Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-vdxz6 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-27T14:21:44.508Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Absence, Presence, Indexicality: The Mise en Scène of ‘the Heart of Neolithic Orkney’

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 March 2017

JONATHAN W. MARSHALL
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

I sketch those characteristics of the mise en scène at the Ring of Brodgar stone circle and associated sites that might solicit within the visitor something like a dynamic performance. Drawing on surrealism, Robert Smithson and archaeology, I argue that the mise en scène at Brodgar – and the visitor's response to it – is characterized by a sense of presence which exists in a dialectical tension with the perception of that which is absent. Brodgar is indexical (like a photograph) and hauntological, in semiotic terms. The Neolithic site is, at some level, unknowable. The visitor becomes aware of coincident yet incompatible manifestations of time and space (heterochronia) and imagines the potential return of unknown, cryptic ritual performances (metatheatre). This solicits within the viewer something akin to Max Ernst's model of frottage. As Breton put it, ‘The imaginary . . . tends to become real’.

Type
Articles
Information
Theatre Research International , Volume 42 , Issue 1 , March 2017 , pp. 72 - 90
Copyright
Copyright © International Federation for Theatre Research 2017 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

NOTES

1 Pearson, Mike and Thomas, Julian, ‘Theatre/Archaeology’, TDR, 38, 4 (Winter 1994), pp. 133–61, here p. 142CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

2 Burl, Aubrey, Stone Circles of Britain, Ireland, and Brittany (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000), pp. 68–76 Google Scholar.

3 Marshall, Jonathan W., ‘Flatness, Ornamentality and the Sonic Image’, World New Music Magazine, 10 (2010), pp. 102–32Google Scholar, available at www.academia.edu/1489984 (all URLs accessed August 2016); Emily Duncan, ‘Waipiata: A Practice-Led Exploration of Heterotopic Script-Writing’, doctoral thesis, Otago University, Dunedin, 2016; Nora, Pierre, ‘Between Memory and History: Les lieux de mémoire ’, Representations, 26 (Spring 1989), pp. 7–24 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

4 Elsewhere I argue that the structure of the viewing subject's own sensorium and subjectivity can be seen as a product of the mise en scène within which it is placed. Pavis, Patrice, Contemporary Mise en Scène (London: Routledge, 2013)Google Scholar; Marshall, Jonathan W., Performing Neurology: The Dramaturgy of Dr Jean-Martin Charcot (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

5 Knabb, Ken, ed., Situationist International Anthology (Berkeley: Bureau of Public Secrets, 2006), p. 5 Google Scholar. Emphasis in original.

6 Melissa Sanford, ‘The Salt of the Earth’, New York Times, 13 January 2004, p. E1.

7 Marshall, Jonathan W., ‘Corporeal Spectacle and Sublime Annihilation’, Double Dialogues, 14 (Summer 2011)Google Scholar, at www.doubledialogues.com/issue_fourteen/Marshall.html; Lippard, Lucy, Six Years: The Dematerialization of the Art Object (Berkley: University of California Press, 1973)Google Scholar.

8 For example, Lunberry, Clark D., ‘Quiet Catastrophe: Robert Smithson's Spiral Jetty, Vanished’, Discourse, 24, 2 (2002), pp. 86–120 Google Scholar.

9 Flam, Jack, ed., Robert Smithson: The Collected Writings (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), p. 250 Google Scholar.

10 Ibid., pp. 146, 298.

11 Olsen, Bjørnar, ‘Roland Barthes’, in Tilley, Christopher, ed., Reading Material Culture (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990), pp. 163–205 Google Scholar, here p. 199.

12 Coverly, Merlin, Psychogeography (Harpenden: Pocket Essentials, 2006), pp. 72–103 Google Scholar; Smith, Phil, ‘The Contemporary Dérive’, Artigo, 2 (2009), n.p.Google Scholar

13 Richards, Colin, ‘A Choreography of Construction’, in Cherry, John, Chris Scarre and Stephen Shennan, eds., Explaining Social Change (Cambridge: McDonald Institute, 2004), pp. 103–13, here p. 110Google Scholar.

14 Breton, André, Earthlight (Los Angeles: Sun & Moon, 1993), p. 90 Google Scholar.

15 Breton, André, Nadja (New York: Grove, 1960), p. 19 Google Scholar.

16 See Ritchie, Anna, ed., Neolithic Orkney (Cambridge: McDonald Institute, 2000), pp. 1–20, 91–100Google Scholar; Renfrew, Colin, ed., Prehistory of Orkney (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1985)Google Scholar.

17 Renfrew, Prehistory, p. 260.

18 Ritchie, Neolithic Orkney, pp. 101–6; Renfrew, Prehistory, pp. 118–30, 248–56.

19 Smith, Roff, ‘Before Stonehenge’, National Geographic, 226, 2 (2014), pp. 27–49 Google Scholar; Card, Nick, ‘The Ness of Brodgar’, British Archaeology (January–February 2013), pp. 14–21 Google Scholar.

20 Richards, Colin, ‘Monuments as Landscape’, World Archaeology, 28, 2 (October 1996), pp. 190–208, here p. 197CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

21 Renfrew, Prehistory, pp. 83–117; Ritchie, Neolithic Orkney, pp. 185–7.

22 Pearson, Mike and Shanks, Michael, Theatre/Archaeology (London: Routledge, 2001), p. 125 Google Scholar.

23 Ritchie, Graham, ‘The Stones of Stenness’, Proceedings of the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland, 107 (1975–6), pp. 1–60, here p. 29Google Scholar.

24 Ibid., pp. 30–4.

25 Richards, ‘Monuments’, p. 205.

26 Ibid., p. 203; Flam, Robert Smithson, p. 146.

27 Graham Ritchie, ‘Ritual Monuments’, in Renfrew, Prehistory, pp. 118–30, here p. 199; Jane Downes, Colin Richards, John Brown, A. J. Cresswell, R. Ellen, A. D. Davis, Allan Hall, Robert McCulloch, David Sanderson and Ian Simpson, ‘Investigating the Great Ring of Brodgar’, in Richards, Colin, ed., Building the Great Stone Circles of the North (Oxford: Windgather, 2013), pp. 64–118, here p. 22Google Scholar.

28 Krauss, Rosalind, ‘Notes on the Index’, October, 3 (Spring 1977), pp. 68–81 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; 4 (Autumn 1977), pp. 58–67, here 4, p. 58.

29 Richards, ‘Choreography’, pp. 107–8.

30 Lunberry, ‘Quiet Catastrophe’, pp. 86–95, 118.

31 Flam, Robert Smithson, p. 256.

32 Richards, ‘Choreography’, p. 108.

33 Downes et al, ‘Investigating the Great Ring of Brodgar’, p. 12.

34 Nick Kaye, Site-Specific Art (London: Routledge, 2000), p. 97. Emphasis in original.

35 Amelunxen, Hubertus, Hubertus Amelunxen and Florian Rötzer, eds., Photography after Photography: Memory and Representation in the Digital Age (Amsterdam: G+B Arts, 1996)Google Scholar.

36 Krauss, ‘Notes’, 3, p. 70.

37 Ibid., p. 75.

38 Krauss, Rosalind, Jane Livingston and Dawn Ades, L'amour fou: Photography and Surrealism (New York: Abbeville, 1985), esp. pp. 31–5, 86–112Google Scholar.

39 Ibid., p. 31.

40 Krauss, ‘Notes’, 4, p. 65.

41 Barthes, Roland, Image Music Text (London: Fontana, 1977), p. 44 Google Scholar. Emphasis in original.

42 Barthes, Roland, Camera Lucida (New York: Hill & Wang, 1981), p. 15 Google Scholar.

43 Ibid., p. 31.

44 Ibid., p. 32.

45 Olsen, ‘Roland Barthes’, p. 199.

46 Crary, Jonathan, Techniques of the Observer (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990)Google Scholar.

47 Rebecca Schneider, Keynote Address, Performance Studies international conference, Melbourne, 9 July 2016, transcript courtesy of the author; see also Marshall, Jonathan W., ‘Accepting the Agency of the Non-human’, RealTime, 134 (August–September 2016)Google Scholar, at www.realtimearts.net/article/134/12346.

48 Pearson and Shanks, Theatre/Archaeology, pp. 54–5, 127; see also Tilley, Christopher, The Materiality of Stone (Oxford: Berg, 2004)Google Scholar.

49 Tompkins, Joanne, Theatre's Heterotopias (London: Palgrave, 2014), p. 15 Google Scholar.

50 Marshall, Jonathan W., ‘“The World of the Neurological Pavilion”: Hauntology and European Modernism “mal tourné”’, TDR, 57, 4 (Winter 2013), pp. 60–85 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Derrida, Jacques, Spectres of Marx, trans. Peggy Kamuf (New York: Routledge, 1994)Google Scholar.

51 Pearson and Thomas, ‘Theatre/Archaeology’, p. 143

52 Flam, Robert Smithson, p. 103.

53 Ernst, Max, ‘On Frottage’ in Chip, Herschel, ed., Theories of Modern Art (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968), pp. 428–31, here p. 429Google Scholar. Emphasis in original.

54 Tompkins, Theatre's Heterotopias, p. 184; see also Duncan, ‘Waipiata’.

55 Marshall, Jonathan W., ‘Vertigo: Between the Word and the Act’, RealTime Australia, 35 (2000)Google Scholar, at www.academia.edu/1490075, p. 10.

56 McAuley, Gay, ‘Place in the Performance Experience’, Modern Drama, 46, 4 (Winter 2003), pp. 598–613, here p. 602CrossRefGoogle Scholar.