A Theatre of Nostalgia / Re-finding New Points of Departure

Back in the birth of the human, in the reign of the ‘princeps’ (in latin ‘princeps’ means the original, the foremost/ τήν αρχήν), at the time of Homo Erectus, there was the crawling body of the human - the beginning of a timelessly evolutionary being. Soon after the initial stage, the crawling body would continue to develop and grow in various and unexpected ways that would entitle it to human. Later in history, when a human would be separated from other human beings, would start to make decisions that differentiated it from others and within just a few thousand years their mutual origin would not be efficient to bridge the disparities that had in the meantime been accumulated. Given this rapid evolutionary pattern and the alienation it has given rise to, the present day finds the average Western being in the conflicted condition of, on the one hand, originating from this common beginning, while, on the other, misconceiving its significance, or even its existence from a hegemonic perspective. This misrecognition is nothing but an unconscious act of expropriation. A condition that deprives the human species of what is most peculiar to it. A moment of violence. A colonizing practice that stems from the colony itself. In Jacques Derrida's words, it is an autoimmune syndrome that attacks its own organism. For Stefanopoulou though, the only pathway towards the realization/discovery of our true selves and authentic sense of being, the only way to escape self-colonization and expropriation, is to retrieve our sources and origins. Referencing Antonin Artaud, the author emphasizes that this part of the human existence that strives to regain its origin and substance will never be able to rely exclusively on the Western World to manage so. What is required though, is a recollection of the time of the crawling body, a point of contact with the non-Western worlds, and an acknowledgement of the traits and qualities that have always been there to connect us to one another and to ourselves.

 

Attempting for a unifying understanding of the past and the future, the origin and the destination, Stefanopoulou engages the concept of “nostalgia” and unfolds its delicate nuances:

 

"The pain of loss, the pain of return, the lack and desire of a place to which we always return mentally, the remembrance of a lost homeland, a lost person, a lost beginning from which we were once separated in the past. But also, the sorrowful sense of nostalgia: a bittersweet recollection of something we experienced once and know will never be repeated again. A grey-eyed daydreaming about a desire we never satisfied, while we know that the opportunities to fulfill it are becoming fewer and fewer. [...]

Memory is not only about the past, but it is the one that, above all, guarantees the future. And then it is identified with nature. When people bury their dead in the earth, entrusting to nature the body of their loved ones, it is not because they want to deliver that body to where it came from. They do not, in this way, return to the dead of the past, plunging death into oblivion, but they commit themselves, through the surrender of the burial in the earth, to preserve from oblivion the memory of the lost person and to preserve it in the future.

Nostalgia, therefore, is not only the longing for the transubstantiation of origin, but also the irresistible desire for the afterlife, for the extension of existence to future generations. The nostalgia of origins appears here much less as the eternal return to roots, and more as a technique of searching for points of departure; it has less the character of the fleeting and indefinite passion of the 'other' and 'then', and more of a search aimed concretely beyond the limits and boundaries of one's cultural experience, but also at the point of their meeting, at some anticipated fruitful future. It could, indeed, in its most optimistic form, be the art that makes the present come alive." (my translation from Greek, pages 365, 380-381)

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Stefanopoulou therefore names the retrieval of the non-Western traditions and civilizations as a form of atonement or as a tender, soothing gesture to the expatriated and displaced being, as a reconciliation with the carriers of the unifying thought and organization of the world. And for her, as for Barba and Grotowski, theatre is by nature a practice of this retrieval. As it detaches you - even instantly - from the historical time, it bares you from facades and prepositions, luring you to worlds different and familiar, far and proximal, to experience the untouched by the human hand theatrical temporality is an experience defined and determined by another force, non-human. Utopian theatre you may call it, but nostalgia in this sense of theatre is "the true experience of this return to the source, a return realized by transforming pain into knowledge, loss into a new value, denial into a new faith, inner division into self-fulfillment" - a return followed anew by a departure (367). 

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Stefanopoulou, Maria. The Theatre of Sources and the Nostalgia of Origin: Jerzy Grotowski - Eugenio Barba: on the path of utopia (trans. from Greek: Το Θέατρο Των Πηγών Και Η Νοσταλγία Της Καταγωγής: Γέρζυ Γκροτόφσκι - Eουτζένιο Mπάρμπα: στo δρόμο της ουτοπίας), Hestia Publishing House, 2011. 

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