Битеф

The basic group will constantly train itself by a wide range of physical, vocal and emotional exercises. It will develop themes and evolve texts, some improvised, some written and some with music. There will be open working sessions with children and with adults in which a public is invited to watch and participate in the process of dramatic creation. Two years later, with international subsidies, the ICTR began operations in a Paris tapestry gallery supplied by rhe French Ministry of Culture. The act of entering a theatre building carries with it a whole structure of associations and practices which largely shapes the experience that eventually takes place ... A fresh experiment must occur in a neutral place which only becomes a theatre as the living event unfolds. Work began on the study of the theatrical uses of language : Greek, Latin, Spanish, Armenian, and the language of the Noh theatre A complex analysis of syllables and letters was initiated. This was studied comparatively through the different larynx-movements and the different sounds of various languages with an important exchange between the different nationalities present. Concurrently, the group explored and compared the relevant mythologies. The experiment was: in the very sound of a language, is the experience of its speakers buried, and might it be disinterred? Every tone of speech, every rhythmic pattern is a fragment of language and corresponds to a different experience. The poet Ted Hughes worked with the group. To express his own Promethean mythology he began to invent a language, Orghast. Yet another language, Avesta, the ancient ceremonial speech of Zoroastrianism, was added to the group’s repertoire when they went on their first journey abroad, to Persia, in 1971. There, they were joined by a group of Persian actors. When the inner group links itself to an outer group it is exercising a primary function of theatre. The exploration of the means by which one group of people, regardless of social and ethnic backgrounds, can make contact with another group through a shared area of human concern is at the root of all theatre activity. There are rare thingspieces of music, certain gestures that can communicate to anyone anywhere. What we are looking for in Orghast and Greek is whether there are rhythms, forms of truth and emotional involvement, which can be communicated without going through the normal channels. It is not a question of the intrinsic value of the material we use, but of the completeness of the circle we make. Back in Paris, they worked with deaf and dumb children, and with the American National Theatre of the Deaf, learning new, non-verbal techniques of communication. For performance, they developed ’Kaspar’, by Peter Handke, a radical experiment in language, discovering how much of it could be transmitted to widely varying audiences in equally various sites; how far improvised, non-verbal communication could take the place of text; what in theatre must be fixed and what must be open. Another project

was to prepare a dramatic version of the classical Persian poem ’The Conference of the Birds’, in an improvisational form that would enable it to evolve throughout the journey in Africa, in 1972-3. Many improvised shows, often comic ones, had been performed in France and Persia; in Africa the experiment was to allow performances to take their form without any pre-arranged pattern, depending entierly on the elements present at the moment of the event. The language of a performance is just like language in everyday life, and must be totally adapted to the person or persons whom one is addressing. ïn Paris, the experience of improvisation in the villages was applied to an urban context with performances in African workers’ hostels, in an Algerian and Portuguese shanty town, in schools for backward and delinquent North African children, and as previously in the Institute for the Deaf. The next journey was to America. For eight weeks the group lived with the Campesino the theatre company of the Chicano farm-workers in California, joining in their work and welcoming the Chicano actors to join in the group’s work. They exchanged experience with an American Indian theatre company. In Brooklyn, they showed their work to audiences of students and professional theatre people, and out in the city improvised performances using techniques based on the African experience. The theatre is not a form that can be understood in theory, it can only be understood at firsh hand by partaking. The experience of the Centre’s research has been picked up and used by all the groups they have worked with. It is disseminated, too, by actors and directors who, after working at the Centre, have founded new groups elsewhere on similar principles. Throughout, a central enquiry has been: in what kind of space can theatre take place? The basic requirements, it seems, are perfect acoustics, concentration, free movement, humanity in the surroundings. The last two are very rare in modern theatre buildings. The Centre found an ideal space in an ethnically mixed area of North Paris: les Bouffes du Nord, an old theatre which looks as though it has been submerged in the salt ocean for a century. There they have been performing ’Timon of Athens’, ’The Ik’, and free-form projects. Of ’Timon’ , acted in French, with Japanese, African, English and American actors as well as French, Michael Billington wrote in The Guardian that is ’economy and simplicity .. . contains some vital lessons for out own beleaguered, crisis-ridden theatre ... The effect was to make one ask what the act of theatre really is ... fundamentally it has to do with the communication of a story to a group of people gathered as closely as possible round a company of actors.’ In ’The Ik’ the Centre entered into a work that directly reflected the experiences of its members, as all the actors had to draw on their own working impressions of Africa to recreate the life of a particular and unique African people. The deep interest aroused by this experiment, and not least of all in African spectators, has been the evocation of an African reality by actors making no attempt to conceal the other reality of their own different cultural origins.