Category Archives: Praxis

De-centering the idea of the originating subject versus the perception of performance as an act of human agency

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J.M. Coetzee

I recognize the potential silliness of thinking about performance texts sustaining their existence as texts by making noise; and that sort of academically “correct” thinking conjures up images for me of texts marching off shelves or committing unmentionable acts on themselves or other texts.  And yet, I recognize that language voices certain cultural predications within the most unique and singular texts, predications that constitute part of the conceptual vocabulary within which an individual text operates.  This recognition prompts me to continue, for the moment, writing sentences that pretend that texts do things, even though that pretense seems increasingly facile and evasive.

There’s Foucault’s coercive voice of the sixties and seventies working to disintegrate the fixed point of origin in the consciousness of the writer and removing the idea of a text as significant because of authorship.  In The Archaeology of Knowledge, Foucault discusses discourse as a sequence of statements that can be spoken by a series of different subjects as these individual voices temporarily occupy that discursive space.  The dissemination or distribution of statements in the world constitutes the authenticity of the text, not its function as the expression of a single subject.  In this sense, the speaker becomes the subject of the text in a process of subjection not as the agent of the text as an instrument or agency to be used by her/him.  For the following reasons that idea of text, agent, agency should be meaningful:

(1) As I [re]produce a text in performance, I do speak it, occupy its space, and am subject to its structure, logic, biases, vocabulary, relational systems even though I am, at the time in which I am involved in production conscious of the text as something I metamorphose.  Like an army of occupation those performing the text are changed by the native populace to whom we are alien.

(2) I recognize that what I consider to be my transformation/ deformation / appropriation / reconfiguration of the text is, in itself, subject to the theatrical and theatrical/cultural systems in which such texts are produced within the theater as an institution–as an “experimental” institution, a commercial institution, an academic institution, etc.  Even when I think that I am “allowing a text to play outside of over-determined interpretation,” I am exercising, consciously or unconsciously, aesthetic strategies that originate both outside of the text and outside of my use of the text.

Despite a skepticism toward the idea of an originating subject and a skepticism toward myself as an originating interpreter of texts for performance (or criticism), I continue to work within a framework that identifies Hamlet with the highly impacted proper noun, Shakespeare, Hedda Gabler with Ibsen, and  Fin de partie with Beckett.  This skepticism prods me to exercise those fashionable circumlocutions in which I shift intention from the “implied” authorship of Beckett, to the “texts of Beckett.”  When I identify predications as the action of a text, I facilely elude the fact that I have elected to address a text made significant by its attribution to a famous subject and I less facilely mask the fact that I am making the predications I pretend to “fall upon”, by chance, in the text.

For me there is an almost erotic appeal of returning to a sense of the presence of human agency within a text. I love thinking of texts as unique, idiosyncratic, solipsistic phenomena whose value derives, at least in part, from their singularity rather than their implication within sign systems that plays upon the absence of an ever receding signified.

Assumptions

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I’ve come to assume the following important historical exchanges between theory and praxis that I find lacking in both the commentary and practice of performance today.

Peter Brook’s King Lear (1971): Alan Webb as Gloucester, Paul Scofield as Lear

(a) New forms of dramatic writing and performance often provide models of perception that criticism re-represents and appropriates within the methodologies that direct its own argument.

(b) Both new modes of writing and performance encourage theatrical and scholarly re-interpretations of “classics” that appropriate analytic structures that developed in response to such avant-garde work.  Yet, such crtiques/interpretations become more fully articulated and valued when applied to documents within the established canon.

(c) Certain modes of experimental performance extend and develop the critical strategies in which they are discussed in a dialogic relationship that informs both a continuation of new writing and a development of theory.

I recognize the inherent difficulties in identifying these interactions within a clear sequential scheme of history.  Each of these activities is subject to conflicting influences and sometimes responds to antithetical stimuli simultaneously.  For example, in the early 1960s productions at the newly re-titled Royal Shakespeare Company used selected visual techniques of Brecht’s epic theater–especially an elegant sparseness of scene in combination with properties that invoked the materialism of the objective world.

At the same time, the company used this simplified aesthetic to develop self-consciously Beckettian images of an isolated subject.  Peter Brook, Peter Hall, and John Bury, for example, responded to both the visual stimuli of the productions of the Berliner Ensemble that arrived in London in the late 1950s and, as well, reacted to a growing interest in both Brechtian and Beckettian dramaturgy stimulated by and reflected in the publication of Martin Esslin’s critical biography, Brecht: A Choice of Evils, (1959), and The Theatre of the Absurd (1961); as well as  the influence of Jan Kott’s conflation of King Lear and Endgame upon Brook’s production and film of the Shakespearean tragedy is emblematized in theater history.  While the absurd and the epic seemed to mark antithetical directions in the contemporary theater, Shakespearean production assimilated aspects of each as the RSC marked out its aesthetic course in the 1960s and 1970s.

Dream: a future performance space.

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In light of current limits on production funding,
artists struggle to implement conventional,
labor-intensive solutions to production.

Yet at the same time
theater technology,
as all technology,
is evolving rapidly
as the techniques of
visual image production
expand in a digital age.
With a few significant exceptions,
this expanding technology
fails to serve important
theatrical experimentation.

The theatrical avant-garde
often rejects the technological
for two reasons,
its expense,
and a fear of becoming mastered
by the technology itself.
I feel a strong mandate
to work with new technologies
to develop methods
of using digitally produced images
to create environments
not dependent upon extensive labor
aesthetic forms not mastered by the technological
but used in creating new theatrical forms of communication.

I sit here dreaming of developing
or being part of
an Experimental Laboratory Space
a place to play with
new technologies in collaboration with industry.

Thinking of the possibilities
combining theoretical whimsy
with actual practice
developing new forms of image production
serving an aesthetic
rather than merely providing spectacle.

The uses of the technologically produced image

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It seems to me
that one of the more interesting aspects
the process of displacing the human figure or puppet
into different media can accomplish
is to make it difficult to determine
what image is prior.

While I can posit the existence of the performer
before the image that is filmed or video-ed,
I also recognize that the demands of technology
require that the image I see is prior to the figure
as he/she/it now is present;
but that assurance can be shattered by revealing
that the video is image
is being produced by the operation of the video camera
at this very moment,
although it would be possible to construct
an image that appeared to be broadcast simultaneously
with the present image
then reveal itself
as prior to the present.

Broadway

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Processes that I call ‘the reversion to realism’ and the transformation of the foreign constitute part of the history of the American theater.  Thorton Wilder’s Our Town absorbed the Brechtian strategies of defamiliarization in a sentimentalized form that makes these aesthetic techniques serve realism rather than contend with it.  Ironically, the familiar codes of realistic American drama do not derive from perceptions of American experience but, with few exceptions, rework schemes of representation that developed in Europe to model the transitions in European society at the end of the nineteenth century and were outdated early in the twentieth.

Late-nineteenth-century realism developed in reaction to the limited ideologies and aesthetic structures of the European commercial theater; now, well into the twenty first century, I find utterly unsatisifying the attenuated, fossilized imitation of Ibsenian and Chekhovian realism as the basic mode of the American commercial theater….

Because plays, films, and television train and re-train audiences to accept the psychological, sociological, economic, biological, and aesthetic conventions in which late-nineteenth-century writers and producers configured their sense of the real, realism remains the form in which American audiences are most comfortable.

Sadly, the logistics of the Broadway theater discourage writing that departs from realism.  It appropriates its own innovative artists by leading them away from experiment into the reactionary codes of dramatic realism.