TEXTS

MY THEATRE

by Javor Gardev

My theatre is based on the genuine desire to create and to reflect on the creation simultaneously, to stand inside and outside at the same time, not to be forced to choose either “vita contemplativa” or “vita activa” but to experience them together. One would say that such a task is impossible to achieve. And this is why I like it so much. And I devote my time in theatre to explore that very gap - between thinking and doing, between the predictability of the project and the unpredictability of the moment, between the shape of the preliminary idea and the shifting of the instant human desire, between reflecting the moment and living the moment, between knowing and feeling, between acting and being. I believe this gap disappears in the instant moment when one stops to divide one’s own personality into parts and reconstructs one’s own integrity into the creative act. This process is very delicate and that is why the talks about creation are never possible as scientific lectures made out of positive terms. I hope though, they are possible as human talks. As talks of sharing experience. My phenomenological theatre ideas are only being used as theoretical basis questioning and provoking the personal human desire. I work with the actors using my regulative idea about “the ecstatic theatre”. According to it acting occurs on the borderline. Rather than an "act", acting is a situation, a situation where matter is left on its own, whose content is gone, where things have lost the crutches of their being. As Plato put it, in ecstasis, the souls are elevated. Eluding conceptual description, it does not easily fit into theories. Acting is located the borderline between two distinct states: the "body with a face" and the "bodies without faces". The orgy (in the ancient sense of this already distorted word) marks the transition or way out (excessus) from the first to the second state. The area in between these two states, between the "I" qua myself, on the one hand, and the "I" in its aspiration towards the image, on the other, forces everyone into the indifference of the ecstatic community where all form one single entity. Situated beyond skill, ecstatic theatre is the proper domain of talent. It is the ability not so much to articulate meaning, but rather to bear it, let it speak through you and others. The theatrical dimension of acting consists not in skilful embodiment, in the illusion of its success, but in the "agony of embodiment" and in the painful endurance of the impossibility to transcend one’s own body. As it turns out, our lifetime imprisonment in a body is a metaphysical tragedy all in itself. Ecstatic theater laments this imprisonment, yet at the same time it celebrates the heroic, if utopian, effort to overcome it.