On the Hidden Potential of Public Solitude, Part I: Ivan Vyskočil’s Theatre as Encounter

Abstract

ABSTRACT In this essay, we introduce Ivan Vyskočil (1929–2023), a Czech theatre maker, author, psychologist, and pedagogue – a case study par excellence for current studies on hybridization and transdisciplinarity as fosterers of creativity. Since Stanislavsky’s public solitude has played a key role for Vyskočil’s concept of authorial acting and its pedagogy, we track down ways Vyskočil elaborated on it as well as other resources that influenced his work (e. g. Brecht’s V-effekt, or the Czech avant-garde movement). Our study comes in a two-part series. In this Essay I, we identify major shifts through which Vyskočil transposed Stanislavsky’s small circle of attention – originally a tool for actors to escape the audience’s intimidating gaze – into the constitutive condition for theatre as encounter, in which the audience co-creates the play while it is emerging. Despite their origins on the big stage of the Moscow Art Theatre and its studios, it is argued here that Stanislavsky’s public solitude and creative state reveal their full potential through small stage forms of authorial creativity – as Vyskočil has shown via “Non-Theatre” productions and in journal articles. Essay II of this series then presents Vyskočil’s concept of dialogical and embodied education, especially when they cultivate the actor’s inner positions of spectatorship and authorship. This approach characterizes studies at the Department of Authorial Creativity and Pedagogy, which Vyskočil founded at the Academy of Performing Arts in Prague (DAMU) in 1994.