Teatro ...

"In our present moment of economic and cultural upheaval, theater is probably the most important activity one can imagine doing or coming into contact with. Why? The answer is simple: Theater provides innovative and alternate models for how people might function together. We need this now. The theater is the only art form that concerns itself predominately with social issues. Can we get along? Can we get along in this room? Can we get along as a society? How might we get along better?In 1922-3, the Moscow Art Theatre, on tour in the United States, introduced a new approach to acting via the performance of plays by Chekhov and Gorky. Young Americans, knocked out by what they saw and felt in those theaters, pursued the Russian theater-makers to learn this new “technique.” I realize now that what these young people were excited about was not only an innovative approach to acting, but also a fresh way of behaving together and a novel kind of social dramaturgy. The harmonic quality of the ensemble, their visible and intense cooperation and the depth of character, psychology and action inspired the Americans. The productions proposed an alternative to the top-down hierarchy of star-led vehicles and melodramatic acting methods common in the United States at that time. The Russian company, guided by Konstantin Stanislavsky, had been influenced by the newest developments in psychology, science, art and the social experiment brought on by the Russian Revolution. The emotional rawness and visceral power of the performances and the way the social structures were embodied in the plays spoke to the young people.The cultural moment of the early twentieth century indeed ushered in profound changes in the social fabric and the politics around the world. Einstein’s Theory of Relativity, Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle, Picasso and Braque’s Cubism, Freud’s discovery of the unconscious, jazz, Schoenberg’s musical experiments and much more all conspired to indicate brand new political, economic and social systems and the theater was uniquely qualified to reflect these discoveries in shapes that proposed the nuts and bolts of how social systems might adjust to these breakthroughs.And now at the beginning of the 21st century, in our post 9/11 partum, in the maelstrom of technological and communicative changes, the rampant corruption and collapse of the economy, coupled with the breakthroughs in physics, the near-elimination of privacy, the hip hop aesthetic, neuroscience, nanotechnology, digital downloading, our part in climate change and so forth, there is a widely shared agreement that previous assumptions are useless. A new way of being, relating and creating is taking shape. The breakthroughs in brain science suggest that we might best function like a brain does – non hierarchical, a living argument. Can we be alive and comfortable with paradox and open to the inherent complexity of multiple universes?I feel that the overwhelming embrace of the Viewpoints in the contemporary theater world is an indication of the excitement about its inherent proposal for new social systems and new ways that people might get along. The Viewpoints embody and make visible a hunch about what might be possible. I invited the eminent neuro-physicist R. Grant Steen to watch a Viewpoints presentation in Chapel Hill, North Carolina where I was introducing the work to a group of actors at Playmakers Rep. After the showing he spoke, “What I am seeing in the Viewpoints is exactly how we now understand that the brain works,” he said. “The synaptic pathways alter and modify as new influences are introduced. It is a constant symphony of change.”What actually happens to actors and audiences in the heat of performance? A lot! Besides following the enacted fiction, the audience’s physical proximity to the actors can have a profound physical effect upon their lives. Recently neuroscientists discovered that the so-called “mirror neurons,” originally detected in monkeys and later in humans, are activated by watching another person. In the context of the theater, watching an actor perform actions actually activates the same synaptic pathways in the body of the watcher as in the body of the actor. The more familiar the action being watched, the more involved the watcher becomes. Watching is active, not passive. And so, the clarity of an actor’s actions and the quality of his or her endeavor, joined with the playwright’s ethical, aesthetic and social commitment, can influence the audience by example. The actor is a model human being acting within a model society of other actors.This is not to say that the characters presented in a play are model people in model situations. On the contrary, characters in plays are most often very imperfect people in horrible crises. A play generally begins with a problem or a disagreement and we watch characters struggle to find balance from a state of imbalance. Transformation ensues. But the actors do not perform dysfunction via dysfunction. The actors ideally function at their highest level of ability. An actor in front of an audience, no matter how viscous and nasty the character he or she embodies, must summon vast quantities of honesty, spontaneity, clarity of gesture and action, vocal veracity, differentiation and visibility. Being present, as an audience member, with another human being in such a magnified state can change you simply in the participation of watching. Similarly, for actors to create a model society together within the dramatic situation of a social order in crisis, from the bloody battles of Shakespeare’s Richard II, to Carol Churchill’s money market skirmishes in Serious Money, the actors require a great deal from one another: intense listening, generosity, responsiveness and reciprocity. "

Anne Bogart