The scenic gesture and its rhythm

The next meditation is on the scenic gesture and therefore the scenic nature of gestures. In this book, I have started from the assumption that the core of a scenic event is the encounter between language and body, the repeated rediscovery of the linguistic body in the form of the scenic body. Although gesture combines both corporeality and language, I have so far avoided discussing the phenomenon in detail. The reason for this is its multidimensionality. In the phenomenon of the gesture, its possible artistic features are inherently intermingled with its multiple everyday, rhetorical, discursive, or ritual aspects, as well as their theoretical interpretations. Carrie Noland has summarized aspects of the debate on the gesture as follows:

Derived from the Latin verb gerere, to carry, act, or do, gesture may be conceived in multiple and sometimes conflicting ways: as movement intimately and exclusively related to the body and its expressiveness (phenomenology); as conventionalized movement belonging to a system of signification imposed by culture upon the body (semiotics, linguistics, and rhetoric); as movement situated within operating chains responsible for producing knowledge, culture, and even types of consciousness (anthropology, palaeontology, and Marxism); and as movement that is not exclusively related to the body but generated instead by any apparatus – including the body understood as apparatus – capable of being displaced in space (deconstruction and new media studies). ¹

Sruti Bala, in her research on participatory forms of contemporary performance, does not see the ambiguity of gesture as a problem but rather as a resource that enables new contrasts and connections between very different cultural, social, and media contexts:

As a unit of theatrical or performative action, the gesture is simultaneously an expression of an inner attitude as well as a social habitude. It extends beyond the stage of theatre or performance into the sphere of civic life. It therefore offers a possibility for critically linking the legacies and aesthetic debates on participatory art to larger issues of citizenship, democratic praxis, collective action and social justice. I also propose that the concept of the gesture not only speaks to the contemporary problems and critiques of participation, but also situates these practices in disciplinary terms at the juncture between the visual and performing arts. I envisage this possibility by a reading of the concept of gesture as situated in between image, speech and action, no longer image but not yet act, not strictly within the coordinates of language but also not wholly external to it. ²

In principle, it is easy for the reader to agree with these observations. What does the logomimesis add to the multiple perspectives of gesture research? The analysis of scenic gesture plays an essential role in the history of theatre, from the Indian treatise on the performing arts, Natya Shastra, to the millennial tradition of Western mime performance, ³ the twentieth-century classics of performing arts pedagogy, such as Jacques Lecoq, Mikhail Chekhov, Rudolf Laban, ⁴ and Bertolt Brecht, who is examined later in this chapter. First, it should be noted that gesture(s) play a very different role in different theatrical traditions and performing techniques. In some traditions, such as the Indian mimic kutiyattam dance theatre, the narrative is a series of codified gestures. In psychorealist theatre, however, the acting is stripped of all conventional expression and the focus shifts to gestures that emerge from the character in a seemingly spontaneous way. Whereas in the former tradition the gesture is the basic element of performing, in the latter it appears to be a by-product or end result. Corporeal performing is therefore difficult to trace back directly to the concept and phenomenon of gesture.