ABSTRACT
Speech and bodies exist and operate in space but only in places take on the meanings associated with being human. They therefore cannot be divorced from the preceding analysis. Brecht’s Mother Courage and Charlie Chaplin’s tramp are thwarted by, but continue to live within, the everyday. There is an international difference between languages, a national distinction between dialects, and a political separation between vernacular speech and the mandarin tongue. The body is in different ways geographically rooted, and as phenomenology has shown, spatially orientated. The word ‘orientation’ itself derives from the historic preoccupation with the East as a primary means of ordering space and is therefore permeated with human and cultural dynamics. The body is not only situated in the world but, through labour, forms habitual patterns which root the body to the locality in which it works. In the urban milieu these residues of previous work patterns are concealed by the needs of capitalfor the worker to adapt or face unemployment. Those who worked in the docks demonstrated, when they were involved in the lay theatre, a movement memory, a vocabulary of physical expression which derived from the regime of the quayside. The lightermen who in impossible acrobatic manoeuvres navigated the river with their cargoes demonstrated an equilibrist’s skill of improvisation and continual adjustment to circumstance. While theatre research and performance anthropology continue to seek out exotica, imported for the purposes of scrutiny, this other ‘tact’ is ignored. There is no room for a nostalgic return to the dangerous and oppressive labouring patterns that are gradually superseded, but there is an imperative to transform them through theatre. There is the need for an ethics of the body and speech which traces this relationship between saying and doing in the everyday. For without this association the theatre remains in the world of make-believe.
