Theatre as Structures of Experience

THEATRE AS STRUCTURES OF EXPERIENCE Dan Ronen After the twenties, the decade of the sixties has been the most fertile period in theatrical innovation in this century. As far as its critical analysis is concerned, several attempts have been made to arrive at a comprehensive theory but there is little use in approaching these works with traditional aesthetic tools. Theories cannot contradict practice; they must fit the total available data, or they must be changed. For this reason it is imperative to re-examine, re-evaluate and modify basic aesthetic theory in the light of the experimental theatre. Before presenting a modified theory of performance, a basic term has to be introduced and explained. The term is: an experience. Experience occurs continuously because the interaction of live creature and environmental conditions are involved in the very process of living. Things are experienced but not always in such a way that they are composed into an experience. Only when the "matter" of experience runs its course to fulfillment does a discrete experience actually occur. Such an experience is a whole and carries with it its own individualizing quality. An experience, in this particular sense, is the one referred to in this context.1 As the Dictionary of Philosophy and Psychology states, "The word [experience] is used so vaguely and ambiguously by writers on philosophy that definition is difficult." Furthermore, "If philosophy insists on keeping this term indeterminate, she can refer to her subjectmatter without committing herself as to certain questions in dispute. But if experience be used with either an objective or a subjective shade of meaning, then question-begging occurs, and discussion grows impossible ." To avoid this problem, the following attempts to arrive at a working definition, which claims no universal applicability but only relevance and sufficiency for the purposes of the theoretical position implemented here. First, what are the boundaries of an experience? 58 1. An experience occurs only in the context of ordinary, or random, experience. An experience is not isolated from ordinary experience but is a conscious and deliberate development of ordinary experience. Experience gains in quality, intensity, meaning and value as it passes from -the phase of experience to an experience. 2. An experience is dynamic - it is a process in spatio-temporal dimensions. Change and order, movement and stability, contingency and regularity constitute the fabric of an experience. 3. It is discrete. The very fact that one is perceiving a work of art separates an experience from random experience. 4. It. is not a self-generated experience. It involves a "given," a sensory stimulus. 5. It involves activity on the part of the percipient. This activity is the reconstruction and reorganization of the "given." It is not similar to the creation and organization of the artist. By abstraction, association, composition, induction and logical activity of the mind, an experience is formed. 6. It is a united and complete entity, as opposed to random experience. 7. It is durable: the reconstruction occurs in such a way that the process leads to a durable experience. 8. And experience is abstract and concrete simultaneously. As to the content of an experience, there are immediate aspects and corollary aspects. Among the immediate aspects of an experience are those that have a direct relationship with the "given"; i.e. the sensory stimuli. These are: a. Feeling-tone b. Emotion c. Conceptualization These three aspects form the immediate content of an experience. The most important one is the third aspect, because in a way it combines the first two and gives a structure to the experience. Conceptualization occurs in three steps: 1. Inference. 2. Interpretation. 3. Construction. To put the content of an experience in its complete context, there is a need to enumerate the corollary aspects: d. Association of memory e. Imagination f. Awareness g. Excitation, or radiation of energy h. Making of significances Thus an experience occurs when the entire sensory apparatus (mind andbody) is stimulated in such a way that a chain of reconstruction is caused on the part of the percipient which, in turn, is transformed into an awareness which has durability in spatio-temporal matrices. By no means are the chaotic implications of "experience" central to...