The Theatre of Imagining

A Cultural History of Imagination in the Mind and on the Stage

Ulla Kallenbach

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9783319763026
• eBook ISBN: 9783319763033
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Performing Arts

This book is the first comprehensive analysis of the fascinating and strikingly diverse history ofimagination in the context of theatre and drama. Key questions that the book explores are: How do spectators engage with the drama in performance, and how does the historical context influence the dramaturgy of imagination?In addition to offering a study of the cultural history and theory of imagination in a Europeancontext including its philosophical, physiological, cultural and political implications, the book examines the cultural enactment of imagination in the drama text and offers practicalstrategies for analyzing the aesthetic practice of imagination in drama texts. Itcovers the early modern to the late modernist period and includes three in-depthcase studies: William Shakespeare's Macbeth (c.1606); Henrik Ibsen's A Doll's House (1879);and Eugène Ionesco's The Killer (1957).

© The Author(s) 2018

Ulla KallenbachThe Theatre of Imagininghttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-76303-3_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction

Ulla Kallenbach¹

(1)

University of Southern Denmark, Odense, Denmark

End Abstract

This book aims to examine the concept of imagination—in the human mind and on the stage. The scope is twofold: on the one hand, to examine the cultural history of imagination in a European context from the early to late modern period; on the other hand, to analyze the cultural enactment of imagination in the drama text as potential performance in modern drama. Both topics are currently underexposed, their integration virtually non-existent. Accordingly, I will investigate the theory and practice of imagination, considering the historical practices of imagination and the theatre via an interplay of context and text; that is, between the history of ideas and dramaturgic analysis.

While the neurological workings of imagination may transcend its various historical incarnations, it is a central hypothesis that the concept of imagination—and with that also perception—is historically and culturally conditioned and thus relative or variable, also in relation to the specific, scenic context of the play. As will be evident, the conceptions of imagination have changed radically over the centuries.

Three plays from three points in the history of modern drama have been selected as case studies:

1. 1.
   The early modern precarious imagination and Macbeth by William Shakespeare (c. 1606).
2. 2.
   The nineteenth-century idealist imagination and A Doll’s House by Henrik Ibsen (Et Dukkehjem, 1879).
3. 3.
   The late modern intentional imagination and The Killer by Eugène Ionesco (Tueur sans gage, 1957).

Each of the three plays not only involves three strikingly diverse paradigmatic conceptualizations of imagination, but also provides markedly different—and remarkably similar—ways of understanding and examining the actions that the spectator performs in interaction with the texts.

While my focus predominantly will lie on the historical interpretations of imagination, the transhistorical imagination, which refers to the cognitive processes of the brain, will also be considered. This will include an examination of how recurring dramaturgic strategies or modes of activating the imagination of the spectator can be observed in all three plays. However, I will argue that these transhistorical strategies are valorized, or acquire their signification, exactly via the historical context, which consequently becomes determining for how these strategies can be interpreted.

The objective outlined here requires that the dramaturgic analysis must take the perspective of the spectator as its starting point and must examine not only what this perspective involves, but also how it might entail or generate potentials for signification. Three points should be noted about this analytical perspective: Firstly, it is positioned between text and performance. Secondly, it seeks to analyze the interplay of imagination and physicalization. And thirdly, it simultaneously works on two levels: (1) the cognitive, transhistorical; and (2) the valorized, historical.

Text—Performance—Dramaturgy

The relation between the drama text and theatrical performance is a troubled one. As Hans-Thies Lehmann has expressed it: “Theatre and drama have existed, and still exist, in a relationship of tension-ridden contradictions.”¹ Rooted in Aristotle’s Poetics where visual presentation is ranked as the least significant element of tragedy,² drama analysis has traditionally been considered a literary discipline with a tendency to focus on language, action and intra-fictional topics, often disregarding the physical, scenic context of presence and interaction for which the play was created. Conversely, performance analysis tends to give lower priority to the drama text. In consequence, there often seems to be a dichotomy between text and performance. One aim of this book is to annul this dichotomy and rather see text and performance as intrinsically connected, also in the so-called text-based theatre. The drama text, in contrast to the novel, is written for performance, for the text to be experienced in a three-dimensional space in interaction with a contemporary audience. Approaching the drama from such a scenic perspective has, I believe, much to offer the dramaturgic analysis.

While the term dramaturgy has come to designate a broad range of definitions and practices, I use the terms “dramaturgic analysis” and “dramaturgy” to designate a critical, analytical practice that looks at both the drama text and the theatrical performance.³ As Wolfgang Iser has put it, “the literary work cannot be completely identical with the text, or with the realization of the text, but in fact must lie halfway between the two.”⁴ I accordingly apply a perspective that looks both to the “internal” composition or configuration of the drama text, and to the “external” reception of the text in performance by the spectator.⁵ Or, in other words, to how a drama text may be read with a view to its potentials for performance on stage in interaction with an audience.

In their book Dramaturgy and Performance (2008), Kathy Turner and Synne Behrndt, with reference to Adam Versényi, note that “[d]ramaturgic analysis implies a process of interpretation, of looking at the ways in which levels of meaning are orchestrated.”⁶ It is the essential viewpoint of the present book that meaning on several levels is simultaneously performed both in the performance and by the spectator. Newer dramaturgies, as proposed by for instance Eugenio Barba or Lehmann , have drawn attention to the “performance text,” implying, as Turner and Behrndt put it, a “turn from a compositional logic based on the primacy of the text, to a logic according to which this primacy is not assumed, so that other elements (visual, sonic, physical) may be equally significant, or may dominate.”⁷ In line with this argument, all compositional registers should be regarded as equally essential.

The anticipation of the performance in the text entails on the one hand the presence, the visual and the physical, which I have termed physicalization and on the other hand imagination. Physicalization refers to the potentials in the text that are material, visible and present on the stage, all that which is made available to be perceived. This includes scenery, properties, costumes, the actor’s body, movement and so on. It also includes the stage building. Imagination designates that which the spectator is prompted to cognitively contribute to the text in the process of engaging with the performance. This includes that which the spectator makes visible, gives presence, infers, transforms, valorizes and so forth. Significantly, the notion of exactly how the spectator might perform the acts of imagination—and the evaluation of the imagined performative acts—varies in each historical interpretation of it. As I will demonstrate, there are, however, also observable recurring strategies for activating the imagination of the spectator in interplay with the strategies for the physicalization of the performance. It is the oscillation between physicalization and imagination which is my principal analytical focus.

The Implied Spectator

By focusing on the oscillation between physicalization and imagination, the emphasis shifts from what the text means to what it does and how it influences the spectator. Focus accordingly becomes centered on the active spectator and on the reverberation or oscillation between the bodily or sensory engagement in the artwork and the mental engagement. While the experience of the actual spectator or a reader of a play is singular, a more general analytical perspective must be set up in order to explore how the drama text structures its dramaturgy towards a spectator. Accordingly, I will operate with the concept of an “implied spectator”; parallel to Iser’s “implied reader.”⁸ While I recognize the individuality of each actual spectator and the heterogeneity of each actual audience, I shall use both the terms spectator and audience to designate the implied spectator and the assembly of implied spectators, respectively.

As Umberto Eco , who operates with the notion of what he calls a “model reader,” emphasizes, the “text postulates its own receiver as an indispensable condition not only of its own, concrete communicative ability, but also of its own potential for meaning.”⁹ The concept of the implied spectator or reader thus does not suggest any restricted interpretations. Rather, Iser characterizes the reading of the literary text as “something like an arena in which reader and author participate in a game of the imagination.”¹⁰ The literary text, Iser argues, activates the reader creatively: “The product of this creative activity is what we might call the virtual dimension of the text, which endows it with its reality. This virtual dimension is not the text itself, nor is it the imagination of the reader: it is the coming together of text and imagination.”¹¹ In the theatre, the “game of the imagination” becomes concrete: The words of the text may be either physicalized, material, or they may be absent from view. Or what we see may contradict what we hear. Therefore, the “gaps,” “Leerstellen,”¹² that the spectator must fill out may be observed both in the text and in the performance (and the gaps may also be divergent in the transfer from text to performance). Accordingly, Iser asserts, we can view both text and performance as a continual “process of anticipation and retrospection that leads to the formation of the virtual dimension, which in turn transforms the text into an experience for the reader.”¹³ Thus, the presence and the position of the reader, or spectator, become crucial, since, says Iser, “[w]ithout an act of recreation th...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. Introduction
• 2. The Mirror and the Messenger
• 3. Corruption or Perfection? The Precariousness of the Early Modern Imagination
• 4. Macbeth: A Dramaturgy of Deceit
• 5. From Mirror to Lamp
• 6. The Disenchantment of the Idealist Imagination
• 7. A Doll’s House: Performing the Cultural Imaginary
• 8. The Late Modern Reimagining of Imagination
• 9. The Killer: The Interplay of Absence and Presence
• 10. Towards a Dramaturgy of Physicalization and Imagination
• Back Matter