Dionysus in exile: the theatre of Theodoros Terzopulos [[1. Auflage]] 9783957492241, 3957492246

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Dionysus in Exile: The Theatre of Theodoros Terzopoulos With a Preface by Erika Fischer-Lichte

Theodoros Terzopoulos, born 1947 in Makriyalos (Northern Greece). Acting studies in Athens. From 1972 to 1976 trainee and production assistant at the Berliner Ensemble. Afterwards return to Greece. Since the late seventies continuous development of an individual, highly codified, and interculturally rooted theatre-language. Founder (1985) and director of the Attis theatre in Athens. Global guest performances, guest productions, and workshops demonstrating his method of stage direction and actors training. Director of several festivals, numerous honors.

Dionysus in Exile: The Theatre of Theodoros Terzopoulos

Dionysus in Exile: The Theatre of Theodoros Terzopoulos © 2019 by Theater der Zeit All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopied, recorded or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher. Verlag Theater der Zeit Publisher Harald Müller Winsstraße 72 | 10405 Berlin | Germany www.theaterderzeit.de Editorial office: Benedikt Maria Arnold Design: Sibyll Wahrig Printed in Germany ISBN 978-3-95749-224-1 (paperback) ISBN 978-3-95749-222-7 (ePDF) ISBN 978-3-95749223-4 (EPUB)

Dionysus in Exile: The Theatre of Theodoros Terzopoulos

With a Preface by Erika Fischer-Lichte

9

Preface Erika Fischer-Lichte

I.

The Aesthetics of Terzopoulos’ Theatre – Anthropological and Political Perspectives

18

The Theatre of Theodoros Terzopoulos Aesthetics and Ideology Georgios Sampatakakis

33

Deep Bodies Light. Theodoros Terzopoulos’ Vertical Choreographies Matthias Dreyer

46

Performing Cultural Trauma in Mauser: An Exilic Perspective on the Greek Civil War Penelope Chatzidimitriou

II.

The Body as Foundation and Epitome of Acting

62

Bodies, Back from Exile Freddy Decreus

80

Terzopoulos’ Jenseits The Psychoanalytic Foundation of Terzopoulos’ Theatre Konstantinos I. Arvanitakis

95

Bodies in Revolt The Art of Performer’s Psychophysical Transgression in Terzopoulos’ Theatre Savvas Stroumpos

III. Breath – Voice – Language 108

The Character of the Respiration Notes to Theodoros Terzopoulos Frank M. Raddatz

115

Tongue in Presence – Speech in Exile Dimitris Tsatsoulis

140

Dionysus in Revenge: The Fractured Voice in the Theatre of Terzopoulos Gonia Jarema

IV.

The Aesthetics of Terzopoulos’ Theatre – Crosscultural or Greek?

152

Transcending the Borders Through Tragedy: Terzopoulos in Turkey Kerem Karabog˘a

160

Theodoros Terzopoulos’ Oedipus Rex in the Context of Russian Theatre Alexander Chepurov

169

On the Greekness of Terzopoulos David Wiles

It was at Delphi when I first met him, eighteen years ago. I like his work more than the works of any other theatre director. His theatre has something I have never found anywhere else. Because Theodoros makes plays that were written a long time ago feel as if they were written today. You never get the impression that they are old. But it is more than that. He listens, too, so the language appears.

There are two things: the body and the word. The two work together. It is not a body sitting there speaking. It is a body through and out of which the words come. And that gives you the feeling of being in a different – liturgical – world. It is like people singing in church – they are not singing, they are talking to God. And when Theodoros does what he does, it is as if man speaks for the first time. I really love the world he creates, the world that comes out of his head. If you are from the past, you are from the future, too. It is the same with Pythia: the things she says come out of the depths, not out of her. And they were there before her. We are not simply who we are, we are also things we know nothing about. So, the world you think is gone is not gone – it is in you, in our bodies.

Etel Adnan

7

Preface

Erika Fischer-Lichte

In the twentieth century, European directors invented and realized new forms of theatre by distancing themselves from established realistic-psychological acting styles and redefining the art of acting through the creation of specific new acting techniques. Meyerhold, for instance, founded his biomechanics in the 1920s by taking recourse to the machine, the work process, and the concomitant principle of Taylorism.1 From the 1950s onwards, Jerzy Grotowski established his theatre laboratory in which he came up with a via negativa leading to the ‘total act’ of the actor – an act that requires the actor to ‘reveal’ himself.2 Theodoros Terzopoulos, meanwhile, took a rather different route in the 1980s and after. His theatre is closely linked to the god Dionysus. One could even go so far as to state that it is an ongoing attempt to lure the god into returning from his exile. After a four-year stint at the Berliner Ensemble (19721976), Terzopoulos staged his first productions at the State Theatre of Northern Greece in Thessaloniki, among them Brecht’s Rise and Fall of the City Mahagonny (1977) and Lorca’s Yerma (1981). At the latest during the preparations for his production of The Bacchae (1986), the result of a nine-month

1

Cf. Meyerhold, 1922/2016.

2

Cf. Grotowski, 1968.

9

rehearsal period with his newly-founded Attis Theatre, Terzopoulos began to refer back to Dionysus. In a talk about The Bacchae he stated: ‘I began to search into the mysteries, the Greek theatrical events, to explore the popular festivals, to search for all information about Dionysus. I found one vital information in a book which was found in Leipzig, an edition of the seventeenth century. I read there that in Attica, where there is the hospital of Asclepius, the patients had to follow a certain ritual. When the sun was setting, they had to walk naked in a circle on wet sand, on wet earth, one around the other. In the second hour, they had to quicken their steps, in the third more. In the fourth, they had to bend their knees just as in Kabuki. In the fifth, they had to bend the elbows, and little by little advancing and quickening this motion, with the extremities bent, the physical pains started to go away, and the clots to break up. One had pain in the heart, another in the stomach, and suddenly it was gone. Little by little these people, for eight hours, did this same thing and they began to have so much energy. This is like what happens in Kabuki. The Kabuki actor can walk with bent knees for ten hours, and plays with the same secret. And from this, gradually, the pains began to break up and go away.’3 This search for Dionysus seems to constitute the driving force behind Terzopoulos’ theatre. By evoking the god, Terzopoulos developed a completely new form of theatre, based on a very particular use of the body. Dionysus was the son of Zeus and Semele. According to the myth, Hera, Zeus’ wife, became so jealous that she goaded on the Titans to kill the child. They ripped Dionysus to pieces, boiled and then devoured him. Only his heart remained intact. Out of it, Zeus recreated Dionysus anew.

3

10

McDonald, 1992, p. 164.

The tearing apart of Dionysus, his restoration to wholeness and his rebirth functions as the leitmotif for the actor’s work in Terzopoulos’ theatre. S/he must persistently destroy something of and within her/himself in order to restore her/himself to a new whole. The actor’s body is at the centre. Terzopoulos proceeds from the assumption that ‘the real source of our energy and knowledge comes from the interior of the body, from memories which have been printed inside us from long ago. There exists an inner energy which carries images and repressed memories of other lives and of other eras. Namely, there exists all the knowledge of the world inside our very bodies, and there is no need for us to refer to a hundred books in order to extract this.’4 The actor turns into a disciple of Dionysus, re-performing again and again the tearing apart and restoration of her/his body’s fragments into a new whole. Similarly to the patients at the hospital of Asclepius, the actors have to transfer themselves into a state of ecstasy – a state that Terzopoulos fundamentally differentiated from that of a trance: ‘In order to enter a state of ecstasy, the body must become aware of its feet. In trance you don’t have feet’.5 Through the state of ecstasy, the actor comes close to Dionysus and reveals her/himself as his disciple. Dionysus is also the god of endless transformations. He appears as man and woman, as god and beast, as a lion, snake or bull, permanently blurring the line between madness and reason, order and chaos, I and non-I. He is the god of liberation, who dissolves all borders. The actor is supposed to emulate him in this regard, too.

4

McDonald, 1992, p. 163.

5

Terzopoulos in Raddatz, 2006, p. 158.

11

The transgression of borders spans even that final frontier – the one separating life from death. Dionysus thus also appears as the god of a mystery cult. The mystery of this cult was the conviction that the tearing apart is always followed by a restoration to wholeness and life. Although Dionysus is not the ruler of the underworld, he ensures the well-being of the initiates in it. He frees them in the face of death – another variant in which he appears as liberator. Terzopoulos specifically describes his theatre as being ‘set in the Prothanatos, the waiting-room of Hades […] My theatre creates enlargements of this [our life as path towards Hades] waiting-room of death, the Prothanatos’.6 In this sense, Terzopoulos’ theatre can be regarded as Dionysian – it is not merely dedicated to Dionysus but even tries to persuade the god to return from his centuries-long exile. In this respect, it is highly relevant that Dionysus is not only a Greek god. In Syria, he was worshipped as Adonis, in Egypt as Osiris, and in Phrygia as Attis. According to another tradition, he came to Greece from India. There are also gods in a number of other cultures bearing a striking resemblance to Dionysus. Wole Soyinka equated him with the Yoruba god Ogun. Terzopoulos himself mentions Yarupari, a pre-Colombian god from Latin America. In this sense, one could regard Dionysus as the god of globalization, who is not so much in exile as on his journey through the world – as is Terzopoulos’ theatre. In this theatre, Dionysus’ journey through the different cultures is made possible by the actor’s body that is torn apart and revived in new ways. In Terzopoulos’ view, the human body is universal. Knowing full well that there 6

12

Terzopoulos in Raddatz, 2006, p. 160.

are no ‘natural’ body techniques as they are all culturally dependent, he claims that these body techniques can be un-learned and new ones acquired, which open up a completely unknown dimension of the human body. This is why Terzopoulos firmly believes that the particular body techniques and exercises he developed can be transferred to all cultures – a linkage that his work with actors in different cultures has repeatedly confirmed. The process of un-learning is equated to the tearing apart of the actors’ culturally formed body, while the development and training of new techniques function as rebirth and transformation into a new wholeness. These new techniques refer to patterns of breathing, the usage of voice, the movement of limbs, and of the body as a whole. At the beginning of The Bacchae, for instance, one figure squatted in front of a large crystal globe and another behind a drum, her mouth agape. She was breathing loudly – as were the other five actors on the circular stage. Her body was erect. She alternated lifting each arm to her shoulders, forming a right angle at the elbow and the base of the palm. The loud, rhythmic breathing was occasionally punctuated by a drumbeat. When Dionysus and Pentheus faced each other for their agon, their bodies were never upright. Their legs were bent at the knees and their upper bodies leaned forward at a sharp angle. The feet were firmly planted on the ground, leaving footprints in the sand that covered the floor, as if the two wanted to draw energy from the earth and channel it into their bodies. With each audible breath, with each movement of a limb, energy was set free to circulate in the space and be transferred to the spectators. This view of the human body as universal explains why certain body techniques aiming to activate and produce energy can be found in various cultures. As Terzopoulos’ comment on the bent knees in the above quotation

13

suggests, this posture is Greek as well as Japanese – and pre-Colombian, as we might add. It is a posture that can be learned and practiced in each and every culture – given that the actor succeeds in un-learning the previously acquired techniques of walking and standing. As such, they must not be regarded as quasi-natural body techniques but as methods that can be developed in every culture under particular circumstances. This point is worth emphasizing: The ‘archetypical body’ which can be discovered and made to appear via this technique should not be misunderstood as a ‘natural’ body. Rather, the idea is to abolish the Cartesian separation of body and mind, and the related domination of the mind in order to allow the actor to appear as body-mind. Ideally, this allows deeply buried and hidden memories to become accessible – not in a psychoanalytical sense but with a focus on physioanalysis, i.e. ‘the tearing apart’ of the body and its restoration to wholeness. Even in this regard, Dionysus appears as a traveler and a ubiquitous god who can summon disciples in all cultures. However, the human body is able merely to approximate the Dionysian without ever fully appearing as such – except in the case that the god returns and lends his power to the actors. Until the day of Dionysus’ epiphany, Terzopoulos’ theatre will no doubt be recognized as the one that comes closest to him. On September 23 and 24, 2011, a group of scholars and practitioners from different fields and parts of the world assembled at the Greek Cultural Foundation in Berlin to discuss aspects of Terzopoulos’ theatre related to its Dionysian qualities. Scholars of theatre studies, classical studies, psychoanalysis, psycho- and neurolinguistics met with writers, dramaturges, directors, and actors to share their views on the particularity of Terzopoulos’ theatre. The symposium was held in his honor. The contributions posed questions on the aesthetics and politics of his theatre, highlighting a number

14

of its elements, such as the actor’s body and, significantly, its cross-cultural dimension. It was a very open discussion that avoided general conclusions, mirroring the fact that a final and conclusive statement about Terzopoulos’ theatre is not appropriate, given that he continues to develop his approach with each of his new productions.

Bibliography Grotowski, Jerzy (1968) Towards a Poor Theatre. London: Methuen. McDonald, Marianne (1992) ‘Theodoros Terzopoulos’ Talk’. In: Ancient Sun, Modern Light: Greek Drama on the Modern Stage. New York: Columbia University Press, pp. 159–169. Meyerhold, Vsevolod Emilevich (1922) ‘The Actor of the Future and Biomechanics’. In: Braun, Edward (2016) Meyerhold on Theatre. London: Bloomsbury, pp. 199–200. Raddatz, Frank M. (ed.) (2006) Reise mit Dionysos. Das Theater des Theodoros Terzopoulos. Journey with Dionysos. The Theatre of Theodoros Terzopoulos. Berlin: Theater der Zeit.

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I. The Aesthetics of Terzopoulos’ Theatre – Anthropological and Political Perspectives

The Theatre of Theodoros Terzopoulos Aesthetics and Ideology

Georgios Sampatakakis

Theodoros Terzopoulos is one of the most significant European directors having staged more than two thousand performances throughout the world (from Beijing and Taiwan to New York and Colombia). He studied acting at the Berliner Ensemble and after returning to Greece in 1976 he was hired as director of the Drama School of the National Theatre of Northern Greece and directed his first productions with an openly anti-traditionalist political agenda and a high interest in creating his own antirealist style of acting (choosing plays by Brecht, Sartre, and Lorca). In 1986 he established his own theatre company based in Athens, the Attis Theatre, whose first production, The Bacchae (1986), is considered as a landmark in European theatre precisely because it produced a ‘de-stabilization’ of aesthetic and cultural expectations.1 Nonetheless, the aim of this article is not to provide a historical overview of Terzopoulos’ work, but to offer some general remarks on the director’s method, aesthetic, and subsequent ideology.

1

18

Fischer-Lichte, 2014, p. 129.

Method: An anthropology of destruction The recently published method of Attis Theatre, titled The Return of Dionysus, is a systematic approach to acting (available in many European languages). The basic functional principle of the method is the tripartite law of deconstruction, analysis, and mainly reconstruction (anasynthesis) of both the actor’s body and the dramaturgical material in use, both of which must be de-familiarized. Schematically:

‘1. Deconstruction: death of the daily body and decline of resistances. 2. Analysis: recalling and re-inscription of corporeal memories. 3. Recasting (metaplasis) of the body into a new theatrical body, and final reorientation’.2

More significantly, Terzopoulos’ Dionysian method presupposes both the creative derailment of the actor’s body from its everyday structures and the controlled reconstruction of the body into a new performing self. But the actor must also process and de-familiarize the text used in the performance in order to show a reactive alternative.3 Without any doubt, this is a process of productive ‘negation’, which seeks to ideologize and recuperate the text according to a directorial concept.4 In the case of Terzopoulos, the restoration of the daily body into a new performing body is mainly achieved through unconscious lapsus/aberrations of the body towards seemingly bizarre and unfamiliar actions that are per-

2

Terzopoulos, 2015, p. 42.

3

Ibid., p. 66.

4

Ibid., p. 47.

19

formed ‘despite of the actor’.5 Improvisation plays an important technical role in this process, given that through improvisation ‘the actor questions the “normal” language […], he is looking for lateral behaviours, creates parapraxes and unfamiliar levels […]. The actor becomes a doing person, the carrier and component of the primal impulses of the body, always ready […] to undo himself opening new fields of research’.6 Accordingly, after a series of exercises and improvisations, which disorientate the ‘normal’ body, the actor is able to reach a condition of controlled ecstasy. The trance-state enforces the physical ability of Fehlleistungen7 or parapraxes (erroneously carried-out actions), that is, involuntary lapsus of the body or any type of parapractic behavior that unleashes the repressed memory within the actor’s body as well as the body’s unconscious intentions. Yet, ‘the greater the resistance’ of the body, ‘the more extensively will acting out replace remembering’.8 Consequently, the regressive body that reenacts repressed ‘archaic’ actions is a new antibody that is unable to reproduce the behavior of its daily self, creating thereby non-canonical gestural emblems. What is readily noticeable after thirty years of practice, according to the director (after personal communication), is that actors’ bodies tend to be led to clear-cut angular schemata which help each body member to create a stylized gesture (to be codified as a gestus with a standard meaning in every performance). At the outset, Terzopoulos accepts the hypothesis that the actor’s body exists in a condition of resistance unable to recognize and re-live repressed 5

Terzopoulos, p. 77.

6

Ibid., pp. 46–47.

7

Freud, 2005, pp. 349–378.

8

Idem, 1950, p. 154.

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‘archaic’ memories.9 Like Tadeusz Kantor, he envisions memory as ‘[film] NEGATIVES that are still frozen’ in the mind ready to be redeveloped.10 In that sense, Terzopoulos introduces a Platonist phenomenology in perfor-

mance. Performative memory, like the Platonic ἰdέα, is already existent and

repressed within the body, yet completely restorable by means of physical action, that is, a somatic reconstruction of its remembrances into a new performing self after the deconstruction (sparagmos) of the old, memory-resistant self. The depository, out of which the surrogates of the normal movements are drugged up, is a ‘depth’ where the forces, ‘which did not accept to be civilized’, are repressed.11 That is, a depository of savage archetypes and impulses. And this second utterance of the body can indeed ‘impel the mind by example to the source of its conflicts’.12 In any case, Terzopoulos’ method is neither culture-specific nor culturerestrictive. It is an anthropological method which is founded on the basic laws of both the omission and the dilation of the daily body in order for a fictive body to be created.13 Not surprisingly, Dionysus, the God of destruction and rebirth, was always a great inspiration for the director in as much as the Dionysian according to Friedrich Nietzsche is a productive Kunsttrieb of change, that is, an artistic impulse and a form-creating force.14

9

A condition properly termed by Grotowski as ‘passive readiness’ (1969, p. 17).

10

Kantor, 1993, p. 159.

11

Terzopoulos, 2015, p. 70.

12

Artaud, 1958, p. 30.

13

Barba, 1991, pp. 13–20.

14

Moore, 2004, pp. 85–96.

21

Aesthetics The most distinctive element of Terzopoulos’ work is his high antirealist aesthetics of geometrical perfection and abstractive simplicity. Real furniture and real props have no place in Attis Theatre. Terzopoulos’ only accessories have historically been knives, cleavers, stones, high-heels, pom-poms, coffins, buckets, swords, and the like; the outfits of Eros and Thanatos, so to say. The obsession of Attis Theatre with geometric forms (floor patterns, postures, gestures) is fundamentally related to a basic aesthetic law of abstraction and the ‘deduction of things to their skeleton until they are stripped from their flesh and surface’,15 thereby constructing ‘in bold outline’ new totalities in themselves.16 Not surprisingly, theatre for Terzopoulos is the antechamber of a death, where the realistically behaving body dies and the diagrammatically reconstructed actors perform their schedules. Accordingly, the scenic idiom of Attis Theatre is a self-contained formalist code that consists of performative pictographs evolving from the practical research on the philosophical nuclei of Tragedy (e.g. the ‘tragic mask’ is a facial gestus that conveys the tremor of the existential fall of the subject, expressed either with the tetanic smile and the wide-open eyes or with the widening of the eyes and the gaping mouth, all of which are symptoms of the tormented being). But what privileges the priority of the formalization of the dramatic text, instead of its explanatory representation onstage, is a fact that most attackers of formalism overlook: ‘[…] form, while it is in some sense “suffered” by content, is itself the sedimentation of content [Inhalt]’.17

15

Müller, 1982, p. 43.

16

Schlemmer, 1961, p. 17.

17

Adorno, 1984, p. 209.

22

Terzopoulos constructs theatrical loci as living self-reflexive organisms that are interested in the geometrical positioning of the acting subject in systems of ‘deviant’ behavior. The endeavor is extended to the construction of a conditionally geometric space whose laws control the movements of the performers. In so doing, Terzopoulos creates a parole (a speech of kinetic morphemes), which looks at an obsession with geometric figures as developing, self-constructed, and self-defined structures of meaning. It is more than obvious that Terzopoulos’ work is pervaded by the Baugeist (spirit of construction) and a subsequent interest in constructing antirealist Kunstfiguren (art forms). But as Oskar Schlemmer has clearly defined ‘the potentialities of constructive configuration are extraordinary on the metaphysical side’.18 The performer becomes a machine of reconstruction, which conveys meaning about both the inherent cruelty and the possibilities of the human condition. In conclusion, the basic aesthetic objectives in Terzopoulos’ theatre are: (1) to simplify and reduce something down in order to find its ‘essence’; (2) to extend the range of expression used (mainly by constructing new forms); (3) to pay a particular attention to the treatment of rhythm; and (4) to defamiliarize the text and the actor from their ‘self-evident, familiar, obvious quality’.19 The result is an impressive stylization not only in the sense of a non-realist stylistics of the theatrical, that is, artificial body, but mainly in a very Meyerholdean sense as a rhythmical synthesis of body postures in motion that bear the qualities of economy and ‘suggestion’.20

18

Schlemmer, 1961, p. 18.

19

Brecht as translated in Brooker, 1988, p. 191.

20

As Pitches defines the term (2003, pp. 50–53).

23

Productions/Models I. Mauser and the machines of revolution The stage as a political metaphor about the teleology of power in modern societies is one of the most recent aesthetic strategies of the Attis Theatre. It is quite rare for a European theatre director today to translate a lucid political statement into mise en scène so self-referentially, so that all the elements of the production concur into a new type of political Gesamtkunstwerk (in the sense of a masterly designed scenic teleology). In 2009, Terzopoulos signed on the task of using Mauser (2009) as a source-Lehrstück according to his biodynamic method in order to be transferred to an ontological level: The body should remember and recall that the violence-work inborn in every revolution is a machine that kills its own operators. The rational embedding of this lesson is always dangerous and threatening to any society whose coherence lies on the strategies of propaganda. Hence, Terzopoulos masterly uses the stratagems of learning for the sake of his production, proving thereby that he employs a method and an aesthetic which violate all safe establishments. Terzopoulos’ set entraps all scenic terms to its teleology like a Beckettian projection. Figures A, B and C are trapped inside an oblong dike (grave?), covered by a black wooden slab that only allows their heads to appear. Chorus A (Terzopoulos) and chorus B (Maria Beikou) sit on the opposite short sides, demarcating the space. Finally, a mouthpiece of revolution stands surefooted with his open hands holding red flyers like a red angel above the chorus.

Terzopoulos transforms the didactic stratagems of the text scenically into an Atroposmaschine (the killing machine of revolution, from which its voluntary

24

victims and cogwheels cannot escape). Everybody has to follow the ‘program’, the recognition of which generates terror to any revolutionist who realizes that it is inevitable to claim his body back. Revolution needs ideology, ideology needs propaganda, propaganda needs banners, banners need martyrs, martyrs need death, death needs bodies. Accordingly, the Atroposmaschine usurps bodies and drags them to their task. The corporeal order of the figures is thereby deconstructed, when they become delirious automata which mechanically reproduce their ‘lesson’ up to the point of gabbling heartbroken by repetition, this time with an assurance that they were just recyclable objects (history acknowledges the possibility that machines present malfunctions). But the angel of revolution stands dauntless outside the machine, so exhaustlessly bound to his ‘divine’ task (however affected by the terror of Revolution). Besides, any teleology has something of a theology: the end is death and death is the end in a masterly humanist way: By questioning what being human means, Terzopoulos fundamentally rejected all types of violence and resurrected a neglected humanism. On this level, Terzopoulos’ political message made a giant leap beyond Müller’s intention.21

II. Prometheus-manifesto for the crisis For the past twenty-five years, Attis Theatre has been working against traditionalist ideologies and canons. Terzopoulos is undoubtedly a formalist director not because he creates human lines on stage, but because he builds inhabitable spaces ‘determined by the circumstances and purposes of the action in question and by the movement of the bodies within the space, in order to 21

Kyoung Kim, 2013, p. 385.

25

create a formally coherent and dramatically functional system’.22 And form in Terzopoulos’ theatre is a structure of meaning: ‘Terzopoulos sets up the salient points of his mostly bear dramatic space on archetypes which disappoint widespread expectations insofar as they go beyond the coherence of one sense alone’.23 Highly characteristic of the company’s artistic profile is the director’s commitment to undermining the conventions of realism, rejecting thereby the traditional canon of gracefulness and archaicness with regard to the staging of Greek drama. But historically speaking, Terzopoulos’ dialogue with Greek tragedy has been extremely creative, not only because the director renounced the nationalistic ideologemes connected to the alleged revival/resurrection of the past, but also because he has been using the tragic texts as models for further ideological treatment. In 2010 the director returned to Prometheus Bound with a very political agenda. The actual mise en scène was a study on the consequences of the (existential) fall of the subject in times of social crisis, promoting thereby the necessity of social action against the agents of power. The actual set underlined the production’s concept in as much as it reflected an outlandish field of combat. The renowned artist of the Arte Povera movement Jannis Kounelis (born 1936) provided an astonishing environment in which a series of falling stones were tied to each other vertically by thick ropes against the walls of an abandoned oil-mill factory in Elefsina. Equally commanding was the acoustic environment with the sounds of shooting machine guns and war sirens occupying the space. Prometheus (Yetkin Dikinciler), this disenchanted emblem

22

Ribeiro, 2007, p. 109.

23

Tsatsoulis, 2006, p. 45.

26

of romantic rebellions24, appeared standing at the back of the stage along with a strange male chorus of Oceanides lying in front of him, all dressed in black suits: ‘JOURNALIST: Why did you transform Oceanides into a male Chorus? T. TERZOPOULOS: In order to give the impression of an ocean that washes up dead bodies of warriors, poor people and newly poor people. The defeated also play the victimizers. They are the victims and victimizers in a very extreme, delirious way. Man has changed. Humanist ideals cannot survive today. Humans are de-humanized. This is something I take into account very seriously with regard to the corporeality of the actor and the delivery of speech’.25 In terms of the movement of the chorus, Terzopoulos introduced a radical kinesiology. The multinational ensemble of Greek, German, and Turkish actors was presented as a human wave constantly lying on the ground en face to the audience with their hands tied behind their back and the ‘tragic mask’ nailed on their face. Like a sweeping tractor, the dehumanized male chorus, who rejected their female emotional past, came to officiate a revolution against repressive forms of power with an image of fall permanently installed on the background. The political metaphor was very strong: now that the past is reconsidered, the victims of history are washed up already dead on the outskirts of civilization in order to revise the discourse of tragedy before a post-industrial scaenae frons. The choice of a multinational cast was equally political in as much as victimhood was treated as an anthropological factum beyond nations and bor-

24

Gillespie, 1990, pp. 197–210.

25

Kleftogianni, 2010.

27

ders. What if the Germans are regarded by many Greeks as the financial controllers of Greece, and what if Turks are historically seen as ‘enemies’? All people are victims of a regulative power regardless of their nationality. This is indeed a type of modern Greek neo-humanism generated by the crisis and the people’s productive reassessment of past ideologies and patterns of thought. To think in terms of a world picture, of a common ‘enframing’ of the social circumstances means to ‘undermine claims of homogeneous and autonomous identity’.26 On the other hand to ‘insist on a racial, ethnic or nationalist identity as something that is not connected or framed in the historical heterogeneity of a shared world is to deny the very forces that gave rise to such concepts (race, ethnicity), and which both ground and permit such an identity to speak’.27

The actual performance appertained to the development of a linear system of meanings, as a battle between order and chaos until the final descent into death. A general canon of Attis is that the intersecting floor patterns are reverberant, while parallel lines of actors act temporarily in fission. But this paralyzed chorus was radically ‘de-chorused’, when the manic Oceanides moved like spastic automata, denying obedience to the straightness of the geometrical system. Prometheus controlled the balance of the scenic construct, being the underwriter and regulator of order. The unchained Titan who spoke Turkish, following a line of descent from the back to the front of the stage, was constantly smearing his abdomen with black paint, unable to escape this self-punishment. The past voyeuristic emblem of social rebellions28 was thus trans-

26

Chambers, 2001, p. 200.

27

Ibid., p. 201.

28

As analysed in Hall, 2002, pp. 129–140.

28

formed into a manifesto-machine heralding the death of romantic revolutions and the inevitability of social action. According to the director: ‘I want to incite people to rise. This can’t be done with a slow ritualistic performance […]. Even Prometheus’ own monologues are phrases that we use today in our everyday reality. Hence, there is already a basis for the development of a rebellion’.29 At the end of the performance, the actors stood up in a long line facing the audience. They started loudly repeating Prometheus’ famous line ‘a day

will come’ after reciting the phrase ἔκδικα πάσχω. Before they finally fall on the ground, they were all trembling as if they were attacked by a power that wanted to take control of their bodies, shouting until the very end that ‘a day will come’. This was indeed an agitating image of shared suffering and hope, which caused loud applause in every performance. The financial and subsequent social crisis in Greece encouraged a more politically minded approach to Greek tragedy. This, however, is not necessarily anchored to a specific aesthetic or directorial ideology (one could assume that a critical stance towards the aesthetics of traditionalism would have been adopted by artists). The crisis, on the contrary, enforced a scenic neo-conservatism and a return to traditional aesthetics, both practically imposed by the audience’s desire to watch the plays unburdened of unnecessary and confusing directorial modernizations. For Terzopoulos, the repetition of Prometheus in an affirmatively ‘traditional’ way could have offered nothing more than the narcissistic confirmation of the Neohellenic nationalizing dreams. Instead of that, the director followed a challenging via negativa. In a time of national cri-

29

Paridis, 2010.

29

sis, the ‘great’ humanist paradigm was used to broadcast a socially agitating message: ‘we are ALL abettors of crime and we will ALL fall, unless we rise’.30 In conclusion, Terzopoulos’ Prometheus was the symbol of a social rebellion pending in modern Greece. The actual performance was a warning that Greece is in war and needs to reconsider the comforting ideologemes of cultural patriotism and ethnic introversion. Or, as Freddy Decreus puts it: ‘In the eyes of Terzopoulos it takes courage to reconsider the absolute metaphors we still use today as well as the historical and mythological roots that are responsible for the way we think, feel, love and fight, and to integrate them into a new globalised and intercultural field, into the new ethnic, national and cultural borders, because interculturality determines more and more the new face of Europe, and therefore also of its production of art, religion and worldviews’.31

Conclusion Terzopoulos is a post-traditionalist European director with a very positivist meaning of the term, exactly as Patrice Pavis embraces the productiveness of questioning canons and traditions: to ‘deconstruct tradition is not to destroy it: it is to extract its principles and confront them with today’s principles’.32 And Terzopoulos’ theatre offers the possibility of new structures, not only in the sense of a renewed aesthetics, but mainly in the sense of new patterns of thought and − to use Raymond Williams’ infamous term − new ‘structures of feeling’.33

30

Sampatakakis, 2010, p. 41.

31

Decreus, 2012, p. 191.

32

Pavis, 2013, p. 161.

33

Williams, 1966, p. 18.

30

Bibliography Adorno, Theodor W. (1984) Aesthetic Theory, translated by Christian Lenhardt. London, New York: Routledge. Artaud, Antonin (1958) Theatre and Its Double, translated by Mary Caroline Richards. New York: Grove. Barba, Eugenio (1991) ‘Theatre Anthropology’. In: Eugenio Barba and Nicola Savarese (eds.) A Dictionary of Theatre Anthropology: The Secret Art of the Performer. London, New York: Routledge, pp. 8–22. Brooker, Peter (1988) Bertolt Brecht: Dialectics, Poetry, Politics. London: Croom Helm. Chambers, Iain (2001) Culture after Humanism: History, Culture, Subjectivity. London, New York: Routledge. Decreus, Freddy (2012) ‘Theodoros Terzopoulos' Promethiade (2010), or the Revolutionary Power of Contemporary Theatre’. In: Classical Papers, 11, pp. 181–196. Fischer-Lichte, Erika (2014) Dionysus Resurrected: Performances of Euripides’ ‘The Bacchae’ in a Globalizing World. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell. Freud, Sigmund (1950) Remembering and Repeating: Collected Papers, edited and translated by James Strachey. London: Hogarth Press. — (2005) Psychopathology of Everyday Life, translated by Abraham Arden Brill. Stilwell: Digirids.com Publishing. Gillespie, Gerald (1990) ‘Prometheus in the Romantic Age’. In: G. Hoffmeister (ed.). European Romanticism. Literary Cross-Currents, Modes, and Models. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, pp. 197–210. Grotowski, Jerzy (1969) Towards a Poor Theatre. London: Methuen. Hall, Edith (2002) ‘Tony Harrison's Prometheus: A View from the Left’. In: Arion, 10, pp. 129–140. Kantor, Tadeusz (1993) ‘Memory 1988’. Michael Kobialka (ed.) Tadeusz Kantor. A Journey Through Other Spaces: Essays and Manifestos, 19441990. Berkeley, London: University of California Press, pp. 159–60. Kleftogianni, Ioanna (2010) ‘Ο Προμηθέας των ρήξεων ταιριάζει σε εργατούπολη’. In: Eleftherotypia, 29 June 2010. Available at: http://www.enet.gr/ ?i=news.el.article&id=167238 (Accessed 13/10/2015). Kyoung Kim, Jae (2013) ‘Theodoros Terzopoulos’s Production of Heiner Müller’s Mauser: Metaphoric Political Theatre through Space, Body and Dialogue’. In: Skene, 1(3), pp. 373–87.

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Moore, Gregory (2004) Nietzsche, Biology and Metaphor. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Müller, Heiner (1982) Rotwelsch. Berlin: Merve. Paridis, Christos (2010) ‘Αντι-Προμηθέας’. In: Lifo, 19 June 2010. Available at: http://www.lifo.gr/mag/features/2123 (Accessed: 23/10/2015). Pavis, Patrice (2013) Contemporary Mise en Scène: Staging Theatre Today, translated by Joel Anderson. London, New York: Routledge. Pitches, Jonathan (2003) Vsevolod Meyerhold. London, New York: Routledge. Ribeiro, João Mendes (2007) Architectures on Stage. Lisbon: Almedina. Sampatakakis, Georgios (2010) ‘Προμηθέας-Μανιφέστο’. In: Φεστιβάλ Αθηνών 2010. Athens: Greek Festival Ltd., p. 41. Tsatsoulis, Dimitris (2006) ‘The Circle and the Square’. In: Frank M. Raddatz (ed.) Reise mit Dionysos. Das Theater des Theodoros Terzopoulos. Journey with Dionysos. The Theatre of Theodoros Terzopoulos. Berlin: Theater der Zeit, pp. 42–54. Schlemmer, Oskar (1961) ‘Man and Art Figure’. In: Walter Gropius (ed.) The Theater of the Bauhaus, translated by Arthur S. Wensinger. Middletown, Connecticut: Wesleyan University Press, pp. 17–44. Terzopoulos, Theodoros (2015) Η Επιστροφή του Διονύσου. Athens: Attis Theatre. Williams, Raymond (1966) Modern Tragedy. London: Chatto & Windus.

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Deep Bodies Light. Theodoros Terzopoulos’ Vertical Choreographies

Matthias Dreyer

For a critical analysis of the present, we must constantly rummage through the dark soil of the past. In his Denkbilder, Walter Benjamin harks back to the metaphor of the archeologist to spell this out: ‘Anyone who seeks to approach his own buried past must conduct himself like someone digging.’ The life of the past can never be discovered as that which it was, and thus has to be reconstructed from re-located fragments. The seeker should unearth the facts, ‘as one scatters earth, […] turn it over as one turns over soil’.1 And he or she must be clear that recollection is related to the place where it emerges, and at the same time yields an image of the one doing the remembering. The theatre of Theodoros Terzopoulos is, in this sense, a site of digging or a setting for excavation. His bodies and spaces, his voices and movements draw their strength from a vertical dimension – in choreographies that expose various deeper layers of historical soil. They trace their provenance, but what they find are not intact forms. Instead, something more important: the experience of a precarious present which emerges from an encounter 1

Benjamin, 2005, p. 576.

33

with the elusive past and which, in the theatre, at best, induces a moment of shock. We can thus say that from verticality comes an aesthetic force of its own. But where exactly does the archeological metaphor lead to? And how does theatre work when it is considered as a trench? The depth is a topos if we look at the reception of Terzopoulos’ theatre. Terzopoulos himself speaks of the ‘concept of depth in ancient tragedy.’2 But is it really, as Marianne McDonald suggests, a ‘depth to which man can descend’?3 What does one actually find there? The idea of ‘depth’ was long intimately associated with metaphysical thought, the image of breaking through a surface level in order to advance to truth and essence. Depth, as opposed to a flat surface – and as opposed to the sublime – can also be found, in this sense, in the mystical tradition. Though, to what extent shall we readapt? To examine these questions, I will explore the vertical not only as a metaphor for metaphysical speculation but as a multi-dimensional aesthetic figuration. To that end I will refer primarily to Terzopoulos’ productions of ancient Greek tragedies to show what the sensation of depth yields, to what extent it also becomes a synesthetic phenomenon, intertwining experiences of space, time, and physicality. The treatment of depth here is an intellectual concept, but also a labor of the body, of matter, of vertical choreography. The approach of this theatre ultimately consists of digging through history to make contact with myth – and yet it confirms that a modern relationship to myth is, in the end, only possible, when this depth is not occupied by metaphysical truths but when one introduces a concept of history into the discussion.

2

McDonald, 1992, p. 162.

3

Cf. Terzopoulos, 2000, p. 17.

34

Vertical space Modern theatre has historically concentrated on two dimensions which can be understood as the internal and external axes of communication: the internal concerns the contact between the actors on the stage, the interpersonal relationships of the drama; the external indicates ways of contact between performers and audience. In both cases, this modern theatrical topology refers to a horizontal movement. However, Terzopoulos’ theatre amounts to more than this. While external communication, contact with the audience, does play an important role at least on the rhythmic level of his theatre (internal communication does not happen as far as I can tell), the vertical axis is as important to him as the horizontal. And this vertical, as we shall see, is to be salvaged from pre-Enlightenment theatre. My observations were precipitated by the Terzopoulos production of Aeschylus’ Prometheus Bound, which I saw in Essen, Germany, in 2010.4 The performance did not take place in a conventional closed theatre space, but in the compound of Essen’s coal mine industrial complex. To reach the area, the audience was driven out of the center to the city limits where deep shafts lead into the ground. One continued past the uncannily silent drilling rigs right to the outermost edge of the compound. A peculiar melancholy weighed on this place, its machines all at a standstill. Until just a few years ago coal was being extracted there, today the old mines are closed. They stand as relics from another time, monuments from a depth all too exploited. Here the theatre has the function to bear witness to other forms of excavation. The arte povera artist Iannis Kounellis designed a site of transition for

4

The project was conceptualized for three places: an old factory close to Athens, the medieval Hagia Irene in Istanbul and the staging in Essen.

35

Terzopoulos here. In his essays he compares art to a spring that leads into the depths of the past.5 On his stage, the audience sat outdoors on risers looking out on a wooden platform; the scene was framed by two large, derelict train cars. The performance could only begin once night fell and the area was submerged in darkness. The spotlights concentrated one’s gaze on the stage, and the contrast between the darkness outside and the luminous set was so immense that it appeared as if a hole in the visible world had been cut open, pointing to something illuminated in the dark. Many of Terzopoulos’ productions generate the impression that the stage is a crater leading inside the earth. They often feature sharply lit circular surfaces. The stage is frequently highlighted with white, as in his Antigone or The Persians in Epidauros. This establishes direct references to ancient Greek theatre, where the disc of an orchestra was surrounded by rising tiers for the audience, thus to emphasize the vertical. Michel Serres called ancient theatre an ‘immense ear’, lying on the floor and leading inside into the earth.6 Ulrike Haß stressed the relationship of ancient theatre to an open horizon above, to cosmology.7 Once this vertical dimension is presumed, it also runs to an impenetrable deep, into the invisible.8

Disrupting time, opening bodies Yet, a topological analysis alone cannot sound out the vertical in this theatre; one needs to think temporally and physically as well. When ancient Greek

5

Cf. Kounellis’ lecture at the Griechische Kulturstiftung, Berlin, October 10, 2005, or Kounellis, 2006.

6

Serres, 2008, p. 85.

7

Cf. Haß, 2018.

8

See Fischer-Lichte, 2007, pp. 173–181.

36

tragedy is produced today, the main challenge is primarily in establishing a connection to the ancient world and that means: rendering the work historical in a specific way.9 This cannot be conceived with a model of chronological time, flowing in a linear fashion. Rather, it can only really be achieved if it is dedicated to the permeability of times, to contemporaneity. Terzopoulos’ theatre is in this sense a search for vertical time, a question of time strata – and its medium is the body. According to Walter Benjamin, history comes into being when linear time is blown open and disrupted. One’s own time should be thought of as a present not causally determined by the past ‘but in which time takes a stand and has come to a standstill.’10 This happens when we refer to unrealized possibilities of the past: to that dimension of historical occurrence that has not become history. With linearly flowing time at a standstill, another access to the body and to a being-with can be initiated. Terzopoulos himself has described his theatre as a ‘long journey to the land of memory.’ ‘Depth in ancient tragedy,’ as he said, has to do with human ‘structure,’ with the ‘deepest layers of the psyche.’11 This is to be read less in regard to a metaphysical essence than as a bodily investigation of a memory, which is not determined by the history of singular individuals. Terzopoulos connects the work on rhythm and breath, on visceral and energetic bodies to an idea of being-with, to the idea of something that binds everyone, that everyone shares with each other.12 Here psychoanalysis intersects with the

9

Cf. Dreyer, 2017, pp. 242–256.

10

Benjamin, 2006, pp. 389–400, here p. 396.

11

Terzopoulos, 2000, p. 50.

12

For the concept of Being-with (être-avec), as opposed to the Heideggerian concept of Being/Sein, see Nancy, 2000.

37

critical understanding of history: the confusions on the surface of consciousness indicate a deeper layer, too deep to be fully fathomed. It becomes accessible when we let go of the idea of linear, chronological time and instead think in terms of leaps in time, tears, in which time opens up, just as the body’s possibilities do.

Myth and trance in repetition Submerging this way into the deeper layers of structure, Terzopoulos’ theatre at once also reflects the bodies that conducts the quest. Thus, many of Terzopoulous’ productions begin in silence, with the conscious act of breathing – for instance in his staging of the fragment The Epigoni. The performers arrange themselves in a motionless gestus; their gaze frozen, directed into a wide void; their mouths are open: they are preparing themselves to serve as the medium for what is coming. The synchronous, rhythmic inand exhaling, the guttural airflow surging among the performers leads inward into the body. The deep breathing links the performers, who coalesce as a kind of breath-chorus, to one another and connects the performers to the audience which in turn is included in the rhythmic field of the breathing. Nearly every movement proceeds from the group. Here, the collective is the means of digging down: both the correlation of performers and of the attentive audience. The acts of silence and of breathing separate the performers as much as the audience from the coherence of chronology. In this different sort of time, their bodies will appear to excavate myth. And although myth articulates itself through recurring, cyclical repetition, this theatre ultimately lives by interrupting cyclical time, too. Terzopoulos places his theatre exactly in this in-between: between the repetition of suffering and the deliverance from it.

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Epigoni, Athens, Attis Theatre 2003: Chorus. Photo: Johanna Weber

On a bodily level, the methodology of depth requires pathos and trance – and originates from the pelvic region. The sober, rational methodology of an archeologist is not enough for this. Terzopoulos describes this in his numerous workshops and it has often been analyzed: an exploration of the rhythm of speech should not result in emotions. Rather, it should unleash an energetic state of arousal in the body. The performers start from the ancient texts, but they do not concentrate on the shape of the whole outer form; instead, they pry out of them fragmentary linguistic pieces. They grapple with the rhythms of the text and turn them into a physical reality. A closer description of this process is hardly possible without referring to the idea, itself not easily rationally comprehensible, of transformation – such as what Nietzsche underlined as the centerpiece of his writing on tragedy. By creating a state of ecstasy or trance, through excessive repetition, the performers try to

39

connect with a forgotten affect of the ancient texts. They evoke a state of being outside themselves, of delirium and subjection. It is an act that arises from the individual existence of a single person and their specific body, and yet, it is based on them going to the very limits of their existence. It has been stressed that Terzopoulos’ theatre is not only associated with the Asian tradition but also to a certain extent with the anthropological-ritual theatre of the 1970s. Even Grotowski employed the metaphor of depth to label his methodology: the actor’s dedication should ‘derive from the deepest layer of his being and of his instincts.’13 Terzopoulos has nonetheless modified these traditions by making clear that there can be no authentic return to these places, that the actor – on his path into the depth of the body – will be confronted with an otherness which frightens and leaves us at once distraught and wondering. Take for instance Terzopoulos’ staging of Ajax, The Madness.14 The production belongs to those works of Terzopoulos’ opus in which he radically substitutes the old iconography of the archaic (soil, dust, linen, etc.) through minimalist, non-narrative abstraction. In Ajax, The Madness, three men form a kind of collective of mythical exploration. They balance on small platforms, arranged on two crossing lines. Each one comes forth from the group that breathed and moved together at the start, to perform a solo through which he physically-mimetically brings to life moments from the myth. Each is working with the same textual material: the words depicting the bloodbath that Ajax causes, complemented by some recurring phrases from Sophocles’ chorus. The performers begin their solos with a dispassionate report of the carnage, but they gradually escalate – each in his own way – into the destruc-

13

Grotowski, 1968, p. 15 (transl. modified).

14

Seen 2005 at the Theater im Pfalzbau, Ludwigshafen; 2006 at the Radialsystem Berlin.

40

Ajax, The Madness, Athens, Attis Theatre 2004: Savvas Stroumpos, Meletis Ilias, Tassos Dimas. Photo: Johanna Weber

tive, externally-controlled frenzy Ajax is subject to. They proceed into the depths of the character and reconnoiter Ajax’ destructive potential from within. Each one ends bitterly weeping, in a moment of awakening. It becomes clear that these people are trapped in a pattern of delusion and violence. The myth leads to a level of suffering and surrender that many understand to be a structure of the human being in which one does not wish to remain, yet out of which one cannot escape. Here, the impression could arise that, in the attempt to achieve a mythical depth, these solos arrive at the nature of the human being, at the truth of our existence. Nietzsche for instance exhorts us in his The Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of Music that the Dionysian principle vanquishes the illusions of life, that it projects forth into the real, that it would thus become possible ‘to take down, stone by stone, as it were, the elaborate construction of Apollo-

41

nian culture until we behold the foundations on which it rests.’15 But what can foundations hold which were built by means of rapture and constant transformation? A closer reflection makes clear that in the depths evoked by Terzopoulos’ theatre, no truth is revealed. Rather, here, we are confronted with an abyss, with darkness so dense it is hardly legible. The search for myth in Terzopoulos’ theatre is the path of experimental approximation. And yet, there, where one thought to find an origin, one only finds this impregnable obscurity. Foreign languages are in play, crystalline formalizations without any explanation. Many scenes do not depend on directly addressing the spectators but well-nigh abandoning them. At their radical withdrawal, these scenes render themselves alien. This particular way into the deep does not yield a fusion with myth. The relationship between myth and performance is not identifiable as a relationship of archetype and actualization, of origin and repetition, or cause and effect. For the performance itself is shaped throughout by darkness; it constantly produces divergence, a fissure, a movement away.

The spiral – a way out In this way, we should understand the path into the deep less as a path to truth than as a strategy of transformation, of renewal. Nietzsche described the Dionysian principle as a transgressive possibility of emancipation, which is tied to a historico-philosophical perspective. The ‘Dionysian enchantment’ would transform a tired culture; Nietzsche spoke of ‘rebirth’ through tragedy, thus of a renewal through repetition.16 Tragedy in this sense cannot

15

Nietzsche, 1956, §3, p. 23 (Transl. modified).

16

Cf. Dreyer, 2015, pp. 273–290.

42

just be understood as an awareness of suffering. Even with Terzopoulos one can only really call it tragedy when it deals with the question of the disruption of suffering and of the caesura of history. Along these lines, tragedy and utopia exist in close proximity – as the pursuit of a claim and as an examination of the claim’s potential failure. Thus, Terzopoulos qualifies his vision of tragedy as an interruption of myth: ‘from a certain point the cycle is broken apart and we arrive at a crack, a qualitative fissure in which each tragedy exists.’ One comprehends an essence of tragedy when one tracks down this ‘explosion,’ the ‘break of the cycle’ that Terzopoulos associates with the image of the ‘spiral,’17 whose modern iconography was shaped by the avant-garde at the time of the Russian revolution. Whatever appears on this path into the depths neither escapes time nor is timeless but rather is always tied to concrete places and eras. Tragedy asks, in various locations and each time with different bodies, how liberation could be ushered in (given the insight into suffering). Myth is not the last word. Myth, sought after in the deep, is not an origin, in the sense that we return to a place where we were born. Rather, it is a path to rebirth which – in the discrepancy we find – affects our position today. By renewal, I do not mean a great revolution but simply the small gestures of resistance. The experience of this broken origin in the deep imparts new strength. That is how I construe the final scene of the 2010 production of Prometheus Bound, which I mentioned at the start. The Greek, German, and Turkish men who formed the chorus, who lay on the ground with their hands bound, who rolled in the dust, and agreed to experience that state of subjection: now they are standing in a row facing the audience. Their foe, 17

Cf. Terzopoulos, 2009, pp. 46-81, here p. 47.

43

Hermes, Zeus’ representative and taunting victor, comes onstage and humiliates them. No one fights back. But they stand there as if this humiliation bounces off of them. Out of the deep emerges co-being: it links them together in the consciousness of death and of suffering. The day will come, as the leitmotif goes in Heiner Müller’s translation of Prometheus. At the end of the night, a dawn, a light.

Translated into English by Maggie Bell

Bibliography Benjamin, Walter (2005) ‘Ibizan Sequence’. In: Idem Selected Writings, Vol. 2, part 2, 1931–1934, edited by Marcus Paul Bullock et al. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, p. 576. — (2006) ‘On the concept of history’. In: Idem Selected Writings, Vol. 4, 1938-1940, edited by Marcus Paul Bullock and Michael W. Jennings. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, pp. 389–400. Dreyer, Matthias (2015) ‘Nietzsches Masken. Medien der Verlebendigung’. In: Lorenz Aggermann et al. (eds.) Lernen, mit den Gespenstern zu leben. Das Gespenstische als Figur, Metapher und Wahrnehmungsdispositiv in Theorie und Ästhetik. Berlin: Neofelis, pp. 273–290. — (2017) ‘Caesura of History – Performing Greek Tragedy After Brecht’. In: The Performance Philosophy Journal, 2(2), pp. 242–256. Fischer-Lichte, Erika (2007) ‘Die Toten kehren zurück. Über die Wahrnehmung von Zeit im Theater’. In: Christina Lechtermann, Kirsten Wagner and Horst Wenzel (eds.) Möglichkeitsräume. Zur Performativität von sensorischen Wahrnehmungen. Berlin: Erich Schmidt Verlag, pp. 173–181. Grotowski, Jerzy (1968) Towards a Poor Theatre. New York: Simon & Schuster. Haß, Ulrike (2006) ‘Das Bergwerk Einar Schleef: Hören & Sehen‘. In: thewis. Available at: http://www.theater-wissenschaft.de/das-bergwerk-einarschleef-hoeren-sehen (Accessed: 2/2/2018).

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Kounellis, Jannis (2006) Der Wind. Texte und Zeichnungen, edited by Wolfgang Storch. Hamburg: Edition nautilus. McDonald, Marianne (1992) ‘Theodoros Terzopoulos’ Talk’. In: Idem Ancient Sun, Modern Light. Greek Drama on the Modern Stage. New York, Oxford: Columbia University Press, pp. 159–170. Nancy, Jean-Luc (2000) Being Singular Plural, translated by Robert Richardson and Anne O’Byrne. Stanford, California: Stanford University Press. Nietzsche, Friedrich (1956) The Birth of Tragedy and The Genealogy of Morals. New York: Doubleday. Serres, Michel (2008) The five senses. A Philosophy of Mingled Bodies, translated by Margaret Sankey and Peter Cowley. London, New York: Bloomsbury, p. 85. Terzopoulos, Theodoros (2009) ‘Die Wunde Müller – 48 Aphorismen. Zur Konstruktion der Gespenster im Werk Heiner Müllers’. In: Frank Raddatz (ed.) Im Labyrinth. Theodoros Terzopoulos begegnet Heiner Müller. Berlin: Theater der Zeit, pp. 46–81. — (2000). Theodoros Terzopoulos and the Attis Theatre. History, Methodology and Comments. Athens: Agra.

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Performing Cultural Trauma in Mauser: An Exilic Perspective on the Greek Civil War Penelope Chatzidimitriou

Introduction Contemporary exile can no longer be epitomized within one cultural paradigm. Nor is there a single poetics of exile. It is certain, however, that the exilic consciousness has an alternative way of viewing the world, of comprehending reality, an alternative mode of artistic thinking and expression. This is a perspective of estrangement that employs the strategy of uprooting, taking things out of their familiar context and shedding light on them through displacement.1 The political-ontological theatre of Theodoros Terzopoulos is characterized by such an exilic perspective. This should not come as a surprise, since the Greek director has been marked by exile experience as a descendant of Greek refugees from Pontus and a leftist defeated family which experienced the postwar traumas of the Greek Civil War and the following military dictatorship in Greece. Such an exilic experience was further amplified during his self-exile in East Germany and his apprenticeship at the Berliner Ensemble with Heiner Müller. This multifaceted exile helped Terzopoulos to nego1

46

See: Jestrovic, 2003, pp. 1–4.

tiate the distances of his world, to assimilate the dialectical push and pull of his relationship with the homeland, and to develop this various relationship into a position that emphasizes ‘tragic universality’. In other words, Terzopoulos’ ‘distancing effect’ is his historical condition of exile. With the above in mind, I will discuss the production of Heiner Müller’s Mauser (2009) and the director’s defamiliarizing techniques of space, time and the body when performing a cultural trauma such as the Greek Civil War. How does he stage these unspeakable traumas which need to be spoken of? But let us start with some necessary historical facts. The Greek Civil War was fought from 1946 to 1949 between the Greek governmental army, backed by the United Kingdom and the United States, and the Democratic Army of Greece, the military branch of the Greek Communist Party, backed by Bulgaria, Yugoslavia, and Albania. It was the result of a highly polarized struggle between leftists and rightists which had started in 1943. Increased American aid under the Truman Doctrine, lack of high numbers of recruits to the ranks of the Democratic Army and the side-effects of the Tito–Stalin split led to the victory of the Western-supported government forces, thus opening the way to Greece's membership in NATO. Greece was left with a fervent anti-communist security establishment, which would lead to the Greek military dictatorship between 1967 and 1974, and a legacy of political polarization, which lasted until the end of the 1980s. All in all, at an international level, the Greek Civil War was not only a three-year military conflict but a political clash between the Right and the Left in the larger frame of the Cold War. In fact, the Greek Civil War was one of the first hot conflicts of the Cold War. Internationally, 1989 marks the end of the Cold War: The Berlin Wall fell, the Soviet Union collapsed, in Tiananmen Square in Beijing there were

47

bloody protests. In the same year, in Greece, the Left and the Right participated in a coalition government. In a political system with a traditionally huge gulf between the Right and the Left, the notion of the right party governing together with the communists was truly novel. This coalition marked a major step toward national reconciliation and the legalization of the communist party within the body politic. In the same year, the Law on Removal of the Consequences of the Civil War was enacted and all parliamentary parties agreed to send all police files for incineration so that the memories of the civil war would be erased. This is the Greek version of the end of the Cold War.2 If this is the role of a civilized society, what is the role of art? Is it not to depict the dystopias created in the name of a utopia and retrace the steep paths people and nations were asked to follow through for the sake of a utopia? In that sense, Theodoros Terzopoulos’ Mauser is a work that proceeds against the repression of memory – the personal and historical memory of the Greek Civil War in particular – so as to articulate it. The Greek director joins a current universal discourse which departs from the facts and history to meet experience and memory. This turn in (dis)course is so commonly and widely detected at the end of the twentieth century onwards that it can be viewed as a cultural phenomenon. Not surprisingly so, since the twentieth century turned hope into a nightmare and introduced the concepts of trauma and loss into the Enlightenment notion of history as a discourse of emancipation and self-knowledge.3 Likewise, Terzopoulos insists that a healthy society reveals its hidden cultural traumas and tells their stories – stories of hate, pain, loss, and shame.

2

Verveniotis, 2010, p. 15.

3

Liakos, 2015, p. 40.

48

‘My memory was marked by the Greek post civil war condition. This is a determining issue for me not so much socio-politically but existentially. I am always angry, my work is also angry and this constant anger is the result of a hatred I felt in my childhood years when I was among those defeated. […] the Greek Civil War hatred has always been a latent driving force. […] The Civil War is an incurable taboo, the trauma instinctively suppressed’.4

Terzopoulos stresses that Mauser does not only depict memory but calls for the work of memory to be undertaken. His play is neither one of reminiscence nor of hatred. I would argue that this is a play of disquietude. Although one might argue that any civil war – that is a war in which a brother kills a brother – goes beyond understanding, thus it is (or should be) unrepresentable, still more and more criticism overcomes the ‘unrepresentability’ argument to focus on how it might be represented or by which aesthetic means. For the claim that a cultural trauma, be it the two World Wars, the Holocaust, 9/11, the Iraq War, etc., cannot be represented, denies the rational decision-making process that is behind each of these events. In other words, ‘it bars any attempt to understand the thoughts and motives of the perpetrators of the major historical cataclysms of the twentieth century’.5 It is not enough that the ultimate event of the Greek Civil War did happen but that it was well organized, rational, and deadly efficient too. This challenge of thinking through the thoughts of the perpetrators in order to never let it happen again is Terzopoulos’ main aim. Mauser is an example of how his personal aesthetic style is challenged by his historical sen-

4

Terzopoulos, 2009, p. 15 (translation mine).

5

Le Roy et al., 2010, p. 251.

49

sibility and vice versa. As I will show, in Mauser he uses theatre as ‘a critical vision machine’.6

Mauser: Between politics and tragedy Heiner Müller’s play is about and for revolution. More specifically, it is about the production of revolution and revolution as production. It explores the reification of consciousness and the crisis of sectarian mentality in the workings of a Leninist party. Central in the play is the theme of killing; killing and violence as essential in the realization of a larger social goal. Interestingly, this is a theme that in the tradition of the European drama after the French Revolution can have tragic implications.7 Just as Mauser touches upon two traditions, those of the didactic play and tragedy, Terzopoulos creates a performance that is both political and tragic. It becomes political the moment that he invites the eighty-three-yearold Maria Beikou to participate. Beikou’s life represents the life of the twentieth century Greece. Born in 1926, she was a fighter of the National Resistance during World War II. Since the age of seventeen, she fought against the Nazis, while later, during the Greek Civil War, she was a deputy commissar of the Democratic Army of Greece, the military branch of the Greek Communist Party. After the Democratic Army’s defeat and the end of the Civil War, she fled to the USSR in order to save her life. She became the newscaster of the Greek Service of Moscow while simultaneously undertaking cinema 6

This expression was first used to characterize the Dutch theatre company Hotel Modern and their performances The Great War (2001) and Kamp (2005). The first focuses on the lives of the First World War soldiers, drawing from their letters and diaries at wartime whereas in Kamp tiny puppets are used to portray the daily routine in the concentration and extermination camp Auschwitz.

7

Rouse, 1976, p. 110.

50

studies. Having been deprived of her Greek citizenship, she had to stay there for twenty-seven years. She came back to her home country in 1975 with the Polity Reform and was actively involved in cultural matters. She passed away in March 2011. Terzopoulos puts the now aged Maria Beikou on stage at a period when the women guerilla fighters of the Democratic Army are given back their voice after forty years of silence.8 And they were not few; they made up thirty percent in the fighting sectors and seventy percent in the assistant services. It is only after the end of the Cold War that their testimonies were published. This is so because for the patriarchal Greek society, be it right or left, the image of a woman fighting with a gun in her hands was a taboo. Thus, the partisan woman was systematically demonized during and after the Civil War as a ‘whore’ and a ‘Voulgara’ (a national enemy).9 Maria Beikou’s participation in Mauser is crucial. The living presence and voice of such a historical personality on stage casts a unique ‘aura’ on the performance. This is further amplified by the very participation of the director. On the one hand, his physical presence also gives the performance a special quality as the spectators have the opportunity to simultaneously see the creator and his creation. On the other hand, his and Beikou’s presence signals a process of negating theatrical illusion, questioning the nature of acting as an interpretation of a role in the direction of non-theatre. What is important is not only the performance itself or the interpretation of a role but the direc-

8

Maria Beikou’s autobiography was published in Athens in 2010. Still, as the historian Tasoula Verveniotis notes in the introduction, the process of collecting and writing had started a decade earlier (2010, pp. 9–25).

9

Ibid., pp. 21–23; Poulos, 2009.

51

tor’s contact with his performer and the historical figure, always in the presence of the spectators.10 The political overtones of Mauser become heavier with Johanna Weber’s photography installation in the auditorium. A hundred thirty-three portraits of fighters of the Greek Resistance are on the spectators’ seats, some famous like the composer Mikis Theodorakis, others largely unknown. As a postwar German woman, she is dealing with the impact that World War II and the German Occupation had on the Greek people. As she explains: ‘My main reason for undertaking this project is the fact that I am German. I wanted to understand the impression the German Occupation (1941-1944) has left on Greece, up to the present day’.11 Weber’s endeavor is not just an artistic project but a historical document. Terzopoulos lets history sweep across the entire theatre house, from the auditorium to the stage, and once more he uses photography to awaken memories and consciences.12 Mauser proves to be a performance abounding with heads. Silent heads, talking heads, watching heads. The silent aged heads in the photos and the talking heads of Beikou and Terzopoulos, who assume the roles of the judges in this military trial. They will deliver ‘the spare, closed language of ideological thought and political jargon’, ‘the revolutionary slogans’, ‘repeated as solutions to contradictions’, as Sue-Ellen Case puts it.13 There are more heads

10

The first time in the history of Attis Theatre that we see Terzopoulos performing is in Samuel Beckett’s Rockaby (2003) and Triptych (2004). He sits on a chair reading the play from his papers, in fact whispering it with a soft voice as if he told a fairy tale, a lullaby to a child. Terzopoulos’ participation as the Reader is crucial. See: Chatzidimitriou, 2006, 2010.

11

Weber, n.d.

12

Such use of photography is particularly made in the Persians (1990, Greece; 2003, Meyerhold Centre, Russia; 2006, Turkey-Greece).

13

Case, 1983, p. 100.

52

to see and to be seen, the watching heads of the twenty spectators who form the judicial body every night. All these heads attend or better participate in the trial of A and B, the executioners on behalf of the revolution. Buried in a long black rectangular box, only their heads are seen. This is their trench, their prison, their guillotine, their coffin. In the play, A and B are shot but Terzopoulos chooses beheading. Although this form of execution was an ancient practice among the Greeks and the Romans as the noblest means of death – a privilege that only noblemen could ‘enjoy’ – beheading is closely associated with the French Revolution. Interestingly enough, democratization demanded equality and humanity not only in life but in death too. Thus, the painless and quick guillotine started falling both on ’noble’ and ‘common’ heads. With such a device, Terzopoulos links the French Revolution with the Red Revolution, ironically reminding us of the optimistic dawn of the Age of Reason. Sadly, all these are civil wars. At the same time, Terzopoulos treats the (bodiless) head as a self-sufficient topos, a self-contained place of consciousness, memory and ideological construct. The present head is in constant conversation with the absent body in an attempt to articulate past experience and memory. As in the case of Samuel Beckett’s heads in plays like That Time, Not I or Happy Days, we leave the mise en scène to enter a sublime mise en abyme.14 There is, nevertheless, ‘a radical heterogeneity in the subject, linked to the body as opposed to the word’, which no dialectics can resolve.15 There is an ‘unresolved contradictoriness’ that ‘remains all the more painful’.16 This

14

For more, see Chatzidimitriou, 2006, 2010.

15

Mahlke et al., 1999, p. 46.

16

Lehmann and Lethen, in ibid.

53

powerful clash between head and body is dramatized in the performance whenever the ‘doors’ of the box open to show mechanized bodies inscribed by the absurdity of revolution and (civil) war in the name of a utopia; when killing becomes ‘a job like any other and like no other’.17 These are the determining scenes of mechanical killing and orgiastic killing, when A becomes one with his Mauser gun and kills like a machine or loses himself in an orgy of blood and destruction, in a kind of dance of death.18 This is where Terzopoulos gives the performance an ontological, that is, a tragic dimension. For what is of interest to him are not just the political and social characteristics of a civil war but the existential dilemma that the individual faces when he is ordered to become a blind servant of the logos of a revolutionary war. Torn apart by the inhumanity of his actions, he suffers and empathizes with the enemy as he is nothing but a human against another human. After all, in the end, he also exclaims, ‘I do not want to die’. As the Spanish Holocaust literature writer Jorge Semprún has pointedly remarked, it is not the tormented victim that loses trust in the world and contact with humanity but the perpetrator; the latter can no longer come to terms with the world but is forever estranged from it.19 Describing her experience of the Greek Civil War, Maria Beikou similarly confesses: ‘How did I feel when I was pointing my gun at my brother enemy? A feeling of disgust for myself, mixed with anger for the dead end experienced’.20 In the end, the murdering hands are coiled not around their enemy’s neck but their own. Remorse can be as asphyxiating as two hands. 17

Bathrick and Huyssen, 1976, p. 116.

18

Ibid.

19

Semprún, in Droumpouki, 2015, p. 6.

20

Beikou, 2009, pp. 16–17 (translation mine).

54

Conclusion

Theodoros Terzopoulos’ exilic consciousness and his resulting exilic perspective help him to stage what is unspeakable but needs to be spoken of, the cultural trauma of the Greek Civil War. If – for the Hungarian Nobel Prize winner in literature and Holocaust survivor Imre Kertész – only literature (as opposed to history) can narrate the horrors of the ultimate paradigm of cultural trauma, Terzopoulos proves that theatre can equally do so by dealing with cultural traumas like the Greek Civil War or the Holocaust. In all cases, the representation of history is not the privilege of historians, because the topos of memory is not static but an ever-changing place, an ongoing debate among various fields. Both literature and theatre can operate as an in-between public space in which personal memories and stories are first tested to then become history and be publicly debated.21 This applies especially to theatre as it is the most public of all arts. Starting from literature (the text), theatre (the performance text) becomes an organic experience in the sense that it takes place in the here and now of actors and spectators. As with oral stories, which have lately become one of the dearest sources of information for history researchers, theatre can depict ‘the sorrow for the last dead of war the moment when everyone celebrates the beginning of peace’.22 For the theatre experience addresses and challenges all our senses – including hearing – and our intellect to observe the ‘incongruity’ and the ‘incompatibility between the time of personal history and the time of teleological history’, the clash ‘between the personal values and the big

21

Droumpouki, 2015, p. 3.

22

Liakos, 2015, p. 38 (translation mine).

55

values – progress, freedom, nation, revolution, for example – which are typical of the big historical narratives’.23 In that sense, Heiner Müller’s play Mauser proves ideal for performing the cultural trauma of a civil war.24 This is so because it negates the ‘natural tendency to conflate the terms “victim” and “traumatized person”’ which is ‘a conceptual error’.25 Mauser gives Theodoros Terzopoulos the firm ground to theatrically examine the wrong assumption that the victim of atrocities is always traumatized whereas the one who commits these atrocities never can be. Thus, the director is allowed to explore trauma as an ethically neutral and diagnostic notion that can apply in the cases of both victims and perpetrators. His theatre becomes ‘a critical vision machine’ the moment he challenges the spectator to look from the perpetrator’s perspective, to imagine being in his position. The viewer is invited to look through the rational logic leading up to the cultural trauma of the Greek Civil war or any civil war. Yet, s/he never totally identifies for s/he sees more than the perpetrator. S/he sees Maria Beikou and Theodoros Terzopoulos on stage; S/he sees the portraits of the fighters of the Greek Resistance; S/he sees the agents of the revolution trialed. S/he overlooks the overlookers. S/he does not see the catastrophe itself, but the process leading to this catastrophe and its outcome. S/he is engaged in a thought-image.

23

Liakos, 2015, p. 38.

24

In that sense, Sue Ellen Case proves right when she says that ‘The play then forces the actors to create a “double” – a play in which they can exist’ (1983, p. 100). Similarly, Bathrick and Huyssen try to answer the question of Mauser’s performativity. ‘Given the historical context of this work, what does it mean to publish and produce it outside of that context?’, they ask (1976, p. 120).

25

Le Roy et al., 2010, p. 257.

56

Operating between theatre performance and visual art, using a set and a photography installation, Mauser proves to be instrumental in exploring Terzopoulos’ strategies for representing trauma, loss, memory, and forgetting, those sociopolitical and aesthetic principles that define his theatre model. This is a theatre that creates an opening for history to be brought into play and to be remembered precisely as an experience which continues to have effects on us today.

Bibliography Bathrick, David and Andreas Huyssen (1976) ‘Producing Revolution: Heiner Müller’s Mauser as Learning Play’. In: New German Critique, 8, pp. 110-121. Beikou, Maria (2009) Interview to Efi Marinou. ‘Ένα Τουφέκι ΄Ηταν το Δώρο του Αρραβώνα μου’. Eleftherotypia-Seven, 10 May 2009, pp. 16-17. — (2010) Αφού με Ρωτάτε, να Θυμηθώ … Athens: Kastaniotis. Case, Sue-Ellen (1983) ‘From Bertolt Brecht to Heiner Müller’. In: Performing Arts Journal, 7(1), pp. 94–102. Chatzidimitriou, Penelope (2006) ‘Τα (Ασώματα) Κεφάλια του Σάμιουελ Μπέκετ ως Τόποι Συνείδησης: Από την Καρτεσιανή bête machine στο Νευρωνικό Άνθρωπο’. In: Porfyras, 121(Oct.-Dec.), pp. 473–484. — (2010) Θεόδωρος Τερζόπουλος: Από το Προσωπικό στο Παγκόσμιο. Thessaloniki: University Studio Press Droumpouki, Anna-Maria (2015) Ιστορία και Λογοτεχνία: Μια Πολυτάραχη, Γοητευτική Σχέση, pp. 1–7. Available at: www.academia.edu/10229517/ Λογοτεχνία_και_Ιστορία. (Accessed: 10/8/2016). Jestrovic, Silvija (2003) ‘Exilic Perspectives: Introduction’. In: Modern Drama, 46(1), pp. 1–4. Le Roy, Frederick, Christel Stalpaert and Sophie Verdoodt (2010) ‘Introduction. Performing Cultural Trauma in Theatre and Film: Between Representation and Experience’. In: Arcadia International Journal of Literary Culture, 45(2), pp. 249–264. Liakos, Antonis (2015) ‘Γιατί η Προφορική Ιστορία’ (Why Oral History?). In: Irene Nakou and Andromache Gazi (eds.) Η Προφορική Ιστορία στα Μου57

σεία και στην Εκπαίδευση. Athens: Nisos, pp. 35-42. Mahlke, Stefan, Ulla Neuerburg and Ralph Denser (1999) ‘Brecht+Müller: German-German Brecht Images before and after 1989’. In: The Drama Review, 43(4), pp. 40–49. Poulos, Margaret (2009) ‘From Heroines to Hyenas: The Civil War, 194649’. In: Idem Arms and the Woman: Just Warriors and Greek Feminist Identity. Available at: http://www.gutenberg-e.org/poulos/chapter5. html (Accessed: 15/9/2011). Rouse, John (1993) ‘Heiner Müller and the Politics of Memory’. In: Theatre Journal, 45(1), pp. 65–74. Terzopoulos, Theodoros (2009) Interview to Efi Marinou. ‘Αγωνιστές στην Πρώτη Σειρά’. In: Eleftherotypia-Seven, 10 May 2009, p. 15. Verveniotis, Tasoula (2010) Introduction. In: Maria Beikou Αφού με Ρωτάτε, να Θυμηθώ…. Athens: Kastaniotis, pp. 9–25. Weber, Johanna (1999) Πρόσωπα από την Αντίσταση -1996- Μνήμη Θανάτου, Μνήμη Ζωής. Athens: Agra — (n.d.) Faces from the Greek Resistance. 1996. Memory of Death, Memory of Life. Available at: http://www.agra.gr/english/26.html (Accessed: 15/9/2011).

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II. The Body as Foundation and Epitome of Acting

Bodies, Back from Exile

Freddy Decreus

I. Klausigelos In the recent past, I have been struck several times by scenes of klausigelos in the theatre of Theodoros Terzopoulos, particularly in his Ajax, The Madness (2004) and his Prometheus Bound (Eleusina, Istanbul, and Essen, 2010), moments that made a deep impression on me. The combined presence of laughing and weeping was an overwhelming, intolerable, chaotic, and provocative experience, staged at the end of an important Greek tragedy, and in the case of Ajax, The Madness, also in the very beginning of it. I must confess that the combination of these strong emotions, important as they have been for two major Western literary genres, tragedy and comedy, made an interpretation of the plays extremely difficult. What was meant by this expressive use of laughing and crying? Was it just a way to focus on the madness and aggression involved in these tragedies, considering the use of threatening knives, glittering cleavers, and red high heels in Ajax, The Madness and taking into account the allusions to deportation and holocaust in the Essen version of Prometheus Bound. Such scenes delay the action, deactivate the dimensions of time and space, and turn the actors into shamanistic creatures. Does tragic life merely become a question of Lächerlichkeit (ludicrousness)? Or is sarcasm taking over here? Is this the end of tragedy, a Western category that accompanied our culture for more than two thousand five hundred years and do we finally arrive in a post-tragic landscape?

62

The excessive and unlimited laughing and crying also suggested that these plays could have ended in many possible ways. They surely affected and deeply disturbed the Western logocentric composition of the tragedy, as well as its text-oriented tradition and destabilized everything I knew about the plays. Looking at Savvas, Tassos, and Meletis (Ajax, The Madness, Archaio Stadio Delphon, 2004; Ludwigshafen, 2005), I saw devils, shamans, possessed beings, sweating and spitting bodies, men brought to the limits of their physical being. At that moment, I realized that I no longer was watching theatre as a representation, but became part of a multileveled energetic and breathing organism that sent signals to the whole of my body and mind. This experience obliged me to leave my ‘old body’ and its traditional habits of watching, analyzing, and interpreting, and simply forced me to participate in a climate of intensive and vulnerable sensations. It was a short-circuiting that blocked my mind and left me with a disoriented body, shaken as it was by the violence and the energy that were released to the public. This field of energy targeted more directly my body than my mind and overtook me more as a kind of feeling than as a kind of thought. It felt like emptying myself and vibrating in new, unseen, unheard, inexperienced ways that I could not express with the old vocabulary. This mixture of thoughts, emotions, and energy will be the main topic of my paper. It will try to understand what happens, when body and energy take over, when no longer the text, but ‘corporality’1 and the ‘bodymind’2 become protagonists on the stage. More specifically, I will ask myself how to

1

Butler, 1993.

2

Zarrilli, 2009.

63

conceive the Greek dimension in the change of paradigms that Terzopoulos conducted. In a more general way, I will ask myself what the consequences will be when the traditional Western way of looking at ourselves in theatre is shifting and released (complemented, crossed, annihilated) by other forms of subjectivity and identity, not as an attempt to travel within the boundaries of traditional binary thinking (Apollonian versus Dionysian, patriarchal versus matriarchal, monotheistic versus polytheistic), but as an explicit desire to challenge binary thinking itself.

II. What kind of body and energy? The last decades, notions like ‘physicality’,3 ‘corporality’,4 ‘viscerality’ (Damien Hirst/Francis Bacon), ‘somatographie’,5 and a ‘Body-without-Organs’6 became important issues in a newly developed post-dramatic theory and an open dramaturgical style.7 Next and opposed to the traditional Aristotelian theory that focused for more than two thousand years on the importance of the plot, the text, and its teleological structure, a new aesthetics promoted the value of the body, avoiding traditional aspects of colonization by the mind and eluding all signs of cultural inclusion and inscription.8 Recently, it became apparent that the West has been characterized by the quasi-total absence of a philosophy of the body. For too long, we have been conditioned to think that we just ‘had’ a body, instead of affirming that we

3

Artaud, 1938.

4

Butler, 1993.

5

Lyotard, 1977.

6

Deleuze and Guattari, 1980.

7

Decreus, 2010a.

8

Lehmann, 1999; Van den Dries, De Belder, Tachelet, 2002b.

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really ‘were’ a body.9 Of course, we had the limping body of an Oedipus, but we dealt with it in a tragic way, that means within the framework of specific Western literary and dramaturgical conventions. We also had to face the tortured corpse of a male Christ nailed to a wooden cross, but we dealt with it in a religious way, that means within the conventions of Western religious imagination and symbolism. These bodies functioned as mere signs within an ideological field and did not disclose any real empathy with the body as such. Both Greek Olympian mythology, Platonic ontology, and JudeoChristian religion, three male constructions of the mind, are not rooted in the earth and never felt at home in physical bodies, see for instance Irigaray’s rewritings of Plato’s ‘Allegory of the Cave’10 and his ‘Symposium’.11 All these constructions depended on what Derrida called a ‘basileo-patro-heliotheological’ basic metaphor12 and on a ‘white mythology’13 that governed the imagination of the West and engendered fragmentation and objectivation of one’s own body. One really had to wait for the ecstatic body of Artaud, the physical athlete of Grotowski, the holy theatre of Peter Brook, the performance culture of the sixties to enter into new fields and to discover the importance of a body dynamics.14 Theatre semiotics got replaced or was at least redeemed by poststructuralist and performance theories that went wider than representation and studied patterns of energy at work in the interaction between stage

9

Le Breton, 1990.

10

Irigaray, 1974.

11

Bluestone, 1987; Leonard, 1999; Tzelepis and Athanasiou, 2010.

12

Leonard, 2010, p. 49.

13

Derrida, 1982.

14

Fischer-Lichte, 2008.

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and audience. Such analyses focused on elliptic tracks between performers and spectators, and studied circuits and contact-zones of energy between heterogeneous universes.15 In recent years, some interesting discoveries have been made concerning kinesthetic intelligence,16 the proprioception or the positioning and activity of neighbouring parts of the body,17 cell memory release (CMR),18 the experience of movements stored in our long term memory,19 the function of mirror neurons,20 the importance of inner mimicry,21 and the working of human energy fields (HEF’s rendered by the SQUID magnetometer). Yet, most of them were studied in the area of dance and movement therapy, healing therapy, or just therapy.22 Judith Butler’s programmatic book Bodies that Matter (1993) exemplifies the importance that from the nineties on, many human scientists accorded to material corporality. And in order to better situate some aspects of Terzopoulos’ theatre, let me copy Butler’s title, create here and now a perspective called ‘Energy that matters’ and return to the working of HEF’s in his theatrical practice. Surely, a position like this has been a central issue in many post-Artaudlike philosophical and theatrical studies (esp. Lyotard; Lehmann; Deleuze and Guattari; Žižek), in works that focused on the transition ‘from logos to opsis’ or ‘from logos to landscape’,23 or in studies based upon the dynamics 15

For the theatre of Castellucci, see Decreus, 2010b.

16

Foster, 1999.

17

Lephart and Fu, 2000.

18

See Diaz, 2010.

19

Baddeley, 2002.

20

Simpson, 2008.

21

Martin, 1939; Bleeker, 2002.

22

Levy, 1988; Serlin, 2005, 2010.

23

Lehmann, 1997, p. 60.

66

of performative arts, often heavily spiced with Derridean expressions like espacement, déplacement, itération. Anyway, from the eighties on, a new paradigm radically focused on a theatre without drama (or with a reduced presence of texts) and gradually turned to the effects of energy both in the bodies of actor and spectators. Although actual science is capable of detecting magnetic fields associated with physiological activities in and around the body, there are, however, only few attempts to study these energetic processes at work in theatre.24 Even today, the lessons of yoga, reiki, pilates, and chakra masters still dwell in an exotic and not (completely) accepted and integrated atmosphere. It amazes most people to hear that yoga holds that we do not have one, but several bodies which are inseparably linked to each other: the physical, the emotional, the mental, and the energetic ones. We hardly can believe that reiki-masters are dealing with the transfer of energy in energy paths (nadi’s) and that they are able to cure and redistribute energy both through their own hands and from a distance. Today, we still are embarrassed to hear that chakras, a kind of wheel-like vortices, are believed to exist on the surface of the subtle body of living beings. And moreover, how to deal with Chinese medicine, and its system of twelve standard meridians, open channels for the profusion and distribution of energy? The study of fields of energy belongs to what we still consider to be ‘hidden’ forces and only sixty years ago, in 1956, the American government burned six tons of books, journals, and papers belonging to Wilhelm Reich, the founder of biodynamics (1927), because he believed in the existence of a type of energy present in all life forms, primor-

24

See Fischer-Lichte, 2006, and her discussion of the embodied versus phenomenal body, 2008; see also her discussion of the state of in-betweenness during performances, 2010.

67

dial cosmic energy, called prana, mana, or chi in non-Western traditions.25 In his opinion, this energy is not only responsible for the creation of the most tiny particles in our bodies, our cells, but is also present in the whole universe and connects the energy paths of our deepest being to everything present in the universe. Can some of these systems be useful to better understand what happens during the training of the actors of the Attis Theatre and the performances they bring? From their very first productions, energy explicitly was the main actor on the stage: in The Bacchae (1986) as part of a generalized atmosphere of ecstasy and exaltation, in Medeamaterial (1988) as a destructive force that burns anything it touches.26 Even the very last major production, Prometheus Bound (Eleusina, Istanbul, and Essen, 2010), was resonating on fields of energy that constantly were interacting with one another, functioning on multiple levels and expressing a perennial anger and threat. The same goes even for the monologue by Paolo Musio, called Desert and produced in Sikyon (2011), a performance where ‘an actor (was) standing all alone, his body turned into a multi-rhythmic machine’.27 Terzopoulos always has been attracted by the primordial human condition and the basic functioning of our physical and mental categories. Marianne McDonald was very right in suggesting that his theatre ‘reveals mysteries about ourselves, dangerous mysteries’.28 He surely met this danger during his childhood, when struck by the dynamics of the Anastenaria he witnessed in his hometown village of Makriyalos in Northern Greece, a ‘fire-walking 25

Zarrilli, 2009.

26

McDonald, 2000, p. 13.

27

Program of the Sikyon Festival, 2011.

28

McDonald, 2000, p. 15.

68

ceremony during which people were in ecstasy, possessed, or somehow transformed to the degree that they could walk over live coals without being burned’.29 Also important was his discovery of a seventeenth century medical book from Leipzig that described the ancient ritual that patients in the Amphiario hospital of Asclepius had to follow, one that instructed them to run for hours and hours, and resulted, after eight hours, in the emergence of an incredible energy.30 Since then, he trained his actors in order to ‘get to the primary sources of energy and ecstasy’: ‘We improvised hours trying to activate the body in its entirety, in an effort to get to know its dark and mysterious heritage’, leading them, in the end, to perform the ‘long journey to the land of Memory. Memory holds the primary language of the human cell’, he mentions.31 Agave, in her ecstasy, dwells in spheres that were long forgotten and meets a situation where the performer overthrows reality. ‘In an ecstasy of reality, the performer’s body finds its way to another, energetically denser and more concentrated reality’, Terzopoulos remarks.32 As Savvas Stroumpos, one of the leading Attis’ performers, specifies: ‘The director insists that the performer has to “bear” the tragic material instead of psychologically interpreting it. In the work of the Attis theatre the laws of the bourgeois theatre are completely eliminated. The actors are not slaves of their poor feelings of everyday life, which derive straight from the cortex of the brain. Instead they strive for the liberating vital energy of the body, considered as the basis of embodying and codifying the tragic material’. And he notices: ‘The actor continuously works through difficult body 29

McDonald, 2006, p. 12.

30

Terzopoulos, 2000b, p. 50–51.

31

Ibid., p. 51–52.

32

Raddatz, 2006b, p. 156.

69

stances and demanding physical exercises to attain this optimal psycho-physical state where his/her breathing originates from the pelvis. This “descent” to the pelvis through breathing permits the triangle, containing the three basic energy zones (1st the anus-base of the spine, 2nd the genital area, 3rd the lower diaphragm) to move autonomously. As a consequence, the energy circulates freely throughout the body and the performer experiences a sense of physical freedom and happiness. Optimally, his/her creative imagination is set free and the body is ready to release unknown amounts of energy and produce new codes of expression’.33 From the eighties on, to be an actor in the Attis Theatre often enough meant the ability to be in command of your center, starting from your base, to be steadily rooted in and connected to the earth and to let the force of the sleeping snake of energy (kundalini) mount to the top of your head, or, to put it differently, to be aware of all the energy channels in their unremitting journeys through the body. Over the years, Terzopoulos developed a great number of exercises compatible with the Hindu ideas of the chakras and concerning the circulation and transmission of energy in the body. Getting into contact with your ‘powerhouse’ not only has a tremendous effect upon the actor’s personal well-being, but also enhances his link with cosmic energy, the most powerful of all powerhouses. As Wilhelm Reich clearly described, the biophysical energy or prana of the human body, the basic component of the human energy field, functions as a key to life and contains the source of energy present in the whole of the universe (1927). Although it is tempting, on the one hand, to consider the director’s method as part of ongoing modernist experiences since the sixties which 33

70

Stroumpos, 2006, pp. 231–232.

refers at the same time to parallel work by the avant-garde of Europe, and, on the other hand, to compare his interpretation of the ecstatic body to ancient Hindu and Chinese practices, it is also necessary to see the new kind of ritual body he introduced as a strictly personal and altogether Greek initiative. Take for instance the part played by shamanism and the Orphic overtones that characterize his views on the theme of descent, turning both his actors and himself into real psychopomps.34 The many katabaseis undertaken by heroes like Herakles, the continuous references to life as Prothalamos of death and the journeys into the collective unconscious or dreamtime that he mentioned so often in his masterclasses, are important thematic links between past and present practices of shamans. And maybe, one of the mysteries brought to happen by the repeated use of klausigelos is situated here, within the sfumato atmosphere that produces ‘un état second’, a neurological and transitory state that dissociates our automated mental activities. While they remain coordinated, our perceptions of both weeping and laughing, and of both the tragic and comic spirit, often appear incongruous and weird. Between the many kinds of effects that an Attis production generates, one certainly recognizes these lowered or extended states of consciousness that even an elementary buzzing, singing or beating the drum can evoke. A state between being awake and asleep, a state somewhere in between these two conditions experienced together, deeply influences our consciousness and tunes in on the vibrations of elementary sounds and acoustic patterns like the clashing of knives, cleavers, and stiletto shoes in Ajax, The Madness. For some moments, modified states of energy took over, brought us into changed

34

See his personal involvement in Mauser and Rockaby.

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conditions of breathing and watching, and temporarily but profoundly disturbed the (old) person that entered the theatre.

III. Terzopoulos, the ‘Black Swan’ Up till now, I mainly have discussed Terzopoulos’ activities within two different conceptions of staging theatre, two paradigms, two major views on the world, and I signalled the importance of what looked, at first glance, to be a small detail, the recurrent use of klausigelos. In what follows, klausigelos will function as a bridge and a transition, one that specifies what, in my opinion, constitutes the revolutionary importance of what Terzopoulos has been doing all of his life. The first paradigm, theatre as representation, embedded as it is in the world of Aristotelian poetics, was present in his staging of a number of very important tragedies and dramas. This paradigm was and still is part of a Western tradition and a way of organizing the most important categories of our thought, emotions, and anxieties. Seen from an anthropological point of view, these tragedies are fictional and mythical attempts to conceive an answer to the black holes in our existence, or, efforts to cope with the fear that the human person as a finite Mängelwesen experiences facing the Absolutismus der Wirklichkeit as Blumenberg calls it.35 Staging mythical and tragic answers is part of an artistic mission, it is even an existential obligation, one of the necessary instruments we all need in order to survive and give sense to an utterly meaningless cosmic world. In this paradigm, the actor’s body was a field of cultural and doctrinal inscriptions, colonized by specific representational images. His body was an 35

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Blumenberg, 1979.

occupied area that created an imaginary Other on the stage, the character. Energy has never been the main protagonist in this tragic and humanist paradigm, it was only one of the unnamed guests, a visitor who by accident witnessed a (dominant) artistic Form that was culturally recognized and cherished as such. Terzopoulos staged a great number of stories that were important for the common identity of our culture and helped to give a certain form to Western mythic imagination. As he staged Greek tragedies, he helped to spread the tragic mood, a typical Western flavor, and thus helped to create an ‘ideologically constructed body’.36 On the other hand, however, he also took part in another paradigm, one that focused on radical presence on the stage. Along this perspective, the body of the actor is a breathing organism that no longer needs to be deciphered in its representational task. Instead of standing (as a sign) for something else, this body no longer serves the implicit goal of representing a dramatic person or character, but becomes part of a flux that keeps going on, endlessly, turning everyone into a nomadic and cosmic traveller, following endless tracks, no longer in function of a well defined hermeneutic process that needs to be founded upon one of the many (invented) master stories, but functions as an energetic stream of energy in a process of continuous transformation. This elusive body is, of course, the heir of Artaud’s ‘Body-without-Organs’, and has been followed later by a ‘Theory without Organs’37 or even a ‘Theatre without Organs’,38 clear withdrawals from a desire to possess and colonize. Apparently, our times became allergic to systems that take pos-

36

Van den Dries, 2002c, p. 33.

37

O’Rourke and Giffney, 2009.

38

Cull, 2009.

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session ideologically, became dominant, and aimed at occupation and constraint. In many manifestations of contemporary art and philosophy, the acknowledgment of bodily and mental flux gained in importance. The just mentioned examples of klausigelos in Terzopoulos’ Ajax, The Madness and Prometheus Bound were concrete cases that functioned like tommy bars and gateways to other worlds, worlds that temporarily left the dominant tragic model and its organized and colonized bodies, and introduced the fluid and ecstatic body, without destroying the former, rather experiencing its organism from a different perspective. It reminded me of Darren Aronofsky’s film The Black Swan, where the body torture of Nathalie Portman’s Nina signalled the transition between two different ways of looking at life. She experienced an ongoing bodily scratch that forced her to leave behind the sidedness of her feelings and to make room for the unknown black swan. Terzopoulos’ radicalized notion of klausigelos functions as such a bodily scratch, one that wounds the old body in order to give birth to a new one, one that mainly operates through breathing, energy, and cosmic connectedness. The breathing organism that he staged from the middle of the eighties created its own music and rhythm, activated virtual potentials that were hidden too long, especially because of the monotheistic Western assumptions that condemned the body, its senses, and unorganized forces of lust. Terzopoulos’ view on this Dionysian body opened new dimensions for theatre and suggested a great deal of interesting questions. Do we not need something else in the West than the tragic feeling and the kind of tradition of despair it inspired? Does not tragedy with its millennia-long heritage casts us in the same old matrix and prevents us from developing new artistic and cosmic feelings? Is tragedy not one of the stable structures in our Western life and imagination that needs to be questioned in its way of deeply condition-

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ing our mind? Does not tragedy as a mental category, that organizes our thoughts, fears, and emotions, alienate us from nature and partially does it not atrophy our senses? Is it not time, facing the deep spiritual and other crises we go through, to (re)win a fuller body than the one we were raised with, one that is teeming with life, but was so often neglected? Painful questions like these focus more on heterogeneous than on monolithic worlds, more on continuous processes than on definite products, more on possible worlds than on situations of perennial being and unmodified Form. Terzopoulos led us to discover aspects of otherness other possible bodies, energies and vibrations. He questioned the traditional ideal of continuous progress and the longing for one dominant ideology, and his recently repeated warnings in Prometheus Bound: ‘The day will come’, had a very explicit political color. In the end, klausigelos in its revolutionary appeal provokes the multiplicity and heterogeneity of all things: all possible kinds of systems of control, all hierarchical, stable and structured entities, both on a material and immaterial plane, perfect incarnations of Form as we always wanted them to be, can always be challenged by others, since underneath one system, there is always another one, and another one, creating lines of flight and a myriad of possibilities to go with. The (re)discovery of diaphragmatic breathing and the endless return through hundreds of exercises to the spine, sacrum, and pelvis (the triangle of energy) turned the body into a psychophysical living organism that set the body free. When klausigelos deeply is related to these fundamental psychosomatic rhythms, the organism is fully driven by an energy that sets fire to any form of oppositional thinking and processing. A unique occasion for the old binaries (male/female, active/passive, god/goddess, …) that constituted for too long our European heritage to be revitalized

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and repositioned in what will be called now a ‘bodymind’. Consequently, the art of scratching the old body addresses all senses and calls for a total bodily revaluation, even for a new relationship, on a bioenergetic level, with planet earth and for new spiritual bonds with the cosmos.

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ken, New Jersey: Wiley, pp. 459–460. Simpson, Elizabeth A., William Oliver and Dorothy Fragaszy (2008) ‘Superexpressive Voices: Music to my Ears?’. In: Behavioural and Brain Sciences, 31(5), pp. 596–59. Stroumpos, Savvas (2006) ‘An Approach to the Working Method of the Attis Theatre’. In: Frank M. Raddatz (ed.) Reise mit Dionysos. Das Theater des Theodoros Terzopoulos. Journey with Dionysos. The Theatre of Theodoros Terzopoulos. Berlin: Theater der Zeit, pp. 230–233. Theodoros Terzopoulos (ed.) (2000a) Theodoros Terzopoulos and the Attis Theatre. History, Methodology and Comments. Athens: Agra. — (2000b) ‘Historical Review and Methodology’. In: Theodoros Terzopoulos (ed.) Theodoros Terzopoulos and the Attis Theatre. History, Methodology and Comments. Athens: Agra, pp. 47–83. — (2011) ‘Language and Space. Theodoros Terzopoulos in Conversation with Frank Raddatz’. In: Frank M. Raddatz (ed.) Promethiade. Essen: Klartext Verlag, pp. 97–109. Tzelepis, Elena and Athena Athanasiou (eds.) (2010) Rewriting Difference. Luce Irigaray and “The Greeks”. New York, Suny Press. Van den Dries, Luk et al. (eds.) (2002a) Bodycheck. Relocating the Body in Contemporary Performing Arts. Amsterdam: Rodopi. —, Steven De Belder and Koen Tachelet (eds.) (2002b) ‘Verspeelde Werkelijkheid. Verkenningen van Theatraliteit. Leuven: Van Halewyck. — (2002c) ‘De grenzen van semiotiek‘. In: Luk Van den Dries, Steven De Belder and Koen Tachelet (eds.) Verspeelde Werkelijkheid. Verkenningen van Theatraliteit. Leuven: Van Halewyck, pp. 21–38. Zarrilli, Phillip B. (2009) Psychophysical Acting. An Intercultural Approach after Stanislavski. London, New York: Routledge.

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Terzopoulos’ Jenseits The Psychoanalytic Foundation of Terzopoulos’ Theatre Konstantinos I. Arvanitakis

Μνημη W. Sz.

I do feel a bit awkward being amongst you since I am a psychoanalyst and not a man of the theatre. But since Terzopoulos is a man of the theatre and a psychoanalyst (I will explain in what sense later), I do not feel entirely out of place here and am convinced that there is indeed a space for a mutually enriching dialogue between us.

We have been convened to reflect on the theme of Dionysus in exile, on Terzopoulos’ theatre as a theatre in exile, and on the aesthetics of exile. I will, accordingly, organize my comments – ‘organize’: you can detect my psychoanalytic bias for and interest in dis-organization – around a number of questions. These are:

– What is exiled? – Why is it exiled? – Terzopoulos wants to bring it back: How does he do it and what happens when it is brought back?

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– Why bring it back? – The risks of Terzopoulos’ theatre.

In the course of discussing these questions, I shall be providing a brief sketch of the psychoanalytic and neurophysiological (if not also the philosophical) basis of Terzopoulos’ theatre. He, of course, does not need this: the foundations of theatre are to be found within theatre, but this is a symposium where we are invited to reflect about Terzopoulos’ theatre and the aim of my comments is to show the solid scientific foundation of his work. At the end, I shall, in addition, comment on Terzopoulos’ production Alarme in order to illustrate aspects of his psychoanalytic ‘gaze’.

What is exiled? A fundamental psychoanalytic tenet is that the past may be forgotten but is never ‘deleted’ and therefore permanently recorded in the body. It resurfaces in various body states and obscure phantasies related to them, e.g. in dreams, but also in severe psychological disturbances such as psychoses. Painstaking clinical studies – over more than a century now – of dreams, nightmares, conscious fantasies, as well as of children’s play and their dreams and fantasies, but also of various psychotic conditions, have led to the formulation of a specific model of the development of the psyche. According to this model, our psychic life begins in an original state of ‘formlessness’, a primeval psychosomatic chaos, the original chaos that is retold in the myths of many cultures and religious texts, and the inner chaos that is painfully experienced in schizophrenia. This is a state of radical undifferentiation, referred to as ‘primary unintegration’ (Winnicott). Dissociated fragments, nuclei of biological energy, and undifferentiated drives float around freely in our early psychic universe

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in a disorganized fashion. What sustains this state is a sort of élan vital, a primal energy. The source, the fountain of all life energy, is to be found here. This is a state of ‘All’ and a state of ‘Nothing’. In the life of the human infant, it corresponds, roughly, to the first six months of life, in a gradually but irregularly diminishing fashion. Then something dramatic – I should say tragic – happens. The ‘All’, the cosmic psychic unit, splinters, breaks up, differentiates: where there was ‘All’, i.e. ‘I am All’, there is now ‘me’ and something which is ‘not-me’; there is ‘I’ and there is ‘you’. There are now ‘limits’ to my being. No longer omnipotent, I now depend on forces outside myself. I am autonomous, but no longer self-sufficient. Even though this is a gradual process, it is felt as an unexpected, fierce violent physical attack on the very being of the infans, who persistently makes determined attempts to revert to the previous state of formlessness and omnipotence. I propose to locate the root of the tragic in this ‘Primary Trauma of Origins’, which violently introduces limits to the human experience, limits that are never fully accepted. This original schism of being entails a loss, the loss of allness, the loss of omnipotence, and, as such, it is followed by acute, painful depressive states in the infant. Threnos is intrinsic to the tragic (cf. Ridgeway’s theory of the origin of tragedy). As I said earlier, all these archaic experiences in our psychic ontogeny are exiled from memory, forgotten, but they are indelibly engraved in our body and in our brain. In Greek mythology, it was Dionysus who came to represent this forgotten and disowned stage of our lives, the stage of undifferentiation and multiformity, of fragmentation, mutilation and primitive violence; of generative forces and of deadly frenzy. Eros and Thanatos at once. No differentiation. And it was also Dionysus who ruled the theatrical stage, the stage that represents this other forgotten, dreaded and exiled world. And it must be

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noted: the world of the infans, the ne-epion, has no words. And so, it is not by logos that the ancient story is to be re-told. Something that Terzopoulos has understood most clearly.

Why it is exiled It is obvious that life-supporting communal living and civilization can only arise if the primitive, chaotic world of our individual (and of our collective) past – a world of radical undifferentiation, fragmentation, and wildly mobile instinctual energies – is brought under relative control. Civilization provides ‘a measure of security’, but this can only be achieved at the price of repression (Freud). The burning question here is, of course, can there be excess of civilization? Walter Benjamin held that capitalism makes it its task to repress and to annihilate the dark forces of our existence. Be that as it may, what happens in the course of such developments is that what was once profoundly familiar, now after its exile, becomes unfamiliar, and its return – as in the theatre of Terzopoulos – gives rise to an uncomfortable feeling of uncanniness (Freud’s Unheimliche). The banishment, in the interests of civilization, of our disorganized Dionysian past self, however, has a heavy price: a sharp dichotomy in the sense of the self, a perpetual conflict between two regions of the self, between two selves, between body and idea.

Repatriating the exile Here, the truly psychoanalytic character of Terzopoulos’ project becomes clear. Psychoanalysis has as its principal aim to recover the repressed, to bring back the exiled, and this is Terzopoulos’ aim as well. However – it must be underlined – Terzopoulos’ theatre is dealing with archetypes, with ontological metaphysics, not with the psychology of the individual.

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Freud believed that dreams provide the royal road to the regions of the repressed. Terzopoulos claims, ‘All my theatre is a dream’. His method of reaching the exiled is a kathodos, a vertical descent in psychic geography that will lead him to archaic layers of a somatic, of a physical psyche. Note that the physical, the earth, is dominant in his theatre, whose space is always close to the earth, if not under the earth, and the prime axis of the movement is, correspondingly, up and down. The aim of Terzopoulos’ first Jenseits is, therefore, to remove, to peel off, the successive accretions of civilization that have established the dominance of men and the rule of logos. It is a process of katharsis, achieved through a gradual dismantling, dis-integration, and fragmentation of the codes of the political body in order to reach a state behind words. He calls his method ‘biodynamics’. This method, devised, of course, intuitively by Terzopoulos, nevertheless rests on solid neurophysiological grounds. What happens in its use is that the actors’ preparatory movements activate the phylogenetically older structures of the brain, at the base of the brain, in the brainstem and the so-called reptilian brain. Here are the centers for heartbeat, breathing, swallowing, body temperature, and blood pressure, for hunger and thirst, for sexual desire and aggression, for pain, pleasure, and all emotions; also, for memory – ontogenetic and phylogenetic memory of the species (the brainstem has connections to the limbic system: memory, emotion, smell). The brainstem is responsible for alertness. It is responsible for the integrated functioning of the organism as a whole. The biodynamic method stimulates these centers. Extreme activity to the point of exhaustion, however, brings about a dis-organization and a de-synchronization of the brainstem centers and a regressive breakdown of their harmoniously correlated function. This results in fragmentation and autonomy of the various vital components described above which now func-

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tion independently of each other. In this state the actor can feel extreme rage and compassion at the same time, sexual arousal and pain, hunger and disgust, burning and freezing, all at once. Thus, the biodynamic method brings about a dis-integration of the actor’s body and a regression back to the state of primary unintegration/undifferentiation, back to the obscure locus of the ‘exiled’ (ek-stasis). All this constitutes a revolution in psychic politics, a revolution whose aim is to re-structure the inner polis. This is no different than the psychoanalyst’s project in the strict clinical sense. Understandably, and as one would expect, there will be a good number of spectators of such de-stabilizing theatres that will react with strong resistances and a need to re-ostracize the archaic self that has come to the surface, sending it back to exile (casting it away, perhaps together with Terzopoulos, to lands abroad!). Again, a fate shared with psychoanalysis. Liberating the archaic body and its vital energy is a political act (Benjamin, Marcuse) and it will not be left unopposed. The uncanny return of the familiar/unfamiliar state is unsettling, acutely disturbing, indeed threatening to the spectator who – faced with uncontrollable chaotic undifferentiated energies of destruction/creation – experiences a sort of primitive unspeakable horror (unspeakable because the disturbing state that is being reactivated dates from a time prior to the development of language). Such a release of disorganized fragments of the ancient self, charged with powerful raw energies, can only occur within a safe, well-delineated space that can contain the chaos. This, in the case of psychoanalysis, is the so-called ‘analytic setting’ (the couch, the analyst sitting behind it, the quiet trusting atmosphere), while, in the case of Terzopoulos’ theatre, it is – in one sense at least – the geometric (spatial and phonetic) arrangement of space. Here Terzopoulos can carry on a dialogue between formalism and formlessness.

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It must be noted in this context that the return of the deepest sources of energy, of hidden occult forces, represents an invocation and epiphany of the ‘sacred’: Terzopoulos’ theatre contains clear aspects of a ritual. This, however, cannot be discussed here.

Why bring it back? This question asked of the artist is, of course, meaningless. Art is its own justification, and any gain to the individual or to society accruing from its random playfulness is epiphenomenal to the nature of art. But, from the point of view of the student of individual or social dynamics, the question can be raised, and it is from that perspective that I raise it here. So, why bring back what has been banished to the furthest reaches of our consciousness? I submit to you the following observations. In the same way that the brain’s evolutionary journey has led to a growth out of control (a sort of neoplastic growth, like cancer), out of tune with the evolution of the rest of the body, so that we can speak of a brain-body or mind-body schism, of a dissonance and an evolutionary discord, our psychic evolution, under the persistent pressures of socialization, has, similarly, led to an ever widening inner schism and dissociation between the dominant conscious, rational functioning of our developed social ego and the earliest ‘Dionysian’ levels of our psyche, which, as civilization advanced, have become more and more alienated, more tightly sequestrated, disowned and foreclosed in the most inaccessible regions of our past. The result of this has been a painful fragmentation of identity. Bringing back our earliest psychic constellations would achieve a better integration and a consolidation of our sense of self. In addition, it would allow access to the source of vital energies, which alone could bring about renewed creativity and change (growth).

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The often-raised question re-appears in this context: If Dionysus is in exile today, can there be tragedy in the twenty-first century or has tragedy followed him in his exile? Now, if tragedy is rooted in the human experience of limits and limitations, in the confrontation with the gods where man is – of necessity (Ananke) – the loser, if it is rooted in the living memory (unconscious though it may be) of a violent originary division, of a primordial loss of omnipotent allness, accompanied by profound dis-illusionment – if we accept all this to be true regarding tragedy – today’s prevailing illusory feeling of human omnipotence, of boundless narcissism, where everything is believed to be possible, where man confronts the gods convinced of his eventual victory; where man’s technological advances challenge all boundaries, where a distorted sense of time wants the future now and the past magically ‘deleted’, all these characteristics of modern man seem to have expelled the tragic from human experience and to have relegated tragedy to the literary museum of history. This dissociation from the tragic, however, exacts a high price by rendering contemporary man more vulnerable to the trauma of unavoidable disillusionments. The shocks produced from such disillusionments tend to destabilize man’s identity, resulting in the familiar post-modern dislocation, dispersion, and fragmentation of identity which forms the basis of a peculiar kind of modern Angst that, at times, reaches psychotic proportions. It is precisely at this juncture that Terzopoulos enters the scene. His theatre takes on – we might say – a ‘therapeutic’ role and this in a thoroughly psychoanalytic sense: Terzopoulos’ aim is to counter the forces of repression and to re-awaken the tragic, to re-introduce it and to re-integrate it into the fabric of human identity, thereby consolidating man’s identity and diminishing his inner division and conflict. And Terzopoulos achieves this by his biodynamic method which pursues deep and daring archaeological searches in the most archaic memories of the body and in the archives of its ancient codes.

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The risk The kathodos brings Terzopoulos’ actor and the participant spectator to the regions of the formless core (Freud’s Anderer Schauplatz). In this domain of undifferentiation ‘All’ is ‘Nothing’ and ‘Non-Being’ is the other face of ‘Being’. The actor/self who has arrived in this dark space is navigating ‘in a raft on a Dead Sea that is boiling in its depths’, in Terzopoulos’ words. He has descended to the ‘antechamber of Death’. Beyond it is the nameless space of ‘Nothing’, the absolute void. Beyond the ‘unspeakable horror’ of the antechamber is silence. Terzopoulos insists ‘my theatre cannot be defined as a theatre of Death’. He takes us to the borderland, to ‘the interspace between life … and death’. At that border, which is charged with unthinkable raw energies, lies the root of all art and of all creativity. The actor’s body before the great void freezes into inaction, being reduced to meaningless autistic automatisms, aphonia (Agave’s silent scream) and apraxia. All the muscles – agonists and antagonists alike – go into action simultaneously, peaking in a state of extreme tension that brings about an absolute immobility in the midst of a volcanic eruption of energy. The slightest ‘slip’ – which must always take place in phantasy, consciously or unconsciously, in the actor or in the spectator – would result in a catastrophic fall into the great void, into madness or death (suicide). Terzopoulos’ theatre is dangerous. It involves a great risk. The body, having been freed from its domination by the mind, having been granted its unconditional liberty, is now free to integrate its nothingness, free to undo itself by itself, free to assert its absolute freedom by returning to nothingness. The mind was a tyrant, but it was, also, a protector against the body’s inherent destructive forces. Magnetically seduced and irresistibly driven to return to the ‘Absolute Zero’ (Freud’s Death drive) that preceded the Big Bang of creation, the body now seeks its own collapse as if to assert its

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primeval paradoxical nature by affirming its being as non-being. This opens a space for what would be a second Jenseits. Thus, in the end, Terzopoulos’ theatre points to a transcendence of the somatic towards the anti- or the asomatic. The Jenseits, this time, opens to the anti-core where all meaning is reversed. The body in the antechamber, at the border of nothingness, is paralyzed, undone, as it touches the outer surface of the anti-core whose temperature is the ‘Absolute Zero’. But now its tragic catastrophic triumph, its final and absolute katharsis in which ‘Being’ is purged of its own being, has become possible. Cosmic chance will now, once again, assert itself. Here we are in the domain of the mystic. Terzopoulos mystes initiates us in ancient chthonic mysteries, the mysteries of the underworld, the mysteries of

Thanatos: ‘αυτος δε Διονυσος και Αιδης’ (Dionysos and Hades are one and the same).

Between Zero and One: Alarme In 2011 Terzopoulos staged Alarme, a play loosely based on the correspondence between Mary Stuart and Elizabeth 1st. He uses three actors, two women (Aglaïa Pappa and Sophia Hill as Mary Stuart and Elizabeth respectively) and a narrator (Tasos Dimas). The duration of the play is about fifty minutes (I am tempted to say: the duration of a psychoanalytic session). The actors lie prone and are placed along the arms of a large V on its side, the two women, reptiles lying on their belly facing each other and slowly crawling towards each other on the left arm of the V which is at an incline, with Elizabeth at the top end and Mary at the lower end, while the narrator is lying on the other arm of the V which is parallel to the audience at front stage and crawling from left to right. The stage is empty and dark except the two arms of the V which are lit in a manner that stresses the angular linear arrangement.

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In the last letter of Mary Stuart to Elizabeth (1587), Mary entreats her captor to, at least, allow her servants to remain with her to the very end and be witness to the events as they really happen. She asks for this favor for the sake of their consanguinity (they are cousins) and ‘for the sex to which we both belong’. Terzopoulos sees in this deadly confrontation between the two women something archetypal, something unraveling on a most archaic psychic level, a sadistic, savage battle over power and omnipotence, guided by primitive hatred and envy, intermingled with equally primitive forces of erotic attraction and infinite narcissistic rapture of two enemies absorbed in their passionate strife for the absolute. The two women are the poles of confused antinomies in an ocean of undifferentiated Eros and Thanatos. Love is another form of hatred and hate is love. Words-things, i.e. words as physical entities, are thrown at each other like spears: ‘blood’, ‘love’, ‘shit’, ‘death’, in French and/or in English, in rapid exchange, in rage or tenderness, all equivalent in a universe of chaotic undifferentiation. Two reptiles defiantly facing each other, their heads raised, their tongues convulsing in erotic excitement and poisonous attack at the same time.

What interests Terzopoulos reading the correspondence between the two women is the meta-narrative that lies behind the historical events, the metapsychological landscape, ‘meta-psychological’ in Freud’s sense of what lies behind the psychological interactions as we observe them. This search, of necessity, takes us to another time and to another space. The events that we witness on stage (we, ‘the faithful servants that ensure that the real story will not be distorted’) unfolded at another time in the lives of the two women, a time that never was, a time of phantasy that returns now to exact its due and to

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Alarme, Athens, Attis Theatre 2010: Aglaia Pappa, Sophia Hill. Photo: Johanna Weber

punish. The two women that we see exist at another time, re-living their own other time, a time they never lived, in a space that exists today only in the dream of the narrator/spectator. The crows, echoes of that other time, shriek at the beginning as the stage is gradually lit and as the narrator slowly raises his head – from his dream? in his dream? The ‘forgotten’ time is lacerating:

‘Το-τε – Πο-τε – το-τε – Οτ-αν – το-τε – Που – το-τε’ [Then – When (also mean-

ing Never) – Then – At a time – When – Where – Then]. A dream of the narrator, a nightmare, the narrator’s nightmare, in which he is the open side of an unstable triangle (the V) – an ‘early Oedipal triangle’, Melanie Klein would say. He is part of the world of hatred and paranoia, of unbridgeable splits and of cruelty: Klein’s ‘paranoid-schizoid’ position. His object being split (Mary – Elisabeth), he positions himself within a triangle as the excluded third, risking a fall into the open void. He disdains and, in

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disgust, sadistically and hatefully attacks and curses the two women who are so caught with each other in their whorish eroticism, totally absorbed in their fight for power, oblivious of him, indifferent to his helplessness. Terzopoulos, here, brings us down to this antechamber of death, a space of chaotic primitive forces of undifferentiated Eros-Thanatos. This space borders death, void, nothingness (Freud’s Thanatos, an inanimate state of absolute inertia). Mary, Elisabeth’s double, will enter it. But here, in the narrator’s phantasy, something else happens, something strange that can only first appear in phantasy, as a phantasy. Reality is built out of phantasy, out of unconscious phantasies: this is a basic psychoanalytic tenet. The strange thing that happens now in the narrator’s ‘hallucination’, something that puzzles, catches him by surprise and worries him, is that the two snakes (the two parts of the ‘split object’, to use psychoanalytic terms) come towards each other, their heads slowly approach in a highly charged hieratic silence, and eventually get intertwined in a tender embrace. An old English ballad is heard in the background. The bodies of the two snakes then slowly slide over or into each other until, in the end, there is only one fused body with a head at either end. The two warring snakes (the ‘split object’) now merge into one body. No longer either/or, but both this-and-that. This is the visualization, the enactment on stage of a crucial moment in psychic development, according to the Kleinian model, the moment of the emergence of the ‘whole’ object out of the convergence of the split objects. Terzopoulos has not studied psychoanalysis in the academic sense, of course; he, as the ‘Archeologist of the Body’, is able to capture these psychoanalytic insights with great precision and lucidity in his artistic breath. The moment records the birth of time at the crossroads between zero and one,

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between nothingness and ‘Being’. And this is also the instant of the emergence of the tragic. The psychosomatic state of chaotic undifferentiation, having escaped the risk of veering retrogressively towards nothingness (death), proceeds towards the coming together of the split psychic fragments of the object and of the self to constitute a ‘whole’ unified object and, eventually, a unified self. The emergence of a separate self, however, separate from the ‘All’, a self that is now defined by borders, limits and limitations, a self that is dependent on the other, is experienced as a violent event, as a painful development, the birth of a sacred monster, and marks the appearance of the sense of the tragic. As the two snakes (two irreconcilable internal objects) now join to form one, the angry, hostile and disdainful narrator is gradually transformed. Motionless now, he looks on, first with a worried look on his face, concerned, then with a vague fear, helplessness, resignation and sadness. He seems lost –

facing a loss – as he utters, slowly, almost mechanically, repeatedly: ’Που πας …

Που με πας … Ολο φευγεις … Σιωπη … Που πας … Σιωπη …’ (Where are you

going … Where are you taking me … You are always leaving … Silence … Where are you going … Silence …). Lights fade out. It is clear that there is a painful price to pay for escaping the regressive return to nothingness and for advancing from undifferentiation to selfhood and to integrated identity. The ‘I’ emerges as a unified and separate subject, but at this point the specter of nothingness re-appears. It is a ghost that will not go away. It is the ghost that is the foundation and the driving force of all theater. ‘All’ theater is ‘Theater of Death’ (Kantor), in that sense. Nothingness re-appears because the self exists only as a relation to an object, to another self. It exists by virtue of its relation to the other. But when the other emerged as a unified object out of chaos the other gained the right to disap-

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pear, to be absent. Its presence can only be defined by its absence: the object is not conceivable outside its matrix of nothingness (which means that ‘Being’ can only be de-fined by ‘Non-Being’). So, if the subject is only by virtue of its relation to the object, and if the object is only the other face of its absence, the subject’s life-affirming relation to the object is vicarious and always brings with it the reality of loss. This explains the sense of loss and the immense sadness of the narrator (as a, now, unified subject) as soon as the unified object emerges. It emerges as a silent object. This is the price for being and the foundational contradiction which is the root of the tragic. But this awareness of the object and its loss is also the moment of humanization. Terzopoulos re-traces the obscure and tortuous paths of psychic ontogenesis as remembered by the body – the body as a psychic object, in the end de-materialized – in order to re-start a dialogue with the ghost, a stichomythia with nothingness. The void returns as soon as the object (and the subject) is unified, but it can, now, be symbolized, ‘framed’, ‘contained’ (in the sense of Bion). Nothingness is ‘processed’, so to speak, metamorphosed, and a consciousness of ‘Nothing’ acts as a bulwark against falling into ‘Nothing’. The leap of the second Jenseits occurs on the wings of a psyche that holds Perseus’ shield/mirror which provides the psyche with symbola of Medusa’s horror.

There is a ‘therapeutic’ effect in Terzopoulos’ theater, a theater that opens up a space for a dialogue with silence. Such a dialogue strengthens the sense of selfhood and allows a more consolidated ‘I’ to continue its struggle to inte-

grate the tragic and to better tolerate the pain (παθος) associated with it. Per-

haps this is the aim of all theater, but here we see it in its starkest expression.

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Bodies in Revolt The Art of Performer’s Psychophysical Transgression in Terzopoulos’ Theatre

Savvas Stroumpos

I. Breath control ‘Keep your knees loose and slightly bent. Extend your eyes' focus straight ahead and keep your gaze concentrated on a specific point. Inhale through your nose and mouth. Press the air down towards the lower abdomen and the pelvis. The diaphragm expands. Exhale through the mouth with the sound s; the diaphragm contracts. Continue breathing, keeping the connection between the point of focus, the diaphragm, and the pelvis. In every inhalation push the air deeper and deeper towards the genitals.’

This is the first introductory step for the performer in the working method of Theodoros Terzopoulos: the physical awareness of the breathing circle. It is a state which the performer assumes daily before the rehearsal and/or the performance. Based on the above process, numerous sets of dynamic exercises are being developed, introducing the actor in a totally new sense of breath, of body and mind, of space and time.

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But why do we start with breathing?

The control of breath and the development of somatic awareness through various circles of exercises constitute the basic way of a dynamic connection through the practice of the performer’s body and mind up to the realization of the psychophysical alertness and openness, which could be described as ‘a body becoming full of eyes’ or as the performer inhabiting the state of ‘standing still while not standing still’.1 Through this process, the actor develops a sense of readiness; he is trained to be present, but also open to what comes next, ready to respond to the multiple possibilities of the oncoming moments. We are interested in silence, in neutrality. The performer is not forced to ‘play’ or represent something, he is not forced to violate his feelings. We are not looking for results. Into silence, he inhabits a state of passive readiness and activated immobility, an inner sense of space and time.

Starting with the control of breath, the performer works intensively on three basic points:

First: he gradually senses the center of the body. By center, we mean the pelvic area (or the triangle) which contains the three basic corporal zones of energy: lower diaphragm, genitals, sacrum, and rectum. Through practice, the area strengthens and simultaneously relaxes, becomes more flexible. The strengthening process of the center offers the performer a very solid mounting point, which helps him assume difficult physical postures; meanwhile, the releasing process allows the breathing air to flow 1

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Zarrilli, 2009, p. 25.

freely throughout the body and activate it to its extreme limits. At this point, we should mention that Indian Kathakali performers refer to the vital energy as the breathing air which flows in the entire body.2

Secondly: with time and daily practice, the breathing capacity of the performer is gradually expanded. During the working process, when tiredness comes, the performer does not stop. Through the control of the breath, the body is trained to spend as much energy as necessary for the execution of an action, without stress or superfluous muscle tensions. As a result, the performer does not receive the point of tiredness as a psychological or physical impasse. Instead, by insisting on the above process, the performer gradually dilates the boundaries of his psychophysical stamina, simultaneously liberating the multiple dimensions of his somatic imagination.

Thirdly: through the control of the breath, the actor learns how to keep the busy, analytical mind of daily life engaged and present in the moment. The process of following the breath’s flow within each physical action allows the mind to penetrate deeper and deeper in the body, to cooperate with it, making the performer able to expand his psychophysical awareness in space and time. We are now concerned with the state of concentration which, as we described above, is inseparable to the control of the breath.

2

Zarrilli, 2009, p. 19.

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II. The state of concentration as a dynamic expansion of the performer’s potential for perception and awareness and not as a closure By extending the eye focus by a point ahead, the performer expands his peripheral vision and as a result he assumes a dilated sense of the performative space through time. Simultaneously, through breath control, the performer cultivates the awareness of the body center, of the spinal column vertebra-by-vertebra, of the diaphragm and the body axles. This form of concentration, which expands dynamically the actor’s ability of a physical perception of space, leads him to an extra-daily sense of time. Now time is perceived through the body; it dilates and contracts according to the demands of each moment within the whole range of the creative process. Eventually, the performer breathes, acts and thinks as a dynamic unity, within a transcendental space-time, till the extreme limits of expression. He is in every moment and, at the same time, he has the sense of it, without getting lost in a Cartesian dualism between body and mind.

III. Encoding emotional states As we can see, Terzopoulos’ theatre develops a radically different idea of the performer’s inner life which contradicts with the psychological theatre tradition. In the paradigm we discuss, the performer is constantly engaged to the breath, to the point of focus, to the sense of his center and spinal column and not to abstract feelings of his autobiography. The above process also extends to the way of expressing each emotional state. The performer does not follow the trodden road of realistic theatre, where one becomes a prisoner of one’s feelings, focusing on the psychological analysis of a role while keeping the body inactive and confined within one’s daily habits.

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Instead, the actor’s body in Attis Theatre codifies a huge range of emotional states, while he expands the psychosomatic dimensions of its expressive abilities. Every codified emotional state creates a different mask and corporality, a different way of breathing and speaking through the diaphragm. We could say that the actor’s body becomes a map of various emotional states, each one of them sculpting its existence anew, realizing the Artaudian paradigm of the actor as ‘the athlete of the heart’.3

IV. The concept of ‘energy’. Looking for the how and not for the why The concept of ‘energy’ in the art of the performer can be understood only through action. It is not a metaphysical or an abstract idea. It cannot be ‘implanted’ in the actor from outside. Modern physics says that energy is a measure of an inner quality of the body: of the motion. Therefore, energy is not only the motion of the body in space and time but also the inner motion, the e-motion.4 In Terzopoulos’ theatre, the cultivation of the voice and the body beyond the daily and socially constructed and restricted behaviors, the demanding codified physical postures and the intense psychophysical training, which aim at the dilation of the performer’s physical axles so as to be able to bear the tragic material, lead to a physical understanding of energy which leads to the question: how? How can the actor move in space and time, or how can he remain immobile? How can he ‘open’ the axles of the body beyond the imposed limits of daily life? And eventually, how can he bear the tragic material? In Terzopoulos' theatre, the answer to the above questions is given by its unique psychophysical performer’s training. This specific working method

3

Artaud, 2000, p. 199.

4

Bitsakis, 2001, p. 131.

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aims at the deconstruction of the actor’s social body and eventually at its reconstruction through the concept of energy, so as the body itself, within its own, unknown till now, codes of expression and tempo-rhythms, to create a transcendental performative space-time. The codified and multi-rhythmical physical behavior in unpredictable directions de-rationalizes the relation between space, text, actor, and spectator. We are interested in the sensory awareness of the spectator, the development of his imagination. Our aim is to break the spectator’s relation to the established rational abilities of perception and let him step freely in the field of symbolism and abstraction concerning the awareness of the in-motion performative image.

V. The deconstruction of the triangle and the performer’s body-of-energy A fundamental component in Terzopoulos’ working method is the process of the triangle’s deconstruction:

The actors march for hours in a collective rhythm within a circle. The body remains completely relaxed. Elbows and knees bent. In each step the soles of the feet root on the floor, overheat, the apophysis of the nerves become full of blood. Gradually the rhythm of the marching becomes faster. As the body gets tired, the temperature rises and the body gets into a sweat. At the extreme point of the collective rhythm’s development, the actors fall on the floor and breathe through the diaphragm. Over time, the breathing air evokes multiple vibrations in the triangle, releasing it until it reaches its complete autonomy. Through the vibrations, the triangle canalizes the energy to the whole body, mobilizing it into unexpectable physical postures through

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opposing flows. The somatic axles relax; they become components of the triangle’s vibrations. Through numerous unpredictable explosions of energy, they become autonomous and are converted into axles-of-energy, giving birth to codes of expression unknown until then. The body is in a state of deconstruction of its institutionalized limits. It stands on the verge between chaos and order, open and perforated, exposed to any kind of stimulus. In the meantime, the body is reconstructed, but this time as a body-of-energy, as a primary body material or as a body channel of the forms of memory. Antonin Artaud’s picture of the burning actor who gesticulates within the flames describes the above process in a vivid way.

VI. Transcendental behavior and physical control In the development of the actor’s transcendental behavior, the control eventually becomes physical; it gets away from the intellectual water tights of the mind as the guard of the body. The mind becomes somatic, and the body starts thinking, sensing, listening and speaking. The performer attempts to break the limits of his self-consciousness and the fear they evoke. In the extreme point of the research and/or the performance, the actor assumes a sensory awareness of space and time; he breaks the borders of a distant, speculative relation to his material, he becomes its component and attempts the dangerous journey in the depth of the structure. The body dances the dance of the forms of memory in a perpetual process of destruction and self-organization of its material. Under these circumstances, the concept of control is accomplished in the performer’s ‘third eye’, which illuminates the road, constantly opening new possibilities, participating every single moment in the performer’s journey, sensing each time every new confrontation.

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VII. Energy in time and in space. Ritual and fragmented time When the performers of Noh theatre comment on their art, they speak about a fundamental principle: ‘3/10 of every action occur in-space and 7/10 intime’. They explain that they need seven times more energy, not to execute an action in space, but to develop it internally, in time. The development of energy in time, which implies the actor’s resistance to the immediate execution of this action in space, is consistent with the state of activated immobility in the maximum level of its tension and density.5 In Terzopoulos’ theatre, the concept of the slow tempo-rhythm penetrates the entire range of his work with the actor, from the training till the performance. He often says: ‘slow tempo bears an aim’ and tries to emphasize that the performer’s persistence on the slow tempo-rhythm carries various surprises and intermediate spaces and times in the development of his corporality within the performative field surrounding him. The quality and quantity of energy required by the body to develop an action through the slow tempo-rhythm deconstructs both the sense of flow of daily life’s time on stage and the institutionalized representation of the actor’s social behavior. We have no more the social tempo-rhythm of realistic theatre, where the actors move back and forth on stage trying to represent reality. An action which we execute in a moment in our daily lives now lasts for some minutes. The actor’s body sculpts the time, creating new fields of expression. Time becomes ritual but also fragmented, bears explosions and unpredictable conditions. Simultaneously it loses the linearity of its social flow; it acquires cracks and becomes relativized: it dilates, contracts, is cut by an undetermined factor, continues, explodes and becomes silent, constantly opening new and unpredictable roads. 5

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Barba and Savarese, 1999, p. 88.

VIII. ‘[…] we have to bring the text from the head into the feet’6 In Terzopoulos’ theatre, the communication (or rather, the confrontation) with the text follows the same dynamic route of exploring the limitless possibilities of the performer’s body-of-energy, through strenuous psychophysical work. During the rehearsals, the text is consciously destroyed, is spoken without meaning or understanding, but full of energy, through the temperature which is created by the performer’s body, in the extreme point of the work. While the temperature rises, the whole body becomes a resonator. The performer stops bothering himself with this or that idea concerning the logic of the text and its interpretation. He becomes component of the diaphragm’s pulses and of the rhythm they produce, while the text is delivered in a way which destroys the rational and socially institutionalized meanings, so as to liberate numerous possibilities and ways of uttering it. What we need is to derive the rhythm from the text’s kernel, to bring the text from the head into the feet, to let the rhythm lead us to a physical understanding of the text and eventually, to liberate multiple meanings of the text through the bodywork. As Terzopoulos says: ‘Rhythm is the medium between the body and the truth […] It’s like dancing on fire. The energy of the text is the fire and the body has to dance on it’.7 In the next phase of the work, the performer starts sensing the relation between the vowels and the consonants of the text. The consonants function like the columns of the vowels; they offer the sense of verticality to the vowels and create a root within the performer’s body while he utters the text. The dynamic interrelation between vowels and consonants of each word, through the phys-

6

Raddatz, 2006, p. 168.

7

Ibid.

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ical rhythm developed by the performer’s body, create a sense of musicality while the performer speaks the text. Eventually, the performer creates a kind of a musical score through his confrontation with the text; he creates multiple rhythmical patterns and vocal tones, combining each vocal action with the pulses of the diaphragm and the physical posture he assumes each time.

Epilogue These features mentioned above are only some stations in the working method of Theodoros Terzopoulos, from the perspective of action and experience of the practitioner, of the actor. Obviously, any attempt to separate elements, which are in a dynamic interaction between them, does not tie up a vibrant and multifaceted system of work that can only be experienced through time and practice, but rather to systematize the experience, aiming at a further deepening and assimilation.

Bibliography Artaud, Antonin (2000) Le théâtre et son double. Paris: Gallimard. Barba, Eugenio and Nicola Savarese (1999) A Dictionary of Theatre Anthropology. London, New York: Routledge. Bitsakis, Eftychios (2001) Contemporary Physics and Materialism. Athens: Daidalos. Jung, Carl Gustav (2006) On the Nature of the Psyche. London, New York: Routledge. Raddatz, Frank M. (ed.) (2006) Reise mit Dionysos. Das Theater des Theodoros Terzopoulos. Journey with Dionysos. The Theatre of Theodoros Terzopoulos. Berlin: Theater der Zeit. Sartre, Jean-Paul (2009) L’ imaginaire. Paris: Gallimard. Terzopoulos, Theodoros (2000) History, Method, Comments. Athens: Agra. Zarrilli, Phillip (2009) Psychophysical Acting. London, New York: Routledge.

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III. Breath – Voice – Language

The Character of the Respiration Notes to Theodoros Terzopoulos

Frank M. Raddatz

In Theodoros Terzopoulos’ theatre, breath generates a force field that is charged continuously. For anyone with eyes to see and ears to hear, respiration is becoming an act. Expiration and inspiration. The duo, contraction and expansion, no longer creates life energy without a sound, calmly and silently: the play of contraction emerges from the shadow. From the shadow of perception. From the shadow of speech. From the shadow of meanings which turn to actions and produce new meanings. The a priori of breath steps out into the open. The inconspicuous and omnipresent servant of the character abandons his subordinate role and reveals himself as an actor. Only by breaking with the hierarchy of the processes on stage it becomes evident that this blind spot on the mirror of the European spirit is full of life. Breath takes on its own existence – even though, as yet, no Western philosophy starts with breathing. Even so, speech knows about the relation between respiration and spirit – German: Atmen und Denken, French: respiration et esprit. There are connections leading from the German word Atmen to the Greek methexis, that kind of group sharing that makes our world overlap with that of Platonic ideas. All the same, breath continues to be the suppressed element of our logocentric culture. Although speech knows about the relation between breath and truth, this is no conscious or constitutive knowledge. The story of lost breath has not yet been written.

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In Terzopoulos’ theatre, breath is the intermediary for organizing the encounter of body and speech. The vocabulary of theatre is renewed, not by adding another technical prosthesis to the existing body, but by codifying the engine of life that is always and everywhere present on stage. In raising the awareness for this existential precondition of all play he crosses the border. Surprisingly, the exhibited breath is blowing against us from the face of the genre. In contrast to speech – which is segmented in many models – breath has a universal character to it. It is understood always and everywhere. The foundation of theatre is something that is common to all mankind. Despite all differences in traditions and languages. In making breath the constructive element of his artistic grammar, Terzopoulos draws attention to the zone of the play that points to the necessities of bare life. The foundation of theatre is life. In the sense as one might say: there is no painting without colors, no music without vibration. It is the essence of breathing that it can serve both consciousness and the unconscious, that its existence remains unaffected, regardless of whether it is in the focus of awareness or whether attentiveness comes to an end. Only if breath fades away life will also terminate. In the intercultural theatre of Terzopoulos, the grammar of codified breath does away with the difference of cultures. Rather the breath of the collective protagonist marks the border between humans and animals. From this perspective of the world, and unlike body and soul, man and animal are no strangers to each other, but humanitas extends deeply into animality. Humanitas is not defined by speech and voice; being human already starts with the awareness of breathing. The reality of that codified breath opens the zone where flesh and sense combine and ignite each other. In this zone, history and nature are merging, neatly separated from tradition. Or, in more careful words: they touch each other. It is a twilight zone where no clear distinction can be made

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between day and night. Where significance is comprehensible, although it is somewhat beyond comprehensibility. It is this zone of indistinguishability in which the connection between humane and animalistic, human and nonhuman, talking and living beings occurs. The exhibited breath forms the bridge between man and animal. For breath is existential and not representative at all. If it were representative, animals would be able to represent themselves. But horses are not able to represent horses. No fish plays a fish. No lark can represent another lark. When Walter Benjamin talks about a work of art as a ‘redeemed night’, he posits that the work of art, although it is standing in the open, also protrudes into the dark and non-readable. A black hieroglyph waiting to be decoded on which Terzopoulos’ theatre sheds an illuminating light. If we follow the trace of breath on his stage, we will soon meet its side effects. Body reactions. Twitching navels. Spit emerging from the actors’ mouths. Behavior that is not generated consciously and volitionally, which, however, takes place in the excess of breathing. On this side of the night, we will at some point be confronted with Antonin Artaud's magical deliria. This darkness marks the beginning of the kinship with all those who are operating with the ecstatic roots of theatre. If, on the other hand, we turn towards the bright day we will inevitably meet the light of speech. Or the theatre of voice. But breathing is not an articulated say. And yet no voice is without breath. If speech is inside the voice like a core, breath forms the margin of the voice. I do not feel like putting forward or repeating any hypotheses about the origin of speech or voice, a subject that proved so inciting for the philosophy of the twentieth century. I do not want to contend, for example, that voice is only a result of breath, like heat results in haze, a mist that crystallizes to shiny particles of speech or suchlike. I would rather prefer to nav-

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igate in that overabundant zone of respiration that is taken into the visible by Terzopoulos’ theatre and to take a look at that area where breath and speech are meeting. For Jacques Derrida, the theatricalized neume, the pure breath – ‘To speak before knowing how to speak, not to be able either to be silent or to speak’ – mutates into ‘a limit of origin’ which ‘is indeed that of a pure presence’, precisely because of its pre-linguistic phonetic component.1 Breath is far more than a sound and, therefore, defines the point of the origin of speech. This is the pole where that sustained presence comes about which does not fall apart into a before and an after. While breath – whether or not codified – is not representative at all, it is always now. A signum of presentness. This presentness is characterized by its closeness to animality. Within the framework of art, this aspect apparently leads into theological districts. Wherever life and death, presence and the divine are involved religion is not afar. Indeed, Jean-Luc Nancy regards the spirit of Judeo-Christian monotheism as being inspired by the imagery of breath. ‘Here, then, the spirit of Christianity, meaning Christianity as a theology of the Holy Spirit, is entirely whole: a religion of breath (already Judaic), […], of exhaling – a deleterious odor of the dead, with perfumes pleasing to the One Eternal, an odor of sanctity (Judaic, already, and also Islamic) – a religion of expiration and inspiration, a general pneumatology, a religion of filiation: the Spirit passes from Father to Son […]; the son is the body, […], gathered up, concentrated in its breath, offered in sacrifice to the father it returns to by expiring, the body of the last cry, of the final sigh where everything is consumed.’2

1

Derrida, 1997, p. 249.

2

Nancy, 2008, p. 77.

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In religions of salvation, the last expiration is interpreted as the transition into eternal life. It is precisely the absence of breathing that is described as being a pleasant scent to the one God. From the perspective of eternal life, breath is an expression of the wrong. It just extends the finite. Yes, it is its signature. One might easily put forward the hypothesis that a theatre without breath represents a metaphysical concept. It is supported by the presence of the one God, not by animality. When Derrida states in this context that ‘a breath of speech, an inarticulate breath […] is no longer on the way to humanity […] but is rather on the way to superhumanity’, he is drawing this paradigm from Gregorian ecclesiastical chant. The religious requirements lead to the assumption that breath in the arts has an inherent potential that goes beyond all things human. Derrida invokes Christian chants without leaving the nexus of monotheism. The trace of breath leads directly into the center of the holy and touches the wound of all art. When God and artists are rivals only nature can give life. Art cannot create life. Pygmalion makes a beautiful mistress from ivory. But only after Aphrodite has accepted his sacrifice he is able to bring her to life with a kiss. Also, with the art of Terzopoulos we enter a space devoted to the Gods, especially to Dionysus, and find ourselves in the field of tragedy. While the rhythmized breath is flaming or blazing between animality on the one hand and the light of speech on the other, a different vector references an extra- or supramundane sphere outside of time. Interestingly enough, for both Terzopoulos and Derrida the link to the divine is created by forms of art which are dealing, or able to deal, with breath consciously. In writing, however, there's no breath. That’s why the Egyptians note ‘breath suns’ into their scripts. When color ages or the projection yellows, they do not show traces of a pure presence but present their material character. The human body, too,

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is exposed to time, but as long as man can breathe, he is present. In the here and now. Together with his breath, man not only loses his voice and speech, but also his life. The theatre of Terzopoulos is characterized by tragic consciousness and not at all by salvation. In the Homeric world, the abode of the dead has no paradisiacal traits. Achilles, the King of the Dead, explains in the Odyssey that he would prefer to be a servant on earth, rather than being an emperor in the beyond. It is only with an entirely modified conception of the beyond – Nietzsche speaks of a revaluation of values – that breath descends to the status of a pariah. Although the world of tragedy does without salvation it knows about resurrection. The latter takes place in playing, not as a historical telos. With the help of the memetic, tragedy provides presence to the dead. Its theatre lends breath to those who do not have any breath left. Only in this sense tragedy is representative. It presents the gift of presence to those who are not present. That is neither a question of confessions nor a question of attitudes. It is an ontological process that is purer than the profane. If the Christian myth of resurrection is taken as a starting point, tragedy must be regarded as a redirection activity. Only the monotheistic perspective of salvation allows for the argument: since the dead will resurrect on Doomsday, the art of tragedy is a representative act. On the level of form, this means: it is not a representation of the dead, but of the Last Judgment. Hence, tragedy would be a redirection activity for true resurrection. But if one does not take the pious fiction of salvation as a basis, the theatre of the tragic era reveals a deeply authentic character. Breath is the opening through which the dead enter into the discourse. The dead, who are reanimated through the breathing of the choir, and the community are breaking the power of death throughout the duration of the performance. Ironically, the

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real death of an actor on stage substantiates the power of death and does not testify to the presence of the dead at all. For this can only be done by the living, that is to say, the breathing performers. At the same time, the theatre of antiquity is far away from that Christian belief in miracles where the remains of the saints and martyrs and other relics testify to the presence of the divine. Tragedy rather lends breath and voice to the dead and, in doing so, makes the spirit talk which is more than literature or an author. We see: the art of Theodoros Terzopoulos' theatre is a singular one. Apart from his theatre, I do not know any other one that could induce me to write such a prologue on breathing and poetry.

Bibliography Derrida, Jacques (1997) Of Grammatology. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press Nancy, Jean-Luc (2008) Corpus (Perspectives in Continental Philosophy). New York: Fordham University Press

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Tongue in Presence – Speech in Exile

Dimitris Tsatsoulis

Researchers of Attis Theatre have already satisfactorily delved into the biodynamic and deconstructive method1 of its founder, a director who places the focus of his performance quest upon the body of the actor and its energy force.2 It is a force that brings about impressive movement results which, in their own turn, lead to the production of speech through a well-studied use of breathing; a ‘speech-pain’, as Terzopoulos himself describes it.3 In the present necessarily brief paper, using examples taken from performances to illustrate my points, I concentrate on what I consider to be the inbetween space of this process; a process mainly stemming from the ways breathing is processed until it acquires a vocal, articulate character of speech.4 That is, I will focus on the system of paralinguistic signs,5 and therefore on the voice itself and its various intonations that in the theatre of Terzopoulos, from a simple sound signifier, which conventionally acquires a meaning only 1

About the biodynamic method of Terzopoulos and an effort to organize its goals according to the theoretical model of Grotowski, see: Sampatakakis, 2006, pp. 90–102.

2

Varopoulou, 2000, pp. 9–14; McDonald, 1992, pp. 159–169; Decreus, 2007, pp. 229–242; Chatzidimitriou, 2010.

3

Terzopoulos, 2000, p. 57.

4

Stroumpos, 2003; 2006, pp. 230–233; Terzopoulos, 2006, pp. 136–171, especially p. 162.

5

For the extent and meaning of paralinguistic signs, see for example: Ubersfeld, 1981, p. 212 (Les éléments paraverbaux); Elam, 1980, p. 78 (Paralinguistic Features); Puchner, 2010, p. 97 (paralinguistic signs); Tsatsoulis, 1997, p. 32.

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through articulate speech, progressively turns into an autonomous signified. Together with the voice, other kinds of ‘vocalizations’, including ‘vocal segregates’,6 become semantically autonomous, and finally, so does the tongue itself, since, from a human organ allowing the production of speech, it claims the production of meaning through the presence of its energy charged flesh. Thus, the tongue talks through its movement without uttering any speech and so it also becomes equal with the other (hands, fingers, legs, soles, etc.) members of a deconstructed and at the same time reconstructed body. It is a progressive development starting as early as 1986 with the outstanding performance of The Bacchae that marks a climax in the research work of the group, as Terzopoulos and his actors, having already been in command of the energy sources of the body through the study of primeval cultural arrangements, embody them in action. Now, with the performances Alarme in 2011 and Jocasta in 2012, they have perfected the energy force of the human sound, an equally primeval cultural element of communication and action, by transforming the word into a rhythm. In addition to that though, they dramatize the carnal form of the speech, by visualizing its materiality through the tongue and so they end up in a ‘speaking’ aphony. Related to that development is that progressively, in Terzopoulos’ performances, the amount of speech is diminishing by being replaced with minor linguistic units, which are often repeated and differentiated in intonation.7 These are words that function as a form of condensed meaning gov6

Vocalizations can range from laughing, crying, giggling, whispering, groaning, etc. to ‘vocal segregates’, that is the distinct but extra-phonemic sound of the language, such as snapping the lips, or the tongue, sounds similar to clicks, ‘uh-huh’, ‘sh’, etc. See: Elam, 1980, p. 79.

7

‘I understood that my research in tragedy had to continue by drawing from the new experiences I had acquired. In order to reach the highest degree of abstraction, the absolute minimalism, while searching for the image of a nuclear rhythm’ (Terzopoulos, 2000, p. 63).

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erned by intense musicality to such an extent that they achieve a point of discarding their real meanings and are re-named semantically inside the sound energy they produce.8 In that sense, they could very well refer to the ‘Telegrammstil’ that Lothar Schreyer and August Stramm developed in their dramatic works, probably inspired by Kandinsky.9 Terzopoulos himself said: ‘What interests me is when someone interprets a phrase, then this someone is also able to discover its sound source […]. A natural source produces energy, not emotion. It produces sounds and frequencies long before emotion’,10 while, elsewhere, he points out that ‘the rhythm is what narrates’.11 The performance Ajax, The Madness, in 2004, based on the tragedy of Sophocles, has been a revealing example of this reasoning. The three actors repeating a passage of Tecmessa’s speech differ from each other in the use of different intonations, which makes it possible to give the same speech a different meaning: a dramatic, parodic, and almost mockery speech.12 Every different manner in articulating the speech signifies a different relation of the

8

Terzopoulos, discussing the dialogue of a performance act he attended in Colombia, mentions: ‘[…] with the use of hand and head motions where one says “ra, ra, ra … ti, ti, ti, a, a, a … which fades as such the word away and becomes a sound, the same as in Aeschylus the Oto, to, to, to … ti, ti, ti.” in the mourning of the Persians’, and he finally adds: ‘The incoherent sounds describe a story […]. Today, being over-informed and wishing to exhaust a subject within a minute, we have lost everything’ (Terzopoulos, 2000, p. 61). Cf.: Claudia Castellucci: ‘The ethical problem today […] is of separating the voice from an issue of communication […] What is most important is the materiality of words’, and Chiara Guidi: ‘[R]hythm – with its capacity to vibrate, to resonate – is the fundamental unity of sensation’ (Castellucci and Guidi, 2004, pp. 111–112).

9

‘The chief technique Kandinsky identified in Maeterlinck’s process was simple word repetition, which “deprives the word of its external reference […] and only the sound is retained”’ (Kuhns, 1997, p. 144).

10

Terzopoulos, 2000, p. 57.

11

Ibid., p. 61

12

Tassos Dimas, Savvas Stroumpos and Meletis Ilias perform the same character, enunciating extracts from the speech of Tecmessa, as I mention further down.

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acting subject of enunciation (Ajax) with the object or the energy of his action (the murder of the animals). Thus, successively, what is heard is (a) the tragic dimension of the murder while the actors are holding knives, and then (b) the parody of the bloodshed holding cleavers in their hands (‘Some he beheaded; of some he cut the twisted throat or broke the spine’, Sophocles, Ajax, 298-299). After that, (c) the mockery of the scene with the use of red stiletto heels – connoting both a lack of bravery (‘for he had always taught that such wailing was for cowardly and low-hearted men’, 319-320) and the female origins of speech since Tecmessa is the source of enunciation. Finally, through the intervening codified laughers of the actors that break the narration (‘gathering streams of swearing […] mixed with laughter’, 303-304).13 The actor, without emotion but following a different rhythm that he enriches with the appropriate paralinguistic elements, elicits different situations while enunciating exactly the same extract.14 The manner of enunciation naturally influences the way the spectator interprets it, while this signal-information turns the attention to the materiality of speech, presenting it as a vocal event.15 The scene of recognition at The Bacchae, when Agave realizes that she is holding in her hands the head of her son, Pentheus, has already become part of the international anthology of performances, and the image of Sofia Mihopoulou’s interpretation of the previously mentioned role has traveled all

13

For a thorough review of the performance, see: Tsatsoulis, 2004, pp. 344–352.

14

About how the received message differentiates according to the paralinguistic signs and the incorporation of non-prosodic sounds in the Stanislavsky method for attaining the transfer of dramatic information with the help of vocal idiosyncrasy and the characteristic vocal abilities of the actor, see the statement of Roman Jakobson, Linguistics and Poetics, in: Seabock, 1960, pp. 355–377.

15

Elam, 1980, p. 83.

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around the world, while researchers have repeatedly described the scene.16 I am using here Freddy Decreus description to remind it: ‘She opened her mouth in order to cry and lament, extending her lips as far as humans are able to do, producing a tongue that first hesitantly, later on violently induced a tremor which in turn took possession of her whole body’.17 The reason I use this illustrative description is because I would like to clarify from the start that, from the viewpoint of Terzopoulos’ method, the course, as in every relevant case of extreme pain,18 is reversed: the body, already in the state of an internal energy turmoil, transfers all its energy to the face, by focusing it mainly on the mouth – the source of speech – through the tongue, which, in its effort to utter words, initially produces inarticulate sounds19 and is transformed into a visible channel but also into the center of the mobility that penetrates the whole body, creating the impression that the rest of the body is inactive.20 Prometheus, in the performance Prometheus Bound of Aeschylus, in both its first version of 1995 and in the direction of 2011, with Tassos 16

For example, see: McDonald, 2006, p. 17; Terzopoulos, 2000, p. 74.

17

Decreus, 2006, p. 203.

18

For the process of charged motion that precedes any paralinguistic or physical linguistic signs in the case of tragic characters such as Kassandra in Aeschylus’ Agamemnon, Pythia in Aeschylus’ Eumenides, Hecuba in Euripides’ Trojan Women, or Phedra in Euripides’ Hippolytus, see: Tsatsoulis, 2007, pp. 142–199.

19

‘Physical pain does not simply resist language but actively destroys it, bringing about an immediate reversion to a state anterior to language, to the sounds and cries a human being makes before language is learned’ (Scarry, 1985, p. 4). Further down she adds: ‘To witness the moment when pain causes a reversion to the pre-language of cries and groans is to witness the destruction of language’ (Ibid, p. 6). Penelope Chatzidimitriou, probably misinterpreting the difference between linguistic and paralinguistic signs, juxtaposes, as not verifiable Scarry's conclusions on Terzopoulos physicality of speech. See: Chatzidimitriou, 2010, p. 76.

20

The cause of the misunderstanding might have been Terzopoulos’ well-known description of the same scene where he writes: ‘alalia is progressively spreading to the whole body’, despite the fact he straight away adds: ‘and all the body was palpitating’ (Terzopoulos, 2000, p. 74).

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Dimas in the title role, constitutes a relevant eloquent example of this process. Titan, being tied in the center of the stage, mute at the beginning and seemingly motionless, is, in reality, experiencing a frantic, inner movement of his entire body where its autonomous upper limbs transfer vibrations to all the body. The mouth, without articulating any speech, gathers this vibration and is full of saliva that overflows, an indicator of its hard effort and necessity to convert the energy into words. When this finally happens, a groan coming from the innermost part of the body will emerge before turning into articulated speech.21 What really happens, in both cases, is that the strain of the body prevents it from ‘speaking’ and so it obstructs the breath from finding a sound release. In such a state, Agave's tongue, which is in an almost demonic mobility, is unable to produce articulate speech and, instead, it produces inarticulate sounds that refer to something bestial, and as such to the most primeval system of communication. Step by step, the articulation of phonemes, as a difficult birth, will follow causing a verbal explosion. This is what FischerLichte has characterized as ‘ex-corporation of speech’,22 accurately referring to the ritualistic animal sacrifices described by Walter Burkert.23 The tongue, however, as a body organ that has been deconstructed from the rest of the body and moves autonomously, has already predefined, or rather coerced, that verbal explosion, which finally seems superfluous since everything has been ‘said’ through kinetic and paralinguistic codes. 21

For a more thorough presentation of the whole scene in terms of the stage spatial arrangement, characterized first by the presence of a cross and then by the triaxial shape, corresponding both to the three diameters of a boundless sphere and their cosmological/cosmogonic interpretation, see: Tsatsoulis, 2005a, pp. 132–149, especially p. 142 et seq.

22

Fischer-Lichte, 2006, p. 115.

23

Burkert, 1983.

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In the production of Samuel Beckett's one-act play, Rockaby, in 2003, Sofia Mihopoulou in the role of the ‘woman’, confined in a black box – a grave and a womb – having only her head protruding from the slit, listens to the speech not from a cassette recorder, but from the director himself who is sitting in front of her. Her only verbal participation is the utterance of the word ‘more’. The word, however, before being shaped and heard, is traced by the intense mobility of the tongue of an open, expressive mouth: the tongue spells the word without any sound, only with its movement, so that when it is finally uttered, it seems to appear redundant. The tongue does not utter any speech, it rather writes and erases it at the same time. A tongue scribe-eraser of speech.24 In a performance with a similar stage arrangement entitled Desert, in 2007,25 inspired by the work of Carlo Michelstaedter (1887-1910), Persuasion and Rhetoric (1910), Paolo Musio, standing motionless opposite the director, who supports him verbally, takes up the task to utter a delirious speech, a death requiem for modern man, moving progressively from despair to an internal explosion, written on his pulsating body from the very beginning. However, before speech starts being articulated in words, for several minutes, the mouth, the tongue, both in constant motion, with the salivary glands in full secretion, give the impression that all the energy force gathered in the body has now been moved to the oral cavity, to the trembling lips opened by the active tongue. Finally though, what is heard are the disorderly, torturing sounds of the breath that have already predefined, with their

24

For a critical analysis of the performance, see: Tsatsoulis, 2003, pp. 340–342.

25

For a critical presentation of the performance see: Idem, 2008, p. 55.

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rhythms, the deeper meaning of what is going to be said. When finally the sounds manage to form elementary verbal syntagms by a painful smacking of the lips, the speech will be heard as an explosion from the depths of the body,26 as in a painful childbirth. The essence of speech-pain that Terzopoulos mentions. What we have mentioned until now leads us to accept a pattern that follows the process below: 1. energy charged body in motion → 2. focus of the energy charge on the face and especially the mouth → 3. production of sounds as paralinguistic signs by breathing → 4. activation and mobility of lips and tongue → 5. production of (vocal) inarticulate paralinguistic signs → 6. production of articulate speech → The above pattern has no other value than the fact that the whole process it describes is not always complete as it can stop at one of its progressive stages mentioned above and therefore never reach an articulate speech – as it successfully happened in the previously mentioned cases – or again, after the completion of the circle, to start a reverse course from the sixth to the first stage. In other words, a process of speech suction and the return to previous inarticulate, speechless extra-phonemic or voiceless stages.

26

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As Erika Fischer-Lichte has specifically written on the performance of The Bacchae: ‘The breathing first rang out loudly from the body of the actor then became an air and energy explosion which collected the words from the depths of the body and hurled them out’ (Fischer-Lichte, 2006, p. 115).

Recently, in summer 2011, in a directorial intervention that Theodoros Terzopoulos made on the triptych of Kalliopi Lemou's sculpture installation, under the general title Esperia,27 at Sikyon, the spectator entering the first room watches the action entitled ‘Lamentia’. Sofia Hill is sitting in front of one of the large iron sculptures, covered with a white cloth, a cloth that she pulls slowly at the end to reveal a primeval shape reminiscent of a seashell referring to the archetype and teeming with symbolism shapes such as the helix and the spiral;28 a shape that does not conceal its sea origins, directly associated with the advent of life and therefore woman herself. Sofia Hill, looking at that still invisible object, produces, with the energy of her pulsating body and through her breath, perpetual and multi-form sounds. She seems to be participating in a primitive ritual in front of a eugenic totem, or similarly, to be giving birth to the primitive shape through sounds that supersede the use of language: A mouth that talks and produces meanings without language. In this particular case, the process described above neither ends up in an articulate speech nor reaches a point where it produces extra-phonemic sounds. On the contrary, it is disrupted on stage three when the spectators leave the room where the installation has been revealed as if its image constitutes the most eloquent semantic explanation of the entire performance event. 27

The installation of Kalliopi Lemou entitled Esperia, curator Maria Maragou, was part of the 3rd International Meeting of Ancient Drama, entitled The Revenge, which was organised by Attis Theatre and the Municipality of Sikion, at Sikion (Kiato), from the 24th to the 28th August 2011. The installations were placed inside the three raisin repositories of ASO, which the spectators could visit one after the other, as part of a performance act directed by Theodoros Terzopoulos, music composition by Panagiotis Velianitis, and lighting by Kostas Bethanis. The actresses Sofia Hill (Lamentia), Sofia Mihopoulou (Eterna), and Aneza Papadopoulou (Esperia) developed a dialogue with the installations, adopting respectively voicelessness, articulated – inarticulate speech, and speechlessness – vocal resonance.

28

These are shapes that really attracted German expressionists like Oskar Schlemmer in his research for the costumes of the work Das Triadische Ballet. See: Hüneke, 1999, p. 56.

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The second part of the triptych, entitled ‘Eterna’, moves in the opposite direction from the above. Sofia Mihopoulou sits here in the middle of oversized sculptures suspended from above that have amorphous faces and encircle her. They resemble huge totems in front of which the woman states her own mourning version through a speech vociferously and incessantly articulated, composed of confused traumatic experiences-recollections from civil or other wars. Progressively, the speech starts losing its logical coherence, and the words are uttered ramblingly, violating the syntagmatic axis, ending up in a delirious speech which lacks any meaning. It is another kind of speech-pain, without any signified, while the signifiers turn at first into non-recognisable phonemes and then into an inarticulate mumbling, reconfirming once more that pain caused even by traumatic experiencesrecollections can lead the suffering subject to utter a kind of pre-language expressions that destroy communication achieved through articulate speech. The woman, experiencing the religious excitement caused by the presence of the totem-deity like figures, touches the very same notion of glossolalía (speaking in tongues), here in a version that refers to a spiritual state when religious practice leads to an enunciation of incomprehensible phrases and is often seen among mental patients where language neologisms follow some rudimentary syntax.29 The woman is angry and looks as if she is addressing the totem-deities about injustice, an activity that has also been observed during mourning rituals recorded in anthropological studies.30 The spectators depart after their ‘guides’ advise them to do so, whereas the woman left alone, talks to herself, remaining 29

The original meaning of the word glossolalía refers to the ability of the Apostles, which came in an epiphany, to talk many languages in order to spread the word of Christianity, while in later times it meant the charismas of knowledge, prophecy, and interpretation.

30

See: Das, 1997, p. 67–92, here p. 79: ‘The address [of laments] was to the dead person, to the living, and to their own bodies, as well as to the gods’.

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in the same spot shaking by the inarticulate sounds her body has started to emit. What we are watching here is the reverse course, namely from stage six towards stage two, as an answer to the previous ‘Lamentia’. In the third part of the triptych entitled ‘Esperia’, Aneza Papadopoulou welcomes the spectators curled up inside another sculpture in the shape of a circular cone referring to a plant shape or a human organ, or even to an Indian hut in which the woman mourns. What is heard is a song – a mourning sound without words that form incomprehensible syllables at intervals – which, however, is not deprived of the emotional charge carried by a lamenting song.31 The produced sound quality borders in such a way inarticulate speech that leads the whole action to a pre-linguistic stage, to an adult babbling, which finally is in accord with the whole primeval ritual the sculptureinstallation suggests. The process here reaches the fifth stage without achieving any articulate speech, while what is promoted to the essence of the action is the speechlessness – and not the voicelessness any longer.

The spectator, on leaving, takes up the task to decode the signs according to his own ‘inner’ cultural code. In other words, one is asked to activate memory, to recall the forgotten sounds possessed before acquiring the vocal restrictions imposed by the learning of the mother language. As Roman Jakobson has early observed, ‘the babbling child can accumulate articulations which are never found within a single language or even a group of languages’, adding that ‘no limits can be set on the phonic powers of the prattling child […] Without the slightest effort, [it] can produce any – and all – sounds contained

31

About lamentation in Terzopoulos’ performances of ancient Greek drama and its relation to popular forms of lament, see: Arvaniti, n.d., pp. 99–120.

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in human languages’.32 Terzopoulos, talking about the memory of the body, unquestionably includes also the memory of the lost sounds his actors have to re-discover by fighting against ‘phonic amnesia’ and recalling them from the depths of the body: ‘the echo of another speech and of something other than speech: an echolalia, which guarded the memory of the indistinct and immemorial babble’, as Heller-Roazen has claimed on a different occasion.33 Something that is not foreign to the broader intercultural program Terzopoulos follows and which could easily incorporate the ‘phonological universals’, as Jakobson would have said.34 We could sum up these three performances that make up the production of Esperia as three different expressions of female pain. The pain of child labor, the pain of memory and the pain about or when facing death. In Jocasta (2012), which based on the text of Giannis Kontrafouris, Theodoros Terzopoulos seems to combine all the linguistic and paralinguistic signs that we could discern in the triptych Esperia. However, before I go into these pure performative elements, I must elaborate on this unique poetic-delirious text that escapes from any traditional kind of play. I must disagree though with the view expressed in the analysis at the introduction of the published works of Kontrafouris,35 and especially the remarks regarding Jocasta, where it is 32

Jakobson, 1968, p. 26.

33

Heller-Roazen, 2008, pp. 11–12.

34

About the notion of intercultural theatre of Theodoros Terzopoulos, according to my approach, see: Tsatsoulis, 2006, pp. 42–54; also: Idem, 2005a, pp. 132–149; Idem, 2005b, pp. 49–98.

35

Sampatakakis, 2010, pp. 13–73. However, the text is ‘delirious’ from beginning to end, but not deconstructive. Since, as it can be seen further down from my approach through lexical categories, he brings back, with the same consistency until the end, steady informational motifs - references to the character of Jocasta and to any events that can identify her. In my opinion, although it is more concise, it can be included in the long Greek poetic tradition of monologic texts inspired by ancient Greek literature that have been dramatized, similar to those by Giannis Ritsos.

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claimed that the text belongs to postdramatic theatre.36 On the contrary, all the elements contribute to the fact that we approach it as a poetic text that is equal (also in its structure) to an improvised lament, an expression of an extreme female pain solitarily experienced when facing the befallen catastrophe that the woman utters alone while she sees her reflection on the water (the first sentence of the text is: ‘In the waters […] I cry’). When facing physical pain, as Veena Das has claimed, the ‘speech is completely incoherent’ and retains only its musicality.37 Despite all this, among the meaningless and unbalanced syntagmatic axis words, there are emerging utterances with very accurate information: although the name ‘Jocasta’ is not mentioned anywhere in the text, sparse words or phrases create lexical categories that, for example, refer to the way she was killed (by hanging: ‘When we saw her, she was hanging, swaying with twisted cords round her neck’, Sophocles, Oedipus Rex, 1263-1264) by using words and phrases like: ‘On the hang rope’ (Jocasta, p. 221), ‘I kick the stool’ (p. 240), ‘I climb upside down up a lasso curled around my neck […] butterfly nets […] spider nets’ (p. 257). In addition, other sparse 36

Sampatakakis uses the term ‘postdramatic theatre’, which, as is known, was introduced by Hans-Thies Lehmann (2002). However, the German theatre scholar defines ‘postdramatic theatre’ both by drawing from the view expressed by Jean-Pierre Sarrazac, (2000, p. 63) and through its relevance with the new needs for literal meaning and theatricality of the end of the twentieth century. He distinguishes it, as a term only applying to theatrical aesthetics, from the meaning of postmodern that generally characterizes that period (p. 25), and allocates it with the specific stylistic traits of postdramatic theatre: parataxis, simultaneity, a play with the density of signs, musicality, visual dramaturgy, physicality, invasion of the real, situation/fact, (pp. 134–135). None of the above traits is a characteristic of the works of Kontrafouris.

37

Das, 1997, p. 86. It is of interest to note here that the researcher, while studying female pain in India, mentions the work of Saadat Hasan Manto’s Pompoms, where the image of the woman presented uses an impaired speech to expose her pain in front of a mirror. I believe that the description and the commentary for this work correspond to a large extent with the ones we can make about Kontrafouris' Jocasta, starting with the ‘mirroring’ of the two women in order to undertake the enunciation of speech, something referring to a non-communicable pain.

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words compose lexical categories that on a paradigmatic axis refer to the event of Oedipus blinding with the help of sharp instruments, such as: ‘the birds have poked me with their beaks’ (p. 217), ‘thorns’ (p. 220), ‘nails’, ‘wounds’ (p. 221), ‘a cut peacocks tail embellished with gouged eyeballs’ (p. 222), ‘sea urchins’ (p. 229), ‘forks’ (cf. the exemplary sound relation in Greek between pirounia [forks] and perones [brooches], Oedipus Rex 1268-69), ‘combs’, ‘fish hooks’, ‘knives’, ‘spears’ (p. 230), ‘horns’ (p. 241), ‘swords’ (p. 246), and finally, ‘eggshells you leave eggs’ (p. 247) with the known metonymic relation of the eye-egg already expressed by Bataille.38 Finally, there is a whole lexical category that refers, always without any connection with the direct linguistic environment, to the issue of incest, of the identification of the father-son on the marriage bed, even to Oedipus’ swollen feet, such as: ‘Young nude swaddled sideburns man governs the bed-sheets orders a lullaby final Father Murder the same pillows’ (p. 232), ‘Sperm Injured Wasted Scepter’ (p. 233), ‘Kinship hide’ (p. 235), ‘I am you are ONE you go from one side to the other’ (p. 236), and others. This speech distortion (which superficially only hides characters, situations, traumas) is reflected and meets in a deeper level the distortion the body has undergone – because of incest, murders, self-blindness, suicide – situations that have been preserved inside it and have extensively defined it: ‘the language of pain could only be a kind of hysteria – the surface of the body becomes a carnival of images and the depth becomes the site for hysterical pregnancies – the language having all the phonetic excess of hysteria that destroys apparent meanings’.39

38

Bataille, 1970.

39

Das, 1997, p. 86.

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The aforementioned brief analysis of the text, until recently unknown,40 was necessary in order to understand Theodoros Terzopoulos performative enunciation. Indeed, the director has chosen to render the text in the form of a mourning ritual, adding elements that reinforce this character. Reading speech as a sound universe where the most important thing is that the signifiers prevail over the signifieds, he instructed Sofia Hill to interpret Jocasta's speech as a mourning that leads inevitably to her own death. Inside an initially dark room that progressively lightens, the actress, kneeled in front of a water basin, is on the top of a stage design where the director sits on the opposite top and the spectators in the other two opposite sides. The actress starts uttering a faint long-lasting sound emitted from inside her body that gradually gets stronger and stronger, giving the impression of a sound produced from a distant musical instrument. Only when the sound becomes strong enough and fills the surrounding space, the spectators begin to realize that the musical instrument is the body of the actress herself. It is quite obvious that an energetically charged body, with an invisible vibration, can produce through its breathing out auditory paralinguistic signs of such high intensity and depth that turn the basic function of breathing into a sound-music event. As intensity increases, the sound acquires the quality of sobbing, now interrupted by small breathing pauses that do not destroy its initial pace but increase its intensity and power until saturation, nearing as such a screaming and thereby the auditory ‘violence’. It is a situation traditionally believed to be dangerous for the lamenting woman, as ‘herself has passed to the autonomy of scream-

40

Its publication coincided with the production of Attis Theatre.

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ing’,41 and therefore in danger of crossing the limits. It is at this point, and in relation to the traditional function of mourning that demands the interference of another person in order to create an ‘antiphony’, when Terzopoulos, by introducing an extra-textual element, will help the lamenting woman out of the dangerous plunge into a non-lingual lament. The director is present on stage, seated at the exact opposite of the actress, when he suddenly breaks with force porcelain plates. Thus, another paralingual system carrying its own distinct meaning, that of the modern Greek ‘grief’

(καημός), interferes to assist the viewers’ route within the previous paralingual universe operating also as antiphony. Afterwards, the same meaning is stated when the director himself interferes, either in prose or singing form, confirming as such that Terzopoulos builds the entire performance on the logic of the traditional mourning ritual. The ‘assistance’, that is the presence of the second person during the mourning process and the ‘antiphony’ as its extension, constitute a dominant motif of the Greek (and not only that) mourning from the antiquity to today.42 In this specific case the dialogical relation is found either in encouraging the mourning woman to reach the final ‘exit’, or in the adaptation by the director of a Pontiac lamentation, which subsumes the female character to the broader cultural environment of mourning, that is of oral history. At the same time, by naming her he gives her substance, since in Kontrafouris’ text any reference to names, besides the title, is absent.

41

Seremetakis, 1991, p. 119. I underline here that the same anthropologist also notes, while commenting on the traditional function of ‘crying’ in Mani (klama: the women's mourning ritual): ‘Pain is materialized by the acoustics of “screaming” and the poetics of the body. This material character of pain endows it with force’ (p. 230).

42

Ibid, p. 100.

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What constitutes an indicative point of ‘antiphony’ is the fact that the director, by starting to speak, doubles the last word of Jocasta’s speech, creating an acoustic interaction similar to what we meet between the soloist and the chorus in traditional mourning rituals.43 If lingual, paralingual, and noise sounds (the breaking of plates) constitute the structure of antiphony that happens between the actor and the director, the same mourning structure can be observed in both the alternation of lingual-paralingual signs that the theatrical Jocasta carries out and in the alternations of the volume and intensity of the voice, elements that are also considered to be expressions of antiphony. Sofia Hill, while she utters the dramatic text, alternates repeatedly a vocal scale, transmitting a polyphony of pain: a normal, a deep, and a thin voice.44 Moreover, what occurs throughout the enunciation of speech and between the phrases is a cancellation of the meaning of words, because inarticulate sounds – of an unknown language – interfere,45 primeval sound units, which, despite maintaining the profound structure of the spoken words, simultaneously mock and cancel them by destroying their signified. The utmost pain does indeed destroy speech, even if it stems from one, even if this is delirious in its structured, pre-existing perfect text. Seen in this light, Terzopoulos performance, with its pure ritual elements, can be perceived by some as ‘postdramatic theatre’, the text it is

43

Seremetakis, 1993, pp. 119–149. ‘The Koriféa is the “soloist” in pain and the moiroloyístres are the chorus whose responses to the performance of the Koriféa socially validate both her pain and their own […] the chorus generates an antiphonic response by a multiplicity of verbal and nonverbal significations. These include the singing of refrains, such as doubling on the last word’ (pp. 126–127, my underlining).

44

‘The mourner sings with more than one voice and in more than one pitch at the same time’ (Idem, 1991, p. 118).

45

The intonation of these articulate but meaningless enunciations refers to the theatre of the Far East.

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based cannot. As for the vocal attributes that we discuss here, this last performance of Terzopoulos creates a constant rearrangement of the stages we already mentioned, covering all their extent in both a normal and reverse course that, because of an inner antiphony, promotes the polyphony of pain. Whereas the second external antiphony adds a parallel acoustic and gestural dialogical universe that functions as a moral ‘assistance’ or testimony to Jocasta’s pain.46 A testimony, simultaneously, of her own end, since, to satisfy the wishes of the director, she will enter the squared shroud in front of her, from which she will emerge crawling from the other side, opposite the director bursting together with him into a liberating laughter-catharsis. The laughter, one of the classic ‘Vocal characterizers’,47 has functioned with equal cathartic strength in an older production of Terzopoulos. In the performance ‘Improvisation’, the third part of the Triptych, in 2004, inspired by Beckett’s short one-act plays, the mouth – source of sound and the main instrument of the face’s mime48 – has already gathered, when the actor Tassos Dimas appears, all the energy charge of the body. The rest of the face carrying a frozen expression refers to a mask, as it does not participate in the effort for communication. The trembling lips are trying in vain to articulate speech, the tension has gathered saliva that oozes out instead of the expected words, but which can be traced incomprehensibly and silently, while the lips sometimes in slow movements and sometimes in impetuous movements answer the monosyllabic questions of the director: ‘what?’, ‘when?’, ‘where?’, who

46

See the common expression used by people present during lamenting, saying that they have come to ‘bear witness’ on the dead person, namely, to represent him/her in their last journey.

47

Elam,1980, p. 79.

48

See: Ubersfeld, 1981, p. 223.

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listens carefully to the narration of the mute mouth. A mouth-body in a speechless, voiceless state, however, totally eloquent in showing the mood alternations of its vehicle, narrative, explanatory, or profoundly communicative. The Beckettian Not I is here without speech, but, with a mouth, quite as expressive in its alalia that ends up forming on it a deep silent laughter which is produced silently and reflected on the vociferous laughter of the interlocutor-director. We realize that in this performance the progress just manages to reach the second stage. Unlike that, in Alarme (Season: 2010-2011), a performance that depicts the conflict between Elisabeth I and Mary Stuart based on their correspondence,49 we witness not only the completion of all the previously described stages but also a reverse course towards the first stage. This happens many times during the performance time. The speech of the performance is fragmentary, repetitive, fully governed by musicality and rhythm. The bodies of the two actresses in a bizarre position, lying on the inclined ground horizontally from their waist upwards, while the torso forms an acute angle; the two women discharge the words sometimes angrily, others politely mocking and others with a manifested irony or even hate. The alternation of GreekEnglish-French renders their ‘dialogue’ even more rhythmic and the words simple sound bodies, undermining though whatever meaning they possess. Breathing holds the rhythmic flow of the words by using repeated inhalation and exhalation between their utterance, while the rhythm is speeding up, the words become autonomous, lose their semantic support, and turn into simple signifiers, homologous with the sound of breathing, and end up being

49

For a thorough review of the performance see: Tsatsoulis, 2011a, pp. 547–550. The performance was also held during the two subsequent theatrical seasons.

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completely absorbed by it: the word thus turns into the sound of the body just as if emitted from its depths. A typical example is the sequence of words Sofia Hill utters as Elisabeth after the increasingly rhythmic tension of ‘love – me’, ‘kill – me’, ‘hate – me’, ‘trust – me’, the acceleration of the utterance destroys the verbs, allowing only the pronoun ‘me’ to be heard, repeated, until it reaches the point when the whole body flings as if to throw it up as a meaningless sound,50 imposing it irrevocably on the opponent. Hence, the whole body of Elisabeth turns into an assertive ‘ego’ that resonates and pervades the space. The complete absorption of the speech by the body and its continuation in a pure material dimension, however, is realised in the stunning scene where the two queens, while fighting verbally like archaic Sphinxes engraved on a pediment that can perpetuate their conflict,51 continue to maintain the rhythm of the talking mouth and erase the words in order to carry on the fight through their snakelike, restless, supple, succulent, and ardent tongues – body organs that hang out of their mouths. Tongues that project their carnal essence,52 cut off from their bodies, faces, and mouths, self-sufficient in their kinetic blabbing, totally liberated from word and verbal sound. Tonguesspeech. And while lighting focuses on the faces, sinking the rest of the body into darkness, they look like bodiless tongues that, despite being cut off from the organic sources of energy, continue to utter speech or even better, to

50

For the notion of meaninglessness see: Spyropoulos, 1989, pp. 156–157.

51

The sloping stage, where the two queens are, reminds indeed of half a gable but in black color.

52

The search for the carnal substance of speech, as the search for its raw material, is also found in Castellucci's theatre but in a different form. See: Castellucci, R., 2004, p. 21; Escolme, 2005, pp. 130–131; Tsatsoulis, 2011b, p. 157.

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‘write’ speech on stage. Bordering as such the case of ‘asomaglossography’.53 Besides, haven't now, in any case, the two queens been dead for centuries, bodiless, and only their language survives written on historical records? The ‘paradox’ of an ego that by being dead, a non-being, enunciates the firstperson speech through writing: autobiographies, correspondences, and others.54 In addition, by faking the utterance of speech and at the same time demolishing it, tongues suggest in its place their own materiality, their flesh existence that does not fake but ‘is’ in all its truth, in other words, they are themselves, registered as signs in the stage book, replicas of the two queens' real writing. In Alarme, where both the paralinguistic or the speechless systems govern and where the striking presence of the tongue-body organ visualizes the exiled speech and replaces writing, Theodoros Terzopoulos goes even further to a more radical – in relation to the already existing – rupture with the western logocentric theatre:55 he brings to the surface not only the forgotten 53

A term I borrow from Daniel Heller-Roazen, ‘Aglossostomography’ (pp. 149–161). In his article he juxtaposes the notion of medical interest of the title with that of ‘Asomaglossography’.

54

For similar incompatibilities towards the rational-semantic rules found in first-person narratives that concerned many literature academics (Barthes, Derrida etc.), see: Genette, 1983, p. 86.

55

‘I believe theatre should free itself from literature. In order to achieve that we must purify theatre from the Text. This does not mean that we should question the priority of words. Speech, as I perceive it is never a literary language. It is something more biological or spiritual, in the sense that it possesses the primary function of language’ (Terzopoulos, 2000, p. 57). In reality, in most of Terzopoulos productions, the texts remain intact. However, even when we hear extracts from the text, this does not mean its rejection but a different kind of acting and directorial approach. In any case, Terzopoulos directions cannot be classified as postmodern. I must also insist here that any effort to classify the stage writing of Terzopoulos must take into account the performative elements and the intentionality of the production, elements that, without any question, can classify him in the ritual-intercultural theatre, in its transcultural version, to use a term of Patrice Pavis (1990, p. 8) which I have already accepted as the most appropriate for the theatre of Terzopoulos. In general, though, the need to liberate the performance from a pre-existing written text and

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kinetic capabilities of the universal body, but also those of its sounds, and thus referring to the distant ‘savage’ era of humanity where communication was mainly carried out through the human sound system and the facial expressions – an era when the mouth was dominant.56 With this, he refers to something bestial. In other words, to the Dionysian spirit. And it is that what shakes the foundations of our rational, structured, semantically charged, articulate, and thus Cartesian world.

Bibliography

Arvaniti, Katerina (n.d.) ‘Το θρηνούν σώμα. Ο θρήνος για την κοινότητα και ο προσωπικός θρήνος’. In: The proceedings of the 1st and 2nd International Meeting of Ancient Drama, pp. 99–120. Barba, Eugenio and Nicola Savarese (1991) The Secret Art of the Performer. A Dictionary of Theatre Anthropology, translated by Richard Fowler. London, New York: Routledge. Bataille, Georges (1970) ‘Histoire de l'œil'. In: Idem Œuvres Complètes. Paris: Gallimard. Burkert, Walter (1972) Homo Necans. The Anthropology of Ancient Greek Sacrificial Ritual and Myth, translated by Peter Bing. Berkeley, London: University of California Press. Castellucci, Claudia and Chiara Guidi (2004) In Conversation with Joe Kelleher. ‘Ethics of Voice’. In: Performance Research, 9(4), pp. 111–112.

its free manipulation is a view accepted by a large part of contemporary world theatre, irrespective of its genre classification, and so materializing what Antonin Artaud envisaged at the beginning of the century. A position that, in fact, has a relation with the development of Theatre Studies as an independent discipline departing from literature; cf. the radical but current position of Claudia Castellucci: ‘There is a tradition governing words in the theatre in which their sole raison d'être would seem to be signification. This is not a thinking with which we have very much to do. Perhaps because we do not consider our theatre to be a branch of literature’ (2004, p. 112). 56

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It is known that many facial expressions and especially those of the mouth are common between human beings and primates. See: Barba and Savarese, 1991, p. 114.

Castellucci, Romeo (2004) Interview to Valentina Valentini and Bonnie Marranca. ‘The Universal. The Simplest Place Possible’, translated by Jane House. In: Performing Arts Journal, 77, p. 16–25. Chatzidimitriou, Penelope (2010) Θεόδωρος Τερζόπουλος. Aπό το προσωπικό στο παγκόσμιο. Thessaloniki: University Studio Press. Das, Veena (1997) ‘Language and Body: Transactions in the Construction of Pain’. In: Daedalus, 125, pp. 67–92. Decreus, Freddy (2006) ‘The Art of Singing in the “Antechamber of Death”’. In: Frank M. Raddatz (ed.) Reise mit Dionysos. Das Theater des Theodoros Terzopoulos. Journey with Dionysos. The Theatre of Theodoros Terzopoulos. Berlin: Theater der Zeit, pp. 202–213. — (2007) ‘The Reptilian Brain and the Representation of the Female in Theodoros Terzopoulos Bacchae’. In: European Cultural Centre of Delphi, Symposium Proceedings, ΧΙΙΙ International Meeting on Ancient Drama - The Woman in Ancient Drama. Delphi, pp. 229–242. Elam, Keir (1980) The Semiotics of Theatre and Drama. London, New York: Routledge. Escolme, Bridget (2005) ‘Performing Human’. In: Talking to the Audience: Shakespeare, Performance, Self. London, New York: Routledge, pp. 130– 131. Fischer-Lichte, Erika (2006) ‘Transformations – Theatre and Ritual in the Bacchae’. In: Frank M. Raddatz (ed.) Reise mit Dionysos. Das Theater des Theodoros Terzopoulos. Journey with Dionysos. The Theatre of Theodoros Terzopoulos. Berlin: Theater der Zeit, pp. 104–117. Genette, Gérard (1983) Nouveau discours du récit. Paris: Seuil. Heller-Roazen, Daniel (2008) Echolalias. On the Forgetting of Language. New York: Zone Books. Hüneke, Andreas (1999) ‘L’abstrait: Forme et symbole’. In: Oskar Schlemmer, Catalogue de l'exposition au Musée Cantini, 7 mai - 1er août 1999. Marseille: Musées de Marseille, Paris: Réunion des Musées Nationaux, p. 50–58. Jakobson, Roman (1968) Child Language, Aphasia, and Phonological Universals, translated by Allan R. Keiler. The Hague: Mouton. Kuhns, David F. (1997) ‘An “Expressionist Solution to the Problem of Theatre”: Geist Abstraction in Performance’. In: German Expressionist Theatre: The Actor and the Stage. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lehmann, Hans-Thies (2002) Le théâtre postdramatique, translated by Philippe-Henri Ledru. Paris: L'Arche.

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McDonald, Marianne (1992) ‘Theodoros Terzopoulos’ Talk’. In: Ancient Sun, Modern Light: Greek Drama on the Modern Stage. New York: Columbia University Press, pp. 159–169. — (2006) ‘Theodoros Terzopoulos: A Director for the Ages: Theatre of the Body, Mind, and Memory’. In: Frank M. Raddatz (ed.) Reise mit Dionysos. Das Theater des Theodoros Terzopoulos. Journey with Dionysos. The Theatre of Theodoros Terzopoulos. Berlin: Theater der Zeit, pp. 8–39. Pavis, Patrice (1990) Le théâtre au croisement des cultures. Paris: José Corti. Puchner, Walter (2010) Θεωρητικά Θεάτρου. Athens: Papazisis. Sampatakakis, Georgios (2006) ‘Dionysus Restitutus – The Bacchae of Terzopoulos’. In: Frank M. Raddatz (ed.) Reise mit Dionysos. Das Theater des Theodoros Terzopoulos. Journey with Dionysos. The Theatre of Theodoros Terzopoulos. Berlin: Theater der Zeit, pp. 90–102. — (2010) ‘Ολοσχερώς πάσχειν: Το μεταδραματικό θέατρο του Γιάννη Κοντραφούρη’. In: Giannis Kontrafouris Ιοκάστη και άλλα κείμενα για το θέατρο. Athens: Agra, pp. 13–73. Sarrazac, Jean-Pierre (2000) Critique du théâtre. De l'utopie au désenchantement. Belfort: Circé. Scarry, Elaine (1985) The body in Pain. The Making and Unmaking of the World. New York, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Seabock, Thomas A. (ed.) (1960) Style in Language, Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, pp. 355–377. Seremetakis, C. Nadia (1991) The Last Word. Women, Death, and Divination in Inner Mani. Chicago, London: Chicago University Press. — (1993) ‘Durations of Pain: The Antiphony of Death and Women's Power in Southern Greece’. In: Idem (ed.) Ritual, Power, and the Body. Historical Perspectives on the Representation of Greek Women. New York: Pella Publishing Company, pp. 119–149. Spyropoulos, Ilias (1989) ‘Άσημος, βαρβαρική και αποκλίνουσα φωνή στην Αρχαία Κωμωδία’. In: II International Meeting of Ancient Greek Drama (Delphi 15–20 June 1986). Athens: European Cultural Center of Delphi, pp. 156–157. Stroumpos, Savvas (2003) The Exploration of Terzopoulos' Psychophysical Approach to Ancient Greek Tragedy. Postgraduate Thesis: University of Exeter. — (2006) ‘An Approach to Working Method of the Attis Theatre’. In: Frank M. Raddatz (ed.) Reise mit Dionysos. Das Theater des Theodoros

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Terzopoulos. Journey with Dionysos. The Theatre of Theodoros Terzopoulos. Berlin: Theater der Zeit, pp. 230–233. Terzopoulos, Theodoros (2000) ‘Αναδρομή και μέθοδος’. In: Θεόδωρος Τερζόπουλος και Θέατρο Άττις. Athens: Agra. — (2006) In Conversation with Frank M. Raddatz. ‘The Metaphysics of the Body’. In: Frank M. Raddatz (ed.) Reise mit Dionysos. Das Theater des Theodoros Terzopoulos. Journey with Dionysos. The Theatre of Theodoros Terzopoulos. Berlin: Theater der Zeit, pp. 136–173. Tsatsoulis, Dimitris (1997) Σημειολογικές προσεγγίσεις του Θεατρικού φαινομένου. Athens: Ellinika Grammata. — (2003) ‘Ο κύκλος’. In: Nea Estia, 1759, pp. 340–342. — (2004) Delphi. XII International Meeting on Ancient Drama, Nea Estia, 1770, pp. 344–352. — (2005a) ‘Διαπολιτισμικά αρχέτυπα στη σκηνοθετική 'γραφή' του Θεόδωρου Τερζόπουλου’. In: Theatrographies, 13, pp. 132–149. — (2005b) ‘Γεωμετρώντας τον χώρο - Διασχίζοντας τον χρόνο. Το συμπαντικό σώμα στη γραφή του Θεόδωρου Τερζόπουλου’. In: The Proceedings of the 1st and 2nd International Meeting of Ancient Drama: 1st Meeting: ‘Σκότος εμόν φάος – 2005’, pp. 49–98. — (2006) ‘Zirkel und Winkelmass/The Circle and the Square’. In: Frank M. Raddatz (ed.) Reise mit Dionysos. Das Theater des Theodoros Terzopoulos. Journey with Dionysos. The Theatre of Theodoros Terzopoulos. Berlin: Theater der Zeit, pp. 42–54. — (2007) ‘Υποθέσεις πάνω στη γλώσσα της κίνησης και της χειρονομιακής αφήγησης’. In: Σημεία γραφής - Κώδικες σκηνής. Athens: Nefeli, pp. 142– 199. — (2008) ‘Der Weg der Asche’. In: Theater der Zeit, 2, p. 55. — (2011a) ‘Αγώνες εξουσίας’. In: Nea Estia, 1842, pp. 547–550. — (2011b) Conversing Images. Photography and Surrealist Aesthetics on the Stage Writing of Socìetas Raffaello Sanzio. Athens: Papazissis. Ubersfeld, Anne (1981) L' école du spectateur - Lire le théâtre 2. Paris: Ed. Sociales. Varopoulou, Eleni (2000) ‘Πρόλογος’. In: Θεόδωρος Τερζόπουλος και Θέατρο Άττις. Αναδρομή, Μέθοδος, Σχόλια. Athens: Agra, pp. 9–14.

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Dionysus in Revenge: The Fractured Voice in the Theatre of Terzopoulos

Gonia Jarema

First, allow me to thank Professor Fischer-Lichte for inviting me. I must confess that I find it particularly moving to be participating in a symposium centered around the concept of exile, here in Berlin, a historically wounded and profoundly destabilizing city. A ‘suspended’ city, as it were, its spatial and temporal boundaries fluid. Beautiful and ugly. Drawing us in, pushing us out. Yet, somehow painfully attractive. Deeply scarred, yet captivatingly alive, vibrant. Berlin, a city in exile. But let me get back to this symposium. We have been gathered here to honor Theodoros Terzopoulos for his outstanding contribution to theatre. Among his many productions, the one that stands out and the one that is historically perhaps the most emblematic of his approach, is that of the The Bacchae. Ingmar Bergman, who never abandoned his passion for the theatre, struggled all his life with this very tragedy. Terzopoulos, on the other hand, dared the impossible at the very beginning of his trajectory and lived up brilliantly to the challenge. His groundbreaking The Bacchae. toured the world and now, twenty-five years later, here we are, celebrating his achievements.

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The body undoing itself. Top left, top right, and bottom left: The Bacchae, Athens, Attis Theatre 1986. Bottom right: Mauser, Athens, Attis Theatre 2009. Photos: Johanna Weber

The Bacchae is a Greek tragedy par excellence. The plot is driven by revenge and its devastating aftermath. In this talk, I would like to look at Terzopoulos’ treatment of this play from the perspective of a cognitive scientist and a neurolinguist. Furthermore, because we are in Berlin and because his master’s memory inhabits this space, I will also examine Terzopoulos’ treatment of Mauser, again using insights from cognitive neuroscience. Thus, precisely because Terzopoulos’ theatre is entrenched in the body, I will make reference to the biological underpinnings of the unsettling body language that is characteristic of his approach. I will examine the emotional states surrounding revenge and their neural correlates, in particular those of anticipatory pleasure and its cruel counterpoint, the silenced voice.

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Revenge is at the core of Greek ancient drama. It is the implacable force driving heroes and heroines to perform the most horrifying acts – acts that propel them to the very edge of chaos and to their tragic end. But what is the nature of revenge? I will argue that drawing on insights from cognitive psychology and cognitive neuroscience sheds new light on the age-old and pervasive drive for revenge, which the tragedians of ancient Greece both explored and exploited so deftly and which Terzopoulos pushes to its most unbearably destabilizing limits. I will now briefly review a study on the neural foundation of revenge that provides clear evidence of the extraordinary physicality of the manner in which this mental state is embodied in Terzopoulos’ theatre. In this study, published in Science and authored by de Quervain and colleagues, the authors conducted a behavioral experiment, while at the same time using positron emission tomography (PET), a brain imaging technique that yields colored three-dimensional images of functional processes. In a nutshell, the introduction into the body of a positron-emitting radionuclide, or tracer, allows to construct images of brain activity while participants perform a task. The task, used by de Quervain and colleagues, was designed to uncover what motivates revenge and involved asking subjects to take part in a game in which two players would both earn money if they cooperated. The critical feature of the experiment consisted in the possibility of double-crossing. Importantly, results showed that when a player would double-cross the other player, the ‘victim’ would ‘punish’ the double-crosser by reducing his share of money. The experiment showed that, in fact, all players opted for revenge! These are the behavioral outcomes of de Quervain et al.’s (2004) study. But what about their imaging results? I believe that this is where we obtain

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the more revealing insight into the psychology of revenge, as so poignantly expressed in Terzopoulos’ theatre. The PET scans obtained by de Quervain and colleagues demonstrated that the brain region showing the highest degree of activation while players engaged in revengeful action, that is while punishing double-crossers, is the dorsal striatum, in particular the head of the caudate nucleus.1 The dorsal striatum is a brain structure which is part of the basal ganglia, a complex of nuclei located deep inside the brain. The dorsal striatum is composed of the caudate nucleus and putamen. It receives input from the neocortex and is associated with the limbic system, in particular the amygdala. The basal ganglia are involved in motor control and motivation. Of particular interest is the fact that they are considered to act as an emotional-motor interface and that the dorsal striatum, notably, is responsive to stimuli that are rewarding or punishing. What de Quervain et al’s study elegantly demonstrates is that revenge activates a brain region known to be associated with anticipated rewards or pleasures. Are we then to conclude that evolution has wired our brains to make us believe that revenge will make us feel good? We all feel relief and satisfaction when justice is done. What de Quervain et al.’s study has shown is that this satisfaction originates in our brain and mind, prior to retribution. So it seems that the feeling of anticipated pleasure before a revengeful act is at the root of the actual decision to perform such an act. One actually experiences gratification before operationalizing the act. Emotion before rational decision making, then, drives revenge.

1

De Quervain et al., 2004, Fig. 2.

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Most interestingly, however, in another study by Carlsmith et al. (2008), that replicated the results of de Quervain et al. by showing that all participants chose revenge when given the opportunity to punish, it was also demonstrated that punishers felt worse than non-punishers. As Carlsmith and colleagues note, ‘people believed that exacting revenge would bring closure […] when in fact it had the opposite effect’. Thus ‘Revenge, at first though sweet, Bitter ere long back on itself recoils’.2 The illusion – the false promise? – of pleasure, and then the open wound, the violated self. Are we, as the tragedians so well understood, merely fooled souls drifting away on a doomed voyage? To return to The Bacchae, not only is revenge at the heart of the play, but it is a god, rather than a mortal, who is engulfed by it. Indeed, in Terzopoulos’ The Bacchae, Dionysus, enraged by the fact that the people of Thebes, his mother Semele’s native city, do not consider him to be the son of Zeus and refuse to worship him, is using his entire body not only to convey that he is cunningly planning every detail of his revenge, but also to express his anticipated seemingly uncontrollable pleasure at the mere idea of revenge. Interestingly, the trauma of revenge is not born by the avenger – he is, after all, an immortal – but by Agave, the mother of his victim, blasphemous Pentheus. Agave’s lost voice epitomizes the terror of ‘wakening up’ from her intoxicating madness and seeing her most horrible – unspeakable – deed: having dismembered her own son. Agave in agony: The mouth, silenced. The tongue, a useless grotesque appendage in the dark gaping hole of the soundless mouth. The organs of speech arrested. Incapacitated.

2

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John Milton, Paradise Lost, Book IX, Line 171, cited in Carlsmith, 2008

In the clinical world, the partial or total loss of linguistic abilities in adulthood is known under the term of ‘aphasia’ (a word composed of the privative

‘a’ and φάσις, or utterance in Greek). It is a neurological impairment caused by a brain lesion following, most frequently, a cerebrovascular accident (CVA), a brain tumor or traumatic brain injury. Because the language faculty is strongly lateralized in the human brain, lesions to specific areas of the left hemisphere, of which the most commonly known are Broca’s and Wernicke’s areas, will cause a number of clinical syndromes that can affect production and/or comprehension of speech, both oral and written. Beyond its clinical consequences, aphasia is a devastating condition, both psychologically and socially. One is reminded of the film by Costa-Gavras, Clair de femme from 1979, with Romy Schneider and Yves Montand, which so poignantly illustrates the suffering and destruction of human relations that aphasia can bring about. Yet, paradoxically, it appears that the unbearable, outwardly dehumanizing as it were, breakdown or loss of speech caused by brain lesions can also manifest itself following a psychological trauma, the very fabric of tragedy. It is here that Terzopoulos’ extraordinary sense of the workings of the – unconscious – mind mirrors with surprising accuracy the insights gained from neurology, neuropsychology, and cognitive psychology.

I have shown that the perhaps most central emotional state propelling tragic narratives, that of revenge, is in fact neuro-physiologically motivated by a feeling of anticipatory pleasure, linked to brain activity in the dorsal striatum, in particular the caudate. I have also underscored the significant role played by this brain structure in serving as an emotional-motor interface. We need to integrate motor, or muscular, activity with emotional input, for example when we shrink away in fear. Or punch and kick when being aggressed. Or

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smile when pleased. Interestingly, when the caudate is lesioned, muscles, in particular those of the face, can ‘freeze’, a familiar phenomenon observed in persons suffering from Parkinson’s disease. This mask-like expression is the one appearing on the faces of Terzopoulos’ actors at moments of utmost agony. It is then inevitably accompanied by total mutism, stuttering, or fragmented speech, all characteristic of some form of reported pathology, whether induced by a lesion or by extreme psychological distress and fear. Indeed, extreme situations of fear can cause catatonic states because, as we have seen, the caudate is interconnected with the amygdala. Studies of patients having suffered a stroke-induced lesion involving the caudate nucleus have reported a variety of symptoms affecting speech. One

such symptom is aboulia – from the Greek αβουλία, meaning ‘non-will’ – which can be defined as a loss of initiative, a decrease in spontaneous speech output, slowing of speech activity, and an increase in response time to queries or directions. It is not that their speech doesn’t make sense, but that it is slowed. This slowing in its most severe form manifests itself as akinetic mutism. Interestingly, lesions to the caudate nucleus can lead to several other abnormalities affecting speech output. One such abnormality is dysarthria, a difficulty in articulating speech sounds. The speech of patients with severe dysarthria can be totally unintelligible. Another abnormality manifests itself as stuttering. But symptom complexes similar to those typical of aphasia and that are normally linked to cortical lesions also appear following caudate damage. Patients may develop a Broca’s aphasia, a non-fluent type of aphasia, characterized mainly by effortful speech, word-finding difficulty, and impaired syntax. To return to Terzopoulos’ The Bacchae, we see how at the moment when Agave realizes that the head she is proudly offering to the people of Thebes,

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to her father Kadmos, and, in an instant of cruel tragedy, to her son Pentheus, is not that of a young lion, but that of her own son. She is overcome with horror, her mouth freezes into a gaping hole, she becomes mute. In parallel, the voice of the chorus echoes the ‘unspeakable’ horror as it were and looses her speech, mouth open, tongue moving erratically, unable to articulate any sound. Here, we have classic examples of mutism and dysarthria caused by extreme anguish. Indeed, one of Terzopoulos’ recurring facial expressions is that of lips moving silently, as if part of an automaton, a puppet in Kantor’s sense of the term. Again, we witness a form of speech abnormality characteristic of a specific form of dysarthria: vocal inaudibility due to lack of breath and volume control.

I would like to further demonstrate Terzopoulos’ deep, if intuitive, understanding of the human psyche’s embodiment of extreme emotion through his dramaturgy/interpretation of Mauser. In Müller’s play, the self both ruthlessly butchers and is butchered in the name of an indifferent and merciless revolution. The psyche is stomped to the ground, annihilated, silenced. Several powerful and deeply disturbing scenes, that illustrate the parallelism between certain forms of speech pathology and the breakdown of speech in the play, come to mind. Striking is the moment when Terzopou-

los utters the following: ‘Εγω σκοτώνεις, εσι χορεύω’ (I kill [2nd person], you

dance [1st person]), instead of the syntactically correct, ‘Εγω σκοτώνω, εσι χορεύεις’ (I kill [1st person], you dance [2nd person]).3 A classic example as

it were of agrammatism in Broca’s aphasia, characterized by the breakdown of subject-verb agreement. The impaired syntax, a reflection of the loss of 3

Mauser, Attis Theatre, 2009

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boundaries between executioner and victim. The body dehumanized, the psyche dehumanized. This is followed by an endless repetition, which is iteratively performed faster and faster: ‘I kill and I kill and I kill in the town of Vitebsk. Knowing, the daily bread of the revolution is the death of its enemies. Knowing, we must yet tear out the grass to keep it green.’ Soon consonants are skipped and only vowels remain. The latter gradually becoming syncopated, until the voice is gradually strangled into silence. We know that vowels appear before consonants in child-language development and consonants are particularly difficult for individuals suffering from dysarthria. Dysfluency of speech is also characteristic of aphasia, with speeded, or logorrheic, speech flow appearing in Wernicke’s aphasia, sometimes leading to totally nonsensical neologistic speech output. Thus, we see that the very symptoms of the ‘broken’ brain are the symptoms of the ‘broken’ psyche as well. This is superbly reflected in Terzopoulos’ embodied theatre.

To conclude, the extreme forms of bodily behavior seen in Terzopoulos’ theatre, the speechless frozen open mouth, the stuttering or silently moving lips, the fragmented utterances, slowly dying out, are all the mirror images of attested behaviors that are neurologically or psychologically conditioned. What the damaged or inhibited brain does is projected on stage and intensified, exacerbated by Terzopoulos in a total reversal of his own model: the enbodied psyche now dis-embodied. The body’s ‘sound and fury’ frozen. The exiled body now silent, dead. Therein lies Terzopoulos’ disconcerting genius: he has morphed his play and taken us to the edge of exile, of unbearable nothingness and horror. He has silenced our voice. We exit mute, our souls incandescent.

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‘Τι είναι ο άνθρωπος; Τι; Τι; Τι;’4

(What is Man? What? What? What?)

Bibliography de Quervain, Dominique J.-F. et al. (2004) ‘The neural basis of altruistic punishment’. In: Science, 305(5688), pp. 1254–1258. Carlsmith, Kevin M. et al. (2008). ‘The Paradoxical Consequences of Revenge’. In: Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 95, pp. 1316– 1324.

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Mauser, Attis Theatre, 2009.

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IV. The Aesthetics of Terzopoulos’ Theatre – Crosscultural or Greek?

Transcending the Borders Through Tragedy: Terzopoulos in Turkey

Kerem Karabog˘a

Turkish audience was introduced to Theodoros Terzopoulos and Attis Theatre in 1990 when the company performed The Bacchae of Euripides as part of the second International Istanbul Theatre Festival. Since then, four productions of Attis Theatre and three co-productions have been performed in Turkey.1 Those four Attis productions were Medea Material and Quartet by Heiner Müller, performed in 1991 and 1993 respectively, as well as Prometheus Bound by Aeschylus in 1995 and a Russian version of Medea Material with Alla Demidova in 1996; the co-productions were Trilogy of Herakles (including Herakles by Heiner Müller, Madness of Heracles and Heracles’ Descent based on tragedies by Sophocles and Euripides) in 1999, Persians and Prometheus Bound by Aeschylus in 2006 and 2010 respectively. Looking at Terzopoulos’ twenty-year-long theatre adventure in Turkey, it is clear that he has left a modest but lasting mark. For example, it cannot be denied that successful productions of Terzopoulos had a great influence

1

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One of them took part in the events that took place in 2010, when Istanbul was the European Capital of Culture.

on the growing interest in Heiner Müller whose plays were translated into Turkish just a few years ago and were welcomed with great interest by young theatre practitioners. It was Terzopoulos who first staged Müller’s plays in Turkey and drew attention to him. He also had a provoking influence on the discovery of the aesthetical and political value of ancient Greek tragedies which, except by philologists, were hardly noticed and rarely staged. He inspired not only renowned directors such as S, ahika Tekand, who noted that she decided to be re-engaged in theatre after seeing The Bacchae, but also many young directors, actors, and actresses, some of whom are amateurs and started to deal with ancient Greek tragedies after seeing his productions. Another significant influence of Terzopoulos on the young generation of theatre practitioners, who are seeking novelties and experiments, is that he offers a strong alternative to actor training in Turkey which is mainly based on the American interpretation of Stanislavsky’s Method Acting and bourgeois realism. Terzopoulos’ sui generis method and approach managed to penetrate into the actor training in Turkey to a certain extent through the invaluable experience he offered to the actors who worked with him in joint projects or participated in his workshops as well as a recently published Turkish book on his theatre. As we all know and as this symposium proves, ever since the Attis Theatre was established, Terzopoulos has made great efforts to keep contact with the international community, to bring together theatre practitioners from different countries, to take Attis productions to various countries and to realize co-productions with theatre practitioners from different countries, which is the only way to overcome borders between artists or different cultures, finding original artistic means and following the constantly changing world trends. It is no coincidence that in Turkey, Terzopoulos’ efforts have been

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taken up by members of a theatre community who do not feel comfortable with the prevailing and old-fashioned theatre schemata and who strive to resist conservatism in art. Terzopoulos’ communication with the theatre community in Turkey could be seen as a natural extension of his work which he has carried out in many countries as a foreign director. However, when it comes to Turkey, he cannot be counted as a foreign director due to the historical bonds between Turkey and Greece and his family’s origin that lie in Trabzon, which is now a city of Turkey. Works of Terzopoulos in Turkey are distinguished by their political aim of contributing to mutual peace and amity between the two countries and by their effort to approach the origins of exile. The geographical borders between Turkey and Greece were shaped under the conditions of, in Gregory Jusdanis’ terms, ‘late modernism’,2 Westernization movements, and imperial power struggles and as a result of nationalism that arose on both sides of the Aegean. The finalization of the borders spanned hundred years, from the Greek War of Independence against the Ottoman Empire to 1923, when the ‘Megali Idea’, the goal of establishing a Greek state that would encompass Western Anatolia, came to nothing. The Nationalistic discourse quickly lost its romanticism and idealism after the total destruction caused by the Balkan Wars and World War I and developed into a voluntary and racist affair which played the most important role in fueling the hostility among the people. Up until 1923, thousands of people had been forced to leave their land, killed or exiled because of nationalism. In January 1923, Turkish and Greek governments signed the ‘Convention Concerning the Exchange of Greek and Turkish Populations’ 2

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Jusdanis, 1991.

under the supervision of the victorious states of World War I. The Convention required the simultaneous and irrevocable expulsion of Christians from Turkey to Greece and of Muslims from Greece to Turkey. Thus, ethnically homogenous nation-states were established with the mutual agreement of the rulers on both sides of the border. In retrospect, it is obvious that this project did nothing but to strengthen the nationalistic policies of the governments. Compulsory migration neither provided peace in the region, as it had been claimed, nor created a homogenous community. On the contrary, the ones who were forced to migrate were subject to discrimination and treated as ‘the other’ where they settled. For instance, a great majority of the Western Pontus, including Terzopoulos’ family, could speak only Turkish whereas the others spoke a peculiar dialect. Their origins go back to the time of the Roman Empire. In addition, they shared the characteristics of Byzantine and Ancient Greek culture rather than the Hellenistic culture which was invented by Greek nationalism and can be defined as ‘imagined community’ in Benedict Anderson’s terms.3 In terms of kinship bonds, they were more closely related to the people living in Georgia today than to those born in Greece. Therefore, they were soon called tourkosporoi (Turkish seeds), yiaourtovaptismenoi (baptized with yogurt), and Anatolites (Anatolians) and were ridiculed in infamous Pontus jokes. Muslims who moved from Greece to Turkey faced more or less the same situation. Consequently, people who were exiled to the other side of the Aegean experienced a permanent feeling of ‘lost homeland’ and passed the feeling of being homeless and lost on to the next generations. Interestingly enough, they experienced no enmity, in contrast to the governments 3

Anderson, 1983.

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which used the existence of immigrants and historical hostilities as a means of agitation and propaganda to turn ‘the other’ into enemies whenever needed. As Renée Hirschon puts forward in Children of the Population Exchange, it is not possible to trace any element of ‘othering’ in any expression of the immigrants, although they were exposed to direct violence and introduced to cruelty.4 Having lived together on the same land for years, they were aware that ‘the Turks’ or ‘the Greeks’ were made up of different individuals and possessed both faults and virtues just like any other human being. Terzopoulos’ works in Turkey share many characteristics with the attitude of immigrants, democratizing the relations between the two nations. His attitude neither includes a discourse of so-called ‘fraternity’ based entirely on economic interests nor a feeling of ‘nostalgia’ that can be counted as a form of nationalism today. The fraternity is much deeper in his works. In fact, it can be suggested that the Turks and the Greeks, who were separated from each other by ethno-nationalism’s armed forces, compose a single social community. This separation was realized at all costs and through the force of politics. Terzopoulos’ fraternal attitude is perhaps mostly prevalent in his co-productions in Turkey. The representation of the requiem for and suffering of Heracles, who turned into a war machine in the rulers’ service, is of Byzantine origins. Turkish and Greek actors suffer together, after Persians were killed due to the policies of Xerxes, and mourn for all the ones that died in wars. The rabbles and the tortured ones that form the chorus of Prometheus are also the victims of Greek Civil War, military takeovers, and civil war in

4

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Hirschon, 1998.

Turkey. They perform Aeschylus’ play to commemorate, embrace, and finally turn into Prometheus who is the archetype of insurrection and resistance. ‘Nationalism requires absolute faith in what is explicitly not so’, says Eric J. Hobsbawm.5 And as Ernest Renan claims in his aperçu, ‘Getting its history wrong is part of being a nation’. Terzopoulos, who was exiled from his homeland by nationalism, tries to unmask wrong written history and blind belief by presenting the sincere resistance of the tortured. On the other hand, this state of being exiled makes it easier for us to understand a great extent of his theatre regarding acting. When I interviewed him for my book, he told me a story about the establishment of Attis Theatre.6 In an audition in Delphi, he selected five actors who were ready to embark on an adventure with him and asked each of them: ‘Where do you come from?’ Four of them said ‘Pontus’ and one of them, Sophia Michopoulou, was ‘from Crete’. Terzopoulos said that everyone in this initial group possessed great energy – ‘a great and high energy which was much closer to the authentic, the origins and thereby Dionysus’. The energy referred to by Terzopoulos lies behind the sui generis existence of individuals who experience the feeling of ‘lost homeland’. Their existence is determined by two factors: feeling alienated in the culture they were forced to be a part of and having lost the culture they once belonged to. Such an individual is much closer to the state preceding the one in the period of turning into ‘cultural subjects’ in Lacan’s terms, closer to libidinal energy, in other words, to the primitive body. If such a person wants and works at it, s/he can make any experiment using the energy s/he has gathered. And this is also the

5

Hobsbawm, 2006, p. 27.

6

Karabog˘a, 2008, p. 166.

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major principle of tragedy. As André Bonnard said, a ‘tragic conflict is a fight against the inevitable and the protagonist fighting against it has to claim or show it by his own actions that it is not or will not always be inevitable’.7 The energy of an exiled person contains the power to fight to death against the inevitable and as a Pontus saying suggests, ‘Life is always and only a path to death’. In Terzopoulos’ productions, bodies are presented that destroy themselves by surrendering to ordinariness and bodies that try to liberate themselves by making contact with agonizing memories in the collective memory. The actors travel to Hades so as to leave the audience with his shamelessness towards themselves, the mistake of identifying their body with their culturally acquired identity, and their obsession to view the individual only as a spiritual entity, which Heiner Müller also rejects. Nationalistic or sexist cultural codes cannot be displayed in such a body as everyone is equal in death and destruction. The tragedy and the Dionysian primitive body remind us of this equality and suggest that we can refresh our lives by making use of this information. The aim of a dialog with the Gods who are already dead, the ‘other’ of our own body and victims of tyranny, is to find peaceful and democratic means of communication resulting from shared suffering. And when it comes to Turkey, what we really need is that kind of intuition and awareness.

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Bonnard, 2004, p. 195.

Bibliography Anderson, Benedict (1983) Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spreadof Nationalism. London: Verso. Bonnard, André (2004) Antik Yunan Uygarlıg˘ı 1, translated by Kerem Kurtgözü. Istanbul: Evrensel Basım Yayın. Hirschon, Renée (1998) Heirs of the Greek Catastrophe: The Social Life of Asia Minor Refugees in Piraeus. New York: Berghahn Books. Hobsbawm, Eric J. (2006) Milletler ve Milliyetçilik, translated by Osman Akınhay. Istanbul: Ayrıntı. Jusdanis, Gregory (1991) Belated Modernity and Aesthetic Culture. Inventing National Literature. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Karabog˘a, Kerem (2008) Tragedya ile Sınırları As,mak – Theodoros Terzopoulos’un Tiyatrosu. Istanbul: E Yayınları.

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Theodoros Terzopoulos’ Oedipus Rex in the Context of Russian Theatre

Alexander Chepurov

Theodoros Terzopoulos’ production of Sophocles’ tragedy Oedipus Rex was staged at the Alexandrinsky Theatre in 2006 as part of the ’New Life of the Tradition’ creative program which was developed by Valery Fokin. The idea of this project was to present writings of Russian and world classics in the interpretation of modern directors in order to expand our concepts on the abilities of theatre language, on the stage of the oldest Russian national theatre. Production systems were meant to represent various methods and actor techniques with a cultural-historical and contemporary aesthetical approach. In this sense, the recourse to ancient tragedy in Theodoros Terzopoulos’ interpretation was meant to demonstrate how an artist with a sharp modern mentality could re-think traditions and basics of his national theatre culture.

In the case of an ancient Greek tragedy, we are not only dealing with the national culture of Greece and the prehistory of the European theatre, which also is the basis of the Russian theatre, but also with the ontological features of the theatre, in the broadest sense of the word, and with studies and experiments in the area Terzopoulos is devoted to. Intercultural projects are one

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of the key principles in Terzopoulos’ artistic work where actors of different theatrical traditions come together. Interpretations of the ancient tragedy on the stage of Alexandrinsky Theatre have their own history. In order to give the public an understanding of classicist tradition, ancient stories and characters were brought to stage. This history is also related to symbolist experiments of the early twentieth century. Of particular importance in this context were the writer and translator Dmitry Merezhkovsky, the director Yury Ozarovsky, and the artist Leon Bakst. In the 1900s, Merezhkovsky, Zinaida Gippius, and Dmitry Filosofov believed that the performance of ancient tragedies could generate a new trend in the formation of poetic theatre, a serious alternative to the naturalistic and psychological movement in Russian theatre. The founders of the Russian symbolism believed that specific features of Alexandrinsky Theatre actors – like their distinctive theatric representativeness and universality – were best suited for an establishment of a philosophic theatre. However, the outcome of this idea was ambiguous. Productions like Euripides’ Hippolytus (1902) and Oedipus at Colonus (1904) as well as Sophocles’ Antigone (1906) marked an attempt to find approaches to the scenic interpretation of ancient Greek tragedies within the borders of the Western European theatre canon. Neither Yury Ozarovsky nor actors participating in the performances could get out of the borders of the traditional theatrical conditionality and get into a different quality of stage mentality; and this caused disappointment among the Merezhkovsky circle. In the 1910s, the St. Petersburg tour of Max Reinhardt’s company had a great influence on Russian theatre: he showed his version of Oedipus Rex with Sandro Moissi in the title role. The breakthrough of the German director into a non-canonic performing space, his grandiose musical-plastic stage

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versions of the ancient choruses as well as his transformation of action into a kind of dramatic oratory inspired leaders of the Russian theatrical vanguard to venture into their own searches. In the 1910s, Vsevolod Meyerhold, then actively working with St. Petersburg Imperial Theatres, suggested to produce Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex on the stage of the Alexandrinsky Theatre. By that time, he was in the process of formulating his ideas of ‘theatrical traditionalism’. Along with the composer Mikhail Gnesin, he began to work in an energetic studio exploring various musical and intonation techniques. Meyerhold was ready to try the ancient tragedy techniques on the major stage of Alexandrinsky Theatre. Back in 1910, Vsevolod Meyerhold traveled through Greece together with

the classical philologist Tadeusz Stefan Zielin ´ski and his students. The pur-

pose of the trip was to get a better understanding of the ancient Greek culture; to feel the atmosphere on the spot; to explore the spaces where ancient Greek theatre once operated. However, the performance announced for 1914 was never realized. At the same time, it was clear that without a core breakthrough in the field of theatrical and, above all, acting techniques, the chance to get closer to the gist of the ancient Greek tragedy was very meager. The modern theatre of the early twentieth century took the place of the classic European theatre. As a result of this change, modern theatre had hardly paved the way for experiments that made it possible to return to the metaphysical foundations of theatre. In summary, it can be said of the theatre revolution and experiments of the twentieth century that all those attempts had the aim to free themselves from ancient theatre elements. It is not surprising that the classical theatre as ‘dead’ theatre was opposed in the minds of most theatre innovators to the

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‘poor’ theatre, which is able to demonstrate the essence of acting in the ‘empty space’ without historical and cultural decorations. The metaphysics of the theatre revealed itself in Antonin Artaud’s ‘theatre of atrocity’, Vsevolod Meyerhold’s experiments on ‘biomechanics’, Bertolt Brecht’s ‘epic theatre’, in Jerzy Grotowski’s breakthrough, and in Eugenio Barba’s researches on anthropologic universality of various actors’ techniques. In the twentieth century, performances of ancient tragedies at the Alexandrinsky Theatre rarely took place. In 1924, director Khokhlov staged Oedipus Rex and in 1964 Rafail Suslovich directed Antigone. However, these performances were of little aesthetic value. More than that, the attempt to bring the art of ‘universal mastership and absolute passion’ to a canon of mundaneness, prevented other acting techniques from gaining a foothold in the theatre. The main artistic change that has been made at the Alexandrinsky Theatre in the 2000s concern acting techniques that were rethought using modern approaches and methods as examples. Only in this context is it possible to gain access to the ancient tragedy which differs from the approach of Russian theatre schools. Theodoros Terzopoulos’ creativity originates at the interface of two great tendencies in theatre art. On the one hand this is undoubtedly the rethinking of national traditions, on the other hand it is the strong influence of the modern European theatre of the second half of the twentieth century. The presence of these two components is determined by the director’s biography. The spatial formation of situations in tragedy leads the director to dissolve the spatial-dynamic structure of the performance. A circle, an energy axis, a diagonal, a cross – these are all geometric dominants of his scenic com-

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positions. The characters move along the preset trajectories according to the internal symbolic necessity, revealing not only ‘non-mundane’ but often even non-conceptual motivations. Gravitation regarding metaphysical, anthropological abstraction reveals itself in these geometrical constructions as well as in purely physical and intonational activity of the actor. Theodoros Terzopoulos’ theatre is closely linked to anthroposophy and other esoteric traditions. One can clearly see the recourse to Rudolf Steiner and Georges Gurdjieff’s spiritual ‘practices’ which are reflected in his working methods with the actors. The ‘practices’ reveal some ontological human capacities and are aimed at the most efficient disclosure of the energy impulses of the human organism. The director’s methodological ‘keys’ to the actors’ bodies are based on the concept of seven chakras or ‘spiritual centers’ of the human body. Theodoros Terzopoulos frequently uses this terminology to explain the mechanism and links between movements, physiology, and what he calls the ‘ontological’ basis of human emotions and actions. Theodoros Terzopoulos considers and bases his practice on Artaud’s theoretical findings. The training system that precedes the beginning of the creative work deals with respiratory hypoxia, yoga elements, and techniques of the Japanese actors of the Noh theatre. No matter which exercises Terzopoulos would include in his training, they all have one goal: to relieve the energy translated by the actor directly to the outside, without any mundane corrections, without theatrical emphases and affectations. The training coordinates the function of the actor’s body and voice; these two become not only the director’s ‘construction material’, but also serve to understand the tragedy of man by building a bridge between the physiology and the spiritual sphere. When Theodoros Terzopoulos began to work with Russian actors, he had a clear understanding of the peculiarities of Russian aesthetic traditions.

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The director had successful experiences with Russian actors such as Alla Demidova and Dmitry Pevtsov, with whom he had realized a number of stage projects. At this point, it should be emphasized that the actors brought with them an intellectual background in their way of acting, which was characterized by its pronounced expressivity. Terzopoulos performed Aischylos’ Persians with master students from the Vsevolod Meyerhold Theatre Center. In the course of Terzopoulos’ work on Oedipus Rex at the Alexandrinsky Theatre, the main aim was to avoid and overcome the recourse to psychological and realistic approaches in the representation of a story, which is typical for the Russian acting tradition. The director’s expectations of the actors were a high level of physical stamina, body plasticity, the ability to precisely imitate complex movements, a sense of rhythm, and vocal strength. About twenty actors of different generations took part in the casting; of those, performers of the leading roles and chorus members were selected. Young actors were invited to the chorus; most of them were graduates of the St. Petersburg Academy of Theatre Arts (Professor Veniamin Filyptinsky’s class). They were prepared by the school training and receptive to the educational process. This group included Oleg Eryomin, Andrey Matyukov, Dmitry Palamarchuk, Alexander Kudrenko, and Valentin Zakharov. Other young theatre actors such as former graduates of other acting departments of the St. Petersburg Academy of Theatre Arts also became choristers. Among the latter were Sergei Blikov (Alexander Kunitsyn’s class), Konstantin Lukonin (Anatoly Shvedersky’s class), and Konstantin Filchenkov (Igor Gorbachev’s class). The latter had studied at a choreography school in the past. Vladimir Kolganov graduated the School of Russian Drama (St. Petersburg). MKhT actor Alexander Mokhov was invited to play

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the leading role (Terzopoulos knew him from his Moscow performances). The young actress Yulia Marchenko was selected for the role of Jocasta (a graduate of the B. Shchukin Theatre Institute). In this case the age of the actress was of no importance for the director. The ‘youth’ of Oedipus’ mother would not affect the core of the character. Terzopoulos saw Marchenko's appearance and acting style suitable for playing the role of Jocasta. Igor Volkov, a well-known actor of the Alexandrinsky Company and also a former graduate of the Shchukin School, was selected for the role of Creon. Not only did he have an excellent physical condition, but his acting style was very creative and changeable, which Terzopoulos demanded. And last but not least an actor of the older generation was chosen for the role of Tiresias: Semyon Sytnik. He was a student of the famous Alexandrinsky actor Vasily Merkuriev; Irina Meyerhold taught her students biomechanical training. Theodoros Terzopoulos was very much helped in his work by Sytnik's intonational and almost plastic precision in playing the role of Tiresias. In addition, Semyon Sytnik as an experienced teacher was very much interested in new methodical ways of acting. Motivation and creativity were indispensable qualities that characterized all the actors involved in the project, as well as their willingness to embrace new ideas, which allowed them to concentrate on difficult technical tasks involving many hours of strenuous, physical work and the intellectual aspects of the tragedy. The director was aware that the actors who had grown up with a certain cultural tradition would not be able to completely abandon their habits of action. Against the background of ontology and performativity, Terzopoulos assumed that ‘energy drama’ and ‘plastic geometry’ would continue to be characterized by a certain psychology and emotional expressiveness. Ter-

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zopoulos was by no means aiming for a formal performance that revealed the scheme and was therefore content with an inevitable compromise in his way of working. In order to better understand the actors, he often dealt with the psychological motivations and situations of the characters and drew associative parallels to modern life. Although the director tended towards a metaphysical and ontological interpretation of the tragedy conflict, in his work with the actors he did not avoid ignoring the political dimension of the play and therefore stressed it at some moments. The work was carried out on several conceptual levels where panhuman collisions encountered a very specific local context. In this way, the tragedy of Oedipus was interpreted both as a general conflict of individuality and predetermination and as a discrepancy between a ruler and his people. The socio-political and life-related topicality of this conflict enabled the director to gain a better understanding of the actors, who naturally brought with them a different national and cultural background. At the same time, a bridge to the audience was built. The existential core of the tragedy concerns the liberation and discovery of the sense of guilt associated with the topos of morality in Russian culture, which is dealt with in the writings of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky. Detached from the real-life setting, this theme has never lost its relevance in Terzopoulos’ abstract-symbolic interpretation of ancient tragedy. What existed in the sub-text of the Russian classics was taken up, whereby archaic rituals were converted into an updated symbolism. Terzopoulos interpreted Sophocles' tragedy as a sequence of pre-mortal visions of the human soul, the portrayal of which required a special level of acting. The Russian actors were able to establish a connection with the psychological and moral nature of the characters’ feelings and emotions, even within the framework of a rigid perfor-

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mative structure. This situation created a hybrid form of representation that had a strong impact on the Alexandrinsky Theatre audience. Oedipus’ emotional state demanded great acting skills; as an actor of the MKhAT School, Alexander Mokhov played this role excellently. In spite of the fact that he accurately embodied the ‘geometry’ of the role, his human mental energy caused a very strong influence on the audience and evoked compassion for his mental sufferings. The audience experienced the extremely emotional-mental dominant as comprehensible and exciting which took them into the world of tragedy. Theatre critics have consistently emphasized precisely these aspects. The psychologism of Mokhov’s acting nevertheless did not contradict the core of Terzopoulos’ concept. On the contrary, it even benefited him. Thus, the emotional and spiritual power of compassion that the actor felt for the hero was integrated into the context of Terzopoulos' proposed ontological ‘geometry of tragedy’. Through this, the necessary artistic quality was attained to enter the field of philosophical theatre.

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On the Greekness of Terzopoulos

David Wiles

Probably theatre in Greece today has more cultural and political importance than anywhere else in Europe – for it is bound up with national identity. That has good and bad aspects. Until now, what the Greeks got up to was something that the rest of Europe could quietly ignore. Today no longer. The Greek problem is our problem. My aim is to place Theodoros Terzopoulos in the context of Greece, looking with the naive eye of an outsider. I have had academic contacts with Greece over many years – but that has now ceased because there is no money for cultural contacts. Students will find it harder to come to Britain. So I am delighted to visit Greece vicariously by way of Berlin. Financially and politically Berlin is the paymaster of Athens – but is Berlin also culturally a lifeline for Greece? I shall argue that this is the case, but the issue is a delicate one that needs to be confronted in all its difficulties. Our theme is that of exile. This event has been sponsored not because of Terzopoulos’ Greekness but because of his internationalism, and the weaving of cultural strands into his work. Terzopoulos is respected in Greece because the value of his work has been recognized internationally. His performance center in Greece is not Epidaurus, the cultural equivalent to Mount Athos in the sphere of religion, but Delphi, with its tradition of internationalism marked by cultural memories of the Sikelianos project.

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I speak about Terzopoulos’ work with caution because I have only limited knowledge. DVDs are not satisfactory guides to performances that are so visceral, and the flat projection screen separates me from the quality of the experience. The bodies of the performers appear in close-up so I am aware of their breathing, and contortions lose all sense of the controlling choreography. Written tributes often tell me more about the writer than the object which is written about. Reviews are often politically inflected, and my own memories leave little more than a mood and a few images. I place most trust in still photos which do offer me some sense of how individual bodies relate to the environment in which they have been placed. I have been fortunate to read two PhD theses which have given me some sort of more privileged insight into the work. The first was by Georgios Sampatakakis, whose subsequent book is in Greek and thus not accessible to me. Sampatakakis’ thesis was about The Bacchae – a play which, he argued, only started to make sense again in the twentieth century, because of its own focus on theatricality. It required the mode of Regietheater to make coherent sense of its performative elements, and its three themes which are also elements: ritual, body, and revolution. Terzopoulos sat well as the climax of this academic narrative, for The Bacchae was his seminal production. Theatre was taken back to its essence as a kind of ritual rooted in the body, and the production was perceived as a theatrical revolution. Negative figures in this narrative of modern stagings of The Bacchae included Matthias Langhoff, who simply aimed to shock pour épater la bourgeoisie, and Peter Hall, whose staid English classicism was rooted in word not body. Grüber was treated with more respect because his The Bacchae seemed part of a more searching quest for the nature of theatre and ritual.

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One remarkable aspect of this thesis is that the Greek academic world judged that he was not qualified to teach Greek theatre in a department of Drama. Only a PhD in Classics would serve. To engage with theatre philologically was deemed the only way to reach its sacred core, which should be transmitted to the next generation of Greek youth by the pedagogue as shaman. I tell you this story because it says something about the interwoven nature of religion, politics, theatre, and academia in Greece, and points up the revolutionary nature of Terzopoulos’ work in that context. Recently, I examined a very different thesis, this time on Sophocles’ Electra. The author, Michaela Antoniou, was writing not as a theoretician but as a practitioner. While Sampatakakis mapped The Bacchae as a work of international modern significance, she mapped Electra as the tragedy perceived to have greatest local Greek significance in the twentieth century. She traced a basic dichotomy running through Greek practice between the classical school of Rondiris and the Theatro Technis of Koun. These were seminal figures because they were pedagogues as much as directors, with a methodology inseparable from a related politics. Although she did not confront the issue of gender in the way that Sampatakakis dealt with Euripidean gender bending, it was clear that the relationship between a male director and a female acting star, supported by a submissive female chorus, lay at the core of this play’s cultural appeal. Antoniou brought the thesis to a conclusion with a long discussion of Terzopoulos, even though Terzopoulos had never directed Electra. It transpired in the viva that she did this because Erika Fischer-Lichte had told her that Terzopoulos could not be ignored in such a thesis. A small example of the cultural impact of Fischer-Lichte’s project. Antoniou defended her decision to write about Terzopoulos on the very cogent grounds that he represented a third way in Greek acting, a systematic method

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of approaching the actor’s work that broke free of the old Rondiris/Koun dichotomy. My fellow examiner and I were impressed by this argument, though to lend a little more legitimacy to her line of argument we asked her to add the detail that Terzopoulos had promised her in an interview that he fully intended to tackle an Electra. Let us remind ourselves of the two established schools. The classical school is associated with the name of Rondiris. Rondiris established the first festival at Epidaurus in 1938, on behalf of what was then the Royal Theatre. The Metaxas dictatorship was supportive of the event because it was consistent with its ideology of nationhood, deeming this to be the authentic theatre of Greece. Rondiris brought to Greece the Regietheater of Reinhardt, and thus the advanced cultural ideas of Europe, so he was in his own terms a progressive and an internationalist. He was a progressive in using the demotic form of Greek rather than the dead Katharevousa, which helped the actor or actress get in touch with authentic emotions. Reinhardt's ideas about the mass chorus inspired his use of Sprechchor. The actor played the Rondiris score like a musician concentrating upon finding the appropriate emotions. In his use of the text as a musical score, Rondiris reminds me of the Shakespearean work of Peter Hall, for Hall likewise anchors his performance in the rhythms of the canonical text by the national playwright. A generation later, Koun arrived, a bit like Terzopoulos, as a Dionysus from the eastern extremity of the Greek world. Although he would introduce Brecht to Greece, his most important influences came from France and from Russia via France, and he explicitly rejected the spirit of Reinhardt. His grandfather was a Polish-German Jew, so his sense of Greekness was rooted in the soil rather than ethnicity. His theatre was oppositional when it began under the German occupation and continued so under the Greek Junta. Like

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Terzopoulos, he rejected the philosophy of materialism, and when he trained actors, he wanted them to come without influences and wanted their training to be part of a way of life. He recognized the importance of ancient links between Greece and Asia. Thanks to centuries of cultural contact, Greek tragedy had, as he put it, a scent of the East. Koun could not be less like Terzopoulos in his emphasis upon the inner world or soul of the actor, and in his search for the inner truth of feelings. In the chorus, each individual member had to find their own truth. We find in Koun a unique mix of liberalism and nationalism. In this dichotomy between the formalism of Rondiris and the populist liberalism of Koun, what we do not see is any Greek attempt to engage with the language of political debate in the Hegelian dialectical tradition, in the way that is common in German and British productions, where there is often a tendency to do plays that are about themes like war or gender. Paradoxically, theatre has become part of the public sphere in Greece precisely because it eschews the language of political debate. Whilst the Anglo-Saxon conception of the public sphere supposes that the theatre will be used as a place to debate political ideas, the Mediterranean emphasis is more upon the shared feeling generated by a powerful sensory experience. Now the political order in Greece has failed catastrophically as everyone knows. Whether theatre on the Anglo-Saxon model could have prevented that situation seems to me doubtful. In my recent book Theatre and Citizenship (2011), I have questioned the propensity of recent classical scholars (Simon Goldhill for example) to regard classical Athenian theatre as self-evidently a surrogate political arena. In the work of Terzopoulos I recognize something of the formalism and discipline of Rondiris and the cultural breadth of Koun, but much also that is new. Koun spoke about the problems of ego and materialism, but his

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methodology nevertheless idealized the individual. Terzopoulos’ background in a Communist family clearly gave more force to his rejection of individualism. His emphasis upon the body and particularly the fragmentation of the body is quite new, especially in Greece which missed out on early modernism with artistic movements like Bauhaus and constructivism. Where Koun spoke of plasticity in the expression of feeling, Terzopoulos speaks of and creates fragmentation. I am interested to know what connection there is between the embodied ritual theatre of Terzopoulos and the Greek public sphere. If Koun and Rondiris correlate with a basic left/right opposition in the political domain, what sort of third way does Terzopoulos represent? The concept of ritual is clearly crucial in placing Terzopoulos’ work. Conservative Greek critics did not like the way he blurred the boundary between theatre and ritual, for such blurring threatens to expose the extent to which summer performances at Epidaurus constitute in themselves a modern ritual: a celebration of the nation and the sunset and supposed cultural memories. Erika Fischer-Lichte in Reise mit Dionysos develops a very interesting account of the liminal state of the audience in performances of Terzopoulos’ The Bacchae. She describes how the basis of the performance in rhythm draws the audience into sharing the same bodily rhythms, so they are in a sense transformed by the ritual just as the actors are transformed. Terzopoulos sits very clearly within the European tradition that she mapped in Theatre, Sacrifice, Ritual, showing how ritual theatre relates to politics. Terzopoulos’ theatre clearly is political in its assault on comfortable institutions, and its more subtle assault on philological and folkloric ideas of Greekness. In Reise mit Dionysos, Terzopoulos distinguishes his own ritual theatre from that of ancient Athens. ‘Aber in Gegensatz zu Brecht, setze ich mich

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mit dem Ritual auseinander, weil mir die Konzentration auf eine konkret realistische Situation politisch keine Einsichten mehr verschafft. Ich arbeite mit dem Körper, nicht mit Ideen’ (the text is sharper in its German version).1 In ancient Athens, it seems, corporeal theatrical rituals could be harnessed to political ideas, but in modern Greece and indeed in the modern world this is no longer possible. I am not sure, however, how far the ancient world is a utopia for Terzopoulos. A source of raw materials, or of authentic memories? Or perhaps this is a false dichotomy since all memories are reconstructions. It seems to me that Terzopoulos’ work remains Greek, despite its overt internationalism. I do not refer here to its quarrying of Greek tragic texts and myths for theatrical material, because many international directors do that. Rather, I am referring to something that is culturally very alien to AngloSaxon ways of thinking: the blending of politics with metaphysics. The ancient world had no such difficulties with this mix. While Koun quotes religion, by incorporating Byzantine music and Orthodox priests in his mise en scène, Terzopoulos pursues metaphysical truth, for its own sake. The mark of this quest, for me, is his obsession with geometry. On DVD we can see how he explores the geometry of the isolated human body. In iconic images from his Persians, like the one on the cover of the volume published by Agra in 2000, we observe how the body is fragmented but the geometry of the composition is perfect and complete. In certain photos, or in live performance, we see how the individual human body relates geometrically to the performance space – as for example in pictures of the Düsseldorf The Bac-

1

Terzopoulos (2006), p. 157. ‘Unlike Brecht, I am critical of ritual because concentrating on a concrete, realistic situation no longer provides new political insights. I work with the body, not with ideas’ (pp. 154–176)

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chae, in Düsseldorf.2 Tsatsoulis, Sampatakakis, and Varopoulou have all commented on this aspect. It seems to me that Terzopoulos sits squarely in the tradition of Plato, who found truth in the order of the cosmos and had a horror of realistic representation. Like Plato, he has no faith in reason to address the problems of the body politic. Plato understood that theatre was a Dionysiac ritual, and he wanted to control those energies, refusing to allow theatre to be ruled by a mass theatrocracy. I have no doubt this argument has already been articulated better than I can do in Sampatakakis’ monograph, which alas I am unable to read – beyond its evocative title ‘The Geometry of Chaos: Form and Metaphysics in the Theatre’. The sketches and photos constantly refer back to the tension between the circle and intersecting diameters and remind me of the Platonist theories of Vitruvius and of his neo-Platonist followers in the Renaissance. Whilst I sense something deeply Hellenic in this fascination with geometry, I feel perhaps even more strongly a certain rootedness in the Greek Orthodox tradition. It is a commonplace to say that Grotowski’s work in Poland was rooted in Catholicism, and no doubt Suzuki's work is equally rooted in traditions of Zen Buddhism. Grotowski's work is grounded likewise in the principle of the via negativa, the renunciation of something construed as evil. Orthodoxy differs from Catholicism in that it takes no interest in the concept of original sin, the defining sin which we inherit from Adam and of which we have again and again to purge ourselves; it is far more concerned with the process of deification whereby the human assimilates him or herself with the divine. The emaciated bodies, which we see illustrated in Towards A Poor Theatre, speak to this idea of the negative, of an Augustinian 2

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See: Sampatakakis, 2007, Fig.s 2–14.

hatred of the flesh. The semi-naked bodies which we see in Terzopoulos’ The Bacchae are of a very different order: there is no denial of the flesh here, but rather a sense of possession by the divine. When Terzopoulos refers to bodies as a storehouse of ancient memories, I think of how the Orthodox liturgy insists upon continuity, insists upon acting out the same rites and chanting the same anthems as were used in the age of Constantine. The power of bodily memory is at the heart of Orthodox spirituality. Let us think a little further about Terzopoulos’ The Bacchae in this light. The great encounter between Pentheus and Dionysus does not appear to me to be invested with the guilt of sexual knowledge, as in so many Western productions. Rather, Pentheus in this scene acquires a kind of divinity. When Agave holds up his face in front of the audience, sustaining the pose for so long, and refusing to look at the face herself, I am reminded of the power of the icon, the face that refuses to be a material object, but is at once a window into the divine world and a gaze that transforms the viewer. The incantatory delivery of the text does not, as in the Catholic liturgy, demand introspection on the part of the worshipper, but rather in the manner of the Orthodox liturgy works cumulatively to change the worshipper's mental state. Of course, we all know that Terzopoulos emerged from a Communist background that had little truck with conservative and nationalistic piety, but it seems to me nevertheless that the Orthodox tradition lies behind what he is seeking to achieve in the theatre. The Catholic tradition is dialectical, playing on the tension between father and son, whereas the Orthodox tradition reaches after a higher unity, a mystical merging that transcends rationality. So I want to argue that Terzopoulos’ work has its international resonance precisely because it is so deeply Greek, being rooted in Platonist and Orthodox traditions. So where will this form of theatre take us, in a Europe gripped

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by self-doubt, a financial crisis that is also a moral crisis? How does this theatre relate to the mental and corporeal discipline shown by those protesting in Syntagma Square, where the spirits of Pentheus and Dionysus seem very much alive and of the moment? The puritan traditions of England and Northern Germany have in many ways always relished the idea of austerity, the morally fortifying practice of self-denial. In this context, I find the otherness of Terzopoulos salutary. His theatre of controlled excess refuses to accept that the problems of the world can be resolved through reason. We have much to learn from what he represents.

Bibliography Sampatakakis, Georgios (2007) Geometrontas to chaos. Morphe kai metaphysike sto theatro tou Theodorou Terzopoulou, Athens: Metaichmio. Terzopoulos, Theodoros (2006) In Conversation with Frank M. Raddatz. ‘The Metaphysics of the Body’. In: Frank M. Raddatz (ed.) Reise mit Dionysos. Das Theater des Theodoros Terzopoulos. Journey with Dionysos. The Theatre of Theodoros Terzopoulos. Berlin: Theater der Zeit, pp. 136–173. Wiles, David (2011) Theatre and Citizenship: The History of a Practice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Theodoros Terzopoulos

Die Rückkehr des Dionysos

40 Übungen

Die Rückkehr des Dionysos Mit einem Vorwort von Erika Fischer-Lichte von Theodoros Terzopoulos Herausgegeben von Torsten Israel Klappenbroschur mit 128 Seiten Format: 140 x 195 mm Mit zahlreichen Abbildungen und Film-DVD ISBN 978-3-95749-047-6 www.theaterderzeit.de

Etel Adnan | Konstantinos I. Arvanitakis | Penelope Chatzidimitriou | Alexander Chepurov | Freddy Decreus | Matthias Dreyer | Erika Fischer-Lichte | Gonia Jarema | Kerem Karabog˘ a | Frank M. Raddatz | Georgios Sampatakakis | Savvas Stroumpos | Dimitris Tsatsoulis | David Wiles On September 23 and 24, 2011, a group of scholars and practitioners from different fields and parts of the world assembled at the Greek Cultural Foundation in Berlin to discuss aspects of Terzopoulos’ theatre related to its Dionysian qualities. Scholars of theatre studies, classical studies, psychoanalysis, psycho- and neurolinguistics met with writers, dramaturges, directors, and actors to share their views on the particularity of Terzopoulos’ theatre. The symposium was held in his honor.

ISBN 978-3-95749-224-1

www.theaterderzeit.de