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Bells and Alarm Clocks: Theatre and Theatre Research at the Millenium

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 January 2009

Maria Shevtsova
Maria Shevtsova
Affiliation:
Maria Shevtsova is Professor of Contemporary Performance and Theatre Studies at the University of Lancaster
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Extract

Space, as Einstein has taught us, has no limits, and time is relative to where you are moving and the speed of light. Our millenium, then, is only a speck in eternal space. It is, nevertheless, a point relative to which we are positioned and on which we place a limit—a date—so that our actions may be chronicled, measured, and brought to some sort of completion, thus releasing us from living forever in the present. Yet, notwithstanding our ability to construct, contain and count time, somewhere someone has made a slip, for there is a ‘glitch’ in the system that still prevents millions of computers from recognizing the year 2000, by which devilry we are sent back to less than zero, to zero twice, 00. This error may well have disastrous consequences, although it would be preferable not have any of them happen—hospital operations failing, aeroplanes losing their bearings and going down in apocalyptic spectacles that are considered appropriate for a millenial ending. is as if this error might be interpreted as a token of what Jean Baudrillard, in a different context that has nothing to do with computers, sardonically suggests may be our desire to wipe out history, even, perhaps, to start again from scratch. Baudrillard's is, of course, one of multiple theses on the ‘end of history’ and millenial nothingness that have emerged, not least via the theatre, with the approach of the twenty-first century.

Type
Articles
Information
Theatre Research International , Volume 24 , Issue 1 , Spring 1999 , pp. 98 - 108
Copyright
Copyright © International Federation for Theatre Research 1999

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References

Notes

1. My reference here to spectacle is ironic and by no means implies that I adhere to the spectacle theories of society to which I shall refer later and whose most influential proponent is still Guy Debord, irrespective of subsequent uses and, especially, misuses of Debord's theses and developments of them since the 1960s, when they appeared to be fully appropriate to a period deemed to be ostentatiously consumer-oriented and, hence, one of display and show. For Debord, consumer capitalism is behind what might be termed display behaviour in all public sectors, notably politics and government. See his La Société du spectacle (Paris: Buchet-Chastel, 1967) and his own consolidation of his original views in Commentaires sur la société du spectacle (Paris: Editions Gérard Lebovici, 1988).

This is the text of the Keynote Address presented in a shortened version at the IFTR/FIRT XIIth World Congress, Canterbury 6–12 July 1998.

2. See his L'Illusion de la fin (Paris: Galilée, 1992), pp. 53–5.

3. In an untitled intervention in Theater (Vol.27, No.1, 1996), p. 96.

4. Ibid. Similarly for the third quotation from Dolan above.

5. For Bourdieu's notion of champ—‘field’—see, in particular, Choses dites (Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1987), pp. 167–77 as well as Réponses, with Loïc J. D. Wacquant (Paris: Le Seuil, 1992), pp. 71–90 and the English version of these pages in Bourdieu, Pierre and Wacquant, Loïc J. D., An Invitation to Reflexive Sociology (Oxford: Polity Press, 1992), pp. 94–115.Google Scholar

6. For an authoritative account of this artistic crosspollination see Garafola, Lynn, Diaghilev's Ballet Russes (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989).Google Scholar

7. For example, the field of semiotics has been appropropriated in numerous ways for the study of the theatre, especially for analysing texts, performances and the construction of mises en scène, in which instances semiotics has become discipline-specific, that is, as the semiotics of the theatre as distinct from any other kind of semiotic practice, without weakening the capacity of semiotics—or, to put it slightly differently, without weakening the applicability of semiotic principles—to be operative in other areas of research (which is what I mean by ‘interdisciplinary elasticity’).

8. ‘The Daughters Take Over? Female Performers in Randai Theatre’, The Drama Review (Vol. 42, No.l, 1998), p. 113 for this and the second citation, and p. 115 for the third.

9. Thus see Schumacher, Claude, ed., Staging the Holocaust: The Shoah in Drama and Performance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998).Google Scholar

10. Cited by Boussouf, Malika in The Open Page (No. 3, 1998), p. 27.Google Scholar Malika Boussouf is a journalist who has put her life on the line by condemning the Algerian regime. What can only be described as Boussouf's tribute to Fouzia Aït-El-Hadj in The Open Page has the weight of Boussouf's moral force behind it, which also confers stature on Aït-El-Hadj's case.

11. It should be noted that I am here stressing the contribution of the above ‘great’ directors to art theatre and to the art of the theatre, which is a contribution to the history of the theatre per se. What remains for discussion, but is beyond the scope of this presentation, are the problematics of the distribution and democratization of art theatre, which, historically speaking, has been the province of various élites—not necessarily always bad or mad élites, but élites, just the same.

12. There is, for example, Richard Beacham's computerassisted reconstructions of theatrical spaces, or Lizbeth Goodman and her team's CD-ROM Shakespeare project. See Beacham, 's ‘Virtually There: Computer-assisted Reconstructions of Theatrical Spaces’ in Berghaus, Günter, ed., New Approaches to Performance Analysis and Theatre Studies (forthcoming Max Niemeyer Press)Google Scholar and Goodman, Lizbeth, Coe, Tony and Williams, Hew, ‘The Multimedia Bard: Plugged and Unplugged’, New Theatre Quarterly (Vol. XIV, No. 53, 1998), pp. 20–42.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

13. See Callow, Simon, Orson Welles: the Road to Xanadu (London: Jonathan Cape, 1997).Google Scholar

14. For a discussion of these and related issues, see ‘Bicultural Perspectives: Interviews with Italo-Australian Actresses’ in my Theatre and Cultural Interaction (Sydney: Sydney Studies, 1993), pp. 183–221. See also my ‘Multiculturalism in Process: Italo-Australian Bilingual Theatre and its Audiences’ in Zolberg, Vera L. and Cherbo, Joni Maya, ed., Outsider Art: Contesting Boundaries in Contemporary Cultures (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), pp. 146–58.Google Scholar

15. Time Out, 17–24 June 1998, p. 134.

16. Primarily claimed by Richard Scheduler, the architect of ‘performance studies’ as outlined here. See, among several examples, including Scheduler's editorials to The Drama Review, his ‘Transforming Theatre Departments’, The Drama Review (Vol. 39, No. 2., 1995), p. 8.

17. For an interesting discussion of ‘performance’ and ‘performativity’ from a point of view that really tends to suggest an eventual intersection between them see Diamond, Elin, ed., Performance and Cultural Politics (London and New York: Routledge, 1996), pp. 4–5.Google Scholar

18. This footnote is an addendum since I wish to thank Tracy Davis for her stimulating and pedagogically toughminded critique of the concluding observations of my oral presentation in which she also reminded me of Judith Butler's seminal role in the formulation of the performativity/performance network of issues. Tracy Davis based her critique on my speech, that is, the shorter version of the present text, although she may well feel that this original written rendition does not have the beginnings of an adequate reply to her. Davis is quite right, of course, to refer to Judith Butler on whom Diamond above draws admirably, notably Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (London: Routledge, 1990) and Bodies that Matter (London: Routledge, 1993).

19. Oida, Yoshi and Marshall, Lorna, The Invisible Actor (London: Methuen, 1997), p. 68.Google Scholar