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Autobiographical, Self-Revelatory, and Autoethnographic Forms of Therapeutic Theatre 1st Edition Susana Pendzik
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P reface
This book was born out of misunderstanding. When Susana proposed to Renée and David that we compile a book on therapeutic autobiographical, self-revelatory, ethnographic performance, there was immediate agreement. When we met to discuss our prospective project, we quickly realized we did not share the same definitions of these labels. Worse, after more debate, we lost confidence in our own views of these labels. Review of the literature convinced us even further that there was a lack of clarity about the concepts, boundaries, and practices of the self in performance. Paradoxically, this proved to us the necessity for the book: to gather a collection of work, and then to make initial efforts to map out the topography of this field. In so doing, we discovered that an entirely unique branch of drama therapy performance has been developing over the past thirty years, and that now is the time for it to be properly identified. The three of us had strenuous conversations that challenged each of our previously held assumptions. We have each grown from these encounters. We hope that you, the reader, do as well, for something powerful and healing occurs when a person creates a performance based on their life. Why that happens, and how that happens, is the subject of this book.
We would like to acknowledge the contributions of our authors and the courage and creativity of the clients and students who have revealed their lives in these performances. Susana would like to acknowledge the creators quoted in her chapter, as well as those who over the years, through their experiences and performances, helped to elucidate a dramaturgical approach. She is profoundly indebted to Dr. Chen Alon for his longstanding partnership in accompanying Therapeutic Autobiographical
Performances and for his precious insights for this chapter, and to Galila Oren for her invaluable input and encouragement. Susana would also like to thank Tel Hai Academic College, and the Swiss Dramatherapy Institute for their support. Renée would like to acknowledge the many students and graduates of the Drama Therapy Program at the California Institute of Integral Studies who embraced the Self-Rev process, and over the years helped to deepen and expand the form. She is also grateful for the ongoing collaboration with her colleagues and fellow faculty in the Drama Therapy Program, especially Gary Raucher. David would like to acknowledge the members of the Developmental Transformations community who have been the inspiration and audience for his self-revelatory performances.
Drama Therapy Graduate Program, Tel Hai Academic College, Israel Susana Pendzik
California Institute of Integral Studies, Drama Therapy Graduate Program San Francisco, USA Renée Emunah
Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut, USA David Read Johnson
n otes on c ontributors
Prentiss Benjamin is a graduate of the Drama Therapy program at New York University, USA. She is also an actress, having performed OffBroadway and in regional theatres across the country.
Drew Bird is a senior lecturer in the Dramatherapy Master’s program, College of Health and Social Care, University of Derby, UK. Drew has worked as a dramatherapist in child and adolescent mental health, specializing in childhood trauma, adult mental health and palliative care, as well as in private practice. He is a solo performer, director and playback trainer.
Zeina Daccache is Founder and Director of Catharsis—Lebanese Center for Drama Therapy. Zeina has been implementing drama therapy processes in Lebanon and the Middle East since 2006. She has directed plays and films for advocacy and awareness-raising, including 12 Angry Lebanese—The Play (2009) with male inmates in the Roumieh prison; 12 Angry Lebanese—The Documentary (2009); Scheherazade in Baabda—The Play (2012) and Scheherazade’s Diary—The Documentary (2013) with women inmates in the Baabda Prison. Zeina and the documentaries she directed have received awards for distinguished contributions to the field.
Ditty Dokter is Course Leader of the Dramatherapy Master’s program, Anglia Ruskin University, UK, and Researcher at the Arts Therapies Research Centre KENVAK, Netherlands. Ditty previously held course leadership positions at the universities of Hertfordshire and Roehampton; her most recent clinical appointment was as Head of an Arts Therapies Department at an adult and older people’s mental health trust. Her
research interest is in intercultural practice. Her books include: Arts Therapies and Clients with Eating Disorders (1994); Arts Therapists, Refugees and Migrants (1998); Supervision in Dramatherapy (2008); Dramatherapy and Destructiveness (2011); and Intercultural Arts Therapies Research (in press).
Pam Dunne is Director of the Drama Therapy Institute of Los Angeles, USA, and Professor Emeritus of Music, Theatre & Dance Department at California State University, Los Angeles. The pioneer of Narradrama, Dr. Dunne’s work includes the books, Narrative Therapist and the Arts; Narradrama; and Double Stick Tape: Poetry, Photography, Drama and Narrative with Adolescents, and the film, Exploring Narradrama. Dr. Dunne has conducted extensive international workshops, served as NADTA president, and is a founding member of its Board of Examiners. In 2014, Dr. Dunne was selected as the recipient of the NADTA Teaching Excellence Award.
Renée Emunah is Founder/Director of the graduate Drama Therapy Program at the California Institute of Integral Studies, USA, where she has been a professor for over 30 years. She is the author of the book Acting for Real: Drama Therapy Process, Technique, and Performance (1994) which has become a classic in the field, and has been translated into Chinese and Japanese. She is co-editor with David Johnson of Current Approaches in Drama Therapy (2009). She was on the Editorial Board of the international journal Arts in Psychotherapy over many years. She is the recipient of the North American Drama Therapy Association (NADTA) Gertrud Schattner Distinguished Award for Outstanding Contribution to the Field of Drama Therapy (1996). She is an international trainer; a pioneering practitioner in the field; the originator of Self-Revelatory Performance; and a past-President of the NADTA.
Alida Gersie is a Writer, Psychotherapist and Planned Change Consultant. She advises senior professionals in the arts, health and education on creative ways to improve the outcomes of their work. For many years Alida directed the Postgraduate Arts Therapies Programme at the University of Hertfordshire, UK. There she developed Britain’s first MA in Dramatherapy, supervisor training courses, Europe-wide ‘train the trainer’ courses for adults with disabilities, and story-for-change modules. Since 2001 she has initiated arts-based public health initiatives. She is the author of several key books used by change agents in over 40 countries.
Dovrat Harel teaches at the Graduate School of Creative Arts Therapies, Haifa University, Israel. Dovrat, a drama therapist and supervisor in private practice, has been working for 17 years in day care centers with older adults, specializing in people with dementia and their families. She works with the Alzheimer’s Association of Israel (EMDA), developing programs of creative care for people with cognitive decline. In 2011 Dovrat was honored with an award for her doctoral research on people with dementia by the International Institute for Reminiscence and Life Review (IIRLR), University of Wisconsin-Superior, USA.
Maria Hodermarska is Master Teacher of Drama Therapy, New York University, USA. Maria is a drama therapist and full-time faculty member in NYU’s program in drama therapy. She has authored and co-authored many book chapters and essays on drama therapy. Currently, she works with young people from around the world who have lost a family member to an act of extremism or armed conflict and is developing a theater project with her son and several colleagues examining how disability performs.
Jean-Francois Jacques is a dramatherapist and clinical supervisor both in private practice and a community adult mental health service, a community theatre director, and a researcher. He is an invited lecturer of the MA program in Dramatherapy at Anglia Ruskin University, UK, where he teaches autobiographical research and is studying the co-creation of meaning in autobiographical performance in dramatherapy.
David Read Johnson is Director, Institute for Developmental Transformations; Co-Director, Post Traumatic Stress Center, New Haven, CT, USA; Associate Clinical Professor, Department of Psychiatry, Yale University School of Medicine; co-editor (with Renee Emunah), Current Approaches in Drama Therapy (2009); co-editor (with Susana Pendzik and Stephen Snow), Assessment in Drama Therapy (2012); co-editor (with Nisha Sajnani), Trauma-Informed Drama Therapy (2014); Past President, North American Drama Therapy Association; and Past Editor-in-Chief, Arts in Psychotherapy.
Stephanie Omens is a licensed Creative Arts Therapist in New York State, USA, Registered Drama Therapist and certified Child Life Specialist. Stephanie has worked at Hackensack University Medical Center since 2002 with chronically ill hospitalized, bereaved and prematurely born infants and children, and is an adjunct instructor at the Department of
Drama, Tisch School of the Arts, New York University, where she teaches drama therapy. Stephanie is co-author of a chapter in The Health Professions: Trends and Opportunities in U.S. Health Care (2007), and is author of a chapter in Trauma Informed Drama Therapy: Transforming Clinics, Classrooms and Communities (2014).
Susana Pendzik is Head of the Graduate Program in Drama Therapy at Tel Hai Academic College, Israel, also lecturing at the Theatre Studies Department of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and at the Dramatherapy Institute in Switzerland. She conducts workshops worldwide, and is pioneering drama therapy in Latin America. She has taught autobiographical therapeutic performance for over 20 years, and is the author of numerous papers and chapters, a handbook of group work with abused women (1992 in Spanish and 1995 in German), and co-editor of Assessment in Drama Therapy (2012) with David Johnson and Stephen Snow.
Jules Dorey Richmond and David Richmond are both Senior Lecturers in Theatre & Performance at York St John University, UK, where for the past ten years Jules has been teaching autobiographical solo performance, and David has been running a module ‘Artist as Witness’ which begins with a pilgrimage to Auschwitz and ends with a collaborative ensemble performance. They have been collaborating partners for over 25 years, creating works in diverse contexts, pulling together their respective disciplines of visual art and theatre. Their research on memory, place and performance can be traced in both their solo projects and collaborative practice, most notably in their Theatre of Witness series of works with veterans, witnesses and survivors of WW2, documented in Performance Research: On Trauma
Sheila Rubin is a drama therapist, storyteller and marriage and family therapist in private practice in San Francisco and Berkeley. She has directed over 25 self-revelatory performances of CIIS students as their final project, and five of her own, as well as hundreds of shorter Embodied Life-Stories performances. She teaches self-revelatory performance directing and healing shame workshops for therapists internationally. She has written several chapters, among them, ‘Self-revelatory performance’ in Interactive and Improvisational Drama (2007); and ‘Almost magic’ in The Use of Expressive Arts Therapy in Treating Depression (2015).
Nisha Sajnani is Associate Professor and Coordinator of the Graduate Drama Therapy Program at Lesley University, USA. Nisha also holds faculty appointments in the Harvard Program in Refugee Trauma, and New York University’s Drama Therapy Program, is the Editor of the Drama Therapy Review, and a past-president of the North American Drama Therapy Association. She has authored numerous publications on improvisation, diversity, arts-based research, trauma, and critical theory. She is also the artistic director of Theatre Beyond Borders and co-coordinator of the Expressive Therapies Research Center at Lesley University.
Anna Seymour is Senior Lecturer in Dramatherapy, University of Roehampton, UK. Anna is a dramatherapist, academic, and researcher. She is a Principal Fellow of the Higher Education Academy and has presented conference papers, master classes and delivered training across Britain and internationally. She is Editor of the peer-reviewed British Association of Dramatherapists journal, Dramatherapy, and Series Editor of Dramatherapy: Approaches, Relationships, Critical Ideas.
Stephen Snow is Professor of Drama Therapy in the Department of Creative Arts Therapies and Co-Director of Research at The Centre for the Arts in Human Development, Concordia University, Montreal, Quebec, Canada. Stephen is an actor, director and drama therapist with thirty years of experience in many clinical and educational settings. As an actor, he has performed in over 100 theatre productions, including experimental theatre in the 1970s and two self-revelatory pieces, Seething Brains and Nightride in the City. He has written many articles and chapters on drama therapy and is the co-editor of two books, Assessment in the Creative Arts Therapies (2009) and Assessment in Drama Therapy (2012).
Armand Volkas is an associate professor at California Institute of Integral Studies, USA, Drama Therapy Program. Armand is a psychotherapist, drama therapist and theatre director. He is Clinical Director of the Living Arts Counseling Center, and Director of the Living Arts Playback Theatre Ensemble, now in its 28th year. Armand has developed innovative international programs using drama therapy for social change, intercultural conflict transformation and peace-building, and has worked with autobiographic therapeutic theatre for many years.
Gideon Zehavi is a lecturer and PhD candidate in the Theatre Studies Department at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel, and adjunct faculty at the Drama Therapy Program of Tel Hai Academic College,
Israel. Gideon is a drama therapist and supervisor, who works internationally, co-leads the Institute for Developmental Transformations in Israel, is currently researching therapeutic autobiographical performances, and has written several papers on drama therapy with the autistic spectrum disorder population.
CHAPTER 1
The Self in Performance: Context, Definitions, Directions
Susana
Pendzik, Renée Emunah, and David Read Johnson
During the second half of the twentieth century, performance and artistic expression took a strong turn toward the personal with the embrace of the memoir in literature, sociopolitical and feminist visual art, solo
S. Pendzik, PhD, MA, RDT ( )
Tel Hai Academic College, Kiryat Shemona, Israel
Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Jerusalem, Israel
Swiss Institute of Dramatherapy, St Gallen, Switzerland
e-mail: pend@netvision.net.il
R. Emunah, PhD, RDT-BCT
California Institute of Integral Studies, San Francisco, CA, USA
e-mail: remunah@ciis.edu
D.R. Johnson, PhD, RDT-BCT
Institute for Developmental Transformations, New York, NY, USA
Post Traumatic Stress Center, New Haven, CT, USA
Department of Psychiatry, Yale University School of Medicine, New Haven, CT, USA
S. Pendzik et al. (eds.), The Self in Performance, DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-53593-1_1
performance art, and autobiographical performance. Since the start of the twenty-first century, with the pervasive public interest in reality television, YouTube and iPhone selfies, the private has indeed become public. As a result, the boundaries between truth and fiction, the real and the dramatic, have never been so ambiguous; the self can be viewed as being performed, everywhere.
Within the field of theatre, this impulse has expressed itself in the emergence of what might be called self-referential or personal theatre—that is, theatre in which the content of the performance consists of material from the actual lives of the performers. This work can be loosely categorized into autobiographical forms (concerning the actor’s personal life) and autoethnographic forms (concerning the actor's ethnicity, class, gender, or social grouping). Within each of these can be differentiated nontherapeutic forms (where the aim is primarily artistic, educational, or advocacy), and therapeutic forms (where the aim is personal growth). This book is about this last category: autobiographical and autoethnographical therapeutic theatre/performance.
The idea that therapeutic practice correlates with the telling of personal stories has a deep hold on western thinking. But when does telling one’s story have a liberating effect, and when does it become merely a recounting of one’s misery and victimization? This question acquires further significance in the context of autobiographical performance, as rehearsal practices allow experiences to become more rooted in our bodies and brains, and exposure in front of an audience helps to validate them. Does performing life experiences, obsessions, memories or dreams on stage invariably bring about therapeutic results? (Pendzik, 2013a; Thompson, 2009). What is required for an autobiographical performance to fulfill the function of promoting psychological well-being, healing from trauma, or advancing personal growth?
Psychoanalyst Charles Rycroft (1983) has questioned the therapeutic potential of autobiographical writings that merely serve the purpose of ‘advertising the continued existence of a long-standing ego’ (p. 193). He emphasizes the need for therapeutic autobiography to involve a reflexive practice that aims at self-discovery. In a true therapeutic process, he says, ‘a dialectic takes place between present “I” and past “me,” at the end of which both have changed and the author-subject could say equally truthfully, “I wrote it” and “It wrote me.”’ (p. 192).
The potentially empowering or healing effects often attributed to autobiographical performances may be associated with the feminist and
2 S. PENDZIK
political inception of the genre, which fueled the sense of personal agency exercised by the authors/performers, underlined the transformative possibilities inherent in the act of storying our lives, and offered a place of centrality—literally, a stage—to uncanonical, radical, and public representations of the personal (Claycomb, 2012; Heddon, 2008; Park-Fuller, 2003; Spry, 2011).
In this introductory chapter we begin by contextualizing therapeutic self-referential performance in the framework of other self-referential modes (western and non-western), connecting and contrasting it with parallel developments, particularly in autobiographical and autoethnographic theatre, that do not emphasize a therapeutic aim. The chapter lays out various definitions proposed by scholars and practitioners, highlighting common concepts as well as discussing areas that lack clarity. Throughout, we attempt to articulate the complex relationships between theatrical and therapeutic aims in such performances. After briefly summarizing the essence of each chapter in this book, we conclude by offering suggestions for future research.
SELF-REFERENTIAL ARTISTIC MODALITIES IN NONWESTERN AND WESTERN TRADITIONS
Historically, the use of self-referential modes as a tool for personal expression that is both introspective and artistically crafted goes back centuries, and has been practiced throughout the world. As Jane Walker (1994) asserts, ‘All civilizations, not just the western, are attentive and have been attentive throughout their history to…“individual self-understanding”’ (p. 207)—including Chinese, Japanese, Indian, Arabic, and other nonwestern traditions, in which aesthetic self-referential forms have been cultivated by both women and men. For example, the Japanese literary tradition since its onset contains self-reflective works that can be viewed as having an autobiographical intent (Walker, 1994); among these, the Japanese poetic diary that flourished throughout the eleventh century, was considered to be ‘in its highest aesthetic quality, the property of women’ (Miner, 1968, p. 42). Closer to a performance of the self are the autobiographical narratives of the Kayabi people (an indigenous group living in the Brazilian state of Mato Grosso), who interweave accounts of their personal experiences in the context of their rituals—including shamanic cures, in which shamans present their own dreams, emotional states,
and former cosmic travels as part of their performative healing methods (Oakdale, 2005).
Autobiographical narratives in non-western traditions may exhibit more stylized or fictionalized versions of the self (Walker, 1994), multiple and hybrid images (such as the merging of self and context in Frida Kahlo’s self-portraits (Helland, 1992), or may defy organization ‘around a privileged Self, in relation to which events and other persons are arranged as background’ (More-Gilbert, 2009, p. 103). As noted by postcolonial and feminist critics, marginalized artists may voice their self-narratives in forms that privilege plurality, emphasize orality, or use dialogical forms, rather than the traditional western self-presentation or confessional style (Miller, Taylor, & Carver, 2003; Smith & Watson, 1998).
Grace (2003) highlights that in western culture, textual narratives tend to dominate the critical discourse as an organizing axis for understanding all forms of autobiographical representations. Scholarship traditionally grants Saint Augustine’s Confessions a position of fatherhood, placing it as ‘the origin of modern western autobiography’ (Anderson, 2011, p. 17). Aligned with his work are a host of male descendants (such as Rousseau and Wordsworth) who have been considered exemplary in the genre, despite the fact that life-writing has been used by many female authors (such as Saint Teresa of Avila) as a strategy to gain access to the written word through one of the few channels that were open to women: writing about their personal experiences (Weber, 1990). The western literary canon has taken a mostly ambivalent stance regarding self-referential writing, either questioning its literary merit or restricting its focus to illustrious (usually male) representatives. Critical debate has centered for the most part on establishing the author’s honesty and truthfulness in autobiographical works, memoirs, and other forms of self-writing, and in discussing the relationship between author and text (Anderson, 2011; De Man, 1979; Smith & Watson, 1998).
CONTEXTUALIZING SELF-REFERENTIAL THEATRE AND ITS RELATION TO THERAPEUSIS
In contrast to the long-established patriarchal approach to self-referential written texts, it appears that self-referential performed praxes in all their shapes and forms have been born in freedom: A gender and politically-aware perspective has been adopted in the critical discourse of
self-referential theatre, supporting self-determination, promoting emancipatory actions, challenging colonization, shaping a critical awareness, and endorsing a feminist worldview that reveals the in/visible threads linking the personal and the public (Forte, 1988; Schmor, 1994). As Deidre Heddon (2008) claims:
The autobiographical and the political are interconnected. Who speaks? What is spoken? What sorts of lives are represented, contested, imagined? The vast majority of autobiographical performances have been concerned with using the public arena of performance in order to ‘speak out,’ attempting to make visible denied or marginalized subjects, or to ‘talk back,’ aiming to challenge, contest, and problematize dominant representations about those subjects (p. 20).
She adds that during the 1970s the main motivation for translating personal content ‘into live performance was inarguably tied to consciousnessraising activities’ (p. 21), which were meant to activate the collective understanding that personal life and gender oppression should be explored together. In the last decades of the twentieth century, this spirit reverberated in the celebratory performances of queer autobiographical solos, which challenged social invisibility and marginalization, exploring issues of identity and ‘speaking out’ (Sandhal, 2003; Pearlman, 2015).
Heddon (2008) defines the current work of autobiographical performance as one that aims ‘to explore (question, reveal) the relationship between the personal and the political, engaging with and theorizing the discursive construction of selves and experience’ (p. 162). In her view, by bringing ‘to the fore the self as a performed role,’ autobiographical performance reveals ‘not only the multiplicity of the performing subject, but also the multiplicity of discourses that work to forge subjects’ (p. 39).
In a similar vein, autoethnographic theatre methods are contextoriented and informed by socio/political/gender approaches (Saldaña, 2003; Spry, 2001); they tend to ‘have a social awareness agenda’ (Saldaña, 2011 p. 31) and to address issues such as gender and racial inequity (Spry, 2010). Conceived as politically and academically transgressive forms of inquiry, these methods aim at re/introducing the body into research discourse in a way that ‘can emancipate the scholarly voice from the monostylistic confines of academic discourse’ (Spry 2001, p. 720). In Tami Spry’s (2011) words:
Performative autoethnography is a personal/political social praxis, and a critically reflexive methodology, meaning it provides a framework to critically reflect upon the ways in which our personal lives intersect, collide, and commune with others in the body politic in ways alternate to hegemonic cultural expectations. It provides a narrative apparatus to pose and engage the questions of our global lives, asking us to embrace one another as fully as we challenge one another. (p. 54)
It is in this context that self-referential theatre methods come to intersect with therapeutic practices, as personal inquiry and critical self-reflection are pursued in connection with topics such as identity, agency, empowerment, emancipatory/oppressive self-representations, memory, and narrative (Langellier & Peterson, 2004)—which have traditionally been the foci of psychotherapy and psychology. An implicit, almost natural alliance is thus forged between self-referential theatre forms and therapeutic processes.
Scholars from the fields of both theatre and drama therapy have acknowledged that self-referential performances can have therapeutic side benefits (Emunah, 2015). Heddon (2008) recognizes that autobiographical performances ‘may equate with personal healing,’ by referring to works by artists like Spalding Gray and Linda Montano that deal with traumatic life events as ‘acts of recovery’ (p. 54). She notes the therapeutic potential of pieces such as Linda Park-Fuller’s A clean breast of it, which the performer defined as an act of personal and political agency that helped her to transform her subjective identity from the ‘prescribed… role of “patient-victim”’ into that of a survivor (Park-Fuller, 2003, p. 215). Yet many of these scholars and performers hesitate to identify their work as therapeutic, underscoring a common confusion about whether expressing emotion or revealing personal information necessarily lies within a therapeutic domain. Noting the emotional impact of self-reflective performed autoethnography, Spry (2011) cautions that ‘emotion is not inherently epistemic’ (p. 108):
Performance studies practitioners have worked with the embodiment of emotion in the production of knowledge for centuries, and are aware of the potential dangers when expecting the expression of emotion in research to stand-in for aesthetic acumen. (p. 108)
The intersection between self-referential performance as an art form and as a therapeutic method therefore is both a place of meeting and of departure. Emunah (2015) notes, ‘Autobiographical theatre… involves dramatic storytelling or dramatization of personal life material, but without a conscious aim of transforming or healing this material’ (p. 72); on the other hand, what she terms self-revelatory performance is both a therapeutic process and a form of theatre. She states:
An aesthetically portrayed revealing and reweaving of a core and current issue in the performer’s life can be compelling, if not riveting, to an audience. The natural suspense and unpredictability in the unfolding of the piece, along with the immediacy of real issues being grappled with in new ways, are all ingredients for good theatre. (Emunah, 2015, p. 79)
Richard Schechner (2013) uses the concept of the efficacy–entertainment dyad to differentiate between ritual and theatre (both being performances): When the primary purpose is effecting change, the efficacy aspect is highlighted, whereas when aesthetics are the primary goal, the entertainment factor prevails. Schechner (2013) encourages us to see the relationship between efficacy and entertainment not as a rigid dyad ‘but as a braid or helix, tightening and loosening over time and in specific cultural contexts’ (p. 80). We are in agreement: aesthetics and therapeusis are not mutually exclusive; more often than not, they powerfully coincide (Emunah, 1994, 2015; Emunah & Johnson, 1983; Pendzik, 2013a, 2013b; Sajnani, 2012; Snow, D’Amico, & Tanguay, 2003).
DEFINITIONS AND TERMINOLOGY
Self-referential forms tend to call themselves by a plethora of names. According to Smith and Watson (2010), the ‘rich and diverse history of self-referential modes requires that we make some crucial distinctions among key terms—autobiography, memoir, life writing, life narrative—that may seem to imply the same thing’ (p. 2). And there are more terms, including testimonial, autoethnography and psychobiography. A similar nomenclatorial overabundance applies to self-referential theatre and performance. Researching the genres of ethnotheatre and ethnodrama, Saldaña (2011) discovered over 80 unique terms for the form, including: autodrama, autoperformance, everyday life performance, factual theatre, generative autobiography, heritage theatre, memory theatre, mystory, reality
theatre, performing autobiography, reminiscence theatre, self-performance, and testimonial theatre (pp. 13–14). More names could enrich this list— especially in referring to autobiographical performance: autobiographical storytelling performance (Langellier & Peterson, 2004), confessional performance (Schmor, 1994), self-story (Beglau, 2012), solo autobiographical performance (Wallace, 2006), and theatre of the real (Martin, 2013). Some names consider the place where the performance takes place as having biographical agency, thus adding terms such as autobiographical site-specific performance or autopography (Stephenson, 2012).
A similar multiplicity for describing performances of the self is present within the field of drama therapy—sometimes informed by culture, language, and practice-related factors. Renée Emunah (1994, 2015) conceived and developed self-revelatory performance (Self-Rev), a form of drama therapy and theatre that has been practiced predominantly in the USA and Canada. In her words, ‘Self-Revelatory Performance is a form of drama therapy and theatre in which a performer creates an original theatrical piece out of the raw material of current life issues’ (Emunah, 2015, p. 71). The focus is on multi-leveled strands of healing, which ultimately augment (rather than compromise) theatrical quality. Her descriptions of therapeutic performance, and particularly her analyses of methods of theatrically grappling with therapeutic issues, and of what constitutes healing in personal theatre, have influenced and informed the field as a whole regardless of terminology and form.
Many practitioners use the more generic term autobiographical therapeutic theatre/performance (ATP). Pendzik (2013a) defines autobiographical therapeutic theatre as a form of drama therapy that involves the development of a performance based on personal material, presented in front an audience, and is conceived with a therapeutic aim. She adds:
Even such a broad definition already implies what it is not: It is not an improvised piece, but one that is developed over time, and is therefore subjected to a rehearsal phase; it is not centered on literary or universal works, but on personal experience; it has a communicative function: it is meant to be performed in front of other people, thus, taking their implicit presence into consideration. Finally, it is not made for entertainment ends, but there is a therapeutic aspect at play. The combination of these premises also indicates the existence of a balance between process and product—one which is indispensable to keep; for in autobiographical therapeutic theatre both ends of the rope are equally important. (pp. 4–5)
In the United Kingdom, performances about the self that dramatherapy students are required to create during their training have been called personal theatre (Seymour, Chap. 14), or simply autobiographical performances. Jacques (Chap. 7) speaks of autobiographical performance in dramatherapy, while Dokter and Gersie (Chap. 13) note that these as well as other terms have been used interchangeably in the UK.
Despite the subtle distinctions between the names many of our chapter contributors apply to their work, we recommend the term autobiographical (or autoethnographic) therapeutic performance (or theatre) (ATP) as the generic, overarching label for this work, and will therefore use it throughout this book. Although Emunah brought her concept of Self-Rev into being before many began to use the term autobiographical therapeutic performance, in the end, Self-Rev is a more specific form with its own criteria - given its emphasis on exploring current personal issues, on a depth of therapeutic working through, and on a high degree of artistic mastery. Although overlapping with or informed by Self-Rev, some of the forms under ATP’s broader umbrella emphasize specific aspects pertaining to the author’s method of drama therapy or focus within clinical practice—as in Dunne’s Restoried Script Performance (Chap. 10), or Volkas (Chap. 8), who finds the word therapeutic to be indispensable in describing the purpose of his work to potential clients.
OVERVIEW OF BOOK
The book is conceptually grounded in the intersection between theatre/ performance and psychotherapy, moving fluidly between these paradigms; in some chapters concepts from other related disciplines are also incorporated.
Part I provides historical background and conceptual perspectives underlying current practice in ATP. Stephen Snow examines how experimental and avant-garde theatre influenced the development of Self-Rev— beginning with ‘the demolition of the famous fourth wall of illusionistic theatre.’ He elucidates how Artaud, Grotowski, The Living Theatre, The Open Theatre, and the autoperformance of Spaulding Gray were significant precedents to Self-Rev. Renée Emunah takes the reader on a closeup tour of what occurs ‘behind the scenes’ in the process of developing a Self-Rev (including the intensive collaboration between performer and director), followed by an analysis of what takes place for the performer in facing an audience—along with the role played by the audience—in such
intimate theatrical productions. She emphasizes the centrality of working through, a process of engaging, developing, and transforming personal conflicts through embodied, theatrical means during rehearsal and performance phases. She then addresses the potential ‘elephant’ in the theatre with this kind of performance: the risk of self-indulgence.
Susana Pendzik outlines the dramaturgical elements involved in autobiographical therapeutic performance, focusing on what makes the presentation of personal stories move from a mere recounting of victimization to a therapeutic experience. Drawing on ideas in the work of Eugenio Barba, and exploring recurrent patterns that characterize the process as well as the performance pieces, she points out some archetypal configurations in ATPs, and offers examples of dramaturgical structures that turn the process into a therapeutic one. David Read Johnson then examines the experience of surprise in Self-Rev and considers the question: How does the performer achieve discovery on stage, when the piece has already been rehearsed and memorized? Johnson stresses the significance of Otherness in these personal creations, arising from the actor’s unconscious, the director, stagecraft, and the presence of the audience. Relying on the instability theory in Developmental Transformations, he underscores the importance of the actor’s vulnerability and openness to the present moment during the performance.
Nisha Sajnani also highlights the significance of others in solo performance, and explores the performance of personal story through the perspective of relational aesthetics. Her chapter elucidates a relational view of art, ethics, and audience. Incorporating examples of the works of several performance artists, Sajnani emphasizes the relationships that are inherent in both the process and content of personal theatre pieces, as well as between performer and audience. From the theoretical perspective of intersubjectivity, Jean-Francois Jacques continues the exploration of the relationship between performer and audience—a distinct theme throughout this book. Integrating elements from performance studies, drama therapy, phenomenology and intersubjectivity theory, he examines the dynamic encounter between actor and spectator. Jacques suggests a conceptual framework for the production of meaning, outlining layers and types of witnessing inherent in autobiographical performance in drama therapy.
Part II begins with presentations of ATP based on a range of approaches. Armand Volkas blends Joseph Campbell’s concept of the hero’s journey, anthropological models of rites of passage, and Eric Berne’s Transactional
Analysis, into a process for helping clients create ATPs within a psychotherapy practice. Sheila Rubin focuses on Self-Rev in healing shame and trauma. Her Embodied Life Stories process stresses the therapeutic relationship in helping to repair damaged or disrupted interpersonal bonds. Like Volkas, she highlights the importance of the reparative witness in accessing deeper aspects or new dimensions of the story. Pam Dunne’s Restoried Script Performance process is based on Narrative Therapy and Positive Psychology, and, like Volkas and Rubin, is typically utilized with psychotherapy clients. The focus is on revealing problematic patterns or scripts in the client’s life, and re-storying these to produce a more positive outcome or identity, presenting these transformations in the performance.
Drew Bird applies Clark Moustakas’ six phases of heuristic research to the process of creating ATP, incorporating reflections from his own personal performance piece. The phases of engagement, immersion, incubation, illumination, explication, and creative synthesis provide a developmental framework for understanding the process of preparing ATPs. Examining four contemporary and recognized autobiographical performances in Israel, two of which were developed drama-therapeutically, Gideon Zehavi uses John Austin’s concept of the performative within performance theory to examine the dynamics of transformative moments of presence that occur within autobiographical performances. He concludes that often these moments occur when the actor breaks out of role and briefly confronts the audience as him/herself, not unlike Johnson’s conclusion that working through occurs when the discrepancy between the actor and his role is revealed to the audience.
The next two chapters focus on the use of personal theatre performances as part of dramatherapy (British spelling) training programs, specifically in the United Kingdom. Ditty Dokter and Alida Gersie review the history of autobiographical performance in British dramatherapy programs, and convey their content analysis of a set of performances as recollected by their alumni. Key themes of family relationships, diversity, being witnessed, privacy, and transformation are discussed, overlapping with some of the issues identified by Pendzik and others. Anna Seymour also interviews graduates about their personal theatre performances, and analyzes them from a dialectical, sociopolitical perspective, relying on Brecht and on Jacques Rancière’s study of the power relations between performer and witness/audience. Her analysis reveals the multilayered and contradictory impulses within the actor (e.g., wanting to be seen and to hide
from view), and raises questions about the nature of the audience’s role in autobiographical performance.
The book then turns to more specific applications in Dovrat Harel’s and Zeina Daccache’s chapters on directing ATPs with particular populations: Harel, in Israel, with elderly people who have dementia, and Daccache, with inmates in Lebanese prisons. Harel describes how ATP revives and preserves memories, consistent with research on reminiscence within narrative gerontology. She illustrates how elderly clients improve their self-esteem and expand their positive self-identities. Daccache’s work also empowers her clients to tell their life stories and dramatize their experiences in prison before large public audiences, building hope where there has been none. Inspired by Boal’s Legislative Theatre, she relates her journey in using these performances to instigate social and legal reform in Lebanon, leading to the passage of a new law for ‘The Protection of Women and Family Members from Domestic Violence,’ approved by the Lebanese Parliament in 2014—a powerful demonstration of the potential of ATP to create tangible social change.
The final two chapters comprise descriptive accounts of collaborative personal performances by the creators of these pieces, who use the form in unique ways. Jules and David Richmond recount their process as a long-time couple of creating an autoethnographic performance exploring loss, aging, and the passage of time. Their poetic personal stories interface with their political commitment (and disillusion) with regard to urgent societal and ecological needs. Maria Hodermarska, Prentiss Benjamin, and Stephanie Omens turn the usual structure of ATP on its head by identifying the play as the client. In most performances, the actor is simultaneously the source of material, the playwright, and the performer. Hodermarska’s team of drama therapists separates these roles entirely: there is no human client, and only the director links the performer, playwright, and the person who is the source of the personal material. Their reflections on this deconstructed process illuminate important themes and raise interesting questions in ATP and Self- Rev.
In our call for chapters we tried to reach a diversity of practitioners and scholars throughout the world, who may be using ATP or related forms of interventions; yet the reply came mainly from European, North American and Middle Eastern sources. We are therefore aware of the cultural and geographical limitations of the book, which will be addressed in future editions.
DISCUSSION
All of our contributors, as well as others engaged in autobiographical or autoethnographic therapeutic theatre, share core values and methods. The differences are mostly subtle, due to varying theoretical frameworks, specific needs of particular populations, settings and contexts, or simply preferred language of the author. All performances described in this book utilize or play with personal narrative. All utilize the fundamental power of personal performance before an audience, involving the embodiment of self while being witnessed. All emphasize the power of revelation of the performer and the corresponding ethics of acceptance on the part of the audience. These themes are deeply linked to the core tenets of both theatre and psychotherapy: the integration of mind and body; the centrality of the reparative relationship; and the complexity of connection and individuation of the person with regard to their history and cultural surround. Indeed, this work is born from, and reaches toward, freedom.
A number of issues deserve attention in future scholarship on ATP and its related forms. These include: (1) the role of the audience; (2) the role of the director/therapist; (3) use in drama therapy training; (4) the degree of creative license and its ethical dimension; (5) the impact of impending performance; and (6) the fact that ATPs are usually performed only once.
ROLE OF AUDIENCE
All of the authors in this volume reference the importance of the audience. They also imply that in these types of intimate, personal performances, the role of the audience is subtly different than that of standard theatre, linked to the fact that many in the audience are friends, colleagues, or family of the performer. Several authors hint at the ethical nature of this special relationship, though details are lacking. For example, how often and how thoroughly do practitioners conduct audience preparation prior to the performance, or de-briefing sessions or talks afterwards? If so, what is the content and purpose of these? Are they directed toward added benefit to the actor, or to the audience members? When, or in what contexts, would engaging the audience be advised, and when not? How do the expectations of the audience play a role?
ROLE OF DIRECTOR/THERAPIST
There is variation in the degree to which the director serves primarily as a therapist or drama therapist, or focuses more specifically on the artistic task of bringing an ATP to fruition. In the former case, the director may serve as the person’s primary therapist long before and after the ATP, while in the latter, performer and director may collaborate only for the duration of the rehearsal and performance process. There is also variation in the degree to which the director/therapist privileges the therapeutic process versus ensuring that the final performance is of the best possible artistic quality. It is clear that some ATP directors/therapists prefer the consulting or witnessing role, while the main playwriting and material-generating tasks are accomplished by the performer; others are more active, taking charge of the shaping of the final script and intervening in the co-creative process. In Self-Rev, for example, the director is actively involved in both deepening the therapeutic possibilities and also in ensuring a product of theatrical excellence. How the trace of the director/therapist lives within the final performance as viewed by the audience remains an interesting question to explore.
DRAMA THERAPY TRAINING
A significant proportion of ATP practitioners work with drama therapy students in training programs, where ATP is encouraged or even required as a culminating project of their education. Most often fellow students as well as teachers are in the audience. Students/actors are asked to put forward a presentation of a highly personal nature, often as a capstone, which has an evaluative component. Many ethical and methodological issues arise that bear on the process of competition, evaluation, and power relations in the field. Though Emunah, Raucher, & Ramirez-Hernandez (2014), as well as Dokter and Gersie (Chap. 13), have provided us with the first data about this process, which shows that students value the experience highly and feel supported by the faculty and fellow students, not enough has been written about ATP in this setting.
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CHAPTER III
THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE SONATA FORM
Vienna as the home of the sonata; definition of ‘sonata’ Origin and history of the standard sonata cycle; relationship of sonata movements Evolution of the ‘triplex’ form: Pergolesi’s ‘singing allegro’; the union of aria and binary forms; Padre Martini’s sonatas, Scarlatti’s true sonata in C; Domenico Alberti; the Alberti bass; the transitional period of the sonata Sonata writers before Haydn and Mozart: J C Bach; Muzio Clementi Schobert and Wagenseil; C P E Bach; F W Rust
Turning our backs upon Bach and looking over the musical marches, we shall observe many roads in the second half of the eighteenth century making their way even from the remotest confines towards Vienna. There they converge towards the end of the century. Thither comes pouring music from England, from France, volumes of music from Italy; music from Prussia, from Saxony, from Russia; from all the provinces, from Poland, from Bohemia and from Croatia. There is a hodge-podge and a pêle-mêle of music, of types and nationalities. There are the pompous oratorios from the west, light operas and tuneful trios and sonatas from the south, dry-as-dust fugues from the north, folk-songs gay and sad from the east. All whirling and churning before Maria Theresa, or her lovable son, or the intelligent courtiers about them. France will grow sick before the Revolution, Italy will become frivolous, Germany cold. Only Vienna
loves music better than life. Presently up will come Haydn from Croatia, and Mozart from Salzburg, and Beethoven from Bonn. Then young Schubert will sing a swan-song at the feast from which the honored guests have one by one departed; and waltzes will whirl in to gobble up all save what fat Rossini can grab for himself.
And what is the pianoforte’s share in this profusion of music? Something of all, variations, pot-pourris from the operas, rondos and bagatelles and waltzes; but chiefly sonatas, and again sonatas.
Now sonatas did not grow in Vienna. Vienna laid before her honored guests the great confusion of music which had poured into her for fifty years from foreign lands, and in that confusion were sonatas. They were but babes, frail and starved for lack of many things, little more than skin and bones. But they had bright eyes which caught Haydn’s fatherly glance. He dragged them forth from the rubbish and fed them a good diet of hearty folk-songs, so that they grew. Mozart came from many wanderings and trained them in elegance and dressed them with his lovely fancies. And at last when they were quite full-grown, Beethoven took charge of them and made them mighty. What manner of babe was this that could so grow, and whence came it to Vienna?
The word sonata slips easily over the tongues of most people, great musicians, amateurs, dilettanti and laymen alike; but it is not a word, nor yet a type, easily defined. The form is very properly associated with the composers of the Viennese period. Earlier sonatas, such as those of the seventeenth century composers, like Kuhnau and Pasquini, are sonatas only in name, and not in the generally accepted sense of the word. The rock which bars their entrance into the happy kingdom of sonatas is the internal form of the movements. For a sonata is not only a group of pieces or movements in an arbitrary whole. At least one of the separate movements within the whole must be in the special form dubbed by generations with an unfortunate blindness to ambiguity, the sonata form. Attempts have been made from time to time to rename this form. It has been called the first movement form; because usually the first movements of
sonatas, symphonies and other like works, are found to have it. Unhappily it is scarcely less frequently to be found in the last movements. Let us simply cut the Gordian knot, and for no other reason than that it may help in this book to render a difficult subject a little less confusing, call this special form arbitrarily the triplex form.
To trace the development of the pianoforte sonata, then, is a twofold task: to trace the tendency towards a standard group of pieces or movements in one whole; and to trace the development of the triplex form of movement, the presence of which in the group gives us the somewhat despotic right to label that group a sonata.
The first task leads upon something of a wild-goose chase. The number of movements which a sonata might contain never became rigidly fixed. A single movement, however, is not a sonata in the generally accepted meaning of the word. It is true that the separate pieces of D. Scarlatti are still called sonatas; but this is only one of the few cases where the original natural use of the word has persisted beside the arbitrarily restricted one. We are, as a matter of fact, almost forced to this continued free use of the term by the lack of a more specific one to cover the circumstance, or even of a suitable abstract one. As we have seen, the few pieces Scarlatti published himself he called esercizii. Even in his day the word sonata was applied mostly to compositions made up of two or more movements. His pieces were not fugues; neither were they dances. They were too regular and too compact to be called fantasies or toccatas. They were not rondos, and his imagination was sterile in fanciful titles such as Couperin gave to his pieces. Our modern minds reject his own title as utterly unmusical. In abstract terms we have ‘piece,’ which may do for the historian but not for the program. ‘Movement’ has been chained up in the sonata and symphony. ‘Gems’ and ‘jewels’ are too often in music a paste of musk and tears. So we hold to sonata, for the lack of anything better.
Though the word originally signified any music sounded or played on instruments, thus differentiating instrumental music from vocal, its use was limited early in the seventeenth century to music written for groups of strings or wind. At that time, it will be remembered, harpsichord and clavichord music was still essentially organ music, to which the word sonata was rarely applied.
The string sonatas had developed chiefly from the old chanson, the setting of a poem in stanzas to polyphonic vocal music. The composer attempted in this old form to reflect in his music the varied meaning of the stanzas of his poem. Thus the music, taken from its words and given to groups of strings to play, was more or less clearly divided into varied sections, showing, as it were, the shape or skeleton upon which it had originally been moulded. At first the instrumentalists, even the organists, as we have seen, were content merely to play upon their instruments what had been thus written for voices. Such had long been their custom with popular madrigals and with other simpler forms.
Soon the organists broke ground in a wholly different direction. But the other instrumentalists, chiefly the violinists, on the contrary, though they began to compose their own music with an ever-growing regard to the special qualities of their instruments, still retained the well-known form. Hence the many fledgling sonatas in the last quarter of the sixteenth century and even the first quarter of the seventeenth, with their title of canzon a suonare. This title was soon cut down to sonata. The form was enormously expanded by the enthusiasm and rapidly soaring skill of the instrumental composers. The many more or less vague sections, fossil outlines, as it were, of the poem in stanzas, swelled out to broad and clear proportions. The number of them was consequently cut down to four or even three, the selection and sequence of which had been almost unconsciously determined by principles of contrast. Finally the influence of the growing suite combined with the breadth and formal perfection of the several sections to cut them off distinctly, each from the other. The word sonata, then, it will be observed, was applied almost from the
beginning to a piece of music divided into several more or less clearly differentiated sections or movements.
The growth of the suite was, as we have seen, of quite a different nature. The sonata developed rapidly from a seed. The suite was a synthesis of various dance pieces, held together by a convention, without any inherited internal relationship. In spite of the number of suites written during the seventeenth century for string band and even other combinations of instruments, it is practically a special development of keyboard music. The lighter character of the music itself, depending largely upon dance rhythms for its vitality, encouraged the free style suitable to the harpsichord. Its influence upon the string sonata is, however, unmistakable.
Thus, though harpsichord music and the suite were more or less neglected in Italy during the second and third quarters of the seventeenth century, we find Corelli publishing between 1683 and 1700 his epoch-making works for violin and other instruments in alternate sets of suonate (sometimes called suonate da chiesa), and suites, which he called suonate da camera. In the former the movements had no titles but the Italian words which marked their character, such as grave, allegro, vivace, and other like words. In the latter most of the movements conformed to dance rhythms and were given dance names.
The normal number of movements in both sonatas and suites is four, and normally these four are in the order of slow, fast, slow, fast. The movements of the suite are all normally in the same key; but among the sonatas the middle adagio is often in a different key from the other movements. This variety of key is nearly always present as a distinctive feature of the sonata.
Corelli’s works are, leaving aside his personal genius, indicative of the state of the sonata at the end of the seventeenth century. That the sonatas with suite movements were called chamber sonatas and the others church sonatas gives us some hint of the relative dignity of the two forms in the minds of composers of that day. In 1695 J. Kuhnau published in Leipzig his sonata in B-flat for the harpsichord,
with the prefatory remarks that he saw no reason why the harpsichord, with its range of harmony and its possibilities in contrapuntal music, should be restricted to the lighter forms of music (such as the suite). He therefore offered to the public a piece for harpsichord written in the more dignified form of the violin music of the day, which he called the Sonate aus dem B.
Here, as we remarked in chapter I, the word sonata comes into pianoforte music, bringing with it a dignity, if not a charm, which was felt to be lacking in the suite. Kuhnau’s sonata is in four movements, none of which is very clearly articulated. The adagio comes between the second and fourth and is in the key of E-flat major. This sonata was followed by seven more, published the next year under the title of Frische Clavier Früchte. The tone of all is experimental and somewhat bombastic. But at any rate we have at last keyboard sonatas.
During the lifetime of Corelli two other Italian violinists rose to shining prominence, Locatelli[21] and Vivaldi[22] . To them is owing a certain development in the internal structure of a new form of the sonata called the concerto, of which we shall say more later on. Here we have to note, however, the tendency of both these composers to make their concertos and sonatas in three movements: two long rapid movements with a slow movement between. Corelli left sonate da camera and sonate da chiesa of the same description; but the procedure seems to have recommended itself to Sebastian Bach mainly by the works of Vivaldi, of which, as we have seen, he made a most careful study. Hence we have from Bach not only the beautiful sonatas for violin and harpsichord in three movements, but harpsichord concertos,—many of which were transcriptions of Vivaldi’s works, but some, like the exquisite one in D minor cited in the last chapter, all his own,—likewise on the same plan. So, too, were written many of the Brandenburg concertos, notably the one in G major, No. 5. Finally we have the magnificent concerto in the Italian style for cembalo alone, which is more truly a sonata, leaving for all time a splendid example of the symmetry of a well-wrought piece in three movements.
Of this perfect masterpiece we have already spoken. It is well to recall attention to the fact, however, that the first and last movements are of about equal length and significance. Both are in rapid tempo and of careful and more or less close-knit workmanship; and both are in the key of F major. The movement between them is in a different key (D minor) and of slow tempo and wholly contrasting character.
Here, then, as regards the number and grouping of movements in the sonata, we have in the work of the father, the model for the son Emanuel. For so far as Emanuel Bach contributed at all to the external structure of the pianoforte sonata, it was by adhering consistently to this three-movement type which was later adopted by Haydn, Mozart, and, to a great extent, Beethoven.
His consistency in this regard is indeed well worth noticing. For between the years 1740 and 1786, when he composed and published his numerous sets of sonatas, there was much variety of procedure among musicians. Bach, however, rarely varied; and this, together with the models his father left, justifies us in calling the sonata in three movements distinctly the German type of this period.
Meanwhile composers who were more in the current of Italian music fought shy of committing themselves to a fixed grouping of movements. Italian instrumental music was taking a tremendous swing towards melody and lightness. This was especially influential in shaping the triplex form of movement; but was also affecting the general grouping. Padre Martini (1706-84) of Bologna alone adhered to a regular, or nearly regular, number and sequence of movements in harpsichord sonatas. His twelve harpsichord sonatas, published in Amsterdam in 1742, but written some years earlier, seem strangely out of place in their surroundings.
To begin with, even at this late date they are written either for organ or for harpsichord. This alone prepares us for the general contrapuntal style of them all. Then, though named sonatas, they are far more nearly suites. Each is composed of five movements. The first is regularly in sonorous prelude style, suitable to the organ. The
second is regularly an allegro in fugal style, the third usually an adagio. The fourth and fifth are in most cases dances,—gavottes, courantes or gigues, with sometimes an aria or a theme and variations. All the movements in one sonata are in the same key. Only one feature resembles those of the growing Italian harpsichord sonata: the generally light dance character of the last or the last two movements. For what is very noticeable in the sonatas of E. Bach is that the last movements, though cheerful in character, are usually of equal musical significance with the first.
Far more in the growing Italian style are the eight sonatas of Domenico Alberti, the amateur thorn in the professional side. Just when they were written is not known. The young man was born in 1717 and died probably in 1740 if not before. None of them has more than two movements. Both are in the same key and the second is usually the livelier of the two, often a minuet.
A group of the Italians preferred the sonata in two movements, Francisco Durante (1684-1755), for example, and later Domenico Paradies (1710-92). Later still, some sonatas of Johann Christian Bach, youngest son of Sebastian, who submitted quite to the Italian influence, have but two movements; and the first of Clementi’s sonatas also. Other Italians, like Baldassare Galuppi (1706-85), seem never to have decided upon any definite number, nor any definite order of movements.
What is, however, due particularly to the Italian influence is the persistent intrusion of a dance form in the cycle—usually a minuet. We find it in Alberti, in Christian Bach, and especially in the clavecin works of Jean Schobert, a young Silesian, resident in Paris from about 1750 to 1766, one of the most brilliant clavecinists of his day, one of the most charming, and one who brought a very decided influence upon the development of the young Mozart.
The Italian tendency was invariably to put at the end of the sonata a movement of which the lightness and gaiety of the contents were to bring refreshment or even relief after the more serious divulgences of the earlier movements,—a rondo or even a dance. To this impulse
Haydn and Mozart both yielded, retaining from Emanuel Bach only the standard number of three movements.
It must be added here that something is due to Slavic influences in the ultimate general triumph of the objectively gay over the subjectively profound in the last movement or movements of the sonata and the symphony. Not only did Haydn incorporate in the scheme the lively expressive melodies and the crisp rhythms so native to the Slavic peoples among whom he grew to manhood. Earlier than he the Bohemian, Johann Stamitz, had thus enlivened and clarified the symphony, and given it the great impetus to future development which bore so splendidly in Vienna. And Schobert, whom we have but now mentioned, was from a Polish land. What such men brought was essentially of spiritual significance; but in music, as in other arts, the new spirit brings the new form.
As we have already said, the number and sequence of movements in the pianoforte sonata has never been rigidly fixed. But an average combination is clear. The majority of sonatas by Haydn and by Mozart, as well as by lesser men like Clementi, Dussek and Rust, and many of the sonatas by Beethoven, are in three movements. Of these the first and last are invariably in the same key (major and minor). The first movement is normally of a dignified, formal, and more or less involved character, though such a generalization may be quickly stoned to death by numbers of conspicuous and great exceptions. The second movement is normally in a key contrasting with the first movement, usually of slow and lyrical character, usually also simple, at least as regards form. The last movement is, in perhaps the majority of cases, more brilliant, more obvious and more rapid than the others, calculated to amuse and astonish the listener rather than to stir his emotions, to send him away laughing and delighted, rather than sad and thoughtful.
The number three was established by Emanuel Bach. The character of the last movement, however, was determined by Italian and Slavic influences, and is somewhat reminiscent of the suite. If one more sign is necessary of the complex crossing and recrossing of various
lines of development before the pianoforte sonata rose up clear on its foundations, we have but to note the curious facts that the suite was neglected in Italy during the seventeenth century in favor of the string sonata; that the suite reached its finest proportions in Germany, chiefly at the hands of Sebastian Bach; that through Sebastian Bach the three-movement sonata group passed from the Italian Vivaldi to Emanuel Bach, who established it as a norm; finally that the Italians, who neglected the suite in the seventeenth century, conceived an enthusiasm for it in the eighteenth and brought their love of it to bear on the German sonata group, introducing the minuet and giving to the last movement the lively care-free form of a dance or a rondo.
Before proceeding to outline the development of the triplex form in which at least one movement of this sonata group was written and which is one of the most distinctive features of the sonata, it is not out of place to stop to consider what relationship, if any, existed between the movements. Was the sonata as a whole an indissoluble unit? Rather decidedly no. The grouping of several movements together came to be as conventional and as arbitrary, if not so regular, as the grouping of the suites. There is about the sonatas of Emanuel Bach a certain seriousness and an emotional genuineness which might prevail upon the pianist today, if ever he should think of playing them in concert, to respect the grouping in which the composer chose to present them to the world. But there is no organic life in the sonatas as a whole. Occasionally in his sonatas and in those of Clementi and Haydn the slow middle movement leads without pause into the rapid finale. In these cases, however, the slow movement is introductory to the last, to which it is attached though not related.
Haydn, Mozart and even Beethoven took movements from one work and incorporated them in another. Moreover, it was the custom even as late as the time that Chopin played in Vienna, to play the first movement of a symphony, a concerto or a sonata early in a program and the last movements considerably later, after other works in other styles had been performed. The sonatas and symphonies of the last
quarter of the eighteenth and the first quarter of the nineteenth centuries in the main lacked any logical principle of unity. We say in the main, because Emanuel Bach, F. W. Rust, and Beethoven succeeded, in some of their greatest sonatas, in welding the movements inseparably together. Clementi, too, in the course of his long life acquired such a mastery of the form. But these developments are special, and signalize in a way the passing on of the sonata. As a form the sonata proper was doomed by the lack of a unity which composers in the nineteenth century felt to be necessary in any long work of music.
The day will come, if indeed it has not already come, when most sonatas will have been broken up by Time into the various distinct parts of which they were pieced together. Out of the fragments future years will choose what they will to preserve. Already the Bach suites have been so broken. It makes no difference that their separate numbers are for the most part of imperishable stuff. Movements of Haydn and Mozart will endure after their sonatas as wholes are dead. So, too, with many of the Beethoven sonatas. The links which hold their movements together are often but convention; and there is evidently no convention which Time will not corrode.
II
In looking over the vast number of sonatas written between 1750 and 1800 one is impressed, if one is kindly, not so much by their careless structure and triviality as by their gaiety. In the adagios the composers sometimes doff their hats, somewhat perfunctorily, to the muse of tragedy; but for the most part their sonatas are light-hearted. They had a butterfly existence. They were born one day but to die the next. Yet there was a charm about them. The people of that day loved them. A run and a trill do, it is true, but tickle the ear; but that is, after all, a pleasant tickling. And simple harmonies may shirk often enough the weight of souls in tragic conflict, to bear which many would make the duty of music; yet their lucidity is something akin to
sunlight. The frivolities of these countless sonatas are the frivolities of youth. There is no high seriousness in most of them. And our triplex form came sliding into music on a burst of youth. A star danced and it was born.
What gave definite shape to this fundamentally simple form is the Italian love of melody. So far as it may be traced to the influence of one man, it may be traced to Giovanni Pergolesi, whose trio-sonatas first gave to the world as a prototype of the classical triplex form what is now known as the ‘singing allegro.’ Pergolesi was born in 1704 and lived to be only thirty-three years old; but in that brief life, gaily and recklessly squandered as it seems to have been, he exerted an influence upon the growth of music which apparently started it upon a new stage. He was all but worshipped by his countrymen. His opera, La serva padrona (1733), won instant success, not only in Italy, but well over all Europe; and had an influence comparable to that of but few other single works in the history of music. On the ground of instrumental music his triosonatas have, as it seems now, accomplished scarcely less.
We must here restrict ourselves to the harpsichord music of the time in Italy, in which the ‘singing allegro’ found place almost at once. Let us first consider what lay at the bottom of the new form.
We may plunge at once to the very foundation, the harmonic groundwork. As we have seen, perhaps the most important accomplishment in music of the seventeenth century was the discovery and establishment of key relationships in that harmonic conception of music which has endured almost to the present day. Instrumental forms developed upon this re-organization of musical material. Subsequently, however polyphonic the texture of a piece of music—a fugue of Bach’s, for instance—might be, its shape was moulded upon a frame of harmony. The piece was in a certain key, clearly affirmed at the beginning and at the end, points in the structure which in a piece of music as in a paragraph are naturally the most emphatic. Within these limits there was the life and variety of a harmonic development, which, departing from the tonic key,
must return thence. Long before the year 1700 the regulation of such harmonic procedures had definitely fixed the symmetrical plan of two forms: the so-called aria form and the binary form. Neither was in itself capable of much development; and it was in a sort of fusion of both that the harmonic plan of the triplex form was created.
The aria form was in three sections which we have elsewhere represented by the letters A, B, A. A, the opening section, was all in the tonic key, and was practically complete in itself. B, the second section, was in a contrasting key or was harmonically unstable. A, the third section, was but an exact repetition of the first, to give balance and unity to the whole. The limitations of the form were essentially harmonic. The first section offered little or no chance for modulation. Its tonality must be unmistakably and impressively tonic. Therefore it did not develop into the second section by means of harmonic unrest. The second was simply a block of contrasting harmonies, like a block of porphyry set beside a block of marble. Frequently, however, the second section was incomplete without the third. In such cases a hyphen between the B and the second A in our lettered scheme would represent the relations between the three sections more nearly, thus: A, B-A.
The binary form, in which most of the dance movements of the suite were composed, was usually shorter than the aria form; but though apparently simpler, it was, from the point of view of harmony, more highly organized. It consisted, as we have seen, of two sections, each of which was repeated in turn. The first modulated from the tonic key to the dominant or relative major; the second from that key back to the tonic again. It will be observed that the first section really grew into the second by harmonic impulse; for the first section, ending as it did in a key that was not the key of the piece, was incomplete. The two sections together not only established a perfect balance of form and harmony, but had an organic harmonic life which was lacking in the aria.
However, the tendency of most forms was towards the triple division typified by the aria, with a clearly defined first section, a second
section of contrasting and uncertain character, and a third section which, being a restatement of the first, reestablished the tonic key and gave to the piece as a whole a positive order. In the binary forms of Froberger and Chambonnières there is the harmonic embryo of a distinct middle section; namely, the few modulations through which the music passes on its way from dominant back to tonic in the second section. It can be easily understood that composers would make the most of this chance for modulation as they became more and more aware of the beauty of harmony; likewise, that the bolder their harmonic ventures in these measures, the greater was their need to emphasize the final re-establishment of the tonic key. Ultimately a distinct triple division was inevitable, with an opening section modulating from tonic to dominant, a second section of contrasting keys and few modulations; finally a restatement of the first section, as in the aria, but necessarily somewhat changed so that the whole section might be in the tonic key. Such is the harmonic foundation of the triplex form.
Such a form makes its appearance in music very shortly after the beginning of the eighteenth century It seems akin now to the aria, now to the binary form. One may suspect the latter relationship if the first section is repeated, and the second and third sections (as one) likewise. These repetitions are obviously inherited from the binary form. On the other hand, if these sections are not thus repeated, the piece resembles more nearly the aria.
Take, for example, an adagio from the second sonata in a set of twelve published by Padre Martini in 1742, written probably many years earlier. These sonatas were republished by Madame Farrenc in the third volume of her Trésor des pianistes. The adagio in question is clearly in three sections very like an aria, with the difference that the first section ends in the dominant (in the eighth measure), and the last is consequently changed from the first so that it may end in the tonic. There are no repeats.
Far more remarkable is a sonata in C major by D. Scarlatti. It is the eleventh in the Breitkopf and Härtel collection of twenty to which
reference has already been made. Here we find a first section modulating from tonic to dominant. This is repeated. Then follows the second section, full of free modulations, and this section comes to a very obvious half-close. The last section very nearly repeats the first, except for the necessary changes in harmony so that all may be in the tonic key. Scarlatti nowhere else wrote in this form so clearly. Did he merely chance upon it? The wide crossing of the hands marks an early stage in his composing, yet the form is clearly triplex and astonishingly orthodox.
The most striking aspect of this little piece is the obvious, clear divisions of the sections. The first section is marked off from the second by the double bar for the repeat. There is a pause before the third section, or restatement, begins. But clearest of all is the arrangement of musical material. By this we know positively that the triplex form has become firmly fixed, that the old binary form has expanded to a ternary form, submitting to the same influences that had made the perfect aria and the perfect fugue.
It will be remembered that in the old binary form, composers made little effort to differentiate the material proper to the dominant part of the first section from that which had already been given out in the tonic. Such pieces dealt not in clear themes but in one or two running figures which lent themselves to more or less contrapuntal treatment. The opening figure was usually the most definite. The second section began with this figure in the dominant key; but in the final restoration of the tonic key the figure played no part. In other words, the chief figure of the whole piece almost never appeared in the second section in the tonic. It was not until the embryonic middle section, which, as we have seen, consisted of but one or two modulations, had developed to something of the proportions of the contrasting section of the aria, that composers realized that in order fully to re-establish the tonic key at the end, the chief figure should again make its appearance and usher in the final section, which thus became a restatement of the first.
Scarlatti’s treatment of the binary form was always brilliant and clear He was, as we know, fertile in sparkling figures. His sonatas are always made up of two or more of these, which, unlike the figures in the suites of most of his contemporaries, are distinct from each other. But in most of his pieces, long as the middle section might be, the tonic key was never re-introduced by the return of the opening figure of the first section. It is precisely this that he has done in the sonata in C major now in question. The first section presents two distinct figures or subjects, one in the tonic, the other in the dominant. The first, or opening figure, is in the nature of a trumpet call. The second is conspicuous by the wide crossing of the hands. The second section begins immediately after the double bar in the proper manner of the binary form; that is, with a modification of the first subject in the key of the dominant. Then follow many interesting modulations, leading to the unmistakable half-close, prefatory to the third section. And the third section begins at once with the first figure in the tonic key, and proceeds to the second, now likewise in the tonic. This, more than all else, marks the passing of the binary form into the triplex. The Padre Martini adagio presents the same feature, but less clearly because the second figure is hardly articulate.
These two little pieces, which are but two out of many now known and others yet to be discovered, seem to reveal to us a stage at which the aria form and the binary form merged into the form of movement generally known as the sonata form, which we have chosen arbitrarily to call the triplex. The three distinct sections, the last repeating the first, seem modelled on the aria. The highly organized harmonic life seems inherited from the binary form of the dance movements of the suite. Finally the arrangement and development of two distinct figures or subjects on this plan are proper to the new form alone.
Upon this hybrid foundation Pergolesi built up his ‘singing allegro.’ Where Scarlatti had employed figures, Pergolesi employed melodies. Therefore we find a melody in the tonic key, a melody in the dominant, these two constituting with the measures which accomplish the modulation between them, the first section, which is
repeated. Then follows a section of free modulation, in which fragments of either melody, but chiefly of the first, play their parts; and lastly the return of both melodies in the tonic key.
It is the Italian love of melody which gives it its final stamp. To this love Scarlatti hardly felt free to abandon himself in his harpsichord music; partly, probably, because of the ancient polyphonic tradition which still demanded of organ and of harpsichord music the constant movement we find in the preludes of Bach’s English suites; also because as a virtuoso he was interested in making his instrument speak brilliantly, and because he realized that the harpsichord was really unfitted to melody.
But the singing allegro of Pergolesi won the world at a stroke, and almost at once we find it applied to the harpsichord by the young amateur, Domenico Alberti. One should give the devil his due. Poor Alberti, hardly more than a youth, for having supposedly seduced the world of composers to bite the juicy apple of what is called the Alberti bass, has been excoriated by all soberminded critics and treated with unveiled contempt. Let us look into his life and works for a moment.
Little enough is known of him, and that little smacks of faëry. He was probably born in Venice in 1717. He died about 1740, probably in Rome. Only twenty-three, masters, but he tied his bass to the tail of music and there it swings to this day. But more of the bass anon. He was an amateur, according to Laborde,[23] a pupil of Biffi and Lotti. He was a beautiful singer. At least we read that he went to Madrid in the train of the Venetian ambassador, and astonished Farinelli, one of the greatest and most idolized singers of the day, who was then living in high favor at the Spanish court. Later he came back to Rome, where he recommended himself to the patronage of a certain Marquis Molinari. About 1737 he set two of Metastasio’s libretti, Endymion and Galatea, to music, which was, according to Laborde, highly esteemed. All his teachers recalled him with great enthusiasm. He could so play on the harpsichord, so improvise, that he charmed large assemblies during whole nights. And sometimes
he would go abroad at night through the streets of Rome with his lute, singing, followed by a crowd of delighted amateurs. He died young and much regretted. Laborde closes his article by saying that Alberti wrote thirty-six sonatas which are said to be superb, and of a new kind (d’un genre neuf). Laborde’s article, though pleasing, is a bit highly colored. From it we have a right only to infer that Alberti was lovable, a good singer and a good player. That he speaks of the sonatas as being of a new sort, however, should not be forgotten.
Dr. Burney mentions Alberti twice in his ‘Present State of Music in Germany,’ both times in connection with his stay in Vienna in the autumn of 1772, more than thirty years after Alberti’s death. Once it is to give his name among the seven men who were at that time considered to be the greatest composers for harpsichord and for organ. Other names were Handel, Scarlatti, and Bach (either Emanuel or Christian: the father was not then generally appreciated). High company for poor Alberti, from which he since has fallen most low. But that he should have been reckoned with such men thirty years after his death, speaks irrefutably for the influence his works must have had, for a time, at any rate, upon the development of pianoforte music.
Reference was made in the second chapter to the other mention of Alberti in Dr. Burney’s book. It occurred in connection with Dr. L’Augier’s reminiscences of D. Scarlatti. Scarlatti had told the eminent physician that he had always borne in mind, while writing his pieces for the harpsichord, the special qualities of that instrument, whereas other ‘modern’ composers, like Alberti, were now writing in a style that would be more fitting to other instruments. In the case of Alberti, Scarlatti must have had the voice in mind, for Alberti’s harpsichord sonatas are hardly more than strings of melodies.
Considering then that Alberti was held in such high esteem as late as 1772, and that D. Scarlatti complained of him that he wrote in a manner less fitting to the harpsichord than to some other instrument, it seems likely that to him in part is due the appearance of the singing allegro in harpsichord music, which was to be characteristic
of Christian Bach, of Mozart, of Haydn, of Clementi and in some part of Beethoven.
The sonatas themselves bear this out. The eight which we have been able to study, are light stuff, indisputably. But the triplex form is clear in most of the movements. He uses two separate distinct melodies as themes. The first appears at once in the tonic, the second later in the dominant. The first section, which is nothing more than the exposition of these two themes, is repeated. After the double bar follows a section of varying length, usually dominated by reminiscences of the first theme, the modulations of which are free but by no means unusual. Then the third section repeats both melodies in the tonic key. The first movement of a sonata in G major is conspicuous for the length of its second section, in which there is not only a good bit of interesting modulation, but also actually new material.
The bass which bears his name is no more than the familiar breaking of a chord in the following manner:
It is hardly more true that he invented it than that such a formula is intrinsically as contemptible as many musicians, mostly theoreticians, would make it out to be. If a musician is, in a given composition, concerned with melody, he may be justified in following the procedure which makes that melody reign undisputed over his music. This inevitably will reduce the accompaniment to the simplest function possible; namely, outlining or supplying the harmony upon which all melodies, since the Middle Ages at least, have been felt to rest.
In the first sophisticated experiments with melody—the opera early in the seventeenth century—the accompaniment to a song was
frequently no more than a few occasional chords upon the harpsichord. These chords were not even written out for the accompanist, but were indicated to him by figures placed over the notes of a single bass part. As composers acquired skill in combining several instruments in accompaniments to their operas, the figured bass lost its importance; but it was still employed as a sort of harmonic groundwork almost to the end of the eighteenth century. It was a prop to the harmonies woven more or less contrapuntally by other instruments, which, unlike the harpsichord, had power to sustain tone.
