Towards the City of Thresholds by Stavros Stavrides

Author:Stavros Stavrides [Stavrides, Stavros]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781942173328
Barnesnoble:
Publisher: Common Notions
Published: 2020-08-04T00:00:00+00:00

The theatrical city

If we accept the opinion of architectural historian Manfredo Tafuri, twentieth-century theater took special care to call attention to the relation between what is happening on stage and in life in a modern megalopolis. The stage of modern theater was taken as a “virtual city” (Tafuri 1990, 95–112) that tried to depict the intensity of the metropolitan experience with the avalanche of stimuli it transmits to the human body, either by adopting an affirmative attitude towards metropolitan life or criticizing it in many different ways.

The interventionism of early twentieth-century vanguards is marked by the presence of bodies that transmit the feeling of a new life rhythm to their movements and forms. From the nervous, frantic grimaces of dadaist performance to the monumental human puppets of Bauhaus theater, the body is no longer the field for the expressive search of a particular psyche which corresponds to the content of a role; rather, it gives form to common sensations. These common sensations represent, reform or even prefigure the metropolitan experience in its development.

Why does the body acquire such a role? Why does the experience of the megalopolis become immediately—and often painfully—perceptible in the body of the inhabitant? The contemporary experience of the crowd which floods the streets, subway stations, department stores and public buildings, this experience which defines the personal relation to the city, is an experience of body relations. The rhythm of the movement of masses, the forced proximity and random path-crossings make up the field of a reflexive behavior of the body that is often expressed in an almost hypnotic compliance with traffic rules. If one is to analyze the experience of the crowd as a new social convention of handling the distance between two bodies, one will see that this convention is taking the form of a particular expressivity of the bodies. It is precisely the theatricality of this new convention regulating encounters between city dwellers that the theatrical avant-garde of the beginning of the century seems to explore, either explicitly or implicitly.

Let us consider the Italian Futurists, for example. In his Variety Theatre Manifesto, Marinetti exalts the shock technique, which is capable of destroying the spatial and temporal unity of the stage (Tafuri 1990, 98). The reality of the metropolis, as a welcomed experience of excitement and intense rhythm, is called upon to flow into the theatrical space as an explosion. Chaos is but a polymorphic blend of life fragments. So, a “body madness” [fisicofollia] (ibid., 99) is channeled into the physical action on stage, capable of turning the “madness” of metropolitan life into a principle of un-founding all value systems. In the name of an aesthetic affirmation of the new world, an affirmation which embraces the praise of the futurists for the industrial landscape and their conception of war as celebration, the body assumes the responsibility of transmitting the intensity and destabilizing force of a contemporary life rhythm (ibid.). Futurists give acclaim to movement’s randomness and polymorphism. In futurist actions, the body-as-movement overcomes all stability and certainty.

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