Day 5

We met Gewnda LedBetter and discussed with her the storytelling revival and her path into becoming Asheville's "Story Lady" for the local "Mr. Bill Show" and Pack Library.

I shared an interview with Laura Simms from the book The Storytellers Journey: an American Revival, by Joseph Daniel Sobol. In the interview, Laura explains her epiphany about storytelling and describes the separation from her theatre group, La Mama Experimental Theatre Club in 1960's.

I made comparison to Plato's allegory of the cave dwellers in which one member leaves the cave and discovers a new, real, world outside. Ironically both the new storytellers and the new actors were pursing similar goals of making new connections between audience and performer and bringing new vitality to the theatre. We viewed sections of a documentary about The Open Theatre, founded by director, Joseph Chaiken. Chaiken was greatly influenced by mythographer Joseph Campbell, especially his masterwork The Masks of God. Again, in Campbell's work, we find common ground with the new storytellers.

Vis-a-vis the experimental theatre movement, Joseph Chaiken came from the Living Theatre, founded in 1947, arguably America's oldest experimental theatre group. Theatre revivalism began much earlier. Following Stanislavski's revolutionary theatre work with Anton Chekov and The Moscow Arts Theatre, Vesvolod Meyerhold pushes for even more radical rethinking of theatre forms. Meanwhile, in the 1920s in Paris, Etienne Decroux, a socialist theatre artist, began to rebuild the theatre in his own way. Decroux created a form of actor-centered theatre that he called “Dramatic Corporal Mime.” His students included Jean-Louis Barrault, Jacques LeCoq, and Marcel Marceau. Marceau, more than the others, brought this art form to prominence in America and the world. Yet Decroux was not interested in the kind of pantomime we saw commercialized in America in imitation of Marceau. He wanted a radical stripping down of theatre to its essence: the actor in action. In 1931, he articulated a formula for the rehabilitation of theatre, the first three points of which were:

1. For a period of thirty years, prohibit all arts other than the actor’s. Substitute for the set of the play the set of the theatre, the backdrop of all imaginable actions.
2. During the first ten years, eliminate all elevation from the stage such as benches, stairs, terraces, balconies, etc. Actors shall suggest the ideas of “above” and “below,” although one partner may be beside the other. Then allow elevations only on the condition that they create greater challenges for the actor.
3. During the first twenty years, prohibit all voiced sound. After twenty years, allow unarticulated cries for five years. Finally, during the last five years allow words contrived by the actor [italics added] (Angotti and Herr, 1974).