The judgment has just fallen, and the justice of the peace has ruled: “the fact of smoking tobacco during a theatrical performance does not constitute expressive content, because no message is conveyed”. The judge’s reasoning is simple: since smoking “does not aim to convey a message or a meaning”, the activity is therefore not protected by the charters. The Law on the fight against smoking is therefore recalled, at the origin of the whole affair: smoking in public places is prohibited. CQFD.
The statement calls out, first of all, because it suggests a more general observation that is almost untenable for anyone who is somewhat interested in the theater – even in art: there would therefore be gestures, objects on stage that cannot be would not be expressive, in other words, which would not participate in constructing the space of representation, in expressing an idea, an emotion. The confident approach of this insignificant protagonist? The black clothes of this other character, just a whim?
To go quickly, most signs in art aiming to contextualize a character or a scene work through connotation: we understand their meaning (by habit, by convention, even naturally) without even having to ourselves them. to explain. This is what allows everything – come to think of it – to signify, to make sense: fictional space is a deliberate, constructed space where everything potentially aims to transmit information. The same is true of the act of smoking. The gesture opens up a whole universe of connotations making it possible to characterize the character on stage. The connotations of cigarettes, in the history of cinema for example, are extremely numerous: we smoke to indicate the sexual tension between two characters, we smoke to indicate that such and such a protagonist is trying to relax, that he is thinking, that he is waits. The very way he smokes betrays his social background; does he smoke with a cigarette holder? with his cigarette between the index and middle fingers? Each way of smoking has a connotation, which allows us to know who smokes, but perhaps also why they smoke. And in our time when we are reminded of the dangers of cigarettes everywhere, we smoke for all these reasons, but also to indicate that the character is going through a bad patch, or even that he has entered a sacrificial, self-destructive mode. Of course, the smoke on stage is “expressive content”. It is even, for our time, a finely coded, complex gesture, precisely because of the taboos that surround it.
More meaning
The judgment, in its final lines, puts forward something a little more nuanced: smoking a cigarette on stage or simply miming this activity means the same thing. The judge even adds: “The law and its regulations do not prevent an actor from simulating the act of smoking on stage in different ways, using various props, artifices or some special effects. It is the surplus of meaning that smoking on stage would contain that is thus questioned. This question is more interesting, in that it opens up to the nature of the performing arts.
We could thus try to answer the equivalence implied by the judge, by recalling that smoking is much more to pull with the mouth on a piece of plastic: it is not only a visual sign, but an auditory – the match that cracks – and olfactory just as well, plunging us back into the different moments when we have been in contact with smokers, when we have smoked. We could try to answer him by pointing out that pretending to smoke – as the judge suggests – is a poor sign. The smoke coming out of the actor’s mouth is a sign, just like the way he places his fingers so as not to get burned, just like the way the actor in front may wish to escape this cloud, or on the contrary wish to enter it.
We could also try to respond to the judge by stressing that smoking on stage is a strong and specific sign, because of the very ban on smoking in public places. Precisely because of the ban, seeing someone smoking indicates to us that we are in a space of creation and freedom, a space of autonomy, capable of taking some distance from the contemporary world to represent it, to think about it, criticize it. Not only is smoking a sign, but smoking even when the activity is prohibited in public is a sign: the sign of art.
Paternalism
But, in the final analysis, to answer on the ground of the question, to try to show the superiority of one sign over another, is already to be doing too much, and to place oneself on a slippery slope. By what authority can a judge say that two profoundly different gestures – so different that one would be allowed and the other prohibited – can mean the same thing? These two gestures have above all distinct meanings, and one could imagine a play where imitating the gesture of smoking would be more appropriate than actually smoking: in an improvisation evening where all the accessories are mimed, we will smile. the improviser who will tilt his head back to exaggerate his gesture. The meaning of expressive gestures is a matter of context, and of creation. There is no dictionary or code of law making it possible to fix a priori the meaning of the signs involved in a creation… To pretend to anticipate the meaning of an artistic sign is already to interfere in the creative process of the creation. artist, and wanting to regulate his work – in other words, to regulate it. It is to limit its creative work and its freedom of expression. For a true creation to be possible, it is essential that the meaning of the signs is forged in the gesture of creation itself, then in the way in which the spectators receive them.
This first paternalism – law as arbiter of artistic sense – implies a second. Why warn the audience at the start of the play that we will be smoking there – as one might do for a play on sensitive subjects – not enough to put it in context? Where does this desire to protect the public from itself – to protect it from what it has chosen for itself? This second paternalism also seems to me contrary to the theatrical gesture, to the freedom implied by the possibility, for the public, of seeing a work as its creator imagined it.