Acta est fabula, plaudite! Acting silly as a way of doing research – Being silly as a way of life

Bert Willems

As a young adult, when I had just completed secondary education and just before I started my studies in psychology, during a sultry, sweaty summer without too many heavy commitments on my mind and only sweet dreams ahead, I went on a road trip to the city of Prague with some of my best friends. We were going to travel in the car of one of our gang, an old white Ford Taunus, with a big blue stripe running across the complete length of the car. To encourage the community-feeling, we all decided to wear a white shirt and a bow tie, and at any time of day we all wore fluorescent orange plastic sunglasses from the brand Sunkist. These glasses were not only given for free (in exchange for buying the litres of ‘fruit juice’ we drank at that time), but they also looked like they were free. The two extended rear-view mirrors on the hood of the Ford Taunus were also given the same orange plastic sunglasses, so that our car’s personality was in line with the team’s. And every time we arrived at a new campsite, we played the most ill-suited music loudly through the speakers, of course with open windows for anyone to hear.

The campsites we visited throughout Central Europe were usually the cheaper campsites, which meant that many young people were temporarily housed there, usually of the backpacker type: sturdy walking boots, lumberjack shirts or jeans skirts, beards or bandanas, decent backpacks on display in front of the tents. Every time we entered such a campsite I remember the disbelieving faces of these alternative young people, rolling their eyes: “What a bunch of losers!” you could hear them thinking. It was anything but funny to them. And because I considered myself more as one of those backpacker types, I always felt a little ashamed. Each time I was confronted with these other backpacker types, I remember feeling the urge to jump out of the car and to confess that we were just pretending, that we weren’t really so silly at all. But because we were always in a group, I didn’t do this, and we remained the silly people from Belgium. And after a few campsites you start to see the fun of it.

Eventually you notice that playing with this reality (“Are they serious? Are they really that silly?”) made it a fun thing to do. Not keeping up this appearance would only have spoiled it. Persistence in this appearance was what, over time, completed the experience of “acting silly”: always staying in your role. “The show must go on!” But maybe that gradually made us become a bit silly? Or maybe we didn’t mind being silly anymore? Who knows! In any case, after a while we experienced the full joy of being silly through the habit of acting silly.

The applause as a demarcation

Sometimes it is completely normal for people to behave silly, or even weird. By weird behaviour we mean all human actions that do not correspond to what daily life, or some social norm, requires of us. In this sense, there are many people that in some circumstances, using weird objects of a particular kind, produce the most unnatural and silly sounds – sounds that we would certainly never have heard in the jungle – and that make the craziest movements – movements that will undoubtedly send all potential prey animals fleeing. Now, it is clear that music and dance performances from, for example, the pop and rock genre, are not considered weird or silly at all because throughout the entire performance, the audience continuously shows appreciation for what is being presented; at any point during the performance, applause and cheering can be heard.

We could regard the social roles that we play in everyday life, and that allow us to transcend the animal-side of us, as a way of “being silly” – the performance that we keep up in relation to each other every day.

Things are very different when we talk about classical music and dance performances. In that context, it is strictly prescribed when appreciation in the form of an applause – the cheering can be almost completely abandoned here – may be given: there is an applause just before the performance (when the performer enters the stage) and just afterwards (when the performance is over). I always find these moments very exciting when you feel that the piece of music is finished, but you still do not dare to applaud because you do not want to be seen as the person who did not know the piece performed. Imagine that you are the only one who applauds too early and therefore gets all of those angry or laughing faces, looking down on you. Knowing when to applaud is therefore indeed part of our social reality. These performances are neatly cut out of reality by the applause: the moment in between the start – and the end – applause concerns the silly appearance, the rest concerns reality.

Some musicians know this all too well: the pianist, for example, who remains seated for seconds in the position in which the final chord (“or was it the provisional final chord?”) was struck. Will he continue the piece or is it finished? No one dares to be the first to break the silence. The transition between the piece of music itself and its end becomes extremely fluid because the musician, through this additional performance, leaves it unclear whether the piece of music is finished or not. A blissful silence usually tends ‘to appear’, like a tight rope stretched between ‘the performance’ (with the music) and the ‘real context’ (with the applause).

A few years ago, I was at a symposium organized by the Society for Artistic Research (Uniarts, Helsinki, 2017) where I was able to participate in an artistic experiment that has something to say about all this.¹ We were in fact dealing with a complete inversion of reality and performance. After a short introduction concerning “choreography as social practice”, we – an audience of about one hundred people – were asked to applaud for half an hour. And strangely enough, everyone started, after looking at each other in disbelief (“What are they asking now?”). You can imagine doing that for one minute. You can even imagine doing that for five minutes. But can you imagine actually doing that for thirty minutes? And yet it happened: no one dared to stop applauding. No one dared to start the silence, no one was able to break that magic.

I remember this artistic experiment in Helsinki as one of the most alienating experiences I ever had. Those who entered the room later (‘the latecomers’) were of course very surprised by the spectacle, not having heard the explanation. But even for those who were there from the beginning this was also quite strange (“Let us all act silly for a while”). The researchers in the arts who announced the performance (Victoria Perez and Vincente Arlandis) stood outside the performance with their chronometer, and all of us, the former ‘real’ audience, were suddenly staged as the performers. This chronometer was certainly necessary because how else do you demarcate something when that what normally demarcates (the applause) now must be demarcated itself?

Silly idiots

Exploring the sensitivity for the overlap between performance (the ‘representation’ or the ‘image’) and the actual context is something that I often encounter within the fine arts. In fact, it seems to me that any attempt to draw a clear line between the performance itself and what is supposedly outside of it, as a real context, makes this performance lose its value. I notice that many fine artists who use this medium are aware of this potential ambiguity. They like to leave open whether it is finished or not: the decision of the ‘real ending’ is left to the audience itself, or the performers leave the room before an embarrassing moment arrives (the weird overlap between fiction and reality), or the performance simply continues endlessly until the audience leaves of its own accord.

I always wonder whether this ambiguous character of the ending, this ‘transition’, is an essential part of any performance. Perhaps it is this overlap between fiction and reality that makes this artistic medium so interesting? This is certainly the case when the actions performed are ‘normal’ actions and when you clearly notice that minimal regulations are being applied to the performers (a minimal script). In such a case the performance is largely based on improvisation (responsive to what is happening ‘in reality’). In his PhD, Frank Mineur describes this recent shift in focus from the performance as a representation towards the performance as an experience. Whereas the distinction between the performer and the audience is very clear in the case of the performance as a representation, this distinction is less clear in the case of the performance as an experience. What is fictional about being part of a performance as a real spectator (a spect-actor as Augusto Boal would say it)?² This lack of a distinction between performer and audience is much less obvious in music or dance performances, as the silly or weird actions in these cases are not part of everyday, ‘normal’ reality. But in performances within the fine arts, or in those described as immersive theatre, the overlap between reality and fiction (the ‘conceptual’ character of the performance) becomes crucial.

Can animals also “act silly”or can they only “be silly”?

In 1995, several Danish directors – including Lars von Trier and Thomas Vinterberg – came up with the Dogma 95 Manifesto.³ The manifesto described several rules (e.g., no special effects, only handheld camera movements, no music editing afterwards, etc.) that they had to adhere to as directors if they wanted to make a movie with this Dogma 95 label. By limiting themselves as directors in this way, it allowed them to “force the truth out of the characters and setting”. A movie under this Dogma 95 label, therefore, became a medium that tried in the strictest way to achieve an overlap between their fiction and reality (even if it was purely fiction).

In Idioterne by Lars von Trier (1995), a film shot according to these Dogma 95 principles, this twilight zone between fiction and reality in fact becomes the theme of the movie itself.⁴ The protagonists in the movie pretend to be a group of people with intellectual disabilities and thereby allow themselves an enormous degree of freedom in certain social situations (burping and farting en plein public is suddenly no longer a problem). “Acting silly”, therefore, takes on two meanings in this movie: first, they are just pretending, and second, they also persist in performing actions that do not correspond to what daily life or some social norm requires of us. And because it is a movie, there is a third layer of acting silly, in the sense of doing something that is not part of their daily life: actors playing a role.

At the end of the movie (spoiler alert!), each of the protagonists is sent out to their normal lives. They are asked to play this same role (acting that they are silly) in a real context, with people who mean a lot to them in normal daily life. However, most of them fail to persevere in the fiction and slip out of the role that they knew how to play rather well in a group (and apart from their own personal reality). Only the protagonist who had every reason not to stay in the role attributed to her (she left her family because she recently lost a child) ultimately succeeds in persevering in the imposed role when reuniting with her family: acting silly in the middle of her harsh reality. You cannot become more authentic (more honest?) as a silly liar (as a performer of fiction).

Performing the performance

Another film that shows the possibilities of performance in ‘exploiting’ the overlap between fiction and reality is The Square directed by Ruben Östlund (2017).⁵ In addition to an overall critical view of the entire subsidized arts industry, this movie presents a good example of a performance that no longer draws any lines between fiction and reality. The performance shown in the movie takes place during a gala dinner, following the opening of an exhibition. In a silly way, this is a perfectly normal, common social situation. The beautifully dressed people, who are ready to start the lavish dinner, first hear the following introduction:

I am asking for your utmost caution during this performance. Welcome to the jungle. Soon you will be confronted by a wild animal. As you will know, the hunting instinct is triggered by weakness. If you show fear, the animal will sense it. If you try to escape, the animal will hunt you down. But if you remain perfectly still, without moving a muscle, the animal might not notice you and you can hide in the herd, safe in the knowledge that someone else will be the prey.

Shortly after that, the half-naked performer emerges in the role of a wild ape-like animal. At first there is some nervous laughter, but the situation becomes increasingly grim due to the all-too-real behaviour of the performer. Some of the guests leave the scene in fear, hoping not to become a victim of ‘the wild animal’. The curator himself tries to intervene but is not sure how, since it is only a performance (“a play with reality”), for which, I can guess, a lot of money was paid. Despite the curator’s attempt to round it all off with a weak start of an applause, the performer refuses to let up. He persists in the fiction, and the performance is only stopped when he drags a female guest by the hair and prepares to sexually assault her. Reality eventually takes over and the performer is beaten up by the angry ‘audience’. The performer, in this case too, left it to the audience to determine when the performance should end. An interesting aspect here is that this performance was shown as embedded in a fiction-movie. Can we imagine someone giving this performance in real life? We need a representation (the movie itself) to depict these kinds of representations (the all too real ‘performance’ in the movie), a performance of the performance.

We could regard the social roles that we play in everyday life, and that allow us to transcend the animal-side of us, as a way of “being silly”–the performance that we keep up in relation to each other every day.

Could a real wild ape have staged in this performance? Perhaps the wild ape would have behaved in exactly the same way. But would we also consider it a performance? In that case, it would have enabled the curator in the movie to intervene and emerge as a hero, because it would no longer have been a ‘real’ performance for him. Can animals also “act silly” or can they only “be silly”? In two of his essays (“Why Look at Animals” and “Ape Theatre”), John Berger explores the idea that animals can (should?) be labelled as performers in a certain sense.⁶ After all, when they live in captivity, for example in a zoo, they often engage in behaviour that no longer corresponds to what can be expected of them naturally. In this context, animals must ‘show themselves’ to an audience of people. With good intentions in mind, they are held captive to perform their actions to the people. And sometimes they are even critically assessed for what they show: “Why does that lion lie still all the time? Is that panda dead? Why does that ostrich walk up and down the fence all the time? Why does that crocodile leave its food?”

We can see the animal’s cage as the concrete demarcation of the space that can be devoted to the ‘performance’. Similar to the start- and end-applause, is it the demarcation that cuts the specific performance out of reality. And even in these situations, overlap is created with reality. Nowadays, cages in zoos are designed in such a way that there is a large overlap between fiction and reality: watercourses and rock formations as a natural fence, an image of a ‘natural’ landscape on the walls of the cage, soundproofing of the cage to prevent the human audience from being too intrusive. But all in all, it remains a cage, and the animals have their role to play for their audience.

The human as a silly monkey

You have made your way from worm to man, but much in you is still worm. Once you were apes, and even now man is more of an ape than any ape.⁷

In the essay Ein Bericht für eine Akademie (1917), Franz Kafka describes a monkey who, based on “utmost efforts”, becomes human.⁸ Utmost efforts, because the evolution that has taken man centuries to complete, this monkey realizes in just one lifetime. The essay is partly written in the form of a report written by the monkey itself and addressed to a scientific committee (eine Akademie). The funny thing about the essay is that the monkey realizes this by imitating the people around him, his captors who have “stolen him from nature”. The behaviours that the monkey chooses to imitate are mainly behaviours that have to do with social interactions – for example, the learning process starts with shaking hands. But the learning monkey is most successful when it starts imitating behaviours concerning alcohol and drugs (smoking a pipe and drinking spirits). When he, for example, carelessly throws the bottle on the floor after drinking it in one go (“not this time in despair {because of that terrible taste} but as an artistic performer”), things progress quickly. From that moment on, evolution accelerates, and the sense of language starts to break through in this monkey.

This is of course fiction, but what does it teach us? Evolution as “the development of being silly”? Education is “learning to be silly”? Is there anything of value in these apparently paradoxical conclusions? Perhaps it is not so strange to put it into words like this? You will probably have noticed that I did not always interpret the meaning of “acting silly” in the same way throughout this essay. Sometimes it concerned all actions that do not correspond to what daily life, or some ‘social norm’, requires of us. In this paragraph we slowly slide, via the animal kingdom, into a different meaning and “acting silly” now instead concerns all actions that do not correspond to what ‘wild nature’ requires of us (actions that transcend selfish, impulse-driven behaviour, Leviathan-wise). Seen like this, we could regard the social roles that we play in everyday life, and that allow us to transcend the animal-side of us, as a way of “being silly” – the performance that we keep up in relation to each other every day.

Homo Ludens

Every individual there {today in China} is scripted into the role of an actor or actress in the drama of the ‘harmonious society’. Either one conforms to one’s role by portraying the good national comrade, the exemplary national comrade – or else one forsakes one’s role and thereby falls under suspicion.⁹

In his book Homo Ludens, Johan Huizinga examines the thesis that our entire culture could be regarded as originating from play, subject to rules.¹⁰ Playing is seen as those actions that are strictly demarcated in time and space and that are placed outside the rationality of daily life. Roger Caillois, extending on this idea, classifies mimicry or simulation as one type of play besides other categories (chance, competition and vertigo).¹¹ The artist can be considered as the master of this kind of simulating play (‘playing pretend’), creating a conceptual place with its own rules that is, at the same time, very real. By doing so, alternative viewpoints are provided that shed new light on our daily realities.

The Belgian artist Guillaume Bijl studied our social realities by playing with the borders between fiction and reality. When he installed a complete supermarket as art in the Tate Gallery in Liverpool (2002–2003), it was in any case thought-provoking:¹² Both fiction (consuming artistic installations/performances) and reality (our consumer behaviour in the supermarket) can be critically examined. The rules that apply to our consumer behaviour in the supermarket (where reality prevails) and those that apply to our consumer behaviour in a museum (where fiction prevails) are both so eerily close that they begin to influence each other.

And, thinking along these lines, you could also regard the urinal that Marcel Duchamp placed on the pedestal as a playing performer. As an existing object, the ready-made can show something real by presenting itself “in a silly way”. A real object is performing an art piece as a piece of art. And again, it was a piece of fiction that was neatly cut out of reality by the pedestal. This pedestal is like the whistle that cuts the soccer-game out of reality, that space or time period wherein self-imposed rules are no longer valid. If we look at “silly behaviour” in this open way, we see that these art forms (“art-ificial ways of being”) can be interesting for studying reality precisely because of their special relationship with that reality. When you start using people’s actions (or the results thereof) as a medium, something is created that allows for immediate reflection on that reality: art as a way of investigating our human way of being. But also, the way in which these artistic performances (in the broadest sense) are cut out of that reality, is often thought-provoking: This cutting out can be done very tightly (applause-wise) or inaccurately (“Is it real or not?”).

That is why it might not be a bad idea to promote “acting silly” (or creating art) as a new research method, as a kind of Fröhlichen Wissenschaft, in our universities and academies.¹³ In addition to conducting interviews, making empirical observations, or systematically following up on a case for years, we can now also simply start “acting silly” (or create objects that act silly, that pretend). Some people find this a strange idea. They say “looking for objective truths, there is no room for fiction”, and “no absolute truths can be found in the conceptual spheres that are created by an artist following his/her own rules”. These people still agree with Plato that the artists are simply faking reality and are therefore cut off from this reality (the world of ideas). However, let us further explore and actively promote from a constitutional context the value of fiction (the silly actions of artists and/or of their creations) for getting grip on our reality. Let us embrace these researchers in the arts as the jolly scientists! “Acting silly” as a research method and “being silly” as a way of life! I immediately see myself again sitting in that Ford Taunus, heading to Prague, dressed up like a silly Belgian: learning by being silly and being cheerful. Let’s start today!

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Bert Willems

is head of research at PXL-MAD, School of Arts, Hasselt and Professor at Hasselt University (Faculty of Architecture and Arts). His main concern within these two institutes is the development of the research policy with a focus on research in the arts.

bert.willems@pxl.be

Footnotes