Theatre in the Expanded Field

Seven Approaches to Performance

Alan Read

• Publisher: Methuen Drama
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781408184950
• eBook ISBN: 9781408183410
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Theatre History & Criticism

Theatre in the Expanded Field is a fiercely original, bold and daring exploration of the fields of theatre and performance studies and the received narratives and histories that underpin them. Rich with interdisciplinary reference, international, eclectic and broad-ranging in its examples, it offers readers a compelling and provocative reassessment of the disciplines, one that spans pre-history to the present day. Sixty years ago, in 1962, Richard Southern wrote a remarkable book called The Seven Ages of the Theatre. It was unusual in its time for taking a trans-disciplinary, new-historical and avowedly internationalist approach to its subject - nothing less than a totalizing view of its field. Theatre in the Expanded Field does not attempt to mimic Southern's work but rather takes his spirit of adventure and ambition as its frame for the contemporary moment of performance and its diverse pasts. Identifying seven ways of exploring the performance field, from pre-history to postdramatic theatre the book presents studies of both contemporary and historical works not as a chronological succession, but in keeping with their coeval qualities, as movements or 'generations' of connection and interaction, dissensus and interruption. It does this with the same purpose as Richard Southern's original work: to provide for the planning of responsive performance spaces 'now'. Illustrated throughout with line-drawings, Theatre in the Expanded Field is as richly rewarding as it is ambitious and expansive in it vision.

1

First Approach

Pre-Historical & Archaeological

The room that you are reading this in almost certainly has walls. I would like you to look up for a moment from the page and look at them. They could be the walls of a café, a library or a waiting room, but you will know they are your walls if you have taken them for granted, maybe for a long time. Take a minute to re-acquaint yourself with these walls. You might have decorated them, papered them, adorned them, mirrored them or mounted things upon them, but these things that you have done to these walls will themselves have become, more or less, taken for granted.

It was Vilém Flusser, the philosopher and historian of media, who first suggested that putting things on walls is what makes humans cultural animals.¹ Living between walls, as humans tend to do, appears to encourage most humans to strive to make the best of them. But now I want you to move beyond the contained room that Flusser imagined you in. Just think now how things would differ should one of these walls be removed and the room you are in becomes exposed to the world outside. The space that was once a room, with mediating walls, would now resemble the stage of a theatre upon which your moves, your feelings and your words would become the stuff of comedy or tragedy, a performance for those beyond this fourth wall that has disappeared – for those whom we might call here, for want of a better word, an audience.

If you make lots of tea and constantly discuss moving to a nearby city, the name for what you are doing is The Three Sisters; if you are an older man and have had an argument with your daughters, an onlooker might call you King Lear. I won’t go into details about the social conditions that might pass in this room for Antigone, given what happened after she was walled up, but you can guess. You do not have to step outside to imagine what the walls of your home look like, even when one has disappeared. The reason you can conjure this up is that you have an idea of what a wall looks like, you could call this an ideal kind of wall, and when you have this idea it does not have to subscribe to the look, scale or elevation of the walls you are looking at now.

In this sense we are all, still, cavemen of sorts, cave-persons at least, troglodytes, whose relationship with the walls within which they lived, the walls they decorated with handprints in their caves in Peche Merle, was part of a continual effort to not take quite as much for granted about what protected them from the elements and the animals outside; that is, the elements and animals that they knew existed beyond the gaping aperture, at the end of the cave, where there was no wall. And we are still cavemen of sorts, or cave people, to the degree that our understanding of what constitutes a community beyond these walls that announce the end of our privacy remains limited by a failure of imagination that shapes everything performance can reasonably do.

It would be premature to presume that our understanding of what lies beyond that fourth wall is any more sophisticated than our ancestor in the cave, and indeed given the rich pictorial record we have at our disposal of the relations that were pursued between those beings inside and outside the cave, it would be plain wrong. But it is undeniable that in manifesting this relation between one community of sorts and another, between humans reliant upon proximate animals for their survival as well as their spiritual and emotional well-being, it is hard to say otherwise why so much effort would have been expended on the aesthetic rather than the utilitarian; it is undeniable that something about performance became possible at this moment that would not have been possible in quite the same way before. And I am not talking about Ritual here, whatever that slippery word stands for. There is no need for something so complicated and demanding of ethnographers’ expertise, no reason on earth to deploy appeals to the sacrificial, if what we seek is the generating principles of performance among humans, the performance gene.

When humans first blew earth-red pigment from their mouths towards their hand placed upon the cave wall, they were doing what we have been doing to the walls around us ever since. But 40,000 years ago, in those caves of Peche Merle and Chauvet, humans stepped back, and away from that wall, removing their hand, and in that moment witnessed themselves at a distance for the first time, now an onlooker to what was their own handprint, but now part of a larger composition.

Is it fanciful, the writer Marie-José Mondzain asks, to consider this very action the ‘invention of the spectator’?² I would like to take Mondzain’s imaginative proposition seriously for a moment, but progress it to a place for which she cannot be held responsible, so far out as it is from the boundaries deemed sensible by philosophical restraint. Is this the moment when Homo Faber, the one who works, or Homo Ludens, the one who plays, becomes Homo Spectator, the one who watches? It is all very well for everyone to work and everyone to play; Karl Marx and Johan Huizinga would have appreciated the equality in such an arrangement, but such continuous equality of action does not account for the commensurate degree of reaction upon which a performance economy could be built. If this is the case and the kind of economy a book of this kind might wish to build its propositions upon, then I want to ask: Who is the watcher watching with? What might Homo Spectator be looking at?

It took just 37,000 years for someone to write an answer down to that question, an answer that would survive the travails of climate, the vicissitudes of war and the precariousness of what had to remain pre-history because there was, as yet, no retrievable record. Don’t worry, we will be returning to the more interesting pre-history of performance in a moment, but perhaps inevitably we have to briefly take a detour via an extant text to shore up the strain on the imagination that such pre-historic speculation demands.

It was Plato, the Greek philosopher, who wrote a story about this spectator that for two millennia has captured the popular imagination, which is surprising, given it took place in a dank cave. It is a myth, a narrative, a legend that played a small part, in a big work, on the form of the ideal Republic, and follows several lively passages of dialogue between his teacher and brother, Socrates and Glaucon, as to the nature of justice and education.

For some, this story will be about as familiar as the walls you have taken for granted. But for others, the story, as Plato conceived it, goes like this:

Picture men dwelling in a sort of subterranean cavern with a long entrance open to the light on its entire width. Conceive them as having their legs and necks fettered from childhood, so that they remain in the same spot, able to look forward only, and prevented by the fetters from turning their heads. Picture further the light from a fire burning higher up, and at a distance behind them, and between the fire and the prisoners, and above them, a road along which a low wall has been built, as the exhibition of puppet shows have partitions before the men themselves, above which they show the puppets.

‘All that I see’ replies Glaucon, [and Socrates continues describing something that, years later, surely influenced the producers of the UK TV series The Generation Game]:

‘See also, then, men carrying past the wall implements of all kinds that rise above the wall, and human images and shapes of animals as well, wrought in stone and wood and every material, some of these bearers presumably speaking and others silent.’

‘A strange image you speak of’ Glaucon said ‘and strange prisoners.’

Like to us says Socrates. For to begin with, tell me, do you think that these men would have seen anything of themselves or of one another except the shadows cast from the fire of the wall of the cave that fronted them?

How could they Glaucon said if they were compelled to hold their heads unmoved through life.³

The dialogue continues, raising the spectre that the shadows seen on the wall, of the humans, animals and objects, the sounds echoing from the wall from their cries, would be perceived by the prisoners as a reality. This illusion, as Plato wants to encourage his reader to think of it, would only be dispelled should the prisoners be released from their chains, to see for the first time their own situation, and to emerge from the cave into the sunlight that would illuminate things as they are.

Those ‘forced’ to be brave enough to make that upward journey, and Plato suggests living under the spell of illusion might be more comfortable than such freedom, despite the seating arrangements, would first experience shadows above. But they would gradually adjust to the light and, in an act that young people should not try at home, see the Truth, the Good, by staring at the sun itself. Having experienced enlightenment, Plato then expected them to give up on their new life and return below to educate those still wasting their time at the spectacle in the cavern.

Despite some other benefits that Plato brought to the table, it has to be admitted at this point that performance in general and theatre in particular are not getting the best of starts here in the philosophical record. But Plato’s antagonism to the mimetic practices to which we have given names such as performance and theatre, his preference was for terms in Greek with the translations poetry and dance, is contrarily perhaps the best possible start to defending performance from its detractors – a remorseless and continuous detraction that was described by Jonas Barish as ‘anti-theatrical prejudice’. And as this book takes seriously the idea of a long history of performance as being somehow endemic or constitutive of human being, it makes sense to acknowledge from the outset precisely this ideological commitment to performance as something that improves that human life rather than inhibits it.

Given Plato’s professional instinct for clarifying these matters, it would be as well to be clear where we differ on this from the outset in case we assume that those who have been rewarded in history by the endurance of their oeuvre, and their archive (Plato would be a prime case of someone who got very lucky in this respect), somehow intrinsically have more to say about the things we are interested in through performance than those who were not so fortunate – those whose work remains anonymous, lost or extinct. In this chapter, for instance, we will see how two manifestations of imagery over writing, the cave wall and the ceramic tile, are both at least as rich and as abundant as Plato’s texts, but have had very little attention from precisely those whose interest one would have thought would be in keeping with the physical, image-rich rhetorics of performance, rather than the two-dimensional page with its alphabetic digital code.

So, before we leave the cave for this supposed enlightenment we should dwell on this scene in the cave, which like the walls around us, we have, perhaps, taken for granted.

It is a most peculiar scene, and especially so when coming to it, as I do, as someone who works in and through performance, who cherishes what is special about performance’s irritation of theatre and theatricality, beyond the privacy of our walls. For if this caved-in life is the stuff of dreams, illusions, where does that leave performance, not just in Plato’s ideal Republic, but for us, wherever we are, now?

The Cave that Plato has Socrates describe is a particular kind of theatre, or, as the writer and philosopher Samuel Weber would prefer, a particular interpretation of a theatre.⁴ It is unmistakeably a theatre nonetheless. And there are two things that mark it out as such for Weber that have nothing to do with the upsetting fact that Plato mentions puppets, strange figures we are all understandably dubious about from childhood.

First we are invited to picture a defined, limited place, a positioning of the people and things that are constitutive of what is taking place there. This is the first characteristic of a theatre for Weber: the events it depicts are not indifferent to their placement. Performance as distinct to theatre might, as the Preliminary laid out, give the impression it can be more laissez faire about such arrangements, but by the nature of performance all is conscious from the outset of a framing that gives that something the title ‘performance’. It must be admitted, however, that in this myth the cavern has been fabricated; it is a theatre in which the prisoners see a highly organised, staged spectacle. This...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Line drawing
• My readers
• Preliminary
• 1 First Approach: Pre-Historical & Archaeological
• 2 Second Approach: Pastoral & Anthropological
• 3 Third Approach: Theological & Historical
• 4 Fourth Approach: Digital & Technological
• 5 Fifth Approach: Psychological & Legal
• 6 Sixth Approach: Social & Sensible
• 7 Seventh Approach: Tactical & Critical
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• Biographical Notes
• Imprint