An Anti-theatrical Dream: Theatre Without Human
Melike Saba AkımThis study explores the roots of contemporary experimental theatrical productions in which the human-actor is removed from the stage as a reflection of post-human thought. The idea of withdrawing the human-actor from the theatre stage is seen in the article as an anti-theatrical position because it leads to a deformation of the ontic components of theatre, the actor, and the audience pair. The first part of the article, entitled “Roots,” presents the perspectives of influential figures including Heinrich Wilhelm von Kleist, Charles Lamb, Maurice Maeterlinck, Gordon Craig, and Vsevolod Meyerhold, who each approached the concept of human-free theatre in different ways. In the second part of the article, titled “Today,” we explore the current state of this vision and the performances involving animate and inanimate entities replacing the human-actor on the stage, respectively: Heiner Goebbels’ Stifters Dinge, Romeo Castellucci’s The Rite of Spring, Rimini Protokoll’s Uncanny Valley, and Rimini Protokoll’s Temple du Présent.
Karşı-Teatral Bir Düş: İnsansız Tiyatro
Melike Saba AkımBu çalışma, insan-sonrası [post-human] düşüncenin bir yansıması olarak, insan-oyuncunun tiyatro sahnesinden kaldırıldığı çağdaş deneysel teatral girişimlerin köklerini soruşturmayı amaçlar. İnsan-oyuncunun tiyatro sahnesinden geri çekilmesi fikri, tiyatronun ontik bileşenlerinden oyuncu ve seyirci çiftinin deformasyonuna sebep olduğundan, makalede karşı-teatral bir tutum olarak ele alınmıştır. Makalenin “Kökler” başlıklı birinci bölümünde, insansız tiyatro tahayyülünü farklı biçimlerde mesele edinen Heinrich Wilhelm von Kleist, Charles Lamb, Maurice Maeterlinck, Gordon Craig ve Vsevolod Meyerhold gibi öncü isimlerin görüşlerine yer verilmiştir. Makalenin “Bugün” başlıklı ikinci bölümündeyse, bu tahayyülün vardığı noktada, sahnede insan-oyuncunun yerini alan canlı ve cansız varlıkların yer aldığı gösterimlere —sırasıyla: Heiner Goebbels, Stifters Dinge [Stifter’in Şeyleri]; Romeo Castellucci, The Rite of Spring [Bahar Ayini]; Rimini Protokoll, Uncanny Valley [Tekinsiz Vadi]; Rimini Protokoll, Temple du Présent’a [Şimdinin Tapınağı]— değinilmiştir.
Tracing the origins of anti-theatrical imaginations across a broad period, from Platon to Nietzsche, is possible. However, imagining a theatre devoid of human-actors might represent the most radical of the anti-theatrical endeavors. This would mean disarraying the actor–audience dichotomy, which stands at the navel of the theatre’s ontic components. Today, as an aesthetic pursuit in contemporary theatre, performances without human-actors are frequent. Nonetheless, dreaming of this move—of constructing a dramaturgy centered on a theatrical design without human-actors—is not just a contemporary approach that is exclusive to new dramaturgies. In contrast, it is an idea that dates back almost two centuries.
The first part of the article explores this idea and presents the views of pioneers who based their theatrical imaginations on the “non-human actor.” Theatre without human-actors has been performed since puppet theatre existed. On a theoretical level, however, eliminating the human-actor from the theatre gained traction in the late 19th century, especially concerning symbolism. The essay “On the Marionette Theatre,” written by Heinrich Wilhelm von Kleist in 1810, is regarded as one of the earliest instances in which this notion was proposed as a theatrical aesthetic model. In this essay, Kleist argues that puppets operate on a plane unaffected by human volition and that the human body is incompatible with nature in motion.
Writing in the same years as Kleist, Charles Lamb stresses in one of his essays the inadequacy of the human-actor. For him, the theatre’s art corrupts the dramatic text’s literary power. Lamb’s argument is important because it significantly influenced Maurice Maeterlinck’ views on theatre. Maeterlinck posits in his renowned essay “Un Thèâtre d’Androdes,” published in 1890, that by their imitative nature, artistic creations are artificial and methodological constructs that can only be conformed to by inanimate beings. As the human presence violates the condition of the artificiality of the artwork, the absence of the human-actor (as an aesthetic goal) is therefore an inevitable necessity.
Another symbolist, Gordon Craig, asserts in his famous 1908 essay “The Actor and the Über-Marionette” that acting is not an art. He sees that the human-actor, one of the ontic elements of theatre, is alive as a problem for the art of theatre. This is because, as a living material, the human being can never be entirely controlled. On the assumption that the puppet, being an inanimate material, is more suitable for theatrical use due to its capacity for manipulation, he proposes the notion of the über-marionette.
Meanwhile, Vsevolod Meyerhold envisioned the human being as a body that would work like a machine on stage. This projects the idea that the stage is a set of signs and that the actor is only one of these signs. For him, the actor is a moving unit on the stage. In contrast to the Symbolists, he did not exclude the human-actor from the stage; rather, he focused to control the human-fallible actor’s body as if it were a controllable machine, for reasons similar to those of the Symbolists. According to Meyerhold, the desire to control the error-prone body of a human actor results in the development of a physical acting channel rather than a character-oriented acting channel. The anti-theatricality of this channel is not at all reminiscent of that of the Symbolists, for here, the actor’s physical presence remains central to the theatre.
The second part of the article focuses on today’s productions without the human-actor. In this respect, the performances with animate and inanimate beings replacing the human-actor on the stage are briefly mentioned, respectively: Heiner Goebbels’ Stifters Dinge, Romeo Castellucci’s The Rite of Spring, Rimini Protokoll’s Uncanny Valley, and Rimini Protokoll’s Temple du Présent. The mechanisms underlying the exclusion of human beings from stage in contemporary theatre frequently diverge from those of its early symbolist predecessors, as the latter does not strive to substitute humans with humanoids. The stage is redesigned in this context with a post-human perspective, which deconstructs the Anthropocene world. The aforementioned examples suggest a novel relational model in which the human is not the focal point. As suggested by Gertrude Stein in her landscape formula at the beginning of the last century, the contemporary theatre presents a conceptual framework wherein all elements exist in interconnection.
