Performance Studies in Motion by Citron Atay; Aronson-Lehavi Sharon; Zerbib David

Author:Citron, Atay; Aronson-Lehavi, Sharon; Zerbib, David [Неизв.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Figure 12 With IDF soldiers becoming spect-actors, ‘Tul Karem-Tel Aviv Theatre Group’ is performing near the village of Izbat-Tabib in 2013. Photo by Combatants for Peace.

Site-specific invisible theatre and the vision of a utopian space

Boal’s first book briefly recounts the Invisible Theatre technique,12 and his second book, Games for Actors and Non-Actors, surveys its technical development in depth.13 Essentially it consists of the covert mounting of a piece of provocative theatre in a public place, so as to cause discussion and debate among unknowing ‘spect-actors’.14 Boal emphasizes that Invisible Theatre is first and foremost theatre: it is perceived as a play, including actors who play characters and a prearranged text. The chosen subjects for invisible theatre are of utmost importance to the actors and spect-actors. Invisible Theatre is only staged in public spaces that are not defined as theatre spaces, and only to an audience that does not know that it is an audience.15 ‘Invisible theatre is not realism, it is reality.’16

In conventional theatre, the consent of the audience and theatre-makers is that the architecture can add and remove meaning in accordance with the needs of the play. The same space can be a fifteenth-century open field or an American kitchen in the 1950s.

In activist theatre, the space is a dimension in itself,17 and in the polarized model, it is sometimes even the decisive element.

Site-specific theatre is usually dependent on the given space defined by the architecture.18 In the case of a performative resistance group, site-specific theatre actually depends on the political context, as place is not merely architectural space but also charged with the political significances of the system of power relations that functions on and in it. With an intimate performative process, it often becomes a utopian space, enabling one to experience and imagine a place in which external power relations are cancelled and no longer exist.19 However, in such cases, neutralizing the power relations from actual reality and leading to their apparent disappearance effectively reaffirms their presence.

The concrete embodiment of polarization in space facilitates mobility and transformation of the individual, the single-nation group and the polarized plenary group. The possibility of imagining and then embodying crossing borders between polarized spaces within the framework of theatrical exercises – in which one can cross the imaginary ‘line’ and appear next to or inside the opposite group – is charged with performative utopian potential.20

Boal contends that the non-violent performative act constitutes trespassing.21 The fact that non-actors create a theatrical space for themselves challenges the accepted perceptions of ‘who is allowed where’. This is a fundamental principle of the main technique of the Theatre of the Oppressed, Forum Theatre. Its ethics and aesthetics require and transgress an additional border, as it enables the oppressed (the spectators) to go on stage and replace those who have already trespassed (the protagonist/s).

The choice of a liminal space, between two areas – between two roadblocks that separate Area A and Area B,22 when it is unclear whether we are in Area B or C and

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