Let's Talk About Theater and Truth

Truth and theater share a double binding. In Spanish, we say “no le hagas caso, es puro teatro”: something like “don't take him/her seriously, this is just theater”—“teatro” here being equivalent to theatrical as “2: having qualities suggestive of a stage play or of an actor's performance: deliberately or exaggeratedly dramatic or emotional” (https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/theatrical). Theater can be mere deceit, but it can also be the place to speak the truth.In the context of the Latin American civil–military dictatorships from the 1950s, parrhesia (Foucault 1983) emerged as a fundamental aspect of the theatrical event not only because speaking the truth put theater artists in danger but also because they were invested by a moral aura built—most probably—on their engagement with political change. Moreover, theater provided a relatively safe space for “public” encounters where the dissidents came together and recognized themselves as a community—we should not forget that, at the peak of the Dictatorship, gatherings of more than five people were banned by law in Chile. This gregarious condition of theater allowed its practitioners to face fear with a greater esprit de corps, thus creating space for resistance and denunciation.In Discourse and Truth: The Problematization of Parrhesia (1983), Michel Foucault discusses “truth-telling as a specific activity, or as a role” (64), digging deep into its problematization in Greek philosophy and how it informed Euripides’ tragedies. The question of truth-telling, mimesis, and verisimilitude has informed Western theater, resulting in various artistic and aesthetic modes or regimes of referentiality to reality. In this context, Bertolt Brecht's proposal of the Verfremdungseffekt (1953) infused the aesthetic practices of twentieth-century theater and reinforced its commitment to participate in political transformation.The idea of theater's political agency and its capacity to serve as a counterdiscourse for hegemonic forces has held fast. In the already-mentioned text on parrhesia, Foucault states a series of questions: Who is able to tell the truth? What are the moral, the ethical, and the spiritual conditions which entitle someone to present himself as, and to be considered as, a truth-teller? About what topics is it important to tell the truth? (About the world? About nature? About the city? About behavior? About man?) What are the consequences of telling the truth? What are its anticipated positive effects for the city, for the city's rulers, for the individual, etc.? And finally: what is the relation between the activity of truth-telling and the exercise of power, or should these activities be completely independent and kept separate? (65)All these questions are still relevant to interrogating theater's role in society. Nevertheless, in the following pages, I focus on “the topics about which it is important to tell the truth.” I propose that the answer to this question is a problematization of the relationship between theater and truth in globalized post-pandemic times. Here, I follow Foucault's definition: A problematization is always a kind of creation; but a creation in the sense that, given a certain situation, you cannot infer that this kind of problematization will follow. Given a certain problematization, you can only understand why this kind of answer appears as a reply to some concrete and specific aspect of the world. (66)After World War II, the long battle between Marxism and Capitalism resettled far from Europe. Latin America was the arena where both bands deployed overt and surreptitious strategies to win over the continent; the cultural field also participated in the struggle. Theater practitioners usually supported the revolutionary forces and political leaders in their intent to transform society. When the series of civilian–military coups overturned the progressive regimes, artists told the truth about state political violence; truth-telling in this context equates to the denunciation of violations of human rights and, more specifically, of disappearance. By the end of the twentieth century, Latin American dictatorships had secured capital neoliberalism and were ready to hand the power to elected governments—or at least, this was the case in Chile.In the meantime—and not only in this continent—Brecht's political theater expanded into various aesthetic forms, resorting to testimonies and other documentary material to assert their embeddedness in reality. Nowadays, the presence of the Real on stage has become a global, ubiquitous phenomenon feeding on the productive relationship between presentation and representation that has always been central to the theater because its performers are always themselves and, at the exact same time, others (Féral 2004, 94, my translation).Summarizing 2000 years of theater and political agency intertwining in two pages might be ludicrous. Nevertheless, it serves a purpose. Jennifer Thompson states that Chilean theater responds to a “political imperative” (2021). In recent years, three subsequent events have claimed theater's attention: the Feminist Wave (March 2018), the “Estallido Social” (October 2019), and the COVID-19 pandemic (2020–2021). In these scenarios, arts proved to be a medium for expressing political demands or providing solace and improving well-being. Despite these benefits tributing to theater's raison d’être, practitioners have experienced the precarity of artistic labor more deeply than ever and have become more skeptical about their real agency and its capacity to offer an alternative to “capitalist realism” (Fisher 2009).In the last years, Chilean theater has been confronted with the limits of its agency. The magnitude of recent political upheavals or the sociosanitary crisis has overcome its power by far. However, this failure has been productive in finding an answer to what truth theater might speak about. From a humbler position than ever, theater might speak its truth, self-criticizing its hegemonical practices, exclusions, and fears. Though my analysis focuses on the Chilean landscape, indulge me if I start recalling a foreign production that made me fully aware of theater bending its own traditional rules.On Tuesday, January 5, 2023, I attended a show. More than two years had passed since my last visit to an arts venue, as happened to all of us during the pandemic. I was going to watch Molly Bloom, a Belgian production based on the last chapter of James Joyce's Ulysses. I was glad to be back in the theater; I also appreciated the long, enthusiastic applause at the end of a play that was difficult to watch. It was an 80-minute solo performance encapsulated in a dreary set design. And yet, it was captivating—and not only for those working in theater, judging by the generous applause. I will not detail the story of a highly complex female character caught in the web of social constrictions that gripped Irish women in the early twentieth century. Instead, I want to talk about the impression she left on me.I arrive just in time, rather late to reach my seat before the show starts. I take the first unoccupied seat I see. The lights of the stage and those of the hall are on. The set design is minimal and ugly: a table, three different chairs, and nothing matching anything. A few minutes later, Viviane de Muynck (b. 1946) enters; she is old and fat but moves with unexpected agility. No mystery there; Viviane has been performing Molly for decades.Theater is the memory of an era and, at the same time, the memory and history of itself. It is also memory in the most banal sense of the word. The actress must learn a text, and remember the director's guidelines, entrances and exits, and a complete set of movements and gestures. This mnemonic load is partly why old actors and actresses are rarely seen on stage—in Chilean theater, outstandingly so.Or that's how we like to think things are, because the agility and mastery Viviane de Muynck exhibits from the moment she sets foot on stage are astonishing. I am watching a performer so used to being on stage that she flows, moved by instinct. And her aging body accompanies her, no matter how little it fits my expectations of what an actress's body should look like.However, while that body remembers without hesitation what the stage calls for, her memory of the text does not keep pace. Well into the play, the actress stops, hesitates, looks backstage, and asks—with captivating innocence and sensuality: “And . . . ?” And a voice is heard “giving” her the text from backstage; a voice that is distinguishable but does not seek any protagonism. The moments of forgetting will keep repeating; she will keep asking for text, and this will the performance watching with other theater production and conditions were different from and memory not have the it has in the last the of was a and of a theater not but a I look I might have caught the actress the last as if for the I a where keep a that without as the show this it does not the of memory that And by the that this is on are all aware of the that the over women in the but this is something I the theater on aging and how it as I that I theater the progressive cultural practices, the Western theatrical has its own Viviane de Muynck is a that the that an aging performer with memory cannot on stage and offer a to her by is a and Molly is a and that is a that is always given to my same as I like to think that “the my in theater as a of the of a where the of an between someone and someone himself to be by that performance in specific a present of In the of Viviane de Muynck not only Molly Bloom, she also exhibits as a of those no the of theater in of the theater's the de or the of was is my if I it some I for theater and The documentary material and the denunciation role are as as the between the real and the of The of the by and of the This and stage proposal on the theatrical of two on the and on the have been to their and but also to the without which the documentary history and not something to the of of which the of a of what we both in the events that it and its it is the history of and the as a of a and of the and its specific of my theater from a by the for and and and it two years of artistic and before is the only theater as in Chile. 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Context (archaeology · Dictatorship · Face (sociological concept · Politics · Problematization · Resistance (ecology · Verisimilitude · Foucault, Power, and Ethics · Samuel Beckett and Modernism · Theatre and Performance Studies

• Horizons of Impossibility

  Jennifer Joan Thompson•Theatre Journal•2021

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