European Drama and Performance Studies. 2014 – 1, n° 2. L’éloquence du silence : dramaturgie du non-dit sur la scène théâtrale des xviie et xviiie siècles (original) (raw)

The Aphasic, Droning Silence of 20 th Century Theatre

"I speak of the poetry or even mantra of that place where words and silence coincide and co-exist; the intrinsic silence of words, silence from words." (Gualtieri, 1993:180) In most dictionaries, silence is often defined in negative terms, being likened to an absence from speech or noise as if it were a background from which sound is detached: but just as matter cannot exist without void, sound cannot exist without silence. We begin this study with the general hypothesis that the sensibility to perceive silence, in the theatre of the 20 th century, cannot be separated from the ability to perceive sound and music. To our knowledge, there are no known texts , either on this subject or on that of the function of sound in the mise en scène, in existence and a few recent theories have proved to be unsatisfactory in relation to the substantial difficulty of putting this whole field of study into perspective. 1. What we are dealing with is, in fact, the definition and outlining of the complex network of relationships upon which the constructive matrix of silence is inscribed in the work of many directors of the 20 th century. In a symbolist aesthetic context, silence assumes a central rôle as a device that is able to renew the theatrical stage; exalting its regenerative capacity, a dark cocoon within which the turmoil of the outside world precipitates and overflows: struck dumb in order to better refine the actual voice and the capacity to listen. In the second half of the 20 th century, the 'silence attacked the dramaturgic corpus from within, corroding the literary text and becoming a constructive device of many performances, bypassing the tiresomeness and exhaustion of the speech. The aphasia of the neoavant-garde theatre scene of the 1970's (from Carmelo Bene to Robert Wilson) favoured experimentation with linguistic resources other than the literary. At the same time it enabled rediscovery a new syntax of verbal expression , restoring lost aspects of the oral tradition to the theatre. After neo-avantgarde, contemporary theatrical research followed a different path than that of aphasia, intending not to silence the voice, nor sacrifice the spoken word but, confronting itself with the physicality of the gesture and the rhythm of movement on the same level. Stripped of meaningful & symbolic content with which early 20th century art had developed and expressed itself, at the end of the century, the idea and the practical use of silence has created a new artistic landscape. One where it is neither background nor mystery emanating from muteness, nor mystic union between poet and bystander, nor the paradigmatic gesture of Cage in the shutting of a piano lid shifting attention to the environment as a source of sound, nor Beckett's desire for extinguishing. In contemporary theatre, silence exists inside words, "words and silence coincide", is an aesthetic quality which has assimilated different functions and manifests itself as the reverberation of a machine that has rendered the sharp contrasts between poles normally considered antinomic (horizontal and vertical, animate and inanimate, two-dimensional and three-dimensional, literary text and performing text) harmonious, slight and adaptable. The dramaturgy of the inanimate