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Theatricality of life as a creative act in 19th and 20th century works

Lifes a Play
Julia Holewiska
The theatricality of life a concept created in
the early 20th century by Nikolai Evreinov, a
Russian theoretician and practitioner of theatre has become one of the basic tools used
by artists, from Witold Gombrowicz to Katarzyna Kozyra

intention, serving a different role? According to


Jan Boski, Gombrowiczs I set out in the preface so boldly, insistently demands reading. It
is a confession, a cipher, a mystification. This
mystification that Bonski describes, a countenance being simultaneously granted and taken
away, the unceasing theatricality of life, the re-production he notes when writing about Paul
de Mans autobiography, refer to the realm of
literature, and yet they can easily be applied in
interpreting many phenomena within contemporary art.
It seems that it is just this theatricality of life
a concept created by Nikolai Evreinov (18791953) in the early 20th century that is now
one of the main tools used by artists. Evreinov
was a Russian theatre director, musician, painter, playwright, and first and foremost a theoretician of art and theatre. As a dramatist he
rose to fame by putting on the largest (in terms
of the numbers of actors and musicians) spectacle in the history of theatre, The Storming of
the Winter Palace (1920).

Je est un autre (I is someone else), wrote


the teenage Arthur Rimbaud to his tutor Georges
Izambard in May 1878. The statement provided
foundation for an entire 20th century school of
thought which questioned the consistency of an
individual, identity, self. As George Steiner wrote
of the French poet in Real Presences: The ego
is no longer itself. More precisely, it is no longer
itself to itself, it is no longer available to integration. Rimbaud deconstructs the first person
singular of all verbs; he subverts the classical
domesticity of the I. (...) Rimbauds decomposition introduces into the broken vessel of the
ego not only the other, the counter-persona of
Gnostic and Manichean dualism, but a limitless
plurality. () Where I is not I but a Magellanic
cloud of momentary energies always in process
of fission, there can be no authorship in any single, stable sense. (...) It becomes a logical and
psychological fiction. It is a trick performed with
the aid of mirrors, but of mirrors, as it were, in
motion and reflecting the mask of the other.
Steiner notes the issue of the creator, his multiple dimensions and characters. The relation
I author, I artist, separated so decisively by Rimbaud at the end of the19th century, appears in 20th century culture almost as
a rhetorical figure; its apogee can be found in
Witold Gombrowiczs Diaries.

Theatrical instinct

Evreinov, working on the sociology of theatre


or perhaps noticing symptoms of theatricality in human behavior devised the concept of
constant acting, stating that each of us is continually playing a role imposed by a societal director. He was one of the first to formulate the
concept of social roles, to which appropriate
costumes, sets, specific behaviors, tones of voice and so on are assigned each time. Like Shakespeare writing in As You Like It All the
worlds a stage / And all the men and women
merely players he perceived life as a neverending spectacle, a process that is constantly
subjected to theatricality.
Evreinov presented a concept arguing for
the existence of a primal, autonomous theatrical instinct, allowing each and every one of us
to turn life into a spectacle. This primal theatrical instinct was, for him, inextricably bound with
the theatricality of life, displaying it on various

Evreinovs concept

There, Gombrowiczs famous I appearing


on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday
fills everything; there is nothing outside it. And
yet is this brazen, challenging, overbearing I a
real image of the author, or rather his creation,
a stage mask worn each time with a different

Stefan Okoowicz/Archiwum Artystyczne Teatru Narodowego

Witold Gombrowicz was a master of creation and autocreation, a constant theatricality of life. The photo
shows a scene from Bdzenie [The Wandering] directed by Jerzy Jarocki, a play composed of fragments of Gombrowiczs dramas, prose, and Diaries
levels: anthropological, historical, ontological,
biological, and performative.
Evreinov applied the concept of theatricality
of life not just to life and theatre, but also to
art, resulting in Original o portretistakh (Original about Portrait Painters), a collection of texts devoted to artists (including Flicien Rops
and Aubrey Beardsley) and essays. Writing mainly about symbolists, Evreinov notes that each
work is an expression of its authors personality,
although since this personality has many levels,
the artists identity is never fully consistent. He
reaches the conclusion that each artist/author
introduces a theatricality in each work, and
expresses what he is not allowed to reveal in
real life. He approaches the essence of his own
existence by using a succession of masks.

ry artists such as Cindy Sherman, Sophie Calle,


Katarzyna Kozyra and Marina Abramovi, have
rejected the encroaching aestheticism with a hitherto unknown decisiveness. They replaced it
with experimentation, brutality, interdisciplinarity, conceptuality, and theatricality and autotheatricality, making themselves the main object
and material of their work. Vladimir Maksimov,
author of the introduction to Evreinovs book,
notes that for Evreinov, Not only theatre but
the whole of art become a method of expressing the authors identity. A cracked personality,
unable to express itself fully in everyday life, becomes embodied in art. This is arts task. The
timeliness of Evreinovs concept is also expressed in his purely anthropological observations.
He notes that everything is a play, and that this
is indeed source of every metamorphosis an
element indispensable in the existence of theatre, as well as contemporary art. He carries
on, Evreinov compares the act of creating artworks to physiological processes, therefore not
only is the creative act a play, but also life with
its sexuality and origins of images (characters,
styles?) carries on like a theatre script and is

Autotheatricality in the 20th


and 21st centuries

The Russian thinkers ponderings seem particularly apt in the context of artistic changes
occurring in the 20th and 21st centuries. Artists
working in the 20th century, including futurists,
Dadaists or surrealists, as well as contempora-

a triumph of theatricality. For Evreinov, then,


art is not a reflection of life, but it is always a
creation as life itself is an unceasing play. Art
is a reflection of a reflection, a sum of the artists experiences, images, emotions. An image
looks entirely at a scene, for whom in turn it is
a scene these words by Michel Foucault, if
they had been written earlier, could have served
as a motto for Evreinovs contemplations on the
essence of art understood as theatricality of
life.

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