Composed Theatre: Mapping the Field

Matthias Rebstock

Symptoms of Composed Theatre

In what follows, the question 'what is meant by the term "Composed Theatre"' will be addressed by taking a historical approach, looking for its traces and forerunners. The assumption is that, since the sixties, a field of artistic practice has arisen that is situated between the more classical conceptions – and institutions – of music, theatre and dance, and that is highly characterised and unified by making use of compositional strategies and techniques and, in a broader sense, by the application of compositional thinking. As a first step, this field can be exemplified by some of the main figures working in it and developing it: composers like Heiner Goebbels, Georges Aperghis, Manos Tsangaris, Carola Bauckholt, Daniel Ott, Robert Ashley or Meredith Monk; theatre directors like Robert Wilson, Christoph Marthaler or Ruedi Häusermann; in dance, part of the work of Xavier le Roy, William Forsythe and Sasha Waltz, ensembles and theatre-collectives such as Theater der Klänge in Düsseldorf, Die Maulwerker and the LOSE COMBO both in Berlin, Cryptic in Glasgow or the Post-Operativ Productions in Sussex; most of them having some roots in the work of composers such as John Cage, Mauricio Kagel, Dieter Schnebel or in the Fluxus movement.

By introducing the term 'Composed Theatre', the aim is to focus on this – necessarily non-homogeneous – field because within it, artistic processes are currently moving forward in a way that gain momentum from mutual influence and exchange of practices and positions, and that this, so far, has not been taken into account by academic research, which usually still focusses only on aspects, questions or positions relevant to the particular discipline of the researcher. But as Composed Theatre is something that may be said to exist between art forms, so an interdisciplinary approach is required to describe and account for it. This being in between not only has consequences for academic purposes but also for the educational system. If it is true that contemporary theatre and performance in general – not just within Composed Theatre – challenges the separation of the art forms that had taken place in the second half of the eighteenth century, somehow recalling or bringing forward an integrated concept of theatre, then this should also lead to changes in an educational system in which interdisciplinary courses are still very rare. I will return to this problem towards the end of this chapter.

But let us first go back to what is meant by the term 'Composed Theatre'. In the discussions during the two conferences on "Processes of Devising Composed Theatre" from which this book has emerged, it quickly became clear that the term 'Komposition' in German is very strongly linked to the field of music. 'Komposition' in German usually means musical composition. In English, however, it means something being put together in a much broader sense, which is not per se linked to music at all. So obviously the concept of Composed Theatre needs some clarification here, because if 'composition' or being 'composed' was to be taken in the broad sense – as the Latin origin 'componere' (= 'place together') suggests – Composed Theatre would cease to mean anything precise at all, as theatre in this sense is always composed. So a first important specification is that the term has to be taken in its musical sense. That means, if the field of interest is characterised by the use of compositional strategies and techniques, these strategies, techniques and ways of thinking are typical of musical composition and, moreover, are applied no longer just to musical material but to such extra-musical materials as movement, speech, actions, lighting or whatever you have in the realm of theatre.

A second characteristic or symptom of Composed Theatre consists in the aesthetic conviction of the independence and absence of hierarchy among the elements of theatre or, to put it another way, in the conviction that in principle no element should so dominate that the others would be reduced to illustrating, underpinning or reinforcing the first. Georges Aperghis makes this very clear when saying:

The visual elements should not be allowed to reinforce or emphasise the music, and the music should not be allowed to underline the narrative. Things must complement themselves; they must have different natures. This is an important rule for me: never say the same thing twice [...]. Another thing has to emerge that is neither one nor the other; it is something new.

(Aperghis 2001)

Similar statements could be found from most of the artists within the field. Interestingly enough, there is a certain latent tension between this first conviction – which implies that each element is not only treated with equal rights but also accorded its own rules and strategies – and a second one, namely that the organisation and interaction of all such elements should follow musical or compositional principles. Thus, the relations between these independent and equal elements and the overall structure of the pieces are governed by compositional means.

Thirdly, Composed Theatre is not only – or even not necessarily – characterised by compositional strategies at the point of performance but also – or even only – during the artistic processes of creation. A performance may not show any typical sign of compositional strategies; yet, without applying such strategies, the composer, the director or the ensemble would not have come to the same result. This means that dealing with the field of Composed Theatre requires a consideration, not only of the performances but also of the working processes if we are to determine in what sense compositional thinking drives these processes. Typically – though not in all cases – within the working process there are phases of experimenting, generating new material, structuring of material, structuring of progressions and combinations and finally creating the formal overall structure, and all these phases may be governed by compositional principles.

What can be seen as a fourth characteristic of Composed Theatre is that the working processes will generally differ from those within traditional theatre. What usually happens, to put it simply, is the separation of the different stages of production: text – musical composition – staging – performance. And for each step it is pretty clear who has the last say. Composed Theatre, however, very often is devised theatre, or at least works against hierarchical norms and with a more collective approach, leaving more space for each individual to bring in their own competences and personality than there is in traditional theatre work. The performers will very often get involved in the developing process of the piece itself, and the segregation of the different steps of production is less strict, thus giving way to a more integral approach of mutual influence and exchange. As a result it is very often unhelpful to attempt to distinguish between a piece or a composition on the one hand and a way of reading, interpreting and staging it on the other. Consequently Composed Theatre, fifthly, can be understood as a genre that basically exists only in its perfomances: it is only in the moment of performance that the different elements come together, and everything before that moment points to it. This directly affects the role of notation and scores within Composed Theatre. Constituting the necessary way to facilitate the performance, they cannot in themselves represent the work or the piece. The composition process is prolonged through the process of staging until the very moment of the performance. That is why so many composers in the field also take responsibility for staging and directing their pieces themselves (e.g. Dieter Schnebel, Mauricio Kagel, Heiner Goebbels, Georges Aperghis and so on).

Thus, 'Composed Theatre' refers to the creative process and the performance of pieces that are determined by compositional strategies and, in a broader sense, by compositional thinking. But 'compositional thinking' is an elusive term. The quest is for a definition that is sufficiently broad to accommodate the needs of different art forms, but sufficiently specific to give full value to the musically derived concept of composition as the productive theatrical force. We are looking for something beyond the metaphorical. The musical titles Kandinsky gave to his paintings are just metaphorical. But what of Vsevolod Meyerhold's claim that theatre performances should be 'put together like orchestral compositions', or Dieter Schnebel's reference to 'visible music'? Is this more than a metaphorical way of speaking?

Things get more difficult as the concept of composition or compositional thinking, even if restricted to the field of music itself, is subject to historical changes. These changes take place in response to the other art forms and their techniques. For example, the musical techniques of phrasing, interpunction etc. are derived from an aesthetics that understands music as a kind of language, but this transfer from the realm of language to the realm of music is a matter, not only of terminology but also of thinking and understanding. And equally, when looking at the music of Ockeghem, Dufay or Josquin des Pres, one can easily see that the idea of building musical pieces on a system of complex proportions is heavily influenced by architecture – itself historically influenced by the idea of the 'harmony of the spheres' proposed by Pythagoras and his followers. So can there be anything specifically musical within 'composition', and what would that be when the realm of music in a strict sense is left and one enters the field of theatre? In the following these questions will be addressed from a historical perspective in order to cast some light on the developments through which the practices of today have been adopted. My assumption is that it is these common historical threads and aesthetic influences, more than a single clear-cut definition, that hold together the field of what we now call Composed Theatre with all its very different forms.

Richard Wagner and the Gesamtkunstwerk

It might be suprising to start with Richard Wagner, as opposition to Wagner's music-theatre and his pathos and heroism seems to be a position most representatives of Composed Theatre have in common. However, in his aesthetic writings Wagner was the first and certainly the most radical to claim that in theatre all elements should come together with equal rights. And Carl Dahlhaus points out that the most important achievement of Wagner's was yet something else: the 'aesthetic revolution' of Wagner was his claim

daß das Theaterereignis nicht bloßes Mittel zur Darstellung eines Kunstwerks, dessen Substanz der dichterisch-musikalische Text bildet, sondern selbst das eigentliche Kunstwerk sei, als dessen Funktion man Dichtung und Musik auffassen müsse.

Wagner with his Gesamtkunstwerk was certainly not the first to pursue 'synthetic visions'. Rather he is relying upon and developing the ideas of early Romantic writing, especially the idea of the unity of the arts and the overcoming of their separation. But whereas, for early Romanticism, theatre was an inferior art form, Wagner put it on the same level as literature and music, an elevation that has been sustained until today. And at the same time his ideas of intermedial relations were of enormous influence on further theatre development:

Der Musikdramatiker setzt Worte, Töne und Bildentwürfe auf der Ebene der Partitur in Beziehung. Der Regisseur, wie ihn Edward Gordon Craig fünfzig Jahre später exemplarisch entwarf, betreibt diese intermediale Kompositorik mit dem Arsenal der Bühne. Der Schritt von dem, was Wagner ‚Gesammtkunstwerk' [sic!] nennt, zu Craigs Konstitutionsformel, die Theater als ,Gesamtheit der Mittel' begreift, ist winzig.

(Hiß 2005: 56)

Musicalisation of theatre

As early as in 1969 Marianne Kesting wrote a remarkable paper, "Musikalisierung des Theaters: Theatralisierung der Musik" (Kesting 1969). She gives a historical outline of these two threads converging in the sixties in a fluid interplay of art forms such as Experimental Theatre, Happenings, Fluxus, Mixed Media, Instrumental Theatre, Experimental Music and so forth that can also be taken as a first peak of Composed Theatre. Reconstructing history along these two separate but converging threads is still a valid approach, one that is adopted in what follows here. Of course, historical developments in theatre and music did not take place separately from each other. They touched whenever the separation of the arts was radically questioned: in Futurism, Dadaism, including the MERZ-Bühne of Kurt Schwitters, at the Bauhaus or in the writings of Antonin Artaud etc. But none of the great composers has ever formed part of one of these avant-garde movements and mostly the different art forms were still so clearly distinguished that it makes sense to look first at theatre and then at music separately.

Theatre, which has always integrated other forms of art, became a model case for interdisciplinary art in the early twentieth century. This new kind of theatre no longer considered itself as 'represented literature'; it liberated itself from the primacy of language. The theatrical reforms of the avant-garde are connected primarily by their fundamental critique of language. Language was toppled from its throne, where it had stood uncontested for centuries at the pinnacle of the hierarchy of theatrical elements. Edward Gordon Craig aimed for a reform, after which "the Art of the Theatre would have won back its rights, and its work would stand self-reliant as a creative art, and no longer as an interpretative craft" (Craig 1957: 178). Meyerhold sought to supplement spoken language by using biomechanics to transfer the laws of mechanics to the actor's body. In Dada soirées, meaning in language was banished by all means of textual collage, simultaneous poems and sound poems that emphasised language's qualities of sound and noise; the forms of abstract theatre practised in Futurism or by Oskar Schlemmer of the Bauhaus neglected to bestow any role upon language; and in Artaud's work, language was integrated into theatrical elements that were to be structured according to musical principles.