Presence or execution

A show can be perfectly executed and meet no one. Rereading Peter Brook closely, and passing through Pippo Delbono, a short film that gets cinema audiences singing, and the memory of André Malartre, I look for what creates presence on stage, and for concrete ways of working on it.

Actors who get better when asked a real question

I sometimes attend shows performed in flats, in real living spaces, as close as can be to people. These are situations where one sees very clearly what can go unnoticed in a large auditorium. When a show is executed rather than played, the place itself reveals it. The transitions between scenes have the mechanical lightness of something redone exactly as it should be, the actors look towards the audience without seeing it, because they are looking at the space where the audience is supposed to be, the moments of emotion arrive at the planned spot, and the irruptions of the real, an audience member coughing, a chair creaking, a child crossing the corridor behind the partition wall, are endured as interruptions instead of being welcomed as material.

What strikes me most, on those evenings, are the interstices. When someone in the audience asks a real question, in a moment of exchange whether planned or not, the actors respond with a liveliness they did not have the rest of the time. They listen, they invent accurately, you can feel them there. These moments show that the actors have within them everything needed to be present, and that the score they have been given to execute leaves them no room for it the rest of the time.

The problem, for those of us who make shows, is that nothing in our usual criteria signals this kind of death. An executed show goes well. It keeps to its running times, it is applauded, the feedback is good, the tour continues. And yet we have an intuition of the difference. We know, coming out of a performance, whether something happened or not, without always being able to say how we recognise it. There is something impalpable there, almost imperceptible, which can slip away and which slips away far too often, because nothing in our working methods is organised to hold it. It is this imperceptible thing that I would like to try to clarify here, and above all the way it can be worked on, because it can be worked on.

Répétition, représentation, assistance

Peter Brook opens « The Empty Space », in 1968, with a sentence that has remained famous: « I can take any empty space and call it a bare stage. » It is enough for someone to walk across this space while someone else watches for the theatrical act to be set in motion. This opening is much quoted; what the book builds afterwards is less often read. Brook distinguishes four theatres:

• the Deadly Theatre, which fulfils its aesthetic obligations without anything being at stake between the actors and the audience;
• the Holy Theatre, which makes the invisible visible;
• the Rough Theatre, popular, rooted in the present, close to the circus and to festivity;
• the Immediate Theatre, the one Brook is searching for, in permanent questioning, which never freezes into a definitive form.

The Deadly Theatre is not bad theatre. It is most often estimable theatre, with craft, resources, good reviews. Brook observes that it is found first of all where the classics are performed with due respect for the forms, and this is what makes it hard to recognise: it looks deceptively like successful theatre.

In the final chapter, the one on the Immediate Theatre, Brook dwells on three French words:

• répétition. This is what French calls the work of preparation, the rehearsal, and Brook takes the word at face value. To rehearse, in French, is literally to repeat, and a badly oriented preparation leads straight to the repetition of the same, in other words to the Deadly Theatre;
• représentation. To represent is to make present again. A performance, if one hears the French word in its full strength, is not the public restitution of what was fixed in rehearsal, it is the operation through which something that no longer exists, or does not yet exist, becomes present tonight, for these people;
• assistance. In French one says that one « assiste » at a show, one attends it, and here too Brook takes the word literally. The audience assists the actors, it helps them, and actors can feel very precisely the difference between a house that assists and a house that consumes.

Taken together, these three words say that preparation builds what will make it possible, each night, to make present, and that this presence only comes about if the audience has a real function in it. Presence is therefore not a quality of the actor; it is a property of the relationship between stage and house, to which both sides contribute. Brook draws from this a methodological demand: he asks that the discoveries of previous rehearsals be questioned anew every day, failing which the form freezes and the play escapes those who perform it.

Bobò, or the presence that cannot be put into a score

It is sometimes said of actors that they have « a presence », as if it were a gift. A very few creators have brought into their companies people whom institutional theatre does not welcome, and their work makes it possible to examine this idea of a gift more closely. Pippo Delbono is the best known of them. He has been working since the early 1980s with the same company, whose members are not all professional actors. Bobò, deaf and mute, met in 1995 at the psychiatric hospital of Aversa where he had spent more than forty years, became a central figure of the company, until his death in 2019. Delbono’s shows do not start from a text, the text is often written afterwards; they are born from improvisations, from chance, from someone entering at a certain moment, and the sequences are then composed. A presence like Bobò’s transforms the very nature of theatrical work, not because it brings superior technique, but because Bobò was not playing a part, he was there, and this way of being there obliged the others to be there too. What cannot be done with such a presence is to put it into a score. It can be welcomed, framed, composed; it cannot be executed.

For trained actors, who can do everything, the lesson is demanding. To be present on stage is to be available to an other who is mysterious, multiple, made up of dozens or hundreds of people whom one cannot make out in the dark; it is to give up a share of mastery and to put oneself in a state of receiving what the situation produces. I know this work from my workshops, where my function consists first of all in receiving what the other brings into being, without knowing what it will be. It is exhausting work. I sometimes find myself drained at the end of a workshop day when in appearance I have done almost nothing; I have not manufactured, I have not directed, I have received. Presence costs that, and this is why I speak of work rather than of a gift.

Actors, moreover, know this phenomenon from the other end. They all know, every night, whether or not they are being carried by the house; they feel it, without needing to be told. It is this process I would like to shed light on. It is usually attributed to the actor’s talent, to their experience, to the specificity of live performance, to that co-presence of bodies which is supposed to be the very essence of theatre. It is not exactly that, and to show it I will now take a detour through a film.

« Le coq est mort », a cinema audience made present

In 1988, the German director Zoltan Spirandelli made a short film entitled « Der Hahn ist tot », distributed in France as « Le coq est mort » (the rooster is dead). The film consists of a single device. A young man, on screen, addresses the cinema audience directly, teaches it the round « Le coq est mort », divides it into groups and gets it singing. Accounts of screenings all sound alike: an embarrassing beginning where everyone finds the idea a little silly, then something that takes hold, and an entire house ending up singing in canon. The film won the audience award at the Nuit du film court in Vélizy in 1991, and nearly 500,000 people have seen it in cinemas in France.

This little film interests me because it displaces the question of presence to where it is least expected. Cinema is the art of execution par excellence; the projection is identical every night, down to the frame, and no one is physically present on screen. And yet something happens in these screenings that many live shows do not produce. The man on screen addresses this house, not an abstract audience; he gives it something to do that he alone cannot do; he takes the ridicule upon himself by singing first; and what will happen then depends on the people who are there, to the point that the screening can fail. The address gives the audience a place, this place includes a freedom, that of not singing, and the result belongs to the house. It is this, and not the physical co-presence of actors, that creates presence.

This must be distinguished from participation in the mechanical sense of the word. People can be made to sing, brought up on stage, made to vote, without being engaged in anything. I have described elsewhere the spectator’s score, that role of the good audience member which the theatrical apparatus assigns: arrive on time, keep quiet, applaud at the right moment. Making the audience participate on command often just adds a line to that score, sing when you are told to, raise your hand when you are told to, and the absurdity is then complete: the audience has been executed just as the show was being executed. The difference does not lie in what people do; it lies in whether or not their presence changes something in what takes place. This, incidentally, is why so many people dislike participatory shows. One feels obliged to participate when one wanted to be left in peace, that is to say free, and this obligation is the opposite of an offered place. The participatory, in itself, produces no quality of presence.

I am speaking here of a terrain I practise a great deal. For a very long time I have been facilitating public moments of collective creation, where passers-by find themselves making films, images, installations. Very often, someone tells me on arriving that they feel like doing nothing, that they are in their own life, that they have just come to watch, and the same person leaves two hours later having created, shown, discussed, with an energy they did not know they had when they arrived. These moments are not classified within the field of theatre, and yet theatre is what they are. There is a scenographic dimension, a dramaturgy of participation, a way of carrying speech, of choosing what one says or does not say to people, of giving them a place. I regularly pass these facilitation techniques on to theatre companies who are asked to design participatory forms.

If I move across this terrain with a certain assurance, it is because I also know theatre from the inside. I have practised it since adolescence, I have performed a great deal, indoors, in the street, at the Avignon Off festival, I have worked on the figure of the bouffon, I have designed stage devices for large venues. For Janáček’s « The Cunning Little Vixen », created by the Arcal company in 2016 in Louise Moaty’s staging, I designed the overall transmedia device of the show, which organised the audience’s participation before, during and after the performance, in the theatre and on the internet. The question of the place given to people is therefore one I have been able to work on from almost every position: actor, designer of devices, facilitator.

André Malartre, for whom every night was a first time

A long time ago, I devoted a documentary to André Malartre, a poet and man of the theatre from Normandy. In 1957 Malartre became academic instructor of dramatic art for the Caen education authority, within the Youth and Popular Education directorate of the French Ministry of National Education. For some fifteen years, he trained teachers, trainers and educators in theatre, in teacher training colleges and sports education centres, and in the summer he mounted, in heritage sites across Normandy, in Gisors, Domfront, Mont-Saint-Michel, large open-air theatrical productions open to the widest public, around Shakespeare or Molière. What I remember of his work, as I was able to approach it by filming him and listening to those who had known him, is that every performance was unique. There was a dimension of improvisation, important things happened there that were not the repetition of the same, and what counted was the life of those evenings, not their conformity to an original.

His story also tells why this way of working has become foreign to us. Malartre belonged to that generation of transmitting artists shaped by éducation populaire, the French popular education movement, for whom art was passed on first of all through a demanding, accompanied practice. The creation of the Ministry of Culture in 1959 separated the world of theatre from that of popular education, and the artists of this tradition, rebels against the institution, were gradually marginalised by a doctrine that gave priority to the encounter with the masterpiece and to professional excellence. If the uniqueness of each night and improvisation seem audacious to us today, it is less for lack of precedents than because our institutional history pushed aside those who carried them. Brook, Vilar, Mnouchkine said nothing else, each in their own way. The useful question is therefore not to rediscover these self-evident truths; it is to understand how our structures make them forgotten, and to organise ourselves so that they stop doing so.

The score protects against fear

Do we, as directors, make shows that give actors the possibility of being present, or scores to be executed? The score reassures; it guarantees that the show will be what it must be night after night, and this function must be taken seriously rather than despised, because it tells us what the score protects against. It protects against fear. The fear that the evening might depend on something we do not control, the fear that the actors might lose their way, the fear that the audience might do anything at all.

Now fear, as I have learned in my workshops and as Olivier Houdé’s work on inhibition confirms, is what prevents presence. When a person perceives a threat, even a symbolic one, part of their cognitive functions shuts down, and what was possible in confidence becomes impossible under stress. An anxious director transmits their anxiety; it passes into the instructions, into the micro-gestures of control, into the fixing of details that could have remained open. I have verified this on myself in another context. When I hand my cameras to children during a shoot, I am asked whether I am not afraid for my equipment, and I answer that if I had that fear, I would be forbidding something without meaning to. What we freeze into a score, we most often freeze against a fear, and the first thing to do is to name that fear in order to treat it differently.

The other way of treating it is the frame. I call a frame whatever gives the actors an orientation, tools, shared agreements, a basic security, while leaving them free to invent within it. The distinction from the score does not bear on the quantity of preparation; a frame can demand more work than a score. It bears on what the preparation fixes. The score fixes the unfolding of events. The frame fixes the conditions that will make it possible, each night, to make present, and it lets the unfolding belong to the evening.

This distinction is in no way a contemporary invention; whole stretches of the history of performance worked this way. In baroque music, the composer does not write everything. The basso continuo is notated as a figured bass, a bass line accompanied by figures indicating the harmonies, and the harpsichordist or theorbo player realises it in the moment, in their own manner, differently every night, listening to the singers and to the house. In da capo arias, the reprise is not written to be sung identically; the performer is expected to provide the ornaments and variations they invent, and the cadenzas belong to them. The commedia dell’arte organised the same freedom for acting. The canovaccio, posted in the wings, fixed the outline, the entrances, the situations, and the dialogue was improvised every night, resting on stock characters that an actor worked on all their life, Harlequin, Pantalone, Columbine, and on lazzi, those well-honed routines that were inserted or not depending on the house. In both cases, the preparation is immense, years on a mask, a lifetime on harmony, and what the preparation fixes is not the unfolding of events but the conditions of invention. The integrally fixed score, executed identically from one performance to the next, is a historically recent habit, not a law of the craft.

Sitting in the audience’s seat, and other ways of working on the imperceptible

The ways of working that follow come from my practice of the stage and from those moments of participatory creation which are theatre without bearing the name. They aim at the imperceptible I spoke of at the beginning, and each of them can be worked on concretely.

• Soaking up the place and the life around it. I always arrive very early in the places where I intervene, to inhabit them, often to install the scenography myself, because I need to feel how to do something right with this place. Even when everything is already in place and one is only a performer, one can soak it up, walk through the neighbourhood, talk with the inhabitants, have lunch on site, take the tram the audience will take, sit in the audience’s seat and feel what it will feel, rather than staying in one’s dressing room like the great artist cut off from the world. Being present to the specific life of a context anchors us in presence, and it is not a question of time; some do it very quickly, others need to come several days ahead.

• Speaking only if one feels asked to. I always tell myself, before speaking in public, that I will only speak if I feel I am being asked to. This may seem odd, it may hold within an instant of waiting, sometimes fleeting, and it changes the relationship with people completely, even when they are seated and silent. Anyone can verify it in a simple conversation. As soon as one tries to get something in, one is no longer listening, and there is no more presence. What one says then may be heard, even received, but it will be without presence, executed, dead.

• Knowing that the people there may not want to be there. Some audience members very much want to be there, others have been obliged, pupils for instance, and others still do not want what is about to happen, especially if something participatory is proposed, because they do not want to be called upon. This absence of desire is entirely legitimate, and it must be respected from deep within, not merely paid lip service. We are not there for people to reassure us; we are there to create something with them, taking into account where they stand, sometimes saying so. This does not condemn the pre-written text, we make the shows we want, but people must feel that they are being listened to.

• Giving of oneself first. In the collective intelligence methods I practise, the person who asks others to take a risk begins by taking the risk themselves, because one does not authorise in others what one does not authorise in oneself. The man in « Le coq est mort » sings alone, and ridiculous, before asking anything of the house. On a stage, this translates into actors who accept being seen searching, and not only succeeding.

• Welcoming the person who disturbs. I will be told that everything above, stand-up artists already do, and that is true, they know this. But this knowledge should not belong to them alone; all forms of theatre stand to gain from holding themselves in this energy of unconditional respect for the other, and I draw from it a consequence that may sound like lèse-majesté. When someone intervenes during a show, speaks, disturbs, the professional reflex is to see in it a breach of protocol, a lack of respect for the artists’ work and for the other audience members, and to silence them. I disagree. Disturbing a show costs whoever does it dearly; you get yourself hated by the whole house, you find yourself stigmatised, and nobody does that lightly. If someone does it, it is out of necessity, because they did not feel respected and need to express their dignity. When one stands from the outset in respect and listening, one is not disturbed; people can see perfectly well that they are respected. And if someone disturbs all the same, that person has a strong reason for doing so, and their gesture is theatre, it extends the play beyond what was planned. We know of evenings when actors managed to improvise with the most difficult situations, and those are the ones we remember. Life is a theatre, and in those moments the theatre overflows the stage.

• Treating the score as an outline. In flat performances as everywhere else, take an interest in the people, do not be focused on your show, and be ready, while talking before starting, to sense that there is something more important to do tonight than what was planned, and to invent it now, using differently what had been prepared. I am not saying it must be done; it is extremely rare to go that far, and one does not force oneself to. But being ready to do it changes the relationship to the score. It stops being an unfolding to be executed and becomes an outline that makes it easier to be together, and one remains free, open to the bond with those who are there, because what matters is what happens between us. Something unique can then come about, which nothing written would have produced.

• Remembering that the subject is a pretext. What we talk about is not what counts. It is not the text being spoken, it is not Shakespeare, nor Molière, nor Wajdi Mouawad, nor Marie NDiaye, nor Pascal Rambert. The text, the staging, the score are tools we use, or not, so that there may be life, and they are worth much less than the life they serve, a unique moment for everyone, performers included.

• Being ready to be transformed. What we have planned to give belongs to manufacturing, and work, real work, is transformation. Coming while telling oneself that one is going to learn something tonight, without knowing what; being attentive to receiving at least as much as to giving; accepting to be touched and changed by the real people who are there. Perhaps someone I meet tonight will become an essential friend. I have no idea, I have no expectation, but I keep that possibility open, and it changes my way of being there.

To this is added a company discipline, already encountered in Brook. After each performance, keep a form of logbook and answer two questions in it: what happened tonight that was not planned, and what did we do with it. It is the opposite of the conformity debriefing in which one checks that everything went as planned, and it is what keeps a play alive over the length of a run.

None of these ways of working guarantees presence. They build the frame that makes it possible and that turns it, night after night, into the object of the work. The audience does not ask for everything to be planned; it asks, without always knowing how to put it, for its presence to serve some purpose.