Performing Objects and Theatrical Things

Marlis Schweitzer, Joanne Zerdy

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781137402448
• eBook ISBN: 9781137402455
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Art General

This book rethinks historical and contemporary theatre, performance, and cultural events by scrutinizing and theorizing the objects and things that activate stages, venues, environments, and archives.

Part I

Archival Digs

1

Technology and Wonder in Thirteenth-Century Iberia and Beyond

Christopher Swift

In his commentary on the Song of Songs, Pope Gregory the Great (540–604) wrote, “allegory serves as a kind of machine to the spirit by means of which it may be raised up to God” (qtd in Swaim 21). According to Gregory, because the human soul has fallen from grace, it requires an allegory machine to elevate it again: “[t]hus when enigmas are set before a man and he recognizes certain things in the world which are familiar to him, he may understand in the sense of the words what is not familiar to him; and by means of earthly words he is separated from earth” (ibid.). According to the traditional explanation of the development of theatre in medieval Europe, mimesis and written drama share common DNA with Pope Gregory’s seventh-century program of liturgical reform, when allegorical tropes were introduced to the Mass.¹ While contemporary scholars have challenged and rewritten an evolutionary model of medieval theatre,² there is little doubt that, as it was explored in musical and figural elaborations of the liturgy, the central rite of the medieval Church was a theatrical act animated by allegory-producing machines.

For the purpose of this chapter, I find significant two concepts from Gregory’s commentary. The first is his application of the word “sense” (sensu), a word that denotes both “feeling” and “understanding” in Latin, and which Gregory uses here to mean a conduit to extraterrestrial knowledge. The second is the word “machine” or “engine” (machinam), which Gregory employs as a rhetorical conceit: an elevator for lifting the soul toward heaven. Centuries after Gregory’s liturgical reforms, conceits materialized: allegory-engines found expressions in the physical forms of articulating, moveable devotional objects. As the desire for sensual experiences of the sacred increased in communities across Europe in the late Middle Ages, the Christian faithful crafted lifelike, mechanized figures of Christ, the Virgin Mary, and saints for use in religious festivals. Although each devotional culture evidences unique body/object relationships and meanings, in general animated ritual objects encouraged lay participation in the celebration of saints and the Passion by engaging the senses, and, consequently, an emotional sense of God. I investigate the ritual alliances between late medieval Christian devotees and moveable, prop-like saints and, in particular, the performative meanings that arose from encounters with technologies of the sacred.

In medieval studies, analyses of moveable objects as instruments of performance, functionality, and technology have only just begun.³ By engaging in an object-oriented inquiry, I hope to bridge two disciplines, arguing that medieval automata were techno-mythological things: productive, symbiotic interminglings of mechanical processes and holiness. Theatrical technology enhanced the sense of sacred presence for medieval worshippers without collapsing beneath the pressure of iconoclastic doubt (skepticism arising from doctrinal encroachments on sacred materiality). While I agree that medieval animated saints effuse differences that are incommensurable with modern anthropomorphic objects from the theatre (Stelarc’s cyborgs or Peter Schumann’s puppets, for instance), I believe that employing both contemporary object-oriented theory and late medieval comprehension of objects and things produces a fuller understanding of medieval sacred puppets and their witnesses.

Shaped by an Aristotelian natural philosophy, medieval techno-mythological objects existed and acted within polymorphous fields of materiality. In the next section, I discuss how medieval metaphysics inflects contemporary concepts like objects, things, and materiality with historical particularity. I then place a unique mechanized object—La Virgen de los Reyes—in the context of the political and religious dynamics of the court of King Alfonso X (1221–1284). In the final section, I tease out performative meanings found among contradictions between faith and doctrine, and idiosyncrasies of sense and reason. In this way we may be able to shed our own metaphysical predispositions in apprehending pre-Cartesian things, and acknowledge what early modernist Jonathan Gil Harris calls the “polychronic multiplicity” of objects that suggest affinities across temporal divides (4).

Medieval presence and materiality

A principal controversy, or engagement, in the field of medieval object ontology—one that benefits from the insights of performance studies—concerns the tensions, relationships, and contradictions between and among signs and substances. As Andrew Sofer and other theatre and performance scholars have shown, the presences of objects and actors onstage have the capacity to transcend semiotic meanings. But clearly theatrical and everyday things are both indexical and phenomenological, and the two meanings do not always coalesce. A kinship exists between this disciplinary conversation in theatre studies and Aristotelian physics and metaphysics, which were incorporated into Christian dogma and exegeses. According to Aristotle, substance signifies being in and of itself, about which accidents and accidental changes (available to the human sense organs) congregate (Physics Book 1). Based in his reading of Physics, Thomas Aquinas contends that striking images are useful to worshippers because they engage the viewer, who, through association, produces surprising and fantastic images in her mind. Inanimate substances cannot move on their own, and the earthiness of statues and simulacra prevents one from confusing images with God (Aquinas, Volume I 6). The scholastic God sustained the world without suspending causal power between substances. Theologians understood images as representations of sacred history transcribed in and through the visual medium.

Aristotelian discourses—as they manifested in natural and medicinal histories in combination with moral philosophy—were particularized by the complexities of social networks comprising medieval humans and things. Doctrinal responses to the veneration of images were often at odds with what medieval scholar Carolyn Walker Bynum identifies as an intentional use of materials by artisans to call attention to the materiality of objects. The crafting of holy objects was less about “conjuring up or gesturing toward the unseen” (as religious orthodoxy would contend) than it was about “manifesting power in the matter of the object” (28). In short, the growing trend in the late Middle Ages of crafting dense, vibrant, complex, articulating sacred objects intensified the present-ness of mystical sensation for the Christian worshipper. The construction of three-dimensional statues and automata “provided direct impetus for, and were the subject of, much visionary experience in medieval Europe,” sustained by “their ability to mimic the volumes, masses, textures, and even scale of living human forms, their sometimes aggressive intrusions into our real space” (Jung 215). The particular medieval brand of living presence is different from what political theorist Jane Bennett calls “conatus,” that which is “expressed as a stubbornness or inertial tendency to persist” (Vibrant Matter 22), since medieval sacred objects not only persist but actively move toward, and interact with, other objects and humans. While contemporary materialist philosophers may conceptualize networks of multimedia actants, the medieval devotee lived them fully in her everyday.

In the medieval period, fluid experiential transactions across textual, representational, and environmental domains opened up a broad variety of potentialities and transmutations for Christian worshippers. For twentieth-century phenomenologists like Maurice Merleau-Ponty, transformations occur in perceptual fields, produced in the experiential rifts and irruptions between thing-ness (presence) and object-ness (subjecthood gained in the reflection of the other). Following Merleau-Ponty, performance scholar Stanton Garner, Jr writes that because the material body is sentient and “impinged on by a thingness, imperfectly grasped […] embodiedness is subject to modification and transformation, multiple and varying modes of disclosure, and that the forms of ambiguity that characterize the phenomenal realm represent experience in flux, oscillating within and between modes of perceptual orientation” (50–51). For the devotee of Christian saints, however, phenomenological flux exceeded the experience of an individual witness. Conditioned by narratives of agentive relics, visions of animating images, and the doctrine of Eucharistic transubstantiation that comprised the central rite of the Church, medieval Christians conceived of a world of present subjecthood—of object-things—in transmaterial dialogue with humans.

Aristotelian metaphysics of matter and zoology—that discerned the souls of humans and other living creatures existing within an eternal scheme of change (kinêsis) among all matters, potentialities, movers, and unmoved movers—were widely disseminated in medieval literate culture via Latin, Hebrew, and Arabic translations, commentaries, and glosses. The exegeses that responded to ancient Greek philosophy offered the existential proposition that everyday entities like plants, animals, rocks, and other humans resided together on a spectrum of interrelated and changeable substances.⁴ Such a proposition supported faith in legends about vivacious, proactive, clamorous saints who intervened into the worldly affairs of humans. The religious world of worshippers comprised “dazzling sanctuaries, ceremony, litanies, curses, visions, and divine vengeance, as well as saints who cured the sick, raised the dead, slept, talked (back), owned property, and, on occasion, fought to protect it” (Little 200). The engagement with the physical manifestation of saints saturated the imaginations and embodied experiences of medieval devotees.

The culture of saint worship and relic devotion in the Middle Ages centered on an assortment of sensorial practices: viewing, touching, kissing (tasting), manipulating, and carrying sacred representations, including articulating crucifixes, Pietàs, Throne of Wisdom statues, reliquary, and tryptics (Hahn 1079–1081). Across the Christian realm, shrines invited pilgrims to engage physically with humanoid object-things. Statues and relics resided in churches and outdoors, took part in processions, were sent to battlefields to lead armies against infidels, and stood in pastures to petition God for the end of drought.

Medieval representations of the Virgin Mary, Jesus, and the Christian saints took multiple forms that crossed generic boundaries: oral and written texts, manuscript illuminations, paintings, reliquary, and three-dimensional statues. Disciplinary divisions between the visual and plastic arts were barely perceptible to artists, patrons, or devotees. As theatre scholar Theodore Lerud argues, in the medieval period audiences understood both elaborate visual tableaux and religious plays as “quick images,” considered in the same artistic category as painted and sculpted images. All religious works of art, whether moving or static, “quick” or “deed” (alive or dead), were designed as external versions of those images necessary to the psychological processes of memory and understanding. Far from corresponding to distinct aesthetic categories (for example, as drama, painting, sculpture, or visual art), all were viewed as the images of phantasmata (214).

Manuscripts were multi-res: materially thick, complex objects that medieval readers explored on the level of the senses. Made of fine materials (animal hides, plant extracts, precious metals) uniquely and painstakingly assembled, manuscripts offered affective portals into a world of touch, sight, smell, and meditation for literate and non-reading viewers. Statues of saints were media regimes: mosaics of wood, wax, dye, fabric, and earthly minerals. From the twelfth century, in a general trend toward aesthetic naturalism, the surfaces of these figures were painted. The droplets of red blood from the wounds of Christ and the blue mantle worn by Mary in Pietà sculptures—a favorite of sculptors from its introduction in the fourteenth century—enhanced the sensorial impact of sacred representations and invited worshippers to view and touch the objects from multiple angles and distances.⁵

King Alfonso X, Mary’s troubadour

The catalogue of medieval sacred statues and images contains a number of items that were constructed specifically for transportation, animation, and articulation in processions, rites, and dramatic representations.⁶ Twelfth-century wooden statues of the Mother of God played the protagonists of sacred plays and processional representations of the Epiphany (Forsythe 56–58). Some Romanesque “Throne of Wisdom” statues functioned as multi-purpose instruments of worship; craftsmen carved interior cavities into the figures for holding holy relics. Human actors participating in Deposition rituals of the Passion performed with moveable wood Christ figures, many of which articulated from the shoulder joints so they could be removed from the cross and placed in a sepulcher (Uličmý 44–49). Ritual objects and automata constructed for profane entertainments contained hidden mechanisms controlled by engines or unseen human operators. Manuscript evidence shows robots that derived their locomotion from steam engines, water wheels, cogs, and clock-like winding devices—technologies that can be traced back through ancient Greek, Byzantine, and medieval Arabic archives. Some European regions were more invested than others in building humanoid props, and it is likely that animated statues were more numerous than what has survived various iconoclastic reform movements. Articulating ritual objects have survived in Germany, Eastern Europe, Italy, and elsewhere. A few remarkable automatons survive on the Iberian Peninsula: a crucifix from which blood flowed in torrents from the arms, feet, and side wound; El Santo Cristo de Burgos, a Christ figure with articulating arms and an internal system of gears; and a mechanical Madonna and Child puppet called La Virgen de los Reyes (LVDLR) (García de la Concha Delgado and González Gómez 60; Martínez Martínez; Hernández Díaz).

Although the joints, cogs, and pulleys of the thirteenth-century wooden LVDLR have been fixed for centuries, the wooden statues were once fully operational dolls. The articulating statues were believed to have been the result of King Fernando III’s (1199–1252) desire to possess a representation that reminded him of the “sweet beauty and warm expressions of the one that appeared to him in transcendental moments for [pondering] the future of the Reconquest,”⁷ and the life-sized statues led his royal entry into Seville after the fall of the Muslim caliphate in 1248. In order to simulate human flesh, the puppet’s craftsmen stretched white kidskin over the head and body of the Mary doll. Mary and Jesus articulated at the waist, knees, wrists, elbows, and shoulders; in order for the statues to move in performance, a puppeteer would have controlled their limbs by manipulating rods. Both mannequins’ shoulders are double jointed, allowing for complex choreography and gestural freedom. A different mechanism controlled head movements: set between their shoulder blades, an internal apparatus consisting of cogs, spindles, and straps moved the heads of Mary and Jesus horizontally (see Figure 1.1). Minuscule pins bind an enormous skein of gold thread to Mary’s scalp, and the doll’s costume is bejeweled with silver, rubies and emeralds. Although the provenance of the machine is not clear, its costly materials suggest that it was assembled at the behest of a monarch or prince (Hernández Díaz 25–36).

Figure 1.1 La Virgen de los Reyes (Mary and Jesus), thirteenth century

The LVDLR invited handling. Like the puppets from traditional Japanese ningyō jōruri, she would have needed at least two puppeteers in order to perform at full potential (head, arms, legs, and baby Jesus simultaneously), and her clothing required maintenance, cleaning, and changing. She traveled through, and occupied, various cathedral and urban spaces, making her available to the general population of Seville. There is something both relic-like (flesh) and manuscript-like (vellum) about the soft goatskin that covers Mary’s body. The compositional complexity of the LVDLR adds ambiguity to this object-oriented analysis. Because the statue blends asynchronous taxonomies from art and philosophy—objects/things, technologies/icons, exteriority/interiority, sculpture/android—it resists a stable interpretation. It is constantly transforming before witnesses, flickering across contrasting ontologies, and inviting the perceiver to open herself to the potentialities of indeterminacy.

Arabic–Latin translations of, and commentaries on, ancient Greek texts were plentiful in Iberia through the twelfth and thirteenth centuries; an Aristotelian climate permeated the Castilian court of Alfonso X. Some of the most widely disseminated and persuasive tracts on the nature of images and human perception influenced the Alfonsine intellectual sphere, comprising scholars of law, spirituality, medicine, mathematics, and astronomy. Alfonso’s massive translation project made the poetics of the ancient Greeks available in the commentaries of Arabic philosophers Avicenna and Averroës, who reaffirmed—among many other ideas—that images are memorable and affective not because they resemble or simulate, but because they are dissimilar to one another (Cicero 3.20, 33). Alfonso clearly understood the power of images and objects to impress and memorialize, and was especially aware of their ability to provide an experiential, performative link between heavenly and courtly spheres. In LVDLR, the Arabic sciences of metallurgy and mechanical engineering that permeated Alfonsine court culture found a theatrical outlet and ve...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction: Object Lessons
• Part I Archival Digs
• Part II Embodied Research Practices
• Part III Materialist Semiotics
• Part IV Excavating Between the Lines
• Notes
• Works Cited
• Index