Archetypes paper 2: ZAUM - dynamo-rhythm

This paper is a continuation of paper 1: The dance of expressions of emotions. In these papers the goal is to define the corporeal mime expression versus the posture-whole body language. Several sources, literature, and studies shed light on the embodiment of the corporeal experience of emotion. I started to unravel expressions of emotion on base of what scientists Darwin, Ekman left us. Here I emphatically explore the embodiment of the expression, Zaum of the Russian Futurist, together with the biomechanics of Meyerhold to reveal Decroux' statuary mobile(or dynamic immobility), his 'dynamo-rhythm' and corporeal mime.

The different sources with their own perspective will clearify the (historical) context and the understanding of what essentially a (whole body)expression-body language is and what in this light corporeal mime is.

I think every expression of emotion in posture or whole body language has its own 'tune'. The way we form an expression can be seen as dynamo-rhythm as it builds. 

 

When putting 21 emotion expressions to the test, we followed the research in the PNAS publication and all the involved Action Units of the facial expressions were double checked and ultimately used as a method to design the emotion masks. The results of the research and backgrounds were published in 2015: 'Maskers Bewogen, onderzoek naar emotie uitdrukkingen en maskers voor fysiek theater.'  (Masks Moved, research into expressions of emotion and masks for physical theatre)

Here are shown the 21 expressions of emotion thanks to Steef Kersbergen, who aside many others cooperated in the research.

EMBODIMENT

At the turn of the 19^th century a new revolutionary approach into the corporeal experience of emotion and ideas on the gestural origin of language came forward. In Russia the Formalists and in Europe and America, studies were made of verbal expressiveness and uncovered that with verbalization, movement and motorics were always engaged and must be seen as a primary subject in analyzing its aesthetics. Before that the meaning (imaging) was always seen as the important principle for analyzing poetry and its contents. The new type of form-sensitive aesthetics analysis (on poetry and the biodynamics of verbal expressiveness) embodied an analysis that would engage, first and foremost, the inner structural laws of an artwork. In Russia was a special cocktail which made all conjure into revolutionary ideas about the New Man, the body and the movement of the body. Moscow was the center of experimentation in bodily performance, (performance activities in Petrograd/Leningrad and Tiflis were relatively less). In Moscow, then the epicentre of the Sovjet Revolution, Meyerhold's productions like the Magnanimous Cuckold) unveiled a new Constructivist and biomechanical theater, entirely based on movement and a mastery of stage - space and time. 

Wassily Kadinsky and Aleksei Sidorov founded in 1921 the Choreological Laboratory at the Russian Academy of Artistic Sciences in Moscow (1923-1929).

Theater "Mastfor" ("Foregger's Workshop") 

brochure walk premiere of 

"Mechanical dances".1923-February 13

The Laboratory was a unique institution in the history of New Dance in Europe and one of many utopian projects within late Imperial Russian and early Soviet culture. The Laboratory sponsored conferences, publications and four major exhibitions under the rubric “The Art of Movement”. The Laboratory studied how movement could be recorded in its various kinetic extensions—gesture, mime, dance, gymnastics, emotional expression—and, up to the very end, made recourse to various instruments and methodologies, including graphic registration along the lines of musical, pictorial and sculptural transcription as well as mechanical registration (still photography, cinematography, cyclograms).

the russian art of movement. Nicoletta Misler - https://gachn.de/files/data/Misler.Movement.pdf

At the same time, in Europe corporeal mime and biomechanics laid the fundaments of new approach and insight in physical theater. Also in modern dance with Martha Graham (1894-1991) contraction-release technique emphazised on the emotional embodiment in the movement itself.  Whereas classical ballet consisted of strict rules about how the dance should be designed, Graham took the feeling as motivation: the rhythm of breathing is the starting point and the dancer has contact with the ground.

The introduction of a new discipline was there as well: Wilhelm Wundt (1832 –1920) in Europe and William James (1842 –1910)  in America were the pioneers of psychology and the psychological-physiology

.

DYNAMO-RHYTHM

A successive series of movements are connected as a whole in a movement phrase or etude and follows its outline or trajectory as it is performed by the muscle activity that in its tuning causes the dynamics.

The phrase as a whole can be seen as a construction and in its course exhibits a rhythm and implies dynamics of movement and space. Each individual articulated movement can be seen as a gesture-part, a word or a sound of the whole.  Each articulation is also a turning point and is causally connected to the whole phrase, action: it waits its turn and depends on the previous articulation strength, tension, intensity, to continue with it in its own articulation and dynamics

There is an analogy with the analysis of the articulation in poetry. Both show a musicality in a stylized abstract medium or form and in both cases the expression is embodied or finds its origin in the movement of the body or the vocal apparatus.

When introducing his dynamo-rhythm Etienne Decroux might have thought of the Futurists’ poetry and must certainly have been influenced by the new approach in analyzing poetry in its verbalization and rhyme.

From the Formalist’ point of view, the architecture or construction of the composition of the poem called for the listeners’ active engagement. Its comprehension involved evaluating the relations between various elements that make up a poem and its construction. You can say that the structural intensity’s of composition were often conceptualized by the Formalists in reference to corporeal experience. Their primary interests lay in the evocative texture of the word, and its potential for artistic defamiliarization.

By the early 1920 and later on, the Formalists in Rusland had their attention to corporeal motorics and their adoption of the impersonal, mechanistic vocabulary of the psychological pshysiology and was in contradiction with the classical literary analyzing focused on the emotional content of the poem.  In America there was an equally similar movement of scientists who developped those new approaches and ideas in uncovering the mechanics of rhythm perception in reading prose or poetry by using voice recordings and graphical speech curves. (E.W. Scripture and William M. Patterson-‘The Rhythm of Prose, An Experimental Investigation of Individual Difference in the Sense of Rhythm’ new york , colombia university press and others around 1916 and later)

BIOMECHANICS

was a system of actor training developed by Vsevolod Meyerhold. Its purpose was to widen the emotional potential of a theater piece and express thoughts and ideas that could not be easily presented through the naturalistic theater of the period. The techniques of biomechanics were developed during the rehearsals of a series of plays directed by Meyerhold in the 1920s and 1930s when Socialist Realism was at its height in Russia. Biomechanics is a precursor to and influence on much of the 20th century's physical theater. 

Meyerhold believed in a presentational style of acting, as opposed to Stanislavski’s representational style of performance.

Biomechanics soon became the principle behind a non-realistic, stylised and movement-centred system of actor training developed by Meyerhold between 1913 and 1922.

Meyerhold’s theater was constructivist and required the artist to become an ‘engineer’. For Meyerhold, Art must have a scientific basis and stem from the organization of his material, his ability to use his body well. To achieve this, his body must be trained and he must know the 'mechanics' of his body. Gymnastics, acrobatics, dance, rhythm, boxing and fencing are all useful in the service of biomechanics.

The fundamental principles of Biomechanics are ‘Otkaz’, ‘Pocil’, 'Toichka' or ‘Stoika’ and ‘Tormos’ and 'Rakurs'. All principles build towards a Meyerholdian theatre and Biomechanics. Otkaz is the Russian for refusal (counterweight) and describes the preparation an actor makes before any actual action – crouching down before jumping or reaching back before throwing. It’s a kind of gestural prologue if you like. Meyerhold believed that all movement has a countermovement, no matter how minute, which initiates it. Pocil: can be translated as  the sending and means both the commitment to and the doing of the action. Tormos is the brake,  the restraint which must be applied simultaneously with the forward momentum of the pocil to maintain control. Toichka (a point in space, a period at the end of the sentence) or Stoika (a stance: ); these terms are often used interchangeably. Both refer to the completion of the action at a specific point in space and time.

Rakurs means perspective (Barba talks about ‘the shadow test’). An actor must be aware from which angle the action is presented. Also: level and plane are equally important. Small changes in Rakurs can change the relationship with the audience. 

The research work of Meyerhold made with the actors, musicians, painters and architects began with the practical study of the different traditional performances, from Kabuki Theatre to Traditional Chinese Theatre, from the Commedia dell'Arte to Classic Ballet, from the Circus and the Theatre of the Fair to The Baroque Spanish theatre.

He had actors focus on learning gestures and movements as a way of expressing emotion physically. Following Konstantin Stanislavski's lead, he said that the emotional state of an actor was inextricably linked to his physical state (and vice versa), and that one could call up emotions in performance by practicing and assuming poses, gestures, and movements. He developed a number of body expressions that his actors would use to portray specific emotions and characters. Meyerhold based his system on the concepts of William James on the primacy of the physical reaction in relation to the emotional reaction. During the years Meyerhold had structured for his students about 150 stable physical exercises or socalled études (like in music and in corporeal mime).
The movements are codified forms, and train the actor and at the same time help maintain techniques alive.

Historically the performance style of Meyerhold, firstly near to ideas of symbolism, then following the futurism and constructivism. Meyerhold uses the expressive possibilities and peculiarity of Grotesque’s to express his artistic idea and to criticize the habits of Russia before and during the Soviet Union. Meyerhold chose to satire the political elite and autoritarian through the physical. Meyerhold’s adoption of the grotesque was most prominent in his productions from The Magnicicent Cuckold and The Death of Rarelkin and The Court Rebellions.

Sergei Eisenstein (later film director and one of the first students– oktober 2021- in the newly formed State Higher TheatreWorkshops in Moscow (home for Meyerhold to develop his Biomechanics), considered the principle of Otkaz" (Refusal or counterweight like in corporeal mime) to be the most valuable discovery of biomechanics.  

Sourсes 1. Malvina. Biomechanics of Meyerhold. Retrieved https://subscribe.ru/group/dlya-durakov/3949051/  2. Helen Levinskaya. What is the Meyerhold’s biomechanics? “Theatre” magazine.  12 February 2013. Retrieved from http://archives.colta.ru/docs/13326 3. Meyerhold: To the history of creative method: Publications. Articles. SPb.: KultInformPress, 1998. 247 p. Retrieved from http://teatr-lib.ru/Library/Mejerhold/method/#_Toc262407031 4. Wikipedia. Biomechanics (theatrical). Retrieved from: https://ru.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?search=Биомеханика%20(театральная)&title=Служебная%3AПоиск&wprov=acrw1_9 5. Theatre. Magazine. Video from YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E9kD8ca-Pd0

Beale, Chloe (2017) ‘The Use of Meyerhold’s Biomechanics Training and Principles of Composition in Contemporary Theatre’ https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/151171525.pdf - University of Huddersfield.

CITA/International Centre for Theatre Arts-Physical Action-Meyerhold etudes.https://internationalcita.com/ja/physical-action/

Grotowski 

Antoni Jahołkowski performing ‘The Cat’ exercise, early 1960s.

 Photograph: Ryszard Cieślak. Training at Grotowski's "Laboratorium" in Wrozlaw in 1972.

Workshop video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dRyLLTvs00c

 

Around 1913, Futurist poets presented their experiments as an inquiry into the biodynamics of verbal expressivity. Victor Shklovskii (Russian and Soviet literary theorist, critic, writer 1893-1984) suggested in his reflections on the subject that Aleksei Kruchenykh’s trans-rational poetry (‘zaum’) uncovered deeply ingrained motor programs, which shape the verbalization of various ideas and states of consciousness. Shklovskii contended that identifying these motor programs, or “sound gestures,” and putting them to play was the Futurists’ method of palpating the “inner form” of words in the Russian language.

In her book Psychomotor Aesthetics: Movement and Affect in Modern Literature and Film Ana Hedberg Olenina maps the spread of psychophysiological terms in Russian literary theory and linguistic scholarship in the 1910s, with a particular emphasis on the echoes of William James’s theory of the corporeal experience of emotion and Wilhelm Wundt’s ideas on the gestural origin of language.

ZAUM

Zaum (Russian: зáумь) are the linguistic experiments in sound symbolism and language creation of Russian Futurist poets such as Velimir Khlebnikov and Aleksei Kruchenykh. Zaum is a non-referential phonetic entity with its own ontology. The language consists of neologisms that mean nothing. Zaum is a language organized through phonetic analogy and rhythm. Zaum literature cannot contain any onomatopoeia or psychopatological states.

Aleksei Kruchenykh created Zaum in order to show that language was indefinite and indeterminate. Kruchenykh stated that when creating Zaum, he decided to forget grammar and syntax rules. The reason for this was that introducing disorder into the language would better convey the disorder of life. Kruchenykh considered Zaum to be the manifestation of a spontaneous non-codified language. 

Examples of zaum include Kruchenykh's poem "Dry bul shcyl", Kruchenykh's libretto for the Futurist opera Victory over the Sun with music by Mikhail Matushin and stage design by Kazimier Malevich, and Khlebnikov's so-called "language of the birds", "language of the gods" and "language of the stars".  The poetic output is perhaps comparable to that of the contemporary Dadaism but the linguistic theory or metaphysics behind zaum was entirely devoid of the gentle self-irony of that movement and in all seriousness intended to recover the sound symbolism of a lost aboriginal tongue. Exhibiting traits of a Slavic national mysticism, Kruchenykh aimed at recovering the primeval Slavic mother-tongue in particular.

Where Russian Futurists sought the deeply ingrained motor programs, Dadaist poetry used shock, nihilism, negativity, paradox, randomness, subconscious forces and antinomiannism to subvert established traditions in the aftermath of the Great War. Particularly with the so-called sound poetry invented by Hugo Ball

URSONATE Kurt Schwitters, Introduccion –

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6X7E2i0KMqM

, Dadaist poems attacked traditional conceptions of poetry, including structure, order, as well as the interplay of sound and the meaning of language. For Dadaists, the existing system by which information is articulated robs language of its dignity. The dismantling of language and poetic conventions are Dadaist attempts to restore language to its purest and most innocent form.

Dadaism (between 1916 and 1920 at its height) arose in Europe during the same period of the Futurists in Russia as a negative reaction to the horrors of the First World War. Anything could be art if the artist declared it to be. This was to prove that if everything could be art, then nothing could be art. Both Futurist and Dadaist poetry share the ideal to restore language to its purest form.

In both Futurist and Dadaist poetry we find sound gestures and inner form, as architectonic elements. Architectonics defines the character of a construction or building. 

URSONATE or “sonate in urlauten” ("primordial sonata" or “sonata in primordial sounds”) is a dadaist sound poem of Kurt Schwitters. The introduction shown here is a part of the total. One can listen to Schwitters himself performing an excerpt of on Ursonate on YouTube  where the singsong notes and rapid explosions of syllables make one think simultaneously of bird calls, machine gun fire, and a jackhammer. Schwitters first presented the work in February 1925.

These are 3 portraits for mime actors, compostion movement-character design for 'Terra Incognita '- 'Het Veem Theater', Amsterdam 1986@sjoerdschwibettus

GERTRUDE STEIN

https://vimeo.com/10892914 Gertrude Stein reads her "If I told him| - a completed portrait of Picasso

 

Gertrude Stein (February 3, 1874 – July 27, 1946) was an American novelist, poet, playwright, and art collector, Stein moved to Paris in 1903, and made France her home for the remainder of her life. She hosted a Paris salon, where the leading figures of modernism in literature and art, such as Pablo Picasso, Ernest Hemingway, F.Scott Fitzgerald, Sinclair Lewis, Ezra Pound, Sherwood Anderson and Henri Matisse.  would meet. In 1933, Stein published a quasi-memoir of her Paris years, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas,, written in the voice of Alice B. Toklas, her life partner. The book became a literary bestseller and vaulted Stein from the relative obscurity of the cult-literature scene into the limelight of mainstream attention. Two quotes from her works have become widely known: "Rose is a rose is a rose is a rose" and "there is no there there". Her books include Q.E.D. (1903), Fernhurst, a fictional story about a love triangle; Three Lives (1905–06); The Making of Americans (1902–1911); and Tender Buttons (1914). Her ‘If I told him – a completed portrait of Picasso’,(part of Three Lives) is a very fine example of the musicality of language – her rhythm of prose here is unsurpassed.  The stream-of-consciousness experiments, rhythmical essays or "portraits", were designed to evoke "the excitingness of pure being" and can be seen as literature's answer to visual art styles and forms such as cubism, plasticity, and collage. Despite Stein's work on "automatic writing" with William  James, she did not see her work as automatic, but as an 'excess of consciousness. Automatic writing, also called psychography, is a claimed psychic ability allowing a person to produce written words without consciously writing.

Though Stein collected cubist paintings, especially those of Picasso, the largest visual arts influence on her literary work is that of Cézanne.Particularly, he influenced her idea of equality, in the sense that the ‘whole field of the canvas’ is important; Stein in her work with words used the entire text as a field in which every element mattered as much as any other. Several of Stein's writings have been set to music by composers, including Virgil Thomson's operas Four Saints in Three Acts and The Mother of Us All, and James Tenney's setting of Rose is a rose is a rose is a rose as canon dedicated to Philip Corner, beginning with "a" on an upbeat and continuing so that each repetition shuffles the words, e.g. "a/rose is a rose/is a rose is/a rose is a/rose."

 

CRACKLE BOX

A crackle box is a sound generator, which can be used as an experimental electronic musical instrument. It is a small box with six metal contacts on it, which when touched by the fingers of the player generates all kinds of unusual sounds through circuit bending. The human body becomes part of the circuit and therefore partly determines the sound generated. Playing the same composition by different people always produces a different sound.

The concept was conceived by Michel Waisvisz and Geert Hamelberg in the 60s and further developed by Waisvisz in the 70s, when he was connected to STEIM in Amsterdam. STEIM then built and sold several thousand cracle boxes. The crackle box is a simple device that is powered by batteries. It is based on a single operational amplifier and single transistors, and can be easily built by people with some knowledge of electronics. Someone who is known as a player of the instrument is Truus de Groot who worked a lot with Waisvisz.

 

https://web.archive.org/web/20081212031646/http://crackle.org/CrackleBox.htm

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dcE0iMQjbJI