Heroic
theatre pieces: heroes in modern theatre today
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| Leonide Massine performs with les ballets russes |
Many
theatre producers of today are NOT heroic. Why? They
prefer to stage theatre that will pay the bills, ensure bums on seats and they heed
instead the voice of fear: public pleasing, following familiar trends and
prophet making…
Such
behaviours are all the features of the non-hero and the makings of stagnation
and the lack of change.
A
hero heeds the voices of courage, intuition and all the other aspects that make
one a hero.
Jean
Cocteau famously said about his theatrical work:
“It
is not for us to obey the public who doesn’t know what it wants, but it is for
us to oblige the public to follow us.
If he refuses, tricks must be employed: mirages, magic lanterns,
intriguing children to follow making them swallow the show”
And
it is the heroes of modern day theatre who obliges the public to follow.
In
‘Hero with a thousand faces’ Joseph Campbell talks of modern humanity having
lost its connection to myth, with individuals losing their sense of self under
a ruler’s ‘hypnotist’ spell. He
describes a German Jewish friend of his doing all that he could to stop himself
raising his arm in the frenzied applause after of a speech Hitler.
He famously said "Follow your bliss no matter what the cost, though society
may revile you, though you may live as an outcast and in poverty"
This is the philosophy he followed in his own life in pursuing his intellectual
passion—mythology. We are so
engaged in activities of outer value—the pursuit of financial security and
social gain—and our sense of reality, our sense of ourselves, is so dominated
by a popular culture that admits only what is tangible, quantifiable, and
measurable that we have little validation of our inner life, our souls. It used to be that there were
institutions and other forums that were a home for the expression of what we
call the soul—houses of religious worship, the corner bar, the community, the
family. All of these have changed, and many have ceased to serve as sanctuaries
for spiritual concerns. Most are operating at a deficit and have less time for
the spirit than for their own survival.
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| Heroic dancer become legend: Anna Pavlova as the Dying Swan |
Looking
at our theatrical history, heroic performers have used mythical stories and
poetry to portray this heroic quest of the inner soul. Anna Pavlova’s portrayal of a swan
exiting life, not only exquisitely celebrates the living swan itself, but
carefully accounts the duality of death and life, of joy and sorrow, so
beautifully written about in the Tennyson poem
“Her
awful jubilant voice, with a music strange and manifold, flow’d forth on a
carol free and bold, as when a mighty people rejoice”
Life cannot stew in stagnation. We can see this also in Serge de Diaghilev’s work and les ballets ruses, a similar trend of courage and
interest in the telling of heroic tales.
Working closely with Jean Cocteau, Picasso, Léonide Massine, the theatre
director became heroic by celebrating the heroic path of the character journeys
he told and set a trend, which audiences would follow.
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| Moira Shearer in The Red Shoes |
Filmmakers
Powel and Pressburger also followed the mysteries of heroic pathways, producing
films about tales: The Red Shoes, The Tales of Hoffman, The Canterbury Tales. The Red Shoes is again the story of this heroic energy which really cannot stop until it has used up itself and become itself.
Aswell
as working himself as a director and cheographer, he is drawn to directors and choreographers
who are interested in ‘unconscious states’ and who challenge the boundaries of theatre
in a hugely innovative way, such as Marlene Monteiro Freitas’s “Paradise”,
Tania Carvalho in “Weaving Chaos” or Simon Vincenzi in “Luxuriant: within the
reign of Anticipation”
In
‘Paradise’ Guerra twists his body into extraordinary forms, combining with the
other dancers like creatures from a strange cabinet of curiosities, who could
either have ethereal wings from heaven, or be maggot like forms born from hell.
In
‘Weaving Chaos’ shown in the experimental Pompidu Centre, Paris, Guerra again
joins a body of dancers. Based on
the story of Ulysses, the hero who took his ship of 12 sailors to save Helen of
Troy, getting caught up in a never-ending episode of trials and tribulations, we
see Guerra dance with a group of trained and non-trained dancers, giving a
sense of varying needs of an interdependent group or ship crew.
The
piece has a recurring sense of animal instinct surviving the elements. The dancers move in instinctive flocks
like migrating birds. The music is
elemental sounds, sometimes like super amplified insect noises and bee
drones. There is reaction to sound
and light, just as the elements in life itself often anticipate our responses.
Yet
interestingly, throughout the piece there is, like a mast of a ship, one dancer
who keeps ‘night watch’ and the dancers take turns to stand in one spot,
awakening themselves should the drop off, with a the same rhythmic pulse of a
heartbeat.
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| Dancer trying to stay awake on 'night watch': Tânia Carvalho's Weaving Chaos |
Guerra’s
performance is not only is energetic and lithe, twisting and bending to create
the various mazes and tests and challenges that the piece shows the dancers are
faced with, but his facial expressions have the garish resemblance to an Eduoard
Munch’s expression of ordeal, ‘The scream’, or a tortured clown mask, painted
by James Ensor. Perhaps it is the
mad house of Circe’s, when the crew, from their inability to resist greed, are
turned into pigs, that dancers show lust and a constant search for stimulation
and satisfaction. The dancers move
individual frenzy but with graceful balletic movements.
The
dance piece sometimes freezes itself in a state of different story moments: and
the dancers form sculptural poses, capturing the group grief has a holiness and
unity almost resembling that of Michelangelo’s Pieta and its sorrow ridden
Madonna, or they form the resisting of the terrible temptation of the sirens by
strapping himself to the mast of the ship.
The
set consists of long strands, like a backdrop curtain, through which resembles
bars. We feel the person left
behind these bars may be Penelope, Ulysses wife, or a personification of his
dream of reaching the state he wishes, his heroic state, that which Tennyson
described as “the grey spirit yearning in desire to follow knowledge like a
sinking star, beyond the utmost bound of human thought”
The
hero’s quest is the opposite of stagnating in ordinary unquestioned life: “How
dull it is to pause, to make an end, to rust unburnish’d, not to shine in use! As
tho’ to breathe were life!”
Interestingly
the piece finishes when the person on ‘night watch’ begins to wilter and fall,
rather like the dying swan itself, or the dancer of the red shoes, when their
powers to dance and live are exhausted by death.
Carvalho
brilliantly incorporates other heroic characters and themes into her dance piece and examines
theatrical heroism. The piece is a
brilliant expression of feeling the sensation of what it is like to experience
heroism and one is entranced by the dancers themselves, whose motions, in
unity, almost enter and enliven the molecules of the audience with this same sense
of energy felt by the hero using the technique of these painterly 'stills'.
Interestingly the painter Turner himself tied himself to the mast of a ship to feel the adrenaline
and excitement of a storm, so that he could express it in his ship paintings
and we do feel something of this excitement and adrenaline from the energy of
the dancers.
Another
piece explored by Guerra that examines the same unsteady ‘fatum’ this time that
of economic crisis, is Simon Vincenzi’s "Luxuriant: within the reign of
anticipation" shown in Poland’s Malta festival curated by Romeo Castellucci.
Again,
this piece explores a heroic path within external states of chaos. The crisis is Financial, set in context
of ‘The Gold Diggers’ about the Depression.
Guerra
moves with a group of other dancers on tiptoe, with the constant agitation and
panic of a herd of deer, on constant alert. Bare, except for trunks, the image conjures the half beast
half man image of Pan, whose name derives from the word panic. The performers move in ways similar to
modern day crowds when controlled or sprayed with tear gas. The space is affected by surges of
dazzling light or huge voltages of sound which alter the motions of the
performers, or the performers are made somnambulant motionless by the hypnotic
interruption of a Lynchian looking orator or the sudden video flashes of a
woman who holds up a commercial projected onto a sheet.
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| Luxuriant: Within the reign of anticipation |
The
audience is also under constant video surveillance. There is a constant sense of reeling from constrained
stillness from the hypnotic orator or from the turbulent abandon of the
dancer’s very frenzied running and fretting where you are almost knocked over.
Extra-ordinary
about this piece is the way the audience enters the stage itself achieving the
transcending states of consciousness.
Set in an abandoned slaughter house, Vincenzi has the audience begin in
a seeming ‘back room’ and an uneasy feeling between black masked sadomasochism
and ear deafening volts of music and comical Mickey mouse ears with cheering
music of “We’re in the money” to following the performers into a deep vault, a
second and larger space filled with smoke and walls stained with oxidised
rust.
Here as audience member you
are allowed to freely move, only stopped by video commercial, or tossed by a
domino effect of the dancers hitting your path, or to be hypnotised. It is
somehow a relief then, to be freed of this painful ensnarement tests and
trials, just as Ulysses was freed of his own difficult ordeals.
Yet what is
quite brilliant about this piece is, that part three of Vincenzi’s piece is the
transfiguring sensation of leaving the theatre space experience: the scene of
the crime, the state of hypnosis, the trauma of the dancers, the resisting of
the dazzling commercialist, to find, in a way, the hero within, which Vincenzi
so brilliantly awakens in his audience, as they are forced to find a state
almost condusive to meditation, leave the state he has put them in and find
their thoughts and their own state of being, that only quite brilliant theatre
can awaken.
Cocteau
says the following of great theatre:
“After
leaving the theatre then the audience processes it. If they do not eliminate
the beneficial poison, it enters the body. Gradually this magic manages to
mitigate and in some rare cases manages to heal”
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| Simon Vincenzi's 'Troupe Mabuse' |
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