Theatre for tomorrow - live theater will flourish despite technological advancement in the field

In an age of spreading computer technology and cultural intermingling, the world's many forms of theatre have reached a crucial stage

"Where is the theatre going?" The question is often asked, but perhaps it would be more accurate to ask it in the plural rather than the singular, for it is clear that there are many different kinds of theatre and that they are not moving in lock-step.

There is the theatre of artists, modeled on Western-style plays made mostly of words, written by playwrights and acted for the most part in a naturalistic style.

There is the theatre of highly codified gestures, costumes and make-up, combining the spoken word with sung dialogue and songs, such as Japanese Kabuki.

There is theatre that could also be called dance or opera because of its total integration of movement, gesture, song and narrative - such as Chinese jingju or Indian Kathakali.

There is the theatre of ritual performances addressing, honouring or entertaining the gods - as practised in many cultures around the world.

There is the theatre of popular festivity and ritual where people build and wear masks and full-body costumes, such as Yoruban gelede, Hopi kachina, or Trinidadian carnival. There is the theatre of religious narrative which takes many days to enact, such as Indian Ramlila, Yaqui Waehma, or the Passion play performed once every ten years at Oberammergau in Germany.

There is so-called "mainstream" theatre - Broadway, the West End and Boulevard Theatre There is also avant-garde or experimental theatre.

The life and death of the avant-garde

Once upon a time avant-garde or experimental theatre was "in advance of" what was following. But it has been at least twenty-five years since that was so. Avant-garde theatre is no longer in advance of anything, and most of the persons working in it do not risk failure in order to explore new boundaries of performance knowledge or practice. In fact, there are strong arguments for saying that all today's theatre is "official", paid for by governments, foundations, or other mainstream funds - or desiring to be paid for by them. Of course, many works are still labeled "avant-garde", but the term does not refer to a single style or tendency, but to several.

* The current avant-garde consists of whatever or whoever critics, audiences and artists identify as belonging to the avant-garde. Calling a theatre artist "avant-garde" is sometimes more a way of praising the artist than describing the work.

* The historical avant-garde. This is the line of development which began with naturalism in Europe in the 1880s and extended through many successive waves of experimentation: symbolism, futurism, Dada, surrealism, Happenings, environmental theatre, performance art, and so on. Each of these claimed hegemony over all its predecessors; each was destined to be absorbed into the mainstream in one way or another. Works that were hissed off the stage by one generation were honoured by the next.

This historical avant-garde ended in the 1970s. No more waves of newness came crashing onto the shore. With the emergence of postmodernism, recycling came to the fore. The end of the historical avant-garde probably coincided with a certain perception of the finality of scientific knowledge, as new developments in science came to be technical innovations and "improvements" rather than shifts in fundamental paradigms. A definite mode of stability reminiscent of the European Middle Ages came to be felt. Perhaps if newness is to become important again it will originate outside the Euro-American cultural sphere. But since the end of the Cold War and the advent of "globalization", is anywhere really outside the Euro-American cultural sphere?

* The forward-looking avant-gard e enacts an amazing and sometimes apocalyptic future It celebrates the newest technology and is currently dominated by interactive telecommunications and CD-ROMS, the Internet, virtual realities, and multimedia.

* The tradition-seeking avant-garde, on the other hand, eschews high tech and looks instead towards "ancient knowledge," "rituals," and "traditional performances" especially in non-Western cultures. Here the ideas and researches of the Polish director and teacher of acting Jerzy Grotowski are dominant. Grotowski has said that his goal is "To re-evoke a very ancient form of art where ritual and artistic creation were seamless. Where poetry was song, song was incantation, movement was dance. One might say - but it is only a metaphor - that we are trying to go back and discover what was before the Tower of Babel. First to discover differences, and then to discover what was before the differences. . . . We can hope to discover a very old form of art, art as a way of knowledge."

* The intercultural avant-garde has two aspects. One is positive, seeking and synthesizing "universals" and connections between cultures. The other is ironic and probing, seeking out disjunctures and miscommunications "at the borders." The work of the Danish director Eugenio Barba and his International School of Theatre Anthropology (ISTA) is an example of the first aspect (see the UNESCO Courier, January 1996); the practice and theories of the performance artist Guillermo Gomez-Pena are an example of the second.

At ISTA and in his writings, Barba attempts to show how "pre-expressive" positions, movements and gestures are at the root of all effective artistic performing. For Barba, these are most clearly seen in Asian dance-theatres such as Kathakali and Odissi in India, buto in Japan, jingju, and kunchu in China. Gomez-Pena emphasizes the contradictions of living and working in more than one culture simultaneously. While Barba wants to find connections, Gomez-Pena and others like him explore the ways in which cultures collide and fail to communicate, with their attendant fractures, difficulties, ideological contradictions and crumbling national myths. Barba tends to work with traditional performers; Gomez-Pena with both traditional and postmodern artists.

The principal goal of the historical avant-garde was to expose, ridicule, and destabilize official art and official culture. The principal goals of the other four kinds of avant-garde are too various to summarize, but revolution and rebellion are not today very important themes. Nor is there an attempt to present "the shock of the new". The newest work in today's avant-garde is highly technological - and these technologies are immensely popular and widespread, global even. They are innovative but not shocking; they tend to integrate rather than divide; and they cost a lot of money, especially during the development stage, and so there has to be a deep alliance with the social forces that have money.

What next?

Once it was felt that theatre would disappear in the face of various other forms of dramatic entertainment and arts, especially movies and video. But the emergence of computer technology is more likely to lead to a collapse of the differences between the various media arts. The use of the information chip instead of strips of celluloid or magnetic tape will mean an increasingly easy-to-use flow back and fort h of images and actions from computer to film to video - and also between the so-called live and the so-called mediated.

I use the term "so-called" because interactivity will allow for the immediate intervention of "viewers" or "audiences" who will become "users" or co-creators. And although fixed-text media - movies and television - will be ubiquitous, interactive exchanges on the personal as well as the artistic level will increase exponentially.

The emergence of chip technology and performance does not sound the death knell of "live theatre". It means only that the various avant-gardes will bifurcate even more. If today there are five avant-gardes, in twenty-five years there may be ten or more.

Collectively, there will be a lot of live performance, but each genre will have relatively few scattered clients, brought together first by means of the Internet and secondly by local and regional "festivals" or other occasions that gather into one spot for a limited time all those interested in a certain kind of performance.

Culture will no longer be defined as localized in place, but as localized in taste and practice. People will be able to belong to a "drama culture" or a "performance art culture" wherever they happen to live.

This new definition of "local" will have an effect on traditional performance genres. At present, such forms as Kathakali or No, gelede, samba or wayang kulit have been tied to a particular place, particular social practices, and particular practitioners. But increasingly, at least some of these forms are opening to practitioners who might not be "born to them," and are frequently domiciled outside their place of origin or primary practice.

Global tourism and traditional arts

Global tourism exerts an extremely strong pressure. Governments and corporations - often indistinguishable from each other - are replacing traditional patrons. Already many traditional arts have been commercialized, globalized and "smoothed out" to satisfy the tastes of tourists and "art lovers". Only those societies rich enough to establish categories comparable to Japan's "living national treasures" will be able to preserve their traditional arts as such. And even when they are preserved in this way, the traditional arts tend to exist in venues that are, like museums or game parks, strictly fenced off from the impact of ongoing life. Many traditional arts will cease to exist. No effective remedy has been found to stop this cultural extinction, which is in any case not entirely bad. Times and circumstances change; not everything that was can be preserved indefinitely. Sometimes the urge to preserve is a mask hiding fear of change.

Nor ought we to underestimate people's inventiveness and creativity, especially the power of popular culture. As advanced economies preserve some traditional arts in their traditional forms, and other less protected arts vanish, a new category of continuous creation of tradition through fusion and hybridity is emerging. Throughout Latin America, for example, performances fusing African, European, and Native American religions are thriving. Other parts of the world are experiencing a similar surge of creativity.

Over the past several centuries immigration and displacement have created the greatest movement among the world's peoples ever experienced. From assailed or displaced fragments of cultural practices, new vigorous performances have arisen. And soon enough, formerly "artificial" or "synthetic" practices are transformed into new wholes. We live in a period where older traditional arts exist side by side with new traditional arts, the fruit of both consciously "invented traditions" and less thought-out but very robust hybrids.

'Ordinary theatre' - the string quartet of the next century

And what about "ordinary theatre" (in Euro-American terms), the enactment of dramas written by playwrights and performed by actors? Of course, this kind of theatre is not "universal" and "omnipresent". It is a specific cultural occurrence and as such it could go extinct. But I don't think it will. I believe that this kind of theatre will become the string quartet of the twenty-first century. By that I mean that it will have a small devoted audience, but it will not be important in the way it was, say, at the end of the nineteenth century when a new drama by Ibsen could shake up an entire continent. The important debates about public culture will be conducted outside theatres - on TV, over the Internet, in new rituals convened and enacted electronically, or via mass movements assembled in the streets.

Live performance

But this is not the whole story. The utopian electronic global village may turn out to be as non-existent as all previous utopias. The media and the Internet are increasingly omnipresent but they do not satisfy certain basic needs that are met by live performance. In fact, live theatre will flourish to some degree because of the rapid development of media and instant information transmission. Note that I say "information" - and perhaps ought to say "data" - and do not use the more complex term "communication". The media provide more information than communication, while live performance often offers more communication than information.

Live performance can be sub-divided into non-theatre and theatre performances. The former include performance in everyday life, religious services, sports, and popular entertainments such as rock-music concerts and theme parks. There are three kinds of live theatre: Broadway, boulevard, and other large-scale commercial enterprises; not-for-profit, subsidized mainstream theatres such as the Stadtheaters in Germany or the regional theatres in the U.S.A.; experimental theatre and performance art.

Commercial theatre is self-supporting because it effectively exploits crossovers between media and live performance. Shows and stars exist both live and on tape, CDs, and film. In this sense, the pop entertainment industry is the most advanced performance genre economically and technically.

The Stadtheater system is the way in which the middle class tells itself that it is "cultured" and "responsible". Its repertory is based on "classics" but includes some new works and the safer experimental artists who "graduate" to official status.

Experimental theatre and performance art, which I regard as the "contemporary avantgarde", are harder to pin down. Some performance artists become fairly big stars and occasionally a movie star also continues to work in experimental theatre. But basically, experimental theatre and performance art take place in small venues for tiny audiences.

Yet they perform a very important function. Live performance of this type continues to be "dangerous". By dangerous I do not mean that the performers wound themselves onstage but that they work in front of audiences while making and recovering from mistakes and unforeseen circumstances. Live performance is also able to explore risky or taboo subjects, unlike large-scale media such as film and video which involve so much money that often the financial backers do not want to take chances. Finally, live performances before/with small audiences allow for the experience of close contact physically, emotionally and conceptually between actors and spectators. This experience of shared presence is irreplaceable.

Will there be money for this kind of theatre? Surely not enough. At one time, experimental performance got no public or official support at all. Maybe under those circumstances the avant-garde was most alive, dangerous, and important, since it owed its existence to no one except the artists and the immediate audiences gave freedom to those involved. Of course, censorship and worse has always been and will continue to be a threat. But the underground seems to find a way.

There is a real need for an unofficial or anti-official theatre. Official theatre - no matter how beautiful - is always just that, "official". And in houses of worship - live theatre's closest sibling - laughter is scarce, especially laughter of the sarcastic, ironic, parodic, and blasphemous kinds. Nor do church, synagogue, mosque or temple encourage bleak tragedy or atheistic scepticism. Official or corporate theatres, newspapers and media, as well as state sponsored religions, all require continuous challenge and critique. Corrective tones of unbelief, mockery, parody, horror and delight are found in experimental theatre and performance art. I hope the next century will see plenty of this kind of theatre.

RICHARD SCHECHNER is an American theatre director, author and teacher. A professor of dramatic art at New York University, he has published a number of books, including The Future of Ritual: Writings on Culture and Performance (1993, Routledge, NY).

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