Reflections of the reflective: theatre and time

By Ana Fati

Empirically immortal, theatre ignores time, dissolves time and simultaneously is Time. How do we formulate unease? How do we condense an unknown experience into graspable parameters? Art sieves time and essentializes itself to a scent, a specificity that functions as an intrinsic quality of being an artist. The significance or insignificance of an experience becomes a question of choice determined by artistic freedom. The actor cries at happiness and laughs at the confrontation with tragedy.

Theatre gets to choose: words, gazes, outcomes and though it stays under the sceptre of the ever-changing moment, it knows its story. Unlike reality, where, though we get to tell what story we want, we don’t get to choose what story we are. Theatre usually puts us in contact with the duplicity of emotion, with the endless alternatives of lives that we cannot have, the ricochet of in-betweens that we happen to be, the uncomfortableness of who we are.

It shows and shelters, provokes and protects, teaches and torments.

The presence of theatre is a reference point, but what about its absence? How does it translate into the public with its silence? Perhaps this is just a longer ceremonial intermission, a meaningful triumph of non-verbal performance. The qualities that pervade this art might seem antagonistic to a hybrid social distanced world. However, those same traits that contour it, are also the advocates for its capacity to adapt. The resilience lies in overcoming social challenges and parallels the very art of the actor who takes a given scenic situation and attempts to find reasons, goals, solutions.

Live performance inflames the imagination and unlike other means of expressing art, you find yourself at the physical space where this art is taking place. You consume it as it is being consumed by the artists. The togetherness envisioned as proximity of the theatrical experience is plausible even within socially distant norms. The act of sharing the same play as it unravels into immediacy still fulfils the energetical exchange between the performers and the audience. Perhaps becoming individually aware into the imposed public isolation is emphasizing on the juxtaposition of private vs. public art digestion. Even the way in which we watch theatre and understand it becomes more evidently segregated than ever. The physical parameters that were indicating that we are together, now show the contrary, hence raising the awareness of the self that is now in an outer-inner harmony.

Expecting the same from theatre as it was giving in pre-pandemic times is a failure in measuring our time with the tools our time has produced. It would not only not feel right, but it would constitute a dishonesty to an art that reflects bits of lives. Our slice of life cannot pretend to be what it is not, but it can excel in what we make out of it.

The isolation expands from our homes and sees an extension in public spaces and in the experience of art. However, the totemic significance lies in experiencing it in any form, regardless of the novelty it might represent and our habitual associations.

Can thriving from performance be quantifiable in physical distance? If we are not close in the way modern theatre was conceived, are we experiencing less?

On the contrary, the generative, irreproducible nature of theatre is an incentive to adapt, not a condemnation to decline. Safe theatre practices have happened and will continue to evolve and will only prove- as Jake Nevins concludes- “theater’s fundamental capacity for elasticity and provocation”.

Thus, the self-reflective quality of theatre acts as an emphasized accolade now that a whole society is forcefully indulged to self-reflect, or rather to confront the awareness that restrictions produce through abruptly interrupting life; the absence of live mediums holds the possibility of something else: for when it happens, the theatrical or performative experience of any kind to substitute the role of other mediums. It congests and essentializes the philosophy of the time, it acts as a source of all the arts that are perhaps hidden or momentarily silenced. Theatre fractures time only to heal it. In a time of a global pandemic what theatre can do is renew itself and survive as it always did, transgressing historical nanoseconds and establishing morphic resonances (not oppositions) with the rhythms of the world.

Photo credit: Ana Fati

ST.ART does not own the rights to any images used in this article.