Who Owns History?

Who Owns History? Elizabeth LeCompte I think there has been a decline, too. But I am not sure it is really a decline in "boundary breaking" theatre activity as much as it is a change in the way the avant-garde is perceived. Things that don't make money are not stylish now. Theatre is not easily converted into a product. It does not, of itself, accrue value over time. The reputation of a performance can accrue value through another form-critical writing, reviews and records of the performance in another medium. But most essentially it exists in time. The most radical thing to happen in theatre over the last ten to fifteen years was not "new staging options," "political theatre" or the "theatre of images ." All of these have been successfully integrated into mainstream commercial theatre. And their integration has changed the core of the commercial theatre not at all. The most radical development in theatre was the combining of the playwright, director and designer in one person. The result was a wedding of text, theatre space and movements of the performers where nothing modified anything else. Each part was but equal in the transmission of the meaning of the piece. Unlike the traditional theatre relationship where the blocking direction and design all serve to modify or enhance the meaning of the words, in this arrangement the words stand more vis-a-vis the actions and the space. Each part informs the other part in a continuous circuit. To make a reputation, or career, to be "legit" these director /designer/writers are encouraged to use their techniques, their "style" on "classical scripts." The producers and critics could buy the style but not the ideas from which the technique was created. This development made it impossible to record for history even a semblance of the original performance -an annihilating circumstance in a time when duplication and preservation have risen to art forms in themselves. 50 I remember how disappointed I was to see the text of Rumstick Road reprinted in the Performing Arts Journal without the stage actions, though I had prepared it that way. ! knew something was wrong-that the words of Rumstick were not a script for me, that the actions had as important a place in the system of things as the words, that Rumstick Road was being distorted and destroyed. The Drama Review made an effort I think to preserve these pieces by "documenting" them, describing them. (Unfortunately for me the man they hired to "document" the Trilogy hadn't even seen one of the pieces.) But when physical actions are translated into words they are weaker than the words of the text, they appear to modify the text and so are more easily discounted -again, a distortion. Video and film records turned out to be equally disappointing to me. When Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts' videotaped Rumstick Road, the director would train the camera on one room at a time. The piece was constructed as a triptych with three central focuses always. The central room-a technician and tape player-being, if anything, more important than the side elements, does not appear at all in the final tape. The most radical development in theatre was the combining of the playwright, director and designer in one person. The result was a wedding of text, theatre space and movements of the performers where nothing modified anything else. In the '60s money was "bad." And just as the economy was inflated before the crash of '29, the ranks of the avant-garde were inflated with people, audience as well as people working in the theatre, who wanted no part of money that was made at the expense of dead Vietnamese babies. These people, refugees from the culture at large, brought an inflated sense of importance to an ongoing movement. It gave some people-including Richard Schechner-the feeling that they were reshaping the world, when in reality, they were only inventing new techniques to be absorbed into the mainstream of commercial theatre. And a lot of "experimental" work that looked good against a different political background paled without its context . The new context of the '70s and...