With Your Brains

8/2/2019 With Your Brains

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With Your Brains & My Body:

The Future Imperfect of Physical Theatre

by John Towsen

(1987)

George Bernard Shaw once explained that his way of joking was

"to tell the truth: it's the funniest joke in the world." Martha Graham,

for her part, claims that "nothing is more revealing than movement."

Most of the performing artists seen in this and previous issues of

Mime Journal be they movers or laughmakers or both would

probably agree.

Call it mime, new vaudeville, clown-theatre, movement theatre, orsimply physical theatre, there is no denying that it has given our

contemporary performing arts scene a much needed shot of

adrenalin. Audiences have discovered something unique about these

artists be they Bill Irwin or Daniel Stein whose entire being is

invested in a live and highly physicalized performance, who work

independently of stunt doubles, flattering camera angles, and

assorted technological tricks. Shaw and Graham notwithstanding, it

would no doubt be extremist of me to grant these innovative artists amonopoly on the truth. If, however, the medium is indeed the

message, then perhaps audiences are beginning to equate the

"honesty" of performance technique with the honesty of a show's

dramatic content.

Comedians are not always physical and mime not always funny, but

what they do share is the risk inherent in an unpredictable, anythingmight-happen performance. A movement artist literally totters on the

brink of disaster, investing every fiber of muscle, every neural

ending in the successful completion of a long and exhausting display

of biomechanical marvels. Clowns and comics gleefully batter down

the fourth wall, boldly inviting the audience into the conversation.


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They all do what they do in the here and now, day in and day out.

No second takes, no splicing and editing, no laugh track.

Today they are the exception to the rule, and that alone may explain

their renewed popularity. Buster Keaton only used a stuntman once

in his film career, and that was for a brief pole-vaulting sequence.

Fred Astaire insisted that his dances be shot in a single take. Today

such an attitude would be dismissed as hopelessly purist. Watch any

movie, any television show or commercial, and you will notice that

outside of professional sports there is little attempt to present

physical truth. An object is propelled through space and an object

hits its target. The object could be a knife, a car, or a human being,

but it's always shown in two takes. Is it even the same object?Today it seems a comic can't even slip on a banana peel in a single

take.

Performances that are "sweetened" by technology (and cannot be

seen without the aid of technology) are a small part of a larger and

more ominous picture. We live at the dawn of the Age of Home

Entertainment. A mere century ago, your typical earthling may have

witnessed a show or two per year. But today the average Americanhousehold keeps that television set on seven hours a day, and our

typical citizen is exposed to over a million commercials by the age

of forty. Instead of spending an hour or two in the same room with a

live performer, the tv viewer is bombarded by a new image on the

average of every 3.5 seconds.

The communications revolution of the 80's, spawned by the

computer chip and magnetic tape, is just the tip of this electrifiediceberg. By the turn of the century, the typical American family will

not dream of being without its own home communications center,

conveniently combining in one unit the functions of a tv, radio, tape

player, vcr, compact disk, musical keyboard, speaker, computer,

printer, scanner, modem, telephone, and six other devices yet to be


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invented all of which will come equipped with camcorder and

satellite dish antenna. At long last, we will be able to access almost

any film, any tv program ever made at the mere push of a button. All

public performances will be taped and made available even that

clown show you did for the K-3's over at JFK Elementary.

No doubt this will in turn spawn the ultimate Age of Narcissism,

one that will put the home movies of yesteryear to shame. Our

private lives will become mere fodder for homemade docudramas.

Children will grow up watching tapes of their own birth, if not of

their actual conception, and will learn the facts of life from videos

smuggled into backyard tree houses. Everything we do will be

documented, and this trend will not abate until we are spending halfof our lives watching the videotapes we have made of the other half.

It would be futile to dismiss this revolution in communications. It is

not all bad and it will not go away; quite the contrary. But we would

do well to think twice before kneeling down to this new god and

hailing it as a great, historical triumph for the performing arts. We

should think thrice about what we might be losing in the transition

from live performance to canned entertainment.

Forget for a moment that 99% of what we see is at best bland,

homogenized pablum guaranteed to offend nothing but one's

intelligence. The other 1% is still quality stuff, and rather than lose it,

we are seeing it transposed from the concert hall to the tv studio, and

reaching millions more than it did a generation ago. What, then, are

we losing?

Western art, with its emphasis on aesthetic distance and its

preference for music, movement, and language that is planned out

and meticulously rehearsed well in advance, may feel it is losing

little and gaining much in the transition from stage to PBS. But there

is another, more endangered tradition of live performance one


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more prevalent in folk and popular theatre forms, and surviving

somewhat better in so called "backward" countries that is raw,

live, spontaneous, physical, and communal in nature.

Live performance can be more than a recital or a representation. It

can be an event, what theatre anthropologist Richard Schechner

calls an "actual," a ritual existing in the here and now for performer

and audience alike. They both give, they both take. It is (to borrow

Carlo Mazzone Clementi's definition of commedia acting) a form of

3-ball juggling an exchange between you, your partner, and the

audience. It takes all three to complete the picture, and the audience

bears some responsibility for the results.

Some twenty years ago (when transistor radios were still the rage),

Norman Mailer wrote that it was better to step out to a local club to

catch a little known jazz quartet than to stay home listening to the

world's finest jazz recording on the most expensive hi-fi. To sit in

that jazz audience is to be party to the performing contract. Live

jazz, with its insistence on improvisation and embellishment, its call-

and-response structure, its vocal audience, is as good a model as any

for modern comedic and movement theatre. Rather than passivelytuning in from the safety of one's living room sofa, ready to switch

channels at the flick of a remote control, the jazz audience is

engaged in a dialogue by the performers, and plays a far more active

role than it imagines in the experience.

Audience members are often the last to realize the crucial effect they

have on a live performance. But performers are keenly aware of it.

It's their business. The performer understands far more than laughs,applause, and hacking coughs. The performer has a sixth sense that

monitors audience chemistry, offering instant feedback on energy

levels, depth of focus, eye contact thresholds, attention span the

whole gamut of good and not-so-good vibrations that constantly

bombard the stage like so many invisible gamma rays.


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The faith of the live performer is that though he/she may be only

reaching 75 people at a time, the experience is more "real" because

it is live, communal, visceral, three-dimensional, riskier, and

ultimately more memorable than the television sitcom that reaches

75 million. Through their willingness to risk all with body and soul,

they keep alive a vital performance tradition that engages the

audience, that is neither chewing gum for the mind nor opiate for the

masses.

I am not advocating the death sentence for videotape, PBS, or

classical Western art. They will survive nicely, and they deserve to.

The real threat, the imminent danger, is not to any of these, but to aspecific tradition of live performance: One that is intimate and

personal enough not to be confused with a rock concert at the local

sports arena, where 95% of the audience is seated somewhere in the

next county. One that means more than just a chance to see a media

superstar in the flesh or to be dazzled by special effects. And of

course even this intimate brand of live performance that I am

championing will never disappear altogether. The worry here is that,

like home-baked bread or full-bodied beer, so few will experience itthat we as a people will not even miss it. And we will become a little

more passive, a little less connected to one another, a little easier to

manipulate.

A live theatre that is also a physical theatre faces its own particular

perils. Instead of being seen as part of an ongoing, vital, and diverse

global tradition one that may even have socio-political

implications the physicalized theatre of the 80's has been dubbed"new vaudeville" by the media, a convenient pigeonhole whose one

size supposedly fits all. In America, art is just another consumer

product, and thus our habit of neatly labeling something, praising it

to the skies, and then dropping it like a hot potato when the next fad

comes along. This is already happening and there is little we can do


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about it.

A graver threat to physical theatre, but one we can exercise some

control over, comes from within. The danger is that our art will too

infrequently transcend its technique, contenting itself with dazzling

displays of physical and/or comedic virtuosity, growing more and

more isolated from the world we live in. Too often the tricks

performed seem far riskier than the artistic statement. Too often the

amount of homework that goes into mastering the craft dwarfs the

amount of time spent exploring and evolving an artistic vision.

This is a problem we have all struggled with. We have all seen too

many clown shows, too many mime performances, that bear anuncanny resemblance to one another, as though conceived by

committee and then assembled and packaged in some factory south

of the border. We've seen too many shows built around tricks as

many tricks as possible with the content tacked on almost as an

afterthought. We have seen too many movement training

curriculums totally devoid of ideas, much less of a writing /

choreography element. And, personally, I know too many clowns

who don't even go to the theatre, too many mimes who haven't reada serious novel in years, and too many dancers whose political

awareness doesn't extend much beyond calorie counting.

The not so coincidental result is a preponderance of lightweight (if

not insipid) material. "Sure these performers are lots of fun," society

seems to be saying. "They're a barrel of laughs, but we don't really

take them seriously." With a few notable exceptions, critics do not

discuss them in the same breath with "serious" writers,choreographers, or visual artists. Audiences don't argue about their

work weeks and months afterwards.

The straight theatre, of course, has its own blind spots: A theatre of

"talking heads" who might as well be invisible from the neck down.


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Method acting teachers who insist endlessly (and I think correctly)

on emotional truth but are often the first to abandon ship when it

comes to exploring the physical truth of a character or a situation.

Theatre schools where movement when taught at all is taught

detached from acting, as a specialized skill to be trotted out for

festive occasions.

The problem can hardly be separated from the general fragmentation

of American culture. We are at best a nation of specialists, the notion

of a "Renaissance man" growing more quaint by the minute. We

have, as I write, two presidential candidates who readily admit to

rarely if ever reading a novel, going to the theatre, or visiting a

museum. Instead of Leonardo Da Vinci, we have scientists whodon't know Bosch from Bush and artists who wouldn't know a

quark from Judge Bork.

For the performing artists of tomorrow, the challenge is not simply

one of education, of enhanced cultural literacy and global awareness

though that couldn't hurt. The fragmentation is also internal, and

is perhaps analogous to what pop psychologists like to call the right

brain, left brain dichotomy: the impulsive, creative side vs. theanalytical, rational side. Probably the brain is not split so neatly

down the middle; nor are most people. But we do tend more and

more to close ourselves off to those modes of perception and

creation where we are not "naturals."

Not every dancer is going to make a great choreographer, not every

clown or mime is a born director or playwright. But we need to

make more conceptual connections within our own heads and weneed to make more connections to the world outside our heads

connections with other artists whose natural talents complement

rather than mirror ours. The artist speaks with a voice that is no

greater than his or her own experience and knowledge. It is a

singular voice, but one that must grow richer, that must reflect more


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of the complexity of the world we live in, if it is not to be a hollow

voice.

A broadening of horizons cannot help but enrich the future of

physical theatre. When collaborations work, when two worlds

collide without destroying each another, the effect is positively

galvanizing. Such is the experience we get from much of Mike

Nichols' new production ofWaiting for Godot. To see clowns and

movers in this case Bill Irwin, Robin Williams, Steve Martin, and

F. Murray Abraham breathe new life into a text so highly

acclaimed yet rarely well performed is a reminder of the potential for

a theatre that is alive with imagination, physicality, and bold

intelligence.

"You have the greatest brain in the world," a woman from Zurich

once wrote George Bernard Shaw, "and I have the most beautiful

body; so we ought to produce the perfect child." Shaw, ever the

skeptic, wrote back to her, "What if the child inherits your brains

and my body?" Physical theatre seems to be in a similar

predicament, but if the risk is only 50-50, then it is one well worthtaking.

With Your Brains

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