Gestural Trace（艺术史学者Leo Steinberg 口述自传选译）－片段01
SESSION ONE:
17 FEBRUARY, 1998
1998年2月17日
[Tape I, Side One]
【母带第一卷，A面】
SMITH:
Okay. Could you say something, so I can test the mike?
（采访者）史密斯：
好了。或许您可以先说几句开场白，让我测试一下麦克风？
STEINBERG:
Let me get my cigarettes. And let me tell you how I feel about speaking off the cuff. When I began to lecture in public, at the Metropolitan Museum, in the late fifties, I was still a graduate student. I thought there was some virtue in coming across as spontaneous, so I just wrote down a few key words to give me a sense of sequence, but I was under terrible tension. I feared that I might forget something important, words would not come to me, I would become repetitious and stumble. Giving lectures was a matter of intense anxiety. As I became more experienced at public lecturing over the decades, I relied less and less on improvisation. I was rather heartened to read in an interview with Merce Cunningham, the choreographer, that he never allowed his dancers to improvise on stage, because the moment you begin to improvise you start falling back on cliches. I spoke to Cunningham about it once. He thought that this was obvious. So for the last twenty years, my lectures have been written out in detail, including every impromptu aside, and I don't have to worry during the lecture; I do all my worrying before. I try to write the lecture not as publishable prose, but as speech to a living audience. It's written the way a playwright might write dialogue, to sound spontaneous. Now, given that background, I have grave misgivings about interviews, in which you do in fact improvise.
（受访者）斯坦伯格：
我得先去拿我的烟。那就和你聊聊我对即兴发言这事儿怎么看吧。我从50年代末开始讲授公开课，在大都会博物馆，当时我还只是个研究生。我曾经认为，从容自若的即兴发言能让演讲者看起来更具信服力，所以只写下了一些关键词作为演讲思路的提纲，结果却是压力山大。在整场讲座过程中，我一直心神不定，生怕自己遗漏了哪个重点，脑子几乎一片空白，讲得冗长重复且磕磕绊绊。讲公开课因此成了我的一个心头大患。在经过长达数十年讲座经验的积累后，我对临场发挥的兴致反而越来越低了。编舞家莫尔西·库宁汉姆的一篇访问让我记忆犹新，因为他不允许手下的舞者在表演过程中即兴发挥，他的看法是，你一旦开始即兴表演，日后必将形成对某种创作套路的依赖。我后来还和库宁汉姆本人当面交流了这个问题。他觉得这是显而易见的现象。在最近20年里，我会为所有公开讲演准备详细的发言稿，甚至包括每一句看似即兴的插科打诨，只有这样才能化解我在讲演过程中的焦虑，因为所有焦虑在讲演开始前已经消化掉了。而我不会按照学术论文的标准去备稿，我在写稿的时候预设的受众必定是活生生的人。我用剧作家写对白的方式编排我的遣词造句，竭力使其生动得像是即兴讲演一样。在这一背景下，我对访谈对话这种形式难免有些疑虑，因为我必须即兴发言。
SMITH:
史密斯：
You must improvise, yes.
是这样没错，对话是即兴的。
STEINBERG:
I hate the way I sound when I hear an interview played back. I think, oh God, this is so platitudinous and awkward. So when you ask me if I have been interviewed before, the answer is, a few times, rarely, and always with extreme reluctance. But I will try to do my best, since this is your work.
斯坦伯格：
我非常讨厌听采访录音的回放。我会觉得……我的天，怎么又是那套又俗又尬的说辞。所以你要问我以前有没接受过采访的话，我的回答是有几次，但极少，而且每次我都是极不情愿的。不过我会尽我所能配合你的工作，毕竟这是你的职责所在。
SMITH:
Okay. Well, one of the things we are interested in is accessing a form of discourse that exists in the spontaneous, in the oral, which no doubt contains a lot of cliches, because every form of expression falls back on genres and motifs that are pre-established. So we're not necessarily looking for brilliant nuggets of original wisdom.
史密斯：
好。嗯，其实我们开展这个项目，正是希望通过这种即兴的、口述的表达形式去观照人物，我同意这一形式毫无疑问会落入种种既有套路之中，因为每一种表达形式都依赖于已经构建起来的类型和母题而存在。从访谈中挖掘出什么空前绝后的原创理论并非我们此行的目的。
STEINBERG:
斯坦伯格：
If you were, I would say you're at the wrong address.
如果你们真那么想，我会奉劝你们还是趁早出门左转，另请高明吧。
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