Seenography: Essays on the Meaning of Visuality in Performance Events [1 ed.] 9781848881389, 9789004373877

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Seenography

Critical Issues Series Editors Dr Robert Fisher Lisa Howard Dr Ken Monteith Advisory Board James Arvanitakis Katarzyna Bronk Jo Chipperfield Ann-Marie Cook Peter Mario Kreuter S Ram Vemuri

Simon Bacon Stephen Morris John Parry Karl Spracklen Peter Twohig Kenneth Wilson

A Critical Issues research and publications project. http://www.inter-disciplinary.net/critical-issues/ The Ethos Hub ‘Performance: Visual Aspects of Performance Practice’

2014

Seenography: Essays on the Meaning of Visuality in Performance Events

Edited by

Andrew Cope

Inter-Disciplinary Press Oxford, United Kingdom

© Inter-Disciplinary Press 2014 http://www.inter-disciplinary.net/publishing/id-press/

The Inter-Disciplinary Press is part of Inter-Disciplinary.Net – a global network for research and publishing. The Inter-Disciplinary Press aims to promote and encourage the kind of work which is collaborative, innovative, imaginative, and which provides an exemplar for inter-disciplinary and multi-disciplinary publishing.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means without the prior permission of Inter-Disciplinary Press.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Inter-Disciplinary Press, Priory House, 149B Wroslyn Road, Freeland, Oxfordshire. OX29 8HR, United Kingdom. +44 (0)1993 882087

ISBN: 978-1-84888-138-9 First published in the United Kingdom in Paperback format in 2014. First Edition.

Table of Contents Introduction Meetings with Meanings Andrew Cope Part 1:

Reconfiguring Meaning: Cultural Perspectives of Performance Looking at Postmodern Performances of Canonical Plays Bilha Blum

Part 2:

3

Dancing Clowns and Desert Dunes: Challenging Traditional Flamenco Imagery through ‘Fusion’ Idit Suslik

19

Old Arts in New Media: Reconfiguring Meaning and Performance in Opera ‘Live in HD’ Adele Anderson

39

Materiality and Meaning: The Visual Agency of the Inanimate Visionary Voice / Silent Clown Andrew Cope Little Cinderella, Big Cinderella: Scenography as Performance Filipa Malva

Part 3:

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67

89

Position and Relation: Spatial Meanings Spatial Relations Speak the Language of Social Hierarchy David Franklin and Milan Kohout

107

The Full and the Void in the Theatre of Robert Wilson Marcelo de Andrade Pereira

129

Part 4:

The Self and the Subject in Performance: Public Place and Meaning The Explanatory Frame Myer Taub Performance Art as Intervention in Everyday Life: Participation, the Public Sphere and the Production of Meaning Alexandra Antoniadou

143

159

Introduction: Meetings with Meanings Andrew Cope 1. The Performance Event The chapters in this book are drawn from a performance conference, entitled Performance: Visual Aspects of Performance Practice, 1 which was held at a venue in Prague, in the Czech Republic, during November of 2011. This three-day symposium drew its contributions from theatre, art, and media departments operating in academies across the globe. Its sessions subsequently shared their notions of performance and visuality through a wide variety of subject matter. This diversity was, itself, propagated through a range of communicative methods, which typically included relaxed demonstrations of performance practices and/or mediated displays of creative work – together with the more traditional and didactic conference formats (such as read papers, and ‘slideware’ presentations). The plurality of pursued research questions conspired with the unfolding spectrum of artistic work and pedagogical styles, to confound any ready identification of performance’s scholarly limits. Yet the medley afforded the clearest of insights into the project’s layered contribution to the realm of visual culture: a characteristic interest in activity being evidenced through engagements that caught the eye in sensory events – so their lively visual involvements could further studious explications of macro social (and material) processes. As such, performance’s relational lens was witnessed in its theoretical extension to the broadest of cultural concerns, without any diminishment of its experiential matrix in artful scenarios. The notions of disappearing disciplinary boundaries and enthralling epistemological developments, which this reflection supposes, provided for the conference’s participatory sensibility. It is this same susceptibility to engagement that has been privileged and put to work in the developments for this publication. In this sense, the book’s differing takes on the creation and recognition of meaning (in visual encounters with performance practices) might be understood to occur in full sympathy with the emergence of academia’s ‘visual turn;’ particularly as it originated in late modernity’s challenge to passive ideas of observation – through an open re-conception of perceiving as a distributed happening. 2 2. Defining the Visual Turn Martin Jay has suggested that the nascent visual turn had a defining moment in 1988 when attendees of a Dia Art Foundation conference, in New York, gathered together to discuss ‘the question of the cultural determinations of visual experience in the broadest sense.’ 3 These proceedings apparently encouraged conjecture on a supposition that ocular views might be analogous with intellectual ‘world-views,’ and so formed through an interested lens constructed in the perceiver’s social environment. 4 This speculation apparently came after a sense that the field of

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__________________________________________________________________ visual studies was cohering around an intersection, of the anthropological application of linguistics (pioneered by Claude Lévi-Strauss) with Martin Heidegger’s Being and Time model of the human subject (it effectively being pulled through the world by the assignations of its culture). 5 The degree to which notions of the innocent eye would subsequently come to be disparaged might be registered in a key 1995 publication edited by Chris Jenks, and simply entitled Visual Culture. This book’s contributors seemed to agree that the implications of the aforementioned intellectual junction could be most compellingly evidenced in the fashionably brash, and arguably neo-Marxist, philosophies of Guy Debord, Jean Baudrillard, and Michel Foucault – the content of Visual Culture’s essays generally endorsing their poststructural suspicions (of a perceptual field of pure information) as chapter after chapter identified perception and its perceived things with the power, and strategies, of ‘civilising’ institutions. As the book’s contributors rallied to support ideas of a culturally determined visual field, their differing academic backgrounds also suggested that the visual turn was poised to cut across the divides between disciplines within the humanities. Chris Jenks’ own introduction to Visual Culture highlighted the poststructural basis of this anticipated coherence, as he supposed that modernity had relieved the world of some of its more enriching dimensions – by transforming it into a display of images: Throughout modernity, vision has … become divested of its originality, in ways both real and imagined. In a perceptual environment of rapidly changing and infinitely replaceable images and representations much of what is “seen” is prereceived … . As Marx originally suggested, nature no longer offers itself free of the “sensuous” engagement of human labour … . But more than this, the visual experience of the real is often second(hand?). 6 In a subsequent chapter of the book, entitled ‘Reporting and Visualising,’ Andrew Barry managed to succinctly capture the challenging connotations of this assessment, through a far-reaching review of the visual paradigm of auditing. This undermined the idea that its perceptual process simply made systems transparent to the parties operating on their outside: [A]udits are not passive techniques; they foster the development of practices and actions which it is possible to audit. The object which the audit “sees” is an object which the institution of audit has helped to make. Thus, there is always the possibility that a discrepancy may emerge between the object of audit and a “real” object which can never be adequately represented. 7

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__________________________________________________________________ As Barry’s essay would come to allow this model of official inspection to represent the event of visuality per se it propagated the newly iconoclastic (yet also passively resigned) mood of the visual studies project. Nevertheless, even as this position was to become something of the orthodox intellectual outlook (for the visual turn), some notable anthropologists and philosophers began cautioning that its perspective was repeating the mistakes of modernity. This latter resistance supposed that if the modern approach, to the perceived, faithfully identified its own discerning perceptions with the truthful essence of some sensed thing, then postmodernism’s growing investment in the inevitability of culturally determined perceptions was producing a milieu that was no-less anthropocentric. 8 The perceived human bias explained John Gray’s disenchantment, with the postmodern academic climate, which he described as ‘only the old anthropocentric conceit, rendered anew in the idiom of a secular Gnostic.’ 9 Tim Ingold evidently shared similar concerns; this led him to suppose that the poststructural logics of the visual turn were continuing a notorious modern dichotomy – even as it repositioned its ideas of ‘the body:’ Formerly placed with the organism on the side of biology, the body has now reappeared as a “subject” on the side of culture. Far from collapsing the Cartesian dualism of subject and object, this move actually serves to reproduce it. 10 What Gray, Ingold, and their ilk seemed to be demanding was some academic adequacy to the earth, as they understood it to be constituted through all configurations of matter. Today, the disturbing epistemological effects of such disputes seem to be weakening poststructuralism’s claim on visual studies. 3. Interdisciplinarity in Action The introduction to a 2010 visual studies publication, The Aesthetic Dimension of Visual Culture, provided Ondrej Dadejik and Jakub Stejskal with an opportunity to share a survey of its developing field. The pair’s preliminary writing recognised the discursive primacy of a ‘French iconaclasm’ (this accepting the philosophies of Debord, Baudrillard and Foucault) in their contemporaries’ accounts of visual culture. But their overview also acknowledged significant pockets of resistance to any poststructural monopoly of its academic discourse. Their essay’s progression would register multiple components to this opposition, but it would come to identify a clear ‘counter-current’ in the apparent revival of iconographical and formalist approaches to visuality. 11 As these unorthodox perspectives were understood to engage perceived things in terms of their apparent capacity for affect, they hinted at visuality’s congruence with a discourse of object agencies, occurring in the somewhat analogous field of material culture studies. 12 This broad perspectival shift registers an enduring credibility for

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__________________________________________________________________ the aesthetic accounts of visuality advanced by the prominent theorists of modern fine art (such as Erwin Panofsky and Ernst Gombrich). The legacy was most clearly accepted and explained in a subsequent essay of The Aesthetic Dimension…, by Pol Capdevila: [O]ur visual capacity is developed by years of looking at our world … . Objects, pictures (artistic or not), and also verbal descriptions (heard and read) are the material from which we form our mental sets and enrich our visual capacities. … [A]rtistic styles, like languages, articulate our experience of the world, these experiences also give us other resources to attend to … other objects of our life. 13 This contrary warmth, for the levels of contact and resonance that occur between perceivers and the things that they perceive, supported Dadejik and Stejskal’s anticipation of a more fragmented visual discourse which remains loosely united – through its suspicion of traditional disciplines – but without the strong consolidating thread which the endorsement of cultural determinism had formally provided. One pertinent promise of this book might, then, lie in its thematic engagement with interface activity itself. This might provide for a cosmological process overtone, which arguably has the potential to safeguard some faltering interdisciplinary coherence, as it also contributes to the growing richness of visual studies’ current discursive field. The layered academic effect supposed has something of an analogue, and an inspirational resource, in the ideas of the sociologist Bruno Latour. The very name of the actor-network-theory (ANT), which he helped to develop, acknowledges a performance precedence for its engagement with the manifold of agencies – near and remote – at work within all scenarios. 14 But a most sympathetic recognition, of ANT’s performance credentials, might come through the adoption of its methodology in the research attitude. I say this because its logic has the capacity to cultivate a reverence and sensitivity for engagement – as its models of systems seems to identify their events with an awe inspiring process of synergy. In effect, then, the acceptance of ANT’s performance paradigm might reproduce the work of process philosophy (which has its most famous advocate in the figure of Alfred North Whitehead): a project which supports an outward looking and selfless perspective – as it disturbs conceptual frames, and the safety of niches, by actively opening up any vision towards the generative horizon of neighbouring entities, perspectives, and projects. Timnah Christine Card Gretencord recently highlighted, and put to work, these process effects in a PhD thesis that explored ways of transforming a somewhat insular outreach project (analogous with a disciplined method) into a progressive field of positive engagement. As Gretencord supposed that ANT acknowledged the

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__________________________________________________________________ ineluctable and transformative activity of interfaces, she also pointed to the earthly (by which I mean ecological and entropic) meaning of performance in/as interdisciplinary research: ANT asserts that performance establishes meaning and that such performances are the means by which power is enacted. While ANT agrees that some individuals wield more power than others, it does not agree that these asymmetries are unchangeable or arbitrary. Rather, ANT asserts that power asymmetries come only at great effort, that there is no such thing as “social capital” … , and that the asymmetries that result … always demonstrate a tendency to revert to a former state or to seek new geometries. This tendency to betray one’s organizer by seeking new alliances stems from the fact that … no alliance is perfectly representative of the interests of each of its members. The members … seek always better representations of their interests, and thus demonstrate their ability to collude with or hold apart from an invitation to be organized and put to use … . 15 If Gretencord’s description of an ANT scenario acknowledges the powerful potential of frontiers, it also accepts that the maintenance of communicative relations need not be an inevitability of its system model. Nevertheless, her articulation shares something of how an existential submission, to ANT’s performance dynamic, might effect a new perceptual coherence for the visual turn, as it reconciles epistemological theme and methodological approach (in its holistic esteeming of activity) – even as it keeps the progressing discursive boundaries open, and so disposed to difference. The chapters in this book might be understood to realise something of this promise as they each register the stimulating significance of visual interfaces both in the queries they pursue and in their subsequent attitude to their research agendas. The imminent introduction, to the constitutive chapters, is intended to frame each contribution in terms of this overarching issue. 4. The Constitutive Chapters This book is sorted into parts, which are intended to recognise four key (and interrelated) conference themes; these are (1) the process of changing cultural perspectives, (2) material agency, (3) spatiality, and (4) identity and the situated self. The first part addresses the issue of changing cultural perspectives in the tense context of theatrical events that are, equally, expected to sustain tradition and become the agents of social change. As Bilha Blum’s chapter, ‘Looking at Postmodern Performances of Canonical Plays,’ considers the contemporary

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__________________________________________________________________ awareness of this tension – and its contested effects – she generates a thoughtful meditation on how a postmodern performance penchant, for challenging an audience’s expectation of a theatrical coherence, might be particularly complicated (and complicating) when the performed plays have helped forge the cultural inheritance of a viewing gaze. As Blum engages with such productions in their struggle to overcome notions of reference, she registers a contrary proliferation of meaning that surely frustrates the visual certainties that secure a human subject. Yet she also invites, and initiates, a new interrogation of the performance interface, as she finds that these pluralising encounters equally challenge the simple alignment of presence with the negation of social identities. The next chapter, Idit Suslik’s ‘Dancing Clowns and Desert Dunes: Challenging Traditional Flamenco Imagery through “Fusion,”’ engages with flamenco dance in terms of its changing representational aims and strategies. To assist, Suslik identifies the cultural modes that have determined prevalent styles of the Spanish dance. As these variously relate to conflicting (if connected) social aims – of preserving and sharing flamenco’s cultural heritage(s), commodifying its communal events, and appropriating its aesthetic to further particular ideologies – Suslik describes a somewhat divided dance scene, yet one which might be understood to be still thriving through an essential level of responsiveness (which shoots through all of its manifestations). The explication of this defining essence allows Suslik to show how its acknowledgement, in a most contemporary variety of flamenco (which she calls ‘fusion’), can curiously defy any conservative tendencies even as it reproduces the format of its earliest incarnation – as a tragic expression of the Andalusian Gypsy reverence for life. Adele Anderson’s chapter, ‘Old Arts in New Media: Reconfiguring Meaning and Performance in Opera “Live in HD,”’ addresses the issue of theatrical experience with some special regard to the affects of its remediation in ‘cinecasts.’ Anderson dwells on the ways in which this unfamiliar interface might be generating a newly remote, yet potentially influential, popular audience for live performance’s more formal (and exclusive) genres. As such events are understood to diminish the traditional, transformative, authority of any staged ‘presence,’ Anderson points to the new questions cinecasting raises, around the pivotal theatrical issue of ‘shared interpretation’ – particularly as its technology extends the reach of live performance into territories where theatrical traditions might not (or need not) be recognised. In the outcome the intermedial subject matter leads Anderson into the fraught discursive territory between cultural determinism and visual aesthetics, yet her careful treatment of its ‘interpenetrating’ scenario announces new visual/performance dilemmas that defy the maintenance of its academic partialities. The two chapters that constitute the book’s second part each address the contribution that material objects have made to performance genres. Moreover, they also contribute to the spreading recognition, in the humanities, of the material

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__________________________________________________________________ agencies that constitute all actions and visual events. The part’s opening chapter, Andrew Cope’s ‘Visionary Voice / Silent Clown,’ continues something of Adele Anderson’s televisual theme as it revisits some early cinematic slapstick in terms of its maintenance of tragic theatre’s ritual dimensions. As this supposes that some cinematic clowning recognised a spiritualising level of continuity that exists between people and their material environment, Cope suggests that some of slapstick’s affecting set pieces were intended to afford a retreat from the perceptual ramifications of modern technology – as their playful encounters privileged the largesse of forceful interfaces rather than notions of independent objects. This part’s second chapter, Filipa Malva’s ‘Little Cinderella, Big Cinderella: Scenography as Performance,’ engages with a longstanding challenge to animate/inanimate boundaries which has been presented the sculpted matter of anthropomorphic and zoomorphic puppets. Through an unfolding concept of performed scenography, Malva’s chapter engages with the theme of interaction to significantly displace any idea of the puppet as a simple extension of a human performer. Her participatory perspective rather recognises the figure of the puppet as a performing body itself. In so doing, Malva joins Cope in acknowledging the vital role that physical theatre might play in maintaining a cultural profile for the magic of synergy, and other gateways to enchantment that are threatened by the intrusive rationalism and anthropocentric limits of our secular milieu. The third part of the book concerns itself with the relational issue of spatiality. David Franklin and Milan Kohout open the section with a chapter entitled ‘Spatial Relations Speak the Language of Social Hierarchy.’ The chapter shares an aesthetic vision of social relations as it re-conceives the internal communications of Western culture in terms of a contrast between the verticality of its mediated transmissions, and the more horizontal relations that are associated with tangible contacts. As their model describes the form of a cross, the chapter goes on to share its provision for symbolic, and physical, performance practices – through some documentation of the pair’s own combative art folio. These responses clearly register the conflicting impositions and agencies of vertical and horizontal communications. In so doing they also seem to remake the perceived as a site of conflict and tension. Nevertheless, as their scenarios also encourage the affirmation of new meanings (that recognise the social circumstances of the civic settings), the work arguably recovers the existential purpose of seeing – as it resolves a site of struggle in a way that favourably changes daily experiences. Given this, the chapter hangs a significant question mark over the postmodern resistance to meaning, by implicating its posturing in a passive complicity with prevalent power structures. Part three’s second chapter, ‘The Full and the Void in the Theatre of Robert Wilson’ by Marcelo de Andrade Pereira, addresses the theme of spatiality through engaging with the event of presence as a site of exchange. Whilst Pereira’s treatment finds its paradigm in the performance-led portraitures that help to constitute Robert Wilson’s theatrical folio, a commensurate philosophical gravitas

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__________________________________________________________________ comes through the chapter’s recourse to Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht’s book, The Production of Presence. Pereira carefully weaves both treatments together, to recover the epistemological importance of presence’s unfolding drama. In this sense he can anticipate an interdisciplinary future for the lively reciprocity of its event – as he supposes that the occurrence of things, towards one another, amounts to a foundational experience that could legitimately succeed (in importance) the prevalent pedagogy of information. The book’s final part visits the issue of subjectivity and selfhood – particularly in terms of its relationship with the dialectical processes that sustain the recognitions of social meanings. The part’s opening chapter, ‘The Explanatory Frame’ by Myer Taub, registers the performance-led development of a civic spectre (namely Florence Phillips, who helped to found the Johannesburg Art Gallery) as it emerges first through an engagement with some archival material and then through ‘a physical trajectory’ which enters a haunted public environment. The latter community project further develops the emerging historical figure as it also raises its own profile in/from the urban environment which it assisted/assists in determining. The lively public interface, which Taub’s methodology supposes, affirms the existential significance of meetings as it also comes to defy both the limitations of its own theatrical frame, and the assumption of an essential ‘inner’ to the subject (in both its human and epistemological meanings). The chapter’s challenge to perceptual dualisms extends to the writing itself, as its documentation is accepted to expose the archaeological process to further public agencies. The book’s closing chapter, ‘Performance Art as Intervention in Everyday Life: Participation, the Public Sphere and the Production of Meaning’ by Alexandra Antoniadou, takes a faceted look at community art through examples which afford a consideration of its imminent relational content (and meaning), its efficacy in a global context, and its collective manifestation in fleeting performance events (such as ‘flash mob’). If Antoniadou’s thoughts affirm the social possibilities of participation, they nevertheless point to a significant democratic tension as she makes clear that art’s public relations must risk hostility (more than they court popular or institutional support) if they hope to fully justify their creative claims and encourage feats of interpretation that carry people beyond the limiting conditions of a subjective gaze. Each of the chapters, gathered together for this book, demonstrates an intellectual capacity to entertain, and wrestle with, the competing conceptual frames that constitute the contemporary field of visual culture. Yet the contributions equally share some reluctance to fully commit to any of these competing perspectives. If this could be understood as some symptom of performance’s characteristic interest dynamic relations (as they are at work in the moment that meanings are generated), then it might also betray the project’s awareness of a drama that is the unfolding story of visuality. In this sense, even as the book maintains performance’s longstanding interest in the immediate

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__________________________________________________________________ interactions (of lives, bodies, voices, and things) that constitute any visual event, its collection also registers the project’s appreciation of the epistemological process tide that supports them. I finish by calling further attention to this tacit transcendence of particulars and details because its appreciation might usefully predispose readers to the holistic read which recognises (and furthers) the interdisciplinary ambition behind the compilation.

Notes 1

This was the second of two symposia, bearing this title, organised through InterDisciplinary.Net’s performance Ethos Hub. Further performance conferences, with a visual theme, are anticipated. 2 Nicholas Mirzoeff, ‘The Subject of Visual Culture’, in The Visual Culture Reader, ed. Nicholas Mirzoeff (London: Routledge, 2002), 6. 3 Martin Jay, Essays from the Edge: Parerga and Paralipomena (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press), 40. 4 Ibid., 41. 5 Martin Jay, ‘Returning the Gaze: The American Response to the French Critique of Occularcenrism’, in Perspectives on Embodiment, eds. Gail Weiss and Honi Fern Haber (New York: Routledge, 1999), 165-166. For a full account of the figures involved in this generative intersection of ideas see Ethan Kleinberg, Generation Existential: Heidegger’s Philosophy in France, 1927-1961 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2006), especially 281-283. 6 Chris Jenks, ‘The Centrality of the Eye in Western Culture: An Introduction’, in Visual Culture, ed. Chris Jenks (London: Rouledge, 1998), 10. 7 Andrew Barry, ‘Reporting and Visualising’, in Visual Culture, ed. Chris Jenks (London: Rouledge, 1998), 48-49. 8 Graham Harman, Guerrilla Metaphysics: Phenomenology and the Carpentry of Things (Chicago: Open Court Publishing, 2005), 15. 9 John Gray, Straw Dogs (London: Granta Books, 2003), 50. 10 Tim Ingold, The Perception of the Environment: Essays in Livelihood, Dwelling and Skill (London: Routledge, 2007), 170. 11 Ondrej Dadejik and Jakub Stejskal, ‘Introduction: Aesthetics and Visual Culture’, in The Aesthetic Dimension of Visual Culture, eds. Ondrej Dadejick and Jakub Stejskal (Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2010), ix-xvii. 12 The promise of this particular parallel is now being more fully recognised. See Gillian Rose and Divya P. Tolia-Kelly, ‘Visuality/Materiality: Introducing a Manifesto for Practice’, in Visuality/Materiality: Images, Objects and Practices, eds. Gillian Rose and Divya P. Tolia-Kelly (Farnham: Ashgate Publishing Limited, 2012), 1-12.

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__________________________________________________________________ 13

Pol Capdevila, ‘Hidden Aesthetics in Referential Images: The Manipulation of Time’, in The Aesthetic Dimension of Visual Culture, eds. Ondrej Dadejik and Jakub Stejskal (Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2010), 66. 14 Bruno Latour, Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-NetworkTheory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005). 15 Timnah Christine Card Gretencord, ‘From Outreach to Engagement: An ActorNetwork-Theory Analysis of Attracting Spanish-Speaking Participants to Public Programming’ (PhD diss., University of Illinois, 2009), 24, accessed in portable document format, 29 June 2012, https://www.ideals.illinois.edu/bitstream/handle/2142/11699/Gretencord_dissertati on_deposited.pdf?sequence=2.

Bibliography Barry, Andrew. ‘Reporting and Visualizing’. In Visual Culture, edited by Chris Jenks, 4257. New York: Routledge, 1998. Capdevila, Pol. ‘Hidden Aesthetics in Referential Images: The Manipulation of Time’. In The Aesthetic Dimension of Visual Culture, edited by Ondrej Dadejik, and Jakub Stejskal, 6175. Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2010. Dadejik, Ondrej, and Jakub Stejskal. ‘Introduction: Aesthetics and Visual Culture’. In The Aesthetic Dimension of Visual Culture, edited by Ondrej Dadejik, and Jakub Stejskal, ixxviii. Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2010. Gray, John. Straw Dogs. London: Granta Books, 2003. Gretencord, Timnah Christine Card. ‘From Outreach to Engagement: An ActorNetwork-Theory Analysis of Attracting Spanish-Speaking Participants to Public Programming’. PhD diss., University of Illinois, 2009. Accessed in portable document format, 29 June 2012. https://www.ideals.illinois.edu/bitstream/handle/2142/11699/Gretencord_dissertati on_deposited.pdf?sequence=2. Harman, Graham. Guerrilla Metaphysics: Phenomenology and the Carpentry of Things. Chicago: Open Court Publishing, 2005. Ingold, Tim. The Perception of the Environment: Essays in Livelihood, Dwelling and Skill. London: Routledge, 2007.

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__________________________________________________________________ Jay, Martin. ‘Returning the Gaze: The American Response to the French Critique of Occularcentrism’. In Perspectives on Embodiment, edited by Gail Weiss, and Honi Fern Haber, 165182. New York: Routledge, 1999. —––. Essays from the Edge: Parerga and Paralipomena. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2011. Jenks, Chris. ‘The Centrality of the Eye in Western Culture: An Introduction’. In Visual Culture, edited by Chris Jenks, 125. New York: Routledge, 1998. Kleinberg, Ethan. Generation Existential: Heidegger’s Philosophy in France, 1927-1961. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2006. Latour, Bruno. Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-NetworkTheory. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005. Mirzoeff, Nicholas. ‘The Subject of Visual Culture’. In The Visual Culture Reader, edited by Nicholas Mirzoeff, 323. London: Routledge, 2002. Rose, Gillian, and Divya P. Tolia-Kelly. ‘Visuality/Materiality: Introducing a Manifesto for Practice’. In Visuality/Materiality: Images, Objects and Practices, edited by Gillian Rose, and Divya P. Tolia-Kelly, 112. Farnham: Ashgate Publishing Limited, 2012.

Part 1 Reconfiguring Meaning: Cultural Perspectives of Performance

Looking at Postmodern Performances of Canonical Plays Bilha Blum Abstract Dismantling the conventional plot-character-space unity that characterises drama in general, and neglecting the role of narrative embedded in it, has lately become the axis of postmodern performance practice. Defined by Hans-Thies Lehmann as ‘postdramatic theatre’ and by Elinor Fuchs as the kind of theatre in which character is dead or dying, it emphasises the conspicuous prioritising of the visual over the textual typical of this era. Among its main qualities, realised by means of visual constructs which include the replacement of the dramatic character by a body in space, is the cancellation of the focused referential frame or logocentric logic often offered by drama, thus becoming presentational: i.e., presenting the elements of performance as themselves, rather than as re-presentational of the real. Followed by a multiplication of frames or, alternatively, by the abandonment of frames altogether, the result is the emergence of a multifarious range of possible ‘looking standpoints’ that leave the spectators’ expectations for coherence and integration unfulfilled. The specific case of staging canonical plays, which presupposes not only the presence of a written text in performance but one that is also at the very core of accepted cultural practices and beliefs, problematises the issues of visualisation and looking, placing them at a conflicting crossroads. Seen as ‘the true art of memory,’ as defined by Harold Bloom, staged canonical plays would seem to retain their representational status and their evocative power despite postdramatic visualising strategies. The question thus arises as to whether the visual signs of such performances, intertwined with representational attributes, can nonetheless function as non-referential autonomous entities and objectify the spectators’ gaze. Thomas Ostermeier’s 2005 production of Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler and Lee Breuer’s 2003 production of Mabou Mines’ DollHouse serve here as my main examples in engaging with these issues. Key Words: Canonical Plays, visual signs, presentation, representation, perception. ***** 1. Introductory Remarks: Defining the Field Seen from the specific angle of performance practice, the passage from modernism to postmodernism seems to have widely affected the very basics of stage direction, acting, stage design and audience reception. When applied to the text-to-stage transfer processes, it has generated new theatrical modes, mainly directed at dismantling the conventional plot-character-space unity that characterises modern drama, and at diminishing the role of narrative embedded in

4

Looking at Postmodern Performances of Canonical Plays

__________________________________________________________________ it. Hans-Thies Lehmann goes as far as defining such postmodern performances as ‘postdramatic,’ 1 i.e., as completely detached from a written play. As in his opinion such performances tend to discard certain ‘fictive processes’ naturally stemming from the visualisation of what is traditionally defined as drama, they fail to be ‘a description of the world by means of mimesis;’ 2 and, consequently, they differ from performances conceived through conventional transference methods of plays from the written page to the stage. By further asserting that, in these performances, it is the body of the actor rather than the dramatic character that ‘becomes the centre of attention, not as a carrier of meaning but in its physicality and gesticulation,’ 3 they introduce ‘a simultaneous and multi-perspectival form of perceiving,’ aimed at replacing ‘the linear-successive [one].’ By this, Lehmann implies that postmodern performances, in stark opposition to dramatic theatre in which ‘the scene stands for the world,’ 4 are actually presentational and selfreflexive. The issue of presentation versus representation in postmodern theatre is also raised by Elinor Fuchs, who describes it, following Lehmann, as the kind of theatre in which psychologically-conceived characters, once intended to reflect human beings in reality, are either dead or dying. 5 This rather controversial statement is certainly drawn from the interrelation of reality and fiction that characterises most artistic fields, and particularly from the intimate connection between dramatic characters in general – the way in which they are constructed and their relations with the other elements of performance – and the various cultural and philosophical shifts that often take place in society. As they also lie at the core of depiction strategies and mimetic systems since the birth of theatre, dramatic characters’ ability to represent ever-changing streams of thought has always been an essential issue in theatrical research. That is why they often constitute a primary theoretical layer in performance analysis and categorisation, including those concerning audience perception. When discussing this issue in relation to the passage from modernism to postmodernism, the cultural and philosophical shifts that determine the conception and the role of character mainly concern the contemporary habitual ways of understanding what external reality is. This is primarily connected to the perception of the self as an independent subjective entity, which has replaced the former idea of man and woman being subjugated to the authority of superhuman powers and religious beliefs. Indeed, in modern times, as a direct result of the predominance of science and scientific research over religious creeds, followed by the rise of rationalistic and humanistic trends and the simultaneous recognition of realism as a main theatrical aesthetic technique, the representative function of dramatic characters in performance was even further enhanced. Gradually, they became one of drama’s most important and influential factors in the creation of meaning; mostly so, because modern drama, as described by Emile Zola at the time, proclaimed the visual reproduction of the audience’s immediate milieu and

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__________________________________________________________________ the disclosure of relevant issues concerning contemporary social order by means of structure and plot as its ultimate aim. Playwrights were continuously encouraged to conceive dramatic characters as the result of ‘true observation’ and ‘sincere investigation’ of real men and women. Following Darwinian theories involving the nature of human beings and the reasons for their social behaviour, they were also advised to depict them as if determined by ‘the environment’ and to let them ‘act according to the logic of facts combined with the logic of their own disposition.’ 6 Judging from the work of key modern playwrights, particularly Ibsen, Strindberg and Chekhov, the European mainstream stage during the last decades of the nineteenth century and most of the first half of the twentieth century did indeed feature dramatic characters that appeared to have been ‘taken from reality, scientifically analyzed, and described without one lie’ 7 – that is, characters that reproduced modern men and women who had the right to make their own decisions and bore full responsibility for their deeds. In postmodern performances, however, this almost unanimously acknowledged humanistic outlook has been replaced by what Fuchs defines as ‘the dispersed idea of self … represented in many different ways.’ 8 Hence, the validity of dramatic characters as a major expression of ideology, also capable of conditioning the audience’s point of view, is severely impaired. In this sense, the ‘death of character,’ as she phrases it, indicates the loss of its ability to quote rational reality, synchronic or otherwise, and results in the substitution of the focused referential frame or logocentric logic offered by modern drama either by a multiplication of frames or by the cancellation of frames altogether. Directly derived from notions obviously reflective of postmodern thought such as relativity, indeterminacy, perspective and plurality, a multifarious range of possible ‘looking standpoints’ is created, from none up to infinite, leaving the spectators’ expectations for coherence, oneness, rationality and unity of thought, utterly unfulfilled. Having discarded the modern concept of character, which had previously functioned as a leading element in representative theatrical modes, all the other visual components of performances are perceived according to their intrinsic value and meaning; or, in other words, as presentational rather than as representative of an extra-textual reality or as its artistic referential operator. Moreover, precisely because ‘the [postmodern] performance appears to offer the audience more direct contact with what is present on stage,’ its focus now turns mainly physical. Consequently, a critical change in what Maaike Bleeker terms ‘dominant modes of perception’ 9 is immediately activated. Bleeker indeed confirms Lehmann’s argumentation on postmodern (or postdramatic) characters, as she also implies that they tend to appear as bodies in space rather than, quoting Zola, ‘bone and blood’ 10 cultural and social agents. Seen as such, these performances also acknowledge the passage from textuality to visuality applied to a large diversity of human activities so typical of this era. At the same time, they attest to the supremacy of the latter over the former – an

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Looking at Postmodern Performances of Canonical Plays

__________________________________________________________________ occurrence which by the end of the twentieth century became known as the ‘visual turn.’ 11 Indeed, bringing the long dominance of textually-orientated culture to an end strongly affected diverse cultural practices; but, in this specific case, it resulted in a different kind of performance, in which the visual components are deliberately intended to be superior to the textuality of the play. As suggested by Bonnie Marranca, who widely researched New York performances at the break of postmodernism, theatre practitioners at the time were mostly devoted to creating ‘a visual grammar “written” in sophisticated perceptual codes’ 12 rather than to bringing a written play to the stage. Marranca further sustains that their works are effectively aimed at the ‘expansion of the audience’s capacity to perceive,’ 13 so as to enable spectators to absorb the visual elements presented on the stage as they really are, rather than to deduce their meaning on the basis of their referential qualities. That is why she uses the term ‘Theatre of Images’ to characterise these performances as a collective, differentiated unit. 2. Canonical Plays as Postmodern Performance When the visualisation of drama engages with established canonical plays, however, these new theatrical principles are often challenged and even defied by the plays’ very nature, as well as by their immortality and their world-wide reputation – with all of them serving to activate human recognition and memory. Basically, canonical plays are dramatic texts that have been elevated to the status of masterpieces by mainly social, cultural and sometimes also economic and bureaucratic systems, following their inherent structural and thematic compatibility with the norms and aesthetic dictates of their own contexts. Even so, their survival, and consequently their extended relevance to a large variety of addressees throughout long periods of time, reveals their unique bond not only to their synchronic context (when their status was being established) but also to the contextual ever-changing characteristics surrounding all production occurrences. As Adele Anderson suggests in her discussion of media and live performances, they ‘enable, constrain, and complicate the material frameworks of practice, presenting further possibilities for serendipitous and unexpected results’ especially in what concerns audience reception. 14 In fact, in each new encounter between a specific production of a canonical play and its addressees, past and present, tradition and actuality are juxtaposed in such a manner that they appear to be simultaneously apprehended by the spectators’ minds. Therefore, it is hardly possible that, having been accepted as excellent and almost sacred, they are then disregarded by stage directors, actors, designers or any other theatrical practitioner, as Lehmann presumes. In any case, the large number of contemporary stage artists who choose to engage with them over and over again, such as Robert Wilson (Strindberg’s A Dream Play, Brecht’s A Threepenny Opera), Richard Forman (Brecht’s A Threepenny Opera, Buchner’s Woyzech), Thomas Ostermeier (Ibsen’s A Doll’s House and Hedda Gabler), Lee Breuer

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__________________________________________________________________ (Beckett’s Come and Go and The Lost Ones, Ibsen’s A Doll’s House), and Peter Sellars (Shakespeare’s Othello and Antony and Cleopatra), obviously serves to confirm these plays’ continued relevancy and popularity long after they were written. Paradoxically, these continuous translations of canonical plays – modern plays in particular – to innovative theatrical trends merely add to their reputation, and even though they sometimes impinge on the plays’ wholeness, they nonetheless reinforce their favoured position in the canon. In this sense, their frequent stage realisations actually contribute to their immortality and popularity among potential theatre-goers who, in this way, are given the opportunity to encounter them on a fairly regular basis. Therefore, it is highly possible that, having been accepted as an archetype of excellence, they still remain visible behind the performance even after they are deconstructed, disguised, displaced or merely alluded to. Idit Suslik finds a similar instance of simultaneity of reception in a new stylistic tendency in contemporary flamenco that utilises a strategy she calls ‘fusion.’ While analysing Malucos Flamenco, an outstanding instance of the way in which traditional flamenco evolved, she points to the ‘aesthetic conflict between the visual language [of the show] and the spectators’ expectations deriving from the show’s title thus challenging the spectators’ reception processes.’ 15 Based on the dynamics of canonisation and the very primary features that characterise canonical plays, as stated above, the question to be posed now is that of whether dramatic texts that have become canonised and an integral and substantial component of our cultural inheritance – indeed, of our cultural genetic code – are really above changes in performative artistic trends. Even if the answer is negative, as their numerous new realisations indicate, the influence of the canonical status of the plays on performances is so profound, and their attested notoriety so powerful, that the starting point of audience perception and reception processes can be none other than the written play itself. In other words, regardless of artistic styles and visualisation modes, when confronted with the performance of a canonical play, spectators are actually encouraged to reflect on how the particular portrayal of Hamlet or Mrs. Elving or Oedipus or Yerma that they are offered differs, or does not differ, from the original, and why. Given the vital role that the spectators’ awareness and a-priori acquaintance with plots and characters generally play in building communication channels that tie together stage and audience, it is quite understandable that their apprehension of the play must be taken into consideration when aesthetic strategies for a particular performance are being established or when its general set-up is about to be decided upon. I therefore believe that a stage realisation of a canonical play by postmodern (or even postdramatic) modes, like any other stage realisation, should be considered an intentional representation of the illusory world imbued in the original play. Within this context, the concept ‘intentional’ refers to the directorial artistic choices and aims involved in the creative processes leading to the performance; the concept

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Looking at Postmodern Performances of Canonical Plays

__________________________________________________________________ ‘representation’ suggests the performance’s intrinsic and simultaneous referential relation to both the play’s context and the surrounding context; and the expression ‘illusory world’ points to those ideological and cultural components of the play that originally relate to the synchronic social systems regulating human behaviour and relationships. Strangely enough, these are the very same components generally made relevant by the artists charged with transferring canonical plays to the stage by means of disrupting the play’s structure, altering the text and re-designing the characters. In sum, staging canonical plays presupposes not only their actual presence in performance but also their intimate connection with both the cultural and the theatrical traditions in which they were originally created. As a result, the issues of presentation versus representation and frame-multiplication emerging from postmodern theatrical techniques and trends often come into conflict, thus implying that these performances belong to a category of their own. On the one hand, because canonical plays, having survived the passage of time, are universally seen as ‘the true art of memory,’ 16 they constitute not only ‘a statement about what is past as mere testimony to something that needs to be interpreted, but say something to the present as if it were said especially to us.’ 17 As such, they are situated at the core of accepted cultural practices and beliefs that preserve past traditions and become simultaneously relevant to their actual audiences whenever they are put on stage. In this sense, they are necessarily turned into representational performances rather than presentational. In fact, it could be additionally contended that due to their extraordinary structural and thematic qualities, canonical plays are exalted by a special kind of ‘aura’ – a kind of ‘strange tissue of space and time’ – that, according to Walter Benjamin, characterises authentic artworks and guarantees their eternal value. Apparently, in the long run, this so-called ‘aura’ turns into such a strong and integral component of the play that it does not wither even when it is transferred to a postmodern stage and made to confront the aesthetic codes of postmodern theatre. Furthermore, because ‘[t]he way in which human perception is organised – the medium in which it occurs – is conditioned not only by nature but by history’ 18 and, I would add, also by philosophical streams of thought – canonical plays are not merely present in performance but are also able to regulate audience perception and reception. It follows that, on account of the audience’s either conscious or intuitive acknowledgement of the play behind the performance, along with its plot, its characters, its former stage interpretations and its original context, realising canonical plays on the stage contradicts what Lehmann claims to be the ever growing tendency to achieve independence from both the dramatic and contextual considerations that characterise postmodern theatre. By strongly sustaining that postmodernism facilitated the ‘entry of theatre into the age of experimentation,’ so that ‘it became conscious of the artistic expressive potential slumbering within it, independent of the text to be realized,’ he presupposes that, at this time, theatre

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__________________________________________________________________ underwent an intensive process of what he identifies as ‘autonomization’ and ‘retheatricalization.’ 19 It should be noted, however, that Lehmann’s remarks refer to theatre in a broad sense of the term and do not include plays that have been canonised as a differentiated category. On the other hand, as stage realisations of canonical, almost venerated, plays do apply postmodern modes of theatrical expression regardless of the plays’ preferred (canonical) status, they may still be inclined to refute representation and free themselves from the text. Like other postmodern performances, they might concentrate on creating a sense of autonomous, immediate, existence in order to meet the many changes in audience perception that have been aroused, quoting Jean-Francois Lyotard, by ‘the postmodern condition.’ 20 In a way, leaving purely theatrical considerations aside, denying the absolute authority of canonical written plays in performance practice parallels Lyotard’s theoretical approach to postmodernism, which he describes mainly as the era of ‘incredulity toward metanarratives.’ Metanarratives, he believes, should be totally delegitimised because they presided over people’s ways of thinking and behaving in past times and prevented them from seeing the truth. 21 Likewise, in postmodern times, written drama, taken as a theatrical equivalent of Lyotard’s metanarratives has apparently become ‘the enemy rather than the vehicle of theatrical presence’ because, using Fuchs’ terminology, it is considered ‘an element of political oppression in the theatrical process, demanding submission to external authority.’ 22 Accordingly, and for the very same reasons, Lyotard argues that metanarratives hinder people’s ability to crystallise their potential to think freely, just as, in Fuchs’ opinion, written drama is liable for repressing artistic independence and limiting creativity by imposing its structure and theme on its visualisations. In this sense, postmodern ideology and performance practice seem to share the same aspiration: namely, to liberate humanity and the theatre from the pre-eminence of myth, old narratives and past tradition, both in form and content. According to Lyotard, this is the unavoidable outcome of the considerable ‘progress in the sciences,’ the annulment of a strong and elaborate ‘apparatus of legitimation’ and ‘the crisis of metaphysical philosophy and of university institution which in the past relied on [metanarratives],’ 23 which characterises postmodernism. And yet, precisely because both canonical plays, whose inherent relevancy to their own as well as to many other social contexts elevates them to the status of masterpieces, and Lyotard’s rather dictatorial metanarratives, are still equally recognised as an organic part of a consensual cultural tradition, their power to bring the past into the present or to relate to reality has not entirely faded. As confirmed by actual postmodern realisations of canonical plays, although functioning as a concretisation of an homogeneous, unifying ideological force held responsible for narrowing the spectrum of ‘looking standpoints’ that self-reflexive, presentational, modes of performance aim to widen, canonical plays and postmodern performances are not, paradoxically, antagonistic entities. As I will

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Looking at Postmodern Performances of Canonical Plays

__________________________________________________________________ presently exemplify, canonical plays’ realisations still retain the ability to create a unique kind of semiosis and meaning-constructing referentiality based on the intimate, simultaneous, co-existence of the performances’ clearly presentational visual signs (as dictated by postmodern theatrical modes) on the one hand, and the clearly representational attributes originating from the aura that surrounds canonical plays, on the other. 3. Canonical Plays in Performance For illustrative purposes, I have chosen to relate to two such performances: DollHouse 24 - Lee Breuer’s version of A Doll’s House – and Hedda Gabler 25 – Thomas Ostermeier’s version of the play bearing the same name. Besides the fact that these two plays were written by Ibsen and are extremely well-known, they both bear additional similarities, mainly concerning plot structure, language, space and characterisation, all derived from the plays’ strict compliance with the aesthetic rules of realism. Hence, the events in their respective three acts develop linearly, in perfect accordance with rational thinking and pure logic; and their characters are depicted as exact replicas of human beings whose reactions can be easily justified by their psychological biographies. In addition, they all speak everyday language, behave naturally and spend most of their time in a fashionable, bourgeois, Victorian-styled, living room. In Breuer’s DollHouse in particular, the question of textual authority in terms of the opposition between presentation and representation seems to be at the very centre of directorial intentionality and visualisation strategy at all times. At the performance’s starting point, in stark opposition to the aesthetics of realism embedded in the original play, the spectators are confronted with an almost empty stage, framed by velvet curtains and occupied by several large brown cardboard boxes scattered around. This somewhat meta-theatrical element, which calls for a definition of the dramatic space as an actual, not-disguised, stage, establishes the general atmosphere for the entire performance and triggers the spectators to regard it, from that moment on, as pure fiction, devoid of any trace of realistic illusion. This first impression is further enhanced after the packages are unpacked, revealing an authentic, prettily decorated dolls’ house, additional matching miniature furniture and a variety of toys. All these and a supplementary black, over-sized piano with another miniature one placed on top of it, a tiny bed, a rocking horse and a small Christmas tree, comprise the only scenery for the entire performance, with the exception of the last scene. When the first characters appear – Nora, Kristine and Helene, played by exceptionally tall actresses who are continuously bending and crawling to accommodate to the size of the miniature props – it is already clear that size, scale and proportions are one of this performance’s main visual motives. This is later confirmed and further enhanced by the three male roles in the play – Torvald, Dr. Rank and Krogstadt – being portrayed by very short men, actually dwarfs. 26

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__________________________________________________________________ Judging from all the characters’ flat, two-dimensional appearance, which includes fluffy corset-dresses for two of the three women (pregnant servant excluded) and Victorian three-piece suits for the men, it seems that they are all meant to perform as ‘icons or images’ 27 rather than as life-size characters that resemble human beings. The almost frenzied way in which most of them move around the stage – making them often look like rather hysterical children on a par with the setting – and the manner in which they deliver the text – which includes high-pitched utterances and occasional shrieks – constitute an additional step in the same direction, i.e., in distancing the performance from reality and, hence, broadening the stylistic as well as the conceptual gaps that separate this performance from the play. Throughout the performance, contrasting binaries, such as big and small, tall and short, childish and mature, men and women, illusion and theatricality, encounter each other to form an awkward, totally mismatched world picture, granting the stage the general appearance of an illusory playground, strangely inhabited by infantile adults of contrasting sizes. Most peculiar of all is the unconventional manner in which these binaries are characterised: for example, the oversized women seem particularly childish, weak and subordinated, whereas the very short men are depicted as powerful, self-confident and authoritative, despite their size. Nora in particular, with her blond, rather straw-looking, ‘big hair,’ her high-pitched voice, her hesitant disposition and her constant crawling posture, appears completely overpowered by her small, somewhat ridiculous husband who, figuratively speaking, seems absolutely determined to reduce her to a doll-like status with which he can entertain himself. Despite the mismatched proportions displayed on the stage and Breuer’s own declaration that in this performance ‘we deconstructed modernism,’ 28 it is still clear that his DollHouse is nonetheless an almost literal reading of Ibsen’s (modern) play – actually, a visualisation of the play’s inner conflicts, originally aroused by social transgression and repression; or, in other words, a concretisation of the play’s sub-text in terms of visual signs. Moreover, even though the basically frontal acting, distressed poses and extravagant gestures, accompanied by a live piano score, associate the performance with melodramatic silent movies and render it a somewhat comic, out-dated style, quite distant from the grave realism of the original play, the situation depicted, like in Ibsen’s play, is obviously meant to prove first and foremost how unfit, and unfair, this world is for women. While in Ibsen’s play this is evidenced through the extensive dialogues, the intricate plot and, in particular, through the characters’ actions and reactions – all serving as representational/referential signs pointing to the play’s social milieu, its inhabitants and its codes – Breuer puts women’s implied social inferiority itself on the stage, graphically conceptualised, and in a manner that certainly emphasises the ideological paradox embedded in a situation in which tall means low and vice versa.

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Looking at Postmodern Performances of Canonical Plays

__________________________________________________________________ Consequently, even if we assume that Breuer, as a true postmodernist artist, intentionally chose self-referentiality (or indeed presentationality) visually materialised as his main strategic tool, he does not entirely estrange the performance from the play’s original version. In fact, by visualising Ibsen’s subtext, concealed beneath the meticulous representation of reality that structures the play and delineates its meaning, Breuer actually deciphers, or rather decodes, the major metaphor imbued in the text and translates it to concrete elements of theatre. Putting the play’s components on the stage in such a crudely literal manner, as well as urging the spectators to see them as they really are, clearly exposes not only women’s pitiful situation but also the play’s intrinsic referential relation to its surrounding context, thus implying that the roots of women’s misfortune are to be found in social orders that are both wrong and offensive. As a result of the canonical status of the play, its wide popularity and its long life – all of which are responsible for its broad recognition – it is the play, its occurrences and the illusory world it contains, and not synchronic reality, that become, at first, the primary object of the referential attributes of the visual signs on the stage. In a rather peculiar manner that echoes Brecht’s theories on theatre, through associative processes and emotional responses to the characters, the spectators are expected gradually to transfer the play’s social context to their own, thus granting Breuer’s purely presentational visual images a sense of representability and referentiality. 29 A similar rather ambiguous attitude towards the visualisation of canonical texts and their representational attributes is also evident in Ostermeier’s production of Hedda Gabler, although his strategy is quite different from Breuer’s. In his version of the play, the original Victorian, rather heavy-set, living room in which the action takes place is replaced by a sophisticated, modern, and yet austere set design, featuring an art-deco style sofa and table. These are all placed in a semitransparent, half-open setting, with the stage enclosed by a concrete wall on only one side and a transparent glass wall at the rear. The stage thus features a T-shaped structure representing a regular room. Because it also rotates from time to time and its ceiling comprises an overhead mirror, the characters are constantly on display, even when they are not an integral part of the on-going action or are situated behind the concrete wall. Their continual visibility is further enhanced by occasional film projections, which are recorded throughout the live performance, so that, in fact, in this production, the points of reference from which spectators can follow the characters’ actions are infinitely multiplied. Through all this – the transparency of the walls, the top mirror, the film projections and the rotating stage – the focused referential frame offered by Ibsen’s play is revoked, resulting in the spectators broadening their understanding. As already mentioned, this phenomenon does not constitute an exception in postmodern theatre for quite similar effects have been achieved by other postmodern productions as well. A notable example can be found in mediatised productions, which Anderson terms ‘inter-medium performances.’ As she rightly

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__________________________________________________________________ affirms, these performances generate ‘ambiguities that can force audiencespectators to actively choose, reconsider, and interpret their meaning.’ 30 Unlike DollHouse, in which the time of action dictated by the play is not completely altered, in Hedda Gabler, in addition to the fashionable furniture, the actors and actresses wear trendy clothes and the background music is definitely upto date – all of which defines this production as an aestheticised representation of what seems to be a multi-layered postmodern society. Substituting a laptop computer for the pages of Lövborg’s thought-provoking manuscript is but a final visual touch that serves to determine that the events of the performance are unmistakably taking place in the present, right here and now. Accordingly, while in the play-text, driven by her discontent and her envious and vindictive disposition, Hedda sets Lövborg’s book on fire just before committing suicide, in the performance she violently destroys the computer with a hammer. 31 When the other characters enter the stage and approach her, she conveniently pushes the pieces under the sofa. The contents of Ostermeier’s stage nonetheless indicate that, despite the differences in style and design, Ibsen’s famous living-room, which originally functioned as a microcosm of nineteenth-century bourgeois society, is the sole dramatic space here as well. However, due to the transparency of the room and the simultaneity of action achieved by the various visual devices that the stage exhibits, it engenders quite a different, multi-perspectival way of looking, in perfect accordance with postmodern terms. With each turn of the stage or each reflection in the mirror, with each film projection or, in sum, each visual invasion of the characters’ privacy, the range of the spectators’ perspectives becomes considerably broadened. At the same time, in Bleeker’s words, as the audience is ‘granted more direct access to the things as they are in themselves;’ 32 they are drawn closer to the visual components of the room and its inhabitants. However, precisely because the evocative power of the play’s canonical aura is enhanced by the performance’s multi-perspectivity, whose ‘function,’ says Bleeker, ‘is not specular or passive but constitutive within the register of representation, of the order and meaning of things,’ 33 the room retains its referential, yet updated, ability and consequently becomes a renewed, and redesigned, microcosm, reprovingly addressing the synchronic reality. The final scenes in both DollHouse and Hedda Gabler offer a further critical approach to society, parallel to promoting the perception of the two performances’ presentational visual signs as concomitantly representational. It is in this sense that they both adopt and challenge postmodern modes of performance practice through the activation and manipulation of the spectators’ emotional memory of the plays lying behind the performances. In Breuer’s production, the meta-theatrical illusion rendered by the stage throughout the performance was further underscored, as he chose to set a new and surprising theatrical background to Nora and Torvald’s last dialogue. Throughout

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Looking at Postmodern Performances of Canonical Plays

__________________________________________________________________ this scene, in which they sing rather than speak the lines of the play, the two characters are surrounded by a multi-level panel of what seems to be miniature opera boxes, each of them occupied by a pair of Victorian-looking puppets, playing the role of spectators, as if they were watching a performance-within-aperformance. Instead of the now iconic slamming of the door that signals the end of Ibsen’s play, in Breuer’s production, Nora takes off her clothes and blond wig and, naked and bold, standing erect on her feet for the first time, she exhibits her true body proportions and, it would seem, her just acquired real identity as a freed contemporary woman. At this time, from a place high above the stage, her voice, now loud and clear, becomes the voice of social protest, while her body becomes representational of the reality in which she lives. In Hedda Gabler’s final scene no changes of scenery are introduced. However, precisely because of the plurality of looking standpoints on which Ostermeier leans, this production’s social concern seems to become the more evident. Indeed, when the stage spins for the last time, the audience is confronted with Hedda’s bloodied dead body, lying behind the concrete wall that blocks the other characters’ sight but not the spectators’. On the other side of the stage, her husband and her friend can be simultaneously seen desperately trying to reconstruct Lövborg’s book, absorbed in finding a way to undo what Hedda had done, and totally unaware of her tragic end. This stage picture reveals not only Hedda’s inability to control her own destiny even in a post-feminist era in which women are not supposed to feel entrapped but also, in more general terms, the ephemeral nature of existence. Echoing a multilayered, estranged, transparent society, for whom death, entangled with boredom, has lost its emotional effect, this final scene constitutes a crucial point in the thematic adaptation of the performance to postmodern ideology. Enhanced by the spectators’ collective memory of the play, in which Hedda’s body remains unseen, as her suicide takes place off-stage, what is emphasised here is the latent danger inherent in the interminable, constant exposure derived from contemporary visual culture. 34

Notes 1

Hans-Thies Lehmann chose this term to define postmodern theatre and used it as the title of his book on the subject. See: Postdramatic Theatre, trans. Karen JürsMunby (London and New York: Routledge, 2006). 2 Ibid., 69. 3 Ibid., 95. 4 Ibid., 16. 5 Elinor Fuchs, The Death of Character: Perspectives on Theater after Modernism (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1996). Though Fuchs parallels Lehmann concerning the depiction of characters in postmodern

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__________________________________________________________________ performances, in her survey of his book, she seriously objects to his use of the term ‘postdramatic.’ See: Elinor Fuchs, The Dramatic Review 52, No. 2 (2008): 178183. 6 Emile Zola, ‘Naturalism on the Stage’, in Playwrights on Playwriting, ed. Toby Cole (New York: Hill and Wang, 1961), 6. 7 Ibid. 8 Ibid., 9. 9 Maaike Bleeker, ‘Look Who’s Looking!: Perspective and the Paradox of Postdramatic Subjectivity’, Theatre Research International 29, No. 1 (2004): 29. 10 Zola, ‘Naturalism on Stage’, 6. 11 Nicholas Mirzoeff, ‘What Is Visual Culture?’, in The Visual Culture Reader, ed. Nicholas Mirzoeff (London: Routledge, 1998), 3-13. See also: William T. J. Mitchell, ‘What Is an Image?’, New Literary History 15, No. 3 (1983): 503-537. 12 Bonnie Marranca, The Theatre of Images (Baltimore and London: The John Hopkins University Press, 1996), xiv-xv. 13 Ibid. 14 Adele Anderson, ‘Old Arts in New Media: Reconfiguring Meaning and Performance in Opera “Live in HD”’, in this volume. 15 Idit Suslik, ‘Dancing Clowns and Desert Dunes: Challenging Traditional Flamenco Imagery through “Fusion”’, in this volume. 16 Harold Bloom, The Western Canon (New York, San Diego and London: Harcourt Brace and Co., 1994), 35. 17 Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method (New York: Seabury Press, 1975), 257-258. 18 Walter Benjamin, ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Reproducibility’, in Selected Writings, Volume 3, trans. Edmund Jephcott, Howard Eiland et al. (Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2002), 104. 19 Lehmann, Postdramatic Theatre, 50. 20 Jean-Francois Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minessota Press, 1984), xxiv. 21 Ibid. 22 Fuchs, Death of Character, 70. 23 Ibid. 24 DollHouse, Mabou Mines, New York, 2003, directed by Lee Breuer, set design: Narelle Sissons, featuring Maude Mitchell as Nora; Mark Povinelli as Torvald. 25 Hedda Gabler, Shaubhüne, Berlin, 2005, directed by Thomas Ostermeier, set design: Jan Pappelbaum, featuring Katharina Schüttler as Hedda, Lars Eidinger as Tesman, Kay Barthölomans Schulze as Lövborg. 26 Various visual captions of this production can be found in:

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__________________________________________________________________ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nmxfLeNXE. 27 Marranca, Theatre of Images, x-xi. 28 Lee Breuer used these terms in an interview held by Tom LeGoff on February 27, 2009, accessed 4 April 2012, http://gothamist.com/2009/02/27/director_lee_breuer_mabou_mines_dol.php. 29 According to Brecht, for theatre to be effective, spectators are to be confronted with historical facts containing social issues that teach something about their own society. See: Bertolt Brecht, ‘A Short Organum for the Theatre’, in Brecht on Theatre, ed. John Willet (New York: Hill and Wang, 1986), 179-205. 30 Anderson, ‘Old Arts in New Media’, in this volume. 31 The computer scene in this production can be found in: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6AQa2HZO5uQ. 32 Bleeker, ‘Look Who’s Looking’, 30. 33 Ibid.

Bibliography Benjamin, Walter. ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Reproducability’. In Selected Writings Volume 3. Translated by Edmund Jephcott, Howard Eiland, and others. Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2002. Bleeker, Maaike. ‘Look Who’s Looking!: Perspective and the Paradox of Postdramatic Subjectivity’. Theatre Research International 29, No. 1 (2004): 29– 41. Bloom, Harold. The Western Canon. New York, San Diego, and London: Harcourt Brace and Co., 1994. Brecht, Bertold. ‘A Short Organum for the Theatre’. In Brecht on Theatre, edited by John Willet, 179–205. New York: Hill and Wang, 1986. Fuchs, Elinor. The Death of Character: Perspectives on Theatre after Modernism. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1996. —––. ‘Postdramatic Theatre’ (Book Review). The Drama Review 52, No. 2 (2008): 178–183. Gadamer, Hans-Georg. Truth and Method. New York: Seabury Press, 1975.

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__________________________________________________________________ Le Goff, Tom. ‘Director Lee Breuer, Mabou Mines DollHouse’. Accessed 4 April 2012. http://gothamist.com/2009/02/27/director_lee_breuer_mabou_mines_dol.php. Lehmann, Hans Thies. Postdramatic Theatre. Translated by Karen Jürs-Munby. London and New York: Routledge, 2006. Lyotard, Jean-Francois. The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. Translated by Geoff Bennington, and Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minessota Press, 1984. Marranca, Bonnie. The Theatre of Images. Baltimore and London: The John Hopkins University Press, 1996. Mirzoeff, Nicholas. ‘What Is Visual Culture?’ In The Visual Culture Reader, edited by Nicholas Mirzoeff, 3–13. London: Routledge, 1998. Mitchell, William T. J. ‘What Is an Image?’. New Literary History 15, No. 3 (1984): 503–537. Willet, John, ed. Brecht on Theatre. New York: Hill and Wang, 1986. Bilha Blum lectures at Tel-Aviv University on modern theatre, performance analysis and canonisation processes. Currently, her research and academic writing are devoted to the analysis of modern drama from a philosophical perspective.

Dancing Clowns and Desert Dunes: Challenging Traditional Flamenco Imagery through ‘Fusion’ Idit Suslik Abstract The opening scene of Malucos Flamenco, a flamenco piece by Carlos Chamorro and the Malucos company, reveals two odd-looking clowns. The visual aspects of these characters place them in contrast to traditional flamenco imagery: their faces are completely painted in white apart from big red noses, and they are only partially dressed with a variation of a classical tutu skirt. This circus-like imagery creates an aesthetic conflict between the visual language and the expectations deriving from the show’s title, thus challenging the spectator’s reception process. These images exemplify a new stylistic tendency in contemporary flamenco, which utilises an artistic strategy termed in this chapter as ‘fusion.’ This tendency has evolved since the early 1990s, and is evident in the work of additional contemporary flamenco choreographers. Despite the differences between these artists, their works nonetheless manifest a relating set of fundamental features, most notably the integration of different styles of movement syntax and musical composition. Moreover, this hybridity functions as part of an innovative visual language, which emphasises the role of stage design in the construction of meaning. This feature contrasts with the fundamental characteristic of flamenco as an art form in which the dancing body transmits emotions, values and meanings in a scenografically abstract or empty space. The submitted chapter will demonstrate how choreographers that realise this type of artistic practice break away from traditional flamenco imagery by adopting contemporary strategies, such as: multimedia and video-art based performances, multidisciplinary compositions, intertextuality and references to visual imagery from cinema and the arts, and images of gender ambiguity. This innovative visual language will be presented as reflecting a cultural-artistic discourse, which simultaneously reacts to the traditional role of flamenco as Spain’s national dance, while constructing a new and relevant paradigm for this dance in contemporary Spain. Key Words: Flamenco, fusion, Spanish dance, tradition, innovation, hybridity, multiculturalism, visual language. ***** 1. Introduction The opening scene of Malucos Flamenco, a flamenco piece by Carlos Chamorro and the Malucos company, reveals a colourful graffiti wall and two oddlooking clowns. The visual aspects of these characters place them in contrast to traditional flamenco imagery: their faces are completely painted in white apart

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__________________________________________________________________ from big red noses, they are only partially dressed with a variation of a classical tutu skirt, and they do not display any identifiable gender features. This circus-like imagery creates an aesthetic conflict between the visual language of the show and the expectations deriving from its title, thus challenging the spectator’s reception process. The images presented in the work of Malucos exemplify, in my opinion, a new stylistic tendency in contemporary flamenco that has evolved since the early 1990s, and utilises an artistic strategy I term ‘fusion.’ In the following chapter, 1 I will demonstrate how choreographers that realise this type of artistic practice adopt stylistic hybridity and an interdisciplinary approach to the construction process of the visual language, and thus challenge the aesthetic abstraction that defines movement and spatial composition in traditional flamenco. Within this framework, a number of resulting thematic and stylistic features will be illustrated, such as: intertextuality and aesthetic citation of visual icons from traditional flamenco, references to current political issues or events, and images of gender ambiguity. An understanding of the profound innovations evident in many contemporary flamenco works requires a short overview of the development of this art, due to the fact that certain stages in its history have significantly altered its initial characteristics. I argue here that this continuous transformation process has created several identifiable flamenco forms that slightly vary from each other: the traditional, the theatrical and the national (with its counter-forms). 2 Therefore, the historical phases hereby outlined will constitute an aesthetic and cultural framework for the discussion on contemporary flamenco, perceived in this chapter as the latest form of this art. Moreover, this overview will emphasise its unique stylistic features and its cultural significance in contemporary Spain. 2. Flamenco, the Art of the Outcasts In its traditional form, flamenco has evolved as an artistic expression which included song (cante), dance (baile) and guitar (toque), and functioned as a means of preserving and representing the authentic heritage of the gypsies, rooted in their history in Andalusia (southern Spain) since their arrival in the 15th century. 3 It was practiced at family gatherings (juergas) which took place in domestic spaces, often an inner patio. This setting did not include any features of a theatrical performance (i.e., stage, curtains, costumes or lighting), and the performance area was determined only by the seating arrangement of the participants in an open-circle formation. Moreover, the event itself was not based on the theatrical separation between performer and spectator, since all the participants performed segments of song/dance in turn, or ‘supported’ the performance with clapping (palmas) and cheering (jaleo). 4 This event was experienced as ‘an audiovisual happening,’ 5 and the artistic expression was perceived as a form of communication or a dialogue between the music and the dance. As a result, the quality of a performer was not

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__________________________________________________________________ evaluated according to aesthetic formalism or virtuosic skills, but in the ability to present his individual expression within the existing musical rules. The dance functioned as the central visual image of this performance, 6 utilising the moving body’s ability to represent a ‘whole gestalt of emotional and psychological states of human behavior within a cultural setting.’ 7 In contrast to other dance styles, flamenco is usually considered an abstract dance, since it does not contain a narrative nor tell a story, but reflects the dancer’s individual interpretation to the emotional content embedded in the music. 8 However, since dance is perceived as a stylisation of the ‘bodily repertoire’ of a specific society 9 and contributes to the formation of its habitus, 10 the aesthetic features of flamenco are also identified as a representation of the existential experience of the gypsies in Spain. Therefore, the solo form of the dance, along with the movement orientation which is both introverted and downward, emphasise the intimate experience of the performer, but also function as a visual image of the oppressed gypsy and his struggle with fate. 11 Moreover, since dance in general functions as ‘a performance of cultural identity,’ 12 certain aspects of flamenco stand out in their role as visual markers of values and beliefs in gypsy society. The movement aesthetic, for example, is translated into distinct styles for men and women, and is thus interpreted as a reflection of traditional gender imagery. The man’s style forms an image of Spanish machismo: The postures are angular, almost geometrical, and the movement is restrained, but sharp. The dance accentuates the footwork (zapateado), emphasising the man’s authority and control of his space. 13 The woman’s style is based on gentle and fluid movements of the arms, hands and waist, symbolising her social role as wife and mother. Moreover, the traditional long dress assists in covering her legs in accordance with the gypsy modesty code. The art of flamenco was practiced informally within gypsy families, and kept isolated from external influences until the official end of gypsy persecution in 1782, and their gradual integration in Andalusian society. The aesthetic features described above became the defining characteristics of traditional flamenco, and are still identified today with its ‘pure’ (puro) form, preserved almost solely by gypsy artists. 3. From the Gypsy Home to the Stage: The Emergence of Theatrical Flamenco Towards the beginning of the 20th century a form of theatrical flamenco was established in two subsequent stages. The first stage, usually referred to as ‘The Golden Age’ (La Edad de Oro), occurred between the years 1860-1910 and is associated with the formation of public cafés, named cafés cantantes. 14 These venues hosted flamenco performances which were presented, for the first time, before local paying audiences. This marked a fundamental transition in the social function of flamenco, which changed from a type of folk art, practiced by and for

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__________________________________________________________________ the people of its community, to a theatre art, performed by professional artists in a theatrical setting. The style formed in the cafés combined features from traditional flamenco with a new stylistic formalism. As a result, it emphasised the aesthetic features of the body and its movements, along with the technical virtuosity of the dancers and their use of flamenco props (a fan, shawl, castanets, etc.). 15 It also reduced the use of improvisation, replacing it with previously arranged musical numbers and structured choreographies. This emphasised a conceptual change in the essence of the artistic event, transformed from a reflection of the emotional state of the artist to pure entertainment. The performances in the cafés also expanded the cultural context of traditional flamenco from gypsy to gypsy-Spanish, by incorporating influences from regional Andalusian culture in the themes and structures of the music and the movement syntax of the dance. Despite these innovations, the stage design, spatial arrangement of the artists, and the structure of the performance itself, all followed the traditional format of the flamenco ‘event.’ However, while the open-circle formation reinforced the sense of community in the gypsy patio, in the cafés it became a means for creating an aesthetic scenic picture. The second phase in the formation of theatrical flamenco occurred between the years 1920-1950 and evolved as a direct outcome of the cafés, which had become too small to accommodate the growing number of audiences. As a result, flamenco performances were transferred into theatrical settings and transformed into an artistic format named ópera flamenca. The ópera performances exaggerated the aesthetic changes established in the cafés into a flamboyant and garish style that was almost devoid of any artistic significance. 16 Moreover, the architectural structure of the theatre created a detachment between performers and spectators, and therefore undermined the essence of flamenco as an intimate art form based on the participation of an emotionally involved and active audience. The theatrical period has been considered ‘a double-edged blade,’ 17 in the evolution of flamenco as a theatre art. It had significantly improved the economic situation and social status of the gypsies, and produced the first generation of professional performing artists. At the same time, the repertoire performed in the cafés and ópera flamenca was motivated by the desire to conform to public taste and therefore marked the beginning of a commercialisation process which almost annihilated traditional flamenco. 18 Despite these grave implications, this period is still considered an essential phase in the professionalisation of flamenco, 19 because it formulated its unique characteristics into a defined system of movement, musical and aesthetic conventions. 4. Cultural Isolation during the Franco Dictatorship and Preliminary Experiments in Stylistic ‘Fusion’ During the years of the Franco dictatorship (1939-1975), flamenco played a significant role in distributing the regime’s nationalist propaganda. Until the late

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__________________________________________________________________ 1950s the economic and foreign policy was xenophobic and enforced cultural isolation, 20 thereby depriving Spain of the ability to take part in modernisation processes that had already begun in other parts of Europe and the West. 21 To further this ideological agenda, Franco established complete control over all means of cultural identity production, in order to construct an image of a unified Spain, purified from external influences. 22 Within this process, flamenco was institutionalised as an official Spanish art, but at the same time forcefully cut off from its authentic regional roots. Traditional performances were systematically silenced in local Andalusian bars and taverns, because they were perceived as potentially threatening to Franco’s centralisation of power. Consequently, the approved form of flamenco was overtly stereotypical and commercial, and earned the ‘demeaning sobriquet,’ 23 nacioinalflamenquismo, which signified its nationalist features. In the 1960s the dictatorship entered its second phase, which was characterised by a large-scale tourist boom. Cultural practices identified as distinctly Spanish, like bullfighting and flamenco, became a means of promoting Spain’s image as an open and exotic country. Flamenco was flourishing in the tablaos, which were a modernised version of the cafés cantantes. However, these establishments led the art to its lowest point in history, 24 as performances exemplified features of burlesque shows: the dance emphasised the virtuosity of the footwork and castanet playing, and the sexuality of the female dancers was provocatively accentuated, including among other things, the exposure of the legs and chest area and exaggerated hip movements. 25 Despite the regime’s complete control over the media and the arts, expressions of resistance against the national form of flamenco were evident from the late 1960s and throughout the 1970s. Preliminary changes in the musical composition of flamenco manifested themselves during this period through a new tendency that was later named ‘new flamenco’ (nuevo flamenco) or ‘flamenco fusion’ (flamenco fusión). This style combined flamenco music with musical instruments, rhythms and cultural-artistic values from western, Latin-American and/or Arab music. 26 It was identified with the work of several artists, the most prominent being the guitarist Paco de Lucía, who was a pioneer in ‘fusing’ flamenco with classical music, jazz and salsa. From a social perspective, this musical tendency was perceived as the younger generations’ attempt to reconnect with the external world in response to the cultural isolation of the dictatorship years. 27 The stylistic innovation evident in flamenco music partially manifested itself in flamenco dancing during the 1970s and 1980s. These decades were experienced as a period of conceptual search and artistic revelations. 28 Private dance schools opened outside the control of the state, and introduced students to movement techniques from the leading figures of American modern dance, such as: Martha Graham, Alwin Nikolais, Merce Cunningham, Lester Horton and Jazz techniques. The establishment of the two official Spanish companies – Ballet Nacional de

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__________________________________________________________________ España and Ballet Nacional Clásico – laid the foundations for the stylistic integration between flamenco and other dance traditions. 29 Respectively, the central format of this period was characterised as ‘ballet-flamenco’ 30 and consisted of narrative-based dance-works that combined flamenco with classical ballet and/or modern dance. 31 I suggest here, however, that while the stylistic transformations in flamenco music symbolised a conscious cultural openness, the leading choreographers of the period continued to focus on gypsy and Spanish themes or texts, and therefore preserved the role of flamenco as a national dance. For this reason, I have chosen to define their initial artistic efforts to broaden the aesthetic and movement language of flamenco as a ‘transition period’ 32 that preceded the innovations in flamenco from the 1990s and onwards. 5. Contemporary Flamenco: The Quest to Re-Define Tradition A central assertion of this chapter stresses that, the stylistic changes which began to take form during the final stage of the dictatorship and the decade that followed, have reached a creative climax which started at the beginning of 1990s, and is still in process. This resulted in the emergence of an innovative visual language that seems to challenge all the defining images and aesthetic conventions of traditional flamenco, but still remains closely linked to it. This is evident in the work of contemporary choreographers such as María Pagés, Israel Galván, Juan Carlos Lérida, Asuncíon ‘Choni’ Perez, Belén Maya, Rocío Molina and the companies Arrieritos and Malucos. 33 Despite the differences between these artists, I argue that their works nonetheless manifest a relating set of fundamental features, most notably the integration of styles, defined here as ‘fusion.’ The choice I have made to apply this term to this unique artistic strategy stems from the fact that it is already an existing concept in the terminology of flamenco, referring to a specific point in its history, in which artists utilised stylistic hybridity as a means of expanding the cultural and aesthetic frame of flamenco. However, it should be clarified, that while the term ‘flamenco fusion’ is identified with a specific style of flamenco music that evolved during the 1960s and 1970s, I believe it cannot be applied as a unifying definition for contemporary flamenco dancing. This is because the diversity of the artists, as well as the varied nature of their practices, rejects the possibility of confining them to one stylistic category. In some contemporary works, stylistic hybridity is achieved through the integration of flamenco dancing with external musical styles, such as jazz, blues, baroque music, heavy metal and electronic music. Other works apply the principle of ‘fusion’ to the movement syntax as well, combining the language of flamenco with aesthetic features from non-Spanish dance traditions, especially post-modern dance of the 1980s 34 and contemporary European dance from the 1990s 35 onwards. An integration of styles is also evident in the construction process of the stage

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__________________________________________________________________ design, which utilises contemporary strategies external to traditional flamenco, such as: multi-media, video-art, mobile props and dynamic lighting. Moreover, and with respect to some artists more than others, these stylistic innovations function as part of an artistic practice, which is uniquely avant-garde or experimental. In my opinion, this radically transforms the concept of individual expression, which lies at the core of traditional flamenco, into a subversive personal style that undermines the fundamental features of the art from within, without completely breaking away from it. As a result, and since the point of reference of the choreographers in discussion is always traditional flamenco, I perceive their visual language as a reaction to traditional imagery, and in certain cases – a resistance to it. I will exemplify this claim with the following analysis of three representative works of contemporary flamenco artists. 6. Flamenco and Multiculturalism: Spanish Flamenco as a Shared Human Experience Dunas 36 is a piece created by María Pagés in collaboration with Belgian contemporary dancer/choreographer, Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui. Through a series of plot-less scenes, the work presents images of human existence, aimed at promoting a multicultural approach to dance, art and society. Despite the fact that flamenco dance and music establish the aesthetic foundation of this piece, it is nonetheless characterised by stylistic hybridity and reciprocal relations between movement and visual art. While traditional flamenco performances always generate Spanish images, the spatial design of this piece creates a culturally ‘neutral’ space: the stage is filled with earth-tone coloured fabrics, which are manipulated in various directions, symbolising the changing contour of desert dunes. Enlarged human-figured shadows are projected on these fabrics throughout the performance, creating an image of ‘everyman,’ devoid of any visual markers that indicate gender, race or religion. Moreover, the interaction between the shadows creates visual images of human existence that are detached from any cultural specification: a fist-fight and a slow-dance are decoded as bodily manifestations of social states, such as violence or intimacy. In contrast to these visual features, the musical score is culturally coded and manifests influences from Spanish, Jewish and Arab music. The stylistic interrelatedness between the different cultures is emphasised through musical crossover, for example: an Arab singer performs a flamenco song, a song in Hebrew is performed by Cherkaoui, and a solo performed by Pagés combines all three styles in one musical score. This hybridity establishes a multicultural context that opens the interpretation process to various possibilities, linking the images of the dunes and the human-figured shadows to all three cultures, but not confining them to one in particular. The dialogue established between the musical score and the stage design therefore challenges traditional hierarchies in flamenco, which

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__________________________________________________________________ exclude spatial design from the construction of meaning. Moreover, they reject cultural boundaries that limit the interpretation of flamenco to a Spanish context, while overlooking its primary essence as a form of communication. This cultural ‘fluidity’ is especially evident in the movement composition and the collaboration between the two performers. Throughout the piece, both Pagés and Cherkaoui perform dance segments that are based on the movement syntax of flamenco. However, they present two very distinct interpretations to the visual and aesthetic features of this dance. Pagés displays flamenco in its traditional form: her body is grounded, vertical and restrained, and she accentuates the picturesque movement of her arms and hands. Cherkaoui, on the other hand, interprets the same movement sequences through his unique contemporary style: his body is loose, almost ‘liquid,’ and his movements include energetic floor work. As a result, while Pagés’ style realises traditional flamenco imagery, Cherkaoui partially detaches the dance from its Spanish context and significances. This is interestingly enhanced in one scene, which highlights the integration between the dancing body and the spatial design. In this scene, Cherkaoui creates sand drawings that are projected on a large fabric spread on stage. Pagés performs flamenco-inspired movements in front of this fabric, and through an optical illusion seems to blend into Cherkaoui’s drawings. The reciprocity between the two elements simultaneously emphasises the body’s ability to function as a visual image, and uncovers the movement embodied in all visual or plastic arts. At one moment, for example, Pagés’ vertical body and wide-open arms are transformed through the drawing into a tree with long branches; at a another moment, it is Pagés’ arm movements that seem to generate the visual changes that occur on fabric – she either erases the drawings or scatters coloured sand all over it. The scene therefore expands the range of meanings generated from the language of flamenco and emphasises its primary function as a form of expression. As the scene proceeds, Cherkaoui’s drawings completely break away from the context of flamenco, and acknowledge significant texts or icons, such as: the biblical story of Adam and Eve, Darwin’s theory of evolution, and the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center. These images are presented with exceptional detail like a cinematic storyboard, and create a visual history of western culture. Interestingly, while the image of the burning Twin Towers completely exceeds the thematic and cultural significances of flamenco, it is precisely this moment in the scene which is re-framed in a Spanish context, as it is accompanied by a seguiriya, one of the fundamental song-forms of flamenco ‘deep song’ (cante jondo). 37 However, because it is not performed in its traditional form but in Arabic, it succeeds in evoking emotional values which are at once culturallycoded and universal in nature.

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__________________________________________________________________ 7. Flamenco and Gestus: Traditional Flamenco as an Estranged Bodily Language Malucos Flamenco 38 presents a variety of human emotions, desires and weaknesses through a colourfully designed stage filled with dancing clowns. Since the official formation of Malucos in 1998, its members have established themselves as pioneers of innovation, creating a visual language that combines flamenco and other traditional Spanish dances with influences from contemporary theatre, dance and music. While this stylistic hybridity reflects the company’s attempt to re-define the language of flamenco, its work nonetheless remains closely connected to tradition and constantly reflects on it, utilising post-modern strategies, such as parody and references to popular culture. The visual language in this piece plays an important role in demonstrating how flamenco traditions are simultaneously realised and deconstructed. As above mentioned, the spatial design is influenced by street art and graffiti, associating flamenco to contemporary urban life, the rock scenes and punk culture. Accordingly, the musical score is based on a wide variety of electronic and club music, and often displays sound manipulations and distortions. The costumes support this extreme imagery; besides the two clowns, who ‘host’ the performance, the dancers are dressed in provocative leather clothes, their faces are heavily painted in make-up, and they wear coloured hair-extensions and odd-looking hats. These features not only break away from the cultural context associated with flamenco, but they also challenge its traditional gender imagery, which abides to a strict modesty code, and is based on a visible distinction between the physical appearance and movement of men and women. These visual images function as part of a wider artistic strategy, which incorporates Brechtian techniques 39 into the movement syntax of flamenco in order to extract familiar aesthetic conventions or bodily codes out of their traditional context. Brecht’s concept of gestus ‘reveals how relations of production determine our social relations where we believe them to be at their most “natural.”’ 40 As a result, it creates a split between the actor and his role by ‘producing a set of contradictory attitudes, gestures, and modes of speech which reveal the difference within the subject.’ 41 In the work of Malucos, techniques such as exaggerated theatricality, parody, movement repetition and bodily slow motion, are utilised as a form of gestus, creating an experience of estrangement with respect to the traditional language of flamenco. In one scene, for example, the dancers enter the stage accompanied by a distorted version of a traditional seguiriya. The majority of song-forms that belong to this musical style usually begin with an accentuated vocal ‘ay,’ symbolising the gypsy’s cry of anguish. In this scene, however, the dancers accompany the ‘ay,’ with exaggerated gestures of yawning, which strip the musical convention from its authentic significance and place it in an ironic context. As the scene continues, the musical score changes into a mixture of electronic music and a text performed in

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__________________________________________________________________ rap style. This text is based on various words or sentences that constitute traditional jaleo cheers, and are usually cried out spontaneously throughout a flamenco performance. However, because these cheers are repeated and distorted through sound editing, they lose their authentic essence. Despite these features, however, traces of traditional flamenco are constantly present throughout the piece, and contribute to the sense of estrangement, because they are always placed against their distorted version. In many scenes, the movement syntax includes identifiable dance sequences from traditional flamenco. However, because the steps and movements are gradually exaggerated and repeated, they create a visual gap between the authentic form and its distortion, similar to the difference between ‘positive’ and ‘negative’ film-strips in photography. In other scenes, the innovative movement syntax is ‘interrupted’ by bodily gestures of a more traditional nature that are performed by the dancers. These poses recreate recognisable visual images from flamenco, such as guitar or castanet-playing. However, because they are detached from their authentic context, what is actually highlighted is the absence of these elements in their traditional form. Moreover, traditional flamenco is creatively instilled as the closing feature of one scene through multi-media technologies: as the dancers leave the stage, a video projected on the graffiti wall pays tribute to legendary flamenco masters, the singer Camarón de la Isla, and the guitarist Tomatito, performing a traditional bulería. 8. Flamenco and Surrealism: De-Familiarising the Visual Canon of Flamenco Tejidos al Tiempo, 42 a piece by choreographer Asuncíon ‘Choni’ Perez, presents man’s quest to conquer time, prolong life and delay the moment of death. Although the musical structure of the piece is based on traditional flamenco, the visual language combines flamenco movements with stylistic influences from modern dance, visual art and the cinema. This artistic strategy succeeds in creating surrealist scenes that extract familiar images of flamenco from their traditional context, and challenge the visual canon of this art. The opening scene presents Perez in a white garment, which is revealed as a type of straitjacket, because it is entirely connected to the ceiling with ropes. Consequently, Perez is able to dance, but she is very limited in her ability to move across space. As a result, she fails to reach a large hourglass that is located upstage, and stop the sand in it from flowing all the way to the bottom. This scene functions as a concrete realisation of the theme that lies at the core of the work. However, it does so through a visual language that is external to traditional flamenco, but closely associated to symbolic imagery that characterises modern dance and certain genres in the visual or plastic arts. This scene ends with the appearance of a dancer (Manuel Cañadas) portraying the personification of ‘Time.’ His visual features place him in contrast to traditional gender imagery in flamenco: he is barefoot and wears a woman’s ‘tail

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__________________________________________________________________ dress’ (bata de cola), and he is holding an umbrella in his hand. In many aspects, this character reflects an ‘incompatibility’ often evident in many Surrealist paintings, especially those of René Magritte. In Magritte’s works, objects and characters are presented in a way that emphasises their thematic and/or stylistic displacement within the larger context of the picture. 43 This creates a unique experience for the viewer, who is overwhelmed with confusion and discomfort due to the undermining of realist representational modes. The spectator of Perez’s work undergoes a similar experience, because the character of Cañadas juxtaposes the defining features of a flamenco performance, stylistically classified as such through the traditional music performed by the musical ensemble. The appropriation of Surrealism into the language of flamenco establishes a unique type of gender ambiguity, which is interestingly manifested in the ‘fluidity’ between two categories that are completely distinct in traditional flamenco. This resonates to the fragmented and shattered images of the human body in many of Magritte’s works. A recurring image in his paintings presents body parts that are re-arranged in order to perform new functions or new senses. Therefore, through the constant changing of its form, ‘Magritte enables the body to escape his socialcultural identity.’ 44 In Perez’s work, this aesthetic principle is creatively applied to the quality of the partnering she establishes with Cañadas in their joint dancing sequences, and to their use of flamenco costumes. As mentioned above, Cañadas appears on stage wearing a woman’s ‘tail dress,’ a type of costume that first appeared in the ‘Golden Age’ of the cafés cantantes. In the second scene he is joined by Perez, who wears a modernised version of the man’s dancing suit. This form of cross-dressing embodies significant meanings, because flamenco garments are extremely gender-coded. Therefore, it creates a surrealist image that undermines the fixed visual representations of gender roles in traditional flamenco. As the dance develops, this blurring of categories is furthermore enhanced through the movement syntax. It should be noted here, that in its traditional function, the ‘tail dress’ was used as a means of presenting the female dancer’s grace, and she was expected to handle the ‘tail’ as an extension of her own body. Although Cañadas wears the dress, it is Perez who actually manipulates it through her own body: she moves the ‘tail’ from side to side with her legs, and manages to swing it off the ground. This way, she realises traditional elements from the unique repertoire of the ‘tail dress,’ despite the surreal cross-dressing. However, as a result of the partnering between the two dancers, it is Perez, and not the ‘tail’ of the dress that becomes a visual extension of Cañadas’ body, thus creating a hybrid, yet fractured, gender image. Moreover, the decision to perform the traditional movement repertoire associated with the ‘tail dress’ as a couple’s pas de deux, and not in its traditional solo format, reflects Perez’s attempt to create aesthetic alternatives to the canon of flamenco.

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__________________________________________________________________ 9. Re-Framing Tradition: Shifting Paradigms in Contemporary Flamenco The three works I have chosen to discuss exemplify a fundamental principle in contemporary flamenco, which is the implementation of ‘fusion’ into various aspects of the artistic process, most notably the visual language. It is my belief, that this strategy brings forth significant artistic and cultural implications with respect to the aesthetic conventions of traditional flamenco. First, it establishes new relations between the components of flamenco, reflecting a transition from a bodybased composition to a non-hierarchical interdisciplinary composition. This feature is identified by Gilpin and Behrndt as characterising many contemporary dance works by European choreographers from the 1990s onwards, such as Wim Vandekeybus, Jan Fabre, Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui, Alain Platel and many others. 45 Secondly, it reflects a gradual withdrawal from the aesthetic abstraction that defines movement and spatial composition in traditional flamenco, towards concepts that are external (and even contrasting) to it, most notably stylistic hybridity, recognised as a central feature of postmodern art. 46 In this respect, Banes mentions post-modern choreographers from the 1980s, like Twyla Tharp or Pina Bausch, whose signature movement languages reflect the blurring of boundaries between different genres of dance. 47 Third and consequently, it expands the cultural identity or habitus associated with traditional flamenco, from gypsySpanish to gypsy-Spanish-western. In relation to the process Desmond describes as ‘the migration of dance styles across national boundaries,’ 48 ‘fusion’ in flamenco constructs a new type of ‘flamenco body’ characterised by ‘bodily bilingualism.’ Because these changes are a recurring feature in many contemporary flamenco works, I argue that they are manifestations of a new paradigm for this art. I support this assertion by comparing the changes in contemporary flamenco with the shift of paradigms evident in other arts and media. A clear resemblance exists, for example, in the relation between traditional and contemporary flamenco, with that of dramatic and postdramatic theatre. As stated by Blum, postdramatic theatre is ‘mainly directed at dismantling the conventional plot-character-space unity that characterises modern drama.’ 49 Similarly, contemporary flamenco undermines the unity between song, dance and guitar, often referred to as the ‘holy trinity’ of traditional flamenco. Blum furthermore stresses that in contrast to dramatic theatre, postdramatic performances are completely detached from the written play, thus reflecting ‘the passage from textuality to visuality.’ 50 Because flamenco, as previously mentioned, is an abstract dance, it defies textuality altogether. However, traditional performances contain an ‘emotional narrative,’ which is reflected in the dancer’s bodily expression. Moreover, this narrative is in fact text-based, because the dance is a visual interpretation of the textual content embedded in the song. By contrast, contemporary flamenco works usually carry thematic significances, but they unfold in a non-linear and fragmented manner. Like postdramatic theatre, contemporary

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__________________________________________________________________ flamenco constructs meaning through ‘a visual grammar,’ 51 aimed at challenging traditional flamenco imagery. Blum argues that in postdramatic stagings of canonical plays, ‘past and present, tradition and actuality are juxtaposed in such a manner that they appear to be simultaneously apprehended by the spectators’ minds.’ 52 This duplicity takes a unique but similar form in the type of ‘intermedial’ performances analysed by Anderson. 53 Focusing on the New-York Metropolitan Opera ‘Live in HD’ cinecasts, Anderson stresses that an evident feature of the Met’s contemporary stagings is intertextuality, because they incorporate ‘citations of familiar icons, events and public memories,’ 54 into the canonical art of the opera. In the case of contemporary flamenco, traces of the past are evident at every level of the performance, because elements from traditional flamenco are ‘fused’ into the innovative visual composition. As a result, the work becomes a multi-layered text that simultaneously embodies two juxtaposing flamenco forms: the traditional/canonical and the contemporary/popular. In light of the above, I stress that these unique features of contemporary flamenco reflect its significant social role, as an artistic practice that has evolved and still functions in Spain today. Because every dance is a stylised bodily practice of a specific society, it plays a central role in establishing the physical culture associated with that society. 55 Consequently, I argue that every dance also holds a potentially critical stance towards the values and beliefs that define it. Therefore, because the innovative visual language identified with contemporary flamenco is still deeply rooted in the historical context, cultural significance, and aesthetic values of past images in flamenco, it reflects a cultural-artistic discourse, which simultaneously reacts to the traditional role of flamenco as Spain’s national dance, while constructing a new and relevant paradigm for this dance in contemporary global Spain.

Notes 1

The following chapter is based on a PhD research in progress, entitled FlamencoFusión: Strategies of ‘Reaction’ and ‘Resistance’ to Traditional Movement Syntax. 2 For the purpose of this chapter and my PhD research in progress, this outline presents an approach that mainly focuses on the transformations that occurred in the dance throughout the different historical periods. Within the existing research on flamenco, other attempts to trace the development of this art emphasise the changes in flamenco song (cante) alongside the dance (baile). See, for example, Nancy Lee Chalfa Ruyter, ‘Report: Flamenco History Conference’, Dance Chronicle 20, No. 1 (1997): 83. 3 Claus Schreiner, ed., ‘Andalusia: Pena and Alegria’, in Flamenco: Gypsy Dance and Music from Andalusia (Portland, OR: Amadeus Press, 1990), 24-25.

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Robin Totton, Song of the Outcasts (Portland and Cambridge: Amadeus Press, 2003), 18. 5 Juan Serrano, Flamenco, Body and Soul (Fresno: California State University Press, 1990), 117. 6 This argument applies only to the visual aspect of the performance, because traditionally, it is the song (cante) that is considered the basis of the art, and the source from which the dance (baile) and the guitar (toque) had evolved. 7 Pauline Hodgens, ‘Interpreting the Dance’, in Dance Analysis: Theory and Practice, ed. Janet Adshead (London: Dance Books 1988), 66. 8 Totton, Song of the Outcasts, 56. 9 Ted Polhemus, ‘Dance, Gender and Culture’, in The Routledge Dance Studies Reader, ed. Alexandra Carter (London: Routledge, 1998), 174. 10 According to Bourdieu’s concept of habitus, bodily patterns stem from a person’s social and cultural environment, and in turn reflect his position or status in the social field. See: Pierre Bourdieu, ‘Structures, Habitus, Practices’, in The Logic of Practice, trans. Richard Nice (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1990), 53-54. 11 Madeleine Claus, ‘Baile Flamenco’, in Flamenco: Gypsy Dance and Music from Andalusia, ed. Claus Schreiner (Portland, OR: Amadeus Press, 1990), 64. 12 Jane C. Desmond, ed., ‘Embodying Difference: Issues in Dance and Cultural Studies’, in Meaning in Motion (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1994), 31. 13 Marion Papenbrok, ‘The Spiritual World of Flamenco’, in Flamenco: Gypsy Dance and Music from Andalusia, ed. Claus Schreiner (Portland, OR: Amadeus Press, 1990), 55. 14 Ibid., 43. 15 José Blas Vega, ‘Hacia la Historia del Baile Flamenco’, La Caña 12 (Otoño, 1995): 20. 16 Christof Jung, ‘Cante Flamenco’, in Flamenco: Gypsy Dance and Music from Andalusia, ed. Claus Schreiner (Portland, OR: Amadeus Press, 1990), 61. 17 Donn E. Pohren, The Art of Flamenco (Morón de la Frontera, Sevilla: Society of Spanish Studies, 1972), 90; and Papenbrok, ‘Spiritual World of Flamenco’, 45. 18 This process was especially evident with respect to traditional gypsy song-forms, which had almost disappeared from the cafés and ópera flamenca, as they were replaced with lighter and more popular musical forms. 19 Luis López Ruiz, Guía del Flamenco (Madrid: Ediciones Istmo S. A., 1999), 17. 20 William Washabaugh, Flamenco: Passion, Politics & Popular Culture (Oxford: Berg, 1996), 13. 21 Nèlida Monés et al., ‘Between Tradition and Innovation: Two Ways of Understanding the History of Dance in Spain’, in Europe Dancing: Perspectives on

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__________________________________________________________________ Theatre Dance and Cultural Identity, eds. Andrée Grau and Stephanie Jordan (London and New York: Routledge, 2000), 145. 22 David T. Gies, ed., ‘Modern Spanish Culture: An Introduction’, in The Cambridge Companion to Modern Spanish Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 1. 23 Washabaugh, Flamenco, 14. 24 The tablaos still function in various parts of Spain (especially in Madrid, Barcelona and Seville), and although some remain tourist-oriented, others display performances and performers of high quality. 25 Michelle Hefner Hayes, Flamenco: Conflicting Histories of the Dance (Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company, 2009), 154. 26 Timothy Dewaal Malefyt, ‘“Inside” and “Outside” Spanish Flamenco: Gender Constructions in Andalusian Concepts of Flamenco Tradition’, Anthropological Quarterly 71, No. 2 (April, 1998): 65; and Gerhard Steingress, ed., ‘Flamenco Fusion and New Flamenco as Postmodern Phenomena: An Essay on Creative Ambiguity in Popular Music’, in Songs of the Minotaur: Hybridity and Popular Music in the Era of Globalization (Berlin, Hamburg and Münster: LIT Verlag, 2002), 188. 27 Totton, Song of the Outcasts, 160. 28 Monés et al., ‘Between Tradition and Innovation’, 148. 29 Ibid. 30 Blas Vega, ‘Hacia la Historia del Baile Flamenco’, 21. 31 Ninotchka Bennahum, ‘Flamenco Puro: Art from Anguish’, Dance Magazine (August, 1992): 40. 32 In Spanish history, the term ‘Transition’ (Transicíon) refers to the period between the years 1976-1982, during which Spain underwent a transition process from dictatorship to democracy. I apply this term to describe the unique characteristics of flamenco dancing during the 1970s and 1980s, because they undoubtedly reflect the social climate of the time. 33 It should be noted that these artists are all trained in traditional flamenco, while some have additional training in other dance techniques. Some of the performances created by these artists display a traditional approach to flamenco, and do not realise ‘fusion’ strategies. 34 For an elaborate discussion on the characteristics of post-modern dance in the eighties, see: Sally Banes, Terpsichore in Sneakers: Post-Modern Dance (New England: Wesleyan University Press 1987 [1977]). 35 For an elaborate discussion on the characteristics of European contemporary dance in the ninetieth onwards, see: Synne K. Behrndt, ‘Dance, Dramaturgy and Dramaturgical Thinking’, Contemporary Theatre Review 20, No. 2 (2010).

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The analysis is based on a recording of the show performed in Singapore, 23-24 October, 2009. See promo-clip, accessed 5 June 2012, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w-4tSspuIgk. 37 Cante jondo is the oldest and most traditional form of flamenco song, representing through its text and musical features the essence of flamenco as the art of the outcasts. 38 The analysis is based on a recording of the show performed in the ‘Madrid en Danza’ festival, Madrid 2004. See promo-clip, accessed 5 June 2012, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HvgjklVPNqY. 39 Elizabeth Wright, Postmodern Brecht: A Re-Presentation (London and New York: Routledge, 1989), 2. 40 Ibid., 20. 41 Ibid., 52. 42 The analysis is based on a recording of the show performed in the ‘Dias de Flamenco’ festival, Tel-Aviv 2008. See promo-clip, accessed 5 June 2012, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ovhiNBeDAi0&feature=relmfu. 43 Marcel Paquet, Magritte (Tel-Aviv: Sifri ltd., 2005, Hebrew edition of Taschen, 2004), 29. 44 Ibid., 52, my translation. 45 Heidi Gilpin, ‘Shaping Critical Spaces: Issues in the Dramaturgy of Movement Performance’, in Dramaturgy in American Theater, eds. Susan Jonas, Geoff Proehl and Michael Lupu (Orlando: Harcourt Brace & Company, 1997), 87; and Behrndt, ‘Dance, Dramaturgy and Dramaturgical Thinking’, 188. 46 Linda Hutcheon, The Politics of Postmodernism (London and New York: Routledge, 1989), 18; and Richard Schechner, The End of Humanism: Writings on Performance (New York: Performing Arts Journal Publication, 1982), 121. 47 Banes, Terpsichore in Sneakers: Post-Modern Dance, xxxi- xxxvi. 48 Desmond, ‘Embodying Difference: Issues in Dance and Cultural Studies’, 44. 49 Bilha Blum, ‘Looking at Postmodern Performances of Canonical Plays’, in this volume, 3. 50 Ibid., 5. 51 Marranca quoted in Ibid., 6. 52 Ibid., 6. 53 Adele Anderson, ‘Old Arts and New Media: Reconfiguring Meaning and Performance in Opera “Live in HD”’, in this volume. 54 Ibid., 52. 55 Polhemus, ‘Dance, Gender and Culture’, 174.

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Bibliography Banes, Sally. Terpsichore in Sneakers: Post-Modern Dance. New England: Wesleyan University Press 1987. Behrndt, Synne K. ‘Dance, Dramaturgy and Dramaturgical Contemporary Theatre Review 20, No. 2 (2010): 185–196.

Thinking’.

Bennahum, Ninotchka. ‘Flamenco Puro: Art from Anguish’. Dance Magazine (August, 1992): 40. Blas Vega, José. ‘Hacia la Historia del Baile Flamenco’. La Caña 12 (Otoño, 1995): 5–23. Bourdieu, Pierre. ‘Structures, Habitus, Practices’. In The Logic of Practice, translated by Richard Nice, 52–65. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1990. Claus, Madeleine. ‘Baile Flamenco’. In Flamenco: Gypsy Dance and Music from Andalusia, edited by Claus Schreiner, 89–120. Portland, OR: Amadeus Press, 1990. Desmond, Jane C., ed. ‘Embodying Difference: Issues in Dance and Cultural Studies’. In Meaning in Motion, 29–54. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1994. Gies, David T., ed. ‘Modern Spanish Culture: An Introduction’. In The Cambridge Companion to Modern Spanish Culture, 1–8. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. Gilpin, Heidi. ‘Shaping Critical Spaces: Issues in the Dramaturgy of Movement Performance’. In Dramaturgy in American Theater, edited by Susan Jonas, Geoff Proehl, and Michael Lupu, 83–87. Orlando: Harcourt Brace & Company, 1997. Hayes, Michelle Hefner. Flamenco: Conflicting Histories of the Dance. Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company, 2009. Hodgens, Pauline. ‘Interpreting the Dance’. In Dance Analysis: Theory and Practice, edited by Janet Adshead, 60–89. London: Dance Books, 1988.

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__________________________________________________________________ Hutcheon, Linda. The Politics of Postmodernism. London and New York: Routledge, 1989. Jung, Christof. ‘Cante Flamenco’. In Flamenco: Gypsy Dance and Music from Andalusia, edited by Claus Schreiner, 57–87. Portland, OR: Amadeus Press, 1990. López Ruiz, Luis. Guía del Flamenco. Madrid: Ediciones Istmo S. A., 1999. Malefyt, Timothy Dewaal. ‘“Inside” and “Outside” Spanish Flamenco: Gender Constructions in Andalusian Concepts of Flamenco Tradition’. Anthropological Quarterly 71, No. 2 (April, 1998): 63–73. Monés, Nèlida, Marta Carrasco, Estrella Casero-García, and Delfín Colomé. ‘Between Tradition and Innovation: Two Ways of Understanding the History of Dance in Spain’. In Europe Dancing: Perspectives on Theatre Dance and Cultural Identity, edited by Andrée Grau, and Stephanie Jordan, 144–158. London and New York: Routledge, 2000. Papenbrok, Marion. ‘The Spiritual World of Flamenco’. In Flamenco: Gypsy Dance and Music from Andalusia, edited by Claus Schreiner, 49–56. Portland, OR: Amadeus Press, 1990. Paquet, Marcel. Magritte. Tel-Aviv: Sifri ltd., 2005 (Hebrew edition of Taschen, 2004). Pohren, Donn E. The Art of Flamenco. Morón de la Frontera, Sevilla: Society of Spanish Studies, 1972. Polhemus, Ted. ‘Dance, Gender and Culture’. In The Routledge Dance Studies Reader, edited by Alexandra Carter, 171–179. London: Routledge, 1998. Ruyer, Nancy Lee Chalfa. ‘Report: Flamenco History Conference’. Dance Chronicle 20, No. 1 (1997): 81–86. Schechner, Richard. The End of Humanism: Writings on Performance. New York: Performing Arts Journal Publication, 1982. Schreiner, Claus, ed. ‘Andalusia: Pena and Alegria’. In Flamenco: Gypsy Dance and Music from Andalusia, 11–33. Portland, OR: Amadeus Press, 1990.

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__________________________________________________________________ Serrano, Juan. Flamenco, Body and Soul. Fresno: California State University Press, 1990. Steingress, Gerhard, ed. ‘Flamenco Fusion and New Flamenco as Postmodern Phenomena: An Essay on Creative Ambiguity in Popular Music’. In Songs of the Minotaur: Hybridity and Popular Music in the Era of Globalization, 169–216. Berlin, Hamburg and Münster: LIT Verlag, 2002. Totton, Robin. Song of the Outcasts. Portland and Cambridge: Amadeus Press, 2003. Washabaugh, William. Flamenco: Passion, Politics & Popular Culture. Oxford: Berg, 1996. Wright, Elizabeth. Postmodern Brecht: A Re-Presentation. London and New York: Routledge, 1989. Idit Suslik is a PhD candidate at Tel-Aviv University, currently writing her research on contemporary flamenco in Spain. She is a teacher at The School of Visual Theatre and a practicing flamenco dancer.

Old Arts in New Media: Reconfiguring Meaning and Performance in Opera ‘Live in HD’ Adele Anderson Abstract For over two decades live performing arts have been subject to continuing remediation across the full range of cultural production. Traditional as well as popular culture performances now are webcast or cinecast simultaneously to globally dispersed audiences. For a canonical art such as opera, trends in digital media transmission move performance practices further towards a collapse of cultural registers and an increase in visual emphasis. In this chapter I explore what the New York Metropolitan Opera’s recent remediation through cinecast affords for understanding the visual aspects of performance, liveness, and audience response taken as a set of interrelated cultural practices. Building upon media theories of J. D. Peters, William Mazzarella, and Peter Boenisch, I begin with the premise that live performance already is a medium that makes us newly imaginable to ourselves. Its emerging intermedial forms, including transmittal over distance, enable us to let go of certain understandings that we held of older associated cultural practices, even as we see them differently and anew in a reconstituted world. 1 A rounded understanding of intermedial performance requires that we consider specific qualities of media being used and the practices surrounding them which yield multiple meanings of performance as a cultural event. I call particular attention to the ways in which audience reception and response co-constitute liveness, often generating performative responses to the originating artistic action. Key Words: Cinecast, opera, liveness, mediatisation, performance, intermediality, intertextuality, spectators, remediation, audience. ***** 1. Introduction Live performances that once were considered singular events can now reach simultaneously and virtually to remote sites of audience reception. At the same time, the visual aspects of performance for audiences are increasingly subject to manipulation, extension, and complication by use of onsite media technology within the originating performing spaces. Mechanically (re)produced traces, rendered with unprecedented visual and auditory quality, furnish occasions for worldwide digitised cultural events that are seen and heard via webcast or cinecast. Recent intermedial practices in performance, of which remote casting is but one type, raise anew questions about the status of live performance, the convergence of high culture, popular culture, and borrowed cultures, and the role of media in the ways audiences make new cultural meanings of performance. The entire process is

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__________________________________________________________________ affected by the projective power and the compelling visual and auditory aspects of current digital technology. Shifts that are brought by mediatisation are particularly apparent in a traditional art form such as opera, where the novelty of alternate perspectives of looking, intertextuality, and images and practices borrowed from other genres combines with technical media to extend and reconfigure live performance that can be read, as Blum has explained in her chapter of this volume, against previous productions in the canon of a form. 2 In this chapter I focus on shifts in practice and meaning making that appear with the live remediation of opera for movie theatres, using as principle example the performing, staging, distance transmission, and audience practices from recent seasons of the Metropolitan Opera’s ‘Live in HD’ cinecast. 3 I intend to show how distance transmission of opera is part of a larger set of intermedial practices that extend liveness and incorporate novel intertextual cultural content, also involving the audience members as a crucial part of making meaning in performance, a transformation that is still unfolding. The communication theorist J. D. Peters defines a medium as the taken-forgranted practices and technologies of social envisioning. 4 He identifies media in material frameworks as old as elocution and as modern as newspapers, statistics, accounting, and social sciences, all of which he calls ‘diverse media of social description,’ arguing that in modernity people apprehend the world bifocally; ‘we only experience it in pieces.’ As a result he proposes that a virtual public may be the only kind there has ever been; 5 an audience of performance is one such public. The anthropologist William Mazzarella usefully elaborates the concept of media as material frameworks for social practices, which are ‘both enabling and constraining ... [Medium] makes society imaginable and intelligible to itself in the form of external representations.’ 6 The specific form of representation may change, yet shared interpretation is what constitutes a public for an art form or for other aspects of culture, including ideologies and world views. 7 Changing representations through new media can generate ambiguities that compel the audience-spectators to actively choose, reconsider, or reinterpret their meanings. Peter Boenisch identifies theatre as a medium that is undergoing these shifts. In the context of using new media onstage, he proposes that the observer is crucial to the process. The particular material framework used in performance is not the main issue; he says, ‘the mere use of various media technologies’ is less the point than the ‘effect performed in-between mediality, supplying multiple perspectives and foregrounding the making of meaning rather than obediently transmitting meaning.’ 8 Indeed the choice of perspectives is critical to agency in making meaning. Mazzarella notes that a medium is at once dynamic and constraining, reifying and reflexive. 9 Novel ambiguities that are introduced to performance by media use will attract notice among audience spectators who are already familiar with the known form, as new frameworks demand its reinterpretation. Blum has explained

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__________________________________________________________________ how this works in the case of canonical plays, where institutional contexts and public memories create knowledge and expectations that make the canonical works relatively more resistant to reworking and radical fragmentation; 10 the same thing happens with traditional operas. A new medium allows the audience to let go of certain understandings about associated cultural practices and see them differently and anew in a reconstituted world. 11 Such a challenge accompanies opera’s latest wave of remediation in the New York Metropolitan Opera’s ‘Live in HD’ remote cinecast performances. The Met Live in HD complicates both the form and the reception effects of opera in ways that in some respects resemble what has happened in contemporary intermedial theatre practice. Cinecast extends the visual and auditory aspects of performance in ways consistent in principle with the Met’s historical mechanical reproductions, yet this wave of technical innovation has brought an additional, unprecedented collapse in more than just geographical reach and technical qualities. It is also affecting content, cultural register, a mixing of genres, and new remote reception practices. As new images and content flood forth intermedial extension, they open further possibilities for making its new meanings. The emerging artistic strategies of the Met Live in HD draw as much from popular and technical culture as they do from existing canonical realisations. Independent media distributors’ earlier technical successes in the digital casting of amplified music concerts by popular rock groups in the late 1990s were their inspiration, 12 and a receptive new general manager at the Met adopted digital casting in 2006. In the beginning cinecasts in general were viewed as only or mainly promotional; 13 however, growth in the number of theatre venues and audience ticket sales prompted the practice to spread. The Metropolitan Opera’s early adoption and success with cinecasting led other classical performing arts into the practice, meanwhile technical theatre and live staging media practices were undergoing their own reconfiguration, especially in Europe. Intermedial and postmodern stage experiments of vanguard directors now circulate on a global scale, and their new practices, which include both digital stage effects and remote operations like digital cinecast, may be shaping the future of a worldwide community of practice in theatre arts. At the time of writing the intermedial practices for staged performance are still controversial. Philosophical and aesthetic debates evince much ambivalence over the mediatisation of performance, even while it is subject to wide experimentation. Mediacasting at the Met, like the contemporary intermedial efforts underway in theatre, make it possible for designers, directors, producers, performers, and audiences to ‘splice in’ views and practices available from other media that lie beyond traditions and canonical forms, increasingly manipulating meaning with content borrowed from cultures at large. For the Met Live in HD, the wave of complicated visuality and intermedial appropriation may have its most notable effects in the unforeseen ways in which audience-spectators may respond visually

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__________________________________________________________________ through media with their own social meaning-making, uncontrolled by the arts producers. 2. ‘Live in HD’: Joys and Hazards of Performance on the Big Screen In the U.S. the New York Metropolitan Opera has the status of a state opera and possesses a grand vision of itself as a cultural force in the world; as such it is the frequent object of intense critical scrutiny. As a performing art with many canonical texts historically and possessed of particular cachet for aspiring modern patrons of high culture in America, opera has many conservative forces surrounding it in this country. The artistic results of recent seasons’ Live in HD have been by turns banal, beautiful, comical, and bewildering. Directors ambitiously experiment with advanced stage technologies and borrowed genres while embarking on the precarious use of digital transmission over satellite to big screens at distant movie theatres. Live in HD illustrates at once an American wonder and optimism about technology and pitfalls and hazards of remediation of canonical stage performances. The whole is always at risk of becoming a vast, eccentric failure; yet it also reshapes and redefines aspects of performance – as did Wagner – through aiming to perfect an exquisite sensory manipulation via mechanical extensions. Will the Met actually reach the achievement it seeks? The verdict is far from clear. The Met Live in HD is hosted in two of my small US city’s local movie theatres which possess the requisite high definition and Dolby sound technology to meet media distributors’ standards. 14 Our local opera guild and public TV channel photocopy and pass out official Met’s programme synopses, also available online, as patrons enter the movie theatre. Once inside, we the cinema audience see crossmarket stills and motion clips onscreen, previewing future productions of a Los Angeles Philharmonic symphony concert or Broadway-at-the-movies. Trailers show dramatic moments in future Met in HD programmes. The local movie theatre manager, solicitous of our patronage, steps forward at the side aisle, warmly greets the audience, and informs us how long the programme will be, announcing the time and number of intermissions, when lights will go up and down, and locations of restrooms. He asks if audience members are too warm or too cold, thanks us for coming, and introduces one or two assistants who will remain in the house to see to our comfort throughout the several hours of screening. Last season a coffee cart was set up for intermissions at the side aisle. Cinecast tickets cost more than regular movie admissions – around US $25 at time of writing – and the manager is very grateful to fill his cinema seats during subprime attendance time slots. 15 About fifteen minutes before curtain we in the movie audience are joined, virtually, by the other audience just getting seated in the originating house, Lincoln Center in New York City. Digital cameras pan over the inside of the actual Met house. Our theatre’s lights dim along with the house lights at the live origination point. We can see the Met house audience and hear the hum of their conversation.

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__________________________________________________________________ We glimpse the Met’s large chandeliers and elegant box seats onscreen. We hear strains of the orchestra warming up in the pit. An establishing shot brings us a full view of the stage. The screen is over-titled with the day’s programme, names of the director, principals, music director, and major funding patrons – and then the scene is interrupted and the screen is quickly saturated with a fast moving, visually kinetic advertisement for the event’s major patron. The lead corporation’s promotional message is done up in latest high definition digital graphics. Loud and overbearing, its Web-style visuals and audio elements might be effective for a small computer screen, but here the stimulus is vertiginous and ill suited for a big movie screen, an abrupt cut in from the magisterial quiet and dark of the preceding double view we were taking in from our darkened movie theatre into the elegant dimmed house at Lincoln Center. From the movie theatre one cannot but help be acutely conscious of adjustments and delays at the origination site, and several such occasions have marked recent Live in HD seasons. As cameras panned over the dimmed live house for Das Rheingold, an on-camera programme announcer’s voice explained that Met techs were struggling with the computer that runs Robert LePage’s muchdiscussed Machine, the elaborate moving set for the Ring cycle. On that particular occasion start time was delayed about 30 minutes. Another time cinecast reception crashed mid-performance, resulting in a small disaster for the local movie house manager: Images froze and pixelated onscreen, as a thunderstorm interrupted transmission of a large portion of the second act of Turandot. Local movie house managers may wring their hands, but there is little they can do. On the other hand Met HD audiences get to see things that live house audiences do not see, such as breathtaking close ups of dramatic moments in the action between exquisitely costumed principals. This intimate view would be unavailable from the physical house seats – and we paid a fraction of their cost. Artful crosscutting accents the emotion on the characters’ faces and the choruses’ reactions. High definition beautifully captures the Met’s most successful technical lighting; for example, the breathtaking digital waterfall projected onto LePage’s Machine set as an inclined platform in Gotterdammerung. At the same time moviegoers get other views that are less graceful, if not uninteresting – a vast close-up of Bryn Terfyl’s face as he comes offstage or principals caught on camera as they rush through the wings, evading moving scenery and scurrying stagehands. Moviegoers view pre-show talks and short, pre-recorded documentary style presentations that resemble a museum docent’s tour, like one given by the head of costumes to show close up views of the gowns designed by Christian Lacroix for Renée Fleming in Thaïs. We also see and hear diva hosts ‘live’ in what are often awkward ad lib interviews with the principals coming offstage between acts or emerging in costume from their dressing rooms. The ‘candid’ on camera talks are a jarring kind of televisual interruption inserted for public relations purpose, but more artful cinematic views are afforded

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__________________________________________________________________ during onstage portions of the cinecast from the rehearsed material. They are under closer control of the live in-console directors. Yet the backstage action is undeniably entertaining: Younger male principals, much in the manner of matinee idols or star athletes between periods at a sporting event, offer on-camera personal greetings in multiple languages to fans watching the opera from home country movie theatres. Other interviewees hesitate, showing more discomfort with their required improvisations. And small mishaps are almost inevitable with live rolling cameras; such moments range from charming to appalling. On one occasion John Adams, the composer of both Dr. Atomic and Nixon in China, was so dazzled by camera lights during his backstage interview that for a moment he lost his way back to the orchestra pit in the dark. A similar fate was narrowly averted for the soprano Eva-Maria Westbroek (as Sieglinde) after her joint on-camera interview with her Wagnerian ‘twin,’ the tenor Jonas Kaufmann (as Siegmund): As Westbroek began to turn left in the wrong direction, Kaufmann could be seen hauling her off camera right, literally by her hair. Still another time, we heard the day’s host Placido Domingo just before an on-camera interview, plaintively telling someone backstage that he had lost his glasses. The mix of images with tremendous power and others suggesting a public relations media circus may aesthetically undermine our sense of grand opera. The interesting, flawed, and incomplete realisations collapse and partially reconfigure relations between vanguard directorial practices and journalistic hype, while combining the whole into one viewing experience, and (as I will demonstrate later in this chapter) the spectators respond. Opera has always thrived partly on spectacle and excess, and the compelling visual intimacy for the distant opera audiences surely motivates the splicing in of these variable elements. The Met entered its sixth ‘Live in HD’ season in the fall of 2011. 16 Other classical performing arts groups have taken different routes for the global digital distribution of performance; for example, Medici.tv in Europe streams performances to individual subscribers’ private computers rather than principally for a public audience seated together in a theatre. Its production values are more conservative and closely resemble established audiovisual documentation methods for classical concert music. The more commercial Met approach is unarguably successful: Recent reports in trade publications indicate that Met HD cinecasts grew from a few productions in initial season to twelve casts in the 2010-11 season, seen in 1200 theatres by 2.2 million viewers. 17 At the time of writing a season of similar size was just announced for the next year. The Met’s forays into new media have a long history. The opera company used mechanical media to reach a wider public audience from their first recordings on wax cylinders in 1901. The Met achieved audio transmission of performance over telephones to New Jersey in 1910, made a major television (NBC) telecast in 1948, did a broadcast via closed-circuit telecast in 1952, and televised the public TV Live from the Met for several years beginning in 1977. 18 Mediatisation for TV 20 years

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__________________________________________________________________ ago involved many hazards similar to today – prerecording, time delays, signal lapse, primitive sound systems remedied by simultaneous stereo radio, and camera close-ups that advantaged the singers who physically matched character types or possessed more focused voices. 19 Patrick Smith recounts the fragmenting effect of the early 1980s TV shots, with just five heavy cameras and a need for constantly bright lighting on the stage. 20 It is clear that much as it did 25 years ago, today’s Met Live in HD operates at the limits of its own – and the local theatre’s – inter-medium capacities. 21 Given the complexity of the artistic productions, problems like occasional faulty shots, thunderstorm interruptions, mechanical problems, and half hour screening delays are part of the risk of going live. Indeed they remind us that risk is one of liveness’ inherent qualities, sometimes considered to be its sine qua non. 22 Multiple showing locations and lower ticket prices make contemporary Met HD cinecasts not only high in visual and sound quality but also accessible to a wider range of audiences. 23 In many respects, cinecast improves on the visual aspects of the originating house: Movie house audiences have a better view of the stage than many in the back seats in the physical house. 24 Digital high definition and Dolby sound make an aesthetically pleasing cinecast production possible, whether or not it is always perfectly achieved. Embedded screen captions are generally less distracting than on stage scrim, and at least twelve small cameras, rather than the five heavy ones of the 1980s, are live-directed from a multi-monitor console that is sometimes shown to the cinema audience as a ‘backstage’ view, making directors and camera operators a visible part of the live performance. Such effects resemble certain technical theatre practices of the contemporary German stage that I discuss in more detail later in this chapter. 25 3. Accessing the Liveness and What Is Taken Out The risks of digitally transmitted live performance add excitement but in the end may or may not always add aesthetic quality for the experience of reception. Aesthetic unevenness has prompted criticism from observers familiar with its canonical realisations. An example is the issue of design for the camera versus design for the house. Music critic Alex Ross recently lamented, ‘When I criticize the Met shows these days, I sometimes receive letters protesting that they look better in the company’s “Live in HD” transmissions;’ Ross then wonders ‘whether it is almost unfair to review new Met stagings from the point of view of one sitting in the house, since they now seem designed more for the camera operators.’ 26 Met house audiences are typically unafraid to boo set designers of whose work they disapprove (and this happened recently at the set designer’s curtain call in the HD production of The Damnation of Faust). But even when the audiences do not boo, vanguard staging can disappoint or can fail to perform as planned. LePage’s ‘Machine’ in the Ring was temperamental and dysfunctional: Its creaking noises, audible through to our cinema, the distracting struggles of performers perched

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__________________________________________________________________ precariously atop it, and major lapses in mechanical motion at crucial times were all distracting elements. But perhaps the larger critical and philosophical concern relevant across performing arts is the general question of what remediation takes out of liveness in the performance experience. As with other contemporary medial shifts, cinecast almost inevitably brings a new sense of loss of particular cherished qualities of previous practice. Concern for felt losses in the wake of mediatisation is expressed from both traditional and avant-garde sources who call for the recuperation of presence, community between performers and spectators, avoidance of visual objectification, and preservation of relations deemed to be authentic or mutually transformative; these qualities have been said to be possible only when live performers occupy common space with the audience members. 27 Such arguments will be familiar to students of modern theatre: Historically, mass media were the major target of resistance. In the 1960s and 70s live performance was taken up among artists of both experimental theatre and visual performance as an alternative to the making of commodity art objects and the alienation of mass media. 28 The audience touch-interaction experiments of Richard Schechner, Joseph Beuys, and Marina Abramović, among many others, 29 strove to resist the stultifying aesthetic direction that these artists perceived coming from a commodified media culture. Live performance as resistance also appears as the theme in Peggy Phelan’s 1990s feminist-psychoanalytic interpretation of the objectifying gaze and her suspicion that the politics of sheer visibility is not necessarily empowering to marginal groups. 30 In her oft-cited debate on liveness with Phillip Auslander, 31 Phelan proceeds from a Lacanian perspective to find in live performance a means to avoid the socially oppressive gaze. For her the fullest realisation of performance is in ephemeral, immediate, and physical short term encounters with an audience. 32 Auslander, adopting a Derridean point of view, identifies media as the definitive term, countering that ‘live’ is an artefact of the very terms of recording media, the capability of which is always already inscribed in anything termed ‘live.’ 33 A basis for this argument is that media have caused us to view reality differently. We gain more of a practitioner’s perspective on the meanings of mechanical reproduction if we consider how the aural aspects of performance practice were complicated by the mid-twentieth century technological advances in ‘high fidelity’ sound recording. According to Irving Horowitz the pianist Glenn Gould, in pursuit of technical sound perfection in performance, asked why audiences would attend live performance concerts other than for ‘voyeuristic or sadistic’ reasons when audio recordings had attained such high quality; Gould for a time withdrew from live performing, preferring the control of the recording studio. 34 Horowitz’s reflection on the implications for current performance is interesting:

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__________________________________________________________________ Clearly the gap between live and recorded performances has been reduced to such miniscule dimensions that it is no longer self-evident that in-person performances have an overwhelming edge, or, for that matter, any edge. Sometimes the risk of error is taken out of live or television musical performances by verbal mimicry of recorded efforts. 35 Horowitz here follows Gould’s rather narrow view of technical perfectibility to define virtues and dangers of high technical quality recording. But what is ‘taken out of live’ in recorded documentation may be something other than or more than only the risk of error: Under certain conditions – the desire for a particular cherished realisation to reach a particular public on a particular occasion, for example – it will be impossible to achieve certain desired effects unless the live performance is mediatised. For example, many of us in the US heard the live duet played by Iztak Pearlman and Yo-Yo Ma over telecast and webcast at the 2008 US presidential inauguration ceremony. However, what we actually heard over the satellite cast, as the two virtuosi played live and televised, was a recording that had been made ahead of time owing to the impossibility of getting concert quality sound out of rare acoustical instruments, if played outdoors on a cold winter day. In that case the ‘fidelity’ to originating performance was of a more complicated nature than the simple quest for perfection: Canonical sound qualities familiar to the audience but impossible to access live were preserved, rather than destroyed, by the use of mechanical documentation and became an extension of the live presence transmitted remotely to millions of viewers. Matthew Causey successfully reconceptualises liveness for such complications by referring to the materiality of the body and its subjectivity as extended and reconfigured through technology in mediatisation. 36 Causey’s sense of liveness, much in accord with Boenisch’s notion of intermediality in experimental theatre and dance, is helpful for understanding how visuality works across a wide range of mediated performances. Causey gives the example of live rock concerts in the 1990s that used jumbotron video projections. These events foreshadow the later uses of digital projection and remote cinecasting in the classical performing arts. He observes how the giant simultaneous video projections ‘become the evidence of a live act ... the manner in which audience members access the liveness’ 37 – and his account makes sense of inter-medium transmittal practices for cultural events of large scale, like the Pearlman and Ma telecast. Mediatisation thus affords other possibilities and motivations which include more audience members desiring visual/auditory access, and it does so in ways that make meanings in addition to the ones that we traditionally associate with mass marketing, propaganda, or hegemony in service of capital accumulation. Striving for distinction is certainly part of the desire that media access generates, but so are other aspects of sensibility, identity, and participation. Recipients at home over

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__________________________________________________________________ television or internet, under certain circumstances, constitute a live audience through making meaning at the point of reception. This is most easily observed when audience members are physically co-present with each other, even if not with the performers. ‘Live’ audiences attended Sir Kenneth Clark’s Civilization television series in the 1960s at home parties hosted across living rooms in England. I attended the 2008 US presidential inaugural performance ‘live’ with colleagues in a conference room at my workplace, via the webcast we viewed on a large screen. In the hours past midnight, young fan audiences watch live and inprogress the international video game tournaments of ‘Starcraft’ that are webcast from Korean TV studios as well as attended by their own live physical audiences. The webcast fans may simultaneously converse live in real time with each other across continents and oceans, even through not physically in the same room, through IRC chat software applications. What is taken out of live thus varies greatly and depends on characteristics inhering in the particular instance, but the mere use of media does not in itself make the experience not-live. 4. Ontological Extension and Collapsed Categories An argument for extending ontological status of live-mediated performance is further supported if we examine intermedial practices operating within the confines of single physical performance spaces and compare their effects with those of performance relayed over distance. Any discussion of intermedial performance, after Boenisch, must include more than only the artistic standpoints of producing and performing and consider the audience’s standpoints of looking as crucial to the process – remembering that without the audience there is no theatre, and by extension, no ‘live.’ ‘Intermedial’ is an apt broad and descriptive term for practices involving novel material extensions of performing bodies in action, whether the images of performance are contained at one location with the audience or are digitally conveyed to remote sites of reception. 38 The concept does require some unpacking, however: While important commonalities exist, for example, between closed inhouse audiovisual extensions and the external digital casting of live performances, such as Live in HD, remote casting adds artistic choices and limits. In-camera direction yields particular selections of visual and auditory elements for intermedium transfer from among the multiple ‘live’ and locally extended perspectives. These choices for remote casting generally aim to optimise for the sites of technically enhanced reception. The Met problem examples described earlier show how this situation can complicate visual aspects of performance practice and artistic effects in both the originating house and the distant cinema. From the examples above we can extrapolate that continued advances in mediatisation of ‘live’ events may make it increasingly difficult in future to maintain a meaningful distinction between art forms that use intermediality to present their views within one common physical theatre space, and forms that use

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__________________________________________________________________ simultaneous, inter-medium transmittal of images and sound to audiences at remote locations. With further technical innovations such extensions could become differences of degree rather than of kind. Intermedial theatrical practice occurs at many possible distances and points of relay between performers and audiences, and cinecast is just one particular case within the larger range of practices. However, the ontological status of mediatised performance in general continues to be undertheorised, assumption-ridden, and difficult to articulate. Two examples illustrate this. Marcyrose Chvasta coins Digitally Mediated Performance as a term to characterise inter-medium relay of audiovisual theatre performances via Internet to remote groups. Her group digitally shares, captures, and archives its work, sometimes in the absence of a live audience in their space save themselves and their technical support. 39 At time of writing, academics have been experimenting with this kind of simultaneous-live-mediated remote performance for perhaps fifteen years. 40 Performers at increasing numbers of locales can now mutually and openly webcast their activities worldwide from dispersed locations, and some do so through recruitment of other artist groups to their events. 41 The problem in Chvasta’s account is she does not clearly situate her group’s particular method among the many other kinds of onsite and distance casting and streaming alternatives. Nor does she describe the unique effects or the reciprocation practices of the audiences of her group’s performances. Thus it remains unclear just how these performances extend or multiply the standpoints of looking. In another example, Paul Heyer provides a richly descriptive early article on Met Live in HD practices in which he coins the term Digital Broadcast Cinema. 42 Here he is clear about the larger set of remote to movie house technologies of which the Met cinecast is an example, but in his analysis of effects Heyer never departs from established single-media theories. He tries on an interesting succession of single media theories, from Edmund Carpenter to John Ellis and James Monaco, and unsurprisingly, none of the theories is adequate to account for the scope of practices and effects of the Met in HD. The resulting discussion remains theoretically unresolved. Like other performances using remote intermedium transmittal, opera cinecast functions between and among layers of a complex ecology of material frameworks and audience practices. This is why it has been so difficult to describe without neglecting, taking for granted, or inappropriately bracketing off important aspects of the performance from different standpoints. Live in HD opera will always elude single-medium paradigms precisely because it involves the interaction of multiple nodes, medium types, and points of reception. Confusion about intermedial performance practice is compounded when both of the above theorists mistakenly refer to it as ‘for the masses’ and ‘to reach a mass audience.’ 43 Such terminology implicitly subsumes the art form to a particular technology that is being used. As the philosopher Noël Carroll points out, mass art

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__________________________________________________________________ is predicated only partly on the use of the technologies of mass production and distribution: It is mass only if it is also ‘designed for mass consumption;’ 44 easy and accessible to the largest number of people by design and not just by dissemination method. 45 Despite potential availability to recipients of live TV, radio, web, DVD, or cinema reception, ‘easy and accessible to the largest number of people’ hardly describes the design of Met operas either in the past or in today’s cinecast. 46 Some recent Met productions led by vanguard designers and directors, including recently the experimental filmmaker Barbara Sweete at the camera console, push critics’ and audiences’ tolerance for novelty; At other times, artistic decisions such as coyly leaving Karita Mattila’s veil-dancing Salome at least partly clad for Live in HD continue what has been historically the more prudish American cultural tendency. Continuing cultural as well as technical infusions from experimental theatre practice, however, will likely drive cinecast opera increasingly towards a rich array of multiply layered media and content, blending the very old with the very new in the exchange of theatre practices onstage. Any material extension of representations can potentially amplify or limit artistic or audience agency, and likely will do both at once. Media available at a given historical moment affect audience capacities to reciprocate in ways particular to the times and technological circumstances. Certain obvious limiting effects of media were pointed out for remote reception prior to digital technology; the best known is perhaps the lack of the possibility of reciprocation from a distant audience. This was the basis for Sartre’s modernist critique in the 1960s of the alienating and isolating effects of radio, discussed by Auslander. 47 The Met Live in HD still severely limits remote audience response from the performers’ standpoint, 48 but the situation is more complicated on the audience’s side, where even in the remote locations audience members inhabit theatre spaces together. 5. Audience Practices, Fractured Viewpoints and Intertextuality Apart from broad claims about the superiority of physically co-present performers and audiences in live performance, 49 discussions of specific visual and auditory aspects and effects of live intermedial performance remain a relatively new field of inquiry whether the viewing occurs remotely or physically in-house. Sweeping characterisations of mediatisation based on one kind of technological framework at one point in history will have limited usefulness for understanding performance and media as the technologies and practices continue to evolve. Audience reception practices in particular receive relatively scant and sporadic attention especially in the canonical performance forms, with most exceptions focused on performance art and relational art. 50 A rounded view requires consideration of audience reciprocation and response. In an insight that accords with Boenisch’s proposition of observers’ agency, noted earlier, Press and Livingstone argue that the contexts of media use - its local sites of cultural sense-

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__________________________________________________________________ making – are what is crucial. It is the media content and audience responses together that constitute cultural performance practices. 51 As I have demonstrated, remotely cast canonical performances of the Met in HD overlap, subsume, and are partly subsumed by televisual, cinematic, and theatrical practices. Audiences are important, and not because they must all be physically co-present in the same closed space. Liveness is constituted as it is experienced when audiences conceive of themselves as co-present at the event. Cinecast performances often receive ‘live’ applause from the movie audience in my city, including occasional standing ovations and bravos for favourite performances, as happened when soprano Kathleen Kim’s coloratura ‘Olympia’ aria in the 2009 Tales of Hoffman stopped the show, both at the Met and in our local movie house. If we considered only the physical and digital agency of performance at their sites of origination, production, and dissemination, we would miss this audience response. Stipulating physical co-presence as a requirement for ‘liveness’ not only maintains the exclusive access making performance more susceptible to scarcity, characteristic of the very commodity practices some theorists decry; 52 it also neglects or brackets off possibilities and unforeseen consequences that mechanical extension engenders in audience reception practices. Such possibilities range from acknowledgement by applause to remote live cultural events provoked by the originating stimulus and socially performative responses among the house and remote audience spectators, who are performing for each other. At the Met the live house audience and the movie audience respond mainly within traditions of periodic applause, cheers, and the like – but not always. When the Met house cameras transmit live images of audience members they occasionally break the frame of stage to audience performance. Audience members in the house at Lincoln Center are quite aware of being on camera. A few preen self-consciously, smile, or even wave, and some go further: One pre-curtain camera shot panning the house audience at the 2011 Die Walküre caught, in brief silhouette, two young patrons seated in the half dark house. They had come to Lincoln Center wearing matching horned helmets for the occasion. This is a different kind of performance that adds a new layer to Boenisch’s ‘in between the layers’ intermediality yet it is a performance that Fischer-Lichte’s purism would implicitly reject and that Phelen might argue as being of inferior value to simple co-presence of live stage performers with a single house audience. The performing subject here is not onstage yet performs for the eyes of strangers both in the live house and over satellite to the cinema. This is the same liveness that we index in the amusing mishaps and backstage shenanigans. Such added camera views open and further reconfigure cultural meanings made in what is already an intermedial performance situation. The added view cites a further intertextual reference from popular culture, evoking related memories – perhaps a Rocky Horror Show response from opera house seats. The register matches the

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__________________________________________________________________ backstage ‘fan’ interview genre that the Met uses and seems to be invited in response to it, not unlike the fan behaviour at televised rock concerts and sporting events. Coming to opera in costume hats is a different cultural response from the taste and class-conscious self cultivation analysed by Bourdieu as display of social and cultural capital. 53 It also differs from the impression management and self validation documented by Goffman 54 in his sociological account. The implications of dressing up fashionably or assuming acceptable poses is another kind of cultural canon performed by people on view at opera houses for generations; but light hearted parody and carnivalesque costume hats echo perhaps even earlier times. Both performances are for fellow spectators and both prompt mimetic response – in this case, the costume helmeted Met house audience members had an effect at my local movie theatre, where at a subsequent cinecast show in the Ring cycle, two local audience members arrived at the movie house similarly helmet-clad. Thus while Fischer-Lichte, for example, would disqualify any mediated portion of a performance from being performance at all, 55 how else do we account for these audience members’ behaviour? If not a direct reciprocation that performers onstage can necessarily see, it is at least parareciprocal to the stimulus and fully live for comembers of the audience. That intermedial performance can be very robust is also demonstrable in practices and effects that distance transmittal and in-house mediatisation share. One effect is the multiply layered and fractured standpoints of looking it affords and a second is the concomitant intertextuality of content with images and meanings borrowed and spliced in from other genres and registers. We see this not only at the Met but also in practices of other contemporary theatre examples where visibility of the action is manipulated through varied technical interventions in the theatre. Carlson discusses the multiple standpoints effect in uses of live video by contemporary German directors Frank Castorf and René Pollesch in performances at the Volksbühne and Prater theatres in Berlin. These directors incorporate a ‘phenomenological interplay between physical and virtual bodies.’ 56 Carlson describes their Live-Produktion in which audiences see, via video, a living picture of what is actually taking place alongside the live action on stage. Early video-live mixing was combined with the famous ‘Neumann Bungalow’ (an actual one-story house built on the large stage turntable at the Volksbühne). Different sides of the structure are presented to the audience as it revolves, with later addition of livevideo offstage in which audience sees actors as visual images, sometimes in a closed room onstage, other times from a room off-stage, or both at once during the actual play performance. In certain cases the cameras also move with the actors. 57 The intermedial onstage-offstage camera and live views can be compared in effect to the Met’s practices, and they invite a further comparison with Blum’s example in this volume, 58 of Ostermeir’s Hedda Gabbler, a production that affords

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__________________________________________________________________ similarly fragmented and multi-perspective views. In Blum’s example, as in Carlson’s account of Castorf and Pollesch, the whole is contained within one performance and reception space at one theatre location with the originating performers. As Blum points out, Ostermeir’s rotating set, top-mirrored view and glass wall as well as the intermittent camera views projected from offstage together emphasise spectators’ visual access through alternating standpoints of looking. Such fractured viewpoints evoke J. D. Peters’ ‘bifocal’ metaphor for the ways mediatisation breaks up the view of action and moreover they illustrate that rather than media necessarily subsuming live theatre performance with simulacra, as Auslander claimed at the end of the 1990s, 59 here are cases in which theatre also subsumes media. What can emerge, as Carlson says, is ‘a more complicated picture, of a co-dependence of the live and the mediatised, interpenetrating each other in an ongoing feedback ... of subject and object, viewer and viewed.’ 60 Such interpenetration takes place in audiences’ active choice of looking as well as in the occasional and unexpected response-performances of spectators. The feeling that Blum notes being conveyed in Ostermeier’s Gabbler, a constant exposure of visual culture in the sense of surveillance and being on view, is also the case for those Met HD stage performers whose faces and actions are caught in camera close up and for the house spectators over whom the cameras pan casually before the curtain goes up. A more intense surveillance occurs when opera principles and their interviewers become visible to theatre audiences via ad lib appearances offstage and between formal acts of the performance. While some of this offstage action – pre-recorded clips in documentary mode – suggest a Brechtian concern with making visible the means of production by exposing the hidden apparatus of the illusionistic stage, other aspects of the offstage views signal the opposite intent, a star-making and mystifying function. Behaviour and comments framing offstage and on-camera star interviews always suggest certain agreed boundaries to intimate televisual access, yet they are more complicated than the performances onstage or pre-recorded clips. At the Met in HD, the offstage entr’acte interviews are presentational rather than representations. 61 Cameras break the mediality of the stage but remediate when they generate a celebrity persona, a different kind of performed ‘self’ from either the canonical onstage character or the images captured from the documented rituals of backstage preparation. The offstage informal interview has become prevalent in practices of symphony soloists and conductors as well. This part of the performance purports to offer audiences a chance to get ‘closer’ to performers as more ‘real’ persons via a televisual intimacy. What the audiences certainly get is the performer’s presentation of self, but such a self is the kind referenced in Auslander’s refutation of a logocentric self as illusory; it begins with reproduction and is created for it on the spot; thus this self, ‘like language, is subject to the vagaries of mediation.’ 62 The increase in televisual intimacy tied to marketing through these ‘candid’

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__________________________________________________________________ interviews requires that principals being interviewed keep performing for their publics beyond the stage exit wing. The camera surveillance has overflowed the stage as medium and prompts the kind of readymade ‘star’ performance and ‘fan’ responses that we have just discussed. Blum’s other example, the Lee Breuer Dollhouse production, maintains a relatively more controlled mediality. Without the image-fracturing multiple views of a turntable, camera, or glass wall, Breuer’s production reaches from stage to the eye in a more conventional way, but in a rhetorical move that Blum aptly identifies as postdramatic, Breuer uses the actors’ bodies (tall women, high voices, short men, tiny furniture) as visual media of the play’s subtext rather than rely upon actors to develop a modernist psychological character. Such a move maintains an auteur-like control by the director, who foregrounds actors’ physicality while undercutting other aspects of their interpretive agency, and as physicality becomes subtext it takes visual priority and assumes a hierarchical relation to other choices on the part of both actors and audience. In contrast, as Blum describes Ostermeir’s Gabbler, it is the more postmodern in its mediality, in the sense that it offers multiple options and a resulting ambiguity that requires the audience to more actively decide for what to look at and where to look, in contrast with Breuer’s rhetorical visual puzzle. 63 Another important aspect shared by much intermedial performance practice is the way that it disrupts canonical interpretations by inviting intertextual references and splicing in novel elements from popular culture or different genres. This is true in the Met Live in HD case and also appears prominently in the two examples of flamenco performance described by Suslik in this volume, 64 although the elements of each case are of a different kind and result from different modes of borrowing. The performed sand animations projected onto the stage in the Dunas piece that Suslik describes, for example, not only give it multi-perspectival scenography with newly layered meanings but also borrow this ‘freehand performance art’ method that has spread across Europe. 65 The novel intertextual references associated with sand animation, namely public memory and iconic images, are also brought into the performance. While in the Met case the technology is different, like the Malucos case the Met incorporates citations of familiar icons, events, and public memories, subtly infusing and complicating the meaning of stage action with reference to these other known and remembered possibilities for interpretation. Yet popular elements added in Met productions barely depart from the linear text for the most canonical operas: For example, although we see Orfeo’s underworld populated by supernumeraries who are costumed as recognisable dead celebrities and icons (Jimi Hendrix, the Beatles, Abraham Lincoln, and so forth), and although the servants at the Los Alamos test site scene in Dr. Atomic are costumed in stereotypical American Indian garb, these intertextual references are small. They break in only momentarily, functioning as visual jokes, scoring ironic points, ornamenting or

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__________________________________________________________________ punctuating the action, and the basic linear narrative of the opera remains unaltered. This is true even in the extended dance interlude ‘Flesh Rebels’ in the contemporary Nixon in China, in which choreographer Mark Morris used available film footage of Red Army ballet corps to inform his costume and movement designs. The material, generally received in the West as popular culture, barely interrupts the opera’s main narrative with its dramatic yet parodic danced interlude. Suslik similarly has noted that the Malucos maintain much of the traditional flamenco style in their choreography, so that even with variations and borrowings, notably dance variation in the Dunas piece, and novel music, costuming, and ironic touches in Malucos Flamenco, the style remains coherent and recognisable as a member of its genre. Something similar obtains in even the most experimental Met in HD productions. The popular cultural citations always take a decorative or at most a contrapuntal rather than a central shaping role to the opera’s narrative. As in Suslik’s examples, therefore, the core form largely maintains its tradition in Met productions. To some extent new realisations and borrowings with a conservative core structure reflect opera’s long history, canonical realisations, and known stagings from different historical periods. It may reflect the challenge of coping with the sheer knowledge and iconic status existing for a canonical artwork, as Blum discusses so clearly for canonical plays in her chapter, in this volume. Also in the case of the Met, however, the fact that the company refrains from major disruption of an opera’s narrative is more likely due to the relative conservatism in both opera as form and in this opera company in particular. All of the cases discussed above maintain the traditional Western performeraudience relation of the proscenium stage. (In Suslik’s case stage performance is actually a modern departure from both popularised cafe and tablao entertainments on the one hand and from earlier gypsy traditions of family events performed in private patios on the other hand. 66 ) But in none of the three sets of performance examples offered here are onsite spectators specifically invited or required to interact directly with performers as part of the staged performance – as happened in theatre experiments like Schechner’s Performing Garage productions in the 1960s, where audience members were recruited and negotiated direct participation, or as in Boenish’s recent account of Felix Ruckert’s Secret Service in 2002 where audience members were blindfolded and submitted to two stages of increasingly intimate physical intervention by the dancers who were in charge of them. 67 Such active interventions troubled the subject-object divide in a different manner. 6. Effects of Intermediality and Qualified Ontologies of Liveness Cinecast and webcast are instances of the globalisation of culture, a process of late modernity that John Durham Peters says is characterised by ‘the waning of place as a container for experience.’ 68 But as I have tried to demonstrate in this chapter, the waning of place is only one effect of technologies of mediatisation. Equally important are a medium’s potential for the ‘bifocal’ effect of fracturing of

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__________________________________________________________________ viewpoints and the way in which it multiplies the available perspectives for looking at the action, for splicing in intertextual and inter-cultural elements, and for shifting register from high to popular to traditional culture through content that may be borrowed along with an associated technique. While we could argue, with Auslander, that newer media are making us look at things differently, the effects discussed here are not necessarily limited by or dependent upon using advanced technologies in the early twenty-first century. Some effects are obtained with mirrors and turntables, with sand painting and conventional projectors, with intercultural borrowings that add layers of visual practice, with images altering the view performed onstage, and with performative responses by audience members in the theatre. Current forms exist within a dynamic and unfolding ecology of media practices spanning from artistic origin points to in house and remote audiences who are reached mechanically and more or less simultaneously. The Metropolitan Opera’s particular complications – time zone delays, recorded encores, and later documentations for sale in DVD or Blu-Ray – in many ways resemble its earlier televised practices in the 1980s. 69 What is different today is the enhancements in compelling technical quality and powerful delivery to audiences in groups at remote sites of reception. In intermedial performance, a single ontology of the original will be confounded because the performance is nearly always constituted from a partial standpoint – bifocally, to repeat J. D. Peters’ term. The Met Live in HD and other intermedial forms thus confound single theories of performance, media, or mechanical reproduction because they are always more than one medium and more than one possibility of experience. Press and Livingstone have said that a characteristic of the internet as a medium is its ability to blur production and reception, mass and interpersonal, and different media forms. 70 The same is becoming the case for other kinds of intermedial performance that are now evolving. I have attempted to address such issues with a broad perspective that moves across medium, performance, and reception, to point out underexplored ways in which audience reception and responses co-constitute live events alongside the medial interventions of originating artistic productions and mechanical extensions. Understanding intermedial performance will require thinking more precisely and critically about the specific qualities and requirements of different media and associated practices for a given instance, as well as what they hold in common with other methods and their placement within the larger media ecology. If, after Mazzarella, we recognise performance as already one kind of medium, 71 its extensions through material frameworks such as cinecast do not necessarily make it not-live. Depending upon vantage point and recipients, inter-medium practices may not only render certain older senses of live less meaningful; but they may also permit us to see more clearly the ways in which reconfigured meanings can reconstitute even the old arts.

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Notes 1

William Mazzarella, ‘Culture, Globalization, Mediation’, Annual Review of Anthropology 33 (2004): 357. 2 Bilha Blum, ‘Looking at Postmodern Performances of Canonical Plays’, in this volume. 3 ‘HD’ refers to the optical high density technology used increasingly in movie theatres to receive digitally broadcast content through large scale media networks. 4 John D. Peters, ‘Seeing Bifocally: Media, Place, Culture’, in Culture, Power, Place: Explorations in Critical Anthropology, eds. Akhil Gupta and James Ferguson (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997), 79. 5 Ibid., 79. 6 Mazzarella, ‘Culture, Globalization, Mediation’, 346. 7 For the ways in which print media helped to make nationalism, see Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London and New York: Verso, Revised Edition, 1991). 8 Peter M. Boenisch, ‘Aesthetic Art to Aisthetic Act: Theatre, Media, Intermedial Performance’, in Intermediality in Theatre and Performance, eds. Freda Chapple and Chiel Kattenbelt (Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2006), 103. 9 Mazzarella, ‘Culture, Globalization, Mediation’, 346. 10 Blum, ‘Looking at Postmodern Performances of Canonical Plays’, in this volume. 11 Mazzarella, ‘Culture, Globalization, Mediation’, 357. 12 Lars Brandle, Ann Donahue and Ray Waddell, ‘Cinematic for the People’, Billboard 120, No. 18 (3 May, 2008): 27-29. 13 Daniel Wakin, ‘Orchestras on Big Screens: Chase Scene Needed?’, New York Times, 9 November 2010, accessed 28 May 2012, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/09/arts/music/09hd.html?_r=1&pagewanted=all. 14 The Met displays its technical standards on its website: The Metropolitan Opera, ‘The Met Live in HD Projector Standards’, 2012, accessed 28 May 2012, http://www.metoperafamily.org/metopera/broadcast/hd_events_participate.aspx. 15 Wakin, ‘Orchestras on Big Screens’; also see Heidi Waleson, ‘Opera: Divas on the Big Screen’, Wall Street Journal, 21 January 2010, sec. D, 6. 16 Brandle, Donahue and Waddell, ‘Cinematic for the People’. 17 Apollinaire Scherr, ‘Popcorn and Sugarplums’, Financial Times, 22 December 2011, accessed 28 May 2012, http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/9b145abe2be2-11e1-98bc-00144feabdc0.html#axzz1nF8SdeSd. Wakin’s figures are larger but comparable: Wakin, ‘Orchestras on Big Screens’. 18 Rebecca Milzoff, ‘Met Tech’, New York, 41, No. 1, 7 January 2008, 71. 19 Patrick J. Smith, A Year at the Met (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1983), 61-69. 20 Ibid., 63-68.

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By 2010 about one third of US theatres had the necessary digital capacity. Daniel J. Wakin, ‘Orchestras on Big Screens: Chase Scene Needed?’. 22 Celia Morgan, personal communication to the author on November 8, 2011. 23 Cinecast tickets at US $20-25 compare with opera house seats upwards of $80. 24 Paul Heyer, ‘Live from the Met: Digital Broadcast Cinema, Medium Theory, and Opera for the Masses’, Canadian Journal of Communication 33, No. 4 (2008): 591-604. My own view accords with Heyer’s observation. 25 Marvin Carlson, ‘Has Video Killed the Theatre Star? Some German Responses’, Contemporary Theatre Review 18, No. 1 (2008): 20-29. 26 Alex Ross, ‘Diminuendo: A Downturn for Opera in New York City’, The New Yorker, 12 March 2012, 83. 27 Ericka Fischer-Lichte, The Transformative Power of Performance: A New Aesthetics, trans. Saskya Iris Jain (London and New York: Routledge, 2008). 28 The stultifying and commodifying effects of media visualities were articulated early by Guy DeBord, The Society of the Spectacle (New York: Zone Books, 2008). 29 Fischer-Lichte, Transformative Power of Performance, 62-65. 30 Peggy Phelan, Unmarked: The Politics of Performance (London: Routledge, 1993), 7-10. 31 Philip Auslander, Liveness: Performance in a Mediatized Culture (London: Routledge, 1999); Philip Auslander, ‘Going with the Flow: Performance Art and Mass Culture’, The Drama Review 33, No. 2 (Summer 1989): 119-136. 32 Phelan, Unmarked, 146; also Peggy Phelan, ‘Performance, Live Culture, and Things of the Heart’, Journal of Visual Culture 2 (2003): 291-302. 33 Philip Auslander, Liveness: Performance in a Mediatized Culture (London: Routledge, 1999). 34 Irving Horowitz, ‘Mass, Class, and Audience: Beyond the Glenn Gould Problem’, Modern Age 51, No. 1 (2009): 7. 35 Ibid., 10. 36 Matthew Causey, ‘The Screen Test of the Double: The Uncanny Performer in the Space of Technology’, Theatre Journal 51, No. 4 (December, 1999): 384. 37 Ibid. 38 See for example Freda Chapple and Chiel Kattenbelt, eds., Intermediality in Theatre and Performance (Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2006). 39 Marcyrose Chvasta, ‘Remembering Praxis: Performance in the Digital Age’, Text & Performance Quarterly 25, No. 2 (2005): 164. 40 For example: Laura Knott, ‘World Wide Simultaneous Dance: Dancing the Connection between “Cyberspace” and the Global Landscape’, Leonardo 34, No. 1 (2001): 11-16.

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Global Water Dances was an example launched in 2011 with follow up planned for 2013: See Global Water Dances, http://www.globalwaterdances.org/. 42 Heyer, ‘Live from the Met’, 593. 43 Heyer’s subtitle: ‘Opera for the Masses’; Heyer, Live from the Met’. Chvasta says her group’s intent is ‘to reach a mass audience’; Chvasta, ‘Remembering Praxis’, 163. 44 Noël Carroll, ‘The Ontology of Mass Art’, The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 55, No. 1 (1997): 187-199. 45 Ibid., 190. 46 Furthermore, the news that Frank Castorf may direct the next Ring cycle at Beyreuth in 2013 hardly leads to a conclusion that opera is mass art. Alex Ross, ‘The Wagner Identity’, The New Yorker, 15 and 22 August 2011, 94-95. 47 Jean-Paul Sartre, Critique of Dialectial Reason (1960), 271, quoted in Philip Auslander, ‘Going with the Flow: Performance Art and Mass Culture’, TDR 33, No. 2 (1989): 130. 48 The Met does have a place on its website inviting the audience to send email feedback later. The Metropolitan Opera ‘Contact Us’, accessed 28 May 2012, http://www.metoperafamily.org/metopera/utility/contact/index.aspx. 49 Phelan, Unmarked; also see Fischer-Lichte, Transformative Power of Performance. 50 Exceptions involve relational or performance art; for example Marvin Carlson, Performance: A Critical Introduction (New York and London: Routledge, 2004); Jaques Rancière, The Emancipated Spectator, trans. Gregory Elliott (New York and London, Verso, 2009). 51 Andrea Press and Saria Livingstone, ‘Taking Audience Research into the Age of New Media: Old Problems and New Challenges’, in Questions of Method in Cultural Studies, eds. Mimi White and James Schwoch (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2006), 179. 52 Phelan, ‘Performance, Live Culture and Things of the Heart’, 291-302. 53 Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984). 54 Erving Goffman, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (New York: Anchor Books/Doubleday, 1959). 55 Fischer-Lichte, Transformative Power of Performance, 73. 56 Carlson, ‘Has Video Killed the Theatre Star?’, 20-29. 57 Ibid., 22-24. 58 Bilha Blum, ‘Looking at Postmodern Performances of Canonical Plays’, in this volume. 59 Philip Auslander, Liveness (London: Routledge, 1999). 60 Carlson, ‘Has Video Killed the Theatre Star?’, 29.

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Philip Auslander, From Acting to Performance: Essays in Modernism and Postmodernism (London: Routledge, 1997). 62 Auslander, ‘Going with the Flow’, 31. 63 Blum, ‘Looking at Postmodern Performances of Canonical Plays’, in this volume. 64 Idit Suslik, ‘Dancing Clowns and Desert Dunes: Challenging Traditional Flamenco Imagery through “Fusion”’, in this volume. 65 For example, ‘Ukrainian Sand Artist Proves that Reality TV’s Got Talent’, The Guardian, 13 April 2012, accessed 27 May 2012, http://www.guardian.co.uk/culture/tvandradioblog/2009/aug/13/ukranian-sand-arti st. 66 Blum, ‘Looking at Postodern Performances of Canonical Plays’, in this volume. 67 Fischer-Lichte, Transformative Power of Performance, 67-68. 68 Peters, ‘Seeing Bifocally: Media, Place, Culture’, 79. 69 Noël Carroll calls such receptions ‘token reception events’. Carroll, ‘The Ontology of Mass Art’, 192-193. 70 Press and Livingstone, ‘Taking Audience Research into the Age of New Media’, 184. 71 Mazzarella, ‘Culture, Globalization, Mediation’, 353.

Bibliography Anderson, Benedict O. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London and New York: Verso Revised Edition, 1991. Auslander, Philip. ‘Going with the Flow: Performance Art and Mass Culture’. The Drama Review 33, No. 2 (1989): 119–136. —––. From Acting to Performance: Essays in Modernism and Postmodernism. London: Routledge, 1997. —––. Liveness: Performance in a Mediatized Culture. London: Routledge, 1999. Boenisch, Peter M. ‘Aesthetic Art to Aisthetic Act: Theatre, Media, Intermedial Performance’. In Intermediality in Theatre and Performance, edited by Freda Chapple, and Chiel Kattenbelt, 103–116. Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2006. Bourdieu, Pierre. Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984.

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__________________________________________________________________ Brandle, Lars, Ann Donahue, and Ray Waddell. ‘Cinematic for the People’. Billboard 120 (3 May, 2008): 27–29. Brunstein, Ada. ‘Singing the Body Electric’. Atlantic Monthly 307, April 2011, 30. Carlson, Marvin. ‘Has Video Killed the Theatre Star? Some German Responses’. Contemporary Theatre Review 18, No. 1 (2008): 20–29. Carroll, Noël. ‘The Ontology of Mass Art’. The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 55, No. 1 (1997): 187–199. —––. Performance: A Critical Introduction. New York and London: Routledge, 2004. Causey, Matthew. ‘The Screen Test of the Double: The Uncanny Performer in the Space of Technology’. Theatre Journal 51, No. 4, (1999): 383–394. Accessed 28 May 2012. http://www.jstor.org/stable/25068707. Chapple, Freda, and Chiel Kattenbelt, eds. Intermediality in Theatre and Performance. Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2006. Chvasta, Marcyrose. ‘Remembering Praxis: Performance in the Digital Age’. Text & Performance Quarterly 25, No. 2 (2005): 156–170. DeBord, Guy. The Society of the Spectacle. New York: Zone Books, 2008. Fischer-Lichte, Ericka. The Transformative Power of Performance: A New Aesthetics. Translated by Saskya Iris Jain. London and New York: Routledge, 2008. Global Water Dances. Marylee Hardenbergh, Artistic Director. Accessed 28 May 2012. http://globalwaterdances.org. Goffman, Erving. The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. New York: Anchor Books/Doubleday, 1959. Heyer, Paul. ‘Live from the Met: Digital Broadcast Cinema, Medium Theory, and Opera for the Masses’. Canadian Journal of Communication 33, No. 4 (2008): 591–604.

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__________________________________________________________________ Horowitz, Irving Louis. ‘Mass, Class, and Audience: Beyond the Glenn Gould Problem’. Modern Age 51, No. 1 (2009): 6–14. Knott, Laura. ‘World Wide Simultaneous Dance: Dancing the Connection between “Cyberspace” and the Global Landscape’. Leonardo 34, No. 1 (2001): 11–16. Mazzarella, William. ‘Culture, Globalization, Mediation’. Annual Review of Anthropology 33 (2004): 345–367. http://www.jstor.org/stable/25064857. Milzoff, Rebecca. ‘Met Tech’. New York, 7 January 2008, 71. Peters, John Durham. ‘Seeing Bifocally: Media, Place, Culture’. In Culture, Power, Place: Explorations in Critical Anthropology, edited by Akhil Gupta, and James Ferguson, 72–92. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997. Phelan, Peggy. Unmarked: The Politics of Performance. London: Routledge, 1993. —––. ‘Performance, Live Culture and Things of the Heart’. Journal of Visual Culture 2, No. 3 (2003): 291–302. Press, Andrea, and Saria Livingstone. ‘Taking Audience Research into the Age of New Media: Old Problems and New Challenges’. In Questions of Method in Cultural Studies, edited by Mimi White, and James Schwoch, 175–200. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2006. Ranciere, Jaques. The Emancipated Spectator. Translated by Gregory Elliott. New York and London: Verso, 2009. Ross, Alex. ‘The Wagner Identity’. The New Yorker, 15 and 22 August 2011, 94– 95. —––. ‘Diminuendo: A Downturn for Opera in New York City’. The New Yorker, 12 March 2012, 82–83. Sartre, Jean-Paul. Critique of Dialectial Reason. Translated by Alan SheridanSmith. Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1960. Scherr, Apollinaire. ‘Popcorn and Sugarplums’. Financial Times, 22 December 2011. Accessed 27 May 2012. http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/9b145abe-2be2-11e198bc-00144feabdc0.html#axzz1nF8SdeSd.

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__________________________________________________________________ Smith, Patrick J. A Year at the Met. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1983. The Metropolitan Opera. ‘The Met Live in HD Projector Standards’. 2012. Accessed 28 May 2012. http://www.metoperafamily.org/metopera/broadcast/hd_events_participate.aspx. ‘Ukrainian Sand Artist Proves that Reality TV’s Got Talent’. The Guardian, 13 April 2012. Accessed 28 May 2012. http://www.guardian.co.uk/culture/tvandradioblog/2009/aug/13/ukranian-sand-arti st. Wakin, Daniel J. ‘Orchestras on Big Screens: Chase Scene Needed?’ New York Times, 9 November 2010. Accessed 27 May 2012. http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/09/arts/music/09hd.html?_r=1&pagewanted=all. Waleson, Heidi. ‘Opera: Divas on the Big Screen’. Wall Street Journal, 21 January 2010, sec. D, 6. Adele Anderson is affiliated with Empire State College, State University of New York. She teaches at the institution’s Rochester Center and in the Master of Arts in Liberal Studies Program, School for Graduate Studies. Her postgraduate preparation is in visual arts and socio-cultural anthropology and current research interests include the rhetoric of images, inclusive dance theatre, and community performance.

Part 2 Materiality and Meaning: The Visual Agency of the Inanimate

Visionary Voice / Silent Clown Andrew Cope Abstract Early cinema’s silent clowns might be appreciated as enduring, in both a popular awareness and a philosophical relevance, through their critical development with the dawn of a new age of technology. Some sense of the fruitful tension that came with this complex synchronicity might be shared through presentations of the vintage slapstick footage that exploits cinema, only to show its protagonists being tormented by other forms of technology (e.g. the ‘automobile’). Such scenarios might suggest that some silent clowns were producing challenging meditations on modern change, through a contrary acquiescence with the possibilities of its new visual media. With some emphasis upon the work of Buster Keaton (considered through the lens of a perceived and perhaps surprising precedent in Friedrich Nietzsche’s tragic philosophy) this contribution will substantiate – and build upon – the social, and existential, significance of this apparent paradox. The chapter expects to achieve this through a comparative method which first calls attention to, and then usefully draws out, the constancies with a similarly tense – yet environmentally reconciled – project that defines the traditional role of the shaman. In its process the chapter will also highlight some epistemologically promising commonalities between performance studies, process philosophy, and the burgeoning material culture project – particularly as their overlapping interest in activity might support a higher academic profile for playful takes on materiality, and object-hood. Key Words: Becoming, material agency, networks, objects, play, presence, tragedy. ***** 1. Drawing Things Near My initial interest in some object-led re-acquaintance with slapstick’s filmic archive was stirred by the way that my own nerves tended to be left untouched by its scenes of physical violence. To identify just what was acting out (and/or taking place) to create this void of sentience, I began to consider slapstick’s ‘knockabout’ burlesque in terms of a three-fold which accepted – as it also contained the relations between – its performatic 1 content, its mediation, and the process of its filmic reception. This perspective was informed by Diana Taylor’s 2003 book The Archive and the Repertoire: a publication that arguably furthered the academy’s participatory zeitgeist through its involving conception of performance as some vital act of transfer. As my subsequent outlook propagated the latter’s emphasis on the liveliness of meetings, it also began illuminating some slapstick scenarios in

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__________________________________________________________________ terms of the metaphysical wholeness, or cosmic connectedness, which has traditionally been pursued by the figure of the shaman. 2 This healing position is shared across a range of cultural contexts, but it remains consistent in its role of perpetuating a sense of oneness, with the wider environment, through the performance of ritual. As such rites share out something of the shaman’s connected psychic consciousness, they also relieve the anxiety that might stem from any sense of separateness from the earth’s matrix. It is the provision of a gateway to this unified existential economy that is typically understood to be definitive of the shaman’s role: [T]he shaman evokes an efficacious power. In a very real sense, it is not the shaman alone or his activities in themselves that are, strictly speaking, religious, but the manner in which the shaman is able to connect the audience to a cosmological power. “For the religious significance of an event,” Ernst Cassirer wrote, “depends no longer on its content but solely on its form: what gives its character as a symbol is not what it is and whence it immediately comes but the spiritual aspect in which it is seen, the relation to the universe which it obtains in religious feeling and thought.” 3 Friedrich Nietzsche’s openness to energies of benevolence, for the purpose of making them more widely available, allowed him to become my own formative reference for appreciating the conditions of some modern fulfilment of the shaman’s capacity. This understanding emerged after my appreciation of Nietzsche’s earliest literary intervention into modernity’s intellectual milieu – The Birth of Tragedy. This sketches some outline of a shamanic earth disciple through its considerations of the ancient Greek gods, Dionysus and Apollo: deities who walked together in the Hellene context, yet conflicted as the Dionysian realm of a universal willing (an essential life-force, sometimes called Brahman in its support of creation) vied with Apollo’s diverse dominion of appearance and form. 4 Nietzsche argued that the performance of tragedy, which the figures of Apollo and Dionysus were synonymous with, maintained a civic profile for the inevitable tension between human being (as this determines how the earth’s process might appear, through the lens of our own interested investments) and the cosmological principle of becoming (which can be identified with the earth’s perpetual death and rebirth flux). Nietzsche supposed that the Hellene awareness of this schism benefited the polis as it kept its people in touch with their widest role in an inevitable process of change. 5 In essence then, the tragic consciousness worked by mitigating the fragmenting effects of any sense of completion in the self. Whist this ‘individuation’ serviced a public state of mind – in its identification of material things with particular,

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__________________________________________________________________ culturally significant, objects – its related tendency to assume several ontological spaces between the subjective self and the matter of the wider earth nevertheless risked frustrating community life through its support of independent perspectives and their rationalisations. Given the perceived emphasis on a generative matrix, Nietzsche understood ancient Greek tragedy to be its civilisation’s regulated and aesthetic revision of more primitive Dionysian celebrations – associated with the orgiastic rites of fertility festivals. If tragedy stopped short of the latter’s overwhelming of culturally accepted appearances, it nevertheless diminished their significance as it identified subjects (and so their objects) with the changing and creative matter of the earth’s flow: Not only is the bond between man and man sealed by the Dionysiac magic: alienated, hostile or subjugated nature, too, celebrates her reconciliation with her lost son, man. The earth gladly offers up her gifts, and the ferocious creatures of the cliffs and the desert peacefully draw near ... as if the veil of Maya had been rent and hung in rags before the mysterious primal Oneness. 6 As The Birth of Tragedy visits the tragic subject matter in terms of its healing, of individuation’s rifts with the earth, the treatise supposes that Attic drama fulfilled the role of the shaman; the latter similarly reviving some holistic sense of involvement as its rituals confront an audience through trusted appearances, defamiliarised for the memorable invocation of an ineffable life-force. In this sense, Nietzsche’s shamanic understanding of tragedy is distinguishable from the vision of other 19th century literary figures (such as Mary Shelley) who – whilst similarly sceptical about Christianity, and equally interested in tragic effects – nudged its drama further towards transcendental idealism as they continued to understand its essence to lie in critical notions of some ‘fatal flaw’ (rather than the affirmation of a whole economy which prevails without error). 7 2. Participation Mystique To the extent that The Birth of Tragedy seduces its late Romantic intellectual milieu (through its interest in the classical world), only to challenge the legitimacy of its Socratic (i.e., rational) underpinnings, it might be understood to begin playing-out the shamanic role that its author, ostensibly, sets out to merely explain. This tentative mystical performance would be more fully realised through Nietzsche’s staggered (and so dramatically ‘staged’) publication of Thus Spake Zarathustra. This project confuses the distinction between the literary creation of Zarathustra and his philosophical creator, as it sees each becoming something of an avatar of the other. If the shamanic aspects of this transformative process are

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__________________________________________________________________ reinforced by the epic narrative – as it is told through an evocative pre-modern parlance – then the implicit becomes explicit when the chapter on ‘Great Events’ has Zarathustra plunging into a volcano: 8 a story that recalls some of Nietzsche’s previous scholarship which acknowledged the shamanic purpose of the (preSocratic) philosopher Empedocles, who undertook a similar plummet into the throat of Mount Aetna. 9 But the spirit of the shaman might inhere most strongly in the affecting experience of Thus Spake Zarathustra’s message, as it encourages a perceptual shift away from the anthropocentric transcendence of matter (i.e., objects) through nurturing an involving awareness of the magical synergy of encounters: a ‘participation mystique’ 10 wherein ‘things all dance themselves’ as they ‘hold out the hand and laugh and flee.’ 11 If the experience of the encouraged change in outlook still has the capacity to leave readers of Zarathustra with the feeling that they have succumbed to a mystic’s healing spell, 12 then it also begins to evoke the apparent anarchy of slapstick scenarios as it challenges the idea that material things can be innocent, inert, or passive in events. As this analogue services this chapter’s deployment of tragedy, as a lens for revisiting the materiality of early cinematic slapstick (and so the purpose of some of its silent clowns) then the apparent foreshadowing of fresh ideas and themes, in the contemporary material culture project (particularly as it advocates notions of ‘material agency’), 13 points to the wider interdisciplinary purpose of this exercise. 3. An Earthly Ego In his book, Religion, Modernity and Postmodernity, Paul Heelas describes the underlying ambition of modernity as a transformation of the Protagoran contemplation of humankind, as ‘the measure of all things,’ into something of an intention to be decisive on the beingness or non-beingness of everything. 14 As this notion conflicts with tragedy’s all-involving idea of a cosmological authority, it allows a glimpse of how the modern project might have continued Christianity’s suppression of the shamanic message. In this sense, Heelas’ understanding of modernity might also assist in distinguishing how a Neo-shaman would have to differ from the traditional archetype, because if the social purpose of the integrated mystic (which might continue to be exemplified by the tribal shamans of the Ojibway Indians 15 and the communal shamans of the Saami culture in Nordic countries 16 ) must withstand in any fluctuation on the shamanic theme, then a contemporary equivalent of its healing individual, in any ‘Westernised’ context, would have to be something of an ethical egoist (in pursuing a virtuous cause which nevertheless conflicts with the widely accepted authority of a human world) and so an outsider figure. I must stress that the apparent egoism of the supposed shamanic figure is not a centred variety – as this would simply act to place the deviant subjectivity at the centre of the project – but rather the lonely inevitability of pursuing the primacy of

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__________________________________________________________________ a process earth in a social milieu that can only recognise the power of humanity. Nevertheless, inasmuch as such outsider figures might refuse to yield to an endemic individuated disposition (even as he or she acts on the behalf of whole which includes humanity) then the behaviour of such a healer might be difficult to distinguish from that of a self-centred egoist – especially to a Western subject who tends to perceive people as social agents who should affirm the authority of a group (by ‘choosing’ to act in accordance with the will of its administrative structures). It was arguably further to reading Nietzsche that Martin Heidegger recognised, and regretted, the emergence of a subject-centred epoch – which he titles ‘The Age of World Picture’ – wherein ‘man’ has become ‘that being upon which all that is, is grounded as regards the manner of its Being and its truth’ (meaning that all ‘matter stands before us exactly as it stands with it for us’). 17 And it is perhaps in his experience, of the powerful auditing that this supposes, that Nietzsche accepted its population would be best served (in the long-term) by a pious retreat from its world: “[A]udience” is merely a word, and not a constant, immutable standard. Why should the artist feel obliged to accommodate himself to a force whose strength lies purely in numbers? And if he feels superior, in talent and aspiration, to every single spectator, how could he feel greater respect for the collective expression of all those subordinate capacities than for that individual spectator who is, in relative terms, the most gifted among them? 18 A democratic instinct has left some Western intellectuals unwilling to identify with Nietzsche’s look down on the many. 19 A related level of suspicion, around the philosopher’s intentions, has arguably combined with his Neopagan and aesthetic associations, to contribute to a popular confusion that has a shaman’s symbolic power associated with the notoriety of art’s enfant terribles. To illustrate the endurance of this misapprehension – and to differentiate the shaman’s earthly ego from a misleading correlate – I might draw on the example of Salvador Dalí. 20 Art’s popular commentators have often allowed this infamous figure to represent the shamanic ethos of Surrealism. 21 Yet his artwork, and an associated public profile, were deemed sufficiently deviant – from Surrealism’s earthly ethos – to sustain internal calls for Dalí’s expulsion from its collective. 22 To expand, Dalí’s stylistic concessions to the canon of fine art were recognised (by founding Surrealist figures such as André Breton) as a circumventing, rather than a furthering, of Surrealism’s shamanic cause. This is because Dalí willfully reproduced and exploited questionable cultural meanings (such as the divisive Western idea of ‘the artist’ which supposes that creativity can be controlled by, or

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__________________________________________________________________ gathered up into, individuals) to afford him his influential celebrity: a socially engaged strategy, for personal power, that conflicted with the holism of Surrealism’s mystical agenda. 4. Foreign Objects Book XI of Homer’s Odyssey documents a shaman’s earthly council, in the form of the restorative prophecy of the blind seer Teiresias (a tiding that is recalled once again in book XXIII). As the soothsayer foresees some end to the journeying of Odysseus, his utterance also points to a symbolic moment wherein two distinguishable objects emerge through the largesse of a single material thing: [G]o forth, carrying with you a balanced oar, till you come to men who know nothing of the sea and eat food unseasoned with salt … . I will give you a plain token you cannot miss. When another traveller falls in with you and takes the thing upon your shoulder to be a winnowing-fan, then plant that balanced oar in the ground and … return home … . 23 Ostensibly, the vision simply anticipates a moment when Odysseus becomes aware of his home through its material culture relations. However, a shamanic bridge lies in the scenario particularly as it triggers some awareness that objects, worlds, and the latter’s people, are mutually disclosed as they feed into (and so constitute) cultural complexes through encounters: a healing appreciation which is associated with the open generosity of the earth through the prophecy’s acceptance that – contra the seductive sense of individuation – beings never have any independent existence. The perceived object-lesson is intimately bound up with the blindness of Teiresias and its affordance of insight, through ignorance, in the context of his dark underworld dwelling (unlike his sighted neighbours, the sage is fundamentally uncompromised by the blackness of Hades). In this sense, the tale further propagates The Odyssey’s positive perception of foreigness as it is more subtly initiated through the drifting figure of Odysseus himself. 24 The scenario of the oar/winnowing fan ambivalence is revisited in many of silent comedy’s most memorable scenes. In Charlie Chaplin’s 1925 film The Gold Rush for instance, the resourceful tramp allows the leather sole of his shoe to become some surrogate for a rump steak – the humour lying in the scenes capacity to invoke the harmonising ontological constancy between the two objects (each coming from a cow), whilst it nevertheless accepts the differences that might be identified through the lens of culture. I will return to something of this scenario in its particular potential for a life affirming experience in section 8, but for now I might further illuminate the premise of its humour – as it is dependent on a

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__________________________________________________________________ resourceful existence at the fringes of society – through some recourse to a 20th century account of modernity’s seminal marginalised sages. As Colin Wilson’s 1956 book, The Outsider, advocates staying foreign, as a way to ‘absolute Brahman, which is supreme and characterless,’ 25 it also presents Nietzsche as a modern model of its spiritual logics in action. In doing so, Wilson evokes the inanimate features of Buster Keaton (who began his stage career in 1899, the year before Nietzsche’s death), 26 particularly as the philosopher advances the role of the outsider in terms of his or her challenge to Eurocentric ideas of human being – which are questioned in their cherishment of ideas of character and personality: Schopenhauer made Nietzsche aware of something that, as a poet and an Outsider, he had subconsciously been aware of for a long time: that the world is not the bourgeois surface it presents. It is will, and its delusion … . … Outsiders … doubt the “reality” of the bourgeois world (I call it this for want of a better word; in practice, I mean the world as it appears to the human social animal). All of the meaning of this attitude is compressed in De Lisle Adam’s “As for living, our servants will to that for us”. It means that the human personality is conceived almost as an enemy; when it comes into contact with “the world”, it tells the soul lies, lies about itself and its relation to other people. 27 Of all the early slapstick icons it is perhaps Keaton who can best embody a modern shamanic model, as his signature ‘deadpan’ symbolically effaces his knowing. Nevertheless, it is important to recognise that the critical possibilities, of this supposed erasure, accept the maintenance of knowledge in the former’s encounters with the wider social milieu. In this sense, the thrill of Keaton’s cinematic performances might remind us that even the most remote of outsider figures are socially engaged – rather than anti-social or sociopathic. 5. Distributing the Limelight Ahead of a review of Buster Keaton movies, at London’s National Film Theatre during the spring of 2006, a BBC News (online) article took a lead from the retrospective to draw wider attention to slapstick’s filmic archive. The item, entitled ‘What Happened to Slapstick?,’ 28 remains noteworthy because of the nuanced way that its author, Steve Tomkins, represents Keaton’s clowning. Rather than visiting one of the star’s famously daring stunts he instead highlights a scene from a 1921 short, The High Sign, where Keaton apparently confounds an expectation by avoiding, rather than slipping upon, a banana skin. This dodge is

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__________________________________________________________________ completed with an esoteric hand gesture, which is interpreted as communicating that there is ‘more to slapstick than you thought.’ 29 In the context of the item, it is clear that the journalist is deferring to ideas of type, as he has Keaton thwarting some formulaic prerequisite for the benefit of an unexpectedly sophisticated effect: a supposition that might reflect a widely-held perception of slapstick, as it privileges a generic narrative (albeit one escaped) over any affirmation of a banana presence. However, if this ostensible non-event is viewed through the Nietzschean lens of tragedy, 30 then the scenario might be reassessed through a serene worldview, which – in reflecting the essential oneness of life’s flux – accepts the inevitable contribution of all things in any given event. In this light, Keaton’s dodge might represent an experiential appreciation of the banana skin’s active presence, albeit through his negotiation of its agencies and their harmful potential; wherein, the object is not neutral, nor is it beholden to a generic staple. Instead, it is a contributor to the skit, and one that lends some knowing artfulness to Keaton’s ‘steer clear’ through its lively unfolding as a slippery thing. This distributing revision (inasmuch as it accepts the agency of a thing, in an event) has Keaton allowing an object to share some of that limelight which commentators (such as Steve Tomkins) tend to throw onto slapstick’s human actors alone. In this sense Tomkins’ apparent confidence, in an anthropocentric reading of the skit, might be usefully representative of a Western subjective outlook. Moreover, it might throw the broad anxiety behind the counter-point – as it finds a contemporary champion in the figure of Bruno Latour – into some useful high relief: Much like sex during the Victorian period, objects are nowhere to be said and everywhere to be felt. They exist, naturally, but they are never given a thought, a social thought. Like humble servants they live on the margins of the social doing most of the work but never allowed to be represented as such. There seems no way, no conduit, no entry point for them to be knitted together with the same wool as the rest of the social ties. The more radical thinkers want to attract attention to humans in the margins and at the periphery, the less they speak of objects. As if a damning curse had been cast unto things, they remain asleep like the servants of some enchanted castle. 31 Latour’s subsequent actor-network-theory (ANT) has provided a ready lens for some 21st century material culture projects. The idea of macro social networks has been particularly useful in helping researchers to track the historical movements of people through its capacity for detailed models of cultural transmissions. 32 Moreover, its underpinning notion of human and non-human hybrids – which

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__________________________________________________________________ occur as people and objects fold into each other – has extended the reach of performance studies’ interest in participatory activity through highlighting a level of equivalence between people and things. Yet, if ANT has returned the energy of objects, back into models of the social (through defying any idea of pure or individuated form), it falls short of tragedy’s holistic promise, even as it has reawakened elements of the material culture discipline to some epistemological need to commune with the process earth. 33 Having highlighted this perceived limitation, I might suggest that ANT’s level of cosmological promise is prematurely curtailed by the way that its material forces are framed, in terms of some useful end. Thereafter things themselves tend to be submerged as the labour that weaves beings into useful networks becomes definitive of their objects. If this satisfies something of the agnostic demands of tragedy (by refusing the anthropocentric idea of agency) then it tends to leave things acknowledged in terms of the sublimated state(s) that are consistent with particular cultural interests. Nevertheless, in its implication of transformative meetings, ANT usefully invokes a field of synergy that can be readily identified with the shaman’s quarry. 6. As Large as Life Any given network tends to put only some of a material thing’s doing to work and so ANT, as a material culture lens, values any subsequent material actors according to how they are disposed to propagating (necessarily) discriminating systems. To explain further, I might invoke my own growing collection of vinyl LPs, where a number of agencies related to the changing durability of their plastic material might rightly be said to be put to work in the networked format. However, even a generous account of ANT would only negatively accept vinyl’s distinctive smell. This is to say that because it does not smell awful, vinyl is networkable as a domestic entertainment medium. Yet this smell remains a very real, and positive, feature of encounters with my record collection – and no less so in their hi-fi context. A perceived limitation of ANT, then, is that in being a theory of social effects (which is to say vested outcomes) rather than the affecting presence, it displaces a tragic idea of fate with the destiny associated with ‘interested’ relations; useful connections which tend to volatise things and stuff into agreeable qualities alone. This latter process might be understood to represent some practical variant of the tragic view, but any intellectual satisfaction with its model might obscure its inability to oversee and nurture our intimacy with a cosmological matter, as it constitutes the physical events of existence (an engagement which might be said to represent the ethical imperative of tragedy). However, this is scarcely of concern to Bruno Latour, whose interest in any notion of oneness between humans and other beings is restricted to its own usefulness as an analytical device for understanding

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__________________________________________________________________ systems. His articulation of this limit, in Reassembling the Social, could scarcely be any clearer: ANT is not, I repeat is not, the establishment of some absurd “symmetry between humans and non-humans”. To be symmetric, for us, simply means not to impose a priori some spurious asymmetry among human intentional action and a material world of causal relations. There are divisions one should never try to bypass … . 34 Yet the ‘intimacy,’ which tragedy nurtures, is based on accord through the fundamental absence of divisions even as it accepts their superficial appearance through networks. From here it might be possible to begin distinguishing a tragic materiality from ANT’s interested and efficient correlate. 7. Quizzing Matter A tragic relationship with material things might be understood as an engagement which occurs on the basis of one life-force, as the latter allows all things to bear upon each other, so that they might affect other beings and constitute the creative authority of the earth’s flux. A communion with this force might be realised when its things are engaged outside of the distracting pull of the social horizons that support networks (and subjects). In their process, I might describe the supposed encounters as an attempt to get behind objects, and they might be initiated when people stay foreign to worlds and instead answer any object’s apparent call to us with idiosyncratic responses. If this process accepts the smelling of vinyl it could equally include the tapping of a pencil upon a desk, or the simple plunge of a hand into wet sand. Such playful experiments, with things and stuff (i.e., materials which cannot be numbered), might assist their protagonists in nurturing some sense of matter’s creative contribution to life in its generously open (inasmuch as it produces affects with pure potential, rather than prescription) and so actively soulful aspect. Milhaly Csikszentmihalyi and Stith Bennett seem to advocate such whimsical activity, as their influential model of play identifies its pleasure with a capacity to tease extraordinary effects from a familiar environment: a process which, they argue, existentially secures any player as it provides for some firsthand life-guidance through extending an appreciation of the synergies which determine a human destiny. 35 It is in this capacity to assist in the divination of natural events that play came to define the repertoires of the most ancient soothsayers and shamans – as they dedicated themselves to ‘quizzing the supernatural’ through methods which accepted that human life had a concrete exteriority. 36 Csikszentmihalyi and Bennett bring the soulful remunerations of play clearly into view by comparing and contrasting its psychic state with the tedium, and

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__________________________________________________________________ worry, that is produced through prevalent Eurocentric material culture conditions. In the case of boredom, socially policed routines ensure that a human being’s potential for action exceeds that which it is allowed to act out. Anxiety, on the other hand, occurs when the demands of the environment exceed a human being’s capacity for their actualisation. 37 Each of the former conditions might be understood to occlude the earth’s generosity, as boredom has the human being experiencing existence in terms of its denial of possibilities whilst anxiety has material culture relations bearing on people in a fashion which produces a negative experience of lack, or inadequacy. Play, then, might be understood to achieve a mental state that lies somewhere between boredom’s dullness and anxiety’s worry, as it limits of a portion of reality (from its social horizons) for an engagement where immanent individuals can act out their potential in circumstances which reassuringly remain within their ability to cope. I would suggest that it is in the revisiting of such scenarios that play escalates (through the measuring afforded by a previous reference) to become a game. But if play is to continue within a game so the conditions must vary according to the growing experience of the player; in these senses play and gaming might be understood to be identical with becoming, and so processes which are fully sympathetic with the matter of the earth. 38 8. Negating Standpoints As they are stripped of any interest outside of their sheltered experience, playful engagements arguably allow access to life’s energetic process of synergy as it exceeds any systems – including the mutual preservations of any subject-object relation. If such a light-hearted attitude towards material culture is, as yet, discouraged by the disciplinary differentiation of art’s creative making from the former’s interest in artefacts, it is nevertheless consistent with the Eastern ontology of Keiji Nishitani, particularly as his book Religion and Nothingness suggests that the mode of being things, as they are in themselves, is a field that negates any location of their essence in any ‘concrete’ standpoints. 39 The subsequent affirmation of activity’s essential emptiness (activity being a process constituted through things, but not being of a form itself) suggests that a playful temperament – with its disinterested relationship with objects – would be most appropriate for appreciating any thing in its capacity for life as it might be defined in the holistic (rather than biological) terms of one ongoing process of becoming. Nishitani seems to finds some supportive analogue, with play’s challenges to individual beings, in the ancient Eastern wisdom which became linguistically adequate to life (as it occurs with material culture) through deploying confounding paradoxes, such as ‘[t]he sword does not cut the sword’ and ‘[t]he eye does not see the eye.’ 40 If these maxims affirm objects then they do so twice and under varying relations that together accept the different perspectives of people and things. As these ostensible standpoints conflict, so they also cofound attempts to locate the essence of their action in any of their substantial entities. But if it is tempting to

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__________________________________________________________________ assert that this process-led position has objects as mere illusions, then it ought to be kept in view that such a perspective might amount to a retreat back to a Western dualism – for without beings there would be no conduit for life’s forceful flow. Nevertheless it might be true to say that, in their creation of differentials, things are the alibis of action (without being any less ‘real’ as they play out that crucial supporting role). The philosophical implications of this might support an epistemological re-estimation of playful praxis: We are used to representing things … as objects on the field of sensation or the field of reason, thus keeping them at a distance from ourselves. This distance means we are drawn to things, and that we in turn draw things to ourselves. (In this sense, “will,” or desire and attachment, can also be posited at the ground of “representation.”) As long as we stand in such a relationship to things, we can go on thinking of ourselves as incapable of coming within hand of things, and of things in themselves as forever unknowable and out of reach. 41 To recap, at the commencement of an act of play, we might first grasp things in the form they appear to us. As this is challenged, so the subject – which is determined through determining objects – is also assaulted. Much like the ancient paradoxes, which diminish what they first affirm then, playing with objects accepts a level of self-contradiction that can ‘neither abide in existence nor abide being away from it.’ 42 Gilles Deleuze’s writing on Nietzsche seems to accept some illuminating correspondence between such Eastern speculative philosophy and Nietzsche’s ‘own’ ideas. Moreover, in a eulogy for the outlook of the pre-Socratic philosopher Heraclitus, Deleuze invokes tragedy as he endorses the ancient sage’s advocacy of physical play for producing challenges to being; disputes which nevertheless accept appearance as a precondition of play’s pursuit of becoming: Heraclitus is the tragic thinker … . [He] is the one for whom life is radically innocent and just. He understands existence on the basis of an instinct of play. He makes existence an aesthetic phenomenon rather than a moral or religious one … . Heraclitus denied the duality of worlds, “he denied being itself”. Moreover he made an affirmation of becoming. We have to reflect for a long time to understand what it means to make an affirmation of becoming. In the first place it is doubtless to say that there is only becoming. No doubt it is also to affirm becoming. But we also affirm the being of becoming, we say that becoming affirms being or that being is affirmed in becoming. Heraclitus has two

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__________________________________________________________________ thoughts which are like ciphers: according to one there is no being, everything is becoming; according to the other, being is the being of becoming as such. 43 Given this, I might suggest that any playful treatment of objects would be immediately useful for shifting the emphasis of the growing discourse, around networks and assemblages, onto the productive synergy that sustains their processes. Such a project promises to push beyond Latour’s (qualified) challenges to anthropocentric attitudes, so ushering the material culture discourse towards the healing promise of life accessed in its spiritual aspect. 9. Being Before Shakespeare’s development of Macbeth seems to provide for some dramatic insight into just how some play might bring entities into view, in terms of their becoming. The role initially unfolds according to a familiar performatic model. Yet it comes to challenge any perceptual separation of theatrics from reality, when (in act 5, scene 5) the eponymous hero announces himself as a ‘poor player’ who is merely strutting and fretting his hour on stage. 44 The instance of ambivalence begins stratifying a single being across distinguishable actor-networks. As such, it also draws attention to the instantaneous and lively versatility of being, which is usually obscured (for Western subjects) by the desire to assert the reality of the most wilfully satisfying possibility. To be clear, Macbeth is always (and all at once) both a theatrical performance and a disciplined performer, but the screen of an interested assemblage is decisive of the former, until Shakespeare fleetingly reconfigures his protagonist as something of a gestalt. A subsequently sensed, if momentary, tension – between possible acting figures (actor/character/viewer) and grounds (the agencies of individuals and collectives as they become newly conspicuous to onlookers) – seems to occur as an audience is caught between the differing appearances that the open gestalt points to. Writing for this volume, Bilha Blum accepts that similar tactics determine the content, and experience, of a ‘postdramatic’ theatre. 45 This postmodern ambition typically manifolds appearances as it aims to have the bodies of actors conspicuously present with any of the characters that they are playing. Blum compellingly argues that as this drama pluralises appearances, it provides for some dissembling reflections on their subjective essence. However, I might suggest that the distinguishing brevity of Shakespeare’s Macbeth disturbance works to ensure that the character of the king never gets to fully compete with the figure of the actor. Instead, there is a suggestion of the latter: enough to momentarily thwart an objectifying intention, for the benefit of catching an audience in the potent encounter of its process. The forestalling effect, of this gestalt method, might afford audiences something of the restorative moment that Teiresias anticipated for Odysseus (as articulated in section 4 of this chapter) – as it allows them to briefly

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__________________________________________________________________ dwell in the experience of an undetermined presence (i.e., a mutually involving scenario of being before something else), arguably identifiable with existence in its universal mode of becoming. Elsewhere in this volume, Marcelo de Andrade Pereira describes a similar process (as it is at work in a series of video portraits by Robert Wilson) as a struggle against the stasis of objects, which significantly configures things ‘more as a force than a form.’ 46 This concurs with the conclusions of Jon Erickson as his book, The Fate of the Object, supposes that locating perception within apparent contradictions, or ‘hinges,’ provides some opportunity for an encounter with life’s generative ‘energy, in a real physical sense.’ 47 Underpinning this logic is a participatory sensibility; this invokes tragedy as it reasons that just as any object depends upon the ground of the subject, so the terms are reversible. As this refusal of a unilateral human perception accepts the agency of material things, it also suggests that otherness might be legitimately appreciated as the stimulating ground of any being – human or otherwise – through its vital production of difference. I might therefore suggest that if Buster Keaton’s treatment, of the banana, refused the perceptual trampling that would have the fruit as some generic common denominator then he was no less attempting to stave of the disenchanting modern ideas of passive or inert matter, which continue to empty mystery and magic out of prevalent understandings of materiality and object-hood. If this vitalist revision of the skit strikes readers as being a little eccentric, then it is nevertheless a perspective which is supported throughout The High Sign, as the film has the banana appearing through a diverse repertoire, which seems calculated – in its particulars, and its whole – to defy any anthropocentric ideas of agency. This challenge occurs right from an introduction where Keaton exploits an ergonomic happenstance to affect the surreptitious exchange of the banana for a policeman’s pistol. Thereafter, a further ‘deviant’ profile for the fruit might be glimpsed in the contraband itself, as it extends the earlier destabilisation by expressing something of a banana’s shape in the process of swerving the trajectory of its fired bullets. A penultimate turn for the banana could be understood as our familiar object of reference as it is snatched from the policeman (who still believes he’s carrying a weapon) for consumption by his ‘target’: a translation which reverses modern ideas of agency through contrasting the mechanical aspect of the latter’s snacking with the provocative status of its foodstuff; particularly as the banana triggers an instinctive grab which compromises any ideas of its diner’s intentionality. 48 And it is the banana skin, as it is discarded following this perfunctory snack, which provides the slippery hazard that inheres in (and lends art to) Keaton’s remarkable dodge: a moment that, in its ‘new’ location within some continuity of doing, might now foreground the thing as a productive force even as it lies, ostensibly useless, in the middle Keaton’s footpath.

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__________________________________________________________________ 10. Animated Subjects If, as I believe it to be the case, it is Keaton’s intermittent intention throughout The High Sign to unfold his appreciation of a slapstick ‘prop’ as a charismatic contributor to the movie, then he might no less be staving off a threatening milieu where a dry aesthetic order occludes the earth’s magical activity. Nevertheless, as Steve Tomkins’ one-dimensional perception – of an apparently uneventful, if amusing, walk-past – misses the bridging significance of the banana’s role (in a repertoire of affects and metaphors) it might affirm something of the naive optimism in Keaton’s project. Some insight into the powers that sustained both Keaton’s hopeful resistance, and the relentlessness of the order that it opposed, might begin to be accessed through Tomkins’ own identification of Keaton’s silent performances with ‘the physical comedy of inter-war years.’ 49 This conflation groups Keaton’s slapstick with the 1930s comedy of The Marx Brothers, Laurel and Hardy and The Three Stooges (in their Mo, Curly, and Larry line-up); in doing so it tellingly misses the significance of the latter acts as they shift cinema’s play for laughs away from affecting set pieces, onto a humour based on personalities – and their related narrative dynamics – instead. Geoff King associates the 1930s cinematic interest, in personality and character, with the ‘moralistic tone’ that accompanied America’s Great Depression. 50 As film-makers attempted to exploit its homogenising mentality, so the movies would come to increasingly animate – rather than challenge – their audiences perspectives, for a more agreeable movie experience which allowed viewers to rest with, and even retire into, their own subjectivity. 51 In this sense, the uptake of sound in films might be associated less with the novelty of an audio dimension to cinema, and more with its provision for added character depth. The supposed dialectic recognises that the ascendance of the Western anthropocentric subject is intimately bound-up with the story of cinema and its capacity to see and express a perception – so making an object of subjectivity itself. 52 A full exposition of this relationship would exceed the mandate of this chapter, nevertheless the tentative invocation might usefully highlight that Keaton was working with an irrepressible medium, and one which (in its capacity to make a subjective perspective sensible) was precariously disposed to reifying the anthropocentric subject which his own object challenges seemed to determined to oppose. As the scenario, described above, supports the shamanic notion of Keaton acrobatically straddling conflicting perspectives, so it also suggests that he shouldered a shaman’s responsibility for the outlooks of his audience. Moreover, it might register a further performance tension as the monotonous order that his dealings were holding at bay would, in its perceptual oblivion, swell opportunities for his apparently magical revelations of a lively materiality – even as its crystallisation, as Heidegger’s ‘world picture’ (outlined in section 3), ultimately

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__________________________________________________________________ threatened to make the role of the shaman superfluous. 53 In the outcome, Keaton adjusted his comedy to recognise the apparent ‘reality,’ and economic sway, of just such perspectives. 54 Nevertheless, his shamanic strategies endured through the imitative enthusiasm of the Surrealist art movement: an appropriate shamanic legacy for a clown who is remembered (by Gilberto Perez) for the ghostly silent performances that always remained ‘scrupulously within the realm of the possible’ even as they contested the ordinary. 55

Notes 1

The term ‘performatic’ (after the Spanish word Performático) differentiates the traditional realm of performance – associated with theatre – from those citational actions and constitutive behaviours that subsume ‘subjectivity … into normative discursive practice.’ Diana Taylor, The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007), 5-6. 2 John A. Grim, The Shaman: Patterns of Religious Healing among the Ojibway Indians (Oklahoma: University of Oklahoma Press, 1983), 3-33. 3 Ibid., 40. 4 Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy, ed. Michael Tanner, trans. Shaun Whiteside (London: Penguin Books, 2003), 14-18. 5 Ibid., 20-24. 6 Ibid., 17. 7 Abigail Burnham Bloom, The Literary Monster on Film (Jefferson: McFarland & Company, 2010), 12. 8 Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra, trans. Thomas Common (Ware: Wordsworth Classics, 1997), 128-131. 9 In Friedrich Nietzsche, The Pre-Platonic Philosophers, ed. and trans. Greg Whitlock (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2001), 237. 10 Michael Tucker, Dreaming with Open Eyes: The Shamanic Spirit in Twentieth Century Art and Literature (London: Aquarian/HarperSanFrancisco, 1992), xxiii. 11 Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra, 211. 12 This suggestion comes after my own experience of reading the book. 13 See, for instance, ‘The Neglected Networks of Material Agency: Artefacts, Pictures and Texts’, in Material Agency: Towards a Non-Anthropocentric Approach, eds. Carl Knappett and Lambros Malafouris (New York: Springer Science and Business Media, 2008), 139-156. 14 Paul Heelas, Religion, Modernity and Postmodernity (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1998), 61. 15 Grim, Shaman. 16 Barbara Helen Miller, Connecting and Correcting: A Case Study of Sami Healers in Porsanger (Leiden: CNWS Publications, 2007), 17-48.

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Martin Heidegger, The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, ed. and trans. William Lovitt (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1977), 128-129. 18 Nietzsche, Birth of Tragedy, 57. 19 Wendy Brown, ‘Nietzsche for Politics’, in Why Nietzsche Still?: Reflections on Drama, Culture, and Politics, ed. Alan D. Shrift (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 205. 20 Dalí himself perceived Nietzsche as something of a role model, and a creative rival. See Salvador Dalí, Diary of a Genius (Clerkenwell: Creation Books, 1998), 21. 21 Michael Elsohn Ross, Salvador Dali and the Surrealists: Their Lives and Ideas (Chicago: Chicago Review Press, 2003), 92. 22 Robert Havard, The Crucified Mind: Rafael Alberti and the Surrealist Ethos in Spain (London: Tamesis, 2001), 32-33. 23 Homer, The Odyssey, trans. Walter Shewring (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 130-131. 24 Michael Naas, ‘Keeping Homer’s Word: Heidegger and the Epic of Truth’, in The Presocratics After Heidegger, ed. David C. Jacobs (Albany: SUNY Press, 1999), 86. 25 Colin Wilson, The Outsider (London: Phoenix, 1997), 220. 26 In Buster Keaton: The Complete Short Films 1917-1923, DVD box set supplementary booklet (London: Eureka Video, 2011), 14. 27 Wilson, Outsider, 220. 28 Steve Tomkins, ‘What Happened to Slapstick?’, in BBC News (online), 24 February, 2006, accessed 30 March 2011, http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/magazine/4746822.stm. 29 Ibid. 30 I might emphasise that Nietzsche’s truly vital variety of tragedy not only denies free-will and pure chance, it also accepts ‘inert’ materials as ‘belonging to the same plane of reality as our affects.’ See Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, trans. Judith Norman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 36. 31 Bruno Latour, Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-NetworkTheory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 73. 32 See Miriam T. Stark, Brenda J. Bowser and Lee Horne, eds., Cultural Transmission and Material Culture: Breaking Down Boundaries (Tuscon: University of Arizona Press, 2008), passim. 33 See Carl Knappett, Thinking through Material Culture: An Interdisciplinary Perspective (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005), 11-34. 34 Latour, Reassembling the Social, 76. 35 Milhaly Csikszentmihalyi and Stith Bennett, ‘An Exploratory Model of Play’, in American Anthropologist, New Series 73, No. 1 (February 1971): 47-48.

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Ibid., 48. Ibid., 45-47. 38 Ibid., 56. 39 Keiji Nishitani, Religion and Nothingness, trans. Jan Van Bragt (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983), 125-126. 40 Ibid., 125. 41 Ibid., 123. 42 Ibid., 137. 43 Gilles Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy, trans. Hugh Tomlinson (London: Althone Press, 1986), 23. 44 William Shakespeare, The Tragedy of Macbeth (Illinois: Aquitaine Media Corp, 2009), 86. 45 Bilha Baum, ‘Looking at Postmodern Performances of Canonical Plays’, in this volume. 46 Marcelo de Andrade Pereira, ‘The Full and the Void in the Theatre of Robert Wilson’, in this volume. 47 Jon Erikson, The Fate of the Object: From Modern Object to Postmodern Sign in Performance, Art and Poetry (Ann Arbor: Michigan University Press, 1998), 8. 48 For more on the provocative status of food see Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010), 40. 49 Tomkins, ‘What Happened to Slapstick?’. 50 Geoff King, Film Comedy (London: Wallflower Press, 2002), 30. 51 Tom Gunning, ‘From the Opium Den to the Theatre of Morality: Moral Discourse and the Film Process in Early American Cinema’, in The Silent Cinema Reader, eds. Lee Grieveson and Peter Kramer (London: Routledge, 2004), 150. 52 Vivian Sobchack, The Address of the Eye: A Phenomenology of Film Experience (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1992), 142. 53 Heidegger, Question Concerning Technology, 131-133. 54 Patrice Petro, ‘Introduction: Stardom in the 1920s’, in Idols of Modernity: Movie Stars of the 1920s, ed. Patrice Petro (New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 2010), 14-16. 55 Gilberto Perez, The Material Ghost: Films and their Medium (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 2000), 102. 37

Bibliography Bennett, Jane. Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things. Durham: Duke University Press, 2010.

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__________________________________________________________________ Bloom, Abigail Burnham. The Literary Monster on Film. Jefferson: McFarland & Company, 2010. Brown, Wendy. ‘Nietzsche for Politics’. In Why Nietzsche Still?: Reflections on Drama, Culture, and Politics, edited by Alan D. Schrift, 205223. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000. Buster Keaton: The Complete Short Films 1917-1923 (DVD Collection with Supplementary Book). London: Eureka Video, 2011. Csikszentmihalyi, Mihaly, and Stith Bennett. ‘An Exploratory Model of Play’. In American Anthropologist, New Series 73, No. 1 (February 1971): 4558. Dalí, Salvador. Diary of a Genius. Clerkenwell: Creation Books, 1998. Deleuze, Giles. Nietzsche & Philosophy. Translated by Hugh Tomlinson. London: Althone Press, 1986. Erikson, Jon. The Fate of the Object: From Modern Object to Postmodern Sign in Performance, Art and Poetry. Ann Arbor: Michigan University Press, 1998. Grim, John A. The Shaman: Patterns of Religious Thinking among the Ojibway Indians. Oklahoma: University of Oklahoma Press, 1983. Gunning, Tom. ‘From the Opium Den to the Theatre of Morality: Moral Discourse and the Film Process in Early American Cinema’. In The Silent Cinema Reader, edited by Lee Grieveson, and Peter Kramer, 145154. London: Routledge, 2004. Havard, Robert. The Crucified Mind: Rafael Alberti and the Surrealist Ethos in Spain. London: Tamesis, 2001. Heelas, Paul. Religion, Modernity and Postmodernity. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1998. Heidegger, Martin. The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays. Translated by William Lovitt. New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1977. Homer. The Odyssey. Translated by Walter Shewring. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998.

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__________________________________________________________________ King, Geoff. Film Comedy. London: Wallflower Press, 2002. Knappett, Carl. Thinking Through Material Culture: An Interdisciplinary Perspective. Philadelphia: Pennsylvania University Press, 2005. Knappett, Carl, and Lambros Malafouris, eds. Material Agency: Towards a NonAnthropocentric Approach. New York: Springer Science and Business Media, 2008. Latour, Bruno. Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-NetworkTheory. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005. Miller, Barbara Helen. Connecting and Correcting: A Case Study of Sami Healers in Porsanger. Leiden: CNWS Publications, 2007. Naas, Michael. ‘Keeping Homer’s Word: Heidegger and the Epic of Truth’. In The Pre Socratics After Heidegger, edited by David C. Jacobs, 73100. Albany: SUNY Press, 1999. Nietzsche, Friedrich. Thus Spake Zarathustra. Translated by Thomas Common. Ware: Wordsworth Classics, 1997. —––. The Pre-Platonic Philosophers. Edited and translated by Greg Whitlock. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2001. —––. Beyond Good and Evil. Translated by Judith Norman. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. —––. The Birth of Tragedy. Edited by Michael Tanner. Translated by Shaun Whiteside. London: Penguin, 2003. Nishitani, Keiji. Religion and Nothingness. Translated by Jan Van Bragt. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983. Perez, Giberto. The Material Ghost: Films and Their Medium. Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 2000. Petro, Patrice. ‘Introduction: Stardom in the 1920s’. In Idols of Modernity: Movie Stars in the 1920s, edited by Patrice Petro, 120. New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 2010.

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__________________________________________________________________ Ross, Michael Elsohn. Salvador Dali and the Surrealists: Their Lives and Ideas. Chicago: Chicago Review Press, 2003. Shakespeare, William. The Tragedy of Macbeth. Illinois: Aquitaine Media Corp., 2009. Sobchack, Vivian. The Address of the Eye: A Phenomenology of Film Experience. New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1992. Stark, Miriam T., Brenda J. Bowser, and Lee Horne, eds. Cultural Transmission and Material Culture: Breaking Down Boundaries. Tuscon: University of Arizona Press, 2008. Taylor, Diana. The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas. Durham: Duke University Press, 2007. Tomkins, Steve. ‘What Happened to Slapstick?’. BBC News, 24 February 2006. Accessed 30 March 2011. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/magazine/4746822.stm. Tucker, Michael. Dreaming with Open Eyes: The Shamanic Spirit in Twentieth Century Art and Literature. London: Aquarian/HarperSanFrancisco, 1992. Wilson, Colin. The Outsider. London: Phoenix, 1997. Andrew Cope is a PhD candidate in The School of Humanities and Performing Arts at Plymouth University. His interdisciplinary project is exploring the potential for integrating a process methodology into material culture studies’ repertoire of research strategies. He would like to take this opportunity to thank The Standing Conference of University Drama Departments (SCUDD), whose Glynne Wickham Scholarship made his conference attendance possible.

Little Cinderella, Big Cinderella: Scenography as Performance Filipa Malva Abstract The purpose of this chapter is to explore the notion of performed scenography as understood by puppetry and in particular by the Teatro de Marionetas do Porto (TMP). This Portuguese theatre company has founded their practice on the Robertos, a traditional way of puppetry with roots in Comedia dell’Arte. TMP has taken this tradition further by introducing bunraku techniques such as a visible interaction between the performer and the puppet and the use of live music as structure for the performance. They develop specific puppets for each performance, basing their design on their possibilities of action. I will argue that their use of multiple puppets as well as the multiple ways of manipulation by its puppeteers has developed a specific interaction with the scenography, which is used to expand character and action. In doing this, the definition of scenography is in turn expanded. Key Words: Scenography, puppet, set, costume, Robertos, performance design, bunraku, Portuguese theatre. ***** 1. Scenography in Puppet Theatre When addressing the matter of puppet theatre from the point of view of a scenographer, one of the first questions that arises is how do we define scenography in a puppet theatre performance? Scenography is space composed through image and sculpted matter, arranged through the time and rhythm of a performance. It is the space where action takes place; it is the space suggested by action; it is both the habitat of the performers and of their characters. In a conventional puppet theatre, such as the Robertos, the puppets and their puppeteers are confined to a stand from where they can manage their character as inanimate objects: in the case of the glove puppets, their lack of lower limbs and consequently the inexistence of points of contact between their bodies and a stage floor; in the case of marionettes, their lack of gravity. We can look at this puppet as a performer, and as such dressed in a costume, using props, and moving through a space of performance, or as the costume itself, dressing the actor/puppeteer, making a character out of a hand. John McCormick confirms that Marionette proprietors commonly emphasised the idea of their puppets as actors, and audiences perceived them in this way, especially when they appeared in well-know dramas of the live theatre. ... Puppets were stock characters designated according to

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__________________________________________________________________ the type of role they played. … Stock types had a number of easily readable signifiers, including costume ..., age and ethnic features and, for character, cut of beard and facial expression. 1 Many puppets can be seen as stock characters, representations of a specific actor’s role or even a specific actor in a specific role. Their property of inanimate objects does not allow for the use of multiple facial expressions or even changes in costume, which are made very difficult during performance. For expressive purposes, the puppets have to depend on body postures, which work together through design, control and construction. Nevertheless, it is exactly this quality of inert object that interests the puppeteer and its audience: its weight and centre of gravity make it both life-like and flawless in its movement. Costumes can serve as extensions of the puppet’s limbs and imbue it with elegance, expressing through body posture a change in their mind or an expression of their character. In fact this body/costume interaction can work as a substitute and extension of facial expressions and speech, as McCormick explains: Expressive potential was strongly affected by the technical aspect of controls, construction, size and articulation of figures. ... Broadly speaking, marionettes had to rely on gesture, body posture and proxemics, but not facial expressions, and the performance was probably a combination of mimesis and of indexical codes based on the way in which live actors are expected to behave on the stage. 2 The use of costume as an expression of the puppet’s character is an example of what I would like to call performed scenography. Performed scenography is scenography, which signifies only through action. It exists as inanimate, often illustrative, matter until it is activated through action. It is dependent on the actor’s perceived intentionality in order to be read as structural to the narrative. A puppet is able to be both actor and animated sculpture, as Schechter understands it: In the puppet theatre sculpture serves a quasi-narrative purpose, if narration is understood as the revelation of an inner world and if we allow the possibility that the narration hinges on and is inspired by the sculpture. 3 If a puppet is an animated sculpture with the purpose of creating a narrative, then may be seen as performed scenography. It carries multiple meanings, which are activated, changed and added throughout the performance through its interaction with the performers and the audience. On the other hand the mise-enscène, is built through these changes in the scenography, given that the actor’s -

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__________________________________________________________________ and puppet’s – movements on stage and even their bodies’ shapes in costume can be part of the scenographic composition. Because we are looking at scenography as a concept that includes the body, human or puppet, performed scenography expands on the concept of action design, as described by Dennis Christilles and Delbert Unruh: a scenographic methodology with its formative roots in the former Czechoslovakia, is, in fact, an approach to all aspects of theatre production. Its theory encompasses not only the creation and utilization of sets, costumes, and lighting, but also the entire realization of the performance text. ... The term Action Design designates an approach to scenography that is physically and psychologically functional, and intimately interactive with the actor. 4 The performing body mediates the described intimacy between the scenography and the actor. In the case of puppet theatre, the puppet is an extension of the performer’s body and a performing body itself. The progress of the spatio-visual composition created by the addition of all theatrical components can at times depend on the possibility of a performing body to merge or come out of a scenography. James Reynolds takes the performer-scenography relationship further when describing Robert Lepage’s performance work: the character is still on stage; they cannot be dissolved entirely, but only absorbed into the environment, to become a scenographic element. Scenographic acting, therefore, can be described as the ability to perform in, and transition between, playing the character in the stage environment, and becoming a being of the stage environment. 5 If we think of Reynolds’ definition of scenographic acting in the context of the puppet theatre, we can recognise the performer and the puppet as scenographic actors since they both have the ability to perform inscribed in a scenography and they can both become part of it. It is their transition between one state and the other that is fundamental to Teatro de Marionetas do Porto’s performances. The fact that we can see a puppeteer as part of the stage environment assists the puppet in becoming a ‘character,’ as it is clear in bunraku theatre. But it is their ability to perform ‘against’ the actor that breaths life into its character. Scenographic acting and performed scenography are two sides of the same concept: on the one side, the possibility to expand scenography into the realms of a body in motion, and on the other, the possibility to bring motion to a built

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__________________________________________________________________ environment made of inanimate objects. Keeping this in mind let us now examine Teatro das Marionetas do Porto’s performance work. 2. A Short History of Teatro de Marionetas do Porto In Portugal, at the end of the 1950’s, puppeteers where common in fairs, popular beaches or religious gatherings, creating enjoyment for children and adults. The well know sound of the ‘palheta’ was recognised by all as an assurance of popular entertainment which would always end with a beating between the principal character or hero and the villain – often some kind of interpretation on the devil – a feature still common in Punch and Judy shows. The Dom Roberto Theatre was born out of the same European tradition. Its fundamental characteristic is the use of the ‘palheta’ already mentioned. It is a triangular piece of tin or plastic that, being hidden inside the mouth of the puppet master, it helps to amplify his or her voice (an important aspect for an outdoor entertainment) while producing high pitch sound effects. Even though it distorts their voice and limits the amount of different sounds they can make, it is this very limitation that originated the Robertos’ enhanced visuality and specific terminology. The fast pace of the puppets’ movements demands perfect body coordination from the puppeteer and the close attention of the audience.

Image 1: Dom Roberto, photo by S. A. Marionetas, © 2012 S. A. Marionetas. Printed with permission from Teatro Marionetas do Porto, http://www.samarionetas.com. 6 João Paulo Seara Cardoso, the artistic director of Teatro de Marionetas do Porto up until January of 2011, was heavily influenced by the Robertos. He researched this tradition and was trained by one of its last puppeteers on manipulation and puppet building techniques. They are the basis for his concept of a puppet theatre. For Teatro de Marionetas do Porto, puppet theatre is a theatre of forms, of plasticity and sculpture, it creates a world of fantasy and poetry, creating a new type of visual theatre where the dramatic text has less importance than in the conventional theatre stage. They believe that for this reason, puppet theatre is the single scenic art where there can be a successful interaction between diverse

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__________________________________________________________________ performance and visual arts: dance, video, live music, digital image, and illustration. João Paulo Seara Cardoso tells us: I am interested in a theatre in which scenic languages reach a complex game of significance and in which, a movement sequence, a light, a sound, the colour of a dress, the mechanics of a marionette, can be strong elements, theatrical signs which appeal to the intelligence and sensibility of the spectator, arousing its passivity and senses. 7 With that in mind and with the collaboration of Isabel Barros, the artistic director of Ballet Teatro, a contemporary dance company, he has developed a consistent research, throughout the last twenty years, into the way they could make dance an aspect of their puppet theatre. They have used hand puppets alongside tall marionettes, which at times merge with the body of the dancer/puppeteer, moving with him. They have developed an extended scenic space, asking the puppeteers to come out from behind the conventional box-set or stand to occupy the whole proscenium or thrust stage. In this way the puppeteer becomes a performer in character, sharing the limelight with his puppets. Once this change was made, the scenography, which traditionally structures the puppet theatre, emerges with it becoming a connection between the puppets and the performer’s body moving across the stage. Another important aspect of their research was the use of live music, specially orchestrated for the show but open to rehearsal and performance improvisation. The use of live sound effects, often manipulated by a single band-person, develops the idea of the ‘palheta,’ which would allow the Robertos’ puppeteer to enhance the expression and movement of the puppets as well as establish an aural narrative. These are the questions I would like to look at in the following section by analysing the 2009 Teatro de Marionetas do Porto children’s show, Cinderela. 3. Scenography Performed in Cinderela? Based on Perrault’s and the Brothers Grimm’s versions, Cinderela follows the original narrative while introducing characters from other children’s tales such as the Big Bad Wolf from Little Red Riding Hood, the witch from Hansel and Gretel and the seven dwarfs from Snow White. In most Teatro das Marionetas do Porto’s productions the technical issues behind the construction and manipulation of the puppets determines their visual style as well as the performance’s. João Paulo Seara Cardoso tells us: there is always a special effort on our part to have in each show, good or bad, a new technique. Because we make the sort of theatre in which technique determines aesthetics. If, for instance,

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__________________________________________________________________ a marionette weighs 1 Kg and measures 80 centimetres there a specific space it will conquer, a rhythm which we will discover and, as a consequence, a dramaturgy which is determined by the way the marionette moves, by the poetics of the space it suggests. ... As a result, we needed to find a way to organize the performance space where actors and marionettes could co-exist. 8 Throughout the performance there are examples of: (1) an actor manipulating a puppet, (2) an actor playing against a puppet and finally (3) an actor being the puppet or an extension of it. All of these are ways actors and puppets can share the same universe and as such the same performance space. The first option is the actor as the manipulator and narrator, alternating between the light and the shadow of the puppet, controlling the rhythm of the performance, the character’s evolution and all other contextual information. In Cinderela, as in many other Teatro de Marionetas do Porto’s shows, the puppeteers share the stage with their puppets. Contrary to bunraku techniques, they are in costume and, often, as lit as the puppets and the set. As such the performance is extended to their interaction as much as the interaction between puppets. Moreover, the universe the puppets inhabit, the scenography, must be inclusive of the actors, dwelling in the changes in scale between human and non-human characters. Toni Rumbau explains that the obvious manipulation of a puppet can make it ‘rise up as a ‘character’ simply defined by its own meaningful autonomy.’ 9 It is the ‘suggestive resources and metaphor’ 10 developed by the puppeteers in performance that allow the audience to see them as all part of the same universe. The puppeteers travel around the performance space, using different types of manipulation techniques, as a motor of their movements – the set, two groups of vertical and horizontal flattage is a result of these. Hand puppets are handled horizontally and string puppets are handled from the top of the vertical module. The physical distance between the tops of the two set pieces emphasises the distance between the character’s worlds and often their opposition in the narrative: the wolf and Cinderella, or the King and the Prince. Also, the fact that they are being manipulated in diverse ways makes them move differently: the King, on a string, is restless and imposing, while the Prince, hand held, is calm and subtle. In his absolute passion for Cinderella, the Prince repeatedly dismisses the King’s efforts to replace his lost love. At each offer – of money, riches, entertainment –, the Prince responds quietly but firmly: ‘No!,’ making the King even more distressed. On another occasion, this same distance allows for one of the actors to pull a string of thoughts – literally a string of painted illustrations – from the Prince’s head, using a fishing pole. This action, along with the scene with the Brazilian birds, to be discussed later, establishes the vertical module as a place of height,

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__________________________________________________________________ fictionally near the heavens inhabited by birds and the narrator. It replaces the conventional remoteness of the stand behind which the puppeteer works his magic.

Image 2: The Prince, Cinderela. © 2012 Susana Neves, printed with permission from Teatro Marionetas do Porto. The use of live music and sound effects is another common feature of Teatro de Marionetas do Porto. They use it as a sound narrator, often improvising through the action, very much in the tradition of the Robertos. The musician establishes the rhythm of the scenes, working in direct and simultaneous collaboration with the actors-puppeteers. Schechter explains that the radicalism of the puppet theatre is further evident in its employment of music as music, as sound production in its own right, operating in its own sphere, parallel to and not governed by the visual theatre. 11 The specificity of the use of music in puppet theatre is evident in the way it structures action in Cinderela. The musician on stage responds to the manipulation in real time, enhancing by intonation and pitch the characters’ expressions. The narrative is composed of a subtle interaction between the performers, the puppet and the music. In it, the music emerges parallel with the visuality of each scene. In the multiple scenes when Cinderella is trying to get to the ball, the fictional distances between her home and the palace, as well as the velocity of the car carrying her, are given by the tone, rhythm and speed of the accordion playing and the repetition in its manipulation. Physically, the puppet is almost stationary: moving backward and forward within less than a meter, but fictionally, it travels long distances and different routes.

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Image 3: Going to the ball, Cinderela. © 2012 Susana Neves, printed with permission from Teatro Marionetas do Porto. One other aspect of TMP’s manipulation technique is the multiple puppet character. Traditionally two different puppets were used to avoid a change in costume during a performance. In some cases, the same head would have multiple bodies, or vice-versa, like McCormick describes: In Sicily, costume-changing was less common, but heads and bodies were interchangeable and, once a character had left the script, the head might be put onto a different body to represent another character in a later episode. 12 With Teatro de Marionetas do Porto, this problem-solving custom has been further developed into a meaning-making technique. The convention of having a single puppet standing for a single character is challenged and, in the process, the limits of scenography are expanded. We can think of puppets as both inanimate objects and living characters, establishing a link between performers and the stage environment. Nonetheless the laws of gravity do not rule them, nor do they follow our assumption that a single ‘soul’ is joined with a single body. Consequently, their physical presence on stage can be modelled to respond to specific theatrical necessities. This is the case with Cinderela where one character is portrayed by multiple puppets. The change from a full body puppet to a rocking puppet is made whenever her sisters are picking at her. This allows the actors to handle three puppets at the same time, but it also establishes the rhythm of the dialogue: with a single pull, Cinderella rocks from one sister to the other, while they alternate insults.

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Image 4: The evil step sisters, Cinderela. Image 5: When Cinderela gets her crystal slipper, Cinderela. © 2012 Susana Neves, printed with permission from Teatro Marionetas do Porto. Similarly, when the evil sisters are rendered unimportant by Cinderella’s success with the Prince, they become two flat windows on the set, portrayed by painted illustrations of the original puppets. They are characters, which can, through manipulation, live as three-dimensional puppets walking the set or they can physically become part of the walls that make it. Even though these three characters evolve physically and visually, the spectator can easily establish a connection between their multiple bodies, while attributing meaning to their change. With this mise-en-scène decision, the director has expanded on the concept of scenography, and has established a link between the open performance space and its ancestor, the painted scenery. The second aspect is the actor playing against the puppet, as an inversion of the convention of the puppeteer playing for the puppet. This maintains the puppet as the central figure of the performance, but extends its abilities to use the scenic space as well as the overall scenography. The actor’s expressions help the spectator understand the character: they lent facial expressions to the puppet, creating a shadow of the character portrayed by the puppet. He addresses both the audience and the puppet, playing as puppet and as actor. In the case of the herald (and the wolf) there is also a visual connection between the actor and the puppet, through the colour red, used on both of their hats, and through their props: the megaphone the puppet carries is a romantic, period version of the contemporary working megaphone, which is used by the actor. The herald-puppet is able to come downstage, close to the audience, to publicly deliver the invitation to the Prince’s ball, and in doing so it opens up the performance space with its sound and movement. This is only possible through the use of an unusual manipulation technique, inspired in a children’s toy. The wheel on a pole has made many generations of children happy, and TMP uses it as a playful way to connect the puppeteer with its puppet while taking advantage of its possibilities of motion. The understanding that the actor is no longer confined within the set, behind a

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__________________________________________________________________ puppeteer stand, permits the performers to activate the whole stage as a fictional public town square.

Image 6 and 7: The herald announcing the ball, Cinderela. © 2012 Teatro Marionetas do Porto. Finally, we can find two examples of the third aspect: the actor as puppet. First, there are the two Brazilian birds chirping away on top of the set. In this scene, the seven dwarfs try to save Cinderella, who’s choking on an apple. They all assume she needs Prince Charming to kiss her well, as in Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. The two actors, using bird-hats and their own fingers, play the birds. They are upset because they want to help wake Cinderella up but they do not know how to kiss. Their fast pace repetitive movement along the edge of the tallest flat of the set takes the place of what we were expecting to see: two hand puppets behind a conventional stand. Even though the layout of this particular set piece is evocative of a puppetry stand, TMP has chosen to use actors and not puppets to portray the birds.

Image 8: The Brazilian birds, Cinderela. © 2012 Susana Neves, printed with permission from Teatro Marionetas do Porto.

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__________________________________________________________________ The discrepancy in scale between their heads and their feet, which are the actors’ fingers, only makes it funnier. The neighbourly dialogue instantly makes them part of the story, as outside observers of the action. Activated by these birds, the tall set piece, once part of Cinderella’s home, becomes a perch. This change in scale and our perception of the actors as puppets using a miniaturisation of the space is yet another way to perform scenography. Another example is Shirley, the single woman band, who has been collaborating with the theatre for many years. Having started as a pianist, playing a musical background to the action, she was incorporated into the mise-en-scène when João Paulo realised that she could become a character. With this decision, he has kept the traditional live and reactive sound of the Robertos’ ‘palheta,’ while giving it a place, and space, in the narrative and stage. The single women band plays the motherly characters: the evil stepmother and the fairy godmother. Technical restraints to the manipulation made the first character a simple mirror face and the second a pair of plastic googly eyes. In both instances it is difficult to establish if these objects are props or puppets. In the first, the actress directs some of her lines towards it, as we would use a mirror. And so the spectator is given two faces to understand the character, one familiar with the other puppets on stage, the other human. These are perceived as a single fascia. The evil stepmother is made off of two bodies, or rather faces, and it is the dialogue, verbal and visual, between them that establishes her character. We are left wondering if the human is manipulating the puppet or the other way around.

Image 9: Shirley, Cinderela. © 2012 Susana Neves, printed with permission from Teatro Marionetas do Porto. In the second, the fairy godmother, the object is closer to a mask, physically transforming the actress into the puppet. It is only because the whole performance is based on the actor-puppet duality that the spectator is able to understand her as part of the cast, and not as an exception to the ensemble.

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__________________________________________________________________ It is a willing suspension of disbelief, which can be traced back to bunraku theatre, an important influence in Teatro de Marionetas do Porto’s research. As Schechter tells us: Unlike some western traditions of puppetry, bunraku resists the illusion that its dolls speak. Trained chanters are seated near the puppet stage, not hidden from spectators; the vocalizing of a prepared text is visibly separate from the bodies of the bunraku dolls. 13 In bunraku, the chanters’ voices and the puppets’ expressions intersect, coming from different areas on stage, to reveal a compound character. In Cinderela, and in particular with the characters interpreted by Shirley, a similar process of synthesis is asked of the audience: to merge diverse visual and aural clues to create a single being with a specific role in the narrative. Its character is richer because it is both the sum of inanimate and human expressive bodies, and their tentative interaction. Further along in the play, when Shirley becomes the fairy godmother, in addition to her plastic googly eyes, she carries a wand – like fairies supposedly do. This prop is an example of the use of everyday objects as props or puppets, habitual in TMP performances. In Cinderela, a cooking immersion hand blender is the fairy godmother’s wand. As an object, which exists in most Western kitchens since the 1950s under the commercial name Magic Wand, it is easily recognisable by the audience. It is a common object, but with magical properties – at least in the performance – making of the fairy godmother someone close to all of us: a haunt, a grandmother, any motherly woman with cooking skills. The use of these objects is made possible by the inclusion of the actors and our human world into the performance. In a box-set puppet theatre the magic wand would have to be made and to scale. Here it is ready-made. It becomes part of the narrative; it creates meaning through manipulation, much like children at play find wonder in the everyday object. The scenography – prop, puppet and accessory – involved in the characterisation of this actress is also what makes her part of the cast of puppets and actors. On another show, Capuchinho Vermelho XXX, re-staged in 2011, Teatro das Marionetas do Porto, expands their use of the everyday object. As with the wand in Cinderela, a bag of groceries is used to perform the well known Little Red Riding Hood story. In this unusual recipe show the sole performer transforms lettuce into woodland, a red cocktail napkin into a hooded cape and a chicken into the wolf. The activation of these objects bares resemblance to what Andrew Cope, referring to Buster Keaton’s The High Sign ‘where Keaton apparently confounds an expectation by avoiding, rather than slipping upon, a banana skin,’ explains in this volume:

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__________________________________________________________________ However, if this ostensible non-event is viewed through the lens of tragedy, then the scenario might be reassessed through a serene worldview, which – in reflecting the essential oneness of life’s flux – accepts the inevitable contribution of all things in any given event. In this light, Keaton’s dodge might represent an experiential appreciation of the banana skin’s active presence, albeit through his negotiation of its agencies and their harmful potential, wherein, the object isn’t neutral, nor is it beholden to a generic staple. Instead, it is a contributor to the skit ... . Cope suggests that the activation of an object as a way to make it a contributor to a performance can happen merely through the recognition of its presence in the space of performance. This recognition can expand the audience’s understanding of the performance space to include objects we originally perceive as part of our everyday. Both in Cinderela and in Capuchinho Vermelho XXX the scenography explores this tight rope, balancing itself between our recognition of the everyday uses of an object and its meaning in performance. 4. Conclusion The collaboration between a scenographer, performers and director is often a difficult business. It involves compromise and trust at a level close to familial bonds. Consequently, when the boundaries that inscribe each of their disciplines are blurred for the sake of a production, and the rehearsal room is also the scenic workshop or the sewing room, everyone involved is asked to enter into dangerous, or at least unconventional, territory. Performed scenography cannot be produced alienated from the performer’s embodied knowledge. As the scenographer Marta Carreiras describes it: ‘there is no door in a scenography until the actors define one in their comings and goings on stage.’ By its nature, performed scenography is dependent on the collaborative nature of a theatre company’s process and work as well as on the ability of the scenographer to reveal space and mater from the interaction between the performers’ bodies and the stage environment. Teatro de Marionetas do Porto’s puppetry thrives on the crossroads of several arts and on the diversity of the marionettes’ forms. These, in turn, imprint the miseen-scène with specific motions across the performance space. Finally, set, props and costumes are developed in a back and forth collaboration, which make each scenic component dependent on the next. The puppeteers/actors handle scenography and puppets in parallel. Performers, puppets and scenography are, at times, extensions of each other, and at other times mirror images in dialogue. Their show Cinderela is an example of performed scenography that explores multiple manipulation techniques. In puppet theatre, the audience is already expecting to see a performer handling scenographic elements, but they take it further by making puppets out of themselves. The work of Robert Lepage with his

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__________________________________________________________________ Québec theatre company Ex Machina, mentioned earlier is clear in its intention to allow a performer’s body to live inside the scenographic composition. The performers merge into the environment and become another layer in the complex visual arrangement of a show. Even though Ex Machina’s and TMP’s creative processes have in common the vital involvement of designers with everyday rehearsals, it is not TMP intention to ever really allow their performers’ bodies, or identities, to disappear into the scenography. The puppeteers explore an close relation with the scenography, but they are still their counterparts (or partners). The three aspects of the performer/scenography relationship provided by Cinderela – an actor manipulating a puppet, an actor playing against a puppet and an actor being the puppet or an extension of it –, demonstrate how the concept of performed scenography may be useful. The definition of scenography is expanded when we choose to include in its manifestation not only the design of a space of performance but its use by performers. The awareness of space they generate, and carry with them into performance, can inform the design through translation into mater or simply through recognition of environment. However, this kind of practice asks for a method of collaboration where the scenographer must be able to interact in rehearsal as well as to transform this awareness into a visual aspect of the performance.

Notes 1

John McCormick and Bennie Pratasik, Popular Theatre in Europe, 1800-1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 108. 2 Ibid., 148. 3 Joel Schechter, ed., Popular Theatre: A Sourcebook (London: Routledge, 2003), 46. 4 Dennis Christilles and Delbert Unruh, ‘The Semiotics of Action Design’, Theatre Topics 6, No. 2 (September, 1996): 121. 5 James Reynolds, ‘Scenographic Acting & the Scenographic Body in the Work of Robert Lepage & Ex Machina’, Blue Pages (December, 2011): 14-15. 6 Dom Roberto, photo by SA Marionetas, accessed 12 December 2011, http://www.samarionetas.com. 7 ‘João Paulo Seara Cardoso’, accessed 12 December 2011, http://www.marionetasdoporto.pt/joao-paulo-seara-cardoso/177-2010-uportoalumn i-pilotar-marionetas-com-engenho. 8 Ibid. 9 Toni Rumbau, ‘Reflections on the Marionette and the Language of Myth’, Malic: Teatre de l’Imaginari, No. 3 (Barcelona: Teatre Malic – Institut del Teatre de la Diputació, nd): 45. 10 Ibid.

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Schechter, Popular Theatre: A Sourcebook, 45. McCormick and Pratasik, Popular Theatre in Europe, 130. 13 Schechter, Popular Theatre, 36. 12

Bibliography Bleeker, Maaike. Visuality in the Theatre: The Locus of Looking. Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008. Carvalho, Paulo Eduardo. ‘Contagiantes Invenções: Nos Vinte anos do Teatro de Marionetas do Porto’. In Dossier de Imprensa Teatro Nacional de S. João. Porto: Imprensa Teatro Nacional de S. João, 2008. Christilles, Dennis, and Delbert Unruh. ‘The Semiotics of Action Design’. Theatre Topics 6, No. 2 (September, 1996): 121–141. Maryland: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997. McCormick, John, and Bennie Pratasik. Popular Theatre in Europe, 1800-1914. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Reynolds, James. ‘Scenographic Acting & the Scenographic Body in the Work of Robert Lepage & Ex Machina’. Blue Pages (December, 2011): 14–15. Sidcup: Society British Theatre Designers. Rumbau, Toni. ‘Reflections on the Marionette and the Language of Myth’. Malic: Teatre de l’Imaginari, No. 3 (nd): 45. Barcelona: Teatre Malic – Institut del Teatre de la Diputació Barcelona. Schechter, Joel, ed. Popular Theatre: A Sourcebook. London: Routledge, 2003. Teatro de Marionetas do Porto. ‘João Paulo Seara Cardoso’. Last modified December 2011. Accessed 12 December 2011. http://www.marionetasdoporto.pt/joao-paulo-seara-cardoso/177-2010-uportoalumn i-pilotar-marionetas-com-engenho. Filipa Malva is a PhD candidate at the University of Coimbra, Portugal. While she is interested in all aspects of scenography, currently her research and writing is devoted to scenography in the context of children’s and young audiences’ shows.

Part 3 Position and Relation: Spatial Meanings

Spatial Relations Speak the Language of Social Hierarchy David Franklin and Milan Kohout Abstract In 2000 Czech dissident artist Milan Kohout and American videographer and performance artist David Franklin collaborated on the performance Flying and Flowing: Horizontal and Vertical at Mobius, an experimental art centre in Boston. Kohout brought his experience of living in the collectivist socialist society of Czechoslovakia to the individualistic context of the U.S. Under Communism, since the government controlled all media, dissident actions were based on a horizontal system of communication among members of society. People insured the ‘underground’ flow of information themselves and thus information was spread horizontally among people, rather than via media placed ‘above’ them. Franklin, whose video and performance work deals with somatic aspects of the submersion and subversion of the desire for political upheaval, also worked as a cameraman and producer in two of the most remote media channels: film and television news, in which communication is oriented vertically in a system composed of individual information ‘droplets.’ Bringing their experiences together to collaborate on Flying and Flowing, Kohout and Franklin contrasted horizontal and vertical geometrical forms in scenography, lighting, and physicality to accompany a series of narrative vignettes. Thus all the components – the visual forms, somatic embodiments, video projections and content of the texts were based on the tensions between vertical and horizontal, each representing differing socio-political power relationships and modes of communication. For example, in one episode of the performance Kohout and Franklin play a dominant-positioning game with an eight-foot long stick held in their mouths. Ironically, the same stick that connects them also forces them to occupy differing orientations in the horizontal-vertical power relationship, and simultaneously distorts their verbal communication such that they are able to negotiate a only a slapstick solution to their dilemma. Key Words: Performance art, dissident, Mobius, Czech Republic, Czech Underground, Second Culture. ***** 1. Is Mobius Horizontal or Vertical? Had you entered a certain former warehouse in Boston, Massachusetts in 2000, and had you gone up to the 4th floor and entered the white gallery space with a small sign reading ‘mobius,’ you would have seen a piano standing sideways. Sitting, balanced somehow sideways on a sideways chair, you would have seen Duke Bojagdziev playing the piano. You would have heard Vlada Tomova’s singing, and you would then have seen her, standing quite normally, vertically,

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__________________________________________________________________ while Balkan-flavoured jazz formed from the intertwining of voice and piano filled the room. Passing through the gallery and entering the small black box theatre in the next room to take your seat on a riser, you would have seen a quite minimal scenographic preparation: the unadorned black walls and ceiling with a single narrow strip of white material hanging vertically in the centre, and a similarly narrow white strip lying straight across the stage, which is not elevated but is simply the original unadorned wooden warehouse floor. When the house lights go down and the performance begins, the two strips of white material are illuminated only by small Lekos, focused and barned so that the beams of light illuminate only the horizontal and vertical white strips, creating a kind of upside-down ‘T’ shape that defines the visual space of the theatre. Almost nothing else is visible in the darkness. The Zen-like calm of this initial state is later to develop into a battlefield of forces, a contest of wills, and a setting for narratives and imagery aimed at themes of social injustice. The relationships represented by the intersection at right angles will become symbols of opposing forces in society as the orientations of ‘vertical’ and ‘horizontal’ take on a range of metaphorical meanings. The performance, Flying and Flowing: Horizontal and Vertical was developed and presented in 2000 by Milan Kohout and David Franklin at Mobius (http://www.mobius.org), an art organisation founded in 1977 and long known as ‘Boston’s artist-run centre for experimental art in all media.’ Flying and Flowing starts from one of the most basic experiences of life on Earth: gravity, the force that defines horizontal and vertical. From this starting point, it develops a language of spatial relationships that is specifically suited to address social and political themes. This language of spatial relationships is concretely expressed through theatrical elements such as scenography, lighting design, props, projected images (static and moving), and the physicality of the performers, and is then used to support narratives on themes of social, political and economic injustice. 2. Performance Artists Do It Horizontally The concept underlying the visual design of Flying and Flowing was a clash of two political and social systems: one is based on horizontality, which is a social system in which people communicate with each other on a human scale, looking into each other’s eyes and listening to each other’s voices. This horizontal communication within a society means that this type of society is based on collectivism, which is probably the most ancient version of society: the oldest concept of how a group should be organised, and the oldest concept of how each member of the group should be understood as a part within the whole. The effects of increased verticality in the ancient past are well-understood by anthropologists: [F]oragers were relatively disease-free, stress-free, and wellnourished. Other disadvantages accompanied food production

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__________________________________________________________________ and the state. Social inequality increased, as elaborate systems of social stratification replaced the egalitarianism of the past. Slavery was invented. Poverty, crime, war, and human sacrifice became widespread, and the rate at which human beings degraded their environments increased. Progress is much too optimistic a word to describe the evolution of society. 1 Avoiding Enlightenment-era arguments of philosophers such as Locke and Rousseau – whose armchair speculations are of dubious value compared to the research-based approach of modern anthropology – with regard to the question of egalitarianism, we can be fairly certain about this aspect of social organisation in ancient cultures and modern tribal societies. They are horizontal in the sense that everything is shared from hand to hand, from ear to ear and from eye to eye. As opposed to that, there is the concept of vertical society, where verticality means individualism. Vertical societies emerge with the invention of agriculture approximately 10,000 years ago, but humans seem to have specialised in this form of social organisation within the last few centuries, when capitalism increasingly took over and people started to exploit each other more; therefore they could afford to be individuals. In a more contemporary technological aspect, verticality can mean that when you want to communicate with a member of your community, you have to use some medium. This is vertical communication: you have to use the phone, the internet, TV, radio, etc. (and doubtless more technologies for vertical communication are in the pipeline). Vertical communication means that one individual sends his or her message vertically via a centralised socio-technological facility (phone towers, exchanges, servers, internet nodes), then the message is processed, and then it is dropped on another person, who is sometimes actually very close to the first, possibly within shouting range or visual contact (how many of us have had the experience of going to meet someone and waving at that person while still completing the cell phone conversation: ‘Where are you?’ ‘Yes, I see you – I’m up on the balcony, waving at you.’ ‘Yes! I see you now.’). In vertical communication, you have to use media, as opposed to horizontal communication, when you simply turn to that person and talk to him or her. In vertical communication, you have to talk through a vertical tunnel, a pipeline which transports the message to the person right next to you. In verticality, people are disconnected from each other; they are atomised. They do not really communicate on a human scale. 3. The Psychogeography of Rehearsal and Preparation Given that artwork emerges from a social context in which the lives of individuals are embedded, some specific background about societies, cities, and

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__________________________________________________________________ lives of the artists who composed Flying and Flowing is relevant to an understanding of the work. Milan Kohout brought his experience of living in the collectivist socialist society of Czechoslovakia to the individualistic context of the U.S. Under Communism, since the government controlled all media, dissident actions were based on a horizontal system of communication among members of society. People insured the ‘underground’ flow of information themselves and thus information was spread horizontally among people, rather than via media placed ‘above’ them. Of course such media existed, but it was generally regarded as often as not with humorous disdain, or at least as a known apparatus of state control. Certainly members of the Communist Party did not take their own newspapers, for example, very seriously. 2 Kohout, a U.S. citizen, is originally from Pilsen, Czechoslovakia, where he got his Master’s degree in Electrical Engineering. He was an independent artist in the so-called ‘Second Culture’ movement of the Czech Underground in the 1980s and later became a signatory and art activist member of the dissident human rights organisation Charter 77, the organisation composed mostly of artists that was nominated for a Nobel Prize in 1985 and that initiated the non-violent Velvet Revolution, which toppled the totalitarian regime in 1989. Following many interrogations and several imprisonments he was expelled from Czechoslovakia by the security police (STB) and in 1986 was forced to leave his country due to his political art activism. After several years in a refugee camp (where he continued making art with several colleagues, including photographer and cinematographer Jiri Dvorsky) he was granted political asylum the United States. In 1993 Kohout received his Diploma from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Since 1994 he has been a member of the Mobius Artists Group, where he has created numerous fullscale performance art pieces, both collaborative and solo. His work often concentrates on the subject of human rights of minorities (for example the rights of Roma / Gypsies or Palestinians) and politics, particularly critiques of both totalitarian capitalism and communism and fundamentalist religions. His work tries to re-integrate art into everyday life. In 2009 he stood a fourmonth criminal trial in Boston for his street performance connected with predatory lending and the mortgage crisis, the American seeds, or at least triggers, of the current (as of this writing in 2012) world financial crisis. He believes that ‘performance art’ is only the latest name for an art form that has been with us ever since we defined ourselves as human beings. David Franklin, whose video and performance work deals with somatic aspects of the submersion and subversion of the desire for political upheaval, also worked as a cameraman and producer in two of the most remote media channels: film and television news, in which communication is oriented vertically in a system composed of individual information ‘droplets.’

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__________________________________________________________________ As a native of New York City, witnessing extreme contrasts of wealth was a daily part of Franklin’s experience growing up. These contrasts are mirrored in the celebrated verticality of the Manhattan skyline and the vibrancy of street life in the horizontal dimension of New York. He moved to Cambridge, Massachusetts in 1987 where he earned an A.B. in Cultural Anthropology, attended but then dropped out of acupuncture school, earned a Senior Instructor diploma in the non-violent martial art Shintaido, a diploma from Boston Shiatsu School, and a Diploma of Fine Arts from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (where he met Kohout and they began to collaborate). Franklin’s solo work reflects some themes parallel to those of Kohout’s, for example the performance piece Democracy Machine at Mobius addressed somatic and para-somatic aspects of the dysfunction of American democratic society, while the video Disappearing Act deals with the invisibility of political dissidents in the U.S. He became a member of the Mobius Artist Group in 1998, where he continued collaborating with Kohout and other Mobius artists on several performances (including Flying and Flowing). He also started working (often with Kohout) as a camera operator and later contracted producer for C-SPAN, an American national public affairs cable television network. Simultaneously he helped found the underground performance art space Pan9 in the Allston district, which was raided several times by the Boston Police Department and eventually shut down by fire inspectors. He also started collaborating with film director Michael Pope on the cult film / live music / performance art event Neovoxer, for which Kohout’s colleague Jiri Dvorsky was the main cinematographer, leading to Franklin’s emigration to the Czech Republic in 2004. Kohout and Franklin developed Flying and Flowing through a thoroughly unsystematic process that included three main components: (1) Endless discussions about political philosophy and art, usually at Kohout’s small apartment in the Mission Hill district of Boston. The kitchen window looks out over the panorama of freestanding houses built by early wealthy landowners, blocks of traditional brick row houses, and many (typical of New England) ‘triple-deckers’ of one of the poorer areas of Boston, site of protests against freeway construction in the 1960s and 70s, 3 a neighbourhood with a social fabric originally organically composed from people’s needs which was cynically destroyed by the needs of institutional urban ‘development.’ 4 (2) Physical rehearsals, usually in a back room at Mobius’ studio in the Fort Point district of Boston, an area filled with 19th-

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__________________________________________________________________ century warehouses stemming from New England’s past importance as a hub of the textile industry and trade, now used largely by visual artists (often residing in their ‘studios’ illegally) and, due to its convenient proximity to downtown, by corporate tenants looking for a slightly cheaper and artsier office location; and (3) Workshopping parts of the performance at public performance art venues such as the aforementioned Pan9, also located in an industrial-space-turned-artists’-loft. In contrast to the readily-aestheticised (and – in a process common to many post-industrial urban areas, SoHo in New York being merely a more famous example – readily gentrified 5 ) red-brick-and-woodbeamed warehouses of the Fort Point district where Mobius is located, Pan9 was located in a former factory built mostly of reinforced concrete in the 1950s with little to recommend it aesthetically other than the amount of space and large windows. Unlike the Fort Point district, the Allston district is zoned for residential and light-industrial mixed use (though the artists in Pan9 also lived there illegally), has fewer tall buildings, is out on the edge of the city, and has a vibrant mix of immigrants, native Bostonians, light industry, ethnic restaurants, auto body shops, artists, rock musicians and people sporting large numbers of dreadlocks, tattoos, and piercings. I mention these details about the historical / social context of the rehearsal and performance spaces because the two underlying themes of Flying and Flowing are the psychogeography of place and the social meaning of space. In this respect it owes a clear tip of the hat to the Situationists in particular. 6 Drawing on this concept, the performance is, in addition to being an outgrowth of the lives of the individual performers, also an outgrowth of the specific social, economic and geographical conditions of the context in which it was conceived and realised. In fact, this aspect of the description and analysis of the performance – that artmaking is fundamentally a socially contextualised rather than an individual act – is integral to the theoretical outlook of the authors. I have developed my own understanding of how art should be implemented within society, or how it should be used, or what the role and function of art is. I know that it should be part of society, it should be involved, it should be engaged with politics. We understand “politics” as related to the ancient Greek word “polis”, which means a small group of people, like a community.

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__________________________________________________________________ So “politics” means to take care of the common interest, common thoughts, common business of the group. I believe that art is the most powerful tool in our hands which can detect aberrations of society. When something goes wrong in society, art is the most powerful tool for expressing those concerns about social ills and the decay of societal ethics. 7 This social dimension of artmaking is what Kohout means when he says he believes that ‘performance art’ is only the latest name for an art form that has been with us ever since we defined ourselves as human beings. 8 This same theoretical outlook informed the performance and also informs the current analysis, thus the relevance of the geographical and sociological background of the rehearsal and performance venues. 4. Into the Black Box As indicated above, the performance more or less followed traditional theatrical conventions with regard to the facts that it took place in a small theatre (approximately 50 seats), the audience was seated in chairs watching action that took place in a space regarded as the stage, and the stage was clearly indicated as the performative space by typical means such as spatial organisation, markings on the floor, use of theatrical equipment such as lighting, audio-visual equipment and projectors; the designation of individuals as ‘audience’ or ‘performer’ was signalled by the use of costumes; and so on (obviously none of which conventions can be taken for granted in anything falling under the rubric of ‘performance art’). In the piece, we were comparing everything on the basis of horizontality and verticality, so sounds, meanings, colours – everything that we could think about – was being processed either horizontally or vertically – the movements of bodies, everything. It was still a piece within the theatre, though it was very concerned with society and with politics. But it was still a theatre piece. There were people sitting in the theatre watching the piece. Later I realised that this style of art is still very limited according to the function of art, as I have always understood art to be, as part of a community, like a sort of liquid which flows among all members of a community. There in the theatre, there was still of course that “fourth wall” as it’s called. And it didn’t work. 9 At this point, we may digress to ask if this failure mirrors in any respect Barbara Prihodova’s analysis of Intolleranza 1960, a question raised by some of the parallels between the two pieces: both utilised projections, including real-time

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__________________________________________________________________ projection, both were politically-engaged left-leaning works that were concerned with themes of injustice and inequality, and both took place in a conventional theatre (as opposed to the public space of street art, for example). Prihodova suggests that Josef Svoboda’s scenography, the projected images in particular, ‘… were so expressive and significant that they often suppressed the action of the performers …,’ 10 a power she explicates via reference to W. J. T. Mitchell’s concept of the ‘pictorial turn.’ 11 This raises the question of whether the visual spectacle’s potential to overwhelm the humanity of the performer’s presence has a political or ethical dimension, regardless of the content. To re-phrase Prihodova’s analysis of Intolleranza 1960 in the terminology of Flying and Flowing, the human presence is horizontal, while the visual / technological spectacle is vertical: projection is a mediated relationship between the audience and the image, and this suggests that to some extent the power of the image also becomes power over the audience. Kohout’s analysis of this power dynamic invokes an unabashedly ethical stance: It [art] should work mostly within the ethical faculty, as opposed to the aesthetics and cognition of art. There are those three faculties of art: how do I see it, what do I think about it, and how do I feel it. Heart, eyes, brain. Heart is the most important, and it’s the ethical value of art. 12 David Franklin’s approach to working with the tension between mediated live presence (real-time projection) and the physical presence of the actor, on the other hand, relied mainly on a slapstick approach, as will be discussed below (in ‘Checkerboard Floor’). Temporally, Flying and Flowing was divided into a series of ‘scenes’ or ‘vignettes’ with a short blackout between each to demarcate them. The vignettes were between five to ten minutes each, with the total length of the performance reaching about 90 minutes. Some vignettes were ‘duets’ with both performers, others were ‘solos.’ Several were narratives, spoken and illustrated by the performers, while some were non-verbal interactions or image-based movement performances. The vignettes did not have formal names, but nicknames were used privately by the performers to facilitate practical communication during the rehearsal process (these nicknames will be used to refer to the vignettes mentioned below). The technical means used to achieve the images in the vignettes were: the physicality of the performers, spoken texts, quality and colour of voice, video projection of recorded images, live video projection, projection of slides, theatrical lighting, scenography, costumes, props, recorded audio playback, and amplification of live voice.

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__________________________________________________________________ Space does not permit a description of the entire piece here, so certain segments will be discussed as emblematic and conceptually relevant. Three of the vignettes that comprised the performance will be described below. 1) ‘Giving God the Finger’ This vignette was a solo by Kohout, costumed in something like a sackcloth leotard vaguely reminiscent of a sterotypical ‘caveman.’ The initial state (referenced also above) begins with a visual contrast between white vertical and horizontal strips of fabric, which provide the setting in which a violent struggle takes place, with a long red stick as a weapon whose potential for aggression is finally directed at the arrogance of the vertical white strip and its uncompromisingly arrogant stance as the symbol of something higher. When the red stick achieves victory and the white vertical strip is vanquished, Kohout takes refuge from the exhaustion of the struggle in the recumbency of a supine posture, lying horizontally on the floor – but inexorably, in a gesture vaguely reminiscent of Kubrick’s Dr Stragelove’s irrepressible prosthetic arm making the Nazi salute, 13 Kohout’s middle finger extends upward in a vulgar gesture aimed toward the light shining down from above. It is painted red. 2) ‘Checkerboard Floor’ This solo by Franklin, also in a sackcloth ‘caveman’ costume, introduced a technical setup that was also used in the vignette (described below) ‘Stick piece.’ Flooring material with a large black-and-white checkerboard design (each square measuring about 30 x 30 cm) was laid in the middle of the stage with a video camera mounted on the ceiling centred directly above it. Live feed from the video camera went to a video projector and was projected on the white wall that formed the up-stage limit of the performance space. Thus the audience saw the checkerboard flooring material on the floor and also the same design on the rear wall. Likewise, they saw any action taking place on the stage simultaneously from two perspectives: their own point of view, looking horizontally toward the stage; and the camera’s perspective, looking down on the stage from directly above. The camera and projector zooms were adjusted such that the perceived sizes of the real and live-projected images (size of the checkerboard squares, size of the performer’s body) were the same. Franklin enters lying sideways on the floor and sidling on his flank in such a way that while his body is lying horizontally on the floor, his projected image – in a normal vertical orientation on the wall – executes a grotesque approximation of walking. This device is exploited for comic effect in the movement improvisation that follows as he attempts to exchange the status of verticality with his projection (in normal English, he tries to stand up) under the constraint that his legs must remain at a right angle to his torso at all times (obviously making standing impossible). A standing posture is nearly achieved when he discovers that he can

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__________________________________________________________________ befriend his projection by trying to touch the shadows of his real fingers to the video-projected fingers in a gesture reminiscent of both Jane Goodall’s renowned study of chimpanzee social contacts 14 and of God transferring the spark of life to Man on Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel ceiling. Unfortunately the shadows and virtual projections of fingers cannot interlock and grasp each other to support the body of the living artist, which finally collapses fatally to the ground. 3) ‘Stick Piece’ Utilising the same costumes and the same video projection setup described in ‘Checkerboard Floor’ above (but minus the checkerboard floor), Kohout and Franklin play a movement improvisation game while holding a red stick (featured also in ‘Giving God the Finger’ above) about 2 meters long between them in their mouths. The square cross-section profile of the stick and the initial positions of the performers – one standing, one prone – insures that as long as they grip it firmly in their teeth (necessary in order not to drop it), their heads will always be oriented at right angles to each other. The basic rules of the game appear to be that whichever player is vertical, the other is forced to be horizontal, and vice versa; but the rules of the game are being negotiated by the players while the game is in progress, which is very difficult because their speech is impeded by the long red stick they are holding in their mouths. The physical and verbal (mis)communications are played to comic slapstick effect until the piece concludes with the players having reversed their initial positions. Due to the video projection, as in ‘Checkerboard Floor,’ the audience observes the action simultaneously from two perspectives, head-on and via the video projection from directly above. The stick therefore is simultaneously (1) an actual medium of communication, by which the performers physically communicate their intended movements or direct the movements of the other; (2) a symbol of communication, a physical representation of the connection between the organs of speech of the two players; and (3) an actual and symbolic impediment to communication, because the players cannot in fact communicate verbally in an effective manner while holding the stick in their mouths (a fact on which they comment during the piece, to meta-humorous effect). 5. Rituals of Giving God the Finger The phenomenon that ‘inanimate’ space takes on not only sociological and political, but also psychological and ‘spiritual’ meanings – in other words, that space is animated by psyche – is at its root a ritualistic concept, yet one that can live comfortably within an atheist conceptual framework. This brings to mind the axis linking theatre and ritual in the theories of Richard Schechner, 15 and also reveals the paradox of the ‘Giving God the Finger’ piece. Antagonistically addressing God directly – questioning His very existence – is so Old Testament, and the lone finger in the shaft of white light from above calls

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__________________________________________________________________ forth a palette of associations with religious imagery. At the same time, the puny finger painted red appears as a microcosmic version of the two-meter red stick. Such devices of magical shrinkage are often employed in literature or folklore (Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland or Wu Cheng’en’s Monkey / Journey to the West come to mind), where they may be seen as exemplars of the most basic symbolforming activity: creating a miniature image, which can be manipulated to give us a measure of control over the original. This is considered by some anthropologists to be the raison d’être for ancient cave paintings of animals (e.g. Lascaux): representations of the prey animals on which people depended were perhaps used in ‘ceremonies of increase’ intended to magically promote their fertility and reproduction. 16 The same process occurs with a different twist in ‘Checkerboard Floor,’ with its reference to Michelangelo and its message of the futility of believing in the transfer of a divine spark. In both pieces, the imagery that has been used in the past to market religion is now turned against it, used as a weapon of sarcasm to critique it. Institutionalised religion uses the language of horizontal and vertical (or perhaps invented it? Why should we feel that ‘up’ is holier than ‘sideways’?) and programmes us with it. The proliferation of Gothic architecture with its vertical emphasis in the cathedrals of the late medieval period has delineated the meaning of height and ‘up-ness’ and co-opted it in the service of religion. However, the double-vision effect that Franklin aims for in the final gesture of nearly-touching fingertips – that rather the divine spark of the Sistine Chapel imagery, one might just as easily glimpse the warm simple gesture of our ancestors, the hands of primates reaching out of isolation to make contact with the other – brings to mind in either case one of the (possibly) unique features of humans: that we have a ‘theory of mind.’ While the question of whether humans are completely unique in having a theory of mind – ‘the recognition that other people and living things can have their own thoughts and intentions’ 17 – remains unresolved, 18 that faculty is undoubtedly well-developed in humans. The paradox of having a theory of mind, as expressed in the double imagery of ‘Checkerboard Floor,’ is that this capacity – a cognitive function clearly related to the capacity for empathy – underlies both the enterprise of horizontal communication and cohesion, and simultaneously according to some research may underlie the human belief in god(s). 19 The hand that Franklin is reaching for in this piece, hoping to grasp, and believing that it has its own intention to grasp his in return, is a mere shadow, a projection, a vertically-mediated visual representation of a hand rather than the horizontal warmth of a real hand – and the source of the shadow belongs to nobody other than himself. 6. Al Gore Calls for Americans to ‘Occupy Democracy’ 20 The urge for the warmth of a real human hand to hold, for horizontal communication in the sense that Kohout defines it, has broken out like wildfire in

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__________________________________________________________________ the U.S. (the empire of verticality) with the start of the Occupy Wall Street movement. Kohout says: .

When I compare this piece, Horizontal and Vertical, with the piece “Occupy”, it’s a really different thing. Nowadays I want to do pieces which are really a part of the social fabric. They should go among the people; it’s not like masturbation, it’s really part of life. A piece, if it’s working, is really an integral part of the whole society, and it even attempts or aspires to effect some social change … I remember that when I saw the first people on Occupy Wall Street, I told myself, “This is it. This is perfectly ingenious.” For me it’s art, it’s a performance art piece as part of life: guerrilla performance art and politics. 21 I was teaching class at Tufts University several years ago, and the final student project, a performance art piece, which I did with the students and which we developed collectively, was to start to build a parallel campus on the university. It was initiated by my idea of ‘Second Culture,’ which was an artistic movement in the Czech Underground before the Velvet Revolution, the main point of which was not to negotiate with the establishment, and rather to create a parallel second culture, like a second layer of culture that was almost completely disconnected. You can have your first culture, we will start to build our second culture. So we came up with the idea of building a ‘second-culture university’ because the students were complaining that the university had become sort of a prostitute on the education market, that it had become a factory for producing successful students, rather than being some kind of ‘spiritual kitchen’ for the society anymore, under capitalism in the U.S. We started to build a parallel campus, with little houses, they dragged sofas in there and so on. It lasted for almost a month, while the dean became incredibly angry. Recently when I saw a little clip on an ABC news report about Occupy Wall Street, suddenly one of my students from that course appeared and was speaking on mic, a wonderful African-American woman, and she was saying that we want to start a new chapter in the protest movement. We do not want to communicate with the establishment, because the establishment is hopelessly corrupted and done. There is no need to even discuss it with the powers that be in the U.S., because its just a bunch of old apparatchiks like under the Soviet Union. 22 In this context, it appears that the genius of the Occupy movement’s refusal to clearly define its message or even to present a list of demands stemmed from a refusal to participate in any narrative that would be imposed upon it by the vertical information-vacuum-cleaner of mass media. Without designated spokespeople, without a message, and without demands, the story could not easily be ‘spun’ for mass consumption, and it remained irreducibly messy, incoherent, democratic, and

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__________________________________________________________________ horizontal. If you wanted to know what the story really was, you might have had to actually go there yourself in person and talk to people rather than sitting at home and watching it on TV / the internet / vertical media. Here was that ingenious moment, which I suppose only artists can push through – there was this new concept: don’t communicate with the establishment while you are occupying. Don’t march, because marches are sort of a waste of time. The establishment loves marches. You march, and nothing happens after the march is over. The president can go back to sleep laughing in his comfortable bed in the White House when it’s over, because then people disappear and disperse and they’re gone the next day. While this [Occupy] was the idea that we will stay here and we don’t want to talk to you. We don’t even have any demands, because when we start to communicate with you, we start to be a part of the establishment, because we suddenly negotiate. If you negotiate, you recognise the legitimacy of the opposite side of the table during the negotiation. And they just came and stayed there and started to create some new concept of society. For me, it was a piece of performance art, as I understand what performance art should be. 23 Much has been made of the democratising role of the internet and social media, especially as regards the Occupy movement and the Arab Spring which is claimed to have partly inspired it. 24 Yet there appears to be a contradiction here, in that within the conceptual analysis of Flying and Flowing, the internet would be considered a vertical medium of communication, which would place it in opposition to democratising processes. Perhaps we should be sceptical of the narrative of the democratising role of social media. While they appear to function horizontally for end users, even a moment’s glance at the engine under the hood shows that all communication technologies using digital technology (which today means the vast majority) have huge potential for both agglomeration of data and surveillance of individuals. 25 Under the totalitarian system in Czechoslovakia, it would have been the wildest dreams of the security forces if people had had Facebook, because everybody says everything on Facebook. I am a hundred percent sure that a powerful elite, in the U.S. especially, has access to all the information on Facebook and they are processing it. People are voluntarily telling them what they doing, how they are thinking, what they are planning to do. If you are in power, and if you have information about how

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__________________________________________________________________ people think, you are a step ahead in staying in control. It’s a perfectly ideal tool for keeping power over people, because you always have time to prepare yourself and change your tactics. 26 In contrast to social media and other forms of digital communication, the ‘people’s microphone’ strategy employed at many Occupy protests represents an ingenious and practical example of horizontality in action: ‘To avoid running afoul of a ban on the use of amplifiers in the noisy urban space, the group has employed an ingeniously simple technique of chanting in unison the words of the speaker just after they are uttered.’ 27 The ‘people’s microphone’ represents a necessity-is-themother-of-invention response to the authorities’ attempts to control the medium of communication. This is in stark contrast to digital / social media, where users must accept terms and conditions of the communication medium that are imposed by providers who are known collaborators with authorities. 28 Even if it appears that they have freedom regarding the content of the message, there are reasons to doubt the reality of this ‘freedom.’ This harks back to the original meaning of polis: Franklin: Do you think that the ability to stand up and speak in front of a group of people using your voice has an important role to play in the future? Kohout: Yes. You know that polis, which meant a community of people in ancient Greek times, originally meant How big is the optimal size of the community? As far your voice could be heard. There were orators who were screaming – and the community ended when it was not heard. When you use an amplifier, you represent yourself using a different technology and you sort of shift yourself to a cyber-form. And it doesn’t work anymore, not in the same way as a real human voice and physical presence in time and space. 29 7. Berthold Brecht’s Body Lies A-Spinning in Its Grave Does physical presence, in itself, have a political and even ethical dimension? Obviously such a strand of thought has the potential to lead in multiple directions ranging from the philosophical (What would Kant say? Are ethics a priori or must they be embodied?) to the legal (What laws pertain to police harassment and removal of peaceful ‘protesters’ whose only crime is presence?) and practical (How likely am I to be beat up or teargassed by police?). For the moment we will explore its relevance to Marcelo de Andrade Pereira’s analysis (to be found elsewhere in this volume) 30 of the works of Robert Wilson. Even a brief and general comparative glance at Wilson’s oeuvre through Pereira’s lens may bring further insights concerning Flying and Flowing.

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__________________________________________________________________ Firstly, concerning Pereira’s discussion of presence and its relation to the process of interpretation, we can find some very productive friction. In exploring the relationship between interpretation, presence, and aesthetic experience, Pereira suggests that Wilson’s work occurs in a space in which interpretation stands in contrast to pure aesthetic experience, and in which uninterpreted aesthetic experience ‘reveals to itself’ a presence. 31 Perhaps, considering the discussion that follows 32 of Wilson’s works in the context of post-dramatic theatre, we could even speculate that this obtained presence becomes more of an ‘actor’ than are the living human beings on the stage in Wilson’s work. This stands in contrast to Flying and Flowing, in which - rather than breathing performers being to some degree eclipsed by ‘the drama of images’ 33 (one can almost imagine roles in some of Wilson’s works being played effectively by robots) – human somatic presence transmits and transforms the abstractions of horizontality and verticality into explicitly politicised actors. To state it in a different way, Flying and Flowing stands explicitly for interpretation. Standing unashamedly on a soapbox, it declares every human act subject to a political interpretation, due in part (and in cases only metaphorically) to the fact that every human act takes place within a human perceptual framework of three-dimensional space that inevitably includes the categories of horizontal and vertical. As mentioned above, Kohout clearly rejects the ethical validity of ‘pure’ or uninterpreted aesthetic experience (leaving aside for the moment a discussion of whether such a possibility exists at all) in favour of an explicitly ethical role for art and the artist in society. From this point of view, art focused on a purely aesthetic experience could be considered the morally corrupt product of an existentially rudderless and decadent society that stands disoriented, having lost its socio-ethical compass. In this respect Flying and Flowing can be recognised as unabashedly Brechtian. Furthermore, the emphasis on physical, personal presence throughout the piece – explicated most concisely in ‘Stick Piece’ – suggests that said compass may be found again – or perhaps re-calibrated – through the sweaty, smelly, panting, in-your-face, not-overly-aestheticised, warts-and-all somatic wrestling of the performers with the politicised meanings of horizontal and vertical. In consideration of the supposition that ‘the means of production is the message’ (apologies to both Marx and McLuhan), we may return momentarily to the concrete conditions and mode of production of both Flying and Flowing and one of Wilson’s works. Coincidentally, Greater Boston is not only home to Mobius (mentioned above), where Flying and Flowing was conceived and executed; it is also home to the American Repertory Theater (A.R.T.), where several of Wilson’s signature works were performed. During the period when Flying and Flowing was being developed and performed (1998-2000), several of Franklin’s friends were working at the A.R.T. as stagehands and theatre technicians (one of whom also provided volunteer technical assistance to the production of Flying and Flowing), and they described their experience from ‘the other side of the curtain.’

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__________________________________________________________________ Regarding the means of production, Wilson’s works were of course technically demanding for theatre staff, though not exceptionally so in comparison with other productions. More relevant to the present discussion is that regarding the social aspect of the organisation, that is the relations of production, Wilson’s work at A.R.T. was absolutely typical of any large, professional theatre: the quasi-military hierarchy of the theatre-as-workplace was enforced; stagehands and other technicians functioned more like a modern construction crew than like apprentices in a old master’s workshop, performing their specialised tasks according to the orders received from on high, filtered through the medium of their immediate superior and without any regard for or even knowledge of the ‘vision’ of the work as a whole; Wilson behaved like a typical rock-star director, never learning the names of the backstage crew, remaining distant and aloof, wearing leather pants and sunglasses at night and screwing one of the actresses. 34 Flying and Flowing, in contrast, was a home-spun, artist-produced work presented in a small theatre. The social relationship between the artists-authors, (those who created images and soundscapes, authored texts and designed the show, and performed) and the technical staff (who mounted projectors, connected cables, adjusted lighting instruments and swept the floor at the end of the evening) was that they were simply the same people (with one or two volunteers helping with the latter tasks). This horizontality of social relations also made for a very different dynamic when we went for a beer or two with interested audience members after the show. The mode of production of Flying and Flowing conveyed this message: recognition from above by the vertical media monster of the art world glitterati is not relevant to anointing one as an ‘artist.’ Anyone who has an idea and is willing to do the work of developing and expressing it can participate in the artistic project. An ‘artist’ is one of us, a person with something to say. This is an extremely important message, particularly in the U.S.A. where a common attitude toward artists is ‘When are you going to grow up and get a real job?’ Audience members may sometimes feel that they do not ‘understand’ the ‘message’ of the artwork; but when they see that an artist is someone who is not afraid to get his or her hands dirty, they are at least more inclined to listen. The above suggests that Flying and Flowing stands diametrically opposed to Wilson’s work (and possibly to other representatives of post-dramatic theatre) in various respects. At the same time however, the eyes (as Kohout refers to the aesthetic aspect of art) cannot be ignored. Flying and Flowing is, in keeping with Lehman’s concept of post-dramatic theatre (referenced by Pereira), highly imagistic, though also encompassing narrative texts within its scope. Like Wilson’s work, it also incorporated several elements that Pereira identifies as post-dramatic devices: projections, literary texts, soundscape, language play, etc. Regarding specifically for example ‘Checkerboard Floor’ (described above), Pereira’s paraphrasing of Lehmann describes this and many other parts of Flying and Flowing perfectly: ‘The intent of post-dramatic theatre, as Lehmann would say, is

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__________________________________________________________________ the activation – through a new spatial and temporal composition – of perception; it is within this plan that theatre tries to dramatise the images.’ 35 Flying and Flowing also has the intent of activating the perception, but the difference may lie in the specific intent to tune our perceptions to the political dimension of spatial relations. In other words, after experiencing Flying and Flowing, you may never think about horizontal and vertical (basic elements of spatial perception) the same way again. 8. All Religions Are Dangerous Cults, De-Program Yourself In conclusion, Flying and Flowing: Horizontal and Vertical can be seen as a kind of cult de-programming at a deep level: by de-programming and reprogramming people’s associations with visual experiences of horizontal and vertical, which religions have been using in the lexicon of their visual marketing propaganda for thousands of years, we can liberate the meanings of ‘horizontal’ and ‘vertical’ from psychic colonisation and re-claim them for new uses in understanding ourselves and the web of social, political and economic relationships in which we live. We may be able to find our voices and hope to re-gain the polis.

Notes 1

Conrad Philip Kottak, Anthropology: The Exploration of Human Diversity, 14th Edition (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan, 2011), 211. 2 Personal communication with a former member of the Czechoslovak Communist Party. Due to the sensitive nature of the current social context in the Czech Republic, the informant’s request to remain anonymous will be respected. 3 ‘Mission Hill, Boston’, accessed 13 May 2012, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ Mission_Hill,_Boston. 4 Chris Faraone, ‘The Battle of Mission Hill’, The Boston Phoenix, 15 June 2010, accessed 13 May 2012, http://thephoenix.com/boston/news/103438-battle-of-mi ssion-hill/. 5 Ilona Sanger, ‘The Gentrification Game: Are Artists Pawns or Players in the Gentrification of Low-Income Neighborhoods?’, NYFA: New York Foundation for the Arts, accessed 13 May 2012, http://www.nyfa.org/level4.asp?id=176&fid= 1&sid=51&tid=169. 6 Guy-Ernest Debord, ‘Introduction to a Critique of Urban Geography’, Les Lèvres Nues 6 (1955), accessed 13 May 2012, http://library.nothingness.org/articles/ SI/en/display/2. 7 Milan Kohout, personal interview, 12 May 2012. 8 Milan Kohout, ‘Umelec z Americkeho Disentu’ (‘An Artist Dissenting from America’), public lecture, Department of English Language and Literature, University of West Bohemia at Pilsen, Czech Republic, 19 November 2009. 9 Kohout, interview.

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Barbora Prihodova, ‘The Power of Images in Performance: Josef Svoboda’s Scenography for Intolleranza 1960 at Boston Opera Company’, 1, accessed 13 May 2012, http://www.inter-disciplinary.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/10/Prihodo va_paper.pdf. 11 Ibid., 2. 12 Kohout, interview. 13 Stanley Kubrick, dir., Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (Columbia Pictures, 1964). 14 ‘Communication’, accessed 13 May 2012, http://www.janegoodall.org/chimpan zees/communication. 15 Richard Schechner, ‘From Ritual to Theater and Back: The Structure/Process of the Efficacy-Entertainment Dyad’, Educational Theatre Journal 26, No. 4, Johns Hopkins University Press (December, 1974): 455-481, accessed 13 May 2012, http://www.jstor.org/stable/3206608. 16 Kottak, Anthropology, 182. 17 Andy Coghlan, ‘“Theory of Mind” Could Help Explain Belief in God’, New Scientist, March 2009, accessed 13 May 2012, http://www.newscientist.com/artic le/dn16725-theory-of-mind-could-help-explain-belief-in-god.html. 18 Josep Call and Michael Tomasello, ‘Does the Chimpanzee Have a Theory of Mind? 30 Years Later’, Trends in Cognitive Sciences 12, No. 5 (2008): 187, accessed 13 May 2012, http://email.eva.mpg.de/~tomas/pdf/TICS30.pdf. 19 Coghlan, ‘“Theory of Mind’”. 20 Ben Storrow, ‘Hampshire Inauguration Speaker Al Gore Calls for “American Spring”’, Gazettenet.com: Daily Hampshire Gazette, 28 April 2012, accessed 29 May 2012, http://www.gazettenet.com/2012/04/28/gore-039occupy-democracy 039. 21 Kohout, interview. 22 Ibid. 23 Ibid. 24 Peter Apps, ‘Wall Street Action Part of Global “Arab Spring”?’, Reuters, U.S. Edition, 11 October 2011, accessed 13 May 2012, http://www.reuters.com/ article/2011/10/11/uk-global-politics-protest-idUSLNE79A03Z20111011. 25 Personal communication with a professional in the IT industry who prefers to remain anonymous. 26 Kohout, interview. 27 Austin Dacey, ‘The Human Amplifier’, The Ethical Ear: On the Values & Politics of Sound, Music, Hearing, Voice & Noise, last modified 23 September 2011, accessed 13 May 2012, http://www.ethicalear.com/2011/09/human-ampli fier.html. 28 ‘Exclusive: National Security Agency Whistleblower William Binney on Growing State Surveillance’, Democracy Now!, accessed 13 May 2012,

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__________________________________________________________________ http://www.democracynow.org/2012/4/20/exclusive_national_security_agency_wh istleblower_william. 29 Kohout, interview. 30 Marcelo de Andrade Pereira, ‘The Full and the Void in the Theatre of Robert Wilson’, in this volume. 31 Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, The Production of Presence: What Meaning Cannot Convey in Ibid., 129. 32 Ibid. 33 Ibid., 130. 34 Troy Kidwell, personal communication, 29 May 2012. 35 Hans-Thies Lehmann, Teatro Pós-Dramático (São Paulo: Cosac & Naify, 2007), 110, cited in Pereira, ‘The Full and the Void’, in this volume.

Bibliography Apps, Peter. ‘Wall Street Action Part of Global “Arab Spring”?’. Reuters, U.S. Edition, 11 October 2011. Accessed 13 May 2012. http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/10/11/uk-global-politics-protest-idUSLNE79 A03Z20111011. Call, Josep, and Michael Tomasello. ‘Does the Chimpanzee Have a Theory of Mind? 30 Years Later’. Trends in Cognitive Sciences 12, No. 5 (2008): 187. Accessed 13 May 2012. http://email.eva.mpg.de/~tomas/pdf/TICS30.pdf. Coghlan, Andy. ‘“Theory of Mind” Could Help Explain Belief in God’. New Scientist, March 2009. Accessed 13 May 2012. http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn16725-theory-of-mind-could-help-explainbelief-in-god.html. Dacey, Austin. ‘The Human Amplifier’. The Ethical Ear: On the Values & Politics of Sound, Music, Hearing, Voice & Noise. Lost modified 23 September 2011. Accessed 13 May 2012. http://www.ethicalear.com/2011/09/human-amplifier.html. Debord, Guy-Ernest. ‘Introduction to a Critique of Urban Geography’. Les Lèvres Nues 6 (1955). Accessed 13 May 2012. http://library.nothingness.org/arti cles/SI/en/display/2. Democracy Now! ‘Exclusive: National Security Agency Whistleblower William Binney on Growing State Surveillance’. Last modified 20 April 2012. Accessed 13 May 2012. http://www.democracynow.org/2012/4/20/exclusive_national_security _agency_whistleblower_william.

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__________________________________________________________________ Faraone, Chris. ‘The Battle of Mission Hill’. The Boston Phoenix, 15 June 2010. Accessed 13 May 2012. http://thephoenix.com/boston/news/103438-battle-of-mi ssion-hill/. Jane Goodall Institute. ‘Communication’. Accessed 13 May 2012. http://www.jane goodall.org/chimpanzees/communication. Kottak, Conrad Philip. Anthropology: The Exploration of Human Diversity, 14th Edition. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan, 2011. Kubrick, Stanley, dir. Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb. Hollywood: Columbia Pictures, 1964. Prihodova, Barbora. ‘The Power of Images in Performance: Josef Svoboda’s Scenography for Intolleranza 1960 at Boston Opera Company’. Accessed 13 May 2012. http://www.inter-disciplinary.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/10/Prihodova_pa per.pdf. Sanger, Ilona. ‘The Gentrification Game: Are Artists Pawns or Players in the Gentrification of Low-Income Neighborhoods?’. NYFA: New York Foundation for the Arts. Accessed 13 May 2012. http://www.nyfa.org/level4.asp?id=176&fid=1& sid=51&tid=169. Schechner, Richard. ‘From Ritual to Theater and Back: The Structure/Process of the Efficacy-Entertainment Dyad’. Educational Theatre Journal 26, No. 4. Johns Hopkins University Press (December, 1974): 455–481. Accessed 13 May 2012. http://www.jstor.org/stable/3206608. Storrow, Ben. ‘Hampshire Inauguration Speaker Al Gore Calls for “American Spring”’. Gazettenet.com: Daily Hampshire Gazette, 28 April 2012. Accessed 29 May 2012. http://www.gazettenet.com/2012/04/28/gore-039occupy-democracy039. Wikipedia. ‘Mission Hill, Boston’. Accessed 13 May 2012. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mission_Hill,_Boston. David Franklin is a video and performance artist and practitioner of the Japanese somatic movement discipline Shintaido. His slapstick social commentary in Flying and Flowing contrasts with the neo-shamanistic role he played in the non-dialogue cult film Neovoxer (dir. Michael Pope).

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__________________________________________________________________ Milan Kohout, artist-activist, participated in the Czech Underground and was a signer of Charter 77. He was expelled from communist Czechoslovakia by the secret police and was granted political asylum in the United States, but his allergy to capitalism eventually forced him to return to his native land, where he continues to be a chronic troublemaker.

The Full and the Void in the Theatre of Robert Wilson Marcelo de Andrade Pereira Abstract This chapter discusses the video and stage works of Robert Wilson, from the circumscription of two operational concepts: the full and the void. It reveals the dimensions of presence and absence that the works of the artist establish, manipulated by means of colours; linear perspective; by the use of monumentality; and also by the graphic aspects of the scenery and the actors’ movements. The idea of image as movement is problematised in relation to the expressionistic aspects of Wilson’s work. We work with philosophical references, in particular, discussing concepts from theatrical and visual aesthetics. The theoretical input comes from the works of Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht. Concepts like presence, interpretation, representation, modernity, and the senses are drawn from this author in order to analyse Wilson’s spectacles. Key Words: Robert Wilson, performance, theatre, video portrait, interpretation. ***** 1. Robert Wilson and His Work The intention, here and to Robert Wilson, is to capture what happens when one looks without interpreting what one is looking at. Interpretation is certainly a form of reading and, as a form of reading, it requires an already crystallised code. However, it is also known that in regard to the arts, interpretation might ruin everything, that is, it can reduce the spectrum of significance of that which is offered to contemplation, of what is revealed to the eye. Interpretation consists, very often, of a choice; what it chooses is a version of what is observed; thus interpretation may be given precedence to it, consequently hindering the possibility to capture another meaning that is refractory to reason – a faculty that challenges everything, that wants to understand, reduce, and simplify everything. Obviously, such considerations do not intend to dismiss the role of interpretation, but only to show more unusual forms of comprehending what is disclosed, of establishing with the observed, with the contemplated, a relation of presence, of contact. In short, it consists in thinking more about the human capacity to retain an aesthetic sense of this something that is revealed – a something in general and not only what occurs in the work; it is about having a genuinely aesthetic experience in such a way that one can grant to that which reveals itself to the eye a presence, its own presence. 1 It is exactly due to this yearning, of granting visibility to what is revealed, that the work of Wilson takes place. In spite of being well-known as a theatre person, Wilson is much more than that, he is an artist of difficult definition – just like his work. His artistic production

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__________________________________________________________________ is diverse, complete, it is made of a great variety of languages: dance, theatre, drawing, photography, cinema, literature, object design, performance, architecture. His plastic production is ensnared with his stage production – making these two expressions indissociable. Wilson is a complete artist – such artist’s notation can be verified in all art spaces where his work is shown. Within the performing arts Wilson falls into what Hans Thies Lehman 2 calls post-dramatic theatre. This characterisation designates a tendency toward theatrical productions based on a multi-centred and diffuse scenic conception. This basically means a rejection of the predominance of the dramatic text; by the minimisation of the author’s personification; by the de-hierarchisation of the stage elements; by hybridism; by the incorporation of the most varied elements and languages, from the use of new technologies to visual arts, performance, dance, and video art. The intent of post-dramatic theatre, as Lehmann would say, is the activation – through a new spatial and temporal composition – of perception; it is within this plan that theatre tries to dramatise the images. 2. The Drama of Images Wilson’s theatre is certainly highly imagistic. It is not uncommon, therefore, to see in certain theatre plays scenes that are not led by an actor or even a text. It is image, and only that, that can eventually be staged. An example of that is the way in which Wilson represents the fable of La Fontaine The Oak and the Reed. In this segment of the play The Fables of La Fontaine we see a frame that is formed and varied only by the use of lights. Between two walls we see a white background that is crossed diagonally by a black stripe. This stripe is gradually tilted to the point when it becomes a horizontal stripe on the bottom margin of the frame. There are several light gradations in this scene that help in creating a stormy atmosphere. The tilting resembles – in relation to narration, sound and music – the fall of the oak. In front of it, in the vertical position, is placed a black line, symbolising the reed, which swings under the wind, but does not succumb to it, keeping still standing, unlike the oak, which thought itself superior. This passage of a scenic work by Robert Wilson allows for just an illustration of the way in which visuality is central in his stagings, at the same time as it allows for the establishment of a relationship with the visual work itself; in particular, the video-portraits. Images that are dramatic on the stage are also dramatic in the video portraits which configures in Wilson a particular way of artistic expression. Such impression could be deduced from the series of video portraits that were shown at the Santander Cultural institute, in the city of Porto Alegre, Brazil, from September to December, 2010. Indeed, the exhibition sought to present, scathingly but appropriately so, the impossibility of contemporary art to stay confined within the domains of one single language. In this particular way of expression, the video portrait, one can see a confluence of languages and the uncertainty relative to the genre it would supposedly represent. The video portraits constitute, thus, moving

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__________________________________________________________________ photographs, large living screens, in LED technology, with sound, with music, poetised, some even with three-dimensional effects. The video portraits characterise, in addition, this renowned artist's effort in shaping his whole production into one single medium. In this support of difficult definition – the video portrait – Wilson’s musical, visual, gestural, and textual expressions converge towards scenic expression. In the images captured by the artist, layer upon layer of visual and sonorous information are sedimented. There is some sort of false bottom in the image: it is at the same time a scene – the centre around which all the elements of the composition orbit – and the drama it stages. As scenes, Wilson’s images struggle against immobility, they are configured more as a force than as a form; diffuse, the image puts perception to the test, it demands from this surrender, availability for a meeting, it demands time because it is variable. In the image, time piles up, it is scanned, it is ample, inflexible. In it, time swells the eye, reveals a gesture – iconic or allegorical, of one and of multiple meanings, respectively. To time are added the sound, the voice, the silence, the rhythmic and melodic counterpoints. In Wilson’s video portraits, visual image and sound image feed each other, they are, so to speak, inter-agents; competing, nevertheless, for the same purpose, the unity of multiplicity. Juxtaposition, a procedure typical of this artist, adds precisely to this yearning for conjunction, of communication between the languages and the beings. This intent is certainly symptomatic. Wilson seeks to regain the amplitude of meaning not only through the verb, but, above all, through the image – inasmuch as its variations are able to enclose several intensities. As staging, the image becomes dramatic, performs an action. The appearance of the person portrayed, in low light, retains a phantom; and once again a false bottom. Who is in fact the one portrayed? What presence is reincarnated? In the frown, in the hysterical laughter, in the rumination, in the stony gaze, in the surrendered, eroded, distressed visage, an emotional landscape, not completely identifiable, because steep, rich in accidents. As already mentioned, Wilson transfers the stage into the video portrait. Like the stage – his own stage in particular – the chain of actions does not happen linearly, casually, but analogically. There is neither beginning nor end, the action keeps in continuous evolution, inside and outside its support. Thus, the artist asserts, in both forms – the stage and the video portrait – the impossibility of every capture. Wilson’s production cannot be interpreted in a way – not even generally – which isolates the influence of all other elements (audible, visual). In him, the image continually challenges the viewer, it questions if what he sees is what he sees, and also what he sees. Wilson makes the work stare back at the one who is staring, an alchemy of the eye. 3 For Wilson, presence is pure ambivalence. In his video portraits, presence may indicate both the portrayed and their effects, that is, there is an individual who is situated within the limits imposed by representation. However, presence also has

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__________________________________________________________________ an effect on the observer due to the observed. The observer recreates, or rather makes present – as aesthetic act, as aesthetic experience itself – the portrayed. The observer brings, with the help of Wilson and his devices – the portrayed into existence, in front of them; the portrayed fills the void assumed to exist in the relation between observer and work. The portrayed occupies, thus, a relational space, outside the frame, expressed in a prolonged duration, in surrender to the contemplation of another, a surrender that is to a certain degree refractory to interpretation. Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht’s interpretation, however, allows us to make this question more clear. In his remarkable book, Production of Presence: What Meaning Cannot Convey, Gumbrecht observes that the aesthetic experience is actually an oscillation between effects of presence and effects of meaning. Effects of presence are understood by the author as effects resulting from the relationship an object establishes with the world and which happens only to the senses, they are intensive. Presence is exactly this point of (body) contact, a link between a subject and an object without the interference of meaning, its tonic. It does no refer to a time frame, but to spatiality (and its time), to the configuration of bodies within a certain shared space-time, their impact over one another: a relation which initiates the individual in a certain sensation (or, in other words, only intensifies the sensation). For Gumbrecht, meaning attenuates the intensity of this encounter, and counteracts the power and energy of presence. For this very reason, the effects of meaning are the effects of this relation reduced to cognitive functions, which are, in turn, extensive. Gumbrecht notes, however, that the aesthetic experience oscillates between these two types of effect. It is also worth mentioning that for Gumbrecht – and in a more practical way, to Wilson, aesthetics operates as a form of ritualisation of thought; the aesthetic gives an aura to thought, since it refers to a state which creates a different time disposition, which amplifies and gives new dimensions to reality, objects, subjects, and knowledge. These notions bring to the discussion, as Gumbrecht notes, two kinds of knowledge: the culture of meaning and the culture of presence. Culture of presence refers to forms of social organisation whose construction of meaning is based on the body. In it, legitimate knowledge goes back to a kind of revelation, of epiphany; the senses do not only refer to a cognitive faculty, a means to knowledge, but to pure, immediate knowledge. On the other hand, the culture of meaning produces a subject whose knowledge is derived from a kind of decantation of the senses through reason; it refers to an individual whose knowledge was attained through interpretation, that is, from something found in a hermeneutical field, with supposedly unambiguous and universal meaning. 4 If time is the dimension that sustains the culture of meaning – because time is needed for acts of transformation to happen in the relation of man with the world -, space is the dimension of presence, and the relation between bodies is its

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__________________________________________________________________ component, a relation which could result in violence, since the singularity of a body can be violated. Indeed, for the author, power is the ability to affect, modify, and transform bodies, and violence, the form in which this power is updated – either as performance or event. This perhaps could explain why for Gumbrecht knowledge is produced by the culture of meaning through interpretation. The event of ‘the unveiling of the world’ would thus correspond to a mere innovation, its surprising effect. While, for the culture of presence, however, an event designates, as already noted, an epiphany, and the knowledge triggered by it, a revelation; in such epiphanic experience, the world opens up to the subject, the individual is included in the ebbs and flows of body and time; an experience that should not be accumulated, defined, but basically lived and experienced. Wilson’s hesitation in interpreting and ‘facilitating’ access to his plays is notorious. Lehmann points out that the works of the renowned director cannot be interpreted or understood in a merely rational way. His production gives rise to associations which perform a kind of productivity in a field which could be seen as magnetic between audience and scene. 5 Robert Wilson, in turn, plays with this relational space of time with space. In his works – including the video portraits and his theatre and opera productions – space does not dominate time, in the same way in which time does not dominate space. The video portrait of Winona Ryder is, in this sense, exemplary. In it we see the famous American actress stuck to her neck in what seems a small mountain. On the surface of this mountain there are some objects: a toothbrush, a purse and a gun. Gradually, and very slowly, the lighting changes, moving. It is practically impossible to find a beginning or an end, since the viewer is confronted with only a continuity. At some point one can see a figure in a very dimly lit hole, and it is difficult to even identify the objects on the ground; it is also difficult to even see what colour the ground. The blue background helps create an atmosphere of isolation and strangeness. Obviously, this background becomes slightly lighter, so the actress’s face becomes visible, as well as the objects in front of her. Indeed, each one of these objects is highlighted by a bright light falling directly upon them, creating a contrast with the ground, which becomes less visible. A bright lateral light illuminates, at another moment, the whole scene, emphasising the outlines of soil against the blue background, as well as its real colour, which is not dark as it seemed due to the dim light, but a bright green. This green colour does not remain for a long time either, changing to yellow in the progression of light changes. Those nuances of light intend, of course, to evidence a process of lighting resembling natural light in a much faster pace. Robert Wilson expands time through the naturalism of this scene’s lighting, concentrating natural time into an artificial duration. Light will, moreover, show ‘that each element in Wilson’s work has a life of its own.’ 6 Quoting Carmen Pardo Salgado, light in Robert Wilson’s work indicates that not only ‘the actors are alive,’ but the toothbrush is also alive, as well as the purse,

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__________________________________________________________________ the gun, and the hat Winona Ryder wears, are all alive, ‘any object, no matter how trivial it seems to us, is a living organism on the scene.’ 7 In other words, ‘with light [Wilson] paints the scene, thus he animates the objects, which become actors.’ 8 Indeed, Winona’s video portrait depicts one day in a life of a static, paralysed individual – which refers directly to Winnie, a character from the play Happy Days, by Samuel Becket, written in the 1960s. Interestingly, Robert Wilson directed his own version of this play. This fact gives support to the affirmation that Robert Wilson’s work is not only heterogeneous – with respect to languages – but always self-referential. The staging of Happy Days both on the stage and as video portrait is therefore an indication of this kind of multimedia and variable production. As Hans Thies Lehmann points out, Robert Wilson creates landscapes in his stagings, but as we will see, such a definition is problematic. 9 The landscape Lehmann refers to, allegorically recreated on the stage and/or in video portraits, like in the work with Winona Ryder, is not concerned with spatial representation, but, as we saw, with the representation of time and emotions. The comprehensiveness of the landscape which can be attributed to the space field happens through what the eye infers, through what the eye is able to grasp, feel, sense, including a form of spatiality which becomes wider through time, and changes with light. The amplitude of the gaze occurs as an amplitude of exposure to time. Duration is, in Robert Wilson’s work, a highly relevant term, since it suggests the determination of a temporal and spatial extension. The minimal character of Robert Wilson’s productions, that is, of the exhibition of few elements in view of the possibilities of filling the space, is inversely proportional to its duration and variability. There are a multitude of objects which reduplicate themselves only through light changes and light movements; there is a chronometric and, therefore, external and formal principle – which Wilson borrowed from John Cage – which is preserved and which is maintained based on a ‘common [and non-aleatory] rhythmic structure,’ 10 From an internal or subjective point of view – in regard to the public – this idea of duration goes back to the Bergsonian acceptation of the term, of something which cannot be measured in strictly chronological terms. As Holmberg reminds us, Wilson’s slow motion dramatizes time, not as discrete unit ticked off by a chronometer, but as flowing succession of states, melting invisibly, indivisibly into each other – time as consciousness. Since consciousness fuses past, present, and future, this is also the cyclical time of myth and ritual, of eternal return. Of the past found again, of Proust’s privileged moment: a moment inside and outside time. 11

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__________________________________________________________________ 3. An Art without Name Such antinomies, in their turn, perhaps allow us to understand the reason why in Robert Wilson everything seems to float – not only the images and the meanings we attribute to them but also the way we frame them, its genre and support. In this respect it is worth questioning: what are the video portraits? To which pictorial genre do they belong – portrait, still-life, or landscape? What is a video portrait, after all? Which artistic expression does it date back to, precisely? Video-art? Performance? Video-installation? Robert Wilson surely would not fail to answer these questions. He would most probably allege that he does not have the answer to any of them and that, even if he had, I suppose, he would perhaps not give them. His works invite the other to create, to invent, to find by him/herself these answers, inasmuch as they are conditioned by the way everyone sees them, the way everyone is found by them. Is it portrait? Yes, but also still-life and landscape. In the case of Robert Wilson such ‘definition’ lacks precision; being of spatial and not merely thematic order, the definition of genre varies according to the position of the viewer in front of the work; it would be, so to speak, as if conditioned by the place the observer occupies in space, by the way he makes himself present in face of the present. Finally, the considerations made so far regain the core, the marrow of Robert Wilson’s work; as we have seen, they refer to the product (specially the video portrait) and not to the way of production, to the artist’s poetry itself. It is precisely in his way of production that a pedagogy is encrypted. 4. The Collaborative Work Even Robert Wilson gave his opinion about that, based on a notion of pedagogy that distances itself from the mere efficient transmission of information concerning specific areas of knowledge. With his pedagogy Robert Wilson tries to find and organise situations in which people with different interests, different experiences and abilities can join and together develop their own individuality; without forgetting, obviously, that such achievement contributes collaterally to a group as a whole. 12 This intuition is certainly materialised in his production. Wilson calls to action artists from the most diverse areas. Collaborative work is one of the founding characteristics of his poetic production. In this respect it is worth recalling the partnerships with Philip Glass, in the staging of the spectacle Einstein on the Beach, in the mid-1970s; Tom Waits, Marianne Faithful and William Borroughs with whom he created The Black Rider, in 1990, aside from numerous works in collaboration with Heiner Müller, famous German playwright, among them Hamletmachine and Quartett, from 1986 and 1987, respectively. Other names worth mentioning are: John Cage, Merce Cunningham, Lucinda Childs, Michael Galasso, Laurie Anderson and Lou Reed. Regarding the video portraits this collaboration manifests itself in different forms and in different degrees. In one of them, the portrayed offered themselves

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__________________________________________________________________ unconditionally to the artist – like, for example, Brad Pitt. In other cases, the portrayed was invited to compose their own portraits with the artist. This was the case in the works with Jeanne Moreau (actress), William Pope.L (performer), Zangh Huan (performer) and Gao Xingjian (writer). In some cases, Wilson uses an idea suggested by a collaborator. It is nothing new to say that his productions emphasise more the formal rigour than the discussion of any subject related to politics and even ethics – which does not mean that these ideas cannot be inferred from his works; the artist, however, does not intend to discuss them. Wilson is not an engagé artist. His work is based on the unique expression of a narrative. In his works, form does not require any identifiable content. He focuses on the expansion of sensorial and cognitive human abilities, and not on their contents. This explains why in some video portraits the collaborative work actually refers to a kind of co-authorship. This, at least, is the case of William Pope.L, an African-American performer with whom Wilson created a video portrait. In their collaborative work, the afro-descending performer is seen completely painted in white, lying on artificial green turf. The background, as usual, is blue. With one hand William Pope.L supports his head, with the other he holds a white egg. He puts on his own head a white crown. In front of him lies a white plush lamb. The scene also has a white picket fence in front of both characters. Their bodies seem giant in relation to the lawn, which has a few miniature trees. The white, or whitened, bodies occupy almost the whole space which is delimited by a white picket fence. At some moments of this moving portrait, in which the portrayed remain still, the little lamb sings Mary had a little lamb. The description is clear, the message refers to the white domination of American society and to forms of oppression and whitening – which is a form of depersonalisation – of afro-descendents and their culture. Wilson, as we saw, expresses through his language an other kind of issue in this work, because another artist collaborated in it. There is, obviously, in these collaborations an idiosyncratic movement by the one who orchestrates such stagings – hence the cornerstone of Wilson’s work; such principle penetrates and becomes visible in the gesture, the light, the colour, the costumes, the sound, and the words 13 – this applies to both the video portraits and the stage, where the works in question originate, as we have observed. Chee-Keng Lee 14 gives us another concept to reframe the way Wilson performs his work in collaboration, that is, the seed of the imagery, which Lee derives from the work of the Chinese director and educator Xu Xiao-Zhong. According to Lee, Xu formulates a seed through a process of analysis and interpretation of the script. The director communicates this seed to artists contributing to different elements of the play, such as acting, set, lighting, costumes. Lee mentions that ‘the seed is a symbolic image’ that summarises the theme of the production itself, from which emerge and crystallise concrete images on stage. In the rehearsals and in the production process as a whole, Xu unifies the proposition of all contributors, in

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__________________________________________________________________ order to establish a system of symbols, which is enriched by layers and layers of meaning. For Lee, Xu has a ideological proposition to make, which does not happen in the work of Robert Wilson – but, as we said before, that does not exclude this possibility. In the other hand, for Wilson, word and image are not necessarily syntonic; they do not lend themselves to the mere transmission of a plot, of a story, but to the establishment of a frequency, of an atmosphere, of an affective tone; they are first and foremost audible and visual elements. Spaces and shapes are configurations, not illustrations. Wilson summarises in images the structure of his work. 15 Perhaps that explains why it is considered rather impersonal – though idiosyncratic, as already mentioned. In his productions, all elements have equal importance. The balance between the terms of the equation is expressed in visual books, or storyboards through which the artist establishes beforehand a language that is graphical, chromatic, sonorous, musical. This anticipation makes the process extremely meticulous, exact, precise. The relations of space and movement among the performers (actors and those portrayed) and the space are defined and adjusted during rehearsals. The performer works like a marionette – or rather like an übermarionette, as is apparent with Gordon Craig. In the actor’s body time acquires gravity, weight, extension. Its duration is analogous to the duration of a trance, which refers to a stylisation technique that tries to empty the persona of the actor and, equally, of the character. Even the actions are taken as symbols, contrary to the current understanding that sees action either as a means or a consequence. In this manner Wilson seeks to eliminate all signs of apparent emotion; he avoids natural behaviour and psychological justification – evidences that would foreshadow a reality. In his stagings (theatre and video portraits), the performer presentifies more than he expresses. 16 Wilson establishes a form that the performer has to fill. The blatant artificiality of the acting as well as the staging affords a glimpse of the ties that the artificial holds with the real, with the truth. To Wilson, the artificiality is closer to the truth than to reality itself, since in the scene it assumes its constructed nature. In the work, in the scene, everything is found on the surface. Wilson dispenses with depth in favour of plainness. This emphasises the plastic and consequently aesthetic character of the work. What is at stake is the faculty of perception and not of understanding. The minimum and non-figurative aspect of his productions seeks, actually, to take the maximum out of perception. Wilson offers absence as a way to resume presence. This retreat from the boasting images with which we are daily trampled is of a highly ethical and pedagogical dimension. And why? Firstly, because his mode of production and his production present themselves as the effort and the result, respectively, of a conjunction of distinct expressive wills. Secondly, because its duration goes beyond the limits conventionalised in art, in the supposed separation between that art and life. Thirdly, because it alludes to a practice that is oriented by the real through the

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__________________________________________________________________ artificial, that amplifies the real by the imaginary. Hence, ethics takes place here. Wilson makes the invisible visible. His image policy entails the maintenance of tensions and resistances. He turns perception into a tribute to attention. 5. Robert Wilson’s Pedagogical Elements In this respect, it is interesting to recall Simone Weil’s reflexions as recalled by Alfredo Bosi in his remarkable essay Phenomenology of the Gaze. To Bosi, attention in Weil constitutes a high form of generosity. Attention invites the self to move away from itself in favour of another, it incurs in a kind of energy transfer into that which is found outside the self. It is characterised firstly as an exercise in detachment, and secondly, in sharing. Attention, states Bosi, ‘has light fingers, it is contrary to certainty and ownership.’ 17 Its unity predicts four dimensions, namely perseverance – as a form that struggles against the immediate and the hastiness, being therefore slow and hesitant; the denudation – which configures a kind of ascesis, of the observer’s free and disinterested surrender in favour of the observed; the work – glimpsed in the effort to perceive everything, either the regularities or the accidents; and contradiction – as acknowledgement of tensions, of struggles that happen and manifest themselves in the game of visibility and invisibility. In short, what is in fact presented here is a problem of formative order. We seek in our pedagogical practices to offer, in a benevolent and well-intentioned way, a repertoire of images, of representations, of ways of being, of thinking, of feeling, and of self-conduct that respond in a sometimes naïve way to the yearnings of assimilation and adjustment that we consider our own. Such an intent can, nevertheless, find resistance. Indeed, this is what brings us here at this moment: understand better to intervene better. In a more specific way, we come to realise that current efforts in art teaching revolve more around the bookish training of this form of human expression than around a policy in itself. We defend this approach for judging that art constitutes an element that is able to guarantee our belonging to the social fabric. Art operates, thus, as a seal that authenticates and qualifies an individual, that indicates that a subject is an equal, that he shares the same representations as us, that he transits through high culture, through official culture. A methodology that ends in contextualising, in fruition and in analysis takes away from art precisely what makes it dynamic, the uncertainty, the impossibility of ownership, the need for re-creation, the establishment of an exchange between work and viewer, co-creator of the work. These affirmations do not seek, for sure, to downplay the importance of a particular interpretation of the art works – enriched by biographies, critical and technical categories –, but above all to take into account the fact that interpretation, when given precedence to the work itself, may in fact ruin everything; to take into account the fact that art education has repercussions in other domains that are not necessarily artistic, that it predicts a policy, that it predicts an ethics, seen in the image, in the gaze, in the relation that this attentive gaze establishes with the

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__________________________________________________________________ world, with the other, with the possible. The text presented so far sought to recover the spectrum of action of the gaze. In case it did not succeed, may the reader call attention to the author – making this writing what Wilson teaches us, a joint, collaborative work. The work of Wilson is, in this sense, highly relevant, since it sharpens the senses, using all of them in favour of the presentification of the other, of the contingent, the temporary, the ephemeral. Robert Wilson seeks with his poignant artificiality to make the spectator more aware of the world, of its subtle and delicate transformations, as well as of the need for intervention in this same space.

Notes 1

Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, The Production of Presence: What Meaning Cannot Convey (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004). 2 Hans Thies Lehmann, Teatro Pós-Dramático (São Paulo: Cosac & Naify, 2007). 3 Arthur Holmberg. The Theatre of Robert Wilson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). 4 Gumbrecht, The Production of Presence, 80-81. 5 Lehmann, Teatro Pós-Dramático, 110. 6 Carmem Pardo Salgado, ‘Contrapontos do Som e da Luz no Teatro de Robert Wilson’, in Robert Wilson Video Portraits: Catálogo de Exposição (Porto Alegre: Santander Cultural, 2010), 52. 7 Ibid. 8 Ibid. 9 Lehmann, Teatro Pós-Dramático, 103. 10 Frédéric Maurin, Robert Wilson: Le Temps pour Voir, L’espace pour Écouter (Paris: Actes Sud, 2010), 90. 11 Holmberg, Theatre of Robert Wilson, 11. 12 Luiz Roberto Galizia, Os Processos Criativos de Robert Wilson (São Paulo: Editora Perspectiva, 2004), xxvi. 13 Maria Shevtsova, Robert Wilson (London: Routledge, 2007). 14 Chee-Keng Lee, ‘Seed of the Image: Image Metaphor as a Strategy of Creative Process and Ideological Resistance’, in Activating the Inanimate: Visual Vocabularies of Performance Practise, eds. Celia Morgan and Filipa Malva (Oxford: Inter-Disciplinary Press, 2013). 15 Shevtsova, Robert Wilson, 42. 16 Ibid., 57. 17 Alfredo Bosi, ‘Fenomenologia do Olhar’, in O Olhar, organised by Adauto Novaes (São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 1995), 3.

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Bibliography Bosi, Alfredo. ‘Fenomenologia do Olhar’. In O Olhar, Organised by Adauto Novaes. São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 1995. Galizia, Luis Roberto. Os Processos Criativos de Robert Wilson. São Paulo: Ed. Perspectiva, 2004. Gumbrecht, Hans Ulrich. The Production of Presence: What Meaning Cannot Convey. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004. Holmberg, Arthur. The Theatre of Robert Wilson. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Lee, Chee-Keng. ‘Seed of the Image: Image Metaphor as a Strategy of Creative Process and Ideological Resistance’. In Activating the Inanimate: Visual Vocabularies of Performance Practise, edited by Celia Morgan, and Filipa Malva. Oxford: Inter-Disciplinary Press, 2013). Lehmann, Hans-Thies. Teatro Pós-Dramático. São Paulo: Cosac & Naify, 2007. Maurin, Frédéric. Robert Wilson: Le Temps pour Voir, L’espace pour Écouter. Paris: Actes Sud, 2010. Salgado, Carmem Pardo. ‘Contrapontos do Som e da Luz no Teatro de Robert Wilson’. In Robert Wilson Video Portraits: Catálogo de Exposição. Porto Alegre: Santander Cultural, 2010. Shevtsova, Maria. Robert Wilson. London: Routledge, 2007. Marcelo de Andrade Pereira is adjunct professor in Philosophy of Art at UFSM – Universidade Federal de Santa Maria, Brazil; PhD in Education, Master in Philosophy. His research interests revolve around Performance Art, dance and theatre.

Part 4 The Self and the Subject in Performance: Public Place and Meaning

The Explanatory Frame Myer Taub Abstract This case study explains how to integrate performance with a written text and the speculation of the self. It also looks at how a proposal in activating performance might inform a document of research experience, interpolated as dramatic content emerging from a model of reflexive framing and inter-modality. It shows how a process of reproduction might contribute to a shape of a particular modified case study methodology appropriated from Qualitative social research theorist, Robert K Yin. This methodology has three frames: exploratory, descriptive and explanatory. The composition of these frames is a process of making and reflecting on the making. The composition of the frames engenders an explanation of the experiment as much as they translate the experiment. It means making a system that is actively aware of its own histories. It is a transformative and original methodology that relies on framing and perforating the frame. In the context of the chapter, it also becomes a research document that introduces the notion of hauntology as contribution to this making of methodology. It is the ghost who emerges from the perforation, into the frame. This is Derridean and the chapter’s reflection is an ongoing research project – with its primary source being derived from his Specters of Marx. This is also the ghost of Florence Phillips that speaks back at the work through the reflective document of a stage play called Florence. The presentation of dramatic text forms part of both the explanatory frame of research and the reflexive space in performance. I present, in the later half of the chapter, three fragments from the stage play: Florence. Key Words: Performance, text, intervention, inter- and multi-disciplinary. ***** 1. The Ghost in the Frames Derrida at the end of his Specters of Marx concludes how: The “scholar” of the future, the “intellectual” of tomorrow … should learn to live by learning not how to make conversation with the ghost but how to talk with him, with her, how to let them speak or how to give them back speech, even if it is oneself, in the other, in the other in oneself; they are always there, specters, even if they do not exist, even if they are no longer, even if they are not yet. 1

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__________________________________________________________________ In this chapter, I want to explain both the process and outcome of a performance project called Florence. The project occurred in Johannesburg twice: first as an exploratory frame in 2010 and then as a descriptive frame in 2011. It was a performance project based in the loci of the historical, the material and the marginal. It worked from within subterranean urban spaces of the past. What was used as a starting point was the figure of Florence Phillips, wife of the colonial South African Rand-Lord, Lionel Phillips. It was Florence Phillips who was instrumental in founding the Johannesburg Art Gallery at the beginning of the twentieth century. Presently the Johannesburg Art Gallery exists as a Victorian heritage trope that is increasingly isolated and demarcated on a post-colonial landscape of concurrency and ruination. The art gallery is located and intrinsically linked to a public park but a seven-meter spiked metal municipal fence separates the two. It is this interplay of the gallery existing both at the city’s center and margins of the city center that informed dramatic conflict in relation to developing a project situated around performance and intervention. From all of this, one could say it drew on what was haunted, or, in fact, it was the haunted that emerged from frames. From the outset, or should I say from an early position of the work, the project’s intent was to hypothetically suggest a process of reproduction and replication that might contribute to the shape of a particular modified case study methodology that would present itself as a case study for research practice in the making of performance. Determining this hypothesis, as an effected outcome of process, was also the recognition of its subject, for the ghost emerged in the interstice of the ontological shaping of the project’s practice. What I mean by this is that since the frames of the project were constructed, a conversation with a ghost began, arising from the spaces – in between and over – the hinges of the frames.

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Image 1: An offering to Lady Florence Phillips (artist’s own photograph). 2. The Frames The frames of the project are a theoretical and practical construct harnessed to implement a particular case-study methodology. The methodology is a rendered process-like template that is integrated along with a series of applied performance projects. The construction of the template had been initially informed by a casestudy methodology that I adapted from Robert K Yin’s models of Case Study Methodology. From Yin’s original, I have modified a model that assumes and generates reproduction and replication as a process of three distinct case study stages. The first frame is exploratory. It determines and explores the ‘feasibility of the desired research procedures.’ 2 It is also an experimental frame. Whatever occurs in this stage is fluid, unfixed and heuristic. Heurism in this context means asking a question without necessarily having a system or an algorithm to substantiate the method of investigation. The intent and focus here is on discovery. Within that, there is a process of self-growth spurred on by discovery; there is also a process of ‘self-inquiry and dialogue with others aimed at finding the underlying meanings of important human experience.’ 3 Findings from this frame are then either discarded or replicated into the second frame.

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__________________________________________________________________ The second frame is descriptive. This frame is where there is a ‘complete description of the phenomenon in question,’ 4 after it has occurred in its previous experimental incarnation. This frame asks what happens now that the research context is more complex but also at the same time more clear. The second frame as a graduating stage of the research is descriptive in that it puts into practice (describes) a particular way of working towards answering more evolved questions that have arisen. If the first frame asks: ‘can something happen?’ then the second frame might ask: ‘might this happen again?’ or, ‘might this happen again or differently by adding or substituting the following variables?’ The third frame is explanatory. It explains ‘how the events happened’ 5 and why they happened. It occurs as a research document and is to be considered as the translation of the research experience. This chapter is part of that explanatory frame. Applying the three frames provides a framework for an analysis and application of a research project. This process framed as exploratory towards descriptive and, thereafter, explanatory helps to constitute the research as a form of practice. It does this by engaging with the activities of the research into a series of activations and reactivations, and in doing so disseminates and generates the research into further research activity. What might fashion this case-study process into a matrix-like shape rather than a linear one is that each phase occurring in each frame might develop its own case study patterning. Therefore, the experimental project even though it will inform a second descriptive project with an entirely different content, will also generate its own phase-like schema by continuing to repeat and replicate on its own algorithms. In doing so, the framework will operate in at least two or more frames simultaneously, each of which has its own sign systems and its own cultural and ideological referents. The overall modified methodology is about frames and framing. It is a discourse that considers how the notion of frames – as in framing an actualisation of hypotheses – is affected through action and interaction. The translations of the frames are used as part of an ongoing process in the making and reflecting of creative case studies, that, in the context of this chapter, are the performance intervention projects that occurred twice – first, as an experimental frame and project and then second, as a descriptive frame and project. Both constitute the overall performance project called Florence. While Yin’s modified case study model was the membrane of this framework, there was also borrowing from other sources that helped construct the frames as much as reconfigure them as the project ensued. Erving Goffman, who cites Edmund Husserl: ‘I may accept it only after it has been placed in the bracket,’ 6 helped realise how visualising the frames as bracketing meant not only a phenomenological device but also as a dramaturgical convention. Goffman further observes:

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__________________________________________________________________ The standard example is the set of devices that has come to be employed in Western dramaturgy: at the beginning, the lights dim, the bell rings, and the curtain rises; at the other end, the curtain falls and the lights go on. 7 Like the traditional theatrical constructs of the stage, curtains opening and closing, Goffman’s sociological, also dramaturgical, brackets are part of the frame that allow for activity and expression to take place in each particular time frame while simultaneously framing the research expectations into experimentation and the reactivation. The bracketed activity promotes suspension from disbelief and provides concentration. An epochê as a phenomenological construct brackets either side of the activity producing a focused interrogation of the activity inside the bracket. It does this through regulating a sense of safety and provides a framework of experimentation and creativity for the researcher/participant. However, the experimentation in the safe-space inside the bracket is not entirely divorced from that which lies beyond the bracket. It will affect the action on the outside of the bracket through the perforation of the bracket-enclosure, therefore promoting a series of generative actions. For, the bracket of the frame does imply that there ‘is a limit to possibility and discourse.’ 8 And it was the activity outside the frame that became as important as what was occurring inside the frame itself: that also ‘indicates the outside world is also present.’ 9 Michel Callon describes this interplay or the ‘unfolding’ 10 of Goffman’s frames as the ‘overflow’ of the frame, 11 meaning that the frames while closing around an action simultaneously open it up onto the world. 12 Callon considers the notion of the overflow to be an emerging and remerging movement occurring between the outside world and the frame that constitutes both leaking from the frame and an external perforation. Callon’s position stems from a combination of sociological and economic science but he considers how these sciences are performative. Performative in this context I understand to be similar to that of Derrida who considers the ‘dimension of performative interpretation, that is of an interpretation that transforms the very thing it interprets… .’ 13 Why this is important is because the encounter with the ghost of Florence Philips as the central role in the project was as much as contained as an intervention as it was also an intervention of the specter, meaning that the ghost emerged through the perforation of the frames. The ghost emerged as result of the intersection and its fissure, enabling an inter-modular transmission between process and subject and product. These modes in this case become pliable and contextualised modes of transmission, translating materials into an event of reflection, and possibly even further, a reflexive one. This chapter will explain how the explanatory frame becomes reflexive and generative, and furthermore how altering commodification occurs in between the construction of frames as a manifestation of the resultant interstices. Both the exploratory frame and descriptive frames of the project will be also reflected upon. Finally what occurs in

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__________________________________________________________________ the explanatory frame is an assemblage or a collage of the two earlier frames incorporating an overflow or a creative stuttering as an allegorical result of the ghost emerging from the frames. 14 3. The Project The project as it first occurred aimed to use multi-disciplinary forms to attract and engage the public with the inner-city art gallery and its separated public park, using performance as intervention while at the same time presenting a retelling of Florence Phillips’ life. It meant experimenting with an initial character that performs an attempt at breaking through the fence that encloses the public park separating it from the art gallery. The character, that was a mutated hybridised clown-like figure called Greedburg, performed a bungled attempt at getting over the fence. His body in this performed piece became a projectile of both stereotypical misrepresentation and the re-mapping of mine dust. The character’s external costume was an old, gangster pin-stripped suit along with an additional internal costume, which had the body wrapped in plastic filled with mine dust that began to leak out of the suit in the course of the performance. The costumes suggested the representation of stereotypes as in foreigner, outcast, gangster and Jew. These were also presented as aesthetically distressed and therefore the representations were remapped as misrepresentations. The performance began in the park. Greedburg tries to scale the almost impenetrable boundary fence that separates the park from the gallery. But in doing so, his costume is torn against the spikes of the fence. Unsuccessful, he eventually scrambles around the fence, finding an open gate while revealing a trail of leaking mine dust that leaks from his body. This symbol intended to indicate the detritus of mining criminality but also a pioneer like discovery. The mine dust leaking from Greedburg’s body made a trail that lead from the park entrance to the Gallery.

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Image 2: Greedburg at Joubert Park fence (photograph by Chris Saunders, used with kind permission). In the basement of the gallery was an abandoned theatre stage, where another performer appeared as the ghost of Florence Phillips. She sat on stage immersed in reading archival correspondence from Florence Phillips to her various male contemporaries, similarly involved in her pursuit of creating a national art gallery in Johannesburg. As these letters were being read, Greedburg enters in his minedust-ridden suit, promptly changes out of it, so as to appear on stage naked. The tension between the two characters was meant to depict the struggle of subject and object in the relationship of intervention. The naked body represented a possible conduit of transformation. Greedburg attempts to transform into a woman by appropriating the Florence Phillips letters from her. In doing so, he also undresses Florence, taking from her, her dress and her hat and changes into them. Once transformed as Florence, Greedburg leaves the basement, exiting to the exterior of the Gallery where he returns to the enclosed barricaded gates of the gallery, which are now reopened. From here, he catches a mini-taxi into the city.

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Image 3: Transforming and transferring roles, character and gender in Johannesburg Art Gallery basement (photograph by Nadine Hutton, used with kind permission). In the descriptive frame the project continued with several exploratory elements implemented as conduits between these places – Park and Art Gallery. This occurred as a further performance experience at the Goethe Project Space: Arts on Main. The conduit meant creating a physical trajectory between the spaces that were articulated through the body in performance, and language in performance, occurring through conversation and objectification of the collection of previous performance experiences. What this means is that the third space, the Project Space, became the presentation space for the synchronistic performances happening in park and the gallery. The third space, in fact, manifested the descriptive frame by it manifesting as the repository of the descriptions of the experimentation that occurred in the park and gallery.

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Image 4: Florence (transformed) leaves the gallery for the city (photograph by Nadine Hutton, used with kind permission). The project space embraced the performer returning from the original experimental site now replicated as descriptive while replication through journeying and memory recurred at a live site performance, 1.4 kilometers away from the Park and Gallery. This move simultaneously exhibited the objectification of the occurred performance through artifact and digital exhibit as if in a museum. When the project moved from its experimental frame towards its descriptive frame it meant using more descriptive means of presentation so as to frame earlier exploratory proposals around performance, generated from the previous experimental exercises that occurred in the exploratory frame. From one frame to another, the project revised the earlier performance styles into something far more presentational. Presentation meant presenting fragments of the reproduced performance as archival representation, through mediums such as digital video and analogue sound records. It also meant relying on the performers themselves to provide memory as a backdrop: memory as representation and the representation of the journey of themselves in the project. These themes were activated in the project space. This space had become the imagined space: dressed and theatricalised as ‘Florence’ – my imagined other city – in relation to Johannesburg.

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Image 5: The project space as descriptive space (artist’s own photograph). This chapter will be interspersed with fragments from the play or the dramatic narrative called Florence: A Play. This is to suggest how dramatic narrative is part of the explanatory frame. Although this is different in time, focus and place as there is now creative incorporation of dramatic license in regards to ‘Florence, the project,’ the general outcome still maintains how there is a progression to the research account that includes the explanatory insight into the process of research practice. Florence is also an emerging original dramatic text but it is also a research document. It incorporates past research experiences into present experiences. As a consolidation of the previous work, I will present some of its histories, intercut and juxtaposed alongside my own reflections of research. This is a way of re-voicing this document. By incorporating into my presentation of the research, the play text itself, I hope to contribute to the debates about engaging with inventive methods of practice and research in fields where inventiveness is necessary for the ongoing pursuit of making, not only knowledge, but also in making meaning from the knowledge produced.

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__________________________________________________________________ 4. Fragments from the Play Text ONE: MOMENTS BEFORE THIS IN PRESENT DAY JOHANNESBURG The Ghost of Florence Phillips enters from the theatre’s wings, dressed in a chic but faded Victorian coat covering a lace nightgown. She is wearing her iconic pink cartwheel hat and carrying several bags of which some seem to hold letters. The lights faintly rise on her as she strikes a somewhat operatic pose. (Beat) She lifts the bag of letters and from them fall ashes. She walks through this fallen pile of ashes towards the audience. Florence also known as Flo or Florrie or Lady Florence walks into an audience to gather up – ‘looking for something’: this turns out to be a folded pin stripe gangster’s suit, placed, somewhere in the audience. It looks like a bundle. She finds the bundle. She fiddles in the bundle. In it, there is a skateboard, perched, as if it is also a minor character in the history of Florence’s life. The jacket is bundled around the skateboard as if it is a swaddled babe in a blanket. Florence sits in an empty audience chair and the bundled up jacket with the skateboard crosses her knees. Once close to the audience, her clothing appears as if it is some detritus from an avant-garde performance piece that has just occurred in a museum in Johannesburg. In truth, she is a ghost living on the street, park and gallery operating in three time zones: subterranean, margins and centre. Florence: Nobody comes here anymore. (Beat) Series of letters. (Beat) Burnt. Found. Pushed over the edge. Without even doing much. What did I/ she do? What would you do? The artist was naïve. Performance art is naive. Except, you walked in. You walked in and I – Thought you were away for good. You came to see me? [She acknowledges the audience. She buries her hands into one of her bags of letters, empty – then warms her hands]. Arrived – Like a miner. Fancy a drink, Mr Pioneer? A promise. For Kings and Queens ... The artist became afraid died on a fence. I had my reputation to protect. My reputation. When the artist and I spoke, finally he asked me to re-inhabit my own persona in that – that Art Gallery I had made. I did. He died. He died. They all died. Things have been stolen. My El Greco. Several Baroque bronzes. That was always going to be the case. It is a public gallery for the public. You think there was any other way? I didn’t want anything to do it with it. Nonsense artwork gets the in the way, the artist is either stupid or nervous. When artist got nervous, I killed him. Off with his head! Couldn’t do it without me. I answered him. One night I pressed my hands around his neck. I have strong hands. Born Dorothea Sarah Florence Alexandra Ottlep. Florence, after that Italian city … Florence. A fake David pronounces precedence. Morbid, medieval, lost city. Lost on its own terms and others and monuments. Lost. Let me start in autumn, my favorite season. Somewhere else. A Broken Body at the fence … An artist died at the fence. Dead. A fence spiked and green and cruel and tall and incestuous and art and life. It begins two months ago, in here in

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__________________________________________________________________ Johannesburg, in Autumn, in a very strange year, more Blacks everywhere, buildings have faded, derelict, larger rats, trains, more tunnels of the dead. Autumn of this year. Autumn with its oranges … This autumn, time seems more broken, when you are ghost like me, time and words start to make less sense. Autumn. Which one dear? What better place to start than – than, in autumn. It starts as a wonder. It starts with art. Autumn. Recounting. I was no ordinary woman. I was an outstanding woman in my day and generation. I was fit to occupy my place among the most remarkable personage of my time in South Africa. General Smuts said that about me. A remarkable soldier. That was in … Time … The Boer Generals, de Wet, de la Rey, Smuts and Botha, attained certain notoriety. And there – We, Li and I – there we were in Piccadilly, cheering on those who had survived. Everyone was there and whispering: ‘Kitchener’s concentration camps, guerillas and scorched-earth policy.’ The whole of the Cape colony was under Martial Law. The Boer rebels striking at their will. We were in Paris of course when Lionel got that letter from Smuts. That request. Boer Rebel to Attorney General, an opportunity from peace for peace. Johannesburg become the city disentangled from the Boer republic, a glittering gold prize but along with it came a municipality in distress. I am here. I am not here. Here. Here. I am here. I am not here. I once was the Queen of Johannesburg. Of course, I was smarter than he could ever be. I am not here. I am here. An artist died on a fence. That’s the point, the end, the signal and the signal is that I am not dead. But If I am no longer dead, even, if I am not yet. I am not here. Not. Not here. But I am ever present. (Florence claps her hands and walks onto an empty and dark stage. Lights out.) SIX: RIGHT-WING FALLACY (In the darkness, Florence returns for her skateboard and in the background, there is the sound track before these words.) Florence: This is an artwork. This is not an artwork. This is a slide of Me. (Florence remains still as if her portrait is being taken. A few moments. She breathes out and then in. Lights out.) TWELVE: THAT WHICH HATH BEEN (Florence returns to her empty bag of letters and sits on a chair or bench.) Florence: What? So what’s the point? A point of this life is that it is still indeterminably prescient. What’s the point of recounting this all? When I still exist, sort of … What about the rest of it, my children: Handsome Harold, Fickle Fred

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__________________________________________________________________ and Temperamental Edie so much like me who burnt my letters and I will never truly understand why but she burnt them all except for those found in Johannesburg in Li’s Office at the Corner House. What’s the point of assembling the fragment of ashes? To rekindle a life that now is as effervescent as my ghostly life itself … What’s the point of ignoring Li’s political career and his meteoric rise as Randlord of Johannesburg and Baron of everywhere made by Royalty? Did I ignore you Li, when we spent so much time apart? We outlived them all didn’t we: Rhodes, Beit, and Milner. All of them …. What’s the point of leaving out much of the building of Arcadia, with its vistas of northern green trees Johannesburg or my rekindling of Vergelegen Estate? Spending thousands of pounds moisturizing Dry Cape Soil. Did I leave out major instances of my life when there is so much to say? Of - why I stopped going to Johannesburg. Of growing old, of becoming a recluse at Vergelegen. Of the days getting sadder and myself becoming more disillusioned. I grow older, thinner and sadder. Of finding solace in the Baths at the Cape in Montagu. Of Li, getting old, loosing his way, loosing his feet, loosing his way, falling and falling and falling clumsily on a big rock in the veldt, falling – losing his one eye at 78. My brave courageous lion. My first visit in London where nothing seemed strange. I was but a young lady of only twenty-four … There in Westbourne Park Villas, where trains night and day ran nosily at the back of the house - there where Li’s aging mad mother spoke mostly in Yiddish and viewed the world with gloom and doom in direct contrast to my lively Li. My Baron of everything. ‘To do anything first is only wrong in the eyes of those who never lead.’ – Lord Lionel Phillips … At 3:45 on the morning of the 2 July 1936, Li died. I caused the great bronze bell outside his library to toll through the day and night. Flowers filled his room and Jan Smuts said how glad that we still have me at least. I have stood by and watched things come and go, change and change and change. I stood by and watched the artist ruin his life by throwing himself at the fence that makes my gallery now a fortress. I watched this idea called performance do nothing but nothing but nothing but nothing but nothing but and where do I start and where do I end? But – Let me start in autumn, my favorite season. Somewhere else. The Broken Body at the fence. An artist died at the fence he died terribly like a broken heart. Dead. A fence spiked and green and cruel and tall and incestuous and art and life; it begins two months ago, in autumn, in a very strange year, more of ME everywhere, buildings have faded, derelict, larger rats, trains, and more tunnels of the dead. Autumn of this year. What better place to start than - than, in autumn it - start/s with art. Recounting. I become you, yes and you become me. Does anybody remember me and the Johannesburg Art Gallery? It doesn’t matter. There were so many things. If anyone wants to write my biography, they will have to be quick. I have always said they ought to have given me a Dictaphone. I told Smuts that, his policy about soil erosion is a scandal. I took him over the lands and showed him that, but do they do anything? I am now past old, but you – yes you young people must carry on. You’ve got life, vitality and you see and feel and

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__________________________________________________________________ touch things … I have always liked young people. They cheer me up. Come again? (Beat) Oh …. Remember, I was no ordinary woman. Heaven or Hell is going to be feast of words. (She winks directly at the audience with one eye and picks up the skateboard as if to skate on it. Lights out. The End.) 5. Conclusion By concluding with these fragments of the play, I am suggesting ways of revoicing the research document, as in this case – into and from a play; as the play speaks back at the work. The play text enables activating an outcome of the research into an alternate research document. Like the character’s ghost of Florence Phillips, who perforated the frames in the making of the project, the play text becomes a realised embodiment of this perforation. This chapter explains how the explanatory frame becomes both reflexive and generative. It is a reflective analysis and when it is positioned alongside its outcome of only fragments of dramatic text, their space recurs as reflexive. This engagement is not so that the one dimension of research should circumvent the other nor for the one to disengage from the other but to generate a reflexive space in activation, engagement and disengagement. And furthermore how the ongoing stylised altering commodification occurs in between the construction of frames as a manifestation of the resultant interstices. Both the exploratory frame and descriptive frames of the project have been reflected upon generating this document the explanatory frame. Finally what occurs in the explanatory frame is an assemblage or a collage of the two earlier frames incorporating an overflow or a creative stuttering as an allegorical result of the ghost emerging from the frames. In simultaneously empathising the conjunct to research and performance, this multiple text, as the explanatory frame of both theory and praxis – of reflection and drama, continues to embody and generate theory and the praxis of research. It is a research text that presents an alternate measuring of one’s research into performance that embodies the fluctuating ways of how performance embeds and activates ideas within its own notation. In this way, intermodality informs a document of research experience that is heterogenic, haunting and active. It is a research experience interpolated as dramatic content emerging from a model of reflexive framing and inter-modality. From this account, it means making a system that is actively aware of its own histories. It is a transformative and original methodology that relies on framing and perforating the frame. In the context of the ghost it is the concept of the ghost that introduces hauntology as contribution to a making of methodology. It is the ghost who emerges from the perforation into the frame. It is the ghost who discloses the past as a translation of previous activity through tracing the present. This trace is also reflective and is revenant, unlimited and limited, repetitive, disclosing further

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__________________________________________________________________ traces of a dead paradigm therefore generative. The ghost is the marginal, strange, unsettling and truncated. And it is the ghost who becomes a reciprocator to the research. This is Derridean and the chapter’s reflection is an ongoing research project – its primary source as derived from ongoing readings of Specters of Marx. This is also the ghost of Florence Phillips that speaks back at the work through the reflective document of a stage play called Florence. The presentation of dramatic text forms part of the explanatory frame of research and is portrayed also as a reflexive space in activating three fragments from the stage-play as part of the research document, Florence.

Notes 1

Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of Debt, the Work of Mourning and the New International, trans. by Peggy Kamuf (London and New York: Routledge, 1994), 176. 2 Robert K. Yin, Applications of Case Study Research 34 (Thousand Oaks: Sage Publications, 2003b), 5. 3 Clark Moustakas, Heuristic Research: Design, Methodology and Applications (London: Sage Publications, 1990), 15. 4 Yin, Case Study Research, 5. 5 Ibid. 6 Erving Goffman, Frame Analysis (Harmondsworth: Peregrine Books, 1974), 252. 7 Ibid. 8 Critical Art Ensemble, ‘Not So Quiet on the Western Front: A Report on Risk and Cultural Resistance within the Neoliberal Society of Fear’, in The Aesthetics of Risk, ed. John C Welchman (JRP Ringier: Zurich, 2008), 371. 9 Michel Callon, ‘An Essay on Framing and Overflowing: Economic Externalities Revisited by Sociology’, in The Laws of the Markets, ed. Michel Callon (Oxford: Blackwell, 1998), 250. 10 Vicki Bell, Culture & Performance: The Challenge of Ethics, Politics and Feminist Theory (Oxford and New York: Berg, 2007), 89. 11 Callon, ‘Framing and Overflowing’, 244-269. 12 Bell, Culture & Performance, 90. 13 Ibid., 51. 14 Charles Garoian, ‘The Spectre of Visual Culture and the Hauntology of Collage’, in Spectacle Pedagogy: Art, Politics, and Visual Culture, eds. Charles Garoian and Yvonne Gaudelius (New York: New York State University Press, 2008), 99-188.

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Bibliography Bell, Vicki. Culture & Performance: The Challenge of Ethics, Politics and Feminist Theory. Oxford and New York: Berg, 2007. Callon, Michael. ‘An Essay on Framing and Overflowing: Economic Externalities Revisited by Sociology’. In The Laws of the Markets, edited by Michel Callon, 244269. Oxford: Blackwell, 1998. Critical Art Ensemble. ‘Not So Quiet on the Western Front: A Report on Risk and Cultural Resistance within the Neoliberal Society of Fear’. In The Aesthetics of Risk, edited by John C. Welchman, 357376. Zurich: JRP Ringier, 2008. Derrida, Jacques. Specters of Marx: The State of Debt, The Work of Mourning and the New International. Translated by Peggy Kamuf. London and New York: Routledge, 1994. Garoian, Charles. ‘The Spectre of Visual Culture and the Hauntology of Collage’. In Spectacle Pedagogy: Art, Politics, and Visual Culture, edited by Charles Garoian, and Yvonne Gaudelius, 99118. New York: New York State University Press, 2008. Goffman, Erving. Frame Analysis. Harmondsworth: Peregrine Books, 1974. Moustakas, Clark. Heuristic Research: Design, Methodology and Applications. London: Sage Publications, 1990. Yin, Robert K. Case Study Research: Design and Methods 5. Thousand Oaks: Sage Publications, 2003a. —––. Applications of Case Study Research 34. Thousand Oaks: Sage Publications, 2003b. Myer Taub teaches in the drama department at the University of Pretoria, South Africa.

Performance Art as Intervention in Everyday Life: Participation, the Public Sphere and the Production of Meaning Alexandra Antoniadou Abstract Over the last decades, Greek artists have shown an increasing interest in performative practices in public spaces. They have set the focus of such practices on the engagement of diverse audiences and the function of art as intervention in everyday life. The term ‘intervention’ in relation to art refers to a bringing of art and public into diverse forms of meaningful relationship to one another. The aim of this chapter is to scrutinise the different forms and notions of intervention in public spaces and examine the role of public participation in the production of meaning. In the first of four sections I will consider the case of ‘Tama Art’ as a performance defined by and contingent upon place identity. In the second section the focus will shift to works where the artist attempts her ‘integration’ in specific places through a consensual intervention while the third section will present the collective intervention of ‘Sfina,’ the Greek flash mob. ‘Sfina’ challenge the subversion of place identity by declining the specific properties and conventional functions of public spaces. This chapter intends to raise a discussion around artistic intervention and its relation to place and audience. Could a discourse be developed around a typology of artistic intervention? What happens when the same performance takes place in front of audiences of different nationality? The aim is to explore the different terms and ways of public participation in contemporary art and examine the correlation between intervention and place through the work of contemporary Greek artists and collectives. Key Words: Performance art, intervention, participation, everyday life, public space, intersubjectivity, identity. ***** 1. Introduction Art in public spaces has been extensively discussed and analysed by theorists and scholars in an effort to examine various aspects of the correlation between the terms ‘art’ and ‘public space.’ As the art critic Rosalyn Deutsche notes: Inevitably, statements about public art are also statements about public space, whether public art is construed as “art in public places”, “art that creates public spaces”, “art in the public interest”, or any other formulation that brings together the words “public” and “art.” 1

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__________________________________________________________________ Consequently, public art in Greece, and elsewhere, too, seems to fall into diversified categories. On the one side, there is public art that intends to educate the ‘ignorant’ public, the passerby and, in doing so, to endorse the instrumental role of art in distributing social inclusion. On the other side, public art projects are often collective and participatory, imbued by a sense of sociability and solidarity with the aim to establish micro-communities. A third aspect of public art concerns groups that are actually concerned with a more interventionist and political approach towards issues of the public sphere. 2 A discussion of contemporary public art in Greece regarding all aspects and parameters would be beyond reach under the specific restrictions of a book chapter. Therefore, my intention is to approach various perspectives of interventionist performative art so as to discern the different forms and functions of intervention. Throughout the last decades, Greek artists have shown an increasing interest in the use of public space and the concept of art as intervention in everyday life. The conditions of viewing and the participation of different audiences have also been central issues in the work of several artists. The term ‘intervention’ in relation to art refers to a bringing of art and public into diverse forms of meaningful relationship to one another. In this chapter I will try to exemplify this diversity and examine the defining role of place in the production of meaning. In the first section I will consider performances defined by and contingent upon place identity. In the second section the focus will shift to works where the artist attempts her ‘integration’ in specific places through a consensual intervention while the third section will present the collective intervention of ‘Sfina,’ the Greek flash mob. ‘Sfina’ challenge the subversion of place identity by declining the specific properties and conventional functions of public spaces. How is artistic intervention defined by its relation to place and audience? Could a discourse be developed around a typology of artistic intervention? The aim of this chapter is to explore the different terms and ways of public participation in contemporary art and examine the correlation between intervention and place through the work of contemporary Greek artists and collectives. It is important to note at this point that since the 1990s Greece, being a passage for emigrants to Europe, has undergone significant demographic changes as well as varied socio-economic changes. Clearly such facts have affected not only the production of art but also the use and notion of public place. The period extending from the mid 1990s to the present day has given rise to an endeavour on the part of artists and art institutions towards a more consistent development of contemporary art practices. Performance art, in its rich diversity of contemporary forms, has been central to this movement. A younger generation of artists has engaged with performance and body art rather systematically while several related exhibitions and festivals have been organised. Consequently, greater attention has been drawn to different forms of performance art and a more stable grounding has been put in place for its development. However, the fact that performance and public art in

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__________________________________________________________________ general are not necessarily among the top priorities of mainstream art production, may partly justify why even after this increasing interest of the last decades, such practices remain historically and theoretically under-explored by scholars, and artists. 2. Mapping the Practice of Intervention: The Issue of Place and Identity In 2005 the group Locus Athens organised an exhibition on performance art with the participation of six young Greek artists, each of whom was asked to conduct a performance at a place and time of their own choice. The performances took place in a two-week period under the concept of an open exhibition, escaping the gallery limitations and space restrictions and expanding to the broader city of Athens seen as an alternative art platform. 3 Evangelia Basdekis, one of the participant artists, completed a project under the title Tama Art which attended imaginatively to a pilgrimage associated with religious vows in the Greek Orthodox Church. The Greek word ‘tama’ refers to a sort of oath, given by people to a specific saint in order to have their wish fulfilled or to be cured. The most popular place of worship in Greece is a church on the island of Tinos which attracts many believers willing to turn their body into a public spectacle of suffering by covering the distance from the port to the church on their hands and knees; expressing this way their gratitude. As the path is very rough and their knees start bleeding, a long red carpet has been placed outside the entrance of the church unfolding till the port to lessen their suffering. The connection between faith and the physical pain required to gain the desirable ‘place,’ whether in art or religion, is also addressed in Basdekis’ performance. Pilgrims leave their offerings, usually consisting of depictions of their wishes – for instance the depiction of a child, a house or even a part of the body – on the famous icon of Virgin Mary that is considered miraculous, and their ‘tama’ is fulfilled. This admittedly rudimentary discussion of the word ‘tama’ helps us see that Basdekis’ performance was inevitably charged with spirituality for all those familiar with the specific religious procession. Starting from Michalakopoulou Street in the centre of Athens, walking on her knees and hands, she ended up at the entrance of the Athens Concert Hall, at the time also hosting the National Museum of Contemporary Art. With a crowd in her wake, the artist remained kneeling in the position of prayer, outside the entrance of the temporary exhibition of the museum for about twenty minutes. As she observed, ‘people were quiet, like in church, during the whole process and afterwards really excited.’ 4 Viewers aware of the performance followed her silently with a feeling of devoutness, whereas passers-by looked surprised and concerned, asking what was happening, why this woman was on her knees and whether she is ok. After being told about the action, some opted to join the silent procession, out of curiosity perhaps, whilst others would just carry on with their journey, having accepted the

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__________________________________________________________________ ‘authority’s’ elucidation. 5 Describing the event as ‘art,’ the elucidation itself appeared legitimate and consistent rather than irrational and unsettling. The performance participants stood silent in the museum while the museum visitors, also necessarily witnessing the action, were uncertain whether the latter was part of the museum’s exhibition or not, acknowledging either way that if something takes place in the territory of the art institution, then it is art. Basdekis enacted the same performance in the UK. In Bristol she covered the distance from the city Cathedral to the Arnolfini gallery. Whilst the performance was designed and executed in the same way in both locations, the experience was utterly different for both the artist and the participants. The content and meaning of the later performance would inevitably alter given the new context, before an audience unfamiliar with the Greek concept of the word ‘tama’ and the religious connotations it conveys. The relation between perceiver and art ‘object’ is particularised and the consequent sense of heightened interdependence of artist and viewer/participant affects an intriguingly changeable fusion of the two parties. As Amelia Jones argues: body art proposes the art “object” as a site where reception and production come together: a site of intersubjectivity. Body art confirms what phenomenology and psychoanalysis have taught us: that the subject “means” always in relationship to others and the locus of identity is always elsewhere. 6

Image 1: Evagelia Basdekis, TAMA ART, 2005, Athens (photograph from the artist’s archive). TAMA ART, © 2005 Evagelia Basdekis, Athens. Printed with permission from the photographer.

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__________________________________________________________________ When Basdekis’ performance took place in Bristol, the consequent interaction assumed a novel quality. The sacred feeling of the Greek audience was absent. For this audience, lacking background information and first-hand experience of an original cultural context, the artist’s pose and gesture were conceived differently. The factor of chance also exerted a crucial impact on the artist’s execution. Some people’s behaviour became so disturbing and violent that the Gallery employees had to intervene in order to help the artist who continued the performance as planned. She arrived at the Gallery and assumed the position of prayer in complete silence for about twenty minutes, thus making a case for a place for her work in art institutions. 7 The artist parodies the ‘art object’ and at the same time presents herself as an object, as a museum exhibit, a precious commodity making claim to a covetable position within a refined institution. She poses questions of the position, status and role of the artist in contemporary society, his/her participation within it and the powerfulness of the effect wielded by the artwork over the audience. Her use and interpretation of the concept of ‘tama’ is ironic and exposes her eagerness to be accepted by the institution. The viewer becomes a participant in the construction of meaning and a complex exchange of art production and reception is facilitated and informed by the very particularity of all the subjects with a stake in the constructive interchange. It is interesting though, that the American Embassy, being right next, was not targeted by the artist. As is well known, all activity near the Embassy is recorded by satellite. Because of the proximity of the American Embassy the performance could have acquired a broader significance and meaning. The contingency of the artwork’s meaning in relation to the viewer and the body’s function as a disruption in the urban environment have also been evident in the work of Georgia Sagri. In her performance, on 17 November 1999, the artist stood still for three hours in a glass container, wearing only bandages in replacement of underwear, just across the main entrance of the Polytechnic School of Athens University during the political demonstration commemorating the student’s riots against the Junta in 1973. 8 Using bandages, perhaps as a reference to wounds, and placing her naked body in a glass container which could refer to both a cage and a window shop, the artist challenges not only the boundaries of her personal and natural endurance, but also and more crucially the boundaries of the socially acceptable by recording the spectrum of tolerance in a society of control and repression of private freedoms. The perception of her work is again changeable and contingent upon the history and memory related to the specific place. The performance’s objective to remark political paternalism was reinforced by the fact that the artist was led to court because of that performance, being accused of scandalous behaviour and immoral actions. 9 Restricted and naked, in a country where freedom of speech and expression is considered given, the artist commemorated the deprivation of liberties during junta and yet she was arrested in 1999. 10

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__________________________________________________________________ In 2003 in her performance New Species, Sagri having her hands and feet tied up, crawled through Athinas street, a busy street downtown Athens, and reached Omonoia Square (concord square). 11 Given the place of Sagri’s work, her action constitutes a commentary on specific characteristics of the new – or already existent – species living in Athens of the twenty first century. Her performance, however, could refer not only to the Greek citizen but the global one as well. Specific conventions are striving to transform the Greek citizen into a European one and the European into an American. Greek, European or American today’s human being is ‘forced’ to bear the characteristics of a prisoner that no longer demands his/her freedom. The New Species is an allegorical way of describing the human that crawls on his/her belly, unable to untie his/her hands and feet, having no demands, no rights and no inner need for change. Becoming weak minded beings with no eager to react, no place to move, dominated by total consensus is what New Species represents. Furthermore, the performance being executed at the centre of Athens constitutes a harsh comment on the transformation of public space in the urban environment. More specifically, the artist targets the alteration of the city centre and Omonoia Square which used to be a place of discussion and communication whereas nowadays it contributes to the moulding of marginal groups and has become a ‘shelter’ for drug addicts, prostitutes, homeless people and unemployed illegal immigrants. It has been isolated and marginalised like its habitués. Even in a more general framework, public spaces in the urban environments of Greece become more and more unfriendly to its habitants by eliminating parks, trees and all sorts of sidewalks. Omonoia Square could stand as an example of such aesthetics. The notions of ‘progress’ and ‘development’ have been corrupted by the uncontrollable encroachment of public space and nature destruction. It is also worth mentioning that during the performance some people were annoyed or even disturbed by the action arguing that in democratic regimes such things do not occur while other people were indifferent pretending not to see her. 12 It is not only the viewer’s identity and subjectivity but also the constructed place identity that determine both the realisation of the performances and the production of meaning or the dynamics of perception. As David Harvey argues, ‘the elaboration of place-bound identities has become more rather than less important in a world of diminishing spatial barriers to exchange, movement and communication.’ 13 Lucy Lippard in Lure of the Local, Senses of Place in a Multicentered Society, defines place as temporal and spatial, personal and political. A layered location replete with human histories and memories, place has width as well as depth. It is about connections, what surrounds it, what formed it, what happened there, what will happen there … [place

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__________________________________________________________________ is] the external world mediated through human subjective experience. 14 She believes, however, that the expansion and transformation of capitalism has influenced the distinctive local differences and cultures and that the particularity of places is continually being homogenised. Yet, as it has been stressed above, different places imbue the same art action with different meaning. As Miwon Kwon argues: what Lippard’s thinking misses are Lefebvre’s important insights on the dialectical rather than oppositional relationship between the increasing abstraction of space and the production of particularities of place, local specificity, and cultural authenticity – a concern that informs many site-oriented art practices today. 15 3. Integration as Intervention A considerable number of Greek artists have structured artworks around more general content which do not appear to exert an influential bearing on issues underlying the particularities of Greek society in any obvious way. While in the preceding section I discussed a performance defined by identity particularities, in the second part of this chapter I will refer to artworks that assume a more international character, touching upon issues that transcend locality while being, at the same time, suggestive of a different character of intervention. In 2005 Mary Zygouri became the organiser and co-ordinator of the collaborative project Hacking Reality. The performance was realised by a group of street cleaners working at Athens council. On the day of the performance a crowd gathered at the centre of Theatrou Square in Athens where a leaflet containing the Semaphore alphabet (the flag-based code used primarily by ships to communicate at a distance) was handed out. Half an hour later three road sweepers appeared at the three exits of the square, surrounding the crowd, spraying them with a freshsmelling aroma. After the vehicles had forced the viewers into a dense mass, four refuse collectors climbed down from the vehicles and stood in front of the public holding flags. Using Semaphore, they communicated the phrase ‘Within a structure. Outside a structure’ to the crowd, which was expected to respond after decoding the message using the leaflet provided. 16 The artist undertook the duties of a trainer for a month and became the coordinator of the final performance. Both the artist and the cleaners adopted different identities for a certain period of time, the former assuming the role of a trainer while the latter became the producer of an artwork. What is also interesting is the artist’s intervention in the cleaners’ everyday life and her endeavour to adopt the role of mediator between them and contemporary art.

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Image 2: Mary Zygouri, Hacking Reality, 2005, Athens (photograph from the artist’s archive). © 2005 Mary Zygouri, Athens. Printed with permission from the photographer. Such a form of intervention is also apparent in her work Parasite: Phoney Utopia, STAR-Porno-Cinema which was realised with the collaboration of the people working in a porn cinema at Omonoia Square, downtown Athens. The artist developed a relationship with the people working there during her three month project. She undertook the duties of the cashier, she gained access to the cinema’s archive and familiarised herself with the environment. She was not allowed to take pictures, therefore she kept a diary. In this case however, partly due to the lack of institutional support, her concept was transformed. Her original idea was to replace the future film board with works of her own and project one of her video works unexpectedly during a screening or perform herself an action in front of the viewers. However, her aim was not accomplished since the owner of the cinema demanded an important amount of money in order to be compensated for the tickets he would lose. Hence, with the background of an American orgy, but not the cinema’s visitors, Zygouri became one of her several personalities, trying to balance on a seesaw while holding a thermometer in her mouth. The action ended

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__________________________________________________________________ when the thermometer reached the ‘right’ temperature and rang as an alarm; then the action would start again. 17 In each of the above cases the intervention betrays a consensual character in marked contrast to Basdeki’s and Sagri’s performances. Zygoury appears to integrate into places where members of the public would not expect to encounter an artist, and to do so while functioning as a ‘chameleon’ or a ‘parasite.’ Her take on the interface between life and art issues in a series of innovative adjustments to variable environments in the course of which she observes and participates in people’s everyday performance while ultimately making them participants in the performance she orchestrates. What is also interesting is the fact that the sites of her intervention/invasion are in most cases male dominated work environments in which antagonism and authoritarian relationships exist. Her work could also be read as a commentary on the recurring interchange of societal roles, and on the dominant stereotypes that can be traced beneath the trappings of deconstructed identity and social exchange. What is in question however, in critical appraisals of such works is whether they contribute to the elimination of such constructed stereotypes or to their reinforcement. 4. Collective Intervention and Place Subversion: The Case of Flash Mob Apart from interventions by individual artists, a new type of alternative utilisation and creation of place has been prompted by some collectives, one of which is ‘Sfina.’ 18 Sfina is an alternative expression of flash mob based in Thessaloniki. According to the 11th edition of the Oxford Concise English Dictionary, published in July 2004, a flash mob is ‘a public gathering of complete strangers, organised via the Internet or Mobile phone, who perform a pointless act and then disperse again.’ 19 The intention of such a public performance, as conceived by Billy Wasik, the New York journalist who introduced the idea of flash mob in 2003, is to generate unexpected situations in urban environments. Participating in an exciting and fleeting event in default of any ideological background is the main focus of this action. 20 Wasik, insisting on the absence of any ideological intention or background, notes that flash mob was ‘planned by no one, born not of a will to metaspectacle but of basic human need.’ 21 However, the significant socio-political framework of 2003 in New York struggled to lend itself coherently to an idea devoid of ideology aiming only at fun. After the September 11th attacks of 2001, people needed a way to overcome the uneasiness and fear of public gatherings and perhaps react to the restriction of personal freedom imposed by the continual surveillance on the streets. Wasik had conceived flash mob specifically as a New York thing, as the people there always look for the next big thing:

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__________________________________________________________________ given all culture in New York was demonstrably commingled with scenesterism, my thinking ran, it should be theoretically possible to create an art project consisting of a pure scene – meaning the scene would be the entire point of the work, and indeed would itself constitute the work. 22 He liked the idea of being frank about the pure scenesterism deployed by flash mobs. ‘But the idea was that the people themselves would become the show, and that just by responding to this random email, they would, in a sense, create something.’ 23 The first Greek flash mob took place in Athens in 2003 in total accordance with Wasik’s principles and practice in New York. In 2008 however, another group of people, based in Thessaloniki this time, turned flash mob into something markedly removed from the principles that gave rise to the phenomenon. Sfina, as declared on their website, is: an interventionist group whose focus is the creation of surreal situations in the city, aiming at the interruption of urban environment’s routine and the satisfaction of thinking up a great idea and then bringing it to life. 24 In the first case it is clear that people involved are interested primarily in the substance of the temporary event, in the action taking place during those specifically designated minutes. Regarding the preparation process, circulation of news of the event would always occur through ‘viral’ means while final instructions would be given just a few minutes before the event took place in a signal manner. In the case of Sfina, however, interest is also focused on the documentation of the event, which alters, in a way, the essence of flash mob. People meet in advance of the set time of the action, communicate with each other and carry equipment in order to document the event. The resulting videos have been directed, montaged and enhanced with music and explanatory text where necessary. Footage of preparations and aftermath is also included. Depending on one’s interpretation, photographs and videos in this way either substitute for or complete the real event, diversifying the focus so that it rests on both representation and presence while encapsulating at the same moment the (re)turn to the document widely observed within the contemporary art world. As Boris Groys remarks, the documentation ‘inscribes the existence of an object in history, gives a lifespan to this existence, and gives the object life as such – independently of whether this object was “originally” living or artificial.’ 25 It is also worth noting in this regard that Sfina diverged not only from the idea of a politically disinterested execution of a prescribed situation but also from the

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__________________________________________________________________ original concept of flash mob, since it was embraced by the authority of an art institution partaking in the second Biennale of Thessaloniki in 2009 which immediately attributes artistic intentions to the group. The exploration of the content and context of flash mob events entails a possible sociopolitical dimension attached to the specific selections of place and action. Central public places, shopping centres, train stations, buses, the underground are chosen for actions unrelated to the distinctiveness of the specific places. Instead of consuming, flash mobbers merely wake up in a shopping centre, instead of being transported, they drink and dance on a bus, instead of viewing the artworks of the biennale in Thessaloniki, they keep their eyes sealed, instead of walking, they freeze. Such pointed departure from social conventions and purposefulness invites the question of whether we could consider flash mob as a digitally formed community making a statement in public places, and whether these actions can legitimately be said to take on political character and constitute a credible form of protest. It is essential to note a specific action of the group right after the civil unrest in Athens in 2008 which started when a fifteen year old student, Alexis Grigoropoulos, was fatally shot by a policeman. The participants gathered at Aristotelous square in Thessaloniki, outside a police station. Some of them were standing still while the rest were holding two pieces of paper next to the former’s left and right side of the head depicting respectively a gun pointing the head and blood following a gunshot.

Image 3: Sfina, Rewind, 2008, Thessaloniki (photograph by Ioanna Hatziandreou). © 2008 Ioanna Hatziandreou, Thessaloniki. Printed with permission from the photographer. And yet one ought to take into account that people join such groups with diverse motives and different aims. They might be interested in doing something

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__________________________________________________________________ unusual, socialising, meeting people, standing in front of a camera, stating an opinion or protesting. Is it the need for a different point of view or the desire to be part of a spectacle that brings people together in a flash mob? It should also be mentioned that flash mobs have been used for commercial reasons in advertising campaigns. T-mobile has organised a mass dance routine in London’s Liverpool Street station, a singalong in Trafalgar Square and another dancing event at Heathrow airport. 26 In such cases it seems that the concept of participation and the idea of inclusion are used as profitable tools, since any form of interaction or partaking is nowadays highly appreciated. People blog, create profiles on internet communities, write and record so that they can be read, heard and seen by others. They need to be part of something, to fulfil their need for a sense of belonging and they gather, they return to physicality and collective endeavour. Is the phenomenon of flash mob an instance of what Gustave Le bon called ‘the mind of crowds’? 27 Is it a miniature of the general consensus and diffused subjection that characterises contemporary society, or is it a reaction against that consensus? It is very interesting to remark that aesthetic values could be traced in several actions of protest the last years in Greece. As mentioned before, the murder of a young student by police on December 6, 2008 resulted in demonstrations and rioting with thousands of people taking over the streets of Athens and Thessaloniki. Solidarity demonstrations were also organised in other European cities. Protesters in central Athens battled riot police by smashing the windows of banks, supermarket chains and car dealerships with petrol bombs and Molotov cocktails. Official media in Athens and around the world along with a variety of theorists, politicians, academics and journalists spent a significant amount of time discussing and analysing the possible reasons for the sudden riots which were supported by the majority of Greek population. To return to the aestheticisation of protest, one of the symbolic actions during the riots took place in front of the police headquarters when a group of teenagers removed their clothes and lay down on the stairs half naked, pretending to be dead bodies. 28 Such an image bears a resemblance not only to the events realised by sfina but also to the work of the artist Spencer Tunick who has used flash mobs to produce installations and photographic work with hundreds of naked bodies in public spaces. In both cases, the protesters and the artist, display the vulnerability and fragility of the human naked body against the harsh modern structures of the city and society. Another example of imaginative protest was the case with the Christmas tree in front of the parliament building. The tree was burned down by rioters, replaced by the mayor of Athens, guarded by police forces and then attacked with plastic bags full of garbage. The image of a glowing Christmas tree being guarded by police officers while many buildings around had been burned down seemed, apart from ridiculous, quite representative of the country’s situation. One other significant gesture of protest was also the interruption of theatrical

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__________________________________________________________________ performances in public institutions – theatres such as the National Theatre and the State Orchestra, largely funded by the state –, calling for audience solidarity along with the two week occupation of the Opera House. These forms of interventionist action and sabotage of cultural activities within public institutions could find their precursors routed in avant-garde strategies of disobedience such as the interventionist actions of surrealists, situationists, and others. 29 According to Kostis Stafylakis some of the above forms of protest derive from a narcissist need to assure visibility, which could also be the case for the emergence of flash mobs and their vast diffusion. 30 5. Participation and Its Connotations The deployment of art ‘in public,’ ‘for the public’ or ‘by the public’ and the enhancement of communication between artist, audience and artwork has been a significant matter in contemporary Greek art. According to Deutsche the term ‘public’ has some democratic connotations which imply ‘openness,’ ‘accessibility,’ ‘participation,’ ‘inclusion’ and ‘accountability’ to ‘the people.’ Consequently, any discourse about public or public-oriented art is ‘not only a site of deployment of the term public space but, more broadly, of the term democracy,’ 31 and specifically of its misinterpretation and its misuses. Curator Nicolas Bourriaud in his theory on relational aesthetics declared that ‘the aura of artworks has shifted towards their public’ 32 and set the focus towards art that in its process encompasses the creation of micro-communities. It seems that Bourriaud in his analysis implies that the public in relational art is no longer a passive and lethargic audience but it is now transformed into a participant and therefore producer that adds value to the artwork. However, according to Jacques Rancière, activity is present in both viewing and acting, spectator and actor. When Rancière discusses the potential of an ‘emancipated spectator’ he does not intend to transform spectators into participants but to clarify the specificity of knowledge and the activity already at work in the spectator. A viewer is also active when she observes, compares or interprets accordingly to her own lived experiences, therefore she can be both a distant spectator and an active interpreter of the spectacle offered to him. 33 As critic Claire Bishop has pointed out, participatory projects connected to ‘relational’ practices or public art do no guarantee the transformation of the public into an active agent nor do they necessarily convey the democratic ideal. ‘The mere fact of being collaborative, or participatory, or interactive, is not enough to legitimise a work or guarantee its significance,’ 34 especially since participation is often used today as a form of controlling the public by creative industries, the mass media, cultural tourism and the governments. It is more crucial to observe how it addresses and intervenes in the dominant conventions and relations of its time. Bishop in her article ‘Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics’ adopts Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe’s theory of antagonism as the essence of democracy

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__________________________________________________________________ and argues about the impossibility of some participatory projects – mainly related to conviviality – to promote the democratic ideal since the relations of conflict are not sustained but erased within these projects. For Kwon collaborations with collective entities should be able to raise questions, unsettle the viewers and make them uncomfortable, yet sometimes they seem more likely to ‘affirm rather than disturb the viewer’s sense of self.’ 35 As it has been shown, not only in this chapter but also in the essay by David Franklin and Milan Kohout in this volume and in the case of Greedburg’s performance considered by Myer Taub, also in this volume, 36 the use of participation, collectivism and public space as means of communication aim at the re-integration of art in everyday life. The evaluation of such projects should, however, be realised after taking into consideration all the parameters and the different levels of their function. It is not, though, amongst the objectives of this chapter to further investigate the notion of democracy or the possibility of its distribution through participatory projects. As mentioned before, the aim of this chapter has been to scrutinise the diverse conditions of art production and the multilevel notion of intervention as an art practice. The concept of participation has been treated differently in each of the sections according to the varied forms of communication and interaction that each project allowed or requested. Nevertheless, the connection or the disconnection between publics, artists and artworks along with the (dis)function of public art can, of course, constitute objects of further investigation.

Notes 1

Rosalyn Deutsche, ‘The Question of Public Space’, The Photography Institute (1998), accessed 20 May 2011, http://www.thephotographyinstitute.org/journals/ 1998/rosalyn_deutsche.html. 2 Sotirios Bahtsetzis, ‘Interventionist and Public-responsive Art in Greece’, RES, No. 2 (2008): 82, accessed 15 March 2012, http://www.resartworld.com/old _issues.htm. 3 Locus Athens, ed., 7 Performances and a Conversation (Athens: Futura, 2005). 4 Evangelia Basdekis, in an interview with the artist by the author (January 2010). 5 Ibid. 6 Amelia Jones, Body Art Performing the Subject (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998), 14. 7 Basdekis, in an interview with the artist by the author. 8 The Athens Polytechnic uprising in 1973 was a massive demonstration of popular rejection of the Greek military junta of 1967-1974. The uprising began on November 14, 1973, escalated to an open anti-junta revolt and ended in bloodshed

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__________________________________________________________________ in the early morning of November 17 after a series of events starting with a tank crashing through the gates of the Polytechnic. 9 Georgia Sagri, Pithanotites, Synenteukseis Me Neous Kallitechnes [Possibilities, Interviews with Young Artists], ed. Christoforos Marinos (Athens: Futura, 2006), 232. 10 She was later disposed of charges. 11 Georgia Sagri in Marinos, Pithanotites, Synenteukseis, 226. 12 Georgia Sagri, in an interview by the author, 13 July 2010. 13 David Harvey, ‘From Space to Place and Back Again: Reflections on the Condition of Postmodernity’ text for UCLA GSAUP Colloquium, May 13, 1991, as cited in Miwon Kwon, One Place After Another, Site Specific Art and Locational Identity (Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2004), 156. 14 Lucy Lippard, The Lure of the Local, Senses of Place in a Multicentered Society (New York: The New Press, 1997), 7. 15 Miwon Kwon, One Place After Another, Site Specific Art and Locational Identity, 159. 16 Locus Athens, 7 Performances and a Conversation, 116. 17 Mary Zygouri, in an interview by the author, January 2010. 18 The word ‘sfina’ in Greek refers to something that is interjected in a process and prevents its continuous and smooth evolution. 19 11th Edition of the Oxford Concise English Dictionary, 2004. 20 Bill Wasik, And Then There Is This (USA: Viking Press, 2009). 21 Ibid., 40. 22 Ibid., 23. 23 Bill Wasik, interviewed by Francis Heaney, Stay Free! Magazine, accessed 25 September 2010, http://www.ibiblio.org/pub/electronic-publications/stayfree/archi ves/24/Flash-Mobs-history.html. 24 Sfina Website, accessed 20 October 2010, http://vimeo.com/sfina. 25 Boris Groys, Art Power (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2008), 57. 26 Mark Sweney, ‘T-Mobile Films Flashmob Ad at Heathrow Airport’, The Guardian (online), 27 October 2010, accessed 27 October 2010, http://www.guard ian.co.uk/media/2010/oct/27/t-mobile-flashmob-ad. 27 Gustave Le Bon, The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind, Electronic Text Center, University of Virginia Library, accessed 20 July 2011, http://etext. virginia.edu/toc/modeng/public/BonCrow.html. 28 Sotirios Bahtetzis, ‘Image Wars: The Athens Riots as Dispositif and Event’, Afterimage: The Journal of Media Arts and Cultural Criticism 38, No. 1 (2010): 22. 29 Ibid.

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__________________________________________________________________ 30

Kostis Stafylakis, ‘Enantia sto Symvan: O Rolos Tou Aisthetikou sta Gegonota tou Decemvriou 2008’, Kaput Art Magazine 5 (2009), accessed 20 March 2012, http://www.kaput.gr/05/stafilakis.html. 31 Deutsche, ‘The Question of Public Space’. 32 Nicolas Bourriaud, Relational Aesthetics (Dijon: Presses du Reel, 1998), 58. 33 Jacques, Rancière, The Emancipated Spectator (London: Verso, 2009), 1-23. 34 Claire Bishop, ‘Socially Engaged Art, Critics and Discontents: An Interview with Claire Bishop by Jennifer Roche’, 25 July 2006, accessed 20 April 2011, http://wayback.archiveit.org/2077/20100906203946/http://www.communityarts.net /readingroom/archivefiles/2006/07/socially_engage.php. 35 Kwon, One Place after Another, 97. 36 David Franklin and Milan Kohout, ‘Spatial Relations Speak the Language of Social Hierarchy’, in this volume. Myer Taub, ‘The Explanatory Frame’, also in this volume.

Bibliography Bachtetzis, Sotirios, ed. Beltsios Collection: An Outing, Contemporary Art in Greece in the 21st Century. Athens: Futura, 2006. —––. Women Only. Catalogue for an exhibition organised by Marganis Foundation and Beltsios Collection, Amphilochia. Athens: Futura, 2008. —––. ‘Interventionist and Public-Responsive Art in Greece’. RES, No. 2 (2008): 82–91. Last modified 31 December 2011. Accessed 15 March 2012. http://www.resartworld.com/old_issues.html. —––. ‘Image Wars: The Athens Riots as Dispositif and Event’. Afterimage: The Journal of Media Arts and Cultural Criticism 38, No. 1 (2010): 19–24. Bishop, Claire. ‘Socially Engaged Art, Critics and Discontents: An Interview with Claire Bishop by Jennifer Roche’. 25 July 2006. Published online. Last modification date unknown. Accessed 20 April 2011. http://wayback.archiveit.org/2077/20100906203946/http://www.communityarts.net/readingroom/archivef iles/2006/07/socially_engage.php. Bourriaud, Nicolas. Relational Aesthetics. Dijon: Presses du Reel, 1998. Debord, Guy. Society of the Spectacle. London: Rebel Press,1992.

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__________________________________________________________________ Deutsche, Rosalyn. ‘The Question of Public Space’. The Photography Institute. 1998. Last modified 1 October, 2005. Accessed 20 May 2011. http://www.thephotographyinstitute.org/journals/1998/rosalyn_deutsche.html. Doherty, Claire, ed. Situation: Documents of Contemporary Art. London and Cambridge: Whitechapel Gallery, The MIT Press, 2009. —––. From Studio to Situation. London: Black Dog Publishing, 2004. Foster, Hal. Recording, Art, Spectacle, Cultural Politics. Washington: Bay Press, 1985. Frieling, Ruddolf, ed. The Art of Participation 1950 to Now. London: Thames & Hudson, 2008. Goffman, Erving. The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. New York: Garden City, Doubleday, 1959. Groys, Boris. Art Power. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2008. Jones, Amelia. Body Art: Performing the Subject. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998. Kwon, Miwon. One Place After Another. Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2004. Lacy, Suzanne. Mapping the Terrain: New Genre Public Art. Washington: Bay Press, 1995. Le Bon, Gustave. The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind. Electronic Text. Centre, University of Virginia Library. Last modification date unknown. Accessed 20 July 2011. http://etext.virginia.edu/toc/modeng/public/BonCrow.html. Lippard, Lucy. The Lure of the Local, Senses of Place in a Multicentered Society. New York: The New Press, 1997. Locus Athens, eds. 7 Performances and a Conversation. Athens: Futura, 2005. Marinos, Christoforos, ed. Pithanotites: Synenteukseis Me Neous Kallitechnes [Possibilities: Interviews with Young Artists]. Athens: Futura, 2006.

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__________________________________________________________________ Moutsopoulos, Thanasis, ed. Great Unrest: 5 Utopias in the ‘70s, a Bit Before: A Bit After. Athens: Patras European Capital of Culture, 2006. Novakov, Anna, ed. Veiled Histories. The Body, Place and Public Art. New York: Critical Press, 1997. Papadopoulou, Bia, ed. The Years of Defiance: Art of the ‘70s in Greece. Athens: National Museum of Contemporary Art, 2006. Phelan, Peggy. Unmarked: The Politics of Performance. New York: Routledge, 2005. Plant, Sadie. The Most Radical Gesture: The Situationist International in a Postmodern Age. London and New York: Routledge, 1992. Rancière, Jacques. The Emancipated Spectator. London: Verso, 2009. Sfina Website. Last modified 20 October 2010. Accessed 20 October 2010. http://vimeo.com/sfina. Stafylakis, Kostis. ‘Enantia sto Symvan: O Rolos Tou Aisthetikou sta Gegonota Tou Decemvriou 2008’. Kaput Art Magazine 5 (2009). Last modification date unknown. Accessed 20 March 2012. http://www.kaput.gr/05/stafilakis.html. Sweney, Mark. ‘T-Mobile Films Flashmob Ad at Heathrow Airport’. The Guardian (online). 27 October 2010. Accessed 27 October 2010. http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2010/oct/27/t-mobile-flashmob-ad. Wasik, Bill. And Then There Is This. USA: Viking Press, 2009. —––. Interviewed by Francis Heaney. Stay Free! Magazine. Last modification date unknown. Accessed 25 September 2010. http://www.ibiblio.org/pub/electronicpublications/stayfree/archives/24/Flash-Mobs-history.htm. Alexandra Antoniadou is PhD Candidate in the department of Art History at the University of Edinburgh. Her research is in the field of contemporary art history and theory and it involves a wide range of practices, with a greater emphasis on performance art and participatory paradigms.