Hyper-Realism--The New Realism?

In my last post to My Front Porch I promised a capsule overview of the history of the theatre.

I wrote the following four paragraphs. By the time I finished I had almost bored myself to death. Those of you with a deep interest in Greek theatre but very little information may choose to read those paragraphs. The rest of you (and by that I mean most of you/all of you) skip those four paragraphs and go on to the observations that lead most directly to the subject—what I call the hyperrealism of the present.

To start with—briefest thumbnail sketch of the history of the theatre up until the present ever:

Greek Theatre—probably evolved out of choral poetry sung and danced by a chorus with a choral leader. Performed as part of religious rituals. The popular narrative asserts that Thespis stepped out of the chorus and spoke in the first person rather than the third person. For example, instead of “Achilles arose at dawn and addressed himself to the dawn as Aurora trailed her rosey fingers across the sky. Calling his man to him, he dawned his gleaming armor, beaten from . . .” he said, “I, Achilles. I rise to greet the dawn as the goddess Aurora trails her rosey . . . “. You get the idea. Because the dithyrambs were performed in temples in great open air amphitheatrical seatings, the plays adopted the same practice. This kind of setting is called architectural theatre. More about that when drama enters, first the church, and then inn courtyards in the Elizabethan period. The architecture of the Temple of Dionysus had and has amazing acoustical qualities making it possible for the audience in the cheap seats could hear clearly. However, in order to improve their ability to see the drama (the noun theatre comes from theatron meaning the seeing place) and in order to feature a number of characters they developed character masks and costumes including cothurnus boots for the actors.  (Think the highest platforms in Kinky Boots). 

Over an unbelievably short time plays begun with a chorus of fifty and one actor under Aeschylus changed into plays with increasingly smaller choruses and three actors.  Increasingly the episodes lengthened and the choral songs decreased in importance. Three actors made it possible for playwrights to achieve the ideal formula for action: three actors onstage simultaneously can be protagonist, antagonist, and a third person whose entrance may bring in new information but, more importantly, changes the balance of power between antagonist and protagonist. Finally, friezes of painted scenery were added to the temples before which the plays were performed so that, at least iconographically, actors were seen within the context of a place in the world—temple, forest, interior room and the like. Drama had within hardly a hundred years achieved the theoretical fullness of its form thanks to the dramaturgy of Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides. (OK, not that brief but a lot shorter than Oscar Brockett’s briefest précis of this portion of history of the theatre and trust me, I’ve read them all.)

The purpose of the arts is fundamentally the one that Horace called teaching by pleasing. In the past a great story teller like Homer could take the listener to the imagination of gods and goddesses, heroes, lovers, sacrifice, betrayal and all the other things belonging to the war between Greece and Troy. It was a way of learning what pleased by describing war as a narrative. Our brains have developed to make sense of a world that is far too complex to be understood in its entirety by reducing it to a narrative. Novels, plays, operas, songs, etc. take us to a place through imagination and understanding that makes the concepts represented easier to understand and remember than all but the most dramatic events of our own lives. 

As technology (photography, recording, film, television, computers, cgi, etc. made it possible to be present at dramatic events of the real world only two things were left. We still needed comprehensible narratives to make sense of a world of bewildering phenomena and behavior of actors so accurate that the entire audience would be able to “read” that behavior with the same eyes and ears by which we stay safe in the world.  But, as I wrote in an earlier post, we have become so expert in witnessing the vocabulary or real-life behavior that what we require of actors in the present time is behavior based accurately on reality but not having the “noise” of behavior in real life.  In the same way that increasingly we expect every single speech, word, and sentence, and speech of a play to illuminate the ideas of the text, we now expect every gesture, every element of the ten elements of behavior with which we write our lives in the air at every moment.

This vocabulary of the ten elements of behavior was first developed by anthropologists as a way of describing the behavior or unfamiliar societies. The vocabulary was borrowed by those in communication theory as a way of doing the same thing in analyzing group interactions in the world. I borrowed the vocabulary because I finally had found something that met a need I felt since my own undergraduate education.  The most frequent feedback we were given was something like “You need more behavior,” “You need more interesting behavior,” “You need more accurate behavior.”  And Inwardly I would be thinking. Fine! Tell me where the behavior store is and I’ll get me some.” The vocabulary of the ten elements behavior, discovered by me about fifteen years ago, I recognized immediately as the behavior store and I have been working on turning that vocabulary into exercises and working principles for actors ever since—a way for actors to satisfy the need for a realism so pure that it would be recognized by every audience member capable of empathy as truthful.

Next time I will try and unpack (with some brevity) the ten elements of behavior. 

For those of you who aren’t actors, it will make people watching much more interesting and understandable - as you observe