Theatricality and Anti-theatricality

Carlos Dimeo and Aneta Głowacka

In a conference presented at the Biennale Teatro Venezia 2013, Angélica Liddell1 expresses that if there is a sure “thing” about theatre in its expressive forms, it is that it acts as a recovery of the old. In a certain way, this theoretical-aesthetic presupposition works (according to what we see or analyse and from what can be deduced from the context) because the Spanish director’s remarks encompass two directions and two senses. The first of these (and one of the most important in this case) is that Liddell, through her proposal, seeks to define what she is, what she does and how she describes it. The second aspect, in this case, probably the most important for us, is the intrinsic value that the recovery of a particular aesthetic value has or allows her to express, whatever it may be. From this dilemma, or rather dichotomy, what becomes clear is that the forms of aesthetic production (whether they are scenic or not, although every aesthetic form is in itself scenic) are manifested as part of the complexity2 that resignifies itself, in so far as its yes, its yes-itself, one of the most reliable ways of manifesting (in reality) not the ancient but the contemporary, the modern and the current. Discourse is meaninglessness, Deleuze points out,3 and precisely the conflict, the incomprehensibility of this conflict, and this epistemological tension that leads us to a question about what is?

So, again, we must refer to the question of What is…? And, of course, this very question leads us directly to an (almost infinite) drift of other significant alternatives to the problem of defining what the scene is. From our reading, it is simply a question of the theoretical–philosophical–practical problems brought about by both the complexity4 and the dissemination.5 Although these “problems” are not particularly due to how theatre can be linked to these ideas of the “sensible world”, of the “world of Platonic shadows” in which we live, let’s say to this “world of the cave” in which, since Plato, we find ourselves, but also because this Platonism fixes the essentialism of the “theatrical”, of the (perhaps misnamed) dramatic theatre, which is a category inscribed in the modernity of western thought on stage art and stage creation, but also because this persistent idea of wanting to define the transitory (there is nothing more transitory than the theatrical stage) is therefore essentially Platonic and metaphysical. The theatre still seems not to have overcome this ambivalence, which Friedrich Nietzsche has already established in The Origin of Tragedy6 using his categories, the Apollonian and the Dionysian, and with his critique of Wagner. In any case, let us bear in mind that beyond this and the later innovations, or rather, the substantive changes that theatre (or what we call theatre) underwent after Nietzsche, with the advent of the multiple aesthetic revolutions of the twentieth century, it persisted in the source of its strata. At the same pace at which “humanity” unfolds, the changes are not as substantive or significant as intended. The differences between the precocity with which this world pretends to take the path of further development and the idea of a change in the type of sociality. This world pretends to lead either to an absence of the social or to the “end of the social”,7 demonstrating the urgent need for total change. However, theatre still “plays” to remain in the background of a relatively magical–mythical territory of its presence, of the condescension of its meanings. To put it more simply, despite the post-dramatic, theatre continues to search for the place of the dramatic. Despite the necessity of a post-metaphysical framework, the theatre continues to search for the epicentre of the properly metaphysical experience. Perhaps one of the most palpable signs of this conspicuous relationship between theatre and territory has been the influence of the most recent COVID-19 pandemic, a situation that persisted in the Baudrillardian perspective that division in a “destruction of the social”, but except another scenario of conglomerates, of trans-aesthetic discourses (we refer, e.g. to the current war – 2022 – between Russia, Ukraine and other countries, a war of multiple dimensions and complexities), the theatre world has seen, and in many cases has had to disrupt its models of staging and its modelling precepts. At these crossroads, the Schechner–Lehmann concept (let us not forget that Lehmann himself claims that Schechner was the first to enunciate the concept) comes into play and establishes its epistemological efficacy. In other words, “world” events such as COVID-19 and the War confirm that theatre is fundamentally post-dramatic; the post-dramatic theatre enters a field and a sphere that transgresses theatricality, and there are dimensions of “human life” and society itself that are more theatrical than the theatre itself or perhaps even more antitheatrical. In the conference to which we referred at the beginning of our text, Liddell herself criticised the fact that people did not attend the theatre. She also noted that, even when they had the opportunity to attend the theatre in front of them, people did not go to the theatre itself. This absence (Liddell assumed), this “persistent” neglect of art, was for her a palpable sign of the loss of sensibility and, in turn, of the failure of education. However, Liddell does not (in any way) refer in the same way to a possible failure of aesthetics, but only refers to the possibility of insouciance of the enjoyment of the aesthetic as a matter proper to and the responsibility of the modes of perception of education. But it never considers the fact that currently, it is the aesthetics, the aesthetic languages, that have failed. However, from this perspective, aesthetics, culture and the social are (to borrow Derrida’s notion) in retreat, not to say that they are also at the point of failure. Consequently, COVID-19 and the War confirm what others, even Liddell, Milo Rau or Krzysztof Garbaczewski, Romeo Castelucci, among many others, have supposed to be the conduction of the new perspectives of a new aesthetic that is oriented towards the essentially theatrical. Although the scenic games that these and other directors, other stagings (it would take too long to list them all here), mostly this theatricality leads us to that dimension.

Assuming these premises, the book aims to define and show how some of the theoretical fields and contents of theatre, performances and writing formats are increasingly displaced in the place of other resonances. The point is to emphasise that a certain history of theatricality has been defenestrated for different reasons (both for good and for bad) and that beyond all this, what we are confronted with is rather the “post-dramatic”,8 the emergence of a post-theatricalism (without the “t”, so that it is not understood as posterity nor as the Lehmann’s post-dramatic), which unfolds through another dichotomy within the theatrical: the antitheatrical, the counter-dramatic and the counter-theatrical. It was Jean Duvignaud, precisely, who assigned theatre a place within the masses – a notion that we must deterritorialise by pointing out, for example, that a mass cannot be considered theatre, not because it lacks elements of representation, but because it lacks theatricality.

The central theme that is conferred on us is, therefore, that of theatricality–anti-theatricality, framed within the transdisciplinary and scenological studies of contemporary theatre, which finally leads us directly to an essential question: What is theatre? Answering this is obviously not an easy task. But the question does not have to force us immediately to search for a precise answer, let alone a single answer. If other questions and possible answers arise from it, this is only a natural consequence of the implications of unravelling such a subject. Therefore, rather than questioning the essentiality of “theatre”, understood as a monolithic cultural unit, we are trying to reach a territory that is increasingly shifting and unstable. It is not certain that the foundations of what we call theatre remain intact. Even in the light of the eyes of those who are still adhering to a modern way of thinking. Nor is it a question of whether theatre now assumes itself to be modern or not. It is not its persistence to remain static in a frontier that promises not to dissolve. It seems clear that this metaphysics, that of wanting to define theatre, no longer passes so much through the pure object of the consecration of its own activity. In other words, the theatre is no longer obliged to call itself “theatre” and does with its forms what it pleases. These displacements, sometimes interim and sometimes permanent, involve us with another theme underlying the very definition of theatre: that of theatricality. There would be no theatricality if it did not have its counterpart, anti-theatricality. Our book, therefore, wants to investigate this “ubiquity” since theatre is everywhere, even if not everything we see is theatre, and in which the concepts related to the stage, the scenic and the stage are displaced indistinctly from their historical and non-historical antecedents.

Originally, the theatre was instituted as a monolithic unit of total expression; nowadays, those frontiers, that territoriality, that dominion, which in the past were erected as “indissoluble theatres”, monolithic theatricalities, read: the Greeks, Shakespeare, Beckett, Strindberg, Chekhov among many, many others or in the stage field itself Stanislavski, Grotowski, Brecht, Brook and Strehler, open up, in what seems to be the end of a time, a very dynamic field for creation and research, from which the new stage representations emerge. If, in modernity, the scenic and research field was theatricality, but if even before that modernity, the theatrical field also admitted finding other spaces of scenic creation, such as those of anti-theatricality, we propose to study and observe which are the new proposals for this time that accompany us and how these two concepts that act as “categorical imperatives” in the history of theatre are contrasted and confronted. For all these reasons, we invited researchers, critics, actors, directors, theorists, playwrights, writers, etc., to reflect on the subject in any of its areas: dramaturgy, acting, directing, stage space, theatre criticism, theatre culture, classical theatres and theatre studies (Latin American, Asian, European and African) or whatever specialities those who would participate may find themselves in. The only working premise was to debate and discuss the two central categories that we want to focus on in this conference: theatricality and anti-theatricality.

In a certain way, the question of the possibilities of these questions arises because, if we have posed a question about the theatrical, we also do so in a field where any other plane that breaks with that structure manifests a certain discontinuity that abounds in a different metaphysics. Our intention here is not to revert to the idea of a total deconstruction or deconstruction without construction.

The book consists of four parts. The arrangement of the texts we proposed seems the most readable. However, we realise that due to the diversity of perspectives from which the authors approach the issue of theatricality and anti-theatricality, the book could also be arranged differently. The variety of perspectives, discourses and ways of examining the relationship between theatrical and non-theatrical reality means that all the texts collected in this monograph, in some sense, complement each other and provoke further questions about the relationship of theatre with the outside world and the strategies of absorbing further elements of reality through art. A strong theoretical slant characterises the articles in the first and second parts and takes up the topic enshrined in the book’s title primarily in the context of aesthetic transformations. In turn, the authors of the texts included in parts 3 and 4 look at the presence of cultural and social issues in theatre and drama in various ways.