Living on the Edge: Memory, Material Circumstances, and Perception in the Theatre of Kama Ginkas

Living on the Edge: Memory, Material Circumstances, and Perception in the Theatre of Kama Ginkas MANON VAN DE WATER Kama Ginkas is hailed as one of Russia's most innovative directors. His intimate . minimalist, visual productions, based on the work and life of Russia's well-known literary figures - Dostoevsky, Chekhov, and Pushkin - communicate through intuition and emotion, reportedly leaving the audience member with a sense of revelation, disrupting the perceptual nanns of the dominant culture. While Ginkas' work is praised for its artistry and its overall aesthetic appeal (Smeliansky 179), the reception of his productions by both audiences and critics is immediate and intuitive. Critics frequently acknowledge that they feel "incompetent" to describe his productions, asserting that you have to experience them in performance to understand their full force (Rassadin, Sokolianskii , Freedman).' Ginkas plays with the cultural memory of his audiences, with their nomative ex.pectations of familiar subject matter, jolting them into an emotional perception. In this essay, I explore how Kama Ginkas negotiates the emotional and the material in his productions, disrupting the perceptual norms of the dominant culture. Ginkas' productions deal with "man living on the edge," his preoccupation with what goes on in our minds and souls in moments of life and death is translated into often stunning theatrical metaphors. He stirs his audience through theatrical provocation, juxtaposing the earthly and the divine, the naturalistic and the fantastic, verbal and non-verbal signifiers. Using three of his productions as examples, I attempt to articulate the semiotic relationship among cultural memory, material circumstances, and perception in Ginkas' work. Cultural memory is a slippery term. Mieke Bal, in her introduction to Acts ofMemory: Cultural Recall in the Preselll, states rather broadly that "the term cultural memory signifies that memory can be understood as a cultural phenomenon as well as an individual or social one." She sees "cultural memorizaModern Drama, 47: 1 (Spring 2004) 133 134 MANON VA N DE WATER tion" as "an activity occurring in the present, in which the past iscontinuously modified and redescribed even as it continues to shape the future"(Bal, Crewe, and Spitzer vii). In a succinct argument in Theatre Journal, Atillio Favorini lays out his take on "collective memory," based on Patrick Hutton, Pierre Nora, and Maurice Halbwachs (Favorini 102). Favorini sees collective memory as "a set of recollections, repetitions and recapitulations that are socially, morally, or politically useful for a group or community." Collective memory is "reinforced by social occasions such as rites and commemorations (including theatrical performance), as well as by body practices such as gestural behavior and proprieties" (100). Cultural memory is linked to the material circumstances that generate the act of memorization. In Russia, the official ideology of Marxism-Leninism demanded particular interpretations over others, a process of memory and forgetting that was reinforced by the regime and the social, cultural, and ideological institutions. As Spencer Golub points out, in twentieth-century Russia, memory was created rather than retrieved. Following Yury Lotman's theories, Golub argues that "the state and the intelligentsia's reconceptualizing of history embodies the paradox of a temporally obsessive culture which is at once committed to staging the utopian future and reenacting the 'genuinely real' past in the present" (9). Joseph Roach points out that the gencml concept of collective memory can serve to "establish a sense of heritage, however fabricated and illusory" (259). Ginkas, working in what Mikhail Epstein identifies as the transcultural and transideoiogical environment of the post-Soviet era, seems very aware of the artificiality of Russia's cultural memory, together with its suggestive power (159). His productions are about national cultural artifacts; that is Russia's most canonized writers and their work, which have been subject to dominant interpretations constructed by and perpetuated through the ideological, educational , cultural, and social institutions. Ginkas' productions rely on what Susan Bennett identifies as a "collective nostalgia which is often highly and powerfully regulatory" (5). But while cultural memory is always connected to the social - as remembered images of the past are filtered through public agencies and subject to the process of memory and forgetting (cf., Bennett and Roach) - memory is also an act of individual cognition. In his erudite and evocative account...