The Senses in Performance

Sally Banes, Andre Lepecki, Sally Banes, Andre Lepecki

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781134460700
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Médias et arts de la scène
• Subtopic: Arts de la scène

This ground-breaking anthology is the first to be dedicated to assessing critically the role of the human sensorium in performance.

Senses in Performance presents a multifaceted approach to the methodological, theoretical, practical and historical challenges facing the scholar and the artist. This volume examines the subtle actions of the human senses including taste, touch, smell and vision in all sorts of performances in Western and non-Western traditions, from ritual to theatre, from dance to interactive architecture, from performance art to historical opera.

With eighteen original essays brought together by an international ensemble of leading scholars and artists including Richard Schechner and Philip Zarrilli. This covers a variety of disciplinary fields from critical studies to performance studies, from food studies to ethnography from drama to architecture.

Written in an accessible way this volume will appeal to scholars and non-scholars interested in Performance/Theatre Studies and Cultural Studies.

1

Introduction

The performance of the senses

André Lepecki and Sally Banes

“Nothing in man,” wrote Michel Foucault in his famous essay on Nietzsche’s notion of genealogy, “not even his body – is sufficiently stable to serve as the basis for selfrecognition or for understanding other men” (Foucault 1977: 153). Drawing from Nietzsche’s understanding of the body as self-differentiating becoming, Foucault reminds us how the body is constitutively unstable, always foreign to itself – an open process of continuous self-estrangement where the most fundamental physiological and sensorial functions endure ongoing oscillations, adjustments, breaks, dysfunctions, and optimizations, as well as “the construction of resistances” (153). The construction of resistances, for Foucault, would be so many ways of reinventing not only subjectivity but also a whole new corporeal project, what he later called “a livable life.”¹

Now, to cast the body as essentially metamorphic within the force field of history is to give to perception and the sensorium central roles that transcend the purely somatic. Neither can be seen any longer as anthropologically stable, historically neutral, or a culturally passive neuro-physiological basis where subjectivities find common ground. On the contrary, perception and the sensorium are to be understood as historically bound cultural agents, constantly being activated and repressed, reinvented and reproduced, rehearsed and improvised. In an intertwining process where the somatic, the physiological, and the neurological criss-cross the historical, the sociological, the political and the imaginary, the profoundly performative interfaces occurring between history, corporeality, power, language, and the sensorial become apparent.

No wonder then that performance practices become privileged means to investigate processes where history and body create unsuspected sensorial-perceptual realms, alternative modes for life to be lived. To carry out the task of analyzing “the senses in performance” is also to carry out bio-political investigations of the many critical thresholds where the corporeal meets the social, the somatic meets the historical, the cultural meets the biological, and imagination meets the flesh.

To these investigations, to the critical exploration of a plethora of performance practices where the instability of perception and the creative activation of the senses are explored, to the identification of those many chiasms intertwining the physiological and the cultural, to the advancement of innovative methodologies in performance analysis focused on a variety of cultural contexts and sensorial organizations, this anthology is dedicated.

In writing history, theory, or criticism of the senses in performance, one is faced with significant challenges. For instance, a descriptive language for tastes, textures, aromas, and sounds (as performance devices) that is as rich and detailed as that for sight and musical or verbal sounds has yet to be developed. Partly for that reason, the tasks of interpretation regarding the uses of alternative, or uncharted, senses in performance (senses that fall outside Western classifications and divisions of the sensorium into taste, vision, smell, touch, and hearing) are complex. Thus, we invited leading and emerging scholars in the fields of theatre studies, performance studies, dance studies, semiotics of the senses, and philosophy to address, through a variety of methodologies and through historical, contemporary, and cross-cultural examples, new strategies to write about, and to rethink, the experiences of the senses in performance.

The seventeen essays gathered in this volume approach the methodological, theoretical, practical, and historical challenges of studying the subtle action of the senses in performance and offer case studies of the uses of taste, touch, smell, and/or hearing (other than dialogue, music, and specific sound effects), as well as other senses, in performance in both Western and non-Western traditions (including drama, dance, opera, and performance art). What we believe comes out of this collection is a multifaceted vision of how the senses in performance remain a site of unsuspected critical and performative power.

Performances of the senses reveal histories – they propose practices, privilege materials, mirror social conditions, and implement techniques. And in each of these steps a body is constructed – even if momentarily – even if just for the duration of one particular performance. Every performer, every actor, dancer, musician, body artist enduring her or his training knows well how to operate these more or less localized, more or less momentary, more or less material constructions of body and senses, these perennial metamorphoses. Moreover, every performer knows these transformations to be a profoundly psycho-physical fact. Audiences intuit this metamorphic sophistication of the sensorium that the trained performer endures, enacts, and projects. They recognize it, sense it, fall into it, are summoned by it, and then either reject it or applaud it.

But what still needs to be articulated more clearly if we want to build a theory of the performance of the senses is that any such performance generates and reveals subjacent economies and politics of appearing. Indeed, whether this appearing, this stepping of the sensed object or subject into the fore of perception, happens visually, or happens rather as an olfactory, or tactile, or proprioceptive, or gustatory, or aural experience (or as a combination of, or synesthesia between, different sensory organs), the imbrication of sensory perception with language and memory makes the senses a matter of urgency for understanding the conditions under which the body interfaces with and assigns privileges to certain modes of the perceptible while condemning other modes to the shadows of the imperceptible and the valueless.

A performance theory of the senses would allow for an accounting and a critique of whole hegemonic or majoritarian politics of the perceptible and the imperceptible, of the significant and the insignificant, of what emerges within the field of attention and what will remain unremarked. In other words: as the senses shift in relation to social and cultural changes, what they also change are the political conditions of possibility for entities, substances, bodies, and elements to come into a being-apparent. It is in this light that we can talk not only of a performance of the senses but also of a performative power of the senses. The political economy of the senses subjacent to any system of presence, to any system of power, by casting a dividing line between the properly perceptible and the imperceptible, impacts on the ontological and political status of any perception by defining it as significant or as insignificant.

This can be read as a rather gloomy rendition of the political agency of the senses. But the same mechanisms allow the senses to trigger acts of resistance. As Nadia Seremetakis reminds us, “the sensory landscape and its meaning-endowed objects bear within them emotional and historical sedimentation that can provoke and ignite gestures, discourses, and acts – acts which open up these objects’ stratigraphy” (Seremetakis 1994: 7).

Thus, changes in the perceptual field chronicle a history of sensory disciplining but also of sensory dissent – Foucault’s “creation of resistances” – a history of how bodies relate to the world, and a history of how certain stimuli gain symbolic currency and linguistic validation as properly belonging to the realm of the aesthetic. Within the history of theatre and performance, historians, theorists, and critics have either totally ignored certain senses and certain sensorial experiences or, at best, relegated them to the periphery of critical attention and of theoretical investigation. Indeed, besides certain sights (e.g., costumes, sets, lighting, gestures, postures) and sounds (e.g., speech, music, sound effects) usually attached to specific linguistic referents, a whole plethora of sensorial information in performance has been discarded, unnoticed and poorly documented.

However, live performance often does involve the senses in ways that transgress the boundaries of the visually iconic and of the linguistically and musically sonic. Taste, touch, smell, vestibular and kinesthetic senses, pain, and hearing sound qua sound are pivotal sensorial experiences in making and experiencing performance across cultures. In the West, modern and postmodern attempts to re-involve audience members in sensory experiences – thought to be part of the total artwork that characterized theatre from ancient Greece up through the European Renaissance – have led to experiments with theatre architecture and technology as well as to new forms of staging theatre, dance, opera, and performance art. For Western critics and scholars, knowledge about regimes of the senses, both traditional and contemporary, in non-European-American cultures often prompts a deep re-evaluation of Western aesthetic and cognitive premises regarding what is experienced sensorially in performances.

The particular cultural force contained in the agential power activated by the senses in performance is revealed in a sentence by North American theatre director Matthew Goulish. He asked: “What is culture?” His own answer: “The formation of attention.” Goulish’s question and answer summarizes the dramaturgical backbone of much of the staged and video work he has been co-creating with Lin Hixson and the other members of the Chicago-based ensemble Goat Island. But Goulish’s sentence captures the privileged relationship that any performance practice has with the manufacture of perceptive-sensorial techniques as culture-making techniques. The different ways through which performance practices create and form a plethora of modes of attention reveal precisely those endless exchanges criss-crossing the body and linking its sensorium to environment, genealogy, soma, culture, and performance practices. This open exchange between the somatic and the cultural begs for new ways to write critically on performance practices, since much of our implied modes of classifying performance are supported by an implicit and unacknowledged sensorial mapping. As Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett reminds us in her contribution to this anthology (see Chapter 6): “It has taken considerable cultural work to isolate the senses, create genres of art specific to each, insist on their autonomy, and cultivate modes of attentiveness that give some senses priority over others.” The modernist fragmentation of artistic practices into self-contained and autonomous genres would correspond to a fragmentation of the senses into self-contained and autonomous “perceptions.”

The essays collected in The Senses in Performance challenge inherited notions of sensorial performances. Taken as a whole, it could be said that a common thread running throughout this anthology can be found precisely in the realization that any body in a performance situation (be it the bodies of the performers or the bodies of the audience) is an inexhaustible inventor of sensorial-perceptual potentials and becomings. In Chapter 13, Maya Roth, when analyzing the work of the Omaha Magic Theatre in the late 1980s, reminds us precisely how a whole new organization of the senses can actually be transmitted to an audience. Moreover, she tells us that this transmission is a mode “to bring the audiences to their bodies,” reminding us that the body is something that may have been stolen from its subject, that the body may not be the full property of its subject’s desire and agency. Roth’s essay reminds us how transmissibility of the senses is one of performance’s most powerful performatives.

Processes of invention and becoming, then, are not only purely corporeal but also dialogically tied to technological developments. Two decades before Foucault published his essay on Nietzsche, Walter Benjamin had already remarked that the historical dynamic of the senses revealed how the sensorial and the technological fabricate each other dialectically. In his famous essay on “The work of art in the age of mechanical reproducibility,” Benjamin wrote:

During long periods of history, the mode of human sense perception changes with humanity’s entire mode of existence. The manner in which human sense perception is organized, the medium in which it is accomplished, is determined not only by nature but by historical circumstances as well.

(Benjamin 1988: 219)

This is Benjamin’s anthropological view of history – a long durational process where “humanity” gradually changes its modes to perceive and to sense. But within this anthropological view there were also philosophical and political preoccupations. It is the very advent of film and photography that is seen by Benjamin as effecting a profound transformation not only on the nature of the work of art itself but on the nature of our perceptive-sensorial relation to it as well, a political transformation of what we deem to be our most natural mode of relating: our senses, our perceptions. In this way, at the core of any critical analysis of artistic practices in the age of mechanical reproducibility, Benjamin identifies the potential for creating what would be called today a political anthropology of the senses.²

What could the project of a political theory of the senses be when transposed to the broad field of performance studies and of performance practices? What could be the creation of a “political performance studies” of the senses? In many ways, such a project would have to account for both Foucault’s notions of history and Benjamin’s careful attending to the perceptive-sensorial summons already encapsulated in the art object itself, while keeping in mind Goulish’s and Kirshenblatt-Gimblett’s remarks on the endless possibilities that performance brings to the formation of unsuspected modes of attention and of attending, and Roth’s notion of sensorial transmissibility. It would imply looking at the ways technology, and particularly technologies of representation, create and implement, but also dissolve and disturb, perception. Many of the essays in this anthology reveal this dialogue between the senses and technologies of representation by addressing the implied organization of the senses that sustain and make possible Western theatrical representation. Stanton Garner (see Chapter 9) rethinks the question of theatrical “illusionism” and notes how “attention to sensory address in the theatre can help to illuminate the internal dynamics and representational volatility of realism itself.” Kerrie Schaefer’s essay (see Chapter 15) probes how theatrical representation holds the senses in a particular economy of theatrical consumption, which she believes is challenged by the figure of the cannibal – a figure she introduces to initiate “a discussion of the efficacy of political theatre in the ‘society of the spectacle,’ where the audience has been transformed into consumers.” Jennifer Fisher (see Chapter 14) thinks of the role of “tactilism” or “tactile synesthesia” as the counter-representational device used by contemporary performance artists (Valie Export, Ron Athey, Vito Acconci, among others) “to interrogate technologies of vision.”

But a crucial question remains unanswered: to know what “the senses” would be. It is well known that by positing such a realm, and by apparently isolating “the senses” from other agents that reveal the intertwining between the physiological and the cultural (agents such as “desire,” “language,” “fantasy,” “dreaming,” “sexuality”), we could be uncritically participating in a very specific mode of understanding the body that derives directly from Western notions of embodiment and perception. But it is precisely to a critique of Western notions of embodiment – where body functions are compartmentalized within autonomous zones and properly assigned functions – that performance art, since the mid-1960s, and particularly...