BIG DANCE THEATER; ANOTHER TELEPATHIC THING: THE PREFORMING
GARAGE • NEW YORK, NEW YORK
by
Artaud, Big Dance Theater, and the Threat of Meaninglessness
In 1930, in essays for The Theater and Its Double, Antonin
Artaud attacked what he perceived as Western theater’s subjugation
to the text and criticized its preoccupation with individual Psychology.
He called instead for theater to discover its own language. Artaud imagined
this language as the sum of all theatrical elements—lights, costumes,
rhythm, music and gesture—utilized not in the service of a text,
but for their own expressive values in space.
This “total-art” would be used to express fundamental
metaphysical struggles rather than dissect the Psychology of an individual.
During the Spring of 2000 and Summer of ‘01, Big
Dance Theater performed “Another Telepathic Thing.” The piece
suggests a thorough absorption of the tenets of experimental theater put
forth by Artaud, including the use of multiple disciplines, the rejection
of an interpretative hierarchy that favors speech and the literary script,
the acknowledgment of theatrical artifice, and the group as an ideal working
structure. “Another Telepathic Thing” is a sophisticated,
if unconscious, manifestation of Artaud’s theatrical vision.
Directed by Annie-B Parson and Paul Lazar, “Another
Telepathic Thing” is based on Mark Twain’s short story “The
Mysterious Stranger”, about the citizens of an isolated town in
Austria whose lives are irreparably altered by the visit of an angel named
Satan (not that Satan, but his nephew and namesake). The story concerns
Father Peter, the town priest, and his niece, Marget, who face economic
and social ruin for daring to say “God was all goodness and would
find a way to save all his poor human children” (Twain 1916). When
Father Peter decides to take a wallet full of money that Satan has left
in his path, a string of events is set in motion that leads to Father
Peter’s demise.
Additional scenes based on actual illicitly recorded
tapes of film and television auditions are interwoven into the Twain narrative.
Linked thematically, the two stories are about “trying to conjure
a moment that will change your life” (Lazar 2000). Both transformations
are financially based and both are ultimately an illusion of something
great happening. Finding the wallet actually causes the suspicion and
imprisonment that finally ruins Father Peter. The audition material suggests
that success in the commercial acting industry is transitory and random,
resulting in a weakened sense of self. The piece has an abstracted play-within-a-play
structure, in which the audition script is actually “The Mysterious
Stranger”, allowing the performers to move back and forth between
the two worlds.
Artaud believed that music and dance, by alluding to
subconscious layers of meaning basic to human experience, were particularly
well-suited to reaching an audience on a physical level. In “Another
Telepathic Thing,” songs and dances are used to compress elements
of the narrative, capturing the essence of the experience described. They
also have a strong structural function, linking sections of the audition
material and the Twain story.
In “The Mysterious Stranger”, Satan meets
the young protagonist as he lounges in the woods with his friends. The
angel reads the boys’ minds and lights their pipe, simply by breathing
into it. It is the first scene that reveals Satan’s special powers
and irresistible charm.
In “Another Telepathic Thing,” the scene
is captured in a slow dance between Cynthia Hopkins as the boy, and Stacy
Dawson as the angel. The dance, in which Dawson seems to magically light
Hopkins’ cigarette as they intertwine and turn slowly, captures
the hypnotic thrill of the boys’ first encounter with Satan. Using
an image to distill a narrative element, the moment contains all the ecstasy
and danger of reaching the point of no return.
Props, as well, are used for their sensual, plastic qualities
to express the essence of the story. Early in the performance, Hopkins
sprinkles snow over a miniature version of the story’s setting:
a sleepy Austrian town cut off from the rest of the world. In the closing
scene, snow falls on the stage from above, transforming the miniature
to the life-size and whisking the audience into the world that before
was merely described. A stuffed cat that sits on the casting director’s
shoulder in the audition scenes, giving her the aura of a demented but
powerful queen, also represents the magical cat that Satan gives to a
washerwoman in “The Mysterious Stranger”. Purses become hats,
bamboo pieces strung together are a path, then a prison. The objects are
aesthetically rich—the smooth dark shine of wood, the plush of a
furry cloak, the bright orange of a paper umbrella—and outlandish,
as if governed by the logic of dreams. Rather than representing functional
objects, the props express a fundamental idea in both the Twain story
and the audition material: the potential for instantaneous transformation.
In “Another Telepathic Thing,” all theatrical
elements are exploited for their formal, sensual qualities, and employed
toward a single goal: engaging the audience in a basic philosophical question
about the nature of good and evil and the weight of human existence. In
“The Mysterious Stranger”, Twain suggests that the distinction
between good and evil, like everything else, is a matter of perception
and therefore, immaterial. In the story, Satan creates a tiny city to
amuse the boys and then brutally murders its citizens. The boys are horrified,
but Satan explains he is incapable of sin because he has no moral sense.
Twain extends the idea to assert that all of existence is a matter of
perception: an illusion, and therefore, meaningless.
Before Satan leaves the boys forever, he tells them:
. . . there is no god, no universe, no human race, no
earthly life, no heaven, no hell.
It is all a dream—a grotesque and foolish dream. Nothing
exists but you. And you are but a thought—a vagrant thought, a useless
thought, a homeless thought, wandering forlorn among the empty eternities
(Twain 1916).
The last minutes of the performance are extremely concentrated,
simple, and focused. In the rest of the piece, text is used sparingly,
stripped down to the essentials or an emblematic phrase. Here, the conclusion
of “The Mysterious Stranger” is heard almost in its entirety.
Dawson delivers the final speech deliberately and evenly through a microphone
hidden in a small Asian umbrella as she moves slowly around the stage
in a smooth movement from knee to knee.
“The Mysterious Stranger” was the last piece
Twain wrote before his death in 1910. It reflects a life-long struggle
between the instinctive humor and heart that are captured in his art and
the great suffering he endured in his life. The company was intrigued
with this struggle, rather than the nihilism Twain’s conclusions
seem to imply.
The idea of the speech is cynical, but the language used
to say that idea is so absolutely antithetical to the idea itself. Like the phrase, “the wilderness
of stars.” That is just so beautiful, and so entrancing, and so,
for lack of a better word, optimistic. It’s a linguistic celebration
and a philosophical damnation (Lazar 2000).
“Another Telepathic Thing” functions in the
same way. The effect of Dawson’s final speech is shattering. Uttered
calmly and rationally, it affects a kind of slow philosophical terror
in the audience. It is the final moment of the performance. There is no
song to release the tension or dance to change the energy of the room.
The anticipated moment of transcendence never comes, but the entire performance
suggests it. The idea of meaninglessness is challenged by the formal artistry
used to convey it.
Artaud thought of the actor as a healer and wanted the
theater to perform a spiritual function, freeing the audience from subterranean
evil by expressing it on stage. Decades later, when polls showed most
Americans believed in the real threat of nuclear holocaust, psychiatrist
and social critic Robert Jay Lifton put it another way. He envisioned
a theater that could “imagine the end of the world and create beyond
that” (‘82).
The life-threat is personalized and specific in “Another
Telepathic Thing,” represented by the world of commercial film and
television auditions, but the theme (everything is an illusion and therefore
meaningless), is indeed apocalyptic. Realizing the goals Artaud imagined
for the theater, Big Dance Theater has tackled the metaphysical threat
of meaninglessness with an inter-disciplinary performance of exceptional
cohesion and richness.
Tara Anderson
New York, New York
2001
References
Artaud, Antonin
1976
Antonin Artaud, Selected Writings, edited by Susan Sontag, Berkeley
and Los Angeles: University of California Press.
1932
“The Theater of Cruelty: First Manifesto”
1933
“An End to Masterpieces”
1935
“Oriental Theater and Western Theater”
Chalmers, Jessica
1997
“Dada Today: Not Offending the Audience.”
Off Journal of Alternative Theater
vol. 2, no. 11.
Lazar, Paul
2000
Personal interview. New
York, December.
Lifton, Robert Jay
1982
Art and the Imagery of Extinction.
New York: PAJ Publications
Twain, Mark
1916
“The Mysterious Stranger”.
New York: Harper & Brothers.