Live body, real and clear body, the ever-flowing energy to which there is no end, like the flow of sea tide; you don’t know when it began and when it will end…These are the kind of energy in style and pace of “Physical Theater” forgotten for many years. It began by the arrival of “Black Narcissus” and gradually faded away with the group’s annihilation. And you all dears are witnessing my efforts to revive the truth of body and its eternal energy besides the personal and new methods of pronunciation of me and those of my group.
Atefeh Tehrani
These statements are worded by the choreographer and director of Indra Theatrical Group whose most recent dramatic activity, Read, was staged March and April 2009 in the Tehran City Theater. As she has pointed above, Indra’s tremendous attempt has been pointed towards employing and “revive[ing]” body language in Iranian contemporary drama. Such revival of already-“forgotten” acting style of the Physical Form Theater is accelerated in Read by making use of video projection, music, mimic, and apparently nonsensical sounds.
Read casted eight players, four men and four women, all of whom wearing similar simple costumes except for an apparently female creature, “She”, whose gold- black, witch-like attire and make-up, seductive and menacing mimic and gesture became the centre of attention in the play.
The stage spectacle was sheerly plain. Just at the corner of the stage, a gauzy cylinder was employed both as the abode of “She” and as a trap into which people were at times caught. The gold light shed on this cylinder and its gauzy look tended not only to foreground, but even to mystify the strange creature’s emergence on the stage and, later on, her mode of existence which people seemed to have both desire to and repellence from but were inevitably trapped in.
On the central wall motion colours were projected, presumably, in order to express the aura of the play and also to brush the characters’ physical expressions with a tint of colour in accordance with their mood. The video projection, therefore, besides the gestures, attempted to serve as formal concepts, a series of correlative signs, to be “read” by the audience. White side-walls were designed in a way that the shadows of the characters, usually very grotesque ones, were casted on. Throughout the play these shadows sometimes appeared very moving and impressive; more often than not, however, they were unmethodical and careless. Music (a selection of Phillip Glass’s), too, was selected and meant to be in accord with the ambiance, movements, and plot of the play. But music like the other elements, as the play developed, appeared to suffer repetitiveness and monotony.
As to the gestures and manner of gesticulation, the opening of the play was made abrupt by convulsive and frenzied movements acted out uniformly by the actors and actresses in a way that bewildered the audience at first sight. The sinewy body movements acted extremely robustly and toughly with the performers pronouncing repetitive, hysterical though seemingly nonsensical sounds appeared as if the characters were afflicted by a never-ending pain in spite of being in a state of equilibrium with regard to the plot of the play. I’d rather call the initial action of the play its equilibrium since, despite the abrupt beginning, the major matter of the play begins with the appearance of “She,” the witch-like character who seemed to be endowed with malicious magic powers, either worshipped like a god or despised like a devil by the people of the tribe.
The formal elements were so much elaborated on and foregrounded that the major plot or the so-called story seemed of secondary or even tertiary importance to the play. It was the story of a group of people’s life imbued with suffering and pain in a world demanding perturbation and plague under the omnipresent influence of a weird creature that seemed to have godlike powers. Each member of this tribe, who seemed to stand for the whole humanity, had certain a contribution to and difference from the rest of the group. A man, for instance, tended more than the others to suffer from the afflictions exerted upon the tribe, or another female character was mostly prone to childlike, innocent and even naive moods, thus the first to be trapped by the she-devil and the only one who served “She” closely to the end. Having fallen in love with a layman in the tribe, “She” attempted, this time not to threaten, but to seduce him. “She” whose menacing advancements to persons were mostly seductive and sexual, usually ending with assault or hypnotization, now has appeared to be love-stricken and longing for attention. “She” still acts, however, in an intimidating manner when she faces his (the beloved’s) resistance; a resistance which with the help and encouragement of other fellows ended the play with the deity’s death.
As stated above, what mostly mattered in the play turned out to be how such a simple and perhaps mundane story can be staged by focusing on formal aspects of presentation and performance, through foregrounding and defamiliarizing effects of action and movement, and by setting a pattern of unconventional motives. From a Formalist view, propounded by Shklovsky, “art is a way of experiencing the artfulness of an object: the object is not important”. Nevertheless, such effects and motives recurred so much in Read that at times lost their impressiveness and got very soon automatized by the audience. That is to say, the formalist concept of “dominant” can perchance be endangered by the banality of such defamiliarizaing presentation. An example may be a good proof for such a claim: the gestures and movements which were designed to be non-arbitrary compared to those of everyday life, after a short while became banal and even redundant. Thus, the “dominant” which here stressed body movement as language in an unconventional sense, mingled so defectively with arbitrary and ordinary gestures that underestimated the initial defamiliarizaing quality. According to Shklovsky, “as perception becomes habitual, it becomes automatic.”
Above all, the main concern of the play seems to have to do with the workings of language not only in a verbal but also in a nonverbal sense, like the language associated with colours, gestures and gesticulations. Physical Form Theater generally, and this very play particularly and at times imitatively, seeks to question and react to the arbitrary nature of the relation between signifier and signified in verbal, musical, gestural sign systems. It aims to rid these sign systems of such arbitrariness, of referring the signifiers to the already-held, naturalized and exhausted signifieds that deprive the audience from active involvement in the process of signification and that serve to communicate certain meanings and ideas. Such mechanical and utilitarian aspect of language is referred to by Paul de Man as “defacement,” “decomposition,” “radical annihilation,” and finally “inhuman” randomness of language.
Zohreh Exiri
References:
Harpman, G. Geoffrey. Language Alone: The Critical Fetish of Modernity. London: Routledge. 2002.
de Man, Paul. The Resistance to Theory. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. 1968.
1.“She” might remind us of ancient Greek or Roman gods like Zeus or Jove who fell in love with earthly women or mortals and made them give in by doing tricks upon them.
2. A Chomskyan linguist, Ray Jackendoff says that “the language faculty is at bottom a device for externalizing and communicating meaning” from one mind to another. That is, we communicate with each other by agreeing on the use of the “same words” to express the “same ideas” and to refer to the same things. Such a notion amounts, as well, to the difficult-to-believe Wittgensteinian account of “picture” theory of language, the idea that language mimes and mirrors reality
Shklovskey, Victor. “Art as Technique” in Literary Theory: An Anthology, edited by Julie Rivkin et al. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers. 1998.