An Aesthetics of the General

Cécile Guédon

Origin: Static Issue 08
Content: Text

Modernist’s strategy of deprivation can be seen most clearly in its extensive use of the non-verbal or the non-articulate in modernist theatre – voices, gestures, silence are used against their grain, that is, not to convey characterisations or to portray plotted emotions any longer, but rather, to register depersonalised possibilities of expression, representing conceptual notions with a greater force. The principle of Loie Fullers’ dance was to put on stage her own body wrapped up in white veils, displaying alternatively slow and rapid gestures, with a complex electric-lighting system, in complete silence. Adolphe Appia’s and Gordon Craig’s insights echoed Fuller’s conceptions, her performances being structured around a playful contrast between invisible forms and their potential for visibility. Veiled silhouettes, silent puppets and masked dancers transfigure the performing actor into an abstract shadow of human presence, and thereby into functional sign: this mutation from the particular to the general makes possible a direct representation of images, concepts, or ideas with the same density and concision as figurative and discursive ideograms, by means of the stylisation of the human shape. I suggest tracing the stylisation of the human figure into its abstract shadow in Loie Fuller’s silent performances, Maurice Maeterlinck’s speechless theatre, and William Butler Yeats’ abstract dancers, from veiled silhouettes, human reflections or puppets, to masked marionettes. My proposition is as follows: abstraction concretely stands for an aesthetic of the general; its defining feature is the stylised abstract shadow, implicit and generative model for theatrical experimentations at the turn of the twentieth century. This paper intends to formulate a definition of an ars poetica stripped bare, which would gather the threads unravelled by the ambition to achieve a truly abstract theatre: a play on the borders of theatricality, with the structural use of silence, speechlessness and geometrical forms, to the point of the disappearance of the human presence altogether, visible only under the guise of its uncanny trace or remainder, the abstract shadow.

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Contributor:

Cécile Guédon is a PhD candidate (London Consortium, Birkbeck College). She completed a DEA in Comparative Literature in 2005 at La Sorbonne-Paris-IV and an M.A. in European Culture on a Marie Curie Scholarship at UCL in 2007. She is a member of the Association for the Study of Comparative Theory and History of Literature and has been working since 2007 as an Associate Editor for the International Journal for the Humanities.