2 THE POLITICS OF PRIMITIVISM BAKUNIN ~ BAKHTIN aspect has been ideals, syntactical structure and logic, as swell as everything associated with the bourgeoisie. But this apparent nihil mn always implied a utopian alternative to the statns gus, which has three aspects. Broadly speaking these can be called the philosophical, the popu list and the primitive ~ althoug! want garde categories are often inseparable, equally political and tend to be expressed in psychological terms. which also image became misleadingly terrorists, the basic principle of associated the turns extreme individual superseded those of the state, mt. For Bakunin and bis lollowers, personal rights which by definition were coer Form of social organization; had to be discarded shnent (hich was sometimes de more than eravon came 10 be conceived pry mea ws requenly Bhysieal=feeing the mind through assaulting had strong politcal ocerones. The commune was iden ly or even spit the route to its Personal wall fied with the acting gt IGS OF PRIMITIVISN, on artistic creation as ‘process’, in place - substituted fo ion of becoming’ ‘ame antichierarchical ethos characterizes the populist aspect is pethaps best defined 5 work, ed from ava Russia and restricted to literary theory, his path-breaking.s1 coewsky and particularly Rabelais are not only representative, but also offer a critical tool for analysing avant garde work. By contrast to classi ration of genses, wved by a singleness of voice and carnivals, All of what has been defined as ‘great literature’ Renaissance is considered an aberration in the context of this 2 which incorporates contradictory elements, con ith the grotesque, « or the medern Mardi Gras, for Bak! it both com and contrary to political organizat antidote to the ‘official motes an abstract spirit rized by rigidity and ind iat are denigrated or denied her ‘vulgar’ bodily functions, “cru tic categories, or social inferiors, Breaking taboos to signal of the earthly upper classes, res the concept of an atomized bourgeois indi each festive participant conscious of “being a m growing and renewed people’ This utopian ideal of com extension Communism) -d and affirmed by presented as not labels f ferary terms (with Rabelais as th derives a radical theory of hume in gargantuan themes of physical appetite and excremental or genital imagery, corrosive parody, and abusive language, together with fom whom BakAVANT GARDE THEATRE violent its of tone or the juxtaposition of contradictory fragments, invel sion and materialistic hyperbole. Its indispensable traits are the grotesque and ambivalence, which are seen as being integrally connected. On the thematic level a deliberate stressing of the ugly or monstrous, the hall formed or incomplete, and and man, copulation and dismemberment) ‘goes along with verbal puns, multiple viewpoints and switches in consciousness on a stylistic level Artistic forms qualify as carnevalesque if they release imaginative and sexual energies by subverting social, moral and aesthetic categories, no: and prohibitions, Both the grotesque and ambivalence i displa potentiality of an enticely different world, of another order, another fe’; and this is associated w definition offers an ‘abnormal’ viewpoint that is free from ideas and official ‘truths’.' Ic also relates 10 the kind of psychol universe created by Dostoevsky, where the disru iterary logic, together with temporal and spat inside the divided consciousness of an outcast whose pathological mentality casts doubt on standard concepts of reality himself pointed out che correspondence between the ‘dialogizing’ ness in Dostoevsky, and expressionist drama with its distorted perspe subjectivity. But the parallels between his ideas and avant garde theatre are far wider. Abusive parody, combined with the focus on sical ugliné’s and moral monstrosity are the hallmarks of Alfred Jarcy's nented plays. The positive function of madness, the inversion of moral categories and the grotesque in all its aspects are central 10 Anton Artaud’s work, An ambivalent attack on the sacred, the breaking of taboos and the exaltation of the body characterize Jerzy Grotawski's theatre, leading to a scarch for primal relationships beiween man and the natural ‘world. Sexual liberation and social revolution formed the core of the Living Theatre, revolving around a universal ideal of community that was rep- resented as a cosmic prin’ s Bacrault bo created dramas based on Rabelais: one right ar the start of the avant garde movement, the other as a direct response to the-student revolution of 1968, Ina sense, sant garde theatre lie in the type of radical laughter that Bakhtin saw as fandamental to the carnival spi which is also evident in the dark expressionist depictions of urban existence and the surrealist portrayals of the bourgeoisie although comedy is signally absent from Artaud and! most later manifestations of the avant garde This tendency to quasi-religious seriousness, which all too often led to inflaced self-pretension, is the antithesis of Bakhtin's camival spirit. But camevalesque qualities are the defining marks of avant garde drama: in particular the emphasis on stage production as process the fixed artsproduct of classical aesthetics; and the fusion of actors audience, breaking down the barriers between performance and real TRE POLITICS OF PRIMITIVISM create a communion of (in theo puts i, ‘Car the feast of be renewal. It was hostile 0 al ed and completed’ — bath in society and art ~ wi he stage as a metaphor: in the sense that it docs not acknowledge any distinction between actors and spectators. y @ carnival, as the absence of footlights would destroy has been seen as t garde, which being ‘the experi- istorically given itself a double task: to destroy and to inve s are the more striking and significant since there can be no question of influence. Baki self was cut off from artistic developments in Europe, and shows a very limited knowledge even of early expressionist theatre, while his study of Rabelais was only written in 1940, remained unpublished until 1965, and first became av able to the West (in an English translation from the Russian) in 1968, some months after Barrault’s production of Rabelais THE CULT OF THE PRIMITIVE ‘The thrust of Bakhtin’s work is also regressive — finding its ideals in the return to a medieval survival of traditions from prehistory, already marginalized in Rabelais’ time and imereasingly ellaced by social develop ments that were the opposite of all they stood for ~ and this links earneval- esque populism with the third aspect of the avant garde: primitivism. In the theatre ¢ forms, apparen y compleinentary. On the one hand there is the "9 of the stage into a laboratory for exploriag fundamental vestions about the natute of performance and the relationship between actor and audience, On the other, the exploitation of irrationa e exploration of dream states, the borrowing of archaic dramatic models, logical mavcrial or tribal rituals, What unites the scientific with the tipping down drama to the naked actor on a bare ads to an interior focus on the psyche and to inal or ditect physical communication. Both are 3" of theatre ~ whether in its primitive origins or by vesting it of scenic or illus ‘accretions’ — as much as to the psychological or prehistoric ‘roots? of ma atavism itsel is a symptom of he avant garde hostility to modernAVANT GARDE THEATRE ‘primitive’, it embodies an alternative value scale, In the same way the point of exalting the unconscious an side of human nature is to provide an antidote to a civilization that almost exclusively emphasizes 1¢ rational and intellectual. The conviction that bourgeois society destroys the artistic indi ke Toller, surrealists or absurdists Communist Party. Quite i however, their motives were questioned by other communists, In the tot arian state to which they were committed, their artistic approach would bbe impossible, as the suicide of Mayakovsky had already demonstrated. Yet it was no coincidence that Artavd described the ‘social suicide’ of Van Gogh as a prototype for the modern artist, and defined an incoherent scream of protest as the official voice of the avant garde. ‘dal protest might seem completely just as primitivism could be seen simply as escapism, or the mm the subconscious as retreat from reality. Indeed the miscon- ception that ritualistic, mythical theatre and political theatre are mutu exclusive opposites ~ epitomized in the Tynan/lonesco controversy (Zhe Obsercer, 1958) ~ is far too commonly accepted. Perhaps this is because at its extreme the avant garde repudiation of society cither harks back to a tellingly described jrely in a movement towards itself as ‘anti-theatre rejects thematic mean- that might be identified as an ideo- logical position or ‘message tends (0 be justified ~ misleadingly and paradoxically’ ~ as ‘theatre of pure form’ (Witkiewicz, 1921), or as drama “that cannot serve any other kind of truth bu and therefore has the sole function of revealing ‘the fandamental laws of [dramatic] construction’ (lonesco, 1958). On one level such claims are an attempt to align the stage with advances in other art forms. As the expressionist director Jessner pat it as there is a pure (absolute) music and a pure (absolute) painting, we must have pure theatre.”” But emphasizing stylistic exploration at the expense of statement does not really rule out commitment, despite some avant garde claims that any drama ‘Bated on is outdated and ievelevant since ings, logical the most advanced phenomena are neither literary nor political, but formal. If bered, it will be for the ensembles of the Theatre, Café la Mama and Grotowski, whose common factor is a physical istic. theatre-language. revolutionary and standing in opposition to... psychological ‘Aristotelian time str Leaving aside the incorrect assertion that ideological commitment auto- matically rules out stylistic advances, which is clearly contradicted by the THE POLITICS OF PRIMITIVISN work of ideological artists like Bertolt Brecht, what is stress on spiritual revolut Mon is Mon being a representa! determined by envivo: ‘change must precede any alteration in consciousness. The avant garde reverses the process, seeing a fundamental change in human nature as the prerequ 3 social alteration. As Eugenio Barba put it, ‘Our erat is the poss of changing ourselves, and thus changing sociecy’ ~ the link: primitivism are clear in Richard Schechner’s asser 1¢ ambition to ‘make theatre into ritual is nothing other than a wish to make performance cllicacious, to use [theatrical] events to change people Naturally in light of this political intention, the most appropriate ~ and in fact the most frequently used ~ ritual forms were the “rites of passage’, hropologists like Van Gennep as early as 1908, The basic pattern here is the separation of participants trom their previous environ- ‘ment, frequently through sensory deprivation and disorientation: an action that symbolizes a change in their nature, and their physical integration to anew group. And recognition of ding the treatment of the audience in the Living Theatre This borrowing of ritual forms to manipulate the audience is what distinguishes avant garde aims most clearly from social or politically com- mitted drama. Both kinds of theatre may repudiate existing social con- change. But commitment uses logical structures ~ whether “dialectical” as in Brecht or the conventional cause-and-effect of Bemard Shaw ~ since its aim is to promote a future programme (class lution/eugenic evolution) through 2 conscious awareness of spe desire for a ‘pit of philosophers’ is as typical as Brecht’ he ‘smoking-observing’ attitude of ‘experts’ in his audi tence, and emotional responses are secondary, evoked only as a technique of positive reinforcement for ofa ly disturbing means: ‘In philosophical valent 9 a basic change in existential condition; that which he possessed before his in ‘This may seem an unrealistic expect an audience who are not only self-aware but are also aware of the make- believe and pretence inherent in stage performance. Yet, in the political while the concept of a ‘one’s existential nature is the basis of the major surviving secularized society. Baptism gives ancnynious babies a spiritual and social identity, a name and a place in 1