Theatre and History

Rebecca Schneider

• Publisher: Methuen Drama
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN:
  9780230246614
• eBook ISBN:
  9781350316386
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Performing Arts

This provocative book meets the supposedly 'live' practices of performance and the 'no-longer-live' historical past at their own dangerous crossroads. Focussing on the 'and' of the title, it addresses the tangled relations between the terms, practices, ideas, and aims embedded in these compatriot - but often oppositional - arts and acts of time.

theatre & history

Since you are holding it in your hand (or using your hand to scroll across your screen), you are already aware that three words put together make the title of this little book – Theatre & History. In fact, the order of the first and third words may not matter very much. What is important – it seems obvious – is that the ampersand, the coordinating conjunction “and,” falls in the middle. It’s in the middle that things often get interesting. But it’s also where things can get awkward or confusing.

Given that this book is part of a Theatre & series of books, the “and” may function here not only as a coordinating conjunction, but as what’s called a copulative conjunction. In a copulative conjunction, one of the words is an add-on, or surplus in some way, and as in all copulation, things can get sticky, complicated, and lead to all sorts of family disputes. Which comes first, for instance – theatre or history? Which is on top, which on bottom, in order of interest, emphasis, importance, pleasure, and so on?

But let’s not let squabbles start before we even begin!

Most of the book that follows will be about the ampersand – the conjoining “and” that brings together, for the time we spend together in this book, theatre and history. It is not a book of theatre history, or even about theatre history,¹ but a book balancing in the sometimes awkward overlapping spaces between the practices, between the disciplines, between the ideas and ends of theatre and history. When we fall fully into the topic, as we will, we may at times feel far removed from the most grounded question: Why?

Why study theatre and history?

It seems as if we ought to proceed with care. Because, in fact, the topic is one of importance. This is not a small book on a conjunction rarely studied by students – say, theatre and seagulls, or Vulcans and history. Almost every Theatre Department in every major university in Europe and the United States offers a course or courses on theatre history, often as a requirement for those who graduate with the focus of their degree in Theatre Arts. Even if History Departments do not regularly offer theatre history as a requirement, we might add ruefully, the topic is nevertheless one with gravitas, with its own history and its own ongoing theatre of operations.

Still, for some students, particularly those who want to go onto the stage as actors, studying theatre history can feel like sitting on your hands.

For others, such as those who study history, getting on your feet to “act” may seem antithetical to proper archival pursuits or engagement with fact.

The two don’t often know why they might want to be in conversation.

For most practitioners, the theatre is “live,” and by definition “now.” History appears at first glance to be neither. Doesn’t a theatre artist struggle to lift calcified worlds off of the page or out of the past? Being in the moment, finding the “beat,” chasing intuition, riding “emotion memory,” or even just “finding your light” – how can that possibly be related to spelunking for “facts” in dark and dusty archives where historians work like Shakespeare’s burrowing old moles (Harries 2000: 81)?

Conversely, for historians, studying a medium in its liveness, its “nowness,” may seem against the grain of the project of history – a project that, by most accounts, seeks to analyze the “then” in some distinction to the “now.” Even if a history brings us “up to the minute,” few historians would claim it’s the minute shared by the reader in a “co-presence” akin to theatre (Zhao 2004; Fischer-Lichte 2008). “What happened” does not recur.² What’s in the past stays in the past. Can the dead appear live? The live dead? Then and now are not usually given to be simultaneous, except in decidedly problematic embodied practices – like reenactment and theatre.

To historians, actors may seem like the manipulators of shadows in Plato’s proverbial cave, their surface projections at a definite remove from anything resembling ideal or real historical evidence concerning whatever is presented. It may seem against best practice to look to the theatre – the domain of artifice – for what happened in a past “reality.” Theatre can only “evidence” theatre – a mise en abyme that doesn’t ever hit the ground of the real. Isn’t theatre, and theatricality, always essentially faux? Thinking with and through the theatrical can raise conundrums almost beyond measure whenever “facts” are at stake. If one can say a production of The Seagull by Anton Chekhov “happened” in 1898 at the Moscow Art Theatre, what relation would the real falseness of the theatre have, or have had, to the real reality of the street, the city, the country, the world of actual events? Beyond the recognition that people, “then,” made theatre “then” (and that that “then” was “now” only “then”), why study it further? The now and the then, the pretend and the real, are awkward bedfellows at best, and aren’t the progeny of their copulation complicated hybrids? Impossibilities? Illegitimacies? Errors?

So, I’ve decided to start this small book with brief sections on the words themselves – “And,” “History,” “Theatre” – followed by sections on why the topic is important. Dropping the “and” would leave us with “Theatre History.” It is useful, I think, to ask quite simply: Why study it? And important, as well, to ask that question both for students of theatre and for students of history, though in fact it is not only students who sometimes wonder at this conjunction, but teachers and professional practitioners as well as audiences of both disciplines. Sometimes it’s the most obvious things that require the greatest patience to think through. So, after we’ve looked at how the dictionary might orient our use of the words, we’ll drop the “and” for a moment to turn to the topic: Why study theatre history? This important question is taken up in two sections, each with subsections. The first, “History and the theatre artist,” is addressed to theatre artists. The second, “Theatre and the historian,” is addressed to historians. But my hope, of course, is that the deleted ampersand continues its copulative activities under wraps, so to speak, and that the borders will begin to blur as we see some of the same anxieties, problems, hopes, desires, and aims occurring from different directions in both perspectives. When we return to the ampersand, we will already be well aware of the tangled terrain between the terms, and well into the heat of our … activities.

For the moment, then, before the important question of “Why?,” let’s get down to the matter of what the words assembled for study actually mean. A warning in advance: looking closely at the dictionary does not, in fact, simplify our pursuit. Quite the contrary!

“And”

“And,” the Oxford English Dictionary tells us, is “simply connective.”³ With this word, one thing – theatre – is “simply” given to exist in relation to another thing – history. But what relation? And how simple?

In truth, a connecting preposition might have been simpler than “and.” Think of the straightforwardness of various prepositions that might have been used to suggest relation. For example, “Theatre in History.” That phrase would signal the various practices of theatre that have happened in the past and would not indicate an open relation. Theatre would be placed inside the ongoing stream of events in time, and such a book could relate facts about which theatres did what, when, where, why, and how in the flow of historical time. Or, if we went a step further in thinking about theatre in history, the preposition “in” might signify the theatrical properties of historiography itself – the theatrical or fictive in historical writing. Or we could flip the first and third words around the “in” for a very different meaning, a different outside and inside: “History in Theatre.” That phrase might indicate, straightforwardly, historical facts as they are transmitted on stage – what history looks like, sounds like, feels like replayed in a theatre.

The phrase “Theatre as History” would be another example. It would seem to suggest that theatre can be approached as a mode of telling or making or displaying the past, just as the phrase “History as Theatre” might suggest the argument that any written narrative about the past is always a substitution or surrogate – posing for the thing itself – and in that way theatrical. Think about “History of Theatre.” Or “Theatre of History.” Both phrases appear to be far more straightforward in terms of the relation that is set up between the words. But “simply” connective, “Theatre and History” tells us nothing about the connection. Whether in comparison or in distinction, just what the relation is goes unsaid.

Our task, then, is to say what we might say about theatre and history and the practices they signify – in relation and in distinction. What we will find is rarely if ever a simple relation, and neither is any distinction entirely easy to draw. There are quite a few complexities held tenuously in the “simple” ampersand and those complexities are always interesting – if, at times, infuriatingly paradoxical.

We will shortly delve into all manner of complications, but as a start, and at the level of the ampersand, maybe the connection between theatre and history can be simple if we keep in mind one thing – time. Because theatre, like history, is an art of time. Even, we could say, the art of time. Time is the stuffing of the stage – it’s what actors, directors, and designers manipulate together. In this they are much like historians who wrestle or coax or otherwise prompt sentences into place, lifting one time into another time, to say something about yesterday today. In both endeavors, time is decidedly porous, pockmarked with other times. Whenever citation or repetition is in play – as it inevitably is with gestures, stances, and words – something akin to theatre and something akin to history takes place. For to use a word is to use it again. To make a gesture or express a feeling almost immediately couples with other gestures, other feelings, from other times and places. Language itself, whether composed of ink, light, sound, or bodily gesture, teems with other times, and words other than nonsense words (and even a lot of nonsense words) set up historical relations. Words have been used before, heard before – that’s how we come to understand them and “do things” with them (Austin 1975). Beforeness is a given, and beforeness (as well as afterness) is the explicit substance of rehearsal, as much as it is of archives. Theatre makes itself in the “again and again and again” that is not only rehearsal but the run of a show and the trajectory of a tradition, mode, or style of performance. History, too, goes back (and back and back) over tracks traveled before. If beforeness is relatively implicit in everyday life (Connerton 1989; Schechner 2013: 34), it is the explicit glue in the works of theatre’s stages and history’s pages (Roach 1993: 16–17).

Nevertheless, the couple can sometimes have trouble conversing. An acting student explained to me once that studying theatre history is a “time suck.” And for an historian to take an acting class? It may be a fanciful pastime (versus past time) at best, but hardly a required tool in an historian’s box of methods to access the past. And yet, studying across this divide should be vital to both endeavors. Why?

We will need to look at the “why” from a theatre student’s perspective as well as the perspective of a history student. We will do that. First, though, let’s stay with the idea that the relation is “simple” before we turn again to the dictionary to excavate precision. As a simple start, what do we know at a commonsense level about what these words signify? Is it possible to say a few simple things about what will soon become an impossible paradox of a project? What can we say very reductively? For example, can we say that both theatre and history are practices? That is simple enough.

You can practice theatre. You can practice history. Both are practices.

But what kind of practices are they?

What can we say of theatre as a practice? We can say, for the moment, that one can practice theatre as an actor, or dancer, or director, or designer, or spectator, or script reader, or playwright, or box office manager, or stage manager (the list goes on and on). One can practice theatre arts by renting or buying or building or finding a stage or an arena or even a street corner or URL for performance and then by performing there – rehearsing or performing a play script, or practicing improvisation, or, through one of innumerable methods, acting or directing or dancing or singing or writing or designing plays or skits or choreographies or stances or sounds or performance acts for or in that space.

What can we say of history as a practice – again, at an impossibly reductive level? We can say that one can practice history by studying the past and writing a narrative about it, or creating an oral narrative about the past based on one’s own experience or on the testimonies of others, or remembering and in some way relating something about the past based on factual evidence, or researching the past in an archive or at an archaeological dig or by talking to people who experienced something in the past … This list, too, goes on and on. One can practice history as an archivist to preserve the past, or as an archaeologist to reveal artifacts from the past and then analyze them in a narrative, or as a researcher to analyze and tell about the past, or as a curator to display the past. Uncovering, preserving, analyzing, writing about, telling about, displaying materials considered to be of the past are the domain of the historian.

So far, they are both practices. But there is overlap here. You might say of theatre, as we said of history, that you can practice theatre by analyzing, revealing, writing, telling, or displaying and that, by virtue of training and rehearsal and the practice of citation, theatre, too, necessarily processes and preserves the past. In any run of a show, the effort is usually to play the performance or perform the play as determined in rehearsal, and sometimes to present the play with “fidelity” to the author’s intention, or to “original” productions, or simply according to an event score or plan, and other such temporally removed indicators of lineage or tradition or (to borrow a word from Yoko Ono) instruction. Thus, there is often a fundamental “replay” aspect to theatre and performance; whether fidelitous or infidelitous to the past, it is often the past that is put into play. In fact, this is true of any time-based art that follows a script, a score, a tradition, a style of playing, or an instruction for doing. Often a theatre artist uses or manipulates embodied traditions of theatre art (preserved through live practice and in-bodied knowledge passed down through generations) to impart stories on the stage, and more often than not those stories or plays come from a time before the present moment of production.

But let’s not get too far ahead of ourselves. The word “live” has already slipped into this book several times and it will have a world of impact. For there is nothing “simple” about the appellation “live” – especially in the context of the question of what constitutes history and what constitutes theatre. Is theatre always only live? Is history … not live? If so, is it “dead”? Or if the antonym to “live” is “recorded,” is history never accessed off the record? Or is live theatre never itself a means of recording? Can there be no body-to-body transmission that has historical verity? Can live modes of remembering, such as orature,⁴ never be considered history? We’re falling into a world of troubles very quickly here. Let’s return to the simpler line of questioning, at least for a little while longer.

What else can we say by way of simple comparison?

Surely we can say with confidence that there are professions assigned to both practices of theatre and practices of history – if history for the moment means the art or practice of writing or telling about the past in the form of a book or narrative or record (more on this anon), and theatre means the art or practice of mounting, writing, or telling stories or acts in a space that can be called a stage or performance space (more on this anon). One can make a living as a theatre artist or theatre scholar. One can make a living as an historian. One can even make a living as a theatre historian! But: Can one make a living as the inverse of a theatre historian? And what would that be? A history theatrician? A history theatrical (for one definition of “theatrical” in the OED is “a professional actor”)? A history performer? Or a theatrical historian? A performing historian? A history theatre artist? If so, what is history theatre or history performance? Again, we may be getting ahead of ourselves.

In a moment we will need to become more precise about our word use, clearly. The word “historical” and the word “theatrical,” as well as the odd word “theatrician,” not to mention again the word “live,” have all snuck into our comparison without adequate definition. But for now, the answer to the question “Can one make a living as a history theatre artist?” might be, simply, yes. One can make a living as a history theatre artist, as awkward as the phrase may be. Think of a professional reenactor – there are quite a few Abraham Lincoln presenters out there, for example, some of whom make at least a partial living out of what for others is a “hobby.”⁵ Think of “...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Series editors’ preface
• “And”
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index