An apprenticeship to pleasure : creative deconstruction of the distribution and form of a theatre play - Archive ouverte HAL
Communication Dans Un Congrès Année : 2013

An apprenticeship to pleasure : creative deconstruction of the distribution and form of a theatre play

Résumé

The creation of a theatre play rests classically on a rather strict distribution of the roles and of the sensible between the playwright, the director, the actors, the public, the critics, and so on. This helps everyone to perform their roles and make sense of what they watch. But what happens if this distribution is shaken all over, if the various roles and inputs are shared in among all the participants? For the play Prazer (Pleasure), this distribution has been deconstructed. There is no text, but an inspiring book of Clarisse Lispector (An Apprenticeship or the Book of Pleasures - Uma Aprendizagem ou o Livro dos Prazeres), from which the actors have improvised and written from resonances and experiences triggered by the book. There is no director: directorship is taken over in turn by each of the four actors, with an adviser, with very occasional inputs from a dramaturgist, a choreographer, and with regular feed-backs from amateur spectators. "Text" and staging continue to evolve during the one-year tour across Brazil, and probably after. Many spectators write long feedbacks and critics right after the show or on social networks that bring about changes in elements of acting and mise-en-scène. Several critics and theatre professionals had long contact with the troupe during the creation processes and participated with some friendly spectators to an "observatory of the creation". Lights, décor, video effects… also resulted from a participative process. An author of this proposal is one of the four actors and was at the forefront to the genesis of the project. The research will be a one-year participant observation (we are now half-way in the project), accompanied by interviews of the main participants and collection of the relevant documents. Whereas there will be some moments of autoethnography, this will not result in the main source of reflection. Our focus will not be on the explicit intention of the participants, nor on the strategies to generate such or such performativities. We will rather be in search of elements among the "sensitive" level. The web of sensitive experiences commands ways of perceiving and making sense, it reconfigures experiences and ways of being affected (Rancière, 2011/2013). The sensitive is a component of organization life as much as the discursive or the normative (Linstead & Höpfl 2000; Strati, 2007; Strati & Guillet de Monthoux, 2002), it is linked to affectivity and reflexivity (Letiche, 2009; see also Lingis 1996; Stewart, 1996). Rancière (2000/2006) has contended that although each artistic age is built on a certain "distribution of the sensible" (we would rather translate it as a distribution of the sensitive), our aesthetic age experiences many plays with the rules, roles, norms and framings of each domain of arts. In Prazer, the deconstruction of the distribution resulted in a highly polyphonic, heteroglossic and dialogic play (see Backthin; also Belova, King, Sliwa, 2008) but also in doubts, tensions, fights, ups and downs in the preparation and the performance of the play. It also resulted in unique reactions from spectators: many came several times to (re-)see the play, giving long and supportive feedbacks, sharing out some of their most intimate experiences that they felt were echoed by the play (that we can see as manifestations of emancipated spectators, Rancière, 2008/2009). Certainly this came from the highly personal texts pronounced by the actors, but also from some elements of performativity. Spectators experience pure pleasure of opsis (series of scenes, as beautiful tableaus with intimate effects of lights and poetic visual effects) with a fable made of open references over references, with a loose but shared connection to the inspiring book (we use here the vocabulary of the Film Fable, Rancière, 2001/2006). Another striking element of this play with the sensitive, lies also in its liveliness. The performance seems to always reinvent itself, with changes in the text, order of scenes, effects and ways to speak out and embody the text. Brook (1968) opposes the deadly theatre where text and performance is set, to a living theatre. For Brook, theatre is an auto-destructive art, written on sand. Once a staging is set, an invisible something starts to die. Each form has to be thought again, and bear all the surrounding references. The sensitive has to be constantly re-induced in order to produce its effects. The new aesthetic experience re-launches sensitivity and reflexivity on life and culture. But this works only if both actors and spectator get affected in the present moment of the performance. Stiegler (2005) states that theatre is one of the few sources of renewal and revival of desire in our capitalist economy. This play appears as a never-ending apprenticeship, where learning to live reoccurs each time with its drive of specters and infancies (See Derrida, 2005/2011). An apprenticeship to pleasure from which we want to ground, as emancipated actor and spectator of the play, our reflexivity on the sensitive, with its links to creative deconstruction, pleasure and power redistributions.
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Dates et versions

hal-02402214 , version 1 (10-12-2019)

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  • HAL Id : hal-02402214 , version 1

Citer

Isabela dos Santos Paes, Jean-Luc Moriceau. An apprenticeship to pleasure : creative deconstruction of the distribution and form of a theatre play. SCOS 2013 "Creative De-Construction" : 31st Standing Conference on Organisational Symbolism, Jul 2013, Varsovie, Poland. ⟨hal-02402214⟩
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