Take a scene from Bessie's Head by First Physical Theatre Company. In it, five performers danced the same regimented movements to a fast, relentlessly repetitive rhythm, evoking a mental asylum.
One critic did not like this section and aligned it with restrictive forms in ballet and jazz ("strictures" was the word used). Reading between the line, the critic was basically saying that unison is bad. Ballet and jazz can have unison, physical theatre is supposed to rebel and must not have unison.
Are there other possible readings of the scene? Is it possible, that the five performers represent one person with a tremendously split psyche? Perhaps the unison of movement produces a visual effect of endless redundancy, as if a tv is flashing the same image at you over and over again? Wouldn't that drive you mad, like it drove the characters in the play mad? Perhaps the ruthless precision of timing and moves represents the regimenting, restrictive society in which the character(s) find themselves? Isn't that the theme of the play, to escape that restrictive madness and sadness that both Bessie Head and her mother experienced?
I hope this analysis provides an example of a possible way to read physical theatre.
Physical theatre is not an aesthetics. It is not in the visual line or harmony, it is more how the aesthetics is used. A physical theatre performance using pointe does not make it less physical theatre; a ballet using weight and contact improv techniques does not make it physical theatre. Anyway, why should it be? Ballet is a good dance form. Physical theatre does not always have to define itself as anti-ballet.
Physical theatre is not always raw, unpolished, cutting-edge. It is more like seeing in a slightly different perspective, opening the possibilities a little. It is experimental in the sense that it begins with questions, explorations, not a set of givens like some other performing arts. But it does not have to look different every time. It does not have to look "work in progress", or tentative, marginal, weird, ugly, obscure.
Physical theatre is physical. But so are all dance forms. Physical theatre emphasizes the experience of the body, as it exists, moves, feels. It is not the look, it is the breathing, living bodies that matter. One cannot copy contact improv catches in a, say, jazz dance, and call it physical theatre. Physical theatre is a whole way of doing things.
Physical Theatre: performance constituted of, centrally, the sentient body, and its awareness of itself, other bodies, and the space in which it exists.
Physical theatre is diverse and changing. You can't judge it according to a dogma, you'll miss the point.
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