What is the Theatre?, Routledge, 2019, 616 pages
Première édition chez Routledge de la traduction en langue anglaise de Qu’est-ce que le thé âtre ?, de Christian Biet et Christophe Triau (Gallimard, 2006).
« Le théâtre est d’abord un spectacle et un genre oral, une performance éphémère, la prestation d’un comédien devant des spectateurs qui regardent, un travail corporel, un exercice vocal et gestuel, le plus souvent dans un lieu particulier et dans un décor particulier. Il n’est pas nécessairement lié à un texte préalablement écrit ni publié. Pour comprendre ce qu’est le théâtre, et particulièrement pour saisir ses évolutions les plus récentes, il convient donc de toujours mêler les points de vue qui le constituent – les spectateurs, les metteurs en scène, les dramaturges, les scénographes, les régisseurs, les acteurs, les auteurs, les lecteurs enfin. Car le jeu du théâtre n’a cessé, depuis les origines, de mobiliser des individus historiquement, socialement, hiérarchiquement, topologiquement hétérogènes. L’histoire longue révèle que les choix des lecteurs, des auteurs, des acteurs et des spectateurs ont considérablement varié et se sont, dans une même période, généralement opposés. C’est aujourd’hui évident : après un » âge d’or » du genre dramatique, le retournement contemporain d’un théâtre sans illusion veut que le metteur en scène donne au spectateur quelques matériaux à partir desquels ce dernier devra créer son propre point de vue. La situation du théâtre contemporain – une phase parmi d’autres – se saisit dans une perspective qui mobilise les histoires de l’architecture, de la littérature et de la voix, de la représentation et de l’écriture, des esthétiques et des idéologies, du statut des acteurs et de l’économie des loisirs. Une approche en quelque sorte à l’image de certaines pièces : totale. »
Table of Contents
What is the Theatre?
INTRODUCTION
Points of view
The spectator
The author
The dramaturg
The director
The set designer
The stage manager
The actor
The readers
I. What does it mean to go to the theatre?
Together with others or one among many?
Theatre and performance
1. SITES AND SPACES : DEFINITIONS
Sites
The spaces
Text as site and text as space
Organising space through signs
The actor and their presence
2. THE THEATRICAL SPACE: A CONCRETE SPACE
Theatre and urbanism
The open space
The principle of the procession
The infiltration principle
Locating the closed space
Seventeenth- to eighteenth-century London
The end of the Boulevard du Crime: nineteenth-century Paris
La Cartoucherie de Vincennes in the 1970s
Recycling and re-appropriating buildings in the twentieth century
The evolution of places
Memory and repetition
3. ARCHITECTURE
The illusion of creating illusion
II. The evolution of material and representational spaces
4. SOME THEATRICAL SITES AND SPACES
The Greek skênographia
The scaena and the Roman spectacle
Medieval scenography: nowhere and everywhere
The scaffold theatre and the trestle stage: integrative function versus critical function
Short digression : the amateur theatre in the contemporary moment
A story of thresholds rather than of ruptures
Elizabethan theatre and the so-called « wooden O »
The « classic » French theatrical space: a rectangle
At the courts
In the cities
Italian-style theatre
Make way for the visible!
Scenography
Promoting attention
5. THE ART OF PERSPECTIVE AND THE SOCIAL SPACE
Italy, the « Prince’s eye » and Europe
The secularised space
The building and the session as spaces of socialisation
Line and circle: traditional double cone and multiple angles
Back to reality
The line and the circle: the depiction of infinity transcended by the infinity of words
Places, spaces, two spectacles, and the distance effect
Reforming theatre from the building out: from d’Aubignac to Luigi Riccoboni
The experience of the fourth wall: dramatic theatre
The closed space instituted by dramatic theatre
The crisis of drama
6. STAGE AS PLACE AND STAGE AS SPACE
Rupture: the invention of the director, the total space of a total work
« Epic » theatre/dramatic theatre
The boundaries of the theatrical space
The dramatic space: a replica?
III. How to act at the theatre? How the theatrical space functions
The work of practitioners
Two senses out of five?
7. DESCRIPTION AND VOCABULARY OF THE TRADITIONAL THEATRE SITE
A traditional stage
The fly system
The proscenium
The curtain
The proscenium arch
The stage
The cyclorama
The trap room
8. OTHER STAGES, OTHER APPARATUSES
Referential systems and innovations
Notes on bi-frontal staging
9. THE COORDINATES OF THE STAGE
A space more or less filled, more or less closed
10. THE TECHNICAL AND MATERIAL ELEMENTS OF THE STAGING SPACE
The floor
Lighting
Sounds and silence
Scenery, objects and stage props
Costumes
Masks and make-up
11. ON THE DANGER OF INTERPRETING EVERYTHING
The pleasure of the audience
IV. Time, Rhythm, Tempo
The time of the session
Stage time and dramatic time
The plasticity of time
The succession of sequences, the condensation of the 24-hour period, and the transition to timelessness
Play, rythm, staging
V. The body, the actor’s play, and illusion
Where is the body?
Ostensible presence, exhibited communication
The handling and history of codes
The game of signs
When one body hides another: the virtual body of the character
The dual utterance of the two bodies of the actor
From space, time and body, to representation
Illusion and identification
Continuity / discontinuity
Consecutivity, simultaneity: a necessary disillusion?
The blurring of the real and the virtual: delirium
Illusion and autistic performance
Theatrical illusion and cinematic illusion
The negative impact of theatre on the viewer and on the world
Seduction and utility of theatre: the thorny issue of « catharsis »
Spectacle, reading and judgement
VI. The reader of theater texts
The appearance of the book and its pages
The oral text and the act of reading
Literariness, utterance and dramatic reading
Haphazard reading and the reading of a story
Places, spaces and the readers’ time
The indexical reading of places, spaces and times
From reading time and space to the reading of a fable
Reading discourse and the constitution of characters
The test of the title
What is at stake here?
From general reading to reading of plot
From the plot to actantial narrative schema
From dramaturgical reading to dramaturgy
VII. Staging: traditions, concerns
Writing for the theatre today
Memory and forgetting
12. THE AGE OF ALL POWERS
The meaning mill
Rereading the « classics »: the issue of interpretation
The classics as a symptom: a prospective overview
The image factory
The actor as a collective body
The actor as an individual body
Between tradition and invention: the play of forms
Triumphant theatricality
« A relative totality »
13. THE EXPERIENCE OF RELATIVITY
The « emancipation of representation »
Excess/void: Matthias Langhoff/Klaus-Michael Grüber
Collage, montage, hybridisation, performance
Kantor as an emblem
Armand Gatti, another emblem
14. THEATRICALITY QUESTIONED: A THEATRE WITHOUT ILLUSION ?
Contestations
Other aspirations, other practices
Crisis of representation, crisis of meaning
Showing writing: another relationship with the text
The actor exposed
From the legibility of crisis to the questioning of perception
The troubled perception
Theatre of presence and theatre of non-representation
Experiencing the theatrical relationship and the present-ness of the stage: theatricality unveiled
Choral aspirations
Decentring representation, diffracting reception: form as medium
Other distances, other presences
Deconstructing/reconstructing theatricality
« The postdramatic »
CONCLUSION