Mnemodrama in Action: An Introduction to the Theatre of Alessandro Fersen by John C. Green (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Mnemodrama in Action: An Introduction to the Theatre of Alessandro Fersen by John C. Green Scott Venters MNEMODRAMA IN ACTION: AN INTRODUCTION TO THE THEATRE OF ALESSANDRO FERSEN by John C. Green Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2019, pp. 215. Mnemodrama in Action draws Polish-Italian theatrical anthropologist Alessandro Fersen (1911–2001) out from the shadow of his younger contemporary Grotowski. Fersen is best known for his unique stage adaptations beginning in the 1940s at Teatro Stabile in Genoa and the foundation of his Roman acting studio where, over the course of several decades, he transformed Stanislavskian protocols into an idiosyncratic experimental form called Mnemodrama. In brief, Mnemodrama is “the actualization in dramatic-oneiric form, of an event or trauma that emerges from the unconscious of the performer and which is expressed scenically” (6). Green’s book makes a convincing argument for the vital place of Fersen’s laboratory practice, which anticipated most of the notoriously radical experiments of the 1960s. To accomplish this, Green historically incarnates several lines of thought. First, he posits Fersen as a continuation and development of early avant-gardist anti-literary critique and aesthetic politicization. Second, Green situates Fersen’s Mnemodramatic discoveries in the long-running occidental conversation concerning the application of anthropological research to performance practices. Third, he translates and introduces Fersen’s crucial tracts rife with empirical discoveries, multicultural musings on origins, and polemical jabs. The result of Green’s efforts is the revivification of one who speaks uncynically of experience in the first-person plural, who ponders sincerely, not skeptically, shared provenance and intercultural transmission, and who believes in the incantatory, ecstatic power of dramatic praxis. For those looking for the familiar, unobstructed path followed in the argumentative monograph, Green’s Mnemodrama in Action will prove frustrating. That frustration is undoubtedly intentional, caused by a disjunct between disciplinary preconceptions and a text that alluringly mimics the exploratory mechanics of Fersen’s studio work. Green structures his book into two main sections: 1. an artistic biography and studio development of Mnemodrama; 2. selected writings of Fersen on Mnemodrama and the cultural responsibilities of performance. Part one adumbrates a definitional apparatus for Mnemodrama and then moves through a chronology of its consummate realization. The ensuing chronology of this actualization is a turbid one, functioning as a dialectical process with Mnemodrama’s ontogenetic embodiment oscillating between intercultural frictions and studio refinements. According to Green (chapter 2), Fersen’s inchoate formula for Mnemodrama occurred in the crucible of Nietzschean thought, the anthropology of Lucien Levy-Bruhl, and Luigi Pirandello’s emphasis on social role playing. Influenced by this menagerie of thinkers, Fersen, in his dissertation The Universe as a Game, argued for a return to “creative abandonment” via mythopoesis and spontaneous play. Subsequent work with Charles Dullin in Paris bolstered Fersen’s anti-statist “nostalgia for the ‘primitive’” increasingly shaped into collective ritual forms and given polemical thrust in three manifestos published in the wake of WWII (14). Like Artaud before him, Fersen attacked the literary proclivities and industrial inclinations of modern theatre. His critique eventually materialized in a surrealist cabaret created in collaboration with Emanuelle Luzzati, Nottambuli, an event that simultaneously brought Fersen into conflict with authorities and served as a model for the establishment of his laboratory, The Fersen Studio of Scenic Arts, in Rome in 1957. In chapter 3, Green cites three phases of Fersen’s laboratory experiments following a general arc moving away from individuated role playing and spoken dialogue associated with realistic methods of actor training toward gestural group dramas performed with abstract props granting passage to the manumitted unconscious. From 1957 to 1961 Fersen led [End Page 109] investigations from the starting point of Stanislavski’s psychophysical training with stress placed on scenic improvisations, but that starting point soon proved insufficient in accessing unconscious states. Exposure to Carnivale and Condomble cults in Bahia actuated Fersen not to abandon occidental mimetic practices, but rather, in the vein of Nietzsche, to place them in a binaristic agon with forms of ritual while hoping to discover those contact points in the struggle “when Ritual becomes Theatre” (41). This, Fersen, was coming to believe could be done only by releasing the...