THE PROBLEM  OF THE MODEL IN CONTEMPORARY THEATER: A Comparative  Socio-Cultural Approach 

What is so surprising is the fact that among the apostles of this concept of theater, based on a recurrent and obstinate myth, are renowned representatives of the sociology of the theater [4], who should rather be expected to distrust such premises rather than to  give them credence. These same specialists know very well that the Italian stage - for example - has been created for no other reason than to satisfy a precise need which has determined its design  in a certain manner, for the very purpose that it face the cabinet of the principe considered as its protector, in the context of specific socio-economic relations as well as that of an etiquette and formal constraints observed at the court.  Why then should we need, for example, this artificial stage with its settings and curtains, if it is a matter of a popular ‘entertainment’, where there exists neither master nor subaltern, neither governing nor governed, and all the people are equal, no matter whether they are presenting or perceiving the performance. And where, even as ‘receptive’ spectators, the latter wouldn´t be any less creative than the former, in their act of production, nor less enriching and thus, contributing to the performance, thanks to their spontaneous and direct 'additions'.

Are not for instance the "halaqa" (circle theatre) of the Arab Maghreb and the Egyptian "samer"  closer to realizing an "artistic" pleasure where "theatrical" production and consumption are no longer severed but "intwined", in other words, where consumption is achieved as production (for the viewer), and production as consumption (for the actors), in order to attain the maximum of delectation, that is to say consumption, as the highest form of production, and vice versa.

How could  the Italian stage, with its artificial dissociation of the production of a play from its consumption satisfy this spontaneous need?

Is it for this reason that it is not allowed to consider the "halaqa"  (rooted in the Arab Maghreb) and the Egyptian "samer" [4] as constituting a possible form of theater? 

I don't really intend here to "revolt" against the traditions and concepts of theater which prevail in the world today, because they don't merit it, for the simple reason that they turn things upside down, so that they may conform to the norms of the dominant culture of our world. Consequently, do we not have the right to ask ourselves which of the two models sketched above really enhances the enjoyment of the theater: the model which, at the formal level,  due to the very rules of its performance, intimately relates the production to the perception? Or rather the model which, by cutting of and thus  neglecting the reception, plunges itself only the more deeply into the immediate production of the text with the effect that the text is put into the center and fetishized, at the cost of a lively and dialectic interaction with the public. This is a simple question.

If, by any chance, the "occidental" theater  which constitutes one of the main supports underpinning the opinion of the apostles of European literature, should be demystified and  freed from the myth of its pretended universality, would the apostles of this idea such as E.R. CURTIUS, E. AUERBACH, and R. WELLEK still cling to what they consider the European "unity" with regard to drama? Or would they rather be inclined to turn to the experiences and the models of all the countries of the world, no matter whether they belong to the South or the North, in order to appreciate them on an equal footing, so that each one can learn  from the difference of the other?
The South has learned a lot from the experiences of the theater as practiced in the North, and there is nothing  wrong with that. But, has not the moment arrived to see the peoples of the North learning from that which has escaped them so far, concerning the experiences of the South, both with regard to the theater and to life?
 

An example of ‘anomie’

In the summer of 1975, while attending the Festival de theatre in Avignon, I happened to walk into a performance, at the fringe of the festival that was dealing with the exile of the Turkish poet, Nazim Hikmet, in what was then called the Soviet Union. I had come from Paris, in a packed train and was extremely tired. And as the play was basically a number of monologues, and I was sitting in the darkness of the small theater, watching the actor the lamps were focused on, I soon fell asleep. Upon leaving the theater, I saw, more or less by chance, that there was another performance going on, in the yard before me. The actor I had exchanged a few polite words with indicated his contempt for what was going on there. „They are just a bunch of North African workers,“ he said. „It’s really not worthwhile.“ It made me curious, and  so - this is how I discovered the ensemble ‘La tempête’ or The Tempest.
 

The ‘play’ they performed, and that I saw once again later that week, was entitled „Ca travaille, ca travaille et ca ferme sa geuele“, which might be translated ‘It works, it works - and it keeps its gob [mouth] shut.’

The ‘play’ is constructed in a serial manner, as a series of sketches, linked by what we might call a ‘red thread’.
At the outset, we see a man living in misery in his North African village. A so-called entrepreneur, in fact a recruiter of labor in contact with French enterprises, appears. He wears expensive spectacles, and his suit is très chic. He addresses the man in his misery, promising  that France will mean a lot of money, women, a beautiful flat and so on.
Next we see how the poor chap goes and sells his belonging and departs to find the realization of his dream in France.

At the border, the recruiter with his group of men recruited from North African villages happens upon a member of the frontier police he seems to know very well. He tells him, ‘These are sheep (mouton). Let us pass.’ The officer answers, ‘Yes, I see that’ and demands a „pot de vin“ which he obtains. The so-called moutons then pass the frontier.

In France they are ‘distributed’ to a number of French entrepreneurs.

Next, we see a worker  working with a pneumatic drill in the street. The pneumatic drill, held shakily by the man,  pounds back and forth forcefully, dancing almost on the pavement of the street. And the entrepreneur addresses the working chap, ‘Ah you, you shaky one - can’t you control your tool any better, holding it firm and straight? You have to work a little bit more careful, don’t you?’  'Sure DO -DOing it...,'  the worker stutters.'  'Ha -YOU!  You can't even speak correctly,' says the boss, then adding sternly, 'Every minute COUNTS!'
And now, the worker turns to the audience and says, 'He tells us  every minute counts. But for the entrepreneur, the hours that I have worked do not count.'
Indeed, at the end of the month, we see him, who has done so much overtime, in the office of the entrepreneur, asking for the agreed-upon wage. But the entrepreneur tells him that he can only give him half that sum because he has not worked intensely enough.
When the second worker enters the office, he is told by his boss that he is ‘just not liquid at the moment’ and will have to give him a cheque.
‘You can cash it in at the bank,’ the boss says.
But in the bank we hear the cashier asking for his residence permit. Otherwise, no cashing in of the check.
The second worker, with his check, returns to the entrepreneur who tells him, ‘Sorry, I am not liquid. Haven’t I given you a cheque? If you don’t like it, you may go to the police.’

But the worker tells us how he knows that he’ll be jailed and deported should he go to the police.

Another scene shows him in the street. He is lost in the big city and seeing a police man walks up to him, asking for directions. The police man, however, only retorts, ‘Circuler! Circuler!’ ‘Get on, move on!’

In order to put his head to sleep, we are shown how he has to share a decrepit domicile with his colleagues. They live in houses destined for demolition, 15 or 20 in a room with several rows of beds, and the rent they are asked to pay by the landlord is exorbitant.

Thus we learn,  from situation after situation, how these travailleurs immigrés are seen as subjects, as human beings, but are discriminated against, both by the state and the trade unions. And this because they are  sans papiers,  because they have no documents legalizing their residence and work in France. 

All the while, the overt or implicit racism is apparent, as many ordinary French citizens treat them as ‘strange’ and ‘an anomaly’ because they look different. 

The police, on the other hands, incarcerates and even tortures them. Some, we are told, even die at their hands.

The entrepreneurs we see in the act of ruthlessly exploiting them.

Even among the French workers, a sympathetic understanding is rare. For quite a few among these French workers hate them and despise them as unfair competitors, selling their labor dirt-cheap and undercutting  their official wages.

All this is shown in a sarcastic manner, in a quick sequences of ‘sketches’.
The circumstances and concrete aspects should be mentioned as well. Each time I saw ‘Ca travaille...’, the stage was very brightly lit, and there were few accessoires. The audience confronted it frontally, sitting on long, wooden benches. Everything was rather Spartanic, reduced to the minimum.
Even from a linguistic point of view, the actors were always directed to the concrete public in front of them. If the audience was French, they would use French, when it consisted of immigrant workers, they used their North African Arab dialect, and when it was a mixed public, they spoke a mixture of French and North African Arabic dialect, even addressing individual members of the audience in an improvised way in French or in Arabic. This Franco-Arabic aspect of some of their performances can, however, not be compared with Franco-Arabe performances in Egypt during the 1930s which started out from an entirely abstract level, that is to say, the Western values dominating the theater and especially, an interest in formalist devices. The superiority of French, as a lingua franca of the Egyptian elites and a language of the theater, was then unquestioned. Arabic began to play a role in the course of Arabization  but also in order to portray the contradiction between privileged European foreigners and those subjected to discrimination in their own country. But it turned out that the contradiction was instrumentalized in an abstract, aesthetic manner, to achieve certain theatrical effects. Thus, the use of Arabic could be meant to produce a joke, and provoke laughter. This implies a completely different approach from that chosen in Avignon, which was a militant one.  Whereas then the one approach reflects a completely formalistic conception of the theater, the other is materialistic; and whereas in the Egyptian example of the 1930s the performance would be ‘entertaining’, the contrasting one, of ‘La tempete’ was militant and directly intervening.  Whereas in the first case, what we get is ‘only theater’, the other is theater as a means of communication of concerns  and interests  and as an appeal to our solidarity.

Before sketching my impression of another ‘play’ staged by ‘La tempête’, I want to give here some background information on the historical context in which the group originated. 
‘La tempete’ was formed as an integral part of the mouvement of North African immigrant workers in France,  le Mouvement des Travailleurs Arabes (MTA).  It consisted mainly but not exclusively of North African militants. It sprang from a hunger strike. 

After Pompidou had died,  37 members of the Mouvement des Travailleurs Arabes confronted the interim government then in office with their demand that the sans papiers  should be given  work permits and that their stay in France should be legalized. They not only began a hunger strike but threatened to burn themselves alive if their demands were rejected. The French authorities at the time attempted to undermine this resistance by promising the 37 participants in the hunger strike work permits and a legalization of their immigrant status, which they refused to accept. During the hunger strike which lasted several weeks, they improvised songs on the basis of their North African musical traditions, attempting to describe and express their alienated and repressed  situation. Finally, in the context of this hunger strike, various forms of communication were discovered by them, all destined to communicate their situation to the French and Maghrebinian population. Thus,  they began to produce their own newspaper or ‘journal’ which ridiculed certain racist French papers like le Parisien  which they referred to as Paris chien (the Paris dog)  or  le Méridional  (a racist paper in Aix-en-Provence) from which they quoted sarcastically to demask its biased and demagogic reports on North African workers. Another medium used to present their situation were tape recordings. I remember one that critically tackled the French alphabetization program for immigrants. And then, they decided to found ‘La tempête’ - the theater ensemble  that was to serve as yet another form of communication with the public. 

In the framework of this ‘theater movement’ as a medium among other media designed to communicate their cause, they have described themselves first and foremost as militants fighting for their cause, and only in second place as ‘gens du theatre’ (people of the theater). In realizing their performances, they could draw on the support of Monsieur Clancy, who then held a chair as professor of dramatic arts at the Université de Vincennes (today Paris VIII).  Playing the role of the French bourgeoisie in their performances, his wife, Madame Clancy, became a member of the ensemble. She was a professor of philosophy at the Sorbonne, who actively and with considerable solidarity supported them, as did a number of other French sympathizers who took on roles in their plays.

The ‘cultural movement’ thus initiated has boycotted all the dominant festivals and cultural events, including the Festival d’Avignon, deciding instead to perform in alternative contexts (sometimes in theaters, and often at the fringe of festivals).
In Aix-en-Province, as well, they worked to bring about a large manifestation where they presented North African popular traditions, and contributed to fetes of the North African population, as an expression of shared joy, which was their alternative to the formalistic festivals in Aix which mainly serve to prop up the local and regional tourism business.

It was in Aix that they presented a performance called „Vive la France! Immigrés, silence!“ which I also happened to see at the time. The site of the performance was the main street of Aix-en-Provenve, le Cour Mirabeau.  As with the halaqa  or circle theater,  the audience formed a circle around them. And while the audience thus ‘presented’ the settings, the militants as actors  vanished into these settings and appeared, again, from them inside the circle.  As „Ca travaille...“, this play again consists of a series of sarcastic sketches. 

At the outset, there is an actor playing a tourist guide, showing and explaining to a group of tourists what he takes to be the remarkable sights of Aix. A North African immigrant worker walks up to them, addressing a tourist and promising to show him something he should really be seeing. The tourist guide warns the tourist, but the tourist says, ‘Why not?’ and comes along. 

Next, we see them walk to a house awaiting demolition. When they enter, the staircase is embraced in darkness, some of the stairs are broken. With difficulty, they reach a large room where several rows of beds have been lined up - the sleeping place of what seem to be perhaps a score of immigrant workers. 

The North African guide introduces the tourist to his colleagues, and the tourist asks: ‘Is this here a meeting, a sort of plenary assembly?’ Whereupon the guide answers, ‘No, we live here, twenty of us, in this lousy joint.‘  And then, he adds, ‘I’ll show you something still better.’ And he shows him their smelly, dirty kitchen. The tourist shouts, ‘No, I can’t even breath here! I have to go now, immediately.’ The North African worker retorts, ‘You see - you can’t stay here, not even for a minute. And we have to stay here all those years. Tell those other tourists what you have seen. This is our reality, which nobody wants to see.’

The Aix performance of ‘Vive la France, immigrés, silence!’ was later followed up by another, certainly not an identical performance of the ‘play’ in Marseille, in front of fishermen striking against the companies operating the large trawlers they worked on. And after the strikers had seen ‘Vive la France...’, they immediately put on their oil cloth, took their nets, and improvised a play depicting their own, unbearable situation.
 

Even though ‘La tempête’ performed its plays outside the framework of official theater festivals, they were praised by a number of the theater critics. And it was in fact Jean-Louis Barrault who intervened in favor of its leader and director later on when this militant was arrested and tortured in Morocco where he had returned, prompted by the fatal disease of his father.

The praise, however, did not do them any good. The group became divided among those who wanted to continue as militants using the theater as a vital means of expression, and those who thought they should produce theater as - above all - a form of ‘art.’
Still, even the applause was far from universal.  I encountered, among colleagues teaching in Paris much skepticism. The productions of ‘La tempete’ appeared to them as simply ‘agitation’. In fact, it is true that their political activism far exceeded the involvement in their theater group which represented just one of their several forms of intervention.  It was not unimportant that they were lay actors for it made them search actively for creative forms of expression,  drawing (as I soon recognized) on traditional forms like the halaqa that they had come to know in their countries of origin (which for most of them was Morocco and Tunisia). But it appeared that they were not unaware of Western street theater even though perhaps they had not found spontaneously a way pointing in this direction. It is clear that they owed something to the ‘input’ of Monsieur and Madame Clancy, but at least as much they owed to their own theater tradition in Morocco and even more to the concrete situation they suffered from in France - a situation which they wanted to react to, and to actively transcend. It is clear, then, that their social concerns which lay at the root of their reflection and their expressivity implied a strong impulse to communicate as effectively as possible with the audience, in order to  involve  them in their cause. Extremely expressive gestures, drawing on their Maghrebinian fundus of gestus and thus resulting in a certain strangeness, a kind of  Verfremdungseffekt  for an educated, urban, French public,  body language, aspects related to pantomime, all were integrated. There was no unity of time and space; scenes were added, sketchlike, one to another. And this in order to articulate, or rather, demonstrate - in a sense not identical with but also not completely unrelated to Brecht’s  Lehrstuecke -  different situations of immigrants, subjected to the difficulties of life, in a foreign, often hardly understanding and even racist social environment.

I think that many of the situations presented in their performances, but also in other medial forms of expression that the group has chosen, referred to something which in sociological discourse is often referred to as anomie. 
This is apparent even in one of the tape recordings I obtained. In the form of a radio play,  it presents us the accoustic dimension of sketches, pointedly adding one to the other, in order to construct a whole. One such sketch features a ‘class’ of Maghrebinian youths subjected to an alphabetization program of the French government. The lady teacher tries to teach them French vowels and consonants; but they react with an expressive cacophony of sounds proper to the Arab language. In other words, they assert their identity, their autonomy. From the point of view of the dominant culture, this is simply deviant behavior - rooted in that sort of anomie which first Durkkeim, and later on Parsons and Merton have described, giving the State and its agencies a theoretical justification to deal with what was deemed to threaten law and order, either reacting with the tool of repression or that softer, subtler one of so-called social work. 
In „Vive la France...“, the situation where the North African worker, at the outset of the ‘play’, addresses the tourist in the presence of other tourists as well as a guide, from the point of view of the dominant culture portrays at least bad manners, if it is not ‘entirely impossible behavior.’ But for the person with a North African village background, to draw somebody - even a stranger - at his sleeves and whisper something to him may not seem that abnormal at all. From the dominant point-of-view, accessing the dorm where all the immigrant workers off duty at the moment spend their free time, would seem like an undue invasion of privacy, and thus an ‘awkward’ situation. But the horrible housing situation of the immigrant workers is not seen as ‘awkward’ or ‘impossible’ but rather as normal. What is indicative of anomie, then? From the dominant point of view and from the subaltern, North African worker’s  perspective it is not the same that is unnormal and outside its nomos. 
For the large body of illegal immigrants whose existence the lay actors refer to in their play, their entire existence is an anomaly  -  because their human dignity is permanently denied. In opposition to this, they assert their autonomy, their dignity, and they articulate their protest and their demands. But from the dominant point of view their life in France amounts not to an unbearable denigration of human dignity: it is an anomie  pure and simple that should be wiped out either by deportation or by ‘integration’. The remarkable thing is that in fact both from the point of view of Maghrebinian dominant social forces and from that of the French dominant social forces, it is an anomie.  For the former because the Maghrebinian sans papiers  in France have become exposed too much to French society, because they have been estranged from traditional, patriarchic, rural society - having turned urban, having said good-bye to patriarchal values, opting for a more or less outspoken revolt.  And for the French dominant social forces, because they are ‘Arabs’, and illegally present Arabs at that. Accordingly, they are confronted by the police as  sans papiers,  they are shut out of decent housing, becoming  sans abri  in Parisian bidonvilles or rotting, decrepit housing waiting to be torn down. They face their employers without legal rights, working as illegals, bearing his insults or attempts to cheat them out of the agreed wage. All of this, for the militants, constitutes an expropriation of their dignity, and of their rights as human beings; for the opposite side it contains an infringement of law and order, of ‘normalcy’, in short - an anomie. 

But it is not only on the content level of the plays, by way of their sujets, that is, that anomie becomes central.  On another level, the performance itself as well as the actors constitute an anomie.  To sum it up briefly: From a certain dominant point of view, the play is no play and the actors are no actors. This kind of theater, expressing concrete socio-cultural needs in an interaction with a public that is to be ‘awakened’, is no theater, to many a serious scholar of literature and of drama studies in the West. For to them, the play breaks the rules of so-called serious theater; it does not pretend to be an autonomous work of art pointing only to itself. The group of actors uses all its energies, ‘liberationist’ energies, as Edward Said would say, to present in a mediated, in an extremely expressive way, an extra-literary reality. The  rapport,  the relationship  or  Bezug,  is what is at stake for them, what they work on, artistically, in their own theater language and with theatrical devices borrowed from two theater cultures (the halaqa and Western agitational street theater), because without the rapport,  without the interaction  with the public, their entire effort would come to nothing and be devoid of meaning. That this was indeed the case could be witnessed not much later. For, as I have already pointed out, with a certain critical acclaim won due to the performances in Avignon and Aix,  and after having received a number of subsequent invitations to perform, the group soon split along two lines. There were those who wanted to go on and become involved in theater as art, and those who saw their performance as an expression of their militancy and political intervention. The result was that the group disintegrated.
Perhaps this is not even to be regretted, if groups, as Sartre pointed out, are emphatic and shortlived social phenomena, centering around a cause and disintegrating when the cause is achieved or disappears as an issue. The importance of their example is that they allow us to comprehend the vitality of a hybrid theater form,  borrowing what was felt to be useful, from two different theater cultures, and doing so according to the needs of the actors as well as the public. The beautiful thing about it was that this hybrid  theater form, arising out of an interaction between a Maghrebinian and a French theater experience, was so lively - so immediately in contact even with the French, non-working-class audience who cared to watch this performance. How much greater must have been their aesthetic and intellectual effect and the active response of the audience when performing before their most vital recipient, the illegal Arab immigrant workers in diverse French urban agglomerations!

But, let us not forget this:  from the point of view of a canon  shared by most educated French theater critics, their performance was rightly delegated to the sidelines of the festival; to them it constituted not theater (which was seen to exist only in the so-called European tradition) but mere role playing, an amateurish effort, superficial political agitation without any aesthetic and intellectual relevance. It constituted an anomie, just like the illegal immigrant workers who continue to constitute an anomalie for l’état francais.

It will perhaps be thought that this experience is much too exceptional to devote attention to it in the context of a debate of models of the theater. But I think that as an expression of so-called ‘anomie’ that in fact asserts the autonomy of socio-cultural subjects and sets free their creative, intellectual and artistic energies, it indeed foreshadows an utopian counter-model of what a truly emancipative theater could be. Of course, there will not be one model. There will be the specific socio-cultural needs of theater producers  and  of theater recipients, and they will not be identical regardless of time and space. In so far, I would have been happy to see the performance of a group of young actors belonging to the American Indian Movement (AIM) that was staged before journalists on the occasion of their peaceful occupation, or liberation, as they called it, of the island of Alcatraz in the Bay of San Francisco, after the U.S. government had given up use of the St.Quentin penitentiary of that island. The photo I saw in a U.S. journal, offering a snapshot taken during that performance, made me, in my imagination, see another beautiful theater event, full of energy, expressiveness, and with a message that aimed to activate an audience. 
 
 

Towards a really universal theater
 

I don't think that there will be much disagreement with the view that there exists no authentic theater which relies exclusively  on the rules of ARISTOTLE - or which revolts against it only in the manner of the epic theater of BRECHT, or which contents itself with the experiences of PISCATOR or STANISLAWSKI or MEYERHOLD, or of the theatre de boulevard or the theatre de cafe, etc.

As I see it, all these experiences and dramatic conceptualizations emanate from causes and oppositions inherent in a specific socio-cultural context, as a reaction against  the latter (or in favor of  the latter), in dramatic form.

This is why all these drama models - regardless of what they have achieved as a result,  giving rise to reflection to the extent of the effort and the energy put into their productions - are nothing but the fruit of the culture or the society from which they emanate, with all its conflicts and its polemics.

If we owe it to coincidence that this takes place in the Western countries because the enlightenment has for a  long time put them at an advantage in modern times, has not finally the moment arrived for the authors of these models to learn from the heritages of the theater of the  entirety of the peoples of the world, which for so long have remained unrecognized by this glaring enlightenment? 

And who says that Western authors have learned absolutely nothing from ‘others’? Have not the most advanced among them learned from the drama heritage of Asia, such as, for example, ARTAUD, drawing on the theater of BALI / Indonesia,  and BRECHT, interested in the Japanese "NO" theater? Subsequently, once  that which they had learned from the cultures of the South is re-exported to the countries of the South, one does not hesitate to decree that their exports carry the traits characteristic of the North, that is to say, the traits characteristic of the cultures of certain, well determined societies.

To be clear about this, there is nothing wrong with the fact  that a culture 'receives’.  But, as it is, something in the ‘receiving’ culture can 'favor' the modification of the received work, due to the difference of the cultural context. (Or to put it differently -  while a socio-culture ‘receives’ an alien cultural element, it transforms it in terms of its own needs.) And that is due to the difference of the receiving cultural context.   What should we say, moreover, in the case where we deal - as in our example - with societies that are very different from each other on the linguistic, cultural, and social level? For a constructive research, one may attempt to transform the 'interference'  between civilizations (in the negative sense) into positive interaction. And this, based on the consciousness of the objective difference  between one's own culture and the other. That is to say, without any temptation of ethnocentrism or of marginalization of the other and without seeking a romantic fusion with the different that is fascinating, but rather by dealing with the other in a way that permits to obtain a clearer perception of one’s own cultural reality and thus, moreover, to contribute something additional both to one’s own entity and to others.
 
 

The theater as model
 

If, as Sisyphos did, one poses the question, simple in apppearance, What is theater?, and if one wants to define it with regard to what it was, essentially, in its "beginnings" and in its "first element", from which emanated all its forms and the problems it poses, will it be risky to say that the theater constitutes a gesticulatory  and interactive model which assumes an artistic position? And thus, moreover, and indirectly so, a mediating position  vis-a-vis nature and society, in a historically determined context? And furthermore, (will it be possible to say) that this position often expresses a conflictual relation between dominant ideologies and dominated ideas in a given society regarding the approach to the drama heritage and the models it encompasses that is in turn linked to relationsships between the  members of this society?

If we suppose, on a dialectic level, that a given society had overcome all forms of conflicts or of differences, it would be possible that this society still had its theater.  And this theater would incorporate  two contradictory aspects, the first aspect confirming the concept or the prevailing illusion that no really antagonistic differences exist in that society, a probable aspect generally in the theater of entertainment and consumption where the play is concluded with a happy ending.
The  second aspect, on the contrary, would be that of a theater of enlightenment which favors a path through the zones of shadow and of illusions in the minds of the spectators, in order to awaken them and to stimulate the discovery of their reality.

In both cases, all depends on the way in which the heritage of theatrical representation and its models are dealt with.

The method itself, and the corresponding theatrical model, is tantamount to a position vis-a-vis the relations between men which cannot be but enlightening or obscuring.  This depends on whether one makes evident the illusions of those participating in a given social relation or attempts to reenforce their illusions by way of a dramatic discourse that is either prone to accentuate them or, on the other hand, to unveil their mechanisms.

But, and this is so astonishing about it, does one not often rely on a traditional theater and its instruments, its stage, and settings, and sometimes its interpretation, while the performance is critical and  elucidating with regard to the questions it deals with, thus stimulating reflection in the spectators to the extent that  they contribute  something additional to the problems posed? Whereas we may encounter, on the other hand, a ‘theater of experiments' which is content to follow the latest fashions  appreciated in different sociocultural contexts, mostly Western.  Or which is inspired by the popular heritage of its own society and culture in a purely formal way - emptying it of its real content. Due to its experimentation with pure form, it thus becomes  less able to satisfy the needs of its spectators, making it thereby less likely for the people to involve themselves in  a play opening before them the horizons of reflection and the joy of discovery. The theater of enlightenment, however , even when emanating from the bowels of traditional theater, is often contributing creatively to the techniques of experimental theater.

As far as it is concerned, the experimental theater remains incapable of surpassing innovation of a purely formal kind and it even remains incapable of developing it.

Frequently, the theater attempts to fulfill the most rudimentary human needs, complicated as they may be, having gone through so many different, complex historical experiences.

The theater often tries to fulfill these basic needs in a compensatory way, and  in the process turns to ‘techniques’ - in the technological sense of the term - which appear of an extremely seductive power, as is the case for instance with ERWIN PICATOR during his New York exile, where he sought to create  a theater that exuberantly embraced the dream of American technological superiority, something that earned him a special hommage of the city of New York.

But is it not the case that exactly that which PISCATOR contributed to this new technological theater implied his defeat in the pursuit of those popular theatrical experimentations  for which he laid the foundations, in the Germany of the 1920s?

But one is well advised to note that the enormous cost of the technological theater has rendered its imitation impossible in most parts of the world, where the people  depend on the grain imports used to produce their daily bread and paid for with the ‘aid’ of American credits, made available at market rates.

In contrast with this technological theater that is overly complex in its configuration, there exists that  very modest theater which I have been able to  see, initially, on the fringe of the festival de teatre at Avignon  in the course of the summer of 1975 and that I have extensively referred to above.

Having sketched these models of the theater, I would now like to ask two questions. Is there no director capable of saving humanity from the attempted hegemony of one model over the other?  And (secondly,) how could this rejection of hegemony become possible in the theater? For I think that it will be possible if the strongest and the most ferocious ceases to impose and to generalize its own culture. To my mind, it is a fact  that the most ferocious oppression  is exactly that which uses the arms of culture and of information in a way that will make it impossible, for somebody who is not a specialist, to  avert or demask what is false in its discourse. For he will rather fall into its traps and make use of a category without reflecting on its contraditions and without  arriving at the point where he would satisfy his real needs.

If it is true that the mechanisms of generalization vis-à-vis the specific and of the assertion of the supposed ‘whole’ (das Ganze) vis-à-vis other socio-cultural particularities shaped the pretended supremacy of the dominant specificity as well as the fragility of the dominated particularities, critical research must make it its task to unmask the weakness of that dominant tendency.  And it must work to discover the positive aspects, not only of the model which attempts to dominate but equally of the other, marginalized and dominated models. It is for this very reason that there exists the necessity of critical illumination for the purpose of eliminating an irrationality which prepares the ground and justifies all forms of conflict and struggle between men, whether on the level of one and the same country,  as is the case in North America, concerning the relations between 'Whites' of European origine, and 'colored people' as well as 'blacks', or on the level of relations between countries, as is the case between cultures of the North and its "theaters"  and cultures of the South and their drama heritages.

Therefore, I do not think that it is possible to factually overcome the relation of domination of theater models by way of a simple 'disengagement' between these models; rather, a constructive  knowledge of the objective difference between the diverse socio-cultural particularities would be necessary for the mental formation of an auto-image and an image of the other that would  be profoundly subjective.
 

If this contrastive 'map’ based on the objective and precise knowledge of the difference of the 'self' in relation to other socio-cultural entities is realized in  conformity with that method which I propose, it will  be possible for members of all  socio-cultural particularities to profit from the difference of cultural realizations accomplished by other particularities. This is a large project which can be adopted (as I hope it will be) by the organization of the United Nations, only the more so because  this subject did find such an echo in what the GA of the UN called "preventive diplomacy."

Starting out from the consciousness of the specificity of one’s own culture  and the specificity of one’s needs, it is necessary to arrive at a model of mutual intercultural ‘attraction’ where the members of every socio-culture would avidly learn from the other instead of reductively equating it with their own, as is the case today in that struggle of literatures (Literaturkampf)  referred to by Huntingdon in his „Clash of Civilizations.“
 

(1) Cf. the late Gyoergy Vajda's "argument" in his  essay:  Gibt es eine europaeische
Literatur neben den Nationaliteraturen / Einzelliteraturen Europas? in:
Europa Provincia Mundi, Festschrift fuer Hugo Dyserinck, ed. by Joep Leersen and 
K.-U. Syndram, Atlanta-Amsterdam (Rodopi) 1992, p. 101

(2) This viewpoint was presented in a lecture given by Jean Duvignaud in 1984 
at the Institute of Theater Studies of the Academy of Arts in Cairo. I critically 
discussed this issue with him at the time.

(3) Cf. Duvignaud's statement in his lecture referred to in the previous footnote.

(4) See with regard to the Egyptian  Samer as an entertaining form of 'total theater'
 my book Brecht in Aegypten: Versuch einer literatursoziologischen Deutung, 
Bochum, 1978, chapter 1
 
 
 

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