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Dan Friedman
What is probably most unusual about Castillo is its overriding concern with
making performance accessible to non-performers in their daily lives. This
concern grows from Castillo’s understanding, articulated most clearly by its
artistic director Fred Newman, that performance is the dialectical activity of
being both who you are and who you are not, that is, who you are and who
you are becoming, at the same time. Castillo’s artists share with German
playwright Heiner Muller the conviction that it is in the ‘space between I and I’
(1990:48) and in what Victor Turner has termed the ‘liminoid,’ (1987: 29) that
new cultural and social discoveries are made and innovations become
possible.
Turner’s concept of the liminal has its roots in the work of the early 20 th
century anthropologist Arnold van Gennep. Van Gennep used the term
"liminal" (from the Latin limen, meaning "threshold") to describe the changes
people go through in performing the rituals that accompany social changes in
tribal societies. In rituals marking transformations in individual lives (from child
to adult, single to married, etc.) or in the life of the group (from peace to war,
change of season, etc.) van Gennep noted that those involved pass through
(or beyond) the threshold of traditional or conventional behavior and emerged
changed. For van Gennep ritualized performance remained an activity distinct
from daily life (in fact, defined by its distinction from daily life), and one that,
contained within established ritual, played the basically conservative function
of keeping change within the boundaries of tradition. (van Gennep, 1960)
Turner, building on van Gennep’s work made a distinction between the liminal
and the liminoid. Liminal activity, which he saw as primarily relevant to tribal
and early agrarian societies, was ritualized performatory activity which broke
social norms in order to reintegrate the individual or group back into the social
norm. Liminoid activity, which has evolved since the industrial revolution and
the consequent distinction between work and play, is a less ritualized, more
individualized and playful performatory activity from which innovation and
social transformation can grow. (Turner, 1982) Following Turner, Brian Sutton-
Smith, a developmental psychologist, emphasized the inherent
subversiveness of performance, and argued that individuals and groups had
much to learn from the "disorderliness" of performance, which he called "the
source of new culture." (Sutton-Smith qtd. in Turner, 1982:28) Also based on
Turner’s work, Colin Turnbull has challenged the traditional methodological
approach of anthropology (and by implication, other social sciences), by
maintaining that performance cannot be studied objectively and can only be
understood by participation in the performance. (Turnbull, 1990) Turnbull’s
activistic (as opposed to cognitive), dialectical (as opposed to dualist)
methodology has much in common with Newman’s concept of performance,
which is not primarily about watching performance; it is about but doing
performance.
The Castillo Theatre has played a significant role in the creation of this
community and its approach to performance. In 1981, when I first met
Newman, his movement already placed psychology and culture at the center
of its efforts to radically transform society. It had a performatory practice even
though it did not yet have a clearly articulated understanding of the
transformative, creative power of performance. That is the context in which
Newman, myself, and six others founded the Castillo Theatre in 1983.
Castillo quickly became a performance lab, both on and off the stage, in ways
we had not anticipated. From the beginning it was clear to those involved that
unlike other nonprofit theatres in the United States, Castillo could not and
should not survive on grants from government agencies or corporate
foundations. If it were to survive as the theatre of a political movement that
was working to radically transform mainstream society, it could not go to the
powers-that-be, it would have to go to ordinary people for support.
The Development School for Youth is a smaller, more focused program that
each semester takes a group of working class youth through a performance-
for-life training. With visits to major corporations, congressional offices and
other institutions of authority and power the young people are helped to
develop performances that allow them to function within and impact on these
institutions. At the same time, the adults involved, many of them quite
privileged, learn to perform respectfully with the working class youth, and a
new relationship is created.
Newman has been a practicing therapist for three decades and is the author
or co-author of five books that challenge the ideological underpinnings of the
institution of psychology. (Newman, 1991; Newman and Holzman, 1993;
Newman, 1994; Newman and Holzman, 1996; Newman, 1996b; Newman and
Holzman, 1997) Just as his therapeutic work has influenced his work in the
theatre, so his theatre work has had a major impact on the evolution of his
radical therapy movement. Lois Holzman, a developmental psychologist and
close collaborator with Newman in the development of performance social
therapy, describes it this way, ‘Dealing with emotional problems and pain does
not require insight, objectification or analysis. Rather, as we see it, it requires
creating new emotions (developing emotionally). This is a creative activity
people do with each other.’ (1999: 55) That creative activity that people do
together is performance.
How can the claim be made that this sort of performance in everyday life is
revolutionary? To answer this, we must first make a distinction between
‘revolutionary activity’ and the ‘the activity of making the Revolution.’ While
making the Revolution is certainly a revolutionary activity, it is not the only
one, nor even the most radically transformative. In fact, it seems to Newman
and his colleagues that it is precisely because 20 th century revolutionaries
confused making the Revolution with revolutionary activity that they failed to
qualitatively transform anything.
Given the highly developed alienation of contemporary society and the weight
of tradition and convention, revolutionary activity has increasingly become
performatory. As early as 1989, just as he was taking on the responsibilities of
artistic director at Castillo, Newman wrote, ‘In a world so totally alienated as
ours doing anything even approaching living requires that we perform. To be
natural in bourgeois society is to be dead-in-life. Unnaturalness is required if
we are to live at all.’(1989: 6)
I believe this is where Newman and Turner may part ways. There is, to be
sure, extensive discussion in Turner’s writings of the liminoid, transformative
and anti-structural nature of performance. At the same time, Turner’s view of
what he calls ‘social drama,’ that is, of performance that breaks with
conventional social structures and has the potential to bring about social
change, is structural, even formularistic. There are, Turner maintains, four
‘steps’ in a social drama: (1) the breach of regular norm-governed social
relations; (2) the crisis in which people take sides relative to the breach; (3)
the application of redressive or remedial procedures to deal with the crisis;
and (4) the reintegration of the disturbed social group or the recognition and
legitimization of irreparable schism and a subsequent reorganization of
society. (Turner, 1957)
References
Gennep, Arnold van (1960) The Rites of Passage. M.B. Vizedon and G.L.
Caffee (trans.). London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. First published in 1909.
Marx, Karl (1974) ‘Thesis on Feuerbach,’ in The German Ideology, Part One:
With Selections from Parts Two and Three and Supplementary Texts. New
York: International Publishers. First published in 1888, pp. 121-123.
Turner, Victor (1982) From Ritual to Theatre: The Human Seriousness of Play.
New York: PAJ Publications.
Vygotsy, Lev (1978) Mind in Society. Michael Cole, Vera John-Steiner, Sylvia
Scribner, Ellen Souberman (ed. and trans.). Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press.