Mitin’s Magazine 51 (Spring 1994), ed. Dmitry Volchek, secretary Olga Abramovich, pp. 116-127

 

DIALOGUE BETWEEN MONSTER AND MINSTREL

 

Remarque: Reason the playmaker and Reason the premeditator.

 

Reason the playmaker involutes itself to the instrumented test to the genesis. However, what is genesis if not the other mine? In the Reason the playmaker any agitation is absent. It is always a free aspiration to the only possible way. It is always an exodus.

Reason the premeditator is always a return. It is labour on a single spot; labour that has not been a subject of travelling.

 

The wanderer who plays it seeks new impressions. He, as any tamer of illusions, feeds them more with his own expectations rather than with the landscape.

 

He is a premeditating inhabitant, who measures the rhythms of his own life with deeds and in name of that part of land that was granted to him for his existence.

 

The premeditator returns home.

 

The playmaker goes through the premeditator, and into the Orchard.

 

Reason the premeditator and Reason the playmaker, alias Monster and Minstrel, alias the Beast and the Goat. Monster is on stage, Minstrel in the auditorium. Theatre, overcoming the eternal dualism of the stage-auditorium relation, forms itself as an integral whole: World-Myth-Orchard. The Goat enters the Beast.

 

Monster: A normal human-actor, in my understanding a madman, unlike the actor, master of personal stage directing. Playing one role he will already be unable to play the rest. It overfills him, this role. It possesses him, devouring from the inside his variative capabilities, nurturing in him often odious crummy text – an image of himself. The light of the universal potential fades.

 

Mistrel: In contemporary culture I and YOU are exhausted. The pronouns in general are exhausted. A story about I from me to you the story about YOU from me to you he, she – all that is exhausted, whatever modalities we would invest into these stories. They do not stand today against the multilevel passion for the alien, for the other-world-ly, that other world from us. A man is exhausted, as a mental koan. To be more precise, that mental coan is solved forever. It is torn open, untied as an yin yang knot, deciphered, unlaced, dissolved. That is why we carefully return to ‘I’ and ‘you’. We again take in our hands the ends of the untied, untressed, discerned threads because a solved riddle (likewise, a human being) becomes closer and more important to us as it multiplies us by itself. The solution is actually us! It is always us because through it and straight from us is the way to Heidegger and back! Instead of a name, to a pronoun!

 

Civilisation?! It is curious. From Aleut to Eliot. And back!

 

Why?

 

Monster: Text is not a human being, it is dead, it is impossible to work with it – you need to animate it; or to put it into another human being and then to animate it in him, starting to investigate it; or to put it into oneself. However, if you put it in someone else, it will come live in them and when that someone will go away from you, the text will go away from you with him! Only in you, with you, till the end of times will your text live. Until you leave yourself, as a stranger. But where? Where? Where will you run away from yourself?

 

Minstrel: Only into the text.

 

Monster: This is how the text lives when it is studied. Phrases, when you unite them by a plot, detach themselves from the massive stream of narration. They acquire independence and call you to follow them into a new story, immerse into it – werewolves of the narrative. Speech tokens, abortions, interludes inhabit the performance. And this, put between phrases, <…> often inwards, lines. From them (her), among them is the plot (small story), always part and always the whole, which allows us to hope for an interlude as a part of the whole – dear, native, harrier, maid, queen of the act…

 

Minstrel: Both she and she both he and he from baron to the crown All aboard Empty gob.

 

Monster: This is only a possibility, only a possibility and nothing more. You see how many lapses in the text I am forced to make. In front of me I have the world only in its own possibility. You make about 200 lapses and versions, choosing only one but preserving all the drafts. That is to say that everyone deals in his own with the variability of this world.

 

Minstrel: Space? – Consciousness? – Destiny?

 

Monster: Space is transformed in our consciousness by the destiny.

 

Stanislavsky: Art is to play a character, not destiny.

 

Monster: Grotowski tried to modify Stanislavsky into the art of playing the destiny, not the character but instead turned out to be on the way to the art of self-discovery. That is to say that instead of the art of playing the destiny he acquired destiny and now (let us assume) tries to teach people to acquire destiny, to meet it… The riddle of ancient mystical plays, which is in the art of playing the destiny, remains. In the Orchard it is resolved without an opposition to self-discovery and not sequentially but simultaneously.

 

Grotowski: Actor should no longer use his body to illustrate the movements of his soul; he should make this very movement with the help of his own body.

 

Monster: I think that the gesture should form a relationship with the movement of soul. However, not to participate and, even more importantly, not to initiate this movement. The independence of the organism (to be more precise, of the soul of the organism) and the movement of the soul is the basis of the future development of drama theatre. 

 

For example, let us imagine freedom as ‘actor does not ought to do anything. Let this understanding of freedom become the starting point of the work with him (actor).

 

PROVOCATIVE QUALITIES OF THE THEATRE

 

Theatre in its essence represents a chain of provocations, which on the territory of its operation form utterances (system).

 

Rehearsal is a preparation of a certain arsenal of provocations. Such a rehearsal requires output and special methods of avoiding the fixated meanings and, on the contrary, the accumulation of provocative stimuli (qualities), which result (for example, in the field of drama play) in a possibility for utterances to be formed.

 

It is not the action in accordance to that way of thinking about theatre that turns out to be the essence of the stage process, but the sequential evolution of the series of provocations. It aims to form a system consisting of utterances and provocations, which enter into relations with each other. 

 

Provocation can be defined as a minimal unit of theatre; an act that forms an utterance (a match but not the fire). The combination of provocations and the utterances it forms and the simultaneous involvement (existence) in a unified process – theatre – ensures our interest (pleasure) in/for the performance. We trace how provocation, impinging an object, energy or sign, forms a trace of meaning. Audience’s perception determines the tremor, shiver, the final cardiogram, the flexibility of borders; auditorium-stage. During the performance it is always unstable; it as if intervenes now the stage, then the auditorium. As a result, the contemporary theatre is more and more interested in that boundary itself. To be more precise, in the methods of controlling it!

 

Often an actor as if soaks up the spectator, uses him to form a game (reaction of the audience) while the spectator, vice versa, ‘uses’ an actor to form perception (that is to say utterances towards a game, not from the game).

 

The special meaning and tension is given to this opposition by the ‘sociocultural orientation’, which is not often mutual but usually very strong, conflictive and even martial, both from the audience and the actors. Thus, a possibility of specific scenic and sociocultural tactics is made possible. That is to say that initially (or in the process) it is set to work with the relationship auditorium-stage. Today this to a large extent forms the impression of the spectator. The insanity is not accepted!

 

Provocation gives an opportunity to control the uncontrolled ones. The art of rehearsal, as I understand it, - is not so much an art of violence but rather an art of liberation – which requires an outstanding strength. The final pressure is formed not so much in the field of speech but rather in the zone of silence. These are specific streams of mutual vibrations, in which information, which comes from the essence, is processed.

 

Radiation, studying in silence, which escaped the discourse, forms in the end the ground for that fertile field, on which the heuristic speech grows!

 

 

DRAMATIC (INDUCTIVE) GAME

 

Dramatic (inductive) game is included into the rehearsal process. The system of inductive (dramatic) games gives birth to the final and growing text of the performance-orchard, which is launched into evolution and by this reveals the break away from the theatricality. From the dramatic play to the inductive…

 

The inductive game, unlike the dramatic one, does not imply an ‘overcome’ spectator. It resides where the life-giving action participates in a real destiny: not of the protagonist, the character but the author himself – artist, actor, participant of the game, master of personal directing. The inductive game resolves the opposition between life and game. We, using the achieved at that quality stimuli, characteristics and text, that is to say the whole system of reflection which can in the end be perceived as the product, proclaim the inductive game to be the project itself! By providing additional responsibilities and characteristics, which give maturity to each stage of the game-project and also possibility of translating it into the rehearsal process (through a system of elaborations in the form of ‘dramatic games’). Within the rehearsal itself the opposition is actively used and works productively: rehearsal work is an inductive game that is to say the professional and the creative (life-as-art) fields.

 

The landscape of universal existence, which is being looked for,  is enriched with additional illusions, which allow to test, to nurture and to grow new ways – collections of impressions, traces, which realise themselves through work of the future strategies not only during the game-performance but also during work, which objectifies the performance and collects the expositional field (Gallery-Orangery, for example) or the laboratory in the Orchard.

At the same time, inductive games generate such a dense chain of reflections, which fertilizes not only the rehearsing labour but also the labour of objectification, in other words – life activity.

 

Within both the rehearsal process and the life activity, one should differentiate the generative labour and batching labour.

 

However, the life-creative-inductive game does not have these differences within itself as it is not actually labour. Therefore, the universe of the ORCHARD is defined by the coupling (intensification) of all three processes. The central position is given to the inductive-life-creative game, which nourishes the project with the juices of its own pleasures. This means that it enters itself and gives itself not only for the ‘production’ of images and personas but also for that mysterious realm of spirit, where the growth of personality hides; of the soul that performs the ballet-dictation of its universal potential.

 

Minstrel: There images faces burn in me (like an illness) Beautiful faces images vitamins – microbes Prophets of theatre Craig, Artaud…

 

They, as great provocations, formed/form the theatre of the 20th century. However, the illness results in either death or recovery and the epoch of personal directing comes, the epoch of monsters – ‘masters who form the new strategies’. The times of the great neglect of the esotery of our business has come to an end.

 

Brecht, Stanislavsky and the rest have settled on the bookshelves; the time of discord has ended. The seed of the life-giving logos (under the careful attention of semiology-semiotics-semantics, pragmatics, new rhetoric and so on) inside (amongst) the heuristic speech-orchard sprouts the universum!!!

 

Monster: Situation of real action of project-performance Orchard is a situation in which:

 

Actor is an Unknown author

 

Director is an Unknown author

 

Painter is an Unknown author

 

Composer is an Unknown author

 

And all of them together are an Unknown author –

 

of the carving which copies (embodies) in the panels of the House the exact drawing of the Orchard, which come to us, to him, from the depth of centuries and though the stream of Unknown masters, who were creating, like him, this Orchard inside the tree.

 

Minstrel: Time is like a panel on which we carve the figures of the Orchard.

 

Monster: Performance as an ancient bas-relief.

 

 

 

Minstrel: Directing as archeology.

 

Monster:

PERFORMANCE AS A RECONSTRUCTION OF ONESELF

(Variative theatre)

 

Such type of performance is a way of initial creation of certain directions, which guarantee the work of recovery and development, agreement and tensions between those stages of the project. The opposition between repetition and generation is to be resolved as well as an understanding of it as the central problem of the rehearsal process to be achieved. It is this resolution that is on the ways of reconstruction, in other words that ‘archeological’ care of thought, gesture and action in relation to the previous outputs and at the same time freedom from them (yet again ‘archeological’); distance, remoteness which allow us to feel time as part of the movement (of work, performance, action), that is to say, as a thing and through this it allows to overcome it…

 

It is precisely these reconstructive methods that today contribute to the resolution of yet another opposition, which has been ‘burning’ for almost twenty years now – opposition between the tyrannical and democratic ways of creating a performance. How without loosing the director (in other words, the ensemble) and the unified, coherent, carefully controlled text of the performance can one achieve the authorship of everyone, that is to say – the collective creation?

 

Variative theatre in particular considers a performance, that is launched into the evolution, as a chance to realise itself sequentially (and sometimes even simultaneously) in the most various methods of existence of theatre. It tries to search in every single one of them the possibility to enrich and develop itself. The performance, gradually extracting theatre from itself, comes to the space which can be conventionally understood as an indeterminate space. It can then apply its own variational possibilities, which reside in the characteristics of the ideas and people that form it as well as in relationships, which people, ideas and texts enter into.

 

The main potential of variability is concentrated in the director’s study of the text but also simultaneously in the post-structural processing of the trials, sketches, actions, performances, which are born during the work with the text and are linked with the text. In the end, the variability theatre also includes a method of presenting the collected material, unrolling it as variations (sequential or simultaneous) during the performance.  It also includes a certain type of a game, when an actor has a choice of where to go (which either is outlined during the rehearsals or is born right at the moment) and so he (actor) chooses one of the ways of implementing his choice. This type of revealing of the initial variability of the theatrical process implies a special technique of playing the game and of the discourse, which I call a dilogical and which means an understanding of an action as a combination of the self-developing words and actions of actors. They are almost independent in their unfolding but at the same time always reside in a constantly and mutually enriching contact – not conflicting but able to reflect all sorts of conflicts. This principle implies a special way of creating the heuristic field of the performance-action; the entwinement of perspectives, as it is typical to polyphony, which does not, however, mean the subordination of their diversity to one single agenda.  Moreover, that principle allows the initial imbalancing of the signified, performed structure, in other words, the additional individual freedom or the initial myth-world, which is taken as a basis of the role, which is understood as a territory of movement in the general landscape-illusion, the paradoxically born and developed intertwinement of all trajectories of movement in it…

 

All that does not at all mean the break of the initial integrity of the dramatic text, in this case the ‘Cherry Orchard’. On the contrary, it demands an attitude towards the text itself as a sacred reserved zone, which carries endless meanings in details, connections, rhythms and interweavings. This guarantees a constant lively relation to text on all levels of existence of the project, which allows to overlay and define every following director’s analysis of the text as a layer of thematic and structural ground of the Orchard. This highlights the archeological type of relationship of the project-performance with itself and guarantees, as has been mentioned before, the continuity and indefatigability of the evolution…

 

POSITION OF AKIN, NAMELY HEURISTICS

 

Placed between the priest and the people akin is always at a distance from some mentality, he is always in between. In this sense his central figure in the mental analysis is a coordinate, starting point, axis, the axis of sky…In that sense in which today (in the light of the mental war) Barthes, Derrida can be called the priests…

 

Minstrel: Oh, screw that…

 

Monster: Baudrillard...

 

Minstrel: And other amassment of consonants…

 

Monster: …for example, and people (on that level) – every specific poet, painter, musician, photographer and so on… In that sense akin is a master of personal directing: using heuristic discourse (which means that type of speech that frees the legend from the a priori assumed in it and inaccessible to normal human beings meaning) frees and opens, but not just simply opens but by means of heuristics it forces to work for the new, here and now born meaning. Therefore, it turns it from the previous meaning (the meaning of the priest) into a mechanism, rather toolbox, with the help of which the normal human being witnesses the process of creation of the new meaning from the ‘akin-style’ perception of the situation, here and now, and with the ‘priest-style’ processed by the means and mechanisms of the previous knowledge. Hence, in the proposed model akin is not so much a necessary figure of exposure but rather evolution! Not so much reconciliation but more contribution!

 

Remarque: Minsrtel, enlightened by Monster’s speech, approaches him, the Goat enters the Beast.

 

AKIN

 

The time of discussions is over. Here comes the time of discourse. Discourse as discomfort is experienced today by every consciousness, which attempts to actualize its existence in the realm of contemporary culture. Everyone of us, of those who have heard the call of the akin who has not yet stepped into this world but we have already let his voice to enter us, his rhythm and music of that epos which does not know borrowings and quotations, which has overcome the postmodernist paradigm, is out of brackets that were set for us by the 80s. That means it did not find itself in that prison cell of lexical seizure, which has been intensively imposed into the realm of our homeland by the demiurges, militant adepts who have not finished the course on post-structuralist enlightenment, by the activists of conceptual battles. If I was asked today: ‘What do you think about?’ – I would answer: ‘I cannot stand a dialogue with you but I can a monologue’. If I was told today: ‘What do you want?’ – I would say: ‘Probably it sounds erotic but I desire to communicate with you’. If I was warned today: ‘Why do you go where you go?’ – I would answer: ‘In order to meet there you, who warns me about that’. I know, I was convinced in that at night while now is already a sunrise, that a change of cultural paradigm was preceded by a change of spiritual paradigm. Absolute, which is freed from totalism, calls our souls again. It penetrates through the discoursive shells of our existence to a real compassion, empathy and that which is not exhausted by the term ‘communication’ but was always called and should be called by us - intercommunication. Yes, discourse is discomforting today, my friends. And this confession, which is a sort of preaching delirium, is no longer that because it is sincere and filled with that attempt of discovery of the fresh nuance – in the feeling, which also means in the thinking, that will triumph during the day, when the sun will reach midday.