Fly on the Wall—From Princess to Artaud

Anthropologists in days of yore would traipse into mountain villages, bushwhack the depths of tropical jungles, and safari to see new and unique human specimens living in their natural environment. Those days, though not gone, are fast receding given that the universal code of human contact: wifi—and the internet more broadly—has permeated almost every rural nook of settled humanity. The days of finding a tribe who hadn’t tasted a hot dog and recording that adventure for posterity, are way over.

If one bought a quarter-section of ranch or woodland crown land far from a town named Flin Flon or High Level or Carrot River a person might be able to go fully astray from the bondage to the internet that has engulfed us all—until espying Elon Musk’s creepy ant line of stars across the night sky (Elon Musk’s wifi satellites) that can provide email to many a distant locale. That universal internet access is wholly a realm of opportunity has become an ideological truism; until, for instance, you try and have a weekend getaway at a writing retreat and instead of writing your masterpiece find yourself, wifi enabled, doing much the same malarkey as conducted at home. However, in terms of writing and the need to know our chosen audience, access to the global digital village does provide some insights into how to get over, or put over, one’s point of view. We are each of us in public as much as private, wittingly or unwittingly perpetually on stage now that a livestreamed video is a mere click away. In a sense we are always enacting a cinematic script or novella character. This enters the question of how we ever, in a social setting, know if we’re being authentic. In an epoch where much of what people view for pleasure is purportedly created by their peers, it’s a timely topic. What happens when no one ever quite steps off stage, out of the wings of being needed to step into a now-vacant understudy role?

Mental Health For Our Instagram Noodle

One might presume that this eternal link of self to audience would serve to diminish social stage fright—akin to when anthropologists uncover a tight-knit community where people are at ease with their roles and their lives. But, if the memes and experts are to be trusted, people today have never been so angst-ridden, guilt-laden, and wired to the gills with a spectrum of anxiety that would make even the brawniest rainbow trout blush.

Meanwhile, to find humans outside the endless open circuit camera system of the wifi world is difficult, making finding a control group for scientific research into the degree to which wifi causes anxiety no easy task. But that doesn’t mean that a little ethnography can’t be on offer—checking out the social media realm as a researcher rather than participant, for instance. Even the flightiest perusal of TikTok or Instagram, or wherever brief clips of human action are unveiled in the manner of caffeine-laced TV commercial segments rapidly unveling warning lists at the end of a pharmaceutical ad, reveal a general theme: faster, faster, faster! Brevity as the soul of wit, that old Shakespeare trope, has given way to an almost finger-snapping haste by which clip after clip are unreeled, the better to draw in millions of attention spans and perhaps create legions of sore necked seniors in old folks’ homes later this century.

Upside of Looking Down – Looking Inward

Looking down is, after all, the essence, physically, of looking at a smartphone screen. But what about when we look up, way up, to our selfie-stick self who is making a video? The videos that go viral, in a good way rather than a “mask-up” COVID-19 way, typically play some heartstrings or finger some empathy beads or fidget some fidget sticks to signal some kind of chord that goes beyond the trite aphorisms implied by a tired phrase like “strike some kind of a chord.” Good social media clips say something that jars us out of our seats, as it were, not unlike a bombastic and unforgettable performance on a stage in the usual, performance arts, manner.

Enter Artaud, For A Bumpy Ride

Here, interestingly, a famously creative and controversial 20^th Century dramatist named Antonin Artaud comes to mind. For him, in what he called a “theatre of cruelty”, the audience was forced into the picture. Not in some “ooh, Justin Bieber spilled his milk on my top” kind of way, but in a raw, visceral, shocking manner—a cruel way, that is, for audience members hoping to attend a theatrical venue for a relaxing zone out and perchance some Z’s. Nope, “what Artaud proposed was a new kind of participation by the audience”. Each of his performances was “aimed to shock the senses of its audience, sometimes using violent and confronting images that appealed to emotions. The text was given a reduced emphasis in Artaud’s theatre, as movement and gesture became just as powerful as the spoken word. Piercing sound and bright stage lights bombarded the audience during performances.”

Artaud spoke pedagogically, too, in his own words at once describing and teaching his new school of dramaturgy. He said:

“Poetry is a dissociative and anarchic force, which, through analogy, associations, and images, lives only on an upheaval of common relations.”

“And the novelty will be to pour these relations not only into the external domain, into the domain of nature, but into the inner domain, that is to say, into that of psychology. How? That’s my secret.”

In the end, be it improv drama, standup comedy, or a well-oiled retelling of one or many greatest stories ever told, the key to good theatre may be much the same as the key to a short social media video. Somehow, some way, we must (if we deign to participate, and try our hand at expressing ourselves cinematographically) say or do something that causes people not to swipe away but pause, in the slipstream of digital consciousness and pay full attention.

Given this backdrop of perpetual stimulation, it’ s amazing any student ever gets a full essay written and proofread, with their full attention, their FA if you will. Now, “at the root of Artaud’s ideas on the theatre was the thought of having the players so work upon the audience (with the aid of all manner of external devices) that the spectators would literally go mad and, participating with the actors in a frenzy of delirium carry the drama to real and unthinkable excess.” (308) This allows the magical means of art and speech to be exercised organically and altogether, like renewed exorcisms. The upshot of all this is that theatre will not be given its specific powers of action until it is given its language.” This state of madness is familiar for anyone who’s felt inundated by too many clips, too many voices, too much information.

Finally, and this goes to the heart of the difference between digital, spoken media, and scripted, traditional, performance (including political speeches) “instead of continuing to rely upon texts considered definitive and sacred, it is essential to put an end to the subjugation of the theatre to the text, and to recover the notion of a kind of unique language half way between gesture and thought”. Here too intervenes (besides the auditory language of sounds) the visual language of objects, movements, attitudes, and gestures, but on condition that their meanings, their physiognomies, their combinations be carried to the point of becoming signs, making a kind of alphabet out of these signs.” (online)

Said simply, to be heard in the cacophony of social media viewership and to hear our own humble selves, we must not only say something familiar-yet-new, or relatable-yet-unique, we must somehow do all that in a whole new way, with a whole new language as it were. To appear creative takes some practice, just like any performance.

From sock puppets to carrot stick UFC fights, performance arts in modernity have come a long way. Yet, to consider social media as the performance that it is—the curation of self always with a chosen audience in mind—helpfully returns the personal political realm of social theory to the forefront. Just as “oh, I just happened to be standing there and looked up” is a faint excuse for snapping the perfect picture of a sunset, the “I was being my authentic self and thought I’d share my feelings with the world” statement reveals that it’s okay to realize that when we share our ideas online we are more in line with a scripted performance than our ordinarily self allows. In real life. Or as the kids say: the RL.