ABSTRACT

Michael Chekhov’s spiritual thinking and the circumstances of his life as an exilic theatre actor stimulated his vision of a Theatre of the Future. This would originate in an international language of theatrical communication and be comprehensible for audiences of any cultural or linguistic background. Chekhov created his own theory of actor-spectator interactivity, with the spectator as the ultimate addressee and point of departure of the stage/audience communicative system. He wanted the spectator to experience affect, the “thrill of being in the presence of actors who are radiantly experiencing the present moment” (Bogart 2010: xii), as the ultimate outcome of a theatrical encounter. This encounter, Chekhov believed, should require no cultural translation: the spectator’s emotional engagement would result not only from the actor’s routine of inspired acting and engaged imagination, but also from the theatre maker’s artistic intention to transmit theatrical energy and hence stimulate the audience’s emotions. Chekhov went beyond naturalistic or realistic theatre practices in seeking to engage

the audience’s emotions and senses in the on-stage action. In his directorial and pedagogical experiments, Chekhov was looking for a theatre of sound and gesture to free the dramatic stage from the burden of logos (the “word”) and to bring its expression closer to dance. His utopian theatre program, which he tried to realize in the 1931 production of The Castle Awakening: An Essay in Rhythmical Drama in Paris, was based on three fundamental principles: to employ a sound narrative instead of the traditional text, to use the archetypal structures of the folk-tale, and to utilize the actors’ body language. Chekhov aimed to create a theatrical event based on the exchange of energy between the stage and the audience. For Chekhov, “it was vital […] to engage with what he called ‘the will of the auditorium,’ to reach out to each member of the audience and share the creative act with him or her. […] He spoke, mystically, of the actor sacrificing himself to the audience” (Callow 2002: xx). He also talked about the transmission of the actor’s love to the auditorium, to stir the emotions of the spectators. Although Chekhov’s ideas on spectatorship sounded idealistic in his time, they

were in line with the experiments of many avant-garde theatre practitioners who were seeking emotionally and politically involved audiences. While he almost always

worked in text-based theatre (apart from his 1931 experiment), he still recognized rhythmical waves and on-stage pauses as major meaning and emotion-forming elements of a theatre production. Thus I would argue that Chekhov’s theory and practice predated today’s postmodernist and postdramatic theatre, which often avoids using logic-based or logos-based stimuli to create meaning. In text-based theatre, our reception of a given theatre production is always culture

specific; it relies on our understanding of dramatic narrative and the theatrical codes that constitute it. Text-based theatre expects us to follow its storytelling techniques and clearly articulates its moral, artistic, or pedagogical messages. The rise of postdramatic theatre has been largely instigated by contemporary tendencies such as globalization and the development of international theatre festivals with their culturally and linguistically diverse audiences. Hence, very often postdramatic theatre rejects the power of logos to convey meaning to its audiences. It frequently originates at the crossroads of modern dance and drama, or dance-theatre; it mutates into theatre-video installations and in its communicative aesthetics approximates performance art (Lehmann 2006). Moreover, instead of seeking our intellectual involvement, postdramatic theatre engages with the “physiology and neurology of the

human body as a receiver of outside stimuli” (Di Benedetto 2010: 1). It repeatedly investigates how theatrical lighting, sound, acting techniques, and other material mechanisms of production “can assist the artist in using sensorial stimuli to compose a live theatrical event and create an in-between state of experience and awareness” (ibid.). Chekhov’s ideas on atmosphere, radiation, energy exchange, and rhythmical

waves as the basis of a theatrical composition (Chekhov 2002: 94-110) find their echo in postdramatic productions, which often shift the focus of a theatrical encounter to the audience and so turn passive spectators/observers of the enacted events into actively and emotionally engaged co-creators of these events. Using aural, visual, and other sensorial stimuli to manipulate spectators’ attention and to “[break] in below the cultural surface” (Di Benedetto 2010: 165), the postdramatic theatre rouses our senses; it requires the spectators’ psycho-physical involvement in making a show. Like Chekhov’s theatre utopia, it stages the audiences’ “affect,”1 when “we do not have to know anything about the specific culture. We do not have to read a culturally specific image subtly; the visceral nature leads us to the experience” (ibid.). In order to better understand how Chekhov’s ideas correlate with such experi-

mental theatre practices today, I examine a set of the pedagogical and directorial techniques that he used to stimulate spectators’ sensorial receptors and help performers to create affect in theatre. Chekhov suggested that actors work with the idea of an imaginary audience during the rehearsal period and become each other’s on-stage spectators/collaborators. Hence, I demonstrate that what Chekhov calls a theatrical composition also functions as the dramaturgy of affect in his theatre, the device of staging the spectator’s emotional involvement with the given production.