Staging and Re-cycling

Retrieving, Reflecting and Re-framing the Archive

John Keefe, Knut Ove Arntzen, John Keefe, Knut Ove Arntzen

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9780367501754
• eBook ISBN: 9781000073096
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism

In Staging and Re- cycling, John Keefe and Knut Ove Arntzen re-visit and reappraise a selection of their work to explore how the retrieval, re-approaching and re-framing of material can offer pathways for new work and new thinking.

The book includes a collection of reprinted and first-published (although previously presented) textual material interspersed with editorial material – reflective essays from John and Knut on these pieces from the archives and original essays from invited scholars that explore the theme of repetition and re-cycling. The project has a number of aims: to suggest how the status of 'new' with regard to academic and staged dramaturgical materials may be reframed; to re-examine these through certain lenses and concepts (re-cycling; re-working; the spectator; landscape, post- and other dramaturgies); to explore the possibilities of critique offered by particular modes of juxtaposition, dialogue and dialectic; to offer further provocations to received ideas; and to retrieve and re-approach material, once published or presented, that becomes 'lost' in archives or on library shelves. As shown here, the role of the hyphen acts as an indicator to the status of 're-' in relation to the 'new'.

Written for scholars and academics, researchers, undergraduate and postgraduate students, and practitioners working in all forms for theatre and performance, Staging and Re-cycling suggests a new form of dialogue between work, authors and readers, and draws out threads that extend back into the past and potentially forward into the future.

Chapter 1

Editorial introduction

John Keefe and Knut Ove Arntzen

A question of aims

The sun shone, having no alternative, on the nothing new.

(Beckett 1977: 1)

From this our theme can be easily stated: that there is nothing new under the sun, that all ideas and concepts are re-cycled in one form or another – and then write ‘the end’. But given the claims for the ‘new’, the denial of re-using, of copying in one form or another in the fields of theatre practice and theatre writing, we have ventured to present some musings, some arguments and reflections that take us beyond such truisms.

This volume, then, is a hybrid; a collection of re-printed and first-published (although previously presented) papers as textual material interspersed with editorial material – reflective essays on these pieces retrieved from the archives and invited original contributions from other scholars. As a hybrid it will move between the first and third person, between the personal and the objective, between the subjective and inter-subjective, between the experienced-affective and the researched-theorised. We trust the juxtapositions will emerge in both considered and unforeseen ways.

For the authors, we believe the project is unusual in allowing a re-visiting and reflecting on selected materials and ideas in a dialogue between ‘now and then’ and ‘then and now’, and between the two authors. Perhaps a means, a taking-a-risk to accommodate where we were then with where we are now. To balance any tendency towards self-indulgence or egoism that escapes self-censure, our external contributors have been invited to take a constructively critical perspective on the archive material and themes of this volume. We trust such perspectives will mitigate any sense of narcissism that the project may imply; a risk inherent in such a project but one we can only hope will not be the case once the book is launched and taken out of our hands.

Whilst working on the project, Keefe has been reading Joe Kelleher’s book The Illuminated Theatre (2015): a fascinating journey through selected images and memories of theatre, that allows some serendipities to stand out. The style of complementing thoughtful experience with theorised insight that parallels some of our textual material dating from 2003 and earlier; the inter-twining of what Joe refers to as ‘threads’ (routes?) that serves to illustrate the inter-weaving principles and themes we attempt to unpick and re-examine; the simple fact of sharing and borrowings that are made between authors but unbeknownst to them until seen – but then of course recognised by the reader; the centrality of the prefix ‘re-’ that echoes not just earlier discussions but also conceptualising. We make this point here because of certain key themes that will emerge – the ‘re(-)cycling’ of materials, the questionable status of what then is ‘new’, the centrality of the spectator to any and all theatres, the centrality of the physical and visual to all theatres.

The project, then, has a number of aims – to suggest how the status of academic and staged dramaturgical materials may be re-framed; to re-examine these through certain lenses and concepts; to explore the possibilities of critique offered by particular modes of juxtaposition, dialogue and dialectic. What is the status of material, once published or presented, that becomes ‘lost’ in archives or on library shelves that may now be retrieved and re-approached?

We launch our books and papers ‘like ships into the world’ (to borrow from Roald Dahl); once launched they are for others to do with what they will. The published works then become part of our own archive and of public archives in one form or another. The dilemmas of what is retrieved, what can be retrieved, what remains out of sight as either vanished or lost or simply becoming pushed to the back of the shelf face all scholars.

Inevitably, we have been forced by parameters and practicalities to make pragmatic as well as intellectual choices of what to include, of what is relevant, of what to leave on the shelf. As a compromise, we will give full details of our respective other published works; to draw on, cite and reference as appropriate, to allow the reader to follow these other ships if they so choose.

One further clarification. We will not be looking at (except peripherally) the concept of ‘recycling’ in relation to sustainability, ecology and environmental issues. This is not to ignore these, but we feel they are outside the scope of this project and to simply touch on them would seem tokenistic and disrespectful to the centrality of the climate crisis we are facing. But, to offer some examples of the relationship between theatre and environmental concerns: in play-texts see McGrath (1981), Waters (2009), Bartlett (2014), Churchill (2016); in performance theory see Heddon and Mackey (2012), Lavery (2018), Pitches and Shearing (2019); in art and culture see Poláček and Pokorný (2015), Eliasson and Rosing (2018), Comte (2019); in academia, the forthcoming ‘Reimagining Theatre Pedagogy in the Era of Climate Crisis’ project 2019–20). But perhaps we can say that such concerns are not new; for example, with respect to scientific approaches, von Humboldt’s writings on the synthesis of life on earth, on environmental degradation seem to pre-figure what we now know in updated and greater detail.

A question of styles

As may be apparent by now, certain stylistic devices are presenting themselves.

I use ‘(re)consider’ to mark clearly the implicitly processual nature of ‘considering’. This view invites us not only to see performance as processual, but also to see that both society and human beings are performative, always already processually under construction.

(Zarrilli 2002:1)

Our use of hyphens (the equivalent of Zarrilli’s parentheses) hence ‘re-’ to indicate our playing with certain terms; the use of inverted commas to add emphasis or an implied question to such terms; the nature of ‘post-’ (or should that be (post)) to raise questions about the status and connotations of key concepts. We will consider these uses from the perspective of contexts, as a prefix that adds nuance to the term, as other ways of looking. In the same spirit, we have invited our guest contributors to explore their use of these devices in their own writings.

Such concepts and principles include ‘re-cycling’, ‘the new/not-new’ and ‘repetition’ as inevitable shaping influences on theatres and stagings. To borrow from Zarrilli, principles always processually under construction within the hybrid and plural nature of ‘theatres’; that all theatres are ‘post’ and all theatres are a re-working (in Arntzen’s term, ‘re-circulation’; see Arntzen 2015: 29) of what has gone before. Such hybridity and plurality are expressed in a number of three-way relationships or forms of dialectic: between ‘new’-‘repetition’-‘re-cycling’ (itself a form of inevitable but constructive ‘repetition’); from this, ‘re-cycling’-‘landscape’-‘geoculture’; from this, geography-culture-history.

Following the same sensibility, we can also acknowledge another aspect of ‘re-’ in the re-working and re-writing implied in adaptation, where Laera (2014) characterises this as kinds of interpretive intervention. Here, the source material is taken into other forms, media or cultures with the ‘matches’ and ‘mismatches’ of meaning that may be demanded. We would suggest, as a further route of thinking, that the same demands of ‘re-’ are made in processes of translation. (See also Hand and Minier 2008.)

Keefe and Arntzen see the re-production and re-presenting of their material (as forms of instructive repetition and intervention) not simply as a project in-itself but as an opportunity to return to it, to bring it out of the archive and thus make it subject to re-appraisal: a returning to. To anticipate Kierkegaard later in the volume, to both take pleasure in yet be anxious about what has been done before. In this, we challenge ourselves (and our readers) to ‘look again’ at work that may have become received ideas for us, and others in the academic and theatre communities. To force an examination of ideas that, at first sight, may seem merely a repetition but when re-framed and re-contextualised may be seen as a continuing affirmation of our strongly held axioms and principles. To foreground what then is ‘new/not-new’ (in context, in subject, from one reader or viewer to another, from one era to another) given the centrality of re-cycling or re-circulating to the work and dynamic of theatres.

It is for this reason that we have invited our external contributors to muse on, to ‘re-consider’ the textual material through their own editorial considerations, as we outline further down. We suggest the textual materials become not only subject in themselves but ‘subject’ of editorial commentary and reflection: author to himself, author to author, and promoting a different form of dialogue between the work, writers and readers. In a similar vein, there will be overlaps between the authors’ works, between the authors, between the authors and our guest contributors as coinciding, opposing and/or contrary views and positions are taken. We do not intend to flatten or harmonise these but let them stand side-by-side (perhaps Derrida’s ‘parergon’, evoked later in the volume) as a mild cacophony of voices.

As a dialogue, we will find ourselves moving between ‘I’ and ‘we’, between past and present, between the coherent and sometimes more intangible, what is seen directly and what may be glimpsed. We see these as part of the openness of the project, an embracing of the hybrid quality that marks the volume, an inviting of interventions.

To further push this invitation to consider and re-consider, we use quotes to support arguments or ideas, as ‘choric quotes’ commenting on what is being said, as signposts and provocations within the flow of the material. We hope these will act as promptings for the reader to agree or dis-agree; be a further level of reflection in the spirit of ‘then-from-now/now-from-then’, so to have their own sense of ‘returning to’. The disturbing power of (un)familiarity will then play its part in re-collection and re-appraising.

A question of themes and perspectives

The inter-twining or threading of textual, editorial and contributed materials allows a number of themes and particular interests (perhaps obsessions) to be fore-grounded; themes that run through the papers, are returned to, are both re-iterated and re-examined or developed.

This process of re-reading has revealed the extent of repetition and re-using of such threads of themes and ideas that may be both intentional and/or inadvertent. Some repetition comes from the necessity of setting context when introducing a given paper to a new audience. Some comes from the grip that certain key ideas hold over one’s thinking – our own routes and threads. An essential few come from the axiomatic quality of themes and principles where their self-evidence nevertheless needs re-iterating against the currents of fashion and trends. We may be surprised at the extent of such repetition. But is this a mark of consistency in thinking? Is this preferable (or at least complementary) to flitting between what is current or claimed as ‘new’? Is it to some degree a complacency in thinking or simply an over-looking? Is it an accident of timing as a number of overlapping pieces being worked on seem in retrospect to form a cluster of interests and emphases? This project allows us to, at least, raise such implicitly demanding questions as we choose to look again at our work.

The authors have been colleagues and collaborators in ideas, projects and conferences since 1995. The volume is an attempt to express our shared theatre histories through a collection of textual material looking from where we are now and from the beginning of our co-operation and collaborations in 1995 at the Artistic Boundaries Crossed conference in Amsterdam. Meeting next and working together in Kaunas, Lithuania, in 1996, in the aftermath of the final ending of the Soviet occupation, revealed contrasting but complementary frameworks of research interests in a newly emerging theatrical landscape.

As colleagues, we have been engaged in dialogue, conversations and complementary differences of opinion centred on our dramaturgical interests. This volume, then, becomes a further collaboration where the differences as well as similarities of views are not evened-out but left as a statement of plurality within what theatre and performance is and might be.

For example, the authors’ interests in dramaturgies of landscape (the expression of a post-dramatic paradox concerning art theatre and the theatre machine of dramatic narrative) and dramaturgies of spectatorship in relation to the stage, theatres and performance:

The landscapes...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Information
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of figures
• Notes on contributors
• Acknowledgements and permissions
• Chapter 1 Editorial introduction
• Chapter 2 Play Beckett: Beckett’s performance dramaturgy as total theatre
• Chapter 3 The PG and FPG: Stage action or stage metaphysics?
• Chapter 4 Essay 1: Archival foundations and first reflections
• Chapter 5 A letter on recycling Sam
• Chapter 6 Dramaturgical dissolution in the ambient
• Chapter 7 The resurrected theatre machine: A postdramatic paradox
• Chapter 8 Essay 1: Theatre studies, self-reflection and creativity: Understanding theory through metaphors
• Chapter 9 Berkoff’s ‘Londons’: Staging psycho-geographies of the feared and the ecstatic
• Chapter 10 Recycling sources and experiencing physical theatre in educating professionals
• Chapter 11 Essay 2: Circling around: Looking(s) and empathies
• Chapter 12 Retaining and reframing: Notes on processes of remembering in Rosemary Butcher’s choreography-making
• Chapter 13 On telling the world and ‘recycling’ in the new theatre
• Chapter 14 Essay 2: Researching, re-making, re-cycling
• Chapter 15 Recycling, situationism and postspectacular theatre
• Chapter 16 Play(ing) it again: Recycling as theatres, histories, memories
• Chapter 17 Essay 3: Spectatorial ghosts
• Chapter 18 Re-cycle/up-cycle: A conversation
• Chapter 19 Producing marginality and post-mainstream in independent theatre
• Chapter 20 Essay 3: Nordic inter-action: Avant-garde to visual performance – the ritualistic and mechanical
• Chapter 21 Impossible Theatres and the possible; some dramaturgical provocations and responses to the opening statement, and implications
• Chapter 22 Essay 4: Further paths, returning threads
• Chapter 23 Drama in landscapes
• Chapter 24 Essay 4: Directing and choreographing as a free and open mise-en-scène: From risky auteurship to re-cycling theatre
• Chapter 25 Dancing with your cycle – theatre and performance research as archivist practice
• Chapter 26 Editorial conclusion
• Chapter 27 Selected other published material
• Index