Analyzing Performance: Theatre, Dance and Film

-Internal Space is the representation of a fantasy, a dream of waking dream evoked by the mise-en-scene, stage becomes a derealised space where dream mechanisms can be represented, and into which spectators, can project themselves. Such is the case in Japanese No theatre, where the acting evokes a dream or fantasy, represented by the stage; or at moments of visual evocation in a mise-en-scene. (pg 155)

-A text that is performed and delivered by the actor is already served by the stage space and prosodic, visual, and gestural signs one can no longer abstract. (pg. 201)

-Mise-en-scene is not dictated by a reading of text alone; however, readings do provide practitioners with suggestions for an experimental and progressive placement of enunciatory situations - in other words with a choice of 'given circumstances" pg 205

-A common tendency of contemporary mise-en-scene is to deny any link between texts and stage practices. Certain directors seek out texts that theortically cannot be performed on a stage, or resist being performed. Heiner Muller even made this the criterion of a productive theatre; " It's only when a text cannot be realized with the existing theatre that it becomes productive and interesting for the theatre." pg 206 Heiner Muller, Gesammelte Irrtumer: (Frankfurt am Main:Verlag der Autoren, 1986),18.

Analysis of performance containing text should start by specifying the "given circumstances' of the text, but without restricting them to psychological situations, as Stanislavsky advised. It should locate the text historically, at the moment of its production as well as that of its sociocultural context. pg209

In African cultures, for example, it is quite appropriate to reconsider the diving lines between text, movement, dance and music. pg211

-Gestalt Theory

Perception and reception therefore comprise an act of rhythmic construction of a work: "Theatre doesn't happen to someone, they make theatre happen to them." pg 229

"What (the artist) aims at is to awaken in us the same emotional attitude, the same mental constellation as that which in him produced the impetus to create". Sigmud Freud, "the moses of Michaelangelo," in Art and literature, Penguin Freud Library, vol.14(london, 1985), 254

-Modalities of Identification

Associative,

Its only end is to understand each point of view in order to establish the overall situation. It is what we do by listening to each of them in turn, and reconstructing their motivations.

Admirative

We admire a character unreservedly - hero, saint; we are invited to imitate him/her.

Sympathetic

The hero is meritorious, although imperfect; she presents herself in a human, accessible light, which provokes an identification through compassion and sentimentality.

Cathartic,

Beyond sympathy, it provokes a violent emotion and a "purgation of the passions," a catharsis, which arouses pity and fear toward a tragic figure, or on the other hand sarcstic mokery in relation to a ridiculous character

Ironic Identification

It would be a contradication in terms if irony did not allow a certain sympathy, in spite of everything, for an unfortunate hero or an antihero; our feeling of superiority is colored with a sensitization to the problems of the other. This leads us directly to the opposite of identification: a critical distance that Brecht christened Verfremdungseffekt, an effect of distanciation or, more precisely, of defamilarization.

pg 233

-Consequently spectators are analysts confronted with enigmatic mechanisms comparable to dreams and phantasms, mechanisms whose latent content they have to decipher(rather than decode). Therefore one imagines that the authors and spectators of a performance, each in their own way, go through the same unconscious psychic processes; and one must now endeavor to reconstitute this "concatenation that obeys an unconscious logic." pg 244