Narrative—Marianne Weems IToP
Marianne Weems, co-founding artistic director of The Builders
Association, was head of graduate directing at Carnegie Mellon
University and is currently developing CMU’s Integrative Media Program
in New York.
1. THE DEMAND FOR NARRATIVE
If we presume the structure of narrative to be a “story,” then we
adopt the Aristotelian classic progression in which the protagonist is
introduced, begins “his” journey, encounters obstacles, and triumphs
over them. Traditionally the narrative structure of any work (be it
film, play, or novel) can be divided into the three-act structure: setup,
conflict, resolution.
In contemporary performance there are now countless efforts to
problematize, deconstruct, unsettle, reverse, or disperse narrative. I’ve
always liked the playwright Mac Wellman’s summary of these efforts,
via the translation of the Finnish word juoksentelisinkohan: “I think I shall
wander about a little without a particular destination.”1
© 2016 [Link]
Narrative—Marianne Weems IToP
2. FEAR OF NARRATIVE
From the early 1960s on, experimental theater artists demonstrated a
fear of narrative in an enormous and violent effort to belie, deny, resist,
and critique mainstream American theater. Whether evading the realism
of Arthur Miller or the saccharine “story lines” of the musical, the goal
was to put as much distance as possible between themselves and the
packaged products of “Broadway.”
This aversion to conventional theater practices can also be
viewed as a fear of narrative; it launched these artists into the territory
of slippery signifiers, as seen in Robert Wilson’s theater of images, Jack
Smith’s collages of 1940s Hollywood “exotic” B movies, or the Wooster
Group’s various strategies to expand narrative. My work as a dramaturg
with the Wooster Group allowed me to closely witness a variety of
approaches; they have now become identified as “postdramatic theater,”
but in the early to mid-1980s we understood them to be activist
experiments in demolishing story. This was accomplished variously
through the interpolation of a text with little obvious connection to
the ostensible “play,” through the addition of complex movement
sequences, exaggerated performance styles, highly formal approaches
to music and costume, ambient video, and so on. The result was a
sophisticated and sometimes hilarious refusal of stories and of the
writers who made them; the playwright-writer-storyteller could no
longer remain the master of “story” or identify a central meaning for
the experience. Many meanings were conveyed; perhaps some were
associated with the central text, but most were intended to problematize
or open up a space for new associations to be formed.
Paradoxically it is interesting to note that while all these theater
makers were eschewing narrative, visual artists began experimenting
with it. Many visual artists were successfully delivering narrative
meaning through brief (we might now call them Twitter-like) story
lines: Jenny Holzer’s “protect me from what I want,” Barbara Kruger’s
“your body is a battleground,” Glenn Ligon’s “I am a man,” and
others. With the advantage of being in an art space that did not expect
narrative, these visual artists could use short bursts of text to infer a
narrative reading. Free of the conventional theatergoer’s demand that a
“narrative arc” accompany anything taking place in a proscenium, those
working outside of the proscenium found new ways of using rather than
discarding narrative-like content.
© 2016 [Link]
Narrative—Marianne Weems IToP
3. NEW NARRATIVES
Whether exhausted by our predecessors’ intolerance of narrative
or inspired by other artists’ interest in narrative, it now seems that
a generation of artists who came through the Wooster Group have
rebounded. Many are now crafting radically different approaches and
new ways to connect with narrative. My own approach with the Builders
Association has been not to implode narrative but to foreground
contemporary readings of a canonical narrative, for example, pairing
The Grapes of Wrath with stories from the current foreclosure crisis in
HOUSE/DIVIDED (2012), or pairing the story of Aladdin with the call
centers of Bangalore in ALLADEEN (2003). Reactions to these strategies
will still vary. For some, my work does not sufficiently tell a story, and
for others, it is too narrative-y and too content-driven.
Other practitioners have returned theater to a space of language
and narrative by turning a magnifying glass on the often excruciating
process of storytelling itself. By creating a metaconsciousness of the
demands of and for narrative, Richard Maxwell produces a stripped-
down stylized storytelling. This pursuit also seems to inform the
work of Elevator Repair Service, which unpacked F. Scott Fitzgerald’s
Great Gatsby with an eight-hour verbatim reenactment of the entire
novel. We can find it in the work of Nature Theater of Oklahoma,
which meticulously stages casual audio recordings, again calling for
examination of the apparatus of storytelling. For instance, its Romeo
and Juliet “stages” the attempts of some family members to remember
the story’s plot line, and their fragmented reconstruction of the story
becomes a moving alternative narrative.
1 Mac Wellman, Speculations (2001), [Link]
images/[Link].
FOR FURTHER REFERENCE
The Wooster Group, BRACE UP!, 1991.
Richard Maxwell, House, 1998.
Nature Theater of Oklahoma, Life and Times, 2009–.
Elevator Repair Service, Gatz, 2006.
The Builders Association, Alladeen, 1999–2007, and
House/Divided, 2011–.
© 2016 [Link]