Richard, are you referring to the Robert Wilson piece where the text had it's source in the language of his now adopted son who has autism?  The language had a logic, it had a sense just not one most of us are attuned to. I like what you said about "where language fails, we have to pay attention."  In the case of the Wilson piece, we are invited to pay attention to things we perhaps don't usually attend to when we attend to language.  In the case of the Wilson piece I would add that perhaps the language doesn't fail, but we fail in our inability to understand it.

Great discussion. I very much agree that on one level, text in alternative theater has been highly influenced by the postmodernist desire to destroy heirarchy and bring many expressive elements equally into play.  However, when I was a performing dance theater work in Canada, Boston and New York in the late 80's to mid-90's there were artists (and I was one of them) who were interested in the dictomy or expressive struggle between the body and language. We didn't want a level playing field. We were out to destroy. We worked to "conceal" the words and reveal the embodiment that was the source of language. We revealed the sensation of words and the physicality that went into the production of words.  We wanted to burn the feeling behind the word into the word until nothing was left but the shadow of that word and the explosion of sound that destroyed it. We shredded words, or spit them out, or sucked them in until they were not recognizable as the original text but had become something else. Something we believed could be transrational, primal, universal.  We wanted to reveal the limits of words and explode them into groans, shouts and hisses. And we wanted to reveal when and how language was useless or failed outright. This boundary of the body, the flesh that makes us all foreign countries to each other, could not be crossed by words in the face of physical pain. Words failed in the face of conveying the experience of torture or trauma. And words often failed us as we tried to cross boundaries of culture and gender. Texts were seen as bodies themselves, that could be grown, changed, developed, mutilated, transformed. And the body was itself a book which had it's own text, written in history, sensation, memory, imagination... Derrida revealed the dance in the text, and choreographers began to reveal the text in the body. A text which I strongly felt at the time had been suppressed by our culture in favor of an often cruel emphasis on rationalism. 

This seeking of the "language of the body" was not only seen in the physical explosion of text, but in the sources of text used by dancemakers. The body speaks in many different ways through the senses. A text of recipes reveals the language of taste. A text of taboos reveals how many of our common swear words have their source in basic bodily function. A fragmented text on the qualities of silence reveals the language of listening.

I saw a performance in France in 2000 where a famous French dance critic gave a critque of the performance while the performers smashed tomatoes into her face. The critics "text" seemed absurd, limp and ridiculous inside of the living breathing poetry of the live event.  

Back to the postmodernists: I have always felt that movement in space is a text in itself. Not only is it a nonverbal communication of gesture and posture, but choreography literally means to "write movement".  In my recent work I use language text to expose that dance has it's own "thought" process and therefore requires it's own non-linear language structure. The language text reveals the subtext of the movement which includes layers of sensation, feelings, memories, images, actions and thought. There is the technical terminology of the movement; the metaphorical associations; and the layers and layers of cultural "text" that the audience brings through history, politics, pop culture..the list is limitless. As Tere O'Connor once said, "dance lives in subtext land". Now, instead of only concealing the text inside of the movement, I also work to reveal the text inside of the dance.

The central question emerging for me is: what is the point of departure?  Or, what's the way in?  Is it text? characters? movement? Sound? Light?  The hierarchies of theatrical languages in any process are set up arbitrarily in order to best serve the exploration at hand. This is the question I ask myself when I start any process as a director. When I directed True West last year, I found my way in was through the text and the actors.  I knew that Shepard had revised the play heavily, simmering it until he arrived at the essence of the opposing forces shared between the two brothers, (or the two sides of one person).  So everything decision I made during the process was informed by that central idea.  The set was stripped to the essentials and the actors were evenly matched and complimentary in their abilities.  The process was focused on seeing the play through them, and what they were discovering in the text.  No matter what the process, the goal for me is to set up a situation in the rehearsal room where beautiful accidents can occur and then to capture those accidents before they evaporate.  The trick is in concocting a recipe actors, writer(s) and designers that allows for the imaginative spark. Sometimes a reverential treatment of text can  restrict the theatrical exploration of a certain theme or idea...but not always.   The obvious example for me is Shakespeare's language, whose restrictive forum generates a rich palette of lyricism, meaning, and infinite possibilities for interpretation.   When creating devised work with a company, I look at text with a much more egalitarian eye.  Through arbitrarily matching movement with text, it's possible to find fresh interpretations of dusty plays; through improvisation and juxtaposition of styles, it's possible to peal away the layers of mythical narratives.  But for me deconstruction of text and narrative is not enough to make for a satisfying theatrical experience. There has to be a clear intention of building something new.  It's easy to fracture the language in order to create ambiguity, but harder to build it into a mosaic that has a clear purpose, and a unified voice.  This doesn't necessarily mean I'm after clear answers to solvable problems -- life tells us otherwise--but I've noticed that the artists I admire are always striving to articulate focused questions from a messy reality, whether it's primarily through text or other theatrical languages.

Thinking about this question brought me to look at Richard Schechner's Environmental Theater - Considering he brought his own type of revolution to theater in the late 60's early 70's. What I found curious is how he can’t quite commit to his own personal view of being a theater director and, “a master of the whole,” making the necessary adjustments with text that allow the performers to pull, push, and punch them out of shape: “transformed into sounds without regard for denotation; made into guts, extruded from guts.” (Yes, this is remarkable to do, and do as he may with text that he referred to as “pure literature” or text that was never intended for the theater - and was in the public domain); and then when it came to working with an actual playwright, Sam Shephard’s The Tooth of Crime. In there dialogue from letters, Schechner felt the pull to work in the same capacity as his previous works and look at the play “nakedly, approaching its language not as a dialect but as a way into the heart of the play…We start with only what is there, the barest facts: seven performers and a collection of words organized under role heading.” However, Shepard felt conflicted considering that the play he wrote was “pre-conceived,” and later wrote his main reluctance he had was that the play would “become over-physicalized and the language will fall into the background.” As Shepard gave his okay for the production with his reluctances, a review by Ron Verzah of Vancouver’s The Peak, stated, “Tooth was a combination of sights, sounds, experiences from the past and mysteriously from the future puddinged together and stirred – constantly stirred.” This pleased both for the plays accomplishment in how both contributed being aware of each others positive and negative intentions.   

So, in regards to subverting text, sometimes it may happen as a result of a particular vision, and succeeds; however, sometimes it happens subconsciously by being overpowered by elements of the performance that the director or group feels should be on the forefront – say for example technology.

In response to vanessa's statement regarding characters as "god", there is also the director as "god". As I was doing research, I came across an article published by the QUT Law & Justice Journal Vol 2, 2002 regarding the intellectual dispute between playwright David Williamson and Director/ Producer Wayne Harrison over the production of the play Heretic. Both had decided to collaborate on the play, however when it came to the final weeks of the production the playwright felt the director was taking extreme liberties with the script and making such liberties withour his authorship was "a breach of the ethical norms and standards that governed the theater." And in response, the director, "was distressed that his authority as the director of the play had been compromised...the interference of the playwright in the direction of the cast was a breach of the protocols and conventions of the theater."

So, who is really the "god" of theater. Is itthe characters, the Playwright, the director, or god forbid may it be the "act" of theater. -  

Hello and welcome to Blog the Boards. I have invited some special guests to ponder this question of subverted text: Theater artist, director, performer Richard Gilman (Boston, MA), Choreographer Tonya Lockyer, Installation and Performance Artist Vanessa DeWolf, and Theater Director Braden Abraham. Please feel free to enter in on the conversation and respond with your reactions and comments…

When I began to ponder the question, I was having a conversation with Richard Gilman (fellow blogger) regarding the word: SUBVERT = destroy or corrupt. In some capacities I have never felt that in alternative performance it was to destroy language. I felt more that artists were interested in allowing other aspects of performance to become more recognized. I remember taking a work shop with Mary Overlie, the creator of the Six Viewpoints, (which later Anne Bogart borrowed, manipulated, and expanded upon) and she posed that these six elements of performance: Space, Shape, Time, Emotion, Movement, and Story be laid upon a table of democracy; that no one element have more or less focus than the other, or that each is looked up on with the same intention and awareness.

I have felt that ever since the 60’s the awareness of reducing the hierarchy of language/ story has become much more of a cornerstone in contemporary theatrical performance. Here we have a interesting development. Because while alternative theatrical performance was looking to incorporate movement, and lessen the role of language, dance was making strides in bringing out the relationship between language and movement – and both had its limitations. However, since that time, 40 years has passed and this development is still figuring itself out. I must say, on a personal level, I have more affinity to the democracy idea of performance. By allowing the equality of attention revealed, only brings more revelation to the audience in their experience.

What also has been interesting has been to witness how language can be corrupted in how we hear or experience it, whether it be through amplification, sound manipulation, or projected text.

This discussion will start at noon today! Hooray!