Consciousness, Literature and the Arts

Archive

Volume 2 Number 2, July 2001

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Autobiographical Spectatorship

 

by

 

John Freeman

 

 

This paper addresses the role of interpretation … and it does so through a questioning of the role of text in contemporary performance. By 'text', if only for the purposes of this paper's opening remarks, I am referring to that which is intended to be spoken aloud ... to the text as words rather than the texture of the whole. To the ‘dramatic’ rather than the ‘performance’ text. The paper has a generic theme, which concerns the obligation within university departments to introduce students of Performance to contemporary rather than mainstream practice.  It is hoped that during the course of this paper these seemingly discrete areas will coalesce into a unified argument.

 

This paper will suggest that developments in professional performance are inextricably linked to scholarly experimentation and that innovation in theatre owes much to the university studio as a laboratory of trial, error and creative discovery. It may well be the case that the greatest evil (and I choose the word with some care) of the modular system is that its more rigidly structured assessment criteria combine to work against the notion of progression via a natural and organic process of related study.

 

The greater the compartmentalisation of neatly packaged courses, the less likely the opportunity is afforded the student to get things wrong for the right reasons. Independent modules, with their tendency to preclude cross-fertilisation, chance and the circuitous routes of the enthusiastically idiosyncratic student, have an in-built bias towards the safe and formulaic. Modules, irrespective of the subject, thrive on a tenuous and ubiquitous 'equivalence', on a belief in parity defined by learning outcomes, aims and objectives, which, by the precision of their vernacular, lean heavily towards the prescriptive in place of the provocative. The management of these modules likewise seems at times to amount to little more than job-creation schemes for ex-academics, keen to swell the coffers with one-off courses for sale to the inquisitive non-specialist. The problem of the modular system is that the most surprising and valuable discoveries are often made whilst seeking answers to an entirely different brief.

 

At best, the relationship between university courses in performance and innovative professional practice functions on a reciprocal commitment to work which is at the frontiers of knowledge. This investigative emphasis has resulted, in the last fifteen years, in some of the most radical and influential companies stemming from academic rather than vocational courses in the subject. [1] Essentially, vocational drama schools concentrate on the 'how' of acting and not the 'why' of performance, implicitly reinforcing rather than challenging mainstream practice. The relatively new hybrid courses offering a degree qualification as an aspect of accredited drama training, in keeping with their traditional roles as providers for the 'legitimate' stage, prefer to approach ‘experimental performance’ as historical genre and little else.

 

Theatre history, like the bones of the dead, can be picked apart without fear of reproach. When Brecht said that a good idea, badly taught, dies a long time, he can have had little idea that his own organic, practical and often-contradictory approaches to theatre would metamorphosise into 'Study Packs' for last minute revision. Would be staged with slavish deference by directors clutching their Short Organums and manipulated into the alienation by numbers of the mock-ensembles of countless undergraduate productions. Would lead to the irreversible calcification of form into formula. We would do well to remember Heiner Muller’s claim that to refer to Brecht without challenging him is to betray him[2]. Derrida has shown us that we can develop Muller’s position into the idea that to refer to any text without challenging it is no less a betrayal.

 

And what of 'text'? Contemporary performance displays a predilection towards self-reflectivity, in that the product seeks to exemplify and even foreground the process. This makes the theatrical essentially theoretical. Notions of the mechanics of text are thus central to the ways in which it may be used. If text is taken to be the body of messages bound up in chosen codes in order to create an experience of signification, then it follows that anything spoken is text. Anything spoken within the theatrical frame forms one element of the performance text. As Barthes has argued, 'text' can only exist in expression, inside a system of production which is opening itself to the dynamics of interpretation[3]. Not only is text all that is uttered, but only that which is engaged at that time in a process of signification and signified can be known as 'text’. The playscript on the shelf then, whilst inevitably authored, can no longer stand as a text. The script in performance is a text with multiple authors. Deference to the writer has given way to a tacit approval of directorial and performative interpretation, which has in its own turn given way to reception-theory.

 

This is not so much the eroding of the authority of the author as recognition that it is no longer plausible to accept without question that the writer's words can ever speak for themselves. 'Meaning’ is generated by the dialogue between the one who sees and that which is observed, between the experiencer and the experienced; interpretation is not a deviation from meaning, it is meaning, because all meaning is interpretive. The possibility of a core of absolute meaning in the text, either written or performed, has disappeared. Deconstruction then emerges as the tension between the unreliability of presentation and the unpredicatbility of response.

 

Watching performance is an exercise in the making of value judgements. Despite the best (sic) intentions of directors, spectators choose what to look at and they choose what to see. More than this, they choose how to see. The eye may move but the ‘I’ is fixed. We believe what we see when we believe in the things we are seeing. There is more at stake here than mere suspension of disbelief: it is an acceptance that all acts of belief are acts of interpretation. Contemporary performance seeks to expose as false the solid-seeming ground on which the ‘truth’ of any moment might seem to exist. This is not a contradiction. In telling lies performance tells the truth, because so many of our truths are lies. That which is not a lie is only ever that which we believe to be the truth. Truth and reality are thus subject to plasticity, and contemporary performance reveals this ambiguity in presentation. Truths, like theories, do not always stand the test of time. It is within this spirit of temporary reliability that spectators are increasingly asked to engage with current practice.

 

The spectators’ inevitable interventions in the spectacle are manifest in the personal pronoun. This is an acknowledgement that the ‘I’ has an overt function. We need to remember Barthes’ warning, however, that the ‘I which approaches the text is already itself a plurality of other texts, of codes which are infinite or more precisely, lost.’[4] This applies to the performance maker’s ‘I’ no less than to the ‘I’ of a spectator. The sense we send is the sense we make. This sense is flawed and incomplete, but only inasmuch as it is born of partiality. Spectatorship will always reveal more about the spectator than the spectacle. Approached thus, the choices we make as to what we omit are as significant as the ways that we deal with what remains, and partiality is accepted as an act of revelation.

 

When Geraldine Harris writes of Rose English’s The Double Wedding she explains that ‘the theoretical terrain in which this piece appears to be placed, in and of itself, suggests that in the final analysis this is a show which cannot be interpreted, only described.' [5] This is a negation of the fact that all description is interpretative. What it is that Harris chooses to describe is the result of an interpretative act, not vice versa. To suggest otherwise is to argue for a type of factual reporting that we know is impossible, and, ultimately, undesirable. What makes Harris’ reading of English as interesting as it is is the perspective she brings. As ‘drama’ has its origins in the Greek verb ‘to do’, so ‘theory’, like ‘theatre’, comes from the verb ‘to see’: we can trace both theatre and theory to the word ‘theatron’, meaning ‘a place to view’. The place that we view from is as central to our findings as the subject on which we fix our gaze.

 

If we accept that any reading of any culturally manufactured product, of any art, is an act of interpretation, then we are also recognising that the ‘meaning’ of the work is interpreted, and, as such, that all meaning is interpretative and personal. [6] Every performative act can be consumed in a multiplicity of ways and the ways in which performance is interpreted are subject to innumerable variations of perspective. Meaning can no longer be discussed without referring to the question of who reads the work, of where, of when, of how. In this sense, notions of cultural reception, of aesthetics that are inseparable from the vagaries of reading are central to all aspects of interpretation.

 

Gadamer argues a position of moderate relativism, wherein understanding is always one’s own. In this way, interpretation is neither ‘good’ nor ‘bad’, it simply ‘is’. Prejudice becomes a positive force, to the point where Gadamer can claim that

 

 

Prejudices are not necessarily unjustified and erroneous,

so that they invariably distort the truth. In fact, the

historicity of our existence entails that prejudices, in the

literal sense of the word, constitute the initial directedness

of our whole ability to experience. [7]

 

Prejudices, or ‘preconceptions’, shape the way we start to view, and any subsequent rationalisation is conditioned by this first response. The circle is thus interactive and anticipatory in nature, with the spectator, approaching the performance with the inevitability of projecting certain meanings onto and into the work. This happens in a variety of ways: the theatre space (or the space(s) designated for the theatre) attended; the price of admission; the dress-code required; the previous work of either the creative personnel involved or the ‘theatre’ itself; any reviews encountered; one’s previous and/or abiding predilection towards certain types of work. [8] Gadamer uses the term ‘satisfactory understanding’ to describe the end-result of this relationship between that which is seen and the one who sees; referring to a mediation between the author and the reader which nevertheless stops some way short of licensing an infinity of meanings. To Gadamer’s mind, the intention of the author plays a considerable part in this construction of the satisfactory response.

 

Gadamer has his adversaries, notably E. D. Hirsch Jr., who prefers to speak of ‘valid’ and ‘invalid’ interpretations. For Hirsch, the job of scholarship is to somehow arrive at the author’s own intended meaning.b [9] In this way, the ‘correct’ meaning of, for example, Shaw’s Major Barbara or Robert Wilson’s Einstein on the Beach would always lie within their own ‘authorial’ intention, rather than relating to it in the Gadamerian sense. Where Gadamer embraces subjectivity, Hirsch favours the assumed objectivity of meaning arrived at through archival evidence and literary rather than dramatic excavation. [10] The text is thus a puzzle for the scholar to solve, with, presumably, the prize of meaning as the ultimate goal ... a goal which is only ever attainable by the scholar. Both Gadamer’s and Hirsch’s positions are exposed and subsequently attacked by Roland Barthes. [11] For Barthes the author’s voice is banished entirely from the equation of meaning, thus

 

          We know now that a text is not a line of words releasing

a single ‘theological’ meaning (the ‘message’ of the

Author-God) but a multi-dimensional space in which

a variety of writings, none of them original, blend and

clash. The text is a tissue of quotations drawn from

innumerable centres of culture .... Once the Author is

removed, the claim to decipher a text becomes quite

futile. To give a text an Author is to impose a limit on

that text, to furnish it with a final signified, to close

the writing. Such a conception suits criticism very well,

the latter then allotting itself the important task of

discovering the Author beneath the work: when the

Author has been found, the text is ‘explained’ –

victory to the critic. [12]

 

There is more at stake here than a surface understanding of semiotics, an ability to rationalise, both in a directorial and analytical fashion the signification of signs. The realisation that interpretation is always already an act of re-creation stems from the polysemic nature of performance itself. The codes on which performances are built are complex and, semiotics notwithstanding, the ways in which these codes are deciphered are never absolute. [13] That which some will regard as the exemplification of an ‘incorrect’ reading is embraced by others as an exemplar of a post-semiotic world of polysemia. Italian art critics coined the term inesspressionismo to describe that art which, through the creation of moments of loaded ambiguity, aspires to a state whereby it means whatever the viewer chooses it to mean. For those of us who regard the Derridaen idea that things may not mean what their creator intended as an eminently acceptable philosophical positioning, inesspressionismo, or inexpressionism, can still seem like a leap into an excess of liberality. In reality, inexpressionism differs little from the negotiated readings inherent in all forms of communication, with the perceiver incorporating ‘intended’ and ‘accidental’ responses to any given subject. As indeterminate works, performances cannot but leave spaces that the spectator will fill in in the process of spectating; the spectator, therefore, fixes that meaning in the process of spectatorship. That the work means something else to other spectators, as it will to the creator and any participants, is to be embraced.

 

Inexpressionism fails as a philosophical as well as a critical phenomenon because of the impossibility of creating an entirely ‘open’ text: indications always exist, whether they are recognised as such or not. If the text is never open then it follows that subjectivity is always compromised by indications. Performance draws on the preconceptions of a spectator. There is no idealised watcher. A spectator is guided by the structure of the performance, which suggests that the range of interpretations, although infinite in the subtlety of their variations, is chiefly situated within the artist’s version of events. [14] Meanings are suggested, although not demanded, by the rigidity or otherwise of the codes in operation, and these codes will, for the most part, be manipulated by the artist, by the creator of the work.

 

‘The spectator is the decoder whose code overlaps that of the performer, the encoder’[15], and the stage figure is only one element in the set of signs that offer signification. The stage action is also only a partial sign. A number of other codes convey what it is that is happening, and how it is that this might be read: the set, the lighting, music, the space in which the work is performed. From a directorial perspective, no one of these enjoys an a priori status over the others.

 

As the making of performance is a process plagued with doubt, so too is the process of spectatorship. Of particular significance to the spectator may be those elements that remained (and remain) unknown to the makers/performers. And the spectator is as capable of determining the meaning of a performance as its creator(s). We should heed Zygmunt Bauman’s assertion that the spectator ‘understands as much as his knowledge allows him…. If the author sends his signals from an island whose interior he has not and could not explore in full, the reader is a passenger who walks the deck of a sailing ship he does not navigate. The meaning is the instant of their encounter.’ [16]

 

All performance can be regarded as autobiographical, inasmuch as all performers will bring something of an autobiographical self to their work [17]. This phenomenon will differ in degree from one performer to another, but authorial presence, shaped by personal history and intent, will remain. In this way all performance is a document of the discoursal self.  Artists make work not as a result of being divorced from the structures that determine human behaviour, but precisely because they choose to enter into a world where they are able to make performative that choice given to each of us through biography and society. [18] As such, performance emerges as the outcome of an always specific and individual response to a body of determinants. The artist operates through choice, and the choices available are no more or less determined than the impetus and ability to work through the choices made.

 

Any work that makes a claim for truthfulness is compromised at source by the inevitability of its mediation. The truth in performance, no less than in performance writing, cannot be regarded as either absent or present … the differences between production and reception make any such claim redundant.  We might argue that the here-and-nowness of performance makes it more ‘truthful’ than the there-and-thenness of writing; however, performance is no less subject to mediation than is written text. Any apparent immediacy is illusory. The moment is loaded, and only partly by the performance maker. To say that activities take place in the same context in which they are read is to disregard the fact that the frame around performance is always also a contextualising framework within the spectator.

 

This takes us some way towards an understanding of truth’s adulterated transference - as an omnipresent act of spectatorial deconstruction – it also throws into doubt the possibility of truth having any currency for the performer. If truth has no possibility of ‘successful transmission’, then its value as currency is reduced; equally, we have to question the extent to which a performance maker has an adequate understanding of how and why performative choices have been made. What we think is the truth may not always be so.

‘Every practical procedure … presupposes a theoretical perspective of some kind’. [19] With the practice of performance, theories - some of the theories of postmodernism, for example - are part of the conceptual apparatus of making work. In this way, performances are as much dialogues with the makers’ selves as a dialogue between the performance and its spectators. Performance then is a record of ‘a’ truth and not ‘the’ truth. It is a characteristic of language that webs of meaning are generated and that any and all texts are necessarily self-contradictory. Performances are no different. They are, in Wittgenstein’s terms, language games. [20] Works which, in seeking to utilise the language of performance, are handicapped ‘because the attempt to do so itself constitutes a (further) language game.’ [21] For the most part, we can substitute the word ‘truth’ for ‘significance’, inasmuch as imbuing an occurrence with significance is less problematic than regarding that same occurrence as ‘true’ and incontestable.

If we accept that the certainty of ‘truth’ is lost to us, which is a theory rather than a fact, then it becomes difficult to see any space beyond this for theory to occupy. Interpretation per se relies upon arriving at a distinction between what is offered as the surface of a text and what is thought to exist beneath it … interpretation is in this sense the making of a distinction between surface and depth. If all that we are able to say is that something happened, or did not (to take Baudrillard’s assertions that the Gulf War never really took place) then there is little left for theory to do. [22] If the degree zero of postmodernism is left unchallenged, if truth is to remain as a disenfranchised concept, then the idea of academic honesty is equally bankrupt, for we cannot believe in one type of ‘honesty’ in a world where no truth can be said to exist.

 

This contradiction is a part of making performance. The printed word has a permanence (and a status) that is denied to the ephemerality of performance. However, the existence of live performance in the now imbues it with a different relationship with truth. The work seen may be illusory, but the seeing of it, in this space and at this time, is rarely, if ever, in doubt. Readers of words written are not usually witnesses to the process of writing. Words, no matter how truthfully they may read, are constructed in the elsewhere, whereas performances, no matter how other they may seem, are constructed in the here and now.  Where performance charts a wrestling with the contradictions between truth and lies that contradiction is undermined by performance writing that functions as though truth were something identifiable and transferable.

 

Contemporary performance is predisposed towards text which aims for distance rather than empathy. For the relative truthfulness of description rather than the sham of imitation. For a recognition of the device of performance rather than the fake spontaneity of a form where the aim is to hide the rehearsal.

 

This approach empowers the endless alternatives of reception-theory, and this is a negation of the importance of sub-textual analysis. Sub-text suggests that any reading which contradicts the writer's or director's own is emphatically wrong. Sub-text implies that all we need to know is somewhere hidden in the words. Sub-text, though interpretive, has a logical point of closure (how many 'meanings', after all, can be intentionally buried in the dialogue of characters?) "Who owns the play?" is no longer a question of directorial interpretation versus authorial intent, but a plea to be told that whilst the play might belong to the author, the performance belongs to anyone who witnesses it, and from every point or side of the stage.

 

Is it possible then to 'teach' a play? Clearly not, in the old sense of ascribing a given 'hidden truth' to the work, which can then be determined by an examination of established scholarly interpretations. The text in performance belongs to the receiver and the concept of a misreading or a misinterpretation becomes redundant. The playwright's intentions are not so much stripped of their relevance or usefulness as included in an ever-shifting matrix of information which, whilst denying the concept of authorial ownership, cannot fail to recognise the writer's role in the assemblage of given codes of fluid meaning. We would do well to remember, as Peggy Phelan tells us, that representation will always convey considerably more than it intends. [23]

 

The key question in theatre is not ‘what is happening on stage?’ so much as ‘what is happening to me?’ Not ‘what the butler saw’ or even ‘what the butler is seeing or might see next’ but ‘what can I see?’ For the ‘I’ of the spectator is inseparable from that same spectator’s ‘eye’. The spectatorial ‘I’ is in motion from moment to moment, moving at pace but never fully in line with the performance made ‘real’ as it is watched. In this way, performance no more imitates life than life could be said to imitate performance ... apparent, and even artfully designed similarities are at once both more and less than they may seem

 

Theatre resists change at the same time as it appears to embrace it. Performances are a series of conventions, and it is only when a shared understanding of the performative codes in operation exists between the watcher and the watched that the process of presentation and reception aspires to ‘successful’ communication. The willingness of an audience to suspend its collective disbelief is as integral to the 'as if' of mimetic drama as the actors' commitment to representation. This knowledge of convention is no less vital when dealing with contemporary performance. For, just as we know that the poison which kills the good Sweet Prince is only potent within the fictional content of the play, so must we realise that, in certain areas of work, the 'play' itself is essentially without meaning. This absence of a limited, intended meaning can work towards a prioritising of the 'event' of performance over and above the 'object' of the play.

 

The reason contemporary performance continues to reject the re-presentation of traditional practice is that this practice seeks to present as significant that same object (the play, the theme, the ideology) which, even in its apparent absence, has been pre-dominant since Aristotle. Contemporary performance demonstrates a concern with the difference between event (performance) and object (that which is being performed); this concern results in, and indeed rests upon, the process of performing performance rather than presenting the re-visited glorification of classicism.

 

This can be regarded as a form of anti-didacticism. Anti-didacticism, however, does not amount to apoliticism. Any performance with its roots in mass culture at the same time as its text denies an unequivocal meaning is dealing implicitly with a process of empowering the perceiver. One cannot be reduced to the level of passive consumership when there is no packaged object to consume. In foregrounding an active subjectivity the watcher becomes as vital to the event of performance as the watched.

 

The priorotising of the presentational (the here and now) emphasis of performance at the expense of the literary (that which has been) nature of theatre is a way of making clear that all performance has to be viewed as process. All work becomes work in progress. Once this initial tenet has been accepted, it is natural that any subsequent critical discourse about process should be seen as an integral part of the performance itself and not, as has been previously held, as a separate (and separating) accompaniment.

 

Any and all attempted objectivity is obsolete; for we cannot report as 'fact' that which exists in no concrete form. When we label performance as 'abstract' or 'meaningless', we are actually recognising a series of subtractions: narrative coherence, character, linear activity etc., and yet we are conditioned to accept this subtraction as an artistic inferiority. We do so as if the space where apparent logic used to sit is somehow transformed into an inaccessible vacuum.

 

The performance no longer serves the text; it is the text, the once meaning-laden object, which is now used to serve the performance. Similarly, ‘meaning’ can no longer be regarded as something (some thing) that exists to enhance the lives of spectators. Something which, when communicated ‘correctly’, will travel through time and space sans interference. 

 

Performance exists to encourage a tiny percentage of the infinite number of ways of looking at a given event … to show us certain things from a particular perspective and to invite our views. Nothing more. Performance has no monopoly on entertainment, enlightenment, celebration or catharsis, and there is a strong argument that it satisfies none of these. Its continued existence is valuable because, and only because, it seeks attention and we attend … it seeks interpretation and we interpret. The most potent performance will always be that which facilitates the widest possible variety of interpretations, because performance is only ever potent when it succeeds in providing us with a space in which to look.

 

As with performance, so it is with documentation. These words are presented as an accumulation of intentions. The sentence and paragraph structures are possessed of intentionality. The font seeks to persuade. The words, flat on the page or screen, strive to evoke ideas about performance at the same time as they are antithetical to all that is performative. In writing about an absence of meaning I write in order that meaning is conveyed. In discussing performance-in-denial-of-closure I seek now to close this paper with an emphasis that ensures my thoughts are also yours, that the reader trusts both the teller and the tale. Where Derrida (after Flaubert) is able to make the claim that he is writing to you without knowing what he is going to say [24] I am claiming to be writing to you without knowing what you are going to think.

 

 

“There is no such thing as an objective, innocent,

primary document. The document … is the result,

above all, of an assemblage, whether conscious

or unconscious, of the history, the time and the society

which have produced it, and also of the ensuing

periods through which it has continued to be used, even

if perhaps in silence…. The document is a monument ….

In the end, there is no documentary truth.

Every document is a lie. [25]

 

 

Think what you will.

 

 

Notes

 

1.    1 Keefe, J (1995) A Report on the European Mime and Physical Theatre Workshop Symposium. Moving into Performance. (M.A.G), p.24.

2.    Drain, Richard (1995) 20th Century Theatre a Sourcebook. (Routledge, London)

3.    Barthes, Roland (1977) From Work to Text. (Fontana, London)

4.    Barthes, R. S/Z, trans. Richard Miller, Hill & Wang, New York, 1974. p. 10

5.    Harris, G. Staging Femininities. Manchester University Press, 1999. p. 23

6.    ‘By interpretation I mean here a conscious act of the mind which illustrates a certain code, certain ‘rules’ of interpretation.’ Sontag, S Against Interpretation. Anchor, New York, 1988. p.5

7.    Gadamer, H. G. Philosophical Hermeneutics (1976). London, University of California Press. p. 9.

8.    See Beckerman, B Theatre Audiences. Routledge, London & New York, 1993.

9.    See the section on Hirsch in Bateman, A Philosophy of Art. Routledge, London & New York, 1997.

10.           Hirsch’s views on interpretation can be found in Validity in Interpretation, 1967. London: Yale University Press; and The Aims of Interpretation, 1976. London: University of Chicago Press.

11.           See Image, Music, Text. Roland Barthes. Fontana press, London, 1977, particularly the chapter entitled The Death of the Author, pp. 142-148.

12.           ibid. pp. 46-147.

13.           See Esslin, M Fields of Drama. Methuen, London, 1992 and Eco, U ‘Between Author and Text’ in Interpretation and Overinterpretation. Collini, S (ed.) Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1992.

14.           Bennett, S (1992)

15.           Reeder, Roberta. ‘An Encounter of Codes’ (TDR. Vol. 23 p. 86)

16.           Bauman, Z Hermeneutics and Social Science: approaches to understanding. Hutchinson, London, 1978 p. 229`

17.           See Clark, R and Ivanic, R The Politics of Writing. Routledge, London & New York, 1997 for a discussion of the ways in which the self is always made present in one’s writing.

18.           Bohm, D Causality and Chance in Modern Physics. Harper & Row, New York, 1958. p.96

19.           Barry, P, 1995. p. 35

20.           Lechte, J Fifty Key Contemporary Thinkers. Routledge, 1994. p. 247

21.           ibid

22.           For an elaboration of Baudrillard’s thoughts, see Norris, C Uncritical Theory: Postmodernism, Intellectuals and The Gulf War. Lawrence & Wishart, 1992.

23.           Phelan, Peggy (1993) Unmarked: the Politics of Performance. (Routledge, London)

24.           Derrida, J ‘Telepathy’. (Trans. Nicholas Royle. ) in Oxford Literary Review, 10, pp.3-41

25.           De Marinis, Marco. ‘A Faithful Betrayal of Performance: Notes on the Use of Video in Theatre’ in New Theatre Quarterly. Vol. 1 No. 4, November, 1985. p. 383