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On Ambiguity: Towards a Post-Modern Performance Theory

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 January 2009

David George
David George
Affiliation:
School of Human Communication, Murdoch University, Western Australia.
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Extract

The challenge and the excitement of expanding both the focus of our research and the field of our praxis beyond Theatre (or Film, Pop or Video) to Performance is to identify phenomena which transcend one medium and may enable us to know something about acting as such, spectating as such and thus ‘being’ as such: performance, not as a second-hand version of some more primary reality, but as a ‘realm’ in its own right.

Type
Articles
Information
Theatre Research International , Volume 14 , Issue 1 , Spring 1989 , pp. 71 - 85
Copyright
Copyright © International Federation for Theatre Research 1989

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References

Notes

1. ‘What is performance? A Play? Dancers dancing? A concert? What you see on TV? Circus and Carnival? A press conference by whoever is President? The shooting of the Pope as portrayed by media – or the instant replays of Lee Harvey Oswald being shot? And do these events have anything to do with ritual, a week with Grotowski in the woods outside of Wroclaw, or a Topeng masked dance drama as performed in Peliatan, Bali? Performance is no longer easy to define or locate: the concept and structure has spread all over the place. It is ethnic and intercultural, historical and ahistorical, aesthetic and ritual, sociological and political. Performance is a mode of behaviour, an approach to experience: it is play, sport, aesthetics, popular entertainments, experimental theatre, and more’. Brooks McNamara and Richard Schechner, General Introduction to the Performance Studies Series published by Performing Arts Journal Publications, New York.

2. Quoted from a television documentary, ‘James Dean. The First American Teenager’, Good Times Enterprises.

3. Press conference at the Plaza Hotel, New York to announce The Prince and the Showgirl.

4. Playwrights on Playwriting, Cole, Toby, (ed.), New York, 1961, p. 145.Google Scholar

5. Zeami, , On the Art of the Noh Drama, Princeton University Press, Princeton, 1984, p. 120.Google Scholar

6. Bharata, Iyer K., Kathakali, London, 1955, p. 82.Google Scholar

7. ‘The Virgin and the Vixen’, Christopher Reid in the National Times, 08 23rd. 1985.Google Scholar

8. Meshkoflf, Jan Evan, Psychological Androgyny and Jungian Typology in Professional Actors and Actresses, Ph.D. dissertation, United States International University, San Diego, 1984, pp. 71, 73 f.Google Scholar

9. Braun, Edward, The Director and the Stage, Methuen, London, 1982, p. 69.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

10. Taylor, Mark C., Erring. A Postmodern A/Theology, University of Chicago Press, 1984, p. 9.Google Scholar

11. Neil Postman writes in Amusing Ourselves to Death (London, 1986)Google Scholar: ‘even the simplest act of naming a thing is an act of thinking – of comparing one thing with others, selecting certain features in common, ignoring what is different, and making an imaginary category. There is no such thing in nature as ‘man’ or ‘tree’. The universe offers no such categories or simplifications; only flux and infinite variety’. To Postman himself, this is the superiority of print over video, the age of Text over the new age of performance, namely that the latter ‘documents and celebrates the particularities of this infinite variety. Language makes them comprehensible’ (p. 72). Such nostalgia for what are recognized as fictions betrays clearly how regret for the passing paradigm of the world-as-text is regret for the false security it created – not by design or conscious deception but simply by the process of transferring language to the reading of the world.

12. Zeami, , op. cit., p. 58.Google Scholar

13. cf. Ishii, Tatsuro, ‘Zeami's Mature Thoughts on Acting’, TRI, 12, 2, Summer, 1987CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Komparu, Kunio, The Noh Theatre, New York, 1983.Google Scholar

14. ‘It is often commented on by audiences that “many times a performance is effective when the actor does nothing”. … to speak of an actor “doing nothing” actually signifies that interval which exists between two physical actions. When one examines why this interval “when nothing happens” may seem so fascinating, it is surely because of the fact that, at the bottom, the artist never relaxes his inner tension’. Zeami, , op. cit., p. 96f.Google Scholar

15. The German term is ‘Aufheben’, a term which means both to annul and prolong, to raise to a state where two terms or forces are not reconciled but, rather, retain their integrity and difference but are purged – temporarily – of antagonism: the term is absolutely crucial to the understanding of Hegelian dialectics.

16. It would extend this footnote too far to offer any sort of detailed or comprehensive Western analogy here but it is important nevertheless to realize that this phenomenon is known and recognized in the West:

Among the Expressionists (Toller, for example, writing of the ‘timeless moments’ in which we hear the ‘Silence of the Universe’) (Playwrights on Playwriting, (ed.), Cole, Toby, New York, p. 218).Google Scholar

Cocteau (‘The poet must bring objects and feelings from behind their veils and their mists; he must show them suddenly, so nakedly and so swiftly that it hurts man to recognize them’: ‘this peculiar range of sensibility can be expressed by dramatic poetry, at its moments of greatest intensity’) (ibid., pp. 241,259).

Maeterlinck (‘I had gone there [to the theatre] hoping that the beauty, the grandeur, and the earnestness of my humble day-by-day existence would, for one instant, be revealed to me … one of those strange moments of a higher life that flit unperceived through my dreariest hours’ (ibid., p. 30) as well as his other insistent references to the ‘moment’, the ‘instant’ and his recognition of them as moments of silence and stillness which come to us in a flash).

Yeats writing about the theatre as the home of ‘moments of intense life’ (ibid., p. 37) or lonesco (ibid., p. 145).

17. cf. Barba, Eugenio, Drama Review, XXVI, 2, 1982Google Scholar; Analomia del teatro, Savarese, N. (ed.), Florence, 1983.Google Scholar

18. cf. Berlyne, Daniel, Conflict, Arousal and Curiosity, McGraw-Hill, 1960CrossRefGoogle Scholar; ‘Effects of Novelty and Oddity on Visual Selective Attention’, British Journal of Psychology, LXVII, 2, pp. 175–180.Google Scholar

19. aSchechner, Richard, ‘News, Sex, and Performance Theory’, in Innovation/Renovation, edited by Ihab, and Hassan, Sally, University of Wisconsin Press, 1983, pp. 189–190Google Scholar. Cf. Schechner, Richard, Between Theater and Anthropology, University of Pennsylvania Press, 1985, p. 4.Google Scholar

20. cf. ‘Letter to a Poor Actor’, New Theatre Quarterly, Volume 11, number 8, 11 1986, p. 352–363.Google Scholar

21. Tao De Ching, verse 42.Google Scholar

22. cf. Magliola, Robert, Derrida on the Mend, Purdue University Press, Indiana, 1984.Google Scholar

23. Timaeus, 31.Google Scholar

24. in Garvin, Harry R., Romanticism, Modernism, Postmodernism, Associated University Presses, London and Toronto, 1980, p. 123.Google Scholar

25. op. cit., p. 38.Google Scholar

26. cf. Alter, Jean, ‘From Text to Performance’, Poetics Today, volume 2, number 3, Spring, 1981, pp. 113–139.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

27. Quoted in Sheldrake, Rupert, A New Science of Life, Paladin, London, 1984, p. 174.Google Scholar

28. cf. Winnicott, D. W., Playing and Reality, London, 1971, p. xii.Google Scholar

29. To quote but one example: Ihab Hassan summarizes: ‘As an artistic and philosophical, erotic and social phenomenon, postmodernism veers towards open, playful, optative, disjunctive, displaced, or indeterminate forms, a discourse of fragments, an ideology of fracture, a will to unmaking, an invocation of silence – veers toward all these and yet implies their very opposites, their antithetical realities’ (in Garvin, , op. cit., p. 125).Google Scholar