By ROBERT W. BETHUNE
ART TIMES Jan/Feb 2006
In rehearsal
and in class,
we usually make do with a great deal less than we do in performance.
In performance, we want some spectacle; we want a set, or at least some
furniture, or at the very least some stuff we can handle, sit on, lie
down on, stand up on, or put things on.
Now, I’m very interested in how to
do theater with a bare minimum of stuff, meaning all the stuff you have
to find, lug around, pay for and store. The less of that, the better;
the less of that, the more resources I free up for what really matters
to me, which is performance itself; the expressiveness of performers
seen live.
It occurs to me that the functions
of the stuff I mentioned above—handling, sitting upon, lying down
upon, standing up upon, and putting things upon—can be abstracted.
I don’t need a knife, a gun, a pencil, a toothbrush, an umbrella, a
pipe, or whatever else my character may have in hand; I can do all those
things with an abstract object. A plain undecorated Japanese dance fan
works very well. Any other medium-sized conveniently manipulable object,
preferably one with no strong connotations of its own, would do also.
In other words, I can handle anything I want to handle by establishing
the convention that the abstract object I have in my hand stands for
the thing. A little mime takes care of that very well.
Likewise, I don’t need a chair, a table,
a bed, a staircase, or whatever. I need surfaces, but any sturdy nondescript
object of the right height and size will do the job. In fact, the more
nondescript, the better; it then provides less resistance to the imagination
that turns it into whatever we want it to be.
I would love to see a clever designer,
probably a sculptor with a theatrical bent, create a set of universal
theatrical objects: sittables, standables, lie-ables, handle-ables,
set-ables. You get the one set, you do all your productions from then
on using them. Perhaps you decorate them differently from one show to
the next, but you don’t need to re-build them every time.
However, I don’t think we really know
how to do this yet. There’s a level we need to explore first—the
level at which we often find ourselves in class or rehearsal, the level
at which we have nothing. Nothing? Well, not quite nothing. We always
have the floor.
Hmm. The floor. The ever-present, indestructible,
utterly unassuming floor, the floor that can be the top of a mountain,
the bottom of the ocean, the surface of Mars, the shore of the still-vex’d
Bermoothes, or anything else we like. “This is the forest of Arden,
Lady.” And by George it is, then and there.
What can we do on the floor? What can’t
we do on the floor in some way that we might want to do? How far can
the range of motion available to the body, or better yet to multiple
bodies in contrast, take us? Can we not abstract the physical relationships
we need? If I need to be low, and you are high, cannot I crouch, and
you stretch? What human relationship cannot be expressed by finding
the right physical engagement of bodies, without any need for stuff?
We don’t often explore this territory. We are hooked, like addicts, on stuff. I would love to see a company quit cold turkey on stuff and return to the ultimate source of acting, the unaided body. Imagine that—a performance without stuff, ready to take the stage at any time, any place. Two trestles, three boards and a passion? Let’s leave the trestles and boards home.