The Theatrical Spectaculum: An Anthropological Theory 3030281272, 9783030281274, 9783030281281

Table of contents :
Series Editors’ Preface......Page 6
Foreword......Page 8
Acknowledgments......Page 10
Contents......Page 12
1 Introduction to Theatrical Cosmo-logic......Page 14
Anthropology and the Theatre......Page 17
The Spectaculum: Preliminary Remarks......Page 24
Boxes......Page 31
Dramatizing Theatricality: Natasha Rostova’s Gaze......Page 33
Boxes: The Logic of Aesthetic Authority......Page 47
An Event-That-Models......Page 66
References......Page 82
2 Aesth-Ethics......Page 90
An Abstract Machine......Page 100
On Virtue......Page 109
An Ethical Triangle......Page 117
References......Page 167
3 The Spectaculum......Page 173
Space-Ification......Page 174
Syntax Semiotics......Page 185
Ethical Ostentation......Page 189
Boxes: Back to the Mythical Event......Page 197
Iteration: Receiving the Torah......Page 202
References......Page 213
4 Epilogue: Prostration......Page 218
Against Hypermedia......Page 219
Wagner: Foreshadowing Theoretical Sovereignty......Page 227
Sacred: The Aesthetics of Sovereignty......Page 231
References......Page 245
References......Page 249
Index......Page 267

Citation preview

PALGRAVE STUDIES IN LITERARY ANTHROPOLOGY

The Theatrical Spectaculum An Anthropological Theory Tova Gamliel

Palgrave Studies in Literary Anthropology Series Editors Deborah Reed-Danahay Department of Anthropology The State University of New York at Buffalo Buffalo, NY, USA Helena Wulff Department of Social Anthropology Stockholm University Stockholm, Sweden

This book series aims to publish explorations of new ethnographic objects and emerging genres of writing at the intersection of literary and anthropological studies. Books in this series will be grounded in ethnographic perspectives and the broader cross-cultural lens that anthropology brings to the study of reading and writing. The series will explore the ethnography of fiction, ethnographic fiction, narrative ethnography, creative nonfiction, memoir, autoethnography, and the connections between travel literature and ethnographic writing. More information about this series at http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/15120

Tova Gamliel

The Theatrical Spectaculum An Anthropological Theory Translated by Naftali Greenwood

Tova Gamliel Department of Sociology and Anthropology Bar-Ilan University Ramat Gan, Israel

Palgrave Studies in Literary Anthropology ISBN 978-3-030-28127-4 ISBN 978-3-030-28128-1  (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-28128-1 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover illustration: AA World Travel Library/Alamy Stock Photo This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Series Editors’ Preface

Palgrave Studies in Literary Anthropology publishes explorations of new ethnographic objects and emerging genres of writing at the intersection of literary and anthropological studies. Books in this series are grounded in ethnographic perspectives and the broader cross-cultural lens that anthropology brings to the study of reading and writing. By introducing work that applies an anthropological approach to literature, whether drawing on ethnography or other materials in relation to anthropological and literary theory, this series moves the conversation forward not only in literary anthropology, but also in general anthropology, literary studies, cultural studies, sociology, ethnographic writing, and creative writing. The “literary turn” in anthropology and critical research on world literatures share a comparable sensibility regarding global perspectives. Fiction and autobiography have connections to ethnography that underscore the idea of the author as ethnographer and the ethnographer as author. Literary works are frequently included in anthropological research and writing, as well as in studies that do not focus specifically on literature. Anthropologists take an interest in fiction and memoir set in their field locations, and produced by “native” writers, in order to further their insights into the cultures and contexts they research. Experimental genres in anthropology have benefitted from the style and structure of fiction and autoethnography, as well as by other expressive forms ranging from film and performance art to technology, especially the Internet and social media. There are renowned fiction writers who trained as anthropologists, but moved on to a literary career. Their v

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SERIES EDITORS’ PREFACE

anthropologically inspired work is a common sounding board in literary anthropology. In the endeavor to foster writing skills in different genres, there are now courses on ethnographic writing, anthropological writing genres, experimental writing, and even creative writing taught by anthropologists. And increasingly, literary and reading communities are attracting anthropological attention, including an engagement with issues of how to reach a wider audience. Palgrave Studies in Literary Anthropology publishes scholarship on the ethnography of fiction and other writing genres, the connections between travel literature and ethnographic writing, and Internet writing. It also publishes creative works such as ethnographic fiction, narrative ethnography, creative nonfiction, memoir, and autoethnography. Books in the series include monographs and edited collections, as well as shorter works that appear as Palgrave Pivots. This series aims to reach a broad audience among scholars, students, and a general readership. Deborah Reed-Danahay Helena Wulff Co-Editors, Palgrave Studies in Literary Anthropology Advisory Board Ruth Behar, University of Michigan Don Brenneis, University of California, Santa Cruz Regina Bendix, University of Göttingen Mary Gallagher, University College Dublin Kirin Narayan, Australian National University Nigel Rapport, University of St Andrews Ato Quayson, University of Toronto Julia Watson, Ohio State University

Foreword

In what follows, Tova Gamliel provides a stirring and profound meditation on the feeling of drama. It is written in a layered, complex, archeological prose that is Jamesian, moving upward and downward, back and forth, from abstraction and intellectualism to banal interviews with actors, observations of audiences, and dictates of directors. As with James, the effect of Gamliel’s intimate, subtle, implicative prose is to create a sense of the ultimate, of transcendence and its secular mystery, of a deep layer of sensation and metaphysical awareness underneath the prose. It as if reading itself provides an experience of the spectaculum, the experience that Gamliel posits as the ultimate ground base of theatre as compared to reading. What follows is an anthropological essay. It is personal and metaphorical and often theological. Yet it is also filled to the brim, indeed generated by, years of intense fieldwork and minute empirical observation and interview. Gamliel finds that actors view their actions as efforts to enact truthfulness. They strive to create an existential authenticity, the only sacred meaning possible in modern times, a sacrality stripped of metaphysics. As they seek to practice the art of bare honesty, actors purge themselves and their audiences of the performative pollution of modern life. “Authenticity has happened” is how an actor relates to Gamliel his performative success. Not just actors but theatrical writers, directors, and technical staff aim to allow audiences to experience transcendence as if they were vii

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in the traditional world of the ancient Jews who received the Godly Revelation on Mount Sinai. The Ten Commandments, the ethical backdrop of western civilization, could never have passed to posterity if God had not scripted and Moses had not directed the sacral presence. Bubers’ I-thou, a work that grows from but also goes beyond modern Jewish theology, translates the dramatic experience of transcendence at Mt. Sinai, performing the sacred that is modern acting. It is not the theatrical text, theological or secular, but the experience of the darkened theatre and the blaze of arc light that illuminate emotions and meanings of actors on the stage and create the experience of theatrical sacredness. One can become alienated from a theatrical text, but not from the experience of theatre. This is why the ethical survives at the center of drama, no matter postmodern critique. Theatre is Barthes’ “third,” the oblique experience outside of the text that is phenomenological, inchoate, and primordial, a sensation of the other that warrants the suspension of disbelief. New Haven, CT, USA

Jeffrey C. Alexander

Acknowledgments

This book was written as I neared the end of a lengthy ethnographic and intellectual journey that earned me the acquaintance of a great many outstanding people. I am immensely grateful to the artists of the theatre at all levels—the teachers and students who populated the acting schools that I visited, the theatre managers, and the stage directors, actors, and other professionals. I owe a special debt to the director of the play on which this book focuses, for giving me entrée to behind-the-scenes rehearsals, guiding me through the labyrinth of the theatrical world, and paving my way to invaluable information. I also express my appreciation to the cast, the set producer, and the other artists and stage people who took part in presenting the play. It is my pleasant duty to mention the lavish generosity of the Israeli theatre, which, by inviting me to sit in the audience as a spectator, afforded me many pleasurable evenings at the theatre in the course of my research. My visiting professorship in New York created valuable channels of inspiration. I thank Professor Richard Schechner, who was twice my gracious host in the Department of Performance Studies at New York University (NYU), for his invaluable insights, and Professors Marvin Carlson and William Bill Worthen, whom I met at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York and at Barnard College of Columbia University. Both engaged me in fruitful conversations and shared unique points of view about ideas that I presented to them. I am also indebted to Professor Worthen for perusing part of the manuscript and sharing with me important insights. ix

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

To reach the point where I could make use of the contributions of these renowned scholars—close neighbors of the Broadway theatres— and the intellectual riches that the city’s libraries could offer, I armed myself with a scholarly blessing for the road from my mentors, Professors Haim Hazan and Don Handelman, whose anthropological thinking served me as an intellectual lighthouse. No acknowledgment would be complete without mention of the inspiring theoretical thinking of Professor Jeffrey Alexander, who hosted me warmly in his department at Yale University. I am beholden to him for his intellectual insights and the support that he offered me after his reading of the manuscript. Finally, I thank the staff of Palgrave Macmillan and, particularly, Ms. Mary Al-Sayed, the Commissioning Editor, and Ms. Madison Allums, the Editorial Assistant, for adroitly steering the manuscript through the publishing process to its culmination. This book was published with the support of the Israel Science Foundation.

Contents

1 Introduction to Theatrical Cosmo-logic 1 Anthropology and the Theatre 5 The Spectaculum: Preliminary Remarks 12 Boxes 18 Dramatizing Theatricality: Natasha Rostova’s Gaze 20 Boxes: The Logic of Aesthetic Authority 34 An Event-That-Models 53 References 69 2 Aesth-Ethics 77 An Abstract Machine 88 On Virtue 96 An Ethical Triangle 104 References 154 3 The Spectaculum 161 Space-Ification 162 Syntax Semiotics 173 Ethical Ostentation 177 Boxes: Back to the Mythical Event 185 Iteration: Receiving the Torah 190 References 201

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CONTENTS

4 Epilogue: Prostration 207 Against Hypermedia 208 Wagner: Foreshadowing Theoretical Sovereignty 216 Sacred: The Aesthetics of Sovereignty 221 References 234 References 239 Index 257

CHAPTER 1

Introduction to Theatrical Cosmo-logic

The scene: the spacious square that fronts the Center for Stage Arts. This cultural monument, the Center, would be especially worthy of the heart of a great city, say New York, London, or Madrid. As it happens, it’s in Tel Aviv.1 This city, well versed in the self-glorification of theatrical culturism, traces its ancestry way, way back to the ancient configuration of the Greek Dionysian festivities or, at the very latest, to the Herodian theatres. Nothing remains for the relics in Caesarea to accomplish but to simulate the architectural grandeur. Ages and ages have passed since a Hellenistic kingdom there used this theatre as a show window for its sculptures and adornments, its culture of spirit and body (Segal 1999). By the time they form a crowd at the entrance, Tel Aviv’s theatre-goers funnel from several directions onto this square, which, like its counterparts in Western cities, boasts huge gleaming marble tiles and an envelope of buildings that bespeak “culture.” Its archaic splendor protrudes from the rest of the cityscape with its suggestive pillars and arches and its impressive heavy white stone, avoiding the allures of glass and steel. Its magnificence evokes a restrained modern architecture that seems to aspire to historical semiotics (Helbo et al. 1991). Its aim: to evoke in its viewer an affect of something not just classy but majestic. Etched into these stones is something that leads, as if by self-propulsion, to a stage-poetry that will close in on all sides very soon. A theatrical event is about to begin. If the cosmological gospel that it carries were to send a message of banality—an idea that might be received easily

© The Author(s) 2020 T. Gamliel, The Theatrical Spectaculum, Palgrave Studies in Literary Anthropology, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-28128-1_1

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by most of those involved—the introduction that follows would almost certainly play the conventional role of an overview. I would enter and exit by citing theoretical tractates about this cosmo-logic as if I owned it, or I might march to my foreknown destination safely and confidently. In that case, I might be inspired by the idea of pronouncing a blessing over a theatrical finished product, the symbolic outcome that an Aristotelian playwright would earn by having built in his/her mind’s eye a beginning, a middle, and an end (Aristotle 1996). Such, however, is not the case when one deals with a cosmo-logic, a transcendental consciousness of the life and order of the universe. That’s a rather fraught theme, to which atheistic culturephiles, a religious bunch that holds the secular “sanctuary” at rigid if not disgusted arm’s length, or an intellectual who has attained high stature by studying the theatre, may take raucous exception. To prove it, one need only consult the passel of writings in the theatre literature into which the objections, from clashing directions, are woven covertly or overtly. The self-evident attire that these objections sometimes wear may place the cosmo-logic and those who write about it beyond the pale of the discourse and the time. The word cosmology abounds with similes of earth and firmament, creation and doom, religion and rituals. It embodies science’s cumulative bewilderment over the worship of the invisible, a confusion that culminates, as in a foreknown conclusion, with the epithet “primitive.” Cosmology evokes the ability to conjecture about the collective unconscious and thus, by mental regression, to cast suspicion on modern drama, which since the early twentieth century has adorned itself in a mantle of Realism and supported the Kantian separation of art from religion (Burns 1972; Kant 1951; Friesen 2004). Furthermore, if accessories are among the signs of consciousness, the truly puzzling question is what theatrical cosmology has to do with the T-shirts and jeans, the cell phones and tablets, that so many of today’s theatre-goers can’t leave behind as they theatre-go. The impression they make is one of children who cling to their technological obsession until the moment someone tells them they have to turn everything off before the curtain goes up. What’s more, cosmology meshes poorly with the subscription plans and sales promotions that by necessity come with the business end of the theatre and with its significant other, the consumerist craving for entertainment. These common-law partners leave little room for the cosmos. A counterweight to these objections lies, one presumes, in conservatism as an elemental trait of the traditional modern theatre (Lev-Aladgem

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2010)—a characteristic that lends this institution a current archaic configuration, like an old brown-and-yellow nostalgic photo that refuses to crumble. Avowed theatre-goers know about this feature of the theatre; the masses who don’t visit the theatre know it best of all. It establishes a great distance between the theatre and popular culture, and, above all, it’s often connected with the theatre as a province of antiquity that has gone through a secularization process (Rozik 2002b). Barthes uses the metaphor “bourgeois myth” to describe the theatre, using it to build a bridge of “mythologism” between the ancient and the familiar. Like a myth, the theatre imposes itself on the audience as an undecipherable essence and defies scientific explanations and intellectual discourses with artistic contempt (Barthes 1957 [1970]). But the theatre defies more than this. If one may add to Barthes’ encouraging distinction, some find that, since the late nineteenth century, the theatre has successfully outlived avant-garde trends and subversive experiments. It innovates a little for its own sake and accommodates minuscule changes in order to fend off institutional metamorphoses that might be visible (Alter 1990). It is almost surely the only cultural institution that has deflected the Postmodern discourses and trends that have influenced cinema, photography, television, architecture, popular music, literary theory, and the human sciences (Birringer 1998; Sevänen 2001). The theatre is seen as being true to its non-participation in the cultural struggle over images and values that shape or mediate between perceptions of reality (Fortier 2002; Blau 1990). Its stature as a vestigial institution also manifests amid the rapid development of electronic and visual technologies and media (Sevänen 2001). Where technologies are concerned, it appears to be the audience that delivers them to the theatre, having so emphatic a “last shout” as to drown out the institution’s own voice. The bourgeois theatre, among other theatres, is seen as one that rests on its laurels. It carries the image—basically the stereotype—of a worthy high culture that takes pride in its self-segregation, deaf to the temptations of the pace, diffusion, and logic of technology and popular culture. In this sense, the theatre displays a piety akin to that of a religion. These features make the theatrical cosmo-logic less strange once you delve into it. In a non-cosmic way, the theatre’s conservatism is weighty in the manner of philosophical thinking, which typically burnishes an imagined linkage between the artistic and the transcendental or the religious (Tillich 1987; Langer 1970). The throngs of urbanites throughout the West who flow to this current archaic institution do so in search of a reality of space and time

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unmatched anywhere else. So this flow has been explained (Fischer-Lichte 2008). For this reason, theatre-goers are not totally distinguishable from tourists who visit ancient temples and sites; they justify the perception of theatre-going as an “artistic pilgrimage” (Carlson 2001, p. 156). The Globe Theatre in London, a.k.a. the Theatre of the World, merges the two streams. This reconstructed theatrical monument was established in 1599 and, of course, hosted Shakespeare’s plays while the Bard was still alive. Among all sites, it has additional uniqueness due to the cosmo-logic embedded in it. For the historian Frances A. Yates, the names of this Elizabethan temple to the arts attest that the Globe, viewed in terms of its architectural magnificence and symbols, represents an attempt to fulfill the idea of cosmology in its historical and religious senses: The theatre of the World [is] the “idea” of the Globe Theatre. To the cosmic meanings of the ancient theatre, with its plan based on the triangulations within the zodiac, was added the religious meanings of the theatre as temple, and the related religious and cosmic meanings of the Renaissance church. The Globe Theatre was a magical theatre, a cosmos theatre, a religious theatre, an actors’ theatre, designed to give fullest support to the voices and gestures of the players as they enacted the drama of the life of man within the Theatre of the World. These meanings might not have been apparent to all, but they would have been known to the initiated. His theatre would have been for Shakespeare the pattern of the universe. The idea of the Macrocosm, the world stage on which the microcosm acted its parts. All the world’s a stage. The words are in a real sense the clue to the Globe Theatre. (Yates 1969, p. 189)

A splendid reconstruction that lures tourists’ camera lenses, one might think, is all that remains of the cosmological idea insofar as ancient architecture related to it. The written sources, however, see it differently. A cosmological analysis of the Theatre of the World, a place that was packed to the rafters back then as it is today, is placed at the door of the cosmo-logic of the modern theatre in our environs. This essay derives inspiration from Yates’ ramified and abundantly detailed interpretation and, like Yates, attempts to decode the nexus of the theatre’s symbolic geometry and humankind’s relationship with the cosmos. It will, however, do so in its own way, on a road as-yet untraveled.

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Anthropology and the Theatre The theme of the theatrical cosmo-logic, expounded on below, will be quarried below with the tools of anthropological epistemology. The question of its reception is particularly interesting in view of a problem that anthropology has with itself, namely its incomprehensible adherence to the role of the audience, that is, one side of the intellectual divide. This propensity, lamentably, has placed the anthropological literature in a gloomy situation, one that stands out for its rarity relative to the canon assets of the modern theatre (Beeman 1993). Anthropology, flush with the internal grammar of ritual cosmology, does not tend to count the modern theatre among proximate fields of research that it has long marked as belonging to the domains of Western society (ibid.). The public “rituality” of the modern theatre reminds anthropology, in a paradoxical and disciplining way, of its traditional commitment to the cultural Other who lies outside the boundaries of language, time, and space. Within the ambit of this relationship, the approach of the Cambridge school of anthropology (CSA), established by British anthropologists in 1912–1914, embodies a rare intersection of anthropology and the Western theatre.2 The ritualistic outlook of this school, true to the tenets of the discipline in the early twentieth century, provides an epitomic demonstration of unswerving empathy with the exotic. CSA turned its strongest interest to the question of the cultural origins of the theatre and, theoretically, found them in Dionysian myth and ritual (Harrison 1927; Murray 1972; Cornford 1914). The theatre as a dramatic text and a performative medium, according to this approach, is a masked configuration of the ritual, one that evolved in view of the weakening of magic and religion, the strengthening of mimesis, consolidation of the separation of performers from spectators, and the passing of the heroicsaga myth (Johnson and Savidge 2009). Accordingly, I side with Hastrup’s conclusion that, “As a predominantly Western form of spectacle deriving from the Aristotelian view of drama” (2004, p. 17), the theatre pushed anthropology back into its already-challenged borders, clinging proudly to its old badge of identity. As for dropping a research anchor, Read aptly expressed anthropology’s perception of its fields of inquiry, which boils down to one compound lexeme: NIMBY, Not in My Back Yard.

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The ritual enquiries of theatre anthropology have enriched the possibilities of what is considered part of the theatre field, but as field work, have left to some degree, the domestic to the sociologist and statistician. (1993, p. 7)

The conservatism of this typical perception in anthropology dismisses calls from theatre savants even when they are clearly meant to attract anthropologists to the backstage. The most manifest urging of all was issued by Patrice Pavis, who proposed the theatre as a solution to one of anthropology’s most significant difficulties: that of decoding. The theatre is anthropologically unique, Pavis claims, because it uses concrete means to translate abstract elements of a culture (1992). Until recently, anthropology was unconcerned about how inviting and spot-on this diagnosis is. Persistently, it refused to take up the gauntlet, as it has, firmly, ever since the high priest of theatre, Peter Brook, ruled that anyone interested in the processes that unfold in human civilization would do well to investigate the world of the theatre (1969). A steadily widening fissure in this wall of refusal may be found among anthropologists in recent times. Thus, Marcus remarks: If anthropological fieldwork as a method is both realized and accountable within a distinctive professional culture as the performance of a highly valued aesthetic of inquiry […], the material expression of which is the written ethnography, currently at odds, so to speak, with its historic disciplinary exemplars, than practices in the arts, film and theatre are an obvious place to look for affinity and kinship. (Marcus 2010, p. 269)

The change is evident in remarks by Caroline Gatt, a leader of the recent trend toward collaboration between these disciplines. The logic of Brock’s statement, which is decoded via reflection as a dominant trait of both anthropology and the theatre (Schechner 1985), finds expression in joint workshops established by this anthropology and by contributing a processive paradigm of shared presence of researcher and informant (Flynn and Tinius 2015). Countering the Euclidean view, phrased in 1999, of relations between cultural anthropology and theatre culture as parallels that will never meet; even though they have commonalities of ritual, gameplaying, and representation (Giacchè), Gatt adheres to the interdisciplinary vision and recommends that it be applied for the interest of the discipline. Substantiating Brock’s statement, she notes that theatrical practice offers

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anthropology both resources for theoretical development of matters of relevance to current anthropology, such as experience, motion, body, process, and temporality—topics that prominent theoreticians have appropriated (Ang and Gatt 2017)—and new tools beyond the fieldwork method (Gatt 2015, 2017; Ang and Gatt 2018). It is true that theoretical anthropology has been dialoguing with the theatre since the middle of the twentieth century. Like sociology, however, at least until the aforementioned trend developed, it has been doing so while confining the meaning of the theatre to a metaphorical world of content. Its theorization, similarly credited to leading scholars, delves into the theatrical world only as a conceptual elaboration that basically extricates “theatricality” from the theatre. I concede that this approach has broadened the cultural radius of what we understand about “social drama” (Turner 1974) and “performance” (Schechner 2002, 2003) into a fructive theoretical tractate (Carlson 2004).3 This tractate, however, is deficient in the harvest that one would expect to find since the Western theatre has been a field of anthropological research. Performance has evolved into an inclusive, interdisciplinary concept of value in bridging the gap between non-Western rituals and Western drama. Alexander (2006, p. 38) substantiates this by stating that, in contrast to Schechner’s contention that every performance is a ritual act at its core, all ritual is a performative act at its core. Such a theorization (see also Carlson 2004) is needed in order to establish “performance” as a key concept sufficiently flexible to be interpreted in a manner warranted by the loop-shaped structure of the theatre—a reality or a “culture/drama complex” (Hornby 1996). This is reflected, for example, in the “performative ethnography” paradigm, although it is usually applied among marginal groups outside the mainstream of the theatre (D’Onofrio 2018). This theorization may undoubtedly abet the kind of anthropological research that considers the theatre a “field” or a symbolically distinct subculture in contemporary societies. It is immensely valuable in demonstrating the relevance of theoretical insights that emerge from theatre studies for areas of social action external to it. Thus, the golden mean from my standpoint is, first, to pay hermeneutic homage to the theatre that I investigated within a traditional anthropological construct (as I do here and in Part II) and, then, to replace this construct with the bridging loop structure that this theorization inspires (Part III). Within this rests, the singular contribution of Alexander’s theory

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of cultural pragmatics (2006), which, by means of the concept of “rituallike,” proposes to identify the social arenas, actions, and patterns that clearly encapsulate the theatrical phenomenality on which this essay is based. To the best of my knowledge, not only traditional ethnography about the theatrical cosmo-logic is lacking in this harvest. The size of the missing crop becomes evident when one considers the possibilities offered by traditional structuralism, which deals with human consciousness at mediated arm’s length, and, antipodally, by “in-depth anthropology,” the kind of anthropology that seeks the bedrock of psychological structures by digging into the very heart of the culture. Before I elucidate this anthropological approach, I must note that its epistemology belongs to a theory anchored in the field. Apart from its value for validation, credibility, and humanism, in-depth anthropology requires a much more solid infrastructure of interdisciplinary relations between anthropology and the theatre. This is especially the case in view of anthropology’s craving, not devoid of a penchant for the colonial, to discover novelty in a field “not its own,” given the likelihood that any novelty in the field of theatre will be rejected as exoticism. It is Read (1993, p. 7) who long ago diagnosed theatre anthropology as the exoticization of the domestic. I hope the accuracy and brilliance of this observation lack the strength to settle the question of relations between the disciplines—a hope that should be formulated in words, it would seem, despite the development of research that I will assess below. Furthermore, it is encouraging to find that the pronouncedly ethical aspect of some of these concerns finds expression (Conquergood 1985, 2002; Rappaport 2008) in an ethnography titled Action: Anthropology in the Company of Shakespeare (Hastrup 2004), a commendable work on the modern theatre that anthropology produced more than a decade ago. This interdisciplinary study, its contents fortunately captured by its title, offers a first-ever confession of guilt for anthropology’s disregard of the theatre and proclaims its author’s ethnographic endeavor a worthy attempt “to reintroduce theatre into general anthropology” (p. 18). This explanation represents the outer limit of such progress as has been made. Nothing about the new spirit emanating from this initial ethnographic breakthrough, however, obviates the need to ask an important question about the reception of the cosmology, the point at which I began. It is: Are anthropologists willing enough to demarcate the field of their theatre research so as to establish fruitful relations between their discipline and that of the theatre or, at the very least, to promote tolerance of whatever

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claims anthropology may present? The lesson I learned as a participantobserver who tracked the theatrical consciousness in 2007–2014 in two repertory theatres in Israel and various related settings4 is that the onus for the absence of a bold interdisciplinary alliance belongs to both sides. Namely, theatre people share the blame. I would phrase the indictment thus: The theatre may place a spoke in the wheels of research whenever it gives inquisitive anthropologists the idea that their forays into its territory are unwelcome. Anthropologists who face such a reception have to show great fixity of purpose. My hosts’ overt suspicion occasionally reminded me of Susan Sontag’s mordant and uncomplimentary remark about interpretation as “the intellect’s revenge upon art” (Sontag 1966, p. 7). Theatre artists, as if possessed by the wondrous power of their craft, fear for their institution’s integrity whenever the scalpels of research draw near. The message regularly addressed to me clashed frontally with the “festivity” of collaboration described in “performative anthropology” (Abossolo Mbo and Kilian 2015; Kilian 2017; Flynn and Tinius; Conquergood 1985, 2002; Ang and Gatt 2017; Gamliel 2011, 2014). Thus, anthropological endeavor with the theatre and not about it, as Gatt (2015) recommends, or the expansion of the professional partnership among actors to joint inquiry in a manner that leaves the traditional role of the informant behind (Kilian 2017), was far from fulfilled in my research. This was especially the case when it came to the ideal of the convergence of the partners in my research into a flow, as has been described convincingly (Ang and Gatt 2017). Thus, I was regularly given to understand that the presence of anthropology in the theatre might yield something not far enough from distortion and ruination, if not sacrilege and crude trampling. Sometimes I sensed the theatre people’s discomfort—including that of the artists, the very individuals who control the rules of the stage as they relate to acting, lighting sequence, set design, costumes, and sound level. This attitude recurred, somewhat, among scholars and teachers of the theatre, whose classes I attended in mute compliance. Hastrup’s ethnographic story also reports difficulties. Her attempt to gain access to backstage professionals at the Royal Shakespeare Company worked out well but not easily.5 The comportment of the theatre people, whom—yielding to temptation—she called “natives to the world of European theatre” (Hastrup 2004, p. 18), attests that the doors of this edifice of modern art did not open to research on the first knock. From my experience, some do not open at all. Not in all cases did my Israeli theatre respondents surmount their fear of loss of reputation, even when I waved a letter of commitment in their faces and presented it to a

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lawyer whom they had hired. Several clauses of this commitment had been concluded orally with some of the artists, almost exactly as Kilion recommends: “‘I would prefer not to’ be solely responsible for an agreement that is situated in an environment shaped by capitalist logic, harsh working conditions, and postcolonial entanglements that affect all of us, collaborators and anthropologists” (Kilian 2017, p. 120). Thus, evidently, the colonial order that is historically intrinsic to the method, one that signifies researcher–subject relations in our times—to the extent of excoriation, fortunately—may have been reversed. The evolution of sensitivity in inquisitiveness has led anthropology to respect subjects’ right to challenge, outmaneuver, test, and even refuse to be researched in view of the dilemmas that ethical tenets pose (Rappaport 2008; Conquergood 2002). This is not the place to analyze the impediments to, or the precipitants of, the fulfillment of anthropological research. In my estimation, however, until the field of theatre research shifts to an open-source mode, the mainstream theatre may again eagerly cast anthropologists who cross its threshold in the role of uninvited guests. Just the same, how can in-depth anthropology return from the field with a bounteous harvest in tow? One cannot reduce the answer to a heroic narrative of surviving the bumps on the road. True, the deeply paradoxical nature of the theatre also lent its support to this case study; thus, I may say that the theatrical cosmo-logic, as the focal point, would not have been researched more effectively if it involved unshackled contemplation of a tolerated “protégé.” Such a narrative should be dismissed as inadequate— not only for the sake of peace but also for that of justice. It is unworthy to disregard the very granting of patronage by the theatre, the triumph of willingness over aversion in the minds of several key people. Thanks to these individuals, it is my pleasant duty to admit that I reached most of my destinations on paved roads. Be it under the spotlights or in places where rules of concealment apply, amid the audience, and in the many encounters that I was able to attend in theatre classes, cafés, private homes, and theatre halls, ultimately it was courtesy—a trickle-down chivalry, to some extent, from the theatre directors-general to the stage people—that gave me the privilege of being there. I am especially grateful to the directors-general, stage directors, and actors who invited me to numerous performances, the teachers at acting schools and the university department of stage arts, and the stage director and the actors who hosted me at rehearsals and offstage. By virtue of their generosity, yet another modern theatre became a field

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of anthropological research and a place where peace between the domains might be ordained. The political epistemology that informs my discourse thus far—the least appropriate of all for this festive moment—forces me to divert this introduction to the square in front of the theatre. That’s because this ethnographic essay has a spatial dimension. It begins on the square, as the reader will recall in the first paragraph, befitting its textuality-of-visitation nature. This textuality sets up a formal comparison between the continuum of claims, true to the Structuralist approach, and the structure that forms in the visitor’s imagination, in the hope that the cosmo-logical subconscious that presumably belongs to the theatre-goers’ experience of visitation will become conscious. Given the restriction that the theatre imposed on my research— non-cooptation into the artists’ performance—in contrast to the privilege of circulating behind the scenes, the textuality-of-visitation is the only possible gesture, one may say, to the mating of “text” and “performance,” the one that Conquergood (2002) glorifies in discussion of a project in performance studies, or to the slight moderation called scriptocentrism. That is, the “performance” with which the textuality before us wishes to unite, to generate empathy, constitutes the totality of motions made by theatre-goers, among whom I mingled even as I was authorized to deviate from what they are allowed to do (visit the backstage). The comparison of form will be undertaken by accumulating words, impressions, and verbal tableaux pursuant to motions that correspond to the sequence of events in the theatrical space. We follow the spectators from their urban surroundings onto the square. From there, a linear detour steers us to the theatrical event—a temporal and spatial enclave where voices are muted and the experience is imbued with authority. After visiting the backstage, we retrace our steps to the square as we return to the externality beyond, the city life. Amid the motion of objects that the visit encourages, the square is an idea that transcends the simplicity of a mere spatial overture. Carlson says as much, theorizing that the theatre, like a haunted house, has tended to reconstruct sanctified sites ever since the salad days of Greece and that, like the square, it likens the movements of those who enter it to an artistic pilgrimage (Carlson 2001). Accordingly, the square holds the main responsibility for the allusion to what’s coming. More than serving as a gateway to the theatre, it functions as a blueprint for a textuality-of-visitation, an epistemological demarche that proposes to decode the cosmo-logic of the theatrical event with all due sensitivity.

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The Spectaculum: Preliminary Remarks Once I went into a theatre where they were showing a kind of drama. I said to my neighbors: “I know the end of this drama from its very beginning.” And what I said was fully confirmed, because all I had to do was mirror one thing with another. And I did this through the power of simple imagination, but if I had used the higher imagination, I should have been proved wrong, for most plays are made with the simple imagination, because the authors have not been privileged to possess the higher imagination. (Agnon, A Guest for the Night —a Novel, p. 111)

The great question is, Is it really so? Below, in measured steps to the last segment, an anthropological theory of the reality for which the modern theatre serves as a paradigmatic model will be built. At its focus lies the theorization of the spectaculum (the Latin source of the English word “spectacle”). To make this concept less enigmatic, I note right here that the spectaculum is a covert dimension of the theatre that carries cosmological meaning. Its reception by theatre-goers depends on a certain kind of gaze and on knowledge of the ethic of the structuring of the stage “world” behind the scenes. The spectaculum is a stage substantiation of the total-utopian fundamental in Judeo-Christian cosmology known as “divine providence.” I wish to present it as a theory of the theatre about the “theatre-like”6 nature of extra-theatrical reality in the sense that it can be experienced as the stage world experiences it, as fictive and currently as hyper-realistic, non-random, amazingly precise, and ethical. In its ritual sense, the spectaculum is a central element in the Western theatre, the productions of which, repeated before audiences, reenact a nonrecurrent, paradigmatic Revelational mythical event. I am referring to the Revelation at Sinai. In its singular way, the spectaculum confirms the statement that myths are recorded into cultures around the world by theatrical repetition (Carlson 2001, p. 3). Thus, the more one can ascribe repetitiveness, structure, and sanctity to the ritual event, the more the spectaculum draws the meanings of the concepts of “myth” and “ritual event” closer to each other. The repetition and sanctity that I have in mind pertain not to the dramatic plot, as conventional wisdom would have it, but to the structure of the theatrical event, which recurs in the theatre-goers’ experience—a paradigmatic structure identical to the Revelation at Sinai.7 This is the connection to structure by which the mythical uniqueness of the sacral occasion finds clarity or the theatrical event resorts to Claude Lévi-Strauss theory

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of the structural myth. The theoretical status of the spectaculum will be anchored in its social sense, by which it represents every charismatic social theory/ideology that is characterized by an epitomic structure of social sovereignty—stage–audience—as the theatre and the myth offer.8 The theory that follows is true to the paradigm of the dialectic relation that exists between the theatre and the transcendental, a relation that recurs in Wayne Rood’s probing philosophy (Rood 2000). It is a moderate paradigm, innocent of any religious appropriation of the theatre as it strives to decode the latent but hidden transcendental content of the aesthetic experience. It reflects its respect for artistic autonomy by rejecting attempts to treat the theatre as a place for religious “Bible lessons” and, accordingly, by ruling out the creation of theatrical plots or dramas as media that expressly convey messages about the surreal (Friesen 2004). It would smile on Beckett’s play Waiting for Godot , in which, instead of a plot that one can logically follow or piece together at the final curtain, there is a “world” where one “dwells” and the focus is not on action but on “being”—a dialectics that “appears to be based on the premise that the more the audience dwells in the finite human condition the more it experiences a transcendent dimension.” (ibid., p. 46)

This paradigm, serving here as an alternative to the overt drama, inserts the covert transcendental into the theatrical event. The event that the participant-observer is shown, and its reception by the audience that experiences the artistic work, lies at the focus of interest in this paradigm and, in its wake, in the theory of the spectaculum. The essay presented here deals with the secret cosmo-abode of theatrical aesthetics. The spectaculum theory fired my imagination months after I participated in a seemingly trivial incident during a rehearsal. It happened during a break, as I sat with a director on the steps at the entrance to the building and exchanged words as we faced the bustling street. The director reflected on his vocation in an associative and contemplative way that seemed wholly unsuited to the moment and to what the actors in front of him were doing and were about to do. His ruminations lent my field journal the mythical stature of the Revelation at Sinai when he quoted a verse fragment from the reportage of that event: “All the people saw the voices” (Exodus 20:18). Even as I write this, I still do not fully understand why he saw fit to quote from the mythical account in our conversation. Some time after our talk, however, the myth carved out a respectable place, not to say a

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prime one, in my thoughts. Each time I re-read the field journal and reencountered my documentary remarks, I found a burst of new information and a growing accumulation of theoretical insights from the literature until the myth shed its undeciphered reflective attire and demanded recognition as an idea per se. This metamorphosis squares with an erudite comment, common among Israeli theatre artists, about the “deep footprints” that the “ancient sources,” including the Bible, the Mishna, the Talmud, and rabbinical and Hasidic literature, have left (Levi 2016, p. 77). Levi, thoroughly versed in the Israeli theatre, noticed something that I learned in months of attending rehearsals behind the scenes: “One often encounters a deep religious facet among artists and playwrights who are thought to be ‘great’9 […] perhaps specifically among declared heretics” (ibid.). Indeed, many remarks that likened the theatrical event to the Sinai theophany— stories, anecdotes, observations, and reflections—crowded their way into my journal. Like the extent to which this theory is received, “in-depth anthropology” deserves to be adopted as an interpretive method that references the Jungian unconscious and Claude Lévi-Strauss’ deep structures in its premise of the immeasurable depth of a culture’s consciousness. In-depth anthropology makes a liminal statement about the controversial debate of structuralism and post-structuralism with phenomenology.10 The informant is an agent who treats with self-subjectivity and reflexivity his/her relationship with the troves of cultural and historical knowledge of her/her community (as I show below). Concurrently, it should only be expected that although informants are well educated (as are many theatre artists), their very affiliation with secular Western society leaves its imprint on them in the form of a fundamentally truncated and incomplete reflexivity—the kind that is not necessarily or fully conscious of its deep relationship with a superstructure such as a myth.11 This integrative approach, which finds an amazingly similar iteration in the matter of ethics,12 is consistent with Victor Turner’s theorization of the Homo Performant and Liszka’s semiotic theorization. Just as a theatrical performance in a complex contemporary society is an instrument of reflexivity and better self-acquaintance of actors and audiences with their selfness and the dual existence of alter-ego and ego (Turner 1988, 1990), there is room for insight about the dualism of the myth, its marginality, and its perils in a society in symbolic crisis and, accordingly, about my role as an interpreter who is trying to eradicate this dualism, i.e., to assemble the puzzle and elevate it to the conscious (Liszka 1989).

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According to in-depth anthropology, inquisitiveness values an informant’s discourse as it would that of a patient in a psychiatric clinic. First, it is keenly attentive to informants’ statements—conscious and unconscious, deliberate and random—about the meaning of their culture and their doings. Second, it tests the standing of these statements relative to other discoveries in the research field. Third, it is willing, if it finds a reason to do so, to sculpt and interpret the corpus of data in accordance with this gift from the field that, ex post, may prove to be a meta-perspective, a model, a theory, something reported in some verbal way. It is an inquisitiveness that, within the frame of its exertions, also captures reflections on, and digressions from, the ordinary or rational path of the discourse. Insofar as these upset the process of scholarly questioning, this kind of inquisitiveness wonders about their very existence and where they belong in view of the copious information that exists.13 When the emic is characterized as a respectful relationship between a researcher and her subjects, its incidence is broadened. The field may, in this manner, express itself in a dual fructiveness that gives it not only content, in the sense of data, but also a theoretical idea or a meta-perspective with which the data may be portrayed. In these senses, in-depth anthropology is in no way one of those fundamentally arrogant “dominant epistemologies” that, as Conquergood predicts, will fail to capture deep meanings that by nature are masked, camouflaged, oblique, embodied, or buried in some other way in context. As I see it, in-depth anthropology, as an engaged model of inquiry in its own right, is “coextensive with the participant-observation methods of ethnographic research” (Conquergood 2002, p. 146). Amid and in support of the wealth of unharvested information, the myth that the stage director shared with me at that unforgettable encounter on the stairs just off the busy street stood out. The reflection that the respondent shared with me may encode a profound truth, an insight that the anthropological imagination cannot deny. In the case at hand, it reshuffled the deck. Now I wish to explore the meanings of that reflection. The question is not whether this anthropological intervention will yield the theoretical novelty that I desire but something more mordant—what will come of this novelty? I intend, after all, to base the spectaculum on the mythologization of the Sinaitic Revelation and station its reception at the base of the theatrical consciousness. It would be disingenuous to place this mythologization next to other theories on the theatre bookshelf with a meaningless flip of the hand, as one would for a theory that should be read with mere equanimity. On the face of it, at the level of historically rooted knowledge, I realize

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that the intention of this essay, as expressed above, carries the pairing of words and the mines that will defeat them. Before weaving them into a whole, I offer the possibility that only by calling the whole by name will it become a red flag before the sorrowful eyes of clerics and believers. After all, the expression “Revelation at Sinai” is a symbol par excellence of a theological split in Western civilization. The event, alternately known as the giving of the Torah, is the narrative of the Revelation, the “true story” of formation, de-formation, and re-formation in the Old and New Testaments that the deity concluded with his flock. The Sinai theophany holds the title to the early monotheism that a minority of Jewish believers who descend from the ancient Hebrews upholds. It is like a first-level heading in the code of Jewishness with its claim of national-level chosenness and specialness. Accordingly, one should not expect the creedal timelessness and the symbolic and interpretive performances of this sanctified occasion, in a Hellenistic-Christian arena such as the theatre, to be innocent of seemingly posing a challenge to the collective of believers in Jesus, be they pious or not. I only hope that the universalistic approach of Jewish theology toward the holy occasion—by which “When God revealed Himself to give Torah to Israel, He revealed Himself to them not in one language but in four languages: Hebrew, Latin, Arabic, and Aramaic”14 —will be accepted trustingly. A theological minefield of a different kind is embodied in the word “myth” and its obvious relationship with the nature of the Hellenistic culture that the theatre represents. This would be so even if the theory in this essay were to center its attention on the Sermon on the Mount as opposed to the Revelation. The problem traces to the Revelation in the events on the mount, an aspect that lies at the root of Christianity as well as Judaism— religions of unsurpassed acridity in their opposition to “myth” (Schwarz 1966). The concept of mythology is fraught with threatening potency due to the theoretical and popular uses of the word “myth,” which reduce the concept to a mere social invention, a figment of the imagination, “an intellectual and abstract content” (ibid., p. 144). This is the meaning that still runs the show, literally and figuratively, in religious circles. In the theatrical context, anything that’s mythical is axiomatically fictitious, as Rozik (2002b) explains: “Myth can be a fundamental structural layer of a more complex fictional world (p. 293); [it] is a product of the imagistic method of representation. […] The psyche spontaneously formulates thoughts in the shape of fictional worlds…” (p. 294).

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That’s a far, far cry from religious faith. Returning to the Revelation event that the director summoned in his imagination, the distance from Jewish thought becomes evident in the Apter Rebbe’s admonition: All Jews should think of themselves as having stood at Mount Sinai to receive the Torah (Buber 1962). It seems that where their Torah is concerned, believers in the Revelation should not be told that the event was a “myth” because they consider this word a desecration, something far removed from an event that history has sanctified, the dismissal of something they hold as utter truth (Amir 1996). These remarks and those that follow, however, cannot suppress the thesis that’s yearning to be written because it rides on rails and trestles that have already been built into the various forms of Judeo-Christian monotheism. Even the attitude toward myth has been rehabilitated. It is the similarity of these two cosmo-logics that prompted both faiths first to spurn the polytheistic Greek drama and then to adopt it in keeping with the ritual mechanism that the faith dictates (Rozik 2002b). Pursuant to this evolutionary approach, my comments below may challenge the pagan images of the theatre and position Judeo-Christian monotheism as their opponent. By noting the theological similitude of Judaism and Christianity in their treatment of Hellenism and the relative liberation of the contemporary theatre from the dictates of religious orthodoxy, however, I prepare the thesis in this essay for a more tolerant reception. I would also like to believe that my readers may dispense with the virtue of tolerance altogether, since the systems of meaning with which I will discharge-charge the “Sinaitic Revelation” and the “myth” are amply capable of reconciling matters all by themselves. Now, since the textuality-of-visitation must not be allowed to dawdle at the welcoming threshold of the theatre hall, theatre-goers and readers wherever they may be—Madrid, London, Rome, New York, or Tel Aviv—should be assured that this essay predicates itself on theologybridging tenets that specialize in dispelling monotheistic fears, fracturing structures of consciousness that are imprisoned in discourses of “Otherness,” and liberating them from the evils of one-upmanship. ∗ ∗ ∗ A theatrical event is about to begin. The flow of people from the square pauses briefly at several regular way stations from the moment they enter the theatre building to their crossing of the threshold. They head into the auditorium, a vast cavity totally dissociated from outside sights and sounds.

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This disconnect is part of the essence of the whole deal. The stops en route to this innerness legitimize the pauses of those who have assumed the role of spectators by issuing them with tickets, offering them the physical comforts of coffee and cake, and preparing their conscious minds by giving them a program that apprises them of the plot and the characters. The theatregoers—individuals, couples, or some other ensemble—comply with this preparatory scenario even though they are oblivious to the many unwritten rules that accompany it. From the moment they cross the threshold of the hall that transports them to another world, their obeisance becomes almost a self-estrangement from urban freedom. After all, the conventions of the theatrical event require more than row and seat numbers and brook no compromise.

Boxes There are various ways of describing the scene that greets the spectators in the under-illuminated moments that ensue after they enter the auditorium. One of these ways was called to my attention by the set manager of Ibsen’s The Master Builder, the play that I observed in my research, watching its rehearsals and performances from start to finish. At the beginning of the rehearsal season, the set manager put on a “box show” that, like the reference to “seeing the voices,” demanded theoretical imagination. Facing the director and the actors in the theatre’s conference room, he cautiously showed them a hollow black cardboard cube. On one side of its walls gaped the “stage” space, furnished with tiny colorful accessories, each artfully made and set in place. The presentation ushered the onlookers into a miniature likeness of Solness’ and Aline’s living room—the characters, the setting where much of the drama takes place, the backdrop and précis of which appear in the footnote.15 Familiar items such as a wooden rocking horse, a sofa, an armchair, blueprints—Solness is an architect—jumped out and shrank severely in their transition from the rehearsal room to this box. The sight of the “boxed” reality created cognitive pleasure. The author Gustave Flaubert would surely agree with this generalization in view of his reportage on the reaction of invitees to several pastry creations served at the wedding of Emma and Charles Bovary: A confectioner of Yvetot had been intrusted with the tarts and sweets. […] At dessert he himself brought in a set dish that evoked loud cries of wonderment. To begin with, at its base there was a square of blue cardboard, representing

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a temple with porticoes, colonnades, and stucco statuettes all round, and in the niches constellations of gilt paper stars. (Flaubert 1986, p. 28, Madame Bovary, author emphasis)

After moments of amazement, self-conscious smiles, and praise for the miniature set design—an art in itself—several leading actors approached each other occasionally to see exactly where things were placed on the stage. They peered—from the audience’s side—into the box, which opened onto the stage world in which they would operate in the months to come. Like other things that strongly impact an actor’s psyche, the presentation inspired these actors to see themselves being seen. Their verbal and body language at the sight of the mise-en-scène created closed circles in which the conversation was evidently fraught with meaning. Their excitement and the value caught my attention. I too gazed into the box and began to reflect on structuralism. The gigantic and dimly lit structure that accommodates the real theatrical event is shaped like a box. “Box” isn’t one of the most popular similes in the theatre literature, but I encountered it here and there. Etienne Souriau invokes it by referring to the theatrical space as a “closed” structure (Souriau 1950). Helbo et al. (1991, p. 53) call the auditorium a “black box.” Robert Smyth does the same: “I spent much of my life in a black box” (Johnson and Savidge 2009, p. 7). There’s also a historical overview that mentions the “box” in reference to small structures in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century theatre halls, the whole purpose of which was to segregate the aristocracy from the other classes (Helbo et al. 1991, p. 56)—a practice echoed in today’s “box seats.” The box, with its conscious meanings, goes much farther than Plato’s allegory of the cave, of which many scholars are fond. The box is metaphorically advantageous because the theoretical temptation fostered by the picturesque nature of the cave, its archaism, and the imprint in it of the philosopher’s halo is associated with a rather gloomy conclusion about the connection that the allegory of place and consciousness creates. The upshot of the cave allegory is that the human consciousness, being dependent on context, history, and culture, may find itself smothered in darkness, stricken with blindness and deficiency, and imprisoned in selfdelusion and -deception. Consequently, the choice of the cave analogy as a way to understand the theatrical experience (Weber 2004) is pessimistic from the outset.

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So let’s go back to the box. Every evening, people fill classically configured theatre halls.16 The structure and design of these facilities rarely agree to deviate much from such architectural diversification as is exemplified in avant-garde and historical experiments (Brockett 1992). Spectators may find themselves within a space that the contemporary culture, via media such as Google Images and textbooks, represents in so recycled a manner as to indulge in stereotype. It looks like this: The hall is a box of sorts that’s divided into two unequal portions. In the larger and more spacious box are dozens of very lengthy rows of red-upholstered seats, arrayed on multiple levels across the entire width of the hall. The seats face a wall-like curtain made of folds of heavy, thick cloth in standard reddish or bluish hues—the ubiquitous fabric that separates the small box, the stage, from the large box, the one intended for the audience. It’s clear to the point of tautology that both boxes, the small and the large, are subject to stringent marking of boundaries, without which they cannot exhibit their traits in the event. When the hall fills up and an edgy silence and darkness set in among the spectators, the curtain opens at both of its extremes. The symbolism of this curtain has no equal anywhere else. Its extremities seem to be sewn into the rows at the fringes of the play and are opened and closed at the moments when the narrative occurrence begins and ends. From then until the curtain is pulled shut, the spectaculum—depth, sounds, sights, and all—will be in full view.

Dramatizing Theatricality: Natasha Rostova’s Gaze What happens at the theatrical event from here on? This is the quintessential question that this essay asks and answers by invoking cosmo-logic. To understand the matter, one needs a different theatrical gaze, the kind provided by the set manager’s box-prop in the conference room. The prop was freighted with meaning because it placed performers of stage art in the unusual role of spectators in the stage world. By adopting the set manager’s perspective, they could see only objects that were positioned some distance apart. For a lengthy moment, the miniature spectacle lacked the soul of the play. The reversal of roles on this occasion estranged the dramatic plot from those who should have been engrossed in it—the performers, the audience, and the scholars for whom, more than anyone else, the play at all its dramaturgical levels furnished material for insights. I doubt that anything firmer exists than the standing of the box on which the set manager

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set his estranged gaze or whether daily life in the theatre generates a spectacle kindred to the anthropological one. One must bear this estrangement in mind to understand the theatrical spectaculum. Continuing, it was the stage of Ibsen’s The Master Builder, presented in Tel Aviv’s festive evening hours, that contributed an ideal spectacle to my thoughts about the spectaculum. Long before it came time to write these words, I was prodded by the memory of the sensory experience of those evenings to ask whether a gaze that can propel the spectator out of the stage world and into another realm is conceivable and whether this gaze may attend any presentation that follows different plots. The artists’ interpretation of The Master Builder in the recitals promoted the abstract aspects of the play and turned the performance into a bright and polished tableau. The set brought to the stage a living room, a house, a garden, and minimalistically configured flowers. It created an implied and wondrously aesthetic iconization. The living room lacked walls; its elevated floor reflected pallid light onto the actors’ faces. The garden was strewn with dozens of sunflowers that cast a yellow glow from one end of the stage to the other. Given this positioning, the audience had to make an extra effort to understand the characters’ world. Such a labor is thought of as cognitive anchoring or a “game,” as Alter theorizes in order to explain one of the pleasures that a theatre audience obtains (1990, pp. 222–225).17 The second meaningful aspect of this spectacle was produced mainly by light. In several dramatic scenes, the small box enriched the spectators’ eyes with a light that established a strong differentiation between the stage and the spectators, who sat in the dark. Hilde’s first appearance on the stage created a powerful blend of abstract aesthetics, light, and in-depth psychology.18 Hilde materialized all of a sudden, her advent accompanied by a giant background drape that glowed in shiny green and was flooded by bright yellow light from overhead. As the actress leaped off a ramp and landed on the floor of the stage, she made a noise that also planted doubts about her humanness. By the time I joined the audience, I had read Richard Schechner’s article, which set Hilde, like other Ibsenian characters, within the contours of Jungian theory. The Tel Aviv production stressed Hilde’s nature as a woman-child, a pseudo-human character, an “unexpected visitor,” a “stranger,” a good fit for what Jung called “personified thoughts.” The actress, with her flaming red hair and gleaming white skin, clearly came across as one of “these ‘trolls’—fairy-tale people—condensed out of the past to haunt the decisive days of the hero’s life” (p. 159).

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Thus, as I sat in the audience, three matters diverted my attention from the words of the plot toward the spectaculum: the museum-like aesthetics of the illuminated stage, the aforementioned in-depth interpretation that transformed the content into an existential metaphor, and my presence in the room-of-rooms of the theatrical work, which made the text and the scenes supremely predictable. My recurrent expectations of the finished performance of The Master Builder reinforced my impression of the existence of an “unseen” that is integrated into theatrical presentations, be their plot what it may. Such an “unseen” may have been included in Carlson’s intent when he noted: It is clear that there is something in the nature of theatre itself, quite apart from the subject matter of any particular play, that is felt everywhere on some deep defining level to be closely involved with religious experience or observance. (1997, p. 35)

∗ ∗ ∗ Now we delve into the properties of the gaze as something disconnected from the drama, the feature from which the spectaculum will spring. First, I propose that we dwell on the nature of the gaze of Natasha Rostova, a character in Tolstoy’s War and Peace. In Rostova’s first visit to the opera house in Moscow, the following account is given: The floor of the stage consisted of smooth boards, at the sides was some painted cardboard representing trees, and at the back was a cloth stretched over boards. In the center of the stage sat some girls in red bodices and white skirts. […] When they had finished their song the girl in white went up to the prompter’s box and a man with tight silk trousers over his stout legs, and holding a plume and a dagger, went up to her and began singing, waving his arms about. […] She looked at the faces of the audience, seeking in them the same sense of ridicule and perplexity she herself experienced, but they all seemed attentive to what was happening on the stage […]. (Tolstoy 1957, p. 603)

Although Natasha is ultimately taken in by the enchantment of the theatre, enchantment is a foreseeable psychological transformation of lesser importance here. Until it occurs, Tolstoy privileges us with this extraordinary literary scene, which responds in its own way to the point of view of

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the Russian Pluralism school and signals the rare failure of an enterprise that bespeaks the suspension of reality—a suspension that has but one purpose, self-oblivion via stage fiction. The story retold in this scene may raise suspicion of near-deviance if its confessor is a theatre-goer, not a stranger like Natasha Rostova. It is the epitome of subversive spectatorship. The quintessential members of a spectatorship club of this kind seem at first to be the theatre artists and theatre-goers; after all, their consciousness, not totally receptive to the allure of the narrative of the play, leaves them sober. “Too often,” a critic once wrote in a newspaper, “I myself was too busy reflecting on the beauty of the set […] or the handsome costumes […] instead of losing myself in the content.” Among those who may attain this degree of non-submission to the stage world, one may include adherents of a foreign culture who stumble into the theatre hall as tourists but do not understand the vernacular or “Natasha Rostovas” in their first visits, at least until they internalize the language of the theatrical conventions. The remarks of a spectator whom Jan Mukaˇrovský quotes transform Natasha Rostova’s attitude into an awareness. In terms of the perspective that’s needed for reception of the spectaculum, they are even more precise. Thus, Mukaˇrovský’s spectator explains: I sit in front of the stage as if it were a picture. Every moment I know that the events before me are not reality at no time do I completely forget that I’m sitting in the audience. Of course, once in a while I experience the feelings of passions of the depicted characters, but this is indeed only material for my own aesthetic feeling. And this feeling does not rest in the depicted passions but remains above the depicted events. Meanwhile my judgment stays alert and clear. My feeling always remains conscious and clear. I never get carried away […].

Then this uncommon spectator offers an interesting insight, a first stone in the artistic mosaic of the spectaculum: Other people who let themselves be carried away by love or fear have completely unartistic feelings. Art begins only where the “what” is forgotten and interest in the “how” remains. (Burbank and Steiner 1978, pp. 102–103, author emphasis)

These “other people,” if I may revert to the banal, get carried away with the plot. It is they who fully perform the role of spectators in the theatrical event.

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One definition of the theatrical event relates to the interaction of spectators and actors in the here-and-now, as the performance proceeds. The occasion is defined as “the totality of the unfolding production of the miseen-scène and of its reception by the public, and the exchanges between the two” (Pavis 1982, p. 160). To eventuate the event—as the theatre knows—a combination of integrated estranging moves that ascend stepwise in impact, ordinarily meant for theatre-goers, must exist. These steps, undertaken this time at the theatre’s initiative, are scattered across the span of the spectators’ movements, a span that begins and ends on the square in front of the Center for Stage Arts. The architectural vision of a lobby à la Greek or Roman antiquities has the potential to unhinge one’s imagination from the familiarity and mundanity of the city streets with their commotion of motion, colors, and forms. The impression that the architectural scene makes when one enters it is but a preliminary mind game, the stage world’s first step toward keeping its implicit promise of escape, enchantment, inspiration, and excitement. To attain these, however, several additional steps are needed: shutting the doors of the windowless theatre hall, thereby isolating the auditorium from the outside; total cessation by the audience of any visible act other than correct seeing, namely spectating; and darkening the large box and illuminating the small one. These acts manifest the total suspension of external reality in favor of an experience, the experience. The climactic moments toward which these measures strive are those of unquestioning belief—rarefied moments of the theatrical event, in which the audience is so neutralized from reality that it may even become unable to defend itself. In this situation, its isolation serves it as a refuge. “I completely forget that I’m in the theatre,” another theatre spectator is quoted in Jan Mukaˇrovský’s work: My own everyday existence totally escapes me. I experience within myself only the feelings of the characters on stage. Soon I am raging with Othello, soon I am shaking with Desdemona. Soon I feel like intervening on someone’s behalf. In this I am drawn from one mood to another so quickly that I am incapable of rational judgment […]. (Burbank and Steiner 1978, p. 103)

This woman, like dozens of people around her, will defeat the totality of the theatre consciousness only when she walks out, turns her back, and no longer lifts her eyes.

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When the audience gazes—looks up—at the stage, it deliberately forgets that what’s happening up there is fiction. Rarely does this gaze concern itself with the location of the stage, high or low, close or far, and with objects on the stage that ricochet from the retina to the mind. As the audience sits in the dark, a faint light from the stage settles on many faces. Rows and rows of eyes are pinned on the spectacle before them. But these eyes, entranced by the performance and gripped in the dramatic plot, do not see. In this situation, the audience has cut the moorings of its spectatorship and falls victim to lust for the act of seeing, the urge from which the theatre constructs its allure. One may recognize this state of consciousness in Blau (1990) and Freedman (1991), whose analyses embroider meaning into the gaze, a meaning several times more subtle and complex than its philosophical and psychoanalytic strands, and that note the temporary effect of the unconscious at the theatrical event on the weakness of the conscious. When Nietzsche said that the stage world has a power that grips the psyche, he did so scornfully: What do the Fausts and Manfreds of the theatre matter to someone who is himself somewhat like Faust and Manfred? […] The strongest thoughts and passions are there presented before those who are capable not of thought and passion—but of intoxication! And the former as a means to the latter! And theatre and music as the hashish-smoking and betel-chewing of the European! Oh, who will tell us the entire history of narcotics? - It is nearly the history of ‘culture’, our so-called higher culture! (Nietzsche 2001[1882], p. 87) No one brings the finest senses of his art to the theatre; nor does the artist who works for the theatre: there, one is people, public, herd, woman, pharisee, voting cattle, democrat, neighbour, fellow man; there, even the most personal conscience is vanquished by the leveling magic of the “greatest number”; there, stupidity breeds lasciviousness and is contagious; there, the “neighbor” reigns; there, one becomes a neighbor. (ibid., p. 233)19

The reader may already realize that to understand—and, I hope, to accept—the theory proposed in this book, she has to turn around and reenter the theatre with cautious intent and without subordinating her will to the familiar pleasure. This time, she has to sanctify the strangeness so that it may counterweigh the delights of the earthly contents of the play with its loves and hatreds and its song of life, kings, blood, and vengeance. Even if the spectator hears a sudden scream, a stamping of the feet, or rolling

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laughter from the small box, she must refrain this time from combing the plot for its origins and to whom among the characters it is addressed. This process is one of a return from the theatre to the myth, and as such, it definitely clashes with the process invoked in Aristotle’s Poetics (1996), following Alexander’s innovative interpretation: Poetics , says Alexander: aimed to crystallize, in abstract theoretical terms, the empirical differentiation among the elements of performance that pushed ritual to theatre. What ritual performers once had known in their guts—without having to be told, much less having to read—Aristotle now felt compelled to write down. His Poetics makes the natural artificial. It provides a kind of philosophical cookbook, instructions for meaning-making and affective performance for a society that had moved from fusion to conscious artifice. Aristotle explained that performances consisted of plots and that effective plotting demanded narratives with beginning, middle, and end. In his theory of catharsis, he explained, not teleologically but empirically, how dramas could affect an audience: tragedies would have to evoke sensation of “terror and pity” if emotional effect were to be achieved. (2006, p. 49)

To receive the spectaculum, one must make an effort to sort and separate the obtuse from the underscored. The obtuse element that I have in mind is amplified and disrupted in the story line, which commands attention in a typical structure that baits the audience with links of information that create chains of expectation. The spectators thus amass sugary capsules of information that they receive in linear sequence. The obtuse is static and non-linear. It sits within the warp and weft of the plot, secondary to the force that grips the psyche with tongs of magic. What might those in the audience receive when they step away from the drama once and for all and experience the spectaculum? An answer at one level is required here due to the need to convert the sense of fogginess into an assurance of sorts. For this purpose, availing ourselves of a scholar who vacillated over such a thing in the domain of cinema, we grasp the white cane that Barthes extends in search of what he calls the “third meaning” (Barthes 1991). This meaning, as he puts it, is “theoretically locatable but not describable—[it] can now be seen as the passage from language to significance and the founding act of the filmic itself” (p. 50). I would maintain that just as the filmic cannot be grasped and is other than the film, and just as the novelistic is not a novel, so the spectaculum, while fundamental to the theatre, is not theatre. Barthes’ description of the third meaning relative to the plot allows us to derive inspiration from his approach toward the truth that lies beyond the

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institutionalized work, the one that you see, the one rooted in stocks of pre-formed knowledge: The obtuse meaning is clearly the epitome of a counter-narrative; disseminated, reversible, trapped in its own temporality, it can establish (if followed) only an altogether different “script” from the one of shots, sequences and syntagms […] counter-logical and yet “true” […] Imagine “following” not […] the character […] but only, within this countenance, that grimace, that black veil, the heavy ugly dullness of that skin. You will have another film […] [t]he story, the anecdotal, diegetic representation, is not destroyed; quite the contrary […] [the] finer story […] is necessary in order to be understood in a society which, unable to resolve the contradictions of history without a long political process, draw support […] from mythic (narrative) solutions. The present problem is not to destroy narrative but to subvert it; to dissociate subversion from destruction is today’s task. […] this presence profoundly alters the theoretical status of the anecdote. The story (diegesis) is no longer merely a powerful system (an age-old narrative system), but also and contradictory a simple space, a field of permanences and permutations; it becomes that configuration […] it is tht false order which permits us to avoid pure series, aleatory combination […], and to achieve a structuration which leaks from inside. […] we have to reverse the cliché which holds that the more gratuitous the meaning, the more it appears to be simply parasitic on the story told: on the contrary, it is the story which becomes somehow parametric to the signifier, of which it is no more than the field of displacement. (Barthes 1991, pp. 57–58)

For the sake of the insights that I reveal below—however horrific it would seem to Tolstoy, the creator of Natasha Rostova—we must now estrange ourselves from a story, even one such as War and Peace if it were to be produced for the stage. Here, all I wish to extract from that monumental literary work is an epistemological act. Namely, I ask the reader to move on and sit down next to Natasha Rostova, whose most auspicious (albeit transient) trait is her inability to immerse herself in the stage world. This, over time, should invest the reader with the contemplative awareness of being, as it were, a simple person in the audience of the Brechtian theatre, whose attention is full of estrangement from the plot and the characters (Urian 1988). After all, and now above all, doesn’t the word theatre mean a place where one sees?! (Weber 2004). ∗ ∗ ∗

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Several issues lurk behind the expression that I used above—“a simple person in the audience of the Brechtian theatre” —and are too important to overlook. They are closely related to the socio-cultural envelope of the Rostovian situation. You see, before Natasha Rostova took her seat in order to wonder, she had arrived from somewhere and intended to return to it. The theatre, for her, is the only point of institutional performance in a space of consciousness, discourse, and practice. I’ll begin with the first part of the expression, a simple person in the audience. By this, I mean the unassuming individuals who fully populate the category of “audience.” They are presumably spectators, although some are theatre-goers whom I wish to separate from ordinary consciousness. They are simple because they share the theatrical gaze proposed in this essay so equally as to evoke, inescapably, the thought of image and status. This will become clear if we revisit the uncommon spectator referenced above and review what he said: “Art begins only where the ‘what’ is forgotten and interest in the ‘how’ remains” (Burbank and Steiner 1978, pp. 102–103). Is there any further distinction between “what” and “how” that separates statuses in this manner? The artistic “how” is asked not by a visibly bewildered stranger but by one who observes with aesthetic inquisitiveness. Even though Natasha Rostova’s gaze is closer to a “how” than to a contentual “what,” the character’s traits leaves no doubt that it lacks all aesthetic judgment that would stem from artistic knowledge. The spectator whom she represents is the strangest of strangers. This spectator’s self-purifying gaze, employed in the course of this chapter, excludes not only the story line but also all knowledge associated with the stage arts. On the face of it, it must be said that this gaze—the simple gaze of one person in a crowd—is not the kind of which the theatre boasts. A deficient gaze such as this is suspected of making the visit to the theatre superfluous, of dismantling the stanchions that support the theatre’s esteemed status among the arts and its centuries-old reputation as “high culture” (Shevtsova 2002). Back in the nineteenth century, it was Matthew Arnold, one of the most-quoted priests of this culture, who festooned the theatre with signs of quintessence, excellence, refinement, and harmony that drew on the Classical era and its literature (Arnold 1882). These signs were doubly validated by “guidelines for appreciation, discretion, and resolution” (as reported by Aloni 2012, p. 89) and, in our times, in cloying elocutions such as the following:

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Art becomes evident when it touches upon cardinal common aspects of humanness. It is capable of doing so in a delicate, creative, singular, and stylized way and leaving a meaningful and long-lasting imprint on us. In these traits it is distinct from entertainment, which, while providing a strong emotional experience, is solely frivolity, short-term enjoyment, simplistic and banal content, immediate access, and ratings orientation. (ibid.)

Once the gaze is freed from the story line and from aesthetic judgment, one might expect it to be wholly divorced from the classic craft of playwriting, in which content and performance are considered prime assets in Western culture (Schiffman 1985). Furthermore, the gaze that I propose here seems unable to distinguish between “classical” and “entertainment,” “high” and “low.” It’s very simple: equal not only for one and all but also for anything narrative that happens in the small box. While theatricality is rich in cultural and political symbolization, the gaze as described falls into the category of the theatrical —a phenomenological configuration of the contemplation of theatricality, of what appears as “theatre-minus-text,” to use Barthes’ expression (1982, p. 75). According to similar approaches, the text is no longer meant to serve as an awarenessnumbing mediator between the individual’s sight and what is seen (Bleeker 2008); instead, it has become a mere “mode of perception” (Burns 1972, p. 13). My attitude toward this theatricality—that of the gaze—avoids all interest in the manipulation of consciousness by the theatre and the faux mimetic self-voicing of the theatrical. Decrying the theatrical as fake, as theoreticians have done profusely, also exceeds the bounds of my analysis. What matters here is that the kind of contemplation that removes the text from the equation is a stance that an audience composed of regular spectators may choose. If this stance is stable, it is likely to flood the theatricality within the theatrical territory to the end. The meanings of “theatricality” in the literature of cultural and social science fail to elucidate this situation. After all, the object of interest in theories relating to the theatre isn’t the real theatre but metaphorical conversions that trace their origins to this house. Theorization that regularly appropriates theatrical elements such as “stage,” “drama,” “curtain,” foreground,” and “backstage” empties the theatre into the theatrical in a manner that nullifies the theatre as a place. (Quintessential examples are Goffman 1959; Burk 1962; Turner 1974; Jung 1967) According to these theories, in contrast to my approach, the theatre serves from start to finish as a mere backdrop that the theoreticians

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and their readers need not attend or even visit, since they ponder matters from the outside. Unlike them, I see the theatre in the theatricality of the egalitarian gaze; I affirm its realness as a place of structural phenomenological value. This theatricality will reveal itself as one that bridges between the theatrical event and a cosmological-mythical status. The additional issue pertains to the mention of the audience of the Brechtian theatre. I refer to Brecht’s theatre in order to say that if a sympathetic or perplexed audience attends the epic theatre, it is emotionally prepared for the phenomenological challenge that I propose here—that of placing the drama outside the boundaries of the gaze. I know of no audience like a Brechtian one that is deliberately maneuvered toward responding to the “alienation effect.” Brecht had ideological reasons to wholeheartedly undermine the legitimacy of the classical drama (Halm 1995). These reasons need not be discussed here. More important for our cause is his audacious urging to place the dramatic effect lower on the scale of development because today’s theatre spectator is shown nothing but an imagined, illusory world with whose heroes he can “identify” but from whom he cannot derive more than he derives from the sights of his own dream, vestiges of his childhood delusions.20 Even more important, the artists and the actors who borrowed from Brecht were steered vigorously toward the goal of alienation. Brecht demanded that they make every effort to restrain the audience’s ingrained habit of plunging into illusion.21 Brecht’s strategies of exceptioning content from “absolute drama” work beautifully. They culminate in a way that, if we seek ready-made spectators for our current experiment, allows us to see the veteran Brechtian audience through the right lenses. A relatively rational assessment such as this, however, does not suffice. That we recognize the Brechtian reception as a mental outcome approximate to the traits of the gaze proposed here does not suffice to determine where the gaze stands in theory. After all, Brecht’s intentions are diametrically different from mine. To determine the location of the gaze in the recent theoretical literature, the question is whether this particular gaze—the one that excludes the drama—may be set within the approach of the Postmodern theatre. This approach has been proclaiming a “crisis of drama” since the 1970s and wondering about the status of the epic theatre as one of its first harbingers (Lehmann 2006). On the face of it, we seem to have reached a happy destination insofar as it’s a theoretical precedent we’re looking for. Sadly, however, it isn’t so because the practical meaning of the postdramatic theatre is the dominant one, and it has no bearing whatsoever on our interest in the drama-free gaze of the audience. In other words, the

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specific signifier of the “crisis of drama” is the large and diverse set of practical configurations that, in all their number, somehow leave the audience out or emerge from the stage—scriptwriting, stage direction, acting, and production practices. The crisis manifests as a “discrepancy between the self-contained absolute form of drama with its interpersonal emphasis and the new social, politico-economic and philosophical subject matter which transcends it” (Jürs-Munby 2006, p. 3). The conclusion to draw from the wealth of examples that Lehmann and his critics provide (Alexander 2014) is twofold: The postdramatic, in this sense, blurs the boundaries between stage and audience, and it is bequeathed ab initio at the theatrical event at the initiative of one side— that of the production. That is, the relinquishing of drama and the ability to imagine a theatre without drama or, at the very least, to conceive of paths to its deconstruction are portrayed as a matter only for performers and their artistic creativity within the broad boundaries of the performance paradigm. The relinquishing of drama of concern to me, in contrast, comes by definition from the reception side and lies in the conscious intention of a specific audience within its domain. Moreover, as I show below, the reductionist gaze that I propose hinges, paradoxically, on the existence and structure of the classic dramatic theatre—the dominance of the text and the differentiation of stage from audience that typify it. In other words, the gaze that establishes the presence of the spectaculum may be disrupted insofar as the theatre’s classical order is disrupted. Once this happens, the gaze that I propose may negate the message of the postdramatic theatre.22 In contrast to all this, the postdramatic in its sense as Postmodernistic license embraces the reductionist gaze. This gaze, far from being a recommendation for theatre-goers as they enter the square, thus constitutes a deconstructive experiment that focuses on the drama. If “dramatic theatre is subordinated to the primacy of the text,” as Lehmann contends (p. 21), then the gaze proposed here, per se and in a Postmodern spirit, upsets this balance of forces between the superordinate and the subordinate.23 In contrast to the postdramatic theatre, the contentless gaze24 not only leaves the authority of the dramatic theatre in place, it strengthens it. Below I depict the role of the contentless gaze in the theatrical event as a theatrical semiosphere, “the fundamental semiotic space that provides the context and potential for both human communication and the creation or generation of new information” (Andrews 2003, p. 43).25 ∗ ∗ ∗

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This essay makes Natasha Rostova’s gaze attainable in various ways. One way is through a language of alienation that evokes ignorance or primalness, one that encounters the theatre as if for the second time or, at the most, for the third. The second way is based on the antipode of the first—gaining awareness, inner and outer, of a content that theatre-goers, and definitely rank-and-file theatre-goers, are rarely privileged to see. This content is harvested from research on clandestine theatrical arenas that are intriguing and rich in behind the scenes events. By unpacking the artistic act and tracing thoughts and secrets, ethnography has the ability to weaken the potential grip of the magic of the plot and impart a different understanding. Another comment on point of view: As an anthropologist, I adopted a much broader field of vision as my researching and writing progressed. Steering clear of a gaze that fixates on the imaginings of the story line, I plunged into meta-perspective contemplation, an isolated angle from which I gazed at Natasha Rostova’s gaze. Such an angle is also, of course, external to the theatrical event. It’s an oblique way of looking at things; it emanates from a hidden, slightly elevated, and all-encompassing place that sees both boxes, the small and the large. This vantage point fulfills, in the field of the theatre, Goffman’s famous theatrical point of view that tracks—from the side—the movement of impressions among mundane areas of social behavior (Goffman 1959). This positioning facilitates a fourth look that simultaneously observes goings-on in both boxes—people and objects on the stage and the spectators watching them as the theatrical event proceeds.26 In-depth anthropology needs an unmanned angle such as this, just as Barthes’ mythologist avoids the company of all consumers of the myth in order to see what he sees (1998, p. 289). This visual act of selfexiling serves the cause of in-depth anthropology in honoring the rules of the abstract. Like psychoanalysis, what this anthropology has learned from the theatre “is a condition of knowing unknowingness which finds its expression in the exhibition of blindness as a form of insight” (Freedman 1991, p. 74). We now turn to rules of an abstraction subsumed in a gaze that uncouples the stage world from the story line—rules that I wish to extract and credit to a cultural kingdom that abounds in content, color, and imagination, the pinnacle of the arts (Urian 2008). The preference of abstraction in the theatre evokes ironic puzzlement about the power of archetype that people attribute to ancient pasts: Might there be a kernel of truth in the writings of Ernest Renan, who dispossessed the Semites of aptitude for creative imagination ever since the formative period of their wanderings

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in the desert (Renan 1855)? Might this essay express the kind of thinking that Renan had in mind when he defined the desert where the Revelation occurred as a naturally monotheistic place, a desolate and monotonous venue that imposes a unitary view of the universe on the migratory lives that people lead there (Shavit 1987, p. 221)? Ineluctably, I recall a similar message in the tradition of the Hasidic legend that links two grandees, one Greek and one Hebrew, in one parable with Aristotle as the former and the Prophet Ezekiel as the latter: Two men visited the king’s palace. One paused in each hall and contemplated with expert eyes all the magnificence and the collections and his eyes could not take it all in. The other passed through the halls and marshaled only one thought: This is the king’s abode, this is the king’s attire, and in another moment I will see the king’s face. (Buber 1946, p. 361)

A similar unavoidable insight is buried in the remarks of an elderly Jewish actress who remains prodigiously active on Israeli stages. “In his novel Wandering Stars, Sholom Aleichem relates to these bands [of Jewish actors— T.G.] who went from shtetl to shtetl on carts. […] It was these carts, circulating through Eastern Europe, that developed among this people the need to see.” Thus, while reflecting monistically on the delights of the abstract and before returning from peering into the box, I should explain the level of meaning that I have in mind by pairing events at the theatre with those of the Sinaitic Revelation. Only ostensibly do I intend this analogy to provoke the rage of conservative Judaism, for which opprobrium toward the theatrical phenomenon arises from the commandment, “You shall not make for yourself any graven image or any likeness” (Exodus 20:3). Weren’t the Hebrews given this commandment at the very site of the Revelation? An anguished clenching of theological fists is expected here. I hold, however, that no such reaction is needed since this essay focuses on the structure embodied in the mythical event, exemplifying the theatrical logic at the archaic level. This demarche of mytho-logy, or of exposing the logos in the myth, relates indirectly to the content and sanctity of the Torah that was brought down from the mount. Furthermore, I learned that Judaism rises on its hind legs to spurn the theatre precisely because it is aware of the theatre’s ability to exert spiritual influence. It is mindful of the menace that the world of the stage—a creation of flesh-and-blood—bodes for the One God’s monopoly on creation (Levi 2006). In this matter, too, this essay

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is wholly unable to dent the myth of creation because of its commitment to structural abstraction. After all, the contentless gaze belongs to those spectators who do not believe in the stage world, who do not suspend their disbelief as the rest of the theatre-goers do. Their conscious gaze, described above as freed from the shackles of the narrated world, is not a witness to a “rival creation” (Levi 2016, p. 9) and, consequently, is unfit to confirm its existence.

Boxes: The Logic of Aesthetic Authority When the audience in the large box encounters Ibsen’s stage world, it may witness a theatricalized version of people lifting their eyes heavenward. So it was, with much emphasis, at the theatrical event, the performance of The Master Builder, that I observed. The event yielded three kinds of eye-lifting that merged for several drawn-out moments into one quasiritual movement. The first was that of the main character, Solness, whose textual performance abounds with motifs harvested from Judeo-Christian monotheism. The second was rendered by the other actors, who in this production gazed like spectators at the lead character as he performed. The third was the audience, which watched the whole thing. Anyone who has read or seen the play knows the dramatic order of events that taps Solness’ psyche. It progresses from despair to promise, after which Solness climbs on the roof to the church tower, ascending all the while with the audacity of heroism and self-sacrifice. Rightly has he been described as an entity that “seeks, knows, and dies” (Schechner 1962, p. 164). Ibsen has this architect, Solness, issue acerbic remarks toward the deity for whose sake he built churches. They begin this way: I came as a boy from a pious home in the country; and so it seemed to me that this church-building was the noblest task I could set myself. […] I was a child from a religious country home. I built those churches with profound faith and a sense of mission. […] He to whose honor and glory they were dedicated, […] when I stood up there and hung the wreath on the tower, I spoke to Him. I said: Now just listen, omnipotent God! From now on I want to be free, to build as I wish, to create as I wish, just as You create as You wish. Never again will I build churches for You.27

Rolling the plot back, these are the ideal materials with which Solness’ final clamber to the tower may be framed as an act of self-contradiction,

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one from which a cry of yearning for a more powerful transcendental arises. Indeed, once the troll, Hilde, is finally tempted, Solness proclaims: I’ll stand up there and talk to Him as I did back then. […] I’ll tell him, Listen to me, omnipotent God, judge me as You will but from this day on I will build nothing but the loveliest and most wonderful thing in the world. […] The princess shall have her castle.

The artist “returns to the mountain of his vision—the tower of his superhuman aspiration where he must face in all his nakedness the pure power and beauty of the clear, cold transcendental truth” (Schechner 1962, p. 164). The artist returns to the high place of his vision. I find this interpretation, fit to sanctify any Judeo-Christian piece of playwriting, not unrelated to the theatricality with which the director chose to direct the rest of the cast and, thus, to flood the attention of the audience. It was among these two groups that I detected the second and third acts of eye-lifting. By this, I mean that the actors—characters who exit from scenes with Solness— did not disappear offstage; instead, they retreated to the two sides of the stage and seated themselves temporarily on chairs arranged in rows. They remained visible, staged to contemplate the ensuing scenes as though they were members of the audience. Before the debut performance, the director explained what lurked behind this theatrical device: I’m not trying to hide the fact that it’s theatre from the audience. I’ve made an agreement with the audience that they always know that it’s theatre. On the one hand, I want them to identify with the characters. On the other, I want to create a kind of alienation, looking down from above, you might say, which means that the audience always remembers that they’re actors in a play. […] Aline [Solness’ wife], for example, exits [one scene] and watches [another]. The viewer has to decide whether she’s sitting there as an actress who’s waiting to enter [the next scene] or as a character observing another character who’s talking about her as she hears, or one who’s watching as though she doesn’t hear what they’re saying about her. It’s moot. Conversely, the actor who continues to sit on the stage is always “on.” There’s always a focus on him. He doesn’t go offstage to cool off; he does other things and then reverts to character. He’s there all the time. Even when he’s not there, he’s there. Every actor who sits on the side of the stage and contemplates another actor who’s acting serves as a spotlight of sorts. The very fact that he’s

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observing directs the audience, too, to observe the one whom he’s observing. […] The question of why [the actors sit on the stage and observe] is always challenging, particularly if the answer isn’t given. What I’m always interested in is to see the actor even when he’s not in character but sitting and waiting for his turn. Hearing—not hearing [what the actors in character are saying], we don’t know that the characters off on the side are also observing characters who are observing them [as they’re being acted].

To wrest a puzzled gaze from the audience—to make it step away from the plot and back again—this quasi-Brechtian stage direction28 evicts the actors from the backstage. By doing so, it breaches the boundary between stage and backstage, expanding the stage and emphasizing the line that separates its box from that of the audience. The “performance” of the actors’ chairs on the flanks of the stage generates a dual disciplined gaze-fromabove onto the stage world—that of the audience, back there in the large box, and that of the actors, whose steps are confined to the small box, where they function as a small audience. This duality amplifies the importance of the messages that the lead character sends the onlooking audience because he finds himself observing an audience of actors whose eyes are also seemingly pinned on him. The resulting configuration resembles a play within a play—not an extreme version as in Pirandello’s Six Characters in Search of an Author, which obstructs attention and may encourage cries such as “nuthouse!”29 but something typical of European Renaissance and Oriental drama. This configuration sidelines belief in the plot and promotes reflection, perhaps even religious reflection, on the illusory nature of life (Hornby 1996). In the aforementioned stage-directed scene in The Master Builder, the audience of spectators and the audience of actors stare ahead, only half-engrossed by the psychological drama of the heroic leading character, who also observes from beyond, from overhead, as he articulates the self-evident content of every monotheism. In the ritual act, the main character is surrounded by the two audience circles for a lengthy moment in the theatrical event. In his uncommon demarche, the director doubled the spectatorship, thereby rendering the sanctity into a trinity.30 Theatricality such as this puts its dimension of disruptiveness or, to quote the director, of “challenge,” on epitomic display. The director created a semi-captive or semi-contentless spectatorship by deliberately deviating from the traditional roles of audience and actors. Initially, the actors

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were asked to “play” an audience with an edginess that ruled out the total performance of the role. In response, the audience was expected to wonder about the place where the actors had seated themselves and what their state of consciousness might be; thus, it occasionally had to disengage from the story. The interesting thing is how the director chose to describe this diverted attention, or liminal consciousness, that began with an actor and continued into the audience: Hearing—not hearing [what the actors in character are saying], we don’t know that the characters sitting off on the side are also contemplating characters who are watching them [as they’re being acted].

Revisiting the director’s comment when the rehearsals began, I ventured a hypothesis: When the audience of actors disrupts the captive gaze of the audience in the large box, it exemplifies and promotes a state of consciousness of “seeing voices.” “All the people saw the voices,” the director intoned, quoting Scripture as I indicated above. Indeed, his whole stage strategy draws on the myth of the Sinaitic theophany. It reflects his belief that everyone at the theatrical event should connect for a while with a kind of seeing that’s external to the story—a gaze that promises to evolve into awareness of the authority, if not the sovereignty, of the stage. ∗ ∗ ∗ The case of The Master Builder is symbolically rich in color. To make it deliver the theoretical promise that the spectaculum implies, however, it should be seen as autopoietic, distinct, or exceptional in comparison with other performances or plays. The question of where gaze and authority, spectators and stage, converge—the core issue in defining the spectaculum as a structure of consciousness—receives startling emphasis in Ibsen’s opus. It allows one easily to detect how the theatre presents the gaze and even generates it as a desire to see (Blau 1990). The observed and the observers, as we have seen, may acquire and shed form; mentally, however, they remain where they are. They are planted on both sides of a reality that exerts its influence in one direction only, from the small box to the large one. If so, under the inspiration of The Master Builder, let us enter the theatre hall, sink into those red plush seats, and do some play-acting. Let us penetrate, under the inspiration of this case study, the essence of a theatrical event that occurs everywhere in modern contemporary theatres. Many of those

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institutions survived sundry avant-garde and Postmodern tests in the twentieth century (Brockett 1992) and preserved the classic spatial-functional form that posts a fence between stage and audience, between production and reception. The box-logic of these theatres, the “architectural fixation of sociology’s attention” (Urian 1988, p. 138) that perseveres to the point of what has been called a “confrontational model,” an “Italianate style” (Helbo et al. 1991, p. 49), or a “proscenium arc,” has prompted theoreticians to wonder about the nature of this arrangement of the theatre space and insinuate expressions of scorn and praise into their writings. A very interesting case in point follows: All theatre interiors consist of two essential areas: one is “the auditorium,” which is designed specifically for the audience; the other, designed for the production, we know as “the stage.” […] Independently they have no life; together they produce a living theatre. It is therefore the sensitive interrelationship of the two that makes a theatre design either a success or a failure. (Mielziner 1970, p. 14)

We would do well, on our path to the theory, to disregard the lament over the loss of the ritualistic experience of festivity and pageantry, expressed by those who ruminate about what would have happened had the theatre surrendered its excessive formalism and prestige, including the alienation that exists between those on either side of the curtain (Meyerhold 1979). We would also definitely gain by connecting with the perspective of theoreticians who are enchanted by the framing of the spectacle, which dates to the Renaissance—a time when the “proscenium arch” was invented along with its accompanying curtain and was meant to assure the separation of those worlds (Cole 1975, p. 51). Since it is anchored in a state of autopoiesis, in which the trespass of boundaries between actors and audience corrals those on both sides into a closed system (Fischer-Lichte 2008), some think it simply naïve to imagine that the existential chasm between stage and audience can be bridged simply by creating a common space for both (Rozik 2002a). Israeli participant-observers in a recent production of Hamlet may confirm this reasoning. As the Hamlet character himself strode down the space between the two blocs of swivel seats that accommodated the spectators, the latter had to squirm back and forth in those peculiar seats as if they were parties to the event, observing it in the kingdom and not in a theatre. Hamlet then outdid himself by seating himself on the lap of a woman spectator for a moment. I was there—sitting in the

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front row, close enough to feel the performers’ breath, and experiencing the sensory meaning of the word “pretense.” But neither I nor the audience truly participated in the actors’ imagined world. The leading actor’s eyes, like those of the rest of the cast, were immersed in seeing/not seeing. They did nothing whatsoever to acknowledge the audience’s presence, let alone the embarrassment of the woman spectator onto whose lap Hamlet leaped. Rozin’s observation was accurate: Even physical contact failed to breach the barrier. “When you’re looking at the audience, you’re not really looking,” one of the actors in The Master Builder put it. “You’re looking at something that’s parallel and the picture doesn’t come together.” For some fans of the classical order, the inviolability of the stage–audience separation at the theatre is merely functional, a way to manage attention and maximize concentration (Crary 1999). I find it more appealing, however, to apply somewhat anthropological phraseology to the stage–audience divide, calling it an “epistemology of extraordinary cultural authority” (Hart 2006, p. 36). From there, it is but a small step to understanding the theatre as something possessed of charismatic structure. Beyond the spatial division, an audience may easily sense that sound, light, and motion intensify the experiencing of charisma. From my position on the side, I observed an audience sitting in the dark and staring ahead soundlessly, eyes facing an illuminated stage where acts of motion produced sounds and voices. Thus, the four dimensions of the theatrical event are embodied. Emptiness antithesizes with fullness, stillness with motion. Their unequal combination of apportionments is permanent, and, in accordance with a cognitive approach to the theatre, one may say that is permanentized via a sensory-motor process into power of iconicity and metaphor (McConachie and Hart 2006). One may view this as a “cognitive poetics” (ibid., p. 40) of the space, one that draws the audience inward and isolates and separates its individual constituents as well, thus amplifying the sovereignty of the stage all the more. Here is the place to suspect the theatre of lusting for power. Those who disparage the theatre as a current archaic institution seize upon this suspicion, citing features that seem unnecessary for the theatrical experience but exist anyway. They may wonder about the absolute equality of the live theatrical event and the cinematic situation in their apportionment of the aforementioned four dimensions. Indeed, although the venues are different, spectatorship in both allocates space, light, sound, and motion in the same way without explaining why. I would like to dispel the puzzlement, starting with space, sound, and motion. For participants in a theatrical

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event, it is clear that what’s appropriate for the small box is not so for the large one—in terms of function and a fortiori in adherence to the self-evident familiar. Indeed, if the audience makes noise and moves about or if the actors fall mute and motionless, the theatrical event will be disrupted and its familiar classical configuration will crumble. So has it been ever since the ancient Greeks invented the auditorium and the orchestra—a binary that’s at least as strong as the archaic stone in which the stage and the spectators’ seats are affixed. None of this, however, manages to dissipate the perplexity that envelops the third dimension, light. Smothering the audience in darkness is not a constant in theatre history. Here’s the proof: In the sixteenth-century Elizabethan theatre, actors and audience basked under one source of illumination. Back in the day, light was so indivisible in this popular entertainment venue, a place where the privileged and the simple rubbed shoulders, that the actors and their acting had to be separated by a sign, not by light. The actor, almost certainly feeling the breath of the spectators who crowded around him or her, dealt with it by over-dramatizing or over-acting. Actors treated distortion of voice and motion as an epitomic facet of character portrayal. The idea was to leave no doubt about it—to alert all participants to which box they belonged— especially where the weakness of emoting was concerned. Indeed, the ambit for the dramatic expression of emotion was so narrow and ill-equipped that “pulling one’s hat over one’s eyebrows was [almost the only] way of signaling despair […]” (Heiner and Hizkiya 2006, p. 149). Dramatization of this kind was an effective way to draw boundaries in the dramatic space. History shows, however, that the theatre did not settle for this. At a particular moment in the distant past, when the audience’s presence literally threatened to undo the performance, it began to black out the spectators (Fischer-Lichte 2008). Thus, blacking-out was a way to police the audience. The question, however, is whether such a thing is necessary today. I find it simply amazing that the blackout persists. After all, the audience no longer poses the slightest threat. Not only have the denizens of the large box, the spectators, become wondrously disciplined, still taken in by one of the modern era’s most categorical acts of consciousness—audience here, stage there—but plainly, too, shining the theatre lights on them would not impair the reception process in the slightest way. Therefore, it stands to reason—one can say this with much confidence—that blacking out the large box today serves no functional purpose and is as surely unnecessary as it is in the cinema. If a theatre auditorium suddenly looks like a giant lecture hall for a moment, the diffusion of light within it will prove unable,

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and will be sensed as unable, to dent the audience’s concentration. I say this without even commenting on the defeat that a stodgy lecture would sustain if it had to compete with a theatrical plot for attention. It is exactly what Peter Handke, in the introduction to his anti-play (1971), instructed the theatre people to do. Cast the light over the stage and the hall, he ordered. Keep it roughly as bright in both places, but not so bright as to make the eyes ache, as is conventional at the end of the presentation. Keep it on in the hall and on the stage throughout the presentation, unchanged. Although I could carry on this manner about dispelling darkness to admit light, it is an unlamented fact that the current archaic continues to dominate, excluding this logic from its confines. The audience sits in the dark. What is this enduring blackout, the audience’s sitting on the opposite side of the floodlights, all about? The answer may lie in the depth of the symbolization, the structure of things, in Western minds: a structural projection, the manifestations of which are as far apart as day is from night. I begin with an approach in Jungian theory that should be seen as a neighbor of this thought, since it anchors the day-from-night separateness of the archetypical structure and symbolizes the human psyche in chiaroscuro (light-and-shadow) terms. Jung explains it with a rhetorical question: How else could it have occurred to man to divide the cosmos, on the analogy of day and night, summer and winter, into a bright day-world and a dark night-world peopled with fabulous monsters, unless he had the prototype of such a division in himself, in the polarity between the conscious and the invisible and unknowable unconscious? (1940, p. 187)

Furthermore, light and darkness have metaphorical stature; they carry meanings all the way to the depths of the conscience: good and evil, valor and fright: It is a frightening thought that man also has a shadow side to him, consisting not just of little weaknesses and foibles, but of a positively demonic dynamism. (Jung 1912, p. 35) The hero’s main feat is to overcome the monster of darkness: it is the longhoped-for and expected triumph of consciousness over the unconscious. The coming of consciousness was probably the most tremendous experience of primeval times, for with it a world came into being whose existence no one had suspected before. “And God said, ‘Let there be light’” is the projection

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of that immemorial experience of the separation of consciousness from the unconscious. (Jung 1940, p. 284)

To identify and frame the underlying psychological motives that Jung adumbrates, one may resort to Koslofsky’s historiography, Evening’s Empire. A History of the Night in Early Modern Europe (2011). As in historiography, we, too, will plot a more-or-less linear course. Koslofsky’s comprehensive work, which also describes the institutionalization of public performances in view of the light-versus-dark issue, identifies the ItalianJewish playwright Di Somi as the first person, in 1565, who referred to the dividing of light in the theatre. In his “Dialogues on Stage Affairs,” Di Somi is quoted as saying: It is a natural fact […] that a man who stands in the shade sees much more distinctly an object illuminated from afar. […] Wherefore I place only a few lamps in the auditorium, while at the same time I render the stage as bright as I possibly can.31

Di Somi’s counsel—to emphasize spectacles on stage by dimming the auditorium lighting—received theoretical and practical expansion in the course of the seventeenth century in a way that attests to the discovery of blacking-out as a genuine remedy for the theatre’s ills. It alluded to something that would prove no less revolutionary: equating artificial darkness to its natural counterpart. The proposal that follows, expressed by the theatrician Joseph Furttenbach, transforms the midday darkness that prevailed in the theatre on performance days into a signifier of the domain of night: It were better if no windows were put at the sides of the audience, so that the spectators, left in the darkness like the night, would turn their attention to the daylight on the stage.32

This recommendation only slightly anticipates the dawn of a new theatrical era, in which night per se became an aesthetic essential in the theatrical event. It evolved into something much more than mere darkness: an effect that plunged the audience into gloom with no need to shut windows and doors. Koslofsky recounts the transition from day to night by speaking of the “nocturalization” of God in early modern Europe. Both opera and the theatre took this main road. Koslofsky considers them a new public sphere

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that was born in pre-modern Europe with the discovery of night (ibid., p. 3). The absolute darkness that envelops the theatrical audience, like the night that follows sunset, would not have been institutionalized had it not been for a meaningful change that took place in Christian theosophy. It is told that the audience found itself gathering in the theatre in the late evening, after finishing their daily labors, and only then was the metaphor of believers as “children of light” succeeded by an almost antipodal mystical preference of the kind of God-worship that lurks in the recesses of the night. Koslofsky, in his historiography, describes the highly influential Christian epistemological model that the philosopher and mystic Jacob Böhme developed in 1619–1624 to illuminate the aforementioned change and, particularly, the structure of contrarieties embedded in it, trapped in the prison of predetermined schemes. The model is captured in the expression “contrariety as cosmos” (ibid., p. 63), which defines the principle of contrarieties as a fundament of godliness, the creation process, and the holism of human existence. In its center appears the cosmology of light and darkness, in which dark serves the cause of revealing light. Darkness and light, like night and day, are described in the model as inseparable, creating a dualism of complementarity. It is this dualism that, initially, vitiated the premodern link that ruled the cosmic roost between night and primal terror, chaos and danger—the ghosts, demons, witches, vampires, and additional weird imaginary creatures that ruled the kingdom of the night in medieval minds. The nefarious achievements of the Angel of Death and Satan, a.k.a. the “prince of night,” as well as those of sundry criminals and strangers, have long been imputed to darkness. Night was seen as a threat because it robbed Westerners of the sense that they preferred above all others, sight (Dundes 1972). Its product, darkness, was considered a configuration of loss of the world’s order and beauty. Thus, the Christian tradition that pairs day with life and night with death—a tradition that excludes ghosts from the light of God during the day (Steger and Brunt 2003; Ekirch 2005)— was reconfirmed each day. The priesthood long viewed light as an attribute of God, as the Bible indeed reports in its account of Creation: “God saw that the light was good and He separated the light from the darkness. God called the light ‘day’ and the darkness did He call ‘night’” (Genesis 1:4–5). Literary iterations of this structure, including Shakespearean characters, continued to specify night as a corrosive and contemptible force. Ekirch, in his overview At Day’s Close: Night in Time Past (2005), informs us that

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the author of “The Husbandmans Calling” in 1670 composed the following phrase, “We lie in the shadow of death at night, our dangers are so great.” Lucrece in Shakespeare’s The Rape of Lucrece says after her rape, “O comfortkilling night, image of hell! /Dim register and notary of shame/Black stage for tragedies and murders fell! /Vast sin-concealing chaos! /Nurse of blame”. (p. 8)

Like Ekirch and others, Koslofsky characterizes this pre-modern topos by resorting to Shakespeare: Each main character in Macbeth reminds the audience of the power of the night to tempt and corrupt. […] Shakespeare takes care to show how the dark crimes of the play are in each case preceded by dark desires, as signaled by Macbeth musing “Stars, hide your fires, /let not light see black and deep desires” (1.4.50). (Koslofsky 2011, p. 25)

As stated, however, Böhme chews and swallows this binary into his model so thoroughly as to recast the relationship between the poles into one of dual intercomplementarity. What this means is an immanence that sees the deity as omnipresent, a holism of the natural, material, and symbolic world in which light and darkness are locked in an embrace. It was this phase of consciousness, especially after Böhme’s time and the Reformation, that powered Christianity’s search for God and its finding Him in the darkness of night. The excerpts from liturgical poetry that Koslofsky quotes give clear evidence that the scales tipped in favor of the dismal part of the day-cycle, sanctifying nightfall and even the light that resides in darkness. Here are two examples: The Divine is “hidden for us in the mystic night” (Hopil 1629, canticle 96, 3) and “Night/more than bright night! Night /brighter than the day /Night [brighter than the sun] /in which the light was born /[…] O night, which can thwart all nights and days.”33 This inversion is also clearly expressed in Psalm 139:12: “Even the darkness will not be dark to you; the night will shine like the day, for darkness is as light to you.” This theology cemented the legitimacy of blacking-out the audience at dance, ballet, and opera performances in Europe. Festivals and festivities began to migrate into the night in the fifteenth century and continued to do so with growing celerity in the seventeenth century. Koslofsky describes the division of light and darkness in the theatre as a matter of special interest and devotes several pages to the development of the use of lighting techniques. The unsurprising thing about it is that the effect of the division, which may

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have resembled the one we observe today (although it was almost certainly less efficient), generated a first-ever enchantment with an artificial lighting that was so good as to seem better than daylight: When the young Scotsman John Lauder, later Lord Fountainhall (1646–1722) visited “the king’s comedy house” (the theatre of Palais-Royal) in Paris in April 1665, he judged “the thing that most commended it was its rare, curious, and most conceit machines.” He was amazed by “the skies, boats, dragons, wildernesses, the sun itself so artificially represented that under night with candle light nothing could appear like them”. (p. 107)

An especially interesting point in this historiographical episode, however, is the claim that the new aesthetics is not naïve. Seeking an answer to the amazement evoked by the unprecedented importance of lighting technologies in seventeenth-century theatrical performances and gatherings, Koslofsky finds it in the political. He discusses new challenges to the rulership attending to representations of power, royalty, reputation, and hierarchy, a phenomenon that instrumentalizes performing before an audience. The use of quotations from his stock of works of political literature attests to the formation of a strong bond between the Kingdom of God and that of flesh-and-blood people. The discourse of governance draws a powerful comparison of deity and kingdom, in which the darkness that aggrandizes the former does the same to the feats of the latter. Rulers divided light and darkness in intelligent and manipulative ways in the course of performative events not only to blur the dark side of the role of night in political culture but also to surmount the shallow perception of the simple man, give the masses a “proper” understanding of the kingdom, and guide and control ordinary people’s beliefs: The common man, who relies merely on the external senses and makes little use of reason, cannot by himself properly grasp the majesty of a king. But through the things that come before his eyes and that touch his other senses, he receives a clear impression of his [the sovereign’s] majesty, power and authority.34

At a time when monarchs such as Louis XIV and Augustus II adorned themselves with the solar metaphor of “sun king,” “darkness was vital to […] displays: it enabled rulers to offer pleasure, demonstrate magnificence, and deceive their subjects, combining the fundamental political strategies of this age.”35

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Moreover, Koslofsky finds much wisdom in the manipulations of Baroque rulers who, just by controlling lighting in their appearances, caused the unification-of-contrasts structure to descend from the divine lawmaker to human ones. They structured sovereignty as something congruent with the order of the cosmos—for better and for worse, above and beyond the individual, an order in which “shadows and lights are relative, reciprocal, and inseparable.”36 The upshot of these remarks is that the chiaroscuro dichotomy that exists in theatrical performances squares with the cosmo-logical sovereign order. Furthermore, the adjectives of the new theosophy, which drew the chiaroscuro poles closer to each other, lack the strength to topple the wall between the large box and the small box and allow the one to ingest the other. Paradoxically, as with all verbiage that seeks to reconcile the irreconcilable, its use managed to restructure the perception back to where it had always been—split. This is how a long-antiquated way of conceiving the spatial order has been preserved in the contemporary theatre. The inhabitants of the large box are deficient in regal consciousness and have no reason to entertain categorical and sweeping abhorrence for the night. When all is said and done, indoor lighting, like the nocturnal lighting of streets and roads in and between Western cities, is so self-evident as to be touted as one of civilization’s victories over nature (Steger and Brunt 2003). Cultured Westerners, too, do not sing the praises of the period of time that cycles from sunset to sunrise. Concealed in the structure (which has always been there) and far from theology (which has had its ups and downs), the only thing they have when darkness prevails—intermittently, artificially, and not quite absolutely—is the experience. Whether this experience is unconscious or semiconscious, the important thing is to advise any competent committee that has wasteful or avant-garde aspirations that any “retro” decision it might make about turning lights toward the audience at a theatrical event not only would be considered capricious but would constitute an issue for debate over the loss of something precious. ∗ ∗ ∗ Until the light in the small box is switched on, theatre-goers remain sunken in their seats. What do they look at during this time? It can only be a minimalistic field that the semi-darkness allows them to perceive for a fleeting liminal moment. On the face of it, given that the curtain hasn’t been

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raised, they are just looking; they are not yet fulfilling their role as spectators, particularly those who fiddle edgily and half-involvedly with their mobile phones. But it only looks that way from an outside perspective that is so uni-dimensional as to be unacceptable for in-depth anthropology. To say something worthy about a connection between “just” peering through the gloom (which the luminescence of the cellular screens merely emphasizes) and the contentless gaze of spectators, we would do well to study an outlook that has jelled in a somewhat shadowy discipline called the “phenomenology of night.” This returns me to the kind of night that ties into the experiencing of darkness in a theatre auditorium that is not strewn with stars. According to the phenomenology-of-night approach, midday darkness is a “thick reality,” the kind that inflicts losses in sociability and self-refinement but ultimately leads to enlightenment or knowledge from some different source. First, the losses. Whether one relates to the darkness of night unreservedly or acknowledges its primal significance, one finds it fraught with the supremacy of the natural world. A darkness that lacks even a flicker of light creates a context of utter Otherness, the antipode of knowledge, orientation, and control. Handelman describes nocturnal darkness as a medium strong enough to rupture the lines of the horizon that we know from the hours of daylight. That is, the place signified and known as there no longer exists. The precipitant of this outcome is a nocturnal experience of here that, in greater part, is an Otherness that touches and floods the person the moment it is encountered. Our experiences may easily confirm the claim that wherever light is absent, Westerners shift their sensory priority from seeing to groping (Dundes 1972). The experience, however, is not uni-dimensional. At nightfall, the self turns inward in a way that makes it receptive to other dimensions of existence, allows it to resemble other beings, and admits additional kinds of Otherness and foreignness. The self’s movement toward proximity, intimacy, and inferiority (Handelman 2005) portends discovery. Something similar happens to modern theatre-goers as they move about. People enter the dimness of the auditorium, the large box, not from daylight but from the artificial lights of the street and the square shortly after the heavens cause darkness to descend. In phenomenological terms, one may rightly expect those who have seated themselves in front of the curtains of the small box, which stand there in the fullness of their concealing magnificence, to be already somewhat willing to go farther in. Indeed, I saw people in their seats staring ahead intently as if at a stage or at their mobile screens just to signal that they were otherwise engaged. I also saw couples and threesomes who, upon their arrival,

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tended to whisper or lower their tone of voice as if being careful not to bother anyone. Either way, a few moments before the curtain rises many spectators behave as though they have separated from each other, so they could stare ahead as individuals would. The seated denizens of the dark experience the movement of the heavy curtain as it opens as though the curtain had been procrastinating until then. Thus, these moments pass until the theatre suddenly asserts its control within the absolute darkness as a sign that something different is about to take place. The order of the theatrical event, from the square inward, evokes the archetype of the night. Thus, it suggests, emphatically, that a breakthrough, a gaze that will defeat the innerness, is about to ensue by its means. Here, it is important to note the possibility of musing. Individuals may entertain aberrant reflections or contemplations at this time. Such musing, sometimes called “thin ritual,” may anticipate participation in a “thick ritual,” a canon ritual in a mosque, synagogue, a church, or a venue where devout agnostics may feel at ease (Innis 2005, p. 211). The theatre may be such a place. Emerson confesses: I like the silent church before the service begins, better than any preaching. How far off, how cool, how chaste the persons look, begirt each one with a precinct or sanctuary! So let us always sit. (1992, p. 145)

The “thin ritual” embodies the logic of the “thick ritual” (Innis 2005, p. 211), one that defines ritual in its own right (Handelman and Lindquist 2005). The individual’s waiting in the dim light, the darkness, of the protracted moment in the large box ushers him or her in and somewhat negates the social self in favor of the one and only function of the entire theatrical event: reception. Handelman expresses something close to this: I think that light and dark affect body image in self-narration. In daylight the person is more outside the ongoing self-narrative she tells herself, and in consequence her body-image is larger in relation to her life-story. In darkness, she enters into her own story more, her body-image becoming smaller, more vulnerable. (2005, p. 254)

Thus, it stands to reason that the darkening of the large box deprives the selfness of those in the audience of all interest in performativism or theatricality. It even overpowers the vestigial interest of visitors to the theatre in a small group of us whom they consider a sympathetic audience until they

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cross the threshold. One may imagine this negation of performativism as something much stronger than the negation occasioned by nocturnal darkness in urban public spaces. The urban context, dull despite its kinesis, has been identified as denoting the border reached by Goffman’s ramified dramaturgical model (Steger and Brunt 2003). Self-presentation, as Goffman almost certainly assumed, is a matter of visibility. Shortly after they appear, those sheltered by the darkness of the large box are glued to their seats while their selves surrender to an odd degree of disengagement. In this, non-interactive situation—if I may strain Goffman’s terminology—the dazzling glow of the ushers’ flashlights, briefly turned on to allow stragglers to take their seats—appears to constitute the dramatization of the inanimate. The individuals in the audience may be likened to old people who sit on park benches and are judged to be gaping into space. Passivity: isn’t that a word that wholly bespeaks a tongue-lashing by the value of pragmatism against those who, despite being able, choose and enjoy a state of performative catatonia? No, it’s not. What seems to lie “beyond them” actually veers from them into the innerness of the self, the subjectivity of foreignness, and it may be immeasurably colorful and glowing. This recurs, I would say—precisely, even literally—in the unstructured, spontaneous midnight meditation that the writings of the Breslev Hasidim describe. The characterization that Rabbi Nachman of Breslev, founder of this Hasidic court, gave to this idyllic intimate convocation with the deity is the nullification of the self or, as he put it, “until one is privileged with nullifying all of one’s materiality and being included in His root.”37 This pious movement toward innerness, however, has a purpose of its own; furthermore, one may, as I understand it, definitely wonder about how fully it parallels that of the theatre. After all, Rabbi Nachman promises, “By doing this one will merit exiting from darkness into light” (ibid., p. 112). The theatre emulates the encroachment of Otherness among mortal people each and every night (Handelman 2005), be it in one’s bed or in the innerness of solitary meditation. It mimics the shift from a first order of Otherness to a second order, from mere darkness to a darkness that heads toward an inner light that conceals an unknown goodness. Thus, even from this primal moment onward I cannot state that the meaning of the theatrical light is totally bounded in simple tangibility. This may be its way of negating “the world of the here-and-now” so that the “wholly other” will appear and make itself manifest (Otto 1966, p. 82). The light that will flood the small box, where the presentation with its plot takes place, will be framed in a square that’s bordered on all sides by darkness. This boxiness is incomparably important:

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It is this from which light becomes nourishment and demands that it be contemplated. Bounded and delivered at a delay, this light lends the theatre the possibility of addictiveness and makes it a structural configuration of dream or Revelation, a supremely systematized configuration that carries the promise of reward. The remarks of an Israeli actor about the opening moments of a theatrical event may corroborate this description in full. Although the actor opposed any compromise with the integrity of the plot, I find his comments worthy because of what they say about light and darkness, dream and addiction, and even an infantile regression that alludes to a selfness that just asks to be nullified: When I say “festive,” I’m referring to the audience that goes to the box office, buys a ticket, and enters the hall. An usher escorts you to your seat pompously and then a signal is given and the lighting in the auditorium dims until you’re totally covered in darkness. And then, as if with a magic wand, a golden light rises and illuminates the curtain, soft music plays from afar, the curtain inches its way open, and you, the audience—like a guileless little child—stare longingly at the stage, as if asking the actors to tell you the whole story from start to finish. (Banai 2001, p. 162, author emphasis)

When the light goes on in the small box, the curtains are swept to its sides, deigning at long last to reveal the box to the audience. From now on, even if the lighting on the stage resembles daylight, it will produce a different light. As stated, it will experience something of that innerness that’s enveloped in constant darkness. What I mean is not the metaphor of light at the end of a tunnel, although there, too, the yearning manifested in the gaping eyes flows in one direction only. The eyes always face the light. It resembles the direction and strength of the light that one experiences when reviewing the doings of one’s life, as reports on near-death experiences attest (Moody 1975). I find the same in a Christian woman’s account of a religious experience (in James 2002): I seemed to myself to perceive a glow of divine love come down from the heart of Christ in heaven into my heart in a constant stream, like a stream or pencil of sweet light. At the same time my heart and soul all flowed out in love to Christ, so that there seemed to be a constant flowing and reflowing of heavenly love, and I appeared to myself to float or swim, in these bright, sweet beams, like the motes swimming in the beams of the sun, or the streams of his light which come in at the window. (p. 276)

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If to mitigate the drama, this has something to do with the subconscious content of the dreamer who lays in the dark. As he or she looks on, as it were, an illuminated world penetrates his or her imagination in the dream. The literature speaks of this in compelling terms. However, since the conceptual context of these terms is different, I must extricate them from it with a wellhoned scalpel: The theatre has been likened to a “waking dream” (Carlson 2001, p. 3) and the curtain to the sign of such a dream, making it, for this reason, a poetic sign (Barthes 2002, p. 181). Here again, I take no serious issue with the story line; I contest only the order of the events, in which the eyes in the large box are hypnotized into the small one. If there is one thing that the dream may do for us, it does it, as stated, in its role as a synonym for the experiencing of light. This is so because visuality controls the celerity of the dream-event as the sleeping observer reposes essentially motionless in the dark. The meaning proposed here has nothing to do with a dream in the sense of a “nocturnal drama.” It threatens to deprive the dream of its depth and reduce it to a theatrical signpost by ignoring the symbolization of the dream-plot, which in-depth psychology addresses, and by neglecting the theatre-as-dream analysis as a creative mechanism for the transformation of reality. States, inspired by Artaud’s remarks about the theatre–dream nexus, note this gap between the phenomenological and the semiotic perspectives. The basis of this theatre, says Artaud, is that the stage becomes “the most active and efficient site of passage” of “ideas into things” (1958, p. 109). Gestures, sound, objects, everything, especially words, will have “approximately the importance they have in dreams” (ibid., p. 94), the creative medium par excellence, in which anything may serve as an image for the preoccupation of the dream artist. The point emphasized throughout Artaud’s theory is its war against the tyranny of reference or at least reference to the social world from which man, as a dreamer, is automatically excluded. “The theatre must be a ‘reconquest’ of the signs of what exists” (ibid., p. 63). Its object is to strip the signs, empty them of received content, and reconstitute them as a beginning or, to use Rousseau’s word, as a birth. It is what we may loosely call a phenomenological theatre (as opposed to a semiological one) in that it seeks to recapture a naïve perception of the thing—its “objective aspect”—before it is defined out of sight by language (States 1987, p. 109). The rule is this: “Dream” is not a perfect metaphor for the experiencing of a theatrical plot, even though the charms and depths of a dream are hardly separable from the theatre’s allure. A gap between the nocturnal

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dream, known to one and all, and the unfolding of a plot in the small box will always be experienced. This gap may assure the supremacy of gaze over plot as I have described—even if someone in the audience identifies with and emotes over the drama. This is because the theatre’s invitation to its goers is fundamentally ambivalent. A drama performed on stage, unlike a dream, creates but also restrains excitement, making it a “waking dream” (Carlson 2001, p. 3). The two elements of the participant-observer orientation that the audience is invited to adopt are not equal in weight because restraint and constraint, emotional values that are considered appropriate tone-setters in the “high” culture of the theatre, figure in the participation (Elias 1978; Aloni 2012). Were this not enough, the ways of the theatre inure spectators to “somnambulation.” They condition the only possible experience, the one informed by what’s visible, on everything being in its place. Consequently, the spectator is a member of an acculturated mass that is not allowed to lose itself by participating actively in a drama in which it may vent its emotions. Furthermore, and beyond all doubt, the thing that helps each spectator to determine in his or her own mind where he or she stands—as a participant at the very most—is the awareness that while he or she is engulfed in the dark and expected to identify with the characters, not so are the characters. They, true to their autotelic nature, do not act out a dream; instead, they deny the spectator’s existence from the beginning to the end of the plot (Brook 1969). If so, the very autotelic propensity of the stage erects a barrier that, as a demure if not invisible item in the theatre’s toolbox, may vitiate the plot and gently encourage the gaze to confront itself. Seeking a more realistic simile for the theatrical experiencing of gaze, we find our way to the museum. The likeness has nothing to do with some amazing similarity between these two sanctuarian repositories of art— similar in that both encourage large crowds of people to migrate from the lobby inward and both evoke associations with the Hellenistic era. Instead, it traces to the membership of the theatre in the family of art, which is essentially “a certain perspective on substance” (States 1987, p. 38). This handsome assertion, which the Structuralist school might find amenable, erects a buffer between audience and exhibition. While the museum isn’t known for toying with the allocation of light as does the theatre, it is an arena where the craving for contemplation is marvelously well organized and sliced into domains of contemplation and permissibility behind panes of glass. In this act of organization, too, its objects are placed in boxes, some of which are illuminated. The stage/box that the set manager in The

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Master Builder produced is so pleasing with its miniature artifacts that one day, perhaps, it will wend its way into the inner sanctum of a municipal art museum and itself be placed supine in a glass box. The boxiness-of-seeing is so appropriate for both the theatre and the museum as to render the two mutually accommodative. For this reason, I will return to the museum as an analogy when the textuality-of-visitation arrives at those venues of knowledge and experience where it may make specific contributions to explaining the spectaculum.

An Event-That-Models Dream and museum are rather incomplete parallels in view of the embodiment of the theatre as a live “boxed” event. To do justice to the eventic whole, I will adopt, with perceptible indiscipline, Handelman’s modernistic concept of the event-that-models (1990, pp. 27–30), wishing to get the most from its well-aimed and persuasive properties. On our way to the event-that-models, if the readers’ gaze is still pinned on the archetypical archaicness of the dream, we may be reminded of the mythological seed that’s been sown in these pages. A spectatorship event that is sublime in the perfection of its boxy structure exists in biblical mythology and awaits theatrical redemption. Surfacing from the deep semiological connection that exists between mythology and the theatre (Rozik 2002), the Sinaitic Revelation steps forth and demands a theoretical status all its own. No conceptual nexus between the Sinai theophany and the theatre has ever been established. The more I delved into the writings on theology and theatrical ritual, the more appropriate I found it to liken this literature to a desert. In fact, it’s emptier than a desert. Admittedly, two “new testaments” help to mold biblical stories into a brimming trove for world and Hebrew drama (Levi 1992) even though they exclude stories of the ancient Israelites’ deliverance. I’ll begin with the better known of the two, the New Testament. Because Christian plays are allowed only to reaffirm this foundational text of Christianity, the symbolic resurrection of the Sinaitic Revelation in its verbatim Old Testament version is out of the question. The theatre’s fear of that possibility is aptly substantiated in Cecil B. DeMille’s film The Ten Commandments (1956). Unsurprisingly, this rare reminiscence of the Revelation adheres to the Christian narrative and to New Testament motifs and symbolization, including the subsumption of Moses into the character of Jesus. So powerful is the injunction against Sinai that Savidge’s bewilderment, revealed in the title of a chapter in one of his books, “Theatre in the Bible: Old and New Testaments,” is naïve:

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It is a surprise and a mystery why books on the relationship of the Christian faith and the theatre fail to begin with or even touch on activities of the ancient Israelites that were either theatrical or actually theatre. (Savidge 2009, p. 25)

I charge the second “new testament” that helped to kill off all Revelation stories, including that at Sinai, to Israeli artists and playwrights. Levi describes how the pioneers of the Hebrew theatre converted the religious redemption of the Return to Zion into a redemption concept that boiled down to making the desert bloom. It’s an act of trivialization, one that nullifies heaven in favor of earth and reconfigures the worship of an abstract God, the legacy of a revelational religion, into a simplification that serves Zionist ideology. Thus, Levi writes: S. Shalom’s play Adama [Land] describes a new testament and it took a certain extent of revolutionism for a traditional Jew to treat his own being in this manner, in loosely converted Christian terms, that is, into the literally erotic contact that he depicts between the [Zionist] pioneers and their land: “We set up a new location here and gave it the Jewish name ‘Land.’ It became an everlasting testimony that Israel has returned from the wanderings of exile, from its castles in the air—and has returned to its source, to ‘mother land,’ to cultivate and preserve it” […]. (quoted in Levi 2016, p. 29, author emphasis)

In its century or so of existence and in some 250 biblical dramas, the secular Israeli theatre has overlooked the religious facet of the Bible (Levi 2016). The biblical stories that it does accommodate do yeoman’s work in abetting the “ritual institutionalization of the Zionist entity” (ibid., p. 80), that is to say, furthering secular Zionism’s interest in planting a people firmly in the land that it inhabits. These stories may dispel the drab sensation that overlays traditional Jewish art when it is set against the magnificence of Greek mythology. They can, however, go no farther. Those biblical plays were brought to Israeli stages after being selected from a plethora of Old Testament accounts of theophany, with the artists’ forebears on the receiving end. And what fate did the deity meet in this encounter? “The Jewish god was secularized, desecrated, banished from the stage, and the stage of the Hebrew theatre became a secular ritual object” (ibid., p. 81). This may have been the Hebrew theatre’s paradoxical way of responding, albeit incompletely, to the creedal trepidations of Judaism. Thus, while eradicating the holiest of the holy, it offered itself up as a resistance-provoking setting that was aware of its impact as an ignoramus, a joker, or a stutterer, unversed in the language and the transcendental codes of the theology. In

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contrast to Christian plays and theatre philosophy (Johnson and Savidge 2009; Lugt and Hart 2014; Harris 1990), the Israeli theatre exceptioned monotheism from the set of truths that might speak to some or all of its attendees. Indeed, in view of the two new testaments’ teachings about what the stage world should embody, the Sinaitic theophany has always been a myth that never stood a chance. Always, I said. I substantiate this by noting, ironically, the exception that emerges in Katharine B. Free’s work (1999). Even though Free alone mentions the myth of Sinai in connection with the theatre, she does so by noting its absence. By virtue of her exertions, however, we find out that the myth of Sinai was not retold in The Exagoge, a tragedy written by one Ezekiel in the first or second century BCE that recounts the biography and mission of Moses. The Jewish playwright Ezekiel, known as the “Jewish tragedian” (Yehezkel 1947, p. 3), lived in Egypt. This opus of his was preserved and resurrected in the writings of the Church Fathers Clement and Eusebius. The tragedy glorifies the feats of Moses the leader but indulges in creative deviations from the source text. Ezekiel, a Jew of Hellenistic Alexandria, took this liberal poetic license with the biblical account due to the need to bear his spectators’ sensitivities in mind. Thus, he served up “various embellishments, the fruit of his poetic imagination,” such as Moses’ dream and its interpretation before Pharaoh and a phoenix story. The structure of his play, too, has been characterized as an imitation of the classical Greek tragedy, “particularly that of Euripides” (ibid., pp. 6–7). After enumerating various deviations of the script from the Bible, Free stresses, “The most striking of these is the omission of God’s giving the Law on Mount Sinai” (1999, p. 154). In Ezekiel’s play, the Sinai myth is sacrificed in its entirety—almost certainly due to the need to avoid steering the tragedy toward literally tragic political outcomes. One can only conclude that the tragedian was aware of the complex context of time and place, in which Jews followed the Greek theatre even as Greeks packed the audience. Jewish–Egyptian relations in that era run through The Exagoge like an undercurrent of political theology. It may be these that sculpted the play into an invalid narrative of symbolic extermination, so to speak. The essay you are reading is a structural way of filling the gap. To appreciate the structural meaning of the mythic occasion, one must become the theoretical host, if one may say, of an approach championed by Martin Buber. To the best of my knowledge, Buber’s teachings do not identify with structuralism but suggest in various poetic ways that the

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tenets of structuralism are not foreign to them. In the nexus of myth and cognitive structure that arises from these teachings, myth is viewed as an “an eternal function of the soul” (Buber 1950, in Biemann 2002, p. 105). Nor is it difficult to see how the “I–Thou” philosophical construct that Buber conceived and developed by contemplating the theatre (Friedman 1969)38 responds to the theorization of a human intelligence that casts the cosmos into a structure of contrasts. The value of Buber’s doctrine, expounded in his “Myth in Judaism” (1950) and other writings,39 is its crossing of theological boundaries40 —an act that accomplishes more than it lets on. After all, Buber, who termed his philosophy of myth a “living monotheism” (in Biemann 2002, p. 102), avoids explicit mention of one community of believers to the exclusion of another and is wont to aggregate as “man.” Contrasting and complementing Lévi-Strauss’ approach, Buber’s insights “underscore the psychological-anthropological line of the myth” (Schwarz 1966, p. 230) and endow the myth with the value of “truth.” Buber’s philosophical observations, deployed battlefield-style against the polytheistic myth, place monotheistic cosmo-logic at the center of the man–God encounter. Any myth, even the most fantastic, Buber writes, is a form that weaves itself around a kernel of historical memory and the organic shaping of this memory (in Schwarz 1966, p. 234). It emerges, he continues, not from the imagination but from genuine encounters with a divine boldness and splendor from which humankind’s great tableaux of godliness surface and ascend authentically (Buber 2000, p. 143). Below I present the myth of Sinai exactly as the Bible reports it. Before showing how the theatre orients itself within the secret of the myth, I call attention to the language in which remarks about boxes and a pre-dialogical cosmological encounter are couched. God said to Moses, “See, I come to you in a thick cloud so that the people may hear when I speak to you and also to trust in you forever.” Moses had told God what the people had said, so God said to Moses, “Go to the people; separate them for Me today and tomorrow by having them wash their clothing and prepare for the third day. For on the third day, I will descend on Mount Sinai before their eyes. Set boundaries for the people all around and say, ‘Take care neither to ascend the mountain nor even to touch its base, for whoever touches the mountain will surely be put to death. No hand shall touch him for he must be pelted with stones or impaled by arrows; neither animal nor human shall live.’ When the shofar sounds, they may ascend to the mountain.” Moses descended from the mountain to the people and separated

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the people for God and they washed their clothing. He [then] told the people, “Prepare for the third day; do not approach a woman.” On the morning of the third day, there was thunder, lightning and a thick cloud on the mountain. Then a shofar blast sounded powerfully, causing everyone in the camp to tremble. Moses led the people out of the camp toward God and they stood near the base of the mountain. And Mount Sinai was enveloped in smoke because God descended onto it in fire; its smoke rose as does the smoke of a furnace and the whole mountain trembled forcefully. The sound of the shofar grew louder and louder and Moses spoke and God answered him aloud. God descended onto Mount Sinai, to the top of the mountain; then God summoned Moses to the top of the mountain and Moses ascended. God said to Moses, “Go down and warn the people not to force their way toward God to see Him; should they do so, many will perish. Even the priests, who are allowed to approach God, must keep themselves holy lest God break out against them.” Moses said to God, “The people cannot ascend to Mount Sinai because you ordered us to set boundaries around the mountain and sanctify it.” God answered him, “Go down and then ascend once again, you and Aaron with you. But do not allow the priests and the people to force their way through to come up to God lest He break out among them.” So Moses went down to the people and told them. Then God said all the following words: “I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the Land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery. You shall have no other gods before Me. You shall not make for yourselves a graven image or any depiction of anything in Heaven above, on the earth below, or in the water beneath the earth. You shall neither prostrate yourself to them nor serve them for I the Lord your God am a jealous God, punishing children for the sins of parents unto the third and fourth generation among those who hate Me but displaying grace to the thousandth generation among those who love Me and heed My commandments. You shall not take the name of the Lord your God in vain, because the Lord will not leave unpunished he who takes His name in vain. Remember the Sabbath day to sanctify it. Six days shall you perform creative labor and all your work but the seventh day shall be a Sabbath unto the Lord your God. You shall do no manner of creative labor—not you, your son or your daughter, nor your slave or maid-servant, nor your livestock, nor the stranger who is at your gates. For in six days, God made the heavens and the earth, the sea and everything contained in them, and rested on the seventh day. Therefore, God has blessed the Sabbath day and sanctified it. Honor your father and mother, so that you may be longlived in the land that the Lord your God is giving you. Do not murder. Do not commit adultery. Do not steal. Do not bear false witness against your neighbor. “Do not covet your neighbor’s house; do not covet your neighbor’s wife, his slave or maid-servant, his ox, his donkey, or anything

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that belongs to your neighbor.” All the people saw the voices, the lightning, the sound of the shofar, and the smoking mountain. When the people saw it, they trembled and backed away. They said to Moses, “You speak with us and we will listen. But God must not speak with us, lest we die.” Moses answered the people, “Do not be afraid, because God has come only to test you and make you fear Him, so that you will not sin.” So the people stood at a distance and Moses approached the thick darkness where God was.” (Exodus 19:9–20:21)

The question is how this mythic event models. When it is read in Claude Lévi-Strauss’ language of cognitive structuralism, the Sinaitic Revelation acquires eye-opening theatricalism. When it is plugged into the myth–theatre–theory triad, the archaic myth models both the theoretical and the theatrical. In structural terms, the myth of Sinai has been so overinterpreted that it tempts me to consider all other myths “naïve.” Tongue in cheek, I suspect Lévi-Strauss of giving this myth a quick glance, accepting whatever teaching he found in it, and tucking it away for future inspiration and insight.41 After all, the Sinaitic Revelation is unique among myths because it is self-aware and relates to its meaning as a myth in accordance with several thick theoretical lines.42 The mythical Sinaitic Revelation story reveals a structure of contrasts between man and God, a cosmological tension so great as to exclude the plot (the “Torah”) from the field of vision. Reading it, one even sees that the myth invented a mediator for this tension (LéviStrauss 1963). The Sinaitic Revelation is a configuration of structuralistic meta-mythology typified by hyper-reflexivity that communicates the logos of the myth. On the basis of this configuration, an amazingly consistent structural parallel between the nonrecurrent mythical event and the theatrical one may take form, repeating itself again and again and pounding unconscious knowledge into theatre-goers’ heads. The spectaculum is the visible and audible entirety of God’s performance on the mountain-stage before the Israelites’ spectating eyes. This cosmological structure of contrast is not unique to the Sinai myth. It is familiar in the Greek mythology that identifies Olympus, the glowing mountain, as the abode of the gods in a manner that compels mortal beings to lift their eyes submissively. It was in the wake of this mythology that the Greek theatre invented the deus ex machina device, in which God descends to earth as people look on. This structure is also familiar in the Christian Revelation of Jesus’ publicly attended Sermon on the Mount, a detailed biblical myth that embodies the structure of a small box in front of a large box,

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production against reception, and a teaching that flows from the one to the other. These are three foundational elements of the event. The Sinai myth is not presented as the standard retelling of an event in its entirety or of its outcome; instead, it recalls how the event took shape and evolved into an occasion in the sense of something that establishes a position and a correct stance. In other words, the myth includes directions for the event by borrowing from theatrical stage directions. The unvoiced orders that separate the boxes of the theatre, which Hurley views as devices for “audience control” (2010, p. 28), appear in the Sinai myth in the repeated calls to order that precede the performance—the giving of the Torah—and recur in its course and at its end. The purpose of these reiterations is to stabilize the boundaries between the audience and the mountain-stage. In their aftermath, the cosmological tension between believers and deity is emphasized. To demonstrate this, let us revisit the verses. First, God instructs Moses: Set limits for the people all around and say, Be careful not to climb the mountain or even touch its base; whoever touches the mountain will surely be put to death. No hand is to touch him; for he must be stoned or shot by arrows; neither animal nor human will be allowed to live. (Exodus 19:12–13)

Afterward, when Moses climbs the mountain, God again orders him to issue a warning, this time against the kind of trespass that is associated with bad spectatorship: “God said to Moses, ‘Go down and warn the people not to force their way to God to see Him; if they do, many of them will perish’” (Exodus 19:21). Finally, the people act at its own initiative to reinforce the boundary between themselves and the mountain-stage: “So the people stood at a distance and Moses approached the thick darkness where God was” (Exodus 20:21). If so, since time immemorial the theme of myth yields a structural insight expressed in the boxy configuration of the theatre, through which “as against the Actor, we take on the collective character of the Audience” (Cole 1975, p. 71). In the spirit of Buber’s teachings, it is not the places—the stage and the audience—but the “facing” relationship between them that lends the theatre its essence. After all, the true myth, as Buber would see it, “is not an expression of the imaginative power of the human spirit; instead, it should be seen as the outcome of an authentic encounter that took place between two realities—man and God” (Schwarz 1966, p. 241). Thus, insofar as a theatrical event captures the myth of Sinai, it may itself serve as a myth. The eventuation of the myth in the theatre connects with our need to

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preserve the tangibility of the meeting that underlies the testimony that it gives—an encounter in which something humanized foists itself on us despite ourselves and demands reciprocity (Buber 1962, p. 228). The mythical version of the sovereignty of the theatrical spectacle corresponds to what Hurley (2010, p. 29) calls “super stimuli,” a sovereignty flowing from feeling-technologies of lighting, architecture, and audience control [that] orient the spectator’s senses—notably, her vision and hearing—to the action onstage by effectively reducing the number of stimuli competing with the onstage performance. (ibid., p. 28)

God descends to the mountaintop. The myth reports the authority of the realized mythical spectaculum as built not only of the stabilization of the boundaries between Him and the mass of humanity but also, and rather, of the growing intensity of the indicators of God’s presence—the “voices and lightning” and the “sound of the shofar [that] grew louder and louder”— transcending any experience of other origin. This powerful authority, which I construe as the power of the spectaculum to flood emotions and senses, is dramatized evocatively by the expression “seeing voices.” In view of the exaltedness of God’s dominion, “seeing voices” is tantamount to extracting the plot —the text delivered on the mount—from the total experience of the mythical event. They said to Moses, “You speak with us and we will listen. But may God not speak with us, lest we die.” […] So the people stood at a distance and Moses approached the thick darkness where God was. (Exodus 20:19–21)

The suspension of mediation of meaning by the messenger, Moses, on behalf of the believers is something that one expects to occur outside the event. What emerges from the decoded wording of the verse is the reduction of the human position in the cosmological event to a gaze, a mere observation of the amazing spectacle from afar. The message conveyed by the verses that retell the myth is that, within the boundaries of the mythical event, the Torah can be received only in its visual or nonverbal dimension. Now that the believers who attend the event can only gaze, the dichotomy of audience and deity is immeasurably intensified after the fact. This, in effect, belies the stereotyped dichotomous structure that attributes eye culture to Hellenism and ear culture to Hebrewism or Judaism (Eldad 1981).

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The myth brings forth the modality in which the structure of monotheistic cosmo-logic is retold: man “facing” God, the exalted Other, in an act that calls for prostration. The structure of “facing,” which amazes due to the magnitude of what is being faced, is intrinsically silent. It is silent of spoken words, of the Torah, and of the story line, which in their essence constitute the mediation. Here is yet another metamorphosis of the Sinai myth in structural theory; I now present it as a point of view that detects structures of consciousness that transcend plot. This interpretive mythologism, which we grasp only at its end, renders the audience, the stage, and the spectacle into symbols within the system that signifies the theatrical event. By making this claim, I intend not to remark about the origin of the theatre—a humility common to scholars of the theatre (Rozik 2002a, b; Schechner 2003)—but to offer a version of Rozik’s proposal. Rozik long ago noted the entrenchment of a tendency to intellectualization that replaced the search for the provenance of the theatre in primordial cultural phenomena with a quest for phenomena that share principles of signification and meaning with the theatre. He then expressed the view that: The theatre medium is rooted in an innate method of signification based on the operation of mental images, which could be conceived […] as units of representation, replacing real objects, for the sake of thinking about them, in mental manipulation of reality. (2002, p. 321)

I see the theatre as a medium for recurrent symbolic participation in a cosmological, mythical event. It is one form of repetition of the original event (Eliade 1953), a temporal and spatial form of representation of the sacred that owes its historical origins to a spatial revelational moment. Moreover, it sets “the frame for the narration of stories although the epiphanic event itself is beyond any reasonable account” (Giesen 2006, p. 369). It follows that the theatre-goers and the actors who inhabit the two boxes, the large and the small, take part in a theatrical ritual from the moment they appear to the moment they leave. This insight is consistent with Alexander’s assertion that “It is the actuality of myth that marks ritual.” The separation of ritual from Greek drama, based on Frankfort’s work, generalizes by accommodating rituals in Asian empires, where “[the] purpose is to translate actuality in the unchanging form of myth. […] The

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gods appear and speak once more the words they spoke ‘the first time’” (Frankfort 1948, pp. 135–136, in Alexander 2006, p. 46). The theory of the spectaculum assumes the existence of a state of tension between form and content. Namely, to experience the sublime one must disregard the content and surrender to the frame. Just the same, a ritual cooperation that preserves the structure of boxes and is familiar to all theatre-goers whose interest lies elsewhere—who seek an experience of flow that disregards the frame and surrenders to the content—is still necessary (Giesen 2006, p. 347). Approximating this insight, Giesen writes: […] Theatrical performances […] cannot dispense with a ritual framing that constitutes the particular reality of the theatre, but is not part of the theatrical mimesis in the strict sense: when for example, the curtain opens at the beginning of the performance or when the audience is giving applause at the end, then the person opening the curtain does not play at being a curtain opener and the audience is not playing at clapping their hands—instead they are performing a constitutive ritual that frames the theatrical mimesis. Thus theatrical mimesis, in order to fascinate the audience, has to be framed by rituals that not only, by their very nature, avoid the question of authenticity but that also embrace audience and actors on stage alike. These embracing rituals or modulations in the Goffmanian sense (taking seats after the gong sounds, being silent after the light is dimmed, giving applause when the curtain falls, etc.) are events on their own, but they also iterate previous events of theatrical rituals […]. (2006, p. 348, author emphasis)

The theatre’s box structure in all its dimensions and all participants’ compliance with the rules of the theatrical event—apart from the gaze, which sometimes wishes to free itself from the story line—are the formal ensemble that accommodates the content of the cosmological consciousness of man–God relations. Akin to this is the form-versus-content tension that lies at the very core of the exalted theatrical experience—the tension between “what” and “how,” a dialectic that, when studied, refines the characteristics of the art, including its ability to accommodate the transcendental (Beit-Hallahmi 1986; Rappaport 1999; Otto 1966). ∗ ∗ ∗ The ultimate purpose is the spectaculum—a theatrical “giving of Torah” in the sense of revealing a theory. My interpretation, in which the archaic myth of the Sinai Revelation embodies a theory as a component of the

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event, may justify an etymological separation of the theatrical spectacle, which focuses on the audience’s gaze, from all configurations of spectacle in Western societies. I make this separation by invoking the term spectaculum, one that reverts to the Latin source and, by so doing, symbolizes the consciousness of the distant past. Given the meaning of this term, one should also contemplate the etymological similarity of theatre and theory, both of which trace to the Greek thea, a place from which one may observe or see (Weber 2004, p. 3). Wilshire contends: Theatron, the word for theatre, is related to the¯ oria, spectacle, but this can also mean speculation and theory. Thus it is suggested that theatre, at its origins, was its own mode of speculating and theorizing about human nature and action. It is not identical with philosophy’s mode of theorizing, for what it presents directly to historic perception—the conditions for the coherence of a life or lives—is argued for by philosophy. (1982, p. 33)

If so, the spectaculum is a theory of the content of reception based on appearance within the small box. Now one asks in puzzlement: How is a Torah without a plot, one that lacks the words of a dramatic story, conceivable? Alter says that an audience receives on only two levels: by understanding the meaning of a story and by having an emotional experience (1990, p. 153). This places the foregoing question in sharper focus: How can the Torah be received by way of gaze? How does one grasp it by sitting in the dark and contemplating the light? It seems improbable, but this improbability is not devoid of traces in theatrical and philosophical thinking. As stated, theoreticians attest that they long ago detected a fundamental of hidden innerness in the theatrical “seen,” namely, that some of what’s invisible is embodied in what’s visible. Rayner finds, for example, that the theatre creates the invisible in the visible, “[refusing] to consent to the idea that invisible, immaterial, or abstract forces are illusions […] or that the division between matter and spirit is absolute” (2006, p. xi). Others explain Christianity’s adoption of the theatre as a quest for the invisible (Rozik 2002b; Harris 1990) and Carlson, as stated, associates the theatrical event behind the drama with a “religious experience” (1997, p. 35). I find a strong if not tangible expression of this abstraction in a remark by Peter Brook about the “holy theatre”: “We know the world of appearance is a crust, under the crust is the boiling matter as we peer into a volcano” (Brook 1969, p. 58).

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We have already encountered Barthes’ discovery of a “third meaning” in a cinematic work (Barthes 1991). Buber’s demarche resembles Barthes’ even though it concerns itself with transcendental meaning. From Buber’s commentary on one of the Hasidic legends that he collected, we learn about belief in the reality of the Torah or in a covert insight immeasurably deeper than the Israelites’ revealed “Torah.” This Torah, known as the “hidden light,” is situated between the letters: “In fact, not only the black letters but also the white gaps between them are letters of the Torah. However, we cannot read the white gaps” (Buber in Avnon 1998, p. 122). Avnon elaborates: We read in this tale an allusion to a hidden reality indicated by the white gaps between the black letters. Its absence is only apparent, an effect of the reader’s focus on the foreground of the text at the expense of noting its inseparable background. […] To render the white gaps relevant to our understanding, we first have to see them as signs. […] Perceiving the black letters differently, in a manner that would bring the white gaps to the fore as “letters,” implies seeing the page with revised sight […]. (ibid.)

The legend invests the white gaps with the status of signs and sets them at the forefront of consciousness without negating the meaning of the black letters, creating a dialectic. Thus, it speaks of the potential of the inquisitive gaze and searches for a meaning that is invisible and therefore unread. This gaze “involves perseverance, doggedness, as if animated by the hope of adding to its discovery” (Buci-Glucksmann 2013, p. 5). The invisible within the visible is an essence or an inadequately decoded enigma, a situation that signifies a theoretical lacuna. Inspired by dialectical insights such as these, this essay, concerning a work of art that addresses and modifies the theatrical tradition, will show powerfully how the act of pivoting away from the drama reveals and discovers reality. For the stage world, it illuminates a covert system of meaning that repeats itself at every theatrical event, delivers itself from backstage to stage, and evinces itself in the mythical whole of the spectaculum.

Notes 1. This is the first of three basic types of contemporary theatre in Helbo and Johansen’s (1991) typology: “generally well-subsidized national theatres, the twentieth-century palaces of culture, found in sites befitting their role as

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national monuments, in landscaped parks or as central elements in modern building complexes” (p. 55). 2. The Israeli repertory theatre is part-and-parcel of Western theatre. The organizational and artistic aspects of its endeavors indicate as much (Ben-Zvi 1996). Its “Westernness” is associated with the origin of its people, executives, artistic directors, and artists, nearly all of whom are Ashkenazi Jews who immigrated to Israel from Europe or America—or their children or grandchildren—and with the inclusion of the pioneers of the Hebrew theatre in this group (Kohansky 1969). The most influential designers of the theatrical spectacle—veteran actors, stage directors, and set makers—have similar Western professional biographies. They attended European or American acting schools (e.g., IDHEC, the high academy of cinema studies in Paris, the London School of Acting, or the academy of music and drama in Sofia). These creative artists, having spent 40–60 years contributing professionally to the Israeli mainstream theatre, are committed to professional standards and norms that pertain to their perceptions of acting, casting, and the training and advising of younger actors. Israeli theatrical artists are characterized by their continual penchant for interpretations that refer to Western dramas, regular use of non-Hebrew concepts, and frequent visits to European theatres for the performance of “Israeli” plays. A mental nativism is at work, one not weakened by immigration to Israel and reinforced by the consciousness of globalization. Therefore, it would be no overstatement to term it basically indistinguishable from the nativism “to the world of European Theatre” that Hastrup (2004, p. 18) attributes to the artists of the Royal Shakespeare Company. 3. From a critical perspective, one may argue that the dominance of performance has implications for the sub-conceptualization of ethnography as a research method and for the status of the theatre as a research field. I mean that the fruitfulness of the concept has helped to sire a so-called performing anthropology/ethnography that translates typical participant-observer anthropological work into performative terms (Turnbull 1990) and into an attempt to impart ethnographic knowledge of rituals and social dramas of “other cultures” by setting this knowledge, didactically and operatively, within a “play frame” (Turner and Turner 2007; Saldana 2011)—a process as one in which “anthropology is being theatricalized” (Schechner 1985, p. 33). Second and more important, the view of performance as the essence of theatrical practice has overshadowed the theatre as a cultural arena or organization that deserves holistic ethnographic research in its own right. Unsurprisingly, then, the discipline of “theatre anthropology” originates not in anthropology but in theatre studies (Watson 1996). 4. The main arenas that I visited included rehearsals for a co-production by two theatres, acting schools, a university department of theatre art, and various places where I encountered actors, directors, stage hands, and so on. The

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5. 6. 7.

8.

9. 10. 11.

12. 13. 14. 15.

protracted field work spanned the entire artistic scenario, from training students in scriptwriting and acting to post-premier performances. I based my findings on personal participation in seven theatrical events, thirty-one formal interviews with actors, directors, and a set manager, dozens of informal talks with various artists in the course of four months of watching rehearsal, and finally, ongoing collection of documents related to the theatres. She elaborates on this under the title “The Uninvited Guest” (2004, p. 32). Inspired by Alexander (2006), as stated. The more we replace the words “location,” “place,” and “site” with the word “structure,” the more Carlson’s theory offers an important insight on the nexus of the theatre and the sacred myth: “The most ancient records that we have of theatre activity are closely associated with the process of site sacralization, of performance carried out in ‘haunted; locations. The narratives of cultural memory often have specific spatial associations […] Every faith has established holy places with real or legendary association to that great events in its founding or its development, places visited by pilgrims as an act of celebration or affirmation of that faith” (ibid., p. 136). What I’ve said so far elucidates the expected wealth of the concept of the spectaculum as compared with opsis , the Greek word for vision. It is one of the six constituent parts of tragedy in Aristotle’s Poetics , the dimension of stage production associated with actors, costumes, masks, and sets. According to current conventional wisdom, Aristotle gave this dimension ambivalent treatment. Quotation marks in the original. For overviews on the topic, see Clarke (1981) and Sass (2014). Since the discussion here focuses on the myth and the theatre’s accommodation of it as a ritual event (and not as a ritual), as noted above, I do not consider it correct to deal with the anthropological polemic about the relationship between ritual and myth and its connection with the tension between structuralism and phenomenology. See, mainly, Chapter 2. This epistemological issue finds especially explicit support in the field of existential anthropology (Jackson 2005). Midrash Aggada, Deuteronomy, 343. Characters in The Master Builder: Halvard Solness, the master builder; Mrs. Aline Solness, his wife; Dr. Herdal, the family doctor; Knut Brovik, a sometime architect now working for Solness; Ragnar Brovik, his son, a draftsman; Kaja Fosli, his niece, a bookkeeper; Hilde Wangel; and other women. People in the street Summary: Halvard Solness, a master builder and self-taught architect, is married to Aline, a woman above his station. Through an ambitious career, he has built himself into a man of power in his home town, and it is hinted that he founded his success on an incident in which his wife’s childhood

1

16.

17. 18. 19. 20.

21. 22.

23.

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home burned to the ground. Aline has never got over the loss of her childhood home and the death of her newborn twins soon after. Lately, she has also been worried about her husband’s mental health, as she confides to their family doctor and friend, Dr. Herdal. Solness has three employees: Ragnar Brovik; his father Knut Brovik, who as a younger man trained Solness in his work and is now an ailing, bitter old man; and Kaja Fosli, who is engaged to Ragnar but deeply and unhappily in love with Solness. When Solness finds out that Ragnar wants to set up a business of his own, he is unwilling to help Ragnar, whom he tries to get Kaja to marry, in order to keep them both in his own employment. Solness has an unexpected visit by a young woman, Hilde Wangel, whom he met ten years earlier at a ceremony where the roofing of a church tower he had built in her home town was celebrated. She tells him that on that occasion, he had kissed her and promised to return in ten years’ time to offer her a “kingdom,” which she has now come to claim. Solness has just built a new house, with a high tower, for Aline and himself, and Hilde dares him to climb to the top of the tower carrying a celebratory wreath as he has done before, although he is obviously afraid of heights. As he reaches the top, she waves a white shawl and calls out in triumph, but the master builder falls to his death (Ibsen 1966). In this essay, the word “classic” denotes not a historical era but a dictionary meaning: simple, pure, elegant, and traditional (Thesaurus, Oxford University Press). See elaboration in the next chapter. See Rokem’s analysis of Ibsen’s plays as part of his argument about the persistent appearance of the deus ex machina in the modern theatre (2003). Quoted from Conversation with Wagner. Paraphrased from Megged, “Toward a New Drama,” a Hebrew translation of Brecht’s “Short Description of a New Technique of Acting which Produces an Alienation Effect.” Paraphrased from Megged, “The Alienation Effect,” 1966, p. 340. It is also noteworthy here that, according to Lehmann, the dramatic theatre reaches its demise when wholeness, illusion, and representation of the world serve no longer as a regulating principle but as one possible variant of the theatrical art. I can only admit that this rule totally excludes the dramas in the Tel Aviv repertory theatres and Ibsen’s The Master Builder. These theatres, which lie outside the “new theatre” category, are described by Lehmann as “tend[ing] not to dare to deviate from the unproblematic consumption of fables” (p. 27). Given the way Lehmann discusses tradition and the postdramatic, it is almost certain that he would consider the current project of consciousness a deviation and a playful exploration of the possible that transcends tradition.

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24. I prefer the word “contentless” to “postdramatic” because the theatre of concern to me is a dramatic one that remains intact per se and in all its features (Lehmann 2006, pp. 21–22) apart from the gaze. 25. The concept of a semiosphere owes its origins to Lotman (1984). 26. The expression “the fourth look” corresponds to four kinds of gaze that are relevant to cinema as described by Mulvey (1975). Since only three of them are relevant to the theatre, the additional one that I noted is the fourth. 27. The excerpts are free back-translations from the Hebrew script used in the production that I observed. 28. As Brecht writes in “The Alienation Effect”: If an actor wishes to invoke the alienation effect, she must present the audience with the story being acted in a way that will clarify that it is indeed just an “act” and not a “reality” (Megged 1966, pp. 340–341). 29. As I encountered in an online story about the audience’s reaction to the debut performance of this play. 30. This analysis is inspired by Schechner’s (2003) attitude toward the spectators’ “selective inattention” in the course of the quasi-ritual performance (pp. 211–234). 31. Quoted in Koslofsky (2011), p. 109. 32. Ibid. 33. Quoted in Koslofsky (2011, p. 81). 34. Quoted in Koslofsky (2011, p. 127). 35. Ibid. 36. Ibid. 37. Collected Sayings of Rabbi Nachman, Torah, Part 1, 52 (in Hebrew). 38. This is elaborated upon in the next chapter. 39. See overview in Schwarz (1966). 40. This is demonstrated in Wayne Rood’s (mentioned above in the context of Christian drama) application of Buber’s dialogical approach in his The Art of Teaching Christianity (1968). 41. See also Levi’s comprehensive and impressive analysis of the correlations between Lévi-Stauss’sstructuralism and Jewish mysticism (Levi, 2009). 42. As I make this case, I acknowledge a difference that deserves emphasis: When I use the words “plot” or “drama,” I do not intend them to be construed as in the Structuralist theory that approaches myths such as this from the perspective of their beginning-to-end narrative integrity. The “plot” or the “drama” refers only to God’s words to Moses and the Decalogue that is part of the myth account. These words are synonymous with the Torah in the sense of the teaching, the textual content, that was handed down on the mountain-stage. The resulting clarification begins to create a structural similarity between the story, with its believers–deity–Torah trinity, and the theatre, typified by the threesome of audience–stage–plot.

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Moody, R. (1975). Life After Life: The Investigation of a Phenomenon: Survival of Bodily Death. Atlanta: Mockingbird Books. Mulvey, L. (1975). Visual pleasure and narrative cinema. Screen, 16, 6–18. Nietzsche, F. (2001 [1882]). The Gay Science (J. Nauckhoff, Trans.). In B. Williams (Ed.), Cambridge Texts in the History of Philosophy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Otto, R. (1966). The Idea of the Holy: An Inquiry into the Non-Rational Factor in the Idea of the Divine and Its Relation to the Rational. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Pavis, P. (1982). Languages of the Stage: Essays in the Semiology of the Theatre. New York: Performing Arts Journal Publications. Pavis, P. (1992). Theatre at the Crossroads of Culture. New York: Routledge. Rappaport, J. (2008). Beyond participant observation: Collaborative ethnography as theoretical innovation. Collaborative Anthropologies, 1, 1–31. Rappaport, R. A. (1999). The numinous, the holy, and the divine. In Ritual and Religion in the Making of Humanity (pp. 371–404). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Rayner, A. (2006). Ghosts: Death’s Double and the Phenomena of Theatre. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Read, A. (1993). Theatre and Everyday Life: An Ethics of Performance. New York: Routledge. Renan, E. (1855). Histoire Générale et Systèmes Comparés des Langues Sémitiques. Paris: Imprimerie impériale. Rokem, F. (2003). Deus ex machina in the modern theatre: Theatre, history and theatre history. In W. B. Worthen & P. Holland (Eds.), Theorizing Practice: Redefining Theatre History (pp. 177–195). New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Rood, W. (2000). Theatre and Religion. Berkeley, CA: Pacific School of Religion. Rozik, E. (2002a). Mapping the complex relations between theatre and religion: A reading of theatre and holy script. Semiotica, 142, 397–418. Rozik, E. (2002b). The Roots of Theatre: Rethinking Ritual and Other Theories of Origin. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press. Saldana, J. (2011). Ethnotheatre: Research from Page to Stage. Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast Press. Sass, L. (2014). Lacan, Foucault, and the ‘crisis of the subject’: Revisionist reflections on phenomenology and post-structuralism. Philosophy, Psychiatry, and Psychology, 21(4), 325–341. Savidge, D. (2009). A survey of Christianity and theatre in history. In T. E. Johnson & D. Savidge (Eds.), Performing the Sacred: Theology and Theatre in Dialogue (pp. 19–50). Ada, MI: Baker Academic. Schechner, R. (1962). The unexpected visitor in Ibsen’s late plays. In R. Fjelde (Ed.), Ibsen: A Collection of Critical Essays (pp. 158–168). Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice-Hall.

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Schechner, R. (1985). Points of contact between anthropological and theatrical thought. In R. Schechner (Ed.), Between Theatre and Anthropology (pp. 3–33). Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Schechner, R. (2002). Performance Studies: An Introduction. New York: Routledge. Schechner, R. (2003). Performance Theory. New York and London: Routledge. Schiffman, G. (1985). Classics of the Israeli theatre. Iton 77 for Literature and Culture, 38–40, 63. Schwartz, M. (1966). Safa, mitus, omanut: ‘iyyunim ba-mahshava ha-yehudit ba’et ha-hadasha [Language, Myth, Art: Studies in Modern Jewish Thought]. Jerusalem: Schocken. Segal, A. (1999). Te’atronim be-erets yisarel ha-qeduma [Theatres in Ancient Eretz Israel]. Jerusalem: Bialik Institute. Sevänen, E. (2001). Art as an autopoietic sub-system of modern society: A critical analysis of the concepts of art and autopoietic systems in Luhmann’s late production. Theory, Culture and Society, 18(1), 75–103. Shavit, Y. (1987). Ha-yesh la-yehudim dimayon? Tekhunot bene Shem u-tekhunot bene Yefet—shemi’im ve-ari’im ba-polemiqa ha-yehudit ha-modernit [Do Jews have imagination? Characteristics of the sons of Shem and the sons of Japhet— Semites and Aryans in modern Jewish polemics]. In S. Ettinger (Ed.), Ben yisrael la-umot [Between Israel and the Nations] (pp. 215–241). Jerusalem: Zalman Shazar Centre for Jewish History. Shevtsova, M. (2002). Appropriating Pierre Bourdieu’s champ and habitus for the sociology of stage production. Contemporary Theatre Review, 12(3), 35–66. Sontag, S. (1966). Against Interpretation and Other Essays. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Souriau, E. (1950). La cube la sphere. In V. Andre (Ed.), Architecture et la dramaturgie. Paris States, B. O. (1987). Great Reckonings in Little Rooms: On the Phenomenology of Theatre. London: University of California Press. Steger, B., & Brunt, L. (2003). Introduction: Into the night and the world of sleep. In B. Steger & L. Brunt (Eds.), Night-Time and Sleep in Asia and the West (pp. 1–24). New York: Routledge. Tillich, P. (1987). On Art and Architecture. New York: Crossroad. Tolstoy, L. N. (1957). War and Peace (Translated and with an introduction by Rosemary Edmonds). London: Penguin Books. Turnbull, C. (1990). Liminality: A synthesis of subjective and objective experience. In R. Schechner & W. Apple (Eds.), By Means of Performance: Intercultural Studies of Theatre and Ritual (pp. 50–81). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Turner, V. (1974). Dramas, Fields and Metaphors. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Turner, V. (1988). The Anthropology of Performance. New York: PAJ Publications.

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Turner, V. (1990). Are there universals of performance in myth, ritual, and drama? In R. Schechner & W. Appel (Eds.), By Means of Performance: Interculture Studies of Theatre and Ritual. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Turner, V., & Turner, E. (2007). Performing ethnography. In H. Bial (Ed.), The Performance Studies Reader. New York: Routledge. Urian, D. (1988). Drama ve-te’atron [Drama and Theatre]. Tel Aviv: ORAM. Urian, D. (2008). Te’atron ba-hevra [Theatre in Society]. Ra’anana: The Open University of Israel. Watson, I. (1996). Eugenio Barba’s theatre anthropology: An intercultural methodology. In P. Pavis (Ed.), Intercultural Performance Reader (pp. 223–230). New York: Routledge. Weber, S. (2004). Theatricality as Medium. New York: Fordham University Press. Wilshire, S. (1982). Role Playing and Identity: The Limits of Theatre as Metaphor. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Yates, F. (1969). Theatre of the World. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Yehezkel, K. (1947). The Exodus: Vestiges of a Play by the Dramatist Yehezkel, Author of Jewish Tragedies (Translated from Greek to Hebrew by S. Spahn). Tel Aviv: Yavne.

CHAPTER 2

Aesth-Ethics

As the theatrical event winds down, it transitions to a de rigueur act of prostration. Under the glow of the lights on Broadway and in London, Amsterdam, and Tel Aviv, the actors shed their characters’ masks and bow deeply to the audience. Now they look the audience in the eye, their gaze having almost nothing in common with dictates of emotion or a plot that has just been put to rest. So it seems. However, even this gesture of selfexposure, of directness of gaze, is somewhat rooted in the stage world. For it is not due to having timed out from the dictates of performance that the actors approach the precipice of the stage and grasp one another’s hands. They are still obeying something; they are far from casting aside the yoke of compulsory signing.1 Their prostration per se mimics something familiar in ritual arenas, something equipped with structural markers or, should we say, something that demarcates the stage in contraposition to the audience with an especially high fence. After all, however expected it may be, curtsying is alien to the daily lives of theatre-goers in contemporary Western societies, who will swiftly return to the entrance square and then vanish into the bustle of the street. Bowing, as both a word and a deed in their secularized form, is exclusive to the theatre—a signifier that has no signified in the surrounding repertoire of gestures. For this reason, it seems, it managed to evade Goffman’s otherwise airtight analyses. Nevertheless, inspired by the ritual grammar of Goffman’s study, I find in it a structural microcosm: As an analytical prefix, the forward and backward tilting of the upper body has the appearance of a demonstrative motive deployment, a gesture that © The Author(s) 2020 T. Gamliel, The Theatrical Spectaculum, Palgrave Studies in Literary Anthropology, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-28128-1_2

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in order to exist demands physical distance from the Other, who, by being near, has richly earned the place across the way. I once found, in a text on the topic of symbolic interaction among Westerners, a photo of two Japanese men bowing to each other in their robes, in their traditional sandals, and with their shaven heads, clutching straw hats close to their chests, bodies tilted at a right angle, two meters or so apart—a thick demonstration of face-to-face rituality. As a symbolic gesture, the freighted meanings of the theatrical bow fall into order nicely on the basis of this contrast. “Taking a bow” is one of the autotelic products of the stage world in the broad sense of this expression, i.e., as a theatrical culture. It attests to the Otherness of the quintessential members of this culture, namely, the actors. Under the glare of the lights, there is good reason to dwell on this prostration as the bearer of a symbolism of mute surrender. The actors’ repeated bowing, however fetching it may be, is performed soundlessly as though by Trappist monks, as something that is foreknown. Thus the actors estrange themselves from the vocal performance of their roles, which they have just carried out at length. They are not the only participants in this estrangement. Their curtsy, a banal act of ritual closure circumscribed with sociality, is a ritual movement of inversion of form and gaze in the large box as well as in the small one. As the actors bow silently in the aftermath of their exhibitionist performance, the audience also estranges itself from its role, casting aside its voiceless passivity and cheering from its seats. Sometimes it even rises to its feet at the spectacle of the cast’s orderly prostration. Cast and audience, or, one should say, each side commits itself to inverting the most powerful medium of expression that it can invoke in the boxy space that contains it. This reversal of form—gaze and lifting of gaze as the ritual dictates—signifies a transition from the theatrical event to the reality that surrounds it. In one stroke, the audience becomes aware of itself and its place, its time, and the discomfiture of reality. The muteness and the submissive appearance of the cast’s prostration, in turn, are consistent with what awaits the actors from now to their next theatrical event, befitting their daily portion. By lowering their heads and falling silent, the actors return to the liminal, compartmentalized reality of the hidden rehearsal rooms where they spend most of their professional lives. Again they will immerse themselves in the secret backstage work that some of them call a “noble routine.” When they are done bowing, the actors march toward the stage doors before they vanish. This rarely evokes curiosity, let alone puzzlement, among the scattering audience. Natasha Rostova’s contemplative eyes,

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however, are not swept away by the magic. The unease of returning to the here-and-now isn’t for those eyes. All these spectacles, this celebration of people and objects in motion, whet their excitement all the more. A woman’s greenish scarf half-falls, half-drifts like a feather to the floor. A man presses an unlit cigarette to his lips with a cowboyish motion. Two lovers grasp each other’s hands as they clamber out of their row of seats as though extricating themselves from a vise. Their dreamy smiles attest to vestiges of dramaticality now doomed to extinction. Natasha’s gaze surrenders to another form of magic that pervades the space away from the stage and turns the banality into saccharine-sweetness. The gaze pays special homage to the ushers, who embody the word “order.” The ushers are like sentries, declared loyalists of orderliness. Before people crowd herd-like at the exit, Natasha’s gaze also tracks the two sides of the curtain as they approach to kiss each other and blanket the stillness of what remains of the spectaculum. The questions now are three: How did the builders of this spectaculum create it? Of what psychological and cognitive stuff is it made? And foremost, how can its unseen inherencies, the invisibilities of what is visible in the hidden offstage labor, be anchored? The textuality-of-visitation will answer in the manner of the challenge that Peter Brook handed down by asserting that “The notion that the stage is a place where the invisible can appear has a deep hold on our thoughts” (Brook 1969, p. 38). Alexander’s remarks do not necessarily pertain to stage actors but do suggest by allusion that we are searching in the right place. Countering Nietzsche’s claim that every culture that loses its myth loses its natural and healthy creativity, Alexander contends that “From a moral point of view, it is often healthy to be skeptical of myths, to see through the efforts of actors to seamlessly re-fuse the elements of performance” (2006, p. 78). The epistemological strategy of the visit lends the spectaculum in this chapter the status of a reference. Like every signifying gesture, the reference built into the spectaculum as a grounded spectacle entails an act of migration: We are to follow the artists and stay within the externality of the theatrical event (on its fringes) on the other side of the boxes. It is there, without the collective awareness, in arenas of “moving-toward,” somewhat dusty and pale in their white neon light, that in-depth anthropology should observe and innovate2 through the internal grammar of creative thinking, i.e., creation by human beings in the here-and-now. Stairs descend from the rear of the stage. They are the symbolic embodiment of the path that awaits grounded theory, somewhat gloomily; they

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lead to the womb of the creative act. Catherine Lutz would almost certainly endorse this expression to denote the division of the gender work that has taken shape between the male tendency to theorization and the female tendency to ethno-graphic gleaning (Lutz 1995). In an amazingly similar although non-generic stance focusing on the manual toil of “stage hands” (a.k.a. theatre technicians), Rayner (2002) critiques the academic hierarchy that credits the written word of literary, critical, and historical discourses with cultural capital even as scholars are clueless about what takes place behind the scenes: The dismissal of labor as merely necessary (and not worth speaking of) reflects a connection between the theological of theatre practice to institutional pragmatism that places such labor in service to other ends. […] The apparently innocent or accidental exclusion of technical theatre from critical and historical discourses seems less innocent when it is a question of power relations between dominant classes and otherness. (p. 545)

In-depth anthropology, which long ago joined the audience as an onlooker, as well as Goffman in his seat on the sidelines—straddling the latitudinal line between stage and backstage—must now migrate in the actors’ wake to the secret domains of creative turbulence. So they must, even though any epistemology that seeks its nourishment in documented minutiae is doomed to de-reputation when it moves from the theoretician’s abode to a place where people sweat. “[T]heater and anthropology each represented a cosmos, making multiple moving shifting universes, which however could easily converge at some points due to certain inherent resonances,” says Gatt (Ang and Gatt 2017, p. 74). From a structural perspective, one may claim that the logic of glorifying the staged at the expense of the process in which it is grounded is inherent to the Western theatre. In principle, too, it coheres with that of grounded theory in ethnographic research (Strauss and Corbin 1998). Metaphorically, much like the spatial contrast between the artistic process (backstage) and the full performance (on stage), the data-gathering process inhabits the field of research while theory (even in its analytical form) lies at the cutting edge of knowledge. Furthermore, research methodology itself is a complex and evolutionary creative process. Just as a theatrical show is the purpose of an artistic process, so is theory the purpose of methodology. Moreover, both projects target an “audience” (of viewers or of readers, respectively). In a more significant convergence of research and theatre,

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most of the data I documented emanate from the process in which a play is created (rehearsals), one that itself includes the processing of “data” (= a dramatic concept) by the actors and the director for the attainment of the “right” performance. Consequently, as ultimate goals, both ethnographic theory and the stage “world” are grounded in the same data, prompting us to expect them to correspond strongly. Due to this convergence, one may theorize about the stage “world” in accordance with the artistic-culture meanings in which this world is grounded and examine its cultural status as a projection of the totality of its creators’ practices and values. These meanings are implied in dramatic conventions and artists’ reflections about them, as my research on the phases before, during, and after the artistic work reveals. These conventions are (by definition) general units of information in theatrical work—units that correspond to cultural conventions. By recurring in production after production, the conventions of dramatic culture form a substrate for the entire stage “world,” which is experienced as a whole that exceeds the sum of its parts. To be more precise, they abet the construction of the spectaculum as a theatrical dimension that transcends the contents of a specific play and, therefore, the linear time perception of the progression of the plot. The backstage is a deep and narrow place of meaning, an exceptional venue in our environs, a theatrical monastery. This monastery of labor— if I may address myself to the time dimension—is a good fit for the Old Testament account of Moses and his forty-day stay on Mount Sinai. Those were sacred days, on which the Law was inscribed on tablets of stone, a backstage-stage of unsurpassed exaltation in anticipation of the handing down of the Torah. With a magnificence that surpasses the human capacity for expression, a face-to-face encounter occurred at that time between the nation’s emissary, Moses, and its God, and there a truth far from the human gaze, one that would descend to earth in letters and in the spaces between them, was communicated. One of the most impressive accounts of the ritualization of acting, likenable to the transformation that Moses underwent between his ascent to the summit of Sinai and his descent with his face aglow, is found in Johnson and Savidge in reference to David Cole’s theory of the theatre (Cole 1975, p. 15): The manifestation of this illud tempus [the world of archetypal myths] in the theatre-ritual is the work of the actor, and this he accomplishes in the same manner as the leaders of primitive rituals: shamans and hungans. This

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approach to acting theory is presentational as opposed to re-presentational. […] The Shaman is a “psychic voyager to the world of the gods” and the hungan is a human “whose presence becomes, through possession, a god’s presence.” According to Cole, “For the actor, shamanism and hunganism are […] successive phases” of his encounter with the illud tempus […] In the manner of a shaman, he opens a ‘way out’ toward the illud tempus , and then, in the manner of a hungan, he himself becomes the ‘way back’ of the illud tempus toward us.” Cole calls this reversal, “in which the actor goes from shaman to hungan—from masterful explorer to mastered vehicle—the ‘rounding.’ […] It is in the moment of the rounding that the theatre, as an event, is born.” (Johnson and Savidge 2009, pp. 45–46)

What I present here, however, is not a scriptural acting theory but the painstaking work behind its implementation. Large black-and-white photographs along the walls of narrow corridors greet the stranger-anthropologist before she visits the actors’ rooms, rehearsal rooms, and other chambers and offices. These blowups document unforgettable scenes in theatre history. After them come still-barren lengths of wall that await pictures of living or dead actors who will gain admission to this lower-pantheon honor by leaving some imprint on the culture of the theatre. Expressive creasing of the face, a rakish wave of the hand, clownish wide-eyed bewilderment, and other harvests from the theatricality of movement are commemorated in these black-and-white pictures. There is nothing like this binary to shade and elucidate every matter of consequence within the framed zone. The absence of color in these living but motionless stage situations proclaims, as it were, that they concern the nonrecurrent theatricality of togetherness. More-or-less young actors circulate among the lower rooms in continual commotion. The pictures at this “exhibition” contrast with the background of the bustle of the new artistry to which they are partners. They mediate the legacy of an enterprise in which relations among characters are forged, in a constant reminder that it can echo the etiquette of the game. The reminder rises in amplitude in the transition from picture to picture, as though the hooks that hold the photos up carry the impressions of lots of words and hours and hours of grueling ant-like labor, without which the stage world would not have been constructed in the amazingly complete way that it was. One of the actors indeed called the backstage theatrical space an “ant colony.” I hunted down the expression and documented it in my writings, attaching to it a tone of emic sovereignty that will dominate this chapter from here on. The visitor’s self-estrangement wafts from all corners of the

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backstage, because wherever one turns relative to the rooms—in or out— one encounters the existence of ensemble, communitas (Turner 1969), the formation of human groups of exceptional cognitive tightness, egalitarianism, and close insularity of ranks with which to expel and beware of anything that does not belong. This social reality, encultured by acting schools via various exercises and disciplining, surpasses a tribal intra-cultural reality in traits that reveal fracturing into subgroups and hierarchy and censure politics. Therefore, actors use the words tribe and family as synonyms for communitas only to denote the unifying framework and the extraordinality, namely the rituality, that occasionally typifies them. In this sense, ritual is their province (Amankulor 1989). McAuley, in her ethnography, discovers the same in an Australian theatre. This, as I explain below, enabled me to accept the connection that she describes between interactive rituals and Durkheim’s concept of the collective consciousness, but not to accept the hint in the title of her book, Not Magic but Work (McAuley 2012), which is geared to the theatrical labor that Tinius (2015), studying a German theatre, takes even farther.3 As for manifestations of this extraordinary communitas, here are two examples. First, I saw actors backstage slicing bread and eating to satiation, as they did together regularly at the end of a show in which the real bread that the audience saw shed its stage role, just as they had. They called what they did a “ritual” before they scattered and went home. Second, I saw an actor crouch facedown on the floor of the rehearsal room along with a group of colleagues and, very slowly and inadvertently, place pieces of trash in the hand of the director, sitting on his chair. The director, bantering with the cast at this time, accepted the scraps firmly and quietly, gathering them into a little heap, as though he were a father who understood the oddities of his young son. The actor’s hopeless act of self-forgetfulness did not put him to the slightest shame. It was one of the loveliest moments of the communitas, confirming the actors’ opinion of the rehearsal room as nothing but a children’s sandbox. In one of the acting classes that I attended, many students were given instruction on breathing together, gravitating in a circle toward the middle of the room and then retreating from it in a flocking motion that was termed the “big lung.” For a moment, they were like fish and birds that moved in unison, namelessly and appearing to the eye as a unitary herd (Lorenz 1966). So beloved is this fusion that one of the veteran actors likened it to a battalion of soldiers in a military show parade. “When everyone’s together, a mass of people in one direction, it’s got power,” he said in an

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affectionate nod to this aspect of fascism. Another actor lauded it from a different direction, asserting that working like ants “in crazy hours” makes people “part of one big body.” He likened this big body to a machine and the actors to its parts. Schechner wrote the following about this (comparing it with traditional theatres such as Noh): In Euro-American theatre it is not so important that an artist be shaped to conform to a particular set of performative expectations already laid down by tradition. It is more important that the artist’s “instrument” (=body and soul) be able to flexibly adapt to this or that temporary grouping of people and with them swiftly and efficiently release feelings and, along with choreographer or director, invent or call upon a stock of movements, gestures, voices, and emotions. If this is accomplished, maybe audiences will believe that this temporary group is an “ensemble”. (1985, p. 20)

∗ ∗ ∗ At the threshold of the rehearsal room, its door ajar, several visitors who have come in the name of philosophy stand in an imaginary array, their imagination triggered and their ideas violated by this theatrical venue. Standing next to them are representatives of anthropology, even though the ethics in this field continue to depend on dialoguing with the “queen of sciences” (Mattingly and Throop 2018). I will take up philosophical anthropology again below; for the time being, I should say that the metaphor of sentries at the door is especially apt when one recalls Deleuze’s and Guattari’s exhortation to scholars who wish to cross the threshold and step in: “Listen to the practitioners” (Cull 2009a, p. 7). This urging, for which anthropological professionalism has no need, delivers a shock and captures the intellectual imagination because it is akin to a call to release the living from their shackles. Theatre is philosophy; these theoreticians’ thinking presupposes the existence of a hyphen between artist and philosopher and deletes it from everything pertaining to the artist’s relations with the Other. One who takes Deleuze’s and Guattari’s advice opens oneself to the non-representational immanence of acting, the deep internal processivity of this form of art, which is unmistakably devoid of being and instead is typified by continual becoming that is forever incomplete. Notwithstanding the metaphors of slavery and sacrifice routinely attributed to actors’ work (Deleuze 1989; Grotowsky 1968; States 1987; Alter 1990), these philosophers preach:

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Listen to Robert de Niro when he talks about walking “like” a crab—not as a metaphor, but as metamorphosis. Listen to the masochist […] who uses the apparatus of the bit, bridle and “the boots of the woman-master” to construct a becoming-horse assemblage, that “represents nothing” (and no-one). (in Cull 2009a, p. 8; Deleuze and Guattari 1988, pp. 274, 260)

I extract from this quotation a more general call for listening—not only to de Niro but a listening consistent with our path thus far, which by necessity silences the voices of the dramatic plot in order to amplify those that speak about its construction. The uncommon epistemological value of the listening that Deleuze proposes, not before the flaw in the idea of mimesis and the purpose of the representation embodied in it is accepted, is evident in view of Derrida’s shattering Revelation—which, in its own way, reviles representationism, the god of the theatre, and prescribes the radical deconstruction of this institution. “The stage,” Derrida (1978) contends, is theological for as long as its structure, following the entirety of tradition, comports the following elements: an author-creator who, absent and from afar, is armed with a text and keeps watch over, assembles, regulates the time or the meaning of representation, letting this latter represent him as concerns what is called the content of his thoughts, his intentions, his ideas. He lets representation represent him through representatives, directors or actors, enslaved interpreters who represent characters who, primarily through what they say, more or less directly represent the thought of the “creator.” Interpretive slaves who faithfully execute the providential designs of the “master”. (p. 235)

However true his remarks may be, for Derrida it is impossible, nor are we invited, to contemplate the matter through the criticism that has been applied to actors’ work—an exertion that he considers captive to the dictates of the traditional-theological theatre. Contrarily, the features of Deleuze’s and Guattari’s theatre ontology are constructed from ruins— ruins of the metaphors of acting, of course. After the fact, it even reflects the condemnations of falsity, fraud, and prostitution that have adhered to this profession (Diderot 2007). The cosmological philosophy that they insert into the artistic “within” is meant to reveal the “continuous variation” (Deleuze 1997, p. 253) that rustles under all kinds of performances, even those that are considered representative. “It’s for this that I’m in the theatre […],” a veteran actor proclaimed, enunciating a professional truth that confirms this stance:

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For the secret of the falsity of the truth, of the truth, of the truth, of the truth, of the biggest lie that can suddenly become truth. Of the end of building life […] because it is in fact life. What’s truth? What was written in the account of the Golem of Prague? I relate to you as a Jewish woman. […] E-m-e-t —those are the letters of [the Hebrew word for] truth. Take away the first letter and it becomes m-e-t [dead].

Deleuze’s continuous variation is detectable in the deep strata of acting. It sustains what Carlson (1990) astutely describes as “the illusion of authenticity” (p. 82). I consider it a property that communicates the decoding of the riddle of actors’ Otherness, which Turner (1969) formulates in the following wonderful manner: Artists tend to be liminal and marginal people, “edgemen,” who strive with a passionate sincerity to rid themselves of the clichés associated with status incumbency and role-playing and to enter into vital relations with other men in fact or imagination. In their productions we may catch glimpses of that unused evolutionary potential in mankind which has not yet been externalized and fixed in structure. (p. 128)

This insight has material implications for the way the balance of influence in the culture/drama complex (Hornby 1996) should be phrased. Turner’s view operates on one level, and perhaps the statement that the art of life is represented mimetically on stage (Hastrup 2004, p. 37) does not rest at a different level. The art of life: In this chapter, it concerns a serious derivative of that expression: ethics. My basic assumption, which I should already present here, is that one may draw an analogy between ethical thought in the world of art and ethical thought away from the theatre, and vice versa. The main source of this hypothesis is Martin Buber’s approach. This unusual theatrelover, as I explain below, absorbed what his keen senses told him about what is worthy and what isn’t, and as he exited the theatre hall en route to the fields of life he unspooled a philosophical thread—an invisible thread, yes, but an extant one nonetheless—between the worlds. I do not really know whether one should hold this unusual philosophical demarche responsible for Buber’s absence in the anthropological literature on ethics.4 It is my view, however, that his contribution to the neo-Aristotelean school in phenomenological anthropology would be no smaller than that of Emmanuel Levinas, whose approach has been applied by ethnographers to what is

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called first-personal humanistic virtue ethics (Throop 2010; Benson and O’Neill 2007; Zigon 2007). This chapter and those that follow contribute to this humanistic school by hypothesizing that human existence relates to a process and that the being of human life comprises not a system of qualities but processes of becoming that embody the potential and the possibilities on which the individual may call (Cavell 2004). The contribution may be fulfilled insofar as anthropology promotes the thesis of free choice in the moral act (Laidlaw 2002; Parish 1994; Lambeck 2010) and is willing to analogize intersubjective phenomenology from the theatrical microcosm (Throop 2009; Hollan 2012). This essay facilitates the analogy by inventing for the anthropology of ethics what it invented for the myth: a theoretical brawl between reflexivity and structuralism. In other words, the validity of the claims of the humanistic school of virtue ethics will be accompanied by a description of the effect of the conscious habitus in its share of the set of coercive artistic norms—what one may call an ethical regime—suited to the explanations of the post-structural approach (Mattingly 2012). Perhaps this isn’t a brawl at all because it may reflect the difference, which I have not always maintained strictly, between two complementary concepts: ethics, positioned in the domain of the conscious, and morality, relating to the stratum of social structure and not always conscious (Mattingly and Throop 2018). When all is said and done, the reader will notice the absence of bidirectionality even in the ethics of the stage world—a matter that will not be so bad if the dichotomy, or the dialectic, can enhance the reliability of the stage world and thus enable the theatre to mirror the complex reality of life. Another structural aspect of virtue ethics is the artists’ surrender to the regime of forms, mostly squares and triangles, that inhabit the wealth of interactions from theatre life, and the artists’ tendency to geometricalize their ethical relations with the self and the other—something that fills the stage world to the brim. The ethics will be seen as inseparably intertwined with structure, which it dictates and creates continually. From here to its conclusion, the text, with its ethnographic findings, will corroborate Robbins’ argument about the obligatory nexus of ordinary ethics, which may also be detected in the routine theatrical art of working behind the scenes, and the transcendental and religious experience of the artists and the audience (Robbins 2016).

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An Abstract Machine I now pause at a theatrical square that I never saw anywhere else. I discovered it under sad circumstances, on the first day of my visits to the theatre in October 2007. From then on, I pictured that square again and again, always under the same circumstances. The event is a quasi-burial ceremony for a famous actor/actress, a dignitary of the theatre, who had passed away. It is midday. The theatre admits a large crowd at no charge. The visitors whisper in the packed hall. The “leading actor/actress,” the deceased, is stationed on the empty stage. Four actors position themselves, standing, at the four corners of the coffin, a step away from it, erect but mute, heads bowed. Every few moments, as if at the behest of an invisible but amazingly exacting stage director, one of these sentries is replaced by a new actor who had been waiting his turn backstage. They pass each other with frozen faces that inhibit eye contact. The quietude of the sentries’ work, which acts in the service of the unfamiliar square with its ritual arbitrariness, infects the crowd. Meyerhold, author of the turn-of-the-century On the History and Technique of the Theatre, would identify the edges of the successively staffed square with the four agents of the theatrical event—the playwright, the director, the actor, and the audience (in Fischer-Licht 2008). In the middle of the square, on the stage, the nameless actor occupies the most desirable situation that an actor at career’s end can have. If such actors do not wish literally “to die on the stage,” at least they endorse this denouement as a last kindness in order to station themselves there for “the final act” (Gamliel 2012). Now the dead actor plays a theatrical role and is represented symbolically by the coffin. This is the actor’s fate, Cole would argue—an actor is perennially “living-dead” because his whole performative essence is but an instrument for the realization of fictional characters (1975, p. 65). A dynamic square of actors formed by live actors’ bodies marks his place at the paradoxical focal point of life and death. Finally, silence takes over. The situation is defined as a holy observance. The unending succession of actors proves to be a catatonic, limbs-akimbo performance. An unfamiliar tinge of sadness that should be experienced at such an event emerges slowly from the constancy of this square. I wondered about those moments—What do these stage artists know about geometry and affect? To answer this question, one would do well to consult Fischer-Lichte’s (1997) thesis about the reflection of the historical civilizing process in the European theatre. This work deserves a second-order look here, one cantilevered upon the nexus of possibly geometric metaphors and the

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strongly entrenched stereotype of theatrical endeavor, that of imitation and representation. Referencing Elias (1978), Fischer-Lichte focuses on three theatres: the Baroque, the eighteenth-century bourgeois, and the early twentieth-century avant-garde. Each represents a distinct acting theory that may be positioned on a continuum of historical development. The intent of theatrical representation, as one may infer, has undergone major changes in tandem with psychosocial economic and technological changes in Europe. Initially, in the Baroque era, the idea was to represent emotions; this is plainly evident in the actors’ technical work. The expression crux scenica, denoting a ninety-degree angle formed by the actor’s feet, demonstrates this well. “Such a stance,” Fischer-Lichte explains, “was interpreted as the correct representation of a firm ego which may be attacked by strong emotions but never overwhelmed […]” (ibid., p. 30). This quintessential intent in representation was succeeded in the eighteenth century by the new ideal of “naturalness” and advanced to what was known then as the “Law of Analogy,” according to which the actor’s body is presented as a cultural system that nature itself has created and defined as such. According to Fischer-Lichte’s interpretation: In that the theatre aimed to restore the original language of gestures in the art of acting, it served as a corrective force in the civilizing process which, under the influence of court society, had spoiled and deformed this language to the point that it had been almost completely lost in European culture. (ibid., pp. 33–34)

This approach and its nineteenth-century evolution became institutionalized in the modern bourgeois theatre as the Realist tradition. The analogy in the Law of Analogy, “whereby anything that occurs in the mind has its analogue in the body” (ibid., p. 32), evolved into the theory of a deep dialogue between the actor and him or herself, a doctrine associated in particular with the name of Konstantin Stanislavski. Stanislavski’s Method, as I will show, underwent additional and far-reaching refinement in Deleuze’s and Guattari’s philosophical theory and in actors’ work. In contrast to these approaches, the avant-garde theatre, influenced by Far East approaches, developed by abstractionalizing emotional individualism until perceiving it as a reflection and nothing more. This theatre was typified by a tendency to repress the body as a sensual object; this was manifested in championing the “mechanization of movement” (ibid., p. 37) and inducing a dramatic increase in the semiotization of the actor’s body. Particularly impressive

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in this approach is the mathematical equation that Fischer-Lichte quotes from Meyerhold: “N (the actor) = A1 (the artist who conceives the idea and issues the instructions necessary for its execution) + A2 (the executant who executes the conception of A1)” (ibid., p. 37). Thus, the ninety-degree angle, the Law of Analogy, and the equation are entries in the theatrical lexicon. However surprising it may be, plainly they are among the props that support the experience and magic. The mechanistic language that I describe below is one element in the ethicstructure logic of the totality of the theatrical event. Let us return to Deleuze and Guattari. Their teachings urge us to grasp artistic thought as an “abstract machine,” an art that transcends life as it really is. This machine, for Deleuze and Guattari, represents a fusion of two categories that defies explanation but deserves deeper attention. We begin by presenting its meaning as Zepke (2005) describes it: It creates a new reality, constructs new ways of being, but although inseparable from this innovation of existence, it has no being. The abstract machine is the entirely immanent condition of the new, and thereby receives its Nietzsche definition: its being is becoming […] [It] doesn’t represent anything because nothing exists outside of its action, it is what it does and its immanence is always active. In the middle of things the abstract machine is never an end, it’s a means, a vector of creation. But despite the abstract machine having no form, it is inseparable from what happens: it is the “non-outside” living vitality of matter. As a result, abstract machines are neither ideal identities nor categories of being, and remain entirely unaffected by any transcendent ambitions. (p. 2)

If one may consider the theatrical art an “abstract machine” (ibid.), it is thanks to the work of Laura Cull, who built a bridge between Deleuze and performance—a stable bridge on firm foundations. This bridge may have been there before, almost forever, if we agree to take the risk of engaging in an associative metaphorics that wonders whether the abstract machine isn’t an a-mystic variation of a deus ex machina, a deity in the principled sense of covert and perennial life (an entity that would be unnecessary had the plot not stumbled into a thicket). Or we may relate to a much nearer period, that of the avant-garde theatre, which considers actors “acting machines” (Fischer-Lichte 1997, p. 37).5 In Cull’s reading, theatrical artistic work is a machine and the rehearsal room is the main venue where its properties may be detected. It is here that repetition happens, in the sense of “trying this, trying that, also a form of testing, thus making something new of

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repetition itself […] each time round extracting something other” (Cull 2009a, p. 25, original emphasis). Theatrical repetition, according to Deleuze, is “metaphysics in motion, in action,” without any mediation, “vibrations, rotations, whirlings, gravitations, dances or leaps which directly touch the mind.” All of this, writes Cull, occurs in an empty space filled by signs and masks “through which the actor plays a role which plays other roles” in a Big Bang of pure forces, the dynamics of space itself, spirals of colour and sound, a language that speaks before and through words, gestural, spectral, phantasmic, the desiring forces of repetition with an unexpected power, yet necessarily what it is in the going beyond itself. (ibid., p. 26)

My ethnographic documentation of Deleuze’s “continuous variation” in repetition or rehearsal of the play The Master Builder adheres to artistic mechanism. During the four-month rehearsal period, I spent the first four to six hours of each day observing and the remaining six to eight hours to transcribing the recordings and updating my handwritten field log. This effort yielded a “performance journal” hundreds of pages long6 that documented motions and parts of motions, expressions and fragments of expressions, innumerable variations, and minute fragments of spoken intentions and motions in a construction project that never ended even after the fifth performance after the premiere. I demonstrate this by noting a bit of miseen-scène from the rehearsals: “To sun oneself like a cat” is a little expression that Ibsen places in Hilda’s mouth as the play winds down. My digital field journal made much of it, however, because the actress who played Hilda asked to have it deleted from her lines. Thus this turn of phrase, like others of Ibsenian provenance, was no trivial matter: H. It’s got a sexual connotation. Director: Not to me…. When you say that, if we think there’s something sexual about it, it’s actually good because you don’t broadcast it to Aline. H. It’s just the location of the sentence that bothers me. Because she tries to approach her and there’s an intimacy that comes about between them. The actress who plays Aline tries to explain to H. that the expression is apt because the dearth of sunshine in Scandinavia makes it important. Director: And after the expression, A. suddenly touches you. It’s got currents and an opportunity for something to happen. Actress-partner: I want to take possession of that moment. Within all the shit, sunshine doesn’t get in, and really the whole Scandinavian culture, people

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who live with candles and candlesticks…. The moment of warming up, of taking some of the warmth, stealing this moment causes something to crack. People melt, as it were. Director: It’s a warm-up for the affective thing [that occurs later in the scene]. H. What bothers me is just the cat. Actress-partner: Let’s change it to “like cats.” Director: I don’t accept that [repeats that the sexual angle may be helpful]. Director to partner: After the cat is mentioned, she [A.] suddenly touches you. The audience might think something’s about to happen between you…. If that’s what they think, we’ve gained even more. The sexual [thing] is in the air and it ought to stay there. That’s the whole beauty of it.

Let us multiply this pause hundreds of times over. The graphy of the acting ethno is painstaking; it aspires to be all-encompassing and clings continually to changing scraps of information in order to construct a miseen-scène that has yet to stand confidently. For me, it became a research configuration of enslavement to the professional enslavement of the artists—a willing enslavement, to be sure, and a well-paying one. This is because the manifestations of this enslavement, as brought to light, square with Deleuze’s argument and refute Derrida’s. The wishes of the actors, the director, and the other stage artists center not on the ritual of representation but on the ritual of precision, one of the subjective. The artists’ artistic selves—reflexive, interpretive, and opinionated—are cited from here on in numerous indented quotations that I harvested from the textuality-ofvisitation; the quotations are rich in the essence of the play-acting psyche and fraught with its craving for the truth. We are about to take a journey into the elementary forms of ethics, forms showing that the quasi-mathematical precision of the inner truth is the true god of the theatre. If mimesis is like a gatekeeper of the psyche that emulates awareness by deliberate intent, then buffering between the psyche and the world with a measure of cynicism, of becoming, is transformative. It means getting lost, permeating a large-pored identificational membrane. Just the same, it is to the becoming of an artistic work to which Deleuze (1997) ascribes “surgical precision” (p. 239). A dialectic wording that aptly describes the presumed goal of Stanislavski’s Method, typified by “fastidious grammar” (author emphasis), is “to find the zone of proximity, indiscernibility, or differentiation where one can no longer be distinguished from a woman, an animal, or a molecule” (Deleuze 1998, p. 1, in Cull 2009a, p. 25). Inspired

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by Deleuze’s paean to becoming as a vitality intrinsic to the human psyche, and in view of manifestations of love of repetition—true taking of pleasure in the process, as reported by my actors/research subjects—I reason that acting should be stratified, i.e., should be considered a more epitomic term for the final stage of the performance, the one that, at its inner-surface level, does not distinguish between mime and the lifework of the art. The underpinning of acting, in turn, is gaming , a term well suited to the exactitude of the process of becoming, the intrinsic trial and error of an experience that encounters the difference-in-itself. This is the “commitment to experimentation” that Deleuze has in mind when he relates to “theatre without organs” (in Cull 2009b, p. 252). En route to this commitment, the choice that an acting teacher enunciates is meant to fine-tune the message through which he encultures his students in the world of the theatre, “in order to prevent play-acting” and achieve “authenticity”: There are actors who don’t act but play-act. […] In rehearsals, you get to the right place of digesting it and hearing it for the first time. It’s the first [tine] even though you heard it yesterday and the day before. Then you’re sometimes at a crossroads of choice. […] “Yes, I’ve been here, but now it’s new.” The same innovative process. The process is initial. You feel it was right. You don’t reconstruct this “rightness,” instead, you experience the process. It happens.

When an imaginary actor asks, “How shall I act?” Deleuze replies: “Immerse yourself in the gaming.” Gaming is intrinsic to the construction of artists. It embodies the added processivity, the feature that, in its advanced segments, seemingly attains the configuration of a stage world, the familiar structure that theatre-goers discover and is dispensed into the small box. In correspondence with the structure of the theatrical event, it is correct to say that the elements of testing and decoding in production-gaming make it a cognitive spouse, or one mental side, of and in the service of another game, one long anchored in Alter’s (1990) socio-semiotic theory and attributed to reception by the audience in the large box.7 One of the motivations of theatre-goers, Alter hypothesizes, is the rewarding need to reconstruct imaginary worlds. This imperative arises in view of the missing segments of the imaginary world that they behold, since it always looks incomplete and unstable. To accept the thesis of the boxes as a complementary structure of stage and audience, one must claim that just as the stage world is concretized, the artists’ game, played with “surgical precision,” must also

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calculate gaps and leave them behind. In turn, the game on the audience’s side will fill these lacunae to create an experience of completeness. This is the structural-gap thesis that one encounters in literature, a theory that sees every work of literature as composed of tatters that readers must sew together as they read (Perry and Sternberg 1968). Thus, the exposition chosen in rehearsal to prepare the audience for the plot is revealed to this audience at the beginning of the show. When the light first goes on, the actress who plays Kaia crouches on the stage next to Solness as the latter sits on an armchair, legs extended and moving a cloth across his legs as if to dry them. At the foot of the armchair stands a cauldron, over which Kaia’s hands make a wringing motion. Due to its lack of words, like the lack of bathing water, the audience almost certainly and immediately understands what the characters are doing and sizes up the nature of relations between the “secretary” and her employer, the “master builder.” The artists and the audience determine, to different degrees, the mental work on social conventions and dramaticality (Burns 1972). To earn their reward, each side in its own box needs a concretization that is both inspiring and balancing in terms of mental difficulty, i.e., that embodies a partial overlap between the imagined world and the familiar one. Some overlap of this kind is needed in order to make the game pleasurable, as may also be adduced from the way a lecturer at the theatre department explained the idea of Gombrich’s (1985) hobby horse. It’s like a chunk of wood that a kid takes and starts to gallop on. It’s got nothing in common with riding a horse except for a few very general characteristics; [it’s] a make-believe game [that is played] even if there’s no direct connection, Gombrich warns us sarcastically. If a piece of wood resembles a real horse too closely, he says, it may yet gallop away. As long as the hobby horse retains the form of a chunk of wood, we can train it, control it, and experience the illusion as we wish.

A game is a pleasure of the mind. Importantly, it is covert, not front-andcenter in the awareness or the desire of theatre-goers or theatre students. It reveals itself after the fact. It makes the audience a partner-recipient in a project that is called abstract, an un-enslaved activist for the duration of the work of art that it beholds. The gratitude for enjoyment that is endemic to the behind the scenes game is evident in one actor’s remarks. The actor wished to give the spectators a beret in order to amplify their pleasure. If for a moment we disregard avant-garde ideas and Postmodern novelties about

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downing barriers between actors and audience, we find that he expressed a sensational idea in terms of any self-respecting backstage: I really enjoy the process. I’m sorry the audience gets only the final product and not the process. I think a real theatre-lover at some stage should be given the right to pay for it, to sit and see how these things are stitched together. […] I’m sure people would enjoy seeing the process. It’s almost like an orchestra’s rehearsals. The orchestra does something and the conductor says, “Now do the same segment but make the violins a little lower and you others a little louder. Then they hear the difference and say, Oh, that’s a net gain.”

Once the phase of reading the script ends, the actors and the director await a new game, in which they will be invasive, experimental, and stringent. This game often comes with an appearance of deep gravitas that puts all pleasure to rest. The rehearsal period is spoken of as a “noble routine,” one that is “always alive,” as against the deadening routine of “a clerk or a lawyer or a sweatshop seamstress.” The actors describe themselves as people who “always sculpt the same statue” in an “addictive” profession. They get such pleasure from it that they evince clearly something that they would never come out and say: It’s not about the plot itself. Apart from the importance of asking whether it is linked to a classic play or not—the unessential facet that the actors seek in order to cultivate their reputation and acting career (Gamliel 2016)—they find the complexity and depth of the human situations in the play, challenges that they aspire to tackle in a protracted game, immeasurably more important.8 The truth is out there but concealed, and once one digs deeply enough to reach it, it gives the game its stable and inspiring support. It is the motive for the search and the final reward at the end of the pleasures of the process. The knowledge that the truth is attainable propels the actors into the theatre’s classroom of sacred studies. Speaking of the sacred, there is no better metaphor than Jewish Talmudic study for the diligence and philosophizing that actors display. It covers the performative and material dimensions handsomely. As they sat around a table clutching their scripts, the actors in my research sometimes even sway in the manner of bearded rabbis. “I’m a Talmudic type,” the actor who played Solness admitted, who thinks on-the-one-hand and on-the-other. It’s because I’m looking for the contradiction, the yes and the no [in the character]. It gives me the option

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of being free, at least in the rehearsals, to enjoy the ingenious solutions that I’ll find each time, clever ways to outwit myself so that I can really act instead of having to play [the character].

Like rabbis who debate a point in Jewish law and lore with gravitas, the actors plunge into an all-out dramatic thrust and parry that amounts to a lengthy and vacillatory negotiation. Although far from competing with the Talmud in terms of depth, Ibsen’s play seems, performatively, like the Talmud in that it puts its students to immense toil and leads them down a bumpy road to successful comprehension. In terms of the essence of the text, the Talmud is a telling metaphor for the labor of actors whether they are Jewish or not, even though from the standpoint of content, carrying out and paying painstaking attention to the demands of the faith, Judaism and Christianity are worlds apart. I hold this view because, be the theology as it may, the work of the play is but a rehearsal of faith (Johnson and Savidge 2009, p. 92).

On Virtue It is in view of this sense of the artists’ stringent and pleasurable game that we should answer the question “How should I act?” which, in the theatrical context, is a double entendre: professional and ethical (Ridout 2009). Art as an abstract machine also relates to the latter meaning by accommodating affirmation as an ethical choice, “a choice for the creative energies of life, first of all our own” (Zepke 2005, p. 7). The question “How should I act?” makes the game of precision relevant and is integral to the gaming ethic known as “artistic honesty.” Given what happens in the study and rehearsal rooms, the honesty that’s most needed is that of virtue, by which I mean precision of tone, meter, and movement. “Artistic honesty, it’s a concept,” a teacher at the acting school intoned at the outset of his pointed remarks at one of the moments of young people’s enculturation into the theatrical world. Halting a scene in which a woman student acted, he inserted the following exhortation: There’s got to be artistic honesty. An actor and a playwright have to be in a place where they feel the character. […] I try to imagine striving for a real place. You seem to be slightly connected but you’re still not there. […] I want you to work on the scene slowly so that you’ll reach a real place.

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The valid message, imparted to actors in the initial steps of their professional careers, is the criticality of authentic self-presentation, a goal attainable only through much precision work. As they cross from the outside— the lawns, the streets, and the parking lots—to the rehearsal room, actors are asked to immerse themselves in the artistic work in order to purify themselves with its internal grammar, with the intention, powered by honesty, to establish a confident relationship with truth. Even if any of them wishes to make light of this demand, to avoid its dominance in even the smallest way, he or she will be unable at this very moment to escape its black-and-white properties, the ones that decorate the backstage corridors. Hanging there, as we recall, are blown-up photos of the founders in mise-en-scène—patriarchs and matriarchs in memorialized motion. In an interview with me, one of these founders, who died in old age, drew a link between adherence to truth and self-prostration. In her remarks, which were almost certainly inspired by a new picture on the wall, she said, “Applause […] it’s pleasing. It’s a pleasure of the kind that says we’re doing something and not using deception and not doing work. […] We’re doing the cleanest work there is. This work is us.” Were this not enough—and just then the yoke-shirking actors completed the phase of reading the script along with the rest of the cast and the director—a predictably mundane thing occurs: Veteran actors sit down with the cast at the “talmudic” table. This leaves the individual no choice but to obey one of them, who declares, “I think we’ve got a tremendous task on our shoulders. At this time, you have to be free of all impurities, of all theatricality.” To obey this imperative, the question that occurs to a young actor: “Why now, of all times?” must be stamped out before it can bud. The veteran actor also has no choice but to assume the duty of a teacher behind the scenes: to talk like a pedagogue at an acting school: There’s a paradox: how can there be a true fantasy? […] It’s not an artistic truth; it’s another truth. It’s a gut-truth that you’re not even willing to admit. So fuck art. The truth [raises his voice], you’ve got to confront it. Confront this elusive truth. And you know you’re able to touch it. It’s scary. But I say that to be afraid of a truth that belongs to my personality […] you acknowledge this truth and then there’s no longer a way forward.

Also inescapable is the director’s remark, which already sounds like a command: “What interests me is to act below the words.”

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Having addressed the commitment to truth that emanates from several directions, I now ask two questions: How does this work of precision operate? And what facets does adhering to it have? The answer is embodied in the language, the becoming-of-self, and the language of the world’s becoming-of-self as it emanates from the vocabulary and gestures of the abstract machine. Before we take vacant seats around the floor of the rehearsal room or, to be more precise, around the floor-like enclosure of the traditional “nine cubic meters,” that the set manager has demarcated with bold lines, we invoke two words that express the message of the machine quintessentially, in the senses of both mechanization and precision, to describe an actor who is imprisoned in a field of consciousness. The words are “button” and “efficiency.” The person who instilled these words in his listeners is an acting teacher. Although he did not delve into Deleuze’s teachings, this, unamazingly, is the language of the theory that his students imbibed: When you go to a play, you’re supposed to press the button and know nothing. Simple. You shouldn’t know what’s going on. The most important button for the actor, maybe, is to be naïve and join the situations that the play hands you. It means that when you’re surprised you don’t play at being surprised; you simply become surprised that it’s happening. When it happens, you can’t fake it. If by chance someone goes bahhhhh! and it shocks you, and you know he’ll do it in tomorrow’s performance, you press the I-don’t-know button. It’s another drop, another millimeter every day. You ate something different, the audience ate something different, you come [after hearing] bad news or better news. Everything matters a little, the mood, the mix of things inside you and in the audience. The situation, it’s new to you. Even though you‘ve done it 200 times, it’s new. […] Acting is a word that I hate. Why do I insert the word efficient, a disgusting word, into art? To prevent play-acting. Play-acting isn’t good. Just be efficient, authentic.

Above and beyond the “how” of the “cat in heat” that I described above, the dramatic affinity of playwrights and directors for riddles, voids of information, made The Master Builder many times more challenging when it came to attaining the precision of authenticity. The play is an exemplar in this ethnographic essay in this sense as well. The question of the actors’ precision was expressed in the course of the rehearsals in dozens of variations that carried a double gist: Where does the character stand in the situation? In view of what allusion should this position be acted for the

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benefit of the audience’s curiosity, interest, and empathy? This and none other is the nature of Ibsen’s plays, as an actor described: In a simple dialogue […] you see a world of people, how enlightened they are, how they interrelate, how long they’ve known each other, why they despise each other or put up with each other. […] It’s very hard to get that across in writing. Ibsen doesn’t have monologues. There’s no actor who stands in front of an audience on a slab of stone and says, “To be or not to be, that is the question,” so that he pours out his consciousness and the audience listens. With Ibsen, the audience gets lots of information without the actors saying the information. […] What’s the most pleasurable thing about working here? That he tells the master’s great story by means of simple conversation. That’s how he tells the great story. There’s a statement here.

Why is Aline stunned to the core by the demise of her dolls in the great blaze? What dark secret from an event in Hilda’s childhood are Solness and Hilda hiding? Why does Hilda storm her way back into Solness’ life? What does the timing of her return mean? How should she cry out “I want my kingdom”? What, for God’s sake, is the meaning of her craving for “castles in the air”? Is Hilda a representation of Solness’ soul, or is she a real girl who has a pent-up story inside her? What should her dramatic status really be? The word “troll” recurs dozens of times during the rehearsals, as do the words “secrets” and “lies.” The director and the actors drive their minds and imaginations to the verge of insanity as they crack the scenes and the characters. Say what you want about Ibsen, it was plain to the cast that this was not a well-made play9 but a chaos of psyches in action, described by an actor as “hard to put on, hard to put on.” The ethic of precision entails the reflexive use of every possible resource: prior knowledge of the play and its creator, other plays and playwrights, psychological interpretations, interpretive transference from the external sociocultural milieu, dependency on people’s rationality, situations, mythologies, biblical stories, theories, films including advertisements in the media, the actors’ prior experience in character portrayal, their personal situations, theatre gossip, the judgment of other theatre artists who are invited to attend the rehearsals, and so on. “Reflexive behavior,” contends Schechner (1985, p. 36), “is the hardening into theater of social, religious, medical, educational, and aesthetic process.” The essential pleasure of the game played by actors and director originates in the multiplicity of challenges to the management of the psyche that is posed by the imperative of being the playing mind and the intent to

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position the overt results of coping with these challenges at the exact point of the epic whole of the stage world. As this meticulous work is pursued to the point of obsession, the epic whole is still perceived as a distant chimera and, therefore, as merely the sum of its parts. The modest steering of the self toward the simple whole, toward appropriately connecting the parts of the puzzle, makes it sensitive to and, equally, influenced by even the slightest change in any of these parts. One of my actor-respondents termed an actor “a stone in a building. If he begins to move, he’ll threaten the stability of everything that’s happening around him. […] The one-off happening that’s called a show is staged down to the fraction of a second.” The characters’ verbal and motive phrasings are somewhat formulaic; they give the backstage viewer the impression of a mathematical labor of putting together and taking apart. As the abstract machine goes about its work, fates are inexorably sealed: those of sentences, expressions, words, sometimes individual letters, turns of phrase, and dozens of forms that allow, or do not allow, the verbiage to move ahead or stand still with one gesture or another. Words and expressions of mathematical precision are common in the actors’ argot: “Givens” are things that one needs to receive from the director, things with which one can get to work. There is a synonym for a given: a “law.” When an acting teacher in my research stepped into the director’s role, she explained the meaning of this term reproachfully: “What’s a law? It’s something that doesn’t yield to your fancy. It’s a law! That is, if I give you a law, you can’t think you’ve got some other law or opinion. Because you have to obey the law.” Working on a “given” or a “law” is all the more demanding when it creates a “problem,” i.e., when it puts distance between the self and the actor’s will. Working is a “search” that will deliver a “decision” or a “choice” with intuitive hypersensitivity. The process that leads to the “choice” attests to the ability to differentiate between what’s “wrong” or “sort-of right” and what’s “right.” Sometimes what’s right is a tiny thing, a “beat,” a pulse representing a word that befits the true rhythm of the body, “back to the jungle.” What the actor, the director, or others in the cast ultimately find acceptable is known as a “solution.” An actress expressed it thus: It’s literally mathematical to dissect a scene and dissect a character. There are so many options. The great wisdom is to choose the best option. We search all the time. Today I did this in with effective anger. I experimented; I’m not ashamed to experiment. It didn’t work, so that’s enough! I don’t want it! I

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throw it away and do something else. Until finally I’ve got the most exact, the most correct formula that’ll serve me, that’ll serve the play […].

As participants in the theatrical culture that I observed know, a scene that is solved for good has to be “put in a plastic bag and stuffed into the freezer.” A continuous performative flow composed of finished scenes is called an “algorithm,” with which “the actor can do the same thing every evening: the same emotion, the same excitation, the same weeping, the same laughter, as though it were the first time […] again and again, without budging.” A veteran actor clarified: “It’s as though […] every time you press a certain button that the actor has, the same code comes out.” Once again, the button metaphor. “If it doesn’t happen, then … it’s terrible. The failure exists. Sin is crouching at the door,” another actor explained, quoting a theological expression associated with the biblical Cain.10 “Do you think the audience notices this failure?” I asked. “No, they don’t know.” “So what do you care?” I pressed, and he answered with his own metaphor for precision. “Because … because we’re literally with a seismograph. I’m not an exception in that sense. […] You feel. This moment….” The emotional seismograph works by mechanization. Indeed, this is what the students hear from their teacher: “How do we build intensity? […] You have to control the brio as the text requires, like a machine that has three buttons and you decide if it’s going to be the first, the second, or the third.” The play-acting psyche is an instrument in a machine that lacks instrumentality (Burns 1972) and wishes only to experience a life of truth. Imprecision defiles, in theory and in practice. The artists, well versed in covert knowledge, react to every breach of acting on their part, or on that of other actors, as do adherents of a culture who are sensitive to the grammatical and compositional rules of their language (Burns 1972). Like members of a tribe who converge for a ritual, they express rejection or enjoyment with an intensity that leaves no room for doubt that a ritual game is being played. In other words, when a violation takes place, it produces a different situation. The enjoyment that comes from assembling matching pieces of a puzzle exists no longer. Disapproval of violation is ready to be brandished by the artists as artists; it reveals the sanctification of the truth, the yearning for a sanctity that entails preparatory self-purification, cleansing of the hands. The word sanctity is in no way foreign here. The sanctifying importance of the rehearsal process is a well-developed idea in the Christian interpretation of the theatre, which considers it a metaphor for the perennial quest for the meaning of the word of God in human life (Craigo-Snell

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2000). An anthropologist who gets caught up in the game in the course of observation may be frightened by the suddenness of the slamming of the door, the director’s shriek—“No! No! No!”—and the despondency in an actress’ self-directed censure, “I wanna die!” This even though already then, when I visited the classrooms, I heard the shouting, a sound of such disgust with the breach as to culminate in derision and shaming of future actors. The flaying tongues of those in authority, the teacher-directors, blurt words of no less import than “That’s a manipulation!” “Bad acting!” “That’s worthless!” “That’s no good!” “Ask the cast if they believe you!” “What happened to you?! Did you lose your wits?!” “Beast!” “That you like me is an alibi for your not doing the work with precision.” “If you don’t want to figure out what the truth is, you shouldn’t be dealing in art!” “It’s not easy to make an audience believe. What infuriating news!” The effect of this public shaming was to inflate the heinousness of the violation to an extreme, in the hope that by the dress-rehearsal phase, the “not-right” would become something that desecrates the acting psyche, marring it and the sacred as well. This ethic is one of the stanchions of the entire theatrical event. In several arenas and occasions in my research, denotations of the title of the play, The Master Builder, merged into an exacting purpose for which one artist, the director, bore ultimate responsibility. The unforgiveable sin of the fictional Master Builder—the leading actor—became known to the cast a moment before he exited the stage, when he chose to lift off the table and carry away one roll of the architect’s blueprints instead of all of them. This piece of skullduggery took place literally on stage, at an advanced phase of the rehearsals, high on the widening spiral of the construction of the stage world, by which time, so it seemed, a safe distance had been established from the small—relative to the “creation”—stones of the building. By that time, the actors had few reasons for trial and error. The assistant director’s unsympathetic outcry—“We’re not some retarded audience! Take all the blueprints with you!”—came swiftly. Her violent fit of anxiety may have been well taken because it was agreed that sins like this were no longer in order, and also because the director—the theatrical Master Builder—is considered the ultimate builder and in fact the only one. Among all the artists, it is he who possesses the dual privilege of being the judge—the final instance that determines their every movement, line, and pause—and the one who measures and tests whenever it seems that they have reached the home stretch and have already earned that blessed final moment. Thus leadership works among the denizens of the theatrical world. Elsewhere,

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far away in time, at a class for young directors, the teacher told a studentdirector in front of his “actors,” “A mise-en-scène is an architectural plan of movement on the stage.” Ibsen’s The Master Builder was not up for discussion. Nevertheless, she added, “You’ve invited an architect and you want him to build you a house. You gave him all the materials and now you’ll be having your next meeting with him. What do you expect him to do?” “To bring blueprints,” the student-director replied. “To bring blueprints,” the teacher repeated. When you produce a mise-en-scène you sketch it out before you go to the actors and move them around on the stage. […] Look, there’s a big difference if you’re in your village and you add another room to some adobe house or if you’re building a cathedral. If it’s a cathedral, you have to plan it out. […] It’s not something that obliges you from A to Z, but it’s a work plan that you check during the rehearsals.

Now back to the theatre: The Solness-actor spoke at length about hubris, the sin of the architect in the play and an iniquity that also stains him as an actor. In the presence of another veteran actor, he said, “I don’t direct plays because I think I’m better as an actor. But I direct myself. I’m already old and experienced enough […].” “He’s unusual that way,” his colleague explained. “It’s not a routine thing for an actor. He confronts the director and fights for his understanding of the play. Usually they obey. It’s unconventional.” “That’s right, it’s less conventional,” “Solness” concludes. One morning, before the evening of an important “run,”11 one could hear the actress who plays Solness’ wife entreaty the director, “I understand what you want; just don’t make me stand there for long.” One could also hear the director silence a request from Solness himself: “Wait a second! I’m building something here!” Afterward, noticing the results of two supporting actors’ responses, he shouts with delight: “It’s really fantastic, really nice!” Their stance at two darkened rectangular openings on the set, as a spotlight just now aimed shined on them, was amazingly precise and aesthetic. Amid all the bustle, “Solness’” associate played a relatively secondary role and was free to act as an observer all that time. At one of the final rehearsals, at “the critical moments of the presentation,” he explained the architectural responsibility of the director, the ultimate master builder, without whose ritual of precision the play would not be as dramatic as it is:

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All these little inconveniences that we have, the whole team, are nil before the director. He presides over the whole thing totally. […] He’s very centralized. If he’s clueless for a moment, the business … falls apart. At this stage of the work, the whole tonnage of the plan is on the stage, be careful, be careful. […] We just abnegate ourselves and let him have it; we do whatever he says. […] Maybe he’ll let us express ourselves one day. For the time being, no. We defer and the hierarchy is clear.

∗ ∗ ∗

An Ethical Triangle The exacting purpose, outlined in the ultimate master builder’s mind, encodes an ethical triangle formed of the circumference and depth of the stage world. In the manner of textuality-of-visitation, we now need to dwell on the director’s dictates and the actor’s performance in order to penetrate the cognitive and affective recesses of ethical design. I find an allusion to the existence of such a design in the “Suggested Plan of the [London] Globe Theatre,” a scheme that reveals a circumferential hexagonal theatrical frame with circles, squares, and triangles within. This religious-Renaissance combination of forms, says Yates (1969, p. 132), is a symbolic geometry of harmonics of man’s relations with the cosmos. The Renaissance precedent, it is true, is adept at pointing to the nexus of form and ethics but it amounts to a thick hint only. The ethical design that I have in mind is thin. It lacks symbolism; it does not even have objects to demarcate. Like Claude LéviStrauss’ mythological triangle, it is covert and abstract. The actor stands in the middle of a triangle of relations within an intersubjective system that succumbs to the director’s overhead view. The three points of this structure are occupied by the character whom the actor is playing, the actor’s partner—his or her collaborator in the mise-en-scène— and the audience. Crouching at the door of both of them, who may be viewed as strata in the abstract machine, is sin. This, after all, is the point of the representation. The imperative of all of this work is to banish the intention, which is prime among the elements of power to which Deleuze (1997) refers. Plainly, this expurgation is necessary not only at the level of the representation of power, as in that of kings and rulers who appear as characters in a drama, but also, and mainly, at the level of representation itself as power (Cull 2009a). The violence, in Deleuze’s opinion, is latent in

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the stasis of the representation, in repudiation of the motion of life, in the imposition on reality of the arbitrariness of foreknown form and content. This imposition deviates not only from the artistic path of the upright but also from the path of scientific research that is known paradigmatically as grounded theory. It is probably due to this fundament that several actioncentric courses at the acting school are called labs, because theatre people use this very word to describe rehearsals as a “revealing, very sensitive, very intimate, sometimes very invasive” place to be. So it is even in “Theatre and Psychoanalysis,” a course on interaction among psyches in action. Turning to the students, the lecturer explained something that may sound pleasing to the ears of an Anthropologist of Depth: I thank you for gearing up to do some decoding. […] Freud intrigues me because he took his own dreams and treated them like a laboratory. Art is a kind of laboratory. What draws me to the theatrical art, among other things, is that something in it remains unresolved. […] It’s a laboratory of experimentation in interactions, mainly of the person with him or herself, but also with the surroundings. Freud doesn’t volunteer all the information that he’s got and opens lots and lots of floodgates to interpretative possibilities.

Plainly, the intent to represent assumes that the world is an object to grasp, one that can be clutched and held, and that the river is the same river at every moment. Representation is falsity and illusion. Even if we do not revert to the Platonic rejection of the Aristotelian thesis of mimesis (Rinon 2002), the phenomenon that incites to ethical objection to the theatre is distortion. Furthermore, the intent of representation, if the artists are in its thrall, may prove to be a killing project, exactly as photography is in Barthes’ (2000) thinking12 or in the intent of ethnographic representative voicing in the old anthropology (Tyler 1986). The subject is sacrificed for the object’s sake. I do not think these comparisons can go far because, basically, they are self-diversifying configurations of the same thing. Another sibling of theirs is language. There is nothing more pretentious than language’s claim to represent reality. Language even attests by itself (through its synonym, a “tongue,”) that it is an appendage that protrudes from its base to something external or far from it. In particular, I find the violence of judgment and evaluation in language akin to the violence of representation. Both are illnesses even in their positive denotations (“That’s good,” “That’s smart,” “That’s beautiful”), even before they descend into stigma and stereotype.

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This is a correct charge to level in the name of movement, i.e., dynamic change. After all, one cannot understand the being of life without it. The actors’ self- and professional identity is shaped in view of these insights. One infers from their remarks that when mimesis is intentional they see it as a stinging insult. “For me,” one actor said, The meaning of what I say on stage matters more than the representation of the character whom I play. […] All I think about is how to avoid the muck, not to sell myself cheaply.

Another actor explained: The theatre is really [a place] of infinite possibilities. The question is how you play someone so that we’ll believe you’re the person who’s playing him—not you as an actor who shows us how he behaves but rather you as him. This is the secret that I work on more than anything else. It’s important because I’ve taken my career to a higher level. I used to be in a situation where I enjoyed hearing, “Wow, what an actor!” Where I am today, I say they should think I’m really the person whom I’m playing.

This is the place to benefit from Hornby’s (1996) structural dramatic theory, which steers a wide berth around the potential for violence in mimesis. It may absolve theatre artists and savants from fidgety discussion of this topic by noting that there’s no point in assuming a polar relationship between reality and non-reality and regarding every play, although having mimetic elements, as but a reflection of itself—the artists’ thoughts and experience. What one gains by invoking theatrical conventions is a presentation that reflects mainly inward, toward the stage world, and only secondarily outward. The axioms behind this approach, based on Barthes’ perspective on the creation of an art that has “self-contained quality” (Hornby 1996, p. 18), stress the similarity of drama to a closed mathematical system and also the complexity with which it acts on the living. The “drama/culture complex,” as Hornby (ibid., p. 17) calls it, acts on reality not in the passive sense of reflecting it but in the active manner of providing a vocabulary with which to describe it or a geometry with which to measure it (ibid., p. 22). This autotelic trait of the stage world may not exhaust itself in the structure of the drama, which has a beginning, middle, and end, and in which every event leads to a successive event (Hornby 1996). I propose that autotelianity even without plot should be specified via an ethical geometry that is set within a closed triangle of relations.

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The triangle that I wish to describe is one of in-between relations— three similar configurations of something halfway between the actor and something else. Each of these configurations is an encrypted truth, a consequence of an abstract machine, that no one in either the small box or the large box actually sees but everyone there definitely knows how to talk about: its feeling, its existence, its presence, or its absence. The actor, in the center of the triangle, is duty-bound to pledge her or his thought, feelings, and language and its connotations to the all-pervasive reality. And what is this “all”? Insofar as their responsibility pertains, actors must recognize the life that pulses in the psychic moves of their character, their relations with the partner, and their indirect relations with spectators. For the actor, character, partner, and audience are an Other whose Otherness she or he must surmount, charge with unlimited sympathy, and, more so, assimilate firmly into her or his artistic psyche to the extent of unreserved love. I would describe this sanctified fundament of relations at even greater length had I not found in Buber’s teachings the I–Thou ethical formula. Buber’s recipe fits our discussion perfectly due to both its structural properties and its epistemological significance.13 To justify my choice of this ethical formula as an elemental base of the triangle, I must stress that Buber initially envisioned it as part of the theatre-goer’s role; only later did it evolve into a philosophical theory (Friedman 1969). The connection of the I–Thou human relationship and that of the contrasting instrumental relationship, I–It, is anchored in the theatre; it arose from the contemplative gaze of the theatre-going Buber, a thinker whose doctrine is considered an anthropological philosophy.14 So Friedman (1969) describes it: What Buber learned [here] about the spokenness of speech, the livingness of the speech that “takes place” in the “between,” was not and could not be restricted to the artistically detached sphere of the theatre alone. […] This reality of speech-as-event was particularly connected for Buber with Vienna. Even while he learned that this city brought into being ever new poetry, he also learned what was ultimately still more important for him, that in Vienna the German language was brought to its full spokenness. Having learned this in the theatre, he could now hear it in the street: Since then it has sometimes come to pass, in the midst of the casualness of the everyday, that, while I was sitting in the garden of an inn in the countryside of Vienna, a conversation penetrated to me from a neighboring table (perhaps an argument over falling prices by two market wives taking a rest), in which I perceived the spokenness of speech, sound “Each-Other”. (quotation of Buber) (pp. 4–5)

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This triad of relations among actor and character, partner, and audience is closely tied to Buber’s ethic of reciprocity, as the following erudite overview demonstrates: Buber’s critique of Novelli shows how much of what later developed as central to his philosophy could claim its origin in Buber’s relation to the theatre: “Life-experience” (Erlebnis ) was the predecessor of “realization” in Buber’s thought, and “realization” of the I–Thou relationship. The external imitation of Novelli, on the other hand, clearly belonged to the line of external experience (Erfahrung ), “orientation,” and the I–It relation. Putting the two essays together, we can say that the great actor must know both the binding with the people and the agony of isolation of the man who knows the abyss between man and man which kills communication and the word. He must know the tension of this simultaneous distance and relationships from within, as if he had stepped into the skin of the other, hence in the polarity between the actor and the audience, the actor and the other actors, and the actor and the character he plays. For this to take place “putting oneself into the other’s shoes” cannot be mere empathy but that act of “inclusion,” or “experiencing the other side” which […] does not mean giving up one’s own side of the relationship. (p. 12)

Much ink in the literature has been spilled over the question of ethics in acting. Ridout (2009), relating to Levinas’ ethical approach, finds the encounter with the other’s innerness central to the theatre, making the theatre a “moral institution” (p. 54). Scholars, however, have vacillated about the ethical stance of Levinas, of all philosophers. Although Levinas’ approach approximates Buber’s in several senses, he accuses the theatre of allowing man to escape his condition (Watt 2010) and approaches this institution with ambivalence at best. It is only correct, however, to note that under Levinas’ inspiration the new ethical thinking has created a worthy conceptual infrastructure. Its value for our consideration is, first, in its adoption of the Platonic insight that ethics should be discoverable in a theatrical work even if it is neither declared nor present ab initio; second, in its swerving from the plot in order to detect the ethic in the form, more than in the content, of the theatre; and third, in its awareness that the I–Thou relationship should be seen as pre-ontological (Grehan 2009; Ridout 2009; Read 1993). It is of the utmost importance to dwell on the pre-ontologism of the I–Thou relationship. This characteristic of firstness is embodied in Buber’s ethic of reciprocity. Many view it as a conceptual paragon. This paragon,

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however, should not be considered self-standing. It is tethered to respected streams of philosophical thinking, foremost anti-individualism per the existentialist formula, which marks the autism of authentic selfness and seeks to breach its limits. This autism, in Buber’s metaphor, is a form of armor, a barrier that obstructs incoming signals (Buber 2007, p. 118). Wilshire (1982), whose insights are also indebted to the theatre, approximates this way of thinking by anchoring the authenticity of the self in the self’s being for others. So does Merleau-Ponty (1962), who sees independence as sociabilitydependent—a dependency that is a focal point and a condition for selfawareness—and for Laing (1960), too, the autistic self is no substitute for the only world that truly exists, the shared world. Buber hints at having attained an even deeper intersubjective experience, noting that: Some existentialists, we know, rule as follows: It is a fundamental fact among people that the quality of an object and its companion is one, but insofar as this happens, the unique reality of the interpersonal, the uniqueness of the touch and the burden, is largely removed. (Buber 2007, p. 116) Outside the subjective, inside the subjective, along the narrow path on which you and I meet, there is an in-between place. […] Here an allusion to the third fundamental possibility, the recognition of which will help us to restore to humankind its true personhood, is given. (Buber 2000, pp. 112–113)

Here an actor’s ethicality is grounded not in a decision about the true essence of the holistic acting self15 but in its intent. This fundament of self-direction stands at the forefront of another word that Buber uses— “contemplation” (1999, p. 116). The intent of contemplation on the part of an actor, whose ultimate fate is to fuse the self to the world with its Othernesses, is the stuff of a real breakthrough. According to Buber, for someone to have the capacity to welcome the other, “One must firmly remember the location of the exit” (Buber 2007, p. 115)—a destination by no means easy to reach. With the help of Daubigny’s essay “The Sociology of Art” (1965), we may appreciate the challenge. Drama, for Daubigny, is an effort to surmount the barrier of disruption of interpersonal communication—“the representation and pallor of this disturbance, its seeming image, its mimesis, and concurrently, the polemic, the struggle against it” (Rapp 1973, pp. 76–77). Rapp continues:

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Individuals who are totally intercoordinated and interconnected, perfectly attuned to each other, would not need to communicate with each other at all; what they say to each other is totally banal; individuals who are strangers to each other, totally distant from each other, cannot attain communication at all; what they say to each other is totally absurd. The “symbolism of the theatre’” is a “belligerent migration” between the two poles, in which a respectively clashing goal is set. Creating distance from the “liked familiarity” and the banality of the intimate […] creates an empathy and a sociability that counter the loneliness and the fear of strangeness. (ibid.)

This auspicious possibility is worthy of an embellishment captured in a quote from Arthur Miller: “How may a man make of the outside world a home?” (in Rapp, ibid.). Insofar as the pre that precedes the pre-ontological has been defined in theory, it becomes possible to amplify the intent that has been adopted and lend ethical value to the path-breaking work that selfness invokes against the ubiquitous instrumental and egocentric forces of I–It. The term “autopoiesis,” coined by Deleuze to denote a state of “self-enjoyment,” is helpful in assessing the challenge of coping that the actor’s psyche faces. This state is linked to his ideas about the pre-personal state, which is defined as: a field of forces, wills to power, that resonate with one another, that interact in ways that produce effects on one another, that enter into combinations with one another. Sexual drives, the surfaces of the body, aggression, one’s internal organs, emotions, experiences, thoughts, sensations […]. (Colwell 1997, p. 18)

Can we imagine a field such as this, one of absolute interiorities that define an impersonal state and a non-subjective space? The crucial thing in imparting ethical value is the finding that the pre-personal state is not had by the self but is constitutive of the self (Kennedy 2009, p. 188). This presents an enormous, and as such an immensely hopeful, implicit challenge to the steering of selfness to a place beyond itself. Deleuze relates to this hope in terms of a becoming: “Becomings constitute attempts to come into contact with the speeds and affects of a different kind of body, to break with a discrete self and to uproot the organs from the functions assigned to them by (molar) identity” (in Cull 2009a, p. 7). The I–Thou nexus is an experiential point that rests on a tangent branching directly from this. The breakthrough of self of which I wrote is, as Buber

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puts it, a choice, a concept, a knowledge of the heart, the reception of a whisper—all made possible by willingness, which is a condition for the shedding of the armor, the intent to open the shutter and let the signals enter: The “Thou” encounters me. But I enter with a direct connection. This connection, after all, is a chosen and a choice, at once acted upon and acting. (Buber 2007, p. 9) The connection to Thou has no buffer. I and Thou are not separated by a buffer of conceptuality, a prejudgment, or an imaginary act. Even the memory itself changes. […] Between I and Thou there is no buffer of purpose, of craving, of short-cutting […]. (ibid., p. 10) When someone encounters me at a propitious and generous moment in my personal life, a person who has something that I cannot grasp as I would an object “says something to me.” This something does not at all mean: Tell me the nature of that person, what is happening in a person’s soul, and such matters. Rather: tell me something, whisper something to me, express to me something that will penetrate my innermost life. This something may relate something about this person, such as that he needs me. Or it may be something about me. The person himself in his attitude toward me, or he may not have noticed me at all. It is not he who tells me, in the manner of an individual who divulges to his neighbor on the bench a secret maintained by silence. Nevertheless, the thing is said. […] It is altogether unnecessary for the object that my heart has discovered to be a person. It may be an animal, a plant, a stone. No phenomenon among phenomena, no becoming among becomings, ordinarily exits from the war of words, by which I am steadily told something at some time among times. Nothing can refuse to serve as a vehicle of speech. The possibilities of dialogue are limited [only] by the knowledge of the heart. (ibid., p. 117)

The triad of objects—character, partner, audience—presents the actor with three Thous that are bundled together at the end of the foregoing remarks. Each belongs to the system that is told to the actor and requires of him or her a devotion that breaches the barriers. Again, it’s a weighty task, not easily performed. ∗ ∗ ∗

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I begin with the nexus of actor and character. Deleuze’s and Guattari’s thinking, true to its path, leans toward the ethical preference in the I–Thou connection by instructing us to avoid the tempting but erroneous conception of theatrical ambition as predicated on mimesis. This, as stated, is because the mimesis configuration imposes stasis on an all-pervasive dynamism. Stasis is tantamount to violence—the opposite of discovering the world as it is and creating thought of “a sensation, a life that participates in the world’s joyful birth of itself” (Cull 2009a, p. 8). The breaking-through work, I find, has an additional aspect: an encounter with the Other. This aspect rests atop the content that the theatre literature already emphasizes in a paean to Stanislavski’s Method: a path of the upright, of authenticity, and of contempt for the idolatry of the ritual of the mask (Alexander 2006). This path is so consistent that it breaks through even after an exhausting—and self-defeating—quest for politics in the Method (Tyszka 1989). Theatre theory is basically psychological, propelled by Jewish actors who made their way from Russia to Israel in the 1930s (Tartakovsky 2013).16 The breakthrough aspect came up as an issue at the highest level of every truth that burdened the question of the specific persona to which the actors must steer themselves. The question of persona has amplified the ethical challenge that is implicit in the intent of contemplation. This is because it entails the establishment of an I–Thou relationship with neither an undifferentiated Other nor one that is banal in its Otherness, but with the Jungian shadow of the acting self, the dark side of the psyche (Jung 1912). This second-order ethic is defined in terms of the actor’s willingness to bear fully, if only briefly, the burden of occupying a shadow that carries deeply negative meanings and to banish facets of his familiar identity that have been brightly illuminated thus far. The theatre’s demand that actors bring to life and demonstrate qualities that they have concealed and repressed contemptuously places a heavy emotional load on their shoulders. In the turbulent areas where possession of the becoming is achieved, I repeatedly observed, and became aware of, the etymological relationship among the words ethics , ethos, and character (Ridout 2009). The acting work—whether it moves from light to shadow or in the opposite direction—is comparable to an important practice in Judaism known as tikkun ha-midot ,17 literally “repair of the virtues,” which concerns refining one’s psychological inclinations and bettering one’s human emotions so that one may become better, closer to perfection, and more pleasing to God. As the Kabbala teaches, a Jew “must understand, know, and instill in the depths of his heart [the awareness] that every small act and word and

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thought of his, at every moment, is not in vain, Heaven forbid” (Nefesh Hahayyim 15, in Govrin 1983). “A horseback rider,” said the Vilna Gaon, “can force [his horse] to follow the straight path by exerting himself, but if it is a bad horse, so is one whose soul is bad in its virtues. The essence of it depends on the spirit” (Even Shelema 1:5). Theatre commentators, aligning their thinking with Judeo-Christian theology, draw a connection between the actor’s ethic and the cosmological affirmation in Genesis 1:27: “And God created man in his own image” (Govrin 1983; Harris 1990). In the kabbalistic tradition, this translates into an undertaking to establish an equality of form with the deity. To make a repair that would have this outcome, the individual must know all sides of her or his soul. This approach clashes frontally with the Nietzschean insight: “Only artists, and especially those of the theatre, […] have taught us the art of viewing ourselves as heroes. […] Only in this way can we get over some lowly details in ourselves ” (Nietzsche 1882 [2001], p. 78, author emphasis). Everyone knows what the director knows: that burrowing into a character’s psyche is like an actor’s burrowing into his or her own. The minute precisions that are imposed on the actor, more than on the director, may give the actor ethical possession of the character. The director of The Master Builder, in a declarative monologue, endorses this intent in acting: Today we spoke about dolls. What are these dolls? […] This religious woman [Aline] says, “The Lord gives, the Lord takes away; it can’t be helped! But the dolls, the dolls!” And there she is broken. What are these nine dolls? Where does it come from? What does it say? Only if [the actress who plays Aline] understands where it comes from—not from me but from her!—will it work. This [the answers to the foregoing questions] will come from her world, from her associations, from her memories, from her dreams. I can tell her about my dreams, but they’re mine. It is she who will be on stage. So I don’t try to impose my world, both because it isn’t ethical and because it won’t work! It won’t have depth; it won’t be effective. An actor mustn’t think about the director. He has to forget everything. What he internalized during the rehearsals—that’ll be. What he didn’t—fuck it. Because it’s got to be his. […] When an actor comes and fights with me, I can get as angry as I want but I appreciate it immensely. Ultimately, we’ll create something we can live with. So I won’t send him away [saying], “Get lost; you’ll see in your contract that I’m a director.” That won’t serve this moment of his on stage. It’s really a transformation that he has to undergo himself.

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There was nothing ab initio that built a bridge between the character of Solness’ wife and the emotional inclinations of the actress who played her, apart from womanhood. By order of the director, Aline was paired with an actress as a God-fearing woman who lets her husband subjugate her. Despite her disaster—the burning of her children—she sincerely and innocuously justifies God’s doings. The actress is much a different person: the cast knows her to be secular, opinionated, and critical. She can only challenge this pathetic character, who, among her other “faults,” expresses more anxiety over the loss of her dolls than over the demise of her children. The two personalities—the actress’ and the character’s—were so far apart as to demonstrate emphatically, in the eyes of the cast and the director, the painful mediation that the actress had to make. So agonizing was it that a mimic approach might have mitigated it because from its outset, without any work invested, the actress’s attitude toward the character would have been one of I–Enemy, no less. The actress accepted the role as a “given,” she says, like being placed in a straightjacket. She devised a “solution” for it by seeking and adopting a rhetoric of truth via psychological hairsplitting. Attaining this, however, entailed arduous, protracted, and humiliating toil because for much time she found no way to empathize with the character at all. Her resistance took on various forms until it crumbled and metamorphosed into a relationship of fusion with the enemy-character. On one occasion, she argued with the director about it: If sacrifice is the only color this place will have, I think it won’t be good. I’d like to ask [you] about something that’s bugging me. On the one hand, she’s undoubtedly a depressive woman. Her house has burned down along with the dolls; Kaia sits on Solness’ lap—that is, she knows he’s cheating on her…. This whole thing is important. Suddenly a girl comes. She doesn’t know who and what [this girl] is. She’s an absolute flower, a beautiful girl. But [Aline] doesn’t need her in this house. Who’s got the patience?! She and Solness are packing up, moving around. Packing up isn’t just anything. You’re up packing memories, a biography. Everything’s in boxes. Then all of a sudden you have to host someone who wants to go to sleep. I’d say “Sorry, I’ll put you up in a hotel. There’s a five-star hotel here. Being a hostess doesn’t work for me right now.” This [interpretation] occurs to me at the most superficial level. But there are additional levels beyond it. Who needs such a thing in their home?! What does Solness want? It’s an enigma. I think there has to be something in Aline’s subtext that goes “What? What?!” [twists her face into a frown] and not only “Sure, it’s a pleasure, why not?!” She [Aline] hasn’t been assertive in a long while. Her spine has really shriveled. She’s at home

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under the table. [Says in character:] We ought to thank [God] and accept [her children’s death].

The actress promptly erupted in fury: “What a fucked-up script!! No, I’ll never manage to memorize it.” The director, in turn, did not spare the actress from the trenchant acuity of the distance between her and the character. Nor did he flinch from insinuating something about her personality: She’s a saint. It’s different from your nature. It’s hard. […] For you, it’s like putting a glove on the wrong hand. […] The audience is coming to see you. They know only you, not Aline. The audience expects you to brandish the sword. […] You’re aggressive but she’s submissive. You resist; she accepts. […] Remember that you’re good, terribly good. You simply forgot that.

The actress’s I–Thou work became incrementally more refined and unidirectional: from anger to irony, from irony to lack of irony, and on and on until it reached the destination: a female emotionality that is wholly and truly saintly innocence. The director applied dramaturgic rules that brooked no argument, such as “The genius of acting is that the irony doesn’t have to be acted,” and “That you don’t react with anger in the way that the audience expects is a sign that there’s a secret here. It’s enigmatic. After all, what makes a telenovela a telenovela? It’s that everything’s clear, that audience knows what to expect.” A bottom line. The director depicts Aline’s attitude toward her wayward lover, Solness, as “so naïve that you want to cry.” Farther on, work on the text was replaced by work on subtext because the actress ultimately managed to express something she had thought inexpressible at first. Furthermore, for some time she had been striving to dodge the director’s verdict that sealed her momentary fate in the cast’s eyes: “I still hear bitterness from you,” or “You should say that submissively, submissively; keep the swords totally hidden.” The “polishing” phase of the stage direction, when the precise truth of angles of emotion for movements of head and chin, gazes and expressions in the eyes, is established, had not yet come. “By the premiere,” the actress said in acquiescence, “you’ll surely clean me up.” It indeed happened when something about her acting so thrilled the director that he blurted, “That’s exactly it!” because it was exactly Aline. It recurred at the end, demonstratively so, in an interview with a media outlet during a small backstage celebration of the premiere. The actress sounded as though she were defending the character, as though seeking the understanding of a future audience.

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She presented herself as truly knowing her character’s psyche. When asked, “Why did Ibsen create such a dutiful, submissive woman?” she replied: It’s totally obvious that this woman […] is post-trauma. […] He husband is all she’s got in life. She has nothing. Her parents have died, her children have died, her home has burned down. All she’s got left is her husband with his lovers, his cheating, his lies, his chicanery. This fragile reed is all she’s got left. So she’s afraid that he might do this inane thing of going up to the tower and dying.

When asked, “How is it that Ibsen chose a woman who says her children matter less? Isn’t it a little puzzling?” the actress answered: I also find it puzzling, I must say, but it’s not that the children matter less…. I think you have to remember her religiosity. It’s such a level of religiosity and faith, I mean, if God brought them to Him, it means it’s good for them and we’ve got to accept it. So it’s religious faith and we mustn’t even question whether it’s good for them; we mustn’t ask why. [Solness] confronts God; [Aline] doesn’t.

This kind of repair—an actress’s accommodating a character whom her psyche repels—is presented here due to the profuse and detail-laden dramaticality that emanates from the backstage. Through many variations, I was able to detect the two pillars of this act of repair. One of them attests in actors’ willingness to invest everything they’ve got in getting to know a character who, in her extreme manifestation, is a soul-enemy; the other presents in the quality of the actor–character relationship at two points in time. Rehearsals, after all, are rites of passage (Hastrup 1998). I reminded the young actor who played the flaccid character of Ragnar, “In the previous interview, you said, ‘If I were in his shoes, I wouldn’t hold my silence. My girlfriend [Kaia] is cheating on me.’” He replied, “Today there’s more balance between me and Ragnar. There’s a more correct connection than the one I had when we spoke back then.” Hearing this, I realized that he had already made his acquaintance with a character whose dubious masculinity had marshaled the strength to accommodate a stinging insult. He had truly figured out the character by himself. In between these points in time, he explained, You have to pump yourself up: “I’ve been cheated on, I’m the one, I’m the one.” At the rehearsal stage you always remind yourself of this. You always

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test it, how I know this situation. You examine it from this side. Over time, it gets easier.

An actor in Amadeus pulled an amazing move: Despite his immense admiration of Mozart, he was willing to play the foolish character of Salieri. Here again, the on-the-one-hand and the on-the-other were truly poles apart: “I’m so smitten with this Mozart thing,” he revealed, “that I’ve spent my whole life with Mozart as though he were my brother. For years and years I’ve listened to Mozart all the time. There isn’t a work of his that I haven’t got at home.” He confessed, however, that “I don’t identify with Salieri at all. I mean, I don’t think I’d let things go that far [envying Mozart]. On the face of it, I’m not a conspiracy type and I don’t strike agreements with God.” He solved the demand for an I–Thou relationship with the problematic character, and attained it after much toil, by turning it into a moral message of sacrifice: My task is to sharpen certain situations for the audience by means of certain stories, certain people, so that the audience will say, “Wow, I’ve got to be careful here. Be careful, man!! Weren’t you ever jealous? Are you jealous now? Do you have gratuitous love in you? Purposeless hate? Isn’t it [Salieri’s attitude toward Mozart] gratuitous hate?” His whole agreement with God is one of faith not for its own sake.

As in the Shakespearean theatre, following Hastrup’s (2004) analysis: The players’ desire for truth is to be reduced neither to the desire for reproduction, nor to an ambition to bluntly correct people’s false views of their own worth. It is a much more profound desire to show the audience the persons they do not yet know that they are, by becoming at one with the true “other”. (p. 63, author emphasis)

The master builder of the I–Thou relationship who hoisted this relationship to the tower of the prayer-house, as though it were a flag, was the actor who played Solness. This is so in view of the riddle embodied in Solness’ repulsive character and the ways in which it is cracked and played. The “acting theory” of this actor is fundamentally Buber’s, with an implicit nod to Deleuze’ insights as well. In his lengthy acting career, he played several male characters who share sins, hubris, violence, and sexual abuse of children with Solness. In The Master Builder, Solness fires Ragnar and

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derides his elderly father; clashes with God; cheats on his wife, Aline; and has a “history” with Hilda. In reference to all these, the actor said, “It isn’t behavior that I’m willing to accept as human.” Once he even let loose and cursed the character as a “shit.” Nevertheless, it is precisely this that, from his perspective, makes stage acting a “huge privilege.” For this actor as an artist-philosopher, the theatre is an arena of investigation and the research tool that he needs the most is none other than “understanding the essence of human nature”: You suddenly meet with—not with the mask—but with dark secrets of your soul. As though the connection among the characters helps you to open a window onto the areas in which you mature, and you know that they’re typical of the human race at large. It’s something essential in the human psyche. A person as a person. Yearning, loneliness, the grand words […]— working on the play, that’s where it’s really fun. It’s a journey into your soul that helps you face a mirror where you see the full complexity of your psyche. You go places where you can never go. In the theatre, you have this backing that you get by virtue of the playwright, and you can connect with it and confront the complex psyche of someone for whom you’re just a messagebearer, but each time you’re the message-bearer of a different psyche. It’s always yours. […] You have to lay another face atop your pleasant face, one that wants to go there, to ask, to face the character. It doesn’t have to be about fiddling with a girl; it can be some other sin that I committed or wanted to commit […] to confront it. Sometimes I say, [expletive] who needs it? It’s a reversion to my adolescence, to the jerk I used to be. […] I asked myself, “You call this a human being?! I have to contribute my talent to shaping him?!” He’s incomparably disgusting. […] Outwardly, to be someone whom you meet in the street and you say, “A nice guy, a respectable guy,” and then suddenly you discover that he’s … got a profile that you tell yourself you don’t want to go near. I don’t want to know who he is. How can he do such a thing, the worst thing in the world?! [Referring to a father-character in another play] […] I told myself, “You’re in the theatre; you’ve already played all the good guys, all the nice guys; you’ll gain by doing this.” In the theatre, every sin is big. As if someone comes from above and knocks me on the head [demonstrates this with his hand behind his head] and asks [thickens his voice]: “What have you done for art, for the task?” The theatre gives me legitimacy to deal with myself via other characters.

In a dialogue that Buber published under the name “Daniel,”

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Leonhard asked: So the actor does not really experience the agitations that he acts? And Daniel answered: He does not experience their feeling, but he experiences his action. And the excitement in which he stands in his: the excitement of the polarity, of the transformation. All high excitement has its origin in a polarity that is experienced, realized, carried out […] that high excitement which is above desire and pain, which is dearer and more sacred to the soul than desire and pain, bestows itself on the venturing man. (in Friedman 1969, pp. 68–69, author emphasis)

Like Buber, the actor called the span of this excitement, the space between the poles, a “middle” (Friedman 1969, p. 75). The middle is the brawl, carried out with unexplained delight, between light and shadow in the actor-character’s psyche. Its purpose is to create a non-categorical character, a single breath within which an architect-of-churches-of denialof-forbidden-sexuality exists. The actor’s description of this liminal place is not simple, of course. As he tries to explain the psychological work that it involves, his words become less orderly, rational, and quotidian, befitting the steps that climb higher and higher in the Solness-actor’s imagined ascent to the church tower. I investigated this ascent in the wake of his footsteps. At the new elevation where I wished to position the ethic, the middle ground between anthropology as a systematic language and nationalism widened. This befits rehearsal as a domain of liminal life; it also befits the actor, a member of a collective that Turner (1969, p. 95) calls “threshold people.” “I had a prayer,” the actor said, brandishing a creased note on which he had written something like a song: “You’ll cross borders; don’t worry, new borders will be set.” What scares me is that if I go to the middle, I won’t want borders anymore. As though the middle is the center, you mustn’t cross a border. Here I say that I widen the borders of myself, of the consciousness of the life of everything. I wrote this in a rather transcendental state.… What I asked of my I … O God, how far I stray in my fantasies to make them true. What I request is artistic truth. Truth. To face it. I am willing to be swept away if only there’s love…. To acknowledge the truth and to desist because what is there in darkness? Nothingness, disillusionment. But to hear it anyway … the gates of heaven … twisting … opening, it’s already in the composer’s ears. It’s a song. […] There’s an especially awful place where fantasy can become true, become reality.

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Madness is alluring. And when there’s a cornucopia of characters, the actor’s penetration of the deranged character is all the more alluring. The agitated character is most at home in classical plays, waiting for the leading actor/actress to redeem him or her. The actors know that from play to play—The Master Builder, Othello, Hamlet, Medea—the character, whose world has turned upside down, is there but goes by a different name each time. If the actor wins the part, the character may give her or him more of the familiar pleasure, more of the same. This pleasure is a spiritual one. The tangle of explanations that made their way to my journal attests that it cannot be understood outside the I–Thou relationship, and that, accordingly, one should not be impressed by sounds of selfishness or pride that an actor blurts in an interview. They cannot mask the manifestations of tumultuous yearning—for the other—that the world of the small box accommodates. After all, what do actors want but to lose their sense of self?! The Thoucharacter, the actor’s Other as it is experienced from the outset, is the abstract solid that leads the actor to break through, to reach out so broadly as to touch life itself, a reality that transcends reality. Therefore, the more tainted with insanity the character is, the greater the delight. An actress in her dotage asked for the role of Medea, who killed her children. Furthermore, if offered the role of King Lear, who is prone to “un-topical eruptions, poor judgment, and bad habits,” she would not hesitate to accept it because “the more madness he goes through, the more human he is,” she said excitedly. “I don’t know whether you can place it in this world of yours,” the Solness-actor ventured. I seek his madness through my own. Do you understand what I’m saying? If he’s crazy, and he is, I have to find the madman who’s in me. Otherwise, what do I gain from it? What am I here for? […] I’m talking from some other “I” that I’ve got. Sometimes I let him talk. He’s the smartest, he knows the most, and he’s figured out all my tricks and put-ons. He won’t let me. I know that he’s … And who is this? It’s me and I know that it’s me. I decided a little while ago to divide him into young-me and old-me. That’s the most convenient way. It’s because I have several additional [selves], not only two [Laughs]. It may sound really disturbed but I’ve got them under control and the control is the center and the secret of everything I’ve said thus far.

“That’s absolutely right,” the actors are expected to exclaim when Buber (2007, p. 215) says, “It’s the individual’s special right to be known, to be known holistically …” (author emphasis). I am sure that by the time this textual moment is reached, it is already clear that the actors affirm this saying

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not only through their knowledge of the human character, the contours of its nature, but also by knowing whether it has ethics and how pleasant it is in its ways. This is true even if the character is immensely and famously benighted. The tension between the shadow—a corollary of a person’s specific selfness—and the self is infinitesimal in view of the monstrousness of certain members of humankind. Below are an actor’s remarks about playing a ruler who is known for his tyranny, fascism, cruelty, and antisemitism. The words in italics are geared to Buber’s theory: I don’t like Mussolini but in those moments of acting I’ll think that he’s a person who’s in pain and he’s hungry and he’s got a bellyache and he’s got his inner sadness. Only then can I do the role successfully. […] The doing, what’s called “instant art,” is a one-way doing, lacking depth of pain. I always want to search for the character’s secret. Maybe he was a battered child. Maybe he had a problem, or more than one problem, with his mother. I don’t look for the difficult perverted secret but for a little secret, one I can always exit from.

The actor-character’s work is all-embracing in terms of human nature; it relates to all characters, culminating with the one who resides in the imagination of the last spectators in the audience. For the actor who plays Solness, it is the ethic of the I–Thou relationship, which strives for the holistic, that determined the meaning of the melodrama. He turned its meaning—a tearjerking plot composed of tragic elements that merge to form a successful ending—into a format that he deems worthy of his performance in terms of human dignity: I’ve seen that melodramatic excitation, always and in all kinds of forms, touches upon the restoration of a person’s dignity. Once there was an American movie about a soldier who was suspected of having stolen a wallet. He denied it and by the time it’s over they ask him to forgive them. It made me cry … because they asked his forgiveness, because he wasn’t guilty. […] Solness talks about God in the play for a reason. Every role means taking words and making a whole out of them. Via the words, due to his words, by the merit of his words, because of his words. All told, there are words that he says and words that are said about him. If I put them together, one and another and another, I want to get to the stage where we’ll see the megalomaniac, the scared guy who’s totally inconsiderate of his surroundings, and suddenly we as an audience say, “He’s suffering so much, he’s so lonely, really so wretched.” We as an audience have to tell him, “Take it, accept it, sh…sh.”

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We have to look at him and say, “Hey, haven’t I been cruel to people around me?!” To receive a drop of forgiveness. To forgive him for the wrongs that he did. That’s theatre.

What happens when the director puts the I–Thou relationship to the test? Actors may stretch the limits of their selfness until they overcome the director’s instructions, as I have described. Perhaps too, however, they will accommodate the character’s agonies and pursue the character’s struggle to be known to the audience as they think he or she should be known— as an aspect of their own psyche. Examples of this exist that meet the requirements of moral drama, in which actors “have to disregard their own interests as well as the special expectations of the audience” (Giesen 2006, p. 327). In one of two especially raucous conflicts, an actor recounted a previous role of his in which he “showed all [his] cards” in his struggle with the director—no less than “betting my life.” He was a student of Lee Strasberg, who famously encouraged actors to free themselves of all commitments to script and audience. Thus, unable to connect with the character whom the director outlined, the actor presented a demand: Hand over the role like a gift. Believe me, the success of the play is my success and vice versa. Sit down over there; do not disturb! I know what I’m talking about. This role burns in my bones. […] A few days later, the director suddenly dropped in at a rehearsal carrying this fake potbelly and told me, “Do this scene with a potbelly.” I asked, “Why?” I stared at him and said, “Get out of here!” He shouted at me, “Put on that potbelly!” “Put on that potbelly?!” I roared. “I want to strip down to my underwear and you want to dress me in a potbelly? Are you an imbecile?! Knock it off, I want to be the most me and I’ve got to hide behind a potbelly?! Are you off your rocker or what?!” […] I went through an amazing trip. I was there within the situation. I told myself that it’s a big play and I’m a partner in a terribly great experience, and I’ll keep going with this. Ultimately, the director gave me lots of leeway. […] I saw the audience accept it. I thought about the mission only with myself. I took no one into account. I acted it out in order to believe that everything I did in the theatre originated in some deep truth, not in how it ought to be done and how to please someone and get good reviews, but really how to create from the words, which are only words of a living person, how to be.

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The second conflict was a great rupture between this actor as Solness and the director. It focused on the question of how the character’s life—the plot—should end: in tragedy or with a dash of melodrama? The director gave Solness a handgun with which to shoot himself in the head. The actor, however, balked at any dramatic solution of lesser impact than a hero’s death, considering only such a death as one worthy of the character. As we passed some skyscrapers on the way back from the rehearsals, an actorpartner of Solness could not substantiate the degrees of death-honor in this dispute better than “I see the towers. He [the Solness-actor] wanted to fall from them but the director wanted him to commit suicide down here.” The denouement of these quarrels left me wondering whether a defense brief such as the one that the Solness-actor stuck in my briefcase had ever been composed in the history of the theatre history. He gave it to me with the insinuation of sharing a secret, after having faxed it to the director: […] Who’s going to compete with you? Solness, maybe? This Solness, who I’m beginning to march past the milestones that you and Ibsen set up for me, my Solness, who stands at the top of the tower and defies God as His equal, my Solness is a megalomaniac full of anxieties. And I am a known megalomaniac. I know him best. I’ve been there. So, for your information, I’ll never put a bullet in my head. I’ll fly. I’ll be above everyone on the brink of heaven and I’ll shout, “I did it!” Everyone is punished for hubris. If the lord tells his princess that he’ll go to the top of the tower and then come down to kiss her, he’ll really go up. […] Don’t forget: Solness, that’s me. I’m sure you don’t want a golem who’ll turn on his creator. You want me at my best. Look me in the eye courageously and let’s cross the bridge together, the one that’s got a gaping abyss underneath it. Believe the distress that I’m in. I believe yours. Find an ear and an eye for me. We’ve been given a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to have a true dialogue with ourselves.

The shards of crises such as these demand what Alexander calls re-fusion. If a social agent whose performance has an effect at the macro-cultural level were to replace the actor, it could happen above all due to fusion between his selfness and his public image. This small building-stone is shared by the theatre and contemporary social performance. In the latter, Alexander (2006) claims, the dimension of fusion embodied in traditional rituals has weakened. Fusion, he theorizes, has the status of a value. In the embedded “theory” of the actors, fusion with the character has erotic significance. Such significance sustains the Deleuzian ethic of creating life by offering

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an immanence that rejects the negations that define the human (Zepke 2005). “I felt that I’d passed an obstacle of sorts in my work,” the Solnessactor gushed: Suddenly I discovered the trick: I’m not past the desire for youth. Now the feeling is that it’s really like the first time. This is the secret of credible and correct acting. It’s the secret of the allure of acting. So it is, too, when I talk with actors about the secret of their being drawn to acting at starvation wages. […] It’s a journey that I’m taking. It’s the prolongation of life by another moment of eternity, another sliver of time. Even though his psyche has shriveled somewhat, almost physically, he’s strong enough to go to the edge of the tower and wave a flag and say, “I’ve made it; I’m here” […]. Here the maximum balance between the psychic and the physical is struck, a dynamic and shaky equilibrium between an undifferentiated sense of eroticism […] it’s Eros, it’s the imperative of life. […] I’m here to change reality. […] It sounds overly philosophical, that the reality of the theatre can be changed. As though I can plan out the future of my life. Of my own life, of to die or not to die, to age or not to age, through Solness. I have to find his connection with these things. And slowly I begin to understand him.

Transformed, Buber thought, the actor “executes with the movements of his existence the secret movement of the world. He lives the lives of the world […]. For the secret of the world is the kinesis of the infinite, the union of meaning and being, and no one comes near it who reflects upon it: only he comes near it who does it, and he is the knower” (Friedman 1969, p. 69). The young actor who played Ragnar, guiding his acting psyche down this path, tried to explain this truly hard-to-explain matter by using the word possession: An actor always has the challenge of shredding his own limits and improving in the middle of what he’s doing, in the middle of this endless quest that we live in. Possession is a milestone, a certain achievement. It’s when you know that what someone might say doesn’t matter, that it’s real, it’s real! […] When it happens, you get a sense of catharsis. A sense of possession….

This kind of possession avoids the coarse metaphoric denotation of the word—penetration—by producing an erotic union that comes with a restructuring of the I–Thou relationship that transcends the encounter. Far from aspiring to take possession, the transition is made in order to shed

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self-identity, an identity that is always fictitious, and to replace it with a unified ontological effect. Loss and fusion are on the same side of the coin, if one may relate to Bataille’s (1986, p. 17) formula with due metaphorics: “The whole business of eroticism is to destroy the self-contained character of the participants as they are in their normal lives.” One of my participants, an actor, issued a crude command: “A stage is for fucking, not for masturbating!” I realized belatedly that this statement may have had more to it than bad taste when, farther on in my interviews, actors drew a line between it and Deleuzian becoming: “You go on stage, it’s life ….” Even in terms of prostitution—a disparaging simile that acting has acquired—this actor wanted to say the same thing as he draped the prostitute in moralism: “She’s very exposed. That’s exactly what it is. She gives the audience her all. It’s authenticity.” Acting is as obscene as prostitution only in respect of fakery, imitation of reality, something that lives in a place that we will not find, of course. This is merely the view of Diderot and his like, who consider the actor tantamount to “a courtesan who has no heart, and who abandons herself in your arms” (Diderot 2007, p. 17). For actors, of course, it is as plain as the truth that this opinion about acting expresses the ultimate heresy. Observing this metaphoric landscape, Buber saw in the transformation of the actor something that makes him or her akin to a sex hero because at issue, like sex, is “a natural and elemental union” (Friedman 1969, p. 47). What principle, however, are the naysayers who affirm the actor = prostitute equation repudiating? The actors’ remarks showed me that it lies in the invisible part of acting, the signified that transcends the erotic metaphors. Acting is a way of expressing a psychological need for what eros offers—a perfect world and a perfect and creative life driven by love (Moore 1998, p. 9). “I believe on the basis of personal knowledge,” the Solness-actor states: that there’s a place after the orgasm […] it’s already beyond sex, but for most people it has to cross through sex to be reached. If only I knew how to explain it. You have to cross it in the imagination, by sublimation. […] I believe it’s an easier way to attain revelation, in which you receive information from the unknown, in which you get the right to be the character.

On another occasion, he said:

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Once I know the character, even then I won’t be him; I’ll just know him. […] Knowing him is interesting. Biblical.18 […] In every role that I play, I’m guided by impulse, by which I mean a driving force. I always do seek this energizing thing that’s called sex, that lies beyond the organic areas.

Acting on stage is an erotic performance—erotic in the refined and abstract sense that the phrase “sexual spirituality” connotes (Gamliel 2014, pp. 256–273) to signify the superiority of spiritual, artistic activity. The sexuality that this activity offers exists solely at the slender symbolic level that denotes becoming one.19 The beneficent I–Thou relationship—a reflection of sexual spirituality—arises from the poet Agathon’s description of Eros at Plato’s banquet: the patriarch of abundant kindness toward the good, of plenitude and refinement, of pleasures, grace, charm, and yearnings, “he who delights to walk delicately upon the tender places of the soul” (Symonds 1880). The Solness-actor wanted to make me—Tova Gamliel—into a character that he plays. I realized post-factum that this course of action, which he dreamed up some time before I arrived for one of my interviews with him, might teach me something about what a female Thou feels in the dialogic relation between actor and character. He prefaced his proposition by calling it “super-scholarly, -artistic, and -legitimate,” and when I assented, he established a division of roles between us. He revealed to me that the Thou in the actor–character relationship, as he understood it, has the status of a “god” and that he as an actor is duty-bound to place the character’s words in his mouth even if no director is present: Now I’m sitting with you and you want to pick my creative brain about the deep anthropological relationship that exists between man and the theatrical artist, the actor who, you might say, holds a mirror up to our lives. Is it possible to adopt a bit of artistry and understand through it the meaning of human relationships? I think that’s where you want to go, isn’t it?! […] I asked myself, “What would happen if, given everything you know about your interviewer, you’ll play her? What work would you do for the role? The only thing you’ve got for it is the information you’ve acquired thus far. You’ve met several times. Now you have to be her in some play.” The ingenious idea is that now I can flow there, into my fantasies, into what only a person who has to play Tova Gamliel should enter. And then you’ll see, maybe this will answer lots of questions of what working on a role is. […] The possibility of enjoying a meeting with you is interesting.

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I’ll do all the talking. You don’t have to speak. But you can disapprove by interrupting and saying, “Please, not this!” […] I’ll let you be the sole editor, as though I know that you’re the “god” before whom I want to be Tova Gamliel. You think it’s funny because you’re lots more than all the Tova Gamliels that I want to be right now. But if you’re really willing, don’t be afraid that with my warped vision, which has nothing to do with you, I might see the wrong things in you. It might be outrageous. What we’re doing now is work for work’s sake.

As we continued, he recounted the “information” that an imaginary director had given him: They told me, “Your role is Tova. You have to be Tova in this play. Why did she come to interview [his name]? Who is this Tova? What do you want from her? Why are you dealing with this question, ‘Who’s this Tova?’ at all?”

Thus he explained an actor’s initial experience, in which he gauges the magnitude of the task: So now I tell myself, “There’s a place out there that might be embarrassing….” It’s working on a role. If I say this is how I see Tova Gamliel, it won’t be Tova Gamliel at all; it’ll be my Tova Gamliel at that moment. She might change 180 degrees before it’s over. That’s what fascinates me about working on a role: to find a Tova Gamliel who’s such that it’ll be me.

When he began working on my character, he sought to uncouple himself from me and did it this way: Now I’m undertaking something that’s quite complex. I’m undertaking to be Tova Gamliel.

He sprawls on the armchair, trying to concentrate on a difficult task, putting himself through a warm-up before going into my character by describing himself in the present: This is a role that I was given. I don’t even want to look at her and absorb things related to her behavior. Even though I look at her and see all kinds of things. One hand is free; I see all kinds of things but I really have to ignore them. Stanislavski, for example, says, “When you’re working on a role, lie down in bed and get into the character at home. Open the door. Smell the aromas.”

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[…] I have to say the words and they have to be concrete and immediate, and they have to believe me in this. Today this is what I’m doing as I work on the role. Hardly anything else. I memorize the lines. […] I know when the character says something, why she says it, and I bog myself down in more questions than I can count: Why does she say [it] now, but where? Can I be in her house?! I can open this door and see what’s on the right and what’s on the left. […] Oh, you’re complex for me and I admire complexity. […] I love her. I love the Tova Gamliel who wrote a book about old people. […] I, who wants to play her, ask the questions there, at the source, in the depth of the character, which I penetrate when I’m working. What really causes her pain? What does she really like? What does she want with this life? How does she make a living? What does she want? [Expletive]. Until I know, I can’t even be next to her. […]

The actor, I realized, was striving to attain the rare state of love that is embedded in the I–Thou dyad. I also sensed that had my doppelgänger been present, the character, like any character when it is played, might be captivated by the sincerity with which he empties and then fills himself. Indeed, there is no reason to deny the pleasure and exaltation that I felt at those moments; they are the rewards that are reserved for the Thou and the I in an authentic encounter. From the moment I realized this, the idea should have come to its end. In no way could I assent to his request: “I very much don’t want you to fall in love with me. You shouldn’t fall in love with me. Give me the option of imagining.” Only slightly did this paradoxical request anticipate my request—that he stop. What the actor failed to obtain from me in that encounter, he received in breadth and depth by means of the rehearsal work. Toward of the final stretch before the premiere, he became Solness. Once he completed his Stanislavskian transformation—something that the rest of the cast noticed—he throbbed with elation and fell captive to Solness’ emotions and doings. This peculiar delight so engulfed him that, as we headed out to the city street after one of the rehearsals, I watched in horror as he strayed from my side and marched with perilous confidence into a crosswalk against a red light and bustling traffic. As if to proclaim that he heeded neither my warnings nor the cars’ horns, the old man thrust his hands heavenward and cried into the void, “I feel like a king!” Then he explained it: “Solness totally solnessed me!” Afterward, when I tried to explain something, he responded mischievously: “You don’t have to tell me what you mean. I know what it is before you speak….” “Excuse me, Solness!” I couldn’t

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restrain a theatrical apology. “Exactly!” he said, laughing at my adherence to his adherence to the character. “I’m doing an internship on you.” The joy of possession belongs not only to an artist-philosopher or what Buber called a “great actor” (Friedman 1969, p. 68). It was evident in all members of the cast, irrespective of the importance of their roles in the play. In pauses that broke up the continuous flow of the scenes, the actors sometimes called each other by their characters’ names when reacting to trivialities or fleeting concerns outside the mise-en-scène, in accordance with the spirit and intentions of the principals—actor, actress, and their characters. Every time it happened, it prompted the interlocutors to smile and gave them an intimate thrill. It also validated the wisdom of the acting teacher who preferred the mechanistic word efficient over acting because the possessed playing of the characters, spilling into coffee breaks, snack time, a cigarette moment, or anything else, created a code that was understood deep down and made inordinately precise communication possible. Like coherent and explicit content (Burns 1972), the character was better known to the actors and the director than was the actor’s personality, something that was vast and in part unfamiliar. In addition to this paradox, in his status as a spirit that deviates from the history that emerges from the mouths of flesh-and-blood people, the character turned the prosaic moment outside the play into something like a dream, something adequately protected from the social logic that exists outside the theatre. Above all, the characters moved away from their place for transient needs only after they had taken on a freight of empathy, several weeks after being thrust into an I–Thou relationship with mathematical precision. Thus they allowed the actors to indulge in great intimacy. Their presence generated an exceptional warmth that enveloped me, too. Entities that rest on I–Thou foundations on all sides, I think, have the potential to encourage forgiveness and sympathy at all times. ∗ ∗ ∗ In his letter to the director that I quoted above, the Solness-actor issued a call that really emanated from the Buberian imperative of conducting “our dialogue with ourselves.” The dialogue in question is hard to unpack; I bend it into a triangle not only to satisfy what scholars call “analytical needs” but also in respect of form as a shape through which structuralist theory peers into the human conscience. “Mozart’s wife” in Amadeus, said an actor on behalf of the partner and the audience, “has a monologue.

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She holds his body and talks to it. She does it all with her back to the audience. How inconsiderate this is of the actors. Of the audience. […] It’s terrible!” Ethical responsibility for the establishment of an I–Thou relationship with a specific character belongs to the actor, the character’s spokesperson. This, however, is not the whole picture that the spectaculum conceals. Another measure and modality of ethical responsibility belongs to the partners, who also “wear” characters and are bound to them in a knot of fateful dependency. The theatre, within its boundaries, carries out what may easily be called enculturation to love. Actors’ temporary love of their living partners is one of the quintessential manifestations of the ensemble, one that proves no less challenging that the fusion of the actor and the abstract character being played. One may express this in terms of the meanings of sex and love in theatrical work à la Buber: Sex, like the transformation of the actor into the hero, is a natural and elemental union, while love […], like the word that arises between man and man in the drama, is the affirmation of the otherness. And for both, spirit, the relation between I and Thou, is primal, and the structure of theatrical production or the interaction of natural impulses is the “It” which the relationship employs and transforms. (Friedman 1969, p. 47)

In one of his classes, the acting teacher repeated the expression “giveand-take” dozens of times and “threatened” his students: “I’ll tear you apart with this yet.” He charged this “give-and-take” with enough energy and profound intent to induce the partner to accept what he or she should accept, something like the truth in giving. Ostensibly, no one was more familiar than him with approaches that empty the self of autonomistic ideas—approaches built atop the seeming limits of individualism, i.e., theories about being for others or being by means of others (Mead 1934; Merleau-Ponty 1962). Prominent among these approaches is Wilshire’s (1982), according to which the theatre “exhibits existentialia (categories of human existence) that structure a priori human life itself” (in Smith 1991, p. 341, original emphasis). Buber and Wilshire settled the debate over the nature of the self in favor of the I–Thou relationship. In the former’s eyes, a person’s special entitlement to be known and to be known in the holistic sense, that of being, can occur only in an act of partnership (Buber 2007, p. 215, author emphasis). For the latter, “Heidegger’s theyself or Sartre’s being-for-others [should be seen as] an authentic rather than an inauthentic self” (Wilshire 1982).

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Nothing better demonstrates the I–Thou value in the theatre than the metaphor of “burn” that the acting teacher invoked. Burning lies outside the ambitus of the metaphors that the actors used, including “tiptoeing,” “passing the ball” as in tennis or soccer,20 and members of a rowboat crew who synchronize the movement of their oars. The teacher’s metaphor was the most extreme imaginable: The “to give” is really and truly to arrive and to give. From all your soul and heart. We’re dealing with the most sincere and pure “to give” there is, one devoid of all interests. […] My page is open. Really, I don’t exist; I exist for you as a partner, I’m free to receive; it means that this is also how I give: I give you something that’s handy, to which you can apply something. […] I tell you that this “to apply” is like a burn of the most difficult degree. May you never know of it, but if you run a very fine feather over a burned body, it hurts so bad that it can’t be described. Even the very lightest feather. And I say, yes, an exposed body, anything that’s exposed, receives. I let my partner act on me. I accept him, accept the partner; therefore, there’s no interest. Give and take.

This skin-exposing intent, which deconstructs into structural manifestations in the rehearsal room, goes so far as to reinforce a magical secret bond among the characters as the partners embody them. These human manifestations are the foundation stones of the mise-en-scène, which in turn is a subunit of the whole that populates the complete stage world. Here are several examples of I–Thou as an essential whole: If an actor flubs his lines and has to repeat them, sometimes he waits for a partner to go ahead with the partner’s own lines. Only then does he manage to remember what he was supposed to say and to go back and fix it. The rule is, “Say your lines first; only then will I know how to say my corrected lines.” One actor’s lines are built atop, and depend on, the other actor’s lines. The two activate each other cognitively in total coordination. This order of presentation does more than force the partners to listen to each other’s words to the end before they respond; it also demands respect because it forbids an actor to break into the partner’s lines. A second example of the structural human embodiment of I–Thou is the equality of all roles played, ruling out the notion of hierarchy. Namely, no differentiation between a secondary role and a leading one is allowed within the whole of the mise-en-scène or the stage world. Every role, “small” or “big,” is equally valuable in an absolute sense because the whole cannot exist without the one or the other, like a machine relative to a screw. This value of equality, well known in the

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theatre (Amankulor 1989), was articulated by one of the actors: “In soccer, players who score goals are often not considered the best players. The good ones are those who build the game, who cook up the goal.” Another actor termed a secondary actor’s assistance to the leading actor a “supporting part.” The positive attitude toward the value of playing a role, any role, was formulated thus: “If all you’ve got is a secondary role, then you’re the star of secondary roles, a star at that moment.” It also happens that an actor who has one line to recite is asked to invest two hours per day, three times per week, in working with the cast around him on that line. “The other actors,” one actor described it, “are his aides; they are there to figure out what has to be done to sustain him. […] In the play, this one line was so full that he was an entire world at that moment.” A Christian interpretation of the theatre invests this idea with cosmic significance, stating that playing any role “contributes to the entire narrative trajectory of the movement of God’s work in the cosmos” (Hart 2007). A third example is the eruption of a crisis in relations between partners that the whole cast inevitably experiences as a rupture of itself. One day, after an actor slammed the door behind as he left, the rehearsals came to a total halt and the cast scattered down the corridors to wait for the director to speak up. Obviously, any member of the ensemble can “ruin everything” at a given moment. The full ensemble cannot survive the absence of any of its constituents. As they talked it over quietly, the actors understood clearly that the crisis between these partners was “everyone’s business” and “not a matter of politics. Our skin is exposed.” This prompts another remark about the sensitivity–dependency relationship that exists between the self and the other. Seemingly, nothing in the world is farther from Schadenfreude than the stage. The runner-up in this respect is the rehearsal room, an enclave where unsullied, consistent, and touching goodness is demonstrated. A partner’s well-being is very important to an actor. No one is more important to an actor than her or his partner. Actors are willing to speak of themselves as “zeroes” without their partners. “You have to make sure to get the best partner,” one actor said, “because when you act with someone who’s small, it pulls you down. When I act with someone greater than me, it pulls me up. Even when I lose, I rise because he pulls me along in the acting.” Acting selves are aware of the modern illusion of autonomy, of their inability to speak for themselves solely by themselves.

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The rehearsals abound with mise-en-scène tableaux such as the following, in which an actor stops due to confusion or forgetfulness and his actress-partner whispers the stream of words. Since actors constantly help each other in this manner, partners find themselves saying together, complementarily, words of a character with whom only one of them so strongly identifies as to consider the character part of the self. The actress prompts her partner with words that reside in his psyche, that fuse with his character, the moment he forgets their continuity. Chiding the director for her partner’s lapse of memory, or displaying an impatience of her own, is the last thing on her mind. She pronounces words that are not hers as if they were hers, in the order that script indicates, and says her line immediately after the forgetful actor picks his lines up again. Her precise incursion into the words of her partner’s character instigates a dialogue and propels it forward. What might an actor feel as the words of his character/psyche are spoken thus, with quiet compassion? Such support verges on the emotion of love. Partners help each other in many additional ways. It happens among all kinds of partners, including young and old, commensurate with their comparative advantage: physical strength, powers of concentration, or breadth of professional experience. Quiet, small-scale compassion, delivered undramatically, allows the drama to proceed by eliminating all weaknesses. Actors help one another to climb out of a low chair, move at the requisite pace, stand out on the stage, look as they should, know the history of the play, conceal from their partners something that might cause pain, et cetera. Of particular concern is the need to prevent one’s partner from being caught performing badly. In another study, describing a social reality that verged on death, I called this phenomenon a “solidarity of respect” (Gamliel 2005, pp. 249–251).21 It is perhaps due to this latent value among members of the ensemble that professionalism in acting reveals itself foremost in the ability to improvise. By means of this facility, manifested before the audience at critical moments, a partner who has forgotten her lines, made a wrong gesture, or had some trouble creating an impression can “get out of it” without the harm that one would expect poor performance to inflict. The theatre is an exercise in mutual responsibility in its most exacting form, an arena for solid configurations of relations in which partners share each other’s disasters equally. At the premiere, the actors plunge into collective anxiety before they go on stage. I realized that a premiere, when viewed from the backstage, is a synonym for the eve of the Day of Judgment, the apotheosis of the audience’s ability to influence a work in progress. Newspaper theatre critics

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are expected to receive preferred seating in the large box. The next day, the actors’ names will appear in print, for praise or scorn. The actors, in their dressing rooms, put a pleasant face on their expectations and divert their fear of failure to various channels, some displaying it within their circles of fraternity and others stewing under a blanket of endless fretting expressed in comments about each other’s clothing, eyeglasses, length of hairpiece, angle of accessory, or not-all-that-beautiful bodies. Feelings of inferiority surface. The actors’ remarks are as childish, whiny, obsequious, and singsongish, as if emanating from a kindergarten. It is a time for love. Heartfelt words of appreciation, affection, and best wishes move from one to the other. A pat on the cheek, a lengthy hug. Laughter rolls about in a tight circle. Two veteran actors size up this hubbub from the side, one step away. They have long been partners, co-owners of a “tradition” that they realize by the compulsory exchange of whispered secrets. He begins by spitting on the floor. She follows by doing the same. The two of them emit a total of three dollops of saliva. Then they embrace one last time and cry, “Good luck. Don’t worry.” There really was nothing to worry about. At this ritual moment, they could not imagine the near-disaster that would occur: She would not respond on time to Solness’ call to his wife, Aline, before the spectating eyes of hundreds of riveted theatre-goers and sharp-tongued guests. They did not know that at the crucial moment he would call Aline once and then again, as though this is exactly how their fictional couplehood played out, and that he would wait for her calmly and thus add something to a script and to an experience that had been nailed down in the mise-en-scène long ago. The resulting impression would be that Ibsen had really meant it to be this way. When Aline finally came on stage, choking on a combination of anxiety and self-directed rage, she realized how good her partner’s improvisation had been. As her no-show on stage continued, we in the backstage, the cast and I, held our breath. The redeeming improvisation was like the unfurling of a red carpet for the actress. It was by virtue of such extemporaneity, the actor related, that he had been admitted to the “club,” something like receiving a badge of honor, while still young. If the regime of I–Thou authenticity remains nothing but the imposed order of an inadequately internalized ethical value, however, a sin may protrude from its fissures. The sin in question is stealing. In the culture of the theatre, “stealing the show” occurs when an actor deviates from the performative sequence that has been precisely established and stipulated in the mise-en-scène, possibly allowing him to upstage his partners in the

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audience’s attention and sympathy. After watching an unripe mise-en-scène in which a fetching and very funny act of larceny took place, the acting teacher called the urge to misbehave a “wind of war.” So shameful did she consider the transgression that she could not leave it with sarcasm; instead, she proposed to the robbed actress that she show up her purloining partner after the class and cuss her out with “a few good words.” The director, she assured the gaping-eyed students, would find a theft of this sort “out of the question.” Such larceny, veteran actors taught me, flows from the use of stage tricks that are unworthy of an actor. The idea of doing it has to occur to an actor as he gazes into the audience’s eyes, metaphorically or literally, through the world that the characters inhabit. Therefore, it belongs not to theatre but to deviant theatricality—to the street. If the temptation mounts but the actor does not want to be considered a thief, the tricks must be approved. “When the rehearsals began,” a veteran actor related, I asked the director, “Would it bother you if I make my hand tremble, like a hundred-year-old man?” He replied, “Ask the actors.” I told them, “Folks, I’m sleeping in an armchair. I want them to see that I’m still alive. I want to wiggle my hand so they‘ll think everything’s okay. Do you agree?” They said, “Do whatever you want.” […] I knew I’d be stealing the scene from the actors. It’s forbidden. But they said yes. It’s one of the most dangerous things.

If so, a famous stage actor who steals the show is deemed to be indecent and “dangerous” by one and all. The actors’ exposed-skin sensitivity taught me that stealing has “misdemeanor” levels that the director may condone. Just the same, stealing qua stealing, however minor and allowable, exposes an actor to the suspicion of harboring impure intentions. “Overlapping” is a minor configuration in which partners break into each other’s lines. In one of the recesses, an actor wondered candidly to his partner about the “overperformance” of this crime by both them in a scene of a brawl between them. Never mind that the director had ordered them to do it exactly so, as rooted in the logic of the struggle. After all, among its various forms, struggle is expressed in the violence of stealing the counterparty’s voice. Nevertheless, the actor found it correct to remark on this that the instruction was diametrically opposed to what he had been taught in acting theory about listening to his partner. Standing at a “wrong” angle may also be considered misdemeanor larceny. In his complaint about his partner, the actor said, “It irritates me

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that she steals backwards all the time. She doesn’t focus on me the same way. I hope she isn’t really aware of what she’s doing. She makes me talk with my back to the audience. The mise-en-scène has to be revised.” Stealing subverts the value of equality even if it honors the other rules of the game. Its underlying intent challenges the belief in the equality of everything—roles, gestures, motions, and so on—relative to the whole of the stage world. It wishes to call extra attention to its object. By gratifying the audience, it may be seen as separating the audience’s well-being from that of the actor–partner. In the ethical culture of the theatre, the partner plainly comes first and the audience has to be won over without undermining his or her status. To the best of my knowledge, only in this case can an actor drive a wedge between his or her partners in the triangular actor–partner–audience relationship. Given the potential damage that this can cause, actors stressed the importance of bodily gestures that attest to their “openness” to each other at the expense of signed communication between one of them and the audience. By saying this, they alerted me to the potential of thievery that may exist wherever movement is nil. Stealing the show, or the mise-en-scène, is the slimmest of betrayals, a pallid and furtive misdeed compared with the changing presences in the dramatic flow that the audience sees. Ever present in the actor-thief’s toolbox are two lines of defense: claiming innocuousness and going on the offensive, i.e., accusing the victimized partner of being petty. An actor who breaches trust can, it seems, cite the laughter, tears, and tumultuous applause of a satisfied audience if he or she is credited with having salvaged blown scenes or a boring play after the fact. The elusive nature of this heist—conscious or not, corrective or damaging—arose in a rare situation in which I heard one of the veteran actors, in the presence of several colleagues, praises an associate of his stature who played in The Master Builder for having stolen a different show: “He stole the show. It was amazing the way he played on their emotions. Literally so, I witnessed it. He showed the actors where fish pee. It was six levels above everyone.” He was trying to show his young listeners the importance of authentic acting by a contemporary of his, acting that could steal the show just by its own power. Once he used the crude and powerful expression “stole the show,” however, the actors in attendance revealed the impact of his words. They fell into thundering silence. The compliment went unrequited. Thus, even an ex post theft, the product of edifying character work, is undesired. Stealing the show, an outcome attainable only at some level of emotional insensitivity, should be seen as the desire to obtain personal gain by making

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one’s partner into an “it,” nothing more than a useful prop, relative to one’s “I.” The damage is repaired by establishing a deep I–Thou relationship that allows the interpersonal barriers to fall and lets a harmonic fusion “happen.” An actor’s presence at what “happens” is his or her momentary Deleuzian reward for the work done, i.e., safe contact with the happening-ness of life. This ideal situation is considered transcendent and has been privileged with various names: “secret,” “chemistry,” and “magic.” It overshadows the need to trust the partner and to engage in disciplined respect work, exacting effort, and gestures of compassion toward him or her. Beyond the intent, it implies abandoning all calculus and letting go. The I–Thou construct that it elicits is enveloped in truthfulness. Consequently, the “others” must be marked as acutely foreign and the director must be deemed unnecessary. An actor described it thus: The magic is something bigger than all of us. This thing that happens when you’re totally in the situation…. All these components that we built and analyzed mathematically in the rehearsal period, when you make everything perfect and set the whole technique free … and allow all these things to become, then you and your partner remain and your [in the plural] texts become yours [in the plural], because there’s no director anymore and no technical elements around you. There are only two people who believe for the moment that this is their situation and they fight with each other, each for the thing they believe in the most and desire the most in the world. Then the magic happens; then there’s truth and chemistry. Sometimes we go out and say, What an amazing scene, Amazing! Authenticity has happened.

A rare account of the performative manifestations of this “magic” comes to light in a director’s remark in an interview: They asked the director, “But how do [the two actor-partners] know what to do?” He answered, “How do they know? I don’t know; they know.” S. knows exactly when L. wants to turn right. He’s already standing aside. He knows when she extends her hand to him. She knows what he wants. They are like two [soccer] players, one passing the ball to the other. I can’t interfere with it. I don’t know where the ball is. I sit; I only tell them in general terms what to act about, and they act. They have a secret. They may not even know that they have one. It’s something that flows. They look at each other. S. suddenly moves to the right and L. suddenly stands up. They know in advance. One day the curtain rose and they knew where to go.

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This is what happens when the I–Thou construct makes its contribution to the overall ensemble, when the mise-en-scène becomes an ensemble per se. The I–Thou nexus can maintain an existence that transcends language and signs, Buber believed. “At its most exalted moments, the dialogue attains a wholeness outside the contents given over […] in an authentic becoming with its exactitude of exactness” (Buber 2007, pp. 110–111). The human middle ground between actor–partners may acquire greater depth if one partner responds to the other’s invitation to establish covert intimacy. The invitation, in no way a bewildering one, is to perform together “throughout the whole rehearsal period.” It may be phrased thus: “Let’s decide to make every sentence that we utter in the play a personal statement to each other.” They enter into an exclusive and conscious partnership in a secret game that is played out within the frame of the overt acting on stage. As this subversive demarche proceeds, the partners contemplate possible meanings of the lines that they recite—intentions within intentions—and thereby multiply the I–Thou identities to which they respond. As an actor explained: I look at [my partner] irrespective of the theater. [I see him as] D., my brother in the play, an actor, and someone who knows how to answer me in the scene before I react. Look how complex it is. […] I’ll tell you how I play it. In the script, the only thing that’s written is “Thank you very much.” He knows that’s what I’ll tell him and he’s got to be a tabula rasa. He told me something. And I’m a tabula rasa, too. He tells me, “I enjoyed it” and I want to tell him, “You piece of shit, you enjoyed it?! You messed up my part! I won’t put up with a brother like you!” But I look at him and tell myself, “But he really believes what he says. This is my brother; I know him.” And I tell him, “Thank you very much. Maybe you really meant it.” Everything that just happened happened without stage direction between us. I really try to hear what he’s telling me, what he’s telling me within it, where D is situated here. Now, how do I relate to it? Every evening I say it to him differently. It’s our story. And the audience thinks it’s written in the script.

Unspoken reflexivity in the course of the mise-en-scène generates a personal dialogue that constitutes a “drama-of-drama” or a “drama-withindrama,” ushering the partners into a becoming that fuses them. Notably, this becoming will not outlast the first few performances unless it is a game of sorts. The mute reflexivity floods the I–Thou connection with new “nuances” that suffice even if they are noticed by the partners only. The nuances enliven and “refresh” the mise-en-scène each evening anew. It is they that

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give the partnership its unending “pleasure” even after a hundred performances. They are a post facto mathematics that cannot be subordinated to permanent consciousness even though, as stated, it is customary to view the worked-up mise-en-scène as an integral whole that, once attained, is immediately “put in a plastic bag and stored in a freezer.” In other words, reflexivity is a consciousness about being conscious (Myerhoff and Rudy 1982, p. 1), mediating the experiencing of experience and dissolving the opposition of mind and body, self and other (Hastrup 2004, p. 64). Thanks to this reflexivity, the actors again avoid imitation—this time of themselves. Today’s mise-en-scène is not yesterday’s. Otherwise, death would prevail. The creative force erupting from nowhere creates a subtext that buds and blossoms with particular vigor in the post-direction period, after the director has had his say. It amplifies the actors’ possession of the game and repeatedly reinvents it for each other. I–Thou is living structure. The partners’ pleasure in responding to each other may sustain their I–Thou dialogue even if the script and the director’s instructions replace it with a single-partner monologue. An actress explained: Sometimes the scene ends on stage and I exit and listen to the monologue [of the partner who remains on stage] even if I don’t have to because I’m not on stage. I listen to him when I exit through the doorway and I find it hugely thrilling. I listen to him every evening and get emotional and weepy from what he says. Then we meet backstage and always hug after this moment, because both of us got terribly excited.

What if the invitation to covert intimacy is spurned? In very rare cases, rejection and disgust may eventuate between partners, pitting them against each other. It happened between the Solness and the Hilda actors, in total contrast to the lovey-dovey instructions in their script. They divulged this revulsion to me, each in turn. Most of the actors knew about it, having seen it in quarrels, crises, threats, and blunt rejection of partnership, which, interestingly, the principals attested only in breaks and/or at the end of the day’s rehearsals—never in the mise-en-scène. The director, the artistic manager, and the actors expressed themselves about it with perceptible concern. Lack of true affection between the two leading actors, they affirmed, was intolerable; the play would not hold together. When the crisis flared with particular intensity one day, a turning point was reached: The two were told plainly that it had to be this way and no other. Now, from the wall to which they had been pushed, the partners began to converge toward each other

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in what became an emotional battle of titans. It suffices to note the extreme configuration on the continuum of efforts to attest to the I–Thou kingdom in the stage world as a sacred value. It was a configuration that invented ex nihilo love—witchcraft. The Solness-actor, whose professional career is flush with anecdotes of magic and mysticism, advised me in advance that now, too, he would plumb the depths of the character he was playing in order to win over the actor who reviles him: “I’ll change my face toward her by 180 degrees,” he promised. I’ll demonstrate Solness’ magic power. It’s an example of how I work. I outsmart myself. It may be a brilliant idea. […] The idea is not to say it, to truly love her, to cross the hurdle in her direction so she’ll want to act with me. […] I’m going to bewitch her.

At the end of this game of roles, the partnership went smoothly and reaped a harvest of accolades. ∗ ∗ ∗ Structural theory necessitates some remarks about the third player, the audience. Here, the textuality-of-visitation envelops us as we gravitate to the edge of the backstage and nearly encounter those seated in the large box. Only ostensibly is it correct to equate the status of the audience with that of the rest of the acting triad. The audience is not a party to the partnership. It has no coalitional agency in the complicated triad of character-partneraudience, as Simmel’s (1950) social structuralism might argue. It is the missing minder that influences everything that guides the artists in their art, including everything I have described about the road that the actors follow to their characters and partners. In this sense, one may view the audience as a meta-agent against which all partner configurations are resolved. It is as if the partnership has encountered Schopenhauer’s “hedgehogs’ dilemma,” in which the outcome—the creation of a liminal distance between people—yields the modality of relations that will give these people the greatest amount of warmth and the least amount of poking or freezing (Schopenhauer 2000).22 The audience is there from the outset, at the beginning of creation. The creation itself comes about under what Hastrup (2004, p. 33) calls “the eye of the audience.” As the mediator of all actor relationships that are constructed, the audience receives one metaphor—an executioner. The audience, the object of the effort to generate immediate gratification

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through this secular ritual (Purdie 1999), judges from a position of knowing and seeing everything that knowledge and vision require (Burns 1972, p. 231). This presentation of the audience’s standing within the framework of the theatrical event is a tentative version of Levinas’ (1985) argument about the third element, the one that represents the human multitudes and, with them, the transition from the ethical dimension to the political one. As I will show, however, it is not only the fear of sin, tantamount to fear of punishment, that grips the actors, but also the fear of greatness , a higher form of fear because it addresses the respect owed to those in exalted places.23 To demonstrate the magnitude of the fear of the audience, let me tell the tale of a mother’s death—a dramatized true story about an actor who found that he had to perform before an audience on the day of his mother’s death. Needless to say, his acting was so supernally professional that no one in the audience noticed its despite-it-all, get-it-over-with quality. What matters here is not the acting but whether the actor’s attitude toward his audience, linked with that toward his mother, is one of respect. The actor described his mother’s sudden passing as having shattered him: “It totally killed me.” He remained at her bedside, immovable, as word of the tragedy spread. The house filled to the brim with worshippers from his father’s synagogue—strictly Orthodox Jewish men with long beards and black coats. Even without the dour picture that this evokes, it was a day straight from the tortures of a gloomy winter. Rain pelted down incessantly, adding its dismal resonance to the outpourings of sobbing. In distant retrospect, one may sum up the setting as one fit for a perfect melancholy drama. Just the same, an unavoidable drama even less palatable to the emotions was about to begin. The telephone in the parents’ house rang; the grieving actor lifted the receiver, listened, and turned pale. It was a call from the theatre: He’s got to rush over to perform that evening. “You gotta do it!” he is ordered in a tenor that surmounted his trembling voice. “There’s going to be a big gate.” Like many actors at times of crisis, he was unable to refuse. Even the black-garbed rabbi, who witnessed the phone call and understood the questions that it evoked, gave him his go-ahead. Literally so: appreciating the implications of an audience discovering ex post that the show had been cancelled due to this actor alone, the cleric encouraged him to submit. To forestall the audience’s imprecations against the actor and his deceased mother, who had chosen this of all days on which to die, the rabbi ordered the actor to “say your lines. Do the job you have to do. Other than that, don’t speak with anyone.” In particular, he instructed the actor to deviate

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from custom and “avoid the bowing ritual.” At the very least, he should stand erect: “Don’t bow at the end of the show with the other actors.” As befitting someone in mourning for his mother, the rabbi continued, the actor should go ahead in order to honor the audience but should do so as an exercise in role-playing and forgo the curtsy. In the rabbi’s opinion, actors bow due to the pleasure of acting and the honor that is theirs to enjoy. The actor also described the shame that engulfed him that evening as he faced the cast for having been dwarfed by his regaining of composure, of all things. It made him antihero in his own eyes. He glanced at his partners apologetically, as would a wrongdoer who regretted his misdeed. The faces that returned his gaze, however, attested that this was their lot, something long familiar to them. After all, they knew the case, one of several that run like an intergenerational serial story among actors, of a “great actor” who in Israel’s War of Independence (1948) went on stage and performed on the day his brother’s airplane was downed. The story of the actor whose craft withstood the loss of his mother attests to the sovereignty of the audience. An actor’s total commitment to the audience, captured in the quip “the show must go on,” is the trigger— an obligation that prevails over every mental and physical crisis, of any type, apart from loss of consciousness. In the manner of all creative artists, this actor showed that the audience is “very important. Number one.” It is even considered immeasurably important. He demonstrated this by concluding his account with a well-known anecdote from theatre history that fits well with the Stoic philosophy of Epictetus, according to which human beings are actors in a play of The One (Hart 2007). A veteran actor, it is said, “once […] saw a young actor peering through the curtain at the audience before the show and asked him, ‘What are you doing?! You mustn’t stare at God!’” The audience is omnipresent in the artists’ consciousness. Thanks to it, the artists’ doings—or, better stated, the artists themselves—are privileged with existence during the run-up to the theatrical event and at every moment of the event itself. “The audience,” Hastrup (2004) contends, “is part of the play […] and as such it is also ever present in this work” (p. 33). The audience is considered “a consciousness constructed” and “what happens when performing the signs and passwords of a play, something postulates itself and unfolds in response” (Blau 1990, p. 25, author emphasis). The audience’s all-encompassingness becomes intrinsic to the dialectic of partnership, which states, in one of its formulations, that “[…] The onlooker is a partner who must be forgotten and still constantly kept

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in mind” (Brook 1969, p. 61). An actor’s every gesture should be seen as an I–Thou communication with an imagined or real audience in a liminal state of consciousness. The work of the character and the partner is a continual labor paved with breakthroughs from forgetfulness. If I may borrow Artaud’s metaphor, the audience knows that the actor’s acting is a “signaling through the flames” (Brook 1969, p. 57). This powerful representation pertains to all authentic acting before an audience. Something would be lost, however, if its especially tragic double entendre were to be ignored. An elderly member of the cast, who had once played the leading role in Job’s Passion,24 related that he repeatedly burst into weeping not in rehearsals but only before an audience, and for only one reason each time—the thought of his parents and family members who perished in the Holocaust: The audience gave Job an exceptional reception but it didn’t know consciously that I was thinking about my parents at that moment … […] An audience in a state of under-consciousness always feels that there’s something driving this actor to make him externalize roles such as these. I don’t disclose [the personal matter] […] but the manner of the performance, the results, are so moving and experiential that something special is needed to animate it, to attain this power. Therefore, I live with the feeling that the audience is with me, that it knows what I’m doing.

The roots of actors’ “signaling” are planted in their partnership relationship with the audience, a product of genuine sympathy. Ab initio, however, their performances stem from fear because they make no breakthrough of any I–Thou kind to the audience. Above and beyond breaking up the Ipattern vis-à-vis the partner, one should say that the actor’s breakthrough to the audience is tethered to a countervailing force. It evokes something of the terror of standing before a judge for sentencing, as the result of which, pursuant to the act of an executioner’s hand, a corpse will be displayed in plain view. “There are actors,” one actor assured me, “for whom every performance is a debut. Before it, they worry: ‘What’s going to happen? Will I endure it? Maybe I won’t? Will I be taken by surprise? Will I not?’” Dread. In the backstage routine, one encounters a “jury” metaphor that isn’t easily negated in conversation between the actors and the director: Director: We act the truth, especially when we lie. Actor A: That’s right (laughs).

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Actor B: That’s right but there’s a jury [the audience] that says, “He acted well, I believe him.” Isn’t there? Actor A: The audience shouldn’t be a jury. Heaven forbid. The audience mustn’t ask whether it’s being defrauded or not. It should fall into the trap that we’ve set for it and it should believe. That’s our role as actors. A member of a jury checks all the time. If our audience has to check, then we’re not in a good place. Actor B: You know what I mean. It doesn’t check, it isn’t influenced [like a jury-audience] by the defense counsel’s performance. Director: In the theatre there’s a term called suspension of disbelief. Namely, we know that it’s acting, that it isn’t the truth. We agree, as it were, to be like children and to believe. We believe now; we can judge later. We’ve got an agreement….

“Executioner” is a metaphor that evokes the immense performative power of the audience, which may easily become a “crowd.” By crowdiness, I do not mean the repertoire of vocal responses, mainly disparaging, that filled the Victorian theatre halls or the Jewish Yiddish theatre in early twentieth-century Eastern Europe: whistling, keening, shouting, cursing, and stamping of feet (Urian 1988)25 —even though this word, like the epithet “the confrontational model” (Helbo et al. 1991, p. 49) for the audience–stage structure, has something of the logic of the site of an execution. When one contemplates the existential images of the acting situation at a live theatrical event, one finds the metaphor in no way hyperbolic. Indeed, the presentation is thought to be in ongoing “danger” and the actor is described as liable to fail at any moment without expecting a safety net to be unfurled (States 1987, p. 119). “Forgetting lines in performance is called corpsing.”26 This seems true even of actors in the anti-play Offending the Audience, whom the playwright places in the role of “speakers”27 who unleash a string of crude and amusing “insults.” The critical playwright has license to deprecate the audience to her or his heart’s content (“asslickers”…) and even to have a recording of tumultuous applause played at the end of the performance (Handke 1971). Acting, however, is unique— tantamount to a “battlefield” where life and death square off (Fortier 2002, pp. 48–49). The audience is an entity that’s always noticed. Its “quietude” toward the “skin-exposed” or those who hold an emotional “seismograph” is nothing less than a bustling stir of emotion. The actors “feel the breathing” of the

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multiheaded thing that sits in the dark, they sense everything, and from the way they describe it nothing in the audience is hidden from those on stage. The crux of it is the heavyweight of the “variations” among the spectators, the unseen flow of feedback that is received by the actors and that determines what they feel. Like a blindfolded defendant facing mob justice, the actors have no license to peer into the audience. The absence of their gaze, which is totally pledged to the stage world that the acted character and the partners dominate and has no need to be banned by dictate, amplifies their sense of doom as it does their sensory sensitivity to every drop of sweat in the dark. The crinkle of a cellophane wrapper being peeled from a piece of candy as a scene is being acted is considered one of the bluntest indicators of poor performance, a mark of Cain for a boring piece of art. Contemporary theatre-goers need not shuffle their feet to make actors feel as though they’re sustaining a penal flogging. It suffices for them to deviate a little from what one may call their performance of attention—to scratch an itch, to fail to ovate long enough, and sometimes even to refrain from approaching this or that actor when the time comes to share their excitement over the actor’s thought-provoking performance. In the “theatre of modernism,” Blau (1990, p. 26) contends, “the audience is more egregiously aware not only of its responsive but its potentially subversive presence in the event.” Nothing is bitterer than a sweet that sheds its wrapper at a theatrical event. It is every actor’s yearning to bask in the greatness of the character that’s conferred by silence in the large box. Here is one of the loveliest descriptions of this effect, from Sholem Aleichem’s Wandering Stars: When the heavy curtain of the Nickel Theater rose with a loud swoosh, the sea of heads in the dimly lit great hall seemed to sway and a cool breeze wafted over it. For the span of a minute, with a quiet rustle, the audience prepared itself to watch and hear. But that soon longed-for hush descended, that pleasant, gentle, blessed stillness that embraces the actor from all sides, elevates him as if he were wings, and lifts him from the sage, sailing him over the sea of heads in the auditorium. That blessed stillness touches the noblest strings of the soul and draws out the finest overtures of talent.28

The audience is the ultimate judge during the rehearsal period; it is the basis on which the director hands down decisions. The director in my study deliberately invoked the actors’ fear of sin to discipline their performance.

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He did so in four main ways. First, he reminded them that he as the director represents the audience in theory and in practice, since he is versed not only in acting theory but also in audience psychology and knows how to predict spectators’ responses. Accordingly, when an actor pleaded bitterly and noisily for the right to perform something his own way, the director retorted, “I sit in the audience and notice it!” or, in other scenes, “I think the audience won’t put up with it,” and also “Here the audience laughs.” The second use of fear was his tendency to invite acquaintances and students, “hostile faces” (Brook 1969, p. 156), to serve as an audience for “runs.” Behind this inclination is the rule that “If the audience says you’re drunk, you must be drunk.” The third tactic was his request, after every run, for critical feedback from the actors on various aspects of their acting, thus serving as “one audience for the other.” When he demanded this, he explained the rationale: “Theatre isn’t poetry. Theatre has to be communicative. It has to reach the audience. It can’t be ‘That’s how I feel and that’s what I want and that’s that. Kiss my ass.’” In another case, he said, “I’m totally unwilling to see the audience get bored. I’m okay if it doesn’t understand for a moment. If it’s confused. But I don’t want them to sit there and say [demonstrates] ‘So what?! We heard. What do they want?!’” The director’s fourth way of disciplining the performance was manifested in activism at the critical stage of crystallization of the show, which takes place in the first ten performances after the debut. The cast still thinks of these performances as rehearsals. The director sits in the audience and takes notes. After the show, he convenes the cast backstage and demands corrections in the performance. Until he takes this responsibility to its limit, he serves as an audience within an audience, one who has an important say about minute tightenings of the mises-en-scène. Here is how one of the actors explained the role of the audience: It’s like you’re building a car. A driver comes over, sits down, and says, “It doesn’t hold the road on curves, it skids a little.” The car you’ve made is absolutely tip-top and he comes over and says, “It doesn’t climb hills.” He sat down in the car only once and he’s already sealed its fate. That’s what a critic is like. He tests you and tells the public how much [the play] is worth. […] The audience responds to the lines in mid-performance. Suddenly you say, “Wow, what I said made them laugh. It’s weird. We didn’t know it in the rehearsals.” Sometimes the audience shifts around; they don’t get it. Like during a concert. The music moves along and there’s one woman who shifts around. She’s not entirely … the music is a background thing for her. We want 100 percent concentration while we’re doing what we’re doing. Sometimes it

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isn’t there. “This play turns me off.” There are scripts like that; the audience talks to itself. And sometimes it falls silent, like it stops breathing. You know, you feel this moment, you don’t want to lose it, you don’t want this quiet to be torn away. […] In the first ten presentations, you usually get to know this thousand-headed partner that’s called an audience. Then you’re okay. […] Then with the eleventh performance, the show returns to the actors and the dynamic among them. That is to say, to conversations inside the car.

It is now best to desist from sloshing around in the shallow, lifeless waters of fear of sin. Insofar as it figures in the actors’ work, this fear is the grayish and somewhat dismal facet that gives the game its shape and, within this property, accommodates the actors’ feelings of shame and anxiety about a poor performance. Much different is the fear of greatness, which is basically the cast’s uplifting attitude toward the theatrical event. It is as though the actors inflate the individual event into an explanation of their entire body of work, their raison d’existence as actors. It is hard to separate the fear of greatness from the magical sense of the I–Thou encounter between actors and audience. The actors delivered their account of this fear and its single outcome with smiling faces and glowing eyes. Their very description of this possibility was a performance of the redeemed self. An outgrowth of the audience—the litmus paper of the acting ethic—is the expanded entity of Otherness in which the actor places his trust (Causey 2006). Another way of expressing it is to say that as configurations that cleanse the acting of every trace of mimesis are applied before the audience’s imagined or present eye, the act of cleansing itself is a perfect imitation of something else—the offering of a sacrifice. This mimesis is done not for the audience but for the exalted. As Causey theorizes: Sacrifice is the violent ground upon which culture and subjectivity is constructed, but is sublimated as mimesis in the form of ritual, which is in turn sublimated into the theatre, and further to art, television, virtuality, etc. Each step is a move away from the sacred horror of sacrifice and the authentic experience of the body in time toward a comfortable and evasive abstraction. (2006, p. 188)

Among the reasons for considering the theatre an art that mimics sacrifice, the theatre deprives the acting self of a value that the society in its habitus sanctifies: sovereignty (Dunne 1996). Actors on the job are merely media, and there is nothing significant about being a medium as a negative

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of sovereignty. I find an extreme and astonishing expression of this interpersonal situation in Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra, in its addressing the audience about what the actor has told it: From you would he learn his belief in himself; he feedeth upon your glances, he eateth praise out of your hands. Your lies doth he even believe when you lie favourably about him: for in its depths sigheth his heart: “What am I ?” (Nietzsche 2015)

In Grotowski’s sacrificial rendering, the actor plies her or his trade not for the audience but in its stead (States 1987, p. 40). This situation is more congruent with the orientation of the prayer leader in a synagogue, who performs with his back to the congregation, which like him gazes ahead toward the Holy Ark, than with that of a priest, who faces his congregation (Govrin 1983). Here is the place to note that Israel’s national theatre, Habima, is named for the raised lectern platform in the synagogue—the bima. A Jewish actor considers it his role to serve God in lieu of the congregation: “Theatre is a place,” one of the actors said, where people pray to other gods with other books, other texts. In acting, the actor occupies the prayer leader’s place. He’s the public’s emissary. The prayer ascends to heaven. Everything is different [synagogue vs. theater] but the intention is the same. I’m in the theater in order to represent my Jewish tribe.

Notably, the stage direction in The Master Builder is consistent with this approach. As I described it,29 the actors concluded their mise-en-scène by sitting down in succession along on the circumferential edge of the stage and gazing at the mise-en-scène in which other actors were performing. This small audience of actors shares one gaze with the “real” the audience, to which its back is turned. The representation of the audience is of course dynamic, moving “from cruelty to absence to death” (Causey 2006, p. 189). The validity of this fatalistic statement may become especially clear in the final reckoning, at the relatively late stage of life in which one’s acting career is weighed, a time when Shakespeare’s aphorism, “All the world’s a stage,” is plainly not the one that holds but rather “The stage is all the world”—an indispensable thing beyond with, on the other side of death, nothing exists. As the prose has it, the actors’ psyche is “sewn into the drama and will bleed

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if any attempt to extricate it is made” (Moskovitz-Weiss 2015, p. 215). The existential-sized sacrifice that emerges from veteran actors’ narratives (Gamliel 2012) is a less dramatic matter in the quotidian routine of acting. From one theatrical event to the next, it was my impression that the acting self celebrates its sacrifices by involving itself in ethical games as conditions for and as the road to redemption. After all, Grotowski himself, the most quoted scholar in the matter of sacrifice, already noticed that the actor in performance is seeking spiritual release.30 The fine masonry of the I–Thou relationship in reference to actor–character and actor–partner is composed of a corpus of deferences and internalizations in the actor’s psyche. I have already described the painful digestion process that the initial estranged attitude toward the character or the partner imposes until it becomes part of the self’s very flesh. All this is meant to fulfill the overarching goal of the performance—creating fusion between the stage world and the audience. Ultimately, this fusion comes to pass because the audience surrenders to the actors’ surrender or when “rounding,” a moment in which the actors give their loyalties free rein, takes place. It is then that the characters can present themselves as the audience wishes (Cole 1975, p. 68). The audience surrenders to the performance when it “takes [the performance] to be an authentic representation of its own internal world, recognizes it unconsciously to be an expression of its conscience collective, accepts it as a representation of its collective identity” (Giesen 2006, p. 358). Until the hoped-for fusion transpires, if the actors fall upon the altar of representing the audience, then the audience, in turn, cannot but find itself within the stage world. The artists’ efforts to delete the hyphen between I and Thou in their acting work—efforts of which the audience is aware— evolve at the end of the work into an invitation, the extension of a covert hand to the audience in a quest for true partnership in the theatrical event. Ideally, the audience gets what it has unwittingly asked for: an indivisible experience (Brook 1969) from all corners of the give-and-take and with every step taken inside the small box. The fusion is achieved only at the expense of an acting self that is committed to one fate—performing within the boundaries of the box amid the torments of its empathy, totally attached to a set of beliefs and conventions, flush with the sovereignty of the audience. ∗ ∗ ∗

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The theatrical event comes to pass in a full presence, one that accommodates people in both the small box and a large box. This presence is essential for the completion of the phases of the work (Brook 1969). It encourages those involved to propel the work to a high place on the “spiral” so that all its elements, and the exacting work invested in it, will culminate in the peak experience: fusion, a unity of consciousness between stage and audience. The theory of the spectaculum as the frame of observation leaves out the description of the experience of stage–audience fusion,31 or the magic, and at the utmost confines these matters to two extraordinary encounters. In one of them, fusion is considered a reliable signifier of the success of the actors’ multilayered ethical I–Thou work. In the second, it is seen as setting the limits of the structural discussion. Nevertheless, the experience of stage–audience fusion needs several guidelines in view of the distinction between the exaltedness of spectacle that is usually attributed to it—the magic of the plot—and that of how it appears. This fusion exists provided each side’s sovereignty vis-à-vis the Other has its effect and is so fully affirmed as to be is totally superfluous. In other words, it happens when the intent reaches its culmination, leaving theatre-goers unable to suspend their disbelief or even to threaten to do so, and leaving the actors beyond any sense of doing acting work. The complementary roles of audience and actor cancel each other out, in a manner similar to what Hayles (1999) calls “distributed cognitions” (p. 208). The result is an open system in which all the patterns that I have attributed to the sober non-epic or contentless gaze—the theatre hall, the two boxes, the stage, the audience, artifacts, actors, and so on—are melted down and blended into an exalted experiential whole devoid of place and time. Flow is an appropriate term with which to understand this liquefied or cascading second-order consciousness (Csikszentmihalyi 1975), a consequence of the abstract machine as “a condition of existence, of being in the world, that exceeds what is perceived and recognized through language” (Kennedy 2009, p. 189). The experience of the flow is signified wordlessly. Wherever words exist anyway, an intermingling of elements, including actors and audience, takes place. One of the actors described it: [It’s] a moment when everything is one. The time is the present, everything that happens doesn’t happen again, and that’s that! It’s absolute and it’s great and it’s exciting and it doesn’t do a thing. You float, you’re there and not there, and everything opens before you. The springs of the heavens

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open up. You’re in seventh heaven. You’re there! You’re a partner in something. It happens. […] You experience something transcendental. Maybe you can’t touch it word for word but you’re there, in … in… nowhere, somewhere in the middle, in an encounter with a thousand people, actors and you, and music and dancing, and lighting, and a certain situation and a certain sentence. Suddenly you, and ahhh … You leave the chair that you’re sitting on.

The theory of the spectaculum, in its claims, goes as far as the boundary created by the “fusion of text, context, and actor,” a fusion attained by a labor of ethical weaving that lies at the focal point of the artists’ exactitude and intent. The merging thus created results in the loss of self-consciousness and lack of concern for the scrutiny of observers outside the action itself (Alexander 2006, p. 56). The spectaculum resides outside this place of intoxication, which, although rarely experienced, is familiar. This theory concerns itself with a different kind of magic.

Notes 1. This insight is inspired by Revermann (2008). 2. Scholars including Hastrup (2004), Dolan (2001), Amankulor (1989), and McAuley (2000, 2012) have devoted attention to the process of creation in rehearsals. So it has been since Schechner (1985) stated correctly that “In limiting their investigations mostly to what happens during the performance itself, scholars are following modern Euro-American theatrical convention: You don’t go backstage unless you’re part of the show. The history of the development of the Western playhouse has been to reposition an event that was largely open, outdoors, and public into one that is closed, indoors, and private” (p. 19). 3. In a politico-cultural analysis of the connection between rehearsals and institutions and processes of institutionalization. 4. Such is the case, at least according to Mattingly and Throop’s recent overview in Annual Review of Anthropology (Mattingly and Throop 2018). 5. I elaborate on this approach in the next chapter. 6. The full set of findings was gathered into two massive journals: a “performance journal” and a “theatre journal.” 7. This analysis adopts the approach of Winnicott (1971), who believes that the game is played in a shared domain that he calls a “potential space,” a liminal space positioned between the (temporally and spatially) inner world and the external reality (since no literal, real “externality” is at issue).

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8. This rule holds with one exception that several actors called to my attention: Complexity and depth in characters are usually found in classical plays, which command greater prestige in the theatrical culture. 9. “A name given in the nineteenth century to a play characterized by the perfectly logical arrangement of its action” (Pavis 1998, p. 438). 10. Genesis 4:7: “You will be accepted if you do what is right. But should you refuse to do what is right, then sin is crouching at the door, eager to control you. You must subdue and master it.” 11. A trial performance of the play before an invited audience. 12. On the nexus of photography and death, Barthes (2000, p. 92) wrote: For my part I should prefer that instead of constantly relocating the advent of Photography in its social and economic context, we should also inquire as to the anthropological place of Death and of the new image. For Death must be somewhere in a society; if it is no longer (or less intensely) in religion, it must be elsewhere; perhaps in this image which produces Death while trying to preserve life. Contemporary with the withdrawal of rites, Photography may correspond to the intrusion, in our modern society, of an asymbolic Death, outside of religion, outside of ritual, a kind of abrupt dive into literal Death. Life/Death: the paradigm is reduced to a simple click, the one separating the initial pose from the final print. 13. As I noted in the previous chapter. 14. It is an edifying fact that both Cohen (2017) and I chose Buber’s model as a structural one originating in the theatre—a model most lucidly realized in the theatrical medium—and we share the hypothesis that the theatrical medium and/or drama makes the stage an effective arena for sociocultural research. The difference between us is that Cohen analyzes dialogues in plays whereas my work, typical of anthropology, focuses on dialogues and acting work that construct the epic dialogues and are their unseen supports. 15. See Auslander’s (2002) interesting discussion of logocentrism and difference on this issue. 16. An overview of the disputed acceptance of the Russian master and his Method in Poland, for example, is more a purge of the historical documentation than anything else. Given the relations between Russia and Poland during the world wars, actors in the Polish theatre regarded Stanislavski as a “political liberal.” His theatre emerges from Polish discourses on art and criticism as “an island of artistic aristocratism in the ocean of vulgarity [of] the Communist tyranny.” According to these sources, the Method is considered “high culture” and a path to the truth. Even via the memory of the Soviet occupation, the following appears in one of the journals: “In his theatre, as also in other Moscow theatres, there exists something that we [the Poles] never […] had: a lively interest in the problems of arts, and in specific questions concerning the art of acting” (Tyszka 1989, pp. 362–364).

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17. The concept originates in the Torah: “And now, Israel, what does Lord your God require of you, but to fear the Lord your God, to walk in all His ways, and to love Him, and to serve the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul?” (Deuteronomy 10:12). The expression “walk in all His ways” is interpreted as including the correction of flaws in one’s virtues and the steering of the emotions to proper and worthy paths. 18. That is, “knowing” the character in the “Biblical,” i.e., sexual, sense. 19. So I also found in a book on the yetser (urge or inclination) and Kabbalistic psychology (Rotenberg 2005). 20. The Hebrew term that my respondents used for this, hitmasrut, is a double entendre: passing a ball to another player and devoting oneself to something/someone. 21. My studies alerted me to another collective reality that involved profuse giftgiving among members of the ensemble, in total disregard of elements of interpersonal superiority and interiority: the death culture that I encountered among residents of an old-age home, who sustained an enterprise of solidarity with goodness. I find similarities in the characteristics of both of these total institutions of the modern era, the theatre and the old-age home, on account of which this singular kind of I–Thou relationship evolved. This, however, is not the place to elaborate. 22. The hedgehog parable goes thus: One cold winter day, a group of hedgehogs had to press together in order to trap the warmth of their bodies and not freeze to death. The animals had to choose between two dire evils: crowding so closely that they prick each other so badly as to draw blood, or pulling so far apart that they may be totally separated and freeze to death. The parable, in Cohen’s (2017) opinion, demonstrates how the dyad rests, structurally, on a cognitive equilibrium that depends on the subjectivity or the private language of the two constituents who define it. 23. The term is borrowed from Rabbi Moses Hayyim Luzzatto’s famous Jewish theological work Mesilat yesharim (Path of the upright), Chapter 24. 24. A play by Hanoch Levin based on the Biblical story of Jesus. Some believe that it accommodates elements from the Passion of Jesus. 25. Thus Sholem Aleichem describes a Jewish woman who watches Wandering Stars, a work that is considered a valuable documentary artifact: “She gazed with one eye at the stage and with the other at the audience, laughing aloud and cheerfully cursing the actors in the entire theatre space. “Bunglers, damn it!” or “May all my pain be on their heads!” or “Ah, break your hips and pelvises,” she says until Holzman, on stage, has to shush her with hand gestures” (Aleichem 1992, p. 239). This is one of many episodes in which the author expresses his disgust with the Yiddish theatre. 26. Mentioned in Rayner (2006, p. xx). 27. Handke (1971, p. 6) prefaced his play with “rules of the game,” noting that the actors only seem to be free of fear of the audienceQuery: “Even as they

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approach, the speakers don’t look at the audience…. They pass rehearsed words from mouth to mouth. […] As far as the speakers are concerned, the audience does not yet exist. The speakers speak pell-mell […].” Sholem Aleichem (2009), Chapter 58—electronic book, no page numbering. In the previous chapter. In Gerould (2012). As explained in the previous chapter.

References Aleichem, S. (1992). Wandering Stars. Translated from Yiddish by K. A. Bertini. Tel-Aviv: Dvir (in Hebrew). Aleichem, S. (2009). Wandering Stars. New York: Penguin Books. Alexander, J. C. (2006). Cultural pragmatics: Social performance between ritual and strategy. In J. C. Alexander, B. Giesen, & J. L. Mast (Eds.), Social Performance: Symbolic Action, Cultural Pragmatics, and Ritual. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Alter, J. (1990). A Sociosemiotic Theory of Theatre. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Amankulor, J. N. (1989). The condition of ritual in theatre: An intercultural perspective. Performing Arts Journal, 11–12(3), 45–58. Ang, G. P., & Gatt, C. (2017). Collaboration and emergence: The paradox of presence and surrender. Collaborative Anthropology, 10(1–2), 67–94. Auslander, P. (2002). “Just be your self”: Logocentrism and difference in performance theory. In From Acting to Performance: Essays in Modernism and Postmodernism (pp. 28–38). New York: Routledge. Barthes, R. (2000). Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography. London: Vintage. Bataille, G. (1986 [1957]). Erotism: Death and Sensuality (M. Dalwood, Trans.). San Francisco: City Lights Books. Benson, P., & O’Neill, K. L. (2007). Facing risk: Levinas, ethnography, and ethics. Anthropological Consciousness, 18(2), 29–55. Blau, H. (1990). Universals of Performance: The Audience. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Brook, P. (1969). The Empty Space. Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin Books. Buber, M. (2000 [1962]). P’nei adam [Face of Man]. Jerusalem: Bialik Institute. Buber, M. (2007). Be-sod siah: ‘Al ha-adam ve-’amidato nokhah ha-havaya [Hidden Dialogue: On Man and His Steadfastness in View of Reality]. Jerusalem: Bialik Institute. Burns, E. (1972). Theatricality: A Study of Convention in the Theatre and in Social Life. London: Longman.

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Carlson, M. (1990). Theatre Semiotics: Signs of Life. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press. Causey, M. (2006). Theatre and Performance in Digital Culture: From Simulation to Embeddedness. New York: Routledge. Cavell, S. (2004). Cities of Words: Pedagogical Letters on the Moral Life. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Cohen, Z. (2017). ‘Al saf ha-’atsmi: fenomenologia shal tsurut heyot u-mivnim hevrat’im [On the Brink of the Self: Phenomenology of Forms of Being and Social Structures]. Jerusalem: Carmel. Cole, D. (1975). The Theatrical Event: A Mythos, a Vocabulary, a Perspective. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press. Colwell, C. (1997). Deleuze and the prepersonal. Philosophy Today, 41(1), 18–23. Craigo-Snell, S. (2000). Command performance: Rethinking performance interpretation in the context of divine discourse. Modern Theology, 16(4), 475–494. Csikszentmihalyi, M. (1975). Beyond Boredom and Anxiety. San Francisco: JosseyBass. Cull, L. (2009a). Deleuze and Performance. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Cull, L. (2009b). How do you make yourself a theatre without organs? Deleuze, Arttaud and the concept of differential presence. Theatre Research, 34, 243–255. Deleuze, G. (1989). Coldness and cruelty. In Masochism: Coldness and Cruelty by Gilles Deleuze and Venus in Furs by Leopold von Sacher-Masoch. New York: Zone Books. Deleuze, G. (1997). One less manifesto (E. dal Molin & T. Murray, Trans.). In T. Murray (Ed.), Mimesis, Masochism, and Mime. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Deleuze, G. (1998). Essays Critical and Clinical (D. W. Smith & M. A. Greco, Trans.). London: Verso. Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (1988). A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (B. Assume, Trans.). London: Athlone Press. Derrida, J. (1978). Writing and Difference. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Diderot, D. (2007 [1957]). The Paradox of Acting (W. H. Pollock, Trans.). Whitefish, MT: Kessinger. Dolan, J. (2001). Performance, Utopia, and the “Utopian performative”. Theatre Journal, 53(3), 455–479. Dunne, J. (1996). Beyond sovereignty and deconstruction: The storied self. Philosophy and Social Criticism, 21, 137–157. Elias, N. (1978). The Civilizing Process: The History of Manners (E. Jephcott, Trans.). New York: Urizen. Fischer-Lichte, E. (1997). The Show and the Gaze of Theatre: A European Perspective. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press.

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Fischer-Lichte, E. (2008). The Transformative Power of Performance. London: Routledge. Fortier, M. (2002). Theory/Theatre: An Introduction. London: Routledge. Friedman, M. (1969). Martine Buber and the Theatre. New York: Funk & Wagnalls. Gamliel, T. (2005). Sof sipur. Mashma’ut, zehut, ziqna [End of Story: Meaning, Identity, Old Age]. Tel Aviv: Tel Aviv University Press. Gamliel, T. (2012). The final act: On the limitations of the “mask-of-aging” dramaturgical metaphor in representing the performing self. Research on Aging, 34(5), 622–645. Gamliel, T. (2014). The Aesthetics of Sorrow: The Wailing Culture of Yemenite-Jewish Women. Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press. Gamliel, T. (2016). Ghosts and habitus: The lasting hegemony in Israeli theatre. Ethnography, 17 (2), 168–189. Gerould, D. (2012). Return to tradition: The symbolist legacy to the presentday arts. In L. Gharavi (Ed.), Religion, Theatre and Performance: Acts of Faith (pp. 172–184). New York: Routledge. Giesen, B. (2006). Performing the sacred: A Durkheimian perspective on the performative turn in the social science. In J. C. Alexander, B. Giesen, & J. L. Mast (Eds.), Social Performance: Symbolic Action, Cultural Pragmatics, and Ritual. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Gombrich, E. H. (1985). Meditations on a Hobby Horse and Other Essays on the Theory of Art. Oxford: Phaidon. Govrin, M. (1983). The Jewish ritual as a genre of a sacred theatre. Conservative Judaism, 20, 15–34. Grehan, H. (2009). Performance, Ethics and Spectatorship in a Global Age. Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan. Grotowsky, J. (1968). Towards a Poor Theatre. New York: Simon & Schuster. Handke, P. (1971). Offending the Audience; and Self-Accusation (M. Roloff, Trans.). London: Methuen. Harris, M. (1990). Theatre and Incarnation. New York: St. Martin’s Press. Hart, T. (2007). The sense of an ending: Finitude and the authentic performance of life. In T. Hart & G. Steven (Eds.), Faithful Performances: Enacting Christian Tradition (pp. 168–188). Burlington, VT: Ashgate. Hastrup, K. H. (1998). Theatre as a site of passage: Some reflections on the magic of acting. In F. Hughes-Freeland (Ed.), Ritual, Performance, Media (pp. 29–45). New York: Routledge. Hastrup, K. H. (2004). Action: Anthropology in the Company of Shakespeare. Copenhagen: University of Copenhagen. Hayles, K. (1999). How We Become Posthuman. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Helbo, A., Johansen, J. D., Pavis, P., & Ubersfeld, A. (1991). Approaching Theatre. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press.

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Hollan, D. (2012). On the varieties and particularities of cultural experience. Ethos, 40(1), 37–53. Hornby, R. (1996). Drama, Metadrama, and Perception. London: Bucknell University Press. Johnson, T. E., & Savidge, D. (2009). Performing the Sacred: Theology and Theatre in Dialogue. Ada, MI: Baker Academic. Jung, C. G. (1912). On the psychology of the unconscious. In CW 7: Two Essays on Analytical Psychology. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Kennedy, B. (2009). Of butterflies, bodies and biograms…Affective space in performativities in the performance of Madame Butterfly. In L. Cull (Ed.), Deleuze and Performance (pp. 183–202). Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Laidlaw, J. (2002). For an anthropology of ethics and freedom. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 8(2), 311–332. Lambek, M. (2010). Ordinary Ethics: Anthropology, Language, and Action. New York: Fordham University Press. Laing, R. D. (1960). The Divided Self: An Existential Study in Sanity and Madness. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books. Levinas, E. (2002 [1985]). Ethics and Infinity (R. A. Cohen, Trans.). Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press. Lorenz, K. (1966). On Aggression. London: Methuen. Lutz, C. (1995). The gender of theory. In R. Behar & D. A. Gordon (Eds.), Women Writing Culture. Berkeley: University of California Press. Mattingly, C. (2012). Two virtue ethics and the anthropology of morality. Anthropological Theory, 12, 161–184. Mattingly, C., & Throop, J. (2018). The anthropology of ethics and morality. Annual Review of Anthropology, 47, 475–479. McAuley, G. (2000). Space in Performance: Making Meaning in the Theatre. Michigan: University of Michigan Press. McAuley, G. (2012). Not Magic but Work: An Ethnographic Account of a Rehearsal Process. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Mead, J. H. (1934). Mind, Self, and Society. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Merleau-Ponty, M. (1962). Phenomenology of Perception. London: Routledge. Moore, T. (1999 [1998]). The Soul of Sex: Cultivating Life as an Act of Love. New York: Harper Perennial. Moskovitz-Weiss, E. (2015). Regashot [Emotions]. Tel Aviv: Yedioth Books. Myerhoff, B., & Rudy, J. (1982). Introduction. In J. Rudy (Ed.), A Crack in the Mirror: Reflexive Perspectives in Anthropology. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Nietzsche, F. (2001 [1882]). The Gay Science (J. Nauckhoff, Trans.). In B. Williams (Ed.), Cambridge Texts in the History of Philosophy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Nietzsche, F. (2015). Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Delphi Complete Works of Friedrich Nietzsche (Illustrated). Sussex, UK: Delphi Classics. Retrieved from https:// www.ibs.it/ebook-inglese. Parish, S. M. (1994). Moral Knowing in a Hindu Sacred City: An Exploration of Mind, Emotion, and Self. New York: Columbia University Press. Pavis, P. (1998). Dictionary of the Theatre: Terms, Concepts, and Analysis. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Perry, M., & Sternberg, M. (1968). Ha-melekh be-mabat ironi: ‘al tahbulotav shel ha-mesaper be-sipur Bat-Sheva ve-‘al shete haflagot [The king in an ironic gaze: On the narrator’s devices in the story of Bathsheba and in two voyages]. Ha-sifrut Quarterly on Literary Science, 1. Retrieved from http://lib.cet.ac.il/ pages/item.asp?item=140492. Purdie, S. (1999). Secular definitions of ‘ritual’: The Rocky Horror phenomenon. In S. Levy (Ed.), Theatre and Holy Script (pp. 171–190). Brighton: Sussex Academic Press. Rapp, U. (1973), Sotsiologia ve-te’atron [Sociology and Theatre]. Tel Aviv: Sifriat Poalim and Tel Aviv University. Rayner, A. (2002). Rude mechanicals and the specters of Marx. Theatre Journal, 54, 535–554. Rayner, A. (2006). Ghosts: Death’s Double and the Phenomena of Theatre. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Read, A. (1993). Theatre and Everyday Life: An Ethics of Performance. New York: Routledge. Revermann, M. (2008). The semiotics of curtain calls. Semiotica, 168(1–4), 191–202. Ridout, N. (2009). Theatre and Ethics. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Rinon, Y. (2002). On Aristotle’s Philosophical Poetics. In Aristotle, Poetics (pp. 55–121). Jerusalem: Magnes, The Hebrew University. Robbins, J. (2016). What is the matter with transcendence? On the place of religion in the new anthropology of ethics. Journal of Royal Anthropology Institute, 22, 767–808. Rotenberg, M. (2005). Creativity and Sexuality: A Kabbalistic Experience. Piscataway, NJ: Transaction. Schechner, R. (1985). Points of contact between anthropological and theatrical thought. In R. Schechner (Ed.), Between Theatre and Anthropology (pp. 3–33). Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Shopenhauer, A. (2000 [1985]). Parerga and Paralipomena (E. F. J. Payne, Trans.). Oxford: Clarendon. Simmel, G. (1950). The Sociology of George Simmel (Trans. and Ed. K. H. Wolff). Glencoe, IL: Free Press. Smith, Q. (1991). Wilshire’s theory of the authentic self. Human Studies, 14, 339–357.

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CHAPTER 3

The Spectaculum

The spectaculum will fill the box of light to the brim with plain implications. Until it does so, the artists will have to follow a lengthy course through the thickness of the theatre, and the readers will have to accompany them and pause with them wherever they may be; more so, they will have to trust and, thereby, acquaint themselves with the specificity of the information accumulated. By the end of this chapter, this specificity will elucidate several conclusions about the ritual (ethical and transcendental) nature of the spectaculum that appear in the pages to come. For the time being, however, our location is the thickness of the theatre. The artists must now discover a forgotten and mute space along the path of motion that leads from the working places, where creation takes place, to the stage. When show time arrives, the actors will be standing in that space, waiting to come out and reenter the stage world. This space stretches from the hem of the rear curtain of the stage several meters onward, amid the dark depth that constitutes a foyer leading to—and in anticipation of—the thing for which the convergence is intended. I open with this quasi-foyer, a place that we have not yet visited, because by its means one may understand how absolutely the boundaries of the spectaculum are drawn. The reality of this foyer, verging on a threshold for actors and sundry stagehands, is a poor counterpart to the one that the audience crosses from the places that surround the theatre, which abound in the bright architecture of marble, ornamented columns, and so on. Before I venture into this realm of poverty, I will say that nothing matches the ability © The Author(s) 2020 T. Gamliel, The Theatrical Spectaculum, Palgrave Studies in Literary Anthropology, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-28128-1_3

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of this foyer to honor the behind the scenes as an expression, literally so, and to affirm conscious forms of repression. This is so because the behind of the scene is a hiding place where one may find secure refuge during the theatrical event. It retains this propensity after the event, too, as if the theatre, once emptied of viewers, hosts a momentary game of hide-andseek. Not only may an actress’ young son be tempted to hide out there, but the somewhat invasive act of spending time in this place may allow a magical memory to take shape. Inquisitive or investigative motivations, including those of theoreticians, do not reach this place, an abode veiled in a thick darkness that’s unparalleled anywhere else in the theatre, an immediate darkness that lies beyond the brightness of the lighting of the spectacle. This gloom mimics the dense murk of the last hours of night, the darkness that precedes the instantaneous erupting radiance of a new day. The biblical pastness of the expression behind the scenes attributes the scenes to the theatre building, that temple-like venue. The Torah’s instructions for the construction of the Tabernacle include the installation of an ornamental curtain that fronts the ark—the parokhet —and dividers made of braided ropes that buffer between the two domains. Moses is also told to “make a courtyard for the Tabernacle: a hundred cubits long on the south side, with curtains of finely twisted linen.”1 In the theatre, as in the Tabernacle, the ritual is played out in all the inward-facing sides of the curtains.

Space-Ification Due to its ontological allegiance to the behind the scenes place, the dark theatrical space is a narrow and bounded structure, a configuration of theorized liminality that is known as an expanded and metaphorical existential arena. Those who fix their interest on the ritual, the creation of the stage world, and ways of making an impression have given this theoretical configuration generous attention. Rayner, too, may have had this space in mind when she depicted “the backstage world as a ‘theatre’s other, internal double […] a space of the dark matter of the real in distinction to the blinding light of the stage representation’” (2002, p. 540, author emphasis). Reality in this place is a mishmash of variously sized objects that exist for purposes that are not always clear: dust-covered boards, rolls of fabric, crates, tools, and special cranes for the background screens of the spectacle. Detached from the manifestations of ensemble that one encounters in the rehearsal and dressing rooms, the self-isolating roving of an Anthropologist of Depths, like that of anyone else, in this zone between the places

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where action occurs—the rehearsal rooms and the stage—attests to the choice of “just looking,” as it were, at an utterly uninteresting a-culturality. Here, those who tarry in circles for reasons other than to listen to the demarches of the stage drama and the rule concerning the right way for them to enter it are uninvited guests. They risk not only being snared in the webs of the poorly lit chaos but also being labeled as deviant. Their eye-straining observation in the buccal void is blatantly illegitimate, worthy of the descriptions of “The Suspect” in Franz Hessel’s Spazieren in Berlin (Walking in Berlin).2 These accounts, says Walter Benjamin, plumb the depths of the “atmospheric resistance” that bars the path to those who would take it and slices through the bitterness of the gaze that tracks things and men, threatening to assault the dreamer (ibid., pp. 103–104). In our case, the dream verges on a nightmare. This space accommodates the implications of theatrical abjection. Namely, the textuality-of-visitation wishes to subjugate it to the sanctimonies of the spectaculum pursuant to the insight that studying the traits of the repressed and the repugnant helps to bring the exalted into greater clarity. After all, the filth and grime of cultural impurity threaten the superego. I say this even before I acquaint the reader with the exalted itself, as I do later in this chapter. This structuralism—framing the sacred by means of its negation—has already been embodied in descriptions of the “defilement” that occurs when imprecision is superimposed on truth, when vulnerability is laid atop mime, in the previous chapter. It obeys the observations of Douglas (2004) and Kristeva (2005) on religion and culture. For our purposes, however, this structuralism is immeasurably more quintessential. It also surfaces, for example, in recollections of the “rats” that swarmed in the theatre in Israel’s early years. By recounting the approach to the stage of these real but heavily symbolized sewer denizens, an actress among my respondents sought to amplify the heroic sacrifice made by actors like her, pioneers of the Hebrew theatre, who performed “in that ghastly theatre” despite it all. Her remarks yield a structure of contrasts: sacred and profane, pure and impure. This structure recurs in Kristeva’s segregative approach, by which “As in true theater, without makeup or masks, refuse and corpses show me what I permanently thrust aside in order to live” (2005, p. 3). This statement, seeking life in a performative context, would have pleased Deleuze and Guattari and also, undoubtedly, another actor of my research acquaintance whose grievance concerns the omnipersistence of the abject space:

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No, no … It’s totally demeaning … dirt and filth, all kinds of stuff piled up there, and curtains and dust and terrible things that you have to overcome. […] You beseech the director: for God’s sake, get some people over to clean this place up. […] Pigeon shit on the set. Clean it up, put it in order, let there be a pleasant feeling when you come to the theatre, red carpets that inspire you with sanctity the moment you enter. You should enter the theater with holy awe on your fingertips. […] There’s a huge gap between the stage and the backstage. It’s failure to think, a lack of precision in details. […] These are the things that for years I couldn’t put up with in the theatre. […] There’s no aesthetics. […] Japanese people will kill for cleanliness and aesthetics. If someone from Japan would see where we work, they’d be aghast. This is what sickens you about the business. You want to disconnect from it, from the gracelessness, from the dark side, the uninteresting, the rough-edged, the idiotic.

Koslofsky (2011), for one, expresses the undistinguished nature of this non-place place, akin to an exceptional junk room in its appearance, from the observer’s point of view. So does Fontenelle in remarks about the marquise (p. 262)3 : From where you are at the opera you don’t see the stages exactly as they are; they’re arranged to give the most pleasing effect from a distance and the wheels and counter-weights that make everything move are hidden out of sight. You don’t worry, either, about how they work. Only some engineer in the pit, perhaps, may be struck by some extraordinary effect and be determined to figure out for himself how it was done. That engineer is like the philosopher. (author emphasis)

Digression over. The straying attention is forcibly drawn to the wires that dangle surprisingly from the high ceiling and lay on the parquet floor in an inchoate and unfathomable crisscross pattern that threatens to snare the passerby’s moving leg. The anthropology-of-the-theatre literature has long symbolized these accessories and the liminal position of the space in question—the place between the stage and its generalized backstage— with its openings and exits to the street, a path to the extra-theatrical. I refer here to a theorization that toys with the wires and molds them into a horizontal iterative form for the purpose of formulating, from a position in the middle, interconnections between the aesthetic and the sociocultural. Schechner theorized one of these iterations pursuant to his work with Turner on the exploration of relations between the performance

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and cultural placement of Turner’s “social drama” and of “aesthetic drama” (2002, p. 77). Hornby (1996) summons an additional and more general iteration, also originating in the structuralist school of thought, that he calls the drama/cultural complex. By testing the value of the spectaculum in these senses, we are led back to the iterations. The revilement-defilement that fills the interstices between the dual domains of enslavement—the rehearsal room and the stage world—is typified per se by social configurations. These are opposite behavioral configurations among the actors, basically acts of unburdening that reveal the liminal as a place of cocooning and shelter. One of them is parody, a performative act that suits the other side excellently. “We come out to perform Hamlet from confinement. That’s where we are,” an actor told me. “It’s a graceless, character-less place, small and badly overcrowded. But since we love each other, we overcome it. We try to get past it somehow by making all kinds of jokes.” This humor derives its quality from its breaking of rules; by using it, the actors show that they see through the game and mock everything associated with it. One may say that they are free of the fear that exists in a typical trap, which Laing (1972) depicts as a person telling him/herself4 : They are playing at playing a game. They are playing at not playing a game. If I show them I see they are, I shall break the rules and they will punish me. I must play their game, of not seeing I see the game. (p. 1)

So actors sneeze at the theatre from their secret hiding places. In pauses while rehearsing The Master Builder, they inserted themselves into a parallel play-act that they fashioned spontaneously from fragments of misesen-scène replete with lust and crudities. The actor who played Ragnar, the betrayed, humiliated male, shared his imagination with the director by saying that when he gazes at his wayward beloved, Kaia, he clutches a barf bag. That is to say: From the place that the script forces him to occupy as an actor, she makes him want to vomit. On another occasion, picking up a roll of toilet paper and drawing a ring on it in a vulgar imitation of the dramatic wreath of flowers, he quoted from his script to the rest of the cast: “I promised the foreman that I’d give him the wreath.” Thus, he exacted vengeance against Solness, the depressing architect. At the end of one of the runs, “Kaia” broke into a run toward “Hilda,” the character who stole Solness from him. She half-shrieked, half-laughed as she extended her arms toward Hilda’s neck, as if about to strangle her. Behind the scenes,

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literally during the performance, after “Ragnar” and “Kaia” waved their hands at “Hilda,” who stood on the opposite side of the small box waiting to come on stage, “Kaia” suddenly rolled up her dress and in one motion let it drop again. Behaving like naughty children, the three actors strode away from the curtain that kept them out of the audience’s line of vision. During another break in the rehearsals, as “Aline,” Solness’ wife, opened the door of the rehearsal room in order to enter, the assistant director, playing the role of Brovik, stopped in her tracks and aimed a toy handgun at the director’s head. Noticing this, “Aline” clutched her chest in ostensible fright. At another pause in the mise-en-scène, as the assistant director replaced “Brovik” and remained in the embrace of “Kaia” and “Ragnar,” she whispered aloud to the treacherous “Kaia,” “Wait, wait, I’ll deal with you at home!” “Aline” responded to “Hilda’s” ghastly question, “What have I got to do there [with Solness]?” with a line that does not appear in the script: “You know … do what Kaia does!” She did not need to say more in the presence of the amused actors, who spoke of Kaia as the whore of her employer Solness, the architect. Noticing that the elderly Brovik-actor forgot the word “craving,” “Solness” sprawled on the sofa during a break and pointed toward his groin, accentuating this by adding a vulgar gesture of the hand. The actors often borrowed from the lexicon of pornography and bodily excretions—vomit, shit, pee—to award themselves multiple moments of thundering, rolling laughter. Their parody subverted everything—values of truth, authenticity, ethics, life, mission, even the entire theatrical enterprise, because the targets of their distortive mimicry included the stage and the production manager, their “taskmaster.” The parody signified segments of the I–Thou relationship that the program demanded but were very hard to attain in emotional work; thus, the actors put them to ridicule. Parody tends to attack what we hold most sacred. It denies “all aesthetic and philosophical values in one great massacre” (Pavis 1998, p. 251). Its grotesquerie is a configuration of liberation from repression. Its outcomes are standardized mises-en-scène that come with a “correction”—a subversive and, above all, deviant and iniquitous contrast. A parody that fails to merit legitimate inclusion in the mise-en-scène from the dramaturgic standpoint belongs to the field of theatrical abjection. One may infer the risk that it carries from the soul-cursing ethic to which I devoted the previous chapter and from the description of the spectaculum that follows. The risk lies in content that flouts the rules of classification that typify a given symbolic system (Kristeva 2005). One detects it, according

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to Douglas, only “where the lines of structure, cosmic or social, are clearly defined” (2004, p. 114). Parody mimics the repulsive in-between domain in which it allows itself to flourish. Indeed, a parody is itself a liminal, fencestraddling thing that distorts what it consumes and depends on it—the lines and instructions of the script, in our case—for its existence. As a corrosive force, parody is like “a hatred that smiles, a passion that uses the body for barter instead of inflaming it, a debtor who sells you up, a friend who stabs you” (Kristeva 2005, p. 4) It is the most abject of abjections, more horrible than all the sins attributed to the theatrical world, a competitive realm due to the cramped space at its top, so crazed by impulses as to be “cannibalistic,” as actors reported. If the audience senses even one drop of the parody, if an iota of its repulsiveness leaks into the roiling drama, the “world” will collapse. Parody has the indescribable ability to mock all artists and insult the audience in a way not yet invented in the theatre’s experience (Handke 1971) and, by so doing, to destroy the sovereignty of the stage and leave it without a chance of survival. The repugnant is demarcated by the exalted; were this not so, it would not arrive at the welcome blinding point of light (Kristeva 2005)—of enchantment. The other side—the constructive side—of the banishment, exclusion, and extirpation of the theatrical abjection is the specification of perfectness that pertains to everything fit for inclusion in the small box, down to the last detail. I begin with the concrete objects with their all-objectifying effect. I start with them specifically because, with dirty and besotted physicality, the conceptualization of abjection was invoked from the outset, before it could acquire abstract meanings. This, however, is not the only reason. It is also because here, more than at other textual moments in this essay, Savran’s “Choices Made and Unmade” deserves mention. Savran encourages the sociology of the theatre to give the materialistic modes of production close inspection (2001). I found an amazing account of the arrangement of worthy material by entities from the rejected world (in the Western theatre) in Sachs (1989), who recounts having discovered, in his first visit as an observer to the Japanese Noh theatre, the art of perfectness: As I gazed at the members of chorus behind [me], dressed in black, which in theatre language means “I don’t exist,” I saw two of them whispering to each other. Something wasn’t right. As the lead actor went about his wonderful dancing, the two of them stepped out of their place in the chorus behind him, approached him, and fixed the string of his mask, which had evidently come undone as he danced. Again they whispered to each other on the stage and continued to fix his clothing. Then they returned to their place. In the Western theatre, such an event would be a disaster. Everyone who deals with

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the theater knows the fear of a technical mishap: the red light won’t go on time, the actor will forget his lines, and so on. And here—it’s a theatre and literally a theatrical world; it isn’t life. If I dress in black on stage, it means that I don’t exist and the thing that I did, that is, fixing the mask, neither belongs to the play nor disrupts it. It’s something from another world, from daily life. Then I understood a little the meaning of the word yugen, the total aesthetic disengagement from life outside, from our flesh-and-blood lives. (p. 29)5

The culture of the Western theatre does not place black-clothed actors in the role of the visible world’s fixit people. It dresses everyone in white, as it were, and demonstratively demands that they do the exact opposite. It treats the stage spectacle as an already-repaired world and puts the actors, until they perform in it, through an objectification process so that they may see themselves as they would all objects. So I found among the extras in The Master Builder. Wearing grey overalls in the dramaturgical segments, they acted like stagehands in breaks between scenes, changing props before the audience’s eyes. This mandatory adoption of an “iconic identity” (Carlson 1990, p. 81), or the treatment the body as a “sign system” (Fischer-Lichte 1997, p. 39), illuminates the distress of an acting psyche that seeks fleeting redemption in parody. More important, however, is to note that this requirement makes the nature of the actors’ mid-performance whisperings different from that of the Noh actors. The objectified identity may elicit, in a book of prose, the following description that one of my actress respondents reported: And then, on the premiere evening when the moment of the embrace arrived, I suddenly felt a terrible thump on my arm, a murmur accompanied by a frenetic whisper in my ears—all of it as the embrace took place—“You’re hiding me. Your face is hiding my face from the audience, you jerk!” (MoskovitzWeiss 2015, p. 214)

When whispering becomes a sin, its encoding serves the spectacle. ∗ ∗ ∗ The specification of perfectness becomes dramatized at the montage phase, in which “stage sequences are assembled in a series of autonomous moments” (Pavis 1998, p. 220). In accordance with the grounded theory/theatre, montaging is also the task of this chapter. To accomplish this

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on the high and widening coils of the spiral of creative art, where elements worked through from the world of the stage are added for the purpose of fusion, we now need to settle into a seat not far from several artists—who are not actors—in the middle of the large box. There they sit most of the time. Apart from them and those whom they invited to share the box, or who happen to be there, the box is empty right now. Most of the box, row upon row of red seats, fills up from time to time with imagined spectators who have come to monitor the stage artists’ intentions and choices. The director—clutching a megaphone—and the lighting technician, the wardrobe woman, the sound people, the wig stylist, and the effects people are facing the stage, loyal to the audience’s gaze. Wherever they position themselves, their eyes track the actors’ engineered movements in a lengthy process that begins with shaping the direction of the “external script” and culminates with the fine buffing that tests the intensions of the characters, who will ultimately move along with their abundant head-to-toe fancy clothing in a space punctuated by sheaves of light, segments of sound, and props. This is the prop technician’s finest hour. In a symbolic gesture for this essay, a motion to which he was oblivious, he had again brought along a miniature model of a house—but a different one than that recounted in Part 1. When the director asked him why he placed the “house” on “Solness’” desk, he replied, “I bring objets d’art because he’s an engineer.” The director rejected the gesture. Addressing me, the propman described his “lab” as something that, as the stage is being set—his most-present hour— inserted itself into an incomparably complex dynamic of other “labs” in which the play was weighed and measured: the lighting lab, the music lab, the wardrobe design lab, and more. The whole thing unfolded in a process of experimentation, one prone to groping for an answer to how the components come together: Like several graphs that start at different periods and move at different paces, and you hope all of them reach the same finish line. […] It’s a proving ground for interactive dynamics among different interconnected fields. […] The actors are media who act and are acted upon equally. Their license goes only so far because they live within a mold of sorts that was constructed in other labs: the translation lab, the design lab. […] They don’t necessarily all reach the same finish line because, practically, the actors continue the lab even afterward because when the play is launched there’s another lab. The audience that enters is another lab and the dynamic that plays out between the actors and the audience is another dynamic, and the whole thing really varies as long as this project exists, until it’s taken down.

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This is one manifestation of the “feedback loop of construction and expression” of an abstract machine in which “the field of immanence or plane of consistency must be constructed […] piece by piece, and the places, conditions, and techniques are irreducible to one another” (in Zepke 2005, p. 5). From here on, the craft of precise nuance in this space will embrace every imaginable dimension and aspect of the stage world. In a vestige of Greek autochthonic thinking (Boman 1960), the prop technician’s advice to sketch a huge numbered ruler on the stage is recalled. As this ruler was drawn to the width of the stage, the geometry of all the movements became possible. I documented, as best I could, a jumble of things that filled the frame of the small box, which slowly and steadily took form. Now the box sorted itself into regions—upstage and downstage—and sides. The artists, and the actors as well, contemplated the box as though peering through a gigantic magnifying glass with filters attached, with which they should divine the requisites of professional intuition that boil down to the question of believability. “Solness” to director: “The shoes have to be preset, don’t they?” Director to “Solness”: “One possibility is that the shoes will be ready. Another is that Kaia will come in house slippers. The music leaves enough time for it.” Director to an extra: “No, you’ll be in mid-action the moment the light goes up. Then you’ll be on this side. He’s over there. Whatever way the light goes up, just enter. This crate is the last thing that’s taken. Lift it from side to side, just like that, okay?” Assistant director to effects technician: “Make sure the pencil is in Kaia’s case so she can pull it out later.” The technician hears this and writes it down in order to do it in the next rehearsal. Director to “Doctor”: “Today you moved the chair and it gave you freedom. … There are things that are unlit. … You’re upstage and you have a monologue; then you’re more open.” Director to “Solness”: “After Hilda comes on, there’s this magic. Don’t rush. When she enters, walk real slow in order to draw the magic out. You [in the plural] noticed that the lighting changed; it was more believable.” “Solness” to director: “Actually, I like the pyrotechnics.” Director: “It looks to me like children playing. I don’t know.” “Solness”: “It’s also a little like a fable.” Director: “We have green and there’s this music, and suddenly you were in the dark. I didn’t like it.” Director to “Hilda”: “The letter in the drawer. You have to discover it; you don’t know there’s a letter there. And you [points to “Solness”]: When she takes the letter, you have to react. You had your back to her.” And also—about the hug: Director to “Hilda” and “Solness”: “I don’t like that hug. It’s a little kvetchy.”

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“Solness”: “But anything I say, the confession, has to come after something.” “Hilda”: “I also agree that there shouldn’t be a hug.” Director: “I felt that it was in a rut there. Something … to grasp ….” “Hilda”: “The way we always did it, with the hands.” Director: “It doesn’t work. I don’t know. … Grasp her by the hand. I don’t know if you’re stopping her or if you want to touch her. It’s no catastrophe if she’s a little troublesome. Then you grab her and we don’t know whether you want it or whether it makes you a little confused.”

Some of this nitpicking finally segued into computer jargon and reduced itself to the letter Q, which signifies entering and exiting and the precise timing of a certain gesture, and to Q-to-Q, signifying all the changes from one end of the show to the other. An actor described it in terms of a musical score: First cue, light on stage. Second cue, actors go on stage. Third cue: darkness in the hall, actors move and “Solness” enters. Fourth cue: light and “Solness” lie on the sofa. Fifth cue: He stays until he goes off stage; the “doctor” enters. […] We’ll know exactly where to stand so the light’ll be on us. […] Look at the production manager’s log: it’s got “cue 13, cue 14, stand by 15, cue!” Music and lighting, all the elements. […] Most of the lighting cue works in accordance with a word. For example, “Promise me this, Halvard; promise me this” [Aline’s line]. When he hears it, the production manager tells the lighting man, “Cue!” Nothing’s left un-engineered. […] Even if you think lots of things aren’t working, when you get to a general rehearsal or a premiere, everything clicks, falls into harmony.

The purpose of this “advanced” technique, in Buber’s view, is to create the illusion that the stage space and our space are alike in kind. The “illusion stage” aspires to overcome not only the real sense of distance but also the real relation that is possible only through activity. All the details of the modern stage destroy the activity of the audience that is essential to its part in the polar tension. Instead, the spectator gazes “in passive and unimaginative astonishment at the perfected technique of its ‘scenic design’” (Friedman 1969, p. 18, author emphasis). This is one way in which the contribution of technique to drama is worded. No matter how liberated drama appears to be from it, Alexander

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claims, technique acts in its service: “The rationale for each aesthetic liberation has been to reclaim dramatic power.” This means adding the components of the performance, the audience and the stage, to the re-fusion (2014, p. 20). It follows that the theatre-goers’ suspension of disbelief in the stage world flows from an aesthetic logic. Perhaps similar wonder may be expressed about monotheism’s belief in its ritualistic yearnings for transcendental unity, for faith anchored in cosmic logic (Handelman 2008). Despite the powerful validity of Alexander’s systematically developed argument, however, the theory proposed here concerns itself not with fusing audience and stage, as stated, but with the cosmo-logics of the spectacle, a thought-provoking construct at the most. Alongside my justification of Alexander’s judgment of the new theoretical appreciation of the “independence of materiality” as “too literal” (2014, p. 17), I wish to dwell on discussion of the material props (and not them alone) in dissociation from their tendency to “absorb dramatic meaning” and thus become “complex symbols” that “motivate the stage action” (Sofer 2003, p. 24). I wish to argue that the artistic management of bodies in the spectacular space carries a structuralist message. The picture of the stage world is the outcome of a comprehensive practice of order that constitutes, in its essence, the sophisticated specification of objects—including the actors’ reified bodies—in space and time. When it serves the drama, the spectacle appears before the audience in the form of perfectness, an exemplary order of inanimate and human elements, fixed or moving, that epitomize their regularity from the curtain’s first rise to its final descent. In his Offending the Audience, Handke “pays respect” to the stage order by commenting that special effects have no place there. Their location is not marked on the stage. There are no mnemonics for the positioning of people. The stage of this order is not a world, just as the world is not a stage. Thus, euphemistically, with emphasis on the non-theatrical, a theatrical convention is illuminated by which order is a condition for the existence of a “world.” Is it only a “world” in which the viewers’ imagination is so swept away as to make them “forget themselves”? I would say no. This is not necessarily what Handke, or anyone who uses the world “world” in a theatrical context, means. True, it might be an enchanted world that fascinates those who observe it, but one cannot exclude also a world composed to suffice only for the construction of cultural “provinces of meaning” that convey a sense of something, as boring plays do. In all these cases, the orderliness of the components is important in that it serves a worldview, a

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world from another order. Insofar as “world” is the right word to use here, it will serve the nexus of cosmo-logic and order. “Cosmo-logic,” which now returns to the discussion after a lengthy textual exile, signifies the ultimate boundary of the small box as a place that accommodates performance and intentions. It prods the textuality-ofvisitation to leave the place of reception and take its seat with the audience. I refer not only to the favored audience, the “good hikers” as the artists call them—members of a bourgeois elite that seeks to quench needs definable as nostalgia for “high culture” (Gamliel 2016)—but also to any theatre-goer who craves more meaning. Thus far, I’ve described the contents invested in the small box as appropriate for the imperative of anchoring a theory in theatrical practice. Going forward, I will treat the box as a cavity filled with forms harvested from the tiresome multitude of “what”s and “how”s. They should be considered final. In other words, it’s time for the small box to speak its theoretical mind.

Syntax Semiotics The box conserves—as a curator conserves—what was considered beauty by the Greeks, who invented the box in close alignment with a malleable world-picture of a closed cosmos. Its intrinsic mythologism, i.e., not relative to the large box, has no respect for the “what’s above” and the “what’s below,” whether the life staged there be of gods, people, or things (Schwartz 1966, p. 354). Its fealty to the fundaments of totality and selfconstraint privilege it with the contemporary attributes of autotelic Western art, which is considered autopoietic and endowed with self-contained quality. Its all-encompassing framing even transforms what goes on inside it into “‘third-order event[s]’ that frame virtual events on stage, which, in turn, attempt to interpret events by fusing them into a narrative” (Giesen 2006, p. 327). In its spectacul-ar amplification, the spectacle is perceived as a demarcated space that serves as a common “focusing lens” (Smith 1982, p. 54) for a structural and spatial analysis of theatre and text. It steers one’s gaze toward order and thence to order within order—orderliness. It urges one to contemplate the theorization of place, space, and form by which rituality, with its sanctity and its cosmological allusions, is fulfilled (Smith 1982; Rappaport 1979; Polaniy 1966). If ritual draws its vitality from the confrontation of order and disorder, as this theorization holds (Abrahams

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1973), the craving for the invisible in the Western theatre flows, in Rayner’s (2002) opinion, from “the spatial model of inside and outside that creates a geometry of seeing difference” (p. 539). As I understand it, this craving may emanate from the tension between the theatre’s characteristics as a realistic and autotelic institution: an experience of reality-ness that encounters its own contents and makes no commitment to anything beyond. Familiar objects in venues of pure chance, ordinary life, or the mundane are now totally mobilized for the cause. The steadily advancing colonization of reality is a practice of defamiliarization, in which objects and people who lack some special aura are digested and placed within a different matrix (States 1987). The theatre-goer is expected to acquiesce in the “loss” brought on by the stage’s appropriation of cherished objects and people that have undergone brainwashing and are no longer accessible to them. The vehemence of demarcation in the Greek cosmos, emulated by being encased in real walls from three directions finds its expression in static art. The theatrical art fuses the segments of the work into perfect unity and invests it with content that totally fills a square-shaped museum-like picture. Can one indulge in a monotheistic reading of The Iconic Sentence in such a construct? Well, I wish to show how. The small box is an essential infrastructure, a substantive condition for a spectacle that sustains, honorably, a syntax semiotics —as I call the signification of all that is unseen in the theatre. The enigma or uncanny-ness of Rayner’s (2002) theorization is found in the haunting dimension, the designification of materiality itself in its being conflated with the formality that defamiliarizes the familiar. Rayner’s analysis also casts an eye on the phenomenon of those dressed in black in the Japanese theatre. Her description of their service on the Kabuki stage serves to differentiate her paradigm from mine: They may not only carry on and off large props, and manipulate effects, they may bring the actor tea, wipe off his perspiration, prompt him with his lines. […] They are in a sense the un-dead who are the non-signifying but functional blank spaces that serve the actor’s life. The formal choreographies of the Kabuki stage and its stage assistants make the uncanny aspect of the stage hand’s position between the living and non-living fully manifest as a haunting that is entirely real but also entirely other. This is […] to point to the material strangeness that is occluded by their ordinariness. (p. 541, author emphasis)

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Rayner’s paradigm touches upon the invisibility of those dressed in black and of the objects on the stage—per se—as concurrent and dialectic embodiments of the material/non-material nexus. This idealistic paradigm, which treats the theatre as a model for a commodity fetish and ties into Marxian ideas, seeks to establish a presence, within the confines of the theatre and in the broad field of the mind, of the stagehands’ work in visual reception of the elements of the spectacle. In comparison with this sophistication, in which the abstract and the excluded are blended, the hidden recess of the spectaculum lacks all ideological insinuation. It depends on everyone who contributes to the spectacle, from stagehands to the director. Together they establish an equality of status. Furthermore, the spectaculum theory finds the unseen not in material and human objects but rather, as stated, in their orderliness in space before the spectators’ eyes—an orderliness that has no ontological standing per se, as objects do, and instead challenges those doing the seeing. As an aspect of the unseen, this quality of order is a paradigm from another order. It is a dimension that can take another step toward understanding the elusive fundament in the transformation, one that answers to a process that Rayner describes as “never wholly identical to the state of the world before or after [and] particularly difficult to grasp because [it] involve[s] transits that resist categorization” (2002, p. 549). Such an orderliness cannot be understood without the study of the artistic craft as illuminated thus far by in-depth anthropology. Syntactic semioticism will prove its aptitude for the myth of the Sinai Revelation, in which the smoke of the mountain “ascend[s] like the smoke of the furnace” (Exodus 19:18) as the deity descends to the summit. The nation, clustered at the base of the mountain, sees nothing but cloud, smoke, and mist—symbols of the indefinite. Thus, the myth places contemplation of the Torah, or of truth, in words. This contemplation is unseen, veiled. If so, what will the nature of the syntactic semioticism be? It will radicalize the intention of the Iconoclasts, members of a Christian reform movement that sought to eradicate paganism, the staunch loyalty of idolworshippers to images and statues that invested those objects with divine expectations. The eradication that the Iconoclasts attempted to achieve was limited because they actually preserved these artifacts by settling for transforming them into go-betweens, conventional signs of the godly presence that lies beyond them (Schmid 2008). Although this change does signal progress in the practices of abstractionalization of God, Judaism carried it to a more focal level that is true to the theatricality of the mythical occasion. The Old Testament abstractionalizes God through the media of

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vocalized text and a demonstratively misty spectacle, thereby metamorphosing abstractionalization into an absolute imperative: “You shall not make for yourself an image in the form of anything in heaven above or on the earth beneath or in the waters below” (Exodus 20:4). Farther on, the spectacle of the mythical occasion is defined post factum as undefined: “You saw no form of any kind the day the Lord spoke to you at [Mount Sinai] out of the flame” (Deutonomy 4:15). Even Moses, God’s emissary, who “approach[es] the mist where God [is]” (Exodus 20:21), is not privileged with His full Revelation. Thus, the Hebrews’ Torah expresses its stance on “picture.” For Heschel (1955), all stories and commandments in the Torah show that God reveals Himself in events, not in things, and that these events can never be set within things. The visual reception of iconic signs and concrete symbols in the varied contexts of any literal or metaphorical theatre, text, and ritual has long been specified in research on the links between the Western theatre and the Jewish approach: The relationship that exists between the material signifier and the transcendental signified is not of mimicry but of allusion and indication. The role of otot, the Hebrew term for concrete signs (tefillin, mezuza, the Holy Ark, the Torah scroll, etc.), is one of mediation with a non-visual reality: Its whole purpose is to achieve internal communication between man and God (Ben-Meir 2002; Govrin 1983). This ties closely into the legend that so impressed Buber about the reality that hides within the otiot, the “letters,” that represent signs by which one reads. As stated, the switching of attention is made from the black letters, which should be considered conventional signs, to the white spaces between them, tacit signs. Only through the latter is the printed page read anew.6 “[…] All the people saw the voices […]” (Exodus 20:18). Can one convert “seeing the voices,” only the results of the spectacality of the vocalverbal work of creation, into the seeing-through of these results, through the finite? The theory of the spectaculum emerges via the totality of the gaze that subjugates itself to the autotelia of the small box, a gaze that is aware of the essentiality of the misleading strata and wonders about what might be missing. Contemplation surmounts the forces that impose illusion, the effect of which emanates from the convergence of the material and the narrative—from immanence. Rayner (2006) expresses the value of searching for something, anything, by noting, “The theatre itself gives appearances to the unseen, the hidden, and to the chronic return of theatrical event from nothing into something” (p. xvi). Contemplation nullifies not only the story but also the receivability of the sign; it also maximizes

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the amplitude of the roving gaze within the living, illuminated content that is framed like a picture. If only they accept the theatrical gift, the readers/viewers will realize that the spectacle gives them, each of them, full emancipation from all of its components because they surely have the option of gazing at whatever they wish, whenever they wish, and for as long as they wish. Each detail within the three-dimensional space can be gazed at, set apart from its place in the narrative chronology, and given a presence of its own by force of the volitional search-lust of those sitting in the dark. An inquisitive performative inversion such as this, rising to the point of audience activism versus stage pessimism, is unique to the theatre. I find nothing like it in traditional rituals, which by definition hinge on participatory activity. Nor does it recur in other visual media in our world (Carlson 1990). Cinema always wedges the big screen into a narrow frame and thrusts the director’s intentions into the viewer’s field of attention. The pictures imagined by readers of novels are snared in the coils of the author’s focus and cannot exist outside the line-by-line progression of the text. Museums, too, sometimes get caught up in steering visitors’ gaze and attention to an object by means of positioning, ropes, and lanes. The theatre is an honorable configuration of the presence of both the spectacle and those watching it. The audience always reserves the option of adding depth to what the theatre intends for it—spectating—and making it into an act. At this textual stage, the spectacle momentarily freezes in the sense of being subject to the examining mind that hunts for the latency that its creator’s mind has left behind. Encoded in this aesthetic is ethical meaning.

Ethical Ostentation The theatrical spectacle presents a translation of ethical values and ideas via the practice of ostension—showing—of a sanctified space unique to it and dependent on its existence. The idea of value-ostension that I am about to present corresponds to a theorization of rituals that anchors the theatrical in the primitive, foremost through Smith’s (1982) hyperspace approach. At the core of Smith’s work is the view of the ritual space as a temple and also, as such, as a place where things and actions can be manipulated. Smith, quoting Lévi-Strauss (below), stresses the significance of placing an object within the native’s perception of sanctity. The description preserves the importance of ostension, as has been identified in simple societies. Ostension is the communicative phenomenon of demonstrating an object instead of

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defining the meaning of a word, known or unknown (in Schmid 2008, p. 86, Footnote 2). A native thinker makes the penetrating comment that all sacred things must have their place. It could even be said that being in their place is what makes them sacred, for if they were taken out of their place, even in thought, the entire order of the universe would be destroyed. […] [T]he refinement of ritual [… is] explicable by a concern for what one might call “microadjustment”—the concern to assign every single creature or feature to a place within a class. (Lévi-Strauss 1966, p. 10)

“Micro-adjustments” may be perceived as a much-determined strategy for the performance of ritual ostension if it is part of an “economy of signification”—a concept indicative of the calculatedness of choosing what to include and what to exclude, what to case as form and what as background, what to enlarge and what to downsize, and so on (Smith 1982, p. 56). Smith’s analysis of paleo-Siberian bear-hunting rituals sheds light on the value of perfectness that underlies the performance and experience of the visible, a value grounded in knowing how things ought to be. It is not the village environs but culturally demarcated conventions that determine the precision of the ostension in the following account (of part of the ritual). The words in italics are particularly typical of the theatrical spectacle: The bear is roped and taken on a farewell walk through the village. It is made to dance and play and to walk on its hind legs. Then it is carefully tied down in a given position and ceremonially addressed. It is slain, usually by being shot in the heart at close range; sometimes, afterward, it is strangled. The body is then divided and eaten […]. (ibid., p. 63)

Art has metamorphosed the sanctifying tidiness into ostentation, a concept that originates in Wittgenstein’s philosophy and is proposed by Umberto Eco (1977). The semiotics of ostentation denotes the positioning of a living or inert object within an “intentional space” such as a stage—making it into something “uplifted to the view,” inspiring conceptual change when awareness shifts into “another gear” and allowing the viewer to relate to the object thus presented as “a signifying, exemplary image” (States 1987, pp. 35–36). The stage, in a much stronger way than a ritual, assigns emphasis to all objects and movements as though they were stationed behind a glass partition in a museum.

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Spectacular ostentation work centers on establishing angles and distances while controlling for all variables (Smith 1982, p. 64). Countless moments during the rehearsal season were devoted to the correct arrangement and positioning of the hobby horse, the architect’s blueprints, the bags of clothing that Aline brought with her, old Brovik’s cane, and so on. The economy of signification was invoked equally for all objects, the actors’ bodies included, much as it was for the transparent pitcher of water: After this pitcher was chosen among other pitchers, it was put to geometrical tests insofar as the tabletop on which it was set allowed. It was a form that the mise-en-scène was expected to underscore for a moment against the backdrop of other objects. The practice of ostension creates a spectacle of message/experience that is innocent of originality and instrumentality, one in which every detail carries meaning. What is the ethical meaning of this demonstration? Smith’s description of rituality as a response to the need to show objects and actions as they should be reflects a “thick” ethic of normative imperatives that social discourses have made familiar to us. So it is at first glance. His analysis emphasizes “the etiquette of the hunt,” i.e., “the complex structures of host/guest/visitor/gift,” an etiquette that “presupposes a reciprocity that cannot be achieved in the actual hunt because, at the very least, one of the parties, the bear, will more than likely not play its appointed role.” In the ritual as described, it was “constrained to rejoice in its fate, to walk to its death rather than run away […] Its soul is enjoined to return to its ‘Owner’ and report how well it has been treated” (ibid., p. 64). The ethic in the signification-ostension of a theatrical spectacle is not decoded as easily as is that of a hunting ritual. If we train our gaze on the symbolism of this signification adequately, however, we will find a similar message, an ethical message buried in the meaning of the meanings that ostentation gives an object. The meanings I have in mind, known as defamiliarization (Shklovsky 1965), attract Hornby’s (1996) descriptive attention: Art exists that one may recover the sensation of life; it exists to make one feel things, to make the stone stony. The purpose of art is to impart the sensation of things as they are perceived and not as they are known. (p. 62)

By being shown, the pitcher of water is rescued from banality. Its ostension makes it a pictorial pitcher. When the propman described the essence of his craft, he presented it not as the “discovery of the world” but as its

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“rephrasing.” For him, the objects on the set are like Paul Cezanne’s apples and pears. At the center of the open composition of Cezanne’s famous picture stands a white table covered by a wrinkled cloth with edges that extend beyond the borders of the work. Between its folds are laid apples and pears. Cezanne is famous for having said, “With an apple, I will astonish Paris.” The propman, in contrast, stated, “I create a prism for looking.” Like painters or other theatre artists, he states, he wishes to show “the same things again but in a different form, the kind that will work on the audience emotionally and intellectually.” Extricating an object from banality is an act that exalts the object and unites it with the beautiful and the aesthetic. There is a virtue of meaningfulness7 ; that is, in an actor’s words, the stage provides the audience with “value optics.” The act of sparing an object from banality amplifies the sense of its presence and gives it a personality of sorts that lifts it out of the category of the inert. We envelop it in an attitude of respect. We do not sanctify it because that would reduce it to the utility of a ritual. It acquires a presence that urges us to study it, in its own right, through the flow of our gaze. Above, I theorized this gaze as a subject that carries something of the I–Thou relationship, analogous to the fruit tree among Buber’s wealth of analogies, making it clear that the connection with the object also pertains to the attitude that is maintained with it: Usually a fruit tree is just a thing for me, an It, an impression among impressions, or I see it as a representative of its botanical genus or as a whole of the physical, chemical, and biological laws that it embodies. It may also happen, however, as the product of will and kindness as one, that by looking at the tree I enter into a relationship with it and it is no longer an It. The selfness of its exclusivity will seize me. […] It literally stands there in my presence, it is mine just as I am its—but differently […]. (Buber 2007, p. 17, author emphasis)8

The presumed reception, like the production of the teaching/theory in the spectaculum, converges into a mirror image here. That morsel of the I–Thou relationship that awaits the viewer is inseparable from the relationship-work that the artists, foremost the director and the actors, have invested in the object. Before the gaze that fills the large box appears, it is they who are graced with “will and kindness” that flow amid the orderliness-work of the spectacle. This work, in its entirety, constitutes the per se ostension of the object, which maintains a “correct” relationship with

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their bodies and all surrounding objects. The “actors’ lab” is tantamount to the “prop man’s lab.” Central in it is the attitude of relationship: Prop man: “I know how to detect focal points of energy or distress or emotion in the text. I detect them without dry analysis. I read [the script] and start to feel personally things that will happen on the stage afterwards. It isn’t clear why the magic happens; it happens because you feel right, left, up, down. In other words, the analysis isn’t aesthetic but energetic. That’s how I determine where to put Juliet’s balcony.” (in Romeo and Juliet )

The orderliness of the spectacle is unlike any other geometric alignment. Intrinsic in it is an expansion from the mechanical to the humanized, toward the ethical. In the course of the mises-en-scène, the props enjoy continual sympathy and consideration as to their place, angles, and characteristics. When they temporarily disappear or are dislodged during the rehearsal period, the actors may fret, stop in their tracks, and feel it necessary to re-cerebrate. They consider the props as essential and singular as any other component of perfectness. Silences and speech are often determined relative to them in ways that have nothing to do with an instrumental relationship. It stands to reason that the objects enjoy the status of position-holders ab initio. In terms of the type of attitude involved, the thespian art bridges between them and the human characters.9 In this state of affairs, the props must not be excluded from the totality of precision in the I–Thou relationship among the actor, the character, and the partner in the mise-en-scène, the triangular connection that I described at length in the previous chapter. Bear in mind that this nexus has been given precision in keeping with the artists’ estimation of how things should be through the imagined eye of the audience or, as Durkheim expressed it, the conscience collective. Let’s go back to the stone. When contemplated through the artistic frame of the small box, it acquires symbolic value. It becomes stony. Its “objectic” presence is amplified, inviting one to reflect on it (probably for the first time) not only as something that can be beautiful but as something of value among objects in the world. The sight of any character that the actors play may be given similar ontological pictoriality. Buber contemplates the stone, too. His contemplation, however, grants it value in addition to its realness; it gives it the presence of a quasi-person. It lifts the stone out of its thingishness and breathes life between it and the person who

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contemplates. “The stone,” says Buber (2007), “is not something ‘dead’ […] [because] nothing is dead in the world. […] Any object can become a ‘Thou’ to me […]” (p. 22). By extension, syntax semiotics operates on two complementary planes: emphasizing presence—amplifying any object into a quintessential form against a background (ostentation)—and filling the intervals among all these forms. Polishing a familiar object into a form surrounded by a background mimics the transformative demarche from It to Thou as soon as something acquires intersubjective value in the contemplator’s eyes. Concurrently existing among these chosen Thou-forms—the inanimate and human forms on the stage—is a continual two-way trickle of the I–Thou relationship that was readied for them ab initio, from the first days of the rehearsals.10 The theatrical unseen brims with the processive, non-representational vitality of the abstract machine. The intersubjective relationship, uncommon in its Good, lurks among the objects and between them and the contemplator. The darkened audience is silent. Acting on stage are Solness, old Brovik, Kaia, an armchair, an ordinary chair, and the pitcher of water. An elderly character, frosty and stooped (Brovik), slumps over the long armchair on which an adult male character has sprawled, long legs akimbo (Solness). Brovik to Solness: “Answer me! Must I part from life in such a way?” Solness: “You should part from life in the way best suited to you.” Brovik: “I understand.” Solness shouts at Brovik, who has begun to exit: “Brovik!! I can’t. I am what I am; I can’t be what I’m not!” Brovik halts and then retorts with repressed anger: “No, you truly cannot.” He begins to exit, trips, and props himself up with the chair in an ostensible situation of estrangement. Rage replaces the respect that had prevailed between the two men. Still, they are sensed as exact vis-à-vis each other with a different kind of respect and, more so, with a sympathy that flows between them constantly—one that builds the fury that resides in their exchange into an emotion that the audience may believe. The chair that Brovik uses for support is sensed as something that has chosen to leave the family of innumerable chairs to become a dramatis persona in form, color, and weight. Brovik’s grip on the chair bends more than the height of both of them, the character and the inanimate object, with a reciprocity that renders the act of bending and man’s brief stay in this world into liturgical poetry. “May I have a glass of water?” Brovik asks. “Kaia, water!” Solness commands. Kaia dispenses water from the pitcher and passes the glass to Brovik. Brovik drinks and places the glass on the table.

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In the meantime, the transparent glass pitcher glitters in the stage lighting and the water remaining in it trembles, making the light flicker. The glass plays a role at the very moment at which a person cools his sense of insult. First, it serves the character, and then, it rests next to the pitcher so as not to be concealed by it, in a familiar pairing of objects that are meant to fulfill each other. It is the kind of relationship that Kaia and Brovik, Brovik and Solness, and Solness and Kaia have. A vitality of profound sympathy flows between objects and characters. It creates vocal and visual forms and makes every movement and word resonate, alluding to a truth that stations itself within the turgidity of the quotidian flow of consciousness. The syntax semiotics approach to the theatre squares with Kapferer’s theorization of the virtual fundamental of rite (2005), although the two are not altogether identical. The concept of virtuality in Deleuze and Guattari (1994) denotes the invisible that is experienced in the traditional theatrical configuration. The virtuality of rite, says Kapferer, is a self-contained imaginal space—at once a construction but a construction that enables participants to break free from the constraints or determinations of everyday life and even from the determinations of the constructed ritual space itself […] the virtual may be described as a determinant form that is paradoxically anti-determinant, able to realize human constructive agency. (ibid., p. 47)

Like the virtual, syntax semiotics emphasizes not the meaning and symbolism of the theatre but “the dynamic for the production of meaning” (ibid., p. 50). Thus, it allows the spectacle to be decoded in its own right. More than this, the unseen in the theatre, like the virtual, is revealed in the backstage work, the arena where “the foregrounding of the mechanics of construction and production, the rules and procedures for the creation” (ibid., p. 52), the work to which much ritual is directed, takes place. The point that matters most is the way the virtual is defined relative to ordinary life, which is considered fractal-like, always changing, immanent within its structuring, a setting where temporary orders fuse seamlessly. Against this “chaosmos” of ordinary lived processes, the virtual reality of the ritual is a slowing of the tempo and the suspension of some of the vital qualities of lived reality. The fundament in question is “thoroughly real” (ibid., p. 48). Syntax semiotics is synonymous with the finite that protects the infinite—the output of the abstract machine (Zepke 2005, p. 5). The

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infinite is what is real; it is what one may ennoble in Deleuze’s and Guattari’s theory of the ontology of art. One ethical aspect of the a-dramatic, contentless reception of the spectaculum is getting to know the high-order mimesis that the theatre produces, i.e., its transpositioning of the cosmological order. Embodied in the spectaculum is the theatre’s mute statement about how all those material and abstract things that the audience sees are correct and worthy, as though they were components of a world not created by flesh-and-blood people. The audience’s reception is the reverse of this statement. Therefore, I consider it what Zepke (2005) describes, in reference to the ethic of the abstract machine, as an “affirmation of immanence” of sorts that may involve the “destruction of nihilism, of all the resentful negations defining the human” (p. 7). The artists and the audience—partners in art—are given a chance to make an ethical choice between two options that Fischer-Lichte (1997) spells out in the text that, for the moment, I lift out of its original context and scale to the full set of objects, including the actor: By means of the increasing semiotization of the body, the actor produced movements in the modern theatre which pointed to the total integration of the once-natural human organism into a nonhuman, unnatural “superior” order: either into a world of technique—an everlasting process made possible by the second industrial revolution—or into a metaphysical order formed by transindividual, mysterious forces. (p. 38)

The ethic manifests in choosing an affirmation that Fischer-Lichte describes as “a leap of faith, a leap into the chaos of the world in order to bring something back, in order to construct something that expresses life beyond its sad negation” (ibid., p. 8). An actor expressed it this way: We don’t understand lots of things in this world. The thing we understand more than anything else is that we’re so small in this cosmos, among billions of people. Especially today, there’s such pessimism about everything. And when there are moments when you feel the truth, the feeling that there’s something beyond, that there’s another level, it fills a very deep-seated human need.

My interpretation, which corresponds to the “cosmic ambition” of the abstract machine (ibid., p. 6), reflects, in part, the cosmological discourse that the artists produce as they reenact Genesis on the stage. Against the sense of “sad negation” as nihilism or the belief in chaos and non-specificity

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as characteristics of ordinary reality, the artists were not only graced with an obsession with disorder for the sake of order, as I have described, but also drawn into the dramatic mysticism of the Christian characters in Ibsen’s play. For example, they plunged into Aline’s acquiescence in the loss of her children, her conviction that the fire is not mere chance but the outcome of God’s wish to take them from her. Another example is “hubris.” For the actors, there was no question about its being a vile characteristic—the exact reason for the appearance of trolls such as Hilda in the lives of Solness and Aline, representatives of humankind. The Tower of Babel (Genesis 11), Moses’ striking the stone instead of speaking to it (Numbers 20), and other events from the religious canon are among the interpretive associations with which they introduced exactitude—the arrival of the heaven-sent “punishment”—in order to remove it from the realm of randomness. Ibsen’s Judeo-Christian cosmologism is shared by his dramatic successors. I hold that in the case of The Master Builder, the drama is one level of a spectacular world order. The cosmo-logical unseen in the small box is administered to the audience in heavy dosage.

Boxes: Back to the Mythical Event The textual return to the structure of large box/small box within a single closed space is a reversion to the mythical event. Once the large box rejoins the flow of the argument, the seated people who spectate in the dark acquire an additional dimension through which they may understand the spectaculum: the creative gaze-act that Fischer-Lichte (1997) ascribes to the Postmodern theatre. To build a bridge to the novelty that this presents, I hold, we need only agree that at every level of theatrical fandom—from avowed theatre-goers to mere spectators—it is possible to stake out an interpretive distance from the drama and invoke the creative gaze. The presence of spectators in the large box today lends outside support to the sophistication of the overburdened gaze at diverse spectacles, a sophistication that is somewhat open to contemplating or criticizing non-contemplation. The Postmodern gaze, it seems—or the deconstruction of the gaze in this essay—will lead the discussion to recent theatrical approaches that revert to the mysterious, the archaic, and the mythical. In the Postmodern theatre, “the spectators are given back their right to spectate”: [The theatre] elevates the spectators to absolute masters of possible semiosis without, at the same time, pursuing any other ultimate goal. The spectators

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are free to associate everything with anything and to extract their own semiosis without restriction and at will, or even to refuse to attribute any meaning at all and simply experience the objects presented to them in their concrete being. (ibid., p. 59)

Fischer-Lichte attributes the most fitting expression for this approach to Heiner-Müller; according to its gist, “The reception of the image is executed as the production of a text—reception is production, looking on is acting” (ibid., p. 59). This “new” approach reflects the perceptible emancipation of the gaze and its successor, interpretation (ibid.). Similarly, it boosts onlookers to a higher status and carries a political message that withstands not only criticism of the bourgeois spectator’s pessimism (Meyerhold 1979; Kershentsev 191811 ) but also the potential delegitimation of certain kinds of interpretations—a delegitimation of which, had it not existed, Kapferer (2007) would not have written the following: Anthropology is a practice of secularism that must often be anti-secular in an effort to break through what is often a blinding prejudice that can be the self-same limitation of secularism, a secularism that defeats itself and a passion for understanding, in its very secularist zeal. Anthropology’s commitments are ideally open so as to challenge even rationality and reason as a necessary method for engaging with the possibilities of being human. Its dialectics of suspicion, combining radical doubt with the suspension of disbelief, is essential to anthropology as a rigorous knowledge practice. Such a dialectics, too, is necessary to the liberating possibility of a discipline which ideally strives to break the constraints to knowledge and understanding that is, paradoxically, internal to the pursuit of rational knowledge as much as it may appear to be its external enemy. (p. 344)

Now those seated in the large box experience the spectaculum. They gaze ahead, free to imagine that what lies on the other side, fenced off from them, is a perfect visual embodiment of what’s under control and what is good. Their eyes, roving from point to point in the small box, can never encounter the not-done, the pause, or the fringes that do not accommodate the human act of creation. Wisdom, wholeness, and unity are evident in everything, carrying inside them the “cult value” or the aura of the work, as Benjamin (1969, p. 226) would argue.12 Every prop, the angle at which every object appears—a character’s dress, a rip in a piece of cloth, the strange coloration of a front tooth, a supine tumble in medium vocality, a stomping hoof suspended in mid-air of a human-headed horse,

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the openings through which the actors disappear, their handles, the yellow dust, the height to which the dust billows, the characters’ words, sentences, silences, and gazes. Sounds of ridicule. Spitting on the floor, murmurings of madness, a twitch of the cheek. Even if the character tells the audience that she doesn’t know what to do with herself. The spectacle, with its profusion of fixed and mobile elements, establishes its presence as perfectness by force of the wisdom invested in it. Just as the characters use objects, objects use them. There is no hierarchy. The viewer chooses what to “see.” Neither is there a hierarchy among the characters, since full understanding of a drama is inconceivable without the two lines of a character who speaks and vanishes. Secondarity is always a leading role because hierarchy in a state of perfection is preposterous. Nor is indistinctiveness conceivable; even dust, dirt, and flaw are distinctive due to their being put on display. The status of belief in the hand of chance is the theatre’s greatest fiction. Not only is everything supervised; this supervision emanates from Good. And this Good means that every object or character is present in the sense of being recognized as an element of intrinsic value as a Thou and by its recognition of the value of the elements around it. Meaningfulness permeates everything, translating into a vital flow, a dynamic, of holism. The unity of the spectacle, embodying the theoretical and ethical inputs of Buber,13 Deleuze, and Guattari, fuses with Otto’s grasp of the numinous object as “something that possesses being, or is actively ‘be-ing’ itself” (Rappaport 1999, p. 379). The metaphorical positioning of this spectacle on the “mountain” is added to these qualities and makes it haunted, if one may derive inspiration from the meaning of the theatrical space that Carlson (2001) proposes. As such, the spectacle brings to mind an archaic event14 —a property that confirms its uniqueness as a spectaculum. As in the mythical encounter at Mt. Sinai, the spectaculum—the theory constructed in this essay—offers its viewers not a picture of the spectacle per se and surely not a picture of God but rather the metaphor of hiddenness in the world of spectacle. It’s a graceful metaphor. As stated, emerging from the cloud, mist, and smoke that attended at the mythical event, the infinite of the finite is passed on: a Torah/teaching engraved on stone tablets, attributed to the Deity, the architect of the universe. The mythical encounter with God is a meeting with His teaching, which, when viewed through kabbalistic lenses, is His art-form in the world. God’s intention in the Torah, as Scripture teaches, is to bestow favor on His creatures as the outcome of an I–Thou relationship that is infinite and beyond the grasp of human intelligence.15 The teaching/art of human artists may earn praise in

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Jewish and Christian theological philosophy (Johnson and Savidge 2009; Levi 2016) because theatrical creation, like other art forms, is considered but an imitation of the good. As such, however, it cannot endanger the exclusivity of the One God’s act of creation.16 Remarks by Rabbi Abraham Isaac Hacohen Kook, whose systematic approach to the fusion of the aesthetic and the mystical is famous in Jewish mysticism (Ben-Shlomo 2012), follow: The great artists are one-of-a kind, the most pious of their time […] among Jewry and all of humankind, who possess great and perfect [unmitigated] virtues and of profound wish to do good and to mimic [God’s] beneficence in all walks of life.17

A demonstration of the mystical content of the aesthetic also occurs in medieval Christian philosophy, as in the following: It is not to be doubted that all things, both good and bad, proceed from a most perfectly ordered play, that they occur and are fitted to one another in such a way that they could not possibly occur more fittingly. Thus Augustine: since God is good, evils would not be, unless it were good that there should be evils. For by the same reason for which he wills that good things shall exist, namely, because their existence is befitting (conveniens ), he also wills that evil things should exist … all of which as a whole tends to his greater glory. For as a picture is often more beautiful and worthy of commendation if some colors in themselves ugly are included in it, than it would be if it were uniform and of a single color, so from an admixture of evils the universe is rendered more beautiful and worthy of commendation. (Lovejoy 1964, p. 72)18

Monotheistic theology’s recognition of the value of the “Greek kingdom of the beautiful” (Schwartz 1966, p. 380) is grounded in its being seen solely as a numinous medium—“a path, one may say, to the divine present” (ibid.), a force that creates and directs and that represents moral perfection. In Rabbi Kook’s words: Beauty is the order that signals in the soundest and most edifying way the practical intention of what is intentional in practice. […] It is altogether impossible for something that captures the heart with its beauty to eventuate randomly and be devoid of valorization of its system with intent, that the rule of beauty is the amalgamation of separate laws into one array and a parallel order. Therefore, observation of God’s feats begins with the laws of beauty

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that dominate all spiritual and corporeal reality, be it deliberate or random […] until you see no possibility of an action that is not accompanied by beauty.19

The artists of the theatre belong to a general population whose craft mimics the divine Good with exalted virtues that become visible in the act of creation. As monotheistic theologians, they, foremost the director, act on behalf of the aesthetic value and give primacy to the projection of Good as a moral value. To help integrate the foregoing insight into the structure of the Sinaitic Revelation, one may consult Ben-Meir’s study on Jewish symbolism in the theatre and, particular, the parokhet, the object that demarcates spaces in the Temple (Ben-Meir 2002). The original parokhet divided the Holy Ark, where the tablets of the Covenant were kept, from the open area around it. Today, a parokhet is used in a synagogue to buffer between the Holy Ark, where the Torah scroll is kept, and the worshipers. Historico-cultural analysis shows that “The Holy Ark, the quintessential ritual metaphor that serves to represent the deity in Judaism, has accompanied the Hebrew theatre from its inception in Europe to the contemporary Israeli theatre” (ibid., p. 47). Ben-Meir et al. value the frontal view of the Holy Ark, after the parokhet is moved aside, as they would value seeing God (Adams and Apstolos-Cappadona 1990)—a gaze analogous to watching a theatrical presentation after the curtain rises (ibid., p. 41). In addition to the perception of the theatre as a place where “voices are seen,” as I attributed to the director, this interpretation is supported by the perception of acting as prayer by the actors. I should again present one of the most impressive quotations: Habima [Israel’s national theatre] is named for the elevated prayer platform in the synagogue. A theatre is a place where people pray to other gods in other books. In fact, I lead the prayer service. Everyone’s seated in the hall. I’ve been sent by them to lead the prayers. I pray from these books. My prayer ascends heavenward. Everything is different [from the synagogue] but the intention is the same. I’m in the theater in order to represent my Jewish tribe.

What we have here is a sequence of replicas (Ben-Meir 2002, p. 47). On the basis of the theatre artists’ religious ethic, the theatrical event au large, in which the spectaculum resides in the small box—covered and revealed by the curtain—should be seen as a simulcre (Baudrillard 1994).

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It copies the structure of separation that keeps the tablets of the Covenant apart in the ark in the Temple and that partitions the small box from the large one in the theatre. Thus, both contexts—synagogue and theatre— replicate the Sinai Revelation.20 The replication reflects the approach of aesthetic monotheism, which sees different forms of creative endeavor as manifestations of the diversity of the divine source and not of the human artist’s originality—because only the divine is considered true (Idel 1988, pp. 275–289).

Iteration: Receiving the Torah When the theatrical event is over and can be confirmed as such, the stage vanishes for the nth time behind the massive curtain and the hall empties out. The spectators and ushers return to the bustling life that lies beyond the ritual. The tired, sweaty actors remain in the dressing rooms, restoring their quotidian appearance before they emerge from the rear exit into the street, the café, their homes, or somewhere else in town. Even though many of them would really like to know what difference their acting has made in the spectators’ psyches, or may simply pray for some post-event attention, our concern is not with them. For the purposes of this part of the chapter, it suffices to note that the actors and the artists are mindful of their role as imparters of something to the crowd that had arrived to receive it and are perennially identified with this role, especially on days that precede their performances on stage and on the crucial evenings. The question now concerns the second-order reception of the Torah, the presumed content that the audience may carry in its consciousness to the swirls of its life that lie beyond the square at the approach to the theatre, the place where the impression of the boxy splendor and, with it, the experiencing of the magic, fade into the nocturnal gloom. I turn now to the ethical meaning of the spectaculum. It’s not hard to predict how Martin Buber would walk out of the theatre at the sound of the penetrating utterances of Irma, a character in Genet’s play The Balcony. At the end of the play, Irma, the madam of the brothel, admonishes the audience as she sends it home: “Go home and there everything, don’t doubt it, will be even more false than here” (Genet 1962, p. 135). Buber would not have doubted it. He would have attributed the character’s cloying mantle of falseness to the fictional brothel and not to the theatre per se, and if nevertheless it were seen as a theatrical falsehood, he would have nodded at the allusion to a moral comparative advantage that a dubious character

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such as Irma ascribes to this institution relative to the home environment. Be Genet’s justifications what they may, this line, one of the most upsetting in the history of the theatre, imposes itself on the audience as the latter rises from its seats and leaves the premises. It is iterative; it bridges worlds. One should say, however, that Buber’s theoretical enterprise is other. As a theatre-goer, Buber demonstrated in both his physical and his philosophical movement a positive and a much more quintessential iteracy, one that sharply contradicts the calumnies against the theatre that burden it with an immorality expressed mainly in falsehood and deceiving the audience. The defamation originates, among other things, in a sociohistorical argument that harks back to the sixteenth century. It goes thus: The invention of the theatre as an institution that strikes a legitimate compromise with the values of sincerity, enhanced awareness of the reality of role-playing, concealment, and deception (Trilling 1972), stems from a Platonic approach that links the theatre with moral corruption (Ridout 2009) and with the perception of its artists as engaging in vacuity or “prostitution” (Diderot 2007). In contrast to these objections, Buber’s ethical theory accords with Burns’ (1972) concept of the theatre as a “moral emblem” (p. 10) and, possibly, with the argument that inheres the ethic to the performance (Rappaport 1979). A claim common to Buber and Levinas has it that through the very encounter with the face of the other, the performance makes the theatre a “moral institution” (Ridout 2009, p. 54). Furthermore, as I have shown, the theorization of the I–Thou relationship, extricated from all movements of people and objects on the stage and transported into social life in the packaging of an ideal, obliterates the theatrical fundament in favor of its diametrical opposite, the theatric truth. Buber, who observed the theatre with less dramatic eyes than would the average theatre-goer, offers his readers a third way of probing Irma’s words: feeling the authenticity of her relationship with the audience, the partners, the objects, and the actress who plays her. In this respect, that of truth, even the madam herself, with her wealth of expressions and motions, offers the possibility of a moral performance. Buber exemplifies this unique way of receiving the theatrical Torah by translating his harvest of observations as a member of the audience into a philosophy of human-relations ethics in social reality. However, the astonishing or, should we say, the perfect iteracy of the movement in Buber’s thought does not end with that. This is because his arguments also refer to the theatrical drama as something with which to

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add amazement to what he received through his contemplation: the hidden contents of the spectaculum. Thus, for example, in his book Be-sod siah (Dialogue on man and being, 2007): Most of this thing that people now call siha [conversation] should be called, to be precise, “compoundings of words.” People rarely converse with each other; instead, in fact they converse into the void of a fictional domain, the existence of which is exhausted with its being heard even though everyone is turned to his fellow. It was Chekhov who coined an apt poetic expression for this situation in his play The Cherry Orchard, in which the family members strive not for fraternal togetherness but for each to speak his piece—in succession. However, this thing that, in the play, was still in a sense the distress of the self-contained, introverted individual, Sartre made into a principle of life. (p. 222)

This chapter follows Buber’s gaze and then ranges far beyond, to the backstage, in order to trace the fundamentals of the self-labor that belong to the artistic phenomenon that he observed and that the spectators encounter—and to strip it of its cloak of alterity. I believe it correct to speak of alterity despite the Shakespearian “all the world’s a stage” because Bard’s quip cannot illuminate the entire theatrical field of meaning from what is known in daily experiences, or to make it implementable or attainable. Instead, Shakespeare’s adage, invested with an unsurpassedly epitomic iterative structure for theatrical production and reception in the social reality, may divide thinkers into two blocs. One engages in descriptive theorization (about what exists and is known); the second concerns itself with ideal theorization (about what ought to exist and is less known). The former is sociological, focusing its appropriation from the theatre on the stage–audience-backstage structure and centering on theatrical face work (a Goffmanian school). The latter bloc, in turn, is philosophical, appropriating artisticism from the theatre and focusing on theatric truth and authenticity work (a phenomenological school). This differentiation reflects Wilshire’s (1982) approach, according to which “Goffman […] must see the actor’s artistry as a kind of deceit. Inevitably, then, he must construe role-like activity offstage as a kind of deceit” (p. 275). Wilshire’s being-for-others phenomenology approximates Buber’s I–Thou by showing that the theatre is lifelike and, “specifically, that it exhibits existentialia (categories of human existence) that structure a priori human life itself” (Smith 1991, p. 341, original emphasis). Furthermore, both philosophers’ theories are consistent with that of John Dewey, which holds that great art may be more

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moral than moral (in Wilshire 1982, p. 267) and borrows an analogy from the ethics of the theatre for man’s facing off with God. The elementary forms of ethical performance in this essay might have fit into Fischer-Lichter’s sociohistorical overview of the civilizing process that takes place in the theatre, and might have evolved into an ideal worthy of emulation, had the signing of worthy behavior from the stage not been conspicuous in its absence. Such is the case, at least, for acting in the Baroque period, about which Fischer-Lichte writes: […] The character presented by the actor who followed the rules was clearly marked as an ideal. Should the actor break the rules by running across the stage, falling down and rolling on the floor […] he indicated to the audience that character he embodied had a weak identity. (ibid., p. 31)

Thus, without it being stated explicitly, the spectaculum today presents the audience with the performance of a better self, if I may use Matthew Arnold’s expression, that exceeds in value the ordinary self that is familiar in quotidian life (2006 [1882]). Signing the I–Thou relationship as worthy of emulation is evidenced not only on the stage; as stated, the ethic of this relationship may become known implicitly or indirectly by the very experiencing of fusion in a state of being charmed. Thus, the signing expands the incidence of the spectaculum to the theatrical event at large. The work of extracting the ethic from the theatre, something also characteristic of this essay,21 indicates that the dramatic magic, unsurpassed in distinguishing between the sacred and the profane, the worthy and the unworthy, hinges on the attitude toward the truth of performers at large. We will not find its place in daily lives that are saturated with social-survival manipulations of the truth. Its place in the living theatre, in which the labor of truth is what counts, in which the truth extirpates any imitation or falsification, is a persuasional strategy that has no other utilitarian purpose on its horizon. An anthropological visit to the backstage convinced Hastrup (2004)—for that was his place, too—that Durkheim’s view on society as “primarily a ‘moral system’ does not seem alien to the society of players and other practicing theatre people” (p. 293, author emphasis). My anthropological visit22 reveals the theatre artists’ quest for the truth as a habitus failure à la Bourdieu, as I have shown elsewhere (Gamliel 2012, 2016). While riveted to its place in the hypnotic hall, a naïve audience receives worthy values in the form of an experience of magic and unity. This state

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of affairs accords with Adorno’s (1998) critique of Brecht’s educational theatre because, for most theatre-goers, the theatrical art, like art, neither tries nor needs to do what theory does better. In contrast, in its craving for more magic, non-naïve spectators know what underlies the totality of movement on the stage and may easily infer that enchanting them is not the sole province of the theatre; the same effect is produced by partial configurations that are attainable (intellectually and/or practically) in social reality. Some would see in the grounded theorization of the spectacle—the spectaculum—an act of transforming knowledge into moral authority. Identifying what cannot be seen in the exaltedness of human creativity, giving thought to the permanent space of the liminal in the structure of oneself relative to one’s surroundings, undermines confidence in social structurings and categories. “Thick ritual” thus becomes “thin ritual” in a shift that encourages reflection (Innis 2005, p. 211) on the superficiality of daily life, those ways of incomplete knowledge or non-intent through which the “It” fundament is perpetuated: judgments, hierarchies, exclusions, and also self-utility and self-estrangement. “Any object can become a ‘Thou’ to me because all the world is creation,” reasoned Buber (2007, p. 22). One may convert this statement into a message about the existence of choice in the theatrical dimension of the realities of our lives, as Jill Dolan (2001), for example, does in her “Utopian Performative”: I believe that theatre and performance can articulate a common future, one that’s more just and equitable, one in which we can all participate more equally, with more chances to live fully and contribute to the making of culture. […] Such desire to be part of the intense present of performance offers us, if not expressly political then usefully emotional, expressions of what utopian might feel like. (pp. 455–456)23

If we set aside the “republican” meaning of the spectacle, we will find Rousseau’s approach very close to expressing such a Utopia through the desired “switching of places” between stage and audience: Plant in the middle of a place a stake crowned with flowers, gather there the people and you will have a fête. Do even better: make the spectators themselves the spectacle, make them themselves the actors; do it in such a way that each person sees himself and loves himself in the others, so that all should be better united. (Rousseau 2003, p. 182)

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The question now is what it means to take over the space between the objects or the syntax semiotics of the gaze. In this matter, too, which I elucidate here, the structure of the theatre plays a role. Paradoxically, an imagined unraveling of the stage–audience structure is needed for the message of the exemplary orderliness of the stage to be received. I experienced this unraveling when the production manager alerted me to the risk that I was taking by peeping at the audience through a crack in the curtain: “You can’t peep at the audience without the audience seeing you,” she stated. Either way, it should make the formal stringency of the buffer between the small box and the large one less impressive. The very proximity of the boxes—sometimes they are but a step apart—and their openness to each other demand attention. This is not to say that the separation will cease; it’s just that the theatre—however realistic it may be—signifies in these ways the content of the stage as an ongoing example of reality, as though the theatrical production, in its essence, appropriates one reality among many realities from which the audience has arrived and places it in a box before its eyes—after having made art into amazement. Several years ago, Israeli television ran a commercial for theatre subscribers that parodied the possibility of blurring consciousness in a loop of theatre and reality. In the ad, there was a scene in which someone in the audience suddenly stands up in the middle of a theatre production, walks over to a refrigerator on the stage, takes out a bottle, and drinks its contents as he holds the refrigerator door open. His body language is banal and indifferent in the familiar manner of ordinary life in an Israeli family home. His act “embarrasses” the actors and “causes” the mise-en-scène to stop briefly. After he “quenches his thirst” and shuts the refrigerator, he steps down from the stage and returns to his place in the audience, resuming his spectator’s role as if nothing happened. I detect a nexus of commerciality and cosmology in that fictitious scene.24 It drops a freighted hint about the status of reality, an artistic state of mind that prefers the kind of stage that consumes reality in large bites. Apart from the commercial message—everyone’s free to join the population of theatre-goers—obviously due to the preference of the familiar, this esteemed lineage will not force new subscribers to withstand the cerebral and/or behavior challenges of the world the classics and the affectations of “haute couture.” In a few words, do not expect future subscribers to find a meaningful difference between stories and objects of the stage world and those of their own. At the theatre, one can feel “at home.” In its essence, then, this commercial scene typifies every theatre event. The “at home” feeling is a metaphoric claim about the awareness of those

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in the audience of the equivalence of the offstage reality to the stage reality, be the plot what it may. This metaphor attracted the literary attention of S. Y. Agnon (2004): That other house, the theater, is like this: People perform there who have never seen a house in their lives, but they pretend they know everything that there is in a house; so they show the householders all that there is in their own houses; and the householders are delighted and clap their hands and say: fine, fine. (p. 112)

First, the theatre “cuts and pastes” elements of reality and, in the space between these operations, reworks them in accordance with theatre conventions. Next, it allows the audience to choose to receive the repaired spectacle or to “cut” it and reinsert it, as-is, into the realities of its life. In other words, if the audience persists with its contentless spectacular gaze at the stage, the stage, which is all the world, will switch places at the end of the theatrical event with the whole world as a stage. This achievement of consciousness may clash frontally with the theatre’s interest—having the show experienced as a dream, after which the audience will return to its quotidian life feeling melancholic (Dolan 2008). As I wish to show below, the magic does no insult to the objective world, as Reinach (1903) believed, and the cosmo-logic obtained from the theatre has no need for artistic opium. In contrast to the literature about the nexus of the theatre and the transcendental (Friesen 2004; Rood 2000; Steiner 1989), the theoretical shaft of light here targets a cosmological unconscious that transcends the words of the play or the playwright, be it Ibsen, Beckett, O’Neill, or even someone whose successful productions belong to the field of entertainment. The artistic theologism of the theatre creates an exemplary orderliness that dominates the three-dimensional spectacle in the small box as far as its most distant corners. No object, expression, or movement, however small and marginal, is activated by chance. With its control of the production process, this stance carries a message that challenges the underlying premise of Friesen’s (2004) overview of the “uneasy alliance” between the theatre and the transcendent, by which: The previous century began with theatrical forms that were rooted in realism and sought to separate the human dimensions of theatrical expression from transcendent claims. Theatre presented the natural world as perceived

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through the five senses and it avoided any claims to truth or reality beyond that empirical foundation. (pp. 57–58, author emphasis)

While not targeting the transition explicitly, the theatre does not impede a perspective that Bleeker (2008) describes as “integrated into our knowledge at the most implicit or unconscious level,” a symbolic one in the sense that “the subject is absorbed in it and produced by it” (p. 14). Thus, the geometry used to structure a stage world that is realistic, to one extent or another, constitutes an infrastructure for what Brook (1969, p. 58) calls the “boiling matter.” What is meant by this is that it should not be considered a mime or representation of a broad, multivariate, continuous, and un-surveillable social structuring process. Instead, as Freedman (1991) puts it, “We might rethink it as culturally conditioned mode of staging the construction of the real ” (p. 50, author emphasis). The result is a highly condensed spectacle, a life-size work of art, a three-dimensional picture pulsing with life, transcending the binary opposition of representation and presence that dominates the discourse on theatre performance. “Life is the imitation of a transcendental principle which art puts us into communication with once again” (Artaud 1958, p. 82). When the art in question is a spectacle seen as a segment of a sociomaterial reality, one may view the theatre as a substantiation of the representation of a cosmological order, a fixed determinant of the transitory narratives. Like a ritual, the theatre, by way of its order or its lack of all randomness, attempts “to realize a divine order in mundane time” (Rappaport 1999, p. 209). The spectaculum, in this transcendent respect, is a theatrical idea about the transition to the reality of the spectacle—an idea that depends on how this reality is perceived and is subject to second-order contemplation. Contemplating the idea that the theatre places before its goers should be viewed as a divided metaphor for philosophical reflection on ideas that originate in Plato’s Politea. It does have something of the kind of contemplation that reflects on the nature of a world in which living people are revealed. Its view of the world, however, does not emanate from the flawed nature of this world and the need to fix it and convert it into an idea about an alternative world. Instead, it accords with a cosmo-logic by which the world, a creation of the God Who handed down the Torah, is the epitome of perfection. As Even-Yisrael (Steinsaltz) expresses it, the sublime divine Revelation of the Torah to man as occurred at Mt. Sinai also has comprehensive metaphysical meaning because it is the medium through which the essential, basic form

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of all of reality is revealed. A spectaculum that addresses the world outside the theatre with a consciousness of perfection and totality offers one collectivistic path (along with other such paths, such as nationalism and secular religions) to the revival and brandishing of the idea of cosmological holism, one that neither secularism nor individualism nor Postmodern time has managed to extinguish.25 The spectaculum experience that one enjoys at the theatre is transformative in the sense that it fuses the symbolization of the archaic event with the visible manifestations of theatricality, stimulating imagination enlightenment, faith, and emotion. Thus, it makes the unseen referents of ritual symbols, or the realities to which they point, into the spectators’ own experience, giving them a sense of knowing the essential and true patterns of human life in relation to the natural and cosmic order. As a result of this transformation, spectators become aware of an overt world that is complete and fully controlled—an awareness that translates into terms of a structural attitude toward art: The understanding which the artistic sign establishes among people does not pertain to things, even when they are represented in the work, but to a certain attitude toward things, a certain attitude on the part of man toward the entire reality which surrounds him, not only toward the reality which is directly represented in the given case. (Mukaˇrovský 1978, p. 128)

Sundry intellectuals, philosophers and theologians among them, have translated this spectaculum-awareness into a moral imperative that is limited to the domains of contemplation of the world, the interpretive gaze. Asking “What is worthy of being appropriated from artists?” Nietzsche (2001 [1882]) writes: What means have we for making things beautiful, attractive, and desirable, when they are not so? […] We have still more to learn from artists, who in fact, are continually concerned in devising such inventions and artifices. To withdraw from things until one no longer sees much of them, until one has even to see things into them, in order to see them at all or to view them from the side, and as in a frame or to place them so that they partly disguise themselves and only permit of perspective views or to look at them through coloured glasses, or in the light of the sunset. […] We should learn all this from artists, and moreover be wiser than they. For this fine power of theirs usually ceases with them where art ceases and life begins; we, however,

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want to be the poets of our lives, and first of all in the smallest and most commonplace matters. (Aphorism 299)

An exemplary description of the proper reception of the Sinaitic Revelation in mythical theatricality is found in The Zohar (The splendor). The text defines three aspects of the Torah or its stories and lays out a hierarchy of contemplation: Rabbi Shimon says: […] All matters in the Torah are of a superior nature and are uppermost secrets. […] The Torah […] has a body, the commandments of the Torah, which are called the “body of the Torah.” This body is clothed with garments, which are stories of this world. The ignorant of the world look only at that dress, the story of the Torah, and […] do not look at what lies beneath that dress. Those who know more look not at the dress but at the body beneath that dress. The wise, the servants of the loftiest King, those who stood at Mount Sinai, look only at the soul, which is the essence of everything, the real Torah. (Zohar 3:152a, author emphasis)

A kind of “looking at the soul” is formulated in Aristotle’s approach to art. The philosopher, Aristotle says, must not content himself or herself with the idea that a beautiful picture of a repulsive object gives pleasure. Instead, she or he should reject as irrational the treatment of a realistic original of an artwork as something repulsive, because under the external ugliness lurks an inner beauty connected to the way the things are organized (by nature) (Belfiore 2001, author emphasis). I conclude this part of the discussion with remarks by Rabbi A. I. Kook that imply the sanctification in Judaism of aesthetics and “Greek art” for the sake of this “looking into the soul”: The aesthetic sense usually needs to develop well, to the point where the soul can equip itself with a noble picture of the magnificence so that it may stand at the height of its steps. The literature of the generation and the craving of the beauty that grips it to expand, notwithstanding their profane tendencies […] are but levels and affirmations of the sublime purity of the high virtue that will appear in the world. (in Londin 2008, no page number)

Finally, I borrow from Fischer-Lichte an insight about the Postmodern theatre audience to remark about the iterative impact of the spectaculum on the areas of life that the spectators reach after they leave the theatre—an impact that may upset the dichotomy of the sacred, equated with the real

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and with being, and the profane, likened to appearance and illusion (Eliade 1953). They “no longer need the stage as a reminder [; …] instead they erect the stage in their own consciousness” (1997, p. 59). This is the last link in the reception of the spectaculum.

Notes 1. Exodus 27:9. 2. Franz Hessel in Benjamin (1992). 3. By way of background, Fontenelle published his Conversations on the Plurality of Worlds in 1686 and was named permanent secretary of the French Académie des Sciences nine years later. His corpus—six nighttime conversations between an unnamed marquise and a savant narrator—reveals the fundamentals of Copernicus’ infinite and dynamic universe. 4. Laing’s context is psychiatry. 5. Yugen—a form of beauty that exists in any aesthetic manifestation. 6. See the end of Chapter 1. 7. The aesthetic per se does not suffice. As Buber (2000) put it, “We are allowed to conjecture that God does not loathe pictures; instead, He tolerates their seeing Him in them, seeing Him in Eden. He accepts even them as forms that he causes to glow in the cloud. Quickly and repeatedly, however, they wish to be more than what they are, to be more than signs and allusions to Him. Finally, it happens again: they hide the path to Him and He vanishes from their midst” (p. 228). 8. Quoted from S. H. Bergman’s preface to the book; the fruit-tree parable appears in Buber’s Daniel . 9. The bridge also goes the opposite way in that the human character is much more coherent and granular than the self in daily life (Burns 1972, p. 178) and, therefore, more object-like. 10. As described in the previous chapter. 11. Quoted in Fischer-Lichte (1997, p. 42). 12. This, in contrast to “exhibition value,” which, according to Benjamin, denotes the technological transformation of art into mass-produced objects. 13. The point is also confirmed by a Christian interpretation of the theater proposed by Johnson (2009), who attributes the “Interpersonal-Encounter Model” to Schillebeeckx, p. 69. 14. Unlike Carlson’s approach, I do not intend to argue that the Sinai revelation is a mythical origin of the theatre. 15. Based on a kabbalistic interpretation of the expression Torato-umanuto (his/His Torah/teaching is his/His vocation/art), which appears in the Babylonian Talmud, Tractate Shabbat 11a.

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16. This danger has been described as the reason for Judaism’s weightiest objection to the theatre (Levi 2016). 17. Rabbi Abraham Isaac Hacohen Kook, Orot ha-Kodesh, p. 263, quoted in Ben-Shlomo (2012, p. 192). 18. Source of quotation: Epitome Theologia Christiana, in Migne Patrologia Latina, Vol. 178, Col. 1726–1727. 19. Berakhot B, 6:46. Quoted in Jewish Creation (no year given), pp. 83–84. 20. This simulcre-ization derives exceptional reinforcement from the word qetoret (incense), which runs like a thread through several sources—the Torah, a textbook on the theatre, and the Jewish prayer book. The title of the Israeli theatre researcher Shimon Levy’s book (2016), Meqatrim babamot (Hebrew: lit. incense-burning on stages) links the ritual of hoisting the incense to the theatrical stage to the negative sense, in which the prophets of Israel inveighed against idolatry, including the theatre as a non-Jewish cultural configuration (ibid., pp. 7–8). In the Jewish prayer book, which mentions the commandments of the Torah, the word qetoret (incense) attests to the Temple being a replica of Mount Sinai: “‘A perpetual burnt-offering offered up at Mount Sinai as a pleasant aroma, a fire-offering unto the Lord’ (Numbers 28:6) […] You are the Lord our God before Whom our patriarchs burned the spice-incense in the time of the Temple.” 21. Consider Ridout’s (2009) claim, pursuant to Levinas and Plato: “An ethical work or event of art would be one which demanded a labour of critical thought for its ethical potential to be realized rather than offering within itself anything of the ethical” (p. 69). 22. Somewhat characterized also by Wilshire (1982). 23. It would be interesting to compare how this essay and Dollan’s approach arrive at a similar ethical conclusion. 24. An interpretation that does not clash with explanations that cultural-studies analyses would propose as to the status and function of the theatre in contemporary society. 25. For a comprehensive overview of cosmological ideas, see Handelman and Lindquist (2013).

References Abrahams, R. (1973). Ritual for fun and profit. Paper prepared for BurgWartenstein Conference 59 on Ritual and Reconciliation. Adams, D., & Apostolos-Cappadona, D. (1990). Art as religious studies: Insights into the Judeo-Christian traditions. In D. Adams & D. Apostolos-Cappadona (Eds.), Art as Religious Studies (pp. 3–10). New York: Crossroad. Adorno, T. (1998). Engagement. In Noten zur Literature (Vol. 3). Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp.

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Agnon, S. Y. (2004). A Guest for the Night: A Novel. Madison, WI: Terrace. Alexander, J. C. (2014). The fate of the dramatic in modern society: Social theory and the theatrical avant-garde. Theory, Culture & Society, 3(1), 3–24. Arnold, M. (2006 [1882]). Culture and Anarchy. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Artaud, A. (1958). The Theater and Its Double (M. C. Richards, Trans.). New York: Grove Weidenfeld. Baudrillard, J. (1994). Simulacra and Simulation. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Benjamin, W. (1992). Ha-meshotet [The flaneur], collection of writings (Translated from the German by D. Singer). Tel Aviv: Hakibbutz Hameuchad. Benjamin, W. (1969). The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. In Illuminations (pp. 217–251) (H. Zohn Trans.). New York: Schocken Books. Ben-Meir, A. (2002). Otot ve-otiot ‘ale bamot. Symbolizm Yehudi ba-te’atron ha’ivri [Signals and Letters: Jewish Symbolism in the Hebrew Theatre] (PhD dissertation). Tel Aviv University, Tel Aviv. Ben-Shlomo, J. (2012). On Links between Religion and Mysticism. Jerusalem: Carmel Publication (in Hebrew). Belfiore, E. S. (2001). Tragic Pleasures: Aristotle on Plot and Emotion. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Bleeker, M. (2008). Visuality in the Theatre: The Locus of Looking. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Boman, T. (1960). Hebrew Thought Compared with Greek. London: W. W. Norton. Brook, P. (1969). The Empty Space. Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin Books. Buber, M. (2000 [1962]). P’nei adam [Face of Man]. Jerusalem: Bialik Institute. Buber, M. (2007). Be-sod siah: ‘Al ha-adam ve-’amidato nokhah ha-havaya [Hidden Dialogue: On Man and His Steadfastness in View of Reality]. Jerusalem: Bialik Institute. Burns, E. (1972). Theatricality: A Study of Convention in the Theatre and in Social Life. London: Longman. Carlson, M. (1990). Theatre Semiotics: Signs of Life. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press. Carlson, M. (2001). Haunted Stage: The Theatre as a Memory Machine. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (1994). What is Philosophy? (H. Tomlinson & G. Burchell, Trans.). New York: Columbia University Press. Diderot, D. (2007 [1957]). The Paradox of Acting (W. H. Pollock, Trans.). Whitefish, MT: Kessinger. Dolan, J. (2001). Performance, Utopia, and the “Utopian performative”. Theatre Journal, 53(3), 455–479. Dolan, J. (2008). Utopia in Performance: Finding Hope at the Theatre. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press.

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Douglas, M. (2004 [1966]). Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution. London: Routledge. Eco, U. (1977). Semiotics of theatrical performance. The Drama Review, 21, 107–117. Eliade, M. (1953). The Sacred and the Profane: The Nature of Religion. New York: Harcourt. Fischer-Lichte, E. (1997). The Show and the Gaze of Theatre: A European Perspective. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press. Freedman, B. (1991). Staging the Gaze: Postmodernism, Psychoanalysis and Shakespearean Comedy. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Friedman, M. (1969). Martine Buber and the Theatre. New York: Funk & Wagnalls. Friesen, L. (2004). The problem of transcendence in modern and postmodern plays. In I. Hentschel & K. Hoffmann (Eds.), Theatre-Ritual-Religion (pp. 35–59). Münster: Lit Verlag Münster. Gamliel, T. (2012). The final act: On the limitations of the “mask-of-aging” dramaturgical metaphor in representing the performing self. Research on Aging, 34(5), 622–645. Gamliel, T. (2016). Ghosts and habitus: The lasting hegemony in Israeli theatre. Ethnography, 17 (2), 168–189. Genet, J. (1962). The Balcony (B. Frechtman, Trans.). New York: Grove Press. Giesen, B. (2006). Performing the sacred: A Durkheimian perspective on the performative turn in the social science. In J. C. Alexander, B. Giesen, & J. L. Mast (Eds.), Social Performance: Symbolic Action, Cultural Pragmatics, and Ritual. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Govrin, M. (1983). The Jewish ritual as a genre of a sacred theatre. Conservative Judaism, 20, 15–34. Handelman, D. (2008). Returning to cosmology—Thoughts on the positioning of belief. Social Analysis, 52(1), 181–195. Handelman, D., & Lindquist, G. (2013). Religion, politics, and globalization. In G. Lindquist & D. Handelman (Eds.), Religion, Politics and Globalization (pp. 1–68). New York: Berghahn Books. Handke, P. (1971). Offending the Audience; and Self-Accusation (M. Roloff, Trans.). London: Methuen. Hastrup, K. H. (2004). Action: Anthropology in the Company of Shakespeare. Copenhagen: University of Copenhagen. Heschel, A. J. (1955). Symbolism and Jewish Faith. In J. F. Ernest (Ed.), Religious Symbolism (pp. 45–73). New York: Kennikat Press. Hornby, R. (1996). Drama, Metadrama, and Perception. London: Bucknell University Press. Idel, M. (1988). Ha-qabala ve-ha-muzika [Kabbala and Music]. In D. Cassuto (Ed.), Emunot ve-yahadut [Beliefs and Judaism] (pp. 275–289). Ramat Gan: Bar-Ilan University.

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Innis, R. E. (2005). The tacit logic of ritual embodiment. In D. Handelman & G. Lindquist (Eds.), Ritual in Its Own Right: Exploring the Dynamics of Transformation (pp. 197–212). New York: Berghahn Books. Johnson, T. E. (2009). The theology of the theatrical process. In T. E. Johnson & D. Savidge (Eds.), Performing the Sacred: Theology and Theatre in Dialogue (pp. 51–76). Ada, MI: Baker Academic. Johnson, T. E., & Savidge, D. (2009). Performing the Sacred: Theology and Theatre in Dialogue. Ada, MI: Baker Academic. Kapferer, B. (2005). Ritual dynamics and virtual practice. In D. Handelman & G. Lindquist (Eds.), Ritual in Its Own Right: Exploring the Dynamics of Transformation (pp. 35–54, 197–212). New York: Berghahn Books. Kapferer, B. (2007). Anthropology. The Paradox of the Secular. Social Anthropology, 9(3), 341–344. Koslofsky, C. (2011). Evening’s Empire: A History of the Night in Early Modern Europe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kristeva, J. (2005 [1982]). Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. New York: Columbia University Press. Laing, R. D. (1972). Knots. Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin Books. Levi, S. (2016). Ha-te’atron ha-yisraeli: zemanim, merhavim, ‘alilot [The Israeli Theatre: Times, Spaces, Plots]. Tel Aviv: Riesling. Lévi-Strauss, C. (1966). The Savage Mind. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Londin, H. (Ed.). (2008). Yetsira yisraelit, sifrut, shira, omanut uesthetika bi-k’tevav shel ha-rav Avraham Yitzhak Hacohen Kook [Jewish Creative Art: Literature, Poetry, Art, and Aesthetics in the Writings of Rabbi Abraham Isaac Hacohen Kook]. Jerusalem: Old City Press. Lovejoy, A. O. (1964 [1933]). The Great Chain of Being: A Study of History of an Idea: The William James Lectures Delivered at Harvard. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Meyerhold, V. (1979). Zur geschichte und technik des theatres. In V. Meyerhold (Ed.), Schriften (Vol. 1). Berlin: Henschel. Moskovitz-Weiss, E. (2015). Regashot [Emotions]. Tel Aviv: Yedioth Books. Mukaˇrovský, J. (1978 [1934]). Art as a Semiotic Fact. In J. Burbank & P. Steiner (Trans. and Eds.), Structure, Sign, and Function: Selected Essays by Jan Mukarovsky (pp. 89–128). New Haven: Yale University Press. Nietzsche. F. (2001 [1882]). The Gay Science (J. Nauckhoff, Trans.). In B. Williams (Ed.), Cambridge Texts in the History of Philosophy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Pavis, P. (1998). Dictionary of the Theatre: Terms, Concepts, and Analysis. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Polaniy, M. (1966). The Tacit Dimension. New York: Doubleday. Rappaport, R. A. (1979). Ecology, Meaning, and Religion. Berkeley: North Atlantic Books.

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Rappaport, R. A. (1999). The numinous, the holy, and the divine. In Ritual and Religion in the Making of Humanity (pp. 371–404). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Rayner, A. (2006). Ghosts: Death’s Double and the Phenomena of Theatre. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Rayner, A. (2002). Rude mechanicals and the specters of Marx. Theatre Journal, 54, 535–554. Reinach, S. (1903). L’Art et la magie. L’Anthropologie, 14, 257–266. Ridout, N. (2009). Theatre and Ethics. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Rood, W. (2000). Theatre and Religion. Berkeley, CA: Pacific School of Religion. Rousseau, J.-J. (2003). Letter à d’Alembert. Paris: Edition Flammarion. Sachs, A. (1989). ‘Al ha-te’atron [On Theatre]. Tel Aviv: Ministry of Defense. Savran, D. (2001). Choices made and unmade. Theater, 31(2), 89–95. Schechner, R. (2002). Performance Studies: An Introduction. New York: Routledge. Schmid, H. (2008). A historical outlook of theatrical ostension and its links with other terms of the semiotics of drama and theatre. Semiotica, 168(1–4), 67–91. Schwartz, M. (1966). Safa, mitus, omanut: ‘iyyunim ba-mahshava ha-yehudit ba’et ha-hadasha [Language, Myth, Art: Studies in Modern Jewish Thought]. Jerusalem: Schocken. Shklovsky, V. (1965). Art as technique. In Russian Formalist Criticism: Four Essays (L. T. Lemon & M. J. Reis, Trans.). Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Smith, Q. (1991). Wilshire’s theory of the authentic self. Human Studies, 14, 339–357. Smith, Z. J. (1982). The bare facts of ritual. In Imagining Religion: From Babylon to Jonestown (pp. 53–65, 143–145). Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Sofer, A. (2003). The Stage Life of Props. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. States, B. O. (1987). Great Reckonings in Little Rooms: On the Phenomenology of Theatre. London: University of California Press. Steiner, G. (1989). Real Presences. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Trilling, L. (1972). Sincerity and Authenticity. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. Wilshire, S. (1982). Role Playing and Identity: The Limits of Theatre as Metaphor. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Zepke, S. (2005). Art as Abstract Machine: Ontology and Aesthetics in Deleuze and Guattari. New York: Routledge.

CHAPTER 4

Epilogue: Prostration

“All the World’s a Stage,” proclaimed the title of the event that everyone had been waiting for: the evening celebration of the return to the renovated theatre. The place exuded a wondrous grandeur, its every space redone. The arch formed by the Greek-temple-style columns, now gleaming-white, remained intact in its façade, decorating the very heart of Tel Aviv. The event was broadcast on state television. A veteran actor moderated the evening. Every guest belonged to the highest of high society, the boulevards of Israeli culture—esteemed women and men flush with artistic achievements. Seated among others in the first row of the large box, the President of the State and the Minister of Culture awaited their turn amid the series of speakers, congratulations, and artistic interludes. The broadcast, timed to coincide with Israel’s Independence Day, switched back and forth and back again from the festive stage to journalistic interviews with other veteran actors, eager to sear itself into viewers’ memory in a way that would make the national, the historical, and the archaic inseparable. At the end of the event, the profusion of texts from all directions converged into a single message: sanctity. “They’ve put up a magnificent edifice for us … the dedicatory reception.… Here we dedicate a small sanctuary,” the emcee enthused. As the sight of the red ribbon flickered across the screen as it was cut, a blessing reserved for Jewish observances rang out: “Who has given us life, sustained us, and allowed us to reach this time.” Like archival

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ghosts, the pioneers of the Hebrew theatre rose to recite their pledge of allegiance once more: “We will treat our work not as a craft or a trade but as an exalted calling and a sacred mission.” Then they refined their praise of the founders’ generation to its crux: “They saw the theatre as a temple.” It was the highest compliment the artists could think of, one with which the audience agreed. The poem chosen for the festive occasion, of all possibilities, was a piyyut, a liturgical poem titled Adon ha-Selihot, which glorifies God and reflects on His awesomeness. This piyyut is sung in an Israeli play that has been presented more than two thousand times and has not been taken down to this day.1 To honor the poem, the actresses and actors—the performers—became Hasidic Jewish characters who wore traditional head coverings that reinforced the impression of righteousness. Finally, before the event concluded and the crowd scattered, an actress quoted with immense dramaticality Laurence Olivier’s guide to taking a bow: The play’s over and now comes the bow. Let your head drop. Wait a moment, spread your hands, step forward, and place a hand over your heart. It’s the last bow. At this moment, the crowd should rise to its feet. However vested with lyrical poetry it may be, this kind of prostration, the familiar and banal type, is not the object of the remarks to come. The theatre is the venue of a prostration of a different kind. Its spectaculum has cosmological cultural significance.

Against Hypermedia Theatre-goers spend lots of other spectacle-time between their visits to the theatre, even if they have tickets for the morrow’s show. Illuminated quadrilateral screens abound in our environs; they are intrinsic to our pseudopersonal routine. Cultural orientation in daily life is a two-way process, as Postman (1992) would claim: to and from information that emanates from the screens of computers, tablets, television sets, movie theatres, advertisements, political and artistic forums, and more. Many media of diverse kinds have the theatre’s proscenium configuration to mediate cultural performances (Blau 1990). So if the sociologism of the spectacular as emanating, for example, from approaches such as those of Debord (1977), Baudrillard (1994), and Auslander (1999), lacks hyperbole, there is reason to note the nocturnal dream as a meaningful pause in this reality. As the subjectimposed suspension of depths and in its appearance as an amorphous and unpredictable visuality, the dream is not part of this colonization of reality. Before they drowse off and awaken to a new day, theatre-goers are

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part of the generality of the masses, a majority whose identity is that of screen-subjects.2 Their social identity involves their first and last gaze at a screen—of the cell phone or of some other mobile device—a gaze that disconnects and reconnects incessantly. The audience’s spectacul-ar consumption of personal mobile devices—its effort to make the most of them to the last moment, until the curtain in the large theatrical box rises— belongs to the domain of the banal script of the convergence. Less banal is the theatre’s announcement that orders this collective to turn off the devices (not only to silence them), screens and all, in order to attain a total blackout. In comparison with the spectacul-ar tussling that occurs at other collective events, where spectators expect permission of some kind to divide their attention or to enjoy what I call “little triumphs of peeping,” the theatre plainly applies counter-tyranny. Given the reality of life in a society of the spectacle (à la Debord), the courting that the theatrical spectacle entails is especially demanding, validating Phelan’s insight that “Performance’s independence from mass reproduction, technologically, economically, and linguistically, is its greatest strength” (1993, p. 146). The ontology of the live event, which obviates all possibilities of documentation or technical reproduction, makes participation in the theatrical event into an epitomic sign, almost a violation of the spectators’ quotidian routine. See, “The show begins at 8:00 p.m. and ends at 10:00 p.m.” Until then and afterward, several measures pertaining to other mundane obligations have to be planned out. In comparison with virtual media, which due to their immediate accessibility eliminate costs in time, place, and money, the theatrical spectacle may be experienced as “heavy.” Its respect for the live presence may grace this presence with the word honor, with all the virtual gravitas that traditional societies typically attach to this lexeme. This is so not only in comparison with media consumed at home but also relative to cinema. On the long and halting path from the entrance square to the theatrical spectacle, the theatre demands that those arriving slow their place and adopt mannerisms typical of lobby or ritual encounters. Farther on, too, as the spectators know, the spectacle will demand active obeisance in the form of gestures of approval, applause, and cheering that befit a ritual spectacle (Revermann 2008). If we add political, judicial, or academic live events to the equation, we again find stringency in the theatrical spectacle. Like those events, the theatre offers an oral text that speakers project from a stage. It does so, however, at the price of total self-restraint on the spectators’ part. Spectators at the theatre are allowed to emit only laughter, provided it’s collective. Just as the

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rustling of a candy wrapper during the show is considered impolite, so do the spectators know what muteness signifies, what it tastes like. Nothing compares with it. Yet one can go farther than this to describe the dominion of the theatrical spectacle over the movement of those passing through its gates, if one may again comment about catatonic terms of consumption. In the “shallowization of value” of the theatrical spectacle, as has snared me at this very moment, one should also include the separation of stage from audience. Since the theatrical spectacle shares this property with technological spectacles, it is as “entitled” to criticism as they are (Weber 2004; Debord 1977). In this matter, the discomfort relates mainly to the illusion that the live spectacle implies, the temptation that it carries, and its unrealized social expectation. I wish to say that even though the dynamic spectacle in the small box is the reason for the institutionalization of the rituality and the practices that accompany it, such as those of a church or a synagogue, ultimately it offers no foundation for the construction of a community (Auslander 1999). In their exiting, as in their entering, individuals are expected to defer in splendid isolation. Spectators should be seen as but an aesthetic community, a community structured by disconnection, “a monument to its absence” (Ranciére 2009, p. 58). Were this not enough to make us wonder about the rationality of theatregoers’ choice of the theatre, theoreticians raise arguments that eliminate all doubt. According to Johnson (2009), for example, When one watches a live performance, one is necessarily reminded of the transient, mortal, and finite qualities of our human existences, because one is in the presence of living human beings. This is something a recorded performance can at best approximate and at worst obfuscate. (p. 96)

“A recording of a performance,” Johnson adds, “can give the illusion of immortality, perfection, and exaggerated importance” (ibid.). In a similar vein and on the basis of his deep philosophical analysis of the gaze in Theatre and Performance in Digital Culture, Causey concludes, “Theatre is the sacrifice and appropriation of the self in its own negativity […] and it is a sacrifice of the self that negates and makes the nothingness apparent” (2006, p. 189). Whether these claims about the disconcerting deviation of the theatrical spectacle from the celebration of existential escapism are valid or not, the potency of its characteristics as a current archaic institution suffices to create much dissonance in a society of the spectacle. Nevertheless,

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the survival of the traditional theatrical spectacle in the presence of avantgarde and Postmodern genres is impressive.3 It’s a fact that, in contrast to the dictates of today’s consumption culture, the theatrical spectacle that unfolds separately in the small box is repeatedly chosen as a medium worthy of pilgrimage. If so, this singular spectacle should be seen as a cultural configuration that re-establishes the presence of choice, with its enigmatic qualities, among aesthetic possibilities in the field of art, and of its enigmatic nature. How can one explain the pilgrimage-like magic of the theatrical spectacle? I would answer by invoking the concept of “intellectual provocation,” an expression that is worthy insofar as the insights accreted in this essay are valid. What I mean is the attitude that “elevates” the theatre over other spectacles in our world on the basis of several structural characteristics that I have noted, while, however, stressing an ethical problematique that has always subjected the theatre to acrid criticism (Trilling 1972; Rousseau 2003). Crary (1999) considers the theatre a paradigmatic example of a broad ambit of cultural practices, all of which designed to sustain and preserve the modern fable of vision as true and objective—the idea that seeing something “as it is” is possible. According to Crary’s reading, the theatre presents a model with which one may understand these practices as a way of organizing the relationship between one who sees and the object seen. In this model, theatricality and the theatre itself need to be repressed in order to safeguard the illusion of what is seen as evidence, as truth, and as fact, of the apparent autonomy of distance and separateness to the spectator, and of the visual aspects of the world viewed as properties of this world itself. So the insight that the theatre is an institutionalized practice of “the authenticity of the illusion” (Carlson 1990, p. 82) is irrefutable. Theoreticians abet the theatre’s dual cultural image by splitting into two camps on the question of this theatrical phenomenology. As I have shown, however, authenticity becomes central in theory insofar as the spectacle ceases to be considered a “flat” visual stimulus and serves as a reference to what’s happening behind its scenes, calling for deeper burrowing through its constituent materials, actions, and thoughts. It is a stratagem in which one can no longer uncouple the theatrical spectacle from art nor endorse a scholarly discourse that, in the service of an insight about spectacul-ar media and theatrical ethics, tends to sacrifice both artists and art. In an era of profuse and unprecedented influence of spectacle on cultural perspectives, the question of the nature of the spectacle as a product and a process is important. In terms of the processive requisites, this work demonstrates

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that one cannot reduce art to “stratagem” and that “authenticity” is not synonymous with the “success” of the illusion vis-à-vis its consumers. An interpretive deconstruction of the spectacle reveals that artists are enslaved not to the spectacle as such but, as stated, to the authenticity of the human connection. The spectacle is an iconic and echoic embodiment of this connection, the canvas on which the connection is painted. My findings lead to the conclusion that truth fills the visible facet of the theatre to its brim. Following this path and alongside the “repressed falsity” paradigm, Alain Badiou’s (2005) model posits a different construct. Badiou explains: Theater, as an artistic procedure, embodies a unique theatrical-idea and theatre-thought, which can appear only through performance and acts as “an illumination of history and life,” an eventual site of truth. The ideas created in the theatre are singular theatre-ideas, and they cannot be produced in any other place or by any other means. […] The ideas arises in and by performance, through the act of theatrical representation. The idea is irreducibly theatrical and does not preexist before its arrival “on stage.” (p. 72)4

Ridout’s (2009) hypothesis about theatre-goers’ unflinching and unquenchable thirst for the truth may help to turn the repressed falsity paradigm on its head. “Perhaps it is the uncertainty about truth and untruth,” Ridout writes, “which is foregrounded in the experience of theatre, that makes it an appealing place to come in search of ethical questions” (pp. 15–16). By implication, even though the theatre is a place of pretense—a very strange place to search for truth—people are motivated for this very reason when they visit the theatre. This essay, for its part, shows that there is no mistaking the dignity attached to the event and the seriousness of the acting, traits that say something about the theatre’s relationship with fiction. Fiction is the raw material for truth work. It is essential and foundational for the theatrical sentence. A possible inverse of this paradigm relates to the connection between the theatre and the social context that is external to it. If the prestige—some would say the “authenticity”—of the truth is on the upswing today, I would trace this mainly to the lack of truth as a social meta-message—a state of affairs associated with the ills of Postmodernism and the saturation of spectacle, due to which “What we feel in reality is the evaporation of authority” (Blau 1990, p. 6, author emphasis). Blau’s social pessimism, drawing on Baudrillard (1983) and wrestling with the question of the audience’s needs

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(in the broad sense of the word), is phrased as follows. Whatever the (social) process is (socialization or desocialization), its odd anonymous needs gather around the luminous spot of the video tube, the hegemony of the mass media and information systems, which act in mutually opposing directions: outwardly producing more of the social but inwardly neutralizing whatever it is that makes the social cohere. The erosion of the social through the media into the mass leaves us with an empty signifier, a term that serves as a “universal alibi for every discourse” but “no longer analyses anything, no longer designates anything. Not only is it superfluous and useless—where it appears it conceals that it is only abstraction and residue, or even simply an effect of the social, a simulation and an illusion. Or even worse.” (p. 66)

The theatre is considered a unique institution, the sort with a potential embodied in its liveness that may reestablish people’s contact with experience and thereby heal psychological and sociopolitical wounds (Ridout 2009). This ethical remedy to the ills of our media-saturated world is anchored in the Postmodern thesis. Lehmann (2006) urges us to rethink the theatre’s role in terms of a “politics of perception” or an “aesthetic of responsibility (or response-ability)” (pp. 185–186). In this recommended thinking, both sides—artists and audience—are encouraged to understand how the images that seize the focal point of their attention are produced. This approach to socio-conscious repair is also reflected in the utopist performative thesis of Fischer-Lichte (2008) and Dolan (2008), the fulfillment of which, or the creation of a transformative “feedback loop” (FischerLichte 2008, p. 51) between actors and audience as a community of artists, may assure the attainment of a similar outcome. The theoreticians’ theoretical attribution of the utopia to a theatrical event, in which the deep structure of separate sphere is violated, corresponds to the hope kindled by Grotowski’s ritualistic performances to revive the utopia of those elementary experiences […] in whose ecstatic elation a community, as it were, dreamed a dream about its own essence, its place in total reality […] where Beauty was not different from Truth, emotions from intellect, spirit from body, joy from suffering; where man felt an affinity with the Totality of Being. (Burzynsky ´ and Osinski ´ 1979, p. 59)

These approaches stand apart from the theory of the spectaculum due to their emphasis on what I call the “Dionysian principle”: Ab initio, the social

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repair that they foresee hinges on toppling the barrier between stage and audience in order to make sure that singularities of the collective ritual will find expression amid the absence of magic, the lack of community, the individuals’ distance from themselves, and the longing for ontological totality. The purpose of such a theatre is to act upon the spectators’ world much as did the fifteenth-century festival theatre of Dionysus, which was designed to act upon the Athenians’ world—or, possibly much like older and lessfamiliar festivals, attributed by some to Moses and the Hebrews, and events outside the boundaries of time and space of the Sinaitic Revelation. So the phenomenon is described: […] Moses was commended for ordaining that all his People should upon certain solemn Days meet together in one Temple, and celebrate publick Festivals at states seasons. What may we suppose his View to have been in this Institution? Doubtless he hopes the People, by thus meeting frequently together at publick Feasts, might grow humane, and be the closer linked in Friendship one with another.5

Handelman’s (2004) characterization of the festival theatre approximates a modeling ritual. The contemporary theatre, in contrast, with its separation of stage and audience, verges on rituals of a different logic, that of presentation. Modeling rituals are, “in the main,” Handelman asserts, “societal icons,” emotionally stirring but typically of uncertain potential influence “in the lived-in world” (ibid., p. 3). Still, I should emphasize, the Dionysian principle is not totally absent in the theatre that’s familiar to us; its manifestation, as a union of audience and actors, resides in the momentary nature of the experience of fusion as Alexander (2006) describes it. This fusion exists at an abstract transcendental level, in a flow that gathers itself above and beyond the participants in the small and the large boxes, which are fixed in their separateness. The spectaculum theory, as I have described it, assumes this presence of the Dionysian principle. My description of the act of Creation that takes place behind the scenes fulfills Alexander’s (2006) recommendation in its own way: “From a moral point of view, it is often healthy to be skeptical of myths, to see through the efforts of actors to seamlessly re-fuse the elements of performance” (p. 78). The account in Part II demonstrates how performative elements help to attain the state of re-fusion and make the performance successful. As stated, however, the spectaculum theory does not consider the transformative state of fusion between spectators and actors the alpha and omega of

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the matter—far from it. In the scenario of the theatrical event, the theory identifies the pre-fusion and post-fusion stages as lacunae in the existing theoretization. In this essay, I focus on these complementary stages to describe the gaze upon all that is not plot (Part I) and the theorized loop between the theatre and the extra-theatrical reality (Part III). I find that the frame within which states of verging on and exiting fusion are discussed, in which the spectacle remains separate from the audience, may abet another explanation of the theatre pilgrimage in an era of multiple spectacles and information-mediating media. The theatre earns its singularity by sharing with most of these media the separation of spectacle and audience and by sharing drama (in the broad sense) but not by sharing its event-ness, the uniqueness that Alexander (2006, 2014) stresses. What attracts theatregoers to event-ness? What does it add that can draw strangers together into the role of an audience at the theatre? The structuralist explanation that I wish to propose extends the explanatory line of the quest for truth by relating to the mythical standing of the theatre and by treating the theatre as a symbolic province of cultural sovereignty. The theatre is a vestigial paradigmatic institution, enduring today only as a metaphorical abode of an archaic cultural sovereignty. The word “sovereignty,” as I’ve said, evokes memories of topographic myths that place a mountain, an emissary of the deity, and believers in the center. For those whose historical road does not stretch that far back, the memory conjures up the famous Dionysian festivals. In the history of European and non-European empires,6 a structural link among a public event, a court, and kingship has been detected. Elias (1983), for example, writing about the French Absolutist court, stresses the cruciality of etiquette, ceremony, and spectacle for “recognition of the king as a visible presence and ruler whose distance from those he governed was established by a series of architectural and cultural separations ” (p. 24, quoted in Benite et al. 2017, p. 19, author emphasis). Another example is Yates’ conclusion about the sixteenth-century Ballet Comique, in which the nexus of theatrical arts, myth, and sovereignty is drawn out: Court entertainment, says Yates, relied on “an academic team of poets, musicians, artists, and humanist experts in mythology [that] provided a field of action for the exercise of the dynamic power of poetry and music.” To reinforce the linkage, Yates notes: The political aim of harmonizing the religious problems of the age through the use of court amusements is related to the philosophical aim of revealing

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the universal harmony through the power of “ancient” poetry, music, and dancing. (1988, p. 270, quoted in Benite et al. 2017, p. 19)

The meaning of power in the sense of cultural sovereignty that I propose here, however, is subtle. It concerns the perpetual ethical valorization of the processes of theatrical production and reception.7 The textualityof-visitation pauses at analytical stops from which stage and audience sovereignties and additional attributions of absolute authority in the stage’s Creation process break through. These symbolic performative sovereignties are analyzed in view of the myth—a theological monarchy of the Sinai Revelation, as we imagine it stereotypically or archetypically—to the point that the abilities of the artistic “monarch” to transform the audience into subjects or agents of a sovereignty are invoked. Now I wish to dwell on the characteristics of the aesthetics of sovereignty and assess its meaning for cultural sociology. The discussion that follows accords with the claim that “The sovereign enactment of aesthetic experience breaks open the boundaries of its validity and asserts its validity for nonaesthetic discourses as well” (Menke 2013, p. 16).8

Wagner: Foreshadowing Theoretical Sovereignty To keep the promise that I have just made, I will maneuver the discussion through the operatic oeuvre of Richard Wagner and his Gesamtkunstwerk, his total work of art. I am convinced that principal motifs in Wagner’s aesthetics—myth, pilgrimage, the proscenium, boxiness, and so on—are a good fit for the Sinai paradigm and may be helpful in nailing down the paradigm’s loose ends. I begin by saying that had Wagner been aware of focal points of the spectaculum theory as I have defined them (preand post-fusion), he would almost certainly have found even more compelling his declared aesthetic antisemitism (Levin 1993), a perspective that comports amazingly well with Ernest Renan’s views on the desolating and imagination-vitiating effect of the Hebrews’ wandering in the desert (Renan 1885).9 Had Wagner done this, he might easily have generalized from opera, in which he engaged, to the theatre in order to adhere to the mechanistic image that he attributed to the Jew—who, he alleged, “merely listens to the barest surface of our art, but not to its life-bestowing inner organism” (quoted from Smith 2007, p. 18). Notably, however, this censure of the Jews (and the French) does not stand alone. It is part of Wagner’s ideological aesthetics, the stance of an artist who criticizes the ailments of

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his time. Wagner’s Gesamtkunstwerk inveighed against nineteenth-century industrial capitalism, mechanization, and mass production, which to his mind, “complete[d] humanity’s fall from Greece” (Smith 2007, p. 15). Wagner sought by means of the world of aesthetics to heal his German and non-German contemporaries. It was in the organic community and in the true presence of the here-and-now that he positioned his utopia. His romantic nostalgia for Greece sanctified the Dionysian principle. Wagner employed techniques that were considered revolutionary for his time. This I adduce from an overview of two of his enterprises, the Festspielhaus and Parsifal. “The importance of Festspielhaus,” contends Smith (2007), is about much more than simply the music-drama that were performed […]. It is about the design and function of the theatre itself, which demanded of its audience a radical reconception of performance, of spectatorship, and of relations between nature and machine. (ibid., p. 21, author emphasis)

There is, in my opinion, an additional—and complementary—way of relating to techniques that are used to take full control of the audience’s attention, subjugate it to the artist’s will, and create a collective reception that nullifies the spectators’ autonomy (Crary 1999): considering these techniques tools with which the cultural sovereignty of the spectacle is constructed. In Wagner’s works, theatrical techniques that this essay treats as fundamental are manifested in strong and at times exaggerated configurations. Nor is this any wonder: Ab initio and with prior intent, Wagner, inspired by the temple of the legendary Grail Knights, created a theologicalmythical allegory for the festival sites that he had shaped and for their spatial stance. It satisfied his need, as he admitted in one of his letters, to build a Castle of the Grail devoted to art, far removed from the common byways of human activity; for only there, in Monsalvat, can the longed-for deed be revealed to the people, to those who are initiated into its rites, not in those places where God may not show Himself before the idols of the day without His being blasphemed. (cited in Smith 2007, p. 40)

Wagner’s operatic events took place at locations far from the great city, which he considered rife with real and symbolic manifestations of industrialized culture and therefore spatially inimical. The geographic remoteness of Bayreuth nourished his idea of setting in motion a pilgrimage and

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enhancing that awareness that one could choose to participate there in a great drama of collective awakening. This is not the only element in the contextualization of Wagner’s artistic event that evokes an inevitable association with the Sinaitic Revelation. Additional to it is an all-encompassing landscape-set and the concealment of the orchestra from the audience’s line of vision in a mystic gulf under the stage. Although Wagner intended this romanticism to cleanse the event of markers of technology and establish an Edenic world, one may stretch the span of his historical reversion to the original sacred event and reflect on parallels, such as the isolation of the mountain in its desert setting, its integrality to nature (as a landscapeset), and its being an occasion of Revelation, of seeing mystical voices, a forerunner to the configuration of the mystic gulf. When I relate to the illusion that Wagner wished to create—the intent behind his emphatic separation of spectators and stage—I find an echo of his words in the Hebrews’ being positioned far from the location of the event at the mountain amid the occurrence of as a superhuman, miraculous spectacle. The primary illusion at Bayreuth is created by the fact that the spectators think that what is happening on the stage is far away, while they perceive it with all the clarity of actual proximity; this gives rise to a further illusion, namely that the people appearing on stage are of superhuman stature. […] As soon as the spectators are sitting in their seats, they find themselves in a virtual “theatron,” that is, a space designated solely for looking at what can be seen from its seats. Between the spectators and the scene to be observed nothing is clearly visible; there is only a “space,” kept indeterminate by architecture mediation, between the two prosceniums, presenting the distanced image in all the inaccessibility of a dream vision. (Wagner 1914, cited in Crary 1999, p. 252)

Wagner’s architectural creativity redoubled in its emphasis something that the theatric demarcation of audience-box and stage-box has made familiar to us. It did more than set in stone these two juxtaposed cavities, do away with the box seats that tradition reserved for the high and mighty, and mold the audience area into a unity by equipping it with rows of seats that gave all spectators equal sightlines. In its wake, the stage area was expanded to almost the size of the audience’s zone, the latter was darkened, and the massive stage was illuminated via techniques to which Wagner also devoted much attention. Wagner’s devices included two proscenia, one as part of the stage and the other set in front of the mystic gulf, almost certainly making it hard to imagine any kind of bridge between spectators and performers.

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Thus, the architecture of the Wagnerian event is significant for the structural analysis proposed in this essay. The Dionysian principle that it typifies is attained, as in a traditional theatre, through the abstract and transcendental union of parts that remain apart. Addressing this, Smith (2007) remarks: “The audience/spectacle opposition at Bayreuth was enforced only for the sake of its elimination” (p. 32). And what about sovereignty? Wagner’s work demonstrates paradigmatically the statement that “Aesthetics, literature, and especially the theatre are no less sciences of sovereignty than law, economics, and the life and mind sciences” (Benite et al. 2017, p. 5). Cultural sovereignty in the Wagnerian project is built atop two declared elements that converge at the visual (the non-vocal or non-narrative) level of the operatic event. They are: (a) relatively aggressive channeling of the audience’s attention10 toward (b) a reality that alludes to the sacred and the archaic. The symbolic spatial structure of contrast—the audience (the Volk in Wagner’s parlance) opposite a performance on stage—is amplified in order “to restore ancient mysteries to the modern world” (ibid., p. 31). Wagner’s feat brings the theatric nexus of structure and myth into sharper relief. The contribution of Wagner’s operatic enterprise to our discussion has to do with his use of technology to establish the presence of the spectacle and the connection between the theatre and the society of spectacle. Smith, whose discussion tracks Wagner’s immense influence—past and future— shows that the composer’s Gesamtkunstwerk did more than draw inspiration from the ancient theatre and sketch the structure of the spectacle in the Western theatre for posterity. It also inspired works of art in cyberspace. Namely, Wagner’s innovations embody something of the resurrection of the Greek amphitheatre. In Smith’s (2007) judgment, the Festspielhaus is “the first proscenium theatre since ancient Rome designated with the explicit purpose of giving all spectators a clear view of the stage” (p. 30); what is more, for the first time in theatre history, the darkening of the hall as set forth by Wagner became a standard from then on (ibid., p. 31).11 Nevertheless, it is known that Wagner, despite his criticism of technological mass industrialization, used technology extensively and even introduced technological innovations of his own to produce “phantasmoagoric” effects including, beyond opera and music, illusion and suggestion (Souriau 1893, pp. 176–177, cited in Crary 1999, p. 254). Wagner’s unique fulfillment of this paradoxical necessity elevated him to the status of a portent, a man ahead of his time; it even prefigured early twentieth-century debates about issues of attention and distraction (Wagner 1994).

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I find a bridge, one of several, between Wagner’s work and the society of the spectacle in a critique by Kittle, who saw in it the anticipation of electronic media, a performance that belongs to the category of media rather than art, because it is no more than a “machine capable of reproducing sensuous data as such” (Kittle 1993, p. 216). “The medium is the message,” the critique concludes (adopting Marshall McLuhan’s famous aphorism) (Smith 2007, p. 340). Smith, from whom I draw a great deal, also analyzes the Wagnerian inspirations of cyber-arts as “a Brechtian critique of the digital Gesamtkunstwerk” (p. 159). By so doing, Smith constructs a fantastic bridge between gazing at a digital stage and doing the same in the theatric small box, as demonstrated in several studies (e.g., Auslander 1999; Giannchi 2004; Laurel 1993), setting the theatre within the totality of manifestations of the spectacle society. What about the gaze that goes back to contemplating the theatre curtain after surfing the multiple screens that populate the networked cyberspace? That is, what standing does the curtain of the event command in virtual reality? Smith’s reply does not assign the theatre a new role in view of the challenge of consciousness. Instead, captive to the convention in the theatre literature, it returns to the “Dionysian principle” (and acknowledges the non-innovativeness of this move): Narratives of return to Mother Nature and community, the deep longing for belonging, the attempts to create an axis mundi of the virtual world—these are the compensatory reactions of the digital age, as indeed they were of the industrial. In this sense at least, the transition from factory floor to cyberspace is no revolution at all. (Smith 2007, p. 169)

Can this possibly exhaust the cultural challenge-compensation equation with the connection between theatre and cyberspace? Plainly I choose to follow Causey, who considers the ideology of the virtual uniquely associated with a downslide to inauthenticity, the embrace of nihilism, and homelessness, and who sees the theatrical event as a “singular event of thought,” a “truth-procedure, and a possible site of an event, which through a process of subjectification contributes to the appearance of a radically new, a truth, an exceptional break with the state of things as they are,” an event that “thereby might adequately respond to our history” (2006, p. 11). The theatre has a special status in contemporary society.

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Sacred: The Aesthetics of Sovereignty As stated, the goal of the theatre-minus-theatre description in this essay is the spectaculum, alternatively expressed as sketching the outlines of the theatre’s cosmo-logic. In the void of a somewhat Beckettian epistemology, I related to the drama in accordance with the insight that “Every truth begins in the place that the situation represents as desert or wasteland, a place devoid of what the situation recognizes of value and promise” (Hallward 2003, p. 120). Whenever I referenced drama, mainly through the medium of Ibsen’s The Master Builder, I did so in the service of a structure that negates it, making drama accept an uncommon role. I did not find it even in works that concern themselves with the trinity of Sovereignty, Theatre, and Shakespeare (see, e.g., Finlayson and Frazer 2011; Gil 2018). If the negation of the theatre’s soul—the drama—mimics, after the fact, a similar undeclared negation created by the proliferation, the truncation, and the infinite parallelism of information in the media of the spectacle, one should say about this negation that it also penetrates this desert of the consciousness to transform that desert into dialogue—offering an insight by dint of itself. The compensation for the absence of the dramatic element is a myth that fills with content the statement that the theatre embodies “an epistemology of extraordinary cultural authority” (Hart 2006, p. 36). The complementary side of this authority—sovereignty—is the unseen prostration symbolized by the uplifting of the audience’s eyes. Since the death of Philip Rieff in 2006, writings about his contribution to cultural sociology, one worthy of a prophet (Zondervan 2005), the singularities of which will be recognized insofar as this field of knowledge dares to reexamine its cosmological horizons, have been accumulating. This American sociologist’s glorification of the wisdom of second-world cultures, i.e., the early Judaic and Christian communities, returns to the Bible, Creation, the Hebrews’ redemptive trek in the desert, and the Ten Commandments. More so, his approach responds to the signaling, via the biblical drama and within and between its lines, from which he builds from the narrated motifs a scaffold for genuine charisma.12 On Rieff’s veneration of the Judaic and Christian cultures, one may say that for him, as for any critical sociologist, it is but one side of the coin. It’s not a coin that one may use for exchange. Instead, it’s a prophetic gift freighted with mordant words that penetrate until they come out at the other end—words that bemoan the voluntary exile in modern and Postmodern life and the still-growing distance between the social message of

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Revelation and its monotheistic missive. In the theoretical classification that he puts forward in his Sacred Order/Social Order (2006), Rieff demarcates the territories where true charisma is absent. They are all modern, enumerated among the third-world cultures that we inhabit13 —a category to which, in his opinion, nearly all theories in the social sciences, literature, and even works of art belong. Had the principle of cosmological abjection14 not established their boundaries, i.e., had these theories not excluded the transcendental to the point of conceptual impotence, they would not have been doomed to the fate that Rieff created for them, as deathworks , and to the epithet anti-cultures (Rieff 2006). The ontology of the sacred, a quintessential element in Eliade’s theory (Dadosky 2004) and one that Rieff lauds in his analyses,15 is steered into a somewhat structural configuration by his statement that the mission of a theory—any theory—is to array people along a vertical line of authority (2006). The line created by this “aesthetics of authority” rises from chaos of social consciousness and crests with the sacred order16 that, in Rieff’s opinion, obliges every structure of knowledge. This aesthetics is charisma (Rieff 2007a), a quality whose truthfulness is based on God, culture, authority, faith, guilt, remission, and sin that are fused into an undifferentiated moral community (Smelser, p. 222). At issue is a structure that reflects the absoluteness of the sacred, as Zondervan (2005) expounds: People can identify “upward” with the character-ideal (striving after goodness), leading to raising acts which Rieff calls “interdictory acts” [those that obey the sacred order]. People can also identify downward with the “primacy of possibility” [“anything goes” or “why not?”], leading to lowering acts which Rieff calls “transgressive acts” [those that are indifferent towards sacred order]. These identification processes are always in the vertical. […] A crisis of authority derives not least from some more or less intellectually elaborate failure to understand that authority, higher and lower, is immortal and unalterable in its form.17 Man may or may not understand how authority works; nevertheless, its influence he will never escape (pp. 122–124).18

This absoluteness of the sacred corresponds to the expression “Master of the Universe,” which attributes sovereignty to God.19 It is consistent with the artists’ perception of the actor, any actor, as “sacred,” “like a priest, like a Levite, like a prophet,” “a messenger,” “a deliverer of God’s word,” and their depiction of the show as a “sacred occasion” in which the spectator encounters his or her “eternal you.” An actress hinted as much:

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It’s a rendezvous [demonstrates by pressing her palms together]. It’s a height that you don’t attain in daily life. A height. The spectators, as it were, ascend to something that they usually don’t, and there they meet exactly what the actor has, and then … ahhhh … it’s the greatest experience in the theatre.

The term aesthetics of sovereignty, in my judgment, is well suited to the spectaculum in the sense that I attribute to it here: as a vertical theory of the theatre. “Where can we find myths, beliefs, and communities that would preserve our culture?” Langman asks. He answers: “Philip Rieff made us examine such questions; that was his mission” (2003, p. 293). The sacred element in works of art, Rieff assumes, should be decoded with the help of appropriate hermeneutical methods (Zondervan 2005, p. 33). It’s the aim of textuality-of-visitation to fulfill this mission. From here on, it will express my identification with those theatre-goers, those readers, who have already visited the theatrical provinces that I have visited in this essay. ∗ ∗ ∗ Shall we go to the theatre? A momentary craving for this current archaic institution may be stirred, for example, by an e-mail message from the theatre’s sales department to its subscribers. After pleading to be opened and read, the message asks you to direct your stiff fingers to your keyboard, where they can access a multicolored and really informative site peppered with images of rows of seats in the theatre hall. The gray seats have already been sold; the green ones still beckon. Where would you like to sit? The same split-second urge may also erupt from some “other” source, from an associative strand withdrawn from the batteries of sounds and screens that grab the eye. If it’s an associative tail, where is its head? It resonates in rapidly decrescendoing pulses of memory. Perhaps it springs from something you saw last night on a different screen—that of a television set—about artists’ struggle to get more public funding for the national theatre, about a new show, an actress, another political demonstration for whose activists the coveted venue is the open area of the entrance square, an architecturally stylized place decorated with gravitas-inducing symbolization. Still … it matters not when a screen-subject honors the association that steers her or him to this current archaic thing that we call the theatre, namely: the extent to which the subject strains to stop the artificial stream of consciousness that’s imposed from without. The subject is flooded. Within the system of digital associativity, one must admit that movie theatres also have flickers

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that come out of nowhere. Nor are they alone. The Internet, whether it dances across the computer screen or that of the mobile phone, definitely knows how to defuse unfashionable urges like a craving to go to the theatre. That elusive entity, although only one constituent of the media industry, contributes mightily by continually abducting the subject and transporting him or her to a frenetic, total virtual space (Virilio 1991), forcibly transforming the screen-subject into a vagrant with a lost gaze. In one possible scenario, we eventually purchase a pair of “green” seats at the theatre, the kind that the reality of the large box accommodates as a signified. The box has accommodated them in this manner for years but never by demonstrating the gap between green squares on a lit computer screen to red-silk upholstery that’s already a bit creased and shabby. Until they seat themselves, our screen-subject couple, now the owners of a string of numbers—date, time, entrance, row, seats, ticket price—imagine the act of pilgrimage, the tearing of selves away from the Internet screen at the end of their day’s labor. Given the endless and uncontrolled nature of surfing the screens, this may be an act of self-respect, a reclaiming of agency for the sake of participating in an event-like spectacle. Few if any theatre-goers are expected to explain to themselves the obligation to undertake an urban pilgrimage as a necessity imposed by the absence of full theatre shows on the Internet. They are either hopeless cyber-subjects or theatre-goers who understand nothing about art. The large majority may nod in agreement with Auslander’s (1999) confession20 : However one may assess the relative symbolic values of live events, it is important to observe that even within our hyper-mediatized culture, far more symbolic capital is attached to live events than to mediatized ones, at least for the moment. […] I would derive substantial symbolic capital from having seen the Beatles at the Cavern Club in Liverpool in 1960, for instance. (p. 59)

Auslander’s example stirs pilgrimage-jealousy, no less, among almost all screen-subjects. The example of the Beatles might give theoretical satisfaction here were it not for the inability to choose between the liveness of the cultural event and the reputation of the legendary band. I see two possibilities of relating to Auslander’s claim about symbolic capital. One is to consider it an expression of the naïve hope, like the naiveté of media-industry theoreticians, that the non-Internet world, the real world, is much more interesting, important, and rich than anything on the computer screen (Stoll 1996), and that the subject must be the “BodySubject,” a realized

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creature, that inhabits natural and cultural worlds and is composed of more than technological information (Becker 2000, p. 361). The second is to ask, seriously, what lies behind the term “symbolic capital” when it is applied to the theatrical spectacle at large. The latter option is the more fruitful. It accords with another example that Auslander offers, Laurie Anderson’s digital performance The Nerve Bible, which he finds “barely live at all” but “still commands greater symbolic capital than fully mediatized forms” (ibid.). This example, in which the stage transports conventions and practices from the media industry to the live event, sharpens the question of the theatre’s status as a source of symbolic capital. Participation in a hybrid event such as this, it seems to me, is a fact that carries a hint: There’s more to it than the symbolic capital that the event awards those who partake of it. Our pair of screen-subjects would have chosen to participate in a digital performance at the theatre not only because the dearth of such performances in a current archaic institution such as the theatre piques their curiosity but also because at the theatre, qua theatre, totality is defined by one spectacle, a virtual spectacle. Let’s go back to Rieff. Pilgrimage to the theatre is a transition from fiction to Faith, from a (modern) third world of “primacies of possibility,” which the hyper-mediatized culture greatly radicalizes to the point of the interactivity of a Bakhtinian carnival (Bakhtin 1984),21 to the (Judeo-Christian) second world, which the stage represents by fusing the symbolic, transcendental, and moral aspects of the culture (Zondervan 2005). The a-dramatic gaze that I propose separates the theatrical spectacle from all other frenetic associative fictions. It ushers the screen-subject into a second-world culture in which “look” and “are” are inseparable (Rieff 2006, p. 22). “The ultimate” emerges not from the imagination (fiction) but from “the other side” (ibid.). Thus, Rieff describes the artistic experience that does not stray errantly down the path of art: There in that inside of where the self and others are in their relation to commanding truth, the mind’s eye gives intellect its true feeling of having entered at last into the right kind of world. […] That sudden epiphany of truth in some telling detail is the truest reading and truly life-enhancing experience. (ibid., author emphasis)

Although classical drama is of value for the structuring of vertical authority, Rieff treats it as something to lament. The centrality of drama established the theatre as a home for Western classicism (mainly Greek and European plays) and cemented its status as “high culture.” Classical plays

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are those in which contents and characters are eternalized in ghosting processes (Carlson 2001) and re-performances, and it is they, mainly, that give theatre artists their reputations (Gamliel 2016). Even though the theatrical stage is more fragmentary today than ever, reflecting a brawl among Rieff’s three symbolic worlds—the pagan (first ), the monotheistic (second), and the secular, i.e., the modern/Postmodern (third)—it retains a modicum of that “classical halo” that screen-subjects may translate into symbolic capital. Antigone, Amadeus, King Lear, The Doll House, Hamlet , and The Master Builder, which are taken as theatrical Beatles, are mainly, overtly or implicitly, preservers of the transcendental motif known as the deus ex machina (Rokem 2003). Rieff (1979) detects in Shakespeare’s Hamlet a vertical line of authority by reformulating the famous question into an older version, “Whether sacred order is or not” (p. 224). It is highly likely that Rieff would have detected this line in Ibsen’s The Master Builder, as I have in this exposition. Solness’ ecclesiastical world with its dictates, its crime-and-punishment, and the character’s climb to the tower at the church dome symbolizes a very clear verticality of authority. By its merit, the play serves the translation that this essay performs. It is undoubtedly in reference to such plays that Rieff finds scenes of genuine instruction and authority dwindling in number (Turner 2011). Rieff’s lamentation of the pernicious impact of the hypermedia culture is shared by the veteran artists. For them, the profusion of cheap-entertainment plays and television reality shows are parts of a value-nihilism that backs them into a corner and defeats their “educational” mission (Gamliel 2016). They would easily empathize with the pessimistic comparison of the “hyperconnectivity culture” with the “old library culture” that Dreyfus (2001) uses to comment on the loss of the authority of the dramatic (pp. 9–11). In my opinion, however, this pessimism is itself a support that reinforces the singularity of the theatre; it enjoins theatre-goers who favor drama against releasing the theatre from the grip of the classical spirits (Carlson 2001). More than ever, the theatre is a haunted house of nostalgia. Our two screen-subjects take their seats in the large box. Their gaze onto the live spectacle, intermittently liberated from fiction, is a fact that the theorization of the hypermedia culture may attribute to a dual identity of the self—one part navigating real reality and another oriented in virtual reality.22 In other words, the dichotomy of realities still exists. The screen-subjects’ preference for perusing the printed brochure that comes with the play also says something about the preservation of old patterns of

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consuming information. Furthermore, this perusal, which instills the presence of the production in their consciousness and creates a background for the play and the artists, exposes in one stroke the visible and invisible dichotomies—theatre and non-theatre, stage and audience, stage and backstage—without which the theatre would not be what it is. The theatre is a place of explicit dichotomies. Accordingly, it stands to reason that insofar as the virtual takes over to the point of imposing a hyper-reality, insofar as Baudrillard’s pessimism about the evolution of the showcase performance of reality into a perfect illusion comes true (1994), the more one would expect the theatre to shed something of its damnation as a paradigm of suppressed falsification (Crary 1999) and acquire the status of a cultural institution that rephrases the certainty of the separation of similitude from reality, of I from not-I, to the screen-subject’s benefit. “Behind the scenes” is the ultimate missing link in cyberspace and other media technologies. Self-interested and maneuvering, the “production” that takes place in these media, although one can hardly call it such, is the dark and satanic side of the rite of the spectacle. After all, to whom do the footsteps lead if not to experts of giant communication corporations, powerful capitalists, and other agents of the global economy? How different is the theatre? Insofar as it plays the role of the repressed, “behind the scenes” is plainly the hidden face of art. Theatre-goers cannot suspect otherwise. The intimate acquaintance with this place that is attained in this study reveals an ethical possibility that no version of Freudian repression can imagine.23 As they spread out in their theatre seats, our screen-subjects may suspect that they have made a constructivist regression from fiction, the term that Rieff uses to characterize the third world, to Faith, an inhabitant of the second world. Even if they make no such conjecture, they are aware of the craving for art and knowingly give of themselves in an egoregressive step that is reserved for religion and art (Beit-Hallahmi 1986; Cole 1975), allowing themselves to be captured by the magic. Thus, the credibility of art, in the sense described, contributes its share to the vertical structure of authority, in which the following appear in declining order: Backstage Stage Audience

This is a structure that competes with the horizontal one—the absence of authority—that typifies spectacles and simulacra away from the theatre.

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As I have shown, character, partner, and audience form a triangle of sovereignty relations in the backstage zone. The tightening, or the behavioral marking, that the commitment to an I–Thou relationship creates in this ethical triangle makes it, in my judgment, a good fit for the term sovereignty loop. The ethnographically described reality is different from the theorization that attributes leadership, charisma (of actors), or submission (of an audience) to the Creation process that takes place on stage (Cole 1975; Alter 1990; Hastrup 2004). The ethic and the geometric precision, on which this essay dwelled at length, have the same effect. And more—I occasionally found my actor-subjects and the director seated around a table, trying with all their might to plot the routes by which truth would progress from the script to the spectators’ hearts. The tone of this decoding work did not change much when they stood and even when they halted the action as the mysteries of the mises-en-scène demanded. From a Rieffian perspective, the rehearsals were acts of translation. The object of the artists’ translation was a moral meta-theory that transcends all plays and determines how cultural and theatrical conventions should be applied. Thus, a cultural-cosmological stage world is constructed. “Unending, world creation comprises the task of culture: namely, to transliterate otherwise invisible sacred orders into their visible modalities—social orders,” Rieff (1966) contends (p. 212). Reading Zondervan’s explanation of Rieff, one can only conclude that the behind the scenes work is a fitting microcosm of the translation: The act of translating presupposes a whole translation technique, which includes a theory of signs and signification (semiology) and a theory of the interpretation of those signs (hermeneutics). The idea of finding the “closest corresponding signs” refers to the very complex character of the transformation of the language of the sacred order into that of the social order. This requires a lot of attention, concentration, and dedication. The example of the study of the Torah […] comes to mind, and likewise the, sometimes ardent, debates in the Mishna among rabbis about the meaning and implications of the passage of the Torah, sometimes even about a single letter or punctuation mark. (2005, p. 127)

One of the stages in translation, undertaken in this work, is a major expansion of Stanislavski’s method and its inclusion in a moral I–Thou meta-theory. What one may learn from the following argument, among other things, is that the method earns Rieff’s (2008) indirect but absolute

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approbation as something seen as a metaphor for an external set of ethical codes: In the absence of a supreme interdictory figure, another Moses, with his disciples, a defense by Jews of culture against our democratic orgias may be reordered, their preposterous position-taking constrained, from the outside in—by a revival of severe codes of low. It is barely possible that interdictory forms, without which relations between reverence and justice, culture and social system, cannot be maintained, may be prepared from the outside in, as if by the Stanislavski method. Imagine reinstalled, as among true primitives, a severe code of role limit that would carry with it severe penalties for deviation. Such a code would have to be strictly retributive. To prepare for this return, and renewal, of the interdicts, we scholars in the human studies might begin by examining the culturally subversive idea of rehabilitation. The result might be to replace rehabilitation by repayment in kind for transgressions committed; there is an original idea. (p. 134)

Interdicts are crucial for the formation of culture. For Rieff, the Ten Commandments are their “prototypes” (Zondervan 2005, p. 135). More than the story line of a given play, the screen-subjects’ experience of fusion depends on the perfection of the live pictorial performance based on a ramified and latent set of interdicts that obeys the principle of theatrical abjection. One may understand the processes of constructing the sacred as efforts to broaden the incidence of the ensemble (via units of the I–Thou nexus). Giesen would almost certain argue that the audience, submitting to the performance, by necessity relates to the sacred in the collective sense as an authentic representation of its inner world and identifies it unconsciously as an expression of its collective conscience. This is a sociological way of speaking about touching Revelation (Giesen 2006, p. 336). In accordance with the contents of the construction of the sacred, the thing that batters the audience’s conscience, in my opinion, is a spectacul-ar demonstration of a positive culture, the absence of which is more keenly sensed by screensubjects than by anyone else. A positive culture, in Rieff’s opinion, provides a “therapy of commitment.” It promises individual redemption via participation in the community and subjugation of the self to common goals. Rieff’s examples of positive cultures are political and revolutionary groups. I see no difficulty in adding the artistic ensemble to that roster and singling it out—following Alexander and Giesen—as a troubling reminder to

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the spectator, that denizen of the third world. This is because today, more than ever, such spectators belong to negative cultures in cyberspace and elsewhere, which content themselves with drowning them in information but do nothing to steer them toward ethical change. Surely these cultures do not offer them a thought that would redeem them from the meaninglessness and malaise that typify reality (Manning 2003). The screensubjects bestir themselves to exit the large box under the influence of the spectacul-ar habitus that’s unique to the theatre. One cannot confuse the hypnotic space at this institution with enchanting spectacles consumed in the hypermedia culture; accordingly, it’s easy to find credible the convention by which all that remains after the theatrical experience is to tumble from the pinnacle to the banal. The pinnacle, however, as an exemplary configuration of order—of the stage fusion of human and non-human performances, as I have described—does much more than this; it generates a theatre–reality loop that makes one reflect on the boundaries of the event and their potential unraveling—the re-sanctification of reality. This fundament is not included in the theatric paradigm that Giesen proposes for sociological theory. Thus, he describes the chaotic aspiration for order within the frame of reciprocity relations between two realities: There is no communitas that can resist being translated into structure, and there is no social order and social structure that can dispense with any spaces for communitas, there is no collective identity that can endure without being represented in stories, rituals, myths, and symbols, and there is no performance or story that does not presuppose any collective identity of the audience. A similar claim could be made with respect to the […] contrast between the changing social conventions and the universal truth [which] are at the core of modern social theory. (ibid., p. 360)

Notwithstanding the validity of this argument, my analysis proposes to augment the discussion of social order with something more basic: a transcendental order.24 The spectaculum serves both as an object of yearning and as the end-product of the experience of the fusion of audience and performance. It is a synonym for a moral spectacle anchored in the mythical, and for a supra-moral system of knowledge that may be translated into the extra-theatrical worlds. In these senses, one cannot, it seems to me, leave the theatrical performance outside the category of moral drama that Giesen (2006) coined, if not more.

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Ultimately, the theory of the spectaculum proposes to test the idea of inauthenticity in drama. The theatre accommodates the dialectic of “the dramatic truth.” That is, drama, an essential in the stage world, springs from the creative enterprise of ethics while concealing it. Drama is the dimension of multiplicity, of the transient, the varying, the fashionable, and the discursive, all of which serve the field of power in art. It takes possession of the theatre’s reputation in its entirety. Such is the situation in the conventional sequence of beginning–middle–end and also in plot-structured avant-gardism of any kind and in the Greek or biblical classics, self-justifying or not. It is the overt face of the theatre. It masks the sacred. Paradoxically, as stated, this is true even for stories in the Torah, an axiomatically sacred text that, in the eyes of religious authorities, see as “stories of the present world”—mere “dressing,” a body that masks the soul, which is “the essence of everything, the real Torah” (Zohar 3:152a).25 In the exit to the referents of this metaphor, it seems that the dialectic meaning of drama applies to most narrative configurations—myth, theory, anecdote, information, knowledge, and so on—wherever we find them. All of them represent a first-order order only. They take the corporeal and the social to their limits and thereby conceal the transcendental. Is Auslander’s “electronic ontology” (1999, p. 43) a distant forecast that will eventually come to pass, or something based on error? Namely, is the live event doomed to disappear? Today we witness a spectacul-ar pendulum movement in the provinces of our third world, between the a-moral and a-mythical (as it is viewed) profane zone of the hypermedia culture (Postman 1992; Shenk 1997; Dreyfus 2001) and the domain of the sacred, none other than the theatrical ritual. The former is horizontal, hypertextual, and representative of multiplicity and the unprecedented emancipation of dramatic configurations. The latter—a vertical, textual realm—may be seen as the gatekeeper of traditional drama. In their swaying between the dramatic horizontal and the vertical, the screen-subjects pendulate between value nihilism (con-fusion), in which dramas are “all there is,” and the mystery of the ritual drama with its freight of value orderliness (re-fusion). This motion reflects a cultural discontent, of which the theatre serves as an important vector by giving the nomads of the culture a structure for nostalgia for giving value. This cultural malaise is privileged with a unique discussion in Alexander’s sacred sociology, a feat of theoretical imagination that resists the charm of the unmitigated pessimism of modern theory and detects symbolic meaning, morality, and affective “ritual-like” practices in contemporary society. Sacred structures, Alexander predicts, will “weave

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in and out of mundane life” (Lynch and Shelton 2013, p. 262). I share Alexander’s conviction that drama is here to stay, with one difference: The anthropological theory of the spectaculum, which coheres perfectly with the theory of the theatre, as demonstrated in this essay, calls for study of its ideas from within the bastion of drama. ∗ ∗ ∗ One evening, Israeli television presented viewers with an exceptional ritual gesture by an elderly actress who participated in the dedication of the renovated theatre building. Once again, the cosmological was grounded. The actress kneeled, trembling in a manner that befits a sacred event, and kissed the surface of the stage with her lips. Her face glowed as do the faces of pilgrims to the Holy Land, who crouch exactly this way the moment they breach the boundary of the profane and enter the sacred zone. Her face was turned toward the small box, as though for a moment she was one of the theatre-goers. Thus, she reversed the conventional direction of the prostration—and awarded the gesture to the audience.

Notes 1. Bustan Sephardi, written by Yitzhak Navon, fifth President of the State of Israel. 2. Inspired by Rosen-Beer’s (2018) concept of the cyber-subject, this expression lends itself with greater precision to my claim about spectacul-ar influences of various sources. 3. It is also impressive in view of tempting ideas to breach the box structure of the theatrical event, as in, for example, Schechner (2003), Fischer-Lichte (2008), and Dolan (2001), and attempts to enhance the relevance of the theatre by creating local “alternative-culture projects and community-based performance and media collaborations ” (Birringer 1998, p. 19, author emphasis). 4. Described by Causey (2006, p. 185). 5. Found in Yates (1969), Appendix C, extracts from L. B. Alberti’s Ten Books on Architecture (De Re Aedificatoria) on the Ancient Theatre, Amphitheatre, and Circus. 6. Consider as an example the case of China (Chia-Chien 1922). 7. The meaning of sovereignty may be incorporated into the end of the following conceptual model: Sovereignty is “a vector of power of force that is articulated, staged, negotiated, imagined, projected, refused, and even assaulted in and for its assertion as a unified, actually or figuratively embodied, absolute

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8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22.

23.

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force that guarantees submission, carves space and time, organizes a society or community and its relations to other societies or communities, binds, commands, and demands. […] Sovereignty [is] integrating a spectrum of meanings and operations that ranges from the control of a geographic space or population to the representation and imposition of majesty or popular force; to the means and performance of political legitimacy; to the attempt to control natural, human, and material forces; to the citation of theologicalpolitical and aesthetic themes ” (Benite et al. 2017, p. 6, author emphasis). This argument is presented as part of the discussion of Derrida’s approach to the sovereignty of art. As described in Chapter 1. Wagner’s unmitigated control of the spectators’ gaze has been widely criticized, as has that of Nietzsche and Souriau; see Crary (1999). See also Note 10, p. 192, in the last-mentioned source. Rieff (2007a) caustically criticized Weber’s attitude toward charisma; this is not the place to elaborate. See Smelser’s (2007, p. 222) typology of the three worlds. Based on Kafka’s “spiritual mutilation” in Rieff’s discussion (2007b, pp. 98–99). Chiefly of Kafka’s (1948) work. See graphic sketch in Zondervan (2005, p. 126). Quoting Rieff. The added explanations in brackets are mine, borrowed from the author. A familiar expression due to its appearance in the Jewish prayer book. Expressed at the end of a systematic analysis that bridges between performance and mediated culture. Cf. Rosen-Beer (2018, p. 171). In several researchers’ opinion, this dualism of identity persisted in a period of historical evolution that predated the collapse of the consciousness of realness into the virtual (Rosen-Beer 2018). Not even the modern “psychological man,” who, according to Rieff, seeks nothing but to feel good by “healing” from the adverse, repressive consequences of the culture (Langman, p. 280). To some extent, the authentic self may describe this possibility, the fruit of Wilshire’s imagination, the meaning of whose authenticity is being-for-others as well as for the divine Other (God) (1982). The theatre, à la Wilshire, presents us with a critical problem of authenticity—the question of the self’s giving authority to authoritative sources such as God or gods. The response to authority, Wilshire says, is a mimetic attachment, an imitation of authority, be it parental, monarchic, or divine. When the self internalizes this authority, the vertical structure presumably collapses in favor of authentic relations. See Smith’s (1991) analysis. On the possible paradox that the two orders create in Rieff’s discussion, see Zondervan (2005, p. 132).

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25. An entire paragraph is devoted to this in the previous chapter.

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Index

A Abossolo Mbo, E., 9 Abrahams, R., 173 Abstract machine, 88, 90, 96, 98, 100, 104, 107, 150, 170, 182–184 Adams, D., 189 Adorno, T., 194 Advertisement, 99, 208 Aesthetic judgment, 28, 29 Aesthetic pleasure, 21, 99 Aesthetics, 6, 13, 21–23, 28, 42, 45, 103, 164, 166, 168, 172, 177, 180, 181, 188–190, 199, 200, 211, 216, 217, 219, 222 Aesthetics of authority, 222 Aesthetics of responsibility, 213 Aesthetics of sovereignty, 216, 221, 223 Agency, 140, 183, 224 Agent, 14, 88, 123, 216, 227 Agnon, S.Y., 12, 196 Alexander, C.J., 172 Alexander, J.C., 7, 62, 66, 112, 123, 151, 214, 215, 229

Alienation, 30, 32, 35, 38, 67, 68 All the world’s a stage, 4, 148, 192, 207 Aloni, N., 28, 52 Alter, J., 3, 21, 63, 84, 93, 228 Amankulor, J.N., 83, 132, 151 Amir, Y., 17 Analogy, 19, 33, 41, 53, 86, 87, 89, 193 Andrews, E., 31 Anthropological research, 7, 10, 11 Anthropology, 5–10, 32, 65, 66, 80, 84, 86, 87, 105, 119, 152, 186 Anti-culture, 222 Apostolos-Cappadona, D., 189 Approach, 5, 7, 8, 11, 14, 16, 17, 26, 29, 30, 39, 41, 47, 55–57, 68, 77, 79, 82, 86, 87, 89–91, 106, 108, 113, 114, 130, 148, 151, 154, 163, 176, 177, 183, 185, 186, 188, 190–192, 194, 199–201, 208, 213, 221, 233 Archaic, 1, 3, 33, 39–41, 58, 62, 185, 187, 198, 207, 210, 215, 219

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 T. Gamliel, The Theatrical Spectaculum, Palgrave Studies in Literary Anthropology, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-28128-1

257

258

INDEX

Archaism, 19 Architecture, 1, 3, 4, 60, 161, 218, 219 Aristotle, Ark, Holy, 148, 176, 189 Arnold, M., 28, 193 Art, 2, 9, 19, 20, 25, 28, 29, 52–54, 62, 64, 67, 84, 86, 87, 89, 90, 93, 94, 96–98, 105, 106, 113, 118, 140, 145, 147, 152, 167, 169, 173, 174, 178, 179, 181, 184, 187, 192, 194, 195, 197–201, 211, 212, 216, 217, 219, 220, 222–225, 227, 231, 233 Artaud, A., 51, 143, 197 Artists, 9–11, 14, 21, 23, 25, 30, 35, 51, 54, 65, 66, 79, 81, 84, 86–88, 90, 92–94, 96, 99, 101, 102, 105, 106, 113, 126, 140, 142, 149, 151, 161, 167, 169, 170, 173, 180, 181, 184, 187–191, 193, 198, 208, 211–213, 215–217, 222, 223, 226–228 Athens, 214 Audience-stage, 68 Auditorium, 17–19, 24, 38, 40, 42, 47, 50, 145 Augustine, 188 Auslander, P., 152, 208, 210, 220, 224, 225, 231 Authentic/authenticity, 59, 62, 93, 97, 98, 109, 112, 125, 128, 130, 134, 136–138, 143, 147, 149, 166, 191, 192, 211, 212, 229, 233 Authority, 11, 31, 34, 37, 45, 60, 102, 194, 216, 221, 222, 225–227, 233 Authority, aesthetic, 34, 222 Authority, theatrical, 31, 37, 39, 226 Autonomy of art, 13 Autopoiesis/autopoietic, 37, 38, 110, 173 Autotelianity, 106

Autotelic, 78 Avant-garde, 3, 20, 38, 46, 89, 90, 94, 211 Avnon, D.A., 64

B Backstage, 6, 9, 11, 29, 36, 64, 78, 80–83, 88, 95, 97, 100, 115, 116, 133, 134, 139, 140, 143, 146, 151, 162, 164, 183, 192, 193, 227, 228 Badiou, A., 212 Bakhtin, M., 225 Balcony, The (Genet), 190 Ballet comique, 215 Banai, Y., 50 Baroque, 46, 89, 193 Barthes, M., 3 Barthes, R., 26, 27, 29, 32, 51, 64, 105, 106, 152 Bataille, G., 125 Baudrillard, J., 189, 208, 212, 227 Bayreuth, 217–219 Beatles, The, 224 Becker, B., 225 Beckett, S., 13, 196 Beeman, W., 5 Being and becoming, 90 Beit-Hallahmi, B., 62, 227 Belief, 24, 36, 37, 45, 64, 136, 148, 149, 172, 184, 187, 223 Believer, 16, 17, 43, 56, 60, 215 Benite, B.Z., 215, 216, 219, 233 Benjamin, W., 163, 186, 200 Ben-Meir, A., 176, 189 Benson, P., 87 Ben-Zvi, L., 65 Bible/biblical, 14, 43, 53–56, 58, 99, 101, 126, 153, 162, 221, 231 Biemann, A.D., 56 Birringer, J., 3, 232

INDEX

Black box, 19 Blacking-out, 42 Blacking-out of audience, 40 Blau, H., 3, 25, 37, 142, 145, 208, 212 Bleeker, M., 29, 197 Boman, T., 170 Box, large, 20, 24, 34, 36, 37, 40, 46–49, 51, 58, 78, 93, 107, 134, 140, 145, 150, 169, 173, 180, 185, 186, 207, 214, 224, 226, 230 Box, miniature, 53 Box, small, 19–21, 26, 29, 36, 37, 40, 46, 47, 49, 50, 52, 58, 63, 93, 107, 120, 149, 166, 167, 170, 173, 174, 176, 181, 185, 186, 189, 190, 195, 196, 210, 211, 214, 220, 232 Box, theatrical, 209 Boxiness, 49, 216 Boxy, 53, 59, 78, 190 Brechtian, 30, 36, 220 Brechtian theatre, 27 Brockett, O.G., 20, 38 Brook, P., 6, 52, 63, 79, 143, 146, 149, 150, 197 Brunt, L., 43, 46, 49 Buber, M., 17, 33, 55, 56, 59, 60, 64, 68, 86, 107–111, 117–121, 124, 125, 129, 130, 138, 152, 171, 176, 180–182, 187, 190–192, 194, 200 Buci-Glucksmann, C., 64 Burbank, J., 23, 24, 28 Burk, K.A., 29 Burns, E., 2, 29, 94, 101, 129, 141, 191, 200 Burzynsky, ´ T., 213

259

C Cambridge School of Anthropology (CSA), 5 Carlson, M., 4, 7, 11, 12, 22, 51, 52, 63, 66, 86, 168, 177, 200, 211, 226 Causey, M., 147, 148, 210, 220, 232 Cavell, S., 87 Character, 21, 22, 27, 28, 34–38, 40, 44, 53, 59, 96, 98–100, 104, 106–108, 111–123, 125–130, 133, 136, 140, 143, 145, 149, 153, 165, 181–183, 186, 187, 190, 193, 200, 226, 228 Charisma, 39, 222, 228, 233 Charismatic theory, 13 Chekhov, Anton, 192 Cherry Orchard, The, 192 Chia-Chien, J.A.G., 232 Christian/Christianity, 16, 17, 43, 44, 50, 53–55, 59, 63, 68, 96, 101, 132, 175, 185, 188, 200, 221 Church, 34, 48, 55, 67, 119, 210, 226 Church, Renaissance, 4 Cinema, 3, 26, 40, 65, 68, 177, 209 Civilizing process, 88, 89, 193 Clarke, S., 66 Clerics, 16 Cohen, Z., 152, 153 Cole, D., 38, 59, 81, 82, 88, 149, 227, 228 Collaboration, 6, 9 Colwell, C., 110 Communist, 152 Conceptualized (world), 7, 108, 167 Confrontational model, 38, 144 Conscience, collective, 149, 229 Consciousness, 2, 8, 9, 14, 17, 19, 23–25, 28, 29, 37, 40–42, 44, 46, 61–65, 67, 83, 98, 99, 119, 139, 142, 143, 150, 183, 190, 195, 196, 198, 220–223, 227, 233

260

INDEX

Consumerism, 2 Contemplation, 10, 29, 32, 48, 52, 109, 112, 175, 176, 181, 192, 197–199 Continuous variation, 85, 86, 91 Corbin, J., 80 Cornford, F.M., 5 Cosmo-logic, 1–5, 8, 10, 11, 17, 20, 46, 56, 61, 172, 173, 185, 196, 197, 221 Cosmology, 2, 4, 5, 8, 43, 195 Cosmology, Judeo-Christian, 12, 185 Cosmology, theatrical, 2, 8 Cosmos, 2, 4, 41, 46, 56, 80, 104, 132, 173, 174, 184 Craigo-Snell, S., 101 Crary, J., 39, 211, 217–219, 227, 233 Creation, The, 13, 31, 43, 106, 140, 162, 183, 213, 228 Crux scenica, 89 Csikszentmihalyi, M., 150 Cull, L., 84, 85, 90–93, 104, 110, 112 Cultural pragmatics, 8 Culture, digital, 225 Culture, high, 3, 6, 28, 52, 152, 173, 225 Culture, hypermedia, 226, 230, 231 Culture, popular, 3 Culture, positive, 229 Culture/drama complex, 7, 86 Current-archaic, 223, 225 Curtain(s), 2, 13, 20, 29, 38, 46–48, 50, 51, 62, 79, 137, 142, 145, 161, 162, 164, 166, 172, 189, 190, 195, 209, 220 Cyberspace, 219, 220, 227, 230

D Dadosky, J.D., 222 Daniel (Buber), 118, 200 Darkening, 24, 48, 219

Darkness, 19, 20, 40–50, 58–60, 119, 162, 171 Day, 35, 40–44, 53, 56, 57, 88, 91, 93, 98, 104, 132–134, 137, 139, 141, 142, 153, 162, 176, 208, 217, 224 Death, 43, 44, 56, 59, 67, 88, 123, 133, 139, 141, 144, 148, 152, 153, 179, 221 Deathworks, 222 Debord, G., 208–210 Defilement, 163, 165 Deity, 16, 34, 44, 45, 49, 54, 60, 90, 113, 175, 187, 189, 215 Deleuze, G., 84–86, 89–93, 98, 104, 110, 112, 117, 163, 183, 184, 187 Derrida, J., 85, 92, 233 Desert, 33, 53, 54, 216, 218, 221 Deus ex machina, 58, 67, 90, 226 Diderot, D., 85, 125, 191 Digital, 91, 220, 223, 225 Dionysian principle, 213, 214, 217, 219, 220 Dolan, J., 151, 213, 232 Doll House, The, 226 D’Onofrio, A., 7 Douglas, M., 163, 167 Drama, 2, 4, 5, 7, 12, 13, 18, 22, 26, 29–31, 36, 51–54, 63–65, 67, 68, 104, 106, 109, 130, 133, 141, 148, 152, 163, 167, 171, 172, 185, 187, 191, 215, 218, 221, 225, 226, 231, 232 Drama, absolute, 30, 31 Drama, classical, 30, 225 Drama, crisis of, 30, 31 Drama, Greek, 17, 61 Drama, moral, 122, 230 Drama, social, 7, 65, 165 Dream, 30, 50–53, 55, 105, 113, 129, 163, 196, 208, 213, 218

INDEX

Dreyfus, H.L., 226, 231 Dundes, A., 43, 47 Dunne, J., 147 Durkheim, E., 83, 181, 193 E Eco, U., 178 Ekirch, A.R., 43, 44 Eldad, Y., 60 Eliade, M., 61, 200, 222 Elias, N., 52, 89, 215 Emotion(s), 40, 52, 60, 77, 84, 89, 101, 110, 112, 115, 128, 133, 136, 141, 144, 153, 181, 182, 198, 213 Empathy, 5, 11, 99, 108, 110, 129, 149 Encounter, 10, 14, 15, 32, 34, 54, 56, 59, 60, 81–83, 93, 94, 108, 111, 112, 124, 128, 140, 143, 147, 150, 151, 162, 174, 186, 187, 191, 192, 209, 222 Ensemble, 18, 62, 83, 84, 130, 132, 133, 138, 153, 162, 229 Epictetus, 142 Epistemology, 5, 8, 11, 39, 80, 221 Eros, 124–126 Erotic, 54, 123–126 Estrangement, 21, 27, 78, 182 Ethical triangle, 104, 106, 228 Ethics/ethical, 8, 10, 12, 14, 84, 86, 87, 92, 96, 104–108, 110, 112, 113, 121, 130, 134, 136, 141, 149–151, 161, 166, 177, 179, 181, 184, 187, 190, 191, 193, 201, 211–213, 216, 227, 229–231 Ethnographic knowledge, 65 Event-that-models, 53 Exagoge, 55 Exalted, 61, 62, 138, 141, 147, 150, 163, 167, 189, 208

261

Existential/existentialism, 22, 38, 66, 109, 144, 162, 210 Existentialia, 130, 192 F Faith, 17, 34, 54, 66, 96, 116, 117, 172, 184, 198, 222, 225, 227 Fear of greatness, 141, 147 Fear of punishment, 141 Fear of sin, 141, 145, 147 Festival(s), 44, 214, 215, 217 Fieldwork, 6, 7 Finlayson, A., 221 Fischer-Lichte, E., 4, 38, 40, 88–90, 168, 184–186, 193, 199, 200, 213, 232 Flow, 3, 4, 9, 17, 50, 59, 62, 101, 126, 129, 135–137, 145, 150, 172, 174, 180, 182, 183, 185, 187, 214 Flynn, A., 6, 9 Fortier, M., 3, 144 Frame/framing, 15, 38, 42, 61, 62, 104, 138, 150, 163, 170, 173, 177, 181, 198, 215, 230 Frankfort, H., 61, 62 Frazer, E., 221 Free, K.B., 55 Freedman, B., 25, 32, 197 Freud, Sigmund, 105 Friedman, M., 56, 107, 119, 124, 125, 129, 130, 171 Friesen, L., 2, 13, 196 Fusion, 26, 83, 90, 114, 123, 125, 130, 137, 149–151, 169, 188, 193, 214, 215, 229, 230 G Game/gaming, 21, 24, 82, 93–96, 99, 101, 102, 132, 136, 138–140, 147, 149, 151, 162, 165

262

INDEX

Gamliel, T., 9, 88, 95, 126–128, 133, 149, 173, 193, 226 Gatt, C., 6, 7, 9, 80 Gaze, 12, 19, 21, 22, 25, 28–32, 34, 36, 37, 47, 48, 52, 53, 60, 64, 77–79, 81, 107, 115, 135, 142, 145, 148, 150, 163, 165, 169, 171, 173, 176, 177, 180, 185–187, 189, 192, 195, 196, 198, 209, 210, 215, 220, 224–226 Gaze, drama-free, 30 Gaze, theatrical, 20, 21, 28–31, 48, 51, 52, 62, 63, 77, 78, 177, 179, 185, 225 Genet, J., 190, 191 Geometry/geometrical, 4, 88, 104, 106, 174, 179 Geroulanos, S., 215, 216, 219, 233 Gerould, D., 154 Ghosting, 226 Giacchè, P., 6 Giannchi, G., 220 Giesen, B., 61, 62, 122, 149, 173, 229, 230 Gil, D.J., 221 Give-and-take, 130 Globe Theatre, 4, 104 God, 16, 33–35, 41–45, 54–62, 68, 81, 82, 85, 92, 99, 101, 112–114, 116–119, 121, 123, 126, 127, 132, 142, 148, 153, 164, 173, 175, 176, 185, 187–189, 193, 197, 200, 201, 208, 217, 222, 233 Godliness, 43, 56 Goffman, E., 29, 32, 49, 77, 80, 192 Gombrich, E.H., 94 Govrin, M., 113, 148, 176 Greatness, fear of, 141, 147 Greek(s), 1, 24, 33, 40, 54, 55, 58, 63, 66, 170, 173, 174, 219, 225, 231 Grehan, H., 108

Grotesque, 166 Grotowsky, J., 84 Guattari, F., 84, 85, 89, 90, 112, 163, 183, 184, 187

H Hallward, P., 221 Halm, B.B., 30 Hamlet, 38, 39, 120, 165, 226 Handelman, D., 47–49, 53, 172, 214 Handke, P., 41, 144, 153, 167, 172 Harris, M., 55, 63, 113 Harrison, J., 5 Hart, F.E., 39, 55, 221 Hart, T., 132, 142 Hasidic/hasidism, 33, 49, 64, 208 Hasidic literature, 14 Hastrup, K.H., 5, 8, 9, 65, 86, 116, 117, 139, 140, 142, 151, 193, 228 Haunted stage, 187 Hayles, K., 150 Hebrew, 16, 33, 53, 67, 68, 153, 176, 201, 214, 216, 218, 221 Hebrews, ancient, 16, 32, 54 Hedgehogs’ dilemma, 140 Heiner, Z., 40 Helbo, A., 1, 19, 38, 65, 144 Hellenism/hellenistic, 1, 16, 17, 52, 55, 60 Heroic, 10, 36, 163 Heschel, A.J., 176 Hilde (character), 21 Hizkiya, K., 40 Holiness/holy, 16, 54, 57, 66, 88, 164 Hollan, D., 87 Homo performant, 14 Honesty, artistic, 96 Hornby, R., 7, 36, 86, 106, 165, 179 Hypermedia, 208 Hypnotic hall, 193

INDEX

I Iacovleff, A., 232 Ibsen, H., 18, 21, 34, 37, 67, 91, 96, 99, 103, 116, 123, 134, 185, 196, 221, 226 Icon(s), 214 Iconic Sentence, The, 174 Iconization, 21 Iconoclasts, 175 Idel, M., 190 Identity, iconic, 168 Idols, 217 I-It, 107, 108, 110 Illud tempus , 81, 82 Illusion, 30, 63, 67, 94, 105, 132, 171, 176, 210–213, 218, 219, 227 In-depth anthropology, 8, 10, 14, 15, 32, 47, 79, 80, 175 Innis, R.E., 48, 194 Interdict, 229 Interdisciplinary, 6–9 Internet, 224 Italianiate style, 38 I–Thou, 56, 107, 108, 110, 112, 115, 117, 120–122, 124, 126, 128–131, 134, 137–140, 143, 147, 149, 150, 153, 166, 180–182, 187, 191–193, 228, 229 J Jackson, M., 66 James, W., 50 Jerr, N., 215, 216, 219, 233 Jesus, 16, 53, 58, 153 Jew, 17, 54, 55, 65, 112, 216, 229 Jewishness, 16 Johansen, J.D., 64 Johnson, T.E., 5, 19, 55, 81, 82, 96, 188, 200, 210 Judaism, 16, 17, 33, 54, 60, 96, 112, 175, 189, 199, 201

263

Judeo-Christian, 12, 17, 34, 35, 113, 185, 225 Jung, C.G., 21, 29, 41, 42, 112 Jürs-Munby, K., 31 K Kabbala, 112 Kafka, F., 233 Kaia, 94, 114, 165, 166, 170, 182, 183 Kant, I., 2 Kapferer, B., 183, 186 Kennedy, B., 110, 150 Kilian, C., 9, 10 King, 33, 45, 199, 215 Kingdom, 1, 32, 38, 43, 45, 67, 99, 140, 188 King Lear, 120, 226 Kittle, F., 220 Kohansky, M., 65 Kook, Rabbi Abraham Isaac Hacohen, 188, 199, 201 Koslofsky, C., 42–46, 68, 164 Kristeva, J., 163, 166, 167 L Laidlaw, J., 87 Laing, R.D., 109, 165, 200 Lambek, M., 87 Langer, S., 3 Langman, L., 223, 233 Law of Analogy, 89, 90 Lehmann, H.T., 30, 31, 67, 68, 213 Lev-Aladgem, S., 2 Levi, S., 14, 33, 34, 53, 54, 68, 188, 201 Levin, D.J., 153, 216 Levinas, E., 86, 108, 141, 191, 201 Lévi-Strauss, C., 12, 14, 56, 58, 104, 177, 178 Levy, S., 201 Lifting (of eyes), 34

264

INDEX

Light(s), 21, 25, 39–50, 52, 62, 63, 77–79, 92, 94, 97, 112, 119, 128, 137, 161, 162, 167–171, 178, 183, 196, 198 Liminal/liminality, 14, 37, 46, 78, 86, 119, 140, 143, 151, 162, 164, 165, 167, 194 Lindquist, G., 48, 201 Liszka, J.J., 14 Literature, 2, 5, 14, 19, 28–30, 45, 51, 53, 86, 94, 108, 112, 164, 196, 199, 219, 220, 222 Live event, 209, 224, 225, 231 Logic, 3, 6, 10, 33, 34, 41, 48, 80, 90, 129, 135, 144, 172, 214 Londin, H., 199 Loop, 7, 170, 215, 230 Loop of theatre and reality, 195 Lorenz, K., 83 Lotman, J., 68 Lovejoy, A.O., 188 Lugt, W.V., 55 Lust, 25, 165 Lutz, C., 80 Lynch, G., 232

M Macbeth, 44 Make-believe, 94 Manning, P., 230 Marcus, G.E., 6 Master Builder, The, 18, 21, 22, 34, 36, 37, 39, 53, 66, 67, 91, 98, 102, 103, 113, 117, 120, 136, 148, 165, 168, 185, 221, 226 Mathematical/mathematics, 90, 100, 106, 129, 137, 139 Mattingly, C., 84, 87, 151 McAuley, G., 83, 151 McConachile, B., 39 Medea, 120

Media, 3, 13, 20, 99, 115, 147, 169, 175, 177, 208, 209, 211, 213, 215, 220, 221, 224, 225, 227 Megged, M., 67, 68 Menke, C., 216 Merleau-Ponty, M., 109 The Method, 10, 112, 152, 228 Method (Stanislavski), 89, 112, 228, 229 Meyerhold, V., 38, 88, 90, 186 Mielziner, J., 38 Mimesis, 5, 62, 85, 92, 105, 106, 109, 112, 147, 184 Mishna, 14, 228 Modeling rituals, 214 Monotheism, 16, 17, 34, 36, 55, 172, 190 Moody, R., 50 Moore, T., 125 Morality, 87, 231 Moses, 53, 55–60, 68, 81, 162, 176, 185, 214, 229 Moskovitz-Weiss, E., 168 Mountain, 35, 56–59, 175, 187, 215, 218 Mozart, 117, 129 Mulvey, L., 68 Murray, G., 5 Museum, 52, 53, 177, 178 Museum, aesthetics of, 22 Myerhoff, B., 139 Mystic gulf, 218 Myth, 3, 5, 12–17, 26, 32–34, 37, 55, 56, 58–62, 66, 68, 79, 87, 175, 214–216, 219, 221, 223, 230, 231 Myth, Jewish, 55 Myth, polytheistic, 17, 56 Mythology, 16, 53, 54, 58, 215

INDEX

N Natasha Rostova, 20, 22, 23, 27, 28, 32, 78 Neo-Aristotle, 86 New testament, 16, 53–55 New theatre, 67 Nietzsche, F., 25, 79, 90, 148, 198, 233 Night, 41–49, 162, 223 Nocturalization, 42 Nocturnal, 46, 47, 49, 51, 190, 208 Noh Theatre, 167 O Offending the Audience, 144, 172 Old Testament, 54, 81, 175 Olympus, 58 O’Neill, K.L., 87, 196 One, The, 142 Ontological/ontology, 85, 125, 162, 175, 181, 184, 209, 214, 222 Opera, 22, 42, 44, 164, 216, 219 Opsis , 66 Ordinary ethics, 87 Oriental, 36 Orthodoxy, 17 Osinski, ´ Z., 213 Ostentation, 177–179, 182 Otto, R., 49, 62, 187 P Pagan/paganism, 17, 175, 226 Parish, S.M., 87 Parody, 165–168 Participant-observation, 15 Partner/partnership, 2, 9, 82, 104, 107, 108, 111, 122, 129–140, 142, 143, 145, 147, 149, 151, 181, 184, 191, 228 Pavis, P., 6, 24, 152, 166, 168 Perfectness, specification of, 167, 168

265

Performance, 6, 7, 10, 11, 14, 16, 18, 21, 22, 24–26, 28, 29, 34–37, 40, 42, 44–46, 58–60, 62, 65, 66, 68, 77–81, 85, 88, 90, 91, 93, 98, 104, 121, 123, 126, 133, 138, 139, 143–147, 149, 151, 152, 164, 166, 168, 172, 173, 178, 190, 191, 193, 194, 197, 209, 210, 212–214, 217, 219, 220, 225, 227, 229, 230, 232, 233 Performance paradigm, 31 Performative ethnography, 7 Performativity, 5, 7, 45, 49, 65, 84, 88, 95, 101, 134, 137, 163, 165, 177, 213, 214, 216 Perry, M., 94 Phenomenological/phenomenology, 30, 47, 51, 66, 86, 87, 192, 211 Phenomenology of night, 47 Photography, 3, 105, 152 Pilgrimage, 11, 211, 215–217, 224, 225 Pirandello, Luigi, 36 Plato, 126, 197, 201 Plato’s allegory of the cave, 19 Platonic, 105, 108, 191 Play-acting, 37, 92, 93, 98, 101 Play, well-made, 99 Play-within-play, 36 Plays, Biblical, 54 Plot, 13, 18, 21–23, 26, 27, 32, 34, 36, 41, 42, 49–52, 61, 63, 68, 69, 77, 81, 90, 94, 95, 106, 108, 121, 123, 150, 196, 215, 228 Plot, dramatic, 12, 20, 25, 85 Poetics (Aristotle), 26, 66 Polaniy, M., 173 Political, 11, 27, 29, 45, 55, 141, 186, 194, 208, 209, 215, 223, 229, 233 Polytheism, 17, 56 Postman, N., 208, 231

266

INDEX

Post-structuralism, 14 Power, 9, 12, 25, 32, 35, 39, 44, 45, 59, 60, 66, 80, 83, 91, 104, 110, 133, 136, 140, 143, 198, 215, 216, 231, 232 Power, dramatic, 21, 172 Power, performative, 144 Precision, 92, 96–103, 113, 129, 164, 178, 181, 228, 232 Precision, work of, 98 Pre-ontologism, 108 Primeval, 41 Production, 12, 21, 24, 31, 34, 38, 59, 66, 68, 81, 86, 130, 166, 167, 171, 180, 183, 186, 192, 195, 196, 216, 217, 227 Props, 90, 168, 169, 172, 174, 181, 182 Proscenium, 208, 216, 219 Prostration, 61, 77, 78, 208, 221, 232 Providence, divine, 12 Psychoanalysis/psychoanalytic, 25, 32 Punishment, fear of, 141 Purdie, S., 141

R Ragnar, 66, 67, 116, 117, 124, 165, 166 Rancière, J., 210 Rapp, U., 109, 110 Rappaport, J., 8, 10 Rappaport, R.A., 62, 173, 187, 191, 197 Rayner, A., 63, 80, 153, 162, 174–176 Read, A., 8, 108 Reception, 5, 8, 9, 12, 13, 15, 17, 23, 24, 30, 31, 38, 40, 48, 59, 63, 93, 111, 143, 173, 175, 176, 180, 184, 186, 192, 199, 200, 207, 216, 217 Redemption, 53, 54, 149, 168, 229

Reflection, 6, 15, 36, 88, 89, 106, 126, 194, 197 Reflexive/reflexivity, 14, 87, 92, 99, 138, 139 Reformation, 44 Re-fusion, 123, 172, 214, 231 Rehearsal(s), 10, 13, 14, 18, 37, 65, 66, 78, 81–84, 90, 91, 93–99, 101–103, 105, 113, 116, 119, 122, 123, 128, 131–133, 135, 137–139, 143, 145, 146, 151, 162, 163, 165, 166, 170, 171, 179, 181, 182, 228 Religion/religious, 2, 3, 5, 16, 54, 152, 163, 198, 227 Religious experience, 22, 50, 63, 87 Renaissance, 36, 38, 104 Renan, E., 32, 33, 216 Repetition, 12, 61, 90, 91, 93 Research field, 15, 65 Revelation, 12, 13, 16, 17, 33, 50, 53, 54, 58, 62, 85, 125, 175, 176, 189, 190, 197, 199, 200, 214, 216, 218, 222, 229 Revermann, M., 151, 209 Ridout, N., 96, 108, 112, 191, 201, 212, 213 Rieff, P., 221–223, 225–229, 233 Rinon, Y., 105 Rite of passage, 116 Ritual, 2, 5–7, 12, 17, 26, 36, 48, 54, 61, 62, 65, 66, 77, 78, 81, 83, 88, 92, 101, 103, 112, 123, 134, 141, 147, 152, 161, 162, 173, 176–180, 183, 189, 190, 197, 198, 201, 209, 214, 230–232 Ritual of presentation, 214 Ritual, theatrical, 53, 61, 231 Ritual, thick, 48, 194 Ritual, thin, 48, 194 Robbins, J., 87 Rokem, F., 67, 226

INDEX

Rood, W., 13, 68, 196 Rosen-Beer, I., 232, 233 Rotenberg, M., 153 Rounding, 82, 149 Rousseau, J-J., 51, 194, 211 Royal Shakespeare Company, 9, 65 Rozik, E., 3, 16, 17, 38, 53, 61, 63 Rudy, J., 139 S Sachs, A., 167 Sacred, 61, 66, 81, 95, 102, 119, 140, 147, 163, 166, 178, 193, 199, 208, 218, 219, 222, 223, 226, 228, 229, 231, 232 Sacrifice(s), 34, 84, 114, 117, 147, 149, 163, 210, 211 Saldana, J., 65 Sanctified, 11, 16, 17, 57, 107, 177, 217 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 130, 192 Sass, L., 66 Savidge, D., 5, 19, 53–55, 81, 82, 96, 188 Savran, D., 167 Schechner, R., 6, 7, 21, 34, 35, 61, 65, 68, 84, 99, 151, 164, 232 Schiffman, G., 29 Schmid, H., 175, 178 Schopenhauer, A., 140 Schwartz, M., 173 Screen, 47, 162, 177, 208, 209, 220, 223, 224 Screen, cellular, 47 Secular/secularism, 2, 14, 54, 114, 141, 186, 198, 226 Seeing of voices, 18, 176 Segal, A., 1 Self, 47–49, 87, 100, 109, 110, 112, 121, 130, 132, 133, 139, 147, 149, 193, 200, 210, 225, 226, 229, 233

267

Selfness, 14, 48, 50, 109, 110, 121–123, 180 Semiology, 228 Semiosphere, 68 Semiotic theory, 93 Semiotics, 1, 178 Semiotics of syntax, 173, 174, 182, 183, 195 Semite(s), 32 Set, 11, 18, 20, 21, 23, 30, 31, 34, 52, 54–57, 59, 61, 64–67, 84, 87, 98, 103, 106, 110, 123, 137, 149, 151, 164, 169, 176, 177, 179, 180, 184, 194, 208, 218, 219, 223, 229 Set designer, 9, 19 Sevänen, E., 3 Sex, 125, 126, 130 Shadow, 41, 44, 46, 112, 119, 121 Shakespeare, 4, 44, 148, 192, 221, 226 Shavit, Y., 33 Sheldon, R., 232 Shenk, D., 231 Shevtsova, M., 28 Shklovsky, V., 179 Sholem Aleichem, 145, 153, 154 Signification, 61, 174, 179, 228 Signs, 2, 28, 40, 48, 51, 64, 91, 115, 138, 142, 175, 176, 198, 200, 209, 228 Simmel, G., 140 Simulcre, 189 Sin, 57, 58, 102–104, 117, 118, 134, 152, 167, 168, 222 Sin, fear of, 141, 145, 147 Sinai, Mount, 17, 55–57, 81, 199, 201 Sinai, revelation at, 16 Six Characters in Search of an Author, 36 Smelser, N.J., 222, 233 Smith, M.W., 216, 217, 219, 220 Smith, Q., 130, 192, 233

268

INDEX

Smith, Z.J., 173, 177–179 Sofer, A., 172 Solness, 18, 34, 35, 66, 67, 94, 95, 99, 103, 114–117, 121, 123, 124, 128, 134, 139, 140, 165, 166, 169–171, 182, 183, 185, 226 Sontag, S., 9 Souriau, P., 219 Sovereign/sovereignty, 13, 37, 39, 45, 46, 60, 82, 142, 147–150, 167, 215, 216, 219, 221, 222, 228, 232, 233 Sovereignty loop, 228 Sovereignty, aesthetics of, 216, 221, 223 Sovereignty, cultural, 215–217, 219 Sovereignty, theatrical, 82, 150, 167, 215 Specification of perfectness, 167, 168 Spectaculum, 12, 13, 15, 20–23, 26, 31, 37, 53, 58, 60, 62–64, 66, 79, 81, 130, 151, 161, 163, 165, 166, 175, 180, 184–187, 189, 190, 192–194, 197–200, 208, 214, 216, 221, 223, 230 Spectaculum, theory of the, 13, 150, 151, 176, 213, 231, 232 Spectatorship, 23, 25, 36, 39, 53, 59, 217 Stage direction, 31, 36, 59, 115, 138, 148 Stage hands, 66, 80, 161, 168, 175 Stage world, 12, 19–21, 23–25, 27, 32, 34, 36, 55, 64, 77, 78, 82, 87, 93, 100, 102, 104, 106, 131, 136, 140, 145, 149, 161, 162, 165, 170, 172, 195, 197, 228, 231 Stage–audience, 39, 150 Stanislavski, Konstantin, 89, 112, 127, 228, 229 States, B.O., 51, 52, 84, 144, 148, 174, 178

Stealing the show, 134, 136 Steger, B., 43, 46, 49 Steiner, G., 196 Steiner, P., 23, 24, 28 Steinsaltz, A., 197 Sternberg, M., 94 Stoll, C., 224 Strauss, A., 80 Structuralism/structuralistic, 8, 14, 19, 55, 56, 58, 66, 68, 87, 140, 163 Subject(s), 10, 15, 20, 22, 31, 45, 93, 105, 177, 180, 197, 216, 223, 224 Supporting part, 132 Surgical precision, 92, 93 Suspension of disbelief, 172, 186 Suspension of reality, 23 Symonds, J.A., 126 Synagogue, 48, 141, 148, 189, 190, 210

T Talmud, 14, 96, 200 Tartakovsky, E., 112 Technology, 3, 218, 219 Television, 3, 147, 195, 207, 208, 223, 226, 232 Temple, 4, 19, 177, 189, 190, 201, 208, 214, 217 Ten Commandments, 221, 229 Textuality-of-visitation, 11, 17, 53, 79, 140, 163, 173, 216, 223 Theater, Brechtian, 27, 30 Theater, repertory, 9, 65, 67 Theatre anthropology, 6, 8, 65 Theatre art, 65 Theatre, bourgeois, 3, 89 Theatre, epic, 30 Theatre event, 195 Theatre, Hebrew, 54, 65, 163, 189, 208

INDEX

Theatre, history of, 123, 191 Theatre, Israeli, 9, 14, 54, 55, 189, 201 Theatre, Kabuki, 174 Theatre-minus-text, 29 Theatre people, 9, 41, 105, 193 Theatre, phenomenological, 29, 51 Theatre, popular, 3, 19 Theatre, study of, 232 Theatre/theatrical, 1–26, 28–33, 35, 37–40, 42–56, 58–68, 78, 80–96, 99, 101, 102, 104–109, 112, 113, 117, 118, 122–124, 126, 129–136, 141, 142, 144, 147, 148, 150–153, 161–168, 172–180, 182–185, 187–201, 207–217, 219–221, 223–228, 230–233 Theatre, Western, 5, 7, 12, 65, 80, 167, 168, 174, 176, 219 Theatre without organs, 93 Theatrical abjection/abjection, 163, 166, 167, 229 Theatrical event, 1, 11, 12, 14, 17–20, 23–25, 30–32, 34, 36, 39, 40, 42, 46, 48, 50, 59, 61, 63, 64, 66, 78, 79, 88, 90, 93, 102, 141, 142, 144, 145, 147, 149, 162, 176, 189, 190, 193, 196, 209, 213, 215, 220, 232 Theatrical medium, 61, 152 Theatricality, 7, 29, 30, 35, 36, 48, 82, 135, 175, 198, 199, 211 Theology, 16, 44, 46, 53–55, 96, 113, 188 Theory, 3, 7, 12–16, 21, 25, 26, 30, 38, 41, 51, 61–63, 66, 68, 79–82, 89, 94, 98, 101, 105–107, 110, 112, 121, 123, 129, 135, 140, 146, 151, 172, 173, 175, 180, 184, 187, 191, 194, 211, 214–216, 222, 223, 228, 230–232

269

Theory, field-anchored, 8 Third meaning (Barthes), 26, 64 Throop, J., 84, 87, 151 Tikkun ha-midot , 112 Tillich, P., 3 Tinius, J., 6, 9, 83 Tolstoy, L.N., 22, 27 Torah, 16, 17, 33, 60, 61, 63, 64, 68, 81, 153, 162, 175, 176, 187, 189, 191, 197, 199–201, 228, 231 Torah, giving of, 16, 59, 62 Torah, reception of, 190 Tragedy, Greek, 55 Transcendental, 2, 3, 13, 35, 54, 62, 64, 87, 119, 150, 161, 172, 176, 196, 197, 214, 219, 222, 225, 226, 230, 231 Transformation (in acting), 22, 51, 81, 113, 119, 125, 128, 130, 175, 198, 200, 228 Transformative feedback loop, 213 Trilling, L., 191, 211 Truth, 15, 17, 26, 32, 35, 55, 56, 81, 85, 86, 92, 95, 97, 98, 101, 102, 107, 112, 114, 115, 117, 119, 122, 125, 130, 137, 152, 163, 166, 175, 184, 191–193, 211–213, 215, 220, 221, 225, 228, 230, 231 Turnbull, C., 65 Turner, C., 226 Turner, E., 65 Turner, V., 7, 14, 29, 83, 86, 119, 164, 165 Tyler, S., 105 Tyszka, J., 112, 152 U Unconscious, 2, 14, 15, 25, 41, 42, 46, 58, 196, 197 Unseen, the, 145, 175, 176, 183, 198, 221

270

INDEX

Urian, D., 27, 32, 38 Utopia, 194, 213, 217 Utopian, 12, 194 V Value optics, 180 Violence, 104–106, 112, 117, 135 Virilio, P., 224 Virtue, 10, 17, 55, 96, 113, 118, 134, 153, 180, 188, 189, 199 Virtue ethics, 87 W Wagner, Richard, 216–220, 233 Waiting for Godot , 13 War and Peace, 22, 27 Watson, I., 65 Watt, D., 108

Weber, S., 19, 27, 63, 210, 233 Well-made play, 99 Wilshire, S., 63, 109, 130, 192, 193, 201, 233 Winnicott, D., 151 World cultures (Rieff), 222, 225

Y Yates, F., 4, 104, 215, 232 Yehezkel, 55

Z Zepke, S., 90, 96, 124, 170, 183, 184 Zigon, J., 87 Zionism, 54 Zondervan, A.A.W., 221–223, 225, 228, 229, 233