The Magic of Masks

Most people know that the mask is the symbol for theater in the West, based on a stylized representation of the masks of the ancient Greek stage. The logos of both the Screen Actors Guild and Actors’ Equity Association feature masks, and even though masked actors are rare on Western stages today, no image evokes theater as distinctly as the masks of comedy and tragedy. Greek and Roman theater were masked forms, of course, as was the Italian popular Commedia dell’Arte, and there are still many performance styles around the globe that use masks such as Japanese Noh, Wayang Topeng in Indonesia, and many African and Native American rituals. In Western theater today, masked performance is a mark of much avant-garde and experimental stage work and masks even still appear in mainstream plays from time to time, such as the one worn by Antonio Salieri in Peter Shaffer’s Amadeus. Playwright Eugene O’Neill was an enthusiastic proponent of returning the mask to Western stages in the early, innovative years of the 20th century and so was E. Gordon Craig, the principal visionary of the New Stagecraft, who even launched a journal entitled The Mask (1908-29) that focused on the new theater of the era. In 1932, O’Neill proclaimed:

I hold more and more surely to the conviction that the use of masks will be discovered eventually to be the freest solution of the modern dramatist’s problem as to how—with the greatest possible dramatic clarity and economy of means—he can express those profound hidden conflicts of the mind which the probings of psychology continue to disclose to us.

During the same era, some renowned artists designed the masks for stage performances, including Pierre Bonnard and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, among those who created the masks and sets for Alfred Jarry’s Ubu Roi (1896), and Pablo Picasso, who devised the masks in Jean Cocteau’s Parade (1917). In the 1940s, ‘50s, and ‘60s, French playwright Jean Genet incorporated masks in his plays as a way to address social and cultural roles and relationships. These artists all wanted to “retheatricalize” Western performance and saw the mask as a symbol of this goal. O’Neill, in the forefront of this movement as exemplified by his plays Lazarus Laughed (1925-26) and The Great God Brown (1926), states:

Looked at from even the most practical standpoint of the practicing playwright, the mask is dramatic in itself, has always been dramatic in itself, is a proven weapon of attack. At its best, it is more subtly, imaginatively, suggestively dramatic than any actor’s face can ever be.

I started to read a little about masked acting years ago because some of the work of Leonardo Shapiro, whom I was researching and on whom I’ve written several times on ROT, employed masks, and his company was named for a masked spirit figure, the Zuni Shalako (about which I’ve also written: “‘May You Be Blessed With Light’: The Zuni Shalako Rite,” 22 October 2010). I discovered that of all the aspects of masks and masking that are covered in the literature, no one had written much about the relation between the mask and the spectator. The mask and the performer, yes. The mask and the mask-maker, sure. The mask and spirituality, the mask in ritual and psycho-drama, reams. But the mask and the audience? Almost not a word. By the time I ceased my research, I'd run out of sources. I’d also pieced together a semi-cogent understanding of the way masked performances work for their audiences.

Masks are mysterious. According to W. T. Benda, a well-known artist and mask-maker from the first half of the 20th century, “when a person, no matter how sophisticated or naive, confronts a masked man, that person will be mystified. The mask may or may not fascinate, it may or may not terrify, it may appeal to the sense of humor or fail to do so, but it will never fail to mystify.” Confirmed by anthropologists, this is the same mystery that ancient cultures, where masks usually represented gods, demons, or other supernatural figures, found in them but it operates even among sophisticated people who only see masks at art shows and theatrical performances. Masks have a dual effect on the observer: they distance us from the wearer because masks are artificial barriers made of inert materials and at the same time, they draw us in because they represent recognizable characteristics and focus our fascination. “No one can remain indifferent as the masked figure moves about making an unreal world, not only real, but larger than life,” asserts masker and mime Leonard Pitt. The effectiveness of masks on stage derives in large part from the inherent mysticism with which, perhaps subliminally, the audience greets them. Essentially, the relationship humans have with masks sets up their function in performance.

Masks, like mirrors, are inherently magical objects. A performing object like a puppet or a mask “seems to come alive without pretending to be alive,” marvels puppeteer Roman Paska, “with an effect closer to magic than technology.” Masks are dead things, inanimate objects that take on the appearance of life. “Our preconceived ideas of the boundaries between life and death are no longer valid as we witness the inanimate being brought to life,” explains Pitt. “In effect, we have here the essence of magic.” Dario Fo, Nobel-winning performer and mask expert, observes that “the mask and its own personality shift in relationship to overall body poses and to the gestures one produces.” Masks appear to change expressions when they’re activated by a performer in motion; a really experienced and talented masker can make the mask seem truly alive by the angle the audience sees and the play of light on the frozen expression. Some Noh masks, for example, are so carefully designed that the face smiles cheerfully when the actor looks up and takes on a dark, melancholy expression when the actor looks down. Even masks designed to imitate one exaggerated emotion, however, can still display many different expressions. International stage director Peter Brook asserts that “the moment [an actor] wears the mask it becomes alive in an infinite number of ways. A mask . . . has this extraordinary characteristic that the moment it is on a human head, if the human being inside is sensitive to its meaning, it has an absolutely inexhaustible quantity of expressions.” Just as miraculously, when an actor dons different masks, the wearer’s physique may seem to alter with each one. The same mask, on the other hand, seems different when worn by another actor. But the magic only happens in performance, when the mask is animated by a flesh-and-blood actor: when the mask, like its puppet cousin, is isolated and inactive, it remains an inert art object. A mask’s life, however, can be drained even in action if other parts of the actor’s body are busier than the false face, drawing the focus away from the mask; the mask must be the center of attention to seem alive.

Most cultures that have masked rituals as part of their religious life believe that wearers are possessed by the spirit or creature represented by the mask, taking on its character and powers. (Some cultures take this a step further, believing that the masker actually becomes the being depicted in the mask.) While the masker carries the spirit’s image, he is no longer the ordinary human he was before but a holy person whose actions are completely altered from ordinary behavior. In some cultures with masked performance forms, actors and dancers feel that they assume the persona of the character depicted in the mask. Theater maskers testify that masks alter their behavior as well—in almost as mystical a way. “Actors can feel possessed by masks,” says mask-maker Ralph Lee, “or they can feel robbed of their own personality,” though famed acting teacher Michel Saint-Denis insists that while actors may feel possessed by the mask, they aren’t actually “dispossessed” of their own selves. Actors who work with masks confirm that their physical actions are different when they’re masked. Benda observes that masked actors attest that they seem transformed into the character portrayed in the mask in both appearance and behavior: “[T]he wearer of a mask yields subconsciously to the irresistible impulse to act like the being the mask typifies.” At least one mask professional noted that when several actors wore the mask of the same character, so powerful was its psychological hold that each one spoke with the same voice in the same rhythm and with the same gestures as the others regardless of differences in the actors’ ages or physical appearances. Only if the masks were altered did the actors show any but the most inconsequential distinctions. Furthermore, the mask’s effect can be so complete that, as Peter Brook attests:

You do things and other people tell you afterwards: ‘It was extraordinary!’ You don’t know: you just wear it and you do certain movements and you don’t know if there is any relation or not, and you know that you mustn’t try to impose something. You somehow do and don’t know, on a rational level; but the sensitivity to the mask exists in another way, and it’s something that develops.

“Anyone who has worked with a mask knows that the use of the body is totally different when one is wearing a mask,” writes Eugenio Barba, experimental theater director and co-author of A Dictionary of Theatre Anthropology, “even if the actions one does are the same.” This apparent power of masks to transform wearers has been affirmed by both anthropologists and performers. According to Susan Harris Smith, a theater professor who’s made a study of masking, Jacques Copeau, one of the most active users of masks in actor-training in the 20th century, saw the masks’ personas take possession of the actors and substitute their personalities for the actors’. Smith reports that maskers complained that their faces, as psychologists have documented, mirrored their masks’ expressions.

Smith also observes that to today’s Westerner, the mask may not represent a supernatural being but rather “one of the many faces of himself.” Indeed, wearing a mask can make us feel safe, but experts attest that that very sense of safety can be the catalyst that reveals our true selves. Kenneth Macgowan, drama critic-turned-film producer in the first part of the 20th century, asserts: “When a man puts on a mask he experiences a kind of release from his inhibited and bashful and circumscribed soul. He can say and do strange and terrible things, and he likes it,” and Smith reports: “Most anthropologists and psychologists agree that the mask liberates man.” Benda suggests that it’s paradoxically because of the concealment of the face that maskers feel free to take such physical and psychological risks without concerns for what others think of them. Harry L. Shapiro, onetime head of the anthropology department at the American Museum of Natural History, holding that the concealment of the mask-wearer’s identity “permits him a freedom not usually his,” finds that a masker may “express himself more vigorously or freely than under normal circumstances” and Ronald L. Grimes, a religion professor, identifying a “recurrent theme” in mask theory, suggests that “masks allow wearers to act out of their unconscious, thus making the repressed public.”

We can see manifestations of this phenomenon in non¬performative circumstances at Halloween, Carnival, and Mardi Gras when ordinary people who may never otherwise act inappropriately engage in extreme behavior, foolishness or flirtation, safely hidden behind a false face. The masks’ psychological effects that release emotions, according to anthropologists, work even today when the ritualistic associations have vanished. In fact, I believe this fact explains much of what’s behind the belief, particularly outside the religious sphere, that a mask’s persona can possess the wearer. Smith continues that “the basic aim of masking . . . is not deception but freedom, the liberation of the true personality. The mask confers the freedom of anonymity and of transformation on the masker” and mask and make-up designer Irene Corey states that “to mask is to unmask: visually unleashing the powers of greater life force.” Adding another dimension, Dario Fo returns to the notion of magic: “Incredible as it may seem, there is for me something magical in the fact that wearing a mask . . . allows one to see more clearly and to act with greater liberty than with the face completely uncovered.” Proponents of masking in actor-training, like Copeau, Jacques Lecoq, Michael Chekhov, Saint-Denis, and many others since the middle of the 20th century, used the liberation of the device to help actors find the alternate personas within themselves and then to tap into them as resources for their creative work.

Some mask experimenters as well as some psychologists speculate that because the mask isolates the wearer, depriving her of many of the sensory stimuli on the other side of the mask, the actor is left alone with herself. That turns the actor’s focus inward and she becomes more aware of her body and her inner resources. Anglo-French actor-teacher Pierre Lefèvre calls the mask “a catalyst,” especially in actor-training, because it’s “an instrument of concentration” that “liberate[s] the actor’s breathing, presence, physicality and imagination.” Others, like Fo and Corey, focus on the rest of the actor after the face has been obscured, explaining that the loss of facial expression forces the actor to work more with the body. “If you put on a mask,” says innovative director and masker/puppeteer Julie Taymor, “you get free of the limitations of your own body and face.” For most Western actors, the face is by far the most animated part of the actor’s equipment and even the best-trained actor overlooks the body as an instrument of expression aside from a few shoulder shrugs or arm gestures. The mask, performers like Fo, a world-respected clown and mime, argue, requires actors to use their bodies more expressively and extravagantly. A masked actor, denied the facile communication afforded by the face, must find means to use the entire instrument in novel ways. Looking at the phenomenon from a slightly different angle, Saint-Denis contends: “The mask helps the body say things which ordinarily speech cannot express.”

Furthermore, Fo affirms, masks require actors to tell the truth because it’s harder to lie with the body than with the voice and face. As mime and Lecoq student Bari Rolfe puts it: “The mask hides the lie and shows the truth.” Fo explains:

Because the mask cancels the prime element—the face, with all the expressions we formulate and employ with such ease—used to give expression to any form of mystification. When the face is removed from the equation, people are compelled to speak in a language free of formulas and of fixed stereotypes—in the language of the hands, of the arms and of the fingers. No one is accustomed to lying with their body. We never bother to check the gestures we make while speaking.
Curiously, this belief is confirmed by an entirely unrelated source, Aaron Frankel, a traditional acting teacher. In his system of actors’ prep, Frankel asserts that body language is the “most difficult to control: it seldom ‘lies’” (see “An Actor’s Homework, Part 3,” ROT, 26 April 2010). Bertolt Brecht, who employed masks extensively in his 1931 staging of Mann ist Mann, writes: “The actors can do without (or with the minimum of) makeup, appearing ‘natural’, and the whole thing can be a fake; they can wear grotesque masks and represent truth.” Susan Smith simply avers that “all masks are true because they represent aspects of the self.”

The freedom masking permits imposes some requirements as well, of course. As Fo points out, “While performing with the mask, the actor’s gestures must be grandiose and exaggerated.” In addition to finding the life of the particular mask (that is, the character) he’s wearing, the actor must break away from all naturalistic impulses. In performance, says Sears A. Eldredge, “the mask attacks mumble-and-scratch naturalism” and Saint-Denis concludes that working in mask is outright “anti-psychological.” Masks are inherently anti-realistic and as such demand a theatrical physicalization that’s commensurate with a masked performance. “Masks elicit a more heightened, more schematic performance,” insists Eldredge, a drama professor who has studied masked performance. Jacques Copeau, in his mask training for the actor, wasn’t interested in letting the mask-wearers impose their usual psychology and physicality on the mask characters, but to find and explore new, imaginative ways of using their minds, bodies, and emotions. Masked acting, says artist W. T. Benda, is “frankly artificial and extremely theatrical”; it is “as unreal, as artificial, as stylized as the masks themselves. It should be entirely different from all other acting. . . . [I]t’s movements should be rhythmic, stylized and expressive . . . .” Masking, in other words, not only frees performers to use their assets in novel and expressive ways, but it obligates them to do so. “Masks,” writes Irene Corey, the make-up artist, “carry us beyond naturalism into suggestions not hampered by earthbound flesh and blood.” Masks, after all, have no imaginative constraints: they can represent the abstraction of a face, a part of a face, a part of a body, or some inorganic object altogether unconnected to the human figure.

As an aspect of this physicalized acting, masks, like puppets, remove performance from the realm of the ordinary and raise it to the level of myth and ritual. “The mask is a translator from the human or ordinary realm,” says anthropologist Joan Halifax, “to one that is out of the ordinary.” Masks, which can make the face larger than life both actually and metaphorically, remind us “that we are in a theater, that the act going on before our eyes is not real in a literal sense, but is rather a symbolic or an artistic presentation,” writes Edwin Wilson, former theater critic and author of The Theatre Experience. Though they can’t depict subtle arrays of emotional expressions, they can reveal clearer, stronger, and less ambiguous expressions of feelings than human faces. Because masks can project those expressions, which can be distorted or exaggerated for symbolic effect, beyond the rows of the audience close enough to discern facial expressions, they are innately more theatrical. “The characters and situations are more heightened, more intensely who or what they are” in masked performances, writes drama professor Eldredge. “They are automatically more archetypal, more mythic, more representative, and metaphorical.” Finding that without masks, performances of some classic plays like Oedipus Rex were far less striking than when the actors were masked, director and producer Tyrone Guthrie proclaims that “the use of the masks gives a magnificence, an aloof grandeur . . . that is not within the range of any human face.” This lines up with theater scholar and poet Stefan Brecht’s discovery that the “ceremonial gesture” imparts an augustness to the performance when executed by a masked actor, while it isn’t just diminished but even rendered pretentious when performed by an actor without a mask. Susan Smith emphasizes that the mask’s very artificiality underlines the artificiality of the theatrical performance as it prevents the audience from indulging in illusionary reality. In Totemism and Exogamy, social anthropologist James G. Frazer further asserts that wearing a mask “throws a sort of mysterious glamour over the performance . . . .” This may be a subliminal residue, even in the modern West where theater has been long separated from religious ritual, of the association of masks with spiritual or superhuman figures, enlarging the masked performance to a level beyond the merely “human.” As Leonard Pitt, a student of master mime Ètienne Decroux, simply puts it: “To move with a mask is like moving under a magnifying glass.”

Along with their theatricality, there are also the Brechtian aspects of masks—that they distance the actor from the character and the spectator from the actor, for example. Since the mask isn’t human, the spectator isn’t drawn automatically to identify with the masked character. Since the performer’s own face is hidden, the spectator can’t readily identify with the actor, either. This puts the masker and the viewer in a less emotional or empathetic relationship and into more of an objective and critically observant one. As Vsevolod Meyerhold, the Russian innovative director to whom Brecht owed a great deal for the Epic Theater concept, observes: “The mask enables the spectator to see not only the actual Arlecchino [i.e., Harlequin] before him but all the Arlecchinos who live in his memory. Through the mask the spectator sees every person who bears the merest resemblance to the character.” Furthermore, the actors can’t identify so easily with their characters, principally since they can’t really see them. As Peter Brook points out, “The great magic of the mask, which every actor receives from it, is that he can’t tell what it looks like on him; he can’t tell what impression he’s making . . . .” Ideally, this makes the audience-character-performer connection more a theatrical one than a personal or emotional one. This doesn’t mean, by the way, that the spectator-character relationship isn’t affecting; of course it is: Aristotle’s original concept of catharsis, the release he believed spectators experience at a tragedy, was, after all, engendered by masked characters. (I should note here that in children’s theater, masking even has a tendency to heighten the emotional connection. Children are more adept at relating to both inanimate objects—observing a child with a doll or stuffed animal will demonstrate that—and with fantasy and non-realistic figures—as their persistent belief in Santa Claus, monsters, fairies, and all kinds of magical creatures makes plain.) The designer facilitates this by using familiar expressions and characteristics; by exaggerating them or painting them in unusual colors, the mask sculptor creates a character at once recognizable and alien. This allows, even encourages, the audience to observe the character analytically—the original objective of Brecht’s distancing technique.

In addition to the distancing effect (I resist the word ‘alienation’ because I believe it’s misleading and inaccurate), a mask also instantly communicates aspects of character, personality, and psychology, as well as other performative elements, often across cultural and linguistic boundaries. According to Smith, masks also “challenge the primacy of language” on which realistic drama is founded. To a great degree, this obviates the need for the actor to engage in character exposition or development as the character will be almost immediately recognizable to the audience. The artist creating the mask selects the specific traits of the character in the spirit of the play, focusing just on those characteristics chosen and omitting the insignificant. (In the realm of traditional masked dramas such as Noh or Wayang Topeng, the characters are immediately identifiable, as they were in Greek theater and Commedia dell’Arte, because the iconography of each role is established.) In modern Western masked performances, the designer must employ commonly known images and then the performers may briefly have to establish the conventions for the character. Sears Eldredge explains: “A sculptor has a vision of an essential personality, an archetype, or a spiritual force and tries to incarnate that presence in a sculpted object that will affect the physical senses and imagination of the wearer and observers.” Anthropologist Shapiro affirms that for a spectator at a play, a mask identifies the character and suggests the appropriate emotional response. For playwright John Arden, the mask is such a powerful conveyor of character that it even eliminates the need for a lot of dialogue, relying on “a more naked expression of emotion.”

The masks’ immediate communication of character information to the audience functions somewhere between what Michael Kirby, a theater teacher, performer, and playwright, calls “nonmatrixed representation”—“that condition in which the performer does not act and yet his costume [or other non-performance element] represents something or someone”—and “simple acting”—the condition “in which only one element or dimension of acting is used”—where the mask “represents something or someone” while the performer does not act or actively depict a character. In Commedia dell’Arte, for instance, with the half-mask and costume identifying the characters by an iconography familiar to European audiences for over a century—like, say, Harlequin’s patchwork or, later, diamond-patterned clothing and black-and-red mask with the snub nose, hollow cheeks, and bump on the forehead—the actors didn’t have to develop the characters for the audience. Spectators already knew what to expect, so the actors (and, today, the director) could focus on making the statements they wanted to make through the action. This most closely resembles a form of “received acting,” in Kirby’s words, where the performers behave as themselves while the performative aspects are projected by a very “strong, persistent” environment, such as masks.

The divide between the mask and the actor can set up the possibility for what is sometimes called “schizoid acting” (described briefly in my ROT report on Venus in Fur, 11 July). Since the mask communicates the character independent of the actor, the actor is freer to appear simultaneously as herself. This is a Brechtian concept wherein the actor can comment on the character and her actions as an observer, thus encouraging the spectators to do the same thing. In a masked performance, this “split” or “divided” performance is eased, even, perhaps, inevitable because the mask conceals the actor’s personality in exchange for the character’s while preserving both. (This isn’t to say that all maskers engage in this kind of commentary: traditional masked performances such as Noh aren’t considered divided in this way. In fact, Noh actors believe they’re transformed into the character when they put on the mask.) Just as the holiday masks of Carnival and Mardi Gras permit revelers to do and say things they’d never be free to reveal under ordinary social circumstances, the theatrical mask allows actors the freedom to express ideas they could never disclose on a conventional stage. Putting on a mask, or “second face” as Ronald Grimes calls it, means “to don an other and doff a selfhood,” allowing the actor to stand outside the character and comment on it or encourage the spectator to do so. If, as Susan Smith states, the masker “is at once himself and someone else,” he is able to act as the mask-character even as he simultaneously behaves as himself.

Aside from the Brechtian aspects of masking, there can be other consequences. In the theater of realism, for instance, the actor is usually expected to bear at least a general physical resemblance to the character. (This is particularly so in today’s theater. We are long past the time when a middle aged man can still play Romeo acceptably or, outside of school plays, a very young woman can successfully appear as Lady Bracknell—though we do recognize that a man can play the part.) With masking, this isn’t necessary true. In Noh, for instance, a stout, jowly man is often seen as a sweet young girl because in that tradition, the mask carries the character. In the West, masking can ease the way to non-traditional and color-blind casting for the same reason. Since masked performances are inherently non-realistic, the impediments to actors of any race, gender, or ethnic heritage playing any role for which they have the talent can be swept aside. (It’s also seen as a method of defeating the entrenched star system.) In fact, masks make many casting problems entirely insignificant. Just as the ritual mask allows humans to portray gods, demons, spirits, and all manner of supernatural beings, today the stage mask can let an actor appear not just as an animal, but an inanimate object or even an abstract concept. (This isn’t an altogether modern idea: the characters in the well-known 15th-century morality play Everyman include not just God and Everyman, but Death, Fellowship, Strength, Five-Wits, and Knowledge, among others. How else but with masks could these abstractions be depicted? The medieval religious dramas have today been supplanted by the work of symbolist, surrealist, and expressionist writers and directors whose characters are often dream or subconscious images.) This application goes far beyond merely permitting three actors to play multiple roles.

There are trade-offs, of course. For all their performative benefits as I’ve outlined them, masks freeze the face in one expression. Yes, the masker can make the mask appear to change emotions and brilliantly designed masks can give the impression of multiple expressions, but even with moving parts, a mask has but one face. Everything else is excluded, and the performance has to be staged to accommodate this restriction. In traditional plays like Commedia dell’Arte, the masked characters can become so familiar to the audiences as to be predictable, even stereotyped, no matter how inventive the actor animating the mask gets. And while the mask frees the actors’ physicality in ways they may never have explored it before, it also restricts the actors’ choices because the maskers are constrained to act in the spirit of the masks they’re wearing—an inanimate piece of art designed by someone other than the performer (in most cases). Yes, costumes are also designed by another artist, but costumes are less specific than masks for the most part and they’re more flexible. Mask performers testify that if they violate the character of the mask, the performance simply doesn’t work; Peter Brook says it becomes “distorted.” I’ve never heard an actor say that about a costume.

Furthermore, of course, actors working in masks either must have been specifically trained or a mask expert must be called in to teach the cast how to act in masks, devoting considerable time and attention to the demanding idiosyncrasies of the form. As we’ve heard, the mask will lose impact if the physical performance of the actor isn’t extraordinarily precise in every movement. For all the imaginative freedom the mask affords, the actor has to know how to exploit her new choices and not all actors, even talented ones, are prepared to meet that challenge. In most of the West, especially in the United States, few actors receive specialized mask training. None of the teachers with whom I studied, for instance, worked with masks. I took mime and dance classes, games and movement classes, even “style” classes (which train actors to work in classical plays with period props and costumes like frock coats, long dresses and hoop skirts, walking sticks, handkerchiefs, fans, snuff boxes, and so on). Many actors also used to get fencing lessons, though that’s gone out of fashion nowadays, but few training programs or conservatories offer mask work. Just as fight choreographers come into rehearsals to work out the moves for a sword, dagger, or fist fight on stage, a mask specialist may be necessary to teach the actors how to work with this strange appendage that has such profound effects on them. The difference is, however, that a sword duel is finite—you do it, it’s over, and you return to the more common acting of the rest of the play. A mask affects everything you do, all the time you’re on stage, no matter what the rest of the action may be. Masks demand total concentration, proficiency, precision, and complete control over every movement the actor makes—all the time. Even if you don’t experience the psychological possession to which some maskers attest, the mask unquestionably takes over all your artistic efforts.

Possibly as important as these attributes of masked acting is the fact that from the audience’s standpoint, as Marshall McLuhan writes, “The mask is not so much pictorial as participatory.” Most of us recognize that for any theater performance to work for the audience, the spectators must often suspend their disbelief, as Samuel Taylor Coleridge put it in 1817. Theater isn’t reality, as everyone but perhaps Ilya of Never on Sunday knows. To believe what’s happening on stage, the spectators must put aside their understanding of the real world and accept the theatrical one. Even more, in what he called “stylized theater,” Meyerhold proclaimed that the spectator is the a “fourth creator” of the “creative act” with the writer, director, and cast. With masks, however, the audience takes an even more pivotal role in actuating the performance, as Ronald Grimes observes: “In performative circumstances . . . , audiences may, in fact, be the real animator of masks and maskers.” As in puppetry, a closely allied art, we see that the audience must imbue the mask with life in order for there to be a show. Psychoanalyst Eric Nuetzel maintains, “The audience projects something onto the object,” which, he declares, “doesn’t exist alone.” “The audience is complicit,” responds master puppeteer Paska, and Sears Eldredge writes, “The audience’s imaginations must be engaged to complete the transformation” from inanimate object to living character. That means that, like actors playing for audiences of children, the masked performer can’t ever lose the spectators’ focus and active engagement in the performance or the show evaporates. So, on top of the additional effort that playing in a mask requires, this extra burden is also placed on the actor in a masked role. As we have already heard, the mask dies if it’s not continually animated by the actor; so, too, the play is in jeopardy if the actors don’t maintain complete mastery of the performance.

With all their mystery and magic, masks are also objects of endless contradictions. To start with, they are dead things that come alive on stage. They are inanimate, ornamental art objects which become animated practical devices. A mask reduces the character to one or two frozen attributes and at the same time raises it to a place of myth and ritual where its impact is magnified. Then, as we’ve seen, masks both conceal and reveal at the same time: masks hide the actor’s natural face, protecting his true identity, while they reveal interior realities that the unmasked actor seldom exposes, allowing the wearer to take great risks. At the same time that the mask hides the performer’s identity, diminishing her, it enhances the character’s persona and spotlights the actor’s physical mastery. Masked actors are limited in their use of the facial expressions they ordinarily rely on but their use of the rest of their bodies is greatly expanded. As for the audience, the mask simultaneously attracts us and draws us in, and distances us and even disturbs us. It’s both familiar and strange at the same time. Peter Brook writes that the mask sends a message inward to the wearer even as it projects a message outward to the spectator. Those messages can echo one another, or they can conflict. Perhaps the most significant dichotomy is the phenomenon that the mask is an unreal object without life until it’s imbued with vitality by not only the masker but the spectator who must participate in the animation of the performing object in a more fundamental way than at a conventional, unmasked play. As Ron Jenkins, an expert in Balinese theater and translator of works by Dario Fo, writes:

The power of the mask is rooted in paradox, in the fusion of opposites. It brings together the self and the other by enabling us to look at the world through someone else's face. It merges past and present by reflecting faces that are the likenesses of both our ancestors and our neighbors. A mask is a potent metaphor for the coalescence of the universal and the particular, immobility and change, disguise and revelation.

But a mask is more than a metaphor. It is a tangible catalyst for transformation in the theater that can charge simple actions with complex meanings.

But actor and teacher Pierre Lefèvre may have summed up the magic of acting in a mask best: “It is like a magnifying glass for the actor. An unforgettable experience. Suddenly, he is aware that he is his own source of inspiration.”

* * * *

[I’ve made reference to an extraordinary number of people in this article, some of whom may be unfamiliar to most readers. Many of the names are well enough known to be listed in available reference works, including on-line resources, but just to make things easier, I’m appending a list of the names I invoked in “The Magic of Masks” (aside from passing mentions) and noting some of the reference sources I used in my original research. Note that many of these people are multi-dimensional figures in the arts, academia, and other fields, so this is hardly a definitive description of their authority and significance—just an introduction.]

• John Arden (b. 1930) – British playwright; married to Irish actress Margaretta D’Arcy (b. 1934); reference for this article: Theater at Work (Charles Marowitz and Simon Trussler, eds., Hill & Wang, 1967)
• Eugenio Barba (b. 1936) – Italian-born theater artist based in Denmark; artistic director of Odin Teatret and founder of the International School of Theatre Anthropology; student of Jerzy Grotowski; author of A Dictionary of Theatre Anthropology (Routledge, 1991)
• W[ladislaw] T[eodor] Benda (1873-1948) – Polish-born American artist and mask-maker; references: Masks (Watson-Guptill Publications, 1944), “Modern Masks and Their Uses” (Encyclopædia Britannica, 1946), “How Benda Revived the Use of Masks” (Boston Evening Transcript, 17 Apr. 1926)
• Pierre Bonnard (1867-1947) – French Post-Impressionist painter; an innovative printmaker; made puppets and masks and designed theater sets
• Bertolt Brecht (1898-1956) – German playwright who defined his own style of theater, Epic Theater, and used masks and other distancing devices and techniques to encourage the audience to observe events critically and analytically; father of American poet and theater scholar Stefan Brecht (see below); reference: “The Popular and the Realistic” (Brecht on Theatre, Hill and Wang, 1964)
• Stefan Brecht (1924-2009) – German-born American theater scholar and poet; son of playwright Bertolt Brecht (see above); author of numerous books on theater, especially the avant garde and experimental theater; reference: Peter Schumann's Bread and Puppet Theatre (Methuen, 1988)
• Peter Brook (b. 1925) – British director and theater theorist; theatrical icon of the 1960s avant garde; author of The Empty Space (1968); director of many iconic plays and films; reference: The Shifting Point (Harper & Row, 1988)
• Michael Chekhov (1891-1955) – Russian-born American actor, director, and acting teacher and theorist; nephew of playwright Anton Chekhov (1860-1904); originally a student of Konstantin Stanislavsky; author of To The Actor (1953)
• Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834) – British Romantic poet, philosopher, and critic of dramatic literature; major poems include “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” (1797-98, pubd. 1798) and “Kubla Khan” (1797, pubd. 1816); reference: Chapter XIV, Biographia Literaria (London: Rest Fenner, 1817; New-York : Kirk and Mercein, 1817)
• Jacques Copeau (1879-1949) – French stage director and acting teacher; proponent of actor-training with masks; founder of Théâtre du Vieux-Colombier in Paris
• Irene Corey (1925-2010) – American make-up and costume designer; references: “To Make a Paper Mask” (Theatre Crafts Book of Make-up, Masks, and Wigs, Rodale Press, 1974), “To Mask Is to Unmask” (Mime Journal, 1975)
• E[dward] Gordon Craig (1872-1966; sometimes known as Gordon Craig) – British set designer, theater theoretician; prime mover in the New Stagecraft movement of the early 20th century and promoter of renewal of masked theater; son of famed English actress Ellen Terry (1847-1928)
• Étienne Decroux (1898-1991) – French mime, actor, and teacher; reference: “Etienne Decroux on Masks” (Thomas Leabhart, Mime Journal, 1975)
• Sears A. Eldredge (b. 1936) – American professor emeritus of drama; chairman of the Dramatics Arts & Dance Department, Macalester College, St. Paul (1986-2000); references: Mask Improvisation for Training and Performance (Northwestern University Press, 1994), “Masks: Their Use and Effectiveness in Actor Training Programs” (Michigan State University doctoral dissertation, 1975), “Actor Training in the Neutral Mask” (with Hollis W. Huston, Movement for the Actor, Drama Book Specialists, 1980)
• Dario Fo (b. 1926) – Italian mime, actor, and playwright; political satirist; expert in masking, improvisational performing, and physical comedy; Nobel Laureate in Literature (1997); married to actress-playwright Franca Rame (b. 1928); references: “Hands Off the Mask!” (New Theatre Quarterly, Aug. 1989), The Tricks of the Trade (Routledge, 1991)
• Aaron Frankel (b. 1924) – American director and acting teacher; taught a course called “How To Do Homework” at the HB Studio which I wrote up for ROT (19, 22, 25, & 28 April 2010)
• James G. Frazer (1854-1941) – British social anthropologist; focused on myth, folklore, and comparative religion; author of The Golden Bough (1890); reference: Totemism and Exogamy (Macmillan, 1910)
• Jean Genet (1910-86) – French playwright and poet; known for plays characterized by ritual, role-playing, and illusion in which masks often appear prominently (The Blacks, 1959)
• Ronald L. Grimes (b. 1943) – American professor of religion; teaches courses on religion and the performing arts; references: “Masking: Toward a Phenomenology of Exteriorization” (Journal of the American Academy of Religion, Sept. 1975), “The Life History of a Mask” (Drama Review, Fall 1992)
• Tyrone Guthrie (1900-71) – British theater director; instrumental in the founding of the Stratford Shakespeare Festival (1953) in Ontario, Canada, and the Guthrie Theatre (1963) in Minneapolis, Minnesota; reference: Twice Have the Trumpets Sounded (with [William] Robertson Davies and Grant Macdonald, Clarke, Irwin & Co., 1954)
• Joan Halifax (b. 1942) – American anthropologist; socially engaged Buddhist and spiritualist; civil rights and ecological activist; reference: “The Magic of Masks” (John Biggs, Science Digest, Nov. 1985)
• Ronald S. Jenkins (b. 1952) – American professor of theater; expert in Balinese performance; translator of works of Dario Fo; reference: “Two-Way Mirrors” (Parabola, Special Issue: “Mask and Metaphor: Role, Imagery, Disguise,” Aug. 1981)
• Michael Kirby (1931-97) – American actor, artist, and theater teacher; editor of The Drama Review; reference: “On Acting and Not-Acting” (Drama Review, Mar. 1972)
• Jacques Lecoq (1921-99) – French actor, mime, and acting teacher; used neutral masks in his actor-training program which stressed physical performance; reference: “The Mime of Jacques Lecoq” (Bari Rolfe, Drama Review, Mar. 1972)
• Ralph Lee (b. 1935) – American mask-maker; artistic director of the Mettawee River Theatre Company in Salem, New York; organized the first Greenwich Village Halloween Parade in New York City, 1974; references: “Fleeting Beasts Collected in a Fantasy Heaven” (Mel Gussow, New York Times, 13 Mar. 1998), “Profiles: Ralph Lee” (Mona Molarsky, American Theatre, April 1998), “Ralph Lee: Masks, Festival Figures & Theatre Designs” (pamphlet for New York Public Library for the Performing Arts exhibition, 6 Feb.-2 May 1998)
• Pierre Lefèvre (1914-2007) – French-born English actor and acting teacher; taught with Saint-Denis, including at Juilliard; teacher of masked acting; reference: “The New American Actor” (Jennifer Dunning, New York Times, 2 Oct. 1983)
• Kenneth Macgowan (1888-1963) – American film producer and theater writer; sometimes his last name is spelled MacGowan; author of The Theatre of Tomorrow (Boni and Liveright, 1921); reference: “Masks and Their Meaning” (International Studio, New York, Nov. 1923), “The Magic of Masks” (Chapter One, Greater New York Chapter of ANTA, Nov. 1958)
• Marshall McLuhan (1911-80) - Canadian educator, philosopher, and scholar; his work is cornerstone of media theory; reference: Through the Vanishing Point (with Harley Parker, Harper & Row, 1968)
• Vsevolod Meyerhold (1874-1940) – Russian innovative stage director; student of Konstantin Stanislavsky; introduced Brecht to concept that became the Verfremdungseffekt; fell afoul of Soviet political leaders but became an icon of avant-garde theater in the 1960s; references: Meyerhold on Theatre (Hill and Wang, 1969), The Theatre of Meyerhold (Edward Braun, Drama Book Specialists, 1979)
• Eric Nuetzel (b. 1950) – American psychoanalyst; practices psychiatry in Saint Louis, Missouri; reference: “Pulling Strings: The Geppetto Effect” (Sarah Boxer, New York Times, 17 Jan. 1998)
• Eugene O’Neill (1888-1953) – American playwright; first U.S. dramatist to earn an international reputation; Nobel Laureate (1936), the only American playwright so honored; reference: “Memoranda on Masks” (The American Spectator, Nov. 1932)
• Roman Paska (b. 1951) – American puppeteer; references: “Notes on Puppet Primitives and the Future of an Illusion” (The Language of the Puppet, Pacific Puppetry Center Press, 1990), “Pulling Strings: The Geppetto Effect” (Sarah Boxer, New York Times, 17 Jan. 1998)
• Pablo Picasso (1881-1973) – Spanish artist of many different revolutionary styles, especially Cubism
• Leonard Pitt (b. 1941) – American mime; student of Étienne Decroux, master French mime; world-wide performer and teacher, based in Berkeley, California; references: “Mask Technique for the Actor” (San Francisco Theatre, Winter 1977)
• Bari Rolfe (1916-2002) – American mime; studied with Lecoq; considered grandmother of American mime; references: “Masks, Mime, and Mummenschanz” (Mime Journal, 1975), Behind the Mask (Persona Products, 1977), “The Mime of Jacques Lecoq” (Drama Review, Mar. 1972)
• Michel Saint-Denis (1897-1971; also known as Michel St.-Denis) – French actor, director, and acting teacher; taught at Juilliard in New York City from 1957, helping to launch the drama division in 1968; reference: Training for the Actor: Premises & Promises (Theatre Arts Books, 1982)
• Harry L. Shapiro (1902-90) – American anthropologist; Curator of the Department of Anthropology at the American Museum of Natural History (1942-70); reference: “Magic of the Mask” (New York Times Magazine, 15 Apr. 1951); [Harry Shapiro isn’t related to Leonardo Shapiro (below)]
• Leonardo Shapiro (1946-97) – American experimental theater director; see articles on ROT: “Song in the Blood (Hiroshima/Los Alamos)” (5 Aug. 2009), “Cheerleaders of the Revolution” (31 Oct. 2009), “Brother, You’re Next” (26 Jan. 2010), “New York Free Theater” (4 Apr. 2010), “War Carnival” (13 May 2010), “’As It Is In Heaven’” (25 Mar. 2011), “’Two Thousand Years of Stony Sleep’” (7 May 2011); [Leonardo Shapiro isn’t related to Harry Shapiro (above)]
• Susan Valeria Harris Smith (b. 1945) – American professor of English; author of Masks in Modern Drama (University of California Press, 1984)
• Julie Taymor (b. 1952) – innovative American film, theater, and opera director; designs elaborate masks and puppets for her productions; best example of her stage work: The Lion King (1997 and still running); trained in several Asian forms, including masked forms, and creative work draws on folk and ritual performance; reference: “A director who can conjure up magic onstage” (Miriam Horn, Smithsonian, Feb. 1993)
• Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec (1864-1901) – French Post-Impressionist painter and poster designer; painted numerous scenes of theater and performing arts, cabarets, and circus; designed theater posters
• Edwin Wilson (b. 1927) – American theater critic and teacher; critic for the Wall Street Journal (1972-94); author of The Theatre Experience (McGraw-Hill, 1976)

[There are many aspects of masking that I haven't covered here. Some of the sources listed above will lead an interested reader to more information, and a simple search of reading lists and bibliographies of masks will provide more than enough reading material.]

Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Waterfall

By Kirk Woodward

[My friend and frequent ROT contributor, Kirk Woodward, and his wife, Pat, recently returned from a short trip north to a popular and famous natural wonder. He told me it had been a remarkable experience and he had some thoughts on the visit and the sight that he wanted to mull over and then try to articulate. His articles for ROT always having been interesting at the very least, I welcomed the offer to share his ruminations with readers of this blog. As you will see, he not only didn’t disappoint, but has a few cogent and quirky ideas to impart. ~Rick]

* * * *

"Keep in your mind," the theater set designer Robert Edmund Jones wrote, "some image of magnificence." What kind of image, exactly? He wasn't thinking of brilliant set designs, that's for certain. What he was thinking of, I believe, were natural wonders.

*

There are some things so American it's hard to believe, and some of them are in Canada. Case in point: think of a getaway site, and what comes to mind? There's the beach, of course, and the mountains, and all the places where George Washington is supposed to have slept. All these have various incarnations – which beach, which mountain, which historical marker? But there's only one waterfall that we're all on a first name basis with. That would be Niagara Falls.

*

Quick question: where is the second largest waterfall east of the Mississippi River in the United States? It's in the center of Paterson, New Jersey, where the Passaic River overflowed so disastrously after Hurricane Irene. Even in good times, it’s quite a sight after a heavy rain. It's not Niagara Falls, though, maybe because there's no Canadian side to it. It's also not surrounded by hotels. It's quite an historical area – Alexander Hamilton is intimately associated with it – and well worth a visit the next time you're in Paterson. But I'm pretty sure it's not the first natural wonder that comes to your mind.

On the other hand, there's a sort of magnetic pull to Niagara Falls, a pull that people have felt for literally centuries. There appear to have been tourists at the falls by the mid 18th century. Today tourists number in the tens of thousands daily, and Niagara surely is the most referenced honeymoon destination.

My wife Pat and I have been married for twenty-seven years, and we honeymooned far from Niagara Falls (we went, actually, to Stockbridge, Massachusetts). But when circumstances combined to give us a free weekend, fewer children at home, and a chance to travel, just the two of us, where we headed was Niagara Falls.

*

What's in a name? The word "Niagara" is so familiar to us that we may not wonder where it came from. I always assumed it was an Indian name, and that apparently is true, except that it’s not clear which Indians we’re talking about. The name may come from the Niagagarega Indians (as the French called them), or it may be Iroquois (a town called "Ongniaahra", supposedly meaning "cutting a point of land into two"), or it may be Mohawk (referring to a neck, like a neck of land).

One wonders how many honeymoon couples arrive at the falls still figuring out what their names are supposed to mean.

*

I got my driving directions on the Web, and followed instructions like a dutiful child. And we got there. My failure to study the map closely, however, meant that I didn't realize that, in terms of my mental geography, Niagara Falls is upside down.

There's a website somewhere that features "upside down" maps of the world, so that, for example, what we think of as the North Pole is actually the South Pole, and Antarctica and Australia are the north most continents. Those maps give me vertigo.

There's no logical reason I can think of why this should be so, because "north" is just a name we’ve assigned – we could just as easily call it “south” or “hast” or “Timbuktu.” I, like most of us, am simply accustomed to seeing the "North" pole (an arbitrary name for it) at the top of the map.

In the same way, my mind is programmed to assume that Canada is “north of,” and therefore “above,” the United States. As a result of this belief, I pictured the Niagara River flowing north to south from Lake Erie into Lake Ontario.

Ah, you say, but doesn't Lake Ontario's name associate it with Canada, and isn't Canada north of the United States? Yes, that's correct, which means that the Niagara river flows north.

To add to the confusion, at Niagara Falls, the Canadian side of the river is actually south of the US side.

This fact means that when I looked out of my hotel window on the Canadian side at the river flowing right to left in my view, it was actually flowing south to north, and not north to south as I believed it was.

I find in this turned-around experience a useful lesson for honeymooning couples. Never be certain you've got the geography of things straight. Surprises are always possible. Emotions, and socks, may not always be where you think they are.

*

Miles before we see the falls, we cross a bridge. In the distance, a giant column of smoke. "There's a huge fire over there," Pat says. "There may be a huge falls over there," I say. I'm right. What we see, miles away, is the spray from the Canadian side of the falls.

When we get to our hotel room, we look out the window and there's the entire Horseshoe Falls laid out before us, much of it obscured by a giant pillar of spray. Things aren't always what they seem.

*

Fancy meeting you here! Niagara Falls is portable. Ten thousand years ago it was almost seven miles upstream – that is, south (not north) of its present location. It's eaten its way through the rock inch by inch, foot by foot, and of course it continues to do so, although the rate of erosion is slower these days, because half the volume of water that used to flow over the falls is now diverted, through huge tunnels, into hydroelectric plants – at night, three quarters of the water is missing.

Because of erosion, the history of the falls is partly the history of buildings that fell down, and often into the river, when the ground under them weakened and finally washed away. You can see what remains of a number of these structures – pieces of walls built into the cliff sides. We've had an effect on the falls, but nature always wins. Change happens.

*

Thanks to my inability to follow simple directions, we took a rather lengthy drive through the American side of the falls before we found the bridge that goes to Canada. Traffic is absolutely abominable in tourist season, on both sides of the Niagara River. There's no speeding in town; you just can't, and the tour busses make the congestion even worse. On the other hand, imagine being a tour bus driver.

Anyway, I apologize for offending anyone, especially with so little information to back up my opinion, but to me the American side looked like a beach town, without the charm. What I saw was, mostly, dives. I was not impressed. On the other hand, I hear that the park on Goat Island, between the American and Canadian falls, is a lovely place, and you can walk down the side of the American Falls – we saw people ascending and descending the stairs along the waterfall all the time we were there.

But Canada! The Canadian side is as built up as the American, but it looks much less seedy, and the riverfront itself is lovely, with stone walls, grass and trees, numerous lookouts, and a corner of the sidewalk, right next to a well-designed lodge, where you can stand beside the falls as the water plunges over the cliff. You can walk down to this level of the hillside, or take a nifty little train car called the Incline that hugs the side of the cliff.

*

More on Canada: my wife and I have recently gone on a binge of watching Canadian entertainment. First we watched the wonderful TV series Slings and Arrows, and were particularly taken by the Canadian actor Paul Gross and his wife Martha Burns. We followed Gross to the TV series Due South, and on to a number of movies. Gross, who will appear with Kim Cattrall this coming season on Broadway in Noel Coward's Private Lives, is a fine actor with remarkable charm and a deftly humorous touch. Many of the pieces he appears in, particularly Due South, have as a theme the nature of Canadians – their patience, their calmness, their all-around niceness.

Our visit to Niagara was the first trip to Canada for both of us, and we expected it to at least in some ways resemble the Canada we had seen on TV. Our first encounter, however, was with a Canadian customs official at the bridge over the river, and he wasn't charming and he wasn't humorous. He seemed offended that we were going to Canada at all, and mystified that we were there for a weekend for pleasure. Why that fact surprised him, I can’t begin to imagine. He definitely had not been hired by the Chamber of Commerce. People aren't always who you assume they are.

Canada – the nation, Canada – owns the casinos on its side of the river, and a classy bunch of casinos they are. On the American side, at night, you see a tall building lit up more or less like, well, a slot machine. This is a casino operated by a Native American tribe. The metaphors for couples going to the falls are piling up, and this one involves taking a gamble.

Also – we have to face it – the Canadian falls is much more impressive than the American. It's shaped like a horseshoe, it's much larger, and it isn't half covered with rubble. Some years ago, engineers actually stopped the flow of water to the American Falls to remove the rubble, but they couldn’t. Make of that what you will.

*

How big are the falls? I have a hard time seeing it in itself; I need a standard of comparison. I always found myself first looking at a person, then at the Falls. People look pretty small in comparison.

Another way to compute the height of the Falls is in terms of buildings. The Horseshoe (Canadian) Falls is sixteen stories tall; the American Falls, seventeen. Out there, that's a tall building.

Still another way to get an idea of the magnitude of the Falls is to go to the top of the Skylon Tower, a 520 foot tall observation tower on the Canadian side, and look at it. You see the falls the way you'd look at it on a map. Just remember that north is south, and vice versa. Anyway, the view is something. Seeing the falls – itself of great height – from a great height encourages one to take the long view.

I had difficulty wrapping my mind around one of the oddest geological features of the falls known as the Whirlpool. The Niagara River rushes from the falls, down the gorge, south – I mean, north – into a sort of rock cul de sac. Finding no way out, it dashes against the rock walls, whirls around – sometimes clockwise, sometimes counterclockwise – and finally plunges out another channel. I couldn't exactly see this process taking place when I looked into the Whirlpool, but I believe the people who say it's so. Sometimes life makes your head spin.

*

Across the United States, the name Frederick Law Olmstead frequently comes up. He was unquestionably the greatest landscape architect this country ever produced. Olmstead believed that natural areas could be both developed and preserved. His first major completed project was Central Park in the city where I work, New York; he designed the parks in Louisville, Kentucky, and his firm designed Cherokee Gardens, the area in Louisville where I grew up; and his concern for the development of the area around Niagara Falls led to the creation of the first state park in the United States – the Niagara Falls State Park.

In tourist season the falls are illuminated from the Canadian side by giant spotlights with shifting colored gels, and on weekend nights there are fireworks. Our first night there, we walked down by the river about ten at night, and the area was filled with people laughing, talking, marveling. Entertainment doesn't always make one really happy. But this isn't just entertainment. This is Niagara Falls.

*

No account of the falls would be complete without mentioning that periodically people go over them, deliberately or accidentally, in barrels or just in clothes, for better or for worse. It is painful to dwell on the folks who decided to kill themselves by going over the falls, or who died when they accidentally fell in. Slightly better to think of those who went over the falls deliberately, with the intention of surviving, in what we might call a Leap of Faith, and survived (they didn't all). Much better still to think of the child who went over the falls wearing a life jacket, and was rescued by the boat called the Maid of the Mist in the pool at the bottom. Rescues do happen.

*

On our one full day at the falls, on a Saturday, we decided that the best way to see the sights in the area, especially considering the difficulty of driving anywhere, was to take a bus tour. Over six hours we rode south of – that is, above – the falls and saw the old hydroelectric plant and several amazing houses along the wide expanse of water that turns into rapids and then into the Falls itself. Then we walked into a tunnel under the falls, and watched the water crashing by from behind it. On down the river toward the North, we visited the lovely Botanical Gardens, the Whirlpool, and finally took the obligatory cruise on the aforementioned Maid of the Mist.

The company that runs these boats (they’re all called the same thing, and distinguished from each other by Roman numerals) has been in business for over a hundred years, and it knows how to operate an attraction. I thought we'd never get on a boat, the lines were so long. Instead, we got on the next boat, dressed in our biodegradable blue rain hoods. The ride goes past the American Falls – the best view we had of it while we were there – and past the relatively tiny Bridal Veil Falls next to it, and then on to the Horseshoe Falls.

The reason you wear a rain hood, as I'm sure you know, is that as you pass along the Horseshoe Falls you get very, very wet. I took off my glasses, which wouldn't have helped even if they'd had little windshield wipers on them, but at the center of the Horseshoe Falls, there's not much to see except water anyway. Tons, ages, worlds of water. When we got to the very middle, facing the Falls, I felt as if my brain were being rewired.

An image of magnificence, and it’s not a bad way to spend a honeymoon, either – getting your brain rewired.

“It's Time to Retire 'Kabuki': The Word Doesn't Mean What Pundits Think It Does.”

By Jon Lackman

[A little over a year ago, a friend sent me a column from Slate, the on-line journal. At the time, the word Kabuki was making the rounds in political punditry as a term meaning ‘affectation’ or ‘pretense’ and the columnist, Jon Lackman, thought it was being overused by the chattering class. (The word Kabuki, though derived from three Chinese characters that mean song, dance, and acting skill, as a whole means ‘something abnormal or askew’ in the sense of deviating from the ordinary. Kabuki, therefore, actually means ‘off-beat performance,’ something deliberately outrageous.) I think my friend sent me the column in part because I’d studied about Kabuki and liked it as a theater form; I imagine he thought this particular article would amuse me. He was right. I’ve been waiting for a suitable slot in the ROT schedule so I can share it with the readers, and now that we’re about to lurch into another presidential campaign season, I suspect the word may have another burst of popularity among political commentators. Lackman’s original column appeared on Slate in “The Good Word: Language and How We Use It,” a regular column in the journal, on 14 April 2010 (http://www.slate.com/id/2250081/).]

Judging from op-ed pages and talk radio, American pundits know a lot about Kabuki, the 400-year-old Japanese stage tradition with the Lady Gaga get-ups. Health care reform recently brought Kabuki to mind for both Rush Limbaugh—"what you have here is 'Kabuki theater' "—and New York Times columnist Frank Rich: "[I]f I were to place an incautious bet on which political event will prove the most significant of February 2010, I wouldn't choose the kabuki health care summit." For The New Yorker's George Packer, all the capital's a Far Eastern stage, and all its men and women merely players. "I looked for answers outside the Kabuki theatre of Washington personalities."

Pundits use Kabuki as a synonym for "posturing." The New Republic's Michael Crowley, for example, has defined it as a "performance, in which nothing substantive is done." But there's nothing "kabuki" about the real Kabuki. Kabuki, I'll have you know, is one of UNESCO's Masterpieces of the Oral and Intangible Heritage of Humanity! And it's nothing like politics. It does indeed use stylized gestures, expressions, and intonations, but it's far from empty and monotonous. As the scholar A.C. Scott has written, a great Kabuki actor's performance will "contain an individuality beneath the unchanging conventions, his symbolism must be something more than imitative repetition." Unlike a Dick Durbin stemwinder, the quintessential Kabuki moment (known as a kata) is colorful and ruthlessly concise, packing meaning into a single gesture. It is synecdoche, synopsis, and metaphor rolled together—as when, in one Kabuki play, a gardener expecting a visit from the emperor cuts down all his chrysanthemums except one, the perfect one. And in contrast with our own shortsighted politics, Kabuki concerns not the present so much as a "dreamlike time shrouded in mist but ever present in the subconscious," to quote critic Shuichi Kato.

Of course, pundits don't care about the real thing. They use Kabuki precisely because they and everyone else have only a hazy idea of the word's true meaning, and they can use it purely on the level of insinuation. They deploy Kabuki because:

1) It sounds funny.
2) It sounds childish.
3) It sounds foreign.
4) It sounds incomprehensible.

Kabuki succeeds chiefly because it makes your opponent sound silly and un-American. And finally kabuki works because:

5) It sounds Japanese.

Needless to say, it sounds Japanese because it is Japanese. Point is, the word can conjure certain stereotypes about Japanese politics. As the scholar Gerald Curtis has noted, we have "an image of Japanese politics in which bureaucrats dominate . . . and policy making is little more than a process of collusion." For Rush Limbaugh, what better image with which to tar health care reform?

But how did Kabuki, one of Japan's most revered arts, come to signify loathsome fakery? Kabuki escaped derision only so long as no one had heard of it. The Japanese initially considered it too difficult to export; indeed, seeing a Kabuki play cold is like tuning into Lost midseason. Consequently, the word didn't appear in print in English until the late 19th-century, and then only rather infrequently. That changed when, following World War II, Japan's government tried to shed its image as a global marauder by touring its best Kabuki troupes. As historian Barbara Thornbury has written, "spectacular, larger-than-life kabuki was seen as having the potential to reignite America's nearly hundred-year-old romance with exotic Japan." This concept, alas, failed miserably. Although America's urban theatergoers lauded Kabuki, their good opinion did nothing to improve ties between the United States and its one-time enemy. Indeed, relations worsened due to drawn-out treaty negotiations. When American official James C. Hagerty visited Tokyo in 1960, protesters surrounded his car, broke its windows, and nearly flipped it.

According to my research, it was in this hostile atmosphere that Kabuki acquired its modern derogatory meaning. Writing in 1961 about a State Department plan to revise its security measures, Los Angeles Times writer Henry J. Taylor declared, "[By] finally dismissing Chester Bowles as undersecretary of state at the moment he did, the President unhitched the plan's kingpin in this shoddy piece of left-wing kabuki." Six months later, Taylor struck again, "Agriculture Secretary Freeman announced he has discussed Billie Sol Estes' political corruption kabuki with Robert F. Kennedy and 'had mentioned it informally to the president.' "

Writers have enlivened their prose with Kabuki ever since. Usage increases whenever Japan is in the news for disingenuous behavior—as in the early 1990s, when it turned out that Japan's go-go economy was an elaborate sham. It's been cropping up most recently due to the Toyota recall, which has made some Americans question the Japanese car company's commitment to safety. "Toyoda Is Wary Star of Kabuki at Capitol," blared the Wall Street Journal. The word is also on the ascendant whenever fakery seems particularly rife in American politics. Kabuki loves itself a Senate nomination hearing.

It may seem P.C. or peevish to ask writers to resist kabuki. (Is Kabuki resistance itself Kabuki?) The request is impractical, I admit. If a former theater critic such as Frank Rich can't be trusted to use it properly, who can? This is one of those writerly words that is helpfully absent from ordinary conversation, that says, "Stand back, pundit here!" (Slate writers, by the way, have also abused Kabuki—repeatedly!) But how would you feel if your favorite art form, ballet or truckers’ quilts, say, became another nation's derogatory epithet? How many Americans today steer clear of actual Kabuki (it is regularly performed here) because of the word's reputation? And there's a final reason to ditch it: Posturing is far too tepid an indictment of contemporary American politics. I'd sooner opt for Grand-Guignol, which Wikipedia aptly defines as "graphic, amoral horror entertainment." It is seppuku time for Kabuki.

© 2011 The Slate Group, LLC

[Back in November 2010, I published a column on Kabuki theater, “Kabuki: A Trip to a Land of Dreams,” followed by the republication of an old review I’d written on the performances in New York City of the Grand Kabuki company in 1985 (1 and 6 November 2010 on ROT, respectively). In the first article, I said of the theater form: “Kabuki is a world of wonder—a world of poetry, color, spectacle, grace, energy, and artistry.” That’s a far cry from the implications about which Lackman is writing above. At the end of my 1985 review, I asserted, “Singing, ballet, acting, storytelling, music, poetry—even worship—are integral parts of most Eastern performances. Kabuki is an example, as the current tour of the Grand Kabuki demonstrates to incomparable pleasure.” I think, like Lackman—who seems to know Kabuki himself—that most Americans who toss around the word derisively have never marveled at an actual Kabuki performance. I’ve been in and around theater most of my life, perhaps as long as 55 years as spectator, actor, director, teacher, and writer. I was on my second grad school go-round when I first encountered Kabuki, so I was no novice to theater—and I fell madly in love with the performance form immediately. It is, in my opinion, one of the most astonishing and remarkable forms of art—not just performance—I have ever experienced. For those of us who know the art, misusing its name as dismissively as do the pundits Lackman deplores is more than unfortunate and misleading. It’s a mark of ignorance.]

Competitive Art

I’ve hinted in the past that I don’t think much of awards and prizes in the arts, including the Tonys, the Oscars, the Emmys, and even the Pulitzers—as well as the scores of other awards for music, writing, dance, or aesthetic basket-weaving (see “Tony Committee to Theater Journalists: ‘Yer Out!’” ROT, 17 August 2009). 

I’ve never articulated my reasons for this disdain except privately to a couple of friends, especially around award times when the big galas are on TV and everyone else I know is watching them. I’ve decided it’s time to try to explain my position. Let’s see if I can.

First of all, let me clear up one confusion that’s come up a few times when the Tonys or the Oscars come on TV and friends ask if I’ll be watching and I tell them I won’t be. “Oh, yes,” some of them reply, “you don’t approve of them.” 

Well, yes—as you’ll see, I hope—but that’s not really why I don’t watch the shows. The very simple reason for that is that I find them awful and boring as TV fare. They’re overlong, the speeches and appearances are dull, the humility is mostly artificial, and I’ve seldom seen most of the performances being “honored.” 

That leaves only the entertainment the award show’s producers have interspersed in the parched desert that fills the rest of the hours, the patter of the host and the presenters and the scenes and musical numbers from the nominated productions. As for the former, the attempted levity of the MC’s and their cohorts . . . well, it’s seldom all that good: most of it’s inside jokes and industry banter—and occasionally the host really lays an egg. 

(I made the mistake of making an exception to my own practice several years ago to watch the Academy Awards the night Dave Letterman hosted in 1995. I’m a fan and I wanted to see what he’d do with the gig. Man, was that a bad call. Even he acknowledges he was lousy. And does anyone remember Rob Lowe’s auspicious appearance in ’89. Can you say “Snow White”?) 

So it’s not because I disapprove that I don’t watch the award shows—it’s simply because I don’t like them. (If I thought the broadcasts were any good, I might be conflicted about watching them because of the way I feel about performance awards, but as it is, that’s irrelevant.)

Second, I should admit to being something of a hypocrite when it comes to art awards. I do disparage them and on the few occasions when I’ve been eligible to participate (I can vote for the SAG Awards and I’ve been qualified to vote for the Regional Tony and some ATCA playwriting awards in the past), I haven’t done so because I don’t like the idea of awards in artistic fields. 

(In the interest of full disclosure, I should also acknowledge that for several years, my late father was a voter on the Helen Hayes Awards panel in Washington, D.C., and I never remonstrated with him.) Yet I cite the awards when I write about actors, directors, or productions that have won or been nominated for them. I even made an argument opposing the Tony committee’s elimination of theater journalists from the voter list for that theater award (in the 2009 ROT article I referenced earlier).

The problem seems to be that though I don’t put store in such awards, I know that other people do, so when I name an artist or an artwork, I mention awards they’ve won, but I feel awkward doing that. Still, I do it.

Finally, I make distinctions among awards, and that may be a little hypocritical, too. For instance, I don’t object to recognition for sales or popularity, like best-seller designations because that’s based on book sales and not a judgment of quality. It’s also theoretically objective—one book sells more than another. I have the same feeling about gold and platinum records in the music business—again, because it’s based on sales. 

I think the People’s Choice Awards are silly, but I don’t really object to them because they’re based on a straightforward popularity contest, not a presumptive quality evaluation. I also don’t have the same problem with halls of fame as I do with awards for superiority. (I have also been eligible to vote for candidates for the Theatre Hall of Fame, though I don’t—but that’s because I just don’t feel qualified to judge.) 

Halls of fame seem different to me because they honor artists for a lifetime or career of contributions to their fields, which seems like a sufficiently substantial basis for some kind of judgment. Also, voting one artist into a hall of fame one year doesn’t preclude that another artist who’d been passed over won’t be honored in another year; if someone doesn’t get an Oscar for a particular performance or a Pulitzer for a specific book or play, it’s finite—that work won’t get a second consideration.

Okay, let’s get to the heart of my problem—and I admit it’s my problem and I’m in a minority here. I object to awards in the arts for two main reasons: they’re a terribly subjective call and I feel they demean the arts they purport to celebrate. Here’s what I mean:

I guess the subjectivity issue is straightforward. If a runner beats everyone else’s times, he’s the champ, right? That’s clear. It’s objectively measured. If a soccer team scores more goals than its opponent, it wins the match. No question, right? If a tennis player accumulates more victories than any other on the tour, she’s number one in the sport. That’s self-evident. 

But how do you really adjudge one performance better than another or one movie or play better than the next? It’s a personal and individual response. I’m sure many of the Oscar or Tony judges can come up with justifications, citing all kinds of film-study or performance-study explanations for why they decided the way they did, but many others will just tell you they like one better than the others—and I submit that all arts-awards judges really go with a gut feeling. 

(I’m not going to get into the potential for professional politics in these contexts. It makes the whole process way too complicated even to discuss cogently.) 

I can’t even imagine what someone’s criteria would be for making such a judgment. Look what some people use for their evaluative basis: I took a group of high school theater students to a play competition one year. (It was part of my job and I wasn’t about to impose my private objections on the students for whom participation was a valued tradition.) 

One entrant was a student-directed staging of a Chekhov one-act. The production didn’t win its category and after the awards were announced, the judges held a critique for the participants. I was appalled when one judge objected to a line in the text that included a phrase which the judge felt sounded too contemporary. 

First of all, the student director, a senior who was a serious theater student, hadn’t translated the script; she was using a published English rendition, so she wasn’t responsible for the text. Second, I had brought along a Russian edition of the play (just to share with the director), and I found that the original words were exactly the same as the English. The translation wasn’t even inaccurate! 

I was aghast: this was what the judge found to object to in the production? (I did point this out, but the prizes had already been awarded. I also wrote to the competition’s organizers, but nothing came of that, either.)

Now, granted, this was a high school theater competition, but I have no doubt that the big-league judges engage in identical inanities. We all know that after an awards ceremony, or even after the announcement of the nominees for an award, there’s a lot of moaning and groaning about what got left out, overlooked, or misjudged. No arts award goes without some second-guessing or caviling among the disappointed. 

Of course, it’s subjective. Art is subjective. If there were ever such a thing as objective art, it would almost certainly be boring. Art succeeds because it is personal: it comes from a personal place in the artist and it speaks to something personal in the consumer. 

Susanne Langer, the art philosopher (see “Susanne Langer: Art, Beauty, & Theater,” parts 1 & 2, ROT, 4 & 8 January 2010), wrote succinctly, “Art is the creation of forms symbolic of human feeling.” Feeling, by definition, is subjective; you can’t rationalize feeling. Art, said Langer, “clarifies and organizes intuition” and therefore “elicits no conscious intellectual work (reasoning).” Art functions outside of reason: it’s not irrational, but arational.

Just to be sure we understand this idea, and its application to art competitions, Langer got specific:

Works of art are not usually comparable. Only prize-juries have to evaluate them with reference to some standard, which is inevitably arbitrary and in many cases inapplicable. A competent jury does not even define a standard. If it consists of people who have developed their powers of perception by long conversance with the order of art . . . in which their judgments are to be made, intuition will guide the verdict. There will be disagreements—not because good and bad works cannot be distinguished, but because among successful ones there is no sure principle of selection. Personal or social factors usually tip the balances; ‘ratings’ are trivial.

“Personal or social factors” are in evidence all the time. We can see in any given awards competition how sentiment for or against an artist affects the vote. We hear people say, “It’s her turn” or “He lost last year so he’ll probably get it this year in compensation.” 

If an artist has offended the community (or, more directly, “the academy”), the work might be overlooked not for its lack of quality, but because the voters were miffed. Industry bias, such as the film academy’s putative leaning toward box-office hits rather than innovative, difficult work or its apparent preference for dramas over comedies are part of the equation. (The drama Pulitzer has only been awarded to eight musical plays in the nine decades since the prize was inaugurated—a period that spans the golden age of the American musical theater.) 

Politics can also come into play, both the internal or artistic kind and the actual kind. Say, if it were possible, a dramatist composed the best play ever written—but its theme was pro-Nazi. You know it would never win any award. (Hell, it probably wouldn’t even get staged!)

A work of art, by Langer’s estimation (and mine), can’t be judged in comparison with another with any claim to legitimacy. Furthermore, we know from experience that even individual taste changes over time. A work of art you liked ten years ago might seem silly and superficial today. Collective taste changes, too. 

Consider the well-known case of Vincent van Gogh, today acknowledged as one of the greatest painters of all time, who sold only one painting in his lifetime—and that was to his brother! Actors as respected as Richard Burton, Peter O’Toole, Maureen O’Hara, and Gena Rowlands have never won Oscars; Charlie Chaplin, Alfred Hitchcock, Robert Altman, and Sidney Lumet have never won for directing some of our best movies; dramatists Lillian Hellman, S. N. Behrman, and Philip Barry never won Pulitzers (neither did novelists F. Scott Fitzgerald or Truman Capote). 

Now look at a list of past Oscar-, Tony-, or Pulitzer-winning movies, books, and plays. How many are almost an embarrassment by today’s standards? If we had it to do over again, we might select a different work to recognize. (And then, we might change our opinions again ten years from now.) On this basis, people declare one work or one artist the best of the year? It doesn’t work for me.

The assertion that such competitions demean the art itself is a little harder to put into words. It’s a pretty subjective statement itself, isn’t it? Okay, I’m writing about my own opinions here, not some universal sense I think is shared by a large majority, so subjectivity is the matrix in which I’m operating. 

I object, even resent, art being turned into a competitive effort like sports or hot-dog eating. Now, I don’t think artists, particularly playwrights, consciously compete with their peers for awards and prizes—they’re too busy making art. (I have no doubt that there are producers, both in Hollywood and on Broadway, who have one eye on Oscars and Tonys when they set out to put together a production—and there may be an actor or two who see statuettes in their futures when they read scripts.) 

I subscribe to Ralph Waldo Emerson’s sentiment, expressed in his essay “Art,” that “every genuine work of art has as much reason for being as the earth and the sun.” A work of art, whether it’s a painting, a poem, or a performance, should be its own justification, its own raison d’être; it shouldn’t depend on some outside recognition for validation.

As Langer said, art’s function is to raise feelings in the spectator—that should be the only evaluation needed. Either the art affects me, makes me feel something that wasn’t there before or understand something in a new way, or it doesn’t. If it’s a great work of art, it will have that effect on more people who experience it (each in his or her own way, of course), and it will continue to have an effect—though the effect may shift—over time. 

That’s what defines a classic artwork, like Hamlet, the Mona Lisa, Oliver Twist, or Citizen Kane. Shakespeare, Da Vinci, and Dickens all created quite nicely, thank you, without prizes and awards. (So did Welles, really, though he was working in the era of the Oscar, New York Film Critics Award, DGA Award, WGA Award, and Golden Globes. He was passed over for most of his work anyway.) 

Of course a work’s reception is important to an artist; despite what some artists say, few really create just for themselves. And I also recognize that grants and commissions, which go back to the days of Shakespeare, Michelangelo, and Da Vinci, are significant in an artist’s creative life—and they are a form of competition, I acknowledge. My argument is fraught with contradictions, I know. But singling out one work for recognition the way an award does, or one artist, as even the famous MacArthur genius grants do, disturbs me.

I know that some competition is always going to be part of the arts, just as it is in all human endeavors. We are a competitive species. There are limited resources and venues, so artists will always have to vie for access. Someone’s going to get the commission or the exhibit and someone else isn’t. And I’m sure that in some cases, whoever controls the desired asset deliberately sets the assignment up as a competition, but even that’s not quite the same as turning the creation of art into a race for recognition the way a prize does. 

It just seems unseemly to me. Artists should be concerned with the best work they can do, comparing their new work with their past accomplishments if they have to try to better something; they shouldn’t feel they have to outdo other artists. Yes, consumers and critics will inevitably compare one artist and one artwork with another—but the artists shouldn’t have to do that.

I think it’s also an element of my distaste for art awards and prizes that there are so many of them. The music business, for instance, seems to have awards for every song and musician the industry can define—which may explain why the Grammys have recently consolidated several categories. 

(Musicians in the fields that were eliminated are complaining about the action, perhaps because it’s gotten so that all artists feel that they deserve some kind of award of their very own.) 

It’s getting to be like some children’s activities where every participant gets recognition so no one feels left out. Is that what we’ve developed: a culture where artists are childish and infantile? If I don’t get a prize, I’ll hold my breath until I turn blue?

Some of the organizations which give out the awards seem gratuitous as well. The so-called Foreign Press Association, who presents the Golden Globes, doesn’t have any function except giving out the award, I don’t believe. And essentially, the award itself seems to be little more than an excuse to stage a TV extravaganza. 

On top of all the different Grammys, for example, what’s the need for the MTV Video Music Awards as well? Since MTV’s a cable TV network (which, umm, airs music videos!), I’m left to assume that its purpose is to, first, promote the network and, second, justify a big broadcast they hope will draw substantial ratings. (Do we need awards for advertisements or porn? Really?)

That most of the big awards are more about selling tickets, records, or books (or, in the case of TV, more ads) was, I think, exposed when the Tonys eliminated reviewers from the voting pool. (Journalists haven’t been part of the voting pools for most of the other major performance awards—though I’m not certain about the Grammys.) 

Of all the interested parties, the journalists were the least invested in the outcome: they didn’t stand to make more money or get better jobs if a show they liked won an award. Everyone else, all industry insiders, has skin in the game, to a greater or lesser degree (even if it’s only to scuttle a rival’s prestige), but the journalists also had an occasional tendency to vote for artier little plays that caught their fancies instead of the big commercial hits the producers want to promote for long Broadway runs and later lucrative tours. 

In other words, the reviewers voted for the art while the others are focused on the commerce. Now the award won’t stand in the way of recognizing the money-making crowd-pleaser rather than the innovator that might attract a smaller audience.

I have no idea if any of the award shows actually does draw a large audience, but that seems to me to be their major rationale—especially when they get more and more elaborate each year or make rules aimed at selecting more popular nominees. Doesn’t that give the game away? Particularly when it turns out that those additional crowd-pleasers aren’t really expected to win anything. 

In marketing, those are called loss leaders—and their sole use is to sell other stuff. That seems to be the intention: marketing, sales, promotion—not honoring artistic achievement. In fact, as far as I can see, even the major awards like the Oscars and the Tonys have only one benefit: they sell tickets. I suppose artists who win one get to feel good about their work, but beyond that, they’re an advertising gimmick to help put asses in seats. That may be the art of the deal, but it’s not art.

Peter Brook’s 'Tierno Bokar'

[I’ve just published a report on Peter Brook’s International Centre of Theatre Research (ROT, 25 August) in which I mentioned the director’s production of Tierno Bokar at Columbia University. As a follow-up to that article, I’m publishing my 2005 performance report on Brook’s production. Note that this assessment was originally a comment to some friends on a casual basis, so the tone is less formal than some of my later theater reports.

[Tierno Bokar Saalif Tall (1875–1939) was a Sufi sage, a member of a distinguished clan, and a spiritual leader in his village in what is now Mali. His clan, exponents of repeating a Sufi prayer 12 times, was embroiled in a debate with a rival clan that advocated repeating it 11 times, a debate that devolved into a conflict over power and leadership in the Tidjani Sufi Order. When Tierno eventually became a follower of Hamallah, a member of the rival clan, he was cast out by family, relatives, and clan, branded a traitor, and forbidden to teach or pray publicly. His enemies further ostracized him by collaborating with the French colonial powers, portraying him as a fomenter of rebellion against French rule. Tierno died impoverished and isolated. The play Tierno Bokar is based on Malian writer Amadou Hampaté Bâ’s book about his studies with Tierno, Vie et enseignement de Tierno Bokar: le sage de Bandiagara (Paris: Editions Présence Africaine, 1957; translated as A Spirit of Tolerance: The Inspiring Life of Tierno Bokar, 2008).]

Diana, my frequent theater companion, and I got tickets for Peter Brook’s Tierno Bokar on Tuesday, 19 April [2005]. Brook's in residence at Columbia University under the auspices of the Columbia University Arts Initiative which is headed by Gregory Mosher, formerly of Lincoln Center (and before that, the Goodman in Chicago). Brook and his troupe, Centre International de Créations Théâtrales (CICT), are performing Tierno Bokar, based on the biography of "the Sage of Bandiagara," at Barnard College; there didn't seem to be any student involvement, so I don't know how the residency/sponsorship works at Columbia.

Where to start, where to start?

Bokar, of whom I had never heard before, was a Sufi Muslim teacher who lived in French colonial Mali (then called Upper Volta, I believe) from 1875 to 1939. He became part of a conflict with another clan over the recitation of a prayer, "The Pearl of Perfection," which his group believed should be said 12 times, while the opposing clan believed it should be said 11 times. This conflict ultimately led to violence and gave the French an excuse to crack down on all of the native subjects. Bokar went to the leader of the Elevens and reached an understanding with him, causing his own clan to ostracize him. He essentially died an exile in his own village. According to Brook's statement in the program, his point is to "illuminate . . . the power of violence and the true nature of a tolerance that is more powerful still." Well, that's certainly a nice notion, laudatory, even—perfectly in keeping with Brook's politics and philosophy. Unhappily, the performance didn't accomplish this as far as I was concerned.

Well, to begin with, Margo Jefferson was way too generous with Brook in the Times on the 7th. She seems to suggest that it's worth seeing the performance: "Still, research is a journey, and journeys can matter as much as arrivals." In this case, neither the journey nor the arrival were worth much. In fact, I'd venture that there was no arrival—it was just an endless journey! I finally read Gordon Cox’s Newsday review of the 7th from the 'Net, and it's more accurate perhaps, but still too kind. [Jefferson’s New York Times review on 7 April 2005 was entitled “Timeless Lessons on Tolerance Imparted by a Sufi Sage From Colonial Africa”; Cox’s Newsday notice seems to have only had the headline “Theater Review” and no longer appears to be available to non-subscribers.]

There are maybe half a dozen serious problems with Tierno Bokar, some large, some small, but the most pervasive and all-encompassing is that it isn't theater! It's storytelling—which is an art, but a different art. (When I say 'storytelling,' I mean the kinds of performance that are part of the tradition in places like India, where itinerant storytellers go from town to town, sit in the village square or someplace, and recount the legends of their people, unraveling an illustrated scroll—sort of like a linear comic strip . . . er, 'graphic novel.' I've see this on tape, and it can be marvelous—the storyteller is a true performer—but it's different from 'theater' as we usually understand it. Africa has this tradition, their griots being charged with recounting the village history—though that may be almost the same as the myths and legends of India, I guess—and many American Indian cultures also have this tradition. Since neither African nor Native American languages had a written form originally, it's obvious where this tradition of storytelling comes from. And, perhaps, why we've lost it in the West to a great degree.)

Tierno Bokar has virtually no physical action of any kind—either innate or imposed (like dancing or rhythmic movement to symbolize something) and the two types of speech are not just untheatrical, they're anti-theatrical: narration (which is almost never theatrical, much less dramatic) and what I can best describe as "instruction" (where someone, usually Bokar, gives a brief lesson to someone else). It's not conversation, much less dialogue. And it's enervating, to say the least. I had trouble keeping my mind from wandering (that's not accurate: I failed often to keep my mind from wandering), and Diana actually nodded off at least once. Maybe we're both ignoramuses, but I posit that that reaction says something about the performance! If Brook is going for minimalism—and he was a follower of Grotowski in his early days—he seems to have jumped over a few steps. Even Grotowski acknowledged the need for acting (well, actors—but the latter seems to presume the former), but Tierno Bokar had no 'acting' in it—just some 'positioning'—not really 'movement'—and recitation/narration. And Grotowski decided that the playwright wasn't a necessity, suggesting that the text was secondary to some extent. This implies that the actors’ work was paramount in communicating ideas, but Tierno Bokar relied on text almost exclusively—words you either read (the supertitles) or heard, but not actions at all. If Brook had had some kind of narrator, like the Kabuki or Noh singer at the side of the stage, while his actors 'performed' the roles and events of the story, maybe in ritualized movement or dance, that might have been something. If the text had been sung or chanted, like we believe Greek drama was presented, that might have been theatrical. (I don't say any of this would have worked—I don't know.) But what Brook presented here was basically narration in which the actors became the speaker/storyteller plus the illustrated scroll—and just about as animated; Diana raised the comparison with 'tableaux.' Anyway, he seems to have jumped over the positions on the continuum of theater that included anything theatrical; he went from what he apparently sees as too much spectacle right to dead air. (Can you say, "Nothingism"? That's the step after Minimalism. It's not the same as "Nihilism," by the way.)

This is all exacerbated by the fact that, since the performance is in French with supertitles, you have to keep reading the words above the actors' heads—the whole piece is the text, after all; there isn't anything else—so you do more reading than watching anyway. I still speak French, but it's not good enough to handle a performance, even though the language was close to elementary-school level. (If your whole piece rests on words, the words, I'd think, should be . . . well, scintillating is a word that comes to mind. This sounded exactly like what I suspect it was—quotations lifted directly from the biography of Bokar that is the basis of Brook's text. Research, indeed! Comes awfully close to plagiarism for my dough! Speaking of which—the tickets were 40 bucks a pop!)

It didn't help, by the way, that the seats in the performance space, a converted gym, were excruciatingly hard—for an hour-and-a-half, intermissionless sitz.

Brook's reputation rests on his innovation and avant-garde convention-breaking, but there were no theatrical techniques on display here at all—neither old, traditional ones nor new, radical interpretations. "Pushing boundaries," if that’s what Brook does, suggests to me that something more ought to have been going on than there was. If creating a totally enervating experience is "pushing the boundaries," then maybe that's what Brook was doing—but it strikes me as an accomplishment that demands (but not 'begs') the question, "Why?" I'll amend that: the question ought to be "WHY??!!" Like I said: not theater.

I guess, if we're ranking the problems, the next one down would be the central plot element: the conflict between Bokar’s Twelves and the Elevens. I understand that this is a symbolic struggle, but it was Little-Endians vs. Big-Endians to me—it made no sense, I couldn't understand it, and it was unengaging to me. Therefore, I didn't really care about the struggle. It seemed so senseless, even though I understood intellectually that it was important to the participants, that I was not engaged. (Brook wrote in the program, "All through human history, every society ends up by getting it wrong. In the beginning there is always a bold rush of energy. This creates new, fresh structures, but they soon turn into institutions which from then on slowly become fossils." That's the closest Brook or the play—in which these lines don't appear—comes to explaining anything.) I suppose it didn't help matters that the acting was so low-key (I think the Newsday reviewer remarked on this phenomenon—he was right) that the performances didn't substitute for the lack of intellectual conflict I felt (or, I guess, didn't feel). Remember Chekhov? It is often said of his plays, especially Uncle Vanya, that in a play about boredom, the acting cannot be boring. Well, Brook forgot this lesson. (Apologies to Grotowski, but there is something to say for spectacle!)

I also never figured out why the French got involved in this struggle. I know, again in my head, that this was just an excuse for the colonial masters to suppress and brutalize the natives, but I still don't see why they even cared one way or another even minimally. I can guess that the struggle became so violent that the French had to start arresting and imprisoning leaders from both sides to try to restore peace or something, even if they didn't care which side prevailed, but that wasn't in the play as far as I could see. Besides, the French brutality was only recounted in the narration—it was never represented on stage. (There were a few early scenes of colonial arrogance—but they were more ludicrous than frightening. School teachers extolled the virtues of France and encouraged the students and native teacher to sing a patriotic song which held no real meaning for them, of course. The French did invent chauvinism, of course.) Besides, do we really need to be told again that Western imperialism is destructive, bad, immoral, and brutal? We hardly need a play about an obscure figure who died almost 70 years ago to tell us that anyway—we only have to watch the news from Iraq and Afghanistan, not to mention the legacy of modern Africa (can you say Sudan and Rwanda?).

I've already remarked on the acting—there isn't more to say than that it was minimal to the level of invisibility—and I guess the point that there was no staging to speak of says all that's needed about the physical directing. The set looked interesting when we went into the theater— the Newsday description is accurate—but nothing was made of any of it. Once or twice, a rug was used to represent a river that had to be crossed, but for the most part, everything was literal.

Remember my personal criteria for good theater? It has to do more than tell a story and it has to do it in a way that uses the attributes of live performance (that is, be theatrical in some way). Well, Brook did just the opposite as far as I'm concerned. He just told a story and he didn't do anything at all theatrical. I'd say that gets an F.

I'll add one further comment: This was all the more disappointing—maybe there's a stronger word—because it was Brook. Despite the reviews, Diana and I both went in expecting something at least interesting if not exciting. Brook's image as an innovator and experimenter implied that there'd be something going on, even if it was unsuccessful. The raised expectations made the experience even more of a let-down. Tierno Bokar didn't look like anything more than an amateur attempt to translate a prose narrative into a staged retelling. (Do you know about the so-called Purim play? Little kids put one on in most temples; it's an enactment of the story of Esther, Ahasuerus, and Haman. Tierno Bokar kept reminding me of this. At least, at the end of a Purim play, you get to have some Hamentaschen—little triangular pastries. In this case, I could have used a stiff drink!)

You know, I have the impression I had more to say right after I saw the performance, but I've already forgotten it all. I've either got early Alzheimer's, or that says something about this experience.

[Tierno Bokar was adapted by Marie-Hélène Estienne from the book by Amadou Hampaté Bâ (1901-1991). The production featured music by Toshi Tsuchitori and Antonin Stahly and lighting design by Phillipe Vialatte. Sotigui Kouyaté, from Burkina Faso, who appeared in Brook's Mahabharata, The Tempest, and other productions, played Tierno Bokar. (Kouyaté died in Paris in 2010 at the age of 73.) Brook and CICT spent a month in residence at Columbia in the spring of 2005. Forty-four related events sponsored by the Columbia University Arts Initiative in partnership with the Harlem Arts Alliance and Barnard College included symposia, lectures, workshops, and class work. The Columbia University Arts Initiative, directed by Gregory Mosher, was launched in February 2004. In 2010, Brook presented 11 and 12, an expanded version of Tierno Bokar; based on the same material, this play is performed in English.]

Peter Brook’s International Centre of Theatre Research

[Peter Brook, the British stage and film director with an international reputation for innovation and experimentation and the author of The Empty Space (1968), a book that had tremendous influence on almost every Western theater artist in the 1960s and ‘70s, has recently returned to New York City and Lincoln Center. Just as he did in 1981 with La Tragédie de Carmen, Brook’s has adapted a famous opera by paring it down to what he considers the essentials. This time, it’s Mozart: Brook’s production of A Magic Flute was at John Jay College as part of the Lincoln Center Festival.

[Brook began his directing career with a 1943 production of Christopher Marlowe’s Dr. Faustus at the Torch Theatre in London. He followed that in 1945 with more contemporary fare, Jean Cocteau’s 1934 Infernal Machine, a retelling of the Oedipus story, at the Chanticleer Theatre. Brook directed all around England, gaining considerable acclaim, joining the Royal Shakespeare company as a resident director in the early 1960s. He remained with the company, directing Shakespearean plays and other classics, often in innovative stagings, as well as contemporary works, perhaps the most famous of which was the RSC production of Peter Weiss’s theater-of-cruelty script, The Persecution and Assassination of Jean-Paul Marat as Performed by the Inmates of the Asylum of Charenton Under the Direction of the Marquis de Sade (known universally—for obvious reasons—as Marat/Sade) in 1964. The director’s famous circus-infused version of A Midsummer Night’s Dream was presented in 1970, influencing nearly every other director who saw it—or even heard about it. Brook, who also directed several films (many based on his stage plays) and wrote six more books since The Empty Space, was at the height of his renown when he decided to abandon the life of a successful and sought-after stage director, move to Paris, and form an international theater research center.

[This article is a brief analysis, however superficial, of some of Brook’s early work with his International Centre of Theatre Research, covering the period from its start to about 1974. Among the impressions revealed are the influence of some of Brook’s most significant inspirations: E. Gordon Craig, Antonin Artaud, Bertolt Brecht, Jerzy Grotowski, Vsevolod Meyerhold, and George Ivanovich Gurdjieff.]

Few theoreticians of the craft of acting have had the conviction to abandon a financially successful career in the commercial theater and strike out to put their theories into practice on a grand scale. Konstantin Stanislavsky (1863-1938) and Jerzy Grotowski (1933-99) did so, but they had the advantage of state-supported programs to release them from the worry of financial backing. Peter Brook (b. 1925), however, did so without the support of his own government, and even removed himself from his native England in order to carry out his experiments in the training of the actor. In 1968, having obtained private funding, Brook and Micheline Rozan gathered together an international group of young theater people in Paris and established the International Centre of Theatre Research (known as CIRT, for the French name, Centre International de Recherche Théâtrale) in the Mobilier National, a former Gobelin tapestry factory on the Left Bank. The company, as it eventually evolved, was made up of fifteen to twenty actors from Iran, Mali, France, Greece, the U.S., Spain, Portugal, Japan, and Morocco; five directors from England, Romania, Armenia, and Germany, and one Swiss designer. Brook himself and Ted Hughes, an English poet, completed the company. Except for the period from 1968 to 1970 when CIRT removed to London because of the 1968 student riots in Paris, Brook’s company remained disconnected from his original base of operations in England. In 1974, CIRT took over the Théâtre des Bouffes du Nord, a theater near the Gare du Nord in Paris’s 10th Arrondissement, where the company has remained. In 2008, Brook, then 83, resigned the artistic directorship of CIRT, handing it over to Olivier Mantei, then director of the Opéra-Comique, and Olivier Poubelle, a theater entrepreneur. (Rozan, then about 80, also stepped down at the same time.)

Because Brook believed that privacy was an absolutely necessary element in the training regimen, the working sessions at CIRT were closed to visitors except for specially scheduled, prearranged experiments opened to a specific audience. No public “performances” were held at the factory. Indeed, Brook’s work in those years wasn’t performance-oriented in any way. If an experimental performance developed out of one of CIRT’s exercises, Brook might select an audience of Paris children (one of his favorite audiences) and invite them to participate. In other cases, the company might go into the rural suburbs or workers’ districts of Paris and present its work to an audience of unsophisticated, theatrically naïve spectators. On three occasions, CIRT took its work on international tours in order to test Brook’s theories regarding language and communication: Shiraz and Persepolis, Iran (1971); Africa (Spring 1973); and New York (Brooklyn Academy of Music, Fall 1973). After the BAM sessions, the Centre ceased to function for several years, terminating Brook’s training experiments.

Though Brook’s foremost purpose for establishing CIRT was to train his ideal actor, a combination of acrobat, juggler, singer, dancer, and clown, he was also committed to the development of a universal theater, and therefore had theories not only on how to train an actor, but on how to relate to an audience, how to construct a piece of theater, and how to stage a performance. These theories necessarily affected his program of training for his company and consequently the work that came out of that program.

The general belief upon which Brook based his concept of the ideal theater was that the world of experience is divided into two parts: the everyday world and the imaginary world. In adult society, according to Brook, the two worlds are separated arbitrarily, whereas children, when they play, pass effortlessly between the two worlds, accepting the fact that the everyday world has elements of imagination and the imaginary world has elements of the everyday. In the adult theater, as in adult society, this blending isn’t accepted: when the curtain goes up in the theater of illusion, so does the finite division of the everyday world from the imaginary world. It was Brook’s contention that this arbitrary separation was both untrue and unhealthy. He advocated the coexisting relationship as the healthy one and the one that, in art, would revitalize the theater. With the acceptance of the free flow between the imaginary and everyday worlds, the adult actor would be able to accomplish the kind of free use of space in adult theater that is characteristic of children’s theater. For Brook, the division of these two theaters was as invalid as the separation of the two experiential worlds. In Brook’s ideal theater, the actors would be capable of passing back and forth between the two worlds for an audience equally capable of accepting that transition.

Because Brook wanted a theater in which the distinction between the everyday and imaginary worlds was blurred, he also required a special relationship between the performers and the audience. Whereas he previously looked upon the audience with an aggressive, even assaultive viewpoint, as exemplified in his 1964 production of Peter Weiss’s Marat/Sade, Brook now considered the audience as a partner in the complete experience. To aid in this interplay, Brook looked for what he called “a walking theater” wherein the audience, instead of remaining static, would move about and experience the presentation from various angles. (This was 16 years before the Royal Court’s presentation of Jim Cartwright’s Road, called a “promenade” production where the actors and the spectators occupied the same space and moved among one another. Seven years before Brook spoke of this concept, playwright John Arden wrote about a day-long event, with spectators coming and going and “rival attractions” offered in the atmosphere of a “fairground or amusement park” with “all sorts of thematically-relevant interludes” intermingled; he called this “a kind of ‘promenade theater’” in his preface to 1963’s The Workhouse Donkey. In 1967, Arden and his NYU theater students presented such an event, entitled War Carnival, in New York’s East Village.)

Furthermore, the CIRT presentations weren’t to be set down and repeated at a specific time and place on a regular schedule. In Brook’s theory of a universal theater, a piece should ideally be performed in as many different milieus as possible, appearing unannounced at irregular times in different places in order to make it available to as many diverse audiences as possible. (Today we recognize this practice as guerrilla theater, a term coined in 1965 by the San Francisco Mime Troupe.) Repetition, both in rehearsal and in performance, was the bane of art to Brook. Ideally no work should ever be obligated to a replay at all, unless in the estimation of the performers/creators, it still had something to offer. Even then, of course, the second performance must not be a mere copy of the first, but perhaps changed entirely as it went along. (In the United States, experimental director Richard Schechner took up Brook’s initiative with the Performance Group, most notably in Dionysus in 69, 1968, Makbeth, 1969, and Cops, 1978. Earlier, however, the Living Theatre had pioneered an improvisational technique in its productions such as The Connection, 1959, and The Brig, 1963. Joe Chaikin, an alumnus of the Living, followed some of its practices with the Open Theater, most noticeably in Viet-Rock, 1966, and The Serpent, 1969.)

With these ultimate goals for the theater well in mind, Brook established CIRT and created a training program to develop actors for his ideal theater. The Centre wasn’t to be a repertory theater or an acting academy, but a laboratory devoted to experimentation and research, with no particular end in mind. (This, of course, is reminiscent of the Teatr Laboratorium, which Jerzy Grotowski, one of Brook’s principal influences, founded in 1965 in Wroclaw, Poland.) Brook was quite adamant in stating that CIRT wasn’t designed to prove any preconceived beliefs or to find specific answers to specific questions. Brook was as concerned with discovering the questions as he was with answers that developed. For this reason, the Centre’s company was selected for its diversity in background and training as well as nationality. They were all young, in their middle or late twenties and early thirties; came from varying training programs; and had varying, but not vast, experience in performance. There was no common language, an important factor in Brook’s experimentation with language and communication, though French and English gradually became the lingua francas of the company. One of the most vital criteria for inclusion in the group was that each entrant must bring something to share with the others. Since there were no trainers, no teachers or instructors—Brook himself was often a participant in the experiments—the exercises were each led by one of the company who was best qualified to do so.

As important as the diversity of the parts was the cohesiveness of the whole, Brook envisioned his theater as a communal experience, and required a high degree of “ensembleness” from the company. Brook wanted a group so connected, so integrated “that a move from one creates a tremor from another; an impulse from a third, an immediate chain-reaction.” In order to be so connected with their fellows, however, Brook believed that actors had to be finely attuned to themselves first. Most of Brook’s exercises and experiments were directed toward this end. The dance, acrobatics, and singing were, on the surface, a program for training the actors’ bodies and voices. But at bottom they were designed to develop in the actors the ability to relate so organically to their own bodies that their thoughts and actions became one.

One of the areas in which Brook and the company concentrated very heavily was the use of language, speech, and sound. In order to connect more organically with language, Brook experimented with speech in various ways, searching for a method of communicating on a direct emotional or biological level, without resorting to intellect. Ultimately, he was looking, he said, for “a form of theatre which makes the same impression anywhere in the world without reference to language.” In his search for a universal dramatic communications system, Brook had his company study ancient languages such as Latin and Greek, and various modern languages such as a Malinese (African) dialect and Japanese. (In 1974, Andrei Serban, who had studied with Brook at CIRT, presented Fragments of a Greek Trilogy at La MaMa E.T.C. using similar language techniques.) The CIRT troupe studied these languages not for their linguistic properties, but their sonorous qualities. The Malinese and Japanese languages were used in native songs taught by the company members from those countries. In further linguistic exercises, the CIRT company used English, often Shakespearean lines, and repeated them at great speed or at a slowed-down pace to exaggerate the sounds that made up the words and to disassociate the meanings superimposed on them. In other instances, one word was stretched out to seven or eight seconds to explore all its sonorous aspects.

Brook’s most ambitious attempt to remove theater from the shackles of conventional language, however, was his use of invented artificial languages. The first such language used in his experiments was Bashtahondo, a language made up of syllables contributed by the members of the company, each contributing one syllable. The name of the language was the first four syllables of the new language. A large number of the company’s exercises were conducted in Bashtahondo to restrict the reliance of the actors on verbal communication. The culmination of this experimentation was the development of CIRT’s experimental piece Orghast, performed at Shiraz and Persepolis, Iran, in 1971. For this piece, which was based on a combination of Zoroastrian and Greek myths concerning the theft of fire, its worship, and the eternal warfare between father and son, Ted Hughes, CIRT’s poet-in-residence, created a new language, also called Orghast, from words and sounds culled from Sanskrit; Persian (Farsi); Greek; Latin; and Avesta, the ancient Zoroastrian ceremonial language.

Neither Orghast nor Bashtahondo were developed in an attempt to find a theatrical Esperanto, a universal language into which all CIRT pieces could be translated. It was Brook’s contention that human beings should be able to communicate with one another without regard to their mother tongues, that a form of basic, biological communication is possible based on sound which has meaning such as music or the grunts and groans by which primitive humans communicated. In dealing with English, the company was searching for “the primal impulse in the sound of a word, what informed it at its coining before it became tarnished with semantic associations . . . .”

Equally as important as CIRT’s search for a universal form of communication between performer and spectator was their work in enhancing the actors’ communication with their colleagues. Various exercises were devised to develop the members’ abilities to respond to each other organically—without the necessity of verbal communication. In one exercise toward this end, a group of actors, each representing separate parts of a particular person, including the invisible functions such as voice and subconscious, tried to create a coherent whole of the parts. This exercise was designed to develop in the individual actors the sensitivity to each other as separate parts of a unified entity, harking back to Brook’s concept of an ensemble company. In another exercise which developed the actor’s attention to implication and innuendo, one actor was being interviewed for a job and the rest of the company acted as extensions of that actor’s personality, speaking what he or she “meant” as they understood the replies to the interviewer’s questions. A third exercise used to develop an actor’s awareness of another’s movements and impulses was a mirror exercise wherein a pair of actors stood face to face and tried to duplicate the movements of each other simultaneously as if acting as a mirror for each other. Sometimes one actor would initiate the movement, sometimes the other would do so, and sometimes neither would be the initiator.

Improvisation was also used extensively by the CIRT trainees to train the actor to respond truly to the actions of other actors. These improvisations were conducted in Bashtahondo and, when the situation became confused or began to pall, Brook altered the circumstances by introducing some new element such as reversing the characters, advancing the time, speeding up the lapsed time of the action, heightening the rhythm, or adding characters. One thing they were searching for was a sort of philosopher’s stone of improvisations: a set of characters that could be rearranged into an infinite number of situations. They came up with The Difficulties of a Bridegroom about a “shy lover’s travails.”

The props used in these improvisations were as restricted as was the language. Most common among CIRT’s props were bamboo sticks, derived from their use in Japanese theater as a means of achieving “Zen calm.” The sticks were used in varying ways as extensions of the body, voice, and psyche to contact the other actors, measure an actor’s relationship to space, and elicit non-verbal responses form the other actors. Another such prop was a simple box which the actors explored in improvisations in which they were to discover the various possibilities of the box. In both cases, Brook’s idea was to require his company to expand their awareness and knowledge of simple, common objects so that the actors could approach more realistic objects on a set with enhanced sensitivity. This seems clearly to be an application of Brecht’s Verfremdungseffekt, the defamiliarization process he sought.

A fourth concentration for Brook’s trainees was self-awareness. To help achieve this, CIRT borrowed an ancient Chinese martial art exercise, T’ai Chi, an exercise in which simple movements are executed very slowly and gracefully with the knees slightly bent to cause all the muscles to balance against each other. T’ai Chi was used to still the spirit in preparation for bodily awareness. For further development of such awareness, an actor was required to make a gesture, then remain still for up to a half an hour trying to recall the exact gesture. Then the actor attempted to reproduce the gesture exactly as originally made. This was a test of “muscular memory” as well as an analysis of the gesture’s meaning.

CIRT’s concentration, then, was in four major areas: communicating with the audience, relating to other actors, relating to objects, and relating to oneself. Did any of this work in practice? According to many critics, in the final analysis, it didn’t. Either communication broke down entirely, or the performers had to resort to standard verbal communication. In so far as the search for a universal language was concerned, one constant problem was that even the artificial language Orghast eventually came to depend on the environment for its meaning. The variables of the circumstances—place, space and acoustics, specific actors, and so on—had a definite effect on the language, and couldn’t be separated from it. Furthermore, Orghast was capable only of conveying feelings and emotions and couldn’t deal with abstractions. In this respect it limited the play’s creators’ ability to communicate with a sophisticated audience.

Brook’s theory that repetition brings sterility to art, though it may theoretically be valid, caused a conflict involving Brook’s biggest problem: striking a balance between freedom and form. He felt that, as it was absurd to prepare dinner party conversation beforehand, it was equally absurd to rehearse what an actor will perform on a stage. It then remains a question of how to arrive at a disciplined, quality performance when dealing solely with freedom and spontaneity. Part of the art of acting is selecting behavior; selection is obviated if there is no rehearsal.

Another difficulty in communicating with the spectators, Burt Supree of the Village Voice found, was “the feeling of a mystique operating here that oppressed me.” He went on to explain:

The company never acknowledged the existence of an audience. No contact. I suppose they were concentrating, but the utter humorlessness of the situation, the holiness and exclusiveness, made things very difficult for me. I found myself hardening my heart against what was going on and had to wrestle throughout the day to keep myself open to the company’s work. It was a constant concern.

As for performers who could adapt to new and unplanned circumstances and react as an integrated ensemble, Walter Kerr of the New York Times found the CIRT company unresponsive and stiff. At the BAM sessions, Kerr found:

When Mr. Brook suggested that the company might try dividing the performing area into Hollywood and Broadway . . . the company sat immobile for a very long time trying to think through that one. It never did. Eventually a few performers rose and made use of the same leaps and hop-steps they’d been employing all day, ‘finding’ nothing new, nothing distinctive, nothing illuminating . . . . Spontaneously, the happening didn’t happen.

Furthermore, Kerr found that these actors, presumably finely tuned and in touch with all their organic resources, couldn’t function beyond the limits expected of any run-of-the-mill performer: their “physical vocabulary” was “extraordinarily limited”:

Though the performers were constantly flirting with mime, they weren’t skilled mimes; though they had taken pains to release their bodies, they weren’t dancers, or anything like; and when it was time to enunciate simple-enough sentences, they proved not to be the trained actors either.

In the final analysis, Brook’s experiments seem to have produced only one fact: they didn’t really work. At least not for most observers, if the critics are any indication. The very fact that Brook tried is of course significant, and the results, even if they’re viewed as failures, cannot be ignored. What he seemed to have discovered in the end was that no one can entirely reconcile absolute freedom and spontaneity with discipline and form. Brook tried to have both, and ended up losing the one necessary element to all theater: the spectator’s attention and awareness. This, it would seem, was the final, and sole contribution to the world theater of Peter Brook’s International Centre of Theatre Research.

[The experimental period of CIRT ended in 1974, and Brook and his company returned to more audience-cognizant performances, changing the company’s name to the Centre International de Créations Théâtrales (CICT – International Center for Theater Creations). After Brook directed his own version of La Tragédie de Carmen at Lincoln Center (1981), in 1985 he and playwright Jean-Claude Carrière adapted the great Indian epic The Ramayana for the stage. Brook followed that with more conventional fare, from classics like The Cherry Orchard (1981) to new works such as Woza Albert! (1989). In 2004, he presented Tierno Bokar, a stage adaptation of a biography of the Malian Sufi sage, at Columbia University. Recently (5-17 July), Brook’s staging of A Magic Flute, his rendering of Mozart’s opera, was on stage at John Jay College as part of the Lincoln Center Festival.

[I saw Tierno Bokar in April 2005, though I didn’t care much for it. I’ll post the report I wrote on the performance then in the next few days. Come back to ROT if you’re curious about my response to this Peter Brook production. (Among the other works mentioned here, I have posted reports on Arden’s War Carnival, 13 May 2010; the Living’s Connection, 9 July 2009; and Serban’s Fragments, 9 April 2011.)]