Picturing Meditation

Abstract

A photograph of a performance is, literally, an act of interruption. Although technically it doesn’t interrupt the continuity of the ‘real’ performance, nor the energy flow that passes between the actor and the audience, photography inevitably produces a suspension, establishing a new temporality that overlaps and interacts with the unfolding of time of performance. Based on the photographic sequence of La Méditation (1957), the highest result of the artistic collaboration between the mime Etienne Decroux and the photographer Etienne Bertrand Weill, the essay intends to emphasize the profound ontological affinities between photography and mime, and to suggest the essential performative nature of the photographic interruption, rather than the widespread idea of ‘petrification’ of the moment.

Notes

1 I had a first opportunity to address this topic during a long research stay at the National Library of France (Bibliotheque Nationale de France) a few years ago. See Chiarelli (2012).

2 ‘Mime only produces presences, which are not conventional signs. And if he happened to produce such signs, he would die’ (Pezin 2003: 44, my translation).

3 ‘The link is the imbalance, and the truth is perhaps instability. Because the balance of a situation changes in the next instant, the truth is different’ (Canis 1980).

4 The film, by an anonymous author, can be seen on the web at this address https://bit.ly/36aoTVi. This is probably one of the first uses of cinema for the recording of Decroux performances

5 Each photograph ‘allows to imagine what preceded and what it is preparing: then, the movement no longer situated in the image, but in the imagination of the “reader”’ (Weill c.1994).