1
TOWARD A THEORY OF CULTURE
AND MISE EN SCNE
The object of this study is the crossroads of cultures in contemporary
theatre practice. This crossroads, where foreign cultures, unfamiliar
discourses and the myriad artistic effects of estrangement are jumbled
together, is hard to define but it could assert itself, in years to come, as
that of a theatre of culture(s). The moment is both favorable and
difficult. Never before has the western stage contemplated and
manipulated the various cultures of the world to such a degree, but
never before has it been at such a loss as to what to make of their
inexhaustible babble, their explosive mix, the inextricable collage of their
languages. Mise en scne in the theatre is today perhaps the last refuge
and the most rigorous laboratory for this mix: it examines every cultural
representation, exposing each one to the eye and the ear, and displaying
and appropriating it through the mediation of stage and auditorium.
Access to this exceptional laboratory remains difficult, however, as
much because of the artists, who do not like to talk too much about their
creations, as because of the spectators, disarmed face to face with a
phenomenon as complex and inexpressible as intercultural exchange.
Does this difficulty spring from a purely aesthetic and consumerist
vision of cultures, which thinks itself capable of dispensing with both
socioeconomic and anthropological theory, or which would like to play
anthropology against semiotics and sociology?
A SATURATED THEORY
When one seeks humanity, one seeks oneself. Every theory
is something of a self-portrait.
André Leroi-Gourhan
Theory has a lot to put up with. It is reproached on the one hand for its
complexity, on the other for its partiality. In our desire to understand
theatre at the crossroads of culture, we certainly risk losing its
substance, displacing theatre from one world to another, forgetting it
along the way, and losing the means of observing all the maneuvers that
accompany such a transfer and appropriation.
Any theory which would mark these cultural slippages suffers the
same vertiginous displacement. The model of intertextuality, derived
from structuralism and semiotics, yields to that of interculturalism. It is
no longer enough to describe the relationships between texts (or even
between performances) to grasp their internal functioning; it is also
necessary to understand their inscription within contexts and cultures
and to appreciate the cultural production that stems from these
unexpected transfers. The term interculturalism, rather than
multiculturalism or transculturalism, seems appropriate to the task of
grasping the dialectic of exchanges of civilities between cultures.1
Confronted with intercultural exchange, contemporary theatre practice
--from Artaud to Wilson, from Brook to Barba, from Heiner Müller to
Ariane Mnouchkine--goes on the attack: it confronts and examines
traditions, styles of performance and cultures which would never have
encountered one another without this sudden need to fill a vacuum. And
theory, as a docile servant of practice, no longer knows which way to
turn: descriptive and sterile semiotics will no longer suffice, sociologism
has been sent back to the drawing board, anthropology is seized on in
all its forms--physical, economic, political, philosophical and cultural--
though the nature of their relationships is unclear. But the most difficult
link to establish is that between the sociosemiotic model and the
anthropological approach. This link is all the more imperative as avantgarde
theatre production attempts to get beyond the historicist model by
way of a confrontation between the most diverse cultures, and (not
without a certain risk of lapsing into folklore) to return to ritual, to myth
and to anthropology as an integrating model of all experience (Barba,
Grotowski, Brook, Schechner).
This keeps us within the scope of a semiology. Semiology has
established itself as a discipline for the analysis of dramatic texts and
stage performances. We are now beyond the quarrel between a
semiology of text and a semiology of performance. Each has developed
its own analytical tools and we no longer attempt to analyse a
performance on the basis of a pre-existing dramatic text. However, the
notion of a performance text (testo spettacolare, in the Italian
terminology of de Marinis (1987:100)) is still frowned on by earlier
2 THEATRE AT THE CROSSROADS OF CULTURE
semioticians such as Kowzan (1988:180) or even Elam (1989:4) and by
cultural anthropologists (Halstrup 1990). This seems mainly a question
of terminology because we certainly need a notion of texture, i.e. of a
codified, readable artifact, be it a performance or the cultural models
inscribed in it.
What is at stake is something quite different. It is the possibility of a
universal, precise performance analysis and of an adequate notation
system. It would seem that not only is notation never satisfying but that
analysis can only ever be tentative and partial. If we accept these
serious limitations, if we give up the hope of reconstructing the totality
of a performance, then we can at least understand a few basic principles
of the mise en scne: its main options, the acting choices, the
organization of space and time. This may seem a rather poor analytic
result, if we expect, as before, a precise and complete description of the
performance. But, on the other hand, we should also question the aim of
a precise and exhaustive semiotic description, if such a project arouses
no interest. As Keir Elam puts it, `the more successful and rigorous we
are in doing justice to the object, the less interest we seem to arouse
within both the theatrical and the academic communities' (1989:6). For
this reason, Elam proposes a shift from theoretical to empirical
semiotics: `a semiotics of theatre as empirical rather than theoretical
object may yet be possible' (1989: 11). It is certainly true that we should
consider `reshaping' the semiology of theatre by checking its theoretical
hypotheses and results with the practical work of the actor, dramaturge
and director (Pavis 1985). But it would be nave to think that one will
solve the problems of theory just by describing the process of
production. It is not enough to follow carefully the preparations for the
performance, to be among the actors, directors, musicians, as we are
during the International School of Theatre Anthropology (ISTA). We
also, and first and foremost, need theoretical tools in order to analyse
the operations involved. One has to be able to help a `genuine' audience
understand the meaning of the production (and the production of
meaning). How can the production be described and interpreted from
the point of a single spectator receiving the production as an aesthetic
object? Instead of looking for further refinement of western
performance analysis, we can institute another approach, the study of
intercultural theatre, in the hope that it will produce a new way of
understanding theatre practice and will thus contribute to promoting a
new methodology of performance analysis. In order to encompass this
overflow of experiences, the theoretician needs a model with the
patience and attention to minute detail of the hourglass.
CULTURE AND MISE EN SCNE 3
AN HOURGLASS READY FOR EVERYTHING
We count the minutes we have left to live, and we shake our
hourglass to hasten it along.
Alfred de Vigny
`An hourglass? Dear Alfred, what is an hourglass?' ask the younger
generation with their quartz watches.
It is a strange object, reminiscent of a funnel and a mill (see Fig. 1.1).
In the upper bowl is the foreign culture, the source culture, which is
more or less codified and solidified in diverse anthropological,
sociocultural or artistic modelizations. In order to reach us, this culture
must pass through a narrow neck. If the grains of culture or their
conglomerate are sufficiently fine, they will flow through without any
trouble, however slowly, into the lower bowl, that of the target culture,
from which point we observe this slow flow; The grains will rearrange
themselves in a way which appears random, but which is partly
regulated by their passage through some dozen filters put in place by the
target culture and the observer.2
Figure 1.1 The hourglass of cultures
The hourglass presents two risks. If it is only a mill, it will blend the
source culture, destroy its every specificity and drop into the lower
bowl an inert and deformed substance which will have lost its original
modeling without being molded into that of the target culture. If it is
4 THEATRE AT THE CROSSROADS OF CULTURE
only a funnel, it will indiscriminately absorb the initial substance
without reshaping it through the series of filters or leaving any trace of
the original matter.
This book is devoted to the study of this hourglass and the filters
interposed between `our' culture and that of others, to these
accommodating obstacles which check and fix the grains of culture and
reconstitute sedimentary beds, themselves aspects and layers of culture.
The better to show the relativity of the notion of culture and the
complicated relationship that we have with it, we will focus here on the
intercultural transfer between source and target culture. We will
investigate how a target culture analyses and appropriates a foreign
culture and how this appropriation is accompanied by a series of
theatrical operations.
This appropriation of the other culture is never definitive, however. It
is turned upside-down as soon as the users of a foreign culture ask
themselves how they can communicate their own culture to another target
culture. The hourglass is designed to be turned upside-down, to question
once again every sedimentation, to flow indefinitely from one culture to
the other.
What theory is, so to speak, contained in the hourglass? It has
become almost impossible to represent other than in the metaphoric
form of an hourglass. It includes a semiotic model of the production and
reception of the performance (Pavis 1985) in which one can particularly
study the reception of a performance and the transfer from one culture
to the other.
Can the most complex case of theatre production, i.e. interculturalism,
be of any use for the development and déblocage of the current theory of
performance? It certainly forces the analyst to reconsider his own
cultural parameters and his viewing habits, to accept elements he3 does
not fully understand, to complement and activate the mise en scne.
Barba's practice (at the ISTA), his trial-and-error method, his search for
a resistance, his confrontation, with a puzzle-like use of bricolage, with
several traditions at the same time, enable us to understand the making
and the reception of a mise en scne, which can no longer be `decoded'
from one single and legitimate point of view.
The fact that other cultures have gradually permeated our own leads
(or should lead) us to abandon or relativize any dominant western (or
Eurocentric) universalizing view.
The notion of mise en scne remains, however, central to the theory of
intercultural theatre, because it is bound to the practical, pragmatic
aspect of putting systems of signs together and organizing them from a
CULTURE AND MISE EN SCNE 5
semiotic point of view, i.e. of giving them productive and receptive
pertinence.
Mise en scne is a kind of réglage (`fine-tuning') between different
contexts and cultures; it is no longer only a question of intercultural
exchange or of a dialectics between text and context; it is a mediation
between different cultural backgrounds, traditions and methods of
acting. Thus its appearance towards the end of the nineteenth century is
also the consequence of the disappearance of a strong western tradition,
of a certain unified acting style, which makes the presence of an
`author' of the performance, in the figure of the director, indispensable.
CAVITY, CRUCIBLE, CROSSING,
CROSSROADS
Theatre is a crucible of civilizations. It is a place for human
communication.
Victor Hugo
Is the hourglass the same top and bottom? Yes, but only in appearance.
For one ought not to focus solely on the grains, tiny atoms of meaning;
it is necessary to investigate their combination, their capacity for
gathering in conglomerates and in strata whose thickness and
composition are variable but not arbitrary. The sand in the hourglass
prevents us from believing navely in the melting pot, in the crucible
where cultures would be miraculously melted and reduced to a radically
different substance, Pace Victor, there is no theatre in the crucible of a
humanity where all specificity melts into a universal substance, or in the
warm cavity of a familiarly cupped hand. It is at the crossing of ways,
of traditions, of artistic practices that we can hope to grasp the distinct
hybridization of cultures, and bring together the winding paths of
anthropology, sociology and artistic practices.
Crossroads refers partly to the crossing of the ways, partly to the
hybridization of races and traditions. This ambiguity is admirably suited
to a description of the links between cultures: for these cultures meet
either by passing close by one another or by reproducing thanks to
crossbreeding. All nuances are possible, as we shall see.
In taking intercultural theatre and mise en scne as its subject, this
book has selected a figuration at once eternal and new: eternal, because
theatrical performance has always mixed traditions and diverse styles,
translated from one language or discourse into another, covered space
6 THEATRE AT THE CROSSROADS OF CULTURE
and time in every direction; new, because western mise en scne, itself a
recent notion, has made use of these meetings of performances and
traditions in a conscious, deliberate and aesthetic manner only since the
experiments by the multicultural groups of Barba, Brook or
Mnouchkine (to cite only the most visible artists that interest us here).
In this book, we will be studying only situations of exchange in one
direction from a source culture, a culture foreign to us (westerners), to a
target culture, western culture, in which the artists work and within
which the target audience is situated.
The context of these studies can be easily circumscribed: France
between 1968 and 1988, with some geographic forays. After maximal
openness in 1968, there followed the `leaden years' (années de plomb)
of artistic and ideological isolation, elimination of dialectic thought and
historicized dramaturgy, the last sparks of theoretical fireworks, the end
of a radical way of thinking about culture which was still that of Freud
and Artaud. From 1973 to 1981, the retreat of ideology and historicity
became even more pronounced, communication advisers and sponsors
gave us our daily bread, the economic crisis slowed down initiatives;
foreign cultures were perceived more as a threat or an object of
exploitation than as partners in exchange; this general numbness, this
jaded lack of differentiation, this theoretical droning none the less did
not prevent certain more or less subsidized artists from attempting a
cultural exchange; geography and anthropology replaced a failing
history. From 1981 to 1988, the French socialist experiment exploded a
last taboo (so-called socialist chaos), but came up against the hard
realities of management, tasted the social democracy of ideas; the
debate on the relativity of cultures and on La Défaite de la pensée (`The
defeat of thought') by Alain Finkielkraut (1987) managed to compress
every historicizing perspective, but rediscovered geographical and
cultural horizons, which it recuperated with a postmodern scepticism
and functionalism. Culture is at the center of all these debates:
everything is cultural, but where has theatrical culture gone?
CULTURE AND ITS DOUBLES
Never before, when it is life itself that is threatened, has so
much been said about civilization and culture. And there is
a strange parallelism between this generalized collapse of
life, which is the basis for the current demoralization and
CULTURE AND MISE EN SCNE 7
the concern of a culture that has never merged with life, and
which is made to dictate to life.
Antonin Artaud (Theatre and its Double)
Let us admit it (and not without apologizing to Antonin): our western
culture, be it modern or postmodern, is certainly tired; theory aspires in
vain to encompass all questions posed by the scope of the concept. The
concepts it opposes are just as varied, whether it be life (Artaud), nature
(Lévi-Strauss), technology (McLuhan), civilization (Elias, Marcuse),
chaos, entropy or non-culture (Lotman). In theatre, the definition is still
sharper and the exclusion more marked, since the first cultural act
consists of tracing a circle around the stage event and thus of separating
performance from non-performance, culture from non-culture, interior
from exterior, the object of the gaze from the gazer.
Before following the flow of sand from one bowl to the other and
tracing the series of filters and deposits, it is perhaps useful to mobilize
for theatre and mise en scne some of the definitions and problematics
which the notion of culture in anthropology and sociology offers. The
excellent synthesis of Camille Camilleri (1982) is illuminating here: we
will consider in turn culturalist conceptions and sociological
approaches, before examining how we might find them again at each
level of the hourglass, and whether it is possible to attempt to
differentiate them.
Culturalist premises
Cultural anthropology, particularly in America (Benedict, Mead,
Kardiner), investigates culture with regard to the coherence of the group
within the sum of the norms and symbols that structure the emotions
and instincts of individuals: it `attempts to discover the characteristics
of a culture through the study of its manifestations in individuals and in
its influences on their behavior' (Panoff and Perrin). Globally, one
might say that culture is a signifying system (a modeling system, in
Lotman's sense), thanks to which a society or a group understands itself
in its relationship with the world. As Clifford Geertz has it:
A culture is a system of symbols by which man confers
significance upon his own experience. Symbol systems, mancreated,
shared, conventional, ordered, and indeed learned,
provide human beings with a meaningful framework for orienting
8 THEATRE AT THE CROSSROADS OF CULTURE
themselves to one another, to the world around them and to
themselves.
(1973:250)
More specific definitions, inspired by Camilleri's reflections, will
enable us to become aware of the ramifications of culture at all levels of
the theatrical enterprise.
Definition 1
`Culture is a kind of bent, of foreseeable determinations, which our
representations, feelings, modes of conduct, in general all the aspects of
our psyche and even of biological organism, take on under the influence
of the group' (Camilleri 1982:16),
Transposed to the stage, one might observe that every element, living
or inanimate, of the performance is subject to a similar determination; it
is reworked, cultivated, inscribed in a meaningful totality. The dramatic
text includes countless deposits, which are as many traces of these
determinations; the actors' bodies, in training or in performance, are as
though `penetrated' by the `body techniques' belonging to their culture,
to a performance tradition or an acculturation. It is (almost) impossible
to unravel this complex and compact body, whose origin can no longer
be seen.
Definition 2
`This determination is common to members of the same group'
(Camilleri 1982:16). Actors also possess a culture, which is that of their
own group and which they acquire especially during the preparatory
phase of the mise en scne. This process of inculturation, conscious or
unconscious, makes them assimilate the traditions and (especially
corporal, vocal and rhetorical) techniques of the group. Because actors
belong to a certain culture, they have convictions and expectations,
techniques and habits, which they cannot do without. Actors are thus
defined by `body techniques' (Mauss 1936), which can be got rid of
only with difficulty and which are inscribed by the culture on their
bodies, then on the performance. According to Barba, part of the actor's
work consists of undoing this natural acculturation, or this everyday
behavior, so as to acquire a new `body technique.' Even naturalist
actors, who ought to be free of this constraint by virtue of their
CULTURE AND MISE EN SCNE 9
mimeticism and supposed `spontaneity,' are subject to a repertoire of
signs, attitudes, `authenticity effects.'
Definition 3
`Cultural order is artificial in the proper sense of that term, that is, made
by human art. It is distinct from the natural order' (Camilleri 1982:16).
Culture is opposed to nature, the acquired to the innate, artifice and
creation to spontaneity. This is the meaning of Lévi-Strauss' celebrated
opposition:
everything universal in humankind relates to the natural order and
is characterized by spontaneity, everything subject to a norm is
cultural and is both relative and particular.
(1949:10; 1969:8).
What heredity determines in human beings is the general aptitude
to acquire any culture whatever; the specific culture, however,
depends on random factors of birth and on the society in which
one is raised.
(1983:40; 1984:18)
In theatre, stage and actor play on this ambiguity of the natural milieu
and the artificial, constructed object. Everything tends to transform
itself into a sign, to become semiotic. Even the natural utilization of the
actor's body is inscribed in a mechanism of meaning, which claims from
the reluctant flesh its share of artificiality and codification.
Definition 4
`Culture is transmitted by what has since been called "social heredity":
a certain number of techniques by means of which each generation
makes possible the later generation's internalization of the common
determination of the psyche and organism, which make up culture'
(Camilleri 1982:16­17).
In the mise en scne, one cannot establish the internalization of
techniques quite so clearly. On the other hand, certain performance
traditions in the most codified and stabilized genres transmit these
techniques, and the players internalize, incorporate, a style of
performance (such as the commedia dell'arte or Peking Opera).
10 THEATRE AT THE CROSSROADS OF CULTURE
Definition 5
Certain cultures are essentially defined by national characteristics,
which are sometimes opposed to cultural minorities, the better to affirm
themselves (see Chapter 7). These majority cultures are sometimes so
powerful that they are capable of appropriating-- in the negative sense
this time--foreign cultures, and transforming them according to their
own majority interests. We are so much caught in the network of our
national cultural modelizations, Eurocentric in this case, that we find it
difficult to conceive of the study of performance or of a theatrical genre
within a perspective other than that of our acquaintance with the
European practice of theatre.
From these definitions inspired by cultural anthropology flows a
series of consequences linked to the following general hypothesis:
`Cultures are without doubt the principal means that humankind has
invented to regulate its amorphous psychic form, so as to give itself a
minimal psychic homogeneity that makes group life possible'
(Camilleri 1982:18).
A. This regulation by culture is both a repression of individual,
instinctive spontaneity and an expression of human creativity:
Civilization is built upon a renunciation of instinct...it
presupposes precisely the non-satisfaction (by suppression,
repression, or some other means) of powerful instincts.
(Freud 1961:97)
There is no document of civilization which is not at the same time
a document of barbarism.
(Benjamin 1969:256)
In theatre, this regulation is assured by the mise en scne, which
prevents any one sign system from taking on unlimited or unilateral
importance. The function of the director is relegated to a physical
absence, to a superego that does not directly display itself. The real
authority is thus internalized and `civilized.' This is the `discreet charm
of good staging.'
B. The principle of internalization of authority consists in accepting
the repressive and expressive function of culture. The mise en scne
regroups directives in order to put on the performance, accepting the
constraints of meaning. Likewise, actors internalize the sum of rules of
behavior, habits of performance. They accept the ephemeral nature of
CULTURE AND MISE EN SCNE 11
theatre, the way it cannot be stored, grasped or memorized. These are
the unwritten laws, which control everything and which are permanent:
`What is of short duration,' writes Eugenio Barba, `is not theatre, but
performance. Theatre is made of traditions, conventions, institutions,
habits, which are permanent in time' (1988:26). This is the phenomenon
of internalization of authority, which should inspire a `negative'
semiotics capable of indicating what is hidden in the sign, what makes a
sign without signaling it, what the actor or the stage shows while hiding
it.
All these definitions accentuate the cultural unity of humankind, but
they tend to isolate it from its sociohistorical context, grasping it only
on a very abstract anthropological level. These definitions need
therefore to be completed (and not replaced) by a sociological
approach, better grounded in history and ideological context.
Sociohistorical premises
The ideological, especially the Marxist, approach tends to be
undermined by the very fact of being opened up to foreign cultures and
to the enlargement of the anthropological notion of culture. In the
process, the notions of group, subgroup, subculture or minority tend to
replace those of classes in conflict. Conversely, Marxist sociology has
too often simplified the debate and proposed ready-made answers
without a knowledge of all the implications of the cultural debate. To
say, for example, that, `in Marxist terms, culture is the ideological
superstructure, in a given civilization, relative to the material
infrastructure of society' (art. `culture,' Dictionnaire Marabout), does
not help to clarify the cultural mechanisms at work. It would be
necessary to show that culture conditions and is also conditioned by
social action, of which it is the cause and the consequence.
I have elsewhere proposed a theory of ideologemes and their function
in the ideological and fictional construction of the dramatic and
performance text (Pavis 1985:290­4). But that was within the
perspective of the dramatic text's inscription within history rather than
within culture. The phenomena are obviously still more complex when
they are considered within very different, especially extra-European,
cultural contexts. It is therefore necessary to imagine a theory of
mediation, of exchange, of intercultural transfer, a `culture of links' in
Brook's sense (Brook 1987:239), i.e. `between man and society,
between one race and another, between micro- and macrocosm, between
humanity and machinery, between the visible and invisible, between
12 THEATRE AT THE CROSSROADS OF CULTURE
categories, languages, genres' (1987:239). The image of the hourglass
emerges once again, as a means of understanding the dynamic of the
flow and the successive deposits. We will examine each step of the
cultural transfer, noting which conception of culture is presupposed by
each operation at each level of the hourglass (see Fig. 1.1)
(1), (2) Cultural and/or artistic modeling. An initial difficulty,
particularly in our western societies, consists in marking the points of
modeling, whether in the source culture (1), (2) or in the target (10A),
(10B), which are clearly specific either to an artistic activity or to a
codification proper to a subgroup or given culture. With the
multiplication of subgroups and subcultures, culture, especially national
culture, can only with difficulty integrate and reflect the sum of
particular or minority codifications. As Camilleri writes, culture tends
`to become what would be common to the subgroups that constitute
society, once we have separated out the differences. But this common
content becomes more and more difficult to define' (1982:23). In
contemporary mise en scne, it is practically impossible to understand
what a commercial play, an operetta, an avant-garde play or a Bunraku
performance have in common, not only because of the artistic
codifications at work, which are extremely varied, but also because of
their ideological and aesthetic function.
In short, the difficulty in all these examples is to grasp the connection
between artistic modeling on the one hand and sociological and/or
anthropological modeling on the other. We can observe that
comprehension of specifically artistic codes generates an interest in the
comprehension of cultural and sociological codes in general, and
conversely the knowledge of general cultural codes is indispensable to
the comprehension of specifically artistic codes. The fact of grasping
the symbolic functioning of a society (1) invites one to perceive artistic
codifications in particular (2). In tackling source and target cultures, we
are on the other hand led to compare the relationship of (1) and (2)
specific to each culture with the slippage which is produced when the
source culture is received in the target culture, thus the relationships
between (1) and (2) as well as among (10A), (10B) and (10C). We have
thus to determine how we recognize a foreign culture, what indices,
stereotypes, presuppositions we associate with it, how we construct it
from our point of view, even at the risk of being ethnocentric.
(3) Perspective of the adapters. As soon as we are asked to take
account of this segmentation of modeling--for example, when trying to
convey a foreign culture to our western tradition--it becomes difficult
CULTURE AND MISE EN SCNE 13
to find a unifying point of view; the result is a relativism in concepts of
culture and the real.
We in industrial or at least western societies are witness today to a
segmentation of systems of thought. As there cannot be several
truths on the same point, one gets used to thinking that these
systems (themselves often relative to the subcultures of different
subgroups, in particular sociopolitical groups) are simply points
of view on the real, and to reconnecting these systems to thinking
subjects. Hence the appearance of the spirit of relativism, which
goes hand in hand with the progress of disenchantment
[désacralisation].
(Camilleri 1982:23)
Relativism is particularly evident in what has been called the
postmodern mise en scne of the classics: the rejection of any
centralizing and committed reading, the leveling of codes, the undoing
of discursive hierarchies, the rejection of a separation between `high'
culture and mass culture are all symptoms of the relativization of points
of view. We are no longer encumbered with the scruples of a Marx, who
sees in classical (for example, Greek) art a high culture admittedly
distorted by class, but above all a potential universality, which ought to
be preserved. At the moment, the split between tried and tested classical
values and modern values to be tested no longer exists; we no longer
believe in the geographical, temporal or thematic universality of the
classics. Their mise en scne opts for a resolutely relativist and
consumerist attitude, which is postmodern since their only value now
resides in their integration into a discourse that is obsessed neither by
meaning, nor by truth, nor by totality, nor by coherence.
(4) The perspective of the adapters and their work of adaptation and
interpretation are influenced by `high' culture, that is the culture of a
limited subgroup, which possesses (or arrogates to itself) knowledge,
education and power of decision. This `concentrated' culture becomes a
methodological code, an expertise the mastery of which enables us to
deepen our knowledge: `we acquire schemas of thinking, equipment
which permits us to discover other information based on this initial
knowledge and thus to deepen the analysis' (Camilleri 1982:25). This
conception is not far from Lotman's semiotic conception of culture: a
hierarchy of partial signifying systems, of a sum of texts and an
assortment of functions corresponding to them, and finally a mechanism
generating these texts (Lotman 1976).
14 THEATRE AT THE CROSSROADS OF CULTURE
This methodological code, this expertise, is often a `cultural cipher'
(Bourdieu) which enables the act of deciphering: it is sometimes also
the instrument of one subgroup against the others. As Michel de Certeau
remarks, cultivated people `conform to a model elaborated in societies
stratified by a category which has introduced its norms at the point
where it imposed its power' (1974:235). The difficulty is often in
guessing where expertise becomes power, in noting the fluctuations of
the code and the powers it confers. Take the example of the treatment of
the classics: during the era of Jean Vilar's `popular theatre,' the classics
were presented implicitly as a universal good, but in reality they
represented a cultural good whose acquisition led to social promotion. At
the moment, postmodern utilization of these same classical goods no
longer attempts to give the audience cultural baggage or political arms,
but to manipulate codes and to relativize every message, especially
political messages.
(5) The preparatory work of the actors does not simply involve
rehearsal or the choice of a theatrical form (6), but the actor's entire
culture, `theatrical knowledge, which transmits from generation to
generation the living work of art that is the actor' (Barba 1989:64). The
actor accomplishes the semiotic project of culture conceived as the
memory storage (mise en mémoire) of past information and the
generation of future information. According to Barba, culture is in this
sense always `the capacity of adapting to and modifying the
environment, as a means of organizing and exchanging numerous
individual and collective activities, the capacity to transmit collective
`wisdom,' the fruit of different experiences and different technical
expertises' (1982:122). The culture of the actor, especially the western
actor, is not always readable or codified according to a sum of stable
and recurring rules and practices. But even western actors are not
protected by a dominant style or fashion, or by body techniques or
specific codifications, but are impregnated by formulas, habits of work,
which belong to the anthropological and sociological codifications of
their milieu, imperceptible codifications which try to escape notice, the
better to proclaim the original genius of the actors, but which are in
reality omnipresent and can be easily picked up and parodied.
(7) The theatrical representation/performance of culture obliges us to
find specific dramatic means to represent or perform a foreign or
domestic culture, to utilize theatre as an instrument to transmit and
produce information on the conveyed culture.4 Theatre can resolve one
of anthropology's difficulties: translating/visualizing abstract elements
of a culture, as a system of beliefs and values, by using concrete means:
CULTURE AND MISE EN SCNE 15
for example, performing instead of explaining a ritual, showing rather
than expounding the social conditions of individuals, using an
immediately readable gestus. The mise en scne and theatrical
performance are always a stage translation (thanks to the actor and all
the elements of the performance) of another cultural totality (text,
adaptation, body). When one remembers, following Lotman, that
cultural appropriation of reality takes place in the form of a translation
of an extract of reality into a text, one understands that the mise en
scne or intercultural transposition is a fortiori a translation in the form
of an appropriation of a foreign culture with its own modeling.
(8) The term `appropriation' sufficiently indicates that the adapter
and the receptor take possession of the source culture according to their
own perspectives; hence the risk of ethnocentrism, Eurocentrism in this
case. This Eurocentrism is not so much a rejection of eastern forms as a
myopic view of other forms and especially conceptual tools different
from those in Europe, an inability to conceptualize cultural modeling,
western and eastern, theoretically and globally. Until the conceptual
tools (extremely problematic in their very hybridization) which would
do justice to the western and eastern context become available,
intercultural communication needs reception-adapters, `conducting
elements' that facilitate the passage from one world to the other. These
adapters allow for the reconstruction of a series of methodological
principles on the basis of the source culture and for their adaptation to
the target culture:
Discovering the secret of some fascinating exotic dance does not
mean that one can easily import it: one would have grasped at
most an inspiration, a utopia or more exactly a series of
methodological principles subject to reconstruction in the context
of our culture.
(Volli 1985:113)
Whatever the nature of this adaptation--character, dramaturgy
(Shakespeare as dramaturgical model for the Indiade or for the
adaptation of the Mahabkarata), these adapters are always placed
beside receptors simplifying and modeling some key elements of the
source culture. In this sense, the adapters necessarily have an
ethnocentric position but, conscious of this distorting perspective, they
can relativize the discrepancy and make one aware of differences.
(9) Moments of readability are also responsible for relativizing the
production of meaning and the level of reading that varies from one
16 THEATRE AT THE CROSSROADS OF CULTURE
culture to the other. They respond to the crisis of the transcendental and
universal subject which claimed, in the name of universal Cartesian
reason and of centralized raison d'état, to reduce all differences: `All
"general" human formations rebound against humanity if they are not
reappropriated every day by the concrete subject, in everyday
operations' (Camilleri 1982:29).
The theory of levels of readability explains how the receiver more or
less freely decides at which level (for example, narrative, thematic,
formal, ideological, sociocultural, etc.) to read the cultural facts
presented by the mise en scne. This theory presupposes an
epistemological concern to possess the cultural means of knowing the
other, and which aspects of the other. Cultural transfer most often takes
place due to a change in the level of readability, which profoundly
modifies the reception of the work (10). The change in the level of
readability often corresponds to an ideological struggle between
dominant and dominated cultures. In the transfer from (1), (2) to (10),
certain elements are assimilated and disappear; these are what
Dalrymple (1987) calls Residual ideology,' the residue of ideas and
practices in a culture which belong to another social formation. Other
elements, on the contrary, emerge and are integrated into the dominant
ideology in (10): this emergent ideology can become a normative model
of sociological (10B) or more generally cultural (10C) codification
(Dalrymple 1987:136).
(10) Examining the cultural confrontation in (1)­(2) and (10), we
choose to compare, to evaluate and to set up a dialogue between source
and target cultures, but this confrontation has so to speak been
attenuated by the filters from (3) to (9) which prepare the terrain and
gradually transform the source culture, or referred culture, into the
reception culture in which we find ourselves. Instead of avoiding this
confrontation, it is useful to seek it out. It is necessary to pre-empt the
demagogy that consists of rejecting comparison, in order not to risk
imposing a hierarchy or setting a value on the confronted cultures, a
demagogy that leads to cultural relativism and so to a lack of
differentiation. Since Todorov has adequately criticized this rejection, it
is unnecessary to return to it (Todorov 1986:10­13). Encouraged by
Todorov and Finkielkraut, Montaigne and Lévi-Strauss, in the excellent
company of Brook, Barba and Mnouchkine, we have dared to compare
two or more cultures in manifestly asymmetrical positions, where one
appropriates the other and the target stage receives the whole mix at the
crossroads of discourses and cultures. It is up to others to judge whether
this theatrical confrontation leads to a generalized acculturation or
CULTURE AND MISE EN SCNE 17
mutual destruction, or rather to an amorous encounter (this deliciously
vague metaphor has been deliberately chosen), a `bricolage' (LéviStrauss),
Eurasian theatre (in Barba's case), a `culture of links' (Brook
1987:239) or an `influence' of eastern theatre (Mnouchkine 1982:8). In
reality, the hourglass is sufficiently complex to avoid a direct
confrontation between peoples, languages or ethical values. Instead we
compare theatrical forms and practices (between (2) and (10A),
modelizations and codifications capable of being engaged and
intertwined with each other (instead of merging together).
(11) Given and anticipated consequences. After the sand has filtered
from one bowl of the hourglass to the other, the spectators are the final
and only guarantors of the culture which reaches them, whether it be
foreign or familiar. Once the performance is complete, all the sand rests
on the spectator's frail shoulders. Everything depends on what the
spectator has remembered and forgotten. Whence Edouard Henriot's
perfect quip: `culture is what remains when one has forgotten
everything, what is missing when one has learnt everything'! After this
continuous flow of the grains of culture, when the sand castles which
are the mises en scne have collapsed, the spectators are finally
compelled to accept the fact that the performance is transformed in them,
that it succeeds or founders in them, and that it wipes itself out to be
reborn. Spectators must welcome forgetfulness, which sifts everything
for them, buries them alive in the sand; a forgetfulness which will
eventually mitigate suffering. This forgetfulness is a savior and God
knows what one can forget at the theatre (thank God)! Thus, the culture
that the spectators reconstitute and which in turn constitutes them as
spectating subjects is in perpetual mutation; it passes through selective
amnesia: `the essential dimension of the theatrical performance resists
time, not by being fixed in a recording, but by transforming itself'
(Barba 1988:27).
It therefore becomes difficult to follow these transformations of
memory, to predict how the spectators will organize their reading,
whether they will accept or reject the series of filters that have
predetermined and selected cultural and especially foreign material. It is
still more problematic to determine what course the performance will
take within the spectators: `Spectators, as individuals, decide the issue of
depth: that is, how far the performance has managed to sink its roots
into particular individual memories' (Barba 1988:27), Despite this
relativity in the depth of the performance's penetration in us, it is
always culturally pertinent to see what the spectators retain and what
they exclude, how they define culture and non-culture, what beckons
18 THEATRE AT THE CROSSROADS OF CULTURE
them, what they do not pick up. The receiver--whether envisaged as a
customer-king, a pig of a paymaster, a flock of sheep (`tas de veaux')
(Cyrano de Bergerac, I, 2) or, more seldom, a partner--is at present an
object often pursued by the covetous eyes of theory and cosmopolitan
producers. But this sudden concern, this discovery of the spectator's
freedom of choice and productivity, often leads to an anti-theoretical
and anti-explanatory conception of art. Meanings belong to the realm of
self-service, we are continually told. Perhaps, but do we still have to go
past the cash register? `Theatre should not interpret, it ought to give us
the opportunity of contemplating a work and thinking about it,' as the
great Bob Wilson warns us (1987:208). So, let us contemplate....
All these testimonies apparently revalorize the function of the
spectator and the receiver, but they also lead to relativism and
theoretical skepticism. Reception theory cancels itself if it confers on
the receivers the absolute power of following their critical course
without taking the objective givens of the work into account, under the
pretext that, exposed to the whims of the text, they can pick and choose
in the self-service of meaning. We will have the chance, in the body of
this book, to return to this postmodern relativism which often takes the
guise of the intercultural, the better to disguise an anti-historical and
relativist discourse, in which works and their contexts are no longer
anything but pleasing pretexts for undifferentiated diversions, deferred
rendezvous at the crossroads of a nebulous postmodernity.
NOTES
1. We should make the following distinctions: the intracultural dimension
refers to the traditions of a single nation, which are very often almost
forgotten or deformed, and have to be reconstructed
the transcultural transcends particular cultures and looks for a
universal human condition, as in the case of Brook's notion of `culture of
links,' which supposedly unites all human beings beyond their ethnic
differences and which can be directly transmitted to any audience
without distinction of race, culture or class
the ultracultural could be called the somewhat mystical quest for the
origin of theatre, the search for a primal language in the sense of Artaud.
In Brook's Orghast (1970), Serban's Medea and The Trojan Women,
Ronconi's Oresteia (1972), we had such a quest for a universal language
of sounds and emotions, as if all human experience sprang from the same
source
CULTURE AND MISE EN SCNE 19
the precultural, which Barba calls the pre-expressive, would be the
common ground of any tradition in the world, which affects any
audience, `before' (temporally and logically) it is individualized and
`culturalized' in a specific cultural tradition
the postcultural would apply to the postmodern imagination,
which tends to view any cultural act as a quotation of restructuring of
already known elements
the metacultural aspects refer to the commentary a given culture can
make on other cultural elements, when explaining, comparing and
commenting on it.
2. It is therefore almost impossible to separate source culture from target
culture. But one can, at least, observe how the source culture is
appropriated step by step by the target culture. This does not mean,
however, that we are using a model borrowed from the theory of
communication which studies the transfer of information between sender
and receiver. Each level of the hourglass (i.e. each `layer') must be seen
as also determined by the levels of the opposite bowl.
It is true, as Fischer-Lichte notes, that `the foreign text or the foreign
theatrical conventions are chosen according to their relevance to the
situation in question; transformed and replanted' (1990:284). But we
would not draw the same conclusions, since, according to Fischer-Lichte,
It makes little sense, therefore, to speak of the source text
and the target text, even less of a source culture or target
culture, as should be the case when the foreign is to be
communicated in translation. This is due to the fact that the
source culture and the target culture are one and the same
thing, i.e. the culture.
(1990:284)
This would seem to lead all too quickly to giving up any theory of
the transfer. The translation model itself is only a particular case
of the general model of cultural transfer, which manifests itself in
translation, mise en scne, intercultural exchange, etc. Moreover,
in our culture, we are still quite able to make a distinction between
native elements and imported elements. Source culture and target
culture are never blended into one, other than in the case of
complete annihilation (Marvin Carlson's second category where
foreign elements [are] assimilated into the tradition and absorbed
by it. The audience can be interested, entertained, stimulated, but
they are not challenged by the foreign materials' (1990:50). In
this case we cannot speak of intercultural exchanges). For our
20 THEATRE AT THE CROSSROADS OF CULTURE
hourglass model of intercultural exchange, we no longer need a
theory of `productive reception' (Pavis 1985: 233­96) and we
should resist the temptation to reduce the exchange and the theory
to a single pole of reception/target culture. Even if the source
culture is almost assimilated and reconstructed by the target
culture, we should still look for the means to describe its
modelization and possible reconstruction. What we enumerate in
the lower bowl of the hourglass (`layers' (3) to (11)) should
therefore also be distinguished and studied--even if only in a
tentative reconstruction from the viewpoint of our target culture.
3. I am using he/his since I am a male critic. I am aware that it could also be
she/her, but I would like to speak from my own point of view rather than
repeat in each sentence he/she since the text would then become
repetitive and hard to follow.
4. I use the notion of representation both in the meaning of a stage
performance (représentation in French) and in that of `being replaced or
depicted by something,' as Marx uses it in The 18 Brumaire of Louis
Bonaparte (`Sie können sich nicht vertreten, sie müssen vertreten
werden'). The representation of a culture thus refers to all texts which
depict it, in the sense of Said's notion of orientalism, i.e. of texts exterior
to it, which are supposed to describe it adequately. The texts of the
represented culture are `found just as prominently in the so-called
truthful text (histories, philological analyses, political treatises) as in the
avowedly artistic (i.e. openly imaginative) text' (1978:21), As in the case
of orientalism, `the things to look at are style, figures of speech, setting,
narrative devices, historical and social circumstances, not the correctness
of the representation nor its fidelity to some great original' (1978:21).
Thus, in order to describe/represent the foreign culture, we have to look
for its conventions, codification, modelizations, i.e. for its forms and
codes.
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