Consciousness, Literature and the Arts
Archive
Volume 7 Number 2, August 2006
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Meerzon, Yana , The Path of a Character: Michael Chekhov’s Inspired Acting and Theatre Semiotics, Frankfurt am Main, Peter Lang, 2005, 338pp, ISBN 3-631-53096-X; US-ISBN 0-8204-7369-3 $62.95.
Reviewed by
University College Cork
One of the key aims of this thoughtful book is to explore a perceived gap between the theatre and academia by bringing together Michael Chekhov’s work with semiotic theories. It also aims to translate Chekhov’s ‘highly spiritual and poetic vocabulary into the terms of today’s performance studies’ (263).
Immediate problems here are whether or not semiotics can effect a suitable translation of Michael Chekhov’s spiritual and poetic vocabulary without performing a significant distortion of Chekhov’s work, and why semiotics is taken as the exemplary language of today’s performance studies rather than, say, the work of Schechner, Auslander, Phelan, or Zarrilli (only the last of these is listed in the bibliography).
The answer to the second problem appears the easiest to answer: the work of the Prague Linguistic Circle in the 1920s and 1930s is seen as a development contemporary with Chekhov’s formational explorations and thus to have existed within a critical and historical context that enables a fruitful cross-referencing. This doesn’t mean that the book’s references are enclosed within this narrow time period; semioticians have continued to develop their work over the past eighty years and these developments are readily drawn upon as being in the same line of thought, particularly the work of Pavis, de Marinis, Ubersfeld, and Fischer-Lichte.
A key aspect of this exploration of Chekhov’s work in relation to semiotics is an investigative comparison of Chekhov’s concept of the ‘stage mask’ and Jiri Veltrusky’s ‘stage figure’. Both are assemblages of signs for an audience but one is discussed from the perspective of the actor and the other from the perspective of the spectator. It is these two perspectives that Meerzon is attempting to bring together in order to enable us to see them as two sides of the same coin, and part of her method for doing this is to identify that both Chekhov and Veltrusky attempted to shift perspective to see the other side of the activity.
Leaving aside, the spectator’s role, the main focus here is the actor’s activity of constructing a stage mask/stage figure and this brings up issues of identity, consciousness, difference, and creativity. All terms which are fraught with difficulty and subject to multiple interpretations. One way of limiting the difficulty is by focusing on the specific historical and cultural context in which the questions initially arose and this is done through setting Michael Chekhov’s work within the context of Russian modernism in general and theatre theories, histories and practices in particular.
In addition to the directly pragmatic goal of constructing a stage mask, Meerzon considers two of Michael Chekhov’s more idealistic goals in relation to Russian modernism: the development of an ‘ideal actor’and the search for an ‘international’ or ‘universal’ theatre.
Chekhov’s quest for an ‘ideal actor’ is linked to Solov’ev’s notion of the God-Man and Steiner’s progress of the initiate, the ‘new man’ of the Russian modernists which confused/conflated Nietzsche’s notion of the ubermensch with a versions of Christian perfectionism. In Chekhov this manifested in his view of acting not only as a profession but also as a means of personal purification (19) and as the theatre as a means of cultural transformation in line with these spiritual views, thus a universal theatre. These links to Russian modernism are explored through references to inter alia Berdiaev, Solov’ev and Bely. Bely himself had argued the ‘actor must become the new man’ (cited, 166). This is all clearly detailed in the book, yet it’s not clear what happens to these ideas once Chekhov’s work is translated into the language of the Prague Linguistic Circle. How do Veltrusky, Bogatyrev, Mukarovsky et al translate the idea of the ‘new man’ and the ‘ideal actor’? This isn’t explored sufficiently in the book and leaves the question of translation unproblematised, something which is ironic in a book that is filled with new and valuable translations from Russian sources.
An idea of the translation problem can be seen if we take Bogatyrev’s notion that ‘transformation’ is a fundamental to the theatre and put it alongside Chekhov’s statement that all true actors have a ‘deeply rooted…desire for transformation’ (cited in Chamberlain, 77). In a semiotic analysis the transformation or the dynamism of the sign is a key aspect of the semiotic system of theatre. From this perspective a character who appears on stage is an assemblage of signs which are articulated through the voice, words, gestures, actions and costume of the actor (in signs which are recognisable, of course, to the audience). This can all be done at a very formal level but Chekhov’s sense of the deeply rooted desire goes back to the impulse for transformation that would lead to the ‘new man’ (which isn’t investigated in gender terms for the impact it might have on training processes: is the archetype of this new creative individual ‘male’? Or is the ideal for a ‘new human’?). Without this desire for transformation being fully taken into account there is a formal similarity but not a substantial one; something is lost in translation.
What is lost is the actor’s subjectivity and consciousness. This is explored through Chekhov’s threefold model of the actor’s consciousness, and its link to the ideas of Stanislavsky and Meyerhold as well as to those of Bakhtin and Shklovsky and it is these latter two who are used as a bridge between Russian formalism and the Prague semioticians. There is a question as to whether such a link is helpful or whether more could have been learned through a deeper investigation of Russian formalism, including Propp, Eikhenbaum, and the early Jakobson, together with the work of Volkonsky and a more throrough investigation of these both in relation to the general movement of Russian modernism and to the theatrical experiments of the period. For example, Chekhov’s relationship with Bely is well known, and Bely’s symbolist aesthetic was challenged by the work of the Moscow Linguistic Circle. It seems sometimes as if the analytic stance taken on Chekhov’s work is somehow supposed to be ‘objective’ rather than a product of a similar set of social and cultural circumstances (in the case of formalism) and of a different set of circumstances (in the case of semiotics). Of course the Prague Linguistic Circle included Russian émigrés such as Jakobson, but his work, for example, shifted when he moved from Moscow to Prague.
Whilst Chekhov himself doesn’t appear to have written anything about any of the formalist critics, nor of the semioticians, Meerzon points out that Valentin Smyshliaev who worked with Chekhov in the 1920s, refers to Shklovsky and Jakobson his notebooks in relation to Chekhov’s experiments with language and this is the area that could have been explored more. She also indicates that Shklovsky saw Chekhov’s work and there seems to be at least an implicit dialogue between them.
Shklovsky’s notion of ‘defamiliarization’ is usefully brought to bear on the idea that Chekhov wanted the actor to ‘become free from his/her consciousness, looking upon his/her stage mask as if from aside’ (39). This ‘as if from aside’ might be differently expressed as Chekhov wanting to effect a change in the actor’s consciousness so that there was distance between actor and role rather than identification, and this distance isn’t one of separation but of relation. It can, however, be seen in terms of aesthetic distancing and defamiliarization; Shklovsky considered that art removed the ‘automatism of perception’ (Shklovsky, 13). This breaking of perceptual habits is precisely what Meerzon sees in Chekhov’s work, by dis-identifying from the character, as well as dis-identifying from the ‘everyday’ self, the actor is able to work on the character as a separate aesthetic construct. In other words, the actor constructs the character through an assemblage of signs and adopts a spectatorial perspective on the process.
Meerzon expresses this development of a spectatorial perspective in terms of consciousness being broken into two poles rather than as an amplification and refinement of a pre-existent reflective consciousness. Whilst Shklovsky’s notion of defamilarization helps to explain what art ‘does’, what it ‘performs’, and can be adopted to explain the process of distancing that goes on in Chekhov’s description of the process of developing a stage mask, it’s not a simple process. What is the difference, for example, between the ability of art object to make us see things as if for the first time and the process of the artist dis-identifying from the artistic product? Defamiliarization, for Shklovsky, might occur with any art object irrespective of genre or style and could apply equally to the naturalism of Stanislavsky, the constructivism of Meyerhold, and the fantastic-realism of Vakhtangov. A shift from product to process might give very different readings and a study of Stanislavsky’s work, for example, would suggest that although the rhetoric is one of identification, the process and practice is one of an ongoing gap between actor and character although in the context of an increasingly close relationship.
But it is in the way in which the process is described that brings Chekhov closer to the formalists and the semioticians, and this is what Meerzon is getting at, not simply that Chekhov’s work is easily translatable into semiotic terms, but that Chekhov himself was thinking along similar lines. The difficulty comes because the Prague semioticians were developing a mode of analysis which they believed would be applicable to all theatre, and so their methodology can be applied to any theatrical performance irrespective of the theoretical perspective articulated by specific practitioners. From this perspective, of course Chekhov’s work can be read in terms of semiotics, but that isn’t the point in question, it’s whether Chekhov is articulating a theory of performance that is congruent with certain key themes explored by semioticians. Even if that is accepted, and it is a strength of the book that this argument doesn’t appear too contentious, there is still the problem of whether or not anything is excluded in the translation. The use of Shklovsky and Bakhtin as a bridge ultimately reveals the gap between the formalists and the semioticians, and points to the non-identity of Chekhov’s idea of the actor and that of the semioticians. This persistent gap, however, is one which enables the kind of critical reflection that the reader is being invited to undertake.
There is a strong sense of theatre history in this book and it’s worth reading simply for the discussion of Chekhov’s work that draws on previously untranslated material.
Ultimately it attempts too much, a closer focus on Chekhov in relation to the symbolist and formalist poles of Russian modernism, for example, would have been more than enough for a book this size. Because of the amount of material covered the text is sometimes unwieldy and there are apparent contradictions in the argument. On the other hand there is plenty of fascinating material and thought-provoking explorations here.
Chamberlain, Franc (2004) Michael Chekhov, London: Routledge.
Matejka, Ladislav and Irwin R Titunik (eds. 1984) Semiotics of Art, Cambridge MA: MIT Press
Shklovsky, Viktor, (1965) ‘Art as Technique’ in Lemon, Lee T and Marion J Reis (eds): Russian Formalist Criticism: Four Essays, Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Pp 3-24.