Update (March 2023): I just noticed that this post gets a few reads, so this note is just to flag up that the ideas developed in this paper have now been published as ‘Actor-Dramaturgs and Atmospheric Dramaturgies: Chekhov Technique in Processes of Collaborative Playwriting’ in the book Michael Chekhov Technique in the Twenty-first Century: New Pathways (Bloomsbury 2020), edited by Cass Fleming and me. There’s a pdf of the chapter available via the ‘writing’ page of my website. The post below is unchanged.
I was delighted to speak about Michael Chekhov, atmosphere, dramaturgy and politics at Staging Atmospheres, an international conference and workshop organised by Martin Welton and Penelope Woods from Queen Mary University London. [picture from @AmbiancesNet]
This is what I said…
We may encounter any given performance in a variety of iterative forms: as a writer or director’s pitch, a synopsis, a script, rehearsal, performance-event, recollection, anecdote, review, or piece of documentation. These are just some of the incarnations through which that performance may enter our experience. All of these incarnations have a dramaturgy: a dynamic form made by the performance and by which the performance is made. The discipline of dramaturgy is thus simultaneously the study of these forms and the practice of their making. To borrow Spinoza’s definition of affect, dramaturgy expresses a performance’s ‘power to affect and be affected’. I want to propose, therefore, that we think of the incarnations of a performance as its bodies, and dramaturgy as a register of those bodies’ affective dimension. I’m going to draw on the artistic praxis of the actor, director and teacher Michael Chekhov to argue that to conceive of dramaturgy as the affective dimension of a performance requires both the concept and experience of atmosphere as the primary condition of encounter. I want to think of atmosphere, in other words, as a dramaturgical substrate: ‘the material on or from which [it] lives, grows or obtains its nourishment’.
Brian Massumi has proposed that affect is both transversal, in Deleuze and Guattari’s sense of cutting across conventional categories, and polyvalent:
Thinking the transversality of affect requires […] honing concepts for mutual inclusion in the event of elements usually separated out from it, and from each other. […] Although affect positively concerns relations in encounter, it is at the same time positively productive of the individualities in relation.
Exploring dramaturgical form with student actors in 1937, Michael Chekhov made a case both for something like Massumi’s ‘mutual inclusion in the event of elements usually separated out from it’ and for an approach that would expose ‘relations in encounter’ without occluding the ‘individualities’ which both produce and are produced by such relations:
We must develop this feeling of contact not only with the other persons, but with the structures, with the space around, with the chairs, etc … Each setting is a special world in which we have to create our actor’s activity. We walk in a special world in each play … The problem is to find and establish contact with each other and with the setting, and to find the moments of climax in the play.
By ‘contact’, Chekhov means ‘a special feeling […] that no-one is alone on the stage, and is never alone, even if he or she speaks a soliloquy. The actor must get the ability to be in contact not only with everybody around him on the stage, but with everything’. Like Massumi’s description of affective thinking, Chekhov’s decision to begin his teaching of acting with an exploration of ‘contact’ was ‘an invitation for an indefinitely constructive thinking of embodied, relational becoming’. Chekhov’s praxis offers a mode of affective thinking in that it moved seamlessly from the ‘embodied, relational becoming’ of ‘contact’ to the ‘constructive [dramaturgical] thinking’ of ‘find[ing] the moments of ‘climax’.
‘Our rehearsals’, he told his student actors, ‘will be for the purpose of finding one line, one path, for the whole group, and for the play […].’ This process was also, for Chekhov, ‘indefinitely constructive’ because it was intrinsically reiterative: ‘We must write and re-write the play, creating new atmospheres and images all the time’. For Chekhov, then, ‘contact’ is a necessary condition of dramaturgy, and the exploration of dramaturgical form is a process which is continually re-absorbed into the contact which gave rise to it, engendering both an ongoing reimagination of the very possibilities of encounter, and of the potentialities of dramaturgical form.
Chekhov’s conception of play-wrighting and of the contribution of the writer to that process likewise stressed the significance of ongoing collective endeavour:
The author of the new theatre will be a person who creates the words for the play, not in the solitude of the study but working with and among the cast. […] The director and the actors must be able to tell him what they wish to do and the author must understand and give the words for their purpose. The theatre is a great power but it must find itself. We must know what it means to be a member of the theatre — — it doesn’t mean to be the servant of the designer or the author.
Perhaps I should briefly contextualise the politics of Chekhov’s vision here. While he presents a coherent critique of the hierarchical structuring of the processes of theatrical production, which he sets out to dismantle by unseating the ‘author’ from his position at its apex, Chekhov’s proposed solution merely replaces that hierarchical structure of relations with another, in which ‘the director and the actors must be able to tell [the writer] what they wish to do’. But, eighty years ago, the concept of a collaborative writing process was almost unknown in the European and American theatres of Chekhov’s experience, and it is significant that Chekhov does not advocate the replacement of the writer with a director, as in the case of Max Reinhardt, for whom he had worked as an actor. Instead, he positions ‘the director and the actors’ in the dominant position, describing them as ‘the heart of the theatre’. Chekhov’s vision of the theatre-making process is thus doubly political: it seeks to restructure the power relations that produce and are produced by the process of production and it seeks to establish a collective identity among those at that process’s core. It is to the second of these projects that I wish to give most attention here: the processual generation of a collective form of identity and its role in the generation of dramaturgical form, a process whose consequences may, as I will go on to argue, reach beyond the walls of the theatre.
If the collective identity of director and actors is the heart of the theatre, then the heart’s core is neither director nor actors but ‘and’. This is Chekhov’s reason for beginning, as it were, in the middle, with contact. It is notable that Chekhov sees ‘contact’ as an affective dimension: it is a space in which he asks his actors to ‘find’ a form they must also ‘create’.
Chekhov developed his students’ sensitivities to this process by taking them into the grounds of Dartington Hall, and asking them to find-create gestures to express the forms of the trees:
a cypress streams upward (Gesture), and has a quiet positive, concentrated character (Quality); whereas, the old, many-branched oak, rising upward and sideways (Gesture), will speak to us of a violent, uncontrolled, broad character (Quality).
Chekhov described this exercise as a way of developing his students’ perception, or, as he put it, their understanding of ‘what it means to live in a world of form — psychological or physical form’. This approach to the study of perception anticipated Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology and its account of perception as ‘inspiration and expiration of Being’: a breathing in and out of the world through which mutual process of discovery, as he writes, ‘things become things’ and ‘worlds become worlds’.
Anthropologist Tim Ingold borrows the phrase ‘coiling over’ from Merleau-Ponty to describe the process of looking at a tree as ‘my being with the tree and the tree’s being with me’, and this is at the heart of Chekhov’s notion of contact with the entirety of a play-world: ‘not only with the other persons, but with the structures, with the space around’. Contact, in other words, generates a space of ‘coiling over’, in which subject-object distinctions blur and double, in which we encounter a relational experience of and interaction with an objective, external reality that is also fundamentally unstable and continually co-created with and among us.
Chekhov’s term for this affective zone is ‘atmosphere’. ‘The atmosphere,’ he said, is ‘a feeling which does not belong to anybody […] which lives in the space in the room’. He gave the example of the first scene of Gogol’s Inspector General to explain this concept:
Blandly stated, the scene consists of the bribing officials absorbed in discussions of escape from punishment which they expect with the arrival of the Inspector from Petersburg. Endow it with atmosphere and … you will perceive the content of the same scene as one of impending catastrophe, conspiracy, depression and almost ‘mystical’ horror.
Despite their apparently subjective and personal nature, however, Chekhov crucially considered such atmospheres to be objective. Atmospheres belong to spaces, or — to be more accurate — to hyphenated event-spaces, since they are spatio-temporal phenomena, and are therefore experienced simultaneously by all of the participants in the event-space. That is not to say that all participants will respond alike, but nonetheless the atmosphere to which they respond — be it the pub on a Friday night, the church on a wedding day, the car accident, the conference room at the end of a busy Autumn term, is objectively experienced and can only be supplanted by another atmosphere with its own objective quality.
Chekhov’s notion of atmosphere is often discussed as though it were mystical, but of course it is also literally true: without the atmosphere — the air — which is the medium of our existence, we could not survive. Tim Ingold observes that:
The air is not an interactant so much as the very condition of interaction. It is only because of their suspension in the currents of the medium that things can interact. Without it, birds would plummet from the sky, plants would wither and we humans would suffocate. Even as we breathe in and out, the air mingles with our bodily tissues, filling the lungs and oxygenating the blood.
And Ingold goes on to argue that ‘if the medium is a condition of interaction, then it follows that the quality of that interaction will be tempered by what is going on in that medium, that is, by the weather’, and that we therefore live in a ‘weather-world’. This weather-world of atmosphere is therefore a necessary condition of all affective relations and thus, I want to suggest, a necessary condition of dramaturgy.
Chekhov told his students that the atmospheres of a play must be explored physically: ‘We must penetrate into the atmosphere with our … hands, legs, bodies, voices’, he said, applying their technique of finding-creating the gestural forms of trees to the process of finding-creating, to borrow from Ingold, the ways in which the ‘qualit[ies] of […] interaction’ that constitute a play ‘will be tempered by what is going on in [the] medium’ of the play-world. Chekhov therefore began his explorations of dramaturgy with the development of what he called a ‘score of atmospheres’: a processual, embodied articulation of the changing qualities of the ‘weather-world’ of a play.
The ‘score of atmospheres’ serves, for Chekhov, as the starting-point for the repeated re-creation of what he called the ‘rhythmical body’ of a performance. For example, in directing his students in Jan Rainis’ adaptation of the Latvian folk tale, The Golden Steed, Chekhov articulated some aspects of its ‘rhythmical body’:
Antin is coming from the world of passion and trying to rise above it, while all the powers are trying to push him back to their level … The mission of the evil group is to push Antin down, pushing him slowly but surely until he is defeated. That is the dynamic of the scene.
In order to understand the relation between body and ‘rhythmical body’, we need to understand a little of Chekhov’s conception of the body in performance. He was famous as an actor for his physical skill and versatility. Numerous accounts of his performances stress this aspect of his work, which was evidently the product of conscious and deliberate practice on Chekhov’s part. Responding to a questionnaire sent to him by the Russian Academy of Arts in 1923, he wrote that, in trying to create the physical form of a character, ‘not only do I disregard my own attributes but try by all means to overcome them’ to ‘create an ideal image’. Chekhov bemoaned the inevitable limitations imposed by his body on this process, but, in his best performances, these limits seem not to have been visible to his audiences. The playwright Karel Čapek, for instance, responded to Chekhov’s portrayal of Strindberg’s Erik XIV by celebrating a performance in which, he said, ‘everything is bared, nothing is hidden, everything is impulsive and sharp; with great intensity it flows into the play of his entire body — this delicate and tremulous tangle of nerves’.
It’s important to note that in this and numerous other descriptions of Chekhov’s acting the physical body is used as a metaphor for the feelings evoked by the performance. These descriptions of Chekhov’s body in performance therefore look through the medium of his physical body to something like ‘the ideal image’ he described himself attempting to create. This image, Chekhov taught, should be incorporated into what he called the ‘invisible body’, a somatic but not merely embodied experience of movement that his technique sought to train in a process that Chekhov both likened to and distinguished from dance:
Dancers … are able to study movements which they can repeat, each time very skilfully and elaborately. We, as actors, have not the same possibility. We must create each time a new movement … We have our own kind of movement training. We must bind together our feeling with our body. We must train ourselves to ask our body, by taking new positions, which feeling is arising within us.
By training the body’s sensitivity to itself in this way, Chekhov was training its affective dimension, its power to affect and be affected, which constituted the ‘invisible body’, which, he said, must govern the actor’s performance: ‘the invisible body must lead, entice and coax your visible body — not the opposite’. Chekhov took this conception of the individual performer’s body and applied it metaphorically to the field of dramaturgy, in which, he said: ‘Everything that we perceive with our eyes and ears we can call the body of the performance’, though ‘What we take from a performance’, is not the body but ‘the spirit of the performance’. These two depend crucially, however, for their relation upon:
that which is between the spirit and the body of the performance — the atmosphere, or soul of the performance. The atmosphere is what we, as the audience, have to feel. If you attend a performance which does not touch your soul or feeling, that performance is dead.
And thus we return to the question of the processual generation of a collective form of identity and its role in the generation of dramaturgical form, about which Chekhov has the following advice:
First find the atmosphere, and then try to find the dialogues and soliloquies in the music of the atmosphere. First, very simply, try to find what is the music of the words. Each scene has its own rhythmical gesture, and this is a very very complicated thing, this rhythmical pattern of the play. The rhythm of the play is the highest spiritual movement of the play.
In this rhythmical conception of dramaturgy, Chekhov proposes that dramaturgical time is kairological. Kairos is both the modern Greek word for weather and the ancient Greek word for a significant time, the moment when something needs to happen, and thus is doubly atmospheric. It is always relational and patterned. And we can watch the kairological time of dramaturgy unfolding below [see video]: as the forms of the murmuration are both found and created by starlings flying with and as the atmosphere. Atmospheres are spatio-temporal beings, but they also create time and space for action-reactions that emerge from, absorb and occupy them. Thus, Chekhov’s affective, atmospheric conception of dramaturgy takes us beyond the familiar notion of dramaturgy as a set of actions or structure of relations and allows us to see it as we do this murmuration, as an ecology: a dynamic, processual becoming that is always complex and yet has what Deleuze called ‘the dynamic unity of an event’.
Finally, I want to propose that, by replacing structure with process and subjects with relations, atmospheric dramaturgy offers a fundamental challenge to the assumptions not only of bourgeois individualism in playwrighting studies (which assumes discrete, coherent characters acting out of rational self-interest or moral rectitude towards consistent goals) but a fundamental challenge to the assumptions of ideological critique more widely. If we remember that, for Marx, capital is value in motion, then we may think of capitalism not as a structure of fixed relations but as an atmosphere: a necessarily dynamic substrate that conditions the relations that it produces. This is the approach taken by Felix Guattari’s prescient description (from 1989) of Donald Trump as a creature of the swamp, a dramaturgical speciation-event emerging from the atmosphere of capitalist relations, in his words: a ‘species of algae taking over entire districts of New York and Atlantic City’. In the years since, it has been precisely Trump’s capacity to grow out of and with the substrate of capitalist relations that has put him in a position to re-shape the dramaturgies of geo-politics. Much political theory has struggled to account for this devastating event in its intellectually vapid invocation of a post-ideological, post-truth society because it has failed to see political dramaturgy as an affective, ecological phenomenon. It has failed, in Chekhov’s terms, to listen to the music of the atmosphere.
[Thanks to ‘Matt’ on youtube for the amazing footage of a murmuration of starlings]
Originally published at tomcornford.tumblr.com.
