The formation of basic approaches of anthropological theater and theatrical anthropology

Stepanova Polina Mikhailovna ORCID: 0000-0001-8410-9086 PhD in Art History Professor, the department of Dramaturgy and Film Studies, Saint Petersburg State University of Film and Television 191002, Russia, g. Saint Petersburg, ul. Pravdy, 13 st-more@yandex.ru Other publications by this author

The decentralization of the theater in the performances of J. Barraud "Rabelais" (1968), A. Mnushkin "1789" (1969), L. Ronconi "Furious Roland" (1968) and in many other experiments led to a conscious return to open theatrical forms, to ancient, medieval and renaissance paradigms. Attempts to update or rather reset the drama theater, creating a new form of relations between the actor and the audience, were connected not only with the search for an open space, but primarily with the understanding of the actor as the center of a theatrical event. So there is a greedy desire to comprehend the laws of human existence at the moment of performance or ritual-theatrical action.

At the end of the twentieth century, two main concepts of the development of anthropological ideas in theatrical theory and practice were formulated: anthropological theater and theatrical anthropology. To investigate the processes of penetration of cultural anthropology into the sphere of theatrical experiments, the author of this study relies on the works underlying the classical European schools of cultural (social) anthropology. The main emphasis in the research methodology is made on the works of French scientists M. Moss, M. Eliade, K. Levi-Strauss, as well as A. van Gennep, K. Wulf.

The "performative turn" ^{[12, pp. 38-39]}, designated by Erica Fischer-Lichte in the 1970s and associated with a fundamentally new understanding of the theatrical event and rethinking the relationships between its participants, became the starting point for the emergence of a large number of new communicative forms and phenomena in the visual arts. The science of the 1970s is also characterized by a turn to anthropology and ethnology, interest in which has increased due to globalization and changes in the cultural picture of the world. "Ethnology, with its contribution to the comprehensive concept of culture and to the methodology of qualitative social research, has achieved a significant impact on the humanities, social and cultural sciences" ^{[4, p. 69]}. Many aspects of those diverse phenomena that are traditionally studied by the humanities have now been considered from a human point of view. The terms "ethnology" and "anthropology" in a broad sense are perceived as equivalent, covering the same field of knowledge. The application of one or the other varies depending on the school and representatives. The variant "ethnology" is widespread in Russia and continental Europe, the term "social anthropology" is accepted in the UK and the countries of the British Commonwealth of Nations, "cultural anthropology" – in the countries of North America. In Russian science, these concepts are most often regarded as synonyms: "Currently, social and cultural anthropology is a field of scientific knowledge designed to study the content of people's joint life and activities" ^{[8, p. 19]}.

Anthropological terminology and methodology have penetrated into all spheres of science, and the science of theater is no exception. Modern performances and performative practices have absorbed a variety of multicultural phenomena and simply cannot be described convincingly without the use of anthropological tools of cognition. Moreover, the anthropological approach offers a new key to understanding the historical stages of the development of visual arts. It lies in the field of research attention to man as the center of the mimetic nature of creativity.

The first stage of the formation of the anthropological theater (which can be designated as practical) is aimed at the development and interaction of theater and cultural anthropology. The idea of the theater exploring and studying the laws of human existence with the help of theatrical practice defined theatrical expeditions of the 1970s, which directly borrow the main method of collecting materials in cultural anthropology - field research.

In an effort to find a new theatrical language based on various theatrical cultures, Peter Brook created the International Center for Theater Studies in 1970. In 1972, the director gathered a group of young actors of different nationalities, traveled across Africa in search of the main, original laws of the theater.

One of the main ideas of Brook's entire work remains the desire to maintain an acute connection between theatrical performance and the processes taking place in modern society: "the theater strives to reflect reality" ^{[3, p. 137]}. The response to the racist ideologies spread in the middle of the twentieth century was broad discussions among scientists and cultural figures. Georges Banu calls these tendencies, reflected in Brooke's philosophy and practical works of the 1970s, "the trauma of race." The ideology of superiority and theater of Europeans no longer reflects the most important processes that take place in society. The performance is accessible to everyone, not only the auditorium, but also the stage should be filled with people from different parts of the world. The theater becomes a reflection of the "multiethnic" picture of the new Europe, so the idea is born first of an experimental troupe in which seventeen nationalities work on equal terms, and then there is a craving for travel that can help actualize the main components of the theater.

Banyu gave a public lecture on the experimental period in the work of Peter Brook in October 2008 at the St. Petersburg Academy of Theater Arts (now the Russian State Institute of Performing Arts). The performance of the French theater critic began with a vivid introduction dedicated to the historical context, the Bath described in detail a completely new Paris, Paris after the student revolutions: rapid emigration, cosmopolitanism and the discovery of anthropology "as a method of cognition of being and oneself in it." The ideas of new theatrical issues and poetics came from the street, but were supported by the theories of M. Eliade and K. Levi-Strauss (lecture notes by J. Banu from the author's personal archive).

Brook's work with the multinational troupe began with two major problems of communication between people of different cultures. The absence of a single language field created the need to use alternative forms of communication within the group. The first obvious way to work together was to master bodily techniques, but according to anthropologist Marcel Moss, even the simplest movements in different cultures can be very different. Bodily techniques are especially different during adulthood. They are determined by religious, territorial and social frameworks ^[15]. Brooke is acutely aware of this fundamental problem of the cultural body, i.e. with a specific adaptation to their social and biological needs – to their culture. For the anthropological context of the second half of the twentieth century, Brooke's rejection of national identity sounds like a challenge. The International Center for Theater Studies does not set itself the goal of creating the body of an ideal actor, combining the skills of all performance cultures in the world and using them as a basis for educating a new acting nature. "An actor should try to distance himself from his own culture and, above all, from its stereotypes" ^{[3, p. 133]}. The director perceives a lot of physical bodily skills of actors of a multinational troupe as a mechanical set of signs, hieroglyphs (in the terminology of A. Artaud), ideograms (in the terminology of E. Grotovsky). Brooke recreates "the whole system of training the actor's body" ^{[3, p. 134]}, based on: a flexible and responsive body, voice, free and open emotions and a mobile mind. Questioning language and bodily techniques as the basis of theatrical art and acting training, Brooke comes to work with sound. The use of ancient Greek texts brought the director closer to the desired meaning without the text prevailing. The actors of the International Center for Theater Studies had to be deprived of cultural cliches, rejecting the role of the rational principle in their work, Brook's trainings were aimed at "anticipating words and ideas as moving forms" ^{[3, p. 136]}. Of course, disarming the mind, Brooke sought to awaken a natural physicality in actors of different schools. The return to "speech before words" became a fruitful field for the actualization of the syncretic model of actor's existence, when movement, singing and the word are one. "As a result, each actor was able to pronounce these words with a deeper sense of meaning than if he knew what they meant. Both he and the listeners felt this meaning" ^{[3, p. 136]}. The appropriation of someone else's sound opened up amazing possibilities of the actor's new bodily apparatus, which awaken complex internal mechanisms of interaction between sound and movement. The work with ancient Greek texts, hymns to the gods and poetic scores of tragedies became the basis for the creation of special trainings in the modern Polish anthropological theater.

From gaining individual experience of actors, Brooke turns to the problem of the universal nature of theatrical performance and wants to prove this thesis by going on a trip with a theater troupe that has already passed trainings on combining different cultural forms. The very idea of such a search contains the pathos of Levi-Strauss cultural anthropology – to identify "kinship systems at the level of unconscious thinking" ^{[6, p. 43]}. Meanwhile, Brook is not just looking for the components of a new communicative model, he is interested in a theatrical form that can exist anywhere and under any circumstances. "In order to establish a fundamentally different type of relationship with the audience, it is necessary to get acquainted in practice with the audience who does not know the theater, to get acquainted in the thick of life, without specially preparing anything for this - such a dialogue can begin anywhere and go in any direction" ^{[3, p. 139]}. At the first stage, the English director works with the actor's bodily apparatus, brings the performer into a state detached from the intellectual comprehension of the structure of the action, and then throws him into open improvisation. After zeroing out the actor's nature and achieving a state of "premonition of the idea", Brooke questions the very existence of the public in a traditional drama theater, calls the actor's relationship with the audience "protection from alleged hostility" ^{[3, p. 152]}.

Brooke's field research in Africa is aimed at discovering the original principles of influencing the viewer, at creating a new form of participation in the process of representation, and is designed to expose the nature of theatricality.

Brooke discovers in practice three main components of the anthropological theater. His field research in West Africa lays the foundations for the creation of a ritual, ritual-theatrical or purely theatrical model as a new communicative system devoid of a narrowly national cultural tradition. All the components identified by Brook and his troupe are as close as possible to the classical ritual models existing in world practice at the moment.   

Any presentation began with the creation of a special space for the event. A carpet was spread on the ground. There was a boundary between the actor-performer and the viewer, such an organization is always present in a ritual form, there is a place for people (observers) and gods (shamans, in whom beings from another world inhabit for the duration of the action). This space restriction can be as conditional as possible. For example, in Japanese kaguras performed in the forest, there is only a thin sacred thread stretched between the trees, but there is also a mandatory place for the altar on which sacrifices must be made ^{[1, pp. 28-43]}. A special space of action implies the existence of a real world. The carpet creates the place of a mythological event, carried out here and nowhere, the viewer sees the story now, but it is born in eternal images living in the collective unconscious.

After the creation of the sacred space, an act of sacrifice must arise. Sacrifice to the gods in pre-theatrical ritual forms is always embodied in a specific object from the material world. The object inside the ritual structure is "the product of a special system of representations" ^{[6, p. 11]}. "We did some short improvisations. The first was connected with a pair of shoes. One of the actors took off the big, heavy, dusty shoes in which he had driven through the desert and put them in the middle of the carpet. There was a tense pause, everyone stared at these two objects" ^{[3, p. 142]}. The inhabitants of Algeria and Niger, where the expedition of the International Center for Theatrical Studies took place, overwhelmingly profess Islam, probably there were people among the audience who had experience of complicity in the religious mysteries of this religious denomination. The main ritual form of representations in the complex of Muslim ritual representations is taziye – a religious mystery dedicated to the tragic death of the prophet Imam Hussein. The structure of the ritual procession is connected with the history of the death of the mythological hero, with his suffering and torture. In this ritual construction, a special place is occupied by things that belonged to the prophet: a horse, weapons, clothes of the prophet. All these attributes of the ritual come from the real material world, but in the process of preparing for the procession and at the moment of the action itself, they acquire the functions of the other world, become sacred objects. It is especially important that the decoration of the horse, military weapons, even musical instruments should be the most beautiful and new, but should at the same time bear the imprint of a terrible battle. The beauty of snow-white fine fabrics is overshadowed by bloodstains. The subject of the ritual works in the sphere of dichotomy, the material world and the eternal world, battle and death and eternal life.

A similar dichotomy arises in the image of dusty shoes in the hands of an actor from Brooke's troupe. An object moves from the material world into the world of action, it ceases to be an element of reality, but becomes an attribute of archetypal content. Shoes create the context of a path, a difficult human life, with all the difficulties and joys, with the dust of roads. Banyu calls working with objects at the moment of improvisation a "zero level of understanding" (a lecture by J. Banyu from the author's personal archive). If sticks were used during the trainings that took place back in Paris, when the troupe had to unite and find a universal language of communication, then improvisation in the desert meant maximum specificity of the stage subject, props. The subject loses its utilitarian meaning and acquires a sacred meaning, so there is a possibility of understanding without words.

The third component of the new communication was singing. "One day we sat all day in a small hut in Agadez and sang. We and the African group sang in turn, and suddenly we found that we had come to a single sound language" ^{[3, p. 149]}. West Africa has the most complex musical culture. Archaic forms of singing and music-making date back to the proto-civilizations of Yoruba and Igbo ^[9]. Many tribes believe in the divine origin of sound. Singing and playing instruments is communicating with the spirit world. That's why Brooke's story about how the tribe in the night forest invited the troupe actors to the funeral and offered to perform their own songs is so important ^{[3, p. 149-150]}. The use of sound as a guide between the worlds of the living and the dead has the character of unification and clear boundaries. Singing-a guide creates a field of common memory, ancestral memory, collective unconscious, and at the same time defines the rigid boundaries of the profane and sacred. Inviting strangers to the funeral ceremony gives the event a more complex meaning, the transfer of the soul to the ancestral world is a unique event in itself, the presence of Another makes the liminal act an open act, really manifests the nature of the non–existent ^[5]. A member of the tribe dies, children hear singing in the forest, strangers are invited to the campfire. The practice of purifying singing, which Brook himself calls one of the most successful field research experiments ^{[3, p. 150]} reflects the theory of individuals and groups in the works of A. van Gennep. The very image of an outsider and the attitude towards him in tribal culture creates the problems of a ritual model and a form of communication within a non-everyday situation, a funeral situation. Outsiders for the tribe "reside in a sacred world, while the community for its members represents a profane world" ^{[5, p. 29]}. Brooke's actors literally become gods, guides, souls of deceased ancestors for one night, who communicate with us through sound. "The song sounded and disappeared, as it happens in the theater – once done, it disappears forever" ^{[3, p. 150]}. Brooke practically equates ritual and theatrical practice. The fundamental question becomes thinking about the nature of the second, which comes in the process of the very implementation of the action of the contact between the actor and the viewer. Within the framework of the ritual tradition, communication is always carried out between the sacred and profane worlds, only these worlds arise at different levels in different types of ritual practices.

In search of the primordial language of the theater, Brook and his actors from different parts of the world in practical experiments revealed three components common to ritual and theater: a special space, a subject of zero level of understanding, sound – all these elements build a "universal totemic system" ^{[6, p. 12]}, connecting speakers of different cultures and at the same time determining the specifics and the uniqueness of all the peoples of the world.

In 1964, Eugenio Barba, together with the Norwegian playwright and writer J. Bjornebu, organized an independent theater group in Oslo, One Theater, which brought together young actors from different countries who were looking for new ways to develop theatrical art, the result of which was the play "Bird Lover" (1964) based on the play by Bjornebu, shown in Norway, Sweden, Finland, Denmark. In 1966, the theater moved to Holstebro (Denmark) under the name "Theater Laboratory of the Nordic countries" (Nordik Teaterlaboratorium). Barba and the actors played performances in the village communities of Carpignano in southern Italy, in 1976 he took a trip to the Amazon to find universal laws of scenic art in the interaction of theater and ritual.

Having arisen in the wake of the student revolutions of the 1960s, the movement, called by Barba "The Third Theater", rejects both traditional and avant-garde types of performances. Initially, this is not a theatrical experience, but a human one: Barba gathered around him young people who are confused in life, tired of drug culture, tired of the senseless struggle for freedom. Barba initially focuses on physicality. "The Third Theater lives on the sidelines, often outside or on the periphery of culture, far from cultural centers and capitals. This is a theater that is made by people who call themselves actors and directors, although few of them have received a traditional theater education — it does not interest them in terms of how to achieve recognition, and is not of professional interest to them" ^[14]. The Third Theater seeks the universal laws of the acting apparatus in the mutual influence of theater culture with various traditional rituals of village communities in Carpignano in Italy, in Amazonian tribes, in poor neighborhoods of Mexico.

From 1976 to 1982, Barba staged performances with the Danish youth group in all corners of the world. It was like carnival processions: people on stilts, in fancy dress costumes with huge noses, with funny painted faces staged impromptu actions on the streets of small towns. Each of the actors tried to exist in different theatrical techniques: someone has a commedia dell'arte mask, someone has a French carnival, etc. With these theatrical performances, they come to a small working village in Italy or Mexico, show performances on the streets of the city, residents join them.

Cultural and scientific expeditions were based on the idea of searching for a new function of the theater. The rejection of traditional theater and going beyond the boundaries of traditional representation gave impetus to the emergence of a different theory and practice, which is on the verge of theater and para-theatrical forms.

The most important aspect of the anthropological theater is the active participation of the viewer in the process of creating a theatrical work. "Anthropological theater, like traditional theater, appeals to the viewer's consciousness, but, in addition, information is transmitted through modeling spontaneous thought processes that affect the viewer's subconscious (self-consciousness). As a result of the transmission of a powerful expressive flow of new ideas, he creates a different model of the universe" ^{[11, p. 98]}.

The most important strategy for creating acting trainings, preparatory stages for the development of the performance score, reactualization of mythological structures of ritual and theatrical models is a technique developed at the very origins of the origin of a specific methodology of anthropological theater, which practitioners call "cultural exchange". The singing in the night forest of the actors of Brook's international troupe is subject to the laws of Malinovsky's "included observation" ^[7]. In the surviving short documentaries dedicated to the expeditions of the Third Barba Theater, markers of cultural exchange and included observation are clearly visible. On the videotape, dances of the tribe of the Amazon forests are recorded, first young Barba actors dance, then tribal residents dance, Europeans who came to visit the tribe try to imitate the movements of the tribal dance, thus penetration and familiarization with the culture of Another takes place. The European body briefly adopts the bodily techniques of tribal culture, and, on the contrary, watching the dancing and singing of Europeans becomes part of the experience of the inhabitants of the Amazon.

         At the turn of the century, the changes taking place in the geopolitical map of the world strongly influence the mechanisms and approaches of cultural anthropology. The method of immersion in a foreign culture with the help of anthropological expeditions in the theater goes by the wayside. For example, since the late 1990s, there has been a Remus theater in Warsaw, organized by Katarzyna Kazimerchuk as a theater-partnership. In total, it employs less than ten people, and none of them has a special acting education. They conduct trainings based on the principles of Grotowski. Kazimerchuk rejects the concept of performance, calls his shows performances-concerts, mainly experiments with songs from different parts of the world: Bulgarian, Ukrainian, African and others. The variety of song motifs from different cultures merges into a single whole. Actors and actresses move in the space of the stage platform, or close in a circle, or someone goes to the center, some sketches-paintings arise: the relationship between a man and a woman, a man lying alone on the floor, etc. The audience freely located around the perimeter of the hall, sitting on benches or on the floor. There is a feeling of complete improvisation: as if by internal agreement, someone sings a song, telling his story, and the others pick up. In the performances of "Remus" there is an energy exchange between the listeners and the singers. The most important work of Remus is "cultural exchange". These are performances that actors play out together with the audience on the streets of the city. For example, they showed a concert performance in a refugee camp from Chechnya, and then invited the audience to perform national songs themselves. Immediately there was a contact between the audience and the actors. Kazimerchuk insists on this intercultural contact, the theater is interested in working in communities that are losing their cultural roots, because "soon it will happen to all nations" (interview with K. Kazimerchuk from the author's personal archive). The Remus Theater exists in one of the residential buildings in a specific area of Warsaw – Prague. On the one hand, this is an area of poor, socially disadvantaged people, on the other hand, a fashionable place of creative bohemia, artists' workshops, rehearsal points of youth music groups are located here. The streets are full of children from incomplete, poor families, the theater works with these children. The director says: "But we are not offering them a theater in the traditional sense, it will not be available to them, we are offering them performances" (interview with K. Kazimerchuk from the author's personal archive). These are bright colorful performances in courtyards and on the streets, in which the audience is actively involved, becoming participants in the action, creators of an emotional atmosphere. "Remus" goes beyond the boundaries of the theater as such to create direct contact with the public. The function of the viewer is absent, there are representations and the represented.

The second stage of the development of anthropological ideas in the theater (theoretical) is associated with the concept of "theatrical anthropology" introduced into modern terminology by Eugenio Barba. In 1979, the Polish experimental director Jerzy Grotowski proposed a new theatrical practice, the Theater of Origins: participants were recruited all over the world by testing. The project was aimed at the practical study of performing techniques related primarily to work on the body and movement. The Theater of Origins focuses on rare and specific ritual traditions: voodoo practices on Giati, work with ungan (a priest of the voodoo cult ^{[13, p. 59-60]}) in Nigeria, the rituals of huicholi (Indian people) in Mexico, medieval ritual songs and dances of bauls in India ^{[16, p. 59-60]}. The task of this Grotowski project was to create a certain set of basic theatrical and ritual practices and try to find common patterns of development of various cultures. In the same 1979, Barba opened the International School of Theatrical Anthropology (ISTA). Theatrical anthropology is a science on the verge of cultural anthropology and theater theory, it does not imply the creation of a performance as the ultimate goal, but concentrates on the process of studying the laws of the existence of an actor. "Theatrical anthropology is the study of the behavior of a human being who uses his psychophysical properties (his presence) as a tool for some kind of demonstration, moreover, organized within the framework of a preliminary plan that has nothing to do with everyday life" ^{[2, p. 7]}. The subject of this science is the actor and his body at the moment of the performance, but not the performance itself. "It is based solely on the analysis of Eastern traditions and is unable to interpret the phenomenon of the Western actor, although it makes us assume the potential for solving this problem as well" ^{[10, p. 48]}.

 Barba's actors meticulously collect a variety of acting techniques of the world in order to create a kind of ideal physicality based on the body trainings of Indian Kathakali, Chinese Peking opera, Japanese nogaku and kabuki, ritual dances of Java and Bali and other countries, capable of creating an actor's body on the stage – a perfect mechanism for broadcasting archetypal contents so that the viewer, in addition to his own will, subconsciously, he read universal ideas and subtexts.

One of the most promising areas of contemporary art is the anthropological theater, its techniques, methods and terminology are the basis of many cultural phenomena of our time. Interdisciplinary scientific approaches in contemporary art studies are becoming more and more in demand and help to actualize the most important processes of both contemporary art and reinterpretation of past periods of cultural development. At the moment, the traditions laid down by the theatrical expeditions of P. Bruck and E. Barba are actively developing in the modern Polish anthropological theater, using techniques of field research and cultural exchange. In different theaters of the world, unique acting trainings are being developed on the basis of universal bodily techniques formulated in the theory of theatrical anthropology. Scientists and practitioners of anthropological theater and theatrical anthropology in the second half of the twentieth century proposed terminology and practical approaches that remain modern and in demand in contemporary art.