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ANAMNESIS OF ART: VOICE / MEMORY / IDENTITY
some sparks of meaning pass between them. The same is the case with our first
production: the line of text of the apocryphal gospels is juxtaposed with the
line of song. A strong non-musical counterpoint can occur — an opposition,
a mutual betrayal, but a faithfulness too.
From the start, our explorations were directed toward Eastern Christian¬
ity: the Armenian and Georgian Churches are among the oldest in the world.
Many remarkable music forms survive there, but when we first headed to the
Caucasus Mountains we had no idea how rich the Svan tradition was. The
pre-Christian funeral songs of the Svans have served the community for over
two thousand years as a means of seeing off the soul of a dead person; a form
of spiritual practice. In Svaneti we came into contact with a living community
that maintained a unique song practice. Only there did I realize that when I
had gone to the Museum fur Völkerkunde in Berlin and to Vienna’s Albertina
to prepare for our expedition, Ihad come across recordings of zar. I was even
able to copy them partly and learn them, but nothing happened. I had the
documents, but without personal experience I wasnt even able to recognize
the uniqueness of this phenomenon which soon, and for many years too, would
define the area I wanted to explore.
What are the elements of this definition? It is difficult to describe in words;
I can only index my intuitions. The full definition is the sung zar. The column
of sound. The column of breaths. The column of past and future generations.
The shared sounds, extraordinarily adjacent in vibration, which concentrically
bond the community at many levels, like the circles of expanding human pres¬
ence — from the singers to the mountain summits. The tradition is so ancient
it is practiced in the language of glossolalia, the “gift of tongues” — it involves
no articulation of meaning.
Zar presents us with a challenge: to bring out the energy of sound. With
adjacent sounds and its vibratory qualities, the music has a very strong effect
on our perception, even our sight. In theater, I believe, music can change the
color of a candle’s flame and the sharpness of an actor’s shadow — zar makes
this experience possible. If all this is taken as a definition of theater, this is the
definition I subscribe to.
PNEUMATICS OF AN ACTOR
Voice constitutes our presence. An attempt to understand its essence brings
us closer to knowing the essence of humanity and the phenomenon of being a
person. In our work, the Pneumatics of an Actor is a way of understanding life¬
in-ourselves which is a breath. There are thousands of techniques to discover
the pneumatic center in our bodies, but the Voice as medium for the Word will
always remain the most sensitive instrument of this discovery. The Pneumatics
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