“There is a special and perfect order within the playing space. Through the intimate relationship between the concept of playing and order, the former one transfers itself on the area of aesthetics. Playing inclines towards beauty… The concepts that determine the elements of playing mainly belong to the sphere of aesthetics: tension, balance, fluctuation, alternation, contrast, diversity, attachment, dissolution and solution. Playing binds and undoes, it fascinates.”
The 31st traditional
Brassai-days took place in May 2002 in the Brassai S. Highschool . This time
the row of shows was enriched with the apparition of an amateur acting company,
which came to life by meeting the “strange” ideas of two language teachers.
There have been some students
who spontaneously acted their role-play during the language-classes as if they
have created the roles themselves, as if they have forgotten the expectations
of the teachers. They were playing for themselves. They were our first actors,
16-17 year old students, they didn’t really know each other as they belonged to
different classes.
We have been concentrating on
a bilingual character and this is how the name Duodrama has come to life.
We are not taking into consideration the original meaning of the words, in our
case it should refer to the parallel usage of the English and German in the
same space. We have been looking for such texts belonging to the two language
areas, which coincide in their symbolical, existential and human contents. This
is how we came across Chaucer and Till Eulenspiegel, as well as
medieval morality plays. During the language-classes we have dealt with both
Chaucer and Till. Some figures of human weakness appeared in the performance of
the earlier mentioned Brassai-days, like the Drunker, The Gambler, Perjury in
person and among these Till, the cheater and revealer in the same time.
A painting by Bruegel
lead to the idea of a “theatre within a theatre” - like inn-scene. This is how
one of Till’s well known jokes came to
We knowingly separated
ourselves from the clichés of the traditional way of acting in our school, from
the festivity hall and its stage, where the red curtain usually falls down at
the end of the performances. We tried instead to select the background and
settings based on the text, on its given symbols, on creating a world while
reading and acting it. The inn atmosphere is created through different little
objects, all of them symbols of human types, by smelly food, by the mirrors
used for self-revealing as Till Eulenspiegel’s name reflects this meaning. “The
space-dynamics of the production is projecting the drama like a metaphor.”
(Grotowski)
We’ve tried to specify this
new school-drama genre we are producing under the name of site-specific
acting. We also have some attempts of making its meaning clearer:
thus we’d rather link our last year’s performance to the Schechnerian
theatre-theory. It reflects both the teachers’ and the students’ expectations.
Unlike the mimetic theatre this different kind of playing requires authentic
playing, which spontaneously came out from the students’ little group. These
children belong to a generation, which still can be referred to with Schechner’s
words in the 70’s: “Youth attempts to completeness, but it has no personal
experience in connection with culture.” In the same time the wish to reach
completeness gives them cultural bases and “culture comes to life while
playing”. (Huizinga)
It is a cultural cliché to
sharply separate the audience and the players and some others who are neither
watching, nor playing. Our first performance was an attempt of building a
bridge across these elements. The mirrors functioned as background reflections,
so the audience could virtually be inside the playing space.
The coordinating teachers
never appear as omnipotent directors, on the contrary they have the role of
mediators. We both experience the benefits of it during the rehearsals and the
show. All the rehearsals took place in classrooms excepting the final one that
preceded the show. We’ve been trying to enforce in the students’ mind the
importance of self-expression helped by associating and the feeling of security
and self-confidence. “The player is constantly searching for his personal
experiences and associations selecting them during each rehearsal… he
learns his role, the score but when that night comes his role-play is still not
entirely planned.” (Artaud)
For us it is the essence of
playing that all the participants should stand on the winner on the winner side
at the end of the events. It is as well important for the Duodrama to
actualize some well-known literary works by playing them. This kind of acting
of course keeps the function of entertaining and entertainment, but it moves
the idea of theatre moves towards reality, towards of the solution of tension
and the anxiety of human condition including the teacher-student relationship.
Our aim is as well to turn the attention to the world of different languages
and to its dramatic functions, as well as the planting the plays into specific
sites of the school. We want to be there with our “acting” in all the suitable
spaces of the school building and to constantly enlarge the number of the
players with new members; the criteria here being the disposition for
self-accomplishment or self-knowledge.
Our second performance made us
somehow reconsider the meaning of school-drama: what is it in fact? What makes
it different from the professional acting, what are its characteristics? Is the
meaning of school-drama the same as school-theatre. Well if it
can be called theatre, surely it is a small-size one where the players are not
professionals at all. This affects their relationship with both: the space and
the audience. The one who plays is a student, those who are watching are mainly
their colleges and teachers, who usually teach both, the actors and a part of
the audience. It is interesting to analyze whether the result is the absence of
reserve or on the contrary a stress, which is known during examination. A
classical theatre is characterized by an impersonal atmosphere referring to the
relationship between actors and audience. Even if it is a studio performance
which implies a reduced place and a low number of visitors it maintains the atmosphere of
strangers, who will usually not meet after the show and will not meet the
actors in their everyday-life. In our case the audience is made up of good
friends and favorite teachers, actually being members of an artificially
created and functioning community within a school. There is an already existing
audience-actor relationship and as a consequence the suitable playing space is
created: “…the essence is to abolish the separate spaces of the auditorium
and of the stage.” (Grotowski)
We changed the space by not
touching it, we simply stepped into it, the hall and the stairs of the main
entrance in our the school are not to be used by students; they can get up to
the first and second floor only using sideways. The playing space which is
obviously an inaccessible world for the students being the symbol of
school-authority can easily be transformed into a different space and time. It
is like magic: the young players seem to experience their feeling of release
from under clichés and conventions. The public is sitting in the same place,
not at all a usual perspective for them either, and they can also feel the
reality and magic of it. This is why the space becomes somehow “dense” and
“compact” (Grotowski), becoming this way an aesthetic space. The
directors of this fantastic transformation are the playing student-actors
themselves. There is no curtain to fall and point out the end of something,
which can’t actually be closed.
The settings are quite absent,
the essence is a view based on speech and acting. We all agreed on searching
for a different color, which is not to be found in the theatrical but within
the essence of theatre. The students liked being the magicians of spaces and
this is how they came to perform their second play: Shakespeare’s Midsummer
Nights Dream. Unfortunately because of the lack of time they could not
fully enjoy the process however they spontaneity was one more time enforced. We
think it important that the student actors instinctively create their role-play
and they constantly return to their still developing teenager selves for
source, for experiences and ideas or even formerly excepted directions. They
know that the reward is self-confidence and trust in the play.
Is school-drama really needed? As far as the students wish to show their personality, to brake through the limits possibly created by language, by the acting space and everyday-tension and as far as they are able to create special sites within a specific school building, the answer is yes. In fact “space is not the site where things are simply displayed, it is a means for things to become possible” (Melreaux-Ponty). The understanding of the Duodrama-workshop depends on a specific space or site, which transfers new senses and connotations to it. Thus the sites of the institution called school become the territory of enlarged culture and of identity.
Documentation:
Johan Huizinga: Homo ludens, Humanitas, Bucuresti, 1998
Jerzy Grotowski: Színház és rituálé, Kalligram, 1999
Balkon, Contemporary Art Review, Cluj, Romania, 2000/4, 64-65
E. Fischer-Lichte: TheaterAvantgarde, Francke Verlag, 1995
© Miklósi Mária, Gergely Andrea, 2002