FRÉDÉRIC MOSER AND PHILIPPE SCHWINGER - A DIALOGICAL APPROACH TO THEIR WORK.
Stuart Hall
FRÉDÉRIC MOSER / PHILIPPE SCHWINGER: The New York-based Performance Group staged their piece Commune for the first time in February 1971. The play included a short scene referring to the My Lai massacre. If members of the audience refused to participate actively in what was happening on stage during this scene, the actors interrupted their performance—sometimes for as long as three hours, depending on the audience's reaction. The group experimented with several variations of this scene.
Starting with photographs of the performance and the notes of Richard Schechner, a theorist of environmental theatre, we came up with a new version of the My Lai sequence. We worked with the statements of soldiers involved in the massacre, criminal investigation reports, and contemporary articles in the press. In the process, we developed a scenario that enabled us to translate the historical documents into a form suitable for the stage. We aimed at representing an event of war without using any of the film industry’s spectacular devices.
What means do we have, as individual citizens, to come to terms with an act of terror? We followed the trail of the Performance Group. Their attempt to create a platform for self-criticism within the context of a theatre performance motivated our dramatic intentions. For this we reconstructed the stage set of Commune: a wave, evoking a landscape and also functioning as an agora, and scaffolding around the stage with seating for the audience.
In 1971 the performers were inspired by rituals: they danced and they sang. We did not attempt to re-create this authenticity in our production. Although we do evoke the symbolic level of their representation, we chose to develop our play with the actors on two different levels. Each of the performers takes on a function, for example, as a reporter, but they can also intervene at any time in their own name. Thus, there is a constant back and forth between the actors and the characters they are representing. This method of dramatic framing enabled us to establish an analogy with film.
There is no live performance in Capitulation Project. The scene was filmed in about 30 sequences during two night shoots, with extras as a ‘fake’ audience. The distance from the performance that is created through the process of filming is comparable to our detachment from current political events.
We intentionally moved back a few steps in time. We evoked the massacre by means of a contemporaneous artistic form in order to demonstrate that the grasp of an event of war is coupled with its medial transmission.
AXEL LAPP: In the film Capitulation Project (2003), four performers and a dozen passive extras struggle to come to terms with staging the horrors of war. Their acting fluctuates between brutal renditions of fictional violence, the ostensibly neutral communication of sanctioned historical fact and the dramatisation of subjective testimony. The action takes place on several levels, with the levels overlapping and subverting each other in a variety of ways. The actors keep switching between their own character and the role they are playing in the staging of the Vietnam War. The ‘Civilian’ is both a Vietnamese victim and a revolutionary communard; the ‘Soldier’ is an automated murderer as well as a charming animator for the extras. The ‘Reporter’ is cast as an interpreter in the dramatised conflict and reports on current events in the present of the play; and the ‘Officer’, having announced that they have to “push” two more villages, remarks in an aside that the lieutenant was thinking in military terms at that point. As members of a politically active, experimental theatre group, the four protagonists act out different methods of dealing with history while analysing it at the same time. As a result, they question not only their own understanding of perpetrators and victims but also their own approach and even the very possibility of communicating their subject matter.
On the morning of 16 March 1968, American soldiers swept into My Lai. Within a few hours they had murdered several hundred unarmed civilians: old men, women, children. When news and pictures of this bloodbath finally reached the public in the autumn of 1969, a flood of shock and indignation spread throughout the world. In 1970, General Peers was ordered to conduct an official inquiry. Hotly debated both in the United States and elsewhere, the “Peers Report” launched the decline of public support for military intervention in Vietnam.
The imagery of Capitulation Project addresses the constantly recurring questions of guilt and violence. The My Lai massacre is used as an exemplum for the investigation of processes that turn people into murderers, and of the consequences such acts have for the survivors. Since objective history can never make this atrocity comprehensible, the actors in the play strive to unravel the many layers of reality through their performance. However, the testimonies used to evoke an image of what happened in My Lai come only from surviving perpetrators – their victims have been irrevocably silenced – and the violence played out on stage reflects the actors’ own preconceptions. Thus, their dramatised approach to reality necessarily remains a fiction and the massacre itself incomprehensible and irreproducible.
This piece is a capitulation of the search for truth! Nonetheless, the characters in the film are buoyed by the hope that their investigative work will prevent such atrocities in the future. They realise neither how little the realities of war and of civil society have in common, nor how little the people involved differ.
When the actors join in singing about friendship at the end of scene, it sounds to us today like echoes of a distant era when people still believed that songs could change the world. However, despite the historical implications suggested by the acting, by the intensity of the conflict and even by the costumes and hairstyles of the actors, visitors to the exhibition, who walk around in the installation Capitulation Project or sit down on the accompanying stage, do not see a document from the times of the Vietnam war. Nor do they see an authentic re-enactment from the piece Commune by the Performance Group. Only the basics of the scene have been adopted from what is known of the historical performances. Everything else has been developed by Moser / Schwinger in order to produce a drama and a film that exemplify the ways in which violence is filtered through the media. The drama within the film thus functions as an exposition of the entire project.
For visitors in the exhibition space, the wooden stage of Capitulation Project becomes a place to reflect on the function of theatre and on the massacre in the Vietnamese village of My Lai. Furthermore, the artists’ retrospective look at that historical debate inevitably directs our attention to current events as well. The parallelism of recurrent military conflicts and their historical continuum are as obvious as the divergence in the way people react. The intensity, in the film, of trying to cope with horror is juxtaposed with the passive act of contemporary observation.
The video piece Acting Facts (2003), which was produced concurrently with Capitulation Project, addresses similar issues. This time a single actor recounts one version of the My Lai massacre. His text is an extract from the public testimonials made before the "Peers Panel", a compilation of subjective memories of eyewitnesses and perpetrators. The film perspective keeps shifting between verbal narrative and visual representation: the actor may recite statements or role play the text as a dialogue between different characters, at other times he gestures and acts out the scene. Even the pinewood forest in northern Germany, where the video was shot, seems to alternate between theatrical stage set and authentic location, for instance when referring to the jungle, a frequent setting in countless war movies, as the arena of the Vietnam War. By breaking a largely familiar historical narrative down into many different facets, Acting Facts demonstrates not only that historical knowledge rests on a variety of sources but also that recorded fact and fictional representation are uncontrollably intertwined in the act of mediation.
In their other large-scale video installations, Moser / Schwinger also use theatre as a means of exposing the structures of information and power within staged events. They present the stage as an intentional place of power, as what Foucault called a dispositive, that is governed by inherent laws and used to assign a certain status to what is happening there. Their works examine these structures by splitting the play into its component parts and thus exploring how a staging is utilised to encode information and actions.
The video installation Affection riposte (2001) is based on a scene from John Cassavetes' film Opening Night (1977), in which the personalities and relationships of the protagonists – a group of stage actors – are mirrored outside the actual film plot. Cassavetes uses the theatre as a medium of detachment; he uses the stage as a place of stylisation and exaggeration. For him, cinema is much closer to veracity than the stage; only there can an audience be completely caught up in another reality. His film characters display an almost unbearable authenticity, whereas the theatre within the film remains light. Only Myrtle, played by Gena Rowlands, unites the two art forms. This leads to such an intense conflict between her acted life and her role as Lisa that she is propelled to the brink of a nervous breakdown. As the action unfolds, her part in the play and her real (film) character become increasingly intertwined until they are all but indistinguishable.
Moser / Schwinger have taken the only uninterrupted theatre scene in this movie as the starting point for their piece. Through this scene, in which reality and play overlap in the different perspectives from behind the scene, they reveal the artificiality of the film's much-vaunted realism. They have reconstructed the set on a stage, there producing their modified version of the plot with actors, and then shooting the scene for their film. The constantly changing camera angle also prevents the viewer’s position from being fixed. None of the takes lasts more than a few seconds and each one had to be filmed separately, out of context. The resulting impression of continuity is pure illusion.
FM / PS: Can our work be defined as a remake in relation to its point of departure, Opening Night?
It consists of a fragment, a situation extracted from a whole that remains hidden. The fragment responds to the finality of the film and not its progress. We took a part that already existed and followed the development of the sequence very closely in order to make a different product out of it, whose meaning lies in being a fragment . (The opening and closing takes, incidentally, diverge in the two versions because our film shows the sequence as a continuous loop. The difference is therefore due to the mode of presentation.)
The situation is ambiguous from the start inasmuch as there is a kind of beginning when the main characters appear on stage; at the same time, the fragment, taken out of context, refers to information and clues that are not provided to the audience. What the scene does show is an uncertain ascription, a belonging and connection among the main characters. For example, we find ourselves in a hotel room with two beds although there are four adults and two children on stage. Even though these people are introduced at some point, the location and their identities remain uncertain throughout the scene. The husband's failure to acquaint the others and therefore his failure to connect his past and present life are key motifs of the situation.
Cassavetes’ focus is on the work of his actors. Our work was to pin down shiftings that were improvised or unclear in his version (Cassavetes did not have a finished screenplay when he started shooting). We prepared a script for our actors that obviously contained the dialogue but also an extremely precise sequence of prescribed gestures and stage movements, which is unusual in theatre. In contrast to the improvised act of Opening Night, we shifted our attention to the mechanisms of drama. We engaged in an act of re-writing. Cassavetes’ jubilance, outburst, and surprise became predetermined and deliberate in our case. The result is an almost scientific, i.e. observable and repeatable description of a situation. The work is and remains detached.
The sequence of takes shows the ceaselessly repeated movement of being-on-stage and walking-off-stage. The close-up of Lisa’s (the ex-wife’s) eyes, followed by a long shot and the only one that shows the stage construction, is an antagonistic response to Cassavetes. The fundamental difference from the original film lies in the changed status of its subject matter. Given that the film is about the life of an actress and the world of the theatre, we use an unexpected dispositive: the scene is neither a performance – there is no audience – nor is it a rehearsal. The entire difference lies in the penultimate take that shows the stage with the actors and – an empty house. For one single take, the emptiness becomes obvious. So who are they playing to? There is no interruption during the entire scene. Because of the absence of a director, of remarks, of repetitions, the scene (the play) cannot be interpreted as a rehearsal. Our project therefore diverges not only in its detachment from the hysterical situation but also in the legitimisation of that same situation.
It is our goal to shake up the customary parameters that underlie the perception of art. It is not easy to localise the uncertainty because, in the final analysis, we are unlikely to ask ourselves to whom the actors are addressing their actions. Signs are given: there is a division into two kinds of speech, the whispering among the actors in the wings as opposed to their elocution when they talk to the audience. The actors mark the difference but they have internalised both modes and therefore show no ambiguity. In consequence, the question is parried, enabling us to step out of the category of representation and pose the truly decisive question. It does not read: who do the actors address, but rather who does i t address? It is the production that must be understood, i.e. the exposure of dramaturgical mechanisms.
AL: In their version of the scene from Opening Night, Moser / Schwinger depict both the reality of film and the action on stage, but the representation of the two levels is considerably less differentiated through the change of perspective. Cassavetes' obvious distinction between film and theatre has been levelled out in their version since the parts that were, or at least appeared to be improvised in the original version have now been as carefully choreographed as the original acting.
The direction of play has also been subverted. The actors in the film's theatre performance were entirely focused on their audience as well as being involved in the plot of the film, which was ultimately also conceived for public consumption. But in Affection riposte, they appear on stage strangely undirected. The background story remains blurred, the behaviour of the characters therefore without context, and furthermore, they are playing to an empty house. The audience of this version is neither that of the original film nor that of the stage. The play by Moser / Schwinger is instead directed at the viewers in the exhibition gallery, with the intention of revealing the theatrical mechanisms of different narrative levels by leaving them suspended in the re-enactment. The re-enacted sequence is only accessible through the unexplained emotionality of the action, which makes an impact despite the reduced narrative.
Another level of refraction in the exhibition is generated by the reproduction of the scenery. Viewers cannot understand it unless they watch the film, because only the film can provide the additional information required to decipher the incomprehensible spatial installation of an untidy hotel room. Outside of the theatrical situation it cannot be perceived as a stage set: more explicit positioning in relation to an audience is required, which Moser / Schwinger provide by juxtaposing film and installation. Out of the fragments of the theatre scene from Opening Night – the undirected action of the film sequence and the stage set without a location – an installational situation emerges, allowing not only a differentiated insight into the dramaturgy of staging but also an experience of the represented emotions.
The installation Internment Area (2002) also separates the play from the stage. It examines staging as a means of psychotherapy. In the projected film sequence, a ‘Therapist’ tries to make a youth, 'Guillaume', recreate typical and problematic situations from his own life on stage in order to resolve conflicts with himself and his surroundings. Guillaume is supported by various characters that embody people from his life or even himself (auxiliary egos) according to his instructions.
FM / PS: The point of departure for Internment Area is the therapeutic technique of the psychodrama, which was first proposed by Jacob L. Moreno in the 1930s and has undergone substantial development since the 1960s.
We have taken a few steps back into the past in order to discover in this clinical instrumentalisation the factors that prefigured one of the most important parameters of current media production: the display of intimacy in a spectacular dispositive.
To this end, we reconstructed the scenic space devised by Moreno. It consists of a circular stage with three steps and a balcony jutting out in the middle. The stage is characterised by maximum visibility, unobstructed surfaces and just a few properties such as stools, a mattress and a table. This underscores the features of an architecture in which shades of the 19th century reverberate while also anticipating the television studios of the 1970s.
Within this context, a meeting takes place in which the technique of role-playing determines the interaction among a group of five protagonists. We constructed the text for the meeting in advance on the basis of authentic minutes, and rehearsed it in great detail with the actors. The meeting was then subdivided into several scenes that we filmed with two cameras. We followed traditional parameters of production because we wanted to construct a staged event based on the spontaneity of each line without deviating from the text. We forced the situation by inserting moments of hesitation, repetition and verbal rectification. The entire film is screened next to the installation of the stage in the exhibition gallery.
AL: Internment Area offers insight into the therapeutic methods of Jacob L. Moreno, who recognised the healing potential of his patients’ play-acting. They were meant to act their way out of their own dilemmas, to break out of the routine of ingrained patterns of behaviour and thought and, through theatre, experience possible new behaviours. The film by Moser / Schwinger tells the story of a therapy session that is not a one-to-one historical account but that certainly could be, when compared to the minutes of actual therapeutic sessions. As the sequence unfolds, an image of a boy emerges who lacks family support and has been thrown back on himself. He is forced to seek escape in a fantasised reality that is tailored entirely to his immediate needs so that the importance of his (real) environment fades into the background.
The film opens with Guillaume on stage, sitting on a mattress. We hear the Therapist giving him advice from the wings on how he might develop a scene with the help of the stage. In the film, however, the location cannot immediately be identified as a stage, and Guillaume seems to be rather disinterested, so that the Therapist's words appear to be directed not only at him but especially at the viewers of the film for whom the monumental stage is the dominant object in the exhibition space.
The stage stands as a site outside of reality, where actions are no longer determined by conventional rules. Anything positioned on stage can become reality and new realities can be put to the test. Thus Guillaume acts out an extremely convincing dialogue with his girlfriend and gradually provides the audience with an image of his family situation, only to reveal later that both are products of his imagination and fantasy.
The stage that is re-created in this installation goes back to the one Moreno used in the 1950s and 1960s. It meets all the requirements: it is immediately perceived as a theatre, the design is open and therefore open to interpretation and yet it is fully self-contained. It requires neither seating nor audience in order to perform its function. The steps all around are enough to set the stage off from its surroundings; the backdrop creates a variable space for performance and also establishes intimacy. As a theatre, it is amenable to any concept and in Guillaume’s play, it first represents a dormitory and then a kitchen. In the exhibition, however, it figures prominently and exclusively as a stage: it remains empty and unused. Even when, in the film, Guillaume and his 'Mother' have their encounter in the kitchen, it is only the stage in the film that becomes the location of this emotional dialogue. Only through the play does the stage acquire meaning; it does not play a role by itself.
Moser / Schwinger’s installations are neither theatre nor film nor installation. All three aspects must converge in order to generate the complex system of distinct levels of action and meaning, which also undergo constant redefinition through the changing positions of the viewers. It is an infinitely convoluted play. Its narrative plot serves as a foil against which the other levels pile up; it is also the thematic point of reference to the present day. This is overlaid with the play within the play, the subject of which is how theatre functions, and also with historicity as a device that creates perspective. In the resulting film, the two levels are analytically documented and condensed. In the gallery, an additional aspect comes into play: the sculptural installation of an element of the scenery, which allows for a further non-visual appropriation of the production.
In their theatrical work, Frédéric Moser and Philippe Schwinger do not target the staging of fictions or the mere representation of theatre; they are interested in decoding the potential and the processes of dramaturgy. Theatre is an especially intense means of transmitting information thanks to direct contact between audience and actors, and therefore ideally embodies the various methods of controlled communication. It is there that Moser / Schwinger produce their complex scenarios, which subvert habitual modes of perception, expose structures and successfully combine analysis and emotionality.
Translation: Catherine Schelbert
Image: Axel Lapp (taken at a rehearsal for Capitulation Project, Berlin 2003)