For Brook, it is crucial that the space in which he directs (stages/puts on) a play be completely empty and that the theatre as a space should have the capacity to provide it as such. It should be emptied out and left free of anything that is redundant. After all, his cult statement on the emptiness of the stage is quite explicit also in relation to certain requirements which, in the theatre – it goes without saying – should be and remain minimalist.
The theatre calculated with and combined these ideas as early as in its long-gone archaic and mythical beginnings in exactly the same/identical way: it urged people to gather at certain cult sites (sacred sites, sites/places of memory) in order to repeat in a symbolic manner some sacred act – a codified act of sacrifice (of the sacrificial goat). Namely, this highly emotionally charged rite was intended to announce again and again some truth which would have been of great importance to the community. Even later, when the great Antique theatres were built on such sacred cult sites (some of them could seat 20,000 people!), the position of the former thymeli, located precisely at the centre of their orchestras, remained marked/memorized as magic. The site that had once been marked with spilt blood could not but become and remain mystical and sacred. Hence, the tragedies of Antiquity are performed only on sites which remember the sites of memory.
Despite the fact that in the centuries that followed the blood that was spilt on all kinds of stages (and which is spilt, to say the truth, still today) was no longer real but “fake”, the spectators never stopped believing in its colour and function. Neither have they stopped believing in its emotional and symbolic charge. At this point, Jung, Freud and other psychoanalysts would remind us of the well-known fact that ever since man uttered the first word, he never stopped dreaming, remembering, thinking and feeling through symbols. Or, for that matter, through archetypes.
Throughout all the epochs of the long theatre history, the space as a fact and a factotum has practically never changed its exclusive status. Even today, when the modalities of the identification and feeling for the sacred and the profane have significantly changed, the theatrical space has succeeded in sustaining its blurred but nevertheless undisputed “mysticism.” If there is any magic in the theatre at all – the kind of magic to which its romantic proponents so fervently refer, while we, the realists, persistently try to dispel their illusions, it probably emanates from its unique space.
Speaking in line with the methodology proposed by the often quoted “new historians”, the theatrical space could also be regarded as the site of memory. Or, in more simple terms, we can speak of it as a site from which the aura (of which its admirers so devoutly speak) emanates – from its quite unique architectonics.
All those who had an opportunity to walk through different theatre spaces, and especially through those not intended for the “common” audiences (to them, they are explicitly off limits!) will understand what I mean. I know that the feeling that overcomes you as you stand on some large, empty stage is quite unique. Even today, after so many years of experience and the amount of the knowledge of the theatre that I have gathered from a number of places, I still fail in my attempts to pass “indifferently” or “disinterestedly” across a stage barely lit with dimmed light while the stagehands prepare it for the evening event. Stages – and especially those in big theatres – leave the impression of mysterious and dangerous caves: a “river deep-mountain high” sort of feeling, the feeling that something is lurking around the corners, darkness in the empty auditorium in which you can hardly discern the seats that are ghost-like empty, too…While the Ghost of Hamlet’s father hovers above you, and Cyclops and Ali Baba lurk behind the backdrops, your own footsteps echo everywhere, you can feel the beating of your heart not only in your chest, but also in your middle ear, and some invisible specks of dust constantly threaten to cover you up. Like some menacing black snow drift.
My friend Petar Selem, a director of great caliber, an outstanding intellectual who, in addition, has a doctoral degree in theatrology, in a couple of his brilliant theatrological essays writes about the characteristic rustling produced by the theatre curtain, especially when it is raised to mark the beginning of the performance. This sound, says Selem, was special, different and incomparable in each of the theatres he visited.
The intimacy of the experience of hearing the fluttering of the many curtains which we have come across in the course of our careers is clearly an example of ego-history which, just like the memory of their raising and falling, attacks when we least expect it. Even the most rational theatrologists cannot avoid its traps. Or – perhaps – such traps should not be avoided after all, as the “new historians” claim. By applying their I-method combined with their persistent redefining (relativization and deconstruction) of those few dominant stereotypes that determine our memory as well as our lives (centre-margin, big-small, public-private, rational-emotional, collective-individual…) it appears that even we, the theatrologists can significantly profit from it. Namely, we can develop our customary methods of interpretation, “engage” our scholarly approaches and make them more adequate for the dynamic and skeptical millennium we live in.
How can the theatre function, i.e., which are its possible forms, if we understand and interpret it as the site of memory?
As a hidden treasure chest.
As a cradle of tradition.
As a place for storytelling – the greater and the more touching the stories, the better.
As an old music box which plays lullabies when you lift the lid.
As a symbolic place d’armes from which certain ideas, concepts, truths and projects should be attacked or defended.
As a unique purgatory, the place for some sort of psychotherapy through which the society will experience a moral catharsis and, in precisely defined cycles, efficiently free itself from the dark passions. They say it worked quite well with the Greeks. However, it was used for hardly a century. The society tried to control the general crisis of morality that occurred later (which, as it seems, is still taking place) with the help and power of some different sites of memory. As for the Christian world, it was the cathedrals that became such sites. However, in recent years, they are being substituted by the big shopping malls with growing success.
It seems that, faced with these combinations, the theatre is becoming introvert. Aware that it will never again experience that great feeling of showing its performances before an audience of 20,000 spectators, the theatre appears to rely more and more on the precision of the script.
the art is inside
