Real Animals on the Stage

Teresa Grant, Ignacio Ramos-Gay, Claudia Alonso Recarte

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN:
  9780367344665
• eBook ISBN:
  9781000649918
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Theatre

Through a series of case studies, this book explores the role of live animals on the stage, from the early modern era to the present time. The contributors deal with visual and textual representations of performing animals; typologies of animals in the theatre; the hybridization of the drama with the circus, the zoo, and the cinema; as well as the semiotic transfer of animal roles from the text to the stage. The focus lies on the changing historical fortunes of the four-footed actor and on exploring the ways that attitudes to the animal affect their dramatic representations – within aesthetic contexts but also in their dramatized scientific use. Exploring snapshots of acting animals from their earliest manifestation on the early modern stage, the chapters contextualize and theorize particular uses of the animal actor, and key into current debates on the cutting edge of animal performance studies. While seeking to consider how these theoretical perspectives were formed, the collection delves into the multiple ways through which the animal presence problematizes the practice of theatricality.

This book was originally published as a special issue of Studies in Theatre and Performance.

Introduction: real animals on the stage

Teresa Grant, Ignacio Ramos-Gay and Claudia Alonso Recarte

ABSTRACT

This special issue explores the role particularly of live animals on the stage, from the early modern era to the present time. The contributions deal with visual and textual representations of performing animals, typologies of animals in the theatre, the hybridization of the drama with the circus, the zoo and the cinema, as well as the semiotic transfer of animal roles from the text to the stage. We seek here to focus on the changing historical fortunes of the four-footed actor and explore the ways that attitudes to the animal affect their dramatic representations and uses. In attempting to relate snapshots of acting animals from their earliest manifestation on the early modern stage, we contextualize and theorize the uses of the animal actor which the essays explore. The collection keys into current debates in the cutting-edge of animal performance studies while seeking to consider how these theoretical perspectives were formed.

Animal performance studies: reconstructing the cultural equation?

This special issue of Studies in Theatre and Performance explores the role particularly of live animals on the stage, from the early modern era to the present time. The contributions deal with visual and textual representations of performing animals, typologies of animals in the theatre, the hybridization of the drama with the circus, the zoo and the cinema, as well as the semiotic transfer of animal roles from the text to the stage. We seek here to focus on the changing historical fortunes of the four-footed actor and explore the ways that attitudes to the animal affect their dramatic representations and uses. In attempting to relate snapshots of acting animals from their earliest manifestation on the early modern stage, we contextualize and theorize the uses of the animal actor which the essays explore. The collection keys into current debates in the cutting-edge of animal performance studies while seeking to consider how these theoretical perspectives were formed.

The past decade has seen an important scholarly conversation between performance studies and animal studies and the formation of a new intersectional discipline, ‘animal performance studies.’ Una Chaudhuri, amongst others, has watched ‘Theatre and Performance Studies join other disciplines in making what has been called “the animal turn” in contemporary thought’ and argues that ‘the animal energies released will surely reconfigure both the genres and the aesthetics that have produced the anthropocentric theatre we have known so long’ (2016, 2). Chaudhuri’s own work, and that of other critics, such as Laura Cull, Lourdes Orozco and Jennifer Parker-Starbuck (see Orozco and Parker-Starbuck 2015), exemplifies this new approach and its interests in embodiment, process and event. As part of these critical developments, critics including Alan Read (2000), Una Chaudhuri (2003, 2007, 2014), Nicholas Ridout (2004, 2006), Jennifer Parker-Starbuck (2006), Michael Peterson (2007) and Peta Tait (2011) have all reassessed the meaning of ‘performance’ and ‘actor’ under the conviction that animals ‘are not just objects in performance, but also its active agents’ (Orozco 2013, 39). What better space to reflect on the sameness between the observer and the observed than a live performance? After all the etymology of ‘spectacle’ takes us back to specere (to look at, see), where the term speculum (mirror) is also rooted. Performers have also attempted to incarnate the animal – what Orozco and Parker-Starbuck (2017) have defined as the transition from the ‘animal turn’ to ‘turning animal.’ In using and actively exercising such forms of performative expression, the theatre emerges as a platform that embraces an illusion of an interspecies fusion, whereupon all sentient subjectivities, immersed in mutuality, explore and articulate a new theatrical language that channels what Castellucci calls the ‘communicable purity of the body’ (2000, 25).

The presence of nonhuman animals on contemporary stages emerges as a space for theoretical and creative contemplation that has, in recent years, attracted huge scholarly interest. The artificial stages that the nonhuman other has been brought to occupy for the sake of creativity and entertainment range from the most typical audio-visual spaces – film, television, the circus, the theatre, dance stages, museum exhibits – to platforms specifically dedicated to the contemplation of their bodies and behaviour (even if manipulated by unnatural conditions), such as aquaria, dog or horse shows, zoos and bioparks, reservations for safaris, or sporting arenas (for rodeos, bullfights, shooting or other forms of animal sacrifice). These highly theatricalized exhibitions and spectacles bring together environmental, ethical, economic, political and legal concerns with those of an aesthetic and philosophical nature, thus exciting an interdisciplinary approach to the live animal in the domain of art. The live animal on the stage is forced to inhabit and challenge the paradox upon which performative arts operate: the contestation between the aesthetic impulse towards the perennial and the ephemeral and evanescent quality of performance. Because we are uncertain of the animal’s consciousness and self-awareness of such artificial spaces, its presence stretches and resets the competing forces between the perpetuity which art aspires towards and the inevitable impermanence that defines theatricality. The essays in this collection negotiate these challenges in different ways. In some, the tension is expressed and reworked in the co-operation between page and stage (e.g. Grant, Ramos, Parker-Starbuck); in others the ‘stage’ needs redefining even before the start of the process of analysis (Alonso, Tait, Orozco). But all the essays point to this new scholarly Weltanschauung in which the animal is not just the entertainment, but engages its audience in a process which reorders thinking in a fundamental way. As Cull puts it, ‘such uses of performance may not be geared towards the production of knowledge about animals at all, so much as an embodied proximity to animals’ own ways of thinking and performing that remains resistant to any attempted paraphrase into discourse’ (Cull 2015, 25).

The symbolism inherent to the performing animal (e.g. Grant, Ramos, Orozco), its translatability into the more permanent, scripted text (Grant, Parker-Starbuck), the industrial cycle within which it is objectified and aestheticized (Ramos, Tait) and the ethics surrounding such exploitation (Alonso, Orozco) are all matters that are described in the articles here. Through a historiographical lens that tends to the semiotics of theatricality in particular cultural and socio-historical contexts, the articles explore the shifting perceptions regarding the condition of animality (and, consequently, that of humanity) as suggested by the different types of ‘stages’ analysed by the authors, and in which the animal is experienced in multiple ways by the senses. The essays here treat animal performance ranging from the seventeenth century to the twenty-first, and draw attention to how shifting notions of theatricality and performance modify the ‘work’ done by the animal on stage (see Ridout 2006, 100ff.). Because audience understanding of the conventions of theatricality has changed, the essays throw up interesting theoretical problems: can, Grant asks, Ridout’s description of theatre as ‘rigorously exclud[ing] nature. It stays where it is, in the city. No natural light comes in’ be usefully applied to early modern stages where meta-theatricality demands that ‘the cultural equation collapses,’ or that we are, at least, considering a very different cultural equation (Ridout 2006, 98)? Erica Fudge (1999, 2006) and Bruce Boehrer’s work on Renaissance animals (and the huge enterprise which was A Cultural History of Animals (Kalof and Pohl-Resl 2007)) has already historicized early modern animal performance to some extent, Boehrer reminding us that it is impossible to say what the early moderns thought about animals (or indeed anything) because they thought differently at different times: he shows us a process of thought rather than historical stasis. The emblematic trajectories that he traces demonstrate the fluidity of animals’ figurative denotations. This is a riposte to those who want to think only with dehistoricized animals – in one way a negation of the ‘real’ which Fudge is seeking in her work – and, as Boehrer points out, an approach which ‘fails to do justice to the richness of animal being’ (Boehrer 2010, 186; see Grant 2012). If this holds true even for the relatively short period of time called early modern, the same must be apparent across the longer time-sweep of seventeenth to twenty-first century. It seems, then, that any models that animal performance studies proposes should be tested by the de-historicizing and then re-historicizing of both the conventions of theatricality and human attitudes to animals.

Economics, ethics and exploitation

As the ludi in Ancient Rome have shown us, the semiotics of theatricality are strategically orchestrated in accordance with an acute awareness of how space is to be managed: far from limiting themselves to the mere randomized parade of wild species on the arena, the masterminds behind the organization of the imperial games seemed to possess a visual sensibility and acuity not unlike those of today’s choreographers or stage directors. Evidence of these aesthetic interests was the cornucopia of species that were exhibited (and the abundant number of specimens per species). In his Epistulae ad familiares (62–43 B.C.), Cicero notes that in the Pompeii games that took place in 55 B.C., up to 600 lions, 400 leopards, and several hundred other species – including a rhinoceros (2001, 7.1.3.) – were proudly displayed. Far from diluting visual effects into a single animalistic mass, each species embodied a distinct symbolic power, and its vitality was theatricalized through adornments that decorated their bodies or through visual narratives in which they were made to ‘play a role.’ Martial for instance recounts in De Spectaculis (80 A.D.) an execution in which the public arena was devised as the forest in which Orpheus (‘played’ by none other than the convict) was to be slayed not by Thracian Maenads, as related in the myth, but by a bear (1993, Ep. 24 (21)). In manners such as these do the ludi flesh out the staggering magnificence (both at a visual and at an allegorical, narrative level) that is rendered possible through the staging of live animal bodies. Indeed, the animal’s theatrical potential and implications (as proven by the elevated number of audience members and actors – be they human or not – and the richness of the scenography and narrative ‘scripts’) foreshadows the ambitious and spectacular lavishness present in the nineteenth-century and current theatre stage. More than the exhibition of the natural reality of the animal, the Roman games sought to capture it culturally (Boyde 2014), that is, to objectify it through forceful domination and through its projection within a theatricalized environment aimed at entertainment and symbolic of the superiority of man over the natural world (Shelton 2007).

The essays here demonstrate that these issues, current in the first centuries B.C. and A.D, have been a matter for discussion in a historical contiguity ever since the renaissance of classical thought. As Tait and Parker-Starbuck attest, most obvious is the distinct symbolic power of massed animals of one or contrasting species as they ‘play their roles’ on later stages. But Parker-Starbuck’s essay demonstrates the drip-feed of repetition, in a series of shows which demand that the spectator engage with animals massed epistemologically rather than physically. And unlike the expendable beasts of the Roman ludi, Tait’s essay exhibits what is, on the face of it, a profit motive but one, crucially, which can also be seen to speak to animal welfare. At this conjunction of the inter-reliant protection of the physical and the financial, we could read Clarkes’ New Circus as an allegory for our burgeoning modern...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Citation Information
• Notes on Contributors
• 1. Introduction: real animals on the stage
• 2. ‘A pleasant tragicomedy, the cat being scap’t’?: William Sampson’s The Vow Breaker (1636) and the instability of genre
• 3. ‘Des singes, c’était le narcisse’: class, imitation and performing monkeys in late-eighteenth century Paris
• 4. Replacing injured horses, cross-dressing and dust: modernist circus technologies in Asia
• 5. There is a whale in the room: Pina Bausch’s animals on stage
• 6. Animals in socially engaged performance practice: becomings on the edges of extinction
• 7. ‘When the animal cannot keep up a good appearance it had better go out of the room’: vivisection and theatricality in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries
• Index