theatre

theatre In Peter Brook's famous description of the essential ingredients for theatre as simply ‘the audience and the message’, the physical presence of actors is not judged strictly necessary. Yet the history of theatre worldwide makes clear that the first requirement of spectacle or drama is the performer's body. As the mime, Etienne Decroux, ironically put it: ‘When the actor ceases to appear on the stage with his body, he will be justified in disregarding the art of the body.’ Decroux condemned the use of elaborate scenery, lighting, costume, and properties (characteristic of the naturalistic or ‘fourth wall’ style of drama prevalent since the nineteenth century) — all of which, he held, obscured the bodily art of acting itself. Contemporary mime stripped the art to its essentials: to act naked on a naked stage, dispensing with all visual or musical support or accompaniment, and thus proving that the gesture can be self-sufficient. A mime, Jean Dorcy claimed, could portray the universe in two square feet.

Older theatre traditions such as classical Greek drama, the commedia dell'arte, and the Japanese Noh theatre, all influenced the development of contemporary mime. Whereas the Classical Greek tragic actor's physical movements were restricted both by his heavy costume and by the transcendant dignity of his roles, and he relied for expression on his voice, the actor in Greek comedy was expected to be something of an acrobat, displaying physical agility and skill in a primarily bodily form of theatre. The Japanese Noh was a drama of soliloquy and reminiscence, rather than one of conflict, in which the actor's stylized movements and stamping provided a rhythmic accompaniment to his narrative, with subjects taken from myth and legend. The commedia dell'arte was a mainly improvisatory form of theatre developed in sixteenth-century Italy: its influence has extended to the present in the stock characters its actors created — most famously Pantalone and Arlecchino — and the comic stunts and routines which evolved around them.

Contrary to the practice of Decroux and other mimes, these forms of drama do make use of spoken dialogue, costume, stage settings, and music. However, the feature these share in common with mime, and which epitomizes the non-naturalistic and body-based nature of these traditions, is the concealment or disguising of the face, by the use of a mask, or heavy stylized makeup which obscures the natural expression of the actor.

The purpose of this is to turn the eyes away from the face and towards the body of the actor. Dorcy once wrote of acting that ‘one cannot simultaneously and fully use the body and the face as means of expression without one of these two being overshadowed by the other.’ Perhaps it is appropriate, for a proponent of unspoken theatre, that the third instrument of the actor, the voice, is missing from the this statement. Indeed, practitioners of mime often claim a conflict between bodily movement, gesture, and attitude, and the spoken text, in holding the attention of the spectator. (This word is preferred by Dorcy and others over the word ‘audience’, for prioritizing the visual over the aural dimensions of theatre.)

Once the face is concealed, the spectator loses sight of what is commonly thought to be the most expressive part of the human frame. Attention is focused instead on the body, which becomes the sole vehicle of expression. Bodily movement, gesture, attitude are heightened and intensified in order to emphasize contrasts, and to eliminate superfluous movements and amplify or exaggerate the remaining motions.

The movement of the actor's body is inseparable from theatre, according to Dorcy: ‘The stage is a place where space changes nature, size and architecture according to the body occupying it; without a body in motion, the stage would be a desert.’ In such physical acting, each image created by the body, viewed separately, will reveal distinct emotions and circumstances. The gesture of the mime can conjure up absent objects; sometimes it serves as an interjection and expresses the psychological content of the moment: hesitation, joy, fear, etc. A successful attitude is like a condensed drama; perfect, complete, it is an image epitomizing identity, origin, destination, and intent.

The ideal intensity of bodily expression on the stage is summarized by Jean-Louis Barrault, who wrote that ‘As soon as I found myself … I was put to death. My life is an execution. My conduct will therefore be a struggle against death, against the clock, against time. A single watchword must be issued in this inner world of the body: to delay the hour of surrender, to delay the “moment of truth”. Accordingly, from head to toe, every part of this body is placed in a state of alert.’ Its enactment of the absurd and tragic collision between the inner world of the self and the outer world of destiny links mime to the plays of Beckett and Ionesco, in the Theatre of the Absurd. Its dictates, based on Jarry's 1896 play, Ubu Roi, held that human life was so illogical and language so inadequate as a means of communication that one was thrown back onto the body as the sole vehicle of expression, whether laughter, pain, or bewilderment.

Bodily confrontation is emphasized in the later Theatre of Cruelty movement, begun in the 1960s. Inspired by the writings of Antonin Artaud, it sought to free humans from the restraints of morality and reason, returning to a state of unfettered expression of power and desire. This was a precursor to the recent resurgence of ‘new melodrama’, which employs non-naturalistic, expressionistic styles of acting, and physical theatre, with its emphasis on extreme bodily states and forms of expression.

Natsu Hattori

Bibliography

Cheney, S. W. (1972). The theatre. Three thousand years of drama, acting and stagecraft. McKay, New York.
Dorcy, J. (1961). The mime, (trans. R. Speller and and P. de Fontnouvelle ). (5 vols.) McGraw-Hill New York.
Hochman, S. (1984). Encyclopaedia of world drama. Robert Speller & Sons, New York.