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The Defamiliarization of a Significant Phenomenon
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 23 January 2009
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As I ponder how we as performance theorists endeavour to analyse the question of context as it relates to theatrical activity, I am struck by the fact that this question has both micro and macro-cosmic implications. Certainly, we must address the far reaching ideological concerns that permeate any performance, but within specific parameters, within the confines of a particular performance, the interrelationship of material components demands that we deal with the physical presence that appears before us. This essay grapples with this problem of theatrical presence through adiscussion of visual perception.
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References
Notes
1. To a large extent this essay has been re-worked based on the feedback I received after presenting it to the Performance Analysis working group at the IFTR conference in Puebla, Mexico, August 1997. While there have been some modifications, the basic structure has remained the same: to present a series of statements and questions revolving around the contextual implications of visual perception as it relates to the art of the theatre. While it may appear that this essay has the more traditional structure of assumptions and support leading toward a conclusion, it is perhaps best approached as variations on a theme.
2. Schapiro, Meyer, ‘On Some Problems in the Semiotics of the Visual Arts: Field and Vehicle in Image-Signs’, in Innis, Robert, ed., Semiotics: An Introductory Anthology, (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985), p. 222.Google Scholar
3. A statement that could obviously be challenged by Wilson's more recent work with classical texts. But, despite the ‘classics phase’, as Arthur Holmberg refers to it in his recent The Theatre of Robert Wilson, Wilson's work is still dominated by images as opposed to text.
4. Robert Wilson in Mark Obenhags, ‘Einstein on the Beach: The Changing Image of Opera’. Documentary produced for PBS and aired as part of its Great Performances series, 1985.
5. Eco, Umberto, ‘Semiotics of Theatrical Performance’, The Drama Review (T73, issue 21, 1977), p. 109.Google Scholar
6. Ibid.
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9. Ibid., p. 17. Clearly, the length of some of his earlier work, the four-hour Deafman Glance, the twelve-hour Life and Times of Joseph Stalin, and the one-hundred-and-sixty-eight hour KA Mountain and GUARDenia Terrace, provided ample opportunity for his audience to daydream.
10. Eco, Umberto, ‘Robert Wilson and Umberto Eco: A Conversation’, Performing Arts Journal (Vol. XV, #43. 01, 1993), p. 87.Google Scholar
11. Eco, Umberto, The Open Work (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), p. 4.Google Scholar
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13. I would like to thank Dr Amie Thomasson, Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Texas Tech University, for reading an earlier version of this paper and helping me to understand more clearly the phenomenological process.
14. States, Bert O., Great Reckonings in Little Rooms: On the Phenomenology of Theatre (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), p. 8.Google Scholar
15. More specifically, Husserl labelled this process ‘eide-tic reduction’. For more information on phenomenology and the ideas of bracketing and reduction see: Husserl, Edmund, Ideas: General Introduction to Pure Phenomenology (New York: Macmillan, 1931).Google Scholar
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18. An activity perhaps most successfully accomplished in the theatre by Richard Foreman's use of voice-overs and other alienating devices that force an audience to watch themselves watching the performance.
19. A term proposed, in a non-pejorative sense, when this paper was presented in Mexico.
20. For more information on this subject, see Carlson, Marvin, ‘The Haunted Stage: Recycling and Reception in the Theatre’, Theatre Survey (Volume 35, No. 1, 05 1994).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
21. ‘Un inédit de Maurice Merleau-Ponty’, first published in Revue de Métaphysique et de Morale, No. 4, 1962, p. 401. Translation in The Primacy of Perception (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1964), p. 3. [‘We never cease living in the world of perception, but we go beyond it in critical thought—almost to the point of forgetting the contribution of perception to our idea of truth.’]
22. Shklovsky, Victor, ‘Art as Technique’, in Russian Formalist Criticism: Four Essays, translated and edited by Lemon, Lee T. & Reiss, M. (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1965), p. 12.Google Scholar Italics Shklovsky's.
23. Pavis, Patrice, Dictionnaire du théâtre (Paris: Éditions sociales, 1980), p. 363.Google Scholar [‘semiology in action, which more or less wipes out the traces of its own labour but reflects all the time on the placing and deciphering of its own signs’]
24. The deliberate use of an example not focused on the interaction of objects and images suggests that this method of analysis can also be useful in discussing the juxtaposition of style and genre.
25. Witkiewicz, Stanislaw Ignacy, ‘Pure Form in the Theatre’, in The Witkiewicz Reader, Edited and translated by Gerould, Daniel (London: Quartet Books, 1993), p. 148.Google Scholar
26. Barthes, Roland, Mythologies (New York: The Noonday Press, 1972), p. 114.Google Scholar [‘a sign (namely the associative total of concept and an image) in the first system becomes a mere signifier in the second’]
27. This is not unlike Pavis description in his essay ‘A Semiotic Approach to Disparations’ of a ‘portmanteau image’, a term that he derived from Lewis Caroll's idea of the portmanteau word, or ‘a verbal creation from two words which, when put together, produce a new sign and a new concept (Snark = snake + shark)’. Pavis, , Languages of the Stage, pp. 171–2.Google Scholar
28. For this idea I must credit my brother Glenn Wilcox and his architectural work on what he has described as the ‘almost represented’.
29. Blau, Herbert, To All Appearances (New York: Rout-ledge, 1992), p. 159.Google ScholarPubMed
30. While sharing a certain focus on semiotics and phenomenology, the idea of the almost become is noticeably different from say Peggy Phelan's ‘unmarked’. Rather than analyse an essence of vision that is defined by the power relations of the marked and unmarked, the present description of the convergence of semiotics and phenomenology is a discussion of the highly marked, the overmarked, and conditioned by a proliferation rather than an erasure of signification. Unlike Phelan's use of Lacanian terminology to describe the unmarked as ‘lacking’, the almost become is contingent upon a surplus of meanings.
31. Derrida, Jacques, L'Écriture et la différence (Paris, Éditions du Seuil, 1967), p. 364.Google Scholar [‘it will always remain the inaccessible limit of a representation which is not repetition’]
32. Ibid., p. 366. [presence, in order to be presence and self-presence has always already begun to represent itself]
33. States, Bert O., ‘Of Paradoxes and Tautologies’, American Scholar (67(1), Winter, 1998), p. 60.Google Scholar