A SUBJECT: ATMOSPHERE

By Cristóbal Peláez González

Translated by César David Salazar Jiménez

“ATEATRO” Magazine. 1997

These little notes have their own particular origins. At the beginning of 1995, a group of theater enthusiasts got together with the desire of creating a symposium that was opened to the city, to discuss all the different subjects of scenic culture. Our theatrical movement, drowned into financial anxieties, has put aside –unfortunately- investigation, analysis and conversation. Let’s say there are common purposes in a guild level, but we still do not take conscience about the fact that we belong to a generation that has a crucial role in the fate of drama.

That was how twelve people, including directors, actors and scholars, managed to meet every two weeks to get round ourselves in conversation. Beyond of our control –and by general agreement-, was the fact that these meetings wore out by discussing subjects that were already addressed, sufficiently, by qualified authors. It was not about replacing academies, nor the act of reading itself; and, neither investigation was predominant, nor ideology or any other pattern; the real purpose was to achieve a thoughtful encounter. Thus a first subject was elected ATMOSPHERE IN ART –specifically in theater. As we were achieving some clarity, the subject kept increasing our own interest and, then, the necessity of writing started to emerge, until we visualized the possibility of a yearly publication that would save the memory of this endless debate. The goal was to address two subjects per year, one for each semester. Nevertheless this very well aimed purpose failed in the constant problem to which theater groups were subjected: our weak resources compel us to an exhausting activism, to a continuous projection that rarely allows the interregnum for investigation and reflection. Rehearsing, premiering, projecting had become the disproportion of a social ideology (supposedly aesthetic!) that measures theater by performances, spectators, and seats number. Even talking about quality has become suspicious, as though music culture could not distinguish between a Loury Anderson and a Darío Gómez song, as if the little verses of Jorge Robledo Ortiz had the same aesthetic value as Homer’s.

From that frustration, I got out some scattered, little personal notes. I divulge some of them.

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Every time we think about theater, our thoughts involve other forms of art, especially literature and cinema, perhaps because theater uses those forms directly. Our culture is closer to cinema and literature in a daily basis.

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The subject of atmosphere seems to be connected with literature (oral or written) and cinema, despite of being a young art.

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Atmosphere is to art what bouquet is to wine. We are talking about an air, a taste, a sensation, a psychic trace.

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Atmospheres in literature appear in a more palpable way in determined genres: gothic, western, crime fiction, sea adventures.

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Authors, consciously or unconsciously transmit established conventions to the reader, codes that are indispensable in the creation of a certain Atmosphere.

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Atmosphere is precisely what seduces us when we read “One Thousand and One Nights”, it is what captures us. Those depurated, idealized worlds emerge more attractive than the real one. It is the atmosphere of “Cinema Paradiso” the thing that makes a lot of people cry. “Casablanca” almost smells like rum. Illusion is opium.

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These codes vary according to the capacity and the talent of the artist. The author always –there are exceptions- tells us a story that could be similar to another one, but different in its atmosphere. The story could be told changing the setting. The effects change.

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Atmosphere has to do with: settings, climate, historical conditions, and scenery. The clarity of day, for example, produces modifications regarding to a nocturnal event.

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We usually get bored with representations that do not set a mood for us, not going beyond an explicit figure. This occurs often in the so called theater-dance (¿Is it possible to talk about theater-cinema, or cinema-dance, or theater-painting?) where, almost always, the appeal resides in the skills of the dancers.

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In literature and theater there is a more rigorous demand of imaginative capacity. The foundation of cinema is the illusion. For someone who contemplates in the middle of the dark of a movie theater, things appear much more different than they do in a theatrical representation. The screen projects images that are taken from reality and have been oversized, the landscapes become much more appealing because of the effects of light and the depuration on the scenery (odors, weather conditions). It is possible, from that very seat, sitting comfortably while we eat a hotdog, to go –with the light of the film projector- into the deep of the ocean, or to participate in a parade across a remote desert, or to go back to prehistoric times. Technology has gone even farther, amazing and overwhelming the audience with beauty and danger.

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It has been said about Kolkata that it smells like urine and feces. On the screen, its exotic atmosphere traps us.

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When in “The Treasure of the Sierra Madre”, by John Houston, the three gold-diggers get together to talk bout what they are going to do with their wealth, the old man says: “I am going to open up a hardware store and I will read adventure novels”, the dimension of the story is now projected to the future, it builds a second story, an air inhabits our imagination.

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Third dimension, a noise that fills the room, Cinerama, Technicolor, cinemascope, attempts of transcending the defenseless audience to confuse it with fiction.

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When we see the faces and the silent attitude of those whom leave the movie theater, we think about the justice in calling cinema a “dream factory”. Roland Barthes called these faces and this silence a “cinema situation”.

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Is there anything sadder and more devastating than a group of spectators coming out of a movie theater? This return to reality is full of pain.

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Cinema, due to its abundance, its commercial capability, its relative facility of extension, has spared no means or economies. It has taken advantage of science and other art forms in order to configure itself, in just one hundred years, into a real aesthetic academy. Around cinema, get together historians, chemists, architects, engineers, photographers, experts in theater and dance, sculptors, gymnasts. It all has been useful to cinema. Anthropology and psychology had found in this art a wonderful field of action.

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Cinema is more abundant, but theater is richer.

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Semiologists had designated cinema as the most important domain of the sign; very arguable. I still believe that the sign finds its plenitude in theater.

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In the narrow border of the stage, the resources of imagination should be agreed, beforehand, with the spectator, because the scenic concavity does not have space for oceans that had not been imagined, nor cavalcades that had not been insinuated.

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Actor, text and representation appear as guides, shreds of worlds that cannot be seen, but emerge from the mind of the spectator.

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Mallarmé writes IGITUR with this dedicatory: “To the intelligence of the reader who is the one that sets into play”

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Installing an atmosphere in theater has to do with the universality of the sign in all its possibilities:

Action and movement: characters act and move according to certain conditions. The old French theater school used to force the nobles to stay still, while the commoners had more freedom of movement. Specialists had said that, in ancient tragedy, characters should remain standing; tragedy becomes drama when any of the character sits down.

Gesture: It changes according to every country, every culture, every époque and every single character (for example, the English phlegm is a direct opposite of the Antioqueño gestures).

Hairstyle: Hair, or the absence of it, defines the face. It is a cardinal subject that tends to be forgotten.

Wardrobe: It has its own history, and changes according to the époque and the social class. In our theatrical environment, and just like the hair, few times we give importance to this matter; it is a loose sign, relegated.

Make-up: Cardinal element in an atmosphere. Sergio Leone forced the actors of his Westerns to a special application: “So much sweat, so much dust, so much death. The difference between me and John Ford is that in his movies, when a man looks out the window is to contemplate the view; in my movies, when a man looks out the window is because he is going to get killed”

Sound effects: Double-headed. Ones are produced by the very action of the actors and the objects on stage, and others are created specifically for the dramatic piece. The very rumor of waves sets up an atmospheric element (Geographic situation; tension). In a scenic box, there can also be produced weather, and the spectator can travel to cold.

Music: In very few movements the playwright could save a thousand explanations, a lot of information.

Lights: Show me what you light up and I shall see wherever you want. Cinematic element: Light is to theater what the camera is to the film. Reading order. Our conception has reduced light to the simple matter of illuminating the actor. The operating of lights should be given to painters.

Theatrical property (Prop): Texture, shape, color. How well chosen was that spear that killed Cocteau in Orpheus!

Scenography: Pornographic word, that even to this day is associated with nails, hammers and racks. It has been replaced with a word that is even worse: Decoration. In books, scenographers are confused with carpenters. The Beckett tree is an atmosphere of death that announces the end of the world.

Voice: The first line of an actor installs me in the representation, or it could expel me as well. Theater is also to be listened. There are styles, genres and atmospheres; that is why you talk about “a grave voice”, “a loud, mariner voice”, “an Argentinean voice”, “a beery voice”, “a melodic voice”, “a seductive voice”.

Literary style: Each story and each genre has its own style. Edar Allan Poe, master of terror atmospheres, knew the use of the words. Colombian people, rich in oral tradition, had not been so lucky in certain genres and we are a little rigid in creating atmospheres. Hispanic heritage?

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Sometimes just the weather is the cardinal element of the atmosphere and a believable key to a plot; example: the film “Rear Window”

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When I take the text of the future mise en scène, weather concerns me. Could it be possible “One hundred years of solitude” in the cold?

How rare! There are certain genres and themes that are elusive to theater: Horror, Western, Suspense, Crime fiction, Soccer, Science Fiction. Precisely those genres and themes that have the greatest proclivity towards “an atmosphere”

It is not used to talk about an atmosphere referred to sculpture; few times to dance, photography or architecture; almost never to painting. In music it is common to talk about a “melancholic air”, or a “tragic tone”, or a “sweet accent”. Does this mean that atmosphere is engaged to the procedure of a narration?

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Colombian TV series do not have atmospheres, they have bad smell; almost all of them smell like problems between rich ladies and irresponsible men from uptown Bogotá. Almost all of it smells like Chicó. Our soap operas, most of them, when we watch them, give us the shameful impression of meddling in the domestic problems these ladies have, there in Bogotá.

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In TV series, it is common to use de word AMBIENTATION. It is referred to the people responsible to take care of all the visual elements, so they would keep up a correspondence with a certain époque. Few times this AMBIENTATION has managed to get out of Bogotá. Not to mention atmospheres.

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There is a subject being raised here: Can I create an ambientation that is the complete opposite of an atmosphere? An example is presented in a typical case. The scene represents a happy infantile celebration. The whole ambientation is set up in that order. There is the cake; there are the streamers, colored balloons, whistles, racket, and chants. All of a sudden appears the corpse of a child that rests stabbed. Has this happy, infantile AMBIENT been transformed into a tragic atmosphere, an atmosphere of horror?

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Cinema, as theater, as literature, has created its own narration codes that serve the genre. When the film starts, the camera registers the close-up of a knife, then an eye, and then someone stares behind a curtain: this movie is not going to be a sweet romance. In these first minutes the Director has put his cards on the table. “If a rifle shows up during the first act –says Chekhov- it should not take more than three acts to be shot”

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One of the biggest drawbacks of our actors in Colombian TV is the exhaustion: I will never believe that Gustavo Angarita could be Rasputin.

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The same way we laugh at the sight of our mulatto actors pretending to be those blonde, blue eyed characters of Shakespeare, talking with a regional accent. There is certainly a very funny “atmosphere” there.

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We frequently confuse atmosphere with the use of a fog machine. I have rarely seen an adequate use of this machine in theater. Perhaps the only time it was justified, was in that beautiful representation of the Teatro de La Llanura, from Argentina, and their “Actores de provincia” (provincial actors); rarefied atmosphere, sad, dramatic.

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From that same group I was able to appreciate an extraordinary effect with their “Clásico binomio” (classic binomial). The cuts of light established distances, time, aging, decadence. Another example of an atmosphere created out of minimal elements; nostalgia and tragedy.

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In “Tráfico pesado” (heavy traffic), by La Candelaria, an actress with a German intonation and a singular acting style, gave the entire atmosphere to the play.

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In “La balada del café triste” , by the Teatro Libre, the same thing was achieved by the narrator with his intonation.

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Generally –and unless it is a very particular experiment- I hate representations of the classics with actors wearing tuxedos.

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Sometimes atmosphere is everything. Sometimes it is nothing.

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According to Apollinaire, the famous London fog is an invention of poets. The Paris of the nineteenth century, with its sun, its ladies and its barges, is an invention of the impressionists. Artists, says Apollinaire, are the ones that give us the image of an époque.

The term “verbal decoration” is certainly clarifying to theater.