Theatrical Performance and the Forensic Turn

James Frieze

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• eBook ISBN: 9781135009960
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Performing Arts

Contemporary theatre, like so much of contemporary life, is obsessed with the ways in which information is detected, packaged and circulated. Running through forms as diverse as neo-naturalistic playwriting, intimately immersive theatre, verbatim drama, intermedial performance, and musical theatre, a common thread can be observed: theatre-makers have moved away from assertions of what is true and focussed on questions about how truth is framed.

Commentators in various disciplines, including education, fine art, journalism, medicine, cultural studies, and law, have identified a 'forensic turn' in culture. The crucial role played by theatrical and performative techniques in fuelling this forensic turn has frequently been mentioned but never examined in detail. Political and poetic, Theatrical Performance and the Forensic Turn is the first account of the relationship between theatrical and forensic aesthetics.

Exploring a rich variety of works that interrogate and resist the forensic turn, this is a must-read not only for scholars of theatre and performance but also of culture across the arts, sciences and social sciences.

Chapter 1

Data chaos and the verification void

The Introduction outlined my view that contemporary culture is shaped by a forensic economy of legibility in which truth is constructed as that which can be evidentially verified. This economy, I argued, was maintained by three illusions (interiority, solvability, and transparency) and two imperatives (innovation and interactivity). In this chapter, I will read four works (first staged between 2007 and 2012) that show how these illusions and imperatives operate. Despite the formal and thematic diversity of the four works, I place them in conversation with one another to highlight their common intent to interrogate, and intervene in, the growth of optics-driven culture. Going Dark and Love and Information are formally experimental in very different ways; both model a theatrical poetics explicitly designed to resist the forensic’s economy of legibility. Situating their work in conscious dialogue with the playwriting of Arthur Miller and Harold Pinter, and with echoes back to Ibsen and even Shakespeare, Lucy Prebble in Enron and Joe Penhall in Landscape with Weapon adopt classical dramatic structure to counter the futuristic rhetoric of the forensic. Defying the middle-distance gaze afforded by the forensic culture of risk management, all four pieces take a long view of this culture. This view entails historicisation beyond the parameters of the techno-present, and oscillation between the cosmic and the intimate to break the shackles of the middle-distance mindset.

Forensic culture’s economy of legibility purports to order the very chaos it constructs: the proliferation of information. In 1985, at the very same time that the presentational strategies deployed in the Mengele trial were sketching a blueprint for a forensic aesthetics, the philosopher and journalist Vilém Flusser published a book (Ins Universum der technischen Bilder, the English translation Into the Universe of Technical Images not appearing until 2011) about this chaos of data overload, the technologies used to manage it, and the ethical and pragmatic challenges posed by the deployment of these new technologies. Flusser argues that classical ways of reading communication through linguistics and cultural studies are of limited use in a world that is ‘quantum’. The great challenge of contemporary culture, he asserts, is that the whirling ‘particles around us must be gathered onto surfaces’. This demand is met by ‘technical images’, produced by computational ‘apparatus’, that allow the ‘particles’ of information to be ‘envisioned’ (7) Fusing physics, philosophy, and sociology he develops a concept of power that resides in this ‘envisioning’: the capturing of information on screen surfaces. Unlike what Flusser calls ‘the traditional image’, which fosters dialogue between image (a representation of an object) and a receiver, the technical image has a powerfully agential life of its own: ‘the technical image is existentially meaningful in itself, not because of what it represents’. In images produced by computational apparatus, Flusser argues, the ‘image is real, not its object’ (Canán and Caldéron), and the apparatus itself becomes the locus of power at the expense of the end-user.

Flusser’s prophetic analysis of the effects of technical imaging particularly informs Enron and Love and Information. While Prebble’s focus is on how Skilling et al. exploit the illusions and imperatives of forensic aesthetics to sell their spectacle of data, Churchill’s is on the experiential effects of living in an economy of legibility. She takes us inside this economy’s recycling bin. As her shards of character labour to process and absorb information while distracted by memories that can be neither assimilated nor discarded, we are placed in a position as we sift through the mounds of detrital information that constitute the play.

While Flusser proceeds from the intensely close scrutiny of the particles that are envisioned via ‘technical images’ and works outwards to place them in cultural context, a book published a year later (also in German) provides a complementary account. Steeped in sociology and the history of science, Ulrich Beck’s Risk Society adopts a much longer view of the contemporary. In the mid-1980s, academia was abuzz with Jean-François Lyotard’s proclamations of a postmodern condition resulting from the collapse of grand narratives. While Lyotard and others identify a break not only with the past but with ways of thinking about self and society, Beck makes his dissatisfaction with the apocalyptic critiques of postmodernism clear at the start of Risk Society: ‘Past plus post—that is the basic recipe with which we confront a reality that is out of joint’ (1992: 9). Unapologetically ‘empirical’ in his approach, Beck rejects apocalyptic claims of a grand rupture or fragmentation. He argues that the industrial era, which apocalyptic theorists regard as being over, has actually entered a new phase he terms ‘reflexive modernity’. In reflexive modernity, industrial capitalism manages not only to recuperate the negative ‘side effects’ of its production, but magnifies them. In Beck’s assessment, contemporary capitalism does not suppress but trades on chaos and risk: the exploitation of side effects is now the core business of industry: ‘The axial principle of industrial society is the distribution of goods, while that of the risk society is the distribution of “bads” or dangers’ (3). Risk society is still an industrial society, though it is no longer ‘structured through social classes’ but through ‘individualisation’. As Beck (2006) reiterates in a lecture twenty years after the publication of Risk Society, the burden placed on the individual to manage risk and order chaos is indeed the consequence of the weakening of ideologies and belief systems that previously cemented social structures. But as grand narratives have lost their mythic charge, this loss has been exploited by corporations, who shamelessly and repeatedly appropriate and re-purpose nature, religion, and ideology to lend themselves an aura, a brand. We see this in Prebble’s lacerating portrayal of Skilling, who positions Enron as founders of a great, new religion that works ‘on Darwinian principles’.

A humane but acerbic riposte to the contemporary economy of legibility, Going Dark (devised and scripted by Sound&Fury in conjunction with playwright Hattie Naylor) places a Flusserian, close-up view of imaging in provocative dialogue with a view of knowledge-validation that is ‘longer’ even than Beck’s. Like Enron, Joe Penhall’s Landscape with Weapon homes in on the power of rhetoric in its portrayal of how anxiety caused by a perceived data overload leads to the devolution of power from human to machinic analysis. While Prebble shows how machinic forms of interpretation driven by technical imaging allow her villain, Skilling, to sell rampant de-regulation as transparency and limitation of risk, Penhall’s hapless, vulnerable protagonist manages to blind himself to the ethical enormity of his work. Ned is developing a new kind of ‘smart bomb’ that will eliminate human error; or so he is persuaded to believe by the shady officers of the military-industrial conglomerates, ready to profit from its manufacture and trade, who prey on his vanity and trust.

Love and Information features many characters who, like Penhall’s Ned, find themselves creating capsules to protect them in a world of networks. It is a world in which ‘simultaneity can be practiced without contiguity’, leaving individuals struggling to locate themselves in what Spanish sociologist Manuel Castells terms ‘the space of flows’ that is networked living. Beck’s 2005 book, Power in the Global Age: A New Political Economy, is credited in Castells’ highly influential account of networked living, Communication Power (first published in 2009), with leading sociology away from the outmoded siting of power in states and institutions and toward ‘networks’. Networks are ‘complex structures of communication constructed around a set of goals that simultaneously ensure unity of purpose and flexibility of execution by their adaptability to the operating environment’ (21). The ‘unity’ and ‘flexibility’ that networks aim to ‘ensure’ does not, of course, insure individuals against risk. On the contrary, and as James Graham’s Privacy explores (see my Introduction), networks that manage but also intensify and accelerate complex flows of information complicate boundaries of private/public and of local/national/global, producing new kinds of risk and uncertainty. As De Cauter puts it, ‘the more networks, the more capsules’. Capsules, as he theorises them, are protective ‘membranes designed to minimize the risk of flow, speed, and networks’. Capsules are defence mechanisms against the existential challenges posed by vertiginously fast-flowing, technical images that lock individuals within a de-subjectifying state of ‘timeless time’ in which ‘being cancels becoming’ (Castells 2013: 34–37). Before I discuss Churchill’s depiction of what Castells calls the ‘black holes’ of informational capitalism, a ghetto whose denizens feel ‘out of order and disconnected’, some desperately trying to plug themselves into the network while other try to unplug themselves, I will consider a piece of theatre that speaks both intimately and cosmically about the metaphorical resonance of ‘black holes’.

Darkness and the Bigger Picture

Many aurally immersive shows, including (Glenn Neath and David Rosenberg’s) Ring and (Sound&Fury’s own first work) War Music, plunge the audience into darkness to offer us a sonically intense experience. But the darkness into which we are plunged in Going Dark has an unusually poignant relationship to the themes addressed. Going Dark juxtaposes cosmologist Max’s planetarium demonstrations of how the universe is ‘going dark’ as it expands further and farther with hallucinations and diminished vision experienced by Max as he suffers the onset of retinitis pigmentosa. I found it all the more powerful because Max is desperate not to attract pity or sympathy. His stoic determination to appreciate the lessons that he can bring to, and pass on from, his disease experience imbue the show with a defiant, humble, hard-headed humanism.

Max’s deteriorating vision places new physical and emotional demands on himself and on his son, Leo, whose mother is no longer around, cannot understand why Max is acting differently and staring at him in an unnerving way; he worries about his dad forgetting what he will look like. Max suffers hallucinations while learning how to manage everyday tasks inside the home: shaving without cutting himself; making packed lunches without mistaking a can of beer for a can of orange soda. Outside the home, he struggles to cross roads without getting killed. Through astronomy-centred play which is rich in metaphor, Leo and Max work through the unpredictability of what is happening and what might happen. Resonating with the narrative’s themes of knowledge-gathering and heroic protection, this play is themed around the cosmic reconnaissance and rescue endeavours of Leo’s Thunderbirds characters and their rockets. One of the most haunting aspects of the play is that Leo does not appear in body, although it feels as if he does. John Mackay, as Max, is the only physical presence in a piece rich with recorded sounds and voices. The scenes between Max and Leo, which make up half the play, are built on craftily edited recordings of ‘free-flowing conversations’ between Jack and his father, Sound&Fury core member and Going Dark co-creator, Tom Espinor (Naylor et al., foreword: n.p.). Every time we hear Leo we, like both Mackay and the character he plays, bridge the division between the empty space in front of us and the picture conjured in our imagination. It is about how we create worlds from the information that we have, which is what Leo does in his games with rockets.

As we find ourselves supplementing the voice of Leo with the sense that he is actually there (no doubt each spectator seeing a different-looking version), Max explains how little of what we perceive about the visual world is actually derived from the signals that our retinas receive. The mind is constantly having to make sense of all kinds of information and it uses memory and myth to do this. Ordinarily, we are unaware of the tricks our minds play in processing what is viewed. The labour and mystery of seeing and perceiving are brought into view through Max’s inspiring and disturbing elaborations on the relationship of what we see to what we imagine. A simple but powerful demonstration of prisms reminds us how ‘our eyes have sensibly evolved to exploit what’s most available’, so that ‘we only see the wavelengths produced by our local star’ (21). Although our brain is ‘turning somersaults’ to transform what we perceive into sight, we are not aware of these busy processes of construction, processes which are governed by biological adaptation as well as cultural training. Max reflects that, despite giving them ‘exotic-sounding names like Betelgeuse, Aldebaran and Zubeneschamali’, we originate from stars; and that ‘the brain is the engine of understanding but is less understood and more mysterious than the most distant star’ (22). Theatre of a Martianist kind, Going Dark forces us to see ourselves close-up by taking a galactically distant viewpoint, raising awareness of the labour we perform every day that is normally invisible, unknown.

Contrary to might be expected of a show that is enthralled by science, Going Dark insists that knowledge is, above all, cultural: it lies in the stories that we tell about information and how these stories are transmitted. It is the charge that is carried by myths that leads us to embody knowledge. As Going Dark reminds us, ‘All cultures have looked up at the night sky, and seen patterns in the stars, and told stories about them’ (9). Such stories are not random; they are generated by cultural necessity to ‘name’ (in the broadest sense) the things we create, the things we inherit, and the things we stumble upon. We identify ourselves through projection onto and into distant objects, and the sky is the originary site of this identification through projection. Although Max is a scientist, he is also a storyteller; he sees no firm distinction between the two. Fables and allegories are not poetic indulgences, ornaments to knowledge, but are the mythical cement that strengthens its bedrock. Stars are described by Max—in a phrase with metaphorical resonance—as ‘giant creative furnaces’ (15). While Polaris, the pole star, is the guiding light that allows Max to guide others, Max himself is his son’s pole star. In India, he tells Leo, the pole star is known as ‘Dhruv Tara’. The name indexes a fable about male pride and insecurity. King Uttanapada’s second wife forbade Dhruv from sitting on his father’s lap as she wanted her own son to be favoured. Dhruv ran to his mother (the king’s first wife) to find out if there was anyone more powerful than his father, and she sent him to the great God Vishnu. So determined was Dhruv to get to Vishnu that he walked to the top of the mountains, to the very edge of the Northern Sky, where he meditated and thought only of Vishnu. Sages and gods tested Dhruv’s determination and courage with various distractions. Impressed that nothing could shake his resolve, Vishnu asked Dhruv what he wanted and, long story short, Dhruv is transformed into the pole star, at the centre of the universe. In Going Dark, the story is invoked to remind us of how the routes of transmission of myth shape cultural knowledge. A defining part of a culture’s inheritance, these stories not only bind individuals to one another but to the material world that outlives them all. Max makes Leo a Dhruv mobile to hang over his bed (10).

The sense of knowledge being transmitted across the cosmos and across aeons is made tangible in the planetarium darkness in which Going Dark is staged. While over-reliance on technical imaging erases boundaries to knowledge and erodes our sense of wonder, a planetarium (as the makers of Going Dark suggest in their preface to the text) is ‘a place to grappl[e]‌ with the limits of our knowledge and the seemingly unfathomable notion of the boundaries and parameters of time and space.’ Whereas the forensic promises to help us overcome ‘the limits of our knowledge’ by offering solutions to uncertainty, Going Dark finds wonder in the recognition of these limits. As Beck argues, our contemporary ‘risk society’ fosters anxiety by inscribing the belief that the universe is problematically chaotic. The only solution, it leads us to believe, lies in information systems powerful enough to eliminate error. In a warning that sounds like one of Leo’s Thunderbirds games, Beck proclaims: ‘The fatal irony, into which scientific-technical society plunges us is’ that ‘we do not know what it is we don’t know—but from this dangers arise, which threaten mankind!’ (2006: 329). Rather than trying to solve the chaos of the universe, Naylor et al. affirm, and find hope in, the capacity of the cosmos to exceed whatever circuits of knowledge try to contain it. Cosmology, as Max presents it, inspires wonder by, not despite, generating doubt. He reflects that ‘until ninety years ago’ it was thought that what we saw at night sky was ‘the whole universe’:

But then, in 1923, Edwin Hubble took a photo through his telescope of a dim smudge of light in the night sky. He thought it was a nebula—a cloud of gas. But when he looked closely at it he saw tiny pinpricks of light, each one a star. It was as if there was a whole new universe outside our own. It was, in fact, another galaxy. The Andromeda Galaxy. And in that moment our notion of the cosmos suddenly exploded.

(7)

Max situates himself as inheritor of a gene...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Information
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Theatrical performance in the forensic turn
• Chapter 1 Data chaos and the verification void
• Chapter 2 I’m seen therefore I am: Romance in the forensic turn
• Chapter 3 The hypothetical real vs. the interiority illusion
• Chapter 4 Life throes: The strange case of the diehard corpse
• Chapter 5 Undead domesticity: Naturalism and home in the forensic turn
• Chapter 6 Open dialogue as prefigurative performance: Re-assembling the forum (part I)
• Chapter 7 Effects of infinity: Re-assembling the forum (part II)
• Epilogue
• Bibliography
• Index