Download Marco de Marinis The Actor is Dead, Long Live the Actors! Current

Marco de Marinis
The Actor is Dead, Long Live the Actors! Current Transformation of an Identity and a Function
0. Two Preambles
I would like to start from the hypotheses and questions proposed by the organisers of the Symposium
(and particularly by Ivan Medenica) with two premables.
First Preamble: presence vs. representation or presence and representation?
The fact of a constituent double dimension of a theatre performance and, in particular, of a play on
stage, which always arises either from presence or from representation, seems to have been a given to
theatre scholarship for a long time. Personally, I have been underlining for the past three decades, at least
since my book Semiotica del teatro1 until the most recent contributions 2, the fact that in all theatre
performances one can notice as its constituent element the dimension of exposition, of self-referential
representation, of self-signifying materiality, in other words referring to oneself, and not “another than
oneself,” of production (of senses, reality) rather than reproduction. During the same period, outside of
semiotics, Eugenio Barba spoke about a “pre-expressive level” of the actor’s work, concerning his/her very
presence.
Certainly, there are performance genres in which this presentational/self-referential dimension,
which I propose to call “performative,” proves to be more powerful and important than in others.
In fact, one cannot negate, as the call for papers for the Symposium underlines, that theatre of the
20th century was characterized by a true crisis of representation. That crisis was translated, on the practical
plane, into a constant effort to overcome representation and, to a certain extent, of the performance itself
as directing. (Here I also have to cite myself, because in a book from 1983, (entitled Al limite del teatro, but
its first title was, not inadvertantly, The Crisis of Representation) I dealt with this very phenomenon)3. Going
from Appia to Artaud, from Grotowski to Carmelo Bene, from Living Theatre to Brook, this effort to
overcome employs different leverages (actor, space, etc.) aiming every time at one or several different
foundations of theatre of representations (or directing): the text, character, mimesis, plot, repetiton, etc.
1
M. De Marinis, Semiotica del teatro. L'analisi testuale dello spettacolo, Milan, Bompiani, 1982 (English
translation: The Semiotics of Performance, Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 1992).
2
M. De Marinis, Représentation, présence, performance: pour un dialogue entre Nouvelle Théâtrologie et
Performance Studies, in Performance et savoirs, supervised by André Helbo, Bruxelles, Editions De Boeck Université,
2011, pp. 53–63; Id., “New Theatrology and Performance Studies: Starting Points Towards a Dialogue,“ The Drama
Review 55:4, Winter 2011 (T-212), pp. 64–74.
3
M. De Marinis, Al limite del teatro. Utopie, progetti e aporie nella ricerca teatrale degli anni Sessanta e
Settanta, Firenze, La casa Usher, 1983.
Still, we have to ask ourselves – as Ivana Medenica justifiably does – whether we can realistically
overcome representation-fiction by continuing to climb on stages and create performances. Or do we
rather have to content ourselves by pushing the limit a little, without truly breaking it? Artaud, Grotowski
and Bene, to cite three representative figures of the domain, seemed well aware of this problem, which is
tightly linked to what is defined in the introductory text of the Symposium as a “’natural’ inclination of the
audience toward dramatic fiction, toward the perception of the character and other elements of the
narrative.” I have already mentioned,4 citing Christian Metz, about a “viewing urge” that irresistibly forces
the viewer to fictionalise and render narrative everything he/she is given to see (experiments conducted by
ISTA have confirmed this).
Second Preamble: death or the crisis of the actor?
Here I am referring directly to the central theme of our Conference.
For years I have been dealing with the question of the actor on the contemporary scene and, more
precisely, his crisis if not his death.
Still, we have to agree on one thing first: almost every period has announced the death of theatre,
and hence of the theatre actor. So it would be better to talk about a crisis, of course not in the current yet
false, imprecise meaning of involution, decadence, disappearance, but in a more scientifically adequate one
of complexity, problematicality, transformation or metamorphosis.
Having said that, the title of the Symposium could prove effective, at least as a provocation, under
the condition it turns from singular to plural: The actor is dead, long live the actors! It is therefore this
change from singular to plural that I would like to discuss in my talk.
1. The Dismembered Identity of the Contemporary Actor: Continuity and Discontinuity in 20thCentury Theatre
So, the first thing that has to be defined: speaking about the crisis (or even death) of the actor
signifies for me today first of all establishing that the identity of the actor has from now on become
fragmented, dismembered. This fragmentation/dismemberement has brought to crisis the unified image
the actor has preserved in spite of everything during the 20th century (even though in this unified image the
4
M. De Marinis, L'esperienza dello spettatore. Fondamenti per una semiotica della ricezione teatrale,
“Documenti di Lavoro e pre-pubblicazioni” del Centro Internazionale di Semiotica e di Linguistica di Urbino, nn. 138139, November/December 1984, pp. 1–36 (in particular p. 16). Metz’s book I referred to is in fact Le signifiant
imaginaire, Paris, UGE, 1976.
differences between diverse examples could have been numerous and profound) and have produced a
proliferation of a multiple typology of actors, whom we are forced in certain cases not to even name actors,
but with the caution of using qualifying adjectives.
I have spoken earlier, for example, about a figure actor, virtual actor, mixed actor, social actor,
narrator actor, performer5.
What is now in play, first of all, in such a diverse phenomenology is the different attitude toward the
great tradition of directors/educators of the past century, whose heritage should be used and consists
primarily—as we know—in assigning to the actor an indisputable centrality in the heart of theatrical
creation, and, consequently, in the idea and the practice of an expressive presence of an actor gifted with a
remarkable, creative autonomy, i.e. with a true dramaturgical and stage self-reality. In connection to this, in
Italy we talked about a figure of an “actor artist” (Claudio Meldolesi) or “actor poet” (Antonio Attisani) in
order to refer to the line that runs through the entire century, starting with the last Great Actors of the late
19th century, in particular Eleonora Duse, all the way to Eduardo de Fillipo, Dario Fo, Carmelo Bene, Carlo
Cecchi, Leo de Berardinis (of course, almost always a figure like Artaud is associated to this line). Personally,
I worked a lot on the notion of “dramaturgy of the actor”6.
From this point of view, we have noticed that certain tranformations mentioned earlier (and to which
I will return) clearly break with this tradition. That is the case, for example, with the actor figure or the
virtual actor. In other cases (actor storyteller, social, mixed), instead of a clear cut it is more correct to
speak about transformation and refunctionalisation of this heritage and, in particular, about the centrality
of the actor creator.
In connection to this, an interesting phenomenon appears, at least at first sight. The area of art
theatre (there is no need to talk about the official/commercial theatre) that has kept in touch with the
current of the actors creators of the 20th century, from Meyerhold to Grotowski. Still, it is from this area or
its proximity that the character of neo-interpreter arises, who continues to work in terms of characters and
dramatic situations, but in his acting he uses novelties arrived at by directors in the previous century, and
before acting, in the manner in which he chooses texts and works on them – not forgetting suggestions that
come from the domain called by some “performance theatre,” which I will talk about later. A few
5
M. De Marinis, Dopo l'età d'oro: l'attore post-novecentesco tra crisi e trasmutazione, “Culture Teatrali”, 13,
Autumn 2005 [in fact: 2006], pp. 7–28.
6
M. De Marinis, In cerca dell'attore. Un bilancio del Novecento teatrale [In Search of an Actor. A Theatre
Survey of 20th Century], Roma, Bulzoni, 2000.
significant names in Italy: Fabrizio Gifuni, Elena Bucci and Marco Sgrosso, Ermanna Montanari, Enzo
Vetrano and Stefano Randisi, Maria Paiato, Enzo Moscato, Francesca Mazza, Angela Malfitano7.
On the other side, in the most progressive areas of art theatre of today, which should have been
natural heirs to the current of the director/educator, we find that this heritage is completely rejected and,
as I just said, the cut or the rupture is much clearer.
2. “This is not an actor“ or „Actor: the name is not correct“
In the second act of the play Julius Ceasar from 1997, directed by Romeo Castelucci, after Cassius’s
death, a black cloud comes down above the stage, and on it a sentence in Magritte’s manner is written in
French: “This is not an actor.” Three years later, Castelucci published a theoretical article entitled “Actor:
the name is not correct,” and it has recently been used as a title of a performance by six young people,
which testifies about its longevity. In that article, published again in the volume Epopea della polvere (The
Saga of Dust) from 2001, Castelucci suggests an extraordinary definition of the human being on stage:
The actor is not the one who acts, but the one who receives. The one who is “taken” (stolen), whose
body is consumed by the burning gaze of the spectators. [...] “Actor: the name is not correct. No act
follows. [...] Actor is no longer the one who acts, but the one who is acted upon by the theatre trestles. [...]
The soma remains and doesn’t speak. The soma-actor is configured as a pure, passive entity.8
In the vocabulary of the most progressive groups of the last two generations of avant-garde theatre
in Italy, perhaps following the example of Societas Raffaello Sanzio, which belongs to the previous
generation, the word “actor” is often replaced with other words, not by accident. The words used are
“figure”, “image”, “simulation.” And, in fact, the use of actors (or rather their bodies) in the plays of art
theatre could be identified with the use of images and materials put in the same plane with other visual
and sound stage means: objects, accessories, space, light, sounds, etc, in a relationship of perfect
interchangeability with virtual images (for that reason virtual actor is sometimes mentioned). Or it is sound
images, voices – but not real actors.
Now we will dedicate ourselves to the manner in which theatre productions of the most
distinguished troupes of this area in Italy (from Motus to Fanny & Alexander, from Teatrino Clandestino too
Masque; from Muta Imago to Pathos Formel, from Città di Ebla to Nanou – headed by Socìetas Raffaello
7
Related to what I call actor neo-interpreter, see G. Guccini, Biografic-theater. Osservazioni sulle rigenerazioni
contemporanee dell'attore interprete, in Identità italiana e civiltà globale all'inizio del ventunesimo secolo
(Conference Papers, Budapest 29–30 September 2011), ed. Ilona Fried, Budapest, 2012, pp. 97–109.
8
R. Castellucci, “Attore”: il nome non è esatto, in Epopea della polvere. Il teatro della Socìetas Raffaello Sanzio
1992–1999, Milano, Ubulibri, 2001, pp. 81–82.
Sanzio) often skip the actor as a creative subject and expressive presence, dividing themselves to two
opposed typologies of production: performances-images and performances-installations on the one hand,
i.e. purely visual and multi-media creations in which the actor, if he survives, is simply reduced to an image,
an icon, body-soma, and, on the other hand, concerts in which the actor is essentially a voice.
A young Italian critic, looking back at episode IX (Marseille, 2004) of the cycle Tragedia Endogonida
performed by Societas Raffaello Sanzio, correctly spoke about the border experience against the tradition
of the actor in the 20th century. [...] The process [which] ultimately discharges the actor of the urgent and
necessary status in favour of rhythmic modulation [baluginio] of lights and sounds. 9
More recently, Silvia Mei, another representative of the young critique, referring to the groups of the
last generation (Muta Imago, Orthographe, Città di Ebla, Santasangre, Zaches Teatro, Teatro Persona,
Anagoor etc.) wrote: These young groups have openly asked questions against theatre, because they
belong to the areas of visual and fine arts, video technologies. The notion of the actor has experienced a
transformation in order to define itself in the light of philosophical terms Figure, Simulacrum, Soma. The
traditional performance frame has experienced a rupture due to the suggestion of new strategies
concerning action and non-action by establishing a dispositive harmonised with vision rather than look. We
are witnessing the doubling of figurative and visual power of stage, which is becoming a hyperstage, thanks
to the support of technologies and/or developped skills. Through the actor or in spite of the actor, this
hyperstage multiplies itself, moves and transforms.10
Starting from the examples of this type (which can be compared, I think, to the rest of the world),
there is a great temptation (which I could not resist a few years ago)11 to speak about a true
epistemological cut in the way in which the last generations are thinking and dealing with theare. In this
cut, an important role was played by technological innovation, from multi-media to hyper-media, with an
irruption of new media and the digital. Still, its foundation plunges into the mentality or, in this case, into
culture and the imaginary of the young theatre generation. This rupture enables us to use again an almost
forgotten term, which fell into disrepute, and that is “representation,” by giving it new semantics, original
in relationship to the past, thanks to the erasure of this lexeme from almost the entire
dramatic/fictional/expressive and its anchoring in the essentially artistic/visual problems, with crucial terms
such as “image” or “figure,” as we have already seen.
Still, one should not generalise too much. What I have just said concern only one area of the new art
theatre, the one in which the rupture and discontinuity between the 20th and the 21st century is clearer. But
9
F. Acca, L'attore e il suo dopo, “Culture Teatrali”, 13, cit., p. 34.
S. Mei, “La nouvelle vague du théâtre italien: le dernier défi pour un théâtre iconographique,“ presented at
the International Conference “Surmarionnettes et mannequins: Craig, Kantor et leurs héritages contemporains”
(Charleville-Mézières, 15-17 mars 2012), the collection is currently in print.
11
M. De Marinis, Dopo l'età d'oro..., quoted, pp. 16 and the following.
10
there are other areas in which this rupture is less clear and in which several elements of continuity survive
with the line of directors/educators in the 20th century, albeit reformulated and refunctionalised.
In these cases, instead of talking about a true epistemological cut that negates/erases the actor as he
was conceived in the 20th century, it is better to speak about current transformations of the
identity/function of the contemporary actor.
3. Current Transformations of the Actor
These two phenomena probably coexist today. While, because of the epistemological cut I just talked
about, conditions are created for a recreation, a completely different regeneration of theatre, theatrical
experience, today there is symultaneously a transmutation of the identity/function of the actor taking
place.
This transformations seem to operate with great vitality, especially in the area of “performing arts” in
a fertile dialogue between a new contemporary post-dramatic foundation and different traditions that
have re-emerged during the past century. According to the words of Thomas Richards12 it is on the border
lines, the so-called „edge-points“ where the actor of the post-20th century, through a transformation and
regeneration seems to be able to regain an energy beyond suspicion and offer new identities: polymorphic,
mutant, constantly susceptible to redefinitions. Temporary but effective.
I will talk about the actor storyteller, social actor and mixed actor in particular. Of course, this is a
phenomenological, not normative classification, which distinguishes between acting (or performance)
modalities rather than types of actors. This, among other things, means that one actor can use more than
one type.
It should be underlined one more time where the difference between these transformation and
categories I talked about lies: actor figure, actor image, actor soma, virtual actor etc. The difference resides
in the very fact that in the latter we notice an almost complete rejection of the actor’s identity/function, as
defined during the 20th century, while in the typologies of transformations, as in the actor storyteller and
social actor the identity/function is not rejected, but it becomes an object of transformation which does not
cut off completely the links with the heritage of the 20th century.
Actor storyteller. The first thing that has to be said is that the actor storyteller does not coincide with
the actor soloist or monologiser. The different between the two is primarily in a different relationship
12
T. Richards, “The Edge-Point of Performance“ (1997), in Id., Heart of Practice. Within the Workcenter of Jerzy
Grotowski and Thomas Richards, London-New York, Routledge, 2008.
between writing and speaking. The actor soloist is still usually a textual actor (actor-who-reads or actorwho-recites-a-text). Quite differently, the actor storyteller works on oral skills, improvisation, even when he
bases himself on the pre-existing text. Moreover, he usually “exposes his unchangeable identity on the
stage13“, i.e. he does not act, he does not become a character, perhaps only rarely and temporarily, he
actually tells a story. In Italy, the names are those of Moni Ovadia, Marco Paolini, Marco Baliani, Ascanio
Celestini, Davide Enia, Mario Perrotta, Mimmo Cuticchio and many others.
Social actor (or actor of diversity). Under the term social actor of actor of diversity, I mean the one
who acts in the so-called social theatres, i.e. theatres that deal with the domain of uneasiness (physical and
mental) and marginalisation. Here I am thinking both about non-actors, i.e. prisoners, the handicapped,
immigrants, political refugees, etc. And professional theatre workers, actors, directors, authors etc. who
choose to work in difficult situations, showing how social effectiveness (even therapeutic sometimes) and
artistic quality are tightly connected, help and support each other. It is sufficient to mention Pippo Delbono
and his true star Bobo, who belong to the troupe Compagnia della Fortezza (comprised from the detainees
of the prison Volterre in Tuscany, guided by Armando Punzo), or in Europe La Compagnie de l'Oiseau
Mouche and Candoco Dance Company.
The social actor as a form of transformation of the contemporary actor reminds us, on the one hand,
of an incredible social/anthropological effectiveness of theatrical techniques (or rather of primary theatre),
but it enables us, on the other hand, to discover new and unthinkable forms of art and beauty: even better,
it forces us to notice and recognise them when laziness, conformity and fear are thwarting us: in the
diverse, the other, elsewhere. By doing this, the social actor carries out an unedited revival of theatre
conceived as practice of alterity.
Mixed Actor. I prefer to talk about a mixed actor than to use other terms used more often, like a
multi-ethnic of inter-cultural actor, because this term – mixed – allows me to better condense the features
characteristic for this form of the post-20th century actor.
In fact, the mixed actor is neither exclusively nor principally the actor who works in multi-ethnic and
inter-cultural environments, i.e. with actors and viewers who belong to different cultures, language
communities, civilisations (as in the case of the pioneer and now classic troupe of Peter Brook and Bouffes
du Nord and Théâtre du Soleil by Ariane Mnouchkine in Paris, or, in Italy, Teatro delle Albe de Ravenna with
its mixture between actors from the region Romagna and young immigrants from Senegal).
In my meaning of the term, the mixed actor is the one who artistically and dramatically works on
his/her own intercultural/multiethnic elements, i.e. on multi-layered identities and internal cultural
13
G. Guccini, “Teatro e narrazione: nuova frontiera del dramma,“ in Il Novecento: Un secolo di cultura: Italia e
Ungheria, eds. I. Fried and E. Baratono, Budapest, ELTE TKF, 2002, p. 219.
differences of the subject, i.e. everyone of us; these differences that are constituent of what we call “me”,
“subject”, “individual”. (Reminding us always of Rimbaud: “I is someone else”). French anthropologist Marc
Augé talked about “an intimate or essential alterity”14. And Piergiorgio Giacché, referring to more or less
the same thing, came up with “vertical alterity”.15
From this point of view, actors of Teatro delle Albe in Ravena represent a perfect example of mixed
actors not only and not principally because of their long-term collaboration with young Senegalese
immigrants, but because they were able, thanks to this circumstance, to gradually, in the artistic sense,
settle their accounts with their own personal, intimate alterity, repressed, forgotten, unknown: their
peasant origin, dialect of Romagna, tradition of village storytellers of this region (fuler), rediscovered thanks
to this African griots brought over by the Senegalese.
A top example of the mixed actor in Italy is doubtlessly Ascanio Celestini: his work on stories of oral
tradition from the souther/central part of Italy is a work on a peasant mentality and on this “magic world”
(citing the great ethnologist Ernesto De Martino) in which he has discovered his roots thanks to his family,
mostly his father and grandmother.
Another extraordinary example of a mixed actor here is Pippo Delbono (already mentioned in the
context of the social actor, confirming the introduction of differences, not between types of actors but
actorial modalities or actorial interventions). His work with marginalised individuals, the lunatics, is based
mostly on settling accounts with difficulty and pain of his own diversity/marginality/lunacy, by claiming his
right to it in a manner at the same time cheerful and enraged, against an oppressive and conformist
society. And the characteristic of artistic mix is carried also by the manner in which Delbono contaminates,
mixes, erases the difference between the high and the low, brutal and sublime, cultivated and ruled by
consumerism: Pasolini and light music, Allen Ginsberg and Raffaela Carra, television and Pina Bausch, the
Orient and varieties, the burlesque, circus.
4. The Case of the Performer
In conclusion I would like to touch upon the case of the performer which for me represents special
problems because I cannot place him simply into a single typology of actorial transformation developping
today, like I showed in my talk, by placing him on the same level with the others.
14
M. Augé, Il senso degli altri. Attualità dell'antropologia (1994), trad. It., Torino, Bollati Boringhieri, 2000, p.
114.
15
P. Giacché, “La verticalità e la sacralità dell'atto,“ in Testimonianze e riflessioni sull'arte come veicolo (Opere e
sentieri, vol. III), eds. A. Attisani et M. Biagini, Roma, Bulzoni, 2008, p. 125.
The first thing that has to be said is that the term “performer” could be considered, as in the case of
“performance” in relationship to “theatre”, more generic or more specific in relationship to “the actor.”
As an entity/concept more generic than “actor”, the term “performer” could be used to refer to any
type of artist on the stage: from the actor-interpreter to the comedian-entertainer, from the mimic to the
dancer, from the storyteller to the singer. And this could be applied to a historically diachronic perspective:
we can call “performers” indistinctively the jugglers, buffoons, minstrels, travelling singers, opera singers,
dancers, mimics, and certainly the drama actors. In that sense, the term “performer” designates what is in
Barba’s theatre terminology defined as “the man in situation of organised representation”.16
As a more specific notion or entity than “actor”, the performer can designate a particular type of
actor or, rather, of artist on the stage: for example, a creator of performance art, especially body art, an
actor in what is today called “performance theatre17“, and maybe even the actor storyteller. Or it could
designate a specific point of view on an actor and his/her stage presentation (the work of an actor viewed
from the pont of view of performance: i.e. as a productive/creative process). Finally, the term performer
can indicate a specific level of play and of actorial dramaturgy: the level of performance, i.e. of presence, a
constituent level, as I said in the beginning. It is the level Barba calls “the pre-expressive level”.
I admit I am not in favour of the increasingly present tendency (to which the text of the presentation
of our Symposium makes reference) that makes some kind of catch phrase from the term “performer”, a
sort of weak synomym of the word “actor”, concerning the artists operating on that post-dramatic stage
characterised by more-or-less radical rejection of all the main elements of theatricality of the 20th century,
starting from the actor creator, through representation, narration, etc. From this point of view,
“performer” is usually used as a synonym of “figure” or “image” or “instrument”, therefore to indicate
those true anti-actors I talked about earlier.
I do not agree because the 20th century theatre was a witness to a completely different conception, a
lot more powerful than “performer.” Of course, I am referring here to the concept developed by Grotowski.
Contrary to what is happening today, when the term “performer” becomes a replacement to “figure”,
“soma” etc. in order to sanction the radical weakening of the actor as interpreter and creator and the
subtraction of every form of authorial and dramaturgical right, in the tradition of Grotowski (a tradition still
live, one has to underline) the term performer (or “doer”) is used as an exponential exaltation of the
function author/creator filled by the author, the function that can be found in the original essence of the
performer as “the man of action”.18
16
E. Barba, Le canoë de papier. Traité d'anthropologie théâtrale (1993), Montpellier, L'Entretemps, 2004.
J. Féral, Théorie et Pratique du Théâtre. Au-delà des limites, Montpellier, L'Entretemps, 2011.
18
J. Grotowski, Performer, in Jerzy Grotowski. Testi 1968-1998 (Opere e sentieri, vol. II), eds. A. Attisani and M.
Biagini, Roma, Bulzoni, 2007, pp. 83–88.
17
Since the ’80s, Grotowski speaks about “performer” instead of “actor”, in order to refer to the work
of the actor outside, after, without the performance, in essence to the work on oneself and the effects he
produces on those who guide him, in terms of energetic transformations or, according to preferences, of
changes to the states of consciousness or modes of perception.
It is a complex and and fascinating subject Grotowski developed after 1986, under the title “Art as
Vehicle” by creating Workcenter de Pentedera, with the perfection of the exercise Motions and above all a
few performances under the title “Action”, the work continued after the work of the Polish master in 1999
by Thomas Richards and Mario Biagini: Downstairs Action, Action, An Action in Creation, The Letter.
The recent results of the work of Workcenter de Pontedera, above all the ones started in 2008 with
the birth of two different teams lead by Richards and Biagini, show how misleading the impressions caused
by the final separation of Art as Vehicle from theatre were, and thus the performer from the actor: Dies
Irae, The Letter, but mostly The Living Room created by Richard’s team, and I am America after Ginsberg,
created in Biagini’s team, do not represent at all a pure and simple return to performance in the sense of
direction change or even rejection. On the contrary, they represent a very interesting example of post-20thcentury transformation of theatrical performance and identity/function of the actor, an example turned to
future that will be analysed for a long time.
Instead of using the term performer in its generic and weak sense, or, on the contrary, to risk and
produce a precise type of actor (of anti-actor, in fact), we should rather, according to my opinion, recognise
the significance of the performative dimension in contemporary theatre and in the manner in which
different aspects of actorial transformation I talked about function.
I am not even sure one should even speak about the “performance theatre” as Josette Féral does,
but on the contemporary stage the dialectic between theatralicality and performance, which the Canadian
researcher has come up with is very important. For decades we have been witnessing the phenomenon one
could call performativisation of theatre, which dismembers theatre into several levels, from dramaturgy to
directing, acting. In that sense, we can distinguish at least three principal processes:
1) (variable) prevalence of the dimension of presence, self-reflexive exposition, self-significant
materiality, return to the self, respect for the dimension of representation, fiction, narration,
return to the other than one self;
2) Tendency toward deconstruction (to a variable extent) of the drama form and the directing form,
through the use of dispositives which are, in the end, the same as Lehmann defined the postdramatic: parataxis, simultaneity, play with the density of signs, music directing, visual
dramaturgy, corporality, irruption of reality, event/situation; but also: fragmentation,
incompleteness, discontinuity.
3) Rethinking of the theatrical peformance no longer in terms of work/product, but in terms of
event and relation, characterised by physical co-presence of the actor and spectator and by
energetic exchange between the two, and therefore by corporality as an essential dimension for
one or the other.
In connection to this, and to conclude, the definition of performance proposed by Marina Abramović
would perhaps be interesting:
“The decisive aspect of performance is the direct relationship to the audience, the transmission of
energy between the audience and the performer. What is performance? It is a kind of physical and mental
construction with which the artist faces the audience. [...] Performance is a direct transmission of
energy19.“
19
M. Abramovič, Body Art, in Marina Abramovič, Milano, Edizioni Charta, 2002, p. 13.