Paris/Artaud/Bali: Antonin Artaud Vede il Teatro Balinese all'Esposizione

Coloniale di Parigi del 1931 (review)

Sergio Costola

Asian Theatre Journal, Volume 20, Number 2, Fall 2003, pp. 253-255
(Article)

Published by University of Hawai'i Press

DOI: 10.1353/atj.2003.0019

For additional information about this article

http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/atj/summary/v020/20.2costola.html

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Book Reviews 253

own, and I am slightly disturbed every time Jiaoniang is “Bella” and Feihong
is “Petal.” But this is a long-standing convention in Birch’s translations, and I
quite see that there is reason for remaining consistent. This translation is
indeed a worthy addition to the illustrious library of translations by Cyril Birch.
It will, of course, be of great use in drama and literature classes. But it will also
provide great pleasure for any interested reader.

Elizabeth Wichmann-Walczak
University of Hawai‘i at Manoa

PARIS/ARTAUD/ BALI: ANTONIN ARTAUD VEDE IL TEATRO

BALINESE ALL’ESPOSIZIONE COLONIALE DI PARIGI DEL 1931.
By Nicola Savarese. L’Aquila: Textus, 1997. 299 pp. Paperback $15

Central to Italian scholar Nicola Savarese’s work is the concept of “oriental

theatres,” a complex of suggestions he explains as resulting from an impre-
cise knowledge of Asian forms of theatre that has worked as a sort of myth for
European theatrical culture since the end of the eighteenth century. “Orien-
tal theatre,” therefore, is a historical rather than a geographical concept that
enables the scholar to investigate the numerous “encounters” that important
European artists have had with Asian theatrical forms.
Paris/Artaud/Bali is the story of one of these encounters: an original
and passionate reconstruction of Antonin Artaud’s vision of a Balinese troupe
at the 1931 Paris Colonial Exposition. As Savarese clarifies, this book is what
remains—“the phosphorous ashes of the ink”—of what used to be a four-
hour-long conferenza-spettacolo (conference-performance) presented for the
first time at the 1981 Festival of Santarcangelo, Italy, and produced more than
a hundred times in Italy and abroad during the following years. By means of
slides, videos, music, registered voices, inscriptions, and so on, Savarese
attempted to give the spectator the archival material the same way he discov-
ered it, in “all the variety and apparent whimsicality of its coincidences” (p.
16). What Savarese offers to the reader is thus the “script” of this conference-
performance, “a montage of various materials divided in five parts and an epi-
logue” (p. 17).
The first section of the book, “Prelude by Moonlight,” attempts to
recreate the atmosphere of the Parisian theatrical life of the period with an
emphasis on artists who were fighting for the modernization of theatre: Dul-
lin, Copeau, Pitoëff, Antoine, and Artaud. The second section of the book,
“Paris by Night,” offers a portrayal of the artistic life in Paris in 1931 through
the writings, among others, of Jacques Prévert, Louis Aragon, Anaı̈s Nin,
Simone de Beauvoir, Henry Miller, and Jean Cocteau. The third section,
“Tabu,” deals with the emergence of the image of Bali in Western culture by
way of the writings of Walter Spies—the German artist who invented kecak, a
form of dance telling the Indian story of Ramayana, with no musical accom-
paniment and whose rhythm is provided by a chanting chorus—and those of
Friedrich Murnau, Spies’ friend, who went to Tahiti with his yacht named Bali
254 Book Reviews

to shoot Tabu. The fourth section “Fire! Fire!” describes the fire that took
place in the Dutch East Indian Pavilion and destroyed its Balinese theatre. But
more important, it presents articles describing the success of the 1931 Paris
Colonial Exposition despite the attacks on colonialism conducted by the Sur-
realists and the French Communist Party. The fifth section, “Colonial Gran
Gala,” is about the fateful night when Artaud saw the Balinese theatre.
In the “Epilogue,” Savarese abandons the kaleidoscopic nature of his
presentation of documents and draws some conclusions. The review of the
Balinese dances that Artaud wrote for the Nouvelle Revue Française (1931)
appeared in revised form seven years later in The Theater and Its Double (1938)
and, chronologically, was the earliest article of the book. Thus according to
Savarese, since Artaud’s visionary concept of theatre was propelled by his view
of the Balinese troupe, “it is not sufficient only to study Artaud’s verbal laby-
rinth or only to examine Balinese theatre. It is instead necessary to investigate
the entire cultural process that . . . made his visionary leap possible” (p. 180).
Savarese’s investigation begins with the “dubious footlights” of the Paris Colo-
nial Exposition: dubious because the declared intent of the exposition—to
celebrate both the colonial economies and the charm and cultural attractions
of distant lands—was not fully realized given the impossibility of eclipsing the
turmoil under way in the colonial world. Although the 1931 Colonial Exposi-
tion was a huge success with the urban masses, even newspapers that sup-
ported colonialism were critical of the performances offered, which were
faulted for being “another presentation of exotic companies already seen too
many times and too domesticated to awaken new interest” (p. 197). The only
exception seems to have been the Balinese dances, seen by their critics as
much more than a case of mere exoticism.
Savarese’s investigation shifts, in the second part of the “Epilogue,”
from the exposition in general to the Balinese troupe as seen by Artaud in
particular. As the scholar claims, in fact, it is quite surprising that no one writ-
ing about this encounter had ever investigated which Balinese company
Artaud saw, which performances were presented, and what was the opinion
of other critics. In addition to articles of the time, Savarese makes a remark-
able revelation of information from the performance program that he fortu-
itously discovered in a Paris bookstore after it had been lost for decades. On
this basis, Savarese argues that the Balinese company—made up of fifty-one
people (fourteen women and thirty-one men) and led by Prince Tjokorda
Gedé Raka Soekawati, a prominent figure in Balinese culture—was “repre-
sentative and of good artistic quality” (p. 201). The program also reveals that
along with ancient traditional genres—the legong, the calonarang—there were
completely contemporary pieces, such as the Gong dance, the kebyar, and the
janger, whose choreographies were created in the 1920s. After careful investi-
gation Savarese concludes that it was the “purely recreational” janger rather
than one of the “most sacred and mysterious rituals” that impressed Artaud
(p. 208). And by comparing Artaud’s vision to those of other critics, Savarese
can also claim that the difference did not “reside in the exactness of descrip-
tion of the performance but in the fact that Artaud perceived its essence and
Book Reviews 255

was able to transform it directly into a total challenge to Occidental theatre

and culture: Balinese dances were an example of . . . the fact that rigor and
cruelty do not kill life but, on the contrary, intensify it because rather than
imitate it, they re-create it for the stage” (p. 210).
Savarese concludes his “Epilogue” by claiming that Artaud’s vision dis-
torted the meaning of a tradition of which he was essentially ignorant: “He
used the Balinese performance because its extraneousness to his own culture
made it possible for him to delineate a difference” and “to create a short-
circuit” (p. 213). In fact, the technical and artistic aspects of the Balinese per-
formers were perceived not just by Artaud but also by other professional
spectators. The Balinese world, which seemed to Artaud to be remote and
archaic, was not isolated from the cultural flow of the period: as Savarese
claims, it was a world that “did not, and does not, accept either a ‘reservation’
mentality or the limits which colonization attempted to impose upon it.” It
was a culture expressive of a resistance “similar to Artaud’s resistance in Paris
to the spread of conformist theatre” (p. 222). In 1931, the Balinese in Bali
and Artaud in Paris were both “weaving the threads of change for a theatre
of the future, not the impossible tapestry of a lost paradise” (p. 222).
This book, besides having the merit of shedding light on a theatrical
event often mentioned but never fully analyzed, offers the reader a useful
appendix (with reviews, essays, and recollections regarding the Balinese per-
formances in 1931 Paris), a rich bibliography ordered by argument, an album
of photographs related to the 1931 Paris Colonial Exposition, and a repro-
duction of the eight-page program for the music and dances of the Balinese
troupe.
It is regrettable that this book, and Savarese’s work in general, is
accessible only to those familiar with the Italian language. I wish to remind
readers, however, that they now have the opportunity to satisfy part of their
interest, since a revised and translated version of the “Epilogue” was pub-
lished in the Fall 2001 issue of The Drama Review.

Sergio Costola
Loyola Marymount University,
Los Angeles