The Genesis of the Proscenium

the actor

acting is not the true self's dissipation
but not its preening either - outside the role
it honours it best fights shy of reputation -
being what prometheus stole

it is a distant spark of that first live coal
a conscious glimpse of human desperation
rekindled as a longing to console

the waning spirit or the shattered dedication
actors are allies of the delphic hole
for good or ill they echo human expectation

being what prometheus stole

After sixty years of commitment to theatre, I still find it difficult to present the multi-aspects of ideas that determine theatre shape. Stephen Joseph saw that shape in theatre, the creative experience most in touch with the presence of people, derived not by accident, nor by the needs of theatre practitioners, but from the pressure of the spiritual assumptions at the core of the ideas that allowed a society to function. That is, for example, in Western history, Greek, Roman, Medieval and Renaissance, theatre architecture symbolically represented, and was an expression of, the assumptions deeply rooted in the inlaid practices of the time.

The key relationship in all theatre is that of the actor to the audience; but that is qualified by several other factors, all combining to make a symbolic portrait of the flows of power, spiritual, philosophical, social and practical, that make up the conglomerate (contemporary) modus vivendi.

Scientists claim they are getting close to reaching back to the start of the Universe - but as to what was before that, what sensible guesses can be made? Eternity (The Eternal) is unknowable and inchoate, even though it must be the sum of every possible form of time.

There are three kinds of time that can fall easily into the grasp of the human mind: the aeon, the era and the age. They constitute the Temporal. The aeon is a stretch of time indifferent to all planetary life. It works to its own harmonies and rhythms and mighty upheavals. Somewhen, in some aeon, life began on earth, either from some fluke within its own composition, or by intervention from outside masses or forces, or by supernatural connivance.

Whatever, by the time the light of reason or the dark of instinct manifested into human consciousness, the fundamentals of the origin of the life we know were already beyond human exposition. The Eternal could be experienced only as a metaphor: it could not be attained. None of us could do more than gawp outwards (inwards) or backwards, creating theories, imagining, dreaming about the consequences of forever.

An era is a fragment of an aeon, an imaginable cycle within an almost unimaginable one. The sum of eras is the sum of human perception: it is that unit of time that marks the complete cycle of the movement of ideas. An era is both governed by the aeonic rhythm it is a part of, and a container of a spiritual assumption, so overriding that it colours every sub-assumption that grows from it.

An era is defined by, and stretches from, the coming into consciousness of a spiritual assumption to its wearing out and settling discarded into the folds of old time. An age is a section of an era; it modifies a spiritual assumption, carries it on into its next stage of development; but it works always within the limits of that assumption, wrestling with its ongoing implications. An age wears out when the implications of the spiritual assumption want to move beyond what the age is capable of resolving.

An era carries the whole idea; succeeding ages carry the development of the idea through its stages, as it rises from concept to climax and then falls away.

As an age is to its era, so an era is to its aeon. In beyond-human terms, the aeon too is a natural conception, concocted by the shift of vast cosmic forces being played out upon the planetary system. It too works by its own logic, causing rising and falling cycles of natural behaviour. Aeonic patterns wear out, and a fresh aeonic rhythm conjures itself out of the void to preserve the infinitely complex balances that stop the whole system blowing itself to pieces. (Even the language in this is a guess, even as the theory is: at best, it is a mataphor.)

Or put it this way: an aeon begets eras, and spans several of them; an era begats ages and spans several of them. Some ages may be sub-ages: changing the idea, but not shifting the weight of it sufficiently to claim proper age-dom.

So what has this to do with the proscenium? Everything, in the long scale of things!

In "The Masks of God", Joseph Campbell suggests that all we are now can be traced back to Mesopotamia, six (?) millennia ago. Let's say the modern era began then. Out of Gilgamesh, shifting westward, Egyptian, Greek, Roman, Norman, Medieval and Renaissance ages grew, maybe give or take a few, and to see things through an Euro-centric eye.

Each of these civilisations grew around a changed assumption about the relationship between the Temporal and the Infinite. Essentially a spiritual assumption, since the sacred stories (myths) that accrued to each change of idea, expressed themselves through a changing definition of the godhead. However, although each idea "moved on", and pretended that it did so by rejecting what had been believed before, it nevertheless retained more of the old supposition than it liked to admit, and more honestly was an added-to interpretation of the previous sacrality, rather than a total renovation.
A spiritual assumption, symbolically conveyed through myths, needs to accrue a structure, architecturally-symbolic, a form within which ideas and actions can be conveyed, reflective of the assumption but also exploring, probing its validity and relevance to the changing times; a form faithful to the assumption, enabling the ongoing contextual debate, but itself affected by the nature of the conclusions being reached, until such times as the form finds itself to be inadequate, and is forced to alter, in some particular in order to enable the debate to reach out into newly discovered territories.

Such a change of form also reflects back on the validity of the assumption that begat it; and in minute ways the assumption has to adjust too, which again adjusts the form which again enables the range of the debate. There is then, within the era, a constant flux of change and adjustment, until the form is no longer capable of further adjustment, and the assumption itself either has to adapt in a major way or collapse in favour of a fresh spiritual dogma. When the form gives way, a new age comes into being. When the spiritual assumption is worn out, a fresh era begins. Meanwhile the aeon, bustling and puffing its way through its own massive contents, will itself (say every 26,000 years) reach the end of its own convulsions (each one of which has directly, if unrecognisably, affected each flick of the age's debate) and a fresh aeon, stirred up with a very different sense of itself, will start its own lonely climb towards "harmonising"
the cosmos. I suspect, by these reckonings, when aeon and era and age find themselves exhausted at the same time, then the whole existence of the planetary system (if not the universe) becomes fraught. (And this may exactly be the point of existence we are at now.)

Assume though that we're not, despite the closing-down antics presently being indulged in by statesmen: we are certainly at the end of an age, where western domination, the so-called Renaissance (a bit of word-play I gather of the 19th century) are being left stranded out of water with the ability only to gasp irresolutely at the world that is turning in on them. Plenty of people, such as Nietsche, Oswald Spengler, Thomas Mann, Henrik Ibsen, have been putting the markers out for well over a century.

What has this to do with the proscenium? We're getting to it.

Out of the relationship between Temporal and Etaernal - the spiritual assumption.

Out of the spiritual assumption - the symbolic form.

Out of the symbolic form (architecturally translated) - the practical form.

The practical form determines the permissible dialogue, and the relationships through which that dialogue must pass and with what social constrictions.

Theatre shape becomes the template, the form pressurised by the state of ideas the spiritual assumption has expressly come to.

Each age's theatre-form therefore can be de-constructed to reveal the workings of its contemporaneous "civilisation" - that is, its controlling channels.

The proscenium (ah!) stage came into being as the product of the change in the spiritual assumption (the one that probably started out in Mesopotamia millennia-ago, but forced to modify itself through several ages and sub-ages since) that brought about the Renaissance, and, for all sorts of interlocking reasons, gave the "Western world" a leash of power it has exploited, so far, ever since.

In Medieval times, a much more static social organism, the divine right of Kings began giving way to barons; with the Renaissance, with the rise of the middle classes, and its greater grasp of technology, fluidity entered the system and Authority was forced off its high horse and expected to be more accountable to the (important) people. Theatres moved indoors, seeing became increasingly as important as hearing, perspective was rumbled. Opera, in Italy; ballet, in France
became the rage. The spoken word began to lose its need to be everything in performance. Machinery made illusion much easier. The world of the "imagination" (scenically-interpreted) became a world apart from that of everyday patter. Myth was lessening its hold on ordinary perception. Business and entrepreneurial individualism took over. Scepticism and distance paradoxically grew as the key bodies of the enfranchised expected the powerful to act on their behalf. The somewhat arenal structure of the old theatres (heightened stages, but audiences able to be on three sides) gave way to end-on structures.

In Medieval Theatre, exit stage R was to heaven; stage L was to hell. Man was torn between the two. The backcloth (background) was static. The Proscenium Stage became an embodiment of the Renaissance, though the Arch took some time to come. Machinery intruded into the performance; sets were devised to show off perspective; the backcloth became more fluid. The need for historical accuracy crept in. The basic spiritual assumption undewent a considerable modification. Elizabethan theatre turned into the darker Jacobean variety. Masques became the fashion. With Protestantism (in its Puritannical phase), theatres were banned for a while. Charles came back from the continent stuffed with the growing fashions of a renewed Catholicism. Tennis courts were taken over and converted into performance spaces - audiences became long and thin. With the ability to light, actors, for their own safety retreated up into the lit space; the unruly audiences very gradually (over two centuries) had to be tamed. Professionalisation was the rage: The creation of trained institutionalised "experts", trying to be serious about their jobs, needed protection from the representatives of the "hoi-polloi" who increasingly were not the hoi-polloi at all: except at some point the theatre split into two: the old native tradition survived as music-hall and pantomime; the new theatre, picking up on its revived classical roots, went for the more high-blown stuff; but, for both, the stage became entrenched as a mysterious, cut-off, magical place of spectacle where the lit experts cavorted, and the unlit gawpers-in increasingly shut up (except to laugh and applaud). The Proscenium Stage, replete with its arch, found the form that still dominates theatre today in the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries. It mutated, over time, into landscape and fourth-wall theatre (among others) as the major ideas of the day wrestled with the difficulties of handling the underlying spiritual assumption, that the Renaissance was both struggling to be loyal to, but growing increasingly critical of.

(I'm getting there! The next blog will look at what the Proscenium is really saying - and why we need to dump it from the way we look at things. )

a roundel for ptolemy

the earth is not the system's centre- so ok
heliocentric - well our sun's a midget
spawning galaxies blow our minds away
space then equal to a digit

the mightiest telescope's a widget
science at best hard guessing gone astray
no genius stretch beyond a second's fidget

ptolemy discarded yet may have his say
infinity takes a hologram to bridge it
each shard of us contains the cosmos -
space then equal to a digit