Eleonora Fabiao
Performance Studies, NYU
Email: ef383@nyu.edu

SCENIC APPARITION

The scenic body experiences space and time in a potentialized way due to the radical relational effect experienced on stage. On stage, "to be" is to be in relation, as relation, relating. The performer's most basic investigation is on her/his own spatial and temporal condition, her/his corporeality. The primary action the performer is engaged with, the basis for any scenic action, is to experience the properties and mysteries of the immaterial materiality of time and the material immateriality of space. "Space" and "time" are not only related with the immediate here-and-now of the scenic event or the playful somewhere-sometime of the fictive construction but also, with political and historical contextual circumstances. Thanks to the plasticity of the scenic body and the stage - being "the stage" whatever space the actor defines - the performer explores, presents and embodies simultaneous spatio-temporal dimensions.

Fred Newman: "You have to go out of your box, of your prejudices, out of your immediate form of civilization and culture. Each of these things is a kind of box. Or in the best, a bottle or a balloon. Then you discover that there is the other person's world, the other person's bottle, the other person's balloon of sensibilities and notions. And you can share things. In theatre you discover it all the time."
"We have antennas. They have to be out there. You must allow these antennas to be live and wiggling, extended out in the space."

The relational compulsion of the scenic body indicates the endless mobility of the scenic apparition. Mobilized by its scandalous properties of connectivity, dependency and vulnerability, the scenic subject is permanently moving and being moved. As a sophisticated and sensitive receiver, the scenic body reacts to the finest stimulus. As a sophisticated and sensitive sender, the scenic body acts in emphatic ways. Permanently sending and receiving, recycling and producing, transforming and inventing, acting, reacting and re-reacting, the scenic state is a state of flow. The nexus of the scenic body is the flow. The fluid body is the spatio-temporal matrix of the scene.

In Beyond boredom and anxiety - a study on "flow experience" which congregates testimonies of climbers, dancers, composers, basketball players, chess players, surgeons and professors - Csikszentmihalyi arguments: "In the flow state, action follows upon action according to an internal logic that seems to need no conscious intervention by the actor. He experiences it as a unified flowing from one moment to the next, in which he is in control of his actions, and in which there is a little distinction between self and environment, between stimulus and response, or between past, present, and future."
According to the author, the "flow" is a peculiar dynamic state of altered consciousness divergent from daily behavior; "flowing" is the sensation one feels while acting with integral involvement. The state of integrity one can achieve while flowing, transforms the quotidian lazy or anesthetized perception into a sharp sensibility. As indicated by Csikszentmihalyi, the sense of unification is central on flowing experiences. The sentiment of intense connection turns the linear succession of events into a free flow of actions and re-actions. The unification with the environment corresponds to a dilution of rigid ego boundaries and the loss of sharp sense of self-centeredness. However, this does not mean that the actor loses grasp of herself and her own physical reality during a flowing experience. In most cases, one becomes more intensely aware of one's inner processes. Csikszentmihalyi: "What is usually lost in flow is not the awareness of one's body or of one's function, but only the self construct, the intermediary which one learns to interpose between stimulus and response." The author counterpoints to a fragmented, alienated and automatized action in the world, an integral, engaged and de-automatized manner of perceiving, negotiating and generating the real.
Ultimately, the author indicates through the flow state concept, the crucial difference between solids and fluids, between the static and the kinesthetic, between rigidity and flexibility, between being and becoming. In this context, the word "apparition" has crucial importance; "apparition" suggests movement in an emphatic way: the endless process of successively and simultaneously becoming momentary appearances.

The body is solid, doughy, gaseous, electric, liquid. The body happens in changing densities. We are permanently vibrating, a minimal vibration. Vibrating qualifies not only the condition of being permanently combining and transforming densities but also a continuous subtle tremble - the oscillation between being and not being, between life and death, between regeneration and decomposition, between determinism and free will, between in and out. The scene accentuates the vibrating condition of the body. Against the idea of autonomous, rigid and finished bodies, the scenic body (in)defines itself as multiple and mutable. Against the notion of definable and definitive identities, the scenic apparition is a eulogy of instantaneous and dialogical forms. The scenic state highlights the metamorphic condition which defines the participation of the body in the world. The scene, presents, amplifies and accelerates metamorphosis because theater drastically intensifies the friction between bodies, between worlds, between the body and the world.

The flow suggests a temporal dimension: the present of the present. The capacity to grasp and inhabit this doubled present determines the vibratory quality of the actor's apparition. To be lost in the surroundings of the present moment - in the future of the present, the time of anxiety, or the past of the present, the time of dispersion - indicates that the person is "absent of her/his presence." The performer's presence is related to her/his capacity to incarnate the present's present, the time of attention. The actor can bring the past to the present as a remembrance, or bring the future to the present as a vision, but these movements are present forces which model the scene. The scenic body is a manifestation of this paradoxical temporal phenomenon: the doubled present is, both, an experience of compressed time - instantaneity - and expanded time - a temporal connective network.

The scenic body is carefully attentive to itself, to the other, to the environment, to the context; it is the body of sensorial openness. Attention allows macro and micro universes, dimensions that usually disappear in everydayness, to be inhabited and explored. To be attentive is an ethic and poetic operation of deconstructing habits. To be attentive to the pressure and weight of the clothes one is wearing, to pay attention to the angles of things, to the other sides, to the way he moves his hands, pay attention to the thought you had while turning the key to get out of the house, pay attention to the spirit of colors. The attention is a means of sensorial and perceptive connection, a way of psychophysical expansion with no dispersion, a relaxed tension. Ultimately, attention is a form of knowledge. Attention though, turns into a pre-condition of the scenic action, the energy of the scenic apparition.

Carmelita Tropicana: "I would say that for me, when I am on stage, I am making people cum as I am cuming. For me it is in that level of sexuality."
"When you are on stage you are having all that chemicals that your body produces… You are having a bomb."
"On stage I feel elevated. By "elevated" I mean, I feel like if I don't have a body, almost it. It is spiritual. […] I am really quick, aware. I can see and hear many things at the same time. If I have a cold, or if I am on my period, whatever, you go on stage and everything disappears!"

On the stage there is no immunity. The body is permanently interacting with something, even with emptiness. Or still, on the stage there is no emptiness: if you remove everything, latency still remains. Scenic emptiness is latency - on the stage nothingness appears, silence can be heard. And you - immersed in this force filed, in this nervous system, in this phantasmagoric mass of future and past apparitions. And you - experiencing the texture of this empty-full, incorporating and sculpturing latency. You - remembering, imagining, evoking, inventing, paying attention, to the bodies that are communicating to you, that are communicating through you. Your body, the stage. The body, a fluid stage. Scenic apparition, a psychophysical state of hyper-attention.

Honora Fergusson: "You are very exposed and vulnerable in front of the audience; you don't perform well unless you are vulnerable actually. If you lose your vulnerability, you will not be a good performer."

The scenic body knows and should be known via "intertwinement". The spectator is not the seer and I am the seen; we are both, seer and seen, ones who touch and who are touchable, performers and spectators. While seen from the stage, the audience is a spectacle of unique beauty. Intertwinement is the condition all participants of the theatrical event have to, simultaneously, see and be seen.
The stage is an exemplar form of the world as perceived and conceived by Merleau-Ponty: the space of permanent becoming, of Being as being-in-the-world, this world with affinity with "the flesh." On the stage, as well as in Ponty's phenomenological philosophy, the subject does not have a body but is body; the world is not occupied by the subject but is one of the subject's dimensions. He says: "Where are we to put the limit between the body and the world, since the world is flesh?"
The philosopher intertwines: "The thickness of the body, far from rivaling that of the world, is on the contrary the sole means I have to go unto the heart of the things, by making myself a world and by making them flesh." Reciprocity, this is the phenomenological dance. "The flesh is not matter, neither spirit, nor substance. […] The flesh is the element of Being." Connectivity, that is the phenomenological potency, that is flesh's main property. The body is neither the container nor the content announces Ponty, but a "connective tissue;" the world is neither container nor content but connective tissue. The stage is a paradigm of intertwinement and the scenic body is a paradigm of Ponty's flesh.

To be so intensely connected with the body of the world is to be engaged in the world as if it was one's own body. From this perspective, the particular politics of action are not private anymore. One's actions affect the world as much as the world affects one's acts. The scenic body affects the world's body as much as the world's body affects the scenic body. Therefore, it is not difficult to understand the social dimension of scenic bodies and the political influence theatrical presentations can produce. The potency scenic events have is not only related to the critic contents plays can have but also to the medium that is being used to communicate it: the scenic apparition. It is not difficult to understand at all, why scenic manifestations are the first activities to be censured in drastic dictatorships.

Denise Stoklos: "I always think that on stage you are in a different level of consciousness, although "consciousness" is not a good word anymore."
"Energy is what really gets communication, what goes to the audience and comes back: energy."
"Communication is always love, there is no other way. And love is always something that comes along with trust, trust that the other is capable; because the other is myself; if the other is capable, I also gain capacity. That is the opposite of paternalism, patriarchy, capitalism. When I can receive the other, so I am communicating. Those moments don't happen all day because we have a strong structure of power and oppression around, inside, everywhere. We live in a world that doesn't want us to be touched by it because then, if we get in touch with it, we'll be powerful and then we can change things. That's why political theater is any theater that is in touch with this bottom line of respecting human beings as equals. And being always in movement because nothing is really achieved and finished."

In the connective context, "scenic action" does not correspond exactly and exclusively to the action that happens on stage. The connective happening is not restricted to what is being acted on stage but includes the room's drama. The performer's activity and apparition is not autonomous but relative; the actor is relative to the spectator by reciprocity and complementarity. In dramaturgical terms, the confrontation between the one who performs and the one who assists is as meaningful as the confrontation between Hamlet and Ophelia, or between the actors playing Hamlet and Ophelia. If the scene is, in fact, a connective space, a system of convergencies, the scenic action occurs out of the stage, between the stage and the audience area, out of the bodies, as an intersection of presences. The scene happens "in between," as movement, as exchange, and, most importantly, not only as something to be seen but also as something to be corporeally experienced.

Actors must work to improve their receptivity as much as their creativity. Usually, creativity is privileged rather than receptivity, the creative force is more valorized than the receptive power. We are better trained to act than to relax body and mind in order to "be moved." The search for a connective and present body is the search for a receptive state. Receptivity is essential for the actor to incorporate factually and not only intellectually, the spectator's presence. Therefore, "to appear" in the scenic sense is not only a visual operation but rather a corporeal emanation; the body on stage refuses to be simply absorbed as image, it resists to be read exclusively as a visual message, it surpasses its visual condition towards a factual and energetic interchange with the audience.

I stood stand and still - only the necessary tension to keep standing and still. Two minutes. I am smiling already… there is no possible immobility. While standing and still I am moving towards immobility… being danced by the subtle dance. The room is breathing, the world is pulsing my relative quietude. I pay attention to the feet, to the contact between feet and floor, the contact zone, there, where the foot is floor and the floor foot, the foot wood and the floor skin. Cézanne painted the continuity of the object in the space and the properties of space in the object. He was investigating the properties of matter and image, he was questioning what we are made of. What are we made of? Cézanne needed 100 sections to paint a still life and 150 sections to paint a portrait. It is really difficult to paint what cannot be seen but clearly perceived. One has to believe in order to see rather than to see in order to believe.
Merleau-Ponty's philosophy is a eulogy to Cézanne's art.

Perception is participation. I am taking part, therefore I exist.

Marina Salomon: "The relation with space - not the physical space but the way my body connects with space, how the space enters into my body and how I connect myself with it - brings me the sensation of a spiritual practice… It is almost having the feeling of a presence."
"On the stage I am the person I would like to be in everydayness. I would like to bring to my quotidian life the same quality of energy I achieve on stage."

The performer engages in an intense experience of communication that akin to a spiritual practice, something as an aesthetic-ecstatic trance. One of the most extraordinary actors I have ever seen on stage - Mr. Yoshi Oida - wrote in one of his books, The floating actor: "I want to know if I can use my theatrical practice as a spiritual discipline." In The invisible actor he says: "The empty space of theater exists inside the actor, as well as on the stage itself." For Oida, this is a space to be filled by the spectator; the less you give to the spectator's imagination, the happier it will be.
In one of the scenes' of The man who, a spectacle directed by Peter Brook, Oida lights a candle. The actor dances everyday life gestures with such a sophisticated simplicity that each element, molecule, force, capacity of his being is lighting the candle. I sincerely suspect that he could light the candle with no matches; actually, somehow, he did it. There is no other word to describe Oida's presence on stage: he is an apparition; his body is as volatile as unbelievably concrete, as thick as empty, as sacred as rough: he is as life is.

Performers pretend that are pretending.

Bibliography and Sources

Bibliography

Barba, Eugenio and Nicola Savarese. A Dictionary of Theatre Anthropology. London & New York: Routledge, 1991.
Brook, Peter. The Empty Space. London: Mc Gibbon and Kee, 1968.
Carvajal, Rina. The experimental exercise of freedom. Los Angeles: Museum of Contemporary Art, 1999, p. 104.
Csikszentmihalyi. Beyond Boredom and Anxiety. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1975.
Damasio, Antonio. The Feeling of What Happens. San Diego, New York and London: Harcourt Inc, 1999.
Hodge, Alison. Actor Training. London & New York: Routledge, 2000.
Huizinga, Johan. Homo Ludens. Boston: Beacon Press, 1950.
Lacan, Jacques. "The Mirror Stage" In: Ecrits. 1949.
Merleau-Ponty. The visible and the invisible. Evanston: Northwestern University, 1964.
____________. Phenomenology of perception. New York: Humanities Press, 1962.
Oida, Yoshi. L'Acteur Flottant. Paris: Actes Sud, 1992.
__________. L'Acteur Invisible. Paris: Actes Sud, 1997.
Schechner, Richard. Performance Theory. London & New York: Routledge, 1988.
________________. Between Theater and Anthropology. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1985.
Winnicott, D. W. Playing and Reality. London: Tavistock Publications, 1971.

Interviews

Carmelita Tropicana (cuban-american performer)
Denise Stoklos (Brazilian Performer)
Fred Newman (American actor - member of Mabou Mines Company)
Honora Fergusson (American actress- member of Mabou Mines Company)
Marina Salomon (Brazilian dancer)

Notes

from workshops conducted by Yoshi Oida
Dijon (France) - 1999 and São Paulo (Brasil) - 2000