How to Make a Spectacle of Yourself!
Performing in extravaganzas, pageants, and opening ceremonies
The Olympics began in Paris last night and boy-howdy what a spectacular opening ceremony! It had everything—dance, music, visual arts, theatre, opera, musical theatre, film, video, literature, architecture, acrobatics, clowning, pole dancing, and a menage a trois. It was site-specific, episodic, over real and imaginary time, on land, on water, in the air, over rooftops, on horse (mechanical and actual). And it was bookended by Lady Gaga and Celine Dion. The setting was the Olympics, but the star was Paris—past, present and future.
There is a LOT to unpack, but I’m going to focus on what the performers did and how they did it.
25 years ago, I published an article in Theatre Topics, the practitioner’s journal for the Associate for Theatre in Higher Education. “The Four Fundamental Verbs” was my first formal foray into the how of acting, and in it, I describe a way to conceive of playing actions that is applicable across genre and forms. Essentially, no matter what the game of theatre is being played, the performer organizes their energy in four fundamental ways—push, pull, hold and release. Each action has two directions—to and from. In a pageant, parade, performance art, or Paris Olympics opening ceremony, rather than focusing on a character’s psychology, needs, goals, etc., you focus on the task and the action required to accomplish it. You do that in more traditional, character-based theatre, too, but the task is derived from your understanding of the character’s agency, in collaboration with the director and designers, based upon the text of the play. In the case of pageantry, the task is assigned by the conceiving artist(s). Thomas Jolly is the artist director who lead the team that created the opening ceremonies. (Here’s a link to a solid recap, and here’s an interview where he explains his vision.)
The performer in spectacle (one of the Aristotelean elements of drama, as I’m sure you recall), has a role, not a character. The role may include aspects of characterization, such as costume, make-up, and other signs of a type (hero, villain, lover, clown). But the essential task is to fulfill a role within the spectacle. A good example is the aforementioned menage a trois, that we saw in the library reading great novels of French literature.
Their costumes are vaguely clown-like, as you can see. And you can also perceive their intention. But we are not to understand them as real people with motivations. They are, as the kids say, iconic. They stand in for youth, vitality, curiosity, and intelligence. They frolic through the library, eventually ending up in a room together, beginning to cuddle, when one of them looks at “us” (the camera) and coyly shuts the door. The rest, as they said, is left to our imaginations!
These performers may have asked Jolly about motivation, but I’m going to guess not. My point is, however, that they needn’t ask. They have a task—frolic among the books, discover a kinship, come together. Release from, hold to, pull to. That’s all they need to know as performers in order to get the job done. And the entire ceremony was loaded with this sort of thing. The decapitated Marie Antoinette, the skate-boarders, the Aristide Lupin figure dashing around with the torch, and the Joan d’Arc person riding the mechanical horse upon the Seine. These performers only need a task and a direction for the action to fulfill the task. The mise en scene does almost all the work and it isn’t required that the performers have a conception of the whole piece.
There was one moment, in the first part, not long after Lady Gaga performed, that we saw a group of dancers working along the banks of the Seine. I haven’t found a good image, sorry to say—and maybe there’s a reason. What I saw were several performers attempting to fulfill their assigned task, but without direction. I could tell they knew what the move/step was (a contraction into a doubled-over posture moving backward and forward), but the behavior lacked clarity. It seemed like a few were more worried about running into someone then organizing their energy effectively to accomplish the task. Almost as if they were thinking, “what the hell am I supposed to be doing?!”
Been there. I have performed in plays and performance art pieces where I literally had no clue as to what my function was or how to fulfill it. My “conceptual conveniences” about the four fundamental verbs came out of those experiences and a desire to help myself and others who may find themselves in these spectacles.
Once we free ourselves of the tyranny of psychological realism, we can find the organizing principals of the piece much more easily. And that’s how you can make a real spectacle out of yourself!