New Approaches to Theatre Studies and Performance Analysis: Papers Presented at the Colston Symposium, Bristol, 21-23 March 1997 [Reprint 2011 ed.] 9783110910582, 9783484660335

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Studien zur Geschichte und Theorie der dramatischen Künste

Herausgegeben von Hans-Peter Bayerdörfer, Dieter Borchmeyer und Andreas Höfele Band 33

Günter Berghaus (Ed.)

New Approaches to Theatre Studies and Performance Analysis Papers Presented at the Colston Symposium, Bristol, 21-23 March 1997

Max Niemeyer Verlag Tübingen 2001

Die Deutsche Bibliothek - CIP-Einheitsaufnahme New approaches to theatre studies and performance analysis : papers presented at the Colston Symposium, Bristol, 21-23 March 1997 / Günter Berghaus (ed.)- - Tübingen: Niemeyer, 2001 (Theatron; Bd. 33) ISBN 3-484-66033-3

ISSN 0934-6252

© Max Niemeyer Verlag GmbH, Tübingen 2001 Das Werk einschließlich aller seiner Teile ist urheberrechtlich geschützt. Jede Verwertung außerhalb der engen Grenzen des Urheberrechtsgesetzes ist ohne Zustimmung des Verlages unzulässig und strafbar. Das gilt insbesondere für Vervielfältigungen, Übersetzungen, Mikroverfilmungen und die Einspeicherung und Verarbeitung in elektronischen Systemen. Printed in Germany. Gedruckt auf alterungsbeständigem Papier. Druck: AZ Druck und Datentechnik GmbH, Kempten Einband: Buchbinderei Siegfried Geiger, Ammerbuch

Contents

List of Illustrations

VII

Foreword

EX

Richard Schechner What Is »Performance Studies« Anyway?

1

Patrice Pavis The Conditions of Reception in the Theatre: Psychological and Psychoanalytical Approaches

13

Darko Suvin On the Epistemology and Pragmatics of Intercultural Theatre Studies

31

Maria Shevtsova Sociocultural Performance Analysis

45

Jean-Marie Pradier Ethnoscenology: The Flesh is Spirit

61

Ian Watson Intercultural Performance: Barter, Cultural Exchange and Reception

83

Deborah A. Kapchan Exchanging Lies and Creating Truths: Intentionality in Moroccan Marketplace Performance

97

Fawzia Afzal-Khan Desiring Methodology: Performing Postcolonial Theatre Anthropology in Pakistan

Ill

Andrew Gurr Versatile Venues and the Displacement of the Globe

127

Richard Beacham Virtually There: Computer-assisted Reconstructions of Ancient Theatrical Spaces

143

VI

Gad Kaynar Audiences and Response-Programming Research and the Methodology of the Implied Spectator

159

Susan Bennett Watching Another, Viewing Theatre: Questions for Audience Reception and Cross-Cultural Performance

175

Janet Adshead-Lansdale Narratives and Metanarratives in Dance Analysis

189

Marc/a B. Siegel Using Lexicons for Performance Research: Three Duets

205

Linda Suny Myrsiades Performance Analysis Through Field Research: The Guerrilla Theatre in Greece Under Nazi Occupation

217

Lisa Wolford Methodological Issues in the Documentation and Analysis of Grotowski's Art as Vehicle

239

Notes on Contributors

257

Index

263

List of Illustrations

1 Debussy's Pelleas et Molisande, dir. Robert Wilson, at Opera de Paris, February 1997, with Jose van Dam as Golo and Suzanne Mentzer as Melisande Photo: Marc Enguerand 2 The Maly Drama Theatre's Claustrophobia, dir. Lev Dodin Photo: Ken Reynolds 3 The Maly Drama Theatre's Gaudeamus, dir. Lev Dodin Photo: Ken Reynolds 4 The Maly Drama Theatre's Gaudeamus, dir. Lev Dodin Photo: Ken Reynolds 5 Members of the Italian theatre group Tascabile di Bergamo performing during the barter in Bahia Bianca, Argentina, 1987. Photo: Ian Watson 6 Odin actors and candombe artists performing together while surrounded by spectators at the barter in Bahia Bianca, Argentina, 1987. Photo: Ian Watson 7 Odin actors and candombe artists at the barter in Montevideo, Uruguay, 1987. Photo: Ian Watson 8 Two local dancers performing during the barter in Bahia Bianca Argentina, 1987. Photo: Ian Watson 9 Itinerant market in Morocco. Photo: Daborah Kapchan 10 A market herbalist and her clientele. • Photo: Daborah Kapchan 11 Woman-as-victim Scene from Ajoka's Eik Thi Nani (There was Once a Grandmother) 12 Women as victims of patriarchy as well as oppressors of each other Scene from Ajoka's Lappar (Slap)

VIII

13 Ajoka's Dekh Tamasha Chalta Ban, a play about religious intolerance, performed in open-air locations to inner-city, low-income audiences in Lahore 14 Lok Rehas' Saar, a street play about women's oppression resulting from Islamic Sharia law, performed as part of the Safdar Mir theatre festival in Lahore (March 1999). 15 The new Globe in groundplan. Reproduced by permission of Pentagram Design. 16 A photograph of the temporary Globe stage in 1996, seen from the yard. Photo: Richard Kalina 17 The groundplan for the theatre drawn by Inigo Jones. Reproduced by permission of the Provost and Fellows, Worcester College, Oxford. 18 The Inigo Jones from scenae and balcony. Reproduced by permission of the Provost and Fellows, Worcester College, Oxford. 19 Image from a computer-generated 3D model depicting the interior of the Odeon of Agrippa. © Richard Beacham 20 The »Room of the Masks«, House of Augustus, Rome, with a wall painting depicting a temporary Roman stage set. 21 Image from a computer-generated 3D model based upon the stage set depicted in the »Room of the Masks«. © Richard Beacham 22 Aerial view of the site of Pompey's theatre, showing the manner in which later buildings constructed on its foundations preserve the shape of the original structure. 23 Image from a computer-generated 3D model based upon existing knowledge of Pompey's theatre, and adjacent colonnade and gardens. In the course of the Pompey project, the model will be progressively refined to incorporate new evidence. © Richard Beacham 24 Representation of the interior and the stage fa9ade of Pompey's theatre, based upon existing knowledge and hypothesis. © Richard Beacham

Foreword

The essays collected in this volume are the fruit of a five-year research project, generously supported by the Colston Society. Edward Colston was a seventeenthcentury merchant philanthropist, and the society which bears his name played a significant role in establishing the University of Bristol in 1909- In the nineteenth century, the Colston Dinner was an important date in the Bristol calendar and the collections made at these events were an important lifeline for what was then the Bristol College. It was a most memorable occasion when at the Society's dinner on 14 January 1908 an endowment of £100,000 by Henry Overton Wills was publicly announced, a fact which enabled the College to petition for the royal charter and one year later led to the establishment of a University of Bristol. In 1948, the Society instituted the so-called Colston Symposium and has contributed significantly towards establishing it as a major forum of debate in the international scholarly community. Since then, forty-nine symposia have been held in Bristol on a wide variety of topics ranging from natural sciences, humanities, engineering, to law and medicine. The 1997 Colston Symposium was held to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of the Bristol University Drama Department. It was the first department of its kind in the United Kingdom and has played a leading role in establishing Theatre, Film and Television Studies at British universities. Since then, geographic horizons have widened with Theatre Studies becoming a university subject in Africa, Asia, the Pacific Rim and Latin-America. Over the last fifty years, many new departments of Drama or Theatre Studies have been founded, all of them contributing towards developing a methodology of the discipline. The 1997 Colston Symposium was a welcome opportunity to take stock of some of the developments over that halfcentury. However, rather than making it a purely retrospective event, the Symposium was intended to combine past with future and to discuss some of the current approaches to Theatre Studies and Performance Analysis. There was a tremendous response to the Call for Papers, which I published in some two dozen journals and newsletters around the world. Altogether I received eighty-nine abstracts and proposals - many more than one could possibly accommodate in a Symposium. The event was never intended to be a large-scale conference with dozens of papers in parallel sessions, with the attendant overkill of information which usually works to the detriment of meaningful discussions, exchange of opinions and fostering personal contacts. This meant, unfortunately, that many interesting papers which were offered could not be accommodated in the symposium programme. Nevertheless, many

of the colleagues who suggested papers came to Bristol as delegates. Their knowledge and expertise undoubtedly enriched our discussions, and in an indirect way found their way into this publication, which I set up to disseminate the many insights gained during our symposium. Unfortunately, a week before the event was to take place, we heard of the tragic death of one of our key speakers. Kofi Agovi, a man of great achievement and a leading figure in the African world of Theatre Studies, was struck by a brain haemorrhage when travelling in Norway. This was a great loss to our academic community, to his country and family, and he was sorely missed during our meeting. I should like to thank the Colston Research Society and the University of Bristol for making the symposium and this publication possible, and to my colleges at the Drama Department for supporting this venture and offering their advice and help. Special thanks go to John Adler, Paul Ryan, Krish Majumdar and Angela Grove for their invaluable administrative assistance. I also wish to express my gratitude to the contributors to this volume, who reworked their original presentations and patiently responded to my many editorial queries and suggestions. Hans-Peter Bayerdörfer was a most supportive and encouraging series editor, and Sarah Miles and Sue Bushell were a delight to work with when preparing the final manuscript for publication. Günter Berghaus Bristol, April 1999

Richard Schechner What Is »Performance Studies« Anyway?

Abstract This essay maps the development over the past thirty-five years of Performance Studies as an academic discipline. It is also a theoretical statement about the parameters of Performance Studies. Interdisciplinary and intercultural in its approach and methods, Performance Studies assumes that we live in a postcolonial world, where cultures are colliding, interfering with each other, and energetically hybridizing. In terms of Performance Studies, this means a discipline operating between theatre and anthropology, folklore and sociology, history and performance theory, gender studies and psychoanalysis, performance events and performativity. Performance Studies resists the establishment of any single system of knowledge, values, or subject matter. Performance Studies is unfinished, open, multivocal and selfcontradictory. Thus any call for a move towards a »unified field« is a misunderstanding of the fluidity and playfulness fundamental to Performance Studies.

The sidewinder rattlesnake moves across the desert floor by contracting and extending itself in a sideways motion. Wherever this beautiful reptile points it is not going there. Such indirection is characteristic of Performance Studies. This discipline often plays what it is not, tricking those who want to fix it, frightening some, amusing others, astounding a few as it sidewinds its way across the deserts of academia.

Mapping the Field In 1966, I published »Approaches to Theory/Criticism«, a formulation of an area of study that I called »the performance activities of man [sic]: Play, games, sports, theatre, and ritual«.1 In 1970 followed »Actualize«,2 the fruit of my 1960s thinking about ritual in non-Western cultures and contemporary avant-garde performance, the basis for what I later called the »broad spectrum approach« - Performance Studies as an intersection of practices, writing, data and theories from social/cultural anthropology, semiotics, ethnography, pre-history, Ritual Studies, Theatre 1 2

The Drama Review, vol. 10, no. 4 (1966), pp. 27-28. The essay was first published in a festschrift for Francis Fergusson, The Rarer Action, eds. Alan Cheuse and Richard Koffler (New Brunswick/NJ, 1986), pp. 97-135, and was reprinted in Theatre Quarterly, vol. 1, no. 2 (April-June 1971), pp. 49-66. It had much currency and was reprinted again as the leadoff of my Essays on Performance Theory (New York, 1976).

2

Richard Schechner

Studies and both the historical and current avant-garde. For the first time, I used the term »performance theory« to describe my ideas. In 1973 in the introduction to a special issue of The Drama Review (TDR) on »Performance & the Social Sciences« I wrote that »performance is a kind of communicative behaviour that is part of, or continuous with, more formal ritual ceremonies, public gatherings, and various means of exchanging information, goods, and customs.« This issue of TDR was probably the first Performance Studies collection. In 1976 I co-edited with Mady Schuman, Ritual, Play, and Performance, an anthology carrying forward the same ideas.3 In the spring of 1979, the first »Performance Theory« course at New York University was offered in what was still nominally the Graduate Drama Department of the NYU School of the Arts. The flyer announcing the course proclaimed: Leading American and world figures in the performing arts and the social sciences will discuss the relationship between social anthropology, psychology, semiotics, and the performing arts. The course examines theater and dance in Western and non-Western cultures, ranging form the avant-garde to traditional, ritual, and popular forms.

Over the next couple of years, the »visiting faculty« included Jerzy Grotowski, Victor Turner, Barbara Myerhoff, Jerome Rothenberg, Paul Bouissac, Donald Kaplan, Joann Kealinohomoku and Squat Theatre. Here, possibly for the first time in a single course, one could find anthropologists, a psychoanalyst, a semiotician, a dance scholar, an oral poet and expert in shamanism, and leading experimental theatre artists. Over the next three years, Performance Theory counted among its visiting faculty Clifford Geertz, Masao Yamaguchi, Alfonso Ortiz, Erving Goffman, Eugenio Barba, Steve Paxton, Joanne Akalaitis, Yvonne Rainer, Meredith Monk, Augusto Boal, Colin Turnbull, Richard Foreman, Allan Kaprow, Linda Montano, Spalding Gray, Laurie Anderson, Brian Sutton-Smith, Ray Birdwhistell, Edward T. Hall, Julie Taymor and Peter Chelkowski. Victor and Edith Turner were frequent participants. Topics ranged from »Performing the Self« and »Play« to »Shamanism«, »Cultural and Intercultural Performance« and »Experimental Performance«. What was missing - I can see this now as clear as day - was feminist performance, poststructuralism, speech act theory and popular entertainments. These pillars of Performance Studies were brought to NYU by my colleagues Brooks McNamara, Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett and Peggy Phelan. But I have jumped ahead. By the end of the 1970s, the faculty of Graduate Drama - Ted Hoffman, Michael Kirby, McNamara and myself knew we were not teaching »drama« or »theatre« in the ways it was taught elsewhere. In many courses, we were not teaching drama or theatre at all. So in 1980 we officially changed our name to Performance Studies. We were experimenting, but we were not collectively coherent. Each of us was doing his own thing. And by 1980 we needed more than a new name, we needed strong, consistent leadership. Enter Barbara Ritual, Play, and Performance: Readings in Social Science / Theatre, eds. Richard Schechner and Mady Schuman (New York, 1976).

What is »Performance Studies« Anyway?

3

Kirshenblatt-Gimblett. BKG, as she is known by all, came to NYU from the Department of Folklore and Folklife at the University of Pennsylvania. Her farranging interests spanned Jewish Studies, museum displays (from colonial expositions to living history museums), tourist performances and the aesthetics of everyday life. BKG became chair of Performance Studies in 1981 and served for twelve years. BKG was truly the first chair of Performance Studies. It was she who crafted a singular department out of what had been disparate and sometimes quirky interests and practices. She insisted on frequent faculty meetings where we hashed out curriculum, degree requirements, entrance standards, qualifying exams and lots more. She made certain that important decisions were debated until we reached consensus. She recruited faculty of quality. She conferred with deans, scholars in other departments and around the world. What happened during BKG's chairship was a congealing of disparate yet related tendencies into a »discipline«. Those practicing this discipline studied an emergent field; that field contained many areas. This expanded scope meant a move away from theatre as the sole basis of Performance Studies both in terms of curriculum and theory. The Department's mission statement in the 1982-1984 Bulletin, the first crafted by BKG, proclaimed: The Department of Performance Studies offers a curriculum covering the full range of performance forms, from theatre and dance to ritual and popular entertainment. [...] A wide spectrum of performance traditions - for example, postmodern dance, circus, Kathakali, Broadway, ballet, shamanism - are documented using fieldwork, interviews, and archival research and are analyzed from a variety of perspectives. As a whole, the program is both intercultural and interdisciplinary, drawing on the arts, humanities, [and] social sciences.

This mission statement is repeated almost verbatim in all succeeding Bulletins, including the recent 1996-1997 edition.4 But that did not mean that things were static. Marcia Siegel joined the faculty in 1983, Peggy Phelan joined as an adjunct in 1985, and on a tenure-track line in 1987. She was tenured and promoted when she assumed the chair of Performance Studies in 1994, a job she will leave after the current term is over. Michael Taussig came as a full professor in 1988 - and left for the anthropology department of Columbia University in 1993- The impact of Siegel, Phelan and Taussig was immediate. Siegel developed and led work in dance, emphasized movement analysis, critical writing and dance history. Taussig taught such things as »Shamanism and Tragedy«, »The Body in Shock«, »The Magic of the State« and »Commodity Fetishism and Montage«. His teaching style was also important. Rambling and digressing, he interrogated more than transferred information. Phelan plunged into courses in feminism and Lacanian psychoanalysis, autobiography and sexuality on stage. Guest faculty included Sue-Ellen Case, Kate Davy, Holly Hughes and Deb Margolin. Performance Studies was moving in strongly theorized and wideranging directions. My own teaching interests remained steady, centering around Asian performance, experimental theatre and performance theory.

4

Richard Schechner

We knew that we could not cover the whole range of what we collectively considered to be Performance Studies. What we wanted to do instead was offer some consistent methodological means for approaching what was a vast, almost unlimited field; and to explore - according to each faculty member's passions and interests - aspects of the whole. This approach emphasized by example the multivocality and plurality of Performance Studies. It also meant a shifting subject matter, the ongoing introduction of new courses, a careful selection of adjunct and visiting faculty. We took a cue from Victor Turner's admonition, »Chaps, not maps!« which meant developing curriculum not according to an abstract theme, but crystallized around a group of people, who loved their work and to the greatest degree negotiable enjoyed working with each other. We wanted to form a »school« in the sense that the Frankfurt School or the University of Chicago's Committee on Social Thought were schools: a scholarly community chewing over shared problems and materials, consciously advancing the borders of knowledge, taking intellectual chances - and passionately, experientially involved in what they were doing. During the 1980s, students greatly helped Performance Studies emerge as a department and field. Beginning in November/December 1981, a student-edited Performance Studies Newsletter was issued on a regular basis. In the September/October 1982 Newsletter, editor Jill Dolan wrote: The Performance Studies Department is the first »drama« department to step beyond traditional forms and approaches to make the examination of performance proper the central concern. The literary, dramatic text is but one part of a complex whole that includes mise-en-scene, acting styles, stage design and technology, and directing theory. Classical theater forms are contrasted with post-modernism and performance art, as well as intercultural performances. [...] Courses in performance theory explore the concepts informing particular genres of dance, theater, ritual, folklore, sports, processions, and festivals.

In 1985, Ann Daly's Newsletter article was titled, »Inter-generic, Inter-disciplinary, Inter-cultural, Inter-esting«. In her account of the end-of-term mini-conference emerging from BKG's Issues in Performance Studies class (a model for the Performance Studies annual national conferences), Daly wrote: In addition to establishing itself as an academic discipline, Performance Studies stimulates practitioners to re-imagine their professions and their methods. [...] Over the course of the conference, presenters questioned whether Performance Studies could include the performative qualities of a comic book, whether hijacking a plane is performance, whether Walt Disney's »Fantasia« is music video. How do funerals fit into the performance sequence model? How do tennis and Noh theatre compare in preparation process? Can the presidential debates be analyzed as performance? What exactly is gay theatre? The »Issues« conference demonstrated the department's experimental approach: openness, flexibility, rigorous thought, and a preference for questioning, rather than accepting.

By the late 1980s, it appeared as if the field had pretty well been mapped out, if not by any means fully explored. How wrong that assumption proved to be.

What is »Performance Studies« Anyway?

5

A period of change Beginning in the late 1980s, and continuing into the new millennium, changes in faculty and disciplinary focus accelerated, bringing both opportunity and instability. Hoffman, Kirby, Siegel and McNamara retired. Barbara Browning, May Joseph, Jose Munoz and Fred Moten joined the faculty. These younger professors brought their own interests and approaches and were less theatre, stage, dance or concert-oriented than those who left. Browning's Resistance in Motion (1995) is a study of Brazilian samba »from the inside«, as Browning learned the dance and was ritually initiated as a sambaista. Her most recent Infectuous Rhythm (1998) traces the metaphors of contagion in their relation to African and diasporan cultures and performances. Joseph's Nomadic Identities (1999) deals with a wide range of subjects, including how persons displaced within and outside their birth-countries construct new senses of themselves. Joseph left the department in 2000. Munoz's work connects queer theory and performance theory. Fren Moten's interests combine African-American performance, particularly music, and Derridean post-structuralism. When BKG stepped down as chair in 1994, Joseph Roach accepted the post but left after only a single term.4 Phelan agreed to chair the Department for three years, from 1994 to 1997. In 1998, Diana Taylor, noted for her work on Latin-American performance and politics, joined as full professor and chair to the Department. Taylor's Disappearing Acts (1997) is a Performance Studies take on Argentina's »Dirty War«. In the 1990s, interest in African and Afro-American performance emerged within the department. J. Ndukaku Amankulor joined the faculty in 1992 teaching African popular performance, mask-dance-theatre and ritual performance. Suddenly and sadly, in 1995 Amankulor died of a brain tumor. In 1993, the Comparative Literature Department recruited renowned novelist-playwrightactivist Ngugi wa Thiongo'o who requested a joint appointment to Performance Studies. Although not on a Performance Studies line, Ngugi teaches, participates in faculty meetings and colloquia and advises Ph.D. students. His courses centre on orature »song, dance, riddle, proverb, tale, narrative, myth, etc.« as the source of modern African theatre. Ngugi's work links several tendencies in the department: postcolonial studies, theatre, traditional and modern performance and orality. What all the changes boil down to is that from about 1990 there has been a strong swing at NYU from being theatre-based towards something more theorybased. Some faculty focus on readings of gender, some on politics, some on the performative, some on behaviour - performance »itself«. Ongoing debates within the department continue around questions such as to what degree does Performance Studies depend on live performance, is Performance Studies »performative« rather than »actually performance«, what is the place of Theatre Studies within Performance Studies, what separates Performance Studies from Cultural Studies? Roach's hire was spousal and although a job was found in the English Department (where she wanted to be) for Janet Carlisle, ultimately things did not work out and Roach went back to Tulane (how history inverts itself!). In 1997, both Roach and Carlisle left Tulane.

6

Richard Schechner

Beyond NYU By the late-1990s, the NYU department and the discipline were independent of each other. The discipline of »Performance Studies« is flourishing on many fronts. The list of books resulting from Ph.D. dissertations at NYU or Northwestern University is too long to be listed here; several book series and journals carry »Performance Studies« in their title; many university departments now advertise courses in Performance Studies. Not only the title, but also the idea of an expanded range of performance genres has been generally accepted. In 1984, Northwestern University (NWU) established its Department of Performance Studies. Starting in 1995, an annual Performance Studies Conference has drawn hundreds of participants from the United States, Canada, Latin America and Europe. This year's conference in Atlanta will have as its theme »Performance and Technology«. TDK, now subtitled »The Journal of Performance Studies«, is no longer alone in the field. Similar material regularly appears in Theatre Journal, Performing Ans Journal and Theatre Topics. In 1996, Performance Research was launched by the Centre for Performance Research in the U.K. The »performance paradigm« is strong in the social sciences and in Cultural Studies. All this signals the maturing and dissemination of a discipline larger than any single institution. NYU's branch of Performance Studies is rooted in drama and theatre, Northwestern University's in oral interpretation and speech. These are not only genres, they are separate academic traditions. NWU's nineteenth-century Department of Elocution became its Department of Oral Interpretation and then Performance Studies. By whatever name, the theoretical foundation of speech departments was rhetoric; their practical work was based on oral interpretations of texts, but usually not dramas.5 In a 1993 Internet discussion of »What is Performance Studies?« Nathan Stucky of Southern Illinois University wrote: Performance Studies at [the Speech Communication Association] [...] seems a logical development over a few decades. By the late 1960s and early 1970s many (then Oral Interpretation) programs were really practicing what was called »Performance of

The reasons for the aversion to drama is itself an interesting side story. Back in the nineteenth century, when the anti-theatrical prejudice was very strong, persons with a dramatic flare could practice public speaking without invoking opprobrium. After all, such speakers were not »imitating« anything, »impersonating« anyone, wearing deceptive costumes, or anything like that. Furthermore, there was in the young United States a grand tradition of oratory, public debate and passionately embodied religious preaching. Chattaquas, revivals, travelling reverends, stump-shouting politicians: all this was within the American Puritan grain. Such an attitude underlies the establishment of speech departments, the study of rhetoric, the competitive mounting of debate teams and the performance of literature orally. Of course, here is where drama slipped in through the back door. Although seated on stools, dressed in concert clothes rather than costumes, and often reading from scripts set on music stands - oral interpreters still identified with the characters whose words they were reading.

What is »Performance Studies« Anyway?

7

Literature«. However, the view of literature quickly broadened to include cultural performances, personal narratives, everyday-life performances, non-fiction, ritual, etc. This view suggests a very wide notion of the concept »text«. [...] By this point in time, ethnographic work, as well as folklore and anthropology, began to be of some interest. [...] These threads connect logically and historically through relatively recent literary/critical foci to the oral tradition which has always been part of these approaches to performance. [...] So, Performance Studies must be conceived in rather broad strokes. Stucky succinctly shows how Performance Studies NWU - especially the researches of Dwight Conquergood - connect to Turner, Goffman, Geertz and Milton Singer, thinkers certainly important to my work, if not to all my NYU colleagues. Stucky's allusion to the »performance of literature« underscores a parallel between Performance Studies and Cultural Studies - the development in literary theory from the 1970s onward of an exploration of the performative: regarding literature from the perspective of speech acts, social and political contexts, and historiography. Conquergood, currently chair of NWU's Performance Studies Department and a major theorist of Performance Studies, raised in 1991 what he called »new questions that can be clustered around five intersecting planes of analysis«: 1. Performance and Cultural Process. What are the conceptual consequences of thinking about culture as a verb instead of a noun, process instead of product? Culture as an unfolding performative invention instead of reified system, structure, or variable? What happens to our thinking about performance when we move it outside of Aesthetics and situate it at the center of lived experience? 2. Performance and Ethnographic Praxis. What are the methodological implications of thinking about fieldwork as the collaborative performance of an enabling fiction between observer and observed, knower and known? How does thinking about fieldwork as performance differ from thinking about fieldwork as the collection of data? [... ] 3. Performance and Hermeneutics. What kinds of knowledge are privileged or displaced when performed experience becomes a way of knowing, a method of critical inquiry, a mode of understanding? [... ] 4. Performance and Scholarly Representation. What are the rhetorical problematics of performance as a complementary or alternative form of »publishing« research? What are the differences between reading an analysis of fieldwork data, and hearing the voices from the field interpretively filtered through the voice of the researcher? [...] What about enabling people themselves to perform their own experience? [...] 5. The Politics of Performance. What is the relationship between performance and power? How does performance reproduce, enable, sustain, challenge, subvert, critique, and naturalize ideology? How do performances simultaneously reproduce and resist hegemony? How does performance accommodate and contest domination?6 The »planes of analysis« Conquergood proposes are closely aligned to what goes on at NYU. What NYU has emphasized more than NWU is dance, movement analysis, popular entertainments and gender in its multifaceted possibilities. But there is more to Performance Studies than academic departments.

Dwight Conquergood, »Rethinking Ethnography: Towards a Critical Cultural Politics«, Communications Monographs, vol. 58 (June 1991), pp. 179-94 (p. 190).

8

Richard Schechner

From Burg Wartenstein and the World Conference on Ritual and Performance to the Bellagio Conference on Intercultural Performance I met Victor Turner face-to-face in the spring of 1977 when he invited me to a lecture Clifford Geertz was giving at Columbia University. After the lecture, we went to one of those grungy beer halls near Columbia, where our conversation ranged all over the place, from Ndembu ritual to Grotowski. Turner invited me to participate in the Burg Wartenstein Symposium No. 76 on »Cultural Frames and Reflections, Ritual, Drama, and Spectacle«, to be held in a castle in Austria in September 1977. There were to be no public sessions - just ten days of intense, passionate interaction among anthropologists, artists, historians and humanists, including many I would later invite to NYU. For the Symposium I showed a film of Dionysus in 697 and discussed ritual in relation to experimental performance. My essay would become »Restoration of Behaviour«.8 Shortly after the Wenner-Gren Symposium, Turner and I began planning a »World Conference on Ritual and Performance«, which turned out to be three conferences with a core group attending all three meetings. The first, in November 1981 in Arizona, focused on the ritual performances of the Yaquis; the second in New York in May 1982, focused on Japanese performance, especially Tadashi Suzuki. The culminating gathering was in New York from 23 August to 1 September 1982. Taken as a whole, the World Conference compared traditional, modern and postmodern performances in Native America, Asia and Africa. By Means of Performance (1990) was edited from the papers, lectures and demonstrations of the Conferences.9 For a 1980 planning committee meeting, Turner articulated our goal:

The movie, made by Brian de Palma, Robert Fiore, and Bruce Rubin, was shot during two of the last showings of Dionysus in the summer of 1969. After being privately distributed at the 1977 Burg Wartenstein Conference, I revised »Restoration« for Studies in Visual Communication, vol. 7, no. 3 (1981), pp. 2-45. A shortened version appeared in A Crack in the Mirror: Reflexive Perspectives in Anthropology, ed. Jay Ruby (Philadelphia/PA, 1982). The definitive version appeared in my Between Theater and Anthropology (Philadelphia/PA, 1985). Ironically, because it had been published, »Restoration« was never was where it actually belonged, as part of the proceedings of the Burg Wartenstein conference, Rite, Drama, Festival, Spectacle: Rehearsals Toward a Theory of Cultural Performances, ed. John MacAloon (Philadelphia/PA, 1984). The World Conference was a big and expensive production, something not really possible anymore as we have entered a prolonged period of downsizing. The conference involved lots of collaboration, both fiscally and organizationally. Those sponsoring and/or funding the conference included the Wenner-Gren Foundation, the Asian Cultural Council, the Asia Society, the International Theatre Institute, the American Theatre Association (now reconstituted as the American Theatre in Higher Education), the Tisch School of the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities.

What is »Performance Studies« Anyway?

9

By their performances shall ye know them. [...] Cultures are most fully expressed in and made conscious of themselves in their ritual and theatrical performances. [...] A performance is a dialectic of »flow«, that is, spontaneous movement in which action and awareness are one, and »reflexivity«, in which the central meanings, values and goals of a culture re seen »in action«, as they shape and explain behaviour. A performance is declarative of our shared humanity, yet it utters the uniqueness of particular cultures. We will know one another better by entering one another's performances and learning their grammars and vocabularies.10

Turner's vision was not only of the conference but a Utopian project based on mutual respect and enjoyment of cultural differences, exchanges of feelings as well as ideas, and the desire to experience each other's cultural identities. For me, this Utopian project still informs Performance Studies. Turner's death in December 1983 cut short his life work. Goffman died earlier, Myerhoff shortly after. All died young. In 1989 and 1990,1 was the principal planner of a conference on Intercultural Performance sponsored by the Rockefeller Foundation and convened in Bellagio, Italy from 17 to 22 February 1991. This conference was not so large as the World Conference, but its participants were more tightly associated with Performance Studies. Among the twenty-one attendees were Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, Amankulor, Phelan, Taussig and myself as well as former and present NYU Performance Studies students: William Sun, Deborah Klens, Radhika Subramanian and Laura Trippi. Others in attendance included Eugenio Barba, Jean Franco, Judith Mitoma, Falabo Ajayi, Trin Min-ha, Masao Yamaguchi, Gayatri Spivak and Drew Hayden Taylor. Anna Deveare Smith, Guillermo Gomez-Pena and Sanjukta Panigrahi each performed as well as participated in the discussions. Smith performed the Conference attendees based on phone interviews (including one with Homi Bhabha, who did not come because he refused to fly during the Gulf War, which was raging at that time). One of the most telling encounters came when Panigrahi intervened in a panel discussing her work with Eugenio Barba to protest that she did not want to be referred to in the third person, that her Odissi dance was not a »natural object« but the product of long and conscious training and that she certainly knew exactly what she was doing when she participated in Barba's experiments mixing Indian and European practices. During each of the four working days of the Conference different issues were explored through presentations and performances. Topics included »Postcolonial Situations«, »The Gulf War and Interculturalism«, »Problems of Translation«, »Collections, Exhibitions, and Festivals«, »Playing Across Cultures«, »The International School of Theatre Anthropology« and »The Divergence/Convergence of Cultures«. But, finally, for me, despite all good intentions and star participants, this conference was not as successful as the two previous ones. The very problems of interculturalism - disjunctures of meaning and intention, the difficulty of really communicating across All the papers relating to the Conference, in its planning phases and in its realization - including full audio tapes of all sessions - are available at the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research.

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ideological and methodological borders, barriers thrown up by charges of sexism, both conscious and unintended, made for rough going over the six days. These three conferences - stretching over fifteen years - extended the reach of Performance Studies far beyond NYU. They gave to the field a worldwide scope both in terms of participants and subject matter. They kept a core of people in touch with each other and working together. The conferences were important both as field-defining events and as a means of dissemination.

So what is Performance Studies anyway? Having come this far, it is time to give my own answer to the $64 million question. Performance Studies is »inter« - in between. It is intergeneric, interdisciplinary, intercultural - and therefore inherently unstable. Performance Studies resists or rejects definition. Performance Studies assumes that we are living in a postcolonial world where cultures are colliding, interfering with each other, and energetically hybridizing. Performance Studies does not value »purity«. In fact, academic disciplines are most active and important at their ever-changing interfaces. In terms of Performance Studies, this means the interactions between theatre and anthropology, folklore and sociology, history and performance theory, gender studies and psychoanalysis, performativity and actual performance events, and more - new interfaces will be added as time goes on, and older ones will disappear. Accepting »inter« means opposing the establishment of any single system of knowledge, values or subject matter. Performance Studies is unfinished, open, multivocal and self-contradictory. Therefore, any call for, or work towards, a »unified field« is, in my view, a misunderstanding of the very fluidity and playfulness fundamental to Performance Studies. That sidewinder again, the endlessly creative double negative at the core of restoration of behaviour. Closer to the ground is the question of the relation of performativity to performance proper. Are there any limits to performativity? Is there anything outside of the purview of Performance Studies? To answer we must distinguish between »as« and »is«. Performances mark identities, bend and remake time, adorn and reshape the body, tell stories and allow people to play with behaviour that is »twice-behaved«, not-for-the-first time, rehearsed, cooked, prepared. Having made such a sweeping generalization, it is necessary to add that every genre of performance, even every particular instance of a genre, is concrete, specific and different to every other. It is necessary to generalize in order to make theory. At the same time, we must not lose sight of each specific performance's particularities of experience, structure, history and process. Any event, action, item or behaviour may be examined »as« performance. Approaching phenomena as performance has certain advantages. One can consider things as provisional, in-process, existing and changing over time, in rehearsal, as it were. On the other hand, there are events which tradition and convention declare »are« performances. In Western culture, until recently, per-

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formances were of theatre, music and dance - the »aesthetic genres« of the performing arts. Recently, since the 1960s at least, aesthetic performances have developed into directions which cannot be defined precisely as theatre or dance or music or visual arts. Usually called either »performance art«, »mixed-media«, »Happenings« or »intermedia«, these events blur or breach boundaries separating art from life and genres from each other. As performance art grew in range and popularity, theorists began to examine »performative behaviour« - how people play gender, heighten their constructed identity, performing slightly or radically different selves in different situations. This is the performative, which Austin introduced and Butler and queer theorists discuss. The performative engages performance in places and situations not traditionally marked as »performing arts«, from dress up to certain kinds of writing or speaking. The acceptance of the performative as a category of theory as well as a fact of behaviour has made it increasingly difficult to sustain the distinction between appearances and facts, surfaces and depths, illusions and substances. Appearances are actualities. And so are what lies beneath appearances. Reality is constructed through and through, from its many surfaces or aspects down through its multiple depths. The subjects of Performance Studies are both what is performance and the performative - and the myriad contact points and overlaps, tensions and loose spots, separating and connecting these two categories.

Patrice Pavis The Conditions of Reception in the Theatre: Psychological and Psychoanalytical Approaches

Abstract This essay examines the psychological and psychoanalytic approach to performance analysis. It reflects on the attributes of reception in the theatre and the methodologies available to us for dealing in a coherent way with the mass of information gathered by the spectator. This essay is inspired by phenomenology, because it is concerned with the way in which the spectator experiences »the world as it is lived, rather than the world as it is objectified, abstracted, and conceptualized«.1 It poses the question of the way (or ways) of looking, which the spectator brings to bear on the performance, in more or less conscious and extensive ways.

One can imagine the spectator at the epicentre of a scenic earthquake, endowed with three kinds of vision: psychological, sociological and anthropological. These three perspectives are distinct but complementary, forming many concentric circles which widen individual and psychological perspectives endlessly, taking them towards a sociological vision and to an anthropology, where the scenic work reconnects with the surrounding human reality of the spectator. From out of this seismic catastrophe emerges our phenomenological project of describing reception in the light of the three principle perspectives on way(s) of looking: psychological, sociological and finally anthropological. Each of these perspectives will distinguish certain details more or less clearly, the field of vision becoming increasingly peripheral and global as it gradually encompasses anthropology. In venturing towards a phenomenology of performance perception, one locates oneself resolutely on the side of the spectator and the audience. The difficulty lies in distinguishing between these two instances, and in adapting for each of them an appropriate and differentiated set of conceptual tools. The audience is not simply the sum of spectators, it does not obey the same laws as individual psychology; and this authorizes our dealing separately with spectator and audience, through psychoanalysis and then sociology. It should be stated at the outset that we can do no more than sketch a psychology and a psychoanalysis of the spectator. These areas soon slip free from the theatre specialist's vigilance; and we are simply interested here in the »reception« of a performance work, and not in theatre's relation to the unconscious in gen1

Stanton Garner, Bodies Spaces: Phenomenology and Performance in Contemporary Drama (Ithaca/NY: 1994), p. 26.

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eral. Therefore I shall confine myself to some core operative processes which are directly accessible to the visitors to theatrical performances.

1. Gestalt theory Gestalt theory is a »psychological theory that has particularly emphasized the aspects of configuration and, more generally, of totality in psychological life«2 and provides a general framework that favours description/interpretation by the spectator. When applied to theatrical performance, it reminds us that analysis should focus on an ensemble of given aspects, not on isolated details. Indeed, as the Belgian theorist Carlos Tindemans states: Totality is different from the sum of its parts, and the essential quality of this view is that the perception of an event or an object cannot be predicted exactly by means of the knowledge acquired through the perception of different parts of the event or object.3

Tindemans judiciously suggests dividing the perception of performance into synthetic temporal blocks, for »we perceive all elements simultaneously as total segments of time, as synthetic scenic units«. So we perceive a sequence of units as what Garcia-Martinez has called rhythmic frames, i.e., »the mental trace of the rhythms of initial moments which become the reference point for subsequent rhythmic development«.4 This is what I define here as vectorizations of a performance, which construct meaning and rhythm as a sequence of oriented frames or segments. Tindemans conceives of these frames or segments as »interactive moments between the actors/characters which represent active and reactive currents of energy«. This dynamic - whether one calls it focalization, interaction or vectorization - engenders the movement of a work, its meaning as much as its rhythm. Spectators locate and reference it, experiencing it with increasing ease as they participate in its creation through their quality of listening and their reactions. Perception and reception therefore comprise an act of rhythmic construction of a work: »Theatre doesn't happen to someone, they make theatre >happen< to them«.5 And yet, the scenic material is already oriented, moulded in a certain direction, vectorized. This conception of vectorization is closely connected with that of Michel Chion as adopted by him for cinema: »The dramatization of shots, the orientation towards a future, a goal, and the creation Eliane Vurpillot, »Gestalttheorie«, in Grand dictionnaire de la psychologic, ed. Henriette Bloch (Paris, 1991), p. 326. Carlos Tindemans, »L'Analyse de la representation theatrale: Quelques reflexions methodologiques«, in Thaatre de toujours d'Aristote a Kalisky: Hommages a Paul Delsemme, ed. Gilbert Debusscher and Alain van Crugten (Brussels, 1983), p. 52. Manuel Garcia-Martinez, Reflexions sur la perception du rhythme au theatre. These de Doctoral: Paris, Universite Paris 8, 1995. Tindemans, »L'Analyse de la representation theatrale«, p. 55.

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of a feeling of imminence and expectation. The shot goes somewhere, and it is oriented in time«.6 I therefore propose the hypothesis that all mise en scene is organized according to the operations and processes of vectorization, and that global signs exist signs of Gestalt, in other words, totalizing vectors that structure a mise en scene as a whole, to which all individual signifiers which spectators are able to recognize will be subordinated. These Gestalt signs constitute the principal vectorization, the frame within which everything is legible - at least until a new vectorization emerges to efface that which preceded it. Above all, Gestalt theory evaluates the cognitive processes of the spectator. However, spectators are not »simply« intellectuals, cerebral beings, computers with human faces; they are also participants, reactive and affective beings. A performance contains a wide range of stimulations, suggestions and elements intended to keep spectators alert or to move them - to make them participate in an event which they do not always face frontally, but which surrounds, seizes and transports them.

2. Participation in the event 2.1. The effect produced Although rather difficult to evaluate, the effect produced on a spectator is at the very heart of participation in an event. Many contemporary performances are characterized by a plethora of very powerful sensory stimuli. In the Welsh group Brith Gof s Camelann, directed by Mike Pearson,7 for example, the multiple stimuli that act directly on corporeal memory include the noise of empty barrels, the disturbing darkness of the factory space, the acrid smell of smoke. Consequently, in order to measure the effect produced, one must be particularly sensitive to the performance as real, material action (and not as production of images, signs and metaphors). The body of the actor, like that of the spectator, belongs to a real embodied being, rather than to some abstract »model« spectator. The spectator's tonal-postural modifications become of interest here; tactile and olfactory perception, kinaesthesia - all of these senses that are often sterilized or anaesthetized - are here reinstated. Evaluation of the effect produced entails being able to feel the energetic charge of a work, and the discharge produced in the spectator: »In order to judge a work of art, one must therefore activate this notion of energy: does this work touch us? does it create a disturbance in our sensibility, in our imaginary? Does one feel strongly what it evokes?«8 The analyst's task is to feel and to make felt a work's aura (that which makes it unique and unreproducible, above all mechan6 7 8

Michel Chion, L'audio-vision (Paris, 1990), p. 16. See the photograph in Patrice Pavis, L 'Analyse des spectacles (Paris, 1996). Pierre Gaudibert, »Entrevue«, in P. Gaudibert, Peuples et cultures (Grenoble, 1982), p. 12.

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ically). Artaud advised us to »return [...] to the active, respiratory, plastic wellsprings of language, to reunite words with the physical moves from which they originated, and the logical discursive side of words should disappear beneath their physical, affective side, that is to say that words [...] should be understood from the angle of sound, they should be discerned as movements«.9 This implies that the observer, while knowing it to be a matter of artistic conventions, experiences the feelings the work produces in him: »What he [the artist] aims at is to awaken in us the same emotional attitude, the same mental constellation as that which in him produced the impetus to create.«10 When this state of passion is absent, one ponders possible analytical resistances to the work: So-called »analytical« resistances stem from emotional and/or sexual blocks; they will be triggered by works which bring into play sexuality, drives, phantasms (surrealism, for example), or by works that evoke the tragic, destruction, crisis, giving rise to anguish and despair.11

Such blocks frequently impede aesthetic experience. Hence the importance of elucidating the relational mechanisms between stage and spectator. 2.2. Relational and interactive theories Often inspired by phenomenology, that of Merleau-Ponty in particular, relational theories aim to clarify exchanges between stage and auditorium - rather than conceiving of such exchanges in terms of the emission of signs from stage to auditorium, or of a production of signs closed in on themselves. Let me illustrate these complex relational theories through a simple fable. The spectator, an eagle surveying the stage, notices tiny mice in the process of gnawing at the knots of all possible relations: actantial, thematic, formal. At such a great height, the eagle still takes himself to be the partner and mediator of entangled relations; he alone is able to perceive the knots in their entirety, but only because of the mice who pull at the threads and scurry about in all corners of the stage. The eagle fails to describe this scene objectively, for the mice move around incessantly. They are rather like the body of the actor, which does not allow itself to be grasped, a sign returning the eagle's gaze: a phenomenological situation that requires us to conceive of the stage as a mirror sending back the observer's gaze. From the phenomenological point of view, the living body capable of returning the spectator's gaze presents a methodological dilemma for any theoretical model - like semiotics - that offers to describe performance in »objective« terms. Alone among the elements that constitute the stage's semiotic field, the body is the only sign that looks back.12 9 10 11 12

Antonin Artaud, Le Theatre et son double (Paris, 1964), p. 182. Sigmund Freud, »Moses and Michelangelo«, in Standard Edition of the Complete Psychoanalytic Works, ed. James Strachey, vol. 13 (London, 1955), p. 212. Gaudibert, Peuples et cultures, p. 11. Garner, Bodies Spaces, p. 49.

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This return of the gaze by the body of the work, which is probably unique in the arts, obliges spectators to place themselves in front of the actor and the stage, and to identify with them or to distance themselves from them.

3. Identification and distance 3. Mechanisms of identification Proximity to the scenic event, or distance from it, is something the spectator should be able to measure. But how can one succeed in this, given the allure and fascination of the stage events? How does one analyse reactions that touch us so intimately? The spectator's identification with a character produces an increase in pleasure, that of experiencing events vicariously without the risk of being actually implicated in them. This relates to the phenomenon of denial (»It isn't me, although ...«), which Freud recognized within psychic life and works of art. We die, like the hero with whom we have identified, yet we survive him and are ready to die anew with another hero, all the while remaining safe and sound in the same way. Pleasure in danger and absence of genuine risk induce an identification, in the course of which lovers of fiction enjoy seeing »psycho-pathological characters« represented on stage; for they then witnesses the mise en scene of drives that they would usually repress but now no longer need to censure, given that they have become the object of scenic fictions. So they enjoys the satisfaction of experiencing different parts of the self moving about on stage without inhibition.13 Identification implicates actors in relation to their roles, as much as the spectator towards a character or an actor; this is what keeps us there. In the absence of an incontestable theory of the emotions it is difficult to propose a typology of ways of identifying with another in the sphere of fiction. Nevertheless, literary history contains numerous attempts to define ways of reacting to tragic and comic situations (from fear and pity, to ironic and cruel superiority in relation to a ridiculous character). 3.2. Modalities of identification Hans-Robert Jauss has produced one of the best syntheses of the full range of these attempts in his account of aesthetic and hermetic literary experience (to borrow the German title of his book),14 in which he places himself firmly on the side of receivers and their aesthetic pleasure. Jauss proposes a typology of modes 13

14

See Sigmund Freud, »Psychopathic Characters on the Stage«, in Standard Edition of the Complete Psychoanalytic Works, ed. James Strachey, vol. 7 (London, 1953), pp. 305-10. Hans-Robert Jauss, Ästhetische Erfahrung und literarische Hermeneutik (Munich, 1977). English translation: Aesthetic Experience and Literary Hermeneutics (Minneapolis/MN, 1982).

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of identification covering the full gamut of possible reactions, from simple associative participation to ironic distanciation. Associative identification: Its only end is to understand each point of view in order to establish the overall situation; it is what we do by listening to each of them in turn, and reconstructing their motivations. Admirative identification: We admire a character unreservedly - hero, saint, demi-god, etc.; we are invited to imitate him/her. Sympathetic identification: The hero(ine) is meritorious, although imperfect; s/he presents him/herself in a human, accessible light, which provokes an identification through compassion and sentimentality. Cathartic identification: Beyond sympathy, it provokes a violent emotion and a »purgation of the passions«, a catharsis, which arouses pity and fear towards a tragic figure, or on the other hand sarcastic mockery in relation to a ridiculous character. Ironic identification: It would be a contradiction in terms if irony did not allow a certain sympathy, in spite of everything, for an unfortunate hero or an anti-hero; our feeling of superiority is coloured with a sensitization to the problems of the other. This leads us directly to the opposite of identification: a critical distance which Brecht christened Verfremdungseffekt, an effect of distanciation or, more precisely, of defamiliarization. 3.3. Distance Critical distance always remains relative; if it pushes too far, the spectator loses all interest and leaves the theatre. This distance is established by actors in relation to their role as well as by spectators in relation to a character. As an example, let us take the moment in Brecht's play, when Mother Courage hears the volley of offstage gunshots which kill her son Swiss-Cheese. Her suffering is so intense that she can only express herself through an inaudible scream that never actually breaks out of her chest. This repressed scream distorts her entire body, throwing her head backwards. Immediately afterwards, Mother Courage shifts her position, dropping her head into her neck, then sinks into a chair as she shuts herself off from the outside world. In just a few seconds, the spectator has to be able to move through this succession of Mother Courage's »hot« and »cold« emotions: moved to tears at moments, removed and critical towards this ambiguous character at others. Therefore, in Brecht's dramaturgy, as in any performance placed at a distance, actors play »against the current of expressive conventions«, and spectators »undertake a mental correction which preserves the rights of the performance«.15 15

David Le Breton, »Le Corps en scene«, internationale de l'imaginaire, no. 2, 1994, p. 37.

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3-4. Beyond the identification/distance binary: the example of Butoh The choice between identification and distance is not absolute, and each mode of reception sometimes occurs in a way other than the fiction/non-fiction dichotomy, based on a quasi-direct and physical relation to the body of the actor. Such is the case with the kinaesthetic perception of movement and of an actor's body in pain. More so than any other genre, Butoh dance makes the spectator experience the fear of the displayed body. A few photographs will provide an opportunity to display our own fears as polymorphous receivers. The fragmented body All that is left of a body in pain is the torso; the head and limbs in the shadows seem to have been severed. A fragmented body such as this, cut into bits and pieces, »regularly appears in dreams, when the notion of analysis touches upon a certain level of the aggressive disintegration of the individual«.16 We can do little other than identify its disconnected pieces in the morgue, and feel an anxiety of fragmentation. The eyeless face Without a gaze, the eyes enucleated like a death mask, the face no longer possesses any living element with which an observer could identify. The disappearance of all emotion, the fixity of features and the rigidity of postures disturb the gaze of the other to the point of destabilization. In the absence of psychological identification, with no possibility of imagining a hidden meaning or a defined situation, the face becomes an object bereft of soul, and fear settles in. So there is always a face-to-face encounter with the work: we examine its authenticity, its creator's investment, »the degree to which desire is implicated, which enables one to say of a particular work that it is charged, inhabited, whereas another is disaffected, fabricated«.17 The body lying on the dolmen, fixed in one position as if by rigor mortis, shows the same mineral appearance, and to such an extent that the eye takes a moment to distinguish the body from its support and to identify a human being. Scarcely able to distinguish between animate and inanimate, actor and setting, the spectator perceives a grotesque body, halfhuman, half-mineral; here it is no longer a matter of finding a place for the body in a landscape, but of perceiving the body itself as a landscape, subjected to the inclemencies of the weather. Contagious hanging Owing to of its unusual and dangerous situation, this body, hanging from a crane by its feet in a town centre, attracts the attention of passersby. Once again one hesitates: human flesh, or the marble of a statue in the process of being installed? Will this exquisite corpse come to life? We are placed in the position of occasional voyeurs reliving aesthesically the actor's movements, wavering between sadism and masochism: our sadism is reflected in our presence at this hanging; we become as masochistic as the actor as a result of a 16 17

Jacques Lacan, Merits, vol. 1 (Paris, 1966), p. 94. Gaudibert, Peuples et cultures, p. 20.

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perception that is no longer aesthetic and distanced, but instead is aesthesic, corporeal and contagious, like the plague evoked by Artaud. The reality of pain bursts into the work of art; body art shatters the conventions of performance and of psychological identification. All of these unforeseen effects on the corporeal identity of the spectator revive traditional modes of identification, by providing increasingly physical bases and »a directly communicative language«;18 they displace the usual boundaries between body and spirit. In this way, Butoh reveals a crisis of identification in Western art; and it provides a timely reminder of the fact that the theory of identification is not universal, at best only valid for the Western tradition, from Aristotle to Brecht. A fact which will become further apparent through consideration of the Indian treatise on the rasas, or aesthetic tastes. 3-5. The taste of identification In Indian culture, the Natya Shastra (sixth century BC) employs the notion of rasa or aesthetic taste. A rasa is a powerful and lasting emotion aroused by a transitory emotion of pleasure or pain. The rasas (love, heroism, sadness, mirth, fear, disgust, anger and wonder) constitute the »flavours« of a work. Spectators can only taste them, if they have found freedom and detachment, overcome desire and egoism, and attained the requisite concentration and purity of spirit. Thus through its flavours, its feelings and its modes of movement, this theatre will be a source of teachings to all.

3.6. Masculine or feminine identification Identification is bound to culture; is it also bound to sex? Is there an identification that is masculine or feminine? Let us be clear on this; sex is a matter of gender and not of biological determinism. For performance analysis, the question is to know whether to distinguish between a male and female gaze brought to bear on a mise en scene, and whether the individual process of spectating perceives it in terms of that individual's sex - and to what precise extent. It does not seem very easy to determine the feminine or masculine characteristics of a mise en scene, without lapsing into painfully banal platitudes. On the other hand, it does not take long to understand whether a mise en scene sides with the viewpoint of women or of men. A production of a play like Woyzeck could choose to portray Marie as victim, or Woyzeck as sympathetic killer; in the same way (and whatever the thesis of the mise en scene), in the process of reception someone could choose to identify with Marie rather than Woyzeck. What is important to recognize here is not femininity or masculinity per se, but their performative representation by the actoress (to borrow a term from Julian Beck). For example, in Kazuo Ohno's magnificent evocation of La

18

Artaud, Le Theatre et son double, p. 162.

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Argentina,19 there is no need for a spectator to wonder whether the performer is a woman or a transvestite; s/he observes the showing of certain feminine traits in the Spanish dancer and in Ohno's mother, without ever having to identify with them. Ohno's endeavour to produce signs of femininity and his pursuit of the identity of feminine alterity are quite touching; and it is this quest the observer is invited to share. Similarly, feminism explores the hypothesis of a sexual difference in the evaluative gaze which spectators bring to bear on what they perceive. For feminism, the difference is evident; masculine spectators have supposedly seized upon, and profited from, a humanism that is constructed as »universal« - although it disregards the specificities of women's gazes and voices. Phallocratic humanism establishes an opposition between the universalizing transcendance of man and the natural immanence of woman. In the context of performance analysis, our task would be to determine whether a woman's body is more receptive, and/or receptive in different ways, to that of a man. We know of no way of settling this. I would, however, agree with feminists such as Irigaray, Kristeva, Cixous or Grosz, who reject the conception of a body that is pre-expressive, pre-cultural, pre-linguistic or pre-social. I share Elizabeth Grosz's concept of »a body as social and discursive object, a body bound up in the order of desire, signification, and power«, which contributes to »the production of knowledge systems, regimes of representation, cultural production, and socio-economic exchange«.20 In addition, I subscribe to her suggestion for the need to develop »some kind of understanding of embodied subjectivity, of psychic corporeality«. These concepts seem to be related to Michael Chekhov's notion of psychological gesture which, when applied to the spectator's psychic corporeality, could provide a productive basis for a concrete analysis of the activity of spectating. The measuring instruments for this activity are rather imprecise, however, and I will restrict myself to a few introductory remarks on the spectator's corporeality.

4. The spectator's body 4.1. The concrete situation Quite simply, the concrete situation comprises the ways in which one's body is affected by the physical space it occupies: its comfort, discomfort, perspective, sight lines and so on. There is a great difference between the plush armchairs of a private theatre, a box in a proscenium arch theatre and an uncomfortable bench at the Theatre du Soleil, the latter crammed with traumatized observers 19

20

La Argentina (1900-1945) was born in Buenos Aires, but lived in Spain from an early age. Her »authentic« flamenco style cause a sensation when touring abroad. Kazuo Ohno saw her in Tokyo when he was very young, and later in life he tried to reconstruct her performance. Elizabeth Grosz, Volatile Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Feminism (Sydney, 1994), pp. 19 and 22.

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who must reckon themselves fortunate to have found a seat. The body is surrounded with successive environments and envelopes: The architecture of an auditorium - its scale, its ornamentation or bareness, its overall shape, the variety or uniformity of its seating, its rake in relation to the stage, its entrances and gangways, and of course its visual and auditory qualities, distances between seating and stage, and the various proxemic relations in broader terms - all are determining elements in which the body is directly implicated.21

It seems as though spectators are tied to their seats; they cannot intervene in what goes on in front of them. On the other hand, they seem to be able to move their selves freely around the stage by means of multiple identifications with characters. The motor system only ever appears to have been neutralized; in reality, observers act and react physically to what they perceive. Evidently these reactions depend upon the auditorium, which reflects a »mise en scene of social links«.22 The behaviour and movements of spectators are regulated by rites of interaction: This ritual aspect inscribes a symbolics of faces and bodies, a suspension of the word, into a symbolics of space and time. In the auditorium, the spectator is physically solicited. Whereas cinema develops a bracketing of corporeity, a suspension of the senses in favour of a rigid visual and auditory configuration that saturates the relation to space, creating a sort of hypnotic state that leaves the spectator quietly paralysed, at the theatre, inversely, it is difficult to forget the chair on which one sits, the presence of others at one's sides, in front and behind.2'

The theatre space constitutes a body; each spectator's body reverberates into those around it, and further afield - it has an effect on the stage and is sensed by the actors, whose performances will inevitably be affected, positively or negatively. Performance analysis should draw attention to the reactions of those present, and evaluate their impact on the performance as it unfolds. These are not isolated moments, but constitute an entire structure of meaning, which intervenes in every aspect of reception. 4.2. Anthropology of the spectator The study of reception leads us to attempt an anthropology of the spectator's corporeity. The latter has evolved a great deal over time: today's dimensions, perceptual habits, faculty of attention are not those of two thousand years ago, not even of a century ago. The body of a Greek spectator, witnessing a trilogy of tragedies in the open air; the coiled body of someone in the honeycomb of boxes in a proscenium-arch theatre; the fragmented, disjointed body of someone per21 22 2S

Elie Konigson, »Le Spectateur et son ombre«, in Le Corps enjeu, ed. Odette Asian (Paris, 1993), p. 187. Le Breton, »Le Corps en scene«, p. 41. Ibid., p. 10.

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ceiving sound through a loud-speaker, effecting a partial delocation; a body plugged into a cybernetic outfit, a virtual reality suit - undoubtedly none of these function in the same way. The mediatized body of a postmodern spectator is subjected to an entirely different treatment from the body of someone taking part in a medieval mystery play. The study of spectators and their bodies24 will provide an indispensable foundation for studying authors and their works, their textuality included. 4.3· Pleasures of the spectator When it refocuses its attentions on the study of spectators' bodies, analysis of spectatorial pleasures is by no means limited to the cognitive sphere, nor to decoding significations tied to signs or words. Psychology teaches us that mental representation is located between perception and concept, and that one can shift smoothly from the sensory-motor sphere to the cognitive sphere. The mental representation of movement is dependent upon the same mental structures as actual movement. To return to Barba's image, the dilated body of the actor »dilates the synaesthetic perception of the spectator by erecting a new architecture of muscle tone which does not respect the economy and fictionality of everyday behaviour«.25 The only limit to pleasure, the only »devil«, is boredom, as Peter Brook reminds us at just the right moment.26 But boredom is sometimes distilled by the individual spectator: the »deadly spectator, who for special reasons enjoys a lack of intensity [in a mise en scene] and even a lack of entertainment, such as the scholar who emerges from routine performances of the classics smiling because nothing has distracted him from trying over and confirming his pet theories to himself, whilst reciting his favourite lines under his breath«.27 Such kill-joy scholars, whom one cannot prevent from entering theatres, are still widespread; so it is quite legitimate to allow them to enter this book (or to remain in it!) Nevertheless the most sought-after theatrical pleasure remains that which, as in the lyric arts, is able to »communicate profound emotions [...] and is in fact a sort of reaction against those hyper-intellectual inquiries that characterize a great proportion of contemporary art«.28 Of course it is this spectator, immersed in feeling, who is the most difficult to get to talk and to analyse - and this is the one who interests us the most.

24 25 26 27 28

See Jean-Marie Pradier, La Scene et lafabrique des corps (Bordeaux, 1997). Eugenio Barba, »Le Corps credible«, in Asian (ed.), Le Corps enjeu, p. 253. Peter Brook, Le Diable, c'est I'ennui (Paris, 1992). English translation: »The Slyness of Boredom«, in Peter Brook, There Are no Secrets (London, 1993). Peter Brook, The Empty Space (London, 1968), pp. 12-13. Giorgio Strehler, interview in Le Nouvel Observateur, no. 723, 1978.

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5. Dream work, stage work 5.1. Dream and phantasm In relation to dream work, psychoanalysis has at its disposal some precious tools, certain of which will be directly applicable in performance analysis and psychoanalytic interpretations of works of art, in this context theatre performance. Freud proposes three types: • focus on the process of creation itself, but without ever being able to explain the mystery of the creative gift; • the relation between artist and creation, illuminating the unconscious problematic that has marked the work; • analysis of the work without reference to its author.29 The second and third of these are particularly pertinent to performance analysis above all the examining of a mise en scene without reference to the director, about whom the »average« spectator knows little. One would like to be able to study scenic production in a way similar to Lyotard's approach to painting after Cezanne: he envisages such painting as aiming »to produce on the canvas sorts of analoga for unconscious space itself, which can only arouse disquiet and rebellion«.30 This hypothesis suggests the stage as phantasm materialized by participants in the theatrical event - phantasm rather than dream, according to Andre Green: The texture of performance is not that of dream, and it may be tempting to compare it with phantasm. The latter owes a great deal to the reprise by the secondary processes of elements whose characteristics link them to the primary processes; these are then elaborated in a way comparable to the elaboration of the ceremonial, of the ordering of actions and dramatic movements, of the coherence of theatrical intrigue.31

Whether dream or phantasm, Green goes on, the figuration of mise en scene is to be »placed between dream and phantasm«. This authorizes us to look closely at some of the processes of dream symbolization, and to play with »the double articulation of theatrical phantasm: that of the scene which occurs on stage, ostensibly privileged by the spectator; and that of the other scene which despite the fact that everything is voiced in a loud and intelligible way, and is displayed in bright light - occurs in the spectator's domain, thanks to a mode of concatenation that obeys an unconscious logic«.32 Consequently, spectators are ana29

30 31 32

In particular see Andre Green, »L'Interpretation psychanalytique des productions culturelles et des GEuvres d'arts«, in A. Green, Critique sociologique et critique psychanalytique (Brussels, 1970), p. 28. Jean-Fra^ois Lyotard, »Psychanalyse et peinture«, Encyclopedia Universalis, vol. 15 (Paris, 1985), pp. 345-50 (346). Andre Green, Un ceil en trop (Paris, 1969), p. 11. For some discussion of primary and secondary processes, see 5.3. below. Ibid., p. 41.

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lysts confronted with enigmatic mechanisms comparable to dreams and phantasms, mechanisms whose latent content they have to decipher (rather than decode). Therefore one imagines that the authors and spectators of a performance, each in his or her own way, go through the same unconscious psychic processes; and we must now endeavour to reconstitute this »concatenation that obeys an unconscious logic«, referred to above. 5.2. Which unconscious logic? But what is the unconscious? Let me attempt a »theatrical« definition: the unconscious is like a radio chattering away, without anyone ever having switched it on. Instead of making works »speak«, in the manner of semiotics (as conceived by Lyotard at least), a psychoanalytic approach conceives of the stage as a body that is libidinal, critical, mute and impenetrable. Butoh's tormented bodies provided a particularly mute, if violent, example. What touches us, and leaves us stupefied in the face of this mute body, is firstly the torso's fragmentation, the amputation of its head and limbs. This is castration anxiety, and the agitation that takes hold of our body schema; it is also our uncertainty as to the cause and the reality of this mutilation, our inability to understand our emotion: »Some rationalist, or perhaps analytic, turn of mind in me rebels against being moved by a thing without knowing why I am thus affected and what it is that affects me«.i3 Interpreting Michelangelo's image of Moses, Freud writes of the paradox that »precisely some of the grandest and most overwhelming creations of art are still unsolved riddles to our understanding. We admire them, we feel overawed by them, but we are unable to say what they represent to us«.J4 Confronted with this inert torso, or with Hamlet, a play which leaves us »completely in the dark as to the hero's character«,35 we always perceive what is hidden or missing: the sub-text behind the text, the corporeal sub-score behind the visible score of the actor. Not only do we project ourselves and identify with this mysteriously »cut-up« character, but we also imagine what our role would be in the elliptical scenario suggested by text and stage. Without pushing the analogy between dream (or phantasm) work and stage work too far, I propose to compare the psychic processes which lead from latent content to manifest content.

33 34 35

Sigmund Freud, »Moses and Michelangelo«, p. 211. Ibid.,p. 211. Sigmund Freud, »The Interpretation of Dreams«, in Standard Edition of the Complete Psychoanalytic Works, ed. James Strachey, vol. 4 (London, 1953), p. 264.

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Pleasure principle and reality principle Pleasure principle

Reality principle

1. Literal meaning The spectator is only interested in the literal meaning and the materiality of the performance, manipulating material without trying to interpret so as to discover a figural meaning. Like a pig that has been given too much jam, he wallows in the signifying matter. For example, the Butoh torso could be approached initially as form and matter, as experience and rough art of dismemberment.

1. Figural meaning The spectator tries to find the hidden or figural meaning; s/he looks for what all of this could mean; s/he translates all perceived material into signifieds. For example, the Butoh torso is reminiscent of a mutilated or defaced Greek statue; it recalls Christ's descent from the cross as represented in Italian Renaissance painting.

2. Primary processes We trust intuitive thinking, free associations, our spontaneous reactions. Inspired by dream work we verify whether material has been treated in particular as condensation, or displacement, or association of incompatible ideas (oxymoron), or reflection on figurability.

2. Secondary processes With Freud, we attempt to put the primary material in order, through linear and narrative thought, a logic of cause and effect, a sequencing of episodes, a referencing of categories used.

3. Affective thought and logical thought The opposition of these two principles intersects with that made by Robert Musil between affective thought and logical thought: In every mind, there is not only logical thought going on, with its austere and simple orderliness, which is a reflection of conditions in the external world; alongside it there is also affective thought going on, with a logic - if one can call it logic at all - of its own, which is appropriate to the peculiarities of the feelings, the passions, and the moods. The laws governing these two bear roughly the same relationship to each other as the laws of a timber yard, where chunks of wood are hewn into rectangular shape and stacked ready for transport, bear to the dark interlacing laws of the forest with all their mysterious workings and rustlings.36

4. Danger of the inexpressible and the unfocused The spectator remains prisoner of free and unfocused association. S/he refuses to talk about the performance, the experience seems incommunicable. The object of desire remains external and untouchable; there is no felicitous analysis.

5. Danger of rationalization The overly rationalist spectator loses the sense of the scenic event, its pulsional quality, the »primary mysterious and indescribable movement« Musil writes about. Reflection remains locked within the analyst, and the analyst within the reflection.

Robert Musil, Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften, book II, chap. 21, in Gesammelte Werke, ed. Adolf Frise, vol. 1 (Reinbek, 1978), p. 857. English translation by Eithne Wilkins and Ernst Kaiser: The Man Without Qualities, vol. 3 (London, I960), p. 225.

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5.3· Processes of stage work In considering the stage as the figuration of a dream or phantasm that is to be deciphered, we need to refer back to some of the operative processes in the construction of unconscious meaning. The Freudian categories »condensation« and »displacement« constitute the core framework in the functioning of scenic phantasm. Condensation is realized in two distinct and antithetical processes: accumulation and shifting. Accumulation concerns both signifier and signified; by dint of their being repeated, materials ultimately combine to produce a third term which is wholly autonomous from the first two. In this phenomenon of metaphorization, two elements are located as partially intersecting equivalents. The Butoh dancer's torso, for example, condenses quite distinct properties: human flesh or marble, life or death, man or woman. The resulting ambiguity and uncertainty confirm the metaphorical condensation of both signifiers and signifieds. Shifting is much more than the simple passage from one signifier to another; it involves entire sequences, enabling movement from one plane or level of reading to another, or translation from one world to another. Shifting requires indices that are common to both worlds, or which at least facilitate their inter-communication. In relation to the Butoh torso, the shift could be the cultural interference or jamming of different contexts: Christ's descent from the cross, mutilated Greek statue, image of a war victim, and so on. Displacement manifests itself in two major forms: connection and rupture. Connection occurs when one segment refers to another through its substitution or replacement by a part of the object referred to (metonymy). In his representation of La Argentina, Kazuo Ohno does not imitate or »condense« the traits of a young or an old woman; he refers to the woman glimpsed long ago, now absent, through a play of the gaze, and a corporeal attitude that indicates a folding back in on himself (right hand) as much as an opening towards the other (taut right hand). His nostalgia for the deceased woman and youth is perceptible in what Ohno's aged body suggests through its own effacement. Connection through contiguity and/or concatenation is ensured through gestural signs, there is nothing magical or inexplicable about it; it regulates the co-ordination of body parts, as well as the link between the visible and the invisible: memory, phantasm, waking dream. Rupture comprises a connection that is suddenly interrupted, obliging the observer to shift perspective immediately and to account for jumps in meaning. In the sequence danced by Kazuo Ohno, the sudden interventions of European symphonic music create a rupturing effect; they require an approach to the dance through a series of emotional tonalities and free associations. Ohno's disguise is never ambiguous or ridiculous; it is charged with the associations of ideas we perceive there, guided by thousands of metonymic signs. Primary processes, secondary processes Psychoanalysts first confront primary processes; as is the case with dreams, these make available to them a scenic work that reveals a free and imaginative mode of

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thinking, for which the movement of signifiers does not submit to the weight of concepts; here, meaning slides freely in unknown directions. Mise en scene is conceived as research and unconscious desire, as fulfilment of desire using the concrete means of the stage - bodies, space, light, time, rhythm - and the whole series of actions these means permit, without aprioristic intentionality. As an artist, the director does not try to express a previously known idea, but to create an aesthetic object with the means at hand, and to see what eventuates. The artist plays the game, allowing unconscious desires to filter into the working methods as a whole, behaving as a desiring subject and not as a speaking subject. Later on, spectators will have to produce an account of this »dream«; so they will move on to the secondary processes. Nevertheless they will not reduce everything to language, to verbal communication; they will maintain the idea that mise en scene is the site where artists manifest their desire, without communicating in a univocal way what they have to say, which is precisely what cannot be said. Therefore one must distinguish two levels: • the pre-conscious and conscious level (which is manifest), in which one can discern signifiers and signifieds: in the example of Kazuo Ohno, one sees a man dressed and dancing as a woman; • the unconscious level (which is latent), in which one must venture a metaphorization or metonymization in order to make conjectures regarding the way in which motives are concealed. In unconscious connective processes, the signifier/signified distinction is no longer operative, as it was on the manifest level; one can no longer rely on the pre-existence or predominance of one or the other, as was the case with verbal connective processes. Now it is a matter of reconstructing what was at the origin of the desire, what has been repressed - substituted or displaced - by something visible. We should remember that, according to Freud, images constitute a very imperfect way of conveying conscious thought, and one can say that visual thought is much closer to unconscious processes than verbal thought, and is much older from a phylogenetic rather than an ontological point of view. The example of Terzirek In this performance by the Theatre du Mouvement, the initial forms one discerns emerging from the sand resist immediate identification: are they mineral, vegetal, animal, human? The shifting of the sand on the dune reflects that of meaning, which does not attain an identifiable form and goes no further than the primary processes. Meanwhile, creatures gradually emerge from the desert; shapes start to stand up and out; we begin to modify our initial perceptions, as if this were a dream we do not know how to interpret, but which we endeavour to present in the form of a coherent scenario: the shapes become columns, then ancient statues, then crosses and desert combatants. What Freud calls the »taking into consideration of intelligibility« (or of »representability«) helps us decipher the scene

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like a dream, whose latent meaning begins to emerge, leading us step-by-step towards the secondary processes. From such a perspective, the buried figures that emerge in a very laborious way would be the disguised expression of a repressed desire, perhaps for a return to the bowels of the earth/mother. The civilizing process - a favourite theme of mime artists, as we know - would consist of emerging from a hole, raising oneself up towards an ever greater autonomy, towards an anthropomorphism. Emergence from materiality, concrete forms, primary processes, so as to accede gradually to the signified, to meaning, symbolism and language - such is the destiny mapped in the narrative of Terzirek; and this narrative is also emblematic of all interpretation, all sublimation. Psychoanalysis applied to the interpretation of a mise en scene examines how the unconscious of the performance's creators is expressed by means of the stage work, and its way of both concealing meaning and bringing it to light. Psychoanalysis provides a stable framework for putting in perspective the diverse observations that performance analysis has already generated. It encourages us to choose the ways in which we receive and deal with the images presented to us in performance. Fundamentally, we can choose between two strategies; either to give ourselves over to the pleasure principle, or to recognize the reality principle. It would be best to avoid choosing between these two strategies and these two dangers, quite simply because logical thought and affective thought are »two modes of thought« that »get mixed up with each other«.37 And because spectating, like any cultural activity, is a sublimation that overcomes this cleavage between pleasure and reality, play and work, eroticism of the object and auto-reflection; for »the cultural object, or sublimation, is half-way between the narcissistic impulse and the erotic object position; it is a point of stabilization in the libido's fluctuation«.38 A stabilized libido: one can see the importance of a psychoanalytic analysis in the evaluation of performances, although the complexity of the undertaking has already been glimpsed - in particular the epistemological difficulties of reconciling a general phenomenological inspiration, a technique of semiological description, biological considerations regarding perception, a symbolism of the unconscious, all of the above also viewed sociologically and anthropologically. In fact, one must insert this psychoanalytical perspective in the broader contexts of sociology and anthropology. For »culture demarcates the origin and horizon of the subject, marking sexuality and the unconscious with its seal, just as it is marked by them«.39 Spectator-subjects will not be satisfied for long with pre-discursive experience and pre-reflexive immersion; guided by the demon of interpretation, they are certain to turn to a deciphering of secondary processes - and so they will need the blinking lights of sociology and anthropology. Translated from the French by David Williams 37 38 39

Ibid. Geza Roheim, Origine etfonction de la culture (Paris, 1972), p. 12. Andre Green, »L'Interpretation psychanalytique des productions culturelles et des GEuvres d'art«, in Green, Critique sociologique et critique psychanalytique, p. 36.

Darko Suvin

On the Epistemology and Pragmatics of Intercultural Theatre Studies

Abstract After preliminary clarifications, this chapter posits an opposition of the substantive and loveable versus the fetishized body, which entails two opposed epistemic models: plural interactions of the substantive bodies as sites of labour and perception versus a unitary Truth. Brook's Mahabharata is then discussed as an example of the latter, an epic of blood-and-soil male bonding with a central Gestus of unavoidable violence towards entire ethnic groups. In order to avoid the pseudoproblem of »appropriation«, I argue that what furthers human creativity or productivity should be borne, however painful for anybody, if the pain is conducive to better cognitive understanding of the collective or personal body's position. This is not the case in Brook's production and its illusionary plenitude of being, which I would call mythical estrangement. The brighter alternative of interculturalism is a critical estrangement that doubts a presumed »Western« universal of bourgeois or capitalist hegemony with the help of an instance that puts it into crisis - as in Zeami's mugen no or in the plays of Beckett. The audience for Brook's intercontinental theatre enterprise may well be the new »transnational class of professionals who can live and travel globally« (Miyoshi).

Introduction Who is speaking to whom here, in my undergraduate student university of Bristol? Can I take it as evident that the situation of our relatively small »humanistic« enclave has in the meantime become seriously threatened in the war against the Keynesian response to Leninism? Or can I at least ask: how can a dissenting intellectual from a marginal country in southeast central Europe, transplanted to the semi-periphery of the US empire and having participated in its now fading financial privileges, here-and-now speak about anything, and in particular about the topic my title approaches? And a first answer: let me at least begin by limning my terms, and then by proposing some models in feedback with stage practice. In this chapter, I shall not attempt to present anything like a methodology of intercultural theatre studies, or even a rough survey of problem areas for a »Western« theatre scholar analysing theatres of other cultures, but only one pair of inductive-deductive polarities for its bon et mauvais usage. I shall take it that we are dealing with competing stances towards, and indeed competing definitions of, an entry in the cultural encyclopaedia of a given social hegemony: our verbal mode is a hypothetic imperative. Finally, I shall be attempting feedbacks between performances and theories.

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One of the key terms which I use here, »pragmatics«, may benefit from some defining. I mean the domain of relationships between the signs and their interpreters, which clarifies the conditions under which something is taken as a sign. For, an object or event (word, text, shape, colour, etc. - in fact, any new perception) becomes a sign only in a signifying situation between people; and a user can take something to be a sign only as it is spatio-temporally concrete and localized and as it relates to the user's disposition toward potential action. Both the concrete localization and the user's disposition are always socio-historical. Furthermore, signifying implies a reality organized not only around signs but also around subjects, in the double sense of psychophysical personality and of a socialized, collectively representative subject. The potentially acting subjects reintroduce acceptance and choice, temporal duration and mutation, and a possibility of dialectical negation. For example, the macro-sign of »The East« has a pragmatic value based on an implicit classification stemming from the interest it evokes in the addressee, the advantages or inconveniences, pleasures or sufferings it suggests to him. What about our own pragmatic situation? There is some good news in the last twenty (or is it eighty?) years: our understanding has at its best incorporated gender, class and race into formal analysis. The bad news is universalizing theory (an equivalent of the new world order of multinational corporations) for which particular cultures are only case studies with limited prestige; and the symmetrically obverse »identitarian culturalism« of interlocking resentments, which constructs monolithic subject-objects of which persons are only examples (an equivalent of ethnic cleansing). Gayatri Spivak's remark that feminist universalism makes the world safe for international capitalism by constructing »women« as the object and »Feminism« as the subject of investigation1 encapsulates both the universalizing urge and the pernicious micropolitics.

Epistemic considerations: Monadic truth vs. caressing My first thesis for this chapter is a crucial opposition, which I abduce from Barthes's cognitive mapping of Bunraku, between the lovable and the fetishized body.2 True, any binary dichotomization shares in certain cognitive limitations, but it may be initially useful to summarize it as a table:

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, »Scattered Speculations on the Question of Linguisticulture«, in Proceedings of the International Symposium »Linguisticulture« (Osaka, 1996), pp. I-VHI. Darko Suvin, Lessons of Japan (Montreal and Washington B.C., 1996); I have otherwise doubted Barthes's take on Japan at some length, see esp. pp. 27-61.

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Notions of the body in the exemplum of theatre Bourgeois, fetishized

Non-bourgeois, »lovable«

»Animated« body Organic unity, simulation of »life«

Substantive body Sensuous abstraction/education from parts Plastic functions Body is governed by various sovereign craftsmen Unity of performance in the spectator

Physiological essence Body governs single actor, the artist serves Unity of individuals on the stage (character and actor)

Performance media and sign-systems are: continuous, fusing Horizon: Idea, Truth

discrete, adding up Horizon: sense/s, caress

It culminates in the final entry, the two opposed horizons, which entails, as I have argued at length in my book, Lessons of Japan, two opposed epistemic models: • The first model is a unitary Truth, situated inside the individualist Self, in his deep centre (it was a male enterprise), a soul or character seen simultaneously as public and private, therefore »in the round«. This fixation on interiority is accompanied by schizophrenic ambiguities toward the body. The fetishized body in bourgeois culture was often demonized as impure; later it evolves to the semi-Fascist or fully Fascist populism of projected identification, where the body is reified into the stars of mass empathy: starting precisely in theatre and other spectacles, and continuing in the mass media, spectator sports, and politics. • The second model is a substantive and lovable body, which is the cognitive site of labour as well as perception, but I shall confine myself to the caress. It is a relationship between two foci - be that people or semiotic aspects, so that the problem of life-likeness or »living truth« does not obtain. Taking some hints from both Japan and Hellas, we can see personal and bodily experience as differently organized here: the subject is an open field of multiple forces which seeks itself in various collectivities. The subject's value, his »face«, is inscribed onto the body, to which belong »his name, his lineage, his origins, his status within the group along with the honours connected to it, the privileges and respect that he may rightfully expect, as well as his personal excellence, all of his qualities and merits [,..]«. 3 3

Jean-Pierre Vernant, »Introduction«, in The Greeks, ed. J.-P. Vernant, tr. C. Lambert and T. Lambert Pagan (Chicago, 1995), pp. 1-21 (p. 18); see also his »L'Individu dans la cite«, in Sur I'individu (Paris, 1987), pp. 20-37.

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Startlingly: only monotheist cultures seem to have invented the interiorized or billiard-ball Self and its ways of understanding and organizing the world. The subject in the sense of an identifiable person or group has existed for millennia before and without the nuclear Self, and it implies, neutrally, other subjects. But the monolithic, and by definition true and good (or in art, beautiful) Self implies a monolithic Another: Platonically - the Other, transcendentally - God. And in a conflictual situation, the fallen god is diabolic. It would follow, first, that all pluralist talk about the Other is still essentially an individualistic allegory; it looks laudably bipolar, but tends to be composed of two monoliths. Second, that this »'interiority' is itself politics and [...] a manifestation of absolute authority«.4 In theatre, there is a clear continuity between the autocrat director a la Stanislavsky and the responsible absolute monarch or indeed (as Brecht rightly protested) the theocrat. I propose to call the body's relation to other bodies, especially the collectivities that shape it, »politics«, and its perceiving of the natural and social universe (even etymologically) »aesthetics«.5 Politics sundered from aisthesis results in tyrannical violence. But the symmetrical refusal to acknowledge the historical dynamics traversing our bodies is its occulted twin with which we have to deal today. For Barthes writing about Japan, situated as he was between the equally contemptible Gaullists and Stalinists, aesthetics sundered from the affairs of the polity may have been an understandable refuge (he would later lucidly acknowledge his quandary in an imaginary conversation with Brecht).6 But without the excuse he may have had, this became a basic and weighty orientation of most shell-shocked »Western« intellectuals; and this was replicated in performances a la Brook and the later Suzuki that »[move] from historiography to aesthetics«.7 Their model of One Inner Truth and One Mythic Way politically means institutionalized mass mangling of bodies: overt or covert, ethnic or class warfare.

The mythical estrangement of Brook's Mahabharata Peter Brook's Mahabharata has been discussed almost to death since its 1985 Avignon premiere. Nonetheless, it remains indispensable for a theoretical discussion that wishes to proceed by testing its positions through historical induction. My strong doubts do not preclude an appreciation of Brook's virtuosity, espe4 5

6 7

Köjin Karatani, Origins of Modern Japanese Literature, tr. and ed. B. de Bary (Durham, 1993), p. 95. I have gone into this at length in »Polity or Disaster: From Individualist Self Toward Personal Valences and Collective Subjects«, Discours social / Social Discourse, vol. 6, nos. 1-2 (1994), pp. 181-210, and »The Subject as a Limit-Zone of Collective Bodies«, Discours social/ Social Discourse, vol. 2, nos. 1-2 (1989), pp. 187-99. Roland Barthes par Roland Barthes (Paris, 1975), p. 57, also 172. David Savran, »Revolution ... History ... Theater ...«, in The Performance of Power, eds. Sue-Ellen Case and Janelle Reinelt (Iowa City, 1991), pp. 41-55 (p. 53).

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cially in his pictorial arrangement of scenes, the clarity of the actors' movement, and the spare but suggestive narrative sweep. However, the better the worse: for me all those evocations of quasi-Indian early royal interiors (arrases, braziers, low wooden tables, hanging chandeliers) or geography and geology (pool and river banks, bamboo, sand and soil) amounted to a pseudo-epic of warrior immediacy around the small campfires, an evocation of a blood-and-soil male bonding that explains the central Gestus of necessary and even sanctified violence towards entire clans or ethnic groups. True, the Pandava protagonists attempt to get their rights without war, but this self-defined »Poetical History of Mankind« shows that the horribly dangerous »pitiless and uncontrollable« warfare is inevitable.8 This holds, as the sage king Yudishthira says, equally for the battlefield and the human heart: war is inevitable in view of both human pride and thirst for justice. To the contrary, the equally great or divine force of sexual love leads to discord, strife and death, as emblematized right at the outset in the death threat for love to Pandu, continued in Arjuna's loss of maleness after refusing the apsara woman, and functioning as a ground-bass [cfOED "ground" 18a] in most fights about the allegiance or outright possession of the women. Finally, the central philosophical or cosmological dialogue between Arjuna and Krishna culminates in the illumination how to act well in the war slaughters that immediately follows. Many critics objected to Brook's »appropriation« of the Indian voice. I see this micropolitical fetish as a red herring. All life is continual appropriation and evacuation, grasping and letting go, of food, oxygen, images, metaphors, terms, concepts, narrative genres or plots. There is no culture without creative stealing. To wave appropriation as an indiscriminate bugaboo seems to me bourgeois anal retentiveness and/or sectarian ressentiment. But, it signals a real neuralgic area: what is proper appropriation outside of the alienating codes of private property and copyright? Are, for instance, a Dogon statue or the Quran or the Christian Bible or the Mahabharata if not a private then a collective property of the creed that believes in it as divine revelation, so that unlicensed appropriators can be chastized in proportion to that grave offence? (As Mussolini said of Gramsci, this brain must be prevented from thinking.) Should we deliver Rushdie to the bloodthirsty clerics, Joyce to the scandalized clergy or Baudelaire to the public prosecutor? No, we should not. But why not? Surely not because hurting people does not matter, and if god and socialism are dead, everything is permitted - so long as the market circulates? Socrates thought the polity had a right to judge him. In other words: what hurt may any of us be expected to bear, even if not grin at? A baby's birth hurts, and so does a senior battered in a city park and a population poisoned by chemical fumes or smog. As my second thesis I propose that what furthers human creativity or productivity should be borne, however painful for All textual quotes of the Mahabharata are from Jean-Claude Carriere, The Mahabharata, tr. P. Brook (New York, 1987); on the theme of warfare in it see Maria Shevtsova, »Interaction-Interpretation«, in Peter Brook and »The Mahabharata«, ed. D. Williams (London/New York, 1991), pp. 206-27 (pp. 210-11).

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anybody (»creativity« is too monotheist a term and »productivity« too capitalist, but I am trying to suggest a collective framework for my caress model). I think any theatre worker may offend somebody's consecrated certainties, if (and only if) it is done with a view to better cognitive understanding of that collective or personal body's position under the stars. Opinions may legitimately differ as to when this is the case. However, as Milton's Areopagitica argues, in case of doubt we should in the domain of signification, for cognitive reasons appropriate to it, err on the side of tolerance. But obversely, offending for purposes of profitable exploitation (e.g., extortion of »art« objects for Northern museums), of vanity, or of class, gender, ethnic, and other supposed superiority is beyond the pale. Thus, a cat may look at a king: nostalgia for protected national markets of culture will get us nowhere today. There is no stringent reason that Brook's performance should deal specifically with India. I am very little impressed by ploys such as serving »authentic Indian food« in the intermissions of Mnouchkine's L'Indiade. Would serving Wiener Schnitzel before a performance of Schnitzler really help in understanding this critic of fake imperial Austrian morality? I think it is pernicious to construct false categories such as a monolithic nation or State as well as a »pre-expressive« global human nature. Even the generous opposition colonizer/colonized soon reaches the limits of its yield. Epistemologically, as Anuradha Kapur has remarked writing about the Ramlila, »several possible voices«, including prominently those of doubt and desecration as well as of certainty and consecration, are to be opposed to »a single, essentially authentic voice«, that mystification of conservatives and temptation of fascinated foreign visitors: power in both the world system's centre and in the periphery states is internally contradictory, and it will not do to ignore the class, gender, race and other hierarchies within each. As to the imperial countries of the North-West, do not most of us come from them and yet attempt to be critical of that hegemony? As to the countries of the South or East: did not the right-wing Indian government endorse, propagandize and bounteously finance Brook's production although it spent years touring the world without coming to India? »'The Orient' [can] be manufactured in India itself«, Bharucha says cogently.9 It follows that, in our theoretical appropriation, the proper terminological horizon is not that of possessions taken from an allegorical monad, a private Self or Other, but one of bodily pragmatics, a relational dyad. Let us then deal with Brook's production of the Mahabharata on its intrinsic merits. It is to my mind overtly metaphysical and covertly political, and in both cases unacceptably such. It is metaphysical in presenting the French, US or The quotes in this paragraph are from: Anuradha Kapur, »Thinking about Tradition«, Journal of Arts and Ideas, no. 16 (1988), pp. 5-32 (p. 6); Sue-Ellen Case, »The Eurocolonial Reception of Sanskrit Poetics«, in Case and Reinelt, The Performance of Power, pp. 111-27 (p. 124; Case is here following Spivak); Key Chow, Writing Diaspora (Bloomington, 1993), p. 13; and Rustom Bharucha, »Somebody's Other«, in The Intercultural Performance Reader, ed. Patrice Pavis (London/New York, 1996), pp. 196-212 (pp. 198-99, but see the whole essay).

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Japanese audience with a picture of human relationships which Patrice Pavis, no doubt echoing Brook's often-stated intention, calls »a vision of rural India, at once eternal and contemporary« with a »mythical and >atmospheric< readability« - and of course no mention of such profane matters as caste. Brook always wished »to articulate a universal art, that transcends narrow nationalism in its attempt to achieve human essence«. This has led to memorable performances as well as to ghastly errors such as Orghast. So when in 1987 he formulates the scenic ideal of his Mahabharata, it is: »At this absolute and pregnant moment [...] geography and history cease to exist«. Carlson has scathingly commented on »[the illusory nature of] the direct, culturally unmediated experience Brook posits for the Mahabharata«. The claim to aesthetic universalizing, which pretends to undercut all historical shaping of people's living together, reduces it to the lowest common denominator of high bourgeois post-Freudian drives of Eros and Thanatos, with Death clearly winning over everything except the aesthetic absolute moment. All the »epical« agitations of the plot are constructed, in direct opposition to the Brechtian narration employed, to oscillate between two aspects of a mythically unchanging human essence. On the one hand, there is the monumental grandeur of non-reified, face-to-face human relationships, characteristic of European pictures of »hard primitivism«. On the other hand, there is the awful but somehow tragically comforting sublimity of equally non-reified mass combat, tamed by a mish-mash of Asian and European theatre conventions of abstraction. These two poles are special cases of what Pavis has identified as the Euro-American theatre's search for rejuvenation through both »foreign sensuality [and] coded abstraction«.10 My third thesis for this paper is that these two poles embrace an illusory plenitude of being, well-known from Orientalist approaches to Japanese semiotics or precisely to Sanskrit, which -was from German Idealism onwards claimed for the particularly pernicious construction of Aryan linguistics as a religious value. I would call this approach »mythical estrangement«.

A brighter alternative: Critical estrangement and a bipolar model The Mahabharata example is particularly apposite since Brook enlists for his purpose the quite proper revulsion from both the solipsistic Self and the disenchanted world. Our best traditions, from the Athenian polity, the Hebrew prophets and Jesus of Nazareth to the Renaissance, Enlightenment and »really existing« socialism, may have contributed to, and certainly seem to have led 10

The quotes in this paragraph are from: Patrice Pavis, Theatre at the Crossroads of Culture, tr. L. Kruger (London and New York, 1992), p. 187 and 205; Peter Brook, »The Complete Truth is Global«, New York Times, 20 January 1974, II, p. 3; Marvin Carlson, »Brook and Mnouchkine: Passages to India?« in Pavis, The Intercultural Performance Reader, pp. 79-92 (p. 88); Brook's interview in Richard Schechner et al., »Talking with Peter Brook«, The Drama Review, vol. 30, no .1 (1986), pp. 54-71 (p. 55); Pavis, Theatre at the Crossroads of Culture, p. 211.

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straight into, the present intolerable dead end. This has resulted in a true return of the repressed: »Dreamily entering upon a sunken East and conjuring up an Asian antiquity as normative cultural model for present-day life, the West searches in an alien past for the possibilities of its own future«. The Utopian countries or spacetimes are estranging mirrors for us. This implies that the West by now »cannot find in the holy writings of the Judeo-Christian tradition the concepts that our times need for a competent self-understanding«, that the »double commitment to self-determination and high technology seems to have left us with a global mess«, and that therefore the »Eastern turn [...] puts into play no less than a world-cultural alternative, which remains such even when the real contemporary East has been modernized to non-recognizability [...]«.n True, mythologists of the »Eastern turn« a la Brook wilfully forget - and buy into - that most pre-capitalist modes of production entailed total murderous despotism over the great majority of »lower« classes, genders, castes and so forth, while all the modes, including tribal societies, entailed grave physical disadvantages (toil, short life-span, etc.): I should not like to have lived before the Enlightenment. Nonetheless, today we may well focus on the crucial plenitude of being we lack, what Schechner in 1970 articulated as the yearnings for wholeness, process, concreteness and »truth through participation«.12 For, in those societies the labour of the individual was not abstracted into a capitalized »universal equivalent«, so that in Marx's famous »Asiatic mode«: [t]he communal system on which this mode of production is based prevents the labour of the individual from becoming private labour and his product the private product of a separated individual; it causes individual labour to appear rather as a direct function of a member of the social organization.13

I think it is from traces and exfoliations of this »direct functioning« within a transparent - if unacceptably hierarchical - society that there springs forth the sensual and epistemic fascination registered by Sloterdijk and also Brook. For example, the pragmatic phenomenalism of East Asian cosmology and politics is a stance which can in the West only be found within art (and Brook significantly shunned it in favour of Indian or better Orientalist transcendentality). Alas, in individualist fiction, from the mendacious Loti and his Madame Butterfly on, the sensuality and fascination is usually translated into the sentimental code, the only bourgeois discourse available for it. But Modernist painters seem to have had more success with cognitive appropriations, and so have some theatre people from Meyerhold, through Yeats and Brecht, to the present. 11 12 13

All quotes in this paragraph are from Peter Sloterdijk, Eurotaoismus (Frankfurt/M., 1989), pp. 82, 86 and 87-9. All unacknowledged translations in the text are mine. Richard Schechner, Performance Theory (New York and London, 1994 [1st edn 1977]), pp. 39-40. Karl Marx, A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (London, 1971), pp. 33-4.

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My fourth (and final) thesis here is that the alternative pole of practising interculturalism is to doubt a presumed »Western« universal - but in fact artefact of bourgeois or capitalist hegemony (therefore often eagerly imitated by subservient or go-getting Easterners) - with help of a non-NATO instance that puts it into crisis or falsifies it. The reason for it is primarily to understand, through the estranging (verfremdend) dream and carny mirror of strangers, how we might and should better live. We could also call it cross-pollination or grafting, which produces something that differs from both sources, a new ethnically impure bastard. To vary the »from Meyerhold to Mnouchkine« canon, I shall use my interest in mugen no for falsifying the theory of ubiquitous dramatic conflict. I wanted also to discuss John Arden's and Margaretta D'Arcy's refunctioning of the Chhau masked dance theatre in The Island of the Mighty for their new look at our rationalism and patriarchy-matriarchy opposition, but I can only say here that theirs is an exemplary non-exploitative and cognitive use of the same source abused, as we know, by Brook.14 Thus, the so-called »Phantasmal No« and its splendid and incontrovertible example can reveal, besides the ubiquitous model of conflict, the existence and some uses of the equally valid model of revelation. In it, plays are organized around the »effect of initiation into a true awareness of something«, which is for our civilization usually confined to lyrical poems. No doubt, contrast - that is, non-antagonistic opposition - remains inevitable for stage narration. But it does not always have to be reduced to the monotheist fixation on adversariness, conflict defined as »the endeavour to carry out one's will against an opposing other will«, on the model of battles between armies. For me, any stage story must have one or more agents confronted with social and cosmic time and value horizons; it then may, but does not necessarily have to, have a collision with other personalized agencies.15 For audiences with non-competitive presuppositions this might well be, for example, progression from the dwindling of life's passions to the desolation of ataraxic enlightenment - as in Beckett; or an unfolding of the destined succession of historical eons as well as its price in suffering - as in Prometheus Bound; or Zeami's mugen no where the audience is led to passionately understand both the bright and the dark revelation - the desolation of life's dark clinging passions in most Warrior and Women's No, and the celebration of the community's evergreen renewal in Deity No. As all these examples might argue, this can produce a semiotic articulation of the intertwining of celebration and desolation, a passionate meditation where our distinctions of religion, politics and ethics do not quite apply. Although functionally »nested« within claims 14

15

For Arden and D'Arcy see Javed Malick, Toward a Theater of the Oppressed: The Dramaturgy of John Arden (Ann Arbor/Ml, 1995), pp. 131-2, 139-83 and 194-5; and for Brook's abuse of the Chhau encounter see Philip Zarrilli [, et al.], »The Aftermath: When Peter Brook Came to India«, The Drama Review, vol. 30, no. 1 (1986), pp. 92-100, and Schechner's comment in Performance Theory, pp. 134-36. My argument is fully developed in Suvin, Lessons of Japan, ch. 4, which also identifies the two other quotes in this paragraph, by Paul Goodman and Max Weber.

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to high significance, often to sacredness, it is as often radically dubious of ruling pieties: I read Zeami as the bad conscience of the shogunal warrior class. Usually, such art springs up at the crossroads of Raymond Williams's nostalgic and oppositional structures of feeling as different from the hegemonic one. Crucially for my argument, the revelation model recognizes the existence of strife but deals with it by what I believe is not catharsis but understanding sympathy. Let me mention here only the difference between the No's much more palpable »ghost« warriors reactualizing the battles of their past existence in order to reveal their suffering, and the Senecan vengeful ghost tradition of, say, the final carnage in Hamlet. Beckett can then be read as an atheist Mystery-play, the painfully total absence of community, the revelation that there is only zero to reveal; while all socialist and anarchist theatre is either embattled, political deconstruction (Dada, Piscator) or an attempt to articulate a new communal solidarity (»Socialist Realism«), with the best people ambiguously stretched between these poles (Meyerhold, Brecht). As you see, meditating on the lessons of, for example, Zeami might be of crucial help to understand our own civilization's supposed aberrancies, for example the limits of the conflict paradigm, unable to encompass fully Aeschylus or Brecht or Beckett or (once we are alerted to this alternative of hermeneutic mystery) so many other performance examples. Conflict is then itself revealed as a historically extremely important civilizational choice rather than inevitability, fit for a society which is »the battleground of the individual interests of each against all«,16 and whose characteristic games are zero sum ones, for example, football or poker. Conflict flows out of the deep structure of monotheistic (God vs. Devil, scapegoating) Euro-American social practices, including our cultural apparati and speech genres. In all our handbooks and theories of drama and of theatre performance (at least up to the mid-1980s), conflict is an undisputed and critically unexamined founding presupposition. I would trust, then, that the strange and different relationships to be found in the »Orient« can have exactly the opposite effect from that described by Said: not the reaffirmation but the defamiliarization, a Brechtian decentering17 of our familiar norms and mythical identities: as a hypothesis, a proposal for dialogue - and perhaps even caress. To my mind Brook is so important because he co-opts many crucial non-individualist lessons of body syntax from the periphery of the world system for an updating of Liberalism to fit the passage from individualism to corporativism. He definitely does not put into radical doubt the new ruling pieties, but only (as most Artaudians) free-market humanism. Indeed I read his perennial »moral neutrality«18 as enabling him for a master of ceremonies to the new despotic hegemony 16 17 18

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Phänomenologie des Geistes. Sämtliche Werke, vol. 2, ed. J. Hoffmeister (Leipzig, 1949), p. 146; this is where Marx's critique starts. See Louis Althusser, »Le >Piccolopilgrimage< theatre« with quasi-ritual overtones,29 beginning with Wagner's Bayreuth that if not globalized then continentalized the splintered Central-European cultures into one Teutonic mega-myth, still ambiguously anti-capitalist. While I doubt the postwar leisure massification 25 26 27 28

29

Naoki Sakai, »Modernity and Its Critique«, South Atlantic Quarterly, vol. 87, no. 3 (1988), pp. 475-504 (p. 477 and passim). Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory (London, 1992), p. 238; see also Amilcar Cabral, Return to the Source (New York, 1973), pp. 51-52. Bharucha, »Somebody's Other«, p. 199Data about corporate support are from Bharucha, »Somebody's Other«, p. 199 and Theatre and the World, p. 118, and those about the quantitative dimensions from »The World Tour: Logistics and Economics« in Williams, ed., Peter Brook and »The Mahabharata«, pp. 289-311. Carlson, »Brook and Mnouchkine: Passages to India?«, pp. 85ff.

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of theatre and other festivals can be explained in any simple way, there is little doubt that their post-1968, postmodern turn is to the Right, like Wagner after 1848. But Brook has done the modern culture-vulture pilgrimage sites one better by personally - as an institutionalized person or personalized institution - becoming an ambulant site. In this respect too, Brook's institutional performance is exemplary (though a number of other names could be mentioned, e.g., Tadashi Suzuki). A crucial matter I could not enter upon here would be just who is the audience for this intercontinental pilgrimage theatre, who is it for? Here too a latterday Wagner, totalizing the heterogenous elements, Brook has always wished to meld his spectators into a unified whole, a symmetrical obverse of Piscator's splitting the audience along class-interest fault-lines. Is this whole Miyoshi's new »transnational class of professionals who can live and travel globally«, accumulating material and symbolic capital »at the site where managers and technicians carry out research and development, not where the corporations or manufactured goods originate«? [B]rand names command recognition and attraction [...]. Cultural eccentricities are to be avoided, if not banned altogether. National history and culture are not to intrude or not to be asserted oppositionally or even dialectically. They are merely variants of one »universal« - as in a giant theme park or shopping mall. Culture will be kept to museums, and the museums, exhibitions, and theatrical performances will be swiftly appropriated by tourism and other forms of commercialism [...] [which] are huge transnational industries by themselves.30

Might a new internationalism of the Right, what he calls »the global truth«, perhaps be brilliantly adumbrated in Brook's brilliant performance? And then, who are our classes and our writing finally for?

Note My warm thanks go to the staff of the Institutes for Theatre Studies both at the Humboldt Universität and the Freie Universität Berlin, in particular to Professor Erika Fischer-Lichte, without whose library and video help this article would not have been possible. This article was also rendered possible by a Humboldt Foundation award for research in Europe.

30

Masao Miyoshi, »A Borderless World?«, Critical Inquiry, vol. 19, no. 4 (1993), pp. 726-51 (pp. 742, 745 and 747).

Maria Shevtsova Sociocultural Performance Analysis

Abstract Analysis of performances is an important component of the sociology of the theatre, which continues to be viewed in mainstream theatre studies as essentially a matter of audience reception and dramaturgical theories of society. These highly inadequate assumptions are placed critically in order to show that performance analysis in the framework of the sociology of the theatre - here termed sociocultural analysis - deals with works of the theatre, that is, with the art works central to the discipline. The problematical issue of the interrelationship between a work and its context is examined via the idea that context is not a matter of mere background, or of a dualistic split between society and theatre art, but is integral to the theatrical processes that distinguish one type of theatre-making from another. The argument is based notably on the cultural theories of Bourdieu, Goldmann and Bastide and on a theory of sociocultural semiosis developed from the writings of Bakhtin. Productions by Robert Wilson, Ariane Mnouchkine and Lev Dodin provide examples as to how sociocultural semioses operate in works and contexts simultaneously.

The issues bound up with sociocultural analysis belong to the problematics of the sociology of the theatre. The various misconceptions about this area of research cannot be discussed here, although several points must be clarified. First, the sociology of the theatre is not concerned exclusively with the study of audiences, nor does it by definition always involve number-crunching and file-filling positivistic, or scientistic, methodologies. This means that analysis of performance from within a sociological perspective (and what is sociological is also cultural) is not automatically - or even secondarily - obliged to deal with audience composition and profiles, even though semiotic processes in a performance rely on some kind of understanding from some kind of spectators. Thus cognitive, unconscious, symbolic, emotional and other kinds of values, which are integral to the lives of spectators, circulate between the latter and performers in performance. Second, the idea that a sociological approach to performance is defined by its reference to dramaturgical theories of society is woefully anachronistic. (»Dramaturgical«, that is, when society is conceived by analogy with the theatre.) Social interaction is not solely, nor even primarily, a matter of role-playing, role-interchange and ceremonial display and artifice, as numerous theories other than these anaological ones have postulated, with or without consequent supporting empirical investigation.1 1

The role-playing thesis, as regards sociology, was formulated by Erving Goffman in the 1950s (primarily in The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life [New York, 1959])

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The third point of clarification concerns the replacement of the term »sociology« - no doubt thought to refer to a narrow, restrictive field (small wonder, if sociology is erroneously reduced to mere statistics or mere role-playing!) - by that of »social sciences«, which, to all appearances, promises to have amplitude as well as the requisite (scientific) rigour for serious learning. Thus researchers in the theatre and performing arts have found a call upon the general »social sciences« more palatable, possibly because, in practice, this category has essentially turned out to refer to an anthropologist's anthropology of »non-Western« behaviours codified as rites and rituals. The latter were taken as constituting archaic, authentic »performance« which became, by degrees, a principal defining characteristic of »non-Western« - generally non-industrial, but so-called developing societies. Moreover, the rites-and-rituals notion of performance applied to »nonWestern« societies could be expanded effortlessly to »performance« perceived as any form of daily-life behaviour in »Western« societies - all this, meanwhile, being easily assimilable to theatre studies, since the notion of performance is inherent in all acts of theatre. Yet, irrespective of the ubiquitous nature of the term »performance« - and, indeed, even because of it - there is no absolute reason for linking this term irrevocably to a ritual-daily-behaviour anthropology. In other words, sociocultural analysis can certainly exist outside such a framework and still speak of »performance«. By the same token, it can also be sociological without drifting into »performancism«, on the one hand, or reverting to sociologism - numerical/quantitative or analogical/dramaturgical - on the other.2

The question of context The fundamental problem of sociocultural performance analysis concerns the relationship between performances and the sociocultural contexts in which they are generated. To say this is by no means to propose a dualistic system, with performances and contexts in separate categories. On the contrary, contexts are present in performances: performances, while happening, are processes of performing contexts, since the latter are present in them not only in their subject matter - implicit, explicit, subtextual, supratextual, parallel or imbricated - but and, alas, is taken even now - when this type of sociology has been well and truly superseded, even discredited - as the principal, if not sole, model for discussing theatre in sociological perspective. Thus see the disappointing chapter »Sociological and psychological approaches« by Marvin Carlson in his Performance: A Critical Introduction (London, 1996), pp. 34-55. For a broader view of the points raised here critically see my »The Sociology of the Theatre, Part Two: Theoretical Achievements«, New Theatre Quarterly, vol. 5 (1989), pp. 180-194. Specifically for performance see Part Three of this article, vol. 5 (1989), pp. 282-300. For a currently expanding concept of performance, see Performance and Cultural Politics, ed. Elin Diamond (London, 1996) and especially Diamond's introduction, pp. 1-12.

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in the very way that they are done. A theoretical reformulation of the issue, which foregrounds the gerund »performing«, also attributes a proactive, »doing« role to sociocultural contexts of the kind that is incipient in the concept of performance itself. This means that contexts are not to be understood as mere receptacles for this or that piece of work. Rather, they are the site of multiple, crisscross actions brought about by various people in a definable time and place. Agents of action (or social agents, as the term goes in sociology), time and place are indispensable for the very existence of societies and cultures, let alone to any discourse on them. Furthermore, this proactive sociocultural dynamic intersects and flows into the dynamics of performance (and vice versa, since there is no need to give priority to contexts) thereby creating an interactive, dialogical and dialectical relationship between them. It is this relationship that is at issue here. Let us take a few steps back to see what is embedded in these remarks. Among them are unmistakable intertextual allusions, »dialogical« standing to Bakhtin as »dialectical« does to Marx. Although these terms are well known, it is useful to look at them again. »Dialogical« in Bakhtin refers to the interchange between speakers and interlocutors in an ongoing, two-way process.3 It bears no resemblance to the Jakobson-inspired and structuralist-propagated communications model, where a one-way arrow goes from sender-to-message-to-receiver. Alas, this is also the basis of the Rezeptionsästhetik elaborated by Hans-Robert Jauss and Wolfgang Iser, which really functions according to an »ideal type« in the manner of Max Weber and blocks our understanding of the interaction - and not static receiver-reception - that occurs between performers, performances and spectators. Furthermore, reception theory brings the state of play to a stalemate by positing the »reader«, who in theatre/performance studies perforce becomes the »spectator«, as a single, homogeneous One - the Weberian »ideal type« again. This eliminates perspective; that is, not only the perspective from which spectators interact with performances, but also the perspective from within which performances are made. Indeed, the whole question of sociocultural contexts is predicated on the coexistence of multiple perspectives, in terms of which multiple social groups operate in any society at any given time. The idea that multiple perspectives are involved in verbal sign processes or semioses is, of course, axiomatic in Bakhtin. In other words, speakers-interlocutors speak-reply according to who they are, where they are and why they are there. All this, together with their social relation to each other and the interests, 3

I am drawing here, as in all subsequent references to Bakhtin, to the whole corpus of his work. However, the term »dialogical« is possibly most thoroughly examined and concretized in »Discourse in the Novel«, in The Dialogical Imagination, ed. Michael Holquist (Austin, 1981), pp. 259-422. My concept of sociocultural sign was inspired by this text as well as by Marxism and the Philosophy of Language (Cambridge/MA, 1986). The notion of »chronotope«, which I develop in respect of the theatre and performance, areas eloquently ignored by Bakhtin, is to be found in »Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the Novel«, in Holquist, The Dialogical Imagination, pp. 84-258.

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values and sentiments at stake in their encounter, determines the kind and use of »speech genre«, as Bakhtin succinctly defines his complex argument. Yet Bakhtin's notion of dialogical semiosis, to which all the foregoing factors belong, provides far more than a communications model. It is a theory of action, since no semiosis is possible without actors, that is, without those who make and do things in given situations in time-space or chronotopes. (»Process« in Bakhtin always connotes something being done, something happening - action.) It matters little that he concentrates on verbal signs and novels. What matters is how Bakhtin's emphasis on making and doing is appropriate for the multifarious, polyvalent - Bakhtin would say heteroglossic and polyphonic - practice which we term performance, whether we mean theatre, performance art or any genre hybrid, multimedia, »event«, or still unnamed »genre« - that is performed. It need not be stressed that performance, however identified, is not even remotely, as a famous Prince once remarked, just a matter of »words«. Its non-verbal sign-making - whether made by the body (mimicry, movement, gestures), having effect on it (light, shadows), or worn (make-up, head-gear, costumes), and so on - is crucial for pleasure, impact, sense and meaning. The point is that Bakhtin's theory shows particularly clearly how signs work in general. Consequently, his principles for dialogics can be adjusted for the logic of performance, its logic lying in its plethora of different types of sign-making made collectively by subjects. The principle of interchange is especially powerful in that it focuses on the way performance sign processes affect each other and take meaning from each other, as gestures might from proxemics, for example, or rhythm from light. Two major methodological consequences follow from this, whether performance analysis is purely formal, or sociocultural, or whatever the approach. The first involves taking the show or spectacle as a composite whole rather than as a conglomerate of separate, parallel »systems«, discrete units, or segments and similar compartments favoured by the scientistic semiotics of the 1970s (although its bad habits still survive today). This is essential since, in addition to being intermeshed, performance semioses have duration: they not only last during the course of performance, but are also modified while they last. The second methodological consequence has to do with the living quality of performance. When a performance is perceived as a dialogical entity, it is grasped as a physical, emotional and cognitive energy in ebb and flow rather than as a reified, zombified thing. One of the greatest inadequacies of rigorously semiotic Schemas has been their inability to conceive of, and hence to grasp analytically, this entirety, this whole of energy. As a safeguard against any misunderstandings, it should be noted that my terms »whole« and »entirety« by no means imply that performances must subscribe to an aesthetics of »totality« in order to qualify as performances. Nor do they advocate a totalizing or »closed« critical method. To do any of these would mean eliminating from discussion numerous contemporary works, whose compositional impetus and figuration is fragmentation, dissociation, dissonance, dislocation, inconclusiveness - in short, anything but the coherence and unity which come with concepts of totality. Nevertheless, even such works - call them

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»postmodern« or »libidinal«, to stay in tune with Jean-Fra^ois Lyotard - even such works have some sort of dynamic going from some sort of start to some sort of finish.4 Which is why they are not excluded by the notions of performance »whole« or »entirety« as understood here. The argument throws up another problem, which concerns reconstitution after the event. A performance's energy is experienced in the immediate present. How can analysis, which comes afterwards, convey the living quality of performance? Analysis cannot help but lose a great deal of it, especially as analysing entails putting into order what was felt and thought spontaneously. In this loss of immediacy lies the difference noted by Pierre Bourdieu for sociology when he distinguishes between sociologie spontanoe and sociologie savante? The spontaneous variety observes without premeditation. Thus it draws on surface appearances, banalities and doxa of one kind and another. Think of Pishchick's spontaneous sociology in The Cherry Orchard when he asks Ranyevskaya whether she ate frogs in Paris. She deflates it brilliantly by replying that she ate crocodiles there. Learned or academic sociology, on the other hand, constructs from observations according to institutionalized procedures. We could borrow Bourdieu's distinction and speak of spontaneous performance analysis, which is our interaction during a performance, and learned analysis, which is a formalized account of what we have observed, felt, thought and questioned during the performance and refined from it since it happened. The purpose, we might say, is to understand and explain it all better. On a less rational plane, the purpose might be to absorb it corporally and store it in emotional memory as part of our inner repertoire of life with ourselves and others. Life with others is social life, where the term »dialectical« finds its place. The concept is a contentious one, although it may be said to be at its clearest when Marx demonstrates how to use it in the Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte. Marx's argument shows it to mean the mutual dependence of different spheres of activity in society. We call them politics, economics, religion, art and more. A diluted version of the idea of interlocked causes and repercussions is to be found in the financiers' adage about Chicago: »When Chicago sneezes, the rest of the world catches a cold« (from which, dialectically, Chicago - or replace it by Wall Street - should get a massive flu, which it does, of course, in the guise of capital). The idea in its concentrated form has played an immense part in Marxism's debate with European dualism where, among a whole string of dichotomies starting from the opposition between mind and body, creativity is opposed to society. Dualism appears in theatre historiography and dramaturgy as a split between foreground and background, the latter being a backdrop to what is put up front as See Discours, figure (Paris, 1971), Economic libidinale (Paris, 1974) and La Condition postmoderne (Paris, 1979). In (co-authored with Jean-Claude Passeron and Jean-Claude Chamboredon) Le Metier de sociologue (Paris, 1968), pp. 5-20.

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a matter of most importance. This particular dualism is essentially a variant of the text-versus-context dispute between champions of the intrinsic value and autonomy of aesthetics and those who seek its extrinsic driving force and significance. Still others who are unsatisfied with - in their view - an elitist or otherwise undemocratic distinction between aesthetics (which produces »art«) and plain, unadorned »making« (which produces »popular culture«) reject the category of aesthetics altogether. Yet even here the notion of text redefined as art is pitted against the context of ordinary achievement, which enters the zone of widely spread, easily accessible, everyday-life - hence also popular - culture. A similar text/context division occurs in Marxist studies in the mirror theory by which art is thought to reflect society. The impetus behind this theory comes from questions asking how the symbolic forms that constitute culture are related to the material conditions of their production and to socioeconomic organization overall. These questions are at the heart of the debate concerning the relationship between the base (or infrastructure) and the superstructure of society, which had become especially virulent during the 1950s and continued to be so until the 1970s. Its focus for critics of »mechanistic Marxism« was the dichotomy imposed by the latter on these terms and which had succeeded in ignoring Marx's emphasis on the reciprocal relations between them. The upshot of the manoeuvre was that the products of the intellect and the imagination, which were said to belong to the superstructure, were defined as nothing more than direct representations of an economic state of affairs, that is, of the base understood as purely economic instrumentalism. None of it might have mattered much for us today, in these times of so-called postmodern scepticism about ideologies, if the emerging »new« disciplines that are the sociologies of literature, theatre, painting, architecture and music, had not been caught up in the fray as, indeed, was necessary given their central preoccupation with art culture as a social practice. Moreover, their focus on the social dimension of aesthetic construction was de rigueur, given that these »new« sociologies were part of a desire to cross-pollinate the social sciences and the humanities - the same upsurge, in fact, that saw the move to combine the social sciences and performance. Those working in a Marxian framework re-interrogated the mirror theory so as to do away with its crude determinism and rediscover how, paraphrasing Raymond Williams, »base was in superstructure« and not outside of it.6 The preposition »in« also repositioned the superstructure, allowing it to be rooted well and truly in the base. It was possible, then, for Williams to support theoretically his empirically-deduced insight that literature - his focus, even when »drama« - was not merely associated with society, but was shaped by it through and through. The seminal figure in this reevaluation is, of course, Lucien Goldmann, to whom Williams, by his own account, is indebted. Goldmann's theory of homologous structures - to take a short-cut across his long trajectory - attempts to See Problems in Materialism and Culture (London, 1980), pp. 3-49.

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explain how and why what he calls »cultural creation« is coterminous with, and on a par with, activities that are socioeconomically and politically driven, as was the case, he argues, for Racine's plays.7 These different areas (Goldmann's »structures«) are linked, differently for different social groups and classes, by the worldview peculiar to each group. World-view, in other words, is both a perspective and a mediating force. It is expressed in literary works - Racine's drama - where, although of a different order from everyday life - possibly to be described as a transposition by fantasy - it is nevertheless consistent with the world-view that guides, not necessarily consciously, the daily life of the people in question. (For Racine, it was the extremist fraction of Jansenists.) Moreover, world-view is a transindividual phenomenon precisely because it is shared. A similar stress on shared values is evident in Bakhtin's argument that all signs carry the values of their users, which is why they have particular resonance for this, rather than that, group of users in the heterogeneous composition of societies. In Goldmann, heterogeneity is explained with reference to class conflict. Bakhtin's perspective is not the same, although metaphors of conflict are so strong in his writings that they permeate his discussions about signs and discourses where, he maintains, viewpoints clash down to the smallest sign. All this belongs to the problematics of sociocultural analysis, especially where the relationship between performance and context is concerned. Bakhtin indicates how we can deal with this particular problem semiotically: signs, by virtue of their continuous circulation, are inside (performance) and outside (context) at one and the same time. The task of analysis is to specify how, say, an actor's gait or hand movements are recognizable because they recall, even if imprecisely, gaits or hands that we have observed elsewhere, outside the performance, as it were, in the streets. This »elsewhere« is what will place, situate and help us to interpret accurately the particular kind of gesticulation being performed. It is also a cultural »elsewhere«. Hence my consistent reference to sociocultural signs, terminology that does not appear in Bakhtin even though his entire corpus resonates with the idea that social actions diversify into plural cultures. The merger between the terms also indicates my position in the long argument between ethnologists about whether cultures may be studied independently of social relations, Roger Bastide, notably among others, claiming that they may not.8 In fact, Bastide's theses on acculturation open the way to understanding how we interFor Williams's debt to Goldmann, including a general summary of this debate from Williams's standpoint see »Literature and Sociology: In memory of Lucien Goldmann«, New Left Review, no. 67 (1971), pp. 3-18. For Goldmann's discussion of mechanistic Marxism and the necessity of dialetical Marxism, see Sciences humaines et philosophic (Paris, 1952). For his study of Racine (together with Pascal), see Le Dieu cache (Paris, 1956). Bastide's seminal texts on these questions may be taken to be »Problemes de l'entrecroisement des civilisations et de leurs oeuvres«, in Tratte de sociologie, ed. Georges Gurvitch (Paris, I960), pp. 315-30; »Acculturation«, in Encyclopaedia Universalis, vol. 1, (Paris, 1968), pp. 102-7; Anthropologie appliquee (Paris, 1971).

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nalize information in and through social relations, and channel action and perception accordingly. This not to say that our apperception of signs in a performance is highly conscious. We generally recognize them by osmosis, by »flair« and intuition, which analysis subsequently articulates.

Context by allusion: Robert Wilson Our recognition of signs is not necessarily transparent. Robert Wilson's CIVILwarS is a case in point. The work, originally planned in six sections and which remains unfinished, has four sections that were performed separately in Rotterdam, Köln, Rome and Minneapolis, and might be said to be Wilson's epic on the horrors of modern history. Cross-references between them, largely visual ones, loosely link the sections together. Linkage, though, is optional in that there is no apparent continuity between the sections. The Köln Section (1984) is full of visual allusions to the American Civil War, the wars of the Prussian King Frederick I and the belle epoque on the brink of the First World War. Soldiers in Dixie grey are juxtaposed against images of elegantly dressed women, here a reference to Abraham Lincoln's wife, there to a European aristocrat, somewhere else, in the shape of a black woman, to slavery. Bears and eagles wander in and out. They are both startling, surrealistic presences and symbols of imperial power, European as well as American. The eagles, needless to say, are syncretic

Debussy's Pelleas et Melisande, dir. Robert Wilson, at Opera de Paris, February 1997, with Jose van Dam as Golo and Suzanne Mentzer as Melisande

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images. A gigantic puppet of Lincoln appears towards the end in what, through light, colour and expansive space - these in respect of a whole range of cumulative semioses - suggests the bloody fields of Gettysburg. The puppet is more of an abstraction than an iconic representation of Lincoln; its long, lean silhouette providing a vertical line for the architectural planes of the piece. Although an aestheticized performance sign, and thus »inside« the performance, it is perfectly comprehensible because it dialogically connects with history. Its line is clear from the myriad of representations of Lincoln seen by some - many - spectators »elsewhere«. In addition, it conjures up a host of contradictory social evaluations that have been grafted on to Lincoln's image. The script, at this juncture, is a delirium of fragments from the Bible, Shakespeare and other sources that are familiar to the ear, though not always easy to pin down. Lear's »Howl« speech over Cordelia's body pierces through the babble in the dispersed, emptied-out space - the blasted heath - of wars. These are but a few details from a rich, ludic mosaic that, while appealing strongly to the senses, feels quite enigmatic. Many of them seem to draw on Wilson's interior repertoire, but their echo for him is not made explicit for spectators. Hence their apparent arbitrariness. And yet, for all their aporia, which invite spectators to fill the gaps as they will, they rely on communicability, not only of sensation, but also of meaning: they are not, in fact, arbitrarily put together. The difficulty lies in the fact that sense is established by allusion; that the whole work is a process of contextualization by allusion and that if you miss it, you miss it. This was brought home when the Köln section was performed in the United States: The American Repertory Theatre News published what it thought was requisite historical background for the benefit of audiences, especially as regards Europe. It was surely helpful on a cognitive level, but was it necessary? Marvin Carlson would say that the newsletter was part of the semiotics of the event, »event« extending his idea of performance.9 I would say that it was para-performance, or even a case of performativity.10 Furthermore, it made the show literal, whereas the great beauty of the work, as of all of Wilson's productions, lies in its metaphorical replacements and displacements. These metaphorical semioses do the necessary contextualizing. They do so, moreover, from a critical perspective, much like the tremendous, four-and-a-half hours' worth of Einstein on the Beach (1976). This atomic opera for an atomic future has mathematical symbols in a flashing spaceship, the former reiterated through Philip Glass's music, and a chorus repetitively singing numbers and colliding semiotically with a steam engine that appears three times and inches its way eternally across the back of the stage. The piece also features a long court room scene, which might well be 9 10

Theatre Semiotics (Bloomington/IN, 1990), pp. 41-55. For an attempt to distinguish betweeen »performance« and »performativity« see Diamond, Performance and Cultural Politics, pp. 4-5. See also Performance and Performativity, ed. Andrew Parker and Eve Kosofky Sedgwick (New York, 1995) and especially the editors' introduction, pp. 1-18.

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the trial of Einstein, who is seen playing forever on his violin downstage. It helps to know that Einstein facilitated the discovery of the atom bomb. It helps to know that he played the violin. Yet you could argue that it hardly matters if you miss the precise contexualization, since there is so much else to extract from the show. What you miss, as in the CIVILwarS, are its social, and even political implications, and the piquant contradictions of a hybrid genre that is not half as innocently aesthetic as it looks. After all, Wilson is not just a pretty face! This raises the issue of how analysis of performance semioses might best do its dialectical work with empirical historical research, whether in the oscillatory and spiral-like manner proposed by Goldmann, or any other suitable way. It is the empirical research, after the performance, that gives maximum resonance to the multilayered contextualization, by association as well as allusion, of the CIVILwarS. Yet this empirical dimension must include what Bourdieu calls the champs of production, that is to say, for our discussion, the range of performance practices employed during a designated period of time.11 I have described Wilson's output as hybrid this because it merges performance art, installation, opera, dance, ritual and more, from contemporary practices, to form his own genre sui generis. Its hybridity throws into relief its overlap with American modern dance from the 1960s to the 1990s - Balanchine, Nikolais, Cunningham and Lucinda Childs, who performed in the original version of Einstein, and choreographed for, and performed in, its 1984 revival at the Brooklyn Academy of Music as well as during its 1992 world tour. And this dance penetrates Wilson's treatment of classical opera, perhaps the least expected ground for it. The hieratic shapes he created for Debussy's Pelleas andMelisande (1997), to take a very recent example, are shot through with it, dance innuendoes making the stage work seem all the more mysterious because they look out of place. Our ability to situate Pelleas in modern dance solves some of the riddles it poses, and by Wilson's hybridized work in general - opera, verse, prose or silence, whether it concerns the ten-hour silence of Deafman Glance (1970), or the short prologue to Stravinsky's Oedipus Rex (1996), which condenses in movement, as in an aphorism, what is subsequently sung. The dialogue between the two, between the silence of the prologue and the sound of music and singing, is another facet of the hybridity that is the quintessence of Wilson's work.

Bourdieu's champs and context A study of champs, or of fields of production, which in this argument is integral to the concept of context, allows specification of the kind made for Wilson's work moreover, by differentiation from other performance practices that might be known, for instance, as theatricality (say, Arlane Mnouchine and the Theatre du Soleil) or realFor a demonstration of how Bourdieu »collates« different literary - not theatre - practices in the second half of the nineteenth century in order to show how the champ may operate, see his Les Regies de l'art: Genese et structure de champ litteraire (Paris, 1992) and especially pp. 75-200.

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ism (say, Lev Dodin who, with the Maly Theatre of St Petersburg, joins Stanislavsky to Meyerhold, creating a very particular type of realism). Coverage of the field also allows us to know that Wilson's theatre is predicated on the double principle of inconclusiveness and spectatorial freedom which allows spectators to connect with the piece in their very own personal way - which is why not knowing about Einstein's violin cannot hurt you or the show. Whereas, for example, in Dodin's Cherry Orchard one cannot not know or reasonably suspect that Evgeny Lebedev, who plays Firs, is pretending to die in the last sequence. Lebedev lies down on a sofa and closes his eyes while he holds a candle to his chest. There is a longish pause, creating uncertainty in the audience as to whether the performance has come to an end. The candle slips from Lebedev's hands. The lights stay on just long enough to show that his breathing appears to have stopped. Dodin's idiom, although infinitely rich in connotations, narrows signification and meaning down. It does not, in other words, offer spectators the same elasticity of perception as the one employed by Wilson. Understanding the difference in performance practice makes all the difference. It is important to note, though, that while Bourdieu's champ is a category for differentiating between practices as well as within them, for different genres and styles, it embraces the infrastructure defined as economic base, as well as nigh everything included in the financial and managerial networks for selling, mounting and distributing »cultural works«.12 Bourdieu's purpose, it seems, in giving his category such broad reach is to circumvent the restrictive tie between base and class, and class and art, by arguing that professional networks of various types influence the creative process itself and, ipso facto, the »cultural works« that result from it. We are all aware of how budgetary constraints may seriously affect the way we mount a production. Bourdieu's argument transfers daily routine to the larger scale in which global market forces may not only impinge upon artistic decisions, but actually dictate them. For instance, the artistic structure of the CIVILwarS in four sections is contingent on these forces: on the commitment by four cities to provide finances, facilities, and so on, in return for determined benefits, including symbolic values and symbolic power such as prestige, on which markets also trade. The projected sixth section, which was designed to synthesize the parts, bit the dust for lack of infrastructural support. The latter dictated an artistic outcome - the work's incompletion, which curtailed the sociocultural reverberations of its parts. This illustrates from a different angle how »context« understood via Bourdieu's champ is in the semioses of performance, and even in there as implied, virtual presence anticipating realization. The category of champ would also be valid for explaining how infrastructural forces, including international immigration, international sponsorship and international markets, which provide audiences and generate predispositions or »demand« and »taste«, bear on so-called intercultural theatre. »Context« here would have to entertain some definite notion of world context and what exactly is happening in it. 12

This is a recurringproblematique in Bourdieu. See, especially, Les Regies de l'art, pp. 201-245 and Chases dues (Paris, 1987), pp. 147-77.

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Internationalization and »creolized >intercultureinterculturebroad spectrum< of things. Like it or not, the main purpose of theatre is founded on the staging of texts, just as the main purpose of the music world is to acknowledge the playing and singing of musical texts.«18 Let us note that the latter part of the 15

16 17 18

A. Paul Hare, Social Interaction as Drama: Applications From Conflict Resolution (Beverly Hills/ CA, 1985). See Sheldon Stryker, »The Theatrical Metaphor: Can It Aid Conflict Resolution?«, Contemporary Psychology, vol. 32, no. 7 (1987), pp. 602-3. For an historical survey see Erving Goffman, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (New York, 1959) and Shirley Weitz, Non-verbal Communication: Readings with Commentary (Oxford, 1978). S. Stryker, »The Theatrical Metaphor«. Richard Schechner, Essays on Performance Theory 1970-1976, (New York, 1977). In an editorial entitled »Critical Positions«, Bonnie Marranca and Gautam Dasgupta, editors of the Performing Arts Journal, review the propositions of Richard Schechner, who defended a »broad spectrum approach«: »Theatre, the idea of the theatrical, is a long great theme in the history of civilisations, but it belongs in the wider humanist intellectual tradition that encompasses literature, philosophy, architecture, history, music, painting. It is wrong to reconceive performance or theatre, or whatever one wants to call it, in the realm of the soft sciences (sociology, anthropology, speech/communication) which have increasingly moved to value-free positions.« For the whole debatem, see Richard Schechner, »Performance Studies: The Broad Spectrum Approach«, The Drama Review, vol. 32, no. 3 [Tl 19], pp. 4-6; Bonnie Marranca and Gautam Dasgupta, »Critical Positions«, Performing Arts Journal, vol. 11, no. 2 [PAJ 32], pp. 4-6, and the response of Richard Schechner, »TDR Comment: PAJ Distorts the Broad Spectrum«, The Drama Review, vol. 33, no. 2 [T122] (Summer 1989), pp. 4-9.

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sentence reflects an attitude nothing less than peculiar, narrow-minded and ethnocentric, since it fails to recognize the significance of non-transcribed music! In fact, the notion of performance, in American English, serves a suitable replacement for the theatrical metaphor in social sciences and anthropology. It does not exclude, however, the need to establish a general theory of the performing human (OHPBP), if one does not reduce it to an ethnocentric description of the many forms which it embodies. The notion of skenos (sceno) as we understand it is caught in the crossfire. On the one side, there are disciplines which set out to analyse daily interactional rituals in association with works on non-verbal communication; on the other hand the Western theatre model as it evolved since the eighteenth century in Europe stands firm. This uncomfortable positioning of ethnoscenology is due to the conceptual gap which affects the understanding of the performing human (OHPBP) and leads towards the temptation of an ethnocentric synecdoche.19

Skenos, absent concept The Greek term skene, temporary covered shelter, and the metaphor skenos, the human body, derived from the feminine noun, provided the lexical compromise best adapted to the founders of ethnoscenology. What concerns the ethnoscenologist is the idea of the human body as »natural symbolism« (Merleau-Ponty).20 This is a perception which implies the exploration of bios in its deep structure and in its outgrowths, its voyage in the symbolic universe, its role as stimulator in interactions and as intercessor at both visible and non-visible levels. The first attempts at defining ethnoscenology required a clarification of its »radical« character in order to avoid the trap of creating something old out of new elements, or in this case, making a universal out of the old demons of particularism, absorbing alien subjects within our practices and theories instead of going towards the other and learning from him/her. We are operating here in a sensitive field and must keep in mind that the universal is a puzzle, whose image becomes more apparent when all the pieces have been joined together into a whole. We have affirmed that ethnoscenology was not organized around the comparative description of »exotic« and/or popular performances, and that it did not limit its field of study to 19

20

I find a striking example of this situation in an essay by Gilbert Rouget now considered a classic. Evoking the cataleptic trance and the dramatic trance of the shaman, he writes: »During the dramatic trance on the contrary, the shaman describes what he sees during his journey to the upper or lower world and describes his adventures while singing and beating his drum, which gives rise to a downright theatrical performance, or more precisely a one man show during which he follows musical episodes and diverse styles.« G. Rouget, La Musique et la transe: Esquisse d'une theorie generate des relations de la musique et de la possession, 2nd., rev. edn (Paris, 1990), p. 248. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, La Nature: Notes cours du College de France, ed. Dominique Seglard (Paris, 1995), p. 381.

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civilizations which form the traditional domain of ethnology. Ethnoscenology is not a widening of the field of theatrical studies to include some nearly forgotten and/or minor forms. On the contrary, it requires that the works and practices of Western theatre be put into perspective by exploring their cultural specificity. In so doing, the discipline will contribute to the development of a general theory on the »performing human« (OHPBP) and thereby to a better knowledge of human nature.

The spectacular human The aim of ethnoscenology consists less of composing an index of spectacular human practices than of understanding the underlying structures and the ties which unite their diverse forms. The great wealth and variety of the physical expressions of the imaginary is admired by everybody; but some people still wonder about the metaphysical value of these experiences. Diverse backgrounds have led us to mistrust appearances, the beauty of the body and its seductive virtuosity. Being forgetful of the reality of Greek culture, we have the tendency to retain from Aristotle only his warning against the weaknesses of the captive gaze of opsis, the spectacle: As for the theatre, which exerts the utmost seduction, it is totally foreign to art and has nothing to do with poetry, because tragedy achieves its purpose, even without any assistance or actors. To produce this effect (fear and pity) by means of theatrical means hardly comes close to art: it is a matter of mise en scene.21

This assertion is akin to the disillusioned acknowledgement of his contemporary, the illustrious orator Demosthenes, who held the power of speech to be much inferior to the sense of sight. Power does not signify the value of meaning. Aristotle and Cicero, aware of the necessity to persuade not only through logic, but also through charm, advised the orator to train in the art of gesture and mime. The spirit is not sufficient in order to persuade, dissuade or defend. It needs the assistance of human substance, passion and the body. Later, the distinction will arise between the liberal arts and the mechanical arts, which gives priority to the former because of their closeness to the mind and to its first manifestation: language. The second oecumenical council of Nicaea of 787 categorized painters and sculptors to be manufacturers or artisans and forbid them to undertake any theological interpretation of the subjects depicted in their works. While solemnly reaffirming the cult of the icon, considered as a memorial of incarnation, the council stipulated that art alone belongs to the painter and composition to the Fathers. The arts of gesture and movement have, for a long time, born this heavy legacy. Theatre has become a literary art. According to this attitude one can paraphrase the council in these terms: »Bodily arts [the signifier] belongs to the performer; the meaning [the signified] belong to the writer.« 21

Aristotle, Poetics, 50 b 17 and 53 b 7.

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It is important to bear in mind the fundamental distinction between the spectacular - as a basic concept - and the spectacle. In French, the concept of spectacle conceals a narrow semantic field, defined by cultural norms that characterize objects distributed into categories which appear universal, but which are largely arbitrary or local. It is common to contrast the paucity of our national vocabulary with the linguistic opulence of Asian and African cultures to indicate the corporeal dimension of artistic, spiritual or martial practices.22 The study of the lexical fields of the »spectacular« in Western languages reveals profound differences, divergences, deficiencies and inventions symptomatic of the influence of local history. For example, the semantic field of the three terms in the Czech language, which come close to »spectacular«, reveals a universe of nuances and values not to be found in the French language.23 Similarly, the Czech language distinguishes »living« as a specific grammatical gender. Its non-use for an animal gives it a utilitarian connotation, the animal being likened to a machine. There are numerous examples which show how variable the status of »spectacular« can be in any given culture. The study manuals on performing arts reveal historical and ideological taxonomies which form particularly significant anthropological models. In fact, to call a play »psychological« refers to the notion of »psychology« as a science which, despite the efforts of psychologists to strive for the same scientific rigour as the »hard« sciences (physics, chemistry, etc.), remains largely an »ideology«.24 The contemporary notion of art therapy, and more precisely of drama therapy, is based, first of all, on the scientific representation of medicine, from which would be excluded the relational and spectacular dimension for the treatment and its effectiveness, and secondly on a conception of art as an activity disassociated from daily life. Does art cure? Rather, is not its exclusion from everyday life what is pathogenic? The experience of the Jesuit Eric de Rosny, who was initiated into the world of the nganga of Cameroon, highlights the relative character of the »scientific« medical approach which deals with the part - the organ - rather than the whole - the subject in its context. For the nganga, who practice traditional, holistic medicine, it is not the individual who should be treated, but the group to which s/he belongs, just as it is not the treatment alone which cures, but the »event« of the treatment.25 The hypothesis of ethnoscenology is that conscious and organized spectacular human activity (OHPBP) is a product of the body/mind unity and a funda22

23 24

25

Frai^oise Champault, »Japon et ethnoscenologie: Quelques considerations linguistiques«, Internationale de l'imaginaire, no. 5 (1996), pp. 237-43. See as well Nakamura Yujiro, »Intuition active et l'art japonais«, Internationale de l'imaginaire, no. 4 (Winter 1985-86), pp. 18-25. Daniela Gothova, »Champs lexical et semantique du spectaculaire en langue tcheque«. Unpublished paper, 1997. The judgement given by the psycholinguist Jacques Mehler some twenty years ago still has, and will continue to have, relevance. See his comment in La Recherche, vol. 10, no. 100 (May 1979), p. 540. Eric de Rosny, Les Yeux de ma chevre (Paris, 1987) and La Nuit, les yeux ouverts (Paris, 1996).

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mental trait of the species. By working with the concept of a »knowing body«,26 ethnoscenology contributes to a better understanding of human practices and eschews the descriptive approaches of old-fashioned anthropology and Theatre Studies. It constitutes the main source from which multiple forms are organized in the most diverse fields of individual and collective life. The analogy with music and language is apparent. Just as it is the musical sense27 that founded music traditions around the world, and just as it is the aptitude for language that generated the languages of the species, human development and cultural evolution led to the formation of autonomous, spectacular entities which correspond to other activities in society: liturgies, ceremonies, parades, rites, rituals, festivals, revues, processions, carnivals, circuses, mimes and theatre performances are the historical and local manifestations of a universal ability. However, none can claim the role of original parent, even if the fragmentation characteristic of cultural evolution reveals filiation, analogies, transferences and grafts. Exchanges have taken place between forms. The latter were not generated by a common Eve. From a neurobiological point of view, the expansion of the neocortex in the human brain and the formation of new neural associations during learning are responsible for the development of organized performing behaviours as well as their rich variety of forms in the species. The paradox of analysing practices preceding the emergence of theatre and unrelated to its values, by taking the latter for its model, seems to stems once more from traps set by the synecdoche. A part of the OHPBP - theatre - is taken for the whole. This attitude shows how difficult it is to think of human performing practices in terms of a dynamic and flexible complex system.28 Certainly, the shaman can be considered the forerunner of the poet, as Eliade believed. He could just as easily be considered a precursor of the actor, as Roberte Hamayon suggests,29 but also of the priest, the therapist, the dancer, the juggler and of many other professions.

The flaws of sight The paradox of a spectacular performance or event is that it is all the more secretive and concealing because it is visible. The proverb »What you see is what you get« is correct, provided it is followed by a reminder: »you only perceive that which you have been trained to perceive«. Likewise, the assertion »I only believe what I see« implies the fact that »I only believe what I want to believe.« To review 26 27 28

29

See Louise Steinman, The Knowing Body: Elements of Contemporary Performance and Dance (Boston/MA, 1986). John Blacking, How Musical Is Man? (Washington/DC, 1973) It is useful to discuss here the way Michel Leiris refers to theatre in his study on possession and its theatrical aspects among the Ethiopians of Gondar: La Possession et ses aspects thaatraux chez les Ethiopiens du Gondar (s.l., 1989), notably pp. 34ff. Roberte H. Hamayon, »En Guise de postface: Qu'en disent les esprits?«, Cahiers de litorale, no. 35 (1994), p. 213, note 1.

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ethnographic discourse, James Clifford showed the ambivalence of the new ethnography of the 1920s, which oscillated between an ideology of synthetic cultural description based on observation and the desire to escape the traps set by the interpreter informant. For Clifford, culture was interpreted as a group of behaviours, ceremonies and characteristic gestures, likely to be recorded and explained by a well-trained spectator. Mead even went further. As a matter of fact, her visual analytic ability was extraordinary. The participating observer became a research norm. Of course, a successful investigation mobilized the largest range of interactions, but priority was given to the visual: interpretation remained tied to description. After Malinowski, a general mistrust of »privileged informants« reflected this systematic preference for methodical observations by the ethnographer rather than the self-interested interpretations of the indigenous authorities.30 In a similar way, the French anthropologist Andre Marcel D'Ans remarked at the colloquium of Cuernavaca (1996) that anthropologists always distrust the spectacular in order not to be deceived by attractive, yet misleading, appearances. If the spectacular aspect of the studied event can give rise to a description, the latter is insufficient to the extent that the »emerging peak« which is perceived, is in reality the visible part of a »re-entrant loop« which acts on and nourishes the complex system from which it derives.31 Focussing exclusively onto the »spectacular« or »theatrical« dimension of an event comes down to taking the part for the whole, not without implicitly presupposing the identity of both the observer and the subject under observation. The successful performance of the shaman who appears, from the spectator's viewpoint, to arrive at a state of trance, is the biological and symbolic nutriment of the officiant. The shaman acts for others, but also for him or herself, in body and in spirit, and in dance and in thought. One of the characterising traits of the shaman noted by Roberte H. Hamayon - »is precisely that the officiant corporally manifests that s/he is in >direct contact< with supernatural powers. One could even say that the direct aspect of this contact lies in its corporal expression, which in a way furnishes the proof.«32 The necessity for the shaman and the participants to verbalize the »voyage«, even in an informal way, suggests the importance of an activity generating secret and interior meaning, difficult to assess on account of its surface banality.33 Likewise, the spectacular performance of the actor-dancer for an audience enriches its author as much on the cognitive as on the imaginative and technical 30 31

32 33

See James Clifford, The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth Century Ethnography, Literature, and Art (Cambridge/MA, 1988). The notion of the »re-entrant loop« is borrowed from the biologist Gerald M. Edelman. According to the neuronal group selection theory, the loop designated the process by which the cerebral maps progressively established interact and send messages. See Gerald M. Edelman, Neural Darwinism: The Theory of Neuronal Group Selection (New York, 1987); Bright Air, Brilliant Fire: On the Matter of Mind (New York, 1992). Hamayon, »En guise de postface«, p. 189. This sometimes led the observers to neglect noting the shaman's words and only retain explicit information. See the commentaries by Roberte H. Hamayon, »En Guise de postface«, p. 191 and 214, note 3.

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levels. The actors of the Odin Teatret rehearse daily, less to maintain technical quality than to protect their integrity and preserve the life of their show. A comment by Eugenio Barba summarizes perfectly the subtle reciprocal movement between the mastered spectacular action - or virtuosity and invention: »Spontaneity cannot be something opposed to >virtuositypress out of himself< - through the resistance which the well-defined musical range of the instrument and the rules which he has chosen for himself impose upon him.«34 During an interview with Marianne Ahrne, Jerzy Grotowski judged that exercises, although necessary, did not necessarily prepare one for the creative process. Indispensable in the way that brushing one's teeth is, exercises are a kind of personal hygiene: »Creativity is at once life, spontaneity, something completely personal, and at the same time rigor, structure and precision.«35 According to the Odissi dancer Sanjukta Panigrahi, an eminent co-founder of the International School of Theatre Anthropology, »to dance daily, even for oneself, is a necessity, like drinking and eating.«36 In other words, the spectacular act - and spectacular practice are not limited to what others see in them, especially since observation is largely determined by the perceptive training of the spectator and/or the observer. The actress and director Julia Varley chose to write a novel through a theatre character in order to narrate the wandering in the labyrinth, which ends with Kaosmos, a production of Odin Teatret, the company she has worked since 1976: »The creation of a performance is possible and impossible to explain«.37

The ethnomusicological model The least offensive and the most obviously »natural« sciences were the first to give rise to the examination of their cultural dimensions. Ethnobotany (1895) was followed by ethnoanatomy, ethnometeorology and ethnozoology. Ethnoscenologists have been examining with some envy the development of an already century-old discipline, ethnomusicology, because it operates with some complementary models, concepts and methods of study. An essential step was taken by ethnomusicology when it shaped the beginnings of an interdisciplinary, if not transdisciplinary, science. The Cantometrics Project of Columbia University, launched in 1962 by Alan Lomax, represents a first exemplary model. It is interesting to read the papers presented by a team of scholars during the »Anthropology« Section (H) of the annual congress of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Washington on 27 34

Eugenio Barba, Beyond the Floating Islands (New York, 1986), p. 92 II Teatr Laboratorium di Jerzy Grotowski,a film by Marianne Ahrne produced for RAI. 36 personal communication, Salerno, 1-14 September 1987. 37 Julia Varley, Wind in the West: A Character's Novel (Holstebro, 1997), p. 61. 35

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December 1966. Entitled Frontiers of Anthropology: Cantometrics and Culture, the report presented the interdisciplinary method implemented during four years of research: »For the first time, predictable and universal relationships have been established between the expressive and communication process, on the one hand, and social structure and culture pattern on the other.«38 Within the Cantometrics Project, music was investigated within the general framework of behaviours and human conduct. In an article published in the Italian journal Nuovi argomenti, Lomax showed how the status of the voice could be linked to social codes of permissiveness or constraint which regulate sexuality.39 His argument rested on some examples borrowed not only from the Mediterranean world, but also from other cultures of which he had knowledge. It is interesting to note that Nicolai Evreinov was the first person in the theatre world to stress the relation between sexuality and spectacular behaviours.40 At present, following the intuition of John Blacking, who drew attention to the cognitive strategies underlying musical activities, ethnomusicology integrates the new perspectives offered by the cognitive sciences (Nils L. Wallin and Simha Arom),41 and even ethology (Bj0rn Merker).42 The formula of Alan Merriam, »Ethnology is the study of music in culture«, should have been able to incite ethnoscenologists to propose a similar definition for their discipline: »Ethnoscenology is the study of performance in culture«. However, the author's point of view defended in his Anthropology of Music (1964) privileges cultural relativism at the expense of a global perspective based on a better understanding of the universal biological foundations of performing human behaviour, achieved in individual and collective particularisms. Nevertheless, the investigational axes which he defines could be adapted to our own aims, even if they need to be supplemented as one progresses in the development of the discipline. Merriam's Propositions • Study of material support for musical practice (instruments, their construction and their socio-economic identity). • The corpus of songs and their relation to music. • The types of music as they are defined by those concerned. • The function and the status of the musician. • Apprenticeship/training. 38

•w 40 41 42

Alan Lomax (with contributions by the Cantometrics staff and with the editorial assistance of Edwin E. Erickson), Folk Song Style and Culture (Washington/D.C, 1968), p. VII. Alan Lomax, »Nuovi ipotesi sul canto folcloristico italiano nel quadro della musica populäre mondiale«, Nuovi argomenti nos. 17-18 (1955-1956), pp. 109-36. Nikolaj Evreinov, Teatr kak takovoj (1912) and Teatr dlja sebja (1915-1917). See Basic Musical Functions and Musical Ability. Papers Given at a Seminar Arranged by the Swedish Royal Academy of Music (Stockholm, 1981). Foundation for Biomusicology and Acoustic Ethology, Mid-Sweden University, 83125 Ostersund, Sweden.

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• The uses and functions of music. • Musical creation. Ethnoscenology • (Ethno)linguistic study of the lexical field of spectacular practices and of the semantic field of the spectacular. • Study of scholarly and non-scholarly representations of the body/mind dichotomy. • Study of types of spectacular practices as they are defined by the natives (from the most global to the most analytical perspective). • The apprenticeship of performers and participants and/or spectators. • The function and the status of performers. • The uses and the functions of spectacular practices. • Associated practices. • Spectacular creation. • Auxiliary materials, such as make-up; accessories, properties. • The symbolic universe of the event. These propositions confine themselves to the first phase of the discipline, related to the drawing up of a descriptive inventory,43 and are by no means exhaustive. The evolution of ethnoscenology towards the creation of a general scenology by putting into effect a non-hierarchical relationship of forms, legitimizes the principle of a discipline devoted to the study of what appears to be a fundamental dimension of humanity. »How musical is man?«, the ethnomusicologist wonders.44 Can the ethnoscenologist ask: »How much of a performer is man?« No! This is because of the lack of a linguistic and conceptual tool, an abstract and neutral word analogous to the term »music« to designate an innate ability to perform, but in the sense of »operating with the whole body/mind« rather than »acting«. Added to this problem is the fact that the ethnoscenologist cannot use a word such as »performance« as a starting point for the hypothesis of an innate ability similar to the musical sense founded on and related to the sense of hearing. What is pointed out in ethnoscenology is not the hypothesis of a particular 4i

44

This inventory is already well advanced, even if the documentation is somewhat sketchy. I refer the reader to a well-presented and lavishly illustrated volume documenting the experience of one institution, the Maison des Cultures du Monde, and which has the advantage of underlining the variety of forms: Atlas de I'imaginaire, eds. Fran9oise Grund and Cherif Khaznadar, in collaboration with Pierre Bois and Bernard Piniau (Paris, 1996). The French translator of John Blacking's pioneering study remarked that in English, the adjective musical signifies less often »musical« (in relations with music) than »musician« (gifted with a musical sense, music lover, musically talented). It was necessary for him to change the original title of the book because the French language does not offer equivalent semantic possibilities compared to the English word on which the author plays. How Musical is Man? is translated into French as i>Le sens musical« (Paris, 1980), p. 13.

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ability - a sixth sense - in addition to the classic five sensorial faculties of receiving impressions through specific body organs and the nerves associated with them, but of a fundamental aspect of the human practices linked to the body/mind unity. In that way one can consider that: • every body practice is a way of thinking; • every body practice has an influence on the way of thinking; • every way of thinking has an influence on the body/mind »emerging peaks«.

The dance model Conversing with the choreographer Angelin Preljocaj, the Albanian writer Ismafl Kadare told him: »Dance is older than literature«. Dance is certainly »older« than theatre. For the human species, dance is certainly one of the most ancient voluntary expressive spectacular practices. It is certain that dance is one of the universal traits of humankind, like musical sense, even if dancing in the wider sense of the word can be found in the animal world long before humans emerged from the evolutionary process. Dance can be seen as holistic rhythmic organization of vital energy. The rhythmic sense has been said to be one of the most fundamental characteristics of life. »In every human (and animal) interaction we can discover that the motor onsets underlying movement or vocal behaviour are of the nature of modulated rhythm and that, on one level of organization, the nature of the relationship can be stated in terms of the relationships between or among the modulated rhythms«.45 We will never know anything about the first manifestations of dance among the human species. It is easy to imagine the social role of these sacred or profane performers, capable of gathering a public around them and giving life to collective emotional states, which contributed to the comfort and to the cohesion of the community. It is now a widely accepted theory that Shamans danced in the palaeolithic caves.46 The Greek biologoi - from bios, life - who mimed animals or humans brought imitation to the rank of art, which little by little took form in the first human populations. In such a process, to mime means to adopt for oneself the patent biological rhythms of another life: »If a stage actor wants to imitate, or mime, a crow, an elephant, or a terrier, he cannot look very much like these animals, but he can get applause from his audience if he actually reproduces the temporal characteristics of the movements of the animal he is imitating. The lumbering walk and 45

46

Paul Byers, »Biological Rhythms as Information Channels in Interpersonal Communication Behavior«, in Perspectives in Ethology, vol. 2, eds. P. P. G. Bateson andH. Klopfer (New York, 1976); pp. 135-164. See Jean Clottes and David Lewis-Williams, The Shamans of Prehistory: Trance and Magic in the Painted Caves (New York, 1999) and David Lewis-Williams and Thomas A. Dowson, »The Signs of all Times: Entoptic Phenomena in Upper Palaeolithic Art«, Current Anthropology, vol. 29 (1988), pp. 201-45.

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head swing of the elephant, the sudden head shifts of the crow, or the rapid restless shifts of the terrier's feet or his rapid tail wag, all suffice to identify the particular animal and require the addition of only minimal spatial cueing.«47 For dance historians it is not a long way from the imitation of temporal qualities of animal movement behaviour to what we call dance. The human ability to dance is a reflection of the moto-behavioural abilities of our most ancient ancestors, and a token of our animal roots. In June 1985, during a colloquium organized at the Royal Academy in London by Sir Julian Huxley and a group of ethnologists, anthropologists and human science specialists, Sir Maurice Bowra, of Wadham College of Oxford, attributed the birth of theatre to the encounter of dance and language. However, he made one rather unfortunate comment: when humans limit themselves to movement, as in dance and ritual, they rarely surpass animals, but when they turn towards speech, they capitalize on something which is unique to humans alone.48 This logocentrism and divided vision of human conduct makes Bowra's assertion representative of a long-held belief that movement - and hence the human body - has been the primitive precursor to language. It is only recently that the neurobiology of learning and neurolinguistics have given a theoretical foundation to Marcel Mauss' intuitive conception of »body technique«. Human behaviours are not created by an independent biological machinery, some primitive and others highly developed. The characteristic interaction of the mental maps result in the cortical involvement of physiological systems which function automatically in more simple organisms. All behavioural traits including those attributed to elementary programs of survival of the individual and the species, like sexual behaviour, collecting food, aggression, co-operation - can give rise to a highly developed cognitive activity likely to generate independent practices. This is the case in eroticism, gastronomy, warrior codes, rules of society. Cerebral plasticity underlies the phenomena of vicariousness and substitution in certain conditions, when the normal organization of the nervous system is compromised. The sign language of deaf-mutes is not a prosthesis, we have learned, but, rather, is corticalized like a »natural language«. The handicap provoked by the shattering of the audiophonotary loop is compensated for by cortical strategies similar to those which can transform a clumsy person into a virtuosic actor-dancer by dint of exercise. Greek theatre emerged when poetry asserted itself as a social practice of the city. It did not appear like Venus rising from the sea, but, rather, was linked to other spectacular practices for which the rites are only a subset. What is said of the mythical return of the Indus sacer - rituals of origins - does not take into account the entangling of the constituent elements of spectacular human practices. The birth of the stage arts cannot be represented by a diagram of a tree, as Frazer's evolutionist theories or the anthropology of theatre inherited from Frazer would suggest, but rather by a 3D representation of complex systems. 47 48

Byers, »Biological Rhythms as Information Channels«, p. 135. See the conference proceedings of the symposium »A Discussion on Ritualization of Behaviour in Animals and Men«, ed. Julian Huxley, in Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London, Series B, vol. 251 (1966), pp. 247-526.

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Human dance arose from subcortical and cortical interactions. It comes from intelligence unique to the species and from emotion, understood in the sense of modern psychology. It should be remembered that the emotion stricto sensu is a pre-verbal form for processing information and action. It comes to the fore as a psychobiological complex characterized by the simultaneity of discrete consecutive events: a) cognitive, b) somatic (internal and expressive, c) affective (subjective states). The adaptive effectiveness of emotion was regarded for a long time as a behavioural disorder and has led some theoreticians, notably behaviourists and psychoanalysis, to consider it in terms of energy (the »energy release theory«)- Muscular reactions, both postural and motoric, generate socially effective signals. When understood, they not only have an informative signal importance, but induce empathetic reactions, or rejection, or aggression. As for subjective states, they play an important role in the process of memorization and the elaboration of the self. The whole of this socialization process contributes to the complexity of the emotional system. Emotions are a phenomenon to be observed in the animal world too, where they appear to be linked to basic survival behaviour of the individual and the species: the search for mating partners; defence against predators; sociability; caring for partners and the young; co-operation, play, motivation. This inventory of emotional demonstrations in the animal realm corresponds to the catalogue of ritualized behaviours established by ethologists. This relation suggests that emotions and spectacular (ritualized) behaviour are linked in such a way as to allow humans to process information and to adapt to the environment. The human species has developed a most complex psychobiological and social interactional system, a richness of the cognitive activities, and an ability to associate, memorize, anticipate and imagine. Yet, this »sophisticated« way of being also has ancient biological roots, and these can be expanded into non-biological areas, e.g., art and spirituality. A recent medical study suggests that the trances of St Theresa (1515-1582) had an epileptic origin and that the Spanish nun was able to transform her neurological disorder into a rich and creative mystical experience. Generally speaking, human emotions have evolved from a reaction to a creative action. In the same way, the corporal organization of dance is not only the automatic result of an instinctive impulse. It generates meaning, subjective states and memory. The subjective state of the dancer modifies his/her subtle corporal organization. The psychomotor sequences are organized by cognitive activity which, unlike that which occurs in emotional reactions, supplants inborn patterns. The dancer does not »pump out emotions.«49 On the contrary, corporal activity induces its own emotional compositions. 49

Jerzy Grotowski in a lecture at Liege (1986) said: »Normally, when an actor thinks of intentions, he thinks it is a question of pumping an emotional state in himself. It is not this. The emotional state is very important, but it does not depend on the will. I don't want to be sad: I am sad. I want to love this person: I hate this person, because the emotions are independent of the will. So, everyone who looks to condition actions

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The archaism and the subtlety of dance, the fact that it associates the history of our apparition on earth with the blossoming of each individual, throws light on the reasons for its presence during life's major moments: praying to the gods, mourning the dead, deciphering destiny, relishing pleasure, celebrating the body, intimidating, assembling. Dervish meditation, rave parties, street dance, hip-hop, exhibition ballroom and theatre dancing, the samba of Brazilian carnivals, African liturgy - the body has danced for tens of thousands of years in every corner of the world. »Bodies are impregnated with the history of the world«, said Bernard Montet.50 The experience of this exuberant blossoming has led dancers, as well as mystics, to regard movement as thought. Recent work in the domain of neurobiology reinforces this idea by suggesting the brain's involvement in ways other than what is defended by the reigning theory about how the brain controls the voluntary movements of the arm and other limbs.51 Known as the »equilibrium point hypothesis«, this theory implies that the brain does not compute all the forces required to move a limb from one place to another, but simply launches the limb, depending on reflexes and the intrinsic elasticity of the muscles to lead it to its destination. According to Hiroaki Gomi and Mitsuo Kawato, researchers at the ATR Human Information Processing Research Laboratories of Kyoto in Japan, and the team of James Lackner at Brandeis University, the situation is more complex. The results obtained after experimentation indicate that the brain is involved in the control of the movement, making all the calculations necessary to work out which muscles to move and when.52 For Hiroaki Gomi and Mitsuo Kawato, the brain fixes the end-point of a movement and then specifies the trajectory the arm will follow by triggering a sequence of muscular contractions that ensure that it reaches that final position: »We believe that the brain possesses and utilizes an internal model of the arm for determining the motor command.« Gerald Gottlieb of Boston University agrees: »The brain knows enough physics to tell [the muscles] what to do; it doesn't rely on reflexes.«53 Marcel Mauss stressed the role of cultural training in developing walking and dancing styles. Knowing that the ability of the brain to make the calculations is in large part determined by exercise, several questions come to mind: to what extend does the type of training - which corresponds to an aesthetic - modify, orient and stabilize the brain's calculation methods? In what way does not only the cerebral, but also the mental and psychic handicap, modify the mastery of movement and gesture? In what way do the emotional and intellectual »ideologi-

50 51 52 53

through emotional states makes a confusion.« Translated and quoted by Thomas Richards in At Work with Grotowski on Physical Actions (London, 1995), p. 36 Codirector with Catherine Diverres at the Centre Choreographique National de Rennes et de Bretagne. See Anatol G. Feldman, »Once More on the Equilibrium Point Hypothesis«, Journal of Motor Behavior, vol. 18 (1986), pp. 17-54. Elizabeth Pennisi, »Tilting Against a Major Theory of Movement Control«, Science, 5 April 1996, pp. 32-33. Gottlieb quoted in Pennisi, »Tilting Against a Major Theory of Movement Control«.

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cal« elements of the complex system of training interfere in the achievement of movement? What are the effects of internal and external imagery on performing dance or mime? Lastly, in what way does the more or less perfect execution of movement work - according to a process of feed-back - reinforce, modify, enrich and impoverish the initial learning. Answering these questions would allow one to better understand the corporal dimensions of culture - its incarnation - and what one could call the physics of the symbolic and the imaginary. Body styles show an intelligence that is different from that of verbal utterances. Dancing is an act of communication which transmits aesthetic, hedonistic, intellectual, emotional and spiritual values. In this light, the idea of dance as defined by the etymology of the word is hardly satisfying. The probable Germanic origin of the word or the derivations from the Greek word choros, like the verb choreuö, do not account for the complementary unity of the somatic and cognitive dimensions of the total act of which it is a question in skenos:^ • The somatic organization of states of consciousness. • The organic emergence of states of consciousness. • The interaction of the somatic and the psychic.

An inter/trans-disciplinary invention The ethnosciences have laid down, as a heuristic principle, the necessity of combining the elements by a double approach: one corresponding to the process of native practitioners and experts; the other conforming to the codes of scientific discipline recognised as such by the international academic community. Strangely enough, the concerns of contemporary ethnology have not modified the academic practices in the centre of the so-called international academic community. It is as if the experts of the industrialized nations felt more inclined to acknowledge the otherness of the far-away stranger than that within their own community. For this reason, Theatre Studies, like Performance Studies, is still largely monodisciplinary.55 Priority has been given to literary and linguistic stud54

55

Marielle Cadopi remarked in a precise way: »Dance is a domain of human motor functioning little studied by cognitive psychology or by the behaviour sciences. Yet, we find some sensory-motor abilities reaching a very high level of development, but which present a peculiarity: contrary to the actions of chase/pursuit, seizure/distress, manipulation, transformation, dictated by exterior constraints and for which the objectives are spatially marked off/located, the actions of the dancer are dictated by a Internal model· and centred on the body's space of the body itself.« »Reproduction of Corporal Configurations Among Adults«, in Danse le corps enjeu, ed. Mireille Arguel (Paris, 1992), p. 158. Jean-Marie Pradier, Ethnoscenology: The Biology and Culture of Human Performing Behaviour', publications of the University of Malta (forthcoming).

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ies, due to the importance of dramatic literature, rather than to anthropology; human sciences are barely represented - with the exception of psychology and, to a lesser extent sociology. As for the life sciences, they suffer from gross underrepresentation in spite of some initiatives, which seem to have provoked more misunderstandings than interest. This reveals the urgency for further research that is intercultural by nature and multidisciplinary by need; otherwise there is the danger of reducing where there is a need to expand. The importance of ethnolinguistics has already been stressed. The conception of the relationship between the body and the mind is inscribed on the two axes, paradigmatic and syntactic, of language. The study of linguistic material allows one to clarify what discourse silences, conceals or disguises. In Korean, for example, the term »chit« at the same time signifies act, movement, sign, behaviour, attitude, conduct. In French it sometimes corresponds to the term »geste«. Yet, the Koreans have at their disposal two words to designate movement: momjit (word for word, body and gesture) and sonjit (hand and gesture). As Alexandre Guillemoz remarked, the precision of the vocabulary indicating the interest paid to gesture seems to be contradicted by their usual tendency to declare that they do not make gestures (in Korea), and, unlike in Western countries, they do not move when talking.56 As for myself, ethology gave me the idea to call the epiphanic system and thephanic systems two aspects of human performance.57 The awaited encounter between life science and human science, besides allowing us to avoid resorting to the theatre metaphor, should introduce a new terminology to underline elements and phenomena, some still to be discovered.58 What is proposed with the idea of an epiphanic and phanic system comes down to no longer thinking of the identity of spectacular human behaviours in terms of relationship and subordination. It is important to consider the organization of discrete organized elements in a »biocultural« complementary relationship. This perspective does not supplant other systems of analysis - historical, semiologic, aesthetic, anthropologic. It hopes to contribute to them without hiding the fact that it represents a challenge to knowledge, all the more difficult because what is at stake obeys an interactive logic about which we know almost nothing. Research carried out in the area of shamanism and the complexity of the phenomenon prompts one to associate the points of view of an initiate and those of the scholarly researcher as being opposed to each other. Just as Jerzy Grotowski rediscovered his culture by way of the Orient, it seems useful for us to explore the experiences of Christian theologians and mystics in order to find a new access to human spectacular behaviour. Two thousand years ago, a group of men s6

57 58

Alexandre Guillemoz, »Gestes coreens«, Geste et Image: Publication of the Centre for Documentation and Research on the Gestural Situation of Human Societies, vol. 3 (1983), p. 37. Jean-Marie Pradier, »Towards a Biological Theory of the Body in Performance«, New Theatre Quarterly, vol. 6, no. 21 (February 1990), pp. 86-98. A precursory study is Ingo Rentschler, Barbara Herzberger, David Epstein, Beauty and the Brain: Biological Aspects of Aesthetics (Basle, 1988)

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and women believed that God, creator of the universe, had taken a fleshly form. Until then, this God had neither name nor face. He was the absolute, ineffable, infinite Word, without need of a place from which to reign, free of physical and immaterial constraints, intangible, imperceptible, immense. Transformed into man, he kept no less his prerogatives of invisibility and namelessness. The theologians called this untenable contradiction the »mystery of the incarnation« and studied it endlessly. They invented concepts such as transubstantiation to explain the transition from divine to human flesh, then from human flesh to the consecrated bread of the Eucharist. They imagined physical techniques to link themselves to the divine by means other than reason and celebration. The experience, the debates and the wars which emerged from this mystery are part of our Western heritage. Just as is the art of mimes, dancers, actors, acrobats, bards, all people whose flesh is spirit. It does not suffice for a discipline or a theory to be justified from a scientific point of view in order to spring up and garner the approval of the community. Acceptability in this case relies more on the social and cultural. Time must grant a latent consent, without which all propositions are premature and thus bound to fail. The manifest interest shown in many countries with regard to ethnoscenology demonstrates that the time has come to conceive of the spectacular dimension of human practices in a manner that is different from those of the past.59 Ethnoscenology places its quest within the venture of the thousands of generations pondering Gods and bodies, appearances and meaning. This is indeed an ambition which demands rigour and an audacious spirit, but also unlike any dogmatism, an appreciation of the complementary nature of mind, spirit and body.

The biologist Antoine Danchin wrote: »It is not enough that a discovery be made to be immediately accepted: it is also necessary that the historical context be ripe«. Ordre et dynamique du vivant (Paris, 1978), p. 161.

Ian Watson Intercultural Performance: Barter, Cultural Exchange and Reception

Abstract »Barter« is a term coined by Eugenic Barba in the early 1970s, which has its etymological roots in economic exchange. In Barba's theatrical barters, however, the commodity of exchange is performance. Instead of money changing hands, payment is in kind. One group's performance is »paid for« by its audience performing in turn. Apart from bringing the conventional economic value of theatre into question, barter provides some useful insights into the actor/spectator relationship during performance. Through a description and analysis of several of Barba's barters, three aspects of the negotiation between performers and their audience in barters are examined: the role shifts and communities which barters generate; the latter's narrativity; and the dynamics of cultural exchange involved in barters.

If a Wall Street broker could be convinced to work in the theatre, he would most likely characterize his newly chosen profession as that of a producer of marketable commodities which, provided they are directed with flair, can boast a marquee performer, and provided they are properly packaged, can be exchanged for the maximum amount of dollars or pounds the market can bear. It hardly takes an Adam Smith or a John Keynes to realize that, excluding long running productions in the hallowed halls of commercialism, such as New York's Broadway or London's West End, theatre is hardly in danger of becoming a »fortune five hundred« company. Facetious commentary aside, our Wall Street broker cannot be blamed for his take on Shakespeare's profession since, even the most politically or socially committed theatre is, by necessity, often cast in economic terms: performances are exchanged for money, they must be, if for no other reason than to defray production costs and to at least give the impression of following the accepted business practice of paying those involved. Some companies bent on challenging the boundaries of theatre and whose finances allow it, have experimented with another model: the theatrical barter. This model, in which cultural products rather than money become the currency of exchange, has been attempted by leading experimentalists such as Peter Brook who, during his three month African trip with the International Center for Theatre Research in late 1972 and early 1973, explored exchanges with the local communities they encountered, Poland's Gardzienice which has traded their work for traditional performance material in the villages of Eastern Poland since the 1970s, and Eugenio Barba. Apart from bringing the conventional value of theatre into question, barter provides some useful insights into the relatively new field of performance analy-

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sis because of the way in which it highlights the dynamics of exchange involved in performance. These dynamics are nowhere better explored than in Eugenio Barba's barter work. This is because, apart from helping to formulate an understanding of the relationship between barter and theatre through employing barter in his theatre practice for over thirty years, he has also questioned its nature and implications in his writings. Using these writings and Barba's barter practice as a point of reference, this chapter examines three aspects of the exchange involved in his barters: the role shifts and communities that they generate; their narrativity; and the dynamics of cultural exchange involved in them.

Barter »Barter«, a term Barba coined in the early 1970s, has, as our imaginary Wall Street broker intuits, its etymological roots in economic exchange. But, in Barba's theatrical barter, the commodity of exchange is performance. In its simplest form, a barter entails one group of people performing for another and, rather than the second group paying money, it performs for the first group. A play is exchanged for songs and dances, a display of acrobatics for a demonstration of training exercises, a poem for a monologue, etc. Barba and his Holstebro-based theatre group, the Odin Teatret, have mounted barters in a variety of settings and among many different communities ranging from rural villages in Wales and Brittany to the Yanomami Indians in Amazonian Venezuela, from small towns in Europe, Latin America and Asia to major cities like Montevideo, Bologna and Paris. Even though there are exceptions, most barters are typical of the one Barba organized in Bahia Bianca, Argentina as part of the 1987 International Group Theatre Gathering. In this barter, many of the groups from the Gathering worked together in the grounds of a large housing complex in a neighbourhood on the outskirts of the city. All of these groups began their performances simultaneously in different parts of the grounds, and gradually moved toward a parking lot at one end of the complex. The audiences followed the performers to the space where each theatre group presented a short performance. These were followed by other presentations by artists from the local community, who had prepared an array of folk dances, traditional and popular songs, as well as a recital of original poetry to entertain both the visitors and their neighbours. The basic model aside, each barter has elements that are unique to it. A barter between the Odin and the candombe performers from the black community of Montevideo, Uruguay, a few weeks prior to the Bahia Bianca meeting, for example, combined the Odin actors and local candombe dancers, drummers and singers into a single performance rather than having Barba's colleagues and the candombe artists perform separately. A barter in the Danish village of Tvis in 1992 included a procession through the village, an exchange of performances in

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the local hall, and a communal meal prepared by the villagers. The Danish anthropologist, Mette Bovin, has even used barter in her fieldwork in Upper Volta, West Africa (renamed Burkina Faso following the 1984 revolution). Working with the Odin actress Roberta Carreri in 1982, Bovin developed a technique she calls »provocation anthropology«, in which she had Carreri enter rural villages as a comic character the actress has developed for her street theatre work with the Odin. This character, which is dressed in a top hat, white shirt, braces and black pants, and whose only »words« are those she makes with a duck decoy whistle in her mouth, encouraged the local people to return her performances with theirs. In this way, Bovin was able to witness local performance material which, she maintains, would have otherwise been inaccessible.1 Regardless of which form they take, barters are a point of meeting between cultures. In every barter one community meets another through the exchange of cultural products and, provocation anthropology aside, these products are not as important as the process of exchange itself.

Role shifts and communities The conventional relationship between actors and spectators in the theatre is passive, that is, the audience is presented with a prepared cultural product in which they rarely take an active part.2 Barter, on the other hand, invokes a participatory model in which not only the audience becomes part of the action, but, in doing so, it engenders a structural instability in the performer/spectator relationship. The three major structural components of barter - the professional actors, members of the local community who perform, and those from the community who are its audience - shift roles during the event; and, in the most successful of barters, these roles all but dissolve entirely. The professional actors in the Bahia Bianca barter, for example, were performers during the first part of the event. Later, as they watched the local singers and dancers, they became spectators; and, with the formal part of the barter Mette Bovin, »Provocation Anthropology: Bartering Performance in Africa«, The Drama Review, vol. 32, no. l (T117) (Spring 1988), pp. 21-41. There have been attempts, particularly in avant-garde theatre, to transform this traditional actor/audience relationship. The Living Theatre and Richard Schechner's Performance Group, for instance, experimented with audience participation in productions such as the Living Theatre's Paradise Now and Schechner's Dionysus in 69. But these experiments generally influenced the qualitative rather than the structural nature of the performer/audience contact because the alterations in the relationship were only partial and/or temporary. The spectators who chose to watch rather than participate remained within the conventional audience/cultural product paradigm. Even those who chose to take part in the action were only allowed to do so in the segments of the mise-en-scene prepared for improvisation with the audience. This latter group merely shifted back and forth between their conventional role and being part of the cultural product itself.

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Members of the Italian theatre group Tascabile di Bergamo performing during the barter in Bahia Bianca, Argentina, 1987

Odin actors and candombe artists performing together while surrounded by spectators at the barter in Bahia Bianca, Argentina, 1987

Intercultural Performance

Odin actors and candombe artists at the barter in Montevideo, Uruguay, 1987

Two local dancers performing during the barter in Bahia Bianca, Argentina, 1987

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drawing to a close, the division of roles blurred when their hosts encouraged the actors to join them in their dances and songs while, under the guidance of several of the actors, some people from the neighbourhood attempted to imitate what the professionals had done. Similarly, the community performers shifted from being audience to the various presentations by the groups to being actors. In the latter part of the barter, meanwhile, they became protagonists in the dissolution of roles because it was they who either encouraged the members of the theatre groups to join them or were the most curious to learn from the professionals. Those inhabitants of Bahia Bianca who remained audience throughout the event were a special kind of audience. Since the barter was mounted as a meeting that involved the local community, those who did not perform had a vested interest in the presentations by their neighbours. The local artists represented the neighbourhood; their songs and dances were what Erving Goffman might have termed the community's face.3 A face which was even further loaded by the fact that much of what they presented to the »foreigners« was traditional material with deep sociohistorical roots in the community. Their community was on display so the entire neighbourhood had an invested relationship with their performers. The local people who only watched were spectators to the professional actors, but they became active observers when their friends performed, because they were part of what was presented. They were not mere passive spectators to an esthetic performance; they were witnesses to an exchange in which they had a stake, they were the barter's »invested community«. Following the completion of the presentations, the divisions between spectators and performers became unclear as both groups mingled together. The spectators congratulated »their« performers, talked with the professional actors about what they had done, discussed the latter's props and admired their costumes, some even joined the local performers who were teaching songs and dances to the actors from the International Gathering. Sociologically speaking, the third stage of the barter was the most interesting because it not only involved a shift in roles, but also something akin to what Victor Turner calls »spontaneous communitas«, that is, »a direct, immediate and total confrontation of human identities«.4 It is not so much that the individuated roles of »foreign actor«, »local performer«, and »community spectator« ceased to exist during this latter phase, but that they were only a backdrop to a foregrounded liminality in which the common experience of the »barter community« took preceGoffman defines face as »an image of self delineated in terms of approved social attributes - albeit an image that others may share, as when a person makes a good showing for his profession or religion by making a good showing for himself.« Erving Goffman, Interaction Ritual (New York, 1967), p. 5. This definition focuses on individual behaviour, but in the case of barter, the entire community's face is presented through its representatives. Victor Turner, From Ritual to Theatre: The Human Seriousness of Play (New York, 1982), pp. 47-8.

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dence over everything else. The structural system of social organization, with its hierarchical earned and/or assigned roles, was irrelevant in the barter community. The barter was a meeting of cultures in which the barter community subverted the separate, homogenous cultures involved through performance and personal contact. A person's role in whatever theatre group he or she belonged to, or their social status in Bahia Bianca was irrelevant; this was »a >moment in and out of timewhoever teaches his brother one letter will go to paradise< [CA]. That's what Saharans are about.« »lianna man 'allama li' akhi-hi harfan wahidan dakhala al-jannata. Saharawa huma haduk.«

In the case of scriptural citation, the veridical assumptions are clear and, above all, unquestionable. Whether the speaker cites the sayings of the Prophet or the Qur'an, the citation is in classic Arabic. As Ochs has demonstrated, stances or intentions may be indexed via other networks of signs.13 Classic Arabic indexes the transcendent and the authoritative, the true, simply by dint of its relation to scripturalist Islam. The question that arises from this brief examination is: how do genres with a clear relation to truth value combine to form a complex, or secondary, genre whose veracity is doubted - i.e., marketplace language? We might invoke Bateson's play frame14 and say that the larger context overrides the individual genres. However, I suggest this is not the case. Marketplace language, like all languages of capitalist exchange, is not »just play«. Rather, it is a special case of linguistic exchange whose conditions of satisfaction are not suspended, as they are in fiction or the imagination, but are delayed. The conditions of satisfaction are delayed until sufficient proof is gathered to constitute their validity. I will return to this point. Positing the intentionalites of a simple genre may be plausible; however, complex genres such as the novel, or the marketplace oratory which I will examine presently, are more problematic. If the intentionality of a simple genre or utterance is multiplicitous, divining the intention of a dialogic genre (that is a genre, like marketplace language, that embeds other genres within it) is a dubious enterprise, dependent on context, audience, code (or genre) as well as the intentions (plural) of the speaker.15 As complicated as this process may be, I am not con13

14 15

Elinor Ochs, »From Feelings to Grammar: A Samoan Case Study«, in Language Socialization Across Cultures, eds. Bambi B. Schieffelin and Elinor Ochs (Cambridge, 1986), pp. 251-72. See Gregory Bateson, Steps to an Ecology of the Mind (New York, 1972). See Alessandro Duranti, »Truth and Intentionality: An Ethnographic Critique«, Cultural Anthropology, vol. 8, no. 2 (1993), pp. 214-45.

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vinced by arguments that posit intention (whether in actor, audience or code) as ultimately indeterminate and unknowable. Rather, intimacy with the intentions of all these variables - both intrinsic and extrinsic, or endowed - teaches us something invaluable about the interplay of the mind/body complex and the society it creates and inhabits.

Marketplace language: A case study in intentionality When Bakhtin introduced the notion of marketplace language, it was in relation to the carnivalesque, and to the function of the carnivalesque - to render performance, experience and/or text dialogic - that is, relativized and irreducible to one meaning or intent. In particular, the carnivalesque genre had properties that set it apart from others: it was deliberately irreverent, challenging limits of appropriateness and hierarchy. Most importantly, it was a genre whose themes had the potential to bleed into the performance context - marketplace language not only discussed the grotesque lower bodily strata, for example, but enacted it: there was a motivated correspondence between the narrative and the narrated event, between what Young distinguishes as the Storyrealm and the Taleworld.16 The carnivalesque was an embodied genre whose performance was a social act with reverberations outside of its limited frame, an enacted genre hooked into pragmatics and empirical life. Although it is postmodernism that has put the Western scholar most in touch with notions of polysemy, openness, and inauthenticity, the Moroccan case examined will underscore how even so called »premodern«17 practices contain these currents. You see, right, always when a woman comes to me I tell her: »Take care of the husband.« Forbearance, forbearance, forbearance, forbearance. God help you. Forbearance, forbearance, forbearance Forbearance, it's medicine, it's the cure. If the wife doesn't have forbearance, [there's] nothing. Because the Messenger of God said: »If they knew what was in helba they would measure it as gold.« [CA] Because my Lord said, God says in the Great Qur'an, in the ha mim [sura], 16

17

»Realms described and realms inhabited, I slip from description to habitation and out of habitation into description.« Katherine G. Young, Talewords and Storyrealms: The Phenomenology of Narrative (Dodrecht and Boston/MA, 1987) p.ix. I qualify this genre as premodern in the sense that it expresses a premodern chronotope - what Bakhtin calls »folkloric time« - a productive and generative time, from preclass agricultural society wherein specific events are part of the whole, non-alienated from nature and the body; and cyclicity is salient.

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»it destroys everything with the order of its God.« [CA] The wise men and the interpreters spoke about the black seed — and it's sanuj. Look today, without gain or loss, you see, you're my brother and I'm your brother; you're my arms and I'm your arms. Because whoever teaches his brother one letter will go to paradise [CA]. That's what Saharans are about. This here is the place of earning. This is the sea. I call it the sea. It's like that, it's [big] like a sea. It's like a television. It's like a video. Understand me and taste the words. Marrakesh is a big city, folklore of the people, a big country, a big city. This ostrich here comes from the Sudan. We used to have them here in Morocco, we remember. We hunted it, even our hunters. We used to eat its meat. Are there any deer left? This ostrich here is the best thing you can see, with its own way to be cooked. But you, you wouldn't know [even] if I gave it to you as a gift, you wouldn't know it. »He who does not know the free bird, grills it« (Hi ma-y-'arf 1-tair 1-hurr, y-shwi-h.) This is an ostrich, this. This cost 100 riyals. Spiritual recompense: he who teaches his brother one letter will go to paradise. The one that teaches his brother in Arabic one lesson from our religion has gone to paradise whether man or woman. Pay attention. Whoever has his health has his bounty. Whoever doesn't have health has nothing. Generous Ramadan. He said to you: »Whoever doesn't know the free bird, grills it.« He'll put it on the fire and eat it with its bones. Yes, the experts said: (CA:} {He who fright hasn't ridden and whose leather sandals haven't worn out and who hasn't absented himself from his family for years, Add to him the kohl stick and the kohl bottle [for he is like a woman] and place him among the expenditures for children.}[p. 33] Bismillah. We want to make the time pass and to talk and speak. Understand me and taste the words. Today is a holiday, the biggest holiday is this Ramadan, the »night of possibility« is better than 1000 months.

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But you have to pray. Because our Lord says in the Qur'an, »Order your family with prayer. [CA]« I'm just a guiding herbalist, but I have to tell you this word, Order your family with prayer.[CA]« Praise be to God. The holy men, the holy men, »There is neither fear nor grief in them« [CA]. If I go to visit a saint, I'll visit him with complete intention [belief]. God is great with generous good intention. Female Orator: I'm going to say two words. They bewitched your sons and they bewitched your daughters. They bewitched your house. They bewitched your store. Consequences [of magic] are following you. How many children you had! How much you built! How much weight you gained! How powerful you are! You have lots of newborn sheep. You had a bountiful harvest. [But] the eye is following you until your entire house falls. The eye is following you. It emptied the castle and filled the grave. The eye follows you. It ate the meat and sucked the blood. Your sins are mine [I'll be responsible for your actions] Here's your key. Well, compensate me with »God have mercy on the parents.« God have mercy on the parents. My Lord, my Master, whoever intends to do something, may God realize it for him. Whoever intends to do something, May God realize it for him. And whoever does harm to his brothers, May God harm him. And whoever does harm to his brothers, May God harm him. And whoever does harm to his brothers, May God harm him. Yeah! Intention (niya) is from you and the impetus is from me And completion is from him who created us, our Master. If you want to buy these herbs prepared, just have good intentions (.dir niya) and leave the yoke here on my shoulders. There's nothing more difficult than responsibility.

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I have analysed the poetics of this genre of verbal art in detail elsewhere;18 in particularly how the poetics contribute to the establishment of individual and gendered authority in the public domain - especially for women orators, who are relatively new there. What I want to emphacize here is that these discourses are sales spiels; their speakers are trying to sell herbal mixtures that cure illness and the malevolent effects of magic. Their words are thus suspect, because interested. This does not mean that they are insincere, however. In fact, the male herbalist in particular comes from a long line of herbalists in Tata, southern Morocco a region renown for expertise in herbal medicine. Yet it is clear that marketplace oratory, as opposed to the simple genres that compose it, is not regarded as a serious or »true« genre. Rather than conclude that intentionality is ultimately indeterminate in the marketplace, or that it is just play, however, I suggest that we turn our attention to precisely the conditions of satisfaction that Searle delimits as determining facticity or truth. The complex genre of marketplace language takes place in a subjunctive mode, an »as if« discursive space, wherein intentionalities can only be devined after the fact, when a configuration of proofs is assembled and jointly recognized, when conditions of satisfaction are established. Here we may learn from Moroccan ethnosemantic notions of intentionality that do not regard truth as inherent in either genre or context, but insist upon a validation of truth by an audience who concur on an interpretation. For Moroccans, marketplace language is a medium of deception where the intentionality (niya) of the speaker is always in question. Thus does the herbalist/performer Abd al-Haddi warn: If I sell to you by swearing it's not good. My Lord says in the Qur'an: »Don't obey [just] any despised oath.« [CA] Ann, sir, a person brings insomnia and nervousness upon himself. Be careful not to follow [it], not to follow. Fatigue isn't good. Be careful not to follow oaths.

The marketplace is not simply a framed context wherein all utterances are interpeted as lies, nor are the »authoritative« or »truthful« genres of oath, blessing or scriptural citation a guarantee of sincerity. Rather, marketplace language is populated with all of these intentions and relations to truth. Such »incorporated genres... comment on each other, stratifying..., refracting authorial intention, showing up and relativizing all borders«.19 Defining one intentionality in such a context is always a matter of exclusion, wresting the vested interests and prior intentions of other genres away. Truth is then a matter of bid and proof. Because it is 18 19

See Deborah A. Kapchan, Gender on The Market: Moroccan Women and the Revoicing of Tradition (Philadelphia/PA, 1996). Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, p. 323.

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composed of different authoritative genres, marketplace language reaches out to different audiences, inviting them to »taste the words« and determine their value with multiple senses and multiple opinions. »Intention is from you«, the female herbalist tells her client, »the impetus [for action] is from me.« God then brings the transaction to completion. It cannot be accomplished alone. Unlike simple (or primary) genres, whose intentionality is traceable,20 marketplace language is language in the subjunctive mode (following Turner) where intention must be seized, claimed and most importantly, validated. This is as true in the marketplace of ideas as it is in the hierarchy of genres, identities or material objects. The language of exchange is not fiction; nor is it true. It is a language of possibility whose actualization is always delayed until a public legitimation occurs. This is not to underestimate the power of fictional realms, nor to reify the empirical. It is simply to assert that intentionality is intersubjectively constructed, and, as such, relies on shared assumptions and generic constraints - in short, audience response.21 To say that Abd al-Haddi means x, is to impose an intentionality on an open text. To say that the response is not conditioned by the stances and attitudes embedded in the speech genre, however, is to overlook the power of generic performativity. Marketplace language is not false, nor is it just play. If it were, societies would collapse.22 Marketplace language hovers in the space of imagination until it is intersubjectively validated, its conditions of satisfaction acknowledged and attained. Marketplace language - »It's a television. It's like a video [...] this is the place of earning / taste the words...« There is an ironic inversion of the local here. Think of Geertz's characterization of the marketplace as a »search for information«, for example.23 In the contemporary marketplace - the unbounded version - it is less the availability of information that is at stake than the discernment of what qualifies as legitimate information telling truth from lies. Marketplace language can be looked at as a factory where dreams of consumption, authority and identities are woven from and represented in a diversity of »true« and »fictional« genres; but it is only in meeting the conditions of satisfaction (or promising to) that a sale is ensured, that »truth« is circumscribed. 20

21 22 23

Poetry is a genre that Bakhtin says is mono-intentional, because it is mono-authorial: »The world of poetry, no matter how many contradictions and insoluble conflicts the poet develops within it, is always illumined by one unitary and indisputable discourse. Contradictions, conflicts and doubts remain in the object, in thoughts, in living experiences - in short, in the subject matter - but they do not enter into the language itself. In poetry, even discourse about doubts must be cast in a discourse that cannot be doubted.« Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, p. 286. See Don Brenneis and Alessandro Duranti, »The Audience as Co-Author: An Introduction«, Text, vol. 6 (1986), pp. 239-47. See Arjun Appadurai, »Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Cultural Economy«, Public Culture, vol. 2 (1990), pp. 1-24. Clifford Geertz, »Suq: The Bazaar Economy in Sefrou«, in Meaning and Order in Moroccan Society: Three Essays in Cultural Analysis, eds. Clifford Geertz, Mildred Geertz, and Lawrence Rosen (Cambridge, 1979), pp. 123-244.

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Concluding intentions My intention in this chapter has been to demonstrate the following: 1. Like utterances, performed genres are socially attributed with an intentional orientation, particularly regarding notions of belief and truth; 2. because of historical precedent/indexical density, the intentionalities present in this genre seem to have a life and authority of their own, and are inhabited by social actors; 3. a complex genre like marketplace oratory contains multiple intentionalities; its comprising genres do not have an equal relation to truth and authority, yet relativize each other and vie for dominance, making the attribution of intentionality an open question; 4. that question (of intentionality) begs for response and is answered collectively as words and goods are tried and proofs accrue; 5. all intentions remain in the realm of fiction/imagination in marketplace language until they are Lntersubjectively proven, that is, until the conditions of satisfaction are met. It then passes from the realm of the imaginary to the realm of the »real;« that is, the authoritative; 6. because of its dialogicity, legitimation is possible by many audiences and criteria; indeed dialogicity (or hybridization) makes a genre maximally appropriable; 7. analysis of marketplace language elucidates how truth is discursively constructed and agreed upon and how the imagination is marketed. I will close, I think appropriately, with words that are not my own: As a living, socio-ideological concrete thing, as heteroglot opinion, language, for the individual consciousness, lies on the borderline between oneself and the other. The word in language is half someone else's. It becomes »one's own« only when the speaker populates it with his own intention, his own accent, when he appropriates the word, adapting it to his own semantic and expressive intention. Prior to this moment of appropriation, the word does not exist in a neutral and impersonal language [... ] but rather it exists in other people's mouths, in other people's contexts, serving other people's intentions: it is from there that one must take the word, and make it one's own. And not all words for just anyone submit equally easily to this appropriation, to this seizure and transformation into private property: many words stubbornly resist, others remain alien, sound foreign in the mouth of the one who appropriated them and who now speaks them; they cannot be assimilated into his context and fall out of it; it is as if they put themselves in quotation marks against the will of the speaker. Language is not a neutral medium that passes freely and easily into the private property of the speaker's intentions; it is populated - overpopulated - with the intentions of others. Expropriating it, forcing it to submit to one's own intentions and accents, is a difficult and complicated process.24

24

Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, p. 294.

Fawzia Afzal-Khan Desiring Methodology: Performing Postcolonial Theatre Anthropology in Pakistan

Abstract This chapter explores both the usefulness and the limitations of the inter-connected, inter-disciplinary methodologies of Postcolonial Studies, Feminist Studies, Performance Studies, Anthropology and the anti-disciplinary Cultural Studies, when applied to a study of contemporary Pakistani street or »alternative« theatre. The chapter begins with a description of what I call an autobiographically inflected »methodology of desire«, which encompasses aspects of the above-mentioned academic approaches in an attempt to understand and analyse the cultural politics of the alternative theatre movement in Pakistan. I then present brief analyses of a few street plays and the politics of reception at different locales. I conclude with a reiteeration of my own complicitous status within a travelling methodology that is forever »elsewhere«.

A methodology of desire As I write this chapter, I am forced to confront, first and foremost.the naked fact of desire: desire as the engine of my methodology, or perhaps more accurately, desire-as-methodology. What do I mean by this? Taking my cue from Ruth Behar's moving meditation on what it means to be a »native anthropologist«, I have, from the start of this project - which I did not even know was going to become one when I first became involved with one of the theatre groups I am now writing about - found myself to be the »vulnerable observer« or rather, observer/participant that Behar writes about in her book. I went »back home« to Lahore, Pakistan, in the spring of 1987, having just completed my dissertation on Indian novelists writing in English. While there for a three-month stay, I promptly started performing with an »alternative« theatre group, led by the indomitable Madeeha Gauhar, someone I had long known and admired growing up in Lahore before leaving for the United States in 1979 to pursue my PhD, and where, by 1987,1 knew I was going to remain. When I returned to my academic life in the United States after that interlude in the country of my birth, after having become involved, through the realm of theatre, in the intense cultural and political debates consuming Pakistanis at that time, I knew that my scholarship would have to take account of those experiences, which had rekindled desire for that part of myself that I had left behind, and which would be kept alive through my research activities. Trained to leave the desiring »I« out of the scholarly acts of research and academic discourse, I now knew that my approach to this project would have to encompass the »per-

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sonal is political« insight of the feminist movement, as well as a whole host of questions beginning to be articulated through the emergent interdisciplinary methodologies of Women's Studies, Postcolonial Studies, Cultural Studies, Performance Studies, etc. Perhaps the most important insight concerning appropriate methodology for my type of project comes from a revisioning of classic anthropology as proffered by Behar: The last decade of meditation on the meaning of »native anthropology« - in which scholars claim a personal connection to the places in which they work - has opened up an important debate on what it means to be an insider in a culture. As those who used to be »the natives« have become scholars in their own right, often studying their home communities and nations, the lines between participant and observer, friend and stranger, aboriginal and alien are no longer so easily drawn. We now have a notable group of »minority« anthropologists with a range of ambivalent connections to the abandoned and reclaimed »homelands« in which they work. '

Postcolonial Cultural Studies, or the Politics of Location Any discussion of methodology in my study of what is variously termed Pakistani street theatre, or Alternative/Parallel theatre must then, by necessity, begin with myself as native anthropologist (informant?), and all of the attendant advantages and limitations of such a self-positioning. Firstly, I agree with Anuradha Kapur that it is important that one relinquishes »the myth of the perfect spectator serenely presenting a seamless overview from a position of superior wisdom. The speaker must define herself or himself according to the position that s/he speaks from.«2 This type of rigorous attention to a politics of location and complicity as part of my methodology I attribute to postcolonial theory in general; although the »engaged« and »vulnerable« form of analysis that such an acknowledgement of positionality entails is very much part of a wider feminist approach, which insists with Sandra Harding that »the beliefs and behaviors of the researcher are part of the empirical evidence for (or against) the claims advanced in the results of research. This evidence too must be open to critical scrutiny no less than what is traditionally defined as relevant evidence.«3 Or, as Donna Haraway insists, »location is about vulnerability; location resists the politics of closure, finality.«4 I have found the postcolonial, postmodern and feminist analytic methods most useful in approaching the study of Pakistani street theatre. They have all helped me, through their insistence on paying attention to a »politics of location«, 1 2 3 4

Ruth Behar, The Vulnerable Observer: Anthropology That Breaks Your Heart (Boston/MA, 1996), p. 28. Anuradha Kapur, Actors, Pilgrims, Kings and Gods: The Ramlila at Ramnagar (Calcutta, 1990), p. 2. Quoted in Behar, The Vulnerable Observer, p. 29. Ibid.

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Woman-as-victim. Scene from Ajoka's Eik Thi Nani (There was Once a Grandmother)

to resist a »politics of closure« in terms of developing a critique and assessment of this type of theatrical activity, while rendering my own position as commentator, researcher and critic vulnerable rather than opaque. This vulnerability has led to my being viewed with a certain amount of derision, especially by those who, like Lok Rehas, belong to hard-line leftist groups. Some are, perhaps rightly, suspicious of my motives for »wanting to know it all«, whilst others see me as someone who, not being caught up in the internal intrigues and power-plays, can be counted upon to air some of the seamier stuff that generally gets brushed under the carpet. Shifting the focus now from my complicitous status as observer to the actual subject of my study, the Parallel Theatre Movement, I should like to point to Cultural Studies as a useful methodology that allows me to look at the subject of analysis as a part of a larger, interlocking system, and necessitating an interdisciplinary methodology which I call Postcolonial Theatre Anthropology. For example, I have realized recently that I cannot confine my study to something strictly defined as »theatre«. Many types of performances - not all of which can, in any conventional sense, be called »theatre« - have to be taken into account. For instance, it has become clear to me that the kind of role-play and educational skits, which community-based organizations engage in, are not »theatre« in the

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Women as victims of patriarchy, as well as oppressors of each other. Scene from Ajoka's Lappar (Slap)

true sense of the word; yet, they are an important aspect of the Parallel Theatre Movement, in that several of the well-recognized theatre groups, such as Ajoka and Lok Rehas in Punjab and Tehrik-i-Niswan in Karachi, conduct workshops for community groups and organizations in rural and low-income urban communities, where theatrical techniques are taught for the purpose of creating awareness of social and political issues. I have also realized that I will have to pay attention to drama performances on television and what Sonia Amin has called »the invasion from the skies«,5 to arrive at a more accurate and profound assessment of so-called street/parallel theatre, especially since some of the leading groups of this type of theatre have started performing on state-owned television, or producing videos of plays for private television channels. Thus, the issue of satellite media, the role of NGOs (non-governmental agencies) in promoting the Parallel Theatre Movement, its interconnection with the women's movement and its battle with religious intolerance, involve the study of governmental politics, Pakistani history as well as the Law. There is a further aspect which is very important in the Pakistani context: the role of gossip. Much that I have learnt about the internal group politics of several theatre groups, as well as the politics and ideological commitment or lack Sonia Amin, »Women and Theatre in the New Millenium: The Present Mirrors the Future.« Unpublished lecture given at the Women and Theatre Conference held in Dacca, Bangladesh, January 1997.

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Ajoka's Dekh Tamasha Chalta Ban, a play about religious intolerance, performed in openair locations to inner-city, low-income audiences in Lahore

thereof of leading personalities of this movement and their attitude toward lowerclass members, has been acquired through an amazingly intricate gossip network. Indeed, my own approach to this project has very much been influenced by early British Cultural Studies, in that I look at unequal structures of Pakistani society, in which, as in other societies, individuals are not born with the same access to education, wealth, health care etc., and my aim as a scholar is to write on behalf of those with the fewest resources. My lack of »objectivity« is granted to me by this methodology, because, unlike the older varieties of literary studies, cultural criticism, or (so-called) objective social sciences, political questions are not considered irrelevant to the appreciation of culture. In fact, culture in such a context is not considered an abbreviation of »high« culture assumed to have value across time and space; rather, culture and society are seen as inextricably intertwined. Theatre, in such a situation, becomes an aspect of culture, and its critique and evaluation are not a matter of some universally established aesthetic credo, but rather the result of various interlocking factors, including an individually and communally situated ideology of aesthetics and ethics. Overall, then, what my methodological approach necessitates is an acknowledgement, first and foremost, of my complicity in what I try to describe, analyse, evaluate. »Complicity acknowledges both faulty vision and partial vision«.6 Why is it important to accept the notion that one's vision might be faulty and partial? Kapur, Actors, Pilgrims, Kings and Gods, p. 3·

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For Kapur, in studying »traditional« Indian theatrical form of Ramlila, the acceptance of a faulty vision helps avoid a: sort of muscology that assumes that forms can be summarized, essentialized, held stable, so as to be successfully ingested by the viewer. Rather, a narrative that is formed by the author's perceptions, shaped by all the disruptive detail that comes along with that, is to be created; such a narrative has space for speaking along with, and intervening in, the history of traditional theatre forms«.7

To this one might add non-traditional forms of theatre as well. At the same time, such a complicitous and faulty narrative counteracts the colonial imperative to classify, schematize and manage »other« cultures by labelling certain »traditions« of that culture as »authentic« and others as not. What is in fact manufactured by such emphasis on »authentic traditions«, is a history of tradition moulded by the West in so far as it is posited as its exact alterity. Arguing against such Orientalist fantasies, Kapur asserts: Traditional forms must be read and re-read, and the details understood not in terms of a unified field marked Tradition, but in terms of what bits and pieces make them work the way they do; that, instead of a single essentially authentic voice, there are several possible voices with which to speak about tradition and traditional forms in order that the puzzles of our seeing today are solved«.8

Ideology and the (re)invention of folklore For me, such a performance-centered, postmodernist, postcolonial approach provides a useful methodology to overcome the obstacles I had to face when analysing, among other things, the folkloric elements utilized in a complex interplay with other motifs, themes and factors, by some of the Punjabi street theatre groups I have studied. For example, one of the questions I asked myself was: »Which elements of Punjabi folkloric tradition are being revived and why?« In order to answer such a question, I was initially faced with at least two obstacles: a) how to isolate the idealized generalized folk tradition against which »modern« variations are being worked; and b) how to judge the ideological value and impact of these performances?

Kapur's deconstructive, performance-centered approach toward study of traditional Indian theatre proved helpful in overcoming the first hurdle; other performance-centered approaches are also useful in that they tend to acknowledge the role of individuality and creativity in the transmission of folklore itself. As Baumann asserts: »Folklore texts have come to be seen not simply as realizations of normative stan7 8

Ibid., p. 3. Ibid., p. 2.

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dards, but as emergent, the product of the complex interplay of communicative resources, social goals, individual competence, community ground rules for performance, and culturally-defined event structures«.9 Thus, one can indeed analyse the folkloric elements of some of these street theatre performances in the context of situated action, allowing one to study the interplay of tradition and innovation in the actual conduct of social life and responses generated by the performances at various locations. For example, the open-air performance of one of Ajoka's street plays, Dhee Rani, at an inner-city girls' school in Lahore, utilized both folk songs and folk gestures including bawdy/body language to much hilarious recognition amongst a lower-class urban audience. In a feminist play performed for an elite, largely Englishspeaking upper-middle class audience in 1987, Ajoka used many folk songs derived from centuries-old Sufi tradition. Lok Rehas, another Punjabi group, has made use on several occasions of popular folk tunes, whose verses have been entirely re-written by them to convey their sentiments on contemporary sociopolitical realities. However, it is when trying to arrive at an understanding and consequent evaluation of the ideological import and effectiveness of these traditional/folkloric motifs both upon audiences and actors, that one runs up against the limitations of the structuralist ethos generally underlying performance-centred approaches. Unfortunately, most classical Marxist approaches, as well as the psychoanalytic models upon which (earlier) gendered theories of spectatorship in film studies (such as Mulvey's) are modelled, also do not offer much of a counter-space to elaborate an analytic method which might provide a more enabling model for a critique of performance-as-praxis. Such politico-psychoanalytic structuralism does not concede enough space to the individual or the community to act on the world on its own terms, to generate its own meanings and effects. In some ways, the very notion of »taking theatre to the people to teach them about their issues«, smacks of such a structuralist (not to say condescending) approach. However, as Anuradha Kapur's methodology shows, a combination of theoretical approaches can help offset some of these obstacles. Most of these can be lumped under the Cultural Studies umbrella, and the notion of polysemy in particular can help us describe how cultural products - linked to folkoric tradition - may be combined with new elements to produce different effects in different situations. In this way, cultural production, as During and Bhabha have suggested, is conceived of as a process of »hybridization« and »negotiation«. Cultural Studies has been, to quote During, »most interested in how groups with least power practically develop their own readings of, and uses for, cultural products in fun, in resistance, or to articulate their own identity«.10 Along similar lines, I have found Scheduler's description of performance theory very useful to overcome the limitations of structuralism and a deterministic Marxism. His description of »actuals« is an appropriate materialist model for understanding what »happens« in the type of street or alternative theatre I am talking 9 10

Richard Baumann, Folkore,Cultural Performances, and Popular Entertainments (New York, 1992), p. 33Simon During, The Cultural Studies Reader (London, 1993), p. 7.

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about, which also attempts to be a type of »total theatre«. Explaining »actuals«, writes Schechner, »involves a survey of anthropological, sociological, psychological and historical materials«, not for the sake of asking whether the (new) theatre is »good«, but rather »how is it built and what are its bases? What are its functions and how does it relate to the life we live individually and collectively?«11 Utilizing the notion of polysemy, we can analyze the concept of »folk« as it is transmitted through these cultural/theatrical performances. Who, for instance, comprises the »folk« who is being addressed? What mechanisms of interpellation and counter-interpellation are set in motion at various locations and among the different audiences where these performances occur? Is there a dialectic set-up between performers and audience? Are women differently »hailed« than men at these performances? Are the variations in folkloric tradition, which are being reworked and recreated in these performances, exercises in social control or are they intended and perceived as subversive? Or, to take up another of Schechner's questions, how do these performances relate to the lives of different individuals and communities represented in diverse audiences?

Analysing performances: Methodology and its discontents The performance of Barri, one of Ajoka's plays, on the back lawn of the Goethe Institute in Lahore for a primarily elite audience, offers some interesting answers to the questions just posed. The Brechtian technique employed by the playwright by having the play end inconclusively with no resolution of Miriam's or Janat's fate (these are two lower-class women), but with Jamila's execution (she is the peasant murderess) and the middle-class activist's »acquittal« imminent, allows for some correspondence between Zahida's experience of alienation in trying to grapple with the political and moral meaning of her prison experience, and the alienation evoked in the audience at that particular outdoor location in the middle-class suburbs of Lahore. Indeed, as the play ends, we are all left to gaze upon the forlorn figure of Miriam sitting under the moonlit peepal tree. Yet, the lyrics of the folk songs she sings into the enveloping darkness (all stage lights have been switched off) hint at the subversive potential of Islamic Sufi thought. The lyrics of Bulleh Shah celebrate the life-force that obliterates all obstacles in the path of true love, human and divine. The passionate rapture, embodied in song and dance, allows for the redemptive power of love to heal one's wounds and to assert one's desire: »I will cast a spell with my song, to get my lost love back [...] Although I am neither married or single, I will have a babe to love in my arms«.12 On the one hand, such lyrics are rooted in a romantic and romanticized past, and celebrate a mystical and metaphysical approach to life's problems. On the other hand, given the political context of Pakistan at the time when the play was 11 12

Richard Schechner, Performance Theory (London, 1977), p. 40. Bulleh Shah, »Spell«, my translation.

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first performed (1987), one can interpret the use of these lyrics as subversive, in that they challenge fundamentalist Islamic thought, which denies and forbids the pleasure principle. However, the question of whether the portrayal of Miriam's character and her use of Sufi folk songs lends itself to an unequivocally feminist interpretation becomes more problematic in the light of recent Western approaches to the issue of gendered spectatorship. Notwithstanding differences in the experience of viewing film and theatre, the issue of representation of female characters and their perception by audiences remains germane to both arts. Despite the critiques levelled at Laura Mulvey's work on gendered spectatorship, her psychoanalytic analysis of the male gaze, which renders the woman performer as spectacle, both as erotic/desired object and symbol of the castrated »other«, does provide a useful methodology to question some of Ajoka's (and others') ostensibly feminist productions. In terms of the character of Miriam, for instance, it is certainly questionable whether she is a figure of resistance to patriarchal rules and images of woman, or an object of desire for the male and masculinized female gaze in her role as songstress of romantic folksongs. Yet, the complications raised by the intersection of class issues with those of gender - both for performers and audience - show up the limitations of a purely psycho-structural feminist approach to theatre analysis and point to the necessity of a Marxist-oriented interpretation. For example, when the play was first performed, I played the role of Miriam and was overwhelmed by the emotional demands of the role. I internalized the anguish of a woman, whose baby-to-be is forcibly removed from her womb in order to eliminate the trace of her jailers' crime. Yet, I had no reference points for imagining the lived reality of a woman such as Miriam. It was not until several years later that 1 visited the shrine of Data Sahib, the place of mystical superstition, which educated, middle-class Muslims did not and do not frequent. What then had I hoped to achieve by playing that role? Acclaim for a fine acting part by an audience assembled on the lawns of the Goethe Institute in Lahore? An increased awareness and sensitivity to the political and social ills afflicting Pakistani society in general and Pakistani women in particular? If at least partially the latter, then what was going to come of this increased awareness? For me? For members of the audience? For Madeeha Gauhar and Shahid Nadeem? For other members of the Ajoka theatre group? What could such a Marxist approach to understanding/appreciating the performance really hope to achieve? The male members of the company were, for this production, very much in the background as stage crew, except for the very corporeal voice of a male warden shouting obscenities and orders to »shut up« at the women during strategic points in the play. This exclusion of men from the stage creates further problems of interpretation vis-ä-vis the feminist intent and message of the play. It obscures their role as oppressors in patriarchy and shifts attention to the women-as-victims. This in turn, raises the problem of form. All of Shahid Nadeem's plays are examples of what Rubina Saigol has called, »relentless feminist realism«,13 one 13

Rubina Saigol, »A Feminist Critique of Ajoka.« Unpublished paper, n.d., p. 10.

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that creates a stereotypical and humourless image of woman-as-victim. I think that a deconstructive approach to the notion of sexual difference has aided me in critiquing such realism. It also makes me think that if these drama groups themselves took a more deconstructive/poststructuralist approach to gender, the entire representational system of masculinity and femininity undergirding patriarchy could be more seriously questioned. Thus far, such a challenge has not emerged. The reactions of a fairly homogenous (from the standpoint of class) audience were curious: from one woman telling me that I was far too »clean and pretty« and that I sang much »too well« to be convincing in Miriam's role (what did she mean? that women like Miriam could be neither clean nor pretty? that women of my class could not/should not attempt to represent women like Miriam?); to another woman kissing and hugging me tearfully with words to the effect that somehow the different lives of these women resonated with her own (this was a woman who was a former neighbour of my parents, and who had been physically abused by her husband for the twenty years that their marriage lasted); to a male lawyer and politician who later became Minister of the Interior under Benazir Bhutto's first government, inviting me to a party in his home (»It'll be great fun lots of interesting people - do come, daahling«, as he squeezed my hand ever-so gently); to a former English professor of mine from Kinnaird College, who frowned earnestly and said that she thought the play raised interesting problems which she needed to think about and »digest« more fully later, in private. So, to reframe my earlier set of questions: who were we talking to, about what, and for what purpose(s)? What, if anything, was subversive about the play and its reworking of traditional folklore performed in this location in a realistic form, tempered through some recourse to Brechtian techniques of alienation? Shifting the locus of performance to different sites with different audiences obviously complicates these questions of communication, reception and motivation. One such location was a Muslim girls' school located in Shahdara, a lowermiddle class urban community on the outskirts of Lahore, where I accompanied Ajoka for a performance in March 1997. As one of the events organized around International Women's Day, this was to be a performance of a short play entitled Dhee Rant, dealing with the theme of female education. The performance was going to take place in the central courtyard of the school, the audience comprising mainly of local housewives who had been urged to attend via the efforts of area activists, as well as some of the older schoolgirls (»We weren't sure the treatment of the subject-matter would be appropriate for the girls to watch«, said one of the teachers in response to Madeeha Gauhar's question as to why there were not more students present). The four-room schoolhouse, which we entered through a large steel gate, was colourfully festooned with welcome banners in Urdu, and had several other banners draped across its walls proclaiming the unity and oneness of God, the greatness of Islam, and the importance of following the »right path« as prescribed by the Prophet. Many of the women sitting in a circle around the courtyard were wearing black satin

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burqas - the Pakistani version of the hijab (veil); others were more »openly« clad, in colourful shalwar-kameezes (loose tunics), with dupattas (scarves) drawn over their bosoms as a mark of their modesty. Most said they were there because the performance provided them with a welcome excuse to suspend their daily chores and leave their homes; they hoped it was going to be »good entertainment«. They knew full well that Ajoka performed »issue-oriented« theatre, or theatre for social change; but, after all, it was theatre, drama, music spectacle! This audience, seated along the edges of the maidan, or central courtyard, of the schoolhouse on the dust-covered grass, was certainly in a good position to view the ritualized movements of the actors and hear the short, repetitive poetic refrains, which punctuated the simple dialogue of the play. The play opens with a young woman in the center of a rectangle formed by her father, brother, uncle and mother, who chant: »Dhee Rani-ay, Dhee Rani-ay, Kee Chani-ay, kee chaniay?« (»Oh daughter, queen of the house, what do you desire?«) The rest of the short play consists of rapidly changing scenes, in which the ominous rectangle closes in on the protagonist whenever she tries to express her autonomy. The chorus of »Nos« builds to a terryifying crescendo that ends with the edict: »Dee Rani-ay, Dhee Rani-ay, Mar jaani-ay, mar jaani-ay« (»Why don't you just die, oh daughter/queen«). The subversive or revolutionary potential of the play lies in the fact that at each repressive moment of the play the young woman questions and protests against the unfair treatment she is receiving in the name of family honour and tradition. At the very end, when it seems that her family/society has finally succeeded in crushing her life, the nameless Everywoman rises and comes forward to declaim: »In olden times they used to bury newborn daughters alive; today, in our society they want to see her buried within the four walls of a concept called >homeother< cultures by western interculturalists emerging from a fundamental dissatisfaction, if not boredom, with their own cultural resources. Indeed, one could argue that interculturalism was born out of a certain ennui, a reaction to aridity and the subsequent search for new sources of energy, vitality and sensuality through the importation of »rejuvenating raw materials«.2 With such a context in mind, it is useful, I think, to return to Roland Barthes and his own elucidation of the spectatorial role. »I am fascinated by the Bunraku«, he writes, »the otherness of peoples interests me and only because these puppets Baz Kershaw, »Cross-cultural Performance in a Globalized World«, Theatre Forum, vol. 8 (1996), pp. 67-72 (pp. 67-8). Rustom Bharucha, »Somebody's Other: Disorientations in the Cultural Politics of our Times«, in The Intercultural Performance Reader, ed. Patrice Pavis (London, 1996), pp. 196-216 (p. 207).

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come from elsewhere does my curiosity remain aroused.«3 On a performance of ritual songs and dances of the Hopi, Barthes commented: »Can we Westerners really consume a fragment of civilization totally isolated from its context?«4 What is precisely imagined by Barthes in his main verb and its modifier (»really consume«) is, of course, irretrievable, although its scope is not confined to the Western view of some other civilization. How, in any event, do we »really consume«? Consuming another's »civilization«, whether consciously or not, presents particular and often fraught concerns. The interest in this not-like-us theatre is apparently especially (only?) its otherness, its seeming inability to be understood (and, as such, to be »really consumed«) by conventional receptive processes. The trajectory by which »fascination« has become what I now want to identify as »obsession« is a complex one. As we have come to understand more carefully the operations and relations of self/other, West/East and all those other stifling binary oppositions, we have become used to both an interest in who »we« are and how that comes to be (subjectivity's dependency on its other), as well as the pleasures and pitfalls in trying to occupy that terrain. Thus, Edward Said makes the claim: [SJtudying the relationship between the »West« and its dominated cultural »others« is not just a way of understanding an unequal reationship between unequal interlocutors, but also a point of entry into studying the formation and meaning of Western cultural practices themselves. And die persistent disparity in power between the West and non-West must be taken into account if we are accurately to understand cultural forms. [...] [T]he striking consequence has been to disguise the power situation and to conceal how much the experience of the stronger partly overlaps with and, strangely, depends on the weaker.5

In the specific situation of theatrical practice, its production and reception, we might see Said's injunction as an account of the West's (ab)use of nonWestern theatrical forms not so much as experimental but as, in fact, reinscribing the traditional schema whereby the power of Western culture is secured. Such so-called experiments instate and reinstate the West's authority to know to know itself and its Others. Moreover, recent theory has also made explicit the glaring lacunae within Western cultural practices: the failure to represent inclusively in its own critical models. Henry Louis Gates argues that »we must redefine >theory< itself from within our own black cultures, refusing to grant the racist premise that theory is something that white people do, so that we are doomed to imitate our white colleagues, like reverse black minstrel critics done up in white face. We are all heirs to critical theory, but we black critics are heir to the black vernacular critical tradition.«6 3 4 5 6

Roland Barthes, »How to Spend a Week in Paris: 8-14 October 1979«, in In Signs, ed. Marshall Blonsky (Baltimore, 1985), pp. 118-21 (p. 120-21). Ibid., p. 207. Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York, 1993), pp. 191-92. Henry Louis Gates, »Authority, (White) Power, and the (Black) Critic; or, It's all Greek to Me«, in The Future of Theory, ed. Ralph Cohen (London, 1989), pp. 324-46 (p. 344).

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Gates's performance metaphor is particularly relevant here. Cultural experience can be expressed in terms of tradition as it has been practiced (Gates's citation of a black vernacular tradition) or in terms of another's (misrepresentation and/or appropriation of tradition (the minstrelsy which becomes doubly inauthentic in Gates's account) or, perhaps most likely, at some intersection of these competing sites of expression. As this particular interest in calibrating the cultural specificities of identity and their operations in a material world has become a focus in critical work as well as theatre and performance studies, there has been an ever-increasing interest in non-traditional forms of performance often characterized precisely as the cultural specificities of an Other represented for the viewing publics' entertainment and engagement.

Intercultural canons As interculturalism has been promoted in the name of theatrical innovation and experiment, as well as in terms of cultural exchange, there has emerged in critical writing, undoubtedly, a performance canon in its support. Broadly speaking, this consists of the projects of Peter Brook (and, especially, The Mahabharata), Ariane Mnouchkine (notably L'Indiade) and Eugenio Barba's corpus as well as other importations of the classics (particularly Shakespeare and Robert Wilson) to non-Western countries, rituals of Asian and African countries described and analyzed primarily in TDR: The Drama Review, and the international festival circuit. It is this trajectory of canon formation that causes Patrice Pavis to ask: Why has interculturalism become a sort of categorical imperative for a good number of contemporary directors? Is it really because it appears to be the new dominant theatrical aesthetic? A new well-meaning ethics of understanding between people? Is it not rather because it corresponds to a need of the theatre apparatus and fulfills an ideological function of white-washing under cover of a democratic openness to all the cultures of the world?7

And, as it takes one spectator to make a performance, so it takes one culturally specific spectator to make an intercultural performance. It is incumbent upon us, then, to chart some of the particular issues that interculturalism raises for a reception-based analysis of theatre. Kershaw suggests that the commodification of intercultural performance is a product of the positioning of those canonical works by Barba, Wilson, Brook and others in the international marketplace, and he turns instead to the work of a little-known Colombian theatre performing in a drama hall in north Wales.81 would Patrice Pavis, »Interculturalism in Contemporary Mise en Scene: The Image of India in >The Mahabharata< and the >IndiadeCongealed Residues< of Dance History: A Response to Richard Ralph«, Dance Chronicle, vol. 20, no. 1 (1997) pp. 63-80.

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From a very few video recordings and written texts on dance itself in the 1960s there has been a dramatic burgeoning of material. Video has become relatively commonplace, dance performances have become more widely available on television as well as in theatres, and degree courses are well established. While the level of activity nationally is still much smaller than that in university departments of Drama and Theatre Studies, it is still growing.28 When I arrived at the University of Surrey in 1982, there were no degree courses, no students and only one member of staff; there were two dance books on the library shelves, a biography of Margot Fonteyn and a Victor Sylvester Ballroom dancing manual. There are now more than 150 dance students including 50 postgraduates, ten staff, circa 3,000 volumes in the library, 56 periodicals, 400 videos, a major archive and information service in the National Resource Centre for Dance, and the European base for Labanotation courses and research, at the Labanotation Institute. It gives me pleasure, of course, to recite these facts, having been intimately involved in these developments, but that is not the reason for listing them. It is simply to give some indication of the rapid expansion of the subject.29 Recent literature in dance research demonstrates a change of theoretical position as well as a significant increase in volume, and in this section of the chapter I refer to a number of new texts as indicative of these changes in the narrative of dance research.

Dance analysis in the 1990s Moving closer to my main concern with Dance Analysis, when I finished my doctoral thesis in 1978, there were neither texts nor courses bearing this title. What there was, however, was a richness of movement analysis that had arisen from the practice and experience of British educators since the Second World War, mainly in using Rudolf Laban's theories both within dance and in other fields, together with an increasing amount of American modern dance and dance criticism.30 The strengths in movement observation, valuable as they were, were not sufficient for an appreciation of dances, either as art works or as cultural products. Many other theoretical perspectives, drawn from knowledge of dance genres, dance and art history, aesthetics and the developing literary and critical theory, and anthropological studies, as well as from cultural and political history needed 28

29 io

At the University of Surrey, for example, where the first independent Dance Studies programme in a British university started in 1982, we have developed single subject honours degrees (in 1996 there were 100 students on course), masters degrees (35 students enrolled) and research degrees (18 students registered), making a total of some 153 students and 10 staff. The expansion is particularly dramatic at the University of Surrey since it started from the proverbial blank sheet of paper only fifteen years ago. Ballet had no profile in the state-funded higher education system, and reviews of its performances were adulatory rather than critical.

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to be brought into relationship with detailed movement analysis of dances to illuminate the construction of meaning. The twentieth century trend towards a formalist, a-cultural analysis of the structures of dances had the benefit of developing types of movement description in some depth, but left out questions of stylistic differences, ignored the position of the maker and appreciator, and failed to address the bigger questions of the cultural construction of meaning in relation to the everyday life of particular cultural groups. This approach to criticism had been compounded by a longheld belief that movement31 could communicate without the benefit of, and indeed outside language. This was often seen as the mainspring of its value - the primitivist attraction of modernism as it has been called.52 In the book Dance Analysis we articulated a theoretical framework which described »concepts through which a dance might be interpreted« as distinct from writing an actual interpretation in order to juxtapose aspects of context with elements of a particular work.33 In other words, we identified a range of contexts, from the wider political and social events of the period, to the artistic frame in which the work in question was made, and the immediate dance context of the creator and receivers of the piece. We linked these contexts to the codification of typical subject matter and methods of treating it in different dance genres and styles as well as to the reader's interpretation of them. At this point of interaction of text and context, in the imaginative and involved engagement of the spectator, and only then, can »meaning« be constructed by a particular participant/observer at an equally specific moment in time. Today the viewer, or »reader«, of new dance is in a paradoxical position as revealed in Eco's suggestion that the spectator has agency, implied in the sub-title How to Produce Texts by Reading Them, which is almost immediately denied in his statement that »you cannot use the text as you want, but only as the text wants you to use it«.34 It is in this sense that the reader can be said both to be »defined« by the text and yet »responsible« for its construction or »production«. Foster, in the introduction to the 1986 volume Reading Dancing, now seen as a seminal exposure of dance to literary critical theories, reveals a similar Janus face. The constructor of meaning is one who looks, on the one hand, »at the choice of movement and the principles for ordering that movement and, on the other, at the procedures for referring to or representing worldly events in danced form.«35 31 32

33 34 35

Note the frequent, but illegitimate slide from »movement« to »dance« in much of this literature. See Roger Copeland's arguments in »Postmodern Dance and the Repudiation of Primitivism«, Partisan Review, vol. 50, no. 1 (1983), pp. 101-21 about Modern Dance and its association with »primitive« ideas. See Chapter 4 of Adshead, Dance Analysis. Umberto Eco, The Role of the Reader: Explorations in the Semiotics of Texts (Bloomington/IN, 1979), p. 9. Susan L. Foster, Reading Dancing: Bodies and Subjects in Contemporary American Dance (Berkeley/CA, 1986), p. XVII.

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Since the mid-1980s, the range and depth of research in dance analysis has grown. Some recent PhD theses at the University of Surrey have included minutely detailed analyses of phrase structures and meanings, comparing music and dance as well as a type of analysis using many detailed readings, of choreographic style across a body of work produced by a single choreographer - research which historically has sound precedents in the critical analysis of music and literature. However, other recent PhDs dissertations and a number of new book publications tell a different story. Alexandra Carter's Feminist Analysis of Women in the Music Hall Ballet (1993); Carol Brown's Inscribing the Body: Feminist and Postmodern Discourse in the Context of New Choreography, including solo recitals made for the PhD (1995); Patricia Penny's Ethnographic Analysis of Ballroom Dancing Competitors (1997); Sophie Lycouris' Improvisation in Dance Explored Both Practically and Theoretically (1996) and Sherril Dodds' Video Dance Body as a Site ofHybridity and Fluidity (1997) suggest other methodologies than those arising out of intrinsic, »new« or structuralist criticism. There is a wide range of research tools and methods in use in these projects, illustrating the point that methods must match the problems under investigation and that many interesting research ideas focusssed in dance are interdisciplinary in character. Research theses are one measure of change, but recently published book length studies might also be expected to reflect shifts in conceptual frame and in methodological perspectives. Amy Koritz examines the shared concerns of literature and dance as revealed in their social milieu.36 She is largely interested in locating a metaphoric body in the literature in the early part of the twentieth century rather than in the dancer/choreographer perspective. She succeeds primarily in highlighting a major problem for dance scholarship - that of being part of an endlessly recurring disappearing act, pressed into the metaphoric service of other disciplines. The absence of presence37 and the lack of concern with bodily matters of dancing and choreographing simply reinforces the legacy of historical and religious convention in which dance is used by any, and all, scholars as a rather nice (or sometimes very nasty) metaphor or symbol of eternal purity (or sensual wickedness) not as actual, if transient, embodied performance practice. Taking over a language in which the notion of »text« dominates, as many dance scholars have, is not entirely helpful to this disappearing body. Having long been known for its ephemerality, rather than its fixity, dance might be seen to acquire a spurious stability by its association with the idea of text. While this may be valuable in other disciplines where it has been used to open up the idea that anything may be a text, the very idea of text, with its literary baggage, is odd for dance. 36 37

Amy Koritz, Gendering Bodies/Performing Art: Dance and Literature in Early Twentieth-Century British Culture (Ann Arbor/Ml, 1995). The reference here is to the bad Derridean joke about a poor Christmas, lifted from Roger Copeland, »Dance Criticism and the Descriptive Bias«, Dance Theatre Journal, vol. 10, no. 3 (1993), pp. 26-32 in true intertextual fashion!

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It has strange outcomes in both scholarship and dance practice, even when the notion of text itself is deliberately fluid. This already absent and metaphoric body splinters into many kinds of danced »texts« - it is no coincidence, in my view, that Rosemary Butcher's recently conceived collaborative work with a film maker, celebrating twenty years of new chorography, took the title Fractured Landscapes, Fragmented Narratives?* While the imagery of the title itself suggests visual and literary meanings, the reality was very much an embodied performance. The conflation and juxtaposition of literary terms with those of the visual arts seems to highlight the peculiar absence of presence that is dance, and its ambiguous placing within the visual and visceral realms, in practice and in theoretical discourse. Gay Morris' collection of essays39 seems not to have absorbed the significance of such thinking, in the sense that even while accepting that cultures (and subcultures) differ, many of the authors, in rather different ways, still seek universale. Morris claims it is a (universal) mode of analysis of movement that will provide a much needed disciplinary strength for dance analysis. On the same argument that critics concerned about being ethnocentric in their response would now look to the culture under study to understand its concepts, so the movement analyst must look at the terms in which movement is made and how it is described in that culture or dance style. In Moving Words, I still detect a plea that what dance scholarship needs is the rigour that other disciplines can share with them e.g., sociology (Thomas), music (Jordan), English (Koritz) in a tiresome repetition of the 1970s.40 In their anxiety some dance scholars (in actuality those whose first academic discipline was not dance but music, sociology or literature) sought to extend research in dance in terms which were, first and foremost, recognisable to scholars in other fields. This is to accept the brutal logic of the institutionalisation of knowledge, that recognition elsewhere is more important than the integrity of critical enquiry. Rigor mortis might be more to the point - taking Goellner and Murphy's American spelling - which has such delightful corpse-like allusions in our version of English. Goellner and Murphy, in the introduction termed Movement Movements, clearly see their enterprise as re-invigorating literary studies, much as film and cultural studies might, by providing a »fresh and relevant perspective«.41 They take a rather more literal view of »literature as dance«, a »performance in text«, as they 38

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41

A series of performances at the Royal College of Art revealed a rich and varied oeuvre of this modernist/postmodernist choreographer. Further work was revived in 1997-1998. Gay Morris, Moving Words: Re-writing Dance (London, 1996). The lack of reference to Dance Analysis: Theory and Practice in these texts is not surprising given this stance, despite its success as a course text, and as the basis of most teaching in the subject in higher education. Ellen W. Goellner and Jacqueline S. Murphy, Bodies of the Text: Dance as Theory, Literature as Dance (New Brunswick, 1995), p. 1.

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term it, trying to establish a »theory in motion«. One reviewer termed this, »gesturing towards a performative epistemology« but an epistemology which is made problematic by the »self-erasure« of dance at the moment of being danced.42 Helen Thomas has produced two major works which draw on extensive sociological knowledge.43 This sociological stance draws attention to the social and historical positioning of dances and choreographers, but ultimately, as Thomas herself says, serves as a »paradigm for sociological enquiry into the ambiguous relation between dance art and society«44 not a paradigm for dance enquiry itself. As Janet Wolff remarks, the attractiveness of dance as metaphor for the reinvigoration of cultural as well as literary studies is deeply problematic for dance scholars.45 Yet again, dance is a means to an end, seen for its metaphoric contribution to other disciplines.46 Schechner and Appel seek coherence rather differently, but nonetheless they seek it, and across a wider range of activities including sport, theatre, dance, music and ritual by seeing them »as performance«,47 This becomes a quest for tools which are valid for understanding all these apparently disparate forms, drawing on Victor Turner's universale in terms of the sociobiological function of these activities. The impact of anthropological, cultural studies and sociological work is not limited to understanding the so-called »external« features of a culture which may have a bearing on the dance. It can be felt equally strongly in the detail of terminology and therefore of conceptual frameworks within which the dance is analysed. In this sense neither Jordan's nor Siegel's supposedly »formal« analysis48 can escape this criticism - I argue that such formalist critique is already a stylistic analysis and therefore, peculiar to a particular form of dance. The relationship between matters of description and of interpretation was of great concern in 42 43 44 45 46

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Andre Lepecki, »If I Can't Dance I Don't Want to be Part of Your Revolution«, Ballet International/Tanz Aktuell nos. 8-9 (1995), pp. 68-70, here: pp. 68-9. Helen Thomas, Dance, Gender and Culture (London, 1993), and Dance, Modernity and Culture (London, 1995). Thomas, Dance, Gender and Culture, p. 166. See Wolff, Feminine Sentences. Other texts which shed light in various ways on these dilemmas include Sally Banes, Writing Dancing in the Age of Postmodernism (Hanover/NH, 1994); Mark Franko, Dance as Text: Ideologies of the Baroque Body (Cambridge, 1993); M. Franko, Dancing Modernism/Performing Politics (Bloomington/IND, 1995); Stephanie Jordan and Helen Thomas, »1995 Dance and Gender: Formalism and Semiotics Reconsidered«, Dance Research, vol. 12, no. 2 (1994), pp. 3-14; Susan Manning, Ecstasy and the Demon: Feminism and Nationalism in the Dances of Mary Wigman (Berkeley/CA, 1993). By Means of Performance: Intercultural Studies of Theatre and Ritual, ed. Richard Schechner and Willa Appel (Cambridge, 1990), p. 3. Stephanie Jordan, »Musical/Choreographic Discourse: Method, Music Theory and Meaning«, in Moving words: Re-u>riting Dance, ed. Gay Morris (London, 1996), pp. 15-28; Marcia Siegel, »Visible Secrets: Style Analysis and Dance Literacy«, in Ibidem, pp. 29-42.

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Dance Analysis (1988), where we proposed that while the link can be made quite explicit, it is always a contentious matter since these concepts are interdependent. It is thus a pleasure to find dance taking centre stage in Susan Foster's edited collection Corporealities: Dancing Knowledge, Culture and Power (1996). Choreography is inverted to serve as a metaphor for cultural theory, extending its tentacles to embrace the larger world, in a refreshing counteraction to the usual direction of traffic described above, from literature to dance. »Text«, »gender, power and identity« are dull ways to convey the excitement that this collection of presentations generates. As the authors say in the introduction: Bodies do not only pass meaning along [...] they develop choreographies of signs through their discourse: they run (or lurch, or bound, or feint, or meander ...) from premise to conclusion; they turn (or pivot, or twist...) through the process of reasoning; they confer with (or rub up against, or bump into ...) one another in narrating their own physical fate.49

Metaphorical as this may also be, it turns on its head and makes fully evident, the way in which dance is still used as absent metaphor by other disciplines. In Foster's book, relevant disciplines are subjected to revision through a choreographic method in which it is dance that provides the thematic concerns and the rhythmic phrasing, dance studies reveals its experience of dealing with ephemeral and real bodies. Here the body is seen as the: critical bridge among disciplinary and political interests. It stretches in multiple directions, collecting with a powerful sweep of its arm distinct methodological and theoretical orientations, instantiating the interstices among distinct perspectives and providing an anatomy for dialogue among them.50

In this new field, »Performance« begins to loom large, as the recent volumes by Campbell (1996), Carlson (1996) and Huxley and Witts (1996) show.51 Campbell's analysis of performance is reasonably typical of these texts, sketched under »Feminisms« and »Postmodernisms«, making reference also to poststructuralisms, politics and psychoanalysis, before concluding with multi-culturalism, AIDS, authenticity, popular culture and censorship. Constructions of identity, gender and race emerge as the key ideas. It is a collection which includes articles on dance and on multi-media performance and which claims to: transgress the established boundaries erected by these disciplines and, in some cases, provide arguments or examples that signal the erasure or at least the elision of traditional lines of demarcation between different areas and categories of the performative.52 49 50 51

52

Susan L. Foster, Corporealities: Dancing Knowledge, Culture and Power (London, 1996), p. XI. Ibid., p. XIII. See Analysing Performance: A Critical Reader, ed. Patrick Campbell (Manchester, 1996); Marvin Carlson, Performance: A Critical Introduction (London, 1996); The Twentieth Century Performance Reader, ed. Michael Huxley and Noel Witts (London, 1996). Campbell, Analysing Performance, p. 1.

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Dance analysis now My own arguments in this field have been for a fence-sitting position, with the ability to look in many directions, at this fragmented site of multiple tensions. From the maze of possible theoretical insights which might inform dance analysis I use here the concept of »intertextuality« as an illustration of theory in practice. While many good reasons might be given for selecting this construct, the primary one is that the notion of »intertextuality« allows me to keep in view the idea that a dance exists as a »work« or »text« while also remaining open to a range of discrete, overlapping or quite distinct, interpretations constructed by »readers«.53 On the linguistic side of the intertextual coin lies a vital corrective. The obviously valid insight, that dance operates largely through movement and other »non-verbal« systems, contains within it the possibility of over-emphasis on movement per se and, in consequence, a denial of the importance of language. What may be obscured is the equally valid perspective that the very construction of these dance and movement systems relies upon codifications in both non-verbal and verbal languages.54 Movement, on these terms, has to be understood through everyday behavioural codes as well as through elaborated dance-specific codes. In this sense, dances are not figments of individual subjectivity and imagination, but part of a social experience; an experience, that is, which is shared between choreographer and reader. This is apparent in Newson's assumption that Greek and Christian beliefs are held in common by readers of his work Strange Fish.^ Simultaneously, however, the text then works to change perceptions of these 53

54 55

Early twentieth-century notions of intertextuality, usually attributed to Bakhtin, were later developed by Kristeva. From a notion of a text as a »mosaic of quotations« she argues that the interpretive process is the creation of a dialogue from an intersection of textual surfaces, in opposition to a more traditional view of the construction of a single point of meaning. See Julia Kristeva, Semeiotike: Recherches pour une ςέητanalyse (Paris, 1969), and Michael Worton and Judith Still, Intertextuality: Theories and Practices (Manchester, 1990). While intertextuality takes many forms there might be some agreement that it has to do with the »complex and variegated play of borrowing, citation, implicit or explicit references, dialogues from afar, and substitutions, which substantiate the relationships between the texts of a given culture (and even between texts of different cultures)«. Marco de Marinis, The Semiotics of Performance (Bloomington/IND, 1993), p. 4. In this intertextual »collage«, Eco believes, references and archetypes multiply to a point where they begin to talk among themselves. See his study, The Role of the Reader, p. 9. The result is an excess of signification. Leitch then sees in »an expanded concept of textuality the entire panoply of historically situated economic, social, intellectual, ideological, moral, institutional, and political thoughts and limitations that constitute and regulate the life of a society. [...] Every text emerges out of, through and back into a complex cultural network«. Vincent B. Leitch, Deconstructive Criticism: An Advanced Introduction (London, 1983), p. 157. See Worton and Still, Intertextuality. Lloyd Newson, »Talkback«, Dance in Europe, February/March 1996, p. 31.

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codes, to build on existing understandings to reformulate ideas. As Margolis argues, artworks are not just »novel expressions of some sort in a language« (my emphasis), but they »institute new conventions«.56 The paradox of this form of analysis lies in its potential to unmask simplistic characterisations of works while at the same time driving the reader on to play among these categories. Through refusing to identify the choreographer with a single style, or form, the reader is endlessly teased by the possibilities, the connections, the intertexts. An example can be found in the entry of alien voices which can be seen quite literally in Forsythe's Alie/n action. By interrogating the use of existing codes (balletic in this instance), and through examination of the »steps« as »text« we invite analogies with sentences, syntax and paragraphs. The idea of the play of language, and its multiple significations, is mirrored in the actual dance play of steps. These brief examples serve to illustrate the vital importance of dance theory and critical practice reflecting the form upon which it comments. An open-minded view of the potential relevance of theories from a number of different sources (including non-dance material) has to be matched by a critical awareness of their capacity to respond to dance, and to illuminate it. Thus, within strands of theory I do not opt for extreme positions, either of authorial intention or of text analysis or of reader-response processes, but rather seek to explore their relationship in the construction of specific dances. The »reader« in my characterisation is not then a parasite upon a fixed object, sucking its life blood, but the co-creator of a mobile text, breathing life into a dancing text. The dance becomes a speaking text: a rigorous science and an indiscreet art.

56

Joseph Margolis, in Art and Philosophy, ed. J. Margolis (Brighton, 1980), p. 94.

Marcia B. Siegel

Using Lexicons for Performance Research: Three Duets

Abstract Lexicon construction is a way of isolating the principal elements in any dance or performance. Having created a list of the most prominent and consistent things seen in an initial viewing of a dance, the researcher can more consciously track the way these elements are maintained, varied and interconnected during the course of the work. In a sense, this process allows the researcher to identify the raw materials chosen by the choreographer and to trace the structural path followed in creating the work. Examples show how lexicons can help to focus our attention on significant aspects of a dance, such as body contact or visual behaviour; it can demonstrate ways in which movement supports or detracts from other texts in the dance, and can assess whether there is nonverbal evidence for suspected social, cultural or political bias.

Most systems of movement analysis concentrate on specific factors that distinguish particular areas of concern. For example, Birdwhistell's kinesics looks at micro-level signals that people send and pick up during interaction, signals which can only be clearly identified in a frame-by-frame study of a film. Dance teachers, on the other hand, work with the rather gross and immediate data that can be seen as dancers are learning choreographic patterns. Labananalysis singles out the dynamic characteristics underlying movement in order to identify expressive nuance. For the purposes of critical writing or cultural study, however, what the researcher needs to see above all is a holistic behaviour, within which these or other isolated factors come into play. In my teaching of dance history, and in my writing, I have been working to elucidate the larger phenomena of performance, such as rhythm, change and the way groups are orchestrated, as more representative of how the audience experiences the work. I am also quite concerned to find a way that a researcher can make an initial approach to a work in which the central text is not stated verbally or is created nonverbally before our eyes. Without the accustomed clues and road maps, we researchers usually have two choices (aside from pure intuition): tracking a set of criteria - dynamic qualities, a technical vocabulary, instances of specific behaviour - that we have picked out in advance; or viewing the performance against other performances we assume to be similar. These hunches or prior judgments may be inappropriate; the work can be made to fit them, but it may have other implications we will miss. Some years ago it was fashionable to see classical ballet as sexist because males manipulated and supported females. One can see this behaviour in innu-

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merable choreographies. But it would be inappropriate to apply the sexist label every time the behaviour occurs, especially if non-sexist gender relationships are also enacted in the same piece, or if the piece is not »about« gender relationships at all. Critics constantly engage in this sort of self-conditioning; they seize on what is familiar to help them fathom what is strange. Of course, it is precisely what is strange that defines any work. The creating of a lexicon is a seemingly simple way of articulating what every ordinary viewer picks up during the performance, of taking the performance on its own terms rather than focussing narrowly on parameters the researcher has erected from his or her past studies. In the absence of these comforting but potentially biased categories, the lexicon provides another way of sorting out a bewildering mass of information. A lexicon is a list of the most prominent things one sees in initially encountering the work. Instead of establishing an inventory of everything the dancer does, we list what we notice - a subtle but important shift that brings into the foreground the performative event and the distinctive patterns by which it produces its effects. Now that videotape is so widely available, we can begin to study dance and other performance without the panic and partial access that critics work with all the time, and that have hampered deep-level research into these ephemeral forms. One can carry out Labananalysis or deduce lexicons from live performance, but I think the results would be only a first stage in a potentially more rewarding process. A lexicon is exactly what it implies: a kind of dictionary, or collection of materials which the choreographer (or cultural style) has selected to fashion the work. It is non-preferential, disorganized, quickly noted, a list, not even descriptions or complete sentences. It can contain movements, dynamic factors, kinesic clues, costumes, gestures, people, anything and everything that stands out, in no particular order. It does not attempt to connect or particularize things. It can have flashes of insight or images which we might forget an instant later. It is a first impression and only an impression, but an authentic one, because it is directly prompted by the work. The lexicon constitutes the vocabulary of the work, the terms with which the artist devised a language to convey something to the audience. The audience inadvertently learns that language as it views the performance. To name the lexicon is to begin making the art process conscious, an admittedly artificial exercise that is at the heart of all thoughtful criticism. In teaching students how to work with lexicons, I ask them to make their own lists during or after the first five minutes of the video. We then stop and collect everybody's contribution into a master list on the blackboard. A repeat of the portion of the video we have seen confirms our observations and allows us to refine the initial lexicon. Then we will go on with the video, noting how the lexicon items keep recurring, whether anything important is added or dropped, and how these factors mutate during the course of the dance. We quickly see that some lexicon items are consistently linked with others to form phrases or recurrent action patterns, or that certain items seem to signal

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changes, or that things that might seem singular are actually variations of items in the lexicon. We also usually note that some things we would have expected to see are absent or have an insignificant role to play, and this forces us to look for the alternatives. When we take the dance in small segments and stop after each viewing to look at what we have, we find that the original list begins to shift and evolve. Certain items acquire sub-lexicons of their own. Others may group naturally into categories. Each time we revisit the film and look at the data, we learn more about the dance. Our reaction to it broadens into a developing interpretation. The lexicon is not an interpretation, nor does it lead unilaterally to AN interpretation. It gives us evidence for different possibilities. I believe art can have many meanings; the critic is not obligated to come up with a meaning identical to what the choreographer says he or she is doing. But we are obligated to back up our inferences, and not simply to wish them into being.

Strangers in the dance Let me start with a two-minute duet, »Strangers in the Night«, from Twyla Tharp's Sinatra Suite. In the fifteen or more times I viewed it, I made lexicons and sublexicons, I counted certain things, and I created several categories I had not started out with. On the surface, the dance is self-evident, a nostalgic replay of the love-struck social dance number which is so conventional that it has become a cliche. However, analysis revealed something else in the dance. In 1982, Tharp choreographed several dances to Frank Sinatra's 1960s recordings, putting them together differently for various subsequent occasions. The Sinatra Suite was videotaped in 1985, with Mikhail Baryshnikov and Elaine Kudo of American Ballet Theatre.1 It begins with a theatrical device that was not in any stage version: the characters spot each other at a cocktail party and, as if magnetized, move towards each other and leave together. In a separate space, they dance in each other's arms. The setting, a platform with a suggestion of lamps and balustrades, leaves us free to imagine a penthouse terrace, a poolside lanai, a riverbank in Paris; and the Crooner's refrain pictures two people meeting and immediately recognizing that they are fated for life. Rather than start as if I did not know what this dance was about, I accepted its romantic intention and its given framework of social dance. I made an initial lexicon in four parts that seemed to suit the theme: touch, look (or eye behaviour), synchronization and a miscellaneous list headed »other«. In the touch lexicon, I found the obvious gestures and body references for social dance - finger, dance hold, arms length, waist embrace. I also noted the word »cross« to remind me of some curious rhythmic breaks in which the dancers quickly shuffled foot and head positions so that they were not mirroring each other, but were momen1

Baryshnikov Dances Sinatra, 1984, (Kultur Video Dance Series. 1167).

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tarily in opposition. I also noted that the distance between them, whether near or far, seemed important. When I isolated the gaze, I immediately realized that the dancers were working with different focusses. Baryshnikov looked intently at his partner, locking on those body parts where he was touching, holding or supporting her. Kudo almost never looked directly at him. She focussed dreamily out into space or drew her gaze inside herself, only occasionally glancing at her partner. The video did not give me complete information, but it appeared that they seldom made eye contact. In the shots when it was clear that they did, they were apart at arms length, or had reached a momentary pause in the dance. I found several lexicon items in the realm of synchrony: call and response, continuing (meaning that one partner would initiate a movement and the other would continue it), shadowing and unison. I also noticed a number of sudden stops, mutually agreed-upon interruptions in the dance's onward flow. These possible hesitations might have been related to the item »willing/not«, which headed my »other« category and referred to my sense that, although the dance convention and the song called for perfect harmony, this couple did not totally accomodate to each other's moves. Under »other« I also included the actions bounce, skip, and chasse, which I bracketed together because they all seemed to emphasize verticality. Later I looked at the dance again and made a more complete lexicon of vertical stress: plie, bounce, skip, chasse, straight lifts, pirouettes. Wondering about this, I jotted down the main actions as they occured throughout the dance, compiling what I called an »action score«. Pan of it read something like this: chasse, around, arms look, push, around, up step, around, and so forth. This process pointed out how much of the dance was circular. In spite of the spectacular vertical elements, the dance, and the dancers, were actually wrapped in circles most of the time. I looked more closely at the lifts, which I initially had not even considered, since social dancing does not usually include them. I discovered first that they came in different kinds, developing during the dance from tiny assisted hops to very large, supported ascents, and expanding in space from upward hoists to sweeping, circular carries and high holds, in which Kudo's visionary gaze seemed pushed into an even more distant fantasy. Putting all of this together, I could start to interpret the dance; that is, the combination of Tharp's choreography and the dancers' interpretation of it in that particular video performance. »Strangers in the Night« is a mixture of showy and intimate behaviour. The relationship of the characters was not so straightforward as Sinatra would have us believe. Their differing focus patterns and the way their eye contact was usually followed by a cancelling-out »cross« or a turn away showed some ambivalence about being »in love forever«. Kudo seemed preoccupied with some imaginary lover more inspiring than the one whose arms encircled her and propelled her through the music. Baryshnikov seemed infatuated by the pliability of her body, the way it felt to move and control her, but he held back from committing himself totally.

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Tharp's typically eclectic choreography loads the basic ballroom or social dancing style with a more and more virtuosic ballet vocabulary. The vernacular conventions, like the stroll into the outside-the-party space that introduces the dance, set up a casual, pedestrian mood that downplays the technical expertise. But closer study reveals the piece to be deeper, more humanly problematic than some generic turn around the dance floor. By building in the many instances of disharmony, Tharp is undercutting the music's hyper-romanticism. She uses it, but here she does not truly believe in it.

Here and hereafter The way in which a structural vocabulary unfolds in lexicon building allows us almost to track the choreographer's creative process. Anyone might do that intuitively, but this device allows for a careful and conscious inspection of the dance's basic elements. It even guides our progress into the work. Although I trust my intuition and my experience, I am wary of making an interpretation without being sure it is founded in the dance. I try to articulate those sources in writing, and the lexicon sets that process in motion. Lexicons can be made for whole dances or performance events. They can also be constructed to go deeper into particular aspects or issues we want to explore, such as the element of physical contact in a work, the way movement is initiated, types of gestures, or use of particular areas in the performance space. It can give us concrete parameters for comparing works, styles or dancers. A lexicon is a guide to how the performance works. Sometimes the analysis proves the work to be deeper than the outer text suggests - Tharp's Sinatra Suite is a good example of this. A work which at the outset may seem random or infinitely diverse may prove much more consistent. Sometimes the movement belies the outer text, or shields the choreographer's less explicit intentions. In Bill T. Jones's Still/Here, a piece about living with terminal illness, the movement lexicon was partly derived from videotaped »survival workshops« which Jones conducted with AIDS and cancer patients. Segments of the videos are shown during the dance, and sometimes the dancers replicate gestures that appear on the screen. Jones intended the piece as a tribute to these people and as a hopeful portent. Looking at the dance's movement lexicon, however, we find, in addition to gestural reflections of the workshop participants, a number of items that seem unrelated to or even alienated from the original movers. In fact, when I saw the dance live, I was negatively impressed; the choreography seemed inappropriately virtuosic and celebratory in view of its tragic background. Still/Here has a long and very visible history, beginning with the »survival workshops« themselves, through showings of the work-in-progress at Aaron Davis Hall in New York City in the spring of 1993, to its first performances in the autumn of 1994. The dance touched off a heated controversy in the national media and stimulated discussion about public funding for the arts, racism and

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homophobia, the role of the artist in relation to social issues, and the responsibility of critics.2 The piece toured for two years and reached television in an hourlong version on Alive TV,3 which is my primary source for this analysis. Along with articles, rebuttals, interviews and debates, the piece spawned a Bill Moyers TV special featuring discussion with Jones and more substantial footage of the workshops than was seen in the dance. In its successful career as an art scandal and a media phenomenon, Still/Here probably surpasses any other occasion in contemporary American dance. So much has been put forth about its intentions, its sources and its choreographic history that analysis may seem superfluous. But even after I had published my own essay on the subject,4 I felt ambivalent about the self-conscious way the dance draped serious social issues in beguiling and seemingly generic physicality. Lexicon analysis might provide some clarification. For the purposes of this study, I selected one short duet out of the two-act performance. The dancers, Odile Reine-Adelaide and Maya Safrin, are tall, beautiful women, one with the shaven head of an Egyptian queen and the other wearing her sleek black hair in a topknot. As they dance, a woman is heard on tape being prompted by Jones to describe the scene in which she was given her positive diagnosis. I set up no particular guidelines for my initial lexicon of the duet. It contained fourteen very diverse items: taut, vertical, peripheral gestures, self-touch, ballet barre, hands, faces, collective lifts, manipulating, statues, strong, superhuman, folding over, parallel dancing. Unlike the Tharp duet, there did not seem to be any stylistic or choreographed links among the actions, or any social framework into which these two women's behaviour could fit as a relationship. I could identify some of the moves as reciprocal actions, like falling and embracing, but rather than cohering into consistent motifs, phrases or rhythms, as many forms of dance actions do, they seemed isolated, non-repeatable. Even this perplexing and seemingly unedited lexicon gave me information about Jones as a choreographer. It placed him in the »postmodern« generation which, three decades ago, rejected traditional choreographic patterning and choreographic intentionality as tactics for making dances. Merce Cunningham and the postmodern dancers who were Jones's teachers insisted that the audience could be persuaded to experience dance without the orderly sequencing, proscenium framing, stylistic or psychological roadmaps, which had defined the previous Modern Dance generation. But clearly, downtown dance has outgrown its rebellious disaffection from »meaning«, and Jones in Still/Here had a very 2

3 4

See Arlene Croce, »Discussing the Undiscussable«, The New Yorker, 26 December 1994, pp. 54-60; »Who's the Victim?«, The New Yorker, 30 January 1995, In the Mail column, pp. 10-13; Joyce Carol Oates, »Confronting Head On the Face of the Afflicted«, The New York Times. Arts & Leisure, 19 February 1995. Alive TV-KTCA, Twin Cities Public Broadcasting, 1996. Marcia B. Siegel, »Virtual Criticism and the Dance of Death«, The Drama Review, vol. 40, no. 2 (T150) (Summer 1996), pp. 60-70. An expanded version appeared in The Ends of Performance, ed. Peggy Phelan and Jill Lane (New York, 1998), pp. 247-61.

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intense subject if not a very specific message. I wondered if Jones's movement and choreography were linked with the meaning of the piece as found in its obvious graphic and verbal material: the workshop tapes, dialogues and their spinoff movements and song lyrics. I decided that I needed to look at more than Reine-Adelaide and Safrin's duet to see if I had overlooked any stressed or repeated elements. Even before I did that, I sensed that Jones was in part using a ballet lexicon, and using it deliberately. The women's verticality, their emphasis on extended limbs, manipulated poses and supports all seemed to shape them into icons, superhuman but not particularly gendered beings, who could move in idealized but relatively impersonal ways. The notion that Jones might be thinking of balleticized dancers as paragons of health and beauty provided me with an ironic but persuasive clue to the dance. Rather than developing a consistent style based on his own movement preferences, Jones borrows from any source that will yield movement for his purpose. The ballet »look« is often a baseline for his gestural moves, as well as a logical springboard for the flashy spins and leaps that some of his dancers can execute. The ballet dancer's training creates the illusion of elongated limbs, indestructibly strong torso, sleek and secure alignment, and poise under extraordinary physical demands. The balletic bodies in Still/Here are further imprinted with semiotic information culled from the heartbreaking testimony on the videotapes, and with movement suggestive of the struggle to survive, from competitive sports and martial arts. Reine-Adelaide and Safrin's duet begins in close-up, with small gestures of appeal and rejection. One woman touches the other lightly on the shoulder. The second woman shrugs her off. She holds up one finger, perhaps in apology, but when the first woman tries to grasp it, the giver pulls away. The fingertip touches and shuddering withdrawals spread through the whole body. Safrin wriggles and pitches forward. Reine-Adelaide turns her by pushing her shoulders, then supports her from the waist in a high pench -ar besque. Safrin escapes with a giant step and a plunge into a crouch. In this one-and-a-half-minute exchange, it seems that Safrin is the needy but wary partner, and Reine-Adelaide is the warded-off care-giver. The intimacy of the duet expands in the sequence that follows it. My fourteenitem lexicon is still in place, except that the peripheral gestures have become wraparound embraces, and all the actions are bigger and more intense. This dance is like an exploded version of the first two women's approach-avoidance interaction. The folk singer Odetta sings the words of the same searing interview, as the entire group of ten dancers hurtle across the space. They bump into each other or knock each other over with a flying tackle. After some of these encounters the combattants remain locked together for a moment, then split apart violently. One partner grabs another, who squirms away. Someone gets pulled down and cradled, or held upside down, then somersaults to become the support of his partner. One person tries to turn or reposition the person who is leaning against her. Acrobatic and even virtuosic moves capture the viewer's eye during this section, but every spin and leap is infected with some sign of need or fruitless compassion.

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Finally, in tracing back through what could be Bill T. Jones's process of abstraction, I could understand at least some aspects of the dance as a dramatization of the terminally ill person's rage. The audience may scream with pleasure at the technical feats, but symbolically all of them could have come out of desperation.

Gender and temperament Let me give one more example, the duet, or »Sanguinic« section, from George Balanchine's/Owr Temperaments. Balanchine has been harshly accused of sexist choreography; he has been made the paradigm of hegemonic patriarchy in dance. I feel that feminist writers have gone overboard here. Perhaps they picked the most visible target in order to point out how ballet has exploited women. Perhaps they did not really analyse the ballets thoroughly. Perhaps they do not know Balanchine's repertory or where it falls within the history of ballet. For lack of a more substantial literature, the kind of politicized rhetoric which has become common in dance criticism has influenced scholars in other fields. The trashing of Balanchine can seem plausible unless we examine his roots or, for that matter, his heirs. Ballet conventions constitute a lexicon. The movements by themselves are abstract and can be interpreted in a number of symbolic or narrative ways. What has not been done analytically about Balanchine's work is an examination of how he employed the ballet lexicon. Did his choreography always show women in a conventionally dependent and decorative role? In those dances or parts of dances where he did employ this trope, is there anything else going on, is there any other possible excuse for behaviour which the enlightened modern generation considers demeaning? Is Balanchine's supposed mysogyny a greater evil than the brutal handling women receive at the hands of a William Forsythe? And one need only watch a nineteenth-century classical ballet - I recently saw a reconstruction of the variations from Paquita - to witness truly irrelevant and sexist projections, and to appreciate how far Balanchine's dancemaking surpassed them. Yet contemporary dancers and audiences are still colluding in this sort of decadence while the reformist Balanchine repertory gets packed in mothballs. Balanchine had been dead for four years when the scholarly interrogation of his work congealed around one article, »The Balanchine Woman«, by Ann Daly.5 Like several other writers at the time, Daly had been re-evaluating dance according to feminist theory, especially E. Ann Kaplan's construction of the film universe as controlled by an ever-present, voyeuristic male point of view. Daly later reconsidered her blanket application of male-gaze theory as a determinant in dance aesthetics, but her article had become a lightning rod, a widely cited focus for the attacks of Ann Daly, »The Balanchine Woman: Of Hummingbirds and Channel Swimmers«, The Drama Review, vol. 31, no. l (T113) (Spring 1987), pp. 8-20. All quotations in this section of the chapter are drawn from this article, unless otherwise stated.

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feminists, culture theorists and a new generation of the dance community that wanted to move on and capture a share of the pre-eminence Balanchine had held for so long. Daly essentialized the Balanchine woman with a lengthy analysis of the third theme of Four Temperaments. This 1946 ballet, based on Paul Hindemith's score for piano and string orchestra, is both an early example of Balanchine's modern ballet style and a choreographic interpretation of Hindemith's extremely formal music. The ballet and the music open with three thematic statements, followed by four expansive variations, all different, named for the medieval physical humours, »Melancholic«, »Sanguinic«, »Phlegmatic« and »Choleric«. Because I felt Daly's analysis was distorting, I deliberately placed it against another section of the ballet which I thought revealed quite a different woman from Daly's dependent and submissive icon. First, I drew from Daly's essay her own lexicon of the Third Theme duet. Her interpretation of the woman's role, and that of the man, is comprised of actual observations of the dance, as both Daly and I viewed it on the videotape made from a Dance in America broadcast in 1977.6 Daly's account also includes interpretive comments, metaphor, quotes from other observers and dancers, and a persistent objectification. That is, Daly linguistically converts what the dancers do (»The danseur lays the ballerina in arabesque against his leaned-back body«) into static fails accomplis nailed down by the critic. (»However innovative the arabesques are, they still serve the traditional purpose of focusing on the ballerina's leg.«) Sorting through this mixed narrative, I was able to derive a lexicon of the dancers' own actions as observed by Daly. In her list, the man does manipulate the woman, and the woman allows herself to be manipulated. However, the woman also has an independent lexicon. She »unfolds her legs forward« while being lifted, she »bursts upward«, »turns in a split second«, »ventures out on her own«, »steps laterally on pointe«, and »lunges sideways off pointe«. Curiously, Daly's lexicon contains no moves for the man except those in which he manipulates the woman. This suggests to me that - at least as Daly viewed the duet - it is in fact the man who is dependent and unable to function on his own, while the woman does have some moments of autonomy and even virtuosity. As the ballet is plotted, the three Themes serve to introduce the movement ideas that will later be developed in the four variations. »Sanguinic«, the second of these, begins with Daniel Duell and Merrill Ashley entering from opposite sides of the stage, and ends as he carries her off in lifts that make her seem to be walking in giant steps. Several things occur in this duet that contradict the traditional roles constructed by Daly. Ashley and Duell's first dance is a presentation to the audience (the camera, in this case). When they meet centrestage, they join hands and demonstrate some of the step lexicon they will proceed to elaborate. In this parallel dancing, which Balanchine gives to the couple more than once in »Sanguinic«, This was released by Nonesuch Dance Collection. The Balanchine Library, 1995 (Nonesuch 40177-3).

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the man and woman do the same things. They are choreographic equals, not sexual contestants, but they are also male and female. His steps are weightier, his changes more sudden; she is on pointe - a basic premise of classical ballet - and both her extensions and her descents into plie cover more ground. After their introductory dance, the couple do a sequence of supported dancing. Duell steadies Ashley as she turns on pointe, simultaneously changing her working leg from arabesque to attitude in unexpected ways. Ashley will later do most of the steps alone. Like the woman in the Third Theme, she pulls away from him several times. There is no question here of his capturing or possessing her. His role is not to manipulate her or even present her for the audience's inspection, but rather to give her his hand exactly where and when she needs it. She needs his help only to perform certain steps in their primitive, tandem form. When she repeats them independently, she amplifies their difficulty. The supported duet, then, is prologue to Ashley's spectacular solos. The man is almost superfluous, except to establish the technical launching pad for her solo virtuosity. For example, without breaking the momentum of a pirouette she transfers her spinning weight from one foot to the other, deliberately spearing the new support into the floor. She jumps in the air, making a small circle with each foot before coming down, in a step called gargouillade. While turning, she performs multiple battementsfrappes, placing the working foot in front, then whipping it behind the ankle or the knee without touching the floor. For the purposes of showing the woman as passive and provocative, Daly consistently refers to the arabesque as a thing. (»As soon as the arabesque is formed [...] the man pulls, lifts, or thrusts the ballerina into another phrase.«) She does not note that the ballerina has to execute the arabesque, or that simply making this shape perfectly can be a technical task. In the »Sanguinic« variation, arabesque and its angular counterpart, attitude, become part of larger, spectacular feats. In one enchainement, Ashley steps forward with a big opening of her leg and bends deeply back; immediately she pitches forward and tilts her back leg straight up (pencho-arabesque). Ballet as Balanchine practiced it is about steps, about pushing steps to their outer limits, and if there is a Balanchine woman, she is a technical phenomenon. If he created Merrill Ashley, her genius enabled his inventiveness. In Four Temperaments, he isolates certain step patterns for reconfiguration and development, just as the composer works with melodic and rhythmic motifs. In both cases the pleasure lies in creating form, in challenging and advancing the performer's skills. Even the woman's balance onpointe inspired Balanchine, and one of the lexical points of departure in »Sanguinic« is her stepping back and letting her whole body come straight down off pointe without travelling any further. Ashley has described the extreme difficulty of »lowering the heel without moving the foot at all«.7 Later on, she does a whole series of these falling-back steps, alternating her strong and flexible feet. 7

Merrill Ashley with Larry Kaplan, Dancing for Balanchine (New York, 1984), p. 140.

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One more aspect of »Sanguinic« is that, although its innovative step vocabulary follows the model established in the three opening Themes, its form adheres quite closely to that of the classical pas de deux: introduction, adagio, variations and coda, with a female corps de ballet backing the principal couple. Both Ashley and Duell perform their variations in front of four women, who usually move in counterpoint to them. These women also use the supported lexicon of the Third Theme without the benefit of a facilitating male, and act as both witnesses and accomplices to Ashley's and Duell's variations. Throughout Four Temperaments, the men are cast in subordinate or weak roles. In the three Themes, they are there to plant the idea of dependency that will be uprooted by Balanchine's subsequent choreography for Ashley and the female soloist in »Choleric«. Men are the principal dancers in the »Melancholic« and »Phlegmatic« variations, but in both cases their actions are indecisive, searching and ultimately reliant on the female ensembles who accompany them. In this ballet at least, it is the men who are Other and the women who have the greater technical power. Only if we see women as objects can we fit them into the stereotypical roles. When Balanchine puts them in motion, their theoretical vulnerability disappears.

Afterword Obviously, lexicons do not only occur in dancing. I was asked whether they could be applied to »physical theatre«, and had planned to include an example in this essay. However, I decided to use dance examples, because their ambiguities submit so readily to this approach. Much »physical theatre« portrays social behaviour, using a kind of mime, a lexicon that combines gestures, expressions, and interactions that are recognisably meaningful, like words. »Physical theatre« may distort these movement signs in various ways (repetition, variation, interrupted sequences) or distribute them in an ongoing dance or rhythm flow, but the movement's meaning is intelligible. We could certainly do deep analysis of it, but we do not grope about searching for clues as we sometimes do with dance. The semiotic dances of people like Bill T.Jones, Susan Marshall, Ralph Lemon and others present a more intriguing first impression, and lexicons reward us with insight we did not initially have. I also find lexicons useful as a way into unfamiliar world dance and popular culture styles, where there is a tendency to project dance values we know onto cultures that never intended to employ them. When I started doing dance criticism in the late 1960s it seemed a priority to write about movement. This might not be so self-evident now, but then, movement was what distinguished dance from the other performing arts. It was how dance communicated ideas, and I wanted, in every instance, to discover the particular aspects of movement that could tell me what the choreographer was up to, and that made one choreographer's dance different from another's. I meant to study movement as a physical system which most people did not know how to intepret.

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Beginning in the 1970s, scholars and cultural critics outside of dance began to notice that something non-verbal might be important, and they fastened on »the body« as the site of information. But »the body« as a signifier is an object, a nonmoving concept which is either outside of the control of the dancer, or has been arranged before the performance in order to appear in a certain way. I find this way of studying performance quite calculated. It is the critic, not the dancer, who decides what this body means. The dancer is only the bearer of the sign. To study the dancer's movement as well as her body is to have to yield agency to her. What she does with her body creates meaning - and not only one meaning, but a reality that changes. As a critic I want to capture what the dancer is making happen, not to objectify her. I want to try to discover the choreographer's agenda before I impose my own. Even when, as is common now, the dance is festooned with signs of significance - words, pictures, codified action (I am thinking, for instance, of Pina Bausch) - and even when movement as personal expression has been deliberately downplayed, still the movement gives us vital information. This insight may be consistent with the dancer's more overt messages, or it may undermine them, but I believe that movement always contains meaningful information. We can always learn more about what it is and how it serves the performance. It is still the dance's primary medium, and still the most revealing thing we see on the stage.

Linda Suny Myrsiades Performance Analysis Through Field Research: The Guerrilla Theatre in Greece Under Nazi Occupation

Abstract During the Nazi occupation of Greece, the liberation force EAM/ELAS produced theatrical performances to recruit supporters and to spread propaganda for social change and revolution. This study examines how fieldwork can be used to study those performances not merely as a means of uncovering and reconstructing production materials and practice, but as a means of determining how the researcher affects the generation and interpretation of data. This study discusses the methodological issues raised by reconstructing the subjective life of the period through interviews and reconsidering some of the ways in which one conceives of subjective life forms, the relative cultural autonomy of art and the unity of resistance. It asserts a research protocol that requires retracing resistance culture along the paths it took and the sites where it was located to discover its primitive economy, demography and its physical and cultural geography. Finally, it examines the systematization of sources as diverse as photographs, letters, diaries, memoirs and official documents.

Introduction Plying the same mountain footpaths that carried performance troupes on their tours, a field researcher discovers early on the importance of becoming familiar with village perspectives, ways of life, traditions and, like the troupes, adapting one's theatrical or research work accordingly.1 Present in the physical location in which resistance theatre was seen and, in Houston Baker Jr.'s use of the term, »scened«2 (objectified and used as it plays itself out in an already written scenario), the researcher is placed face-to-face with the physical geography and local conditions of the mountains of Free Greece where theatrical troupes performed, with the problems they faced in production, and with the issues that would be raised in their relations with village and guerrilla audiences. In one sense, the whole point of resistance is to ensure the preservation of a local way of life, its expression and meaning. To prevent tyrannizing or dominant forms, however well internalized, from denying its existence or legitimacy, a way of life inscribes itself in its social and cultural landscape and protects memory as a testifying act. This field research provided data for Linda Myrsiades and Kostas Myrsiades, Cultural Representation in Historical Resistance: Complexity and Construction in Greek Guerrilla Theatre (Lewisburg/PA, 1998). See Houston A. Baker, Jr., »Scene.. .Not Heard«, in Reading Rodney King: Reading Urban Uprising, ed. Robert Gooding-Williams (New York, 1990), pp. 38-48.

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How it does this is the subject of this project, which contends that the best way to uncover the process of resistance culture is through field study of its artistic, in particular its theatrical, culture and production. Such study foregrounds audience interactivity, communal support, the logistics of transportation, food, lodging, security and performance space allocation. It dictates a local contextdependent, historicized approach to performances which speaks directly to the everydayness of historical resistance and its many living voices rather than to the singular authority of a text and its larger political vision or uses. The relations of theatrical production, we discover, depend upon a self-organizing system that is local and highly context-dependent, rather than centralized and leader-driven. This system developed from temporary, common agreement rather than from ideological consensus, and it incorporated an expansive variety of displaced, exiled and native figures, who inhabited a shifting human geography in the mountainous terrain known as resistance or Free Greece.

Local Knowledge The central problem encountered in studying resistance theatre has to do with the limits of local knowledge, not merely how to generate it or its reliability, but also its validity as a way of knowing. Interpretive questions and questions of representation are clearly implicated here as they contribute to the ethnographic authority of both the researcher and the researched. To some extent, what much of the problem comes down to is how much credit one is willing to give to texts produced by the »other« about the »other« as opposed to the analytic text imagined, constructed, or deduced by the researcher. The inclination of this project is to give indigenous texts and testimony considerable credence so long as physical evidence and the researcher's familiarity with the site support the felt sense of lived life that they produce. Representation ofthat voice by an outsider, in any case, is not an issue when collaboration between the researcher and the researched is able to produce a third, or mediated, text, which in many ways has a synergy that makes it the better of the possible choices in terms of being informed by both local and interpretive knowledges. We could begin with the ^polytheism' of scattered practices« (original emphasis) referenced by de Certeau,3 beneath which we look for what Bourdieu calls the »implicit theory of practice«.4 This approach does not, however, require that we give priority to »facts«, for facts are themselves constructions; even for those who do not regard them as constructions, they are in themselves considered inconclusive. The difficulty lies with whether we allow only the meaning which interpretation gives to facts, assuming that if we fail to control facts they will con3 4

Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life (Berkeley/CA, 1988), p. 48. Pierre Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice, trans. Richard Nice (Cambridge, 1977), p. 1.

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trol us.5 In this approach, we would be endorsing the primacy of argument, refusing to allow the implicit structure of a fact pattern to determine the structure of an argument. Donohue's position assumes we know a fact to be a fact, rather than an interpretation, to start with and that the primacy of argument that he sponsors does not raise serious questions of speaking for the other in one's own voice. I find more comfort in admitting, with Geertz, that »whatever sense we have of how things stand with someone else's life, we gain it through their expressions, not through some magical intrusion into their consciousness. It's all a matter of scratching surface«.6 By extension, we are looking to uncover the implicit theory underlying that consciousness without, however, assuming that it speaks entirely by itself or merely by the fact of its existence. The process, then, becomes one of situating oneself while contextualizing others and considering both »stories« in relation to one another.7 It is not, as Pecora points out, to allow an »illusory elision of the distinction between the ethnographic >text< and the >text< created by the other«8 or to privilege the text of the other above any external factors. In a related twist on the research process, as we shall see below, it is no longer possible to do fieldwork without, as one anthropologist put it, answering the question »Who are you?«.9 How the researcher fits into the equation becomes an issue not only because she or he is the one doing the interpreting, but also because the researcher is the one who chooses what data to generate and how to generate it, raising questions of selective retrieval and research agendas, as well as how the latter relate to how we go about making sense of the data. Indeed, research that deals with embodied knowledge10 and that requires participatory experience to fully understand the subject of study demands that selfreflexivity take some precedence over both interpretation and the mechanical collection of data.''

* 6

7 8 9

10 11

See Joseph Donohue, »Evidence and Documentation«, in Interpreting the Theatrical Past, eds. Thomas Postlewait and Bruce A. McConachie (Iowa City/IA, 1989), pp. 177-97 (p. 191). Clifford Geertz, »Making Experience, Authoring Selves«, in The Anthropology of Experience, eds. Victor W. Turner and Edward M. Bruner (Urbana/IL, 1986), pp. 373-80 (p. 373). See Edith Turner, »Experience and Poetics in Anthropological Writing«, in Anthropology and Literature, ed. Paul Benson (Urbana/IL, 1993), pp. 27-47. Vincent Pecora, »The Limits of Local Knowledge«, in The New Historicism, ed. H. Avram Veeser (New York, 1989), pp. 243-76 (pp. 264-65). See Anthony P. Cohen, »Self-Conscious Anthropology«, in Anthropology and Autobiography, eds. Judith Okely and Helen Callaway (New York, 1992), pp. 221-41. See Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice, p. 91. See Judith Okely, »Anthropology and Autobiography: Participatory Experience and Embodied Knowledge«, in Anthropology and Autobiography, eds. Okely and Callaway, pp. 1-28.

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Locating source material The particular difficulty of conducting this project was related to locating original source material, for a number of reasons. First, resistance theatre was located largely in sparsely populated mountain areas, which was bound to make preservation of materials difficult in spite of an organized effort by the resistance movement to create a historical record that would cover the military, political and artistic aspects of the struggle. The task was complicated by the fact that during the civil war following the resistance and its aftermath, that is, from 1945 to 1952 and thereafter, right-wing governments largely prohibited the preservation of Leftist materials. After a brief Centrist rule, which began in 1956 and included some resurgence of the Left in 1958, the military junta of 1967 to 1974 continued the previous regime of repression.12 Therefore, during a period of three decades, it was only intermittently possible to collect or study resistance materials. The national archival collections only briefly attempted to collect such material; private collecting and political archives went underground for long periods of time; the press was censored and print materials scattered, destroyed or hidden away. Participants in the resistance were themselves dispersed either because they were forced into exile (many to the Balkans or the Soviet Union), incarcerated on prison islands, or imprisoned until they signed forced recantations. The prospect of using archival materials, collecting original materials, or inspiring cooperation from informants was, until the 1970s, sporadic and minimal. Requests for inspection of resistance material in public archives usually met the response: »It doesn't exist.« Informants were justifiably suspicious of efforts to elicit testimony that was likely to create political problems for families already under duress and often either harassed or placed under observation. For these reasons, it became necessary to recover original materials in some other way. Street bookstalls and flea markets were searched for the odd issue of a journal or book, or caches of old and unexamined materials bundled and sold by weight. These searches led to the discovery of a warehouse storing the holdings of an itinerant rag merchant who, during the postwar period, had collected papers, journals and books by cart, buying them on the street or picking them out of the ruins of buildings. Repeated research visits during the 1960s and 1970s allowed me to find and inspect such materials and then to organize and study the finds. With the installation of a Left-Centre, democratic government in the mid1979s, the study of resistance culture became a serious option for research. Political parties and resistance associations opened their archives, original material was reprinted, and essays and books on the subject began to be published. As interest in the study of resistance culture grew, informants became more widely available for interviews. Collecting information and testimony under these changed conditions was bound to be less selective, self-protective, or partial than previously encountered. 12

See Richard Clogg, A Concise History of Greece (Cambridge, 1992).

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The research process The considerable difficulties of conducting this kind of research - hardly the armchair variety - affects one's ability to develop a clear or systematic methodology. Indeed, metholodological purity is hardly possible and less desirable than flexibility, responsiveness to research contingencies, and sensitivity to the ever-shifting directions in which research materials lead us. One could argue that the research process is less a matter of following a predetermined research protocol than of remaining open to the situational needs and going with the flow of information. Once the material has been exposed and scrutinized, it is open to discussion in an on-going process, which raises more questions than it can answer (e.g., flushing out the native perspective, exposing the varieties of interpretation as well as their contradictions, and examining informants' perspectives in relation to, but not through, the eyes of the research perspective brought to bear on the study). A central consideration in conducting this kind of research concerns the questions one asks when confronting one's material (in »material« I include informants, documents and physical sites) and the kinds of guidelines one tries to adhere to in interpreting mountain culture and its people. In one sense it is impossible to know the questions that should be asked until the research process has almost been completed, for only then do we know enough about our subject to understand what questions are appropriate. It thus becomes clear that the research process needs to be recursive, moving from pre-search to search to research in order to circle back and pick up material previously left unexamined. Once one discovers, for example, the variety of groups moving through the mountains and the kind of transportation network they used (ballooning and deflating travel parties along footpaths linked by stone and trestle bridges), the face of mountain culture takes on a wholly new aspect. Homosocial peasant villages must now be balanced against heterosocial units to capture the violent interjection of instability into a stable culture. Contradictory testimony offers conflicting realities. The unavailability of transient populations for interview prejudices testimony in favour of native groups with their own interests and needs. Moreover, the kinds of silent testimony offered by the naming of street and public squares, by the presence or absence of monuments and resistance artifacts in present-day popular culture speak volumes about popular desire to be identified with the resistance movement and the reaction of a nation to acknowledging its debt to resistance. How legitimate is any ex post facto interpretation that tries to explain such silent testimony? Not only did the subjective life of resistance culture exist under conditions that can only be described as chaotic, but it is being studied here at a distance of more than five decades. On the other hand, to fail to study the subjective life is to fail to have studied the culture of the Greek resistance. Making a methodological commitment to field research, one becomes obliged to reconsider the ways in which one thinks about the subjective conditions of resistance, the relative cultural autonomy of art, and the unity of resistance. Unity becomes multiplicity and

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experience takes precedence over abstractions; life on the periphery has priority over life at the centre, and cultural creations over historical events. We are led, as a result, to give up attempts at what can only be false objectivity and to adopt what I describe as an indigenous perspective, not one that finds the academic wolf wearing the laic sheep's clothing, but one that privileges an unstructured rather than a structured methodology, participation over objectivity, and the multivalence of the everyday over analytic order. Such research finds itself guilty of ambiguity that is almost entropic. At the same time, it speaks with a voice that is closer to being authentic and allows itself to be more passionate than research that dares not acknowledge its own resistances or its own lacks relative to an idealized research which assumes a transcendent authority it does not really possess. This is not to say that such research has no method, but merely that method follows practice rather than theory, even as it is theory informed.

Research in the field: Mountain villages and the geography of resistance The field research that was conducted took place in the northern Pindos range south through the Tzoumerka mountains and west to Mount Velouhi and Mount Pelio, covering the nomes or prefectures of Fthiotida, Magnesia, Evritania, Karditsa and Arta. Many dozens of informants were interviewed both on these field trips and on numerous visits to Athens, Volos and loannina. Key informants were interviewed several times over a period of two years from 1994 to 1996. These field trips made it possible to capture the experience of negotiating the mountains the troupes travelled, to visit the villages they visited, to locate the town squares and school yards in which they performed, and to interview performers and members of their audiences who recalled those performances. Informants helped to locate villages no longer on the map, because they had been deserted by their inhabitants (ksera villages), and villages too small for recognition even by regional cartographers. They identified the sites occupied by resistance forces when they sought refuge in areas distant from occupied cities, such as Arta and Volos, or in villages high up in the most inaccessible mountains, such as Voulgareli, Melates, Mesiounda, Pramanda and Melissourgi. Mercilessly assaulted for its support for the resistance, Voulgareli, the home base of one troupe and reported by inhabitants to have been hit by 1,600 bombs in one air raid in 1944, was burned to the ground and all its inhabitants were killed. Melissourgi still shows the scars of the war, with its ancient slate roofs mixed with newer ceramic ones revealing the pattern of destruction and rebuilding, of death and rebirth of villages during this period. Set like tiny nests in the crannies of looming mountains and holding sometimes no more than a handful of inhabitants, and rarely more than several hundred, villages of the resistance tend to disappear from view around the first turn of treacherous narrow roads whose landslides in the winter often made them

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impassable. The deep gorges, well-hidden villages and tortuous mountain roads of Pindos, Tzoumerka and Pelio constitute a terrain critical to operating a secret army and hosting its troops. Towns of the plains appear exposed, open, vulnerable to imposition by the enemy and so were bypassed by the guerrilla army ELAS. The mountains of Thessaly offer a sudden contrast to the flatlands which lead into them, explaining why they were chosen to house those organizing the resistance. From the plains on which the industrial city Karditsa sits, one finds oneself plunged directly into mountainous terrain with an immediacy that is surprising and initially forbidding. A network that is a metaphor for the resistance network itself, barely visible footpaths (monopatia) crisscross the hills, disappearing and reappearing unexpectedly as a vast transportation system used by natives of the area. They are quick, safe, hidden ways to move unknown from village to village, carved out of the earth as animal tracks only to move an entire resistance army and its collateral units to their destinations. The most ancient and traditional means of transport and communication, the local monopatia represent a historical, popular transportation system which arose as an efficient solution to traversing the ravines and streams that penetrated the mountainous terrain of Free Greece. On Mount Pelio alone, as many as 272 monopatia elaborately trace through the mountains.13 Covered with cobblestone, dirt or sometimes rudely paved, they take from twenty minutes to eight hours, and on average some two to three hours, to travel from one end to the other. Adapted to local needs, the footpaths connect surrounding fields, religious chapels and villages by means of stone bridges and wooden trestles. Like the resistance movement, the monopatia express an intimate integration of people and the land, self-organizing, unofficial and context-dependant. The felt sense of life in the present-day mountain villages contextualizes the study of resistance culture. It brings to life testimony from informants, who recall the period as one in which the mountains were teeming with a vast array of parties travelling secretly through it, not by public roads but by the local trails operated and accessed by the people who lived there.14 The mountains flourished then as a life form poorly understood or appreciated at the level of official histories. Moving from village to village, from plains to mountains, from homes to caves and camps were exiles from the city, rival bands ofandartes, refugees from the Holocaust, deserters and escaped captive soldiers, escaped civilian prisoners and hostages, recruits for the organization, political operatives of the movement 13 14

See Nikos Haratsis, Othigos Piliou Yia Peripatites: Thiadromes se Kalnterimia ke Monopatia sto Vouno ton Kentavron (Volos, 1992). See, for example, the memoirs of Yiorgos Koutoungas, To Laiko Theatro Opos to Ezisa (Athens, 1987); Yiorgos Kotzioulas, Theatro sta Vouna (Athens, 1976); Yiorgos Kaftantzis, Theatro sta Vouna tis Thitikis Makedonias ton Kero tis Katohis (Athens, 1990); Haris Sakellariou, To Theatro tis Andistasis (Athens, 1989); Yerasimos Stavrou, »To Theatro stin Eleftheri Ellada«, Epitheorisi Tennis, nos. 87-88 (March-April 1962), pp. 376-85; and Vasilis Rotas, O Agonas sta Ellinika Vouna (Athens, 1982).

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and its free government, black marketeers, fleeing villagers and allied military advisors. At any given moment, it might appear as if the mountains themselves were moving from village to village, redistributing themselves and their human material as if in a great game of musical chairs, no-one daring to stay anywhere for long but stopping just long enough to touch down and take off again. What one quickly learns in the mountains of Free Greece is the strength of an independent tradition of leadership and learning dating from the Byzantine period. Here one finds celebration of teachers such as Evyenios Yiannoulis in Karpenissi, Alexandras Delmousos in Volos, and Anthimios Gazies in Millies (the popularly acknowledged seat of the centaur Chairon, mentor of the classical hero Achilles). Mount Pelio itself is the acknowledged teaching centre for those who prepared for the Greek War for Independence of 1821. One rediscovers the tradition of schools, which the Greeks secretly operated under the Ottomans. The tradition was honoured in schools run by EPON youth resistance units and in the use of demotic schools in Korishades and Viniani, both in Evritania, as meeting places of PEEA (the resistance shadow government) councils. As frequently as the village church or public square, it was the demotic school that hosted the resistance performance. Its centrality to village life and the promise it held for the future of mountain villages made the school a primary target for destruction by occupation forces. In the present, in these same mountains, the public squares of the provincial city of loannina, the regional centre Pramanda, and the small village Melates carry no monuments to the andartes (guerrillas), to the period of the occupation, or to the Holocaust. Although a street or a square in loannina or Melissourgi might be named after the national resistance, the most numerous monuments are to the government dead in the civil war, to those massacred by the communists, to the young who raised the flag of Greece; official or generic deaths. The sparse monuments to resistance even at the local sites of events, the four to five-decade delay in installing monuments and the ambiguifying of their inscriptions suggest not merely ambivalence to the struggle in historical terms, but a failure to integrate the struggle into the fabric of popular life that leaves it unnaturalized. The vague referents to liberty and democracy and generalized incoporative expressions of loss are indicative of a larger-scale absence of artifacts or memorabilia. Indeed, we find considerably more frequent reference to the contemporary communists in mountainside graffitti (on a deserted bus, a rock wall or the side of a hut) than we find evidence of the andartiko (guerrilla war) in any form (in associations or societies, monuments and dedications, crafts and artwork). This expression of entropy suggests the popular imagination has not found a path to centring this marginalized experience. More immediately important is the widely held sentiment that the resistance is a political liability, an inconvenience that provokes oppositionality and prevents deal-making. Of terminal importance is the fading of the participants themselves from the historical stage, together with their institutional and personal testimonies.

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Developing a field protocol The first site visit was planned as a pilot test in Mani, in the Peloponnese, whose mountainous features mimicked those of our prime research area (central Greece) and where occupation forces had also failed to root themselves during the War. My collaborator (Kostas Myrsiades) and I lodged for a while in a large town (Kalamata) and made day trips out from that central location. We did so in order to test the distance mountain resistance would be from an occupied area and to determine how likely occupation forces would be to venture out into unsecured and difficult mountainous terrain. On subsequent trips, we visited a variety of villages throughout the area and stayed in loannina, Volos, Arta, Karpenisi and Karditsa. Having canvassed a village on foot for local landmarks, we then tried to establish contacts with local informers. A visit to the town square cafe was a necessary second step. One not only became oriented to a site but took the opportunity to determine whether it would be friendly to research efforts. Examining landmarks (monuments, graffitti, markers, street names) along the road and in village centres (churches, schools, town squares) as well as the physical condition of a village (its relative wealth or poverty as well as the degree of damage or repair it appeared to have sustained) was another way of assessing a town's general political inclinations. Villages lower down on the mountain proved distinguishable from those higher up, in terms of their level of political activity, but those in the upper reaches were not themselves uniform in their political sentiments or degree of involvement. Conversations in the cafe usually established which members of the community might have lived here the longest or who the leader of the community was. Questions about where we were from and why we were there had to be fielded. Certain attributes seemed more respected by potential informants. Among those more highly prized were a left-wing political disposition, a track record in working with Greek language materials, being from a working-class family, having a village perspective, being a native Greek and being male. Researchers who possessed these qualities (my collaborator possessed all these characteristics) had a much better chance of inspiring the cooperation of an informant and generating fairly reliable testimonies. That we were teachers and writers seemed to work to our benefit, as did my collaborator's assertion that he had worked with several nationally revered poets; offprints of our published work helped as well. That we were originally only scouting sites to study seemed to excite the curiosity of our contacts and encouraged a competitive interest. We would often be introduced to someone respected in the village who would facilitate our efforts. A brief conversation was largely sufficient to determine whether this particular area or village deserved fuller attention. Having already completed the archival work and having prepared a map of political activity in the area from the period under study, we were able to cite local resistance activity using dates and names of participants, which led informants to cooperate more willingly and fully, again stirring local pride. Indeed, the

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most critical tool we had at our disposal proved to be the maps we had made of each of the critical areas we wanted to study (Epirus, Thessaly, Magnesia and western Macedonia). The maps were compiled by collating data generated from period sources (e.g., memoirs, letters and diaries) with local road maps and driving guides obtained from the national road service, as well as provincial and municipal government offices. Conversations with local officials certified whether certain roads were in use during the period in question or where certain towns no longer on the map were likely to be located. Because access to main roads left a town open to mechanized transport of the type that occupation forces had access to, out-of-the-way villages were often selected for study. A choice had to be made between spending significant time at certain sites or attempting to reach as broad a number of sites as possible. Original documents suggested that in a popular resistance movement only a handful of survivors would have substantial amounts of useful information to impart, but many informants have small pieces to contribute. We thus made the decision to focus on intensive interviews of four informants (Voula Damianakou, Haris Sakellariou and Kostas and Emorfia Kotzioulas), who represented the three types of troupes we wanted to study - the political Rotas troupe, village EPON troupes and the military Kotzioulas troupe. We would then travel as broad a range of the touring routes of the troupes as we could, spending only enough time at each stop to take initial notes, conduct brief interviews and photograph critical landmarks. We supplemented these trips with visits to local offices, political associations and regional archives (small collections accumulated by a handful of devoted partisans) to confirm choices we had already made as well as to pick up any new leads or contacts.

How reliable are personal testimonies? Among the most important data generated from site visits was the data derived from interviewing informants. Interviews proved among the most interesting sources both for generating indigenous testimony and for testing the validity of printed sources, in spite of the fact that the interviews were after the fact and the documents being confirmed or disconfirmed were of the period. The central difference was the shared confidences oral interviews are capable of producing. Such confidences suggest a less heroic picture, less organized and less purposeful than the picture presented by printed materials. In one troupe, it became clear that the decision to organize itself was as clearly related to boredom and isolation as to some higher ideological purpose. The contradictions that underlie public reminiscences surfaced in interviews so that it became clear that the arts were in many respects regarded as irrelevant or inconsequential, and that recruiting for them required exerting pressure and using influence. Feelings of support were attached to locally known and admired individuals rather than to an abstract organization or cause. Cults of personality based around Rotas and Kotzioulas, for

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example, proved responsible for a troupe's ability to thrive in much the same way that a military unit cohered profitably around a strong personality like the guerrilla leader Aris Velouhiotis. The ad hoc nature of performances is perhaps the greatest revelation that comes out of the interviews. Performances were not clearly differentiated in the popular mind between those that were officially sponsored and those that spontaneously emerged. Entertainments sprung up among the people using whatever material was to hand in any combination - songs, dance, skits, readings. They were the work of groups of children, women or soldiers as well as the work of organized troupes. Formal art may have been a hard sell, but popular expression was natural and endemic, so that an organized unit such as the Laiki Skini that integrated itself with those efforts was more likely to find itself accepted as a popular statement. Interviews, nevertheless, present the researcher with often intractable problems. How much reliance, for example, can be placed on an informant several decades after an event? Where informants have previously been interviewed - in some cases on film, in others for print media - comparisons can be made for consistency or elaboration. Original documents can often confirm, modify or further specify testimony. However, consistency between sources, or even within one source, is not always to be welcomed. Sources often operate by understood agreement to support a position that »honours« or »dis-honours« certain events or parties to those events, providing interpretations that have been »smoothed« or »corrected«. The question of reliability thus becomes a question of interpretation, which needs to take into account the local perspective and any assumptions that underlie or inform the testimonies. Several things can be done, however, to minimize inconsistencies and unreliability among informants. Many informants spent considerable time in Athens or lived in large towns or cities. Their identity, however, lay in their villages. Informants thus took it as a genuine sign of respect that researchers visited them in their village of origin or at the site of an event. Not only did such visits stimulate recall and create a greater sense of intimacy in the researcher-informant relationship, but it allowed the informant to activate his or her support network, which inevitably generated additional information. Interviews under these conditions proved to be more attuned to the physical sites we were visiting. Informant and researcher shared the inhabited space that had given birth to the event we were mutually trying to recreate. Developing a relationship with an informant is not, of course, without risk and may impact on the investigator's degree of objectivity. That is not to say that subsequent corrections are impossible, but that one needs to do so without betraying the trust of the informant. Nevertheless, the testimony generated must be supplemented and corraborated by other sources, printed or in manuscript form, which have their own problems of authenticity and reliability. But romanticization and hero worshipping, to note two of the problems encountered, can be addressed and put into perspective so long as the researcher does not become

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too engaged a participant observer in the interview process. This is not to say that the researcher is ever truly objective. Indeed, to the degree that one becomes personally involved in one's research, it can become a process that discourages a critical attitude and conduces to self-justification.

Reliability of original source material Thus far, we have tried to have the best of both worlds - participation and objectivity - if only because objectivity is never truly possible. One is, after all, already »positioned« in relation to whatever one studies,15 and the necessary participation to generate an indigenous perspective is never possible without some sacrifice of objectivity. It is true, in any case, that with informants the importance of participation outweighs that of objectivity. This relative imbalance shifts dramatically once one begins working with printed material, even if that material, as in the case of memoirs, for example, is itself based in informant testimony. The removal of the face-to-face component and the opportunity to work with inert material provides the distance necessary to greater objectivity. We are still, however, faced with the problems of bad memory, selective retrieval, or just a partial perspective due to lack of information. Some of these problems can be redressed in field interviews, where additional indigenous or site resources can be exploited. For the rest, printed materials need to be resorted to. But what documents are likely to be available to us and how are we to assess them? Let us begin with memoirs, a prime source of original testimony for a project of this type. The more detailed a memoir in terms of dates, locations, logistics or personnel, the more credence it appears we should give such a document. Yet, in many cases, this insistence on detailing is a habit which, as one informant put it, was inculcated by the resistance movement itself to ensure that its version of events was given priority in the effort to write the history of the period or to win the propaganda war for hearts and minds. Yerasimos Stavrou's memoir, like that of Haris Sakellariou, seems more descriptive than proselytizing and yet is deceptive for just that reason. Embedded commentary is thereby more likely to escape a researcher's close scrutiny. Both Stavrou and Sakellariou were proponents of the EPON troupes and of a perspective that endorses the laic or popular origins of theatre, even as they were well aware of the professionalizing efforts they were themselves making as playwrights in providing written texts to those troupes. The itinerant performer Yiorgos Koutoungas's memoir combines KKE politics and EAM organizational devotion, his heart showing more clearly on his sleeve. Careful historical notations in the memoir of the troupe director Yiorgos Kotzioulas appear, by contrast, calculated to chastise the organization for failing to support his troupe's work, expos15

See Kirsten Hastrup, »Writing Ethnography: State of the Art«, in Anthropology and Autobiography, eds. Judith Okely and Helen Callaway (New York, 1992), pp. 116-33.

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ing an instrumental usefulness for his memoir. Troupe directors Yiorgos Kaftantzis and Vasilis Rotas, urban theatre professionals, by contrast, find greater value in using their memoirs as an occasion for literary theorizing, so that the world of everyday detail is sacrificed to meaning-giving constructions that provide a higher sense of mission which goes unremarked in most of the other memoirs. It is thus difficult to establish a clear set of guidelines by means of which to gauge memoirs. But what about another closely related source, diaries? Given that diaries appear to be less calculated for publication than for some personal use, they might better reflect the author's unfettered state of mind and therefore make a researcher feel more comfortable when giving credence to a diary entry. But Kotzioulas's diary entries, compared to those in his memoir, reveal that the former are not essentially different for comparable dates from the latter. In some ways, the diary is less pointed or less developed than the memoir, while in other ways it preserves sentiments and details that would have proven impolitic had they been incorporated in the memoir. Letters, by contrast, have a wider variety of uses. In one instance, letters provide a paper trail to determine just when Kotzioulas was actually assigned the formal rank of Director of the Artistic Division of ELAS armed forces, in addition to his title of Director of the Laiki Skini troupe. A seemingly trivial distinction at first glance, it soon becomes apparent that the developing status of artistic resistance can be measured by just such a weather vane, as can audience support, the extent of logistical support and the potential for growth of the troupe. Letters, for example, move between the troupe and headquarters transmitting directives and seeking support; between field officers and the troupe expressing gratitude for performances and soliciting texts; and between the troupe and villagers beating the bushes for recruits and expressing reluctance to provide them. Some letters turn out to be field reports on the state of artistic resistance either in part or in full, or contacts between different troupe leaders sharing information or feeling each other out to compare their relative status or support. Such reports and contacts carry their own agendas, serving one troupe leader, divisional ELAS unit commander, EAM political leader or another. Another source, photographs, have a particular use in generating a sense of the period. This includes photographs of the site after the fact, archival photos produced for official resistance movement uses, and photographs that appear in documentary films. We find, for example, evidence of performances by army troupes in Egypt that appear to differ significantly in spirit and attitude from those in the mountains. A rare piece of film footage of a performance by the Rotas troupe confirms significant differences between the size, style, formality and support received by such a troupe compared to that of the Kotzioulas troupe which took its performances into the field. Audiences themselves differ significantly; the former largely adult, male and officers or political figures, the latter largely children, women, peasants and soldiers. The reliability of these original sources - particularly memoirs, diaries and letters - certainly supersedes that of subsequently generated analyses or histories.

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But in some cases, the two groups of material prove to be indistinguishable. Kotzioulas's material, for example, purports to be of the period but is not published until the mid-1970s, leaving open the prospect that it has been reworked. Rotas, by contrast, having had his diary confiscated by the British, reconstructs it in essays of the 1960s, Revisionism is clearly in evidence in the changes Rotas makes in one document that was written in Athens in 1962. Published in 1977, in truncated form, as part of a celebratory issue of the popular journal Theatro focussing on Rotas, it was subsequently re-published in a collection of his essays in 1982 in what appears to be its original form. The part omitted in the earlier version is a section renouncing claims to »ownership« of his troupe and submitting himself to organizational authority in what appears to be a political »confession of error«. Certainly the warring over the relative importance of troupes, which occurs in the opening editorial comments of two special issues of Theatro (the Rotas issue and a special issue on Kotzioulas in 1976), as well as in other documents, demonstrates clear attempts at jockeying for position by rewriting local history. In dealing with such revisionism, it is sometimes relatively easy to detect a reinterpretation of events from a more recent perspective; elsewhere nothing will do but a complete unpacking of that interpretation; in some cases, an alternative revision will have to be brought to bear to clarify contradictions between the first revision, the event as originally construed or perceived, and alternative readings. One mistake to avoid is to take period constructions too literally as a way of resolving differences, as if, somehow, period documents are not themselves afflicted with misreadings or already »positioned« as responses. However, such problems are as much to be expected and as unlikely to be avoided as performance sites that have been built over (Voulgareli), towns no longer on the map (in the area around Voulgareli), or texts burned in fires (those of Stavrou) or lost (among them some by Yiannis Ritsos and Kotzioulas and whole repertoires of ad hoc military and village performances). Written texts provide another kind of problem in that they suggest a stability that performances never had, given the substantial improvisation that occurred and the frequent interruptions and changes demanded by interactive audiences. The plays that have survived, including the more formal Laiki Skini texts, do not reflect the extensive nature of singing and music in mountain theatre in general, which employed a small orchestra of instruments. Interviews, by contrast, make this clear, as do memoirs. Nor do texts reflect the improvisatory nature of how they were actually performed, given audience interactivity and the often ad hoc nature of the way in which performing troupes were put together. On the other hand, performance texts give a strong sense of the »voice« of resistance theatre as it was originally performed. Indeed, any work that wishes to preserve a true sense of the nature of theatre of this period, as well as the indigenous perspective and avoid the primacy of the researcher's analytic or interpretive voice must translate large sections of the texts, together with the memoirs, letters and diaries that support them.

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The management of troupes and performances Having engaged in a lengthy prolegomena to the study of resistance, it is worth considering what such a study might begin to uncover that is unique about its subject. Working through a field perspective and addressing the physical conditions of operating an itinerant troupe, we can consider literary production from the ground up. First, mountain theatre had to establish a set of artistic practices to legitimate itself with its audience. Thus it built performance spaces, developed scripts, created special groups to deliver the product and required admission. These artistic or performative conventions established boundaries that were neither fixed nor always coherent, but were maintained as a sort of temporary collective agreement continuously negotiated within the larger space in which it had a place. The non-literate audience had to learn that the violence on stage was not real and that actors were not members of the audience. Because they were only temporarily contracted, theatrical conventions had continually to reaffirm themselves in an on-going relationship with their audiences. Limited by constraints of circumstances, materials, experience or understood needs, resistance theatre thus had a provisional quality reflected not only in its audience relations, but in actors dropping in and out of a troupe, males playing female roles, performers forgetting their lines and so on. At the same time, it carried an impression of orderliness and design, of structuring both the group's representation of the world and the group itself which, to some extent, was being asked to order itself by means of this representation. And it did so in the context of a changing and unstable new order, where nothing could be taken for granted and little institutional or collective reinforcement could be expected. In their own unpatterned efforts at self-organizing, performing troupes favoured specific audiences by learning the songs which andartes and students had composed; they mimicked the work of other troupes, and integrated peasants and fighters as living material into their performances. Content and form alike arose from momentary decisions or situational constraints as a means of both adapting to, and capitalizing on, physical and political contingencies. Captains who happened to encounter a troupe on route diverted them to their camps to stimulate interest in creating a text celebrating their own exploits. Visual gags and comic business reached out to audiences in remote villages who were unfamiliar with theatre, but were equally successful in large convocations, where keeping a crowd's attention was critical. Dialogue was introduced when stages had to be constructed on unstable school desks and with a blanket for a curtain; songs took over from dialogue when the audience intervened and sought to participate more fully in the performance. Often there were hour-long speeches by political leaders, followed by acted-out scenes of predominantly ideological content; but troupes soon realized that this had to give way to more immediate and lighthearted material in order to keep audiences attentive and involved. Performances could differ enormously, depending on whether they were organized on the spur of the moment or properly planned and prepared for, whether

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they took place on the road or in a village, whether in front of a small or a large audience. The flexibility of the performance was thus of primary importance. As resistance theatre became more widely practised, audience factions began to demand their favourite skits or players, overturning the order of proceedings and imposing their own tastes and predelictions. Replays of scenes and sketches which had been particularly popular meant that some performances could last into the early hours of the morning. Constant recomposition of troupes occurred as they exchanged members and, along with them, materials associated with those players. Such frequent and spontaneous reorganization strengthened the usefulness of a variety format for resistance performances, since it lent itself to recombination and spontaneous adjustment to audience demands and situational needs. During the resistance, many villages, for a variety of reasons, proved hostile to political performances. The provincial population not only disapproved of what it considered shameless urban entertainment or vulgar itinerant theatre, but also feared the seductive appeal of theatre. Villagers felt that the troupes corrupted traditional values and tempted youth to join the performance troupe or enlist in the armed resistance. Tied to the land, many peasants avoided EAM, fearful of being recruited themselves and having to take up weapons not only against the collaborationist Greek government, but also against anti-communist, Right-wing resistance groups. Social and personal ties cut many ways, which made it difficult to choose to side with one resistance group or one political perspective over another. Local loyalties also militated against being pressed into service by EAM, when there was no consensus among members of one's kinship group, church faction, neighbourhood or village as a whole on political issues. In any case, the political, military and youth arms of the resistance movement (EAM, ELAS and EPON) and their performance troupes were something new, and the new was questionable for its own sake in many of the isolated areas that the troupes visited. Fear of change and failures of the movement to follow local protocol motivated many villagers as much as any anti-resistance ideology. The fear of having to provide supplies to the resistance from scarce village resources proved problematic as well, causing villages to refuse to host performances. Many simply avoided any commitment to supporting the armed resistance as it would leave them exposed, on the one hand, to German hostage-taking or, on the other, to EAM reprisals. The hostility of such villages was met in a number of ways, depending upon the source of the objection. One element in EAM's favour was its heterogeneity. Given its range of ethnicities, wartime experiences and the varied ages, regional identifications and occupations of its members, the troupes were able to assert connections with a few villagers in unfamiliar places and build from there. Often a few village youths were persuaded to participate, which encouraged adult relatives to be more receptive and could lead to the establishment of a local support group. In other cases, village mayors or priests were approached, their concerns addressed and their support solicited. In the village of Anafi in 1941, a local com-

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munist team that organized the performance anticipated and addressed the concerns of elected village officials, the police, the church, families and even the director of the post office in issuing formal written invitations to each constituency and preemptively seeking the appropriate permissions and notices required by both custom and law.16 Troupe members began by serving early morning tea, figs and breakfast cakes, which led to a musically accompanied march to church. They decorated and cleaned the streets, organized the singing of the national hymn, flew the appropriate flags (of Greece and the Communist Party in tandem), delivered the appropriate welcomes and joined villagers and the police in a »panethnic« patriotic dance. In general, travelling troupes were careful to announce themselves before they entered an unfamiliar site and to interview inhabitants about the village either to discover political allegiances or to gather material which could be integrated into the performance. In some cases, a troupe would parade through the village offering samples of its skits or songs. Once it had gained entry, a troupe found it easier to persuade villagers to cooperate. In other instances, reluctant villages sometimes became less resistant when they saw rival villages entertain a performance troupe. One of the advantages of hosting an itinerant troupe of resistance actors was to gather information about the war. At that time, commercial travellers had difficulty securing passes from occupation authorities, and unauthorized personnel were unable to move freely from area to area. Therefore, theatre troupes were an important source of information and a means of communication between villages, acting as word-of-mouth newspapers and vital links to relatives engaged in the armed resistance. Once the actors had shown proper respect to village protocols, support of its population was more likely. Direct engagement with hostile villages was not always the preferred course of action, especially when EAM or occupation authorities had taken action against a village. In such instances, the resistance network warned troupes to stay away from certain villages and offered them safe haven in friendly ones. Performances were so sought after, in any case, that troupes performed not only by invitation and bribes but also often by threats. Troupes were ordered to andartis locations, waylaid by smaller villages and detoured by influential officials to such an extent that they either had to rescue their schedules with a concerted effort or risked unpatterned wandering. Thousands of villages wanted performances; unable to get to all of them, performers travelled to as many as they could. With so much movement through the mountains and the need to travel quickly and with little gear, a troupe was highly dependent on support which only local communities could offer. The service provided by gathering an audience or setting up a stage could prove critical to a troupe's need to keep moving and to battle the wind and snow of the rugged mountains. Because performances were 16

See Voula Damianakou and Eleni Vasilopoulou, eds., Vasilis Rotas, 1889-1977 (Athens, 1979), pp. 260-62.

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held during working hours, delays meant losing the sun's heat and having to locate performance lights or having to travel at night in the dark mountains to maintain one's performance schedule. Given the generally conservative tenor of life in the mountains and the deeply disruptive effects of a guerrilla war, recruiting troupe members, especially women, was bound to prove a particular difficulty. The Directorate of Popular Enlightenment Report reflects just such a concern, citing the lack of women for roles while noting that young men from EPON could be found.17 Many women refused to join an enterprise which their families and co-religionists associated with city life and the work of the devil. Troupes struggled to convince families that their young girls should become actresses. They made the case, for example, that a family could be more secure in the knowledge that a daughter was travelling with them rather than carrying a gun on the front-line. In addition, troupes were plagued by the difficult logistics of feeding, housing and transport as well as providing for the scenery, costumes and stage construction. Theatrical resistance troupes had to travel extensively. In Epirus, the Laiki Skini moved out from its camp in Voulgareli and returned at night, but soon it was moving too far out by day to return easily. The tour thus moved from village to village, visiting camps in between, until the troupe was performing every day, sometimes twice a day. The performance was almost three hours in length for audiences that ranged from one hundred to a thousand people; as many as thirty villages were visited in a month.18 Able to be more selective, Rotas's troupe stayed in large villages in Thessaly for a week at a time, performing twice a day on a regular basis to what are described as large audiences, often numbering as many as 2,000, particularly in Itamo in Agrafa where an amphitheatre had been constructed which could accomodate large-scale resistance movement conferences.19 The guerrillas travelled largely on foot, by pack animal and along footpaths; in that sense they could move freely through the mountains.20 But the lack of supplies, the general poverty of the area and the need to travel light in rocky terrain meant that in most locations actors would have to perform in clothing belonging to villagers, including clothing that had just been worn. Troupes soon determined that it was better to carry their own wardrobes in spite of the scarcity of transportation across the mountain paths and animal tracks, for »no one had the disposition to offer us one old useless pair of pants«.21 As for scenery, sheets and blankets with holes could serve for stage curtains, whereas cloth for painting a backdrop was at a premium. Andartes were even implored by their commanders to share with the troupe the red and blue cloth allotted to them for shirts to be used as a stage curtain. 17 18 19 20 21

See Rotas, O Agonas sta Ellinika Vouna, pp. 121-24. Kotzioulas, Theatro sta Vouna, pp. 29, 33-4. Voula Damianakou, »To Theatro stin Andistasi«, in Vasilis Rotas, Theatro ke Andistasi (Athens, 1981), pp. 72-85. See William H. McNeill, The Metamorphosis of Greece Since World War II (Chicago/IL, 1978), p. 68. Kotzioulas, Theatro sta Vouna, p. 39.

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Feeding the troupe proved an even more frustrating problem. In Voulgareli, a local donation to the troupe of a dozen eggs was confiscated by the local garrison, because the daily fare for fighters there was only simple oatmeal. In truth, villagers and andartes alike lived on minimal provisions, often off the land itself. When the army had food, the troupe could eat, but organizing provisions for an entire tour was out of the question. The Division simply did not have sufficient or predictable supplies. Kotzioulas's theatre troupe, knowing of the army's difficulty in this regard, accepted limited stores for two to three days as it set off on its tour, carrying a document soliciting assistance from the local guerrilla commissariat, which meant little considering the general scarcity of foodstuffs. Local villages were often unable or unwilling to provide much assistance. Hosepsi and Thordoriana, celebrating their annual village festivals, were accused of violating Greek custom by failing to invite members of the troupe to share their holiday fare. At each stop, troupes ate only as often as the local inhabitants themselves, once a day, or twice at the most, and often only bread and some cheese. Their schedule was thus partially determined by the pressures of hunger and poverty as they kept moving, touring all the time, to avoid straining the resources of a single community, however hospitable it might be. Security was a final, not inconsiderable, concern as companies moved from village to village. Safety required that troupes travel with speed, limiting the number of their permanent personnel and picking up supplementary help at each performance location. Two pack animals and light weapons assured a troupe's passage by night on mountain paths and the protection of its female members from sexual adventurers on the roads and in the camps. ELAS sentinels stood guard in most populated locations, but the troupe was responsible for itself on its travels between such spots. Not only German and Italian forces, but also rival guerrilla bands were a problem. The former, which tended to move by day, in large numbers and along public roads, were unlikely to take cover among the Greeks in the mountains, whereas Greek bands had their informers and, it was argued, their collaborators everywhere. Theatrical resistance troupes found, as a result, that their travels in the mountains required a shrewd balance of local support and a strong dose of independent initiative. Relations between a troupe and those upon whom it depended remained tenuous. Jealousy abounded among recruits and officers in the fighting forces, who complained that performers received better treatment than they and that actors in theatre troupes dodged service on the front-line. Cultural protocols constituted an important component of life in Free Greece, dictating village relationships with theatrical troupes and determining the nature and limits of their mutual interactivity. The village is the core unit of life in the Greek mountains. More responsive to agricultural life and clan ties than were market towns or regional centres, villages had to be sufficient unto themselves both to counter the effects of isolation and to protect traditional values and culture. The anthropology of village life dictates a conservative and cautious approach to preserve and protect village priorities and relations at the same time as villagers

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express an obligation to those who call upon their hospitality, particularly those whose basic survival needs leave them at the village's mercy. The strange attraction of the theatrical troupes, their association with vaguely distrusted itinerant players, their ties to organizations and networks beyond the village, the war news they carried with them from the outside, and the conflict-riddled themes they addressed in their performances challenged villagers' sense of their invulnerability and stability. For the theatrical troupes to function at all, some form of natural exchange, both spiritual and material, would have to take place between them and the indigenous population of the mountains. Moreover, that exchange, if it was to prove a lasting practice, would have to take place in terms of integration into the local scene through respect for local customs and attitudes.

Summary What a field-research perspective demonstrates, in sum, is the very nature of context-dependency and local expression that characterized resistance theatre at ground level. It reveals resistance theatre's compatibility with the social ecology of the mountain community, a compatibility crucial to its ability to serve that community as well as to represent it. Meeting native informants and interviewing participants, walking the animal tracks and footpaths, the trestles and stone bridges travelled by touring companies allows one to discover the limits and opportunities of the kind of research that can be conducted. The physical geography itself acts as a constraint on what should be studied and how; the people and the culture set limits on the kinds of conclusions that can be drawn. Even the monuments, tombstones and local lore suggest the kind of selective retrieval that informs popular memory. A field research perspective on the practice of resistance theatre suggests that a useful corrective to our understanding of resistance would emphasize its local origins and self-organization. Approached through the everyday experience of the resistance movement, resistance theatre emanated from and was maintained and naturalized in the lives of the inhabitants and the landscape of Free Greece. Theatrical troupes were small and largely amateur, recruited primarily from villages and guerrilla forces, from urban refugees and enemy deserters. Authorized by the central authority of resistance headquarters, they survived through the support of local populations, essentially living off the land. Authors emerged from among village youth and andartes, as well as some professional writers, and their work was informed by audience interactivity, both recruited and volunteered. Organization of the troupes relied upon larger mountain networks and required interdependence with local political organizations. It had to be responsive to local needs and interests. The constitution of the troupes was spontaneous and improvised; they experienced continual personnel turnover and had to address the demands of environmental contingencies in the performances they produced. Like the movement as a whole, resistance theatre troupes represented a division of sentiments and factions and were highly differentiated at the local

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level. In material terms, their theatrical production was resource-driven under conditions of material scarcity and high competitiveness. Performance and textual materials as well as personnel had to be immediately to hand and specific to the mountain experience. Theatre had to be integrated into the daily life of its audience and not an isolated product delivered to them. The result of numbers of people operating empathetically, from political support groups to its audiences, the consensus theatre would be likely to generate could hardly to be taken for granted. The resistance movement was itself a life form in the mountains in which contradictions were left unresolved, an understood unofficial whole, vaguely coordinated and continually reconstituting itself as if in a great gestalt. Life at the micro-level was left largely to local agentive solutions, either individual and collective, agreed or understood. It was organized in terms of social production, feedback, modification and reproduction as in a great open system held together by its embodiment of the experience of a way of life and its reinforcement of that life's instinct for survival. It is the contention of this chapter that accessing such theatre is well served by an immediate and direct methodology such as field research. Indeed, such a methodology may well be the only way to truly exploit the kinds of resources available for the study of resistance, a field very much embedded in and indebted to the indigenous sources and popular perspective of local culture.

Lisa Wolford Methodological Issues in the Documentation and Analysis of Grotowski's Art as Vehicle Abstract Art as vehicle, which Jerzy Grotowski described as the culmination of his lifelong research, is a programme of practical research conducted at the Workcenter of Jerzy Grotowski and Thomas Richards in Pontedera, Italy. According to Grotowski, Art as vehicle focuses primarily on actions related to very ancient songs, which traditionally served ritual purposes and therefore can have a direct impact on the doers. Art as Vehicle troubles easy categorization, balanced on a precarious cusp between ritual and performance, sacred and secular. This chapter considers the implications of the ways in which Grotowski and his collaborators position their creative/ritual practice, and examines the methdological challenges which face the researcher who attempts to document and analyse a project of this nature.

Introduction Over the course of his lifetime (b.1933-1999), the work of Jerzy Grotowski took many different forms - distinct and to some extent disparate projects, which Grotowski conceptualized in terms of precise phases: Theatre of Productions (1959-1969), Theatre of Participation (1969-1978), Theatre of Sources (1976-1982), Objective Drama (1983-1986), and Art as vehicle (1986-1999), which Grotowski designated as the final stage of his lifework.' Grotowski emphasized the importance of keeping in mind the distinctions among these separate projects, so as not to create confusion by interpreting the work of one period in relation to goals and methodologies that more properly pertain to the research of a different phase. This is not to say that there are not common threads running through these disparate projects - only that, in order to come to a true understanding of the progression and development of Grotowski's research, it is necessary to be mindful of differences and discontinuities, as well as underlying goals that can be seen to unify the different stages of his work. In May 1995, Grotowski gave a lecture about Art as vehicle at Northwestern University (Chicago, Illinois). He presented Mercedes Gregory's film of Downstairs Action and engaged in discussion with the audience for several For an overview of the various stages of Grotowski's work, see Zbigniew Osinski, »Grotowski Blazes the Trails«, The Drama Review, vol. 35, no. 1 (1991), pp. 95-112 (p. 102), along with my introductory essay in The Grotowski Sourcebook, eds. Richard Schechner and Lisa Wolford (London/New York, 1997), pp. 1-18.

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hours, until approximately 3 a.m., when the group was asked to vacate the auditorium. Reactions to the presentation were mixed and somewhat polemical in tone, particularly in relation to issues of gender politics and cultural appropriation. One of my colleagues was particularly upset by the performance depicted in the film; when I asked her why, she said that she objected strongly to the mimetic enactment of ritual materials for purely aesthetic purposes. Having worked with Grotowski periodically since 1989, I must confess that I am by no means a neutral or uninvolved witness in relation to his current practice, but that I was genuinely startled by my colleague's characterization of the piece. »But why do you perceive what you witnessed as mimetic?« She seemed no less startled than I, each of us equally convinced of the immutable Tightness of the (contradictory and incompatible) ontological categories that informed our separate readings of the opus. »I suppose«, she answered, »because I've always thought of Grotowski in the context of theatre history. As a director.« This despite the fact that Grotowski has not directed a stage production in nearly thirty years. At a symposium held in Säo Paulo, Brazil, in October 1996, Grotowski stated that it is possible to see his ongoing research as having passed through theatre, but that performance in and of itself was never his primary goal; rather, within the framework of theatre, he has always conducted »a very special research which has never been interrupted« and which has remained the central element of his life's work. On a similar note, Richard Schechner observes that it is misleading to say that Grotowski »left theatre« at a certain point in his development, since in fact he was never »in theatre« to begin with: »even in his early stage productions, theatre was his path not his destination«.2 Perhaps it is time to acknowledge that conventional paradigms of theatre scholarship do not always offer the most productive vantage point for coming to terms with Grotowski's recent work, and that related disciplines - particularly ritual studies and postmodern ethnography - might offer more useful analytic tools. Halina Filipowicz suggests as much when she notes that the propensity to evaluate Grotowski's ongoing research from the point of view of what it might offer to more recognizable forms of theatre practice is distortive, in that it belies the complexity of Grotowski's true contribution by insisting on linear models and clearly circumscribed categories. »If Grotowski's new work indeed falls within the long tradition of mysticism [...] then its potential for serving the theatre's practical needs of the moment is really beside the point.«3 Filipowicz touches on a central issue, as it seems to be precisely the ambiguous positioning of Grotowski's work at the intersection of performative and esoteric practices that has always given rise to the most intense controversy. Grotowski, she observes: Richard Schechner, »Exoduction«, in The Grotowski Sourcebook, Schechner and Wolford, eds., pp. 458-92 (p. 462). Halina Filipowicz, »Where is Gurutowski?«, The Drama Review, vol. 35 no. 1 (1991), pp. 181-86 (p. 182).

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is not an artist in the conventional sense of the word. His work produces new ways to think, not tricks and artifacts that can revitalize the theatre. He works - has always worked - on the margins, constantly expanding them, constantly thinking beyond the limits. He occupies his own territory and commands his own chronology.4

In order to more productively examine the continuing evolution of Grotowski's research, Filipowicz advocates the adoption of »new critical approaches that would correspond to his own disruption of the ruling paradigm.«5 With characteristic postmodern delight in indeterminacy, she rejects the notion of binary categorizations, content to regard Grotowski's ongoing practice as being balanced on a cusp between performative and meditative disciplines, and furthermore, appears to find no inherent contradiction in such unorthodox positioning. In my own efforts to come to terms with the post-theatrical stages of Grotowski's practice, I have attempted, like Filipowicz, to avoid foreclosing the complexity of the issues raised by embracing ambivalence and refusing to insist on bounded categories. Rather than approaching Art as vehicle exclusively from a position of theatre, or conversely, solely through the framework of ritual studies, I strive to take as my point of departure precisely that liminal site betwixt and between, where Grotowski, the former stage director whom some might describe as guru, attempted to position his ongoing work amid the dangerous currents of conflicting discourses and the seductive undertow of nostalgia for impossible origins. Such an acceptance of ambiguity serves neither to resolve contradictions nor to provide clear and simple answers in its attempts to come to terms with Grotowski's final research; rather, it opens the way to a different (hopefully more nuanced and complex) set of questions than those raised by analyses that insist on evaluating Grotowski's later work solely in terms of its relevance for theatre practice. What is the significance of an initiatory practice that communicates predominately in the language of theatre tradition, taking as its »audience« (in a more or less restricted sense) a select community comprised primarily of theatre artists? Conversely, what is the meaning of a performance work that marginalizes the position of the spectator, finding its locus of meaning not in the reception of the work by an outside observer, but in the internal transformation of its practitioners? How are we to understand Grotowski's current research, which cloaks itself in a logic and rhetoric of paradox in an attempt to evade facile categorization in either a theatrical or a mystical lineage? Finally, what ethical and methodological concerns must be negotiated by the researcher who wishes to document and analyse a practice which in terms of its outer structure looks like performance, but on closer examination displays a number of characteristics more often associated with secret societies and esoteric schools?

Ibid., p. 183. Ibid., p. 183.

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Art as vehicle Art as vehicle is a practical work developed since 1986 at The Workcenter of Jerzy Grotowski and Thomas Richards in Pontedera, Italy. The Workcenter does not create public performances, nor is it an »acting school« in any conventional sense of the term. The aim of the Workcenter, as articulated in its programmatic document, is »to transmit to several persons of the younger generation the conclusions - practical, technical, methodological and creative - linked with the work that Grotowski has developed during the last thirty years.«6 According to Grotowski, Art as vehicle focuses primarily on »actions related to very ancient songs which traditionally served ritual purposes, and so can have a direct impact on - so to say - the head, the heart and the body of the doers, songs which can allow the passage from a vital energy to a more subtle one.«7 The work is rooted in the premise that particular songs derived from ritual tradition can serve the practitioner as tools for accomplishing what Grotowski terms an »itinerary in verticality«,8 enabling the doer to »pass from the so-called coarse level [of energy] [...] to a level of energy more subtle or even toward the higher connection.«9 The majority of songs employed in this research are derived from African and Afro-Caribbean ritual practices. In terms of its external structure, the work conducted at the Pontedera research centre can be understood in relation to artistic performance. Participants in the work are skilled actors, who commit to a minimum of one year of intensive research under the supervision of Thomas Richards, who serves both as leader of the day-to-day work and as central doer in the performance structures developed by the research team. Richards explicitly states that the basic elements of work in Art as vehicle: are the same as the basic elements of acting. And on one level, the level of craft, the work is the same for the actor in public theatre and the person who is doing this work. [...] The elements of our work are not only related to the very special ancient songs, but also to the creation of little beats of human behavior, lines of performing details, an acting score with its specific tempo-rhythms [...]. It's oriented toward the creation of a comprehensible performing structure through the montage of series of basic little reactions and actions, and finally - which from the point of view of acting seems fundamental - it's looking for the development of the ability to repeat a performing score hundreds of times and each time maintaining its precision and truly alive process.10 6

7 8

9 10

Workcenter of Jerzy Grotowski. Introduction. Workcenter of Jerzy Grotowski. (Pontedera, Italy, Centre per la Sperimentazione e la Ricerca Teatrale, 1988), pp. 25-7 (p. 25). Jean-Pierre Thibaudat, »Grotowski, un vehicle du theatre.« Liberation, 28 July 1995, pp. 28-30 (p. 29). Jerzy Grotowski, »From the Theatre Company to Art as Vehicle«, in At Work With Grotowski on Physical Actions, ed. Thomas Richards (New York, 1995), pp. 115-35 (P- 134). Ibid., p. 125. Thomas Richards, The Edge-Point of Performance (Pontedera, 1997), pp. 30-1.

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Members of the research group in residence at the Workcenter develop a set score of physical actions which support the work on the vibratory songs; the songs provide the axis of the structure, as these are the tools that catalyse the process of energy transformation. These performance structures are repeatable, precisely detailed and include scenic arrangement, specific garments (»costume«) and fragments of ancient texts. In the most recently developed performances it is even possible to discern a narrative of sorts. Grotowski suggested that a continuum exists between artistic theatre, or what he calls »Art as presentation«, and the more private work conducted under his aegis, which emphasizes the use of performative means as a tool to facilitate an inner transformation of the doer. In order to explicate a distinction between the two extremities of the continuum, Grotowski draws an analogy to two different types of elevators. A performance, he wrote: is like a big elevator of which the actor is the operator. The spectators are in this elevator, the performance transports them from one form of event to another. If this elevator functions for the spectators, it means that the montage is well done. Art as vehicle is like a very primitive elevator: it's some kind of basket pulled by a cord, with which the doer lifts himself toward a more subtle energy, to descend with this to the instincfual body. This is the objectivity of the ritual. If Art as vehicle functions, this objectivity exists and the basket moves for those who do the Action.''

Art as vehicle explicitly shifts the locus of meaning in performance away from its conventional place in the perception of the spectator, relocating it (and it is precisely in this aspect that Grotowski's final research most closely corresponds to ritual or initiatory practices) in the experience of the performers or doers. Grotowski acknowledged that, on one level, the practical work of Art is vehicle is »something very particular to the theatre« insofar as it makes use of the technical elements of the actor's craft. At the same time he noted that the interior process of energy transformation which comprises the essence of the work is something »very close to that which is sought in yoga.«12 »[I]t's a question of passing towards a level of perception, higher or more subtle [... ] it is the matter of the transformation of one's state«.13 The question of what precisely the final stage of Grotowski's work might consist of has long vexed scholars and historians. By Grotowski's own definition, theatre is »what takes place between spectator and actor«, and »at least one spectator is needed to make it a performance.«14 Yet, the spectator's presence is by 11 12

13

14

Grotowski, »From the Theatre Company to Art as Vehicle«, pp. 124-25. Jerzy Grotowski, presentation given at symposium sponsored by the Centro de Pesquisa Teatral do SESC, focussing on current research at the Workcenter of Jerzy Grotowski and Thomas Richards, 16-18 October 1996. Jerzy Grotowski, »A Kind of Volcano«, in Gurdjieff: Essays and Reflections on the Man and His Teaching, eds. Jacob Needleman and George Baker (New York, 1996), pp. 87-106 (p. 89). Jerzy Grotowski, Towards a Poor Theatre (New York, 1968), p. 32.

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no means essential during a number of the late stages of Grotowski's work, and in relation to Art as vehicle, Grotowski even went so far as to say that »in principle, the spectator doesn't exist.«15 This is a somewhat drastic and exaggerated claim, by no means precisely accurate in terms of the actual functioning of the Workcenter, which periodically invites selected persons (primarily theatre ensembles) to witness the performances developed by Richards and his group. More than 150 theatre groups have seen presentations at the Workcenter over the past decade, and a substantially larger number of people have become familiar with the research conducted there by other means, including conferences, presentations and showings of Mercedes Gregory's documentary film of Downstairs Action, an opus developed by Grotowski and Richards during the late 1980s and early 1990s. Richards describes the role of the spectator in relation to Art as vehicle more precisely when he suggests that the presence or absence of the witness is not essential in order for the performer to accomplish the internal process: It's like the performative structure which can embrace the look of the witness without depending on that look. The structure finds its value in the doing of it. In some way this, if we can call it, performance, Action, is not dependent on the look of a witness; even when it is done with no one watching it, its process can be accomplished. The value for the people doing is not in the fact that they're being watched, but in the essence of what they're doing.16

Although Richards apparently wishes to maintain a degree of ambiguity as to whether or not the structures developed at the Workcenter can be regarded, hi some sense, as »theatre«, he acknowledges that it seems to him that the ritual songs which constitute the axis of the structures »were simply not made for doing a >public performance< as we can conceive of this term now.«17 Grotowski, like his primary collaborator, apparently wished to avoid limiting definitions in relation to the work of Art as vehicle, saying that »we can give this the name theatre; we can also invent a different name - no importance.«18 Yet the issue of how to label the work of Art as vehicle is by no means purely a matter of semantics, although it may seem so in light of the expansion of the definition of »performance« in recent years. The fact remains that categorizations, particularly along the continuum from ritual to theatre (sacred to secular, ceremony to fakery), carry with them not only a set of associated disciplinary paradigms, but also a range of value judgments. Even in the wake of Victor Turner's attempts to redefine performance as poesis - »making not faking« associations of performance with deception and hypocrisy have not been entirely eliminated from common parlance.19 Furthermore, the notion of a perform15 16 17 18

Grotowski, »A Kind of Volcano«, p. 89. Richards, The Edge-Point of Performance, p. 59. Ibid., p. 25. Grotowski, Presentation in Säo Paulo, Brazil.

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ance practice which posits the presence or absence of spectators as inessential is perhaps troubling from the position of theatre practitioners (although possibly less so to Performance Studies scholars or performance artists) in that it can be understood to eliminate the dynamic of communication and exchange between actors and spectators, which is conventionally regarded as central to the theatre event. How is the value of such work to be judged if it is not assessed by guests and critics? What purpose does it serve, if its primary purpose is not to communicate with an audience? What is the use of the actor's talent if the work does not culminate in a publicly exhibited production? The very notion smacks of self-indulgence and tends to be viewed, at best, as an incomplete exchange, and at worst as a sinister process with damaging implications for its practitioners.20 In light of these concerns, the issue of how to label Grotowski's current work is by no means insignificant.

Questions of methodology: Evoking embodied practice The difficulties of approaching the various phases of Grotowski's post-theatrical work from a critical viewpoint are further complicated by problems of access. Since the random spectator had no place in the later phases of Grotowski's work, conventional dynamics of critical analysis and response were also precluded. Accounts of post-theatrical activities published by direct participants have tended, for the most part, to privilege testimony over analysis, and only a handful of nonparticipating scholars have witnessed the latter stages of Grotowski's research. Writers who attempted to theorize about Grotowski's recent work did so on the basis of secondhand accounts and/or extremely limited knowledge.21 Among these people there has been a tendency to refrain from detailed description or analysis of the performance structures and training practices, as was the case with Zbigniew Osinski, who suggested that to speak of the practice developed at the Pontedera Workcenter in the vocabulary of production, would be a violation.22 Individuals who wished to gain access to the work conducted in Pontedera could do so only with the consent of Grotowski and his colleagues. The fact that Grotowski and his collaborators selected the artists and scholars invited to the Workcenter ensured that they were able to control who was allowed to witness iy

20

21

22

See Dwight Conquergood, »Performance Theory, Among Shamans and Cultural Politics«, in Critical Theory and Performance, eds. Janelle Reinelt and Joseph Roach (Ann Arbor/Ml, 1992), pp. 41-64 for an interesting discussion along these lines. See especially Richard Schechner, Between Theatre and Anthropology (Philadelphia/PE, 1985) and Victor Turner, From Ritual to Theatre (New York, 1982). The writings of Georges Banu, Zbigniew Osinski, Ferdinande Taviani, Jean-Marie Pradier and Renata Molinari, as well as of course Thomas Richards' own writings, are among the notable exceptions to this trend. Zbigniew Osinski, »Grotowski Blazes the Trails«, p. 102.

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the work, and at least potentially influence the ways in which their practice was represented. This creates a potentially difficult position for the researcher, who may be viewed - simply by entering the community at the invitation of the work's creators, as being automatically in complicity with them, under obligation to produce a sort of »authorized transcript« rather than a critical reflection on the work. Kazimierz Braun suggests as much when he remarks on the servility of writers who have benefitted from Grotowski's cooperation; Filipowicz proposes that »deference« is perhaps a more elegant word, but similarly notes that Grotowski's intervention in certain texts detailing his later work signals the need for a degree of caution on the part of the reader.23 While I think it would be unfair to conclude that Grotowski overtly attempted to censor critical commentary on the research conducted at his Workcenter - indeed, I am aware of numerous published responses to the work of Art as vehicle with which he vehemently disagreed, but which he never, to my knowledge, attempted to suppress - it is reasonable to suppose that scholars who visited the Pontedera centre at his invitation found it necessary to negotiate certain types of pressures which they would not normally encounter in more conventional types of performance scholarship, including possible assumptions that their credibility may be in some way compromised by virtue of their »insider« status. Grotowski's post-theatrical work has been a primary focus of my research since 1989, when I began participating in the Objective Drama Program at the University of California at Irvine. At the time I entered the programme, Grotowski had already transferred his primary residence to Italy, and the bulk of work at Irvine during this period was led by his long-time assistant and collaborator James Slowiak. Although I had initially requested to observe the work as a scholar/historian, this proposition was refused; I was instructed that I could only gain access to the work if I were willing to participate as a performer. I accepted this condition, and also agreed to abide by the request that I should make no visual or audio recordings of work sessions. Since the central investigation of Objective Drama focused on the impact of selected ritual/performative techniques on the psychoenergetic state of the practitioner, the knowledge available to the doer was inherently different from that accessible to the passive witness. Using my body and perception as primary instruments of research, I explored, as an actor, the tangible effects of specific performance elements derived from ritual traditions, working most intensively with a cycle of Shaker songs which provided the main focus of investigation during the final years of the California-based programme. I participated in Objective Drama from 1989 through to the conclusion of the programme in 1992, and over the years succeeded in developing a positive professional relationship with Grotowski.24 23 24

Kazimierz Braun, »Where is Grotowski?«, The Drama Review, vol. 30, no. 3 (1986), pp. 226-40 (p. 231); Filipowicz, »In Search of Gurutowski«, p. 182. For further details about the work of the period, see Lisa Wolford, Grotowski's Objective Drama Research (Jackson/MS, 1996), along with chapters 3 and 7 of Thomas Richards' At Work with Grotowski on Physical Actions.

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I first visited Grotowski's Italian Workcenter in December 1992, staying for approximately two weeks at Grotowski's invitation. Subsequently, I took up residence at the Workcenter during the summer and autumn of 1995, intending to stay for an indefinite period to work with Grotowski on various text-related projects and also to conduct fieldwork for my doctoral dissertation. Unlike my research in the Objective Drama programme, where I was a working member of the performance team and occupied a clear position as participant/observer, my role in relation to Art as vehicle was more ambiguous, somewhat more closely allied to that of a traditional scholar than to that of a performer engaged in practical work. I have never sung the Afro-Caribbean songs on which the work of Art as vehicle is based, nor have I ever worked as an actor under Richards' leadership. I could no longer draw on direct practice, my own embodied knowledge of performance techniques, as a primary element of research. In relation to Art as vehicle, I was simply a witness (albeit a witness specially prepared), and could apprehend the subtle functioning of the process of energy transformation at the centre of this praxis only partially and secondarily. My methodology was ethnographic in so far as I became part of the Workcenter community for several months, striving to create a position of double-belonging which would allow me to become part of the group's distinctive culture, yet also to maintain sufficient detachment to analyse its structural and dynamic elements. Rather than focusing solely on the activities that took place within the work room, I wished to examine the whole of the unusual and complex performance culture that has grown up around Grotowski's Workcenter.

Ethical imperatives: »Objectivity« vs. the injunction to betray Over the years, I have had ample opportunity to observe that a researcher working in close relation to a specific performance community often encounters subtle pressures to present a harmonious, wholly flattering picture of the artists with whom she or he collaborates. Confronted with such expectations, researchers must struggle to maintain the integrity of their own perceptions, without allowing themselves to be unduly influenced by the artists' desired representation. What is their responsibility regarding matters which their subjects/collaborators might prefer to keep secret? Are they bound by loyalty or laws of hospitality to protect the vulnerability of the people with whom they work? Or does duty compel them to interrogate the conflicts, to uncover their deeper meaning and to assess how the hidden transcripts subvert the seamless harmony of the »authorized history«?25 Ruth Behar, whose writing includes details about her family history which her par2