Topic - Devising Theatre,

Theory and Practice

Ritual, Play and Mimesis: a description of Poiesis as Praxis

This article is a product of the reflection upon my experience both as theatre practitioner as well as pedagogue.
In what follows I offer a description of what a process of devising can look like from the point of view of a
community of theatre practitioners involved in the discovery of new avenues of creation. The urge to explore in
some depth poetry as a process comes from my general concern of the role that thinking plays in group
activity. My conviction is that when thought is consciously embodied, it becomes possible to technically
organize thinking within the domain of group collaborative efforts.

Preface on the relation between thought and art

I am aware that the title of this preface could be taken as an ominous introduction to a philosophy of art or
some other topic obscure to the casual reader who is interested simply in a practical account of devising and
different strategies thereof. However, I believe that in so-called ‘devised theatre’ –which is evermore
associated with the autonomy of art and its emancipation from antiquated structures of society– the
practitioner or the interested theoretician should first take responsibility for answering the fundamental
question of “where is thought?” This might seem like an impossible question to answer or in the very least too
abstract to take seriously but we should be thankful enough not to have to answer the more difficult question
“what is thought?”; this indeed would belong to a preface on the philosophy of art or the art of philosophy. In
any case we can shrug off the burden of such questions by allotting them to the professional philosophers who
make it their business to answer such universal questions as to the what of art and the likes; non-the-less, as
devisers we must first acknowledge that in the creation of theatre-art, thinking, which is the very nature of
thought, is uncontestably involved and unavoidably at that. As to the degree and manner of this involvement it
is always a question to which the answer will differ according to the various epochs and styles and indeed
between different artistic modes of production (to borrow a term from Marx). But the fact remains that both in
Art itself as well as in the event of creation the role of thinking is an active ingredient and often a determining
factor.

One must only look to our own contemporaneous artistic landscape to be struck by the conceptual nature that
art has assumed. The presence of thinking in art constantly crops up in different guises. A few general examples
should suffice: in so called abstract art, for instance, the insistence on the thing-in-itself, or the object-as-such

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becomes a conceptual demand for an active participation on the part of the apprehending subject who stands
before it and is tasked with accounting for its ‘incompleteness’. This task is fulfilled by the thinking of the
beholder. This is the essential thrust of the recent avant-garde which paved the way, so to speak, for
conceptual art, as an attempt to shed art’s artisanal past in which value was embedded by craft into the object,
and now attempts to attribute value ‘externally’ in the ‘idea’. We might also take, for example, pieces of
theatre today, which attempt to bring what was of essence of the past into its contemporary sphere, such as re
inventions of commedia dell’arte or Shakespeare or Greek Tragedies; in these, thought nestles itself in
historical interest. This art pivots on the historical idea abstractly constructed from archeological findings
constructing an idea based on comparison. Another art is that in which the thematic content is but a mere
referent to the ‘issues of the times’. This is an art which begs thought in its un-artistic shapes, such as politics,
to take it under its wing. Wherever we look nowadays thinking is active; art is no longer shrouded in mysticism,
it is no longer worshipped as it was by the Greeks, nor does it serve to reveal the divine in sensuous form and
stand among men as their superior. Our thinking is no longer captured by art but confronts it as its master. To
quote Hegel, already in the 1820s: “Art no longer affords that satisfaction of spiritual wants, which earlier
epochs and peoples have sought therein […]Thought and reflection have taken their flight above fine art 1.” This
is to say that it should come as no surprise to us nor should it be a depreciation of the role of art to say that we
live in a ‘reflective’ culture whose substance immediately thinks upon the art work reflecting it back to
thought’s own power. However, seeing as our topic is ‘devising’ our aim will not be to focus on the ‘object art’
and its relation to thought, rather it will be to investigate the process, understood from the perspective of the
architects of an artistic creation, which accounts for where and how thought encounters its subjects in this
process.

When Picasso says “I’m not searching, I’m finding”, he brings up a very insightful point about the artist’s
relation to idea. The implication here is that as the artist does his work, he is not disturbed by any sort of idea
about the activity he does. In other words, there is an unknowing or an unthinking deeply inherent in his
finding, an activity which is liberated from the constituting and projective authority of an idea- hence he finds
without knowing what he is searching for because he does not possess an idea about what it is he finds.

This is all fine and well, but do we know what Picasso means? Should we just paint without thinking? Is there a
method (or anti method) which can bring about this state of creativity? Or do we proceed by dead reckoning,
each hoping to be a Picasso one day? Generally speaking, this insight of Picasso leads the aspiring artist in
search of this state of inspiration, imagining himself undisturbed by thought simply bringing forth his art
perhaps with the help of a bottle of bubbly. This insight is to recognize that in making art ideas can be
1
Hegel-Introductory Lectures on Aesthetics [xvii]
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problematic, which might contain a good portion of truth; however, lacking specification it transforms the
topic of ideas and thinking merely into a topic of taboo and does not help to approach the topic of thinking
from the perspective of a deviser.

If we imagine a devising process, in which one person exclaims “I have an idea!”, we tend to understand the
word idea as a vision or a descriptive image of the way that individual thinks things-ought-to be. It is also in the
common experience that the discussion of ideas and the free exchange of opinions, inevitably lead to
argumentation, which is for the most part fount of endless frustration and a sense of unproductiveness. As a
consequence there arise two different, general strategic trends in collaborative devising: one, is the
‘democratization’ of each person’s position, resulting in the collaborative inclusion of each person’s desire to
manifest their own vision in the outcome of the process. On the other hand we have the attempt to ‘nullify’
ideas in general, for example by working in silence, trying to work as much as possible non-verbally or by
strategies which require the collaborators to stress the psychophysical nature of the work, squeezing out
thinking from the conscious act, which is then dealt with a posteriori by a person who steps in and arranges the
outcome entirely based on that person’s mentality, i.e. the ‘tyranicization’ of ideas.

In any case the point persists that there is a problem regarding the treatment of ideas. What is the problem of
ideas? Where do ideas exist in a creative process? Is it possible to not think? Is thinking a disturbance? Is an
idea constructive or destructive? There is no technique of which to speak that handles ideas the same way that
one might handle clay, in a concrete manner. For this reason questions like ‘where does an idea reside?’ seem
utterly abstract and vacuous, because they lack any specificity. To answer these questions practically will be, as
the title suggests, a description of the praxis of poiesis.

Why poiesis?

Speaking generally art might be supposed to be associated with aims which point beyond itself, namely to the
moral education of the world which it encounters, either on political grounds or otherwise. This all too
common idea implies a utilitarian vision of art which has a use whose value lies quite beyond its own capacity,
placing art in a state of aspiration to a higher and greater good which exists outside of art itself. This is not the
case in our particular conception of art as poiesis. Implied by the word, ‘poiesis’ presents itself as a
reconciliation of the above mentioned antinomy of means and end; art in our conception has to do with an
unveiling and self-revelation of that which art is in-itself as creation, thereby manifesting an essence which is
inchoate in the very artistic act, being thus an act which incarnates this essence as immediately superseded by
a revealed ‘otherness’.

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This idea of art as poiesis for our purpose embraces theatre which falls into consideration under this ‘poetic (or
creative) act of revelation’ in that its primary substance is the same as that of poetry, in which the external and
sensuous play of sound and sight are able to embrace the gamut of possible representations of human
circumstance while at once penetrating with language into the deeper regions of the inner nature of human
thought. But one may ask, how is theatre and poetry to be considered so isomorphic?

As to our typical understanding of the word poetry and in its association to theatre as dramatic poetry driven
by dialogue which can aspire to nothing more than spoken poetry amongst the representation of psychological
acts, I would defer to the theatrical visionary Antonin Artaud when he writes about a theatre of “spatial
poetry” which is a poetry that utilizes all of the elements available to a mis-en-scene. In this regards poetry is
not merely reduced to the sounds of words and the thoughts, which are stirred by their meaning, but it extends
to other ‘semiotic spheres’ in which we perceive ‘text’ non verbally, in, for example, the ‘language of dance’.

A note on the composition of poetry and the contemporary problems surrounding it, will be reserved for a post
script as our main concern is not of an aesthetic nature but of a practical nature. Thus we move on to the Praxis
of Poiesis, in which I will highlight the embodied elements, which constitute the organic parts of this process of
revelation.

Praxis and its Division

In the most basic sense we can understand praxis as ‘embodiment’. Praxis is an enactment of an element,
which has no other purpose other than its own immanent expression. Of course this is not strictly the case of a
performance since in the performing arts poiesis (what the art act reveals through creation) and praxis (the
embodied art act) are simultaneous. However, performance, here, is not our scope so we limit to speaking of
the embodiment of a process; that process in which the continuous embodiment of certain elements points to
poiesis as the outcome of such a process, here devising.

My mentor and dear director Pavel Stourač once suggested to me, in passing, that theatre always has the three
elements of ritual, play and mimesis. My reflection upon his comment led me to try and grasp these
‘categories’ in both the practical and theoretical application of each. The following pages, thus, are in large part
the results of my experience as a theatre maker who maintained this division in mind. I must say however that
besides the authority of suggestion, if there is an absolute necessity that these elements be maintained for
devising, it is not expressed here, though one might be inclined to find such a necessity. I say this only to press
the point that for me, at least in principle, this division is purely of a conventional nature.

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The advantage that I have found of using this triad for observing a process comes from the fact that each
element is easily separated out from the others and that by viewing them simultaneously one is able to
heighten the complexity of the process into a whole, without losing sight of the function of each element and
the activity which each brings to the process. Moreover there is no fixity either of proportion nor of order
between these elements which allows a fluidity and flexibility of creative strategies in their combination and
arrangement.

As to the matter of thought the question will be at once simplified once we ‘attach’ thinking to each of the
elements; it will undoubtedly yield a higher and increasingly complex analysis as the combination takes place
and poiesis begins to come into view.

These elements of Ritual, Play and Mimesis are to be understood as modalities in which work and exploration
take place so that any exercise may be analyzed from one or more of these ‘perspectives’. However they are
not only analytic tools. If one adopts these perspectives in a devising context each element conveys its own
dynamic generative force focusing the work in a productive way. I have found that It is often risky in a devising
process to begin with some arbitrary exercise either because it is too narrowly geared towards a technical
aspect or it creates an abstractness too grand to know how to proceed without bringing in another arbitrary
limitation. These ‘elements’ of ritual, mimesis and play, help to avoid mono-logical trappings and a stiffening of
a process, which purports to be ‘organic’.

It should not be surprising that genuine investigation into the relationship between thought and processes of
creation might involve both a ‘theoretical’ and a ‘practical’ side, and that often these should coincide. As such I
have accompanied each section with a ‘practical’ exercise. It almost goes without saying that these
prescriptions must be attempted in order to be grasped.

Ritual

In the most basic sense ritual is an arrangement in space and time of objects, actions thoughts and words,
which can be repeated. One must only think about a religious mass or any ceremony in which a certain and
specific pattern of doings can be observed. In theatre this might be called a ‘score’, which can be either very
elementary stage-maneuvers of actors, objects, etc., or they can be highly complex scores whose actions may
be infinitesimally subdivided into smaller and smaller actions.

The first interesting thing to note is the potential relation of ritual to thought. Where is thought? This can be
understood with recourse to the idea of the ‘mental event’. If we take an event and juxtapose it to a mental

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event four combinations crop up for consideration: it happens and I think about it; it happens and I don’t think
about it; it doesn’t happen and I think about it; and finally it doesn’t happen and I don’t think about it.

We are now considering the relation between the mentality of the performers (those who perform the ritual)
and the ritual itself. We can see that for a hypothetical observer of a ritual this correlation between event and
mental event remains entirely blind, as is, for example, the impossibility for a church-goer to have any insight
as to whether the priest performing the transubstantiation of the body of Christ is at all a believer himself and
if he while reciting the prayers is not thinking of a grocery list or performing some other unrelated mental
event. In fact on this account it is hard to know at all what a ritual is because it always comes to us as pre-
interpreted by the cultural lens which it supports; in the case of the latter example this cultural lens is that of
religion, for without ritual there would be no religion yet religion cannot know what the ritual is in-itself for
religion itself is the very interpretation of its own ritual, that is a structure of beliefs. Likewise in theatre we
cannot know the actions in themselves and no more their intentional meaning other than the fact that they are
the supporting actions of theatre. We will return to the complexity of the idea of ritual later but for now it is
important to point out that in the ritualistic aspect of theatre, i.e. that which can be materially reproduced
there is 1. thought present in the animators of such actions which 2. escapes the grasp of the thought of those
who observe the ritual. This latter aspect presents itself as a simple blindness.

Exercise: object work. Working in a circle, find x number of moments in which the object “speaks”, this could be
a trick, or a characteristic way in which the object tends to move or simply an interesting or odd sequence of
positions. Decide upon an order and compose the found moments into a repeatable score. The work should be
conducted ‘internally’ not ‘externally’ by discussing meaning or possibilities of significance of the work. One
should attempt to ‘get lost’ in the work trying not to project ideas upon the object but allowing the object to
reach out and suggest its own idea and movement. Later, showing and watching the score will involve mimesis.

Play

Play refers to what can be commonly understood by observing sports. In sports the athletes are highly re-
active, their thoughts and bodies are working in a state of quasi simultaneity and their attention is directed to
their present surroundings, so that when a ball flies in their direction they can react and move accordingly. It
is simpler in this case to ask the question ‘where is thought?’ The thoughts of the actors at play are much like
the thinking of the athletes, born in the here and now of the present moment, i.e. they are the natural thinking
of a heightened ‘drama’. This is not to say that athletes are simply like dogs single-mindedly chasing after a ball,
for we see how these athletes emote by exuberant exaltations or by grieving over losses or being moved to
tears by an overwhelming buildup of sensations of competition and camaraderie. The actor likewise when he
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or she is at play focuses their thoughts on the here and now of the ‘scene’ being very aware of the myriad of
elements which exist in the immediate sense of the now: the lights, the fellow actors, the words, the audience,
etc. all the while allowing these sensations to multiply across the body into an intense net of associations as
related to the senses psycho-physically. This is one of the jobs of the ‘instrument’ of the actor to be a re-active
body-mind complex and lay bare their ‘natural’ being in the now of every performance.

Another important aspect of play is that of the corresponding ‘game’. The idea of game can exist across a vast
spectrum from a micro game of ‘tag’ to the macro ‘game of life’, insofar as the rules of a game are mutually
established. A game can acquire strength the more people are privy to the rules of the game, the more a game
is consolidated the more nuance and rule-bending is allowed, thus ‘game’ or rather play is also another word
for complicity which takes the form of a series of normative patterns of comportment around which the
reactions and the natural thinking of the players take place.

Exercise: play a game of tag. Now alter the game by creating and adding nuanced rules and restrictions.
Discuss the success of the new elements of the game, if the rules make it more or less ‘playful’; if a restriction
allows greater freedom; how the game effect one’s mentality; ask what is the psychological makeup of people’s
inter-relation in the game? What is the goal of the game both on an individual level and on a collaborative
level? What does the game favor? reactivity, intuition, problem solving, team mentality, competition, etc.

Mimesis

Mimesis in its most simple understanding means imitation. If one thing imitates another this means that it is
not such a thing as that which it imitates, for if it were such a thing it would have no need to imitate. When one
person imitates another he does not imitate that aspect by which the other is a person, rather he imitates
those aspects of that person which he does not poses. So we can easily deduce that mimesis means ‘something
which stands for another’. In this regard we can say that as we enter into the element of mimesis two things
happen. Firstly it is necessary that a ‘showing’ occurs, for the imitation must be directed at a subject who
catches the resemblance or connection between the imitator and the imitated and secondly that which is
shown is not to be taken as itself but is to be taken as another and this by virtue of the fact that it is shown. We
can call this something, which is shown, a ‘sign’. Thus with the idea that we show something in order to re-
present something other than itself we can say that we are in the general arena of semiotics in which we do
not perceive things as they are but as a ‘signs’ the definition of which can be deduced from above: a sign is
something apprehended which references something other. 2
2
This means that sign understood in its phenomenological expression or materialization as a ‘thing’, escapes us, for as sign
it is already presented to us as interpretation i.e. as already having passed through our thinking – pre-cooked as it were,
no longer a thing but aspiring to be one; a sign thus is already a shape of mentality. Another way to understand sign is by
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Where is thought? In mimesis thought is exactly in the ‘something other’. In other words thought is not on the
stage but it is in another place referenced by the sign and produced by the thinking of the onlookers. This
‘other place’ is the referent, the concept that arises and resides elsewhere and not in the here and now in
which the sign is materially implemented. Another way to put it is that as sign ‘It is thought’, where ‘it’ is the
unperceived and ‘thought’ is the shape of the thing referenced. So thought is held in a state of observation by
those who perceive the ‘it’ as sign.

Here a distinction must be made between the element of mimesis as it appears to different classes of
onlookers. In the framework of a devising process the onlookers as devisers who should consciously observe
the signs as signs and therefore as a hypothetical interpretation, or possibility of that sign’s meaning which has
not as yet been actualized. When these signs confront an audience in the context of a performance (and not
for somebody consciously involved in process) the strength and clarity of the sign will determine the actual
mentality of that audience. The more a sign is stamped with the mark of sociality or the more it is recognized
by a community of people the less it presents itself as sign and the more it will appear as the ‘natural’ mentality
of the onlooker as the shape of an actual thing. On the contrary in so far as an onlooker does not perceive a
thing but perceives a sign, the mark of mentality will be a hypothetical one or a possibility of interpretation.

In the process of devising, mimesis is the element which begs the onlookers qua devisers to reflect not only
upon their own lens of interpretation which will determine the shape of the referent but also other possibilities
of interpretation and thus other lenses by which the sign might actualize into a thing. Mimesis then is the
utmost element of empathy in which onlookers ask themselves “how could somebody else interpret what I
see?” Even something as basic as a body on stage will actualize as different things according to the different
cultural lenses which will search for the most accepted idea of ‘body’, the most accepted of course according to
their cultural background and to the pressures of the surrounding culture in which the sign is implemented.

Again, mimesis is a showing in which the onlooker tries to maintain a distinction between thing qua actualized
interpretation which appears to the beholder as a representation of the objectivity of their own inner
experience - and sign qua hypothetical, aspiring to different potential avenues for the individual to link up to
the social fabric and the normative intercourse between people ideas and things. The activity of mimesis is a
reflection upon what one sees, a reflection, more precisely, upon one’s own culturally clichéd thinking. 3

attributing it to a value: I value something in that it could hypothetically be something for me; when this something
achieves this being it no longer has that value. As such a sign always remains in the hypothetical representation.
3
Here we can comment on the role of the individual in that as long as a person persists in the role of observer of sign, their
individuality is maintained in a state of hypothetical engagement, emancipated from action. Whereas when a ‘real thing’ is
perceived instead of a sign then such an individual has already submitted their will to upholding the ‘group picture’ by
acting in accordance with the role they play in the community which functions in harmony with such a group picture.
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Exercise: create a small fragment or an entrée; view it once neutrally, before viewing it a second time give it a
title. Discuss how the title directs the interpretation and directs the focus to certain details. Play with different
titles to see how the different verbal and non-verbal signs and motifs attach to other signs and motifs in order
to deploy themselves in a context and determine their implicit meaning by unfolding into that context.

Putting them together

What follows are some possible ways of understanding how these elements can overlap and react to each
other to create more specific practices. These examples are by no means meant to be exhaustive. They are but
findings in my own experience of teaching and theatre making. The reader is thus invited to extrapolate what
he or she may find of essence in each description and parody that essence in his or her own work.

Mimesis and ritual

When ritual and mimesis are combined we come close to what might be considered ‘symbolic thinking’. In this
combination thought is very clearly double for it exists in the persons performing the actions of the ritual and
also in the persons who watch those actions and look for a significance therein. ‘Symbolic thinking’ only means
that in watching persons performing a ritual, as an onlooker I am thinking about a symbol, which is also
thinking. In other words the performer is a thinking symbol and the onlooker is thinking about that symbol. It is
of utmost importance to understand that this complexity exists weather we are conscious of it or not and that
making it conscious does a great service to subsequent manipulation of all the parts which go into a devising
process. The most fundamental point to stress here is that of the concept of intention.

Exercise: create individually or collectively a site-specific piece or fragment. Make sure that the creation
interacts with the specificities of the surrounding space and place for which the piece is conceived. Subsequently
perform the piece in another ‘neutral’ space. The performers will have to stay as faithful to their score as
possible only remembering the reasons why their score was conceived in such a specific way imagining by
recollection a different surrounding then the one they are immersed in. From the outside, comment on the
quality of the performance, of the movements and of the presence of the performers. It will be noticed that the
quality of their performance is heightened by their intention to keep themselves immersed in their memory and
to perform with great precision their movements. It becomes immediately apparent that the intention of the
performers (of the ritual) is utterly hidden from view of those who are watching (mimesis) who are ignorant to
the intended context of the actions. A common error is revealed in that we generally imagine that it is our
‘intention’ to communicate that makes communication successful, whereas we can see that communication
happens only in the sharing of common signs; intension is present but quite irrelevant to communication itself.
Intension is fundamental only to action.

This praxis of overlap in ritual and mimesis creates cognitive distance between the thing perceived (actions in
which thought arises in the past) and the perceiver (watching actions where in watching thought arises in the
present). This cognitive gap is necessary to take into account when working with ‘symbolic thinking’ (i.e.
devising with thinking symbols, or, actions which think). In this sense this aspect of theatre becomes a
‘meaning creating matrix’, the meaning residing in the mentality of the onlooker who cannot see the action for
its true intention but only employs the vision of the action to shape their mentality elsewhere. This is the same

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mechanism as seeing shapes and images in clouds; one no longer sees the cloud for what it is but only the
shape of a rabbit, which is ‘projected’ on the ‘meaning-less’ movements of the cloud. This mechanism is also
commonly known as imagination.

Play and mimesis

When we speak of the coincidence of play and mimesis we refer to a particular meditative state of awareness
of a person who plays, knowing that the game is only for show. It is interesting to note that the sanskrit word
for contemplation is Dhyana. This word comes from the root Dhi- which means something like poetic vision. In
this type of meditation there are two fundamental aspects which are abhyasa and vairagya.

Abhyasa in its common understanding means to practice or to concentrate, but literally it can be translated as
-to prevail over, to reign over, to be above. Much like that in order to prevail over the opposing team one must
practice. The other aspect of dhyana is vairagya which literally means non-colored but more commonly
understood as detachment.

In Dhyana meditation the subject concentrates on an object and prevails over that object while being
detached. What does this mean? Typically it is objects which color our mind and induce us to act upon them. If
for example I see before me custard cream, then this custard cream takes hold of me and transforms me into
an appetite, inducing me to succumb to the object and thus unite with the custard cream. If however I am able
to prevail over the custard cream it means that I concentrate on it and hold it in its place in order to keep it
present to my mind without letting it prevail over my mood. I remain detached from the object which I
contemplate. What does this have to do with play and mimesis?

If I am aware that the game which I play is for show then it is not my intention to be consumed by my desire to
win, rather I concentrate to maintain the game by my play but in a state of detachment; I actively contemplate
my play, as a poetic vision for the higher sake of ‘showing’.

It is an enviable status that of a person who delights in life weather he should continue living or die in the next
moment, he who plays the game because it is but a poetic showing, and who’s brow in not furrowed by the
concern of winning or losing, who amidst they own activity keeps the game and the constant play of thoughts
at bay by a detachment of mind and an unbound joy in existence.

Exercise: Play a game of tag or any other physical high-speed game. Allot someone to clap their hands in the
heat of the moment. At the sound of the clap everybody should continue plying the game without hesitation but
in slow motion. Try now to observe who uses the slow motion to ‘win’. Continue this exercise until the
competition transforms into a complicit ‘showing’ of ‘play’.

It should be specified that the above discussion involved mimesis only as a sort of ‘internal’ mimesis of those
who are at play in that they show to themselves their own aloof involvement in the game. However the
discussion does not need to be limited to this mental state of the performer for the showing can of course be
also for an ‘external’ onlooker. This mixture of play and mimesis i.e. of who plays and who perceives can have
an innumerable quantity of combinations in a devising process.

Play and ritual

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If ritual is a fixity of action and play is a series of spontaneous re-actions based on the rules of a game then the
encounter of these two elements might be understood as the all too invoked “action-reaction”. In a sense we
can imagine play and ritual being inversely proportionate but not in an absolute sense.

A theatre performance can have a minutely detailed fixity of structure which doesn’t allow any ‘improvisation’,
in which case any ‘game’ which the actors will foster amongst themselves will be invisible if not to the secret-
inner life of the actors. Allowing one’s inner reactivity and world of spontaneous sensation to expand within
the container of a fixed score gives life to a ritual and creates a strong foundation for the imagination of an
onlooker to take root.

On the flip-side if the game becomes explicit, it will tend to de-stabilize the agreed upon series of ritual actions.
This is commonly known as improvisation. A classic example of a somewhat even compromise between ritual
and play is the cannovaccio from the commedia dell’arte, in which the rules of play (the boundaries of
improvisation) are made explicit to the audience and are well established between the actors themselves and
work in contrast to the fixity of the plot structure (ritual).

Exercise: take some text, dialogue or otherwise composed into a score amongst multiple ‘players’. Recite the
dialogue while attempting to play ‘capture the flag’ (take an object from the other player’s ‘zone’) in the most
‘non-explicit’ way possible. Be creative in the way you counter your opponents attempts to capture your flag by
interweaving the text into the strategy. Try and feel this contradiction in tasks between sticking with the score
and improvising your ‘win’. This tension comes in infinite variety.

Ritual, play and mimesis

Here not much can be said other than the fact that once a group has achieved a certain autonomy and
specificity of these three elements, the next step is to find different avenues of their development as a totality.
This can be done by giving more or less importance to one or more of the elements or dividing the labor
amongst the devisers so that some take care of the ritual, others of mimesis and yet others of the game. Any
one of these elements can also serve the ven-function of organizing the whole process. For example the
onlookers might be given a privileged position in that they report to the group the possible avenues of
‘actualization’ which arise from watching. Or a ‘meta-game’ might be established between the elements which
impinge externally upon the configuration of these elements, much like the chance compositions of John Cage.
Infinite approaches are possible and it is here where poiesis starts, when a praxis of all the elements of theatre
are established, something will be revealed, how to catch this revelation will of course entirely depend on the
insight of who is devising.

Post script on thought and composition

Here I will limit myself to few overarching remarks, since a digression on composition in general would soon
lead to another enterprise altogether.

In the preface I mentioned the relation between art and thought, stating that we live in an epoch where
thinking and its autonomy play a fundamental role in almost every cultural sphere so as to rival art in

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importance. In what followed in the body of the paper, while each element was described, the whereabouts of
thinking was always suggested as a fundamental aspect of each element in determining its ‘function’ in the
overall process.

However, now that we can say to have restored to consciousness, at least in part, the mechanics of thinking
during a devising process, we might now ask where does thought in general come in the equation when we
speak of composition?

According to Shklovsky the history of art is the history of the transformation from poetry to prose. In poetry
something is revealed by way of thinking inhabiting the sensuous. Shklovsky understands this as thought being
embedded in an ‘estranged’ material so as to bring to life sensations as something new. When the effects of
estrangement wear off, what was once perceived as poetic becomes prosaic, i.e. a simple matter of the
understanding. Thus for Shklovsky it is always the role of the artist to submerge thinking into the sensuous, by
rearranging the sensuous into strange forms.

Hegel speaks about two separate conditions under which poetry comes about. In one case poetry naively
grasps a sensuous truth which has not yet been achieved by the Understanding. In another case poetry deals
with an idea which is already recognized and developed by the prosaic understanding. Thought, in this latter
case-“knows the sphere from which it must liberate itself in order to stand on the free ground of art and
therefore develops in conscious distinction from prose.” 4 This is the challenge of our times, in which thinking
has already infiltrated every cultural nook and cranny. This extra effort must be made in order to re-shape
something which we know in our analytic thought into a sensuous and spiritual truth which rears itself in its
own autonomy.

Vygotsky, who observed children drawing, saw that they developed in three stages. In the first stage the child
drew something and only after named it. In the second stage they begin to draw, name what it is and then
complete the picture. In the final stage the child (now adult) names what he or she will draw and then
executes the drawing.

The artistic wisdom told by Picasso in his dictum “I’m not searching, I’m finding” shows that he has traversed
these stages in reverse, so that he does not know what he draws until it is done and thus revealed to him, but,
make no mistake, Picasso has not forgotten how to draw.

Likewise, when we compose we mustn’t forget how to think but we must think poetically as if for the first time,
to let thought itself draw us into union with its own inner processes, to reveal in creation what thought already
knows of itself.

Now, these remarks are somewhat restricted to the doings of an individual poet (or painter or what have you)
but in theatre the individual poet is replaced by a community of devisers. Thus thinking can be performed by a
division of labor, so that ‘thinking poetically’ becomes a thinking which is distributed functionally throughout
different collaborative elements. This allows thinking to be consciously and knowingly performed and
embodied while simultaneously giving it over to a collective process of revelation in which as process can stand
autonomously on its own two feet.

4
Hegel, Lectures on Art vol. ii page 1006 T.M. Knox
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Samuel Angus McGehee

Meliciano

February 2019

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