Experimental Theatre and Semiology of Theatre: The Theatricalization of Voice http://www.utpjournals.press/doi/pdf/10.3138/md.26.4.501 - Friday, June 03, 2016 7:31:39 PM - IP Address:5.8.47.150 HELGA FINTER Translated by E.A. Walker and Kathryn Grardal I This paper was prepared originally for the Theatre Colloquium sponsored by the Department of French at the University of Toronto in November 1980; and I should like to begin with a brief remark on the title of the session where it was delivered, a session devoted to "theatre as representation." As the title of my lecture was condensed to "Experimental Theatre and Semiology of Voice," I should explain immediately what the association of notions of re-presentation and semiology will cover here. The issue of my article is precisely, if not removing, then putting into parentheses the "re" of representation. In consequence, my argument will describe semiology as an intertext of a theory of the signifying process, rather than as a theory of signs. This approach derives from the particular kind of theatre with which I am dealing - that of Richard Foreman, Meredith Monk, Robert Wilson, Mabou Mines, II Carrozzone, and Squat - which disarticulates the logocentric domination which, in our culture, governs the relation between the different signifying systems (verbal/visual! auditory), and thus brings the signifying process to light at the expense of our fixation on meaning, as the mode of perception is transformed in and by acting. This theatre permits analysis with respect to its subjective and social determinants: the single perspective gives way to multiple meanings. The spectator-voyeur sees himself faced with his own desire and the basis of that desire, namely its relation to signifying systems. From now on in this theatre it is no longer a question of describing or miming what man does and dramatizing those actions: it is a question not of re-presenting facts and actions, but of dramatizing the formation of the being of man in/by languages. Thus this theatre conducts explorations through acting, stage languages, daily languages and aesthetic languages; by comparing new subjective dispositions! with the social dispositions of the subject put forward by theatre and society. http://www.utpjournals.press/doi/pdf/10.3138/md.26.4.501 - Friday, June 03, 2016 7:31:39 PM - IP Address:5.8.47.150 502 HELGA FINTER In such a theatre the analyst's task can no longer be the (re-)establishing of signs, their meanings and significations, by identifying them as they appertain to codes already actualized within. The actant, the action, the time, and the space of this theatre have no pre-existent and predetermined referent: a potential signifier is created which at first signifies nothing more than its difference from the codes of the theatre and of daily life. This potential signifier is called a signifying differential by J. Kristeva,2 who reformulates the question of the sign (in theatre) in a manner which draws the problem nearer to research carried out as the comparison of semiology and psycho-analysis. I shall therefore speak about semiology of the experimental theatre in two senses: this discussion will deal initially with that semiology in actu which is the performance of experimental theatre, a performance that we must describe in order to arrive at that other semiology of theatre - and this involves a longer, more exacting undertaking - which should show us how experimental theatre analyses the formation of subjective spaces. The second type of semiology compares subjective spaces both to the social spaces ruled by a biopolitical model of the body and to a logocentric model; the social spaces leave a very thin margin for the inscription of instinctual drives. Experimental theatre now produces singular spaces by going back - through acting - to the repressed inherent in the social space, thus presenting to sight and hearing the possibility of multiple singular inscriptions of what remains. Such research is inspired, of course, by Antonin Artaud, who demands in "Le Theatre et I' anatomie"3 that the theatre reveal to us the formation of the being of man. As he writes elsewhere,4 he expects from this kind of theatre insights on the signifying systems which rule human relations to others and to the real: "Art is not the imitation oflife, but life is the imitation of a transcendent principle with which art puts us back in communication."5 By taking up the problem of voice in such a theatre, I do not intend to explore how that voice "re-presents" a text or speech always given in advance. On the contrary, my questions will "bear upon what experimental theatre teaches us about the conditions and modalities of the voice's emission; its part in articulated speech and its function; its specificity, not only in relation to the subjective or social dispositions of the subject in theatre, but also in relation to the becoming [Ie devenir] of the subject (split and/or in process) of man's being. II According to Artaud, the theatre's new language "springs from the NECESSITY of speech more than from speech already formed. But finding an impasse in speech, it returns spontaneously to gesture.,,6 He was premising, in his Deuxieme lettre sur Ie langage (1932), an experience of speech as purely symbolic: the impossibility of finding an inscription of instinctual drives within a social disposition of the subject, within a system of language which would be http://www.utpjournals.press/doi/pdf/10.3138/md.26.4.501 - Friday, June 03, 2016 7:31:39 PM - IP Address:5.8.47.150 The Theatricalization of Voice 50 3 socially and nationally credible, as was still the case in the classical tragedy of the seventeenth century. Let us take the example of Racinian tragedy and its declamation, as the latter is recorded for us in accounts of the times 7 and described - in the negative - by Marmontel's article "Declamation" in the Encyclopedie of D' Alembert and Diderot. The word declamation then did not simply indicate theatrical practice, which was defined at least until the beginning of the eighteenth century8 as a placing of the voice; declamation also meant another kind of placing, half-way between song and that daily speech after which it was modelled, because it was close to a sort of Sprechgesang or recitative9 by virtue of its monody. Declamation thus produced, with the famous muting effects (Diimpfung) analysed in the Racinian text by Leo Spitzer,1O speech which was totally other than that which Artaud found in the theatre of his period. Sustained by singing, monotone, and exaggerated declamation, I I the declamation in question proceeded to objectify the saying [Ie dire] and the said [Ie dit] in the enunciation. This objectification operated both within the different textual levels and in their place of articulation. At the semantic level this objectification was carried out through double meanings: the I which spoke was always an other, and that which IIhe/she were speaking about included both the normative evaluation of what was being said and that - antithetical - evaluation of the character's emotion. At the verse level objectification made itself evident through the verse's double status: it was, at the same time, the mark of the essence of a law - the national language - and the mark of passion. The monotone voice thus made these doubles come from a mouth through which music and text made their ways. The music and text seemed to come from a divided elsewhere: from the place of law and from the other stage, its emotional inverse. The emitted voice traced a line of separation and meeting, a line between the law/a national tone and emotion/the music of a passion. The disposition of the subject in Racinian theatre, its character, was therefore no more than a place of meeting where the process ofthese elsewheres was played. It was a place of doubles, of a subject split but nevertheless capable of symbolization in a tense balance of meanings, tones, and sounds. The spectator gathered these doubles, fallen from the simultaneously tight and supple rope: the impassive, exaggerated voice which integrated them, wrote them in time. In this disposition of the subject, the emitted voice took on a function separate from that of speech properly so called; in a certain way it became the bar between the music of passion and the signifiers of law, indicating their fictitious unity through a void of expressiveness which refers to the lack from which the subject is created. The moment of speech which is law, music, and that which separates them did not last. Towards the end of the seventeenth century their disarticulation was confirmed in the separation which occurred between lyric tragedy/opera and the theatre of speech, Sprechtheater. This disarticulation solidly estab- http://www.utpjournals.press/doi/pdf/10.3138/md.26.4.501 - Friday, June 03, 2016 7:31:39 PM - IP Address:5.8.47.150 50 4 HELGA FINTER lished the musiclbody and speech/meaning division which Artaud faced. As a result, the conditions of enunciation were, for him, no longer to be objectified in speech alone. He turned to others of the stage's signifying systems, 12 only to return at the end of this journey to speech, with "Pour en finir avec Ie jugement de Dieu."I3 The experimental theatre and performance of the 1970's seem at first glance to obey a lesson only too well inculcated by a superficial reading of Artaud. The presence of speech is reduced to that of one signifying system among many, one voice in a signifying polyphony. Speech is nothing more than tone or sound in the views of certain critics when they speak of Robert Wilson, Richard Foreman, or Mabou Mines; or it is said to be "pure" voice - sound and breath in the theatre of Meredith Morne This reduction or absence of full and articulated speech, a tragedy of language for numerous spectators, is not a sign of aphasia, however, for the gesture made by these diverse groups is often similar to that of Artaud, wanting to stage the conditions of speech. Foreman, for example, still begins with a text and wishes to explore the possibilities of its emission in making it - according to him - a living organism. Wilson would like to produce "channel switching" in order to analyse the workings of thought modified by media. 14 Thus speech in experimental theatre is not necessarily audible sound alone. Illuminating this idea, Sigmund Freud's work on aphasia l5 gives a conception of the sign much more complex than Saussure' s. On the side of the signifier, which is a closed and heterogeneous unity, he distinguishes spoken signifiers from written signifiers, and sounded signifiers from read signifiers. All four signifiers are present as representations in the perception of a linguistic signifier. It is only our culture which privileges the combination - association, according to Freud - of the sounded representation of the signifier with the more or less visual part of the representation of the signified. Experimental theatre begins with another distribution of the two audio-visual unities of the sign: it centres its preoccupation not on the text, but on the orality which, on the one hand, takes the written (the seen) as spoken sounds and transforms sight into hearing and kinesthesia and, on the other hand, takes tone and sound as spatially written, thus transforming hearing to sight. In so doing, experimental theatre explores a domain which the theatre of the text, having become Sprechtheater (theatre of speech), had at least forgotten if not repressed since the discarding of verse. This domain is orality'S attribute as the presence of a voice situated between body and language l6 which, in singular and social dispositions, writes the myths of impossible origin and also triumphs over it. And slhe who lends an ear again finds herself or himself - just as with the modern text - the analyser of his or her own relation to language. How then does this theatre theatricalize voice? What are its modes of articulation, and what do they teach us about the working of the voice - both in theatre and elsewhere - for the subject? The Theatricalization of Voice 50 5 http://www.utpjournals.press/doi/pdf/10.3138/md.26.4.501 - Friday, June 03, 2016 7:31:39 PM - IP Address:5.8.47.150 III The voice is par excellence the "object" of theatricalization because of its status as between: inscribed in a text, the voice indicates a carrying externality - the mark, according to Roland Barthes, of theatricality 17 - by that which links it to the singular body or to a disposition of the subject. But at the same time the voice is a part of language; it is body, but as product of body it manifests the separation of the two. 18 The voice recalls a former hallucinated harmony, but it is also the object in perspective 19 which, in the evolution of the child, allows his emancipation from dependence on the mother. The voice prefigures that emancipation through rhythms - the first elements of syntax 20 - thus leading the child to language acquisition: The voice thus undergoes the powerful attraction toward the signifying organization of the Other, of the mother or - in a more general sense - the father, and at the same time the necessity of remaining unharmed; of being liberated from the Other and of maintaining the original attachments, which can be represented, in phantasm, by the body or by the corporeal mother, in her breast. 21 The voice leads from the imaginary to the symbolic. It enables what is seen to be transformed into what is heard, and makes it possible for sound to become image. 22 But is the voice nothing more than an instrument, a way23 to other ends? The voice connected to language is, for us, coded: research on prosody as the double coding of language makes this point clear. The voice connnected to the body has been spoken of by all lyric music - ever since the text became the "servant of music" - and lyric music disposes of specific institutionalized places in order to articulate that relation. Experimental theatre will tell us more about this strategy. But let us look first at how semiotic research uses these concepts. For semiotics, the voice receives consideration only to the extent that it connects with language. 24 In his book Litterature et spectacle, Tadeusz Kowzan therefore distinguishes two signifying systems in the pronounced! performed text: speech and tone. This terse distinction can be stated more precisely by using the results of two differing trends in research, one concerning tone, the other sound. The first trend starts from the premise that prosody is a double coding of language, 25 and it centres on prosody insofar as it lends itself to a linguistic study. I shall first discuss intonation and rhythm in the theatrical text, and later demonstrate how exploring this aspect of voice in the theatre of Wilson and Foreman has contributed to the questions of tone and voice. The second trend was advanced by Roman Jakobson and Ivan Fonagy, 26 and is represented especially by the work of Julia Kristeva on what she calls rhythm or music in the modern text. 27 Kristeva' s work takes up a problem 506 HELGA FINTER external to linguistics proper. It deals with the productivity of sounds, of music in a text, organized into signifying differentials and revealing the instinctual basis of phonation, which becomes a space of pleasure. This research is at the same time related to problematization of the subject as part of a process. I shall compare some of the results derived from that research on the space of voice in the theatre of Meredith Monk. http://www.utpjournals.press/doi/pdf/10.3138/md.26.4.501 - Friday, June 03, 2016 7:31:39 PM - IP Address:5.8.47.150 IV Prosody as double coding may bear upon signification and thus appear in a written code as, for example, punctuation does for intonation. But prosody is also expressiveness determined by acoustic quality and the voice's intonational curve. This prosody appears before the acquisition oflanguage;28 it is related to syntax and prefigures syntax. It is constituted by different prosodic systems: pitch direction, pitch range, loudness, tempo rhythmicality, pause. 29 Here I shall consider mixtures of different characteristics from· which intonation results: sound pitch, tone direction, tone range and rhythm, tempo, pauses, and rhythmicality. Prosody indicates the presence of a subject in the enunciation. It is thus denotative or connotative when the marks of the subject's presence in its speech are ascribable to a rhetoric of subjectivity, a rhetoric which forms a social disposition of the subject. Having a function which is either grammatical, modal, or social,3 0 prosodic systems have great import in the performance of the theatrical text. Let us look at how these systems are inscribed in the text, taking intonation and rhythm as examples. I have already mentioned the intonation which is inscribed in the text by punctuation. Punctuation emphasizes not only the identity of meaning and sequence, but also the grammatical modifications brought to meaning by question marks, commas, etc. Punctuation can also indicate expressiveness by an exclamation point. The absence of punctuation takes away an important part of the text's singular meaning or "uni-vocality," making it polysemous. Henceforth the voice's symbolic function can come to the surface. This fact was pointed out by Denis Diderot, and after him by Nicolas Beauzee in his article "Ponctuation" in the Encyclopedie: Just as one speaks only to make oneself heard, so one writes in order to transmit one's thoughts to readers in an intelligible fashion. Now, much the same is true for spoken language as for written language: the pause of the voice in speech, says Mr. Diderot (Encyclopedie article), and the signs of punctuation in writing always correspond, indicating alike the junction and the disjunction of ideas. "There would thus be as many disadvantages in suppressing or misplacing punctuation as in suppressing or misplacing the voice's pauses in speech. Each serves to determine meaning; and there is a succession of words such that, without the aid of pauses or of the characters which The Theatricalization of Voice 50 7 http://www.utpjournals.press/doi/pdf/10.3138/md.26.4.501 - Friday, June 03, 2016 7:31:39 PM - IP Address:5.8.47.150 indicate pauses, it would have but an uncertain and equivocal meaning, one which might even introduce contradictory meanings, according to the manner in which one grouped the words. "3 1 Thus punctuation approximately prefigures a voice and breath which give the position of the subject of the enunciation, but these signs, serving as indications, do not definitively fix the position of the subject. Intonation can also bring supplementary information by emphasizing or giving nuance to meaning through expressive accents, or by adding expressive emotional values which connote pain, sadness, or joy. In the same way the intensity and quality of the tone (timbre/pitch) - this additional information - leave no written traces. The theatrical text adds its portion of information with didascalies 32 indications for the stage and for the actors - which often bring additional data on the voices' quality: their expressive value, and the idiolect's social and regional connotations. The didascalies - a recent phenomenon, the classical text including hardly any - concern only the social disposition of the speaking subject, aiming to establish a convincing voice in order to obtain a desired meaning. The voice's corporeality is here feigned as a more or less coded expression. It is on the side of law; it is the way of a text. 33 Rhythm - the combination of tempo, pause, and rhythmicality, linking to accent (intensity, glottal pressure/pitch, duration) - can be distinguished from accent nonetheless, for rhythm uses different notations in the text. The page, which separates the actors' speeches into lines, verses, strophes, and sequences, and the verse which is inscribed therein, are just so many indications for the real rhythm of voice and breath, as the didascalies concern tempo. In languages with a free tonic accent, tension can arise between artificial rhythms and the national language's own rhythms. 34 But in French, for example, the alexandrine seems rather to underscore a phonological structure of the language. This idea too is emphasized by Marmontel in his article "Declamation,"35 and by the Abbe d' Aubignac in La Pratique du theatre 36 in 17 I 5 . Verse/metre is thus understood as an effort to create a social and national disposition for breath, as punctuation did for intonation from the time of the Renaissance: punctuation and verse or metre thus mark an attempt to anchor the voice in the national language, to make it an integral part of speech, of law. 37 This process corresponds to a social disposition of the subject, which will be a solid, Cartesian, logocentric subject. v Although the text has much less importance than it enjoys in other theatres, the experimental theatre of the 1970' s adds details to the problem of language's http://www.utpjournals.press/doi/pdf/10.3138/md.26.4.501 - Friday, June 03, 2016 7:31:39 PM - IP Address:5.8.47.150 508 HELGA FINTER double coding as tone of voice. No longer the dominant signifying system, speech competes here with other systems of sound - music, sound effects; with visual signifying systems of the stage - sets, props, lighting; and with visual signifying systems of the actor - gesture/movement, mime, mask, costume. Frequently these systems precede the text in the genesis of performance. 38 The text is often found by chance and demands preconscious automatism. 39 Its division and distribution among various actors are effected only after the fact ,40 that is to say, at the very moment when a text without punctuation and metre is confronted by a stage space and actants. In Wilson's theatre nothing remains of punctuation but the question mark. Foreman adds punctuation afterwards, as the result of rehearsals which - like the German Probe - are more aptly named "experiments." Thus the text is initially a mute score in search of a voice whose breath will punctuate it, divide it up, give it rhythm and thus cohesion, and possible sense through action [Ie jeu). My first example will be the performance I was sitting on my Patio. This Guy Appeared. I thought I was Hallucinating, produced in 1978 by Robert Wilson and Lucinda Childs, among others, at the Theatre de la Renaissance, PariS. 41 This two-act play is based on a single text already divided into lines, but without punctuation. It is performed successively by two actors: in this case, Wilson and Childs. The result was two parts with completely opposite meanings, related only by effects of stage articulation - sets and black-and-white lighting and by the same music. Yet the music differed in texture, since it was played the first time on piano and the second time on harpsichord. The first performer's work (Wilson's) resulted in a paranoid disposition through explosive acting structure, whereas Childs's work structured implosive acting which made one think of a schizoid disposition. These meanings were on the whole produced by effects of intonation and speech rhythm, and by the disjunctions among speech and action and corporeal rhythm (movements/gestures). Wilson cut his text into minidramas and disjointed situations which were very inconsistent; at the same time he talked with invisible partners whose existences were indicated only by the ringing of a telephone and by a voice from a video tape which preceded or repeated his words - always in a triangular position with respect to the actor. Wilson's movements/gestures were stiff, as if in slow motion. Childs articulated the text as an internal monologue, without the intervention of any third party, calm, suppressed and always on the verge of falling silent, alone. Her movements were more like those of dance, fluid. In each case, the intonation and rhythm which the single voice gave to the words created cohesion and multiple situations which could be invested with possible significations only after the fact, after taking the actor's other signifying systems into account. Moreover, since the gestures (movement! mime) and the space/stage were, from the very beginning, devoid of any function as signal or evaluative indication; and since they had neither plausible http://www.utpjournals.press/doi/pdf/10.3138/md.26.4.501 - Friday, June 03, 2016 7:31:39 PM - IP Address:5.8.47.150 The Theatricalization of Voice 50 9 connections among themselves nor motivation pointing toward a presupposed centre; the voice - as tone and rhythm - ensured the syntagmatic cohesion and the situation: thus the intonation imposed a semblance of unity on the subject in process. The two prosodic ensembles that I have just described are grammatically correct, significant, and expressive; but each time they are born of a void - a pure social code - for the body does not respond to them. The body remains dissociated from them, the voice has no grain: amplified by the microphones worn around the performers' necks, the voice is an external object. Disincarnate, the voice denies any corporeal origin, denies the transmitting capacity of a voice's grain. 42 In the settings of the two acts, this voice is fantasized as being pure way;43 it is hallucinated - I thought I was Hallucinating - as though one with symbolic law, with that Other which the body speaks. As a partial object, the voice is experienced as a parasite on the body whose original unity is fantasized, as is the (fused) unity of a paternal voice. The voice is thus vehemently rejected: vociferated in order to banish persecution - in Wilson's paranoid version; or held back, swallowed, falsified - in Childs's schizoid version. Each time a different characteristic of the original myth44 concerning the voice is presented as spectacle: its sacrificial side is accentuated by Wilson as the murder of the Father, an acting-out already inscribed in the text, and by Childs as the subject that becomes victim when experiencing the voice as a verbal cyst. VI This voice taken as exteriority or partial object is also prominent in the work of Richard Foreman. I shall point out briefly the methods of this theatricalization, taking as example Foreman's recent production Luogo + bersaglio, performed in Italian at the teatro della piramide in Rome towards the end of 1979. 45 The manipulation of the voice in that production involved a kind of suspended intonation which rendered the voice neutral and decorporealized, like the utterances of radio announcers. This asepticized, bodiless voice nevertheless acquired rhythm and intonation, but indirectly through other signifying systems: Foreman records the text using a male voice - in American performances it is his own - then cuts up the tape, so that most of the phrases of the text pronounced during the performance are anticipated or repeated by the recorded voice, which Foreman often operates himself during the performance. Sometimes the text/words are cut up by other machines, interrupted by other noises (bells, horns, alarm sirens, thunder) which obstruct the words, or by music (in this play, cotton blues, a tango, different bits of carnival music, a cakewalk) which stops the actors' movements, as though in a film which suddenly slows and stops. This slowing down is often accompanied by the enlarging or shrinking of the stage space, with much noise made by walls on http://www.utpjournals.press/doi/pdf/10.3138/md.26.4.501 - Friday, June 03, 2016 7:31:39 PM - IP Address:5.8.47.150 5 10 HELGA FINTER wheels and tracks. The actor is thus caught among three machines: speech which has been recorded on a tape-recorder; sound effects which cut into speech and delimit the time of action; and space which delineates the actor's field. The fiction of the actor who is master of his own speaking, of the action, and of the stage space is thus disarticulated in this production. At the same time, however, speech, action, time, and space are not attributed to some instance of phantasmic control, which in this case might be the text - the production notes - of the play's director. Such an authority would afford the definitive "reading" of the text by giving it its tone or "correct" situation and cohesion. Instead the text's signifying chain becomes mobile, fragments, is spatialized, takes on other supports. The utterance can simultaneously find a situation in the sets; the gestures and movements of the actors, in the props and machines; altogether they weave an enunciation which has no centre, no distinct source. Thus the speech of a master - master of the text and master of the staging - is defeated: it is checked by those who are other - the stage, the actors, the props; speech is made process. Let us take the following scene: E una ragazza grande e grossa come teo RHODA Non hai il senso della proporzioni. VOCE Dubbio, ed il suo rapporto can Ia proporzione. RHODA Farei bene a ripulirmi. MAX Perche. RHODA Per me, non per teo MAX Adesso vedo Ie cose nella giusta prospettiva. 46 MAX The first two and the last sentences answer one another. We can perceive a logical cohesion which links the "sense of proportion" to the "right perspective"; we therefore see a cohesion among the three phrases at the symbolic and abstract level without, however, being able to identify the situation precisely. That more precise identification intervenes - in the form of actions - between the second and the last line, which furnish the "lack of a sense of proportion" with a variety of situations. It also invests the "right perspective" with potential meaning, thus allowing us to give, after the fact, a possible meaning momentary, because it will be disarticulated by other scenes - to the sequence: the first two phrases, when considered alongside the action, may refer to the necessity of a grotesque castration (Max and Rhoda, equipped with enormous phalli on wheels, are subjected to a sawing procedure to which the ripulirmi also obscenely refers; the last phrase could be read as indicating the successful result. But these three statements are also clues to the transformation of the stage space, which is reduced by a parallel wall on wheels that comes on-stage with a great clatter. These three parallel signifying chains - of speech, action, and space - are linked to another stage by two objects (the phalli and the http://www.utpjournals.press/doi/pdf/10.3138/md.26.4.501 - Friday, June 03, 2016 7:31:39 PM - IP Address:5.8.47.150 The Theatricalization of Voice 5 II mirror) and by one word ("perspective"); they enable us to read the scene as a grotesque icon of the passage from the mirror stage to the stage of speech. The scene is the product of both the syntagmatic chains and the paradigmatic chains: it is the product of catastrophes, but inevitable, for this icon shows the belief in magic (the speaking which instigates action and the reverse) that supports the symbolic so that it can produce meanings. This specific intonation of Foreman's theatre offers us an analysis of the conditions of enunciation, and its hearing, which goes beyond the problem of the simple relation between text and voice. By giving words a tone through stage images that correspond to other words, Foreman demonstrates that, for him, a possible reading of the cohesion and situations of speech results from passing by way of the other stage, where the relation is played to sexuality and language in each person's singUlar history. In Foreman's theatre the voice is no longer purely symbolic. By giving intonation's function to other signifying systems, making it visual, and rendering it an object of derision, Foreman shows not only that the theatre is the place of imaginary (impossible) mastery, but above all - with the dissensions, the fragments of signifying chains - that intonation is always affected by another quality of the voice which, through sound, refers to the body, to sexuality. VII Wilson's play and Foreman's work underscore the characteristics of the tone and rhythm of the voice as double coding of speech; they demonstrate the voice's social affect, as well as its limits with reference to the coding of the situation, the cohesion and unity of an atomized subject. Yet other works by Wilson, like Einstein on the Beach created in collaboration with Phil Glass, and the research of Meredith Monk on the voice, study another aspect for which purely linguistic analyses cannot account. The work of Fonagy and of Kristeva on the instinctual basis within the modem text brings to light a phenomenon which is prelinguistic if one studies its place in language acquisition and the evolution of the subject,47 but translinguistic in its textual manifestation. 48 Barthes has already explained this phenomenon in his study on the texture of the voice: the text speaks the trace of a body, tells of language and its separation, and does so in a singular fashion. If we then return to the subject of prosody, it will no longer be significative and expressive prosody, implying a coded memory, the repository of community or national knowledge. For prosody speaks the mnemonic traces - Erinnerungsspuren - of each subject's particular experiences. It does so in alliterative rhythms and the exploration of timbres connected to the unconscious instinctual process. 49 Thus prosody no longer accounts for tone - more or less coded - and no longer is a rhythm which plays the role of unique feature in the particular http://www.utpjournals.press/doi/pdf/10.3138/md.26.4.501 - Friday, June 03, 2016 7:31:39 PM - IP Address:5.8.47.150 512 HELGA PINTER language. Prosody exercises sound in rhythm - that aspect of the voice which distinguishes it from speech - by redistributing the phonic and semantic potentialities. This exercise can lead to the production of new structures of signification, capable of functioning according to two methods: one can make the body speak by emptying the phonemes of their distinctive function (and the phonemes' frequency will be increased); or else one can semanticize the phoneme, resorting to its distinctive character, the body thus becoming a signifier through the production of agreement between dismembered phonemes and their lexemes. 50 A text will then appear beneath the text, a text of voice. Thus the voice has generated a subject, marked its splitting, and is caught between the two: simultaneously body and language. The voice weaves this subject in time and space, in process. This text of the voice is found rarely in the usual theatrical text. There are perhaps traces of it in verse theatre, wherever music - or the pleasure of the text - speaks of what transcends speech's verisimilitude in the subject's social disposition of the voice. But as I have already indicated in reference to Racinian tragedy, this music is still governed by national rhythms and indicates separation rather than atomization of the subject in process. Experimental theatre exercises this voice - sound and breathing - often by comparing it to music. For example, it takes the voice which speaks a text as a voice-instrument to which the text brings modulations. Thus only the very froth of these repetitive speech gestures, which are harmonized and contrasted with the voices of instruments, enters in. This is Wilson's method in Einstein on the Beach, and in part, in Edison (produced in autumn 1979 in Paris): having been thus dismembered, the phonemes harmonize with the instruments; emphasizing at the same time the contrasts in order to make a repetition speak, that life-breath which grows in order that it may speak. This attempt to empty speech in order to distribute it differently - by connecting it to and confronting it with stage images and the actors' performance - can succeed only if the spectator is willing to have his or her perception subverted. The method leads first to an experience of the splitting of perception: listening to the voice-sound can mean the loss of listening to the voice-speech, comprehension of meaning; and listening to the voice-speech can occur at the expense of understanding sound. In the same manner the attention one gives to the voice diminishes the attention one gives to the visual. After this splitting up which recalls an anterior stage of the subject, the perception of the sound-image-speech will have to be reorganized for each of the auditors/spectators, and certainly in the unique difference of each one, according to their singular relations to audio-visual languages . If I do not want to retain the impression of a fusion-bath - or risk paralysis through enticement from a community welded together by its inexpressible origin - this theatre of semioticization of the inexpressible can become the analyst of my own relation to languages. The Theatricalization of Voice 513 http://www.utpjournals.press/doi/pdf/10.3138/md.26.4.501 - Friday, June 03, 2016 7:31:39 PM - IP Address:5.8.47.150 VIII Meredith Monk solves the problem of the text of voice in her production Recent Ruins (presented in March 1980 in N anterre) by working on only the bits or hints of phonemes: sounds which come together in groups that crystallize from time to time into yes and no, and do so in different languages. This field of voice on the way51 to acquiring negation and assertion comes forth musically through enunciation which leads from echolalia to the stage (called that of symbolic castration) of yes and of no, thus calling attention for the human being to the formation of the other, the object and subject of the enunciation. This stage is covered in the first twelve months of a life. 52 Monk makes this distance visual, using a rectangular black space with a mirror lake in the middle, thus presenting an image of the first stage, symbolizing the space of the first chora and the mirror. In the following scenes Monk evokes elements of other original myths, like those of the archaic mirror or of prehistoric animals, but she evokes as well images of practices which she assimilates to those myths by showing the grotesqueness intrinsic to their pursuit of a lost origin. Archaeology, for example, becomes a practice of measuring, cataloguing, and labelling, a positivistic remedy which tries to master a differential. repression, the immeasurable remains of a past, much as science fiction attempts to do with the future. Only the voices seem capable of speaking this repression. Placed in contrast beside flat, stereotyped images, the voices bring out what cannot be mastered in them, what cannot be represented by a common measure without killing or social exclusion. The allusion to concentration camps, shown by the silent film projected in the middle of the theatre half-way through the performance, contributes greatly to that impression. This theatre comes together with the modem text in offering an open space for the voice and breath of s/he who confronts that space in order to make it polyphonic. Further, in making the theatre a place of "pure" voice made visual, the voice reveals the conditions of its emission, conditions which require that the voice create artificially what it had rejected with the symbolism of speech: the voice must have - even tacitly - an institutionalized place, a contract and rules. It must therefore have an institutional and metaphysical framework which authorizes its emission and which the participants recognize as the link between them, which thus permits the now licit voice to rejoin the images. What traditional theatre and opera imposed by the barrier of the orchestra pit or the footlights - footlights which thus instituted the desire towards the stage - is here signified, speaks, becomes transparent as a condition of the voice-body' s emission. The "astral" body which Monk's theatre produces is no longer the object of a hysterical desire to assign the public and the performer their specific roles as master and hysteric: the singing voice which speaks of elsewhere institutes this change through its practice, and that is possible only when it is known by all the participants. 53 http://www.utpjournals.press/doi/pdf/10.3138/md.26.4.501 - Friday, June 03, 2016 7:31:39 PM - IP Address:5.8.47.150 514 HELGA FINTER In that respect the treatment of the voice in experimental theatre is not only a critique of the way the theatrical place makes use of "pure" voice, but also one of those religious practices of the voice which Jakobson, and more recently Michel de Certeau,54 have analysed as afiction of saying [Ie dire]: glossolalia. By accepting the rules of the performance game in recognizing a space unique to this "pure" voice - and thus allowing transgression of the law of necessary voice-speech junction - performers and participants open to themselves the space of a pleasure which goes beyond the simple practice of collective transgression because it knows itself to be transgression. In so doing, experimental theatre seems to reach a final limit of theatre as social practice. It is related to social practice by images, by the visual which - despite its opacity - refers to an experience whose elements bear traces, at the very least, of an artistic or social code. But for its work on the voice, experimental theatre organizes these elements in subjective/singular spaces which s/he in the audience can penetrate only if s/he becomes the analyst of his or her own relation to languages by weaving his or her own text. NOTES 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 By disposition of the subject I mean the model of the relation to the body, to the other, and thus to oneself. It is a construction of the different signifying systems and regulated by the specific mode of the relation to these systems. Thus the social disposition of the subject prefigures, in our culture, a subject that is put into perspective above all by a verbal symbolism which leaves a very thin margin for the inscription of instinctual drives. The subjective dispositions originate from that model and disarticulate it into singular subjective spaces, thus bringing to light its character as a process and at the same time its limits as a common measure for the person who sees her/himself face to face with it. Cf. Helga Finter, "La construction de dispositifs subjectifs dans Ie theatre postmodeme," paper given at the second congress of the AIS, Vienna, 1979, and to appear in the Actes du congres, ed. Tasso Borbe. See Julia Kristeva, Semeiotike: Recherches pour une semanalyse (Paris, 1969), pp. 200, 298, 353; and La Revolution du langage poetique (Paris, 1974), pp. 2 II, 222. See Antonin Artaud, "Le Theatre et l'anatomie," La Rue, 12 July 1946 (Kra); rpt. in Art Press, 18 (1978). Antonin Artaud, "The Theater of Cruelty (First Manifesto)," in The Theater and Its Double, trans. Mary Caroline Richards (New York, 1958), pp. 89-100. Ibid. Antonin Artaud, "Second Letter on Language: To J.P.," 28 September 1932, in The Theater and Its Double, p. 110. See Barbin, Entretiens gaLants (Paris, 1681); Abbe Jean-Pierre du Bos, Reflexions critiques sur La poesie et la peinture (Paris, 1719); Claude-Joseph Dorat, La Declamation theatraLe: Poeme didactique en trois chants (Paris, 1766); Louis Racine, cf. Pierre Regnier, Souvenirs et etudes du theatre (Paris, 1887), pp. The Theatricalization of Voice 8 http://www.utpjournals.press/doi/pdf/10.3138/md.26.4.501 - Friday, June 03, 2016 7:31:39 PM - IP Address:5.8.47.150 9 10 1I 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 5 15 101-II6; lean-Laurent Le Cerf de la Vieville de la Freneuse, Comparaison de La musique italienne et la musiquefrangaise (Brussels, 1705). Towards the middle of the eighteenth century one notices a radical change in the staging of tragedy, which then aspires to become the expressive declamation of passions with which gestures, mime, masks, and costumes (now historical) must also combine; cf. Dorat, and Martine De Rougemont, "La declamation tragique au XVIIIe siecle," Cahiers d' Histoire des Litteratures Romanes, 3 (1979), 451469. Romain Rolland, "Le recitatif de Lully et la declamation de Racine," in Musiciens d' autrefois (Paris, 1908), pp. 143- 168. Leo Spitzer, "L'Effet de sourdine dans Ie style des classiques: Racine," in Etudes de style (Paris, 1970), pp. 208-335. According to the documents cited above, and especially du Bos, 7th ed. (Paris, 1770), I, 419, III, 144, 154, this declamation in which the tragedians Champmesle and Duclos excelled seems to have been analogous to the recitatives of Lully's operas. It followed poetic rhythms rather than the rhythm of the meaning, thus sustaining the monotony of a melodic line while at the same time alternating the passages by occasionally jumping to an octave above or below without, however, ending in song. "Composition, creation, instead of taking place in the author's brain, will take place in nature itself, in real space, and the definitive result will remain just as rigorous and determined as that of any other written work, but with an immense objective richness as well" (emphasis added) (Antonin Artaud, "Pour en finir avec Ie jugement de Dieu," in Oeuvres completes, XIII [Paris, 1978], 108). See Oeuvres completes, XIII, 65-II8. See Richard Foreman, "How I Write My (Self:Plays)," and Robert Wilson, " ... I thought I was hallucinating," The Drama Review, 21 (December 1977), 5-24 and 73-78. See Sigmund Freud, On Aphasia: A Critical Study, trans. E. Stengel (New York, 1953)· See Guy Rosolato, "La Voix," in Essais sur Ie symbolique (Paris, 1969), pp. 287-305; and "La Voix entre corps et langage," Revuefrangaise de Psychanalyse, 38 (1974), 77-94· See Roland Barthes, "Baudelaire's Theater," in Critical Essays, trans. Richard Howard (Evanston, 1972), p. 26. Cf. Rosolato, "La Voix entre corps et langage," 78. Ibid., 82. See David Crystal, "Prosodic Systems and Language Acquisition," in Prosodic Features Analysis/Analyse des faits prosodiques, ed. Pierre R. Leon, et al. (Montreal, 1970), pp. 77-90. Rosolato, "La Voix entre corps et langage," 86. Denis Vasse, L'Ombilic et la voix (Paris, 1974), pp. 115 ff. Translators' note: the author is playing here, as elsewhere throughout this article, on the homophony of the French voix, "voice," and voie, "way" or "path." The speech/tone distinction is given by Tadeusz Kowzan in the last chapter of Litterature et spectacle (The Hague, 1975). It is adopted in more recent semiotic research such as Achim Eschbach's Pragmasemiotik und Theatre (Tiibingen, 1979), which distinguishes Sprache/Redestil. http://www.utpjournals.press/doi/pdf/10.3138/md.26.4.501 - Friday, June 03, 2016 7:31:39 PM - IP Address:5.8.47.150 516 HELGA FINTER 25 See Andre Martinet, Elements of General Linguistics, trans. Elisabeth Palmer (London, 1964), pp. 11-21; and Crystal. 26 See Roman Jakobson, Child Language: Aphasia and Phonological Universals, trans. Allan R. Keiler (The Hague, 1968); and Ivan Fonagy, "Der Ausdruck als Inhalt. Ansatze zu einer funktionellen Poetik," in Mathematik und Dichtung, ed. Helmut Kreuzer and Rul Gunzenhauser (Munich, 1965), pp. 243-274, and "Les Bases pulsionnelles de la phonation," R evue fran~ise de P sychanaly se, I (1970 ), 101-136, and 4 (1971), 543-591. 27 Kristeva, Semeiotike, pp. 174-207, 246-277; and Langage poetique, pp. 20 9- 26 3. 28 Cf. Christine Leroy, "A propos du role de l'intonation dans l'acquisition de structures syntaxiques," Etudes de linguistique appliquee, NS 9 (January/ March 1978), 67-75. 29 Crystal, p. 78. 30 Ibid. 31 Nicolas Beauzee, "Ponctuation," Encyclopedie (Paris, 1765), XIII, 15 ff. 32 See Anne Ubersfeld, Lire Ie theatre (Paris, 1978). 33 See above, translators' note, n. 23. 34 See Sergej Bernstein, "Asthetische Voraussetzungen einer Theorie der Deklamation," in Texte zur Theorie des Verses und der poetischen Sprache, ed. H.-D. Stempel (Munich, 1972), pp. 338-385. 35 J.F. Mannontel, "Declamation," Encyclopedie, IV, 681. 36 Abbe d' Aubignac (Fran<;ois Hedelin), La Pratique du theatre, in La Pratique du theatre und andere Schriften zur Doctrine classique, ed. H.J. Neuschafer (Munich, 1971); see Chapter X. 37 Cf. Kristeva, Langage poetique, p. 218. 38 Cf. Foreman, "How I Write." 39 Cf. Wilson, " ... I thought I was hallucinating." 40 See Richard Foreman and Helga Finter, "Luogo + bersaglio = Italia? Intervista a cura di Helga Finter," Spirali, 3/5 (1980), 50,43; also published in German, "Horen + Sehen: Wohin das alles zielt ... ," Theater heute, 21 (September 1980), 26-27· 41 See Wilson, " ... I thought I was hallucinating"; the text of the play appears in Performing Arts Journal, No. 10/11 (1979), 200-218. 42 Cf. Roland Barthes, "The Grain of the Voice," Image-Music-Text, trans. Stephen Heath (New York, 1977), pp. 179-189. 43 See above, translators' note, n. 23. 44 Rosolato, "La Voix," p. 297. 45 See Foreman and Finter, "Luogo + bersaglio = Italia?," and Helga Finter, "Foremans Sinntriften oder: Vom Dialog zum Polylog in seinem romischen Stiick, 'luogo + bersaglio,'" Theater heute, 21 (September 1980), 23-25. 46 MAX She's as big and heavy as you. RHODA You lack a sense of proportion. VOICE I doubt it, and your relation to proportion. RHODA You better clean me up. MAX For why. RHODA For me, not for you. MAX Now I see things in their right perspective. http://www.utpjournals.press/doi/pdf/10.3138/md.26.4.501 - Friday, June 03, 2016 7:31:39 PM - IP Address:5.8.47.150 The Theatricalization of Voice 51 7 47 See Rene A. Spitz (in collaboration with W. Godfrey Cobliner), The First Year of Life: A Psychoanalytic Study of Normal and Deviant Development of Object Relations (New York, 1965). 48 Cf. Kristeva, Langage pottique, p. 224. 49 Ibid. 50 Ibid., p. 222. 51 See above, translators' note, n. 23. 52 Cf. Rene A. Spitz, No and Yes; On the Genesis of Human Communication (New York, 1957). 53 The specific contract of perfonnance is nonetheless seriously threatened: when an audience that is used to the theatre and the implicit interdiction which grounds the desire towards the stage - when this audience rushes towards the object of its desire, the perfonner (invading the symbolic space), to touch him - then violence speaks the traces of that collective sacrifice which instituted the symbol. In the same way transgressions of the contract of silence and respect, the silence and respect presumed in the service of pure voice - transgression by laughter, by silly remarks - these transgressions, which are meant to arouse the group and so to erase all differences, are far from being mere professional risks; they speak of another contract and its violence: the social contract. 54 See Roman Jakobson, "Glossolalie," trans. Nicolas Ruwet, Tel Quel, No. 26 (1966), 3-9, and Roman Jakobson and Linda Waugh, The Sound and Shape of Language (Bloomington, Ind., 1979); also Michel de Certeau, "Utopies vocales: Glossolalies," in Traverses, 20: La Voull' ecoute (Paris, 1980), pp. 26-37.