Performing Religion on the Secular Stage [1 ed.] 9781003042730, 9780367487522, 9781032225487

Table of contents :
Cover
Half Title
Series Page
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Contents
Figures
Acknowledgements
Introduction
Notes
1. Modern Scriptural Theater and the Performativity of Anachronism
The Performativity of Anachronism and the Concept of "Liveness" in Late Medieval Theater
Simultaneity and Anachronism in Hugo Ball's A Nativity Play. Bruitist (1916)
Tradition and Revision in the Twenty-First Century Oberammergau Passion Play
Anachronism and the Cyclicality of Myth and History in Rina Yerushalmi's Bible Project
Conclusion
Notes
2. "Who shall be Christ?" Between Sacrificial Figure and Social Victim
Playing the Crucifixion in Late Medieval Theater
Sacrificial Figures and Social Victims
Performing the Self, Performing the Icon, Performing the Other
Conclusion
Notes
3. Encountering Absence in the Theater
The Visit to the "Cemetery of the Tribes": Jerzy Grotowski and Akropolis
Walking in the Dark
"Between a Person and Another": Interpersonal Encounters in Deb Margolin's Theater and Performance
Conclusion
Notes
Conclusion
Appendix: English Translation of Hugo Ball, A Nativity Play. Bruitist (1916), Ein Krippenspiel, Bruitist (1916)
A Nativity Play. Bruitist
1. Silent Night
2. The Stable
3. The Appearance of the Angel and the Star
4. The Annunciation
5. The Visit of the Three Kings/Magi
6. Arrival at the Stable
7. The Prophecy
Nativity Play
Notes
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

Routledge Advances in Theatre & Performance Studies

PERFORMING RELIGION ON THE SECULAR STAGE Sharon Aronson-Lehavi

Performing Religion on the Secular Stage

This book examines the relations between Western religion, secularism, and modern theater and performance. Sharon Aronson-Lehavi posits that the ongoing cultural power of religious texts, icons, and ideas on the one hand and the artistic freedom enabled by secularism and avant-garde experimentalism on the other, has led theatre artists throughout the twentieth century to create a uniquely modern theatrical hybrid—theater performances that simultaneously re-inscribe and grapple with religion and religious performativity. The book compares this phenomenon with medieval forms of religious theater and offers deep and original analyses of significant contemporary works ranging from plays and performances by August Strindberg, Hugo Ball (Dada), Jerzy Grotowski, and Hanoch Levin, to those created by Adrienne Kennedy, Rina Yerushalmi, Deb Margolin, Milo Rau, and Sarah Ruhl. The book analyzes a new and original historiography of a uniquely modern theatrical phenomenon, a study that is of high importance considering the reemergence of religion in contemporary culture and politics. Sharon Aronson-Lehavi is a faculty member and former Chair of the Department of Theatre Arts at Tel Aviv University, Israel.

Routledge Advances in Theatre & Performance Studies

This series is our home for cutting-edge, upper-level scholarly studies and edited collections. Considering theatre and performance alongside topics such as religion, politics, gender, race, ecology, and the avant-garde, titles are characterized by dynamic interventions into established subjects and innovative studies on emerging topics. The Motional Improvisation of Al Wunder By H.R. Elliott The Problems of Viewing Performance Epistemology and Other Minds By Michael Y. Bennett Entangled Performance Histories New Approaches to Theater Historiography Edited By Erika Fischer-Lichte, Małgorzata Sugiera, Torsten Jost, Holger Hartung, Omid Soltani Hamlet’s Hereditary Queen Performing Shakespeare’s Silent Female Power By Kerrie Roberts Lessons from Shakespeare’s Classroom Empowering Learning Through Drama and Rhetoric Robin Lithgow Performance, Resistance and Refugees Edited By Suzanne Little, Samid Suliman, Caroline Wake Politics as Public Art The Aesthetics of Political Organizing and Social Movements Edited By Martin Zebracki, Z. Zane McNeill For more information about this series, please visit: https://www.routledge.com/ Routledge-Advances-in-Theatre--Performance-Studies/book-series/RATPS

Performing Religion on the Secular Stage

Sharon Aronson-Lehavi

First published 2023 by Routledge 4 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2023 Sharon Aronson-Lehavi The right of Sharon Aronson-Lehavi to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN: 978-0-367-48752-2 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-032-22548-7 (pbk) ISBN: 978-1-003-04273-0 (ebk) DOI: 10.4324/9781003042730 Typeset in Bembo by MPS Limited, Dehradun

For Amnon with love

Contents

List of Figures Acknowledgements Introduction 1

2

3

viii x 1

Modern Scriptural Theater and the Performativity of Anachronism

13

“Who shall be Christ?” Between Sacrificial Figure and Social Victim

49

Encountering Absence in the Theater

79

Conclusion

110

Appendix: English Translation of Hugo Ball, A Nativity Play. Bruitist (1916), Ein Krippenspiel, Bruitist (1916) Bibliography Index

112 118 131

Figures

1.1 Hugo Ball, A Nativity Play. Bruitist, 1916. [Hugo Ball, Ein Krippenspiel. Bruitistisch, 1916.] Left: “Krippenspiel” (handwritten in red pencil and other drawings in pencil); Right: “Simultan Krippenspiel” (handwritten in red pencil). Full manuscript includes three loose pages. Typescript with handwritten director’s notes in pencil by Hugo Ball (see Appendix). With various drawings in red pencil and pencil. Object dimensions: 27.8 × 22.0 cm. Folder dimensions: 31.6 × 24.6 × 0.5 cm. Kunsthaus Zürich, Bibliothek, 1967. Courtesy: Kunsthaus Zürich 1.2 “Shema Israel” (“Hear, O Israel”), Oberammergau Passion Play, 2022. © Oberammergau Passion Play 2022. Photo: Arno Declair 1.3 “Israel and the Red Sea Crossing” (living image). Oberammergau Passion Play, 2022. © Oberammergau Passion Play 2022. Photo: Brigit Gudjonsdottir 1.4 “They left and they camped” (Numbers 33); Bible Project Part 1, VaYomer, VaYelech (And He Said, And He Walked). Adapted and directed by Rina Yerushalmi. Itim Ensemble and Cameri Theater of Tel Aviv, 1996. Photo: Gadi Dagon. Courtesy: Rina Yerushalmi 1.5 “Jephtah’s daughter” (Judges 11) performed by Iyar Wolpe. Bible Project Part 1, VaYomer, VaYelech (And He Said, And He Walked). Adapted and directed by Rina Yerushalmi. Itim Ensemble and Cameri Theater of Tel Aviv, 1996. Photo: Ornan Rotem. Courtesy: Rina Yerushalmi 1.6 “The vision I saw was like the vision I had seen” (Ezekiel 43:3) performed by Moisi Shmuel. Bible Project Part 2, VaYishtachu, VaYerra (And They Bowed, And He Feared). Adapted and directed by Rina Yerushalmi. Itim Ensemble and Cameri Theater of Tel Aviv, 1998. Photo: Gadi Dagon. Courtesy: Rina Yerushalmi

20 30 34

39

40

42

Figures ix

2.1

“Marc Chagall, Drawing” (“Marc Chagall, Zeichnung”), cover page of Der Sturm magazine, 10 February 1920 2.2 The Torments of Job, written and directed by Hanoch Levin. Cameri Theatre of Tel Aviv, 1981. Yitshak Hizkia (Tsofar) and Yossef Carmon (Job). Photo: © Srulik Haramati. Courtesy: Israel Center for the Documentation of the Performing Arts, Tel Aviv University 2.3 The Torments of Job, written and directed by Hanoch Levin. Cameri Theater of Tel Aviv, 1981. Yossef Carmon (Job) and Dov Reizer (pathetic clown). Photo: © Srulik Haramati. Courtesy: Israel Center for the Documentation of the Performing Arts, Tel Aviv University 3.1 Micha Ullman, Library, Bebelpaltz, Berlin, 1995. Glass, concrete, and plaster. Excavation: 530 × 706 × 706 cm. Glass window: 120 × 120 cm. Photo: Micha Ullman. Courtesy: Micha Ullman 3.2 Walkers in the Dark, written and directed by Hanoch Levin. Habima National Theater in collaboration with Haifa Municipal Theater, 1998. In the center, Dov Reizer (storyteller), and on his right Avraham Mor (God). Stage right: the living; stage left: the dead. Photo: © Pesi Girsch. Courtesy: Pesi Girsch 3.3 Deb Margolin, O Wholly Night and Other Jewish Solecisms, 1997. Photo: © Carol Rosegg. Courtesy: Billy Rose Theatre Division, NYPL A.1 Hugo Ball, A Nativity Play. Bruitist, 1916. [Hugo Ball, Ein Krippenspiel. Bruitistisch, 1916.] Typescript with handwritten director’s notes in pencil by Hugo Ball. Object dimensions: 27.8 × 22.0 cm. Folder dimensions: 31.6 × 24.6 × 0.5 cm. Kunsthaus Zürich, Bibliothek, 1967. Courtesy: Kunsthaus Zürich A.2 Hugo Ball, A Nativity Play. Bruitist, 1916. [Hugo Ball, Ein Krippenspiel. Bruitistisch, 1916.] Typescript with handwritten director’s notes in pencil by Hugo Ball. Object dimensions: 27.8 × 22.0 cm. Folder dimensions: 31.6 × 24.6 × 0.5 cm. Kunsthaus Zürich, Bibliothek, 1967. Courtesy: Kunsthaus Zürich A.3 Hugo Ball, A Nativity Play. Bruitist, 1916. [Hugo Ball, Ein Krippenspiel. Bruitistisch, 1916.] Typescript with handwritten director’s notes in pencil by Hugo Ball. Object dimensions: 27.8 × 22.0 cm. Folder dimensions: 31.6 × 24.6 × 0.5 cm. Kunsthaus Zürich, Bibliothek, 1967. Courtesy: Kunsthaus Zürich

58

63

65

80

94 100

113

114

114

Acknowledgements

The ideas of this book first shaped during my stay at the Hellen Diller Institute for Jewish Law and Israel Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. I am deeply grateful to Kenneth Bamberger and to Rebecca Golbert. Research on the theater of Rina Yerushalmi was generously supported by the Israel Science Foundation for the project “The Art of Adaptation: The Theatre of Rina Yerushalmi and the Itim Ensemble.” I am extremely grateful to colleagues and friends for their continuous support: Ruthie Abeliovich, Daphna Ben-Shaul, Naama Ben-Yehoyada, Tracy C. Davis, Bambi Friedman, Chanita Goodblatt, Dror Harari, Sefy Hendler, Gad Kaynar, Shulamith Lev-Aladgem, Olga Levitan, Sigal Lewkowicz, Yair Lipshitz, Carol Martin, Peter W. Marx, Eran Neuman, Galit Noga-Banai, Freddie Rokem, Iris Shagrir, Natan Skop, Sofie Taubert, Yael Via Dorembus, and Nurit Yaari. My thoughts about the ideas in this book have grown out of many years of conversations in my family. For their love and support I am deeply grateful to my parents, Shifra and Raymond Aronson, to my sister Anat Laufer and my brother Ori Aronson and their families, to Avner Lehavi, Shlomit Lehavi, and their families. Finally, I am deeply grateful Amnon, to whom this book is dedicated with love, and to our wonderful daughter Lia.

Introduction

Performing Religion on the Secular Stage looks at theater works from the twentieth- and twenty-first centuries that perform religious texts, iconographies, rituals, and concepts. The works I discuss throughout the book are created and performed, however, within a secular cultural framework, and most of them grow out of avant-garde, at times radical, artistic contexts. By “a secular cultural framework,” I first refer to the theater as an artistic and hermeneutic forum, which is driven by aesthetic and performative rather than religious objectives, a distinction that in itself is the result of historical and social processes of secularization in the West. In his seminal A Secular Age, Charles Taylor differentiates between eras in the West in which there was no other ontological option than belief as opposed to societies in which this is one of the options.1 In addition to this ontological definition, there is a wide variety of historical, social, and cultural factors that construct the secularism of the modern era, and yet religious discourses, ideas, beliefs, and concepts continue to take part in shaping culture. As James D. Herbert writes in Our Distance from God: Studies in the Divine and the Mundane in Western Art and Music, “Whatever our own religious (or irreligious) tendencies, and irrespective of the manifest content of the artworks we encounter, we look at images, listen to music, and proceed through ritualized space with that sacred legacy forcefully molding our experiences.”2 This book shows how the theater, as an artistic arena, opens up and reveals a complex dialogism between religion, secularism, art, and performance through works that engage with religious representations and rely on the embeddedness, familiarity, and for many, meaningfulness of religious concepts. This cultural iconicity is the basis for theater artists to set religious subject matter against other ideas and questions, and yet to evoke dialectical experiences that, even in profane cases, reiterate the religious content, and thus, as in any deconstructive act, contain and perform its traces and put the one into dialogue with its other. Religious representations on the secular stage are thus situated on the threshold of the holy, the sacred, and the profane, but while these attributes belong to abstract notions associated with a wide concept of the “religious,”3 performing religion in the Western context also entails grappling with charged historical and social questions of identity. On the modern, secular, stage these include, as the DOI: 10.4324/9781003042730-1

2

Introduction

case studies I discuss throughout the book show, dealing with historical events such as the Wars and the Shoah, phenomena such as racism, social constructions of the Other, and philosophical debates about meaning and belief. Taken together, the works I discuss throughout the book represent a uniquely modern theatrical hybrid—theater performances that simultaneously re-inscribe and grapple with religion and religious performativity—a modern theatrical phenomenon of performing religion that requires attention whether audiences have secular, religious, atheist, indifferent, or any other approach to religion. The reasons that theater artists engage with religious representations on the modern and secular stage are complex and at times paradoxical. The combination of a secular cultural context, in which artistic freedom is a dominant value, and the modernist or avant-garde aesthetic ideals of artistic experimentalism, which have rid of the concern of impropriety, taken together with the search for alternative, at times ritualistic and embodied performativities, seem to have created a space within the modern theater for performing religion.4 In addition, it should be taken into consideration that many theater artists have personal religious backgrounds, a constructor of identity that is often overlooked, but which is formative as a source of inspiration and cultural knowledge, even if their works express a secular or non-religious worldview. Twentieth-century and contemporary theater are not, however, the first time in Western theater history that religion is performed, holy figures embodied, and scriptural texts reenacted. Although, as this book proposes, secularism and modernism made these theatricalities acceptable and possible in very new ways, straightforwardly performing religious subject matter, as is well known, was one of the main practices of late medieval and pre-Reformation theater. In other words, in addition to articulating modernist performative models that manifest a contextual dialogic relationship between the religious and the secular, this book makes an additional historiographical argument about the ways the performance of religion changes, resurfaces, and is used to express social and cultural questions in different places and times. While we are accustomed to thinking, for example, about how theatrical genres such as “tragedy” change, remain, and reappear since classical times and throughout the ages, we are less used to thinking about cultural reiterations of, for example, the theatrical genre of the mystery plays, embodied reenactments of sacrificial rituals such as the Crucifixion, and more. The medieval-modern arch is a long one, but not only is there much to be gained from a comparative discussion of performing religion within an overridingly religious cultural context and within a secular one, but also there are notable—sometimes surprising—similarities and connections between the theatricality of religion in the two eras. Taken from a different methodological perspective, Alexander Nagel’s Medieval Modern: Art Out of Time “is a book about the way in which modern and contemporary art has put pre-Enlightenment modalities back into operation, sometimes deliberately, sometimes not.”5 Although Nagel is explicitly not interested in iconographic or thematic connections but rather what he sees

Introduction 3

as “deeper structural analogies, sometimes acknowledged, sometimes not,”6 including, for example, artistic modalities such as “installation,” “indexality,” “collage,” and more,7 his approach is significant firstly in looking complexly at conventional structures of periodization and in suggesting such a comparative methodology between the medieval and the modern. Moreover, while the present book looks specifically at the theatricality and performativity of religious texts, icons, and rituals, this does not rule out the relevance of aesthetic and formal relations between medieval and modern theater more generally. Whereas in the first and second chapters of the book I focus specifically on the ways scriptures and sacrificial narratives are re-performed in modern and contemporary contexts, in the third and final chapter, I return to Nagel’s theory to discuss metaphors of encountering absence, both as a religious representational practice and as a phenomenological mode of aesthetic expression more generally. I do think, however, that employing such a comparative methodology, it is hard to speak about aesthetic modalities, in the medieval context at least, without taking into consideration religious discourses, ideas, and aesthetics that were a dominant part of that worldview. In other words, examining works of art and theater through their dialogism with religious vocabularies does not limit the discussion to their content but rather brings onto the table particular forms and performatives that are part of their cultural history. The comparative methodology of religious performativity I employ in the book thus sheds light on similarities, and not only differences, between the medieval and the modern, and offers a way to examine the dialectics between the religious and the secular in modern theatrical contexts. Religious representations have not disappeared from the post-medieval stage. In the first chapter, for example, which examines the performance of scriptures in contemporary theater, I discuss the changes that have been taking place over the past few decades in the Oberammergau Passion Play, which originates in the seventeenth century. This is the only example throughout the book that belongs to conventional categories of “religious theater,” and particularly for this reason, it serves as an intriguing case study for the ways modern history and contemporary theater aesthetics have affected its theatricality. In addition to Oberammergau or other examples of local passion plays that have been ongoing for centuries, there are, obviously, numerous early modern plays inspired by biblical themes and religious figures, symbols, narratives, and metaphors.8 However, although periodization is always complex, unstable, and dependent on specific cultural contexts, there are theatricalities that were central to late medieval and pre-Reformation theater, for example, the impersonation of holy figures or embodied reenactments of sacrificial narratives, which reappear on the modern secular stage, absorbing and expressing new meanings, as I discuss in the following chapters. It could be argued that staging religious subject matter appears to manifest typical kinds of aesthetics, anachronism as a performative element for example, or non-illusionist acting techniques that are used in order to embody holy figures and to maintain their iconicity, as well as total and ritualistic forms of

4

Introduction

theatricality. There is also a place to consider a historiographical suggestion according to which the modernist shaking-off of Western constructions of professional bourgeois theater, and especially, as mentioned, the avant-gardist ridding of the concern of impropriety, might have led, intentionally or not, to the resurfacing of pre-modern theatrical practices in the context of religious representations. It is hard to pin down exactly how, when, and why these theatrical changes took place, but we can take for example two documents that help to identify moments in which representational norms change. On 16 May 1559, Queen Elizabeth issued a proclamation titled “Prohibiting Unlicensed Interludes and Plays, Especially on Religion or Policy,” according to which “none to be played wherein either matters of religion or of the governance of the estate of the commonweal shall be handled or treated.”9 Exceptions include materials written “by men of authority, learning, or wisdom,” but even in these cases, this should not “be handled before any audience but of grave and discreet persons […].”10 This proclamation is one of numerous documents that help articulate a transition between an era in which it was legitimate to perform religious subject matter and between a cultural moment in which this became to be considered improper. Notably, the exclusion of “men of authority, learning, or wisdom” and of audiences of “grave and discreet persons” stands in sharp contrast to the social status of community members across Europe who took a major part in producing various forms of vernacular, civic, and festive religious theater in the late middle ages. Also notable is the fact that whereas straightforward religious representations continued to dominate painting, sculpture, music, architecture, and literature, in the embodied art of the theater there is a discernable change in post-medieval culture. Similarly, the concluding lines of the post-Reformation banns in Chester, dated to 1607–1608, specifically express the inconvenience regarding the impersonation of God, suggesting that only his voice should be heard and his face covered by a cloud: [ffor] then shoulde all those persones that as Gods doe playe In Clowdes come downe with voyce & not be seene ffor no man can proportion that Godhead I saye To the shape of man face nose & eyne But sethence the face gilte doth disfigure the man that deme A Clowdy Coueringe of the man a voyce only to heare And not God in shape or person to appeare.11 This passage, according to Meg Twycross and Sarah Carpenter, problematizes human impersonation of God, but they argue that “Its patent uneasiness about the appearance of God on the stage seems foreign to the mysteries, and in fact to almost all medieval drama. In spite of the obvious problems of performing divinity, a sense of impropriety in human actors playing God seems to be largely a post-Reformation development.12 These documents indicate how cultural changes affect artistic arenas, just as secularism affects the artistic

Introduction 5

approach to religious representations as I argue in this book. They also suggest the option that cultural changes do not necessarily attest to linear “development,” but rather to a much more complex model of flux, change, and continuity. For this reason, in order to look at modern and secular theatrical religious representations, there is place to take into consideration also the history of this phenomenon in Western theatre. This book is not the first to look at the ways medieval theatricalities have continued or reappeared in modern contexts or at the ways religion is performed, yet it articulates a uniquely modern phenomenon of hybrid performances that grow out of avant-garde and experimental theater and thus put religion and secularism into dialogue. Before I expand on this phenomenon, there is place to consider the scholarly work about additional modern and contemporary forms of religious performativity, including research on revivals, academic reconstructions, and continuations of medieval theatrical forms, as well as popular forms of religious theatricality. These categories should not be overlooked because they exemplify cultural sites in which communities, theater makers, actors, and audiences face the challenges of religious theatricality and performativity. First, revivals of medieval drama and mystery plays in local and communal contexts often grow out of cultural heritage projects and are produced and performed as communal endeavors, which attract tourists and revive what used to be local medieval performance traditions. Books such as Katie Normington’s Modern Mysteries: Contemporary Productions of Medieval English Cycle Dramas or Margaret Rogerson’s The York Mystery Plays: Performance in the City analyze this phenomenon in the English context and the websites of the plays in York or Chester, for example, are significant resources for studying about this category.13 Such productions reenact not only the medieval plays, but also, in their modernized forms, the communal creative endeavor that was also part of the past. These festivals, for example in York, which unlike the medieval annual tradition are produced nowadays once every four years, attract many tourists to the town, and rely on the anachronistic element that is central to the plays themselves to create modern experiences.14 Second, academic reconstructions of medieval drama, which are produced and studied mainly for historiographic purposes, are another cultural site in which theater historians and theater departments are faced not only with questions of theater and performance history but also with forms of religious performance and the embodiment of holy figures. The monumental REED (Records of Early English Drama) project at the University of Toronto and the affiliated PLS (Poculi Ludique Societas), which annually produces these dramas15 as well as other research-by-practice productions such as medievalist Carol Symes’s Le Jeu d’Adam (The Play of Adam) are but a few examples.16 Like the first category, these projects are often based on amateur acting and yet involve large numbers of participants who create and watch the plays. Third, continuations and ongoing forms of religious performance, including passion plays that have continued to be performed as intentionally religious

6

Introduction

theater since the early modern era and until these days. In this context, as mentioned, the most famous is the Bavarian Oberammergau Passion Play, which I discuss in the first chapter in light of the changes the performance has undergone in the past few decades, and which is the only example of conventional or intentionally religious theater I discuss in the book. There are, however, other examples, which require more research and which take place in mainly, but not exclusively, Catholic contexts and religious communities.17 Of particular interest in this context is Claire Sponsler’s Ritual Imports: Performing Medieval Drama in America, which offers a theoretical and historiographical account of the migration of European medieval performance practices to America, from the sixteenth century to the twentieth, examining their continuations, adaptations, and variations.18 Sponsler analyzes the agency and performativity of the ritual itself, which has the power to simultaneously change and escape change, to move from one context to another, and to be imported and reinvented in new social contexts. Also in this category, although not quite “continuations” of medieval theater, the case studies Jill Stevenson looks at in her books Sensational Devotion: Evangelical Performance in 21st-Century America and Feeling the Future at Christian End-Time Performances, delineate the place religion has in contemporary performative contexts, popular and other, and reveal the ways religion and religious belief is performed in the United States.19 Henry Bial’s Playing God: The Bible on the Broadway Stage does not focus on connections with medieval performance practices, and yet his starting point, a historiographical discussion of Salmi Morse’s 1879 The Passion, which rose much controversy, adds yet another model of the cultural performance of religious content in the twentieth century, with a very wide appeal and a long tradition of performing the Bible on Broadway.20 Although these productions and musicals are beyond the scope of this book, they surely take part in the wide phenomenon of performing religion on the secular stage. To this taxonomy, this book adds another group of theater works, in which whether or not there are intentional or acknowledged relations to medieval practices, the performance of religious sources is grounded in particular historical and cultural contexts, rather than in universalistic ideas of religion or the religious.21 These works, as explained so far, are created mostly within secular cultural frameworks and from secular perspectives, and yet exemplify a performance genre in which social, cultural, and artistic questions are dealt with through religious representations. In addition, it should be noted that while most of the scholarly discourses on these subjects relate to Christian theatrical histories, especially those that are connected to medieval performance genres, processes of secularization in the West have also had an impact on Jewish and Israeli theater, as some of the examples I discuss show. The works I discuss come from a variety of cultural contexts and use adaptation in both serious and parodic ways to evoke new and provocative encounters with the source materials. There are numerous works throughout the twentieth- and twenty-first centuries that would fit into this category, and

Introduction 7

which include examples as diverse as August Strindberg’s Coram Populo! De Creatione et Sententia Vera Mundi: A Mystery (1897), a radical abbreviated mystery play, as well as his epic The Road to Damascus (1898), Oscar Panizza’s The Love Council: A Heavenly Tragedy in Five Acts (1894), Hugo Ball’s Dadaist Nativity Play (1916), Vladimir Mayakovsky’s communist Mystery Bouffe (1918/ 1921), Jerzy Grotowski’s Akropolis (1962–1968) and Apocalypsis Cum Figuris (1969), Dario Fo’s Mistero Bouffo (1969), Jean-Claude van Itallie and the Open Theatre’s The Serpent (1969), Hanoch Levin’s The Torments of Job (1981), George Tabori’s Goldberg Variations (1991), Bobby Baker’s How to Shop (1993), Rina Yerushalmi’s Bible Project (1996/1998), Adrienne Kennedy’s Motherhood 2000 (1994), Paul Rudnick’s The Most Fabulous Story Ever Told (1998), Terence McNally’s Corpus Christi (1998), Katie Mitchell’s The Mysteries (1998), Richard Thomas and Stewart Lee’s Jerry Springer: The Opera (2003), Sarah Ruhl’s Passion Play (2010), and there are many other works that could be added to this list. These works can be further categorized according to the specific political contexts and identity formations in which they emerge, as well as through the ways they re-appropriate religious source materials in order to contend with significant social and historical issues or to express alternative or marginalized voices and perspectives through canonical ones.22 In the following chapters, I analyze selected case studies through three performative models: Scriptural theater and the performativity of anachronism; reenactments of sacrificial narratives and the performance of social violence and scapegoating; and theatrical metaphors of encountering absence as representations of the philosophical search for meaning in the theatre. These three categories grow not only out of religious conceptual frameworks (text, ritual and iconography, and questions of belief and search for meaning), but also out of theatrical ones: The rereading and adaptation of canonical texts in the theater; ritualistic and embodied forms of total theatricality with emphasis on the performing body; and the phenomenology of the search for meaning in the theater. In addition, these three models enable a comparison with late medieval theatrical practices such as the performance genre of the mystery plays or embodied reenactments of Crucifixion scenes. In the first chapter, “Modern Scriptural Theater and the Performativity of Anachronism,” I look at the theatricality and performativity of staging scriptures, the Bible, as opposed to theatrical adaptations of dramatic plays. Staging biblical excerpts is the basis of a theatricality that in both medieval and modern contexts playfully uses anachronism and quotation in ways that highlight contemporary social and cultural issues. In this chapter, I discuss three examples that come from very different artistic, historical, and social contexts. I start with Hugo Ball’s Dadaist A Nativity Play. Bruitist (1916), which was created and performed at the Cabaret Voltaire amidst the First World War, a radical adaptation not only of the scriptural event of the Nativity, but also of the performance genre of “nativity plays” (krippenspiel), which has roots in medieval times. In contrast to the avant-gardist performativity of this work, my second

8

Introduction

example in this chapter, the ongoing Oberammergau Passion Play, is an example of intentionally religious theater, which nonetheless has undergone changes and adaptations in recent decades under the directorship of Christian Stückl and in light of the anti-Semitic history of the play. Here too, the theatricality of anachronism gives place for alternative discourses to enter the religious reenactment. My final example in this chapter is Israeli director Rina Yerushalmi’s Bible Project (1996/1998), which is based entirely on the performance of Hebrew biblical excerpts in the original language. Although it is composed fully of biblical quotations, it is perhaps one of the most secular works discussed in this book, as it was created in light of the significant cultural place the Hebrew Bible holds in Israeli secular society as a constructor of identity. Taken together, these works exemplify the ways that staging scriptures, which was a dominant practice of the medieval stage, finds new and politically charged modes of expression in modern and contemporary contexts. In the second chapter, “‘Who shall be Christ?’ Between Sacrificial Figure and Social Victim,” I look at embodied reenactments of sacrificial narratives through the lens of social victimhood and at the performance of violence, particularly through modern and contemporary references to Crucifixion scenes. The modern re-appropriations of this theatricality, which dominated the medieval stage but nearly ceased to exist since early modern theater, touch upon modern historical traumas such as the World Wars, the Shoah, and racism. The question in the title of this chapter is a quote from a late medieval sermon exemplum, which describes a popular summer game, in which the players repetitively play and reenact the Crucifixion, marking the player in the role of Christ as a scapegoat and social outcast. These performances, again, medieval and modern, are cultural sites in which structures of social violence, scapegoating, and bodily suffering are addressed through extreme performative means. My examples in this chapter include Hanoch Levin’s The Torments of Job (1981) in which he uses this iconography to conflate the identities of Job, Christ, and Shoah victims; Adrienne Kennedy’s Motherhood 2000 (1994) in which she revisits the medieval York Play of the Crucifixion by radically reversing the roles of the tormentors and the tormented in a critique of racism and violence; and Milo Rau’s The New Gospel (2021), a film in which he casted in the role of Christ Yvan Sagent, a Black Cameroonian activist who worked on a tomato farm in southern Italy and started a revolt against the exploitation of rural workers. In all of these examples, the performative iconography of scapegoating and crowd violence on the one hand and that of bodily suffering on the other hand, enable modern theater artists to translate sacrificial models into theatrical studies of social victimhood and to question the ethical place of spectators who take part in such reenactments. The third and final chapter of the book, “Encountering Absence in the Theater,” looks at phenomenological and philosophical questions regarding the search for meaning in the theater through choreographed metaphors of encountering absence, death, and the dead, as well as through the ways the theater deals with reenacting entities that defy conventional representation

Introduction 9

such as God or the Messiah. The modern examples I discuss in this chapter include Micha Ullman’s memorial installation, Library, which is located in Bebelplatz in Berlin (1995), Jerzy Grotowski’s Akropolis (1962–1968), which itself is an adaptation of a Polish Resurrection play, Stanisław Wyspiański’s 1904 Akropolis, Hanoch Levin’s Walkers in the Dark (1998), in which the appearance of the character of God on stage turns out to be a bewildering theatrical moment of dis-appearance, and, finally, Deb Margolin’s O Wholly Night and Other Jewish Solecisms (1997), which offers an alternative, feminist, option for finding meaning in the theater through ethically engaged interpersonal encounters in daily life rather than in abstract ideas about the future arrival of the Messiah. All of the works discussed in this chapter construct metaphors of walking towards and encountering absence, which not only highlight search for meaning but also redirect attention to the ethical obligation towards the social Other. These three performative models—the textual, the ritualistic, and the ethical or philosophical—enable me to examine the historical, cultural, and symbolic questions that theater artists are interested in exploring by performing religious sources. As such, the question is hardly ever the beliefs or non-beliefs of the artists or the audiences, but rather the ways religious texts, icons, and phenomena are put in relation to or against other social and philosophical questions, and how they are addressed and interpreted in modern and secular theatrical contexts. Religion means many different things to people, depending on their backgrounds, familial traditions, memories, personal convictions, ideologies, collectively formed identities, cultural histories, and more. In The Cambridge Companion to Religious Studies, Robert A. Orsi suggests three interrelated conceptualizations that help to define what scholars mean by the term “religion,” which include an experiential dimension, a normative dimension that is bound to intellectual and political contexts, and the realm of lived practices.23 The artistic lens of the theater adds a significant perspective to understanding the place of religion in contemporary culture, while religious discursive frameworks enable theater artists to speak about issues that require this set of ideas, practices, icons, and texts, what Ann Taves refers to as “specialness as a generic attribute of things considered religion-like.”24 The intersections between theater and religion are complex. Yet while religion as a cultural system claims certain truths about the world, art also claims it is able to know the world, only in a much more skeptical and relative way. As such, the secular stage is a significant cultural site in which these complexities can be explored. There are many ways through which to look at the relations between religion and theater. Performance studies have surely deepened the discourse regarding the relations between ritual (religious or other) and the theater, through notions of repetition, presence, performativity, and even belief. These relations are clearly part of the modern and avant-garde interest in performing religion and “the religious,” but in this book, I focus on the theater as a discursive and representational arena, which does not necessarily aim to reflect, and definitely not to replace, religious ritual.

10 Introduction

Just as “religion” is hard to define in a way that captures all of its meanings, so is the concept of the secular.25 Importantly, these are not binary terms that exclude each other, but rather interdependent and intertwined. In this book, the term secular, especially, as in the title of the book coupled with “stage,” refers to theatrical practices that are distinct from religious ones. While, as David V. Mason argues in The Performative Ground of Religion and Theatre, these two cultural phenomena share many aspects, I differentiate between theatrical works of art that stage religious representations for artistic purposes and between religious frameworks that, using theater and theatricality or not, are focused on religious practices and intentions. This is an important distinction for a number of reasons. First, it helps to understand experimental works of art that perform religious texts, icons, or ideas in what is often received as parodic or profane ways, not necessarily as blasphemous, but rather as a dialogic, if controversial, engagement with religious discourses, without claiming any kind of religious authority but rather expressing artistic quest and questioning. Although there are, of course, iconoclast examples, in most of the works I have studied as I worked on this book, it became apparent that the theater in which religion is performed is a hermeneutic space through which to think about complex, at times unsettling issues, even in radical works. Second, this differentiation enables us to look at theatrical creativity within religious cultural frameworks, such as the late medieval context, as theater rather than as religious ritual, even if the theater was not disconnected from official religious doctrine or ritual. This helps to explain all the deviations from liturgical or orthodox texts and contexts, all the surprisingly mundane anachronisms these plays are filled with, in a theater that like any theater, was interested in retelling its participants the sacred history as much as it was interested in reflecting their lives and concerns at the present moment. Theater and performance are discursive cultural arenas, bound to the present, and as such even within religious contexts are sites in which unexpected and liminal meanings emerge. At the same time, although modern theater artists who are not obliged to religious boundaries freely manipulate, alter, change, update, and interpret religious sources, their works still manifest repetition, reiteration, and continuity of these very sources even in radical examples. Finally, the distinction between religious cultural practices and theatrical ones paves the way to look at the fascinating and paradoxical relations between secularization, modernization, and the performance of religion.

Notes 1 Charles Taylor, “Introduction,” A Secular Age (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2007), 1–23. 2 James D. Herbert, Our Distance from God: Studies in the Divine and the Mundane in Western Art and Music (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008), 3. 3 For a phenomenological attribution of the notion of the sacred to modern theater, see for example Ralph Yarrow’s Sacred Theatre, in which he explains in the Preface that “[…] our view of the sacred is plural, invisible, and essentially unknowable.” (Bristol, UK: Intellect, 2007), 10.

Introduction

11

4 In his books Holy Theatre: Ritual and the Avant Garde (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), and Avant Garde Theatre 1892–1992 (New York: Routeldge, 1993), Christopher Innes looks at the theories and theater of modern theater artists such as Jarry, Artaud, Brook, Grotowski, The Living Theatre, and more, in light of their use of “ritualistic” forms. 5 Alexander Nagel, Medieval Modern: Art Out of Time (London: Thames and Hudson, 2012), 9–10. 6 Nagel, 2012, 10. 7 Nagel, 2012, 18–21. 8 In this context, see for example, Hannibal Hamlin, The Bible in Shakespeare (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013); Paul Whitfield White, “The Bible as Play in Reformation England” in The Cambridge History of British Theatre Vol. 1: Origins to 1660, Jane Milling and Peter Thomson, eds. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 87–115. 9 Paul L. Hughes and James F. Larkin, c.s.v., ed. Tudor Royal Proclamations: Volume 2 The Later Tudors (1553–1587) (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1969), 115–116. 10 Hughes and Larkin, 1969, 116. 11 Lawrence M. Clopper, ed., REED: Chester (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1979), 247. [For then, all those persons that as God play/should come down in clouds with their voice, but not to be seen/since no man can compare the Godhead I say/to the shape of man’s face, nose, and eyes/And since the gilded face disfigures the man/A cloudy covering on the man [should be used] so that only his voice can be heard/and not God in shape or person to appear]. 12 Meg Twycross and Sarah Carpenter, Masks and Masking in Medieval and Early Tudor England (London: Ashgate, 2002), 195. See also Kurt A. Schreyer, “‘Erazed in the Booke?’: Periodization and the Material Text of the Chester Banns,” in Jessica Dell, David Klausner, and Helen Ostovich, eds., The Chester Cycle in Context 1555–1575: Religion, Drama, and the Impact of Change (New York: Routledge, 2012), 133–148. 13 See Katie Normington, Modern Mysteries: Contemporary Productions of Medieval English Cycle Dramas (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2007); Margret Rogerson, The York Mystery Play: Performance in the City (York: York Medieval Press, 2011); Margaret Rogerson, “Medieval Mystery Plays in the Modern World: A Question of Relevance,” in The Yearbook of English Studies 43 (2013), 343–366; John R. Elliott Jr., Playing God: Medieval Mysteries on the Modern Stage (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1989). 14 See for example the websites of the York and Chester Mystery Plays: https://www. yorkmysteryplays.co.uk/ https://chestermysteryplays.com/ 15 For REED (Records of Early English Drama) see https://reed.utoronto.ca/. PLS (Poculi Ludique Societas) https://pls.artsci.utoronto.ca/ sponsors productions of early plays, from the beginnings of medieval drama to as late as the middle of the seventeenth century. 16 See for example, Nancy Wu, “Medieval Drama at the Cloisters,” September 5, 2013 https://www.metmuseum.org/blogs/now-at-the-met/features/2013/medieval-drama and Nancy Wu and Carol Symes, “Presenting The Play of Adam at the Met Cloisters,” December 5, 2016. https://www.metmuseum.org/blogs/met-live-arts/2016/play-of-adam-met-cloisters 17 The Italian village of Grazzina has been staging annually a passion play for the past three centuries, see http://www.rievstoricagrassina.it/; The Passion Play of Spearfish, South Dakota, in the United State has been performed annually from 1939–2008. https:// visitspearfish.com/blog/10-years-later-black-hills-passion-play-remembered; The third act of Sarah Ruhl’s meta-theatrical Passion Play is situated in the backstage of this play. See also Kevin J. Wetmore, Jr.’s essay on American Passion Plays inspired by Oberammergau: “Oberammergau in America/America in Oberammergau,” in The Oberammergau Passion Play: Essays on the 2010 Performance and the Centuries-Long Tradition, Kevin J. Wetmore, Jr. ed. (Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland & Company, Inc., 2017), 130–159.

12 Introduction

18

19 20 21

22 23 24 25

In the Jewish context, for example, Sarit Cofman-Simhon writes on Jewish orthodox theater groups. See “Performing Jewish Prayer on Stage: From Rituality to Theatricality and Back,” in Performance Studies in Motion: International Perspectives and Practices in the Twenty First Centuries, Atay Citron, Sharon Aronson-Lehavi, and David Zerbib, eds. (London: Bloomsbury, 2014), 246–260. Claire Sponsler, Ritual Imports: Performing Medieval Drama in America (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2004). It is also relevant to mention in this context Erika FischerLichte’s Theatre, Sacrifice, Ritual: Exploring Forms of Political Theatre (New York: Routledge, 2005), in which she discusses the history of political adaptations and appropriations of ritualistic performative forms, including pageants, or, in the context of religious performativity, the Nazi Thingspiel. See also Helen Solterer’s Medieval Roles for Modern Times: Theatre and the Battle for the French Republic (Pennsylvania: University Park, Pennsylvania University Press, 2010). Jill Stevenson, Sensational Devotion: Evangelical Performance in Twenty-First Century America (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2013); Feeling the Future at Christian End-Time Performances (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2022). Henry Bial, The Bible on the Broadway Stage (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2015). In The Death of Character: Perspectives on Theatre After Modernism, Elinor Fuchs has a chapter titled “Pattern Over Character: The Modern Mysterium,” in which she looks at works of symbolist and avant-garde playwrights such as Maeterlinck, Strindberg, and Artaud, in light of the medieval genre of the mystery play, (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996), 36–51. See also, Daniel Gerould, Bettina Knapp, and Jane House, eds., Sacred Theatre (New York, New York, printed by McNaughton & Gunn, Saline, Michigan, 1989). In Performing Bodies in Pain: Medieval and Post-Modern Martyrs, Mystics, and Artists (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), Marla Carlson looks at the performativity of pain in post-modern performance art through a comparative methodology that is relevant here. Robert A. Orsi, “Introduction,” in The Cambridge Companion to Religious Studies, Robert A. Orsi, ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 6. Ann Taves, “Special Things as Building Blocks of Religions,” in The Cambridge Companion to Religious Studies, Robert A. Orsi, ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 58–83. See Milija Gluhovic and Jisha Menon, eds., Performing The Secular: Religion, Representation and Politics (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017) and Claire Maria Chambers, Simon W. Du Toit, and Joshua Edelman, eds., Performing Religion in Public (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013). See also, Janet R. Jacobsen and Ann Pellegrini, eds., Secularisms (Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press Books, 2008).

1

Modern Scriptural Theater and the Performativity of Anachronism

Staging scriptures in the theater is a complex and longstanding phenomenon. In any cultural context, religious or secular, approaching scriptural or biblical texts as dramatic materials for theatrical representation and embodied per­ formance involves adaptation and interpretation processes that highlight the sui generis cultural status of these texts. I use the term “scriptural theater” in order to refer to theatrical works that are not only inspired by biblical themes or figures, but that rather straightforwardly quote and stage scriptures, thus reflecting the attitude of a community or a culture to a delicate matrix of extra-theatrical and interrelated concepts, including holiness, belief, religion, and secularization. The cultural meanings of these concepts themselves are not fixed, as they absorb and are used to express different connotations and ideas depending on the time and place in which they are used. From a theatrical point of view, the term “scriptural,” which comes from the Latin scriptus and scribere, “to write,” focuses attention not only on the question of the holiness of the text, but also on the relations between text and performance, page and stage, which, in biblical theater, invite unique adaptation processes, including the overt use of anachronism. I also use the term “biblical” throughout the chapter, which, in the western context, is quite interchangeable with “scrip­ tural,” yet it too is layered with cultural and historical meanings, including the relations between “Old” or “Hebrew” and “New” Testaments and Bibles and between varying Jewish and Christian traditions and hermeneutics. In the western historical context, scriptural theater stems from the late medieval era, particularly in the form of mystery, cycle, or passion plays, which were created and performed in affinity with, but nevertheless separate from, official religious ritual. This vernacular, popular, biblical performance genre grew within a Catholic religious cultural context that enabled embodied forms of addressing, staging, and performing these scriptural texts, as Clifford Davidson has put it, “from creation to doom.”1 Inspired by these late medieval theatri­ calities, which thrived across Europe between the fourteenth and sixteenth centuries, scriptural theater also continued to take place in different shapes in the post-medieval and early modern era, including after the Reformation,2 but eventually ceased, as Paul Whitfield White explains the case of English biblical theater: DOI: 10.4324/9781003042730-2

14 Performativity of Anachronism

The Coventry cycle was the last of the great “mystery plays” to end (in 1579), and although scriptural drama found a place on the professional stage in early modern London – a dozen or so plays can be identified as such – their decrease and eventual disappearance from England’s popular theatrical culture was due largely to an increasing Protestant reverence for the Bible as the literal word of God, with its concern that nothing be added or omitted in modern expositions or renditions of original biblical texts. This in turn conflicted with the trend on the London stage towards greater complexity in plot design.3 Although plays inspired by biblical themes or figures continued to be written and performed, including, for example, Jesuit drama or neoclassical plays based on biblical characters, the kind of straightforward embodiment of scriptural materials and holy figures that typified late medieval performance is scarce, except in some Catholic contexts such as Bavarian Oberammergau, which I discuss in detail next. Since modernism, throughout the twentieth century and up to contemporary theater, however, a renewed phenomenon of directly addressing, staging, and performing biblical materials is discernible. In the introduction to this book, I outlined a typology of modern biblical performances, most of which are created within artistic and secular, rather than religious, frameworks. This is the result, I argue, of a combination of factors, which include the ongoing cultural signifi­ cance and mythical and dramatic force of these texts, the modernist theatrical search for alternative dramatic forms and experiences, the cultural separation between theater as an artistic forum with ritualsitc dimensions and between religious ritual, and the artistic freedom and daringness brought about by avantgarde experimentalism and processes of secularization. Although modern scrip­ tural performances differ in many respects from medieval ones, not only do many modern theater artists explicitly refer to medieval performance genres in their search for alternative theatrical forms, but also, this resurfacing of biblical theater in different contexts is an example of what Peter W. Marx theorizes as the ways in which the theater is a forum of cultural circulation. Following Hans Blumenberg’s concept of “absolute metaphors,” Marx writes that “Cultures do not jump, but they do adapt over the course of time. This adaptation is double-sided: it is fueled by the loss of an appropriateness of certain concepts, but it is manifest in the persistence of absolute metaphors. Between these two poles we gain perspective on describing historical development.”4 Accordingly, Marx argues that Circulation of, through, and by theatre and performance has to be recognized as a polyphonous, sometimes contradictory phenomenon in cultural life. For a broad methodological approach, it is important also to recognize that circulation includes not only material objects but also narratives, concepts, ideas, techniques, skills, and apparatuses.5 In light of this historiographic methodology, this chapter looks at examples of modern and contemporary scriptural theater that can be read both as

Performativity of Anachronism

15

self-standing modern phenomena and in dialogue with earlier instances of this kind of dramaturgy and theatricality, such as the late medieval performance genres. In the following pages, I examine three distinct modern case studies by focusing on their overt use of anachronism, an aesthetic characteristic that is central to medieval practices of religious and biblical theater as well as to modern ones. This suggests that in addition to identifying typical performative patterns of scriptural theater per se, questioning the relations between late medieval or premodern theatricalities and between contemporary attitudes to performing reli­ gious source materials might lead to new understandings of the relations between the medieval and the modernist as well as between the religious and the secular. At the same time, the continuous cultural significance of the Bible suggests that there are two modes of circulation at work here: The scriptural and the theatrical. More concretely, because of the longevity of the texts themselves, looking at modern models of scriptural theater is a way to examine the complex relations between modernism, religion, and secularization against which theat­ rical adaptation and innovation takes place. In addition, alongside a wide un­ derstanding of scriptures as historical, religious, mythical, or holy texts, western scriptural theater integrates, dialogically, Jewish and Christian cultural histories. Although these histories are not necessarily the subject of many modern biblical performances, modern theater artists who engage with biblical sources, whether they come from personal religious backgrounds or not, respond in their works to such interwoven historical threads, iconographies, and intricacies. Modern scriptural theater, therefore, is a cultural site that expresses and reveals connec­ tions between religion and secularism as well as astute perspectives on historical and political dilemmas and identity formations.

The Performativity of Anachronism and the Concept of “Liveness” in Late Medieval Theater One of the significant performative elements of late medieval mystery plays and other forms of biblical theater is their playful use of anachronism. The performativity of anachronism is manifested in the particular ways in which the performances under discussion blend past and present in order to speak, question, interrogate, and challenge contemporary constructions of identity against the forceful background of the religious scriptural source materials. In the late medieval context, the question of producing additional, contextual, or alternative meanings other than religious doctrine would be seemingly irrelevant. This, however, is not quite the case, and although medieval reli­ gious theater is distinctively different from modern skepticism or subversive art and thought, an oversimplified understanding of medieval performance as mainly didactic is mistaken. As Greg Walker writes, Less idiosyncratically, perhaps, by allowing audiences to witness and be a part of re-enactments of seminal biblical events such as the Annunciation, the Nativity, or the Passion, the religious plays might well have done

16 Performativity of Anachronism

more than they bargained for. They informed and educated spectators about the importance of these events, and the articles of belief that follow from them, but they may also have had more subtle, unexpected, cultural consequences.6 Phenomena such as “trade symbolism,” the connections between biblical themes and the expertise of the guilds that produced them (shipbuilders and Noah’s Ark, fishers and mariners and The Flood, nail manufactures and The Crucifixion, bakers and The Last Supper, and more), help to reassure, it has been argued, how the present partakes in sacred history.7 Other examples of theatrical anachronisms, however, touch in different ways, for example, upon contemporary gender roles and constructions or the embodiment of the social Other, which, in performance, might evoke ambiguous experiences. I have written elsewhere on the relations between late medieval gender constructions and religious theater, including the ways mystery plays dealt with the mirac­ ulous doctrinal events, such as that of the Immaculate Conception.8 In dif­ ferent contexts, English, French, and German, theater makers performed plays that addressed contemporary issues of marital relations, by way of emphasizing that Joseph could have not impregnated Mary. In England, for example, the York “Joseph’s Trouble about Mary,” which is framed by two reverential episodes (“The Annunciation and Visitation” and “The Nativity”) verges on farce, introducing Joseph as a cuckolded man, while in the Chester cycle the character of Joseph assures he is not the father using adjectives that refer to his unmanliness: “myne it is not, be thou bolde, for I am both old and cold.”9 These adjectives would have resonated for contemporary audiences, as we read in Hildegard of Bingen’s twelfth-century Cause et Curae (Causes and Cures) that the reasons women menstruate, include their being “weak and cold.”10 Joseph’s self-characterization of himself as crying (“Her works have made my cheeks all wet”) in the York cycle or cold (in Chester) points at the multi-layered anachronistic references enabled by performance.11 Interestingly, in Arnoul Gréban’s Mystère de la Passion in France, this event is dealt with by introducing a different anachronistic “solution,” as Mary expresses her wish to Joseph that, as a married couple, they take the vows of chastity and lead an abstinent married life.12 This brief example, one out of numerous others, reveals how medieval biblical theater comfortably blended doctrine, religious faith, theological issues, and the airing of delicate social issues. Other examples of the medieval theatrical use of anachronism include contemporary references to violence targeted at social outcasts, an issue I discuss in detail in Chapter 2 through the performativity of the sacrificial narrative. In spite of the popularity of late medieval biblical vernacular theater, or perhaps because of its popularity, there were also voices against it. The fifteenth-century Middle English anti-theatrical tract, The Tretise of Miraclis Pleyinge, objects to religious performances for a large number of reasons, among them an intriguing reference to the live quality of performance. The text, which is understood to use “miraclis pleyinge” as an umbrella term denoting playing/performing religious

Performativity of Anachronism

17

subject matter, significantly includes a specific reference to “the play of Christ’s Passion” [“the pley of Cristis passioun”].13 The tract criticizes these performative activities because of the earthly pleasure (rather than spiritual dedication) that participants derive from such “games” and performances. In the first part of the tract, six reasons in favor of the plays are listed in order to refute them, the sixth of which compares religious painting to religious performance. The argument is that if religious paintings are permitted so should performances be, because live events are more memorable and impressionable, and thus teach religious truths better: “for this is a dead book, the other is alive” [“for this is a deed bok, the tother a quick”].14 The answer to this argument is that paintings can be permitted only if “they are like naked letters for a clerk to read the truth” [“they ben but as nakyd lettris to a clerk to riden the treuthe”], whereas plays are intended for “bodily delight” rather than being “books that teach” [“But so ben not miraclis pleyinge than ben made more to deliten men bodily than to ben bokis to lewid men”].15 Questioning the purpose of these representations helps, first, to sub­ stantiate that performing religious subject matter is not a trivial issue even within overridingly religious cultural contexts. More importantly, the theoretical dif­ ferentiation between painting and performance through the terminology of deathliness and liveness suggests the understanding that theater and performance, being live events, bound to the present, open up gaps into which additional and unexpected meanings can filter. Indeed, in the context of religious theater or, rather, theater that performs religious texts, the question of “stable” meanings (and the evocative idea of artistic signifiers as “naked letters”) is a complex one. Whereas this might have been the purpose of late medieval theater creators, in modern times, in which the theater is an artistic cultural arena that does not partake in religious fra­ meworks, this is clearly not the case, and the question of artistic intentionality, especially in avant-garde contexts, is intriguing. Why, in other words, do modern theater artists stage scriptures? What new or alternative meanings are derived by multi-time dimensionality and the performativity of anachronism? As I argue in the following pages, the “liveness” of these performances, their deviations from traditional and conventional narratives and representational practices, enables them to speak about contemporary communal, social, and political issues and dilemmas through the scriptural texts. Victor Turner’s explanation of “liminality” in relation to performative genres (as opposed to other kinds of social rituals) is illuminating: Liminality itself is a complex phase or condition. It is often the scene and time for the emergence of a society’s deepest values in the form of sacred dramas and objects—sometimes the reenactment periodically of cosmo­ gonic narratives or deeds of saintly, godly, or heroic establishers of morality, basic institutions, or ways of approaching transcendent beings or powers. But it may also be the venue and occasion for the most radical skepticism—always relative, of course, to the given culture’s repertoire of areas of skepticism—about cherished values and rules.16

18 Performativity of Anachronism

Therefore, Turner’s observation about the ways such performances are cultural sites for societies and communities to reveal or express skepticism might have been, even if not stated in these terms explicitly, what the author of The Tretise of Miraclis Pleyinge actually feared in advocating against these performances. In my discussion below of Hugo Ball’s Dadaist A Nativity Play (1916), the recent productions of the Oberammergau Passion Play (1990–2022), and Rina Yerushalmi’s Israeli secular Bible Project (1996/1998), I look at the multilayered integration of time dimensions (past, present, and future) in these works, what I term in the title of this chapter as the performativity of anachronism. The theater’s dialectical playfulness with time dimensions, which grows out of the mythical and/or timeless structures of the scriptures, serves, as we shall see, as a powerful artistic mechanism for theater artists to challenge themselves and their spectators by facing and calling attention to contemporary social and political questions of identity. Accordingly, the theoretical question that underlies this chapter, relevant to all performances I discuss throughout the book, concerns the tensions between transformation and continuity in modern works that re-perform scriptural materials. I am interested in the ways the performances negotiate—in each case differently—the relations between familiarity, continuity, changeability, and revision, henceforth raising aesthetic questions about adaptation and transformation of religious representations. Hugo Ball’s Dadaist A Nativity Play. Bruitist was performed at the Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich on May 31, 1916. In the context of this chapter, it serves as a model of avant-garde theater that explicitly seeks innovative artistic forms through negation and repudiation, yet exemplifies continuity, quotation, and reiteration by means of performative anachronism. In its extreme condensed form, Ball and his collaborators’ performance piece evokes an experience of simultaneous reliance on, and defiance of, the source materials that construct the work. What at first seems to be an “anti-art,” sacrilegious, playful adaptation of the popular genre of nativity scenes and plays, turns out to be a powerful artistic search for a ritualistic language that aims to be not only a representation of a nativity play, but rather a nativity play in and of itself. In my discussion of Ball’s work, I refer to Giorgio Agamben’s theorization of profanation in his essay titled “In Praise of Profanation,” in order to explain how these meanings emerge. As opposed to the radical experimentalism of the Dada performance, my second example, conversely, originates in a religious and conservative context. Here I look at the changes that have been taking place over the past few decades in the Bavarian Oberammergau Passion Play under the directorship of Christian Stückl, and in particular Stückl and his team’s attempts to face the anti-Semitic history of the play and to introduce revisions that explicitly address this issue. Whereas the Dada work adopts and adapts the religious performance genre of the nativity play, the Oberammergau Passion Play is an ongoing tradition that originates in the seventeenth century and is intentionally religious in the conventional sense of the term. This performance serves, therefore, as a thought-provoking model of the dialectics between change, revision, and continuity in conservative theatrical contexts. In my discussion of

Performativity of Anachronism

19

the Oberammergau Passion Play, I refer also to Sarah Ruhl’s meta-theatrical Passion Play (2010), whose second act offers a powerful dramatization of the history of social exclusion in Oberammergau in the 1930s. Finally, I discuss an Israeli Bible Project created by Rina Yerushalmi and the Itim Ensemble in the late 1990s. VaYomer, VaYelech (And He Said, And He Walked, 1996) and VaYishtachu, VaYerra (And They Bowed, And He Feared, 1998) is an epic performance based entirely on biblical excerpts recited and performed in the original biblical Hebrew. Of all the works discussed throughout this book, this performance quotes and uses the original texts as they were written thousands of years ago in the closest way, and yet it is perhaps one of the most secular works I look at. Yerushalmi’s Bible Project relies on the deep cultural significance the Hebrew Bible holds in Jewish–Israeli, Hebrewspeaking, culture, in order to question the cyclicality of and relations between myth, text, history, society, and identity.

Simultaneity and Anachronism in Hugo Ball’s A Nativity Play. Bruitist (1916) As opposed to the grand mystery and passion plays that took many hours or even days to perform, Hugo Ball’s 1916 Dadaist A Nativity Play. Bruitist (Krippenspiel. Bruitistisch) is very short. Although the isolated episodes that compose the medieval cycles are also short, Ball’s five-page text spans from the birth of Jesus to his Crucifixion and includes performing roles of all of the biblical characters of this event, including Joseph and Mary, the shepherds, their sheep, the ass and the ox, the star, the angel, baby Jesus, the Magi, their animals, the nailing, and more.17 As the title of the work suggests, it is not a play about the nativity, but rather, a nativity play in and of itself, inspired by the scriptural event as well as by the traditional and popular custom of posi­ tioning nativity scenes in churches in the Christmas season and the genre of nativity plays that originates in medieval times.18 In his notes to the play, Eckhard Faul explains that “the vividness of this special form of remembering the birth of Christ made the nativity play particularly attractive for children, which once again shows the Dadaist affinity to everything that is childlike, as can be discerned primarily in Ball himself.”19 By “childlike,” Faul probably refers to the Dadaists’ search for primary, seemingly simple, non-sense, or pre-linguistic forms of expression. However, while the performance text appears on the face of it to be an amalgamation of sounds, syllables, clamors, noises, and eccentric humor, and hence its “bruitist” style, it is far from anything childish or childlike and reveals deep questioning, desire, longing, and despair. Its briefness is probably drawn from the popular nativity scenes and plays, which in turn exemplify a conciseness that comes from the familiar iconography and condensed structure of the scriptural nar­ rative. This iconographic referentiality might have indeed resonated also with the Dadaist interest in simultaneity, inspired by Marinetti and the Futurists, and which Richard Huelsenbeck, one of the Dada founding members,

20 Performativity of Anachronism

describes in his 1920 essay “En Avant Dada: A History of Dadaism” as “an abstraction, a concept referring to the occurrence of different events at the same time,”20 “a direct reminder of life,” and one “which defies formulation because it is a direct symbol of action.”21 In spite of the performance’s abbreviated structure, its simultaneous aesthetics encompass and encapsulate, as mentioned, the nativity-to-Crucifixion—birth-to-death—ark, while also including additional contextual references. The title of the play refers to its “bruitist” style, “noise music,”22 which Huelsenbeck correlates with the aesthetics of simultaneity,23 yet the back cover of the typewritten manuscript of the play, which includes Ball’s handwriting, also names the performance a “Simultan Krippenspiel” (“a simultaneous nativity play”) (Fig. 1.1).24 As I suggest below, this simultaneity is achieved not only by the sound interpre­ tation, amalgamation, and overlapping of the iconographic references, but also by performatively responding to quotations from the Gospels of Luke and Matthew. It is hard to determine if these scriptural quotations were recited

Figure 1.1 Hugo Ball, A Nativity Play. Bruitist, 1916. [Hugo Ball, Ein Krippenspiel. Bruitistisch, 1916.] Left: “Krippenspiel” (handwritten in red pencil and other drawings in pencil); Right: “Simultan Krippenspiel” (handwritten in red pencil). Full manuscript includes three loose pages. Typescript with hand­ written director’s notes in pencil by Hugo Ball (see Appendix). With various drawings in red pencil and pencil. Object dimensions: 27.8 × 22.0 cm. Folder dimensions: 31.6 × 24.6 × 0.5 cm. Kunsthaus Zürich, Bibliothek, 1967. Courtesy: Kunsthaus Zürich.

Performativity of Anachronism

21

aloud as part of the performance or, at the least, served as its textual inspiration. Another layer of simultaneity is the result of the evocation of anachronistic references, which speak through the biblical event about the present moment, of both the beginnings of the Dada movement and the war. The Nativity Play was performed on June 3, 1916, at the Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich, where Ball and his collaborators famously founded the Dada move­ ment a few months earlier, amidst the war. Huelsenbeck describes the beginning of the Dada movement using a quasi-religious terminology that reflects the overwhelming conviction of these avant-gardists: “It is a rare gift of God to be present at the birth of a religion, or of any idea which later conquers the world.”25 Furthermore: If you have had the miraculous good fortune to be present at the birth of such a “sensation,” you will want to understand how it happens that an empty sound, first intended as a surname for a female singer, has developed amid grotesque adventures into a name for a rundown cabaret, then into abstract art, baby-talk and a party of babies at the breast, and finally—well, I shall not anticipate. This is exactly the history of Dadaism. Dada came over the Dadaists without their knowing it; it was an immaculate conception, and thereby its profound meaning was revealed to me.26 This suggests not only the thematic relevance of the nativity episode to these sensations, but also the Dadaists’ need for a terminology and semantic framework powerful enough to express and describe, somewhat paradoxically, in a simultaneous act of reliance and defiance, the sense and strength of newness and originality they were seeking. About the importance of this performance more specifically, Tom Sandqvist writes that “The hectic activities during the spring […] can be said to have reached their climax partly in the joint performance of Ball’s ‘bruitist concert’ Ein Krippenspiel at the Meierei on 3 June.”27 This Nativity Play, however, was surely not a traditional one. Ball and his collaborators, Hans Arp, Emmy Hennings, Marcel Janco, Marietta di Monaco, Tristan Tzara, and Johann Schlak, who performed the work together, created an event that on the face of it seems to ridicule, even profane, its source materials. It is the very reliance on the scriptural event and text, however, which raises structural, performative, and conceptual questions regarding change and continuity in performing religious subject matter on the secular stage. The performance text is divided into seven brief scenes: 1 2 3 4 5

Silent Night; The Stable; The Appearance of the Angel and the Star; The Annunciation; The Three Holy Kings/Magi;

22 Performativity of Anachronism

6 7

Arrival at the Stable; and The Prophecy.

Although in performance each of these scenes might take longer than the written script seems to indicate, they are each merely a few lines long, composed mostly of syllables, sounds, tones, noises, music instruments, and stage directions. In addition to these seven scenes/soundscapes, the manuscript also includes a page with short descriptions of the seven parts. Eckhard Faul notes that the exact relations between the two texts are unclear,28 but the two versions closely correlate. This additional page might be a description of the performance, providing additional stage directions and information about the desired atmosphere of the work, a draft of the work, which serves as the basis for the eventual sound performance, or perhaps an alternative version that was or was not tried out and performed. Significantly, the short texts of the accompanying version include quotations from the Gospels of Luke and Matthew (see Appendix), which, therefore, do not seem to be textual sketching of the content or idea of the scenes, but rather, given their poetic language, meant to be recited or performed. In addition, these lines are fol­ lowed by stage directions that indicate the participants by their names and correlate with the sounds and noises of the other text. For example, the first scene in the performance text, titled “1. Silent Night,” reads The Wind: Sound of the Holy Night: The Shepherds: The Wind:

f f f f f f f f f fff f ffff t t hmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm­ mmmmmmmm He hollah, he hollah, he hollah. Foghorns. Ocarina ---- crescendo. (Climbing a mountain) whipping, shouts. f f f f f f f f f f f ffffffffffffffffffffffffffffff t.

The corresponding text on the additional page opens with a quote from Luke 2:8: “And there were in the same country shepherds abiding in the field, keeping watch over their flock by night. (Wind and night. Sound of the night. Signals/Sounds of the shepherds). (Tzara with a small lute/ mandolin. Sound of a whiplash.)”29 Whether these complementary lines were indeed recited aloud as part of the sound scenes of the eventual performance or only served as the ideas behind them, the biblical quotations reveal Ball’s close reading of the scriptures in preparation of the performance, rather than or in addition to a more general kind of inspiration drawn from nativity scenes or Christian iconography. Furthermore, as we shall see, taking into account the biblical quotations deepens the meanings that were inscribed into the performance and enhances

Performativity of Anachronism

23

its desired affectivity. Although both versions of the work correlate closely, they end differently, teaching about the contemplative thought invested in the work. The performance text ends with the sound of bells and jingle bells, ironically followed by the sound of nailing, evoking Jesus’ Crucifixion, whereas the additional page narrates the future of the newborn Jesus from Mary’s lamenting perspective, foreseeing both the Crucifixion and the Resurrection. At the bottom of the typed version of the performance text, there are two lines in Ball’s handwriting, metonymically associating the death of Jesus with the horrors of the war: And there he was crucified A lot of warm blood flowed.30 The seventh scene of the accompanying page opens with a quote about Mary from Luke 2:19 and ends with the nailing before the bells: But Mary kept all these things, and pondered them in her heart. And she saw a mountain and three tall crosses erected. And she saw how her son is being mocked and she saw him crowned with a crown of thorns. And they crucified him. But she knew that on the third day he will resurrect, transcended. (Cheers of the crowd. Rabata rabata (Janco), Tzara: whistles. Ball: He hollah! Nailing. Schalk: rattling. Arp: bah bah. Rabata Rabata, sallada. (Crescendo) Nailing and screams. Then thunder. Then bells) The two endings can be read both seriously and/or critically in light of the surrounding war. In both versions of the performance, there are funny, obscure, ironic, profane, and bewildering elements but at the same time, they reveal the kind of seriousness that corresponds with reality as well as the rigidness of religious ritual. This feeling is also reflected in Ball’s notes in his diary regarding the performance: “The ‘Krippenspiel’ (bruitist concert accompanying the evangelical text) had a gentle simplicity that surprised the audience. The ironies had cleared the air. No one dared to laugh. One would hardly have expected that in a cabaret, especially in this one.”31 What is that “that” that “one would hardly have expected in a cabaret,” “especially in this one” that Ball refers to? Is it the expressive musicality of the noise? The playfulness with the religious source materials? The connotations to the war? The unsettling combination between the religious miraculous event and the fear of current reality? The stage directions of the sixth scene “The Arrival at the Stable,” which require that a candle be lit, reveal that up until this moment in the performance, the room has been in dark and the performers themselves covered with black fabrics that conceal their figures, sitting with their backs to the audience. The theatrical use of darkness to suggest “night,” as in the biblical line quoted in/for the first scene, is moving in its simplicity and evokes a multi-sensual experience that converges the

24 Performativity of Anachronism

auditory and the visual, quite like in a religious ritual. I discuss the meta­ phorical and performative meanings of darkness in Chapter 3 of this book, especially regarding Hanoch Levin’s Walkers in the dark (the title of the play itself a quote from the Book of Isaiah (9:2)) but here, the suggestive attributions of darkness in addition to conveying theatrical atmosphere are moving. The haunting line “a lot of warm blood flowed” in Ball’s handwriting at the end of the performance text is not the only associative reference to the war in the work. To the timeless and abstract sounds and noises that con­ struct the performance, Ball and his collaborators added a powerful con­ temporary one. The appearance of the angel and the star in the third scene, which correlates to the accompanying text that includes the quote “And, lo, the angel of the Lord came upon them, and the glory of the Lord shone round about them: and they were sore afraid” (Luke 2:9),32 is, according to the performance text accompanied by a “propeller noise, quietly growing, trembling, growing stronger, energetic, demonic.”33 This petrifying soundscape conveys an un­ settling associative metonymy between the arrival of the angel and war ma­ chinary, perhaps referring to aeroplanes that were used in war for the first time during WW1.34 The biblical awe-inspiring sense of the unknown miraculous event of the nativity, “and they were sore afraid,” seems to have served for Ball as a metaphor of both salvation and intimidation, a quote that reflected a con­ temporary sensation of fear intermingled, perhaps, with a quest for hope and salvation through art. The supernatuaral angelic realm, which evokes axio­ matic religious locales of exterritoriality, is performed here not by creating a serene atmospehere, but rather through its being devastatingly conquered by human-made machines.35 Freddie Rokem writes about the modern deus ex machina that The persistence of fictional representations of the supernatural in contemporary performances is remarkable and creates a both uncanny and fruitful discrepancy between these representations and the secular approach with which the theater basically grapples with the world around us, even if its supposed religious/ritual roots art still somehow visible.36 What are the relations, however, between the redemptive promise of the religious nativity event and Ball’s expressive sensations of fear and despair? What are the relations, in other words, between fear and reverence in this work? Nicola Behrmann discusses this work in the context of other Dada “scenes of birth and founding myths,”37 and contextualizes this work with their staged reading of Leonid Andreyev’s The Life of Man earlier in 1916 and with Marcel Janco’s production of Oskar Kokoschka’s Sphinx and Straw Man at the

Performativity of Anachronism

25

opening of Galerie Dada in April 1917. Regarding Ball’s Nativity Play she writes that “Ball’s sound collage carves out the materiality or the ‘innermost core’ of language, creating a tenuous language as a reflection of an impoverished world already under the sign of death.”38 Debbie Lewer offers a historiographic contextualization of Dada’s “iconoclasm” (breaking of images) with Ball’s deep interest in Christian religious history (in 1920 Ball fully converted to Catholicism), particularly the writings of Thomas Müntzer, arguing that: […] what needs closer examination is the apparently paradoxical fact that some of Dada’s most radical impulses may in fact share more with the conflicts within Europe’s religious history—especially the upheaval of the sixteenth-century Reformation—than scholarship has yet been ready to admit.39 Lewer argues that rather than “secular iconoclasm” as she terms it,40 typical of Dadaist and other avant-garde movements, Ball’s “iconoclasm” is linked to his interest in post-Reformation religious-activism. Lewer specifically refers to the line “We take the side of the iconoclasts and any radicals,”41 which appears in a manifesto Ball and Huelsenbeck published in 1915. She explains that “during the German Peasants’ War and what is now known as the ‘radical Reformation,’ iconoclasm, or ‘Bildersturm,’ was not mere vandalism, rather it was an inflammatory and political act of protest.”42 This context, she argues, is what adds the political dimension to Ball’s Dadaist art: We might like to understand the very secularity of a modernized “iconoclasm” as signifying political potency in the twentieth-century avant-garde. However, when iconoclasm is uncoupled from its roots in the radical Reformation (and earlier), what it loses is precisely its political dimension.43 This is an important addition to understanding the meaning and performativity of Ball’s Nativity Play. As I have shown through his simultaneous reliance on and defiance of the scriptures, the radically playful yet serious tone of the performance, and its political outcry, there again emerges the question re­ garding the use of religious source materials on the secular stage. To Bhermann’s literary analysis and Lewer’s historiographical contextualization, I would like to add philosopher Giorgio Agamben’s theorization of “profana­ tion” as distinct from “secularization.” In his essay “In Praise of Profanation,” which is ultimately a denunciation of Capitalism, he explains that “sacred” in religious cultures meant the removal and separation of objects from daily use, whereas “‘to profane’ meant, conversely, to return them to the free use of men.”44 In a society that has been fully consumed by capitalism, according to Agamben, he seeks a space in which such profanation can be

26 Performativity of Anachronism

practiced as a political act, a space that can be found, he gives an example, in the realm of play: To profane means to open up the possibility of a special form of negligence which ignores separation or, rather, puts it in to a particular use. The passage from the sacred to the profane can, in fact, come about by means of an entirely inappropriate use (or, rather, reuse) of the sacred: namely, play.45 Agamben adds that it “means that play frees and distracts humanity from the sphere of the sacred, without simply abolishing it.”46 This is an important idea. Ball’s Nativity Play, as well as other forms of avant-garde theater that perform religion, freely, or rather “profanely,” play with religious source materials. These works, however, do not necessarily abolish the “sacred,” despite their playfulness, or, in other words, they display a dialectical interrogation of the relations between the sacred and the profane. As an artistic mode of expres­ sion, this theatrical phenomenon could have grown, surely, only within the cultural context of modernism and secularization, but Agamben’s method­ ology enables us to look at these works not only through their parodic ele­ ments, but also, as he suggests, to see in them “a new dimension of use, which children and philosophers give to humanity.”47 To this formulation, we should add “artists” and perhaps recall Eckhard Faul’s characterization of Ball’s work as “childlike.” Ultimately, Agamben writes, “To return to play its purely profane vocation is a political task.”48 The political performativity of Ball’s Nativity Play resides, in turn, in his moving use of anachronism and in the playful seriousness of his nativity ritual.

Tradition and Revision in the Twenty-First Century Oberammergau Passion Play The Dadaist paradoxical convergence of quotation, reiteration, and profana­ tion is typical of many of the works I look at throughout this book. The Oberammergau Passion Play, however, is a unique case study of contemporary passion plays or scriptural theater because it is created and performed within an intentionally religious and conservative theatrical context. Whereas the Dadaists’ appropriation of religious source materials signifies artistic and radical innovation, the Oberammergauers take pride in the long durée of the per­ formance, which has been performed since the seventeenth century. As such, it is an intriguing example to theorize the possibilities and meanings of change, adaptation, and variation within conformist forms of religious theater, which are obligated to retelling core religious narratives. Although any theatrical rendition of scriptural texts, narratives, or iconography introduces change and variation into an imagined “faithful” representation of these sources, medieval or modern, there is a continuum of the degree of change and adaptation that depends on the aesthetic and ideological intentions of the theatre artists. For this

Performativity of Anachronism

27

reason, conservative religious theater poses unique questions about the perfor­ mativity of anachronism, or, in other words, the “liveness” of the theatrical event as discussed above, its contemporary identity formations, and readiness to absorb and introduce change and revision. In his New York Times review of the 2022 Oberammergau production, Michael Paulson quotes Walter Rutz, the managing director, who points at the fluidity of the concept of tradition: “‘We play the passion play every 10 years—that’s the tradition,’ he said. ‘But tradition is not always the same. Tradition is life.’”49 Rutz’s poignant formulation “tradition is life” touches on the human agency and creativity of theater making, its “liveness” once again, and the potential that resides in the unfixed rather than fixed elements of ritualistic repetition. I next look at this question by examining some of the changes that Christian Stückl, the director of the production since 1990, introduced as part of his artistic vision and in order to face the anti-Semitic history of the play.50 In May 2022, the forty-second production of the Oberammergau Passion Play opened. This production of the passion play—which began in 1634 and has performed nearly once a decade ever since, over the years attracting tens of thousands of spectators, pilgrims, visitors, and tourists—was originally planned for 2020 but had to be postponed because of the Covid-19 pandemic. It is notable that what was conceived initially as an act of faith during another plague that hit the village during the Thirty Years War, would now have to be postponed for the very same cause. The Oberammergau Passionspiele website concisely tells the famous story of the oath: In 1633 the Oberammergau villagers promised to perform the suffering, death and resurrection of Christ every tenth year, in so far as no one was to die of the plague anymore. The villagers were answered by God and therefore in 1634 the first Passion Play took place. The promise has been kept until today. In 2020 the Passion Play had to be postponed for two years due to the corona-pandemic. The 42nd Oberammergau Passion Play will now take place from 14 May to 2 October 2022.51 The inevitable decision to postpone the play because of the thousands of spectators who were about to attend gives a glimpse into the delicate balance between faith and adjustability and testifies to the changes that took place in what was originally crafted as a local, internal, and communal event as opposed to the internationally renowned endeavor it has become. Notably, the wide appeal of the play attests to the large number of people who are interested in religious theater.52 At the same time, this very growth and popularization, which has both traditionalist and financial aspects, has contributed to the postShoah discourse around the play and the understanding that there is a need to make changes that eliminate anti-Semitic elements in the play. This issue is nowadays outspoken on the Passion Play’s website itself, and has been widely discussed in media and scholarly writing, including in a

28 Performativity of Anachronism

number of the essays in the collection edited by Kevin J. Wetmore Jr. The Oberammergau Passion Play: Essays on the 2010 Performance and the CenturiesLong Tradition.53 In her meta-theatrical play Passion Play (2010), Sarah Ruhl relentlessly and movingly dramatizes the social dynamics of exclusion and scapegoating through the history of Oberammergau.54 The second act of her play is set in Oberammergau in 1934, the year that marked the third centenary of the performance and the same year that Adolf Hitler, who appears as a character in Ruhl’s play, visited Oberammergau and praised the play.55 Ruhl’s Passion Play is not only meta-theatrical, but also, in the context of this chapter, a meta-example of modern adaptations of mystery and passion plays, with its three acts located at the backstage of three mystery and passion plays in moments of cultural decadence and political turmoil. The first act takes place in England in 1575, contemporarily with the fracture in Catholicism and the decline of mystery plays in Elizabethan England; the second act takes place, as mentioned, at the 1934 preparations for the Oberammergau Passion Play; and the third act is set in the US, at the Black Hills Passion Play in Spearfish, South Dakota, in the post-Vietnam War era.56 In each case, Ruhl shows how theater at the crossroads of religion and politics is a seismograph of the contemporary cultural climate and social ruptures. Her decision to locate the three acts during the rehearsal processes of the various passion plays offers a meaningful lens through which to explore the literal and metaphorical backstage area of the different social contexts. It also focuses attention on the communality of the theater makers and their views on the meanings of taking part in these productions, quite like the words of Walter Rutz, the current Oberammergau managing director, quoted above. In Passion Play, Ruhl puts into question the ethical responsibility of the art of theater in general and of religious theater specifically. She does this through her meta-theatrical design of the relations between the selfhood of her characters (who are all actors) and between the religious roles they embody and play. In her introductory notes to the play, she writes: “ulti­ mately, this play is about those moments—about how actors wring moments out of their private lives in order to bear witness in the community.”57 This is a profound statement about the role of theater and of the human beings who create it. Bearing witness, as Freddie Rokem writes in Performing History is an ethical act: The actor as witness and hyper-historian is not only dependent on a specific knowledge about the historical past, the “real,” that he or she brings to the spectators. The way in which the witness appears on the stage and communicates with the spectators—the aesthetic dimension of his or her appearance—is also of central importance for the creation of a theatrical discourse performing history.58 Performative witnessing in Ruhl’s play means giving special attention to destructive mechanisms of social conformism on the one hand and the tragic

Performativity of Anachronism

29

results of exclusion and marginalization of the social Other on the other hand, a theme I also explore in Chapter 2 of this book regarding modern performances that deal with sacrifice and victimhood. In Ruhl’s dramati­ zation of 1934 Oberammergau, it is the character of Violet, the “village idiot,” to which I return below, who is a metaphorical embodiment of these dynamics. I now look at these historical, ethical, and theatrical questions in light of the artistic leadership of Christian Stückl (b. 1961), who has directed the last four productions of the Oberammergau Passion Play. Stückl’s appointment to direct the Passion Play in 1990, with the village’s eyes set on the approaching millennium, was seriously debated by village authorities.59 His selection, however, was a pivotal decision, as he came ready to rise to the occasion, willing to address the abovementioned complexities and to bring forth ideo­ logical and aesthetic changes to the show. Like all of the hundreds of the participants in the play every decade, Stückl grew up in Oberammergau. In an essay he contributed to Joseph Sievers and Amy-Jill Levine’s book The Pharisees, titled “A Brief Personal History of the Oberammergau Passion Play,” he shares that “I was in the crowd scene at the entrance of Jerusalem when I was just seven years old.”60 In this essay he also describes his first encounters at the age of ten with the term anti-Semitism, following “heated discussions about comments made by Cardinal Julius August Döpfner of Munich and Rabbi Marc Tanenbaum from New York,” which took place in the 1970s around his grandfather’s table.61 In addition to Stückl’s personal commitment to his familial and hometown tradition, his experience as a theater artist should be acknowledged. He served as a theater director at the Münchner Kammerspiele since 1991 and artistic director of the Münchner Volkstheater since 2002. This professional context, within the German post-war theater culture that became a leading influence on con­ temporary experimental and political theater trends,62 seems to have formed a significant part of Stückl’s openness to and understanding of the ways theater can be a site not only of indoctrination but rather one in which cultural dilemmas are openly processed and negotiated, an agenda he brought to Oberammergau. Together with dramaturg Otto Huber, designer Stefan Hageneier, and other members of the creative team, Stückl turned the preparation and rehearsal process into an opportunity to air and grapple together with the ensemble of the leading actors, with the ethical and aesthetic challenges of producing the Play. These processes included revisions of textual and visual aspects of the performance (Fig. 1.2), such as a new dramaturgical and theatrical emphasis on the historical Jewish identity of Jesus as well as getting rid of degrading stereotypical representations of Jewish characters, as Barbara E. Bowe explains: A jointly authored Jewish-Christian statement, published by B’nai B’rith in 1984, outlined 24 recommended changes in the text and dramatic

30 Performativity of Anachronism

embellishments at Oberammergau. […] Changes were called for not only in the text of the passion play itself, but also in the costuming and staging that had exaggerated anti-Jewish features, as in the example of the Jewish priests wearing outlandish robes and hats with horns symbolizing their connection with the “devil.”63 These changes and revisions, as well as the public discourse around them, operate, I suggest, in three circles. For devout Christians who are interested in the experience of the pilgrimage to Oberammergau and of the theatrical adaptation of the narrative of the Passion which, after all, remains intact, the changes are received as part of the contemporary discourse around the play but, perhaps, not as the main issue. A second group are spectators who are aware of and troubled by the historical context of the play, and, as Joshua Edelman writes, for them the renewed theatrical design of the work might be either meaningful or insufficient: The production in 2010 seemed to go out of its way to show a highly Jewish Jesus, who prays in Hebrew with his disciples, holds up a Torah scroll to the assembled masses, and speaks with great respect toward the Law and the Prophets. These developments are to be welcomed, surely, but they seemed out of place, as if they were added separately to appeal to yet another audience: those who visited Oberammergau to check it for anti-Semitism.64

Figure 1.2 “Shema Israel” (“Hear, O Israel”), Oberammergau Passion Play 2022. © Oberammergau Passion Play 2022. Photo: Arno Declair.

Performativity of Anachronism

31

There is, however, a third, significant group, the theatrical community itself, those who create and perform in the play for many months, daily, as opposed to the audiences who come to watch the play only once. This group, it seems to me, experience most deeply and intimately the discourse of and about change. Focusing on this group reconnects not only with Ruhl’s dramatization and ethical spotlight on the backstage of theatrical social pro­ cesses, but also with the play’s inwardly oriented communal roots, side by side with the mega-event it has become. One of the intriguing innovations that Stückl introduced into the prepa­ ration process of the production is a trip he makes with the leading actors of the ensemble to Israel, a kind of a pilgrimage to the Holy Land. Based on the dramaturgical decision to emphasize the Jewish identity of Jesus, he felt this would be an appropriate way to make this idea tangible, as he writes: It is very difficult to change something with as long a tradition as the Oberammergau Passion Play. I had to convey very clearly to the actors that Jesus was a Jew from the first day of his life until his death, and that the Passion Play is not a story about Jews against Christians; it is an innerJewish affair. In order to start to shift the conception our actors had, we started rehearsing the drama in Israel! This allowed us to see Jesus as a faithful Jewish man.65 This trip is significant on many levels, but from the theoretical perspective of the performativity of anachronism and the multi-layered time dimensions addressed in this chapter, this is a fascinating example of the ways theatrical embodiment of seemingly fixed characters cohabitates a multitude of identities that converge in the body, voice, and presence of the actor. Indeed, this trip is not only an encounter with the historical and biblical Jewish and Christian holy sites, but also with contemporary life in Israel and the variety of secular, religious, Jewish, Palestinian, and other identities that compose its social fabric. It is a very effective way to deconstruct stereotypes of “Jewishness,” especially those that have been inscribed through conservative representations yet dis­ connected from actual human beings. The trips to Israel are referred to on the official website of the Passion Play66 and have been documented in two films directed by Jörg Adolph. Die große Passion (The Great Passion) 2012, is a 144-minute documentary that closely follows the preparations of the 2010 production of the Passion Play, including the trip to Israel.67 An additional 44-minute documentary, Bavarian Passion in the Holy Land, is the second of two films in the DVD titled Die Oberammergauer Leidenschaft (Passionate Oberammergau) 2010, directed by Jörg Adolph and researched and co-directed by Ralph Bücheler.68 On the back cover of the DVD, which was sold as part of the 2010 memorabilia, it says: “An integral component of Passionate Oberammergau was a special ‘attunement journey’ to Israel undertaken by the ensemble in 2009. They were accompanied by a camera from the Bavarian Television, for Bavarian Passion in the Holy Land.”69

32 Performativity of Anachronism

This documentary follows the members of the ensemble visiting Christian holy sites in the Galilee, Nazareth, Bethlehem, and the Old City of Jerusalem, including the Via Dolorosa and the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, as well as Jewish holy sites including the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem. It additionally follows their experience visiting Yad Vashem (literally “Memorial and Name”), The World Holocaust Remembrance Center in Jerusalem.70 These encounters, which probably remain invisible to the majority of the spectators who attend the play, have profound impact, as I have outlined above, on the creative community itself. These experiences, one could expect, enter consciously and subconsciously into acting, enactment, embodiment, and performance. But in what ways? One of the dramaturgical choices made by Stückl and Huber for the 2010 production, and subsequently in the 2022 version of the play, is that during the scene of the Last Supper, the blessings on the candles, wine, and bread are performed in Hebrew, whereas the rest of the text is performed in German. According to the textbook of the 2000 production, this was not done in that performance, which was the second time Stückl directed the play.71 The 2000 text also includes revisions, additions, and alterations in comparison with earlier versions,72 but the more radical changes were yet to come. On the face of it, performing the blessings in Hebrew is one of the ways to symbolically accentuate the Jewish identity of Jesus. These embodied utterances, however, should not be assigned only to the characters but also to the actors who utter, pronounce, and perform them. This theatrical addition or revision, which is written into the official textbook of the play, thus becoming a part of the play’s history, has a special kind of performative presence, quite like a Brechtian gestus that highlights the act of performance in addition to the conveyed content.73 Performing in Hebrew in this particular theater is not only a signifier of an imagined biblical past, but also, anachro­ nistically, belongs to the present. The texture and sound of the Hebrew language was not and could not have been part of the performance just a few decades ago. Moreover, whereas members of the audience might experience these lines fleetingly, part of an overall anachronistic aesthetics, it is once again worth considering this issue from the perspective of the ensemble of actors and creative team, who hear and speak these lines during the rehearsal process and throughout the run of the performance. This embodied act invokes a phe­ nomenologically intimate encounter with the Jewish Other, performing in a language that carries a history that combines holiness, mockery, erasure, revival, secularization, and more. This is an explicit example of the way “li­ veness” functions in the theater, adding a significant performative layer to the enacted content. In this context, it is interesting to recall Sarah Ruhl’s Passion Play, in which the young girl Violet, explains to the “Visiting Englishman,” that “My name means Violet in another language. The children here can’t pronounce it. So they call me the village idiot.”74 In the play, it later becomes apparent that she is Jewish, and hence Ruhl’s sensitivity to the metaphorical meanings of accent and pronunciation as markers of identity, similarity, difference, and

Performativity of Anachronism

33

otherness, elements that the embodied art of the theater highlights and can put into question. The anachronistic element of incorporating Hebrew in the scene of the Last Supper is further complicated in the 2010 and 2022 productions because of an unconventional textual addition in this scene. The recent texts of the play include the lines of the short poem “Blessed Be the Match,” written by Zionist poet Hanna Szenes (1921–1944), who immigrated to Palestine in 1939, vo­ lunteered as a paratrooper for the British army during the war, and was tortured and executed by Hungarian forces, allied with the Nazis.75 In the 2010 version, the quotation of the poem opens the scene of the Last Supper whereas in 2022 it appears towards the end of the scene, in both cases performed in German. (All are silent and Thomas lights the Candle) Thomas: Blessed be the match that is consumed in kindling flame. John: Blessed is the flame that burns in the secret fastness of the heart! Thomas: Blessed is the heart with the strength to stop its beating for honor’s sake.76 Unlike the blessings in Hebrew that stand out in their ritualism and difference from the German language, it is hard to imagine that this quote can be noticed. Joshua Edelman correctly observes that “While non-Jews might appreciate the beauty of this one line (‘Blessed be the match consumed in the kindling of flame’) it is highly unlikely that it would be more memorable than the spectacle surrounding it.”77 However, if we look at this addition from the perspective of the performing community, it is not a trivial one. This poem is recited, quoted, and sung (to the music of David Zahavi) in Holocaust memorial services in Israel and other places in the world, taught in schools, and well familiar. In its cyclical form, it captures bravery and sacrifice and ac­ centuates self-dignity in impossible conditions. Performed in this context, it expresses on behalf of and for the ensemble who might have encountered the poem in the Hanna Szenes exhibition at Yad Vashem,78 so it seems, an internal memorial gesture. A final example of the performativity of anachronism in recent productions of the Passion Play is the innovative design of the “living images,” the tableau vivant scenes of episodes from the Hebrew Bible, which alternate dialogically with the dramatic unfolding of the events of the New Testament, including Jesus’ Entry to Jerusalem, Last Supper, trial, Crucifixion, and Resurrection.79 In the 2010 production, designer Stefan Hageneier used a strikingly bright and modernist color palette. Each one of the tableaus had a different bright background color, including yellow, green, red, blue, and more. In the 2022 production, also designed by Hageneier, the use of color was slightly different from 2010, deeper and less bright, and yet similarly stressing a modernist aesthetics and colorfulness that stands in contrast to the subtle color-degradé of deep blue, off-white, and golden orange that typify the unfolding scenes of the New Testament (Fig. 1.3).

34 Performativity of Anachronism

Figure 1.3 “Israel and the Red Sea Crossing” (living image). Oberammergau Passion Play 2022. © Oberammergau Passion Play 2022 Photo: Brigit Gudjonsdottir.

David Mason analyzes the historiography and aesthetics of the tableaus, which, as he writes, exist “from at least eighteen tableaus introduced to Oberammergau’s stage with Ferdinand Rosner’s highly allegorical version of the passion play in 1750.”80 Mason argues that “Oberammergau’s lebende bilder [live images] remain the most historically consistent element of the Passionsspiele productions because the role-playing that they facilitate contributes to the construction of identities that many Oberammergau audience members long to inhabit.”81 This statement can also be applied, if somewhat differently, to their theat­ ricality in the recent productions, in which, it could be argued, the function of the tableaus as typological pre-figurations of the New Testament evokes a more complex dialectics between the “Old” and the “New.” Rather than a consecutive continuity, designing the “old” with a contemporary, modernist, aesthetics suggests a parallelism and calls attention to the ongoing cultural singularity of the Hebrew Bible events and narratives. The colorfulness of the tableaus might be connected to Hageneier’s experience working with Robert Wilson on a number of productions, including on Wilson’s installation 14 Stations,82 which Stückl included as part of the 2000 extra-theatrical events of the play, and which too exhibits a radically modernist aesthetics as opposed to the conservative theatricality of the 2000 performance. Following the pre­ sentation of Wilson’s installation at Oberammergau, it was positioned at Mass MOCA (Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art), about which James D. Herbert writes that “Wilson’s 14 Stations, installed here [at Mass MOCA], represents religion—both repeating and reversing it—held before the scrutiny of contemporary art.”83 Regarding its positioning at Oberammergau, Herbert furthermore observes that:

Performativity of Anachronism

35

The commissioning of 14 Stations thus allowed the community to make a gesture of atonement, not in spite of but because of the work’s jarring incongruity. The Passion Play may have stood steady on its timeless foundations, but the full experience of the packaged tour promised the dialogue between tradition and modernity so problematically reduced to a whisper within the drama itself. Oberammergau needed Wilson less as a reiteration of the Passion (though it was that) than as an artistic counter­ weight to it.84 This artistic counterweight seems to have been incorporated more freely as part of the 2010 and 2022 productions than was the case in the 2000 version, in part through the design of the tableaus. In 2000, the tableaus were impressive and colorful but much closer in their tonality to the scenes of the New Testament.85 In the recent productions, however, the colorful disso­ nance between the tableaus and the dramatized scenes surely distinguishes between typological biblical motifs and events of the New Testament, yet the countering aesthetics of the two performative modes evokes a more complex dialogism than an evolutionary development “from the old to the new.” It deconstructively and anachronistically creates a sense of a simultaneity of the narratives and, through solely artistic and theatrical means, opens up the option for an alternative kind of interreligious dialogue.

Anachronism and the Cyclicality of Myth and History in Rina Yerushalmi’s Bible Project I now look at a third model of contemporary biblical theater that is different from both the Dada avant-garde performance and the Oberammergau Passion Play. Whereas these two case studies are based on Christian scriptures and represent adaptations of biblical performance genres that have roots in late medieval culture (nativity and passion plays), Israeli director Rina Yerushlami’s Bible Project is a secular performance that grows out of the central place that the Hebrew Bible holds in Jewish and Israeli culture. From a textual point of view, however, it comes closest to the biblical original text than other the­ atrical adaptations of the scriptures, since the entire performance is composed of biblical texts, which are performed in the original ancient Hebrew. Yerushalmi’s Bible Project is composed altogether of four interrelated parts. The first two VaYomer VaYelech (And He Said, And He Walked) premiered in 1996, followed by VaYishtachu VaYerra (And They Bowed, And He Feared) in 1998.86 These titles are Hebrew biblical verbs, which for Hebrew speakers are received as a combination of past and future tenses. The beginning of the verb with “Va,” which in English is translated “And,” adjoined with the future tense verbs “Yomer,” “Yelech,” literally, “will say,” “will go,” turns them into an expression that denotes the past tense, hence, “and he said.” This phenomenon, known as “the inversion Vav” (‫ )ו‘ ההיפוך‬or as one of the manifestations of “Vavconsecutive,” is part of the ancient linguistic structures of the Bible, which in

36 Performativity of Anachronism

biblical times might have been closer to the English translation “And.”87 Although it is not used in modern daily Hebrew, other than in biblical quota­ tions, it is a very familiar formulation. In performance, this linguistic formulation helps to enhance the multiple time dimensionality that Yerushalmi was seeking in order to examine the cyclical relations between past, present, and future and to experience the Bible through both its texts and auditory texture. Over seven hours long in its entirety, the performance is constructed of selected biblical excerpts reedited in a new order. The 12 actors of the Itim Ensemble embody the texts, deriving through movement, intonation, and other directorial ele­ ments unexpected and at times subversive perspectives on the familiar contents. In her review of the performance, titled “Suddenly the dead of the world awaken,” author Batya Gur wrote that “It is hard to understand how she dared to put together canonical texts, in which, it seems, every Israeli feels at home, and let the selection, the ordering of the texts, and their realization on stage, create an ancient-new meaning, stunning in its power.”88 The sources of Yerushalmi’s secular approach to staging the Bible are tied both to her upbringing within the Israeli Zionist secular cultural context and education system in the 1950s, as well as to her exposure to avant-garde trends in the 1960s and 1970s in the United States. Before travelling to study abroad, she danced as a young teenager for many years in Yardena Cohen’s studio, who had her students often improvise and dance to biblical themes, and like all students in the Israeli secular education system, Yerushalmi studied “Bible” not only as a religious text, but also as a Hebrew, literary, historical, and foundational one.89 Whereas Yerushalmi’s productions of plays by Shakespeare, the Greeks, or other classical dramatists necessitated linguistic and intercultural translations, the Bible was a text that she and her actors were deeply familiar with and which they could read in a non-religious way, in their mother tongue, and in which they could feel at home. Much has been written on the revival of the Hebrew language as a spoken language in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries and the central place of the Bible at the crossroads of religion, secularism, Judaism, Zionism, and the founding of the State of Israel. In his Language and Identity, John Edwards explains that: The particularity of the Hebrew “case” is that the religious factor was central—and in two ways: first, during the long period when the language almost ceased to exist as a “normal” vernacular, religion provided a sheltering home for it; second, the development and maintenance of a Jewish state obviously implied powerful interwinings between belief and language.90 In his Language in Time of Revolution, Benjamin Harshav looks at the place of biblical Hebrew from a different perspective, arguing that “Eretz-Israel lived in the memory of the Jews as a homeland, and this memory was contained in the Bible. […] The Bible served as a kind of birth certificate, helped to break the barrier between man and the land, and nourished a sense of homeland.”91

Performativity of Anachronism

37

In addition to her Israeli cultural and linguistic roots, which are constructive to her work on the Bible Project, Yerushalmi’s theater language is inspired by her time in the 1960s and 1970s in the United States, where she studied directing at Carnegie Mellon University and spent a few years thereafter at La Mama Theater in New York City. During these high days of the avant-garde theatrical scene, she saw productions by Grotowski, Kantor, Schechner, The Living Theatre, and the Open Theatre, and she herself directed at La Mama in 1970 and 1971 two radical versions of An-Ski’s The Dybbuk, adapted by Leon Katz, which abounded, unlike the Bible Project, with Jewish religious ico­ nography.92 While all of these were formative in her founding of the Itim Ensemble in 1989 in Tel Aviv, her 1990s Bible Project, which would become one of her masterpieces, is connected to The Open Theater’s The Serpent (1969). This production, based on Jean-Claude van Itallie’s play and under the directorship of Joseph Chaikin, like many other avant-garde biblical theater productions, anachronistically correlates between the biblical texts and con­ temporary political events. In The Serpent, these were the shocking assassina­ tions of John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King, which were processed and performed through the lens of the Book of Genesis, the first murder, and the story of Cain and Abel. As Carol Martin writes, “The assertion of the work as a whole was that the unrelenting violence that characterizes human social life, a violence that began in the biblical Book of Genesis, has remained with us.”93 The first part of Yerushalmi’s Bible Project, VaYomer (And He Said), stages many episodes from Genesis, including an existentialist interpretation of a genealogical list of births and deaths (“This is the book of the generations of Adam,” Genesis 5) that is reminiscent of the ending of van Ittalie and Chaikin’s The Serpent.94 The cultural context of Yerushalmi’s performance is utterly different, however, and in this part of the project, she focuses on human vulnerability rather than divine omnipotence, offering politically charged perspectives on foundational myths. These include, for example, an actress performing the hardships and pain of giving birth while reciting the story of the miraculous birth of Isaac, the scene of the Flood choreographed through the perspective of the suffocating drowning “sinners,” and ironic representations of biblical lists of discriminatory laws that seem archaic but are still practiced against women or other marginalized groups. Rina Yerushalmi is certainly not the first Israeli theater artist to create biblical theater in this cultural context.95 In his 1956 memoir, My Way on the Stages, Moshe Halevy, founder of the Ohel [Tent] Theatre in Tel Aviv in 1925, who himself staged iconic productions based on biblical plays, writes, “Deep in my heart, I always loved biblical plays, which are faithful to the original, and I even dreamt of directing the Bible itself, without working with playwrights’ adaptations.”96 Halevy additionally describes in his memoir his idea “to found in Israel a special theater for biblical and historical plays, in the capital city of Jerusalem, just like the special Shakespearean theater in Stratford upon Avon, the hometown of that genius.”97

38 Performativity of Anachronism

Such a theater was never built in Jerusalem, but in a way, Yerushalmi fulfilled Halevy’s vision by directly performing biblical texts and by creating a strikingly modern aesthetics that rejects both Jewish religious iconography and orientalist images of “biblical” settings such as the desert. Rather than Torah scrolls, as have been used for example in the recent Oberammergau produc­ tions, only once throughout her entire performance does an actress clutch in her hand a small modern day printed Bible book like those each one of the members of the audience has at home. Rather than “palm trees,” Yerushalmi and her collaborators (set designer Dror Herrenson, light designer Avi-Yona Bueno [Bambi], and musician Israel Bright) created a brightly lit mono­ chromatic and almost empty stage, on which there was but one large table inside of which were white cards with biblical verbs printed in black on them. This table was a stage metaphor of a printing table on which letters are organized in boxes, suggesting the deconstructive rereading of the biblical texts by performing them. The performative act of quotation recalls Walter Benjamin’s dialectical description of the literary act of quotation: “In the quotation that both saves and chastises, language proves the matrix of justice. It summons the word by its name, wrenches it destructively from its context, but precisely thereby calls it back to its origin.”98 This cyclical dialectics between past and present, and original text and its staged rendition serves the con­ ceptual aspects of the performance, which anachronistically ties between the Bible and modern historical events, particularly the narratives of exile and redemption (in Hebrew Galut and Geula ‫)גלות וגאולה‬. This is especially the case in VaYelech (And He Was Walking), which is mainly based on texts from the Books of Exodus and Numbers. Two examples from VaYelech (And He Was Walking) illustrate in different ways the layers of anachronism or rather the multi-time dimensionality of this work. This part of the performance, which depicts the wanderings in the desert, the building of the nation, and the biblical conquering of the Land of Israel, opens with the 12 actors of the Ensemble, alluding to the 12 tribes, standing in a line at the rear of the theatrical space. At first, only their faces are visible and then the lighting gradually reveals their bodies and the suitcases they hold (Fig. 1.4). They all recite the list of rest camps in the desert (Numbers 33); however, each one of the actors speaks the biblical text in the language her or his parents spoke before arriving in Israel. Languages include Hebrew, Arabic, German, French, Polish, Russian, English, and more. This is the only scene throughout the production in which the biblical texts are performed in languages other than Hebrew, tying the ancient biblical texts to the personal biographies of the actors themselves. As such, Yerushalmi not only creates a parallelism between biblical and modern wanderings, but also intimately reconnects the per­ formers, and through them the members of the audience, to their personal and familial experiences of reading, learning, or listening to the Bible in different cultural contexts. As mentioned, the stage lighting gradually reveals the actors’

Performativity of Anachronism

39

Figure 1.4 “They left and they camped” (Numbers 33); Bible Project Part 1, VaYomer, VaYelech (And He Said, And He Walked). Adapted and directed by Rina Yerushalmi. Itim Ensemble and Cameri Theater of Tel Aviv, 1996. Photo: Gadi Dagon. Courtesy: Rina Yerushalmi.

bodies, making it apparent that they are holding brown suitcases, which associate modern post-Shoah and other images of refuge and migration. Based on this scene, a special map was prepared as part of the memorabilia of the performance, which includes short personal biographies of the actors as well as the itineraries of “this human fabric of wandering”99 alongside modern his­ torical events: Although it is difficult to define such a dynamic and eventful period as the last hundred years, we felt that a brief study of the actors’ biographies and the encounter with them through the Bible in the theater, will, perhaps, link their individual stories with historical and national events.100 Following the wanderings and scenes that allude to the trauma of the Shoah, VaYelech ruthlessly deals with the wars over the land and culminates in what has become one of the iconic and most memorable scenes of the Bible Project, Iyar Wolpe’s twelve-minute performance of the story of Jephthah’s daughter (Judges 11). Wolpe repeats the biblical chapter about the sacrifice of the young nameless child four times consecutively, accompanied by electronic music, her voice and movement growing into a powerful crescendo (Fig. 1.5).

40 Performativity of Anachronism

Figure 1.5 “Jephtah’s daughter” (Judges 11) performed by Iyar Wolpe. Bible Project Part 1, VaYomer, VaYelech (And He Said, And He Walked). Adapted and directed by Rina Yerushalmi. Itim Ensemble and Cameri Theater of Tel Aviv, 1996. Photo: Ornan Rotem. Courtesy: Rina Yerushalmi.

This biblical story, which is reminiscent of the Iphigenia myth, tells about Jephthah who sacrifices his daughter, following his oath to God, in gratitude for winning the war. This scene had such impact, that in his novel The Liberated Bride (2001), internationally acclaimed author A. B. Yehoshua describes it through the eyes of the main character, Rivlin, a professor of literature, who goes to see the performance: And so, when for the third time she uttered her father’s cry—Alas, my daughter! Thou have brought me very low and art my downfall—a shudder convulsed Rivlin’s being. Quickly, he removed his eyeglasses and hid his face.101 The cyclical repetitiveness of violence powerfully comes through this scene, suggesting, metaphorically, that what seems to have been an archaic brutal practice resonates in contemporary contexts. The electronic music associates the biblical heroine with an image of a contemporary youthful girl, but at the same time, its own intensifying and repetitive tempo has phenom­ enological affectivity that turns spectators into witnesses of the violent ritual.

Performativity of Anachronism

41

Historian Anita Shapira writes that “For almost a century, the Bible was the identity-defining text of the Jewish society emerging in the land of Israel.”102 In Shapira’s extensive discussion of the Zionist secularized attitude to the Bible, which formed “a bridge between past and present,” she refers to the ideological tying of biblical/mythical narratives with modern history, most specifically, the Jewish return from exile to the Land of Israel. As Shapira writes, “Zionism seemed to be recapturing and reconstructing the drama that unfolded in the Books of Ezra and Nehemiah.”103 Indeed, the very final scene of the Bible Project, at the end of VaYerra (And He Feared), conjoins past and future time dimensions around precisely these issues. This scene takes place after the two parts of the work about the kingships of Shaul and David, their deeds and misdeeds. Towards the very end of the entire Bible Project, the theatrical space is nearly dark, and the actors of the Ensemble slowly move forward, holding illuminated lightbulbs in their hands, reciting lines from 2 Chronicles 36, the final chapter of the Bible, which narrates the exile to Babylon: […] And all the vessels of the house of God, great and small, and the treasures of the house of the Lord, and the treasures of the king, and of his princes; all these he brought to Babylon. And they burnt the house of God, and brake down the wall of Jerusalem, and burnt all the palaces thereof with fire […] 2 Chronicles 36, 18–19104 At the same time, simultaneously, an actor wearing binoculars, circles the stage, reciting prophetic lines from the Book of Ezekiel, visioning the future measurements of the rebuilding of the temple when the people return from the Babylonian exile, “And it was according to the appearance of the vision which I saw” (Ezekiel 43, 3) (Fig. 1.6). The convergence of time dimensions in this one verse alone is almost impossible to translate “‫וכמראה המראה אשר‬ ‫ראיתי‬.” However, theatrically conjoining the description of the destruction of the temple on the way to exile with the perspective of the prophet who is already in exile, now foreseeing the future return from the “future,” are but two simultaneous time dimensions Yerushalmi collapses into each other at this moment. To these one must add the present moment of performance, which alludes not only to the biblical textual and mythological past, but also to the recent history of the twentieth-century exile, wandering, and return, and ultimately, to questioning through this scene the future that is yet ahead. In the context of theater historiography Tracy C. Davis differentiates between “theatrical time” and “performative time,” which “emerges in distinction to theatrical time as an alternate model in which the caesuric present is not just backward looking toward the past and speculative about the future but engages all three temporalities experientially.”105 The multiplicity of anachronisms and time dimensions in this theatrical moment, as well of Yerushalmi’s Bible Project in its entirety evoke altogether, a dazzling, moving, and unsettling experience of “performative time.”

42 Performativity of Anachronism

Figure 1.6 “The vision I saw was like the vision I had seen” (Ezekiel 43:3) performed by Moisi Shmuel. Bible Project Part 2, VaYishtachu, VaYerra (And They Bowed, And He Feared). Adapted and directed by Rina Yerushalmi. Itim Ensemble and Cameri Theater of Tel Aviv, 1998. Photo: Gadi Dagon. Courtesy: Rina Yerushalmi.

Performativity of Anachronism

43

Conclusion In all of the examples I have discussed in this chapter, the theatrical simultaneity of the past, the future of the past, the present, and the future of the present, creates, in each case differently, a critical, complex, anachronistic, correlation between scriptural text, myth, and history, one which the theater readily homes. The scriptures, serving as the basis of theatrical texts, absorb new meanings that are relevant both to topically social and political issues as well as to the cultural place the scriptures themselves hold in the respective societies in which they are performed. In addition, this chapter looked at the theatricality of textual quo­ tation as well as at the performativity of pronunciation, speech, accent, and voice, revealing the musicality and auditory qualities of the scriptures as markers of identity. This embodied aspect of theater and performance is at the heart of Chapter 2, in which I look at the ways the sacrificial figure has been re­ interpreted in modern contexts through reenactments of scapegoating.

Notes 1 See Clifford Davidson, From Creation to Doom: The York Cycle of Mystery Plays (New York: AMS Press, 1984). On the history and meanings of the title “mystery plays” see Maggie Solberg, “A History of ‘The Mysteries,’” in Early Theatre 19:1 (2016): 9–36. 2 See Murray Roston, Biblical Drama in England: From the Middle Ages to the Present Day (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1968); Peter Happé and Wim Hüsken, eds. Staging Scripture: Biblical Drama, 1350–1600 (Leiden: Brill Rodopi, 2016); Chanita Goodblatt, Jewish and Christian Voices in English Reformation Biblical Drama: Enacting Family and Monarchy, London: Routledge, 2018; Eva Von Contzen and Chanita Goodblatt, eds. Enacting the Bible in Medieval and Early Modern Drama (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2020); Maggie Solberg, “Quick Books: Censorship and Biblical Drama,” Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England 34 (2021): 57–80; David M. Bergeron, “The Bible in English Renaissance Civic Pageants,” Comparative Drama 20:2 (1986): 160–170. 3 Paul Whitfield White, “The Bible as Play in Reformation England” in The Cambridge History of British Theatre Vol. 1: Origins to 1660, Jane Milling and Peter Thomson, eds. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 114–115. 4 Peter W. Marx, “On Circulation and Recycling,” in The Routledge Companion to Theatre and Performance Historiography, Tracy.C. Davis and Peter W. Marx, eds. (London: Routledge, 2021), 330–331. 5 Marx, 331. 6 Greg Walker, “The Cultural Work of Early Drama” in The Cambridge Companion to Medieval English Drama, Richard Beadle, ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 82. 7 Alan D. Justice, “Trade Symbolism in the York Cycle,” Theatre Journal 31:1 (1979): 47–58. One of the earliest and most influential studies in this context is V. A. Kolve’s The Play Called Corpus Christi (London: Edward Arnold Publishers Ltd., 1966). 8 Sharon Aronson-Lehavi, “Sexuality and Gender,” in A Cultural History of Theatre in the Middle Ages, Vol 2. Jody Enders, ed. (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2017), 59–76. 9 “Joseph’s Trouble About Mary,” in The York Corpus Christi Plays, Clifford Davidson, ed. (Kalamazoo, MI: Western Michigan University, Medieval Institute Publications, 2011), 86–94; “Pagina Sexta: De Salutatione et Nativitate Salvatoris Ihesu Christi,” in The Chester Plays, Hermann Deimling, ed. (London: Oxford University Press, 1968), 104–131; 110; See also Aronson-Lehavi, 2017, 63–66.

44 Performativity of Anachronism 10 Margaret Berger, ed. and trans., Hildegard of Bingen. On Natural Philosophy and Medicine: Selections From Causae et Curae (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1999), 80. See also Joan Cadden, The Meanings of Sex Difference in the Middle Ages: Medicine, Natural Philosophy, and Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 184. 11 Davidson, ed., The York Corpus Christi Plays, 2011, 87. 12 See The Nativity by Arnoul Gréban, trans. Shelley Sewall (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1991), 27. [Arnoul Gréban, Le Mystère de la Passion, Gaston Paris and Gaston Raynaud, eds. (Geneva: Slatkine Reprints, 1970), 46 (lines 3579–3590)]. 13 Clifford Davidson, ed. A Tretise of Miraclis Pleyinge, revised edition (Kalamazoo, MI: Western Michigan University, Medieval Institute Publications, 2011), 102 (line 309). For a close discussion of the tract in the context of performance theory see Sharon Aronson-Lehavi, Street Scenes: Late Medieval Acting and Performance (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 17–84; 127–144. 14 Davidson, ed., A Tretise of Miraclis Pleyinge, 2011, 98 (lines 179–185). 15 Davidson, ed., A Tretise of Miraclis Pleyinge, 2011, 104 (lines 376–377). 16 Victor Turner, “Liminality and the Performative Genres,” in Rite, Drama, Festival, Spectacle: Rehearsals Toward a Theory of Cultural Performance, John J. MacAloon, ed. (Philadelphia: Institute for the Study of Human Issues, 1984), 22. 17 The manuscript of the work is at the Dada Collection of the Kunsthaus Zürich in Switzerland, see: https://digital.kunsthaus.ch/dadaismus/en/dada-in-the-kunsthauszuerich (see Fig. 1.1 in this chapter and Figs. A1- A3 in the Appendix); the anno­ tated edition of the work is by Eckhard Faul in the second volume of Hugo Ball’s collected works, Hugo Ball, Dramen, Herausgegeben von Eckhard Faul, Hugo Ball: Sämtliche Werke und Briefe, Band 2 (Göttingen: Wallstein Verlag, 2003), 197–204; commentary by Faul, 290–296. In English translation, an abbreviated version of the play (scenes 1–3), translated by Henry Marx, is in Mel Gordon, ed., Dada Performance (New York: PAJ Publications, 1987), 40. The appendix of this book includes a full translation into English of the play and its accompanying page as discussed in this chapter. I thank Lukas Czech and Ruth Schor for their help with this translation. 18 In the medieval German context, see for example, “The Play at the Cradle of Christ,” in The Erlau Playbook: Five Medieval German Dramas From Christmas and Easter, Stephen K. Wright, ed. and trans. (Tempe, Arizona: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2017), 1–10. This play, like other medieval performances, includes elements from contemporary popular culture. 19 Faul, 2003, 296; Translation mine. 20 Ricahrd Huelsenbeck, “En Avant Dada: A History of Dadaism,” in The Dada Painters and Poets: An Anthology, Second edition, Robert Motherwell, ed. (Cambridge, Mass.: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1979), 35. 21 Huelsenbeck, 36. 22 Huelsenbeck, 25. 23 Huelsenbeck, 35. 24 See also Faul, 2003, 294. 25 Huelsenbeck, 31. 26 Huelsenbeck, 31–32; In this context see also Nicola Behrmann, “Scenes of Birth and Founding Myths: Dada 1916/17,” The Germanic Review 91 (2016): 335–349. 27 Tom Sandqvist, Dada East: The Romanians of Cabaret Voltaire (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2006), 35. 28 Faul, 2003, 296. 29 “Tzara” refers to Tristan Tzara. 30 [“Und da er ward gekreuzigt da floß viel warmes Blut”]. Faul, 2003, 202. 31 Hugo Ball, Flight Out of Time: A Dada Diary by Hugo Ball, John Elderfield, ed. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 65. 32 See Appendix.

Performativity of Anachronism

45

33 Faul, 2003, 199. 34 The accompanying description of the performance does not include the reference to the propeller but rather says “Star, loud sound of the angel, very strong, then a cymbal.” Faul, 2003, 203; see Appendix. 35 It is interesting to mention in this context an installation exhibition of artist and filmmaker Laura Poitras, titled Astro Noise, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York City, February 5 to May 1, 2016, see https://whitney.org/exhibitions/laurapoitras. In one of rooms of the exhibition, visitors were invited to lay down on a large bed in the center of the room (“Bed down Location”) and stare at the sky that was screened on the ceiling, only to eventually discover that the “sky” was staring back at them with the use of cameras. The artist critically simulated the post-9/11 use of technology for mass surveillance. 36 Freddie Rokem, “‘Has This Thing Appeared Again Tonight?’: Deus ex Machina and Other Theatrical Interventions of the Supernatural,” in Things: Religion and the Question of Materiality, Dick Houtman and Brigit Meyer, eds. (New York: Fordham University Press, 2012), 127–128. 37 Berhmann, 2016, 335–349. 38 Berhmann, 2016, 344. 39 Debbie Lewer, “Hugo Ball, Iconoclasm, and the Origins of Dada in Zurich,” Oxford Art Journal, 32:1 (2009): 20. 40 Lewer, 2009, 20. 41 Lewer, 2009, 23. 42 Lewer, 2009, 25. 43 Lewer, 2009, 27. 44 Giorgio Agamben, “In Praise of Profanation,” Profanations, New York: Zone Books, 2008; 73–92; 73. 45 Agamben, 2008, 75. 46 Agamben, 2008, 75. 47 Agamben, 2008, 76. 48 Agamben, 2008, 77. See also Yair Lipshitz, “Play,” Mafteakh 8 (2014): 129–131. Hebrew. 49 Michael Paulson, “‘It’s My Tradition Too’: A Town’s Centuries-Old Passion Play Evolves,” The New York Times, August 24, 2022. See: https://www.nytimes.com/ 2022/08/24/theater/oberammergau-passion-play.html (Accessed September 4, 2022). I thank Carol Martin for this reference. 50 The seminal study of this history is James Shapiro’s Oberammergau: The Troubling Story of the World’s Most Famous Passion Play (New York: Pantheon Books, 2000). See also Marc Saperstein, “Jewish Responses to the Passion Narratives,” in The Passion Story: From Visual Representation to Social Drama, Marcia Kupfer, ed. (Pennsylvania: The Pennsylvania University Press, 2008), 191–202. Earlier discussions of the anti-Semitic elements of the play exist also before the Holocaust; see for example Joseph Krauskopf, A Rabbi’s Impressions of the Oberammergau Passion Play: Being a Series of Six Lectures (Philadelphia: Stern, 1901). 51 https://www.passionsspiele-oberammergau.de/en/home (Accessed September 5, 2022). In spite of its appeal and although the narrative of the oath has its own his­ toriography by now, the seventeenth-century oath as the ultimate beginning of the performance is debated; David Mason writes that “this era of the Passionspiel was informed by at least two sixteenth-century plays, both a Catholic play and a Protestant one—scripts that precede the fabled plague that leads to the institution of Oberammergau’s decennial performances in 1634.” See David Mason, “Tableaus and Selves in Vrindavan and Oberammergau,” in The Oberammergau Passion Play: Essays on the 2010 Performance and the Centuries-Long Tradition, Kevin J. Wetmore, Jr., ed. (Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers, 2017), 121. 52 See Joshua Edelman’s “Spiritual Voyeurism and Cultural Nostalgia: Anglophone Visitors to the Oberammergau Passion Play,” 1870–1925 and 2010, in Kevin J. Wetmore, Jr. ed., 2017, 66–87.

46 Performativity of Anachronism 53 Kevin J. Wetmore, Jr., ed., The Oberammergau Passion Play: Essays on the 2010 Performance and the Centuries-Long Tradition (Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers, 2017). 54 Sarah Ruhl, Passion Play (New York: Samuel French, 2010). See also, Amy Muse, The Drama and Theatre of Sarah Ruhl (London: Methuen Drama, Bloomsbury Publishing, 2018), 99–109, and Jill Stevenson, “Passion Playing: An Interview With Sarah Ruhl on the Shaping Influence of Oberammergau,” in Kevin J. Wetmore, Jr., ed., 2017, 168–175. 55 The Oberammergau Passion Play official website details the history of the play, including a specific reference to this visit. See: https://www.passionsspieleoberammergau.de/en/play/history/2 (Accessed 2 August 2022). 56 This passion play was founded by Josef Meier in 1939 and ran until 2008. See https:// visitspearfish.com/blog/10-years-later-black-hills-passion-play-remembered (Accessed 2 August 2022). 57 Ruhl, 2010, 8. 58 Freddie Rokem, Performing History: Theatrical Representations of the Past in Contemporary Theatre (Iowa: University of Iowa Press, 2000), 202. 59 According to Stückl, he was elected by a vote of nine to eight. See Christian Stückl, “A Brief, Personal History of the Oberammergau Passion Play,” in The Pharisees, Joseph Sievers and Amy-Jill Levine, eds. (Grand Rapids, Michigan: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2021), 336. 60 Stückl, 2021, 335. 61 Stückl, 2021, 336. 62 On German post-Brechtian and postwar theater, see Marvin Carlson’s Theatre is More Beautiful Than War: German Stage Directing in the Late Twentieth Century (Iowa: University of Iowa Press, 2009). 63 Barbara E. Bowe, “Passion Narratives,” in A Dictionary of Jewish-Christian Relations, Edward Kessler and Neil Wenborn, eds. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 333. See also The Vatican II document Nostra Aetate [Our Age], “Declaration on the Relation of the Church to Non-Christian Religions Nostra Aetate Proclaimed by His Holiness Pope Paul VI on October 28, 1965,” https://www.vatican.va/archive/hist_ councils/ii_vatican_council/documents/vat-ii_decl_19651028_nostra-aetate_en.html 64 Edelman, 2017, 82. 65 Stückl, 2021, 341. 66 See: https://www.passionsspiele-oberammergau.de/en/blog/detail/from-the-pub-toisrael-20190918 67 Die große Passion, Ein Film von Jörg Adolph, if … Productions/BR, 2012 (DVD). 68 Die Oberammergauer Leidenschft/Passionate Oberammergau, Eine Production der if … Productions e.K. München Im Auftrag des Bayeruschen Rundfunks, 2010 (DVD). 69 Die Oberammergauer Leidenschft/Passionate Oberammergau, 2010 (DVD). 70 See https://www.yadvashem.org/ 71 See Oberammergau Passion Play 2000, English Textbook, trans. Prof. Ingrid Shafer (Oberammergau: Gemenide Oberammergau im Eigenverlag, 2000), 42–26. [The Oberammergau textbooks since 2000 are bilingual, German and English.] Although the scene of the Last Supper in this production does not include blessings in Hebrew, it quotes the Passover Haggadah (performed in German), for example, John’s line: “Why is this night different from all other nights?” 44. 72 See for example, The Oberammergau Passion Play 1634–1984 Text (Oberammergau: Buch- und Kunstdruckerei H. Weixler GmbH, 1984). 73 See also Sharon Aronson-Lehavi, “Religious Theatre and the Potentiality of Live Art,” in Inter-Art Journey: Exploring the Common Grounds of the Arts, Nurit Yaari, ed. (Toronto: Sussex Academic Press, 2015), 163–179. 74 Sarah Ruhl, Passion Play, 2010, Part 2, scene 2, 60.

Performativity of Anachronism

47

75 See “Hannah Szenes” in the Shalvi/Hyman Encyclopedia of Jewish Women on the Jewish Women Archive website, https://jwa.org/encyclopedia/article/szenes-hannah 76 See Oberammergau Passion Play 2022, English Textbook, trans. Juan Lucas Cruz and Saco Lesevic (Oberammergau: Gemenide Oberammergau, 2022), 65. In 2010, the order of the poem is slightly reversed and appears as follows: JOHN: Blessed be the light that always burns in the innermost recesses of the heart! THOMAS: Blessed be the heart that maintains its dignity. Blessed be the match that consumes itself as it ignites the light. See Oberammergau Passion Play 2010, English Textbook, trans. Prof. Ingrid Shafer (Oberammergau: Gemenide Oberammergau, 2010), 47. In the original Hebrew poem, the first line (“Blessed be the match that consumes itself as it ignites the light”) is repeated in the final line:

.‫אשרי הגפרור שנשרף והצית להבות‬ .‫אשרי הלהבה שבערה בסתרי לבבות‬ .‫אשרי הלבבות שידעו לחדול בכבוד‬ .‫אשרי הגפרור שנשרף והצית לבבות‬ 77 Edelman, 2017, 82. 78 This poem, which Szenes wrote on May 2, 1944, appears also in English translation by Marie Syrkin on the Yad Vashem website: https://www.yadvashem.org/yv/en/ exhibitions/through-the-lens/hannah-szenes.asp 79 See also Sharon Aronson-Lehavi, “Dialectical Aesthetics of Change and Continuity in the 2010 Oberammergau Passion Play,” in Kevin J. Wetmore, Jr., ed., 2017, 62–63. 80 Mason, 2017, 120. 81 Mason, 2017, 125–126. 82 See https://www.passionstheater.de/mitwirkende/stefan-hageneier; See also Robert Wilson, 14 Stations (Munich: Prestel Publications, 2000). 83 James D. Herbert, Our Distance From God: Studies in the Divine and the Mundane in Western Art and Music (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008), 134. 84 Herbert, 2008, 135. 85 See The Passion Play 2000 Oberammergau, edited by the Community of Oberammergau with contributions by Otto Huber and Christian Stückl, Colour Plates by Brigite Maria Mayer (Munich: Prestel, 2000). 86 VaYomer VaYelech had a world premiere at the Weiner Festwochen (Vienna Festival) on May 15, 1996, and its Israeli premiere was at the Israel Festival in Jerusalem, June 6, 1996. Other international venues of this production include The Sommer Theatre Festival, Hamburg, 1996; Dunya on Stage Festival, Rotterdam, 1997; Adelaide Festival, Australia, 1998; The Kennedy Center, Washington, DC, 1998; KIT Copenhagen International Theatre, 1998; Die Werkstatt, Dusseldorf, 1998. In Israel, the production ran until 2000 at the Ramat-Gan Theatre. VaYishtachu VaYerra premiered at the Sommer Theater Festival, Hamburg, September 1, 1998, and its Israeli premiere was at the Ramat-Gan Theatre, October 1998. See VaYomer Vayelech, Adapted and Directed by Rina Yerushalmi, Itim Theatre Ensemble/Rina Yerushalmi and the Cameri Theatre of Tel Aviv, 1996, Theatre Program; and VaYishtachu VaYerra, Adapted and Directed by Rina Yerushalmi, Itim Theatre Ensemble/Rina Yerushalmi and the Cameri Theatre of Tel Aviv, 1998, Theatre Program. My research on the theater of Rina Yerushalmi was funded by the Israel Science Foundation, research project no. 1181/17 “The Art of Adaptation: The Theatre of Rina Yerushalmi and the Itim Ensemble.”

48 Performativity of Anachronism 87 See John A. Cook, Time and the Biblical Hebrew Verb: The Expression of Tense, Aspect, and Modality in Biblical Hebrew (Pennsylvania: Penn State University Press, 2012), 80–81. 88 Batya Gur, “Suddenly the Dead of the World Awaken,” in Haaretz, February 14, 1997. Hebrew. Translation mine. 89 On Yardena Cohen, see the Shalvi/Hyman Encyclopedia of Jewish Women on the Jewish Women Archive website https://jwa.org/encyclopedia/article/cohen-yardena. 90 John Edwards, Language and Identity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 112. 91 Benjamin Harshav, Language in Time of Revolution (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999), 200. 92 See Leon Katz, Midnight Plays (Raleigh: Boson Books, 2000); Yerushalmi’s prodctions at La Mama Theatre in New York City, Toy Show (1970) and Shekhina (1971) are based on Katz’s adaptation of An-ski’s The Dybbuk. See: https://catalog.lamama. org/MultiSearch/Index?search=rina+yerushalmi. Additional materials from Rina Yerushalmi’s personal archive are on file with the author. 93 Carol Martin, Theatre of the Real (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 33. 94 Jean-Claude van Itallie, The Serpent, A Ceremony, written in collaboration with The Open Theatre under the Direction of Joseph Chaikin (New York: Atheneum, 1970). 95 I have written on biblical performances in the Israeli context in Biblical Theatre in Israel: Between Identity and Otherness (Jerusalem: Israel Democracy Institute, 2016), Hebrew. See also Shimon Levy, The Bible as Theatre (Brighton: Sussex Academic Press, 2000); Freddie Rokem, “The Bible and the Avant-Garde: The Search for a Classical Tradition in the Israeli Theatre,” European Review 9:3 (2001): 305–317; Moshe Shamir, ed., “A Playwrights’ Conversation: Why? How? Can It Be? – A Modern Biblical Play,” Teatron: A Bi-Monthly Journal of the Stage Arts 3 (1962), 23–32. Hebrew. See also my discussions of the works of Hanoch Levin in the following chapters of this book. 96 Moshe Halevy, My Way on the Stages (Tel Aviv: Masada, 1956), 103. Hebrew. Translation mine. The biblical plays Halevy staged include Nikolai Krasheninnikov’s Jacob and Rachel (1928) and Stefan Zweig’s Jeremiah (1929). On Jacob and Rachel see also Ruthie Abeliovich, Possessed Voices: Aural Remains From Hebrew Modernist Theatre (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2019), 123–156; and Aronson-Lehavi, 2016, 29–43. 97 Halevy, 1956, 206–207. 98 Walter Benjamin, “Karl Krauss,” in Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings, trans. Edmund Jephcott (New York: A Harvest/HBJ Book, 1979), 269. 99 VaYomer VaYelech VaYishtachu VaYerra, Itim Ensemble/Rina Yerushalmi and The Cameri Theatre of Tel Aviv, Map accompanying the theater program, 1998. 100 “The Actors’ Familial Journey to Israel Through the Historical Events of the Century,” VaYomer VaYelech VaYishtachu VaYerra, Itim Ensemble/Rina Yerushalmi and The Cameri Theatre of Tel Aviv, Map accompanying the theater program, 1998. 101 A.B. Yehoshua, The Liberated Bride, trans. Hillel Halkin (Orlando: A Harvest Book, Harcourt, Inc., 2003), 146. 102 Anita Shapira, “The Bible and Israeli Identity,” AJS Review 28:1 (2004): 11–42. 103 Shapira, 2004, 12. 104 The programs of the performances include lists of the scenes and their corresponding biblical references. In addition, Rina Yerushalmi’s archive includes full video re­ cordings of all of her works. 105 Tracy C. Davis, “Performative Time,” in Representing the Past: Essays in Performance Historiography, Charlotte M. Canning and Thomas Postlewait, eds. (Iowa: University of Iowa Press, 2010), 145.

2

“Who shall be Christ?” Between Sacrificial Figure and Social Victim

In the previous chapter, I looked at the question of performing religious texts, particularly the ways modern theater artists quote, adapt, and re-perform scriptures, touching on contemporary social and political issues. This chapter is dedicated to questioning the representation of violence in avant-garde works that reenact sacrificial rituals, particularly the Crucifixion, by interrogating the relations between religious sacrificial iconography and performativity and between social victimhood. In addition, I look at the ways these theater artists construct the relations between these reenactments and between the audience who takes part as viewers, participants, or both. Nevertheless, while the performativity of violence and its reception forms a major part of this theat­ ricality, reenacting the religious narratives in the theater involves also questions regarding the embodiment of holy figures and the actor/character dialectical relationship. The relations between ritual and theater have been widely theorized, from both historiographical and cultural perspectives, with or without direct ref­ erence to religious ritual as the “origin” of theater.1 Although ritual (religious or other) and performance are interrelated concepts, my focus here, as in the rest of the book, is on the ways theater, which has its own ritualistic dimensions functions, as Eli Rozik has argued, as an artistic medium for collective met­ aphorical thinking.2 In other words, I look at theater performances that reenact executions and/as sacrificial rituals, which, as in the case of performing the Crucifixion, involve bodily and embodied practices and unmistakable iconographic elements, including representations of violence, torture, and suffering. The particular kind of embodied theatricality of the Crucifixion, which is to be found in late medieval passion plays and Corpus Christi plays, has largely disappeared from the theater, yet not from pictorial arts, sculpture, music, or literature in the post-medieval era, and reappears, as I argue in this chapter, on the modern avant-garde stage. The reasons for this reappearance are vast and depend on specific cultural contexts. Moreover, the ideas modern and contemporary artists convey through these reenactments are distinctly different from those of the late medieval theater or other forms of ongoing Catholic religious performance. However, this phenomenon suggests, as I have in the previous chapter, a circulation or resurfacing of theatrical practices, DOI: 10.4324/9781003042730-3

50 “Who shall be Christ?”

or to the least, a basis for a comparison of this theatricality in the late medieval and modern contexts. Notably, medieval official religious ritual did not include live embodiment of the figure of Jesus, but rather symbolic repre­ sentations, whereas the vernacular theater, referring to the historical event of the Crucifixion or other events in the life of Christ, did.3 As put by Martin Stevens, a medieval theater specialist: “the Mysteries’ central subject is the Incarnation, their mystery is Christ’s Resurrection, and their climactic moment occurs when the community enacts the most formidable of all taboos, the killing of its god.”4 As we shall see, there are connections to be drawn between the theatricality of late medieval Crucifixion scenes and its roots not only in the scriptural narrative but also in social games and other public forms of punishment, and between modernist aesthetics and performativity of vio­ lence that is projected on the sacrificial figure and/as a social victim. In her The Medieval Theatre of Cruelty: Rhetoric, Memory, Violence, medievalist Jody Enders invokes Antonin Artaud’s concept of “the theater of cruelty.”5 As Enders argues, Even at the level of philology, a connection emerges between torture, law, rhetoric, drama, and what Isidore of Seville (ca. 570–636) once termed “the spectacle of cruelty.” That connection was conspicuous centuries before Antonin Artaud pronounced that “without an element of cruelty at the root of every spectacle, the theater is not possible.”6 Indeed, as Enders writes about the medieval stage more specifically, “Countless plays stage beatings that imitate, reenact, and may even subvert the literal inscription of the law upon bodies.”7 Such religious performances, which she compares with other forms of medieval social and juridical spec­ tacles, “exhort their audiences to experience the pleasures (voluntary or involuntary) of being witnesses to, participants in, and judges of acts of vio­ lence.”8 What is the performative model of these reenactments, medieval and modern? What are the reasons modernist and contemporary theater artists stage religious iconographical sacrificial rituals and figures?9 How are inter­ religious histories constructed and problematized in these performances? In what ways does the theatricality of violence take shape in these performances? How does the modernist interest in and search for embodied performative forms that highlight the suffering body of both character and performer contribute to this theatricality? What are the relations between the religious sacrificial figure and the social victim? And, in what ways do modern theater artists deflect the referentiality of the figure of “Christ,” or, in other words, what additional identities are attributed to this figure? This last question about attributing additional identities through the em­ bodiment or playing of the figure of Christ focuses attention on the differences between religious ritual and theatrical renditions of this scene. Like the per­ formativity of anachronism, which I discussed in the previous chapter, here the theatrical question resides in the relations between the actor and the

“Who shall be Christ?” 51

character, the performative tension between the iconographic traits of the religious figure, the actual performing body of the actor, and additional social identities that emerge through representation, reenactment, and performance. The question “Who shall be Christ?” (“Quis erit Christus?”) in the title of this chapter is quoted from a late medieval Good Friday sermon exemplum which includes a short story about a summer game (“somergame”), a familiar ex­ ample the preacher draws on from daily life to teach about the sufferings of Christ.10 The game is a reenactment of the Crucifixion and it incorporates the violence and humiliation that are part of both the religious narrative and the dynamics of such social games. In this summer game, according to the sermon, one of the players is cast in the role of Christ while the other players are “tormentors” and “devils.” The game is simple: The player in the role of Christ is “stretched out,” “crucified,” “beaten,” “mocked,” and “held to be a fool,” while the player who is best at “tormenting” and “scorning” the one in the role of Christ is considered the best player. As is common in social games, there are a number of rounds, and the question “who shall be Christ?” is not—or at least not only—metaphorical but practical, and, theatrical. It literally refers to the player who will play the role of Christ in the next round of the game. According to the preacher, When the game was over, all the players talked among themselves and considered playing again; and one of them said, “Who shall be Christ?” The others said, “He who played today, since he played well.” This player then said to them: “I was Christ and was crucified, beaten, mocked, held to be a fool; I was hungry and thirsty, and nobody gave me anything. I looked down below and saw the tormentors and demons in great joy. For he who could make them drink and eat was well pleased. I looked to the right and saw Peter on the cross, and I looked to the left and saw Andrew on the cross, so that for me and my apostles everything was a pain, but for our tormentors and the demons everything was comfort. And therefore I tell you for sure that if I must play again, I do not want to be Christ nor an apostle but a tormentor or a demon.”11 The religious, didactic, message of the sermon exemplum, with its surprisingly concrete description of the game, is that those who suffer in the present will, like the player in the role of Christ, eventually benefit in the future. Nevertheless, the reference to the game itself and the refusal of the player to play the role of Christ in the next rounds reveals a wider performative context regarding the social and cultural dynamics at work in such events. These dynamics fall somewhere between religious reenactment, social games, and what Richard Schechner terms “dark play,” in which “actions continue even though individual players may feel insecure, threatened, harassed, and abused.”12 Moreover, this reference suggests that late medieval reenactments of the Crucifixion constructed the embodied identity of the sacrificial figure not only as a religious icon, but also as a social scapegoat surrounded by a crowd of

52 “Who shall be Christ?”

players, potentially secondly surrounded by a group of onlookers as when such social games and other performances took place in public, open spaces.13 This suggests that reenacting the religious narrative of the Crucifixion in the form of games and plays was a cultural space for retelling the religious narrative—the summer game mimics the iconographical spatial use of the isolated player held up high (“I looked down below and saw” [“Respexi inferius et vidi”]), while also being an outlet, so it appears, for the expression of violent social energies.14 The emotional intensity of such games and per­ formances, which converge the mimetic bodies of the characters with the real ones of the performers, is constructed through the suffering of the character/ player/performer in the role of the scapegoat as well as the violent actions of the rest of the group. Moreover, the participants in such performances are complexly positioned vis-à-vis the religious narrative, as the power-relations in this summer game, for example, unsettle the seemingly clear question of with whom the onlookers, spectators, or participants are supposed to identify. Is it humility or humiliation that is staged? In the following pages, I first look at the ways the Crucifixion was performed in late medieval theater, which, as mentioned, finds its roots not only in the scriptures but also in daily culture and such social games and performances. The rest of the chapter is dedicated to a comparative discussion of modern avant-garde case studies, examining the ways other identities are referred to and reflected through these reenactments, and how the religious concept of the sacrificial figure is appropriated in order to theatrically explore social victimhood.

Playing the Crucifixion in Late Medieval Theater In the abovementioned summer game, the preacher describes the player in the role of Christ as having been treated as “a fool.” “Christ was stretched out, cru­ cified, and beaten, mocked, and held a fool” (“reputatus fatuus”), and repeatedly “quoting” the player who seeks to switch roles, “I was Christ and was crucified, beaten, mocked, held to be a fool” (“eram reputatus stultus”).15 This terminology is used also in later medieval mystery plays and dramatizations of the passion and the Crucifixion, which feature a comfortable blending of elements from doctrinal and daily contexts. For example, in the opening lines of the famous York Play of the Crucifixion, Jesus is referred to by the soldiers as a fool, (“doote” in Middle English): I MILES Sir knyghtis, take heede hydir in hye: This dede on dergh we may noght drawe. Yee wootte youreselffe als wele as I Howe lordis and leders of owre lawe Has geven dome that this doote schall dye.16 [1 Soldier: Sir knights! Take heed, quickly draw near! We must not delay this deed to do.

“Who shall be Christ?” 53

You know yourselves as well as I, how lords and leaders of our law have judged that this fool shall die.] The rest of the episode is devoted to the actual physical process of tying Jesus/the actor to the cross, carrying the cross, dropping it, and eventually lifting it, accentuating the crude treatment of the soldiers and the bodily suffering of Jesus. Notably, the player in the summer game is similarly “stretched out, crucified, beaten, and mocked,” suggesting that the dramaturgy of the game, as well as that of the later mystery play, focuses on the process of the crucifixion rather than on a fixed representation of the end-result as is mostly the case in religious paintings or tableau-vivants. As such, medieval participants and onlookers took part in an actual carrying out of a mimetic crucifixion, making the performance not only a theatrical representation of a historical event, but also a reenactment of a cru­ cifixion.17 As Erika Fischer-Lichte writes about performativity following John L. Austin and Judith Butler: [P]erformative acts/performances do not express something that preexists, something given, but they bring forth something that does not yet exist elsewhere but comes into being only by way of the performative act/the performance that occurs. In this sense they are self-referential—i.e. they mean what they bring forth—and, in this way, constitute reality.18 This theorization suggests that the performative question the players of the summer game casually ask among themselves—“who shall be Christ?”—is deeper than the literal reference to the actual player in the next round of the game. It means that theater and performance can refer simultaneously to a number of identities, whether through inflicting pain on the very body of the performer and casting him, the performer, as a social outcast as in the summer game, or through other dramaturgical, theatrical, and metaphorical practices, as explored in the modern examples below. These performances thus con­ stitute complex and culturally loaded sites in which the sacred, the secular, and the profane converge. In their essay “Bullying in York’s Plays: A Psycho-Social Perspective,” Clifford Davidson and Sheila White discuss the bumbling manner of the soldiers’ treatment of Christ, arguing that “[t]hey demonstrate group collusion, a powerful determinant of bullying scenarios, with the objective of killing the victim.”19 It is fair to assume that such a performance in medieval York (and in other places where such episodes were performed) evoked reactions that expressed not only devotional piety but also other responses, as Jody Enders writes: Whenever torture is enacted on the medieval and early Renaissance stage, it solicits horror, terror, fear, and trembling in some; pity, mercy, and empathy in others; and yucks and guffaws in those who, like the spectators at the Corpus Christi pageant in which Fergus is beaten, “used to produce more noise and laughter than devotion.”20

54 “Who shall be Christ?”

In the York play, which I circle back to towards the end of this chapter through Adrienne Kennedy’s Motherhood 2000, the soldiers’ physical actions are accompanied by a crude, sarcastic, and matter-of-fact dialogue, calling attention to their playfully aggressive dynamics. Although Christ’s tranquility (except for two short monologues) in this episode conveys a powerful pres­ ence, especially in contrast to the boisterous crucifiers, the soldiers’ sarcastic tone constructs a complex position for spectators. Martha Bayless explains the laughter and folly that the soldiers’ behavior evokes in the medieval context, arguing that “[b]y this route the audience must come to realize that, although they temporarily share the perspective of God, their true counterparts are the soldiers who put Christ on the cross; that they inhabit the earthly realm of the human vice and folly displayed on stage.”21 Whereas this theorization suggests an affinity between the spectators and the soldiers/tormentors, just as in the summer game, the constructed identification of the York play’s spectators can be further complicated by examining the performance history of this specific episode. In the late fifteenth/early sixteenth century manuscript (British Library, MS. Add. 35290), which serves as the basis for the text in all editions of the play, the crucifiers are identified as soldiers (miles). However, in the earlier 1415 Ordo Pajinarum (Order of the Pageants)—a document that lists the plays and respective guilds that were responsible for their production, as well as short synopses of the performances at an earlier stage of the cycle—the cru­ cifiers are identified as Jews: “four Jews beating him” (iiij Iudei flagellantes).22 This suggests an alternative model for the ways by which theatricalizing the Crucifixion could be a complex performative site for reflecting on social questions of identity, and for letting out negative energies directed at the social Other. In other words, whether the social Other is embodied in the identity of the scapegoat or victim—an outcast referred to through the role of Christ—or in that of the tormentors, these performances evoke, reflect, and express contemporary social issues in both late medieval and modern theater.

Sacrificial Figures and Social Victims In Violence and the Sacred, René Girard argues that “mimetic killing” has roots in sacrificial rituals that include violence as part of the ritual. He writes that “society is seeking to deflect upon a relatively indifferent victim, a ‘sacri­ ficeable’ victim, the violence that would otherwise be vented on its own members, the people it most desires to protect.”23 The idea of “a sacrificeable victim” is vital to begin answering the players’ question in the late medieval summer game and offers a lens through which to examine the twentiethcentury renewed phenomenon of theatrical reenactments of Crucifixion scenes as a metaphorical way to explore social mechanisms of exclusion, violence, and othering. Although in late medieval culture these performances took place under the authoritative wings of the overruling religious worldview, using the theater to express social issues but ultimately reconfirming the religious narrative of

“Who shall be Christ?” 55

redemption through sacrifice, in contemporary secular theater the staging of sacrifice is more multifaceted. In some cases, performance artists undertake the art of performance to exhaust its extreme possibilities, for example Marina Abramović, while others seek personal redemption by embodying the per­ formative iconography of the Crucifixion, even positioning themselves in the place of Christ.24 In the theater works I discuss below, this performativity serves as the basis for an examination and critique of collective violence and social victimhood.25 It appears that in the modern works the longstanding gravitas and cultural embeddedness of the religious iconography of the Crucifixion serves as a performative vocabulary for pondering on racism, the exploitation of the underprivileged, and other forms of violence addressed at the social “Other.” In addition, the physicality and emphasis on bodily suf­ fering that originate in sacrificial rituals and narratives seem to correspond with the interest of modern avant-garde theater in notions of presence, ritualistic or “total” forms of theater, and the performing body. Regarding the relations between sacrifice as a religious concept and vic­ timhood as a social or political one, it is of note that whereas in English the terms “sacrifice” and “victim” are distinct, there are languages in which the same word denotes both meanings; for example Korban (‫ )קרבן‬in Hebrew, or Opfer in German. In his book On Sacrifice, philosopher Moshe Halbertal ex­ plains the terminological meaning of “sacrifice”: In its primary use, a sacrifice is a gift, an offering given from humans to God. It involves an object, usually an animal, which is transferred from the human to the divine world. In its second use, which emerged later, the term refers to giving up a vital interest for a higher cause. […] The third meaning of korban is manifested by an intriguing development in its use in many languages. In modern Hebrew, korban denotes not only an offering but also a victim of crime; yet in biblical, rabbinic, and medieval Hebrew as well as in Greek and Latin, no such use exists. This additional use of the term “sacrifice,” referring to both an offering and a crime victim, appeared in other languages such as Arabic, Spanish, and German before Hebrew.26 This etymological development is of interest because it attests to changes in the cultural understandings of the idea and meaning of this term throughout the ages, alongside the cultural continuity of the core religious narrative(s). In order to examine the modern politicized theatricalization of the social victim as represented through the narrative of the religious sacrificial figure, it is also worth considering Terry Eagleton’s definition of the scapegoat in relation to tragedy. In Sweet Violence: The Idea of the Tragic, drawing on Girard, he characterizes the scapegoat and society’s relation to it: The scapegoat incarnates dirt, deformity, madness, and criminality, and rather like the insane of classical antiquity, it is both shunned and regarded

56 “Who shall be Christ?”

with respectful awe. This unclean thing is a substitute for the people, and thus stands in a metaphorical relation to them; but it also acts as a displacement for their sins, and is in that sense metonymic. In burdening it with their guilt, the people at once acknowledge their frailty and disavow it, project it violently outside themselves in the slaying of the sacrificial victim or its expulsion beyond their political frontiers. The victim is thus both themselves and not themselves, both a thing of darkness they acknowledge as their own as well as a convenient object on which to offload and disown their criminality.27 Eagleton’s emphasis on the alterity of the scapegoat makes explicit the deeper social structures found in theatrical reenactments of sacrificial rituals such as the Crucifixion. At the same time, his suggestion regarding the community—for whom the scapegoat “is both themselves and not themselves”—is significant to understanding the complex position of spectators who watch or take part in such performances. In the works I discuss, as in medieval plays, spectators are indeed reflected in both the identity of the victim and that of the surrounding community. While classical tragedy also has origins in sacrificial rituals (tragos + ode = “goat” + “song”), as a dramatic genre it has been developed through a model that inflicts responsibility on the tragic figure (hamartia). In contrast, the medieval religious performative model centers, on the one hand, on the innocence of the victim, and on the other hand, on the embodied and somatic performativity of suffering and crowd violence. In other words, it forms an alternative kind of “tragedy,” which connotes this concept not only to the Aristotelian dramatic genre, but also to other performative structures. Such an understanding of “tragedy” associates this performance genre with a wider set of meanings that have been attributed to the term in modern contexts, including a disaster or a calamity.28 The numerous reenactments of the Crucifixion on the secular stage since the onset of modernism call for special attention, in part, because this specific kind of embodied theatricality, so central to late medieval theater, nearly ceased to exist in post-medieval and early modern theater.29 As mentioned, in addition to the question of performing violence, in these plays, there is also the question of performing the deity. Although artistic representations of Christ and the Passion persisted in painting, sculpture, music, and literature throughout the early modern era, this was not the case in the theater, where human beings directly assumed this role. This dissipation was a complex and gradual process, with exceptions in various Catholic locations such as Oberammergau in Bavaria, which I discussed in the previous chapter. In Mysteries’ End, Harold C. Gardiner quotes the 1575–1580 Court Book in England regarding the Wakefield plays, according to which: […] in the sais playe no pageant be used to set further wherin the Ma(t)ye of God the Father, God the Sonnem or God the Holie Ghoste or the administration of either the Sacramentes of baptisme or of the Lordes

“Who shall be Christ?” 57

Supper be counterfeyted or represented, or anythinge plaied which tende to the maintenaunce of superstition and idolatrie or which be contrarie to the lawes of God and or [sic] of the realme.30 [in the said play there should be no pageant in which the mighty of God the Father, God the Son, or God the Holy Ghost, or the administration of either the Sacraments of baptism or of the Lord’s Supper be counterfeited or represented, or anything played which causes superstition and idolatry or which contradicts the laws of God and of the realm.]31 Such an order stands in sheer contradiction to the ongoing, late medieval Catholic theatrical practice of representation and embodiment of holy figures. In the Chester post-Reformation Banns (“the late banns”), we similarly find an objection to showing and seeing God’s face; only “his” voice should be heard.32 In other words, one of the arguments that underlies this chapter and the book more generally is that secularism on the one hand and avant-gardist daringness on the other brought about new possibilities for the enactment and embodiment of sacred figures and themes, while designing theatrical practices that enabled theater artists to express contemporary questions of identity. This performativity, in turn, reveals the modern and secular (re)en­ gagement with various forms of religious subject matter and iconography. That this theatricality is discomforting even today suggests that it remains relevant, as, reenacting “Christ,” “God,” or other holy figures is not a simple or trivial theatrical issue. Modern and contemporary theater artists struggle with the question of religious signification and performativity for reasons that might include philosophical skepticism, atheism, reverence, or the technical artistic challenges of representing these religious figures. In the examples below, the question of theatricalizing the figure of the sacrificial figure is dealt with by deflecting reference to additional, contemporary identities of social victims. There are numerous examples of this phenomenon in modern theater and the arts, but I focus on examples in which meta-theatricality and Brechtian strategies are used to create multiple identities through the reenactment of the religious icon.33 Although modern performative adaptations of the Crucifixion or sacrificial rituals are at times daringly profane in the ways they interpret this religious icon, many of the works offer a serious and deep contemplation on the subjects of suffering, violence, and victimhood.

Performing the Self, Performing the Icon, Performing the Other On the cover of the February 1920 issue of the Berlin avant-garde art and literary magazine, Der Sturm (The Storm), which was founded by Herwarth Walden in 1910 and published until 1932, there is a drawing of a Crucifixion by Jewish painter Marc Chagall (Fig. 2.1), whose works appear in many issues of the magazine.34

58 “Who shall be Christ?”

Figure 2.1 “Marc Chagall, Drawing” (“Marc Chagall, Zeichnung”), cover page of Der Sturm magazine, 10 February 1920.

“Who shall be Christ?” 59

This drawing, made by Chagall sometime during 1908–1912, served as the basis of his painting Golgotha (1912), which, according to Franz Meyer was “exhibited by [Herwarth] Walden in Berlin under the title Dedicated to Christ, now called Golgotha.”35 In this unconventional drawing of the Crucifixion, Chagall replaces the letters of INRI (Iesus Nazarenus Rex Iudaeorum) with his own first name (Marc),36 and it could be argued that the curly, young figure in the role of Christ is reminiscent of Chagall himself. More importantly, it is one of Chagall’s first works of many in which the Christian figure of Jesus is rep­ resented as a Jew, or as embodying symbols of Jewish identity. Perhaps the most famous of these works is Chagall’s 1938 White Crucifixion, in which the crucified Jesus is surrounded by numerous symbols of Jewish life and the anti-Semitic reality of Chagall’s day, as well as the “burning town.” In particular, Chagall replaces Jesus’ loincloth in this painting with the Jewish tallit.37 Although Jesus was born as a Jew, the icon of the crucified Christ is not only the central icon of Christianity, but also from a Jewish perspective representative of the religious “Other.”38 This kind of replacement, as explored below, serves as a central dramaturgical and performative idea in Israeli playwright and director Hanoch Levin’s Torments of Job, where the theatrical figure at the center of the work represents simultaneously the biblical character of Job, Christ, and a Shoah victim. For Chagall, a Jewish artist with a strong religious background who has become famous for his Jewish art, to turn the crucified Christ into a Jewish figure is not a simple gesture. Ziva Amishai-Maisels writes on these tensions in regard to the White Crucifixion, with quotes by Chagall himself: It is in this connection that one must view Chagall’s use of Jesus in this painting as the crucified Jew. He becomes the very symbol of Jewish martyrdom under the Nazis, and it is as such that Chagall later described him: “For me, Christ has always symbolized the true type of the Jewish martyr. That is how I understood him in 1908 when I used this figure for the first time … . It was under the influence of the pogroms. Then I painted and drew him in pictures about ghettos, surrounded by Jewish troubles, by Jewish mothers, running terrified with little children in their arms.”39 Chagall’s early drawing on the cover of Der Sturm is an example of the avantgarde response to personal and social crises and conflicts through bold ex­ perimentalism with religious content and iconography, quite like Hugo Ball’s Dadaist Nativity Play discussed in the previous chapter. These works critically put into question, I think, the place of religion in modern society as well as religion’s ability (or inability) to offer meaning in the context of modern historical traumas, while also performing the “self” through the “other,” calling attention to the ironic discrepancy. The editor of Der Sturm in those years, who worked closely with Walden, expressionist artist Lothar Schreyer, has a Crucifixion play of his own, titled, straightforwardly, Crucifixion (Kreuzigung) (1920).40 Most recently, this work has been thoroughly discussed by Jennifer Buckley in her book Beyond Text:

60 “Who shall be Christ?”

Theater and Performance in Print after 1900.41 This work, inspired by Schreyer’s interest in mysticism, medieval artistic practices, religious writings, and ex­ perimental forms of “total” and communal art, precedes by nearly a decade his full conversion to Catholicism, as well as his identifying with the Nazi party in the 1930s, an issue that surely complicates the discussion of the relations between religion and politics.42 Schreyer published the performance-text on a series of hand-colored woodcuts that detail the movement, tone, rhythm, and verbal texts of its three figures, each represented by a visual symbol, an “icon”: Man (Mann) symbolized by a red cross, Mother (Mutter) by a full red circle (signifying her womb), and Beloved (Geliebte) by two small red circles (signi­ fying her breasts).43 He called the work a “Spielgang,” which, as Buckley writes, “draws on different roots: the verb spielen (to play) and the noun Gang (course, path, or development).”44 The work is a meditative, communal, ritual, intended to be performed, seen, and heard, as detailed on the front page of the prints “with a circle of friends as a shared experience, as a shared act of devotion, of a shared work,”45 what David Kuhns refers to in terms of a “coterie.”46 Dramatically, it is set against the background of the First World War, using metonymies that link religious iconography with the war, for example, Beloved’s line “Men scream. Men go into the battle. I dance. I. I sacrifice,”47 or Man’s line “The dark birds peck at our heart. We prepare for the last supper.”48 In contradiction to Schreyer’s retrospective explanation about the redemptive meaning of the work,49 my next example, Hanoch Levin’s postShoah radical play and performance, The Torments of Job (1981), combines the sufferings of Job and of Jesus in an unsettling work that is comparable with medieval theatricalities.50 Levin’s works blend poetic (at times rhyming) lan­ guage, intertextuality, meta-theatricality, and a comic, excessive, and gro­ tesque worldview, revealing human existence in its most basic and base manifestations. Although his plays are grounded in Jewish and Israeli contexts, they transcend to universality because of Levin’s deep engagement with the condition humaine. The title of this play refers to Job’s actual physical and emotional suffering, as well as to his moral and philosophical psychomachia (conflict of the soul) around his belief in or denial of God because of the ordeals he endures. Towards the end of the play, in a grotesque version of a Crucifixion performance, Job is skewered from his behind, raised up, and put high up on a spit, surrounded by a circus. Whereas in the Bible Job is redeemed, in Levin’s play he is left to a mortifying death. In Job’s words: Papa, they raise me up to you on an iron pole. On poles and crosses and spears and pyres they raise us, Our arms stretched out to our fathers.51 Merging Job and Christ creates a complex theatrical figure, both an iconic, timeless epitome of suffering and still profoundly human, especially given the actor’s live embodiment of such a demanding role. As mentioned above, this

“Who shall be Christ?” 61

pairing of Job and Christ has its roots in the Christian formulation of Job as a pre-figuration of Christ, the “man of sorrows.”52 Yet from a Jewish/Israeli perspective, adding a Christian reference to a Hebrew Bible figure is less common, creating an unsettling effect similar to the works of Marc Chagall discussed above. Moreover, and like Chagall’s Crucifixion paintings, the third identity woven into this theatrical version of Job is that of a Shoah victim. Perhaps most concrete and explicit is the scene in which the bailiffs come to confiscate all that Job owns “except for you yourself—skin, bones, hair, body, soul, and underwear,”53 resulting in a long list of furniture items, dishes, and personal belongings. Just as the bailiffs are about to leave, Job, who has been stripped down to his underwear, calls them back: “You forgot my gold teeth. I’ve got some gold teeth in my mouth. (He opens his mouth).” The Leader of the bailiffs dismisses this idea, “don’t try to make us into monsters,”54 only to return after a few moments in the immediately following scene, to violently pull out his gold teeth.55 However, in addition to performing humiliation in its extremity through the multi-referential stage figure, Levin’s performance requires spectators to look the victimized Other in the face and to be held ethically accountable for witnessing such instances of victimization and violence. Elisabeth Goldwyn discusses Emmanuel Levinas’s attitude to personal responsibility when con­ fronted with the suffering of others, in light of post-Holocaust theological dilemmas and Levinas’s objection to theodicy: The suffering of others is scandalous and a call for action, to relieve their pain. The only religious meaning of the pain of others is one’s ethical obligation towards the other, one’s responsibility for the suffering of others and one’s duty to relieve their suffering. Justifying the suffering of others through theodicy is not only wrong theologically, it might also relieve one’s complete responsibility; therefore it must be entirely wrong.56 From this perspective, the grotesque Crucifixion scene of Job in Levin’s play, staged meta-theatrically as a public execution within a circus within a theater performance, is twofold. On the one hand, it exposes the degree of posttrauma that Levin, himself a son of Holocaust survivors, identifies with his surroundings and society. On the other hand, the emphatic-yet-distanced identification with the victim as an isolated, differentiated, Other—hanging alone, high on a pole amidst a circus—can be seen, in following with Levinas, as a call for ethical responsibility towards such victims, a call not to shy away from those who suffer among us. In the words of Terry Eagleton quoted above, “the victim is thus both themselves and not themselves,”57 as, towards the very end of the play, the character of the cynical clown sums up the spectators’ mixed fascination and indifference to the performance of violence: Ladies and gentlemen, you see A man falls off a high roof, you stare—

62 “Who shall be Christ?”

His arms waving, spinning in the air, His shattered scream reverberates in space. You step back a bit, so the blood won’t spatter on your clothes and face. Hypnotized by his fall like lead, Your expressions a blending of yearn and dread For the final, unrepeatable moment when his body hits the ground. Don’t search for a meaning. Don’t ask for a moral. Why try? Just watch: a man falls, soon he’ll die.58 Levin’s multi-referential stage figure also suggests the cyclicality of violence that is targeted at the weakest. This cyclicality is suggested through the structure of the play, which opens with Job hosting a large dinner, implying the Last Supper given the catastrophic set of events that follow. A few beggars come to panhandle leftovers and suck the bones Job and his guests throw away. Job’s indifference to the beggars in this opening scene ironically high­ lights his inability to foresee his coming disasters, but more importantly their appearance in the prologue hints at the degrading final scene of the play. In this closing scene, after Job has been executed, mocked, and left alone hanging on the post, the character of the “most beggarly beggar of all the beggars” arrives and “licks Job’s vomit,”59 a gruesome realization of the consumption of the sacrificial animal and/or the Eucharistic eating of the body of Christ. Although much research on Levin has addressed this play, an understanding of its end through Eucharistic imagery and performativity has been overlooked in critical analysis. Moreover, this abject concluding image is more complex than an act of theatrical profanation or disgust. Such a reference to the Eucharist, through the eating of the body of Job/Christ, paradoxically leaves open the philosophical question about the existence of God that hovers over the entire play, a question, which gains special significance in light of the pertinent postHolocaust discourse.60 The beggar, grateful to find something to eat, is ex­ plicit, if cynical, about the meaning of what just happened: Just like I said: a little patience And somebody finally pukes. Yes, Somehow we manage to live. There’s a god in the sky. Tra-la-la, tra-la-lie. (He exists)61 The beggar’s statement of “There’s a god in the sky,” suggesting that the “food” he consumes is proof of the existence of God, reconnects spectators with the beginning of the play; at the end of the opening dinner, Job blesses God as he realizes that “one chicken bone fed a whole gang,” a proof that “there’s a God!”62 At the end of the play, tragically, it is his own consumed body that serves as such a proof—a proof, which both is and is not. Through this image, Levin complexly sacralizes the profane and profanes the sacred.

“Who shall be Christ?” 63

In between the opening scene of the “last supper” and the final scene of the grotesque Eucharistic meal, the play follows Job’s passion, so to speak. There are three main differences between Levin’s work and the biblical source: First, the play omits the biblical framing of the wager between God and Satan; second, as mentioned, whereas the biblical Job is saved in the end and his belongings restored to him, Levin’s Job dies destitute; third, while the biblical Job never curses or denies God despite his sufferings, Levin’s character goes back and forth between acceptance and condemnation. At first, having lost all his belongings, discovering the sudden death of his sons, and experiencing an unrelenting itching and scratching, Job argues with his friends Zofar, Bildad, and Eliphaz who come to console him, denying the existence of God.63 But then, during their visit, Job experiences an epiphany—a rare scene in this cruel play—when Zofar “rocks him in his lap,” a visual reference to the Pieta, and convinces him to cry out to his dead father/to God (Fig. 2.2). His plea, with Zofar’s aid, is a thread of utterances made up of broken fragments quoted from the Book of Psalms.64

Figure 2.2 The Torments of Job, written and directed by Hanoch Levin. Cameri Theatre of Tel Aviv, 1981. Yitshak Hizkia (Tsofar) and Yossef Carmon (Job). Photo: © Srulik Haramati. Courtesy: Israel Center for the Documentation of the Performing Arts, Tel Aviv University.

64 “Who shall be Christ?”

This anachronistic scene, in which a biblical figure quotes the Bible, turns the scriptural Job/Christ into a “post-biblical” human being who finds himself in a state of despair, left with nothing but his underwear and the cognitive ability to utter fragments of prayers that are internalized in his memory. In this moment, Job’s humanity, humanness, and even dignity is somehow reclaimed through the speech-act of praying, turning him from the “sacrificable victim,” in Girard’s terms quoted above, into a human being who is the victim of wrongdoing. It is his cognitive and emotional ability to pray, to utter, that reconnects him with his dead father/God and causes him to reassert his belief in God. This singular moment of agency and the momentary comfort he finds in his renewed belief in God, is, however, what tragically leads Job to his mortifying death as the play moves more concretely into the imagery connected with the passion of Christ, where the Jewish, rather than biblical, identity of Job is referred to explicitly. In the original 1981 production, there was an intermission following this scene of prayer, after which the second part of the performance opened with the change of rules announced in the Roman Emperor’s newly arrived decree, “All those who believe in the god of the Jews will have a spit stuck up their rear.”65 This, as mentioned, leads to theatricalized performance of the execution. In its emphasis on the victim’s suffering body and isolation from the crowd, this part of the play comes closest of all the examples in this chapter to an embodied theatricality that is reminiscent of the medieval summer game discussed above. By staging this scene, Levin calls attention not only to the sensation of violence but also to the ethical responsibility of the audience both inside and outside of the play. In Job: The Victim of his People, René Girard argues that the focus of the biblical Book of Job is the manner in which Job is isolated and alienated by his community: “Job clearly articulates the cause of his suffering—the fact that he is ostracized and persecuted by the people around him. He has done no harm, yet everyone turns away from him and is dead set against him. He is the scapegoat of his community.”66 Girard refers to verses such as “He hath put my brethren far from me, and mine acquaintance are verily estranged from me. My kinsfolk have failed, and my familiar friends have forgotten me. They that dwell in mine house, and my maids, count me for a stranger: I am an alien in their sight” (The Book of Job 19, 13–15). As opposed to the philosophical discourse about theological justice, Girard, following his work in Violence and the Sacred, calls attention to social mechanisms of exclusion in the Book of Job, arguing that Job is “the victim of absolutely everyone, the scapegoat of the scapegoats, the victim of the victims.”67 Quite like Levin’s cynical clown quoted above, Girard furthermore draws attention to the indifference of the Book of Job’s readers to Job’s sufferings: “We are just a little more hypocritical than Job’s friends. For all those who have always appeared to listen to Job but have not understood him, his words are so much air.”68 From this perspective, this version of the performance of violence amidst the circus requires the audience to grapple with their own voyeuristic fascination at the sight of violence and humiliation, as well as, paradoxically, with their indifference to Job, or any social victim for which he stands.69

“Who shall be Christ?” 65

In ways reminiscent of the late medieval York play of the Crucifixion and like other late medieval passion plays, here too the actual process of “spearing” Job and lifting the pole is explicitly stated in the stage directions and carried out on stage. The soldiers “spread Job’s legs and bring the spit” […] and then “raise the spit Job is impaled on, putting the end on the ground.”70 When the three friends who “stand looking at Job on the spit”71are unable to convince him to deny God yet once more to save himself from the torture, they eventually leave him alone. Job, in an ironic reversal of the crucified Christ’s plea to God —“Eli Eli Lema sabachthani?” (God, God, why have you forsaken me? Matthew 27:46)72—calls after them: “Don’t leave me alone with god! My friends, don’t leave me Alone with god!”73At this point a circus enters and the ringmaster introduces himself as one who has “run musical circuses in all of the most important capitals of Europe,”74 explicitly locating the performance not in the Land of Uz or in the times of the Roman Empire, but rather in modern times. Just before Job finally dies, unable to bear the pain, he cries for air and shouts out: “there is no god—take me down from the spit! There is no god!”75 It is now, however, too late for him to be saved, and two clowns, the pathetic

Figure 2.3 The Torments of Job, written and directed by Hanoch Levin. Cameri Theater of Tel Aviv, 1981. Yossef Carmon (Job) and Dov Reizer (pathetic clown). Photo: © Srulik Haramati. Courtesy: Israel Center for the Documentation of the Performing Arts, Tel Aviv University.

66 “Who shall be Christ?”

clown, and the cynical clown, “climb ladders on either side of Job, [and] paint him like a clown.” (Fig. 2.3)76 At this point, just as in the summer game, quoted at the beginning of this chapter, or in the late medieval mystery plays, the association between the victim, the sacrificial figure, the scapegoat, the king for a day, and the the­ atrical fool is complete. Yosef Carmon, the actor who played Job, describes his experience: Hanoch Levin’s character of Job is an apex for me, because it maintains immense force. It’s a role that demands drawing enormously on one’s deepest layers of emotional, physical, and spiritual energies. I come here to relate to and identify with an untold degree of suffering. And there is also the power of the words that the playwright puts in Job’s mouth. Because of all of these, I think, this role is a climax of all the roles in the classics and in the tragedies.77 It follows then, that the end of the play where the beggar eats Job’s vomit—or, as explained above, consumes Job’s body—is not only a grotesque Eucharistic metaphor, but also places this character, play, and performance in line with the great tragedies, recalling Hamlet’s “a king may progress through the guts of a beggar” (4.3.34–5).78 Finally, The way Levin positions spectators in this performance, me­ tatheatrically calling attention to the act of watching suffering and violence, as well as the ethical implications this positioning entails, recall the staged pho­ tographs of artist Adi Nes, in particular two of his series, “Soldiers” (1994–2000) and “Biblical Stories” (2003–2006), in which he creates multireferential identites through visual referneces to religious iconography and famous works of art.79 In “Biblical Stories,” Nes’s references to religious iconography and his visual citationality of other works of art allow him to create images that combine extremely realistic depictions of human beings in states of poverty, homelessness, despair, and need together with an aestheti­ cized grandeur that is associated with the biblical figures themselves and with Western religious painting. He thus calls attention to both the artificiality and constructedness of cultural narratives, and to the differences between looking at powerful artistic images and between overlooking destitution in daily life. For example, in “Untitled” (Abraham and Isaac) (2004), a poor, homeless man, pushes a shopping cart full of empty cans and bottles for recycling, on top of which lies a sleeping boy. As Susan Chevlowe writes, this composition is based on Duane Hanson’s Supermarket Shopper (1970) and the figure of Abraham in the photograph recalls Caravaggio’s Abraham in The Sacrifice of Isaac (1601–1602).80 In addition to this multi-referentiality, by staging the biblical heroes as homeless, poor, migrant, or people in destitute, Nes criticizes a society that turns away from these people. The staged figures in his large theatrical photographs demand to be looked at. In a short essay titled “Judgement Day,” Giorgio Agamben writes about this potential of photography:

“Who shall be Christ?” 67

But there is another aspect of the photographs I love that I am compelled to mention. It has to do with a certain exigency: the subject shown in the photo demands something from us. The concept of exigency is particularly important and must not be confused with factual necessity. Even if the person photographed is completely forgotten today, even if his or her name has been erased forever from human memory - or, indeed, precisely because of this - that person and that face demand their name; they demand not to be forgotten.81 The memorial element Agamben locates in the act of watching, looking, and seeing—a dialogic kind of being looked at—suggests a spectatorial performa­ tivity, according to which whatching unsetlling works such as those of Levin or, differently, those of Nes, is a call for ethical reponsibility and action. In a work such as Nes’s Abraham and Isaac, the question of who victimizes who complexly refers not only to the biblical narrative but also to those watching the work. One of the most complicated and challenging meta-theatrical interrogations of the theatrical question “who shall be Christ,” is perhaps in Adrienne Kennedy’s short play Motherhood 2000 (1994).82 In Motherhood 2000 Kennedy radically cohabits the identity of both the victim and the tormentor in the figure of Christ. Known for her feminist, antiracist, and surrealist writing style, Kennedy dedi­ cated three of her works to a real event that traumatized her family: In 1991, a white policeman beat her son, Adam P. Kennedy, for the reason that one of his car taillights was out.83 This event joins numerous racist incidents of brutality targeted at Blacks, including famous cases such as those of Emmet Till or Rodney King, explicitly referenced in Kennedy’s plays on this subject,84 or, the more recent death of George Floyd in police custody that led to the 2020 eruption of BLM protests. Kennedy’s three works relating to these themes are Letter to My Students on My Sixty-First Birthday by Suzanne Alexander (1993), Motherhood 2000 (1994), and Sleep Deprivation Chamber (1996), co-authored with her son, Adam P. Kennedy, and winner of the OBIE award for the best new American play. Motherhood 2000 is written as a monologue—a vision—of Mother/Writer, in which she retells her trauma in a dreamlike mixture of times that conflate past, present, and future, and including parts of the York play of the Crucifixion which appear as a play-within-the-play. Written in 1994, the play takes place in the future—at the then yet-to-arrive year 2000—relating to her son’s beating in 1991. The title of the play, Motherhood 2000, focuses attention on its futurity and visionary qualities, as well as on its feminist perspective. Futurity and a visionary writing style connect this play not only with religious writing genres (for example, apocalyptic visions or those typical of female visionaries),85 but also with the imaginary qualities of the theater as an artistic form and cultural forum. In this respect, Maakie Bleeker’s use of the term “seer” in the theater instead of “spectator” is particularly relevant: The term “seer” apart from the meaning “the one who sees” and “an overseer, an inspector,” is also associated with insight, revelations, prophecy

68 “Who shall be Christ?”

second sight, and magic. The seer is someone who sees things that are not there: future things, absent things. Seeing always involves projections, fantasies, desires, and fears, and might be closer to hallucinating than we think.86 Indeed, by sharing her vision with spectators or readers of the play, Kennedy turns her addressees into seers, constructing their identification with her trauma. This enables the understanding of the unsettling end of the play, where Mother/Writer finds herself, in her vision, striking at the head of the policeman who beat her son, the same man who is now playing the role of Christ in the reenactment of the medieval Crucifixion play which she has joined in the role of one of the soldiers. Motherhood 2000 is an apocalyptic vision of New York City in the year 2000. In the play, Mother/Writer describes her (future) encounter with Richard Fox, the policeman who beat her son, who is running a theater “on the steps of the Soldiers and Sailors monument on Riverside Drive at 89th Street.”87 Notably, the name “Richard Fox” does not appear in the other two works Kennedy dedicates to this event.88 As mentioned, the play that Fox’s troupe is rehearsing is no other than the York play of the Crucifixion, or, as Mother/Writer refers to it, “an ancient miracle play,” in which Fox, “[t]his man who I had thought of constantly since 1991 was playing Christ.”89 This ironic reversal of roles, where the victimizer is the actor in the role of Christ, is further complicated by the end of the play-within-the-play, coinciding with the end of the play itself. According to the stage directions towards the end of the play, “the play appears before her,”90 a vision within her vision, a play within her play. The actors who she has been watching rehearse the medieval episode evening after evening are all familiar to her from her haunting trauma, “the former district attorney, the county manager, the police chief, and two policemen who had been involved in my son’s case.”91 The ensemble is made up of all those who have silenced her, accusing her of “behaving like a mother” in her attempts to pursue justice for her son by repetitively sending letters to the authorities.92 Having watched them rehearse the Crucifixion play, Mother/Writer tells: I decided to join their company. I told them I had once been a playwright and had taught at Harvard. I was relieved to see they did not remember my name from my son’s case. I became their only Black member. They said I could rewrite a section of the play.93 The possibility Kennedy introduces of “rewriting a section of the play” is intriguing, because although the medieval play, as well as all the works dis­ cussed so far, are literary interpretations and adaptations of the scriptural event, the concept of “rewriting” suggests how processing trauma in the theater can be meaningful and can add perspectives to seemingly closed narratives. Just before the play of the Crucifixion “appears before her,” she recalls: “That

“Who shall be Christ?” 69

night as I sat on the roof writing I remembered my son screaming when the policeman kicked him in the stomach, my son who as a child laughed at his turtle and ate poptarts and watched Rawhide with his cowboy hat on.”94 Although this and other descriptions in the play of the violence inflicted on her son “on Friday night”95 clearly associate him with Christ as the victim, in the futuristic theater-within-the-theater she imagines, in her act of writing, it is Richard Fox “acting the role of the Savior.”96 According to the stage direc­ tions, “Three soldiers and Jesus—Richard Fox—stand directly opposite her.”97 The soldiers perform the final lines of the rhymed Middle English York episode of the Crucifixion, laughing and mocking at the crucified Christ and drawing the lot for his mantle. Then, she writes, “I spoke my lines coughing, wheezing … then found my place directly before Fox and struck him in the head with a hammer. She does. He falls.”98 These lines end the play abruptly and are hard to contend with. There are a number of possible interpretative directions for this “rewriting.” In her essay “The Apocalyptic Century,” Elinor Fuchs suggests that Kennedy interweaves the genres of the mystery and revenge plays: The extreme discordance of the two genres, mystery play and revenge tragedy, itself becomes a dramaturgical image of the moral chaos of the millennium that provides the setting of Kennedy’s narrative. A moment ago we trusted the narrator as our ethical norm in a racist and collapsing world. Now morality is suddenly suspended. There is an end, but no resolution.99 From a feminist perspective, it could additionally be suggested that, as in Letter to My Students, the voice and perspective of Suzanne Alexander or Mother/ Writer enable Kennedy to explore the question of action versus stereotypical feminine passivity or inaction.100 In Motherhood 2000, this is particularly complex because of the culturally embedded iconography of Jesus’ passive endurance, here subverted by casting Fox in his role, as well as by Mother/ Writer’s re-action to the mocking she suffered from the authorities. This line of thought can be further developed, given that while Motherhood 2000 engages meta-theatrically with the play of the Crucifixion, in Letter to My Students and Sleep Deprivation Chamber it is Shakespeare’s Hamlet, the epitome of revenge and inaction that hovers over the works. In both of the latter works, her son “Teddy,” as he is named in these two plays, is associated with Hamlet. These references establish the question of action, inaction, and reaction as a central theme in Kennedy’s works. Accordingly, this dualistic intertextuality opens up a complex matrix of actor/character relations, role-playing, and identifications, yet further problematizing the question of who is or “who shall be Christ.” Moreover, in Letter to My Students, Kennedy’s autobiographical character, Susan Alexander, recalls a course she taught on “Black Playwrights of the World” in which she and her students read, among other texts, “Philip Fisher’s essay on Hamlet, Thinking about Killing: Hamlet and the Paths among the Passions […].”101

70 “Who shall be Christ?”

In the play, she quotes Fisher’s essay: “I couldn’t sleep and read Philip Fisher’s essay on Hamlet and sleep: ‘Killing plays the role that it does in the literature of the passions in part because it breaks off the response and counterresponse of action by means of the one act that removes the possibility of any further response.’”102 This actual quote from Fisher’s essay continues as follows: “It becomes the final act of a will that can be certain that it is not to be limited by the answering act of the other. It becomes for that reason the direct translation in the field of action for the unilateral assertion of the self and the passions imply in general in the realm of inner life.“103 The idea of the “assertion of the self” is intriguing as an explanation for the way Mother/Writer uses the theater-withinthe-theater as a visionary option for a reversal of roles, action, and reaction, which simultaneously take place and do not take place. Finally, Kennedy’s focus on the theatricality of the medieval Crucifixion play—on its rehearsal, and on its actors rather than on the characters who are represented in the play—is reminiscent of the description of the summer game at the outset of this chapter. In the summer game, the focus of the preacher (and that of the game’s participants) is on the potential exchange of roles between the players and the immediate relevance of the game to their own lives. As such, Kennedy’s play, like the summer game, functions as a mimetic ritual. Kennedy’s choice to intertextually refer to the medieval play of the Crucifixion, to its theatricality, as well as complexly interchanging the identity of the victim, the sacrificial figure, and the tormentor, construct the strong emotions, the passions, that are inscribed in these performative forms.

Conclusion The intersections of theatrical representations of violence and religious re­ enactments are complex. I end this chapter with theater director and activist Milo Rau’s recent film, The New Gospel (2021). In this work, produced by Milo Rau/IIPM (NTGent Theatre), Fruitmarket, and Langfilm, Rau not only questions who plays the role of Christ but also, “What would Jesus preach in the twenty-first century?”104 Typical of his theater, Rau works with “nonprofessional” actors in order to explore the thresholds between art and life. For The New Gospel he casted in the role of Jesus Yvan Sagent, a Black Cameroonian activist who worked on a tomato farm in south Italy and started a revolt against the exploitation of rural workers in that area, leading Rau to document through the reenactment of the Passion Sagnet’s and his fellow workers (“apostles”) “Revolt of Dignity” (Rivolta della Dignita). Rau’s decision to film the work in Matera in south Italy, is not only because this is the area Sagnet led his protest, but also because this is the place where Pier Paolo Pasolini filmed in 1964 The Gospel According to St. Matthew and in 2004 Mel Gibson filmed his controversial The Passion of the Christ.105 One of the memorable moments of Rau’s film documents auditions he held in Matera for the roles of the Roman soldiers. In this scene, local actors are asked to improvise torturing, and so, for example, one of them is captured

“Who shall be Christ?” 71

violently beating a chair (representing “Jesus”) with a whip. In an After Talk conversation about the film, which can be viewed on NTGent’s website, Lily Climenhaga and Frank Hentschker discuss the work with Rau and Sagnet. Climenhaga asks Rau about this scene, about the improvised performance of violence and the behavioral meanings it uncovers, and Rau’s answer is illu­ minating not only in regards to the realness and reality of violence, torture, and humiliation but also regarding the relations between re-performing the nar­ rative of the Passion and the question of casting and of playing its roles. Rau asks: “Why do we have all these rhetorics ready in our society? Why do we know how it has to be done, what has to be said?” […] “The question is ‘the structure of violence.’”106 Religious iconographies and representations are a complex and charged kind of performative vocabulary. Rau’s idea of “the structure of violence” as a culturally internalized mechanism that the theater and the arts can undo is intriguing. Rau’s Brechtian highlighting of the processes of reenactment, the rehearsals, the auditions, the casting, is a way to call attention to these mechanisms. The second item of Rau’s “Ghent Manifesto” states that “Theatre is not a product, it is a production process. Research, castings, rehearsals, and related debates must be publicly accessible,”107 as happens in this film. Carol Martin writes about Rau’s “Theatre of the Real” that “Rau does this by wedding theatrical con­ structions to political and social realities in the context of upending the con­ ventions of theater’s relationship to acting, violence, ghosts, stage space, and the notion of rehearsal while at the same time using these theatrical devices to tell a story.”108 There is an inherent paradox in calling attention to the cultural structures of violence while re-presenting narratives such as the Passion or the Binding of Isaac, as we have seen in all of the examples discussed in this chapter. At the same time, Rau’s highlighting of “the structure of violence” helps to understand the ways modern reenactments of sacrificial narratives focus atten­ tion on the social victim, the ethical responsibility of spectators who partake in such performances, and, indeed, on the structure of violence.

Notes 1 For an analytic survey of wide range of theories about the relations between ritual and theater, see Eli Rozik, The Roots of Theatre: Rethinking Ritual and Other Theories of Origin (Iowa: Iowa University Press, 2002). 2 Rozik, 2002, 271–313. 3 Although we cannot apply to the medieval theater the same aesthetic discourses about acting that we use today, in many places the theatrical practices teach us that there was an observable tension between “actor” and “character” in this religious theater, which helped perhaps to maintain the distance of the holy figures in spite of their repre­ sentation through the human bodies of the actors. For example, a decision recorded in a York House Book dated 3 April, 1476, states that players should not act in more than two plays of the Corpus Christi pageants: And ϸat no plaier ϸat shall plaie in ϸe siade Corpus Christi plaie be. conducte and Retened. to plaie. but twise [˂.˃] on ϸe day of ϸe siade playe And ϸat he or thay so plaing. not. ouere twise ϸe saide day vpon payne of xl s. to forfet vnto ϸe Chambre

72 “Who shall be Christ?” asofen tymes as he or ϸay sheall be founden defautie failing in the same. [And that no player that shall play in the said Corpus Christi play be hired and retained to play but twice on the day of the said play. And that he or they playing the play should not do so over twice the said day or else they will be fined 40s. to have to pay unto the Chamber as often times as he or they shall be found failing the same.]

4 5

6 7 8 9

10

11 12 13

See Alexandra F. Johnston and Margaret Rogerson, eds., York: Records of Early English Drama, Vol. 1 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1979), 109. Although this rule was most probably designed to regulate financial relationships between different players, one of its consequences is that different actors would play the same character throughout the performance of the cycle. Many characters appear in more than two plays, but outstanding is the figure of Christ, who appears consecutively as an adult in over twenty plays in the cycle. This means that a minimum of ten different actors would have to play this role, resulting in “Christ” having many different voices, sizes, facial expressions, and so on. I discuss this in more detail in Street Scenes: Late Medieval Acting and Performance (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 4–5; 95–106. Martin Stevens, “From Mappa Mundi to Teatrum Mundi: The World as Stage in Early English Drama,” in From Page to Performance: Essays in Early English Drama, John A. Alford, ed. (Michigan: Michigan University Press, 1995), 27. Jody Enders, The Medieval Theatre of Cruelty: Rhetoric, Memory, Violence (Cornell: Ithaca University Press, 2002); Antonin Artaud, “The Theatre of Cruelty: First Manifesto (1932),” in Antonin Artaud: Selected Writings, Susan Sontag, ed., trans. Helen Weaver (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), 242–251. Enders, 2002, 2. Enders, 2002, 174. Enders, 2002, 185–186. See for example, Nissan N. Perez, Revelation: Representations of Christ in Photography (London: Merrell Publishers in association with The Israel Museum, Jerusalem, 2003); “Obedience: An Installation in Fifteen Rooms by Saskia Boddeke and Peter Greenaway,” at the Jewish Museum in Berlin, which was presented 22 May to 15 Nov 2015, featuring artworks on The Binding of Isaac. See: https://www.jmberlin.de/en/ exhibition-obedience; See also, Aaron Rosen, Art + Religion in the Twenty-First Century (London: Thames and Hudson, 2015) and Amitai Mendelsohn, Ecce homo: Jesus in Israeli Art (Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 2017), Hebrew. This exemplum was published and translated by Siegfried Wenzel, “Somer Game and Sermon References to a Corpus Christi Play,” Modern Philology 86:3 (1989): 274–82. The late fourteenth-century exemplum appears in a Good Friday sermon on the theme “Christ has suffered for us, leaving you an example that you may follow in his footsteps,” 1 Peter 2.21. In this essay Wenzel writes also on another sermon exemplum with a very similar narrative, leading him to conclude that “[t]he two versions of this sermon exemplum provide evidence that at the time of Langland’s writing Piers Plowman, the term somergame could indeed be used with reference to a ‘pageant of Christ,’ which in the later text is called ‘a Corpus Christi play.’” (282). See also Lawrence Clopper, Drama, Play, and Game: English Festive Culture in the Medieval and Early Modern Period (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2001), 72–75. Wenzel, 1989, 279–80. Richard Schechner, The Future of Ritual: Writings on Culture and Performance (New York: Routledge, 1993), 27. In their essay “‘A whole theater of others’: Amateur Acting and Immersive Spectatorship in the Digital Shakespeare Game Play the Knave,” Gina Bloom, Sawyer Kemp, Micholas Toothman, and Evan Buswell describe the performative situation in which spectators are intrigued by and immersed in watching other people play a game. Shakespeare Quarterly 67:4 (2016): 408–430. From a different perspective, Jody Enders writes about the

“Who shall be Christ?” 73 relations between the pleasure of violence in games and other public forms of violent performativity: There, the depiction of torture as a violent ludus is consistently reinforced by the philological cohesion of bodily harm and pleasure. When the torturers of diverse Passion plays proudly announce their intent to concentrate on the fun and games of inflicting torture, they also articulate an important dramatic principle according to which pleasure is imbricated in the juridical representations of violence. Enders, 2002, 174. 14 Wenzel, 1989, 278. 15 Wenzel, 1989, 278. (Emphasis added). See also Sandra Billington’s A Social History of the Fool (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1984), 18–19. 16 Clifford Davidson, ed., “Crucifixio Christi,” The York Corpus Christi Plays, (Kalamazoo, Michigan: Medieval Institute Publications, 2011), 292–301. (Emphasis added). According the MED, the Middle English meaning of the word “dote” is “a fool, sim­ pleton; senile man, old fool,” https://quod.lib.umich.edu/m/middle-englishdictionary/dictionary/MED12420. 17 On the theatrical process of attaching the actor to the cross and raising the cross in medieval theater, I have written following a student production of the play in an essay titled “Raising the Cross: Pre-Textual Theatricality and the York Crucifixion Play,” in The York Mystery Plays: Performance in the City, Margaret Rogerson, ed. (Woodbridge, Suffolk: Boydell and Brewer, 2011), 165–179. 18 Erika Fischer-Lichte, Theatre, Sacrifice, Ritual: Exploring Forms of Political Theatre (New York: Routledge, 2005), 27. 19 Clifford Davidson and Sheila White, “Bullying in York’s Plays: A Psycho-Social Perspective,” in Corpus Christi Plays at York: A Context for Religious Drama, Clifford Davidson and Sheila White, eds. (Brooklyn: AMS Press, AMS Studies in the Middle Ages, 2013), 206. (Original emphasis). 20 Enders, 2002, 180. The quoted line about Fergus appears in REED: York, 2 Vols., Alexandra Johnston and Margaret Rogerson, eds. (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1979), Vol. 1, 47–48 (Latin); Vol 2, 732 (English)). See also, John Spalding Gatton, “‘There Must Be Blood’: Mutilation and Martyrdom on the Medieval Stage, in Violence in Drama, Themes in Drama 13, James Redmond, ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 79–92; Mitchell B. Merback, The Thief, The Cross, and the Wheel: Pain and the Spectacle of Punishment in Medieval and Renaissance Europe (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999); and Marcia Kupfer, ed. The Passion Story: From Visual Representation to Social Drama (Pennsylvania: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2008). 21 Martha Bayless, Parody in the Middle Ages: The Latin Tradition (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1996), 210. 22 “Ordo Paginarum” in REED: York, 2 Vols., Alexandra Johnston and Margaret Rogerson, eds. (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1979), Vol 1. 22. Similarly, in the Chester The Passion and Death of Christ (play 17 of the cycle) and in the N-Town Procession to Calvary and Crucifixion of Christ (play 32), the crucifiers are identified as Jews. It is beyond the scope of this book, but unfavorable representations of the Jew as the Other in French and German medieval drama require a different contextual discussion. 23 René Girard, Violence and the Sacred, trans. Patrick Gregory (London: Bloomsbury, [1977] 2013), 4. 24 See for example Mikaela Bobiy, Imitatio Christi: The Christic Body in Performance (PhD Diss. Montréal: Concordia University, 2005); Mary Richards, Marina Abramović (New York: Routledge, 2010); Nicole Fritz, ed., Marina Abramović: That Self/Our Self (Berlin: Walther Koenig, 2021); Chanda Laine Carey, Embodying the Sacred: Marina Abramović, Transcultural Aesthetics, and the Global Geography of Art (PhD Diss., San Diego: University of California, 2016).

74 “Who shall be Christ?” 25 Bobiy’s research is dedicated to performance artists who perform what she titles the “Christic Body” and whose works exemplify in her view a religious aspect of selfsacrifice. For example, she analyzes Chris Burden’s work Transfixed (1974), in which the artist laid on the back of a Volkswagen car while accomplices drove nails through his palms. 26 Moshe Halbertal, On Sacrifice (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012), 1–2, 33–34. 27 Terry Eagleton, Sweet Violence: The Idea of the Tragic (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2003), 278–79. 28 See for example, “A Forum on Tragedy in the Wake of September 11, 2001,” Theatre Journal 54:1 (2002): 95–138. 29 Famous exceptions include the Bavarian Oberammergau Passion Play, which I discussed in the previous chapter. See also, Christian Biet, “Spectacle and Martyrdom: Bloody Suffering, Performed Suffering, and Recited Suffering in French tragedy,” in Thomas Macsotay, Cornelis van der Haven, and Karel Vanheasebrouk, eds. The Hurt(ful) Body: Performing and Beholding Pain 1600–1800, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2017; 32–33. 30 Harold C. Gardiner S.J., Mysteries End: An Investigation of the Last Days of the Medieval Religious Stage (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1946), 77–78. 31 Translation mine. 32 Lawrence M. Clopper, ed., REED: Chester (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1979), 247. 33 See n. 9 above. 34 Der Sturm Vol. 10, No. 11, 10 February 1920. See The Blue Mountain Project: Historical Avant-Garde Periodicals for Digital Research, Princeton University Library: https://bluemountain.princeton.edu/bluemtn/?a=d&d=bmtnabg19200210-01.2.20& srpos=12&e=-------en-20--1--txt-txIN-Der+Sturm++1920-----Herwarth Walden (1879–1941), founder and publisher of Der Sturm, was a Jewish German expressionist artist. His original name was Georg Lewin. His first wife was Jewish painter and dramatist Else Lasker Shculer and his second wife, Nell Walden. 35 See Franz Meyer, Marc Chagall: Life and Work (New York: Harry N. Abrams Inc., 1964), 173. See also, Ziva Amishai-Maisels, “Chagall’s White Crucifixion,” Art Institute of Chicago Museum Studies 17:2 (1991): 147–149. 36 Amishai-Maisels, 1991, 147. 37 For a detailed analysis, see Amisahi-Maisels, 1991, 138–153. 38 See Andrew Williams “The Church’s Reception of Jewish Crucifixion Imagery after the Holocaust,” AGON no. 48/4 (2015). http://agon.fi/article/the-churchs-reception-ofjewish-crucifixion-imagery-after-the-holocaust/#fn1 (Accessed Dec. 15, 2021). 39 Amishai-Maisles, 1991, 143. Amishai-Maisels quotes Chagall from the following source: L. Leneman, “Marc Chagall wegen zeine Christus-figuren als symbol fun Yidishe martyrertum,” Unser Wort (In Yiddish), Jan. 22, 1977, 4. 40 Lothar Schreyer, Kreuzigung: Spielgang Werk VII (Crucifxion: Movement/Play Work VII); Second printing, made in 500 copies from woodcuts, hand-colored, 1920; Schreyer published the verbal text of the work in the August 1920 issue of Der Sturm, 66–68, as well as in his 1948 memoir, Expressionistisches Theater: Aus Meinen Erinnerungen (Hambrug: J. P. Toth Verlag, 1948). In English, Mel Gordon has translated and published a full black and white reproduction of the work in “Lothar Schreyer and the Sturmbühne,” TDR 24:1(1980): 85–102, and he also published the verbal text of the work in his edited volume, Expressionist Texts (New York: PAJ Publications, 1986), 208–220. 41 Jennifer Buckley, “Scoring Theater: Lothar Schreyer’s Notation,” Beyond Text: Theater and Performance Beyond Print after 1900 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2019), 61–93. 42 See Buckley, 2019, 69–70; As David Khuns notes this is a complex issue, particularly in light of Schreyer’s close relations with Herwarth Walden. It is also worth mentioning

“Who shall be Christ?” 75

43

44 45 46 47 48 49

50

51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59

that Nell Walden published together Schreyer a book in Walden’s memory, Der Sturm: ein Errinerungsbuch an Herwarth Walden und die Künstler aus dem Sturmkreis (Baden-Baden: Woldermar Klien Verlag, 1954). Notably, the cross icon has two horizontal bars, the top one longer than the bottom one, and therefore it does not refer to the “Cross of Loraine” or the patriarchal cross, which have two bars, of which the bottom one is longer. It seems that like in the case of the abstraction of Mother and Beloved to signs of a red circle signifying the womb and red circles signifying breasts, this cross is a hybrid of the human being and the religious symbol. Buckley, 2019, 71. Gordon, 1980, 89. David Kuhns, German Expressionist Theatre: The Actor and the Stage (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 151. Gordon, 1980, 95. Gordon, 1980, 96. See Helga Straif-Taylor, “Lothar Schreyer’s Das expressionistische Theater: Context, Background, and Translation,” PhD diss. (New York: State University of New York at Albany, 1992), 222–23. This unpublished dissertation includes a full translation into English of Schreyer’s Das expressionistische Theater: aus meininen Erinnerungen (Hamburg: Hamburg: J. P. Toth, 1948). Hanoch Levin, “The Torments of Job,” in Yisurei Iyov ve’aherim [The Torments of Job and Other Plays], (Tel Aviv: Hakibbutz Hameuchad, 1988), Hebrew. Premiere per­ formance 1981, The Cameri Theatre of Tel Aviv. Directed by Hanoch Levin and designed by Ruth Dar; Music by Poldi Shatzman; Yosef Carmon in the role of Job. See https://www.hanochlevin.com/en/productions/1896. Israeli playwright and theater director Hanoch Levin (1943–1999) wrote over sixty plays, many of which have been translated and performed worldwide. See https://www.hanochlevin.com/ en. Selected writings on this play include Nurit Yaari and Shimon Levy, eds., Hanoch Levin: The Man with the Myth in the Middle (Tel Aviv: Ha Kibbutz Ha Meuchad, 2004), Hebrew; Yael S. Feldman, “Deconstructing Biblical Sources in Israeli Theatre: Yisurei Iyov by Hanoch Levin,” AJS Review 12:2 (1987): 251–277; Freddie Rokem, “The Bible on the Hebrew/Israeli Stage: The Torments of Job as a Modern Tragedy,” in The Book of Job: Aesthetics, Ethics, Hermenutics, Leora Batnizky and Ilana Pardes, eds. (Boston: De Grutyer, 2015), 185–212; Yair Lipshitz, “Biblical Shakespeare: King Lear as Job on the Hebrew Stage, NTQ 31:4 (2015): 359–371; Sharon Aronson-Lehavi, Biblical Theatre in Israel: Identity and Otherness (Jerusalem: Israel Democracy Institute, 2016), 44–58, Hebrew. Hanoch Levin, The Labor of Life: Selected Plays, Trans. Barbara Harshav (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003), 83. All translations of the play into English are from this edition. See for example G. von der Osten, “Job and Christ: The Development of a Devotional Image,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 16:1–2 (1953): 153–8. Levin, 2003, 62. Levin, 2003, 62. Levin, 2003, 63; On this issue, see for example Jan Tomasz Gross and Irena Grudzińska Gross, Golden Harvest: Events at the Periphery of the Holocaust (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 29; 136 n. 41. Elizabeth Goldwyn, “The Power of Goodness: Ritzpah Bat Aiah in the Interpretation of Levinas,” in Levinas Faces Biblical Figures, Yael Lin, ed. (New York: Lexington Books, 2014), 81. Eagleton, 2003, 79. Levin, 2003, 89. Levin, 2003, 91.

76 “Who shall be Christ?” 60 See for example Elie Wiesel, The Trial of God (as it was held on February 25, 1649, in Shamgorod) (New York: Random House, 1979). 61 Levin, 2003, 91. 62 Levin, 2003, 56. 63 Levin, 2003, 69. 64 These include the following broken quotes: “Our father who art in Heaven—”; “Who sits in the highest—”; “Into your hands I entrust my spirit—” (Psalms 31:5); “And in the shadow of your wings I will take refuge—”; “May your ears heed the sound of my supplications—” (Psalms 130:2); and “For you are good and forgiving and merciful—”(Psalms 86:5). The full Psalms verses are “Into your hand I commend my spirit; you have redeemed me, O Lord, God of truth” (Psalms 31:5); “Have mercy on me, O God, have mercy on me, for my soul finds shelter in you; and I will find refuge in the shadow of your wings until the calamity has gone past” (Psalms 72:1); “Lord, hear my voice; let your ears be attentive to the voice of my supplications” (Psalms 130:2); “Because you are good and forgiving and full of mercy to all who call upon you” (Psalms 86:5); and “That they may know that only you, whose name is the Lord, are the most high over all the earth” (Psalms 83:18). 65 Levin, 2003, 77. 66 René Girard, Job: The Victim of his People. Trans: Yvonne Freccero (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1987), 4. 67 Girard, 1987, 6. 68 Girard, 1987, 7. 69 On fascination with theatrical or artistic forms of violence and pain see for example Bert O. States, “The Pleasure of Pain,” in The Pleasure of the Play (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994), 200–214; Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985). 70 Levin, 2003, 82, 83. 71 Levin, 2003, 83. 72 Opening words of Psalms 22; translated as “My God, my God, why hast Thou forsaken me” (KJV). See Matthew 27:46; Mark 15:34. 73 Levin, 2003, 84. 74 Levin, 2003, 85. 75 Levin, 2003, 88. 76 Levin, 2003, 88. 77 Qtd. Emmanuel Bar-Kadma, “Job: A Doubter to Death,” Yediot Achronot April 10, 1981, Hebrew, translation mine. 78 See more on this idea in Joan Fitzpatrick, Food in Shakespeare: Early Modern Dietaries and the Plays (Northampton, UK: University of Northampton Press, 2007), 9. 79 Adi Nes, Adi Nes: Catalogue (Tel Aviv: Tel Aviv Museum, 2007). The exhibition Adi Nes: Biblical Stories was presented at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art, Opening: 16 March 2007, Curated by Mordechai Omer. See also, Sharon Aronson-Lehavi and Nissim Gal, “Wholly Unholy: Religious Iconography in Israeli Art and Performance,” Performance Research: A Journal of the Performing Arts, 13:3 (2009), 154–162. 80 Susan Chevlowe, “Adi Nes’s Biblical Stories,” in Adi Nes: Catalogue (Tel Aviv: Tel Aviv Museum, 2007), 118. See: http://www.adines.com/content/biblical/Abraham&Isaac.htm 81 Agamben, “Judgement Day,” in Profanations, trans. Jeff Fort (New York: Zone Books, 2007), 25. 82 Adrienne Kennedy, Motherhood 2000 in The Adrienne Kennedy Reader, with an Introduction by Werner Sollors (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001), 228–233. Adrienne Kennedy, Motherhood 2000, in Plays for the End of the Century, Bonnie Marranca, ed. (New York: PAJ Publications, 2005). In 2021 the McCarter Theatre at Princeton University held a special festival honoring Kennedy’s works: https://www. mccarter.org/adriennekennedy

“Who shall be Christ?” 77 83 See “Introduction” in Adam P. Kennedy and Adrienne Kennedy, Sleep Deprivation Chamber (New York: Theatre Communications Group, 1996). 84 In “Letter to My Students on My Sixty-First Birthday by Suzanne Alexander,” Adrienne Kennedy writes: “We are now a grieved family. Our son is being persecuted by the A---- Police Department just as surely as happened in the deep South in the 1930s during Emmet Till’s time.” […] “This is the height of persecution of a black male with tactics of the deep South in the 1930s and overtones of Emmett Till.” See Adrienne Kennedy, The Adrienne Kennedy Reader (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001), 202. 85 On female medieval visionaries, see for example Elizabeth Alvidia Petroff, ed., Medieval Women’s Visionary Literature (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), 30–31. Visions of the End: Apocalyptic Traditions in the Middle Ages (New York: Columbia University Press, 1979). 86 Maaike Bleeker, Visuality in the Theatre: The Locus of Looking (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 18. 87 The Adrienne Kennedy Reader, 2001, 228. 88 Leanne Groeneveld argues that in Motherhood 2000 one cannot be sure that Richard Fox is indeed the policeman who beat Kennedy’s son; In my view this ambiguity adds to the imaginary qualities of the play, suggesting that this is how Mother/Writer imagines the policeman, and this is how she imagines his name. See Leanne Groeneveld, “Remembering and Revenging the Death of Christ: Adrienne Kennedy’s Motherhood 2000 and the York Crucifixion,” Jornal of American Drama and Theatre 21:1 (2009): 81–83. [65–85] 89 The Adrienne Kennedy Reader, 2001, 228; 229. 90 The Adrienne Kennedy Reader, 2001, 232. 91 The Adrienne Kennedy Reader, 2001, 229. 92 The Adrienne Kennedy Reader, 2001, 229. 93 The Adrienne Kennedy Reader, 2001, 231. 94 The Adrienne Kennedy Reader, 2001, 232. 95 The Adrienne Kennedy Reader, 2001, 230. 96 The Adrienne Kennedy Reader, 2001, 229. 97 The Adrienne Kennedy Reader, 2001, 232. 98 The Adrienne Kennedy Reader, 2001, 233. 99 Elinor Fuchs, “The Apocalyptic Century,” Theater 29:3 (1999): 35. 100 In this context, Groeneweld suggests that Kennedy’s black identity as Christ-killer is a replacement of the Jew as Other (67). I do not think this line of thought is supported in the play, especially given that in the York play the crucifiers are identified as Roman soldiers and not as Jews. 101 The Adrienne Kennedy Reader, 2001, “Letter to My Students,” 217. 102 The Adrienne Kennedy Reader, 2001, 218. 103 Philip Fisher, “Thinking about the Killing: Hamlet and the Paths among the Passions,” Raritan 11:1 (1991): 43–78. 104 See The City Theatre of the Future NTGhent website page on Milo Rau’s The New Gospel (2021). https://www.ntgent.be/en/productions/rivolta-della-dignita-thenew-gospel. On Milo Rau see also the special issue of Theatre 51:2 (2021), which is dedicated to his work and edited by Lily Climenhaga and Piet Defraeye. 105 For a critical discussion of Mel Gibson’s film, see Adele Reinhartz, “Jesus of Hollywood,” in Marcia Kupfer, ed. The Passion Story: From Visual Representation to Social Drama (Pennsylvania: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2008), 165–178. In regard to Pasolini’s film, it is interesting to note that Enrique Irazoqui who played the role of Jesus in that work, participated in Rau’s film in the role of John the Baptist.

78 “Who shall be Christ?” 106 “The New Gospel Aftertalk: Milo Rau, Yvan Sagnet, Frank Hentschker and Lily Climenhaga.” See: https://vimeo.com/532944868 [min. 48:49–52:12]. The screening of the film and the Aftertalk were part of seventh Segal Center Film Festival on Theatre and Performance (FTP), which, due to the Covid19 pandemic was held digitally from March 1–15, 2022. See: https://segalfilmfestival.org/the-newgospel-by-milo-rau-nt-gent/ 107 See the “Ghent Manifesto,” written by Milo Rau, Artistic Director NTGhent: https://www.ntgent.be/en/about/manifest 108 Carol Martin, “Holding Up a Mirror to Theatre: Milo Rau’s La Reprise: Histoire(s) du théâtre (I),” TDR 65:1 (2021): 54–55.

3

Encountering Absence in the Theater

Sealed by a glass window in the heart of Bebelplatz in Berlin, Micha Ullman’s Library (1995) invites passersby to look downwards into emptiness (Fig. 3.1).1 Underground beneath the sealed glass window is the library itself; five meters deep of empty white bookshelves. This site-specific memorial is located where, on May 10, 1933, when it was still called Opernplatz, a Nazi ceremony of book burning took place.2 Visitors and passersby encounter Ullman’s work as they walk in the square so that their walking towards the Library and their standing around it becomes part of its performativity in the public space. Ullman’s Library is quite small (120 by 120 centimeters) and almost unnoticeable, especially in relation to the entire size of Bebelplatz. It is, however, its human proportions and powerful use of absence and silence that evoke a strong sense of presence of the burnt books and all that was written in them and, metonymically, of the lives of their authors and readers. There is a clear connection between the historical burning of the books and the memorial in the shape of a library, yet by turning it into an underground empty library, recalling a grave, it asks visitors not only to remember, mourn, and commemorate the loss, but also to think critically about the relations between humanity, history, culture, art, creativity, and destructivity. Ullman’s evocative use of emptiness is a mirroring, a reflection, of visitors’ attempt to see, understand, and make sense, even when the queries remain open. The transparent glass ceiling of Ullman’s work not only enables one to look down and see the empty bookshelves, but also, depending on the weather and the time of the day, reflects the sky above and the visitors themselves as they look down. It is thus an invocation to think about art, libraries, and culture as the locus of searching for meaning, debating, questing, and questioning. The performativity of Ullman’s work depends on the visi­ tors’ encounter with the experience of absence it offers, while at the same time, its dramaturgy is constructed through the act of the visitors’ seeking for reference of what remains intangible. The emptiness of Ullman’s Library is a deconstructive trace of what is irretrievably gone and at the same time, it is in itself a form of presence.

DOI: 10.4324/9781003042730-4

80 Encountering Absence in the Theater

Figure 3.1 Micha Ullman, Library, Bebelpaltz, Berlin, 1995. Glass, concrete, and plaster. Excavation: 530 × 706 × 706 cm. Glass window: 120 × 120 cm. Photo: Micha Ullman. Courtesy: Micha Ullman.

In this chapter, inspired by Ullman’s underground library, I look at theat­ rical metaphors of encountering absence, the un-representable, or, what could be termed “the Other.” I suggest that these metaphors reflect a quest for meaning and deictically point at the act of seeking as meaningful. By the term Other, I refer to theatricalizations of concepts, ideas, or phenomena that defy conventional forms of representation including, in the works I discuss below, entities such as God, the Messiah, the dead, and the social Other. I include encounters with the social Other in this framing based on Emmanuel Levinas’s theorization of this concept. In his conversation with Philippe Nemo on the “face,” Levinas differentiates between ordinary elements that signify an identity of an “other” person, and between his notion of the face of the “Other,” which is uncontainable and, as such, carries an ethical obligation, responsivity, and responsibility: Here to the contrary, the face is meaning all by itself. You are you. In this sense one can say that the face is not “seen.” It is what cannot become a content, which your thought would embrace; it is uncontainable, it leads you beyond. […] But the relation to the face is straightforwardly ethical. The face is what one cannot kill, or at least it is that whose meaning consists in saying: “thou shalt not kill.”3

Encountering Absence in the Theater

81

Levinas’s insistence on the ethical obligation towards the Other, is, I think, helpful to understanding modern and contemporary works of art that con­ struct encounters with absence, not as nothingness, but rather as a call for responsivity. As such, in addition to the search for meaning as a meaningful act in and of itself and to enabling remembrance or contemplation as in Ullman’s site-specific memorial, it could be argued, following Levinas, that the meaning that resides in the encounter with representations of absence, in their various manifestations, has ethical dimensions. In Sacred Theatre Carl Lavery points in a similar direction about the potential of the theater to evoke ethical openness towards the Other: Some of us talk about a politics of the sacred, a politics of alterity, of engaging with and respecting the Other. […] For us this is where the liberation of the sacred resides, and ultimately, where its moment of transcendence is found: that is to say in the realization that ethics and politics are located in a value that transcends value. However, this value is not necessarily transcendental; it is not for instance, traceable to a god or theology. Rather, it is immanent to our being in the world. We have the potential to experience it in moments of disjuncture or dislocation.4 The modern theater works I discuss in this chapter interweave metaphors of walking, encounter, absence, and representations of abstract or uncontain­ able phenomena such as the Messiah or God, and yet, while the works dialogically interrogate their contemporary cultural meanings, as Lavery writes, these representations are not traceable to theology. My examples include Jerzy Grotowski’s Akropolis (1962–1968), Hanoch Levin’s Walkers in the Dark: A Nocturnal Vision (1999), and playwright and performance artist Deb Margolin’s O Wholly Night and Other Jewish Solecisms (1996). These works each grow out of distinct contexts and theatrical styles, yet share a post-Shoah examination of the validity and meaning of cultural values as well as a conviction that the theater is the cultural forum to engage boldly with challenging philosophical questions. While the works of Grotowski and Levin perform encounters with absence by echoing walking rituals such as processions or visiting of tombs, Margolin’s work offers a different perfor­ mative model of encountering the Other and the hopeful potentiality that resides in such encounters. Although modern art and theater are abounded with representations of void, absence, and monochromes, often conceived as expressions of distinctly mod­ ernist aesthetics, there are pre-modern examples of the performative model of encountering absence as a form of presence that are worth considering in the context of this book.5 One such example is the tenth-century medieval liturgical drama that was designed to celebrate Easter and the Resurrection, The Visit to the Sepulcher (Visitatio Sepulchri). This short dramatic piece, also known to theater students as the Quem Quaeritis? (Whom do you seek?) liturgical play, dramatizes

82 Encountering Absence in the Theater

the visit of the Marys who come to anoint the body of Jesus and discover the empty tomb, which is a sign of his foretold Resurrection.6 “Whom do you seek?,” the question that the angel who sits at Jesus’ tomb asks the women is, famously, the beginning of the dialogue between the angel and the women, which has turned this episode into a paradigmatic example of medieval drama, but at the same time, performatively, it focuses attention on the act of seeking. This staging is intriguing, as is the way it highlights the absence of the body and the encounter with absence as a meaningful experience. Pilgrimages, ritualistic walking, processions, and visits to tombs form a central part of numerous cul­ tures and heritages, religious and secular,7 and yet this particular performance is interesting because of the way it theatricalizes the Resurrection by constructing tensions between absence and presence. In theater studies and historiography, this liturgical performance gained a significant place, regularly taught as “the beginning” of medieval drama because the description of the ritual includes stage directions, the enactment of dramatic roles (the Marys, the angel), dialogue, and other “theatrical” elements. Regardless of the fact that medieval religious theater has numerous other “beginnings,” the dramaturgy and performativity of this ritual are of interest and can serve as a model for a comparative discussion of theatrical and per­ formative representations of encountering absence in religious and secular contexts. In addition, although the evolutionary historiographical model ac­ cording to which this performance is the “origin” of what later developed into the civic scriptural cycles has long been abandoned, it is significant for studying the reenactment of scriptural source materials within ritualistic and religious contexts that tend to use abstract rather than figurative forms of theatrical representation.8 Within the Christian liturgy, there are many versions of this performative ritual from the tenth century onwards. Despite variations, all versions include the same dramaturgy described above; the seeking women walking towards the empty tomb, which is a sign of the miracle that took place. Dunbar Ogden, following Karl Young and Walther Lipphardt, analyzes the various stagings of this drama and notes that: Some twelve hundred texts of the medieval music drama have been discovered and published. The manuscripts range in date from the tenth century to ca. 1600. About a thousand of them are versions of the Visitatio Sepulchri, deriving from seven hundred different monasteries and churches.9 The large amount of iterations and long span of this ritual performance (concurrent with the development of the vernacular cycle plays) attests to its centrality in cultural memory as a representation of the dialectics between appearance and disappearance, essential to the event of the Resurrection and Easter celebration. Its retrospective dramaturgy, which culminates in the public presentation of the empty tomb and empty shroud, offers participants

Encountering Absence in the Theater

83

an encounter with an image of absence as a powerful and meaningful ex­ perience.10 As Pamela Sheingorn explains: The Gospels do not describe the Resurrection, an event that took place without witnesses. It is handled in the Gospels as it was experienced by the followers of Christ, as a mysterious moment, proofs for which were offered after the fact. The Holy Women, the angels, the empty tomb itself, spoke to the truth of the event.11 In the medieval cultural context the encounter with absence, which was repeated annually as part of the ritual, signified a promise of redemption, whereas in the modern, secularized use of this performative model, this is hardly the idea. Paradoxically, representations of absence and disappearance are able to signify irregular or uncontainable kinds of phenomena and, no less importantly, to call attention to questing as a meaningful act. The stage directions of the Quem Quaeritis trope, as they appear in the Winchester tenth century Regularis Concordia (ca. 965–975), detail the process (and procession) of the seeking women with extreme care, building up expectations of experiencing the empty sepulcher12: While the third lesson is being recited, let four brethren vest themselves; of whom let one, wearing an alb, enter as if on other business, and go unobtrusively to the place of the sepulcher, and there, holding a palm in his hand, let him sit quietly. While the third responsory is being sung, let the remaining three follow, all of them vested in copes, bearing in their hands thuribles with incense; and haltingly, in the manner of seeking for something, let them come before the place of the sepulcher. These things are done in imitation of the angel seated on the tomb and the women coming with spices to anoint the body of Jesus.13 The “unobtrusive” entrance of the clergy member in the role of the angel, “as if on other business,” constructs a theatrical mise-en-scène that instantly transforms the space into a dramatic locale, which is both past and present, presentational and representational. With the scene thus set, its performativity is enhanced by the smell of the thuribles and the sound and sight of the three performers’ slow movement in the role of the Marys. Together, all these elements form a scene that frames and highlights the absence that is about to be revealed and which the participants anticipate. These stage directions are famously followed by the angel’s question “Whom do you seek?” and the women’s answer “Jesus of Nazareth”— the “quem quaeritis” dialogue—after which the angel announces that “He is not here (Non est hic), he has risen as he had foretold.”14 To show them the proof of his absence he calls them to “Come and see the place” (Venite et videte locum). “Saying this,” the stage directions continue, the angel should “rise, and lift the veil and show them the place bare of the cross, with nothing other than the shroud in which the cross had been wrapped.”15 This leads to the pealing of the bells and the

84 Encountering Absence in the Theater

festive celebration of Easter. It is a short ritual-performance that exemplifies the performativity of absence.16 Notably, the tenth-century Regularis Concordia also includes descriptions of rituals that precede the performance of the Quem Quaeritis; “The Adoration of the Cross,” which is followed on Good Friday by “The Interment of the Cross in the Sepulcher” (representing the death and burial of Christ).17 In theater histories, these rituals usually receive less attention than the short Quem Quaeritis “play,” because they do not include textual dialogue or embodied impersonation, elements that have been traditionally taken to signify “theater” and “theatricality.” In the context of this chapter, however, it is worth con­ sidering this series of rituals, especially the ritual of the interment of the cross, which imitates the burying of the body of Jesus and as such is performed in preparation of its very disappearance/Resurrection. According to the descriptions of this ritual, after the cross has been venerated it is enfolded in a linen cloth and laid “therein, in imitation as it were of the burial of the body of our Lord Jesus Christ.”18 The representational metonymy of the cross as the body of Jesus is already in itself a symbolic form of disembodiment that is typical of liturgical performativity, as opposed to the later vernacular cycles in which actors played the role of Christ (as discussed in detail in the previous chapter regarding late medieval embodied scenes of the Passion). What hap­ pens to the cross between when it is wrapped and “buried” and between its disappearance is a matter of ritualistic conventions, and yet it suggests the importance and carefulness of preparing the empty “place.” One line in the Regularis Concodia that appears in the section that precedes the description of the Quem Quaeritis ritual performance, relating to the night between Saturday and Easter Sunday, might suggest how its disappearance was dealt with: “On that same night, before the bells are rung for Matins, the sacrists shall take the Cross and set it in its proper place.”19 If this line is indeed the link between the two rituals, it is marked as an “off-stage” event, within a performative context that never conceals its theatricality. The medieval series of representational rituals build up strong expectations of experiencing the public display of the empty shroud as a form of presence. As in almost any instance of theatrical adaptations of scriptural source materials, all of the participants are familiar with the content and narrative of the ritual. Therefore, this “hide and seek” ritual-performance appears to have its own kind of effect. Thomas P. Campbell highlights the centrality of this phe­ nomenon regarding medieval religious art of the same period: […] Contemporary tenth- and eleventh-century artistic renderings of the Resurrection reveal a strikingly similar attempt to point out the absence of the risen Christ. In this iconography, the angel wordlessly addresses the women at the tomb by pointing directly into the empty tomb, revealing the graveclothes deprived of Christ’s body. Similarly then, the revelation of Christ’s resurrection is defined artistically by absence, rather than presence: He has risen because he is not here.20

Encountering Absence in the Theater

85

Whereas, as we shall see, of all the modern secular examples discussed below, Grotowski’s Akropolis is directly related to performing the Resurrection albeit through a series of inversions of these ritualistic practices, while the other case studies are not related to the Christian ritual, their theatricality is comparable with it. Accordingly, in this chapter, my comparative approach is more phenomenological and related to similarities between artistic forms than in the previous chapters, which looked quite concretely at reiterations of medieval theater genres such as modern mystery and passion plays or embodied rep­ resentations of sacrificial rituals such as the Crucifixion. Although the modern theater works I discuss below are engaged with staging religious concepts, I invoke the medieval liturgical drama because of its performative structure that combines walking, seeking, and encountering absence as a form of presence. Rather than arguing, however, that the modern works I now examine rework the medieval theatricality of the Resurrection, I suggest that similarly to the medieval ritual itself they refer to wider cultural sets of ritualistic walking and encounter. Anthropologist and psychologist Yoram Bilu writes that “the emotional power of the pilgrimage experience is due to a combination of two factors: the holy site and the journey.”21 As we shall see, the modern theater works challenge the very idea of the holiness or the sacredness of the “site,” by attributing alternative meanings to this performative structure, but at the same time, they highlight the performativity of seeking, journeying, and encounter as meaningful. In addition, from a choreographic or formal perspective, there is something in the simple (but not simplified), literal, and straightforward ritual of walking towards a certain point and encountering absence, that transcends conventional aesthetic periodization models, and that has been used, for example, in the medieval liturgical context. In his Medieval Modern: Art Out of Time, art historian Alexander Nagel proposes an a-periodical methodology for looking at such connections, rela­ tions, and similarities between medieval and modern art, writing that “[i]t is difficult to overestimate how deeply medievalism is built into the history of twentieth-century art.”22 The comparative categories Nagel identifies are “Installation,” “Indexicality,” “Replication and the Multiple,” “Collage,” and “Conceptual Art,”23 which, as he shows throughout the book are applicable to both medieval and modern art history. He thus challenges conventional categories of periodization, without claiming that modern artistic practices are medieval or doctrinal on the one hand or that modern practices are contin­ uations of medieval ones: The point of such an investigation is not to reduce one set of practices to the other. I am not interested in showing that a Christian chapel is installation art avant la lettre, or that Saint Francis was a performance artist. I am not interested in trying to naturalize the radical interventions of modern art by showing that they belong to well-established traditions. The final consequence, I hope, is that the modernist historical schemas themselves will break down.24

86 Encountering Absence in the Theater

In what follows, I offer that we look at the ways modern theater works deal with complex philosophical challenges, including belief, meaning, and ethical responsivity to the Other, by highlighting the act of seeking and by doing this using performative models and choreographies that are reminiscent of and comparable with rituals such as the Quem Quaeritis liturgical drama.25 Finally, highlighting the act of seeking turns encounters with absence, dis­ appearance, or intangibility into phenomenologically liminal moments. The experience of emptiness, its “existence,” in other words, is revealed and per­ formed by those who encounter it. Furthermore, absence or silence in the theater are phenomena that raise questions about the relations between appearance and disappearance, and between the quest for meaning and the meaning of meaning itself. The paradoxical appearance of disappearance— points back at the act of seeking as meaningful. I am interested in aesthetic, performative, and phenomenological experiences evoked by such works and performances, medieval and modern, religious and secular, and not any kind of theological proposition. As mentioned, except for Jerzy Grotowski’s Akropolis, which is a radical adaptation of a Resurrection play, the rest of the works I discuss, including Ullman’s, touch upon these questions regardless of the specific medieval liturgical or Christian context. Merold Westphal’s differentiation between theology and phenomenology is thus helpful: Unlike theology, phenomenology does not address itself to any “church,” any particular community of faith; unlike theology, phenomenology does not appeal to the authority of any scripture, tradition, or institution; and unlike theology, phenomenology leaves open the question of the truth of the beliefs and the appropriateness of the practices described. The phenomenologist as such, whatever personal faith and commitment there may or may not be, describes phenomena that are undeniably there to be described without judging their validity.26 Accordingly, while the first chapter of this book focused on the anachronistic performativity of the text, and the second chapter looked at the performativity of the body, the modern examples in this chapter focus on choreographies of encountering absence and dialectical interactions between life and death, the living and the dead. As in the rest of the book, the works I discuss belong to theater that sees itself as a social forum in which spectators take part in aesthetic events that enable contemplation and engagement rather than escapism or entertainment, events in which audiences come to think together and to touch on memory, identity, and social responsibility. Alain Badiou articulates this notion of theater in his Handbook of Inaesthetics: We will therefore maintain that this event—when it really is theater—is an event of thought. This means that the assemblage of components directly produces ideas […]. These ideas—and this point is crucial—are

Encountering Absence in the Theater

87

theater-ideas. This means they cannot be produced in any other place or by any other means.27 Representations and choreographies that combine seeking something and en­ countering absence can be regarded as such “theater-ideas.” Moreover, this theater-idea can be applied more widely to the actual going to the theater and the desire of spectators to see(k) the un-seeable in the theater. “Seeking,” the English translation of the Latin verb quaero, means in addition to “to search for” also “to seek with longing, to miss, want.”28 This dramatization of yearning helps perhaps to explain how and why the Quem Quaeritis short liturgical drama, with its particular performative structure, gained such a significant place in Western theater history. I start with Jerzy Grotowski’s Akropolis (1962–1968), which is not only one of the most explicit examples of reworking religious iconography in the modern avant-garde theater, but it is also per se based on a “Resurrection play.” It is in an adaptation of Stanisław Wyspiański’s romantic and symbolist play Akropolis (1904), which takes place inside of the Wawel Cathedral in Krakow on the night of the Resurrection, and itself echoes medieval thea­ tricalities.29 Grotowski’s haunting post-Holocaust reversal of the nationalist (and religious) Resurrection envisioned by Wyspiański climaxes in the famous final scene of the processional descent and disappearance of the actors into the central stage object: A large wooden chest, an image of a grave, and a symbol of the “cemetery of the tribes.”30 The rest of the examples in this chapter are not rooted in the Christian or medieval theatrical practices, but manifest additional modern formulations of walking towards and encountering absence, disappearance, or the Other. The title of Hanoch Levin’s play, Walkers in the Dark (Haholchim Bachosech, literally “those who walk in the dark”) is quoted from the Book of Isaiah 9:2: “The people walking in darkness have seen a great light.”31 The play follows the nocturnal itinerary of “The Walking Man” who is joined by “The Waiting Man” and “The Evading Man.” This “walking trio” forms a theatrical kind of procession, a metaphorical embodiment of wandering in the dark (the mind, the theater) in search of meaning. Their walk in the dark culminates in their encounter with their dead ancestors and with “God” himself, who appears on stage as a man with a hat and a suitcase. Unlike the haunted theatrical universes that Grotowski and Levin stage, Deb Margolin’s plays and performances explore intimate dialogic relations and interpersonal encounters as ethically redemptive and even, as she pro­ poses in O Wholly Night and Other Jewish Solecisms (1996), messianic. In this work, she explores the idea of the Messiah by differentiating between an­ ticipating redemption (“waiting for”) and between one’s responsibility to respond when situations call for one to act. Margolin’s theater, as articulated by Jill Dolan, is utopian and future-oriented in that it enables one to “find hope at the theater.”32

88 Encountering Absence in the Theater

The modern works discussed in this chapter, including Ullman’s Library, react in different ways to the philosophical challenges of a post-Shoah context, probing issues of belief and the quest for meaning through metaphors of absence. As mentioned, these works also raise deep questions about what could be termed “the visit to the theater” and the quest or desire for seeing the un-seeable in the theater, even though or maybe because—to borrow from Peter Brook—the theater is an “empty space.”33

The Visit to the “Cemetery of the Tribes”: Jerzy Grotowski and Akropolis In Eugenio Barba’s interview with Jerzy Grotowski in 1964, titled “The Theatre’s New Testament,” Grotowski talks about “the possibility of creating a secular sacrum in the theater.”34 He clarifies that he speaks “about ‘holiness’ as an unbeliever. I mean a ‘secular holiness.’” And when asked about his idea of the “holy actor,” he summarizes it in aesthetic and artistic terms: “In short, he [sic] must be able to construct his own psycho-analytic language of sounds and gestures in the same way that a great poet creates his own language and words.”35 However, the oxymoronic idea of “secular holiness,” which draws directly on religious terminology, suggests a dialogic—if unconventional— relationship with religion as a central iconographic and referential cultural system in Grotowski’s theatrical search and research. His theory and theater are one of the most explicit examples of the twentieth-century avant-garde reliance on, and reimplementation of, religious terminology, iconography, and ritualism in search of secular-yet-transformative theatrical experiences. It is this concept of the secular sacrum I explore here in my discussion of Grotowski’s Akropolis, and the ways he relies on the local cultural familiarity with religious rituals and processions, including “the Visit to the Sepulcher,” in order to create a radical experience. Thus, although the concept of “ritualism” or even religion in reference to his works are often used as a general characterization of “total” theatrical forms, Lisa Wolford identifies the particular cultural back­ ground of his iconic works: Grotowski’s productions were ritualistic, not in the exoticized or Orientalist sense of imitating or appropriating elements from rituals or other cultures, but rather in terms of their reliance on Christian themes and imagery, a consistent focus on martyrdom as a heroic act, and an emphasis on music, chant, and poetry rather than naturalistic speech.36 In his essay “Towards a Poor Theatre,” which he published in Polish in 1962, the same year he was working on the first version of Akropolis,37 Grotowski discusses his search for a way to “elicit the sort of shock needed to get at those psychic layers behind the life-mask” in an era in which “social groupings are less and less defined by religion, traditional mythic forms are in flux, dis­ appearing and being reincarnated.”38 “What is possible?” Grotowski asks,

Encountering Absence in the Theater 39

89

answering, “First, confrontation with myth rather than identification.” This idea of “confrontation with myth” is relevant to many of the works discussed in this book. “Confrontation,” however, is not nullification. Quite the con­ trary, as Grotowski continues: “while retaining our private experiences, we can attempt to incarnate myth, putting on its ill-fitting skin to perceive the relativity of our problems, their connection to the ‘roots,’ and the relativity of the ‘roots’ in the light of today’s experience.”40 In these lines, Grotowski touches on a cultural characteristic of twentieth-century secularism, especially relevant for cultures with a strong religious background and in which religious practices remain collectively embedded, albeit more in some places than in others, but in all cases in profoundly different ways than in the past. Despite historical changes that have occurred or the “ill-fitting skin” of myth, the cul­ tural continuity of these forms serves as a powerful force for artistic “confron­ tation” with them. For this reason, paradoxically, the effect of “confrontation,” and even radical profanation, depends on the cultural relevance of “myth,” as Grotowski terms it. Although in the later stages of his international career, he practiced more eclectic experimentalism with a variety of mythologies, religious forms, and rituals, in works such as Akropolis the religious quotes and references are grounded in local Catholic contexts. During the years 1962–1968, Grotowski worked on and presented five versions of his adaptation of Polish poet, painter, and playwright, Stanisław Wyspiański’s romantic drama, Akropolis (1904), which, as mentioned above, takes place in the Wawel Cathedral in Krakow, on the night of the Resurrection.41 In Wyspiański’s play, biblical and mythological figures that are depicted on tapestries at Wawel come to life, and the play in its entirety ex­ presses the idea of a national and religious resurrection of Poland in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Grotowski’s post-Holocaust work, on the contrary, is a despairing representation of the collapse of western cultural values, as this has catastrophically culminated in the death-camp of Auschwitz. In Grotowski’s version, Wyspiański’s biblical and mythological figures are reenacted by prisoners in the death-camp, a theater within a theater within a ritualistic performance. Akropolis is structured, paradoxically, by many layers of absence and dis­ appearance, inviting spectators to grapple with a post-war material sense of loss and absence through a radical reworking of the concept of resurrection and through reenactments of rituals associated with it. Paradoxically, again, it is the theater in which such “resurrections” can take place, and in which figures depicted on tapestries or, troublingly, the dead, the victims of the death-camp, can be embodied and “come to life.” Magda Romanska’s The Post-Traumatic Theatre of Grotowski and Kantor: History and Holocaust in Akropolis and Dead Class is the most comprehensive and detailed analysis and historiography of this performance, which has gained a central place in modern theater history in academic contexts as well as in the avant-garde scene of the 1960s and 1970s, particularly in the United States.42 Romanska’s book adds the much needed historical, literary, and cultural context for understanding the meanings of

90 Encountering Absence in the Theater

Akropolis in Poland. As she writes, “Grotowski’s aesthetics were an extension of sedimented historical tensions. They grew organically from a particular historical moment which could not be artificially transplanted and replicated.”43 One of the main theatrical choices that evoke an encounter with absence, reflecting and referring to this particular post-Holocaust historical moment, is the embodiment of the dead. This idea was enhanced by the performers’ avoidance of eye contact with the spectators, in spite of the close proxemics between the performers and the audience and the small amount of spectators in each performance. In an interview with Richard Schechner and Theodore Hoffman, Grotowski describes what he was trying to achieve: The spectators sat throughout the room. They were treated as people of another world, either as ghosts, which only get in the way or as air. The actors spoke through them. […] They are in the middle and at the same time they are totally irrelevant, incomprehensible to the actors – as the living cannot understand the dead.44 Second, Grotowski, through Wyspiański, disturbingly juxtaposes the elevated geographies of the Acropolis in Athens and the Wawel Cathedral in Krakow with the hellish underworld of the death-camps, what Magda Romanska refers to in her contextualization of the work with Wyspiański’s, as “Akropolis/ Necropolis.”45 This representational practice is reminiscent of medieval literal theatricalizations of hell, for example by presenting audiences with theater structures of devouring hell-mouth mansions into which “bad souls” were “swallowed.”46 And third, the procession with the ragdoll at the end of the performance and the descent and disappearance of the actors, profanely recall Catholic religious processions in which statues or dolls representing the figure of Christ are carried as well as iconographies that depict Jesus’ descent into hell.47 Whereas Wyspiański’s play ends, as Nina Taylor writes, with “a double scenic metaphor of annihilation and resurrection,” with a futuristic triumphant Christ-Apollo figure storming the Wawel Cathedral on a golden chariot “flying open the walls and vaults of the cathedral,” Grotowski inverses this verticality, as the actors descend downwards.48 The descent of Grotowski’s actors at the end of the performance into the central stage object, a large wooden chest, an improvised altar, and a symbolic representation of a grave has become one of the iconic moments of the modern avant-garde theater. It arrives following a frenetic reenactment of a religious procession, in which the performers carry the doll, a macabre repre­ sentation of the Savior, leaving the spectators at the end of the work in silence. Grotowski describes this moment in an interview with Richard Schechner and Theodore Hoffman: “The final procession was the march to the crematorium. The prisoners took a corpse and they began to sing, ‘Here is our Savior.’ All the procession disappears into the hole during the song of triumph.”49 On a thematic level, this theatrical moment inverses the religious reference, and, perhaps, in line with my discussion in the previous chapter, is a way to refer

Encountering Absence in the Theater

91

though the “sacrificial figure” to the social victim. In addition, however, by referring to the ritual that is associated with Easter, this scene provocatively challenges the meaning of the religious representational system itself, and not only its signified contents. It turns the spectators who are left sitting around the silent performance area into participants of a radically alternative Visitatio Sepulchri ritual.50 In addition to performances in Europe and in New York City, the fame and popularity of Akropolis in the west are mainly the result of the filming and television broadcasting of the fifth version of the work that was made in 1968 in London.51 This filming remains available for re-viewing, including Peter Brook’s endorsing introduction of the work, in terms that halo it as an original and unprecedented theatrical experience of the theater of cruelty Antonin Artaud had envisioned. Its reception in the west has been mediated by prominent figures such as Peter Brook, Richard Schechner, and more recently Liz LeCompte, who created with the Wooster Group in 2003 Poor Theatre: A Series of Simulacra, in which the performers reenacted in extreme precision the final moments of Akropolis based on the video recording of the work.52 In her Performing Remains: Art and War in Times of Theatrical Reenactment, Rebecca Schneider analyzes the multiple reflective layers of the Wooster Group’s performance in light of the cultural resonance of Grotowski’s work on the one hand and its own referential multiplicity on the other, suggesting that repli­ cation, remembering, and forgetting are intertwined: In any case, if forgetting is not entirely what occurs through LeCompte’s overt reenactment of Akropolis, neither, exactly, is it remembering. Something between or to the side of remembering and forgetting – like the theatrical twitches of Charcot’s hysterics or the anxious dreams of a trauma victim – lurches diagonally across the stage, making events available to forget or recall again. Indeed againness becomes the subject itself, both available to experience and to analysis.53 This theorization adds a significant perspective to understanding theatrical encounters with absence through metaphors of “reliving” and “resurrection,” which, as Schneider points out are central to the Wooster Group’s work but, in fact, take place also in Grotowski’s re-performance of ritual. In the Israeli context, one of the most radical and renowned works that was inspired by Grotowski’s theory and theater is David Maayan’s and the Acre Theatre’s Arbeit macht freie miToitland Europa (1991), a five-hour haunting soulsearching into the historical and cultural trauma of the Shoah in Israeli society.54 This performance ends similarly to Akropolis with a hellish scene, only here the 15–30 spectators climb up (ascend) from an extremely small performance space in which one can only sit but not stand up, into a night­ marish hell scene, recalling Hieronymus Bosch’s paintings. Following this scene, and as in Akropolis, spectators are left in silence and do not meet and greet the performers at the end of the work.

92 Encountering Absence in the Theater

Indeed, in ritual as opposed to theater, the convention of applauding or greeting the performers does not take place. However, Grotowski’s and Maayan’s are theater performances and not rituals, and thus yet another en­ counter with absence occurs. If performance depends on, to quote Erika Fischer-Lichte, “bodily co-presence” of actors and characters,55 subverting this convention transgresses a fundamental element of the theater, what FischerLichte calls the “autopoietic feedback loop,” and what Victor Turner, in relating to social drama, more generally identifies as the final stage of “reintegration.”56 In her 1972 poem, “Theatre Impressions” (“Wrażenia z teatru”) Polish Nobel Prize Laureate Wysława Szymborska refers to this postperformance moment of mutual recognition of the performers and spectators of each other as “the sixth act,” which, for her, is even more meaningful that the performance itself. In the opening lines of the poem she writes— For me a tragedy’s most important act is the sixth: the resurrecting from the stage’s battlegrounds, the adjusting of wigs, of robes, the wrenching of knife from breast, the removing of noose from neck, the lining up among the living to face the audience.57 Szymborska’s use of the term “resurrection” (zmartwychwstawanie) in reference to the actors’ reappearance on stage after the performance has ended, in and out of character, is interesting in this context, especially because towards the end of the poem she describes this moment through additional metaphors of the miraculous, the invisible, and disappearance, focusing attention on the dialectics between death and life, characters and actors: […] The miraculous return of those lost without trace. The thought that they’ve been waiting patiently backstage, not taking off costumes, not washing off makeup, moves me more than the tragedy’s tirades. But truly elevating is the lowering of the curtain, and that which can still be glimpsed beneath it: here one hand hastily reaches for a flower, there a second snatches up a dropped sword. Only then does a third, invisible, perform its duty: it clutches at my throat.58 Szymborska touches on the phenomenology of theatrical dis-appearance, the ability of the theater to offer an encounter with death, and the paradoxical moments in which it turns presence into absence and absence into presence.

Encountering Absence in the Theater

93

Walking in the Dark Hnaoch Levin’s Haholchim baChosech: Hizayon Leili (1998), which has been translated by Jessica Cohen and Evan Fallenberg as Walkers in the Dark: A Nocturnal Vision, does not refer to the Resurrection, but stages an encounter with the dead and with “God” as a paradoxical experience of presence and/as absence.59 In this work, walking in the dark is a theatrical metonymy of seeking meaning. The Hebrew title of the work is, as mentioned above, a quote from the Book of Isaiah (9:2)—“The people walking in darkness have seen a great light,” and with typical irony, Levin omits the second part of the verse and its promise of redemption. This omission focuses attention, how­ ever, on the performativity of walking and seeking, and on the phenome­ nology of “darkness” that enfolds this search for meaning. Moreover, the biblical contradictory parallelism of darkness and light finds expressions in the performance in a number of ways, starting with the simple fact that although the characters are walking at night and in the dark, the theater is lit. Conceptualizing darkness without “seeing it” requires spectators to “unmake” what they see, to imagine it is dark as in the Shakespearean stage, or, as is the case in Levin’s work, to grasp darkness as a sensual and evocative metaphor. Whereas, as Adam Alston and Martin Welton note in their introduction to Theatre in the Dark, “the metaphysical and intellectual trope by which ‘truth’ is revealed in or out of darkness remains dominant in Western culture,”60 Levin problematizes this idea by focusing on the questing and seeking of his char­ acters, whose quests and questions remain unanswered, unlike their desire to find meaning, which persists. There are over 30 characters in Walkers in the Dark, divided into different existential categories: “The Intangibles,” which include “The Narrator” and “God,” “The Living,” “The Dying,” “The Dead,” and embodied personifi­ cations of “The Thoughts.” The play opens with the journey of The Walking Man who is on his way to visit his sick, dying, mother, a mission he never accomplishes. He is joined by The Waiting Man and The Evading Man, who together form a tripartite procession that wanders the stage, the night, and the mind. The play is structured as a palindrome, so that the trio strolls the stage towards and away from the central, focal, moment of the encounter with the dead and with “God.” In the fourth of the seven chapters that compose the play, at the center of the play, Levin stages a grand mise-en-scène in which he doubles the play’s 30 characters, bringing onstage an equal number of their dead ancestors. The two groups wave at each other from both sides of the wide stage, both sides of the world, so that the space in between them, the stage’s center, becomes a focal point as well as a lacuna, and thus imbued with potency. The character of The Narrator takes his place at this spot and casually sighs “Oh God,”61 in a skeptical reaction to the hope of the dying mother of The Walking Man that she will be cured of her malady. In response to the storyteller’s “Oh God,” the character of “God” appears, taking that central spot. Played by Israeli actor Abraham Mor,

94 Encountering Absence in the Theater

Figure 3.2 Walkers in the Dark, written and directed by Hanoch Levin. Habima National Theater in collaboration with Haifa Municipal Theater, 1998. In the center, Dov Reizer (storyteller), and on his right Avraham Mor (God). Stage right: the living; stage left: the dead. Photo: © Pesi Girsch. Courtesy: Pesi Girsch.

he appears as a short man wearing a suit and hat, holding a suitcase, and introduces himself: “Did someone call me?” (Fig. 3.2).62 It is a comic moment—the laughter of the audience can be heard in the video recording of the performance—and bewildering at the same time, putting into question the representational apparatus of the theater and pro­ vocatively entering the complex Jewish discourse regarding artistic represen­ tations of the Deity.63 In their essay “The Divine Image: Depicting God in Jewish and Israeli Art,” Ronit Sorek and Sharon Weiser-Ferguson write: The desire to depict God – difficult, and even impossible, as this may be – and the strict prohibition against doing so are at the heart of the discussion of divine images in the works of Jewish artists of the past and present. […] The conception of God as lacking a definite figure, and the taboo on attempts of depicting God in “any graven image, or any likeness,” as stated in the second of the Ten Commandments (Exodus 20:4), are basic principles of the Jewish faith – principles which seem to have remained intact in our modern-day consciousness.64 Levin’s play is a secular work of art performed within a secular cultural context. Still, this embodiment of “God” is quite unusual and points directly,

Encountering Absence in the Theater

95

as Sorek and Weiser-Ferguson suggest, at the desire to give form to the formless, to ask for meaning in a way that disables the fulfillment of this very desire. The character of “God” continues: God: Narrator: God: Narrator: God:

Usually I’m asked two questions: One, if I exist. Well, here I am. (hesitant, slightly apprehensive). Do you maybe have some … proof? No. Thanks, I was just asking. And the second question is, why did I create evil? To which I reply … (He continues speaking but the din of a passing train drowns out his words. The din ends.) Narrator: Your honor, we didn’t hear your answer to the second question because of the noise. God: I will not repeat myself.65 The loud noise of the train lasts for 45 seconds, overshadowing and actually muting the voice of “God,” so that his answer, accompanied by expressive and explanatory hand gestures, cannot be heard. Forty-five seconds is a long time in the theater, a long moment of experiencing intangibility. The loud noise of the train is an obvious semiotic reference to the Shoah, suggesting that this evil cannot be explained. This is echoed in the narrator’s comments afterwards: “And by the way here in our town there is no train track; could it be that God performed a magic trick and created a train for five seconds only so that it would drown out the answer to embarrassing questions?”66 From the per­ spective of the audience, sitting in the theater and hearing/listening to the sound of the train while trying to follow and understand what the character of “God” is saying despite the inability to do so, bluntly reveals the desire to find answers in the theater. It directly points, in a literal sense, at spectators’ willingness to suspend disbelief, by giving into Levin’s theatrick. Paradoxically, by embodying and staging the figure or character of “God,” Levin creates an encounter with absence and intangibility that signifies the potential of pres­ ence, or rather the dialectics between absence and presence. For the characters, as for the spectators, no concrete answers are given and at the same time, the theater becomes a place where such an encounter can take place precisely because it does not. After this scene ends, the second part of the play follows each one of the three walkers on their way back to their homes and where they return to sleep. It is interesting to compare this palindromic structure, walking towards and away from a charged focal point that functions simul­ taneously as an evocation of presence and absence, with other works. Late medieval station plays, such as the Digby fifteenth-century Conversion of Saint Paul, have a similar palindromic structure (Jerusalem, Damascus, Jerusalem) and, as in the scriptural event, the moment of revelation occurs “on the way.” Notably, in such performances, the audiences often walked together with the performers from station to station.67 Taking inspiration from this scriptural event, August Strindberg’s dense and complex The Road to Damascus

96 Encountering Absence in the Theater

(Part 1) (1898), draws on medieval station (and conversion) plays.68 The play follows the character of “the Stranger” on an expressionistic, psychological, and mythological journey in search of emotional salvation. The 17 scenes of the play start and end at “a street corner” and climax in scene nine, the exact center of the play, at “St. Savior’s Convent.” In this scene, his arrival there is explained to him by the Abbess: “You were found on the hills above the ravine, with a cross you’d broken from a Calvary and with which you were threatening someone in the clouds.”69 The Stranger’s transformative moment at this moment in this place, before he leaves to go back, is not quite redemptive, but rather a haunting confrontation with the wrath of God, which is performed through two texts he hears: Dies irae (“Day of Wrath”), and a long list of curses the sinner will suffer which the Confessor quotes from Deuteronomy 28. The character of the Stranger, most likely referring to Strindberg himself, is composed of a multitude of scriptural references including Adam, Cain, Jacob, Job, Saul (St. Paul), and Jesus. Above all, Jesus is known as “the stranger,” who encounters his disciples on the road after the Resurrection, an event that is dramatized in many late medieval plays. Another example is Samuel Beckett’s television play Quad (1981), or Quadrat 1 and Quadrat 2,70 a wordless choreography of four figures to a percussions soundscape, who, according to Beckett’s stage directions wear “gowns reaching to the ground, cowls hiding faces. Each player has his par­ ticular color corresponding to his light. 1 white, 2 yellow, 3 blue, 4 red.”71 The four figures, each with a particular sound of their footsteps, walk repet­ itively in a carefully designed geometrical pattern towards and backwards from a central focal point (“E”), which they never reach. Whereas Waiting for Godot ends with paradoxical static movement,72 in Quad, Beckett creates an even higher state of abstraction and stages the act of walking towards an enigmatic center in itself. The four figures obsessively walk towards, but neither arrive at the central point of the performance space nor make contact with each other. In his essay, “The Exhausted,” in which Gilles Deleuze discusses Quad, he analyzes the repetitive effort of the Beckettian anonymous characters in terms of exhaustion, a state that is constant tension with the potentiality and pos­ sibility that are evoked by that central, focal, point: The protagonists tire according to the number of realizations. But the possible is accomplished independently of this number, by the exhausted protagonists who exhaust it. The problem is this: in relation to what can exhaustion (which is not the same as tiredness) define itself? The protagonists realize and tire at the four corners of the square, along the sides, and the diagonals. But they accomplish and exhaust at the center of the square, where the diagonals cross. That, one might say, is where the potentiality of the square lies. Potentiality is a double possibility. It is the possibility that an event that is itself possible is realized in the space under consideration. The possibility that something realizes itself and the possibility that some place realizes it. […] To exhaust space is to extenuate its potentiality through

Encountering Absence in the Theater

97

rendering any meeting impossible. The solution to the problem from now on is found in this nimble central disconnecting, this sway of the hips, this swerving aside, this hiatus, this punctuation, this syncope, rapid sidestep or little jump that foresees the coming together and averts it. Repetition takes away nothing of the decisive, absolute character of such a gesture. The bodies avoid each other respectively, but they avoid the center absolutely.73 Deleuze’s analysis captures the ways the dialectics between walking, intangibility, and avoidance are related to potential. In Levin’s Walkers in the Dark, as in Strindberg’s To Damascus, or Beckett’s Quad, this performative structure points at desire and seeking on the one hand, and at potentiality on the other hand. Not that any of these works are particularly optimistic, but creativity, the theater, and “theater-ideas,” as the ones I have looked at in these cyclical and palindromic choreographies, are, to the least, meaningful. As Andrew Sofer writes in his introduction to Dark Matter, “Invisible phenomena are the dark matter of theater. Materially elusive, though phenomenologically inescapable, dark matter is the ‘not there’ yet, ‘not not there’ of theater.”74

“Between a Person and Another”: Interpersonal Encounters in Deb Margolin’s Theater and Performance My final example in this chapter offers a different theatrical model of the relations between metaphors of walking, encounter, and liminality. The works of American playwright and performance artist Deb Margolin reveal daily experiences and interactions as moments abundant with meaning and even, at times, redemptive potential.75 Through autobiographical monologues, story­ telling, metatheatricality, and profound humor, Margolin touches on the meaning of dialogic interactions and responsivity between human beings, particularly the repercussions of the ways people perceive and react to one another. Margolin’s feminist perspective turns the theater into a space where participants can seek and find openness and acceptance of human desires as well as weaknesses or, as Jill Dolan has written, into a utopian space, where one can “find hope.” In her book Utopia in Performance, Dolan articulates the concept of “utopian performatives”: Utopian performatives describe small but profound moments in which performance calls the attention to the audience in a way that lifts everyone slightly above the present, into a hopeful feeling of what the world might be like if every moment of our lives were as emotionally voluminous, generous, aesthetically striking, and intersubjectively intense.76 “Utopia,” or “utopian performatives,” to use Dolan’s term, are yet another form of places or spaces that are not “here,” an absence that signifies desire and longing. Seemingly, there is an inherent paradox between the “no-place” of utopia and the actuality of coming together in the theater. But as Dolan writes,

98 Encountering Absence in the Theater

“[t]he very present-tenseness of performance lets audiences imagine utopia not as some idea of future perfection that might never arrive but as brief enact­ ments of the possibilities of a process that starts now, in this moment in the theater.”77 In the following pages, I look at selected examples from Margolin’s solo performance, O Wholly Night and Other Jewish Solecisms (1996) which questions the idea and possibility of messianic appearances in everyday life, and which uses the theater as a forum to think together about this potentiality. O Wholly Night and Other Jewish Solecisms, was commissioned by the New York Jewish Museum as part of the exhibition Too Jewish: Challenging Traditional Identities (1996).78 In this work, Margolin shares ideas about Jewish identity by exploring the concept of the “Messiah” from many perspectives. At the same time, this very idea enables her to explore the intersections of the real and the unreal, materiality and immateriality, and belief and imagination, as they come together in the theater. As in many of her solo performances, Margolin opens O Wholly Night addressing the audience and sharing a story about how the very performance they are now taking part in was conceived. She presents the audience with “this dress,”79showing them a dress, which, she tells at length, was given to her by one of her parents’ friends, Mrs. Friedman, who told her when she gave the dress to her about its history: Well, you know, Debbie, this dress has an extraordinary history. It was found under huge boulders in a destroyed synagogue, and the story goes that the woman who owned it, a young immigrant mother, had to abandon her possessions and leave very quickly lest she and her children be decimated by the destruction of the temple … or something like that, she said something like that, but I did not hear her, so enraptured was I by the garment itself … […].80 Margolin’s capturing and compelling storytelling as well as her deictic pointing at “this dress,” might suggest that while the story is maybe inaccurate, the dress is “real.” She continues with the story, explaining that the dress became the raison d’être of this performance, and so she called Mrs. Friedman to make sure she had the story of the dress right, only to discover that Mrs. Friedman denies having ever given her a dress.81 Instead, Mrs. Friedman advises Margolin, “Look, Debbie, I never gave you a dress. And if you need a story, MAKE IT UP!”82 As in Levin’s “appearance” of “God” on stage, at this moment in Margolin’s performance, the “realness” of the dress and its story is put into question. Margolin thus playfully calls attention to the impossibility of “proof” on the one hand, and to the realness of telling stories on the other hand. It turns out, in other words, that it is not, or not only, “the dress,” that is at the heart of the per­ formance, but also storytelling, imagination, and a communal sharing of stories, as in the theater. While stories themselves may be untrue or unprovable, making them up, performing, and sharing them is both real and true. This formulation is another model of the meaningfulness of encountering absence in the theater I have been looking at in this chapter. Yet in works such as those of Margolin, this

Encountering Absence in the Theater

99

meaningfulness resides not only in the dialectics of the real and the imagined, but also in the potentiality of these theatrical encounters to reveal something about responsivity, care, and openness to humanness, however nuanced it may be. I discuss O Wholly Night in this chapter because it straightforwardly touches on the elusive concept of the messianic, which grows out of religious discourses. In its future-oriented and unprovable “existence,” it functions as an idea through which human thoughts about it can be processed. Just like the dress at the outset of the performance, the work is not about the Messiah, but rather about the meanings and actions bestowed in hope and belief, particularly when it comes to interpersonal encounters. For Margolin, in this play as in so many of her works, the responsibility for being responsive to other human beings is in our hands, and hence the potentiality of redemption: “I don’t want to give you the impression that waiting for the Messiah is in my opinion a completely passive experience.” (Fig. 3.3)83 Towards the end of O Wholly Night and Other Jewish Solecisms, she shares a story that correlates to the performative model of walking and encounter that I have been discussing in this chapter, and which exemplifies this idea. Unlike, however, intentional visitations or ritualistic processions, Margolin’s is a casual afternoon walk that reveals this kind of potential. “I was in Hawaii one time, taking a walk. There was this craggy promontory out to the ocean, and I decided to follow it as far as I could. This was my hour to myself; such luxuries have been delimited since I had kids.”84 The “craggy promontory out to the ocean” is a liminal space, dividing culture and nature. Margolin describes how she noticed “the shape of a young woman, down at the end, saw her from behind.”85 As she came near, she realized she was shrugging her shoulders, sobbing, and holding her baby. The “craggy promontory” to which she further refers to as “this gravesite”86 enhances the solitude of the young woman. Unlike Beckett’s characters in Quad who avoid the focal point and avoid each other, their bodies and faces covered, Margolin’s noticing of the woman becomes a moment of responsive encounter. She reaches out to her, helps her with the baby, and sings to the baby in a hymn that gives the work its title, “O Holy/Wholly Night”: And then I took the baby from her, she let me take the baby, stranger as I was, high over this cliff, this raw, natural, gravesite, and I sang: O Wholly Night! The stars were brightly shining! It is the night of our dear Saviour’s birth … See, I always thought it was O Wholly Night, with a W! That it meant it had to be totally night, truly deeply dark, no trace of the colors and streaks of dusk or dawn before Moschiach would manifest, like a virgin bride who’ll only disrobe in the dark. And I sang that song in such a stupid voice, such a stuffed-nose DJ Imus-in-the-Morning voice, that the baby stretched its face into a radiant smile, and I turned the baby’s face toward its mother, as if it were she who deserved the first look, the first time the baby’s eyes opened to Messiah, and I handed the baby back to her, and I walked away. Moschiah, or not?87

100

Encountering Absence in the Theater

Figure 3.3 Deb Margolin, O Wholly Night and Other Jewish Solecisms, 1997. Photo: © Carol Rosegg. Courtesy: Billy Rose Theatre Division, NYPL.

Encountering Absence in the Theater 101

It is implied in the text, although not said explicitly, that the post-partum mother sitting on the cliff in despair might be considering death. The en­ counter on “this raw, natural, gravesite,” reaffirms life, becoming an alterna­ tive “resurrection” moment, suggesting a different, feminist, understanding of what or who a “savior” can be, of an encounter “between a person and another,” or as in this case “between a woman and another.”88 In Martin Buber’s 1929 essay on “Dialogue,” he devotes a section to “responsibility,” in which he argues that “The idea of responsibility is to be brought back from the province of specialized ethics, of an ‘ought’ that swings free in the air, into that of lived life. Genuine responsibility exists only where there is real responding.”89 He ends this section by explaining the meaning of dialogic responsibility and responsivity in terms that resonate with Margolin’s performance: Only then, true to the moment, do we experience a life that is something other than a sum of moments. We respond to the moment, but at the same time we respond on its behalf, we answer for it. A newly created concrete reality has been laid in our arms; we answer for it. A dog has looked at you, you answer for its glance, a child has clutched your hand, you answer for its touch, a host of men moves about you, you answer for their need.90 Buber’s quote also reconnects with Levinas’s idea about the uncontainability of the “face” and its ethical demand, mentioned at the outset of this chapter. Melissa Rafael writes that “Levinas insists that, in contrast to an image of a face, the transcendent alterity of another’s actual face is presentative of the infinite; it is a revelation whose ‘nudity’ is a moral summons coming absolute responsibility for its care.”91 The notion of infinity is also relevant to Margolin’s playfulness with the word and concept of “holiness.” In the final monologue, she explains how she used to misplace the spelling and meaning of the “holy night” with that of “wholly night,” a doubleness that is lost or becomes one in the auditory (feminine) realm as opposed to the orderly written one. A solecism is, ac­ cording to the OED, “An impropriety or irregularity in speech or diction; a violation of the rules of grammar or syntax; a faulty concord.” It is, in other words, a language lacuna, an elusive empty space of ambiguity, double meaning, and potentiality, in and from which new and multiple meanings can emerge, quite like the dress at the outset of the performance. This “holy”/“wholly” solecism—which, as mentioned, gives the work its title—adds the element of totality to the concept of “holy,” as in “sacred,” which when coupled with “night,” evokes the association of total darkness, as Margolin explains in her final monologue quoted above, “that it meant that it had to be totally night, truly deeply dark.” It is interesting that the darkness of the night and the concept of total darkness reconnect us with Levin’s Walkers in the Dark as a metonymy of thinking, walking through the mind, and seeking meaning.

102

Encountering Absence in the Theater

In her commentary on Margolin’s play, Lynda Hart writes that “Like the nearly translucent weave of the dress where one can see if one looks closely the threads that were once there but have worn away, leaving in their trace the very fabric that gives the dress its gossamer splendor, Margolin makes that which is ‘holy’ into a whole.”92 An additional, significant point has to do with Margolin’s particular choice of this religious hymn. It is peculiar that she ends a performance about Jewish identity with a Christian reference. I think it offers another perspective on a solecism as “a violation of the rules of grammar” that touches on the com­ plexity of these interreligious relations. Replacing “holiness” with “totality” is a solecism that enables her to reappropriate the hymn, and use it in order to create new kinds of meaningful “holy” moments. It is a form of secularization, of personalizing the “holy” content. Margolin’s walk down the promenade and encounter with the woman is thereby closely connected with her own storytelling, wandering in the mind, in language, and in the theater. It is also related to her attempts to make sense of language, understand the meaning of the lyrics, and the freedom that is to be found in making up new meanings and stories. These stories, while fictional or even invented, help to make sense in and of the world, as does the theater. As Jill Dolan writes about O Wholly Night that this performance “is all about noticing, witnessing together moments that otherwise might pass into oblivion, moments that might signal, if you look at them properly, the advent of utopia when, for Margolin, the Messiah comes.”93

Conclusion In her book Walking through Traumas: Rituals of Movement in Jewish Myth, Mysticism, and History, poet, historian, and philosopher Haviva Pedaya writes: In the extreme kind of traumatic walking, often accompanied by extreme silence, walking is towards emptiness, to the non-place, driven towards the place that will not be, arrival at the destruction. There is an attempt to represent in space, to move towards a lost center, to move in space towards void, as a bridge, or as an expression of the will to move towards the internal lacuna which has been blocked. That is why there is the need to experience the external limbo – human beings have a strong need to move, to be on the way.94 These beautiful lines capture quite closely the matrix of ideas I have been discussing in this chapter regarding theatrical representations of abstract phenomena and choreographies of search and encounter. The formal and aesthetic similarities that can be drawn between religious representations of events such as the Resurrection, and between modern and contemporary metaphors of questing and questioning suggest how encountering absence in the theater does not only represent lack but also the potentiality of meaning.

Encountering Absence in the Theater 103

The “theater-ideas” I have been examining, whether they designate religious belief, absurdist existentialism, or a call for ethical responsivity, reflect how the theater is an artistic forum in which serious questions can be processed and how the act of going to the theater is meaningful.

Notes 1 Micha Ullman, Library, Bebelplatz, Berlin, 1995. Glass, concrete, and plaster. Excavation: 530 x 706 x 706 cm. Glass window: 120 x 120 cm. See also Yigal Zalmona, ed. and curator, Sands of Time: The Work of Micha Ullman (Jerusalem: Israel Museum Jerusalem, 2011), 132–151. This retrospective exhibition of Ullman’s works, curated by Yigal Zalmona, took place at the Israel Museum in Jerusalem, June 21, 2011–November 12, 2011. https://museum.imj.org.il/exhibitions/2011/micha_ullman/Library.html 2 On Nazi book burning see Paul R. Bartrop and Michael Dickerman, The Holocaust: An Encyclopedia and Document Collection (4 vols.) (Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, 2017), 457–459. 3 Emmanuel Levinas, Ethics and Infinity: Conversations with Philippe Nemo, trans. Richard A. Cohen (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1985), 86–87. Original emphasis. 4 Carl Lavery, “Giorgio Agamben and the Politics of the Sacred,” in Sacred Theatre, Ralph Yarrow, ed. (Bristol, UK: Intellect Books, 2007), 39. 5 This is an extremely wide subject that is beyond the scope of this book, but prominent examples from the arts include works by Kazimir Malevich, Mark Rothko, Anish Kapoor, and many others. See for example, Barbara Rose, Terisa Santiago, et al., Monochromes: From Malevich to the Present (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006). Particularly relevant in the context of this chapter is Mark Rothko’s “Rothko Chapel” in Houston, Texas, which contains 14 murals created by Rothko. According to the mission statement of the chapel, “The Rothko Chapel is a spiritual space, a forum for world leaders, a place for solitude and gathering. It’s an epicenter for civil rights activists, a quiet disruption, a stillness that moves. It’s a destination for the 100,000 people of all faiths who visit each year from all parts of the world.” See: https://www. rothkochapel.org/. See also, Wessel Stoker, “The Rothko Chapel Paintings and the ‘Urgency of the Transcendent Experience,’” International Journal for Philosophy of Religion 64:2 (2008): 89–102. In theater and performance, prominent examples of aesthetics of absence and disappearance include the works of Samuel Beckett on the one hand and those of Tino Sehgal on the other hand, on which there are numerous writings. See for example, “The Void on Stage – Shaping Emptiness: Designing for Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot,” MFA Thesis, Tulane University, 2014; Jessica van-den Brand, Tino Sehgal: Art as Immaterial Commodity (Saarbrücken, Deutschland: LAP LAMBRT Academic Publishing, 2015). 6 The description of the liturgical performance appears in the tenth-century (ca. 973) Regularis Concordia, compiled by St. Aethelwold at Winchester in England. See Thomas Symons, ed. and trans. The Monastic Agreement of the Monks and Nuns of the English Nation: Regularis Concordia (New York: Oxford University Press, 1953), 49–51. On this text see Michal Kobialka’s This Is My Body: Representational Practices in the Early Middle Ages (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2003). See also, David Bevington, Medieval Drama (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1975), 14–28. For the scriptural sources of this liturgical drama, see Matthew 28:1–7; Luke 24:1–7. 7 See Simon Coleman, Powers of Pilgrimage: Religion in a World of Movement (New York: New York University Press, 2021); Victor Turner and Edith Turner, Image and Pilgrimage in Christian Culture: Anthropological Perspectives (New York: Columbia University Press, 1978).

104

Encountering Absence in the Theater

8 See O. B. Hardison, Cristian Rite and Christian Drama in the Middle Ages: Essays in the Origin and Early History of Modern Drama (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1965). Notably, however, this very scene of the visit of the Marys to the empty tomb continues to be performed in episodes of the Resurrection in the vernacular cycle plays, centuries after its inception, including in plays that unlike the liturgical trope also embody the actual moment of the rising of Christ. In the fifteenth century York Plays, for example, The Carpenters “The Play of the Resurrection” (episode 38) includes the literal stage direction: “Then Jesus being risen” (Tunc Jhesu resurgente) (following line 186). Here spectators presumably witness a player in the role of Christ rising, perhaps stepping out of the grave, or performing some such gesture. This moment is then followed by the visit of the Marys to the (now empty) tomb and their discovery of its emptiness as sign and proof of the Resurrection. The dialogue of the York play reiterates the liturgical “Quem Quaeritis” trope, suggesting the trope’s embeddedness in cultural consciousness, a meaningful representation of the event of the Resurrection the community expects to experience: Angelus: Ye mournand women in youre thought, Here in this place whome have ye sought? [Whom do you seek?]I Maria: Jesu, that to dede is brought, Oure Lorde so free. Angelus: Women, certayne here is he noght, Come nere and see. He is noght here, the soth to saie, The place is voide that he in laye. The sudary here se ye may Was on hym laide. He is resen and wente his way, As he you saide. […]

9

10 11 12 13 14 15 16

See Clifford Davidson, ed. “The Carpenters The Resurrection,” in The York Corpus Christi Plays (Kalamazoo, Michigan: Western Michigan University, Medieval Institute Publications, 2011), 322–335; 329 lines 235–246. Dunbar Ogden, The Staging of Drama in the Medieval Church (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2002), 35. See also, Karl Young, The Drama of the Medieval Church, 2 Vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1935 [reprint 1955]); Walther Lipphardt, Lateinische Osterfeiern und Osterspiele, 9 vols. (Berlin: Wlater de Gruyter, 1975–1990). Dunbar Ogden further explains that “the Council of Trent (1545–63) banned these dramas as one of its reforms, thus also contributing to their end after seven centuries of per­ formance,” 35. See note 8 above regarding later vernacular biblical plays, which staged the moment of the Resurrection. Pamela Sheingorn, “The Moment of Resurrection in the Corpus Christi Plays,” Medievalia et Humanistica 11 (1982): 111–129; 113. Earlier versions of the Quem Quearitis trope appear, for example, in St. Martial, Limoge and in St. Gall. See Bevington, 1975, 17–26. Bevington, 1975, 27; See also Symons, 1953, 49–50. Emphasis added Bevington, 1975, 28; See also Symons, 1953, 50. Bevington, 1975, 28; See also Symons, 1953, 50. It should be noted that in the liturgical context, unlike the later mystery plays, the figure of Christ is symbolized by a cross and is not embodied by an actor, whereas the angel and the women are. I would like to thank my colleague Yair Lipshitz for pointing out to me that in the Mishnah, the third-century Rabbinic written collection of Jewish oral traditions, in the part that is dedicated to Yom Kippur (The Day of Atonement), the holiest day of the Jewish calendar, there is a long and elaborate description of the preparations of the High Priest’s entrance into the Holy of Holies, while the description of the “place” itself, the rock, remains minimal, resists figurative description, and points at lack—what used to be there, the Ark, and is no longer there: “After the Ark was taken into exile, there was a rock in the Holy of Holies from the days of the early prophets, and this stone was called the foundation rock. It was three fingerbreadths higher than the ground, and the High Priest would place the incense on it.” See: https://www.sefaria.org.il/Mishnah_Yoma.5.2?

Encountering Absence in the Theater 105

17

18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25

26

27 28 29

lang=he. It should be noted that “the ark that was taken into exile” refers to the Destruction of the First Temple, whereas these procedures describe the ritual in the Second Temple period. See Symons, 1953, 43–52 for the full sequence; See also Bevington, 1975, 14–16. There are variations of these rituals in different communities, monasteries, or churches. See Debra Hilborn, “Relating to the Cross: A Puppet Perspective on the Holy Week Ceremonies of the Regularis Concordia,” in The Routledge Companion to Puppetry and Material Performance, Dassia N. Posner, Claudia Orenstein, and John Bell, eds. (New York: Routledge, 2014), 164–175. Symons, 1953, 44–45; See also Bevington, 1975, 16. Symons, 1953, 49. Thomas P. Campbell, “Liturgical Drama and Community Discourse,” in The Liturgy of the Medieval Church, Thomas J. Heffernan and E. Ann Matter, eds. (Kalamazoo, Michigan: Western Michigan University, Medieval Institute Publications, 2001), 624–625. Yoram Bilu, “Introduction,” in To the Tombs of the Righteous: Pilgrimage in Contemporary Israel, Rivka Gonen, ed. (Jerusalem: Israel Museum, 1999), 15. Alexander Nagel, Medieval Modern: Art Out of Time (New York: Thames and Hudson, 2012), 14. Nagel, 2012, 18–20. Nagel, 2012, 20. Peter W. Marx shows how the Quem Quaeritis ritual performance was adapted and referred to in the late sixteenth century in Thomas Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy, see: Peter W. Marx, “On Circulation and Recycling,” in The Routledge Companion to Theatre and Performance Historiography, Tracy C. Davis and Peter W. Marx, eds. (New York: Routledge, 2021), 331–336. In addition, it is obvious, but worth noting, that postmedieval western theater developed a wide range of conventions to reenact and rep­ resent the dead as well as other ghostly, underworld, supernatural, or abstract figures and phenomena. In this respect, unlike the dissolution of the genre of the vernacular scriptural plays on the one hand or the near disappearance of theatrical embodiments of Christ and the Passion on the other, stage “lacunas,” for example traps on the Shakespearean stage signifying graves as well as other theatrical forms of the super­ natural, persist throughout western theater history. See for example, Kristen Poole, Supernatural Environments in Shakespeare’s England: Spaces of Demonism, Divinity, and Drama (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011). Merold Westphal, “Phenomenology of Religion,” in The Routledge Companion to the Philosophy of Religion, Paul Copan and Chad V. Mester, eds. (New York: Routledge, 2013), 735. From a theologically oriented phenomenological perspective, Jean-Luc Marion’s concept of “saturated phenomena” is relevant, but offers a different analytic discourse than the performative one in which I am interested here. See Jean-Luc Marion, In Excess: Studies of Saturated Phenomena, trans. Robyn Horner and Vincent Berraud (New York: Fordham University Press, 2002). Alain Badiou, “Theses on Theater,” Handbook of Inaesthetics (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005), 72, original emphasis. See D. P. Simpson, Cassel’s Latin-English, English Latin Dictionary (London: Cassel, 1968), 492. Stanisław Wyspiański, Akropolis: The Wawel Plays, trans. Charles S. Kraszewski (London: Glagoslav Publications, 2017), 304–432. See also, Magda Romanska, The Post-Traumatic Theatre of Grotowski and Kantor: History and Holocaust in Akropolis and Dead Class (London: Anthem Press, 2012); Robert Findlay, “Grotowski’s Akropolis: A Retrospective View,” Modern Drama, 27:1 (1984): 1–20; Teemu Paavolainen, “Grotowski and the Objectivity of Performance,” in Theatre/Ecology/Cognition: Theorizing Performer-Object Interaction in Grotowski, Kantor, and Meyerhold (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 123–162; Ludwik Flaszen, “Akropolis: Treatment of the Text,” in Jerzy Grotowski, Towards a Poor Theatre (New York: Routldege, [1968] 2002), 61–78.

106

Encountering Absence in the Theater

30 In his description of the performance, Ludwik Flaszen writes about the adaptation Wyspiański’s play that “the balance of the text has been somewhat altered by the deliberately obsessive repetition of certain phrases such as ‘Our Akropolis’ or ‘the cemetery of the tribes,’” reframed to reference to the death-camp of Auschwitz: “In this idea of ‘the cemetery of the tribes,’ to quote Wyspiański, the concept of the director and that of the poet coincide. They both want to represent the sum total of a civilization and test its values on the touchstone of contemporary experience.” Flaszen, 2002, 61, 62. 31 (“1 ‫“ ;העם ההולכים בחושך ראו אור גדול“ )ישעיהו ט‬Haam haholchim bachosech rauu or gadol.” In Hebrew, the structure of the tense of the prophetic verse combines presentprogressive, past, and future, literally, those who walk/are walking in the dark have seen/will have seen a great light. Hanoch Levin, Walkers in the Dark and Other Plays (Vol. 7), Muli Meltzer, ed. (Tel Aviv: Hakibbutz Hameuchad, 1999), Hebrew. For English translation of the play see: Hanoch Levin, Walkers in the Dark: A Nocturnal Vision, trans. Jessica Cohen and Evan Fallenberg, in Hanoch Levin: Selected Plays Two (London: Oberon Books, 2020), Kindle edition. All quotations from the play are from this translation. 32 Jill Dolan, Utopia in Performance: Finding Hope at the Theatre (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2005). 33 Peter Brook, The Empty Space (London: MacGibbon & Kee, 1968). 34 Eugenio Barba, “The Theatre’s New Testament: An Interview with Jerzy Grotowski by Eugenio Barba, in Jerzy Grotowski, Towards a Poor Theatre (New York: Routledge, [1968] 2002), 49. 35 Barba, 2002, 35. 36 Lisa Wolford, “General Introduction: Ariadne’s Thread: Grotowski’s Journey through the Theatre,” in The Grotowski Sourcebook, Richard Schechner and Lisa Wolford, eds. (New York: Routledge, 1997), 2. 37 Romanska, 2012, 55. 38 Jerzy Grotowski, “Towards a Poor Theatre,” in Grotowski, 2002, 23. 39 Grotowski, “Towards a Poor Theatre,” 2002, 23, original emphasis. Grotowski wrote this essay in Polish in 1962 and it was translated into English in 1965. On the origin of the concept of “the poor theater” in the context of homiletic practices, see Romanska, 2012, 55. 40 Grotowski, “Towards a Poor Theatre,” 2002, 23. 41 See Wyspiański, 2017. See also Colleen McQuillen, “Sanctity or Sanctimony in Staniław Wyspiański’s Akropolis: On Boundary oppositions, Subverted Expectations, and Irony,” Sarmatian Review (2009): 1468–1475. The first four versions of Grotowski’s adaptation were performed in different places in Poland, while the fifth and most famous version premiered in 1967 in Wrocław and was seen in Amsterdam, Utrecht, The Hague, Rotterdam, Brussels, Edinburgh, Paris, Aix-en-Provence, and New York City. See the website of the Grotowski Institute for a full list: https://grotowski.net/en/encyclopedia/akropolis. 42 See Romanska’s chapter titled “The Making of an Aura,” 2012, 82–85. 43 Romanska, 2012, 80. 44 Richard Schechner and Theodore Hoffman, “Interview with Grotowski,” in The Grotowski Sourcebook, Richard Schechner and Lisa Wolford, eds. (New York: Routledge, [1968] 1997), 52. 45 Romanska, 2012, 92–93. 46 On medieval theatrical representations of hell and hell mouths, see for example, Clifford Davidson and Thomas H. Seiler, eds., The Iconography of Hell (Kalamazoo, Michigan: Medieval Institute Publications, 1992) and Gary Schmidt, The Iconography of the Mouth of Hell: Eighth Century Britain into the Fifteenth Century (Selinsgrove: Susquehanna University Press, 1995).

Encountering Absence in the Theater 107 47 On these practices in the religious context see for example, Kamil Kopania, “Animated Sculptures of the Crucified Christ: Origins, Development, and Impact, Material Religion: The Journal of Objects, Arts, and Belief, 14:4 (2018): 545–558. See also Richard Schechner and Theodore Hoffman, “Interview with Grotowski,” in The Grotowski Sourcebook, 1997, 51; and Romanska’s chapter titled “The Final Descent,” 2012, 147–149. 48 Nina Taylor, “Stanisław Wyspiański and Symbolist Drama: The Work of Art as ‘dra­ matis persona,’” The Slavonic and East European Review, 66:2 (1988), 205. 49 Schechner and Hoffman, 1997, 51. 50 Robert Findlay explains that “the dummy served to represent a corpse, the figure of Christ on the cross, and ironically by the end the figure of the resurrected Christ.” “Grotowski’s Akropolis: A Retrospective View,” Modern Drama, 27:1 (1984): 7. On Polish Easter traditions see A. Kreutza and J. Augustine, “Easter Customs in Poland,”Blackfriars 29:337 (1948): 169–173. The resonance of locally familiar rituals is also attested in Grotowski’s explanation of the scene of Jacob and Rachel’s marriage: “The marriage procession is that of a tragic farce. A man and a woman – a man and a pipe – and they begin to sing songs of marriage that are very well known in Poland.” Schechner and Hoffman, 1997, 52. 51 The fifth version of Akropolis was filmed between 27 October and 2 November 1968 in London, directed by James MacTaggart, produced by Lewis Freedman, featuring an introduction by Peter Brook, and distributed by Arthur Cantor Films, c1968. 52 See The Wooster Group, Poor Theatre: A Series of Simulacra, https://thewoostergroup. org/poor-theater. 53 Rebcecca Schneider, Performing Remains: Art and War in Times of Theatrical Reenactment (New York: Routledge, 2011), 124. See also David Savran, “The Death of the AvantGarde,” TDR 49:3 (2005): 10–42. 54 In this production performance artist, Smadar Yaaron, performed one of the leading roles, and the production is documented on her website. See https://smadaryaaron.com/index. php/plays/arbeit-macht-frei-mitoitland-europa. See also: Freddie Rokem, Performing History: Theatrical Representations of the Past in Contemporary History (Iowa: Iowa University Press, 2001), 56–75; Heike Roms, “Encountering Memory: Acco Theatre Center’s Arbeit Macht Frei MiToitalnd Europa,” in Contemporary Theatres in Europe: A Critical Companion, Joe Kelleher and Nicholas Ridout eds. (London: Routledge, 2006), 47–60. A documentary of this production, which included the final hellish scene, is Asher Tlalim’s Don’t Touch My Holocaust (“Al Tigu Li BaShoah”), 1994, 150 min. 55 Erika Fischer-Lichte, “Shared Bodies, Shared Spaces: The Bodily Co-presence of Actors and Spectators,” in The Transformative Power of Performance: A New Aesthetics, trans. Saskya Iris Jain (New York: Routledge, 2008), 51. On a similar case of disruption of the “feedback loop” in Frank Castorf’s adaptation of Dostoyevsky’s The Idiot see 71–74. 56 See for example, Victor Turner, “Social Drama and Stories about Them,” in Critical Inquiry 7:1 “On Narrative” (1980): 141–168. 57 Wisława Szymborska, Sounds, Feelings, Thoughts: Seventy Poems by Wisława Szymborska Bilingual Edition, Magnus J. Krynski and Robert A. Maguire, eds. (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1981), 114–115. 58 Szymborska, 115. 59 Walkers in the Dark: A Nocturnal Vision, written and directed by Hanoch Levin and designed by Rakefet Levi, premiered in 1998 at the Habima Theater in Tel Aviv, co-produced with the Haifa Municipal Theater. See: https://www.hanochlevin.com/en/productions/1875. Details on the edition of the play and its translation into English see note 31 above. 60 Adam Alston and Martin Welton, eds., Theatre in the Dark: Shadow, Gloom, and Blackout in Contemporary Theatre (London: Bloomsbury, 2017), 15. 61 Levin, Walkers in the Dark, 2020, Chapter 4, Scene 10, Kindle edition. 62 Levin, Walkers in the Dark, 2020, Chapter 4, Scene 10, Kindle edition.

108

Encountering Absence in the Theater

63 Cecil Roth shows a few cases of pre twentieth-century Jewish artistic representations of God, despite deep reservation in Jewish tradition of this practice. See his article “Representation of God in Jewish Art,” Proceedings of the World Congress of Jewish Studies, Vol. 2; The World Union of Jewish Studies, (1965), 139–140. 64 Ronit Sorek and Sharon Weiser-Ferguson, “Depicting God in Jewish and Israeli Art,” in The Divine Image: Depicting God in Jewish and Israeli Art, trans. Anat Schultz (Jerusalem: The Israel Museum, 2006), 15. 65 Sorek and Weiser-Ferguson, 2006, 15. 66 Levin, Walkers in the Dark, 2020, Chapter 4, Scene 10, Kindle edition. 67 On this staging of the fifteenth-century East Anglian Digby Saint play The Conversion of St. Paul, see for example, Victor I. Scherb, “Frame and Structure in The Conversion of St. Paul,” Comparative Drama 26:2 (1992), 124–139. 68 August Strindberg, The Road to Damascus (Part 1), English version by Graham Rawson, (Middlesex: The Echo Library, [1898] 2006). See Freddie Rokem, Strindberg’s Secret Codes (London: Norvik Press, 2006), 25, n. 16. It is worth mentioning in this context also Strindberg’s short 1897 play Coram Populo! De Creatione et Sententia Vera Mundi: A Mystery, translated by David Scanlan, an abbreviated symbolist adaptation of the genre of medieval mystery plays. See The Tulane Drama Review 6:2 (1961): 128–131. 69 Strindberg, The Road to Damascus, 2006, 44. 70 Samuel Beckett, Quad, in The Collected Shorter Plays (New York: Grove Atlantic Press, 1984), 287–291. A work for television, first broadcast in Germany (Quadrat 1 + 2) by Süddeutscher Rundfunk, October 8, 1981, directed by Beckett. Beckett: The Collected Shorter Plays, 318. 71 Beckett, Quad, 291. 72 “Vladimir: Well? Shall we go? Estragon: Yes, let’s go. They do not move.” Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot (New York: Grove Press, 1954), 109. 73 Gilles Deleuze, “The Exhausted,” trans. Anthony Uhlmann, SubStance 24:3 Issue 78 (1995): 13. 74 Andrew Sofer, Dark Matter: Invisibility in Drama, Theater, and Performance (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 2013), 4. 75 See Deb Margolin’s website https://www.debmargolin.com/. See also the TDR 52:3 Fall 2008 special issue dedicated to Margolin. 76 Jill Dolan, Utopia in Performance: Finding Hope at the Theatre (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 2005), 5. In the first chapter of the book, “‘A Femme, a Butch, a Jew’: Feminist Autobiographical Solo Performance,” Dolan discusses Margolin’s O Wholly Night as an event with such “utopian potentiality,” following Margolin’s per­ formance of the work as part of a series of feminist autobiographical performances Dolan co-curated at the University of Texas, Austin, 56–62. 77 Dolan, 2005, 17. 78 Deb Margolin, O Wholly Night and Other Jewish Solecisms in Of All the Nerve: Deb Margolin Solo, Lynda Hart ed. and commentaries (New York: Cassell, 1999), 137–160. All quotations from the play are from this source. On the exhibition see Norman L. Kleeblatt, ed., Too Jewish: Challenging Traditional Identities (New York: The Jewish Museum and New Jersey: Rutgers University Press), 1996. 79 Margolin, 1999, 137. 80 Margolin, 1999, 138. 81 Margolin, 1999, 139. 82 Margolin, 1999, 140. 83 Margolin, 1999, 154. 84 Margolin, 1999, 155. 85 Margolin, 1999, 155.

Encountering Absence in the Theater 109 86 Margolin, 1999, 155. 87 Margolin, 1999, 156. 88 I borrow this expression, “between a person and another” (‫)בין אדם לחברו‬, from the Mishnah, the Jewish third century rabbinic written collection of oral traditions. In Mishnah Yoma 8.9, which deals with orders and regulations of Yom Kippur (Day of Atonement) (see also note 16 above), it says: “Furthermore, for transgressions between a person and God, Yom Kippur atones; however, for transgressions between a person and another, Yom Kippur does not atone until he appeases the other person.” https://www.sefaria.org.il/Mishnah_Yoma.8.9?lang=he&vside=William_Davidson_ Edition_-_English|en&with=Translation%20Open&lang2=he ‫משנה יומא ח ט‬ Stuart Charmé distinguishes between two I-Thou relations in the philosophy of Martin Buber. The first is the I-Thou relationship between man and God while the second is the I-Thou relationship is between man and man, the ethical meaning of I-Thou: When I-Thou is proposed as the proper way to treat other human beings, Buber is not concerned with a mystical cognition of another person about whom one has no phenomenal knowledge. Rather, Buber presents I-Thou in this context as an ethical relation based on respect for the uniqueness and integrity of every individual.

89 90 91 92 93 94

See Stuart Charmé, “The Two I-Thou Relations in Martin Buber’s Philosophy,” The Harvard Theological Review 70:1–2 (1977): 168. Martin Buber, Between Man and Man, trans. Ronald Gregor-Smith, (New York: Routledge, 2002), 18. Buber, 2002, 20. Melissa Raphael, Judaism and the Visual Image: A Jewish Theology of Art (London: Bloomsbury Publishing Plc, 2009), 34. Lynda Hart, “Like a Virgin,” in Margolin, 1999, 159. Dolan, 2005, 56. Haviva Pedaya, Walking Through Traumas: Rituals of Movement in Jewish Myth, Mysticism, and History (Tel Aviv: Resling Publishing Ltd, 2011), 234. Hebrew. Translation mine.

Conclusion

As I wrote in the introduction to the book, there are many ways to conceptualize the relations between religion and theater, religion and secularism, and the performativity of religious subject matter. I assume that readers of the book, as they follow the three performative models through which I looked at these questions, are reminded of many other theater works that could fit into these categories as well as into other thematic, textual, iconographic, or phenomenological ones. This large amount of modern and contemporary theater performances that “perform religion” by engaging straightforwardly with religious representations attests to a number of interrelated issues. It suggests that processes of secularization in the West are more complex and intertwined with the cultural stamp of religion than it might be assumed. For many theater artists, as well as for their audiences, thinking through the dialectics between the religious and the secular, the sacred and the profane, is a way to process challenging historical, social, and political questions. Religious symbolic systems, which offer strong ideological and iconographic contexts, form a solid background against which other ideas can be explored. Secular cultural contexts on the one hand and modern and contemporary artistic arenas on the other hand, not only create space for artistic experimentalism, but also for the expression of a multiplicity of worldviews. This project grew out of my initial interest in aesthetic models of biblical performance in both late medieval and modern contexts. When I started, however, to work on these materials I did not realize that delving into this subject would entail touching so profoundly on complex questions of interreligious histories, cultural constructions of the Other, the trauma of the war, racism, and the Shoah, as many of the theater works that perform religion on the secular stage do. Although most of these works are deconstructive in their approach to the source materials, it appears that one way to handle questions that originate in these histories and social realities is through a dialectical dialogue with religious sources and discourses. This understanding helps to look at works that at first might seem to be profane for the sake of avantgardist experimentalism, as much more serious and dialogic than they might first appear. Focusing on the relations between the works I have looked at throughout the book and between these social and historical contexts also DOI: 10.4324/9781003042730-5

Conclusion 111

deviates the discussion from abstract notions of the “religious” or the “sacred” towards ethical perspectives and to understanding the significant role that the art of theater can play not because it is similar to (religious) ritual but because it is not. While there are obvious ritualistic aspects in theater and performance, and while many avant-garde theater artists I discussed throughout the book aim to achieve “ritualistic” experiences, the theater is a social and artistic form and forum in which charged issues can be reenacted, challenged, and debated. Religious symbolic systems are serious, grave, and for many people meaningful. As such, they provide a way to speak about other serious issues. Another significant conclusion of this book has to do with the comparative historiographical methodology of late medieval and modern theatricalities I have employed. As I have shown, the resurfacing of scriptural performance, the genre of the mystery and passion plays, modernist embodiments of holy figures, and reenactments of sacrificial rituals as ways to grapple with questions of social and political scapegoating and victimhood, are theatrical phenomena that require and deserve attention. Focusing on the question of “performing religion,” invites and enables this comparison. In addition, it lets us think about relations between linear and cyclical changes and modes of adaptation in and of theater history. It also lets us think about the ongoing changes and modes of adaptation in the social, philosophical, and cultural history of religion and secularism.

Appendix: English Translation of Hugo Ball, A Nativity Play. Bruitist (1916), 1 Ein Krippenspiel, Bruitist (1916)

The German annotated version of the play appears in Hugo Ball: Sämtliche und Briefe; Band 2: Dramen, Herausgegeben von Eckhard Faul, Wallstein Verlag, 2003; 197–204; notes on pages 290–296.

A Nativity Play. Bruitist 1. Silent Night

The Wind: f f f f f f f f f fff f ffff t t Sound of the holy night: hmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm­ mmmmmmmmm The shepherds: He hollah, he hollah, he hollah. Foghorns. Ocarina ---- crescendo. (Climbing a mountain) whipping, shouts. The wind:

f f f f f f f f f f f ffffffffffffffffffffffffffffff t.

2. The Stable

Ass: Little ox:

ia, ia, ia, ia, ia, ia, ia, ia, ia, ia, ia, ia, ia, muh muh muh muh muhm muh muh muh muh muh muh muh

(Stomping, noise of straw, chain rattles, bumping, chewing) Sheep: bäh, bäh, bäh, bäh, bäh, bäh, bäh, bäh, Joseph and Mary (praying): ramba ramba ramba ramba ramba – m-bara, mbara, m-bara, -bara- ramba bamba, bamba, rambababababa 3. The Appearance of the Angel and the Star

The star:

Zcke, zcke, zcke, zzccke, zzzzzcke, zzzzzzzzcccccccke zcke psch, zcke ptsch, zcke ptsch, zcke ptsch.

Appendix 113

Figure A.1 Hugo Ball, A Nativity Play. Bruitist, 1916. [Hugo Ball, Ein Krippenspiel. Bruitistisch, 1916.] Typescript with handwritten director’s notes in pencil by Hugo Ball. Object dimensions: 27.8 × 22.0 cm. Folder dimensions: 31.6 × 24.6 × 0.5 cm. Kunsthaus Zürich, Bibliothek, 1967. Courtesy: Kunsthaus Zürich.

The angel: Arrival: Lighting:

(Propeller noise, quietly growing, trembling, growing stronger, energetic, demonic) (hiss, burst, bundles of light in noise) flooding white white white white white.

114

Appendix

Figure A.2 Hugo Ball, A Nativity Play. Bruitist, 1916. [Hugo Ball, Ein Krippenspiel. Bruitistisch, 1916.] Typescript with handwritten director’s notes in pencil by Hugo Ball. Object dimensions: 27.8 × 22.0 cm. Folder dimensions: 31.6 × 24.6 × 0.5 cm. Kunsthaus Zürich, Bibliothek, 1967. Courtesy: Kunsthaus Zürich.

Figure A.3 Hugo Ball, A Nativity Play. Bruitist, 1916. [Hugo Ball, Ein Krippenspiel. Bruitistisch, 1916.] Typescript with handwritten director’s notes in pencil by Hugo Ball. Object dimensions: 27.8 × 22.0 cm. Folder dimensions: 31.6 × 24.6 × 0.5 cm. Kunsthaus Zürich, Bibliothek, 1967. Courtesy: Kunsthaus Zürich.

Appendix 115

All performers fall down:

first on the elbows, then on the fists. So that two noises integrate.

Sudden silence: --------------------4. The Annunciation

Sound of the litany: do da do da do da do da dorum darum dorum do da do, dorum darum, dorum, darum, do da do, do, doooo. All: Chains, Shwams, Prayers, Stars, Sheep, Wind. Laughter: Ha ha. haha. haha. haha. haha. haha. haha. haha. Increase to the highest noise. Dance to a whistle’s melody The Angel:

Dorim darum dorum darum, dorum darum, dododododododododooooo (the doooooooo ends very painfully and regrettably)

5. The Visit of the Three Kings/Magi

The star: The caravan of the three kings: The three kings: Bells of the elephants:

Zcke zcke ptsch, zcke zcke zcke zcke zcke ptsch! zcke zcke ptsch! ptschptschptschptsch. zcke zcke ptsch ptch ptsch. Puhrrrrr puhrrrr (snorting horses, trampling camels). rabata, rabata, bim bam, rabta rabata, bim bam ba, rabata rabata rabta, rabata bim bam. bim bam. bim bam. Bim bim bim bim bim bim bim bim bim

Whistles Trumpets: Snorting of the horses: Neighing of the horses: Poop of the camels: The star:

Tataaaaaaaaaaaa! tataaaaaaaaaaaaaaa! Puhrrrrr, puhrrrrrrrr, puhrrrrrrr. Wihihihihih, Wihihihihlhi, Wihihihlhih. clapping hands with hollow bottles. Zcke zcke zcke ptsch!

6. Arrival at the Stable

A candle lights up. Until now the room was in dark. One can now see the orchestra members. They are covered with black scarfs, so that one cannot see their shape. They also sit with their backs to the audience. Joseph: Ass and ox:

Good evening, sirs. Good evening, sirs. Good evening, sirs. Ia ia ia ia ia ia a ia, muh muh muh muh muh muh

Noise of copper devices, rattling cans, glasses, key chains,

116

Appendix

Joseph: The three kings: Mary (whistling): Joseph: Jesus:

Do you speak French, sirs? Do you speak French, sirs? Ah, eh, ih, ohm, uh, ah, eh, ih, oh, uh! aih, auhh, euhhh, eh ih, oh uhhhh! Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh! sleep child sleep! sleep child sleep! sleep child sleep! sleep child sleep! kt, kt kt potz! kt kt kt kt Potz! kt kt kt kt potz! lip-smacking [schmatzend]

7. The Prophecy

Sudden hammer blows. Nails. Rattles. Clapping. Shouts of the servants: He hollah! he hollah! he hollah! Cymbals, pipes, hoots, barking crowd. The Pharisees: The three kings: Ass and ox: Lamb: Lamentation of Mary: Bells and jingle bells:

Rabata, rabata, rabata, rabata, sallada, salada, sallada, sallada, sallada, sallada, sallada, rabata bumm, rabata bumm, rabata bumm, rabata bumm. oh oho oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh (very painfully) (very painfully) Muh iahh, muhhhhh, iahhhhh, muhhh. bähhhhhhh, bähhhhhhhhh, bähhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh! Ahhhhhhhhh, ahhhhhhhhhh, ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh! Bim bam bum, bim bam, bum, bim bam, bum. Gong gong.

Nailing: ------------------------------------------And there he was crucified A lot of warm blood flowed.

Nativity Play 1

2 3

4

And there were in the same country shepherds abiding in the field, keeping watch over their flock by night.2 (Wind and night. Sound of the night. Signals/Sounds of the shepherds. (Tzara with a small lute/ mandolin. Sound of a whiplash.) But Maria and Joseph were kneeling in the stable in Bethlehem and prayed to God. (While Ball and Janco pray, this text is repeated. Schlak: muh, keys. Arp: bah. Sound of rustling straw) But in the sky, the brightest star shone above the stable of Bethlehem. And, lo, the angel of the Lord came upon them, and the glory of the Lord shone round about them: and they were sore afraid.3 (Star, loud sound of the angel, very strong, then a cymbal. Light instrument and fall. (Janco). Pause. And the angel said unto them, Fear not: for, behold, I bring you good

Appendix 117

5

6

7

tidings of great joy, which shall be to all people. For unto you is born this day a Saviour, which is Christ the Lord.4 (Do da do of the angel, then joy performed by all. Louder. Crescendo, Then angel: do da do doooooo). And the wise men of the East departed with their caravans, with camels, horses, and elephants, carrying many treasures, and the star showed them the way.5 (Star, sound of horses neighing and snuffling, elephants’ walk, the kings talking, a trumpet (Tzara, Arp), Bells. The star. All increase and decrease). And they found the stable and Joseph welcomed them. (Bon soir, messieurs) Rabata rabata. Muh. Bah.) But Joseph didn’t understand their language. (rabata, rabata.) (Tzara: o mon dieu, o mon dieu) (Emmy’s lullaby, Ah eh Tzara ih oh of the kings. Then ah eh ih quiet down. Only Maria’s singing, the lute. The baby’s lip-smacking, noises and prayer: ramba rambaramba.) Pause. But Mary kept all these things, and pondered them in her heart.6 And she saw a mountain and three tall crosses erected. And she saw how her son is being mocked and she saw him crowned with a crown of thorns. And they crucified him. But she knew that on the third day he will resurrect, transcended. (Cheers of the crowd. Rabata rabata (Janco), Tzara: whistles. Ball: He hollah! Nailing. Schalk: rattling. Arp: bah bah. Rabata Rabata, sallada. (Crescendo) Nailing and screams. Then thunder. Then bells).

Notes 1 2 3 4

I thank Lukas Czech and Ruth Schor for their help with this translation. Luke 2:8. Luke 2:9. Luke 2: 10–11. The full quote is “And the angel said unto them, Fear not: for, behold, I bring you good tidings of great joy, which shall be to all people. For unto you is born this day in the city of David a Saviour, which is Christ the Lord.” Ball omits the words “in the city of David.” 5 This line is a paraphrase of Matthew 2:1-2: Now when Jesus was born in Bethlehem of Judaea in the days of Herod the king, behold, there came wise men from the east to Jerusalem. Saying, Where is he that is born King of the Jews? for we have seen his star in the east, and are come to worship him. 6 Luke 2:19.

Bibliography

Abeliovich, Ruthie. Possessed Voices: Aural Remains from Hebrew Modernist Theatre. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2019. Adolph, Jӧrg. Die Oberammergauer Leidenschft/Passionate Oberammergau. Eine Production der if … Productions e.K. München Im Auftrag des Bayeruschen Rundfunks, 2010 [DVD] 44 min. Adolph, Jӧrg. Die große Passion. Ein Film von Adolph Jӧrg. if … Productions/BR, 2012 [DVD] 140 min. Agamben, Giorgio. Profanations. Trans. Jeff Fort. New York: Zone Books, 2007. Alston, Adam and Martin Welton, eds. Theatre in the Dark: Shadow, Gloom, and Blackout in Contemporary Theatre. London: Bloomsbury, 2017. Amishai-Maisels, Ziva. “Chagall’s White Crucifixion.” In Art Institute of Chicago Museum Studies 17:2 (1991) 138–153+180-181. Aronson-Lehavi, Sharon. “‘The End’: Mythical Futures in Avant-Garde Mystery Plays.” Theatre Research International 34:2 (2009) 116–123. Aronson-Lehavi, Sharon. Street Scenes: Late Medieval Acting and Performance. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. Aronson-Lehavi, Sharon. “Raising the Cross: Pre-Textual Theatricality and the York Crucifixion Play.” In The York Mystery Plays: Performance in the City. Ed.Margaret Rogerson. Woodbridge, Suffolk: Boydell and Brewer, 2011. 165–179. Aronson-Lehavi, Sharon. “Transformations of Religious Performativity: Sacrificial Figures in Modern Experimental Theatre.” Performance and Spirituality 3:1 (2012) 57–70. Aronson-Lehavi, Sharon. “Religious Theatre and the Potentiality of Live Art.” In Inter-Art Journey: Exploring the Common Grounds of the Arts. Ed. Nurit Yaari. Toronto: Sussex Academic Press, 2015. 163–179. Aronson-Lehavi, Sharon. Biblical Theatre in Israel: Between Identity and Otherness. Jerusalem: Israel Democracy Institute, 2016. Hebrew. Aronson-Lehavi, Sharon. “Sexuality and Gender.” In A Cultural History of Theatre in the Middle Ages, Vol 2. Ed. Jody Enders. London: Bloomsbury Academic Press, 2017. 59–76. Aronson-Lehavi, Sharon. “Dialectical Aesthetics of Change and Continuity in the 2010 Oberammergau Passion Play.” In The Oberammergau Passion Play: Essays on the 2010 Performance and the Centuries-Long Tradition. Ed. Kevin J. Wetmore, Jr. Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers, 2017. 53–64. Aronson-Lehavi, Sharon, and Nissim Gal. “Wholly Unholy: Religious Iconography in Israeli Art and Performance.” Performance Research: A Journal of the Performing Arts 13:3 (2009) 154–162.

Bibliography 119 Artaud, Antonin. Antonin Artaud: Selected Writings. Ed. Susan Sontag. Trans. Helen Weaver. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988. Asad, Talal. Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003. Badiou, Alain. Handbook of Inaesthetics. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005. Ball, Hugo. Flight Out of Time: A Dada Diary by Hugo Ball. Ed. John Elderfield. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996. Ball, Hugo. Dramen. Herausgegeben von Eckhard Faul, Hugo Ball: Sämtliche Werke und Briefe, Band 2. Gӧttingen: Wallstein Verlag, 2003. Bar-Kadma, Emmanuel. “Job: A Doubter to Death.” Yediot Achronot April 10, 1981. Hebrew. Barba, Eugenio. “The Theatre’s New Testament: An Interview with Jerzy Grotowski by Eugenio Barba.” In Towards a Poor Theatre. Jerzy Grotowski. New York: Routledge, [1968] 2002. 27–54. Barthes, Roland. Mythologies. Trans. Annette Lavers. New York: The Noonday Press, 1957. Bartrop, Paul R. and Michael Dickerman. The Holocaust: An Encyclopedia and Document Collection (4 vols.). Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, 2017. Bayless, Martha. Parody in the Middle Ages: The Latin Tradition. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1996. Beckett, Samuel. Quad. In Samuel Beckett: The Collected Shorter Plays. New York: Grove Atlantic Press, 1984. 287–291. Beckett, Samuel. Quad. A work for television. Süddeutscher Rundfunk, October 8, 1981. Behrmann, Nicola. “Scenes of Birth and Founding Myths: Dada 1916/17.” The Germanic Review 91 (2016) 335–349. Benjamin, Walter. Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings. Trans. Edmund Jephcott. New York: A Harvest/HBJ Book, 1979. Berger, Margaret, ed. and trans. Hildegard of Bingen. On Natural Philosophy and Medicine: Selections from Causae et Curae. Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1999. Bergeron, David M. “The Bible in English Renaissance Civic Pageants.” Comparative Drama 20:2 (1986) 160–170. Bevington, David. Medieval Drama. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1975. Bial, Henry. The Bible on the Broadway Stage. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2015. Biet, Christian. “Spectacle and Martyrdom: Bloody Suffering, Performed Suffering, and Recited Suffering in French Tragedy.” In The Hurt(ful) Body: Performing and Beholding Pain 1600-1800. Eds. Thomas Macsotay, Cornelis van der Haven, and Karel Vanheasebrouk. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2017. 25–48. Billington, Sandra. A Social History of the Fool. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1984. Bilu, Yoram. “Introduction.” In To the Tombs of the Righteous: Pilgrimage in Contemporary Israel. Ed. Rivka Gonen. Jerusalem: Israel Museum, 1999. 1–12. The Black Hills Passion Play (1939–2008). https://visitspearfish.com/blog/10-years-laterblack-hills-passion-play-remembered. Bleeker, Maaike. Visuality in the Theatre: The Locus of Looking. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008. Bloom, Gina, Sawyer Kemp, Micholas Toothman, and Evan Buswell. “‘A whole theater of others’: Amateur Acting and Immersive Spectatorship in the Digital Shakespeare Game Play the Knave.” Shakespeare Quarterly 67:4 (2016) 408–430. Bobiy, Mikaela Bobiy. Imitatio Christi: The Christic Body in Performance. PhD Diss. Montréal: Concordia University, 2005.

120

Bibliography

Boddeke, Saskia and Peter Greenaway. “Obedience: An Installation in Fifteen Rooms by Saskia Boddeke and Peter Greenaway.” The Jewish Museum in Berlin. 22 May-15 Nov 2015. Exhibition Catalogue. Bowe, Barbara E. “Passion Narratives.” In A Dictionary of Jewish-Christian Relations. Eds. Edward Kessler and Neil Wenborn. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. 333. Brook, Peter. The Empty Space. London: MacGibbon & Kee, 1968. Buber, Martin. Between Man and Man. Trans. Ronald Gregor-Smith. New York: Routledge, 2002. Buckley, Jennifer. Beyond Text: Theater and Performance Beyond Print after 1900. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 2019. Cadden, Joan. The Meanings of Sex Difference in the Middle Ages: Medicine, Natural Philosophy, and Culture. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993. Campbell, Thomas P. “Liturgical Drama and Community Discourse.” In The Liturgy of the Medieval Church. Eds. Thomas J. Heffernan and E. Ann Matter. Kalamazoo, Michigan: Western Michigan University, Medieval Institute Publications, 2001. 619–644. Carey, Chanda Laine. Embodying the Sacred: Marina Abramović, Transcultural Aesthetics, and the Global Geography of Art. PhD Diss., San Diego: University of California, 2016. Carlson, Marla. Performing Bodies in Pain: Medieval and Post-Modern Martyrs, Mystics, and Artists. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010. Carlson, Marvin. Theatre is More Beautiful than War: German Stage Directing in the Late Twentieth Century. Iowa: University of Iowa Press, 2009. Chambers, Claire Maria, Simon W. Du Toit, and Joshua Edelman, eds. Performing Religion in Public. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. Charmé, Stuart. “The Two I-Thou Relations in Martin Buber’s Philosophy.” The Harvard Theological Review 70:1–2 (1977) 161–173. Chester Mystery Plays. https://chestermysteryplays.com/ Chevlowe, Susan. “Adi Nes’s Biblical Stories.” In Adi Nes: Catalogue. Tel Aviv: Tel Aviv Museum, 2007. 114–126. Climenhaga, Lily and Piet Defraeye, eds. Theatre 51:2 (2021), Special Issue on Milo Rau. Climenhaga, Lily, Frank Hentschker, Milo Rau, Yvan Sagnet. “The New Gospel Aftertalk.” Online. 4 April, 2021. https://vimeo.com/532944868/ Clopper, Lawrence, ed. REED: Chester. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1979. Clopper, Lawrence. Drama, Play, and Game: English Festive Culture in the Medieval and Early Modern Period. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2001. Cofman-Simhon, Sarit. “Performing Jewish Prayer on Stage: From Rituality to Theatricality and Back.” In Performance Studies in Motion: International Perspectives and Practices in the Twenty First Century. Eds. Atay Citron, Sharon Aronson-Lehavi, and David Zerbib. London: Bloomsbury, 2014. 246–260. Coleman, Simon. Powers of Pilgrimage: Religion in a World of Movement. New York: New York University Press, 2021. Collins-Kreiner, Noga. “Dark Tourism as/is Pilgrimage.” Current Issues in Tourism 19:12 (2016) 1185–1189. Cook, John A. Time and the Biblical Hebrew Verb: The Expression of Tense, Aspect, and Modality in Biblical Hebrew. Pennsylvania: Penn State University Press, 2012. Davidson, Clifford. From Creation to Doom: The York Cycle of Mystery Plays. New York: AMS Press, 1984. Davidson, Clifford, and Thomas H. Seiler, eds. The Iconography of Hell. Kalamazoo, Michigan: Medieval Institute Publications, 1992.

Bibliography 121 Davidson, Clifford. ed. The York Corpus Christi Plays. Kalamazoo, Michigan: Western Michigan University, Medieval Institute Publications, 2011. Davidson, Clifford. ed. A Tretise of Miraclis Pleyinge. Revised edition. Kalamazoo, Michigan: Western Michigan University, Medieval Institute Publications, 2011. Davidson, Clifford and Sheila White. “Bullying in York’s Plays: A Psycho-Social Perspective.” In Corpus Christi Plays at York: A Context for Religious Drama. Eds. Clifford Davidson and Sheila White. Brooklyn: AMS Press, AMS Studies in the Middle Ages, 2013. 188–210. De Vos, Laurens. “A Tale of Truth: The Use of Brechtian Strategies for Non-Brechtian Artistic Purposes in Milo Rau’s Theatre of the Real.” Theater 51:2 (2021) 74–83. Deimling, Hermann, ed. The Chester Plays. London: Oxford University Press, 1968. Davis, Tracy C. “Performative Time.” In Representing the Past: Essays in Performance Historiography. Eds. Charlotte M. Canning and Thomas Postlewait. Iowa: University of Iowa Press, 2010. 142–167. Deleuze, Gilles. “The Exhausted.” Trans. Anthony Uhlmann. SubStance 24:3 Issue 78 (1995) 3–28. Der Sturm. Vol. 10, No. 11, February 1920. Dolan, Jill. Utopia in Performance: Finding Hope at the Theatre. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2005. Dunkelberg, Kermit. “Confrontation, Simulation, Admiration: The Wooster Group’s Theatre.” TDR 49:3 (2005) 43–57. Eads, Martha Greene. “Conversion Tactics in Terrence McNally’s and Paul Rudnick’s Gay Gospels.” Modern Drama 48:1 (2005) 163–185. Eagleton, Terry. Sweet Violence: The Idea of the Tragic. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2003. Edelman, Joshua. “Spiritual Voyeurism and Cultural Nostalgia: Anglophone Visitors to the Oberammergau Passion Play, 1870–1925 and 2010.” In The Oberammergau Passion Play: Essays on the 2010 Performance and the Centuries-Long Tradition. Ed. Kevin J. Wetmore, Jr. Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers, 2017. 66–87. Edwards, John. Language and Identity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009. Elliott Jr., John R. Playing God: Medieval Mysteries on the Modern Stage. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1989. Enders, Jody. The Medieval Theatre of Cruelty: Rhetoric, Memory, Violence. Cornell: Ithaca University Press, 2002. Enders, Jody. A Cultural History of Theatre in the Middle Ages, Vol 2. London: Bloomsbury Academic Press, 2017. Feldman, Yael S. “Deconstructing Biblical Sources in Israeli Theatre: Yisurei Iyov by Hanoch Levin.” AJS Review 12:2 (1987) 251–277. Findlay, Robert. “Grotowski’s Akropolis: A Retrospective View,” Modern Drama, 27:1 (1984) 1–20. Flaszen, Ludwik. “Akropolis: Treatment of the Text.” In Jerzy Grotowski, Towards a Poor Theatre. New York: Routldege, [1968] 2002. 61–78. Fischer-Lichte, Erika. Theatre, Sacrifice, Ritual: Exploring Forms of Political Theatre. New York: Routledge, 2005. Fischer-Lichte, Erika, The Transformative Power of Performance: A New Aesthetics. Trans. Saskya Iris Jain. New York: Routledge, 2008. Fisher, Philip. “Thinking about the Killing: Hamlet and the Paths among the Passions.” Raritan 11:1 (1991): 43–78. Fitzpatrick, Joan. Food in Shakespeare: Early Modern Dietaries and the Plays. Northampton, UK: University of Northampton Press, 2007.

122

Bibliography

Fo, Dario. Mistero Buffo: The Collected Plays Volume 2. Trans. Ron Jenkins. Based on the Editing of Franca Rame. New York: Theatre Communications Group, 2006. Fritz, Nicole, ed. Marina Abramović: That Self/Our Self. Berlin: Walther Koenig, 2021. Fuchs, Elinor. The Death of Character: Perspective on Theatre after Modernism. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996. Fuchs, Elinor. “The Apocalyptic Century.” Theater 29:3 (1999) 6–39. Gatton, John Spalding. “‘There Must Be Blood’: Mutilation and Martyrdom on the Medieval Stage. In Violence in Drama. Themes in Drama 13. Ed. James Redmond. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991. 79–92. Gardiner, Harold C. Mysteries End: An Investigation of the Last Days of the Medieval Religious Stage. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1946. Gerould, Daniel, Bettina Knapp, and Jane House, eds. Sacred Theatre. New York: Printed by McNaughton & Gunn, Saline, Michigan, 1989. Gherghescu, Iuliana. “The Void on Stage – Shaping Emptiness: Designing for Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot.” MFA Thesis. Tulane University, 2014. Girard, René. Violence and the Sacred. Trans. Patrick Gregory. London: Bloomsbury, [1977] 2013. Girard, René. Job: The Victim of his People. Trans: Yvonne Freccero. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1987. Gluhovic, Milija and Jisha Menon, eds. Performing the Secular: Religion, Representation and Politics. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017. Goldwyn, Elizabeth. “The Power of Goodness: Ritzpah Bat Aiah in the Interpretation of Levinas.” In Levinas Faces Biblical Figures. Ed. Yael Lin. New York: Lexington Books, 2014. 80–94. Goodblatt, Chanita. Jewish and Christian Voices in English Reformation Biblical Drama: Enacting Family and Monarchy. London: Routledge, 2018. Gordon, Mel. “Lothar Schreyer and the Sturmbühne.” TDR 24:1(1980): 85–102. Gordon, Mel, ed. Expressionist Texts. New York: PAJ Publications, 1986. Gordon, Mel, ed. Dada Performance. New York: PAJ Publications, 1987. Grazzina Passion Play (Italy). http://www.rievstoricagrassina.it/ Gréban, Arnoul. Le Mystère de la Passion. Eds. Gaston Paris and Gaston Raynaud. Geneva: Slatkine Reprints, 1970. Gréban, Arnoul. The Nativity by Arnoul Gréban. Trans. Shelley Sewall. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1991. Groeneveld, Leanne. “Remembering and Revenging the Death of Christ: Adrienne Kennedy’s Motherhood 2000 and the York Crucifixion.” Journal of American Drama and Theatre 21:1 (2009): 65–85. Gross, Jan Tomasz and Irena Grudzińska Gross. Golden Harvest: Events at the Periphery of the Holocaust. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012. Grotowski, Jerzy, Towards a Poor Theatre. New York: Routledge, 2002. Grotowski Institute. https://grotowski.net/en/encyclopedia/akropolis. Gur, Batya. “Suddenly the Dead of the World Awaken.” In Haaretz. February 14, 1997. Hebrew. Hage, Emily. “A Living Magazine”: Hugo Ball’s Cabaret Voltaire.” The Germanic Review: Literature, Culture, Theory 91:4 (2016) 395–414. Halbertal, Moshe. On Sacrifice. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012. Halevy, Moshe. My Way on the Stages. Tel Aviv: Masada, 1956. Hebrew. Hamlin, Hannibal. The Bible in Shakespeare. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013.

Bibliography 123 Happé, Peter and Wim Hüsken, eds. Staging Scripture: Biblical Drama, 1350–1600. Leiden: Brill Rodopi, 2016. Hardison, O. B. Cristian Rite and Christian Drama in the Middle Ages: Essays in the Origin and Early History of Modern Drama. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1965. Harshav, Benjamin. Language in Time of Revolution. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999. Hart, Lynda. “Like a Virgin.” In Of All the Nerve: Deb Margolin Solo. Ed. and commentaries Lynda Hart. New York: Cassell, 1999. 158–160. Herbert, James D. Our Distance from God: Studies in the Divine and the Mundane in Western Art and Music. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008. Hilborn, Debra. “Relating to the Cross: A Puppet Perspective on the Holy Week Ceremonies of the Regularis Concordia.” In The Routledge Companion to Puppetry and Material Performance. Eds. Dassia N. Posner, Claudia Orenstein, and John Bell. New York: Routledge, 2014. 164–175. Hughes, Paul L. and James F. Larkin, eds. Tudor Royal Proclamations: Volume 2 The Later Tudors (1553–1587). New Haven: Yale University Press, 1969. Huelsenbeck, Ricahrd. “En Avant Dada: A History of Dadaism.” In The Dada Painters and Poets: An Anthology. Ed. Robert Motherwell. 2nd edition. Cambridge, Mass.: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1979. 21–48. Innes, Christopher. Holy Theatre: Ritual and the Avant Garde. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981. Innes, Christopher. Avant Garde Theatre 1892–1992. New York: Routeldge, 1993. Jacobsen, Janet R. and Ann Pellegrini, eds. Secularisms. Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press Books, 2008. Johnston, Alexandra F. and Margaret Rogerson, eds. REED:York. 2 Vols. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1979. Jones, Amelia. “Holy Body: Erotic Ethics in Ron Athey and Juliana Snapper’s Judas Cradle.” TDR 50:1 (2006) 159–169. Justice, Alan D. “Trade Symbolism in the York Cycle.” Theatre Journal 31:1 (1979): 47–58. Katz, Leon. Midnight Plays. Raleigh: Boson Books, 2000. Kennedy, Adam P. and Adrienne Kennedy. Sleep Deprivation Chamber. New York: Theatre Communications Group, 1996. Kennedy, Adrienne. “Motherhood 2000.” In The Adrienne Kennedy Reader. Ed. and Introduction by Werner Sollors. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001. 228–233. Kennedy, Adrienne. “Letter to My Students on My Sixty-First Birthday by Suzanne Alexander.” In The Adrienne Kennedy Reader. Ed. and Introduction by Werner Sollors. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001. 197–227. Kennedy, Adrienne. “Motherhood 2000.” In Plays for the End of the Century. Ed. Bonnie Marranca. New York: PAJ Publications, 2005. Kleeblatt, Norman L. ed. Too Jewish: Challenging Traditional Identities. New York: The Jewish Museum and New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 1996. Kobialka, Michal. This Is My Body: Representational Practices in the Early Middle Ages. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2003. Kolve, V. A. The Play Called Corpus Christi. London: Edward Arnold Publishers Ltd., 1966. Kopania, Kamil. “Animated Sculptures of the Crucified Christ: Origins, Development, and Impact.” Material Religion: The Journal of Objects, Arts, and Belief 14:4 (2018) 545–558. Krauskopf, Joseph. A Rabbi’s Impressions of the Oberammergau Passion Play: Being a Series of Six Lectures. Philadelphia: Stern, 1901. Kreutza A. and J. Augustine. “Easter Customs in Poland.” Blackfriars 29:337 (1948) 169–173.

124

Bibliography

Kuhns, David. German Expressionist Theatre: The Actor and the Stage. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. Kupfer, Marcia, ed. The Passion Story: From Visual Representation to Social Drama. Pennsylvania: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2008. Lavery, Carl. “Giorgio Agamben and the Politics of the Sacred.” In Sacred Theatre. Ed. Ralph Yarrow. Bristol, UK: Intellect Books, 2007. 39–42. Levin, Hanoch. Yisurei Iyov ve’aherim [The Torments of Job and Other Plays]. Tel Aviv: Hakibbutz Hameuchad, 1988. Hebrew. Levin, Hanoch. Haholchim BaChoshech ve’aherim [Walkers in the Dark and Other Plays]. Vol. 7. Ed. Muli Meltzer. Tel Aviv: Hakibbutz Hameuchad, 1999. Hebrew. Levin, Hanoch. The Labor of Life: Selected Plays. Trans. Barbara Harshav. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003. Levin, Hanoch. “Walkers in the Dark: A Nocturnal Vision.” Trans. Jessica Cohen and Evan Fallenberg, In Hanoch Levin: Selected Plays Two. London: Oberon Books, 2020. Kindle edition. Levinas, Emmanuel. Ethics and Infinity: Conversations with Philippe Nemo. Trans. Richard A. Cohen. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1985. Levy, Shimon. The Bible as Theatre. Brighton: Sussex Academic Press, 2000. Lewer, Debbie. “Hugo Ball, Iconoclasm, and the Origins of Dada in Zurich.” Oxford Art Journal, 32:1 (2009) 19–35. Lipphardt, Walther. Lateinische Osterfeiern und Osterspiele, 9 vols. Berlin: Wlater de Gruyter, 1975-1990. Lipshitz, Yair. “Biblical Shakespeare: King Lear as Job on the Hebrew Stage. NTQ 31:4 (2015): 359–371. Lipshitz, Yair. “Play.” Mafteakh 8 (2014) 125–152. Hebrew. Leneman, L. “Marc Chagall wegen zeine Christus-figuren als symbol fun Yidishe martyrertum.” Unser Wort, Jan. 22, 1977, 4. Yiddish. Mangold, Alex. “Failure, Trauma, and the Theatre of Negativity: The New Tragic in Contemporary Theatre and Performance.” NTQ 35:1 (2019) 33–43. Marion, Jean-Luc. In Excess: Studies of Saturated Phenomena. Trans. Robyn Horner and Vincent Berraud. New York: Fordham University Press, 2002. Margolin, Deb. “O Wholly Night and Other Jewish Solecisms.” In Of All the Nerve: Deb Margolin Solo. Ed. and commentaries Lynda Hart. New York: Cassell, 1999. 137–160. Margolin, Deb. Three Seconds in the Key. New York, 2001. Margolin, Deb. “Basketball and Desire.” TDR 58:4 (2014) 126–128. Martin, Carol. Theatre of the Real. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012. Martin, Carol. “Holding Up a Mirror to Theatre: Milo Rau’s La Reprise: Histoire(s) du théâtre (I).” TDR 65:1 (2021) 54–61. Marx, Peter W. “On Circulation and Recycling.” In The Routledge Companion to Theatre and Performance Historiography. Eds. Tracy C. Davis and Peter W. Marx. London: Routledge, 2021. 327–347. Mason, David V. “Tableaus and Selves in Vrindavan and Oberammergau.” In The Oberammergau Passion Play: Essays on the 2010 Performance and the Centuries-Long Tradition. Ed. Kevin J. Wetmore, Jr. Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland & Company, Inc., 2017. 108–129. Mason, David V. The Performative Ground of Religion and Theatre. London: Routledge, 2020. Mayakovsky, Vladimir. The Collected Plays. Trans. Guy Daniels. New York: Washington Square Press, 1968.

Bibliography 125 McGinn, Bernard. Visions of the End: Apocalyptic Traditions in the Middle Ages. New York: Columbia University Press, 1979. McQuillen, Colleen. “Sanctity or Sanctimony in Staniław Wyspiański’s Akropolis: On Boundary Oppositions, Subverted Expectations, and Irony.” Sarmatian Review (2009): 1468–1475. Mendelsohn, Amitai. Ecce homo: Jesus in Israeli Art. Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 2017. Hebrew. Meyer, Franz. Marc Chagall: Life and Work. New York: Harry N. Abrams Inc., 1964. Merback, Mitchell B. The Thief, The Cross, and the Wheel: Pain and the Spectacle of Punishment in Medieval and Renaissance Europe. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999. Muse, Amy. The Drama and Theatre of Sarah Ruhl. London: Methuen Drama, Bloomsbury Publishing, 2018. Nagel, Alexander. Medieval Modern: Art Out of Time. London: Thames and Hudson, 2012. Nes, Adi. Adi Nes: Catalogue. Tel Aviv: Tel Aviv Museum, 2007. Normington, Katie. Modern Mysteries: Contemporary Productions of Medieval English Cycle Dramas. Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2007. The Oberammergau Passion Play 1634–1984. Oberammergau: Buch- und Kunstdruckerei H. Weixler GmbH, 1984. Oberammergau Passion Play 2000. English Textbook. Trans. Prof. Ingrid Shafer. Oberammergau: Gemenide Oberammergau im Eigenverlag, 2000. Oberammergau Passion Play 2010. English Textbook. Trans. Prof. Ingrid Shafer. Oberammergau: Gemenide Oberammergau, 2010. Oberammergau Passion Play 2022. English Textbook. Trans. Juan Lucas Cruz and Saco Lesevic. Oberammergau: Gemenide Oberammergau, 2022. Oberammergau Passion Play website. https://www.passionsspiele-oberammergau.de/en/ home Ogden, Dunbar. The Staging of Drama in the Medieval Church. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2002. Orsi, Robert A. ed., The Cambridge Companion to Religious Studies. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012. The Passion Play 2000 Oberammergau. Edited by the Community of Oberammergau with Contributions by Otto Huber and Christian Stückl. Colour Plates by Brigite Maria Mayer. Munich: Prestel, 2000. Paulson, Michael. “‘It’s My Tradition Too’: A Town’s Centuries-Old Passion Play Evolves.” The New York Times, August 24, 2022. Paavolainen, Teemu. “Grotowski and the Objectivity of Performance.” In Theatre/Ecology/ Cognition: Theorizing Performer-Object Interaction in Grotowski, Kantor, and Meyerhold. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012. 123–162. Pedaya, Haviva. Walking Through Traumas: Rituals of Movement in Jewish Myth, Mysticism, and History. Tel Aviv: Resling Publishing Ltd, 2011. Hebrew. Perez, Nissan N. Revelation: Representations of Christ in Photography. London: Merrell Publishers in association with The Israel Museum, Jerusalem, 2003. Petroff, Elizabeth Alvidia, ed. Medieval Women’s Visionary Literature. New York: Oxford University Press, 1986. Poole, Kristen. Supernatural Environments in Shakespeare’s England: Spaces of Demonism, Divinity, and Drama. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011. Raphael, Melissa. Judaism and the Visual Image: A Jewish Theology of Art. London: Bloomsbury Publishing Plc, 2009. Rau, Milo. “Ghent Manifesto.” NTGhent Theatre. https://www.ntgent.be/en/about/manifest.

126

Bibliography

REED (Records of Early English Drama). https://reed.utoronto.ca/ Reinhartz, Adele. “Jesus of Hollywood.” In The Passion Story: From Visual Representation to Social Drama. Ed. Marcia Kupfer. Pennsylvania: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2008. 165–178. Richards, Mary. Marina Abramović. New York: Routledge, 2010. Rogerson, Margaret. The York Mystery Play: Performance in the City. York: York Medieval Press, 2011. Rogerson, Margaret. “Medieval Mystery Plays in the Modern World: A Question of Relevance.” The Yearbook of English Studies 43 (2013) 343–366. Roman, David, et al. “A Forum on Theatre and Tragedy in the Wake of September 11, 2001.” Theatre Journal 54:1 (2002) 95–138. Rosen, Aaron. Art + Religion in the 21st Century. London: Thames and Hudson, 2015. Roston, Murray. Biblical Drama in England: From the Middle Ages to the Present Day. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1968. Rokem, Freddie. Performing History: Theatrical Representations of the Past in Contemporary Theatre. Iowa: University of Iowa Press, 2000. Rokem, Freddie. “The Bible and the Avant-Garde: The Search for a Classical Tradition in the Israeli Theatre.” European Review 9:3 (2001) 305–317. Rokem, Freddie. Strindberg’s Secret Codes. London: Norvik Press, 2006. Rokem, Freddie. “‘Has this thing appeared again tonight?’: Deus ex Machina and Other Theatrical Interventions of the Supernatural.” In Things: Religion and the Question of Materiality. Eds. Dick Houtman and Brigit Meyer. New York: Fordham University Press, 2012. 127–136. Rokem, Freddie. “The Bible on the Hebrew/Israeli Stage: The Torments of Job as a Modern Tragedy.” In The Book of Job: Aesthetics, Ethics, Hermenutics. Eds. Leora Batnizky and Ilana Pardes. Boston: De Grutyer, 2015. 185–212. Romanska, Magda. The Post-Traumatic Theatre of Grotowski and Kantor: History and Holocaust in Akropolis and Dead Class. London: Anthem Press, 2012. Roms, Heike. “Encountering Memory: Acco Theatre Center’s Arbeit Macht Frei MiToitalnd Europa.” In Contemporary Theatres in Europe: A Critical Companion. Eds. Joe Kelleher and Nicholas Ridout. London: Routledge, 2006. 47–60. Rose, Barbara, Terisa Santiago, et al. Monochromes: From Malevich to the Present. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006. Roth, Cecil. “Representation of God in Jewish Art.” Proceedings of the World Congress of Jewish Studies, Vol. 2. The World Union of Jewish Studies. 1965. 139–140. Rozik, Eli. The Roots of Theatre: Rethinking Ritual and Other Theories of Origin. Iowa: Iowa University Press, 2002. Ruhl, Sarah. Passion Play. New York: Samuel French, 2010. Sandqvist, Tom. Dada East: The Romanians of Cabaret Voltaire. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2006. Saperstein, Marc. “Jewish Responses to the Passion Narratives.” In The Passion Story: From Visual Representation to Social Drama. Ed. Marcia Kupfer. Pennsylvania: The Pennsylvania University Press, 2008. 191–202. Savran, David. “The Death of the Avant-Garde.” TDR 49:3 (2005) 10–42. Scarry, Elaine. The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World. New York: Oxford University Press, 1985. Schafer, Elizabeth. Theatre and Christianity. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019. Schechner, Richard. The Future of Ritual: Writings on Culture and Performance. New York: Routledge, 1993.

Bibliography 127 Schechner, Richard, and Lisa Wolford, eds. The Grotowski Sourcebook. Eds. Richard Schechner and Lisa Wolford. New York: Routledge, 1997. Schechner, Richard, and Theodore Hoffman. “Interview with Grotowski.” In The Grotowski Sourcebook. Eds. Richard Schechner and Lisa Wolford. New York: Routledge, [1968] 1997. 38–55. Scherb, Victor I. “Frame and Structure in The Conversion of St. Paul.” Comparative Drama 26:2 (1992) 124–139. Schmidt, Gary. The Iconography of the Mouth of Hell: Eighth Century Britain into the Fifteenth Century. Selinsgrove: Susquehanna University Press, 1995. Schneider, Rebcecca. Performing Remains: Art and War in Times of Theatrical Reenactment. New York: Routledge, 2011. Schreyer, Kurt A. “‘Erazed in the Booke?’: Periodization and the Material Text of the Chester Banns.” In The Chester Cycle in Context 1555–1575: Religion, Drama, and the Impact of Change. Eds. Jessica Dell, David Klausner, and Helen Ostovich. New York: Routledge, 2012. 133–148. Schreyer, Lothar. Kreuzigung: Spielgang Werk VII (Crucifxion: Movement/Play Work VII). Second printing, made in 500 copies from woodcuts, hand-colored, 1920. Schreyer, Lothar. Kreuzigung. In Der Sturm, August 1920. 66–68. Schreyer, Lothar. Expressionistisches Theater: Aus Meinen Erinnerungen. Hambrug: J. P. Toth Verlag, 1948. Shalvi/Hyman Encyclopedia of Jewish Women (The). Jewish Women Archive website. https:// jwa.org/encyclopedia/. Shamir, Moshe, ed. “A Playwrights’ Conversation: Why? How? Can It Be? – A Modern Biblical Play.” Teatron: A Bi-Monthly Journal of the Stage Arts 3 (1962) 23–32. Hebrew. Shapira, Anita. “The Bible and Israeli Identity.” AJS Review 28:1 (2004) 11–42. Shapiro, James. Oberammergau: The Troubling Story of the World’s Most Famous Passion Play. New York: Pantheon Books, 2000. Sheingorn, Pamela. “The Moment of Resurrection in the Corpus Christi Plays.” Medievalia et Humanistica 11 (1982) 111–129. Sofer, Andrew. Dark Matter: Invisibility in Drama, Theater, and Performance. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 2013. Solberg, Maggie. “A History of ‘The Mysteries.’” Early Theatre 19:1 (2016) 9–36. Solberg, Maggie. “Quick Books: Censorship and Biblical Drama.” Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England 34 (2021) 57–80. Solterer, Helen. Medieval Roles for Modern Times: Theatre and the Battle for the French Republic. Pennsylvania, University Park: Pennsylvania University Press, 2010. Sorek, Ronit and Sharon Weiser-Ferguson. “Depicting God in Jewish and Israeli Art.” In The Divine Image: Depicting God in Jewish and Israeli Art. Eds. Ronit Sorek and Sharon Weiser-Ferguson Trans. Anat Schultz. Jerusalem: The Israel Museum, 2006. Sponsler, Claire. Ritual Imports: Performing Medieval Drama in America. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2004. States, Bert O. The Pleasure of the Play. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994. Stevens, Martin. “From Mappa Mundi to Teatrum Mundi: The World as Stage in Early English Drama.” In From Page to Performance: Essays in Early English Drama. Ed. John A. Alford. Ann Arbor: Michigan University Press, 1995. Stevenson, Jill. Sensational Devotion: Evangelical Performance in Twenty-First Century America. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2013.

128

Bibliography

Stevenson, Jill. “Passion Playing: An Interview with Sarah Ruhl on the Shaping Influence of Oberammergau.” In The Oberammergau Passion Play: Essays on the 2010 Performance and the Centuries-Long Tradition. Ed. Kevin J. Wetmore, Jr. Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland & Company, Inc., 2017. 168–175. Stevenson, Jill. Feeling the Future at Christian End-Time Performances. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2022. Stoker, Wessel. “The Rothko Chapel Paintings and the ‘Urgency of the Transcendent Experience.’” International Journal for Philosophy of Religion 64:2 (2008) 89–102. Straif-Taylor, Helga. Lothar Schreyer’s Das expressionistische Theater: Context, Background, and Translation. PhD diss. New York: State University of New York at Albany, 1992. Strindberg, August. Coram Populo! De Creatione et Sententia Vera Mundi: A Mystery. Trans. David Scanlan. The Tulane Drama Review 6:2 (1961) 128–131. Strindberg, August. The Road to Damascus (Part 1). Trans. Graham Rawson. Middlesex: The Echo Library, 2006. Stückl, Christian. “A Brief, Personal History of the Oberammergau Passion play.” In The Pharisees. Eds. Joseph Sievers and Amy-Jill Levine. Grand Rapids, Michigan: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2021. 335–343. Symons, Thomas, ed. and trans. The Monastic Agreement of the Monks and Nuns of the English Nation: Regularis Concordia. New York: Oxford University Press, 1953. Szymborska, Wisława. Sounds, Feelings, Thoughts: Seventy Poems by Wisława Szymborska. Bilingual Edition. Eds. Magnus J. Krynski and Robert A. Maguire. New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1981. Taves, Ann. “Special Things as Building Blocks of Religions.” In The Cambridge Companion to Religious Studies. Ed. Robert A. Orsi. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012. 58–83. Taylor, Charles. A Secular Age. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2007. Taylor, Nina. “Stanisław Wyspiański and Symbolist Drama: The Work of Art as ‘dramatis persona.’” The Slavonic and East European Review 66:2 (1988) 198–209. Tlalim, Asher. Don’t Touch My Holocaust (“Al Tigu Li BaShoah”). 1994. 150min. [DVD]. Turner, Victor and Edith Turner. Image and Pilgrimage in Christian Culture: Anthropological Perspectives. New York: Columbia University Press, 1978. Turner, Victor. “Social Dramas and Stories about Them.” Critical Inquiry 7:1 “On Narrative” (1980) 141–168. Turner, Victor. “Liminality and the Performative Genres.” In Rite, Drama, Festival, Spectacle: Rehearsals Toward a Theory of Cultural Performance. Ed. John J. MacAloon. Philadelphia: Institute for the Study of Human Issues, 1984. 19–41. Twycross, Meg, and Sarah Carpenter. Masks and Masking in Medieval and Early Tudor England. London: Ashgate, 2002. Van-den Brand, Jessica. Tino Sehgal: Art as Immaterial Commodity. Saarbrücken, Deutschland: LAP LAMBRT Academic Publishing, 2015. Van-Itallie, Jean-Claude. The Serpent: A Ceremony. Written in collaboration with The Open Theatre under the Direction of Joseph Chaikin. New York: Atheneum, 1970. Von Contzen, Eva and Chanita Goodblatt, eds. Enacting the Bible in Medieval and Early Modern Drama. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2020. Von der Osten, G. “Job and Christ: The Development of a Devotional Image.” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 16:1-2 (1953) 153–158. Walden, Nell and Lothar Schreyer. Der Sturm: ein Errinerungsbuch an Herwarth Walden und die Künstler aus dem Sturmkreis. Baden-Baden: Woldermar Klien Verlag, 1954.

Bibliography 129 Walker, Greg. “The Cultural Work of Early Drama.” In The Cambridge Companion to Medieval English Drama. Ed. Richard Beadle. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011. 75–98. Wessel, Stoker. “The Rothko Chapel Paintings and the ‘urgency of the transcendent experience.’” International Journal for Philosophy of Religion 64 (2008) 89–102. Westphal, Merold. “Phenomenology of Religion.” In The Routledge Companion to the Philosophy of Religion. Eds. Paul Copan and Chad V. Mester. New York: Routledge, 2013. 733–743. Wenzel, Siegfried. “Somer Game and Sermon References to a Corpus Christi Play.” Modern Philology 86:3 (1989) 274–282. Wetmore, Jr. Kevin J. “Oberammergau in America/America in Oberammergau.” In The Oberammergau Passion Play: Essays on the 2010 Performance and the Centuries-Long Tradition. Ed. Kevin J. Wetmore, Jr. Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland & Company, Inc., 2017. 130–159. White Whitfield, Paul. “The Bible as Play in Reformation England.” In The Cambridge History of British Theatre Vol. 1: Origins to 1660. Eds. Jane Milling and Peter Thomson. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. 87–115. Wiesel, Elie. The Trial of God (as it was held on February 25, 1649, in Shamgorod). New York: Random House, 1979. Williams, Andrew. “The Church’s Reception of Jewish Crucifixion Imagery after the Holocaust.” AGON 48/4 (2015). http://agon.fi/article/the-church-reception-ofjewish-crucifixion-imagey-after-the-holocaust/#fn1 Wilson, Robert. 14 Stations. Munich: Prestel Publications, 2000. Wolford, Lisa. “General Introduction: Ariadne’s Thread: Grotowski’s Journey through the Theatre.” In The Grotowski Sourcebook. Eds. Richard Schechner and Lisa Wolford. New York: Routledge, 1997. 1–22. Wooster Group (The). Poor Theatre: A Series of Simulacra. 2003. https://thewoostergroup. org/poor-theater. Wu, Nancy. “Medieval Drama at the Cloisters.” Metropolitan Museum Blog. September 5, 2013. https://www.metmuseum.org/blogs/now-at-the-met/features/2013/medievaldrama Wu, Nancy, and Carol Symes. “Presenting The Play of Adam at the Met Cloisters.” Metropolitan Museum Blog. December 5, 2016. https://www.metmuseum.org/blogs/ met-live-arts/2016/play-of-adam-met-cloisters. Wright, Stephen K. ed. and trans. The Erlau Playbook: Five Medieval German Dramas from Christmas and Easter. Tempe, Arizona: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2017. Wynands, Sandra. Iconic Spaces: The Dark Theology of Samuel Beckett’s Drama. Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press, 2007. Wyspiański, Stanisław. Akropolis: The Wawel Plays. Trans. Charles S. Kraszewski. London: Glagoslav Publications, 2017. 304–432. Yaari, Nurit and Shimon Levy, eds. Hanoch Levin: The Man with the Myth in the Middle. Tel Aviv: HaKibbutz HaMeuchad, 2004. Hebrew. Yaari, Nurit, ed. Inter-Art Journey: Exploring the Common Grounds of the Arts: Studies in Honor of Eli Rozik. Brighton: Sussex Academic Press, 2015. Yarrow, Ralph, et al. Sacred Theatre. Bristol, UK: Intellect, 2007. Yehoshua, A.B. The Liberated Bride. Trans. Hillel Halkin. Orlando: A Harvest Book, Harcourt, Inc., 2003.

130

Bibliography

Yerushalmi, Rina. VaYomer Vayelech. Theatre Program. Tel Aviv: Itim Ensemble and Cameri Theatre of Tel Aviv. 1996. Yerushalmi, Rina. VaYishtahu VaYerra. Theatre Program. Tel Aviv: Itim Ensemble and Cameri Theatre of Tel Aviv. 1998. Yerushalmi, Rina. Moving Towards Meaning: The Freedom to Play. Tel Aviv: Resling, 2020. Hebrew. York Mystery Plays. https://www.yorkmysteryplays.co.uk/ Young, Karl. The Drama of the Medieval Church, 2 Vols. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1935. Zalmona, Yigal, ed. and curator. Sands of Time: The Work of Micha Ullman. Jerusalem: Israel Museum Jerusalem, 2011.

Index

Abramović, Marina 55 absolute metaphors 14 Adolph, Jӧrg 31 Agamben, Giorgio 25–26, 66–67 Akropolis (Jerzy Grotowski) 9, 81, 85–92 Akropolis (Stanisław Wyspiański) 9, 87, 89–90 Alston, Adam 93 Amishai-Maisels, Ziva 59 anachronism 3, 7–8, 13, 50; in Hugo Ball’s A Nativity Play. Bruitist (1916) 19–26; Oberammergau Passion Play 26–35; performativity of 15–19; Yerushalmi’s Bible Project 35–41 Andreyev, Leonid 24 Arbeit macht freie miToitland Europa (1991) 91 Arp, Hans 21 Artaud, Antonin 50 artistic experimentalism 2, 110 Austin, John L. 53 autopoietic feedback loop 92 Badiou, Alain 86 Ball, Hugo 7, 18–26, 112–116 Bavarian Passion in the Holy Land (DVD) 31 Bayless, Martha 54 Bebelplatz, Berlin 9, 79 Beckett, Samuel 96–97 Behrmann, Nicola 24 Benjamin, Walter 38 Beyond Text: Theater and Performance in Print after 1900 (Jennifer Buckley) 59–60 Bial, Henry 6 “Biblical Stories” (Adi Nes) 66 Bildersturm 25 Bilu, Yoram 85 Black Hills Passion Play, Spearfish, South Dakota 28 Bleeker Maakie 67

“Blessed Be the Match” (Hanna Szenes) 33 Blumenberg, Hans 14 Bosch, Hieronymus 91 Bowe, Barbara E. 29 Bright, Israel 38 Brook, Peter 88, 91 Buber, Martin 101 Bücheler, Ralph 31 Buckley, Jennifer 59–60 Bueno, Avi-Yona (Bambi) 38 Butler, Judith 53 Cabaret Voltaire 21, 23 The Cambridge Companion to Religious Studies (Robert A. Orsi) 9 Campbell, Thomas P. 84 Carmon, Yosef 66 Carpenter, Sarah 4 Catholicism 25, 28, 60 Chagall, Marc 57–59, 61; White Crucifixion (1938) 59 Chaikin, Joseph 37 Chester, post-Reformation banns 4 Chester cycle 16 Chevlowe, Susan 66 Climenhaga, Lily 71 Cohen, Jessica 93 Cohen, Yardena 36 Conversion of Saint Paul (Digby Plays) 95 Covid-19 pandemic 27 Crucifixion 2, 7–8, 23, 49–52, 54 Dada movement 21 Dark Matter (Andrew Sofer) 97 dark play 51 Davidson, Clifford 13, 53 Davis, Tracy C. 41 Deleuze, Gilles 96–97 Der Sturm 57–58

132

Index

Die große Passion (Jӧrg Adolph) (DVD) 31 Die Oberammergauer Leidenschaft (DVD) 31 di Monaco, Marietta 21 Dolan, Jill 87, 97, 102 Döpfner, Julius August (Cardinal) 29 The Dybbuk (An-Ski) 37 Eagleton, Terry 55–56, 61 Edelman, Joshua 30, 33 Edwards, John 36 Elizabeth, Queen I 4 Enders, Jody 50, 53 Fallenberg, Evan 93 Faul, Eckhard 19, 22, 26 Feeling the Future at Christian End-Time Performances (Jill Stevenson) 6 Fischer-Lichte, Erika 53, 92 Fisher, Philip (Thinking about Killing: Hamlet and the Paths among the Passions) 69–70 Fuchs, Elinor 69 Gardiner, Harold C. 56 Girard, René 54–55, 64 Goldwyn, Elisabeth 61 Golgotha (1912) 59 Gréban, Arnoul 16 Grotowski, Jerzy 9, 37, 81, 86–92 Gur, Batya 36 Hageneier, Stefan 29, 33 Haholchim baChosech: Hizayon Leili (Hnaoch Levin) 93 Halbertal, Moshe 55 Halevy, Moshe 37 Hamlet (William Shakespeare) 69 Handbook of Inaesthetics (Alain Badiou) 86 Hanson, Duane 66 Harshav, Benjamin 36 Hart, Lynda 102 Hennings, Emmy 21 Hentschker, Frank 71 Herbert, James D. 1, 34 Herrenson, Dror 38 Hildegard of Bingen (Cause et Curae) 16 Hitler, Adolf 28 Hoffman, Theodore 90 Huber, Otto 29, 32 Huelsenbeck, Richard 19–21 iconoclasm 25 iconography 7, 8, 19, 22, 26, 37, 38, 49, 55, 57, 59, 60, 66, 69, 84, 87, 88

Immaculate Conception 16 infinity, notion of 101 INRI (Iesus Nazarenus Rex Iudaeorum) 59 “the inversion Vav” 35 Israeli Bible Project (Rina Yerushalmi) 19, 35–42 Itim Ensemble 19, 35–42 Janco, Marcel 21, 23, 24 Jewishness 31 Job: The Victim of his People (René Girard) 64 Katz, Leon 37 Kennedy, Adam P. 67 Kennedy, Adrienne 8, 67–70 Kennedy, John F. 37 King, Martin Luther 37 Kokoschka, Oskar 24 Kuhns, David 60 Language in Time of Revolution (Benjamin Harshav) 36 late medieval theater 17, 49, 52, 56 Lavery, Carl 81 LeCompte, Liz 91 Le Jeu d’Adam (Carol Symes) 5 Letter to My Students on My Sixty-First Birthday by Suzanne Alexander (Kennedy) 67 Levin, Hanoch 8, 9, 24, 59–67, 81, 87, 93, 94, 97, 101 Levinas, Emmanuel 61, 80–81, 101 Levine, Amy-Jill 29 Lewer, Debbie 25 The Liberated Bride (A. B. Yehoshua) 40 Library (Micha Ullman) 9, 79, 88 The Life of Man (Leonid Andreyev) 24 liminal, liminality 17, 86, 97, 99 Lipphardt, Walther 82 liveness 17, 27 live image (tableau vivant) 33–35, 53 Maayan, David 91, 92 Margolin, Deb 9, 81, 87, 97–102 Martin, Carol 37, 71 Marx, Peter W. 14 Mason, David V. 10, 34 Medieval Modern: Art Out of Time (Alexander Nagel) 2, 85 medieval-modern arch 2 The Medieval Theatre of Cruelty: Rhetoric, Memory, Violence (Jody Enders) 50

Index 133 Meyer, Franz 59 Modern Mysteries: Contemporary Productions of Medieval English Cycle Dramas (Katie Normington) 5 Mor, Abraham 93 Morse, Salmi 6 Motherhood 2000 (Adrienne Kennedy) 8, 67–70 Münchner Kammerspiele 29 Münchner Volkstheater 29 Müntzer, Thomas 25 Mysteries’ End (Harold C. Gardiner) 56 Mystère de la Passion (Arnoul Gréban) 16 My Way on the Stages (Moshe Halevy) 37

Performing Remains: Art and War in Times of Theatrical Reenactment (Rebecca Schneider) 91 The Pharisees (Joseph Sievers and Amy-Jill Levine) 29 Pieta 63 Playing God: The Bible on the Broadway Stage (Henry Bial) 6 PLS (Poculi Ludique Societas) 5 post-Reformation development 4 The Post-Traumatic Theatre of Grotowski and Kantor: History and Holocaust in Akropolis and Dead Class (Magda Romanska) 89 profanation 18, 25

Nagel, Alexander 2–3, 85 A Nativity Play. Bruitist (Hugo Ball) 18, 19–26, 112–117 Nazi party 60 Nemo, Philippe 80 Nes, Adi 66, 67 The New Gospel (2021) (Milo Rau) 8, 70–71 Normington, Katie 5 NTGent Theatre (Milo Rau) 70–71

Quad (Samuel Beckett) 96–97 Quem Quaeritis (liturgical drama) 81, 83, 84, 86, 87

Oberammergau Passion Play 3, 6, 8, 18–19, 26–35 The Oberammergau Passion Play: Essays on the 2010 Performance and the Centuries-Long Tradition (Kevin J. Wetmore Jr.) 28 Ogden, Dunbar 82 On Sacrifice (Moshe Halbertal) 55 Ordo Pajinarum (Order of the Pageants, York 1415) 54 Orsi, Robert A. 9 Our Distance from God: Studies in the Divine and the Mundane in Western Art and Music (James D. Herbert) 1 O Wholly Night and Other Jewish Solecisms (Deb Margolin) 9, 81, 87, 97–102 Passionate Oberammergau (DVD) 31 The Passion (1879) (Salmi Morse) 6 Passion Play (Ruhl, Sarah) 28, 32 Paulson, Michael 27 Pedaya, Haviva 102 The Performative Ground of Religion and Theatre (David V. Mason) 10 performative time 41 performativity 57–70 Performing History: Theatrical Representations of the Past in Contemporary Theatre (Freddie Rokem) 28

radical Reformation 25 Rafael, Melissa 101 Rau, Milo 8, 70–71; Ghent Manifesto 71 REED (Records of Early English Drama) project 5 Reformation 2, 4, 14, 25, 57 Regularis Concordia 83, 84 religious symbolic systems 110–111 Ritual Imports: Performing Medieval Drama in America (Claire Sponsler) 6 The Road to Damascus (August Strindberg) 95 Rogerson, Margaret 5 Rokem, Freddie 24, 28 Romanska, Magda 89, 90 Rozik, Eli 49 Ruhl, Sarah 28–29, 32 Rutz, Walter 27, 28 Sacred Theatre (Carl Lavery) 81 sacrificable victim 64 sacrificial figure and social victim 49; late medieval theatre, playing the Crucifixion in 52–54; performing the self, performing the icon, performing the other 57–70 sacrificial figures and social victims 54–57 Sagent, Yvan 8 Sandqvist, Tom 21 Schechner, Richard 37, 51, 90, 91 Schlak, Johann 21 Schneider, Rebecca 91 Schreyer, Lothar 59–60 scriptural theatre 13 A Secular Age (Charles Taylor) 1

134

Index

“secular holiness” (Jerzy Grotowski) 88 secular iconoclasm 25 secularism 4 secularization 14, 25, 110 Sensational Devotion: Evangelical Performance in 21st-Century America (Jill Stevenson) 6 The Serpent (Open Theater) 37 Shakespeare, William 36, 37, 69 Shapira, Anita 41 Sheingorn, Pamela 83 Sievers, Joseph 29 Simultan Krippenspiel 20 Sleep Deprivation Chamber (Kennedy) 67, 69 social victims, sacrificial figures and 54–57 Sofer, Andrew 97 “Soldiers” (Adi Nes) 66 Sorek, Ronit 94–95 Sphinx and Straw Man (Oskar Kokoschka) 24 Spielgang 60 Sponsler, Claire 6 Stevens, Martin 50 Stevenson, Jill 6 Strindberg, August 7, 95, 96, 97 Stückl, Christian 8, 18, 27, 29, 32 Summer game (somergame) 51–54, 64, 66, 70 Supermarket Shopper (Duane Hanson) 66 Sweet Violence: The Idea of the Tragic (Terry Eagleton) 55 Symes, Carol 5 Szenes, Hanna 33 Szymborska, Wysława 92 Tanenbaum, Marc (Rabbi) 29 Taves, Ann 9 Taylor, Charles 1 Taylor, Nina 90 “Theatre Impressions” (Wysława Szymborska) 92 “Theatre of the Real” (Carol Martin) 71 theatrical time 41 To Damascus (Strindberg) 97 Too Jewish: Challenging Traditional Identities (Kleeblatt, Norman L.) 98 The Torments of Job (Hanoch Levin) 8, 59, 60–66 “Towards a Poor Theatre” (Jerzy Grotowsky) 88–89 trade symbolism 16 tragedy, tragic 55, 56, 69, 92 The Tretise of Miraclis Pleyinge 16, 18 Turner, Victor 17–18, 92

Twycross, Meg 4 Tzara, Tristan 21, 22, 23 Ullman, Micha 9, 79 Utopia in Performance (Jill Dolan) 97 utopian performatives 97 Van-Ittalie, Jean Claude 37 VaYishtachu, VaYerra 19, 35 VaYomer, VaYelech 19, 35 Violence and the Sacred (René Girard) 54 The Visit to the Sepulcher (Visitatio Sepulchri) 81 Wailing Wall 32 Wakefield Plays 56–57 Walden, Herwarth 57 Walker, Greg 15 Walkers in the Dark: A Nocturnal Vision (Hanoch Levin) 9, 24, 81, 87, 93, 97, 101 Walking through Traumas: Rituals of Movement in Jewish Myth, Mysticism, and History (Haviva Pedaya) 102 Wawel Cathedral 87, 89, 90 Weiser-Ferguson, Sharon 94–95 Welton, Martin 93 Wenzel, Siegfried 72 Westphal, Merold 86 Wetmore, Kevin J. Jr. 28 White, Paul Whitfield 13 White, Sheila 53 Wilson, Robert (14 Stations) 34–35 Wolford, Lisa 88 Wolpe, Iyar 39 Wooster Group 91 The World Holocaust Remembrance Center, Jerusalem (Yad Vashem) 32 Wyspiański, Stanisław 9, 87, 89, 90 Yad Vashem, The World Holocaust Remembrance Center, Jerusalem 32, 33 Yerushalmi, Rina 8, 19, 35, 37, 38; Bible Project 35–41 The York Mystery Plays: The Annunciation and Visitation 16; The Crucifixion 52–53, 54; Joseph’s Trouble about Mary 16; The Nativity 16 The York Mystery Plays: Performance in the City (Margaret Rogerson) 5 Young, Karl 82 Zahavi, David 33