Theatre's Heterotopias

Performance and the Cultural Politics of Space

J. Tompkins

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781137362117
• eBook ISBN: 9781137362124
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Art General

Theatre's Heterotopias analyses performance space, using the concept of heterotopia: a location that, when apparent in performance, refers to the actual world, thus activating performance in its culture. Case studies cover site-specific and multimedia performance, and selected productions from the National Theatre of Scotland and the Globe Theatre.

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Theatre and the Construction of Alternate Spaces

In her nuanced analysis of Christopher Marlowe’s Dr Faustus, Ruth Lunney argues for the greater understanding of how space and performance interact:

The connecting space within its [theatre’s] ‘landscapes’ is always potentially refractive, setting repeatedly before the spectators images that challenge or distort the ‘vertical and antithetical balance’ that other elements of staging reflect. These images offer them alternative perspectives on the action, confronting them with the interconnectedness of experience. (2002, p. 181)

While Lunney turns this discussion to Dr Faustus, her observations are also relevant for understanding performance and spatial relationships in the contemporary world. Further, her investigation connects the world of the stage with the world in which that theatre is situated. My project also accounts for the refractive, challenging, and distorting nature of theatrical space. I explore the ways in which space in performance can instigate a significant interaction between theatre and the culture in which it enacts its meaning when it rehearses locations that may have resonance with the actual world. While this may seem to be the function of theatre already, the method of heterotopia that I offer extends the spatial reach – and its meanings – more than occurs in the genre naturally, as it were.

Specifically, I argue for the efficacy of heterotopia as a means of rendering more palpable both the spatial and the socio-political possibilities that theatre presents. It is also a useful production tool in that it helps generate different orders of space in performance. I explore heterotopia in detail later in this chapter, but I summarize it here as a space generated via performance that enables us to better understand the theatrical experience; it may comprise the concrete space of the theatre venue, the imagined locations depicted in that venue, and/or the social context for the performance. Heterotopias, which Hetherington succinctly defines as ‘spaces of alternate ordering’ (1997, p. viii), offer a means to articulate and extend theatre’s role in its socio-political context, especially in an age when theatre competes more than ever with the entertainment pleasures of cinema, television, and internet-based social networking communities, among many other possibilities. The core of this project is a combined and sustained relationship between space and performance.¹

In this chapter, I construct a theoretical understanding of the role that heterotopia can play in creating and analysing theatre and performance. I introduce the term – which has been deployed more fully in cultural geography – into theatre studies and provide the ‘map’ to justify my approach (while also demonstrating the rigour required in interdisciplinary borrowing). I review the discourse on heterotopia because I believe it to have been inadequately deployed in many cases, particularly in its limited application in theatre. To lay the theoretical groundwork for this means of analysing spatiality in theatre, I furnish a genealogy of heterotopia that hasn’t been undertaken since Kevin Hetherington’s 1997 The Badlands of Modernity: Heterotopia and Social Ordering. It charts heterotopia’s origins from the concept of utopia, through Michel Foucault’s initial explorations of the term, to Hetherington’s recasting of it, and finally, to how I argue for its potential in theatre. The second part of the chapter conveys the method that I have developed and introduces its application to theatre and performance to discuss heterotopia as a bridge that connects theatre with cultural politics and practice.

Following this theoretical section, I map how theatre’s continual presentation of ‘possible worlds’ in performance can intensify the art form’s relationship with the actual world beyond a venue. Such ‘worlds’ have meaning in themselves, in the context of the theatre experience, and in the connections we make between them and the worlds that exist outside a theatre or site-specific performance venue. Heterotopias open up the opportunity for exploring in detail the possibilities that such connections present; they have the capacity to occupy a deeper ‘place’ than theatre already offers. They demonstrate how the layers of spatiality – both the concrete spaces that architecture provides as well as the abstract spaces and places that a specific production creates – articulate meaning in their own right, let alone through overlap between and among these layers. In so doing, they attend to spatial ordering, leaving open the chance to reveal and rethink existing structures of power and knowledge. The next section, on utopia, contextualizes studies of topoi generally.

Utopia: imagining and framing culture

Underscoring the popularity of utopia, Oscar Wilde quipped, ‘[a] map of the world that does not include Utopia is not worth even glancing at, for it leaves out the one country at which Humanity is always landing’ (qtd in Neville-Sington and Sington 1993, p. 33). Before examining how heterotopia works, I briefly discuss its antecedent, utopia, to distinguish one from the other. Heterotopia requires an understanding of utopia, the more commonly described term, but they diverge from each other. Since ‘utopia’ was coined in 1518 by Sir Thomas More in his foundational narrative that is named for the word, it has been considered either topical or antiquated by turns, and sometimes even both at the same time.² Its enduring presence leads Angelika Bammer to argue that ‘utopianism has been a staple, if not bedrock, of the western cultural tradition’ (1991, p. 1). Its attraction is, Lucy Sargisson argues, its focus on ‘spaces free from constraint, limited only by imagination’ (2000, p. 153). Fredric Jameson also addresses the relationship between utopia and imagination: ‘utopia as a form is not the representation of radical alternatives; it is rather simply the imperative to imagine them’ (2005, p. 416). Traces of abandoned utopias remain in the cultural and historical landscape, reinforcing the form’s currency in contemporary culture (see Pinder 2005).

A short description of utopia will help distinguish it from heterotopia. More’s Utopia describes a society and its location in which life is ordered for the benefit of all by limiting the freedoms of the individual in favour of the greater good. Utopia satirizes the society of its time, contrasting the inequalities and injustices of sixteenth-century England with the egalitarianism of its fictional society. From a twenty-first-century standpoint, the satire takes on a compelling edge, suggesting certain of the regulatory measures recalled from the more extreme twentieth-century experiments in egalitarianism. While More was clearly criticizing the values in his own society, he ironically questioned the relative values of freedom and equality. But a fundamental quality of this fictional ‘elsewhere’ – this impossible place – was precisely the fact that it was elsewhere.

By contrast, heterotopia offers a functional and reflective agency for change or commentary in contemporary society. Heterotopia retains the quality of otherness in a way that utopia does not. It is the operation of the ‘alternate ordering’ that provides the means that ‘looks to how society might be improved in the future’ (Hetherington 2001, p. 51). Heterotopia exists within the present time and place, an internal organ of its community, affording it a direct, functional relationship to that time and place. Heterotopia had originally been used to describe the medical situation in which an organ is displaced from its usual location or position in the body (Concise Medical Dictionary).³ Like the anatomical abnormality of its etymological origin, heterotopia can work from within, albeit occurring where we may least expect it. Since a lengthy reading of utopia is outside the scope of this study,⁴ I have narrowed the remainder of this section to its manifestations in and applications to theatre.

Jill Dolan’s Utopia in Performance is the most prominent of these; although she engages in a different project, she has comparable expectations of theatre and performance to mine. She suggests that theatre can provide – however fleetingly – the means to change perceptions.⁵ It is helpful to my argument on heterotopia to address Dolan’s work briefly. We both recognize the potential of the ‘glimpse’ of the topos (whether utopia or heterotopia) and that such a glimpse has the power to transform interpretation and understanding. She seeks in theatre the moments that she calls the ‘utopian performative’, which is a ‘complex alchemy’ (2005, p. 8) that ‘lifts everyone slightly above the present, into a hopeful feeling of what the world might be like if every moment of our lives were as emotionally voluminous, generous, aesthetically striking, and intersubjectively intense’ (2005, p. 5). She articulates the fleeting nature of utopia, which for her, is determined by affect. This feeling has the capacity to prompt us to achieve what is otherwise thought to be impossible. Dolan’s formulation is valuable for the possibility, however transitory, that something ‘better’ might be generated, even though her exploration of utopian performatives through affect leaves little room for a spatial analysis. While she explores only one component of utopia’s spatial possibilities – the ‘no place’ that is part of the meaning of the term (2005, p. 7)⁶ – she usefully situates how the potential that she sees in affect-driven utopian performatives can be realized in performance: ‘[u]topia is always a metaphor, always a wish, a desire, a no-place that performance can sometimes help us map if not find’, whereas performance ‘is not a metaphor; it’s a doing, and it’s in the performative’s gesture that hope adheres, that communitas happens, that the not-yet-conscious is glimpsed and felt and strained toward’ (2005, p. 171). This formulation that combines the metaphoric with the concrete ‘doing’ is central to the way I discuss heterotopia. Utopia is, in its strictest sense, not a place at all. It is a geographical impossibility that cannot be marked out by a set of global positioning coordinates, yet it nevertheless takes up ‘space’.⁷ As Dolan establishes, it can be revealed by performance: mapped onto a stage, it can be made into a reality of sorts, even if temporarily.

For Dolan, the affinity between performance and utopia is close: ‘performance always exceeds its space and its image, since it lives only in its doing, which is imagining, in the good no-place that is theatre’ (2005, p. 13).⁸ Theatre, then, has an alliance with utopia in that both describe fictional locations that resist mapping onto a particular place (except in site-specific performance) but both can intervene in the shaping of their cultures. My project moves in a different direction in its attempts to institute this potential spatially, since, as Hetherington notes, ‘[u]topian experiences are inherently spatial in character’ (2001, p. 49).⁹

If utopia is deemed to be satiric, another related topos, dystopia, is equally so.¹⁰ Dystopia ‘satirizes both society as it exists, and the utopian aspiration to transform it’ (Ferns 1999, p. 109). Dystopian worlds are a reification of disaster. For Dragan Klaić, ‘[d]ystopian drama frightens us with its vision but at the same time reawakens utopian instincts and urges the rejection of dystopian threats, similar to tragedy, which brings catastrophe but most often some sort of reconciliation and healing as well’ (1991, p. 188). Dystopia in theatre also points to the ways in which the diegesis of a performance works to trouble our understanding of the worlds established through performance and, importantly, to make strong connections to the construction and operation of worlds beyond the theatre as well. While comparable to heterotopia’s function in performance, it, like utopia, fails to exploit spatiality as much as it might.¹¹

This brief summary of utopia and its dystopic relative reinforces the idealistic nature of utopia and the ways in which the generation of alternative worlds (whether actual or imaginary) continues to captivate humans. This background is essential for my study, which argues that heterotopia, ironically unlike utopia, has the capacity to actually build the foundations for making what Hetherington terms alternate orderings of spatial structures. Heterotopia describes the relationship between performed worlds and the actual world beyond the theatre, holding the potential to spatialize how socio-political relationships might work differently beyond the stage. To illustrate heterotopia’s function in theatre, I explore the concept itself, beginning with Foucault’s interpretation of the term.

Foucault’s heterotopia

Foucault popularized heterotopia, introducing it first in 1966; in addition to recounting a genealogy of the term, I articulate the most important features from his version of the term, and extend it by drawing attention to how it ‘unsettles’.¹² I then combine this understanding with Hetherington’s development of the concept before laying the groundwork for my own intervention, which applies heterotopia to theatre and performance studies. These disciplines have yet to properly engage with the term, an oversight that I seek to correct. Finally, this chapter turns to theatre, proposing it as an ideal art form for heterotopic analysis.

Foucault’s explanation of heterotopia in ‘Of Other Spaces’ has provided its widest citation in the humanities. In cultural terms, heterotopias are

real places – places that do exist and that are formed in the very founding of society – which are something like counter-sites, a kind of effectively enacted utopia in which the real sites, all the other real sites that can be found within the culture, are simultaneously represented, contested, and inverted. (1986, p. 24)

While they are culturally specific, they exist ‘probably in every culture, in every civilization’ (Foucault 1986, p. 24). His examples of heterotopias suggest that they have discrete units of meaning, rules, and existence: churches, theatres, museums, libraries, fairgrounds, barracks, prisons, brothels, and colonies. His three most significant heterotopias are the cemetery, the garden, and the ship, each of which presents a world of its own, related to the actual world, but in some form separated from it. Most importantly to Foucault, heterotopias must have some relevance to the space and place outside them, a relevance that takes one of two forms:

Either their role is to create a space of illusion that exposes every real space, all the sites inside of which human life is partitioned, as still more illusory […] [or] their role is to create a space that is other, another real space, as perfect, as meticulous, as well arranged as ours is messy, ill constructed, and jumbled. (1986, pp. 25, 27)

In both cases, heterotopias for Foucault operate as ‘counter-sites’ or ‘sites of resistance’. In using ‘counter-sites’ to describe heterotopias, he provides a means of distinguishing actual life from these other spatio-temporal sites. Russell West-Pavlov pursues this difference between the actual and the heterotopic by insisting that Foucault’s concept be understood in the context of ‘fault-lines’ such that ‘[h]eterotopias emerge at moments when the conceptual bedrock is shifting, at places where the social and semiotic fabric is fraying […] [where] primordial space is undergoing change and can no longer be taken for granted’ (2009, p. 138). Diana Saco takes this in a slightly different direction, arguing that a heterotopia ‘is a kind of in-between space of contradiction, of contestation: a space that mimics or simulates lived spaces, but that in so doing, calls those spaces we live in into question’ (2002, p. 14). Such fraying or contestation is core to Foucault’s heterotopia. In The Order of Things, he notes that heterotopias

are disturbing, probably because they secretly undermine language, because they make it impossible to name this and that, because they shatter or tangle common names, because they destroy ‘syntax’ in advance, and not only the syntax with which we construct sentences but also that less apparent syntax which causes words and things […] to ‘hold together’. (2002, p. xviii; original emphasis)

This is the point about Foucault’s heterotopia that is most frequently overlooked: that heterotopia is disturbing. It unsettles the world as we know it, a quality that will come to be key in its use in theatre.

Heterotopia is usually either applied ineffectively or dismissed, possibly as a result of Foucault’s imprecision. Both Benjamin Genocchio (1995, pp. 38–9) and Robert Topinka (2010, p. 57) critique Foucault for a lack of specificity in describing the concept.¹³ Hetherington defends Foucault against these claims, arguing that ‘[t]he power of the concept of heterotopia lies in its ambiguity’ (1997, p. 51). Nevertheless, Genocchio’s criticism comes down to a rhetorical question implying that Foucault’s interpretation is simply too wide-ranging: ‘what cannot be designated a heterotopia?’ (1995, p. 39). Certainly Foucaul...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Theatre, Space, and World-making
• 1 Theatre and the Construction of Alternate Spaces
• 2 Heterotopia and Site-Specificity
• 3 Heterotopia, the National Theatre of Scotland, and ‘Theatre without Walls’
• 4 Re-establishing Heterotopic Relationships at Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre
• 5 Heterotopia and Multimedia
• Conclusion: Gaps, Absences, and Alternate Orderings
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index