Performance and the Politics of Space

Theatre and Topology

Erika Fischer-Lichte, Benjamin Wihstutz, Erika Fischer-Lichte, Benjamin Wihstutz

• Editore: Routledge
• Anno: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781136210266
• Edizione: 1
• Argomento: Medien & darstellende Kunst
• Categoria: Theater

From its very beginnings, theatre has been both an art and a public space, shared by actors and spectators. As a result, its entity and history is intimately tied to politics: a politics of inclusion and exclusion, of distributions and placements, of spatial appropriation and utopian concepts. This collection examines what is at stake when a theatrical space is created and when a performance takes place; it asks under what circumstances the topology of theatre becomes political.

The book approaches this issue from various angles, taking theatre as a cultural paradigm for political dimensions of space in its respective historical context. Visiting the political dimensions of theatrical space in both theatre history and contemporary performance, the volume responds to the so-called spatial turn in cultural and historical studies, and questions a politics of aesthetics that is discussed in continental philosophy. The book visits different levels and linkages between aesthetic theory and geography, art and sociology, architecture and political theory, and geometry and history, shedding new light on theatre, politics, and space, thereby transforming this historically intertwined triad into a transdisciplinary theme.

PART I

Placements and Boundaries

1 The Theatre ici

Marvin Carlson

The original inspiration for this chapter was an invitation to speak at a conference held in Berlin, Germany, in October 2009 on the politics of space: theatre and topology. I was delighted when I learned the venue for the conference, the recently established Institute for Cultural Inquiry, better known as ici Berlin. What fascinated me was the fact that the institute logo, normally printed in lowercase letters, encouraged another reading—the French word “ici,” so that in French the logo reads “Here. Berlin.” What, it seemed to me, could be more appropriate for that conference than to meet “here,” ici, to consider some of the fascinating implications of the particular kinds of here-ness involved in theatrical production and performance.

This fortuitous appellation was far from the only reason why the Institute for Cultural Inquiry was particularly well suited for such a conference. Its mission statement emphasizes three aspects of culture that it takes as its central concerns, and one of the three is in fact space (the other two being identity and discourse). It is clear that the organizers of the institute took this aspect of their project seriously by the attention given to spatial meanings and spatial politics in the introduction to the institute posted on its website. I quote the relevant paragraph:

The ICI chose and designed its location and architecture specifically in view of its mission. Berlin with its complex history, its experience of division, its dynamic and multilayered present and its high concentration of cultural, academic and creative activity is a particularly well-suited place for the ICI. The Institute is situated in Prenzlauer Berg on the border to Berlin-Mitte within the Pfefferberg complex, a former brewery developing into a vibrant cultural and social centre. The facilitation of a broad range of intellectual and cultural interactions was also a central concern of the institute's architectural design.¹

I could spend most of this chapter exploring the implications of this fascinating paragraph but will note here only the two most closely tied to theatre and topology, first the urban location, here noted in the evocation of Prenzlauer Berg and Berlin-Mitte, two geographical locations with, as the statement suggests, a deeply rich layering of meanings and associations— artistic, historical, cultural, and political—and second, the noting of the building itself as a recycled space, an essential feature of much modern theatre and architecture—with the inevitable laying of associations that that process also involves. Indeed the phrase “a former brewery developing into a vibrant cultural and social center” ties the ici into a major network of enterprises around the world tied together not only by common cultural concerns but by a particular spatial dynamic with major implications for their role in the contemporary city. Both the analysis of urban space and the dynamics of physical location are of central concern in current theatre and performance studies.

The name “ici” evokes other associations as well. Perhaps most importantly, it can serve to call our attention to a particular quality of space in the theatre, the importance of presence, what we might call “here-ness” of the operations of theatre. This “here-ness” is fundamental both to the particular kind of fiction with which the theatre is involved and, equally important, with the particular way in which that faction is experienced by its audience. I would like to briefly to consider the way each of these operate in this art form. In an often-quoted theoretical statement about drama by Thornton Wilder, titled “Some Thoughts on Playwriting,” Wilder proposes four “fundamental conditions of the drama,” which he claims separates it from the other arts. None of these is directly concerned with space, although the second—that the theatre is addressed to a group mind—does note that a play requires a crowd. This, of course, could have led Wilder into speculations about the space in turn required by this crowd, but he goes in a quite different direction, considering what sort of material appeals to a crowd rather than an individual. His fourth fundamental condition, however, considers space's traditional partner in the ordering of reality: time. Theatre, he observes, takes place in a perpetual present time. “On the stage it is always now.”²

A number of features in Wilder's important article place it in its own historical period (it was published in 1941), but one of special interest to us is that he is writing before what has been sometimes called a “spatial” turn in theatre aesthetics. This involves many aspects of the discipline, among them a move away from a focus on linear structure and a narratology of temporality. Were Wilder writing today he might well add that the drama also takes place in a perpetual present space. “On the stage it is always here.” Indeed it is a rare play that does not begin with a stage direction indicating what that “here” is for this particular action, whether it is as elaborate as a Shavian parlor or as simple as Beckett's famous “A country road. A tree.”

A look backward from this new spatial awareness to the more traditional linear one confronted me as I sought to convert my convention presentation, centrally involved with the multidimensional here-and-now relationship with its audience, to the more abstract linear form of the printed essay.

Although I can still use the word “here,” it is no longer the real shared space of the theatre or the conference room, but the conventional and shifting space of the literary imaginary. My own “here,” an office in central Manhattan, is far different from your personal “here,” dear reader, which I am unable even to imagine, let alone to share.

This disturbing distance imposed upon our “here-ness” by the intervention of writing has become central to modern performance theory, especially in its discussions of the phenomenon of presence, but it has occasionally been a matter of concern in the past. One of my favorite examples is the haunting little poem by Keats, “This Living Hand.”

This living hand, now warm and capable

Of earnest grasping, would, if it were cold

And in the icy silence of the tomb,

So haunt thy days and chill thy dreaming nights

That thou wouldst wish thine own heart dry of blood

So in my veins red life might stream again,

And thou be conscience-calmed—see here it is—

I hold it towards you.³

The chilling effect of this masterful little work is centered of course, on the word “here,” when the dead hand of the poet, living in his own “here,” stretches uncannily out through his words into our own “here,” to haunt and chill. The deathly distance imposed by the written as opposed to the spoken “here” has surely never been so powerfully expressed.

Only occasionally has the theatre mounted a challenge to this central quality of physical presence. One famous iconoclastic drama in the early days of the modern theatre challenged “here-ness,” as it did much of the apparatus of the conventional theatre. When Alfred Jarry's Ubu roi was given its famous premiere performance at the Théâtre de l'Oeuvre on December 10, 1896, it was preceded by a prologue, delivered by the author, which ended with the striking and highly unconventional observation: “As to the action, which is about to begin, it takes place in Poland, which is to say nowhere.”⁴ Of course this amusing literary device by no means removes the “here” of the ensuing action, which takes place within its clearly defined imaginary world, including Père Ubu's chambers, the royal palace, and so on, like the most conventional drama. The evocation of Poland adds a complex further dimension to the situation. The clear reference is to the disappearance of Poland as a political entity, a process that had begun with the partition of that country among Prussia, Russia, and Austria a century before and had been completed by the mid-nineteenth century. Jarry and his audience well knew, however, that this was by no means the end of the matter. Paris was a favored location for Polish exiles, passionately dedicated to the restoration of their country, a goal achieved in the new century. Although this political background has little direct bearing on the action of Ubu, it serves as a reminder that the imaginative “here” of the theatre stage can draw upon the entire experience, memory, and fancies of its public to create a present space of potentially infinite variety and complexity.

Theatre as an artistic and cultural activity has been the subject of academic speculation ever since the Greeks, but it was not until the beginning of the nineteenth century that European and American scholars institutionalized a field of theatre studies. A significant part of this new field's self-definition involved a clear splitting away from traditional literary studies, within which theatre had previously had its academic home, and this split was centrally concerned with a new attention to space. The entire Western tradition, from the Greeks onward, considered the drama primarily as a branch of literature (the other basic divisions being the epic and the lyric). Traditionally, theatre scholarship was based upon the literary text (Aristotle's indifference to spectacle is an early and notorious example of this bias), and the actual process of the physical realization of this text, while not entirely ignored, was a matter of considerably less interest.

Two pioneering theatre scholars presented a radical challenge to this orientation at the turn of the nineteenth century: Brander Matthews in the United States and Max Herrmann in Germany. Their new perspective, which was bitterly resisted by many of their colleagues in both countries, was not to reject the study of literary drama but to insist that such study was incomplete unless one went beyond the literary text to consider the physical conditions of performance, the spatial realization of that text. Thus it is no exaggeration to say that the foundation of modern theatre studies was grounded upon a spatial reorientation—from the linear reading of drama to the three-dimensional staging of it. Herrmann was particularly interested in audiences and what would later be called reception theory, while Matthews, who in 1899 was named at Columbia the first professor of dramatic literature in an English-speaking university, was more particularly interested in a spatial concern: the shape of historic theatres and the relation of that space to the plays presented in them. In his 1910 A Study of the Drama, he stated this fundamental principle in these terms: “It is impossible to consider the drama profitably apart from the theatre in which it was born and in which it reveals itself in its completest perfection.”⁵ The scale models of historical theatres built to illustrate performance spaces by Matthews and his students may still be seen at Columbia. In a very fundamental way, the new orientation introduced by Herrmann and Mathews still serves as the most widely accepted model for historical research in theatre, as may be seen in a very recent articulation of the aims of the discipline by one of its leading scholars, Robert D. Hume. In a survey article on the “Aims, Materials, and Methodology” of theatre history in his period of specialization, 1660–1800, Hume observes, “I would suggest that one crucial function of the theatre historian is To demonstrate how production and performance circumstances affected the writing and public impact of plays....