Psychogeographical Voyage through the Cities and their Theatremakers

Theatre

A Psychogeographical Voyage Through the Cities and their Theatremakers

“The city is a discourse, and this discourse is actually a language: the city speaks to its inhabitants, we speak to our city, the city where we are, simply by inhabiting it, by traversing it, by looking at it.” Roland Barthes, Semiology and Urban Planning

If we consider the artistic act alone, to what extent does it affect the city and how much does the city affect the artistic act? “Hugo has written a very fine chapter of an extremely subtle intelligence, ‘This will kill that’; ‘this’, which is to say the book, ‘that’, which is to say the monument.”

Psychogeography is essential to understanding the spiritual relationship between the city and its inhabitants. The most famous definition of psychogeography is: “the point at which psychology and geography collide, a means of exploring the behavioural impact on the urban space.” The behavioural impact on the urban space, however, may also be approached in a spiritual way. Indeed, psychogeography is related to the research of the genius loci, which is the spiritual sense of the place as perceived by one subject. In an artistic context, the research of the genius loci leads to the elimination of any boundary between art and urban space, so that every artistic act and any other person’s behaviour leave a trace in the spiritual stratifications of the city. Psychogeography is popular for its tracing maps which follow the spirit of the place as perceived by one subject, who is always a wanderer, rather than representing how the city physically appears. The first psychogeographical map is considered to be contained in Daniel Defoe’s novel A Journal of the Plague Year (1772) which depicts London through a fictitious eyewitness of the plague that infected the city in 1665, imaging how the urban signs became unrecognisable to its very inhabitants, providing a map of this disorientation. According to psychogeography, each urban element has in itself this stratification of spiritual and virtual meanings that any subject leaves by living in the city. Both the psychogeographical and linguistic study accept that there is a mutual influence between the people and the city. Let us now take into account The Roman amphitheatre built around the 1st or 2nd Century BC in Lucca, a city located in Tuscany. Originally the amphitheatre was built outside the city as it was common during the Roman era and its capacity was about ten thousand people. The first account of change of the function of the building happened with the barbaric invasions when the theatre was employed as a storehouse and its decorations were removed. Under a semiological point of view we can see how the advent of a new cultural code, the primal function of the theatre (capacity of people) was substituted with another primal function (capacity of goods) and the elimination of the decorations that connoted the entertaining, cultural and social aspect of the space was deformed through their removal, adapting to the new function and code. The function of the amphitheatre changed again during the Middle Ages, when it was employed for the citizen assembly as witnessed by a parchment dated back to 980 BC. In modern times, buildings started to rise around the central empty space, originating the sui generis town centre that maintains the elliptical shape of the original theatre whose walls are still visible as they merged with more recent buildings.

If a theatrical space can become the city, can the city materially become the theatrical space beyond the metaphor of Theatrum Mundi? How can theatre-makers detach themselves from the cultural code they belong to in order to look at the urban space, beyond its denoted signifiers, and conceive new ones for theatrical purposes? The artist, in particular the theatre-maker, can detach themselves from their cultural code and look at a given architectural element beyond denoted and connoted signifieds, and therefore contribute to the evolution of the code.

Philippe Petit is a French high tightrope walker whose performances we shall explore in order to understand how the argument from the previous paragraph can be translated in practice, explaining, at the same time, what makes Petit an artist and not only an athlete. We shall start by considering the list and locations of Petit’s early performances: Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris (1971), Sydney Harbour Bridge (1973), World Trade Center in New York (1974). Analysing these buildings with semiological lenses, we notice how they all have different denoted and connoted functions; however, they must also have a common structure that goes beyond their current functions that made Petit elect them as suitable buildings for his performances. This structure consists of the void between two towers. Hence, he necessarily detached himself from the code, looking beyond the different functions in the height of these buildings, such as proximity to god and economic power. So why is Philippe Petit a theatrical figure? Because he was able to look at an object for what it is, overturning its meaning and leading viewers to an inevitable physical change of their senses which are fitered by the code. Without official permission, Petit walked over buildings that connote high social symbolical powers, and through the act of stepping over them, he automatically subverted those values which are instead meant to be above the single citizen. Accordingly, his was not a physical exercise, but his mere body, without use of words managed to convey and generate a physical and biopolitical difference, leaving a psychogeographical trace in thegenius loci of the cities where he performed. Another analogous example is the performance Lectura Dantis that took place in Bologna on 31st July 1981 in the Asinelli Tower, one of the main symbols of Bologna. It was edified during the 12th century and it is located on the crossroad of the two thoroughfares of the city. The tower is 97 metres tall and it is famous due to its slight leaning to one side. Carmelo Bene, one of the most important theatre directors and actors of the last century, read passages from the Divine Comedy, employing a 40-thousand-watt amplification system as he did so. From the tower Bene could not be seen by the 100 thousand people who were estimated to walk around the streets of the city centre, but they could hear his amplified voice. Once again, a building was devoid of its signifieds (touristic site, historical building) to fulfil a new function, that of the actorial machine, which does not belong to the code. The actorial machine is one of the fundamental concepts of the theatre of Bene, it is the tool that allows theatre to grind language, representation, object, subject and history. In this case, the actor does not make a scene of himself, but he is hidden in his private space and elevates the rendezvous point with the audience through semiological subversion of the urban space. Literature is not the only art capable of affecting the urban space, i.e. the act of killing that the book perpetuates against the monument. Instead, I argue that theatre can achieve the same result by exploring the way the theatre maker can subvert the signs of the city’s language because of their faculty to look beyond the code. This subversion leads to the transformation of the code and of people’s senses as a consequence, establishing new functions for the object. The artistic piece can leave a trace in the very substance of the building, influencing not only present viewers but it has the potentiality to affect the spirit of any human being who experiences it. The city is thus a poem that goes beyond human comprehension, but of which people can feel the effects.

WORDS BY LUCAMATTEO ROSSI