To preface these notes with an additional note from Gilles Deleuze – the painting arriving whole and gradually…
“And then I made these things, I gradually made them. So that I don’t think the bird suggested the umbrella; it suddenly suggested this whole image.” This text seems obscure, since Bacon invokes two contradictory ideas at the same time: a gradual series and a sudden whole. But both are true. In any case, he means that there is not a relationship between one form and another (bird-umbrella), but a relationship between an intention at the beginning, and an entire series or ensemble at the end.
– Gilles Deleuze, Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation, trans. Daniel W. Smith, Uni. of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 2003, pp. 166-167, n. 5
There is another aspect to the problem of the dancer in the project which despite the length of the sentence in the preceding post (towards day 16 @ sf: the dancer’s role in RJF project, pt. 1) I didn’t address. Through the course of this series of derailed observations and comments on what we’re up to at the soap factory down in the cellar, I’ve presented an idea that has been useful to us in practice but is possibly a theoretical redundancy, anacting, meaning a zero degree of acting relative to performance and not the expunging of character but of the character as personal or individual. At the level of anacting the actor becomes his or her own supernumerary, which means in addition that anacting remains a modality available to the actor. I’ve also talked about half-mime, an idea that so far has been more gainfully discussed than usefully employed.
Half-mime relates to the sense in which the performance space, like the pictorial space, is already full before you start. Rather than there ever being a tabula rasa, there it is, a sponge soaked in all manner of cliche, memory, feelings and misgivings – and objects – and subjects. Half-mime suggested itself as a way to overcome the pretence of the empty space. Everything already there in the space to the performer, which sometimes sucks the life out of performance for being unacknowledged, may gesturally be acknowledged, may exist as part of the performance in half-mime, in recognition of its sometimes suffocating half-life, may be liberated indeed, in-half-deed. Of course, in practice, this has been the concept to show its redundancy.
Actors fill up the entire offstage area with their everyday personal mental furniture. It’s part of the routine to get rid of it before entering the stage and every role is a new one for the reason that the actor’s focus, unless it drifts, is on the present, the thinnest possible present, as Gilles Deleuze points out. So that the actor actively clears the space of the distractions of cliche and memory, etc., and relies on the actuality, even as it exists only in the imagination, of the specific mise-en-scene and the particular make-believe prop in hand. However, to ask an actor’s focus to drift… well, we might call that improvisation. I had had in mind thinking about half-mime that the gesture retreated from its object before fully engaging in the mime of its being there. Hence, half-mime. But there are also zones between half-mime and mime which may be profitably considered.
The gesture anticipates. The mime illustrates. There comes with the gesture a pathos of half-remembered things, a half-light, a romance of the image, the veiled, the iridescence of the body seen through smoke, a field of fallen gazes and the failure of love: the pathos of that which may not arrive. The broken-tones Gilles Deleuze liberates as pseudo-causes in Francis Bacon, in the paintings of Francis Bacon, are related by analogy to the diagrammes of this still tentatively suggested concept of half-mime, to its zones of indiscernability. Things are there for the actor or actress but not visibly there: mime. They are in addition, in half-mime, made mutable by the gesture which stops before encountering and drawing out from the air the shape of them, the weight of them. They therefore mutate one into another in a cascade of indiscernably different objects linked only by the performer’s attention and not represented.
The contents or modes of representation differ between the canvas and the stage. We can begin to think of half-mime as being the pictures in the mind. And of the gestures as experiencing a fall before they reach their ideal object. And of the fall as a terrible optimism, leading into areas of chance relations. What I am suggesting is that this concept with the degree of abstraction of movement it entails is more useful for dance than acting, where gesture has a different function, acting having made the historical psychoanalytical jump from externally conditioned instincts to internally derived drives.
It would be nice to think of putting the cause of theatre back a hundred years or so. This is what I had had in mind: a Bernhardtianism revisited, a revitalised gestural language. But that last word calls to our attention why this could never be so. What is at stake in the language of the theatre is the closed system that naturalises signs, which is to say that the purely gestural will get mixed up in the bad company of what is natural, characteristic, or what is abstract, or what returns it to itself, before it is considered on its own behalf. Its anticipation of analagous gestures to which it refers within the closed system of the work is what returns the gestural to itself as natural. Dance in contrast – hence that nebulous term dance-theatre – denatures movement, at the same time as it brings all movement, up to and including the gestural, within its ‘natural’ ambit. This happens in a way resembling John Cage’s naturalisation of sound within the medium of music.
The actor’s gesture represents an emptiness or fullness won from the naturalised mode of, because relative to, theatre as significant action. Let’s just say that it’s hard won. The art of theatre resides in inverse proportion to the degree of insignificance in the behaviours exhibited, including the actors’ gestures. Their systemisation may therefore be viewed as extra-theatrical. The closed system of an accepted code of (an ahistoricised) naturalism – naturalisation – provides legimation insofar as it guarantees the meaningfulness of the spectacle. And so in theatre we can again speak of a code, undersigned by language where language is taken strictly to refer to the closure of the symbolic system.
Herein lies the tension of contemporary theatre, the reason for self-referentiality, for a closed system of internal references, and the reason for its great pathos in terms of anticipating a movement which may yet not come. Theatre has slipped from that level of the aesthetic which was already in slippage from beauty to be almost completely usurped by theory. And not its own theory. That is the irony. Theory has arrogated to itself the staging of its own simulacrum, sucking it in through a small hole before which it contorts without ever really being able to pass. Stuck on a ship-bound anti-Robinsonade.
The preceding leaves out what is essential to say: alongside the dance theme’s critique of theatre there is the acting theme’s critique of dance, in which the dancer, Anja, playing the role of Ida, dances parenthetically, within theatrical parentheses. She steps into the preconsidered dance-like image with the casualness of meaningful acting, makes the image and then steps out, out and back into her proper milieu. If there was to be an anacting before this would be its counterimage in dance.
Re: as tony s. might have said, "is my name Imbroglio?! It's Soprano, you little –!" or can I be on both sides of a Tui billboard at one time?
Exhaustively, with apologies:
We are not in agreement about what the generality is. And since it is a specific apparent problem in rehearsal and not a symbolism that is at stake—your testimony being inspirational in all senses as well as, for me, as a reader and interlocutor, a respite from the nausea of humdrum stagecraft (a further respite being David Lawrence’s Lear with Mick Rose)—it’s clear that I have to take on more responsibility for defining “the generality” in terms of my own argument.
Inevitably, that gesture of definition IS the argument. To make it clear from the start that the argument is not about the generality as “friend” or “foe”—glass half empty/half full measures but about a fundamental apprehension concerning where the actor is. By where the actor is, I mean where he or she is, prior to the generative deduction (or the false lead or impasse) prior to coherence-optimisation-emergence, prior to the assimilative and orginary processes that would seem to intimate a something that is entering the psyche and transforming it, as well as galvanising body and mind. The question then is whether that priorness, that immanence, can rightly be called the generality; whether it can be so called without semantic conceit—without a preference of presupposition whose strategy turns out to be unsupportable.
I want to emphasise that, in specifying the generality as plane or screen of immanence or abiding significance, I do not intend to imply “a condition of an all-pervasive representation.” Rather, that the generality is necessarily pre-conditional, imageless, non-summative, non-representational: prior to but—and this is the key—neither causative of the gestures or ideograms of representation, or of any particularity, nor reducible to the mass of indistinctions that are prefigurative of representation itself. In other words, the generality has nothing to do with the stream of equivocations that cling to nothing, not even to themselves; nor is the generality an integral unit or function of cohesion! All in all the generality is not the generality of a something. It is generality itself. It is irrefutable not because it is imposed or because it imposes itself but because it is not, and cannot be, imposed and does not, and cannot, impose itself. The general is, in every possible sense of the word, appositional.
If the generality is not causative and if the generality is not the rendezvous of conditionalities, of qualities, than it is the case that generality cannot be the herald of anything that is potentate relative to the stage itself. And yet neither is the generality a nothing. The generality simply abides—as the very condition of the stage itself. To this degree, generality may well be construed as applicability in the total sense, except that generality is, much sooner than applied, incarnated: that is to say, actualised whole-bodily and even richly lived. What is thus lived is not generality as the greater part, or even the greatest part, of things themselves but rather a greatness of, and also beyond, the parts and things. And if a greatness of, and also beyond, the parts and things is acceded to, then what must be admitted is an indefinability; moreover an indefinability that is not merely contingent or felicitous or infelicitous but simply inherent. The inherent indefinability is perhaps, above all, what the generality is.
If the generality is the field of immanence that is non-problematic why indeed would the actor want to reverse out of it? The impulse to reverse out of, or better said, recoil from immanence is the human impulsion of identity and differentiation itself. Identity/differentiation appears because that which is immanent—a greatness of, and also beyond, the parts and things—would seem to imply a demand that is untenable. That demand need not be conscious in order for it to be resisted: already the dilemma makes its representation to us in all of the minimally conscious patterns of our suffering.
This taken into account, the actor, is on the one hand, not so different from any other sentient bundle or mover or you or I(!). On the other hand, it is almost always the impulse of the actor to release the problem of identity and differentiation—or simply to suspend it, for at least as long as is required for another emergence to occur. The actor—any actor!—may seem querulous for a time but it is not often that the actor spends much time dramatising that querulousness. A times, the actor may appear almost placid, suggesting, to the inexperienced eye, indigence—much as the studio boss, in David Mamet’s account is bewildered to find the writers in the middle of “the nap.” And yet the actor, sitting on the chair on the perimeter of the rehearsal space, peruses the text, murmurs lines; he or she warms up, shakes loose the constricted parts, shares a joke, asks a pointed question, and then, without much in the way of visible expectation or apprehensivness or even curiosity, enters into the continuum of exploration that is rehearsal itself. And he or she enters that continuum without very much regard for where or when or how the continuum will be interrupted if at all. Here is the actor’s relaxation from the recoil; the actor’s relaxation into the plane of immanence and into the possibilities of production. Here is the stage—and here is the unopposed and unopposing and non-dual generality that is the condition of is the stage itself.
Is this purposive relaxation an asking for trouble? Very likely it is. If there is relaxation into the generality, the stage, the plane of immanence, the primary or primordial significance, then there is not necessarily sublimation only. More likely, there is a crisis. This is because what is immanent or innermost and even pervasive is inevitably consciousness, and consciousness is not simply a fire that warms, that glows but is one that burns and purifies. In all of the possible functions of human agency, and altogether in the human purlieu itself, immanence as and of itself is, even necessarily a crisis. On the stage, that crisis will not necessarily and fully be one of "a totalising order", or a crisis of reification to an absolute degree. It is simply that the encounter with immanence, or the paradox of immanence coming to fore, will imply a crisis of transubstantiation of one form or another. And yet, if this crisis should occur in the theatre, prior to, but also in plane sight of, the audience—the crisis of Lear, for example, doubled as the crisis of the actor—then it is an inevitability, much proven, that the glow will fall from actor onto audience. And the audience, never impassive but always participating if so invited—doing, to invoke Kate Hepburn, quite a lot of the acting itself if given the chance—will leave at the end; excited perhaps or quiet and thoughtful, and yet gratified—certainly sifted out of the malaise of everdayness for a time.
It would not be going too far to maintain that the crisis MUST occur in order for the performance to be realised. If in rehearsal the stream of putative content and significance is moving too fast for something to obtain, then that in itself is symptomatic of a crisis that must and that does unfold in one or another way. The crisis will be ABOUT particularity and yet the support of that almost inevitable crisis will, under all circumstances, necessarily be the generality itself. It will not be case, however, that, in the failure of anything to obtain, you will be in the “marshland of generality.” It will be that you are in the swamp of indistinction, which is something quite different. If your activity is contrary to the foundation of that which you would otherwise or ideally chose or cherish than that is on account of a blameless incoherence in the moment, an incoherence of which the generality itself is neither cause nor consequence. The question then is why would the generality be perverted and why would it be maintained as a something to be opposed for the sake of making sense or of staking out a position?
If the generality is allowed to be what it is—whatever it is altogether—than the particular is not, and need not, be a progression out from, much less, the opposition to the generality, in the manner of a search or stressful contradistinction—or of the virtuous insinuation of either. Rather, it is sufficient that the particularity simply plays itself out upon the generality, the screen of immanence, itself. This transimultaneity of the general with the particular is perhaps the very and indefinable thing that may appear to be holding the performance literally in place. It is something greater than praxis. It is something auspicious and also ordinary. It is something that certainly can't be proven. One couldn't say how it works or why it works, only that it does work.
If there is a "muteness inferred of generality" then that is, as I suggested earlier, something acceded to out of reactive recoil and of a refusal of the generality itself. If there is coherence and there is no recoil then what is found is not muteness but ineffability. As with the ineffable itself, muteness is imparticular. If a muteness is inferred then any indistinction will be heard but it is muteness itself that will be the misprision. False notes, proposals that are not generative are inevitable—how problematic they will be will depend on the level of recoil that affords them a prominence that they don’t deserve and would otherwise not receive. If there is no recoil, then the actor is simply free to discover that a note is false, that a proposal is not generative; and then the actor is in no doubt concerning the status of either. They simply have no status. If, on the other hand, there is recoil from the generality, then particularisation becomes distorted. In that event, significance will be inevitably attributed to what is insignificant. In that case the ailment will be one of false attribution. There is no malady of significance inherently and none at all of generality.
The issue concerning practice in the generality is—and this has an acute bearing on the compass of the actor on generality's stage—how does it actually become possible for the actor or actress to wrestle with the apparent infelicities of amorphous surfeit, multiple options and meanings, metaphoric indistinction, insufficient deduction? Is it via the progressive substitution of a better subjectivity? Is it through the gestures of deduction alone? Or it is through the fidelity to an apposite analogy that produces multiple, related outcomes in an integrated line or continuum? To be sure, any of these can obtain. But they cannot simply obtain by themselves as planes of subjectivity unsupported by anything beyond artful creature power. If this was the case then it would be as if a child could learn language simply through imitation and not via an inheritance, an immanence of language itself.
But for the child, language is an inheritance, and the actor or actress is, in the most auspicious sense, child-like. The self-conscious adult may make a problem out of generality or confuse generality with indisctinction. He or she will do so since it would appear that the generality is the intimation of all indistinction, whereas, in reality, the generality is always already self-conserved from indistinction. It is only, however, a feeling-submission to the generality itself that can find this out. Rest assured, if the real content of performance is to be at once located and substantiated then it is perforce that feeling-submission, and not simply the search for content, that must come to fore. If such feeling-submission is active, then generality will obtain to the total significance available to the root-intuition of agency in any given moment. In that case, significance itself will obtain not merely to a given significance or significances but to the literally meaning-less ground wherein radical or primary significance is always pre-eminent. And even if such radical or primary significance should not be fully or apparently available, that selfsame significance is yet guiding the actor as nothing else can or will. Mind and will alone cannot guide the actor. Neither can the director. In the end, the actor must, unaided, and also beyond exacerbation from outside, struggle apparently “alone” or as, the case may be, cease from struggling. In that event, the generality will not be a voice beyond that leads the actor away from the ideal gesture and into the sway and stray of indistinction. The actor will not wrestle indolently and indefinitely; will not be distracted from her or his task by falsely-promising indistinctions. He or she will pay no heed to the voices. If the actor does, then there will be a rebound first, but after that, simply an inertia. The indisctinctions will have no issue in the feeling-continuation and will not survive there.
It is the case that if such feeling-navigation is abroad, not only will be the actor move by ineffable intuition but what is discursive will be palatable, and what is dialectical will be fully supported. There will perhaps be an imposition of order but sooner than that there will be the fluid attribution of seemly forms that is the volition of the actor’s nativity. I’ve already proposed that the generality is not a problem; the corollary of that is that generality is not a solution either. Nevertheless, in abiding and locating the generality as the non-problematic plane of immanence, of inmost feeling-apprehension, it is the case that the actor is free to test all putative significances, to hold fast to those that are self-revealed as truthful and to discard any that are found wanting. Similarly, the actor is free to allow the ideal or originary gesture to appear as the primary resource from which performance can be actualised and in which significance may beget significance.
If the generality is taken as a given, conceptually, but even more than that to the degree that unobstructed feeling allows it to be so, then the freedom of the stage is a freedom of focus. Certainly the actor must project; in order to project the actor MUST focus. Is the actor locked onto a focus? To be sure, there is a bodily lock, and a natural polarisation from which the actor may proceed, not pinioned, but pivoting, the platform of intensity drawn along with and by the actor; the actor sustaining the zone of duration with his or her own instrumentality, albeit deeply affected by the instrumentality of others. All in all, the actor will sustain the focus: not as a point or points but as the tension of mobility that acquires the zone of duration in the fully focused navigation that IS performance. Then, in the actor’s focus and navigation, or the zone of duration, the question will be: WHERE is it that the actor projects? Onto what, if anything? Onto the platform, wall—the so-called stage? Onto an inexorable and/or transparent fourth wall? Onto other actors? Onto the audience as an acknowledged and even beloved presence? In every direction, indifferently? In any given direction, sympathetically?
It is of course true that the actor projects, but more than that, the truth is that the actor is projected. The actor is a prominence of consciousness, uniquely displayed in the sacral space of the stage itself. In that event, the generality that is the very stage and very consciousness is not a "totalising success represented in the body of the actor of the actress." It is rather an inexhaustible pre-condition of sympathy itself that makes it possible and worthwhile for the actor or actress to, in the words of Samuel Beckett “fail better”—to be an agent of the real but not the slave of reality, successful only insofar the innermost compulsion of his or her agency comes to fore in the unglamourised certitude of the sacrifice itself.