Performance et multimodalités
Multisemiotic modes of cultural expression

Séminaire du 8 janvier 2009

Les trois concepts, coordonnés entre eux, de «performance» (au sens de ce mot en anglais), «format de production» de la parole et «cadre de participation» aux actes de parole (au sens défini par Erving Goffman) reçoivent, dans notre projet de construction de scénographies de la voix, deux applications distinctes. Ils permettent d'abord d'analyser le dire et le chanter, comme le font les folkloristes et les ethnopoéticiens depuis les années soixante-dix dans le sillage de Richard Bauman. Mais ils permettent aussi de penser ce qu'on appelle aujourd'hui, dans le contexte créé par les nouvelles technologies informatiques, la multimodalité du discours.

 

De la phénoménologie (1960-1980) à la multimodalité du discours

L'anthropologie des arts vivants (anthropology of performance), dans les années 1970, prend essentiellement la forme d'une ethnographie des arts de parole avec Richard Bauman mais simultanément, sous l'influence de Victor Turner, une autre approche des arts vivants rejoint la phénoménologie (interpretive anthropology) et l'anthropologie religieuse. Cet axe de développement sensiblement différent de celui sur lequel se situent les anthropologues linguistes stricto sensu nous intéresse particulièrement parce qu'il prend en considération la diversité des modalités d'expression et préfigure les développements les plus récents, que permet l'avancement des techniques, autour de la multimodalité du discours.

(Kapchan, 480) Synonymous with the ethnography of spoken performance in folklore studies was the development of a more symbolic view of performance, one that examined multisemiotic modes of cultural expression [See V. Turner 1967, 1988… Schechner 1977, 1985]. Drawing on Arnold van Gennep's study of rites of passage [1909], Victor Turner attended to Ndembu initiation ceremonies and later to large-scale cultural display events like carnival, finding that all such socially dramatic performances bear within them a metacommunicative and explanatory function that attempts to make social sense of schism, ambiguity and division through "public reflexivity" [V. Turner 1969, 1987…]…

The emphasis on ritual in this paradigm makes its proponents especially sensitive to the processes whereby performance transforms the social, psychological, and emotional being while, at the same time, it experientially enfolds the individual into the group.

kapchan_performance.pdf — Deborah A. Kapchan, Performance, The Journal of American Folklore, Vol. 108, No. 430, Common Ground: Keywords for the Study of Expressive Culture (Autumn, 1995), pp. 479–508.

Là où le chemin que nous prenons diverge de celui des folkloristes et ethnopoéticiens, c'est dans le choix que nous avons fait de théâtraliser la performance.

(Kapchan, 481) Because of their interest in complex and multivocal events, students of ritual have looked to theorists of theatre for inspiration. Following Antonin Artaud, for example, theater has developed its own "concrete language" of gesture and posture, a language of anarchy which pushes the actor and the audience toward a questioning of "object relationships" (usually taken for granted) and thus toward chaos. Such performances denaturalize the world, splicing signs from their referents, and contain an implicit metaphysics in their assumption of art and ritual as active…

Sur Antonin Artaud, précurseur des scénographies de la voix:

http://ehess.commediante.fr/theatre/voix/texte-et-performance.html

http://ehess.commediante.fr/theatre/pantomime/scene.html

http://ehess.commediante.fr/theatre/pantomime/hieroglyphes.html

(Kapchan, 481) For scholars of verbal art, the theatrical definition of performance is problematic for two reasons: (1) it implies that performance cannot be rendered as text: as a spontaneity that never repeats the same gesture/meaning twice, Artaudian performance resists mimesis, refusing to be captured and fixed; (2) it privileges gesture as a "speech prior to words" and makes nonverbal or affective communication a prerequisite for what Artaud calls an "active metaphysics" [dans Le Théâtre et son double]. Both these assumptions challenge the ethnographer to reformulate methodologies and writing practices that illuminate the many semiotic systems at work in the construction of performative reality.

 

Multimodalité du discours: le point de vue d'un indianiste

La société et la culture hindoues, où le théâtre exerce un magistère sur l'éducation religieuse et philosophique de tous ceux qui n'ont pas accès à l'étude des Védas, offrent un contexte propice aux scénographies de la voix dans toutes ses modalités. Dois-je me justifier de travailler plus particulièrement, lorsque je peux le faire de première main, dans le contexte d'une diglossie sanskrit—malayalam (Inde du sud) et, pour des comparaisons fines, sur des dossiers indianistes où le sanskrit offre des points d'accrochage à la comparaison?

Lorsque j'entrerai dans le vif du projet de scénographies de la voix, les illustrations et les matériaux de première main viendront du Kerala et des arts vivants en sanskrit et malayalam et trouveront progressivement leur place dans ces pages web. A titre d'introduction et de comparaison, j'entreprends ici de documenter aussi complètement que possible trois «dossiers indianistes» particulièrement intéressants pour nous.

 

Milton Singer à Madras

redfield_singer_cities.pdf — Robert Redfield and Milton B. Singer, The Cultural Role of Cities, Economic Development and Cultural Change, Vol. 3, No. 1, The Role of Cities in Economic Development and Cultural Change, Part 1 (Oct., 1954), pp. 53-73. Un grand texte classique.

singer_madras.pdf — Milton B. Singer, The Great Tradition in a Metropolitan Center: Madras, The Journal of American Folklore, Vol. 71, No. 281, Traditional India: Structure and Change (Jul. - Sep., 1958), pp. 347–388.

singer_radhaKrishna.pdf — Milton B. Singer, The Radha-Krishna "Bhajans" of Madras City, History of Religions, Vol. 2, No. 2. (Winter, 1963), pp. 183–226.

Milton Singer, When a Great Tradition Modernizes. An Anthropological Approach to Indian Civilization, Chicago: UCP, 1972, chapitre 3: “Search for a Great Tradition in Cultural Performances.”

 

Joan Erdman sur Uday Shankar

erdman_performance_translation.pdf — Joan L. Erdman, Performance as Translation: Uday Shankar in the West, The Drama Review, Vol. 31, No. 1, Spring 1987, pp. 64–88.

erdman_scholarPerformers.pdf — Joan L. Erdman, Inside Tradition: Scholar-Performers and Asian Arts, Asian Theatre Journal, Vol. 8, No. 2. (Autumn, 1991), pp. 111-117.

erdman_empowering_performance.pdf — Joan L. Erdman, Empowering Performance: the Choreographic Techniques of Uday Shankar, dans Heidrun Brückner, Elisabeth Schömbucher & Phillip B. Zarrilli, Eds., The Power of Performance. Actors, Audiences and Observers of Cultural Performances in India, New Delhi, Manohar, 2007, pp. 121–150.

 

Michael Lempert, Débats bouddhistes tibétains

lempert_tibetan_debate.pdf — Michael P. Lempert, Denotational Textuality and Demeanor Indexicality in Tibetan Buddhist Debate, Journal of Linguistic Anthropology, Vol. 15, Issue 2, December 2005, pp. 171-193.

lempert_tibetan_theatrics.pdf — Michael P. Lempert, Disciplinary theatrics: Public reprimand and the textual performance of affect at Sera Monastery, India, Language and Communication, Vol. 26, Issue 1 (January 2006), pp. 15–33.

This article examines ‘public reprimand’ (tshogs gtam) at Sera Monastery, a major Tibetan Buddhist monastery of the Geluk sect in India. This disciplinary practice is shown to be of duplex textual and theatrical complexity. In this form of reprimand, the Disciplinarian seeks to (re)form the dispositions of monastic subjects by textually projecting, juxtaposing, and evaluating morally weighted voices. As the Disciplinarian stages this moral-didactic drama – this ‘serious theatre’, to borrow Foucault’s expression – he adopts a culturally prescribed stance on his own affective performance. In investigating the textuality of voice, stance, and affectivity in this form of public reprimand, this article seeks to rekindle interest in ‘penal semiotics’, a vector of inquiry that Foucault initiated.

lempert_tibetan_diasporic.pdf — Michael P. Lempert, Conspicuously past: Distressed discourse and diagrammatic embedding in a Tibetan represented speech style, Language and Communication, Vol. 27, Issue 3 (July 2007), pp. 258–271.

Using as a point of departure Vološinov’s discussion of a dialectic between reported speech styles and large-scale cultural-ideological formations, this article examines how a represented speech construction can diagram and be reciprocally ‘embedded’ by its sociohistorical context of occurrence. I focus on a form of represented speech in diasporic performances of Tibetan Buddhist debate, in which monks tropically subsume the voice of the animator into the voice of tradition. In making tradition manifest, monks ‘distress’ or ‘antique’ debate discourse, rendering it conspicuously past under conditions in which its authenticity seems suspect. The significance of this style is shown to rest on its social embedding, illustrating one way in which represented speech can reflect and refract the experience of certain categories of Tibetan diasporic subjects.