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Performing the Theatricality in the Game of Framings: rethinking the weaving of the dramatic

Abstract:

Through the analysis of contemporary propositions and postulating the game of framings as the principle of scene poetics building, this article analyzes the notions of theatricality and performativity as co-existing functions. Displaced from the field of theater criticism to the performance, theatricality and performativity appear as operational notions of an analysis of the actorly praxis, providing the basis for a review of theory and the place of the dramatics as an alleged practice of signification, allowing its presentation as a framing mode among others.

Keywords:
Performativity; Theatricality; Actor; Post-Dramatic; Framing

Resumo:

Através da análise de proposições contemporâneas e postulando o jogo de enquadramentos como princípio da construção da poética da cena, este artigo contextualiza as noções de teatralidade e performatividade como funções que coexistem. Deslocadas do campo da crítica teatral para o da atuação, teatralidade e performatividade aparecem como noções operacionais de uma análise da práxis atoral, servindo de base para uma revisão da teoria e do lugar do dramático como uma suposta prática da significação, permitindo apresentá-lo como uma modalidade de enquadramento entre outras.

Palavras-chave:
Performatividade; Teatralidade; Ator; Pós-Dramático; Enquadramento

Résumé:

À travers à l'analyse des propositions contemporaines et postulant le jeu de cadrage comme un principe de la poétique de la scène, et article contextualise les notions de théâtralité et de performativité tandis que fonctions qui coexistent. Déplacé du champ de la critique théâtrale pour la performance, théâtralité et performativité apparaissent tandis concepts opérationnels de une analyse de la praxis des actors, purge comme base à une révision de la théorie et le lieu de dramatique tandis que un exercice de signification, permettant présenter cette en tant que mode de cadrage entre autres.

Mots-clés:
Performativité; Théâtralité; Acteur; Post-Dramatique; Jeu de Cadrage

Foundations

The plasticity of the autonomous corporal and poetical scene (in detriment of the language) is assigned, in a large extent, to Artaud. However, it can be claimed that what Artaud wanted for the body was the language statute; that is, of the fragmentation (which, with the word, is witnessed) producing an effect of what escapes to its reading and interpretation - the poetic effect itself (if we think on the poetics as figuration of the object, pointing to a space of suspension of the language, emptiness, of fissure, silence)10 1 Proposed by Lacan and used by other Lacan-oriented authors, as Christian Dunker, for a Philosophy of the Art, the object is an object without image whose figuration establishes the statute of the work as such. Dunker organizes as figure of the object: anamorphosis, the deformation, the strangeness, the depersonalization, the problematization of the form's limits (Dunker, 2006). .

The concept of object helps us to assume a contemporary conception of performing poetics, without, however, excluding the dramatic - taking it as a possible modality of poetics and pointing to what it has of performative (and metonymic) in its building. The term object a is conceptualized by Lacan as an object without image and used by Lacan-oriented authors to establish the statute of poetics as such. Art emerges as "figuration of this object a", implying a place of emptiness, flaw of the language, absence, silence. Art points to an edge, a limit of the form, disclosing the open aspect of the work ‒ which, structurally, allows a series of interpretations and sliding of meaning.

Artaud did not fight exactly against the use of the lines (even though his project has proposed it), but against a word that would be at the level of communication. He says: "[...] as the clear meaning is not everything, but rather the music of the word, which speaks straight to the unconscious" (Artaud, 1999ARTAUD, Antonin. O Teatro e Seu Duplo. São Paulo: Martins Fontes, 1999. , p. 140). One can perceive that Artaud assigns to the body a language statute, denoting its condition of shattering: the body as something that one can fragment and remake, remount. "[...] verão meu corpo atual / voar em pedaços / e se juntar sob dez mil aspectos notórios / um novo corpo"11 2 Excerpt from the radio broadcast entitled Pour en finir avec le jugement de Dieu - performed by Artaud with Roger Blin, Marie Cesarès and Paule Thévenin, in 1948. Available at: <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MClA7LE5wbM>. Accessed September 15 2016. , diz na transmissão radiofônica Para Acabar com o Juízo de Deus. The fragmentation is what can witnessed in the speech: a chaining of phonemes, that can be burst open and redone, causing an effect of suspension, pointing to a space of emptiness (of fiction and silence) ‒ a poetic effect itself. Artaud aimed to a corporal engagement of the spectator in the performing act. Thus, he is considered as the precursor of the performative theater. Artaud proposed other modalities of framing for the performing action - resulting from the game with the sound, the light, the spaces and a corporal density that should be endowed with magical powers, reaching rich and fertile regions of the sensitivity. His aim was exactly a psychological theater, that is, the word evoking the drama of the individual with the clearness of the visuality of a diegetic universe.

The point is how to demonstrate what exists of performative in the work of the scene with the dramatic text, detaching it of an idea of representation. Even though, in a certain extent, one works with the linearity and mimesis, it would be possible that their game of framings would imply this a ‒ and the performativity of the look, in the metonymic displacements, either engendered when the spectator is faced with the gesture (of the work) pointing to the edges of an emptiness (of a non form, object without image, not a signifier registration).

When pointing to the functioning of the performing poetics as a succession of metonymic movements, Féral refers, especially, to the performative works to which we call, as Lehmann, Post-Dramatic Theater.

This deconstruction passes through a game with the signs that become unstable, fluids forcing the look of the spectator to adapt incessantly, to migrate from a reference to the other, from a system of representation to another one, inscribing always the scene in the ludic and trying through it to escape from the mimetic representation. The performer installs the ambiguity of significations, the displacement of the codes, the sliding of direction. Therefore, it is a matter of deconstructing the reality, the signs, the meanings and the language (Féral, 2008FÉRAL, Josette. Por uma poética da performatividade: o teatro performativo. Tradução de Sônia Machado. Sala Preta, São Paulo, Revista do Programa de Pós-Graduação em Artes Cênicas, Universidade de São Paulo, n. 08, p. 197-210, 2008., p. 203-204).

If the point is to demonstrate that the performativity of the look also can be situated in the work of the scene with the dramatic text, it is necessary to waive the concept of representation.

The expression game of framing was initially proposed (in a PhD research developed in Universidade de São Paulo)12 3 The research entitled O Ateliê do Ator-encenador: Enquadramento, Incidência e Vulnerabilidade [The Ateliê of the Actor-stage director: Framing, Incidence and Vulnerability] was developed from 2009 to 2014 in the Center of Research in Performing Experimentation of the Actor, in Universidade de São Paulo, under the orientation of Prof. PhD. Armando Sergio da Silva and support of the Foundation of Support to the Research of the State of São Paulo (FAPESP). supplementing the notion of sign, exactly to propose the diegetic action as a form of framing (and not of sign). This function (framing) concerns to what has edges and offers limits. The first reference is the cinematographic framing, which establishes limits to everything that is situated within it. In the same way, the corporal design, with its plasticity (transformation ability) also is a framing, as it implies limits to the incidence effect, an affection that occurs within its limits. As well as the visuality13 4 Visuality is understood as the property of the object to allow being seen or as what one can see. of diegesis (dramatic or epic) that, with its edges, circumscribes the relations between characters (which, within its limits, acquire meaning). Thus, we have different modalities of framing and a game of differences and discrepancies between them. Also the look of the spectator is unveiled as a framing, as, with its limits and edges (with the limits and edges of the visuality of his own world), situates (frames) the work.

According to Lehmann (2007), the function of the Post-dramatic Theater would be to cause other perceptions in the spectator (which is configured as a political act), provoking him, challenging and even attacking him, constraining him. Lehmann articulates the performance to the terrorism - due to its vocation to interfere with the social reality. Another modality of performative scene is when the context of production of the work is questioned. It can be perceived variants in the meaning of the word performative, also used as interference in the relations between stage and audience. It is possible to think the performative from three aspects: a) the one that questions the relation spectator-scene; b) what questions the live act (in detriment of the representation act); c) what, as a figure of the object, escapes to the language and resists to the signification effects, promoting a certain opacity and the sliding of the meaning through a metonymic process.

Pavis (2010PAVIS, Patrice. A Encenação Contemporânea: origens, tendências, perspectivas. São Paulo: Perspectiva, 2010.) points to a perspective of mixture of what can be performative and what is staging. Taking staging as a system of effects of signification more or less under the control of the stage director, as a relatively closed work, he forges the term performise for a range of variations between one end to the other (what would be pure performance and what would be pure staging).

Let's say that, when we listen to a scene, we listen to it in different ways: this is structural. It is obvious that we can associate things from a scene, i.e., having one listening and my colleague, right beside me, a different one. If we increase the differences between the framings, we open fissures and, consequently, possibilities of linking produced by each spectator (with the successive metonymic displacements of their look). These differences between the framings, is what we call theatricality: we address the theatricality as a clash between framings14 5 Concept developed in the text A Teatralidade como um Choque entre Visualidades a Questão da Visualidade em Cena [Theatricality as a Clash between Visualities: the Question of Visuality in Scene], published by the Urdimento Journal in 2014 (Arruda, 2014). .

Performativity would be exactly what comes to romper this listening and to establish a space of determination, that is revealed as opacity; it establishes what resists to the reading - and, thus, the look of the spectator performs. The performativity is what we can make of the emptiness that opens thanks to the theatricality (thanks to the clash). Thus, in a performative work with the dramatic, there is no fictional visuality a anteriori to be represented (in a way to make it to coincide with the performing framing, to confer the statute of action to the signifier heard). It is about placing the context of the relation with the spectator in play through a clash between the framings, as the corporal plasticity is a framing and the visuality of the dramatic action is another one.

It can be said that, in the Performative Theater, there are moments when the distress is established due to the lack of reading (that there is nothing to listen): the spectator stops associating and dislocating signifier chainings. They come across with a type of exacerbation of the strangeness and the contradiction; and, with the lack of meaning of the act: "After all, what am I doing here and what meaning does this have?" This type of praxis of silence comes in reply to the semiotic utopia: a word or gesture mean. This thought was formalized in the 1960s (according to Pavis), but was already set before, in the way how the texts used to be staged ‒ and it is against this form, exactly, that Artaud based his project (calling it communication).

With the emergence of the semiology, in the end of the 1960s, there was a tendency to conceive the staging as system of meaning, a coherent set, a legible or describable work for the linguistics, decodifyable sign by sign, such as the classic stage of a Copeau (Pavis, 2010PAVIS, Patrice. A Encenação Contemporânea: origens, tendências, perspectivas. São Paulo: Perspectiva, 2010., p. 48).

We use the expression semiotic utopia for understanding (with psychoanalysis) that the language (either performing or other) is not based on the relations between signifier and signified. The structure of the language is based on two operations: metaphor (condensation) and metonymy (displacement); not in straight relations between signifier and signified. This would not be possible, as the signifier does not signify, but it always leads to another signifier, generating the metonymic displacements which, in turn, make possible the metaphors, that is, the condensation (provisory) of dislocated elements. The signified is blocked ‒ and is expressed as an empty place, implying the desire as metonymic remaining and the subject's aphanisis (successive disappearances and appearances). The subject in Lacan is divided, provisory and ambiguous, never immanent and fixed.

We believe that the poetic effect (either of the dramatic spectacle, Physical or Performative Theater, Verbal Poem, Plastic Arts or Mediatic) has metonymic sliding, provisory metaphors, space of desire and multiple attempts of interpretation, being that something always escapes to the designation, something impossible to say15 6 Here the notion of sublime "[...] that, as Lyotard said well, always insists on evading as impossible of the formalization" (Fernandes, 2010, p. 38) can also be articulated. ; e that this effect is structural of any poetry, also making part of those that reckon on the use of the lines and the linearity. We think about the impossible as structure of the poetry of the scene. Thus, the theory of the Post-dramatic comes as a reply to a utopia of translation of any work in signs. More than a theater modality, the Post-dramatic questions the need of the elaboration of a new theory of the scene.

The listening of the signifier chainings can, between the lines, evoke something opposite that originates from the clash between the framings, each one with its plasticity. The plasticity16 7 The term plasticity is being used as property of a framing transformation. The visuality (what one can see) of the character's action is a framing modality and has its plasticity. of the character action is a layer, with a certain weaving of associations that imply certain limits and logic. But it is only one. Another weaving implies other plasticity (a visuality that is transformed): of the look of the spectator on the impressions of the scene. The thought of the spectator, weaved in the extra fictional axis, acquires density. To the performing production, the scene of its look is juxtaposed. From the fissures of them both theatricality is also extracted.

According to Pavis (2010PAVIS, Patrice. A Encenação Contemporânea: origens, tendências, perspectivas. São Paulo: Perspectiva, 2010., p. 49), the "theater writing is linked to signifier practice" ended up in crisis in the 1960s:

The height of the stage as performing writing in the 1960s coincided with the beginning of its crisis: it became a much closed system, too linked to an author, to a style and a method of performance, too associated to the idea of 'reading the theater'17 8 The author refers to Reading Theatre, Anne Ubersfeld's book [Brazilian translation: Para ler o teatro]. São Paulo: Perspectiva, 2005. . The structure of the spectacle is named 'signifier practice'18 9 The author makes reference to Julia Kristeva's proposals. .

The importance of the reflection on the operations that a "signifier practice" implies is witnessed. As Nadiá Ferreira explains (2002FERREIRA, Nadiá Paulo. Jacques Lacan: apropriação e subversão da linguística. Revista Ágora, Rio de Janeiro, v. 5, n. 1, 2002. , p. 1):

The structure of the signifier is characterized by articulation and the introduction of a difference that founds the different ones. A series of consequences is produced: 1. the privilege of the signifier in detriment of the signified; 2. the signifier is pure non sense and has no relation with the signified, what is equivalent to say that the signifier does not mean anything or can mean anything; 3. the opposition between signifier and signified marked by the bar places the signifyable submitted to the signifier; 4. what it is part of the very structure of the signifier is the connection with other signifiers forming a chaining; 5. there can only be articulation between the signifiers because they can be reduced to pure distinguishing elements; 6. the organization of the signifiers is achieved by means of two operations, that are the same of the language: condensation (Verdichtung) and displacement (Verschiebung), whose effects are the metaphor and the metonymy.

The illusion of this discourse in crisis (related by Pavis to reading the theater and calls closed) reside in a supposed pairing of the relations between signifier and signified. Reading and interpretation happen by constant sliding (metonymy), leaving a remaining (metonymic) resistant to the multiple effect of signification; a type of flaw that implies the necessary topos for the establishment the relations of desire (the lack is necessary in order to have desire). The desire is implied in an act of listening where always something escapes. This is exactly the operational mode of the language - and of a system of reading (either dramatic, or non dramatic or post-dramatic). Thus, the term signifier practice could very well be related to the practice of the reading of the stage, without this being conveyed to any attempt of signification. However, it is about another theory, different of the semiology of the gesture or the word. It was against univocal relations between gesture and meaning that the movements, from the 1970s on, were established, between them the post-dramatic and the theories of the performance as genre.

Then the texts were approached and, next, the spectacles in a very different way. This change of perspective favored the theater practice, as it was ready to review all the notions of the dramaturgy: the character, the scene, the meaning, the subject that perceives and the purpose of the theater. In this atmosphere of crisis of the resumption in question, the performance became a way of challenging the theater and its literary conception, considered too logocentric, but also a way to overcome a semiology too worried with the reading of the signs and the stage (Pavis, 2010PAVIS, Patrice. A Encenação Contemporânea: origens, tendências, perspectivas. São Paulo: Perspectiva, 2010., p. 49).

The concept of theatricality as a clash between framings allows us to recover the idea of signifier practice as the metonymic sliding produce visualities beyond others that are not in the stage ‒ by multiple associations. These visualities do not imply a wholeness (they have gaps, holes), but an investigative spirit on the part of the spectator; a type of engagement. It is in the fissures between visuality and another that the effect of theatricality is built. The visuality of the fiction (evoked in the listening of signifiers) is different from the plasticity of the body in scene; and it is different from the visuality of the world of the spectator set in the scene of his look. It is through the difference (clash) between one and the other that the theatricality is forged. The same happens when an object is framed in the fiction (being inscribed in this as a signifier): something of its form remains that is not framed by diegesis. A broom, for example, can evoke a character, what it generates an effect of theatricality (or the theatricalization of the broom) thanks to the difference (clash) between broom and character.

The performativity, in its turn, would imply the uncertainty and the indetermination ‒ that is, when the signifier does not find framing. The signifier, as a matter of principle, is difference, that is, it needs to lead to another signifier so that a chaining is produced. In the performance, this can be breached, and the spectator is implied: in the engendering of the very situation from which it is called to the action or in the absence of the signification effects (which takes him straight to the failure of the language). Here, we can articulate Renato Cohen's idea of "[...] shapeless lines, reverse gesture, asymmetric and disjunctive scene, strange collage" (Fernandes, 2010FERNANDES, Silvia. Teatralidades Contemporâneas. São Paulo: Ed. Perspectiva, 2010., p. 38).

At a certain moment of the Post-dramatic Theater, Lehmann finds support in Lyotard to exemplify a theater that, exactly for moving away from the representation, would be beyond the drama - that is, the drama emerges pasted to the theory of representation (where the idea that prevails is that the scene represents the actions of a text).

Lyotard speaks here of a differentiated idea of theater, from which one must depart in case one wants to think a theater beyond the drama, which is called 'energetic theater'. It would not be a theater of signified, but of the 'forces, intensities, affects in its presence'. In face of Einar Schleef's spoken choirs marking towards the audience, for instance, who does not see the 'energetic' but looks for signs, for 'representation', encloses the performing one in the model of the copy, the action and thus of the 'drama' (Lehmann, 1999LEHMANN, Hans-Thies. O Teatro Pós-dramático. São Paulo: Cosac Naify, 1999. , p. 58).

It is necessary to detach the Dramatic Theater of a theory of the sign which, in turn, reduces the physical actions to signs of the dramatic actions of the text that precede them. Structurally, the language is not organized in signs, but in metonymic sliding. Introducing the concept of framing, the dramatic is disclosed as a specific modality of game of framing.

In the Post-dramatic, relatively stable framings (like the tale and the visuality of the reality), are discarded. What prevails is what the spectator cannot frame and that disturbs him, as it is out of the usual recognition. The indetermination of the framing is used - and this defines a modality of theater that is different from the dramatic. However, the Dramatic Theater can, yet, in detriment of a theory of the sign, to carry forces, intensities and affects in its presence (as it is not representation). Even though one of the framings in play is the linearity of a diegesis, the spoken text is a matter that will enter in clash (and in play) with a series of others.

When suppressing the linear and diegetic framings of the performing discourse, the Performative Theater plays with a certain opacity: "Most of the time there are not characters psychologically elaborated nor individualized in a coherent performing context (as in Kantor), but only figures that act as unintelligible emblems" (Lehmann, 1999LEHMANN, Hans-Thies. O Teatro Pós-dramático. São Paulo: Cosac Naify, 1999. , p. 130-131). "When the concept of action dissolves in such a way in favor of a happening of continuous metamorphosis, the space of the action emerges as a landscape continuously modified by light variations, by objects and forms that appear and disappear" (Lehmann, 1999, p. 133).

Without a linear tale, without evoking the permanence of characters and conflicts that would develop in articulated chaining, in the Post-dramatic, what it starts to prevail is the structure of enunciation with juxtaposed materials, constituted of relatively independent chaining, that are not articulated in a syntagmatic way. Silvia Fernandes, one of the scholars of the Post-dramatic Theater in Brazil highlights different procedures:

[...] the economy of the performing elements, in processes of repetition and emphasis on the duration or the ascetism of the empty spaces of Jan Fabre and of the Théâtre du Radeau; [...] the polished Antunes Filho and Márcio Aurélio's stagings, who privilege the silence, the emptiness and the minimalist reduction of the gestures and the movements, creates ellipses to be filled for the spectator; [...] the multiplication of the data of performing enunciation, that results in spectacles overloaded with objects, accessories and inscriptions, whose intriguing density comes to disorient the audience, as it happens in Frank Castorf's stagings (Fernandes, 2010FERNANDES, Silvia. Teatralidades Contemporâneas. São Paulo: Ed. Perspectiva, 2010., p. 55).

One can perceive the game between visuality and sonority. These are plastic, that is, they transform themselves. "The music transforms into a type of sonorous dramaturgy." (Fernandes, 2010FERNANDES, Silvia. Teatralidades Contemporâneas. São Paulo: Ed. Perspectiva, 2010., p. 55). At the same time, "[...] this musical text can also be composed of the melody of the actors' lines, of diversified timbres and accents". Overlaps are used. The fissures between different types of plasticity do not necessarily articulate a listening, or the listening does not produce a chaining (it is breached): its articulation is opaque. Something insinuates itself as an enigma in the performative tradition.

In the Dramatic Theater, both the plasticity of the body and the visuality of the fiction articulate the same signifier: the name of the action (the verb-of-action) that can be heard. Although something of the corporal plasticity remains (and resists) to the action (because it is pure materiality), the verb-of-action, as a dramatic action, is inscribed in the tale - and, at the same time, in scene. An articulation (and not the disjunction) is perceived.

According to Fernandes, Lehmann uses the expression "concrete theater" to refer to the corporal plasticity: "to the immediatism of the human bodies, the matters and the post-dramatic forms". The term, he borrows from Kandinsky - that sends us straight to what, of the corporal plastic, is abstraction, form, color, tangible quality. Concerning this thought, Fernandes cites the "formal structures of movement and light of the theater of Jan Fabre" (Fernandes, 2010, p. 57). The abstraction (of the body) would be a way to exceed the sphere of the dramatic representation - according to Lehmann - that is, of that figurative visuality of a body inscribed in the daily diegetic reality. Thus, it points to a world of geometric forms or a poetic of the deformation, such as the Plastic Arts had made in the passage from the figurative to the abstract.

Performativity and Theatricality in the Field of Actors Training

Depending on which procedures are used, the actors can accent the performativity and the theatricality in the building of physical actions for a work with the dramatic text. When Grotowski, Burnier or Stanislavski give examples of physical actions, they engender a context of relations in which the concept of action is inscribed. But it is possible to dismember the concept of action: the dramatic action (conveyed to the diegesis); the physical action (corporal plasticity that conveys, provisionally, a diegesis and that articulates to the visuality of a thought, intentionality or impulse); internal action (conveyed to the visuality of the thought or intentionality and that can be worked in opposition to the external action); the external action (when the corporal plasticity is disconnected from the internal action). This dismembering helps us in certain procedures.

When using a Performative Theater (Pina Bausch's, for instance) as a possible field of extraction of movements (material loaded with abstraction) to inscribe them in a diegetic context (supplied for a dramatic text) and, thus, transform them (in physical actions), something of its performativity remains - and something of theatricality emerges.

Why not to represent diegesis? Why bringing abstract materials from another context (Pina Bausch's spectacle) to clash its form against the form of the dramatic action? If the form of the resultant body (physical action) does not fit totally within the limits of the plasticity of the dramatic action, theatricality is evidenced: because there is a clash - and also the performativity (as something opaque forces the spectator to perform his look to frame the form of the body). And for making to emerge the actor's labor with the game of this building in the instant-already of the scene, each time that this scene is repeated, its performing continues live.

Figure 1
Visuality condensation in the physical action formation Action

The equal sign (Figure 1) implies the absorption of visuality in the other, synthesis and condensation. The act of playing this absorption in the instant-already implies something of the form that escapes to the listening of the action, presenting itself as opacity, enigma, mystery (and poetics), performativity. This is a way to operate the concepts of the performativity and the theatricality in the field of Actors Training (and in the work with the dramatic text).

The Performative Theater can be used as a field of extraction of images for the corporal mimesis. However, there are others. The visuality of the quotidian, for instance, when used as matter, implies pure plasticity ‒ and clashes (even serving as opposition) to the dramatic actions. Therefore, theatricality is provoked. The issues of the performativity and the theatricality are inscribed in function of a game where the form used as material, when inscribing in scene (in tension with others), produces a resultant. This resultant, in turn, has something (a piece) that remains and is exceeding, exceeds the dramatic action, does not enter in the chaining of the listening of the signifiers - pointing to a non read, non said effect of pure materiality, resistance, opacity, indetermination.

This way, for the development of the performative theater, the use of diverse sources of extraction is possible, from the quotidian, facts of the personal life, abstract physical scores originating from corporal training, descriptions of body extracted from the literature, the cinema etc. As they are fixed and placed in relation with other materials, they will produce the physical action in an unexpected, not thought way ‒ what denotes a structure in the work of the actor: the image-support of the creation game is not what the spectator reads, sees and listens. Its listening depends on the resultant of the game ‒ that is, of a new (another) inscription. This is a structure evidenced in accounts by Grotowski, when he tells that Cieslak used an image of his personal life (the passionate touch in the adolescence) in the Constant Prince to generate the corporal excitability of a religious sacrifice (a situation heard by the spectator). Grotowski tells, not without a certain surprise, the perspective of the actor to use, as material, something total different. That is, the visuality of the inscription of the body in scene evokes another thing - different of the one that the actor used as material. This operation makes evident the game of the clashes and encounters between materials originating from different fields. This way, the essence of the practice with the physical actions is in playing with the perspective of the performativity and the theatricality.

Concerning the dramatic text as a possible field of extraction of materials, we claim that it is necessary to surpass the beginning of the representation and to provoke encounters between different framings. This would be a type of exit for the work of the staging with the material word extracted from the theater part or the literature. It is proposed that actions produced with this textual material are not taken as signified, but framing modalities. The action is a framing that participates of the performing poetic logic because there are others that are different. Thus, the game is to make emerge and disappear something in function of a series of differences and discrepancies.

It is believed that the material advocated by Stanislavski (considering him as the father of the theory of the dramatic actor) does not need to be abandoned when the principle is the performative. As internal formations, they occupy the actor, providing support for the plastic work of the body, while the game of framings implies discrepancies. However, a revision of the theory of the dramatic actor is necessary.

It was possible to defend, for instance, that the lines are a consequence of the internal movement (objective, intention or internal action). Stanislavski advocated the proposal of the actor to discover what the character wants and thinks to mark the truth or organicity in the speech. When analyzing this operation, we perceive that it is a building, as the actor names an objective, intention or internal action, that is, creates material that precedes the lines; it installs, in the chaining of the text, a new material. Thus, it constitutes an effect of internal movement.

We consider that the actor can choose the mode of game: predetermining the material, establishing it in an intentional way, or constituting it in improvisation in the instant-already of the scene. In both cases, we are faced with the performative as weaving of an act. Even when we play with the pre-determined material, we do not know its effects in the instant-already. It is about instigating the effect of the lines as consequence of internal movement when the focus is on constituting it or using it in the instant-already of the scene and the interior of a game that implies a series of discrepancies.

Figure 2
External lines and the internal material that precedes it

Thus, the lines are used as a second element in the chaining; the physical action is previous to it, with which, immediately, it enters in relation. The actor inscribes the physical action previously the lines are at stake. The spoken lines emerge, for the spectator, as a consequence of the action that preceded it. This is an effect (it is a framing building); and it is necessary the establishment of a material to produce it (Figure 2).

Another framing that the dramatic actor produces in scene is the relation with his own thought, used as a place (a space where one can look at). Thus, it affirms itself as a contemporary framing. We find, for instance, the instruction to look at the thoughts in an account by Galizia on the creation of the Life and the Time of Joseph Stalin (of Robert Wilson, in 1976). This instruction stabilizes the focus of attention (of the actor) in a certain place (or in a certain search for this place). It can be said that looking at the thought is an attempt to establish an internal framing. In accordance with Galizia (2005GALIZIA, Luiz Roberto. Os Processos Criativos de Bob Wilson. São Paulo: Ed. Perspectiva , 2005.), Wilson used to ask to the actors to look at the thought with the aim of avoiding the representation.

In the same way, in a poetics of the dramatic-realist performance, the relation with the own thought is used. The quotidian of the body is evoked, diluting the idea of representation. The bringing up to date of a corporal design that can come to indicate the idea of the representation (that it becomes an index of the act of representing) is avoided. This way, if the actor uses the external word only ‒ leaving it to reverberate (without any filter or opposition that an internal framing would install) ‒ ends up accusing its situation of representation. The visuality of the representation becomes evident when the actor does not build a previous (internal material intern) for the lines to be built as an effect. The visuality of the thought (or the internal action), being another framing, offers resistance and creates a game of opposition.

In Lehmann's theory on the Post-dramatic, Wilson is one of the exemplary directors. But so does Maria Knébel (representative of a theory of the dramatic), who proposes that the actor continues thinking. Associations with life itself are used, so that the actor creates bonds between the corporal memory and the external framings. In texts written by oneself there are constructions (visual and acoustics) that do not concern to the diegetic universe, but are present as another framing. The actor uses his thoughts, because they focus over him and pressure the external framing, extending it. The corporal weaving uses the reverberations of the history of life, affect and memory of that body-subject-actor. The actor also assumes his own situation of game and creates physical actions from his real sensations ‒ in their turn framed (situated) in the fictional context (of the character). The displacement of the action (from the context of the actor to the diegetic context) is performative, as it implies leaps, discrepancies and production in the instant-already. On behalf of the character, the internal action is situated in another context: the one of the fiction ‒ what happens as a metonymic effect (a displacement).

It is known that the contemporary dramaturgy uses very little of dialogic weavings and that the narrative material becomes a strong ally, entering in a relation of stress with the dramatic. It is a matter of extrapolating the present for (in a Brechtian way) making emerge another time (the past, narrated time). In such way that the relation between two times (present and past) allows glimpsing the visuality of the look and of the thought of the one who narrates - the relation of the narrator with the narrated fact. In this case, the distance between two scenes (narrated and lived) produces a poetics of the thought ‒ and also the theatricality.

These operations witness that the poetics of the actorly action is not constituted of a specific framing, but from several ones. Thanks to the discrepancies between these framings, a new space emerges, of articulations and disjunctions that one can call poetic ‒ in the extent that logic is produced: the logic to work differences, the logic of that stage itself.

To figure it, we draw on some evidences provided by Plastic Arts. We take as an example the painting of a woman seated in a coffee shop (Figure 3). We have the visuality of an action: waiting for somebody, reflecting upon life, dwelling on pains, gaining time or any other that we can listen to (to be read in the picture). The action is inscribed in a situation that the painting evokes - an evocation that could be achieved, however, in a different way, for instance, with words.

Figure 3
Automat (Edward Hopper, 1927).

The (plastic) visuality of the weaving of a work is specific: it is not reduced to the action, even when the work is figurative. The plastic weaving of the work is different from the visuality of the actions that this evokes within (framed by) a situation (to which the picture points to). There is a game; a logic of the relation between them, that, on its turn, defines the poetics of the picture. The same happens with fiction and dramatic lines. The actor frames the lines in a certain fictional time-space, however, the plasticity of the voice and the body remains to the fiction.

There is poetics in which the plasticity of the fiction is not used, but they misuse the plasticity of the sound or the abstraction of the movement (they privilege other modalities of framing); there are poetics in which the plasticity of the body is completely detached from the visuality of the actions (evoked in other ways) (Figure 4). In some of Bob Wilson's plays, the design of the body has nothing to do with the actions that the lines evoke ‒ purposeful disjunction between the two layers (lines, parallel texts).

Figure 4
Plasticity that is strange

The painting of the body in the scene evokes associations that can articulate a tale or distance from it, implying other layers. The body may or not evoke an action to frame it. The part of the corporal plasticity that does fit within the framing of the action can be considered as unusual (the same with the sonority of the voice and the word). The absorption of the abstraction of the movement in the visuality of the action implies shades (Figure 5). There are poetics that count on an intense, almost total absorption, in such a way that the visuality of the situation conceals the abstraction, producing what is named mimesis of the reality (or, in certain cases, of reality of the fiction).

Figure 5
Abstract plasticity absorbed in the visuality of a situation

Activities perfectly inscribed in the visuality of the quotidian, like cutting onions, put the tablecloth on or light a fireplace (to mention examples that are present in Stanislavski), can also be used as plastic-corporal framing. In any way, the corporal plasticity and the fictional plasticity imply different layers and evoke different associations (there is a game between them). A field of experimentation for the inscription of the body in a poetics of the scene is open and the need to create corporal repertoire to bring it up to date in the game with the other framings is observed. Thus, one can work the corporal forms or performing movements without any relation of representation of a text, even when this is present as a field of extraction of materials. This way, the articulation will happen in scene with the absorption of a framing in the other, disclosing the logic of a poetics that finds itself in process, performing. The image of the body is inscribed in the chaining of the fiction and enters in relation with the word (also situated in this chaining), releasing other vectors of association. The body has its own plasticity (it is a framing different from the diegesis that embraces it), just like the voice and the formal structure of the word. The fiction where the dramatic action is situated is a mode of framing only (with its own plasticity). Being a difference, the plasticity of the body, the voice, of lines and of fiction may be articulated or not; they can generate more or less strangeness. For a poetics of the scene (and the performance) to emerge, it is necessary to establish the logic of articulation between the frames; a logic that is established as autonomous poetics.

Conclusion

The contemporary theory is based on names like Schechner, Fischer-Lichte, Féral, Lehmann, bringing a perspective of overcoming of the signification effect in scene, as well as pointing to materiality as immediate affection of the spectator. Taking the stage work as writing (and not representation), we agree that effects of signification are not predetermined, as the spectator frames the work with his look (it is a unique and distinguishing process from a life history); that the very reality of this frame implies affect, fruition, discovery, in the extent that it is subjected to a series of metonymic sliding and detachments. What remains from these sliding is translated as a space of flaw of the language (absence of signifier inscription) that, in turn, makes it possible the performativity.

The performative dramaturgy (or post-dramatic) values the plasticity of the extra fictional axis, in which an effect of thought of the work happens. In contrast to this, the dramatic dramaturgy emphasizes the context of the character as a closed universe. Thus, performative and dramatic were established as two opposing models in the Post-dramatic theory. However, the performativity is also implied in the dramatic when it considers the operations of the framing games, weaved in the instant-already of the scene. This also relates to the work of the actor: the performance as a poetics subjected to games of frames and possible logics built from these. It is considered, yet, the two models, in a way to try a hybridism, either through the synthesis or other solutions, like the alternation or the juxtaposition (where the different ones do not mix).

We can say that, in the case of the work with the dramatic text (that uses the operations of the game of framing weaved in instant-already); there is contamination of the performative in the dramatic. Or we can, still, claim that, when working with the dramatic text, the work of the actor implies, structurally, the performative (that is, the unfinished, the processual, the instantaneous weaving when the act is carried through in the carne viva), escaping to the semiotic elaboration.

The notion of game of framings points to visualities clashing, with discrepancies, articulation, disjunction etc. Thus, it can represent a solution when it proposes the dramatic text as a field of extraction of materials - as it allows to the actor disentangle from theoretical framework of the theory of the signification and the representation.

Referências

  • ARRUDA, Rejane K. A teatralidade como um choque entre visualidades (e a questão da realidade em cena). Revista Urdimento, Florianópolis, v. 1, n. 22, p. 211-218, 2014. Disponível em: <Disponível em: http://www.revistas.udesc.br/index.php/urdimento/article/view/1414573101222014211 >. Acesso em: 15 set. 2016.
    » http://www.revistas.udesc.br/index.php/urdimento/article/view/1414573101222014211
  • ARTAUD, Antonin. O Teatro e Seu Duplo. São Paulo: Martins Fontes, 1999.
  • DUNKER, Christian. A Imagem entre o Olho e o Olhar. In: RIVERA, Tânia; SAFATLE, Vladimir. Sobre Arte e Psicanálise. v. 1. São Paulo: Ed. Escuta, 2006. P. 14-29.
  • FÉRAL, Josette. Por uma poética da performatividade: o teatro performativo. Tradução de Sônia Machado. Sala Preta, São Paulo, Revista do Programa de Pós-Graduação em Artes Cênicas, Universidade de São Paulo, n. 08, p. 197-210, 2008.
  • FERNANDES, Silvia. Teatralidades Contemporâneas. São Paulo: Ed. Perspectiva, 2010.
  • FERREIRA, Nadiá Paulo. Jacques Lacan: apropriação e subversão da linguística. Revista Ágora, Rio de Janeiro, v. 5, n. 1, 2002.
  • GALIZIA, Luiz Roberto. Os Processos Criativos de Bob Wilson. São Paulo: Ed. Perspectiva , 2005.
  • LEHMANN, Hans-Thies. O Teatro Pós-dramático. São Paulo: Cosac Naify, 1999.
  • PAVIS, Patrice. A Encenação Contemporânea: origens, tendências, perspectivas. São Paulo: Perspectiva, 2010.
  • This unpublished text, translated by Thais Torres Guimarães and proofread by Ananyr Porto Fajardo, is also published in Portuguese in this issue.
  • 1
    Proposed by Lacan and used by other Lacan-oriented authors, as Christian Dunker, for a Philosophy of the Art, the object is an object without image whose figuration establishes the statute of the work as such. Dunker organizes as figure of the object: anamorphosis, the deformation, the strangeness, the depersonalization, the problematization of the form's limits (Dunker, 2006DUNKER, Christian. A Imagem entre o Olho e o Olhar. In: RIVERA, Tânia; SAFATLE, Vladimir. Sobre Arte e Psicanálise. v. 1. São Paulo: Ed. Escuta, 2006. P. 14-29.).
  • 2
    Excerpt from the radio broadcast entitled Pour en finir avec le jugement de Dieu - performed by Artaud with Roger Blin, Marie Cesarès and Paule Thévenin, in 1948. Available at: <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MClA7LE5wbM>. Accessed September 15 2016.
  • 3
    The research entitled O Ateliê do Ator-encenador: Enquadramento, Incidência e Vulnerabilidade [The Ateliê of the Actor-stage director: Framing, Incidence and Vulnerability] was developed from 2009 to 2014 in the Center of Research in Performing Experimentation of the Actor, in Universidade de São Paulo, under the orientation of Prof. PhD. Armando Sergio da Silva and support of the Foundation of Support to the Research of the State of São Paulo (FAPESP).
  • 4
    Visuality is understood as the property of the object to allow being seen or as what one can see.
  • 5
    Concept developed in the text A Teatralidade como um Choque entre Visualidades a Questão da Visualidade em Cena [Theatricality as a Clash between Visualities: the Question of Visuality in Scene], published by the Urdimento Journal in 2014 (Arruda, 2014ARRUDA, Rejane K. A teatralidade como um choque entre visualidades (e a questão da realidade em cena). Revista Urdimento, Florianópolis, v. 1, n. 22, p. 211-218, 2014. Disponível em: <Disponível em: http://www.revistas.udesc.br/index.php/urdimento/article/view/1414573101222014211 >. Acesso em: 15 set. 2016.
    http://www.revistas.udesc.br/index.php/u...
    ).
  • 6
    Here the notion of sublime "[...] that, as Lyotard said well, always insists on evading as impossible of the formalization" (Fernandes, 2010FERNANDES, Silvia. Teatralidades Contemporâneas. São Paulo: Ed. Perspectiva, 2010., p. 38) can also be articulated.
  • 7
    The term plasticity is being used as property of a framing transformation. The visuality (what one can see) of the character's action is a framing modality and has its plasticity.
  • 8
    The author refers to Reading Theatre, Anne Ubersfeld's book [Brazilian translation: Para ler o teatro]. São Paulo: Perspectiva, 2005.
  • 9
    The author makes reference to Julia Kristeva's proposals.

Publication Dates

  • Publication in this collection
    Apr 2017

History

  • Received
    26 Dec 2015
  • Accepted
    05 Oct 2016
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