Experimental Theatre and Semiology of Theatre: The Theatricalization of Voice

Experimental Theatre and Semiology of Theatre: The Theatricalization of Voice HELGA FINTER Translated by E.A. Walker and Kathryn Grardal I This paper was prepared originally for the Theatre Colloquium sponsored by the Department ofFrench at the University ofToronto in November 1980; and I should like to begin with a brief remark on the title of the session where it was delivered, a session devoted to "theatre as representation." As the title of my lecture was condensed to "Experimental Theatre and Semiology of Voice," I should explain immediately what the association of notions of re-presentation and semiology will cover here. The issue of my article is precisely, if not removing, then putting into parentheses the "re" of representation. In consequence, my argument will describe semiology as an intertext of a theory ofthe signifyingprocess, rather than as a theory ofsigns. This approach derives from the particular kind of theatre with which I am dealing - that of Richard Foreman, Meredith Monk, Robert Wilson, Mabou Mines, II Carrozzone, and Squat - which disarticulates the logocentric domination which, in our culture, governs the relation between the different signifying systems (verbal/visual! auditory), and thus brings the signifying process to light at the expense of our fixation on meaning, as the mode ofperception is transformed in and by acting. This theatre permits analysis with respect to its subjective and social determinants: the single perspective gives way to multiple meanings. The spectator-voyeur sees himself faced with his own desire and the basis of that desire, namely its relation to signifying systems. From now on in this theatre it is no longer a question ofdescribing or miming what man does and dramatizing those actions: it is a question not of re-presenting facts and actions, but of dramatizing the formation of the being of man in/by languages. Thus this theatre conducts explorations through acting, stage languages, daily languages and aesthetic languages; by comparing new subjective dispositions! with the social dispositions of the subject put forward by theatre and society. 502 HELGA FINTER In such a theatre the analyst's task can no longer be the (re-)establishing of signs, their meanings and significations, by identifying them as they appertain to codes already actualized within. The actant, the action, the time, and the space of this theatre have no pre-existent and predetermined referent: a potential signifier is created which at first signifies nothing more than its difference from the codes ofthe theatre and ofdaily life. This potential signifier is called a signifying differential by J. Kristeva,2 who reformulates the question of the sign (in theatre) in a manner which draws the problem nearer to research carried out as the comparison of semiology and psycho-analysis. I shall therefore speak about semiology of the experimental theatre in two senses: this discussion will deal initially with that semiology in actu which is the performance of experimental theatre, a performance that we must describe in order to arrive at that other semiology oftheatre - and this involves a longer, more exacting undertaking - which should show us how experimental theatre analyses the formation of subjective spaces. The second type of semiology compares subjective spaces both to the social spaces ruled by a biopolitical model ofthe body and to a logocentric model; the social spaces leave a very thin margin for the inscription of instinctual drives. Experimental theatre now produces singular spaces by going back - through acting - to the repressed inherent in the social space, thus presenting to sight and hearing the possibility of multiple singular inscriptions of what remains. Such research is inspired, of course, by Antonin Artaud, who demands in "Le Theatre et I'anatomie"3 that the theatre reveal to us the formation of the being of man. As he writes elsewhere,4 he expects from this kind of theatre insights on the signifying systems which rule human relations to others and to the real: "Art is not the imitation oflife, but life is the imitation ofa transcendent principle with which art puts us back in communication."5 By taking up the problem of voice in such a theatre, I do not intend to explore how that voice "re-presents" a text or speech always given in...