Sozita Goudouna "Personhood and the Allure of the Object" in Critical Issues: The Visual in...

Edited by

Adele Anderson, Filipa Malva and Chris Berchild

The Visual in Performance Practice

Series Editors Dr Robert Fisher Dr Daniel Riha

Advisory Board

Dr Alejandro Cervantes-Carson Dr Peter Mario Kreuter Professor Margaret Chatterjee Martin McGoldrick Dr Wayne Cristaudo Revd Stephen Morris Mira Crouch Professor John Parry Dr Phil Fitzsimmons Paul Reynolds Professor Asa Kasher Professor Peter Twohig Owen Kelly Professor S Ram Vemuri

Revd Dr Kenneth Wilson, O.B.E

A Critical Issues research and publications project. http://www.inter-disciplinary.net/critical-issues/

The Ethos Hub ‘Performance’

2012

Critical Issues

The Visual in Performance Practice:

Interdisciplinary Perspectives

Edited by

Adele Anderson, Filipa Malva and Chris Berchild

Inter-Disciplinary Press

Oxford, United Kingdom

© Inter-Disciplinary Press 2012 http://www.inter-disciplinary.net/publishing/id-press/ The Inter-Disciplinary Press is part of Inter-Disciplinary.Net – a global network for research and publishing. The Inter-Disciplinary Press aims to promote and encourage the kind of work which is collaborative, innovative, imaginative, and which provides an exemplar for inter-disciplinary and multi-disciplinary publishing. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means without the prior permission of Inter-Disciplinary Press. Inter-Disciplinary Press, Priory House, 149B Wroslyn Road, Freeland, Oxfordshire. OX29 8HR, United Kingdom. +44 (0)1993 882087 ISBN: 978-1-84888-066-5 First published in the United Kingdom in eBook format in 2012. First Edition.

Table of Contents

Introduction ix Adele Anderson

Part 1 Image, Illusion and Reality: Objects in New Contexts

The Reality of Illusion made Apparent through the 3 Verity of Theatre Celia Morgan

The Semiotics of Images in Romeo Castellucci’s Theatre 15 Stamatia Neofytou-Georgiou

Exploding Contexts 23 Michael Spencer

In Front of Meaning: Revisiting Surfaces after 31 Nietzsche’s Corpus Andrew Cope

Part 2 Spatial Imagery and Visuality: The Seen and the Unseen

A Space within a Space: Contemporary Scenographic 43 Approaches in Historical Theatrical Spaces Sofia Pantouvaki

Theatre for All: The Scenic Contraption in the Work 55 of O’Bando Filipa Malva

Spatial Imagery: Visualization Strategies in Two Dance 65 Performances of Romeo and Juliet Bilha Blum and Liora Malka Yellin

Phantoms, Phantasms and Fantasies of Beckett’s Tramps 75 and Ashfaq Ahmed’s Pakhiwaars: Game of the Seen and the Unseen in East and West Humaira Ahmad

Part 3 Identity and Characterisation: Performing Bodies

Τhe Identity-Character Crisis in Greek Theater and 87 Its Repercussion in Costume Design Chryssa Mantaka

Something Rich and Strange: Drawing a Visual 97 Narrative from the Text Anne Curry

The Pain is Visible: Presence in Pain in the Aesthetics 109 of Pina Bausch and in Buddhist Teachings Einav Rosenblit

Disability Performance: Emancipating the Spectators 117 Adele Anderson

Dreams of Djinni and Djuna: Performance and 127 Performativity in the Dance of the Seven Veils Drew Eisenhauer

Part 4 Persons and Objects: Performing Technologies

The Gaze of the Other: Mask and Recognition in 137 Greek Drama David Nichols

Personhood and the Allure of the Object 145 Sozita Goudouna

From Assistant to Performer: The Changing Role 155 of Technologies in Digital Dance Zeynep Gündüz

Time of Flight: Biodigital Feedback and 165 Performance Design John Carroll and Richard Xu

Introduction

Adele Anderson

The inaugural volume of the conference proceedings of Performance: Visual Aspects of Performance Practice is an outgrowth of two related ideas: first, that visual aspects of theatre and its many related forms in performance are inter-disciplinary arts in themselves, engaging all art-forms and drawing ideas from the humanities, historical studies, social and human sciences, cultural studies, philosophy, and history of ideas. Second, the conference and proceedings have been informed by the idea that the best learning and most fruitful resources for collaboration can be realized through an interactive process of mutual and reciprocal dialogue that transcends traditional disciplinary boundaries. The chapters and conversations of the Performance 1 conference meetings, held in Prague, Czech Republic in November 2010, spanned a great range of performance practices, experiences, and roles, from performers, designers, and artistic directors to visual arts practitioners, educators, humanists, theorists, and scholars. Individual delegates often represented two or more roles or kinds of experience with visual aspects of performance practice.

The conference delegates examined performance practice not only from artistic points of view but also from cultural, sociological, historical, psychological, semiological, and anthropological viewpoints, as well as from emerging technological and educational perspectives. We considered performance practice as an interface within which the work of many roles, such as the director, actor, movement director and choreographer, scenographer (set and costume designer), musical director, composer, lighting designer, and sound designer meet. From these multiple viewpoints we were able to include in our discussions aspects and issues that involved the full scope of the theatrical process, from initial concept to final realization, and we considered it from the varied vantage points of its creators, the material, and its cultural and historical contexts, as well as from the perspectives of performers, settings, and spectators. The proceedings accordingly reflect great breadth and variety as well as the dynamic and multiple intersections among emerging themes, problems, and ideas.

The following sketch of the volume’s plan will illustrate some specific interests and points of focus that delegates held in common along with some enriching points of exchange, difference, and convergence – among many – that we discovered in dialogue and that connected the chapters to each other in fruitful ways.

The chapters in Part 1 reflect their authors’ thematic interest in images, illusion, and reality, as well as in relationships to objects and contexts in performance. The first two chapters, by Celia Morgan and by Stamatia Neofytou-Georgiou, both address images, illusion, imagination, and the nature of perceived reality in theatre. Morgan’s ‘The Reality of Illusion made Apparent through the Verity of Theatre’

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does this by exploring parallels and paradoxes between Western theatre’s pursuit of the real and Noh drama’s careful objectivity and reflection, notably its tradition of the mask as real. Neofytou-Georgiou, in ‘The Semiotics of Images in Romeo Castellucci’s Theatre’, examines that d irector’s extreme universe of powerful images in which the spectators’ intense experience moves beyond text into a visual language, away from naturalism and towards an onstage semiotics populated by live animals, intense sounds, suffering and terrifying subjects, extreme bodies, and symbolically sculptural machines.

The next two chapters, by Michael Spencer and by Andrew Cope, also address illusion and reality, but in different ways: Spencer’s ‘Exploding Contexts’ draws upon his pedagogical experience with the next generation of visual performance makers to identify new dispositions and terminologies in their ‘disciplines of refusal’; his emerging performance artists are concerned simultaneously with empowerment, interactivity, process, and the personal in a theatre that explodes beyond conventional settings and audience and into everyday encounters. And in Cope’s chapter, ‘In Front of Meaning: Revisiting Surfaces after Neitzsche’s Corpus’, we find an extended example that resonates closely with these new dispositions. Cope’s approach, inspired by Nietzsche’s account of material encounter, explores relations of sensual becoming in interface with qualities, surfaces, and objects, whose dialectical engagement makes new meaning possible between performance and material culture.

The chapters in Part 2 share interest in spatial imagery and the use of what is visible and invisible in theatre. In their chapters, Sofia Pantouvaki and Filipa Malva both investigate the challenges and potentials of scenographic design for particular performance strategies and contexts. In ‘A Space within a S pace: Contemporary Scenographic Approaches in Historical Theatrical Spaces’, Pantouvaki discusses how pre-existing and historically significant architectural space contributes, shapes, and complicates modern scenography. She compares and assesses design strategies over fifteen years of productions in the ancient and world-known Roman Odeon of Herodes Atticus, which continues to host contemporary performances. Malva, in ‘Theatre for All: The Scenic Contraption in the Work of O Bando’, examines the evolution of the O Bando theatre company’s scenographic practices of developing fully-integrated pieces or ‘contraptions’, from the company’s inception as a 1970s children’s theatre to its current engaging ‘theatre for all’; she offers O Bando as a m odel for the investigation of a scenography that is both integral and audience-specific.

The next two chapters also address spatial imagery as visual strategy, while turning their comparative focus to the spatial and narrative imagery, intertextuality, and distinctive visual strategies of particular productions. In ‘Spatial Imagery: Visualization Strategies in Two Dance Performances of Romeo and Juliet’, Bilha Blum and Liora Malka consider the very different spatial and visual worlds evoked by the Preljocaj/Bilal realization, in contrast with the Nureyev/Frigerio production

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of the ballet that is arguably the western world’s most famous performance story of love and death. The authors contrast the socio-cultural mode of perceiving in Preljocaj’s visual approach with the more traditional and textual-aesthetical reading of Nureyev. In ‘Phantoms, Phantasms, and Fantasies of Beckett’s Tramps and Ashfaq Ahmed’s Pakhiwaars: Game of the Seen and the Unseen in East and West’, Humaira Ahmad compares narrative imagery and use of the real and unreal and the seen and unseen in Ahmed’s Phantasm with Beckett’s Waiting for Godot. She finds connections in the ways that both dramatists give life and presence to the act of waiting among their socially marginalized characters, a s ocial and human experience that is held in common across very different cultural traditions.

The chapters in Part 3 bring varied perspectives to the consideration of identity, characterization, and the body. Chryssa Mantaka, in ‘The Identity-Character Crisis in Greek Theater and Its Repercussion in Costume Design’, traces the fragmentation, independent realities, and alienation of character which, in parallel with the modern crisis in portraiture, have come to reflect new identities of anonymity and project their emphasis on the aesthetics of the director rather than the actor as the creator of roles. Mantaka explores the effects of these changes on the art of costume design, noting departures from aesthetic organization and the human presence in performance that happens without characters; she illustrates these shifts through contemporary examples. Anne Curry, in ‘Something Rich and Strange . . . Drawing a V isual Narrative from the Text’, presents a co ntrasting perspective on costume design, as she emphasizes the physical act of figurative drawing as a means for exploration of meaning and interpretation of character, drawn from Shakespearean texts for the Royal Shakespeare Company. Curry describes and illustrates her process and method, which include experiential learning, experimentation, and visual response to the text.

A common interest in the next three chapters is the visibility of the body in the construction and performance of identity, with particular attention to the ambiguity and mutability of performing bodies. In ‘The Pain is Visible: Presence in Pain in the Aesthetics of Pina Bausch and in Buddhist Teachings’, Einav Rosenblit relates the presence and visibility of pain and incompletion of the body in dance works by the late Pina Bausch to Buddhist concepts of suffering as a law of existence. Rosenblit analyzes the Bausch work Kontakthof, which in a particular version features visibly vulnerable older bodies. She connects that work with Buddhist acceptance of pain as something which must be sincerely observed, and finds implications for the healing powers of the dance. Adele Anderson’s ‘Disability Performance: Emancipating the Spectators’ interrogates spectators’ perceptions by applying an avant-garde confrontational sensibility to dance with disability in a conventional genre. Viewing changes in the work of wheelchair dancer Kitty Lunn, Anderson asks whether and to what extent spectators can be emancipated from stigmatized aesthetic readings. In his chapter ‘Dreams of Djinni and Djuna: Performance and Performativity in the Dance of the Seven Veils’, Drew Eisenhaur

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considers the influence of consciously constructed performance on identity formation in an exploration of Judith Butler’s concept of performativity. He examines commentaries from the modern writer Djuna Barnes on Sapphic orientalist performance and discusses a p erformer of contemporary transsexual striptease (‘Jeannie’), offering these examples as a critique of audience expectations of what the performer makes visible.

In Part 4 the final group of chapters usefully troubles conventional distinctions between persons and objects, reconfiguring notions of the subject and object in performance and raising new visual and conceptual possibilities through alternative interpretations, practices, and emerging digital technology. The chapters by David Nichols and by Sozita Goudouna both explore visual presence, the concept of personhood, and personal identity as well as objects and objectification, while approaching these concepts from very different vantage points. In ‘The Gaze of the Other: Mask and Recognition in the Greek Drama’, David Nichols explores the symbolism of the prosopon, standing ‘before the gaze’ of the other, to suggest a philosophy of personal identity based on social or communal recognition as precondition. At the same time he identifies the paradox that this is accomplished via a mask as a non-living object. Sozita Goudouna’s ‘Personhood and the Allure of the Object’ considers persons and objects within the recent history of minimalist performance practices that restrict interpretation, blur distinctions between aesthetic and ordinary experiences, and subtract representation to emphasize ‘objecthood’ in performance art. Goudouna comments on anti-theatricality and the concept of ‘presence’ or the immediacy of lived experience, describing the ways in which minimalist dance has used the body as genuine raw material for the stage.

The two chapters that conclude Part 4 and round out these proceedings take the discussion of performance and visuality into the new territories of emerging technologies. In ‘From Assistant to Performer: The Changing Role of Technologies in Digital Dance’, Zeynep Gündüz draws upon critical and spectator responses to argue for a shift in traditional hierarchies of perceptual importance of technology relative to performance, as she describes emerging partnerships of dance with motion-tracking real time interactive technology. Gündüz illustrates this shift in her case study of digital dance as a performance that achieves a duet of mutual interaction between dancer and technology. And in the final chapter of the volume, ‘Time of Flight: Biodigital Feedback and Performance Design’, John Carroll and Richard Xu report on in-progress work with an interactive, autokinetic performance design technology, which receives bodily movement as input for the generation of image and sound projection. Carroll and Xu describe how the Time of Flight camera, using infrared image data, allows the extrapolation of three-dimensional data in real time, and how the performer, without need of special accessories or trackers, can use Labanotation to improvise reflexive biodigital performances involving sound, image, and movement together.

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As the above descriptions will undoubtedly suggest, on many occasions in the conference presenters across the sections of the program discovered important insights and common points of interest to share with one another. Just a few of the emerging and crosscutting themes included the importance of the unseen in relation to that which is seen, and related artistic and semiotic choices about what is shown and that which is not shown; the potential readings and meanings of persona, mask, and personhood; the establishment, fluidity, and fragmentation of identities through performance and performativity in various deployments of visible bodies; the relationships, spaces, and distances among and between performers, performances, media, technologies, and spectators; and importantly, challenges to the primacy of text and a recognition of new aesthetic regimes, visual vocabularies, languages, sign systems, and the visual turn in narrative and imagery. Finally, much interesting discussion focused on emerging visual aspects of performance that are global and technological simultaneously as they are personal and immediate, and on the new cultural emphasis of humans’ connection to the non-human world and the potential of human-object interactivity.

We hope that readers will find all of the ideas in this volume as exciting and enriching as we have, and we anticipate that they will discover further possibilities in these interdisciplinary explorations. We look forward to continuing many of these dialogues and directions in future Performance conferences.

Part 1

Image, Illusion and Reality: Objects in New Contexts

The Reality of Illusion made Apparent through the Verity of Theatre

Celia Morgan

Abstract The verity and illusion of theatre are not the contradictions they might seem but rather are entangled in a paradoxical configuration that mimics the illusory nature of reality. What we are presented with is only part of the enactment. Theatre itself acts as a mask that at once conceals and reveals. What this chapter aims to demonstrate is the dramatic presence of the withheld and it contends that both the presented and unrepresented within performance and theatre are equally present. The visual impact of performance is not constructed solely through its tangible parts but through very particular choices about what to leave out. It is not just the seen but also the imagined, the conjured resonance of the implied that performs the visual act. The unmasked illusion of theatre is just as, if not more than effective as a pretended realism or naturalism and thus it is the symbolic language of suggestion within scenography that yields the greatest effect. The participatory imagination of the spectator is presented as an active and vital tool yet inherently limited. The significance of the mask is reconsidered and presented as a metaphoric act that mirrors the nature of perceived reality. Like the mask of persona of Kyoto philosopher Nishitani Keiji, this mask is ‘through and through real’. Key Words: Seeing of not-seeing, paradox, reality of illusion, symbolic, Zeami, Beckett, mask, verity.

*****

The roots of theatre are nourished by its origins in ritual and myth. These roots are far from carbonised relics of another time, their élan vital comes from a source deeper than the rationalising mechanics of a demythologized age. In a brief but authoritative overview of theatre’s projected future Martin Esslin is of the opinion that theatre provides the possibility of a

return to the roots of what need not be called religious experience, but which might be called a contact with the ultimate archetypes of the human condition, the awe and mystery, the grandeur of man’s lonely confrontation with himself, the universe and the great nothingness that surrounds it.1

Simmering within this impassioned apotheosis are the essential ingredients of a

theatre that is the reality of illusion. Harbinger to the overthrowing of a


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representational legacy the italicised is salutes the evanescent horizon where reality and illusion merge.

It may be that theatre has never actually severed the connection with its historical past, that the ritual stains of sacrifice have lingered, and present within all performance are the crystallised forms of a Dionysian offering. This admittedly seems unlikely especially in the context of Brechtian theatre, which purposefully directs both audience and participant away from potential cultish reverie. Nonetheless a certain longing of a metaphysical-transcendent kind pervades the vicissitudes of theatre’s narrative. The longing manifests as an inexorable search for reality enacted under the eminent auspices of truth. The multifarious incarnations of theatrical form all striving incessantly for authenticity not only furnish us with most eloquent evidence of the motility and subjectivity of such a concept2 but act it out as if from a universal script in unison with the same unequivocal longing eschewing from the world at large. Theatre thus has the advantageous position of being at once the observed and the observer.

In ancient Greece the word prosōpon3 was used without distinction for both face and mask. The dual capacity intimates a co nception of self that is not restricted to a ‘person-centered prehension of person’4 and an understanding of reality that acknowledges the reciprocity between the seen and unseen. It is linked with a society that had an entirely different perspective of reality, one poised on the cusp of two worlds. The mask hints at an authentic façade of reality5 that is not a concealing veil but a visible sign.6 If mask is thought of as something that conceals then it means something more real lies behind it, but ‘there was no secret reality behind the mask. Truth was made visible by the mask.’7

Nishitani Keiji8 explains ‘person’ using the Latin concept of persona to constitute the face or mask of absolute nothingness,9 rendering the thing called personality ‘in unison with absolute nothingness’.10 Even though personality is called a mask it is not some ‘temporary exterior that can be donned and doffed at will’ and moreover is ‘through and through real. It is the most real of realities. It comes into being only as a real form of human being that contains not the slightest bit of deception or artificiality’, thus ‘personality is something altogether alive…it is a mask of absolute nothingness precisely as living spirit.’11 The symbiotic contingency of this relationship is a key to understanding the nature of reality as illusion – as an illusion that is ‘through and through real’. In the same sense, theatre as a supposed mask of illusion can be seen as through and through real. What’s more it comes even a little closer to truth for it is already thought of as an illusion.

The difficulty of comprehending the mask of persona as manifest nothingness is somewhat alleviated by situating it as the ‘middle’ between ‘illusion’ and ‘emptiness’.12 The ‘middle’ ground is a privileged site of unity where the dualities and contradictions become the active paradox, which from the perspective of William Archer constitutes a miracle.13 Miraculous it may seem to a d ialectical

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mindset conditioned by antithesis, but for Nishida Kitaro it is much more straightforward

the distinction between mental and material phenomena in no way signifies that there are two kinds of reality. Mental phenomena are the unifying aspect, the subjective side, whereas material phenomena are that which is unified, the objective side.14

In Reading Theatre Anne Ubersfeld15 suggests that theatre architecture,

specifically the traditional auditorium, is not necessarily a concrete recreation of intrinsic hierarchies and social structures but rather a r eflection of how they are perceived to be as a spatial image. Housed within the architecture of this idea are scenes from a greater performance whose stage protrudes beyond the proscenium arch and extends quite outside the theatre doors. Simultaneous to the theatrical performance (within but outside of the world) there unfolds an enactment of another kind, no less of a spectacle but altogether hidden because of its gargantuan scale. This drama of epic proportions, nascent in the suggestions of Ubersfeld, is the unfolding of life itself. Theatre thus sits within a paradox of reality and illusion both of which are equally foundational to its existence and which is precisely why it has the capacity to provide a peephole to life’s own stage. If the playhouse in its spatial construction does not necessarily represent the milieu of its making but rather an image or imagining of what that reality is, then it also bears witness to and is a symbol of a greater presumption: reality. The play house stands like a monument to the incessant grasping at reality and the performance is the living organism that acts it out.

Theatre is real because it is alive. Referring to the aesthetic experience as an autonomous authentic experience that is its own reality Gadamer states, ‘it is not simply the laying bare of a truth, it is itself an event.’16 This is precisely what keeps theatre authentic and why it is not just a mirroring of the world around it, but a simultaneous creation, it is what it reflects; there is not a more authentic origin of experience apart from it nor does it point ‘beyond itself to a more authentic experience of reality,’ it is in other words that very reality itself.17

Casting off the artifice of appearing real in a bid to be real is a recurring and pre-eminent concern of varied effect within theatre since the late nineteenth century. It figures in the acting methodologies of Stanislavski, the realistic settings of the Naturalists (even though this was then reacted against as bourgeois illusion), Artaud’s ‘Theatre of Cruelty’, the immediacy of Grotowski’s ‘Poor Theatre’ which sought to eliminate entirely the division of audience and actor, the live ‘happenings’ of the late 50’s and consequent artistic performance practices up to the present day. Curiously, the intensely stylised and choreographed acting of Noh theatre arises from the same principles that mark the more naturalised instinctive


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model of Stanislavski.18 How can two such irreconcilable results proceed from the same origin? What emerges is an ever changing but continuous line propelled by a deep and insatiable compunction to present ‘Truth. And it is Truth, Truth in every sphere of existence’19 which is what Otto Brahm declared to be the resounding aim of naturalist drama in his manifesto presented at the opening of the Berlin Freie Bühne in 1890. The naturalism championed by Brahm was a reaction to the poetry of art that ‘in a bashful flight from reality’ reached towards an unreal and distant ideal squandered in a remote and dark past.

Some transmutations witnessed a paring back to the one supposedly vital ingredient, that of the actor. This is a heroic attempt at essentialisation, but also a decidedly Cartesian position that will be inevitably blinded by the glare once emerging from the cave and is ultimately anathema to the pursuit of reality. The protagonism of the cogito foments in a ‘person-centred prehension of person’20 which consecrates a mode of being caught up in itself. Antipathic to intention, the reduction of theatre to the autonomy of the actor, a supposed stripping away of superfluity to get to the raw matter, results in collapse with the Echo of Narcissus resounding in the eaves.

Our reality is the same illusion that we perceive theatre to be. It is only in this sense that we can say ‘life is theatrical’.21 Not that there are aspects of spectacle within life but that life itself is the spectacle. Artaud declares theatre ‘uncovers lies, flabbiness, baseness, and hypocrisy; it shakes off the asphyxiating inertia of matter’22 and thus ‘makes the mask fall.’ However, when the mask is accepted as through and through real there is no need to make it fall to uncover some hidden reality. The illusion of theatre is its verity.

Paradoxically theatre has strived to free itself from this mask of illusion, and done so primarily in the pursuit of truth and reality. In a bid to jettison every remaining artifice of the theatre Tadeusz Kantor sought a non-acting acting so as to imbue the stage event with its own life force, he demonises ‘acting as irresponsible illusion.’23 Grotowski tenders that through confrontation with myth ‘the life-mask cracks and falls away.’24 Neither is necessary to achieve what in fact is already occurring. Arising from an entirely different context (that of Yoruba ritual performance in West Africa) but one grappling with the same ambiguities of illusion and reality Margaret Drewal states all that is necessary to see25 through the masks of both reality and illusion and attend to both simultaneously is a ‘reorientation of working assumptions.’26

Acknowledging that ‘the spectator should know that he’s in the theatre’27 is one step closer to debunking the myth of illusion that looms like a tombstone bearing its depreciating epitaph. Brecht writes that what stage designers ought to be doing is ‘make you believe you are in a good theatre. Or rather, they should make you believe you are in a theatre when you are actually in a real place in real life.’28 Chekhov states, ‘the stage reflects the quintessence of life and there is no need to introduce anything superfluous to it,’29 and this approach of removing anything

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unnatural to the stage, (in other words not naturalistic scenography) transforms the stage from ‘an illusion of reality’ into ‘an allusion to reality.’30

Rather than see life as a solid reality in which aspects of theatre can be read, as in Esslins ipse dixit ‘much of our life is theatrical’, the notes of Zeami Motokiyo31 intimate a closer resonance with the position taken here ‘performance is of a kind with life itself in its immediacy, impermanence and grounding in experience…’32 Yamazaki Masakazu remarks that Zeami ‘carefully warned the actor against indulging in his own emotions as well as using his technique to manipulate them.’33 The composure and restraint of the Noh actor conjures the objectivity advocated by Brecht. In Brecht’s notes we can read ‘instead of setting out by working up enthusiasm for the play…he should make an effort to sober up, not to be enthusiastic so much as open-minded, not to seek sensations so much as to reflect.’34

Whilst the imagination may prompt an active participation from the audience that can transform the spectacle into an event or a lived moment and is a highly valued tool to this end, it is in fact a cul-de-sac, though a very important detour nonetheless. The imagination is part of the world of senses and as it occupies us it keeps us turned away from the world of the unseen. Al-Ghazali35 casts the imagination in an earthen form that portends of Nietzsche’s proclaimed nemesis, the gravity of matter.36 ‘Imagination, which provides the clay from which the similitude is taken, is solid and dense. It veils the mysteries and comes between you and the lights.’37 He then explains how by the purification of the imagination the clay becomes like glass and is able to point towards the lights, or rather ‘it preserves the lights from being extinguished by violent winds.’ He speaks of the bringing together of the outward and the mystery which is allegorised by the ‘doffing of two sandals’ which signifies a ‘crossing over’ from one world to another. The ‘doffing of the two sandals’ is the outward indication of an inward ‘throwing off the two worlds.’38 The imagination acts as a ladder to the unseen world of what al-Ghazali would call Dominion39 and of which Wittgenstein would say ‘where-of one cannot speak, there-of one must be silent.’40 As a way-pointer, a tool, the imagination requires use. Naturalist drama tempted mutiny by making the imagination redundant. In rebellious ennui it could turn on the performance and become critical.41 This is perhaps why Brecht somewhat contradictorily favoured the imagination of the audience over the effective acting of the player.

Takahashi described a moment of unexpected recognition he experienced whilst watching Izutsu, a traditional Noh play by Zeami. In Izutsu an exquisitely graceful female ghost is bent over the well-curb (the plays only prop on an otherwise empty stage) when suddenly the form of Beckett’s Krapp bending intently over his tape recorder (also the only prop on an empty stage) materializes before him. The image of the bending figure peering into an unseen unknown is very much that of Krapp trawling through the archives of his mind. Zeami’s heroine is in fact looking into reflections of her past whilst Krapp is listening to a


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vociferous phoenix rising up from the past through his diligently recorded tapes. Takahashi identifies the vacant centre from which radiates the vital source of the drama, ‘the centre, the ultimate vision, is consciously left invisible by the dramatists.’42

Beckett’s mise-en-scène is a lexicon of symbolic imagery that he continuously returns to with a knowing that eventually the hidden meaning will emerge from the pockets of all those soiled trench coats and the corners of those grey empty rooms with windows that are either not actually there (Piece of Monologue) or cannot be seen out of (Endgame). They are the ladders that take us from the sensory world, the world of the imagination into that of Dominion. His images are the ravaged remains of the world and like the decrepit bodies of his protagonists are prosopon incarnate. Whilst Play bares the explicit instruction ‘but no masks’ to portray the ‘faces so lost to age and aspect as to seem almost part of urns’ this does not, however, preclude the effect of a mask. Dark and yet luminous (literally spot-lit), Beckett’s dramatis personae are a threshold between known and unknown, life and death, hopelessness and humour. They are living masks that straddle two worlds, pointing past themselves to an unknowable truth.

The sentient minimalism and symbolic potency of Beckett’s dramatic work and classical Noh staging43 invokes a seeing that penetrates the immediately given (albeit very little). It is the symbolic that ‘constitutes the absolute form’ according to Schelling. The symbolic is a synthesis of the universal and particular ‘where neither the universal means the particular nor the particular the universal, but rather where both are absolutely one’.44

This farraginous chronicle by way of suggestion rather than specificity (tempered by the brevity of the exposition) means to open the stage to a ‘seeing of not-seeing’45 wherein the spectator looks through the surface of the performance and experiences the reality of the surface knowing ‘that the outward similitude is true and behind it is a mystery.’46

Notes 1 M. Esslin, Reflections: Essays on Modern Theatre, Doubleday & Company Inc, New York, 1971, p. 214. 2 H. Bergson, Key Writings, K. Ansell Pearson and J. Mullarkey (eds), Continuum, New York and London, 2002, p. 274. ‘I. There is an external reality which is given immediately to our mind. II. This reality is mobility…All reality is, therefore, tendency, if we agree to call tendency a nascent change of direction’. 3 This roughly translates as ‘before the gaze’. 4 K. Nishitani, Religion and Nothingness, trans. J. van Bragt, University of California Press, Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1982, p. 69. 5 This should not be considered an oxymoron but a paradox.

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6 S. Goldhill, ‘ΠΡΟΣΩΠΟΝ F. Frontisi-Ducroux: Du Masque au Visage. Aspects de l'identite en Grece ancienne’, The Classical Review, Vol. 46, No. 1 (1996), pp. 111-113. 7 D. Wiles, Mask and Performance in Greek Tragedy: From Ancient Festival to Modern Experimentation, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2007, p. 202. 8 Keiji Nishitani (1900-1990) is one of the pre-eminent figures of the Kyoto School of Philosophy from Japan, marked by a unique synthesis of western logic and eastern philosophy grounded in a tradition of Zen, paradox and parable. 9Absolute nothingness from a standpoint of Zen philosophy is the ultimate reality, it is the well spring from which all being and things arise. It is not the relative nothingness of Sartre or Heidegger that is constituted as a nihilation of being. 10 Nishitani, op. cit., p. 71. 11 Ibid., pp. 69-72. 12 Ibid., p. 72. Nishitani states that he is borrowing this terminology from the Tendai School of Buddhism. 13 W. Archer, Masks or Faces: A Study in the Psychology of Acting, p. 1. ‘What is a miracle, indeed, but a paradox in action?’ 14 K. Nishida, An Inquiry into the Good, trans. M. Abe and C. Ives, Yale University, USA, 1990, p. 65. Kitarō Nishida (1870-1945) is considered the founding member of the Kyoto School. 15 A. Ubersfeld, F. Collins, P. Perron and P. Debbèche, Reading Theatre, University of Toronto Press, Toronto, 1999. 16 S. Kemal and I. Gaskell, Performance and Authenticity in the Arts, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1999, p. 80. Esslin emphasises the cardinal importance of ‘live’ if the theatre hopes to survive. Esslin, op. cit., p. 200. 17 H.G. Gadamer, The Relevance of the Beautiful and Other Essays, R. Bernasconi (ed), University of Cambridge Press, 1978, p. 143. 18 See Zeami’s treatise on Noh acting for theories of ‘imitation’ and ‘becoming’ for a comparison with Stanislavski’s intuitive naturalist model. 19 C. Schumacher, Naturalism and Symbolism in European Theatre, 1850-1918, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, 1996, p. 159. 20 Nishitani, op. cit., p. 69. 21 Esslin, op. cit., p. 208. 22 A. Artaud, Artaud on Theatre, C. Schumacher (ed), Methuen Drama, London, 1989, p. 119. 23 T. Kantor, A Journey through Other Spaces: Essays and Manifestos, 1944-1990, M. Kobialka (ed), University of California Press, Berkeley, 1993, p. 64. 24 J. Grotowski, Towards a Poor Theatre, Simon and Schuster, New York, 1968, p. 23. This is again a t ype of truth search and is a p erspective that recognises the religious and mythical dimension of theatres origins as a powerful truth source.


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25 ‘Theatre’ comes from the Greek θέατρον (théatron) meaning a place for viewing and from θεάομαι (theáomai) which is to see or observe. The theatre really is a temple of vision. 26 M. Thompson Drewal, Yoruba Ritual: Performers, Play, Agency, Indiana University Press, Bloomington, 1992, p. 103. and that the ‘spectacle dwells conceptually at the juncture of two planes of existence – the world and the otherworld’. 27 As Radok says in J.M. Burian, Leading Creators of 20th Century Czech Theatre, Routledge, New York and London, 2002, p. 66. 28 J. Willet, Caspar Neher: Brecht’s Designer, Methuen London Ltd, London, 1986, p. 99. 29 A. Aronson, Looking Into the Abyss: Essays on Scenography, The University of Michigan Press, Michigan, 2008, p. 117. Aronson calls Chekhov ‘a symbolist playwright trapped in a naturalist theatre’. 30 Ibid., p. 124. 31 Zeami Motokiyo (1363-1443) and his father Kan’ami (1333-1384) both actors and playwrights, are recognised for developing noh drama into the classic form it still exists in today. 32 M. Zeami, Performance Notes, trans. T. Hare, Columbia University Press, New York, 2008, p. 1. 33 M. Zeami, On the Art of the Nō Drama: The Major Treatises of Zeami, trans. J.T. Rimer and M. Yamazaki, Princeton University Press, West Sussex, 1984, p. xlii. 34 Willet, op. cit., p. 105. 35 Abu Hamid al-Ghazālī (1058-1111) was an Iranian born Sūfī mystic. 36 F. Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra: A Book for Everyone and No One, trans R.J. Hollingdale, Penguin Books Ltd, London, 2003, p. 177. ‘Spirit of Gravity, my devil and archenemy’. 37 A.H. al-Ghazālī, The Niche of Lights, trans. D. Buchman, Brigham Young University Press, Utah, 1998, p. 34. 38 Ibid., p. 33. 39 ‘The visible world comes forth from the world of dominion just as the shadow comes forth from the thing that throws it’, The Niche of Light, p. 12. 40 L. Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, trans. D.F. Pears and B.F. McGuiness, Routledge & Kegan Paul, London, New York, 1974, apophthegm 7. 41 C. Schumacher, Naturalism and Symbolism in European Theatre, 1850-1918, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, 1996, p. 163. ‘The imagination of the audience is totally excluded from the performance so that their imagination becomes idle and redundant and so turns against the performance itself’.

Celia Morgan

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42 Y. Takahashi, ‘Memory Inscribed in the Body: Krapp’s Last Tape and the Noh Play Izutsu’, The Theatrical Gamut; Notes for a Post-Beckettian Stage, E. Brater, (ed), University of Michigan, Michigan, 1995, p. 59. 43 The iconic central figure of the tree in Waiting for Godot (coincidentally?) recalls the staging of Noh where the only scenery is an ancient pine tree painted on the kagami-ita (resounding board) at the back of the stage. 44 F.W.J. Schelling, The Philosophy of Art, trans. D.W. Stott, D.W. Stott (ed), University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 1989, p. 46. 45 The term ‘seeing of not-seeing’ comes from Nishitani Keiji. 46 al-Ghazālī, op. cit., p. 34.

Bibliography Al-Ghazālī, A.H., The Niche of Lights. Trans. Buchman, D., Brigham Young University Press, Utah, 1998. Archer, W., Masks or Faces a Study in the Psychology of Acting. Kessinger Publishing, LLC, 2006. Aronson, A., Looking Into the Abyss: Essays on Scenography. The University of Michigan Press, Michigan, 2008. Artaud, A., Artaud on Theatre. Schumacher, C. (ed), Methuen Drama, London, 1989. Barba, E. and Sanzenbach, S. (eds), ‘Theatre Laboratory 13 Rzedow’. The Tulane Drama Review. Vol. 9, No. 3, Spring, 1965, pp. 153-165. Beckett, S., Krapp’s Last Tape and Other Dramatic Pieces. Grove Press, New York, 1960. Ben-Shaul, D., ‘In Disharmony with Itself: Dual Aspects of Illusion and Alienation in Brecht’s Thought’. Bertold Brecht: Performance and Philosophy. Kaynar, G. and Ben-Zvi, L. (eds), Assaph Books Tel Aviv University, Tel Aviv, 2005. Bergson, H., Key Writings. Ansell Pearson, K. and Mullarkey, J. (eds), Continuum, New York and London, 2002. Esslin, M., Reflections: Essays on Modern Theatre. Doubleday & Company Inc, New York, 1971.


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Burian, J.M., Leading Creators of 20th Century Czech Theatre. Routledge, New York and London, 2002. Drewal Thompson, M., Yoruba Ritual: Performers, Play, Agency. Indiana University Press, Bloomington, 1992. Franck, F. (ed), The Buddha Eye: An Anthology of the Kyoto School and Its Contemporaries. World Wisdom Inc, Indiana, 2004. Goldhill, S., ‘ΠΡΟΣΩΠΟΝ F. Frontisi-Ducroux: Du Masque au Visage. Aspects de l'identite en Grece ancienne’. The Classical Review. Vol. 46, No. 1, 1996, pp. 111-113. Grotowski, J., Towards a Poor Theatre. Simon and Schuster, New York, 1968. Kantor, T., A Journey through Other Spaces: Essays and Manifestos, 1944-1990. Kobialka, M. (ed, University of California Press, Berkeley, 1993. Kemal, S. and Gaskell, I., Performance and Authenticity in the Arts. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1999. Mitchell, J.D. and Watanabe, M., Noh and Kabuki: Staging Japanese Theatre. Institute for Advanced Studies in the Theatre Arts, USA, 1994. Nietzsche, F., Thus Spoke Zarathustra: A Book for Everyone and No One. Trans. Hollingdale, R.J., Penguin Books Ltd, London, 2003. Nishida, K., An Inquiry into the Good. Trans. Abe, M. and Ives, C., Yale University, USA, 1990 Nishitani, K., Religion and Nothingness. Trans. van Bragt J., University of California Press, Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1982. Schelling, F.W.J., The Philosophy of Art. Trans. Stott, W., University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 1989. Schumacher, C., Naturalism and Symbolism in European Theatre, 1850-1918. University of Cambridge, Cambridge, 1996.

Celia Morgan

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Takahashi, Y., ‘Memory Inscribed in the Body: Krapp’s Last Tape and the Noh Play Izutsu’. The Theatrical Gamut; Notes for a Post-Beckettian Stage. Brater, E. (ed), University of Michigan, Michigan, 1995. Ubersfeld, A., Collins, F., Perron, P. and Debbèche, P., Reading Theatre. University of Toronto Press, Toronto, 1999. Wiles, D., Greek Theatre Performance: An Introduction. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2000. Wiles, D., Mask and Performance in Greek Tragedy: From Ancient Festival to Modern Experimentation. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2007. Willet, J., The Theatre of Bertolt Brecht. Methuen and Co Ltd, London, 1959. Willet, J., Caspar Neher: Brecht’s Designer. Methuen London Ltd, London, 1986. Wittgenstein, L., Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. Trans. Pears, D.F. and McGuiness, B.F., Routledge & Kegan Paul, London, New York, 1974. Worth, K., Samuel Beckett’s Theatre: Life Journeys. Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1999. Yoshikohi, T. and Maruoka, D., NOH. Trans. Kenny, D., Hoikusha Publishing Co., Osaka, 1969. Zeami, M., On the Art of the Nō Drama: The Major Treatises of Zeami. Trans. Rimer, J.T. and Yamazaki, M., Princeton University Press, West Sussex, 1984. Zeami, M., Performance Notes. Trans. Hare, T., Columbia University Press, New York, 2008. Celia Morgan, PhD candidate, University of Sydney, Sydney College of the Arts, Australia.

The Semiotics of Images in Romeo Castellucci’s Theatre

Stamatia Neofytou-Georgiou

Abstract The Italian director Romeo Castellucci suggests a n ew, interesting, daring, and provocative way of presentation in the field of performance and visual art. In the early 21st century Castellucci accomplishes on stage Artaud’s theory about the abolition of the text of the play and the creation of a new theatrical language. In an attempt to find a different kind of communication between the artist and his audience, the director excludes the text and gives shape to universal and non-realistic images. This contemporary representation fills the spectator with intense feelings and deep emotions. The audience considers Castellucci’s performances as a strong experience, because, as the director explains, the images he creates remove living matter from time and space.1 Making use of the grotesque, the director creates a n ightmarish universe. In this world the monstrous depicts all modern man’s hidden desires, metaphysical concerns, and terrors. Using as a point of reference the performance of Dante’s Divine Comedy directed by Castellucci and presented by Societas Rafaello Sanzio in 2008, this chapter will explore the pioneer, delirious environment in which human beings, animals, and modern technology combine and depict the trilogy ‘Inferno’, ‘Purgatory’, ‘Paradise’. Key Words: Grotesque, image, semiotics, illusion, visual arts.

***** 1. Introduction

In the genetic phase of the ancient Greek theatre, Aristotle in Poetics says that the poet is responsible for «την των πραγμάτων σύστασιν», which means the constitution of things.2 The ancient tragic poet is actually responsible for the total creation as a whole, according to both his inspiration and his accomplishment on stage.3 In subsequent centuries, the dramatist was one of the participants in the performance and he had a very important role, because the text dominated over the spectacle. However, modern and contemporary history of the theatre with directors such as Antoine, Stanislavski, Meyerhold, Craig, Appia, Reinhardt, Piscator, Brecht, Vakhtangov, Copeau, Baty, Brook, etc. reveal that the director is more responsible than the dramatist.4

In 1926 Artaud’s theory about the abolition of the text of the play and the creation of a new theatrical language brought new data in the contemporary art of the theatre. Artaud says that the stage is a specific place which asks us to make it speak its own language. The language of the theatre according to Artaud is the one which speaks to our senses and has nothing to do with the written text.5


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In the theatre of the 21st century, contemporary trends show an inclination to the theatre of senses, which Artaud suggests. Romeo Castellucci is one of the most authentic directors who depicts this technique in his work. Castellucci’s theatre excludes the text and gives shape to universal and non-realistic images. This contemporary representation fills the spectator with intense feelings and deep emotions. The audience considers Castellucci’s performances as a s trong experience, because, as the director explains, the images he creates remove living matter from time and space.6 Making use of the grotesque,7 the director creates a nightmarish universe. In this world the monstrous depicts all modern man’s hidden desires, metaphysical concerns, and terrors.

Using as a point of reference the performance of Dante’s Divine Comedy directed by Castellucci and presented by Societas Rafaello Sanzio in 2008, this chapter will explore the pioneer, delirious environment in which human beings, animals and modern technology combine and depict the trilogy ‘Inferno’, ‘Purgatory’, ‘Paradise’. The chapter will specifically examine the semiotics of images and the aesthetic rules of the keystones that follow: First, the extreme body which suffers and pains: The actors hurt themselves, hover and have extreme feelings. Second, the strange sound universe and the peculiar use of dramatic speech: During the performance incomprehensible words, terrifying sounds, whispers, breaths, screams, and silence can be heard. Third, the presence of real animals: Dogs and horses appear and run free producing natural sounds on the stage of the theatre. Fourth, the use of machines: Technology presents machines which are used as sculptural objects and in a symbolic way.

2. The Semiotics of Images

What do we actually mean when we refer to the term ‘semiotics of images’? When all of the bodies and objects are on stage they lose their usual character and become theatrical signs.8 According to Fischer-Lichte,9 the semiotics of the theatre can be classified into three categories, the actor’s actions, the actor’s appearance, and the signs of space. These three categories include linguistic signs, mimetic signs, sound effects, music, gestures, costumes, hair design, stage design, stage objects, and the light effects. The world of images created by Castellucci is the theatrical code of communication between the director and his audience. In other words, these images compose Castellucci’s semiotic system. However, it is worth noting that a communication based on aesthetic signs does not allow a high degree of communication between the spectator and the artist, because of the many and different options of these signs.10 In these terms, every performance presented by the theatre company of Societas Rafaello Sanzio constitutes a u nique experience for every spectator.


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A. The Animal Kingdom on Stage The appearance of real animals on stage has always captivated the audience. In

Roman amphitheatres there was a bloody and cruel version of the legendary struggle between beasts and human beings. The animal kingdom has many admirers in the circus and the various musical horse shows. In the naturalistic theatre many directors introduced real animals on stage and raised curiosity, admiration or aversion. The animal kingdom, the fusion of human and bestial existence and the aversion to man’s bestial character are matters which play an important role in Kafka’s or Heiner Muller’s texts.11

The use of real animals on stage is certainly associated with plastic arts and performance, proving that plastic arts have a great effect on the art of the theatre. In these performances the simple presence of the animal on stage is enough to transfer its organic energy, without enacting anything or having another symbolism or meaning except for its own existence. The world of animals composes an organic ingredient in the theatre of senses, of pureness and of what we call primary in Castellucci’s theatre.12

In Castellucci’s ‘Inferno’ Alsatian dogs and a horse appear on stage, move, and make sounds. The play begins when the director comes on stage and imagines his own ‘inferno’. He introduces himself by saying ‘my name is Romeo Castellucci’ as if he wants to state that the presentation of his own conception of the inferno begins right now.13 In Dante’s Divine Comedy, the poem starts with the poet meeting three animals – a wolf, a ch eetah and a l ion. In this performance Castellucci is attacked by the dogs which go for him furiously and bite him.14 Actually, the director falls prey to the voracious dogs because he wants to transfer his personal feeling of terror for the inferno of his rapacious century.

B. The Universe of Sounds

In Castellucci’s trilogy based on Dante’s Divine Comedy, the spectator faces a reality on stage which has almost abandoned speech and is based on body theatre, incidental music, and sound effects. The actor’s body is like a transmitter which makes sounds. The actors communicate and express themselves with movements and sounds. Apart from speech the audience can hear whispers, cries, breaths, and silences which create an interesting atmosphere of sound. Short but important sentences come out of the actors’ mouths, terrifying sounds are used to shock the audience, and sounds of extremely high volume leave the spectators under acoustic pressure. The director uses this kind of sound terror on purpose, because he wants to transfer either the inferno’s noisy and deafening sounds or the sounds of the man who pains and suffers. Castellucci’s Inferno depicts many different aspects of human behaviour.15 The actors speak, scream, squeal, cry, laugh, use objects to make sounds and react to the sounds they hear. Castellucci places Andy Warhol as his fellow-traveller like Dante, who chose Virgilius for this role. The director’s choice can be explained if we associate it with Andy Warhol’s theme on the


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presentation of masses of people and his anxiety about mass deaths and executions. The sound universe also consists of sounds made by road accidents, wars, murders, and so forth.

In ‘Purgatory’ the topic of a child’s molestation is posed. From the beginning of the play parents and a young boy act in a r ealistic way, but this real-like atmosphere is subverted by the time transfer of the facts.16 The spectator is informed about the facts by subtitles, before the facts actually take place on stage. It is like listening to a narration of the story when this story is enacted in front of you. When Castellucci has to decide about the enacting of the child’s rape, his choice is to make people listen to it and not watch it live on stage. However, the audience has already watched the child’s mother cry and beg her husband not to do anything this evening. The audience has been prepared that something bad is going to happen. The father calls his child to play cowboys like last time. The subtitles mention that the father and the boy are going to go upstairs, listen to music and dance. When they walk up the stairs the subtitles show the words ‘the music.’ The spectators watch an empty stage, read the words ‘the music’ in the subtitles, hear the boy’s voice trying to resist, crying and being hurt and then they hear the father’s sighs and silence for a long time. Alan Read writes that the words ‘the music’ in the subtitles point out that human pain can be translated as a kind of music.17 The scene of the boy’s molestation is presented in a unique way by Castellucci, because it manages to make the audience feel as if they were under extreme sentimental pressure, without showing any action on stage. The alternation of silence and the boy’s voice with the sounds that can be heard compose a really pressing atmosphere.

C. The Extreme Body

In the 1960s theatre the actor’s body was associated with many different meanings according to social-political, moral, or philosophical matters. The body theatre played an important role in the 1970s performances, and the actor’s body became a sign in the semiotics of the theatre. In Castellucci’s theatre the actor’s body is the key to transfer the director’s images and symbolisms.

The image of the old man’s body acquires the meaning of the human being in its last stage, which at the same time can be used as a v ehicle of memory and knowledge. In the ‘Inferno’ the aged actor weighs up the limits of his corporal strength and depicts the effort of man to survive and to fight for life, the corruption of youth and beauty and the ephemeral time of existence. As Elena Papalexiou says:

The view of the unusual bodies with some kind of pathogenesis often shocks the audience and raises questions about the legality and moral aspect of such a choice. The company of Societas Rafaello Sanzio of course does not want to shock or provoke the


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spectator but wants to show the beauty that every normal body has. It is also a co mment on contemporary trends of aesthetic, which have made people ignore natural beauty, since we are used to watching only the artificial beautiful bodies of modern styling.18

There is a very interesting scene in the last part of the play ‘Purgatorio’. There

is a metamorphosis of the two bodies, the father and the boy: the boy is very tall and his father has got distorted limbs and moves unsteadily. They start dancing in an ecstatic and paralerematic way as if they are trying to get on to another stage of life, above reality.19

D. Illusion and Reality: The Use of Technology

From Richard Wagner’s stage innovations in 1876 to the theatrical miracles of the 20th century, technology, and the use of visual arts in the theatre, all kinds of stage illusions are used to make special effects, which sometimes serve and other times undermine the performance. In Castellucci’s performance machines are used as sculptural objects with a symbolic meaning. In ‘Purgatorio’ a giant robot appears with eyes shining and sparkling in the dark. The huge-sized mechanical robot moves on stage and the little boy calls it. The monstrous robot reflects the boy’s terror and everything which is hidden in his soul. After his molestation by his father the child continues to live in an illusive world away from reality. The director uses giant flowers to seduce the audience into the child’s magical world, which he imagines as a forest with sugar-beets. His father comes out of this forest so that the boy can forgive him for his violent action and manage to survive and not miss out on his childhood.

The new, interesting, daring and provocative way of presentation in the field of performance and visual art that Romeo Castellucci suggests is one of the most representative samples of the new trends in contemporary theatrical reality. The trilogy ‘Inferno’, ‘Purgatorio’, ‘Paradiso’ signals the common use and acceptance of techniques in the contemporary art of the theatre, such as the abolition of the text, the emphasis on the actor’s body, and the use of audio-visual and other new effects. The 21st century theatre seems to be taking a t urn to new codes of communication and the acceptance of the domination of the director, who creates images that will constitute a turning-point in the field of the semiotics and the history of the theatre.

Notes 1 E. Papalexiou, Όταν ο λόγος μετατρέπεται σε ύλη [When Words turn to Matter]: Romeo Castellucci- Societas Rafaello Sanzio, Plethron, Athens, 2009, p. 9. 2 Aristotle, Poetics, Estia, Athens, 1995.


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3 T. Lignadis, Το ζώον και το τέρας: Ποιητική και υποκριτική λειτουργία του αρχαίου ελληνικού δράματος. [The Animal and the Monster: The Function of Poetics and Acting in Ancient Greek Drama], Herodotus, Athens, 1988. 4 D. Bablet and J. Jomaron, Ιστορία Σύγχρονης Σκηνοθεσίας. [History of Contemporary Theatre Direction] Volumes 1 and 2, University Studio Press, Thessaloniki, 2008. 5 A. Artaud, Το θέατρο και το είδωλό του [The Theatre and its Double], Dodoni, Athens, 1992, pp. 42-47. 6 E. Papalexiou, When Words turn to Matter, p. 9. 7 P. Thomson, Το γκροτέσκο [The Grotesque], Hermes, Athens, 1984. 8 L. Matejka and I.R. Titunik, Semiotics of Art: Prague School Contributions, Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press, Cambridge, 1984. 9 E. Fischer-Lichte, The Semiotics of Theatre, trans. J. Gaines and D.L. Jones, Indiana University Press, Bloomington, 1992. 10 W. Puchner, Σημειολογία του Θεάτρου [ Semiotics of the Theatre], Pairidis, Athens, 1985, pp. 73-74. 11 E. Varopoulou, Το Ζωντανό Θέατρο: Δοκίμιο για τη Σύγχρονη Σκηνή [The Living Theatre: Essay on the Contemporary Stage], Agra, Athens, 2002, p. 415. 12 E. Varopoulou, The Living Theatre, Agra, Athaens, 2002, p. 414. 13 E. Papalexiou, When Words turn to Matter, p. 20. 14 Ibid., p. 20. 15 P. Di Matteo, ‘In Front of the Masterpiece’, Programmes of the Performances ‘Inferno’, ‘Purgatorio’, ‘Paradiso’, Education and Culture Programme, 2008. 16 E. Papalexiou, When Words Turn to Matter, pp. 61-62. 17 A. Read, ‘Romeo Castellucci: The Director on this Earth’, Contemporary European Theatre Directors, M.M. Delgado and D. Rebellato (eds), Routledge, London and New York, 2010, pp. 256-257. 18 E. Papalexiou, When Words Turn to Matter, pp. 51-54. 19 Ibid., p. 51.

Bibliography

Aristotle, Poetics. Estia, Athens, 1995. Artaud, A., Το θέατρο και το είδωλό του [The Theatre and its Double]. Dodoni, Athens, 1992. Bablet, D. and Jomaron, J., Ιστορία Σύγχρονης Σκηνοθεσίας. [History of Contemporary Theatre Direction] Volumes 1 and 2. University Studio Press, Thessaloniki, 2008.

http://hippo.lib.uoa.gr/ipac20/ipac.jsp?session=1284Y18C773D7.193291&profile=maingr-tr&uri=search=AL~!Fischer-Lichte%20,%20Erika&ri=2&aspect=subtab33&menu=search&source=~!uoa_library

http://hippo.lib.uoa.gr/ipac20/ipac.jsp?session=1284Y18C773D7.193291&profile=maingr-tr&uri=search=AL~!Gaines%20,%20Jeremy&ri=2&aspect=subtab33&menu=search&source=~!uoa_library

http://hippo.lib.uoa.gr/ipac20/ipac.jsp?session=1284Y18C773D7.193291&profile=maingr-tr&uri=search=AL~!Gaines%20,%20Jeremy&ri=2&aspect=subtab33&menu=search&source=~!uoa_library


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Fischer-Lichte, E., The Semiotics of Theatre. Trans. Gaines, J. and Jones, D.L., Indiana University Press, Bloomington, 1992. Lignadis, T., Το ζώον και το τέρας: Ποιητική και υποκριτική λειτουργία του αρχαίου ελληνικού δράματος. [The Animal and the Monster: The Function of Poetics and Acting in Ancient Greek Drama]. Herodotus, Athens, 1988. Matejka, L. and Titunik, I.R., Semiotics of Art: Prague School Contributions. Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press, Cambridge, 1984. Matteo Di, P., ‘In Front of the Masterpiece’. Programmes of the Performances ‘Inferno’, ‘Purgatorio’, ‘Paradiso’. Education and Culture Programme. 2008. Papalexiou, E., Όταν ο λόγος μετατρέπεται σε ύλη [When Words turn to Matter]: Romeo Castellucci- Societas Rafaello Sanzio. Plethron, Athens, 2009. Puchner, W., Σημειολογία του Θεάτρου [Semiotics of the Theatre]. Pairidis, Athens, 1985. Read, A., ‘Romeo Castellucci: The Director on this Earth’. Contemporary European Theatre Directors. Delgado, M.M. and Rebellato, D. (eds), Routledge, London and New York, 2010. Thomson, P., Το γκροτέσκο [The Grotesque]. Hermes, Athens, 1984. Varopoulou, E., Το Ζωντανό Θέατρο: Δοκίμιο για τη Σύγχρονη Σκηνή [The Living Theatre: Essay on the Contemporary Stage]. Agra, Athens, 2002. Stamatia Neofytou-Georgiou, Mphil. Master of Philosophy in Theatre Studies, is affiliated with the University of Athens (Greece).

Exploding Contexts

Michael Spencer

Abstract Michael draws on his experience of a decade of teaching at Central Saint Martins College in London where the student agenda has generated fundamental changes to a curriculum whose aim is to prepare the next generation of visual performance makers. Achieving this involves the task of negotiating benchmarks or common criteria to discuss and evaluate activity of such breadth that new terminology and new parameters are constantly being formulated and tested. Even the touchstones of what constitutes ‘the visual’ are being challenged as students apply their skills and ambitions to increasingly expanding contexts. Through the presentation of video documentation of selected performances from both students and his own work, Michael will attempt to pull together and articulate some common concerns—or perhaps common dispositions, evident in the work of young performance makers today. These ‘dispositions’ will touch on many different aspects of contemporary performance practice: performance in the ‘everyday’, performance as social documentation, the self as performance, spectatorship as performance and so forth. These patterns, tendencies…zeitgeists…emerge from a plethora of interconnected historic, economic and social circumstances—digitality, post-post-modernism, global warming, the phenomena of the ‘cult’ of identity in Western Europe, social inclusion etc. Michael examines some of this complex web through examples of current practice, and an analysis of the forces which are driving and motivating the next generation of visual performance makers. The notion that Theatre Design, in the post-Craig traditional sense, is a discipline of rejection is articulated in light of these emerging practices. Changes in pedagogic theory, which seem to parallel this shift, are also discussed as a means of attempting to understand the explosion of contexts for visual performance makers. Key Words: Audience, authenticity, devised, immersive, interactive, liveness, mediatized, performance, post-dramatic theatre, theatre design.


The fact is that theatre as we have known and practised it—the staging of written dramas—will be the string quartet of the twenty-first century: a beloved but extremely limited genre, a subdivision of performance.1

Exploding Contexts

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From where I’m standing Schechner’s prediction has yet to come to fruition. Maybe it never will. However, the work I intend to discuss in this short chapter demonstrates that the context for what was theatre has expanded exponentially over the last decade.

I refer to ‘the last decade’ not because I believed everything changed in the year 2000, but because I have taught on a co urse at Central Saint Martins in London for all of that time, and my thoughts here are drawn from observations of work from the young artists we try to encourage. I will discuss five pieces of student-generated work and try to identify a collective agenda—or disposition—that has emerged. Increasingly on the course we have moved away from a tutor-lead empirical approach, towards one that allows students to follow their own agendas, related to what they see as relevant within the discipline, and beyond. We are not alone in this. The examples are selected for what they represent in terms of these agendas. In each case the students themselves initiated both the form and content of the work.

2. Sewing Machine Soundscape

The first example is a piece performed by a group of five students responding to a site they were given to work in. The site, now an independent art club, was originally an old clothing-manufacturing factory in the 1950s. It was a place where mainly poor working-class women, often immigrants, worked at sewing machines—a so-called sweatshop, now discredited in the West—as places where workers were abused by long hours, poor conditions and low wages. The students were inspired by a s eries of first-hand interviews they recorded with ex-factory workers.

Four students sit in a darkened space lit only by the light from the four sewing machines at which each works. A fifth student stands to the side with a series of props: scissors, fabric, etc. The students create a soundscape from the synchronised operations of the sewing machines, punctuated by live sonic interventions from the fifth member of the team—cutting, tearing, etc. The performing of this soundscape became the means of expressing the students’ reaction to their engagement with the ex-workers. They described their work as a piece of ‘staged music’ which included fragments of the recorded interviews with ex-workers. Interestingly, they were keen to present the factory as a p lace of camaraderie and pleasure in a s hared task—not the general perception of abuse and misery.

Although only performed to their fellow students and tutors, the students most wanted to show the film to those women they interviewed, or those who might have an understanding of the environment the piece was trying to describe. They never questioned that they, as researchers/designers, should also perform the piece.

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3. The Oxford Street Helena The next example was performed by a colleague of the student who created it,

beginning with the text of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream which we gave him to read, supported by lectures deconstructing the themes of the play. He became ‘obsessed’ with the character of Helena, and her isolation from the other characters in the play. He found a parallel in the private life of a fellow female student on the course and the performance became an exploration for both himself as creator and her as performer.

The performance spans a day in and around London’s Oxford Street, where the female performer attempts to intervene in the everyday lives of the busy shoppers via a series of staged tableaux in which she tries to communicate her plight. In one scene she is in a phone booth, writing her text in lipstick on the window of the booth for passers-by to read. In another she asks random passing men to waltz with her amongst the bustling crowds. Most ignore her. Some dance. In another she holds a squeezy bottle between her legs and appears to squirt blood onto the pavement.

The idea is that Helena displays her feminine grief in public, and that the public, of course, ignore it. This kind of work commands my respect because, if nothing else, it demands a level of courage on the part of the performer. You could argue that this piece was more about the artist, the self, than Shakespeare’s character, although others have discussed the savagery inherent in Shakespeare’s text. It certainly relates to ‘the city’, and to the isolation of individuals within the city. Self indulgent? Theatre as therapy? Maybe. Like the sewing machine piece, it discards words for action. Unlike that piece, its audience are transient, and arbitrary.

4. Maxilasty

In this next example, the targeted audience are the world-weary businessmen who haunt the trade shows of the globe—selling a lifestyle, or at least a commodity that represents a lifestyle. It uses humour, irony and absurdity to comment upon the curiously formal and codified world of the trade show and—one might even say—to undermine that world. The students creating the work initially used professional actors in the roles but in the end preferred to perform it themselves because, ‘the actors were too good.’

The students produced a spoof promotional film, promoting a product hailed as a multi-purpose ‘must-have’ accessory for modern living. It was in fact, an elastic band—the ‘maxilasty’—ludicrously marketed as: a means of carrying a water bottle at all times (attaching the bottle to your arm with the rubber band), a way to facilitate a hands-free mobile phone (attaching the phone to your head with the band) and so on. The film echoed the conventions of such promotional material: it was cheaply made, in an obvious studio location and performed with painful over-enthusiasm.

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Incredibly, the students proposed the idea to an established events company, who organises trade shows. The company is genuinely interested in having an entertaining intervention as part of what even they admit to be rather predictable events. For the students there is now a dilemma as they see the work as political rather than ‘an entertainment’.

5. Blind Tempest

The next example is also political in that it focuses on an audience not normally associated with theatre, and certainly not associated with work created by visual artists—partially-sighted people. This student wanted to create a p iece of performance, ‘that really mattered to someone’. She felt this had not been the case with work she had previously completed on the course. She joined support groups for blind and visually-impaired people and then designed and built an inter-active installation in the studios, inviting some of those from the support group to experience and comment upon her work. Like the earlier example, the starting point was a S hakespeare text—The Tempest in this case—and like that piece, it utilised ideas within the play to explore a p articular agenda: here to provide a democratic theatrical experience for an audience of fully and partially-sighted people. A specially designed mask was used to replicate, for those fully-sighted participants, the experience of being partially-sighted.

This piece was driven by the need to place an often-disenfranchised group within society, to a status where their experience was as valid, if not more so, than those whose engagement was more usually sought. In this it connects to the sewing machine piece in that it gives a voice to an often unheard section of society.

6. Body Formalism

The last example of student work is hard to describe or define. The two students called their work ‘the creation of a new art movement’, which they called ‘Body Formalism’. They began with a s tandard piece of research into early performance movement theory, looking at Eurythmics, Biomechanics and Oscar Schlemmer. This was undertaken in order to initiate design ideas for a play. As a way of exploring these ideas they began performing a series of experiments and designing the play was quickly dropped as they became obsessed (that word again) with the capacity we all have to use our body to describe simple ideas, concepts and objects, for example, a simple configuration of the limbs and associated movement to represent the word ‘beetle’.

The dissemination of these ideas became almost a marketing campaign as they fly-posted the studios with images of the movements, infiltrated their fellow students’ work with guerrilla performances, created large-scale workshops exploiting the course resources, and even incorporated their families in the indoctrination of their new movement. The piece raised many debates—amongst their fellow students, amongst their families, amongst the assessors and between

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the two students themselves who constantly questioned and re-evaluated the purpose and the ethics of what they were doing.

The piece combined a p ersonal obsession (dare I say, ego?) with a g enuine belief in ‘art for all’—a Widening Participation agenda perhaps, not dissimilar from the approach taken by the creators of both Sewing Machine Soundscape and Blind Tempest.

7. Dispositions

As I’ve rushed through this extraordinarily diverse selection of work, I’ve tried to create thematic links in an attempt to make some kind of sense of it all. Where is this coming from? What is driving the student’s agenda? Earlier I talked about ‘dispositions,’ the tendencies, the inclinations, of a generation—the things that are in the air. To list them is arguably reductive, but hopefully useful in terms of the debate. They are not in any order of preference. Some could be said to be contradictory to others.

What I’m proposing then is that performance makers today have a disposition:

• to engage and empower all elements of the community through performance;

• to express a deeply personal standpoint; • to become obsessive in their process (to travel is more

exciting than to arrive); • to challenge and subvert conventional forms (still); • to see theatre and performance and their everyday lives as

one and the same; • to embrace the economy of communicating through

performance. This last point acknowledges the fact that all of these pieces were produced

with very little money. None of them even takes place in a recognised theatre building—they can ‘happen’ almost anywhere. This is not to say that the staging of plays in theatres is somehow less relevant than this work. To go back to Schechner, the string quartet is as relevant as any form of music. Neither am I saying that this ‘economy’ is necessarily a good thing for our discipline. In the UK, as with much of Europe, the economic decline has effectively rendered the Arts ‘broke’—or at least ‘poor’. That could result in work produced on limited resources emerging as mainstream; but where is the scope for spectacle and sheer excess? The cult of self, the celebrity artist, ordinary people as celebrities, the move in education over the past thirty years towards a m ore liberal student-centred approach—all of these phenomena contribute to work which could be deemed as self-indulgent—created by elitists for an elitist audience.

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8. Conclusion As practitioners and academics, we are largely insignificant in shaping these

dispositions, most of which are social, scientific and/or political. World economics, global issues (if the world is dying we may as well indulge ourselves), intercontinental migration, the latest digital gadget, Big Brother, a swing to the right, a swing to the left…

In the presentation of his chapter Time of Flight,2 John Carroll analyses the ‘digital generation’ audience and looks at parallels between live and digital performance. Some of his analysis, shown below, although using different terminology, maps directly onto the identified dispositions:

Live Performance Digital performance Entertainment expectations

Interpretative and non-naturalistic

Configurative and interactive

Underlying assumptions Acceptance of text ambiguity

Acceptance of open narrative

Carroll is also interested in engaging with new audiences and, whether the

performances are live or digital, recurring tendencies are identified: the acceptance of fragmented meaning emerging from both a personal obsession and a need to challenge and subvert, and the desire for interactivity through the intersection of real life and performance.

Recently, theorists have debated the efficacy of ‘the live’ in our digital, ‘mediatized’ age. Peggy Phelan champions the unique, unrepeatable/un-recordable quality of the live, which for her only exists in the subjective memory of its audience. Philip Auslander challenges the idea that the live is ‘real’ as opposed to the media reproducing it, which is somehow fake or untrue. He asserts that mediatized performance can equate to the live in terms of the processes of reception. Carroll’s Time of Flight project would seem to vindicate this assertion, as the mediatisation itself, initiated here by the performer, becomes the ‘live’ aspect. Carroll also refers to Walter Benjamin, who sees the desire to bring art closer for wider dissemination as the driver to reproduce and replicate the original artwork. He regards the result of this replication as being a loss in what is special and valid about the artwork. In Benjamin’s terms, the ‘aura’ of the work is lost.

Looking at the five examples of student performance discussed in this chapter, the concerns of Phelan, Auslander, and Benjamin are not apparent, and none of the identified dispositions relate directly to the question of the authenticity of live performance. I speculate that in the minds of these young artists, the divide between live and the recorded/mediatized has dissolved, and therefore is not part of their agenda.

(In an earlier manifestation of this chapter I showed video footage of all five performances. But I decided not to include visuals here because they do not

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describe the work any better than words. Neither did they do s o at the original presentation, which highlights the issues raised by Phelan and Benjamin. They simply mislead.)

In some cases, for example in Sewing Machine Soundscape, the recording of the work became the work. It was the film that the students wanted to disseminate, despite not being recorded at the original site. In the case of the Oxford Street Helena, the recording was completely inadequate as a reproduction of the event, which existed only in the minds of the transient audience…if it engaged them at all. The Body Formalism piece functioned as both live and mediatized event—the manipulation of the live being a significant part of its content.

You could argue that my earlier disposition: ‘to see theatre and performance and their everyday lives as one and the same’3 is another way of saying that, for the next generation, ‘the live’ will be unconsciously re-defined.

I began my theatre education in 1980. Thirty years ago, most theatre students would never have even thought of creating work like this. The disposition of my fellow students was entirely different at that time. By and large, we did not consider our audience and we did not challenge the theatre form. We did not consider theatre as ‘a subdivision of performance’.

Notes 1 R. Schechner, ‘A New Paradigm in the Academy’, Drama Review, Vol. 34:4, 1992. 2 J. Carroll, ‘Time of Flight: Biodigital Feedback and Performance Design’, Inter-Disciplinary.Net Conference: Visual Aspects of Performance Practice, Prague, 13 November 2010. 3 Ibid.

Bibliography

Carroll, J., ‘Time of Flight: Biodigital Feedback and Performance Design’. Inter-Disciplinary.Net Conference Presentation: Visual Aspects of Performance Practice. Prague, 13 November 2010. Schechner, R., ‘A New Paradigm for Theatre in the Academy’. Drama Review. Vol 34:4, 1992. Michael Spencer is Course Director at Central Saint Martins College of Art & Design, University of the Arts, London. A practising designer and lecturer for over 20 years, Michael was the Rufus Putnam Visiting Professor at Ohio University, and has recently returned from designing a staged lecture on number theory at the Centre for Advanced Research, Princeton University.

In Front of Meaning: Revisiting Surfaces after Nietzsche’s Corpus

Andrew Cope

Abstract Nietzsche’s undertaking might be understood as an attempt to rescue the ostensibly groundless abstractions of culture from the looming threat of nihilism. The answer, as he saw it, lay in the re-evaluation of our own transformative capacities, as they might be realized through the senses. In practice, the Nietzschean approach, toward the question of meaning, promises to place its advocates sensibly ‘in touch’ with material surfaces. But as this process nurtures the affects of difference, as some sensible communion with the Earth, it also rigorously challenges some well subscribed, but questionably divisive, epistemological attitudes. As such, this task uses a vivid visual-aesthetic paradigm (that is Caspar David Friedrich’s painting of The Wanderer above the Sea of Mist) to introduce the positive and involving potential of Nietzsche’s distributive, perceptual framework: a process which begins to link Nietzsche’s body-led philosophy with material culture studies, through a vision of materiality that might also be associated with speculative realism and minimalist art. The aim then, is to begin weaving each of these discourses together in a fashion that might point to a role, and perhaps even a need, for sensual-creativity, at the front of academic engagements with objects. Key Words: Nietzsche, wanderer, materiality, surfaces, will, seeing, sensual, phenomena, dialectics, nature.

*****

In his 1882 book, The Gay Science, Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) cautioned that an emergent technological age was promising a strangely stratified disappearance for its advocates:

[a] shadow stands even now behind everyone, as his dark fellow traveler… And all… suppose that the heretofore was little or nothing while the near future is everything; and that is the reason for all of this haste, this clamor, this outshouting and overreaching… Everyone wants to be first… yet death and deathly silence alone are certain and common to all in this future…1

I describe this vanishing process, as it is portrayed by Nietzsche, as ‘strangely

stratified’ because, in its singular realization, it seems to promise two dissonant and equally eerie effects - as it is registered as both a presence of human absence (or a

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trailing ‘shadow’) in the evacuated carnality of the here and now, and also as the absence of a sensual presence for subjects who forsake the sensibility of their lived moment for the ‘deathly silence’ of its near future.

The accuracy of Nietzsche’s foreboding critique might be registered through Martin Heidegger’s (1889-1976) 1926 writing, Being and Time, which located the very essence of human existence in Dasein, which is to say a self-interested and so inevitably forward-looking movement through an evanescent material world. But if Heidegger’s ontological transformation of material surfaces, into environmental cues, accepted Nietzsche’s observation, then it just as certainly negated Nietzsche’s preferred mode of object-engagement, that conflicted with an apparent life-essence in its tendency to privilege things in terms of their sensible affects, rather than through any given hermeneutical process.2

Towards the end of the 20th century, the vanishing effects of technique began to outstrip even Martin Heidegger’s futural account of being - as it became widely appreciated that much of the useful information we receive from material bodies, such as the light from the sun for instance, exists in a temporal moment which can be distinguished from that of its substantial origin. A growing realization that would lead Paul Virilio, writing in 1981, to describe his own cultural milieu in terms of a ‘supernatural’ experience of decomposing materiality.3

Today, the work of the political theorist, Jane Bennett, continues to highlight the negative consequences of this dissonance between the information that configures our social world, and the material substratum that supports and sustains it. Furthermore, Bennett’s recent appeal for the re-establishment of some sensible kinship between people and the objects that they live with, revives the whole Nietzschean oeuvre as it builds on his faith in a vital materiality and also shares his demand for some process-led framework wherein the relationships between humans and the further fabric of the Earth might be nurtured through some perceptual distribution of doing.4

The task for this writing then, is a preliminary one of establishing the grounds, and perhaps something of the form, of a usefully harmonizing engagement with matter (albeit as this accepts strife), through some sensual-aesthetic commitment to its sensible surfaces. And, as such, I intend to introduce Nietzsche’s pivotal principle of Will to Power, through an invocation of the cover of the Barnes and Noble printing of Thus Spoke Zarathustra5 - as it continues a long-standing association between Nietzsche and the iconic image of Caspar David Friedrich’s (1774-1840) …Wanderer above a Sea of Mist (see Fig. 1).

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This conflation (of image and philosophy) is by no means inevitable, especially

since Friedrich’s painting is irreducible to its formal content, of a figure in a landscape, and rather invites its viewers to witness the seeing process of another individual. From an art-historical perspective then, this would seem to evoke the 19th century Romantic outlooks that were contemporary with Caspar David Friedrich, but to which Nietzsche was generally opposed. All the same, by first exploring the wanderer’s gaze in terms of such ‘erroneous’ ways of seeing, it seems possible to make an enlightening epistemological approach towards Will to Power, in a manner which might usefully foreground its strengths as a contemporary methodological lens.

Figure 1: A sketch after Caspar David Friedrich’s The Wanderer above a Sea of Mist (c.1818).

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To the extent that Friedrich’s painting is rendered with a technical fidelity that might be linked with linear perspective, then the way of seeing that the artist implores, through his representation, might be said to be at the disposal of a gaze that equates reality with the reductions of geometry. Such a r eading might be further sustained by the precarious location of the wanderer figure (on a mountain peak), as it delimits his visual field in a manner that seems to restate the centric immobility of the body in Leon Alberti’s (1404-1472) proto-Cartesian account of the seeing process (Fig. 2). And by further dwelling on the way that Friedrich’s painting readily gives up its foreground and background in a single uniform sharp focus, it might also be possible to verify the presence of Alberti’s ambivalent ‘screen’ (that is the visual plane, between the subject and the object in Fig. 2, which serves as both a window and as an image ground for a perceiver) in the painter’s process - as Friedrich apparently represents, against the actual experience of an eye recovering such a large depth of field, the wanderer’s vista as a single flat image positioned somewhere only just in front of its observer (see Fig. 3).6

However, the classical correlation between vision and the truth of geometry, means that the modern conflation of the seeing eye with the ‘I’ that is the self of the subject, withstands the destabilizing conceit of Friedrich’s realist process. And some meditation on the status of this ‘I’, as it had influenced Friedrich’s intellectual milieu through the pioneering work of Rene Descartes (1596-1650), might provide for some insight into the enduring tensions that lie within the Romantic gaze.

Figure 2: A sketch after Giacomo Barozzi da Vignola’s 1583 illustration of the seeing model in Leon Alberti’s book, Da Pictura (1435).

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In assuming the role of an observer upon the Earth (rather than someone brought about by, and so involved in, the processes of its constitution), Descartes managed to stratify of the experience of matter into cognitive and sensed components. The effect of this dichotomy, as it occurred together with some commensurate theological rationalizations, was arguably one of relieving materiality of its generative medieval aura, because if reason presented a r ather mechanical picture of the world (from which it was difficult to recover any kind of sublime experience), then empiricism’s appreciation of material relations as ‘sense impressions’ once removed from the Earth, also threatened to eclipse ideas of presence as it extended (through an earlier configuration of Judeo-Christianity) to the dignifying notion of a subject who could be sensibly ‘in touch’ with truth.7

In this sense, Romanticism might be understood as a kind of rescue mission: one that, in deifying the productive laws of nature (and the sense impressions that

Figure 3: Wanderer (2008) by Kristoffer Zetterstrand. The image disturbs the illusion of Freidrich’s realist painting by apparently representing it through the scenography

that is consistent with its own geometrical process.

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‘revealed’ them) moved subjective thought towards the lushness of the material environment without threatening the distinguished and annexed status of the self-satisfied European thinker. And so, whilst this movement initiated some breaks with the Renaissance project, the latter’s tradition of philosophy, for the most part, endured.

The key metaphysical continuum might be registered, together with its Romantic inflection, through the durable neoclassical fascination with ancient ruins and fragmented objects - because, just as Renaissance classicism had made a creative demand on perception, for restorative projects that were apparently deployed for the benefit of devotion, so the Romantics would similarly foreground the same creative processes in their worldview - albeit in terms of mnemonic performances which were apparently recuperating a more secular, but no less infallible, formal schema.

This shadowing forth of form might now be understood as a performative tendency, configured by the terrestrial inevitabilities of the body.8 But within the Germanic Romantic scene, it seems to have sustained the notion that perception might be haunted by some kind of primordial, or essential, subjectivity. And if archaeology and architecture provided some basis in praxis for this seemingly enchanted twist on mind-matter relations, then the perspective was arguably reflected, and furthered, through the work of Emmanuel Kant (1724-1804), who seized upon the same uncanny regularities of human experience to posit the primacy of an impersonal consciousness.

Kant’s philosophical amalgam, whilst ostensibly secular and unifying, synthesized the modern bifurcation of experience (into the noumenal world of matter and the phenomenal realm of sense experience), to the explicit advantage of the individuated subject - who, despite some seemingly sincere relationship with nature, ultimately remains exceptional from it, through a ‘special… access to knowledge.’9

From the Kantian perspective, the matter that Friedrich’s wanderer perceives, whilst unknowable in-itself, supports a number of truthful concepts for the subject, and through this unique process of bearing an apparently disinterested thought, modern mind-matter and subject-object dualities were protected. Whilst it might be tempting then, to read the mists in Friedrich’s image as some kind of pictorial metaphor of mystery, they might actually facilitate the idea of a penetrating introspection wherein the security of a transcendental truth is glimpsed through the fog’s apparent flux.10

However, for the atheist philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860), writing in 1818 ( just as The Wanderer above the Mists was being completed), Kantian representations not only pointed to a real world exterior to the observer, they actually gave up, through their process, an unmediated experience of reality through the will of the ‘I’, which, without the modern appeal to some human specialness, could be reconceived as both the basis of concepts and a quantum of

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an Earthly reality itself. From this perspective, the process that brought about thought was arguably identical with Kant’s noumenal plane. Moreover, as Schopenhauer was under the influence of Buddhism, he believed that a shared materiality, between subjects and objects, was a rubric that guaranteed an essential oneness between people and matter. And this assertion of will, as the essence of reality, meant that he could not only affirm that people are distinguished incrementally, rather than categorically, from objects - he could also controversially suggest that all things (organic or otherwise) were actively doing, inasmuch as they were exercising some essential driving force that was some analogue of our own willful being.11

For Nietzsche (who was compelled by the pre-Socratic Greek philosophy which insisted on a ‘real’ unity behind the appearance of fragmentation), Schopenhauer’s notion promised a rigorous Dionysian cosmology that might help to deliver Europe from a nihilism that loomed after its alleged first principle, God, succumbed to a combination of destructive forces. But he would also be compelled to significantly revise Schopenhauer’s ideas after considering that some radically independent will, with its own singular economy of one, could not amount to a striving at all - as any given thing would be its own and sole reference, effectively forestalling the willful ‘question’ of what it e lse might become, before it could even be raised. Thereafter, Nietzsche reasoned that all willing things were in essence relational, and always engaged in becoming as opposed the atomized project of being.12

Nietzsche’s modification of Schopenhauer’s ideas allowed him to argue that whilst there might be a single, unifying principle of will, its appearance would necessarily involve an encounter between (at least) two things. And it is in this sense that Nietzsche deduced that will, or Will to Power, in being identical with the mutual interpretations of embodied encounters, effaces the noumenal plane entirely and so renders the issue of a subject-object dualism redundant.13

This revision negates the idea of both the Cartesian and the socio-semiotic idea of knowledge, because if the former type of knowing claims untenably independent roles for the subject and the object, then the semiotic approach registers exterior impositions of power, rather than the sensible interpretation which is, according to Nietzsche, identical with the object. Moreover, if the Nietzschean reassessment of things, as exoteric sites of knowledge, renders the idea of a m aterial culture analysis somewhat pale and secondary, then Will to Power also devalues a symbolic approach to material knowledge through the dialectical format, which determines that any given object can never be quite the same experience twice for its conscious contributor.

Ostensibly then, the Nietzschean approach to the Earth would seem to render the realm of object-knowledge entirely experiential, and unutterable - as each encounter with materiality would be valued for its uniqueness. However, to engage fully with Nietzsche is to also accept a martial process of self-knowledge (as this

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accepts a s elf which is determined through, and created by, sensual encounters). And this, in allowing the Earth to speak through the body, recovers an important epistemological subject for substantial practitioners, within the question of how a presence might be consistent in its modifying contribution to phenomenal scenarios. It is this discursive issue - one that relates to the thing-side of affects14 - which could join or even overtake (through its relationship with an ontology built on presence), both the categorical object-question of ‘what is it?’ and the contextual alternative of ‘what it is for?’ at the front of engagements with material culture.

It was arguably with some similar ambition in mind that Nietzsche believed that his model for a creative communion with the Earth demanded a commensurate aesthetic program of accustoming the eye to ‘calmness.’15 And some insight, into just how this deferral might be realized, might be glimpsed through one of Nietzsche’s own letters, to his friend Peter Gast, which explained that his retreat in the Swiss Alps, allowed ‘a mountain range for company, but not a dead one, one with eyes,’16 and if I transpose this scenario onto Caspar David Friedrich’s painting, then it no longer has the wanderer gazing at a passive materiality, rather it seems to have him posing for, as he captures, the landscape’s ‘camera’; a dialectical engagement then, and one that, in granting a level of subjectivity to all actants in the scene, posits the wanderer and the mountains as each at once exposing, and exposed to, the thing-side of the other.

In concluding, I might emphasize that whilst this latter depiction of Caspar David Friedrich’s scene indulges the inevitability of interpretation, contra scientific realism, it also promises something more than a solipsistic self-encounter or an evanescent world disclosure: It actually holds within it, by virtue of its dialectical irreducibility, the potential for some sensual-aesthetic knowledge of the mountains ‘themselves’. To be clear about the particular opportunity for performance then, it might be said to lie in the possibility of some convergence between sensually doing with things and knowing them (and, indeed, oneself) through some exhaustive appreciation of their manifold affects, and whilst there are a n umber of well-subscribed academic perspectives that variously resist the identification of creativity and doing with knowledge (as that includes an institutionalized deconstructing tendency within contemporary art) the supposed union might nevertheless draw strength from the growing (if still marginal) conviction, in material philosophy, that the orthodox definition of the object itself ought not to depend on some model of things as ‘blocks existing in a vacuum without context, but only [upon] a standpoint (…) capable of treating human and inhuman entities on an equal footing.’17 And it is here, on this promising epistemological brink that I wish, for now, to leave the figure of the wanderer precariously poised.

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Notes 1 F. Nietzsche, The Gay Science, Vintage Books, New York, 1974, p. 225. 2 M. Heidegger, Being and Time, Harper Perennial, New York, 2008, pp. 67-269. 3 P. Virilio, The Aesthetics of Disappearance, Semiotext(e), USA, 1991, pp.100-101. 4 J. Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things, Duke University Press, USA, 2010. 5 F. Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Barnes and Noble, New York, 2005. 6 A. Friedberg, The Virtual Window: From Alberti to Microsoft, M.I.T. Press, Massachusetts, 2009, pp. 26-48. 7 K.W. Kiefer, The Mantle of Maturity: A History of Ideas about Character Development, State University of New York Press, Albany, 1988, pp.76-78. 8 B.M. Stafford, Echo Objects: The Cognitive work of Images, University of Chicago Press, USA, 2007, p. 16. 9 Kiefer, op. cit., p. 30. 10 N. Wolf, Friedrich, Taschen, Koln, 2003, pp. 57-61. 11 D. Skrbina, Panpsychism in the West, MIT Press, Massachusetts, 2007, pp. 117-122. 12 Nietzsche, op. cit., 2005, pp. 99-102. 13 F. Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols with The Antichrist and Ecce Homo, Wordsworth Editions, Ware, 2007, p. 23. 14 J. Bennett, op. cit., p. 54. 15 F. Nietzsche, op. cit., 2007, p. 45. 16 K. Jaspers, Nietzsche: An Introduction to the Understanding of His Philosophical Activity, John Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, 1997, p. 347. 17 G. Harman, Guerrilla Metaphysics: Phenomenology and the Carpentry of Things, Open Court Publishing, Chicago, 2005, p. 42.

Bibliography Bennett, J., Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things. Duke University Press, USA, 2010. Friedberg, A., The Virtual Window: From Alberti to Microsoft. M.I.T. Press, Massachusetts, 2009. Harman, G., Guerrilla Metaphysics: Phenomenology and the Carpentry of Things. Open Court Publishing, Chicago, 2005. Jaspers, K., Nietzsche: An Introduction to the Understanding of His Philosophical Activity. John Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, 1997.

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Kiefer, C.W., The Mantle of Maturity: A History of Ideas about Character Development. State University of New York Press, Albany, 1988. Nietzsche, F., The Gay Science. Vintage Books, New York, 1974. Nietzsche, F., On the Genealogy of Morals. Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1996. Nietzsche, F., Beyond Good and Evil. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2002. Nietzsche, F., Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Barnes and Noble, New York, 2005. Nietzsche, F., Twilight of the Idols with The Antichrist and Ecce Homo. Wordsworth Editions, Ware, 2007. Skrbina, D., Panpsychism in the West. MIT Press, Massachusetts, 2007. Stafford, B.M., Echo Objects: The Cognitive Work of Images. University of Chicago Press, U.S.A., 2007. Virilio, P., The Aesthetics of Disappearance. Semiotext(e), USA, 1991. Wolf, N., Friedrich. Taschen, Koln, 2003.

Illustrations Figure 1: A sketch by the author, which comes after The Wanderer above a Sea of Mists (c.1818) by Caspar David Friedrich. Figure 2: A sketch by the author, which comes after Giacomo Barozzi da Vignola’s 1583 illustration of Leon Alberti’s (1435) seeing model. Figure 3: Wanderer (2008) by Kristoffer Zetterstrand, which appears by the kind permission of the artist. Andrew Cope is a PhD student at the University of Plymouth. His interdisciplinary project explores the potential for aspects of art and performance within material culture studies’ repertoire of research methodologies.

Part 2

Spatial Imagery and Visuality:

The Seen and the Unseen

A Space within a Space: Contemporary Scenographic Approaches in Historical Theatrical Spaces

Sofia Pantouvaki

Abstract This study investigates the performativity of space by researching the relations between existing architectural theatrical space and the scenographic space designed for a specific performance. A comparative review of different scenographic propositions designed for the famous Roman Odeon of Herodes Atticus in Athens over the past 15 years was drawn up. Some of these performances were originally designed for the specific venue, while others were only hosted in it. The set designs of various theatre, dance and musical performances are analysed from the perspective of ‘space within a space’. Scenography is thus presented as dramatic space within a r eal space. A critical presentation and thorough study of the architectural dynamics and the aesthetic elements developed in the examples presented in this study result in conclusions with respect to the spatial and dramatic connection between theatre, viewed as the hosting space, and scenography, perceived as ephemeral architecture. Key Words: Space, theatre, scenography, architecture, Herod Atticus Odeon.


This chapter explores the relationship between the ‘hosting’ architectural space of a g iven theatrical venue and the scenic space designed for a s pecific performance. Given the temporary nature of a s cenographic construction, scenography is analysed as a t ype of ephemeral architecture. The aim is to understand the multiple aspects of the dynamic liaison between the constructed architectural space and the different scenographic approaches related to contemporary performance.

The case studies analysed in this chapter are performances staged in the framework of the Athens Festival, the major international festival in Greece, traditionally taking place in the Roman Herod Atticus Odeon at the foot of the Acropolis hill in Athens.1 The approach adopted for the analysis of the research results is a combination of: a) the experience of the author as a designer who has collaborated on a series of new designs in this space, b) the researcher’s theoretical research on and academic exploration of the subject, as well as c) the researcher’s experience, gleaned from years of attending performances at the Herod Atticus Odeon.

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2. Space and Theatre: Scenographic Space as Dramatic Space A theatrical space includes both the place where the theatrical action takes

place, that is, the stage, whether architecturally defined or not, as well as the space where the audience gathers to watch the performance, while there are also secondary theatrical areas intended for the preparation of the performance, the backstage.

According to Rudolf Arnheim, space is ‘a self-contained entity, infinite or finite, an empty vehicle, ready and having the capacity to be filled with things;’2 Arnheim also claims that the experience of space ‘is generated only through the interrelation of objects.’3 In performance, the space and everything that it may comprise is interrelated to the human presence, and this includes both the performers and the audience. Therefore, space in performance is not a co mplete whole on its own; ‘it only comes to life when the dynamism of the human body penetrates the space.’4

In theatre, the notion of space includes the scenic space, meaning the dramatic space where the performance takes place on the stage. Therefore, the theatrical stage has a dual aspect: the actions take place on stage, and thus the real space is where the action takes place. The same space, however, is where the apparent, the story, takes place. Scenography contributes to the creation of the ‘world’ where this story takes place. In this sense, the scenographic design creates a space within a (given) space. Scenography is hence conceived as dramatic space within real, architectural space.

The design of the dramatic space is characterised by the interpretation of the story or theme by the creators of the performance, led by the director. Pamela Howard remarks that space ‘is part of the scenographic vocabulary.’5 Designing the performance space relates the elements of composition to the given story and action, creating a new spatial synthesis, whilst lighting is the most important compositional medium for the creation of atmosphere.6 The design of the dramatic space embodies symbolisms based both on visual semiology and on common experience. Moreover, the scenographic design creates the visual character of the action, which is also identified by the spatial characteristics of the given space. Hence, when investigating the dramatic space within a certain architectural space, all the aforementioned elements are examined.

3. Contemporary Performance in a Historical Architectural Space

This study is based on on-site observation and active collaboration in a number of performances and also on personal interviews conducted with several persons who have collaborated with the specific venue.7 Scenographic designs staged at Herod Atticus Odeon within the framework of Athens Festival were investigated in detail.8

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A. The Given Space: Herod Atticus Odeon Herod Atticus Odeon was built in ancient Athens between 160 and 174 AD,

and it is the only odeon that survives today in good condition. It is shaped as a semicircular amphitheatre and was originally covered with a roof. During Roman times, the Odeon primarily hosted musical festivals and could seat up to 5000 spectators. The skene (stage) was a long rectangle, built of quarried stone,9 and the scenic wall extended over three levels, up to 28m high and was lavishly decorated with architectural elements such as niches for the placement of statues.10 Both wall surfaces were covered by porous stone blocks, while the interior was filled with quarry faced stones.11 The Odeon was destroyed during the invasion of the Heruli in 267 AD and never reconstructed. In later years, it was gradually covered by embankments, until when excavations at the monument began in the mid-nineteenth century.12 The monument was restored by the Hellenic Archaeological Service during 1952-1953; today, Herod Atticus Odeon can seat 4680 spectators.

B. The Context: The Athens Festival

The Herod Atticus Odeon has hosted productions almost continuously since its excavation in the mid-nineteenth century.13 The Athens Festival was founded in 1955. The policy that triggered the foundation of the festival was to develop Greek cultural activity, bringing local and international artists and audiences together, to promote Greek culture worldwide and to further tourism through culture. The Athens Festival has been, from the very beginning, an international festival for performances of music and theatre, and later on also for dance and ballet performances.

C. Performance in Herod Atticus Odeon

The performances which are hosted in the space of Herod Atticus Odeon can be divided into the two following categories:

Firstly, there are performances which were originally designed and presented in other spaces, and then invited by Athens Festival. In these cases, the scenographic designs were initially created for a d ifferent space. Thus, the designer is called upon to suggest an adaptation of the original scenographic design, in collaboration with the Festival’s technical supervisors.

Secondly, there are also productions commissioned specifically for the Herod Atticus Odeon. These cases are far fewer in numerical terms in the history of the venue, given that Athens Festival is primarily a hosting institution. In these cases it is possible to examine in what ways the actual architectural space has inspired the staging.


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4. The Architectural Dynamics of the Hosting Space The observation of the given space for the needs of this study focuses mainly

on the area of the stage (skene and orchestra) and its relationship with the audience area.14

Figure 1: The Herod Atticus Odeon in performance; © Sofia Pantouvaki

The architectural characteristics of the Herod Atticus Odeon are as follows:

• The space has no roof; it is an open-air theatre. Therefore, the stage does not have traditional theatrical mechanisms or wings.

• The shape of the stage is defined by the surrounding walls. It’s a l ong rectangle, very wide (width: 32m.) and shallow (depth: 6m.).

• The orchestra is semi-circular, in the typical Roman theatre shape.

• The main wall of the building is the dominant architectural and aesthetic element at the back of the stage. It has a strictly defined symmetrical architectural form.

• The wall, although solid, is not a massive construction; it is not permitted, therefore, to use the wall to support anything.

• Specific openings give access to the stage, defined by the scenic wall.

• The spectators are seated amphitheatrically at a considerable distance from the stage, while the orchestra is between the elevated stage area and the audience.

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• The porous stone blocks covering the wall surfaces have a light ochre colour, which give the space a soft but distinct atmosphere.

A few examples are critically presented in this study and summarize some

observations about the spatial and dramatic connection between the theatrical space and the scenography of the productions presented in it.

5. Space within a Space: Scenography as Ephemeral Architecture

At the Herod Atticus Odeon, there is a dual function of the given space: on one hand its identity as a monument of cultural heritage and on the other its function as a performance space operated by a co ntemporary cultural institution. These two aspects of the site are both operative, both relate to the architecture of the space in different ways, and need to be combined. There are three collaborating sides which are called upon to work together: the archaeologists, who are in charge of the preservation and restoration of the site; the artists, whose creative works are presented in this historical theatrical space; and the managing institution, which selects and administrates the performances. Their successful collaboration can be summarized in three basic key-words:15 cohabitation, metamorphosis and compromise.16

In a certain sense, performance design for the Herod Atticus Odeon is very site specific. The principal architectural elements of the space are so precisely defined that few alterations can be made.17

As observed previously, the dominant element in both the architectural and the aesthetical sense is the stage’s back wall. This wall has an everlasting presence, whatever the architectural design of the ephemeral scenography may be. Only in very rare cases have scenographers attempted to ‘hide’ the back wall with an enormous scenographic construction.18 Such was the case of the design for La Forza del Destino, produced by Greek National Opera and designed by the architect-scenographer Nicolas Petropoulos in 1998. Petropoulos, who had designed in the Herod Atticus Odeon several times in the past, decided to guide his spectators into a ‘different variation’ of this well-known theatrical space, purposely covering the famous wall (Fig. 2.a-b).19


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Figure 2: a and b. La Forza del Destino, Greek National Opera, 1998, designer

Nicolas Petropoulos; © Stefanos (collage by Konstantinos Theofanis) Given the enormous size of the sets in question, having this design approved by

the Archaeological Service was a lengthy procedure, despite the autonomy and firm support provided by the scaffolding.

On the other hand, most designers have tried to include the architectural and aesthetic characteristics of this venue into their design and thus let themselves be inspired by the space rather than ‘go against’ its qualities. One such example has been the ballet Raymonda, designed for the GNO ballet company by the author, Sofia Pantouvaki, in the summer of 2001. The concept was not only to incorporate the openings of the theatre into the scenography by using light scenographic elements (i.e. door frames), but to actually involve the whole of the back wall into the dramatic action by virtue of lighting (Fig. 3.a). Moreover, this scenographic solution facilitated the choreography by leaving much of the stage space available for the dancers’ movement. The interaction between this and the choreography design was so successful that when the production was revived in GNO’s regular venue, a new set had to be created, reproducing the main architectural form of the Odeon! (Fig. 3.b)

Figure 3: a. Raymonda at the Herod Atticus Odeon, 2001; b. Raymonda at the

Olympia Theatre, 2002, Greek National Opera, both versions designed by Sofia Pantouvaki; © Stefanos

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On some occasions, scenographic design can provide a space with a new look by lending visual emphasis to specific elements of the spatial composition. Such was the case with the scenography for Turandot, produced by Greek National Opera in 2008 based on a new design for Herod Atticus Odeon by Italian scenographer Carlo Diappi. This Turandot set was conceived with a h orizontal emphasis, underlined by the golden ‘line’, which visually ‘cut’ the back wall to two sections (Fig. 4.a-b).

Figure 4: a and b Turandot, Greek National Opera, 2008, designer Carlo Diappi;

© Stefanos The aforementioned designs are examples of scenography especially designed

for the Herod Atticus Odeon. Things are very different when productions created elsewhere are hosted in the venue. Some touring productions are obliged to use very limited sets, for technical and financial reasons. The following examples illustrate the effect of such small-scale sets when they are placed on the Odeon stage (Fig. 5.a-b): the disparity in proportion between the dimensions of the theatre and the visiting sets is huge, and thus the enormous venue is much more imposing than the dramatic space.

Figure 5: a. Le Malade Imaginaire, Municipal Regional Theatre of Crete, designer

Nikos Saridakis, 2003; © Stefanos; b. Medea by Bost, Stoa Theatre Company, designer Bost, 2003; © Stefanos


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Another interesting example is a production entitled Songs of the Wanderers by the Cloud Gate Dance Company of Taiwan, hosted at the Herod Atticus Odeon during the Athens Festival in 2005. An enormous amount of wheat-grain was required on stage for the scenography of this production (Fig. 6.a). The choreography was based on the changing shapes of the wheat, so that this dance performance could not be performed without it (Fig. 6.b). In this respect, the grains were also active compositional elements for the design of the space. Still, any material which cannot be removed after the performance (i.e. grains, rice or sand) are prohibited by the Archaeology Board, since the orchestra of the Herod Atticus Odeon is surrounded by ancient rain-water drainage systems. The grains could block the drains, which are not only of historical value but are also, to this day, the venue’s only drainage system. The solution found in this case was to build a small container, closed on each side at a height of about 30 cm all around the stage, in order to keep the grains of wheat within the area of the stage. The result was a magical production of marvellous harmony of body, movement, lighting and space.

Figure 6: a and b Songs of the Wanderers, Cloud Gate Dance Company of Taiwan,

designer Austin Wang, Athens Festival 2005; © Stefanos There are also examples of performances which did not work well in this

particular venue. On May 1, 2004, the year of the Athens Olympic Games, a concert of the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra opened the 2004 Athens Festival. Since the concert was internationally broadcast live at 1pm in the afternoon, it was necessary to have a roof to provide shade and shelter to those on stage. Having seen the preliminary design for a massive roof, the archaeologists were against its installation, since it would have created problems in terms of weight and aesthetics. The negotiations lasted three months, and finally a more appropriate solution was found in the form of a smaller-scale and lightweight tent as opposed to a large roof, so that all parties involved were satisfied.20 Still, the aesthetic result of the approved ‘roof’ is very controversial (Fig. 7.a-b).

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Figure 7: a and b Aspects of the setting for the concert of the Berlin Philharmonic

Orchestra, Athens Festival 2004; © Stefanos The production of the opera Pagliacci, commissioned by the Athens Festival to

Franco Zeffirelli, who designed and directed it in September 2005, was probably the most ambitious plan in the history of the Festival. Zeffirelli was inspired by the actual architectural space of the Herod Atticus Odeon, and designed a scenographic space extending across the entire scenic area of the monument. In particular, the back wall of the stage became part of a scenographic composition, which seemed to be extending around and behind the wall. The wall was incorporated in the dramatic action by using scaffolding, thereby giving the impression that the sets were inhabited by people, i.e. the performers, thus imbuing the architectural space of the Odeon with life. In order to make the construction of a scaffolding which could hold the weight of 20 persons walking on it possible, it proved necessary to construct a second scaffolding at the rear of the stage wall, to provide support to the front scaffolding by connecting both sides, since it is prohibited to affix anything whatsoever to the theatre’s ancient walls.

This enormous construction had to be discussed at great length with the Central Archaeological Council representatives and accompanied by a ci vil engineering certificate before it could be approved.

Zeffirelli’s intention was to convey a sense of cinematographic realism to the theatrical space of the venue. Therefore, the Pagliacci production also included a series of real objects, realistic scenographic elements and a long list of props, many of which were ultimately ruled out and not used in the end.21 All in all, Pagliacci was a p erformance of complex scenographic demands. The final outcome was a lively performance, in which the dramatic space merged with the architectural space of the theatre. The director-designer’s initial intention was fulfilled, in that the performance brought the space in which it was taking place to life.


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Figure 8: a through d Pagliacci, Athens Festival 2005, designer Franco Zeffirelli;

© Stefanos

6. Conclusion The case studies analysed highlight several parameters with respect to theatre

architecture and design for performance. These parameters interrelate and involve the architectural dynamics and the aesthetic identity of a given space, the type and style of the performance and the (desired) character of the scenographic design. Special requirements and restrictions, such as those examined in connection with the Herod Atticus Odeon, also contribute to the creation and/or adaptation of a scenographic approach. In each individual phase, close and constant collaboration must be ensured amongst all professionals involved.

‘In whatever size, shape and proportion, space has to be conquered, harnessed and changed by its animateurs.’22

Notes 1 George Loukos, Athens Festival Chairman and Artistic Director since 2006, broadened the festival programme to host more regularly experimental and avant-garde performances, introducing new venues in an industrial complex. 2 R. Arnheim, The Dynamics of Architectural Form, University of California Press, Berkeley/Los Angeles/London, 2009, p. 9.

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3 Ibid., p. 10. 4 See L. Damiani in P. Howard, op. cit., p. xv. 5 Howard, op. cit., p. 1. 6 See also S. Pantouvaki, ‘Visualising Theatre: Scenography from Concept to Design to Realisation’, Mapping Minds, M. Raesch (ed), Inter-Disciplinary Press, Oxford, UK, 2010, pp. 67-75. 7 Interviewees include: Athens Festival Chairman and General Manager Yannis Karahissaridis (2001-2006), Athens Festival Technical Director Kostas Charalambidis (2001-2008), and Theatre Manager for Herod Atticus Odeon, Keti Vavalea (1999-currently). 8 Most of the research material for this research was collected during the author’s collaboration with Athens Festival as production manager (2002-2006). 9 See the History of the Odeon of Herodes Atticus at the official webpage of Athens Festival, Viewed on 5 December 2010, Available at http://www.greekfesti val.gr/gen_content.aspx?pgid=4&vid=1. 10 See also, M. Kosma, ‘Herod Atticus Odeon, History’, Odysseus Portal, Hellenic Ministry of Culture & Tourism/Hellenic Culture Organization S.A., Viewed on 4 December 2010, Available at http://odysseus.culture.gr/h/2/eh25.jsp?obj_id=6622. 11 Kosma, op. cit. 12 History of the Odeon of Herodes Atticus at the official webpage of Athens Festival, op. cit.; Kosma, op. cit. 13 These were initially theatrical productions of ancient drama, in keeping with the cultural policy of the Greek State, in need of ‘bolstering its identity.’ See the official webpage of Athens Festival, op. cit. 14 According to Howard, ‘the characteristic of a s pace also has to be taken into consideration from the first moment of planning. Its atmosphere and quality deeply affect both audience and performers.’ P. Howard, op. cit., p. 2. 15 For the development of these ideas, the author is grateful to discussions held with the former Chairman and General Manager of Athens Festival, Yannis Karahissaridis. 16 For more details see: S. Pantouvaki, ‘Monuments - Theatres - Conflict & Collaboration Concerning the Use of Archaeological Sites by Cultural Institutions – The Athens and Epidaurus Festivals’ (in Greek), Academic Lectures 2008-09, Department of Theatre Studies, University of Peloponnese, Nafplion, (forthcoming). 17 However, the added stage provides numerous possibilities to change shape and dimensions, according to the needs of each type of event. 18 This is difficult to achieve, also due to the high cost of such a construction. 19 Petropoulos supported his views during the set up of the production in June 1998. 20 The Philharmonic, the archaeologists and the Athens Festival.

http://odysseus.culture.gr/h/2/eh25.jsp?obj_id=6622


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21 For example, Zeffirelli had requested the presence of live animals on stage, but this was not allowed. 22 P. Howard, op. cit., p. 1.

Bibliography Arnheim, R., The Dynamics of Architectural Form. University of California Press, Berkeley/Los Angeles/London, 2009. Hellenic Festival S.A. Available at http://www.greekfestival.gr/. Hellenic Society for Law and Archaeology. Available at http://www.law-archa eology.gr/Index.asp?C=3. Howard, P., What is Scenography? Routledge, London and New York, 2002. Pantouvaki, S., ‘Visualising Theatre: Scenography from Concept to Design to Realisation’. Mapping Minds. Raesch, M. (ed), Inter-Disciplinary Press, Oxford, UK, 2010. Pantouvaki, S., ‘Monuments - Theatres – Conflict & Collaboration Concerning the Use of Archaeological Sites by Cultural Institutions – The Athens and Epidaurus Festivals’. (in Greek) Academic Lectures 2008-09. Department of Theatre Studies, University of Peloponnese, Nafplion, (forthcoming). Rose, G., Visual Methodologies. Sage, London, 2005. Collins, J. and Nisbet, A. (eds), Theatre and Performance Design: A Reader in Scenography. Routledge, London and New York, 2010. Sofia Pantouvaki, Ph.D., is a f reelance scenographer and researcher, currently teaching at the Department of Theatre Studies, University of the Peloponnese in Greece.

http://www.greekfestival.gr/

Theatre for All: The Scenic Contraption in the Work of O Bando

Filipa Malva

Abstract Should scenography be audience-specific? Should there be a s pecific ‘formation process’1 of the scenography in performances for children and young audiences? The purpose of this chapter is to address these questions and investigate the process of designing scenography while looking at the work of O Bando. O Bando Theatre Company started out, in the seventies, by touring Portugal hoping to interact with children of all ages and social backgrounds, rural and urban. They defined themselves as a children’s theatre company and their art as being popular, based on traditional tales. Their scenography was made from warm, old, found materials and was put together by all the people involved in the performance, from actors to welders. Rehearsals ran parallel with the set, prop and costume making. The final designs were later on called ‘scenic contraptions.’ A single piece of scenic machinery moving alongside the actors and by them creates all spaces of the performance. In Afonso Henriques, a crib turns into a set of threads, rotates into a throne and finally into a deathbed, as it tells the story of a king. During the last thirty years, their theatre changed: It is now a theatre for all. O Bando believes that their plays are built from popular traditions, and as such, they easily conquer an adult audience and communicate with a younger audience. Their emphasis on materializing these traditions into an interactive scenic object which defines the audience-performers relation, the fictional space and the narrative structure, might be a clue as to what is a scenography valued by all audiences. Key Words: Scenography, set, space, scenery, costume, narrative, children’s theatre.

***** 1. Short History of O Bando Theatre Company

O Bando started out in the 1970s, touring Portugal and hoping to interact with children of all ages and social backgrounds, rural and urban. They defined themselves as a children’s theatre company and their art as being popular, based on traditional culture.

During the last thirty years, their theatre has changed: It is now a theatre for all. O Bando has come to believe that their plays can easily conquer an adult audience if they communicate with a younger audience. They are based on cultural heritage and collective imagination. A good example of this utilization is the Serrar da Velha, a village’s traditional celebration. In Vila Real, during the Easter fasting period, young boys were allowed to pick on a few old single women and pretend to saw them in half while singing. It was the only day of the year when children were

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in charge. These and other social gatherings were the basis for the work of O Bando, since they used existing social and generational relationships to interact with their audience. They believe contemporary work should always be founded in the past, and that a p erformance should always carry us into a place of fear, mystery and uniqueness. For O Bando, theatre should not be age specific, but rather a celebration of what is common to all ages.

2. Their Use of Scenic Contraptions

Their scenography is made from old, warm, found materials and is often put together by the performers themselves. Rehearsals run parallel with the set, prop and costume making. Tito Lívio, a P ortuguese theatre critic, has called these objects ‘scenic contraptions’ as their sets are frequently a single piece of scenic machinery moved by the actors, creating the space and place for performance. These scenic contraptions started out by being a product of touring difficulties: how to easily carry a full range of sets and props on tour. For each new play the same problem arose and in the end these machines turned into a sum of stage objects but also a narration tool. For each of their drawers tells a different chapter in the story and each of its movements changes the scene into a new setting.

One of the most emblematic is used in Afonso Henriques, a play about the first king of Portugal, still touring the country after 30 years. The scenic contraption used in it is a carpentry puzzle, which incorporates a wooden crib, a set of threads, a throne and a deathbed. By flipping, rotating and folding it, the actors are able to have fast scene changes. Each setting relates to a t ime in the king’s life: birth, childhood, knighthood and death.

Figure 1: Alfonso Henrique.2

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The machine has also multiple drawers where props and instruments are stored. The time that is spent with these changes, leisurely and deliberately makes the mechanisms visible to the audience, decelerating the time of narration while speeding up narrated time. When the king’s page flips his bed into place, the audience is immediately carried to a new place and time, condensing multiple years and events into a single movement; simultaneously this scene change is done slowly allowing for a pause in the storyline.

Figure 2: Alfonso Henrique.3

This is also a playful way to involve the audience, giving meaning to a

conventionally technical moment. The fascination for the craft in the contraptions involves the audience, young and adult, in the discovery of the scenography and consequently of the narrative. This involvement might give us some clue as to how these scenic contraptions could be representative of a scenography for all audiences.

For the purpose of this chapter, we will now look at their use in O Bando’s latest play, Quixote, an opera buffa.

3. Why Quixote?

Quixote is the story of Dulcineia’s journey to find her Quixote de la Mancha. This particular production is a good example of why the scenography is fundamental to the way a story is told; it becomes another character engaging actors and audience.

Quixote is based on the original comedy play for puppets written by António José da Silva, the Jew, who in turn based it on D. Quixote de la Mancha, by Miguel de Cervantes. In the Jew’s opera, the characters were to be played by puppets and their voices by the singers-puppeteers manipulating them. These hand puppets are called Robertos and their traditional plays are based on characters from commedia dell’arte. They use ridicule to interact with the audience.

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In this adaptation, we are told of the journey Dulcineia decides to make to find her long lost love, D. Quixote. She is wasting away in a home, alongside her faithful servant Teresa Pança, when after a t empestuous argument with her hairdresser she hops on her wheel chair and leaves. Scene after scene, a few of her keepers try to get her to come back, by trickery and force. As she explores every corner of her world, she eventually realizes D. Quixote will always be lost to her. For O Bando, this is a story of old age and madness, the last breath of life of an old woman ‘because the search for utopia is, today, something absolutely feminine.’ 4

4. Quixote’s Scenography

Let us now examine how these concerns were explored by the scenography, how set, props, and costumes enhanced the characters’ narrative.

In the first scene, Dulcineia, dressed in a white nightgown and with white make-up staggers on stage. After her, the musicians still tuning their instruments wheel themselves on. Little by little, men and women all dressed in white gowns carrying different kinds of walking aids start to move into the scene. As the music begins, two singers dressed in black, standing on the tall cubic set, give voice to all characters. On the stage floor below, the diverse white costumes react with actors’ actions and emotions as they use their skirts to hide from or to fight the enemy. Moreover, they use crutches, steel walls and a revolving floor as extensions of their movement. A jump is made wider by the height of a cr utch or a ch arge on an enemy’s castle faster by the speed of a wheel chair on the revolving floor. The fast paced larger-than-life choreography and high-pitched voices are in contrast with the monolithic steel set. Its austere look and single rotating motion mark the scene changes. When the singers-puppeteers on the top level withdraw, musicians and performers revolve the cube to reveal a new side, a different setting. By the end of the opera, they have explored all sides to the cube until they have unlocked it, exposing its interior.

Figure 3: Quixote.5

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This steel scenic contraption was set on a centered revolving floor, against the bareback wall of the stage. Behind it t he audience could see the stairwell to the dressing rooms, the doors to the workshop and old painted flats from past productions. Quixote was designed for touring but also keeping in mind that the opening night would be at Teatro Trindade, a XIXth century Italian style theatre. In a proscenium theatre, the performance is expected to conform to the stage dimensions. The foyer, the stalls, the red corridor carpets and of course the backstage are in principle off limits. The performance does not react to them or with them and so the audience space is pre-determined and static. Taking a scenic contraption into a place of performance and simply dropping it stage centre, without masking or backdrops, it is a way, through performance design, to confront and test the pre-determined boundaries of the theatre building. While in other proscenium arch performances the audience is aware they are watching performers and scenery inside a framed box, and as such there are clear boundaries between active performance and passive audience, in Quixote, the fact we are able to view beyond the frame, even beyond the set, into the theatre backstage, melts the boundaries away, allowing the actors a clear, fluid, relationship with their public. There’s no longer a ‘theirs’ and ‘ours’ territory and that tacit agreement that each of us is to keep to their own. All audience is privy to their world and as a result is asked to participate further. Additionally, exposing an old theatre’s innards to the audience is incorporating its history into this tale of old age. Through the use of this scenography, the production engages in an active interaction with the audience, exploring and making sense of its concepts: adventure, madness, the feminine, and power.

Contrary to site-specific performances, which try to sequence a set of spaces into a narrative, Quixote’s scenic contraption, while on tour, tries to include each new place into its narrative. They work as centripetal objects. They focus the action on them, however each time they shift they launch the movement forward taking the conditions of the place, and audience’s reactions, into account. For example, every time the floor revolves, there are a limited number of musicians that are able to move with it, using the narrow space between the set and the back wall. Nevertheless, it is easy to imagine that on an arena type stage the whole production would move with the main set, making of the scene changes real journeys from one point to another in fictional space.

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Figure 4: Quixote.6

Scenic contraptions, as opposed to heavy scenery or a portable flat background,

are one of the most resourceful methods to create fictional place. On the one hand, they are functionally efficient, incorporating multiple sceneries; on the other hand, they record the building, rehearsing and performance process, accumulating layers of meaning with each stage of the formation process. They become characters, characters that react with the performers and consequently the audience. In Quixote and in other works by O Bando, scenography is seen as a vital dramatic tool of the performance, many times the trigger that initiates it. It is no longer a scenography of background or illustration, but a vigorous means to define fictional place.7

In the palace scene, Dulcineia’s and Teresa Pança’s hostess convinces them to partake of a meal in the hall before they are allowed to see D. Quixote. They suspect they are being tricked, but they agree nonetheless. The large steel cube is split in half and opens to reveal two tall doorways and several small drawers. The actors slide their hands through them and pull them out to use them as steps, benches and a table for the palace meal. Behind the set, the music is still playing while they climbed up the wall to settle for what turns out to be a negotiation for the person of D. Quixote.

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Figure 5: Quixote.8

Every time one of the characters gets upset, they lose their balance, almost fall

and end up changing position, trying to keep up with the singers’ voices. It becomes a balance feat as the argument rouses to its climax. The anxious tone of the narrative is clearly shown by their interaction with the set. Moreover, the flat landscapes of Cervantes’ original tale are suggested, in the previous scenes, when the performers continually walk on the flat stage, revolving around the single tall object on stage. In this particular scene, the interior space of the palace takes them into the cube and uses its height for the first time. After this scene, Dulcineia and Teresa take separate routes as, disappointed, they realize D. Quixote is yet to be found. It is a turning point in both the narrative and the motion of the set. This type of use of the scenography is a meaningful way to guide the audience from one point to another in the narrative, while appealing to their creativeness: it works as a guessing game, fascinating both adults and children.

Teresa is finally given her place to govern by her mistress and in the following scene we see the last side of this scenic contraption: a forest of rusty steel pillars and beams. Against it, it was sometimes difficult to distinguish their bodies from the machines’ parts and the white ethereal costumes and make-up design made them look as ghosts going in and out of fortified walls. Teresa is made governor and as such keeps being called upon to protect her land. Behind the thick steel grid, she can hardly move her body. When two actors cross paths, they have to jump over and twist around the complex steel shapes.

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Figure 6: Quixote.9

By the end of the scene, Teresa decides to leave: this new home has been too

much like a p rison. Again, the set is seen to add to the actors’ movements, their characters’ state of mind and thus the narrative. Throughout the performance the scenic contraption becomes, for the audience as for the performers, a record of this interaction. It is narrative made material, a co ntinuous aid in the discovery of meaning, relaying to all audiences.

5. Conclusion

The work of O Bando and Quixote in particular, show us that a g reat performance is one that makes us reflect, that engages our memory and imagination, during and after it is passed. It is telling a story the way it brings out its most relevant aspects. Sometimes this means going into a place of discomfort or fear as well as pleasure and joy. And a great scenography is that which cannot be taken apart from its production, it is as much embedded in it as the production depends on it to depict a story. As it was demonstrated, the twisted limbs of the actors against the steel grid walls are telling us of how they feel trapped behind the governor’s fortified walls, by the way their movements were enhanced by wooden crutches, making their characters look both old and vigorous – a complex way to respond to the show’s hypothesis: thinking of old age as bold, free and adventurous.

Quixote was a show for audiences over 6 y ears old, though it dealt with subjects like sex, fear, growing old and solitude. O Bando thinks that regarding theatre for children as a simplified version of adults’ isn’t respecting the children’s abilities to discover the multiple meanings of theatre. Furthermore, in the effort to ‘communicate with all audiences, they’ve paid special attention to visual symbols understood by children […] developed the taste for detail, for miniatures that, like toys, allow us to dominate reality’.10 Since their scenic contraptions are at the

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centre of their performances, they have been, consequently, the facilitators of this connection with the audience.

The work of O Bando shows us that it is possible to design a scenography that engages our collective memory, and what’s more, the experience of communicating with a children’s audience can inform its formation process.

Notes 1 L. Pareyson, Os problemas da estética, Martins Fontes, São Paulo, 1997, p. 185. 2 Afonso Henriques photo from O Bando Theatre archive. 3 Afonso Henriques photo from O Bando Theatre archive. 4 C. Barradas, ‘D. Quixote está velho e mudou de sexo’, O Público, 25 November 2010, http://www.ipsilon.publico.pt/teatro/texto.aspx?id=254593, 15 April 2010. 5 Dulcineia and Teresa Pança, Quixote, photo by A. Teixeira. 6 Musicians, Quixote, photo by A. Teixeira. 7 G. McAuley, Space in Performance: Making Meaning in the Theatre, University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbour, 2000, p. 25. 8 ‘The Meal’, Quixote, photo by A. Teixeira. 9 ‘At the Governor’s’, Quixote, photo by A. Teixeira. 10 M.H. Serôdio, et al., O Bando: Monografia de um Grupo de Teatro no seu Vigésimo Aniversário, Grupo de Teatro O Bando, Setúbal, 1994, p. 261.

Bibliography Bando, Cooperativa de Teatro de Animação, O Manifesto – Teatro. C.T.A.B., Lisboa, 1980. Bando, Cooperativa de Teatro de Animação, Teatro O Bando, Afectos e Reflexos de um Trajecto. C.T.A.B., Palmela, 2009. Barradas, C., ‘D. Quixote Está Velho e Mudou de Sexo’. O Público. 25 November 2010, 15 April 2010, http://www.ipsilon.publico.pt/teatro/texto.aspx?id=254593. McAuley, G., Space in Performance: Making Meaning in the Theatre. University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor, 2000. Oddey, A. and White, C., Modes of Spectating. Intellect, Bristol, 2009. Pareyson, L., Os Problemas da Estética. Martins Fontes, São Paulo, 1997. Reason, M., The Young Audience: Exploring and Enhancing Children’s Experiences of Theatre. Trentham Books, Stoke on Trent, Sterling, USA, 2010.

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Ribeiro, A., O Bando : Máquinas de Cena/Scene Machines. Campo de Letras, Porto, 2005. Serôdio, M.H. et al., O Bando: Monografia de um Grupo de Teatro no seu Vigésimo Aniversário. Grupo de Teatro O Bando, Setúbal, 1994. Filipa Malva is a PhD candidate at the University of Coimbra, Portugal. While she is interested in all aspects of scenography, currently her research and writing is devoted to scenography in the context of children’s and young audiences’ shows.

Spatial Imagery: Visualization Strategies in Two Dance Performances of Romeo and Juliet

Bilha Blum and Liora Malka Yellin

Abstract In this collaborative chapter we intend to explore the spatial imagery of two different dance performances based on the same Shakespearean play-text – Romeo and Juliet – and danced to the musical score composed by Prokofiev. In the first one, Rudolf Nureyev, working in collaboration with Ezio Frigerio as designer, choreographed a classical ballet piece (1991) depicting Renaissance Verona while following the plot of the play-text step by step; in the second one, Angelin Preljocaj and the renowned visual (mainly comics) artist Enki Bilal created a contemporary dance work (1997) portraying an imaginative futuristic totalitarian society, using the play-text as a mere inspirational starting point. The aim of our examination is to unfold the basic visual principles that frame the formulation of the spatial imagery in each of these dance performances and detect its perceptual and conceptual effects. Our analysis of Nureyev’s and Preljocaj’s respective visualization strategies moves along two main paths: the aesthetical, in which the stage imagery is revealed mainly through the interplay between the visual and the experiential space; and the cultural, which deals with the way the imagery can be understood in an historical and socio-cultural context. Informed by studies in visuality, we intersect between the aesthetical and the cultural and consider the two productions as an indication of the visual turn in terms of performance practice. Key Words: Spatial imagery, visual space, experiential space, visual turn.

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When the curtain rises on Nureyev’s ballet of Romeo and Juliet,1 the spectators are confronted with a massive construction comprising two very tall and richly ornamented gates, one bearing the name of Capulet and the other that of Montague, enclosed by imposing columns. In front of them five dancers are engaged in what seems to be a street quarrel. When one of them forcefully pushes the gates apart, an upper level is revealed, and in its centre the statue of an impressive but anonymous figure riding a horse. The stage is thus immediately transformed into a perfectly symmetric and monumental Renaissance-style street. Later on, this statue will be intermittently replaced by Juliet’s bed and various other elements to convey intimate spaces, as opposed to the lower level of the stage used for the public scenes.

In comparison, in Preljocaj’s dance performance,2 the metallic external walls of a futuristic fortress, an elevated bridge and dim street lamps, are the main components of a claustrophobic scenic space. Armed guards with flashlights and a

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German shepherd dog patrol the bridge, intimating that there is nowhere to hide. The wall varies in height and colour, suggesting a hierarchical separation: the right section is high and dark, with a large opening through which the dancers can enter or exit the stage; the left section is low and gray, with three holes in it, one the size of a human and the other two much smaller and can only be crawled through. Each side of the stage is mainly occupied by a fairly homogeneous group of dancers. Their well-differentiated costumes – black leather military-like uniforms and boots for one group and light gray suits for their adversaries – instantly reveal their association to violently opposed social entities (rather than families), respectively defined here as the ‘people of the towers’ and the ‘people of the burrows.’

Although the visual space, i.e. what we see, is utterly different in each of the two above-noted performances, both create a complex web of monumental stage pictures that activate a primarily culturally-embedded experiential space, i.e. the way we see. Among other interpretative possibilities, juxtaposing the two performances discloses what might be termed ‘the rise and fall of the enlightenment credo’, rooted in the humanist project: Nureyev and Frigero’s proscenium stage, affording a wide perception, induces the spectators to reflect upon its positive, rational and scientific idiom along with its ‘scopic regime’ of ‘Cartesian perspectivism,’3 while Preljocaj and Bilal’s rather obscure and panoptic spatial figuration negates the idea of progress by juxtaposing past, present and future. It consequently mirrors the contemporary critique of the enlightenment credo. Besides reflecting the artists’ different approaches to Romeo and Juliet, the spatial imagery, comprising both the visual and the experiential spaces, seems to characterize their works as a locus of reflections on, and an inquiry into, performance practice as cultural discourse. In this light, the key differences between the two productions reflect the emergence of what is usually described as ‘the visual turn.’

The term ‘visual turn’ refers to a new field of studies that emerged in the 1990s in response to the ever-growing importance of vision and visuality within cultural practices. This was a d irect result of the influential presence and unprecedented dominance of images in our lives. In this ‘society of spectacle,’4 visual culture is not ‘just a part of your everyday life, it is your everyday life,’5 and as such, it focuses on questions of identity and power relations.6 Looking thus at performance practice demands a r adical change in analytic focus: instead of prioritizing the textual and relating the visual to the textual, as had been customary in western culture, attention is now mainly directed at visual strategies and their expressive and performative powers. Following Mitchell, this new analytic approach relates to visuality and textuality as separate, independent models, because ‘visual experience or ‘visual literacy’ might not be fully explicable on the model of textuality.’7 It explores how visuality offers an alternative to textuality, or in Mirzoef’s words, how the visual ‘challenges and disturbs the textual’.8 While Nureyev traditionally relates to the visual design as a compositional element,


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Preljocaj’s dance reflects this shift in visual culture realized in terms of performance practice.

Although Nureyev’s and Preljocaj’s works are devoid of verbal expression, the manner in which they confront, re-work and interpret the familiar narrative provides a b asic frame of reference, moulding the spectators’ experiencing and understanding processes. However, as choreographers who relate to the musical score the way that theatre directors use the play-text, they seek to visualize the music through movement and stage composition. Their aim is to present ‘the complexity of both the musical score and the movement’9 by materializing the former in visual-kinaesthetic form. In this specific case, Prokofiev composed a narrative score in line with classical tradition,10 directed at guiding the choreographer toward a d ance composition that respects the Shakespearean plot through its 52 movements in three acts and an epilogue.

Except for minor changes, Nureyev’s choreography follows the musical score’s every nuance, while still offering a p ersonal interpretation. Through a co mplex multifaceted interplay between audio-visual and kinaesthetic images, his work equals the play’s complexity although his staging completely disregards the common romantic conception. Rather, it enhances the narrative’s ambivalent dimensions by emphasizing the play’s other, long overlooked, interpretative aspects, such as the ironic, grotesque, carnivalesque and erotic.11 His basic visualization strategy focuses on seeking dance expressions as powerful and effective as the text, and parallels the visual with the textual, resulting in visuality and textuality enriching and enforcing one another.

Preljocaj, in contrast, introduces extensive changes to the musical score, cutting about 40% of its movements and adding several new sections of ‘sound music’ by the media artist Goran Vejvoda. As a collage of ‘sound objects’ (objet sonore) such as metallic industrial noise and hectic urban resonance – all electronically synthesized and covered by echo haze – these novel inserted pieces create a futuristic atmosphere, mainly associated with the ‘people of the towers’. By omitting key characters (Juliet’s parents, Paris, the Prince) and substantial scenes (e.g. Tybalt’s murder), Preljocaj creates a more condensed narrative, focusing almost solely on the fight as a meta-theme. In his version, the original struggle between the families becomes an all-out war between two (ethnic) groups, thus undermining, marginalizing and dooming the theme of love. The overall interplay between the impressive, highly effective, audio-visual and kinaesthetic images in his dance is designed to create a cl ear-cut image of a tyrannical world, mainly instigated by Tybalt, who opens and closes the performance, and his insatiable thirst for control. The visual imagery is thus presented as an alternative to the textual tradition, and serves to illustrate how visuality challenges and disturbs textuality, in line with the spirit of the visual turn.

A striking, highly illustrative example of the differences in these two productions is the suite known as the ‘Dance of the Knights’,12 probably the most

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popular number of the whole piece. Originally a part of the Montague masked ball, its march-like opening sounds paradoxically impart a grave tone and dark mood to the outward festivity of the situation. Nureyev enhances this musical conflict by choreographing a s ocial dance that challenges classical ballet aesthetics and visualizes the latent violence beneath its formal and dignified surface: strong diagonal stamping steps and harsh movements peak in a vigorous sword dance that marks its end.13 The limits of aristocratic discipline and the critical flaws in its noble ethos are thus clearly established.

Preljocaj’s choreography severs this scene from the original ball and introduces a march-like dance comprising three lines of men walking, jumping and leaping, simulating a parade of hailing and goose-stepping figures. A group of black-garbed women of the ‘people of the towers’ then enters the stage; they approach the men in turn and caress, kiss and admiringly stroke their muscles. The last one to enter is Juliet, conspicuously dressed in white. After inspecting three of the men, she discovers Romeo, a member of the ‘people of the burrows’, and chooses him for an intimate duet.14 All these images, in interaction with the impressive fortress-like scenery, are undoubtedly intended to bring to mind a controlled society of dehumanized, machine-like members. Their totalitarian/fascist and even Nazi connotations are unavoidable, while the specific inference seems to be that war is more powerful than love.15 This is further enforced by this movement sequence becoming the central visual-kinaesthetic leitmotif of the entire work. Within this framework, Juliet is depicted as the only exception, as she dresses and dances in her own style and seems determined to have her own way. Unsurprisingly, Tybalt persecutes her and, eventually, becomes the direct cause of hers and Romeo’s death.

The story of Romeo and Juliet has become a cultural icon for its central themes of ‘love/war; life/death’. Death is thus a crucial element imparting violence to the love story. In both productions, the death imagery is granted a substantial role and appears as both literal and metaphorical, as a cultural construct. In Nureyev’s ballet, the murder of Mercutio, Tybalt and Paris, and the suicide of Romeo and Juliet, are all justified by the plot’s inner logic. As frail as this justification may be, death enhances here the tragic outcome of the families’ feud. In the dictatorial world that Preljocaj portrays, death seems instead a matter of (automatic) socio-cultural practice: Mercutio is left alone to face a dead-end situation against ‘the people of the towers’; Romeo brutally murders a guard on the bridge when he sneaks into Juliet’s room merely to avoid the unavoidable surveillance in this panoptic space. These shocking, unjustifiable murders elicit emotional turmoil and intensify the impression of a dehumanized world, inhabited by disembodied, machine-like people. Living a disembodied life, devoid of lived experience, entails no distinction between life and death, for both are objectified and deprived of human meaning.


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Understood as an indication of common cultural norms, the metaphorical images of death in both productions reveal yet another dimension of the play’s theme, ‘love/war; life/death’. One such image emerges in Nureyev’s ballet when Romeo leaves Juliet’s bedroom. A male performer wearing a death mask enters the scene, lifts her, puts her gently down on her bed and lies over her still body. The Danse Macabre, and particularly the Renaissance theme of ‘Death and the Maiden’, is clearly evoked here, recalling the cultural history of this visual motif eroticizing death. Juliet’s passive and calm reaction and Death’s gentle manners contrast the traditional iconography that portrays Death abruptly intruding and cutting off life. Instead, this image emphasizes death’s alluring qualities and foretells its victory over love.

Preljocaj too created a visual metaphor associating love with death, as Juliet’s massive marble bed immediately evokes the image of a tomb. However, this is a problematic image since no actual metaphorical process takes place: the bed, which also serves as her grave in the last scene is literally equated – visually and ideationally – with a tomb, and love is death for Romeo and Juliet. Not only is the poetic process negated here but Preljocaj’s metaphor, contrary to Nureyev’s, also creates no explicit culturally-shared image by which to channel the interpretative processes. Through this manipulation, Preljocaj makes spectatorship an issue, while interrupting the recursive loop between the perceptual and the conceptual. How we interpret, that is, how we conceptualize and make sense of our (theatrical) experience, thus becomes the crucial issue through which Preljocaj seeks, it seems, to confront his audience with common cultural notions.

Preljocaj’s last scene is highly enlightening in this respect. When Romeo finds Juliet lying on the grave covered with a red cloth – substituting the drug – he is unaware that by simply removing it he could restore her to life. Sorrowfully, he performs a rather enigmatic series of actions: crawling on his knees he gently lifts a finger of her right hand with his mouth and lays her arm to rest upon her chest. He does the same with her left hand until both her arms are folded upon her chest, recalling the familiar Christian posture of a corpse. Later, when Juliet awakes and realizes that Romeo is dead, she performs the same actions, in the same deliberate and tender manner. At first, these actions seem peculiar and incoherent, yet the scene is mesmerizing and highly moving – probably the most touching scene in the entire piece. The repeated, meticulous movements gradually evoke the image of a ritual held to honour the beloved deceased, and associate the visual imagery with Christian funeral rites. Paradoxically, this civilized final picture is created through a series of somewhat uncivilized actions that recall the animal world, since the movement composition fits quadruped bodily form and conduct. Indeed, the main connotation here associates the two lovers with puppies, or young animals, engendering a hybrid human-animal image.

This is the key to the issue of spectatorship and its function, for it p oints primarily to human order in relation to natural (animal) order. Through this image,

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Preljocaj marks the ideational frame he intends us to recall and reconsider: namely, the mega-narrative of (modern) western discourse – the humanist project. The way he juxtaposes the human and the animalistic contrasts this tradition, for it is precisely when Romeo and Juliet are swept away by grief, stripped of their socio-cultural attributes and re-connected with their animalistic instinct, that they become better human beings. The delimitation between humans and animals, lying at the core of the humanistic project, originated an entire set of dichotomous binaries, such as body and mind, perception and cognition. When Preljocaj places the human within the animal (evolutionary) order, he reverses this conception by granting it beauty, compassion and human values. As language is understood to be the cardinal justification for detaching humanity from its natural origins, his criticism against textually oriented culture is clearly implied.

This scene contrasts the dance’s dehumanized dictatorial world with death, and thus also life, re-attaining human meaning. If we look at the preceding imageries through it, another significant cultural dimension is uncovered. What is manifested here is that the same ideology that sought to cultivate humanity in order to improve life is also at the root of oppressive regimes. In denying humanity its evolutionary order while promoting an ideology of abstract minds and disembodied souls, the humanist discourse virtually advanced objectifying technologies. This ideology is taken to an extreme by fascist dictatorships which turn the body into an efficient machine and the soul into an effective engine directed by a d rive to conquer. Nonetheless, ironically, the same discourse that objectified human existence in the name of (a better) life is also the source of such thanato-politics in which the disciplinary biopower becomes an inhuman mechanism of monstrous bestiality.16 The dramatic conflict climaxes here in visually contrasting the fascist beast and the human animal.

The call to return human order to the evolutionary order that Preljocaj seems to express here is one of the issues conveyed by the visual turn. The differences between these two productions are thus not a mere matter of aesthetics; they rather open a w hole spectrum of socio-cultural premises, manifested in performance practice. As a ballet practitioner Nureyev undoubtedly works within the humanist rational order and textually-oriented culture. Thus, his criticism appears from within, and by presenting recurrent confrontations between classical attitudes and unrefined movements he exposes the fatal abyss between an idealized ideology and a brutal reality. Preljocaj, on the other hand, opposes this tradition: he expropriates the plot from its Shakespearian source and turns the tragedy of Romeo and Juliet into a mythical (archetypal) narrative that might be entitled ‘The tragedy of a textual oriented culture.’


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Notes 1 R. Nureyev, choreography, (1995) Romeo and Juliet, Music: Sergei Prokofiev; Design: Ezio Frigerio, The Paris Opera Ballet with Monique Loudières (Juliet); Manuel Legris (Romeo); Charles Jude (Tybalt). Recording Production: Bel Air Média Paris, Opéra National de Paris, la Sept/Arte. This recording was staged with the Paris Opera Ballet in 1991, but first staged by Nureyev in 1977 with the London Festival Ballet and since then restaged with other ballet companies. 2 A. Preljocaj, choreographer and director (1992) Romeo and Juliet, Music: Sergei Prokofiev and Création sonore: Goran Vejvoda; Design: Enki Bilal. Lyon Opera Ballet with Pascal Doye (Juliet); Nicolas Dufloux (Romeo); Pierre Advokatoff (Tybalt). Recording co-production: Opera de Lyon, R. M. Arts, La Sept. * Staged 1990. 3 M. Jay, ‘Scopic Regime of Modernity’, Vision and Visuality: Culture beyond Appearances, H. Foster (ed), Bay Press, Seattle, 1988, pp. 3-4. 4 G. Debord, Society of the Spectacle, Black and Red. Detroit, 1983, eBook, http://library.nothingness.org/articles/SI/en/pub_contents/4. 5 N. Mirzoeff, ‘What is Visual Culture?’ The Visual Culture Reader, N. Mirzoeff, (ed), Routledge, London, 1998, p. 3. 6 See for example: J. Elkins, Visual Studies: A Skeptical Introduction, Routledge, New York, 2003, p. 27; W.J.T. Mitchell, Picture Theory: Chapters on Verbal and Visual Representation, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1994, p. 5. 7 Ibid., p. 16. 8 Ibid., p. 5. 9 S.J. Cohen, ‘A Prolegomenon to an Aesthetics of Dance’, The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, Vol. 21.1, Autumn 1962, p. 24; for a more detailed account concerning the interrelations between dance and music, see D.R.S. Chamberlain, ‘Dancing in the Imagined Space of Music’, Dance Research, Vol. 25:1, Summer 2007, pp. 73-83. 10 Prokofiev worked on the libretto with Sergei Randlov (a theatre director), Leonid Lavrovsky (a choreographer, who choreographed the first Kirov production in 1940) and Adrian Pyotrovsky (a theatre critic). 11 R. Knowles for example offers a literarily non-romantic interpretation in ‘Carnival and Death in Romeo and Juliet’, Shakespeare and Carnival: After Bakhtin, R. Knowles (ed), Macmillan Press, Basingstoke, Hampshire, 1998, pp. 36-60. 12 Suite no. 2 op. 64b, Montagues and Capulets, act I, scene ii, no.13, in the musical score. 13 The whole scene can be viewed on YouTube at: http://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=ZB3sd2BAxys&feature=related, Viewed 20.9.2010.

http://library.nothingness.org/articles/SI/en/pub_contents/4

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14 Footage from this scene (the march-like opening) can be seen in the beginning of the video on the Ballet Preljocaj site at: http://www.preljocaj.org/menu. php?lang=fr&m=1&a=4, Viewed 20.9.2010. 15 The association between ‘The Dance of the Knights’ music and the Nazi regime is familiar in popular culture, as for example in Charlie Chaplin’s use of the suite in the Great Dictator portraying Hitler's dream to conquer the world. The scene can be viewed on YouTube at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lw6Yw YLJBIs&feature=related, Viewed 20.9.2010. 16 On biopower, dictatorship and ‘thanatopolitics’ see P. Rabinow and N. Rose, ‘Biopower Today’, BioSocieties, Vol. 1, 2006, pp. 195-217.

Bibliography Chamberlain, D.R.S., ‘Dancing in the Imagined Space of Music’. Dance Research. Vol. 25:1, Summer 2007, pp. 73-83. Debord, G., Society of the Spectacle. Black and Red, Detroit, 1983. http://library. nothingness.org/articles/SI/en/pub_contents/4. Elkins, J., Visual Studies: A Skeptical Introduction. Routledge, New York, 2003. Cohen, S.J., ‘A Prolegomenon to an Aesthetics of Dance’. The Journal of Aesthetics and Criticism. Vol. 21:1, Autumn 1962, pp. 19-26. Knowles, R., ‘Carnival and Death in Romeo and Juliet’. Shakespeare and Carnival: After Bakhtin. Knowles, R. (ed), Macmillan Press, Basingstoke, Hampshire, 1998. Martin, J., ‘Scopic Regime of Modernity’. Vision and Visuality Culture beyond Appearances. Foster, H. (ed), Bay Press, Seattle, 1988. Mitchell, W.J.T., Picture Theory: Essays on Verbal and Visual Representation. University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1998. Mitchell, W.J.T., ‘Showing Seeing: A Critique of Visual Culture’. Journal of Visual Culture. Vol. 1:2, 2002, pp. 165-181. Bilha Blum lectures at Tel-Aviv University on modern theatre and drama, and canonization processes. Currently her research and writing is mainly devoted to the analysis of modern drama from a philosophical perspective.

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Liora Malka Yellin lectures at Tel-Aviv University on history and aesthetics of theatre and dance. Body and embodiment as manifested in performance practices are currently the main issues in her research and writing.

Phantoms, Phantasms and Fantasies of Beckett’s Tramps and Ashfaq Ahmed’s Pakhiwaars: Game of the Seen and the Unseen

in East and West

Humaira Ahmad

Abstract Collaboration of performing arts, whether in film or in drama, not only keep the dramatic as well as the cinematic imagination going but also provide an experience that cannot be found elsewhere. While Beckett is renowned for shaping his work through repetition of themes, images, visual gestures and certain phrases in the English drama, Ashfaq Ahmed, a giant among Pakistani dramatists, is well known for his use of phantoms and phantasms for the purpose of delivering the most sensitive predicaments of life. His plays, performed on television in the 70s and the 80s, were the highlight of the golden era of Urdu Drama in Pakistani Literature. This chapter attempts to show that despite their different cultural and social, and sociological backgrounds, Beckett’s Waiting for Godot and Ahmed’s Phantasm [Ishtebah-e-Nazar] exhibit unique similarities. It also tries to exhibit how both of these inventors of unique prose in drama bring out unbelievable symbolisms and metaphors by giving life and presence to waiting. The desires of the characters in both plays are the same and so are the end results they face. Their actions and moving images give expression to their hopes and aspirations, helping them imagine what they might be. Beckett’s Tramps and Ahmed’s Pakhiwaars educate us and make us reflect and shape a s ense of identity by enhancing our understanding of the world in which we actually live. Elements of fantasy, fear and desolation as part of the lives of two Tramps and the Pakhiwaars bring East and West together. Key Words: Phantom, phantasm, Godot, Pakhiwaars, tramps, seen, unseen, west, east.

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Performing arts have the shocking power to enlarge the vistas of our shrunk-up

worlds. Whether it is the medium of film or drama, articulation through these mediums is a forceful act which turns experience into expression. The outcome always has colossal impact on the life of people and the history of the times they live in. The transformative power of theatre makes one enter into life and its reality, which depends on our choices of what and how we choose to observe. According to Wintersen

Inside every good play lives a question. A great play asks big questions that endure through time. We enact plays in order to

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remember relevant questions; we remember these questions in our bodies and the perceptions take place in real time and space.1

Playwrights have a knack to unleash these questions in the minds of people to

make them see reality and truth. T he normative power of TRUTH is walked through actors on t he empty space of stage. Drama, as performing art, tends to cope with greater themes through the real and the unreal as well as the seen and the unseen. Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot gave birth to Godot, who became one of the greatest mysteries to be deciphered for the critics, audiences and the readers alike. While watching Ashfaq Ahmed’s play Ishtebah-e-Nazar, which we later translated as Phantasm at our university, a lot of common ground was noticed between Waiting for Godot and Phantasm. Every research chapter tends to find answers for the questions in the minds of the researcher. This chapter, however, will not only try to find the answers but will also attempt to try to ascertain the right questions in order to solve the mysterious presence of phantoms and phantasms and their importance in the lives of VERY common people like Beckett’s Tramps and Ahmad’s Pakhiwaars.2 Despite their different sociological and cultural backgrounds, their desires and hopes face the same end results. However, their lives make us reflect and shape a sense of identity by enhancing our understanding of the world in which we live.

Being Pakistanis, and citizens of the Third World countries, such symbolisms, allegories and metaphors seem to come naturally to us as they not only give life and presence to waiting, but keep our people going as well. While Vladimir and Estragon are seen waiting for Godot in apparent inertia, the suffering they are going through cannot be denied. On the other hand, Ahmad’s play presents before us two women of two different generations trying to cope with real life through fantasy. Focusing upon the life of one young girl in the prime of her youth, it shows how her Phantasm is providing her with the escape from the world of bitter and tough reality.

1. Ashfaq Ahmed’s Phantasm

Ashfaq Ahmad’s works in Urdu literature have achieved national and international acclaim. A naturalist and an optimist to the core, he took Urdu shorter fiction (afsana) and playwrighting to new heights. An important aspect of his personality was his simple but convincing way of dealing with complex social issues. He gained recognition from his radio program, Talqeen Shah, projecting a man of dual personality, exposing the hypocrisy in the society. His journey from Talqeen Shah3 to the spiritualist [Sufi] in Zavia4 tells tales of historic proportions.5

Though his famous Aik Mohabbat Sau Dramay6 [A Hundred Faces of Love in plays] is supposed to epitomize the prime qualities of the head and the heart, however that is not just it. It also tells us how people from the lowest strata of society have a propensity to look for some kind of solace in fantasy to keep them

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going. Thus, his collection speaks of love, ‘unpresumptuous stories of love within, not sagas of uncontrollable passions’.7

The whole action of the play keeps revolving around two women in the family of Pakhiwaars, Feroza and her blind mother. These Pakhiwaars look after the orange fruit farms for a landlord. Precisely speaking, the job entails that the family will help tend the fruit trees and save the fruit from birds and also pick it when ready for the owners. In return, they can have a temporary straw-hat (Jhuggi) on the land, small monthly wages and some oranges from the pick of the day every day. Usually, these people sell these oranges for money as they are paid very little and have lots of difficulty in making both ends meet financially. Feroza’s Phantom looks like Ranjha,8 a great romantic hero of Punjab who would leave no stone unturned in order to get married to his beloved Heer. The Phantasm emerges out of a Scarecrow in the fields at the fruit farms. He melts when he looks at her and the whole world comes to a standstill.

Then there is the girl’s blind Mother. Every night she tries to convince her husband to find a man for their daughter and every time he gives the same answer, i.e. wait till next morning, and yet that tomorrow never comes. The Mother believes that a Phantasm is always after beautiful virgins of age who roam under the trees at dusk with their hair loose. Once he possesses them, no exorcism can save them. She has memory of one such Phantasm who used to appear before her, and then the world darkened for her when she stopped seeing him. As she finally tells her husband when he questions her:

Mureed: You were also grown in orchard. Did anybody fall in love with you? Mother: With me... No… (seeing far off) I became his lover… He used to come near the dam’s embankment, riding on a blue mare… In the moonlight, her colour appeared blue. I have never seen her in daylight… Mureed: Who was he? Mother: I do not know. I never talked to him. He used to come near the canal banks on moonlit nights on his mare. I always used to meet him after washing my hair on the bridge. He never talked to me, but always smiled at me. His eyes always glittered, Mureed… My mother used to call me mad and unstable when I told her about him. She made many amulets, but I knew he was not a human; he was a genie who never appeared to me in daytime even at a d istance. You see Mureed! Just get Feroza engaged to someone, otherwise you would repent. Trees are not good companions. (Mureed, playing with dog)


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Mureed: My good wife, companionship of a man is also not worthwhile. Mother: Companionship may not be good but sometimes the illusion of companionship helps fight your feeling of being lost and alone. You do hurry up! Mureed. Mureed: Can’t do anything at this time I will search for a match for Feroza tomorrow.

Her memory of this phantasm prince keeps her lost and agonized. She is

constantly arguing with Feroza about this matter as well:

Contact with fruit orchard is bad, among the trees where darkness prevails all the time…Young girls should not roam about under the trees at dusk… Because phantasms can possess them… (lost in her thoughts) Washed hair …oak tree… evening time… A girl’s scent spreads and then! Then spirits and phantasms possess.

And then again:

…He is [there]… it seemed to me, as if…. as if he was standing here.

She is scared that if Feroza falls for a Phantasm like she did in her youth, all

will be lost. Nowhere are we given any description of Feroza. It is only towards the end of

the play that Master Kabir, the look-alike of Feroza’s Phantasm, describes her to his wife:

Well, she was not actually crazy…she…sometimes she seemed to me like a p rincess and sometimes like a d aughter of the nomads. Many a times she appeared to be like a beautiful witch, which always kind of scared me.

Ahmed’s main focus is always her behaviour rather than on the appearance. It’s

the workings of the mind of this girl belonging to the lower class that can speak to the audience more than her appearance. Her habit of looking at the Scarecrow from the beginning is described like this:

[She] smiles as if the scarecrow is a real-life, handsome man. Then she greets him. A flute begins playing softly and the scene is taken from Feroza’s point of view by keeping the camera-shot

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on Feroza’s shoulders, her head and in view with the scarecrow seen at a distance in the scene. All of a sudden, the scarecrow turns into a beautiful young man whose back is towards Feroza. He has Ranjha’s characteristics and is playing the flute. He plays it.

The phantom-like Prince keeps emerging out of the Scarecrow till one day he

actually materializes in her life. Kabir is the village School Teacher, who is completely unaware of Feroza’s fantasies. He accidently meets her when two of his students get caught while stealing oranges from the garden. She forces him to work in the garden for the destruction of the trees his pupils brought. While Kabir is scaring away the birds from the fruit farm, she sees them living happily romancing around the orchard. When one day he does not turn up, her world goes upside down and she keeps crying. Then he comes with his wife and introduces her to Feroza. Feroza’s dreams shatter. However a strange thing happens then. She keeps looking at him until she hears him professing his love for her with a hope of a bright future full of love:

(Suddenly the Teacher’s face becomes still. He speaks consolingly to Feroza. Do not be afraid, she is nothing to me. Its you and you alone who means everything to me Feroza. This woman cannot harm you. Honestly! She can’t.)

But the harm is done:

(Camera focuses all three in the view. Feroza smiles, Teacher and his wife turn back. Feroza keeps on smiling and then sits at the feet of an imaginary man, then she sees him turn into the scarecrow and the Teacher takes [his Wife] away. Feroza keeps on laughing until her tears begin to fall. Slowly, her tears change into sobbing. At a distance, teacher is going with [his Wife]. The flute is playing and the scarecrow’s desolation dominates the scene. Her mother’s voice is heard from the distance).

Feroza’s ending is more dreary and disastrous than the two Tramps in Beckett.

She has lost the only hope that kept her going in the day to day miserable life. Now she will live like her mother, in a d ark and desolate place of existence called Reality. Nothing will be the some ever again.

2. Godot

When Beckett wrote his apparently ‘extreme and idiosyncratic’ 9 play, he did not want to impress the avant garde modernist circles. He actually tried to monitor


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the psychological and mental deterioration of the post-war modern man. However, it turned out that what was thought to be the end of World War II actually became a beginning of violent acts of humanity against each other. Survival in this world was not easy. People needed some kind of intervention, or solace, or even hope to carry on with the burden of life.

Here, the action revolves around Vladimir and Estragon. They are waiting for somebody named Godot for so long that they even have forgotten why they wanted to meet him, or even if it was Godot who wanted to see them. Everything is vague and does not make sense.

As for Godot, the two Tramps are waiting for him as if forever, yet they do not know what he looks like. That is why they ask the Boy, Godot’s messenger, to describe to them what he looks like.

It is always the behavior of the Tramps that Beckett focuses our attention on to, not that of Godot.

It is the Tramps who hold the fort in the Absurd play Waiting for Godot. In Act II of the play, Vladimir says, ‘…at this place, at this moment of time, all mankind is us.’10 Though Vladimir and Estragon’s miserable plight on stage creates a lot of laughter for the audience, yet one should not forget the seriousness of the game life has been playing on/with them. Both of them are representing billions of people like them who are struck here, waiting for their miracles – miracles that will never happen.

3. Pantasm & Godot: Gods of Small Beings

Feroza and the Tramps come from two different backgrounds, yet their needs seem to be the same. Phantoms, phantasms and Godots are actually sorts of allegories and stereotypes used for the inexplicable realities of life. Beckett’s Godot and Ahmed’s Scarecrow Prince or the Prince on the blue mount are examples that make us ask serious questions like, why do these people need their personal Phantasms and Godots? Or even better, do they need them to exist or survive? Does their survival depend on them?

Then what does Godot stand for? According to Beckett, ‘If by Godot I had meant God I would [have] said God, and not Godot.’11 But even then Godot appears to stand for some kind of god, god of small beings. Watching and reading Ahmed’s version of a Godot-like Prince and what he stands for, Beckett’s play becomes more universal and his Godot even more so. Godot who has always been considered a metaphor to puzzle the audience, here shapes into a kind of phantom that gives hope and meaning to Vladimir and Estragon’s otherwise inert existence.

People living in Third World countries like ours, with the drastic political upheavals and political corruption, know what it means to await a Messiah or a Godot. Small beings12 like the Tramps and the Pakhiwaars have no choice but to wait for a miracle and divine intervention. The same scarecrow possesses them generation after generation and the nightmare carries on. Who is going to save

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them? Who will be their Godot who will finally arrive for them - the same politicians, America, Taliban or – ? There is no answer to the question. The fact is that when masses are left with nothing but an empty casket of hope, Godots and phantasms surface to help them wait for their deaths. The current flood situation in Pakistan can be an excellent example. Millions of Estragons and Vladimirs are still waiting for a Godot to help them under open skies. And the wait goes on. While the answer to this question is usually looked into with apathy, maybe empathy will be a more appropriate tool to be used along with the apathetic approach.

In Beckett’s world God is dead but in the guise of the Tramps, divine intervention is not only still awaited but actually exists. Waiting highlights the stagnant and apathetic lives of masses. Williams believes that the play is about ‘loss of faith, and an essentially uncertain waiting;’13 however this seems more like a cry for faith. Whereas, in Ahmed’s world, people are dismayed yet work hard to keep hope alive. They are afraid of losing their soul today but want to believe that at least tomorrow can be made bearable through fantasy.

Notes

1 A. Boggart, A Director Prepares: Seven Essays on Art and Theatre, Routledge, London, 2001, p. 23. 2 A term that will be continuously used in the Research paper, it is a caste of people belonging to the lowest strata of society. Like nomads, they live in tents or make temporary houses with straw (like African lappas). These particular people work in fruit farms and tend the plants before fruition and afterwards pick fruit for the landlords on minimal wages. For a certain number of everyday pick they are given some fruit which they usually sell to make ends meet. 3 ‘Talqeen Shah’ means the Preacher in Urdu Language. 4 Meaning ‘Perspective’. 5 This virtual change in his personality was described by his wife Bano Qudsia, herself a distinguished name in the world of Urdu literature, through a comparison between him and his two best friends of the literary circle, Mufti and Shahab: Ashfaq Ahmad, Mumtaz Mufti and Qudrat Ullah Shahab… all three of them decided their paths for themselves. Mumtaz Mufti was always worried about the Hereafter [M’a Baad]. His preferred passage takes him from the Known to the Unknown. Shahab’s passage has to do with the Path of the Prophet Mohammad Pbuh [or Sunnah-e-Rasul]. And as for Ashfaq, his whole being is always in search of God but only through His creation—human beings. (See Ravi, p.112.) 6 A. Ahmad, Aik Mohabbat so Dramay, Sang-e-Meel Publications, Lahore, 2000. 7 R. Hassan and H. Bin Munnawar (eds), Ravi, Vol. xcii, GC University, Lahore, 2005, p. 112. 8 A great Romeo-like romantic hero of Punjabi origin of whom every common girl dreams, Ranjha was a rich landlord who disguised himself as a servant and looked


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after cows and buffalos for the household of Heer for 12 years in order to win her hand in matrimony. 9 D. Pattie, The Complete Critical Guide to Samuel Beckett, 2000, p. 6. 10 I. Hasan., Samuel Beckett: Wordmaster, Waiting for Godot, Oxford University Press, 2002, p. 104. 11 D. Pattie, The Complete Critical Guide to Samuel Beckett, p. 37. 12 ‘Small beings’ of brotherhood is another term I feel is appropriate to describe the common people like us, the Tramps and the Pakhiwaars, who need gods and phantasms to keep going. It is formulated from Roy’s world famous novel God of Small Things. 13 R. Williams, Drama from Ibsen to Brecht, 1987, p. 229.

Bibliography

Ahmed, A., Aik Mohabbat so Dramay. Sang-e-Meel Publications, Lahore, 2000. Barnett, D., ‘Memory-Theatre and Post Modern Drama’. German Quarterly. Vol. 73(2), 2000, pp. 230ff. Barzun, J., ‘The Artist as Prophet and Jester’. American Scholar. Vol. 69(1), Winter 2000, pp. 15. Boggart, A., A Director Prepares: Seven Essays on Art and Theatre. Routledge, London, 2001. Bowers, V.A., ‘The Space Between: Using Peer Theatre to Transcend Race, Class, and Gender’. Women and Language. Vol. 25(1) 2002, pp. 29ff. Busi, F.A., ‘Waiting for Godot: A Modern Don Quixote?’. Hispania. Vol. 57(4), December 1974, pp. 876-885. Cardullo, B., ‘Stanley Kaufffmann on Criticism, Theatre, and Film’. Literature/Film Quarterly. Vol. 15, 1987, pp. 207-218. Dowling, J., ‘Theatre and the Artist: A Personal Reflection’. Daedalus. Vol. 129(3), 2000, p. 293. Foley, K., ‘Review: [untitled]’. Theatre Journal. Vol. 4(2), May 1992, pp. 229-234, http://www.jstor.org/stable/3208745.

http://www.jstor.org/stable/3208745

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Harvey, L.E., ‘Art and the Existential in en Attendant Godot’. PMLA. Vol. 75(1), Mar., 1960, pp. 137-146. Hasan, I., Samuel Beckett: Wordmaster ‘Waiting for Godot’. Oxford University Press, 2002. Hassan, R. and Munnawar, H.B. (eds), Ravi. 2005. Heffernan, J.A.W., ‘Cracking the Mirror: Self-Representation in Literature and Art’. Queen’s Quarterly. Vol. 115(4), Winter 2008, p. 518. Issacs, E.J.R. (ed), Theatre Essays on the Arts of the Theatre. Little, Brown and Company, Boston, 1927. Johnson, E.A., ‘A Theological Case for God-She: Expanding the Treasury of Metaphor’. Commonweal. Vol. 120(2), 29 Jan. 1993, p. 9 . Keller, J.R., Samuel Beckett and the Primacy of Love. Manchester University Press, Manchester and New York, 2002. Kingwell, M., ‘Love and Philosophy’. Queen’s Quarterly. Vol. 111(3), Fall 2004, pp. 343ff. Kustritz, A., ‘Slashing the Romance Narrative’. Journal of American Culture. Vol. 26(3), 2003, pp. 371ff. McParland, R., ‘The Sounds of the Audience’. Mosaic. Vol. 42(1), 2009, pp. 117ff. Pattie, D., The Complete Critical Guide to Samuel Beckett. Routledge, 2000. Roy, A., The God of Small Things. Random House, New York, 1997. Slusser, G.E., Rabkin, S.E. and Scholes, R. (eds), Bridges to Fantasy. Southern Illinois University Press, Carbondale, IL, 1982. Smith, S.P., ‘Between Pozzo and Godot: Existence as Dilemma’. The French Review. Vol. 47(5), April 1974, pp. 889-903. Sontag, S., ‘Waiting for Godot in Sarajevo’. Performing Arts Journal. Vol. 16(2), May 1994, pp. 87-106.


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Strauss, W.A., ‘Dante’s Belacqua and Beckett’s Tramps’. Comparative Literature. Vol. 11(3), Summer 1959, pp. 250-261. Sweet, R.B., ‘Creatures of Metaphor’. The Humanist. Vol. 55(6), Nov-Dec 1995, pp. 25ff. Tsur, R., ‘Two Critical Attitudes: Quest for Certitude and Negative Capability’. College English. Vol. 36(7), March 1975, pp. 776-788. Webb, E., ‘Pozzo in Bloomsbury: A Possible Allusion in Beckett’s Waiting for Godot’. Journal of Modern Literatue. Vol. 5(2), April 1976, pp. 326-331. Williams, R., Drama from Ibsen to Brecht. The Hogarth Press Ltd., Great Britain, 1987. Humaira Ahmad [D. Lit. University of the Free State, South Africa] is an Assistant Professor of English Literature at Fatima Jinnah Women University, Rawalpindi, Pakistan. She has studied drama, and theatre & film are her focus of interest. Themes like Faith, belief, identity, religion along with gender issues affecting modern society are the subjects she likes to deal with in her research.

Part 3

Identity and Characterisation: Performing Bodies

Τhe Identity-Character Crisis in Greek Theater and Its Repercussion in Costume Design

Chryssa Mantaka

Abstract In the era of globalization and Mass Media domination, the heroic and integrated individual is being disputed in multiple ways. In theater, modern drama direction very often elaborates aspects of embodification, demanding that the actor present independent realities, cut off from the internal character, the ‘soul’ of the role. The theater of characters, especially in the Greek post-modern performances, seems to have lost its originality. It has been changed into an interactive communication where the actor’s body functions as a ‘screen projector’ and the costume loses its traditional purpose to focus on the special aspects of the hero. Similarly, in the visual arts the ‘portrait crisis’ is not irrelevant to the theater. In portrait painting the ‘subject’ is brought to predominate and impose his/her dynamic. The belief in the re-presentative ability in painting is identified with confidence in the dominating power of the individual, a belief disputed in the 20th century. In the post-industrialized societies, a new subject is proclaimed as the ‘leading role:’ a non-identity, an anonymous person, a consumer of goods, ideas and images. These social and artistic alienations influence not only the direction of drama, but also the costumes, bringing new manners of design inspiration and practice. Key Words: Post-modernism, costume design, costume narrative, portraiture and theatre.


Throughout theater history, the appreciation of the hero as a figure of higher standing within the social norms and attitudes has been continuously changing following a rather downhill course. Whereas in ancient drama the hero is a figure limited in his glorious isolation, endowed with unusual strengths, a figure with whom the public identifies emotionally through the conveyance of fear and pity, the identity of the hero today can not be easily identified by current scientific criteria. In every encounter with a theatrical character the ontological dimensions attributed to it by the public are reflected through the concepts and images projected on stage by the hero her/himself.

In the era of post-modernism, the hero as a concrete personality has suffered recurrent fissures. Globalization, visual reality, and the end of long narratives have left their mark not only in the way we perceive our own identity but that of the theatrical character as well. Interpretation models for characters and their actions have multiplied: Well-defined margins are avoided and the concept of truth is

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disputed. To quote E. Benveniste, there is not a word for ‘character’ in ancient Greek theater, where it used to identify the individual and his/her status, closely related to the specific social figures and norms. That which appears to us ‘psychological’ really refers to the relationship of the individual with the members of his/her social group.1

Every change in the depiction of characters proves the wider changes in the institutions of community and its ability to identify the individuals in their environment, or vice-versa. Naturalism and realism depict a b ankrupt, pitiful character, victim of social determinism. The theater of the absurd solidifies his failure presenting a metaphysically disoriented creature without expectations. Brecht rejects the element of individual personality, considering that the modern hero forfeits his/her position to the organized or amorphous mass. He/she appears as the only solution for the depiction of human acts. So, in Brecht’s dramas he/she rarely survives the overthrow of his/her values and when he/she does so, he/she is portrayed as a buffoon – ridiculous as in Becket.2 Therefore, in any genre of dramatic production, the costume designer is required to use different tools and manipulations for the interpretation of the character.

2. Shifts in the Role of the Costume Designer

In every dramatic role there is a special ‘proportion’ of characterization reinforced by the interventions and finally by the collaboration of the director, the actor and the costume designer. Traditionally, the costume designer is called to help the actor construct his/her role, to offer the audience the visual and semiological tools necessary to recognize certain aspects of the character, to underline the dramatic relations and generally to become a p art of the play direction. From this point of view, the work of the costume designer in many ways recalls that of the portrait painter.

The imposing elements of the post-modern theater like the play, the non-programmed, anarchy, silence, the happening, destruction, eccentricity, the trace, the inter-textual and irony are some factors that influenced the development of a relatively new model of costume design that has conquered the Greek theater stage. The post-modern tendency towards heterogeneia and heterotopia is moving against the idea of national culture and the homogenous identity. The post-modern artist believes that in this way his/her art is wide open, liberated from any form of identity, so he/she dreams of an intercultural world.3

Modern fashion generally is considered the only and the most reliable source of ideas able to lead the audience to the comprehension of the role. Fashion, having absorbed the tendency to meld the high with the low, becomes a connecting link between the reality of the theater hero and the reality of the audience, and it is merely used in the post-modern theater. At the same time, worldwide financial conditions often impose the idea of minimal, so minimalism is adopted as a fashion. The costume as psycho-gram is likely to disappear. The characteristic

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idiotypes of the hero remain open to any investigation by the spectator. As a result, in many contemporary performances, there is a s trong tendency of the heroes’ depersonalization through the banning or neutralization of the visual language. Even when some symbols or signs are used on stage, the spectators find them difficult to interpret unless they look through the direction scripts or the notebook of the costume designer. Τwo productions recently staged in the State Theatre of Northern Greece best exemplify this situation: A. Chekhov’s The Seagull (2007) and Sophocles’s Antigone (2009), shown in pictures 1 and 2.

The cultural production of the millennium cannot yet manage to organize the present and the future of the human in a coherent experience. Therefore the theater dramaturgy ends up collecting fragments, usually beyond time and space, of memories and recollections, applying this theory to the practice of fragmentary spectacle.

Some believe that the visual performance is threatened with extinction and instead of theater we have interaction, lectures and communication. The under-valuation of acting, portrait painting, and self identification is due to the sovereignty of mass media and the power of the screen. Thanks to these communicative practices, the interrelation and the impact between the actor and the audience has

become vivid and original. The spectator aims at a quality, live meeting with the actor, appreciating more her/his individuality than her/his acting. In addition, there is a lack of interest concerning the aesthetic organization by the director, at the same time depriving the costume designer of inspired applications. Scenic images provided by design elements weaken.

Some others believe that by means of virtual reality, projections, holograms, etc. the performance is visually enriched and finds its own real meaning. However, internationally in highly-developed countries emphasis is placed on cybernetics, special hybrid forms of bodies, robots and high-tech costume constructions. In Greece the audience hasn’t witnessed any of these, apart from the tendency to use projections on stage as parallel narratives.

Figure 1: NTNG Archives,

A. Chekhov’s The Seagull (2007) Photo by Kostas Amiridis


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As an argument for the identification crisis and its impact on the theater costume design, we could use an example of post-modern performance in the Greek stage, but we must stress the fact that the phenomenon of Greek post-modernistic theater is rather new. In the last fifteen years, a part of the Greek

audience has witnessed several attempts at staging post-modern plays or attempts at post-modern directing. These performances are usually produced by non-commercial theatre companies, scarcely officially financed, and can be best characterized as experimental. Very often in non-traditional theater spaces, these performances are on for a short period of time, leaving few traces behind them. As Greek theater theorists conclude, it i s probably

wiser to talk about post-modern elements in Greek contemporary theater than Greek post-modern theater.4

Lives of Saints, recently staged by Theseum Ensemble in Athens by the post-modern director Mihail Marmarinos, was based on metaphysical writings of Nikos Gabriel Pentzikis and on Orthodox religious texts. According to the stage directions, there are no real characters on stage. The human presence is implied only by voices or memories. The actors were dressed in contemporary street fashion costumes, with almost no indications about their figures. Three blond women around 30-40 years old were wearing bright-coloured blouses and jackets and different skirts with printed figures or trousers. Only some elements - signs in their clothing (yellow jacket-collant, green bolero - blue scarf) stood out. An older woman, more old-fashioned, was dressed in a dark suit. A bearded young man was slightly distinguished by a more alternative street style: a blue parka, a dynamic colour in the neutrally grey set and underneath a striped jacket with a hood, a blue sweater and trousers of a uniform. A canteen tender was also casually dressed, while a common figure was his daughter, sitting behind the fridge, reading during the entire performance. The performance referred to problems of the self and its reflection to the others as mirrors of the ego. Dialogues and parallel narratives were enriched with abstracts about the Saints’ martyrdom. The need to approach the other being and humbly serve it was stressed symbolically by the washing of one another’s feet. The performers also mingled with the audience begging for forgiveness and understanding, basic human values. The three women were likely to represent the multi-faced split personality of the modern era and the de-theatralization of the hero. The figures were interchangeable. The spectator had to

Figure 2: NTNG Archives, Sophocles’s

Antigone (2009), photo by Kostas Amiridis

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decode the multiple meanings of the play, in order to understand the function of the actors.

Dora Delouda the costume designer is a well-established artist distinguished by the modern costume design interpretation of plays. Her inspiration is usually based on fashion, mainly focusing on abstraction and differentiation through colour. This trend is international and in some cases it marks the performance style of completely different artists, from Robert Wilson to Romeo Castelluci. It is still difficult to estimate to what degree this trend has influenced the Greek stage; most probably it has been followed and adopted by many Greek artists and drama students in costume design interpretation, even as an act of imitation.

3. The Portrait as Multiple Signifier

Portrait painting is an art closely related to the human problem of immortality and the undefined fear of vanishing at death. From its outset, it was connected to magic and rituals. First it was God’s image, then the master’s. The portrait becomes the eternity itself. The image of God or the ruler was immortalized, the icon functioning as symbol. The individual peculiarity of the common person was later discovered in fayums and in Roman portraits. Fayums represented the constant possibility of human existence through poetry and the utopia of art. The question of immortality appears in their wide-open eyes. The person, the persona, the individual and the citizen, are mutually merged to become the later Roman portrait-identity. During the Renaissance, we can find portraits with a great precision of depiction. The resemblance of the original model to the work of art and the morals that influenced the given social environment were clearly demonstrated.5 The portrait, introduced along with the flourishing of the urban art, supports the tendency of peoples to dispose a social awareness. The individual as a totality of legal and political rights is a conquest of the Enlightenment and French Revolution. After Cézanne, the portraits are elaborated to express the style and the artistic worries of the painter rather than those of the model, or his/her social class or feelings. Some changes are brought to light in the middle of the 20th century, where the resemblance to the model and its character is limited. For Panofsky especially, a portrait is a painting where the artistic work is identified with the ability of the painter to show the human beings in their entirety. The belief in the representational ability of the painting is interpreted and identified with belief in the imposing power of the subject.6 Today, we will meet a temporary and maybe transitive dimness concerning the identity of a person represented in portraits, in painting and in theater art. The multi-cultural role of artistic portrait painting has become the characteristic of the last 20 years.7 The role of the portrait survives more so through the artistic photograph, while the visual representation and the historical subject are at risk. This could also explain why young Greek painters avoid portrait-painting. On the other hand, photography uses theater techniques to renew its vocabulary. Through the script, the direction, and the visual registration,


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new spaces are created where the lives of the artists are de-materialized, decoded. So, as with representational art, photography serves two goals: first, the imprinting by post-modern artists of the limits of human identity, and second, criticism of the idea of representation idea, using its own media.8

Special reference should be made to the work of Orlan: A series of self-portrait photographs where the main suggestion concerns the plastic transformations of her face through an appropriation of archetypes and rituals of feminine beauty and social power. The face gets a new identity using make-up, prosthetics and different accessories as tools. In this case, the body becomes the costume. Criticizing her work, it is worth mentioning that while visual arts take wide loans from theater practice, the theater itself remains relatively stable in its visual development.

In the Greek artistic visual environment, two figures are worth mentioning in the field of portraiture and human figure painting as examples of transition between the ‘traditional’ portrait and the post-modern one: Botsoglou and Psychopaidis. Botsoglou, under the title of ‘Nekyia’ presents a series of persons, painted only from his memory. All these figures are dead persons beloved of the artist. The painting technique recalls, in a way, theater costume design practice and methods. We detect the search for the image of the human being’s soul apart from its external personal appearance. The image is multiplied by double print and enriched with the attempt to reveal different gestures and the traces of memories across time. Psychopaidis, on the other hand, depicts the contemporary history of Greece in a form of collage: pictures, photographs, snapshots from the recent political and social reality. His works direct us to estimate the precious moments of a fractured memory. In the beginning of his career, he chose strong faces and interesting poses, emphasizing the projection of historical processes on human beings, deforming them. In his more recent work, entire familiar figures are missing from the paintings: politics and history are annulled by erasing the subjects’ faces and leaving a vacant lot instead. Both Greek artists are quite representative of visual depiction of figures, maintaining in their work something of the ontological dimension of fayums, though in a different way.

4. Conclusion

In postindustrial societies the proclaimed hero is a new subject, with no identity, anonymous consumer of material goods, ideas and images. This protagonist is the conqueror of the stage in the Greek theater, where some directors refuse to form a concrete system of signs on stage. They somehow demand the spectators’ liberation from the ‘archaeological meaning’ of the written work.9 It is therefore easily understood why all these strategies influenced the theater costume and challenged its role in the performance. The aesthetic reliability of costume interpretation is disputed, and there comes an equalization of the stage world and the audience.

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Theater professionals are strongly arguing and supporting these strategies, though it is difficult for the audience to decode neutral images of clothes. On the other hand, the neutralization of costume in post-modern performance has led to the preeminence of the body and its projections on a new series of meanings.

The parallel study of Greek portrait painting and the visual representation of characters in Greek theatrical performances reveal the predominance of open works of art which often demand a new way of being viewed, understood and interpreted. As already mentioned, we are still examining the appropriate ways to approach these phenomena.

Notes 1 E. Benveniste, Le vocabulaire des institutions indo-europeennes, Indo-European Language and Society, London, 1973, p. 276. 2 P. Pavis, ‘Ήρωας’ στο Λεξικό του θεάτρου, Gutenberg, Athens, 2006, p. 164. 3 S. Patsalidis, ‘Το θέατρο μετά τη σημειωτική: Anything Goes στο Θέατρο και θεωρία, University Studio Press, Thessaloniki, 2004, p. 109. 4 D. Tsatsoulis, Σημεία γραφής κώδικες σκηνής στο σύγχρονο ελληνικό θέατρο, Nefeli, Athens, 2007, p. 7. 5 Μ. Stefanidis, ‘Το πορτρέτο ως σύμβολο-Το πρόσωπο ως ταυτότητα. Μια προσπάθεια ορισμού: Από τα φαγιούμ ως τον Duchamp», στο Το πορτραίτο και η κρίση της αναπαράστασης, Πρακτικά ημερίδας, Μουσείο Μπενάκη, 18.1.2005.’ Benaki Museum, Athens, 2007, pp. 33-46. 6 Ν. Daskalothanassis ‘Αναπαράσταση και αλήθεια: Το πρόβλημα της προσωπογραφίας στη σύγχρονη τέχνη,’ στο Το πορτραίτο και η κρίση της αναπαράστασης, Πρακτικά ημερίδας, Μουσείο Μπενάκη, 18.1.2005.. 7 N. Loisidi, ‘Η αυτοπροσωπογραφία του καλλιτέχνη στον 20ο αιώνα: Η κρίση ταυτότητας και οι απόπειρες για αισθητική και κοινωνική επανασημασιοδότηση’ στο Το πορτραίτο και η κρίση της αναπαράστασης, Πρακτικά ημερίδας, Μουσείο Μπενάκη, 18.1.2005. 8 T. Markoglou, ‘Τα όρια της ταυτότητας στην τέχνη (και τι βρίσκεται ανάμεσα)’, Εικαστικό πανόραμα στην Ελλάδα 2006, διασχίζοντας τα όρια, Ministry of Culture, State Museum of Contemporary Art, Thessaloniki, 2006, p.83. 9 Ε. Varopoulou, Το ζωντανό θέατρο, δοκίμιο για τη σύγχρονη σκηνή, Agra, Athens, 2000, p. 40.


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Bibliography

Arfara, K., ‘Το μεταμοντέρνο στο σύγχρονο ελληνικό θέατρο. Μια επαναπροσέγγιση του φαινομένου με αφορμή τον Εθνικό Ύμνο του Μιχαήλ Μαρμαρινού’. Παράδοση και εκσυγχρονισμός στο Νεοελληνικό Θέατρο, από τις απαρχές ως τη μεταπολεμική εποχή, Πρακτικά του γ΄ Πανελληνίου θεατρολογικού συνεδρίου, Ρέθυμνο 23-26 Οκτωβρίου 2008. University of Crete, Iraklion, 2010. Badea-Päum, G., The Society Portrait, Painting, Prestige and the Pursuit of Elegance. Thames & Hudson, London, 2007. Benveniste, E. and Lalotte, J., Le vocabulaire des institutions indo-europeennes. Seuil, Faber and Faber, 1973. Botsoglou, C., Είδωλα καμόντων. Μια προσωπική. Metehmio and Chronis Botsoglou, Athens, 2002. Daskalothanassis, N., ‘Αναπαράσταση και αλήθεια: Το πρόβλημα της προσωπογραφίας στη σύγχρονη τέχνη’. στο Το πορτραίτο και η κρίση της αναπαράστασης, Πρακτικά ημερίδας, Μουσείο Μπενάκη. 18.1.2005. Doxiadi, E., The Fayum Portraits. Thames and Hudson, London, 1995. Grammatikopoulou, Α., ‘Πορτρέτα/ Αυτοπορτρέτα, στο Face to Faces, Βiennale: 2, Praxis: Η Τέχνη σε αβέβαιους καιρούς. Ministry of Culture, State Museum of Contemporary Art, Thessaloniki, 2009. Kaouki, M. (ed), Το πορτρέτο και η κρίση της αναπαράστασης, Πρακτικά ημερίδας- Μουσείο Μπενάκη. 18.01.2005. Benaki Museum, Athens, 2007. Loisidi, N., ‘Η αυτοπροσωπογραφία του καλλιτέχνη στον 20ο αιώνα: Η κρίση ταυτότητας και οι απόπειρες για αισθητική και κοινωνική επανασημασιοδότηση.’ στο Το πορτραίτο και η κρίση της αναπαράστασης, Πρακτικά ημερίδας, Μουσείο Μπενάκη. 18.1.2005. Markoglou, T., ‘Τα όρια της ταυτότητας στην τέχνη (και τι βρίσκεται ανάμεσα)’. Εικαστικό πανόραμα στην Ελλάδα 2006, διασχίζοντας τα όρια. Ministry of Culture, State Museum of Contemporary Art, Thessaloniki, 2006. Moutsopoulos, T. (ed), Εικαστικό πανόραμα στην Ελλάδα 2006, διασχίζοντας τα όρια. Ministry of Culture, State Museum of Contemporary Art, Thessaloniki, 2006.

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Papanikolaou, M., Η ελληνική τέχνη του 20ου αιώνα. Vanias, Thessaloniki, 2006. Patsalidis, S., ‘Μοντερνισμός και μεταμοντερνισμός :Συγκλίσεις και Αποκλίσεις’. στο Θέατρο και θεωρία. University Studio Press, Thessaloniki, 2004. Pavis, P., Λεξικό του θεάτρου. Gutenberg, Athens, 2006. Pervolaraki, M. (ed), Βίοι (ζωές ) Αγίων. Program of the Performance, Theseum Ensemble, Athens. Stefanidis, M., ‘Το πορτρέτο ως σύμβολο-Το πρόσωπο ως ταυτότητα. Μια προσπάθεια ορισμού: Από τα φαγιούμ ως τον Duchamp»’, στο Το πορτραίτο και η κρίση της αναπαράστασης, Πρακτικά ημερίδας, Μουσείο Μπενάκη. 18.1.2005.’ Benaki Museum, Athens, 2007, pp. 33-46. Τsatsoulis, D., Σημειολογικές προσεγγίσεις του θεατρικού φαινομένου. Ellinika Grammata, Athens, 2008. Tsoukalas, K., Christofoglou, M. and Kouselis, G., Γιάννης Ψυχοπαίδης Πατριδογνωσία, τέχνη, κοινωνία, πολιτική 1964-2004. Metehmio, Athens, 2005. Varopoulou, E., Το ζωντανό θέατρο, δοκίμιο για τη σύγχρονη. Agra, Athens, 2000. Chryssa Mantaka is Stage and Costume Designer and Lecturer of Costume Design, Drama Department, School of Fine Arts, Thessaloniki, Greece.

Something Rich and Strange: Drawing a Visual Narrative from the Text

Anne Curry

Abstract

Nothing of him that doth fade But doth not suffer a sea-change Into something rich and strange… -William Shakespeare, The Tempest.1

Shakespeare’s language can often be a barrier to understanding and informed interpretation. Yet, students of scenography are, perhaps surprisingly, excited by the prospect of designing for Shakespeare. The actor draws a visual narrative from the text when he speaks, evoking emotion and atmosphere; creating character and establishing a sense of mood, of time and of place. Traditionally, Shakespearian drama was performed with minimal scenic embellishments. Yet, there were extravagant displays of costume, which further enhanced and re-emphasised the physical presence of the actor on stage; physicality, words, action, and costume combined. The Royal Shakespeare Company R.S.C. develops its remit to explore Shakespearian text in professional and educational contexts. A priority for directors and actors is making informed creative choices on the interpretation of Shakespeare’s language. I fuse traditional and modern methodologies for freehand figurative drawing with educational theory, notably experiential learning and reflective practice, as described by Kolb, 1984. A pedagogic methodology for drawing developed as part of on-going empiric practice-based research into my scenographic practice as a c ostume designer. I develop methods of drawing the human figure because this interests me and the students I teach. Students find it difficult to express their concepts for costume design without adequate figurative drawing skills. The physicality of freehand figurative drawing helps students to engage with the physicality of characters in the text. As such, it is an effective means of exploring Shakespeare’s poetic language, deriving meaning from the text, and informing creative character interpretation and costume design concepts. Key Words: Text, emotion, draw, figure, experiential, physicality, information, experimentation, interpretation, innovation.


The Slade School of Fine Art was innovative in theatre design education. Vladimir Polunin, a scene painter with Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes, introduced

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scenic art to the curriculum in 1929, and postgraduate study in theatre design was available from the late 1960s. Theatre design was established at degree level in the United Kingdom U.K. in the early 1970s.

Theatre design is conceptually close to fine art because it expresses emotive intellectual and aesthetic concepts. Clearly, figurative drawing links with fine art and costume drawing is also emotive in nature, whilst acknowledging the physicality of the actor’s body. Therefore, knowledge of drawing in the context of the history of art and portraiture are both important and informative, giving multiple insights into character, emotion, clothing, status and culture, for example. Costume design requires design concepts presented on convincing renderings of the human body. Therefore, freehand figurative drawing is an essential skill for costume design.

Standards of freehand figurative drawing amongst students are weak. Students omit valuable pre-degree training such as the Art and Design Foundation Course. This developed from the initial recommendation for pre-diploma training, in the early 1960s.2 The holistic ethos of the Art and Design Foundation Course teaches traditional and modern methods of freehand figurative drawing in a curriculum based on experiential learning; this model, ‘pursues a framework for examining and strengthening the critical linkages among education, work, and personal development.’3

2. Reflection on Drawing in Education and Practice

I studied and taught drawing on Art and Design Foundation Courses; these experiences inform my opinion of its educational importance and professional relevance. The ethos of my theatre design degree education in Birmingham was influenced by the fine-art tradition of Margaret Street School of Art. I later completed a t wo year postgraduate course in theatre design at the Slade. Postgraduate study in ‘Education and Professional Development’ involved research into costume design education. This chapter develops my research.

3. Literary Sources

There is no imperative to preserve tangible evidence of the design process, such as drawings. Minimal archival evidence and literary sources survive to record the designer’s methodology. Increasingly, designers do retain their work and publish literature on design methodology. Motley began work in the 1930s, producing a seminal joint publication demonstrating their process methodology, first published in the 1960s. The importance of anatomy, figurative drawing, portraiture and colour are emphasised.4

Pamela Howard, scenographer and academic, defines the importance of drawing the human body. Her freehand figurative drawings illustrate her publications: ‘The body is the structure on which the scenographer creates and builds costumes,’5 she emphasises, ‘constant practice of life drawing is the anchor

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for artists to develop an anatomical understanding that underpins costume creation,’6 Howard emphasises the importance of the performer’s physicality. Anatomy is rarely taught now in art education, and opportunities for life drawing are minimal.

There is merit in reinstating freehand figurative drawing from the plaster cast and introducing more drawing from the life model. The nude, from the Renaissance onwards, is depicted in freehand figurative drawing and painting in museum and gallery collections and archives, plus substantial illustrated literature; ‘the naked human body was the central subject of art.’7 Nineteenth century art students had to draw first from the plaster cast, usually a life size plaster cast of an ancient Greek sculpture. Students were examined in drawing from the plaster cast. Once proficient, they could progress to drawing from the life model; some examples of examination work survive.8

Acknowledging the difficulty of drawing the human figure is not new, as Haydon comments to Poulett Thompson in 1837: ‘The most difficult accomplishment in the arts is the power of drawing correctly the human figure.’9 Haydon contextualises the merit of figure drawing: ‘when the power of drawing the human figure is acquired, the power of everything else becomes easy and requires little effort.’10 Key findings from my pedagogic research indicate students’ interest in designing for Shakespeare and their difficulties in drawing the human body. Students valued life drawing, for example: ‘G.: life drawing definitely helps with the basics of presentation, without that I wouldn’t be able to express my ideas. You can’t present well unless you can draw bodies to put your imaginative designs on.’11

Sir Peter Hall, director and founder of the R.S.C. and the Royal National Theatre companies, is passionate about the interpretation of Shakespeare’s text orally and visually. Hall describes the theatre designer’s role as one which centres on ‘the actor and the text. He (she) must make the world and the suit of clothes in which the actor can live, be understood and work on our emotions. Together they express the play.’12

In 1987, I attended the first Society of British Theatre Design S.B.T.D. Exhibition in London. This provided the impetus for a literary culture to develop for theatre design in the U.K.; this and subsequent exhibitions produced illustrated catalogues and prompted debate. Designers exhibited final design work and their design process, rarely seen outside the industry. Both the S.B.T.D. and The Prague Quadrennial Exhibitions and catalogues contribute to international scenographic literature.

The Quality Assurance Agency Q.A.A developed from recommendations in the Dearing Report 1997, and published the Benchmark Statements for Art and Design in 2002. These define the ‘Nature and Extent of Subject’, and acknowledge the importance of drawing as a key skill: ‘Drawing ability was regarded as a


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prerequisite skill for observation, recording, analysis, speculation, development, visualisation, evaluation, and communication.’13

The R.S.C. develops its remit to explore Shakespeare’s text in professional and educational contexts; what does the company feel is important, ‘All directors of Shakespeare have one thing in common: the text.’14 Text is key, yet, ‘Productions differ greatly because the play texts are open to interpretation - it’s up to each director and their company to make informed interpretive choices.’15 This key statement is taken from the company’s educational website aimed at educating school pupils. However, this is appropriate to students in further and higher education and to professionals, because it emphasises the importance of making ‘informed interpretive choices’16 from the text. R.S.C. education policy encourages early development of interpretive choices by ‘exploring a play physically and emotionally – giving students the experience of getting up on their feet – encouraging experimentation…’17 There are parallels in R.S.C. practice and my methodology for costume design which arise, because we both adopt a theatre based approach to study and interpretation of the text.

4. Drawing Together a Methodology

My practice-based research explores figurative drawing of the human figure, particularly the male because I find this challenging. Shakespearian drama provides an extensive range of male and female archetypes including many male types. Shakespeare’s work is in the national school curriculum in further and higher education, and Shakespeare is perennial in professional and amateur performance for drama, dance, film, television and video production.

Designing for Shakespeare is popular with students; however, his poetic language is often a barrier to understanding and informed interpretation of his texts. Through years of extensive practice, I have evolved a methodology which helps me to understand and interpret a play text and I apply this method to Shakespeare’s words. My methodology consists of three parts.

The first part of this method involves rigorous text analysis, using footnotes; being physically engaged by reading the text aloud, actively moving around enacting how you imagine characters might actually feel, look, move. Facial expression, gesture and posture are vital to character interpretation; they inform effective costume design, hair, and make-up.

The second part of this method involves regular practice of observational freehand figurative drawing, ideally from the life model. This includes quick studies and longer studies, essentially of the whole figure, then studies of head, hands, and feet. Regular practice in quick observational drawings of clothed figures from everyday life is essential because although the text may require some nudity, the actor is mostly clothed or semi-clothed. Practicing both these methods of drawing the human figure builds knowledge and confidence rendering both male

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and female forms with and without clothes. This approach involves traditional formal methods of drawing.

The third part of this method involves a liberal approach to drawing and painting the human figure, using abstract mark-making techniques introduced in the 1960s. I stress that the discipline of formal figurative drawing informs the abstract mark-making process and that text analysis informs and drives the whole process. Figures 1-6 illustrate my methodology for conceptual and realised designs for The Tempest by William Shakespeare.

Figure 1, on the next page, is a finished conceptual costume design for Miranda. I worked on The Tempest, with reference to its original period, 1611. I incorporated classical elements derived from the text. I value the opportunity to explore text and develop drawing skills. Conceptual design projects are also a major part of pedagogic practice in art and design. Conceptual projects are valid, allowing artistic freedom to develop ideas. For Miranda, I depict an idealised Renaissance female, as Miranda might look dressed as Ferdinand’s future bride. References include the work of Renaissance painters. I experiment rendering pale skin, long golden hair, jewellery and flowing fabrics. The size of the drawing is A2. The design includes traditional methods of drawing for the face and embellishment of the bodice and fabrics. Materials used include water colour paint, chalk pastels, water-soluble coloured pencils, lead pencil and collage. Free abstract methods of drawing and painting with water colour were used as the basis of the initial figurative drawing.

Figure 2, which then follows, is an unfinished conceptual costume design drawing for the Spirit of Ceres, an earth spirit; goddess of the harvest. I painted her figure in motion. This drawing illustrates the initial abstract process; later this is drawn into with pencil to introduce more traditional figurative detail. The size of the drawing is A2. Often fabrics are depicted as static and the actor/performer is portrayed as static; this is rarely the case in performance narrative. I aim to convey a sense of action and drama. My scene-painting experience influences my large scale costume design work. Scene-painting requires freehand figurative drawing, and the creative use of paints, plus a sense of colour and the ability to mix colours. These elements are explored as part of my on-going practice-based research.


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Figure 1: Miranda, a finished conceptual costume design drawing.

Figure 2: Ceres, an unfinished conceptual costume design drawing.

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Figure 3 below is a male figure life drawing, using fine black pen on white paper. The size of the drawing is A4. These drawings illustrate the life model in positions appropriate for the character. Here the character of Ferdinand has to show obedience to Prospero by carrying logs as he is ordered. Decisions on an appropriate pose or range of poses for one character can only be determined after text analysis and by experimentation with the model. Using A4 size paper is convenient for quick sketches and photocopy reproduction of the image. Drawing on a small scale to begin a session is a helpful discipline to ensure the whole figure fits on the page.

Figure 3: Male Figure Life Drawing, a pose for Ferdinand carrying logs. Figure 4 in the next view below is a male figure life drawing also using fine

black pen on A4 size white paper. The model adopts a pose for Prospero holding his staff. Both of these pen drawings are of the same model, but they can be used as a b asic template and then worked into to make them represent characters of different ages and physiques. Generally, it is easier to adapt a well proportioned figure and distort the proportions than to attempt working in reverse.


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Figure 4: Male Figure Life Drawing, a pose for Prospero with his staff.

Figure 5, which appears in the next view below, shows the realised designs for Miranda and Prospero. I designed set and costumes for an intimate studio space. The concept was circus. Prospero was the ringmaster; Miranda and the other characters were dressed from the contents of old theatre wicker skips used to store costumes and props. I was aware of this proximity when designing the costumes, hair, and make-up in particular. Rather than distressing or breaking down costumes, I selected appropriate original old costumes and adapted them. I always draw costume ideas even when working from stock costumes; this is evidence of my design process. These drawings looked windswept, rough, torn and faded. All drawings used the same technique of free abstract mark-making, producing the same atmosphere, a colour scheme, and details in parts of the drawings, but overall, they were never completely finished. Unfinished, they remain a true representation of what I could convey in the time. The size of the drawing is A2.

Figure 6, in the final view, is a realised costume design drawing for Ariel, an airy spirit, played by a woman. Ariel was based on an exotic bird of paradise.

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Figure 5: Realised Costume Design Drawing for Miranda and Prospero.

Figure 6: Realised Costume Design Drawing for Ariel.


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Interpreting character and designing costume, I prefer to show my ideas in drawings, endeavouring to create the best solution. There is creative compromise, however; a r ecord of process is informative. As a b ird, Ariel would have been attracted to shiny, decorative objects, with which she would adorn herself. The hairstyle was part Mohican with additional feathers added for exoticism. Ariel’s skin, hair and feathered hairstyle show the use of abstract mark-making, with water-colour. The size of the drawing is A2.

My research indicates that there is parallel practice between the methods I have been using and the educational methodology applied by the R.S.C. I think many scenographic practitioners and educators would relate to a method which emphasises text analysis. As practitioner/teachers, it is common for us to adopt a theatre-based approach. As Jocelyn Herbert describes it, ‘…there seems no right way to design a play, only perhaps, a right approach. One of respecting the text, past or present.’18

Notes

1 J. Bate, William Shakespeare: The Tempest, J. Bate and E. Rasmussen (eds), Royal Shakespeare Company, Macmillan Publishers Ltd., 2008, pp. 37-38. 2 S. Strand, A Good Deal of Freedom: Art and Design in the Public Sector of Higher Education, 1960-1982, Published by the Council for National Academic Awards, C.N.A.A., 1987, p. 9. 3 D.A. Kolb, Experiential Learning, Prentice-Hall, New Jersey, 1984, p. 4. 4 Motley, Designing and Making Stage Costumes, M. Mullin (ed), Herbert Press, London, 1992, p. 35. 5 P. Howard, What is Scenography, 2nd edn., Routledge, Abingdon, Oxon., 2009, p. 163. 6 Ibid. 7 K. Clark, The Nude: A Study of Ideal Art, 2nd edn., The Preprint Society Ltd., by Arrangement with John Murray (Publishers) Ltd., 1958, p. 1. 8 C.A. Jones, A History of Nottingham School of Design, Published by the Faculty of Art and Design, The Nottingham Trent University, Nottingham, 1993, p. 26. 9 Q. Bell, The Schools of Design, Routledge and Kegan Paul, London, 1963, p. 24. 10 Ibid. 11 A. Curry, ‘Drawing Conclusions: The Importance of Drawing in the Process of Costume Design’, Costume in Education, Costume Symposium, 2006, Academic Research Papers, Published by the Arts Institute at Bournemouth, 2006, p. 126. 12 J. Goodwin, British Theatre Design, Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 1989, p. 16. 13 Q.A.A., Quality Assurance Agency, Benchmark Statements for Art and Design, Nature and Extent of Subject, Published by the Quality Assurance Agency, 2002, p. 4.

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14 R.S.C., Royal Shakespeare Company Education Department Website, Viewed 28 April 2010, http://www.rsc.org.uk/explore/Shakespeare/work.aspx. 15 R.S.C., Royal Shakespeare Company Education Department Website, Viewed 28 April 2010, http://www.rsc.org.uk/standupforshakespeare/content/theatre_bas ed_approach.aspx. 16 Ibid. 17 Ibid. 18 J. Herbert, A Theatre Workbook, Art Books International, London, 1997, p. 15.

Bibliography Bate, J., William Shakespeare: The Tempest. Bate, J. and Rasmussen, E. (eds), Royal Shakespeare Company, Macmillan Publishers Ltd., 2008. Bell, Q., The Schools of Design. Routledge and Kegan Paul, London, 1963. Clark, K., The Nude: A Study in Ideal Art. The Reprint Society Ltd., John Murray Publishers, Ltd., 1958. Curry, A., ‘Drawing Conclusions: The Importance of Drawing in the Process of Costume Design’. Costume in Education: Academic Research Papers. Published by the Arts Institute at Bournemouth, 2006. Goodwin, J., British Theatre Design. Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1989. Herbert, J., A Theatre Handbook. Art Books International, London, 1997. Howard, P., What is Scenography. Routledge, Abingdon, Oxon., 2009. Kolb, D.A., Experiential Learning: Experience as the Source of Learning and Development. Englewood Cliffs, Prentice-Hall, New Jersey, 1984. Motley, Designing and Making Stage Costumes. Herbert Press, London, 1992. Quality Assurance Agency, Q.A.A., Benchmark Statements for Art and Design. Nature and Extent of Subject, 2001. Royal Shakespeare Company, R.S.C. Education Department Website. Viewed: 28 April 2010. http://www.rsc.org.uk/explore/Shakespeare/work.aspx.

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Anne Curry, Senior Lecturer in Costume Design and Interpretation, Nottingham Trent University, United Kingdom.

The Pain is Visible: Presence in Pain in the Aesthetics of Pina Bausch and in Buddhist Teachings

Einav Rosenblit

Abstract My chapter engages with the aesthetic perception of the contemporary choreographer Pina Bausch and with the way she expresses pain in her works. My analysis of Bausch’s works is based on the Buddhist concept of suffering. When Pina Bausch (1940-2009) began creating in the 1970s in Germany, she evoked mixed reviews due to her intensity and originality. Bausch deals with aspects of human suffering. Using her unique movement language and other rhetorical means at her disposal, Bausch accurately weaves an impressive artistic text that has more segmentation than completeness, more confrontation than reconciliation, and more questions than solutions. ‘Dukkha’ (Pali), translated as ‘Suffering’ or ‘Dis-ease’ is one of the laws of existence according to Buddhist teachings. Dukkha is not only attributed to an acute condition of mental or physical pain, but also to a daily sense of inadequacy that arises when we don’t get what we want. In his meditation, the Buddha found a way out of suffering, and concluded that suffering may be reduced through sincere observation of it. I suggest that the works of Pina Bausch enable a direct accessibility to the human experience and enable a similar experience to the Buddhist practice. I argue that both the spectator in Bausch’s works and the Buddhist disciple—have that accessibility to the inmost essence of reality. By that indwelling in that concrete reality, both can become less miserable. Key Words: Pina Bausch, suffering, Buddhism, dukkha, contemporary dance, spectatorship, Café Müller, Kontakthof, beginner’s mind.

***** 1. Knowing the Truth

Dance and the Buddhist way, both enable a direct experience of our inmost being. The Buddhist practice teaches accessibility to the most intimate essence of our concrete experience. Here I attempt to show how the contemporary dance of Pina Bausch enables a similar access.

D.T Suzuki, indeed the first ‘ambassador’ of Zen Buddhism to the West, noted

that: Our ordinary life only touches the fringe of our personality; it doesn’t cause a commotion in the deepest parts of the soul… We may be clever, bright, and all that, but what we produce lacks depth, sincerity, and does not appeal to the inmost feelings. 0F

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Both the arts and religions investigate the deepest aspects of reality, those which in our ordinary lives we seldom touch upon. While many art works engage with the fragility of human existence, dance is unique in that it reveals human reality through the body. Pina Bausch does so poetically. In her works she presents the inmost feelings and the deepest components of the human soul.

In spite of the influence of Buddhist thinking on western contemporary choreographers such as Merce Cunningham, who was one of the founders of western post-modern dance, which preceded contemporary dance, I shall not deal here with the historical and cultural influences of Buddhist doctrine on western dance. I do not compare east and west or dance and meditation. Instead, I present Buddhism and contemporary dance as meeting in the unique quality of mind that can be achieved in both. The Buddhist practice is an access to that concrete moment, as it is, and not as we like it to be. Even if it is the most confined moment, if one stays in it without trying to get out of it, one becomes less imprisoned. I argue that the body in contemporary dance is able to materialize the Buddhist practice, and perhaps even take it one step further: turning it from motionless sitting to movement.

Dukkha (Pali language), translated as ‘suffering’ or ‘dis-ease’, is one of the laws of existence according to Buddhist teachings. Dukkha is attributed not only to an acute condition of mental or physical pain, but also to the daily sense of inadequacy that arises when we don’t get what we want. Dukkha manifests as a pleasing experience, which we crave, or as a displeasing experience that we long to be over. For example: we all wish to stay young, healthy and live forever; instead, we grow up in pain, our body betrays when getting old, and we are afraid of death.

The Buddha asks first to know that truth about the inevitable pain. By that knowing, it can be immediately reduced. That knowing is not only intellectual, but also knowing like the biblical knowing of Adam and Eve, practically, through the body. I argue that Pina Bausch executes that Buddhist demand to know. The body in her works is a mean for a sincere awareness of our nature.

While Descartes established a dichotomy between body and mind, and determined that our thinking makes us what we are, Buddhist doctrine insists that thinking is only one of our body-mind’s qualities, and that a real awareness can be achieved only ‘without thinking.’2 Here I pose a similar hypothesis and suggest that the moving body knows about oneself much more than does the intellect.

I argue that the physical gestures of the body in Bausch’s works expose a variety of mind habits, which cannot be represented in any way other than movement.

The Buddhist practice investigates the essence of reality in both physical and mental aspects, and relates to body and mind as one unit. That practice develops an awareness that is beyond thinking. That is exactly what Pina Bausch does with the moving bodies on stage.

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Bausch, who passed away last year untimely, was the establisher of a new genre in dance, called Tanztheater, which was a new form of performance that integrates theater and dance. Bausch was a follower of Kurt Joose, the establisher of the expressionist dance in Germany, and in her aesthetics there are many expressionist features. Bausch’s aesthetic principles have provided an essential foundation for contemporary western dance of the last three decades. Bausch’s appearance on stage offers an authenticity. Her unique movement language combines ordinary movements with dance gestures and presents a body with a sincere awareness of itself. In her works, the body looks into itself, and reveals its reality (both physical and mental) as it really is.

The moving body in classical ballet has been a general body, without any uniqueness of its own and is in that sense, anonymous. The ‘beauty’ in such a body is achieved by means of the harmony obtained between the organs, the perfect symmetry and the virtuosity of the movement. Such a body, however, denies any reminder of the personal authentic body of the dancer himself.

The body of the prima ballerina in the great ballets exposes no sign of distress, even when she is broken hearted or dying. When the princess in Sleeping Beauty (Petipa 1890) is pricked, she is still standing in susu and dancing as beautiful as before. Thus also in The Dying Swan (Fokine 1905); the ballet follows the last moments in the life of a swan-ballerina, but she is pretty, vertical and rising on point shoes with perfect spine; dying is not really visible.

In Bausch’s dance the individual body comes to the fore. Unlike other dance genres, contemporary dance is not idealistic but reveals reality as it is. The body of that reality is sometimes ugly, sometimes in pain, and often has had a hard day. That body is realized in day-to-day movements like walking, eating, running, scratching, and falling. These are the ways in which the body is embodied, and there is no heroic or sublime body other than the ordinary one.

According to Buddhist doctrine, most suffering is caused not because of life’s troubles, although there are many such, but by the way the mind deals with them.

The Buddhist approach is not exclusive in human perception. The understanding that the origin of our distress lies in our mind has also featured in western philosophy. Buddhism is unique, however, in suggesting a practical way to deal with this distress: meditation, which is a sincere observation of body and mind. By employing that observation, suffering may come and go, but the mind learns not to make the pain more than it really is.

Pina Bausch’s pieces create a world of immediate presence, obliging the viewers to devote themselves to the raw emotions on stage. The structure of the piece works to uncover that presence, rather than lead us, through a linear narrative, toward some desired end. In her works, Bausch enters directly and sensitively into the depth of heart. In that trembling heart there is only a thin line between bitter tears and joyous laughter. The women on stage look agonized and irresistible, miserable and gorgeous at the same time.

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2. Desire The origin of misery, according to the Buddha, is desire: the more we desire,

the more we experience dissatisfaction with life. It can mean a strong desire to obtain something or an intense desire to get rid of something. Those two desires—attraction and rejection—have the same source. Desire is always present in our mind. We want a better future than the present, and we miss the past. The desired object is marginal. The main thing is the situation of craving that we maintain. We become addicted to that sense of craving, and the desire intensifies the more we try to fulfil it.

This desire is not only for love, money or the pleasures of life, but also for ideas, thoughts and beliefs. Both the physical and the mental distress in life are limited, but our desire is limitless and that is why we are so miserable. As the Zen Master S. Suzuki says: ‘We have limitless suffering because we have limitless desire.’3

These two aspects of desire, attraction and rejection, are present on Bausch’s stage. The moving bodies in her works want to get somewhere, but remain in one place; they want freedom but experience bondage; they seek relationships but remain alone; crave for contact but receive only strange and aggressive touch. Bausch thereby reveals the craving nature of our mind.

Bausch’s work Kontakthof (1978) has been performed throughout the world over the past thirty years in the repertoire of the Tanztheater Wuppertal, and became a central piece in defining Bausch’s aesthetics. The show reveals different aspects of human vulnerability, exploring a broad range of craving emotions through intimate moments on stage.

Kontakthof (German) means a meeting place like a courtyard or a square. Bausch began the rehearsal process by asking: ‘What is connection?’ and the performers entered into a long process of revealing their experiences with connecting to others. The piece focuses on attempting to connect, and the difficulties inherent in communication. In her work Café Müller (1978) too, Bausch engages with the fragile human desire to communicate. As in Kontakthof, here too Bausch titled the piece as a place that is supposed to be full of people, laughter and exciting encounters. However, the café is gloomy, devoid of joy, and there are only five lonely figures in it, all looking for a relationship but finding only fragments of kindness. In both Café Müller and Kontakthof, although the figures always look for sympathy and embraces, when these arrive they become annoying, binding and exaggerated.

3. Beginner’s Mind

Kontakthof was reprised in 2001, when Bausch chose 26 men and women out of 120 applicants, all over the age of 65, who had worked hard to get on stage for the first time in their lives.

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Bausch’s elderly performers don’t hide behind anything. They accept their bodies as they are, with all the marks of time. After intensive rehearsals they looked exhausted; their bodies were tired. It is hard to practice contemporary dance, and it is harder when you are over 70 years old. Although their bodies were wearing out, however, when they moved they seemed complete, together with their flaws, satisfied with their difficulties.

One of the terms in Buddhist doctrine is that of the ‘beginner’s mind’,4 meaning a quality of mind which knows nothing but agrees to be present in the moment, even if this involves uncertainty and absurdity. The same applies here: the participants in Bausch’s project were obliged to enter the studio with curious and open minds in order to discover themselves anew. Sometimes that curiosity led to disappointment because of the disabilities of the body; and sometimes to amazement because of success in complicated tasks.

Sometimes, however, when you looked at those elderly dancers, you saw neither pleasure nor pain. You saw only a sincere presence in their aging bodies. Wholeness and harmony were achieved not due to the virtuosity of a perfect body, but because the bodies on stage moved their imperfections—perfectly.

The aesthetics of the original show differed from that of the performance-making by the elderly performers. Indeed, both engage with the craving nature of our mind, but in the latter show—more so. There, the desire that was presented on stage joined with our own desire as an audience: the desire for beauty. We agree to view the conflicts of our life through the moving bodies of the dancers, but we want their dancing to be beautiful. When we see the elderly performers we do not really get what we want. We sometimes see a clumsy body, and when it is naked it makes us uncomfortable. I consider that it is in this way that Bausch tells us: ‘Look at yourself and see how you don’t accept reality as it is’.

When the show is over you feel as if you need someone to hold you, to hug you, and you experience the same feelings as those of the dancers on stage. By achieving this, Bausch indeed fulfils the main desire of her characters for contact: she creates a real relationship between audience and performers.

4. Courageous Acceptance

The meditation master, Chogyam Trungpa, wrote:

If you search for awakened heart, if you put your hand through your rib cage and feel for it, there is nothing there except tenderness…you feel tremendous sadness…that sadness is unconditioned, it occurs because the heart is completely exposed. This experience of sad and tender heart is what gives birth to fearlessness. Real fearlessness is a product of tenderness.5

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Trungpa calls for us to be open to all our feelings, in the inmost parts of heart. Although we are used to relating to sensitivity as weakness, Trungpa declares it is a source of fearlessness. Bausch, in Kontakthof, enters directly into that trembling heart.

Although the aesthetic wrapping of the stage makes the pain beautiful, it doesn’t ignore its existence. The pain is still there, like in reality. In Bausch’s contemporary dance catharsis is reached not only from touching peaks of pleasure and displeasure, but also owing to an intensive practice of observing pain as it is.

Knowing about the existence of misery does not make life gloomy. The Buddha was not melancholic but always smiling. Buddhism is neither pessimistic nor optimistic but has a realistic point of view: that’s life, pain included. The good news is that just as the body turns from young to old, so too does everything. Everything changes over time, and through honest observation of pain one can perceive the transformation from pain to other experiences.

As I tried to demonstrate, Pina Bausch brings the Buddhist idea of human suffering to life. Her works conduce to a courageous acceptance of our pain; and that acceptance enables us to look upon it with tenderness and compassion.

Notes 1 D.T. Suzuki, Essay in Zen Buddhism, Souvenir Press, Great Britain, 2010, p. 27. 2 T.P. Kasulis, Zen Action, Zen Person, University of Hawaii Press, Honolulu, 1981, p. 71. 3 S. Suzuki, Not Always So, HarperCollins Publishers, New York, 2002, p. 44. 4 S. Susuki, Zen Mind, Beginners Mind, Weatherhill, New York, 1970, p. 21. 5 C. Trungpa, The Sacred Path of the Warrior, Shambala, Boston, 2007, p. 46.

Bibliography

Kasulis, P.T., Zen Action Zen Person. University of Hawaii Press, Honolulu, 1981. Suzuki, D.T., Essays in Zen Buddhism. Souvenir Press, Great Britain, 2010. Suzuki, S., Not Always So: Practicing the True Spirit off Zen. HarperCollins, New-York, 2002. Suzuki, S., Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind. Weatherhill, New York, 1970. Trungpa, Ch., The Sacred Path of the Warrior. Shambala, Boston, 2007.

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Videography Café Müller: Director and choreographer: P. Bausch, Music: H. Purcell, Set and Costume Design: R. Borzik, Collaboration: M. Cito, Wuppertal Dance Company. Premiere: May 1978. Kontakthof: Director and choreographer: P. Bausch, Music: J. Llossas, C. Chaplin and others. Set and Costume Design: R. Borzik, H.. Por. Collaboration: M. Cito, R. Borzik. Premiere: Dec. 1978. Premiere with elderly performers: Feb. 2000. Ladies and Gentlemen over 65 (Documentary Film): Choreographer: P. Bausch. Director and Producer: L. Mangelsdorff. Cinematographer: S. Maintigneux, Editor L.E. Voosen and L. Mangelsdorf, 2002. Einav Rosenblit is writing her dissertation in Tel-Aviv University, the Faculty of Arts. Her research examines the encounter between contemporary western dance and the Buddhist doctrine.

Disability Performance: Emancipating the Spectators

Adele Anderson

Abstract Jacques Rancière recognizes spectators as emancipated and performance as ‘an autonomous thing, between the idea of the artist and the sensation or comprehension of the spectator.’1 But disabled performers register with the audiences who judge their image in qualified and troubling ways; they become subject to the triple discipline of critical appraisal, the medical gaze, and public stares. I discuss two mixed ability dance performances separated by fifteen years, examining the shifts in one artist’s practice. I ask where aesthetic agency lodges, and how visual readings of disability may have changed since the 1990s. Through this lens I explore how the space of the visible in disability performance remains interpretively open to variable distributions of the sensible. Key Words: Disability performance, visibility politics, Jacques Rancière, Kitty Lunn, emancipated spectator.

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After the two decades of visibility politics that closed the 20th century, what can be said about freedoms and responsibilities in visual representation? Whose agency informs images and their reception in performance? In his essay The Emancipated Spectator, Jacques Ranciére sees artistic performance as something autonomous that has distance from both the artists creating it and from its spectators. It is a ‘third thing that is owned by no one.’2 He argues that modern theatre mediates and then strives to abolish the mediation of itself and the distance that is the spectator’s state of ignorance; its prevailing modes have been Brecht’s epic theatre, which alienates and presents a problem for reform, and the alternative, Artaud’s Theatre of Cruelty, which de-rationalizes the spectator, making her participant in a cathartic ritual.3 But these strategies lodge aesthetic agency with the artists – performers, designers, and directors – not the audience. They make the spectator a message recipient whose agency, even in the most interactive examples, is mainly the concern of marketers and producers.

Taking aesthetic agency and the visibility politics of the 1990s as a starting point, I will review two dance performances separated by fifteen years. Both are relatively apolitical in their address. I will speculate about how the artist’s images of disability in performance have changed over the past ten years, and following Rancière, I will explore what light these changes cast on the emancipation of spectators from the ignorance of stereotype, regarding visible disability.

According to Ranciére the inactive spectator reflects DeBord’s concept of social dispossession through the exteriority of spectacle and operations of capitalist

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society that create mediated instead of real relations.4 Ranciére argues that in the theatre, rather than creating and abolishing distance to activate spectators into a community, there are, just as elsewhere, ‘only ever individuals plotting their own paths in the forest of things, acts and signs;’ spectators’ collective power lies in the ability of each to ‘translate what she perceives in her own way;’ everyone has equal capacity to exercise ‘an unpredictable interplay of associations and dissociations’; he says the distribution of the sensible is accomplished through these same irreducible distances.5

Political discourses of disability especially in the 1980s and 90s would often pit the performer against unequal terms as being subject to a triple discipline of critical evaluation, the medical gaze, and public stares. The disability community was late to be acknowledged in a struggle for recognition of the disabling environment and status as a minority. Art and commentaries on stereotype, rejection, and intolerance have aimed to raise consciousness and public visibility on disability’s own terms, exemplified by Linton, Norden, Garland-Thomson, and Siebers, among others.6 Since the 1990s many performers with disability have sought to seize the curious or fearful gaze to awaken spectators from complacency.7

But, Peggy Phelen argues, visibility does not guarantee power; an Other cannot truly be seen in a videocentric and ocularcentric economy that is dominated by privilege – and whereas Phelen’s model of privilege is patriarchy, from a disability perspective it is the normate world.8 Phelan’s answer and hope for new performative works that vanish as they are made repeats the desire for the artist to control the possible readings of her visibility, presumably against a biased, passively receptive audience. This rhetorical frame of representational concerns typified much of cultural criticism in the 1990s.

Strategies to seize and confront spectators continue to inform much of disability performance; Petra Kuppers specifically mentions Brecht and Artaud in her analyses.9 Most of the performance descriptions collected by Sandahl and Auslander illustrate a similar approach.10 And recorded instances are not hard to find: In a 2007 recording, Neil Marcus embodies alienation in his dance theatre piece with the Berkeley based, able-bodied street improv artist Stoney Burke.11 Burke names the dilemma, telling Marcus: ‘If you were perfect like me, capitalism would work better!’12

Artaud’s Theatre of Cruelty infuses other disability performances. In Alito Alessi and Emery Blackwell’s Trier performed 2002 in Germany, a recorded Wizard of Oz Witch-like voice is heard abusing Blackwell.13 His normate partner Alessi and the audience watch him painfully tumbling into a b lacked out area of the stage. At a Judson Church, New York City performance in 2006 dancer Lisa Bufano blends shock, beauty, and wonder in Five Open Mouths.14 The camera invites spectators to gaze and stare at Bufano’s adagio shot in close-up, as dream-like, she runs her fingerless hand slowly over her head and arm.

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These avant-garde works seek to politicize representation with astringent effects, responding to that strand of judgment that evaluates images in relationship to their origin (the worthiness of what they represent) and their destination (the effects they produce on the spectator).15 But other disability performances lack this manner of direct political address. Some artists say they do not perform ‘about’ disability. Can disability performance ever be read as not about disability? Without didactics or shock, can spectators emancipate themselves from iconic, historically stigmatized readings? And are some performances, because of their style, particular embodiment, or evocation of certain cultural texts, less worthy or less representative?

In the 1980s and 1990s proscriptive judgments of images shaped art criticism on both ends of the political spectrum. Among critics and theorists we find demands for just representation and some works identified as wanting or disappointing as worthy and effective images. I will use one such critique from the 1990s as a benchmark to compare two pieces by another artist that were composed nearly fifteen years apart, in 1995 and in 2009. My aim is to explore both artistic changes and corresponding shifts from the visibility politics of the 1990s and to identify different distributions of the sensible in spectators’ receptions of disability performance.

Ann Cooper Albright, in her 1997 book Choreographing Difference, critiques the artistic practices of Mary Verdi Fletcher, a pioneer of wheelchair stage dance in the US.16 Cooper Albright’s discussion of several Verdi Fletcher performances in the period 1992 to 1995, in particular, May Ring(1995), concludes that Verdi Fletcher allowed herself to be interpreted as a ‘super crip’, that her represented images of partnered dance potentially undercut feminist interests, that promotional photos downplayed the artist’s wheelchair, and that Verdi Fletcher’s audiences were reassured that they would not ‘see anything too uncomfortable;’ Cooper Albright concludes that Verdi Fletcher’s performances reproduce an ablest aesthetic.17 Verdi Fletcher’s dance performances begin in the 1980s with a primarily classical style, adding modern dance elements later. Cooper Albright says:

As long as the representational basis [of Verdi Fletcher and Dancing Wheels] . . is steeped in the ideological values of classic dance and formalist aesthetics (complete with the fetishization of ‘line’) their attempts to include dancers on wheels can very quickly get recast within the same old patronizing terms of abled and disabled bodies.18

Thus Cooper Albright objects not only to the image content but also to the style

and genre of the dance. I do not have access to the particular performances she


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discusses. However, her critique provides a useful point of departure for reading images in another pair of performances to which I do have access.

The first of these is a duet, Last Night of the World, performed by the New York-based wheelchair dancer and artistic director of the mixed-ability Infinity Dance Theater, Kitty Lunn. Commissioned for the opening of the 1996 Paralympics, Last Night is first danced about the same time as Verdi-Fletcher’s May Ring. As did Verdi-Fletcher’s piece, Lunn’s Last Night features many lifts partnered by an able-bodied dancer, Lunn’s colleague Christopher Nelson. A recorded version accessed on the Web was performed at a Christopher Reeve Foundation benefit on 12 June 2000, over ten years ago at the time of writing.19

The way Last Night is introduced by the emcee giving a biographical narrative of how Lunn became disabled and associating her performance with the Paralympics theme, ‘triumph of the human spirit’, could well strike disability activists as perpetuating oft-criticized ‘overcoming’ stereotypes of disability. The triumph-of-spirit stereotype is one of Cooper Albright’s criticisms of Fletcher-Verdi’s publicity. The disabled character as ‘inspirational overcomer’ has a long history in media and film.20 Triumph of spirit as transcendence of the body appeals to what Wendell calls the desire ‘to make one’s happiness, or at least one’s sense of self, independent of illness, pain, weakness, exhaustion, and accident,’ without ever fully confronting the limitations of the body.21 Cooper Albright gives little detail on Verdi Fletcher’s performance context other than that her event is (like Lunn’s) a gala benefit. Popular disability heroism themes have been popular for such fundraising benefits.22 In the context of the 1990s, a commission like Lunn’s or Verdi Fletcher’s could have been at once both a rare artistic opportunity and a limiting discursive framework.23

In Last Night, Lunn and Wheeler dance to the popular climactic duet from the musical Miss Saigon. Stylistically, the dance is glitzy, upbeat, and breathlessly Romantic, evoking a popular and easy-to-take musical genre. Its conventional gender images include the man assembling and bringing the wheelchair, Lunn’s low-cut dress, and intimate partnering in which she is swept off the floor, and perhaps metaphorically, off her feet. Last Night’s overall tone and presentation echo pas de deux from Romantic story ballets and familiar heroic anticipatory scenes in opera, for eample the Nessun dorma aria in Puccini’s Turandot. In its stylistic aspects, Lunn’s 1996 dance is clearly not avant-garde.

But it is also possible to read Last Night in other ways, especially from the distance of a decade and a half. Lunn is active and in clear command of herself, beginning on the floor in her own independent space, dancing not-on-her-legs but in control of the situation and her own body. Her strong able-bodied partner is not, despite his strength and agility, a traditional youthful dance squire. Moreover, this is a love song, neither playfully cute nor ironic. Whereas disability critics object to portrayals of infantilization, sexual disenfranchisement, or the enfreakment of disabled people with regard to sexuality; Last Night is grown up, serious, and does

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not suggest any such images. Linton notes how others often think of disabled people as having compromised pleasure, or that they enrich their lives and relationships only in order to search for something to take their minds off their troubles, rather than heighten their sensory experience and positive pleasure.24 The way in which Last Night is danced conveys affirmative pleasure, not compensation.

Certainly if accessibility and conventionality are negatives, and if non-classicism, non-Romanticism, and non-formalism free of ‘line fetishism’ are requirements, then Kitty Lunn’s 1996 piece would not pass Cooper Albright’s 1997 test as a worthy image. Indeed, Last Night’s populism and stylistic conservatism might be compared with the situation that Alain Badiou describes as failed class breakthrough depicted in Wagner’s Meistersinger: Then does Lunn’s dance performance, conventional and entertaining, achieve a breakthrough or new relation of a non-relation? Or does it, like Meistersinger’s triumphant young knight, only perform a new piece that does not really approach a break with known forms and genres, except that its production was realized owing to the convictions of someone unexpected, similar to Wagner’s heroic cobbler?25 Is the novelty and surprise of Lunn’s disability combined with her thoroughly professional performance, enough to break through the spectator’s ignorance and disability stereotypes?

More than ten years later, the identity politics of the 1980s and 1990s arts have given way to a plethora of new concerns; these may have become increasingly intimate, ironic, and shocking, but they are often less politically ambitious. A burgeoning of eclectic styles and bodies has acquainted more spectators with diversity in images and performance.

A second and later dance by Kitty Lunn, Lead Me Home, is composed fourteen years after Last Night. Performing 30 May 2009, in a 75 seat downtown New York theatre, Lunn has moved on from genre dance; her more prosaic movement now looks contemporary.26 As before, she does not dance specifically ‘about’ disability. In Lead Me Home, Lunn embodies Ranciére’s notion of the pensive image, a quality which exists not as a property of certain images but as ‘a set of distances between several image functions that are present on the same surface.’27

In addition to using quieter, traditional Celtic music, Lead Me Home is partnered at its beginning and end by Lunn’s husband the actor Andrew Macmillan, whose presence adds a kind of image montage to their framing encounters.28 Lunn’s initial solo figure moves on all fours, crawling across the stage and casting shapes that for this viewer evoke the American transcendentalist painter Andrew Wyeth’s tempera work Christina’s World.29 Her images and narrative gestures of washing at a b ody of water begin to suggest a t heatre of memory.30

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as she is partnered almost imperceptibly. In Lead Me Home and in other dances she performed at the May 2009 c oncert, this freestanding occurs multiple times for extended moments. Spectators attending the performance know that Lunn navigates by wheelchair. They may not know her specific circumstance with disability. There is wide diversity in the use of wheelchairs for locomotion. Some people can locomote very briefly on foot. Others do not bear weight at all. Still others, like Lunn, may stand or balance, with trained use of upper body, trunk muscles, and breath control, upon their non-walking legs. Standing upright onstage in this way could be like tightrope walking, but it is also a gesture with enormous cultural and symbolic freight, as pedestrian for some as it is risky and virtuosic for others. Its complexity makes visible the distance between the artist and the stance, and between the audience and the stance. This performance of standing up onstage is indeed a third thing that is owned by no one.

Ranciére also observes that the spectator alone can fix the measure of this relationship.31 A man sitting next to me at Lunn’s May 2009 concert burst out, after a different dance with Lunn standing as the stage lights were blacking out, ‘What does that mean? That everything’s okay?!’ He had navigated to his own seat using two metal crutches, the kind with hand-level handles and semi-cylindrical arm bands that enclose the upper arms and assist when one controls much of one’s weight shifts through the arms. The brief moment of dissensus marked a different distribution of the sensible across that audience. Rich images offer many possibilities, including what may become a nearly intolerable image for some spectators.

All artists succeed at least partly by being acceptably spectacular; that is, by defying certain expectations while meeting others. Disability in performance complicates the spectator’s view in the context of a disabling society, where the tactical performance of disability may be necessary to get a needed access or service.32 Spectators could react as coaches and players have done to those classified disabled rugby players whose performance they deem ‘too good’.33 But an artist can commit to a certain kind of virtuosity in performance in which she pursues her own meanings and aesthetic integrity.

While both art and the artists have changed in ten or more years, so have spectators. As images of the performing body diversify, reaching wider audiences, this artist has had room to evolve in her own art of images such that she remains partly outside and beyond the rhetorical canons of disability politics. She does so in ways specific to her own art and embodiment. And we can see that the sites of control and responsibility for aesthetic operations are never lodged only with the voices and bodies of the creators and performers, who will always risk moments of dissensus among their spectators. The sense-making of performance remains beyond the control of masters or masterpieces, as the spectator brings dispositions and associations of her own and makes what she will of visible disability in performance. The relations and ambiguities of these images will continue to enrich

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theatre. As Ranciére claims, the ensuing scenes of dissensus, without assuming any concealed realities behind appearances and without any single regime of presentation and interpretation, allow ‘anyone whatsoever’ the power to reconfigure what is newly possible.34

Notes 1 J. Ranciére, The Emancipated Spectator, trans. G. Elliott, Verso, London and New York, 2009, p. 13. 2 Ibid., p. 15. 3 Ibid., pp. 2, 4, and 8. 4 G. DeBord, The Society of the Spectacle, Black & Red, Detroit, MI, 1983, p. 4. 5 Ranciére, op. cit., pp. 16-17. 6 S. Linton, Claiming Disability: Knowledge and Identity, New York University Press, New York and London, 1998; M. Norden, The Cinema of Isolation: A History of Physical Disability in the Movies, Rutgers University Press, New Brunswick, 1994; R. Garland-Thomson, ‘Feminist Disability Studies’, Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, Vol. 30, No. 2, (2005), pp. 1557-1587; T. Siebers, Disability Aesthetics, University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor, MI, 2010. 7 C. Sandahl and P. Auslander (eds), Bodies in Commotion: Disability and Performance, University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor, 2005, p. 3. 8 P. Phelen, The Politics of Performance, Routledge, London and hew York, 1993. 9 P. Kuppers, Disability and Contemporary Performance: Bodies on Edge, Routledge, New York and London, 2003, pp. 55, 75. 10 Sandahl and Auslander (eds), loc. cit. 11 N. Marcus and S. Burke, Neil Marcus Dance, YouTube.com, Posted 2007 by Neil Marcus, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OnIkMdy2GiM&feature=related, Viewed 10 August 2010. 12 Ibid. 13 A. Alessi and E. Blackwell, Trier, YouTube.com, Posted 3 November 2008, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D3mNJqqJ4qs&feature=related, Viewed 11 August 2010. 14 L. Bufano, Five Open Mouths, YouTube.com, Posted January 2007 by HeidiLatskyDance, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JTw1AVpVRbs&feature =related, Viewed 12 August 2010. 15 J. Ranciére, The Future of the Image, Verso, London and New York, 2007, p. 111. 16 A. Cooper Albright, ‘Moving Across Difference: Dance and Disability,’ Choreographing Difference, University of New England Press, Hanover and London, 1997, pp. 56-92. 17 Ibid., pp. 66-67.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OnIkMdy2GiM&feature=related

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D3mNJqqJ4qs&feature=related

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JTw1AVpVRbs&feature%20=related

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18 Ibid., pp. 68. 19 Infinity Dance Theater, Last Night of the World, YouTube.com, Posted 7 March 2010, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IzhoiZGq5dc, Viewed 9 August 2010. 20 Norden, loc. cit. 21 S. Wendell, The Rejected Body: Feminist Philosophical Reflections on Disability, Routledge, New York and London, 1996, pp. 165-166. 22 M. Quinlan and B. Bates, ‘Dances and Discourses of (Dis)Ability: Heather Mills’s Embodiment of Disability on Dancing with the Stars’, Text and Performance Quarterly, Vol. 28, January-April 2008, pp. 64-80. 23 In fact Lunn as confirmed that the ‘triumph’ theme was indeed given to her as part of the commission for Last Night. (pers. comm. 4 March 2011). 24 S. Linton, Claiming Disability: Knowledge and Identity, New York University Press, New York and London, 1998, p. 111. 25 A. Badiou, ‘The Lessons of Jacques Ranciére: Knowledge and Power after the Storm’, Jacques Ranciere: History, Politics, Aesthetics, G. Rockhill and P. Watts (eds), Duke University Press, Durham and London, 2009, pp. 51-53. 26 Infinity Dance Theater, Lead Me Home, Infinity Dance Theater, Posted 28 June, 2009, http://www.youtube.com/user/infinitydancetheater#p/a/u/1/bt0THCRchu4, Viewed 11 August 2010. 27 Ranciére, The Emancipated Spectator, op. cit., p. 131. 28 Ranciére, The Future of the Image, loc. cit. 29 A. Wyeth, Christina’s World, Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1949, http://www.moma.org/collection/browse_results.php?object_id=78455, Viewed 11 August 2010. 30 Ranciére, The Emancipated Spectator, op. cit., p. 131. 31 Ibid., p. 128. 32 Kuppers, loc. cit. 33 K. Lindeman, ‘I Can’t be Standing Up Out There: Communicative Performances of (Dis)Ability in Wheelchair Rugby’, Text and Performance Quarterly, Vol. 28, January-April 2008, pp. 98-115. 34 Ranciére, The Emancipated Spectator, op. cit., pp. 48-49.

Bibliography Alessi, A. and Blackwell, E., Trier. YouTube. Performed 30 A ugust 2002 a t Grossen Saal der Tufa Trier. Posted by BewegGrund, 3 November 2008. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D3mNJqqJ4qs&feature=related. Viewed 11 August 2010.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IzhoiZGq5dc

http://www.youtube.com/user/infinitydancetheater#p/a/u/1/bt0THCRchu4

http://www.moma.org/collection/browse_results.php?object_id=78455

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Badiou, A., ‘The Lessons of Jacques Ranciére: Knowledge and Power after the Storm’. Jacques Ranciere: History, Politics, Aesthetics. Rockhill, G. and Watts, P. (eds), Duke University Press, Durham and London, 2009. Bufano, L., Five Open Mouths (online YouTube video clip). Performed January 2007 at Judson Church. New York City. Posted 25 S eptember 2007 by Heidi Latsky Dance. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JTw1AVpVRbs&feature= related. Viewed 12 August 2010. Cooper Albright, A., ‘Moving Across Difference: Dance and Disability’. Choreographing Difference. University of New England Press, Hanover and London, 1997. DeBord, G., The Society of the Spectacle. Black & Red, Detroit, MI, 1983 (first pub. 1967). Garland-Thomson, R., ‘Feminist Disability Studies’. Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society. Vol. 30, No. 2, 2005, pp. 1557-1587. Infinity Dance Theater, Last Night Final. YouTube. Performed 12 June 2000 at New Amsterdam Theatre. New York City. Posted by Infinity Dance Theater 7 March 2010. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IzhoiZGq5dc. Viewed 9 August 2010. Infinity Dance Theater, Lead Me Home. YouTube. Performed 30 M ay 2009 a t Joyce SoHo Theatre. New York City. Posted by Infinity Dance Theater 28 June, 2009, http://www.youtube.com/user/infinitydancetheater#p/a/u/1/bt0THCRchu4. Viewed 11 August 2010. Kuppers, P., Disability and Contemporary Performance: Bodies on Edge. Routledge, New York and London, 2003. Lindeman, K., ‘I Can’t Be Standing Up Out There: Communicative Performances of (Dis)Ability in Wheelchair Rugby’. Text and Performance Quarterly. Vol. 28, January-April 2008, pp. 98-115. Norden, M., The Cinema of Isolation: A History of Physical Disability in the Movies. Rutgers University Press, New Brunswick, 1994. Linton, S., Claiming Disability: Knowledge and Identity. New York University Press, New York and London, 1998.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JTw1AVpVRbs&feature=%20related

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JTw1AVpVRbs&feature=%20related

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Marcus, N. and Burke, S., Neil Marcus Dance.YouTube. Performance date and Venue Unknown. Posted by Neil Marcus 1 February 2007. http://www.youtube. com/watch?v=OnIkMdy2GiM&feature=related. Viewed 10 August, 2010. Quinlan, M. and Bates, B., ‘Dances and Discourses of (Dis)Ability: Heather Mills’s Embodiment of Disability on Dancing with the Stars’. Text and Performance Quarterly. Vol. 28, January-April 2008, pp. 64-80. Ranciére, J., The Emancipated Spectator. Trans. Elliott, G., Verso, London and New York, 2009. Ranciére, J., The Future of the Image. Trans. Elliott, G., Verso, London and Brooklyn, 2007. Sandahl, C. and Auslander, P. (eds), Bodies in Commotion: Disability and Performance. University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor, 2005. Siebers, T., Disability Aesthetics. University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor, MI, 2010. Wendell, S., The Rejected Body: Feminist Philosophical Reflections on Disability. Routledge, New York and London, 1996. Wyeth, A., Christina’s World. Museum of Modern Art. New York, 1949, http://www.moma.org/collection/browse_results.php?object_id=78455. Viewed 11 August 2010. Adele Anderson is on faculty with the Rochester Center and the Master of Arts in Liberal Studies program, Graduate School, Empire State College, State University of New York. She has studied arts and anthropology, is nondisabled, a nonprofessional dancer, and collaborates in design and choreography. Current research interests include the rhetoric of images, mixed-ability and multi-age dance theatre, and community performance.

http://www.moma.org/collection/browse_results.php?object_id=78455

Dreams of Djinni and Djuna: Performance and Performativity in the Dance of the Seven Veils

Drew Eisenhauer

Abstract In 1988 Judith Butler introduced the term performativity, to argue that gender is not biologically determined, but rather enacted: ‘gender is in no way a stable identity or locus of agency from which various acts proceed; rather, it is an identity tenuously constituted in time—an identity, instituted through a stylized repetition of acts;’1 gender ‘is real only to the extent that it is performed.’2 In 1993 Butler emphasized that performativity should be understood as an unconscious ‘reiteration of norms’3 distinct from consciously constructed theatrical performance. This assertion led to a firestorm in theatre studies, and much scholarship in the field in the last decade has sought to understand the value of consciously constructed performance to the unconscious identity-forming processes of performativity. My chapter offers two case studies of Americans who explore these theoretical concerns: the first is that of the modernist writer Djuna Barnes and her acerbic critique of Sapphic orientalist performance. Barnes’s critique of women in performance has never been fully understood; I argue that she anticipates Butler’s notions of performativity and is working—even in the early stages of her career—from metaphysics of absence derived in part from her reading of Nietzsche. Barnes is precisely concerned with the construction of gender and identity in the visual field. I will also cite an example from late twentieth century gay culture—the transsexual striptease artist called Jeannie, who styles her act on Barbara Eden’s portrayal of the 1960s television sitcom character.

Key Words: Djuna Barnes, performance, performativity, orientalism, transgendered, bisexuality, Jeannie, veiled woman, theatre, modernism.

***** 1. The Performing Woman

Today I will discuss the ‘Dance of the Seven Veils’ that originates in Oscar Wilde’s Salomé (1893), and other images of the veiled woman in American theatrical culture. Stage and later Hollywood manifestations of the veiled other abound, an imaginary that reached its pre 9/11 peak in the bottled djinni played by Barbara Eden in the 1960s US television comedy I Dream of Jeannie. Historically, some queer artists employed the orientalist fantasy of the eastern woman as a method of critiquing the construction of gender roles and offered the potential for an alternative performed identity; while others—I present two case studies here— challenged the stereotype of eastern exoticism and its acceptance in queer culture. My two examples bookend the twentieth century: American modernist Djuna

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Barnes, most famous for her 1936 novel of Paris Nightwood, critiqued the ontology of the performing woman and the Dance of the Seven Veils as early as 1913. I argue that a related critique appears at the end of the century as a new generation of queer performers explore their identity through performance. The transsexual performance artist Jeannie, working with a parody of the Barbara Eden persona, performs a critique of the icon of the veiled woman that also challenges certain queer tropes. In order to understand these voices, it is first necessary to reconsider the importance of the 1990s debate caused by Judith Butler’s controversial distinction between performance and performativity.

2. Performance/Performativity

In 1988 Judith Butler introduced the term ‘performativity,’ which she based on J.L. Austin’s speech act theory and Simone de Beauvoir’s notion that ‘one is not born, but, rather, becomes a woman’4 to argue gender is not given, but rather something that is enacted:

gender is in no way a stable identity or locus of agency from which various acts proceed; rather, it is an identity tenuously constituted in time — an identity, instituted through a stylized repetition of acts.5

Butler further argued that the specifics of the ordinary, everyday performance

of gender were instituted through the ‘the stylization of the body;’6 hair styles and clothing, verbal and non-verbal acts, gestures, and movement all ‘contributed to the illusion of abiding gendered self.’7

Butler was apparently concerned that she had implied the performance of gender was a matter of volition, and that alteration in gender performance could take place through the intentional intervention of the performer. 8 In ‘Critically Queer’ (1990), she clarified her original notion, stating that performativity is a ‘reiteration of norms which precede, constrain, and exceed the performer.’9 She deliberately distinguished performativity from performance, the latter she portrayed as a matter of ‘will’ or ‘choice,’ and, in an apparently off-hand remark, stated, ‘the reduction of performativity to performance would be a mistake.’10 This likely unintentional denigration of theatrical performance, the medium that, after all, had provided the central metaphor of her philosophy, caused a reaction among theatre and performance studies scholars. The debate led scholar theorists such as Elin Diamond and Jill Dolan to justify theatrical performance’s role in helping us understand gender formation through performativity. Dolan, for example wrote

[we] might put Butler’s provocative performative metaphor to use in theatre spaces, in which the intentional performance of gender acts might be examined, disrupted, and reconfigured. 11

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In fact, the conscious constructions of theatrical or artistic performance provide an ideal medium, to explore the fundamental processes of dress, gesture, and the verbal and non-verbal acts Butler identifies as constituting gender. Thus performance provides perhaps the best means to challenge conservative gender norms, precisely by identifying, enacting and analyzing them.

3. Elinor Apter on Stereotype and Sapphic Orientalism

One scholar working with the tensions between performance and performativity is Elinor Apter. In an article called ‘Acting Out Orientalism: Sapphic theatricality in turn-of-the-century Paris,’ Apter states her intention to ‘assert a p lace for performance within the theory of gender performativity without employing the ‘truth-value’ of compulsory heterosexuality.’12 Her hypothesis is that what allowed turn of the century French gay and lesbian sexual identity to ‘perform itself was its mediation by the culturally exotic stereotype.’13 This stereotype is the middle-eastern woman, represented in various historical guises. Apter argues that Sapphic performance ‘self-consciously’ mobilized

orientalist stereotypes to fashion ‘new’ sexual identities. Monstrous superhuman figures […] were excavated from cultural history; women such as Semiramis, Thaïs, and Cleopatra (…) In the context of Parisian identity politics, where the political was defined more personally and the salon or stage prevailed as the chosen arena of activism, Orientalist stereotypes were used as a means of partially or semi-covertly outing Sapphic love and establishing powerful feminine personas.14

In public performances, but also in many private salon skits, Parisian actresses

and friends from theatrical circles acted out roles of exotic Middle Eastern women — frequently cross-dressing in the male-roles as well. Participants included Sarah Bernhardt, Colette, Natalie Clifford Barney, and Ida Rubenstein. Apter argues that the performance of an exaggerated orientalism; ‘as code for gender identities that cannot be admitted, exposes the performativity; the similar but unconscious gestures, clothes; and acting out of identities’15 underscored by Butler as the ‘repetition of norms’ of performativity. Indeed here Apter theorizes the advantages of drag in general for analyzing performativity, concluding:

Acting and outing, as ontological strategies, commonly rely on essentialist typologies of enacted being that are thrown into definitional crisis by the wild mimeticism of affect. Perhaps it is this inflation of affect that helps to explain why campy Orientalist scenarios have always been and continue to be good value with gay drama; their over-acted quality points to the way


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in which nonconformist sexual identity must perform itself into existence, more often than not through the transformation of originally conservative models.16

We might say in this case the East, as reified to serve forbidden sexuality,

serves as antithesis to heterosexuality. The exaggeration of ‘traditionally conservative models’ is a tool to expose how such models of gender and, therefore, all models of gender are performed. However, one must ask if the orientalist stereotype — or any stereotype from another culture – is the best means to break outside of the conservative social context that insists on conformity. Stereotyping is inherently problematic because it relies on or demands conservative patterns of perception. Apter concludes her investigation by admitting the stereotype may only sometimes be effective in presenting an alternative identity.

A number of the women Apter mentions in her study have an association with the high decadence of Oscar Wilde’s Salomé. Rubenstein was discovered when she approached the Ballet Rousses for dance lessons for a private performance of the play. Wilde created the role originally for Bernhardt, but the British government denied the play a l icense in 1891, ostensibly because it violated an ancient law against the portrayal of Biblical characters. Salomé had a successful opening in Paris in 1901, although Bernhardt never actually played the part or danced the seven veils. The script does not specify that the dance must be seductive, as is often assumed, or that it must consist of the removal of veils one after another. In fact Wilde does not name the dance. The Strauss Opera that followed may have added some of the notoriety. It features Salomé wearing only her veils, leaving the actress nude or in a body stocking at the end of the dance. In the United States, many shortened versions of Salomé, featuring primarily or only the dance appeared. Canadian Maude Allen made her acting and dancing debut in ‘Vision Of Salomé’ in 1903 i n Vienna and toured widely, becoming famously entangled in obscenity charges in London. In the United States, Florence Lawrence, ‘the Biograph Girl’ appeared in the first film version of Wilde’s play in 1908. Nearly all film versions of Salomé were either subtitled or retitled The Dance of the Seven Veils.

In America, the Dance of the Seven Veils and the veiled woman took on increasing notoriety as they gained more popular audiences. It is perhaps this trend, which led the American modernist Djuna Barnes early in her career to write a parodic review of one production. On December 28, 1913, Barnes interviewed Mimi Aguglia, an Italian actress starring in a revival of Salomé. Barnes’s portrait is a strange mix of sympathy and mockery. Barnes seems dubious of Aguglia’s over-acting, and Barnes, herself somewhat ethnocentric, finds Aguglia perhaps too Italian for the role. Barnes mentions that Aguglia had gathered her pet monkeys (which were also used in the production) to her, and ‘cried over them in Italian and spoke to them of the good spaghetti.’17 Barnes then writes of Mimi’s histrionics:

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Slowly, with feet that curled, she came, brown and spangled, and shaking with tinsel [...] swaying prophetically [...]. She took her balance on the brink of the well and offered John her soul in all the shapes that a heroically tragic woman could offer it, and was scorned. From every staccato scream, from every sudden-reached crescendo of misery, from every backward headshake and every troubled posture, in every lunge and the spasms of her dancing, she was putting her pride back. This was the epic of undulating spaghetti, turmoil of tragic chiffon, damp spurning feet.18

Barnes continues her critique of Aguglia’s performance, which ends with the

latter’s exaggerated rendition of the death of Salomé. Why Barnes appears so unwilling to accept the Dance of the Seven Veils as tragic art, although she was an artist steeped in the Decadent tradition and, in fact, had family connections to Wilde’s circle, is the question that inspired the current study. Barnes’s critique, I believe, is manifested by her understanding of the construction of identity in performance and her unwillingness to accept the orientalist drag of Parisian Sapphic culture. If, as Dolan suggests, theatre may be used to explore performativity, a space in which ‘intentional performance of gender acts might be examined, disrupted, and reconfigured,’ unintentional recapitulation of conservative models, unexamined performances serving an audience conservative-minded in its definition of gender might be not only ineffective but retrograde in its effects. In the interests of time, I won’t elaborate further on Barnes’ acerbic critique of the performing woman, but the examples given here and a number of her other writings — such as her 1920s critique of Natalie Barney’s Sapphic circle, Ladies Almanac, show her skeptical of the risk of performance to use and potentially even create new stereotypes rather than free alternative sexualities.

4. I Dream of Jeannie 1990s

The reputation of the Dance of the Seven Veils continued in burlesque and onscreen in B movies in the United States through much of the twentieth century. Rita Hayworth starred in a 1953 production of Salomé with Stewart Granger that no doubt was intended to capitalize on the popularity of recent DeMille biblical epics. However, for the sanitized 1950s, Salomé has been converted to Christianity and dances for Herod to save John the Baptist from being beheaded. Baby boomers in the United States are most familiar with the icon of the veiled woman through the television situation comedy, I Dream of Jeannie, which ran from 1965-1970. The show featured the hi-jinks caused by a b eautiful djinni, clad in a t wo-piece costume with bare midriff, who has been found in a bottle by an unwitting astronaut after splash down. The astronaut was played by Larry Hagman (whom Europeans probably remember as J.R. from Dallas). Hagman’s character despite his apparent good fortune is for some reason unable to consummate his relationship


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with the beautiful nubile who calls him ‘master’ every week — or accept any of her magic to aid his career.

Morris Meyer in a 1991 TDR articled called ‘I Dream of Jeannie: Transsexual Striptease as Scientific Display’ reviewed and analyzed a p erformance by a transsexual drag performer calling herself Jeannie and invoking the 1960s television show in her costume and by the use of the show’s kitschy theme song. But Jeannie’s act was different than other drag shows Meyer was familiar with. Although Jeannie quickly established her character, ostensibly an impression of Barbara Eden, Meyers notes, she

terminated the impersonation only one minute into the act, and spent the remaining time out of character […] By discarding this convention in mid-performance, Jeannie produced an uncommon and unsettling effect. This well-defined rupture, or discontinuity, provided a starting point for de-coding her dance.19

Meyers found that this was a trope used by other transsexual performers as

well: the performer’s transsexual identity is most effective when it c ontains an element of surprise or shock because the largely gay male audiences who have come to see the show are not expecting to view the body of a woman:

Complete clothing removal by a female would not occur in a drag show. To clarify the intention of her performance, Jeannie first had to create a link to the conventions of female impersonators. Through the Barbara Eden impression executed in a camp aesthetic, she fulfilled audience expectations of sexual representation while aligning herself with the values of the gay male audience. Without doing so, there could be confusion or possible resentment of the presentation of female eroticism on a stage dominated by same-gender male sexuality. Jeannie also does striptease in Las Vegas nightclubs for non-gay spectators and with co-performers who are biological females. The fact that she is a transsexual is never revealed because it is irrelevant under these circumstances. But when she performs in the drag show, the transsexual body, not the female body, becomes the object of the gaze.20

Meyers felt that Jeannie had to at first align ‘herself with the values of the gay

male audience’ to avoid confusion or ‘possible resentment’; however; this idea does not make sense given his interviews with other transsexual performers that rely on precisely the shock or surprise effects of their acts. I would argue Jeannie’s performance offers a cr itique of one aspect of the drag show tradition — the

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eastern other. Jeannie invites her audience to invest in the shtick of the Barbara Eden impression, and then breaks the fourth wall to confront the audience with her biological reality. The message to the gay male audience seems not unlike that Barnes delivered nearly a century before to Sapphic performers — Jeannie breaks the repetition of social norms — not simply in the heterosexual majority but by questioning the establishment of the normative within gay culture that privileges a specific Sapphic or gay performance imaginary and risks imprinting a new stereotype.

The drag show provides an outstanding opportunity for analysis of performativity by transforming and subverting traditional conservative models of gender, such as the exotic eastern woman, the Hollywood star, and others. However, Jeannie’s performance both questions the nature of constructed identity, and, profoundly explores the question of who is doing the watching. Jeannie finally challenges her audience to accept the construction of gender as separate from biological sex, emphasized by the sudden surprise of her biology, challenging her audience to perceive, as Butler has pointed out, that humans are not without biological sex, but that gender is experienced by humans as costume and kitsch.

Notes

1 J. Butler, ‘Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory’, Theatre Journal, Vol. 40, 1988, p. 519. 2 Ibid., p. 527. 3 Butler, ‘Critically Queer’, GLQ, Vol. 1, 1993, p. 24. 4 Butler, op. cit., p. 519. 5 Ibid. 6 Ibid. 7 Ibid. 8 My account of Butler’s actions here is indebted to the version of the events provided by Elin Diamond and Shannon Jackson. See E. Diamond, ‘Introduction’, Performance and Cultural Politics, E. Diamond (ed), London, Routledge, 1996, and S. Jackson, Professing Performance: Theatre in the Academy from Philology to Performativity, Cambridge, 2004, pp. 188-190. 9 Butler, ‘Critically Queer’, op. cit., p. 24. 10 Ibid. 11 Dolan quoted in S. Jackson, op. cit., p. 190. 12 E. Apter, ‘Acting out Orientalism: Sapphic Theatricality in Turn-of-the-Century Paris’, Performance and Cultural Politics, E. Diamond (ed), London, Routledge, 1996, p. 16. 13 Ibid. 14 Ibid., p. 19. 15 Ibid., p. 24.


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16 Ibid., p. 34. 17 D. Barnes, Interviews, A. Barry (Ed), Washington, Sun and Moon, 1985, p. 21. 18 Ibid., pp. 21-22. 19 M. Meyer ‘I Dream of Jeannie: Transsexual Striptease as Scientific Display’, TDR, Vol. 35, 1999, p. 25. 20 Ibid., p. 29.

Bibliography Apter, E., ‘Acting out Orientalism: Sapphic Theatricality in Turn-of-the-Century Paris’. Performance and Cultural Politics. Diamond, E. (ed), Routledge, London and New York, 1996. Barnes, D., Interviews. Sun and Moon, Washington, DC, 1985. Butler, J., ‘Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory’. Theatre Journal. Vol. 40, 1988, pp. 519-531. –––, ‘Critically Queer’. GLQ. Vol. 1, 1993, pp. 17-32. Diamond, E., ‘Introduction’. Performance and Cultural Politics. Diamond, E. (ed), Routledge, London and New York, 1996. Jackson, S., Professing Performance: Theatre in the Academy from Philology to Performativity. Cambridge UP, Cambridge, 2004. Meyer, M., ‘I Dream of Jeannie: Transsexual Striptease as Scientific Display’. TDR. Vol. 35, 1999, pp. 25-42. Yegenoglu, M., Colonial Fantasies: Towards a Feminist Reading of Orientalism. Cambridge UP, Cambridge, 1998. Drew Eisenhauer is a 2010-2011 City of Paris Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of Paris, Diderot.

Part 4

Persons and Objects: Performing Technologies

The Gaze of the Other: Mask and Recognition in Greek Drama

David Nichols

Abstract The actors of ancient Greek drama always donned masks as a way of being in character with their assumed mythical identities. My chapter explores the symbolism of prosopon—the mask or face—as a basis for thinking about personal identity in a communal context. The Greek etymology of prosopon suggests an experience of standing ‘before the gaze’ of the other. Thus its purpose exceeds that of a surface through which one communicates, as would be the case for the Latin persona. Instead, the mask of Greek drama helps to open a whole visual arena wherein characters experience what it means to be in relation with each other as a way of being seen by each other. The symbolism of the mask can assist us in constructing a philosophy of personal identity, but only so long as we accept that social recognition is a precondition for acquiring an individual understanding of who I am. My study incorporates historical information about Greek masks that preceded dramatic use—e.g., funerary masks, temple masks, and mask sculptures. Also, I observe parallels between the dramatic mask and contemporaneous Greek sculpture. I weave these ritual, cultic, and aesthetic factors into a p aradoxical account of the mask. On the one hand, masks allow characters to ‘fit’ meaningfully within a unified, cohesive sphere of phenomena. The actors occupy a mythological space with aesthetically reinforced identities. On the other hand, the mask has a way of reminding us that human beings ultimately do not fit within their surroundings. The sculpted rigidity of the mask disturbs us with its alien, corpse-like features. As an ossified visage, the mask serves as a symbol of mortality. As a mythical and provisional image, it serves as a symbol of socially-derived identity—the self made possible by the gaze of the other. Key Words: Mask, face, prosopon, tragedy, drama, theater, personal identity, recognition, Dionysus, Bacchae.

*****

When a human being wears a mask, it typically has a jarring effect upon others. One reason for this is that masks are never completely honest with us: the person who wears it resorts to an inanimate medium for the sake of conveying the living expression of the face. Most masks strike us as obviously mimetic, so that the wearer assumes the character of the mask and yet, at the same time, we know that he or she cannot be the mask. We might be tempted to account for the jarring effect of the mask simply by pointing to the infrequency of its usage in modern life. Masks were much more common among ancient cultures because of the religious and dramatic purposes associated with them. The actors in Greek drama

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wore masks for every role that they performed without exception. But I maintain that the Greek mask was even more extraordinary for the viewers of its time, and that its prevalence only illustrates this importance. Moreover, it offers us an important glimpse into Greek ways of relating to personal identity. It reminds us that self-identity takes root from within a wider communal context of recognition relations, a shared experience of seeing and being seen. The mask exemplifies the being-seen necessary for identity formation—a being-seen that exposes the limitations fatefully besetting who we are. The mask is a symbol of constructed identity and its discontents, an admission that for all our efforts to assimilate to our surroundings, we can never completely belong.

The ecstatic nature of human existence comes to the fore in the Greek mask. By ‘ecstatic’ I refer to the ek-stasis whereby human beings are always ahead of themselves, absorbed in a world of phenomena within which they make their way. We inhabit a meaningfully structured universe—a theater of the appearances—made possible by an ongoing shared historical project. The project is the rational ordering of the cosmos, which assigns and sustains meaning associations so that the stone appears as a stone, the tree as a tree, etc.—an ordering that also unites all this phenomena for an interconnected whole. In other words the world as we know it has been organized for us in advance, and we continue to perpetuate this organization now, that we might take a stand in its midst. Yet the ecstatic nature of the human being includes more than just this dwelling alongside and among the phenomena for the sake of a meaningful abode. It is simultaneously the process whereby someone receives and cultivates a self-identity within that environment. The mask demonstrates with disturbing clarity how the human being is an otherwise no-one who requires, and who must be, the constructed identity afforded by a larger network of meaning. At first glance, the mask would seem to offer an identity every bit as concrete as that assigned to a stone or a tree. But the mask has a peculiar irony about its presence: the viewer cannot help but notice that this someone is at the same time not who he or she claims to be.

Although the mask was a c ommon ritual device for ancient societies, the Greeks had their own distinct ways of relating to it. The Greek word for the mask, prosopon, suggests a special communal relationship at work in self-identity formation. The pros of prosopon is prepositional, which in this case means to be ‘in front of’ or to move ‘toward.’1 The stem of prosopon comes from the noun ops, the face, and more specifically, the eye or optical capacity of the face. Thus the etymology of prosopon points to a sense of being ‘before the gaze’ of the other, as though this were an integral factor in what it means for someone to be whomever he or she is. In most contexts, the English word ‘face’ would be a more suitable translation for prosopon rather than ‘mask,’ with its many masking-veiling connotations. Even the prosopa worn by actors in a d rama were faces, not coverings that hid ‘the real thing’ behind them. In the drama these faces were temporarily assumed identities made possible by the gaze of others. Without the

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recognition provided by others, the actor would lack the communal space necessary to step forward in character, to be anyone in particular. Here we are some distance yet from the Roman mask—in Latin, persona—which is literally a ‘sounding-through’ process, and separable from the face that dons it.2

The Greek mask had already established a long history before it ever had the chance to emerge for the theatrical festivals. The earliest known examples come to us from the grave circles of Mycenae—five beaten gold funerary masks dating back to the 16th century B.C. The most exquisite of these is the so-called ‘mask of Agamemnon,’ mistakenly attributed to the king of Homer’s Iliad by the archeologist Heinrich Schliemann. This death mask immortalizes the deceased with iconic power in the sight of those still living; conversely, it sends the living one forever into the realm of the dead with a sealed identity, the final hardened product of a lifetime of personal development. The mask of Agamemnon marks liminality—the betwixt and between of life and death, presence and absence—by combining naturalist and idealist techniques into a single work of art. The precision of nose and mouth, as well as the proportionality of the central facial features, are realistic enough to have born a strong resemblance to the one who finally wore it. But a considerable portion of the face drifts into decorative license, its ears curled and flat, the facial hair remarkably fine. Most significant are the double-lidded eyes, however, which seem to be both waking and sleeping, their outside rims wide open for sight, with closed eyelids resting within them.3 Again, the optical powers of the mask are prominent, except that here darkness and light also enter the equation.

The Greek mask had plenty of other ritual contexts besides those associated with funerary customs. In the 7th to 6th centuries, the Spartan temple of Artemis Orthia housed terra cotta votive masks of human, satyr, and gorgon likenesses, possibly copies of wooden masks used in religious ceremonies devoted to the goddess.4 Gorgon heads made for popular masks in various Greek locations: often the gorgon depicted was the beheaded Medusa, renowned for her deadly gaze. Artisans would hang her in their workshops as a precaution against meddling demons; soldiers frequently had the gorgon image painted on their shields.5 Each of these early mask types contribute to our understanding of the wider ritual setting in which the dramatic mask had its birth. But the soil would not have been fertile enough for the possibilities of the drama were it not for one last cultic development, the mask of Dionysus. Several pottery pieces from the 6th and 5th centuries feature imagery of a wine-mixing ritual, usually performed by female devotees, before the solitary mask of the deity.6 The mask was typically larger than any human face, often hanging from a pillar, with ivy strung above it and clothing occasionally draped beneath.7 The sufficiency of the mask as opposed to a whole sculpture of the god is unique to Dionysian worship. The women find themselves transformed along with the wine, dancing as maenads before his intoxicating gaze.


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Since Dionysus was the god of theater, the introduction of the mask into dramatic performance could not have been an accident. Thespis was probably the first of the poets to turn mask-wearing into a standard practice for the performing arts. Aristotle identifies him as the progenitor of dramas that included actors, with the result that tragedy was no longer restricted to a chorus singing dithyrambs.8 Thespis used face paints taken from the lees of wine, sometimes from white chalk, until he finally graduated to canvas masks. Since he could rely upon multiple disguises for his characters, he only needed one actor for each of his dramas—and he was the most likely candidate. Aristotle reports how Aeschylus increased the number of actors to two, Sophocles to three, albeit at the expense of diminishing the role of the chorus.9 The character possibilities increased exponentially with every additional actor that the poets allowed into the performance. Of course, even three actors seem few in number by today’s standards; the original preference for a smaller cast must have been significant for the art itself. The ‘exponential preference’ for small casts with multiple masks could easily have stemmed from an implicit Dionysian principle, one reigning from the costumes of Thespis all the way down to the late tragedies and comedies, that what mattered was the possessive power of the mask, or to be more specific, the gaze with its web of identity relations. Anything resembling an actor or essential cause behind the mask had to evaporate anyway, at least temporarily, so that the system of masks and their characters could enter fully into ritual communion.

The ecstatic symbolism of the mask includes important lessons about time, especially the temporal limits pertaining to human existence. The actors assumed the faces of renowned figures from a mythological past, as though the dead were allowed to stand among the living. The stories of these characters were more or less known to the audience already, their fates sealed in advance by a collective memory. The myths helped establish a shared horizon of meaning whereby masks could make sense as the masks of Prometheus, Elektra, Oedipus, etc. The masks were responsible, in turn, for keeping that horizon in play as the sphere of a dynamic exchange among participants. The early chalk face paints, courtesy of Thespis, must have been a ghostly sight for the viewer, but no more eerie than the mask that followed. What came later was nothing less than an external skull that replaced the comforting warmth of flesh with lifeless features. The mask caused characters to appear corpse-like, as though rigor mortis had already come upon them. In fact the aesthetic powers of the mask parallel those of the sculpture, which comes as no surprise given that the oversized Dionysus masks of wine rituals were themselves sculptures—what the Greeks called algamata, ‘offerings’ to the gods. Hegel has good reason for comparing the actors of the Greek drama to ‘moving sculptures’: in his view, the mask exemplifies how we desire to be objects for one another, not only subjects.10 What makes the sculpted inflexibility of the mask so perplexing is the sense we all have that the human being is not an object—not a concrete ‘thing’—but in fact a process.11

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The mask tells us just as much about the space of human existence as it does about its time. The ecstatic nature of the human being is its eruption into the khora, the matrix of all things.12 The mask places the self in relation to everyone and everything with all the apparent solidity of a concrete material surface among other such surfaces. This awareness of distance presupposes a wider arena of visibility made possible by the gaze of the other. The theater or theatron means literally the site—the place for being seen—where actors find themselves before another presence, similar to the passivity one might have before a god (theos) or goddess (thea). The Greek drama reinforces this experience by placing the actors, not only in the presence of one another, but also before the eyes of the community, in broad daylight. The mask shows us that the space opened by sight is necessarily constrained by the perspectives of everyone involved in that visibility. For instance, the imagery of the mask is generally iconic; it acquiesces to the expectations of the audience by providing a fixed portrait of the hero or heroine. The exaggerated features of the mask, often ridiculous or grotesque, force the actor to become a caricature. The mask impedes communication too: actors must face each other directly in order to address one another, so that they appear as characters limited to their own linear sight; they cannot so much as speak without the mask causing the sounds to reverberate off their cartoonish identities. All the same, they are constant witnesses of the unendurable, their gaping mouths and lidless eyes perpetually open for the horrors of existence.

The tragedies typically avoided any references to the mask as a mask, whereas the comedies were far more likely to draw attention to matters of performance practice. Euripides’ Bacchae was the exception to the rule because of the centrality of Dionysus and his prosopic possibilities for the tragic plot. The god returns as a stranger to Thebes, the city of his birth, with the curse of madness for those who no longer recognize him. He announces this curse at the beginning of the play when he first confronts the audience with the deranged smile of his extraordinary mask. His face functions otherwise as the prototype for every mask that follows—i.e., Dionysus appears as the mask itself, which each of the characters need. But the wildly inappropriate smile on his face disrupts the sameness of masks with a profound sense of irreducible difference, as though he laughs at us through the system of meaning. His presence in the city soon results in a co mmunal rift between initiates to the god’s cult of madness on the one hand and rational holdouts on the other.

At one point, the young king Pentheus, blinded by his own rational hubris, mistakes the god for a mere devotee. He interrogates the stranger about whether he has actually seen the god in person or merely in a dream. The answer is instructive: ‘face to face,’ horon horonta—or, more literally, ‘seeing him see me.’13 All seeing necessarily includes the passivity of being seen. One cannot have a meaningfully structured world to inhabit in the first place except by way of the sharing that comes from being in relation to others. The fateful alternative to this realization is


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that knowledge loses awareness of its own creative and manic origins within the community—only to become myopic and static, subject to the naiveté of absolute certainty. When Pentheus later decides to spy on the maenads he disguises himself and climbs a t ree for the sake of peering down upon others without being seen himself. He finally falls from his lofty perch to the mouths of the frenzied women below who make a quick meal of him, leaving only his head for a trophy in the hand of his confused mother. The final demise of Pentheus equals the complete failure of identity, the face that neither receives recognition nor recognizes others.

The message that Dionysus brings to the city of Thebes is that they have lost sight of their extraordinary otherness. The sight provided by the other opens the space for me to be who I am—to be in response, to be in character. If the Thebans could just see themselves as being-seen, they might return to that intoxicating spell where the dance of life has its origin. They might realize that they are ecstatic beings, and therefore a creative force, co-responsible for the procurement of their own meaningful habitat. What made Pentheus’ approach to sight so hubristic was the fact that he imagined himself having a viewpoint beyond human perspective—a God’s eye view of his world. But the only God’s eye view available to us is the one symbolized by the face of God, a f ace that reveals our communal dependencies, grounds us in the receptivity of being before others, and all the while reinforces a sense of the limitations at work in such an existence. There is moreover a madness that lingers within that mask of Dionysus: it is the stubborn remainder of meaninglessness that a constructed identity could never quite eradicate.

Notes 1 J.P. Manoussakis, ‘Prosopon and Icon: Two Premodern Ways of Thinking God’, After God: Richard Kearney and the Religious Turn in Continental Philosophy, Fordham University Press, New York, 2006, pp. 283-284. 2 David Wiles offers an intriguing account of the Roman mask as an object that could be inhabited by a spirit. D. Wiles, The Masks of Menander, Cambridge University Press, New York, 1991, pp. 129-133. 3 R. Hampe and E. Simon, The Birth of Greek Art: From the Mycenaean to the Archaic Period, Thomas and Hudson, Ltd., London, 1980, p. 86. 4 A.D. Napier, Masks, Transformation, and Paradox, University of California Press, Berkeley, 1986, pp. 45-49. 5 J.P. Vernant and P. Vidal-Naquet, ‘Features of the Mask in Ancient Greece’, Myth and Tragedy in Ancient Greece, Zone Books, New York, 1990, p. 191. 6 For a description and photograph of the vase, see D. Wiles, Mask and Performance in Greek Tragedy, Cambridge University Press, New York, 2007, pp. 38-39. 7 D. Wiles, Mask and Performance in Greek Tragedy, op. cit., pp. 214-219.

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8 C. Kerényi, Dionysus: Archetypal Image of Indestructible Life, trans. R. Manheim, Princeton University Press, Princeton, 1976, pp. 326-327. 9 Aristotle, ‘Poetics’, Aristotle XXIII, Loeb Classical Library, trans. S. Halliwell, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, 1995, 1449a17-19. 10 G.W.F. Hegel, Aesthetics, Lectures on Fine Art, Vol. II., trans. T.M. Knox, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1975, p. 1181. 11 On a more positive note, the resemblance of the mask to the sculpture raises the specter of immortality—that someone can become a work of art, worthy to be memorialized, timeless. 12 R. Kearney, ‘Epiphanies of the Everyday: Toward a Micro-Eschatology’, After God: Richard Kearney and the Religious Turn in Continental Philosophy, Fordham University Press, New York, 2006, p. 10. 13 Euripides, ‘Bacchanals’, Euripides III, Loeb Classical Library, trans. A.S. Way, William Heinemann, London, 1930, p. 470; J.P. Vernant and P. Vidal-Naquet, ‘The Masked Dionysus of Euripides’, Bacchae’, Myth and Tragedy in Ancient Greece, trans. J. Lloyd, Zone Books, New York, 1990, pp. 392-393.

Bibliography Aristotle, ‘Poetics’. Aristotle XXIII, Loeb Classical Library. Trans. Halliwell, S., Harvard University Press, Cambridge, 1995. Euripides, ‘Bacchanals’. Euripides III, Loeb Classical Library. Trans. Way, A.S., William Heinemann, London, 1930. Hampe, R. and Simon, E., The Birth of Greek Art: From the Mycenaean to the Archaic Period. Thomas and Hudson, Ltd., London, 1980, p. 86. Hegel, G.W.F., Aesthetics, Lectures on Fine Art, Vol. II. Trans. Knox, T.M., Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1975. Hoffman, M., Salvia Divinorum: The Entheogen Theory of Religion and Ego Death. Viewed, September 2010, http://www.egodeath.com/ EntheogenTheory OfReligion.htm. Kearney, R., ‘Epiphanies of the Everyday: Toward a M icro-Eschatology’. After God: Richard Kearney and the Religious Turn in Continental Philosophy. Fordham University Press, New York, 2006. Kerényi, C., Dionysus: Archetypal Image of Indestructible Life. Trans. Manheim, R., Princeton University Press, Princeton, 1976.

http://www.egodeath.com/%20EntheogenTheory%20OfReligion.htm

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Manoussakis, J.P., ‘Prosopon and Icon: Two Premodern Ways of Thinking God’. After God: Richard Kearney and the Religious Turn in Continental Philosophy. Fordham University Press, New York, 2006. Napier, A.D., Masks, Transformation, and Paradox. University of California Press, Berkeley, 1986. Vernant, J.P. and Vidal-Naquet, P., ‘Features of the Mask in Ancient Greece’. Myth and Tragedy in Ancient Greece. Zone Books, New York, 1990. Vernant, J.P. and Vidal-Naquet, P., ‘The Masked Dionysus of Euripides’ Bacchae’. Myth and Tragedy in Ancient Greece. Trans. Lloyd, J., Zone Books, New York, 1990. Wiles, D., Mask and Performance in Greek Tragedy. Cambridge University Press, New York, 2007. Wiles, D., The Masks of Menander. Cambridge University Press, New York, 1991. David Nichols, Dr., is a Visiting Assistant Professor at the Department of Philosophy at Saginaw Valley State University.

Personhood and the Allure of the Object

Sozita Goudouna Abstract Theatre is mostly defined by the performer’s presence and personhood is the term used to define this notion. However, performance practitioners emphasize the object-qualities of the human body by simultaneously de-emphasizing their human qualities. As part of their anti-theatrical methods, theatre practitioners, writers and choreographers have integrated the ‘personhood’ of the performer. Minimalist choreography demonstrates the sculptural elements of dance. Minimalist practice, in general, blurred the categorical distinction between aesthetic experience, the specular experience of ordinary empirical objects and restricted interpretive practices, because of the notion of ‘objecthood.’ Minimalist works by artists from different disciplines such as dance, music and sculpture exemplify a significant shift in compositional methods, towards subtraction of representation, emphasis on objecthood (literalness) and on the object of art. The chapter will discuss the relationship between the notion of objecthood, that is central to minimalism in the arts, and the notion of ‘personhood’ of the live performer so as to analyze the artistic venture to define the borders between a theatrical performance and a purely visual representation. Key Words: Representation, minimalism, visual arts, theatre, objecthood, personhood, temporality.

*****

[A]lmost everyone is agreed about ‘70s art. It is diversified, split, factionalized...We are asked to contemplate a g reat plethora of possibilities in the list that must now be used to draw a line around the art of the present: video; performance; body art; conceptual art; photo-realism in painting and an associated hyper-realism in sculpture; story art; monumental abstract sculpture (earthworks); and abstract painting, characterized, now, not by rigor but by a willful eclecticism...Both the critics and practitioners have closed ranks around this ‘pluralism’ of the 1970s...But is the absence of a collective style the token of a real difference? Or is there not something else for which all these terms are possible manifestations? Are not all these separate ‘individuals’ in fact moving in lockstep, only to a rather different drummer from the one called style?1

In the course of the 20th century, ideas about how the theatrical event is defined

and constituted have been destabilized, as were those of the visual arts. In the


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institutional sphere of experimental visual arts and theatre, there were resonant shifts both from the perspective of the development of innovative aesthetic strategies and from that of audience expectations. Diverse factors enabled critical discourses to attain hegemony, both in the appreciation and the generation of art works. The artwork displayed its dependency on these discourses, while it demanded a cer tain contribution from the audience. These institutional and discursive frameworks provided aesthetic definitions that displaced the traditional concept of the visual object and of the theatrical medium.

1. The Expanded Field of Art Practice and Discourse

Similarly, the relationships and interchanges between the theatre and the visual arts have determined a wide range of artistic proposals and attitudes that sustained a dialectic between the dimension of visual and theatrical representation. As a result, visual culture has been dominated by the performative paradigm and the theatrical roots of art were interpreted as a constituent element of western modernity. This expanded situation was embedded in new conceptual and spatiotemporal matrices that produced a certain loss of distinction, both disciplinary and spatiotemporal. Henceforth, the transient and limitless formal possibilities of the artwork and the expanding site of artistic practice marked a time of intense controversy about the nature of modernism.

The chapter initiates a critical reading of the consequences of these artistic practices within the late modernist discourses and legacies, by focusing on the mid-60s: a period of significant activity, debate, and ultimately crisis in the art world, as curators and critics tried to come to terms with recent developments in the visual arts. These aesthetic practices responded to the emergent flux of the late sixties, which was flourishing in new, universal ways of life that were based on specially developed models of perception, art, architecture, science, technology, education, political practice and predominantly on the strong conviction of forthcoming social change. In this context, late modernist critical discourse is narrowed down to the dominant critical tendency in the New York art scene of the 1960s, which commented on Abstract Expressionism.

This critical edifice built up around methods of perceiving and conceptualizing the art work in the visual arts and established a set of basic terms for understanding key issues in high modernism: the relationship between work and beholder, the nature of pictorial and sculptural abstraction, temporality and the role of theatricality in the visual arts.

The theatrical effect of the artwork and the relationship between time and medium have been a l ong-standing problematic within Modernism. Post-war European and American sculptors became interested both in theatre as a durational encounter and in the extended experience of time, which seemed part of the conventions of the stage. Theatricality was the term that was used in order to describe this phenomenon, a terminology, under which one could place both

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kinetic and light art, as well as environmental art and tableau sculpture, along with the more explicit performance art, such as ‘happenings’ or more generally the stage properties visual artists constructed for dance performances. This type of work attempted to transform the whole of its ‘ambient’ space into a theatrical and dramatic context, or often internalized a sense of theatricality.2

It is significant that the categorical claims about the concept of theatricality be thought of in conjunction with the inherent difference between a temporal event and a static object. According to this line of investigation the art forms that concern themselves with the one or the other type of ‘construction’ are differentiated. The focal point here is the minimalist type of ‘construction’ and the critical context framing it. Minimalist aesthetics reached a wide range of artistic activity. It also played a leading role in avant-garde initiatives, from Alain Robbe-Grillet’s ‘nouveau roman’ to John Cage’s musical compositional techniques, the ‘new dance’ of Merce Cunningham and Yvonne Rainer, Duchamp’s ‘readymade’ and in the focus on everyday objects in movements such as Pop, European ‘Art of the Real’ and ‘Arte Povera.’3

The notion of theatricality as a matrix of artistic practice implies that the art experience per se is staged; the term was used in order to define the relation between beholder and work. Therefore these shifting practices of beholding, whether in Pop, Conceptualist, Minimalist, Arte Povera, Neo-Dada, or performance orientated art, indicated that it was no longer possible to experience as unmediated the direct physical encounter between viewer and work, at a p urely optical level of apprehension, given that the work appears as something other than what it is known empirically to be.

Despite the fact that ‘theatricality’ is a recurring trope in the visual arts, it is, often, conjured in the imagination of contemporary visual art, through reverse or negative identification. Modernist anti-theatricalism and the anti-theatrical prejudice have been dominant in Western intellectual history. Visual artists are attracted to the expressive possibilities of the theatre and of theatricality as a property of the quotidian, however they are repelled by its seemingly mimetic drive. Recent trends in performance and installation art around the new millennium pose interesting challenges to the legacy of theatricality. The scene of performance now extends far afield from the stage of the theatre to the spaces of the museum, the cinema, the lecture hall, in architectural ephemeral structures, and in public spaces. Parallel to this, there is a pervading need to act out art, while the visual arts have moved out of the museum.

An important aspect of anti-theatrical debates is that the term theatricality, has been seen in contradistinction with artificiality and with art movements like realism. Western theatricality has been interpreted negatively, since its appearance or acknowledgement calls into question the basic illusion upon which realism is based (the illusion that seeks at least in principle to deny the operations of the theatre). As Marvin Carlson argued theatricality (on the realist stage) suggested


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artificiality that was against the illusionism of the realist tradition; to designate a costume, a setting, a l ighting effect or an actor’s work as ‘theatrical’ suggested a flaw. According to this reading, theatricality again suffers from a mental grid that privileges normal, everyday life as the experience of primary interest and validity, and theatrical enhancement of that life as artificial, false, and thus to be avoided insofar as possible.

Nevertheless, anti-theatricalism emerges in response to specific notions about the theatre; for this reason, the chapter examines multiple versions of anti-theatricalism, particularly the modernist form of anti-theatricalism, which attacks not theatre itself but the value of theatre, with a central focus on Michael Fried’s theory of anti-theatricality. Fried’s approach to theatricality and his attempt to define the relation between beholder and work that disturbed him in minimalist and other anti-modernist artistic tendencies of the 1960s.

Theatricality turned into a polemical term in the criticism of modern sculpture, as in the essay ‘Art and Objecthood,’4 the illuminating critical writing on minimalism, by the formalist art theorist Michael Fried. This theory expressed the anti-theatrical aesthetic prevalent within modernism and marked the most vexed point of intersection of critical discourses in the visual arts and the theatre. Fried’s polemic was directed not against the theatre per se, but against certain types of painting and sculpture, ‘the new art of minimalism,’ which he labeled ‘theatrical,’ as regards the terms of its appeal to the viewer. He dealt centrally with the idea of the bodily experience of the minimalist work, the body’s orientation, and the points of view, which made it so theatrical.

Minimalist practice presented a range of strategies that redefined the structure, form, material, image, and production of the art object in its relationship to time, space, and to the spectator. These strategies began to imply a d ifferent kind of viewer, hence, a different kind of engagement with the artwork, where the boundaries between a t imeless visual art object and a t emporal theatrical work became indistinct. In the well-known statement about the distinction between the temporal and the spatial arts, from ‘Laocoön: an essay on the limits of painting and poetry,’5 Gotthold Ephraim Lessing argued that all bodies exist not only in space but also in time and that:

they continue and at any moment of their continuance, may assume a d ifferent appearance and in different relations. Every one of these momentary appearances and groupings was the result of a preceding, may become the cause of a following, and is therefore the centre of a present action.6

Temporal consequences of a p articular arrangement of form are very

significant for the history of art. In any spatial organization, there will be folded an implicit statement about the nature of temporal experience. Sculpture is a medium

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located at the juncture between stillness and motion, time arrested and time passing. Minimalist practice stresses the condition and the significance of temporal experience during the viewing of the artwork. Attitudes towards time, in the work of art, vary and art theorists have given many insights into a notion of temporality and its relationship to ‘presentness.’

The effect of ‘presence’ in the plastic arts has been criticized by modernist theorists. Central to the notion of ‘presence,’ and the phenomenological aspirations of minimalist sculpture, was the idea of direct experience, which is related to the ‘here and now’ of the temporal, material world, contingent upon the transient situations of encounter. In the critical writings of the late sixties, the notion of ‘presence,’ of lived experience, was differentiated from modernism’s trancendentalism.

Writings on pe rformance focused on the immediacy of the concept of ‘presence,’ given the structure of co-presence of artwork and viewer, especially in interactive installations, which involve the viewer’s immediate engagement with the work and her/his ultimate involvement in the creation of the artwork. The emphasis of theorists on perceptual and phenomenal states and the insistence on direct, lived experience, generated through representation, undermined aesthetic boundaries and questioned the logic of medium specificity, which was prevalent in modernist theories.

2. Objecthood and Personhood

The effects of media on perception have been extensively addressed in critical literature, particularly in relation to the notion of literal presence in environmental installations. Adding to that, the implications of the relationship between time and medium have been very crucial for modernism, and minimalist sculpture has been characterized as a matter of time by modernist theorists like Michael Fried. Fried sees temporality as connected with the theatre and the performing arts. As a result he criticizes the effect of presence of the new sculpture of the sixties.

Fried’s argument associates the open-endedness or sense of duration of the minimalist object to its violation of medium as theatrical. Thus, ‘Art and Objecthood,’ has been one of the most seminal theories to support medium specific art. Fried describes the artworks of artists like Tony Smith as presences of a sort and not sculptures7 and these presences persist in time. As he suggested, he wanted to emphasize that:

the experience in question persists in time, and the presentment of endless or indefinite duration…The literalist preoccupation with time – more precisely, with the duration of the experience – is, I suggest, paradigmatically theatrical, as though theatre confronts the beholder, and thereby isolates him, with the endlessness not just of objecthood but of time; or as though the


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sense which, at bottom, theatre addresses is a s ense of temporality of time both passing and to come, simultaneously approaching and receding, as if apprehended in an infinite perspective.8

According to this reading, minimalist practice blurred the categorical

distinction between aesthetic experience, the specular experience of ordinary empirical objects and restricted interpretive practices, because of the notion of ‘objecthood.’ Minimalist works by Samuel Beckett and by other artists from different disciplines, such as dance, music, sculpture (like Yvonne Rainer, Simone Forti, John Cage, Agnes Martin, Frank Stella) exemplify a significant shift in compositional methods, towards subtraction of representational registers, emphasis on objecthood (literalness) and on the object of art. These artworks project visuality or literality, as Frank Stella declared:

only what can be seen there is there. It really is an object . . . If the paintings were lean enough, accurate enough, or right enough, you would be able to just look at it. All I want anyone to get out of my paintings, and all I want to get out of them, is the fact that you see the whole idea without any confusion… What you see is what you see.9

These prominent minimalist artists have reduced their medium to its most basic

form of objecthood; through this process the encounter between the two disciplines and the convergence of the performing with the visual arts, becomes apparent, in view of the fact that their artwork is inserted in a system of relays and that both disciplines have to resolve a problem that is similar to the one confronted by the other. In the context of the visual arts, the minimalist paradigm is related to material objecthood and is, often, used for defining the spatial, gestural and durational extensions of artistic innovation. Jon Erickson argued that each art form reduced itself to a form of objecthood. As he wrote:

In part, the rationalization of art, its will to self-knowledge and the attempt to eliminate all but its most absolutely essential features, can be seen as the will to autonomy from other, ‘exterior’ forces that would define it for their own purposes. Each particular form of art within modernism has engaged in this process – literature, painting, sculpture, music, dance, theatre- and in each, the relentless pursuit for understanding the essence of its formal properties has resulted in one or another kind of minimalism. Each has reduced itself to its most basic form of objecthood - sound, colour, plastic form, and so on, but each has

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drawn attention to what gives that form its shape–silence, emptiness, stillness. This movement has even resulted in certain reversals of work that end up enchroaching on the territory of other arts or disciplines: conceptual art’s reliance on language, minimalism becoming body art then performance art, which slides into theoretical purview of theatre.10

The notion of objecthood, which was central to minimalism in the visual arts, is

differentiated from the notion of ‘personhood’ of the live performer. Theatre is mostly defined by the performer’s presence and personhood is the term used to define this notion. Artists emphasized the object-qualities of the human body by simultaneously de-emphasizing their human qualities. As part of their anti-theatrical methods, theatre practitioners, writers and choreographers have integrated strategies in order to diminish the ‘personhood’ of the performer. The prominent choreographer Yvonne Rainer11 wrote in 1970 (shortly after the performance of Continuous Project – Altered Daily at the Whitney), that she loved:

the duality of props, or objects: their usefulness and obstructiveness in relation to the human body. Also the duality of the body: the body as a moving, thinking, decision-making entity and the body as an inert entity, object-like...oddly, the body can become object-like; the human being can be treated as an object, dealt with as an entity without feeling or desire. The body itself can be handled and manipulated as though lacking in the capacity for self-propulsion.12

The manipulation of the body, in minimalist practice, marks the convergence of

sculpture with the performing arts. Minimalist choreographers thought about dance as being in some way sculptural and the sculptural elements of the moving body were emphasized in their choreographies. Minimalist dance practice techniques presented a range of strategies that redefined the structure, form, material, image and production of the art object in its relationship to space and to the spectator. In addition, the body becomes an exceptional medium for the exploration of the interplay between theatricality and ‘anti-theatrical’ techniques in minimalist theatre practice. The body is present and active, as object and agent, in a very different way than other forms of theatre that employ actors. It is approached as a genuine raw material, like space, objects, light and language, which may be modified, sculpted, shaped and distorted for the stage.


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Notes 1 R. Krauss, ‘Notes on the Index: Seventies Art in America’, October, Vol. 3, Spring, 1976, pp. 68-81. 2 See R. Krauss, Passages in Modern Sculpture, Viking Press, New York, 1977. 3 Ibid. 4 M. Fried, Art and Objecthood Essays and Reviews, The University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1998, p. 167. 5 G.E. Lessing, Laocoön: An Essay on the Limits of Painting and Poetry, Bobbs-Merrill, Indianapolis, 1962. 6 Ibid., p. 91. 7 Tony Smith said that ‘I didn’t think of them as sculptures, but as presences of a sort.’ 8 M. Fried, ‘An Introduction to My Art Criticism’, Art and Objecthood Essays and Reviews, The University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1998, p. 167. 9 G. Battcock, Minimal Art: A Critical Anthology, University of California Press, California, 1996, p. 158. 10 J. Erickson, The Fate of the Object: From Modern Object to Postmodern Sign in Performance, Art, and Poetry, University of Michigan Press, Michigan, 1995, p. 13. 11 The minimalist choreographer, Yvonne Rainer, wondered whether she and others in the performing arts were making theatre-objects and she referred to the five minute dance Trio A (1966) as an object (a found object). As she said ‘all as if to grant ephemeral performance the temporal solidity of objecthood… art at this watershed moment was defined not so much by sculpture becoming like performance but by a curious convergence of actions and things.’ 12 Y. Rainer, 1974, quoted in S. Banes, Democracy’s Body, Duke University Press, Durham, 1993.

Bibliography Banes, S., Democracy’s Body. Duke University Press, Durham, 1993. Battcock, G., Minimal Art: A Critical Anthology. University of California Press, California, 1996. Bersani, L. and Dutoit, U., Arts of Impoverishment: Beckett, Rothko, Resnais. Harvard University Press, Massachusetts, 1993. Erickson, J., The Fate of the Object: From Modern Object to Postmodern Sign in Performance, Art, and Poetry. University of Michigan Press, Michigan, 1995.

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Foster, H., ‘The Crux of Minimalism’. Individuals: A Selected History of Contemporary Art. Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, 1986. Fried, M., ‘Art and Objecthood’. Minimal Art: A Critical Anthology. E. P. Dutton, New York, 1968. Goldstein, A., A Minimal Future? Art As Object 1958-1968. The Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles, The MIT Press, Massachusetts, 2004. Goldstein, A. and Rorimer, A. (eds), Reconsidering the Object of Art: 1965-1975. The Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles, The MIT Press, Massachusetts, 1995. Krauss, R., ‘Notes on the Index: Seventies Art in America’. October. Vol. 3, Spring, 1976, pp. 68-81. _____, Passages in Modern Sculpture. Viking Press, New York 1977. Lambert, C., ‘More or Less Minimalism: Performance and Visual Art in the 1960s’. A Minimal Future? Art as Object 1958-1968. The Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles, The MIT Press, Massachusetts, 2004. Lee, P., Chronophobia: On Time in the Art of the 1960s. The MIT Press, Massachusetts, 2004. Lessing, G.E., Laocoön: An Essay on the Limits of Painting and Poetry. Bobbs-Merrill, Indianapolis, 1962. Meyer, J., Minimalism: Art and Polemics in the Sixties. Yale University Press, New Haven and London, 2001. Murray, T. (ed), Mimesis, Masohism, and Mime: The Politics of Theatricality in Contemporary French Thought. University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor, 1997. Potts, A., The Sculptural Imagination: Figurative, Modernist, Minimalist. Yale University Press, New Haven, 2001. Pountney, R., Theatre of Shadows: Samuel Beckett’s Drama: l956-76. Colin Smythe Limited, Gerrards Cross, Buckinghamshire, 1988.


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Puchner, M., Stage Fright: Modernism, Anti-Theatricality and Drama. Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore and London, 2002. Quinn, M., ‘Concepts of Theatricality in Contemporary Art History’. Theater Research International. Vol. 20, Summer 1995, pp. 106-113. Roesler-Friedenthal, A. and Nathan, J. (eds), The Enduring Instant: Time and the Spectator in the Visual Arts. A Section of the XXXth International Congress for the History of Art. London, 2000. Sozita Goudouna, Associate Editor, Studies in Theatre and Performance Studies, Affiliation: Royal Holloway University of London.

From Assistant to Performer: The Changing Role of Technologies in Digital Dance

Zeynep Gündüz

Abstract According to Baugh (2005), in terms of the function of technologies in performance, most often technologies have served to assist the performance. Baugh claims that the history of integration of technologies in performance has created a certain mode of perception, which he refers to as the ‘hierarchy of perceptual importance.’ According to Baugh, the hierarchy of perceptual importance places the performer centre stage while the technology remains in the periphery. The aim of this chapter is to demonstrate that this hierarchy of perceptual importance no longer holds when we consider dance performances that integrate recently developed motion-tracking based real time interactive technologies. Via a ca se study of a digital dance performance Glow, dance reviews, and literature on digital dance, this chapter argues that Glow’s choreography changes the conventional centre-periphery mode of perception to one of centre-centre. Moreover, it argues that Glow allows a mutual interaction between the animate and inanimate elements onstage, which transforms the role of technologies into a performer, and thus, the relationship between dancer and technology into a duet. Key Words: Digital dance, interactivity, interactive media, stage technology.


An extensive historical overview of the role of technology is offered in the work of Christopher Baugh (2005). Baugh’s useful description details the changes in Western European theatrical presentation over a span of three hundred years. A key conceptualisation in Baugh’s work is that performer and technology have mostly operated in a ‘hierarchy of perceptual importance’, which implies a neat division between the animate and inanimate elements onstage.1 Essentially, Baugh’s study points out that historically, technologies have most often functioned in theatre to assist the performance and to direct the focus of attention to the performer onstage. Although in his text, it operates as a t hrow away term, ‘hierarchy of perceptual importance’ seems to neatly conceptualize the clear division of the roles he describes. As such, and because of the relevance to the present research, the term is adopted as a key working concept in this chapter.

Baugh locates the roots of this division in the nineteenth century, in which certain changes in the understanding of theatre as an art form accompanied by infrastructural changes in theatre led to a certain functioning of theatre. Consequently, such an understanding of theatre generated a p articular artistic

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hierarchy that places the actor at the centre of attention while the technology occupies assisting roles and, therefore, remains at the periphery in terms of the perception of the audience.2

A hierarchy of perceptual importance seems to operate in existing writings on the role of technologies in dance. Most often, in these writings the performer is introduced as the primary focus and technology is introduced to enable or enhance the focus in one way or another. In terms of the role of technology, stage designer Ter-Arutunian (2004) and Cohen (1974), for example, explain that in most cases, technologies simply support the dance as elements of stage design, such as lighting, costumes, and scenery. Hence, essentially, what these arguments point to is the historically dominant role of technology as supportive devices for the performance.

The aim of this chapter is to show that we have now reached the point where the integration of real-time, motion-tracking based interactive technologies used in digital dance performances represents a r eal challenge to the hierarchy of perceptual importance. This chapter argues that this specific integration of interactive technologies in digital dance cannot simply be seen as an extension of the commonly accepted role of technologies as assistants for the dance. On the contrary, the functionalities that interactive technologies bring have been exploited in digital dance performances to such an extent that the place of technology within the performance and the relationship between dancer and technology is now qualitatively different. For this, the first step is to describe an example of staged digital dance. The performance chosen is the highly praised work, Glow (2006), by internationally renowned choreographer Gideon Obarzanek and programmer Frieder Weiss. The second step is to present the perspectives of key parties who perceive digital dance: dance critics and academics. The perspective of the dance critics is illustrated on the basis of a survey of reviews on Glow. Finally, the perspective of academics on digital dance is provided by a review of academic literature. With these two steps, this chapter aims to makes explicit what remains implicit within the discourse of digital dance: that the understanding of the role of technologies and the relationship between dancer and technology is changing.

2. The Audience’s Perspective

Glow (2006) is a recent example of digital dance that has received critical acclaim on an international basis and is currently on tour. The website of Weiss promotes Glow as a ‘spectacular 27-minute duet for body and technology, an essay on the relationship of dance and cutting-edge software technology.’3 Weiss describes this cutting edge technology as the ‘latest video-based real-time interactive technologies that operate with sophisticated motion-tracking software.’4

Although simple, there is something peculiar about the aesthetics in Glow. To start with, the output of the technology seen as various forms of light is present onstage throughout the entire performance. In addition, the technology

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continuously creates visual imagery in conjunction with the movements of the dancer. In turn, the movements of the dancer seem to complete the movements of the technology. Whereas in a common understanding, the main function of technology is to enhance the dramaturgy and/or the dancing body, in Glow, technologies seem to occupy an equal role alongside the dancer and function as a central element of the choreography. Although non-human, the central role played by technology throughout the performance leads to an unconventional idea of the role of technologies: that in Glow, technologies may function as performers onstage.

Glow’s aesthetic becomes even more unconventional as a r esult of the relationship it presents between the dancer and the light. This may be seen in the perceptual effect that the movements of the dancer and technology seem to share the same dynamics; for example, the technology intensifies its degree of light as the dancer increases the force of movement she sets in motion. In this sense, Glow creates the effect of something rather peculiar, that is, the depiction of a partner-work between dancer and technology. Watching Glow, we are left with two impressions. First, interactive technologies now carry out the role of fully-fledged performers onstage. Second, the relationship between dancer and technology in Glow is now a duet. If this is the case, then, the commonly accepted role of technologies as supportive devices for the choreography no longer holds in Glow. It also implies an interruption of the hierarchy of perceptual importance because technology and dancer are now given equal roles in the choreography. In order to guard against subjective conclusions regarding the roles of technologies and the relationship between dancer and technology, the next section will elaborate on the perspective of dance critics.

3. The Critic’s Perspective

Reviews of digital dance can be found in a variety of places, including leading journals on dance to online art review magazines. Two most relevant themes from the reviews are discussed below.

The first theme is what constitutes a performer onstage. Hillary Crampton in her review of Glow, for example, illustrates this point:

The audience is ranked on four sides of a white rectangle. […] The lights go out. […] In the semi-darkness a scrabbling, twisting, writhing figure slithers into view. The two performers - a dancer and a computer - have been introduced.5

Consolidating this point, a second review of Glow by April Green, ‘The Lady

and the Light’, points to a qualitative shift in the perception of the roles of technologies:


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There is only one person on the stage. […] But she is, by virtue of the light, not really alone, and the projections’ complimentary nature fill alternating roles […] of partner, ensemble, dialogue.6

The second theme that is often discussed in the reviews of Glow is what

constitutes partner-work onstage. Gareth Vile’s article for example, underlines this point:

A single dancer, Kristie Ayre, performs in a white square […] her movements trigger responses in the lighting, generating patterns and shadows on the white stage: her solo rapidly becomes a duet between light and dancer.7

Hence, although the technology operates on the basis of a quantitative logic, its

evaluation is made on the basis of the perceptual and qualitative effects that it creates. Also, Crampton points out that Glow portrays ‘a genuine interaction [between dancer and technology] as if the two are engaged in an organic, symbiotic relationship’.8 Similarly, Green underlines the organic coordination in the ‘duet’ between dancer and technology:

The luminous projections belong to a tracking system that […] responds to the dancer’s movements to generate each new image […] making the partnership noticeably and wonderfully organic.9

Interestingly, from an analytical perspective, the review’s description of the

duet between dancer and technology in Glow shows similarities to the requirements of a physical duet between two dancers. Partnering is a general term used to describe the assistance and support (usually) given to one dancer by another. A detailed account of partner-work in dance can be found in the work of Tobi Tobias. According to Tobias, in ballet ‘what characterizes a successful partnership is perhaps what marks any fortunate partnership: mutual sympathy and a good sense of timing’.10 One of the leading journals on dance and improvisation, Contact Quarterly, describes the two most important conditions to achieve a smooth partnering in modern dance as trust and communication between partners and shared timing and dynamics between them.11

As described earlier, accurate timing and corresponding dynamics between dancer and technology are among the most striking aesthetic elements in Glow. A clear correspondence between dancer and technology is illustrated in the opening scene, in particular, when the light responds to the changes in the dynamics of the dancer’s movements via an increase and decrease in its amount of light. In this sense, the perceptual effect of the combination between dancer and technology in

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Glow is a type of coherent communication that entails shared dynamics and timing. If it is true that mutual communication, shared dynamics and timing are the most important skills and conditions for a successful partner-work, then, based on the reviews of dance critics, Glow can be categorized as a s uccessful partner-work between dancer and technology.

Indeed, many dance reviews evaluate Glow as a successful and innovative partnering between interactive technologies and the dancer. Stephanie Glickman, for example, claims that Glow ‘feels complete and is a great (and rare!) example of the possibilities for dance and new media collaboration.’12 Crampton argues that Glow is so innovative because it ‘offers exciting new theatrical possibilities’ as a result of a ‘fascinating marriage between dance and technology.’13 For Crampton, Glow is another step in the quest to ‘imagine and realize new possibilities of how dance might be made, viewed, and read.’14

Hence, the reviews demonstrate that the critics are largely in agreement that Glow offers a new role for interactive technologies, now as performing partners onstage, alongside the dancer. They also point out that the relationship between dancer and technology is not a hierarchy; rather, what is portrayed in Glow is a genuine interaction between the animate and the inanimate elements onstage. In order to find out whether the academics’ perspective confirms or contradicts the conclusions achieved so far, the next section turns to the perspective of the academics.

4. The Perspective of Academics

For the most part, literature is largely positive regarding the integral incorporation of interactive media in the choreography. Rubidge (2004), Meniccaci (2002), and Quinz (2002), for example, argue that interactive technologies enrich dance as art form and, thus, add to existing perceptions of dance. Perhaps the most important of these changes, according to these authors, is the perception of dance as a dialogic relationship between dancer and interactive technologies.

Rubidge (2004) locates the new perceptions of digital dance in the way it generates a major shift in the perception and conception of a familiar practice. She explains the new perception in digital dance in the way this genre aims to illustrate how the body and technology establish a dialogue together and how they create a kinetic and poetic world on the basis of this encounter. For Rubidge (2001), the major reason for the shifting perception in dance is the improvements of the interactive software and hardware used in digital dance. In her view, most of the earlier examples of digital dance failed to illustrate a b alance between demonstrating the capacities of the technology and the demonstration of physical dance. However, Rubidge argues that recent works in digital dance have made significant improvements upon the earlier digital dance works.

Also for Dixon (2007), the advanced and sophisticated media hardware and software now available and exploited within digital dance performances has


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dramatically shifted the perception of dance. In his view, in the early days of digital dance practice (by which he means the beginning of the 1990s), the communication between performer and technology was rather ‘rough’, because the technologies did not have the capacity to enable a fluid conversation. For Dixon, in these early experiments with technologies, the dialogue between performer and technology resembled a conversation between two people who could understand each other’s language to some extent, but were forced to artificially slow down to compensate for the gaps in the understanding. Over the years, however, ‘a genuinely sensitive and sophisticated interactive paradigm has gradually replaced a previously rough and reactive one’. 15 Consequently, today, the advanced dialogue between human and machine enables ‘an increased attention to fluidity and nuance, and particularly an understanding that less can be more in contrast to previous explorations [of dance and technology]’.16

Johannes Birringer (2008) also argues that an interactive paradigm brings technology and performer together in a d emonstrably communicative process, rather than the interactive system and performer being understood as separate entities. In his view, digital dance ‘bridges the organic and inorganic forms, it evolves as a coupling with technically expanded virtual domains.’17 Moreover, this coupling of the organic and inorganic is not static but takes the form of a ‘dynamically evolving dialectic’ between the interactive environment and the human agents onstage. Birringer considers the relationship between performer and the interactive technology as dynamic because of the most defining intrinsic feature of interactive media, namely, that data can be processed and rendered in real-time. For Birringer, the changing perception in digital dance that frames the dancer and technology as part of a dialogic communication affects the perception of the choreography. From this perspective, choreography in digital dance cannot be seen as separate from the interactive system created for the performance, but it has to treat the performer and the interactive system in a symbiotic manner or a ‘mutual interpenetration of the organic and the technical’. 18According to Birringer, this mutual interpenetration in digital dance leads to the creation of something that neither the dance nor the technology could create alone. In sum, the perspective of the academics confirms the results of critics. Hence, to a large extent, all parties can be said to agree that a hierarchy of perceptual importance results in a b reakdown in digital dance. And, all parties also seem to agree that digital dance offers a new role for the interactive technology and a new relationship between dancer and technology onstage. Indeed, even the dancer in Glow, Kristie Ayre, is in agreement with the perceptions of the three parties involved in digital dance. In her answers to the questionnaire on the role of technologies and the relationship between dancer and technology designed for this article, she reported that dancing with interactive technology enhanced the choreography because it created something bigger than what she alone as a dancer

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could achieve. Moreover, she claims that dancing in Glow was ‘a very satisfying piece to perform through an equal importance of performer and technology.’19

5. Conclusion

On the basis of the case study Glow, this chapter has shown that the integration of interactive technologies in digital dance presents a b reak with the conventional role of technologies in dance. Accordingly, this chapter has argued that the integration of interactive technologies may be seen as a turning point to examine the roles of technologies in dance as well as the relationship between dancer and technology. To improve the rigor of its arguments, this chapter has examined the perspectives of different stakeholders in digital dance: the critics and the academics. On the basis of dance and literature reviews, this chapter has shown that the claims of these stakeholders are in large agreement regarding the roles of technologies as performers and the relationship between dancer and technology as a dialogue, and thus, meaningful communication.

Notes 1 C. Baugh, ‘Theatre, Performance and Technology’, The Development of Scenography in the Twentieth Century’, Palgrave Macmillan, New York, 2005. 2 Baugh explains that the hierarchy of perception has been challenged in two different periods in the 20th century. The first challenge took place in the early 20th century, with the work of scenographers, such as Appia, Craig and Svoboda. The second challenge was a result of the shift towards the paradigm of post-dramatic theatre in the mid 1960s, reflected in the work of certain artists, such as Robert Wilson and Jan Fabre. 3 G. Obarzenek and F. Weiss, Glow, Frieder Weiss Website, http://www.frieder-weiss.de/works/all/Glow.php, Viewed 12 January 2010. 4 Ibid. 5 H. Crampton, ‘Glow’, The Age, 17.10.2007, Viewed on 18 December 2009, http://www.theage.com.au/news/artsreviews/glow/2007/10/17/11300821989.html. 6 A. Green, ‘The Lady and the Light: Chunky Move’s Glow at the Kitchen’, The Brooklyn Rail, March 2008, Viewed on 15 December 2009, http://www.brooklyn rail.org/2008/03/dance/the-lady-and-the-light-chunky-moves-glow-at-the-kitchen>. 7 G.K. Vile, ‘Glow’, Ballet Magazine, June 2008, Viewed on 15 December 2009, http://www.ballet.co.uk/magazines/yr_08/jun08/gk_rev_chunky_move_0608.htm. 8 Crampton, op. cit. 9 The Brooklyn Rail, loc. cit. 10 T. Tobias quoted in S.N. Hammond, ‘Pas-de-deux’, International Dictionary of Dance, Vol. 5, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2004, p. 108. 11Contact Quarterly, http://www.contactquarterly.com/cq/webtext/resource.html, Viewed on 14 April 2010.

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12 S. Glickman, ‘Glow: Chunky Move’, The Australian Stage, 17 October 2007, Viewed on 19 D ecember 2009, http://www.australianstage.com.au/reviews/ miaf/glow--chunky-move-782.html. 13 Crampton, loc. cit. 14 Ibid. 15 S. Dixon, ‘Digital Performance: A History of New Media in Theatre’, Dance, Performance Art, And Installation, MIT Press, Massachusetts, 2007, p. 205. 16 Ibid. 17 J. Birringer, Performance, Technology & Science, PAJ Publications, New York, 2008, p. 121. 18 Ibid., p. 323.

Bibliography Birringer, J., Performance, Technology & Science. PAJ Publications, New York, 2008. Cohen, J.S., Dance as a Theatre Art. Dance Books Ltd, London, 1974. Dixon, S., ‘Digital Performance: A History of New Media in Theatre’. Dance, Performance Art, And Installation. MIT Press, Massachusetts, 2007. Hammond, S.N., ‘Pas-de-deux’. International Dictionary of Dance. Vol. 5, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2004. Rubidge, S., ‘Dance Criticism in the Light of Digital Dance’. Paper Presented at the Taipei National University of the Arts Seminar on Dance Criticism and Interdisciplinary Practice. July 2004. Viewed on 10 September 2009. http://www. sensedigital.co.uk/writing/CritIntDiscTaiw.pdf. Ter-Aroutian, R., ‘Designing for Dance’. International Dictionary of Dance. Vol 5. Oxford University Press, Oxford: 2004. Reviews Crampton, H., ‘Glow’. The Age. 17.10.2007. Viewed on 18 December 2009. http://www.theage.com.au/news/artsreviews/glow/2007/10/17/12300821989.html. Glickman, S., ‘Glow: Chunky Move’. The Australian Stage. 17.10, 2007. Viewed on 19 December 2009. http://www.australianstage.com.au/reviews/miaf/glow--chunky-move-782.html.

http://www.australianstage.com.au/reviews/%20miaf/glow--chunky-move-782.html

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Green, A., ‘The Lady and the Light: Chunky Move’s Glow at the Kitchen’. The Brooklyn Rail. March 2008. Viewed on 15 December 2009. http://www.brooklyn rail.org/2008/03/dance/the-lady-and-the-light-chunky-moves-glow-at-the-kitchen. Vile, G.K., ‘Glow’. Ballet Magazine. June 2008. Viewed on 15 December 2009. http://www.ballet.co.uk/magazines/yr_08/jun08/gk_rev_chunky_move_0608.htm. Zeynep Gündüz has studied classical ballet and modern dance and is currently a PhD candidate at the University of Amsterdam and a member of ASCA’s Imagined Futures project, researching the collaboration of digital media technologies and contemporary dance. Her project is funded by NWO (the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research), Mosaic program.

http://www.ballet.co.uk/magazines/yr_08/jun08/gk_rev_chunky_move_0608.htm

Time of Flight: Biodigital Feedback and Performance Design

John Carroll and Richard Xu

Abstract The Time of Flight Project reported in this research links computing and design together with live movement performance and computer controlled sound and image staging. The project investigates the dialogic possibilities between performer, audience and digital staging. It encourages direct performer-to-computer interactivity and control through body poses which act as inputs for image and sound projection. The computer-interpreted images of the artist’s movement are captured in real time three-dimensional space through the use of a Time of Flight camera. A Time of Flight camera measures image data in infrared light, and from this it extrapolates three-dimensional data in real time. This data is then fed into a p rocessing computer where specifically devised computer vision algorithms are used to recognise and track the artist’s movements and gestures in real time. This data is then fed into automated lighting and sound production software to produces a digital performance. The performance in this experimental research uses a movement-based notation, which allows the performers to improvise reflexive biodigital performance pieces encompassing sound, image and movement much in the manner of a jazz improvisation. Key Words: Time of flight, intermediality, digital performance, computer imaging, infrared camera.

***** 1. Intermediality

Robert Lepage talks about the survival of the theatre as depending on i ts capacity to reinvent itself by embracing new tools and new languages.1 In a period of rapidly evolving digital social media the adoption of these new digital languages has placed the performer at the intersection of these evolving technologies in the new role of an intermedialist,2 that is, a performance artist who creates a shared presence between performer, technology and audience.

Unlike Auslander3 who sees the overwhelming effect of media swamping and incorporating theatre into itself, this research project, like Lepage, sees the performers in a cr itical role creating a specific co-presence between themselves and the audience. This form of postdramatic theatre4 proposes that it is in the exchange between the mediums both digital and live that the performer creates meaning. This interplay between stage, performer and digital media nevertheless takes place in a t heatrical performance space, thus enabling theatre to retain its specificity and remediate5 new performance forms and technologies within itself.

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While Auslander may be correct in that there appears to be no ‘clear cut ontological distinction between live performance and mediatized ones,’6 there is little recognition in his work of the hybridity of mixed media performance which allows the performer to create new meanings through the manipulation of all elements within the performance space. The digital and the physical are complementary mediums within this intermedialist view of performance and the performer has agency to manipulate the media, including their own body as they operate within this new space. Within this perspective, postdramatic performance retains and remediates the ontology of the theatre while incorporating the digital elements through the central medium of the body. As Howard Rheingold noted back in 2004:

For better and for worse, the virtual world and the physical world are becoming very intermingled, they’re no longer the separate places that they used to be.7

Kattenbelt8 also sees this remediation of performance occurring through the

digital postdramatic artform carried out by intermedialist performers who weave the different forms together with their own corporeal presence. He also feels the ontology of theatre remains intact while incorporating other technologies through the primary medium of performance, the body.

The question of how the body relates and interacts with these evolving technological spaces is at the heart of the research question within this chapter.

Currently in most staged performance, the lighting and sound systems are human operator controlled or indirectly controlled through pre-specified software routines in computerised lighting and sound desks. In the Time of Flight (ToF) project, instead of using pre-programmed routines or operator-assisted cues, the performer is able to control both sound and vision according to a movement-based notation enacted within the performance by the body of the artist. The computer interpreted images of the performance artist’s movement are captured in real time three-dimensional space through the use of Time of Flight image technology. A subsidiary question then arises from such interactions, whose performance is it? Is it the artist or the digital software creating the performance and the meaning?

This dilemma echoes another time when the influence of technology on artistic production occurred, and while for us, performance occurs in an age of digital reproduction, we can see the obvious parallels to Walter Benjamin’s famous 1936 paper, ‘The work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’.9 In this highly influential short article Benjamin discusses the changes that occurred in audience reception in the arts in the 1930s. He considers how photography and especially film had changed the form of theatre, drama and the fine arts. It was chemically based photography and cinema that then seemed to radically threaten the established cultural forms of drama and painting.


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Benjamin felt that the authenticity of the individual artwork, whether it was fine art or drama, would be degraded by the ease of constant reproduction by mechanical means. This has, of course, not happened. Recognized original artworks or theatre productions have become more and more valuable as their rarity and celebrity status produce a monetary value that places them in a global network outside of any connection to national cultural or economic systems. Reproduction did not equal degradation as Benjamin imagined, but culturally something else was going on. This was the rise of a new audience, both for the reproductions of images of art as still photography and as filmed drama, as well as for celebrity artist/performers who by performing in them transcended their national backgrounds and became international stars.

Nearly seventy years on, the proliferating forms of media reproduction have become digital across all fields of artistic endeavor, including the filmic and dramatic. This transformation has produced another generational shift in audiences accessing digital content through the computer, the DVD and social media on interactive hand held devices including mobile cell phones. Baudrillard felt that the collapse of aesthetic distance resulting from the use of digital screens resulted in a ‘tele-image’ that was merely visual and ‘unbridgeable by the body.’10

So the questions for performance artists about agency and changing audience perceptions of drama/performance seem even more urgent today than they were for Walter Benjamin because the pace of technological change is so much faster now. Artists today are having to create a co -presence with audiences who inhabit a world saturated with mediated digital images and interactive technologies that are entertainment, identity maintenance, and communication devices all at the same time.

What is clear is that the collapse of cognitive distance between performer and spectator has not happened. New forms of postdramatic live performance have evolved alongside purely digital performance forms. The new forms are not oppositional but complementary as audiences find meaning in performance forms that reflect the reality (however mediated) of their everyday lives.

In the remediated performances of Lepage and Wilson among others, we see this ongoing cultural shift; the wholesale adoption of the technologies of data and image capture is producing new dramatic forms of performance. Many of these forms involve the amplification of personal and private electronic images. The performances are electronically mediated and the images edited to explore the emotional experience of individuals portrayed within them in ways that are radically different to earlier conventional concepts of role and theatrical performance.

The ‘techno-en-scene’11 Lepage envisions integrates technology and the performer in a unifying intermedialist presence where digital information is translated into performative understanding. The live body and the technology become co-creators of the total meaning in the new social media environment and

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the increasingly sophisticated visual and narrative vocabulary circulating within global culture. Lepage along with many performers is also aware that ‘we have to find a way to invite the audience into the theatre’12 with performance that reflects this new and evolving digital aesthetic.

This evolving aesthetic developing around live performance and digital performance, especially postdramatic forms, can be summed up by the preferences of the current young digitally sophisticated audiences as seen in the diagram.13

These shifts in audience expectations were first seen in experimental work in

postdramatic theatre and performance and have increasingly moved to the mainstream. As happened with Brecht, the mainstream theatre will always catch up with the avant-garde and incorporate it into the dominant theatrical forms of the culture.14 The emerging cultural forms of live performance have shifted towards the collaborative and physical in response to the growth of a d igital performance emphasis on disembodied constructed and mutable identity. The success of drama groups such as Cirque du Soleil or Circus OZ in physical performance is clear evidence of that. Individual artists such as Robert Lepage or groups such as La Fura dels Baus by incorporating and remediating media and physical performance forms also point to this trend in international live theatre. Within digital performance, the acceptance of an open textual form in multiplayer online gaming and the role based configurative nature of virtual performance while equally important, is outside the scope of this chapter.15

Live Performance Digital Performance

Preferred cultural form Collaborative and physical

Mediated and virtual

Entertainment expectation

Interpretative and non-naturalistic

Configurative and interactive

Underlying assumptions

Acceptance of ambiguity in text

Acceptance of open narrative

Production preferences

Spectacle and intertextual layering

Interaction and appropriation as art

form


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2. Time of Flight The experimental performance on which this research is based consisted of a

single dancer who performed a range of choreographed poses based on a simplified Laban16 notation around a s cenario that traced the cycle of the seasons. The performance moves from winter through to spring and on to summer and autumn. It aimed at direct performer-to-machine interactivity and control, without the use of any external hand-held accessories, while using body poses to act as inputs for image and sound projection.

The research used a Time of Flight camera connected to a laptop computer and the images that were generated were processed using a specifically developed algorithm. The principle of ‘Time of flight’ (ToF) used here describes a method that measures the time that it takes for an object to travel a d istance through a medium, in this case a body through space. In broad terms it operates on a similar principle to RADAR, with the current developments in semiconductors and software enabling true visual 3D imaging to be stored and processed.

The time of flight camera measures image data in infrared light, and from this it extrapolates three-dimensional data in real time. This data is used to monitor body pose performance and the three dimensional imaging data from the camera is then fed into a processing computer.

These images are based on range image segmentation calculated on surface selection criteria from the point cloud generated by the dancer’s image.17 The simplified notation is then fed into three interfaces within the computer to create the ‘techno-en-scene’ for the performance. The specific interfaces were augmented by automatic importation via MATLAB18 and consisted of DMX for light, which operated digital spotlights. Sound was generated via a MIDI interface and image animation was triggered in Final Cut Pro to produce a flow of appropriate seasonal images.

The human pose recognition algorithm required the development of eight different poses and the camera and software system had to be ‘trained’ to recognise the difference in stance. Each Laban stance was repeated and recorded twenty times with slight variation and another ten times for cross validation. This required 30x8 = 240 individual image states to be recorded.

This data enabled the development of an experimental three dimensional offline classifier, which is still undergoing further development to optimize the image recognition function beyond the initial eight states. The image states were developed from Laban’s simple static positions, e.g.; neutral body, body with arms extended, body with twist to right, and so on, using the XYZ axis orientation of three dimensional space that is common to both Laban Notation and the Time of Flight camera. The three dimensional orientations of both the image capture software and the dance notation classification clearly mapped over each other, with minimal adjustment necessary.

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The circular data capture process model employed was designed with a built in feedback loop which begins with human pose data captured through camera processing, which is then fed to computer software triggering the visual sound and light display through to the dancer’s reactions which are then picked up and processed as data as the cycle begins again. This data is processed in real time and from this the software is able to extrapolate three-dimensional data in real time. The particular ToF camera19 used in this experimental research comes with software that enables Distance, Grayscale (Amplitude) and Confidence images to be displayed, (the ‘Confidence Map’ being the area within the image shown that 3D data can be reliably utilized). Radio buttons select full 3D representation of the image cloud of the measured pixel distances, which provides the time-of-flight range imaging required.

Using the emerging data from the Time-of-Flight camera, the static pose recognition then applies a standard pattern classifier, a Support Vector Machine (SVM) using data from the eight pose training classes. Because of the high dimensionality of the feature vector used for recognition, a dimension reduction technique is applied prior to classification to counter the effect of dimensionality. A Principal Component Analysis (PCA) model for dimension reduction was used. As more temporal data interactions are developed and more complex human movement are accessed from the ToF sequences, the Hidden Markov Model (HMM)20 as part of the toolbox of MATLAB is being trialled to provide a more sophisticated temporal classification.

3. Outcomes and Conclusion

The applications used in this experimental research allow the performers to use Laban notation to improvise reflexive biodigital feedback performance pieces encompassing sound, image, and movement much in the manner of a jazz improvisation. The development of an artistic adaption of this new technology is seen as important both culturally and artistically. It is an attempt to theorise and experiment artistically in new media and not simply allow commercial interests to drive the agenda of digital technology development. If multinational companies are ceded the artistic and developmental space in this field then cultural experimentation and reflection on the evolving human condition and the place of social identity within performance as well as the audience for such digitally augmented performance within it becomes their territory.

Microsoft started selling its new interactive device, Kinect,21 in Europe on November 10th 2010. This device lets consumers play video games with their bodies. The launch of Kinect is seen as an attempt by the company to attract casual gamers and find more takers for its Xbox 360 gaming console. The Microsoft proprietary software, while similar in some respects to the present research project’s approach, however leaves no room for reflexive self-awareness or audience influence on the form.


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Baz Kershaw’s analysis of this closed approach is that the commercial theatre, digital performance, and gaming have, by embracing the disciplines of the new consumerism, succumbed ‘to a commodification that stifles radicalism in the moment of its birth.’22 If performance and theatre are to remain relevant for the new digital audience then they need to find ways to critique as well as offer connection and insight into the currently evolving digital performance forms.

Notes 1 R. Lepage, World Theatre Day International Message 2008, http://worldtheatre day.org/the-2008-world-theatre-day-international-message, Viewed 5-11-2010. 2 C. Chapple and C. Kattenbelt (eds), Intermediality in Theatre and Performance, Rodopi, Amsterdam, 2006. 3 P. Auslander, Liveness: Performance in a Mediatized Culture, Routledge, London, 1999, p. 2. 4 H. Lehmann, Postdramatic Theatre, trans. K. Jurs-Munby, Routledge, New York, 2006, pp. 22-23. 5 J. Bolter and R. Grushin, Remediation: Understanding New Media, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 1999, pp. 23-24. 6 Auslander, op. cit., p. 7. 7 H. Rheingold, ‘Background Briefing’, ABC Radio National, Australia, 2004, 25-4-2009, http://www.abc.net.au/rn/talks/bbing/. 8 C. Kattenbelt, ‘Intermediality: A Redefinition of Media and a Resensibilization of Perception’, Intermediality: Performance and Pedagogy Conference, Sheffield University, UK, 2007. 9 W. Benjamin, ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’, Illuminations, Schoken Books, New York, 1969, pp. 217-251. 10 J. Baudrillard, The Transparency of Evil: Essays on Extreme Phenomena, trans. J. Benedict, Verso, London, 1993, p. 55. 11 A. Dundjerovic, The Theatricality of Robert Lepage, McGill-Queens University Press, Montreal, 2007, p. 180. 12 J. Donohue and J. Koustas (eds), Theatre Sans Frontieres, Michigan State University Press, East Lansing, 2000, p. 147. 13 J. Carroll, M. Anderson and D. Cameron, Real Players? Drama, Technology and Education, Trentham Books, Stoke on Trent, 2006 p. 27. 14 M. Featherstone, Consumer Culture and Postmodernism, Sage, London, 1991, p. 36. 15 J. Carroll, ‘Point of View: Linking Applied Drama and Digital Games’, Drama Education with Digital technology, M. Anderson et al (eds), Continuum, London, 2009, pp. 81-96. 16 J. Newlove and J. Dalby, Laban for All, Nick Hern Books, London, 2005. 17 Point Cloud, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Point_Cloud 2010,Viewed 5-11-2010.

http://www.abc.net.au/rn/talks/bbing/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Point_Cloud%202010

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18 K. Murphy, MATLAB, Updated, 2009, Viewed 5-11-2010, http://www.cs.ubc.ca /murphyk/Software/HMM/hmm.html. 19 Swiss Ranger 4000 Model (SR4000), http://www.mesa-imaging.ch/, 2010, Viewed 5-11-2010. 20 Hidden Markov Model (HMM), http://www.cs.ubc.ca/~murphyk/Software/ HMM/hmm.html, Viewed 5-11-2010. 21 Microsoft Corporation, Kinect for Xbox 360, November 10, 2010, European Launch. 22 B. Kershaw, The Radical in Performance, Routledge, London, 1999, p. 23.

Bibliography Auslander, P., Liveness: Performance in a Mediatized Culture. Routledge, London, 1999. Benjamin, W., ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’. Illuminations. Schoken Books, New York, 1969. Baudrillard, J., The Transparency of Evil: Essays on Extreme Phenomena. Trans. Benedict, J., Verso, London, 1993. Bolter, J. and Grushin, R., Remediation: Understanding New Media. MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass. 1999. Carroll, J., Anderson, M. and Cameron, D., Real Players? Drama, Technology and Education. Trentham Books, Stoke on Trent, 2006. Carroll, J., ‘Point of View: Linking Applied Drama and Digital Games’. Drama Education with Digital Technology. Anderson, M. et al. (eds), Continuum, London, 2009. Chapple, C. and Kattenbelt, C. (eds), Intermediality in Theatre and Performance. Rodopi, Amsterdam, 2006. Donohue, J. and Koustas, J. (eds), Theatre Sans Frontieres. Michigan State University Press. East Lansing, 2000. Dundjerovic, A., The Theatricality of Robert Lepage. McGill-Queens University Press. Montreal, 2007. Featherstone, M., Consumer Culture and Postmodernism. Sage, London. 1991.

http://www.mesa-imaging.ch/

http://www.cs.ubc.ca/~murphyk/Software/%20HMM/hmm.html

http://www.cs.ubc.ca/~murphyk/Software/%20HMM/hmm.html


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Giersekam, G., Staging the Screen: The Use of Film and Video in Theatre. Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke, 2007. Kershaw, B., The Radical in Performance. Routledge, London, 1999. Lehmann, H., Postdramatic Theatre. Trans. Jurs-Munby, K., Routledge, New York, 2006. Newlove, J. and Dalby, J., Laban for All. Nick Hern Books, London, 2005. John Carroll is professor of communication research at Charles Sturt University, Bathurst, Australia. Richard Xu is a senior lecturer at the University of Technology Sydney, Australia.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nick_Hern_Books

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