Theatre in the Dark: Shadow, Gloom and Blackout in Contemporary Theatre 9781474251181, 9781474251211, 9781474251204

Table of contents :
Title Page
Copyright Page
Contents
List of Figures
Notes on Contributors
Acknowledgements
Introduction: The Dark Draws In
Theatre in the dark: 1993 to the present
Symbolic, diegetic and metaphysical darkness
Dark histories and the sensory turn
Darkness and identity: Blindness, blackness and lightlessness
Reaching into the dark
References
Part 1 Dark Aesthetics
Chapter 1 Harnessing Shadows: A Historical Perspective on the Role of Darkness in the Theatre
‘Going to black’
Darkness and the auditorium
Light and darkness in Renaissance Italy
Active light and darkness
A dramaturgy of darkness
References
Chapter 2 Melting into Air: Dining in the Dark, Reification and the Aesthetics of Darkness
Dining in the dark since the 1990s: Scholarly preoccupations and the retrieval of theatre
Reification in the commercial sector: Towards a critical theory of darkness
The electrical illumination of Italy and the Tactile Dinner Party
Darkness that dances: Between food art and theatre
Conclusion
References
Chapter 3 Creating in the Dark: Conceptualizing Different Darknesses in Contemporary Theatre Practice
Dark aesthetics
Plays in the dark
Darkness: An intervention in the spectacle of displaying bodies
Darkness as quantum superposition
Conclusion
References
Part 2 Dark Phenomena
Chapter 4 Aural Visions: Sonic Spectatorship in the Dark
Sounding Fiction
Seeing in the dark
Aural visions
Sound functions
Critical listening and coerced looking
Conclusion
References
Chapter 5 Darkness, Perceptual Ambiguity and the Abyss
References
Chapter 6 Missing Rooms and Unknown Clouds: Darkness and Illumination in the Work of Lundahl & Seitl
On being blindfolded … on being and blindfoldedness
Unknown Cloud … the space(s) between
Conclusion: Acts of illumination
References
Chapter 7 Staring at Blindness: Pitch Black Theatre and Disability-led Performance
The Effing and Blinding Cabarets (2007–9)
Sheer (2012)
Flatland (2015)
Conclusion
References
Part 3 Shadow, Night and Gloom
Chapter 8 Playing with Shadows in the Dark: Shadow Theatre and Performance in Flux
In two rooms, divided by a screen
Self and others
Shadows without dividing screens: The historic avant-garde
Shadow puppetry unmoored: Contemporary performances
References
Chapter 9 Under the Starry Night: Darkness, Community and Theatricality in Iannis Xenakis’s Mycenae Polytopon1
Xenakis and darkness
Darkness, questioning and transcendence
A performance in the making
Audiences
Conclusion
References
Chapter 10 In Praise of Gloom: The Theatre Defaced
Houselights out
Snap back to black
Reverberating faces
Dark enough yet?
Facing out
References
Notes
Index

Citation preview

Theatre in the Dark

Methuen Drama Engage offers original reflections about key practitioners, movements and genres in the fields of modern theatre and performance. Each volume in the series seeks to challenge mainstream critical thought through original and interdisciplinary perspectives on the body of work under examination. By questioning existing critical paradigms, it is hoped that each volume will open up fresh approaches and suggest avenues for further exploration. Series Editors Mark Taylor-Batty Senior Lecturer in Theatre Studies, Workshop Theatre, University of Leeds, UK Enoch Brater Kenneth T. Rowe Collegiate Professor of Dramatic Literature & Professor of English and Theater, University of Michigan, USA Titles Adaptation in Contemporary Theatre by Frances Babbage ISBN 978–1–4725–3142–1 Authenticity in Contemporary Theatre and Performance by Daniel Schulze ISBN 978–1–3500–0096–4 Beat Drama: Playwrights and Performances of the ‘Howl’ Generation edited by Deborah R. Geis ISBN 978–1–472–56787–1 The Contemporary American Monologue: Performance and Politics by Eddie Paterson ISBN 978–1–472–58501–1 Drama and Digital Arts Cultures by David Cameron, Michael Anderson and Rebecca Wotzko ISBN 978–1–472–59219–4 Social and Political Theatre in 21st-Century Britain: Staging Crisis by Vicky Angelaki ISBN 978–1–474–21316–5 Watching War on the Twenty-First Century Stage: Spectacles of Conflict by Clare Finburgh ISBN 978–1–472–59866–0

Theatre in the Dark Shadow, Gloom and Blackout in Contemporary Theatre Edited by Adam Alston and Martin Welton Series Editors Mark Taylor-Batty and Enoch Brater

Bloomsbury Methuen Drama An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

LON DON • OX F O R D • N E W YO R K • N E W D E L H I • SY DN EY

Bloomsbury Methuen Drama An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc Imprint previously known as Methuen Drama 50 Bedford Square London WC1B 3DP UK

1385 Broadway New York NY 10018 USA

www.bloomsbury.com BLOOMSBURY and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published 2017 © Adam Alston, Martin Welton and contributors, 2017 Adam Alston and Martin Welton have asserted their right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as editors of this work. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. No responsibility for loss caused to any individual or organization acting on or refraining from action as a result of the material in this publication can be accepted by Bloomsbury or the authors. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN: HB: 978-1-474-25118-1 ePDF: 978-1-474-25120-4 eBook: 978-1-474-25119-8 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. Series: Methuen Drama Engage Cover design by Louise Dugdale Cover image: Mixed media on paper © Christer Lundahl Bergmann Typeset by Deanta Global Publishing Services, Chennai, India To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com. Here you will find extracts, author interviews, details of forthcoming events and the option to sign up for our newsletters.

For the artists

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Contents List of Figures Notes on Contributors Acknowledgements Introduction: The Dark Draws In Adam Alston and Martin Welton

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1

Part One  Dark Aesthetics 1 2 3

Harnessing Shadows: A Historical Perspective on the Role of Darkness in the Theatre Scott Palmer Melting into Air: Dining in the Dark, Reification and the Aesthetics of Darkness Adam Alston Creating in the Dark: Conceptualizing Different Darknesses in Contemporary Theatre Practice Liam Jarvis

37 64 88

Part Two  Dark Phenomena 4 5

6

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Aural Visions: Sonic Spectatorship in the Dark Lynne Kendrick Darkness, Perceptual Ambiguity and the Abyss Tom Espiner and George Home-Cook in interview with Adam Alston and Martin Welton Missing Rooms and Unknown Clouds: Darkness and Illumination in the Work of Lundahl & Seitl Josephine Machon with Christer Lundahl and Martina Seitl Staring at Blindness: Pitch Black Theatre and Disabilityled Performance Amelia Cavallo and Maria Oshodi

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131

147 169

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Contents

Part Three  Shadow, Night and Gloom   8 Playing with Shadows in the Dark: Shadow Theatre and Performance in Flux Matthew Isaac Cohen   9 Under the Starry Night: Darkness, Community and Theatricality in Iannis Xenakis’s Mycenae Polytopon Marina Kotzamani 10 In Praise of Gloom: The Theatre Defaced Martin Welton Notes Index

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221 244 265 277

List of Figures Figure 1.1 Appia’s proposed stage design for Tristan and Isolde, Act 2. The castle garden outside Isolde’s chamber. 1896. Swiss Theatre Collection, Berne

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Figure 1.2 Appia’s design for Tristan and Isolde, Act 2, Scene 1. Tristan and Isolde’s ‘phantom world’ created through torchlight and darkness. 1896. Swiss Theatre Collection, Berne

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Figure 1.3 Appia’s redrawn sketch dated 1923 for Tristan et Isolde. Act 2. N° inv. 1993-0067. © Cabinet d’arts graphiques des Musées d’art et d’histoire, Genève

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Figure 6.1 Lundahl & Seitl, Symphony of a Missing Room – archive of the forgotten and remembered, Royal Academy of Arts, London, 2014. Photograph and © Julian Abrams

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Figure 6.2 Lundahl & Seitl, Symphony of a Missing Room – archive of the forgotten and remembered, Royal Academy of Arts, London, 2014. Photograph and © Julian Abrams

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Figure 6.3 Lundahl & Seitl, Unknown Cloud (R&D), Stockholm, 2016. Photograph: Joakim Olsson, © Lundahl & Seitl

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Figure 8.1 Karagoz performance by Hayali Nevzat Çiftçi, Clissold Park, London, 25 May 2014. Photograph by Jungmin Song

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Figure 8.2 Wayang kulit performance of Parikesit Jumeneng Ratu (The Coronation of Parikesit) by Ki Enthus Susmono, TVRI Television Station, Yogyakarta, 5-6 September 2015. Photograph by Matthew Isaac Cohen

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Figure 8.3 Manual Cinema rehearsing Lula Del Rey, Chicago, 25 January 2015. Photograph by Matthew Isaac Cohen

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Figure 8.4 Chris Milk’s The Treachery of Sanctuary (2012) installed at Digital Revolution, The Barbican Centre, London, 20 August 2014. Photograph by Matthew Isaac Cohen

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Figure 9.1 Iannis Xenakis, Mycenae Polytopon, 1978. Photograph by Babis Konstantatos, courtesy of Eugenia Alexaki Archive

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Figure 9.2 Iannis Xenakis, Mycenae Polytopon, 1978. Photograph by Babis Konstantatos, courtesy of Eugenia Alexaki Archive

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Notes on Contributors

Adam Alston is Lecturer in Theatre and Performance Studies at the University of Surrey. His first monograph, Beyond Immersive Theatre: Aesthetics, Politics and Productive Participation, is published with Palgrave Macmillan, and he has published a range of journal articles and book chapters exploring the politics and aesthetics of audience immersion and participation in contemporary theatre and performance. He is currently co-convenor of the Theatre and Performance Research Association’s Performance, Identity and Community Working Group. Amelia Cavallo is a blind theatre practitioner with experience in various performance styles, including acting, music, burlesque and aerial circus. She is also a PhD candidate at the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama researching crip theory and performance. Amelia works as a performer, workshop facilitator, visiting lecturer and a consultant for performance, disability studies and accessible theatre making. She has been published in RIDE: The Journal of Applied Theatre, is a columnist for Exeunt, and has presented her performative research in multiple forums and conferences. www.ameliacavallo.com. Matthew Isaac Cohen is Professor of International Theatre at Royal Holloway, University of London. His most recent book is Inventing the Performing the Arts: Modernity and Tradition in Colonial Indonesia. A student of wayang kulit (shadow puppet theatre) in Indonesia since 1988, he performs internationally under the company banner Kanda Buwana, a stage name he received along with a royal title from Sultan Abdul Gani of the royal court of Kacirebonan for contributions to Javanese culture and shadow puppetry in particular.

Notes on Contributors

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Tom Espiner is an actor, Foley artist and puppeteer. He co-founded Sound&Fury Theatre Company with Mark Espiner and Dan Jones in 1998 with their staging of Christopher Logue’s War Music, performed in total darkness for the Battersea Arts Centre’s ‘Playing in the Dark’ season. Their subsequent productions have toured internationally and include The Watery Part of the World, Ether Frolics (with artists from shunt), Kursk (in collaboration with Bryony Lavery), Going Dark (in collaboration with Hattie Naylor), and Charlie Ward. Tom has co-created and performed in all of Sound&Fury’s productions. George Home-Cook is a performance practitioner-researcher and freelance lecturer, based in the UK. His research in theatre phenomenology, theatre sound, and the aesthetics of atmosphere has received international recognition and has been translated into French and German. George has taught theatre studies, performance philosophy and the study of sound at a variety of academic institutions, and he also continues to work as a professional actor, having trained at East 15 Acting School. George is the author of the critically acclaimed monograph, Theatre and Aural Attention (2015), which was nominated for the Joe A. Callaway Prize for Best Book on Theatre and Drama 2014–15. Liam Jarvis is a Lecturer in Drama in the Department of Literature, Film and Theatre Studies at the University of Essex. He co-founded Analogue, with whom he has created award-winning devised work from stage shows to interactive performance events that have toured the UK and internationally. His AHRC-funded PhD at Royal Holloway, University of London, examined immersive performance practices that integrate neuroscientific body transfer illusions as an applied tool for audiences to feel with the virtual body of another. Liam is co-convener of the Intermediality in Theatre & Performance Research Working Group at the International Federation for Theatre Research (IFTR). Lynne Kendrick is Senior Lecturer in New Theatre Practices at the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama, University of London.

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Notes on Contributors

Publications include: ‘Aurality, Gestus and the Performance of Noise’ in Ernst, Niethammer, Szymanski-Düll and Mungen (eds) Sound und Performance (2015); ‘Scene in the Dark’ in ‘Sounding out “the scenographic turn”: eight position statements,’ A. Curtin and D. Roesner for Theatre and Performance Design, 1:1–2 (2015); and Theatre Noise: the Sound of Performance co-edited with David Roesner CSP (2011). Marina Kotzamani is a theatre scholar whose work focuses on the production and reception of classical Greek drama, as well as on contemporary theatre. She has published articles in internationally acclaimed journals including PAJ, Theater and Theater Journal. Recent work includes the translation into Greek of P. B. Shelley’s Oedipus Tyrannus or Swellfoot the Tyrant, which premiered at Epidaurus (summer 2016), as part of the Athens/Epidaurus Festival. The translation, including an introduction to the play, will be published in Athens by Stigme. Christer Lundahl and Martina Seitl formed Lundahl & Seitl in 2003 – a transdisciplinary artistic collaboration that focuses on making the viewer’s perception the central medium of the work. Each project is specific to a particular place and situation, while also investigating history, time, space and human perception. Recent developments include projects for smartphones involving large groups of the public in an interplay between physical and virtual space, and between traditional and social media. [email protected] Josephine Machon is Associate Professor in Contemporary Performance at Middlesex University, London. She is the author of Immersive Theatres: Intimacy and Immediacy in Contemporary Performance (2013), (Syn) aesthetics: Redefining Visceral Performance (2009, 2011), and has published widely on experiential and immersive performance. Josephine is Joint Editor for the Palgrave Macmillan Series in Performance & Technology. Her broad research interests address the audience in immersive theatres and the creative intersections of theory and practice in experiential performance.

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Maria Oshodi is a blind theatre practitioner. She worked as a script writer for theatre and screen from 1984 to 1992, with plays produced by Warner Sisters, as well as national touring theatre companies such as Talawa and Graeae. After working for BBC drama, she founded Extant (www.extant.org.uk) in 1997, the leading performing arts organization in the UK managed by visually impaired professional artists. Extant is a National Portfolio Organisation of Arts Council England and was the first disability-led company to win an Arts and Business Diversity Award in 2007. As well as consulting for companies such as the Royal National Theatre, Oshodi also freelances as a script writer. Scott Palmer is a Lecturer in Scenography at the University of Leeds. His teaching and research focus on scenography, immersive theatrical environments and interactions between technology and performance. He is an executive member of the Association of Lighting Designers and the co-convenor of the International Federation for Theatre Research Scenography Working Group. He is Associate Editor of the Routledge Journal of Theatre and Performance Design, and his 2013 monograph Light: Readings in Theatre Practice offers new perspectives on how light has been used as a creative scenographic element in performances both past and present. http://www.pci.leeds.ac.uk/people/dr-scott-palmer/ Martin Welton is Senior Lecturer in Theatre and Performance in the Department of Drama, Queen Mary University of London. His research concerns movement and the senses in contemporary performance. He is a co-director of ArtsCross, an international choreographic research project, involving scholars and artists in China, Taiwan and the UK. His monograph, Feeling Theatre, is published by Palgrave MacMillan.

Acknowledgements Acknowledgements have for the most part been made within each of the chapters; however, there are a few names that some of the contributors would like to add here who have supported their research in various ways. Scott Palmer would like to thank members of the TaPRA and IFTR Scenography Working Groups, the Audience Experience and Engagement Research group at the University of Leeds and Adrian Curtin for his generosity in sharing his thinking on Maeterlinck and scenographic atmospheres. Adam Alston wishes to acknowledge Edouard de Broglie, Sally Essex-Lopresti, Caroline Hobkinson, Dominic Johnson, Martin Gent, Loy Machedo, Paula Cohen Noguerol, Alicia Ríos and Bárbara Ortiz for their generous comments and conversation, and Lynne Kendrick would like to thank Glen Neath for conversations and permissions, and Louise Blackwell and Kate McGrath at Fuel for their generosity and support. Liam Jarvis would like to thank Shaun Prendergast for his generosity in talking about his work, and Niki Winterson for providing a copy of the script of The True History of the Tragic Life and Triumphant Death of Julia Pastrana, the Ugliest Woman in the World (1998). Extant would like to thank Arts Council England for its continuing support, and Matthew Cohen wishes to acknowledge the support of the Ballard Institute and Museum of Puppetry at the University of Connecticut, for hosting him as a visiting research professor in 2015; staff and students in the Department of Drama, Theatre and Dance at Royal Holloway, University of London for inclusion of the ephemeral subject of shadow performance in the curriculum; and above all Dr Jungmin Song for tolerating a yearslong hunt for shadows in the theatre, workshops, museums, archives, home, outdoors and even a haunted house or two. Marina Kotzamani would like to acknowledge the following for their valuable help with researching Iannis Xenakis’s Mycenae Polytopon: Dr Eugenia Alexaki and KSYME (Center of Contemporary Music Research), for generously

Acknowledgements

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supplying her with research material on Xenakis’s work; participants in the Mycenae Polytopon who shared their experiences of the event with her and made valuable suggestions about new leads; and particularly helpful in this respect were Costas Ferris, Kallirhoe Argyropoulou, Olga Tournaki and Panayiotis Skoufis, as well as Angeliki Apostolopoulou, administrative secretary of the Theater Studies department of the University of the Peloponnese, who helped Marina locate people and sources related to Xenakis’s Mycenae Polytopon at Argos. Finally, the kind permissions to publish images by the Swiss Theatre Museum in Berne (courtesy of Simone Gfeller), the Musée d’Art et d’Histoire in Geneva (courtesy of Marie-Laure Monney), Julian Abrams, Joakim Olsson, Matthew Isaac Cohen, Jungmin Song and Eugenia Alexaki were warmly received, not least in the context of a book that poses a few challenges to the prospect of illustration.

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Introduction: The Dark Draws In Adam Alston and Martin Welton

The Estate of Samuel Beckett has loosened its notoriously tight grip on the interpretation of artistic intentions if two recent productions of his radio text All That Fall (1956) are anything to go by. The first, by Pan Pan Theatre, has been running since 2011; the second, by Out of Joint, premiered in 2016. What makes these productions controversial is that both adapted the text for theatre. In a letter to his American publisher dated 27 August 1957, Beckett describes All That Fall as a ‘radio text, for voices, not bodies’, and states his absolute opposition ‘to any form of adaptation with a view to its conversion into “theatre.” … Even the reduced visual dimension it will receive from the simplest and most static of readings … will be destructive of whatever quality it may have and which depends on the whole thing’s coming out of the dark’ (Zilliacus 1976, frontispiece, with Beckett’s original emphasis).1 Why, then, were these productions granted leniency in the distribution of rights – the first being staged in several highly prominent venues, including London’s Barbican Centre (2015), the Abbey Theatre in Dublin (2016) and the Kennedy Centre in Washington DC (2016), and the second having transferred to the West End’s Arts Theatre (2016) after short runs at the Bristol Old Vic (2016) in South West England and Wilton’s Music Hall (2016) in London? One reason, it seems, is precedent. Both Pan Pan Theatre and Out Of Joint made concerted efforts to eliminate, or intermittently eliminate, light from an observable stage, putting a somewhat literal spin on Beckett’s intentions that finds precursors both in the production history of All That Fall and in Beckett’s oeuvre more broadly. Tom Morris staged an important production of All That Fall in complete darkness at the Battersea Arts Centre (BAC) in 1996, which,

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Theatre in the Dark

as will become clear, is a pivotal institution in the history of dark theatre performances. However, the heritage of setting theatrical adaptations of this play in darkness stretches back another thirty years. In a letter dated 17 June 1967, Beckett authorized a Canadian theatre production directed by Charles C. Hampton that was staged in dim lighting, and with certain moments occurring ‘in almost total darkness’ (Zilliacus 1976: 176–7). In fact, Hampton prepared three productions between August 1967 and early 1968, with each exploring different kinds and intensities of visibility, or ‘greying’, to borrow a Beckettian trope from Enoch Brater (2011: 48). It is also worth noting Beckett’s own preoccupation with darkness in theatre (as well as his writing for other media), strategically omitting the addition of extraneous lighting (see Elam 1986: 127–8), and emphasizing what is specifically made to be seen to come out of darkness as a primal medium for the theatre.2 Good examples can be found in the so-called ‘Billie Whitelaw plays’, not least Not I (1972), which takes place in complete darkness aside from the focused illumination of a chattering mouth and a shadowy, mute auditor (the latter sometimes being excluded to emphasize the reach of the dark). Pan Pan Theatre and Out Of Joint, then, were adopting a Beckettian hallmark. In both cases, audiences listened to prerecorded text narrated through headphones either wholly or in part with the accompaniment of live utterances in a shared space. The radiogenic element was preserved and the darkness in each allowed for vicarious experience as disembodied mumblings drifted in and out of consciousness, speaking not just to but through the listening, feeling body. Ghostly apparitions were enlivened by attention, grounding the sense of the text not so much in itself, but in us – an ambivalent surrogate for characters in search of an existence beyond purgatory (see also McWhinnie 1959: 134–5). While each production clearly drew inspiration from a literal reading of Beckett’s intentions, darkness was nonetheless ‘composed’ very differently, and these different compositions inflected the text with different meanings, and resulted in the arousal of different kinds of experience. The darkness was thick and pervasive in Pan Pan Theatre’s

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production, and was occasionally punctured by the glow or glare of lights that hung from the ceiling, or that formed part of a wall of syncopated light bulbs facing an audience sat in rocking chairs. The lights ‘breathed’, and took the place of each character as a Manichean and peculiarly affective counterpoint to the character(istics) of the dark, resulting in an uncanny meshing of enigma and foreboding. In contrast, the darkness in Out of Joint’s production was a darkness to be neither gazed at nor peered through; it was a state of lightlessness/sightlessness as the audience wore blindfolds, which nonetheless evoked a profound sense of space as live orations, intermeshed with recordings, floated up into the rafters – at least as performed in the auditorium of Wilton’s Music Hall. Here, the text’s grimly prescient humour was foregrounded as the performance’s loquacious protagonist, Maddy Rooney, wound her way to Boghill railway station to meet her blind, misanthropic husband, Dan Rooney, as well as its catharsis as we, the audience, learnt of a child’s tragic death under the wheels of an awaited train. Radiogenic reception excludes neither the specular nor the spatial (see Home-Cook 2015: 70–1; Guralnick 1996: 3; McWhinnie 1959: 133–51). We do not need theatre to experience radio drama visually and spatially. This being the case, one might reasonably ask what the darkness of a theatre environment adds to an experience of radio drama. Indeed, is there a need to perform any kind of theatre in the dark? What is it that lightless theatre offers its audiences that radio cannot? As our brief account of productions by Pan Pan Theatre and Out of Joint introduces, darkness is a form-giving entity animated by the presence of others (both immediate and mediated) in the social event of theatre. Narration is radiogenic to the extent that each makes use of prerecorded audio, but the ritual of theatre as a public art form imbues experiences of aesthetic reflection with a charged demand to respond to a situation that one could potentially alter. Darkness serves to highlight, not obfuscate, the publicness of theatre, alongside its durationality; it emphasizes links between that which is prepared, that which unfolds in the present and that which could possibly unfold in the future, however unlikely. Darkness implicates the audience in the eventfulness

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Theatre in the Dark

of theatre. There are also different forms of darkness that affect how other facets of a theatre event are experienced, including text, space, proxemics, embodiment, atmosphere, intersubjectivity and theatre design. In other words, there are more complicated areas of concern to explore than the relationships of theatre in the dark to radio plays. To even come close to identifying the unique significances of theatre in the dark, one must first get to grips with its diversity.

Theatre in the dark: 1993 to the present We are wary of identifying ‘theatre in the dark’ as a genre identifiable by a consistent set of conventions; instead, we want to set out nuance and difference across related, but diverse, fields of contemporary and historical practice. Similarly, we have avoided staging a definitive argument over the relative merits of turning off or on the lights, or of reconfiguring sensorial perception, for instance. Furthermore, our ambition in soliciting contributions has been to reveal how darkness in the theatre, as elsewhere, is less constant than it is conditioned by the cultural, political and technological contingencies of historical circumstance. In short, Theatre in the Dark seeks to rescue the plural pleasures and intrigue of shadow, gloom and blackout from the nominalized determinism of ‘the dark’, and is intended to open up rather than foreclose a field of research. More specifically, it responds to a remarkable rise in the number of theatre performances and other kinds of event occurring (at least in part) in complete darkness, gloom, or in conditions of obscured vision in the twenty-first century, asking: What, if anything, is peculiar in the aesthetics of theatre in the dark? What does it mean to experience dark phenomena in theatrical settings? How might we begin to conceptualize and theorize the interplay of light and darkness, especially with regard to shadow and gloom? How might we approach darkness as a subject of critical enquiry? What is the value of doing so? What kinds of cultural, historical and material contexts are relevant for an examination of theatre in the dark, and what are their significances?

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There are two particularly important events that helped to spur this rising tide of experimentation with darkness in the twenty-first century: a strand of the 1993 Avignon Festival, titled Dark/Noir, and a season of work programmed by Tom Morris at the BAC in 1998 called Playing in the Dark.3 These were the first examples of performance programmes cohering around the theme of darkness, and they also included work that anticipated a number of more recent approaches to darkness in performance and related fora. Especially significant examples from each include, first, Andreas Heinecke’s internationally touring installation Dialogue in the Dark, which featured in Dark/Noir. Dialogue in the Dark has been running since 1989, and seeks to simulate quotidian experiences of blindness by immersing audiences in complete darkness while they try to navigate a range of environments based on locations in the host city. There are obvious issues that accompany this coupling of blindness and darkness (see Adams 2012: 851), but the influence of this interactive exhibit and particularly its affiliated ‘dining in the dark’ activities on the development of theatre in the dark has been pronounced, as Adam Alston addresses in Chapter 2. A second example is Sound&Fury’s War Music, which was commissioned by Morris for Playing in the Dark, and explored more fulsomely in George HomeCook’s interview with Tom Espiner (one of Sound&Fury’s co-directors) in Chapter 5. We note this as a significant work not just because it was the first of Sound&Fury’s productions – all of which have engaged with darkness in some form or another – but also because it teased out the peculiarly immersive qualities of darkness in ways that gained traction in the first decade of the twenty-first century, not only in Sound&Fury’s other work, but also, arguably, as a prototype for recent experimentation with the immersive aesthetics of darkness. While both festivals played important roles in promoting theatre in the dark as a multifaceted current in contemporary theatre, they do not capture the sheer wealth and diversity of creative output that has emerged since the turn of the twenty-first century. For instance, Simon Stephens’s One Minute (2003), Tim Crouch’s The Author (2009) and Jude Christian’s staging of Cordelia Lynn’s Lela & Co at London’s Royal

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Court in 2015 each deployed extended and uncomfortable periods of blackout as a dramaturgic device, and Robyn Winfield-Smith’s 2015 production of Howard Barker’s The Twelfth Battle of Isonzo (1998) and Goat and Monkey’s The Devil Speaks True (2016) set the bulk of both performances in uncompromising darkness. It is also worth flagging Mischa Twitchin’s Beckett-based A Catastrophe (2013), set for the most part in darkness aside from the isolated illumination of hands, and a superlative touring production of a Beckettian ‘trilogy’ – Not I, Footfalls and Rockaby – directed by Walter Asmus and starring Lisa Dwan (2014), the greater part of which was set in near-complete darkness.4 All of these examples used darkness as a dramatic device, both in terms of engendering impactful drama and of diffusing the dramatic world of a performance in an ambiguous play space that attracted highly imaginative modes of spectatorship. Most of these examples were set in theatres or studios in fairly conventional stage-auditorium configurations; however, theatre in the dark encompasses a broad range of forms spanning immersive theatre, one-on-one theatre, performance installations, live art and game-based performances, to name a few. For instance, Part 3 of Seth Kriebel’s The Unbuilt Room: Scratch Quartet (2014) was a gamebased performance set in darkness that explored notions of mapping, memory and imaginative engagement in a fundamentally communal – though at times competitive – framework, as Martin Welton addresses in Chapter 10. Jo Bannon’s Exposure (2011), Bad Physics’s 2011 adaptation of Louis de Bernières’s Sunday Morning at the Centre of the World (2001), Tino Sehgal’s This Variation (2012), Tania El Khoury’s Gardens Speak (2014) and Anagram’s Door into the Dark (2014) also engaged with notions of connectivity in conditions of obscured vision, gloom or darkness, using those conditions to explore both immediate and dispersed forms of togetherness and empathy. Franko B and Kamal Ackarie’s Don’t Leave Me This Way (2006) is another work that explored similar themes, but in ways that couldn’t be more different – less a personal and emotive journey for the audience, and more a shocking experiment in the ethics of spectatorship and visuality as

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darkness, gloom and bright light bled into or violently interrupted one another. Obscuring vision as an unnerving prospect for sighted audiences was also tackled in Ontroerend Goed’s The Smile Off Your Face (2003), and key moments in Lucien Bourjeily’s 66 Minutes in Damascus (2012), as well as the second part of Punchdrunk’s The Black Diamond (2011), where blindfolds or hoods covering the whole head were used to disorientate audience members, while generating a potent sense of risk, foreboding and excitement. The numerous dark and gloomy rooms, vaults, containers and corridors in a range of other work by Punchdrunk, as well as the shunt collective, are also worth flagging. Such spaces facilitate transitions between environments that ‘immerse’ audiences in the world of a given performance, sometimes by way of a stumbling journey through darkness, or as the basis for a coup de théâtre, as shunt have deployed so effectively in performances like Tropicana (2004), Money (2009) and The Boy Who Climbed Out of His Face (2014). As Liam Jarvis considers in Chapter 3, Analogue’s Lecture Notes on a Death Scene (2012) also dealt with the notion of ‘journeying’, only as much more of a thematic concern as individually participating audience members were presented with the forking paths of a multiverse. It is also worth singling out Sound&Fury, Lundahl & Setil, Extant, Fye and Foul (alongside the practice-based research of Yaron Shyldkrot), and the collaborative work of David Rosenberg and Glen Neath, as special instances of theatre makers who specialize in the making of theatre in the dark – and hence why most of these companies and artists are represented so prominently in this book. Theatre in the dark also upsets taxonomic boundaries between theatre and installation art, only in circumstances that often do away with ‘live’ performers altogether, or in circumstances that render gallery-goers as performing audiences, which is often a key part of their theatricality. Denis Marleau’s 2002 multimedial production of symbolist playwright Maurice Maeterlinck’s The Blind (Les Aveugles, 1890) is one such example, which picked out from an otherwise pervasive darkness disembodied heads projected onto masks. David Hammons’s Concerto in Black and Blue (2002), which took place in New York in the same

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year as Marleau’s installation, encouraged audience members to dimly illuminate parts of an otherwise completely dark space using handheld and blue-tinted lights. In Miroslaw Balka’s How It Is (2009), installed in the Tate Modern, London, the yawning darkness of a gigantic shipping container found itself intermittently interrupted by the flash of camera phones – an effect built into the design of Andy Field’s dark installation Non In Luce (2015), and a theme Chris Goode evocatively explored in a performance set within Balka’s installation called Who You Are (2010). Hofesh Shechter’s contribution to Fuel’s podcast series Everyday Moments (2011) added another discipline to the theatre in the dark mix – choreography. Shechter choreographed the movements of participating audience members who were invited to experience this highly insular and solipsistic work alone in a domestic and completely dark space late at night. All of the examples above implicitly promoted an altered state of sensory encounter with the world, but in some instances this was made the piece’s raison d’être – as was the case with the choreographic duo Projet in Situ’s Do You See What I Mean (2005), and BitterSuite’s choreographed sensory concerts that the company have been experimenting with since January 2014, most notably with The Sensory Score (2015). Both Theatre Ad Infinitum’s Light (2016) and Flexer & Sandiland’s Disappearing Acts (2016) allowed light to participate in highly choreographed sequences, becoming itself a kind of dancer, which is an innovation that Michael Hulls pushed to a profound limit with his superb piece LightSpace for Sadlers Wells (2016); in this work, the only ‘dancers’ that performed were a range of beautifully composed light sequences, each one piercing or gradually illuminating an electric gloom.5 Theatre in the Dark has been inspired by such richly diverse theatrical forms and styles, and responds to them by: contextualizing the current prevalence of theatre in the dark in relevant historical and geographical contexts; documenting and theorizing how a number of especially prominent makers of theatre in the dark have been experimenting with the aesthetics of darkness; proposing a range of approaches to the phenomenon of darkness in theatre and other closely related

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cultural practices; and examining or critiquing the ethics, politics and economics of experiencing darkness in a range of public fora. It is beyond the scope of the book to present a comprehensive chronology of dark theatre aesthetics; nonetheless, several of our authors explore key milestones in the evolution of theatre in the dark, including the darkening of theatre auditoria and experimental approaches to lighting design in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries (Scott Palmer, Alston and Welton), the revisitation of theatre as a place of listening (Lynne Kendrick), ancient, modern and postmodern approaches to shadow puppetry (Matthew Isaac Cohen), a major performance event staged under the night sky (Marina Kotzamani), and a series of more recent innovations in the usage of shadow and complete darkness in theatre and related cultural forms, with a particular emphasis on the 1990s through to the present day – these latter being peppered throughout all remaining chapters. What emerges, we hope, is a quilting of theatre in the dark that is rooted in tradition, enhanced by innovation, and that encompasses a field that includes performances that utilize complete darkness or gloom, blindfolds and other similar technologies, the night sky and shadow play. Theatre in the dark is therefore intended to denote not just the handling and functioning of darkness and sensory deprivation in performance, but half- and low-light as well, and a host of relationships and interchanges between light, dark and obscured vision as compelling elements of theatre design.

Symbolic, diegetic and metaphysical darkness Much of this book is concerned with relatively recent work that has in one form or another sought to disrupt conventional stage-auditorium configurations. However, playwrights and theatre makers over the course of the twentieth century had already anticipated some of these techniques for immersing or absorbing audiences in the symbolic intricacies of dark and gloomy performances – not by doing away with sedentary spectatorship, but by radicalizing its operation. Argentine

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playwright Ricardo Sued’s Caramelo de Limón (Bitter Lemons, 1991) and the British company dA dA dumb’s Listen with dA dA (1993) are two such examples, but precedent was set a century earlier at the outset of the 1890s. In the early stages of his ‘shadow’ period (see Worth 1985: 42), the Belgian playwright Maurice Maeterlinck published several dramatic prototypes for theatre in the dark that engage with the potent symbolism of darkness (in ways that would come to resonate strongly with Beckett) and that deploy it as a dramatic device (in anticipation of the plays of Harold Pinter). Most notable is his play The Blind (Les Aveugles, 1890), which premiered with Paul Fort’s Théâtre D’Art at the Théâtre Moderne in Paris on 11 December 1891, and was directed by Adolphe Retté and Aurélien Lugné-Poe, who was to play a key role in the experimental handling of shadow, gloom and darkness in French symbolist theatre. It featured in a programme of work that deliberately appealed to the sensorium (see Deak 1993: 153; see also 154–5; Worth 1985: 23), rather than any one privileged sense, and hence marked a fairly stark contrast with the otherwise dominant emphasis on visual spectacle in romanticism, melodrama and realism. The Blind is set in an ancient forest with ‘moonlight that here and there struggles to pierce for an instant the glooms of the foliage’ (Maeterlinck 2012: 38). It features six blind men and six blind women (later joined by a dog and a crying infant) who grope around in a bluish darkness waiting for a priest who was meant to be leading them back to refuge. However, the priest sits wrapped in a black cloak centre stage, resting against an oak tree, ‘deathly motionless’, and with ‘dumb, fixed eyes’ that ‘no longer look out from the visible side of Eternity’ (Maeterlinck 2012: 38). While arguably resisting ‘concise metaphorical values’ (Taggart 1994: 627), darkness in The Blind nonetheless alludes to the side of Eternity inhabited by the dead priest, now liberated from ‘the thraldom of the senses’ (Daniels 1901: 554). The deployment of ‘symbolic blindness’ to illuminate the ‘ignorance’ of human understanding is troublesome, deriving as it does from a ‘myth of aesthetic blindness’ (Bolt 2013: 94) that found itself reiterated throughout the literature of the period, and beyond; however, it is the nuance of symbolic darkness in Maeterlinck’s

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symbolist drama – of shadow and gloom, especially – that pique our interest as editors. He even wished for shadows (or reflections, sculptures or puppets) to replace his all-too-material and earthly actors (see Deak 1993: 25), inviting comparisons with Plato’s Allegory of the Cave (1987: 316–25) and clearly anticipating Edward Gordon Craig’s championing of the Über-Marionette. Shadows allude, rather than represent, and darkness and gloom evoke the atmosphere of a place or circumstance without mimetically reproducing its terrain.6 This is what made shadow, gloom and darkness the lifeblood of symbolist theatre. All seep deeply within Maeterlinck’s The Intruder (L’Intruse) (1890), which is set in ‘A gloomy room in an old chateau’ (Maeterlinck 2012: 31). The short play’s plot is driven largely by the discomforting presence of a stranger, undoubtedly Death, who cannot be seen and ‘lives only in the air’ (Hall Caine qtd. in Worth 1985: 20), and whose horror the character of a blind Grandfather senses most acutely. The play’s climax comes with the inexplicable extinguishing of the set’s sole source of interior lighting – an oil lamp placed on a table – which is later replaced, quite suddenly, by a dim ray of moonlight that penetrates through green-tinted windows just as a clock strikes midnight, announcing the untimely passing of a mother shortly after the birth of her son, confirmed by the appearance of a backlit, silhouetted and silent Sister of Charity who makes the sign of the cross to confirm the tragedy.7 In the play’s first production with the Theatre d’Art at the Théâtre du Vaudeville in Paris on 20 May 1891 – which premiered just prior to The Blind, and was put together largely by Lugné-Poe (who also played the blind Grandfather), alongside Maurice Denis and Paul Percheron – ‘there were no footlights, and, when the lamp went out, the play was completed in near darkness, with illumination eventually coming from the doorway, upstage left, when the Sister of Charity stands on the threshold to announce the Mother’s death’ (Chamberlain 1997: 31). Darkness is clearly deployed as a dramatic device, and is diegetic in so far as it derives from the drama’s environment; however, as Franc Chamberlain recognizes, it retains a mystical symbolism of its own,

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conjuring ‘a space for the presentation of the unfigurable as perception of detail is removed and people and objects are (perceptually) reduced to essential shapes’ (1997: 31). In The Intruder, darkness is clearly meant to arouse an uncomfortable sense of menace, a sense that Harold Pinter was to explore in his work through the use of blackouts, silhouette, faint light and diminishing degrees of illumination in plays like The Caretaker (1960), The Hothouse (1958–80), Moonlight (1993), Ashes to Ashes (1996) and the closing moments of Party Time (1991), but most notably and prototypically in his influential play The Birthday Party (1958). The Birthday Party features three blackouts that occur within, rather than appending, the drama, all in Act Two; the first two are the result of the lights being switched off by the sinister McCann, but neither is a complete blackout – rather, a faint but, in each iteration, dimming light can be seen from outside the window. The gradations of darkness that are introduced at this point are on the one hand diegetic, but on the other are intended to anticipate a much deeper and more disturbing darkness introduced during a game of blind man’s buff towards the end of the Act, where ‘no light at all’ can be seen through the window (Pinter 1991: 58); this time, though, the lights go off because the electricity metre has not been topped up (unbeknownst to the characters). The darkness here remains diegetic, but it no longer anticipates menace; instead, the third blackout acts as a device at a climactic point in the drama when menace actualizes in an attempted murder before the blackout, and an attempted rape which is only confirmed once the lights come on again afterwards. The dark interim, however, is filled with confusion – chaos, even – appealing to both the audience’s and the characters’ imaginations as to what nightmarish goings-on could possibly be happening. Pinter’s darkness, then, pitched as dramatic device, acts as a vehicle for the diffusion of a nightmarish ambiguity of a kind that informs much more recent experimentation with blackouts, not least in Stephens’s One Minute and Crouch’s The Author. Some of the most compelling prototypes for darkness’ symbolism and power to evoke come not from European theatre forms but from

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religious and spiritual performances, with light and darkness playing key roles in both the metaphorical and practical dealings of most major world religions, both extant and extinct.8 For instance, as Matthew Cohen explains in Chapter 8, darkness is a necessary condition for the wayang kulit puppet theatres of the Malaysian and Indonesian archipelagos, and informs a mode of spiritual or metaphysical seeing that does not, or cannot, pertain in either daylight or in the intense illumination of the lighting technologies associated with theatrical modernity. A still older set of traditions of performing in or out of darkness can be found in south-west India. As Phillip Zarrilli notes, although contemporary performances of the famous Kathakali dance dramas of Kerala are regularly performed under top lighting, historically they were ‘lit solely by the large oil lamp (kalivilakku) at centre stage. With its multiple, flickering wicks, the lamp emits a yellow-hued light, which dances across the faces and hands of the actors casting shadows’ (2000: 50). Until the last century Kathakali was most often performed outdoors or within temple compounds. However it owes much of its aesthetics of flickering hands and faces in the shadows to its ancient precursor Kutiyattam. The only extant version of an earlier classical Sanskrit tradition, Kutiyattam performances traditionally take place at night over several days within temple theatres. As Lawrence Babb suggests, in many Indian cultures seeing has not been understood as a passive receipt of sensory data from the world outside the body, but rather as ‘an extrusive and acquisitive “seeing flow” that emanates from the inner person, outward through the eyes, to engage directly with objects seen, and to bring something of those objects back to the seer. One comes into contact with, and in a sense becomes one with what one sees’ (1981: 396–7). To see in darkened conditions is thus not only to perceive the obscurity of things in comparison with brighter circumstances, but also an engagement of oneself in and with the spiritual medium of darkness. The metaphysical possibilities of darkness are by no means unknown in Western religious cultures, however. While not a religious text in itself,

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Plato’s famous ‘Allegory of the Cave’ in Book VII of the Republic (1987: 316–25) played an important role in the development of metaphors of light and darkness in Western religious traditions, with shadows being affiliated with deception and ignorance (and by extension evil), and light with truth and knowledge (and by extension goodness). Platonic connotations can be found throughout the post-Exilic Torah and New Testament, where God and Jesus, respectively, are frequently associated with light, whereas evil in its various manifestations is associated with darkness. However, even here the metaphorical connotations of light and darkness are muddied; after all, Judaeo-Christian law is rooted in the appearance of Jahweh on Mount Sinai ‘in a dark cloud’, where, as Denys Turner puts it, the ‘darkness of knowledge’ – an excess of darkness, or ‘luminous darkness’ – is ‘deeper than any which is the darkness of ignorance’ (Turner 1995: 17–18). Such ‘luminous darkness’ informs a broad swathe of theological writing, not least in Christian Gnosticism. And as Craig Koslofsky observes of persecuted mysticism in midsixteenth and seventeenth-century Europe, ‘Worship at night helped expand the legitimate social and symbolic uses of the night, fostering the nocturnalization of spirituality in the confessional age’ (2011: 90). It is also worth noting the Roman Catholic Tenebrae service, which, while less widely practised since reforms in the mid-twentieth century, makes evocative use of complete darkness and periods of silence (see Palmer 2013: 7). The expressive potential of light and darkness, then, has been harvested in a range of religions in ways that do not just tell us something about that religion; rather, as Hans Blumenberg puts it, they reveal how ‘transformations of the basic metaphor indicate changes in worldunderstanding and self-understanding’ (1993: 31) – basic metaphors that might include light and darkness. And such changes were perhaps none so potent as they were at the outset of the Enlightenment, where the ‘ignorance’ of the Middle Ages, not least the belief that truth would ultimately reveal itself, was countermanded by conviction that truth ‘must be revealed’ (Blumenberg 1993: 52, original emphasis).

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Dark histories and the sensory turn The metaphysical and intellectual trope by which ‘truth’ is revealed in or out of darkness remains dominant in Western culture. ‘Enlightenment’ carries a potent political and social force. Not only has the idea that others ‘elsewhere’ are lost in darkness been a driving force in the narratives of European colonialism, but, as the historian Chris Otter explains, in the nineteenth century efforts to reform urban planning, education and health care were often motivated by a desire to bring light to the dark areas of industrial cities where poverty, crime and ill-health were rife: ‘Sunshine was a universal agent of vitality, a dehumidifier, deodorant, and disinfectant. … Darkness was physically incompatible with all forms of dynamism: material and intellectual, intellectual and social’ (2008: 67). Furthermore, the linking of daylight and its luminous nocturnal corollaries with the forces of modernity as a progressive good continues to have political implications, as Martin Welton has previously argued in addressing the 2010 UK Daylight Saving Bill, which attempted to align the horological adjustment of British Summer Time with that of the continent to gain an extra hour of daylight (2013: 4–5, 16). As Wolfgang Schivelbusch (1988) explains, novel lighting technologies in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries also invited new aesthetic encounters with metropolises: ‘The illuminated window as stage, the street as theatre and the passers-by as audience – this is the scene of big-city night life’ (1988: 148). Otter (2008) has argued that the impression of a pervasive illumination that this gives ignores social and economic differentials in levels of light and darkness. However, the development of a social aesthetics of light in darkness in tandem with that of the theatre underscores the extent to which theatre practice informs and is informed by cultural conditions beyond its stages and auditoria. There is surely no accident that entertainment districts such as Broadway in New York or London’s West End, which also include a significant number of theatres, announce their offerings with brilliant and ubiquitous lighting. The social and geographical situation of these

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districts as the ‘centre’ of the cities they serve makes the urban centre of gravity also one of illumination as a solar position around which the rest of the metropolis orbits. It is worth remembering at this point that prior to the social and political changes instigated by the revolutions in capital and industry between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries, darkness carried quite different social and political implications, and its penetration by light was an altogether more difficult affair. As Roger Ekirch suggests, although night represented quite different criminal, sexual and occult possibilities than those that pertained in daylight, it would be wrong to view the nocturnal in early modern societies as simply an inversion of the state of affairs that held between sunrise and sunset: ‘Rather than a backdrop to daily existence, or a natural hiatus, night-time in the early modern age instead embodied a distinct culture, with many of its own customs and rituals’ (2005: xxv). For example, as Ekrich explains, even sleep was differently configured from the unbroken state of unconsciousness that postindustrial societies have come to conceive of as ‘natural’. Slumber was marked by two distinct phases, but the interval between them provided an opportunity for domestic chores, religious observances and lovemaking. Certainly, prior to the industrial revolution, the expense and difficulty associated with providing sufficient light for either work or leisure during nocturnal darkness was considerable, and hence of relevance to the accrual of political capital. Not only were the citizens of many European towns and cities regularly subject to curfews after sundown in an effort to police crime and political dissent, but brilliant nocturnal spectacles were significant means by which rulers might demonstrate their power and wealth. The vast expense of providing the candles and fireworks that lit Nicolas Foucquet’s festivities for Louis XIV at Vaux-LeVicomte in 1661 must have been as impressive as the events themselves, given that the illuminations lasted from sunset until after two o’clock in the morning, and included a comedy ballet by Molière and designs, lighting and displays by Charles Le Brun and Torelli (see Koslofsky 2008: 97–9). The movement of theatre towards indoor presentation in the early modern period also brought with it significant costs with the

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purchase of sufficient candles for venues such as the Salisbury Court indoor playhouse in 1639, met partly by the house itself and partly by the actors. As Martin White (2014) demonstrates, delicate negotiations took place between these two groups over the cost and provision of lighting such that performance itself became a matter of responding to differentials between light and darkness. White’s scholarship has been significant to recent efforts by Shakespeare’s Globe to simulate candlelit performance at the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse in London, based on the (long lost) Blackfriars Theatre. Despite the savings against the cost of lighting that might have been made for seventeenth-century audiences, White argues that in a ‘modern reconstruction’ audiences will reasonably expect ‘higher levels of illumination’ than would otherwise be authentic (2014: 121). While one should not assume audiences to be ahistorical groupings, their positive engagement with both contemporary theatre in the dark and historical darknesses beyond the playhouse suggests that one should also be wary of assuming an overweening desire for illumination at all costs. Not only has the theatre deployed technological means of shaping seeing – from perspectival sets to the proscenium arch, cyclorama projections and reconstructions of early modern indoor theatres – it has also long sought to appeal to a sensual, aesthetic play of the eye within its medium. As Scott Palmer discusses in Chapter 1, there is a remarkably lengthy history of artists and designers using light and shadow to do so. As editors, we have been struck by the extent to which this history has received relatively little acknowledgement, and also by the depth it lends to considerations of more contemporary works experimenting with light and darkness outside theatre buildings, such as Josephine Machon’s discussion of Lundahl & Seitl’s Symphony of a Missing Room (2009) and Marina Kotzamani’s detailed analysis of Iannis Xenakis’s Mycenae Polytopon (1978). In each, the aesthetic potential of differing forms of darkness to shape seeing is shown to have been deployed by artists to unsettle or question the relative contingency of cultural and sensory conventions, which also prompts us to consider the relevance of sensory studies for a study such as this.

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As several of the chapters that follow make clear, one’s visual sense remains active even in conditions of total blackout, both in the extent to which one actually sees ‘nothing’ and in the integration of the act of looking with vestibular, proprioceptive and aural perceptions. That the works these chapters discuss should retain an evental status as visual experiences might not be so surprising, given the long-standing cultural significance of ‘going to see’ theatre. Indeed, it has almost become a cliché to note etymological reliance on vision in the development of the word ‘theatre’ into modern European languages from the ancient Greek theatron, or place of seeing, itself derived from thea or ‘a view’, a root shared also by ‘theory’, a contemplation, or means of looking. However, despite the relative banality of this observation, the what, how, when and where of theatrical seeing are often taken for granted. In response, Theatre in the Dark seeks to deepen the engagement of theatre and performance studies with what might be called ‘the sensory turn’ that has impacted a range of disciplines in the humanities and social sciences over the last two decades. Despite significant publications by Sally Banes and André Lepecki (2007), Stephen di Benedetto (2011), Lynne Kendrick and David Rosener (2011), Ross Brown (2010) and George Home-Cook (2015), it remains the case that the discipline has been curiously tardy in drawing the range and scale of sensory encounters in both historical and contemporary theatre and performance into the ambit of sensory studies more broadly. While it is beyond the scope of the volume to address sensory engagement across the discipline at large, Theatre in the Dark is avowedly an effort to further advance the possibilities for theatre and performance studies within a broader turn of scholarship. Writing in Aroma: The Cultural History of Smell (1994), a groundbreaking work in the sensory turn, Constance Classen, David Howes and Anthony Synott propose that scholarship in the humanities and social sciences needs to move beyond ocularcentric paradigms and address non-visual cultural knowledge and practice: ‘It is only when a form of sensory equilibrium is reached, that we may begin to understand how the senses interact with each other as models of

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perception and paradigms of culture’ (1994: 10). This dispute with the classically inflected notion of vision as the ‘noblest’ sense (Jonas 1954) is partly a recognition within social science of the anti-ocular trend that Martin Jay (1993) has identified within twentieth-century philosophy. Western modernity since the nineteenth century has demanded that individuals define and shape themselves in terms of a capacity for ‘paying attention’ – that is, for a disengagement from a broader field of attraction, whether visual or auditory, for the sake of isolating or focusing on a reduced number of stimuli (1993: 1). Moreover, as Howes has argued, the pervasiveness of the visual technology of text and its concomitant tendency in certain academic cultures to be seen everywhere has prompted the predominance of a ‘textual’ model of visuality that finds itself framed as a basis for ‘reality itself ’ (1991: 70). As Howes’s fellow anthropologist Paul Stoller suggests, ‘The guiding metaphors of the humanities and social sciences have been visual ones. … Throughout the history of anthropology ethnographers have been participant observers who reflect on their visual experiences and then write texts that represent the Other’s pattern of kinship, exchange, or religion’ (1997: 55, original emphasis). Against this backdrop of the intensification of vision as a cultural and technological force, it is hardly surprising that many of those who have questioned modernity, or have sought to consider its effects upon, or in comparison with, other cultures and eras, have tended towards the so-called ‘other senses’ as either the means or substance of their critique. Given its emergence from literary studies on the one hand and from conservatory systems of acting geared largely towards the interpretation and performance of written playtexts on the other, it is comparably unsurprising that theatre studies is still dominated (admittedly without being entirely monopolized) by the kind of position outlined by Stoller. Banes and Lepecki’s The Senses in Performance (2007) remains a landmark volume for both the range of topics it covers and the groundbreaking perspective it offers. However, as suggested, the discipline has been slow to absorb other-sensory possibilities for what theatre and performance studies might attend to, including, even, the

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term ‘going to see’. One might then wonder what an account of going to see performance constructed around glancing, peeking or peering could help elucidate. Similarly, what of those other movements of body and sense that align with seeing? Alongside writings by the likes of Howes, Stoller and Classen that have drawn attention to the cultural heterogeneity of the senses, much recent scholarship has looked to the important work of the psychologist James Gibson concerning the senses as perceptual systems (1968, 1979), and to its recent furthering by the British anthropologist Tim Ingold (2000, 2011a). For Gibson, writing in the middle of the twentieth century, psychology struggled to account for sensing effectively in its tendency to describe and emphasize visual processing as a passive receipt of environment. Significantly, he argued, this meant ignoring the extent to which the ‘information’ acquired in sensing depends upon active orientation towards an environment, which frequently involves multimodal ‘systems’ excessive of individuated sensory channels. Instead, Gibson suggested that bodily orientations of head and hand might be considered as much a part of sensing as the ‘anatomical units’ of eye, ear, tongue or skin (1966: 58). What makes Gibson’s proposal more radical still was that in understanding the senses in such terms, he also sought to demonstrate the role played by bodily orientation in organizing or choreographing them. While inevitably shaped by individual predilections and habitus, the operations of these sensory systems are also informed by the possibilities for action that features of an environment afford. Returning to the theatre, we might then suggest that ‘going to see’ is determined not only by the structure of light that falls upon one’s retina, but also by what the theatrical environment in and of itself affords. This must include, for example, the kinds of movement restricted or enabled by one’s seat, row and auditorium position (where applicable), but also the drawing of one’s attention by a perspectival set, lighting beams or the gestural shapes of performers’ bodies. If one follows Gibson’s line of thought, then these theatrical elements do not draw or hold one’s attention simply as a cognitive matter, but as a

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physiological engagement, even if the individual movements involved may be only slight. In light of this, we might approach spectatorship as an inherently practical engagement with the theatrical event. It is therefore notable that contributors throughout Theatre in the Dark have sought means to describe the performances they consider from the position of their own embodiment. Certainly, performances such as Lundahl & Seitl’s Symphony of a Missing Room, or David Rosenberg and Glen Neath’s Fiction (2014–15) – as discussed by Machon and Kendrick respectively – presume a more direct engagement with the work by spectators than might otherwise be the case. However, even where spectators remain seated in conventional auditoria – as in works discussed by Jarvis and Welton, for example – the darkened theatre presents an opportunity to readdress both the significance of other senses to experience and the possibility that seeing itself might be variegated and mutable. In a series of spats with other anthropologists concerned with the senses, Howes has asserted that the kinds of phenomenological perspectives that such writings from experience imply risk ‘emphasizing the individual and the subjective over the communal and social’ (2010: 335; see also 2011). However, as Tim Ingold (himself the subject of Howes’s critique) has been at pains to point out: ‘People in this’ – for whom we might also read scholars of theatre or anthropology – ‘do not “make sense” of things by superimposing ready-made sensory meanings “on top” of lived experience, so as to give symbolic shape to the otherwise formless material of raw sensation. They do so, rather, by weaving together, in narrative, strands of experience born of practical, perceptual activity’ (2011b: 326). Throughout this book, strands of perceptual experience are woven together with critical, historical and political currents to form narratives of darkness that inform how looking, touching and listening are shaped, alongside their combinations. Certainly one needs to be wary of the kinds of generalization on the basis of subjective experience that Howes takes issue with; nonetheless (and notwithstanding the satisfactions of anecdote), we propose that the sensory and phenomenological challenges offered by darkness to

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critically engage with theatrical events draw the perceptual terms of engagement into the foreground.

Darkness and identity: Blindness, blackness and lightlessness At this point, pause for thought is invited as to the imbrication of individual subjects within ideological configurations and their concomitant impact on empowerment and disenfranchisement; such is the aim of this section, which introduces how theatre in the dark has confronted the politics of identity and how this book chooses to position itself in relation to it, taking one especially compelling (and harrowing) example as a point of departure: Adrienne Kennedy’s one-act play Funnyhouse of a Negro (1964). The play focuses on the desire of Sarah, its ill-fated protagonist, to become increasingly ‘pallid like Negroes on the covers of American Negro magazines’ (Kennedy 1997: 8). Sarah’s subconscious is split among several alter egos that visually manifest in the guises of Queen Victoria and the Duchess of Hapsburg (Carlota of Mexico), both dressed in cheap white satin and with ‘alabaster’ faces obscured by white veils (Kennedy 1997: 6); a hunchbacked, dwarfish and yellow-skinned Jesus – implying impurity, ‘as if he has been “infected” by jaundice or blackness’ (Barnett 1997: 378); and the black Congolese independence leader Patrice Lumumba. Funnyhouse of a Negro offers a highly symbolic meditation on race, identity and identification, deploying light and whiteness, and darkness and blackness, as charged symbolic tropes around which a probing identity politics is revealed. Decaying ideals of whiteness and imperial femininity, alongside violent and disease-ridden conceptualizations of black masculinity, mediate how Sarah thinks of herself; blackness and whiteness, and masculinity and femininity, present disaggregated facets of a persona that fails to assimilate cohesively its sources of identification.

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The play’s white royal extensions of Sarah’s self are illuminated in ‘strong white LIGHT’ of a kind that is ‘unreal and ugly’ and surrounded by an ‘unnatural BLACKNESS’ (Kennedy 1997: 5), and the emergence of Sarah’s only black alter ego, Lumumba, comes from gloom or darkness. The pragmatic implementation of these lighting states is feasible, despite the loaded adjectives – however, not so with the ‘dark brightness’ (Kennedy 1997: 22) of the jungle. As Erin Hurley queries in an important article in the context of this book, ‘What combinations of lights, gels, and focus techniques might create “a dark brightness”’ (2004: 200)? For Hurley, what such lighting states portray is a realm of representational appearance that is doomed to fail (2004: 201). More specifically, Hurley is referring to a realm of visual appearance, and she does so in a way that resonates with Elin Diamond’s comments on ‘the Kennedy spectator’, described as ‘one who cannot know what she sees’ (Diamond 1997: 114), but who might nonetheless come to terms with what she feels through ‘an alternate [and more elusive] current of perception, one that forces attention to what is sensed even when nothing is seen and to the conditions of racial and technical substantiation’ (Hurley 2004: 201). In other words, states of light and darkness – some uncannily possible and some compellingly impossible – are deployed to highlight the conditions of identity formation; the state of a ‘dark brightness’ is a state that NegroSarah shares (Hurley 2004: 203). Lightlessness, as a phenomenon, is not the equivalent of blackness, and yet the coupling of darkness and blackness is well rehearsed in myriad forms of discourse, literature and the arts. Light and darkness are haunted by the ideologies that code signification, not least in the ‘semantic-existential field’ produced by the enlightenment’s ‘constitutive photophilia, its whitewashing of the world as reified photologics of reason’, as André Lepecki has recently explored (2016: 59). Jarvis comes at the haunting of darkness from another angle in his contribution to this book, analysing the impact of temporal and geographical context on the semiotics of darkness in different productions of Shaun Prendergast’s The True History of the Tragic Life and Triumphant Death

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of Julia Pastrana, the Ugliest Woman in the World (1998), among other plays. Alston’s chapter also touches on the semiotics of darkness in an advertisement launched by Coca-Cola Middle East as part of their ‘see without labels’ anti-prejudice campaign in July 2015. It is also worth mentioning how light, whiteness and privilege, and darkness, blackness and poverty, were materially dichotomized in early- to mid-twentiethcentury metropolises, particularly in the United States, where ‘White Way’ electric lighting systems were rolled out to illuminate wealthy streets – frequently populated by affluent white people keen to protect their private property (see Harrison 2015: 958) – marking a striking counterpoint to poorly lit and less affluent neighbourhoods that were often inhabited by disinvested black people. Light and darkness, in other words, have participated in the formation of ‘racial economies’ in a range of contexts, ‘effectively linking a lack of illumination with blackness’, ‘producing the spaces in which whiteness can be invested and in which racism takes place’ (see Harrison 2015: 952–53; see also Wilson 2012: 940), and directly or tacitly ostracizing or alienating blackness as a racial marker. Darkness, then, is legible as racialized blackness if there is something in its framing, or in the horizon of expectations that is brought to the interpretation of its experience, that constructs a bridge between the two concepts. However, as Darby English recognizes, racialized blackness ought not to be read as some essential attribute of darkness (or vice versa); such a ‘prefab’ mode of reading, as English puts it, fails to account for the discursive composition of blackness in the social sphere (English 2007: 2), acknowledging also the material and highly consequential significances of racial markings that have resulted in profound tension and conflict both historically and in the present moment, not least in the United States. Darkness can indeed be representative of the idea of black culture, as English argues, but it is not synonymous with blackness (English 2007: 2–3). Theatre in the Dark recognizes that there is a profound difference between blackness and darkness, and refutes the idea that a study of shadow, gloom, blackout and lightlessness must deal with racialized

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blackness, as one recent study of (dance) performance in the dark has implied in critiquing ‘an aesthetic-racist unconscious’ (Lepecki 2016: 59). Instead, we argue that a more thorough phenomenology of darkness per se – as pursued throughout the volume – undermines the presumed structural connection of photic, racial and aesthetic conditions. That being said, the authors’ outlooks and comments, like ours, are affected by experiences informed by identity – whether from the perspective of writing as a woman or a man, white or black, sighted or visually impaired – and for that reason there will always be scope for studies such as this to be enhanced, developed and critiqued. But it is not our place as editors to prescribe a particular set of connotations, racialized or otherwise; however, it is our place to contextualize the work surveyed in this book, and we invite readers to carry such connotations forward into their interpretative encounters with the chapters that follow. We hope that the ambition of this book to pluralize the various connotations of dark phenomena is read as our own means of dealing with the politics of perception that acknowledges how seeing or sensing darkness can be racialized, just as it can be bound up with other modes of looking and sensing, not least those that might be defined as ‘ableist’. As editors, we have been keen to represent work by blind artists within the volume, not least because of the creative opportunities theatre in the dark has offered them, and because of the compelling invitations to audiences to think and feel differently that derive from their work. As Maria Oshodi and Amelia Cavallo explore in Chapter 7, darkness and blindness are not equivalents (only around 4 per cent of registered blind people report no vision at all), but darkness can nonetheless invite one to experience the alterity of non-normative visual experiences. Theatre in the Dark also seeks to avoid the risk of parochialism that might find itself attached to a project that narrows focus to a particularly vibrant and contemporary cultural scene in Britain; Southeast Asian theatre, particularly the various shadow puppetry traditions explored by Cohen in his contribution, has played a vital role in the development of dark theatre aesthetics in ways that impacted the Anglo-American avant-gardes; performances ‘in’ and

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‘of ’ the night likewise have a very long and international heritage, part of which Kotzamani explores in her analysis of Iannis Xenakis’s Mycenae Polytopon (1978); and the co-evolution of theatre in the dark and dining in the dark restaurants, franchises and food art events, while most commonly affiliated with Europe, also traverses the Americas, Southeast Asia, Northern Eurasia and the Middle East, as Alston touches upon in his chapter. British theatre in the dark, then, along with related cultural practices, may well be flourishing at the moment, and we have sought to capture something of its current vibrancy in what follows, but it is by no means a ‘British’ phenomenon, whatever that might mean; theatre in the dark as it exists today builds upon and has sustained itself as a global and diverse set of practices with culturally diverse roots – some of which stretch back to the most ancient civilizations.

Reaching into the dark Over the last decade or so, a significant number of scholars have engaged critically with theatre and darkness. Works by Welton (2005, 2007, 2012, 2013), Machon (2013), Alston (2013, 2016), Hurley (2004), Arnold Aronson (2005) and Alice Rayner (2006) have variously explored questions of the phenomenology, history, dramaturgy and politics of the extinguishing of theatre’s lights, although none with the concerted breadth and depth of Theatre in the Dark. It was partly in recognition of this emerging field of enquiry that Alston organized the symposium ‘Theatre in the Dark’ in July 2014, held at the University of Surrey, UK, at which several of the chapters of this book were given early drafts as presentations. Similarly to the symposium, this book seeks to create an intellectual space where the knowledge and perspective of artists is put into the public domain in dialogue with scholarship that seeks to expand and reflect upon it. It therefore includes contributions from both researchers and practitioners. As editors, we want to resist the temptation to separate out theory- and practice-based approaches to the critique

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and documentation of theatre in general, and of theatre in the dark in particular, and see this shared sphere of interest as an opportunity in which these perspectives might be usefully brought together. The book therefore gathers the work of scholars and practitioners in three themed parts that follow this introduction: (1) Dark Aesthetics, (2) Dark Phenomena and (3) Shadow, Night and Gloom:

Dark aesthetics This section begins with Scott Palmer’s ‘Harnessing Shadows: A Historical Perspective on the Role of Darkness in the Theatre’, which provides an important historiography of theatrical darkness, and sets the scene for the chapters that follow. Palmer challenges recent claims that suggest that darkened auditoria emerged in the midst of nineteenth-century modernity, and argues that shadow and darkness are essential to theatre’s aesthetics of visibility, in terms of both what is seen and the conditions that enable and affect seeing. Adam Alston’s ‘Melting into Air: Dining in the Dark, Reification and the Aesthetics of Darkness’ locates the contemporary concern for lightless performance within two significant and related aesthetic trends: the concomitant, rapid and global dispersal of theatre in the dark and dining in the dark post-1993, on the one hand, and the earlier concern of Futurist artists such as Fillìa for multisensual aesthetic experiences, on the other. Through these and related examples, Alston invites a consideration of darkness in performance as a stimulant for questioning and rethinking encounters with the material world. The section concludes with Liam Jarvis’s ‘Creating in the Dark: Conceptualising Different Darknesses in Contemporary Theatre Practice’. As well as the enduring conditions of pitch darkness utilized in performances such as Amphibian Stage Production’s The True History of the Tragic Life and Triumphant Death of Julia Pastrana, the Ugliest Woman in the World, Jarvis also considers the connection between physical and dramaturgical states of shadow and gloaming in plays such as Anne Washburn’s Mr Burns: A Post-electric Play, and in his own work with Analogue.

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Dark phenomena In this section’s opening chapter, ‘Aural Visions: Sonic Spectatorship in the Dark’, Lynne Kendrick asks what sound invites us to see in darkened theatrical settings. Focusing on David Rosenberg and Glen Neath’s Ring (2013–14) and Fiction (2014–15), Kendrick examines the aural constructs of spectatorship in the dark, offering a perceptual as well as political perspective on how theatre in the dark recasts visual objects while opposing tyrannies of the gaze. The next chapter in this section, ‘Darkness, Perceptual Ambiguity and the Abyss’, pays particular attention to the work of Sound&Fury, one of the most influential theatre companies working with theatre in the dark in the present moment. We, the editors, invited the company’s co-director Tom Espiner and the performance theorist George Home-Cook to interview one another (with our own occasional interventions). The ensuing record addresses the company’s development of an aesthetics of darkness over almost two decades and the challenges it has presented to audiences and artists alike. In Chapter 6, Josephine Machon enters into a collaboration with the artists Christer Lundahl and Martina Seitl, titled ‘Missing Rooms and Unknown Clouds: Darkness and Illumination in the Work of Lundahl & Seitl’. Together with Lundahl & Seitl, Machon considers the implications of ‘being-in-the-dark’ explored in the artists’ work. This includes performances such as Symphony of a Missing Room, in which blindfolded participants are deprived of vision, but also a new work called Unknown Cloud on its Way To … (2015–), which seeks to engage its audience with a mode of being that vision cannot compass: our dwelling and participation within the cosmos. This section’s final chapter, Amelia Cavallo and Maria Oshodi’s ‘Staring at Blindness: Pitch Black Theatre and Disability-led Performance’, once again presents a perspective from within the dynamics of practice, offering reflections on the company Extant’s approach to narrative, form and technology in dark theatre performance. As blind practitioners involved with a company comprised of visually impaired artists, they reflect on how taking control of darkened performance spaces has allowed them

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to question the social and political hierarchies that often govern interactions between sighted and non-sighted people.

Shadow, night and gloom This final section assesses dark theatre practice as it connects with wider performative and cultural aesthetics of shade and darkness. The liminal potential of shadows is explored in the opening chapter by Matthew Isaac Cohen, titled ‘Playing with Shadows in the Dark: Shadow Theatre and Performance in Flux’. Examining a range of examples of shadow theatre from the traditions of wayang kulit in the Indonesian archipelago to more contemporary postmodern forms, Cohen considers the possible alternatives they offer to the ‘bodily co-presence’ that is often understood to be a defining feature of performance. By contrast, by separating audience and performer, the shadow screen that distinguishes such works in effect positions them in different rooms, both of which are in semi-darkness. The penultimate chapter, Marina Kotzamani’s ‘Under the Starry Night: Darkness, Community and Theatricality in Iannis Xenakis’s Mycenae Polytopon’, offers a critical reassessment of a multimedia performance work of epic scale, which was presented at night in a vast open-air space facing the eponymous Grecian archaeological site featured in the chapter’s title in early September 1978. Through the example of this work, Kotzamani explores the poetics and politics of performance in the open air at night, emphasizing the possibility it offered for a democratic, non-authoritarian idea of public engagement with art. Finally, Martin Welton’s closing chapter, ‘In Praise of Gloom: The Theatre Defaced’, examines the aesthetic and ethical implications of the loss or obfuscation of the face in darkness as a locus of theatrical relations. Freed from the clarifying urge of the photic regime outside the theatre to see exactly what you mean, Welton argues that shadows give a stage to the not quite sensed or not yet apparent. Through the example of contemporary and historical performances, he argues that in gloom, at the threshold of expression, we might recast aesthetic and ethical encounters with others in the theatre.

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Across all of the book’s sections and chapters, the editors and contributors of Theatre in the Dark have approached darkness as a theatrical presence that is both mutable and diverse across a range of contemporary and historical examples. In addressing both production and reception, we have also sought to reveal darkness as a theatrical medium that offers creative potential to the imaginations of artists and audiences alike. But it is also to your imagination as a reader that we appeal, and to your embodied memories as a spectator, participant or night walker, who comes to this book by means of illumination – by sun, screen or bulb, most likely – and who must therefore take it upon yourself to think and feel the gloomy penumbras, the contours of shadows and the embrace of lightlessness that you encounter along the way.

References Adams, R. (2012), ‘Casting Light on Disability’, American Quarterly, 64 (4) (Dec.): 851–60. Alston, A. (2013), ‘Politics in the Dark: Risk Perception, Affect and Emotion in Lundahl & Seitl’s Rotating in a Room of Images’, in N. Shaughnessy (ed.), Affective Performance and Cognitive Science: Body, Brain and Being, 217–28, London: Bloomsbury Methuen Drama. Alston, A. (2016), Beyond Immersive Theatre: Aesthetics, Politics and Productive Participation, London: Palgrave Macmillan. Aronson, A. (2005), Looking into the Abyss: Essays on Scenography, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Asmussen, J. P. (1975), Manichaean Literature, Delmar: Scholars’ Facsimilies & Reprints. Babb, L. (1981), ‘Glancing: Visual Interaction in Hinduism’, Journal of Anthropological Research, 37: 387–401. Banes, S. and Lepecki, A., eds (2007), The Senses in Performance, London and New York: Routledge. Barnett, C. (1997), ‘A Prison of Object Relations: Adrienne Kennedy’s Funnyhouse of a Negro’, Modern Drama, 40 (3) (Fall): 374–84.

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Blumenberg, H. (1993) ‘Light as a Metaphor for Truth: At the Preliminary Stage of Philosophical Concept Formation’, in D. M. Levin (ed.), Modernity and the Hegemony of Vision, 30–62, Los Angeles: University of California Press. Bolt, D. (2013), ‘Aesthetic Blindness: Symbolism, Realism and Reality’, Mosaic, 3 (Sept.): 93–108. Brater, E. (2011), 10 Ways of Thinking About Samuel Beckett: The Falsetto of Reason, London: Methuen Drama. Brown, R. (2010), Sound: A Reader in Theatre Practice, Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan. Classen, C., Howes, D. and Synott, A. (1994), Aroma: The Cultural History of Smell, London: Routledge. Chamberlain, F. (1997), ‘Presenting the Unrepresentable: Maeterlinck’s L’Intruse and the Symbolist Drama’, Contemporary Theatre Review, 6 (4): 25–36. Daniels, E. D. (1901), ‘A Cursory Review of Symbolism in Maeterlinck’s ‘The Blind’, Poet Lore, 13: 554–60. Deak, F. (1993), Symbolist Theater: The Formation of an Avant-Garde, Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press. Di Benedetto, S. (2011), The Provocation of the Senses in Contemporary Theatre, London and New York: Routledge. Diamond, E. (1997), Unmaking Mimesis: Essays on Feminism and Theatre, London and New York: Routledge. Ekirch, R. (2006), At Day’s Close: A History of Nighttime; London: Phoenix. Elam, K. (1986), ‘Not I: Beckett’s Mouth and the Ars(e) Rhetorica’, in E. Brater (ed.), Beckett at 80/Beckett in Context, 124–48, New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press. English, D. (2010), How to See a Work of Art in Total Darkness, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Garner, Stanton B. (1994), Bodied Spaces: Phenomenology and Performance in Contemporary Drama, Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Gibson, J. J. (1966), The Senses Considered as Perceptual Systems, London: Allen and Unwin. Gibson, J. J. (1979), The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception, London: Houghton Mifflin.

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Guralnick, E. S. (1996), Sight Unseen: Beckett, Pinter, Stoppard, and Other Contemporary Dramatists on Radio, Athens, OH: Ohio University Press. Harrison, C. (2015), ‘Extending the “White Way”: municipal streetlighting and race, 1900–1930’, Social & Cultural Geography, 16 (8): 950–73. Home-Cook, G. (2015), Theatre and Aural Attention: Stretching Ourselves, London: Palgrave Macmillan. Howes, D. (1991), The Varieties of Sensory Experience: A Source Book in the Anthropology of the Senses, Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Howes D. (2010), ‘Response to Sarah Pink’, Social Anthropology/Anthropologie Sociale, 18 (3): 331–40. Howes, D. (2011), ‘Reply to Tim Ingold’, Social Anthropology/Anthropologie Sociale, 19 (3): 318–22. Hurley, E. (2004), ‘Blackout: Utopian Technologies in Adrienne Kennedy’s Funnyhouse of a Negro’, Modern Drama, 47 (2) (Summer): 200–18. Ingold, T. (2000), The Perception of the Environment: Essays on Livelihood, Dwelling and Skill, London: Routledge. Ingold, T. (2011a), Being Alive: Essays on Movement, Knowledge and Description, London: Routledge. Ingold, T. (2011b), ‘Worlds of Sense and Sesing the World: A Response to Sarah Pink and D. Howes’, Social Anthropology/Anthropologie Sociale, 19 (3): 313–17. Jacobsen, T. (1976), The Treasures of Darkness: A History of Mesopotamian Religion, New Haven and London: Yale University Press. Jay, M. (1993), Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth Century French Thought, Berkley, CA: University of California Press. Jonas, H. (1954), ‘The Nobility of Sight’, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 14 (4): 507–19. Kendrick, L. and Roesner, D. (2011), Theatre Noise: The Sound of Performance, Newcastle-upon-Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Press. Kennedy, A. (1997), Funnyhouse of a Negro, New York: Samuel French. Knowlson, J. (1972), Light and Darkness in the Theatre of Samuel Beckett, London: Turret Books. Koslofsky, C. (2011), Evening’s Empire: A History of the Night in Early Modern Europe, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lepecki, A. (2016), Singularities: Dance in the Age of Performance, London and New York: Routledge.

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Maeterlinck, M. (2012), The Plays of Maurice Maeterlinck, Memphis: General Books. McWhinnie, D. (1959), The Art of Radio, London: Faber and Faber. Otter, C. (2008), The Victorian Eye: A Political History of Light and Vision in Britain 1800-1910, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Palmer, S. (2013), Light: Readings in Theatre Practice, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Pinter, H. (1991), Harold Pinter: Plays 1, London: Faber and Faber. Plato (1987), The Republic, translated by Desmond Lee, 2nd ed., London: Penguin Books. Rayner, A. (2006), Ghosts: Death’s Double and the Phenomena of Theatre, Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press. Schivelbusch, W. (1988), Disenchanted Night: The Industrialisation of Light in the Nineteenth Century, translated by A. Davies, Oxford: Berg. Stoller, P. (1997), Sensuous Scholarship, Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press. Taggart, A. (1994), ‘Blind Process: Maeterlinck’s The Sightless’, Modern Drama, 37 (4): 626–37. Turner, D. (1995), The Darkness of God: Negativity in Christian Mysticism, Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press. Wakeling, C. (2015), ‘“Only Her Mouth Could Move”: Sensory Deprivation and the Billie Whitelaw Plays’, TDR: The Drama Review, 59 (3) (Fall): 91–107. Welton, M. (2005), ‘Once More With Feeling’, Performance Research, 10 (1): 100–12. Welton, M (2007), ‘Seeing Nothing: Now Hear This…’, in A. Lepecki and S. Banes (eds), The Senses in Performance, 146–55, London: Routledge. Welton, M. (2012), Feeling Theatre, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Welton, M. (2013), ‘The Possibility of Darkness: Blackout and Shadow in Chris Goode’s Who You Are’, Theatre Research International, 38 (1): 4–19. White, M. (2014), ‘When Torchlight Made an Artificial Noon’: Light and Darkness in the Indoor Jacobean Theatre’, in A. Gurr and F. Karim-Cooper (eds), Moving Shakespeare Indoors: Performance and Repertoire in the Jacobean Playhouse, 115–36, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Wilson, D. (2012), ‘Introduction – Racialization and The U. S. City’, Urban Geography, 33 (7): 940–41

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Worth, K. (1985), Maeterlinck’s Plays in Performance, Cambridge, UK: Chadwyck-Healey Ltd. Zajonc, A. (1993), Catching the Light: The Entwined History of Light and Mind, New York: Bantam Books. Zarrilli, P. B. (2000), Kathakali Dance Drama: When Gods and Demons Come to Play, London and New York: Routledge. Zilliacus, C. (1976), Beckett and Broadcasting: A Study of the Works of Samuel Beckett For and In Radio and Television, Åbo: Åbo Akademi.

Part One

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1

Harnessing Shadows: A Historical Perspective on the Role of Darkness in the Theatre Scott Palmer

This chapter examines two key issues – the history and impact of the darkening of the theatre auditorium, and the development of the expressive use of light that emerged through a rediscovery of the importance of shadow on the increasingly brightly lit stage. The two aspects are closely related, but there are fundamental differences which it is useful to distinguish here: darkness in the auditorium is predicated on an absence of light – a controlled environment that is created principally to allow for better visibility; shadows, however, are created on stage as a direct result of a light source, and the resultant contrast in levels of illumination and areas of shade can be seen to represent degrees of darkness. Shadows can obscure parts of the stage, but they are also essential in achieving visibility since they allow us to perceive the object that the light is illuminating. In focusing on historical notions of theatrical darkness and its importance as both practical necessity and a fundamental scenographic strategy, this chapter seeks to reveal how darkness and the use of shadow have both influenced and continue to shape the experience of the audience.

‘Going to black’ ‘Standby….. Houselights Go. LXQ1 GO.’

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These instructions, familiar to many who work in the theatre, but not audible to the audience members themselves, often mark and signal the precise moment at which the performance begins. They identify the typical technical cues given to the lighting operator to dim the houselights and for any lighting preset (on the stage area or perhaps illuminating the house tabs) to fade to black. During this slow fade to darkness, an audible, collective intake of breath might be distinguished, followed by an excited air of hushed expectation as the auditorium becomes darker and the spectators prepare for the experience of the performance. American scenographer Robert Edmond Jones in The Dramatic Imagination recognized both this physical experience and its potential connotations: ‘How shall I convey to you the meaning of shadow in the theatre – the primitive dread, the sense of brooding, of waiting, of fatality, the shrinking, the blackness, the descent into endless night?’ (1941: 122). This moment is recognizable to most of us who have experienced performance in Western theatre. The darkness establishes a convention and a mode of behaviour in the auditorium. We understand that we should be quiet, sit together in the surrounding darkness and gaze into the more brightly lit stage space. At the interval, or when the performance ends, the houselights are restored and this is a sign that we may now leave our seats, talk to our companions and return to the outside world to reflect on what we have experienced. Scholars have posited a number of theories about when this convention was established and who was responsible for the phenomenon of the darkened auditorium. As we shall see, this cannot be attributed to a single moment in Western theatrical history, but it is clear that as theatres moved into indoor spaces – from around the sixteenth century – the control of light and darkness assumed paramount importance. For the first time light needed to be addressed practically for the auditorium and in both practical and aesthetic terms for the stage. However, the limitations of the candle and oil lamp, and in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries the technologies of the Argand burner and gaslight, restricted the areas of the stage that

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could be lit and therefore used by performers (Bergman 1977; Palmer 2013). Darkening the auditorium was key in seeking to ameliorate the practical and technical issues of lighting the stage and at the same time promoted new creative possibilities of using light. However, theatre history reveals an ongoing tension between the perceived need for overall levels of ambient light in the space of the auditorium and the desire to light the scenic stage while at the same time also ensuring that actors remained visible. Roland Barthes noted the impact of the ‘clandestine darkness’ of the auditorium and the consequently blissful ‘abrupt loss of sociality’ (1975: 35),1 but darkness also fulfils a practical purpose; it helps us to see the stage better as it is brighter than our immediate surroundings. Because our eyes are naturally drawn to the brighter areas of our field of vision, darkness enables us to focus our attention on that which is lit and hides that which should not be seen or is deemed unimportant. Darkness in performance, therefore, has both a practical and dramaturgical significance. In writing about light as an expressive tool in the theatre, Jones recognized that ‘our greatest dramatists have woven light and shadow into their creations’, and that when plays are realized on stage, the quality of the theatrical experience is conditioned through our relationship with light (1941: 117–19). He concludes that, to understand the nature of the dramatic experience, ‘The secret lies in our perception of light in the theatre as something alive’ (ibid.: 128). In this he is echoing the pioneering Swiss scenographer Adolphe Appia, who first articulated notions of ‘active light’. If light is acknowledged as ‘alive’, then its counterpoint darkness might also be thought of as a living force. Jones writes of a ‘different’ kind of ‘lucid’ light on the stage that enables us to both approach and literally to see drama in a new way. Theatrical darkness might then be considered lucid, since although it does not actually illuminate, it presents an eloquent phenomenon that prepares our bodies for what is to come. Dimming the lights in the auditorium at the beginning of a performance echoes ancient customs and rituals, which are also evident, for example, in Tenebrae religious services.

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There is a literal sensation of the darkness in the theatre space on ‘going to black’, but, as Jones suggests, the moment also provides us with a subliminal reminder of our own mortality through its suggestion of ‘the descent into endless night’ (ibid.: 122). While light is linked closely to our primordial sense of safety, darkness represents danger and the unknown (Hensey and Dowd 2016). Darkness is not generally welcomed in theatre buildings unless performances are in progress. Theatres that are unused or empty are said to be ‘dark’, and this is seen as unlucky. When theatres are closed temporarily there is a tradition (particularly in North America) of ensuring that a ghostlight – a single lamp placed on a stand in the middle of the stage – is always left on. The light ensures that anyone entering the theatre can navigate safely and discern scenery, obstacles or where any potential dangers such as the edge of the orchestra pit are. In protecting workers from the dangers of the dark, theatrical superstition also suggests that the light wards away supernatural spirits (Altman 2006). In my own practice as a lighting designer, theatre maker and contributor to the architectural design of theatre spaces, the ability to establish a ‘dark world’ of blacked-out space in which light can be controlled has caused many difficulties. Leaving aside the debate in relation to the problems inherent in the tabula rasa of the black box theatre space, darkness has often proved to be impossible in contemporary theatres even when there has been careful negotiations with architects, venue licence-holders and fire authorities. The intrusion of the illuminated Emergency Exit sign has prioritized audience safety over the aesthetic potential of darkness. Stanton Garner observes: Darkness … is a pervasive extradramatic presence in the modern theatre: establishing the playing space through its boundaries it both guarantees the audience’s invisibility in the conventionally lighted theatre and ‘erases’ the illusionistic field between dramatic segments. And yet closer consideration reveals the curious fact that – even on the modern stage … theatrical darkness is never total, never fully itself … . Like silence – which is always rendered virtual by the inescapable

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sounds of a peopled auditorium – theatrical darkness is always, if only slightly, an illusion. (1994: 40)

Audiences, therefore, rarely experience the sensation of total darkness in the modern theatre, and historical records also demonstrate that darkness was largely a convention rather than an actual phenomenon. Until the late nineteenth century, auditoria had been predominantly illuminated during the performance, and audiences went to the theatre as a social activity to be seen as well as to see. It is perhaps not surprising then that theatrical ‘darkness’ has been considered to have emerged as a convention of the modern era – but how and why did the practice originate?

Darkness and the auditorium ‘There is some confusion over the darkened auditorium,’ notes Nicholas Ridout (2006: 48). The differentiation in light levels and the consequent dislocation experienced by the actor contributes to feelings of stage fright as the audience cannot be seen. To explain this phenomenon Ridout provides a useful summary of the development of house lighting practice, citing Jean Chothia’s view that André Antoine’s 1888 production of La Mort du Duc ‘d’Enghien was the first that introduced the Parisian audience to the darkened auditorium (2006: 49). We can agree that the dimming of the auditorium was an important development in the establishment of the new naturalist theatre of illusion. It at once marked the stage and auditorium as two distinct environments and enhanced the convention of the fourth wall through which the audience gazed into a separate theatrical world. However, despite emphasizing this new relationship between audience and stage, Antoine’s darkened auditorium was not in fact a new phenomenon in 1888, either in Paris or elsewhere. It was the technical evolution of the gas table over half a century earlier that was to prove the single most critical development that allowed the lighting of both stage and the auditorium to be controlled remotely. The

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advent of gaslight provided a significant overall increase in light levels, and the ability to dim separate banks of light fittings to relatively low levels. For the first time not only was a controlled darkness possible in the theatre, but the use of pilot burners fed by a secondary gas source allowed gas taps to be turned on again remotely, so that lights could be extinguished and relit. Crucially, gas lighting also allowed the stage and the auditorium to be illuminated independently of each other and for all of the lighting to be controlled from a single place. Henry Irving was an acknowledged master of using these techniques and understood the need for audiences to view his lighting effects from a darkened house. He remodelled and refurbished the Lyceum in London in 1878 and was credited with introducing the darkened auditorium to the city’s audiences. Bram Stoker, Irving’s business manager, witnessed first-hand the experiments with gas lighting, and noted the techniques of using ‘many thousands of feet’ of flexible tubing to link the gas burners back to a single control: The final result was excellent. When the mechanism was complete it was possible to regulate from the ‘Prompt’ every lamp of the many thousands used throughout the theatre. This made in itself a new era in theatrical lighting. By it Irving was able to carry out a long-thought-of scheme: that the auditorium should be darkened during the play. Up to this time such had not been the custom. Indeed, it was a general aim of management to have the auditorium as bright as possible. The new order of things was a revelation to the public. Of course, when the curtain came down the lights went up, and vice versa. In the practical working of the scheme it was found possible to open new ways of effect. In fact, darkness was found to be, when under control as important a factor in effects as light. (Stoker 1911: 907)

This last sentence is important as it reveals the development of an aesthetic of darkness discovered through the new technologies of light. The control of light through the gas table promoted more intricate effects to be created, but the ability to create darkness on the stage also allowed a new method of scene-changing to take place without

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the need to bring in the house tabs to obscure this from the audience. The control of light, coupled with a substantial army of well-drilled technicians, allowed for new creative possibilities: When the workmen had been trained to do the work as Irving required it to be done, darkness itself became the curtain. The workmen were provided with silent shoes and dark clothing, all of which were kept in the house and put on before each performance. Then, in obedience to preconcerted signals, they carried out in the dark the prearranged and rehearsed work without the audience being able to distinguish what was going on. (ibid.)

While Irving was clearly employing a dark auditorium a decade before Antoine at the Théâtre Libre, two years before Irving’s innovations, Richard Wagner had introduced darkness to German audiences at the opening of the Bayreuth Festspielhaus on 13 August 1876. This revolutionary and highly technologized, purpose-built theatre was centred on the audience experience. The aim was to present Wagnerian opera2 in the spirit of the Gesamtkunstwerk – or ‘total art-work’ – and to create an all-embracing, imaginative experience for the audience that was designed to act on feelings as well as the rational mind. The audience were positioned in a single communal span of seating that was rigorously separated from the stage area by a ‘mystic gulf ’ comprised of a deep orchestra pit and a double proscenium. The darkened auditorium was key to promoting a sense of immersion through the focus on the combination of word, music and action on the illuminated stage. But the atmosphere created through the dimming of the auditorium lighting was also critical in isolating each audience member from their immediate social environment, preventing them from reading their libretti, and provoking a dreamlike reverie focused on aesthetic experience. Because of the radical and total nature of the experience offered at Bayreuth, it is often claimed that Wagner was the first practitioner to introduce a permanent state of darkness to the theatre auditorium. For example, Matthew Wilson Smith claims: ‘For the first time in theatre history, house lights were darkened during all performances, forcing

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the spectators to direct their entire attention on the work’ (2007: 30–1). This claim predates Irving by two years, but it is still very difficult to substantiate. As Wagner reminds us, the darkness that was such a feature of this first experience had actually not been intended at all: By midday of the first representation of The Rheingold the arrangements for illuminating the auditorium were really only so far advanced that the gas could at least be lit, though a careful regulation of the various fittings had been quite impossible. The result was, that the exact degree for lowering the lights could not be calculated, and against our will the auditorium became completely dark when we had merely meant to strongly shade it. This contretemps could not be remedied until the later repetitions of the whole festspiel; but all the reports referred to this first performance. (Wagner 1897: 103–4)

This passage is revelatory and challenges existing theatre histories (see, for instance, Abbate and Parker 2012: 52; Isenstadt, Petty and Neumann 2014: 31). However, what is clear is that the low levels of light (rather than complete darkness) in the Festspielhaus auditorium did make a significant impact on the aesthetic experience offered there, and was subsequently highly influential in the development of modern theatrical practice.3 Wagner had in fact been influenced by his earlier experience working in a theatre in Riga in 1837, where he had admired the quality of the very low levels of light in the auditorium, and later aimed to replicate this at Bayreuth (see Carnegy 2006: 14). While the dim candlelit auditorium at Riga may have been due to economic factors, Wagner’s account shows that darkened auditoria were not uncommon across Europe, even into the nineteenth century. Candles could be an expensive commodity (see Bergman 1977: 154–68), and in combination with the oil lamp, had illuminated the stage since the Renaissance. In England for example, when Elizabethan theatrical presentations moved into indoor spaces (at court and subsequently in the private theatres such as the Second Blackfriars Theatre), darkness had become both a practical issue and a scenographic opportunity. In contrast to the purpose-built outdoor

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Elizabethan playhouses, where performances took place during the afternoons and in daylight, the indoor spaces offered the potential for evening performances. Darkness could be experienced by audiences rather than alluded to by on-stage symbols such as actors carrying lanterns, as was the custom in the outdoor playhouses. This new sense of darkness (in England at least) replicated the playgoer’s experience beyond the theatre building where the night-time city was fraught with numerous dangers and populated by thieves and murderers that were only revealed in the darkness by the lantern of the night watchman (see Thomas Dekker in Kinney 1973: 258). Where performances in the indoor theatres took place during the afternoons, natural daylight was often harnessed through the use of windows with shutters regulating the amount of light within the theatre space. This use of windows was widespread during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, as drawings of theatres such as Amsterdam’s Schouwburg in 1658 clearly show (see Palmer 2013: 48). Shutters were therefore essential to create darkness and were operated manually to create night-time scenes and for mood effects such as those required in tragedies. Josef Furttenbach’s writings on lighting practices for the theatre demonstrate that these techniques were widespread across Europe, and underlines the importance of shutters in evoking darkness as an integral part of the dramatic action (1663). Indoor theatres were therefore inherently gloomy spaces once daylight was expunged, although it is perhaps difficult to imagine performances that took place in much lower ambient light levels than we are used to.4 Illumination was generally reliant on candles and oil lamps near the stage, with candles arranged around the periphery of the auditorium and suspended above in chandeliers. Although it is dangerous to make general assertions about audience experiences in the theatre in the early modern age, we do know that it was likely to have been affected by both smoke and the dripping of hot wax from chandeliers and sconces. Performances were interrupted continually by the intrusions of the candle snuffer who needed to attend to and trim each individual wick in a constant battle against darkness.

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However, the experience of the theatre varied significantly even between consecutive performances of the same play. For example, we know that records of the Comédie Française for the 1719 season show that opening nights and those attended by royalty were lit by the more expensive wax candles that provided a clearer whiter light, while later performances resorted to the use of fewer, cheaper and dimmer tallow candles (Bergman 1977: 168). This demonstrates that even in the most prestigious theatres, illumination of stage and auditorium was moderated by economic necessity, and that the experience of the theatre, conditioned through relative qualities of light, was far from uniform. It is important to note that until the adoption of gas lighting in the mid-nineteenth century, the centre and upstage areas had been dimly lit, the wings had been dark and there had been generally little delineation between the illuminated auditorium and the downstage acting area. Dark areas around the stage periphery ensured that actors were restricted mainly to the central downstage areas and the apron. In some cases the auditorium was actually brighter than the stage, as the German writer and theatrical producer August Klingemann observed in 1823: I was immediately struck by an obvious drawback, namely that the relationship between stage lighting and auditorium lighting was totally wrong. The former was too weak and the latter too strong; the reverse would have been more correct and better. This incongruity stems from the fact that the court pays for the auditorium light, while the theatre management pays for the stage lights. (qtd. in Schivelbusch 1995: 204)

Attempts to accentuate the prominence of the stage area and to darken the auditorium followed sweeping staging reforms in France in 1759, which also included the removal of spectators from the stage area itself. This gradual process of the darkening of the auditorium – instigated in the mid-eighteenth century, but not widespread until the turn of the twentieth century – ‘signalled that a change was taking place in the social, aesthetic and moral role of the theatre’ (Schilvelbusch 1995:

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206). We know much about this period from the writings of the French scientist Antoine Lavoisier, who critiqued the existing practices of lighting in the Paris theatres and suggested some technical innovations in his writings of 1781. In accentuating the scenic stage he noted that the auditorium had become so gloomy that students could no longer complete their literary education by following their play texts during the performance. Lavoisier also informs us of the Italian architect Giovanni Servandoni’s experimentations with a darkened auditorium for performances in the Great Hall (Le Salle des Machines) in the Tuileries Palace between 1738 and 1742, where the theatrical illusions were augmented by a dual process; the very deep stage was lit brightly, and through the means of counterweighted chandeliers which, when lifted into voids above the auditorium, ensured that it ‘was not illuminated by any direct light’ ([1781] 1865: 93). Although Lavoisier is writing about a performance he could not have witnessed first-hand, Servandoni’s techniques were well documented and the spectacular visual impact ensured that they became adapted for other theatrical presentations. Servandoni’s contribution represents a key point in the history of optical spectacle that is often considered as separate from developments in the theatre. These entertainments, which grew in popularity in the nineteenth century, included panoramas, dioramas, phantasmagoria and entertainments based on projected images, that were entirely reliant upon a darkened auditorium in order to be seen (see Bergman 1977; Baugh 2013; Elcott 2016). The new staging aesthetic centred on illusion promoted new practices of creating darkness in the theatre, and evidence, for example in Grobert’s treatise of 1809, demonstrates clearly that Antoine’s 1888 ‘innovation’ of darkening the auditorium had been pre-empted in Paris on numerous occasions in the preceding century. These developments in theatre lighting in France were not in isolation. They reflected practices established elsewhere across Central Europe,5 and can all be directly attributed to discoveries made in the court theatres of the Italian Renaissance. Servandoni had brought to France established lighting and scenic traditions that had emerged

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over the preceding two hundred years. Hence, if we wish to establish the beginnings of the darkened auditorium, it is in the writings of the scenic architects of the Italian court that we need to turn.

Light and darkness in Renaissance Italy We have evidence of the theatrical practices in Renaissance courts from the writings of architects who, as stage designers, were responsible for designing the elaborate stage settings and how they were lit. Their collective writings established the key principles of stage lighting, and through them we can trace the origins of the darkened theatre.6 Architect-designers such as Baldassare Peruzzi began to establish conventions for staging drama and rules for lighting the scene and auditorium in the Italian court theatres. Sebastiano Serlio committed these emergent lighting practices to print and provides the first written account of a method for lighting the stage in Book II of De Architettura in 1545. The Dialogues of Leone Di Somi written in 15567 are particularly pertinent for highlighting the importance of an auditorium configured to create the impression of viewing from ‘the shade’ and for noting how the use of darkness can emphasize tragic moments on stage (see Di Somi [1565]1966: 274, trans. Nicholl). The importance of lighting to the experience of theatre is also recognized in Angelo Ingegneri’s 1598 treatise Dramatic Poetry and How to Produce Plays, which provides us with the first records of a fully darkened auditorium, and also establishes conventions of lighting design, techniques and principles that continue to be used in contemporary performance practice: The darker the auditorium is, the brighter the stage will appear; contrariwise, the brighter the auditorium, the more confused will be the spectators’ view of the stage, for then that which ought to have been distinctly and easily seen will be rendered obscure and consequently less pleasing. Hence, at the fall of the curtain I recommend that every lamp in the auditorium set there to show the spectators to their seats

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should be removed. Still further, the less illumination there has been up to that point, the better it will be, for when the curtain falls the light on stage will seem more powerful and accordingly will produce a more lovely effect. (Ingegneri [1508] 1937: 133–4, trans. Nicholl)

This differentiation between light and shade on the Renaissance stage was not simply for practical purposes; rather, it was an essential component of a visual aesthetic. The ‘lovely effect’ refers to the perception of increased illumination in comparison with the dark auditorium, but it also facilitated a more overt use of shadow within the scenic stage that sought to mirror the contemporary chiaroscuro of the paintings of the period. The recognition of the importance of shadow gained prominence in the theatre of the baroque period.8 Writing in 1755, Francesco Algarotti critiqued the outmoded staging practices he observed in the Italian court operas in Saggio Sopra L’opera in Musica and advocated a new approach to stage lighting based on selective use of light sources to create shadows: What wonderful things might not be produced by the light when not dispensed in that equal manner, and by degrees, as is now the custom. Were it to be played off with a masterly artifice, distributing it in a strong mass on some parts of the stage, and by depriving others, as it were, at the same time; it is hardly credible what effects might be produced thereby; for instance, a chiaro obscuro [sic] for strength and vivacity, not inferior to that so much admired in the prints of Rembrant [sic]. And pray, why might not a representation of the pleasing mixtures of light and shade, in the pictures of Giorgione or of Titian, be found practicable on the stage? ([1755] 1767: 86–7)

Algarotti develops this argument by comparing the quality of lighting experienced in ‘those little portable theatres carried about under the name of mathematical optic-views’ (ibid.), and through linking the popular spectacular entertainments with the new aesthetic emanating from contemporary painting, recognizes the importance of a controlled use of light and darkness on the theatre stage through a selective use of sources.

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Discoveries that informed theatrical lighting practice in Renaissance Italy were gradually adopted in theatres across Europe, but there remained a tension between the relative levels of illumination of the stage and auditorium for social as well as technological reasons. However, as discussed above, it was the advent of the gas table and the new total control of light that it enabled, that facilitated for the first time a flexible and practicable use of darkness both on stage and independently in the auditorium.

Active light and darkness Although gas allowed the separate control of stage and auditorium illumination, a significant increase in overall levels of light, and the ability to fade to darkness, the rows of burners did not provide the type of selective, directional light to create contrasting shadows or ‘chiarascuro’. The advent of electric lighting compounded these issues since its gradual introduction to the stage after 1881 led to the systematic replacement of the gas burners, but with little differentiation in how it was used. The new technology first used in conjunction with gas lighting allowed both a uniformity and a significant increase in levels of illumination of the stage. French director Louis Jouvet recognized the impact of the problems created by universally bright lighting and lamented the loss of the golden age of the shadow: Benevolent darkness, which instigated a redoubling of attention, where imagination took an active part in the drama, where the viewer could see much more and much better than today. What progress have we made? … Comfort and convenience only. It would be incorrect to state that the theatre has benefited from the increase of light when you consider all it has lost … it has lost its dark and consequently some of its mystery and its magic. (Jouvet 1937: 44, trans. Palmer)

The rediscovery of the importance of shadow on the stage in the modern era is the focus of the second part of this chapter. Scenographers Adolphe

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Appia and Edward Gordon Craig were central to the promotion of a new theatre aesthetic. Through their separate writings, drawings and practice, both recognized the power and creative potential of the use of shadow on the stage. Both advocated a new scenography in which darkness was key as a response to a theatre that in the last years of the nineteenth century was still using painted shadows on scenic backcloths. The increased illumination made possible through the advent of electric light created an aesthetic conundrum, as overlighting the stage was destroying the theatrical illusion of the painted settings which had for so long been designed to respond to lower, flickering levels of light. In previous eras, shadows were a necessary by-product of light that needed to be accommodated; however, the brighter electric lighting both exposed the construction of the stage settings and, in casting distinct shadows of the performers against two-dimensional painted backdrops, revealed the artifice of the theatre stage, thereby instantly destroying any sense of visual illusion. Appia recognized both the fundamental aesthetic problems and the potential creative possibilities of using light as a unifying force on the drama. His revolutionary advocacy that shade and shadow were of equal importance to light on the stage has become central to our thinking about lighting design and has had far-reaching consequences for modern theatre practice. The precise circumstances in which this new scenography emerged, inspired by Wagner’s music, has already been documented (e.g. Bablet-Hahn in Appia 1983, 1986; Palmer 2015). However, given Wagner’s role in promoting the darkened auditorium, it is interesting to note the close relationship between Appia’s advocacy of a scenographic darkness (which will be examined below) and his own experiences of the staging of Wagner’s work. In 1882, the twenty-year-old Appia witnessed Parsifal at Bayreuth,9 but he was appalled at the quality of the staging, which he felt failed to match the qualities of Wagner’s music. Appia experienced four further Wagnerian operas in the theatre space that had been built for them, but could not reconcile Wagner’s stated aim of a Gesamtkunstwerk

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with the conservative staging practices predicated on painted scenery that he observed there. Appia later observed that ‘if everything in the auditorium at Bayreuth expresses his [Wagner’s] genius, on the other side of the footlights everything contradicts it’ ([1925] qtd. in Bablet 1982: 68). Appia is important to the development of modern theatre practice, as he conceived of light as the key dramatic element that could work in tandem with music to become a forceful unifying element. Darkness, shade and shadow were integral to his conception of light on the stage. ‘Light, just like the actor must become active,’ he argued. ‘Light has an almost miraculous flexibility … it can create shadows, make them living, and spread the harmony of their vibrations in space just as music does’ (Appia [1919] 1954, trans. Palmer in Palmer 2013: 148). Appia’s internship at Dresden’s Court Theatre in 1890–91 allowed him to witness Hugo Bähr’s innovative electric carbon arc technology,10 and he realized the creative potential of these powerful beams of directional light, which created strong shadows. Appia was to understand that harnessing the power of this darkness would be the key to unifying the space of the modern stage; ‘fundamentally a place of darkness that is energized and brought to life by the performance of light’ (Baugh 2013: 133). In order to understand the radical nature of this proposal, it is important to recognize the distinctions that Appia made between ‘active’ and ‘passive’ light. ‘Passive light’ (éclairage passif or Helligkeit) was the term he gave to the general diffused light of the stage area usually created by gas footlights, battens and border lights. These fixed instruments were typical ways of illuminating the stage at the end of the nineteenth century, and indeed what Irving had become so adept at using at the Lyceum. While passive light was principally concerned with the widespread illumination of the stage space, active light (lumière actif or Gestaltendes Licht)11 refers to intense and focused light, such as that created by Bähr’s lanterns that crucially allowed distinct shadows to be created. Appia’s own scenarios for Wagner’s operas reveal this new dramaturgy of light and shadow; mountain tops are shown enveloped

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in cloud and figures are glimpsed in silhouette against a brooding sky. In direct contrast to the general lighting which created shadows of the actors on the painted settings and thereby destroyed the visual illusion, Appia advocated a three-dimensional setting which would be animated through light and shadow. This, he argued, returned the focus from the scenery to the performer located within the atmospheric space of the stage. Light and darkness were to be used as visual counterpoints to the music, continually shifting in relation to the mood and the action to create an aesthetic unity. This selective use of light foregrounded shadow and darkness as a distinct scenographic tool and was linked precisely to Wagner’s musical scores in Appia’s writings and drawings. These documents provide us with imaginary, detailed scenographic responses to the specific demands of the drama, and they are widely regarded as the original examples of lighting scores. For example, Appia’s scenario for Tristan and Isolde, envisaged in 1896 and published in the Appendix to La Musique et la mise en scène in 1897, envisages a shadowy world that, in a radical departure from the conventional staging of the time, presents a space that is almost totally in darkness. In Act II, Tristan and Isolde appear to be lit by a single light from a brazier torch fixed to the castle walls (see Figure 1.1). While there is a naturalistic rationale behind the small pool of light that is shed on the lovers upstage centre, the flame is also established as a symbol of separation for the lovers and therefore also of death: ‘When the curtain rises: a great flaming torch in the centre of the scene. There needs to be restraint in using diffused light so that it doesn’t detract from the focus on the light from the torch or destroy the clear shadows that it brings forth’ (Appia 1986: 180, trans. Palmer). This selective use of ‘active’ light allows the surrounding dimly lit stage to bleed into our world in the darkened auditorium, emphasizing not only what can and cannot be seen, but also – through the creation of shadow in this example – the darkness becomes a metaphor; it represents the impossible situation in which Tristan and Isolde find themselves entrapped, and the abyss in which the lovers have become lost. The external world has become irrelevant to the lovers’ emotional state of mind and it is therefore no

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Figure 1.1  Appia’s proposed stage design for Tristan and Isolde, Act 2. The castle garden outside Isolde’s chamber. 1896. Swiss Theatre Collection, Berne.

longer perceived by them or by the audience (Figure 1.2). Darkness is employed as an active agency to immerse the audience literally and metaphorically in the ‘phantom world’ of the two lovers. At the end of the act and as a precursor of what is to follow, Isolde symbolically extinguishes the light to bring forth darkness and all that it represents (see Figure 1.3). Appia’s articulation of the function of darkness in the form of shadow and its manipulation in his imagined scenarios for Wagner’s operas represent a paradigmatic shift in theatre practice, even though these radical ideas were not immediately acted upon or understood. The approach was rejected outright by Wagner, which is fascinating, given Wagner’s own emphasis on the void between stage and darkened auditorium at Bayreuth. Inherent in Appia’s thinking is a shift towards using light and darkness for synaesthetic affect – an attempt to convey complex feelings and emotions through the creation of an atmosphere on stage – what Gernot Böhme, also citing Wagner as an example, and drawing on Kümmerlen, terms a ‘tuned space’ (2013: 4–5).

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Figure 1.2  Appia’s design for Tristan and Isolde, Act 2, Scene 1. Tristan and Isolde’s ‘phantom world’ created through torchlight and darkness. 1896. Swiss Theatre Collection, Berne.

Figure 1.3  Appia’s redrawn sketch dated 1923 for Tristan et Isolde. Act 2. N° inv. 1993–0067. © Cabinet d’arts graphiques des Musées d’art et d’histoire, Genève.

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A dramaturgy of darkness Craig, who was Appia’s contemporary, also envisaged a new form of theatre as antithesis to the ‘old scenography’ in which light and its absence would create a kind of ‘tuned space’. Craig also understood the power of shadow, in part through his experience of the theatre: first through the formative experience as a child observing Irving’s stage from the wings of the Lyceum and later from onstage as an actor in his company. Craig’s embodied experience of the impact of shadow was also evident in his daily ascent of the Duke of York’s steps in central London. Here he observed the effects of shifting light on a single architectural entity and the changing atmospheres that were created. Craig experimented with the use of light and darkness to accentuate the temporal qualities of the drama and to function as both symbol and expressive force in order to bring forth the ‘unseen but not unfelt’ (1911: 128). This is evident in both his realized productions, such as The Vikings at Helgeland (1903), and in his own imagined dramatic scenario The Steps (1905), inspired by the flight of steps in London and articulated through four microscenes each presenting a ‘mood’ and defined through light and shadow. In this ‘drama without words’ that can be seen as Craig’s own vision of a Gesamtkunstwerk, shadows foreground the steps as the central protagonist in the action as darkness gradually takes over the space and throws the human figures into silhouette. The darkness shifts the perception of the single monumental setting and guides the audience’s response in suggesting a transition from day to night, from youth towards death and from a carefree hopefulness towards a more sombre and reflective mood (see Palmer 2013: 96–100). As Craig famously asserted: ‘I think that my aim should be to catch some far-off glimpse of that spirit which we call Death … that life of shadow and of unknown shapes, where all cannot be blackness and fog’ (Craig 1911: 36). The fascination with scenographic darkness and the power of the stage to make meaning through suggestion and sensory stimuli were already evident in the work and practices of symbolist playwrights.12

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Maeterlinck (who Craig acknowledges openly in his synopsis of The Steps) exhibits an attraction in his work to ‘unknown shapes’ in a search for a new dramatic form that relied on both sound and image to act directly on the audience’s imagination. Adrian Curtin’s study of the staging aesthetics of Maeterlinck’s L’Intruse (The Intruder) at the Théâtre d’Art in Paris in 1891 reveals how an overt use of darkness was central to the creation of atmosphere and feeling. The stage was partially obscured by a scenic gauze which shrouded the ghostlike figures in a shadowy world illuminated by a single desk lamp. Maeterlinck’s dramaturgy, rather like that of later horror films, is predicated on a gradual and growing sense of unease achieved through a combination of sound and the absence of light. When the light source is extinguished, the blind grandfather is left alone both literally and metaphorically in the darkness. The sense of the unseen pervades the action as the intruder of the play’s title comes to be understood to represent ‘Death’ and is both characterized and ‘felt’ through the audience’s experience of the dark stage. The meta-theatrical irony of Maeterlinck’s play is that when it is performed there is something out there in the dark (most likely), invisible to the characters in the scene – namely the audience, figurative inhabitants of another realm who form a kind of spectral entity. In this regard, the audience notionally resembles the ‘theatrical dark matter’ at the heart of this play. (Curtin 2015)

Curtin here references Andrew Sofer’s term that seeks to describe ‘felt absences’ – invisible phenomena that ‘continually structure and focus an audience’s theatrical experience’ (Sofer 2013: 4) – an observation that both echoes and underscores Jones’ earlier articulation of darkness which began this chapter. The creation of an affective atmosphere, in large part realized through low levels of light that Böhme and Curtin examine, was also an important feature of Stanislavsky’s staging of Chekhov’s plays at the Moscow Art Theatre at the turn of the twentieth century. A direct contemporary of Appia, Craig and Maeterlinck, Stanislavsky was clearly

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responsive to emerging European theatrical trends, but importantly the influence of the surrounding stage environment on the feelings and emotions of the characters at the heart of this dramaturgy was as important for the affect it had on the actors as much as on the audience. Darkness was integral to this process, as it allowed the actors to become absorbed into the atmosphere of the play, and its affective qualities provides an interesting parallel with Ridout’s observation about the problematic dark void of the auditorium that was discussed earlier. The creation of a new aesthetic or ‘Chekhovian mood’ also had a profound impact on the audience experience and was largely responsible for the subsequent critical success of Chekhov’s plays at the Moscow Art Theatre and beyond. The low levels of light for the first and last acts of The Seagull in 1898, for example, created a world that was ‘dim and ominous’, but also ‘made it difficult to see and hear’ (The Courier 19 December 1898 qtd. in Innes 2000: 161). NemirovichDanchenko wrote to Chekhov and described the gloomy opening to the play: ‘It was often so dark on stage, that not only the actors’ faces, but even their figures could not be seen’ (in Allen 2000: 48). Despite the critique of symbolist theatre inherent in the opening Act of The Seagull, Stanislavsky’s radical approach to lighting the stage seems to owe a debt to the atmospheric staging practices of Maeterlinck and the symbolists at the Théâtre d’Art and elsewhere. The role of light and shadow in transforming our experience of space advocated by both Appia and Craig can be traced to the development of a new theatrical form – a dramaturgy of darkness that was offered as an antithesis to the modernist convention of the need to make everything visible through light. In contemporary theatre practice a dramaturgy of darkness has been evident in both specific performances focused on an absence of light and theatre festivals dedicated to celebrating work created for audiences in the dark, such as Battersea Arts Centre’s Playing in the Dark season (1998) and The Broken Space season at London’s Bush Theatre (2008). While many of these examples feature elsewhere in this volume, it is worth noting here how the absence of light has also become key to the audience experience in work in which the strict

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boundaries between performers and audience have been removed. In so-called ‘immersive theatre’ practices, the aesthetic tensions between the darkened auditorium and lit stage disappear altogether. For instance, in Punchdrunk’s The Drowned Man: A Hollywood Fable – a site-responsive, ‘immersive’ performance staged in an abandoned postal sorting depot in West London in 2013–14 – darkness was used to frame the audience experience from the moment they entered the performance space and then amplified as they were thrust out of a lift into a strange, shadowy world. Darkness worked on several levels. Practically, it both defined the separate spaces of encounter while also masking the utilitarian character of the building itself; it promoted feelings of disorientation and a sense of heightened sensory experience in a similar way to that experienced in some fairground attractions; and importantly it provided agency for the audience to wander anonymously, ghostlike, through the multiple landscapes spread across four floors of the building. Darkness also shrouded intimate one-onone encounters and micro-scenes that also used light and its absence as both metaphor and for phenomenological affect. The control of levels of light is as critical for this type of audience immersion as it was in Wagner’s theatre space. It is interesting that Felix Barrett, Punchdrunk’s artistic director, has openly acknowledged his debt to Craig and how an atmosphere of darkness underpins the company’s approach to making work: ‘What Craig realised was that every single theatrical element – the scenography, the music, the state of the mind of the audience, the auditorium itself – should be about creating the atmosphere, or Stimmung, of that work’ (2014). In using this phrase Barrett echoes the concerns of theatre practitioners working at the turn of the twentieth century who, as we have seen, also advocated the importance of mood through the employment of low levels of light as an affective aesthetic force. It is both a welcome recognition and a reinforcement of the central argument of this chapter that darkness has been an essential component of the theatrical event for many centuries. It also reminds us of the critical role that darkness continues to play, both onstage and off, and suggests that there is an

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urgent need to reclaim darkness as an integral and essential element of our experience of the theatre.

References Abbate, C. and Parker, R. (2012), A History of Opera: The Last Four Hundred Years, London: Penguin. Algarotti, F. ([1755] 1767), An Essay on the Opera, London: L. Davis and C. Reymers. Allen, D. (2000), Performing Chekhov, London: Routledge. Altman Rentals. (2006), Behind the Scenes: Ghostlight. Available online http://behindthescenescharity.org/bts/Documents/Behind_the_Scenes_ Ghostlight_Cutsheet.pdf (accessed 30 December 2015). Appia, A. ([1919] 1954), ‘Actor, Space, Light, Painting’, Journal de Genève 23–4, 19 January. Appia, A. (1983), Œuvres Complètes Volume I, 1880–1894, ed. M. L. BabletHahn, Société Suisse du théâtre, Lausanne: l’Age d’homme. Appia, A. (1986) Œuvres Complètes Volume II, 1895-1905, ed. M. L. BabletHahn, Société Suisse du théâtre, Lausanne: l’Age d’homme. Appia, A. ([1921] 1991), ‘Expériences de théâtre et recherches personnelles’, in Œuvres Completes Volume IV, ed. M. L. Bablet-Hahn, Lausanne: L’Age D’Homme: 35–56. Bablet, D. (1982), ‘Appia and Theatrical Space: from Revolt to Utopia’, in D. Bablet and M-L. Bablet (eds), Adolphe Appia 1862-1928, Actor-Space-Light Exhibition Catalogue, London: John Calder Ltd. Barrett, F. (2014), ‘Inspiring Innovators’, interview with Isabel Lloyd, The Economist: Intelligent Life Magazine, September/October. Available online: http://www.moreintelligentlife.com/page/contents/-septemberoctober2014 (accessed 11 October 2015). Barthes, R. (1975), The Pleasure of the Text, translated by Richard Miller, New York: Hill and Wang. Baugh, C. (2013), Theatre, Performance and Technology: The Development and Transformation of Scenography, 2nd edn, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

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Bergman, G. M. (1977), Lighting in the Theatre, Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell International. Böhme, G. (2013), ‘The art of the stage set as a paradigm for an aesthetics of atmospheres’, Ambiances. Available online: http://ambiances.revues. org/315 (accessed 30 November 2015). Brockett, O. G. (1991), History of the Theatre, 6th edn, Boston: Allyn and Bacon. Carnegy, P. (2006), Wagner and the Art of the Theatre, New Haven: Yale University Press. Craig, E. G. (1911), On the Art of the Theatre, London: Heinemann. Curtin, A. (2015), ‘Sensing Death in the Atmosphere of Symbolist Theatre’, unpublished paper given at Scenography Working Group, Theatre and Performance Research Association Annual Conference, University of Worcester, 8–10 September. Dekker, T. (1609), Lanthorne and candle-light. Or, The bell-mans second nightswalke In which he brings to light, a brood of more strange villanies than ener were till this yeare discouered, Oxford: Early English Books. Available online: http://quod.lib.umich.edu/e/eebo/A20046.0001.001?view=toc (accessed 31 December 2015). Elcott, N. M. (2016), Artificial Darkness: An Obscure History of Modern Art and Media, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Furttenbach, J. ([1663] 1958), The Noble Mirror of Art, in B. Hewitt (ed.), The Renaissance Stage, Documents of Serlio, Sabbattini and Furttenbach, Coral Gables, FL: University of Miami Press. Garner, S. B. Jr. (1994), Bodied Spaces: Phenomenology and Performance in Contemporary Drama, Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Grobert, J-F-L. (1809), De L’exécution Dramatique considérée dans ses rapports avec le matériel de la sale et de la scène, Paris: F. Schoell. Hensey, R. and Dowd, M., eds (2016), The Archaeology of Darkness, Oxford: Oxbow Books. Ingegneri, A. ([1598] 1937), Della Poesia rappresentativa e del modo di rappresentare le favole sceniche, in A. Nicholl (ed.), Stewart Masques and the Renaissance Stage, 133–4, London: Harrop & Co. Innes, C., ed. (2000), A Sourcebook on Naturalist Theatre, London: Routledge.

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Isenstadt, S., Petty, M. M. and Neumann, D. (2014), Cities of Light: Two Centuries of Urban Illumination, London: Routledge. Jones, R. E. (1941), The Dramatic Imagination, New York: Theatre Arts Books. Jouvet, L. (1937), ‘L’apport de l’eléctricité au Théatre et au Music Hall’, in L’Homme l’eléctricité, la vie, Classe 17 de l’Exposition international de Paris 1937, Paris: Editions Arts et Métiers graphiques. Kinney, A. F. (1973), Rogues, Vagabonds, & Sturdy Beggars: A New Gallery of Tudor and Early Stuart Rogue Literature Exposing the Lives, Times, and Cozening Tricks of the Elizabethan Underworld, Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press. Klingemann, E. A. F. (1823), Kunst und Natur: Blätter aus meinem Reisetagebuche, Vol. 3, Braunschweig: Meyer. Kümmerlen, R. (1929), Zur Aesthetik bühnenräumlicher Prinzipien, Ludwigsburg: Schmoll. Lavoisier, A. L. ([1781] 1865), ‘Mémoire sur la manière d’éclairer les salles de spectacle’, Œuvres Vol. III, Paris. Available online: http://moro.imss.fi.it/ lavoisier/main.asp (accessed 13 Februray 2016). Morgan, N. (2005), Stage Lighting Design in Britain: The Emergence of the Lighting Designer 1881-1950, Great Shelford and Cambridge: Entertainment Technology Press. Nicholl, A. (1937), Stuart Masques and the Renaissance Stage, London: Harrap & Co. Nicholl, A. (1966), The Development of the Theatre, rev. 5th edn, London: George G Harrap & Co. Palmer, S. (2013), Light: Readings in Theatre Practice, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Palmer, S. (2015), ‘A “choréographie” of light and space: Adolphe Appia and the first scenographic turn’, Theatre and Performance Design, 1 (1–2): 31–47. Available online DOI:10.1080/23322551.2015.1024975. Ridout, N. (2006), Stage Fright, Animals and other Theatrical Problems, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Roach, J. R. Jr. (1978), ‘From Baroque to Romantic: Piranesi’s Contribution to Stage Design’, Theatre Survey, 19 (2): 91–118.

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Schivelbusch, W. (1995), Disenchanted Night: The Industrialization of Light in the Nineteenth Century, translated by Angela Davies, Berkeley: University of California Press. Serlio, S. ([1545] 1657), The second book treating of perspective This second book of architecture made by Sebastian Serly, entreating of perspective, touching the superficies, translated out of Itallian into Dutch, and out of Dutch into English, London: printed by M[ary] S[immons] for Thomas Jenner at the south-entrance of the Royall Exchange, 1657. Smith, M. W. (2007), The Total Work of Art: From Bayreuth to Cyberspace, Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge. Sofer, A. (2013), Dark Matter: Invisibility in Drama, Theater, and Performance, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Somi, L. di ([1565] 1966), The Dialogues of Leone Di Somi, in A. Nicholl (ed.), The Development of the Theatre, rev. 5th edn, London: Harrap. Stoker, B. (1911), ‘Irving and Stage Lighting’, The Nineteenth Century and After – A Monthly Review, 69 (May): 903–12. Wagner, R. (1897), Richard Wagner’s Prose Works, trans. W. A. Ellis, Volume 6, Religion and Art, London: Kegan & Paul.

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Melting into Air: Dining in the Dark, Reification and the Aesthetics of Darkness Adam Alston

Phosphorescent watches, electric light that seeps from doorframes, the luminous orange of the night-time metropolis that penetrates cracks in blacked-out windows, and (most unbearably of all) tiny green and red LEDs that glow from the back of stage lights and occasionally from the headphones of audiences immersed in the intimate soundscapes of audioperformances: these have all become personal bugbears of a purist craving uncompromisingly complete darkness in theatre. So imagine my delight when I sat down to eat in a restaurant that had successfully evacuated light from its interior, thanks not least to the policed banishment of portable light-emitting devices, all in the service of sensory deprivation. Once inside, I spent most of the time listening to hubbub, and laughing with my partner as rebellious tomatoes popped off plates after forks failed to pierce their skin. It wasn’t long before obsolete cutlery was replaced with hungry but pragmatic hands that revelled in slimily tactile encounters with shellfish, shunning Western social mores in a place that licensed the more frivolous kinds of taboo – the rejection of table manners, especially, alongside the titillating brush of anonymous fingers. And every once in a while, thanks to long communal benches, I would turn to the invisible stranger next to me, or he would turn to me, and we would guess the identity of each new morsel, or apologize following the messy novelty of spilt water, or comment on the ability of the waiter – who was blind, as were all the waiters in this particular restaurant – to navigate the space so easily.

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Those familiar with ‘dining in the dark’ may recognize from this description an anecdotal account of attending Dans Le Noir?, which I visited in January 2015 at its Farringdon branch in London. Dans Le Noir? is a global franchise offering employment opportunities to blind and visually impaired people in the commercial sector. Darkness in these restaurants functions as an environmental condition intended to defamiliarize the sensorium for sighted publics, but it is also presented as a (problematic) gateway to sight unseen through an Other’s eyes.1 The success of dining in the dark restaurants like Dans Le Noir? rests on the appeal of difference and packaged otherness set at a safe distance from one’s own everyday experiences, but that nonetheless facilitates fun flirtation with blindness’ chimera. In other words, these restaurants build on a tension between ethics and aesthetics, juggling social responsibility and the profitable desire for sensorial exploration among neophile consumers. I left Dans Le Noir? disappointed and hungry – not for food, but for something transformative. This is because I find a wealth of potential in the possibilities of darkness, as Martin Welton puts it (2013), particularly in societies that have fallen foul of neoliberal individualism in the spheres of both work and leisure. What draws me to darkness is its potential to make us rethink and feel how we perceive and process peopled environments. I think this is important because perceptual, cognitive and social processes are by no means innocent of ideology, which makes me want to identify and explore the influence of a particular set of ideological effects – specifically those linked to the commerce of capitalism – on perception, cognition and sociality so as to better understand their ramifications, as well as scope for subversion. Aside from the bare fact of darkness, communal benches and the option of a surprise menu, Dans Le Noir? offers a remarkably conventional restaurant experience once inside (albeit one that may be responded to extraordinarily). The extra-daily qualities of complete darkness are present, but there is no real attempt to explore these qualities. However, Dans Le Noir? does not hold a monopoly on dark

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dining experiences, which span pedagogic, commercial and social enterprise, as well as theatre and food art – and it is theatre and food art that has tended to evidence a more explorative approach to the aesthetics of darkness, testing how things, people and the environments that house them are made to appear to experiencing subjects, and experimenting with darkness as a compositional element that can possess very different characteristics and promote very different kinds of effect and affect. Dining in the dark and theatre in the dark evolved concurrently in Italian Futurism, and as part of theatre and performance festivals in the late twentieth century, including the Avignon Festival in 1993 and Battersea Arts Centre’s Playing in the Dark festival in 1998. However, such links are largely unaccounted for in relevant scholarship, which focuses on social and commercial dining in the dark enterprises2 that run the risk of reifying, rather than defamiliarizing, how acts and objects of perception ‘appear’ to beholders in the dark, and assumes that the bare fact of immersion in darkness is enough to stimulate both a recalibration of the senses and a reconfiguration of social relationality. This chapter identifies these as ambitious aims, and argues that they lend themselves more to the playing space between experimental theatre and food art than they do to the commercial sector. The next section sets out a brief history of dining in the dark since the 1990s, which is a decade that propelled (without originating) a wave of interest in dining in the dark events; however, it does so by setting out the co-evolution of theatre in the dark and dining in the dark. The section after that offers a framework for what I’m calling a ‘critical theory of darkness’, which draws on and frames the Marxist theory of reification as an aesthetic concept of relevance to a critique of dining in the dark restaurants like Dans Le Noir? The penultimate section looks back to Italian Futurism for an example of a dining in the dark event that straddles theatre and food art, addressing the aesthetics of darkness in ways that might resist the reifying impulses of capitalism, at least those of the time. And a final section reflects on the continued relevance of reification in postindustrial societies where

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nothing – where darkness – poses as a unique selling point. Returning to the fruitful interplay between food art and theatre, this time in more recent history and in the light of compromises charted throughout the chapter, I explore how the artistic sphere carries the best potential for defamiliarizing acts and objects of perception in completely dark contexts. Has reification reached an apogee in the postindustrial culture industry, objectifying human relationships that serve not only the production of material goods, but the alluring immateriality of darkness as well? And what scope is there today to recalibrate the core media of political economy and of dining in the dark: the appearance, disappearance and representation of social relationships?

Dining in the dark since the 1990s: Scholarly preoccupations and the retrieval of theatre The first scholarly text to be published focusing specifically on dining in the dark was Siegfried Saerberg’s ‘The Dining in the Dark Phenomenon’ (2007). His argument is typical of claims made by many dining in the dark restaurants formed during or shortly after the 1990s as social enterprises, exploring how communal experiences of complete darkness can promote insight into the social construction of disability, especially as the result of verbal communication between sighted consumers and the blind and visually impaired labourers who serve them as waiters. Saerberg’s research aligns with other blind writers who challenge the misleading conflation of darkness and blindness (see Kleege 1999; Magee and Milligan 1995; Michalko 1999) – and is in this sense very useful – and it also builds on his own experience of working with relevant social businesses and special events. However, it is worth exploring other salient features associated specifically with darkness that move beyond a critique of simulation, while expanding the fairly narrow historical and geographical reach of his article. In response, I will be challenging Saerberg’s identification of a singular dining in the dark movement, which in his articulation largely limits

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scope to German initiatives emerging just before and after the turn of the twenty-first century, turning instead to a broader sweep of practices that propose alternative approaches to the ‘recalibration’ of sensory perception and sociality. A second and more recent article worth highlighting is by Tim Edensor and Emily Falconer, titled ‘Dans Le Noir? Eating in the dark: sensation and conviviality in a lightless place’ (2015) – an article that also focuses on dining in the dark as a social enterprise, this time solely as a commercially run social enterprise. ‘Repetitive, everyday sensual experience’, they write, ‘occurs in familiar spaces that constitute a stable backdrop to habitual practices of work, leisure and rest, routine tasks accomplished with little reflection, unless we are alerted to the possibility that things might be out of place’ (2015: 602). Defamiliarization – a canonical tactic in Marxist aesthetics – is meant to counter such a backdrop by alerting subjects to the overlooked and taken-for-granted. Edensor and Falconer are largely supportive of the ‘sensory alterity’ that Dans Le Noir? purports to offer its diners by putting perception ‘out of place’, but I’m not as convinced about the depth of this alterity and its departure from ‘normative apprehension’ (2015: 602–3). This is because Dans Le Noir? does not engage with a very particular circumstance that impacts on sensory cultures: the effects of commerce on sensory experiences under capitalist conditions of production and consumption. Light is displaced, which requires some degree of sensory reorientation, but normative apprehension is not affected all that much, particularly the normative apprehension of social relationships – at least, that is the argument that the rest of this section builds towards, and that the next unpacks. While they found an important precursor in Italian Futurism, dining in the dark initiatives did not gain any real momentum until the 1990s when it resurfaced in 1993 as a social enterprise looking to enhance understanding among sighted publics about the lived experiences of blind and visually impaired people. This resurfacing was linked to Andreas Heinecke’s travelling installation Dialogue in the Dark, which began as an experiment at the Foundation for the Blind in Frankfurt

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in 1988, before a fully fledged exhibition opened in Dusseldorf in 1989. The installation aims to develop understanding of blindness and visual impairment by immersing visitors in a series of pitch black installations based on spaces found in the host city. Dining in the dark offered another ‘edge’ to the Dialogue in the Dark experience. The first dining in the dark event affiliated with Dialogue took place in 1993 as part of the Avignon Festival’s Dark/Noir season, which programmed a range of performances coalescing around the exploration of light and darkness. Produced by Michel Reilhac, food and drink was offered for consumption in total darkness under the guidance and service of blind and visually impaired waiters, which went on to form the model for Reilhac’s Parisian pop-up restaurant Le Goût du Noir (A Taste of Darkness) six years later. The year 1993 is crucial for both theatre in the dark and dining in the dark, as Dark/Noir marks the first occasion that a programme of work addressed the aesthetics of darkness in any kind of coherent way. Furthermore, Reilhac’s participation in Dark/Noir provided June Bretherton of the Bretherton Consultancy and Martin Gent of dA dA dUMB with a model for Dark Dinners, which featured in the second major festival of theatre in the dark after Dark/Noir: the Battersea Arts Centre’s 1998 Playing in the Dark festival. Bretherton and Gent had previously collaborated when Dialogue visited London’s Royal Festival Hall in 1995, and they were both campaigners for enhancing awareness and understanding of blindness at the time (Gent 2014). Reilhac’s influence is clear, as is the link between dining, darkness and theatre within a themed programme of work, which begs the question: What is it that lends each to the other? Going to ‘see’ a show has a historical connection to social gatherings that centre around food, particularly through the custom of discounted pre- and post-show meals. But at both Dark/Noir and Playing in the Dark the social patterning of meal-based gatherings were rerouted into a curated context, the common theme of which was darkness and hence the inhibition of sight. Theatre-going ordinarily exceeds the timeframe of a performance once conceived as ‘an event’, but the curation of

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festivals like Dark/Noir and Playing in the Dark problematize smooth distinctions between daily and extra-daily activities by positioning the sociality of dining neither prior to, nor after, but within the context of a programme of performance. Theatre festivals like these are patently susceptible to the material conditions of production and consumption; nonetheless, the integration of dining in the dark within each opens up scope to play with how audiences consume and with connections between patterns of consumption and the ordering of the senses. However, there is much ground to cover before unpacking such scope in the final two sections of the chapter. The shared evolutionary heritage of dining in the dark and theatre in the dark has not always shared a stage within curated programmes; rather, dining in the dark has also emerged as an adjunct alongside such programmes. For instance, the Nalaga’at centre in Tel Aviv, which was set up in 2007, is a non-profit organization for deaf, blind, deaf-blind and general public artists and audiences. A dining in the dark restaurant called BlackOut is now a permanent fixture at the centre to be attended before or after a performance. A slightly different example comes from the Argentinian collective Teatro Ciego (Blind Theatre), which was founded in 2001 at the Centro Argentino de Teatro Ciego in Buenos Aires. Teatro Ciego has been running A Ciegas Gourmet since 2008, which picks up on Reilhac’s now influential model – making sighted diners dependent on the guidance of blind and visually impaired waiters – only it resembles more closely the North American tradition of dinner theatre, albeit set in complete darkness. Teatro Ciego and the Nalaga’at centre both conform to fairly conventional social patterns – dinner and or with a show – rather than experimenting with the artistic potential of dining in the dark itself. While I do not want to take anything away from the valuable work of either company as social enterprises, I find myself wondering whether a more radical potential for defamiliarization is missed, which relies less on the bare novelty of darkness. To get to the root of dining in the dark’s decoupling from theatre in the dark, as well as what this means for ‘a more radical potential for defamiliarization’, it is necessary to engage with the transformation

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of dining in the dark from a social enterprise into a global franchise. In 1999, the same year that Reilhac launched his pop-up restaurant Le Goût du Noir, Blindekuh (meaning both ‘Blind Cow’ and ‘Blind Man’s Bluff ’) was founded in Zurich as the first permanent dining in the dark restaurant, laying the foundations for a more commercially orientated set of initiatives. It was set up to give ‘sighted people an insight into the experience of being blind’, while facilitating job creation for visually impaired people (Blindekuh 2015). Two German restaurants followed shortly afterwards: unsicht-Bar (Invisible Bar) in Cologne in 2001 and Nocti Vagus and a second unsicht-Bar in Berlin in 2002. But it is Dans Le Noir? that has ended up as the biggest commercial success. Dans Le Noir? now has permanent branches in London, Paris, Barcelona and St Petersburg, and temporary restaurants have popped up in Moscow (2006), Lille (2007), Warsaw (2008), Bangkok (2008 and 2010), Geneva (2009), New York (2011/2013)3 and Riyadh (2013) (see Dans Le Noir 2014). The Parisian branch was the first, founded by the social entrepreneur Edouard de Broglie, in cooperation with Etienne Boisrond. It opened in 2004 with the support of the Paul Guinot Foundation for Blind People, which is a charitable organization that also supported Reilhac’s Le Goût du Noir five years earlier. However, Dans Le Noir? was always intended by de Broglie as a company that could transform social responsibility into a profitable business capable of employing a large number of visually impaired and blind people in a visionist labour market, and it now self-supports as a private company (de Broglie 2015). What is defamiliarized, if anything, in the darkness of Dans Le Noir? It seems to me that the social construction of disability – the very thing that’s intended to be defamiliarized in this franchise, and restaurants like it – is not defamiliarized at all, or at least all that much. This is because a more fundamental layer of appearance remains intact that is linked to the lack of an experimental approach to the aesthetics of darkness, taking for granted its impact on acts and objects of perception, and especially social relationships between consumers and blind and visually impaired workers. To unpack the reasons why, I want

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to return to an idea that until recently had fallen out of fashion: the Marxist concept of reification.

Reification in the commercial sector: Towards a critical theory of darkness Inspired partly by Marshall Berman’s (1983) reading of Marx as a modernist writer, I find myself drawn to the descriptors used in conceptualizing reification: terms like ‘disappear’, ‘invisible’, ‘ghostly objectivity’, ‘phantom objectivity’, ‘concealment’, ‘veil’ and ‘disguise’ (Marx 1995: passim; Lukács 1971: 83–100; Honneth 2008: 32; Chari 2015: 114). These terms have accrued special significance in the present moment, evidenced by a turn to immaterial modes of production in postindustrial societies and, more narrowly and literally, in the commodification of darkness. Moreover, they lend themselves to aesthetic scrutiny. Theories of reification frame capitalism as an ideology premised on the concealment of the labour process, which has as much to do with the formal and relational composition of a commodity and its appearance to beholding consumers as it does with economics. This is what leads me to suggest that reification has an aesthetic character (see also Bewes 2002: 107–10), implying a need to dig down into notions of appearance, and the hidden dimensions of objects, or objectified subjects. In his unfinished masterwork Capital: Critique of Political Economy (1867–83), Karl Marx identifies social relations in capitalist societies as the source of a commodity’s value, defining commodities – the fruits of labour – as a mediator of relationships among workers that only manifest indirectly after labour-power is sold and wages are exchanged for the material necessities of existence, such as food and shelter. To the producers of commodities, ‘The relations connecting the labour of one individual with that of the rest appear, not as direct social relations between individuals at work, but as what they really are, material relations between persons and social relations between things’ (Marx 1995: 44). Consequently, the labour process ‘disappears in the product’

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(ibid.: 118) and is incorporated ‘as a living ferment, with the lifeless constituents of the product’ (ibid.: 120). For Marx, the incorporation of a disappearing labour process is what animates commodities. At the points of exchange and consumption, the social relationships between people that go into a commodity’s production transform into social relationships between things. The obfuscation of social relations and their displacement to relationships between things is what Marx calls ‘commodity fetishism’, but it also forms the basis of the Marxist theory of ‘reification’ – a term most closely associated with György Lukács’s History and Class Consciousness (1971), which is a collection of essays first published in 1923.4 Lukács’s analysis of reification adapts the theory of commodity fetishism by focusing on the subject positions of social agents. For Lukács, reification describes both the objectifying effects of interactivity among social agents across capitalist societies as a result of pervasive commodity exchanges within them and an interpretative habit inculcated by these societies that tends towards the objectification of people and the world they live in. As Anita Chari neatly summarizes, the Lukácsian notion of reification ‘focuses on the interplay between subjective experience and political economy’ (2015: 62), and describes a veiling of social relationality that results from commodity exchange, as well as an objectifying mode of perception that becomes habituated as a kind of second nature. I want to draw on the concept of reification in putting forward a critical theory of darkness, but such a project is not without issue. Lukács’s Hegelian leanings were repudiated by Structuralist Marxists in the early 1960s (see especially Althusser 2005: 230), and more recent critical attention has targeted his essentialist and normative proselytizing of a ‘universal’ class – the class of the proletariat (Chari 2015: 121). As Judith Butler points out, the revelation of a more ‘genuine’, ‘truthful’ or ‘idyllic’ set of social relations that precede capitalist appropriation risks disregarding the inequities associated with historical precursors such as feudalism, on the one hand, while asserting normative relationships and ethical demands, on the other (2008: 104). However, provided

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that social relationality under capitalism is not pitched against a more ‘essential’ and ‘natural’ social order, and that we recognize that there are myriad configurations that a social order might adopt, then applying the concept of reification as a critical tool is still valuable if it can inform understanding of the influence of capital on perceptual experience and cognition. As Marx and Friedrich Engels anticipated in The Communist Manifesto, capitalist relations of production and consumption evolved over the course of the twentieth century with the advent of Fordism, followed by the ascendency of the service economy in national and international markets, and most recently the experience economy, of which Dans Le Noir? is certainly a part. ‘All that is solid melts into air,’ they wrote, but quite how prescient and literal a spin this was to have might have surprised them (2002: 223). The unique selling point in dining in the dark restaurants is darkness, which is an attractive commodity because of its ability to make familiar things disappear from view. That’s its draw. It is not just the disappearance of ‘the real conditions of life’ that need to be retrieved in its study, but the disappearance of the very things, commodities, that derive value from these conditions (ibid.). While the employment that Dans Le Noir? offers to its blind and visually impaired workers is a good thing, the generation of surplus value that is required for a commercial business to evolve into a global franchise carries important ramifications for the commodification of darkness and the kinds of social relationality that can occur under its veil. The labour of the waiting staff is present to customers who depend on their guidance, but the ‘pull’ of the dark – as a talking point, novelty and spectacle – takes precedence once framed as a core attraction. Reification is at work. What’s more, the kinds of social relation that are forged are no different to the more dominant kinds of social relation that can be found elsewhere in capitalist societies; they are still mediated by commodities. Dans Le Noir? does seek to undermine visual culture, but it does not affect the dominant mode of transforming social relationships in capitalist economies – reification – and fails to

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recalibrate a more fundamental framework on which the appearance and disappearance of social relations is based. Dans Le Noir? evidences how nothing can be marketed, but since its emergence darkness has also come to be used as a marketing device put in the service of material goods. For example, in July 2015 Coca-Cola Middle East launched an advertisement featuring six strangers who were invited to participate in an ‘Iftar in the dark’ held at the Fairmont Hotel in Dubai. The advertisement sought to redress prejudicial assumptions about the visual appearance of people, adding a layer of connotative meaning to an aesthetic of darkness that is of some relevance to its critical theorization. ‘I read a lot of books. I read cognitive psychology. I read behavioural science,’ says one of the diners, before an infrared camera reveals to the viewer a Middle Eastern man, in his mid- to late-thirties, perhaps, with tattoos covering most of his face and shaved head. This man is Loy Machedo, a personal branding strategist (Machedo 2015). A little later, one of the participants describes himself as an extreme sports athlete before a caption appears: ‘We then switched the lights on.’ The camera surveys the table from behind his wheelchair, before each of the participants describes how shocked they are by the appearance of one another. Finally, they are asked to reach beneath their seats where a box is waiting containing two limited-edition label-less cans. The closing tagline: ‘This Ramadan see without labels.’ The ‘see without labels’ campaign plays into the hands of reification as an ‘interpretative habit’ that springs from ‘the interplay between subjective experience and political economy’ (Chari 2015: 62) – only not at the point of a material good’s production, but its marketing. This is because the advertisement, despite its best intentions, does not so much undermine as substantiate the attachment of prejudice to the visible markings of race, ethnicity and disability; visuality is crucial in the advertisement’s logic, which objectifies the participating subjects by isolating and harnessing each of these markings to hammer home the message that labels are not for people, but for a commodity that mediates and is ‘animated’ by their interactivity. It is also noteworthy that women do not feature at all in the advertisement, which is striking

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in a purportedly anti-prejudice campaign. This is most likely because of the (variable) interpretation and application of Sharia law in several Middle Eastern countries, which limits the kinds of interaction that women are permitted to have with men, and the ways in which women are entitled to appear in public.5 Nonetheless, by anticipating criticism from the more conservative arms of Islam, the advertisement ends up sustaining concealment of the very subject who stands to benefit most from this kind of platform. The ‘see without labels’ campaign subsumes tension between the commerce of sociality and the commerce of buying and selling, and in looking to foster an empathic understanding of alterity it solidifies the very sensory framework that forms the brunt of its critique: ocularcentrism. The irony here is that the advertisement deploys light, so often associated with whiteness and steeped in ideology, as a means of revelation. In mediating a strange experience of darkness via illuminated screens, the campaign figures the aesthetics of darkness – in both its literal and connotative guises – as a fully reified spectacle abstracted from its conditions of production. Comparably, Dans Le Noir?, while clearly distinct from the campaign given its grounding in a live encounter, nonetheless shares in the reification of subjectivities pitched as Other; in both cases, alterity is encountered through fairly conventional means that neither test those means – as aesthetic conditions of production and reception – nor defamiliarize the objectification of the subjects they claim to reframe.

The electrical illumination of Italy and the Tactile Dinner Party Avant-garde precursors to the rising tide of dining in the dark initiatives in the 1990s have adopted less complacent approaches towards its defamiliarizing possibilities by exploring the aesthetics of appearance and disappearance at the tail end of a particularly interesting point in the histories of capitalism, sensory perception and social relationality.

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I have in mind the commercialization and globalization of electric lighting in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, which mark a period when a highly effective artificial light was newly omnipresent, and a period when the visual appearance of things and people came to form a relatively novel link with capitalism. Thomas Edison and his co-workers were vital contributors to the commercialization of electric lighting and its widespread instalment as a utility, not least because of the ‘backing of established financiers willing and able to bring his ideas to market’, such as J. P. Morgan (Hausman, Hertner and Wilkins 2008: 11).6 Edison founded a long string of light and power companies in his own name in countries around the world between 1880 and 1883, including Italy; Società Generale Italiana di Elettricità Sistema Edison was founded in Milan in 1883 and soon became Italy’s leading electric utility. While the company ultimately ran independently of Edison’s ownership and control and received foreign investment from European banks through the Banca Commerciale Italiana, its initial links to Edison and Morgan nonetheless signal the reach of foreign capital into nascent electricity industries. Italy witnessed a remarkably high growth rate of 18.6 per cent in per capita electricity production between 1900 and 1918 (see Hausman, Hertner and Wilkins 2008: 26, 80, 85), and it was within this period that Filippo Tommaso Marinetti founded Italian Futurism in 1909. Italian Futurism was inspired by: industrialization and the commercialization of newly emerging technologies, not least lighting technologies; the industrial and commercial applications of the theories of light, metallurgy, chemistry, electricity and electromagnetism; the incessant enhancement and revision of these theories and applications; and their impact on metropolitan life, which followed a fairly belated Industrial Revolution in Italy in comparison with other Western European countries (see Berghaus 2009: 2). Italian Futurism was ignited by innovation, and electric light was its beacon. Gas lighting inspired some of the earliest modernists, notably Charles Baudelaire (see Berman 1983: 90), but none celebrated the aesthetics of light in modern life as ardently as the Italian Futurists

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after the proliferation of electric lighting.7 Marinetti desired to ‘murder the moonlight’ (2009b: 59), eulogizing electrical advertising signs ‘obdurately opposed to the desperation of darkness … sickly twilight, the nostalgic moon, and the stars so abounding in depressing melancholy’ (2009a: 282, original emphasis). Indeed, these electrified advertising signs exemplify the pact that was being forged between science, technology and commerce at the time, and ‘the new Futurist aesthetic’ (ibid.) mined its consequences as creative stimuli. As for Futurist theatre, darkness tended to serve as a counterpoint to the captivating brilliance of electric light. A good example is Francesco Cangiullo’s play Luce! (Lights!) (1919), which begins by immersing audiences in complete darkness for a period of ‘3 BLACK minutes’, with members of ‘the PUBLIC’ shouting ‘Lights!’ until ‘THE ENTIRE THEATRE’ is roused into a ‘wild, crazy’ state of obsession for light, at which point ‘The stage and auditorium are illuminated in an EXAGGERATED way,’ just as the curtain ‘slowly falls’ (qtd. in Kirby 1971: 254). In this example, which marks an early instance of theatre in the dark (putting to one side a longer history of experimentation with shadow, gloom and the dimming of theatre auditoria), the aesthetics of darkness is toyed with – but only as a foil to be vanquished by electric light.8 Luce!, as a milestone in the history of theatre in the dark, came from a movement that also birthed an early example of dining in the dark – and it is the latter, particularly in an example that traverses both, which marks out a direct and rare embrace of darkness in Italian Futurism. The example I have in mind is taken from The Futurist Cookbook, which features a ‘formula’ by Fillìa for a Tactile Dinner Party. The Cookbook describes Fillìa’s plans – whether or not they materialized is unclear, but, if they did, the dinner probably would have taken place in 1930 or 1931 (Berghaus 2001: 14) – to invite participants into a darkened room wearing pyjamas ‘made of or covered with a different tactile material such as sponge, cork, sandpaper, felt, aluminium sheeting, bristles, steel wool, cardboard, silk, velvet, etc. …: without being able to see, each guest must choose a dinner partner quickly according to his tactile inspiration’ (Marinetti 2014: 170).9 Having selected a partner in the

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dark, guests make their way into a dining room where a banquet begins, which includes dishes designed to challenge the diner’s sensorium: for instance, a ‘Tactile Vegetable Garden’, to be eaten by ‘burying the face in the plate, without the help of hands, so as to inspire a true tasting’, all accompanied by perfumes sprayed into the faces of diners (ibid.: 171). Fillìa turned to darkness as a stimulant for a mode of encounter attuned to invisible forces, proposing a new relationship with the sensorium well-suited to scientific discoveries that eluded perception by the naked eye (see also Pietropaolo 2009). However, in doing so, he also turned his back on an important aspect of modernity that spread rapidly as a result of commercialism and globalization: electric light, which by that time had become domesticated and integrated into the municipal and industrial spheres. By evacuating light – including and especially electric light – from an experiment within a movement inspired by its radiance, Fillìa enacted a symbolic attack on the relationship that Futurism had forged with capitalism, recognizing that electric light had remained dependent on private energy providers until the nationalization of Italy’s electricity sector in 1962 (later reprivatized in the years just before and after the turn of the twenty-first century).10 Electric light in the networks of capitalist commerce could be bought and sold like any other commodity and had taken the form of an object well-suited to labour after dark. In facilitating the commonplaceness of commercially viable electric light, capitalism co-opted the means by which eyes could see clearly and pristinely throughout the day and night, which in visual cultures deeply affects the appearance of the world to its spectators. In other words, light, and the social relationships that had come to participate in its production and consumption as a commodity, became reified. But in depriving spectators of the ability to see anything other than darkness and by encouraging a more holistic engagement with the senses, Fillìa took on the politically imbued mediation of appearance – no longer filtered through the commodity of electric light, but through a more nuanced engagement with the world as it appears in the nostrils, on the tongue and at the tips of fingers. Commerce as an economic activity was consequently substituted for the commerce

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of sociality as participants sought tactile inspiration from communal interactivity, alongside an encouraged exploration of the sensorium. In other words, Fillìa concerned himself with the social possibilities of darkness in a scenario that collapsed theatre in the dark and food art, turning the ‘culinary’ publics of restaurant culture into an experimental social gathering that toyed with a sensus communis. Contextualized in the commercial activities of capitalism, light becomes both a reified and reifying entity; light is put in the service of an ideology interested in more than just its use value, ultimately resulting in the connection of capital to perceptual experience. This is what makes the Tactile Dinner Party so interesting, as it presented an implicit challenge to the reified and reifying characteristics of commodified light by questioning the alliance that Futurism had established with capitalism through a fairly novel embrace of darkness. At the threshold of food art and performance, Fillìa’s Tactile Dinner Party revealed the potential – albeit a potential that probably did not inform the project’s creation – to enact a radical unbinding of perceptual experience from an ideology that found itself able to profit from an ocularcentric culture. This potential may well have been arrived at by accident, but it nonetheless signals the kind of unpredictable (and for that reason potentially subversive) values that experiment can procure when faced with the reifying tendencies of commercial capitalism.

Darkness that dances: Between food art and theatre As Chari recognizes, postindustrialism has transformed the economy and modes of work in ways that Marx and Lukács could not have anticipated, despite prescient insight, which should make us at least a little ‘skeptical of the usefulness of the paradigm of reification for describing contemporary economic and political subjectivity’ (2015: 128). Postindustrial societies are not governed by the same Taylorist principles that informed Lukács’s writing and contextualized Fillìa’s Tactile Dinner Party; instead, as has been well documented in sociology

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and political philosophy, labouring subjects ‘are increasingly called upon to become active, enthusiastic, and entrepreneurial’ (Chari 2015: 128), as are consumers who now participate in the modelling or adaptation of products and staged experiences (see Pine and Gilmore 1999). However, in my view – which is a view shared with Chari and others (see, for instance, Bewes 2002; Honneth 2008; Crary 2013: 99–105) – the advent of postindustrialism has made theories of reification even more useful and illuminating. This is especially so when we take into account biopolitical studies of political economy that address the instrumental handling of corporeal experience in neoliberal economies (see, for instance, Hochschild 1983; Hardt 1999; Illouz 2007). The difference is that these more recent studies turn attention towards more contemporary issues that are no longer tied to the production of physical things; instead, they address immaterial phenomena such as affects, emotions, feelings and experiences that become ‘thing-like’ – and thus reified – without materializing as a physical entity. Such a shift makes it all the more important to consider reification’s relevance as a theory fundamentally concerned with subjective experiences of capitalism. On the basis of the examples surveyed in this chapter, it seems that dining in the dark’s most promisingly subversive potential rests at the threshold between food art and theatre. But what other, more recent, examples straddle this threshold, now that the context that inspired Italian Futurism has changed so fundamentally? While several permanent dining in the dark restaurants have developed cultural programmes that include live theatre and concerts, including Blindekuh and Nocti Vagus – and, as Maria Oshodi and Amelia Cavallo explore in their contribution to this volume, Dans Le Noir? as well – these tend to offer dinner and or with a show, comparable to Teatro Ciego and the Nalaga’at centre, rather than experimenting with the aesthetic possibilities of dining in darkness. However, a number of theatre and performance makers have been toying with food art and theatre in work for dark environments over the past two decades. Several of Caroline Hobkinson’s immersive dining experiences either took place in darkened spaces or incorporated the use of blindfolds

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and have directly referenced Italian Futurist banquets (see Hobkinson 2014). Enrique Vargas and the Barcelona-based collective Teatro de los Sentidos have also been creating multisensory performances over the past two decades, most notably with their touring production in the dark La Bodega de los Sentidos (The Cellar of the Senses) (2006–13). Beth Hogan’s contribution to the first of the Odyssey Theatre’s Theatre in the Dark (2012) programmes in Los Angeles – which were directly inspired by the BAC’s Playing in the Dark festival (Essex-Lopresti 2015) – saw audience members reaching beneath their seats in a fully darkened auditorium to find bags containing food for an ‘eat along’. And Dana Salisbury’s Dark Dining Projects, founded in 2005 in New York, mark an especially close relation to Reilhac’s dark restaurant model, only shorn of a clear ethical agenda, and replacing darkness with blindfolds. Dancers lead guests to tables, and audible performances in a range of styles, such as beat boxing, tap dancing and body percussion, unfold throughout. However, it is the work of Alicia Ríos that I want to dwell on in what remains of this section. Her sensory concerts performed in London, Madrid, Alcalá de Henares, Adelaide and Sydney between 1996 and 2002 were inspired by the Italian Futurists, and Rios’s website makes specific reference to the influence of Fillìa’s Tactile Dinner Party. Particularly noteworthy is her installation Cena de los 9 Vacios (9 Absences Dinner), performed in the gallery VACIO 9 in Madrid in 2002.11 Like the sensory concerts, Cena de los 9 Vacios participates in Rios’s ongoing exploration of food art and the multisensorial, placing diners in a darkened room to evoke notions of emptiness and serving them a ‘black meal’ consisting of red wine, black caviar and tapenade, among other richly shaded consumables (Rios 2015).12 Cena de los 9 Vacios is not strictly a theatre performance: it is a food art event set in very low light. But the food nonetheless plays at being something other, adopting a theatrical quality that deals in metaphors of darkness. The red wine, black caviar and tapenade are all material things that can be seen in dim candlelight, taking on a representational value that adds something more to sustenance. They are composed objects that offer themselves up to the diner’s interpretative capacity

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who must work to connect meaning to sensation and a holistic mode of appearance that appeals to all of the senses, and that refuses to allow for any one sense or cognitive capacity to assert primacy over any other. Darkness is as susceptible to objectification as any other prospective commodity, especially in postindustrial societies where growth in the immaterial consumption of experiences ties in with rises in immaterial production. However, while the doubleness that Ríos experiments with in her theatrical food art is not innocent of ideology – the kinds of food being served are quintessentially elitist – it builds on and at the same time makes strange a familiar process; darkness is ‘reified’ in the food, but a perceptual, cognitive and social encounter both with it and through it invites the perceiving subject to draw connections between the material, the immaterial and the representational. The diner consumes the reified labour of an artist, but reification as a process emerges as a point of engagement for the consuming audience member as they are invited to connect, on their own exploratory paths, the terrain of the sensory, the social and the representational. What is more, in flickering candlelight the contours and crevices of faces and bodies morph, and the appearance of diners to one another is made strange not because they cannot be seen, but because their appearance is affected by a darkness that dances. This, I think, signals the potential of the threshold between food art and theatre as a space for experimentation with the aesthetics of darkness. By appealing to the interpretative capacities of her diners, Ríos unsettles the reifying tendencies of dining in the dark not by romanticizing invisible Others, but by subtly shifting acts and objects of perception into an aesthetic playspace that allows darkness to orientate as well as disorientate, and that allows for food to perform.

Conclusion The commercialization and globalization of electric light impacted the evolution of art history, inspiring one of the most radical avantgarde movements of the twentieth century. While Italian Futurism

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tended to celebrate the virtues of electric light, Fillìa’s Tactile Dinner Party took a different path by experimenting with acts and objects of perception under cover of darkness. It was an experiment that sat between food art and theatre, anticipating the co-evolution of dining in the dark and theatre in the dark in the 1990s. Reilhac’s participation in Dark/Noir provided a model for dining in the dark that guided the establishment of permanent and commercially run social enterprises like Dans Le Noir? However, several artists and companies have since proposed alternative models more akin to Fillìa’s maverick experiment. Ríos’s Cena de los 9 Vacios is one such example, albeit one that will not satisfy theatre in the dark purists; however, it is not completeness that teases out the potential radicalism of darkness in the contemporary moment, or the fact and novelty of sensory deprivation, but how darkness is approached and handled as an immaterial aesthetic that allows us to rethink and sense the material world.

References Althusser, L. (2005), For Marx, translated by B. Brewster, London: Verso. Berghaus, G. (2001), ‘The Futurist Banquet: Nouvelle Cuisine or Performance Art?’, New Theatre Quarterly, 17 (1) (February): 3–17. Berghaus, G. (2009), ‘Futurism and the Technological Imagination Poised Between Machine Cult and Machine Angst’, in G. Berghaus (ed.), Futurism and the Technological Imagination, 1–39, Amsterdam: Rodopi. Berman, M. (1983), All that is Solid Melts Into Air: The Experience of Modernity, London: Verso. Bewes, T. (2002) Reification, or The Anxiety of Late Capitalism, London and New York: Verso. Blindekuh (2015), ‘blindekuh – more than a restaurant’. Available online: http://www.blindekuh.ch/en/blindekuh_zuerich/who_we_are/press_ releases/ (accessed 10 August 2015).

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Butler, J. (2008), ‘Taking Another’s View: Ambivalent Implications’, in A. Honneth, Reification: A New Look at an Old Idea, edited by M. Jay, 97–119, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Chari, A. (2015), A Political Economy of the Senses: Neoliberalism, Reification, Critique, New York: Columbia University Press. Coca-Cola Middle East (2015), ‘Remove labels this Ramadan’, YouTube, 4 July. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=84OT0NLlqfM (accessed 6 October 2015). Crary, J. (2013), 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep, London and New York: Verso. Dans Le Noir (2014), ‘Around the World’. Available at: http://www.danslenoir. com/franchises/around-the-world.en.html (accessed 2 January 2016). de Broglie, E. (2015), Skype interview with the author, 13 August. Edensor, T. and Falconer, E. (2015), ‘Dans Le Noir? Eating in the Dark: Sensation and Conviviality in a Lightless Place’, Cultural Geographies, 22 (4): 601–18. Elcott, N. M. (2016), Artificial Darkness: An Obscure History of Modern Art and Media, Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press. Essex-Lopresti, S. (2015), Personal interview, Royal Festival Hall, London, 6 October. Gent, M. (2014), Personal interview, Spinach, London, 6 October. Hardt, M. (1999), ‘Affective Labour’, Boundary 2, 26 (2): 89–100. Hausman, W. J., Hertner, P. and Wilkins, M. (2008), Global Electrification: Multinational Enterprise and International Finance in the History of Light and Power, 1878-2007, New York: Cambridge University Press. Hobkinson, C. (2014), ‘An Aerobanquet at the 24ft Slow Speed Windtunnel Building Q121, Farnborough’, 21 June, Stirring with knives. Available at: http://www.stirringwithknives.com/ (accessed 29 December 2015). Hochschild, A. R. (1983), The Managed Heart: Commercialization of Human Feeling, 2nd edn, London: University of California Press. Honneth, A. (2008), Reification: A New Look at an Old Idea, translated by J. Ganahl, edited by M. Jay, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Huysmans, J-K. (2003), Against Nature (A Rebours), translated by Robert Baldick, London: Penguin.

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Illouz, E. (2007), Cold Intimacies: The Making of Emotional Capitalism, Cambridge: Polity Press. Jay, M. (2012), ‘Introduction’, in A. Honneth, Reification: A New Look at an Old Idea, edited by M. Jay, 3–13, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Kirby, M. (1971), Futurist Performance, New York: E. P. Dutton & Co. Inc. Kleege, G. (1999), Sight Unseen, New Haven: Yale. Lukács, G. (1971), History and Class Consciousness, translated by R. Livingstone, London: Merlin Press. Machedo, L. (2015), ‘Coca-Cola “Remove Labels This Ramadan” BehindThe-Scene with Loy Machedo’, LOYMACHEDO: Personal Branding Strategist, 9 July. Available at: http://www.loymachedo.com/2015/07/cocacola-remove-labels-this-ramadan-behind-the-scene-with-loy-machedo/ (accessed 10 October 2015). Magee, B. and Milligan, M. (1995), On Blindness: Letters between Bryan Magee and Martin Milligan, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Marinetti, F. T. (2009a), ‘Electrical Advertising Signs: An Open Letter to his Excellency Mussolini’, translated by L. Rainey, in L. Rainey, C. Poggi and L. Wittman (eds), Futurism: An Anthology, 282, New Haven: Yale University Press. Marinetti, F. T. (2009b), ‘Let’s Murder the Moonlight’, translated by L. Rainey, in L. Rainey, C. Poggi and L. Wittman (eds), Futurism: An Anthology, 54–61, New Haven: Yale University Press. Marinetti, F. T. (2009c), ‘Tactilism’, translated by Lawrence Rainey, in L. Rainey, C. Poggi and L. Wittman (eds), Futurism: An Anthology, 264–9, New Haven: Yale University Press. Marinetti, F. T. (2014 [1932]), The Futurist Cookbook, translated by S. Brill, edited by L. Chamberlain, London: Penguin. Marx, K. (1995), Capital: an Abridged Edition, edited by David McLellan, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Marx, K. and Engels, F. (2002), The Communist Manifesto, translated by S. Moore, London: Penguin. Michalko, R. (1999), The Two-in-One: Walking with Smokie, Walking with Blindness, Philadelphia: Temple University Press.

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Palermo, E. (2014), ‘Who Invented the Light Bulb?’, LiveScience, 15 February. Available at: http://www.livescience.com/43424-who-invented-the-lightbulb.html (accessed 17 August 2015). Pietropaolo, D. (2009), ‘Science and the Aesthetics of Geometric Splendour in Italian Futurism’, in G. Berghaus (ed.), Futurism and the Technological Imagination, 41–61, Amsterdam: Rodopi. Pine, B. J. and Gilmore, J. H. (1999), The Experience Economy: Work is Theatre & Every Business a Stage, Boston: Harvard Business School Press. Rios, A. (2015), Alicia and Ali&Cia – Food Artists. Available at: http://www. alicia-rios.com/en/food/sensory-concerts.html (accessed 14 September 2015). Saerberg, S. (2007), ‘The Dining in the Dark Phenomenon’, Disability Studies Quarterly, 27 (3) (Summer): n.p. Spence, C. and Piqueras-Fiszman, B. (2012), ‘Dining in the Dark: Does Food Taste Better in the Dark?’, The Psychologist, 25 (12) (December): 888–91. Spence, C., Hobkinson, C. Gallace, A. and Piqueras Fiszman, B. (2013), ‘A touch of gastronomy’, Flavour, 2 (14): 1–15. Welton, M. (2013), ‘The Possibility of Darkness: Blackout and Shadow in Chris Goode’s Who You Are’, Theatre Research International, 38 (1) (March): 4–19.

3

Creating in the Dark: Conceptualizing Different Darknesses in Contemporary Theatre Practice Liam Jarvis

Darkness has been positioned by some contemporary theatre practitioners as a lack, a deficiency or the negation of an aesthetic system. For example, in the discourse around his practice, director Robert Wilson stresses the importance of light to theatre, most notably articulated through his axiom, ‘Without light, no space. Without space, no theatre’ (Teschke 1999: 15). Wilson has argued that light is the ‘most important element in theatre … because it’s the element that helps us to see and hear’ (Enright 1994: 20). But beyond illuminating the performer, he goes further by stating that light in his work ‘assumes the function of an actor’ (Grillet and Wilson 1992: 8, italics added). Through this understanding, light performs. As Maria Shevtsova describes, light for Wilson becomes a ‘surrogate’ for what would otherwise be achieved by actors (Shevtsova 2007: 65). By this logic, in complete darkness the spectator is without space, deprived of the act and denied theatre. Correspondingly, this specific conceptualization of ‘theatre’ leads to a logical conclusion in which darkness is conceived of as something that is ‘anti-theatrical’ in the respect that it negates the possibility of theatre becoming manifest; ‘Without light’ there is ‘no theatre’. While, as Tracy C. Davis and Thomas Postlewait have argued, ‘theatricality’ is a word with multiple meanings and applications (Davis and Postlewait 2003: 1), I use the word’s equally polysemic antonym ‘anti-theatrical’ here specifically to refer to Wilson’s indirect but implicit

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argument that the absence of light equates to an effacement of ‘theatre’. This inevitably privileges the role of sight in reception – an idea that accords with the etymological origin of the word ‘theatre’ from the Greek theatron (‘seeing place’), deriving from theasthai (to ‘behold’) and thea (‘a view’ or ‘a seeing’). Correspondingly, I claim that via this discourse Wilson’s particularized notion of ‘theatre’ becomes aligned with common understandings of ‘aesthetics’ that are entrenched in the prioritization of the visual sense. But does an aesthetic experience cease in the darkness, or when a blindfold covers a spectator’s eyes, any more than ‘theatre’ ends with the lights out? Wilson’s predecessor in matters of theatre lighting, Adolphe Appia, placed a similar emphasis on the role of light which he described as ‘form-giving’ (Appia 1993: 96).1 However, I argue that darkness should be understood as something more than an anti-theatrical phenomenon that is form-removing. As Martin Welton suggests in Feeling Theatre (2011), darkness is not just a concealing ‘veil’, but has its own distinct vocabulary of ‘shade, shadow, dimming, gloaming, and so on’ (2011: 53). As I will demonstrate in this chapter, emergent theatres that incorporate darkness in different ways provide a compelling counter-argument to Wilson’s antitheatrical claim. In the selected theatre practices discussed in this chapter, it is my contention that darkness performs. Far from being the wholesale absence of an aesthetic system, I assert that the interest compounded in this book – which includes contributions by and about practitioners who work with darkness as a primary (im)material – necessitates reframing darkness as the key operative of sense-making in theatre practice. As I will demonstrate, darkness is a protean phenomenon that has been conceptualized by theatre makers in a variety of ways across different performance modes and vocabularies. Pursuing what Erin Hurley refers to as ‘engineered darkness’ (2004: 211) – pertaining to the technical achievement of the blackout from the nineteenth century, as differentiated from naturally occurring darkness – I will use different exemplars of theatre practice to counter Wilson’s claim. Furthermore, I will demonstrate through the selected case studies that engineered darkness should be understood as relational and pluralistic insofar as it performs different roles in

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different contexts; from a narratological function as ‘diegetic darkness’ in Ann Washburn’s Mr Burns (2014) to an aesthetic of sustainability in FanSHEN’s Cheese, or from counteracting visual culture in Tom Morris’s Playing in the Dark season to disrupting the spectacle of displaying bodies in Shaun Prendergast’s The True History of the Tragic Life and Triumphant Death of Julia Pastrana, the Ugliest Woman in the World (1998). Finally, I will examine how darkness accumulates metaphorical resonances with quantum superposition in the one-on-one theatre spectatorship of Analogue’s Lecture Notes on a Death Scene. Darkness performs for an audience in myriad ways and the task of this chapter is to disentangle the general aesthetic traits of the different darknesses that theatre makers have deployed, both in my own work as a practitioner with my company Analogue and in the adjacent practices of other artists. As part of this survey I will reflect on aesthetic differences between plays in the dark (i.e. darkness that is first schematized in the stage directions of a playtext) and the immersive works of artists or companies that generate both shared and isolated experiences in the dark (for audiences and individuals in ‘one-on-one’ spectatorship). Furthermore, I will highlight ways in which theatrical darkness is mutable. For example, in touring productions of plays intended to be performed in the pitch black, darkness has accrued unintended or unanticipated meanings as a result of shifting the social, contextual or spatio-temporal circumstances in which the performance is received; a notion that I will connect to both ‘deixis’ in linguistics and the propensity of theatrical darkness towards ‘terror’. But beyond merely performing as a ‘surrogate actor’, I will demonstrate that darkness is heterogeneous in its performing roles.

Dark aesthetics Prior to the task of identifying the aesthetic traits of theatre in the dark, I must first undertake the groundwork of establishing darkness as a part of an aesthetic system, as opposed to a phenomenon characterized only by non-aesthetic properties. The necessity of this undertaking arises

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from the fact that in theatre scholarship, darkness has been excluded from various taxonomies of meaning-making. For example, in Jon Whitmore’s semiotic framework for analysing performance in Directing Postmodern Theater: Shaping Signification in Performance (1994), he identifies twenty sign systems from the spectator to systems that ‘frame’ the performance (e.g. publicity and environment) (1994: 13). Whitmore proposes that these signs are, in turn, decoded by five communications systems in theatre reception; linguistic, visual, aural, olfactoral and tactile.2 Of these sign systems, three-quarters convey meaning through the visual modality. This semiotic approach to ‘reading’ theatre places a heavy emphasis on visuality, and darkness does not acquire the status of a ‘sign system’ in Whitmore’s schema. Whereas for Wilson darkness is the absence of theatre, here it is conceptualized by virtue of its omission as the absence of ‘signs’. The exclusion of darkness as a theatrical sign-system in its own right suggests that, via Whitmore’s logic, it cannot be assimilated easily within the order of ‘sign-reading’. On occasions when darkness is treated as a ‘sign’ in the theatre, it rarely signifies itself – what I term as diegetic darkness acts as an indexical sign to a referent within the fictive cosmos of drama (i.e. darkness that ‘performs’ in the narrative world as other darknesses).3 Similarly, non-diegetic or extradiegetic darkness operates in a cause-and-effect relationship outside of the ‘world of the play’ in the theatrical circumstance. Perhaps the most common example is the use of blackouts to cue the audience for the commencement or ending of a performance (i.e. darkness that is not experienced by characters in a narrative world).4 But darkness, like fire, running water or clocks, might be better assigned to Bert O. States’s list of ‘happenings’ in the aesthetic world that ‘resist being either signs or images’ (1985: 29), as set out in Great Reckonings in Little Rooms: On the Phenomenology of Theater (1985). The idea that darkness resists being an image, or what I will term in this chapter as a ‘non-image’, is brought into sharp relief in Chris Goode’s performance, Who You Are (2010). This took place inside Miroslaw Balka’s steel container artwork, How It Is (2009–10) at Tate Modern, which plunged visitors into total darkness. Commenting

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on his observation of gallery visitors, Goode says: ‘One of the teenagers took a photo of himself on his mobile phone. … Wanting to say, “look I was there” in this great darkness. The problem, of course, is you can have a picture or the darkness, not both. You can’t take a picture of the darkness’ (Goode 2010). From this anecdote, pitch blackness resists the camera’s ability to apprehend it by way of a mediatized likeness, or put differently, it confounds mimesis. In this respect, complete darkness might be thought of as a non-image insofar as it is irreducible to a visual sign and resistant to analysis through the lens of visual or pictorial semiotics. But is total darkness akin to Bert O. States’s ‘happenings’, a ‘sign’, or both? If we think of a sign as an ‘object, quality, or event whose presence or occurrence indicates the probable presence or occurrence of something else’ (‘Sign’), darkness in Goode’s piece, while resisting the digitally reproducible image, continues to signify through its conjunction with his text. In Who You Are, the dialogue draws the audience’s attention to ‘how suggestible we all become in the dark’ – the performance connects the gloom of Balka’s container to historic darknesses under cover of which were the intimate ‘copulations’ that may have led to the very existence of some of the unseen audience members. It is the eroticism and latency of this specific darkness that is signposted as a space of becoming and conceiving where ‘there are more possibilities’. Darkness in Goode’s performance is a wavering signifier moulded into different signifieds, a ‘happening’ and a non-image that is, nonetheless, replete with possibilities for mental picture-making. Beyond my delineation of darkness as a non-image, I would identify a broader pattern of discourse in aesthetics through which darkness could be understood as a non-aesthetic, or a phenomenon singularly characterized by that which is not perceptible. Susan Feagin and Patrick Maynard argue in Aesthetics (1997) that the word ‘aesthetic’ is most commonly used to refer to what is ‘visually pleasing, while philosophically it is used in relation to both visual and auditory experiences, with ongoing debate about whether gustatory and kinaesthetic perception should be thought of as “aesthetic”’ (1997: 3). Feagin and Maynard’s definition affirms that visuality is bound up in common usage of the

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word ‘aesthetics’. For this reason, the potentially paradoxical notion of a ‘dark aesthetics’ necessitates a return to the etymological origins of the word. ‘Aesthetics’ derives from the Greek word aisthētikos, from aisthēta (‘perceptible things’) and aisthesthai (‘perceive’). At the root of ‘aesthetics’ is what is perceptible by the senses, or one’s becoming aware or conscious of something. Accordingly, the correlation between light and what is known and darkness and what is unknown to the senses are deeply entrenched in the English language, as evidenced by numerous idioms, such as to ‘shed light’ on something, to ‘see the light’, or to be ‘kept in the dark’ – the latter example connecting darkness to a state of ignorance or the unforeseen which corresponds with theatrical darkness that performs a concealing function as a plot device (e.g. a blackout in the murder scene of a ‘whodunit’). Like the prioritization of light in Wilson’s discourse on theatre, and the proclivity of theatrical signs towards visual communication systems in Whitmore’s taxonomy of signification, these idioms accentuate the role of the ocular sense in meaning-making. But darkness understood only as that which renders things imperceptible is too limiting a notion when examining theatre in the dark. ‘Dark aesthetics’ then, in the context of performances that deploy engineered darkness or low-level lighting as a primary state throughout a performance, invites us to attempt to understand what can only be known by being enveloped in different darknesses.

Plays in the dark Peter Handke famously posited that in the theatre ‘light is brightness pretending to be other brightness’ (1969: 10), anticipating Shevtsova’s claim, made on behalf of Robert Wilson’s work, that light performs as a ‘surrogate’ actor. Handke draws attention to the diegetic quality of theatrical light, which must double as light in the narrative world. Concomitantly, diegetic darkness in the theatre signposts the presence of its double in the narrative world. Following my claim that diegetic darkness in the theatre acts or deputizes for other darknesses, in what specific roles has it been

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cast by the playwright in both the stage directions and dialogue of the playscript? In accordance with my provocation that ‘darkness performs’, in this section I want to extrapolate the different respects in which this is the case, focusing on the aesthetic properties of playtexts that are intended to be performed in either complete darkness or penumbral gloom. Anne Washburn’s Mr Burns: A Post-electric Play (2014) explores an American future without power. The play is set in the aftermath of a catastrophic event involving the meltdown of nuclear power stations – its title providing an explicit reference to Charles Montgomery Burns, an archetype of corporate America and owner of the Springfield nuclear power plant in Matt Groening’s animated sitcom, The Simpsons. The play premiered at the Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company in Washington D.C. in 2012 with a New York premiere of Director Steve Cosson’s production at Playwrights Horizons in 2013, and a further production directed by Robert Icke at The Almeida Theatre, London in 2014. Washburn’s stage directions indicate that ‘all illumination is from ostensibly non-electric sources’ (2014: 9) – ‘ostensibly’, but not actually, since Icke’s production made full use of a theatre lighting rig to explore the varying shades of murkiness in this America ‘unplugged’. However, aligned with Handke’s idiom, theatre lighting in the context of Icke’s production is pretending to be other light; Act One takes place by ‘firelight’, Act Two ‘under a skylight’ and Act Three is lit with ‘non-electric instrumentation … candles and oil lamps, probably, or gas’ (ibid.: 9). The directions in the playtext therefore demand an aesthetic in which darkness is a predominant force, and although theatre lighting is used to fill-in the stage of Icke’s production, as Michael Billington observed in his review in The Guardian, the actors were frequently disguised by ‘pervading gloom’ (2014). But this diegetic theatrical darkness is also pretending to be another darkness; the gloom indexically references the unspecified inciting incident that has set the action of the play in motion. The loss of electric light when accompanied by ambiguity in the plot as to the exact cause evokes the familiar epistemological correlate I have flagged between darkness and ignorance, or at least the absence of available information to the senses. It is in this darkness that stories

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are exchanged by survivors gathered around the flickering embers of an onstage campfire. Time is passed by piecing together from memory the plot events of an episode of The Simpsons. In this darkness, the characters of Washburn’s play wait out a nuclear winter by engaging in a collective act of remembrance, summoning from memory a now lost artefact of American popular culture. Post-television, theatrical reconstruction is the only means to revive The Simpsons which is reconceived as part of theatre’s oral tradition as the precise plot events of the lost episode flicker back and forth between competing memories with the flames of the fire. Seven years on, what emerges from this darkness in Act Two is the formation of an acting troupe who trade in nostalgic re-enactments of Simpsons episodes as a currency before Act Three propels the audience seventy-five years into a future in which the sitcom has mutated into another theatrical form; an operatic masque pageant that is ceremonially lit with candle-adorned chandeliers. Light accrues symbolic value as ‘hope’ in Homer’s dialogue when he reassures his children, ‘Hope will always triumph. Day will always follow night’ (2014: 85–6), while the dialogue of the ‘chorus of the shades of Springfield’ shapes the gloom into the familiar trope of a lingering and threatening darkness that must be overcome by the protagonist, Bart. This notion is akin to the ritualized conquering of darkness in preChristian ‘festivals of light’.5 However, unlike these ancient festivals, in which darkness was associated with primal anxieties over natural or celestial order (e.g. fear that the sun might not rise), this darkness is attributable to human cause in the twenty-first-century epoch of the Anthropocene. In the play’s conclusion, the stage directions prompt the reveal of the actor playing Mr Burns, who is ‘frantically pedaling a bicycle connected to a treadmill. As he pedals the mechanism malfunctions, and the lights slowly dim to blackness’ (ibid.: 95). Beyond the non-diegetic ‘blackness’ that signals the end of the play, its closing image reminds us that the visibility that electric lighting affords always has a relationship to labour by staging the ‘as if ’ of the lighting being pedal-powered. The ‘blackness’ that ends the play as the causal outcome of ‘malfunctioning’ technology

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accrues further meaning as a narrative echo of the mass failure of nuclear technologies that give rise to post-electric civilization. Beyond performing a narratological function as diegetic darkness in Mr Burns, the dimming of theatrical light towards the goal of sustainable energy is beginning to redefine stage aesthetics. FanSHEN’s production of Nikki Schreiber’s play Cheese (2013) is an absurd allegorical exploration of the global financial crisis, performed in the non-theatre space of a vacant office in the heart of London’s shopping district on Oxford Street. The audience first encounter employees of the recently liquidated ‘London Mortgage Company’ who have decided to stage a play as part of their leaving-do. The play that they perform explores the lives of a couple (Joe and Freya) who live in a world where money is substituted for cheese. When the supply of Gruyère runs out, the characters must go on a journey to alter their habitual ways of living. But of particular relevance to this chapter is the fact that Cheese builds the desire for sustainable energy into the very mechanics of the play’s production. Resonating with the closing image of Mr Burns, the show is lit with pedal-generated energy gathered from local gyms and community centres through a collaboration with pedal power specialists Magnificent Revolution and Re-Innovation (‘Pedalling Power’). FanSHEN’s Lighting Designer Joshua Pharo commented in an interview that in the past lighting has been used principally to create beautiful images onstage without considerable concern about power consumption – a fact that he observes is changing but ‘hasn’t become part of mainstream practice yet’ (Pharo 2013). Significantly, the interest in either dimming the lights or other means of reducing energy consumption is also reflected outside of stage aesthetics, for example in the National Theatre’s switch from discharge lamps to LEDs for their external lighting sources, the seismic shift towards ‘powersaving’ consumer technologies and the dimming of New York City’s high-rise office buildings at night. The last example relates to a popular bill introduced in 2015 which requires high-rises of over twenty stories to turn off the lights after midnight when a floor is unoccupied as a measure intended to both cut energy usage and help migrating birds

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which can become disorientated by the city lights (Associated Press in New York 2015). Beyond representation, FanSHEN demonstrate a formal interest in unmasking the abstracted relationship between labour and the production of electric light theatrically. While not performed in complete darkness, I draw on this example to highlight that a ‘dark aesthetics’ should be inclusive of theatre that operationalizes low-level lighting and pedal-generated power to enact sustainable performance practices. The DIY aesthetic of this work is not just concerned with appearances. Instead, the work’s aesthetic principles arise from selfreflexivity to the very structures that support theatrical representation. ‘Aesthetics’, as the meaning of the word pertains to what is valued through a perceptual experience (e.g. the ‘visually pleasing’), becomes inseparable from a consideration of how its aesthetic is produced. In Cheese, aesthetics must be understood as a ‘doing’ as much as it is an act of ‘perceiving’. Correspondingly, low-level lighting when utilized through concerns of environmental sustainability renders darkness itself as performative. Beyond darkness as an indexical signifier of nuclear catastrophe in Mr Burns, low light in Cheese ‘performs’ as an intervention, producing real-world impacts through the conservation of energy. The creative use of engineered darkness in other performance practices might be better understood as a reaction against visual culture, such as Tom Morris’s Playing in the Dark (1998) season at Battersea Arts Centre, London. The specific counter-visual rationale for Playing in the Dark’s origination is signposted by Morris in his programme note entitled ‘All in the Mind?’, which says that the season was conceived in response to writers and directors who had argued that ‘the power of the spoken word in theatre to excite the imaginations of audiences’ had been ‘bamboozled by visual effects’ (Morris 1998: 2). Much as Mr Burns represents a vision of its characters repurposing ancient storytelling forms from the gloom, Morris had expressed a desire to use darkness as a vehicle to reclaim oral traditions of storytelling – a point that he qualifies by stating that the Elizabethan theatre had no ‘designers’ since ‘that job was left to the audience’ (ibid.: 2).

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More broadly, Morris’s argument is for a retrieval of theatregoers as an ‘audience’, since the noun is rooted in the Latin audire meaning ‘to hear’. It is through acts of hearing in the dark that audiences were invited to ‘design’ via their individual acts of reception. Shared darkness in Morris’s manifesto is not anti-theatrical – it is a pluralistic space that becomes its own kind of spectacle by passing over the responsibility for image-making to its audience. It is not the negation of images tout court, but a provocation to the idea of theatrical images as ready-mades, defining audiences in terms designated to practitioners (‘designers’) rather than as an abstracted assemblage of decoding ‘communication systems’ (via Whitmore’s discourse).

Darkness: An intervention in the spectacle of displaying bodies A play in the dark that was first staged as part of Tom Morris’s Playing in the Dark season was Shaun Prendergast’s The True History of the Tragic Life and Triumphant Death of Julia Pastrana, the Ugliest Woman in the World. I will examine this play to illustrate how darkness performs as an important intervention in particular scopic regimes – more specifically the visual spectacle of displaying bodies. I will then demonstrate how the theatrical darkness of the play is mutable. Its stipulation for ‘absolute darkness’ prompted tension between the function that darkness is intended to perform and cultural sensitivities around audience safety in the context of its reception in the United States in the wake of the 9/11 attacks. I suggest that this tension elides with a common conflation between darkness and ‘terror’, and I use this example to highlight that the schematized darkness in the play must always be performed by actual darknesses in different cultural contexts. Prendergast’s biographical play explores the life and death of Julia Pastrana, who was born in 1834 in Sinaloa, Mexico. Pastrana’s story had been widely documented in books such as Frederick Drimmer’s Very Special People: The Struggles, Loves and Triumphs of Human Oddities (1973)

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on account of her non-normative appearance living with hypertrichosis and gingival hyperplasia. These genetic conditions caused an excess of hair growth over her body and a thickening of the lips and gums, and both conditions went undiagnosed during her lifetime. Pastrana was bought, trafficked and exhibited by carnival barker Theodore Lent as a freakshow attraction in nineteenth-century tours of North America and Europe under the moniker of the ‘world’s ugliest woman’. Lent married Pastrana while working as her tour manager and she soon became pregnant, giving birth to a baby who was born with the same genetic conditions. The child survived for only three days and Pastrana died just five days later. Following her death, Lent toured and displayed the mummified remains of his wife and child in a glass cabinet. In death, Julia’s body continued to be exploited as an object of curiosity, touring fairs in the United States as late as 1972.6 It was not until laws were passed in Sweden and Norway in 1973 that prohibited the exhibition of human bodies that the touring of Pastrana and her child’s body was halted. The human remains were held in storage, stolen and vandalized before being archived at the Schreiner Collection in the Department of Anatomy, University of Oslo for research purposes (Anderson Barbata n.d.). The problematic practice of exhibiting human beings from Africa, Asia and Latin America in zoos, theatres or exhibitions in Europe and the United States, has been influentially critiqued in the live art practice of Coco Fusco and Guillermo Gómez-Peña. In their satirical performance The Year of the White Bear (1992), the artists presented themselves as caged ‘Amerindians’, the pseudo-aboriginal inhabitants of an island off the Gulf of Mexico that was ‘overlooked by Columbus’ (Johnson 1993). The piece prompted radically different responses from spectators, many of whom received the fictitious ‘Amerindians’ within the order of the real. In the adjacent spectacle of displaying bodies explored in Prendergast’s play, implications arise regarding the stipulation in the stage directions that the audience ‘enter a dimly lit circle of seats’ and following this entrance the action of the play occurs in ‘ABSOLUTE DARKNESS’ throughout (Prendergast 2015: 2). Rather than staging a representation of Pastrana’s body image

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and perpetuating the political economy of Lent’s touring exhibition, Prendergast uses darkness to conceal both Pastrana’s image and that of the acting company. Darkness performs as a non-image by resisting the singular possibility that Julia might only be spectated as a body image, and the novelty of this darkness is a substitution for the novelty of bodies presented as freakshow oddities. In a personal interview with Prendergast, he observed that an audience’s perception prior to participating in theatre in the dark tends to be that there will be an ‘absence of light’, but ‘when you’re in total darkness, that darkness is as tangible as water’ (Prendergast 2015). It is only immersion inside the engineered darkness of the performance that brings to bear the ineffable knowledge that arises from being in an alien environment. For Prendergast, part of the significance of this environment in its relationship with his play is the sense of collective experience that it engenders because an audience must ‘strain to understand and to picture’. In the context of the drama itself, the theatrical darkness is transformative and diegetic, becoming other darknesses in the ‘world of the play’; for example, the capitalistically motivated darkness that engulfed Pastrana in the backstage recesses of her carnival tent. Pastrana was concealed from the public eye so that the commercial value of her presentation to paying audiences was not diminished. The conceit of the play is that it casts its audience first as Lent’s nineteenth-century audience, before repositioning them inside this backstage darkness with Pastrana as co-auditors of the world beyond the thin canvas walls from which she was ultimately denied participation. The soundscore that encircles the audience locates them at the centre of the story. In this respect, darkness acts in at least two different ways: first, as a crucial intervention that disrupts the received scopic regime that permitted viewing Pastrana’s body as a commodity. Secondly, to place the audience perceptually at the centre of her story with a soundscore created in the 360 degrees around the audience. The invitation is to imagine a slippage from the third- to the first-person perspective. In this darkness, the lack of visibility of both Pastrana’s and the audience’s own bodies prompts empathic perspective-taking

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from Pastrana’s vantage point. In this way, darkness permits radical acts of self-transformation which Prendergast likens to the perceptionaltering function of carnival, and in particular the hall of mirrors in a fairground; ‘it’s disorienting; it changes who you are and your perception of yourself ’ (Prendergast 2015). The self-transformation of the spectator in darkness helps to facilitate a dispensation with our own materiality in order that we might better imagine being the other body. Prendergast’s play was premiered in the United States by director Kathleen Anderson Culebro and Amphibian Stage Productions in Fort Worth, Texas, in 2003, with a subsequent production staged by the same company in 2012. It is important to recognize that it was Culebro’s production of Prendergast’s play that triggered the momentum for a political campaign that was supported by the Mexican Embassy in Norway to repatriate and bury Pastrana and her son’s body in her birthplace in Mexico. While I should not overstate the case on behalf of theatrical darkness in prompting this outcome (when it was the tireless efforts of Culebro, Laura Anderson Barbata and others that played the determining role), the intervention that I have suggested that darkness performs in disrupting the spectacle of displaying bodies is aligned with this broader political action to make perceptible Pastrana’s exploitation as an object of entertainment and scientific enquiry. Crucially, the play problematizes received notions in which darkness is analogous to a state of ignorance. The darkness performed to disrupt the spectacle of displaying bodies, but in doing so contributed to heightening awareness of Julia’s story, prompting the restitutive political action that followed. In Andrew Sofer’s Dark Matter: Invisibility in Drama, Theater, and Performance (2013), he makes use of the analogy of ‘dark matter’ from physics to refer to the ‘invisible dimension of theatre that escapes visual detection, even though its effects are felt everywhere in performance’ (2013: 3). Dark matter is non-luminous mass that cannot be detected through observation, while its gravitational force holds the universe together; both invisible and fundamental. For Sofer, theatrical dark matter includes phenomena such as offstage space/action, absent characters, the narrated past, hallucination and blindness (ibid.: 3). The

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visuality of Julia’s body image concealed by engineered darkness might also be understood as theatrical ‘dark matter’ on account of the fact that it is both visibly unrepresented onstage but simultaneously unignorable. Much as Balka’s container confounds photographic reproduction, this darkness counteracts the possibility that Julia might be reduced to an image by jamming the spectacle. Julia-as-dark-matter creates ‘more possibilities’ for her audible representation to signify beyond a body image; biographical character is visually emptied out, becoming a space to be filled in with pluralistic acts of mental picture-making. Both the 2003 and 2012 productions performed the play predominantly in pitch black. However, the context of the darkness in the 2003 production made it all the more contentious. In the aftermath of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, the producers expressed their concerns to Prendergast about staging the ‘absolute darkness’ indicated in the script from the moment the audience are seated. They proposed instead to light the beginning of the play up until Pastrana’s entrance. Consequently, the 2003 production was the first occasion in which the opening scene and the entire acting company were rendered visible to an audience from the beginning. This inevitably delimited the potential stage pictures that might be ‘designed’ by the audience. A tension arose between the function of darkness in the play and the semiotics of darkness. With regard to the latter, I refer specifically to the way in which darkness had acquired semiotic baggage in the wake of the 9/11 attacks. The producers, with admirable sensitivity, felt that the audience would be too uncomfortable to attend a performance staged in complete darkness throughout. The vulnerability entailed in sharing engineered darkness with strangers coalesced in this instance with more pervasive concerns about national security and anxieties over personal safety in the wake of the terrorist attacks. This concern points to the way in which the notion of a play in the dark – its a priori connotations shaped by the cultural and spatiotemporal circumstances in which the performance occurs – signifies before the audience have even entered its particular darkness. From this example, darkness might be understood as a phenomenon that is ‘deictic’ – in linguistics, deixis typically refers to words that mark the orientation

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of speaker/listener (‘me’/’you’), time (‘next week’) or space (‘here’). The meaning of a deictic word is contextually dependent. ‘Here’ only makes sense in confluence with knowing the site from where the utterance takes place. Accordingly, deictic darkness denotes interpretive meanings that are acquired by theatrical darkness that are spatio-temporally dependent. The word ‘darkness’ written into the play script always enters into a tension with the fact that in performance its real counterpart is a wavering signifier that is highly relational to its site of reception. Deictic darkness accumulates unintended meanings, and while darkness performs, it is not always an obedient performer – much as other phenomena that O. States describes as ‘happenings’ such as fire can ‘signify’ onstage, but may proliferate and burn down the theatre if left unattended. I suggest that there is an important connection that might be drawn between theatrical darkness and ‘terror’. Returning to Sofer’s discourse on ‘dark matter’ in theatre, he makes a helpful distinction that ‘horror is what we see’, whereas ‘terror is what we know is there though it remains unseen’ (ibid.: 5). By this logic, I argue that theatrical darkness has an inevitable predisposition towards the invocation of ‘terror’ on the basis that we know that the space is not visible, but suspect that it is not empty (hence, the prevalence of telling ghost stories in darkness). Our imagination counteracts the not visible with its own phantoms. To reveal the actors and the space is a strategy to empty out the darkness of its inclination towards the ‘terror’ of the ‘unseen’.

Darkness as quantum superposition Developing the notion of theatrical darkness as an agent of selftransformation, I will reflect in this final section on the aesthetic traits of a one-on-one performance created with my company Analogue called Lecture Notes on a Death Scene in which darkness performs as a medium through which to express the notion of quantum superposition. The piece was initially developed through a week-long residency with MA Advanced Theatre Practice students at Central School of Speech and

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Drama in 2009, and subsequently developed with the support of Arts Council England to tour the UK in 2010/11. The use of engineered darkness in Lecture Notes originated from a personal experience alone in a dark theatre auditorium following a class that I had taught at Royal Holloway in 2009. Having turned off the lights I noticed a silhouetted figure standing on the other side of the room. Suppressing the fight or flight response that accompanied my awareness of this intruder, I called out, ‘Hello?’ No response. I walked across the auditorium with growing consternation, and the figure walked towards me. When I switched on the lights my situation became clear. I had not noticed a large mirror positioned towards the rear of the space. The intruder was me! This trompe l’oeil effect in the darkness – my false perception of an ‘other’ – provoked a strong physiological response that in retrospect accords with the correlation Prendergast had made between darkness and the self-altering perception of fairground mirrors. Thinking back on the implications of this virtual encounter with my reflected image, I was, in quick succession, an unknowing author of the performance, a spectator, a character (the character of ‘intruder’), a non-actor (in the respect that I was not consciously acting) and an ‘actor’ in the noun’s definition as a ‘participant in an action or process’ (‘Actor’). This prompted the idea of reconstructing a similarly indeterminate mode of spectatorship in which darkness affords the audience slippage between these different roles. Working with articulating mirrors and engineered darkness, I sought out narratives that intersected with my exploration of indeterminate spectatorship, drawing on Jorge Luis Borges’s short story The Garden of Forking Paths (1941). Borges’s story contains a fictional book in which all the possible outcomes of an event occur. When a character is confronted with a choice in this book, she or he makes all possible choices, ‘splitting’ into different selves that are distributed across multiple universes, or ‘multiverses’. Borges’s story departs from Newtonian physics and the logic of ‘absolute time’, in favour of a quantum universe containing ‘an infinite series of times, in a growing, dizzying net of divergent, convergent and parallel times’ (1970: 53). The notion of ‘quantum superposition’ was most famously illustrated through Erwin

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Schrödinger’s 1935 thought experiment ‘Schrödinger’s Cat’, in which a cat is sealed inside a steel chamber with a device containing a vial of radioactive substance. Since one cannot know if the cat is dead or alive, according to quantum law, the cat occupies both states. It is only when the observer opens the chamber that the cat’s superposition is reduced to one state or the other. This is termed as the ‘observer’s paradox’, as it is the act of observation that affects the outcome. There is no single outcome unless it is observed. It is this notion that I suggest imbues the lack of visibility in darkness with the potential to perform as a container for all the possible outcomes that might arise as a consequence of a spectator’s participation. Darkness-as-superposition has resonances with Chris Goode’s articulation of the latent qualities of darkness in which there are ‘more possibilities’ – though ‘more possibilities’ in Lecture Notes is conceptualized more specifically as ‘many worlds’. The ‘manyworlds interpretation’ of quantum physics, proposed by American physicist Hugh Everett lll in ‘“Relative State” Formulation of Quantum Mechanics’ (1957), attempts to reconcile the paradox of Schrödinger’s Cat by arguing that ‘an observer can only experience one “reality” at a time’ but all other possible ‘realities’ were ‘realized in parallel universes’ (Chodos 2009: 2). For Everett, when the chamber is opened, it is both the observer and the cat that split into a) observer looking at a dead cat and b) observer looking at a living cat. Lecture Notes apprehends the reflected image of the spectator and deploys darkness to stage Everett’s interpretation of the quantum world through the illusion that the split that occurs in the observer might be rendered perceptible. Prior to the commencement of Lecture Notes, the participant is dressed in a blue hooded sweater and enters a darkened room following a white line along the floor that leads them to a leather chair at its centre. They raise their hand as a cue to let the company know that they are ready for the performance to begin. An Mp3 audio file is triggered, and the audience hear the voice of a lecturer in philosophy talking about Borges’s Garden of Forking Paths and the ‘many-worlds interpretation’ that it presents. Subsequently, they hear the lecturer’s post-class ritual

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as he stacks chairs, gathers his things and turns off the lights, coinciding with the extinction of the table lamp next to the audience’s chair, which leaves them in complete darkness. In an event that indexically references my encounter with my reflection in the dark, the lecturer tells the audience that they are ‘not alone’, but being watched by a silent ‘intruder’ in the auditorium. Across the studio space, a shutter is opened in a black moveable screen by a concealed operator, exposing a mirror that is orientated towards the audience. A light is very slowly brought up on the seated spectator, making visible to them a hooded figure across the space. As the spectator hears footsteps walking towards them, the hidden operator glides the mirror towards the audience on a track, until they are confronted with a close-up of their reflection and told that ‘the intruder is you’. The lecturer then poses the audience a series of ‘what if ’ questions that had initiated the devising process for the show; ‘What if the person in front of you is the you that said “yes” when you said “no,” the you that turned left when you turned right? At every decision presented you, you have made every conceivable choice. In some instances, you get up from that chair and leave right now.’ This coincides with the mirror being tilted to reflect the image of a figure wearing an identical blue sweater exiting through the door that the spectator had entered at the start. From this moment, the audience metaphorically occupy a dual state; a) they have left the theatre and b) they are still there. This is just one example of the way in which the work attempts to stage the immersant in a superposition of states, prompting the seated person to imagine their potential to exist multiply by strategically planting concealed ‘doubles’ of the spectator within the engineered darkness. From this moment, the hidden recesses of the room have the potential in the immersant’s imagination to suddenly become populated with the ghosting of other possibilities. Darkness acquires a metaphorical significance as an indeterminate space. Unlike the anti-theatre that ‘no light’ produces for Robert Wilson, the non-observable theatrical space of Lecture Notes accumulates signification as an environment in which all possible occurrences might take place, like the chamber housing Schrödinger’s Cat. Darkness is cast principally for

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its indeterminacy, or what I have expressed earlier as a ‘wavering signifier’ to indicate its mercurial properties. Similarly, selfhood in this darkness is staged as something that is unstable and multiplicitous. Here darkness represents a counter-ritual to the aforementioned festivals of light that banished darkness by immersing the audience member in a dark space of contemplation among the many possibilities of what might take place – both good and bad. In this way, Lecture Notes stages an ambivalent darkness. Being ‘kept in the dark’ in this context is not commensurate with a state of ignorance, but rather an excess of imagining the hidden multiverses that are as unobservable as the non-image of darkness. Dark aesthetics in this instance concerns the performance of the darkened studio as a metaphor to express the quantum world in such a way that it might be experienced at the level of observable reality.

Conclusion In this chapter, I have surveyed the diverse ways in which engineered darkness might be thought to be its own kind of performer. I make this claim not simply as an inversion of Robert Wilson’s notion of performative light – the abundance of theatre practices that deploy darkness as a predominant state that can take on heterogeneous roles (and not just as an actor ‘surrogate’) are testament in themselves to the idea that Wilson’s provocation – ‘without light’ there can be ‘no theatre’ – is far from unassailable. My core argument has rather sought to draw attention to some of the different ways in which darkness operates, how it has been conceptualized by practitioners and how different darknesses are giving form to new modes of theatrical expression. The post-electric aesthetic that pervades Mr Burns stages diegetic darkness that pretends to be another darkness triggered by manmade catastrophe, as characters retrieve the lost televisual products of an electrical age through ancient oral traditions of storytelling. I have argued that ‘dark aesthetics’ should be constitutive of theatre practices that enact sustainability such as FanSHEN’s Cheese, in which

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aesthetics cannot easily be disentangled from its modus operandi towards real-world impacts in energy saving. I have demonstrated how darkness confounds mimesis as a non-image and counteracts visual culture, reframing the audience as the ‘designer’ of theatrical images and disrupting received scopic regimes such as the visual spectacle of displaying bodies – as a consequence, precipitating further real-world political action. My consideration of darkness as a deictic phenomenon has demonstrated how unintended meanings accumulate around theatrical darkness that is spatio-temporally dependent. I have also indicated how darkness has facilitated the imaginative self-transformation of the spectator as the perceptual centre of Julia Pastrana’s story and how darkness performs as a metaphor to make perceptible the unobservable state of quantum superposition. In all of these examples, I argue that darkness becomes the most important element in this kind of theatre making, not by what it obscures but by what can only be rendered perceptible in darkness.

References ‘Actor’. Oxford Dictionaries. Available online: http://www.oxforddictionaries. com/definition/english/actor (accessed 9 January 2016). Anderson Barbata, L. (n.d.), ‘Julia Pastrana: Brief Chronology’. Available online: http://www.lauraandersonbarbata.com/work/mx-lab/juliapastrana/3.php (accessed 15 December 2015). Appia, A. (1993), Adolphe Appia: Texts on Theatre, edited by Richard C. Beacham, London: Routledge. Associated Press in New York (2015), ‘Dim the Lights, Big City: New York Bill Seeks to Save Energy at Night’, The Guardian, 16 May. Available online: http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/may/16/new-york-proposedenergy-saving-bill-turns-lights-off (accessed 17 December 2015). Billington, M. (2014), ‘Mr Burns – Rebuilding the US on Fragments of Pop Culture’, The Guardian, 13 June. Available online: http://www.theguardian. com/stage/2014/jun/13/mr-burns review (accessed 30 December 2015).

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Borges, J. L., Yates, D. A. and Irby, J. E. (1970), Labyrinths: Selected Stories and Other Writings, London: Penguin. Chandler, D. and Munday, R. (2011), A Dictionary of Media and Communication, 1st edn, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Chodos, A., ed. (2009), ‘APS News: This Month in Physics History: May 31, 1957: DeWitt’s Letter on Everett’s “Many Worlds” Theory’, American Physical Society, 18 (5): 2. Available online: http://www.aps.org/publications/ apsnews/200905/upload/May-2009.pdf (accessed 8 April 2016). Davis, T. C. and Postlewait, T., eds (2003), Theatricality, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Enright, R. (1994), ‘A Clean Well-lighted Grace: An Interview with Robert Wilson’, Border Crossings, 13 (2): 14–22. Everett, H., III (1957), ‘“Relative State” Formulation of Quantum Mechanics’, Reviews of Modern Physics, 29 (3). Available online: http://www.univer. omsk.su/omsk/Sci/Everett/paper1957.html (accessed 3 January 2016). Feagin, S. L. and Patrick, M. (1997), Aesthetics, Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. ‘Festivals of Light – Christianity’, Victoria and Albert Museum. Available online: http://www.vam.ac.uk/content/articles/f/festivals-of-lightchristianity/ (accessed 8 April 2016). Goode, C. (2010), ‘Experiences of the Dark: Who You Are’, Tate, 7 April 2010. Available online: http://www.tate.org.uk/context-comment/audio/ experiences-dark-who-you-are (accessed12 December 2015). Grillet, T. and Wilson, R. (1992), ‘Wilson selon Wilson’, Theatre/Public, 106: 8–13. Handke, P. (1969), Kaspar and Other Plays, translated by M. Roloff, New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Hurley, E. (2004), ‘Blackout: Utopian Technologies in Adrienne Kennedy’s Funnyhouse of a Negro’, Modern Drama, 47 (2): 200–18. Jarvis, L, (2010–11), Lecture Notes on a Death Scene. Devised by the company and through a residency in collaboration with MA ATP students at CSSD. Performed by Phil Desmeules and Liam Jarvis. Produced by Ric Watts. UK Tour. Performance. Johnson, A. (1993), ‘Coco Fusco and Guillermo Gómez-Peña’, BOMB 42. Available online: http://bombmagazine.org/article/1599/ (accessed 21 October 2015).

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Morris, T (1998), ‘All in the Mind?’, Playing in the Dark programme, Battersea Arts Centre Digital Archive. Available online: www.bacarchive.org.uk/ items (accessed 15 August 2015). Nield, S. (2010), ‘Galileo’s Finger and the Perspiring Waxwork: On Death, Appearance and the Promise of Flesh’, Performance Research, 15 (2): 39–43. ‘Pedalling Power’. FanSHEN. Available online: www.fanshen.org.uk/ environment/pedalling-power.html (accessed 16 August 2015). Pharo, J. (2013), ‘Interview with Cheese Lighting Designer, Josh Pharo’, 24 August. Available online: https://pedallingpower.wordpress. com/2013/08/24/interview-with-cheese-lighting-designer-josh-pharo/ (accessed 17 August 2015). Prendergast, S. (2015), Personal telephone interview, 16 October. Prendergast, S. ([1998] 2015), The True History of the Tragic Life and Triumphant Death of Julia Pastrana, the Ugliest Woman in the World. Unpublished manuscript. Shevtsova, M. (2007), Robert Wilson, Hoboken: Taylor & Francis. ‘Sign’. Oxford Dictionaries. Available online: http://www.oxforddictionaries. com/definition/english/sign (accessed 8 April 2016). Sofer, A. (2013), Dark Matter: Invisibility in Drama, Theater, and Performance, Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press. States, B. O. (1985), Great Reckonings in Little Rooms: On the Phenomenology of Theater, Berkeley: University of California Press. Teschke, H. (1999), ‘Brecht’s Learning Plays – a Dance Floor for an Epic Dramaturgy. A Rehearsal Report on Robert Wilson’s Ozeanflug at the Berliner Ensemble’, translated by J. Compton, TheatreForum, 14: 10–16. Washburn, A. (2014), Mr Burns: A Post-electric Play, London: Oberon. Welton, M. (2011), Feeling Theatre, Basingstoke, England: Palgrave Macmillan. Whitmore, J. (1994), Directing Postmodern Theater: Shaping Signification in Performance, Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press.

Part Two

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Aural Visions: Sonic Spectatorship in the Dark Lynne Kendrick

It’s pitch black, it feels like the dead of night and I’m stranded in the middle of a forest. I’ve no idea how I got here, I can’t move and I can’t see a thing. It’s cold too. I suspect I’m naked. I’m not sure whether to cry out, when suddenly someone is calling for me; a woman’s voice peals at a distance that makes me anxious. Will she come nearer? Is she friend or foe? Will she find me or will she disappear entirely? At this point someone jabs a skateboard into my left side; it’s his first time at the theatre and he won’t be parted from it. I’m reminded it’s press night; I’ve arrived totally unprepared for what is unfolding in my ears, and I’ve no idea where Glen Neath and David Rosenberg’s latest ‘sound journey’, Fiction, will take me.1 Indeed, I seem to be simultaneously abandoned in a forest and perched in the Grand Hall of the Battersea Arts Centre, London – with no clothes on. Of all the various forms of experiences in the dark (thanks to some deft navigation of health and safety regulations you can now dine, game and even karaoke with the lights off), headphone theatre, also known as ‘audio theatre’ (see Balme 2014), is rapidly growing in popularity. One of the obvious reasons for this is that sonic technologies are more advanced, readily available, downloadable, communicable and shareable, inviting listening experiences from the smallest scale of oneto-one theatre to the broadest range of online participation. Yet theatremakers are drawn towards making theatre for the ear for more radical reasons than its availability, particularly how this covert aural experience works in relation to the visually evident world. It demonstrates how

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proximity can cross distances, because voice can be directly for the ears without the constraint of travelling an auditorium, which demonstrates sound’s capacity to exceed visual space by generating its own diegesis.2 Without any visual reference, sound can take us where it bloody well likes. This is most evident in theatre in the dark, particularly that played directly into our ears and produced by binaural recording which creates the feeling of elsewheres by capturing the three-dimensional locations of sounds and creating an auralization of spaces around us which is uncannily realistic.3 Sound is fundamental to our understanding of spaces as it reverberates between surfaces, echoes dimensions and resonates atmospheres; sound allows us to sense spaces in ways that cannot be seen. In the hands of theatre makers, these spaces become fiction: here sound knows no boundaries other than those made for us. Theatre in the dark is a part of a growing movement of theatre wrought from sound that is firmly made, performed and perceived within the aural sphere, and is specifically designed for a listening experience. This form of theatre is also a part of the emerging genre of theatre aurality, which describes a critical field of performance practice as well as a movement in theatre making (see Brown 2005: 105; Kendrick and Roesner 2011). From the minutiae of online performances from the ASMR4 community, to Complicite’s recent production, The Encounter (Edinburgh International Festival, 2015 and The Barbican, London, 2016), we can lend our ears to a diverse spectrum of performances that have something to say about how listening takes place, the relation of sound to spectatorship and the political potential of sonic diegesis to make meaning on its own terms. In this chapter, I will explore some of the ways in which theatre in the dark creates aural versions of the visual. I will touch on contemporary thinking about the relations between seeing and hearing, suggesting ways in which this (almost) purely sonic form of theatre reveals residual hierarchies that arguably persist between the ocular and aural senses. Focusing on Fiction as a prime example of looking on aural terms, this chapter will demonstrate that sonic spectatorship is not just a case of seeing through a different medium, but is a critical position from which

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darkness reveals the ways in which seeing is organized. One of the ways in which Fiction does this is by making a subject of looking, which exposes the problematics of vision. In the darkness of this production, others are bestowed with sight: those who see our nakedness and who can gaze upon us without our knowledge, revealing a relationship between looking and knowing. The important point is that this interrogation of vision is achieved by means of sound.

Sounding Fiction Fiction is, as it sounds, a story. It is designed to immerse the listener in a dreamlike experience, which involves us, the audience member, in certain tasks that seem half formed, unreal and yet somehow familiar: we must first find a pen, which we are given no time to do; we are assembled for a talk that never starts; we seek out instructions that we never find; and we must replace something we didn’t realize we had broken. Occasionally we wake up with a jolt in a moving car, unsure if it’s us at the wheel. We’ve forgotten to get dressed. Someone is staring at us from the hotel room opposite. We must get out before the building collapses around us and we must find someone called Heddel, which we eventually do, murdered in our hotel room bathroom – with a pen. By playing all this out around our ears, Fiction fakes our participation in a performance over which we actually have no control. We are all cast as companions. Voiceless and immobile we are moved by our chaperone – ours is Julie. Though we remain stationary throughout the production, in the story of Fiction she moves us in our chairs, articulates us, speaks for us and lets us in on what she thinks are the real tasks we need to prepare for. Julie is our animator, her presence marked by her breath and her intermittent little cough that locate her immediately behind us. She may well be the same woman who was calling for us in the forest at the beginning of the production, yet we have no visual reference to be sure of anything.

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Sound almost entirely constitutes the material of Fiction. Yet, unlike Neath and Rosenberg’s previous production, Ring, which was written in a way that meant the audience became acclimatized to the function of sound in creating the production around them, Fiction is a more robust, sometimes brutal event in its handling of sound in darkness.5 After a swift induction to our headsets it plunges us into it seemingly without warning, before throwing us back into light, with a final notice flashed before our eyes – ‘this is your last opportunity to leave’ (Neath and Rosenberg 2015). Fiction is purposefully crafted as a sonic experience. As a consequence the dramaturgy of Neath and Rosenberg’s second piece of theatre in the dark is not just wrought through the text and its capacity to carve out scenes in darkness, but is also a crafting of sound’s potential to create a story on its own terms, a form of sonic diegesis. In Fiction, sound propels us between locations and drops us into situations by sounds both familiar and unknown. For instance, the noises of an unexplored space become a car park when we hear the recognizable bleep of a car alarm unlocking in the distance. We are thrown from scene to scene, from person to person: we are aural hostages to all that falls upon our ears. This becomes most apparent at the end of the production whereupon the withdrawal of certain sounds reveals their dramaturgical function: the remaining characters  – including us – are left in a car, abandoned by Julie, either escaping the collapse of the building or on route to our destination (neither of which are entirely certain, but both are possibilities). The location of the car is articulated by: the sounds of the weather around us; the proximity of voices spoken within its interior; the thrump of windscreen wipers; the hum of the engine ticking over; and the gentle bleat of the in-car radio which, when turned off, prompts the following exchange: MAN 3  That’s better. MAN 1  Is it still raining? … I can’t hear rain on the roof. MAN 2  It’s stopped. MAN 1  Why don’t you turn the wipers off?

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Windscreen wipers are turned off MAN 2  What if you were to turn off the engine …? MAN 3 What? MAN 2  Turn off the engine … MAN 1  I have a bad feeling about this. WOMAN 1  About what? MAN 2  Are we attached to any of these layers? WOMAN 1  What do you mean? MAN 2  I have no sense of the roof now that the rain has stopped. If you turn off the engine will the car disappear as well? WOMAN 1  What if you were to stop talking? MAN 2  Turn it off … The engine noise stops. (Neath and Rosenberg 2015)

Once the sound of the engine ceases, the car is no longer present and as the characters stop speaking they too disappear. In this way sound forms the scene, the scenario, the dialogue and the interstices of these, the diegetic relations between each layer to which the characters are also indexed – or, as they suspected, ‘attached’ to. However, these signals of sound – what things, objects or settings they signify – are not the only dramaturgical function of sound; Fiction also weaves its dramaturgy by acoustic means as the possibilities of spaces are sounded out, their scale, dimensions and atmospheres resonated so that the acoustic not only makes them appear to us in the dark, but manifests these as places to be inhabited, places we are in.6 Where we are can be gone in the blink of an eye. This is perhaps the most uncanny aspect of Fiction: that we have a sense of seeing – of aural visions – because visual things can be produced even though everything ‘seen’ is entirely heard. This prompts the question of how vision might take place on aural terms, and what it means to create a form of sight in darkness: is seeing in the dark possible?

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Seeing in the dark Though it is in the dark, Fiction seems to have a fundamental point to make about seeing and visuality. This is most obvious at the outset of the show which, like most productions of theatre in the dark, begins in light: we make our way into a lit auditorium that is arranged for a lecture pending the arrival of the speaker; the chairs are arranged facing a stage that features a large screen; and we navigate our way to our seats with headphones that we are handed on entry and that correspond to seat numbers that are randomly distributed, meaning that we find ourselves strategically separated from those we arrived with. What is important about all this is that we have a visual record of our assembly, not only of our formation but of the seating, which is unusually roomy and comfy for theatre auditoria. Then several short but significant visual effects take place, which are clues for what we might be about to see. At this point Fiction seeds visuality in a number of ways, first by the use of a rather rudimentary slide presentation which gives preshow information as we find our seats and wait for the show to start. Secondly, the potential visuality of the production is suggested through this power-point prologue which includes repeated images of scenes – a forest, a corridor, a hotel room – for the ensuing sound journey. Some of these images change; for instance, the second image of the hotel room features an ornament that wasn’t there in the first, the ornament we will later be accused of breaking. If we are unsure whether or not this object appeared in the first image, then this doubt is subsequently reinforced: ‘Memory is unreliable’ (Neath and Rosenberg 2015), warns the next slide. Also, we may not notice that the company logo on the screen is ‘Heddel’, the name of the person we will find murdered in our hotel bathroom; even the innocuous things we see grow out of proportion in this sound journey, as they sometimes do in dreams. The rapid, almost subliminal, images of subsequent scenes raise questions about the sustainability of visual effects such as: do these images remain with us? When we hear the forest, do we see a

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development of the image shown at the beginning of the production? When we are taken along the hotel corridor in the dark, does this evoke the image previously shown? Or does the mind pay heed to the visual prologue? Do these images remain, or does a different corridor or our own forest take their place? Do we ‘see’ at all? One response to these questions might be that hearing is a conduit for looking; perhaps what we hear prompts our visual imagination? Like eyesight, is there also ‘earsight’, whereby hearing can conjure its visual counterpart (see Ingold 2000: 248)? Can hearing in the dark become a form of seeing? These questions perhaps invoke some of the traditional distinctions between the visual and aural senses: for instance, the enduring visual bias that has rendered sight the dominant sense or the residual prejudice that assumes the world is reproduced for the eye, yet remains original and therefore authentic for the ear. Yet ocularcentrism, which is the predilection for that which can be seen, does not mean that the eye itself is dominant; rather swathes of historical and political discourses have made recourse to vision, cleaving apart the senses and forming a hierarchy of perceptual engagement (for an overview of ocularcentrism and its critique, see Jay (1994); for aural alternatives of modernist and contemporary subjectivity, see Erlmann (2010) and Connor (1997)). The upshot of this is the assumption that seeing is objective and hearing subjective, because we can close our eyes but we cannot close our ears and therefore what we see is always apart from us, whereas hearing is constant – a part of us. Tim Ingold (2000) rejects the notion that there is a fundamental difference between visual and aural perception: that one sense reveals a world to us and the other immerses us in it. Drawing on the phenomenologies of Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Don Ihde, Ingold draws attention to the common assumption that we are apart from the world and that the veneer of our bodies – our skin, our fingertips, our retinas – marks the point at which the outside world ceases and our interior perception of it begins. This Cartesian model of the self as being separate from the world is one that ripples through the distinctions

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between the visual and aural senses: that light stops at the retina, whereas sound travels within us, and that seeing is a perception of light that brings forth objects, but hearing is primarily an engagement in sound and not (or not yet) the object.7 The phenomenological body is one that is already in the world and our perception is of ‘being-in the-world’, rather than a matter of us gazing upon it or it resonating through us. Therefore, Ingold argues, it is almost impossible to distinguish between the aural and visual senses in the ways in which we traditionally have done; rather, he proposes that ‘vision is a kind of hearing, and vice versa’ (Ingold 2000: 245, original emphasis). His point is not that one can readily substitute for the other, but that sensual engagement is rarely a matter of sight or sound alone and, furthermore, that the eye is rarely the only beholder of the object and that the ear is not the only organ that feels it. Ingold uses the example of listening to live music to illustrate the point: if this is undertaken with closed eyes, arguably we can be immersed in sound alone, yet on opening our eyes ‘we cease to be mere consumers of sound, and join silently in the process of its production. Hearing is roused from its slumber, and becomes active and engaged’ (Ingold 2000: 277). Ingold’s point is that the presence of seeing impacts on how hearing takes place. This isn’t just a straightforward move from hearing to listening by dint of sight, but that seeing is in relation to aural engagement and has the capacity to shift, augment and alter the ways in which our engagement with sound takes place. For Ingold, a ‘hearing eye and the seeing ear’ (Ingold 2000: 266) can be conjured through perceptual experience: ‘It is the very incorporation of vision into the process of auditory perception that transforms passive hearing into active listening. But the converse also applies: it is the incorporation of audition into the process of visual perception that converts passive spectating into active looking or watching’ (Ingold 2000: 277, original emphasis). The idea that vision can inform auricular engagement to the extent that it can be a form of hearing, and vice versa, demonstrates one of the ways in which a sense can prompt or augment another. Yet Ingold’s theory is based on a world that is available to all senses, one in which visual and aural perceptual engagement, it is suggested, are

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equally possible. However, theatre in the dark reveals a less than equal relation between seeing and hearing not just because the visual world is concealed, but because this is an experience designed specifically for the ear. This staging of sound, I argue, invites more than a seeing ear, producing a particular recalibration of the visual on aural terms in ways that aren’t necessarily available to the eye.

Aural visions Listening can have an impact on the thing seen, shifting the visual from appearing as a static image to becoming mobile, as Michel Chion demonstrates in his theory of audio-vision, whereby our perception of sound has the effect of temporalizing the image (1990: 12). In Fiction the visual takes on similar temporalizing qualities of the sonic, demonstrated by the movement of the scenes. The speed with which locations and persons, objects and objectives – things around us as well as what we should be doing with them – can appear and disappear foregrounds the motility of sound, and how this can propel them into perspective in ways that a visual object in theatre would struggle to achieve. This difference in movement between the aural and visual is an aspect of perception that Don Ihde (2007) has explored in depth as a phenomenology particular to sound. According to Ihde, there is a distinction between what is seen and what is heard that is linked to how each moves into the territory, or field, of our perception. In simpler terms, sound moves things into our field of perception, yet we must move to perceive things revealed by light to be able to see them. Therefore the visual field remains directional because it is formed by how we look, whereas the auditory field is omnidirectional, because sound comes at us from all directions, and because we are in it. These fields overlap in many ways, but Ihde’s point is that auditory perception not only operates differently: it also puts us into a different relationship with things. One of the consequences of an omnidirectional field is that it not only shows how we are amid sounds and their movements, but

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also situates us within the things themselves. Ihde makes the point that we listen within things, because sound has an ‘ability to reveal interiors’ (2007: 81, original emphasis), not just surfaces, and because it moves through objects. Listening, then, is an engagement in and with their substance and depth. Through listening we have a sense of the bodies of entities around us, whereas sight can only ever give us their veneer. However, Ihde is not advocating for sound alone, but rather makes the point that this has consequences for our understanding of what seeing is: ‘It is with the hearing of interiors that the possibilities of listening begin to open the way to those aspects which lie at the horizons of all visualist thinking, because with the hearing of interiors the auditory capacity of making present the invisible begins to stand out dramatically (Ihde 2007: 70, original emphasis).’ In theatre in the dark, hearing places us in a different relation to the visual object, not only because it is not available through vision, but because seeing takes place on aural terms. The visual is indexed to sound and becomes recalibrated because our hearing places us amid the things of our perception, or even within them according to Ihde’s auditory interiority. In Fiction we can be within the forest, not just seeing its image; or we can be moving down the corridor, not recalling a picture of it. Whether or not this is our actual perception of these moments in the production remains to be seen, but the important point is that sound moves visuality into the movable, immersive and mutable territory of the aural. Listening to a production of theatre in the dark produces an aural visuality which may well, as Ihde suggests, test the boundaries of what we consider the visual to be. Sound not only moves through us but can move us in ways that, arguably, light cannot. This potential of sound to transport an experience is also explored by Ingold in several ways. Significantly, he describes sound as a medium, which he uses to dispel the notion that listening is mere playback of the outside world but is rather a form engagement in it. He also refers to sound as atmosphere, which can be generated by us and be generative of the world around us; what is sounded (such as music played) can be constitutive of our world

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too. Both these forms of sound articulate the ways in which it performs and can be performed. This is exciting thinking for theatre analysis; however, in doing so, Ingold unveils a vision of the world not quite so available to sound’s radical potentiality to disrupt the thing seen.

Sound functions In Against Soundscape (2007), Ingold argues against sound as material, as an object or as a thing in and of itself. Developing his phenomenological model that one does not see light but sees in light – and similarly (or so it appears to him) that sound is not the thing heard but is more a matter of hearing – he writes: ‘Sound, in my view, is neither mental nor material, but a phenomenon of experience.… It is not the object but the medium of our perception’ (2007: 11, original emphasis). Ingold prefers the analogy of weather and likens sound to wind which may be experienced and felt but cannot be touched and as such cannot be fully embodied. Rather, he argues, just as we might better think of ourselves as ‘enwinded’ (2007: 12, original emphasis) in our encounter with moving air, we are ‘ensounded’ by that which we listen to. However, this immaterial, seemingly innocuous version of sound is problematic in that it prompts the question: what is sound a medium for? This is a challenge proposed by Salomé Voegelin in Sonic Possible Worlds (2014), in which she points out that, ‘To Ingold sound … is a medium, a vehicle that transports something else, like wind transports leaves’ (Voegelin 2014: 10). If this is so, then this also raises the question of what things or objects are brought over with sound: what does it bring forth? There is a problematic concept of the utility of sound in this model of perception which, Voegelin goes on to suggest, lies in Ingold’s distinction of the object from our perception of it and his subsequent definition of sound as intangible: ‘Implicit, it seems, in [Ingold’s] desire for a paradigm of sound as wind, moving all there is rather than being anything in itself, is a critique of art discourse that focuses on the object rather than on the process of perception’ (Voegelin 2014: 11). This concept of sound as a medium rather than an object begs further

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questions as to what sound is in service to. Voegelin suggests that this is a fixed version of the world hinted at in Ingold’s attempt to describe how the environment is not sensorially exclusive: ‘The environment that we experience, know and move around in is not sliced up along the lines of the sensory pathways by which we enter into it. The world we perceive is the same world’ (Ingold 2007: 10, original emphasis). While his point is to describe the ineffective division of perception into discrete sensory registers of seeing, hearing and so on, nevertheless the notion of the world as same by whatever means it is encountered is one that Voegelin challenges as that which ‘ignores the agency of the material and of the subject, and pays no attention to the cultural prejudices and hierarchies with which we approach and interpret the world’ (Voegelin 2014: 11). While I support Ingold’s democratizing of the senses as an important part of dismantling deeply held notions of sensory hierarchy, such as ocularcentrism, does this critique necessitate a fixed version of the world and the circumnavigation of who the perceiver is? In The Life of Lines (2015) Ingold appears to reject the idea of sound as a medium; instead, he explores the possibilities of sound as a ‘phenomenon of atmosphere’ (2015: 111). This is an important manoeuvre from the received idea that sound simply travels from source to recipient, with the latter usually an impassive receiver of the former. Rather, Ingold argues that sound peals and pitches, just as light beams and beckons, placing the perceiving subject amid this in a kind of ‘fission/fusion’ (Ingold 2015: 99). His theory illuminates our understanding of an aesthetic function of sound, particularly how it is created by performance: how the hapticity of playing (i.e. fingers upon a fret board) is also the experience of, as well as the production of sound; and how the maker and the perceiver are one and the same, not because they are simply listening while playing, but rather that they are simultaneously experiencing the flight of sound while remaining in the fixed position of player, an experience that Ingold describes as being of the cosmos as well as of the corporeal. However, Ingold bases this important theory on similar terms as he does the soundscape, one that is set against the commonly held idea that ‘when we identify

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what we hear as this or that, we have imposed our own conceptual forms, drawn from the sedimentations of cultural memory’ (2015: 106), which, he states, is based on ‘the orthodox idea of the poverty of the stimulus’ (ibid.). While I agree with Ingold’s argument for sound as an experience, a sensation and atmosphere and – potentially – as a performance of these things, nevertheless this theory seems at odds with the subjectivity, cultural difference and experience of the person perceiving – as maker, as well as performer and audience. This becomes problematic for theatre analysis, not only of that which is made with a particular type of audience in mind, but because there are theatremakers whose work often commences with deeply held dissatisfactions about the assumption of the world’s ‘sameness’, particularly creators of theatre in the dark. It must be said that Ingold’s focus is on perception of the everyday environment, and although the arts frequently feature in his work (such as the examples of listening to or playing music considered in this chapter), his task is not the analysis of audience engagement. Yet, I am interested in how the perception of sound takes place in theatre: what happens to the aural senses when they are guided by sonic performance? Does the aural visuality of theatre in the dark, which recalibrates that seen in the more mutable territory of sound, also activate the subjectivity of the listener? I argue that to think of sound as a medium or as an atmosphere is, to some extent, to circumnavigate the material ways in which sound can be created for a particular experience, to draw attention to perception as generative and to critique the ways in which the world’s sameness might appear. I also argue that theatre in the dark engages in sound as a political move that can reveal other worlds by listening – which the remainder of this chapter explores.

Critical listening and coerced looking In Fiction darkness is not just a matter of the removal of the visual, but is also a staging of listening – not just a more focused version

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of hearing, but listening as a form of perception that has a different relation to meaning and its formation. In his seminal philosophy Listening (2007), Jean-Luc Nancy draws a number of distinctions between hearing as reception of meaning and listening as a largely ignored and yet transformative perceptual practice. One of the tenets of this is that listening can liberate the subject from understanding the world as it is, instead moving towards new versions of what it might be. As he states, to hear is to engage in meaning, but ‘to listen is to be straining toward a possible meaning, and consequently one that is not immediately accessible’ (Nancy 2007: 6). Nancy’s version of listening is one that takes us towards meaning which exists outside of our sphere of knowledge, in relation to other voices yet to be encountered, to sounds hitherto ignored and, arguably, beyond the world we consider to be the same. In this way listening offers a radical alternative to visual engagement; it is an invitation to otherness which is not available to the eye but is, I argue, particularly available to the ear in the domains of darkness. Within the depths of theatre in the dark, listening draws us into a relation with difference which Voegelin believes is crucial to the dismantling of sameness: Listening as an innovative and generative practice, as a strategy of engagement that we employ deliberately to explore a different landscape other than the one framed by vision, and it is cultural vision that I refer to here, grants us access to another view on the world and on the subjects living in that world. It shows us the possibilities of sound, that which could be, or that which is, if only we listened. (Voegelin 2014: 12)

At the heart of theatre in the dark is a crucial concern with how visuality is (re)configured and why seeing is predicated on listening. What is the purpose of sonic spectatorship? What critical engagement does this invite? Not only does our perception of Fiction generate an aural visuality, it also makes a subject of vision, which brings the sonic staging of this production into the political domain. Throughout the production our position in the visual world is spoken for us. This is

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not only because we cannot see; we ‘companions’ are the only persons who cannot look. Ostensibly, all the other characters can see us and, as such, looking is something we are both the subject of and subjected to. Crucially we are not in a position to return their gaze. When halfway through the production we realize we have been naked all along (and to make matters worse we’ve had pictures taken of us during the production), and we are made aware of the fact that we are seen when we are vulnerable. We are gazed upon without our knowledge, only able to ‘look’ back when we are informed about it afterwards. In these ways Fiction stages the gaze in darkness by making us figure visually in certain ways without our knowledge. For example, near the beginning of the production we are made aware by our chaperone, Julie, that there is a man in the hotel room opposite staring at us. He too is a chaperone in charge of a companion, but he cannot take his eyes off us. Julie attempts to defend us from his gaze by closing the curtains and taking photographs as evidence, but we are left with the impression that he remains looking at us regardless of our chaperone’s efforts to hide us from view. When we are abandoned by her towards the end of the production, this voyeuristic scenario is reversed as fellow chaperones inform us that the man has raised a complaint – we were apparently the ones maintaining the stare. Looking is the issue; even as we stand accused of voyeurism and spying, the gaze is held against us – we are not in control of the look. There is a political imperative to theatre in the dark, which takes issue with visuality because the ways in which we are allowed to gaze upon the world around us remain problematic. The world may well be, as Ingold argues, the same one perceived, but the ways in which vision is organized cannot be discounted, and as a consequence neither can the positioning, experience and subjectivity of the perceiver. Arguably the act of creating theatre in darkness is, in itself, an exposé of the hierarchies of vision. The gaze comes up for critique in this darkness, which foregrounds the ways in which others possess vision while denying us access to it, demonstrating the impact of its organization and raising a series of questions and doubts about a world that is not

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fully available without our being in possession of it. For these reasons I would suggest that Fiction is not a show about not seeing; it’s about not knowing. Yet my point is not that we need sight to come into knowledge, but that seeing fools us into certainty – a false sense that the world is as it is: not changeable and subject to change. In this way a piece of theatre in the dark such as Fiction critiques looking as the locus of knowledge. As such, it becomes a political move against the hierarchies of the gaze.

Conclusion There is an aesthetic and political purpose to theatre in the dark. Our perception of it generates an aural visuality which, as we have seen in this chapter, describes how the things that figure visually – whether seen in the prologue power-point, described by those around us or ‘seen’ by our imagining ear – take on the qualities of the aural, as motile and movable, revealing interior as well as exterior. Indeed, darkness, as Voegelin has pointed out, is the one territory wherein we can fully experience this potential of sound because its ‘logic is plural and it is unseen; its necessity is determined in darkness, not on the surface of the visible world, but in its depth’ (Voegelin 2014: 33). All this has considerable consequences for audiences – not just the act of paying auditory attention, but for us as a body of listening individuals. In Fiction we feature throughout as the mute companion, described as ‘audience member’ in Neath and Rosenberg’s script, and in many ways we are as movable as the objects and things that ‘appear’ entirely by means of sound. The aural visuality of Fiction makes subjects as well as objects much more moot, including us. Who we are is not so much a shift in identity, from companion to murderer, but is problematized by the fact that we are all this character. Therefore, who ‘us’ is, is also up for question; there is an ambiguity of identity which, as Martin Welton has argued, is particular to theatre in the dark (Welton 2013: 6). As Julie speaks for us – because we never speak, even though it turns out

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we are the speaker everyone is waiting for – is she us? And, as we are all individually cast as ‘audience member’, exactly how many of us is she being? Such questions about who we are demonstrate the critical field of sound, specifically how it can transport audience experiences and cast sharp relief on sonic subjectivities, which are selves made, performed and understood only by what we learn about them through sound. This is the matter of sonic spectatorship; it’s not just that what we see is formed from sound, but that to spectate is on sound’s terms. The aesthetics of theatre in the dark are formed from its particular aural visuality, and its politics come to us through the ways in which this invites us to look through sound.

References Balme, C. (2014), ‘Audio Theatre: The Mediatization of Theatrical Space’, in F. Chapple and C. Kattenbelt (eds), Intermediality in Theatre and Performance, 117–24, Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi. Brown, R. (2005), ‘The Theatre Soundscape and the End of Noise’, Performance Research, 10 (4): 105–9. Chion, M. (1990), Audio-Vision: Sound on Screen, New York: Columbia University Press. Connor, S. (1997), ‘The Modern Auditory I’, in R. Porter (ed.), Rewriting the Self: Histories from the Renaissance to the Present, 203–23, London and New York: Routledge. Erlmann, V. (2010), Reason and Resonance: A History of Modern Aurality, New York: Zone Books. Farina, A. (1993), ‘An Example of Adding Spatial Impression to Recorded Music: Signal Convolution with Binaural Impulse Responses’, Acoustics and Recovery Spaces for Music Conference, 22–23 October, Ferrara: Italy. Ihde, D. (2007), Listening and Voice: Phenomenologies of Sound, New York: SUNY. Ingold, T. (2000), The Perception of the Environment: Essays on Livelihood, Dwelling and Skill, London and New York: Routledge.

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Ingold, T. (2007), ‘Against Soundscape’, in A. Carlisle (ed.), Autumn Leaves, Sound and the Environment in Artistic Practice, Paris: Double Entendre. Ingold, T. (2015), The Life of Lines, Abingdon, Oxon and New York: Routledge. Jay, M. (1994), Downcast Eyes: the Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century French Thought, Berkley and Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press. Kendrick, L. and Roesner, D., eds (2011), Theatre Noise: The Sound of Performance, Newcastle: CSP. Nancy, J-L. (2007), Listening, translated by C. Mandell, New York: Fordham University Press. Neath, G. (2016), personal conversation with the author, 2 August. Neath, G. and Rosenberg, D. (2015), Fiction, prod. Fuel Theatre, London and UK Tour. Till, N. (2015), ‘Theses for a sceno-sonic turn’, in A. Curtin and D. Roesner (eds), ‘Sounding out “‘the scenographic turn”: eight position statements’, Theatre and Performance Design, 1 (1–2): 115–6. Vautrin, E. (2011), ‘Hear and Now: How Technologies Have Changed Sound Practices’, in L. Kendrick and D. Roesner (eds), Theatre Noise: The Sound of Performance, 144, Newcastle: CSP. Voegelin, S. (2014), Sonic Possible Worlds: Hearing the Continuum of Sound, London: Bloomsbury. Welton, M. (2013), ‘The Possibility of Darkness: Blackout and Shadow in Chris Goode’s Who You Are’, Theatre Research International, 38: 4–19.

5

Darkness, Perceptual Ambiguity and the Abyss Tom Espiner and George Home-Cook in interview with Adam Alston and Martin Welton1

Sound&Fury is a British theatre company formed in 1998 by brothers Tom and Mark Espiner, and Dan Jones. Their critically acclaimed work includes The Watery Part of the World (2004), Ether Frolics (2005), Kursk (2009), Going Dark (2011) and Charlie Ward (2014), all of which use innovative sound design and extended periods of darkness to explore theatrical and dramaturgical landscapes and atmospheres. In addition to documenting the work of this important company, we wanted to capture something of the experience of Sound&Fury’s performances from the perspectives of both intention and reception. We were especially interested in exploring the intersections between theatre making and audience engagement, respecting both as modes of explorative practice. This is one of the reasons why we invited George Home-Cook to participate. Home-Cook is a theatre and performance scholar with a long-standing relationship with the company. In his monograph Theatre and Aural Attention: Stretching Ourselves (2015), he gives a detailed phenomenological account of a series of repeated engagements with Sound&Fury’s Kursk, which informs aspects of his responses in what follows. Martin Welton  Tom, Could you tell us how you, Mark and Dan first came to produce War Music for the Battersea Arts Centre? Tom Espiner  We didn’t exist as a company before we made War Music (1998), which was our first show. It came about as a response to a provocation from Tom Morris, who as artistic director of the Battersea Arts Centre (BAC), was interested in all sorts of ideas for makers, and

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one of them was a season called Playing in the Dark. It was in Studio 2 at the BAC, which they managed to get completely light sealed, including permission from Wandsworth Council to extinguish the fire exit lights. My brother Mark had worked with Tom Morris before and Tom asked if there was something that he could think about doing. Mark was very interested in a text by Christopher Logue called War Music – his adaptation of Homer’s The Iliad, Book XVI, Death of Patroclus. Mark, myself and Dan Jones all knew each other from years before; Dan was already working as a composer and sound designer, and had trained in theatre directing as well. I was training as an actor, and had also worked as a Foley artist for natural history and animation films in Bristol, so I was quite familiar with post-production sound effects. Mark suggested that we come together to make a performance of War Music with the particular intention of asking: In hijacking the visual sense, to what extent can you harness the power of the imagination of the audience by focusing particularly on the aural sense in the context of a shared, live experience? As there were so many people performing across the season, we only had two performances, but we had lots of time to get together and workshop and rehearse. The initial stages involved sitting around the table, looking at the text, reading it out loud to each other, thinking about what it actually sounds like, and what the sound framework might be that we could put around it. That could include atmospheric sound effects, some kind of music, or music-sound, specific spot effects (Foley effects). We also explored how far we could extend the vocal palette – choric voice, vocal textures such as whispering into microphones, and the movement through the space of a disembodied voice. All these vocal elements can really be heightened and have so much more dynamic range in the medium of total darkness, and go way beyond the conventional delivery of poetic text. The majority of sound was eventually designed in the studio by Dan, but these initial group discussions helped us to get a real purchase on the piece and to experiment with text and sound. It helped us to create something for an audience who would not be able to see this world, its detail, its story, and its characters. Our considerations about sonic design at the table were then taken into the rehearsal room with actors. Together

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with them, we were able to experiment not only with how the text would be delivered, and broken up, but also with what we could do with various sounds to help layer and add texture to the performance world. Adam Alston  It’s interesting to find such a focus on text in your response. It makes me think about the importance of dramatic narrative and form in much of Sound&Fury’s work. This is an exception to the rule in theatre in the dark performances more generally, where any linear, text-based narrative tends to be quite fragmented, or disrupted, or surreally constructed. What’s the appeal of dramatic form and narrative with regards to darkness? Tom  There was a lot of theatre work at the time focusing on different approaches to sensory deprivation and sense enhancement. For example, experimenting with audiences in terms of tactility or their olfactory sense. We didn’t really want to take on everything in that respect. We felt that it was not just an experiential exploration and that putting too much emphasis on this would feel like some kind of ‘ghost train’ ride. That’s fine – a great night out in the dark, and an interesting experience – but it wasn’t what we were after. We still wanted to engage with a more traditional storytelling approach. And so dramatic narrative has been really, really key in everything we do. Funnily enough, War Music is the only piece we’ve done that was pre-written. Kursk, for instance, was written within the process, and likewise with Going Dark we came up with an idea, and then we worked with a writer to deliver that.2 Text has always been important to us, and we haven’t gone into any kind of sensory enhancement beyond delivering the story and fine tuning the aural sense. We’re very aware of the visceral nature of experiencing darkness. What happens to the audience when you switch the lights off, and of course to the performers as well? It’s a shared space in that respect. There is a moment when the audience are suddenly confronted with impenetrable darkness. We try to think about what happens to their concentration in this moment. When do we grab them with the story? When do we metaphorically grab them by the hand and say ‘come with us, to this world’?

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Ether Frolics [a co-production with three of the artists from shunt] is probably one of the most experiential and least narrative-driven pieces we’ve done. We deliberately and mischievously played with that point of plunging the audience into a false darkness and a false silence. At the point when they might be thinking, ‘this is pretty dark, but it’s not completely dark, I’m sure there’s a tiny LED that they forgot to switch off ’, that’s when we pulled the plug on the residual light, and on the false air conditioning sound taking them into a deeper level. That resonated with the whole subject matter of the production, which explored the effect of anaesthetic drugs on consciousness. We were collaborating with other artists from shunt on that project, which inevitably influenced how we configured and worked on narrative. In that instance we embraced the idea that the narrative of the piece was simply that the audience enter the space and discover that they’re undergoing an anaesthetic trip into various fragmented levels of consciousness; it didn’t need to be any more plot-driven than that. It was an opportunity to use darkness to explore different levels of reality through the use of limited light, set and spatial changing, and sound design. Having the canvas of total darkness does allow a certain play of proximity to the material. The audience can feel somehow close to the action in the way that you might feel watching a film; it draws you in. Also, the relationship between the performers and what’s happening on the stage is shared with the audience. For example, in War Music, if we’re (the performers) riding on chariots to attack the Trojans, or if, in The Watery Part of the World, we’re on a whale hunt, the audience are on that journey too; they feel like they’re ‘active’ observers or ‘real-timeeye-witnesses’, but without having to engage with any further form of audience participation. That’s where I think we differ from many other companies that play with the idea of ‘immersive’ theatre; we don’t directly engage or ask the audience to participate – they’re effectively invisible – but hopefully they feel as though they’re part of the architecture of the piece, and are experiencing the world. The level of detail in the sound design and its spatialization is important in this respect. The smallest of sounds can trigger associations and memories that help the audience to

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inhabit a conjured space or atmosphere. Another element of the use of darkness in relation to the sound is that you can go from one scene to another very quickly without clunky scene changes. Capitalizing on an audience’s familiarity with the language of film – quick cuts and cross fades and so on – helps to achieve fluency, and tension in the unfolding narrative and translates well into this kind of theatre. Kursk has a strong narrative. We didn’t want to tell the story of the submariners on board the Kursk who perished in 2000 directly; we wanted it to resonate very deeply, but felt that it might be more interesting to see it through a different lens – from the point of view of British submariners spying on the event itself.3 As we did our research, we found that the details of life on board a submarine were fascinating in itself. Dan came up with the term ‘the heroics of the everyday’: living for several months at depth, in cramped conditions with no windows, not knowing where you are on the planet (unless you are the captain or the navigator), surrounded by some of the most extreme conditions, charged with the responsibility of keeping world peace, as well as supporting and maintaining the wellbeing of your fellow shipmates. Such things encompass the banal routines of making the tea, to undertaking highly dangerous tasks to gather classified information while remaining silent and unseen. We wanted to get under the skin of that, and tell that story in great detail. A nuclear submarine is a vessel of secrecy, and holds state secrets, but also personal secrets in our play. When it came to the point when we plunged the audience in total darkness, that was the only point when we left the British sub and went on board the Kursk. There was no particular narrative in that moment – it was just about placing the audience there. And the use of darkness arrested people. Suddenly, the framework of the British sub – seeing the bunks, and the mess, the captain’s cabin, the control room, the torpedo room … All that stuff was suddenly gone, and they were put into an alien place.4 That alien place was where these Russian submariners were dealing with their last few moments. There’s no real narrative there – it’s just an experience, to really, really hold the audience, inviting them to consider the impact and weight of that situation. It was a moment

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where darkness was used with a kind of minimal effect, but (hopefully) with a laser-like precision. In Going Dark, we used darkness peppered throughout the piece with a kind of sonic narrative depicting what it might be like for somebody who is losing their sight.5 The narrative of these dark sequences charted a journey from the point of view of the central character, Max, leaving the planetarium, negotiating the traffic, being on the underground, and then walking back to his home and going through the garden gate. It’s quite a troubling journey. Of course, we’re not trying to say to an audience that total darkness is the same as being blind. We know that’s not the case. But it is a way of trying to communicate or share that feeling. George  Our perceptual experience of darkness, not unlike the phenomenology of silence, is contingent on context. It’s shaped by that which goes before it. Could you shed further light on the contextual contingency of darkness in Kursk, especially? Tom  It’s a moment of reverence, allowing the audience to feel some kind of communion, and it’s an empty space for them to feel whatever they want to feel rather than telling them what to feel. It’s a moment that contrasts very strongly with the following scene in which we abruptly switch back to the British sub, the lights come on in the submarine mess, and the submariners are having an end-ofpatrol party playing, very loudly, Eminem’s ‘The Real Slim Shady’ (2000). Their journey and their lives have moved on. People maybe found that a bit abrasive – but that was deliberate. The darkness took people to this black hole, this intense moment of silence, of death, of contemplation, of sadness, of horror, an abyss, whatever it is – it’s a receptacle that can mean so many things. It’s an absence of design, but the abrasive switch back, I think, seemed to heighten the potency of the memory of witnessing such a dark ‘terminus’ – we are able to move on, but knowing full well that some were left behind, unable to move on, in that moment. George  You’re saying ‘the absence of design’ – but what about this notion of the trace of what went before? What that moment of silent

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darkness profoundly reminds me of is Remembrance Sunday. A group of silently present beings. Tom  It’s definitely a very intimate moment, and a moment of selfreflection as well. Remembrance Sunday is dealing with that in some ways. The audience go into the Kursk for that horrific moment, and they’re experiencing it, and then they experience nothing. It’s an incredibly intense and potentially lonely moment, and yet we had feedback afterwards saying that there was a great sense of sharing. It could be suggested that death is a true moment of loneliness, and we’re using the darkness and the sound to reflect on that. George  In that moment of death and deadness, it was incredibly live. It was a really intense moment – of intention, but also of profundity. I’m thinking about different kinds of experience of being in the dark. What you managed to achieve with Kursk was to situate the audience not only in the same space, but in the same sound-world as the voices of the dying sailors. Tom  That was a moment that tended to stay in people’s memory. In our piece Charlie Ward, the audience lie on beds looking at a Charlie Chaplin film projected onto the ceiling that then bleeds into total darkness.6 We go into some kind of altered state of consciousness, whether it be memories, or the battle on the front, or childhood memories. The audience are effectively inhabiting the body of a patient; they’re having that experience of trying to stay conscious. So we have the sound of a hospital circa 1914–15 – the gravel just outside, the whirring sound of the projector, you can hear soldiers coughing, and a nurse is bringing utensils to tend all these wounds. And then, as darkness envelops the room, you go into a deeper, richer memory where we’re looking at seashells from the point of view of a four-year-old child with his mother, or seeing fireworks before the war. What was quite interesting was that because they were not on their feet, but lying down and plunged into the darkness, surrounded by this intense sound, some people started to feel something quite trance-like. … Not necessarily an outof-body experience, but certainly a different physical sense. Of course,

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something like this has to be connected to the narrative in terms of what state you find yourself in, but I think it plays with your sense of time as well. Again, experientially, this is an exploration of different levels of consciousness, and the threshold between life and death. Thematically, it is exploring the strange and disturbing landscape of the early twentieth century ushered in by world war and the dawning of cinema in which light, darkness, shadow and overshadowing are key elements. Martin  But what is of particular significance about bringing together darkness and silence, in theatrical terms? George  Interesting question. Here radio drama provides us with a useful point of reference. I first began to think deeply about silence (as a phenomenon) when listening to Pinter’s radio play A Slight Ache (1958). The play features three characters – two of whom speak, and one of whom does not – and plenty of pauses. What happens in these moments of silence is very much shaped by context; silence can be incursive. You can have a sudden moment of silence where previously there was lots of noise. Naturally, the ontology of silence has resonances with death. But silence is also a moment of listening, where our aural attention is piqued and where we are prompted to pay greater attention to our surroundings. Paradoxically, in moments of silence, we also have this acute sense of attending to ourselves. Similarly, darkness in the theatre is necessarily theatrical, and our perception of darkness is heightened as we attend to it and look for meaning in a way that we wouldn’t normally do. How we attend theatre shapes the way that we perceive it. Silent darkness, if it’s as acute as it can be in a theatrical setting, is pregnant with meaning, and is very much dependent not only on context, but also on the material conditions of where one is. Adam  You mentioned that darkness in theatre is necessarily theatrical, George. That strikes me as a fascinating comment, one that accords with your book Theatre and Aural Attention. But I was wondering what you make of that, Tom? What do you make of this idea that darkness can have a specifically theatrical aspect? I’m asking because, after all, the lights are actually switched off – and hence there’s something non-

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theatrical about that, undercutting theatricality on a very basic level. At the same time, for all the reasons that George’s outlined, darkness also takes on a kind of representational quality that traverses its (im) materiality and symbolism. Tom  Firstly, I think we need to be clear about the distinction between switching the lights off in a conventional theatre setting, and total darkness, which means the elimination of any residual light. Critical here in appreciating this distinction is timing. As you say, switching off the lights can be non-theatrical, but not if you are considering blackouts in conventional theatre that occur before the curtain rises. Such blackouts have some kind of theatricality: they build a sense of anticipation; they help to instil shared focus; or they tend towards a particular kind of atmosphere. But there is a time threshold too – a few seconds before the eyes can adjust to the residual light of LEDs and Fire Exit lights and so forth. This can lead to a level of concentration which in some way acknowledges that we are passing into a different world. It is also interesting to note that when performing to younger audiences blackouts can provoke an entirely different sense of attention, perhaps accompanied by whoops and screams. It is extremely heightened and fully engaged with the moment of anticipation and transition into the ‘world’ of the play. But in both age groups there is still some awareness that this ‘transitional darkness’ is momentary. Any dwelling beyond this threshold, I think, would be nontheatrical and dull. It demands illumination to progress and evolve. In contrast, total darkness offers a whole different level of theatricality. With zero residual light, the process of adapting to the dark cannot take place and so subverts our usual perceptual anchors, as George was articulating. It takes time for the audience to re-adjust to a new perceptual challenge. We’ve already discussed how we played with this time adjustment difference in Ether Frolics, but the very confrontation with total darkness, with this stretching out of time, prompts the audience to engage with more than simply anticipating what happens next. So yes, I think it does take on a kind of representational quality. For instance, in The Watery Part of the World we were interested in exploring what was an undercurrent

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in Melville’s Moby Dick (1851), which is the darkness of the mind, the unknown, the unfathomable, and how the ‘boundless’ ocean is a metaphor for the impenetrable depths and recesses of the human mind. The use of total darkness was very much representing these unsettling notions, and provided the nebulous setting for the story to loom into existence for the audience (and funnily enough the very first chapter in Moby Dick is entitled ‘Loomings’). And in Going Dark, darkness represents several things. From the very first moment of the play we are subsumed in total darkness, and our aural attention is drawn to a sonic depiction of nature, such as a gentle breeze in grass, or distant ripples of thunder. I think this suggests something about perception of the outside world, and about experience. There is no indication in the sound of any human activity whatsoever. Where are we? Are we alone in experiencing this place and time? Without being heavy-handed, I hope, I think this opening scene was offering up a space and time to reflect on the nature of experience and awareness, of how seemingly miraculous it is that nature can be experienced and appreciated. The darkness is also representing the gulf that can exist between us in trying to share feelings and to articulate individual experience. How can this gulf be crossed? In the play the darkness itself follows its own journey from an embodiment of an abyss, of loneliness, of confusion and isolation, to one of comfort and a sense of equilibrium, and that this darkness too can be shared. It’s about quality of experience, which is at the centre of the play, and made manifest in the gentle discussion between the son and the father at the end, with the little boy who’s saying, well, if you can’t see me, do I exist? Max, the father, is saying, well, you can still see me. It’s a philosophical musing on the idea, which of course is emotionally troubling as well. There’s an attempt really to translate the quality of experience, even if you’re never actually going to have that experience. Adam  But what importance does the notion of there being ‘different darknesses’ to be explored have for you as a theatre maker, Tom, who composes darkness? Tom  There are all sorts of different ways of playing with darkness. If you are in a cave, the darkness is palpable – but it holds a completely

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different set of tensions and sense of anticipation than you might find when you’re in a theatre, where you’re in the hands of the performers, where there’s something that’s going to happen. That sounds very obvious, but when I was in the cave it was actually quite boring! In the theatre, there’s a sound that’s going to lead on to another sound. You get drawn in on a deeper level, the dynamic demands some kind of engagement. I still think it’s theatrical even though there aren’t lights because it sets up anticipation and attention as to what is about to happen. It’s not just an absence of light. It is a potent force. Martin  George, in researching Theatre and Aural Attention, you made several visits to Sound&Fury’s Kursk. Many of the audiences for this performance found the descent into darkness in it shocking, but, as a repeat attender, did you sense any difference in your experience? Did it shift according to where you were in the space when it happened? I first watched the piece at the Young Vic from the gallery, and the darkness felt less risky there than when I watched it from the ground floor by the captain’s cabin. George  There was one thing that happened on one of the seven times I saw it, in three different spaces. When it was in Bristol I recall seeing someone’s telephone at a vital moment. It didn’t sound, but I could see it illuminated in their trousers, or wherever it was. It was only very subtle, but because it was so dark you were able to see it. I’m not going to say it wrecked the moment for me, which wouldn’t be true, but it made me remember that I was in a theatre, an attender looking at a distance at something ‘over there’. In terms of being up in the balcony (I was only up there once), there was a sense of not being quite there [in the performance], mainly because of micro-differences in the sound and where you’re positioned in the sonic environment. That also affects how you are ‘listening in’, an interstitial idea of being in one place while listening to another. When you’re listening in, you’re aware of yourself as a listener. It’s a very particular kind of experience. Tom  That’s something that we played with in Ether Frolics. The audience becomes one patient ‘listening in’ collectively to the sounds

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in the operating theatre while under anaesthetic. As a ‘passive’ observer you can’t do anything about that. It could be relaxed, or alarming, but again it involves trying to give the audience the experience of another level of reality. George  That comes back to the idea of not being in control discussed earlier. The absence of control, and of indeterminacy, was very present in that moment of darkness in Kursk. This absence of control is in part linked to perception itself. It’s hard to know what you’re perceiving in those moments. Perhaps that’s part of this space for reflection, contemplation, and so on that we’ve been discussing. It’s what I’d call ‘silentric’ space; a space of perceptual ambiguity.7 Martin  Leaving Ether Frolics to one side, Kursk saw the company making use of a set-design for the first time – as opposed to the rigging of say War Music, which the performers used to navigate a space in darkness. What challenges did this pose to how you thought about, and worked with, darkness? Tom  The design of The Watery Part of the World was quite key. Mark Anstee, who designed the system, chose very carefully the kind of ropes that the performers used to navigate the space, and how the ropes were suspended above the heads of the performers, so that the audience would come in and see this strange, hovering ‘tennis court’ suspended in midair. The tensions of the lines made some connection to nautical rigging, but it was also a pragmatic design. I’m not sure whether the audience were aware of that, that it was pragmatic, but nevertheless it had an aesthetic of its own.8 We had a similar system with War Music. The Kursk set, though, was very modular, and significantly grander in scale, involving two levels. We wanted the audience to be very close to the action visually, and yet not be ‘active’ participants. This allowed the actors to act very naturalistically, and to be lit by the submarine’s consoles, or by lights that sometimes were only a few inches away from their heads. There were clearly defined no-go areas – the audience couldn’t go up onto the captain’s cabin, or to the mess – but we then had to work out a way that allowed the performers to get from one place to another traversing areas occupied by the audience.

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We found a pretty sensible convention for that – we taped the boundaries of each corridor on the floor and when we needed to walk through these areas we would put our hands just slightly ahead of us so that the audience would naturally part, clearing the corridor. There are limitations with a set of that size. If you switch the lights out you can’t do that much, and for that reason when we went into the dark with Kursk, the audience’s attention had to be somewhere other than in the space the performers were in. It had to be somewhere completely different – the Kursk. It was a moment that demanded stillness – from both performers and audience. If you’re going to have a sophisticated, panoramic set design, then you’ve got to be careful about what you’re going to do in the dark. Likewise, in Going Dark it was a pretty simple set; the audience were, critically, seated in that show, so we didn’t have to worry about them, but as a performer in that show I did have to be quite careful to know that I wasn’t going to get too untethered going from one place to another. There was also an aesthetic response to darkness in the set design for Going Dark, as well as the pragmatic one. With designer Ales Valasek and lighting designer Guy Hoare we wanted to try and convey the idea of the physicality of darkness, so all the furniture was black: the central desk which served as a light box in the planetarium and the kitchen surface in Max’s flat were covered in black serge material; the armchair and the bedside table were black; and this extended to the floor carpet and the audience’s seats. This gave an almost light-absorbing quality to the world of the play which was literally ‘going dark’. George  There’s something I’m keen to pick up again: Where does the production of atmosphere figure in your thinking about Sound&Fury’s work? How does the company generate atmospheres? And what’s the relationship between the five ‘As’, as I call them: attention, architecture, atmosphere, audience, and actor? Tom  We’re creating worlds. And with the use of darkness you’ve got so much to play with. Just by cutting out the lights, you’re already setting up an atmosphere. In post-production film sound, ‘atmospheres’ is a technical term for one of the layers of sound that’s put down. There

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are spot effects, there’s music, and dialogue, and ‘atmospheres’ is one of the tracks that would be mixed down, which might be for example the sound of the wind, or the sound of a room – ambient sound. But there can be a lot of information that can be unpacked in that sound track. A clichéd example might be a ticking clock. If you crank up the volume, what was an atmosphere without you knowing it increases the tension. There are all sorts of atmospheres that can create a sense of place, but that can also create tension. And that’s critical in what we do. In the dark, the sound of rain can actually have a tangible effect on the audience. They can feel somehow that it’s cooler. George  I’m especially interested in the audience’s role in generating and maintaining atmospheres – what I refer to as ‘tending’. We are together in an atmosphere. Do you have any thoughts on how one might want to experiment with atmospheres further? Tom  Your question makes me think about the accumulation of story. In Kursk, there is a moment when the submarine’s conning tower hatch opens, and you can hear a helicopter that is coming to collect the character of New Dad Mike who needs to be taken home early due to tragic news concerning his family. The sound starts quite a long way back, but by the time it comes to collect him it’s throbbing. There’s a lot of things that are contributing to the atmosphere there, not least sonically. It’s something that everybody feels. I remember playing the scene in which I (as New Dad Mike) left the captain’s cabin having been told the tragic news, and walk very slowly to the sailors’ mess. There was a strong sense of shared feeling with the audience; as they were so close to the action they naturally parted to allow a space for me to make my journey. Once I reached the mess the other characters took over the ‘tending’ (to use your terminology, George) and from then on the business of packing my things and getting me ready to be winched off was underway. This was underscored with the approaching sound of the helicopter and the communication protocols between the pilot and the radio operator, while simultaneously the audience could hear the captain preparing his tribute to the sailors of the Kursk who lost their lives and read out their names.

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George  How does one atmosphere transfer into another? How does that transition occur? Tom  It’s a movement between representations of objectivity and subjectivity, or between diegetic and non-diegetic sound, isn’t it? When they bleed into one another, that’s when the audience can start to transcend each individual experience. In Kursk, the sonar operator, at midnight, is playing some sounds that he’s recorded – that’s in the world of the play. He plays the sounds of seals and of snow, and suddenly we’re not only in the sub, but we go beyond it, where we can hear whales in the distance, and music starts to play. George  Listening out, rather than listening in. Tom  Yes. This interplay between ‘real’ atmosphere, and a more ‘subjective’ one is crucial in our work. George  That relates to Husserl’s writing on imagination, and imaginal content. And also the notion of control comes around again, because we can intend and design atmospheres, as actors and directors and so forth, but once audiences are in there, who knows? Tom  It’s often said that the circle is never complete until the audience is present. You don’t know what it’s like when you’re making a new piece, until the audience are there. We found out so much about Kursk once it was put in front of an audience. The same thing with Going Dark. When the actors are going on stage in front of an audience for the first time, we sense when they are enjoying themselves, when they’re scared, when they’re confused. Any theatre maker knows this. This is the craft of making theatre. But atmosphere – the audience have a part to play in it. George  Gernot Böhme, whose work is formative and key to recent thinking about atmospheres, has the idea of their largely being generated by means of scenography, or, more specifically, emanation – he talks about ecstases, that is to say, the ecstasy of things emanating through and in space. Böhme is thus mainly referring to scenography and design of the stage set. He doesn’t, however, attend to the interplay

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between actors, audience and architecture, which is something that’s very complicated, but that needs further attention. Martin  Sound&Fury seemed to have worked with gloom, shadow and low level darkness in recent works; what brought about this shift, Tom? Do you think you will maybe return to the full and lasting darkness of War Music at some point? Tom  Yes. I think we will, if the piece demands it. If we know we can get a totally dark space, you don’t necessarily have to have a huge set. We just need to make sure we can get a blacked out space and the performers and that’s all we need. But we haven’t found that piece yet. That said, we have been talking a lot more recently about War Music, and working with text, and especially classical text. It may be that we return to the total canvas of darkness, but one doesn’t want to be hampered by a particular methodology; you just want to use everything as a spring board and learn from what you’ve done in the past. With The Watery Part of the World, we started with total darkness, but enjoyed the use of very minimal lights at key moments, and those moments of gloom seemed to work very well with both the thematic nature of the piece and its theatrical nature. And of course Kursk was much more light-driven. Our starting point is really to ask: What are we interested in pursuing narratively? And then we will know that total darkness is a key part of our tool kit to draw upon. Certainly, if the piece can sustain it we’ll be using it, but neither do we want it to exclude the experimentation with other ideas as well. Playing in the dark has opened our eyes to so many possibilities dramatically, and I’m sure there is a lot more to explore.

References Home-Cook, G. (2015), Theatre and Aural Attention: Stretching Ourselves, Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Welton, M. (2005), ‘Once More With Feeling’, Performance Research, 10 (1): 100–12.

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Missing Rooms and Unknown Clouds: Darkness and Illumination in the Work of Lundahl & Seitl Josephine Machon with Christer Lundahl and Martina Seitl

At the time of writing, my encounters with Lundahl & Seitl’s work extend across Rotating in a Room of Images (2011), The Memory of WT Stead (2013), Symphony of a Missing Room (2014) and to the research and development phase of Unknown Cloud On the Way To … (2015–).1 All of these works explore differing approaches to ‘theatre in the dark’. In Symphony of a Missing Room, I was blindfolded with ‘whiteout’ goggles – an illuminated blinding. With Rotating in a Room of Images, much of the experience occurred in total blackout. In The Memory of WT Stead, shadows, darkness and whiteout-goggles were employed. Each became an investigation into the nature of perception, in narrative, theme and form. In a development of these interests Unknown Cloud … takes the notion of ‘being in the dark’ into new territories by examining the ‘unknowable’ phenomena of astronomy and geological temporality: phenomena that humans are, ordinarily, unable to know through direct experience. The discussion that follows documents the ways in which notions of ‘being in the dark’ can be illustrated through Symphony of a Missing Room and Unknown Cloud. These two works demand that vision is renegotiated and tactual modes of perception are prioritized. They elucidate how embodied perception manipulates the sensuous world of the audience member’s body, shaping it as medium, message and museum of the work.2 Each offers an encounter with perception itself as much as with imagery and ideas. I have woven personal

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reflections from Martina Seitl and Christer Lundahl, which capture the nascent quality of their thinking around Unknown Cloud, alongside my first-person recollections as ‘visitor’ (Lundahl & Seitl’s term for the audience member) to both works. The interwoven ruminations on each identify the creative decisions taken by the artists that serve to inform the visitor’s experiences of ‘darkness’ in relation to these events, and emphasize the indivisible relationship between the work and its audience. Martina and Christers’ methodologies and concepts are surveyed and my individual experience underscores how these are translated as aesthetic phenomena to the visitor. The shift between tenses in analysis and the italicization to indicate creative contemplation denotes the interplay between the live performance moment, ongoing artistic enquiry and my subsequent interpretations.

On being blindfolded … on being and blindfoldedness Symphony at the Royal Academy of Art, London (first produced in 2009 in collaboration with the National Museum, Stockholm), was a bespoke response to the architecture, to the artwork hung throughout the Academy’s history and to the many works submitted to the 2014 Summer Exhibition, yet to be hung in place. The piece is an exploration of the enigmatic nature of art appreciation. I’m in a group of six being led upstairs to the Central Hall, where a kindly faced, grey-bearded, male assistant greets us. He gives instructions to seat ourselves on one of the stools, staggered equidistantly to focus attention on an artwork at a distance. I’m made aware of perspective from the start. I observe people, milling around me looking at art, buying art. Headphones are placed over my ears and soundscape merges with the ambience of the space; footsteps shuffling, murmurs of hushed speech, background noise. An ethereal voice directs me to look at the painting in the distance, coordinates my line of vision, sites my sight. My audio-guide invites me to look around at the other works

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on the walls. Sound enhances the milling about the space; people become larger than life, the colours worn, the shape, stance and gait of each person magnifies in front of me. I’m acutely aware of my gaze, my ways of seeing. I’m told to notice a new guide ahead, to follow her. I focus on her back, on her blonde chignon. We’re led to an adjacent room where headphones are removed, goggles placed over my eyes and vision is replaced with a milky-white opacity that attunes me to listening closely as my headphones are returned. I’m instructed to reach out my hand, which is gently taken by an invisible, seemingly disembodied, guide. She holds my palm, upper hand and fingers in both her hands, delicately reassuring. She leads me, walking carefully, then faster, eventually running the bolder I become, while soundscape, narration and shifts in the light outside of the goggles accompany us to enhance the suggestion of moving from one location to the next; a tunnel through which I crawl; the edge of a cliff over which I peer, feeling the sensation of height, rain all around; a wall on which my hands are placed so that I might search for a frame, for the textures of a painting, but I find only the solid surface of the wall; a lift where I feel the bodies of others pressed shoulder to shoulder, hip touching hip, takes us up in a rumbling fashion; a ballroom where I twirl to the soaring, spinning music of violins; downstairs, outside, to a courtyard with dappled light and a pond with a fountain and a silent old man sat by it (immediately the face that emblazons itself on my inner eye is that of our earlier assistant); through a watery vault that plunges me into the sensation of evolutionary time, time before time, all on a journey towards ‘the missing room’, where the memories of the Royal Academy are stored, along with all the artworks that have been exhibited or not yet displayed. I’m led upstairs and my goggles are removed. I’m staring at an empty wall, at the top of a flight of stairs in a part of the building that could do with a lick of paint, positioned amongst the other members of my group. This hallway is removed from gallery visitors, mutedly busy with employees preparing for an exhibition. My eyes are drawn to our chignoned-guide who passes along the floor below us; then my narrator draws attention to an adjacent room that stores canvases – forgotten, removed, about to be exhibited. In the corner, on

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Figure 6.1  Lundahl & Seitl, Symphony of a Missing Room – archive of the forgotten and remembered, Royal Academy of Arts, London, 2014. Photograph and © Julian Abrams. the floor, sleeps our grey-bearded assistant. We’re invited to lie down close by him, to close our eyes, as the journey is brought to its close and our headphones are removed (see Figure 6.1).

Being blindfolded in Symphony took me to a place not of darkness but of lightness, in all its variations: lightness of vision despite the denial of my lens on the external world; lightness of touch in that delicate, tactile exchange; lightness of the body in motion inspired by the fusion of touch, sound and submission to internal sensation; lightness of the body in anticipation of that touch; lightness as a state of being, unfettered in spirit and physicality; and lightness as internalized illumination, caused by my sensual submergence in imagination and contemplation. My experience resonates with that of the philosopher Jacques Lusseyran in his writings on his own blindness, which overturn the general assumption by those with sight that blindness equates to darkness. Lusseyran describes his perception as an all-encompassing experience of light – light as radiance, as levity, as emotional affect, as a deep engagement with insight:

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Looking from an inner place to one further within instead of clinging to the movement of sight towards the world outside … radiance was there, or, to put it more precisely, light. … I could feel light rising, spreading, resting on objects, giving them form, then leaving them. … The opposite of light was never present. … I saw the whole world in light, existing through it and because of it. (1999: 9–14)

During Symphony, my eyes were blindfolded yet still receiving light (see Figure 6.2). The removal of sight-but-not-light supported my physical buoyancy and made me tune into the sensations of motion rather than causing me to stumble. The whiteout and its lightness – as opposed to a blackout and darkness – enabled a more willing submission to the physical interaction, and made it easier to be bold in forging forward without the guidance of her hand. My eyes were no longer focusing outwards, but were rested from the everyday exercise of looking, and invited to refocus inwards. It facilitated attention to the intermingling of sensations, suffused by that visual radiance. The removal of sight made me intensely aware of embodied cognition underpinned by imagination; an insight accessed via imagination. Elaine Scarry’s writings on imagination are useful to my thinking here as she unpacks the manner in which artistically induced imagination, which leads to full comprehension of a work (whether knowingly so in the immediate moment or through a process of analysis), is bound up with our sensory perceptual capabilities and relies heavily on a vivid quality of ‘instruction’ in form (see 1985: 161–80; 2001). All internally conjured image-making is influenced by the ‘sensory content’ of the work in question and evoked as ‘an act of perceptual mimesis’, in this case, ‘under the instruction’ of my audio and tactile companions (Scarry 2001: 6). Furthermore, any reference to ‘insight’ employs its full meaning and usage and incorporates haptic experience.3 It defines my attention to seeing inwards, focusing on the internalized sensations of kinaesthetic motion, fused with an embodied visioning (i.e. the internalized conjuring of image within the body, often ‘seen’ as mental pictures) and with the felt discernment of more abstract (and not necessarily pictorial) ideas and themes through the whole body.

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Figure 6.2  Lundahl & Seitl, Symphony of a Missing Room – archive of the forgotten and remembered, Royal Academy of Arts, London, 2014. Photograph and © Julian Abrams.

My whole-body comprehension drew attention to my being in the work moment by moment. Consequently, my recollection is neither narrative nor chronological, but a piecing together of a series of sensations and recollections; the aural shifts, the soaring violin strings; fluctuations in temperature registered upon my skin; slopes, steps, surfaces under foot; textures of walls and handrails; awareness of people next to me and the swish of their energy; the accidental brush of an elbow when dancing; the static touch of upper arm against upper arm and the bone of a hip in the lift; the perception of confined space versus that of echoey expanse; the inappropriate feel of my Birkenstock sandals as I twirl, slide and tiptoe; and the pleasurable sensation of that gentle hand holding mine. Symphony is firmly rooted in an embodied process, attributable to the tactile-kinaesthetics of Martina’s unique choreography coupled with intimate sound relayed through headphones. Combined as audiohaptic instructions for imagining, partnered with the ambient scents, tones, textures and temperatures of the Royal Academy, they bring about an experience of imagining that generates palpable imagery (see Scarry 2001: 10–30). My imagining moves beyond visual evocations to become a whole-body manifestation of ideas and images, as shaped by

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my guides; I feel rain at a distance as much as hear it; I warm under the dappled sunlight that caresses my skin in that imagined courtyard; and my breathing and suddenly sluggish limbs pull through the amniotic gloopiness of the primordial tunnel through which I pass. The fusion of the tactile, haptic and auditory senses is prioritized, making me acutely aware, in the moment and in retrospect, that the imagination is not exclusive to vision. It is the deprivation of sight that emphasizes the playfulness of the tactual dialogue and encourages the visitor to surrender to intuition. Symphony activated haptic awareness, which encompassed a revitalized appreciation of my own moving body and extended to my consciousness of the moving bodies around me, sensed as a palpable presence in the space. My haptic intuition was especially brought to bear by the guidance through touch without sight, which formed a journey through themes as much as through the building. The tacit interaction relies on a perceptive response from the performer, developed from the dynamic initiated on that first hand-to-hand contact. It involves a process of facilitation that encourages an attuning-together between visitor and guide as the piece progresses. The movement quality subtly stimulates the senses and elicits an attending to the anticipation of the movement, as much as to the movement itself. This sensation instils a felt comprehension (how apt that ‘to comprehend’ is also ‘to grasp’) of presence in absence. It affects the experience of the geometry of the spaces – rooms, courtyards, tunnels – in which I perceive myself to be located and yet, in actuality, I am not. This palpable sensation of being ‘there yet not there’ is inspired by imagination and motion – imagination in motion. It is elaborated by each encounter with the hand and its playful touch. This relationship becomes an acutely perceived absent-presence, a relationship forged as much by the absence of that touch (the virtual sensation that remains in the palm, the expectant awaiting of its gentle hold) as much as by its physical clasp. Anticipation of the absent-present touch in Symphony prompts the sensation of suspended time, of being held in an ongoing present. This elicits a felt sense of dwelling in time and space. Here dwelling describes

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the inhabiting of, and feeling inhabited by, temporality and spatiality caused by attending to the perceptual slide (across sensation and imagination) of embodied cognition. This, in turn, generates a slide between my awareness of inner and outer space, resulting in a perceived fusion of these entities caused by ‘a heightened sense of presence, the kinesphere around the body’ (Seitl qtd. in Machon 2013a: 180). It is the attention to full-body perception, as opposed to a prioritization of sight, that affords this holistic cognition of ideas as much as states. With Symphony, participants are invited to comprehend an embodied experience of art where internalized visual references are a consequence of a whole-body attention to ideas as much as physical sensations and sensual descriptions. In this way Symphony elicits affective cognition of non-visible phenomenological concepts. Mark Johnson, in his examinations of neuroscientific and psychological research alongside artistic and phenomenological philosophies, argues that human understanding ‘is rooted in how our bodies and brains interact with, process and understand our environments in a way that recruits bodily meaning, neural simulation, and feeling to carry out both concrete and abstract conceptualisation and reasoning’ (2015: 7). For Johnson, ‘Understanding is not just an intellectual operation on disembodied concepts, ideas, or representations,’ but ‘a profoundly bodily process of experiential simulation that uses complexly interconnected brain regions responsible for all sorts of perceptual and motor activities, as well as emotional responses and feelings’ (2015: 6, original emphasis). He asserts: ‘Perceiving is a mode of thinking, just as much as thinking appropriates the resources and mechanisms of perception’ (2007: 228). Johnson, like Scarry, provides compelling evidence for the ways in which, ‘Imagination is tied to our bodily processes and can also be creative and transformative of experience’ (2007: 13). Imagination and its capacity for influencing abstract reasoning, bound up within our full perceptual capabilities, enables humans to ‘enlarge concepts, and to arrive at new ways of making sense of things’ (2007: 13). With regard to Symphony, it is the combining of imagination and sensation in form that entices the visitor to attend to this fused nature of

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perception, its interrelated resources and mechanisms. The inhibition of sight accentuates this experience of the (syn)aesthetic; rather than compartmentalizing the senses in perception, it serves to liberate the holism of the human sensorium (see Machon 2011: 13–24). The manipulation of sight, recast as light that influences inner visioning and haptic introspection, brings about a ‘full-attention-to’ this holism as whole-body (re)cognition. Furthermore, the imagination and its embodied imagery is influenced by and influences any accompanying sensory activity during, and following the event, which then textures and shapes ‘meanings’ that are made. Knowing and feeling in the live moment and in subsequent interpretations are not divorced from each other but symbiotically combined. As Johnson suggests, ‘We recruit body-based, image-schematic logic to perform abstract reasoning’ (2007: 181) and, through this, the knowing of abstract ‘unknowns’ can be felt. Christer Lundahl (CL)  When visitors leave Symphony, when they take off the goggles, they experience the world from a slightly different perspective, in themselves. Their perception is slightly sharper, as with opening the eyes after deep meditation. Today the gap between what we can perceive with our senses versus what we can measure and calculate with technology and science is constantly widening. This is largely because our sensory perception is evolving relatively slowly in comparison with technology. But could technology then in turn train us to reprogramme that natural perception that leads us to habitual, cultural misconceptions about space and the universe? This question is in part what prompted Unknown Cloud, a project that moves Lundahl & Seitl into astronomical spheres through a current concern with phenomena that are so far beyond human comprehension that we can only ever remain ‘in the dark’ about them. Unknown Cloud deepens Martina and Christers’ preoccupation with the nature of human perception and their desire to explore how art becomes the means to bridge ‘the experience gap’ on a number of levels concerning the nature of human perception and cultural experience.4

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Unknown Cloud … the space(s) between The full title of Lundahl & Seitl’s current project (at the time of writing) is Unknown Cloud On The Way To …. The title is completed by the location to which ‘the cloud’, as deployed in the work, travels. It names the piece itself and foreshadows the manner in which the artwork will become known across various media. CL  Without institution or biennial, without a white cube framing the experience as art, how would we stage the right context for this experience? When art is to be found in life, everything that leads you to the experience needs to be considered as important, especially how you hear about it. Unknown Cloud will be a nomadic artwork that takes the form of a cloud forecast via the public weather report as a natural phenomenon. Martina Seitl (MS)  ‘An invisible magnetically charged cloud is at the moment travelling across the northern Baltic sea and will reach you by Wednesday afternoon.’ The cloud can only be experienced if you download new technology available via a website where you can see the speed at which the cloud is travelling, when it will arrive at your location. Like the weather, the cloud’s exact future location can be predicted only a few days beforehand. I have walked to the river, placed my headphones in my ears, tapped ‘play’ on my phone. Recorded birdsong at a distance merges with the shrieks of the gulls in the sky in front of me, and then, that Arielesque voice; ‘You’re soon about to enter the time of no time, and from now on, your device will serve as your compass.’ She tells me that I’m standing in the northern hemisphere of Earth and the cloud is approaching me from the northwest. It travels through my right ear, through my body, sounding its electro magnetic radiation, like a fusion of birds singing, dolphins chatting, ice melting and metal softly screeching. Close my eyes. I’m now positioned inside the cloud. Like the centre of a tornado it is peaceful and silent – ‘Listen can you hear it? The sound of the sun and its solar activity?’ – pulsating. Open my eyes. Attend to my compass

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and its position. Locate myself via the sunset, lean backwards and into the rotation of Earth. I feel the weight of my feet drawn through the earth by gravity, lean back onto my heels, incline with it as it turns. She reminds me that a horizon rises in front of me, hiding the sun, while another, below me, is sinking, revealing new sky. Together, Earth and I tilt at the sun, spin at a speed of 500 metres per second as the sound of a mistral crosses my audio path; binaurally pushing me according to the rotation of Earth. Focused in and out on my own bodily axis, connecting this with the axis of Earth, I feel a centring of my body through Earth’s gravity, follow it down, far down into space. From this perspective I’m invited to imagine myself attached to Earth by my feet as if hanging upside down. A magnetic line, from the soles of my feet, through the earth, connects me with the sky of the southern hemisphere, pulls me towards The International Space Station, as it orbits Earth. It fleetingly aligns itself with my current position, as it travels on an audio journey through my body, syncopates briefly with my breathing, moves on, leaves via my left foot. She reminds me to reconfigure through the sunset, the horizon, while the soundscape draws me on to Neptune, to the sound of its stormy surface against my skin, through my lungs. She reminds me to turn on my own axis, slowly, slowly with eyes closed, exploring my position in relation to the sun, to Neptune, to the spinning Earth; to feel celestial bodies through my own body, moving in tandem with the pull of our universe, travelling with the cloud on a course of 540,000 metres, as I tap into the movements and stillness of space.

Challenged by curators Hanna Wörman and Kirsten Hinders, Martina and Christer were keen to explore whether the sense of trust explored through touch in previous works could be replicated by technology. Unknown Cloud deploys ‘Nagoon’, an innovative software that utilizes smartphone sensors that can pinpoint and interact with an individual in a personalized, layered fashion in real time, supported by GPS positioning methods. It can relay binaural soundscapes and narration (an element that previously required advanced sound equipment) via the visitors’ own headsets. As described above, my encounter with a pilot version of Unknown Cloud involved following the sunset, guided

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by the audio experience, along a stretch of the Thames Embankment that curved along an expanse of wetland area opposite. Despite the ‘test’ nature of my experience, the soundscape and narration, the play with balance through closed eyes and off-kilter stance served to facilitate the sensation of a connection with meteorological phenomena and astronomical space. Where, in Symphony, haptic perception extended to a connection with other human bodies, in Unknown Cloud it became a tuning into celestial bodies. The work facilitates a tapping into geological time and planetary alignment. To draw on John Berger, it induces a strange, palpable coincidence of the ‘space of physics’ and my own inner space (1992: 51). It enabled me to experience a (re)connection with the natural world through a focus on the sunset. The tilting back of the head, as the white-yellow to apricot to pink to mauve sun hung ahead of me on a crisp, winter afternoon, induced the sensation of my body balancing on Earth as it rotates. Manipulated by soundscape and by my own haptic engagement, my imagination elicited an affective connection with time and space. The 360-degree ‘overview effect’, deployed through sound, aligns with The Space Station, takes in Neptune, all (re)orientated by the repeated return to the rotating reference of the sunset.5 It affects a connection between personal inner space, geographical location and imagined astronomical space; between my corporeality, my heartbeat and breath, the tempo of the sunset and the magnetic pull of Earth. CL  In contemplating ‘theatres of the dark’, the stars and the night sky might be described as a curtain in a theatre that either serve as a romantic scenery like the sunset, or mark the end of an act on our ‘world stage’, when we go to bed. In terms of ‘being in the dark’, our comprehension of the universe through maps, or the way we learn from school, is very static, intellectual; an unnatural perspective removed from time. If instead your teacher had told you, ‘Stand up with your feet on the ground now, and imagine, in this moment, a straight line runs from your feet down through the earth, out into the space; below you, you will find the planet Mars on its orbit – and it is currently moving from your left foot passing your right foot and we are ourselves moving with Earth’s rotation, tilting this way….’ This is our aim with Unknown

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Cloud, to encourage this to be felt. It takes you away from your frontal visual perspective, and it also takes you away from a purely intellectual understanding of our solar system to focus on a moving 360 degree perception of the universe that coordinates with the orbital schedule. This is not a visual experience; you do not hang in space looking back at Earth. Instead, it’s related to time through a simultaneous perception of celestial bodies all around you – where your attention to the planets’ movements is registered simultaneously as a four-dimensional soundmap related to your body’s movement on Earth. MS  We want to create an aural symphony in space and time. Let’s say we play the sound of The International Space Station below you, planets above you and so on, and those different locations in space move so whenever you turn you will hear the direction in which Earth is spinning. It’s like a dimensional soundmap of the universe, incorporating that visitor’s movements. When you turn your head, the sound of Neptune is in one place and it stays there – it’s a kind of physical experience, the sound of Neptune touching your body. In Symphony you have the hand, it’s touching you and the recording’s three-dimensional but it doesn’t move. In Unknown Cloud there’s no hand anymore, but because the sound is located in space it doesn’t move with you when you turn your head or your body; it stays where it’s supposed to be so you’re experiencing sound touching your body. CL  In previous works we’ve created a residual feeling of presence of something that’s not really there through the workings of illusion. With Unknown Cloud we do quite the opposite. We use illusions to reveal things that are around us all the time but that we cannot experience because of the limits of our perception – things our perception has not evolved to apprehend, because there has been no evolutionary need for it. MS  It’s hard for us humans to imagine time intervals larger than our own lifespan. Geological time, astronomical time, are both ‘unseen’, ‘unperceived’, and ‘unfelt’, by humans. So, especially in western cultures, we have problems visualising the future consequences of our actions and how it will impact on generations to come. It’s ‘the experience gap’. With

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Unknown Cloud we want people to imagine a time beyond our own existence, to tap into geological time and, eventually, cosmological time; to bridge the experience gap. We know that we live on a globe, a planet, although we cannot experience it as ‘the overview effect’ unless we are in space. We like to think of ourselves as the still-point in the universe – an egocentric worldview. Unknown Cloud questions and shifts our perception of our placement in the universe, creating an imagined overview effect. Astronauts describe it by focusing on what keeps us together rather than separating us. For those of us who remain on Earth, the cartography of how countries and nations are divided become more real to us than the physical reality of the globe. An important question we are investigating is, can an overview effect be non-visual? With Unknown Cloud we’re interested in simulating an overview effect – not as a sense of just imagining seeing Earth from the outside but a physical awareness of the globe that is imaginative, haptic and empathetic; an understanding that we share a globe, that there are no boundaries that separate us, boundaries which humans invented. Another misconception is that we also think of space ‘out there’. But it’s not out there, we’re in space, we’re on ‘spaceship earth’. This is an idea too big for our comprehension. The same goes with the classical image of the sunset. Even after Copernicus we still haven’t integrated the idea that it’s us moving and not the sun. We’re stuck in the experience of us being the still-point of the universe, which everything circles around. CL  The project that started to form became time-specific, rather than site-specific. We wanted to explore Shakespeare’s quote, ‘All the world’s a stage,’ where the world stage is spread over a web of traversed layers of realities, far from the traditional frontal theatrical stage. Life as art/art as life becomes an interesting paradox when applied to a global coexistence with media. The ‘narrative’ that underscores Unknown Cloud addresses how abstract, fictional creations of money, corporations, religions, politics are taken as more ‘real’ than the physical environment around us. The R&D testing of the first seed of the project is aiming eventually to induce the feeling of a spatial and temporal

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overview effect in relation to your body on Earth – a conversation that is powered by this new perspective. MS  We want to use this limited time window of the sunset, employing technology to collect people and invite them to experience this sunset, haptically, together. What might happen if we shift some of our habitual perceptions? Could that transform the ways in which we relate to the planet, and to each other? The sensory relation we have to our surroundings makes us aware that much of our perception is individual and based, primarily, on vision. What if we experienced the ‘dark phenomena’ of the Venus passage, or a solar eclipse while we share in the primordial transition from day to the darkness of night-time? If we involved ourselves physically and collectively in this phenomenon, following the temporality of the universe, what might this open up? If you listen to the soundmap that will be composed as the piece progresses, if you listen to it long enough, could you physically comprehend the movement of the universe? (See Figure 6.3.)

Figure 6.3  Lundahl & Seitl, Unknown Cloud (R&D), Stockholm, 2016. Photograph: Joakim Olsson, © Lundahl & Seitl.

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As these reflections identify, the attention to sensual imagination that is bound up with holistic perception is vital to the very form of Unknown Cloud and its potential to bridge the experience gap through aesthetic phenomena. To trace how this takes effect, how it becomes an affective experience, it helps to return briefly to the removal of sight and the handto-hand interchange in Symphony. It was this formalistic device, the denial of the visual, that brought me to a state of embodied mindfulness and intensified insight. Insight was reached through a self-conscious awareness of my internal image-making combined with my acutely felt understanding of the concepts underpinning the work. It also directly resulted from the slide between my internal and external experiences of perception. This underpinned a conscious state of being with(in) myself and extended out to the architecture and artefacts of The Royal Academy, textured by a sense of my body merging with the kinesphere. With Unknown Cloud Lundahl & Seitl advance this perceptual state and facilitate a deeper connection with the immediate and imagined environment. No goggles are employed, but the multidimensional sound shifts perception across the sensorium, thereby modulating vision. There is no invisible-disembodied-tactile-guide; instead, the visitor is choreographed directly through audio instruction alone. Yet, the sense of merging with the kinesphere is still keenly felt. The impact of the audio-haptic instruction on the imagination – incorporating directions to close eyes and to skew orientation by bending backwards while looking up and so on – engenders a perceived merging with geological and astronomical spheres. In these ways, sight, site and insight intertwine. To clarify, the remodulation of perception through inner sight during Symphony causes this intertwining of site and insight. Internally envisaged through narration as both an actual chamber and a philosophical space, the eponymous ‘missing room’ for me morphs between a shuttered attic where dust particles hover in shards of sunlight and an amorphous, temporal state, darkly twinkling like a galaxy. Yet it is also a fused conceptual/sensual site and a non-visual phenomenological process: It is an allegorical museum that stores memory within the

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body, built from my corporeal archives of experience in hippocampus, neurones, flesh and bone. It is my personal space of contemplation as I journey through the work. It is thus a sensuous world that serves as metaphor and materiality in my interpretations. Pictorial and abstract, it illustrates how imagination conjures a site where my artworks, art histories and aesthetic responses reside. Equally, this room, this space, is my body, my interiority, my sensory capacity to store those memories and that art. Space and body merge in unusual ways in Symphony; when sighted at beginning and end, it is the intimacy of the soundscape that underscores the fusion of the real and the illusory in a physical setting, defamilarized through my directed gaze; when blinded by light, the fusion of interiority and exteriority is accentuated through my embodied perception, a feeling of merging with the kinesphere while attending to temperature, sound, scent and hapticity; additionally, a further shifting of perception occurs, enabling comprehension of site through the body, when vision is removed and architectural space becomes located within the imagination. My explanation of insight through insite here emphasizes the term’s connection to kinaesthetic and haptic experience, both metaphorically and materially. The elision of the senses that layered my experience of the piece in the immediate moment textures my present recall and analysis of the work. My corporeal memory of artworks across my lived history, folds into my embodied memory of Symphony and its philosophical concerns. Interpreting the work through this corporeal memory involves a further folding-in of these imaginings; those that made absent rooms present within me. The imagined space of the missing room was, and is still, both metaphor and internal manifestation. It is a site inside my insight. In questioning how individuals experience and archive art – the ways in which the human body stores art as experience, incorporating the sensual, temporal and spatial – Symphony made me the medium and museum of the work. This intertwining of sight, site and insight as a blurring of inner/ outer, sight/site is also central to my experience of self as the medium of Unknown Cloud. My inner focus made planes and dimensions

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palpable, inflected by imagination and reflection. Berger suggests that such construction of meaning can be as strongly felt as any ‘proven’ experience evidenced by the visual: ‘At the moment of revelation when appearance and meaning become identical, the space of physics and the seer’s inner space coincide: momentarily and exceptionally the seer achieves an equality with the visible. To lose all sense of exclusion; to be at the centre’ (1992: 51–2). Unknown Cloud generates such a feeling of inclusion. It activates my attention to the turning of Earth and the centring of my body through this felt evocation of the globe as its spins. As with Symphony, physicalized moments of suspension in time and space exaggerate the ongoing present, increase expectancy and generate an experience of dwelling. Situated in a natural-urban setting, this attention to dwelling freely evokes environmental philosophies and politics. The sensual and the conceptual influence each other to elicit a (re)cognition of my involvement in the turning of it all. The overriding themes of both Symphony and Unknown Cloud manifest themselves in this fused fashion, leading to a vivid comprehension of each work, comprised of the felt, the imagined and the understood.

Conclusion: Acts of illumination The work of Lundahl & Seitl sheds light on the wholly embodied and artful nature of human perception. Symphony and Unknown Cloud demonstrate the ways in which the felt, the imagined and the understood are intimately connected in human processes of meaning-making. During and immediately following both pieces I could feel how the sensuous world of my body had been the material of the work and the manifestation of its themes. With Symphony the haptic traces that remain in my embodied memory of the piece influence my interpretation of the work. It underscores how human bodies are sensual archives of images, thoughts and experiences. This resonates with a wider contemplation of

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the way in which art is shared with its public, that which is selected for view, that which is stored away. It questions, what happens to art (and thus cultural commentary) that is removed from sight and memory, rendered invisible, left unseen and forgotten. Correspondingly, the audio journey, the feel of the cold ground underfoot, the receding light of the sunset, the very activity of Unknown Cloud, remains with me. It has invited me to tune into how everyday human routines might be mingling with the planetary activity all around in constant motion. Where Symphony has been created to evolve according to the architecture and history of the museum or gallery in which it is located, Unknown Cloud will follow a nomadic formlessness, conceived as a system of different possibilities in a series of given relations. MS  Unknown Cloud is a form, a format, with so many different incarnations and relations. The work will evolve and become something other, something more, or something diluted, at any given time. Having had the initial experience you are then part of its community. A potential outcome is that people will be invited to send their thoughts and voices into the cloud as an after-reflection. If heard in the parallel location, after being in silence for some time, it might offer the previous ‘live’ discussion a different perspective. A hope is that visitors’ thoughts will continue to travel with the cloud as a living, constantly transforming, archive of voices. Like The Golden Record – a travelling time-capsule sent into space in the 1970s containing greetings from our planet – the furthest human object that’s about to leave our solar system. Symphony and Unknown Cloud are fascinating examples of practice that manifest, in form and theme, complex ideas and techniques related to theatres of darkness, or at least, theatres of obscured or affected vision. Each requires the visitor to renegotiate ‘ways of seeing’ as ‘ways of being’, both during and after each event. This attention to being suffuses the quality of recall in any subsequent interpretation of each event. Both the works play across sensuous worlds in theme and form. By removing sight and turning focus inwards, Symphony underscores how bodies are the sensual material of the artistic encounter and highlights how the human sensorium stores image, thought and experience. The

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sensuous experience of theme opens out to a wider contemplation of cultural arguments around public access to art. Unknown Cloud plays upon the notion of ‘being in the dark’ with regard to international and environmental politics, as expounded through astronomical and geological concerns. The work manipulates bodily comprehension to encourage a cognitive shift in awareness, and thereby offers insight into the vulnerability of Earth. Consequently, understanding of this phenomenon feels, palpably, within reach. Martina and Christer’s ambitions for Unknown Cloud are a fitting place to conclude our reflections on shedding light, through art, on the obscure and the unknown. This work aims to test the potentials of the human sensorium in partnership with technology: to explore the spaces that can be blurred between the visceral and virtual; to wonder at what might be achieved by becoming attuned to the universe as a way of understanding the politics of our environment and attending to global concerns. It looks towards positive outcomes that might arise by tapping into other ways of being and other ways of knowing. It imagines art as a means of sharing an embodied, collective consciousness. And it conceives of vast and dark matters that might be illuminated by that art.

References Berger, J. (1992), And our faces, my heart, brief as photos, London: Granta Books. Hertwig, R. and Erev, I. (2009), ‘The description-experience gap in risky choice’. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 13: 517–23. Johnson, M. (2007), The Meaning of the Body – Aesthetics of Human Understanding, London and Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Johnson, M. (2015), ‘Embodied understanding’, Frontiers in Psychologies, 6: 875: 1–8. Lundahl & Seitl Official Website (n.d.). Available online: http://www.lundahlseitl.com/ (accessed 22 July 2016).

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Lundahl & Seitl (2013), The Memory of W.T. Stead. Artistic Directors, Christer Lundahl and Martina Seitl. Assistant Director, Rachel Alexander. Collaborators, Laura Hemming-Lowe, Sara Lindström, Genevieve Maxwell, Colin McLean, Lucía Montero, Pia Nordin. Produced by Nomad, London. Supported by Mont Blanc and Arts Council England. Steinway & Sons W1, London. [Date experienced: 3 April]. Lundahl & Sietl (2014), Symphony of a Missing Room. Artists, Christer Lundahl and Martina Seitl. Choreographer, Martina Seitl. Collaborators, Dagmara Bilon, Lisette Drangert, Laura Hemming-Lowe, Catherine Hoffman, Genevieve Maxwell, Colin McLean, Pia Nordin. Costume designer, Jula Reindell. Project Manager, Emma Leach. Lift Festival at The Royal Academy of Arts, London. [Date experienced: 5 June]. Lundahl & Seitl (2015–), Unknown Cloud. Commissioned by curators Hanna Wörman and Kirsten Hinder. Produced by AKOI Solutions, Hanna Wörman, Kirsten Hinder, together with Lundahl & Seitl. Developed by AKOI Solutions. Designed by Kristian Hell. Financial support from Konstnärsnämnden and Innovativ Kultur. [Dates trial version experienced: 15 January and 24 February 2016]. Lusseyran, J. (1999), And there was Light – the Autobiography of a Blind Hero in the French Resistance, translated by E. R. Cameron, Edinburgh: Floris Books. Machon, J. (2011), (Syn)aesthetics: Redefining Visceral Performance, Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Machon, J. (2013a), Immersive Theatres – Intimacy and Immediacy in Contemporary Performance, Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Machon, J. (2013b), ‘(Syn)aesthetics and Immersive Theatre: Embodied Beholding in Lundahl & Seitl’s Rotating in a Room of Moving Images’, in N. Shaughnessy (ed.), Affective Performance and Cognitive Science: body, brain and being, 199–215, London: Bloomsbury Methuen Drama. Machon, J. (2017), ‘Audience improvisation in the Immersive Experience’, in V. Midgelow and C. Hopf (eds), Oxford Handbook in Improvisation in Dance, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Scarry, E. (1985), The Body In Pain – The Making and Unmaking of the World, New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press. Scarry, E. (2001), Dreaming by the Book, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

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The Overview Institute Official Website (2012). Available online: http://www. overviewinstitute.org/ (accessed 22 July 2016). White, F. (1998), The Overview Effect – Space Exploration and Human Evolution, 2nd edn, Reston: American Institute of Aeronautics & Astronautics.

7

Staring at Blindness: Pitch Black Theatre and Disability-led Performance Amelia Cavallo and Maria Oshodi

Extant is a leading British professional performing arts company comprised of visually impaired artists. Formed in 1997, Extant’s strength has been to create shared experiences for visually impaired and sighted audiences and to draw inspiration from new collaborations. We challenge perceptions and traditional methodologies across multiple formats including traditional stage settings, outdoor arts and hightech installations. An example of this can be found in one particularly relevant strand of the company’s work, which explores pitch black performance for audiences and blind performers – the core subject of this chapter. Extant recognizes that in the context of disability-led performance as well as disability studies and politics, theatre in the dark has the capacity to make bold statements about identity, creativity and empowerment. What follows tracks the trajectory of Extant’s theatre in the dark from 2007 to the present, mapping what the creative pathways have been for the company in sculpting narrative, form, access and technology for their investigations into darkened theatre performances. Alongside this, we will be offering an analysis of the scholarly and sociopolitical effects of our work through lenses such as Rosemary Garland-Thomson’s work on staring, studies of the disabled ‘freak’ and discussions about the lighter and darker shades of individual experience for blind people. In so doing, we seek to present examples of how darkness can

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be a space for untapped political and creative potential in both the disability community and wider social contexts. Our discoveries show that under the control of visually impaired practitioners, darkness can present blindness as an empowered identity while antagonizing and deconstructing normative, hierarchical values of ocularcentrism, and creating a communal need for access and inclusion, regardless of sensory make-up.

The Effing and Blinding Cabarets (2007–9) In 2007, Extant began to develop a cabaret in the dark which originated at the famous Dans Le Noir? restaurant in Farringdon, London. This restaurant, where diners eat in total darkness and are served by blind waiters, is part of an international network of similar establishments in Paris, Köln, Berlin, Switzerland and Moscow, as Adam Alston surveys in his contribution to this book. Extant presented four shows in the dark called The Effing and Blinding Cabaret at Dans Le Noir? and over the next two years further adapted these comedy and song reviews, touring them throughout the UK and internationally to Zagreb, Berlin and Helsinki. The show often followed a typical cabaret format of sketches and songs, and was themed for the restaurant around a particular celebration or holiday such as St George’s Day, Shakespeare’s birthday, Burns Night or American Independence Day. As the cabaret toured further afield, we began to develop more general material that included some of the following sketches: ●●

The Estate Agent – An estate agent visits a property to give an evaluation but finds the lights have tripped and the owner is a little uneasy. During the scene it is revealed that the reason for the owner needing to sell is due to her losing her job as a snake charmer, and the reason for her unease is because her snake has just disappeared somewhere in the darkness of the house. As she reveals this, the estate agent’s voice becomes slowly more constricted until he is

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swallowed. Once the snake has done her worst, she escapes once again out into the audience. What Ever Happened to Steven Hawking? – Set in the near future, we find Steven Hawking working as a pilot of a Virgin Black Hole Tour’s spaceship, ferrying space tourists (the audience) over the event horizon into black hole safari. Hawking’s synthetic voice is accompanied by two personal assistants, funded by Access to Work, who also double up as on-board flight attendants. They give out drinks and meals and take the audience through their safety procedures, giving various information and leading the audience into a countdown as the ship crosses over into the black hole. Inside, everything becomes chaotic, including Hawking’s intention, which is to rid the world of Richard Branson and take over the black hole tourist industry.

Both of these sketches moved in and around the audience, often with the performers adding soundscapes and tactile effects to support the scenes. For example, the end of the Estate Agent scene had the actors running through the performance space while hissing loudly and throwing large jelly snakes into the audience. Through touring these cabarets the company cut its teeth on basic techniques, tricks and possibilities of working in intimate dark performance spaces. As we will go on to discuss, the practices developed in this earlier period were to prove significant in the company’s ongoing work with theatre in the dark. From this, we can propose the following guiding principles: ●●

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Dark performance can assist the creation of scenes set anywhere, from space ships to restaurants with no need for visual representations and minimal need for props or set. Audiences lose inhibitions in the dark. They tend to be more comfortable interacting with actors, singing, shouting and heckling, most likely because they cannot be seen, creating a sense of anonymity.

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Live and prerecorded sound can be spatialized to create the illusion of an environment. A performance space that surrounds an audience can expand, contract and transform perceptions of space through sound. Surrounding an audience with moving performers in pitch black space using foley sound effects, which sometimes are in very close proximity, together with materials that occasionally touch them, creates a haptic interactivity that is not experienced in lit performance styles. Moreover, this would be difficult to re-create in lit space as the element of surprise would be lost if the audience could see the performers.

It was these discoveries, along with a desire to make a strong political statement about blind identity, that gave Extant the impetus to continue exploring the creative potential for pitch black performances. The cabaret was also designed as a method of disrupting the status quo of sighted dominance in society. It was meant to be simultaneously fun and antagonistic to ocularcentric norms, not just from the perspective of darkness, but from the perspective of disability. By capitalizing on darkness, we were able to create an unusual and exciting show, as well as a societal role reversal. For once, blind people were completely in charge of a space and were more equipped to function in that space than the sighted. This simple concept of role reversal is at least partially why restaurants like Dans Le Noir? were established. Siegfried Saerberg has written about this in an article for Disability Studies Quarterly entitled ‘The Dining in the Dark Phenomenon’. In this article, Saerberg discusses the setup of blind waiters serving sighted people in pitchblack environments as a method of role reversal that ‘gives sighted guests an impression of how a disabling society constructs blindnessrelated problems [while] open[ing] guests’ eyes to blind people’s ... skills, and to the ways a more enabling society could meet and accommodate those ... skills’ (2007: 2). He also points out that such a setup allows for uncensored communication between the sighted and the blind community. Both sides can learn and gain confidence from each other

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in this setting as it presents a space where blindness and sight can be explored as individual perspectives on the world, as opposed to fixed states of being that exist on a hierarchical scale. Similarly, cabaret tends to be playful and malleable as a form, creating a sense of fun that can present the political without it feeling overly didactic or moralistic. It is also often dependent on audience interaction, which furthered the potential for communication, and is where the desire to create haptic experiences stemmed from. Concordantly, Extant was keen to challenge the dominance of ocularcentrism or the privileging of sight over the other senses (Garland-Thomson 2005; Johnson 2002) that is conventionally maintained by various performance styles and venues, whether that be a restaurant or an established theatre. One can argue that placing a performance space or indeed a dining experience in the dark already does this. However, working in darkness asks what it might mean to live without light – a question that is still fundamentally based in sighted perception. Having blind people in control of said darkened space challenges the ocular even further by asking what it means to live without ‘normal’ sight. The word ‘normal’ in itself is problematic in relation to disability as it can reinforce social hierarchy and stigma. It labels those who are not disabled as ‘normal’ and everyone else as defective (Davis 1995; Garland-Thomson 2009; McRuer 2006). However, in darkness no one has ‘normal’ vision, sighted or otherwise. It is because of this that blindness can escape negative stereotypes of incapability, lack and loss, becoming instead an example of how non-normative sensory makeups can be catalysts for challenging assumed behaviour and identity constructs. This was found time and time again with audiences (both blind and sighted) feeding back that they now understood blindness differently, as for many this was their first experience of blind performers. They also often stated that they felt liberated because of being given an unusual performance experience and a space to be vocally expressive on a variety of subjects, from the historical to the political to the absurd. It is important to understand that while Extant’s use of darkness was, and is a political and performative device, it is not a simulation

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exercise for sighted people. As Saerberg states, ‘Darkness does not reproduce blindness’ (2007: 4). This is further explained in Jim Davies’s article ‘What Do Blind People See’. According to Davies, blind people see ‘nothing’ in the same way that one does not see out of the back of one’s head. ‘The space behind [your head] does not look black. It does not look white. It just isn’t’ (2014). Equating blindness to darkness also gives strength to the stereotype that every blind person cannot see anything, which is false. Statistically, only 4 per cent of blind people have no vision. Moreover, there is a danger of using such simulation exercises with regard to disability because they tend to focus on impairment as opposed to social barriers, placing emphasis on what blind people cannot do (Donaldson 1980; Siperstein and Bak 1980). They also do not account for methods of adapting, such as the use of mobility canes, and are far more controllable and temporary than the actual experience of blindness. What Extant explored and exploited in The Effing and Blinding Cabaret was the creation of a non-visual, interactive performance that sought to change perceptions of how performance might be constructed without a predominance of visual content, and presented blindness as an empowered and empowering identity. Another interesting aspect of dining in the dark restaurants that was explored by The Effing and Blinding Cabaret is demonstrated by the opening statement on the Dans Le Noir?, London website: You are about to embark on an unbelievable trip: eating and drinking in pitch darkness. This idea might seem a little strange at first, but by suppressing the dominant sense of sight, you will enter a whole new world in which one is uncertain of their surroundings. Do not worry! Our blind guides will lead you through our gastronomic and pedagogical journey. (Dans Le Noir? 2016)

At first glance, this quote reads similarly to the patter one might hear at an old-style freak show. Words like ‘unbelievable’, ‘strange’ and ‘exciting’ appear throughout Dans Le Noir?’s advertising. This is something that Saerberg identifies and critiques in his article. He begins by pointing out that ‘darkness events ... come close to presenting what Bogdan (1988)

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has called the “respectable freak”’ (2007: 7). According to Bogdan, whose writing focuses on the freak shows of the early 1900s, ‘With respectable freaks the mundane was exploited as amazing and ordinary people were made into human wonders’ (1988: 200). In dining in the dark settings this is exactly what happens. The fact that the bartender is visually impaired moves the job from the everyday to the exceptional, not because blind people cannot work as bartenders, but because it is unexpected to see blind people in this setting. This potential freakishness is due to social barriers and ignorance as opposed to physical capability, which creates a political statement that is empowering for all who interact with the experience. However, while Saerberg identifies the possibility of blind freakishness in darkness events, he also dismisses it, stating that ‘an inalienable element of the freakshow is the staring at the “other.” For obvious reasons, that’s not possible in darkness’ (2007: 8). According to Saerberg, if you cannot physically stare at/see a ‘human wonder’, you cannot have a freak – an assertion that fails to take freakishness beyond the visual, which is problematic with regard to both darkness and visual impairment. It also sometimes falls into presenting freakishness in negative terms. While this is understandable given the objectifying and exploitative nature of freak shows, in making these assertions Saerberg fails to interact with the abundant scholarly and performative work that has reclaimed the freak in disability culture and art. Rosemary Garland-Thomson’s extensive work on staring (which Saerberg uses loosely to argue against dark freak shows) is heavily dependent on discussing the act of seeing and, more importantly, the ability to be seen. On the surface, staring is a physical response that is not available to most blind people. However, Garland-Thomson is clear that, while staring may instinctually start as an ‘ocular response’, it is based in ‘an interrogative gesture that asks what’s going on and demands the story’ (2009: 3). Staring occurs to gain information about things that are not understood. We would not stare if we did not start with the desire to experience the unknown and uncommon. GarlandThomson also states that ‘cognitive psychologists tell us that staring

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is a universal neural reflex. Even blind people get involved in staring’ (2009: 197). By this she means that, while blind people may not see, we nonetheless desire to interrogate and understand. Staring for blind people may take a different form, in that we will ‘rely on alternative sensory clues that staring provides to the sighted’ (Garland-Thomson 2009: 102). However, while we may not be able to physically see the thing we stare at, the ability to visualize is still well within the grasp of a blind person. For disabled performers who are often on the receiving end of staring relationships, the freak show presents an opportunity to utilize this interrogative gesture to ‘purposefully enlist and manipulate the staring dynamic to mount a critique of dominant cultural narratives about disability’ (Garland-Thomson: 2005: 32). As David Mitchell states in ‘Exploitations of Embodiment: Born Freak and the Academic Bally Plank’, The freakshow allows one to presume a connection between the exotic mechanisms at work in sideshow spectacle and the less explicit investments that infuse daily disability interchanges. The freakshow exposes hierarchical relations that might otherwise go un-remarked – or, at least, less remarked. (Mitchell 2005: 2)

In The Effing and Blinding Cabaret, the blind performers understood the morbid curiosity that comes along with not only darkness events, but also watching blind people move from the everyday (bartending and serving) to the exceptional (performance). Knowing this and consciously exploiting it gave us space to make succinct and provocative political statements about our identity. By arguing that darkness events do not function as modern-day freak shows, Saerberg not only rejects a large amount of study on staring and freakishness, but also sells experiences of darkness short of their creative and political potential. Darkness events allow the sighted world to experience the unexpected and unknown in a playful and exciting way. The Effing and Blinding Cabaret allowed the audience to ‘stare’ at blindness, and in doing so,

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also allowed them to question normative societal hierarchies with regard to disability and sight.

Sheer (2012) Sheer (2012) was a touring production that mixed concepts and techniques from The Effing and Blinding Cabaret with research we then carried out into burlesque performance, sexuality and reversing visual exposure. The aim of Sheer was to create a provocative theatre experience from the perspective of visual impairment that expanded on the interactive, haptic and sonic techniques used in cabaret, while exploring the darker and lighter sides of disability and sexuality. The goals were to combine: ●●

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Burlesque and the grotesque Comedy and cabaret Magic and horror Darkness (to evoke fear, suspense and tension) and light (to evoke exposure and trickery).

The overall experience set up an immersive environment in the dark where sound, set and performers reached out to the audience. The audience were led into the dark and seated before the show started, and so, they had no concept of the size or aesthetics of the space. Four blind performers moved in and around the audience, and also above them via aerial silks, creating scenes that oscillated between cabaret, fantasy and naturalism. Atmosphere was evoked by using live sound effects, as well as a rich, prerecorded, ‘spatialized’ sound design that travelled throughout the performance space. Tactile special effects were used in the dark to stimulate a palpable sense of place and narratives and so at times the set literally reached out to touch the audience. For example, a sound effect for birds flying might travel through the space accompanied by light ‘feathery’ fabric that was simultaneously

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draped across people’s heads. The soundscape aided this by creating aural tricks that confused physical size and perception, merging live sound into recorded. This was done by taking the live sound of actors travelling, including the sound of a tapping cane and voices moving from one side of the performance space to the other in the dark, and then transitioning these live sounds into a prerecorded version that was picked up through carefully positioned speakers, giving the effect that the tapping and calling was continuing on into the far distance. In this way we used the darkness to give the illusion of space reaching beyond its physical confines, depending on what was needed for story and character development. When the show moved into the light, the setting took on a more traditional–visual relationship with the addition of live audio description (AD), which was delivered by the blind performers. We also added a variation on delivery of AD through a pantomimic call-and-response interaction between performers and audience members. The intention was to involve the sighted audience in giving description of the visual elements when they occurred in the show as a form of access for the blind and partially sighted. In pitch black productions, AD can become an important storytelling tool for everyone, sighted or otherwise, as it offers imagery and depth to the performance. In Sheer, it also created unconventional methods for our AD that supported the production, such as those described above, making it into an interactive and improvisational experience. In its conventional setting, AD is an access tool that is reserved for blind and visually impaired spectators of visual media ranging from film and theatre to museums and sporting events (Braun 2007: 1). AD ‘provides a verbal version of the visual – the visual is made verbal, aural, and oral for the benefit of people who are blind or have low vision’ (Snyder 2005: 935). It is most commonly presented as an additional track created in post-production and then delivered to blind spectators via headsets. This means that, in most cases, sighted participants of AD performances and media events may attend without an awareness that anything is different. It also means that the blind spectator can have

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a somewhat isolating experience. Using a headset can make one feel ‘segregated from the rest of the audience’ (Clarke 2016). AD is traditionally delivered in a ‘neutral’ voice that speaks in the third person. For example, when describing an actor who looks angry, instead of naming the emotion directly, the AD would be more likely to describe physical actions such as ‘she clenches her jaw’. This is done to give the blind spectator as much interpretative license as possible when viewing a performance. While the creation and implementation of this tool is extremely helpful and important, there are many blind spectators and practitioners who feel that the methods for AD present it as something purely functional and ultimately ‘lacking creativity’ (Clarke 2016). This issue of overt functionality is what Extant sought to tackle when using AD in both the research on burlesque and with Sheer, with the discovery that simple changes to AD conventions were extremely effective. In the burlesque work, we discovered that switching AD into the first person was powerful and exciting, particularly when done by a blind performer who was describing herself. In most instances, AD reinstates ableist hierarchies in that the blind spectator is dependent on the sighted describer for information. The act of a blind individual having control over visual content and naming where to look yet again presented a sociopolitical role reversal. Sheer tells the story of three totally blind professionals, meeting for the first time at a lower ground level of a conference centre to deliver presentations to an audience of social workers. Unable to find their contact ‘Ray’ they decide to start despite being told by their audience that the space is in total darkness, something of which they were unaware. When they begin their presentations, each trainer becomes vaguely outlined by the dimmest of illuminations, which is accompanied by an eerie noise, seeming to shift their training from the ordinary subjects of disability awareness, access technology and the law to more flamboyant and performative representations of self, such as being ‘sexy’ or ‘dominant’.

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After the presentations and back in total darkness, each character describes how they met the illusive Ray, who seemed to have had a strange curiosity in their blindness and the details of their sight loss. (This scene used a storytelling style that travelled around and above the audience.) At a point in each character’s story, a blinding light bursts on for a few seconds to reveal a grotesque or shocking image, such as a person falling from height, or being painfully restrained with chains and electrical wires. After this, each character takes it in turns to question the audience on what they saw, before leaving, confused about the entire situation. Soon, it is revealed that Ray is a physicist, carrying out an experiment with a new discovery on the light spectrum – the Sheer Ray – and that the audience are not social workers but his fellow scientists. Ray needs to keep the trainers in the dark a little longer so that he can refine his invention. The audience are encouraged to call the trainers back for more presentations. Baffled, the trainers return and begin their presentations again, this time becoming properly illuminated by the Sheer Ray. Their presentations are transformed into grotesque burlesque routines parodying their visual impairment. One trainer, calling herself ‘Bifuckular’, is shown with her many eye operations extending into extreme cosmetic surgery resulting in a distorted clownish body image. Another, calling himself ‘Cataracto’, starts out in weedy underwear. Wanting to be more masculine and in control, he uses his gadgets as magic tricks to appear more attractive, but ends up trapped in a magician’s cabinet that looks like a cross between a suit jacket and a straightjacket. The final trainer, ‘Miss Stagmus’, is revealed in frilly pink underwear, flying free on an aerial silk, and preening herself in a huge princess mirror, following her desire to see her own femininity. She is interrupted by her alter ego, ‘Squint’, who performs a hard-core striptease routine where ultraviolet light picks out brilliant white nipple tassels, thong, stilettos and gloves moving in isolation in the pitch dark. This disembodied clothing enacts a dance/fight with a white cane. Items of clothing are removed until only one white glove remains in the dark and breaks the white cane in half, causing the overfeminized Miss Stagmus to fall from her high perch as the mirror shatters.

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The Sheer Ray is a metaphor for our ocularcentric society and symbolizes visual dominance. Exposure to the light reveals needs and addictions to pornography, advertising or consumerism, all of which are at home in ocularcentric societies. Dr Ray lurks in the bowels of the subconscious like a twisted representation of the worst of visual culture, and has invented the Sheer Ray as a beam of light that has revelatory properties, but works only in the dark and if its victim has no idea that the light is present (hence the need for blind testers). He believes it can uncover layers of the social mask. The three trainers are confident at the start in their respective areas of visual impairment, disability and equality, but according to Dr Ray this is undercut by their sexual/ emotional insecurities which he believes the Sheer Ray can reveal. The ray itself is temperamental and hard to control, revealing too little at first and then too much, before settling at the right level to uncover the characters’ true fantasies. These are couched in burlesque styles as a reflection of the indoctrination into visual culture which Dr Ray believes influences the way the trainers think they ought to appear. Their fantasies therefore take on a parody of visual sexual expression. The light works on a subject as if it is undressing them without their knowing. It is only when the characters come off stage that they have an epiphanic moment by revealing to each other what they were doing. This realization eventually makes each of the characters murderously angry, propelling them to the extremes of destroying Dr Ray, his machine and ultimately the audience. Most of the piece happened in the pitch black with audience members having no sense of what their surroundings looked like. This was further confused by the fact that, much like the cabaret, the performance happened in and around the audience as opposed to on a separate stage space, meaning that there was no real front or back in which to orientate. Given all of this, AD became all the more necessary in the lighted sections of Sheer, as they were often quick and isolated moments. Also, the script required that various pieces of information were delivered to the audience from the mundane to the fantastical. Through darkness, tactile and sound effects, audio description in the

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light and the overall story, we were presenting a space for each audience member to create the world around them inside their imagination. As in our burlesque work, we were in charge of creating and imparting the visual information. Also, as stated above, there were points where the performers would ask the audience to describe visual stimuli, such as an aspect of someone’s body, thus making the AD interactive, improvisational and spontaneous. We found that this method of AD troubled or disrupted the ‘truth’ behind an image, because in this format what was seen could be contradicted and debated by everyone watching, even those who couldn’t see.1 The lit sections of the performance happened in three specific moments. The first happened as a dim illusion as described above. The second happened in quick flashes, each showing the characters in disturbing and compromising situations. The final illuminated the burlesque-style scenes. In all instances, the characters were unaware of what was happening to them in the light and consequently needed this information after the fact. This meant asking the audience for input, which meant that visual experience was available for debate and contradiction. This situation was further heightened by the fact that these images sometimes appeared for a few seconds before being subsumed back into darkness. The audience had to describe something based on a memory that was designed to be shocking and confusing. Also, the characters in Sheer, as well as the blind audience members, needed the visual information to be imparted (regardless of how convoluted the description was) as part of the plot. While this arguably fits into the same social hierarchies of traditional AD, it meant that the visual world of our play was up for debate by everyone. Our use of visual performance also created another societal role reversal: while darkness was by no means comfortable in Sheer, it became a knowable entity. The light was confusing, disorientating and dangerous. It was darkness that made the world safe. Sheer also expanded on the concept of blind freakishness by exploring exploitation of disabled identity. As stated above, exploitation is a part of freakishness. In The Effing and Blinding Cabaret, this exploitation

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was consciously used in that we were playing with and poking fun at the taboos and stereotypes that were being presented, exaggerated, disrupted and dismantled. In Sheer, we expanded this to look at the darker aspects of these taboos and the exploitation that can happen around them. This is a tactic that has been used by other disability-led performances, and is succinctly described by Mat Fraser, a disabled actor who has spent a large portion of his career investigating and reviving freak show performances. Recalling his experiences as a ‘freak actor’, Fraser explains how he ‘cannot help but exploit [his] physique when performing’ (Fraser 2014). To clarify his point, he relates his experience to other potentially objectifying styles of performance such as striptease, saying that these styles of performance help actors ‘learn … about the control and power of the body on stage’ (ibid.). From this perspective, being a freak and embracing exploitation can be empowering. By acknowledging that people are curious, that they will stare, probe for information and base understandings of disability identity on preconceived notions, the disabled person or ‘staree’, to use Garland-Thomson’s wording (2009: 4–16), can take control of that dynamic. By doing this, we can redirect the conversation to one that critiques and potentially changes preconceived notions. Sheer did this by using the darkness in similar ways to that of the cabaret with the additional support of AD further subverting social hierarchies and ocularcentric dominance. This was offset in the lit burlesque scenes by creating grotesque representations of blind taboos and stereotypes, such as the medically scarred, the trapped and emasculated man, or the hyperfeminine beauty with the assumed desire to be sighted/normal at any cost. Concepts of exploitation and freakishness also came from the character of Dr Ray and his implicit involvement of the audience as his ‘fellow scientists’. He represented a dangerous aspect of sighted dominance in that he used the darkness as a form of manipulation that kept the blind characters ignorant of his ultimate goals. Instead, they became guinea pigs for an invention that was based on light and vision, with his experiments happening when the blind characters were unaware of the situation and at their most vulnerable. It was Dr Ray’s objectification and exploitation of these individuals for the betterment of science, and his dangerous

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assumption that he knew their ‘inner workings’ better than they did, that caused conflicts to occur. Though it was presented through fantastical and non-naturalistic performance styles, the underlying thread presented some of the more frightening disabling barriers for blind individuals, and gave some examples of how freakishness may be created and placed onto an individual without consent.

Flatland (2015) Flatland was a second-phase collaboration between Extant, robotics engineer and research scientist Dr Ad Spiers, and the Open University’s Pervasive Interaction Lab. Led by Extant, Flatland sprang from a shared desire to explore the potential of haptic technology: ‘the science of applying touch (tactile) sensation and control to interaction with computer applications’ (Rouse 2005). This was an idea the collaborators had begun to investigate in a 2010 initial R&D called The Question for which The Haptic Lotus, a first-generation haptic prototype device, was created to navigate test audiences around a scratch dramatic installation in complete darkness.2 Flatland was designed to further prove that it is possible to create an immersive theatrical experience using technology that is accessible to both sighted and visually impaired audience members. It aimed to challenge the status quo in arts and heritage where digital expansion or enhancement of cultural opportunities focuses on the visual, with screens as an interface. Instead, Flatland aimed to move theatre away from spectacle to a more embodied sensory experience. The project involved a multidisciplinary team based in the UK and abroad, consisting of artists, designers, engineers, researchers, academics and creative consultants. Together we explored a range of innovative technologies to create an immersive, pitch-dark world inspired by Edwin Abbott’s nineteenth-century satirical novella, Flatland. Specifically, we developed a handheld haptic device and tracking system that guided audience members through the dark, created interactive set

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pieces that provided sensory experiences throughout the installation (including through the use of eTextiles) and used sound effects and live actors to integrate all of these elements within a dramatic narrative. Each performance enabled independent navigation through a set of four multisensory scenes and group moments when audience members were brought together to test whether the technology could support a collective experience. Flatland tells the story of a two-dimensional world populated by unusual 2D characters where social classes are distinguished by using the ‘Art of Hearing’ and the ‘Art of Feeling’ (Abbott 1992). In our production four audience members per performance started their journey by being ushered into a small, closed empty corridor, where they sat together in dim lighting with nothing but the loud distorted ticking of a clock for company. In time, the character of Elder Square burst into the corridor, introducing himself, his story and the world of Flatland, where the audience (Spacelanders) were soon to travel. Leading them into his larger workshop, kitted out with tables laden with experimental equipment, cupboards, ladders, etc., he dressed the four in 3D suits, explaining that this was necessary to protect them during dimensional shift and to help them perceptually translate the 2D occurrences that they would experience in Flatland. (These were special Neoprene quilted suits that looked like adventure uniforms, the inside of which housed some of the electronics for the haptic guidance devices.) Next the device, the ‘Animotus’, was introduced, and Elder Square demonstrated its navigational properties to the Spacelanders. He described how he intended to inhabit each device, not only to guide them but also so that he could covertly re-enter Flatland with them, after he was exiled many years previously. He also kitted them with bone-conducting headphones through which they could continue to hear his voice once in Flatland. (These headphones allow sounds to be heard through skull bones while leaving the ears free to hear external sounds.) Pulling back one wall of his workshop he revealed four separate entrances to four individual corridors. This was the dimensional shift

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from 3D to 2D. Each Spacelander was placed in a different doorway and instructed to feel their way along their corridor, which zigzagged into blackness, and to use just their hands, as the Animotus only worked once they arrived in Flatland. By swapping the usual visual cues for multisensory ones, the drama of Flatland was intended to be experienced through the whole body. The core challenge for audiences was to move independently in the dark to discover tactile or audio unfolding of the narrative, using only their hands or the Animotus to guide them. In this way, Flatland demanded that its audience move to meet the environment, reversing the experience created in Sheer where the environment came out to meet the audience. The project enabled us to explore how new technologies can play with the audience’s engagement with their own senses and, through this, how alternative kinds of storytelling can be created through physical journeys that do not rely on visual effects. As the four audience members felt along the twisted contours of their corridor in the dark, the floor began to slope downwards under their feet and loud, dimensionally distorted sounds played both in their headphones and through external speakers, including under floor base from subwoofers. Air currents rose up and the corridor walls began to move away to leave the participants in a dark open plain – Flatland. Each Animotus then activated and guided the Spacelanders through the dark to different locations. When they arrived at a location, the Animotus stopped and the voice of Elder Square was heard in the visitors’ headphones, introducing the particular location and how to interact with the tactile environment. E/textiles (conductive materials linked to touch and sound feedback) featured in some environments, triggering localized sounds or vibrational feedback to the Spacelanders. Individual soundscapes for each location were designed to be heard through the bone-conducting headphones, embedding the narrative for each location that described an aspect of Flatland life, social rules and conflicts. When the soundscape finished, the Spacelander was urged to move on by the prerecorded voice of Elder Square, and the Animotus activated once again to lead them through the dark to the next location.

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The four Spacelanders were guided individually from experience to experience, and Elder Square, hidden within the Animotus, learnt that Flatland had changed, that civil unrest had been growing over the decades since The Square was exiled from Flatland, and that it is on the verge of civil/class war. Unknown to him, the High Priest Circles decreed it illegal for more than two Flatlanders to meet in a public place, and so, as Elder Square guided all the Spacelanders to a location to make an escape from Flatland, they found themselves breaking the public-gathering law and were arrested. A Flatland court sprang up around them (played by live and not prerecorded actors). The intruders were tried, and Elder Square sentenced to death through the destruction of the Animotus, which was removed from each Spacelander and crushed in the dark. The Spacelanders were chained and dragged from Flatland, banished. In its experimentation with new modes of performance, use of access tools as a creative catalyst and expression of pertinent political statements that present inclusivity and equality, Flatland is a project that amalgamates many of Extant’s motives and ideals. The piece oscillates between being a dramatic work and an art instillation, but uses darkness as a means by which to mould space and time into something new and exciting. As with The Effing and Blinding Cabaret and Sheer, darkness is used to manipulate space, empower blind people and question sighted norms. This time, however, the experience is unique enough that everyone who visits Flatland is on a level-playing field. There is no real separation of audience and performer, starer and staree, freak and normative, sighted and blind. Everyone who enters Flatland is a freakish disruption, including the leader, Elder Square. Being blind or sighted does not matter here because no one knows the rules of the world into which they are venturing, both in terms of audience behaviour in performance and as important players in Flatland’s narrative. From the participant’s perspective, this creates an immediate sense of community, even though each person spends the majority of the piece exploring independently. Extant has always been keen to explore disability and identity politics in the work produced, and all the projects discussed in this chapter are

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examples of this. Flatland fits into this desire with one simple but important difference: blindness is not mentioned at all in the story. However, the narrative describes tensions in social hierarchies and invokes the question of eugenics, making it ideal for a disability-led piece. Extant is also clearly advertised as the UK’s leading professional company of blind and visually impaired artists, and so, the issues around disability are implicitly present. The concepts of oppression and discrimination that are raised in Flatland are specific to the fictional characters in the narrative, but presented in a situation where participants are given space to make connections between the everyday and an experience of performance. The introduction of haptic technologies into Extant’s work has broadened the creative and dramatic potential for exploring darkness, and has also created a situation where access becomes universal without feeling that it has been integrated as an afterthought as with other tools such as AD. The experience of Flatland really starts from the Animotus and a need to connect with this object, as it is what gives you access to explore space. Using a device like this does not feel clunky or overbearing; it is presented as a necessary aspect of the 2D world (not unlike vision is presented in ours), which means it does not feel like an access tool. It feels, in the setting of Flatland anyway, integral for everyone. This presents a powerful statement about access and inclusion that shows what is possible when such tools are given a positive status from the beginning of an experience. It also presents the potential for haptics and access tools to be used creatively as well as functionally in performance, pitch black or otherwise. By placing dominance on haptics, audio and movement, Flatland called attention to the main navigational tools employed by blind people in everyday living without being as overt or stereotypical as giving everyone a white cane and dark sunglasses. Each sensory experience was layered with both access and creative potential interwoven into the process. Likewise, the need to create a communal and universal mode of access stems from frustrations around the potentially isolating and functional nature of conventional forms of access such as AD. Also, by creating a communal connection through the access tools provided in

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Flatland, such as the Animotus, freakishness appeared in a subtle way that was yet another type of role reversal. The audience members were the freaks, the abnormality and the objectified being that was the subject of morbid curiosity. Throughout the experience, this was presented via both tongue-in-cheek absurdism, as with the cabaret, and darker, more sinister experiences, such as with Sheer. By attempting to create this universal experience while not naming blindness, or indeed any marginalized group, Flatland experimented with placing autonomy over subject and meaning into the hands of the individual, while continuing to use darkness as an empowering tool for blindness and non-visual experience.

Conclusion At its core, Extant describes itself as a company of visually impaired practitioners who work towards ‘the emergence of a new dynamic space, intended to redress our invisibility as [blind] artists and explore new creative territories’ (Extant 2016). Everything we do is contained within this goal in order to present blindness as empowered and empowering, and to give us a voice in the performance world, disability-led or otherwise. Theatre in the dark creates this dynamic space on levels that stretch far beyond the physical and the sensory. It presents non-normative visual perspectives as a basis for creative potential and allows blindness to be conceptually explored on a sociopolitical and artistic level. It also allows for the dark and light sides of freakishness to be celebrated. Darkness has made access tools such as AD more universal, controversial and far more widely understood as a creative medium. Finally, darkness can be a great equalizer that can give both the sighted and the blind a communal experience, whether that be via haptic technology (such as in Flatland) or in the simple conversation that seems to occur the minute the lights are turned off and the social hierarchies are switched. For Extant, darkness has become a place where we can celebrate and take ownership of ourselves as blind creators. It is not a metaphor for our experiences; rather, it is an important partner and ally in our creative process.

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References Abbot, E. ([1884] 1992), Flatland A Romance in Many Dimensions, New York: Dover Thrift Edition. Bogdan, R. (1988), Freakshow, Presenting Human Oddity for Amusement and Profit, Chicago: Chicago University Press. Braun, S. (2007), ‘Audio Description from a Discourse Perspective: A Socially Relevant Framework for Research and Training’, Linguistica Antverpiensia NS, 6: 357–69. Cavallo, A. (2015), ‘Seeing the Word, Hearing the Image: The Artistic Possibilities of Audio Description in Theatrical Performance’, Research in Drama Education: The Journal of Applied Theatre and Performance, 20 (1): 125–34. Clarke, C. (2016), ‘The Importance of Being Described … Earnestly’, http:// chloephillipssite.wordpress.com (accessed 24 July 2016). Dans Le Noir? (2016), ‘Welcome to a Truly Human and Sensory Culinary Experience’, http://london.danslenoir.com (accessed 24 July 2016). Davies, J. (2014), ‘What Do Blind People Actually See?’, Nautilus, 13 August, http:// nautil.us/blog/what-do-blind-people-actually-see (accessed 24 July 2016). Davis, L. (1995), Enforcing Normalcy, London and NYC: Verso. Donaldson, J. (1980), ‘Changing Attitudes toward handicapped Persons: A Review of the Literature’, Exceptional Children, 46: 504–45. Fraser, M. (2014), ‘American Horror Story’, https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=G2zR0vgESBo (accessed 24 July 2016). Garland-Thomson, R. (2005), ‘Dares to Stares’, in P. Auslander and C. Sandahl (eds), Bodies in Commotion, 30–41, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Garland-Thomson, R. (2009), Staring: How We Look, New York: Oxford University Press. Johnson, B. (2002), ‘Writing Noise, Noisy Wringing: The Eyes No Longer Have to do Their Work’, School of English, University of New South Wales. http://acousticecologyaustralia.org/symposium2003/proceedings/papers/ bJohnson.pdf (accessed 24 July 2016).

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McRuer, R. (2006), Crip Theory: Cultural Signs of Queerness and Disability, New York: New York University Press. Mitchell, D. (2005), ‘Exploitations of Embodiment: Born Freak and the Academic Bally Plank’, Disability Studies Quarterly, 25 (3), http://www.dsqsds.org/article/view/575/752 (accessed 24 July 2016). Oshodi, M. (2007), The Effing and Blinding Cabaret, www.extant.org.uk (accessed 24 July 2016). Oshodi, M. (2010), The Question, Extant Theatre, www.extant.org.uk (accessed 24 July 2016). Oshodi, M. (2012), Sheer, Extant Theatre, www.extant.org.uk (accessed 24 July 2016). Oshodi, M. (2015), Flatland, Extant Theatre, www.extant.org.uk (accessed 24 July 2016). Rouse, M. (2005), ‘Haptics’, Computing Fundamentals Glossary, http://whatis. techtarget.com/definition/haptics (accessed 24 July 2016). Saerberg, S. (2007), ‘The Dining in the Dark Phenomenon’, Disability Studies Quarterly, http://dsq-sds.org/article/view/24/24 (accessed 24 July 2016). Siperstein, G. and Bak, J. (1980), ‘Improving Children’s Attitudes toward Blind Peers’, Journal of Visual Disability and Blindness, 56: 132–5. Snyder, J. (2005), ‘Audio Description: The Visual Made Verbal’, International Congress Series, 1282: 935–9.

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Playing with Shadows in the Dark: Shadow Theatre and Performance in Flux Matthew Isaac Cohen

Theatre is often conceived as a communication in a performance space that contains and defines performers and spectators. ‘Bodily co-presence’, in the terminology of Erika Fischer-Lichte (2014: 19–22), is taken as a defining feature. It is through the direct ‘encounter and interaction’ of ‘doers’ and ‘onlookers’ that a performance comes into being and a fictional world unfolds (Fischer-Lichete 2014: viii; FischerLichte 2010: 29). However, shadow puppet theatre, found worldwide in many forms and variants, presents a different apparatus. Conventionally, shadow puppetry involves a puppeteer manipulating puppets posed between a light source and a white cotton screen (see Figure 8.2). The audience watches the shadows of these figures from the screen’s opposite side without glimpsing the puppets or their animator.1 Audiences are figuratively ‘in the dark’ regarding how shadow puppetry generates illusions of life. The means of animation are occluded (cf. Tillis 1996) and there is no bodily co-presence of performer and spectator. The shadow screen bifurcates doers from onlookers, in effect positioning them in different rooms, both in semi-darkness (see Figure 8.1). A shadow puppet theatre of sorts is famously sketched by Plato in the tenth book of The Republic (c. 380 BCE). Plato describes enchained spectators rendered incapable of seeing the figures projecting images on a cave wall. Nor can the prisoners see the puppeteers who bear these figures, let alone the forms in the sunlit world outside the cave upon which the figures are based. Plato argues that it is the task of the

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educator-philosopher to break the chains confining the ignorant to a twodimensional, stylized image of life, and drag the freed prisoners out into the sunlit world to confront glaring reality. For Plato, shadow puppetry’s theatrical apparatus is a metaphor for artificiality, dissimulation and tradition’s cosiness. So, what is it that tempts spectators time and again to return, like treacherous Cypher in The Matrix (1999), to bondage in a dark cave in order to gaze upon shadow images we know are so removed from their purported originals? In shadow plays we are deprived, it seems, of bodily co-presence and, it might therefore seem, stripped of the hard-to-define, effervescent excitement that comes from audiences occupying the same space as charismatic actors channelling larger-than-life characters. Why would any performing artist willingly divest herself of the thrill of bodily co-presence with an audience? What draws spectators to this seemingly aseptic form? This chapter examines the appeal of shadow theatre’s unique mode of theatrical communication, exploring the screen aesthetics of shadow play across various cultures and periods, attending to both established traditions and modern and contemporary innovations. Shadow play is nomadic, in Deleuze and Guattari’s (2004) terminology, with rhizomatic connections underlying its artistic plateaus. Shadow puppetry with articulated figures from animal hide, hand shadow performance and ‘large shadow’ performance with human actors casting their shadows on screens existed in China since the Song dynasty (960–1279 CE) (Chen 2007: 33), and Java, Egypt and possibly India have traditions of comparable antiquity. Which came first, and how shadow puppetry arrived in Europe and other sites, has long been debated. Here I can only hint at a possible chronology tracing origins, influences, cross-fertilization and dissemination of practices. Suffice it to say that in modern times some practitioners have consciously harked back to earlier traditions of shadow theatre, reinventing the past or reframing exotic forms. Others appeared to have chanced upon shadows as a medium or are inspired by other art or philosophical concepts. Usually operating ‘in the dark’ from one another, we find apparent revivals and radical revisions or subversions emerging sui generis in multiple locales independently.

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In two rooms, divided by a screen Shadow theatre does not, by and large, indulge in the face-to-face interactions of the sort that makes Nicholas Ridout (2006: 70–95), in a confessional account of his discomfort in theatricality and the presence of actors, so anxious. Shadows can hail an audience from behind the screen, as we will see, but they do so without making eye contact. The same applies to film. Stanley Cavell writes in The World Viewed: Reflection on the Ontology of Film that ‘the world of a moving picture is screened. … A screen is a barrier. What does the silver screen screen? It screens me from the world it holds – that is, makes me invisible. And it screens that world from me – that is, screens its existence from me’ (Cavell 1979: 24). The semi-opaque screen is a liminal space; quite literally it is of the threshold or limen. Nineteenth- and early twentieth-century European and American instructional texts on the domestic shadow theatre, known in England as the gallanty show, commonly describe the expediency of constructing a screen in a doorway by tacking up a sheet or piece of cloth (Every Little 1864: 321–2; Whanslaw 1950: 63–87).

Figure 8.1 Karagoz performance by Hayali Nevzat Çiftçi, Clissold Park, London, 25 May 2014. Photograph by Jungmin Song.

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The door’s frame thus transforms into a shadow screen frame, with one room becoming the theatre’s ‘backstage’ area where performers reside and figures are prepared, while another becomes a hall for the audience. Likewise, houses in Central and East Java (Indonesia) were traditionally built so that front walls could be removed and replaced with a shadow screen for wayang kulit performances. Invited guests sat inside the house with the performance’s sponsors in order to watch the play of shadows, while the uninvited masses gathered outside and took in the play from the puppeteer’s point of view, apprehending wayang kulit more as a puppet play than a shadow play. Such houses still exist, but they are rarely constructed anymore – hence the past tense. The screen’s separation of performers from spectators affords both sides with a sense of privacy akin to the cinema experience of Stanley Cavell’s youth. Cavell recollects with nostalgia how We entered at no matter what point in the proceedings (during the news or short subject or somewhere in the feature – enjoying the recognition, later, of the return of the exact moment at which one entered, and from then on feeling free to decide when to leave, or whether to see the familiar part through again), we took our fantasies and companions and anonymity inside and left with them intact. (1979: 11)

Shadow theatre allows for similarly anonymous comings and goings. In many traditions, spectators arrive and depart freely in the semidarkness of performances. There is no opprobrium attached to late comings or early leave-takings. This is partly due to the separation from performers but also because so many traditional shadow plays are episodic in structure and enact already-familiar stories. Characters, motifs and plots are known intimately to audiences from childhood. Each audience member comes with her own set of ‘prior texts’ (Becker 2000), stories that they project upon the flickering black-and-white images on the screen. Individual performances embroider rather than fundamentally change audience preconceptions of story worlds. Like movies in the era of shorts, newsreels, travelogues and double features romanced by Cavell, spectators attend performances confident that

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even if they miss a key moment these episodes or their variants will be available for future viewing. This is what it means to participate in a living tradition. You come to a performance with the certainty that what you will experience has been experienced before and will be experienced again in the future. Not only do spectators come and go without fear of disturbing the performers behind the screen, in ritual shadow theatres such as the tōl pāva kūttu of Kerala, puppeteers will perform even in the total absence of human spectators. The belief is that performances are watched by invisible, divine spectators who make up the essential audience. Puppeteers are also motivated by a desire to impress their fellow performers by their verbal artistry. In this etiolated Indian tradition, the bulk of patrons who offer small donations for acquiring spiritual merit do not even attend. ‘The puppet play’s public [human] audience do not participate in the performance; at best, they overhear it’ (Blackburn 1996: 192). The Séraphin Theatre of Paris, the most famous European shadow entertainment of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, was not only a tourist attraction but also a ‘convenient’ site for illicit assignations (The Englishman 1819: 84f). Behaviour unacceptable in other parts of public life is licensed by the separating screen. I have witnessed a Javanese shadow puppeteer slip an upturned sound kettle under his sarong in order to alleviate his bladder during the middle of a six-hour-long performance. Actors cannot make phone calls or text while on stage, but Javanese shadow puppeteers and their crews can, and do. As a cultural form readily visualized by their readers, medieval Arabic poets were prone to referencing shadow puppetry for explicating complex theological notions. The screen was considered by these writers as a symbol of ‘what is fore-ordained but secret’ (Moreh 1987: 61), like the veil which hides Divine plans from mortals. In performance, shadow plays are punctuated by pauses which mark out an experiential disjuncture between the screen’s two sides. Action on the screen might come to a halt while a puppeteer frantically prepares puppets for the next scene, or searches for a puppet that had played a role in an earlier scene

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and is now buried somewhere in a discard pile. More often than not, the audience is screened from and oblivious to this backstage drama. During an episode of frenzied fumbling on one side of the screen, the audience on the other experiences a serene moment to contemplate the action that has taken place and anticipate the scenes to follow. An attitude of meditative calm, or perhaps bated expectation, is projected into a caesura. A spectator might reflect upon the impassive figures on the screen, gently throbbing like a beating heart (when the source of the illumination is an open flame), and recollect the appearances of these same figures in past performances. Or she might consider their current configuration on the screen, and the harmonies and tensions implicit in the tableau. German shadow artist Herta Schönewolf (1969) writes from practical experience when she says that, in shadow theatre, the spectator is by himself, and his feeling of isolation is heightened by the darkness of the room. He does not truly experience figures and play; he only sees the image, the projection. … But the actor, too, is isolated. … His concealment gives him a feeling of protection and anonymity, but he hears and senses his audience, and his sensation becomes more intense as he realizes that the spectators follow his thought and intentions. Thus mutual contact is created between the performer and the invisible public.

In this state of heightened attention, performer and spectator attune their senses to detect nuance, innuendo and intention emanating from the screen’s opposite side. At the height of his fame in Greece, the karagiozis player Giorgos Hardimos rejected overtures to perform on television or film, for in his view the core of his improvisational craft lay in the live communicative channel of jokes and laughter. He would pitch each performance differently depending on which of his opening jokes received the biggest laugh. ‘You test out your joke to find out your audience, if they are serious or more slap-stick. It is the audience that decides the way the performance goes and the end result’

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(qtd. in Warmoes 1989: 51). Purbo Asmoro, a shadow puppeteer whose performances in Java regularly attract audiences in the thousands, was once asked by the American gamelan musician Jody Diamond whether he was ever tempted to look behind him and see how spectators were responding. He said there was no need – he could see the audience through the eyes of the puppets (Diamond 2015). In much puppetry, performers maintain a soft focus, looking peripherally and attending to the three-dimensional puppet’s world through the eyes of the puppet. The shadow puppeteer’s gaze is much more directional, focused along an axis defined by the puppet at hand, the screen before him and the audience beyond. The intensity of gaze places a puppeteer in a prone and vulnerable state, oblivious to hazards. In Thailand, nang talung puppeteers sit on sheets of corrugated iron to prevent injury from knives thrust from below the elevated stage by supporters of rival shadow artists (Smithies and Kerdchouay 1972: 382). The commitment that spectators in turn make to sustaining illusion means that they are prone to sentimentality. As Arjunawiwāha, an eleventh-century Old Javanese poetic narrative, states, ‘Someone watching wayang puppets weeps, is sad, foolish and easily moved,/ though he already knows that it is only chiselled leather that moves and talks’ (Robson 2008: 59). Audiences are thus surprised, and sometimes disappointed, at the end of a show when the shadow screen is lifted. They are shocked to learn that characters or scenic figures they imagined to be unitary were in fact constructed by multiple puppets, either to express characters in different moods or attitudes – like the various wanda used in classical Javanese wayang kulit – or for filmic close-up and far shot effects as in the contemporary shadow theatre of the American company Manual Cinema. Oftentimes, they are astonished by the simplicity of means: an entire world can be realized by a solo operator. As the medieval Egyptian politician and poet al-Qāḍī al-Fāḍil put it, ‘I have seen empires going and empires coming, and when the screen … was folded up, [I discovered that] the prime mover was but one’ (qtd. in Moreh 1987: 48).

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Self and others Another Islamic poem, Suluk Wayang, this one from early-nineteenthcentury Java, states in its opening that wayang kulit is a medium in which ‘you can contemplate your private self ’ (Cohen 2002: 172). The blackness of shadow figures is a blank surface upon which communal memory and personal imaginaries are imprinted. Giorgos Hardimos described the Greek tradition of shadow puppetry as ‘something you live, it takes in all of your life. … It really is an enactment of the player’s life enfolding on the screen with Karaghiozi as the catalyzing medium’ (qtd. in Warmoes 1989: 46). Shadow play relies on human propensities for pattern recognition and pareidolia, the instinct to find meaning and intention in what might be fragmentary, random or naturally occurring phenomena – faces in rock formations, animals in clouds, constellations among the stars, Jesus on a grilled cheese sandwich. Plato tells us that in the cave there were ‘rewards and praise and prizes for the person who was quickest at identifying the passing shapes, who had the best memory for the ones which came earlier or later or simultaneously, and who as a result was best at predicting what was going to come next’ (Plato 2000: 222). He mocks and belittles this pedantry and questions whether anyone with experience of the sunlit world would desire such accolades or feel envy for ‘those who were respected and powerful’ in the cave world due to their mastery of performance conventions. Yet to admirers of the medium, shadow puppetry offers unique possibilities for understanding the self and the world. To the German romantic poet and physician Justinus Kerner, who authored a series of shadow plays in the early 1800s, the medium is ‘much more unaffected, much more natural than live actors’, and sustains an ‘illusion that a given event is actually occurring in a real place in this world and that it is being witnessed as if through a magic mirror or a camera obscura’ (qtd. in Tribble 1990: 186). The shadow of a puppet propped up against the screen can maintain stillness without the visible labour, awkwardness and staginess endemic to much other

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theatre – aspects of theatre that make Ridout so queasy. Charles Magnin, in his magisterial puppet history, likened shadow puppetry to ‘mobile painting’ (1852: 177). We relate to shadow characters on the screen without reflecting on their mundane, three-dimensional physicality. Javanese pundits often link the word for shadow theatre – wayang – and the word bayang, meaning ‘image’, ‘shadow’, ‘imagination’. The illuminated white screen signifies a world pregnant with potential, awaiting activation by puppets and storytelling and audience imagination. Characters are depicted by elaborately carved puppets, but scenery tends to be cursory, nondescript or generic so that the setting of scenes is left largely to a combination of the imagination of audiences and the verbal artistry of puppeteers. A similar claim to Kerner’s was forwarded by German critic Franz Blei in 1909, à propos of the Schwabinger Schattenspiele. This was an art theatre that foregrounded visual aesthetics and literary refinement. Echoing Edward Gordon Craig’s diatribe against actors in ‘The Actor

Figure 8.2  Wayang kulit performance of Parikesit Jumeneng Ratu (The Coronation of Parikesit) by Ki Enthus Susmono, TVRI Television Station, Yogyakarta, 5–6 September 2015. Photograph by Matthew Isaac Cohen.

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and The Über-Marionette’ (1908), Blei declaims that, in this Munichbased shadow theatre, the plays thus presented, unhampered by perspiring, laboring and painted living actors, appealed more strongly to the inner ear than they could possibly have done in any other theatre. The author was allowed to express himself, rather than the actor. The stage setting and the outlines of the shadows, very delicately cut in accordance with the essential traits of the characters, presented no more than a delightful resting place for the eye and the imagination of the beholder was unrestricted in supplying the features while lingering on the extreme simplicity of the picture. (Blei qtd. in Joseph 1920: 132f)

American literary and cultural critic Kenneth Gross gets at this aspect of shadow theatre in his insightful essay on wayang kulit as performed in the Indonesian island of Bali. Balinese wayang kulit is a sacred art, a form of devotional shadow play consecrated to gods and ancestors enacted usually for temple ceremonies, with plays that quote the sacred texts of the Mahabharata and Ramayana in millennium-old translations. Without comprehending the dense verbal tapestry of Balinese shadow play, Gross is still drawn into the world of the shadows: ‘Immaterial as the shadows are, diffused and thin, elusive, flickering, and fast, animated by a sound that keeps faith with the density of sensation in the tropical night, I feel yet as if I could burrow into them, which might mean burrowing into some substance of the puppets, as well as burrowing into some nameless aspect of myself ’ (Gross 2010: 13). The South African artist, animator and stage director William Kentridge, who has worked with shadow and silhouettes in various media (including collaborations with Handspring Puppet Company), has been a passionate defender of shadows for similar reasons: the form for him yields ‘gaps’ for active and reflexive spectatorship. In the gaps, in the leaps we have to make to complete an image … we perform the generative act of constructing an image. … The very leanness of the illusion pushes us to complete the recognition and this

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prompts us into the very awareness of the activity itself. Recognizing in this activity our agency in seeing, our agency in apprehending the world. (qtd. in Huyssen 2013: 25)

In Stanley Cavell’s view, a significant difference between social reality and the projected world of cinema is that the latter ‘does not exist (now)’ (Cavell 1979: 24). Shadow theatre does exist in the now – it is created by human performers who are just behind the screen an audience watches – but it seduces spectators into believing they are witnessing actions taking place remotely, vis, Kerner’s comparison with the camera obscura and the common belief in nineteenth-century Java that watching wayang kulit allowed one ‘to apprehend stories about the people or countries of old’ (Poensen 1873: 150, my translation). Shadow theatre’s onlookers do not directly encounter shadow puppetry’s doers (the puppeteers). Spectators and puppeteers interact indirectly in relation to the projected liminal world between them. Indeed, the origin of shadow theatre in different world cultures is attributed commonly to longing and a desire to restore departed significant others to the world. In Turkey, a popular legend has it that the shadow theatre of karagöz was created after the blacksmith Karagöz and the mason Hacivat were executed by a sultan due to their comical conversations delaying construction of a mosque. The sultan later missed the humour of the workmen and regretted his order, and a court retainer was ordered to construct puppets representing them and re-enact their dialogue behind a screen (And 1975: 32). A similar story, sometimes represented as the origin of shadow theatre in China, is told about a Chinese necromancer who consoled the grieving Emperor Wu (r. 140–86 BCE) by creating the moving likeness of a dead concubine behind a diaphanous curtain. The emperor could see a beautiful lady who resembled Lady Li circling within the curtains, sitting down and then rising to walk again. But he could not move closer to get a good look and, stirred more than ever to thoughts of sadness, he composed this poem: ‘Is it she?/Is it

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not?/I stand gazing from afar:/timid steps, soft and slow,/how long she in coming!’ (Ban Gu qtd. in Chen 2007: 22)

There is reason to doubt the accuracy of this account or whether it has anything to do with Chinese shadow puppet theatre’s actual origins. (As Chen argues, there is no firm evidence of the existence of shadow puppet theatre in China until a millennium later.) But the emperor’s reaction does capture something essential about shadow theatre – its play of distance and closeness, time and rhythm; the way its flickering images command attention; the interpretative doubts it sparks; the way the form looms out at us softly and slowly. When a puppet is slanted inwards towards the screen, the girth of its shadow dwindles, and it is flattened to the verge of disappearance when perpendicular to the screen. Depending on a lamp’s focus, shadows can swell to enormous size or fade to obscurity as the figures back away from the screen and approach the illuminating light. A shadow can disappear in an instant when a puppet is pulled away from the screen and a character can be made to transform when another puppet is then put in the place where it had been. Shadows can fly effortlessly through the sky, burrow into the earth, pulse with life or co-mingle with other shadows. Shadows prompt questions about discernment and subjectivity. Was that really a ghostly ancestor hovering over that character or did I just imagine it? Did that shadow puppet actually scratch its bottom, or stare with consternation or stamp its foot? Or was this only my own construal?

Shadows without dividing screens: The historic avant-garde The screen veiling the proximity of two environments was a nearuniversal feature of shadow theatre until the twentieth century. Diverse circumstances and aspirations resulted in the elimination of the divide or radical repositioning of the screen in the overlapping fields of theatre, installation art, expanded cinema, kinetic sculpture and participatory

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performance. Concurrently, conventional understandings of the shadow puppet and the puppeteer were also exploded. Atomizing the theatrical apparatus (cf. Jurkowski 2013: 112), standard features of shadow play once hidden or taken for granted became visible and open to ludic pronouncement. With the aesthetic deck of card’s reshuffling, the art form was ripe for ‘discovery’ by new audiences. One of the earliest avant-garde projects to investigate new permutations for animating shadows in real time was Hungarian artist Vilmos Huszár’s Mechanische Dansfiguur (Mechanical Dance Figure), also known as Tanzpuppe (Dancing Doll/Puppet), developed in the Netherlands in the period 1917–20. This was a shadow puppet with an aluminium frame freckled with red and green translucent mica panels, manipulated from below by strings and levers into a variety of angular poses. The figure, inspired in equal measures by Javanese wayang kulit puppetry and De Stijl aesthetics, was animated in various contexts, including a 1923 Dada tour of the Netherlands, programmes of a Dutch shadow puppetry collective and a 1926 exhibition of puppets and masks. A shadow puppet without a character to represent or a narrative function to fulfil, Huszár’s creation has frequently been interpreted by art historians as an early work of kinetic art. Huszár reported in Kurt Schwitters’ journal Merz that ‘the aim is to produce a plastic composition with each pose and incorporate the intermediary space of the background into the composition’ (qtd. in White 2003: 39, White’s translation). While the screen’s position remains fixed, its meaning shifted. No longer was it conceived as a neutral surface for projection. The screen was an integral part of a time-based artistic composition. Huszár’s experiment set the stage for the light-andshadow compositions generated at the Bauhaus by Kurt Schwerdtfeger and his fellow students in the early 1920s, and László Moholy-Nagy’s emblematic shadow-and-light projector cum kinetic sculpture, LightSpace Modulator (1930).2 While Huszár’s generation created light-and-show performances to propose models for future technological and artistic forms, it was an interest in what was dubbed the ‘pre-history’ or ‘archaeology’ of cinema

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and past aesthetic practices that prompted a generation of 1960s artists to create happenings, performances and expanded cinema events that revived and transformed the shadow play as it was known. Among the most devoted of the post-war artists to embrace and reconfigure shadow theatre was the American experimental film maker Ken Jacobs, who created a series of shadow play cabarets under the banner of Apparition Theatre of New York. Jacobs professes that he began making shadow plays as he lacked the means to produce an actual film for an avant-garde film festival. The work was quickly championed by film critic Joan Mekas for reintroducing a ‘forgotten art of the past’ and challenging ‘cinema as we knew it’ (qtd. in Walley 2005: 135f). While the company’s first performance in 1965 involved simple actions performed by backlit actors behind a screen, in the 1970s Jacobs’ techniques became increasingly varied and complex. 3D effects were created by having viewers wear 3D glasses and shining two lights of different colours upon objects and people behind the screen (Pam 1975). Shadow objects loomed out into the auditorium, emerging from the depths of the screen world to move among the audience. This was an old effect – developed by Laurens Hammond and popularized in a striptease number by Barbara Stanwyck in the Ziegfield Follies of 1923 – but had been largely forgotten and was ripe for reclamation and reframing. Jacobs’s work occupied some of the same New York alternative arts spaces frequented by Fluxus artists of East Asian descent who authored a series of seminal shadow performances in the 1960s. Yoko Ono’s Shadow Painting (1961) positioned a blank canvas near a window; as the sun rose and set, the shadows of different objects were cast upon the canvas. Ono’s collection of performance scores Grapefruit: A Book of Instructions and Drawings inscribes a variant of the piece for readers to perform at home, Painting to Let the Evening Light Go Through, dated from the same year. This involves placing a bottle adjacent to a canvas so that the bottle’s shadow is cast on the canvas when the ‘west light’ enters. ‘The painting will exist when the bottle creates a shadow on the canvas, or it does not have to exist’ (Ono 2000: n.p.).

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Nam June Paik’s Zen for Film (1962–4), an homage to the aleatoric aesthetics of John Cage, involved the projection of a loop of clear film strip which accumulated dust and scratches over time. In Cage’s apt reading: The dust actually moves and creates different shapes. The specks of dust become, as you look at the film, extremely comic. They take on character and they take on a kind of plot – whether this speck of dust will meet that speck. And if they do, what happens? I remember being greatly entertained and preferring it really to any film I’ve seen before or after. (Cage 1996: 135)

Performances were of variable length. In some, Paik would stand in front of the projection screen with his back to the audience so that his shadow would mingle with the images of the blank film leader. It thus became a memento mori, a reminder of susceptibility to decay and the inevitability of death (see also Hölling 2015). Another East Asian Fluxus artist, the Japanese composer Mieko Shiomi, wrote a series of conceptual shadow pieces in the period 1963– 6, which involved creating, attending to and representing shadows cast by your body and objects around you and observing their falling on the page of the book on which her performance scores were printed (Friedman, Smith and Sawchyn 2002: 94, 97–8). Shiomi’s compositions, and the work of Paik and Ono before her, bring to mind Junichirō Tanizaki’s 1933 nostalgic essay ‘In Praise of Shadows’, which admires the sensitive use of light and shadow in traditional Japanese architecture before the introduction of electricity, the culinary functions of shadow and the play of light and shadow on outdoor noh stages. ‘The quality that we call beauty … must always grow from the realities of life, and our ancestors, forced to live in dark rooms, presently came to discover beauty in shadows, ultimately to guide shadows towards beauty’s ends’ (Tanizaki 2001: 29). The Fluxus artists did not create shadow-projecting objects but rather encouraged viewers to attend to the aesthetic qualities of shadows in the world and subtly moved things and people into relations that heightened the ephemeral beauty of shadows.

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Other practitioners further deployed shadows to flatten distinctions between artist and spectator and disrupt dominant viewing patterns. The USCO collective, also known as The Us Company (founded in New York in 1962), created participatory light shows, ‘be-ins’ and happenings in which the shadows of those attending mixed with projected slides, fluid-filled bowls on overhead projectors and pulsating neons, coloured strobe lights and oscilloscopes. Professing the collectivist ideology ‘we are all one’ (the title of their 1966 psychedelic road show), group founder Gerd Stern insisted that ‘you don’t watch’ an USCO event, ‘you exist in it’ (qtd. in Lester 1966: 472). Stern’s partner Jackie Cassen further explained that USCO events were less performances than environments. The lighting ‘gives people a chance to create part of the environment with their shadows on the screen’ (ibid.). The immersive installations of New York-based composer La Monte Young and his partner the sculptor Marian Zazeela collapse spiritual and artistic experiences. In their long-running Dream House (1969), visitors enter an ashram-like space with a shrine to the artists’ guru Pandit Pran Nath in the corner. A loud drone of thirty-two different frequencies created by a custom-designed Ranya synthesizer assaults the ears. Placement of pillows on the white-carpeted floor encourages one to lie down. When visiting on a weekend afternoon in early 2015 there were five others lying about in the room, all of whom appeared to be in their twenties and thirties. Looking overhead I observed the coloured shadows on the walls thrown by abstract strip mobiles illuminated by four coloured theatrical lights and moving slowly with the room’s air currents. Like the music which seems to shift over time – sometimes deep, sometimes high, sometimes pulsing, sometimes constant – the shadows also transformed gradually before my eyes. Sometimes a shadow looked like a stylized ‘e’ or ampersand, sometimes a schwa, sometimes wafer thin and nearly invisible, a cursive letter in an unknown script, a backwards ‘c’, a wishbone, a goldfish or infinity symbol, a cursive ‘t’, a race track, or (briefly) a flat line. As I watched, it dawned on me that readers of other scripts and symbols would see

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other signs. The clarity of the shadows fluctuated with light coming from outside, and I wondered how the installation would appear at night. I noticed that others lying on the floor had their eyes closed, prioritizing the music over the so-called light sculptures. Tilting my ears and shuffling around on the carpet different overtones came to the fore and patterns emerged. The shadows looked the same though, regardless of my position. They shifted on their own initiative, not mine. Whose dream occupies this house? Is this just a crash pad for minimalist groupies? Do visitors take the work’s title as an invitation to catch up on sleep? Does the art bleed into the dream world of those asleep and continue like a wayang kulit play of the imagination?

Shadow puppetry unmoored: Contemporary performances The explorations of shadow in performance and time-based art adumbrated above have informed current developments in posttraditional shadow puppet theatre, directly and indirectly. Starting with the 1970s innovations of the Italian shadow puppet company Teatro Gioco Vita, ‘Screens were neither fixed nor taut, introducing new possibilities for metamorphosis and movement: they were sometimes framed, sometimes flapping like great sails; still or dynamised, huge or tiny’ (Jurkowski 1998: 470). Innovations in lighting technologies meant that puppets no longer had to be placed directly against screens but could project sharp shadows from a distance (Montecchi 2015). Visible shadow puppeteers, mobile screens and lights, and nontraditional puppets have rippled through the international puppet world in Gioco Vita’s wake. Inspired in part by film noir, the Chicagobased shadow puppet collective Manual Cinema emphasize the liveness of their craft by allowing audiences to see both their carefully coordinated work on parallel overhead projectors and the cinematic montages they create collaboratively and which are projected above

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Figure 8.3  Manual Cinema rehearsing Lula Del Rey, Chicago, 25 January 2015. Photograph by Matthew Isaac Cohen.

them (Jimeno 2015) (see Figure 8.3). The company argues that in electing whether to focus on process or on product, spectators are given agency that they do not possess in film or mainstream theatre. The puppeteers in the British satirical shadow puppet company The Great Puppet Horn are on view while they work puppets from the side of their small tabletop screen (The Great 2013). This exposition allows them to signal to their audiences with a wink that their oftentimescrude stereotypes are not to be taken seriously. Spectators glimpse the rough treatment they give their puppets after use: the casual way they discard puppets on the floor is a studied performance of nonchalance and irreverence. It is both an implicit critique of puppetry’s precious regard of performing objects and a demonstration of lack of respect for their political targets. Other performing and visual artists have retained the morphology of shadow puppets while stripping away the conventional screens and narrative frameworks, re-mooring shadow puppets in installation and environmental art contexts. Many of sculptor Mark Bulwinkle’s shadow figures cut from sheet metal depict movement – automobiles, airplanes

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and boats are all repeated motifs – but they are stationary objects with shadows that shift on the ground with the rising and setting sun when exhibited outdoors. The mechanized shadow puppets of Eddo Stern, which reference World of Warcraft, Narnia and other forms of popular culture, depict perpetual conflict, repeated threats, slow motion feints and thrusts. Not surprisingly, granted the prominent place of shadow puppetry in local cultures and conceptions of national heritage, a staple of Southeast Asian contemporary artists, pre-eminently Heri Dono, draw on shadow puppet images and themes in their work. Indonesian artist and shadow puppet collector Nasirun’s installation Between Worlds (2013) presents a compelling commentary on shadow puppetry’s heritagization. This work fixes hundreds of miniature wayang kulit figures inside a stupa of beakers and bottles. Nasirun plays reflexively and critically with dominant schemas of codification, the obsessiveness of collecting and scientistic museum discourse. He draws attention to the loss of vitality and solitude of devivified puppets extracted from their performance apparatus. In contrast, Christian Boltanski’s installation series Théâtre d’Ombres (Theatre of Shadows), conceived in 1985, gives uncanny life to shadows of simple cardboard cut-out figures – demonic heads, skeletons, ghosts – dangling by wire from a metal frame. A fan and multiple lamps around this centrepiece project their moving shadows on the surrounding walls in a silent danse macabre of supernatural apparitions. His shadow installations emphasize the fragility of puppets and, through their enlargement on the surrounding walls, the possibility of transcendence of their materiality. The puppets’ animation by fan rather than direct manipulation is an aleatoric device that emphasizes the viewer’s active role as interpreter. Shadows on the walls come into focus, draw near, overlap and move apart, allowing viewers to fashion their own micro-narratives. Many shadow puppeteers today work with found objects instead of bespoke flat figures. In My Civilization (1990), a piece of solo shadow object theatre by American puppeteer and performance artist Paul Zaloom, autobiography springs to life through everyday objects

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placed on an overhead projector with accompanying narration and dialogue. Zaloom starts from ‘the very beginning’, the origin of life on earth. Drops of food colour sprinkled into a tray of water stand in for atomic particles and amino acids. Primitive organisms are shown by effervescent antacid tablets, plastic tchotchkes and toys. In a subsequent episode showing a catechism on guilt, spoons represent the children in Zaloom’s class. The Zaloom spoon is bent to indicate that he was ‘just the same as other kids – almost’. Zaloom transitions to the next scene, which shows how his adolescent guitar skills enabled his first sexual relation, by saying he ‘was a very musical child’ and flipping the spoon so that it resembles a musical note. A journey to California is enacted with a fork (depicting lightening), a twisted string (a Kansas tornado), drops of water (rain in Oregon) and a tangle of tubing (roads in Los Angeles). Zaloom’s objet trouvés are neither altered nor disguised. We simultaneously apprehend the tchotchkes and the symbolic objects and characters that they represent in the play of shadows and delight in Zaloom’s ingenious repurposings, transformations and visual puns. In Hans-Peter Feldmann’s shadow object installation Schattenspiel (Shadow Play, 2002), objects sit on eight rotating platforms lined up on a long table, each illuminated by a theatre light. We see overlapping shadows of Christmas tree ornaments, a golden Oscar statuette, a garden gnome, souvenir dolls, a mummy action figure, a cartoon-like figurine of a waving Queen Elizabeth II, a pair of glasses, a handgun, a pinwheel, a plastic toadstool and artificial potted plants, a model of the Eiffel Tower and a toy airplane. With each platform rotating at a different speed and with the objects blown up in shadow to extravagant height on a long white screen, the effect is theatrical, playful and carnivalesque – like a garish carousel. At the same time, there is something disquieting in the way that the projected shadows strip cultural artefacts of their identities, flatten and blur differences, and subject individuality to an apparatus of display. Things that culture dictates are associated with particular occasions, events, preoccupations or memories and are drained of their everyday functions. We are left to construct ur-narratives about the world-in-motion and contemplate our own attachments to things.

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An even more sombre and haunting shadow object installation is Ryota Kuwakubo’s The Tenth Sentiment (2010). Here, a powerful LED light is mounted on an electric train that travels slowly down a winding train track, passing by still objects by the track’s side and through and under other objects in a thirteen-minute journey. To the accompaniment of a clankety-clank soundscape suggesting industry and movement, visitors experience both a three-dimensional scale model and an immersive moving landscape: shadows of great clarity projected on the white walls, floor and ceiling of the gallery. The artist says that, while abstract, the work offers ‘triggers’ for memory and emotion (qtd. in Jap_On 2011). A crowd of featureless people at the journey’s start is juxtaposed with a tableau of an empty interior. Who are those people and why are they fleeing the comforts of home? We pass a group of grazing cows and we know we are now in the hinterlands. Electrical pylons are formed in shadow by clothespins hanging from a wire; overturned mesh waste bins make a convincing nuclear power plant in shadow; and an assembly of blocks clearly signifies an urban setting. Other objects are more ambiguous. Is a grouping of pointed pencils a grove of leafless trees, stripped bare by weather, fire or catastrophe? Is the overturned mesh laundry basket that we travel through a train station, atrium or bio-dome? Other objects glimpsed in shadow suggest helicopters, tunnels, bridges, debris, unfinished construction projects and industrial plants. In shadow, the most ordinary of objects – colanders, strainers, a slinky – become freighted with ominous significance. Recent shadow installations have incorporated visitors into their participatory scenographies as both onlookers and doers. Spectators become puppeteers or find themselves implicated in scenarios not of their own making. For instance, Kara Walker’s silhouette work projects their shadows into the grotesque racism of the Antebellum South before the American Civil War, making viewers confront the continuities between current racial prejudices and past injustices. Nalini Malani’s rotating shadow plays of myth and history incorporate human shadows into her imaginative cycles of violence. By being

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included in Malani’s narratives of India, doer-onlookers relativize experience and come to comprehend interpenetrations of history. Motion capture technologies also potentiate the puppetization of the shadows of visitors to Philip Worthington’s Shadow Monsters (2004) and Chris Milk’s The Treachery of Sanctuary (2012). Participants see their projected silhouettes sprout horns or fangs, grow wings or get consumed by a flock of birds. In these encounters with displaced selves, they can delight in magical transformations normally exclusive to dreaming. By animating the shadows of pedestrians in their public artworks, Lozano Hemmer (Body Movies, 2001; People on People, 2010) and Jonathan Chomko and Matthew Rosier (Shadowing, 2014) create complicity, entanglement and social play in otherwise alienating urban spaces. Far from shackling people to walls or isolating them from one another by impenetrable screens, shadow performances today are uniting participants in lively encounters and interactions, enabling the sharing of ideas across cultural and historical divides. Shadows, whether projected intentionally on a shadow puppet screen or chanced upon under a lamp post in everyday life, fly in the face of Platonic idealism. Platonists’ manifest ‘revulsion against that which is subject to change [and] a certain preference for eternal forms over transient matter’ (Bennett 2010: 46f). Plato is to be credited with introducing the concept of shadow puppetry to philosophy. However, the transient form is better understood from the perspective of his philosophical precursor Heraclitus, known for his aphorism that ‘it is not possible to step twice into the same river’ (qtd. in Graham 2015). The puppets of the shadow puppet theatre might be fixed like the banks of a river, but the shadows they cast are forever in flux, like a river’s flowing water. For Plato, looking for meaning in shadows was looking in the ‘wrong direction’ (Plato 2000: 224). But for Heraclitean devotees of shadow play, the form allows special access to a plastic reality of continual change. Jan Mrázek (2005), in his phenomenological study of Javanese wayang kulit, likens

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Figure 8.4  Chris Milk’s The Treachery of Sanctuary (2012) installed at Digital Revolution, The Barbican Centre, London, 20 August 2014. Photograph by Matthew Isaac Cohen.

shadow puppet theatre to a dwelling that is constructed anew in each performance according to a cultural blueprint. We reflect privately on the way that the tradition’s building materials (puppets, screen, the craft of animation) enable performances that are dynamic, responsive to their moments of enactment and personal in inflection. We meditate further on past encounters with traditions, the interactive contingencies of performance and how we too are in flux. Heraclitus (qtd. in Graham 2015) was also reported to have said: ‘Into the same rivers we step and do not step, we are and are not.’

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References And, M. (1975), Karagöz: Turkish Shadow Theatre, Ankara: Dost Yayınları. Becker, A. L. (2000), Beyond Translation: Essays Toward a Modern Philology, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Bennett, J. (2010), Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Blackburn, S. (1996), Inside the Drama-House: Rāma Stories and Shadow Puppets in South India, Berkeley: University of California Press. Cage, J. (1996), Musicage: Cage Muses on Words, Art, Music, Middletown: Wesleyan University Press. Cavell, S. (1979), The World Viewed: Reflection on the Ontology of Film, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Chen, F. P. L. (2007), Chinese Shadow Theatre: History, Popular Religion, and Women Warriors, Montreal: McGill-Queens Press. Cohen, M. I. (2002), ‘Reading Suluk Wayang: Javanese Shadow Puppets, “Nala”-Vision, Private Self, Bodily Self ’, Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, 3rd ser., 12 (2): 167–86. Craig, E. G. (1908), ‘The Actor and The Über-Marionette’, The Mask, 1 (2): 3–15. Deleuze, G. and Guattari, F. (2004), A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, translated by B. Massumi, London: Continuum. Diamond, J. (2015), Personal communication, 13 March. Every Little Boy’s Book: A Complete Cyclopædia of in and Outdoor Games with and Without Toys, Domestic Pets, Conjuring, Shows, Riddles, etc. (1864), London: Routledge. Fischer-Lichte, E. (2010), ‘Performance as Event – Reception as Transformation’, in E. Hall and S. Harrop (eds), Theorising Performance: Greek Drama, Cultural History and Critical Practice, 29–42, London: Bristol Classical Press. Fischer-Lichte, E. (2014), The Routledge Introduction to Theatre and Performance Studies, edited by M. Arjomand and R. Mosse, translated by M. Arjomand, Abingdon and Oxon: Routledge. Friedman, K., Smith, O. and Sawchyn, L., eds (2002), The Fluxus Performance Workbook. Available online: http://www.deluxxe.com/beat/ fluxusworkbook.pdf (accessed 1 July 2016).

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Graham, D. W. (2015), ‘Heraclitus’, in E. N. Zalta (ed.), The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, fall ed. Available online: http://plato.stanford. edu/archives/fall2015/entries/heraclitus (accessed 3 April 2016). Gross, K. (2010), ‘Shadows’, The Yale Review, 98 (3): 1–14. Hölling, H. B. (2015), Revisions: Zen for Film, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Jap_On (2011), Ryota Kuwakubo, https://vimeo.com/21064437 (accessed 1 July 2016). Jimeno, M., director (2015). Working in the Theatre: Manual Cinema, https:// www.youtube.com/watch?v=XAzWYTaFMPU (accessed 1 July 2016). Joseph, H. H. (1920), A Book of Marionettes, New York: Huebsch. Jurkowski, H. (1998), A History of European Puppet Theatre, 2: The Twentieth Century, edited by P. Francis, Lewiston: Edwin Mellen Press. Jurkowski, H. (2013), Aspects of Puppet Theatre: A Collection of Essays, edited by P. Francis, 2nd edn, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Lester, E. (1966), ‘Happenings and Happiness’, Commonweal, 22 July: 466–72. Magnin, C. (1852) Histoire des Marionnettes en Europe, Depuis l’Antiquité Jusqu’à Nos Jours, Paris: Michel Lévy. Montecchi, F. (2015), Schattentheater 4: Jenseits der Leinwand, Schwiibisch Gmiind: Einhorn-Verlag. Moreh, S. (1987), ‘The Shadow Play (“Khayāl al-Zill”) in the Light of Arabic Literature’, Journal of Arabic Literature, 18: 46–61. Mrázek, J. (2005), Phenomenology of a Puppet Theatre: Contemplations on the Art of Javanese Wayang Kulit, Leiden: KITLV Press. Ono, Y. (2000), Grapefruit: A Book of Instructions and Drawings, rev. and repr. edn, New York: Simon & Schuster. Pam, D. S. (1975), ‘The N. Y. Apparition Theatre of Ken Jacobs’, TDR, 19 (1): 96–109. Plato (2000), The Republic, edited by G. R. F. Ferrari, translated by T. Griffith, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Poensen, C. (1873), ‘De Wajang’, Mededeelingen van wege het Nederlandsche Zendelinggenootschap, 17: 138–64. Ridout, N. (2006), Stage Fright, Animals, and Other Theatrical Problems, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Robson, S., ed. and trans. (2008), Arjunawiwāha: The Marriage of Arjuna of Mp Kaṇwa, Leiden: KITLV Press.

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Schönewolf, H. (1969), Play with Light and Shadow: Art and Techniques of Shadow Theatre, New York: Reinhold. Schechner, R. (1976), ‘Selective Inattention: A Traditional Way of Spectating Now Part of the Avant-Garde’, Performing Arts Journal, 1 (1): 8–19. Schwerdtfeger, K., Jüdes, R., Stoeber, M., Schwerdtfeger, S. and MeyerSewering, E. (2010), Kurt Schwerdtfeger (Bauhaus Weimar) Reflektorische Farblichtspiele (1922/1968), Höchberg: Red Avocado Film. Smithies, M. and Kerdchouay, E. (1972), ‘Nang Talung: The Shadow Theatre of Southern Thailand’, Journal of the Siam Society, 60 (1): 379–90. Tanizaki, J. (2001), In Praise of Shadows, translated by T. J. Harper and E. G. Seidensticker, London: Vintage. The Englishman in Paris: A Satirical Novel with Sketches of the Most Remarkable Characters that Have Recently Visited that Celebrated Capital (1819), London. The Great Puppet Horn: Out of the Shadows (2013). Available online: https:// www.youtube.com/watch?v=8bSZEP6c6AY (accessed 27 December 2015). Tillis, S. (1996), ‘The Actor Occluded: Puppet Theatre and Acting Theory,’ Theatre Topics, 6 (2): 109–19. Tóth, E. (2015), ‘Capturing Modernity: Jazz, Film, and Moholy-Nagy’s Light Prop for an Electric Stage’, Modernism/Modernity, 22 (1): 23–55. Tribble, K. O. (1990), ‘European Symbolist Theater: Conventions and Innovations’, PhD thesis, University of Washington. Walley, J. (2005), ‘Paracinema: Challenging Medium-Specificity and Re-defining Cinema in Avant-Garde Film’, PhD thesis, University of Wisconsin-Madison. Warmoes, V. A. (1989), ‘Karaghiozi Shadow Theater’, MA thesis, Concordia University. Whanslaw, H. W. (1950), Shadow Play, Redhill, Surrey: W. Gardner, Darton. White, M. (2003), De Stijl and Dutch Modernism, Manchester: Manchester University Press.

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Under the Starry Night: Darkness, Community and Theatricality in Iannis Xenakis’s Mycenae Polytopon1 Marina Kotzamani

This chapter considers how darkness can inspire the exploration of community in performance, focusing on Iannis Xenakis’s Mycenae Polytopon. This was an extraordinary land artwork that took place at night in early September 1978, forming the last of a set of multimedia installations, the Polytope, that the internationally acclaimed composer and architect had presented in the 1960s and 1970s in various cities worldwide, including Montreal, Cluny in France and Persepolis in Iran. Primarily set at Mycenae, the Mycenae Polytopon encompassed an enormous open-air area in the region of Argolis in Greece and spanned one hundred square kilometres (Papaioannou 1979: 215). The citadel of Mycenae, the neighbouring archaeological sites of Argos and Tiryns, as well as the planes and mountains of Argolis, all became the venue for a multimedia performance connecting ancient Greece to the technological era. The Mycenae Polytopon combined live performance with an impressive array of light and sound elements emerging from eighteen sources in the space, including anti-aircraft searchlights, film screens, electric lanterns, lighted pyres and fire, recitations in ancient and modern Greek, choral singing, percussion, orchestral performance, sirens, goat bells and computer-generated music (Lacouture 1981: 291). The programme included performances of some of Xenakis’s bestknown works, including Psappha, Persephassa and the Oresteia (in the 1967 uniquely choral version), as well as the premiere of Mycenae Alpha,

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which was composed by using a computer that employed drawing as input, as opposed to musical notation (Touloumi 2012: 117–18; Levy 2012; Xenakis 1987). Apart from professional performers, the event relied on the significant contribution of numerous amateurs in its preparatory phase, as well as in performance. These came from Argos and the villages neighbouring Mycenae, and included choir singers, children with handheld lanterns and assistants who put customized bells and lights on performing goats. Soldiers were also employed for numerous tasks, from carrying pyres in procession to operating the searchlights. Wide grass-roots participation was combined with support from the second post-junta government of Constantinos Karamanlis, and the event was sponsored by an impressive array of state institutions, including the Ministries of Tourism, Defense and Culture, and the National Theatre (Xenakis 1978: 2). The Mycenae Polytopon was performed on four consecutive nights (2–5 September 1978) before a mass audience totalling, according to Xenakis, about 30,000 people consisting of locals, Athenians, tourists, state officials and professional critics (Parlas 1978: 8). As Xenakis has explained, his employment of multimedia forms part of a unified conception of art, integrating the senses of hearing and vision through technology (Xenakis 2006: 197–202; see also Harley 1998; Renault d’Allonnes 1975; Sterken 2002, 2007; Fayers 2011). Employing film as a model, Xenakis aspires to design in space, immaterially, with light. Aural properties such as rhythm, density and duration become important to this proto-virtual form, in which architecture is approached as an art of time rather than as an art of space. Paying particular attention to the placement of sound in space, the artist highlights the material properties of sound. On this conception, sound segments can define space in the same way as Euclidean geometry, allowing for a concrete, visual perception of sound. At the same time, this approach has a strong performative character. Indeed, the mobility of light and sound in the Polytope works can be regarded as a form of performance, dramatizing the juxtaposition between the material and the immaterial, or presence and absence, in what Xenakis referred to as

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‘visual theatrics’ (Xenakis 1985: 7). This is what leads me to argue that darkness, whether in a metaphorical or a literal sense, is important to this composite, visual and aural form of art, stimulating audiences to explore transcendental forms of perception. Darkness supplies an ideal context for exploring what one can only ‘see’ with the mind’s eye, the unknown, or even the ineffable. I will be approaching the Mycenae Polytopon as an event, rather than as a spectacle or a show, integrally related to its happening in the dark, the space in which it was set, as well as the people who participated in it (both performers and audiences). Particular attention will be paid to the work’s potential to engage subtly ‘synaesthetic’ perceptual experiences in the audience through its employment of light and sound in elliptical or proto-virtual ways. Ultimately, I argue that the Mycenae Polytopon is a work about darkness and about ourselves, posing self-reflexive questions about how we perceive that have epistemological, aesthetic, but also social and political underpinnings relating to community. Dwelling on the work’s rich liminality, I present the Mycenae Polytopon

Figure 9.1  Iannis Xenakis, Mycenae Polytopon, 1978. Photograph by Babis Konstantatos, courtesy of Eugenia Alexaki Archive.

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as a popular work of communicative import, engaging collective historical knowledge and fostering sharing between participants.

Xenakis and darkness Research on this singular work is still at the initial phases and we lack a comprehensive evaluation of its reception. My discussion draws on unexplored reception material on the Mycenae Polytopon, as well as on interviews I conducted with project participants. Moreover, I make use of Xenakis’s own writings and draw on my own experiences of having seen the performance as an adolescent. Reflecting on it gives me a chance to revisit a sense of wonder that I felt back then. Being able to draw on my memory is important, as the enormous scale of the performance, the multiple transmission sources used and the constant mobility of light and sound made the event unrecordable in any straightforwardly descriptive way, even in film. Scholarly research that the Mycenae Polytopon has attracted recently contextualizes the event in relation to cultural life in Greece following the fall of the junta of 1967 (Touloumi 2012). Alternatively, the performance has been placed in the context of aesthetic and ideological research on Xenakis’s work (see Levy 2012; Fayers 2011; Sterken 2002, 2007; Harley 2002). Drawing on first-hand accounts, the Mycenae Polytopon has been characterized as a popular celebration, but without showing how popular elements are shaped by and affect the nature of the performance itself (Kanach 2006: 323; Harley 1998: 62). More commonly, the work is approached as a modernist example of a Gesamtkunstwerk, or total theatre – with qualifiers – synthesizing multiple arts and media (see Alexaki 2015: 50; Alexaki 2009: 60; Touloumi 2012: 107, 120, 123, 125; Fayers 2011: 5; Sterken 2002: 269). However, none of the existing accounts make use, in an integral way, of reception material, although most make references to the perceiver, inviting consideration of the conditions under which one perceives.

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The most helpful material in interpreting the performance comes from art rather than scholarship. This is a documentary by the acclaimed Greek filmmaker Costas Ferris, who followed Xenakis and his team around in situ for about a week before the opening (Ferris 1978). Focusing on an illuminating interview with Xenakis, the film makes a strong case that the Mycenae Polytopon should be viewed not as an abstract spectacle of light and sound, but as a popular ceremony inspired by the site’s history. Xenakis adopts a popular and at the same time a performative approach to history. The artist appeals to and engages the senses rather than the understanding, as stimulated by the identity of the archaeological site. This reflects the cultures of the people who have been using the space since antiquity. Historical knowledge becomes associated with memory, and intimately relates to how the collective past is perceived and remembered in the present, through performance. Indeed, Xenakis refers to the Polytopon in Ferris’s film as a memorial service in honour of the Mycenaean civilization that thrived at Argolis. Evidently, this sense-based, ceremonial approach to history has a strong artistic quality. Xenakis ends his note in the Polytopon programme on the optimistic remark that the performance will interweave art and history (Xenakis 1978: 11). The project’s focus on perception and on memory also implies that Xenakis departs drastically from traditional readings of history as a grand narrative. His own view of history is selective and fragmentary rather than monolithic, inviting diversity and polyphony (Kotzamani 2016: 164–5; Levy 2012: 183–4).2 Ferris’s documentary highlights the Mycenae Polytopon as an anthropocentric rather than as an abstract work, supporting research approaching Xenakis as a socially conscious artist (Fayers 2011; Solomos 2001). The goal of relating Greeks to their history through ceremony at the ancient site, and the central concern to include volunteers in the project, are all anthropocentric features, encouraging the building of relations between people, alongside a community spirit. These goals also invite attention to initiation or process, which forms an integral part of the work. Finally, the film highlights the importance

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of space as one of the Mycenae Polytopon’s major structural elements. Space is also approached in anthropocentric terms as a cultural locus in which even the appreciation of the natural landscape is necessarily mediated through history. Xenakis’s fragmentary conception of history, as well as his emphasis on the role of the body and of ceremony in making participants aware of its importance, is reflected, as I show, in the aesthetics of the performance. Clearly, within the framework I have outlined, light and sound do not define the performance; rather, they are means of achieving its anthropocentric goals. Although Ferris’s documentary is extremely useful in supplying major analytical tools, it leaves out elements that are also going to be relevant to my interpretation. A remarkable feature of the performance was the participation of Xenakis in an all-inclusive role as director/ performer and audience member, orchestrating ‘on stage’ communities in the making. The film also does not touch on the role of the audience in the Mycenae Polytopon. Moreover, it supplies no information on the functions of darkness in contextualizing this ambitious work, to which I now turn in what remains of this section. Although Xenakis does not explain in the film why he chose to set the Mycenae Polytopon in the dark, he does make relevant remarks in the production’s programme. On a trip to Mycenae as a student, he saw in the ruins of the citadel both the death of a civilization and potential for future creation (Xenakis 1978: 10–11). In either case, whether pointing to past or future cultures, the ruins point to darkness as something formless or non-apparent. In this sense the Mycenean ruins inspire wonder and designate the starting point of an exploration into the unknown. Their incomplete character evokes Xenakis’s fragmentary view of history outlined earlier, which is as relevant to the past as to the present. A ruin belongs to the world of the living, highlighting the present as a major reference point in any historical exploration. Moreover, a ruin underscores that the relics we see in the present moment are integrally related to darkness or what we do not see, whether in our past or in our future. In this respect a ruin is emblematic of liminality, stimulating transcendental perception

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of the unknown, and transformation. Set in this context, a historical exploration of culture has a strong existential and self-referential quality, as the present is always its point of departure. Besides historical inquiry, a ruin’s incompleteness also readily evokes theatre through its focus on the present and on acting, so as to achieve completion. This form of theatre, which partly unfolds in the mind’s eye, can nevertheless be shaped into a social art, since the past is part of our collective heritage. Indeed, as I show later, the interplay between here and beyond in the Mycenae Polytopon does have theatrical potential. Richly evocative of darkness, history and theatre, the archaeological ruins might well have inspired Xenakis’s theatrical exploration in a nocturnal setting at Mycenae. The artist was aware of the potential of employing darkness as an aesthetic medium in performance: as visual theatrics, the Polytope aimed at achieving transcendence. Their uncanny materiality was also highlighted by the name Xenakis had initially been using for this art form: ‘void sculpture’ or ‘audiovisual event for the void’ (Touloumi 2012: 105–6, endnote 5). In a context discussing his Diatope, a performance work strongly related to the Polytope, Xenakis described how he ‘wanted to deal with the abysses that surround us and among which we live. The most formidable are those of our destiny, of life and death, visible and invisible universes. The signs that convey these abysses to us are also made of the lights and sounds that provoke the two principal senses that we possess’ (Xenakis, Brown and Rahn 1987: 32). Just like ruins then, lights and sounds function as signs, indexing darkness and inviting liminality and transformation. Indeed, reversing the situation in conventional theatre, I show that in the Mycenae Polytopon, darkness, as opposed to light, is what the audience is exposed to. Vision does not serve to objectify a focal point. Rather, combined with other senses such as hearing or touch, vision becomes a tool of penetrating into or exploring the unknown. Vision in this context outlines a form of theatre in the dark where synaesthesia, affect and liminality are central. As I explained earlier, Xenakis’s unified conception of sight and hearing and the interplay between presence and absence invite exploration in the dark. Reflecting

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on the Polytope performances in retrospect, four years after the Mycenae work, Xenakis mentioned that his primary inspiration for these works came from nature’s ‘luminous phenomena’, such as lightning, volcanoes or the clouds, as opposed to ‘play with light’, such as that which occurs in film or theatre. He elucidates what he means by this theatre of nature, referring in affective terms to ‘the vertigo which creates the abyss of a starry night when diving our head in it, forgetting the earth where our feet rest’ (Xenakis 2006: 292). The luminous phenomenon of a starry night might focus our attention on qualities associated with both sight and hearing, such as forms, movements, intensities and expanses. The perception of functions like ‘luminous music for the eyes’ generate poignant synaesthetic experiences where what we see and what we hear form part of a unitary conception (ibid.). Perception then occurs in a liminal context, pointing towards transcendence or transformation from one state, where we sense the material world, into another, where we appreciate it as an enigma and are confronted by what may emerge from the unknown. Indeed, Xenakis has referred to transformation as a central aim of his work. ‘The power of music’, he writes, ‘is such that it transports you from one state to another. Like alcohol. Like love. If I wanted to learn how to compose music, maybe it was to acquire this power. The power of Dionysus’ (Xenakis, Brown and Rahn 1987: 18). In conclusion, Mycenae presented an ideal venue for Xenakis to set a transcendental performance. Functioning in a manner similar to ruins, light and sound highlighted ellipsis, pointing beyond themselves for completion. The performance at night at Mycenae unveiled the great theatrical potential of the ruins by making the audience palpably aware of fragments in their knowledge, whether of history, of nature or of the self, and stimulating transcendental and synaesthetic perception. The Mycenae Polytopon manifested a form of theatre in which acting, liminality and transformation have a central place, along with a questioning attitude on the part of participants, who, coming together into communities, assume, as I show later, a dynamic role in performance.

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Darkness, questioning and transcendence The Mycenae Polytopon clearly exemplifies the composer’s use of light and sound as means of exploring darkness. Xenakis’s apparatus inspired curiosity about what was ‘out there’, plunging audiences into the unknown and encouraging them to explore it. The setting of the performance in the open air confronted audiences with the immensity of the dark space as an abyss in which even the glaring of searchlights and the blaring of loudspeakers appeared feeble. Contrary to what some researchers have concluded, the performance was not overloaded with effects (see Touloumi 2012: 108; Sterken 2002: 269); rather, it had the minimalist, elliptical quality of ruins, in which effects served as signals or incomplete fragments, offsetting darkness and stimulating transcendental perception beyond what could be seen or heard. The employment of a great number of sources of light and sound and especially the constant mobility of effects absolutely precluded focusing on the effects themselves. At times the light of the projectors had a hazy quality, blending into the night, so that it was not possible to define the contours of light and darkness, as when watching a constellation. This created effects of displacement, annihilating the material world as perceived by the senses and confronting audiences with the unknown and other worlds that might emerge out of it. The hazy rays were projected up in the sky, giving a sense of ‘material space’ up above, or they would dart below the space where audiences were seated, creating the disorientating impression of a sky fallen on the earth. Indeed, Xenakis has mentioned that he had the ambition with the Polytope to bring down the stars and make them move (Matossian 2005). Essential to achieving transcendence was the stimulating of a questioning mood among audiences about the space where the performance was set. Light and sound made the audience aware of the incomplete character of the ruins, inspiring curiosity about how these figured in compositions in the past or about how they might form part of novel syntheses. At times inquisitive eyes would follow the travelling

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rays of the searchlights piercing darkness like questions addressed to the abyss, soon to be devoured by the abyss. No matter how far the rays would reach, they were still miniscule in relation to the vastness of the dark open-air space, evoking rich associations with both the potential and the limitations of questioning or finding answers. Watching the performance at night the audience could not pick out the exact location of the archaeological site, its shape or its relation to its surroundings. At best, the citadel and the surrounding mountains would figure as dark volumes.3 Submerged in darkness, the Mycenae space and its surroundings emerged as an enigma, especially as the use of light allowed audiences to appreciate different ways of posing questions. For example, tiny luminous segments would appear on the looming surface of the citadel, as if opening miniscule windows from which to survey the haunting presence-absence of these ruins, both in a metaphorical and in a literal sense. Ferris’s camera has spotted travelling rays, which would occasionally travel on the citadel’s wall, exposing in narrow strips of light the ordering of its cyclopean stones. The camera leads the viewer to appreciate structure in the most luminous segment, a more blurry version of it in the strip’s shadows, and finally nothing at all as the light would move out of the segment, leaving lasting impressions of the juxtaposing of order and chaos, and of the Mycenaean ruins’ dynamism. The focus on the interplay between the appearance and disappearance of historical traces in the ruins evoked a kind of liminal encounter with the past for audiences, drawing attention to their being betwixt and between an elusive history and the present. The performance’s exploratory character was also taken up by sound. Most of the sound apparatus had been placed in the area directly in front of the citadel and in the valley below the space where the audience was placed, which is a natural resonator (see map in Alexaki 2015: 52). The acclaimed musician Sylvio Gualda has written that the performance of Psappha, a percussion piece, at Mycenae led him to realize that the work should end in a questioning rather than a concluding tone. ‘Sound’, he has noted, ‘should evoke silence and not abolish it. … The rhythmic violence and rigor should lead us, through retentive control,

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to infinity. The final bang, so unexpected, should arrive like a question mark, not like a period’ (Gualda 2010: 164). As performed in the valley, Psappha and Persephassa, another percussion work incorporating silences, would resonate with primordial energy during stasis, giving the impression that the earth responded to the dynamic beating of the drums as invocations. Indeed, the performance’s questioning attitude fostered a sense of communication with the space and its history. The elliptical quality of luminous and auditory signs in the dark stimulated the audiences’ cultural and collective knowledge, encouraging them to form transcendental visions of communities. A central highlight of the performance was the recitations by Sakkas and Tournaki, which readily evoked cultures past and present. Indeed, Sakkas mentions that he recited ancient Greek in Linear B, which Xenakis had taught him how to pronounce. The composer had great concern for the accuracy of the pronunciation and had incorporated into his version the latest results of linguistic research (Sakkas 2010:

Figure 9.2  Iannis Xenakis, Mycenae Polytopon, 1978. Photograph by Babis Konstantatos, courtesy of Eugenia Alexaki Archive.

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319–20). On a relevant note, insofar as language is a marker of communication and community, Tournaki and choir members have remarked on Xenakis’s preference for uncultivated voices, which allowed audiences to appreciate the recitations as speech (see Tournaki 2015; Argyropoulou 2015; see also Christine Prost qtd. in Harley 1998: 62; Fajond 1981: 286–7). Still, they had a powerful hieratic quality, which distanced the text from the individual speakers, alluding with more immediacy to the communities using the languages heard. The voices of Sakkas and Tournaki gave a powerful visual impression of two solid columns of sound slowly ascending up from the dark valley and exuding terrestrial energy. It was as if they were generated from the world of the dead, evoking rich sensual experiences of how the textual fragments related to their spatial context, stimulating not only sight and hearing, but also touch. The recitations engendered synaesthetic perception, allowing audiences to apprehend historical knowledge in transcendental ways and highlighting a community’s metaphysical core. At the same time, the voices of the actors gave life and a presence to these communities in an embodied and hence physical way, while also effectively theatricalizing the natural qualities of the landscape. I remember comparing the virtual verticality of the sound columns to the volume of Mount Zara, across the valley; lit from below with searchlights, the mountain figured as a luminous curvy surface, whose grainy texture matched the dry, unadorned character of the recitations. I had a sense of being able to feel out the mountain, as well as the voices reciting. I could clearly differentiate between the effects of Sakkas’s and Tournaki’s voices on the landscape of dark outlines, or on the body of the night itself. Sakkas’s baritone voice had a velvety texture, shrouding, caressing or enveloping darkness. Although at a higher register, Tournaki was reciting at a low key as well, but the female voice was distinctly harsh. With its monotonous rhythm, it appeared to hammer into darkness or into the rough surfaces of the stony citadel and landscape. Still, the fragmentary and immaterial quality of what was perceived precluded identification of voices, languages and communities with the

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surroundings in a deterministic or monolithic way; instead, the work evoked multiple cultures which had been at Mycenae, conflating the senses, nature and civilization, past and present, along with the people and the space (see also Levy 2012: 183–4). What remained of past glories was a set of ruins in the present, nodding towards tragedy and fostering, in spite of and because of it, the coming together of people in performance.

A performance in the making Beside transcendence, the Mycenae Polytopon also focused, in a concrete way, on the live moment of performance, drawing attention to the process of its becoming and forging bonds between Xenakis, the performers and audiences. Sitting in the last row of a wooden platform constructed in situ for the audience, Xenakis directed the entire work through a walkie-talkie, following a plan in front of him outlining the entire design of light, movement and sound. He took on the functions of author-composer, director, as well as performer, evoking the strong traditions of popular theatre in the past, but also experimental forms of contemporary theatre. Audiences sitting close to him on the platform were able to hear and see him (see Gill 1981: 297–8; Lacouture 1981: 281; Christidis 1978: 4). They would probably see him dimly, from the indirect illumination that the light source he was using to read the map would cast on his face and body. His indistinct presence allowed him to be considered not only as part of the event, but also as part of the audience, pointing towards, as I show later, a unitary conception of performers and audiences, where the audience formed part of the event. Regarding his role as director-performer, the critic of the Financial Times observed that on one or two occasions there were brief interruptions in the work, as Xenakis, distracted from his coordinating role, would get lost in contemplation of the stars (Gill 1981: 298). Besides commenting on directing as performance, the remark also

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highlights the fallible, anthropocentric nature of the work. Indeed, the reviewer marvels at how ‘pieces of the gigantic puzzle’ came together perfectly, although there was only one rehearsal. The reference to the Polytopon as a puzzle has affinities to Xenakis’s reference to it as a stitched together rhapsody, drawing attention not only to its fragmentary structure and to fallibility, but also to the performative, non-representational character of the spectacle. Tournaki was surprised when Xenakis instructed her, during her performance, to raise her voice a quarter of a note up, as if it were an instrument (Tournaki 2015). Indeed, Xenakis’s communication with performers during the work would go well beyond cueing. As reported by Minas Christidis – a theatre critic, at that time, of the major Greek daily Kathimerini – the composer would give instructions to the children drawing Mycenaean designs on the mountain ridges to walk in close formation and to turn on the lights after completing the movement, or he would praise the soldiers’ procession with lighted pyres and tell them to mark the movements for the following day’s performance (Christidis 1978: 4). In integral ways, then, the work came together in performance before an audience each night. Indeed, a local journalist who saw all four performances of the Mycenae Polytopon remarked on noticeable differences between them in an interview with Xenakis (Pitsakis 1978: 2). The composer responded that the Mycenae landscape was a perpetual source of inspiration for him, drawing attention to the work as an event of a unique, non-representational character, but also to the process of performance making. The Mycenae Polytopon’s unfinished, performative quality points towards a contemporary conception of a director as a coordinator of performers, rather than as the omniscient, autocratic figure of modernism, aiming at total theatre and ideal representations. Admittedly, performers had no sense of what the entire work was like, had a partial view of other performers and depended entirely on Xenakis’s instructions as to when and even how to perform. Still, this did not mean that they had the passive role of followers. Indeed, Christidis presents the Mycenae Polytopon almost as a collective work,

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remarking that collaboration between Xenakis and the performers crucially depended on the building of trust between them, not least to help the performers explore how to be in the space (Christidis 1978: 4). Although it would be an exaggeration to term the Polytopon a collective work, volunteers, as is also corroborated by the local press, had a major role in making the performance happen, particularly at the preparatory phases, which focused on the performers’ developing a relationship to the space and to each other (Dorovinis 1978a; ‘O Xenakis stin pole mas’ 1978). Perhaps the preparatory work functioned as a form of initiation, which was vital to the strong community spirit in performance and to the collective commemoration of Greek history that Xenakis aspired to, with its ritualist and transcendent elements. Fajond, a member of the mixed choirs of the University of Provence, emphasizes a sense of ‘sacred ancient terror’ that the space inspired in him (Fajond 1981: 287). Moreover, he mentions that everybody in his group felt as performers a ‘heavy responsibility’ before an audience of epic dimensions. Such a heightened sense of duty on the part of the performers evokes theatre as a vocation, rather than as a profession. Argyropoulou, a member of the volunteer Argos Lyceum Club of Greek Women choir, remembers that her group had to walk a long way, carrying torch lights in the dusk so as to be able to see and navigate their way to their appointed space in performance. Standing in front of the citadel, on a narrow strip of land before a ravine, they could not help but ‘respect’ the space and felt extremely alert and concentrated during the performance. In retrospect, about forty years later, Argyropoulou refers to her volunteer participation as ‘an act of love’ (Argyropoulou 2015), and Tournaki remembers it in heightened terms, appropriate to its ceremonial character, ‘as a gift which life gave me’ (Tournaki 2015). Still, Xenakis thought that the work might have been more poignant had his production team and volunteers had the time to get to know each other better (Parlas 1978: 8). Indeed, the artist cared for participants beyond the confines of the work. He gave each of the members of the female chorus of volunteers a guide book to the archaeological sites at Argolis, as well as a record of his own work,

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presenting them with a physical trace of their bonding and encouraging them to continue the exploration of space that the Mycenae Polytopon initiated (Argyropoulou 2015). Apparently, then, the most remarkable aspect of the Mycenae Polytopon for participants was the experience of participation itself, stretching beyond the performance to its preparation and its lasting impression in memory. Clearly, if the Mycenae Polytopon depends on or is even defined by bonding and relations of trust between participants, this is a work about the coming together of a community rather than a spectacle of light and sound. Indeed, a strong sense of community is what gives any memorial service conviction. In the absence of this bonding, Xenakis’s total design of the memorial service would have appeared arbitrary. The Mycenae Polytopon was an experiment in the coming together of a community, employing the past as its connecting matter. Besides Xenakis’s presence as performer-director, setting the performance in the dark was also vital to its engendering a sense of community. Since audiences, for the most part, were not able to see the people singing or holding lights, it became evident that what holds a community together is not synchronized movements or actions, but the sharing of culture, uniquely associated with a particular space. Consider, for example, the children’s composing of Mycenean designs on the mountains using handheld electric lanterns. Through their performance, museum artefacts became part of living culture and were reconnected in the contemporary period to the concerted human effort which went into making them. The composition also integrally connected the artefacts to the Mycenean space, as their designs had been traced in the ground by volunteers. In performance, children had been instructed to walk on these ground marks and to turn the torchlights on once they had formed the design (Xyndaropoulou 2015). Knowledge of performance logistics, however, is irrelevant to appreciating the poignancy of these light-based compositions. What gave them expressive power was their communal embodiment of the Mycenean designs, signalling through lighting the existence of past communities and allowing me to appreciate the performers as a

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community of our own time. The central point of reference holding this contemporary community together was the past.

Audiences Another important aspect of the Mycenae Polytopon was the engagement of the audience, which attracted great attention (see, for example, Fajond 1981: 287, 289; Christidis 1978: 4; Parlas 1978: 8; Psychramis 1980; Dorovinis 1978a; ‘Poikiles skepseis kai ektimiseis’ 1978; ‘To Polytopo tou Yanni Xenaki stis Mykenes. Anepanalepte giorte fotos kai kinesis’ 1978). The engagement of audiences had similar qualities to that of the performers, as it contributed to the ceremonial, ritual quality of the work which ‘was not a production in the traditional sense’, but aspired to mark life rather than theatre (Christidis 1978: 4; see also Fajond 1981: 289). In this respect, achieving audience participation was important to the success of the work. As already discussed, audiences had an active role in relating the cultural fragments presented in performance to past communities. Also, audiences sitting on the platform would not only witness the bonding between Xenakis and the performers, but would also empathize with it, as the composer was also a fellow audience member. Indeed, the Mycenae Polytopon inspired great curiosity not only about past cultures or the making of the performance, but also about other audience members, who became in this sense performers, or part of the work. Darkness had a key role to play in incorporating audiences into the work, as it enveloped performers, audiences and the Mycenae landscape in a unitary, liminal space. As Christidis suggests, the audience ‘were present and they participated, digested into the night’ (1978: 4). In the absence of a point outside, as in traditional theatre, from which to look out into, audiences had freedom to choose their viewpoints, which might be directed not only towards the luminous and auditory signs, the night and the space, but also towards other audience members. The difficulty of picking them out in the dark created fertile ground for questioning: Who is there? What does she

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see? How does what she sees relate to what I see? Beyond epistemology, this curiosity, which privileged self-reflective perception, had great potential to stimulate communal bonding. Incorporating audiences into the performance was one of the distinctive marks of the Mycenae Polytopon. Its success, however, should not be entirely attributed to darkness, but also to the audience’s involvement with the Mycenae Polytopon beyond the contours of the performance. In addition to their cultural knowledge about Mycenae, or Xenakis, many audience members, just like the volunteer performers, had had the experience of participating in the preparation of the work, or had friends and relatives who had participated on a scale from local to national state involvement. Others had heard or read about this effort. Audience members, then, had already developed a charged, emotive relation to the performance well before it began, which fostered a participatory spirit. This was obvious even to a foreign critic who presented the Polytopon as a popular work, focusing on audiences and connecting the preparatory phase to the performance: ‘The Polytopon was a national project and a project of the entire region [around Mycenae] … an immense crowd of people would go up the plane, a rural crowd … extremely engaged from the collective work which had happened during the preparation of the performance. Alert in their places, they waited to see what they had worked for’ (‘Yiannis Xenakis: to oikoumeniko orama tou kosmou’ 1978). Just like the performers, although at a smaller scale, audiences had the opportunity to familiarize themselves with the space, in situ, in the long walk they took at dusk from the parking to the ridge across from Mount Zara and the citadel, where they would choose where to stand or sit. Psychramis’s film of the Mycenae Polytopon almost presents this activity as a ritual; the long line of cars and of people slowly moving on the tree-lined road leading to the archaeological space looks like a procession. The film also shows audiences on the ridge, exploring where to sit. Dusk makes the rays of the sun visible, as they become ever darker, enveloping the people in a haze and almost visibly uniting them (Psychramis 1980).

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Audiences as performers would also engage in more dynamic actions. Choir member Robert Fajond observed that ‘an immense crowd … essentially a popular audience’ violated the fencing of the archaeological site and sat at one of the major centres of the action, the valley (Fajond 1981: 289). In this way they became performers, theatricalizing their appropriation of Mycenae and responding to Xenakis’s aspirations to bond local people to the space. This form of appropriation is qualitatively similar to the assisting of the volunteers in the preparation of the work. Both activities have elements of initiation and allow for appreciation of the Mycenae Polytopon as popular work. On a relevant note, what is also striking in the work’s reception are the frequent references to affect, highlighting, in yet another way, the ritualistic quality of the Mycenae Polytopon, as well as the openendedness of its interpretation. For example, the critic of the Monde notes that the performance evoked archetypal emotions of ‘Dionysian disorder’; as a director of the work, Xenakis was, in ritualist terms, ‘a master of a great ceremony … a gigantic hymn to the dark forces of Mycenaean Greece’ (Lacouture 1981: 292). In a similar spirit, Michel Tabachnik, the conductor of the mixed choirs of the University of Provence at the performance, has noted that Xenakis’s work links the audience to ‘eternal emotions or forces’, which have affinities to the heightened emotions of tragedy (Tabachnik 2010: 350–1; see also citation in ‘Yiannis Xenakis: To oikoumeniko orama tou kosmou’ 1978). His music has the potential to sublimate or transform existence. A letter to a newspaper by a reader who had been in the audience also highlights the production’s rich affective quality, as well as its potential for sharing and self-reflective perception. The writer mentions that the raggedness of the landscape combined with the intensity of light and sound created a sense of awe in him. Analysing its affect, he reasons that it was not manipulative, as it was not forced on him by the work, which had an open-ended quality. What prompted the self-analysis was a comment he had heard during the performance by another audience member, who functioned as a performer in exclaiming, ‘This is fascism!

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Only fascism aims at impressing and at inspiring fear’ (‘Poikiles skepseis kai ektimeseis’ 1978). Clearly, audience engagement in the Mycenae Polytopon unveiled in yet another way the great communicative import of this work. Xenakis’s assumption of the dual role of director-performer and audience member was emblematic of a performance where darkness eliminated boundaries between spectating and acting. The night invited the fleshing out of the audience’s roles in new ways, allowing for great freedom in how they could act. Whether dynamically occupying space, watching other audiences or being overcome by affect, audiences, just like the performers, became part of a theatricalized space for acting. This conception supported the performance’s emphasis on the building of community spirit. Unifying the space for acting and the space for spectating under the night sky transparently revealed, in a literal and metaphysical sense, that there is no outside point of observation; darkness obliterated distinctions between theatre and life.

Conclusion To sum up, the Mycenae Polytopon constituted an event rather than an art product, shifting focus away from what a work means, or mimesis, to the perceiver and to sign usage, highlighting different ways of communicating and of coming together. Apart from putting into play multiple perceptions or perspectives, it was also insistently self-reflexive. Above all, Xenakis’s work emphasized an approach to theatre as presence/present, an unmediated experience of the real and of sharing. Parting ways with representation, this form of theatre aims at making participants aware, through performance, of what is ‘out there’ at the present moment of perception. Alertness to space as well as to partners, whether performers or audiences, is essential to this conception of performance. Darkness was essential to creating a theatricalized context in which Xenakis’s work could be appreciated as an event, linking together

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the people and the space. In this context different ways of coming together into a community could be explored through theatre, from the community of participating volunteers to audiences, linking themselves to cultures of the past, to each other, as well as to Xenakis and the performers. All present at the Mycenae Polytopon fleshed out the event as it unfolded. Light and sound were their guiding signs, pointing away from spectacle to the night and what it could generate.

References Alexaki, E. (2009), ‘Metapolemikes anazitiseis synthesis ton technon kai peiramatismoi gia ena synoliko ergo technis. H proslipsi kai e provoli tous stin Ellada kata tis dekaeties 1960 & 1970. O rolos tou Yanni Papaioannou’, in I tecni tou 20ou aiona: istoria-theoria-empeiria, 47–62, Thessaloniki: Aristotle University of Thessaloniki. Alexaki, E. (2015), ‘Polytopo Mykenon’, in Synergasia technon: to polytechno oramatou Gianni Papaioannou, 50–2, Athens: Contemporary Greek Art Institute. Argyropoulou, K. (2015), Personal interview, Argos, 23 June 2015. Christidis, M. (1978), ‘O Xenakis apocalypse tin archaia Ellada!’, Kathimerini, 5 September: 4. Dorovinis, V. (1978a), ‘Nai sto Argos’ Anagennese, 29 August. Dorovinis, V. (1978b) ‘Polytopo ton Mykenon’, Anagennese, 10 September. Fayers, E. (2011), ‘Utopian Aesthetics. Philosophical Perspectives upon the Work of Iannis Xenakis’, in Proceedings of the Xenakis International Symposium, London, 1-3 April 2011. Available online at www.gold.ac.uk/ccmc/xenakisinternational-symposium/programme (accessed 10 October 2014). Fajond, R. (1981), ‘L’Orestie à Mycènes’, in M. Fleuret (ed.), Regards sur Iannis Xenakis, 283–90, Paris: Stock. Ferris, C. (1978), Iannis Xenakis. Polytopon [Film], Athens: ERT. Gill, D. (1981), ‘Le Polytope de Mycènes’, in M. Fleuret (ed.), Regards sur Iannis Xenakis, 294–98, Paris: Stock. Gualda, S. (2010), ‘On Psappha and Persephassa’, in S. Kanach (ed.), Performing Xenakis, 159–66, New York: Pendragon Press.

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Harley, J. (2002), ‘The Electroacoustic music of Iannis Xenakis’, CMJ, 20 (1): 33–57. Harley, M. A. (1998), ‘Music of Sound and Light: Xenakis’s Polytopes’, Leonardo, 31 (1): 55–65. Kanach, S. (2006), ‘Polytope de Mycènes 1978’, in I. Xenakis, Musique de l’architecture, The Iannis Xenakis Series 4, 323–7, Marseille: Editions Parenthèses. Kotzamani, M. (2016), ‘Greek History as Environmental Performance: Iannis Xenakis’s Mycenae Polytopon and Beyond’, Gramma, 24: 163–78. Lacouture, J. (1981), ‘Le Polytope de Mycènes: Xenakis chez les Atrides’, in M. Fleuret (ed.), Regards sur Iannis Xenakis, 291–93, Paris: Stock. Levy, B. (2012), ‘Clouds and Arborescence in Mycenae Alpha and the Polytope de Mycènes’, in S. Kanach (ed.), Xenakis Matters, The Iannis Xenakis Series 4. 173–84, Hillsdale, NY: Pendragon Press. Matossian, N. (2005), ‘The unsung hero of architecture’, Building Design, 30 September: 2. Available online at: www.bdonline.co.uk (accessed on 13 December 2015). ‘O Xenakis stin pole mas’ (1978), Argeiakon Vema, 27 August: 1. Papaioannou, G. (1979), ‘Mousika gegonota tis chronias’, Chroniko: 215–17. Parlas, C. (1978), ‘Yiannis Xenakis: Apologismos kai skepseis meta apo mia prospatheia’, To Vema tis Kyriakis, 17 September: 8. Pitsakis, G. (1978), ‘Me zitane ekso pantou alla edo tora ksypnesan’, Anagennese, 23 September: 2. ‘Poikiles skepseis kai ektimiseis’ (1978), To Vema, 15 September. Psychramis, F. (1980), Polytopon Mykenon 1978 – Iannis Xenakis [Film], Athens: Farko A. E. Renault d’Allonnes, O. (1975), Xenakis/Les Polytopes, Paris: Balland. Sakkas, S. (2010), ‘Singing … Interpreting Xenakis’, in S. Kanach (ed.), Performing Xenakis, 303–34, New York: Pendragon Press. Solomos, M. (2001), ‘Prologos tou epimeliti’, in Iannis Xenakis. Keimena peri mousikis kai architektonikis, xi-xxv, Athens: Ekdoseis Psychogios. Sterken, S. (2002), ‘Towards a Space-Time Art: Iannis Xenakis’s Polytopes’, Perspectives of New Music, 39 (2): 262–73. Available online at: http://www. urbain-trop-urbain.fr/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/Iannis-Xenakis_sPolytopes.pdf (accessed 15 October 2015).

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Sterken, S. (2007), ‘Music as an Art of Space: Interactions between Music and Architecture in the Work of Iannis Xenakis’, in Resonance: Essays on the Intersection Between Art and Architecture, Culicidae Architectural Press. Available at: https://lirias.kuleuven.be/bitstream/123456789/340882/1/sven (accessed 5 November 2015). Tabachnik, M. (2010), ‘Conducting (and Playing) Xenakis’ Orchestral Music’, in S. Kanach (ed.), Performing Xenakis, 303–34, New York: Pendragon Press. ‘To Polytopo tou Yianni Xenaki stis Mykenes. Anepanalepte giorte fotos kai kinesis’ (1978), Ta Nea, 4 September. Touloumi, O. (2012), ‘The Politics of Totality: Iannis Xenakis’s Polytope de Mycènes’, in S. Kanach (ed.), Xenakis Matters, 101–25, Hillsdale, NY: Pendragon Press. Tournaki, T. (2015), Personal interview, Athens, 5 September. Xenakis, I. (1978), Mycenae Polytope. Performance Program. Xenakis, I. (1985), ‘Preliminary Statement by Iannis Xenakis’, in Arts/Sciences Alloys, 1–10, Hillsdale, NY: Pendragon Press. Xenakis, I. (1987), ‘Mycenae-Alpha 1978’, Perspectives of New Music, 25 (1/2): 12–15. Xenakis, I. (2006), Musique de l’architecture, The Iannis Xenakis Series 4, Marseille: Editions Parenthèses. Xenakis I., Brown, R. and Rahn, J. (1987), ‘Xenakis on Xenakis’, Perspectives of New Music, 25 (1/2): 16–63. Xyndaropoulou, V. (2015), Personal telephone interview, 27 June. ‘Yiannis Xenakis: to oikoumeniko orama tou kosmou’ (1978), To Vema, 14 September.

10

In Praise of Gloom: The Theatre Defaced Martin Welton

It is early December 2015. A couple of hundred yards away, crowds and traffic throng along Kingsland Road in Dalston, East London. However, here in Studio 2, in the basement of the Arcola theatre, an atmosphere of quiet concentration prevails among an audience straining to hear and to see elusive words and images. It is dark in here. Completely and utterly pitch dark, in fact, until odd moments, such as this, when dim threads of light briefly illuminate the hands and face of the actress Emily Loomes, performing here as Tenna. Tenna is a blind seventeen-year-old bride to Nicholas le Provost’s hundred-year-old blind groom Isonzo in Howard Barker’s The Twelfth Battle of Isonzo (1998). Loomes’s face is hard to look at, not because of a light that glares upon it, but because the light is barely there at all. Peering through the gloom that engulfs her, one can hardly distinguish the shadows that give contrast to Loomes’s features from those that surround her. Although one’s eyes can adapt very well to conditions of low lighting, it takes a considerable effort (especially when coming out of a full blackout) to focus on her face. It is hard to say whether its wavering appearance is a trick of the light or of one’s optic muscles and visual cortex struggling to gain a purchase. The performance is largely given as an audio-playback on wireless headphones worn by the audience throughout the preponderant darkness of the show’s hour-or-so duration. It is hard not to cleave to the wavering light of Loomes’s face as something not only to be seen, but grasped for. Her face can be seen, but only just. Appearing out of

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the darkness, on its fringe with the luminous, she is not entirely distinct from the shadows; she is a bare presence at the threshold of visibility. Theatrical concern for facial visibility is long-standing. From the exaggerated features of Greek and Roman masks, to the wig that amplified the shock of Garrick’s Hamlet before his father’s ghost, to the brilliant glare of electric light in the nineteenth century, seeing in the theatre has tended towards faces. However, the argument explored in this chapter is that the theatrical face has increasingly come to bear a different relation to light and darkness – a fact underscored by actors’ working language, in which to be ‘in light’ is to be visible facially, in contradistinction to the darkness outside of it. I will argue further that the ubiquity of light in contemporary social life outside the theatre affords this darkness a particular significance, and especially in respect of the visibility of faces. While this is driven in part by advances in lighting technology, the relentlessness of social and political drives towards ever-increasing conditions of clarity or transparency gives one pause to revalue darkness. If everything is available to be seen, comprehended and thus possessed, wither privacy, agency or subjecthood? What of the productive possibilities of a lack of clarity, out of which understanding might arise, or be discovered? Furthermore, as technology supersedes the powers of human vision, what becomes of the sensibility that goes with seeing? In the theatre, as elsewhere, we do not merely ‘see’, but gaze, peer and strain towards objects of attention, which are themselves given to us in a medium of light. What we see, in other words, is never entirely distinct from how we do so. Seeing does not merely offer up the things of the world to perception, but is itself an activity of making sense. This activity is in turn politically and economically inflected, so that making sense may in part depend on how closely one can afford to sit to the objects of one’s vision or are privileged to do so according on the basis of one’s social capital. Over the last two centuries light in the theatre has developed aesthetic and technological sophistication and nuance, such that ‘lighting’ refers to many varied gradations of levels and effects.

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The theatre continues to be attended primarily as a ‘place of seeing’ determined to a considerable extent by the shaping and affordance of that seeing by light, although the necessity of a corresponding darkness out of or against which it occurs passes without question or comment. Given the long-standing cultural and intellectual significance of light in servicing the language of truth, thought and understanding, in which the banishment of a corresponding trope of darkness is one of its principal accomplishments, the priority given to the luminous over the gloaming is perhaps understandable. However, things appear to us out of the shadows, at least as much as they do in the light. Indeed, although they are not things in and of themselves, shadows are seen. As Roberto Casati reminds us in his fine book Shadows, far from being vision’s antagonists, ‘Shadows bear witness to the meeting between the world of material things and a world in which matter does not seem so important’ (2004: 29). In a darkened theatre, peering at shadows, from the shadows, we are witnesses not only to this meeting, but also to its substance. We have not left the material world behind, but it is no longer quite so assuredly there. How things appear to us – and we to them – becomes a more exacting proposition in the gloom. It is a matter of peering at that appearance. To peer of course refers to the use of your eyes in a particular sort of way, but it is not a passive mode of looking; the peering spectator directs her gaze from and into the shadows, angling her body accordingly, and leaning, tending or straining towards them. As a bodily and sensory engagement with shadow beyond mere observation, stretching out into gloom in this way is also to engage with it affectively. Beginning in the fourteenth century as a verb describing a sullen countenance, gloom has come to describe darknesses both actual and psychological, and is a property of things and situations as well as persons (Harper 2016). Whether photic or psychological, the darkness suggested by ‘gloom’ is one that is hard – but not impossible – to see into. Furthermore, as Stanton Garner has argued, theatrical darkness often involves a lowering of the lights, rather than their being wholly extinguished. This, he suggests, has given rise to ‘a fiction’ in which ‘the amount of darkness

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sufficient to signal “darkness” nonetheless engages responses that draw upon those provoked by darkness in its absoluteness’ (1994: 40). A typical response to the ‘perceptual unmooring’ (Garner 1994: 41) enacted by darknesses absolute, partial and fictional is, I suggest, that of befuddlement. Unable to see clearly, if at all, one is left to wonder how, and what one sees. Far from the stupefaction of one’s sensibility, peering, befuddled into gloom as the lights fade to black out in the theatre, the audience are not preparing for seeing nothing, but for seeing – and also thus for feeling – differently. In darkness we must either peer through the gloom to discover what remains of one another’s appearance or, while also listening carefully, begin to feel our way through it. What remains of theatre when we no longer face one another? Who are we, for and to one another, in such circumstances? Might there be something productive in the facelessness that darkness provides, and for which gloom provides a threshold state? The penumbrally astute might recognize a nod towards Junichiro Tanizaki’s ‘In Praise of Shadows’ in the titling of this chapter. ‘I have written all this’, muses Tanizaki, ‘because I have thought that there might still be somewhere, possibly in literature or the arts, where something could be saved. … I would push back into the shadows the things that come forward too clearly … but perhaps we may be allowed at least one mansion where we can turn off the electric lights and see what it is like without them’ (2001: 63–4). Written in the 1930s, as the bright light of modernity was suffusing the cultural mansions of Japan, as well as those of Europe and North America, Tanizaki’s essay is only partly a eulogy to shades past. Just as importantly (at least as far as this chapter is concerned), it finds in darkness, shadows and gloom an aesthetic of seeing that is different from that made present by and in the light. As the historian Chris Otter has observed (2008), the readiness with which Western modernity is equated with powerful new technologies of lighting that served to reshape seeing is often overstated, as both seeing and illumination were more variously distributed and engaged with than the gloss would seem to admit to. However, as he points out, ‘who could see what, whom, when, where, and how’ was to

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become a profound political and phenomenological question through the course of the second half of the nineteenth century. Accordingly, this chapter turns initially to the theatre practice of this period to examine how lighting technology in the theatre, and the contrapuntal darknesses it necessitated, brought about new and unusual interfacial encounters between actors and their audiences. Using examples of innovations in theatrical practice by Henry Irving and Richard Wagner, I examine how the descent of the Victorian audience into darkness shifted not only their view of the stage and of actors’ faces upon it, but also their corresponding sense of self. This sets the scene, so to speak, for a further descent into darkness a hundred years or so later in the contemporary trend for theatre in the dark, where I focus on two examples of performances that played with the partial or obscured appearance of the face in darkness: Beartrap Theatre’s Bound (2010) and Seth Kriebel’s scratch performance of The Unbuilt Room: Scratch Quartet, Part.3 (2014). Through them, I argue for a productive befuddlement in the act of peering through gloom. Insofar as it necessitates the possibility of seeing and feeling differently, this befuddled peering serves as a phenomenological ground upon which to consider the ethics of theatrical encounters. Certainly, contemporary interfacial relations can be considered different from those of the nineteenth century, given the extent to which facial appearance and identity are now interwoven with systems of social regulation, and belonging, from passport controls to commentary on social media. To be faceless otherwise is to fall outside the purview of the social order, as variously criminal, disenfranchised or abject. Even so, the arrival of technologies of lighting and self-visualization in the nineteenth century marks a social and phenomenological turning point in how the face could be seen. Since their arrival in this era, the spotlight and that other most theatrical of lights, the limelight, have cemented their place in the popular imaginary as means of illuminating actors’ faces, as well as in terms of public appearance more generally. Being in the spotlight or in the limelight is not only to appear under public scrutiny, but also to be so facially. As I will discuss later in the

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chapter, the removal or obscurance of faces – not only those of actors and others, but also one’s own – in early-twenty-first-century theatre in the dark begs questions of public scrutiny as a result. How does one appear and act responsibly in relation to others sans face in a cultural milieu in which faces are brighter and more visible than ever?

Houselights out A further significance of historical shifts in lighting technology for contemporary experiences also lies in the extent to which, in the nineteenth century, darkness itself became wrested from the night. Just as light began to pervade all manner of social and temporal spaces only previously visible in daytime, in the theatre in particular, darkness found a sensory and social significance beyond its nocturnal manifestation. Although unused playhouses had been described as ‘dark’ since the sixteenth century, it was in the last decades of the nineteenth that they became deliberately, and aesthetically, so (see Orrell 1984: 279). A key innovator in this respect was the English actor-manager Henry Irving. In a development roughly contemporaneous with innovations by André Antoine in France and Richard Wagner in Germany, Irving sought to use darkness as a means of underscoring or intensifying the audience’s attention to the stage, finally popularizing the differential effect noted by Italian renaissance designers three centuries earlier.1 As Bram Stoker, Irving’s friend and business manager, was later to reflect: Irving was able to carry out a long thought-of scheme: that the auditorium should be darkened during the play. Up to this time such had not been the custom. Indeed, it was the general aim of management to have the auditorium as bright as possible. The new order of things was a revelation to the public. Of course, when the curtain came down, the lights went up, and vice versa. In the practical working of the scheme it was found possible to open new ways of effect. In fact,

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darkness was found to be, when under control, as important a factor in effects, as light. (1911: 907)

Irving’s innovations in lighting would also go on to have an impact upon the more radical theatrical visions of Edward Gordon Craig, the son of his leading lady Ellen Terry. It is noteworthy in this respect, that it was not only Irving’s experimentation with lighting per se that captured Craig’s imagination, but also with the darkness that attended it. ‘I suppose few actors have acted in darker scenes than Irving,’ Craig would later reflect. ‘At the Lyceum the lights were often turned very low. It was from Irving that I learnt to plunge my scenes in a good deal too much gloom – but the fault must not be laid at his door’ (1930: 117). Irving was also an innovator in the development of acting as a craft shaped by photic conditions. Although he held out against a move from gas to electricity, Irving used the technology of powered lighting in order to create new conditions for playing within it as part of an atmospheric mise en scène: He had noticed that nature seldom shows broad effect with an equality of light. There are shadows here and there, or places where, through occasional aerial density, the light is unevenly distributed. … It became an easy matter to throw any special part of the stage into greater prominence – in fact to ‘vignette’ that part of the stage picture which at the moment was of the larger importance. (Stoker 1911: 907)

Within this aesthetic, shadows did not impede seeing, so much as they became both its medium and its object. Audiences found their ability to see the stage enhanced by their immersion in the shadows of the darkened auditorium. Furthermore, as a newly focused light cut through the darkness, shadows became visible as constituent elements within a mise en scène. These shadows allowed nocturnal or gloomy conditions to be represented, but also permitted the production of atmospheric conditions associated with the ineffability of the unseen. What makes Irving’s experiments with darkness all the more remarkable is that, even after the introduction of first gas and then

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electrically powered systems with which to light the stage, nineteenthcentury audiences still largely wanted to be present to one another visibly. As the architect T. Roger Smith noted: ‘The audience should see each other, so as to allow all who wish it an opportunity for personal display, and for scrutinising the appearance of others’ (1878: 74).2 The persistence of the desire to be together under light speaks of a sensibility determined, in part, by a sense of the expressions of feelings by others as extensions of one’s own. Seeing the visible expressions of one’s peers in the audience as well as those of actors on the stage could be argued to be a determinant not only of thoughts or feelings about them, but also of feelings about oneself. Recounting the power of Irving’s performances, Gordon Craig notes the extent to which physical grace served to accentuate the presence of his face: His movements being measured, rhythmic, planned, it may be too obvious to state that the action of his face was part of all this, and was measured too; yet it may not have occurred to one or two of my readers that this control of feature till immobility was achieved constituted a mask [sic] … A Mask never fidgets, it endures, and at the slightest touch it becomes expressive, it lights up and speaks. … No, the really agile portion of his body was his face – his mask. (1930: 7–8)

Such was the significance of his facial presence to his performance that Irving made use of the newly available lighting technologies to further enhance its visibility. Writing of his experience as a stage manager for Irving in 1899, the early film pioneer Percy Nash recalled: ‘A special operator always followed the chief ’s face with a small “pin” of light of steel-blue; however dark the scene was, you always saw Irving’s face’ (qtd. in Saintsbury and Palmer 1939: 263). Brilliantly lit against the gloomier conditions that surrounded it, Irving’s face commanded attention. When today we demand of student actors that they learn how ‘to be in light’, we mean, primarily, that they learn to feel it on their faces and to shape their performances accordingly. To be seen theatrically is to be seen facially, with acting geared to this as a result.

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Irving’s innovations in terms of facial appearance in light and darkness are significant in considering the power of his performance. Equally important, however, is the extent to which they also represent the interests of nineteenth-century culture concerning the face as revelatory of an inner and authentic self and of the theatre as an ideal place within which to inspect and experiment with it. As Sharrona Pearl has argued, ‘For a culture obsessed with the hierarchy of humanity, a confined space in which types were being paraded and organised was seductive’ (2010: 62). Moreover, she suggests, ‘Physiognomy was both explicitly and subtly part of the story of the realistic stage,’ to the extent that physiognomic principles ‘dictated that character could be seen in the face’ (2010: 59). Although physiognomy has since joined a list of pseudosciences along with phrenology and mesmerism, the scientific and cultural concerns of the Victorian era for the nature and meaning of facial expression continue to play out in our own. As the twentieth century progressed, the cinema came to replace the theatre as a social space where audiences gathered to examine the faces of actors for the expression of morally and emotionally authentic truths. However, it is in the second decade of the twenty-first century that the nineteenthcentury desire for capturing authentic experience ‘full in the face’, so to speak, has met its techno-cultural apotheosis in the pervasive uptake of camera phone technology and the trope of the selfie – although it is no longer to actors’ faces that we turn, so much as our own. Even when communicating with others via softwares such as Facetime or Skype, is it not the image of one’s own face that fascinates at least as much as the distant presence of another’s? Even so, whether capturing myself in memorable locations or occasions, it is perhaps not so much ‘me’ that I seek to capture as ‘the moment’. The presence of my face in the image is a record of my having been verifiably there and then, but it is less my face that I want to capture so much as the intensity of the affect or atmosphere that has led me to turn the lens on myself in the first place. The risk, of course, is that the image of my face, brilliantly backlit as touchscreen light, overwhelms the occasion or location I sought

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to capture in the first place. As faces everywhere are brought ever more into light, it seems that what we wanted them to reveal becomes ever harder to see. As Gordon Craig complained nearly a century ago: ‘It is quite unnecessary, all this glare in theatres, because there is a glare in the streets at night and a glare in our houses too. And, leaving these, we have to be met by a greater glare or we grow depressed. No art is used at all … anywhere’ (1925: 144).

Snap back to black Contemporaneous with Irving’s experiments with light and darkness were those of Richard Wagner at the newly built Festspielhaus in Bayreuth. As with Irving, Wagner exploited darkness to enhance both spectatorial attention and the theatre’s atmospheric potential. However, perhaps even more than Irving, Wagner’s innovation in this is often held up as a decisive point in the arrival of light in the theatre as a performative power beyond illumination (see Baugh 2005). As much as this may be the case, it appears to have come about as much by accident as by genius or design. As Patrick Carnegy (2006) has suggested, the total auditorium darkness that left shocked operagoers at the opening performance of Das Rheingold in 1876 unable to read their librettos was never really Wagner’s intention. The installation of a mechanism for gas lighting in the newly built opera house was subject to major delays, such that the theatre’s staff had very little time in which to master its new and complex controls. The sudden coup de theatre, in which the audience were plunged into darkness, was, Carnegy proposes, a technical error. Accidental or not, this descent into darkness is notable for its impressing on both artists and theatregoers the significance of the phenomenology of a dual effect in which light both reveals objects before vision and becomes present within the visual field as an element enabled by darkness. Writing in Scribner’s Magazine in 1887, the American critic William Apthorp noted: ‘The importance of Bayreuth

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in the art-history of this century lies far less in the fact that Wagner’s greater music-dramas are performed there than in the peculiar style and conditions in which they are given’ (1887: 516). ‘The darkened auditorium is with him a sine qua non,’ Apthorp explained, although the lighting of the stage itself also provided points of particular interest, such that ‘with Wagner the play is the thing, not the actor’ (1887: 524). Previous to this, Apthorp had surmised: The old method was so to arrange the means of lighting the stage – foot-lights, sidelights, and head-lights – that the greatest possible intensity of light should be shed upon the performer, especially upon his face. Where the public was, with reason, supposed to come to the theatre to judge and, if possible, enjoy the performance of certain artists, the point of paramount importance was that these artists should be distinctly seen. No smallest detail of their gesture or play of facial expression must be lost upon the spectator. (1887: 524, emphasis in original)

The great innovation of Wagner’s ‘often brilliant, but never garish’ lighting lay not only in an auditorium darkness of unusual depth and intensity, but also in a shift in the counteractive illumination on stage away from the actor’s face. This loss of facial brightness meant that the actor no longer ‘carried the drama on his shoulders’, as Apthorp put it, with his expression obscure to an audience who also now no longer saw themselves. If Irving’s steel-blue pin-spot marked the apotheosis of the face as the object of spectatorial focus, enabled by the differential darkness that he shared with Wagner, its simultaneous displacement and dispersal into the atmospherics of mise en scène in Bayreuth marks the beginning of the facial obscurity exploited and interrogated in the more recent performances that I now turn to in this chapter. If, in the century that followed Wagner’s accidental innovation, the everincreasing brilliance of facial presence on the stage before a darkened auditorium served to further alienate the viewer from the viewed, then the recent rise of works of theatre exploiting a fuller or total darkness might be seen as a move towards their reconciliation. What these

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works share with their nineteenth-century forebears, I argue, is an interest in the atmospheric potential of shadow, gloom and darkness as a corollary or other of light. Furthermore, in forcing audiences to peer into darkness, making a seeing that is partial and uncertain, they invite an ethical questioning of the appearance of self and others.

Reverberating faces Until its recent move to new premises near Elephant and Castle, the Southwark Playhouse had a home in the network of tunnels and arches beneath the railway lines serving London Bridge station. The Vault, which was their studio space at that time, was, in the venue’s own words, a ‘large untreated performance space’ (Hopkins 2011), and in October 2011 served as the London venue for Beartrap Theatre’s Bound, following a critically acclaimed opening at the Edinburgh Festival in August the previous year. Written and directed by Jesse Briton, it tells the story of a group of Devonian trawlermen, driven to put out to sea in the face of a gathering storm that parallels the economic and social collapse of their way of life. The production used a plain, boarded playing area enclosed on three sides by raked seating. The actors entered this simple arena from the depths of two dark archways, stretching away from the audience. Although it was undoubtedly atmospheric in its narrative foreboding, and in the beautiful plain-sung harmonies of the sea shanties with which the cast punctuated the action, its setting within The Vault made it more so. As an ‘untreated performance space’, it was neither soundnor damp-proofed. In watching Bound, the gloomy darkness into which you peered could not be entirely separated from the cold and damp that enveloped you, nor from the shiver of trains and voices that resounded in the vaulted brickwork. Bound was performed by five actors who brought the docks and decks occupied by their characters to life with some simple mime and the playful use of a table and chairs. However, they also made use of the

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gloom of The Vault to make the performance a matter of appearance – a bringing forth – before a peering audience. Much was made of the actor’s entrances into the playing space from out of the darkness at the rear of the stage. From it they emerged into a dimness that the audience had to continue to peer into, in order to keep the actors’ forms visible as well as audible in the singing of traditional shanties and songs. In the play’s final scene, the crew respond to a mayday call from a competing trawler caught in the throes of a storm, only to find themselves foundering. As the situation worsens, one became gradually aware that the actors were swaying from side to side and back and forth, as if under the pitch and yaw of a rolling ship, to the extent that some audience members reported feeling seasick (see Hopkins 2011). As the storm and the stricken fishermen’s situation intensified, the lights were slowly extinguished bar one hanging, naked light bulb that swung in time with the men. To peer into the deepening gloom was to do so through and with this swinging light, so that its gloaming movement was itself taken up by the very act of looking. Rather than a world revealed by illumination, this was one that grasped at it flailingly. Hearing voices in the gloaming and watching bodies flailing within it, one strained to see the actors’ faces moving with the song. However, where any one of them became visible, passing through the shadows, it was already receding into the gloom from which it came. The faces of the actors became less expressive objects for spectatorial inspection, and more, as Alan Read has it, ‘a play of surfaces in which ear, nose, and eye give way to throat, limbs and torso before moving out towards “dispersed bodies” and their relationship to “distributed things”’ (2008: 37). Read draws our attention to theatrical facial expression – whether in light or in shadow – as being contiguous with the atmosphere it plays upon and within. However, he mounts a strong argument that we might look elsewhere than the stage for face-to-face encounters, and that in looking for ethical substance there, we are wont to lose sight of its occurrence within a ‘more concrete’ theatrical economy, which we engage with ‘in meetings with the usherette, the barman and the ticket seller’ (2008: 37). Be that as it may, I think that he rather downplays

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both the extent to which we are given to look for, as well as at faces. Furthermore, those bodies and things that are visible as ‘distributed’ and ‘dispersed’ are so within a medium that in itself affords and qualifies the act of seeing as both movement and perception. As Tim Ingold writes of the shifting light of weather, ‘We do not see different things, but we do see the same things differently. … If weather is an experience of light, then to see in the light is to see in the weather. It is not so much an object as a medium of perception’ (2005: 102). As the faces of the Bound actors shifted in and out of gloom, one was aware of them as a play of surfaces, as Read proposes, but also of their being seen in and in relation to the prevailing gloom. This required an act of ‘seeing differently’, to borrow Ingold’s phrase: the movement and perception of peering. To peer into gloom is to reach out, apprehensively, towards the limits of what is visible. Insofar as it is a question of trying to pay attention to what may be there, peering into gloom is also a matter of straining out aurally, of trying to hear what is obscure before it crosses the threshold of vision. However, after visible objects have retreated across this threshold, it is not just the loss of light that frightens or intrigues, but that someone might be in the darkness, someone who should – if they are indeed to be someone – have a face. Jon Erickson suggests that coming face-to-face with an actor/Other is an experience of ‘a call to responsibility’: a setting up of the conditions whereby communication is possible between two beings’ (1999: 8). However, once adumbrated by darkness, rather than clarified by light, the bare or minimal appearance of the theatrical Other throws that possibility into even starker relief. If there is to be nothing more of the Other than the apprehension of a shadow – and therefore nothing to scrutinize either for signification or for hidden depths – then we meet them as possible, rather than actual presences, and are befuddled as to their sincerity or truth. However, as I will shortly discuss in the context of another gloomy performance, the befuddled loss of illumination shared by both actors and audiences in such works does not wholly or necessarily erase the encountering of self and other. Befuddlement does not efface seeing, nor render it impossible, but demands that we ask

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harder questions of the acts and percepts it affords. As I argue, this does not mean having to follow the rather dull line of reasoning that because vision is so regularly found to be at the root of the evils of objectification, other, more cuddly sensory registers should present the occasion for more authentic, playful or transformative encounters by default.

Dark enough yet? Although Bound did not set out to be a production of theatre in the dark explicitly, it was able to capitalize on the gloomy conditions that prevailed at Southwark Playhouse. However, my next, and more recent example of a loss of theatrical face to gloom, Seth Kriebel’s The Unbuilt Room – although originally made for lit conditions – used the gloaming to try and imagine different possibilities for the worlds it sought to conjure. In its original form, a significant aspect of The Unbuilt Room’s aesthetic involves its performers and audience members being able to see one another’s faces. Blending gaming and theatre, small groups of players are offered a series of choices by Kriebel (and in fuller versions also by his partner Zoe Bouras) about how to undertake a journey through an imagined series of interconnected rooms, and which directions or actions they might undertake.3 They are presented these choices in turn, and can address them as they wish, but they are also encouraged to discuss them with others, creating collaborative acts of memory and imagination. Ordinarily, the players sit in a circle, and the scrutiny of one another’s faces during the decision-making process is central to the temporary community of imagination and action that the performance offers. Kriebel was commissioned by Battersea Arts Centre (BAC) in the autumn of 2014 to create a series of four scratch performances of The Unbuilt Room in order to test how it might be presented for other, and potentially larger, audiences than the smallish circles to which it had played up until then.4 Perhaps bearing in mind BAC’s pedigree with respect to theatre with the lights off (it hosted the hugely important

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Playing in the Dark season in 1998), the third of these was chosen as a dark performance. As part of the commission, Kriebel worked with different collaborators on each of the scratches, and for the third one, he invited me. I hadn’t been involved in theatre in the dark from the perspective of its production since I had worked as an actor with Sound&Fury on The Watery Part of the World in 2004 (see Welton 2005), and so the opportunity to engage with darkness in practice was immediately attractive. However, the difficulty of actually making the room dark meant that many of my preconceived ideas about what darkness should be had to go abegging. Because of the scratch nature of the performance, conditions of ‘perfect’ darkness – those that might seem most ideal for thinking through it in research terms – were impossible to obtain. Despite our sealing every chink in doors and windows through which light might have leaked, BAC was unable to get a full-enough licence to switch off a safety LED in one of the overhead houselights. Within five minutes of the lights being extinguished, this tiny source of luminescence provided enough illumination for shapes and space to be distinguished. Kriebel had originally hoped for a full and total darkness in which he might gently touch and prompt a select number of players in their decision-making processes as Bouras moved around the studio giving voice to imagined locations from various positions within it; however, under the LED’s dim glow, they were both just visible as shadowy figures in the gloom. Hearing Kriebel in the gloaming, seeing the vague outlines of other spectators and of Bouras moving through it, one strained to make out their faces – mouths, brows, noses, chins, cheeks and jowls. Where any one of them became visible, swaying either through the shadows or in the strain of one’s eyesight into them, it was difficult to totally distinguish it from the gloom from which they came. Under its normal lit conditions, the faces of Kriebel and one’s fellow players are central to the interactions that sustain the experience of The Unbuilt Room. In the other players’ faces one sees anticipation, apprehension and encouragement of one’s actions and it is clear that the appearance of these affects shapes and guides Kriebel and Bouras’s own playing of

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their roles in some degree. However, as they were to relate to me in discussions following the performance, in the befuddlement brought about by the darkening of these interactions, both were forced instead to try and act on or against the gloom itself. Paradoxically given their relative invisibility, both performers found themselves having to add more colour to their vocal performance and to move with greater intensity.5 Befuddled in the shadows, Kriebel and Bouras had to enact their own means of reaching out towards the peering attention of the audience. This greater intensity of attention towards indefinite or uncertain others paralleled the peering of the audience. However, for both parties, that effort was expended in a medium that confounded the recognition of one by the other. Unable to gain a purchase on the other’s face and to know them on the basis of what it revealed, the performers and players were made aware, instead, of the medium of gloom itself. Leaving to one side the affects of misery and abjection that most commonly attend to it, within this medium the experience of others was uncertain and unfinished. Neither performers nor players could fully ascertain how their own expressions of affect played out visibly in the reciprocity of the other’s facial expressions. What one became aware of instead was of the others’ scant visibility, barely distinguishable from the gloom we were all immersed in. Whatever affect arose as attention was cast out into the darkness was unmoored from that which typically generates or receives it – the face of an Other looking on and looked at. ‘Doesn’t the theatre automatically thematize the Other,’ Jon Erickson asks: ‘Isn’t the impulse of any audience to create projections, to give a mask to a performer when they seem not to have one’ (1999: 19)? Under the cover of gloom these projections have nothing so certain to rest upon. Unable to see or sense the possibility of one’s self in the face of an Other, darkness frustrates the possibility of theatrical performance – in Erickson’s echoing of Emmanuel Levinas – for ‘evoking responsibility in the audience for herself as paradigmatic Other’ (1999: 11). However, this does not necessarily mean that the darkened theatre is void as an ethical space. Instead, the loss of facial clarity (of one’s own as well

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as that of others) marks the possibility for ethical beginnings. As the political theorist Tina Edkins has suggested: A politics of the face-blind, or the politics that is a dismantling of the face – another politics – may be a politics that demands not that we see ourselves as once whole beings now fragmented, but that we recognize and accommodate our inevitable incompleteness, our insecurity. … It would be a politics where we saw each other not as ever at any time whole, complete persons, but as inevitably incomplete, in relation, continually missing to ourselves and to each other. Each encounter would be an encounter with the person as missing. (2013: 551)

An encounter with the missing is inevitably an active one, of looking or searching out for them. In peering through or into gloom, how one looks is as significant as what one sees in doing so. As one’s eyes struggle against the pervasive shadows of a performance like The Unbuilt Room, the ethical potential that Edkins finds in facial obscurity is one that must, necessarily, be on the move out and into the gloom, uneasy as it may be. Furthermore, if Erickson and Edkins’s concerns for interfacial relationships with others underscores a sense that our feelings are beyond us, the gloom of performances like The Unbuilt Room causes us to see that even more so. As noted, Kriebel did not pursue darkness or gloom in the development of The Unbuilt Room after the scratch series at BAC. However, the struggle for relations with others that the gloomy experience foregrounded did profoundly affect the performance he went on to develop – A House Repeated (2015) – albeit ironically. Where the gaming structure of The Unbuilt Room had previously premised interactions and choices among individuals in a small group, here, a much larger audience was divided into two groups facing one another across a central divide. Although it was lit throughout, and did not rely on the befuddlements of gloom or shadow, A House Repeated placed its participants as part of a group of faces before many other faces. While not defaced exactly, the micropolitics of negotiation that also

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characterized the work were conducted with a sense and set of others who, in being multiple (to paraphrase Edkins), were always incomplete.

Facing out Back at the Arcola’s Studio 2, Barker’s play is ending. The soundtrack of atmospheric music begins to fade. Loomes’s face is slowly brought into the light again, and then, inexorably, it renders her visible bodily. She is suddenly more, and less, than she was in our hour together in darkness. Beneath the lights she is more present, but more separate, and more readily determined as both actress and character. For all that, in this clarifying moment where we have returned to ourselves from out of the darkness, she is less ‘out there’, in that befuddling place where we were also obscure, together. The house lights come up, dissipating the darkness still further, and we go our separate ways. Peter Sloterdijk has suggested that ‘human faces produce one another’ (2011: 164). In a society of self-regard, in which facial brightness is ever more alienating – pace the selfie – theatrical conditions of gloom, shadow and darkness offer an opportunity to reassess or recalibrate the terms on which the ethical encounter presumed by Sloterdijk might be engaged. In the gloom, we must struggle with the loss or obscurance of shared expression, but have the potential to be drawn together in the vestiges of seeing that remain, and in hearing and feeling together. By forcing us out of the regime of clarity, to turn, for this short theatrical while, to the odd business of how sense is made at all, gloom makes space for ethical thoughts, if not quite ethics per se. Who are we, and how should we be together? What is it that we share? What separates? The performances touched upon in this chapter offer no direct answers to these questions; instead, they offer states of gloom – both affect and appearance – as states of difference from the photic excess outside the theatre that obscures the possibility for looking and feeling differently together in the shadows.

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References Apthorp, W. F. (1887), ‘Wagner and Scenic Art’, Scribner’s Magazine, 2 (5): 515–31. Baugh, C. (2005), Theatre, Performance and Technology: The Development of Scenography in the Twentieth Century, Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan. Carnegy, P. (2006), Wagner and the Art of the Theatre, Boston: Yale University Press. Casati, R. (2004), Shadows: Unlocking Their Secrets, from Plato to Our Time, London: Vintage. Edkins, T. (2013), ‘Dismantling the Face: Landscape for Another Politics?’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 31 (3): 538–53. Erickson, J. (1999), ‘The Face and the Possibilities of an Ethics of Performance’, Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism, 13 (2): 5–22. Garner, S. B. (1994), Bodied Spaces: Phenomenology and Performance in Contemporary Drama, New York: Cornell University Press. Gordon Craig, E. (1925), Books and Theatres, London: J. M. Dent Ltd. Gordon Craig, E. (1930), Henry Irving, London: J. M. Dent and Sons. Harper, D. (2016), ‘gloom’, Online Etymology Dictionary. Available at: http:// www.etymonline.com/index.php?allowed_in_frame=0&search=gloom&se archmode=none (accessed 3 March 2012). Hopkins, L. (2011), ‘Review: Bound’, A Younger Theatre, 3 October. Available online: http://www.ayoungertheatre.com/review-bound-southwarkplayhouse-bear-trap-theatre-company/ (accessed 23 April 2012). Ingold, T. (2005), ‘The Eye of the Storm: Visual Perception and the Weather’, Visual Studies, 20 (2): 97–104. Orrell, J. (1984), ‘Lights, Ho! (II)’, Essays in Criticism, 34 (4): 278–82. Otter, C. (2008), The Victorian Eye: A Political History of Light and Vision in Britain, 1800-1910, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Pearl, S. (2010), About Faces: Physiognomy in Nineteenth-Century Britain, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Read, A. (2008), Theatre, Intimacy and Engagement: The Last Human Venue; Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan.

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Saintsbury, H. A. and Palmer, C. (1939), We Saw Him Act: A Symposium on the Art of Sir Henry Irving/A Series of Essays, Articles and Anecdotes, Personal Reminiscences and Dramatic Criticisms Written by his Contemporaries, New York: Hurst and Blackett. Schivelbusch, W. (1995), Disenchanted Night: The Industrialisation of Light in the Nineteenth Century, translated by A. Davies, Oxford: Berg. Sloterdijk, P. (2011), Bubbles: Spheres I – Microspherology, London: Semiotext(e). Smith, Roger T. (1878), Acoustics in Relation to Architecture and Building: The Laws of Sound as Applied to the Arrangement of Buildings, new edn, London: Virtue. Stoker, B. (1911), ‘Irving and Stage Lighting’, The Nineteenth Century and After: A Monthly Review, 411: 903–12 Tanizaki, J. (2001), In Praise of Shadows, translated by T. J. Harper and E. G. Seidensticker, London: Cape. Welton M. (2005), ‘Once More With Feeling’, Performance Research, 10 (1): 100–12.

Notes

Introduction 1 Beckett was responding to Herbert Berghof ’s plans to stage All That Fall, which ended up coming to fruition anyway in October 1957 at the Carnegie Hall Playhouse in a production directed by Edward Greer (Zilliacus 1976: 169–70). A number of ‘simple’ and ‘static’ readings were also subsequently staged, most notably versions by Mary Manning (1958), the Living Theatre (1959), Deryk Mendel (1966) and Trevor Nunn (2012). 2 While darkness also pervades Beckett’s literary fiction, especially Murphy (1938) (see Knowlson 1972: passim), it was only in theatre that Beckett was able to explore connections between the semiotics of darkness and what Corey Wakeling describes as ‘a dramaturgy of sensory deprivation’ (2015: 105). 3 More recent festivals of dark performances include the Bush Theatre’s Broken Space Season (2008), and two ninety-minute micro-festivals by the Los Angeles-based Odyssey Theatre called Theatre in the Dark: Dark (2012) and Theatre in the Dark: More Dark (2012). 4 Dwan also performed in a BAC production of Not I in 2005, directed by Natalie Abrahami, which she went on to produce herself for the Southbank Centre in London in 2009. 5 For a recent survey of dance in the dark, see the second chapter of André Lepecki’s Singularities (2016). 6 Compare with Stanton B Garner’s writing on ‘theatrical darkness’ – ‘in part sleight of hand’, in part drawing ‘on the phenomenon of actual darkness’ (1994: 40–1). 7 It is possible that Maeterlinck’s interest in gloom was influenced by the second act of Auguste Villiers de l’Isle-Adam’s metaphysical melodrama

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Elen (1865), in which moonlight from an open window, at that point the main source of light, is suddenly replaced by a single source of diegetic lighting emitted from a candelabra (see Deak 1993: 42–4). Maeterlinck’s specification of dim lighting also finds a counterpart in the gauze scrim that was stretched across the front of the stage in several symbolist plays performed by Fort’s Théâtre D’Art. 8 Some of the earliest examples can be found in ancient Mesopotamia (see Jacobsen 1976), though Zoroastrianism (see Zajonc 1993) and Manichaeism (see Asmussen 1975) are also noteworthy.

Chapter 1 1 Barthes is referring to the darkened auditorium of the cinema but the comparison is valid. 2 Wagner refuted the term ‘opera’, preferring ‘Word-Tone-Drama’. 3 Carnegy notes that by 1889 auditorium lighting was dimmed to a quarter of full intensity for most performances in Germany (2006: 121). 4 The Sam Wanamaker Playhouse adjacent to Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre in London attempts to recreate something of this experience – an experimental space lit predominantly by beeswax candles. 5 See, for instance, Furttenbach’s innovations at Ulm (1620–67), and Bouqueton’s spectacular ballets at Quaglio’s court theatre at Mannheim (1758–69). 6 For further analysis of these writings see Palmer (2013: 1–19). 7 Nicholl (1966: 252) notes that despite the published date of the manuscript, the dialogues were not completed until at least a decade later and speculates that this was a copyist’s error for 1565. 8 Manifested, for example, in the scenic designs based on the paintings of Giovanni Battista Piranesi (see Roach 1978; Brockett 1991). 9 Designed by Paul von Joukowsky with gas lighting and electric arc ‘mobile projectors’ that had been installed by German lighting specialist Hugo Bähr. See Appia Œuvres Complètes vols 1–4, edited by BabletHahn, for a definitive biography and collection of Appia’s life and works.

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10 Bähr is widely referred to as ‘the father of German lighting’. He was an engineer and manufacturer of innovative lighting equipment, based in Dresden. His influence on Appia is discussed in detail in Palmer (2015). 11 Sometimes referred to in English translation as ‘living light’ or ‘formative light’. 12 See also Adam Alston and Martin Welton’s Introduction to this volume.

Chapter 2 1 I am borrowing the phrase ‘sight unseen’ from Georgina Kleege (1999). 2 Charles Spence, Caroline Hobkinson, Alberto Gallace and Betina Piqueras-Fiszman (2013) reference Italian Futurism and Hobkinson’s food art, but focus on tactile encounters with food in lit spaces. Spence and Piqueras-Fiszman do address dining in the dark elsewhere (Spence and Piqueras-Fiszman 2012), but limit attention to commercial contexts. Siegfried Saerberg also refers to ‘Blackout – a performance in absolute darkness’ (1992) by Blinde und Kunst e. V., but this appears to be a music and story-telling event set in darkness, which included the serving of drinks, rather than theatre in the dark or dining in the dark, specifically (Saerberg 2007: n.p.). 3 The New York restaurant was not intended as a pop-up; rather, and surprisingly, it failed to make enough money to sustain itself. 4 The study of reification is also indebted to the first wave of the Frankfurt School and the European New Left. For an instructive overview, see Jay (2012: 4). 5 My thanks to Loy Machedo for his informative emails in January 2016. 6 Thomas Edison did not invent electric lighting, but rather participated in an international wave of experimentation in its physics and chemistry throughout the nineteenth century (see Palermo 2014). 7 Giacomo Balla’s Iridescent Interpenetrations (1910s) provide the clearest examples, along with his replacement of dancers with coloured electric lights in his set design for a production of Igor Stravinsky’s Feu d’artifice (Fireworks) (1908) in 1917.

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8 See also Augusto Mauro’s Morte e Trasfigurazione (Death and Transfiguration, 1920), which treats ‘sensitive darkness’ as a backdrop for vibrantly coloured lights (see Kirby 1971: 296), Paul Frischauer’s expressionist play Im Dunkel (In the Dark) (1924) (see Elcott 2016: 169), and the broad range of historical examples featured in this book’s Introduction. 9 Several of these materials are specified in Marinetti’s manifesto on ‘Tactilism’ (1921) (see Marinetti 2009c: 266–7). Interestingly, Marinetti dismisses the value of immersing participants in darkness in the manifesto, believing it would bring about a lesser form of tactile experience. 10 Fillìa had previously contributed to the Futurist mainstream by glorifying electric light – for instance, in his 1927 play Sensualità Meccanica (Mechanical Sensuality). The Tactile Dinner Party was therefore innovative not just within the broader context of Italian Futurism, but within Fillìa’s oeuvre as well. 11 I am very grateful to Alicia for an instructive correspondence in the spring of 2016 and to Bárbara Ortiz for sharing documentation of Cena de los 9 Vacios. 12 The idea for a ‘black meal’ was inspired by an eccentric funeral feast depicted in Joris-Karl Huysmans’s À Rebours (Against Nature) (1884) (see Huysmans 2003: 13).

Chapter 3 1 See also Scott Palmer’s contribution to this book, which offers a detailed account of Adolphe Appia’s approach to the aesthetics of light and shadow. 2 A notable absence being the kinaesthetic sense (movement); neuroscientist Alain Berthoz has since challenged the common exclusion of this sense in The Brain’s Sense of Movement (2000). 3 ‘Diegesis’ etymologically derives from the Greek diēgēsis meaning ’narrative’.

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4 My distinction between the terms ‘diegetic’, ‘non-diegetic’ and ‘extra diegetic’ are consistent with film theory’s definitions that pertain to sound design in Daniel Chandler and Rod Munday’s A Dictionary of Media and Communication (2011). 5 Pre-Christian ‘festivals of light’ often entailed the symbolic banishment of darkness. For example, the Celts believed that the sun stood still for twelve days in mid-winter and during this period would burn a log ‘to conquer the darkness’ (‘Festivals of Light – Christianity’). Both Hindu and Christian iconography have commonly associated light with goodness/faith and dark with evil/lack of faith. The semiotic resonances that darkness possesses in these brief examples are as something to banish or reject. Wilson’s anti-theatrical understanding of darkness in theatre parallels festivals of light that have sought to ritualize the expulsion of darkness, while I propose that theatre in the dark might be thought of as a kind of counter-ritual that in some instances seeks to deliberately problematize visual culture. 6 A more recent example of the posthumous displaying of bodies is anatomist Gunther von Hagens’ Bodyworlds exhibition which presented the ‘plastinated’ cadavers of consenting donors. Notably, in a journal article entitled ‘Galileo’s Finger and the Perspiring Waxwork: On Death, Appearance and the Promise of Flesh’ (2010), theatre scholar Sophie Nield critiqued this exhibition’s staging of the corpse in a ‘space of representation as an entertainment’. Nield argued that death poses a problem to the possibilities of theatrical ‘appearance’; ‘everything may be representable, but there are nevertheless some things that cannot work to represent; they cannot imitate; they cannot “pretend”’ (43).

Chapter 4 1 Fuel Theatre, the producers of Glen Neath and David Rosenberg’s theatre in the dark pieces, describe them as sound journeys, alluding to these productions as sonic art as well as forms of theatre. This choice also circumnavigates the problem of defining theatre in the dark, as the

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producers place an emphasis on its material – sound – rather than the absence of light. 2 Diegetic sound traditionally refers to sounds that are locatable within a narrative, particularly the visual frame of this; for instance, the voice of a ‘character’ is diegetic. A non-diegetic sound relates to a narrative and the world of a story told, but not directly to what is seen, such as narration or a voice over. The idea of a sonic diegesis is that form of sound which makes meaning on its own terms without recourse to other forms such as the visual object. For examples of this, see Vautrin (2011: 144); see also Liam Jarvis’s contribution to this book, which considers diegesis in relation to darkness, specifically. 3 Auralization refers to recording techniques that produce ‘signal in such a way to reproduce at the ears of the listener the psychoacoustic feeling of an acoustic space, including reverberation, single echoes, frequency colouring, and spatial impression’ (Farina 1993: 2). Binauralization utilizes a dummy head to position mics at strategic points to render a three-dimensional experience of sound that only the movement of the listener’s head reveals as prerecorded. 4 ASMR refers to the ‘autonomous sensory meridian response’ experienced in relation to digital performances of low-fi sounds, whispers and soundscapes designed to relax the listener. There is a growing online community of ASMR performance makers who use binaural recording to affect their liveness as well as their intimate spatiality. 5 The structure of Ring was designed to accustom the audience to the story as taking place in the room they were assembled in for the show. The first ten minutes or so is lit and takes the form of a pre-show/soft opening to the production with an introduction by the main character, Michael. As well as checking our equipment and preparing us for the ensuing darkness, he also sets up the idea that we are assembled for a meeting of sorts seeding the notion that what follows is the upshot of the proceedings of the meeting, and that scenes set in other places are the product of the imagination of those assembled. According to writer Glen Neath, this had the effect of the audience ‘not acknowledging the sound’ and therefore consciously attributing the events in the darkness as not

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an effect of sound but as actual events in the space and, as such, they ‘don’t understand what is happening to them’ (Neath, 8 February 2016, personal conversation with the author). 6 Unlike the scenography of sound effects, or sonography, acoustic scenography describes design from the perspective of sound’s affect. Nicholas Till describes a similar approach as a ‘sceno-sonic’, articulating the ways in which aesthetic spaces are ‘multi-model’, how these are experienced through sound as well as through scene, and that this is particular to theatre in the dark because of its capacity to dissolve the boundaries between the scenic and the sonic, or ‘the real and the virtual’ (Till 2015: 111). An acoustic scenography is more of sound’s affects, and describes what sounds do in the spaces, and how sound creates the different environments not only by signals (sounds that indicate objects such as opening doors or ticking clocks) but by sounding out the size, scale, texture and materiality of spaces as well. This is particularly evident in productions like Ring and Fiction, where spaces in the dark are directly produced by the material, resonant and haptic qualities of sound. 7 Ingold is drawing out the common point that sound is often heard before the object is seen, such as the cuckoo which – for him at least – exists purely as a sound because he has yet to see one making its sound. The point is not so much that sound can arrive first, but that the visual object isn’t essential for the comprehension of this sound as bird. He goes on to say that ‘only through being seen does the cuckoo come to be apprehended as a thing that makes a sound, instead of the sound itself ’ (Ingold 2000: 245). Therefore the bird exists as sound alone before it is beholden by the eye as an object which is, visually identifiably, a bird.

Chapter 5 1 This text is a slightly modified transcript of an interview that took place at the British Library, London, on 24 May 2016. 2 Where the text of The Watery Part of World was developed by Mark Espiner in collaboration with the company, drawing on texts including

272

Notes Herman Melville’s Moby Dick (1851) and Nathaniel Philbrick’s In the Heart of the Sea (2000), Kursk and Going Dark made use of original scripts by Bryony Lavery and Hattie Naylor respectively, which were written in collaboration with Sound&Fury.

3 Kursk tells the story of life aboard a British nuclear submarine as it engages in a secret mission to spy on the Russian vessel Kursk. The British boat is fictional, but the Kursk was a Russian submarine lost with all hands following an accident on board on the 12 August 2000. The play builds towards a moment of dramatic intensity in total darkness as the British submariners listen to the final moments of their Russian others. The hunt and eventual demise of the Russian boat is played out in counterpoint with the British crew’s banter and concern for New Dad Mike, who is eventually airlifted from the submarine following disclosure from the captain of the tragic news of the death of his infant daughter. 4 Kursk was the first of Sound&Fury’s productions to make use of a set that remained visible to the audience. Designed by Jon Bausor, it allowed the audience to stand and move adjacent to different areas of the submarine, such as the Captain’s cabin, the control room, the bunks, torpedo tubes, and even the showers. 5 Going Dark told the story of Max, a planetarium worker who is losing his sight. It paralleled his efforts to explain the mysteries of space to his young son, alongside his own encounter with the unknown. 6 Developed initially for the London Cinema Museum, Charlie Ward was an immersive performance that placed audiences in a First World War hospital ward for wounded soldiers. It was inspired by the idea that soldiers who were bedbound were shown films that were projected onto the ceiling during convalescence, such as Charlie Chaplin films. For Charlie Ward, Sound&Fury used the Chaplin film By The Sea (1915). Audiences walked into a light-sealed tent and lay in one of ten hospital beds. As the lights on each faded, the film flickered into life. At several points the film faded to black, plunging the audience into total darkness as they were subjected to a change in their sonic environment that would become associated with memories or dreamscapes. Towards the end of the piece the film image depicting Chaplin and another character standing in front of a

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life-saving post was slowed down, giving the film a hallucinatory, almost menacing quality. Charlie Ward was a 14–18 NOW commission to mark the hundredth anniversary of the First World War, but it also marks the anniversary of Chaplin’s first appearance on the silver screen. The dawning of the age of cinema had a strange effect on the collective unconscious as sightings of a Chaplin-like figure became frequently reported. His image was even taken to the battlefield as a cardboard cutout held up by British troops on the front line in the hope that the enemy would die laughing. 7 In Theatre and Aural Attention, Home-Cook develops the idea of the silentre as a soundless counterpoint to the acousmetre, a notion first coined by film theorist Michel Chion. Where Chion sought to explain the phenomenon of unattributed sound, Home-Cook’s silentre is ‘a silentbeing whose absence somehow indicates a presence’. Silentric experience thus concerns the awareness of silence as a present absence (2015: 110). 8 The use of the lines by actors in The Watery Part of the World is discussed in Welton (2005).

Chapter 6 1 The dates provided here refer to the most recent version experienced and used as illustration in this discussion. For information on Lundahl & Seitl’s wider work and the premiere dates of performances, see the official website, as detailed in the reference list. For in-depth considerations of Lundahl & Seitl’s Rotating in a Room of Images and The Memory of W.T. Stead, see Machon (2013b, 2017). 2 By ‘museum’, I intend that the human body archives experience via ‘corporeal memory’; the traces of lived, sensate experience that reside within the body as a whole, stored in neurones, bones and flesh as much as in the hippocampus. It relates to how we feel the performance in the moment and recall these feelings in subsequent interpretation. I go on to provide illustration of this in regard to Symphony and Unknown Cloud. For detailed explication of corporeal memory and the body as archive, see Machon (2011, 2013b).

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3 ‘Haptic’ and ‘hapticity’ (from the Greek, haptikos and haptesthai, to grasp, sense, perceive, ‘lay hold of ’) relates to both performing and perceiving bodies. Employed alongside tactility it accentuates the perceptual experience of the human body as a whole (rather than merely the fingers) and highlights the perceptive faculty of kinaesthetics (the body’s locomotion in space) which involves proprioception (stimulation produced and perceived within the body relating to position and movement of the body). Haptic perception, a tactile-kinaesthetic, encompasses the sensate experience of an individual’s moving body and that individual’s perceptual comprehension of the moving bodies of others. In this instance, as later accounts illustrate, it also incorporates the combined perception of external and internal spaces. 4 ‘The experience gap’, first coined by Ralph Hertwig and Ido Erev (2009), is a term appropriated from neuroscientific and cognitive behavioural research into human sense-making and consequent decision-making processes. Theories related to studies of this area have since been adopted and explored by researchers in education, management training and games design. In simple terms, it describes the gap between knowledge that is assumed through received and described wisdom versus knowledge obtained through direct experience. 5 The ‘overview effect’, coined in 1987 by Frank White, is a cognitive shift in awareness reported by astronauts and cosmonauts viewing Earth during spaceflight. It describes the experience of seeing the vulnerability of Earth as it rotates in space, a fragile sphere hanging in the void, protected only by a gauzelike atmosphere (see White 1998). Information about The Overview Institute can be found at its official website, as listed in the references (2012).

Chapter 7 1 For further discussion, see Cavallo (2015). 2 Flatland was a collaboration of multiple artists and companies. For a full list of credits, please visit http://flatland.org.uk/about/project-team/

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Chapter 8 1 Sometimes a hand can be glimpsed, or a control rod, but these artefacts tend to be ignored through what Richard Schechner (1976) describes as ‘selective inattention’. In the shadow puppet tradition of Cirebon (West Java, Indonesia), which I studied actively between 1993 and 2000, it was absolutely ‘taboo’ (pumali) for hands’ shadows to be visible on screen. This was not the case, however, in the dominant Javanese style associated with the court centre of Surakarta, in which spectators pay more attention to puppets than shadows. 2 For a documentary about and reconstructed performance of Kurt Schwerdtfeger’s farblichtspiel, see Schwerdtfeger et al. (2010). For a recent assessment of Moholy-Nagy’s Light-Space Modulator, see Tóth (2015).

Chapter 9 1 This is a reworking of an earlier article in which Xenakis’s Mycenae Polytopon was placed in a comparative context of twentieth-century environmental artworks in Greece, dealing with issues of national identity (see Kotzamani 2016). The present article explores the impact of darkness on Xenakis’s performance, making extensive use of reception material, including original interviews with participants. 2 This passage has been reprinted with the permission of the editorial board of the journal Gramma. See Kotzamani (2016). 3 Visibility was poor on the performance days: 1 per cent on 2 and 3 September, 4 per cent on 4 September and 8 per cent on 5 September.

Chapter 10 1 See Palmer, this volume. 2 Indeed, Wolfgang Schivelbusch speculates, it was not until the introduction of cinema in the early years of the twentieth century – a

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medium that required a darkened auditorium to be visible at all – that the houselights became dimmed as a matter of course (1988: 210). 3 In many, if not most instances, these have been modelled on aspects of the architectural layout of Battersea Arts Centre, which first commissioned the piece, so that some audience members begin with a sense of how the spaces connect. 4 Scratch is a process devised by BAC as a means of developing its programming through audience engagement and feedback with artists’ work in progress. 5 I experienced a similar necessity in performing with Sound&Fury in The Watery Part of the World. See Welton (2005) for further discussion.

Index absence  91, 136, 141, 153, 199, 222, 227, 273 of light  37, 56–9, 89, 100 acoustic dramaturgy  116–17 active light  39, 52–3 aesthetics of darkness  15, 66, 69, 76, 78, 83, 92–3, 97, 107–8 Algarotti, Francesco  49 Almeida Theatre  94 Amphibian Stage Productions  27, 101 analogue  7, 27, 90, 101, 103 Anstee, Mark  142 Antoine, André  41, 43, 47 appearance/disappearance  23, 67, 71–2, 74–7, 79, 83, 164, 230, 246–8, 252, 256–7, 262 Appia, Adolphe  39, 50–8, 89 Apthorp, William  253–4 Arcola Theatre  244, 262 Asmoro, Purbo  201 atmospheres  11, 43, 53, 54, 56–9, 117, 122, 124–5, 135, 139, 143–5, 250, 252–6 attention  2, 19, 20, 23, 39, 92, 128, 138–41, 151, 154, 162, 164–5, 222, 253, 260 heightened  200 audio-vision (Chion)  121 auditory perception  19, 120–2 audio description  178, 181 audience  3, 5, 7–10, 17, 41–3, 45, 54, 57–9 passim, 90, 97–8, 100–7 passim,, 125, 133–7, 139, 143–5, 171–3, 182, 186, 195–6, 198–9, 223, 228–9, 231, 237–40, 247, 250–2 passim, 256, 260 aurality  114

aural visuality  112, 125–6, 128 Avignon Festival Dark/Noir  5, 66, 69 Bähr, Hugo  52, 266 n.9 Balka, Miroslaw  8, 91–2, 102 Balla, Giacomo  267 Barker, Howard The Twelfth Battle of Isonzo  6, 244, 262 Barrett, Felix  59–60. See also Punchdrunk Barthes, Roland  39 Battersea Arts Centre (BAC)  1, 5, 58, 82, 131–2, 258–9, 261, 266, 276 Baugh, Christopher  47, 52, 253 Bausor, Jon  272 Beartrap Theatre  248, 255 Bound  248, 255, 257, 258 Beckett, Samuel  1–2, 6, 10 All That Fall  1–3 Not I  1–2 befuddlement  247–8, 257, 260–1 Bergman, Gösta  39, 46, 47 Berman, Marshall  72, 77 binaural  114, 157, 270 n.3 blackness  22–5 blackout  6, 12, 18, 24, 89, 91, 93, 139, 147, 151, 244 Blindekuh  71, 81 Blinde und Kunst e. V  267 n.2 blindness  blind/visually impaired  25, 28, 65, 67–71, 74, 169–70, 172–84 passim, 187–9, 244 blindfold  3, 7, 9, 28, 81–2, 89, 147, 150–1 Braun, Sabine  178

278

Index

Bretherton, June/Bretherton Consultancy  69 Böhme, Gernot  54, 57, 145 Boltanski, Christian  213 Borges, Jorge Luis  104–5 Bulwinkle, Mark  212 Bush Theatre, London  58 Cage, John  209 Cangiullo, Francesco  78 capitalism  65, 66, 72, 74, 76–7 passim, 79–81 passim Casati, Roberto  246 Cavell, Stanley  197–8, 205 ceremony  225–6 Centro Argentino de Teatro Ciego  70 Chaplin, Charlie  137, 272 n.6 Chari, Anita  72–3, 75, 80–1 Chekhov, Antoine  57–8 chiaroscuro  49 Chion, Michel  121, 273 n.7 Chomko, Jonathan  216 A Ciegas Gourmet  70 Coca-Cola Middle East  24, 75 co-presence, bodily  29, 194–6 community  187, 223, 225, 232, 235–7, 240 Craig, Edward Gordon  50–1, 56–60 passim, 250–1, 253 Crouch, Tim  12 The Author  12 Culebro, Kathleen Anderson  101 Curtin, Adrian  57 Dans Le Noir?/Edouard de Broglie/ Etienne Boisrond  65–6, 68, 71, 74–6, 81, 84, 170, 172, 174 darkness diegetic  11–12, 90–1, 93–4, 96, 100, 107, 117, 145 deictic  102–3, 108 non-diegetic/extradiegetic  91, 95

darkened auditorium  37–9, 41–50, 53–4, 58, 82, 104, 249–50, 253–4 dark matter  57, 101–3 Davies, Jim  174 de-familiarization  65–71 passim, 76 Dialogue in the Dark/Andreas Heinecke  5, 68–9 Diamond, Jody  201 dining in the dark  5, 26, 65–71 passim, 78, 81–3 passim, 172, 174, 175, 267 disability/disability-led  67, 71, 75, 169–70, 172–7 passim, 179, 181, 183, 187–9 access  170, 178–79, 184, 187–89 Dono, Heri  213 earsight (Ingold)  119 Edensor, Tim  68 Edkins, Tina  261–2 Elcott, Noam  47 electric light  13, 50–1, 64, 77–80 passim, 84, 94–7 passim, 221, 245, 247–51 passim, 266–8 English, Darby  24 Enlightenment, the  14, 15, 23 Essex-Lopresti, Sally  82 Erickson, Jon,  257, 260–1 Everett, Hugh III  105 expanded cinema  206, 208 Extant Theatre Company  7, 13, 28, 169–89 passim face, the  58, 79, 83, 242–62 passim faciality/facial expression  245, 248, 251–2, 254, 256, 260–1 Fajond, Robert  235, 239 Falconer, Emily  68 FanSHEN  90, 96–7, 107 Feldmann, Hans-Peter  214 Ferris, Costas  225, 230 Fillìa  27, 78–80, 82, 84, 268 n.10 Fischer-Lichte, Erika  194

Index Fluxus  208–9 Foley sound  132, 172 food art  26, 66–7, 80–3 passim freak/freakshow  99–100, 169, 174–6 passim, 182–4 passim, 187, 189 Frischauer, Paul  268 Furttenbach, Josef  45 Fusco, Coco and Guillermo GómezPeña  99 Futurism  66, 68, 77–82 passim Fye and Foul  7 gallanty show  197 Garland-Thomson, Rosemary  169, 173, 175–6, 183 Garner, Stanton B.  40–1, 246–7, 265 gaze  115, 127–8, 149, 163, 201, 245, 246 Gent, Martin  69 Gibson, James J.  20 gloom  4, 6–11 passim, 23, 45, 47, 58, 78, 92, 94–95, 146, 244, 246–51 passim, 255–62 passim, 265–6 Goat and Monkey  6 Goode, Chris  8, 91–2, 105 Great Puppet Horn, The  212 Gross, Kenneth  204 Gualda, Sylvio  230–1 Hammons, David  7–8 Handke, Peter  93–4 Handspring Puppet Company  204 haptic/hapticity  124, 151–3, 155, 158, 160, 162–3, 164, 172–3, 177, 184–5, 188 Hardimos, Giorgos  200, 202 headphone theatre  2, 64, 113, 118, 148–50, 152, 156, 185–6, 244 hearing  88, 98, 114, 117–26 passim, 185–6, 222, 227, 244, 256–7, 262 Hemmer, Lozano  216 Heraclitus  216–17 Hoare, Guy  143

279

Hobkinson, Caroline  82–3, 267 Hogan, Beth  82 Home-Cook, George  3, 18, 273 Homer (The Iliad)  132 Howes, David  18–22 passim Hulls, Michael  8 Husserl, Edmund  145 Huszár, Vilmos  207 Ihde, Don  119, 121–2 Ingegneri, Angelo  48–9 imagination  6, 12, 43, 50, 57, 97, 101, 103, 106–8, 128, 145, 150–5 passim, 158, 160, 162–4, 181–2, 203, 258–9, 270 immersive theatre/immersive environment  5, 6, 59, 81, 90, 134, 177, 184, 210, 215, 272 Ingold, Tim  20, 21, 119–25 passim, 127, 257, 271 insight  150–1, 162–3 Irving, Henry  42–4, 52, 248–54 passim Jacobs, Ken  208 Johnson, Mark  154–5 Jones, Robert Edmond  38–40, 57 Jouvet, Louis  50 Kanach, Sharon  224 karagöz/karagiozis  197, 200, 202, 205 Kathakali  13 Kennedy, Adrienne  22–3 Funnyhouse of a Negro  22–3 Kentridge, William  204 Kerner, Justinus  202–3, 205 Klingemann, August  46 Kriebel, Seth, and Zoe Bouras  6, 248, 258–61 The Unbuilt Room  6, 248, 258–61 A House Repeated  261 Kutiyattam  13 Kuwakubo, Ryota  215

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Index

Lavery, Bryony  272 Lavoisier, Antoine  47 Lecture Notes on a Death Scene  7, 90, 103–7 passim Le Goût du Noir (A Taste of Darkness)  69, 71 Lepecki, André  18, 19, 23–5, 265 Le Provost, Nicholas  244 Levy, Βenjamin  222, 224, 225, 233 Lynn, Cordelia  5–6 liminality  29, 197, 205, 223, 226–8, 230, 237 listening  2, 21, 113–14, 120–3 passim, 125–6, 128, 138, 141, 145, 270 Logue, Christopher  132 London Cinema Museum  272 looking  18, 21, 25, 114–15, 119–21, 126–9, 148, 151, 246, 256–7, 260–1 Lukács, György  72–3, 80 Lundahl & Seitl  7, 21, 147–66, 273 Memory of W.T. Stead, The  147, 273 Rotating in a Room of Images  147, 274 Symphony of a Missing Room  17, 21, 28, 147, 148–55 passim, 158–9, 162–6 passim, 273 Unknown Cloud On the Way To …  28, 147–8, 155, 156–66 passim, 273 Lusseyran, Jacques  150

Marx, Karl  72–4, 80 Marxism/Marxist  66, 68, 71–3 Mauro, Augusto  268 Melville, Herman  139–40, 271–2 Milk, Chris  216–17 Mitchell, David  176 Moholy-Nagy, László  207, 275 Morris, Tom  1–2, 5, 90, 97–8, 131–2 Mr Burns: A Post-electric Play  27, 90, 94–7, 107

Maeterlinck, Maurice  7, 10–11, 56–8, 265–6 The Blind (Les Aveugles)  7, 10–11 The Intruder  11–12, 57 Malani, Nalini  215–16 Manual Cinema  201, 211–12 many worlds interpretation  105–6 Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso  77–8, 268 Marleau, Denis  7

Paik, Nam June  209 Palmer, Scott  14, 39, 45, 51, 56 Pan Pan Theatre  1–3. See also Beckett, Samuel pareidolia  202 Pastrana, Julia  98–102 passim, 108. See also Prendergast, Shaun Pearl, Sharrona  252 peering  20, 244–8 passim, 251, 255–7, 260–1

Nalaga’at centre  70, 81 BlackOut  70 Nancy, Jean-Luc  126 nang talung  201 Nasirun  213 Naylor, Hattie  272 Neath, Glen  7, 21, 28, 113, 116–18, 128, 269, 270–1 night  8–9, 13–16, 45, 79, 96–7, 158, 161, 204, 211, 221, 228–30, 232, 237, 240–1, 249, 253 Nocti Vagus  71, 81 non-image  91–2, 100, 107–8 ocularcentrism  18–19, 76, 80, 119, 124, 170, 172–3, 181, 183 Odyssey Theatre  82, 265 Ono, Yoko  208–9 Ontroerend Goed  7 Otter, Chris  15, 247–8 Out of Joint  1–3. See also Beckett, Samuel

Index perception  4, 18–23, 25, 39, 49, 65–8 passim, 71, 73–4, 76, 80, 83–4, 92–3, 100–1, 104, 108, 119–26 passim, 128, 136, 138–40, 142, 147, 150–64 passim, 173, 178, 222–3, 225–8, 232, 240, 245, 247, 257–8, 274 Peruzzi, Baldassare  48 phenomenology  21, 25, 26, 119–21, 123–4, 136, 154, 161–2, 216–17, 248, 253, 265 Philbrick, Nathaniel  272 Pinter, Harold  10, 12, 138 A Slight Ache  138 The Birthday Party  12 Plato  11, 13–14, 195–6, 202, 216 Polytopon  17, 26, 29, 221–41 passim, 275 Prendergast, Shaun  23, 90, 98–102 passim, 104 The True History of the Tragic Life and Triumphant Death of Julia Pastrana, the Ugliest Woman in the World  23–4, 27, 90, 98–103 passim Projet in Situ  8 Psychramis, Fotis  237, 239 Punchdrunk  7, 59 The Drowned Man: A Hollywood Fable  59–60 al-Qāḍī al-Fāḍil  201 quantum superposition  90, 103–5, 107–8 radio drama  1, 3–4, 138 radiogenic  2–3 Rayner, Alice  26 Read, Alan  256–7 reification  23, 66–7, 72–6 passim, 79–81, 83, 267 Reilhac, Michel  69–71, 82, 84 Ridout, Nicholas  41, 58, 197, 203 Ríos, Alicia  82–3

281

Rosenberg, David  7, 21, 28, 113, 116–18, 128, 269 Rosier, Matthew  216 Saerberg, Siegfried  67, 172, 174–6, 267 Salisbury, Dana  82 Sam Wanamaker Playhouse  17, 266 Scarry, Elaine  151–3 scenography  51, 53, 56, 59, 145, 215, 271 Schilvelbusch, Wolfgang  46–7 Schönewolf, Herta  200 Schreiber, Nikki  96 Schrödinger, Erwin  105–6 Schwabinger Schattenspiele  203 Schwerdtfeger, Kurt  207, 275 Sehgal, Tino  6 senses  4, 8, 10, 13, 17–21 passim, 27, 59, 64–66, 68, 70, 76, 79–80, 82–4, 89, 93–4, 114, 117, 119–20, 124–5, 132–3, 147, 150–5 passim, 158, 161–6 passim, 173–4, 176, 184–6, 188, 200, 222, 225, 227, 229, 232, 246, 249, 251, 274 sensory studies  17–21 passim Séraphin Theatre  199 Serlio, Sebastiano  48 Servandoni, Giovanni  47–8 shadow  4, 10–11, 13–14, 37, 38, 49, 50–4 passim, 56–9, 78, 89, 138, 146, 147, 195–217 passim, 244–7, 250, 255–8, 259–62, 268, 275 shadow puppet  9, 13, 25, 195–217 passim, 275 shadow screen  29, 195–217 passim Shechter, Hofesh  8 Shevtsova, Maria  88, 93 Shiomi, Mieko  209 shunt  7, 134 Shyldkrot, Yaron  7

282

Index

silence  14, 40, 134, 136, 138, 165, 230–1, 273 silentres  273 Sloterdijk, Peter  262 Sofer, Andrew  57, 101, 103 Solomos, Makis  225 Somi, Leone Di  48  sound design  131–2, 134, 177, 269. See also aurality; headphone theatre Sound&Fury (Mark Espiner, Tom Espiner and Dan Jones)  5, 7, 131–46 passim, 259, 272, 276 Charlie Ward  131, 137, 272–3 Ether Frolics  134, 139, 141 Going Dark  131, 133, 136, 140, 143, 145, 272 Kursk  131, 133, 135–7, 141–6 passim, 272 War Music  5, 131–4, 142, 146 The Watery Part of the World  131, 134, 139, 142, 146, 259, 271, 273, 276 Southwark Playhouse  255, 258 spatiality  154, 177, 270 Sakkas, Spyros  231–2 spotlighting  248 staring  127, 169, 175–6, 183, 187 States, Bert O.  91–2, 103 Stanislavsky, Konstantin  57–8 stage lighting  3, 11–12, 23, 37–60 passim, 64, 88–9, 93–4, 96, 102, 106, 107, 244–6, 248, 249–51, 253–4, 256, 266–7. See also electric light; spotlighting candlelight  17, 46, 82–3, 95 footlights  11, 52 gaslight  38, 42, 46, 50, 77, 253, 266 ghostlight  40 houselights  9, 37–38, 41–8 passim, 259, 262, 266, 276 limelight  248 moonlight  10–11, 78 strobelight  210

Stephens, Simon  6, 12 Sterken, Sven  222, 224, 229 Stern, Eddo  213 Stoker, Bram  42–3, 249–50 Stravinsky, Igor  267 street lighting  15, 24, 253 subjectivity  80, 119, 125, 127, 206 Sued, Ricardo  9 symbolism  7, 10–13, 56, 58, 139, 266. See also Maeterlinck, Maurice (syn)aesthetics  155 Tabachnik, Michel  239 tactile-kinaesthetics  152 Tanizaki, Junichirō  209, 247 Tenebrae service  14, 39 Teatro Ciego  70, 81 Teatro Gioco Vita  211 Teatro de los Sentidos  82 Theatre Ad Infinitum  8 Theatre d’Art  10–11, 57–8, 266 theatricality  7, 88, 139, 197 tōl pāva kūttu  199 Touloumi, Olga  222, 224, 227, 229 Tournaki, T.  231–2, 234, 235 Twitchin, Mischa  6 unsicht-Bar  71 USCO  210 Valasek, Ales  143 Vargas, Enrique  82 visual impairment/blindness  25, 28, 65, 67–9, 70–1, 74, 169–70, 172–84 passim, 187–9, 244 visuality  6, 19, 75, 91, 92, 102, 118, 122, 125–9 Voegelin, Salomé  123–4, 126, 128 Wagner, Richard  43–4, 51–4, 59, 248, 249, 253–4, 266 Walker, Kara  215 Washburn, Ann  27, 90, 94–5 wayang kulit  13, 29, 198, 201, 202–5, 207, 211, 213, 216

Index Welton, Martin  15, 26, 65, 89, 128, 259, 273, 276 Whitmore, Jon  91, 93, 98 Wilson, Robert  88–9, 91, 93, 106, 107, 269 Wilton’s Music Hall  1, 3 Winfield-Smith, Robert  6 Worthington, Philip  216

283

Xenakis, Iannis  17, 26, 29, 221–41 passim, 275 Young Vic Theatre  141 Young, La Monte  210 Zaloom, Paul  213–14 Zazeela, Marian  210

284