La liminalité est l'énonciation d'une réalité virtuelle
Séminaire du 22 janvier 2009
Le projet d'utiliser les seuils, les marges, la liminalité, comme des prismes pour décomposer la parole et le geste dans le contexte de spectacles rituels ou ritualisés, est très ancien puisqu'il nous vient d'Arnold Van Gennep, Les Rites de passage (1909). Dans le droit fil de cette tradition de recherche en anthropologie religieuse et anthropologie symbolique, je me propose de modeler mon analyse sur celle de Goffman dans Footing pour décomposer le format de production de la voix en Réalité et Fiction, et pour décomposer le cadre de participation aux actes de parole ou aux arts de parole en Monde réel et Monde virtuel. Ce faisant, je vais basculer dans le XXIe siècle et me libérer des a priori de l'anthropologie religieuse et de l'herméneutique, pour interpréter la liminalité (Victor Turner) comme instauration ou énonciation d'une réalité virtuelle et pour l'analyser non plus (comme il le faisait) en termes de symboles et croyances, mais avec les outils conceptuels de l'informatique.
Nous basculons de l'anthropologie des années 1960 dans l'étude de la multimodalité du discours. L'utilisation des outils de l'informatique pour construire nos scénographies de la voix ne viendra qu'à son heure, après que nous ayons recueilli tout l'héritage des traditions classiques. C'est la multimodalité que visaient les théoriciens du théâtre lorsqu'ils ont repris une idée d'Antonin Artaud pour développer la problématique de la Théâtralité.
Sur la notion et le terme technique de Théâtralité:
http://ehess.commediante.fr/theatre/voix.html
http://ehess.philosophindia.fr/inde/theatralite
Dans ce cheminement je me propose de tirer parti de mon expérience indianiste et nos scénographies de la voix, dans la mesure où ce travail sera de première main, s'enracineront dans l'Inde, ses arts vivants et la physiologie humorale qui commande aussi bien les traditions écologiques et médicales que la poétique du théâtre joué-parlé-chanté-dansé (Nâtyasâstra). Sur la polysémie du mot sanskrit Rasa («suc physiologique» autant qu'«émotion esthétique»):
http://ehess.philosophindia.fr/inde/theatralite/le-theatre-et-la-danse/le-mot-rasa.html
Des années 1960 aux Performance Studies appliquées à la multimodalité, le parcours passe par Richard Schechner.
1 / Du visuel au multimodal
schechner_rasaesthetics.pdf — Richard Schechner, Rasaesthetics, TDR (1988-), Vol. 45, No. 3 (Autumn, 2001), pp. 27–50.
(Premiers mots) Where in the body is theatricality located? What is its place? Traditionally in Western theatre, the eyes and to some degree the ears are where theatricality is experienced. By etymology and by practice a theatre is a "place of/for seeing." […]
But in other cultural traditions there are other locations for theatricality. One of these, the mouth, or better said, the snout-to-belly-to-bowel [du museau au ventre à l'intestin] — the route through the body managed by the enteric nervous system [le système nerveux sympathique] — is the topic of this essay. The snout-to-belly-to-bowel is the "where" of taste, digestion, and excretion. The performance of the snout-to-belly-to-bowel is an ongoing interlinked muscular, cellular, and neurological process of testing-tasting, separating nourishment from waste, distributing nourishment throughout the body, and eliminating waste. The snout-to-belly-to-bowel is the where of intimacy, sharing of bodily substances, mixing the inside and the outside, emotional experiences, and gut [boyaux] feelings.
Distinguons donc le théâtre du regard et le théâtre de la multimodalité sensorimotrice.
2 / Influence asiatiques sur le théâtre européen
“Medieval European narrative received from the East—through complex patterns of influence, mediation, and also transformation—a significant heritage of physical performance: in medieval storytelling, the role of the body and the savoring and sharing of emotions were just as important as the transmission of the plot—and perhaps more so.” (Vitz 2008: 146.)
vitz_rasa_romance.pdf — Evelyn Birge Vitz, A “Rasic” Aesthetic in Medieval French Storytelling, TDR: The Drama Review, Volume 52, Issue 4, Winter 2008, pp. 145–173.
Vitz part d'une définition large de l'oralité comme performance, telle que nous l'avons nous-mêmes envisagée à partir de l'œuvre de Paul Zumthor en particulier. C'est donc un peu une porte ouverte qu'elle enfonce dans les premières lignes de cet article:
(145) Scholars working on medieval Europe tend to think of the aural performance of narrative works as merely that: “aural”—the speaking aloud of a text; the page rendered audible; medieval “books on tape” with an invisible and disembodied reader. But the auditory element, however important, was, I believe, only one part of the live performance of many medieval works of narrative. Stories, just like dramas and lyrics, often received strongly physical and emotionally engaging performances with substantial audience interaction.
Elle est aussi très scolaire dans la façon dont elle emprunte à la Rasaesthetics de Schechner toute l'armature théorique de son analyse du Contage (storytelling) en France au Moyen-Age. Mais elle rappelle un fait historique massif: en matière d'arts vivants et de littérature, le modèle dominant au Moyen Age n'est pas aristotélicien mais asiatique; et elle souligne opportunément l'indifférenciation première entre le Récit et le Drame (between narrative and dramatic genres):
(149-150) Rasic Aesthetics and Medieval Storytelling
An aesthetic of a strikingly rasic nature existed in medieval France. This is particularly the case in storytelling, and most obviously in the comic tales of the 13th and 14th centuries. There we find the strongest, most conspicuous—sometimes even outrageous—and most persuasive examples of a rasic mentality and corporality. Actually, such an aesthetic can be found already in the 12th century—virtually at the dawn of French literature—and even in serious and hightone works such as romances. These rasic performances competed with clerkly, restrained, idea-centered performance.
But how can there be an Eastern performance aesthetic in the West? Schechner strongly contrasts Western/Aristotelian/ocular performance traditions with Eastern/rasic/guts-centered ones. The Aristotelian tradition was indeed strong in Antiquity, and it was revived in the European Renaissance—but the medieval period was not Aristotelian. (More precisely, it became somewhat Aristotelian on certain philosophical issues starting in the late 13th century, but not at all as regards literature and theatre.) The non-Aristotelianism of the Middle Ages comes as no news to medievalists. The fact that the medieval period is unlike both Antiquity and the Renaissance is a key reason why many of today’s literary theorists (and some drama historians as well) jump from the classical period straight to the Renaissance, entirely bypassing the Middle Ages.
Just how Western—or “Greco-Roman”—was the Middle Ages in general? Of course, the medieval period was Catholic, and Catholicism is “Roman”—or, more precisely and specifically, the Pope and the Church’s administrative center are in Rome. But Greece and Rome—along with their traditions of logic—were themselves infiltrated and influenced by Asian thought and religious practices, especially from the Hellenistic period onward. Thus, hard-and-fast distinctions between East and West do not suit the complexity of cultural realities, even in antiquity—and even less so in the Middle Ages. And is Catholicism really so very—and exclusively—Roman? G.K. Chesterton may have been right when he said that Christianity is an exotic Eastern religion. Eastern mentalities and traditions were present, and remain, in the West.
The medieval period had no theatres in either the ancient or Renaissance sense, and no drama based on sight and distance. Indeed, for much of the medieval period no firm line existed between types of performers: dancers, acrobats, singers, instrumentalists, mimes, fools, storytellers, and a whole host of others (see figs. 1, 2, and 4). For example, in The English Medieval Minstrel, John Southworth notes that the term “minstrel” designates “a host of men and women who live by their wits as entertainers at every level of society; all those professional performers known (in Latin) as mimi et histriones, or (in French) as jugleurs or jongleurs, or (in Old English) gleemen” (Southworth 1989:3).
Traditions based in physical mime and mimicry seem to have been particularly important. Scholars of the history and pre-history of medieval drama all emphasize continuity between the late-classical mimes and medieval minstrels […]. People in the Middle Ages believed that Terence was mimed by actors while someone read aloud, rather than played dramatically (see for example Davidson 1991:54–56). Grace Frank states:
It is evident that for the Middle Ages there was less distinction between narrative and dramatic genres than for us. Narrative works depended for their circulation upon a single jongleur, the usual means of distribution at a time when manuscripts were relatively scarce and printing had not yet made books easily accessible to a wider reading public (1954:213).
Truly dramatic productions separated themselves out late, and slowly, from a broad matrix of performances enacted by minstrels and players of all kinds: storytellers and actors; dancers, acrobats and jugglers; singers and musicians, playing a wide range of instruments; performers who worked with bears, dogs, and other animals, and those who imitated animals and bird songs; professional fools—and more. Performers often knew and combined several different arts […].
Il s'agissait donc d'un théâtre de la multimodalité sensorimotrice. Retenons seulement cette thématique, en laissant de côté les contextes religieux et rituels d'énonciation. Voilà comment Richard Schechner et ses disciples ont transformé l'héritage de Victor Turner (ritualité, liminalité) en une esthétique multimodale.
3 / Trois modes de réception: identification, distanciation, empathie
Je me place du point de vue du spectateur et je reprends deux doctrines classiques de la réception — l'identification du spectateur aux héros du drame (Aristote) et la distanciation dans le théâtre épique (le Verfremdungseffekt de Brecht [1]) — pour leur opposer la doctrine de l'empathie que Schechner reprend (mais c'est sa lecture personnelle) à la tradition indienne du Nâtyasâstra.
(Schechner, Rasaesthetics 2001, 46) Watching traditional Indian genres, one sees the performer looking at her own hands as they form different hastas or mûdras — precise gestures with very specific meanings. This self-regarding is not narcissism in the Western sense. Abhinaya [1] literally means to lead the performance to the spectators — and the first spectator is the performer herself. If the self-who-is-observing is moved by the self-who-is-performing the performance will be a success. This splitting is not exactly a Brechtian Verfremdungseffekt [distanciation], but neither is it altogether different. Brecht wanted to open a space between performer and performance in order to insert a social commentary. The rasic performer opens a liminal space to allow further play — improvisation, variation, and self-enjoyment.
[1] Abhinaya «le jeu de l'acteur». Il y a une liste stéréotypée de quatre registres de jeu: le Geste, la Voix, l'Emotion, le Fard. Dans une autre classification des modalités du jeu de l'acteur, on distinguera ceux qui sont issus du corps, de la voix et du sattva [l'esprit]. (Lyne Bansat-Boudon, Poétique du théâtre indien, 342.)
The performer becomes a partaker herself. When she is moved by her own performance, she is affected not as the character, but as a partaker. Like the other partakers, she can appreciate the dramatic situation, the crisis, the feelings of the character she is performing. She will both express the emotions of that character and be moved to her own feelings about those emotions. Where does she experience these feelings? In the ENS [Enteric Nervous System, le système nerveux sympathique], in the gut [les boyaux] — inside the body that is dancing, that is hearing music, that is enacting a dramatic situation. The other partakers — the audience — are doubly affected: by the performance and by the performer's reaction to her own performance. An empathetic feedback takes place. The experience can be remarkable.
In orthodox Western theatre, the spectators respond sympathetically to the "as if" of characters living out a narrative. In rasic theatre, the partakers empathize with the experience of the performers playing. This empathy with the performer rather than with the plot is what permits Indian theatre to "wander," [s'attarder, musarder] to explore detours and hidden pathways, unexpected turns in the performance. Here rasa and raga (the classical Indian musical form) are analogous. The partakers' interest is not tied to the story, but to the enacting of the story; the partakers do not want to "see what happens next" but to "experience how the performer performs whatever is happening." There is no narrational imperative insisting on development, climax, recognition, and resolution. Instead, as in kundalini sexual meditation, there is as much deferral [retard, lenteurs, suspens] as one can bear — a delicious delay of resolution.
[1] «L'effet d'étrangeté» (Verfremdungseffekt), dans la dramaturgie de Bertolt Brecht, s'oppose à la tradition d'un théâtre dramatique d'identification. A l'inverse du théâtre aristotélicien dans lequel l'acteur s'identifie à son personnage, le théâtre épique se fonde, selon Brecht, sur la distanciation (Verfremdungseffekt) qui produit un effet d'étrangeté par divers procédés de recul, comme l'adresse au spectateur, le jeu des acteurs depuis le public, la fable épique, la référence directe à un problème social, les songs, les changements à vue, etc. Ces procédés dévaluent l'intrigue, la narrativité ou la linéarité du drame au profit de la performance.
(46-47) Orthodox Western performing arts remain invested in keeping performers separated from receivers. Stages are elevated; curtains mark a boundary; spectators are fixed in their seats. Mainstream artists, scholars, and critics do not look on synchronicity and synaesthesia with favor. Eating, digestion, and excretion are not thought of as proper sites of aesthetic pleasure. These sites — aside from rock concerts, raves, and sports matches — are more in the domain of performance art.
C'est formuler là le corollaire de la distinction entre théâtre occidental (identification, narrativité) et théâtres d'Asie (empathie, gestuelle) du point de vue de la scénographie.
