Theatricality as Estrangement of Art and Life In the Russian Avant-garde

"We, too, will show you life that's real—very! / But life transformed by the theater into a spectacle most extraordinary!" writes Vladimir Mayakovsky in the prologue of his famous Mystery Bouffe. This transformation of life "into a spectacle," both on stage and in reality, is one of the most distinct features of the phenomenon of theatricality. It is to some extent the metamorphosis of the real, the habitual, the ordinary into the theatrical. The parallel between theatricality and the ideas of the Russian Formalist school of literary criticism has often been pointed out, particularly in relation to the Formalist concept of literariness. ¹ Nevertheless, the affinity between theatricality and the phenomenon of making the familiar strange, central to Russian Formalism, has rarely been addressed. In 1917, Russian Formalist scholar Victor Shklovsky coined the term ostranenie to describe the artistic strategy of presenting the well-known as if seen for the first time. The term is translated into German as Verfremdung, which became the cornerstone of Bertolt Brecht's anti-Aristotelian dramaturgy of estrangement. The traditional means of estrangement in theater are epic devices central to Brecht's strategy of breaking theatrical illusions. Theatricality, however, can be present in the context of illusion without a self-referential aspect, but whenever theater's conventions and processes become its own topic, theatricality turns into a conceptual approach, often expressing its potential to make the familiar strange. This was the case with Meyerhold's, Tairov's and Evreinov's concepts of the theatricalization and re-theatricalization of theater in the Russian avant-garde. Moreover, these directors practiced the strategy of distancing the familiar using devices of theatricality in ways much closer to the notion of ostranenie as elaborated by Russian Formalists than to Brecht's Verfremdung. Thus theatricality functions as a distancing device when it foregrounds what is immanent to theater, calling attention to the fictionality and incompleteness of the representation. Brecht's concept of Verfremdung, Shklovsky's ostranenie, as well as practical and theoretical works of the Russian theatrical avant-garde suggest that there are several variants of the notion of distancing the familiar. Likewise, there is more than one concept of theatricality.

Patrice Pavis defines this phenomenon as "the specific enunciation, the movement of words, the dual nature of enunciator (character/actor), and his utterances, the artificiality of performance (representation)" (395). In this view, theatricality is a special kind of theatrical stylization through which its aesthetic and self-referential function is foregrounded. Roland Barthes's definition stresses the extra-textual—the visual and auditory aspects—as immanently theatrical:

It is theater-minus-text, it is a density of signs and sensations built up on stage starting from the written argument; it is that ecumenical perception of sensuous artifice - gesture, tone, distance, substance, light - which submerges the text beneath the profusion of its external language. (26)

Barthes's definition is closer to Artaud's and Evreinov's vision of theater as everything that cannot be expressed through only words and dialogue. For Evreinov, whose work in many aspects parallels Artaud's vision of theater, theatricality is almost an anthropological category and an organic part of being human. Theatricality is inherent in humans as the will to play, claims Evreinov, echoing in a way Nietzsche's will to power.

In her study on theatricality, Elizabeth Burns recognizes two sets of conventions involved in this phenomenon: the rhetorical, which is immanent to the theatrical performance and its production; and the convention whose function is to authenticate the performed, in other words, to establish "a connection with the world of human action of which theater is only a part" (32). Theatricality in real life, according to Burns, combines the rhetorical grammar with authenticating conventions. Making a crossover between theatricality as immanent to stage performance and as an aspect of real life, Burns prefigures the contemporary notion of performativity. Michael Sidnell defines performativity—a term borrowed from speech act theory&#8212...