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Issue 7
Winter 2007
On Space

‘Timespace’
The Interplay of Material and Imaginative Spaces in a
Physical Theatre Production of Heiner Müller’s Quartett
Bronwyn Tweddle
Victoria University of Wellington
‘ZEITRAUM: Salon vor der Französischen Revolution/Bunker nach dem dritten Weltkrieg’ (Müller, 1983: 71)

‘TIMESPACE: Drawing Room before the French Revolution. Air Raid Shelter after World War III’ (Müller, 1984a: 106)

These stage directions, which introduce the printed text of East German writer Heiner Müller’s play Quartett, imply
multiple performance ‘spaces’ for this dramatic work, an interplay of both material and imaginative ‘spaces’ of
performance. The interaction between two time periods, and the physical presentation in space that each implies,
varies depending upon the stage one finds oneself at of the production process. In this essay, my discussion of these
stages occurs in three parts. Firstly, some of the imaginative or interpretative ‘spaces’ within the playtext itself are
noted. In discussing my method of creating a physical ‘score’ to embody Müller’s text, the physical and mental ‘spaces’
of the rehearsal process are then analysed. Thirdly, the physical and interpretive ‘spaces’ of the performance itself and
the interaction between stage and auditorium is examined.

The Imaginary Spaces in Müller’s Playtext

In order to specify temporal/material spaces for performance, Heiner Müller opens up an imaginary space (which he
calls a ‘timespace’) for the engagement with history. History is a vital concern throughout Müller’s oeuvre; it does not
function merely as a temporal backdrop for action depicted on stage. The ‘historical time’ Müller favours is the period
immediately prior to the French Revolution – a time of historical significance used by Müller in several texts, for
example, the play Der Auftrag (The Commission orThe Task). This historical ‘timespace’, although removed from the
playwright’s own moment in time, is nevertheless experienced as present for the author in important ways. This is
certainly the case in Quartett, written in 1980-81 when the German Democratic Republic still existed. One might say
that Müller uses a Brechtian technique of Historisierung (‘historicisation’), in which the distancing effect of using an
analogous incident from the past (or a ‘foreign’ location) allows us to examine the issues of the present. Brecht is not
alone in using this technique of course – an example widely known in the English-speaking world is Arthur Miller’s The
Crucible, which uses the Salem witch-hunts to examine McCarthyism.

Unlike Der Auftrag, which is set after the Revolution, as its ideals are crumbling because of the corrupting influence of
power, Quartett is set before it. The psychological manipulation of the two aristocrats, representative of the decadence
and corruption of the ancien régime, are used to examine the flaws of the East German socialist state, a state in which
psychological torture was frequently used for political ends. Müller’s utilisation of simultaneous time periods makes
Historisierung more explicit than in Bertolt Brecht’s plays. Whereas Brecht infers the present from his representation of
the past, Müller collapses time. We are not definitively seeing the probable past, or the possible future. In the present
moment of the performance, or of reading the text, both exist simultaneously. The challenge for theatre practitioners in
creating the physical space for a performance of Quartett is how to bleed the time periods together to allow the
audience to see both, and their present selves, simultaneously.

The slippage between the time periods, which is highlighted by the role-play of his protagonists, is the real ‘space’ of
this performance of ‘time’. One dialectical process for the actor in defining a character’s choices is the ‘not…but’, which
shows not what theyare or have done, but what they did not choose: what they could have been or could have done.
Rather than this Brechtian ‘not…but’, Müller asks the theatrical interpreters of the text for a ‘both…and’ or a ‘not not’, to
use a term from theatre theorist and director Richard Schechner. In examining the slippage that occurs between the
actor and the role, Schechner points out that the actor can never be purely the character s/he is playing, nor purely him-
or herself. There is always a trace of the actor within the character and of the character within the actor:

My restoration of behaviour theory…. proposes that performances occur in the space between a ‘not’ and a ‘not
not’, in the denial of a negative. In other words the actor playing Hamlet is not Hamlet, but neither is he not not
Hamlet. Conversely, this actor, while playing, is not himself; but neither is he not not himself. His performance
takes place in the ambiguous space between his not being himself and his not being another. Or to put it
another way, when Lawrence Olivier plays Hamlet, he takes on the words and gestures, the relationships and
patterns of Hamlet (as interpreted by Olivier). During this time Olivier is not Olivier because he is Hamlet, and
Hamlet is not Hamlet, because he is Olivier. Neither identity is wholly erased or effaced by the other. What we
see and hear, what we can watch move and enact, is a being existing in the space between a denial and the
denial of that denial. (Schechner: 134)

This is further heightened in Quartett, as the protagonists, Merteuil and Valmont, slip in and out of role-playing, playing
themselves in the act of deceiving another, or represent the victims of their seductions.

Müller himself is famous for a similar slippage between personas (it is not by chance that the ‘mask’ is a major
metaphor in his work) in his writings and interviews. His refusal to be pinned down to a meaning is one of the reasons
he is considered by many to be the consummate post-modern dramatist – a charge he himself denied, stating: ‘The
only Postmodernist I know of was August Stramm, a modernist who worked in a post office’ (Müller, 1984b: 137). As
Jonathon Kalb explains:

Müller was not simply an abdicator of authority; he was a strong, clownish intellectual who enjoyed being seen
as living proof of the Death of the Author, and who read postmodern theory himself in order to protect himself
from it. One could say that he tried to act as his own deconstructionist critic by serving up puzzles of flagrantly
contradictory meanings to begin with, so that others wouldn’t have to bother ‘embarrassing’ him by cleverly
searching them out. (Kalb 2001: 206)
Kalb’s monograph, The Theater of Heiner Müller, engages directly with Müller’s ‘masks’ as a playwright, by examining
the ‘traces’ of his literary predecessors. In chapters entitled ‘Müller as Brecht’, ‘Müller as Kleist’, ‘Müller as
Shakespeare’, ‘Müller as Beckett’ and so on, Kalb demonstrates how Müller’s work takes on characteristics of the
playwrights whose skins he borrows for a time.

In the case of Quartett, Müller’s borrowed ‘masks’ are the Marquis de Sade, Choderlos de Laclos, and Jean Genet.
Laclos is the most obvious, as Müller takes as his protagonists the two main characters from Choderlos de Laclos’ 1782
novel Les Liaisons Dangereuses: the Marchioness de Merteuil and the Vicomte de Valmont. He also borrows the basic
action – the plot between the two to seduce a pious wife, Madame de Tourvel; and to deflower Merteuil’s niece, the
virginal Cécile de Volanges, in revenge against her future husband for rejecting Merteuil. The ‘mask’ of De Sade is
present in the pornographic content of the play – the sexual debaucheries the two aristocrats re-enact to fill the hours of
extreme boredom; in memory of their earlier pursuit of pleasure unrestrained by morality or law – and in the twisting of
religious doctrine to evil ends (see Kalb 2001: 179). The layers of role-play leading to a murder/suicide echoes Genet’s
1947 play The Maids. Thus traces of these three author’s voices are audible in the interpretive ‘space’ of Müller’s play.

Corporeal and Mental Spaces of the Rehearsal Process

In order to allow these ‘voices’ to be ‘heard’ by an audience, the play must be staged in a way which allows an
openness of interpretation. Any approach which reduces the characters of Müller’s play to psychological motivations is
too simplistic. In a ‘post-modern’ world, familiar with Erving Goffman’s concept of the ‘role’ in everyday life, and with an
understanding of self as ‘fragmented’, acting approaches which aim for a unity of psychological process and physical
gesture, such as Stanislavsky’s, are rendered obsolete. We may desire clarity and unity, but ultimately we fail: we may
have contradictory feelings about any event, and we are used to operating on several levels at once. Acting
methodologies which operate under hierarchies of objectives are too simple for this conception of the world – this
certainty died with the master narratives. The most we can achieve is to set the ‘rules of the game’, but there is no
guarantee that they won’t be broken. Müller’s dramaturgy reflects this. To perform his plays, evenQuartett, which is far
more character-driven and linear than much of his work, actors must engage with the slippages, must create layers of
‘masks’ as part of the ‘game’; and in our process, layers of interior ‘spaces’ to counterpoint the physical images.

The process I used to develop the mise en scene with the actors intentionally disrupts the search for unity. Rather it
requires the actors to progress through different mental ‘spaces’ in the development of their role(-play). We lay down a
series of mental and physical ‘tracks’ of ever-increasing complexity, which initially operate independently but eventually
coalesce, like the individual ‘tracks’ of a sound recording merge to form a coherent composition. This process ensures
that any apparent unity of mind and body, of image and text, is the result of a hard-fought battle of oppositions, an
integration of the ‘Not…but’ or ‘both…and’, which still allows an openness of play in performance.

From the beginning, any safety the actor feels in reliance on the logic of the text is destroyed. Initially the text is a
merely a structural coat-hanger to drape a ‘physical score’ over, a support for the geometry of the actor’s movement in
the performance space. This ‘score’ is intentionally unrelated to the meaning of the play in order to break the actor of
cliché and to keep the text ‘open’ to interpretation. When physical gesture is chosen on the basis of logical analysis, the
options are limited. By removing the option of logic, the actors cannot take refuge in habitual responses or emotional
tricks. By randomly creating a physical score, unexpected juxtapositions of physical and verbal imagery open up
resonances in the text. Random physical actions begin to make metaphorical sense when ‘read’ against the words of
the play; opening up interpretive possibilities for the audience that would not have emerged if we’d taken textual
analysis as a starting point.

With texts as dense as Müller’s, it is important to gain distance from the text in order to make a beginning, or it will
drown you. The sheer visual impact on the page ofQuartett’s monologue-dominated format is enough to paralyse an
actor. Commencing a rehearsal process by analysing what the text ‘means’ or what the characters ‘want’ – as even
Stanislavsky discovered in his ‘Tablework’ period – can create a barrier to getting the piece on its feet, as the
collaborators are confronted with the impossibility of translating the ideas that have been discussed intellectually into
physical reality on the stage. For this reason, I never do a first reading of a play with actors sitting down, as this
frequently causes them to focus on how to say the text. They spout pre-prepared intonations that become cemented.
Instead, I give them physical provocations. ForQuartett, which consists of huge blocks of text by one actor at a time, I
gave the actors physical instructions to follow – such as one actor must seek physical contact while the other avoids it –
which were designed to destroy the speaker’s focus on the words, and to force them to react instinctively and
physically. In doing so we broke the pre-rehearsed vocal patterns, but also generated material to use in the ‘physical
score’ for the show, but we also in effect started playing with the slippage between character and actor that Schechner
speaks of – the character’s text filling the aural space, while the actor’s body reacts instinctively to provocations from
the other actor. This is a first step towards creating the slippage between ‘roles’ or ‘masks’ in Müller’s stage world.

Before discussing the details of the process itself, it is necessary to clarify two concepts already alluded to: the concept
of ‘tracks’ of performance and notion of a ‘physical score’.

A conventional approach to acting, such as the Stanislavskyan techniques, has the physical gesture and psychological
intention working in tandem. A more contemporary technique is deliberately to fragment the aspects of performance to
allow a more complex ‘reading’ experience for the audience. A recent trend amongst theatre practitioners is to create
separate visual (physical) and auditory (textual) ‘tracks’ of performance. The surprising juxtaposition of seemingly
contradictory elements necessitates a more active engagement with the interpretation of the performance. Quebecois
director Robert Lepage, in recording Japanese influence on his work, explains the use of ‘tracks’ of performance: ‘[The
Japanese] have no problem performing the role of a samurai to Brahms or mixing very disparate techniques in the
same show’ (Charest: 45-6) in a ‘harmonious counterpoint’ of sound and image.

The American director Robert Wilson was one of the early proponents of this concept, utilising it in his early production
of Heiner Müller’s Hamletmachine (NYU, 1984). As Laurence explains: ‘He (Wilson) describes the playwright’s texts as
‘very hot emotionally’ and says that he prefers to present them in a cool, objective manner, with… distance and
formality… Wilson believes that this seemingly contradictory mode of presentation enhances rather than diminishes
their impact: ‘When you’ve got a hot text and you want it to be really hot, you have to be very cold. If you perform it in a
hot way, what you’re going to get is… nothing’’(Shyer 1989: 131). If Müller’s verbally violent texts were performed in a
‘hot’, angst-ridden way, they would be too over-the-top, and risk the audience’s switching off. Juxtaposition with
Wilson’s calm, repetitive stage picture serves as a counterpoint which makes the text stand out in relief.
ForHamletmachine Wilson created a choreography over which the text was layered as both a separate auditory ‘track’ –
a voiceover – and a visual textual ‘track’ – a rapidly scrolling screen of the full playtext – and objected if the moves
related ‘too much’ to the text. Wilson justifies this approach by saying: Müller’s ‘texts have so many images in the words
that one needs a certain amount of space in order to see the pictures’ (Shyer 1989: 130).

Wilson is utilising the concept of ‘tracks’ from a director’s perspective – and his ‘tracks’ of performance are clearly
visible. He separates the auditory and physical tracks so the audience can see the individual ‘tracks’ more clearly. What
I am more interested in however, is the actor’s ‘tracks’ – and these are not only more numerous, but also invisible.
While a physical ‘track’ – the physical ‘score’, to be discussed below – can be seen by the audience, the mental ‘tracks’
– the layers of process in an actor’s mind – cannot. It is the layering of these tracks – physical, subtextual, mnemonic,
emotional – which build a performance. You will have experienced the operation of ‘tracks’ yourself. It’s like walking
down the street wearing a personal stereo. You have a visual ‘track’ of what you see occurring around you – and it is
separate from the auditory ‘track’ which is the music coming through your headphones. At the same time you are
thinking about all the things you need to get done – your mental ‘track’, like an actor’s subtextual ‘intention’ for a scene.
You also have a ‘physical’ track – you need to be aware of spatial dynamics in the street to avoid bumping into other
people or objects. These ‘tracks’ may be contradictory, and in scoring a performance I intentionally make them so, but
when the actor is able to hold several ‘tracks’ simultaneously, their performance is incredibly alive. I would go so far as
to say that the more tracks that are operating, and the more contradictions between them that the actor has to
overcome in their body and mind, the more interesting the performance. As American director Anne Bogart explains:
‘The calibre of the obstacle determines the quality of the expression’ (Bogart 2001: 141).

Bogart presents her audiences with similar contrapuntal reading experiences to Wilson, and she utilises ‘tracks’ from an
actor’s perspective. Bogart begins by setting the physical ‘track’. Her work, utilising her ‘Viewpoints’ method, begins with
the body in space, not the intellect, and her ‘Sourcework’ and ‘Composition’ exercises use associations and instincts
rather than structured reasoning to develop material. As Ellen Lauren, a Bogart collaborator explains: ‘In the best of
rehearsals, the body’s priority over the text allows a truer emotional response to surface. One is simply too busy to ‘act’.
When the body informs the psychology, the language is startlingly alive. The actor is available to a much greater range
of musicality’ (Lauren 1995: 64). Bogart uses the actor’s ‘body knowledge’ (instincts, physical memories, gestural
responses) to compose her work. She sets the physical form but allows the actors to have free reign in the interior
‘track/s’. The Viewpoints, as distilled principles of performance, are not merely compositional exercises, rather, as
points of focus that operate simultaneously in a performance, they can each constitute a ‘track’ of mental focus. An
actor can consciously select one ‘track’ to dominate when they wish to concentrate on a particular aspect of
performance, but all layers are operating as background music to their ‘score’.
Perhaps one of the reasons for a dissatisfaction with Stanislavskyan methods is that because mind and body ‘tracks’
are aiming for unity, a performance can become automatic and stale, when the actor has internalised their performance
so they no longer have to focus on it to remember the next step. When this happens we say an actor ‘phoned in their
performance’. Complex ‘tracks’ of focus can prevent this. Josefina Baez, a New-York-based performer from the
Dominican Republic, uses Kathakali finger exercises as a technique for keeping ‘present’ (in the moment) in
performance. They enforce a focus that she doesn’t need any more for her text, emotions and basic choreography. The
principle I draw from this is that to keep a performance fresh, as soon as an actor masters all their current ‘tracks’, it’s
time to add another one. Theatre methodologies like these, which aim to capture the energy and ‘liveness’ of a
performance, to keep the performer ‘in the moment’, share concerns with phenomenology. These methods are a very
real example of the interaction between consciousness and reality: a conscious provocation of an encounter between
the actor’s perception and environment. A point of focus is used to create a palpable physical energy that can be
perceived by the audience, but which doesn’t emanate from the intellect.

The technique I used to direct Quartett is a process of laying down progressive layers of ‘tracks’ like a sound engineer
in a recording studio. With each layer the performance becomes richer, in both the possibilities for the performer’s focus
– giving them a freedom of selection in performance – and in interpretive possibilities for the audience.

To begin with, I have two ‘macro-tracks’ – the text of Müller’s play and the ‘physical score’ we create to accompany it.
As a principle, I deliberately create as large an opposition between the ‘meaning’ of the textual ‘track’ and the physical
‘track’ (movement) as possible. The actors create ‘micro-tracks’ to build up their performance in layers. They must
merge these tracks to the extent that they become unconscious, so that they can focus on the next layer, and therefore
some purely ‘mnemonic’ tracks only serve a temporary function. Any ‘unity’ of internal performance logic for the actors
comes from an integration of seemingly disparate elements, a moulding of ‘tracks’ that vary in importance during the
composition. Like an orchestral score, a physical ‘score’ implies a set of instructions to follow: rhythm, timing, quality of
expression, interaction between individuals or groups may be defined, but open to interpretation in each performance.
Both the ‘macro-track’ of the playtext and the ‘macro-track’ of the physical ‘score’ are modified as ‘tracks’ are added. In
Quartett, the decision as to when Merteuil is role-playing Valmont and when she is speaking as herself has implications
for both the vocal emphasis of the delivery of the text and for the quality of the physical gestures accompanying it.

When I use the term ‘score’ I am using it both for the method and the results of my process. The initial ‘score’ is the
instructions I give to generate material. I don’t control the material, I simply set up a series of provocations and see
what comes out. We begin by creating the basic physical shape – an empty chronology of movements that fit
temporally with the sentences of the play, the first stage of the ‘physical score’ – the undifferentiated ‘macro-track’. For
the director this process is a leap into the unknown because when I begin I have no idea how the physicality will look at
the end. But it is a necessary leap. Müller himself said that ‘The leap, not the step, is what makes the experience
possible’ (Bogart 2001: 113). This dictim applies to the director as well, because I can’t ask the actors to trust the
process I have been describing unless I trust it myself. We don’t begin from a sense of who the ‘character’ is, and so
many actors trying this process for the first time fear that their role will have no coherence. Yet the factor that gives the
role coherence is the actors themselves – their own bodies. Every performer has unique physical capabilities – moves
that naturally feel more fluid, physical barriers they can or cannot push. Actors unknowingly create patterns of
movement – some of which we must consciously break so they don’t become repetitive. The process enables a director
to really get to know an actor’s brains and ‘body-thinking’. The final product, the ‘fixed’ choreography of moves for the
performance, which results from the process, is also a ‘score’. It is detailed and defined, but is only a blueprint for
performance, the actors still have room to play within it. By choosing to focus on a particular ‘micro-track’, the
performance is modified.

My personal explorations with physical scoring were inspired by a visit of the Argentinian-born Cristina Castrillo and her
Swiss theatre company Teatro delle Radici to New Zealand in 2001 as a guest of Magdalena Aotearoa, the New
Zealand branch of the international Magdalena network of women in professional theatre. I began applying physical
scoring to playtexts in 2002 with my production of Wolfgang Borchert’s The Man Outside (Draussen vor der Tür). My
ideas on scoring have been influenced by short trips to Odin Teatret in Holstebro, Denmark, training in Biomechanics
with Gennadi Bogdanov at the Berlin Mime Centre and Ernst Busch Hochschule für Schauspielkunst (Berlin), and
research into the working processes of Anne Bogart and Robert Lepage. Unlike many practitioners who use scoring
techniques to devise new work, I have focused my experiments on creating new physical scores to present classic
playtexts – Friedrich Dürrenmatt’s The Visit (Besuch der alten Dame), Shakespeare’sTitus Andronicus and The
Comedy of Errors and Frank Wedekind’s Lulu in addition to the Borchert. The techniques developed during these
productions have informed my approach to the following methodology:

Generating the Physical Score

The first stage in creating the physical score is generating reserves of physical material to draw on. We are operating
on a principle of randomness – by creating physical moves without relating to the text at all, we open the way to
surprise associations that illuminate the work at a deeper, more metaphoric level. Randomness allows images to be
created which resonate with the text in a way we could never have discovered if we’d started from a logical, rational
place. The images seem to ‘fit’ the text somehow. The justification of why this is – the rules of the ‘game’ in the fictional
world – occurs in retrospect. This random approach relies on Kuleshov’s theory of montage. His principle states that
film scenes shot in completely different locations are ‘read’ as being in the same place by virtue of the scenes occurring
in close proximity to each other in the final edit. This is transferable to theatre – when we place two things on stage
simultaneously, the audience looks for coherence, for the logical connection between them. The human impulse to
search for patterns operates to make sense of the seemingly disparate. Both actor and audience use the text to find a
‘reason’ for the physical images created separately from it.

Broken down step-by-step the process functions as follows:

The actors create a long ‘master’ list of movements or physical poses to imitate, which are randomly allocated to lines
of text – thus they must come up with as many moves as they have lines in their text. At this stage the text provides
merely a function of form – we work to the punctuation and supply one image/move per phrase of the text. This ‘master
list’ is created a number of ways:

a) Guided physical provocations: If these are associated with character, then only peripherally. For example, actors are
asked to explore animal physicalities that might be applicable to their character – but given an extended period of time,
so they get beyond the clichés (out of boredom they must think beyond the obvious). Or they are asked to choose a
daily activity, such as making a sandwich, and to define every detail of this action. Then they play with scale, tempo, or
add emotions or visualise physical circumstances to vary the quality of movement. If both actors are present (Quartett is
a two-hander), instructions on how to behave in relation to what the other does are added, i.e. one must always be on a
lower level than the other; between the two actors only two feet are allowed to touch the ground at one time.

b) Using images: the actors scan printed material for images of interesting physicalities, which they would then embody.
The sports pages of newspapers and art books are rich sources of physical material. Brian Hotter, who played Valmont,
found a weighty tome on the history of sculpture to be inspirational. Good sculpture naturally incorporates Meyerholdian
concept of Rakurs – the viewpoint you present to the audience; the most interesting viewpoint being that which shows
as many planes of the body as possible. Ciara Mulholland, who played Merteuil, found a Taschen monograph of
Victorian pornography. Interestingly, despite the explicit nature of the source material, once you remove the fellow
players from the images, the physical poses themselves are rather innocuous. She also drew on the photography of
Wolfgang Tillmans and documentations of Butoh and Pina Bausch’s Tanztheater. Sometimes the use of an image is
literal – e.g. Michaelangelo’s The Creation of Adam for the line ‘I see you wavering’ (Müller 1984: 114) – but frequently
we may only use part of a body posture, or turn it upside down, or do the action without walls to lean on, props or
whatever other physical barriers are in the image. If the image has multiple protagonists, we may use several different
people’s poses as moves for successive lines. Similarly the use can be more associative – an advertising slogan may
suggest a physical image, or the line of a drawing may be translated into a line made with the body. Text can be used
the same way: actors may randomly open a dictionary or thesaurus and physically enact whatever word their eye falls
on.

c) Physical ‘logic’ – sometimes one has to rely on the honesty of the body to determine the next move. When the actor
assumes a particular pose, an instinctive reaction (whether from them or the director watching) is that the next move
must be X. There might be no rational reason for this action explicable in words; the action just feels physically right.
Therefore we follow instinct. If pose A is scored for a particular line and the next pose randomly allocated, Pose B, is
radically different, a line or two may be used for a transition, and again a body ‘logic’ must be used – what is the
smoothest transition from A to B? We trust the knowledge of the body.

With a text like Müller’s, where there are huge amounts of lines to set moves to, the most interesting work often comes
when the actors have exhausted their reserves of movements; when they reach the edges of their patience, and are
beyond self-censorship. In their desperation to finish the scoring, they often come up with the most interesting physical
material. When asked to come up with yet another move, they often ‘blurt’ an action in expression of their frustration,
which has a spontaneity and honesty lacking from the more calculated moves. The director has to capture and define
these ‘blurts’. We work chronologically through scoring the play, so by the time this frustration peaks, it is often towards
the end of the text. Dramaturgically, as is the case in Quartett, this is usually when the tensions in the text are building,
so the intensity of frustration, which increases the intensity of the physical response unconsciously keys in to the
inherent tension in the text.
Up to this point, the process I have elucidated implies that all the moves in the physical score are unrelated to the text.
There are some exceptions, where the score is text-inspired, though not in a literal, psychological way. For example,
when I used this technique to direct The Visit, Will Connor, the actor playing Alfred Ill, was looking for physical material
for the scene at the railway station. The text, in the translation by Patrick Bowles, which we used for the production, was
as follows:

POLICEMAN: Where are you going?

ILL: I don’t know. First to Kalberstadt, then a bit further to…
SCHOOLMASTER: Ah! Then a bit further?
ILL: To Australia preferably. I’ll get the money somehow or other…
(Dürrenmatt 1962: 58)

When Will was stuck for a move, I suggested he try to physically represent a map of Australia. So he stood on one leg
with one arm mapping the curve of the Northern Territory and the other as the Cape York Peninsula, and a toe pointing
out Tasmania. Thus the physical move was abstract – and few in the audience would see its geographical origin – but
did emerge from the text in an associative way.

Similarly in Quartett, when we came to the seduction of the virgin, we were faced with the ‘Müllerism’ of capitalised
sentences in the text. As I’ve never discovered an all-inclusive explanation for these, we simply made up our own. We
decided that each phrase in capitals was an orgasm for Valmont. For the sake of variety, we concluded that each
orgasm should be in a different sexual position, and as the text speaks of a Holy Trinity of three ‘gateways’ to Paradise,
the sexual positions were somewhat predetermined. Much of the scoring for this scene was designed to either heighten
the ridiculousness of the positions or to aid the transition from one to another. Thus we made a physical expression for
a textual convention. In case you’ve ever wondering, playing a washing machine rotator gives a great metaphorical
representation of an orgasm!

Most of the scoring of this master list of moves to text was done individually, then we put the individual moves of the
actors together and adjusted them in response to each other. The exception was this seduction scene, which was
largely scored together, as the one moment where the characters physically connect.

In fitting the moves randomly to the lines of text, the rhythm of the monologues became clearer. The length of the line
determines how the move must be adjusted to ‘fit’. Either the move needs to be fitted to the length of line – a small
move perhaps extended and slowed down to fit a long line; or a complicated move sped up to fit a short line – or broken
down into parts to fit across several lines. Or the line must be said at a speed appropriate to fit the move.

Notating the Score

Once the rough physical ‘score’ has been created the actors must memorise it. In order to do this, they must notate it in
a way that they can be prompted on it. The biggest challenge for the actors in the early stages of the process is trying to
remember which actions go with which lines – as they were randomly associated there is no mental crutch so pure
physical repetition is necessary to ingrain them. Few actors learn Labanotation, and, besides, it is too complex. They
need something which immediately suggests a physical form to them, so they can be cued quickly by the Stage
Manager.

So the initial mental ‘track’ is a series of mental associations for each move. It may be a visual image of the physicality if
it was derived from an artwork or image. However, I have found that the simplest technique is to create a ‘track’
consisting of a series of names given to each physical position. This is not a subtext, but a simple mnemonic device –
an abbreviated verbal prompt that can be given by the Stage Manager the way they normally prompt lines is crucial
until the actor has internalised the moves. Thus our scripts often have numbers next to each phrase of text, correlating
to a long list of summary prompts or images down the blank page opposite.

At this point the actor’s internal monologue has two logics or two ‘tracks’: the lines of the text, and a series of verbal
prompts of moves to fit with the text.

Integration of Score and Text

After a period of repetition, a ‘body memory’ of the score is made and the verbal prompts (a purely mnemonic ‘track’)
become redundant. The moves begin to flow smoothly into each other, and to resonate. As Anne Bogart explains: ‘The
Japanese use the word kata to describe a prescribed set of movements that are repeatable. … In executing a kata it is
essential never to question its meaning but through the endless repetition the meaning starts to vibrate and acquire
substance’ (Bogart 2001: 101). The physical ‘score’ is an extended kata.

Once the ‘score’ is internalised, the actor’s mind is open to exploring layers of the text. The physical score is operating
independently with its own logic, so now the actor can begin to lay down ‘tracks’ which ‘justify’ the seemingly unrelated
moves in terms of the text. Psychological ‘tracks’ replace the simple mnemonic ‘track’. On a micro-level we created an
‘actioning’ track. Using this Mike Alfreds method, the actors assign a verb, which expresses the psychological subtext,
to each line of the text, and they use this verb to colour the way they speak that text. For example, Merteuil’s first
monologue contains this section (‘actions’ are in brackets):

Or was your virility damaged in my successors. (I poke at your sore spot)

Your breath tastes of solitude (I pity you)
Did the successor of my successors send you packing. (I gloat)
(Müller 1984: 107)

In doing this we discovered another ‘macro-track’: the ‘rules of the game’ between Merteuil and Valmont. Rule number
one is that they know how the game will end (someone will die) but they don’t know when it will come. Each character
has psychological ‘micro-tracks’ for different role-plays, i.e. when the characters are using their role-playing as a mask,
when they are speaking their opinion of the other character directly to them and when they are speaking to themselves.

Although cultural theory has demolished the modernist narratives of a unified self, a ‘fragmented self’ is little use on a
rehearsal room floor. Actors need a principle to cling to – they must discover the ‘rules’ of this fictive world. In this case
we found four layers of role-play:

1. Valmont and Merteuil’s relationship

2. Playing each other; and also enacting Cécile Volanges, Merteuil’s virginal niece, and Mme. de Tourvel, the pious
wife Valmont is challenged to seduce. This has two levels: are they playing what they think the other wants to
see; or using it to say what they want to say to them but don’t dare?
3. The entry of metatheatre – an awareness of their role as a performer before an audience. This also has two
levels: are Merteuil and Valmont performing for the audience; or are they merely ‘macro-roles’ being played by a
pair of actors, to pass the time until death, in the bunker.
4. The actors also have two levels: the ‘persona’ of the actors in the bunker, as part of the fictional world, and the
people in the real world behind the fictive ‘actors’ – Brian Hotter and Ciara Mulholland. While there were moments
when I could tell it was Brian or Ciara saying the line, because they’d fallen ‘out of character’, we haven’t
consistently explored this level. This level can bring a deeper resonance, as it did with Müller’s own 1994
production at the Berliner Ensemble with Marianne Hoppe as Merteuil. The actress has a huge persona and her
history, including a marriage to controversial theatre director Gustaf Gründgens, a leading theatre artist under the
Nazis, is known to an audience at the Berliner Ensemble, and this colours their reading of her as Merteuil. As
Müller’s dramaturg, Stephan Suschke, states: “Sie kannte die Lügen des Jahrhunderts, die grossen wie die
kleinen.” (Suschke 2003: 237 – “She knew the lies of the century, the large as well as the small”). Hoppe was 85
when the production premiered, which gave extra bite to the jibes about age that Valmont and Merteuil trade with
each other.

Discovering these psychological levels or ‘tracks’ is an ongoing process with a text as multi-faceted as Quartett.
However, this gradual discovery of the ‘rules’ of the ‘game’ assists in editing the ‘physical score’ for public presentation.
It is necessary to pare it back to allow the audience to absorb it. Moments of stillness are necessary to counterpoint the
movement, just as silence is necessary to recover from the torrent of language – the audience needs a visual and
mental ‘breather’. One moment clearly marked in the text as ‘falling out of role’ – Merteuil and Valmont speaking directly
to each other – gave this breather:

Valmont: I believe I could get used to being a woman, Marchioness.

Merteuil: I wish I could.
Pause.
Valmont: What now. Are we to go on playing.
Merteuil: Are we playing? Go on to what? (Müller 1984: 114 – 115)

The actors played it stock still facing the audience.

The Physical and Interpretative Spaces of the Performance

The final aspect of this discussion is the interaction between the physical ‘space’ of the performance and the
imaginative ‘space’ of the audience observing it, who decode the ‘rules’ of this world for themselves. The actors’ ‘tracks’
inform the audience’s understanding of the words but the spectators must draw the ‘tracks’ together to interpret the
contrapuntal relationship between Müller’s text and the physical ‘score’. If there is any ‘implied spectator’ for this work, it
is one who is willing to work hard to construct an interpretation. However, I hope that this understanding is not purely
intellectual, but made of associations, sensory responses and visual patterns. There is no literal ‘meaning’ of the
physical score, so the audience has freer interpretive range. My earlier productions using this physical scoring
technique were of ‘classic’ texts which had ‘heightened’, non-naturalistic tendencies. In these, the audience decoding
process was simpler, because they had the mental crutch of a linear plot and defined characters to hang their
interpretation of the movement on. Müller’s matrix of role-play levels inQuartett increases the amount of audience
decoding necessary: in addition to creating their own logic for the physical score, spectators must also determine,
moment to moment, the layer of roleplay i.e. ‘who’ is speaking, and ‘to whom’. Yet the performance can also be enjoyed
by just letting the text and the visuals wash over you – as Robert Wilson once said, you can just ‘listen to the pictures’.
Phenomenologists have critiqued semioticians’ focus on ‘meaning’ to the exclusion of the experience, of feeling. The
actors’ simultaneous ‘tracks’ allow them to access both ways of thinking, and hopefully the complexity of the
performance we have constructed also allows both responses in the audience.

Since the emergence of reader response/reception theory, it has been posited that the ‘meaning’ of any particular
theatre performance is unique to each audience member, depending on their personal associations. Theatre theorist
Marvin Carlson claims the openness of stage performance creates a ‘psychic polyphony’ where the spectator chooses
their own points of focus, thus creating ‘an unique and individual ‘synchronic’ reading as the play moved forward
diachronically’ (Carlson 1990:99). However, the audience’s meaning-making influence on the performance goes further
than this. The actor’s experience of an individual performance, and thus the shape this performance takes, is also
dependent on audience members’ responses. Which ‘micro-tracks’ the actors focus on during a given performance may
make minute changes to their performance, but one ‘micro-track’ which only emerges during a performance season is
the intuitive modification of the action in response to their reading of the audience’s responses. As Anne Bogart
explains:

Quantum physics teaches us that the act of observation alters the thing observed. To observe is to disturb. ‘To
observe’ is not a passive verb. As a director I have learnt that the quality of my observation and attention can
determine the outcome of a process. Under the right circumstances the audience’s observation and attention
can significantly affect the quality of an actor’s performance. Actors can respond to an audience’s powers of
observation. It is the contact/response cycle at the heart of live performance that makes being there so
extraordinary. … The reception is palpable. Listening to the listening, the actor makes adjustments in the speed
of an entrance, the intensity of the first line spoken or the length of a pause. An actor learns when to hold back
and when to open up based on the agility of the audience. …The audience is engaged in a collaboration of
silence which makes possible the extended intercourse of performance (Bogart 2001: 72-73)

This effectiveness of this ‘listening to the listening’ is mediated by the physical space of the performance. Especially in
Quartett, where the structure contains long periods when an actor speaks to the audience rather than connecting with
the other actor, the performers really need to feel the audience are working with them. The architecture of performance
venues impacts hugely upon this relationship. BATS theatre in Wellington, where we first staged Quartett, is an intimate
‘black box’ theatre, where the audience, in raked seating, shares the same space as the performers. The solid black
walls create a sense of enclosure and the sound travels easily in both directions. The actors can hear and see the
audience’s responses easily. In contrast, the Allen Hall theatre space, used for the Dunedin season, is a reversed
proscenium arch set-up. That is, the audience sit on what used to be the stage, again in raked seating, but they are
clearly separated from the performers, who work on the floor of the former auditorium. There is a large potential
performance space for the actors, with a high ceiling. Our attempts to enclose the space with ‘blacks’ (stage curtains)
failed to give the claustrophobic sense the play needs, as they lack the solidity that suggests a ‘bunker’ environment.
But the most dramatic impact of this space on the actors was the acoustics. Sound seemed to bounce in only one
direction: from the actors, over the heads of the audience and into the ceiling behind the proscenium arch. The
performers could hear no responses from the audience, and combined with the need to work physically harder to ‘fill’
the larger space, they felt that they were operating in the ‘void’ that is constantly being referred to in the text.
In phenomenological terms, this had the effect of giving the actors a real ‘lived experience’ analogous to the content of
the play – a failure to really connect with other human beings present – but this perception was agonising for them. In
retrospect, it is clear to me that the circumstances created by this scoring process also paralleled the content of Müller’s
play. The isolation the actor feels in the initial scoring process creates an empathy with the ‘Dialogunfähigkeit’ (inability
to engage in dialogue) of Müller’s characters. The battle to remember text and moves before they enter the body
memory mirrors the characters’ frustration at the lack of control over the fantasy they wish to enact, because their
nemesis won’t play along. Valmont and Merteuil rarely ‘connect’ with each other at a level not masked by role-play.
What was a shock to the actors in this venue was that they had overcome the earlier obstacles only to encounter a new,
overwhelming one. One astute observer commented that the audience suffered a similar experience. As the only
entrance/exit to Allen Hall is behind the performance space, spectators cannot leave without totally disrupting the
performance. Thus both – actors, who are cut off from hearing or seeing those they are playing to; and any audience
members not enjoying the performance – were trapped together in a Beckettian situation. The actors feel doomed to go
through the motions of ‘the game’ and the audience is compelled to remain until ‘the game’ ends. Perhaps the space
unintentionally contributed to a Müller-like joint experience of the tediousness of passing the time until death in a
bunker!

Ironically, of the two venues, the one least physically like a bunker, most effectively created this aspect of ‘timespace’
mentally. As discussed at the beginning, the challenge for producers of this play is to evoke the two periods
simultaneously in the minds of the audience. Our understanding of the simultaneity, in this production, is that while the
world of the characters’ ‘game’ is a luxurious palace, the physical ‘reality’ is a bunker. For the BATS season, which had
a full design, our intention was to suggest treasures looted from a destroyed palace in the bunker. The ‘treasures’ were
an antique mirror and a chandelier which only partially worked. Other objects were contemporary: simple chairs, a milk
bottle which is ‘endowed’ as being a wine glass, the period costumes were tattered and stained, and worn over
contemporary clothing. The lighting design was a ‘real-time’ sequence suggesting chinks of sunlight coming through
holes in the bunker walls. Despite these attempts to blur the time periods, we failed in this objective. Many BATS
audience members read the antiques metonymically – envisaging the whole fictional ‘world’ as a sumptuous palace,
rather than seeing the blank walls as blank walls of a bunker.

One production choice that did work, and equally well in both spaces, was the use of real red wine for the ritual
murder/suicide. The wine would pool on the floor and slowly creep across the stage throughout the final speeches.
Many audience members commented on being fascinated by its almost imperceptible progress. We chose to use real
wine to add another sensory experience to the ending of the play – rather than just seeing and hearing the poisoning,
the audience could also smell it, their encounter with the onstage world occurring within their own bodily senses.

For the actors, the direct encounter with their environment was kept ‘live’ and unpredictable in the BATS season with
Martyn Roberts’ lighting design (which unfortunately couldn’t be recreated for the tour). Except for very few hand-
operated cues, the lights were on a timer. As mentioned above, the design consisted of slowly moving, strong shafts of
light dissecting the space, as if coming through holes in the bunker walls. Small variations in the actors’ timing in any
one performance meant that it was not predictable where a shaft of light would be on any given line of text. This kept
the actors ‘present’ and playful – they had to interact with the light as with another player, choosing to move into light or
shadow in the moment. These choices dramatically affected the spectator’s ‘reading’ of the character’s intentions in that
moment, and provides another example of the physical and imaginative ‘spaces’ of the performance overlapping
unpredictably.

In this article I have attempted to elucidate the interaction of a number of physical and mental spaces in the creation
and reception of this production of Quartett. The way in which these spaces overlap differ depending on the phase of
production: (con)textual analysis, rehearsal or performance. The working process has been strongly influenced by
contemporary theatre theory and practice, which playfully explores the interaction of these spaces, but my explanation
of it also touches on the intersection of these theories with broader cultural theory. Theatre theories which aim to keep
the actor ‘present’ by creating actor’s ‘tracks’ of performance (Bogart, Butoh, Biomechanics) connect with
phenomenological concerns: of engagement in a ‘lived’ experience between the individual consciousness and reality;
and reflection on encounters with the environment. The theatre practices which consciously construct director’s ‘tracks’
of performance (Wilson, Lepage), aim to create a complex and open reading experience for the audience in line with
broader reader response/reception theories. Both these approaches access a matrix of spaces. In rehearsal and
performance the actor operates within a variety of internal (mental) and external (corporeal) spaces. The invisible
(emotional, subtextual, mnemonic) ‘tracks’ affect the visible (gestural, spatial, interactive) ‘tracks’. The audience
perceives these in their imaginative (mental) and sensual (corporeal) spaces. The overall aim of this process is to
engage both creators and receivers in an engagement with the complexity of Müller’s multi-layered text, by setting up
seemingly contradictory mental and physical actions. Müller, himself a great paradox, hints at exactly this kind of
simultaneous but diametrically opposed physical action and mental response, when he quips: ‘Even dying we can
laugh’ (Holmberg 2001: 65).

REFERENCES

Anne Bogart (2001). A Director Prepares – Seven Essays on Art and Theatre (London & New York: Routledge).

Marvin Carlson (1990). Theatre Semiotics: Signs of Life, (Bloomington: Indiana University Press).

Rémy Charest (1997). Robert Lepage Connecting Flights, transl. Wanda Romer Taylor (London: Methuen).

Mel Gordon (1987). The Stanislavsky Technique (New York: Applause Theatre Book Publishers).

Lawrence Halprin, Jim Burns, Anna Halprin, and Paul Baum (1974). Taking Part – A Workshop Approach to Collective
Creativity (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press).

Arthur Holmberg (2001). ‘Heiner Müller: The Political Beast – A Never-Before-Published Interview with the Late German
Writer,’ American Theater, December 2001: 62-65.

Jonathan Kalb (2001). The Theater of Heiner Müller (New York: Limelight Editions).

Tina Landau (1995). ‘Sourcework, The Viewpoints and Composition: What are They?’ in Michael Bigelow Dixon & Joel
A. Smith (es.) Anne Bogart Viewpoints (Lyme, NH: Smith and Kraus).

Ellen Lauren (1995). ‘Seven Points of View,’ in Michael Bigelow Dixon & Joel A. Smith (eds.) Anne Bogart Viewpoints
(Lyme, NH: Smith and Kraus).

Heiner Müller (1984b). ‘19 Answers byHeiner Müller,’ in Carl Weber (transl.),Hamletmachine and Other Texts for the
Stage (New York: Performing Arts Journal Publications).

Richard Schechner (1999). ‘Re-wrighting Shakespeare: A Conversation with Richard Schechner,’ in Milla Cozart Riggio
(ed.) Teaching Shakespeare Through Performance(New York: MLA).

Laurence Shyer (1989). Robert Wilson and His Collaborators (New York: Theatre Communications Group).

Stephan Suschke (2003). Müller macht Theater – Zehn Inszenierungen und ein Epilog(Berlin: Theater der Zeit).

Playtexts

Friedrich Dürrenmatt (1962). The Visit: A Tragi-Comedy transl. Patrick Bowles (London: Cape).

Heiner Müller (1983). ‘Quartett,’ in Herzstück (Berlin: Rotbuch Verlag).

Heiner Müller (1984). Quartet, in Carl Weber (transl.), Hamletmachine and Other Texts for the Stage (New York: Performing Arts
Journal Publications).

NOTES ON PRACTICES AND PRACTIONERS

Gennadi Bogdanov

Bogdanov is one of the few master teachers of Meyerhold’s Biomechanics in the world today. Frustrated with Stanislavsky’s
methods Vsevelod Meyerhold (1874 –1942) began creating a system he called ‘theatrical Biomechanics’, influenced by the
motion economy studies of Frederick Winslow Taylor (1856 – 1915) and ‘reflexology’: the study of principles governing human
reflexes, that is, the body’s automatic response to stimuli (the work of William James, Vladimir Bekhterev and Pavlov).
Meyerhold created a series of études to teach theatrical principles of scenic movement, such as economy, and his ‘acting cycle’
– Otkas (preparation), Posyl, (main action), Stoika (fixing of the action) – is based on Taylorist ‘work cycles’. The development of
Biomechanics was cut short when Meyerhold was executed for refusing to toe the Stalinist ‘socialist realism’ line. As
Biomechanics was banned, some of the only extant archival records of the system are the series of photos of Meyerhold’s
collaborator Nikolai Kustow, which the American director Lee Strasberg took during a 1934 trip to Moscow. However Kustow
himself was a ‘corporeal archive’ of the system. He taught it to a group of young actors, including Gennadi Bogdanov, at
Moscow’s Theatre of Satire in the 1970s. Bogdanov has been a teacher of the system since 1986.

Konstantin Stanislavsky
The Russian director Konstantin Stanislavsky (1863 – 1938) known for creating a System of approaching a role, which was later
adapted by American director Lee Strasberg et al. to form ‘The Method’. Stanislavsky articulated two key ways of working. In his
‘Tablework’ period (c. 1925 – 1928), psychological objectives for individual characters in each moment of a scene were derived
in a process of breaking scenes down into Units of Action after analysing their Through Action (over-riding idea that guides the
character through the play) and their Super-Objective (character’s overall aim in life). In working these psychological objectives,
the actor draws on his or her ‘affective memory’ (their storehouse of experiences) and finds an equivalent one to the emotion
necessary for the scene. Thus the evocation of an emotion determines physical movement. From approximately 1935,
Stanislavsky consciously took the opposite approach in his Method of Physical Actions. In this, physical gestures appropriate to
a moment in the scene were perfected and this led to an evocation of the emotion, as internal feeling and character
identification can be stimulated by pure movement, action and rhythm. With either method, Stanislavsky relied on the
interconnectedness of body and emotions to inform one another and present a unified concept. See Gordon (1987).

Robert Wilson

Texan-born Wilson (b. 1941) made his name in his early, self-created theatre works which explored alternate ways of seeing the
world. His staging of Deafman Glance(1970) reflected the ‘inner screen’, image-based viewpoint of his deaf-mute collaborator
Raymond Andrews and the key visual element of the set of Letter to Queen Victoria(1974) was the repetitive, pattern-based
experimentation with words of the autistic Christopher Knowles. His fine arts background has led Wilson to treat his stage
composition like a painting. He prefers to work on a proscenium arch stage, and movement of actors is frequently divided into
three spatial ‘tracks’: horizontal movement across the foreground, mid-ground and background, with a playful use of scale. In
recent years Wilson has applied his trademark clear washes of colour, use of silhouette and stylisation of costume to classic
texts, such as the hugely successful production of Büchner’s Leonce and Lena at the Berliner Ensemble (2003).

Published
June, 2007

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