In L’être et le jouant / Het zijn in het spelen / Being in Playing onderzoekt Jan Steen de ‘dramaturgie van de acteur’. Hij ontleent dit begrip aan theaterpedagoog en regisseur Eugenio Barba. In On Directing and Dramaturgy legt die uit dat de acteursdramaturgie verwijst naar de creatieve en hoogstpersoonlijke bijdrage van een acteur aan een creatieproces, en naar zijn vermogen om wat hij wil communiceren te wortelen in een structuur van fysieke en vocale acties. Deze acties zijn in staat de onmiddellijke aandacht van de kijker te grijpen en een scenische aanwezigheid van de acteur te genereren. Steens onderzoek spitst zich toe op de bewustwordingsprocessen die aan de basis liggen van deze scenische aanwezigheid en op de wijze waarop de acteur, vanuit zijn eigen ervaringsperspectief, die aanwezigheid kan intensifiëren. Enkele aspecten die worden onderzocht – zowel in de praktijk als binnen een interdisciplinair theoretisch kader – zijn uitzonderlijke zijnstoestanden in het spelen, lichaamsbewustzijn en tactiele interactie.

Het resultaat van dit doctoraatsonderzoek bevat zes fictieve conversaties over de dynamiek en de processen die aan de basis liggen van de dramaturgie van de acteur. Deze conversaties hebben nooit echt plaatsgevonden – of tenminste niet buiten het denkproces van de auteur. De gesprekspartners zijn niet gebaseerd op echte mensen. Het zijn gender-neutrale stemmen die spreken vanuit het perspectief van hun specifieke functies binnen het theaterveld. Het zijn perspectieven die de auteur kent vanuit zijn eigen ervaring als acteur, als regisseur, als docent of als student.

Hieronder volgt een fragment dat handelt over de rol van de acteur.

D In which way does the actor position himself towards his role? I think that, as an actor, you must put yourself in an equivalent position towards your role and towards the other. You look at it from the side, not to accentuate the apartness but to be aware that you are next to it. You put yourself in an equally vulnerable position as the role. You cannot exclude yourself from the work. You include the role in your self.

A   I don’t like actors who are playing with the attitude: ‘This is not about me. It’s about the others. They are like that. I am not!’ I always think: but of course it is about you! Who else would it be about!? It is about a fellow human being. So it is about us, not about them. I really believe actors need to abandon that narrow-minded us versus them-thinking. Furthermore I am convinced that we are all capable to be everything and everyone that we can imagine. We know that if circumstances change, one can change drastically, in every possible way one could imagine. If my circumstances would be similar to the circumstances of the character/the other, my actions might be akin to the actions of the character/the other.

   (short silence)

If I were to play Richard III, I would want to understand his actions, and not only through my thinking apparatus. It is not the ‘tout comprendre, c’est tout pardoner’-attitude that I am looking for. I want to experience an embodied understanding which does not explain his actions to me, nor judge them, nor pardon them, but which confronts me with actions that are extreme but not estranged to me as a human being. As an actor I must ‘vibrate along’ with those extreme dimensions, as my teacher Dora van der Groen said. They are human dimensions, and I am part of those dimensions and I care about them.

   (silence)

S When you used the word akin, A, it reminded me of what Grotowski wrote on kinship in relation to our discussion. In his text ‘Tu es le fils de quelqu’un’ he asks actors to keep in mind at all times that every character has its own origin and is someone’s son or daughter. As a player, you are someone’s son or daughter as well. If you go back to the earliest days of human kind, we are all ‘sons and daughters of…’, we are related to each other.

T Yes. I think we need to take a closer look at this text. It is highly interesting. In this text he explains, among other things, how and why he liked to work with authors of  the past. He makes a very compelling analysis on how the actor must approach his role.

S  (takes the Grotowski Sourcebook, searches, stops at page 294)

So first, let’s have a look at what he says about the authors of the past:

  (reads)

“Authors, the great authors of the past, were very important to me, even if I struggled With them. I stood face to face to Slowacki and Calderon and it was like Jacob’s fight with the angel: ‘Tell me your secret!’ But to say the truth, your secret, what the hell? What counts is our secret, for us living today. But if I understand your secret Calderon, I am going to understand my own. I don’t speak with you as to an author whose work I will stage, but I speak with you as with my great-grandfather. That means that I am in the process of speaking with my ancestors. And of course, I am not in agreement with my ancestors. But at the same time I can’t deny them. They are my base; they are my source. It’s a personal affair between them and me. And that was how I worked on dramatic literature and almost always with authors of the past: exactly because it was a matter of ancestors, of other generations.”39

In the way Grotowski wants an actor to approach his role, we can read that same idea that it is a matter of ancestors. You must search for the origin of the role, for the beginning of the role, the traces of your role. If you do so, you are strongly connected to your role. You are connected to your past, to your ancestors, to someone from your lineage. It is a very personal affair. It is an affair between you and your ancestors.

  (searches, stops at page 303, then reads)

“You must face all the classical questions of the performing arts. For example: But who is the person who sings the song? Is it you? But if it is a song from your grandmother, is it still you? But if you are discovering in you your grandmother, through your body’s impulses, then it’s neither ‘you’ nor ‘your grandmother who had sung’: it’s you exploring your grandmother who sings. Yet it can be that you go further back, toward some place, toward some time difficult to imagine, when for the first time someone sang this song (…) You have this song, you must ask yourself where this song began (…) If you are capable of going with this song towards the beginning, it is no more your grandmother who sings, but someone from your lineage. (…) Finally you will discover that you come from somewhere. As one says in a French expression: ‘Tu es le fils de quelqu’un’. You are not a vagabond, you come from somewhere, from some country, from some place, from some landscape. There were real people around you, near or far. It is you two hundred, three hundred years ago, but it is you. Because he who began to sing the first words was someone’s son, from somewhere, from some place, so if you refind this, you are someone’s son. If you don’t refind it, you are not someone’s son; you are cut off, sterile, barren (…)

What is it-the character? You? The one who first sang the song? But if you are the son of the one who first sang the song, yes, it is that which is the true trace of character. You are from some time, from some place.”40

A That reminds me of something I read in an interview with Anna Zubrzycki and Grzegorz Bral, the founders of the Song of the Goat Theatre.41

  (searches in his red notebook, then reads)

“Traditional cultures, traditional songs, contain thousands of years of memory. It’s like it’s genetic; it’s as if the song is open, like a gene. You hear the sound, but under the surface of the sound there is the experience of hundreds of generations. Sometimes, you can hear it. I remember an African girl who came to our workshop about three years ago. On the first day I proposed to students that they sing very simple motifs, and asked some students simply to improvise. She started improvising. She obviously had a good ear and she had a good sense of rhythm. When she started singing, just by instinct, I said, ‘Could you sing me your ancestors?’ For her, it was a completely natural question, a natural request, and we all felt it, we all saw it. Only she was singing. She started singing her ancestors, generation after generation after generation. At one point she exploded with shaking and tears because she touched a place somewhere in her past that completely released her own energy and her own strength and power.”42

  (short silence)

I really like the idea that you look at the role as if looking a relative. If you do that, you create a bond between yourself and the role. You are in lineage with your role. You are in line with your role. You create human ties. You belong to a larger whole.

  (silence)

D So if we try to summarize what we discussed about Stanislavski’s, Brecht’s and Grotowski’s thoughts on our second question, what do we have? I think we can say that Stanislavski is aiming for an empathic attitude from the actor towards his role. Brecht is looking for a critical attitude towards the role. And for Grotowski we could say that it is a tracing attitude, an attitude in which the actor explores the role’s traces, its origin. As an actor you must trace your role, you must find the origin, the beginning of it.

T It is fascinating that you put it that way.

D We also talked about superior positions and more equal positions. We talked about ‘coldhearted’ acting, which is a detached and primarily intellectual approach to acting. That type of acting is in line with Brecht’s ideas. We opposed it to ‘warm-hearted’ acting, which involves the mind and the body. It is an embodied way of acting. That type of acting is in line with Stanislavski and Grotowski. Yes.

A Yes.

  (short silence)

I would like to ask you one more question on our topic, T. Can I?

T Of course you can.

A Can you summarize your own ideas on what we discussed today?

  (silence)

T To me, the crucial question is: ‘In what way are you, as an actor, present in your role, and how can you be present and repeat that every single night in the presence of an audience?’ To me, it is not about identifying with a role or merely interpreting a role, but about the way in which you, as an actor, relate to your role and to your audience, with your whole physical and mental being – taking into consideration that we do not define a role as being merely text-based, but as everything actors create on stage.

  (short silence)

I ask the actor to position himself towards his role, towards his material, towards the audience. In fact, asking the question ‘What is the actor’s attitude towards his role?’ or in other words, ‘How does the actor position himself towards his role?’ is already an attitude in itself. I mean, if you are actually asking yourself how you are related to your role or what your position is towards your role, and you do this while you are creating your role, while you are playing, that is a particular attitude. It is an attitude through which you are looking for relations.

  (short silence)

In my work I ask the actor/student to make connections. You need to connect to your role. You need to connect to your actions, to your material, to your audience.

(short silence)

I also affirm the idea in Grotowski’s ‘Tu es le fils de quelqu’un’. I ask actor/students to be aware of that. But for me, it is not just a matter of going back to this one and only origin. The line to your ancestors is not a straight, direct one, but a flexible, ongoing one with many dimensions and accumulations of different generations that you are related to. I underline what we discussed before, namely that we don’t want to fix our roles, nor our own identities. The roles change through the actors who are playing them, just as the actors change through the roles they encounter.

  (short silence)

If you, as an actor, ask yourself time and time again how you are related to a bigger whole, to the ones before you but also to the person you could be, you also exclude that ‘us versus them’-mindset that you mentioned earlier, A. As a player, you are connected to your material and to your character in a very personal way. It is about us, about being human. You are aware of who we have been and of what we could be, and you pay attention to that. You connect to your past. You connect to what is here and now and to what could possibly be. You connect to the other. It is an inclusive, relational attitude.43 And in this way, acting becomes an exercise in making connections and connecting.

  (short silence)

We bond, bind, link, affiliate, relate, connect.

We re-ligate.

39 J. Grotowski (2001). Performer. In R. Schechner & L. Wolford (eds.), The Grotowski Sourcebook (p. 294). New York: Routledge.

40 Grotowski, 2001: 303-304.

41 Anna Zubrzycki and Grzegorz Bral founded the Song of the Goat Theatre in 1996 in Wroclaw, Poland. Apart from their international celebrated performances, throughout the years several company members also developed different pedagogical tools for actors and performers by giving workshops and master classes. In October 2014 they will start a study program in the ‘London School Of Performing Arts Practices’ (LSPAP). It is a desire of mine, in the light of future research, to visit their school and to learn their ‘coordination technique’ first-hand.

42 Shevtsova, M. (2010). Maria Shevtsova in Conversation with Anna Zubrzycki and Grzegorz Bral, ‘Song of the Goat Theatre: Finding Flow and Connection’. New Theatre Quarterly, 26(3), pp 248-260.

43 One could read an indirect reference to the notion of Relational Art or Relational Aesthetics. Nicolas Bourriaud (1965), a French art critic and director of the Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Beaux Arts in Paris, coined the term in 1995. But in is his work Relational Aesthetic (Paris: Presses du réel – 2002, originally published in French in 1998) he extensively explains his ideas on it. He describes artistic activity as “a game whose forms, patterns and functions develop and evolve according to periods and social contexts; it is not an immutable essence”. In relational art, “art is taking its theoretical horizon the realm of human interactions and its social context, rather than the assertion of an independent and private symbolic space”. Bourriaud points out the tendency of contemporary artists to increasingly leave their imaginary private worlds and to enter into public spaces, to actually interact in a more direct way. The artist is not only talking about himself anymore, he is no longer at the core of own his work, but he is the one who installs or deliberately evokes an interaction, a relation with the public. The artist preferably does this in social spaces and social environments. Bourriaud writes: “Art is a state of encounter”. Those encounters can and will endlessly occur since “the essence of humankind is purely trans-individual, made up by bonds that link individuals together in social forms which are invariably historical (…) There is no such thing as possible ‘end of history’ or ‘end of art’, because the game is being for ever re-enacted in relation to its function, in other words, in relation to its players and the system which they construct and criticize”.

Being in Playing is een uitgave van MER Paper Kunsthalle en is te koop in de webshop van MER (shop.merpaperkunsthalle.org) of in Copyright Bookshop in Gent en Antwerpen.