The misdeeds of the psychological theater de~cende~ from Racmehave unaccustomed us to that immediate and violent action which the theatershould possess. Movies in their tum, murdering us wi~ se~ond-hand ~e?~o-d · h" h filtered through

At the point of deterioration which our sens1b1htyhas reached, it 1scertain that we need above all a theater that wakes us up: nerves and hear

Intheir daily work they do not concentrate on the spiritual techniquebut on the composition of the role, on the construction of form, onthe expression of signs - i.e., on artifice. There is no contradictionbetween inner technique and artifice (articulation of a role bysigns).

QIN ZHONGYI:

(SONG ENZI JR. and w

KANG SHUNZI enters from the back. Her back is now slightly bent

Mother Li: (Sings "erh huong yao pan") I'm ill and unwell, our grain is gone, I call my son, but there is no reply. Oh, the hatred of us poor, this debt of blood, When will it ever be redeemed?

Communist always heeds the Party's call, He takes the heaviest burden on himself; I'm set on smashing the chains of a thousand years To open a

Long ago Chairman Mao told us: "The revolutionary war is a war of the masses; it can be waged only by mobilizing the masses and relying on them."

id the Communists were now in our old home village helping the poor to win emancipation. I wonder if it's true.

Vulture: You know, openly the Americans are pretend-ing to be working for peace talks between the Kuomintang and the Comm

Vizier

Caliph

Catharsis and Repose, or Knowledge and Action?As we remarked previously, Hegel maintains that the tumult of human passions and actions making up the dramatic work is followed by a state of repose. Aristotle likewise speaks of a system of wills that represent concretely, individually, the justifi able ethical values, and which come into confl ict because one of the characters possesses a tragic fl aw, or commits a tragic error. After the catastrophe, when the fl aw is purged, serenity returns necessarily; equilibrium is re-established. The two philosophers seem to say that the world returns to its perennial stability, its infi nite equilibrium, its eternal repose.Brecht was a Marxist; therefore, for him, a theatrical work cannot end in repose, in equilibrium. It must, on the contrary, show the ways in which society loses its equilibrium, which way society is moving, and how to hasten the transition.Brecht contends that the popular artist must abandon the downtown stages and go to the neighbourhoods, because only there will he fi nd people who are truly interested in changing society: in the neighbourhoods he should show his images of social life to the workers who are interested in changing that social life, since they are its victims.10 A theatre that attempts to change the changers of society cannot lead to repose, cannot re-establish equilibrium. The bourgeois police tries to re-establish

How can one fail to be moved when Mother Courage loses her sons, one by one, in the war? Inevitably, the spectator is moved to tears. But the emotion caused by ignorance must be avoided: let no one weep over the ‘fate’ that took Mother Courage’s sons from her! Let one cry rather with anger against war and against the commerce of war, because it is this commerce that takes away the sons of Mother Courage.

Galy Gay is not Galy Gay; he does not exist purely and simply. Galy Gay is not Galy Gay, but rather is everything that Galy Gay is capable of doing in particular situations

Eisenhower proposed the invasion of Vietnam, Kennedy began to carry it out, and Johnson took it to genocidal extremes. Nixon, perhaps the greatest scoundrel of them all, was forced to make peace. Who is the criminal? The President of the United States of America: all, and any one, of them

e Hegelian idealist poetics but rather denies its very essence, asserting that the character is not absolute subject but the object of economic or social forces to which he responds and in virtue of which he acts

C H A R A C T E R A S S U B J E C T O R C H A R A C T E R A S O B J E C T 7 7 it is the concretion of a moral value, the good of the family. When these two individual wills clash, in reality two moral values collide. It is necessary for this confl ict to end in repose, as Hegel views it, so that the moral dispute can be resolved: Who is right? Which is the greater value? In this particular case the conclusion shows that both moral values are right, though their expression may be exaggerated. The error is not in the value itself, but in its excess.4. In order for tragedy to occur, if it is to be a true tragedy, the ends pursued by the characters must be irreconcilable; if a possibility of conciliation should exist, the dramatic work would belong to another genre, the drama.Of all these Hegelian arguments, the one which most obviously characterises his poetics is the one which insists on the character’s nature as subject; that is, the argument that all exterior actions have their origin in the character’s free spiri

A ‘Western’ story begins with the presentation of a villain (bandit, horse thief, murderer, or whatever) who, precisely because of his vice or tragic fl aw, is the uncontested boss, the richest or the most feared man of the neighbourhood or city. He does all the evil he possibly can, and we empathise with him and vicariously we do the same evil – we kill, steal horses and chickens, rape young heroines, etc. Until, after our own hamartia has been stimulated, the moment of the peripeteia: the hero gains advantage in the fi st fi ght or through endless shoot-outs and re-establishes order (social ethos), morality, and honest business relationships, after destroying (catastrophe) the bad citizen. What is left out here is the anagnorisis, and the villain is allowed to die without feeling regrets; in short, they fi nish him off with gunshots and bury him, while the townspeople celebrate with square dance

It is, in effect, a powerful system of intimidation. The structure of the system may vary in a thousand ways, making it diffi cult at times to fi nd all the elements of its structure, but the system will nevertheless be there, working to carry out its basic task: the purgation of all antisocial elements. Precisely for that reason, the system cannot be utilised by revolutionary groups during revolutionary periods. That is, while the social ethos is not clearly defi ned, the tragic scheme cannot be used, for the simple reason that the character’s ethos will not fi nd a clear social ethos that it can confront

A variation of the ‘anachronistic ethos’ is that of the ‘diachronic ethos’: the character lives in a moral world made up of values which society honours in word but not in deed. In José, from Birth to Grave, the character, José da Silva, embodies all the values that the bourgeoisie claims as its own, and his misfortune comes precisely because he believes in those values and rules his life by them: a ‘self-made man’, he works more than he has to, is devoted to his employers, avoids causing labour troubles, etc. In short, a character who follows The Laws of Success of Napoleon Hill, or How to Win Friends and Infl uence People of Dale Carnegie. That is tragedy! And what a tragedy

Different Types of Confl ict: Hamartia and Social EthosAs we have seen, Aristotle’s coercive system of tragedy requires:• the creation of a confl ict between the character’s ethos and the ethos of the society in which he lives; something is not right!• the establishment of a relationship called empathy, which consists in allowing the spectator to be guided by the character through his experiences; the spectator – feeling as if he himself is acting – enjoys the pleasures and suffers the misfortunes of the character, to the extreme of thinking his thoughts.• that the spectator experience three changes of a rigorous nature: peripeteia, anagnorisis, and catharsis; he suffers a blow with regard to his fate (the action of the play), recognises the error vicariously committed and is purifi ed of the antisocial characteristic which he sees in himself.This is the essence of the coercive system of tragedy. In the Greek theatre the system functions as it is shown in our diagram; but in its essence, the system survived and has continued to be utilised down to our own time, with various modifi cations introduced by new societies. Let us analyse some of these modifi cations.First Type: Hamartia Versus the Perfect Social Ethos (classical type)This is the most classical case studied by Aristotle. Consider again the example of Oedipus. The perfect social ethos is presented through the Chorus or through Teiresias in his long speech. The collision is head-on. Even after Teiresias has declared that th

Without acting, we feel that we are acting. We love and hate when the character loves and hates.Empathy does not take place only with tragic characters: it is enough to see children very excited, watching a ‘Western’ on television, or the sentimental looks of the public when, on the screen, the hero and the heroine exchange kisses. It is a case of pure empathy. Empathy makes us feel as if we ourselves are experiencing what is actually happening to others.Empathy is an emotional relationship between character and spectator. A relationship which, as Aristotle suggests, can be basically one of pity and fear, but which can include other emotions as well: love, tenderness, desire (in the case of many movie stars and their fan clubs), etc.Empathy takes place especially in relation to what the character does – that is, his ethos. But there is likewise an empathic relationship dianoia (the character’s) – reason (the spectator’s), which corresponds to ethos-emotion. The ethos stimulates emotion; the dianoia stimulates reason.Clearly, the fundamental empathic emotions of pity and fear are evoked on the basis of an ethos which reveals good traits (hence pity for the character’s destruction) and one bad trait, hamartia (hence fear, because we also possess it).Now we are ready to return to the functioning of the tragic scheme

‘Art imitates nature’ actually means: ‘Art re-creates the creative principle of created things.’

The School of MiletusBetween the years 640 and 548 BC, in the Greek city of Miletus, lived a very religious oil merchant, who was also a navigator. He

Should art educate, inform, organise, infl uence, incite to action, or should it simply be an object of pleasure?

mes? Befor

Jeraiah Jip? · URIAH: His kind change of their own accord, you know. Throw him into a pond, and two days later he'll have webs growing between his fingers. That's because he's got noth-ing to lose.

ou have a soft nature, G

Mahagonny

But today's situation is much different. As social groupings are less and less defined by religion, traditional mythic forms are in flux, disappearing and being reincarnated. The spectators are more and more individuated in their relation to the myth as corporate truth or group model, and belief is often a matter of intellectual conviction. This means that it is much more difficult to elicit the sort of shock needed to get at those psychic layers behind the life-mask.

The acceptance of poverty in theatre, stripped of all that is not essential to it, revealed to us not only the backbone of the medium, but also the deep riches which lie in the very nature of the art-form.

By gradually eliminating whatever proved superfluous, we found that theatre can exist without make-up, without autonomic costume and scenography, without a separate performance area (stage), without lighting and sound effects, etc. It cannot exist without the actor-spectator relationship of perceptual, direct, "live" com-munion. This Is an ancient theoretical truth, of course, but when rigorously tested in practice it undermines most of our usual ideas about theatre. It challenges the notion of theatre as a synthesis of disparate creative disciplines - literature, sculpture, painting. architecture, lighting, acting (under the direction of a metteur-en-scene). This "synthetic theatre" is the contemporary theatre, which we readily call the "Rich Theatre" - rich in flaws.

Another technique which illuminates the hidden structure of signs is contradiction (between gesture and voice, voice and word, word and thought, will and action, etc.) -here, too, we take the via negativa.

on of the role, on the construction of form, on the expression of signs - i.e., on artifice.

We do not want to teach the actor a predetermined set of skills or give him a "bag of tricks." Ours is not a deductive method of collecting skills. Here everything is concentrated on the "ripening" of the actor which is expressed by a tension towards the extreme, by a complete stripping down, by the laying bear of one's own intimity - all this without the least trace -of egotism or self-enjoyment. The actor makes a total gift of himself. This is a technique of the "trance" and of the integration of all the actor's psychic and bodily powers which emerge from the most intimate layers of his being and his instinct, springing forth in a sort of "trans-lumination."

Theatre is an Enco

achieved is a total acceptance of one human being by another.

es place in the

brings down the axe]

Merde

Attention! Je ne suis qu’un homme

verliebt

dramatic li

€n1HARL