Jonathan Cripps

           Of the plethora of responses raised against this perceived apathetical crisis, I wish to narrow my gaze to the theatrical avant-garde, and in particular examine the situation of Ariane Mnouchkine’s Theatre du Soleil in this context. In his book Avant Garde Theatre: 1892 – 1992, Christopher Innes undertakes an expansive and detailed study of the practitioners of avant-garde theatre, isolating a number of particular factors as being common to all. A dissatisfaction with the mainstream appears to be taken as read, when Innes states that “the avant-garde as a whole seems united primarily in terms of what they are against: the rejection of social institutions…and established artistic conventions”, however it is both motivation and manner which isolate the avant-garde from other, concurrent artistic movements. The rejection of mainstream social convention is, for Innes, the symptom of a broader concern; namely a dissatisfaction with the ubiquity of rational thought in art, philosophy and culture. Among the proponents of the avant-garde (which, Innes reminds us, is broadly a retrospective endowment), a chief concern was the exploration of mental and psychological states beyond the narrow and exclusively rational ideas presented by mainstream theatre. Judith Miller, in her account of the work of Mnouchkine, describes the situation that led to the creation of the Theatre du Soleil:

“From the end of the nineteenth century, and in sync with a generalized European arts movement, part of the French art world has sought a way to uncover what the veneer of civilization has potentially hidden. To put this another way, many artists have hoped to re-find the soul of art they believed buried by bourgeois and industrialized society. Some perceived this soul in what was considered to be “primitive” art from non-Western countries…Searching for “reality” beyond the commitment to reason and logic, which the Enlightenment project had privileged, suspicious of the construction of a real which did not include dream states and intuition, theatre-makers pursued contact with arts from Asia as a means of inventing a theater both multi-layered and emotionally truthful.”

Innes, too, considers this trend toward primitivism to be at the heart of the avant-garde movement. “What links the works of Strindberg, Artaud, Brook and Mnouchkine is an idealisation of the elemental and a desire to find ritual in archaic traditions. This widespread primitivism is the key to understanding both the political and aesthetic aspects of modern theatre”.
                I wish to explore in which ways this primitivism has been manifest in the work of Mnouchkine, and how this relates to the concerns of other avant-garde practitioners. Central to much theatrical exploration of both foreign and ancient cultures is an idea of mythic storytelling, and, as the mythographer Laurence Coupe reminds us, “if literary myth takes the form of drama, it cannot escape the suggestion of ritual.” Innes credits the belief that “symbolic or mythopoeic thinking precedes language and discursive reason, revealing fundamental aspects of reality that are unknowable by any other means” as the motivating factor behind this particular element of avant-garde exploration. Certainly, this has been the concern of practitioners such as Peter Brook and Jerzy Grotowski, for whom an exploration of what might be termed the ‘deep structures’ of theatre could expose overlooked elements of humanity. Yet despite Mnouchkine’s work -  particularly during and after the 1980s – greatly resembling mythic storytelling and often having ritualistic appearance, the direction from which she comes at theatre is markedly different. From their inception in 1964, the Soleil have been an unrelentingly politically conscious company, with early productions responding directly to contemporary events in French society. Brook, for example, has instead privileged a voyage to the roots of theatre above overt political concerns, highlighting what Miller calls “the ubiquitous idea of process becoming more important than product”. For Grotowski, the foregrounding of process in his quest for spiritual awakening through theatrical exploration led him to abandon public productions altogether. It is at least arguable that the primary concern for most practitioners of avant-garde theatre has been a deep questioning of the central parameters of theatre itself, with productions serving as representations of an ongoing experiment rather than stand-alone manifestations of political belief. In this respect, Mnouchkine’s primary concerns diverge. Though the company may undertake to understand something fundamental about the nature of theatre, this is in service of the mounting of a production with a specific and real-world application.
                This can perhaps best be described as the difference between discovery and invention. Mnouchkine makes no pretence about adapting extant theatrical traditions to suit her own ends, stating:

“We are not resuscitating ancient theatrical forms, commedia dell’arte or traditional Chinese theatre. We want to reinvent the rules of the game by which everyday reality is portrayed, revealing it not to be familiar and unchangeable, but astonishing and capable of transformation.” 

Many avant-garde practitioners have, as Innes notes, sought to extricate themselves and their work from their contexts and universalise their performance style and matter. This was Brook’s specific intention in taking a small group of actors and musicians on a tour of north-western Africa and creating a series of vignettes that were wordless and involved what he considered to be a universal language of physicality. In this respect, as evidenced by many of the company’s receptions by local communities, the tour was a consummate failure. For Brook, a universal style was exterior, existing somewhere between history and culture; whereas for Mnouchkine, it is a possession which can only be realised through extensive training. 
                However, if the creation or adaptation of performance style is at the heart of Mnouchkine’s work, and her productions are principally aimed at contemporary European audiences, what role does the avant-garde practice of mythic-storytelling have in her oeuvre? Among her canon of productions, only a small handful can be said to be mythological in nature and only one – the 1990-93 cycle of Greek plays entitled Les Atrides – has been an extant myth. Therefore is the supposition of the centrality of myth and ritual in her work misplaced? If, as Innes states, the avant-garde is philosophically bracketed by a concern with the ritualistic, does Mnouchkine belong among these practitioners at all? He states that:

“…primitivism goes hand in hand with aesthetic experimentation designed to advance the technical progress of the art itself by exploring fundamental questions: ‘The questions are: What is a theatre? What is a play? What is an actor? What is a spectator? What is the relation between them all? What conditions serve this best?’"

In answer to these questions, Mnouchkine has exhibited a highly traditional tendency. While early productions experimented gently with stage geography, the role of the actor (which Miller relates to Artaud’s ‘athlete of the heart’), the configuration of the stage and the situation of the audience have usually been exactly as one might expect from theatre.
                The evidence that Mnouchkine might occupy a different ideological space to the bulk of avant-garde practitioners is persuasive. Whereas the majority of other practitioners have attempted to explore traditional performance styles in order to discover a universal theatre, Mnouchkine relies only on what she personally considers to be a theatrical absolute and applies this to the development of productions with direct political relevance. Moreover, the instances of ritualised performance styles are by no means ubiquitous in her productions, and are favoured in plays with existing mythopoeic elements – such as the Greek myths and the Shakespeare Cycle of 1981-84. Many productions foreground dramatized events from either current or local history and, as Miller notes, have become increasingly globalised in outlook over the years. Despite the company (and the avant-garde generally) typically resisting what Mnouchkine terms ‘psychological naturalism’, a number of recent productions have sailed dangerously close to this territory. Le Dernier Caravanserail (2003-6), which told of the migration of Middle Eastern refugees and was inspired by visits to detention centres in Australia while touring their previous production Tambours sur la Dige (1999), was performed mainly in Farsi and Dari and as such “decenters what is most crucial to French identity, the French language”. Such a device exposes Mnouchkine’s concern with the changing face of France and its contemporary position in a wide geopolitical framework. The following production, Les Ephemeres (2007), could readily be categorised as naturalistic. Despite a tendency toward the melodramatic, her most recent production of Macbeth (2014) would seem to be situated closer to the study of naturalism than the representative styles usually associated with her productions.
                This is, however, by no means an exclusive treatment. Innes notes that “the misconception that ritualistic, mythical theatre and political theatre are mutually exclusive opposites…is far too commonly accepted," and this is perhaps best evinced by the productions of the Soleil. There are a number of ways in which their work can be said to possess mythic elements: their mytholigisation of history, the use of formalised/traditional performance practices in rehearsal, the use of ritualistic performance styles in certain productions, the creation of epic theatre, and the belief in actor and audience transformation. All of these elements serve a guided, political purpose culminating in a production, however each has what Innes considers to be “the hallmark of avant-garde drama…an aspiration to transcendence, to the spiritual in its widest sense”. Mnouchkine has made this explicit herself, stating in an interview with the Guardian “I hate the word ‘production’. It’s a ceremony, a ritual. You should go out of the theatre more human than when you went in”. Certainly, this sentiment would seem to exalt the position of theatre as transformative, a quality which Karen Armstrong notes is basic to myth:

“A myth is not a story that can be recited in a profane or trivial setting. Because it imparts sacred knowledge, it is always recounted in a ritualised setting that sets it apart from ordinary profane experience, and can only be understood in the solemn context of spiritual and psychological transformation.”

Such a performance is not unique to theatre, let alone the avant-garde, however. It is therefore necessary to identify precisely how Mnouchkine addresses mythic story in her work. The ritualization of the theatrical experience is, for Mnouchkine, an ideological enabler, and is best understood by an examination of the company’s 1981 production of Shakespeare’s Richard II. The production had strong overtones of Japanese culture, and Miller notes that “the central and most important aspect of this turn to Asia in Richard II was the latitude it afforded her to create the feeling of staged ritual”. As previously noted, the Asian influences were not replications but sites of imaginative investigation. The actor who played the title role, Georges Bigot, notes in an interview that “this form, this transposition of the ritual of the play, wasn’t derived from a pre-existing theatrical language. We created it entirely. Each movement, each gesture was invented by the actors”. This gives us insight into the creative process of the company. Ritualisation, it seems, was considered the most powerful way of representing this play. Bigot notes later in the interview that the Japanese influence was slowly developed, however the need for a codified form was present from the outset. The intention, as Miller notes, was to “geometrise power”, alerting us to the political intention of the production; however the aesthetic effect of the ritualisation on the audience “so transcended the ordinary that it attained the luminous power of the sacred”. In this way, we can align certain productions of Mnouchkine with the broader desire of the avant-garde to establish spiritually powerful, non-rational reactions among spectators through an exploration of mythic states.
                There are several ways in which the presence of mythic or mystical understandings takes on a more quotidian role at the Soleil. Mnouchkine discusses, knowingly or otherwise, the journey of an actor in ways that echo the structure of a number of extant myths, suggesting too that mythic qualities in performance – by which I mean those which imply an inexplicable understanding of something transcendent – are crucial to the actor’s work. In an interview with Fruits magazine, Mnouchkine describes an actor’s journey as that of a person entering a dark, subterranean tunnel in order to explore and return in some way enlightened. This is reiterated, albeit with a slightly different metaphorical structure, in Adrian Kiernander’s book Ariane Mnouchkine (1993), where she states that an actor resembles a deep sea diver, delving to great metaphorical depths in search of renewed wisdom (1993, p. 19). These metaphors closely resemble concepts of transformation found in myths such as the Ugaritic Ba’al cycle, the Odysseus myth, the story of Christ et al, whereby a protagonist must descend beneath the earth and actually or metaphorically die to his or her former self in order to be renewed. Karen Armstrong notes that this is a concept ritually and actively practiced in some Shamanic cultures. While Mnouchkine may be limiting her discourse to metaphor, the sense of a mystical, personal and transformative journey into the earth in order to emerge new and with greater understanding employs a strongly mythic narrative. While an overt link to the primitivism and mythic preoccupation cited by Innes may only be suggested here, her assertion that an actor’s journey is essentially spiritual places her work firmly within Innes’ understanding of the avant-garde.
                Mnouchkine’s work with mask further advocates a mystic quality. During a series of workshops in September of 2015, I experienced the Soleil mask work with Mnouchkine first-hand. In a letter inviting participants to take part, it was noted that the masks were “waiting impatiently” for the actors’ arrival, endowing the masks with an emotional existence independent of the presence of an actor. This concept became strengthened during the workshops, where participants were introduced to the characters of the masks at length, as if trying to suss them out. Once an actor felt they were ready, they were selected to be dressed in a separate area by members of the Soleil – a process which would often take upwards of half an hour - and they would then wait patiently at the side of the stage, which was visible and therefore considered ‘onstage’. They would there try to acquire a sense of the mask’s character by assimilating what they had been told, what they had already seen, and what they were feeling in the present moment. When summoned, they would enter the space through an upstage curtain and improvise a scene; this being the test as to whether they had “understood” the mask. Crucially, the mask was not an item to be interpreted by an actor; it could not be played according to what an actor wished to make it do. In a correct understanding of the mask, the object itself guided the improvisation. Often, actors’ resources led to their trying to dictate the nature of the mask and the direction of the exercise; something which engendered an emotion close to fury in Mnouchkine. In virtually every case, the participants did not successfully embody the mask and the exercise was stopped very quickly. There were, however, a number of moments where the mask could be said to have ‘lived’, and while there was, in each case, a different actor behind the mask, the character of the mask was the same. The participants watching, before long, would understand the character of the mask and be able to tell themselves when an actor was correctly embodying its character or not. Despite an extraordinarily high failure rate, Mnouchkine was usually very upbeat about failure (provided that the actor did not try to “lie” by directing the exercise), often stating that a participant had “understood something” and that it ought to take a very long time before one were able to be a “good host” for the mask.
                The idea of the character inhabiting the actor and requiring a body to come to life contains a strong mystical overtone. As Miller notes of masks: “What better vehicle for exteriorising psychic states and focusing on myths and magic, for reinforcing a ritualistic pattern of performance, for taking distance from the everyday, for heightening the sense of ‘presentness’?” Improvisations would involve Madame Mnouchkine, standing in the stalls, asking questions of the mask, trying to offer it space to become itself. If a process was unsuccessful, Mnouchkine would ask the mask “Who is your actor?”, reinforcing the independence of the mask’s existence from that of the participant. Laurence Coupe notes that “For its purpose, myth may always exceed its origin…myth may imply a hierarchy, but it also implies a horizon: it is a disclosure of unprecedented worlds, an opening on to other possible worlds which transcend the established limits of our actual world”. It is indeed an assumption of life at the Soleil that such a world exists alongside their own; one which is able to come into contact with our own only under precise circumstances of mind, body, space and ritual. The mask tradition is, in this respect, a mythic device.
                On a less visible level, one may also consider Mnouchkine’s mythopoeia. A hallmark of the company is their treatment of extant historical events in epic dramatic form, examples of which include the French revolution in the productions 1789 and 1793 (1970), the genocide of Cambodia in Norodom Sihanouk (1985) and the separation of the Indian subcontinent into India and Pakistan in L’Indiade (1987). Both Norodom Sihanouk and L’Indiade ran to in excess of five hours each and, like much of Mnouchkine’s work, involved themes of war, genocide and the displacement of peoples. While dramatizing actual historical events, the scale and theme of the pieces are most readily comparable to Greek dramas, and Miller notes that the latter production was “an epic theatrical journey alluding to Homer”. Importantly, the aforementioned production Le Dernier Caravanserail was subtitled ‘Odysseus’ and was, in part, inspired by the mythological saga. In these productions, there is perhaps a suggestion that the so-called ordinary lives of some communities has a mythological scale to it; however it is also arguable that a belief that the underlying structure of mythic story – particularly in terms of saga – has widespread dramatic application. This is virtually the opposite notion to Brook and Grotowski. Where they sought the presence of transcendence onstage, Mnouchkine presents life as-it-happens to be transcendent and worthy of mythological status. It was unsurprising that Mnouchkine would eventually undertake a cycle of Greek tragedies in the House of Atreus Cycle (1990), which Mnouchkine herself considered to be a “parable” of the birth of democracy, mythically rendered. As well as dramatic events which bear hallmarks of mythic structure, such as theophanies, the initial endeavour of such productions can be seen as a mytholigisation of historical events in order to solidify their enduring importance to the world.
                I have encountered, however, a lack of specific assessment of Mnouchkine’s work in terms of myth and ritual through my research. Returning to the earlier point of departure, it seems that at best the productions of the Théâtre du Soleil can be said to contain elements of the mythic storytelling described by Innes and, at times, rely on this understanding for creative inspiration, however to equate Mnouchkine to other avant-garde practitioners, whose chief concern is the illumination of myth and ritual, would be to limit one’s understanding of her work. What appears to be of greatest importance is assessing the role of mythic storytelling and mythopoeia in conjunction with other elements of her methodological approach to establish how she has achieved the breadth of performative influence seen in her work. Rather than my research finding that myth is not as significant as I had first imagined, I have discovered that its import is contingent upon many factors – such as tradition, actor process and presence – and exists for the Soleil as a background principle rather than a direct intention. It may be, then, that locating Mnouchkine’s work in the avant-garde, as Innes does, is principally due to its instances of aesthetic similarity to precedent avant-garde directors rather than its wholesale belonging to the movement.