What is Theatre’s Job?

Rebecca Coleman recently posted in her theatre blog, “The Art of the Biz”, a short article on “Entertainment versus Provocation: What is Theatre’s Job?” What a great topic to stir up conversation. There is a lot of religion around this and it is certainly worthwhile to debate at every stage in an artist’s career. I believe it is virtually unanswerable, but the asking of it provokes clarity and vision in the artist no matter what camp you pitch your tent in.

I think of it as asking “Nutrition versus Flavour: What is a Chef’s Job?” – creating a dichotomy when, in the finest examples of the craft, the two are not mutually exclusive. A comedian would say that provocation is entertainment. A person who loves mystery novels and puzzles would feel cheated by an entertainment that gave up its resolution too early, or too simplistically. A great story of revenge would not be satisfying if the antagonist did not provoke our moral outrage, making us wish he’d get his just dessert. And a story would fail us if it did not leave us with something pertaining to the here and now; whether to confirm our hopes in a happy ending or to shock us by revealing a dark, but familiar evil of the human condition. Provocation is at the heart of our most classic and most contemporary entertainments.

I believe the dichotomy is in “Preaching versus Playing”. In the early stages of childhood development, we play games with children that have to do with sneaking up and shouting “Boo!” Normally this behaviour provokes the primal fear response. But because the child is playing a game with someone known and safe, the response is expressed as laughter. It is the sense of safety and trust placed in the environment that allows “play” to happen.

This is where I see the audience of today’s shrinking theatre. They’re a bit shy of playing because the last few times they did they got burned, or someone cheated on the prize. To compensate, the artists have turned to preaching; telling people why art is good for them and how culturally bankrupt they will be if they don’t support it. Well, when was the last time you genuinely felt like doing something because someone shouted “It’s good for you.”?

I’ve had the unique pleasure to work with a theatre company who regularly sells out all of its performances. In most cases the entire run will be sold out before the middle of the first week. How is this possible? I think it has to do with what Aaron posted as “starting a tribe”. Which, if you follow Aaron’s links through to Seth Godin’s talk, has to do with becoming a leader of a group who shares common values. Like Godin’s idea of group organization (which he says is 10,000 years old) theatre has to turn back to an older model. We were the story tellers, councilors, educators and newspapers of our tribes. Making good, quality theatre is part of the solution, of course. But, as anyone in business would say, making a “better mousetrap” is not addressing the whole picture.

To get our audience back, I think we have to get them to trust us. We have to give them their sense of confidence by not telling them what is good for them. And I think it is the artist’s job to develop and reward his audience by acknowledging its shared values and being true to them. If you bulls**t them, just like cheating a kid in a game, they’ll stop wanting to play with you.

To go back to the culinary metaphor; I compare the audience to the customer base of a restaurant. Remember a time in Vancouver (it was only the 70s) when there were virtually no ethnic restaurants? In about a decade Vancouverites became a lot more “foody” and developed the confidence to experiment and become the loyal supporters of “their favourite” Thai, Japanese or French restaurant. Part of that had to do with the quality of the product, but the other half of that relationship came from the shared set of values surrounding the food.

With all the tools we have at our disposal today such as social networking sites, twitter and other web 2.0 applications, we can “find our tribe”, as Aaron quotes, and offer to lead them. I am confident that theatre will not go the way of the dinosaur, no matter how bad an economy gets. It is too close to our innate mode of communication. If Peter Brook can wander post-war Germany and find cabarets being performed in bombed-out buildings, we can certainly find our audience.

So I would say that theatre’s job is to find its audience, not in a generalized way that “entertains” or “challenges” them as if they a non-descript mass; a restaurant never says it is simply feeding a group of people. The audience is sophisticated, opinionated and has a lot of information at its disposal. It wants dialogue and memorable experiences. We have to cultivate the energy to meet that expectation if we want them to come out and surpass it if we want them to come back for more.

The Immediate Theatre

Peter Brook’s “The Empty Space”.

Chapter 4, The Immediate Theatre.

STEPHEN ATKINS [Vancouver] The Immediate Theatre is the theatre of the fresh. In this chapter Brook generously positins himself as a fellow “student” of the art. The most valuable thing I have taken from this book, and that I continue to practice years later is a tolerance for ambiguity. This is largely because, as Brook implies, performance is constantly recreated. Film is a representation of the past. There are great and timeless films, but a popular film loses its “playability” in 10 years. Production designs for theatre have an even shorter life span according to Brook. Even beyond the design elements which might incorporate fashionable colors or costume details borrowed from popular culture, the character of a performance changes in the course of a run. Opening nights are filled with tension and newness, the edgy risks of the new production are highlighted because they have not been done before an audience yet. By second night, the audience is not as exposed because they know it has been done at least once.

In this chapter, more than in the others, Brook addresses Time and the theatre. In a cast of older and younger performers, you can see the differences in actor training techniques and the practices of different “generations”. Brook calls upon all the ranks in a company to aid in the art of reinvention and re-creating (of play-ing) during rehearsals. He speaks of the importance of improvisation, not to indulge in the self or for its own sake, but to step outside of the defined and preconceived and begin to create a creative language unique to the needs of the present work.

Brook also talks about the director in contemporary theatre and the need to guide and unify without a strict pedagogy. A director must keep an eye on all elements of the performance from the shapes suggested by the floor plan to the context of the performance in the culture of its audience. He also speaks of a kind of balancing act, seeing the merits of both the “physical” and “psychological” approaches to performance and always outlines the need for adaptability while serving one vision. Discussion of this chapter is probably better served by comparing experiences in one’s performance and directing with those in the book.

Finally Brook outlines that the search is ultimately a search for form. As we progress forward, sideways and sometimes backward, the art of performance progresses as well. For this reason, there is never likely to be a “World Theatre” (p. 135) but there will be situations where a form will reach a moment of achievement that makes all distinctions and labels (Deadly, Holy, Rough and Immediate) redundant when compared to the lasting impression it leaves. We are always on the move. One of the hardest things for a young actor to do is to place value in the act of training. We are a society that validates Victorian ideals of forward progress. Reinvention seems counter-productive. Athletes understand the value of training, musicians and dancers do as well. But actors have a task of making their work seem effortless, effacing or masking the evidence of labour. The formula that Brook discusses (Theatre = R r a) is a great tool to examine exactly what we do. Theatre is Repetition, representation and assistance. Repetition gives technical perfection, confidence and strength, but it is hollow. The act of representation breathes life into the work, searching for the immediate, the real and comparing it to the fake. Assistance comes from the director, who is a privileged observer and guide, and also from the audience, who assists by participating: by making it meaningful and allowing the truth of the performance to become a truth of life, for two or so hours.

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The Rough Theatre

Peter Brook’s “The Empty Space”.

Chapter 3, The Rough Theatre.

STEPHEN ATKINS [Vancouver] Rough Theatre is the theatre of tattered edges, dirt, makeshift and make-do. In direct contrast to the Holy, the Rough gives more validity to down-to-earth crudeness than to the eloquence of prayer (p. 71). Brook reminds us that theatre can exist in an attic or a bombed out theatre because the audience recognizes its necessity and purpose and that one of the responsibilities of the theatre is to meet this expectation of necessity (the “usefulness” of performance). Whether it is to provide an hour of escape during wartime or to rouse the spirit of revolution, the rough theatre uses whatever is at hand to fulfill its purpose in a practical manner.

Brook points out that there is a kind of antagonism between the rough and the holy; one is decidedly less high-falootin’ than the other. But he also reminds us that while the Rough Theatre makes an effort to exist outside of style it, in fact creates its own (while denying that it has – a knd of reverse snobbery). A movement in popular music comes to mind. Many are aware of the “alternative” music scenes which cropped up in the last decade or so. This genre-word sprang up to confront the overproduced sound of studio and techno bands, but after a while it formulated itself. The word “alternative” which, in its purest sense should refer to a vastness of possibilities, comes to mean a quite strictly defined look and sound. It has become quite easy to identify the “alternative” in the marketplace by the culture of imitation that it has propogated (the deadly).

In discussing the slope between the rough and the deadly, Brook looks to Brecht; a subject anyone interested in performance cannot overlook. But the “Brechtian” elements of contemporary theatre can often be seen as a victim of their own importance. Brook criticizes misreadings and half-digested imitations of Brecht’s work in this chapter. He does make a good point when he suggests that one should consider the context of Brecht’s work. I am of the opinion that today’s audiences are more skeptical, more intellectually engaged and already more alienated than Brecht’s original audience. Popular media culture and post-modern practices such as the displacement of symbols and the fracturing of narrative have conditioned us to be judgmental and subject illusion to scrutiny (maybe even creating an illusion of scrutiny: scrutiny as entertainment?). Perhaps this is why Brecht said what he did near the end of his days; that the theatre should have naivety as well.

As he does, Brook ambles quite comfortably from one topic to another in this chapter; from history to anthropology to politics to an actor’s studio work. He draws the reader to Shakespeare as an example of a theatre where the rough and the holy coexist and seem to energize each other by their contrasting qualities. He is a advocate of connecting the work on stage to its surroundings by using costume, setting (or no setting) to give the action of the play meaning and to assist in the fluid interchange between the outer and inner worlds that Shakespearean structure navigates so freely.

I would like to highlight one section that really stood out for me this time around. It is quite short; pages 77 to 79 where Brook addresses the simplification of the terms “psychological” and “naturalistic”. It interests me because the first hurdle one addresses in actor training revolves around the distinction between playing emotion and playing action. In good practice you want to discourage emotion and encourage action. But there comes a point where one leads the other and they seem (to the outside eye) one and the same. It is touched on in this section. I know that many of the actors studying in the studio have, at times, been exasperated by this, but I honestly think of this as the first lesson of the actor in training.

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The Holy Theatre

Peter Brook’s “The Empty Space”.

Chapter 2: The Holy Theatre

STEPHEN ATKINS [Vancouver] Holy Theatre the theatre of the invisible made visible. Brook calls for a theatre that not only offers the possibility of presenting the “invisible” but also the conditions that make its perception possible. He presents four pioneers of the Holy; Merce Cuningham, Samuel Beckett, Jerzy Grotowski and The Living Theatre of Julian Beck and Judith Malina. In these four sections convey what one could take to be the main values of a Holy Theatre.

1) The importance of a tradition, or knowledge of one’s place in the evolution of one’s discipline.

2) The invisible can never really be perceived by pointing directly at it. It must be evoked through symbolism that has clarity. By clarity, I think he means a truth that is not vague but has immediate resonance without necessarily being immediately readable (This = That).

3) He makes an excellent point of showing how one’s art has to be validated by providing its practitioners a living. There are implied questions here to the reader; “What would you consider a living?” “How would you arrange your life so that you could serve your art and have it serve you back?” “Where does your work and your community lie? Is it in a friendly environment where there is a unity of values and tension shared by the work and its audience, or is it in hostile territory where its value might be to divide and provoke its audience?”

4) The Holy Theatre often contains its opposite. With moments of apotheosis come moments of derision. We cannot see all of the invisible at once and must be knocked back down to earth. It seems to be an essential aspect of the human condition, which a Holy Theatre could not deny without becoming deadly.

This chapter makes brief mention of Tradition and its role in the theatre, and references several areas of inquiry that were coming into the fore at the time of writing. He calls it a “rich and dangerous eclecticism” (p. 63). Superficiality is, as he has pointed out, the road to deadliness. But, ironically, so is tradition. This contradiction seems to have become the backbone of the work conducted at Paris’ International Centre for Theatre Research. There is an essay, “Peter Brook and Traditional Thought” by Basarab Nicolescu Translated by David Williams. Basarab Nicolescu is a quantum physicist from the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, University of Paris 6.

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The Deadly Theatre

Peter Brook’s “The Empty Space”.

Chapter 1: The Deadly Theatre.

STEPHEN ATKINS [Vancouver] Reading Brook’s essay on The Deadly Theatre (even re-reading it after several years) is a bit like taking a splash of cold water in the face. The first of the four essays of “The Empty Space” is a wake up call where Brook describes the “best and the worst” of theatre. This chapter leaves you with the feeling that not much has changed in commercial and mainstream theatre practice since 1968 when Brook wrote it. What was deadly then is just as deadly today.

The term “Deadly Theatre” does not refer to a specific genre of work or a particular type of theatre (e.g. commercial, community, political or musical comedy); it refers to a practice. The deadly can be found in a “sure ticket” opera or an over-toured hit, but can also be found in a moment of a performance or in a week of rehearsals or in the habitual practices of an actor. As he makes his way through his topic, Brook makes some penetrating observations, lining up all the “usual suspects”. Performer, director, playwright, critic and even the audience member all bear responsibility for creating the deadly.

A student once told me that she thought the book was pretentious rubbish, but confessed to only having read this first chapter. She was an insightful, sensitive and practical woman who had been a school teacher for many years. I was so surprised by her reaction that I reread the chapter, looking for (and finding) what offended her. I think Brook is speaking in the reformist tone of the late sixties and seventies. He jars the reader and makes polite but firm demands about what he wants changed. He respects his reader, throwing out a series of implied questions about the problem that can sound like finger pointing if taken the wrong way.

In his opening paragraphs Brook reminds us of the boring and pompous theatre we can sometimes mistake for “culture”, which we swallow like bitter medicine because we’ve been bullied into thinking it is good for us. Television has trained us to be disengaged critics, judging things based on our personal likes and dislikes rather than their purpose and merit. Our preoccupation with art that imitates life has skewed our perception of excellence. We often praise skilled imitation instead of truth. It is in this observation that Brook makes a strong platform for his views on process. He points out that in order to make good theatre the rehearsal process must re-enter a creative process and re-discover the text as it applies to the living compnents of the performance in progress. It should have roots in the time, place, country, beliefs and tensions of the people creating and attending it.

Brook makes his best points in his conclusion where he says he is not against fun or frivolity. He is against superficiality when it is being practiced without knowing it. This chapter also begins his process of stripping the stage back to “The Empty Space” by asking how to connect the stage to its context. He discusses his various experiences in touring a show to audiences of different geographical, political and economic backgrounds and how these factors impacted upon the work.

Just so you know, the student who found the book to be pretentious changed her view by the time she got to the second chapter. Have a good read.

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Brook

Peter Brook’s “The Empty Space”.

STEPHEN ATKINS [Vancouver] For those of you familiar with Peter Brook’s body of work, this post will seem redundant. For students or people new to the theatre world, he is one of the masters of the craft who should be studied. We all can benefit from the experiences of someone who has had such a long and widely influential career.

Peter Brook is probably one of the most influential directors of the 20th Century. He has had an impact on the study of theatre since the late 60s, with the publishing of his first book “The Empty Space”. I remember my first reading of it at age 19 and realizing the boundaries I had placed around what I thought was theatre. In graduate school we examined his Mahabharata. As an instructor, all of us in the department took our students down to Seattle to see his Hamlet in 2002.

Brook’s work inarguably stands apart. He points to the most basic components of  live theatre; “story” and “event”. The first of his books, “The Empty Space” is a reflection of the reductionist attitude he adopts in this first, and probably most influential of his books. I like to think of him as a kind of chemist who has identified the four basic elements of what theatre is made. Going back to read The Empty Space is an opportunity to get re-acquainted with the Brook “periodic table” consisting of the Deadly, Holy, Rough and Immediate theatres. The next four posts will be notes and questions from each of the chapters. Here is a good page featuring his bio.

One of his most widely acclaimed and criticized works, The Mahabharata, has sparked debate on interrcultural collaboration and cultural appropriation. Here is an excellent article on the exigencies of intercultural and intersemiotic translation for any readers familiar wifh the play or who may have seen the film.

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