ON CATHARSIS & A THEATRE OF GRIEF

Amended version of the presentation given in the framework of a panel discussion about the opera Innocence, in conversation with Rolien van Mechelen, Marc De Kesel, and Johan Schokker, organized by the Breukvlakken Foundation in collaboration with the Dutch National Opera, at Theater Perdu (Amsterdam) on October 15th, 2023.

I would like to thank the Breukvlakken Foundation for their invitation to speak today; creating bridges between artistic practice and the study of the human mind is something inspiring, that our opera Innocence calls for, and it is a privilege to be part of this endeavor.

We were asked to offer a presentation as a prelude to the discussion about the opera. Like Marc De Kesel before me, I would like to talk about Greek tragedy, but I will start from a different angle, and hopefully also be able to say something valuable about Innocence by way of this. As a dramaturge and director, I am interested in the discourse we can create about the depiction of violence in art and, in an environment that is saturated by acts of violence and images of violence, the need we are in to find an approach that could feel even moderately helpful. One important starting point for us, in the development process of Innocence, was a line defined early on by the composer Kaija Saariaho, the writer Sofi Oksanen who created the original script, and myself as a dramaturge: that line was that unlike what is generally done – and indeed easier to do – we were not going to show the act of extreme violence around which the story revolves, a school shooting, nor its perpetrator, but would instead focus on causes and consequences. Meaning: how violence is born and perpetuated in a social group, and the process of individual and collective healing. How do you do that in the context of performing arts, within a culture and an art form that are obsessed with spectacle, of which violence is the preferred manifestation? Violence is the typical climax around which the classical and still dominant dramaturgical forms available to us are constructed.

Hence the need to justify the depiction of violence in one or the other form. There is a dominant assumption in contemporary cultural practice that showing violence is not only inevitable, but actually beneficial. The violence of mainstream cinema, television, and other entertainment is commonly justified by using a word of dignified reputation: catharsis. It’s not every day that Ancient Greek concepts are manipulated by the cultural industry, but this one has oddly entered common vocabulary, along with the derived adjective cathartic. This is an interesting concept to study, because it ties together the notions and violence and healing within artistic expression. But I believe there is a strong need to reassess our use of this notion: are we using it correctly, for one, and more importantly what utility does it have in the way we experience art?

The concept of catharsis, generally defined as some kind of artistically induced release of accumulated emotional tension that follows what is now considered the golden ratio of an effective dramatic structure (event, tension, resolution), is originally related to Greek tragedy, which as we know is concerned with the question of violence on many levels: psychologically, the effects of extreme emotions on characters; politically, the necessity to regulate the cycle of talionic vengeance that destabilizes social order; and lastly, the so-called cathartic impact of emotions on the audience.

In chapter 6 of his Poetics, Aristotle defines tragedy through four parameters: a serious subject, a specific literary form, imitation of action rather than its narration, and catharsis. To be more specific, the catharsis of emotions of terror and pity through these same emotions. Literally the word catharsis means purification, or purge, in a medical sense, and in his physiology, Aristotle uses it about the mechanism of menstruation for instance. The problem is that his statement in relation to tragedy is very vague, and that he doesn’t explain how this purported theatrical purgation process should work, to the point that we simply assume that we have lost the texts in which he goes into further detail, and can only guess what he meant. The allusive nature of this text has prompted centuries worth of interpretations, which we can group into three readings of what catharsis could mean: 1) we are cleansed from our extreme emotions by seeing them unfold and be punished by dramatic consequences – i.e. we are being educated; 2) or maybe, by experiencing a little bit of these emotions on a regular basis at the theatre, we are homeopathically immunized against them, or our need to experience them is kept at reasonable levels; 3) or on the opposite, tragedy allows us to experience raw emotions in their purest, purified form, at high intensity, and provides us with a release that makes it unnecessary to seek them in our daily lives.

There are already many possible forms of art contained in these three tentative definitions of catharsis, and worse, they contain also many wild assumptions about how we deal with emotions. Variations of these three readings have been used to justify different types of emotion-inducing experiences, and opera, which has always sought to reproduce some kind of fantasy of Greek tragedy, has long been at the forefront of this culture of voyeurism based on the enjoyment of the spectacle of violence. Although works depicting violence for ideological purposes still constitute a potent genre, a lot of what we have to deal with in our culture is of the third kind I described. The assumption is that we functionally need to sometimes experience a range of negative emotions in a controlled environment, in particular emotions of fear, distress, aggressivity, and that this should have a cleansing effect on us – this is what is often being marketed as a cathartic experience. This is just assumed to be true, somehow, in the same way we in Finland hang on to the comforting wisdom that you can treat a cold with shots of vodka because ‘it kills the germs.’

Apart from the fact that maybe we should not base all our work on arbitrary interpretations of one sentence someone wrote twenty-three centuries ago about an extinct form of theatre… we can credit Aristotle for being a little more precise than these simplifications would suggest. First, in this same sentence quoted earlier, two emotions are mentioned, terror and pity, that not only were meant to balance each other out (as respectively cold and hot emotions in Aristotle’s physiology), but make each other possible: empathy is what allows us to enter a fiction and emote in response to it. Second, in chapter 14 of the Poetics, he does mention more specifically “the pleasure caused by terror and pity”, meaning the experience must produce sensual and aesthetic pleasure and not pure unfiltered emotions. Third, Aristotle does go into more detail elsewhere, namely in book 8 of his Politics: there he speaks of three emotions – terror, pity, and exaltation – and how they are induced by different musical modes, that can be used, again in the medical sense, to purge and regulate the emotions of individuals. His model is religious rituals, where intense exaltation is followed by release and pleasure, but he applies his reasoning to any musical context, and were he alive today, he would find his views applied in film music, with its conventional set of codes, internalized by the broadest audience to the point of thinking them natural and universal.

These elements coalesce into something like a clearer formula for catharsis, that has historically produced some important works, but do we find it satisfying? Fine, you can balance negative emotions with positive emotions, and you can even derive pleasure from the safe, distanced experience of negative emotions, in the same way that you can take bittersweet pleasure in listening to a sad song. But there is a persistent disturbing idea in all of this: that you can and must calibrate emotional response like a medication. That the all-knowing artist can pharmaceutically create the correct emotional experience for the audience. Is that what we want? What happens to the spectator’s agency in such a setting? Works that manipulate us emotionally to a desired effect would commonly be called either hypnotherapy or propaganda, or both.

We do live in an age of calibrated, optimized emotional responses, suited to an age of purified, refined products. In the same way we have industrially isolated sugar from plants to consume it as raw as possible and add it into everything we eat, we have party music that consists only of a steady trippy pulse; we have scary movies filled with ‘jump scares’ and primal fears, complete with music that provides the appropriate emotional cues; we have videos that stimulate arousal without emotional engagement; and of course, we have pure aesthetic pleasure without context or content: culinary formalist art. In that framework, it is not surprising that we also have isolated the elements that make a narrative plot efficient on an endocrine level, and that Artificial Intelligence is capable of implementing them well enough into a functional narrative. The fact is that precisely calibrated emotional pharmacology is not just a prerogative of propaganda, it is a defining trait of the rationalized cultural industry as a whole, both in the current mass media and in the tradition of that one historical mass medium called opera.

I would propose that we question if we want to participate in such consumerism, where every form of emotion is conditioned into the appropriate format, and where we can prescribe ourselves the appropriate amount of endorphin, adrenaline, or serotonin according to what we need to remain functional, e.g. what do I need tonight, a 90-minute feelgood movie or a 120-minute action film or a playlist of my favorite sad songs, so I can go back to work tomorrow morning and be proficient and productive? Of course there will always be rituals such as the cathartic religious rites referenced by Aristotle, meaning places and times where pent-up stress and tension is being released collectively, either constructively or destructively: all societies have them, as feasts, sacrifices, sports competitions, and they prevent more destructive outlets. But these rituals are distinguishable from what theatre does, and I dare say they are probably not what theatre does best, that they are not what is best experienced in a theatre or an opera house. If we believe in the possibility of a curated experience that is not manipulative, consumerist, or both, if we do not experience art to be educated, entertained, groomed, purged, but to be challenged and nurtured in deeper ways, we need to envision another relationship to our emotions and to our mental health, and maybe that requires for us to move beyond the paradigm of catharsis with the pharmacology it entails, whether it’s based on ancient physiology, hormonal imbalance, or behavioral theory.

Let us look at Innocence in terms of its psychological world. If I had to summarize one of the main ideas of Innocence, I could express it in Freudian terms: the repressed always returns. It’s not just your conscious lies and faulty narratives that you cannot escape, it’s all the survival strategies by which you keep at bay your past, in particular the traumas of your past, that will always come back at you, probably in a violent form, unless you face them and process them. So-called cathartic release is not processing; in worst cases it triggers past traumas and/or contributes to glamorizing violence as an outlet.

There have been many acquired cultural techniques to deal with the repressed, but the most universally shared experimental space we are all endowed with to confront it is our dreams. Dreams offer us a paradigm for an open field where we can safely face the figures, memories, ideas and images that we don’t know how to process in everyday life. What matters here is not just the dream ideations themselves, but also the act of interpreting them, of discussing their meaning, which is a transcultural practice. Maybe we should look into existing ways to channel these practices into art?

In the making of Innocence, it was a crucial influence that Kaija Saariaho and myself were at the time both working on integrating elements of Japanese Noh theatre in parallel projects; Kaija’s opera Only the Sound Remains, based on two Noh theatre plays, was premiered here in Amsterdam in 2016. Noh has many acquaintances with Greek tragedy – among others, they both deal with traumatic events being processed in a choral form. But Noh, a theatre form performed at dusk, that traditionally aims at a certain dreamlike quality and is drenched in dream metaphors, puts a specific and unique emphasis on healing. In Noh we meet a warrior who died at war, his spirit trapped in an inferno of anger, needing to be released; we meet a mother whose child has died, driven to madness, needing to be accompanied through the stages of grief; we meet a woman left by her lover, transformed into a vengeful demon, wearing a hannya mask that, as she dances, reveals alternate expressions of rage and fear. This kind of Noh play typically ends in a form of in-story exorcism, but more importantly it features at its climax a monologue: after a long, slow build-up, release comes from verbalization and partial, controlled reenactment, liberating confrontation with the trauma that starts a process of healing. A process that is always difficult and that never has a clear finish line, a triumphant climax and resolution, much like the open chord at the end of Innocence.

There is much we can learn from the example of Noh theatre dramaturgically; one key element is the role of music in creating an elaborate and polyphonic experience of time. The specificity of Kaija Saariaho’s music, even before she started creating operas or telling stories, has been its way of working with tension. This is music more interested in creating long arches and slow erosions, inspired by natural processes, than in achieving classical effects of exposition / tension / and release (in music called resolution) that mirror the so-called cathartic structure of our traditional drama. If what we need is precisely to move beyond these conceptions of cathartic drama as a way of reflecting on the human experience, in order to approach something like a time-sense of dream, a time-sense of healing, we need both fundamentally new music and new storytelling. This is not about forsaking intelligible form and removing tension entirely: quite on the opposite, Kaija’s specific input within her generation of composers has been to find a way to create forms of musical instability and tension that don’t rely on traditional linear harmonic/dramatic resolution, but on a harmony that is built over complex energy fields, and still makes us intuitively wonder what comes next, in a fragile homeostasis of organic collapse and reconstruction. And so when writing the music for Innocence, Kaija doesn’t simply pump us up with adrenaline, but she curates an experience, in which we are not just faced with trauma, but also doing collectively what you learn to do individually in dealing with a panic attack or the effects of PTSD: slowing down your breathing to slow down your heartbeat, entering a slower timeframe that allows you to process. Although the mechanisms still are empathetic, we are not here to be purified, but to explore. It is a fundamental shift, and I would not call this a music of catharsis, but a music of care. It is also paired with a form of storytelling not designed to elicit rushes of pure emotion, but consisting in a game of make-believe, a play in which the audience engages in reconstructing the narrative, and producing associations and interpretations – something that is not possible when your brain is bathing in adrenaline and cortisol and enduring effects similar to those of the response to trauma, impairing memory and other processing abilities. This would be whatever the opposite of a thriller is: an actual, genuine existential investigation.

I would like now to listen to a few fragments from Kaija Saariaho’s music without text, to give a sense of how it works outside of a theatrical context: its contribution might then appear more clearly. Here are a few of her Sept Papillons for solo cello. Each miniature is a delicate exploration of sound, building ephemeral structures that collapse into inharmonicity as they grow.

[Sound sample: excerpts from Sept Papillons by Kaija Saariaho, 2000.]

As you can see in these examples, and as you might have experienced with Innocence, an attitude of care in music doesn’t entail some sort of relaxation music like what they play in massage parlors or 10-hour-long ASMR videos: it is not designed for us to wind down against a pleasant background. It does not make everything clear and comfortable for us – it still has the emotional variety, complexity and the deeper, dark mystery of a dream. But like a dream, it creates a space for us to experience things, without telling us at any given moment how we are supposed to feel about them, letting us explore our feelings instead. This still requires technique, and structure which is to say dramaturgy, in the way that dreams, grief or therapy also require a structure in which to unfold freely, and safely face dangerous forces, anguish, madness, monstrosity, or the void. With Kaija, we constructed this dramaturgy through an ethos of mending, particularly suited to the possibilities of musical polyphony, by piecing together multiple stories, voices, languages that provide musical material, and only make sense when they are assembled, sophisticatedly interwoven into a fabric. I believe there is a pressing necessity to imagine a range of artistic experiences that possess that degree of polyphony and finesse. They necessarily forsake easy solutions and circumvent the allure of violence, the part of us that responds to violence with extreme emotions and stimulation of our sympathetic nervous system and reward system, but instead offer us something profoundly different by focusing on the processes of healing, which as we know are active – as Freud has stated about grief, they are work, like scarring is to an organic tissue.

This is why Aristotle’s antiquated medical metaphors must be questioned, replaced by images that express the sophistication of an evolved medical science; just as we may update the idea of the artist into something else than that of a physician of society who has all the answers and cures his ignorant audience. The artist, by crafting forms of experience as both a researcher and a practitioner, can be an insightful partner in creating spaces that allow for nuanced exploration, both collective and individual. Only at that condition can artistic experiences offer something radically different from the industrial forms of the mainstream, that respond to calibrated demands and fill our heads with images they don’t help us process. If the ancient word tragedy could in that sense still have a meaning, and in a deeper way be opposed to the mainstream of catharsis-driven post-Aristotelean drama, I am compelled to think of the German version of the word, in its beautiful transparency, a word I believe you also have in Dutch: Trauerspiel / treurspel – literally, a (collective) play of grief, for a theatre of grief, centered on process and exploration rather than action and resolution. Thank you for letting me share these few thoughts towards imagining how and why such a theatre could be created.