The Return of Dionysus

An Aesthetics of Destruction
Theodoros Terzopoulos is one of those important European directors who have de-
stabilized (Fischer-Lichte, 2014, 129.) the aesthetic and cultural normalities of
contemporary Theatre. The most distinctive element of Terzopoulos’ work is his highly
antirealist aesthetics of geometrical perfection and abstractive simplicity. Real furniture
and real props have no place in Attis Theatre. Terzopoulos’ only accessories have
historically been knives, cleavers, stones, high-heels, pom-poms, coffins, buckets,
swords and the like; the outfits of Eros and Thanatos, so to say. The obsession of ATTIS
Theatre with geometric forms (floor patterns, postures, gestures) is fundamentally
related to a basic aesthetic law of abstraction and the deduction of things to their
skeleton until they are stripped from their flesh and surface (Müller, 1982, p. 43),
thereby constructing “in bold outline” new totalities in themselves (Schlemmer, 1961,
p. 17). Not surprisingly, theatre for Terzopoulos is the antechamber of a death, where
the realistically behaving body dies and the diagrammatically reconstructed actors
perform their schedules.

Accordingly, the scenic idiom of ATTIS Theatre is a self-contained formalist code that
consists of performative pictographs evolving from the practical research on the
philosophical nuclei of Tragedy (e.g. the “tragic mask” is a facial Gestus that conveys
the tremor of the existential fall of the subject, expressed either with the tetanic smile
and the widely open eyes, or with the widening of the eyes and the gaping mouth, all
of which are symptoms of the tormented being). But what privileges the priority of the
formalization of the dramatic text, instead of its explanatory representation onstage, is
a fact that most attackers of formalism overlook: “[…] form, while it is in some sense
‘suffered’ by content, is itself the sedimentation of content [Inhalt]” (Adorno, 1984, p.
209).

The recently published Method of Attis Theatre titled The Return of Dionysus
(Terzopoulos, 2015) is a systematic approach to acting (available in many European
languages). The basic functional principle of the Method is the tripartite law of
deconstruction, analysis and mainly reconstruction (anasynthesis) of both the actor’s
body and the dramaturgical material in use, both of which must be de-familiarized.
Schematically:
More significantly, Terzopoulos’ Dionysian Method presupposes both the creative
derailment of the actor’s body from its everyday structures and the controlled
reconstruction of the body into a new performing self. But the actor must also process
and de-familiarize (Terzopoulos, 2015, pp. 66) the text that is going to use in
performance, in order to show a reactive alternative. Without any doubt, this is a process
of productive ‘negation’ (ibid., p. 47), which seeks to ideologize and recuperate the text
according to a directorial concept.

In the case of Terzopoulos, the restoration of the daily body into a new performing body
is mainly achieved through unconscious lapsus/aberrations of the body towards
seemingly bizarre and unfamiliar actions that are performed “despite of the actor”
(Terzopoulos, 2015, p. 77). Improvisation plays an important technical role in this
process, given that through improvisation “the actor questions the ‘normal’ language
[…], he is looking for lateral behaviours, creates parapraxes and unfamiliar levels […].
The actor becomes a doing person, the carrier and component of the primal impulses of
the body, always ready […] to undo himself opening new fields of research” (ibid., pp.
46-7).

Accordingly, after a series of exercises and improvisations, which disorientate the

‘normal’ body, the actor is able to reach a condition of controlled ecstasy. The trance-
state enforces the physical ability of Fehlleistungen (Freud, 2005 [1914], pp. 349-378)
or parapraxes (erroneously carried-out actions), that is, involuntary lapsus of the body
or any type of parapractic behaviour that unleashes the repressed memory within the
actor’s body, as well as the body’s unconscious intentions. Yet, “the greater the
resistance” of the body, “the more extensively will acting out replace remembering”
(Freud, 1950, p. 154). Consequently, the regressive body which reenacts repressed
‘archaic’ actions, is a new anti-body unable to reproduce the behaviour of its daily self,
creating thereby non-canonical gestural emblems. What is readily noticeable after thirty
years of practice, according to the director (after personal communication), is that
actors’ bodies tend to be led to clear-cut angular schemata which help each body
member to create a stylized gesture (to be codified as a Gestus with a standard meaning
in every performance).

At the outset, Terzopoulos accepts the hypothesis that the actor’s body exists in a
condition of resistance unable to recognize and re-live repressed ‘archaic’ memories (a
condition properly termed by Grotowski, 1969, p. 17 as “passive readiness”). Like
Tadeusz Kantor (1993, p. 159), he envisions memory as “[film] NEGATIVES that are
still frozen” in the mind ready to be redeveloped. In that sense, Terzopoulos introduces
a Platonist phenomenology in performance. Performative memory, like the Platonic
idea, is already existent and repressed within the body, yet completely restorable by
means of physical action, that is, a somatic reconstruction of its remembrances into a
new performing self after the deconstruction (sparagmos) of the old, memory-resistant
self.

The depository out of which the surrogates of the normal movements are drugged up,
is a “depth” where the forces “which did not accept to be civilized”, (70) are repressed.
That is, a depository of savage archetypes and impulses. And this second utterance of
the body can indeed “impel the mind by example to the source of its conflicts” (Artaud,
1958 [1938], p. 30).

In any case, Terzopoulos’ Method is neither culture-specific nor culture-restrictive. It

is an anthropological method which is founded on the basic laws of both the omission
and the dilation of the daily body in order for a fictive body to be created (Barba, 1991,
pp. 13-20). Not surprisingly, Dionysus the God of Destruction and Rebirth was always
a great inspiration for the director in as much as the Dionysian according to Friedrich
Nietzsche is a productive Kunsttriebe of change, that is, an artistic impulse and a form-
creating force (Moore, 2004, pp. 85-96).

Finally, Terzopoulos is a post-traditionalist European director with a very positivist

meaning of the term, exactly as Patrice Pavis (2013, p. 161) embraces the
productiveness of questioning canons and traditions: to “deconstruct tradition is not to
destroy it: it is to extract its principles and confront them with today’s principles”. And
Terzopoulos’ theatre offers the possibility of new structures, not only in the sense of
a renewed aesthetics , but mainly in the sense of new patterns of thought and
−to use Raymond Williams’ (1966, p. 18) infamous term− new “structures of
feeling”.

George Sampatakakis
University of Patras
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