Theatricality & Global Theater

Theatricality & Global Theater Deborah Griggs Berlin, March 2015 I. Theater Beyond Borders Concept & Culture As individual cultures navigate global identities and explore overarching elements of human culture around the world, European and North American study of theater has become more and more interested of global variation in form, theme and content. Despite this broadening of interest, however, the foundations of theory and theater history have largely retained culturally biased conceptual paradigms. In addressing contexts in which plays are presented or the branch of industry to which a play is connected, discussions might identify centers of theater industry such as Broadway, off-Broadway and dinner theaters or institutions of culture such as national theaters or regional festivals. Analysis might focus on stage configuration (e.g., proscenium stage, revolving stages, or theater in the round); on method or style (e.g., realism, naturalism or absurdism; on 'classics' by such playwrights as Shakespeare, Molière or Ibsen; or on traditional genres (e.g., tragedy, comedy, musical, or political theater). What happens to all of these concepts and categories, however, if the focus is theater occurring in a culture in which Broadway or National Theaters do not exist and the performance under study is a ritual dance? What happens when the 'stage' is merely a loosely defined space within a larger loosely defined space? What concepts do we have that concretely move us away from inadvertent or implicit cultural bias of paradigm? In his novel Things Fall Apart, Nigerian author Chinua Achebe describes the ritual of the egwugwu, a group of respected men within traditional pre-colonial Igbo culture who donned ritual masks, thus taking on the identities of spirits, and, in this identity, counseled other tribal members who came before them with problems or conflicts. Vital to this ritual interaction was the belief that when theses men put on the masks, they became the spirits they represented. On the one hand, they were clearly playing roles in costume; on the other, they saw themselves, as did the spectators, as spirits interacting with tribal members who were bringing forward real-world problems. While clearly a performance, it is not as clear to which category the event belongs? Is it a church service, a trial, or a piece of theater? Put into any one of these categories, the classification jars existing systems. If, for example, its is categorized as a religious ritual and not theater, might one still speak of a passion play that reenacts the trials of Jesus as a play? While not a piece of dramatic literature in itself, Nigerian author Chinua Achebe's book, set in the late 1800s and published in 1958, reveals aspects of pre-colonial Igbo storytelling and ritual relevant to fundamental problems that arise in thinking about theater. A modern instance of a theater performance that might be difficult to discuss in terms of traditional concepts of staging is street theater. Street theater presents dramatizations of socially or politically relevant topics, situations or conflicts in public spaces such as streets, squares or parks. Using public places as its physical context, street theater may include a 'stage' that is merely a space in a crowd. The San Francisco Mime Troupe played in parks and public squares, the 'stage' nothing more than a 'hole' in the crowd. In the Invisible Theater of Augusto Boal, actors slipped unnoticed into everyday contexts, for example into a streetcar or bus, and played 'scenes' with spectators who did not even know that they were part of a 'play' until the actors revealed this, after the fact. In these kinds of performances, the 'stage' or, more appropriately, the theatrical space, appears suddenly in around the players as they move forward and closes up behind them as move away. Another aspect of theater that becomes hazy in any view of world theater is genre. Do different cultures find the same things comic or tragic? And what of the heroic? North American cultures are generally described as individualistic, that is, as promoting and relying upon independence and self-interest of each individual as a means of responding to cultural needs; a collectivist culture generally calls for the individual to subordinate personal needs and desires to those of the group, whether the family, the tribe or society as a whole. It therefore makes sense that in Western drama, a hero is generally a character showing individualism and independence while in a collectivist culture, such as China, where one is traditionally expected to sacrifice personal interest and gain for the sake of the family or a larger collective group, would such characteristics as individualism or independence be heroic? The diversity of global theater traditions in form, content and social significance makes it difficult to use the standard Western critical concepts to approach world theater with complete confidence. Where we find a seeming correspondence, we must be especially careful. Perhaps the danger here can be most easily understood as it compares to a problem in foreign language learning called the false cognate. This term describes the phenomenon, when we are learning foreign language, of words that seem to be the same in two languages but really are not. The word gift in English, for example, signifies a present; in German, however, the word gift means poison. Although the mistakes made on the basis of false cognates are generally more humorous than harmful, they do represent moments of miscommunication and cultural misunderstanding. The same principle holds when in viewing art forms and products across cultures to compare other experiences or phenomena: apparent similarities, such as our own understanding of the heroic or the comic, are not reliable. Ways of seeing that help us avoid assessing what we see solely on the basis of concepts from our own cultural experience or from our own cultural code must be found. Theorists and practitioners have thought and written about the problem of borrowing or misunderstanding isolated elements of culturally embedded theater for years. Groups such as Odin Teatret from Norway have done extensive borrowing from various types of global performance over decades, consciously incorporating elements in a practical exploration of what human theater is. Contemporary academic study, for example, the Global Theatre Histories in Munich are studying "theatrical trade routes" and the way that the movement of artists and productions influences (and creates) theater histories. However, while practitioners "do" and academics analyze traces, philosophy and media theory desire the search for new ways of getting inside the play or perhaps just the "play" in the play. I think that this kind of search for a new entry into theater as a medium is the basis for the use of the idea theatricality in Samuel Weber's book Theatricality as Medium (2004). In theatricality, Weber sees not only drama but also the core of a medium that transcends diversity of form, content or culture. Theatricality Important to Weber's concept of theatricality is the understanding that the theatrical experience is not only a matter of explicit elements of play and performance, but also an intellectual or a philosophical positioning of the audience and the actors. It is a tension between what is seen and what is not seen by the spectators. It is a relationship between the everyday world and the world of the stage. It is a presentation of language or movement as it relates to language and movement in the everyday world. In introducing his take on theatricality, Weber makes use of the analogy of the cave from Plato's Republic, emphasizing the following aspects of Plato's philosophical text: Being bound in a fixed position, the spectator's field of vision is limited; except for the fire, the cave is dark; the spectator does not see real figures but only shadows. According to Weber, Plato's main objective in presenting this scene is to concretize an idea of perception and truth, for although the shadowy movements are what these spectators perceive to be reality, those reading Plato's text can see that the spectators are not viewing 'real figures.' Reality, according to Plato, occurs neither in the shadows and unreliable light of the cave nor in the 'fixed position' of the spectator but rather out in the bright, natural, and diffused sunlight of day and its 'unfettered' vantage point. Weber's objective in referring to the scene, however, is not primarily philosophical but theatrical. In the cave analogy, he sees a revelation of the basic elements of theatricality. • The cave is a limited, determinant space: it is an interior space, yet is attached by its entrance to the exterior world. • The space is divided into a territory of action and a territory of spectator: the shadows are 'represented' action, the bound humans, the spectators. • Sensory input relies heavily on sight and sound. • The space is illuminated by a light source that is natural and unnatural at the same time. Fire is a natural element, but the fire has been 'staged' (lighted and placed) by human hand. The light source illuminates a visibly limited space and, for the spectator, only in part (unlike the sun). The source of the light—the fire itself—is not visible to the spectators. • The shadow 'puppet' figures can be compared to stagehands. The viewer may not see 'behind the stage.' • The relationship between the spectator and the actors is unexplained. • The protagonists in Plato's theater are the spectators, not the shadows. They watch the action but do not participate. The ignorance of their location (the limitations of their visual perspective) leads not only to ignorance of the truth, but to ignorance of Self, and also to belief in an illusion. There is an inherent question of spectator-actor-action relationship in this configuration. Weber's analysis reveals several fundamental aspects of theatricality as medium: the space between spectator and action; the illumination or lighting; the 'staged' setting; the sense of 'reality' communicated by the production; the connection between the theater and the world outside of it; and the enforced positioning— physical, emotional and intellectual—of the spectator. This point of viewing the theatrical is especially useful in examining world theater, where the spectrum of theatrical representation is so diverse that critical points of reference from one culture may have little or no meaning in another. By focusing on the basic dynamics, tensions and relationships of theatricality, we may more easily find points of comparison between Javanese Puppet Theater, where the audience views puppets as shadows on a backlit screen and clearly sees the mechanism of the puppeteering; the Invisible Theater, where there is no theater building at all and the action takes place in the everyday 'real' world of the audience; or a Broadway play, where the audience most often sits in the dark and watches action occur on an illuminated stage. In all of these cases we can investigate the relationship between the audience and the stage and the tension between them. We can describe the physical space, the language, and the field of vision that is presented or the perspective that is withheld. We can discuss the role of illusion and how consciously visible pretence may be. Theatricality, Reality, and Authenticity Leaving the theatrical relationships implicitly introduced in the cave analogy and going back to the explicitly presented philosophical problem of recognizing reality, we can see another aspect of theatricality suggested by Plato's text: How real or authentic are the events, characters or themes represented in the theater's 'place of action'? The spectators in the cave saw shadows and thought them to be reality. According to Weber, Plato's use of dramatic illusion to make his point does not merely reveal the problem of taking appearances for granted in terms of designating them as 'real' but also demonstrates a fundamental skepticism regarding the theater: • Mimesis or 'representation' of reality is only a 'shadow' of reality. • As such, representation cannot reveal truth but only illusion and deception. • Spectators are content with illusion. They are susceptible to being taken in. Mimesis most generally refers to imitation of what our senses perceive in artistic or literary form. Weber therefore sees in the cave analogy a view of the theater as presentation of illusion, an inferior kind of truth. Moreover, by not understanding the limitations imposed by their positioning in the cave (much less the relationship between the cave and the world outside the cave) and by not understanding that they are seeing illusion, the spectators are hindered from gaining an enlightened view of the world. Finally, they are not only prevented from discovering truth and Self, but they are content with the lie. Even if we reject Weber's interpretation or Plato's prejudices, the points are central to fundamental ideas about theater. Is what we see when we dim the lights and give ourselves up to the suspension of disbelief something that may enlighten us or something that will hinder us from understanding? Is the readiness to accept the possibility of a relevant truth of a fictional plot and made-up characters a liability to our self-discovery? These questions are not only of interest to the reflective spectator but to narratives of theater history since through the evidence of Plato's philosophical text, Weber is maintaining that skepticism is just as much a part of Western theater tradition as the belief that drama contains exalted or universal truths. Certainly, exploration of the relationship between everyday life and what occurs on the stage, as well as a fundamental skepticism regarding illusion, reality and Self, may be found in the kind of modern theatrical experimentation undertaken by Bertolt Brecht in his epic theater or in Samuel Beckett's play Waiting for Godot. Weber further notes connection between skepticism regarding truth in dramatic representations and linguistic skepticism, such as that expressed by J. L. Austin in "How to Do Things with Words." According to Austin, when language is extracted from the context of everyday life and actual situations, it loses its authenticity. The language used within the drama is therefore not only "inauthentic" but also "parasitic.' Communication theory regarding speech acts contends that when we use language in everyday life, we are responding to a complex communication context consisting of such factors as physical setting; occasion; time; and power relations, personalities or language habits of partners in conversation. 'Authentic' speech comes out of an authentic, unique situation, one in which speech is evoked by all of these complex factors. Seen from this perspective, it is easy to see the dramatic context as thoroughly contrived. The playwright creates the communication context, the personalities and communication habits of the characters and then 'parasitically' borrows speech that has been 'authentically' used in other contexts, but which is being repeated in the play for a purpose. The question becomes, if the characters are puppets or shadows, how can their speech be authentic? And if it is not, what are we to conclude about the relevance of the dramatic presentation to real life? Another, contemporary way to look at the problem of authenticity and dramatic representation might produce a completely different conclusion, namely that the real world is not any more real than the 'reality' on the stage. In a world which is increasingly 'staged' by politicians who want constituents to see the world from their perspective; by consumer industry wishing to create a reality in which a particular product is 'necessary' or 'desired'; or by media broadcasts presenting a limited view of an event as the reality of the event—in this kind of world, is there any absolute reality at all? And if so, is this any more real than any 'theatrical illusion'? These are questions that we also encounter in such twentieth century styles and schools of thought as absurdism. If the universe is meaningless, characters can speak only the truth of meaninglessness. The problems of the relationship between the theater and 'real life,' as well as the themes of illusion, meaning and deception in the theatrical space and in the everyday world are central to work of Bertolt Brecht, Jerzy Grotowski and others within twentieth century literary movements and dramatic as well as to the discussion of theater as a social institution and element of public discourse. II. The Desacralized Stage and the Epic Theater The Sacred Stage Two aspects of the sacred that relate to drama and theater are the fundamental religious experience itself and the reenactment of sacred events or dramatization of stories that serve to affirm or legitimize belief. In his essay on "Thinking Religion," Spanish literary scholar and philosopher Eugenio Trias describes religion as a symbolic event, consisting of the revelation of a divine "presence" and the "recognition" of this presence by a "witness." Having experienced the presence of the divine, the witness writes a "testimony" of the event, which then becomes a sacred text. In this dramatization or the religious experience, the divine entity is the 'actor'; the witness is the 'spectator'; and the 'plot' consists of the event inherent in the divine revelation. The purpose of Trias' essay is to find an aspect of religious experience as such, one that might defuse the focus on fundamental differences that keep members of diverse religions from accepting a common point of reference or religious experience. However, this dramatization of the original religious experience also implicitly provides a perspective on the connection between the religious experience and theatrical representation. In Europe of the Middle Ages belief expressed itself in ritualized, liturgical 'conversations' between the priest and the choir during Church services; in passion plays reenacting the trials of Christ; and in miracle and mystery plays depicting Bible stories or the lives of saints. In these theatrical events, we can clearly see a relationship between theater and the original religious experience as described by Trias since the theater becomes the place where the sacred text—the witness' record of original religious experience or divine revelation—is reenacted. It is the dramatic religious event, once removed from the original experience, recreated in copy in order to celebrate and perpetuate the experience for an audience not involved in the original event. The second face of the sacred stage is less explicit. Aside from depicting or reenacting the original drama of divine revelation or religious experience, the theatrical event may also be a conscious means of transmitting established religious values and belief or of establishing the cultural legitimacy of belief in the first place, through the use of dramatic representation. For example, when a spectator is presented with a reenactment of Christ's suffering at the Crucifixion, one may ask whether the purpose of the dramatization is merely to celebrate an event that the spectator already believes or is whether the performance is designed to push the spectator toward a belief. The answer may be available only through a study of the social and historical context of the play and the place and time of a specific performance. If the play is staged in Germany's Oberammergau, where the passion play is annually performed and watched by Christians desiring to share in this ritual, it would seem a celebration of communal religious belief that has already been established. The same play performed by Western Europeans in an African village of the early nineteenth century reveals a completely different purpose. Is the content of the play to be perceived by the spectators as 'truth'? As 'reality'? Is it presented to share belief or to influence the audience toward belief? Certainly the performances of Christ's suffering were undertaken to celebrate, but also to ingrain belief in the spectators. As a physical and public event and social experience, theater very concretely expresses not only the playwright, but the producing entity, and the social context of performance as co-author. The Birth of Tragedy Both of these aspects of the sacred can also be seen in Friedrich Nietzsche's The Birth of Tragedy , in which he discusses the religious, philosophical and psychological aspects of the Classic Greek Theater. In this interpretation, the roots of the Greek chorus can be traced back to the religious experience of ecstatic Dionysian pre-Hellenic cults, in which drug- or wine-induced rapture or mystical union with Nature played a dominant role. According to Nietzsche and other scholars, the rhythmic, choral odes of Greek Tragedy were a reference back to the dance and the music of these earlier rituals while the dramatized stories of Greek Tragedy that portrayed by the actors on the central stage, referred back to Apollo, a god associated with reason and carefully crafted, artistic representation. By unifying the chorus and the dramatized action in the play, Nietzsche saw the Greeks as reaffirming the cultural values of their own mythology, which had rejected the pure Dionysian and embraced the Apollonian. Moreover, by making this making this rhythmic verse a counterpoint to the centrally located dramatized action of the story, the stage was 'taming' Dionysius and yet giving due to an underlying unity with Nature. Seen from this standpoint, the stage was a place of cultural reaffirmation and representation of sacred principles. Similarly, the tragedies of Elizabethan England or French Classic Drama may be viewed as carrying 'sacred' religious or cultural beliefs and values, even where God and religion are not explicitly present. One such implicit presence of God rests in the situation of the tragic hero. One major prerequisite for the Aristotelian tragic hero is a fundamentally ethical and good character, but one which prone to a specific kind of error. That the hero must err is necessary since the punishment of pure goodness would be despicable, rather than tragic. Also necessary to the tragic context, however, is the divine, whether pagan, as in the case of the Greeks, or Christian, as in the case of Shakespeare; for if the individual (hero) is destroyed, there must be some larger meaning which prevails, if the audience is not to fall into despair. When Shakespeare's King Lear gives away his kingdom, misunderstands and curses his most loyal daughter, and finally goes mad, we must believe that God is watching, if Lear's fate is not to be construed as absurd. What would his suffering mean if the spectator does not imagine God watching? The tragedy of a character such as Lear, therefore, depends on a larger framework of goodness and rightness, that expressed by the good daughter Cordelia, that which survives the individual life. The idea of redemption may often be only implicitly present, but it is basic to Western tragedy. The idea of the sacred stage is one that relies on a resonance between reality and belief and to the idea that the stage may serve a sacred purpose, rising above the crowd in order to educate, enlighten or transmit culture. In exploring World Theater it is therefore useful to consider the basic dynamic of reenactment and the perpetuation of values or religious belief, since this will allow us to look beyond Christian or Western elements which may be used to describe developments in Western Theater, in order to identify reenactment or perpetuation in non-Christian or non-Western theater. The desacralized stage Modernism moved from looking at the world in terms of belief to viewing it in terms of secular theory: biology, physics, psychology, philosophy, history, or economics. Walter Benjamin used the word desacralization to describe this shifting focus, a concept which went on to pervade Western thought and art in the twentieth century. Due to the widespread dominance of Western culture through colonization or globalization, it is also important to discussion of global theater. If the 'resonance between reality and belief' as described in the previous segment is relevant to the idea of a sacred stage, it makes sense that the lack of resonance between reality and belief might characterize the desacralized stage. This desacralization is a main point in Benjamim's essay "What is epic theater?"—a discussion of Brecht's revolutionary theater of the early 20th century. Like Nietzsche, Benjamin refers to the tradition of Classic Greek Drama, when discussing the sacred aspects of the stage, describing it as rising "from the abyss" to a higher place, above the audience—philosophically and morally, as well as physically. However, unlike Nietzsche, Benjamin focuses not only on sacred aspects of drama, but also on the problem of illusion. As drama moved away from the representation of explicitly mythical or religious material, such as Greek myth or Bible stories, and moved toward the representation of bourgeois or everyday reality, theater became more focused on creating dramatizations that would seem real to spectators. The increased use of technology in creating sets and designing lighting added to the apparent reality of the theater experience. Thus, in addition to an exalted stage, the spectator experienced what has been called illusionist theater —theater requiring the suspension of disbelief, the identification with characters, or the virtual entry into the world of the play. On this stage, the spectator, like those in Plato's cave, are invited to believe what they see. In the modern theater, specifically in the theater of the early twentieth century, Benjamin sees this stage replaced by a "podium" such as that present in the theater of Bertolt Brecht's epic theater. Epic Theater The epic theater focused on changing relationships between "the stage and the public, the text and the production, the director and the actors." Rather than a place of illusion, magically conjuring up a world to which the spectators may give themselves up, the stage becomes a "podium" or an "exhibition space." The audience is not a "hypnotized mass" but a group of rational, "interested" spectators, who know they are watching a play and consciously considering its meaning outside of the play. (Benjamin, 520) In order to produce this kind of play, the director does not guide the actors toward "creating effects" (to encourage the illusion) but toward "taking a stand" (to which the spectator will respond); the actor, on the other hand, is no longer merely a "mime" (one who carries out orders) but one who is "taking stock of the role" (interacting personally with what the role is representing). Text is not interpreted by the production, but controlled by it. (Benjamin, 520) Looking at these shifts, it is easy to recognize that the focus in not primarily on the script and its interpretation—for example, how should we interpret Hamlet in this production—but on the medium, what interaction is occurring. The play is seen as a confrontation between everyday reality and the material of the play, between the spectator and the actor, the actor and the role, the director and the actor, and society and theater—all taking place in front of an audience aware of the fact that they are watching a play and being asked to take a stand. Especially important to the epic theater is the alienation effect. The alienation effect implies more than a lack of general identification with a character, more even than a refusal to empathize with a character. Rather it implies a critical distance which makes the spectator are of the theatricality of the moment, and of 'real' conditions which are not simply being "portrayed" in the production, but being "discovered" by it. Finally, alienation is largely achieved through 'interruption.' Brecht's plays are often interrupted with songs or texts which comment on the action or elaborate on principles represented in the action. In order to support this lack of illusory world of the play, Brecht also refused to use a smooth, causal sequence of scenes to create plot. Rather than tightly knit series of events which seem to, by nature, lead from one to the other, Brecht presented an 'episodic' structure of loosely associated scenes. This lack of causality was designed to force the spectator to consciously fill in gaps or put scenes together. This lack of harmonious coherence in the plot or in the characters was, in turn, designed to point to the lack of harmonious coherence in society or in social or perhaps even personal identity. The above aspects of epic theater may all be seen in Brecht's play The Good Woman of Szechuan. In the first scene of The Good Woman of Szechuan, Brecht presents the character Shen Te, who demonstrates her innate goodness by sheltering three disguised gods for the night. The gods reward her generosity by giving her enough money to buy a small business. However, after buying her small tobacco shop, she is assailed by people asking her for money. In the next scene, Shen Te disguises herself as an alleged male relative in an attempt to gain control over the parasites who have gathered around her. Having succeeded in ridding herself of most of these freeloaders, in the next scene, she promptly falls in love with an unworthy man named Sun. In the next scene, due to her own lack of willpower, she falls prey to her misguided love through the person of Sun's scrupulous mother, who convinces her to give up her rent money for something Sun wants. At the end of the play, she is penniless, alone, pregnant and accused of murdering the alleged male cousin, whose existence she had fabricated in the first place. The gods she sheltered at the beginning of the play are asked to judge her, but rather than help her, they merely leave—end of play. The loosely connected series of scenes discourages identification with Shen Te. In a so-called illusionist production, spectators might hear about Shen Te's personal history; or they might see why she is so naive or helpless and thus identify her journey as a tragedy. As it is, they see her in despair, but do not know her; and in the next scene, they see her already assailed by the parasites. Why doesn't she just say 'no'? The audience does not have enough information to 'feel' her motivation and so looks at her decisions and the situation with more distance. If this parable were presented on the sacred stage, on the other hand, spectators might learn more about the gods' purpose in testing humankind and, thus, at the end, see resolution, whether this comes in the form of punishment or a setting to rights of Shen Te's situation. However, because this kind of resolution does not belong to the desacralized stage of the epic theater, the gods merely depart, and the audience is left with questions: Is it possible to be generous in this world? What are the motivations for apparent kindness or generosity? Why do the gods give Shen Te money, only to leave her in the lurch at the end of the play? What kind of gods are these? What was Shen Te's responsibility? To further increase the alienation already incurred by the episodic structure, Brecht interrupts the episodes with songs: "Song of the Suicide" or "Song of the Waterseller Wang" or "Song of the Gods Disappearing on a Cloud." Because these songs do not serve to connect the already episodic arrangement of scenes, but rather to interrupt them wholly with reflective commentary on characters or action, they only increase the critical distance of the spectator. It is in this sense that the lack of continuity or illusion of coherence promotes critical distance and questioning in the audience. Aside from Brecht's social and political context and its relationship to Marxism appears a general stance of media-activism that interrogates medium, incorporates the spectator in the activity of drama, and throws the perhaps all too neat package of dramatic illusion off balance in order to gain an understanding of self-presence and self-discovery. This kind of 'media activism' is also present in Jerzy Grotowski's theater. Rich and poor theater Jerzy Grotowski's concepts of rich and poor theater, as described in his essay Towards a Poor Theater are an example of the confrontation between the theater and the meaninglessness or pain present in much 20th century thought. They may also be viewed as a further development of Brecht's formal exploration of the tension between the actor/action and the audience, the actor and the role, or the theater and the stage as 'place.' In terms of theatricality, it is a clear statement of the central importance of medium to meaning: rather than a fixed position of the spectator and a technologically achieved illusion, Grotowski wanted to explore the most basic relationship between the actor and the spectator. According the Grotowski, complex and technically elaborate theatrical spectacle is rich theater, that which tries to compete with television or film by increasing technological capabilities of the stage, incorporating electronic media, complex orchestrations of sound, visual imagery, illusion. According to Grotowski, the theater will always lose this competition because it will always remain "technologically inferior to film and television. Moreover, this competition will only to take the theater away from itself as medium. This conclusion drove Grotowski chose to explore what he called poor theater, a theater that went to the core of the theatrical experience. Like other experimental theater enterprises, such as the Living Theater in New York, the poor theater that Grotowski developed in his "theater laboratory" called for the dissolution of the proscenium configuration, not because this was faulty, but because this dissolution was the basis of the "theater laboratory" in which each drama or theatrical production could find its "proper spectator-actor relationship." In some productions, the actors acted among the audience, interacting with or ignoring them; in others they acted below the audience in a pit surrounded by a fence; in yet others they acted above the audience or perhaps even behind it. According to Grotowski's theory of production, each play evokes an organically corresponding physical set-up. Grotowski also rejected costume, saying that a piece of clothing, supposedly invested with a meaning of its own, was not capable of creating an "organic character." All that was necessary for Grotowski was the actor's transformation into the character—through gesture and physical technique, a transformation not to be accomplished in a dressing room, but onstage before the audience. Likewise, make-up was to remain relatively neutral; music would ideally be produced by the actors; rhythm would be created by the piece itself; and lighting would be confined mostly to simple illumination or non-illumination, sometimes including the audience, thus making them part of the action. Above all, this theater focused on the actor, whose "personal and scenic technique" he considered to be the "core of theater art." His theater therefore often resembled dance, the choreography of movement a tableau, but not one that the audience necessarily faced frontally or from which the audience itself was separate. Finally, as Growtoski claimed, his theater was not the result of a philosophy of art, but arose from "the practical discovery of and use of the rules of theater." That is, productions do not spring from preexisting aesthetic postulates; rather, as Sartre said, the "technique" led the way to the "metaphysics." Grotowski's disclaimer regarding his theoretical or philosophic impetus seems disingenuous, however, the moment he describes the actor's performance without make-up, costume or rich symbolic disguise as a "struggle with [his] own truth" or as "[an] effort to peel off the life mask…a provocation." Behind this statement certainly lies a theoretical impulse regarding the purpose of theater and the objectives of the theatrical experience. Cross pollination and intercultural influence The modern theater is an intercultural theater. Brecht was aware of Chinese Opera and Chinese Spoken Theater was aware of Brecht. Chinese theater remade Ibsen. Wole Soyinka modeled aspects of his drama on Greek Tragedy. The crosspollination in global theater, however, is sporadic and sometimes difficult to assess, due to the manner in which elements of one culture's theater are extracted and integrated into that of another culture, thus alienating the extracted element from its context and changing its meaning. There is also the danger that a foreign element may be completely misunderstood and thus distorted in the new context. What we see, as a result, is certainly mutual influence, although not necessarily intercultural merging of form or content. In speaking of the symbolic gesture of the traditional Chinese Opera, for example, Grotowski says: "…the hieroglyphic signs of the oriental theater are inflexible, like an alphabet, whereas the signs we use are skeletal forms of human action, a crystallization of a role, an articulation of the particular psycho-physiology of the actor." (Grotowski, 24) Here, Grotowski is referring to the traditional gestures of the Chinese Opera, which can be compared to ballet movements in the sense that they are fixed positions or gestures which are always to be performed in the same manner. Grotowski sees these gestures as 'hieroglyphic' because, like hieroglyphs, they are fixed visual symbols. For example, a character in a play may use a traditional hand gesture that refers to a gesture made by a specific historical character in a specific historical context—a battle, a conversation or other historically significant moment. Because spectators of the Chinese Opera were expected to know the language of the opera, this nonverbal gesture is like a combination of letters or a pictogram (hieroglyph) representing a specific meaning for the audience. Grotowski is comparing this symbolic gesture to the physical movement of his actors, which, after they are trained in 'knowing' their bodies and exploring the possibilities of expressing themselves through their bodies, does not speak in 'set gestures' but is freely expressive and uses some physical 'language' or 'articulation' that Grotowski perceives as generally 'human' or somehow 'natural.' At first glance this makes sense, until we think of the ways in which the body is a cultural object. According to contemporary communication theory, nonverbal behavior and many physical attributes are neither innate nor 'natural,' but are culturally constructed. In fact, communication theory allows for the cultural basis of many fundamental physiological experiences, such as visual perception, posture, gait, or such physiological attributes as muscular development and body shape. Thus, from the perspective of intercultural studies, culture is one foundational element of not only all verbal and nonverbal language, but also of all physical movement or expression in general. From this perspective, it is hardly possible that Grotowski's 'natural' movements are less culturally symbolic or less "hieroglyphic" than the more consciously constructed symbolic gestures of the Peking Opera. Grotowski merely sees the 'code' of the Chinese Opera because it is foreign to him; the cultural aspects of our own nonverbal behavior, the articulations of our very Western bodies, do not occur to him because they are familiar and therefore 'invisible.' More aware of the relativity of cultural code was Eugenio Barba in his search for intercultural connections within a global mythical theater. In his book on Barba and his theater group Odin Teatret, entitled Floating Islands, editor Ferdinando Taviani describes the theater scene of the mid-1960's: …The artistic milieu in Stockholm is among the first in Europe to organize Happenings, the latest novelty from the USA. In these Happenings, the tendencies and agitation of avant-garde painting and music ally themselves with the avant-garde theater: the destruction of significance, the rupture of the "information circuit". But also the eloquence of pure fact. Once again, and in a form apparently disguised, the art of theater seems to be nothing else but an anthology of all other art forms. (Taviani, 9) Over the last forty years or so, Barba's theater company has invited Balinese dancers, dramatists, actors, directors from all over the world to work with his troupe in Denmark. Similarly, the troupe has spent long periods of time in foreign environments, rural and urban, within established theater institutions, schools, and everyday environments, trying to find elements of theatrical expression with are truly intercultural. In general, although cross-cultural influences in the increasingly globalized world of theater of the twentieth century become more and more prevalent, care must be taken in assessing the nature or depth of the influence in question. Is the material cosmetically or organically applied? Has the element imported merged forms from each culture or created something completely 'other'? What cultural misunderstandings remain apparent in the adoption of elements of dramatic form or content? Approaching modern drama: media theory and medium In contemporary media theory, such as that of Friedrich Kittler, the theater might be discussed in terms of its 'means,' i.e., sensory input through light, sound, or experience of physical space. Some branches of media theory propose the idea that the physical and technological possibilities within the theater (as opposed to literature on paper or moving images on a screen) will determine what it is possible to say. What, for example, is the relationship between idea and concrete sensory experience? In other words, what is the difference between reading a narrative description of a fist fight, which employs imagery, metaphor or symbolism to create the 'presence' of the event for the reader, and watching a fight on stage, listening to the grunts and punches of the fighters, feeling the tension between two physical bodies, perceiving the tension in the spectators. What is the effect of 'reading a 'backdrop' in a fictional text and 'experiencing the backdrop' in the theater? How does this affect the focus of the reader/spectator? How does it influence the perception or understanding of the event? Of reality? To say that the technical characteristics of a medium determine what can be said within that medium, is different than saying that a thought may look different when expressed through different media. It is saying that the medium influences our field of vision to the extent that it may promote understanding in one direction and limit it in another. Take, for example, the telephone: what significance does color take on in experience expressed via telephone? If we communicate a story by means of telephone, what do we leave out and how does this effect the meaning or what can be said? An example of media influence described by Kittler in his book Discourse Networks may be seen in the invention of the gramophone. Kittler maintains the when the technology of sound recording developed, humankind discovered the idea of language as merely another form of noise, allowing us to distance ourselves from a romantic notion of language. If this proposition of media influence is accepted, what are the possibilities and the constraints of the medium theater? Concepts such as those introduced by Weber, Benjamin, Trias, Grotowski or Kittler point up complex relationships that should be a main focus in not only the study of modern theater but in everyday spectator awareness and critical discussions in the public sphere. Works Cited: Benjamin, Walter. "Was ist Episches Theater?" Gesammelte Schriften II. 2. Auflage. Frankfurt am Main, 1999. 519-539. Grotowski, Jerzy. Towards a Poor Theatre. New York: Touchstone, 1968 Kittler, Friedrich. Discourse Networks 1800/1900. Trans. Michael Metteer. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990 Taviani, Ferdinando. "Bird's-Eye View." Floating Islands. Eugenio Barba. Holstebro, Denmark: Thomsens Bogtrykkeri, 1979 Trias, Eugenio. "Thinking Religion: the Symbol and the Sacred." Religion: Cultural Memory in the Present. Ed. Jacques Derrida and Gianni Vattimo. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998. 95-110. Weber, Samuel. Theatricality as Medium. New York: Fordham University Press, 2004