ABSTRACT
Although their theatres are based upon very different premises, both Michael Chekhov and Eugenio Barba embrace performer-centered theatres, in which the actor has discarded the role of skilled craftsman interpreting the genius of others for the mantle of creative artist. Chekhov’s theatre is driven by a technique in which the actor’s imagination is shaped by an author’s script and a learned process that transforms the imagined into embodied action. Barba’s theatre, on the other hand, is rooted in the devised and physical. In his theatre, actors move from a stock of improvised études shaped by transcultural principles of physical action and a subtext of personal associations to a collective mise en scène in which the somatic takes precedence over the semiotic. The fundamental creative unit for Chekhov is the journey between the individual
actor and his character; as he puts it, the “gap” between the “two poles” of the written play and performance can only be connected by “the power of the actor’s true individuality, which begins with his creative subconscious and artistic intuition” (1991: 85). Drawing upon a trained imagination, the Chekhovian actor conceives of another self that he proceeds to inhabit in the company of similarly imagining others; together they shift the creative valence from the individual to the collective. For Barba the fundamental creative unit is based on transcultural performance principles, while the collective is grounded in an interplay between precise physical actions shaped by these principles and the tension between those actions and the individual subtexts at play in them. Barba’s theatre leans towards a technology of expression; however, his approach to training does not lack critics, because it suggests the triumph of precision over the unreliably human. For all its encyclopedic comprehension, Chekhov’s acting technique is characterized by a language open to interpretation with technical terms that include atmospheres, feelings, qualities, the subconscious, and the Higher Ego, as well as an at least implied embrace of
Rudolf Steiner’s worldview, which many regard as pseudoscience shaped by a dubious notion of the spiritual. Chekhov and Barba thus appear to inhabit different worlds, yet in his book The
Paper Canoe Barba discusses Chekhov’s acting system at some length and concludes that it has much in common with his own take on acting (1995: 72-80). How is this possible when the fundamental components of their approaches to training, the techniques of acting they embrace, the ways in which they create their works during rehearsals, and the theatrical manifestation these rehearsals lead to appear so very different? Barba argues that the answer lies in the transcultural principles of theatre anthropology; it is here, in the substrata of the actor’s art rather than in the landscapes of form or the way those forms guide spectators through terrains of meaning, that the similarity between his performance world and Chekhov’s resides. The subtitle of The Paper Canoe, “a guide to theatre anthropology,” is revealing, because the volume offers a comprehensive discussion of Barba’s transcultural principles of performance. This study encompasses years of what cultural anthropologists would term fieldwork (observing, studying, and compiling documentation on different types of aesthetic performance in various countries, particularly the traditional Asian forms), interviews with practitioners (oral histories, of a sort, in which the performance histories that interest Barba reside in trained bodies rather than in conventional memories or archives), and the International School of Anthropology (ISTA) seminar/work sessions, which combine practitioners and scholars who, together with Barba, examine aspects of performance as they relate to theatre anthropology. Barba defines theatre anthropology as “the study of the pre-expressive scenic
behaviour upon which different genres, styles, roles and personal or collective traditions are based” (1995: 9). As the nomenclature suggests, the pre-expressive level of performance is concerned with performance behavior that, as Barba’s many years of transcultural research show, underlies the expressive codex of particular performance forms. The pre-expressive is, in Barba’s words, “the elementary level of organization of the theatre” (ibid.). Meanwhile, the expressive codex constitutes the techniques of a particular form; it is these techniques that organize the performer’s physical and vocal presence in what Barba characterizes as an other than ordinary, “extra-daily,” way. These psycho-physical, extra-daily organizations (or techniques) are a major concern of theatre anthropology, rather than the more conventional socio-cultural thrust of cultural anthropology, because they harbor the pre-expressive within their embodied constructions. The major findings of this concern are that “it is possible to single out recurring [pre-expressive] principals from among these techniques” (ibid.) and that many of these principles are common across performance forms from very different traditions and cultures. In laying out the evidence for transcultural performance principles, Barba discusses
performance genres ranging from traditional Asian forms (noh, kabuki, Balinese dance-drama, etc.) as well as the ideas of various European masters (the likes of Étienne Decroux, Vsevolod Meyerhold, Konstantin Stanislavsky, Yevgeny Vakhtangov, and Jerzy Grotowski). Barba includes Chekhov in this discussion as representative of the mainstream Euro-American acting tradition, as evidenced in Chekhov’s To the Actor, which Barba describes as “[o]ne of the best practical manuals for the training of the ‘realistic’ actor” (1995: 72).
