I was privileged on Thursday 2 December to attend the opening performance of Voice Theatre Lab’s production of Iam Nocte at the Annex theatre space. The performance lasted an hour but what a rich and intense hour it was. From the outset the audience was plunged into a Hieronymus Bosch dreamscape. We compulsively watched, filled with fascination and dread, as Freudian monsters from the Id possessed the stage and our psyches. This was Leah’s ‘bare forked anIaml’, humanity reduced to its primordial longings and terrors.
I had the sense that i was watching a performance that did not readily fit any performance genre. It had elements of boutique theatre. The very choice of venue, the nature of performance space, seating and lighting flagged that we were about to watch a play. Yet the movement often of the ensemble cast felt like dance while the voice-work at times was redolent of operatic performance. Were the costumes and staging more sumptuous this would have been total theatre. Not that the costumes were inappropriate. The black skirted pants resembled the Aikido hakama, evocative and poetically appropriate given the affinities of Voice Theatre Lab’s production values with Butoh dance.
The notion of placing the body in unbalanced positions in order to tense muscles, and consequently tense the voice (produce crisis), works on a number of levels. Yes, as diaphragms become tight as drums, the audience hears breathing become shallow and fast, vocalisation become brief and trail off with the insufficient carriage of air, tremors of muscle become tremors of voice. At a subliminal level we apprehend that all is not well. We are thrown into crisis.
There are additional spin-offs. To move the ensemble in and out of these crisis-inducing postures requires an elaborate choreography. The consequence is that physical performance becomes orchestrated and rhythmic as it moves characters through a range of forms. In brief, it becomes contemporary dance so that at times I felt we watching a Graeme Murphy dance company. Time seems suspended or distorted in a stylized world of stylized movement, a world filled with beautiful horror. The arabesques through a pool of blood brought to mind Lindsay Kemp’s unforgettable performance when he toured Flowers (an stunning adaptation of Genet’s Our Lady of the Flowers) to Australia back in 1974. At other times I was watching Rodin’s Burghers of Calais come to life in their ordeal.
The choice of drama, based on Seneca’s Oedipus, was inspired. The chorus, the furies, the gods all seemed present. The use of Latin, stylised and filtered through crisis filled the drama space with an air of the portentous and prophetic. The atmosphere had the gravitas of religious invocation, of a dark liturgy. The outpouring of physical energy, the sounds of lamentations, the sounds of terror and of rage, the whimpers of contrition, was to experience tragic catharsis in performance.
The goose-bumps came not only from the sheer theatricality of performance but from a direct visceral response to performance. The vocalizations, some almost non-human or inhuman, were a paralinguistic communication that linked directly to our pre-verbal anIaml receptors. The nouns and verbs of a familiar language were absent but the syntax of utterance remained present. Chomsky proposed a model of language acquisition the posited a pre-wired brain, a brain that has evolved for syntax and symbolism, a dry river-bed waiting for the flow of experience within culture to fill it with a torrent of signifiers and meanings. This production seemed to race down those primitive wirings with a kind of proto-language or Ursprache.
Michael Argyle, in his seminal work on non-verbal communication (NVC) argued that 70% of human communication occurs via the non-verbal channel, of which paralanguage is an important element in establishing and maintaining the interpersonal domain. Interpersonal emotional orientation, familial harmony, tribal bonding, assertion of dominance, inter-group aggression, ecstatic experience – all mediated through paralinguistics as any infant hearing a lullaby or oceanic rival subjected to the haka would know.
This means that erudition and sophisticated enculturation provided a flimsy defence against the emotional impact of the actors interpersonal paralinguistic vocalisations and whose physical proximity exuded an intense sense of their anIaml presence. The cast became totemic. As theatre, this performance under the sparse illumination of well-placed spotlighting had more in common with firelight corroboree than with the Importance of Being Ernest. The intense and sustained focus of the performers was palpable and provided a subtext that underscored the seriousness of purpose of the work. Their utter immersion, reaching to some place deep within to retrieve inchoate cries, was theatre of veritas. I felt it was kind of performances that Grotowski would recognise as Theatre of Poor:
the "ripening" of the actor which is expressed by a tension towards the extreme, by a complete stripping down, by the laying bare of one's own intimity - all this without the least trace of egotism or self-enjoyment. The actor makes a total gift of himself. This is a technique of the "trance" and of the integration of all the actor's psychic and bodily powers which emerge from the most intIamte layers of his being and his instinct, springing forth in a sort of "trans-lumination." http://www.scribd.com/doc/20263119/Towards-a-Poor-Theatre-J-Grotowski (p. 16).
Could it be that provoking crisis also provokes trance? Indeed, is physical crisis a form of ‘kinaesthetic driving’ [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trance ]? Does a sense of having witnessed a religious rite derive in some part from a mystical aura generated by the actors’ strenuous physical and emotional immersion in their roles? (See http://www.mindpowernews.com/BrainCreatesGod.htm for some discussion of trance induction through kinaesthetic stress, a sense of the numinous, and discussion of neurotheology – though admittedly i’m stretching a long bow now)
I was also struck by similarities of this search for expressive performance modes in drama with my MCA research project where I am exploring expressive mark-making in portrait painting. I too am searching for the authentic emotional communication with a viewer but using the manner of paint marks rather than of the manner of vocalisations. I too hope that the very quality of marks, not simply the cultural signifiers depicted in Iamges, will induce synchronous emotional reactions in viewers so that the trace of human movement over a surface with pigment, the manner of mark-placing, becomes a haptic primordial para-language. I too hope that the emotion with which the marks are put turn is transmitted at a pre-conscious level to any viewer who has ever handled materials and observed the effects of their own handling. Just as Butoh had its post-war roots, in part, in German Expression, like-wise my painting looks to Austrian Successionist Expressionism and contemporary German neo-Expressionism for an artistic orientation in my search for a lexicon of authentic mark-making.
I came away from Iam Nocte feeling i had been in the audience of contemporary Expressionist theatre. I came away feeling both up-lifted and discomforted, engaged and challenged, entertained and drained. Most of all a came away with a great respect for the company, especially the director Robert Lewis, who were extending the boundaries of Australian theatre. This was serious theatre at its best – innovative, daring, profound.
Dr Harry Kent
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