Hauntological Dramaturgy

Affects, Archives, Ethics

Glenn D'Cruz

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781000547344
• Topic: Medios de comunicación y artes escénicas
• Subtopic: Artes escénicas
• Edition: 1

This book is about some of the ways we remember the dead through performance. It examines the dramaturgical techniques and strategies that enable artists to respond to the imperative: 'Remember Me' – the command King Hamlet's ghost gives to his son in Shakespeare's famous tragedy, Hamlet. The book develops the concept of hauntological dramaturgy by engaging with a series of performances that commemorate, celebrate, investigate, and sometimes seek justice for the dead.

It draws on three interrelated discourses on haunting: Derrida's hauntology with its ethical exhortation to be with ghosts and listen to ghosts; Abraham and Torok's psychoanalytic account of the role spectres play in the transmission of intergenerational trauma; and, finally, Mark Fisher's and Simon Reynolds' development of Derrida's ideas within the field of popular culture. Taken together, these writers, in different ways, suggest strategies for reading and creating performances concerned with questions of commemoration. Case studies focus on a set of known and unknown figures, including Ian Charleson, Spalding Gray and David Bowie.

This study will be of great interest to students, scholars and practitioners working within theatre and performance studies as well as philosophy and cultural studies.

1 Memorialisation, Memory and Practices of Archival Care

DOI: 10.4324/9780367808891-2

Ghosts can manifest in a variety of places, but archives, institutional and personal, provide an especially conducive environment for spectres since they contain ephemera associated with dead people, past events and bygone eras. These remnants mediate our encounters with ghosts. Archives, then, are haunted places. And the institutional archive is an especially foreboding place. In the words of Elin Diamond, it ‘reeks of legality and ceremony. It’s where you curtsy even when you don’t intend to. It’s where you mark the difference between this place and every other place’ (2008, 24). This type of official repository is often difficult to access without the appropriate academic or professional credentials, and, as we shall see, it functions as stern arbiter of truth and a source of historical authority. That said, archives have never been so prominent in scholarly discourse.

David Carlin believes that archives, in recent times, have lost their dowdy reputation and have become ‘enticing’ (2020, 32). No doubt, this transformation is partly a consequence of the digital revolution, and many scholars, including Carlin, have pointed out that we need to rethink the ontology of the archive in the light of digital technology since, today, archival objects, or digital representations of such objects, are, theoretically, available to everybody. The Internet may be the biggest archive ever built, but material collecting institutions—galleries, libraries, archives and museums—still exist, and access to their materials continues to be restricted. Gunhild Borggren and Rune Gade make a similar point to Carlin when they note that the idea of the archive has expanded in recent years

from the idea of a physical storage space that preserves objects and documents to virtual archives of data collections accessed through computer screens, collective memory engaged in reinterpretations of history, or political dimensions of archives invested with issues of accessibility and power.

(2013, 9)

It is no coincidence that various digital technologies—digital audio and non-linear video editing software along with digital storage and retrieval mechanisms—provide a condition of possibility for the appearance of ghosts that I write about in this book.

Inevitably, archives house incomplete records, and these omissions generate debate and rancour amongst all scholars concerned with questions of history, legacy and inheritance, but archives also pose a particular set of practical and philosophical problems for those interested in preserving the legacies of performances and performers. A welter of critical commentary on these difficulties testifies to the way the archive troubles the ontology of performance. Paul Clarke and Julian Warren point out that from the 1960s, ‘performance’s origins have been ontologically founded on disappearance and ephemerality as vanishing’ (2009, 47). Peggy Phelan’s claim that performance only exists in the present is the most famous articulation of this position. ‘Performance,’ she writes, ‘cannot be saved, recorded, documented, or otherwise participate in the circulation of representations of representations: once it does so, it becomes something other than performance’ (1993, 146). While Phelan was referring to performance art in this passage, I think her observation also applies to theatre since it is difficult to maintain the distinction between different genres of live performance in absolute terms—the theatre production I discuss in the second part of this chapter is, as we shall see, a case in point.

Rebecca Schneider adds a deconstructive twist to Phelan’s oft-cited ontological declaration when she argues that

the scandal of performance relative to the archive is not that it disappears (this is what the archive expects) but that it both ‘becomes itself through disappearance’ (as Phelan writes) and that it remains—though its remains resist ‘house arrest’ and Derrida’s noted domiciliation.

(2001, 105)

I will unpack Derrida’s commentary on the archive shortly. For now, it is sufficient to acknowledge that Schneider disturbs archival orthodoxy by asking whether ‘in privileging an understanding of performance as a refusal to remain, do we ignore other ways of knowing, other modes of remembering, that might be situated precisely in the ways in which performance remains, but remains differently?’ (2001, 101). This chapter is about some of these other ways of remembering, which more often than not manifest as embodied practices of care, to use Heike Rom’s phrase (2013, 38). Erdmut Wizisla points out that we remember Walter Benjamin, the celebrated literary and cultural critic, because of

the strategic calculation with which he deposited his manuscripts, notebooks, and printed papers in the custody of friends and acquaintances in various countries. His archives landed in the hands of others, so that their documents might be delivered to posterity.

(2007, 1)

Benjamin’s friends cared for his archive as a body of work and eventually found ways to disseminate his rich scholarship to the world. But what about those writers who never had the foresight or opportunity to care for their legacies? And what becomes of the legacies of those artists whose work cannot be preserved on the page or is distorted by recording mediums? This chapter engages with these questions but in so doing it will unpack the politics of the archive by paying particular attention to its spectral character. These tasks necessarily require a conversation with ghosts and an explication of the archival theory that underpins the concept of hauntological dramaturgy.

This chapter tells two ghost stories. The first concerns the memorialisation of Vicki Reynolds, an emerging playwright who died before her first full-length play, Daily Grind, was performed. I first encountered Vicki’s spectre when I was compiling a history of MWT in 2006. Sorting through a collection of dusty boxes containing the production ephemera of the company, I found a mysterious untitled VHS videotape, which, as we shall see, facilitated my interest in Vicki’s life and its memorialisation. The second section of this chapter is about the relationship between human memory and the archive. It analyses this connection by contrasting my memory of seeing what was, for me, an especially formative theatre production (John Laws/Sade by the Sydney Front) with viewing the archival video record of the same work 30 years after my original viewing. The Sydney Front, a dynamic, experimental Australian theatre company, has haunted me since I saw them perform John Laws/Sade in 1986. My encounter with the video record of this production was a singularly unsettling experience since it exposed the unreliability of my memory but also raised questions about how the unreliability of human memory can function as an archival practice of care if it remains true to the spirit of a person or an event—a topic that haunts most of the subsequent chapters in this book. Having outlined the broad structure of this chapter, we can now converse with our first hungry ghost, Vicki Reynolds.

Letter to a Dead Playwright

Dear Vicki,

You didn’t know me, so let me introduce myself. My name is Glenn D’Cruz, and I’m a theatre studies academic at Deakin University. Through a convoluted chain of events I won’t bore you with, I find myself faced with the daunting task of organising the Melbourne Workers Theatre archive. I guess I’m one of the guardians of the company’s history. Since you were an important part of that history, I feel obliged to tell you, for reasons I’ll reveal later, a little bit about what I intend to do with the remnants of the company’s past—the photographs, videotapes, scripts and other bits of production ephemera. Soon I will sort, catalogue, classify, describe, analyse and eventually deposit these items in the Deakin University library, and they’ll be accessible to anyone who has a scholarly interest in MWT, or perhaps the history of Melbourne, or maybe some other purpose I can’t possibly foresee. As you might have gathered from this awkward prelude, I’m troubled by the fact that I can’t anticipate who will examine this material—I can’t predict how future scholars might use and interpret the contents of the MWT archive, and I’m not sure how to proceed. I thought you might be able to assist me. What do you reckon, Vicki? Before I go any further, I should say something about my motivations, just in case you’re wondering about why I’ve summoned you here today.

First, let me assure you that I’m not some disinterested academic without any direct involvement with MWT. I was the chair of the company’s committee of management from 2002 to 2006 and a member of its artistic advisory committee from 2002 to 2008. I’ve seen almost every MWT performance for the last 10 years, although I must confess missing most of its early productions. I’m sorry to say I never actually saw any of your work. I also edited a book celebrating MWT’s 20th anniversary (D’Cruz 2007), but more importantly, I’m someone who admired the company’s radically egalitarian ethos and its political commitment. So there you have it—my credentials, my justifications. I have to confess my motives aren’t completely altruistic—as an academic, I stand to benefit from sifting through the miscellaneous debris of MWT’s past. This task that I find a little disquieting won’t hurt my career. Anyway, enough preamble—let’s get to the point.

In short, I’m writing to you because during the course of digitising the company’s video archive I found a videotape, which I subsequently identified as belonging to the first production of your play, Daily Grind. You might be pleased to know that it was a great success—MWT staged in 1992, and it was remounted by the Street Arts Company in Brisbane in 1994 and Belvoir Street Theatre, Sydney, in 2001. So belated congratulations. Anyway, unlike most of the archived MWT video material, which consists of edited production highlights, or full-length performances, the tape in question, while obviously connected to your play, was difficult to classify without researching its context. Why is this a big deal? Well, I can’t just deposit this artefact without some contextualisation and commentary—I’m an academic, after all, and we’re compelled to inspect, classify and analyse any artefact we consider significant (don’t ask me about the stuff we toss out—I might come to that later). Some of my colleagues call this process of selection and commentary ‘dramaturgical analysis’ (Burvill and Seton 2010, 316). Can I put a reference in a letter? Sorry, you probably don’t give a shit, but there are no hard-and-fast protocols for what I’m doing in addressing you like this, Vicki. You’ve probably sensed my nervous disposition—this is a bit weird, especially since this letter is not a private bit of correspondence. I want to respect your privacy, but since your work and name are scattered through several archives for all to see it’s probably a bit late to be overly sensitive about these things.

Anyway, the grainy VHS tape contains three sections. In the first, an actor, who I subsequently identified as Belinda McClory, performs a choreographed striptease for the camera. She bumps, grinds, gyrates and strips to Prince’s song, ‘Cream.’ Her performance is obviously sexual, although hardly provocative given the proliferation of soft pornography in popular culture in the early nineties (her ‘striptease’ is positively tame by today’s standards—how do I know? Well, let’s not go there). Belinda’s character is clearly performing for the camera, and my first impression is that the tape does not represent any sort of record of a ‘live’ theatrical performance. The second part of the tape contains footage of a man leaning on the bonnet of a parked car at night. He rolls and lights a cigarette, looks up the sky and shakes his head with a look of disdain before walking away from the car and disappearing into the distance before the image fades to black. Someone has obviously composed the scene to look like it’s part of a film or television drama. The final section is also filmic and portrays the stripper in the first scene walking down a street with a large blue bag strapped to her left shoulder. She walks right up to the camera until her head is fully in frame and produces a look somewhere between trepidation and anxiety.

It didn’t take me long to solve this mystery. Of course, I’d heard bits and pieces about you and your play while assembling the MWT book, and I remembered your friend and collaborator Patricia Cornelius insisting that the book include some acknowledgement of your singular contribution to company. I republished a short article that Patricia had written about you for the April 1995 edition of Australasian Drama Studies. Included in that volume, which I dutifully located in the Deakin University Library, were several other pieces you might find interesting. First, the journal contained the revised version of your script with an account of the ‘making’ of Daily Grind by Carol Stevenson, who was the play’s assistant director. Apologies for this, but I need to quote a bit of Carol’s article.

The original production of Daily Grind began with video footage of Roxy performing a strip and the live actor coming on to complete the routine. The juxtaposition of live and recorded images of the same woman—the one passive, viewed, the other confrontational, speaking—helped to highlight the way in which the female nude is generally positioned in an X-rated cinema compared to the way in which Roxy is positioned within Daily Grind.

(Stevenson 1995, 110)

Carol sounds like an academic (she did teach theatre history at Victoria University in New Zealand according to her biographical statement in the journal, which explains the tone of her article, which sounds as though it’s informed by aspects of 1970s feminist film theory). Anyway, there’s no direct reference to the video in the published script, and I couldn’t locate earlier drafts of the work when I was editing the MWT book. Perhaps I should trawl through the formidable pile of MWT papers and documents again. Did you ever consider using video to make the point about the disparity between passive and active performances, Vicki? Convinced that I have a duty to undertake more than a perfunctory dramaturgical analysis of the video, I searched for more information about you and Daily Grind. Possessed by ...