THE METAPHYSICS OF ABSENCE IN GREEK AND CHINESE THEATREAN INTRODUCTORY COMMENT

The aim of this paper is to discuss the generic

relationship between Ancient Greek and Chinese theatre,

and also examine how European directors, like Theodoros

Terzopoulos, use these anti-realistic traditions of

theatrical theatre productively in their work.

From Renaissance onwards, the theatrical tradition

of the West was valorized through Aristotle’s Poetics (4th

century BC), a literary, and not theatrical, model that

was normatively used in order to lend some Greek glamour

to the first European plays1. Through the tradition of

French and German Classicisms (16th-18th century AD) there

was established a peculiar dramaturgical canon, which

praised verisimilitude either of the tragic action, or

that of the composition of the play (the realistic union

of style and subject), so that the work is presented in

a way that could still be believed as a direct imitation

of the natural world2, in an attempt to allegedly create

images of order and harmony, using the unities of space,

time, and action (mainly for reasons of moral

instruction).3 Nevertheless, as the Aristotelian term

1 For details and full bibliography cf. Brigitte Kappl, Die Poetik des

Aristoteles in der Dichtungstheorie des Cinquecento, Walter de Gruyter, Berlin and

New York, 2006. 2 Cf. Harold S. Wilson, “Some Meanings of ‘Nature’ in Renaissance

Literary Theory”, Journal of the History of Ideas, v.2.4, 1941, 430-48.3 Cf. Phillips Salman, “Instruction and Delight in Medieval and

Renaissance Criticism”, Renaissance Quarterly, v. 32.3, 1979, 303-32.

mimesis does not imply the realistic reproduction of the

natural world4, ancient Greek tragedy alike was never

concerned with the representation of the real kosmos

(worldly order) onstage, precisely because ancient Greek

theatre was an anti-illusionist genre with many

antirealist stage conventions.5

In the case of the theatre of Terzopoulos and the

traditional theatre of China we have a generic

coincidence extremely pleasant for the excessively

realistic West. In both cases, we are dealing with

theatrical theatre, i.e. antirealist theatre, which

presents itself merely as a self-governed artistic

construct and not as a mimetic product by reflection of

the real world. Here in Asia, the issue of realistic

4 Cf. Paul Woodruff, “Aristotle on Mimesis”, Amélie Oksenberg Rorty

(ed.), Essays on Aristotle’s Poetics, Princeton University Press, Princeton,

1992, 89ff. [73-96].5 For example, the use of masks meant that detailed facial

expressions were not possible. The standardized outlines of the masks

made the features of the character more easily recognisable, and

different expressions could be shown by shifting the tilt of the head

with the assistance of natural light. Accordingly, emotions could be

displayed by body movements and gestures, as well as by verbal means

(wows, cries, exclamations, shouts, and the like). Certain postures

and gestures were associated with certain feelings and social

behaviours (as we assume from vase paintings). Details of scenery

were suggested by the use of plaques (pinakes), which could have been

turned for changes in scene (rare in Greek plays), though verbal deixis

(reference by means of speech) was principally used. For a good

introduction see David Wiles, Greek Theatre Performance: An Introduction,

Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2000.

representation was never raised and mimetic scenic

strategies were never sought, thus many theatrical codes

(gestural, facial, etc.) were created in order to cover

the onstage denial of the real world. In any case,

surrogates of reality were employed to stand for an

absence, as for example the flags in Chinese theatre,

which signify many different things from a tempest to the

presence of an army, or the chair which could stand for a

cottage bench or a prison gate or many other absent stage

scenery.6 More generally, the generic differences between

the theatre of Asia and the realist theatre of the West

could be summarized in a box as follows.

ASIA WESTEMPHASIS ON PERFORMANCE EMPHASIS ON THE TEXT

EMPHASIS ON SYMBOLS EMPHASIS ONREPRESENTATION

EMPHASIS ON CONVENTION EMPHASIS ON ILLUSIONSTANDARDIZATION IMITATION

VOCABULARY OF ACTING PERSONAL EXPERIENCETHE AUDIENCE KNOWS,

EXAMINES, AND BELIEVES THE AUDIENCE OBSERVES

THE BODY DETERMINES THEMEANING USING CODES

THE TEXT DETERMINES THEMEANING

THE ACTOR BECOMES THEROLE

THE ACTOR IMITATES THEROLE

THE CENTER OF THE ROLEIS CORPOREAL

THE CENTER OF THE ROLE ISPSYCHOLOGICAL

EMPHASIS ON THE ENERGYOF THE BODY

EMPHASIS ON THEFLEXIBILITY OF THE BODY

THE ACTOR CONSTRUCTSTHE CHARACTEREXTERNALLY

THE PLAYWRIGHT CREATESTHE CHARACTER TEXTUALLY

6 For all the antirealist conventions of Chinese theatre cf. A.C.

Scott, The Classical Theatre of China, Dover Publications INC., Mineola, New

York, 2001[1957], 93-184.

The generic relationship between the theatre of

Terzopoulos and the traditional theatre of China becomes

more pleasant, if we look at the Greek theatre of the 5th

century BC. Ancient Greek tragedy was also a genre based

on conventions and, of course, absences: the absence of

real women,7 the absence of the real face behind the mask,

the absence of real tears and realistic gestures, the

absence of the realistic representation of violent acts.

Nevertheless, on the level of the reception of the actual

performance these absences acquired a material presence

through the use of an agreed code unknown to us, even if

that was a standardized vocabulary of gestures, or the

immobilized tragic expression on the Greek mask.8

What appears to be extremely interesting is the

standardization of the movement into a gestural code,

which seems to have been consisted of Gestus, in the

Brechtian sense as not merely gestures, but gestural

attitudes that corresponded to certain social behaviour:7 This seemed to be a serious issue of feminist interest: see Sue

Ellen Case, Feminism and Theatre, MacMillan, London, 1988, 5-19, who

makes an interesting, though axiomatic, statement: the “vocabulary of

gestures initiated the image of ‘Woman’ as she is seen on the stage –

institutionalised through patriarchal culture and represented by

male-originated signs of her appropriate gender behaviour”, or

perhaps the exact opposite as women on the Greek stage were seen in

extremis; and Nancy Sorkin Rabinowitz, Anxiety Veiled: Euripides and the Traffic in

Women, Cornell University Press, Ithaca, New York, 1993.8 Cf. with full bibliography David Wiles, Mask and Performance in Greek

Tragedy: From Ancient Festival to Modern Experimentation, Cambridge University

Press, Cambridge, 2007, esp. 205ff.

for example, supplication, prayer, or appeal seems to be

displayed with the extension of the hands towards the

addressee and the opening of the bent choreographed legs

at the same direction, as if the whole body is gravitated

to a cause (see images 1-3). And as we can see on ancient

Greek vases,9 these gestures could as well be used by the

Actor and the Chorus, whose members created collective

structures of meaning.10

The cultural relationship of the Greek and the

Chinese people should not only be ascribed to the

affinity of their traditional theatre genres, or their

love for measure and harmony, but also to an ancient

devotion to lyrical forms of poetic art, which determined

the evolution of their civilizations. The poetic descent

of Chinese drama added up to its antirealist nature, in

as much as the multifold southern and northern Chinese

traditions contributed greatly to the artistic

codification of the human ways, situations, and behaviors

9 Oliver Taplin, “The Pictorial Record”, P.E. Easterling (ed.), The

Cambridge Companion to Greek Tragedy, Cambridge University Press,

Cambridge, 1997, 80 [69-90], argues quite convincingly that the vases

do not only present a myth, but a standardized version of the myth

performed on the Greek stage. This, however, does not mean that the

images on the vases are “photographic” testimonies from the Greek

theatre. Cf. also Taplin’s Pots and Plays: Interactions between Tragedy and Greek

Vase-painting of the Fourth Century B.C., Getty Publications, Los Angeles,

2007.10 Cf. Eric Csapo – William J. Slater, The Context of Ancient Drama, The

University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor, 1995, 57-78.

into a theatrical system so perfectly, so superbly11 anti-

mimetic that appertains to an aesthetic category.

From the beginnings of the previous century and

after the decline of Naturalism, many Western directors

felt the need to apply to the codes of the Chinese

theatre due to an aesthetic deadlock, which in most cases

emerged as a charge against the unnecessary12 realism: “We

Westerners have only created realist forms. That is to

say, we haven’t created a form at all, in a true sense.

The moment one uses the word form in connection with

theatre, there is already a sense of Asia”13. And

admissibly, the thing that Western directors always seek

in Asia is a form.

It is not accidental, for example, that the first

thorough analysis of “the alienation effect” is made by

Bertolt Brecht in an essay on Chinese acting14, which was

inspired by a performance of Mei Lanfang he saw in Moscow

in 1935. In this essay Brecht discusses the traditional

11 Cf. Min Tian, “Gordon Craig, Mei Lanfang and the Chinese Theatre”,

Theatre Research International, v. 32.2, 2007, 161-77 (esp. 170).12 I borrow the term from Valery Bryusov’s renowned essay “The

Unnecessary Truth” (1902), see Marvin Carlson, Theories of the Theatre: A

Historical and Critical Survey, from the Greeks to the Present, Expanded Edition,

Cornell University Press, Ithaca and London, 1993, 313-14.13 Ariane Mnouchkine, “The Theatre is Oriental”, in Patrice Pavis

(ed.), The Intercultural Performance Reader, Routledge, London and New York,

1996, 97.14 Bertolt Brecht, “The Alienation Effects in Chinese Acting”, in John

Willett (ed.), Brecht on Theatre: The Development of an Aesthetic, transl. John

Willett, Methuen, London, 1978 [1964], 91-99.

acting techniques of the Chinese actor as a model for the

actors of the Epic Theatre, who should try to make the

audience think by making anything self-evident look

unfamiliar15. The functional ways suggested for the actor

according to the Chinese model were three: 1. no fourth-

wall (i.e. naturalist) acting (the actor should show an

awareness of being watched); 2. the actor should

critically monitor and master himself; and 3. he should

not act, but display physical and gestural behaviours,

using symbols and social gestures (Gestus), so that the

spectator could critically observe the actor and take a

position accordingly. As a result, while mainstream

Western theatre presents the facts as if they were

universal, timeless, and unchangeable, Epic or

“historicizing” Theatre uses de-familiarization in order

to make everything noticeable and in need of research,

according to the Chinese model. But most Westerners tend

15 This is not entirely true for the Chinese actor: “While Brecht was

seeing ‘alienation,’ Mei was concerned with essence, specifically the

four essences: life, movement, language, and decor (costumes, general

setting). Mei’s technique appeared to Brecht's Western eyes as form

but was to Mei, at least in part, a transcendent kind of theatre

refined from life into a higher plane of human movement, lyrical

language, and theatrical visuality […]. Thus Mei, in the words of his

contemporaries, was concerned with the essence rather than the

appearance of things”, Carol Martin, “Brecht, Feminism, and Chinese

Theatre”, The Drama Review, v. 43.4, 1999, 78 [77-85]. But if the

Chinese actor is interested in showing the socially recognisable (or

perhaps expectable) feminine and not the woman-like, that is rightly

Brechtian.

to forget that we have borrowed alienation from the

Chinese theatre.

As an epigone of these anti-realist traditions,

Theodoros Terzopoulos in his productions establishes a

multiple system of morphogenesis, according to which he

constructs his theatric universe. The process of

morphogenesis does not only include the onstage

reconstruction of a textual role, but also evolves the

dialectic emersion of the form from the directorial, and

not from the dramaturgical, Idea as a performative lapsus

(an involuntary symptom of the actual performance).

Nowhere in this process is the real world involved,

unless as a horizon of cultural expectations violently

attacked. On the contrary, this endeavor is extended to

the construction of a conditionally geometric space,

according to which the Form must behave. In so doing,

Terzopoulos creates a parole (a speech of open

signifiers), which refers to archetypal areas of

knowledge before the aesthetic consolidation of any

theatrical language. This also emerges as a descent into

the primordial ways of human expression and presumably

into the roots of Greek art: simplicity, abstraction, and

economy (or else, this feeling of inexhaustible meaning

behind a higher order of things, as the German philosopher

Friedrich Nietzsche argued16 about ancient Greek

architecture). With his geometric directions, Terzopoulos16 Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human, transl.: Marion

Faber with Stephen Lehmann, University of Nebraska Press, Nebraska,

1996, 131.

attempts to descend into the dead and dark areas of

knowledge, in which the figures represented self-sown, as

well as self-sufficient meanings by default of any

realistic representation. In that way, the director

constructs a theatrical locus as a living self-reflexive

organism that is interested in the ontological

positioning of the acting subject in geometric systems of

behavior, creating thereby a code of linear formulation

(a language of acting according of course to his

Biodynamic Method).

ATTIS Theatre looks at an obsession with geometric

figures as developing, self-constructed and self-defined

systems of meaning. Theodoros Terzopoulos’ mises-en-scène

bear the aesthetic values of a primordial order, when the

older cyclic themes gave their place to purely linear

constructions (from the Protogeometric to the Geometric

era, for instance17). After the cyclical Bacchae18 (1986)17 Cf. Anthony M. Snodgrass, The Dark Age of Greece, Routledge, New York,

2001 [1971], 24-105; and J. N. Goldstream, “The Geometric Style:

Birth of the Picture”, in Tom Rasmussen - Nigel Jonathan Spivey

(eds.), Looking at Greek Vases, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge,

1991, 37-56.18 For this production and the Biodynamic Method see Georgios

Sampatakakis, “Dionysus Restitutus: Terzopoulos’ Bakchen”, in Frank

Raddatz (Hsg.), Reise mit Dionysos: Das Theater des Theodoros Terzopoulos, Theater

der Zeit, Berlin, 90-102. For the theatre of Terzopoulos in general

see: Marianne MacDonald, Ancient Sun Modern Light: Greek Theatre on Modern

Stage, Columbia University Press, 1992, 147-69; the album Theodoros

Terzopoulos and the ATTIS Theatre: History, Methodology, and Comments, Agra

Publications, Athens, 2000; and the extremely valuable collective

volume by Raddatz (Hsg.), Reise mit Dionysos, op.cit.

Terzopoulos begun his experimentation on the “linearity

in space”, an endeavor that is still in progress today,

without the director entirely abandoning the cyclical

space formations. On the contrary, in many performances

the cycle remains as the archetypal theatrical space of

the self-contained performance, without always

participating in the creation of the meaning, but in the

seclusion of a meaning. His first Prometheus Bound by

Aeschylus (1995) constituted the first extensive study on

the linear positioning of the acting form (the Bio-form)

in performance, in order to create a theatre that would

seemingly transcend the limits of space. The

establishment of cosmic order around the axis of

Prometheus, who is hovering in ontological pendency

between divinity and mortality, was the central metaphor

for a tragedy that has traditionally suffered from the

realism of the fake rock and the red paint. Moreover,

that production was a research on the possibilities of

incising order onto a blank performing surface, creating

thereby linear meanings consubstantial with the

directorial Idea. In particular, the squared space

revealed the ideological qualities of the performance: in

the beginning, Prometheus (played by Tasos Dimas) was

nailed into the center of the true diagonals that

dichotomized the corners of the performing space and

along with the centripetal Prometheus were the axons of

its symmetry and balance. The geometric signification of

the space extended further, in as much as the acting

subjects were oppositely equivalent and thus homogenous

reflections of the same principle (if, of course, the

sides of a square are all equal). All scenic forms arose

after a Gestus of genesis, according to which the

performer transformed into an acting Form unreeling as an

apophysis from the ground. The center of this scenic

construct was bound by Prometheus, the underwriter and

regulator of taxis (order).19 More generally, the actual

evolution of the performance appertained to the

development of a linear system of meanings, as a battle

between order and chaos until the final attainment of

cosmic order.20

Terzopoulos work refuses the hoax of realism and

thus the counterfeiting imitation of the real world. In

the theatrical theatre of Terzopoulos the vested

structural bases of normality are denied, vanishing

thereby the structures of any established social order.

In so doing, the director unnails the cultural

expectations of a society based on self-valorization and

reflective reproduction. Finally, it needs to be stressed

that a new metaphysics of presence is created in absence

of the real world, manifesting the existence of new,

unknown structures of knowledge, the encounter with which

gives birth to an inspiring terror, always present in

Terzopoulos’ theatre. As the director confessed:

The performers of ATTIS Theatre are movingaccording to the temperament of a turbid moment

19 See image 4.20 See image 5.

through an unavoidable defeat, in order to catchwhat is never to be caught. And there is alwaysthis agony of being and not being present.

Nonetheless, the theatre of Terzopoulos does not aim

at the objectification of the natural world into some

geometric figures, but it hopes to give material essence

to some unapproachable terrifying Truth. The performer of

the Chinese Opera, as well as the ancient Greek actor, or

the Bio-form in the theatre of Terzopoulos, when

replacing the real world with a sublime aesthetic form,

they denounce the material absence of the unseen ontos

onta, the really beings which are readily visible to great

civilizations.

Dr. GEORGE SAMPATAKAKISLecturer in Theatre Studies, University of Patras, Greece

Special Consultant of the Hellenic National Centre for Theatre andDance

IMAGES

1. Members of a chorus (5th century BC).

2. Orestes Kills Clytemnestra with a Fury looking down from above (4th century BC).

3. A play in performance: a chorus of young soldiers dancing

in front of a tomb, while a ghost is appearing (c. 490).

4. Prometheus (Tasos Dimas) in Prometheus Bound by Aeschylus, ATTIS Theatre, Athens, 1995, directed by Theodoros Terzopoulos. Photo by Johanna Weber.

5. Prometheus Bound by Aeschylus, ATTIS Theatre, Athens, 1995, directedby Theodoros Terzopoulos. Photo by Johanna Weber.