Laughter and love: creative counter-discourses within performer training

Abstract

The importance of being serious and treating the practice seriously is emphasised across many different psychophysical performer trainings, with practitioners following Grotowski’s lead and emphasising the need, as Slowiak and Cuesta highlight, to ‘Leave all giggling, jokes, social chatter … outside the workspace’. However, drawing on a range of practices, particularly experiences as a participant-observer in Phillip Zarrilli and Sandra Reeve’s trainings, this article contends that these private forms of fun should be viewed and utilised as integral to the practice. Aided by Bakhtin’s depiction of the carnivalesque and focusing upon the, as yet, unexamined environment of the performer training changing room and other related daily moments and spaces, it explores participants’ parodic, playful and grotesque treatment of the trainings and their bodies. Frequently sidelined as taboo, these rebellious counter-discourses produce the means for the participant to jokingly question and unwrap the training processes and their evolving bodymind within them. It is argued that these discourses not only enable the participant’s independent ownership of their training, but develop a powerful alternative form of group awareness. This group awareness strengthens the individual participant’s independence, and creates a deeply useful presence of love and care within the training space.

Keywords:

• performer training
• laughter
• grotesque
• Bakhtin
• subversive/counter-discourses

Notes

¹ I would like to thank Jane Milling for her extremely helpful comments on an earlier draft of this article.

² Following Laclau and Mouffe’s belief that ‘discourses are material’ and ‘social practices,’ in whatever form, are ‘fully discursive’ (Phillips and Jørgensen 2002, p. 35, emphasis in original), I am taking discourse, here, to refer to all modes of interaction and communication, not just those confined to the word.

³ Further details about this and other more complex structured improvisations can be found in Zarrilli’s (2009, pp. 99–112) text, Psychophysical Acting: An Intercultural Approach after Stanislavski.

⁴ Whilst it lies outside the remit of this essay to investigate the cultural construction and reception of humour, here and elsewhere in this essay I acknowledge that the cultural specificity of humour and how it may be shaped by socio-cultural background, prior experience and training, will have an impact on how participants experience and respond to these dynamics between seriousness and laughter.

⁵ Participants’ jokes surrounding this concept of bodily ‘elimination’ could be viewed as a grotesque extension of the traditional emphasis within kalarippayattu on ‘the fluid humoral body’ (Zarrilli 1998, p. 91), with the ‘daily practice’ of kalarippayattu ‘popularly believed to establish congruence among the three humours (tridosa; tridhatu): wind (vata), phlegm (kapha), and fire (pitta)’ (Zarrilli 1998, p. 86).

⁶ Again, such laughter can be seen to grotesquely develop and play upon the way in which Zarrilli will emphasise the belief that in kalarippayattu ‘You should wash the floor of the kalari with your sweat’ (Zarrilli 2009, p. 63), as heated relaxed muscles are more able to actualise the vigour and fluidity required. Yet whilst the ‘earthen floor’ of a traditional kalari would ‘absorb sweat and oil’ (Zarrilli 2009, p. 64), where a wooden or dance mat-covered surface is frequently present in contemporary studio spaces, sweating feet and hands may slip when making mistakes, or bodies may slip when excessive sweat has fallen unnoticed.

⁷ The consideration of the effect of menstruation on the training body in kalarippayattu is predominantly a contemporary concern. When discussing the practice of kalarippayattu ‘between the twelfth century and the beginning of British rule in 1792’, Zarrilli points out how in this male-dominated martial form ‘among at least some Nayar and Ilava families, for whom it was traditional to practise the art, young girls also received preliminary training up until the onset of menses’, although ‘at least a few women … continued to practise [beyond this] and achieved a high degree of expertise’ (Zarrilli 1998, p. 36).

⁸ Echoing the earlier Russian Soviet-era context within which Bakhtin’s Rabelais and his world was produced, the troubles and restrictions of communist rule in Poland provoked Staniewski’s politicised decision to engage with Bakhtin’s examination of the satirical and parodic in Gardzienice’s early performances (Allain 1997, pp. 3, 27–34, Hodge 2010, pp. 272–273). Moreover, Gardzienice’s Expeditions to and Gatherings with, particularly rural, communities to exchange music, song, dance, embodied ritual and developing performance also provided a means of exploring Bakhtin’s emphasis on the possibilities of carnival and folk culture (Allain 1997, pp. 3, 27–34; Hodge 2010, pp. 272–273).