DIDASCALIA

(Talk at The Players Club in Manhattan)

The term “Didascalia” comes from old Greek, it means “teaching”, and it’s used to refer to the instructions that a dramatist or stage director gives to the performers. It describes the immediate environment, the physical appearance of the characters and their actions, without referring to what they think or feel. A didascalia is usually written in italics and between parentheses, written in the 3^rd person.

     The term “Didascalia” comes from old Greek, it means “teaching”, and it’s used to refer to the instructions that a dramatist or stage director gives to the performers. It describes the immediate environment, the physical appearance of the characters, and their actions, without referring to what they think or feel. A didascalia is usually written in italics and between parentheses, written in the 3^rd person.

     In theater, actors know that they are playing a character, but the audience must suspend disbelief in order to believe them. Without didascalias, the suspension of disbelief would be in danger, and the artifice would be revealed. For fiction to enter our lives in an organic manner, it must develop a degree of empathy and persuade us to let go of our vulnerability, or what protects us from feeling defenseless.

     What we see that an actor does with what is arranged in the space that the narrative context uses is what allows theatrical sets to make sense. On their own, these structured situations are empty, until someone has a reason to move in them. On their own, the arranged objects in a scene are decorative until they are given meaning.

     In theater, reactions are provoked by the acceptance of instructions. The same thing happens in daily life. The productions of greater convergence shape our identity characteristics through an invisible didascalia or set of instructions. If the author and the actor were one and the same person, his/her story wouldn’t need didascalias. Are we the authors of our own scenes?

     The hegemonic system shapes us through the new instrumental technologies of de facto powers that direct our perception, “through the control of time and space as constitutive dimensions, through industrial and cultural manipulation of our relationships with image and sound”. (Valenti, p 105-106)

“De facto powers constitute and dismiss. They constitute because they establish an order. They dismiss because, to carry out operations management of the environments, they have to build the artifice and drown us in it, controlling, as much as they can, the ways in which we perceive time, our trust in history, our spatial incorporation and dissolution, and our relationship with what we see and hear”. (Valenti, p. 24)

     In this process, it’s key to recognize the role that entertainment plays in our daily life, it significantly exceeds the various ways in which we incorporate it in a conscious and intentional manner. When we normalize it as a constitutive part, we begin to discern the connections between the fields built from fiction and what we tend to associate with ‘personal opinions’ and ‘personal life’, especially when what we consider as genuine turns out to be the product of a structural mimesis. Innumerable are the “risks of not recognizing ourselves in our own image, of not knowing how to inhabit our time, spaces, or sounds that lock us in, when all of this is what, precisely, can liberate us”. (Valenti, p. 112)

     Guy Debord, in his famous book Society of Spectacle, stated that spectacle is a social organization that unifies. I quote: “The spectacle, as the present social organization of the paralysis of history and memory, of the abandonment of history built on the foundation of historical time, is the false consciousness of time.” “Another side of the deficiency of general historical life is that individual life as yet has no history. The pseudo-events which rush by in spectacular dramatizations have not been lived by those informed of them”. (Debord, p. 62) Historical performances have soaked through the stories of individual lives. Our notion of History as a closed and agreed set, through dramatizations of what happened, is still building the foundations of our social imaginary. Every History is scripted from the moment we use that term in the singular, and it operates following a linear narrative. If we understand History as something linear, it is because of its adaptations to a tale, which ingrain in our habits the static notions of beginning, middle, and end. But if we could perceive simultaneities, juxtapositions and incongruencies, the history of humanity would reveal to us that nothing is lineal. What transformation would occur if we stopped repeating in an ordered and successive manner the tales, re-editing their connections, selecting, and connecting again?

     History, as the literature of what happened, has its own rules, but, at the same time, it is the home of interlocutors that talk towards multiple directions in time, contradicting it. So, to doubt the stories that have been accepted and represented in a massive manner is also to doubt absolute victories or losses.

     Often, we are faced with black holes that we complete with ellipsis points. Our communion with the historic tale is an agreement of faith. We inhabit time, but others make us inhabit History. And the major problem is not only that history is usually written by those who win, instead it is that it’s written by those who can write. History writes us, and, sometimes, we can write about it. Rarely we can connect in another way the packed data that the system offers us. To imagine history, it’s necessary to carefully observe our time and to try to see which cells are left empty. Without a doubt, something important is happening there, and what is important is always in plain sight, but it is mediated in such a way that we see it with the eyes of the system that illustrates it, through spectacle.

     As Neil Postman wrote: “There is nothing wrong with entertainment. As some psychiatrist once put it, we all build castles in the air. The problems come when we try to live in them.” (Postman, 1985, p. 85) Although we can even say that today those castles have become more solid and more inhabitable than before, they’re still spaces that give shelter when we are outside of everything else. 

     However, a system that expels, at the same time, is left out of everything that was expelled, when what was expelled is still willing to live, from the place that the system fears the most: what is unclassifiable.” (Valenti, p. 23)

MANIFESTO DIDASCALIA

Vast expanses without signages had invented oases so that Bedouins kept walking. Today, the mirage has devoured the desert.

In the theater, three walls are built to break a fourth one, but once the existence of that wall is revealed, an innumerable guild of walls rises. Like the wheel, which abandoned the world of inventions from the moment it began to spin. But no wheel is still so functional, so irreversible.

Spectacle has trapped us outdoors, and we have been left inside of it, under an open sky. Theatrical metaphors are now being used off stage; they even make more sense without it. Through everyday sets, invisible stages, anonymous directors, ghost writers and sponsors, the spectacle has become part of the system’s DNA. What narrative teaches us not to listen to the instructions of its own script?

Slowly and suddenly, we are left alone with the world. Who cares to be, not knowing that it exists? Algorithms train us and the system instructs us to interpret its own didascalia. How can we recover the meaning of light if it only fulfills its task shyly, perplexedly, inconclusively? Slowly and suddenly, we are left blind with the world. Since light exists, darkness tries to speak with it, but a didascalia separates them, and when it classifies them, it condemns them. Night, then, makes the day waste time until someone can rescue us. Darkness is not everything there is, but light is no longer the only instantaneous thing.

The void is full of circumstances that disinhabit us, and that, at the same time, constitute us. There are no blank spaces except for us. But when the margins have something to say, parentheses fear them. How many instructions are still needed so that something can begin and end?

In this century, what never turns off has become enemy of the eyes, and what is always heard has taken control of what we can listen. What script, what didascalia justifies and celebrates us?

There is a humanity being written in italics.

Manifesto 19^h“404 International Festival of Art & Technology”
by Gina Valenti 
September 2022
Argentina 

Translation by Belén Nimo