Performance in the Twenty-First Century

Theatres of Engagement

Andy Lavender

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781136467196
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Medios de comunicación y artes escénicas
• Subtopic: Teatro

Performance in the Twenty-First Century: Theatres of Engagement addresses the reshaping of theatre and performance after postmodernism. Andy Lavender argues provocatively that after the 'classic' postmodern tropes of detachment, irony, and contingency, performance in the twenty-first century engages more overtly with meaning, politics and society. It involves a newly pronounced form of personal experience, often implicating the body and/or one's sense of self.

This volume examines a range of performance events, including work by both emergent and internationally significant companies and artists such as Rimini Protokoll, Blast Theory, dreamthinkspeak, Zecora Ura, Punchdrunk, Ontroerend Goed, Kris Verdonck, Dries Verhoeven, Rabih Mroué, Derren Brown and David Blaine. It also considers a wider range of cultural phenomena such as online social networking, sports events, installations, games-based work and theme parks, where principles of performance are in play.

Performance in the Twenty-First Century is a compelling and provocative resource for anybody interested in discovering how performance theory can be applied to cutting-edge culture, and indeed the world around them.

Part 1 Scenes of engagement

Introduction

DOI: 10.4324/9780203128176-2

As with some performance installations or immersive theatre productions, there is no necessary sequence to this book. You can roam as you wish. Even so – as with some performance installations or immersive theatre productions – it has units (here essays) within sections that are deliberately arranged.

Performance in the Twenty-First Century is about various sorts of theatre and performance after postmodernism. As a whole, its argument is that subsequent to the ‘classic’ postmodern tropes of detachment, irony and contingency, many theatre and performance events in the twenty-first century entail altered modes of engagement on the part of both practitioners and spectators. They connect more overtly with social process. They involve a pronounced form of personal experience, often implicating the body and sometimes even one’s sense of self. And they entail certain sorts of commitment.

I tend to use ‘theatre and performance’ as a compound in the book, for reasons that I expand on in the opening chapter. While both terms can mean different things – and are routinely contested in theatre and performance studies – I incline to conflate them in the same spirit as Alan Read in his conception of an ‘expanded field’ for theatre. Read provides a tabular comparison of what might be thought norms of theatre and performance, in order to suggest that the ‘order and history’ of the former is ‘irritated and disturbed’ by the latter. Read’s chart proposes that ‘linearity (theatre) is infused with ‘simultaneity’ (performance); ‘character’ with ‘autobiography’; ‘acting’ with ‘authenticity’; ‘invention’ with ‘revelation’ (Read, 2013: xx). You don’t have to agree with Read’s specific mappings to grant a general point. Performance as a disciplinary construction now finds theatre in its field; while theatre can be thought of through the patterns of performance, and provides a paradigm for the organisation of that which is encountered.¹

Performance in the Twenty-First Century explores such developments in relation to three mainstays of theatre and performance: mediation, performing, and spectating. That’s to say, the mediality of the event and the way in which it is structured and conveyed; the sorts of acting and performance involved; and what this means for audiences, who often become participants in some way. The book features close analysis of a number of performance events in a range of international settings. It also examines a wider array of cultural phenomena – including installations, online video performance, sports events, games-based work and theme parks – where principles of performance are in play. In each instance, new forms of interaction are facilitated between creator, performer, spectator and event, and personal experience is often foregrounded. Most of the instances I discuss in the pages that follow are shows or events that I attended between 2003 and 2015. I don’t hold that you have to see a piece of theatre in order to write about it – otherwise how could we ever say anything about Garrick’s Hamlet, for instance? That said, the essays that follow set store by the phenomenological stuff of encounter, visceral response and contextual engagement. A procedure that situates the critic in face of the event is not inappropriate here. In part through a form of immersed analysis, I address some key developments in contemporary theatre and performance, and critical paradigms for discussing such work. This all makes for a reengagement with meaning in and around theatre and performance; a change to our understanding of registers of performing and what it is to be an ‘actor’; likewise a new set of possibilities for spectatorship, increasingly drawing on participatory models of engagement, and privileging sensory experience.

Each essay has a specific focus and usually addresses one or more representative instances of performance, although the first is more synoptic and outlines a context for those that follow. Chapter 1, ‘Theatres of Engagement: performance after postmodernism’, discusses a timeframe for developments that have shaped contemporary cultural production: the quarter-century from 1989. It considers two key tributaries: significant historical events that have remodeled our sense of what Rancière describes as the sayable and doable; and the extension of digital culture, enabling new forms of communication and interaction (therefore, new ways of saying and doing). We arrive beyond postmodernism at a changed cultural paradigm, albeit one attuned to continuing postmodern tactics and techniques. I propose that the notion of ‘engagement’ describes the mode of this cultural scene. I discuss the intertwining of motifs of reality and performance, as a way of thinking about underlying features of a broad ‘reality trend’ to performance that goes hand-in-hand with a pervasive theatricality to contemporary culture.

Three sections address core features and procedures. The first, ‘On mediating performance’, explores changing processes through which performance is shaped, presented and engaged. Chapter 2, ‘The visible voice (or, the word made flesh): political presence and performative utterance in the public sphere’, examines an interest in apparent truth-telling in performance, particularly through a privileging of the ‘authentic’ speaking voice. I explore reasons behind the growth of testimony, witness, and first-person speaking, and their platforms including vox-pop radio, reality TV, verbatim and documentary theatre and ‘reality trend’ performance. I discuss the relationship of ‘authentic speaking’ to both personal experience and social process, and how this marks a shift in the Habermasian public sphere towards plural public spaces for diverse discourse. By way of example, I explore Judith Butler’s polemical and poetic utterance at an Occupy demonstration in Washington Square Park in New York; No Man’s Land, a walking tour conceived and directed by Dries Verhoeven, featuring testimony drawn from immigrants; Riding on a Cloud, in which Yasser Mroué speaks of his life, near-death, and amateur artistic endeavours; and (by way of counterpoint) Annual Shareholders Meeting, whereby the actual AGM of the Daimler Corporation is framed as a theatrical event by Rimini Protokoll.

In Chapter 3, ‘In the mix: intermedial theatre and hybridity’, I consider hybridity as a signal feature of contemporary cultural production. Hybridity suggests both a becoming and a beyond: here, the emergence of cross-disciplinary formations. I explore this with reference to scholarship in bioscientific, aesthetic, cultural, postcolonial and performance studies; and look at hybridity in relation to intermediality, as a way of explaining developments in media form and function. I discuss dreamthinkspeak’s Before I Sleep, a promenade production that includes models, installations, live performance and scenic design, to consider the strategies and implications of a blended aesthetic. In Chapter 4, ‘Feeling the event: from mise en scène to mise en sensibilité’, I argue that we observe a shift in performance-making from mise en scène (the arrangement of the stage) to mise en événement (the arrangement of the event) to mise en sensibilité (the arrangement of feeling). I explore critical perspectives developed by scholars including Pavis, Franko, Foucault, Fischer-Lichte and Lehmann, and literary critics writing about sensibility. The developments here are exemplified by Zecora Ura Theatre Network’s Hotel Medea, a durational, immersive event. Based on the Medea story, the piece runs from midnight to dawn and involves its spectators in an array of scenarios of affect, as they witness the drama from within.

The next section, ‘On (not) being an actor’, addresses changes to acting and performance in the first decade or so of the twenty-first century. Chapter 5, ‘Sincerely yours: from the actor to the persona’, examines the notion of ‘character’ in performance. I note the apparent shift in postmodernism from characterization to the presentation of a persona, in part theorized by Auslander, Fuchs and Lehmann. I suggest that nonetheless a conception of character often underpins performances that are otherwise rooted in non-acting. I explore this as it applies to magicians (David Blaine and Derren Brown) and machines (those presented in Kris Verdonck’s installations and performance pieces). In each case, a mix of apparent sincerity and evident fabrication helps to present a form of characterful personhood that provides an enjoyable kind of presence. In Chapter 6, ‘Me singing and dancing: YouTube’s performing bodies’, I consider a more obvious kind of digital performance, by way of the rapid spread of self-curated performance online. I examine the growth of YouTube, enabling serial presentations of the self and a shared reiteration of motifs of performance. I discuss the memes of ‘me dancing’ and ‘me singing’, digitally-enabled cultural practices that re-inscribe the body at the heart of virtual performance.

The subsequent section, ‘On (not) being a spectator’, examines changes to spectatorship, and particularly a movement towards participation, interaction and agency. Chapter 7, ‘Viewing and acting (and points in between): the trouble with spectating after Rancière’, examines Jaques Rancière’s celebrated notion of the ‘emancipated spectator’. I trace some significant contributory currents in Rancière’s work (particularly concerning ‘equality’, ‘dissensus’ and ‘sensus communis’) to unpack ‘emancipation’ here as a combination of critical detachment and commitment. I explore the application of this to scenarios of spectatorship by discussing four instances of events in Chicago in which the spectator is ingrained: a promenade-style studio theatre production, a civic sculpture, a museum event and a basketball game. I conclude by suggesting that, in these examples at least, we observe spectators who are pleasurably implicated within events, rather than emancipated in the more politically-oriented sense of the term. Chapter 8, ‘Audiences and affects: theatres of engagement in the experience economy’, starts by addressing characteristics of the ‘experience economy’, whereby transactions are developed precisely in order to provide certain sorts of experience. I discuss the notion of affect as a key to developments in this larger cultural ecosystem, and examine diverse studies of affect to build a framework for analysing the experience-inducing work of performances and events. I focus on four instances of audience engagement – an end-on theatre production by Ontroerend Goed; a sporting event; an immersive production by Punchdrunk; and an interactive game-based piece by Blast Theory – to explore how each facilitates the experience of its audience/participants.

In my concluding chapter, ‘Performance engagements across culture’, I draw threads of the book together to suggest ways in which we have moved not only beyond postmodernism and the postdramatic, but perhaps even beyond theatre itself, as performance suffuses cultural production and is itself suffused with effects of encounter, experience and actuality. I look briefly at civic installations by Kris Verdonck and Dries Verhoeven to gather several strands, including the convergence of performance, digital production and civic space; and the incorporation of the spectator in scenarios of actuality. The chapter closes with a discussion of three theme parks – Disneyland in Hong Kong, Dickens World in Chatham and Banksy’s Dismaland in Weston-super-Mare, the latter two in unprepossessing towns either side of south England – that help reverberate the book’s wider themes. Whatever else you make of them, theme parks depend upon our engagement in an ‘eventful present’. It hardly needs saying that this applies to nearly all the performance work discussed in the book.

Note

1. In their volume Theatricality, Davis and Postlewait are cautious of the wide embrace of performance, which they suggest is no different from the idea of theatrum mundi (2003: 33). Nonetheless, in their view ‘theatricality’ is concept, system, ‘quintessentially the theatre’ and ‘the theatre subsumed into the whole world’ (1). If theatricality is different from performance, it is no less pervasive.

1 Theatres of engagement Performance after postmodernism

DOI: 10.4324/9780203128176-1

As so often, ours is a story of changing realities. Consider this, the publicity blurb for a new theatre festival, inaugurated in May 2014, for the economy-raddled city of Athens:

Digital cameras, iPods, mobile telephones, the Internet, and live-cinema, documentary and editing techniques are all mobilized in the interactive, multimedia and site-specific spectacles the OCC [Onassis Cultural Centre] will be hosting as part of the 1st Fast Forward Festival (FFF). Because the theatre of now is restless and hybrid, a collage of arts, techniques and media and an exciting, groundbreaking, holistic experience closely bound up with the technological advances and quickening socio-economic pulse of our times.¹

Several themes are harnessed: the rapidity of cultural change; the defining role of digital technologies in contemporary culture; the increasingly hybrid nature of theatre form; and experience as a main attraction. It is perhaps not surprising to see this initiative emerge from amid Greece’s economic chaos. Artistic production here is a marker of resilience and connectedness. The Fast Forward Festival (supported by the financially independent Onassis Foundation) looks out to an international circuit of festival theatre production. It looks back to a scenario – we might even call it Athenian – where festivals mark the cultural currency of a place. And it looks forward, embracing work that is new and emergent.

The Festival included productions by the Berlin-based company Rimini Protokoll, the Dutch scenographer and performance-maker Dries Verhoeven, and the Lebanese writer and director Rabih Mroué.² This small selection represents much of what Performance in the Twenty-First Century: Theatres of Engagement addresses, for these pieces variously deal with perspectives on fact and reality, adopt hybrid performance modes, and are intrinsically shaped by digital culture. Rimini Protokoll’s Situation Rooms is a piece for 20 spectators. Each has a set of headphones connected to an iPad (Figure 1.1). The event is split into eleven segments. In each, the spectator hears the story of an individual in some way connected with contemporary warfare – a surgeon, a child soldier, a hacker. The iPad shows a video that mixes documentary footage with a recorded version of the performance setting in which you find yourself. This enables you to navigate the space, in which you encounter different rooms (scenically arranged within a realist aesthetic), and other spectator-participants who stand in for the additional characters that are described in the scenes that you inhabit.

Figure 1.1 The spectator in action: iPad immersion in Rimini Protokoll's Situation Rooms

Source: Baumann-fotografie.de.

Dries Verhoeven’s No Man’s Land is also for 20 spectators (indeed, auditors), whom it also asks to don headphones. These are connected to MP3 players. As distinct from Situation Rooms, the voiceover that you hear is the same for all spectators simultaneously, and is a merged account of the experiences and musings of a group of immigrants who contributed to the process of creating the piece. Each spectator is taken on an individual journey through the surrounding streets by an immigrant or refugee, the latter acting as a guide and, in effect, standing in as a witness for her or his c...