The Interplay between Avant-Garde Theatre and Semiology

The Interplay Between Avant-Garde Theatre and Semi'ology Patrice Pavis AVANT-GARDE THEATRE AND SEMIOLOGY PERFORM A CURIOUS BALLET: they avoid each other at first, for want of being acquainted, as if they were going through an identity crisis, not quite knowing how to define themselves and, a fortiori, how to behave vis-d-viseach other. It is certain that the artistic avant-garde in no way resembles a domain precisely marked out in time, space, style or method; as for semiology,even if its place in theatre studies is no longer in dispute, it still hesitates between a theoretical model, abstract and often difficult to put into practice, and a concrete , but too descriptive, application. Let us therefore not ask semiology if it can be applied to the avant-garde and what it enables us to discover about it; thiswould be a naive question rendered false from the outset: one can always apply a method to its subject, even if it is with avery mixed success , and there isno reason why thasemiologist should not tackle contemporary theatre events and describe certain signifying systems of the performance. It is much more productive to turn the question and the perspective about and to examine how the avantgarde uses or disqualifies certain semiotic practices in its creative work. In this way we can better understand the characteristic union of avant-garde art and theory,at a time when the artistic subject is very often called upon to formulate its own theory and to integrate this metalanguage into its very content, and when establishing the theory very much resembles an artistic operation, since it takes a lot of imagination to create explanatory models more or less adapted to their subject. Nothing, however, has been decided as regards the type of semiology whichwould be the best suited to the avant-garde, and it is by examining the use or the rejection of semiotic tools in avantgarde theatrical art that we can appreciate the integration of the avant-garde and semiology. 75 *Numbers in parentheses correspond to page numbers in works cited. It is obviously not the first time that an artistic movement and a theory have met and enriched each other. One only has to think of futurism and formalism in Russia, Czech structuralism and the art of the thirties, the nouveau roman and the theory of narration, structuralism and the rereading of the classics, etc.What seems to be new, in the relationship between theatrical practice and theory,is a willingness not to separate and oppose approaches and to checkthe validity of the one against the other.Thus miseen-scene becomes the stake of semiotic practice,and a reading ofthe miseenscene no longer takes place except through the discovery of contrasts, isotopes and textual and visual exchanges . Now-is this the sign of over exaggerated abstraction and theorizing?-it is certain that the notion of miseen-scene which fora century,ever since the official birth of the historical avant-garde in 1887,1 has been the end result of acentralizing and controlled conception of meaning in the theatre, is today in a state of crisis. Perhaps because the spectator's role has become too rigid (the miseen-scene being consideredthe source of and key to the meaning furnished by the author of the performance), he is wrongly expected to find a continuity and a centering on what is,on the stage, but a multitude of performance practices and texts.To replace the structural notion of miseen -scbne by that of an author of the performance or director, is thus to fall back into a problematic situation that the avant-garde had indeed resolved to transcend: that of an autonomous subject who is the source of meaning and whocontrols the totalityof signs, as did formerly the playwright or actor.Thus meaning is not assumed in advance, it emerges from the bringing into view (/a mise en regard),by the stage practices, of the different signifying systems always out of forms in relation to one another, and which necessitate, in order to be recentered, the intervention of the perception of a "spectator-director," for a while disconcerted: the end of his disconcertion is always...