Surviving Theatre

The Living Archive of Spectatorship

Marco Pustianaz

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9781032078472
• eBook ISBN: 9781000450545
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Mezzi di comunicazione e arti performative
• Subtopic: Teatro

Written soon before and in the middle of the Covid-19 pandemic, when theatre ground to a halt and spectatorship was suspended, this book takes stock of spectatorship as theatre's living archive and affirms its value in the midst of the present crisis.

Drawing from a manifold affective archive of performances and installations (by Marina Abramovi?, Ron Athey, Forced Entertainment, Socìetas Raffaello Sanzio, Blast Theory, LIGNA, Doris Salcedo, Graeme Miller, Lenz Rifrazioni, Cristina Rizzo, etc.), and expanding on the work of many theorists and scholars, such as Roland Barthes and Jacques Rancière, Giorgio Agamben and Alain Badiou, Nicholas Ridout and Alan Read, among others, the book focuses on the spectator as the subject, rather than the object, of investigation. This is the right time to remember their secret power and theorise their collective time in the theatre. This book is an archive of their adventure and a manifesto rooted in their potentiality. It boldly posits the spectator as the inaugurator of theatre, the surplus that survives it.

The book will be of great interest to spectators all and sundry, to scholars and students of theatre and performance studies, of spectatorship and politics.

1 Infinite amounts of remaining time

DOI: 10.4324/9780367809065-2

Spectatorship is inherently connected with time. This becomes apparent once we recognise the fundamental discontinuity that allows us to say that acts of spectatorship have occurred. The seeing spectator is replaced by the spectator who has seen and vouchsafes for a relation of continuity between the two. The surviving subject may be called posthumous, the term defining the offspring born after the death of the originator, and by extension the last-born child in a family. Surviving, a spectator remembers another on behalf of both subjects and renames this remembrance spectatorship. An aesthetic closure – the end of theatre – produces a temporal threshold and the historicity of its subject. Spectatorship will only be ownerable as a consequence of that closure, the distance between a duration felt and one vividly sensed as remaining, like an aftermath. As the distance from the point of departure lengthens, so spectatorship travels inexorably further from it, even as it attempts to retrace its steps. This double movement shapes the affective relation with its archive: the beginning from which one’s experience springs coupled with a return to it that misses the mark. Without these missed returns, there would be no affective archive, especially no archive of theatre, to which no spectator can return. This is why the spectator’s destiny is to be homeless. They do not belong to the theatre. As the theatre is no home to them, so it confounds their return. Yet, the impossible notion of the theatre as a kind of home, a generic home that is home to nobody, is hard to dispel. Hence, the stubborn retracing of steps and the attempt to domesticate an impossible return. The recurrence of memory – a technology of survival to cobble together a home with what is no longer there – conjures up the feeling that theatre itself might be engaged in a similar business.

A camp structure, an assemblage of bunk beds huddled close together. Children and adults scramble along the narrow paths winding their way among the beds to find an empty place. They remove their shoes. A dormitory. Its confined spaces create a womb-like interior gathered around a small clearing. There, underneath a dim light, a storyteller holds a book in her hand, ready to be opened. The beds are child-size. Adult spectators curl up to fit inside them, making themselves smaller, like children. They cover themselves with rough military blankets. A theatre mimicking the intimacy of home, yet scarcely recreating the enclosure of domestic comfort. An emergency camp, rather, a temporary one. Children snuggle up with parents in the same bed. This time, the adults will be listening, like them, to a fairy tale, rather than reading it to them. Children and adults, equally turned into listeners, are all exposed to the fairy tale’s imminent dangers. In the moments of fear, the adults will hug and comfort the children, though having fear themselves. Lights go off, except for the spot where the woman starts reading, “Once upon a time”. Closing their eyes, they allow her body to float away, clinging only to her voice. Seeing surrenders to listening. Wrapped up in the semi-darkness, childhood is once again within the adults’ reach, remembered by their crouching body. Is childhood the time to which they are returning? Will this be their homecoming?

The fairy tale is Charles Perrault’s Little Thumb (or Hop o’ My Thumb), a folk tale where the iteration of homecoming is as obsessive as it is disturbing. Enter the posthumous, the indisputable hero of the tale. Little Thumb is the last-born, the seventh son to a poor woodcutter’s family. He is so small he is nearly invisible and easily forgotten. As Louis Marin has remarked, he is also the odd one out among his twin brothers.¹ Being unusually quiet, he is supposed to be dumb, but, as the storyteller reminds us early on, he is also a sharp listener. Listening, together with the diminutive size making him unnoticeable, affords Little Thumb the chance to slip away, overhear plans and steal secrets. There are two homecomings in the tale, both of them orchestrated by the resourceful child. In the beginning of the story, faced by utter starvation, the poor parents have no qualms in abandoning their seven children to fend for themselves in the woods. The first time, Little Thumb leads his brothers back by following the trail of pebbles dropped by him, unseen, along the way. Unrepentant, the parents attempt to get rid of their children a second time. This time, however, as a big storm approaches, Little Thumb and his brothers discover that the secret plan masterminded by our hero has come to nought: the trail of breadcrumbs has been eaten up by starving birds. With the breadcrumbs gone missing, the children are totally lost, with no shelter, drenched by the outpour of cold rain and easy prey to the howling wolves they hear in the distance. We hear in the distance. In Socìetas Raffaello Sanzio’s Buchettino (Little Thumb),² the immersion in sound forces the listeners to imagine themselves as those children. There is simply no other option. As the children in the tale are prevented from going home, the spectators (both children and adults) are forced to share their homelessness, thrown into a primitive state of abandonment. This is the first disconcerting feature of childhood in Buchettino.

In the theatre, the experience of this shared condition is made possible by the collision between narrative time and listening time, by the tension between distance and immersion. On the one hand, the narrator’s voice (Monica Demuru’s) tells the story in the past tense, keeping us at a conventionally safe distance – the distance secured by the written text she is reading from.³ On the other, the feeling of safety is frustrated, because in our listening time Monica’s oral performance and the immersive soundscape conspire to jolt us to a present that is inescapable. In Buchettino, sound effects are created live by sound technicians all around the camp structure, their foley techniques turning it into a veritable acoustic chamber. The effect is especially overpowering in all moments of danger, which in this tale are as frequent as they are extreme: being cast out, getting lost, dying of starvation or cold and, especially, being eaten up (by the wolves, by the Ogre). In these moments, the indefinite time of an immemorial past (“Once upon a time”) is replaced by a presentness that is immanent and overwhelming. Thus, when the wind is supposed to be howling in the past, we hear it howling now, and the same applies to the chairs scraping the floor, the pebbles being dropped, the horses galloping and the fire crackling. The aural intensity of the present is also amplified by the grain of the storyteller’s voice, fleshing out the singularity of each character through modifications in pitch and timbre. Her voice, in other words, never stands above or to the side of the narrative, but merges with the sound event. When the Ogre, preceded by his thunderous paces, roars his first words, “Is dinner ready? I am so hungry!”, the whole structure shakes, and we cower in fear. The distant remembrance of the protection of home wanes before the perception of the utter fragility of our temporary shell, repeatedly pierced by sound. At times, our bunk beds feel literally quaking, as though their collapse were not such a distant possibility. No matter how safely we are sheltered, we feel exposed, as if in the open. The adults, including those of us unaccompanied by children, become sharply aware of the smaller ones among us, whose uneasy movements we overhear, interspersed by the occasional gasp and, sometimes, by subdued crying.

With no homecoming possible and helplessly at the mercy of the elements, the brothers lose sight of Little Thumb. They may be desperate, but he is not. Climbing on top of a tree, he looks around in search of a saving light: a new home to be gained. This, of course, will turn out to be the Ogre’s dwelling, where he lives with his submissive wife and their seven small girls. Behind the brothers’ backs is a home that has cast them out, ahead of them a house whose gaping mouth is waiting to swallow them. The question boils down to bare bodily survival. Such a grotesque reduction is reinforced by the violating presence of the acoustic envelope invading our safety zone, as though to force a return to basic bodily affects. The subordination to an all-encompassing aurality emphasises our bodily interconnection, both amongst us and with the unseen, endangered children of the tale. Spectatorship reverts to a kind of wakeful alertness. Unlike attention, which is trained on a specific object, alertness is a diffuse bodily intelligence aroused when our body is surrounded by danger on all sides.⁴ Thus, stripped of any rhetorical sublimity, the here and now of theatre conjures up a plane of radical immanence. Its inescapable present is the time when survival is at stake. It is allegorised for us by Little Thumb up on a tree, scanning the space between the family and the Ogre. That there is no basic difference between the two becomes obscenely audible when, on their first, successful homecoming, the children catch their parents in the act of relishing an unexpected banquet. We distinctly hear them savouring their meat with mouth-watering sounds: “Yum, what a treat! I can’t wait to pick the bones, too!”, “Ah, I am so full up, my belly is bursting!”. The salivating mouths of the parents, blissfully forgetful of their children, are a foreboding of the Ogre’s famished growl. Immanence is unforgiving. We can neither go back to a safe home nor look forward to a safe future. The present danger is our only common ground: we share it with Little Thumb and his brothers, not to mention the Ogre’s girls who, thanks to Little Thumb’s cunning, are going to be slaughtered instead of them. Above all, we share this danger with the children and adults around us. It is therefore imperative for the spectator to understand what this shared present is and how to survive it.

Buchettino by Chiara Guidi (one of the founding members of Socìetas Raffaello Sanzio) is the fourth work in a series that, since 1992, has immersed children in spatial environments where they make a promenade journey inside a fairy tale. It is part of a theatrical research, focused on the children’s gaze and their relationship to the world, which goes by the name of teatro infantile (infant theatre).⁵ First performed in 1995, Buchettino departs from the other performances devised for the company’s Experimental School of Infant Theatre in its being designed for an audience of 50 children and adults. The mixed nature of its spectators further complicates the scope and resonance of the notion of ‘infancy’. How can adults be possibly addressed as infants? ‘Teatro infantile’ is a term that is hard to translate, as it differs from the usual terms indicating, in Italian, ‘children’s theatre’ (teatro dell’infanzia, teatro ragazzi and so on). A children’s theatre usually refers to a theatre, which, though addressed to children, is directed by adults according to what they think is safe and appropriate for them. It is an extension of the pedagogical mission of school and family, whose educational goal is to draw the children out of childhood (as the prefix ex- in the Latin verb educere makes clear). In the chronological sense implied by the term ‘children’s theatre’, childhood is seen as a temporary condition which, while being common to all (an age of humankind), is specific to children: a necessary step in their development towards adulthood. Overshadowed by its destination, childhood is by definition a time that has to be overcome. We may compare the relationship between childhood and adulthood to that between potentiality and act, though a potentiality whose future is already foreseen, with no other possible realisation than adulthood. As childhood develops into adulthood, the former is subsumed into the latter.

Taking seriously the difference introduced by the term ‘infant theatre’, however, means to reject this segregated notion of childhood. The only way infancy might serve its purpose is to disrupt the always already established boundary between the child who is not yet an adult and the adult who is no longer a child. To a traditional pedagogy driven by adults, infant theatre juxtaposes a parallel “anthropogogy” driven by children.⁶ If pedagogy draws children out of childhood, we may suppose that anthropogogy would probably draw adults out of adulthood. A two-way process of education implies a mutual drawing out, exposing both children and adults to the scattering of chronological time. Their mutual displacement may end up altering the very meaning of anthropos. In the liminal space called ‘infant theatre’, children and adults are both invited “to step over a threshold”: “Who does so perceives that something has always been there: a world open to experience, planting an insight right at the bottom of one’s own gaze”.⁷ Thus, infant theatre does not address itself to children as a special target: it takes infancy to its own bosom.⁸ It addresses at the same time children and adults, whether actors, instructors or spectators. By making infancy simultaneous to all, indeed by displacing it to the theatre – it is the theatre that is infant – Chiara Guidi and the Socìetas contest the idea of infancy as a bounded time and a closed horizon, thus problematising the apportioning and measuring of time according to what is deemed proper to the different ages of man.⁹ Rather, infancy is approached as an experiment (a quest, a trial, in the typical language of myths and fables). It is neither a temporal outpost to which adults time-travel, fantasising a recovered childhood, nor the time tautologically inhabited by children alone. At least, if we accept Chiara Guidi’s extraordinary suggestion that children are such because they do not know they are children.¹⁰ The non-chronological quality of infancy is especially crucial for the self-appointed adult spectator of Buchettino, who is made to share the same horizontal posture as the children. In order to be equally addressed, children and adults must be levelled. But how can the chasm of chronological time be made to retreat? One way of doing so is suggested by the etymology of the word infans: the one not speaking. As its negative prefix suggests, infancy is less a positive capacity than a negative attribute, maintaining an ambiguous connection with an absence of speech. In order for infancy to be accessible, adults and children must both be thrown into a scene of language, where the origin of their difference will be felt, as if for the first time.

Buchettino opens with a powerful image: a woman waiting for us with an open book. The book reminds us that the words she is going to say precede her voice, enshrined as written traces. Yet, this is not how we will encounter them. We are not readers, we are read to. With our eyes closed, the book vanishes, only her voice remains. Whereas in the light she is a reader drawing her power from literacy, in the dark she is a storyteller, commanding her magical power through orality. Her maternal figure shuttles reassuringly between the written and the oral word, as though they belonged to the same world. But we know they do not, or at least we just start to remember their strange difference. Two contrasting scenes are held together by the woman’s voice. The reading scene promises a safe shelter to those who gather around the book. The storyteller, perfectly still in the eye of the storm, is going to lead us all to safety, since the written word has tamed all danger by capturing it inside a book, so that our lives will never be at risk. However, the reading scene disappears as soon as we close our eyes. The listening scene takes over with its untamed, impinging sonority, threatening to bring down our shelter and thrust us into the open. The neat opposition between safety and danger is thrown into confusion by the fact that in Buchettino we are soon led to forget that a book is being read. We forget the safety of literacy, which would be right at hand if only we opened our eyes. Thus, a confrontation is staged between the tale read from a book, steadily progressing to its happy end, and the same tale hurtling back into the darkness, as though reaching back to a time immemorial signalled at the beginning of the tale: “Once upon a time”. Listening in the dark pits the forgotten power of orality against the progressive fortunes of literacy. The confrontation takes us to a fateful threshold: the becoming-infant of speech.

The very notion of ‘infant speech’ sounds puzzling. What is a speech that is not speaking? Despite the apparent contradiction, the term infancy commonly refers to an early stage of childhood that follows the onset of speech. In England, children aged four to seven are sent to infant schools. Even Chiara Guidi’s infant theatre has in mind children aged seven to ten.¹¹ What might turn young speake...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• Acknowledgements
• Note on pronouns and number
• Introduction: the twilight of spectatorship
• 1 Infinite amounts of remaining time
• 2 Affect and the spectator’s body
• 3 Spect(r)ating Hamlet
• 4 Spectatorship at work
• 5 Diasporics
• 6 The manifold archive of Shibboleth
• End: as a prelude
• Bibliography
• Index