Petra's Keyword: Ervaringstheater

Ervaringstheater.

Experience or experiential theatre would be the literal translation of ervaringstheater, but it is an illusive term, since theatre without experience seems quite impossible (to me). The specific focus of ervaringstheater is the unique experience. Or as theatre company Ontroerend Goed puts it (concerning to there performance The Smile Off Your Face): "Actually, it's not about viewing. You are blindfolded; you are in a wheelchair, tied up. It's about experiencing. There is no stage. There is no public, no fixed spot in the lights where actors perform. In fact, you don't know where you are.” In the Netherlands this kind of theatre seems to pop up everywhere since the 2001 Holland Festival invited the Colombian Teatro de los Sentidos (theatre of the senses) according to theatre critic Annette Embrechts. Elaborating on this term Embrechts continues with the following: “welcome to the world of ervaringstheater. Theatre performances which first and foremost want to seduce the audience to look and experience the performance and save judgement and interpretation for later. It’s theatre that preferably manifests itself on unexpected locations such as shopping malls, train stations, prisons, city busses and dunes. The audience is slowly being detached from their daily routine through physical contact and is put in a state of confusion.” This year’s theatre season in Frascati opened with a festival named I, THE SPECTATOR aiming to: “discuss on the position of the audience in the theatre through the showing of new, surprising forms of theatre” in which the audience is in the spotlight in one way or another.

Some examples: Boukje Schweigman, Ontroerend Goed, WunderBaum and Dries Verhoeven. Dries verhoeven U bevindt zich hier (You are here):

[the link in case it doesn't work: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lu-DNUNCwms]

Keyword: el mágico si / sí - Diego Amsterdam

Mágico ‘si/sí’
K. Stanislavski used to talk about a ‘magical if’ necessary for the work of the actor. It was a kind of self-deception or use of the will to make on self ‘believe’ necessary to enter the role and be able to ‘play’. Mexican director Rubén Ortiz, plays with this idea. Ortiz is a director that has been linked to ‘physical theatre’ which makes his reference to a classical stanislavskian term quite unusual.

The ‘magical if’ is in Spanish ‘el mágico si’. The game rests on the fact that the word ‘si’ (‘if’, conditional) sounds exactly the same as ‘sí’ (with an accent [´], affirmative, means ‘yes’). [There are other possibilities for the word: ‘sí’ (with an accent), also stands for the ‘self’; ‘si’ (without an accent) can also mean a musical note.]

Si – conditional, ‘if’.
[Si- muscial note]
Sí- affirmative, ‘yes’.
[Sí- reflexive 3rd person, ‘one’.]

Ortiz’s game consists on replacing the conditional in ‘the magical if’ for an affirmative ‘magical yes’. So ‘el mágico sí’ –‘the magical yes’- would be then a key to enter into the game of theatre, but not by making an effort of belief in an imaginary world (like the ‘magical if’), but as an act of faith and affirmation of whatever comes: saying ‘yes’ to the circumstances, and working with what is given –even if it falls out of the ‘plan’.

It seems to me, that the ‘magical yes’/’magical if’ distinction points towards two different ways of theatre making. The ‘magical if’ is closer to a realist, director as artist, text-based theatre -product-oriented. The ‘magical yes’, on the other hand, attempts to build a less conventional theatre that assumes transformation as it’s shore, devised theatre, actor as artist, body-based theatre -process-oriented. The weight of the work is displaced to the actor, embodiment and collaborative creation.
Two theatres:

Ortiz's proposal seems to suggest the need to take a stance (and thus falls into the realm of ethics). I don't know if one is better than the other (though I'm more interested in one than in the other). The difference is there to think about it. Could it be phrased as 'acting' vs. 'performing'? Does all of this make any sense?
The following quote of Nietzsche, helps me think about Ortiz's 'magical yes':

“I walk amongst men as the fragments of the future: that future which
I contemplate.
And it is all my poetisation and aspiration to compose and collect
into unity what is fragment and riddle and fearful chance.
And how could I endure to be a man, if man were not also the
composer, and riddle-reader, and redeemer of chance!
To redeem what is past, and to transform every "It was" into "Thus
would I have it!"- that only do I call redemption!
Will- so is the emancipator and joy-bringer called: thus have I
taught you, my friends! But now learn this likewise: the Will itself
is still a prisoner.
(...)
Unless the Will should at last deliver itself, and Willing become
non-Willing-:" but ye know, my brethren, this fabulous song of
madness!
Away from those fabulous songs did I lead you when I taught you:
"The Will is a creator."
All "It was" is a fragment, a riddle, a fearful chance- until the
creating Will saith thereto: "But thus would I have it."-
Until the creating Will saith thereto: "But thus do I will it!
Thus shall I will it!"

[Niezsche, F. “42. Redemption”. Thus Spake Zarathustra. Translated by Thomas Common]