· Introduction – What do you think this project is about? What do you know about the Holocaust? Youtube videos: Yad Vashem 15 minute introduction; La vita è bella; Band of Brothers
· Peter Brook, The Empty Space
· Intro to Liliane Atlan; Ritual/Ceremonial
· Read Canto 11 of Peter Weiss’ The Investigation
Yesterday we had our first rehearsal for the project and it was exceptionally interesting and very exciting, albeit quite intense (which is to be expected, I suppose.)
As the introductory session, I wanted to gauge the level of knowledge the actors had of the Holocaust, as well as ask them what they thought this project was about, from what they had read on the website. In terms of the project, the responses were concise and accurate insofar as they reflected the brief that is on the ‘About’ page on the site, but some interesting questions came up. Were we responding to the events of the Shoah, or were we responding to the artistic (and therefore mediated) responses to those events (Books, films, plays, testimony etc.?) The short answer, I think, is both, but with a focus on the artistic responses, given that anything one hears or reads or watches about the Shoah nowadays is mediated anyway; I want focus on those responses that have had the biggest effect on me in my research. Another issue I’m looking at, and that I want us to explore as a company, is the thorny issue of Holocaust representation in general. But more of that later.
Knowledge of the Holocaust amongst the cast varied from almost none, to a bit, to quite well-informed, but none had a comprehensive historical overview, which is to be expected; the Shoah is a huge historical topic, and one that I myself am only slowly coming to grips with. Obviously the ‘6 million Jews’ statistic came up, and there was some good general knowledge about Hitler and WWII more broadly, but in terms of the extermination process, there was almost no factual knowledge. We spoke about the power of official and euphemistic language, and how it can have an equally inflammatory or de-sensitising effect: i.e. ‘Undesirable’ is more neutral, while ‘vermin’ or ‘rat’ is highly inflammatory. We then watched Yad Vashem’s concise introduction to the Holocaust, which was exceptionally useful and consolidated a lot of what had been spoken about.
We then moved on to issues of representation, looking at clips from Roberto Benigni’s La vita è bella, and the Spielberg/Hanks HBO programme, Band of Brothers.
Debate around these two extracts was wide-ranging, with my disparaging comments about Benigni’s facile use of the ‘love triumphs over adversity’ trope being disagreed with by some, although this did lead to an interesting discussion about the validity of comedy in Holocaust representation. For my part, I think it’s perfectly valid, even desirable, to have elements of black humour in Holocaust theatre (cf. Peter Barnes’ Auschwitz, or Donald Margulies’ The Model Apartment), and I’d like to incorporate this in our final piece, provided it’s deployed purposefully. Regarding the clip from Band of Brothers, most of the debate centred on the use of sentimental music as Easy Company liberate the unnamed German concentration camp. This music was referred to as emotionally manipulative on the one hand, but also as a ‘comfort blanket’ or something to latch on to, on the other. For my part, I think that while an audience does need a hook of some sort, anything that resembles a comfort blanket must be avoided at all costs. However, Nima pointed out that, for him, the music consciously drew attention to the fictionality of the liberation of this camp. To do the scene in silence might have lent it the semblance of documentary, which it patently is not.
Rosie raised a more performance-related point, regarding the difficult performance of grief, and the use of clichés, with lines such as: ‘Can you believe this place?’ and various actors covering their noses as if to portray the stench, which we saw to be unnatural and overly performative. Rosie then raised the interesting point that it would be fundamental for us not to have any display whatsoever of virtuosity in performance of sensitive issues. The last thing an audience want is to be shown how to respond (cf. the use of sentimental music). The question was then raised: What is it that we are looking to elevate? Language? Imagery? Something to think about. The last comments here were to do with zombie imagery possibly being influenced by the Shoah, drawing on people’s fear of the uncanny, or the living dead, as the Muselmänner have been described. I also brought up Chicken Run in passing, having just read an article by Barry Langford in a book entitled Holocaust Intersections: Genocide and Visual Culture at the New Millenium that examines the film’s allusions to the Holocaust.
After the break we read a passage from Peter Brook’s The Empty Space, (suggested to me by Angus), in which Brook describes the different performance qualities that emanate from different material:
"During a talk to a group at a university I once tried to illustrate how an audience affects actors by the quality of its attention. I asked for a volunteer. A man came forward, and I gave him a sheet of paper on which was typed a speech from Peter Weiss’s play about Auschwitz, The Investigation. As the volunteer took the paper and read it over to himself the audience tittered in the way an audience always does when it sees one of its kind on the way to making a fool of himself. But the volunteer was too struck and too appalled by what he was reading to react with the sheepish grins that are also customary. Something of his seriousness and concentration reached the audience and it fell silent. Then at my request he began to read out loud. The very first words were loaded with their own ghastly sense and the reader’s response to them. Immediately the audience understood. It became one with him, with the speech – the lecture room and the volunteer who had come on to the platform vanished from sight – the naked evidence from Auschwitz was so powerful that it took over completely. Not only did the reader continue to speak in a shocked attentive silence, but his reading, technically speaking, was perfect – it had neither grace nor lack of grace, skill nor lack of skill – it was perfect because he had no attention to spare for self-consciousness, for wondering whether he was using the right intonation. He knew the audience wanted to hear, and he wanted to let them hear: the images found their own level and guided his voice unconsciously to the appropriate volume and pitch."
This passage, along with Skloot’s invitation (found on our ‘About’ page), was one of the sources for my idea about drafting audience members to perform testimony, unseen, onstage in front of their fellow audience members, and playing with the ‘many layers [that] silence can contain’ [Brook].
Before buckling down to read from Canto 11 of Weiss’s verbatim play The Investigation, I briefly introduced some of the ideas that I want to play with in this production, drawn from my encounters with Richard Schechner and Liliane Atlan, who both reawakened for me the essence of ritual and ceremony in theatre, and, more specifically in regard to Atlan, to its necessity in Holocaust theatre (cf. Liliane Atlan’s Un opéra pour Terezin). (I am particularly drawn to Schechner’s description of what he terms an ‘actual’ and how we can relate this to our production.) However, having read some choicely selected bits from Atlan’s An Opera for Terezin, the actors found the statistics invoked to be dehumanising and difficult to digest, finding much more empathy in individual stories of suffering. I agree, but the problem here, for me, is that to focus on the individual could be seen as excluding or not doing justice to the suffering of the millions of other, just as individual, cases. The specifically Jewish nature of Atlan’s play was seen as being potentially alienating to those who aren’t Jewish (it’s worth noting at this point that none of the cast is Jewish, by chance. I don’t think this presents a problem…). It was raised that it would be better to emphasise the victims’ status as human, rather than specifically Jewish. I agreed, but countered this with the fact that it must not be ignored that the Nazis specifically attacked and targeted Jews with more urgency and hatred than those other undesirables who also met their fate at the hands of the Nazis; the ‘Final Solution’ was a solution to the ‘Jewish Problem’, and I think it’s of utmost importance that our production not forget that.
Ritual was discussed by Thomasin as being in some way ‘post-traumatic’, insofar as it can often be instigated after a traumatic event, i.e. survivors of a car crash meeting up at the pub and constantly re-visiting the incident, or in a more formal context, Jewish holidays like Passover and Yom Kippur. In our discussion of how we might use ritual and ceremony in our production, it was instantly agreed to make every effort to avoid sentimentality and cliché at all costs. Rosie also brought up the issue of making audience members feel like a part of our ‘world’ and not creating a sense of worry over being a ‘good’ or a ‘bad’ audience member. (Cf. an incident described in relation to Badac Theatre’s 2008 production entitled The Factory, where a critic decided to resist the nature of the show, and threw the production off slightly, and who was later verbally abused on the street by the company’s director for her actions. See: http://www.theguardian.com/culture/theatreblog/2008/aug/22/edinburghfestivalholocausts and http://www.theguardian.com/culture/2008/aug/20/theatre.edinburghfestival). Thomasin also raised issues of what Jean Laplanche terms ‘violent intromission’, which I related to Marianne Hirsch’s definitions of ‘postmemory’, insofar as both refer to a sort of intergenerational transmission of trauma, or inherited trauma. Both these concepts could be useful to us, and will surely reappear when we start looking at Art Spiegelman’s Maus.
As a final exercise, the cast read out Canto 11 (I & II) of Peter Weiss’s The Investigation. Taking it in turns to read line by line, the reading took on a monotonous, liturgical quality very quickly, which I found interesting. When asked, the performers said they liked the juridical tone of the extract. The extract was described as being slightly ‘addictive’ in its detail, in the same way that one slows down to look at a car accident. (This is the constant fear of Holocaust representation, particularly as mentioned by Adorno, that there is the possibility of producing aesthetic pleasure from suffering. It is however, human nature to be drawn to such things.)
Here are some raw ideas that we are looking to play with as we progress:
Setting? Factory/Courtroom – cliché
Cooking program? Raw meat = cliché but there’s definitely something in the ritual of cooking as a family, or small family rituals that could be played with. Knitting/Baking. Juxtaposition of action and speech. What about playing chess/cards with audience and having an interaction that has the form and tone of ‘let me teach you how this is done’ whilst having testimonial or graphic content? Must steer clear of being emotionally manipulative, whilst at the same t
Thanks for reading, if you’ve made it this far! Another one of these tomorrow. Please feel free to comment and engage with the thoughts above.
J