Marranca, Bonnie. Ecologies of Theater.
"How do biology and the body determine the human drama?" (xiv).
"The word ecology, which derives from the Greek oikos, meaning 'home' or 'place to live,' was used by nineteenth-century German zoologist Ernst Haeckel to describe the relationship of organisms to their organic and inorganic environment. I have enlarged this definition to contemplate the world of a work as an environment linked to a cultural (aesthetic) system. Texts themselves are always alive in the world, finding new life in the way they are absorbed into the works of artists through the ages and in the subjectivity of each reader/spectator. A text, then, can be considered an organism, and a collective of texts, images, or sounds an ecosystem. The interaction of this ecosystem and its cultural system elaborates an ethic of performance I want to acknowledge" (xiv).
"The ecology perspective I propose is not that of traditional literary studies organized primarily around the rhetoric of writings on nature or metamorphosis, or genres, like the eclogue and pastoral, or the nature/culture argument and existential crisis. Such points of departure are anthropocentric. Nor do I have any affinity for the apocalyptic end-of-nature school of thought or the frequently anti-technology, anti-modern aspects of the 'deep ecology' philosophy of New Age thinking" (xv).
"My linkage of ecology and aesthetics in the search for newer and deeper kinds of knowledge outlines th biocentric worldview in certain works, a nonhierarchical embrace of the multiplicity of species and languages in a work, in the world, that can address the issue of rights in nonsentient beings" (xvi).
"Any modern ecology must take into account [Chekhov's] breakthrough in conceiving dramatic space as landscape and bringing a new sense of nature into the drama. In a more developed symbolist dramaturgy, his contemporary Maeterlinck pushed theater further in this direction by uncovering the semantic powers of space. Symbolist aesthetics ushered in the new world of theater that transformed setting into performance space, and Maeterlinck was fully to bring together natural history and human history as the subject of drama" (xvi).
"Moving from modern drama to contemporary avant-grade performance, more than eye decades ago Allan Kaprow, clarifying his own happenings and other performance activities, defined the new performance spaces as 'environments,' and idea that Richard Schechner extended into a theory of environmental theater, whose attention to levels of feedback offered a view of what today might be considered community ecology. This direction in performance thinking signaled an essential recognition of the organic, living relationship between the body and its experience of space or environment, moving performance from the confines of a theater into the world. In the fifties and sixties, many different theaters and artists reconciled the interaction of performance space and spectator, among them The Living Theatre, Peter Brook, The Polish Theatre Laboratory, Théâtre du Soleil, The Bread and Puppet Theatre, Anna Halprin, Meredith Monk, and The Performance Group. Similarly, in the visual arts, site-specific pieces and installations (the direct descendant of happenings), whose subject is the sense of place of a work, reflect an evolving awareness of ecology, space, and spectatorship. History has shown that each new vision of art reconfigures human life in the natural world, and surely any elucidation of a theater ecology begins in the understanding of performance space" (xvii).
"I refer to an ecology of theater rather than, say, an ecology of performance because I wish to preserve the historical concept of theatrum mundi, which has always linked the theatrical world, the world of society, and the natural world in the history of ideas. The feeling that all the world's a stage is a familiar one, and performance in everyday life a contemporary way of being in the world, but scholars once wrote of the theater of plants and the theater of insects" (xvii).
Gertrude Stein. "As early as her first play, What Happened, Stein has decided that a play didn't have to tell a story. What happened was the theater experience itself. In other words, the creation of an experience was more important than the representation of an event....Stein shifted attention from the text to the reader (or spectator). In every sense, the perceiving intelligence took precedence over the art object, whose status as an autonomous, self-contained totality was diminished. The observer and the art object were not separate but interdependent, making art and life indistinguishable. [1] In this way both [Stein and Marcel Duchamp] welcomed the 'ready-made,' the everyday, into their works, becoming part of the century-long avant-garde search for the real" (6).
Stein play as landscape. "This spatial conception of dramaturgy elaborates the new, modern sense of a dramatic field as performance space, with its multiple and simultaneous centers of focus and activity, replacing the conventional nineteenth- (6) century time-bound, fixed setting of the drama. The effect is a kind of conceptual mapping in which the activity of thought itself creates an experience" (7).
1934 essay Plays. Marranca writes, "A landscape is made up of things and people to be viewed in relation to each other. It doesn't have to come up to you; you must discover for yourself what is there. The pictorial composition replaces dramatic action, emphasizing frontality and the frame, flatness and absence of perspective. The play is just there. It has no center. Whatever you find in it depends on your own way of looking" (7). "you complete the view" (8).
"Stein was not concerned with creating a drama, but an image. In her world, seeing has nothing to do with remembering, which is why she wanted to negate memory and intensify the present, continuous sense of becoming in space. This affirmation of space and ontological process underlies the phenomenological thinking Stein brought into the theater, with its emphasis on observation and description, and the perception of an activity rather than its definition" (8).
Stein playing with authorial voice, authorial intention, authority. 10
Stein and incorporating her personal everyday into writing process and product. 10. Intrusion of the commonplace, organic quality. 11
"Knowledge should proceed from the activity of being totally absorbed in the present moment of looking at someone, something. That is why Stein valued what she thought of as the flatness of the human mind, it's continual present news, over the contours of human nature, which she considered to be representative of the past, of memory. Experience was privileged over history" (16).
"The idea of geography, as state of mind or place and personal mapping, is a major theme of Stein's writing" (16).
"From the perspective of ecology, Stein and Cage formulated strikingly like-minded biocentric worldviews in their treatment of all material for composition as natural phenomena. The sounds of birds interrupt the human voice, plant life shares the environment with human life. Their reaching out to the natural world, to nature as process, creates the feeling of the open air in their world, the importance given to space as a luxurious field of activity and wonder, a landscape of unlimited centers of focus. This spatial unfolding of composition distances itself from linearity as time flows into space: duration, not sequence, is what matters. Both Stein and Cage conceived ideas about art by observing nature, making art more like life rather than the other way around. For them life itself made a composition. In their generosity of spirit they were interested in everything that came their way, a quality of worldly engagement that led to a deep regard for inclusiveness and differentiation and a fondness for the 'found' phrase, object, event. They gloried in the ordinary, Stein in the lives of words, Cage in the lives of sounds, and more lovingly, in their writings the everyday activities and comings and goings of friends -- in short, the pleasures of company -- are casually recorded as text. In particular, their longtime companions, Alice B. Toklas and Merce Cunningham, are embedded in words. Conversation is the key to their compositions" (21).
"A composer as naturalist, Cage didn't merely write musical notation, he documented the sounds of the world, bringing human, animal, vegetable, mineral, industrial, meteorological, natural, and artificial sounds together just as they exist in the environment....He was in love with the ordinary" (26).
"Sound as conceived as an environment, another kind of landscape, sounds em selves as points in space, each one creating its own space and the spaces constantly multiplying, yet everything a part of everything else....He made music attentive to geography, or rather, he brought the sense of place into music" (26).
"Every event could be an occasion for interaction, as if nothing existed so well as in the company of others. Oh, things could be appreciated for their own sake, but it wasn't the same without the heightened pleasure of conviviality" (26).
"He regarded the natural world as a theater of sound in much the same way as the early naturalists saw it as a theater of plants" (29).
"He exalted the theatrical because it welcomed the social aspect present in the spectator/listener experience, envisioning a future of music that would offer a new example of social interaction. World as theater was all process, potentiality, splendor of chance meeting in the price of music" (29). Theatrum mundi.
"It was not a question of distinguishing between the natural and the (30) artificial realms of experience but of recognizing the infinitely various interactions between human beings and the landscape, each transforming the other in time and space. He simply didn't see human beings in conflict with nature or glorify nature as separate from society, nor was he a romantic in search of the lost wilderness, but a futurist at heart" (31).
Heiner Muller despoiled shore medeamaterial
"The monuments are already crumbling, whole cities cry out in putrefaction, people disappear into landscapes at the moment of catastrophe" (71).
"Müller uses the texts of the past like found objects from an archaeological dig, dreaming in them, reshaping, recasting them: burnt offerings from the altar of war. Everything is material. His writing, a history of imagery" (72).
"Müller expands the range of history in drama by adding geography to it. Until the life of societies fragmented into separate branches of knowledge, geography had always been part of the narrative of history. But the sense of place was gradually overshadowed by the domestication of dramatic form, trapped in its agoraphobic four walls. Müller writes of civilizations, not towns, of cultures and classes, not personalities. His subject is at once collective and historical, unconcerned with the fleeting interests of individual chronology. In this meltdown of time the notion of dramatic subject is on its way to being reinvented" (73).
"His drama is a kind of travel writing: essayistic, narrative, intimate, ethnographic, surveying the battlefield of tourism....His world is that of curved space-time, his unities past, present, and future" (73).
"His plays are journeys, his companions voices. Unidentified speakers surround him. The voices are like winds, shifting direction and scattering language debris from continent to continent" (74).
"Always Müller returns to the landscape. His attitude toward nature is finally one of politics. In the timepiece of evolution, what is human history to natural history and where does the concept of presence begin" (75).
"Müller's writing fiercely acknowledges natural history in the history of the world, until now one of the many histories whose narratives have been left out of History. That knowledge suggests an entirely new perspective on theatrical space, the behavior of character in relation to environment, as radical a change as naturalism once brought to the age of determinism " (75). Speaking for on behalf of nature. Recognizing presence and importance of nature environment. A fuchsian systems awareness.
"Müller's plays return the theater to its original scene, the landscape....The proper home for his plays is the parterre of Charlottenburg Palace, or beneath the triumphal arch of Brandenburg, gateway to paradise" (76).
"The end of human history, the end of a species, will first occur as a destruction of the landscape. In the great sweep of DESPOILED SHORE MEDEAMATERIAL LANDSCAPE WITH ARGONAUTS the history of the world leaps from the beginning of colonization to nuclear war. Here in the theater of his death Jason watches his body merge with the landscape, just as the Pompeiians were sculpted in monuments, their bodies their gravestones, just as the flesh of the Jews turned the sky a sinewy red and the atomized victims of Hiroshima paved the streets where they lived. At such times it is impossible to separate the drama from natural history, the ecological theme subsumed all political issues. It is the final solution" (76).
Woman and body as landscape 77. Gyn/ecology
Body as text Artaud Brecht Pirandello 87. Social body. Self as text 88.
"what does role-playing mean as a model of human behavior? How can it make one more conscious and critical in a life experience? What are the kinds of 'performance acts' one can engage in? Is performance an art or an activity? Does it aestheticize emotions or draw one closer to them?" (89).
Our obsession with spectacle...we spectacularlize a lot. "The kind of imagery rehearsal taking place all around us elaborates a profoundly disturbing mode of thinking because it regards history only in terms of spectacle. The growth of the media and communications in the evolution of society has made theatricalism into the twentieth-century political/art form: it subsumes both ideology and individuality as our way of being in the contemporary world. The social sciences have shown their limitation in creating a profile of the performing self. It is time to recover performance theory from the social sciences and return it to the realm of art and philosophy. What we need is an ethics of performance" (91).
"Theatre of images" ... "It was a theater that turned away from such things as psychology, realistic conventions, and audience identification and instead reorganized the sense of space in theater, recast the actor, created texts in which words were sometimes used for their plastic qualities, and made technology an expressive feature of the work. Here was a theater in which imagery carried the weight of the narrative, which was usually dominated by dialogue. The present moment was emphasized, rather than there being an attempt to represent a past event. One of the chief intentions of those who created this theater was to cultivate a new spectator, one who would experience time and space and narrative in a more immediate, sensual way. With this theater a new visual style came into American theater. The theater of images, incidentally, did not exclude writing, but generated a textuality in which many more parts of the stage were emphasized as a language. All the elements did not have to serve the text. The works were highly self-conscious; they were about theater, about the act of creation, and, like much art of the time, they were very space- and process-oriented" (92).
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