Action”, whether poetic, personal, or political (trying to affect the way society was organized) became key. Wordsworth's “emotion recollected in tranquility” soon was replaced by Shelley's calls for direct radical action. This affection for radical thought, rhetoric, and action in opposition to accepted values was at the heart not only of the historical avantgarde's politics, but its bohemian lifestyle.
Even the ancien regime was not hated as much as the new
dominant class, the bourgeoisie. Not only was the middle class
in power, and to avantgardists therefore the cause of what was
wrong with society, the bourgeois were also uncultured, grossly
materialistic, and greedy. Ironically, some of Shelley's heirs,
in their hatred of bourgeois values and manners, adopted
aristocratic airs — for example, Oscar Wilde. Paris' Left Bank
and New York's Greenwich Village were famous as places where artists, dandies, and radicals (far from mutually exclusive categories) lived their eccentric and libidinous lives making art, mocking the bourgeoisie, and plotting revolution. Middle class people considered the artists to be neurotic, childlike, and savage — a trinity formulated by Freud (in many ways an apologist for the Victorianism to whose practices his “talking cure” adjusted errants). From the bourgeois perspective, artists were thought “naturally” to be impetuous and irresponsible when it came to money, sex, and politics.
After the Russian Revolution of 1917, the conjunction of revolutionary thought and art grew stronger. Meyerhold was the most visible of a large cohort who wanted to find a place for experimental performance in what he believed was a new and progressive social order. For a time, until the paranoid “man of steel”, Josef Stalin, turned it off, the sun rose in the East in the form of bio-mechanics, constructivism, Russian futurism, montage, multimedia, and vibrant performance styles combining the most recent technological innovations with traditional popular entertainments such as commedia dell'arte, circus, and the cabaret. And just as Germans fleeing Hitler in the 1930s and 40s fertilized the artistic and intellectual life of Great Britain and the Americas, so Russians (Czarists as well as progressives) vitalized Western European and American theatre, film, and visual arts. All the avantgardes that followed follow in the wake of the historical avantgarde.
The “current avantgarde” (second of the five types) is by definition what's happening now. Of course, “now” is always changing — it will be different when this writing is published from what it is as I write in New York in November 2005. Today's current theatre avantgarde includes reruns of the historical avantgarde as well as the practices of formerly experimental artists whose work is by now “classical” in terms of its predictability, solidity, and acceptance. In terms of the American current avantgarde, you know what to expect from Robert Wilson, Anne Bogart, Bill T. Jones, Karen Finley, Laurie Anderson, Elizabeth LeCompte, Meredith Monk, Lee Breuer, Richard Foreman, Merce Cunningham, Robert LePage, Pina Bausch, Rachel Rosenthal — and a bunch of younger people working in roughly the same ways as their predecessors and mentors. People and groups like Richard Maxwell, Skewed Visions, Elevator Repair Service, Critical Art Ensemble, Builder’s Association, Nicole Blackman, Vanessa Beecroft, Coco Fusco… and many many more. In terms of quantity and quality, there never has been more going on, in large theatres and tiny cracks in the wall. Much of this work is at an extremely high level of sophistication and accomplishment (of course lots of it is dull and sloppy, too).
However brilliant, none of this work is “new” in the sense that it breaks existing taboos or shows the way — either conceptually or technically — toward something that audiences have not experienced before. The way that, in its own time, Ibsen’s Ghosts, Jarry’s Ubu Roi, Duchamp’s various objet trouvé, Kaprow’s 18 Happenings, or my own Dionysus in 69 were “new.”
The work of the current avantgarde is frequently virtuosic in its mastery of formerly experimental techniques. This mastery, coupled with a second and third generation of artists working in the same way, is what makes the current avantgarde classical. Over time, the historical avantgarde modulated into the current avantgarde: what were once radical activities in terms of artistic experimentation, politics, and lifestyles have become a cluster of alternatives open to people who wish to practice or see a various kinds of theatrical art. The current avantgarde offers no surprises in terms of techniques, themes, audience interactions, or anything else. Like naturalism before it, this “avantgarde” has become a style, a genre, a way of working, rather than a bellwether. But unlike what naturalism and realism became, the current avantgarde is not “mainstream,” not what most theatres do. It is simply a menu of options drained of the fervor of their original impulses.
The current avantgarde certainly may be considered a “new establishment”. As Graham Ley wrote, “The continuing admiration for a select group of experimental practitioners prompts the question of whether we can have a theatrical avant-garde that would seem to be so well-established” (1991:348). Ley identifies certain qualities of the current avantgarde that are antithetical to what drove the historical avantgarde. Chief among these is the heavy doses of money — most of it from government, big business, and foundations (where the robber barons and their descendants buried their pots of gold) — underwriting almost all of the established current biggies from Robert Wilson and Peter Brook through to the Wooster Group. (Ley does not exclude me from the list of the subsidized, due to my long employment by first Tulane and then New York University). Not only do established current avantgardists feed from various public fountains and private patrons (as did artists from the Renaissance forward), subsidy is what generations of younger theatre, dance, and other artists expect as their birthright. The rough-and-ready economics of the free market operates in popular entertainments — music, sports, movies, the internet, and tv. However “vulgar” many of these entertainments are, they are also often both lively and innovative, especially in the development of physical techniques (lighting, sound, ways of including the audience, “special effects”).
The current avantgarde has been for decades dominated by a group of oldsters (of which I am, for better or worse, one). The current avantgarde is an established style of performance, one that in many ways is not distinguishable from orthodox theatre and dance. What innovation comes from the current avantgarde, is mostly emanating from performance art where people are exploring such things as explicit sexual art, combining the extremely personal with the political, and various kinds of audience participation and even co-creation.
Another wing of the current avantgarde is the activist political theatre — heirs to the guerrilla and street theatre movements of the 1960s. This work is avantgarde because there is free trade among techniques, persons, and ideas of the avantgarde and political theatre from the days of Meyerhold, Brecht, and dada. People and groups like the gay activists of ACTUP, the radical environmentalists of Greenpeace, and the “theatre of the oppressed” of Augusto Boal are in the forefront of this kind of theatre. Those who demonstrate against the World Trade Organization employ theatrical means (as well as time-tested political means such as massive street demonstrations). Active political theatres are working in Latin America, Africa, and Asia. ACTUP and Greenpeace get their messages across to the general public by using sudden, often disruptive, and dramatic means; these actions also reinforce solidarity among their members — nothing brings a group together faster or with more enthusiasm than collectively taking action in an atmosphere of risk. When ACTUP members lay down in the streets simulating the dead and dying of AIDS, when a Greenpeace ship intercepts a polluting or nuclear arms bearing vessel, not only does the media catch and broadcast the event, group members are invigorated, reaffirming in public their belief in their cause and in each other. In this way, the activist political theatre is a religious and ritual theatre, a theatre of “witnesses” in the Buddhist, Christian, and Hindu sense. Indeed, the strategies of Gandhi live in the works of political theatres everywhere.
Boal's techniques, originating as opposition to Latin American fascists — Boal himself fled Brazil in the late 1960s and was later forced from Argentina, he is now back in Rio — are somewhat different from those of ACTUP, Greenpeace, and other guerrilla theatre operations. More than wanting to unmask, attack, and ridicule systems and people he feels are oppressive, Boal wants to empower the oppressed. To do this, he has developed over nearly 25 years of work a non-Aristotelian form of improvisational participatory performance. Boal has written extensively about his work.
Political performance, formalist theatre, personal expression, meditative performances... and on through a long list of styles, objectives, social and political contexts, and venues: For a long time, since the late 1970s at least, the trend has been away from hegemony toward a situation where there are a number of styles each of which is an alternative to all the others. Instead of fiercely contentious “isms” struggling against the mainstream and each other (a characteristic of the historical avantgarde), the current avantgarde is one where producing organizations and particular venues celebrate their receptivity to various styles. So, for example, in New York, the Brooklyn Academy of Music's “Next Wave” festival is actually a compilation of many different kinds of non-naturalistic theatre and dance, none of it really new, none of it about to replace everything that came before. BAM has no ideological or artistic program beyond presenting what Harvey Lichtenstein and his cohorts think is “hot”. BAM titles its annual avantgarde festival the “Next Wave,” an absurd appellation for artists most of whom have been on the scene for decades. Or take the 1991-92 season at the Public Theatre arranged by the organization's new artistic director, JoAnne Akalaitis, a Mabou Mines founder. Works range from solo pieces by people of color (“curated by George C. Wolf”) to performance art to productions of Shakespeare, Ford, and Lorca to Anne Bogart directing the Mabou Mines company in Brecht's “In the Jungle of Cities”. The former dominant mainstream — Broadway, the West End, regional theatres — for their part freely borrow techniques and people from the current avantgarde. Such willy-nilly eclecticism, a monoculturalist's nightmare, is the way things are going to be for a long time.
But it's not enough to divide the avantgarde in two, the historical and the current. Since at least the last great burst of new activity in performance, the late 1950s through the mid-70s — the time of happenings (later to become performance art), environmental theatre, guerrilla theatre, ritual arts — there have been two strong themes within the avantgarde: the forward-looking and the tradition-seeking. Those who are forward-looking advocate and celebrate artistic innovation and originality. This branch of the avantgarde is heir to the historical avantgarde, on the look out for new ideas and techniques — multimedia, video hookups and interactive telecommunications, megasound, laser light shows, cybernetics, and hyper or virtual time/space. The works of Robert LePage, Laurie Anderson, John Jesurun, and The Wooster Group comes to mind. Naim June Paik and many performance artists are forward-looking in the way I am specifying. Or those who showed their works at one of the PULSE shows (People Using Light, Sound, and Energy) in Santa Barbara, California. Often this kind of work fuses the avantgarde with popular entertainments because so much of pop culture is not only technologically driven but where the money is.
The forward-looking avantgarde enacts a future that is both amazing and apocalyptic. The very technology that is celebrated is also feared, it obliterates even as it liberates. The film “Total Recall” very clearly shows this. In the movie the boundary between inner fantasy life and outer “real” life is blurred. As in Indian tales where the dreamer wakes up into his own dream, the Schwarzenegger character in “Total Recall” doesn't know if his vacation to Mars — a violent, grotesque, and erotic place — is happening inside his mind or in ordinary time/space. The movie ends with the hero and heroine barely escaping death as they witness the violently explosive terraforming of Mars. The old desiccated planet is transformed into a new fertile Edenic world. Unfortunately, this exciting denouement becomes pure Hollywood when it is stripped of its ambiguity and made clear that it's no dream, it's really happening.
The tradition-seeking avantgarde — so strongly present in Grotowski and Barba — but visible as well in “roots” movements and “shamanic” performances, rejects fancy technology and cybernetics preferring the “wisdom of the ages”, most often found in non-Western cultures. Jerzy Grotowski's journeys, both actual and conceptual, are paradigmatic of this tendency in the avantgarde. Grotowski's theatre education in Poland and the USSR was nothing unusual. He got his certificate in acting from the Krakow theatre school in 1955; from August 1955 until 1956 he studied directing in Moscow at the State Institute of Theatre Arts — where he became a “fanatic disciple of Stanislavsky” and “discovered Meyerhold” (Osinski 1986:17-18). Then in the summer of 1956, he traveled through central Asia where, it seems, he experienced an epiphany. In Grotowski's own (translated) words:
During my expeditions in Central Asia in 1956, between an old Turkmenian town Ashkhabad and the western range of the Hindu Kush Mountains, I met an old Afghan named Abdullah who performed for me a pantomime “of the whole world”, which had been a tradition in his family. Encouraged by my enthusiasm, he told me a myth about the pantomime as a metaphor for “the whole world”. [...] It occurred to me then that I'm listening to my own thoughts. Nature — changeable, moveable, but permanently unique at the same time — has always been embodied in my imagination as the dancing mime, unique and universal, hiding under the glittering of multiple gestures, colors, and the grimace of life (in Osinski 1986:18).
Grotowski returned to Poland where he studied directing and became involved in the anti-Stalinist movements then gaining strength.
But his interest in things Asian and traditional continued. In 1957 he gave public lectures on “The Philosophical Thought of the Orient”, including discussions of yoga, the Upanishads, Buddhism, Zen-Buddhism, Advaita-Vedanta, Taoism, and Confucius. In 1957 and again in 1959, Grotowski traveled to France where he saw works of Jean Vilar and Marcel Marceau, whom he greatly admired. All the while, Grotowski was directing Western works ranging from Ionesco's “The Chairs” and Chekhov's “Uncle Vanya” to an adaptation for radio of Mark Twain's “The White Elephant”. In 1959, Grotowski and critic-dramaturg Ludwik Flaszen took over Opole's Theatre of 13 Rows where they and their colleagues developed what was to be known as “poor theatre” (see Grotowski 1968, Kumiega 1985, Osinski 1986). This style of performing — emphasizing the actors' psychophysical abilities, refusing theatrical sets, redefining audience-performer interactions according to the needs of each production, constructing a textual montage from many sources (rather than interpreting a drama written by a single author) — was based on rigorous training founded at least initially on yoga and other principles Grotowski derived from his studies of Asian theatre and philosophies combined with a deeply Polish Catholic and Hassidic mystic practice. In fact, Grotowski felt the similarity between these traditions, a similarity that Eugenio Barba some years later dubbed “Eurasian Theatre” (Barba: 1988). The stripped-down stage, the ritualized nature of the encounter between performers and spectators, the startling confrontation of extremely personal expression and totally composed face and body “masks” all were modeled to a degree after what Grotowski knew of Asian theatre, ritual, and thought. Grotowski's most audacious and experimental inventions are founded on tradition. What Artaud intuited and theorized, Grotowski researched and practiced.
In the late 1960s, Grotowski “left the theatre”. He stopped directing plays. He began a series of research projects taking him to and putting him in touch with many artists and ritual specialists from different cultures in an attempt to find and express in specific theatrical ways — dances, songs, gestures, utterances, words — universals of performance. These research projects have had several names: Theatre of Sources, Objective Drama, Ritual Arts. The work is not yet complete and is probably uncompletable. It has taken Grotowski to Asia, the Americas, the Caribbean (and possibly other places too: Grotowski often travels incognito). Grotowski has not been silent regarding his work after poor theatre; and often enough he sounds classically avantgardist:
Art is profoundly rebellious. Bad artists speak of rebelling; real artists actually rebel. They respond to the powers that be with a concrete act: this is both the most important and the most dangerous point. [...] Real rebellion in art is something which persists and is competent and never dilettante. [...] When I began working with the Theatre of Sources (it was still the period of participatory theatre) it was quite clear that in certain traditional human activities — which may be called religious — from different cultures where tradition still existed, it was possible to see, in some cases, participatory theatre without banality. [...] It soon became clear that not all the differences can be reduced, that we can't alter our own conditioning, that I shall never be a Hindu even if I am consecrated by the Hindus. [...] One can, however, move toward what precedes the differences. [...] Why do the African hunter from the Kalahari, the French hunter from the outskirts of Saintes, the Bengali hunter, and the Huichol hunter from Mexico all adopt the same body position when they go hunting, with the spinal backbone leaning slightly forward, and the knees slightly bent in a position that is sustained at the base by the sacrum-pelvis complex? And why can only kind of rhythmic movement derive from this position? And what use can be made of this way of walking? There is a very simple, very easy level of analysis: if the weight of the body is on one foot and you move the other foot, you don't make any noise and you can also move very slowly without stopping. In this way certain animals remain unaware of your presence. But this isn't the important thing. What is important is that there exists a certain primary position of the human body. It's a position which goes back so far that it was probably the position not only of Homo sapiens, but also of Homo erectus, and connected in some way with the appearance of man. An extremely ancient position connected with what some Tibetans call the “reptile” aspect. In the Afro-Caribbean culture this position is linked more precisely with the grass snake, and in the Hindu culture linked with the Tantra, you have this snake asleep at the base of the backbone. [...] We are now touching on something which concerns my present work [1985]. I began asking myself, at the end of the period of the Theatre of sources, how people used this primary energy, how, through differing techniques elaborated in the traditions, people found access to this ancient body of man. I have traveled a lot, I've read numerous books, I have found numerous traces (1987:30-35).
It is not necessary to summarize Grotowski's work over the past 25 years to note two things. It remains in the vanguard of experimental work concerning performance (if not strictly theatre in the Western sense); it is deeply traditional in a way that Grotowski himself, among others, is defining.
Eugenio Barba, Grotowski's longtime colleague and the founder-director of Odin Teatret, one of Europe's leading experimental theatres, challenges Western orthodoxy with Asian practice.
Why in the Western tradition, as opposed to what happens in the Orient, has the actor become specialized [instead of being able to act, dance, mime, and sing?] Why in the West does the actor tend to confine herself within the skin of only one character in each production? Why does she not explore the possibility of creating the context of an entire story, with many characters, with leaps from the general to the particular, from the first to the third person, from the past to the present, from the whole to the part, from persons to things? (1988:126).
Barba proposes an experimental theatre of roots. “Here the term 'roots' becomes paradoxical: it does not imply a bond with ties to a place, but an ethos which permits us to change places. Or better: it represents the force which causes us to change our horizons precisely because it roots us to a center” (1988:128).
The roots movement is not only of the West. Re-examining and re-defining tradition is a characteristic of the avantgarde in India, Japan, and elsewhere. Suresh Awasthi writes:
I am taking the risk of giving a label — “theatre of roots” — to the unconventional theatre which has been evolving for some two decades in India as a result of modern theatre's encounter with tradition. [...] Directors like B. V. Karanth, K. N. Panikkar, and Ratan Thiyam have had meaningful encounters with tradition, and, with their work, reversed the colonial course of contemporary theatre. [...] It sounds paradoxical, but their theatre is both avant-garde in the context of conventional realistic theatre, and part of the 2,000-year-old “Natyasastra” tradition” (1989:48).
Awasthi points out that the “theatre of roots” must be seen against the backdrop of more than a century of Western naturalistic theatre which is the mainstream in India. Some qualities of the “theatre of roots” — rejection of the proscenium stage, closer contact between spectators and performers, integration of music, mime, gesture, and literary text — are identical to the experimental theatre program practiced by environmental theatre workers in the West. Of course this would be so: many of the Western experiments were modeled on the kinds of performances directors like me studied and/or saw in India or elsewhere. That this same avantgarde impulse should now be affecting modern (that is, orthodox or mainstream) Indian theatre is only to be expected.
In Japan, butoh, a word which used to mean “ancient dance”, now refers to an intense, physically extreme, and rebellious avantgarde performance art developed by Kazuo Ohno and the late Tatsumi Hijikata. Butoh is practiced by Kazuko Shiraishi, Min Tanaka, Natsuo Nakajima, and several groups (Dai Rakuda-kan, Muteki-sha and Sankai Juku, are the best known). Described by Bonnie Sue Stein as “shocking, provocative, physical, spiritual, erotic, grotesque, violent, cosmic, nihilistic, cathartic, [and] mysterious” (1986:111), butoh is closely linked to noh and kabuki as well as other traditional Japanese arts.
Butoh is an anti-traditional tradition seeking to erase the heavy imprint of Japan's strict society and offering unprecedented freedom of artistic expression. [...] Nakajima said, 'We found that we were making the same discoveries as noh actors mace, using some of the same terminology, but we had never learned these forms' (Stein 1986:111).
The images and actions butoh performers create are striking. Ohno in his 80s still performs the movements of a young coquette, her face painted white, her lips scarlet. “He drapes himself across the edge of the stage in the serpentine curves of traditional femininity, then kicks his foot high like a carefree young lover. To the slow koto music, he skips, flutters, and poses (Stein 1986:107). Or Sankai Juko's nearly naked performers, their bodies powdered white, dangling upside down far above the street, held aloft by ropes tied around their ankles. In Seattle in 1985, a rope broke and a Sanka Juko dancer plunged to his death. But risk is what butoh is about. Often performing outdoors in extremely harsh weather, forcing their bodies against rocks or into icy seawater, their teeth blacked out or painted, butoh performers awaken Japan's shamanic heritage, demonic mythology, and folk theatre. Butoh performers are also disruptive bohemians, canny city-based artists consciously playing out their subversive countertext mocking Japan's hyperorganized social life.
Examples like “roots” from India and butoh from Japan could be multiplied all around the world. There is no area, be it Micronesia, the Pacific Rim, West Africa, the Circumpolar Region, or wherever, which does not have artists actively trying to use, appropriate, reconcile, come to terms with, exploit, understand — the words and political tone vary, but the substance doesn't — the relationships between local cultures in their extreme particular historical development and the increasingly complex and multiple contacts and interactions not only among various cultures locally and regionally but on a global and interspecific scale. Fitfully, unevenly, and with plenty of cruelty a planetary human culture is emerging which is aware of, if not yet acting responsibly toward, the whole geo-bio-cultural system. Founded on certain accepted values which express themselves abstractly as mathematics and materially as technology this planetary culture is engaging more and more scientists, social activists, and artists concerned with mapping, understanding, representing, and preserving the earth as an integrated geobiocultural system.
When I say “accepted values” I don't mean these are God-given or inherent in nature or experience. They are constructed and imposed. These imposed values — mathematics and its expression in technology — can be used for good or bad. What constitutes good and bad is, of course, what philosophers, religious and spiritual people, and artists want to find out — and impose. No matter what is written or spoken at any given time — the Bible, the Koran, the Upanishads — history teaches that the question of good and bad is always open. Inquisitors used the Bible, bloody Muslim zealots the Koran, and the architects of the Indian caste system the Upanishads.
Which leads me to the fifth kind of avantgarde, the intercultural. For whatever reasons — left over colonialism, American imperialism, the hunger of people everywhere for material goods, the planetary spread of modernism, (2) the ubiquity of a “cosmopolitan style” in everything from airports to clothes — artists of the avantgarde are producing works on or across various borders: political, geographical, personal, genric, and conceptual. In a world where so-called universal values each day run up against deeply held local values and experiences, the result is clash, disturbance, turbulence, unease about the future, and hot argument about what the past was.
As intercultural performance artist Guillermo Gomez-Pena says:
I physically live between two cultures and two epochs. [...] When I am on the U.S. side, I have access to high-technology and specialized information. When I cross back to Mexico, I get immersed in a rich political culture. [...] When I return to California, I am part of the multicultural thinking emerging from the interstices of the U.S.'s ethnic milieus. [...] I walk the fibres of this transition in my everyday life, and I make art about it (1991:22-23).
This kind of uneasiness marks many in the intercultural avantgarde. It is not mostly a question of the artist not knowing where she lives. It is about belonging to more than one culture, subscribing to contradictory values, conflicting aesthetic canons. Salman Rushdie well knows the contradictions between Western liberal and Muslim fundamentalist values as they apply to literature and life. Rushdie has said he'd like to belong both to the Western and Islamic worlds. And within every nation many people are living difficult, sometimes exciting, multiple lives. The “nation” no longer describes how or even where hundreds of millions of people live. As Sun Huizhu, aka William Sun, a leading young Chinese playwright who since the crushing of the democracy movement in Tiananmen Square in June, 1989 has been unable to return to his native Shanghai says:
I would like to call on artists to pay more attention to an increasingly important reality. More and more people of different cultures are interacting and having problems in their interactions. As intercultural artists — often as ambassadors to other cultures — can we artists do something to address this issue and help solve some of those problems?(3)
Engaging intercultural fractures, philosophical difficulties, ideological contradictions, and crumbling national myths does not necessarily lead to avantgarde performances. Intercultural performances occur across an enormous range of venues, styles, and purposes. What is avantgarde is when the performance does not try to heal over rifts or fractures but further opens these for exploration. For example, I would say that Peter Brook's “The Mahabharata” was intercultural but not avantgarde, while Gomez-Pena's solo performances as “Border Brujo” or the “Warrior for Gringostroika” definitely are. The difference is that Brook wants to elide difference, he is looking for what unites, universalizes, makes the same. The conflicts in his Euro-Indic epic are philosophical, personal, familial, and religious — not intercultural. Brook assumes — as the English who own Shakespeare do — that certain works operate at the “human” rather than cultural level. His “Mahabharata” does not interrogate the epic or subvert it; nor are spectators to regard with anything but liberal approval the “international cast” Brook assembled to enact not only the epic story but the universalist doctrine that under the skin all humans are the same. Don't get me wrong. I support non-traditional, color blind, culture blind casting (see Schechner 1989b). But in the case of Brook's “Mahabharata” such casting could have been the occasion for an exploration of the tensions between non-racialist universalism and the ethnic, nationalist, religious, and racial jungle of current world politics and personal relations.
Of what use is dividing the avantgarde into five? These categories clearly overlap. The current avantgarde includes work that is future-looking, tradition-seeking, and intercultural. But despite the rudeness of the division, the operation reminds us of how complex, how multiple, the avantgarde has become. We can also see how very far the current avantgarde is from the historical avantgarde. The current avantgarde is neither innovative nor in advance of. Like a mountain, it just is. Although the term “avantgarde” persists in scholarship as well as journalism, it no longer serves a useful purpose. It really doesn't mean anything today. It should be used only to describe the historical avantgarde, a period of innovation extending roughly from the end of the 19th century to the mid-1970s (at most). Saying something is avantgarde may carry a cache of shock, of newness, but in the West, at least, there is little artists can do, or even ought to do, to shock audiences (though quite a bit can offend them). And why try to shock? There are no surprises in terms of technique, theme, or approach. Everything from explicit sex shows, site specific work, participatory performance, political theatre and guerrilla theatre (of the kind Greenpeace or ACT UP now do), to postmodern dance, the mixing of personal narratives with received texts, the deconstruction of texts, the blurring of boundaries between genres... and so on, has been and done again many times, over the past 40 years. And if the scope is opened to 100 years, what in today's performance world can be said to be new? But the question is not, “Can anything new happen?” but “Who cares? Does it matter?” Who today could write manifestos comparable to the febrile outpourings of Artaud, palpitating with hatred, rage, and hope? Who would want to? Is anyone waiting for an Artaud to come around again?
I doubt it. A rubicon has been crossed. Events today are recorded, replayed, ritualized, and recycled. And if Artaud were to show up, he would be accepted, put in his proper place. The limitless horizons of expectations that marked the modern epoch and called into existence endless newness have been transformed into a global hothouse, a closed environment. I do not agree with Baudrillard that everything is a simulation. But neither do we live in a world of infinite possibilities or originalities. A long neo-medieval period has begun. Or, if one is looking for historical analogs, perhaps neo-Hellenistic is more precise. A certain kind of Euro-American cultural style is being extended, imposed, willingly received (the reactions differ) by many peoples in all parts of the world. Exactly what shape this style will take, what its dominant modes of thought will be, are not yet clear. But it will be a conservative age intellectually and artistically. That does not mean reactionary or without compassion. Nor is the kind of conservatism I am talking about incompatible with democratic socialism. It is a conservatism based on the need to save, recycle, use resources parsimoniously. It is founded on the availability of various in depth “archives” of many different prior experiences, artworks, ideas, feelings, and texts. This stored and recallable prior knowledge is being used to avoid repeating certain kinds of events as well as to promote certain new kinds of events. Local violence increases, no one seems to care how many die if the bloodshed, starvation, or plague is “limited” (not in danger of becoming pandemic). What those in control fear is global violence, a threat to the established order not simply emergent but already firmly in place. The world's peoples are reminded daily of what will happen if global violence — to the environment, to populations, to species — is not brought under control. At the same time, entertainment expands its scope to include almost anything that happens that is technically witnessed and can be edited and played back. Art comes in several mutually reinforcing varieties: that which passes the time of those with enough money to buy tickets; that which excites without satisfying the appetites of its consumers; that which shows off the wealth, power, and taste of its patrons; that which is acquired as an investment. Popular entertainment follows roughly the same path.
To recycle, reuse, archive and recall, to perform in order to be included in an archive (as a lot of performance artists do), to seek roots, explore and maybe even plunder religious experiences, expressions, practices, and liturgies to make art (as Grotowski and others are doing) is to ritualize. Not just in terms of subject matter and theme, but also structurally, as form. Ethologists and psychologists have shown that ritual works by means of repetition, rhythms, and the tuning of the left and right hemispheres of the cerebral cortex (see d'Aquili et al. 1979, Lex 1979, Eibl-Eibesfeldt 1979, and Turner 1983). This understanding of ritual, as a process applying to a great range of human activities rather than as something tethered to religion is a very important development. The relatively tight boundaries that locked the various spheres of performance off from each other have been punctured. It is doubtful if these boundaries ever really functioned in fact. Certainly they didn't in popular entertainments and religious rituals. The boundaries, in fact, are the ghosts of neo-classical and Renaissance readings of the Aristotelian “unities.” Keeping each genre in its place is a last ditch regressive action mounted by some critics and academics.
The four great spheres of performance — entertainment, healing, education, and ritualizing — are in play with each other. This playing (and it can be a very serious matter) is the subject of this book. What used to be a tightly boundaried, limited field has expanded exponentially. Each of the performance spheres can be called by other names. Entertainment includes aesthetics, the arrangement and display of actions in ways that are “satisfying” or “beautiful” (according to particular and local cultural canons). Education includes all kinds of political performances designed to exhort, convince, and move to action. Healing performances include shamanism, the ostensive display of hi-tech medical equipment, the bedside manner, and all kinds of interactive psychotherapies.
As the writings in this book show, I am of at least two minds regarding all this. I am enthusiastic about the expanding field of performance and its scholarly adjunct, performance studies. Performative analysis is not the only interpretation possible, but it is a very effective method most in a time of charged rhetorics, simulations and scenarios, and games played on a global scale. It has always been a good method for looking at small-scale face-to-face interactions. The public display of these “for fun” may be taken as an operative definition of drama. But only a small number of art works relate creatively and critically to the worlds around them. These are what used to be the avantgarde, but which today, as I've been saying, barely owns its name. A century from now the world may be running on new fuels, the automobile may have passed away, human settlements may exist on the moon and elsewhere — and on through a list of as yet barely imaginable changes and technological improvements. The basic tendency of all these changes has already been set. That tendency is to use without using up; to reserve the ability to repeat; to test through modelling, virtual experience, and other kinds of mathematical and analogical rehearsing.
Where does that leave Jayaganesh?
The writings in this book all relate to aspects of what, I have called the “broad spectrum” of performance (see Schechner 1988b, 1989c, 1990). The broad spectrum includes performative behavior, not just the performing arts, as a subject for serious scholarly study. This book is one contribution to this big project. How is performance used in politics, medicine, religion, popular entertainments, and ordinary face-to-face interactions? What are the similarities and differences between live and mediated performances? The various and complex relationships among players — spectators, performers, authors, and directors — can be pictured as a rectangle, a performance quadrilog. Studying the interactions, sometimes easy, sometimes tense, among the speakers in the quadrilog is what performance studies people do. These studies are intensely interdisciplinary, intercultural, and intergenric. Performance studies builds on the emergence of a post-colonial world where cultures are colliding, interfering with, and fertilizing each other. Arts and academic disciplines alike are most alive at their ever-changing borders. The once distinct (in the West at least) genres of music, theatre, and dance are interacting with each other in ways undreamt of just 35 years ago. These interactions are both expressive of and part of a larger movement culturally.
The essays in this book examine various cultural and artistic performances as Jayaganesh Richard Schechner experienced them, thought about them, and was able to put his thoughts into written words. These performances were often more social, political, or religious than artistic. They were meant to effect and cause life, not reflect or express it. Live performance increasingly happens not as art but as religious practice, political demonstration, popular entertainment, sports match, or intimate face-to-face encounter. Such was the brave and tragic confrontation between the young and the old in Tiananmen Square in May-June 1989 when Deng Xiaoping played Creon to a multitude of Antigones and Haemons. Or in Pascua Pueblo near Tucson where a village of Yaquis annually don their chapayeka masks to play out again their relationship not only to Jesus but to their friends and family and to the whole outside world. Or the Ramlila of Ramnagar, where for one month a mid-sized city is reconfigured so that celebrants can participate with the Hindu gods as they enact their epic adventures. What will happen to such performances, especially as they are repositioned by writers like myself? The question of what happens when scholars intervene is discussed in the essay about wayang kulit, a Javanese shadow puppet theatre. I write also about ritual and violence, playing and pretending — themes erupting from my earliest published essays of more than 25 years ago, and still unresolved.
The writings that make this book are shadow plays of my having been in this place or that, in such and such a frame of feeling and mind. Maybe I was led to that ashram in Kerala by my desire wherever I went and worked (in a rehearsal hall as well as in a village) to transform myself. Is there any other way to understand experience? Or maybe the conversion was Jayaganesh's confession that such a transformation cannot take place. What is possible is what's left: experiences retold as stories, stories rendered as discourse.
New York, November 2005
1. Director teatral y teórico estadounidense, fundador del Performance Group y su director entre 1967 y 1980. De esta etapa se recuerdan, entre otros, espectáculos como “Dionysus in 1969”, “Makbeth” y “The Tooth of Crime”, teatro ambiental basado en un texto de Shepard. En los años 60 y 70 Schechner fue uno de los primeros concitar interés teórico en torno al término “performance” y dar rango de disciplina académica al estudio de los fenómenos performativos que tienen lugar fuera de las estrictas fronteras del arte y el teatro. En los años 80 fundó y hasta ahora es Profesor del departamento de Performance Studies de la Universidad de Nueva York (NYU), el primero de su género que existió en el mundo. Schechner es, además, el director de la prestigiosa revista The Drama Review (TDR). El ensayo que publicamos, recientemente revisado por el autor, en su versión original sirvió de prólogo a la primera edición de su libro “The Future of Ritual” (1993). Otras obras: “Performance Theory” (1988), “Between Theatre and Anthropology” (1985). Volver
2. For a discussion of the differences between "modernization" and "Westernization" see my "Wayang Kulit in the Colonial "Margin," chapter 6, this book. Volver
3. Sun made this statement during a five day conference on intercultural performance held in Bellagio, Italy in February, 1991 under the auspices of The Rockefeller Foundation. Gomez-Peña was also there, as were 16 other artists and scholars from the Americas, Asia, Africa, and Europe. It became clear during the meetings that intercultural performance was both an experimental enterprise and an unsettling issue. Papers and proceedings from the conference will be published in 1993. Volver