Are we at risk
of degenerating into a theatre of smugness?
Few things repel as surely as
smugness; that impenetrable shield that surrounds the body and psyche
of someone consumed by certainty while hiding within his or her own
limited sense of self-righteousness. When it is encountered on the
stage, it is no less repelling and repugnant. Yet a growing
characteristic in some areas of theatrical creation is an air of
smugness and it leads to a whole theatre of smugness.
Theatre of smugness avoids
the very basis of artistic expression and communication: ie. the
vulnerability and willingness of artistic endeavour.
Vulnerability has no place for
the certainty that comes with smugness. Willingness in the face of
personal, social and cultural challenge requires courage and clear
understanding of a role for art in society. Theatre is not simply a
promotional tool for its creators. Nor is it simply a vehicle for
egoistic vanity. Where it becomes either of these it degenerates into theatre
of smugness.
And this smugness is a poison
that can seep into all areas of artistic expression. It is akin to narcissism.
It is all the more insidious because smugness prevents any form of
personal insight. The perpetrator is being constantly deceived by his
or her own reflection; the voices of flattery from an adulatory
coterie of friends and colleagues; the bigness or worthiness of the
cause to which the perpetrator is attached; and the feeling of being
the only one with the true gift, knowledge or insight.
All of us can be guilty of it.
It's sometimes a fine line between commitment to one's task or focus
and being smug. Writers and directors particularly need to be aware
of the symptoms: paranoia, pettiness, resistance to challenge,
pickiness. All of this derives from vanity and misplaced ego. With a
little humility and due homage to the very nature of our art form we
can liberate ourselves from theatre of smugness.
Our work is bigger than us. Our
art is drawn from somewhere indefinable that, if we are lucky, we may
access. As artists, we are like hounds chasing the scent of a rabbit.
But if we catch it and try to devour it, we are poisoned by its
flesh. No art can ever be complete. Any such completeness is
poisonous. The tension between: (1) the need for completeness and
surety; and (2) the desire to find and discover, provides the
starting point for our process. If we have not changed through this
process, then we have evaded the most basic element of art.
Our responsibility is to follow
the particular logic of our ideas and perceptions and to then
discover the paradigms that rule us. This makes us humble. The moment
we realize that everything we hold precious is culturally bound and
limited by our experience we are freed to see the other person. We
are also freed to see ourselves. And this, I believe, is the function
of theatre.
On the other hand, if we decide
that theatre is really just a tool for our agendas and propaganda,
then it is being debased. Recent experiences of working on issues
based theatre and seeing community groups attempting current social
commentary lead me to question the motives of much that passes for
art. Unless it is true to its own forms and authentically rooted
within some unified contextual structure where all its elements are
structurally integrated, the work is mere propaganda held captive to pre-conceived
notions while being restricted to the ideology that drives the work.
At worst, we have Stalinist style
over-blown poetics and heroic imagery that tells us what we must feel
and believe. At best, we see naive presentations by people without
the skill or willingness to find and distill the essence of what it
is they are trying to create. In either case, the work presented
merely uses theatrics to illustrate some predetermined idea ... and
without really going into those dark and nebulous recesses where the
ideas are baked and become fragile. As an audience we can see the
falsity on the faces of the performers and feel it in their
expressions and hear it in the forced nature of the dialogue, songs
or recordings.
Of course there are many other
areas of smugness outside issues based works. The lack of willingness
to experiment and take risks in commercial theatre and even publicly
funded theatre is a major source of smugness.
So where do we turn?
I suggest the answer is simple
but deceptively difficult to implement. We need to keep re-inventing
theatre's quest for live communion and immediacy. The balance of
ritual, even spiritual and formal aspects of live presentation with
the ephemeral and radical elements needs to be of the highest
priority. I haven't seen this described anywhere more effectively
than in Peter
Brooke's The
Empty Space where
he contrasts what he terms Immediate Theatre with Deadly Theatre.
Theatre of smugness reeks of the deadliness that Brook speaks
of in The
Empty Space.
Personally, I don't think our
theatre as a whole will ever degenerate into theatre of smugness.
Thankfully, it gets hounded out. Theatre's immediacy is its greatest
asset. And thankfully there are many people involved in its creation
and implementation for whom the journey of discovery is so very
important as a value in and of itself. Creativity is the antidote to
smugness. It is the vehicle through which we can travel beyond
individual cultural boundaries and belief systems of all kinds. The
creative imagination is something that became treasured as a creative
tool some two hundred years ago with the advent of the romantic
movement. It is the vital ingredient in a theatre of immediacy beyond
personal vanity and smugness.
© Joe Woodward
For performance and licence
details for staging any SHADOW HOUSE PITS production, contact: pitspro@shadowhousepits.com.au
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