Kinesis as Mimesis: On the Application of Martial Arts to Dramaturgical Practice

“A samurai must have both literary and martial skills: to be versed in the two is his duty. Even if he has no natural ability, a samurai must train assiduously in both skills to a degree appropriate to his status.”

—Miyamoto Musashi, The Book of the Five Rings (ca.1645)

In a recent talk at Duke University on his work with the World Performance Project titled “Ambient Poetics,” Joseph Roach proposed “kinesis as the new mimesis.” Engendered by his experiences of the past few years investigating and producing global dance and theatre, Roach posited kinesis as the twenty-first century’s equivalent of Aristotelian mimesis. Inspired by this discussion as both martial artists and dramaturgs, we propose to illustrate how dramaturgical training and martial arts study are deeply imbricated and create the potential for a new theatrical poetics.¹ We therefore recognize that theatrical performance and martial arts share certain qualities with ritual and religious practice, chief among them the imbuement of actions with specific, extra-normal meanings that recondition reality and move the participants into the creation of a community.

Dramaturgy is defined by Adam Versényi in The Oxford Encyclopedia of Theatre and Performance as “the study of how meaning is generated in drama and performance,” which “can be understood as an attribute, a role, or a function” (386). That is to say, dramaturgy can refer to the aesthetic architecture of a piece of drama, the individual person who is assigned to cultivate an understanding of that architecture, and also can refer to the functional means by which that architecture is discovered in rehearsal. By the same token, martial arts can refer to the architecture of a physical bout, the individual who engages in that physical bout, and the functional process by which the martial artist discovers the best techniques to use at any given moment in that physical bout. It is key to note that the primary purpose of both theatrical performance and martial arts is to imbue actions with meaning.

Such a statement will hardly surprise theatre artists, even those who have not studied the works of Etienne Decroux and his “phrase plastique.” In his essay “Dosage of Mime for the Speaking Actor,” which appeared in Il Cigno in 1953, for instance, Decroux repeatedly uses grammatical terms to talk about movement. When he discusses what the actor adds to the meaning of a line in performance, he writes that

[w]hen he [the actor] pronounces the verb, he simultaneously expresses its adverb. If “I will kill you” is written, and if the writer was thinking, “I will kill with pleasure,” the actor, of course, says only “I will kill you,” but does so in such a way that the audience infers that the man thinks of committing this murder with pleasure. The two ideas, one of action and the other of manner, reach us at the same time, by the same voice and the same route. Is that not marvelous? The text on its own is not capable of such a feat.

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The actor, then, becomes the one who completes the theatrical sentence only partially inscribed by the playwright, first by developing a dramaturgy that interprets the playwright’s intention, and then employing a physical language of pitch, tone, intensity, speed, and gesture. The playwright, Decroux argues, works hard to leave the actor enough room to do this critical work. This was a key element of Decroux’s concept of the corporeal mime. Gordon Craig, after witnessing Decroux’s performance at the Maison de la Chimie in Paris in June 1945, wrote that he had witnessed “the creation of an alphabet—an ABC of mime.”²

This kinetic language is as beholden to cultural conventions for its grammar as a spoken or written language. Kinetic language depends not on syntax and lexicon, but rather on kinetic contingencies that likewise must be decoded; that is to say, kinetic meaning is derived from relationships between movements that create meanings. Mimes learn, for instance, to isolate individual body parts so that the movements between different...