Performance Arts: Research in the Age of Digital Revolution (Digital Culture and Humanities, 4) 9811992126, 9789811992124

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Digital Culture and Humanities  4

Kwok-kan Tam   Editor

Performance Arts: Research in the Age of Digital Revolution

Digital Culture and Humanities Challenges and Developments in a Globalized Asia Volume 4

Editor-in-Chief Kwok-kan Tam, The Hang Seng University of Hong Kong, Shatin, Hong Kong Associate Editors David Barton, Lancaster University, Lancaster, UK Joanne Tompkins, University of Queensland, St Lucia, Australia Anthony Ying-him Fung, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shatin, Hong Kong Lang Kao, The Hang Seng University of Hong Kong, Shatin, Hong Kong Sunny Sui-kwong Lam, Hong Kong Metropolitan University, Ho Man Tin, Hong Kong Anna Wing-Bo Tso, The Hang Seng University of Hong Kong, Shatin, Hong Kong

This book series on digital culture and humanities examines how digitization changes current cultural practices as well as the modes of thought in humanities subjects, such as art, literature, drama, music and popular culture (which includes comics, films, pop songs, television, animation, games, and mobile apps). It also addresses the opportunities and challenges for scholarly research, industrial practices and education arising from the wide application of digital technologies in cultural production and consumption. The series publishes books that seek to explore how knowledge is (re/)produced and disseminated, as well as how research in humanities is expanded in the digital age. It encourages publication projects that align scholars, artists and industrial practitioners in collaborative research that has international implications. With this as an aim, the book series fills a gap in research that is needed between theory and practice, between Asian and the global, and between production and consumption. Furthermore, the multidisciplinary nature of the book series enhances understanding of the rising Asian digital culture, particularly in entertainment production and consumption, cultural/artistic revisioning, and educational use. For instance, a study of digital animated Chinese paintings will elucidate the reinterpreted Chineseness in artistic representation.

Kwok-kan Tam Editor

Performance Arts: Research in the Age of Digital Revolution

Editor Kwok-kan Tam School of Humanities and Social Science The Hang Seng University of Hong Kong Shatin, New Territories, Hong Kong

ISSN 2520-8640 ISSN 2520-8659 (electronic) Digital Culture and Humanities ISBN 978-981-19-9212-4 ISBN 978-981-19-9213-1 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-19-9213-1 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2023 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. This Springer imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. The registered company address is: 152 Beach Road, #21-01/04 Gateway East, Singapore 189721, Singapore

Preface

“Traditional” humanities disciplines have undergone significant transformations in the twenty-first century, particularly the process of digitization. New perspectives and methods are essential to comprehending these changes. This book series explores how digital culture has revolutionized the humanities in terms of production, presentation, interpretation, and research. By addressing questions about knowledge, scholarship, and practices, this book series aims to revitalize the humanities disciplines and explore new possible modes of critical thinking. This book series also seeks to address the rapid changes of contemporary culture. The rise of digital media is constantly changing our perception of the world in terms of politics, economies, social lives, and culture. In the realm of culture, traditional cultural texts, forms, and scholarly works are transformed even as new cultural practices are created. The emergence of virtual/augmented reality and digital communities has generated new cultural forms and interactions, which in turn intervene and reshape the non-virtual reality. By examining digital technology, this book series explores the social aspects of the emergence of digital culture, especially how changes in the form of cultural production affect expressions in art and communication. It seeks to provide a wide array of new thoughts, particularly from Asian perspectives, on various facets of digital culture in the globalizing world. With the development of new media forms, our personal and social lives have come under the mediation of digital representation. The advent of digital technologies has greatly influenced how society functions, and how culture is (re-)mediated, (re-)produced, consumed, interpreted, and manipulated. This series features books that seek to explore how knowledge is (re-)produced and disseminated, as well as how research in humanities has been expanded in the digital age. With all of this in mind, this book series will make connections between theory and practice, between Asian and the global, and between production and consumption. Furthermore, the multidisciplinary nature of this book series will enhance understanding of the rising

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Asian digital culture, particularly in entertainment production and consumption, cultural/artistic revisioning, and educational use. Hong Kong, China April 2018

Kwok-kan Tam

Acknowledgments

The studies collected in this volume, which is the fourth in the Springer Series Digital Culture and Humanities: Challenges and Developments in a Globalized Asia, consist of contributions from many distinguished scholars who have been conducting research in theater and performance arts as groups with great success. I would like to express my gratitude to all of them, who have been patient with my work in editing the studies and putting them together as a coherent volume. The idea of this volume sprang from my work on digital humanities since 2016. I am privileged to have the support of many colleagues since I joined the Hang Seng University of Hong Kong in 2018 as Dean of the School of Humanities and Social Science and Chair Professor of English. My colleagues Paul Fung, Eva Hung, Anna Tso, Rochelle Yang, Patrick Mok, Shiru Wang, Muk Yan Wong, Rachel Lo, Joanne Chow, Wendy Liu, and Vickie Chau must be acknowledged for their assistance in various roles. My former colleagues at the Open University of Hong Kong (renamed at Hong Kong Metropolitan University), Sunny Shui Kwong Lam, Kit Yee Chan, David Yip, and Kaby Kung have all along helped in the project on digital humanities. To all of them, I owe a debt of thanks. The contributors of this volume are admirable scholars from Australia, Norway, the USA, China, and Hong Kong, who see higher education as a mission in knowledge creation. Despite the hardships that we have gone through over the past 2 years (2020–2022), our work with dedication finally comes to fruition. I would like to thank Lang Kao, Director of the Centre for Greater China Studies at the Hang Seng University of Hong Kong, and the Research Grants Council, Hong Kong for the funding support given to the research (Reference number: UGC/IDS14/ 17) that led to the publication of this volume. I must also thank the two anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments and suggestions. The editors and the staff in Springer deserve a special note of thanks for their devoted work in making this publication possible.

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Contents

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Introduction: Performance Arts and Technology: Research in the Age of Digital Revolution . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Kwok-kan Tam

Part I

Virtual Construction of Lost Theatres

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Virtual Praxis and Theatre Research: Textual Recovery . . . . . . . . . Joanne Tompkins and Liyang Xia

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Virtual Praxis: Conducting Performance Research in Virtual Theatres . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Julie Holledge

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Stardust Orientalism, Virtual Praxis and Digital Construction: “Madame Butterfly” on Ice at the Stardust Hotel, Las Vegas, 1959 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Jonathan Bollen

Part II 5

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Spatial-History Digital Database for Humanistic Research

Coded, Transcoded, Encoded, Mapped: Reading Film Adaptations of Ibsen’s Plays in the Digital Age . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Lisbeth P. Wærp

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Digital Ibsen: Tracing Houses and Homes in an Ibsen Play . . . . . . . Astrid Sæther

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A Performance History of Ibsen in America: Outlines, Conjunctures and Regional Diffusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 105 Svein Henrik Nyhus

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Part III

Digital Culture in Performance Production

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Digitisation and New Modes of Ibsen Studies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 121 Sabiha Huq

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Artifact as Digihistory: Re-viewing Islamist Militancy in Bangladesh Through Ibsen’s Brand . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 137 Ahmed Ahsanuzzaman

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Digital Operatic Precedents in Haruki Murakami’s Killing Commendatore . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 151 Neil H. Wright

Part IV

Arts Tech and Experimentations in Stage Performance

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The Carp Fairy in the Digitalised Traditional Chinese Theatre . . . . 171 Lily Li

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Rethinking the Use of Multimedia Technology in the Theatre . . . . . 201 Minghou Liu

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Staying Alive: The Plague and Performance in a Digital Age . . . . . 213 Angela C. Pao

Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 227

Chapter 1

Introduction: Performance Arts and Technology: Research in the Age of Digital Revolution Kwok-kan Tam

Compared with the age-old tradition of culture which is shaped by the humanities, digital culture has a rather short history. However, digital culture is a game changer that has disrupted almost all spheres of life, resulting in a reconceptualisation of the humanistic views of the world. The rise of digital culture in recent decades has brought about a revolution in culture that can be attributed to the maturity and wide application of digital technologies in cultural production. It is a typical case of technology translation and application, with renewed presentations of old contents. Though being technologised, cultural production still relies on contents and sources from the humanities. The content re-creations used in digital communication, advertising, public display, exhibition projection, imaging, interactive game, digital film, electronic music, virtual reality and other forms of mass consumption are derived from stories in the traditional humanities, such as historical stories, drama, literature, paintings, music, and in popular culture, such as cartoons, comics, and pop songs. On the other hand, as digital technology has gained wider impacts, new forms of cultural production have taken shape that affect the patterns of consumption and expression. In his book Being Digital (1995), Nicholas Negroponte envisages a world in which all necessities and communication become digitised and online contacts replace in-person interactions. Digitisation occurs in all forms of social activities with people becoming more and more dependent on technology. Such a mode of life gives rise to a culture of “digitalism,” in which the virtual replaces the

K.-k. Tam (✉) School of Humanities and Social Science, The Hang Seng University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong (SAR), China e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2023 K.-k. Tam (ed.), Performance Arts: Research in the Age of Digital Revolution, Digital Culture and Humanities 4, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-19-9213-1_1

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real, making it all the more possible in transcending the boundaries of life. This is what Negroponte calls a revolution of being digitalised in the twenty-first century.1

The Rise of Digital Culture Digital culture is very much a part of today’s life, which depends heavily on the use of digital technology. Our cell phone is not simply a phone, but a hand-held computer, in which image mapping, database archive, interactive communication, creative gaming system, historical research, and creative literary work all come together in one single device. Our computer is not just a device for computation of massive data; it can store raw data and generate new data according to the user’s requirements. Arts and the humanities have been digitised to create new forms of visual culture since the 1980s, particularly in animation and video games. Digital culture is concerned with the forms and effects of technologised culture. This very brief background sketches the field and the issues arising from the use of digital technologies in art and cultural production, as well as in humanities research. It demonstrates the infinite possibilities of research that can generate new knowledge. Digital culture has changed our popular imagination and challenged traditional modes of thinking. An interactive gaming system can be used for teaching history. A digital archive database will provide new ways of discovering relations in social contexts and thus inform humanities scholars of new insights in critical analysis and interpretation that cannot be done in traditional ways which are individually characterised, labour intensive and time consuming. A digital archive database will help generate data for new ways of research that cannot be previously imagined. A digital platform can create a virtual bridge between various cultures and styles of design and the arts, so that people can experience and understand the world’s creative works in terms of geographical relations. Digital technologies make it possible to reveal relations between geography and history, as it helps visualise history in terms of spatial relations, and it also gives geographical locations historical dimensions. In short, the application of digital technologies has revolutionised humanities research and human perceptions in ways unimagined. We simply live in a world that is now based on digital representations. Computers, smart phones and entertainment devices are all digital products that have not only shaped our way of life, and hence our cultural existence, but also mediated our thinking and values. We are the users who drive the development of the next-generation applications and tools as much as the engineers and designers. We have created a culture that in turn shapes us. Our aesthetic sense and emotional attachment are products of art and design that have become part of a digital culture.

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Nicholas Negroponte. Being Digital (London: Hodder & Stoughton), p. 163. In this book, Negropnte gives numerous examples to argue for the emergence of a post-information age, which he calls digital culture or digitalism.

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With the advent of digital technologies and their applications, the humanities disciplines that are traditionally text-based have been reconceived in newer relations and newer modes of representation. Such new representations make it possible to probe the hidden connections behind large sets of data and reconfigure them in temporal and spatial dimensions that are unnoticed before. The use of digital technologies also helps uncover the visual and interactive nature of the hidden connections. Put simply, it is the digital database that has demonstrated its power in uncovering new relations and in presenting new images. The revolutions digital representations have brought about are not limited to new modes of representation, they also are capable of showing new connections in relations. All such changes demand new research methodologies that look at data beyond texts. When text representation is replaced by images and when connections are supplemented by database-generated relations, what will be the role of critical interpretations? What will remain to be done in close reading? New research methodologies in digital humanities have posed questions that challenge not only data mining, data curation, text encoding and extraction, but also new conceptions of critical interpretation.

Virtual Reconstruction of Lost Theatres Of particular interest to theatre research is that a group of Australian scholars, including Joanne Tompkins, Julie Holledge and Jonathan Bollen at AusStage, have formed a consortium in using digital technologies in reconstructing lost theatres. The consortium has commissioned Ortelia, a company specializing in 3D and 2D constructions of narrative-driven virtual spaces, in developing digital models for reconstructing lost theatres (https://ortelia.com/products/exhibition-designsoftware/). One of their projects is Visualising Lost Theatres “which studies a selection of venues from across the world that have been ‘lost,’ whether through being demolished or having experienced substantial remodeling or rebuilding.”2 With 3D visualisation technology, Ortelia “can recreate venues with a high degree of accuracy to actually ‘inhabit’ them, to evaluate how performance operated there, and to investigate the ways in which people (actors and audience) intersected and interacted in them.”3 So far the consortium has completed the virtual reconstruction of the following lost theatres: • London’s 1590s Rose Theatre (near the Globe Theatre and of a similar shape, but with its smaller size, it provides a very different performance effect from the better-known Globe) (Fig. 1.1); • The 1860s Bergen Theatre in Norway (the country’s first national theatre and the location for Henrik Ibsen’s education as a playwright);

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Fig. 1.1 Virtual Image of the Rose Theatre, 1590s, London. Source: https://ortelia.com/project/ recreation-of-the-rose-theatre/. Screen capture 13 January 2022

• The 1841 Queen’s Theatre in Adelaide (the oldest extant theatre in Australia, it premiered Othello at a time of controversy over the treatment of local Aborigines); • The mid nineteenth-century form of Cantonese opera (which was performed in mobile bamboo theatres in China’s Pearl River Delta and then transported to the Victorian goldfields where it was performed in circus tents); and • The Las Vegas showroom at the Stardust Casino in the 1950s (to which a Parisbased dance troupe came and performed acts about cultures from around the globe). The consortium believes in “the importance of understanding a venue as the key step in the historical interpretation of live event” and “it examines theatres from social, cultural, geographical and historical contexts, venues that have been sites of social and cultural transformation. These theatres and forms have provided the material constraints that have shaped some of the most enduring theatrical genres of world theatre and cultural production.”4 The projects completed by Joanne Tompkins, Julie Holledge, Jonathan Bollen and Liyang Xia have methodological implications for the study of theatre performance and history in that they showcase how digital technologies can be used not only in virtual constructions of the past, but also in demonstrating how certain performances that have cultural and artistic value can achieve global significance.

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https://ortelia.com/project/visualising-lost-theatres/

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Spatial-History Digital Database for Humanities Research Humanities research has been very successful over the past decade in creating digital databases that can generate spatial-temporal relations of data, thus yielding new insights in geographical-historical dimensions. Two examples are AusStage and IbsenStage, the former of which contains large data sets on live performances in Australia, and the latter stores large data sets on Ibsen performances worldwide. Based on the big data obtained from these two databases, scholars are able to generate macro-relations in probing global and historical relations in receptions of theatre performances. Such macro-relations can be presented on a Google map with a movable timeline to show the geographical and historical dimensions of the reception of certain playwrights and their works. A new methodology of “distant reading,” which is attributed to Franco Moretti (2000) for his advocacy, complements the methodology of “close reading,” which is critical and interpretive in qualitative analysis. AusStage (Fig. 1.2) is an open access website developed in 1999 to bring together disparate and ephemeral materials about the performing arts in Australia: “The database contains information relating to live theatre and performance events in Australia from 1789 to the present. It links people with theatre and production

Fig. 1.2 Opening page of AusStage website. Source: https://www.amw.org.au/register/listings/ australian-live-performance-database-ausstage. Screen capture 13 January 2022

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Fig. 1.3 Opening page of IbsenStage website. Source: https://ibsenstage.hf.uio.no/. Screen capture 13 January 2022

companies, venues, resources and works” (https://www.amw.org.au/register/ listings/australian-live-performance-database-ausstage). IbsenStage: The Ibsen Stage Performance Database (Fig. 1.3) collects “all known performances of Ibsen’s plays worldwide.” It contains “data on more than 20,000 productions of Ibsen’s plays and provides an accessible online resource for researching the performances.” It is developed and maintained by the Centre for Ibsen Studies at the University of Oslo. IbsenStage has been developed in cooperation with AusStage, the national database of performative art in Australia, and The National Library of Norway” (https://ibsenstage.hf.uio.no/pages/learn/About/ About). Both AusStage and IbsenStage have the power of generating relations among data of different historical periods and geographical locations and hence producing results that are otherwise hidden deep in the data.

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Arts Tech and Experimentation in Stage Performance The World Expo Shanghai in 2010 showcased how digital technologies were widely used in the presentation of art and culture that gave spectators a completely new experience in “experiencing art,” rather than just watching or appreciating from a distance. Digitised exhibits were given life and are to be experienced as animated object-subjects, but no longer merely objects. The digitisation of the Chinese painting in the eleventh century, Along the River during the Qingming Festival (Qingming shanghe tu 清明上河圖), is a very good example to illustrate how a traditional art work can be animated to show the city life in Song China (960–1127 AD) (Fig. 1.4). The animation demonstrates how a still painting on paper can be enlivened to become a live scene by means of digitisation. What is more, when the animation is shown in a round theatre for public display, the spectators are transposed to an immersed experience of living within the painting, or actually within the city life of China in the eleventh century. Since then there have been numerous attempts in different parts of the world, including London, Berlin, Toronto and Shanghai, that experiment with a new form of theatre by using digital mapping and projection technologies to create an immersive experience. Architects and stage scenic designers, as well as museum experts work together to create new venues for presenting immersive performances or displays so that the audience or spectator can interact with the performance-cum-exhibits. A new dynamic spectatorship has thus been created. While watching, the spectator re-lives the experience of a vibrant city life in ancient China.

Fig. 1.4 An animation of the traditional Chinese painting Along the River during the Qingming Festival shown at the World Expo Shanghai 2010. Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v= vsVGbOkPXT8. Screen capture 13 January 2022

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Animation of art objects has given rise not only to a new mode of consumption in which the ways of presentation and appreciation are changed, but also to a new culture of production in which everything is given life and becomes interactive with spectators being part of the enlivened experience. The new mode of production and consumption characterised by an enlivening experience in which the spectator is both the perceiver and the experience creator. A new subjectivity of art experiencing is fostered in this new relation between the art object and the spectator as experience creator. Such new experience has given inspiration to experimentations in new spatial designs in cinema, stage and museum with spectators being placed at the centre of experience. AR, VR and MR with virtual sets, which have been used in games, are now merged in XR in a new application in filmmaking and stage performance. All such uses of technologies point to one direction: the virtual has replaced the real in creating a new space which looks more real than the real. Theatre performance becomes a laboratory for Arts Tech applications and experimentations (Wiley & Rangoni, 2018). Experimentation with Arts Tech has been increasing with more and more hardware and software being developed to support artistic creation, filmmaking and theatre performance. Digital culture is both the driving force and outcome of such developments. In humanities research, digital technologies have also given rise to new forms and new formats. Libraries and research centres have been set up in many universities in different parts of the world. Projects of digital humanities, particularly in creating information retrieval systems and interactive platforms, are different from previous print-based bibliographic storage. Besides giving rise to a new technoculture, digital technologies have revolutionized traditional ways of research in the humanities. In Hong Kong, the Government is building a new cultural complex called the East Kowloon Cultural Centre, in which there will be a Lab that will be equipped with latest models of media server, such as Disguise, for experimentation with XR in performance production (Fig. 1.5). Several universities have been supported by the government in establishing programmes in Arts Tech and animation. In London, New York, Moscow, Tokyo and Taipei, performance production companies are using Disguise, a media server, for creating virtual sets in filmmaking and theatre performance. In China, billions of funds have been invested in promoting Arts Tech for innovations of performance in the theatre as well as in filmmaking. The use of VR and AR in performance have now been experimented with in the multimedia labs in both the Shanghai Theatre Academy and Central Academy of Drama, Beijing. A noted example is Orbit (Fig. 1.6), which is a VR Dance Film directed by Zhang Daming, a theatre artist trained at the Central Academy of Drama, Beijing. Orbit is a dance performance that brings dramatic techniques into content creation by virtual reality. It was presented in the 2021 Sand Box Immersive Image Exhibition held at Beijing Kerry Cultural Center. The performance was shortlisted for the 38th Montreal International Art Film Festival, the 17th Amsterdam Dance Video Festival.

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Fig. 1.5 A demonstration of the media server “Disguise.” Photo ©Kwok-kan Tam

Fig. 1.6 Orbit by Zhang Daming. Source: https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/xh519gny1exY3 rjbGoK6CQ. Screen capture 13 January 2022

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Scholarly Projects and Critical Reflections Public and academic interests in digital culture have grown markedly in recent years, as can be seen in the increasing number of teaching programmes in the UK, the USA, Canada and Australia. Oxford, King’s College London, University College London, Leeds, Sussex, York, University of the West of England, Glasgow, UCLA, Maryland, McGill, UBC, Sydney, Western Sydney, and Flinders have offered undergraduate and postgraduate programmes in digital culture and digital humanities. In China, numerous archives are set up to digitise materials that are originally print based. In Taiwan, the Academia Sinica has a research institute that conducts research in spatial history projects. In Hong Kong, notable programmes of research have been set up at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong Baptist University, and the Hang Seng University of Hong Kong. Many scholars have devoted their energies to the study of humanities and arts with new methodologies arising from the use of digital tools. New professorships and research positions in digital humanities have been created into universities worldwide. Numerous conferences on digital culture have been organized in different parts of the world over the past few years. The Springer Series on Digital Culture and Humanities which was established in 2018 is a response to the need to understand this rising trend. In this volume, the essays cover four major areas of inquiry: (1) Virtual reconstruction of lost theatres; (2) Digital Database for Humanistic Research; (3) Digital Culture in Performance Production; (4) Arts Tech and Experimentations in Stage Performance. All four areas present the latest research and methodological developments in digital humanities and scholarship. The first area of inquiry (Part I), “Virtual Reconstruction of Lost Theatres,” is illustrated by the first three chapters in this volume. As Joanne Tompkins and Liyang Xia describe, the three chapters form a trilogy on a related topic. Chapter 2, ‟Virtual Praxis and Theatre Research: Textual Recovery,” jointly written by Joanne Tompkins and Liyang Xia, is a study based on a project that ranges through history and geography provides the opportunity to establish relationships between theatrical forms that may not often be examined together. The study compares two very different forms of theatre in Australia at roughly the same time: the nascent theatre in Adelaide, South Australia in the early 1840s and Cantonese opera on the Victorian goldfields in the 1850s. Recovering performance elements of classic texts in nineteenth-century performance in Australia has been painstaking, and far from complete. This chapter explains the process of attempting to ascertain the nature of the performance text for Shakespeare’s Othello at the Queen’s Theatre in Adelaide, the production that opened the theatre. It also investigates the texts that were most likely performed in the tents on the goldfields in Victoria that replaced the itinerant bamboo theatres for Cantonese opera from the Pearl River delta, China in the early nineteenth century. Chapter 3, ‟Virtual Praxis: Conducting Performance Research in Virtual Theatres,” written by Julie Holledge, is a study in using digital methods to re-capture past performances conducted in theatres that no longer exist today. It is impossible to

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travel back in time and capture the essence of a lost performance, but a new performance research methodology using virtual reality technology is reducing this epistemological gap. It has emerged from the “Visualising Lost Theatres” (VLT) project, which is predicated on the assumption that embedded in every live event are the material condition of its venue, whether this is the audience/performer relationship, the culture of spectatorship, the visual spectacle, or the techniques used by performers. The virtual theatres created by VLT are versatile performance research laboratories. The study reports on a number of experiments conducted by scholars and artists working inside these laboratories to translate archival documentation into spatial, visual and embodied data. The work challenges conventional interpretations of the archive because the process of translating historical documents into three dimensional animate or inanimate forms highlights hundreds of practical problems not addressed in the ephemeral traces of a lost performance. Three examples of the virtual praxis are presented: the reconstruction of written descriptions of set designs using the stage machinery available in the performance venue; examining a lost culture of spectatorship by reproducing elements of audience response; and the reconstruction of moments from a lost performance by actors using the performance techniques attributed to the original cast. Chapter 4, “Stardust Orientalism, Virtual Praxis and Digital Construction: ‘Madame Butterfly’ on Ice at the Stardust Hotel, Las Vegas, 1959,” by Jonathan Bollen, focuses on Ca C‘est L‘Amour, the 1959 production of the Lido de Paris revue at the Stardust Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas which included an interpretation of “Madame Butterfly,” performed on ice, as part of a three-part segment depicting scenes from ancient and modern Japan. While there is little that (now) seems Japanese about the performance, the overarching spatial-narrative locates Las Vegas at the centre, mid-way between Paris (as origin) and Tokyo (as destination), on an East-West map of world entertainment. Ca C‘est L‘Amour attracted an estimated audience of 800,000, drawn from the mobile, middle-class of predominantly white America, at a time when the spectacle of nuclear tests was also attracting tourists to Las Vegas. This chapter explores the historical significance of “Madame Butterfly” at the Stardust by interrogating documentation within a threedimensional virtual-reality model of the venue. Applied to an investigation of this scene, the methods of digital venue construction and virtual performance praxis frame the Stardust’s orientalism as an international assemblage of industrial materiel. The investigation of ‘Madame Butterfly’ on ice at the Stardust in Las Vegas, reveals the capture of the figure’s flow within a closed-circuit economy of hydraulic machinery, refrigeration equipment, electronic communications, amplified sound, projected lighting, synthetic fabrics, and ventured capital. The methodology illustrated in these three chapters deserve more elaboration, which Joanne Tompkins sums up as follows: But visualising historical venues does more than offer the chance to visit them: it facilitates our examination of the elements of performance that may no longer be in use, as well as our understanding the social relations that are shaped by architecture and theatre practice. We have recreated five theatres in virtual form: the Rose in London from the late 1500s, the Komediehuiset in Bergen, Norway from 1800, the Queen’s Theatre in Adelaide from 1841,

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K.-k. Tam an itinerant bamboo theatre for performing Cantonese opera from the Pearl River Delta in China that performed in circus-like tents in the goldfields of Victoria in the 1850s to 1880s, and the Stardust Casino’s Showroom from Las Vegas in late 1950s (Tompkins, Holledge, Bollen and Xia). Our linked contributions here offer several ways in which such models can assist in expanding our understanding of theatre history and its socio-political context(s). Our aim is not to recreate performance but rather to consider the performative aspects that each venue enables, amid its particular historical environment. This method of analysis extends the research possibilities for theatre historiography with the help of digital technologies. Rather than recounting the process of building the virtual models, these essays investigate how we have used the models to enhance research into these theatrical moments. This first essay focuses on textual recovery by comparing our findings for two very different theatrical forms that operated in mid-nineteenth century colonial Australia: the Georgianstyle Queen’s Theatre in Adelaide, South Australia which opened in 1841; and the itinerant form of Cantonese opera on the Victorian goldfields, also in Australia, from the 1850s. First, we explain how we ascertained the nature of the performance text for William Shakespeare’s Othello which opened the Queen’s Theatre. Recovering this text has been almost as difficult as tracking down the performance texts for Cantonese opera performed in the tents on the goldfields in Victoria. Both forms were transported from elsewhere to very different sociopolitical and geographical contexts; both these theatrical examples replicate their origins in a new land, but while one provides a temporary force-fit, the other almost vanishes from the traditional historical record. Recovering different aspects of these performance traditions contributes, then, to a more nuanced view of the broad history of performance in Australia.5 (Quoted from Tompkins’ presentation in Hong Kong on 6 May 2021.)

It is a pleasure to have these studies, which illustrate a solid methodology in theatre research that complements the distant reading of data obtained from AusStage with critical analysis based on close reading. The four scholars, Joanne Tompkins, Julie Holledge, Jonathan Bollen and Liyang Xia have been working successfully as a group in reconstructing the lost theatres for today’s understanding. The second area of inquiry (Part II), “Spatial-History Digital Database for Humanistic Research,” consists of the next three chapters, which illustrate a methodology in using data obtained from IbsenStage. The three studies adopt a method that complements distant reading with close reading in critical analysis. Chapter 5, “Coded, Transcoded, Encoded, Mapped: Reading Film Adaptations of Ibsen’s Plays in the Digital Age,” written by Lisbeth P. Wærp is a study of the great impact Henrik Ibsen, the father of modern drama, has exerted in the world through his drama which has been performed on the stage and adapted into different art forms, particularly film. For over a century, Ibsen’s influence can be found in the feminist movement, modern drama movement, and other spheres that shape modern culture. Since his influence is so wide ranging covering many parts of the world, there is the need to have a new methodology that can help analyse the data from various sources and various historical periods. The National Library of Norway has done an excellent job in collecting and archiving not only the works of Ibsen, but also the critical studies and performance records. Based on these records and archival materials, the Centre This long quote is originally part of the first section of Joan Tompkins’ chapter introducing the project “Digital Reconstruction of Lost Theatres.” Putting it in the Introduction will give it the context too see the larger significance of the project. 5

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for Ibsen Studies has created a database IbsenStage, which is a search engine that has the function of visualising the worldwide reception of Ibsen with overviews in historical-geographical relations. This study has made use of the spatial-historical data in IbsenStage to uncover the hidden relations in five film adaptations of Ibsen’s An Enemy of the People. The maps generated by IbsenStage visually present the world reception of Ibsen’s play with colourful illustrations. Chapter 6, “Digital Ibsen: Tracing Houses and Homes in an Ibsen Play,” written by Astrid Sæther, has its focus placed on the play that has traditionally been called A Doll’s House in English, in Norwegian it is called A Doll Home [Et dukkehjem]. The study incorporates some perspectives from Ghosts, The Lady from the Sea, Hedda Gabler, The Master Builder, and When We Dead Awaken, all prose plays dating from 1879 to 1899. It examines Ibsen’s use of two Norwegian words, hus and hjem, or house and home. The source for the study of the use of these nouns is the new electronic edition of Henrik Ibsen’s Writings (2014) which expands and facilitates access of Ibsen’s entire oeuvre, and enables the user to search for frequency of specific words and expressions. Its maneuverability allows one to quickly create cross references and bookmarks throughout his writings. Again, the search engine in IbsenStage makes it possible to produce accurate quantitative data in support of qualitative analysis. Chapter 7, “A Performance History of Ibsen in America: Outlines, Conjunctures and Regional Diffusion,” written by Svein Henrik Nyhus, presents a survey of the performance history of Ibsen on the American stage in the period from 1879 to 1914. It highlights the transatlantic entanglement that characterised Ibsen’s early beginnings and traces the development of this trajectory in the efforts of actress Mary Shaw. The study especially focuses on Shaw’s tour of Ghosts and its catalytic function for the productions of Ibsen to follow. The first part of the study approaches the topic with methods from digital humanities by using data derived from IbsenStage and other historical sources, while the second part sheds light on Shaw’s biography by ways of more traditional modes of historical theatre research. The study demonstrates a methodology of historical analysis based on “distant reading” advocated by Franco Moretti (2000). The third area of inquiry (Part III), “Digital Culture in Performance Production,” is covered by three studies from Chaps. 8 to 10. Chapter 8, “Digitisation and New Modes of Ibsen Studies,” by Sabiha Huq examines the digitisation of Ibsen performances with specific emphasis on two modes of performance: theatre and film. Video recording of theatre performances and the marketing of commercially produced films through compact discs or CDs and digital versatile discs or DVDs have made it possible for the teachers and researchers to bring Ibsen back into discussion through performance analysis. Recorded theatre performances and clips extracted from them are shown while teaching that covers a significant portion of coursework on Ibsen. Ibsen scholars also use CDs or DVDs for their research. On the other hand, films based on Ibsen plays are also important sources for further studies. It has been evident that video recordings of performances and commercially produced DVDs have opened up more possibilities of further studies in the field of theatre and film because of their availability and easy access. On the other hand, recordings as such

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have given permanence to some of the stage performances that are not running in the theatre houses. Both kinds of recordings have enabled teachers and researchers rediscover Ibsen existent in different social and cultural milieus. Chapter 9, “Artifact as Digihistory: Re-viewing Islamist Militancy in Bangladesh Through Ibsen’s Brand,” by Ahmed Ahsanuzzaman, is a study that builds upon the old, yet forever new Keatsian concept of art as ‘sylvan historian’ to examine digitised artifacts as historical texts. Digital history comprising “digitexts” is a rich archive which by both its overt and covert interpretations of events and incidents can retell history to us as did the Grecian Urn to Keats like a pastoral historian. Seen in this light an artifact becomes a popular/subaltern historian that registers history and comments on it as well. In this study, Ahsanuzzaman looks at the digitised Brand, directed by Kamaluddin Nilu, and argue that by its unwavering critique of Christian fundamentalism it can function as digihistory in the context of Bangladesh. He contends that Nilu’s Brand by its oblique critique of the Islamist militants is a digitext that negotiates with Bangladesh politics and history in the early 2000s. Chapter 10, “Digital Operatic Precedents in Haruki Murakami’s Killing Commendatore,” by Neil H. Wright, is a study of the novel Killing Commendatore (2018) by Haruki Murakami, which references two famous operas, Mozart’s Don Giovanni and Richard Strauss’s Der Rosenkavalier. Both operas are reflected in the narrative structure and character development of the story, so that the operas function as meta-narratives that amplify the essential themes of the novel. Readers who are familiar with these operas are thus equipped to enjoy the story on a more intimate level. In the novel, only analogue recordings of the operas are heard by the principal characters; but it is apparent that Murakami was familiar with a particular production of Der Rosenkavalier that is widely known in digital video form; Don Giovanni is also available on DVD in dozens of versions, and it is quite likely that Murakami, a connoisseur of both popular and classical music, is acquainted with several of them. It is also likely that among his readers are those who, as opera lovers with DVD collections, would easily recognise the scenes that are transposed into the narrative of Killing Commendatore. Neil Wright’s study illustrates how digital culture has become an indispensable part of life, as vividly shown in Murakami’s work. The fourth area of inquiry (Part IV), “Arts Tech and Experimentations in Stage Performance,” is represented by three studies from Chaps. 11 to 13. Chapter 11, “The Carp Fairy in the Digitalised Traditional Chinese Theatre” by Lily Li, is a study of how the traditional Chinese theatre has been given new energies when it adopts the use of digital technologies in performance that brings a change in style. In the era of new media, digital technologies present an unprecedented challenge to the survival of traditional theatre due to the public’s accelerated living style and their habit of online consumption of information and entertainment. Not surprisingly, digital technologies have also become an avenue for innovation and dissemination of traditional Chinese theatre art. Lily Li’s study examines and analyses six digitalised stage performances of the Carp Fairy story in Peking Opera and Yueju opera. In the fabulous mythological story, the Carp Fairy falls in love with the poor student Zhang Zhen, transforms into his betrothed rich girl and finally pursues her freedom and love

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after going through the painful ordeal of having her three golden scales removed. In this study, Lily Li explores the visual effects and distinctive features of digital presentation as they pertain to these traditional theatrical pieces that have evolved in the digital age. Digital technologies are often used to enhance theatre conventions with visual effects, which have in turn inspired changes in recent live stage performances. In this way, digital versions of the Carp story have helped to refine and modernise the opera without sacrificing its traditional character. Chapter 12, “Rethinking the Use of Multimedia Technology in the Theatre,” by Minghou Liu continues with a critical review of the use of multimedia technology on the theatrical stage. While acknowledging how such use has vastly enriched stage designing and lighting, extended the spatial and temporal dimensions of stage performance and brought to the audience a new aesthetic experience, Minghou Liu finds that when some directors overly rely on science and technology, the expression of the innate substance of the theatrical art is inhibited. What is worse is that it could even result in the superseding of the secondary over the primary—the performance of the actors may become inundated. To make her point, she takes the Chinese performance Ghosts 2.0 staged in Beijing, and British performance, The Magic Flute produced by Britain’s Company 1927 in collaboration with the Komische Oper Berlin, Germany, as examples for comparison and offers critical views on the strengths and weaknesses of using technologies in performance. Chapter 13, “Staying Alive: The Plague and Performance in a Digital Age,” by Angela C. Pao, offers a critical view of the digital theatre compared with live performance. Bill Irwin and David Shiner’s Old Hats (2013, 2016) and Peter Sellars’ 2009 staging of Shakespeare’s Othello are discussed as examples of live performance, which are contrasted with Richard Eyre’s 2013 production of Ibsen’s Ghosts, performed on stage at London’s Almeida Theatre and live-captured for streaming by Digital Theatre. Angela C. Pao has given examples to illustrate how digital technologies have been used on the stage to enhance theatre arts in performance. However, she has also convincingly argued from the viewpoint of cognitive psychology why a drama presented digitally on a two-dimensional flat screen cannot convey the threedimensional experience of a live performance. This is an inspiring critical study that offers a caveat on the limitation of digital theatre. The 13 studies, including the critical Introduction, collected in this volume showcase how deeply digitalism has permeated contemporary culture and affected modes of presentation and consumption. It is everywhere in art production, stage performance, film and literature, and in our lives. It is apt to have Angela C. Pao’s study as a conclusion to the collection, as it offers a rethinking of the advantages of using digital technologies in artistic production, but also reminds the reader that there are limitations in 2D digital representation, which after all lacks the depth and complexities of the original. In the humanities and arts, what is most important is the “touch” that an artwork gives the audience. The volume begins with studies on digital reconstructions of lost theatres, goes on to critical examinations of the world receptions of Ibsen by using distant reading methods, continues with digital enhancements in performance arts, and concludes with a live performance of Ibsen’s Ghosts in comparison with other digital

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performances. By coincidence as well as by design, Ibsen provides a focus in the volume and serves as a thread connecting different studies in performance arts. While the 13 studies illustrate the use of an array of research tools and critical methods developed from digital technologies, they also offer opportunities to appreciate and rethink the benefits that such technologies bring to art.

References AusStage. https://www.amw.org.au/register/listings/australian-live-performance-database-ausstage IbsenStage. https://ibsenstage.hf.uio.no/ Moretti, F. (2000). Conjectures on world literature. New Left Review, 1(4), 54–68. Negroponte, N. (1995). Being digital. Hodder & Stoughton. Ortelia. https://ortelia.com/products/exhibition-design-software/ Visualising lost theatres. https://ortelia.com/project/visualising-lost-theatres/ Wiley, H., & Rangoni, S. (2018) Digital theatre: A casebook. European Theatre Convention. https://www.europeantheatre.eu/publication/digital-theatre-a-casebook

Kwok-kan Tam, PhD, is currently Chair Professor of English and Dean of the School of Humanities and Social Science at the Hang Seng University of Hong Kong. He was ReaderProfessor and Chairman of the English Department at the Chinese University of Hong Kong where he worked for 21 years before he joined the Open University of Hong Kong (renamed in 2011 as Hong Kong Metropolitan University) in 2007 and later the Hang Seng University of Hong Kong in 2018. He is former Head (2012–2018) and current member of the International Ibsen Committee, University of Oslo, and is a Founding Fellow of the Hong Kong Academy of the Humanities. He has held visiting positions in teaching and research at Stockholm University, Friedrich-Alexander Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg, University of Tokyo, National University of Singapore, and the East-West Centre, Honolulu. His publications include the authored books: Ibsen, Power and the Self: Postsocialist Chinese Experimentations in Stage Performance and Film (2019), Chinese Ibsenism: Reinventions of Women, Class and Nation (2019), The Englishized Subject: Postcolonial Writings in Hong Kong, Singapore and Malaysia (2019), Ibsen in China 1908–1997: A Critical-Annotated Bibliography of Criticism, Translation and Performance (2001), The Politics of Subject Construction in Modern Chinese Literature (2000), New Chinese Cinema (co-authored with Wimal Dissanayake, 1998) and many edited or co-edited volumes on Ibsen, Gao Xingjian, Anglophone literature, modern Chinese literature, drama and film. He is editor-in-chief of the Springer Series Digital Culture and Humanities and he serves on the editorial board of many international journals.

Part I

Virtual Construction of Lost Theatres

Chapter 2

Virtual Praxis and Theatre Research: Textual Recovery Joanne Tompkins and Liyang Xia

Abstract A project that ranges through history and geography provides the opportunity to establish relationships between theatrical forms that may not often be examined together. This chapter compares two very different forms of theatre in Australia at roughly the same time: the nascent theatre in Adelaide, South Australia in the early 1840s and Cantonese opera on the Victorian goldfields in the 1850s. Recovering performance elements of classic texts in nineteenth-century performance in Australia has been painstaking, and far from complete. This chapter explains the process of attempting to ascertain the nature of the performance text for Shakespeare’s Othello at the Queen’s Theatre in Adelaide, the production that opened the theatre. We also investigate the texts that were most likely performed in the tents on the goldfields in Victoria that replaced the itinerant bamboo theatres for Cantonese opera from the Pearl River delta. Keywords Australia · Cantonese opera · Cultural Revolution · Femininity · Othello · Queen’s Theatre · Revolutionary model plays · Virtual praxis Imagine being able to visit a theatre from the past that has long been demolished: our research has made this possible with accurate and detailed recreations of theatre venues from the past, through the use of virtual reality technology. But visualising historical venues does more than offer the chance to visit them: it facilitates our examination of the elements of performance that may no longer be in use, as well as our understanding the social relations that are shaped by architecture and theatre practice. We have recreated five theatres in virtual form: the Rose in London from the late 1500s, the Komediehuiset in Bergen, Norway from 1800, the Queen’s Theatre in Adelaide from 1841, an itinerant bamboo theatre for performing J. Tompkins (✉) School of Communication and Arts, The University of Queensland, Brisbane, QLD, Australia e-mail: [email protected] L. Xia Faculty of Humanities, Centre for Ibsen Studies, University of Oslo, Oslo, Norway e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2023 K.-k. Tam (ed.), Performance Arts: Research in the Age of Digital Revolution, Digital Culture and Humanities 4, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-19-9213-1_2

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Cantonese opera from the Pearl River Delta in China that performed in circus-like tents in the goldfields of Victoria in the 1850s–1880s, and the Stardust Casino’s Showroom from Las Vegas in late 1950s. Rather than recounting the process of building the virtual models, we have used the models to enhance research into these theatrical moments. This essay focuses on textual recovery by comparing our findings for two very different theatrical forms that operated in mid-nineteenth century colonial Australia: the Georgian-style Queen’s Theatre in Adelaide, South Australia which opened in 1841; and the itinerant form of Cantonese opera on the Victorian goldfields, also in Australia, from the 1850s (Figs. 2.1, 2.2 and 2.3). First, we explain how we ascertained the nature of the performance text for William Shakespeare’s Othello which opened the Queen’s Theatre. Recovering this text has been almost as difficult as tracking down the performance texts for Cantonese opera performed in the tents on the goldfields in Victoria. Both forms were transported from elsewhere to very different sociopolitical and geographical contexts; both these theatrical examples replicate their origins in a new land, but while one provides a temporary force-fit, the other almost vanishes from the traditional historical record. Recovering different aspects of these performance traditions contributes, then, to a more nuanced view of the broad history of performance in Australia. Once we established the nature of each venue in virtual form (itself a lengthy process of extensive documentation and experiment), we turned to examine the repertoire, the next essential building block in understanding more about these performance forms. Our first objective in sourcing the repertoire was to ensure that each model could enact a greater historiographical function than simply exhibition or display. Textual recovery can be associated with identifying a particular script or scripts but, as we have learned in these two cases, it also requires the research into many other types of theatrical resources. This research process has provided a fascinating foundation for the methodology of virtual praxis which we define as

Fig. 2.1 The Queen’s Theatre VR model, courtesy of Ortelia

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Fig. 2.2 The Queen’s Theatre exterior today. Photo courtesy of authors

using performance history and practice—in conjunction with the body knowledge offered by performers, designers, and directors who enter the virtual environments— to provide a fuller understanding of performance from the past. The search for documentary resources was in neither case simply a matter of isolating a single text. This essay itemises some of the challenges that we encountered, and then establishes what we have learned in locating what we discovered in an appropriate socio-political context. We found the process of establishing the repertoire for each of these examples to be comparable, although our conclusions (and the historiographical difficulties in ascertaining some of them) vary considerably. Opened in January of 1841, the Queen’s Theatre was built by Emanuel Solomon who had been transported as a convict for theft and later discharged as a free man (on the proviso that he not return to the UK), just 5 years after South Australia was founded. Solomon hired John Lazar, who was well known on the Sydney stage, to be the actor-manager. The venue was the colony’s first public building and considered to be much like a provincial British theatre, ‘built and decorated from the plans of the most popular theatres in London’ and aiming to stimulate development of the new colony (“Queen’s Theatre, Gilles Arcade, Currie Street” 5 Jan, 1841b: 1) (Fig. 2.3).

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Fig. 2.3 Interior of the Queen’s Theatre interior today. Photo courtesy of authors

Today, only three walls of the original remain, and it evokes little sense of its original grandeur, but when it opened on 11 January 1841 with Othello and John Baldwin Buckstone’s 1838 one-act farce, Our Mary Anne, it held 1000 people, or 10% of Adelaide’s settler inhabitants.1 The pit accommodated 700 patrons, and its dress circle, boxes, and upper gallery sat about 200 more (“Queen’s Theatre” 5 Jan, 1841b, 1841c: 1). It boasted a small orchestra pit and machinery for opening and closing the wing flats which reviews suggest were used to spectacular effects.2 We have focussed on the part of the playbill that featured Othello (Fig. 2.4). One might assume that establishing the text for Shakespeare’s Othello would be simple since there has been a script in print since the early seventeenth century, but, as we 1

See the census documents (https://archives.sa.gov.au/finding-information/discover-our-collection/ registration-life-events/census-1841; Anonymous, 1841e). The indigenous population totalled about the same, for a short time before dispersion and disease took their tolls (http://sahistoryhub. com.au/subjects/population; Anonymous, 2020a). See also Sendziuk and Foster (2018: 2). 2 See the review of Coyne’s All for Love for a sense of the effects: ‘[s]cenery and dresses are of the most costly description [. . . .] The Hall of the Phiades is a magnificent affair [. . .] suddenly opening to the audience. The fairy chorus and sudden disappearance of the clouds were admirably managed’ (“Queen’s Theatre” 24 April, 1841a: 3).

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Fig. 2.4 Advertisement for the Playbill for Othello and Our Mary Anne at the Queen’s Theatre, 11 January 1841. Advertising (8 January 1841). Southern Australian (Adelaide), p. 2. Retrieved June 3, 2022, from http://nla.gov.au/nla. news-article71613927 Southern Australian (Adelaide)

explain below, theatre regulation in Britain in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries complicates an understanding of how this production of Othello was performed at the Queen’s. We needed to trace the detail that we could uncover from other indicators, including establishing which version of Othello was used, how it was performed, by whom, on what type of set. Only one newspaper carried a review of the play, with its actual comment on the performance amounting to a single paragraph: Lazar’s Othello was upon the whole good. At times his utterance was too rapid, and consequently rather indistinct, and once or twice he gave more scope to his voice than

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J. Tompkins and L. Xia was necessary, but taking the part as a whole it was very creditably gone through, and drew from the audience repeated expressions of applause. Mr Arabin, as lago, decidedly sustained his character better than anyone on the stage; he indeed played the plausible and wily villain to the life. Mr Allan, who played Roderigo, appeared to be quite out of his line, and endeavoured to amuse the audience at the expense of the tragedy. In the afterpiece he seemed more in his element. Mrs Cameron was well received by the audience, and promises to take the lead female part of the company. Mrs Arabin we doubt not, is a very useful actress, and seems equally at home in comedy and tragedy. (“The Queen’s Theatre” 13 Jan, 1841d: 3)

While appropriate for the day, this review offers us almost no help in ascertaining the nature of the performance, the edit or interpretation of the script, or the set. And thus we began the process of broadening the recovery of the ‘text.’ First, we knew that we were likely looking for a shorter version of the play. Othello was popular on the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries stages although it tended to be edited since Shakespeare’s plays would typically be paired with a melodrama to make an evening of entertainment. A search for acting editions of this play from the time suggests that John Philip Kemble’s (1757–1823) revised 1814 version of Othello is likely to have been used in Adelaide, based on publication dates and on how well-received his interpretation of Othello on the London stage was (Kemble, 1814). Other unpublished, acting versions of Othello may have been circulating as well, but James Siemon argues that the script was largely stable in this shortened form at the time. The most important additional alteration was to shape the play almost entirely around Othello and the emotional transitions that build to the climax. Much else was eliminate including any of the plot intricacies, most female characters, and most of the lines of the remaining women. Desdemona’s role is to communicate solely a passive femininity (Siemon, 1986: 50). We also examined visual images via famous engravings of actors in costume for Othello. From these we tried to determine the degree of ‘blacking-up’ but the images were inconclusive.3 Nevertheless, the engravings reinforce the prominence of a passions-based approach among early nineteenth century tragic actors, to the approval of the critics who reviewed them (Marsden, 2019: 11–13). We then examined the context of shortened versions of Othello and other Shakespearean plays as they were performed at this time. There are numerous reasons why this version of Othello dominates at the time, exacerbated by the divide between the illegitimate theatre tradition and the legitimate form of performance. ‘Legitimate’ performance was, from 1737 to 1843, restricted to London’s two ‘patent’ theatres: Theatre Royal Drury Lane and Covent Garden. The regulations stipulated that opera and spoken word theatre (including Shakespeare, 1604) could only be performed at these two theatres. Illegitimate theatres (all the others throughout Britain) were forbidden from staging an entire, spoken production of a Shakespeare play, but they could use his plots (segments of narratives, action without

3

We do not know if Lazar wore black make-up in the role or if he, like Edmund Kean, another famous Othello of the day, performed Othello in lighter make-up. See Kim Hall and Michael Neill for overviews of critical approaches to this play (Hall, 2007; Neill, 2006).

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spoken dialogue) via different genres, including burlettas (three-act musical pieces of six songs and no dialogue [Moody, 2007: 31]), operas, pantomime, dance, circus acts, and other forms. New highly physical forms of performance evolved on the illegitimate stage in response to the 1737 Licensing Act; over time, the two different categories of theatres came to be blurred, and the illegitimate theatres eventually took market share (Prince, 2006: 87)4 but the separation of the two types of performance extended to Australia where the illegitimate tradition more often determined what the actors could credibly perform and the type of performance that audiences preferred. The illegitimate stage was allowed to present travesties of Shakespearean plots and several based on Othello were popular, including Othello Travestie and Othello Burlesqued. These scripts were shortened even further so that they resembled a single act more than a full-scale play. They tended to build on racist and sexist responses to the play. A review of ‘The Grand Burlesque, Operatic, Farcical, Bombastic, Extravaganza’ described Othello Travestie at Sydney’s Theatre Royal in 1837 as ‘[t]he immortal bard’s splendid tragedy, frittered down into two acts of the vilest doggerel imaginable’ (“Drama”; The Sydney Gazette and New South Wales Advertiser, 1837: 2), whereas other reviewers were more appreciative of the comedy. In 1850 a court case in Adelaide saw John Lazar sue for damages after being attacked in the press for staging obscenities including Othello Travestie, and winning (Brisbane, 1991: 43). Despite this win, it is clear that he had a talent for physical comedy, bringing more of the illegitimate tradition to Adelaide, where actors and audiences alike jump their class and/or status. The illegitimate tradition and Lazar’s comic skill could well have helped in determining the broader repertoire at the Queen’s: about two thirds of the plays were comedies to one third drama. Once we had an approximation of this shortened text, we attempted to discern some of the detail of its interpretation by exploring reviews of other Othellos in Australia in the 1830s, some of which were far more helpful than the review of the Queen’s premiere. The actors’ biographies make for fascinating reading when their off-stage lives were reported in the newspapers as well as their performances (financial disagreements, broken leases, affairs, affrays, and backstage disruptions). We have tracked through newspaper reviews of their careers to appreciate not only the many theatres in which they performed but the kinds of performances that appealed to reviewers and audiences, and the ways in which a play like Othello could have been performed at the Queen’s. At the Queen’s, the leading roles were played by Mr John Lazar, the actor-manager (as Othello), Mr Arabin (Iago), Mr Cameron (Cassio), Mrs Cameron (Desdemona), and Mrs Arabin (Emilia) (“Queen’s Theatre” 5 Jan, 1841c: 1). These actors had all already acquired acting reputations in 4

The Act did not necessarily mean that the productions at the patent theatres were of high quality (Moody, 2007: 123). There was, nevertheless, a desire to associate oneself with the legitimate tradition: Lazar suggested that his acting pedigree included Covent Garden but there is no evidence to support this claim. While most actors in Australia picked up the profession on job when they arrived (Warrington, 2014: 1), Lazar, who arrives in Sydney in 1837 at the age of 27, performed Othello in May that year.

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the colonies, and even in other productions of Othello. The audience in the Queen’s may not have ventured far from Adelaide (having only recently arrived from the UK), but by the 1840s theatre was a burgeoning itinerant profession that used shipping routes that linked New South Wales and Tasmania with Adelaide. By piecing together a sense of the Queen’s Othello from earlier performances by the same actors, we have been able to discern that the heroic interpretation of the character of Othello (against the arch villain Iago) dominated and Lazar, experienced with this role, likely shaped the overall performance to maximise emotional empathy with Othello. Once we established the repertoire, we found that we needed to reinterpret it against the socio-political context in which it was performed, specifically the themes of race and miscegenation. In other words, other texts helped shape the likely effect of this version of Othello at this moment. The crucial backdrop to the Queen’s Othello illustrates the unease experienced in this colony with the perceived threat of miscegenation and the potential for experiencing a displaced anxiety from their own social world. Newspapers of the day reported on the 600 indigenous people living in Adelaide (‘South Australia: Aboriginal Australians 1837–1858, 2020b’). We wonder if these ‘real-world’ connections resonated with at least some of the audience, especially since this play was staged a few months after the murders by indigenous people of 24 settlers who were shipwrecked from the Maria south of Adelaide in the Coorong district. Following this event, a summary execution of two indigenous men for the crime took place, a response that many considered illegal since indigenous people were to be protected by their status as British citizens. This occurrence was the topic of months of editorials in the newspapers (Foster et al., 2001: 15). The theatre is built in a colony that attempts to hermetically seal the flow of performance and preserve it within a theatre designed to replicate Britain, as part of the utopian expectations of the colony.5 But the realities of occupation suggest a different effect: the realities of life in this new colony and the complexities related to a frontier war between settlers and Indigenous peoples must have been at or near the front of mind for the audience on opening night at a play where race is centrestage. Our attempts to establish the repertoire brought us to being able to sketch a much fuller picture of this performance and its possible effects on the audience. Further work with this model in our next phase addresses this in more detail: we plan to generate avatars of audience members at the Queen’s, especially since we have been able to gather considerable background on the types of settlers and their culture of spectatorship. We turn from a scripted performance of Othello (if not quite Shakespeare’s version) to an even more itinerant form on the goldfields that presents different specific problems but our process was much the same: seeking a larger example of 5 Unlike the other colonies that came to create Australia and were begun as penal settlements, South Australia was to follow Edward Gibbon Wakefield’s scheme of ‘systematic colonization’ (Lee, 1986; Steer, 2017) or a planned emigration to a carefully selected location. The documentation of the selection of settlers means that we have much more information about the actual people who arrived in South Australia in its first few years. Further work in our next phase addresses this in more detail: we plan to generate avatars of Queen’s audience members.

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Fig. 2.5 Model of a Bamboo Theatre. Photo courtesy of authors

what repertoire might include, outlining the challenges in our finds, and then understanding the findings in the different socio-political context. First we describe Cantonese opera at the time and specifically its existence on the goldfields. Cantonese opera was the major entertainment for Chinese goldminers on the Victorian goldfields in the mid-nineteenth century, as most of the miners came from the Pearl River Delta region in south China; as well, all attention on the goldfields was finding the lucky strike in these (then) extremely remote places, so there were few other options for entertainment. Back home, this theatre was usually staged on an open-air bamboo platform set opposite a temple in a village, often to celebrate a festival over several days (Fig. 2.5). The troupes would rebuild a bamboo stage everywhere they travelled by taking the building material with them on what was known as the “red boats”—their main means of transportation on tour. The stage dimensions and its strict organisation of backstage were replicated every single time. When this form travelled to Australia with the Chinese miners, it was performed inside equally mobile circus-style tents using the same stage configuration (Fig. 2.6). The way the troupes positioned the bamboo stage inside these tents ensured that the material conditions of performance were the same as the village setting so that the performers had all the essentials necessary to mount a show. They then sidestepped any influences exerted by new locations.6 A familiar spatial context also allowed the performers more freedom in interacting with their unfamiliar audience in the new social context (Figs. 2.7 and 2.8). As Cantonese opera is a highly fan-based and audience-oriented form of theatre, with the audience having much say in what is to

6

The traditional Cantonese opera stage is set in the open air and is square—the back half being backstage—with audience on three sides. Inside the tent on the goldfields, there is a central king pole and 12 internal quarter poles, which favours a centrally situated circular stage with the audience placed in-the-round. Cantonese opera troupes resist this spatial dynamic by placing the familiar square stage platform in one quarter of the tent, replicating the thrust stage feature with audience in the front and on the sides.

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Fig. 2.6 Lee Goon’s tent theatre performance, Melbourne, 1872. Samuel Calvert and Oswald Rose Campbell, “Chinese Theatricals in Melbourne,” Courtesy State Library Victoria

Fig. 2.7 Circus tent in Chinese Quarter, Ballarat, 1868. Albert Charles Cooke, “Chinese Quarter, Ballarat.” Courtesy of State Library Victoria

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Fig. 2.8 Wire frame model of Cantonese opera circus tent (interior). Courtesy of Ortelia

be performed at a given event, we think that one of the major changes that may have happened to this form in Australia had to do with the choice of repertoire. As we found with Othello in Adelaide, the process of researching the Cantonese opera repertoire on the goldfields was more complicated than we anticipated. Most labourers who came to Australia were illiterate, in Chinese but especially in English, reducing opportunities for documentation (see Tompkins & Xia, 2022). However, the highly regulated nature of colonial Victoria has provided some evidence for the performance activities among the Chinese because all theatre companies required permits (Love, 1985: 48). Harold Love investigates the 14 Chinese companies applying to perform between 1858 and 1870 (48). These records do not include the content of the performance, though, and are therefore of little use in determining the repertoire. Theatre reviews at the time are not much more helpful either. While we found one review of the Queen’s Othello, we were not able to discover a single review of any identifiable Cantonese opera play performed in the circus tents on the Victorian goldfields. All the reviews that are available were written by Europeans, who unsurprisingly don’t identify the narratives performed. Instead, the few reviews we have found by Europeans attending different Cantonese opera events provide general impressions of what the reviewers saw and heard. Some are more interested in understanding the events than others. For example, J.A. Patterson’s 1862 review describes the opera performance as having ‘no proper beginning or end, but to go in a succession of battles and lovemaking until the patience both of the performers and the audience is exhausted’ (qtd in Farrell, 2007: 89). A more discerning review of Cantonese opera in the goldfields is Robin Goodfellow’s contemporaneous account of an 1860 piece by the Po An Toy Company: scenes could be extemporised almost instantaneously. A slip of paper laid upon the ground became an impassable river. Two pocket handkerchiefs are fixed upon a table, and a bed is

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J. Tompkins and L. Xia improvised immediately. By standing upon a chair and speaking over its back, to a crowd of four, inclusive of the prompter, an actor is supposed to address an army from the walls of a beleaguered city. One moment the chair, covered with green baize, is a mossy bank, and anon, by aid of a strip of black calico, it symbolizes darkness. [. . .] Villainy comes upon the boards striped like a zebra; prospective murder betrays itself by a thick coat of vermilion; and with indecision—but of a sinister tendency—the eyebrows have also a strange kind of sympathy, since in an individual of a vacillating turn of mind, one of them becomes developed into a strange scroll-like patch of black, whilst the other is nearly obliterated. [. . .] Passion is manifested, by action, in a manner no less striking. Despair prompts a lady to tear her hair [. . .] literally; to grovel in the dust, to bump her head upon the ground; and, as a culmination of agony, to turn a summerset [summersault]. [. . .] In the case of assassination the victim retired behind a screen, and, coming out having his face smeared with red paint, was supposed to have been foully slaughtered. (qtd in Love, 1985: 75–6)

Goodfellow’s decoding of stage semiotics shows a good knowledge of the sign system–probably from frequent visits to Cantonese opera troupes. He describes typical ways of using props on the traditional Chinese theatre stage, techniques that would have come from many different regional forms, over and above the efficient and creative way of using props that would have been a part of the itinerant nature of this form. We are more certain about the finale to these performances, given that almost all reviewers commented on this segment in greater detail and with the most enthusiasm of the evening: a performance’s final act generally presented acrobatics routines. These required far less interpretation, and instead all European reviewers tended to marvel at the physical prowess of the performers (Love, 1985: 52–53). As European reviewers tend to treat the Cantonese opera form as a novelty act, it is difficult to isolate the elements of its repertoire. Without written records of what plays were being performed in these tents or any description indicating discernible scenes, we decided to broaden the search and investigate the larger repertoire of Cantonese opera that was popular during that time. To do this, we needed to go back to its origin in China. Establishing the traditional repertoire of Cantonese opera has long been a difficult task. Much has been written about this performance form’s history, music, and recent repertoire (from early twentieth century onward), but very little research has been done on the traditional repertoire. And much of what we know about the early repertoire is based on performers’ memories and interviews as well as speculation (Mak, 1940: 35; Chan, 2007: 45; Wang, 2008: 417–8). In our project, we consulted some of the most authoritative sources and identified the “eighteen scripts of the underworld” (jianghu shibaben 江湖十八本) to be the repertoire circulating among Cantonese opera performers until mid-1860s. In a project that we worked on, we gave synopses of all the 18 plays, some of which have multiple candidates (Tompkins et al., 2022). In what follows, we present a brief literature review of sources on early Cantonese opera repertoire and recount the major challenges in identifying these plays. Some of these challenges are common for almost all traditional theatre forms while some are specific to Cantonese opera. Cantonese opera has a large repertoire of more than 13,200 plays, of which most are outline plays (提纲戏 tigangxi)—with brief descriptions of scenes, roles and music but without detailed script (Chen, 1989: 221–230). The small number of plays

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that were written down with detailed script, lyrics, and stage directions made up a set of what is often called the “eighteen scripts of the underworld” (Yang, 2019: 54). In the history of Cantonese opera, there have been several sets of “eighteen scripts” circulating at different time periods. The earliest of these is simply called “eighteen scripts of the underworld” (–1860s) while later ones are called “new eighteen scripts of the underworld” and “big-scale eighteen scripts of the underworld” (1860s–). The renowned Cantonese opera composer, director, and performer Mak Siu-Ha (麦啸霞 1904–1941) wrote a book titled Brief History of Guangdong Theatre (广东戏剧史 略 Guangdong Xiju Shilüe) in 1940, in which he offers a partial list of the earliest “eighteen scripts” based on his childhood memory of what he heard from older Cantonese opera performers. His list is missing number 11, 14, 15, 16, and 17. The title of each play starts with a number marking its place in the list. For example, the first play is called “One Handful of Snow”, the second one “Two Times of Plum Blossom” and so on. Chan Fei-Nung (陈非侬 1899–1984), another famous Cantonese opera performer, gave an almost identical list of the earliest “eighteen scripts” in his memoire titled Sixty Years of Cantonese Opera (粤剧六十年Yueju liushinian), in which number 15 is no longer missing. Another list was published in 1961 based on collective effort by a group of Cantonese opera performers and playwrights (Drama Association: 1–10). This list, while adding more candidates to some of the plays, has the exact same missing numbers as in Mak’s list. The missing numbers in these three most authoritative sources on the early repertoire has led Cantonese opera scholar Huang Wei to question the titles in the first “eighteen scripts”. Huang asserts that the earliest “eighteen scripts” had really only ten scripts and therefore should be called “ten scripts” (145–6). His claim is based on the fact that the missing numbers in the three lists are all after number ten and that the plays after number ten come from other opera forms whose influence on Cantonese opera was later than the initial formation of the first “eighteen scripts”, which is during mid- to late-eighteenth century (“New Exploration”: 146). Huang’s study compares the classical “eighteen scripts” or “ten scripts” of several traditional Chinese opera forms that have had significant influence on many other opera forms in China (including Cantonese opera) in order to determine the origin of Cantonese opera, which is still a debated issue among scholars. While Huang’s findings are important contributions to the origin debate, they do not eliminate the possibility that these later numbers were absorbed in the “eighteen scripts” of Cantonese opera at a later stage. As our project concerns the repertoire until 1860s, all of these numbers would have been well known to Cantonese opera goers by then, according to Huang’s study. Therefore, we still consider the conventional notion of “eighteen scripts” valid (Huang, 2009). Our synopses in Visualising Lost Theatres are based on a full list published in 1981 in an essay written by Liang Songsheng (梁松生) and Deng Jinxiang (邓金祥) in Resources on the Cultural History of Guangzhou. The authors refer to several lists published earlier and combine all of them into one.7 It has all 18 numbers and

7 Liang and Deng claim that their list is a combination of previously recorded lists, but without giving any specific references (Liang & Jinxiang, 1981).

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presents multiple candidates in several places. Liang and Deng provide a brief one-line description for each number except for number 7, 10, 13, 14 and 15, which are either self-explanatory by title or well known to Cantonese opera goers. For our research, we speculate that the form of the Cantonese opera performance did not change in any significant way because the performers tried their best to recreate the exact same performance space wherever they toured—they built a bamboo stage of the same configuration so the blocking stays the same as in rehearsals. However, since audience members often had the opportunity to order which numbers would be performed at a given event (Huang, 2008; “Taboos and Customs”: 58), we reckon that there might have been changes in the choice of plays when troupes travelled to the Victorian goldfields. This is largely due to the audience demographic in the goldfields being different from that of the Pearl River Delta region. Therefore, identifying the plots, role types, and music in these fully scripted plays was an important task in determining changes in repertoire in the goldfields. Unfortunately, there are no published records of any full script of these “eighteen scripts.” The synopses we provide in our book are gathered from various sources including some official websites of Cantonese opera organisations.8 Judging from these synopses, we can to a limited extent figure out the role types (and hence costumes) and the possible scenes in each play. What we cannot figure out is the music, lyrics and stage directions, among other things. Many factors have caused the difficulty in recovering the early Cantonese opera repertoire. As an oral tradition that was circulating among a mostly illiterate population, Cantonese opera has few early written records. The earliest published script available today is from the 1920s (Zhou, 2015: 151). In addition to being an oral tradition, we address two other factors that have hugely impeded the preservation of classic Cantonese opera repertoire. The first one is the ban on theatre in late Qing, which directly affected the circulation of Cantonese opera. The second one is reforms of traditional Chinese theatre—collectively known as xiqu (戏曲). Xiqu was forced to go through rounds of “examination”—both in form and in repertoire— during the Republican and Communist revolutions in the twentieth century. The result of these reforms is the loss of many classic opera scripts. It is well known that Cantonese opera was banned by the Qing authority between 1855 and 1871 due to its participation in the civil war waged by a Christian force called taiping tianguo (太平天国 the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom) against the Qing authority. Li Wenmao (李文茂 d. 1858), a martial role performer in Foshan, led his fellow Cantonese opera performers to join the Taiping rebellion in 1854. The next year, Qing authority issued a ban on Cantonese opera, which lasted 16 years. During this ban, the Qing authority burned down the Qionghua Guild (琼花会馆)—the headquarters of organised Cantonese opera companies—and troupes were forced to disband. Cantonese opera performers were killed; those who survived the killing fled the Guangdong region or performed in disguise in the name of other opera forms (Ng, 2015: 21).

8

These websites include yuejuopera.org.cn, xijucn.com, and xi-qu.com

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In addition to the ban reinforced by the Qing government, Cantonese opera was also affected by a general ban on all theatre activities in areas under Taiping rule— largely in regions below Yangtze River (Chang Jiang)—from as early as 1850. Taiping policies on theatre were essentially for ideological reasons: traditional theatre in China was closely associated with traditional religions such as Buddhism, Taoism and Confucianism; therefore the ban on theatre effectively became a ban on other religions (Zeng, 2010: 49–54).9 The “double ban” that Cantonese opera was subjected to understandably had a negative impact on the preservation of its repertoire. The twentieth century in China saw two major theatre reforms—one in the first two decades during the New Culture Movement (1910s–1920s) and the other from 1950s to 1980s. These two reforms are similar in nature in that they were meant to discard what is “traditional” and thus “backward” and embrace the “new” and “progressive”. Although they did not wipe out the traditional theatre completely, the damage they did to the traditional theatre repertoire is long lasting. In the first reform, the Western style spoken theatre was adopted by the left-wing reformists and became the modern Chinese theatre. The second reform, which lasted three decades and targeted the repertoire, artists, and organisation of all xiqu genres resulted in the loss of many scripts and their performance techniques (Liu, 2009: 387). During the Cultural Revolution (1966–1976), the entire classical repertoire of Chinese theatre was replaced by eight so-called “revolutionary model plays” (geming yangbanxi). Five of these eight plays were in xiqu form, all of which were Beijing opera plays. Against this broader context of theatre reform and theatrical censorship, Cantonese opera went through its own reform and revolution in the twentieth century. Due to its popularity in the Pearl River Delta, republican revolutionaries used this theatre genre to spread patriotic, anti-imperial and anti-Qing ideologies before and during the Xinhai Revolution (1911) which resulted in the overthrow of the Qing monarchy (Xie, 1982: 87). A great number of new plays were written at the time to promote the revolution and Cantonese opera integrated elements from the emerging spoken theatre (huaju) to include more speeches and modern attire. It was during this time that Cantonese opera began to be performed in the local Cantonese dialect—prior to that it was sung in the official court language called guanhua (Mandarin Chinese). The revolutionary repertoire gradually replaced the traditional repertoire. And by early 1930s the Cantonese opera reform was taken to another level by two prominent rival actor-managers—Sit Kok-Sin (薛觉先 1904–1956) and Ma Si-Tsang (马师曾 1900–1964). Sit and Ma both saw the need to update the organisation, techniques and repertoire of Cantonese opera, not the least to be more economically viable in competition with new forms of performing arts such as film and spoken theatre. During their peak rivalry years, which lasted from early 1930s to 1940s, there were more than one hundred playwrights for Cantonese opera spread across Guangdong, Hong Kong and Macau, penning around five thousand new plays (“History of

9

The ban on theatre during the Taiping rule was not entirely airtight; in some areas theatre was recognised as an important propaganda channel.

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Cantonese Opera”; Drama Association Guangdong Branch, 1961). While part of Sit and Ma’s legacy is raising Cantonese opera performers’ social and economic status, their reform nevertheless led to further diminishing of the classic repertoire. Since the 1980s, the Chinese authority has made numerous efforts to preserve classic xiqu repertoire, but the theatrical censorship is not entirely rescinded. Many formerly banned plays in the traditional xiqu repertoire are still not restored because they are “out of date, are still considered to be indecent, or are no longer technically viable” (Liu, 2009: 404). In the most recent decade, major xiqu genres in China have all put forward newly written (or revived) plays with Communist revolutionary themes in pursuit of preserving a national memory of the “red culture” (红色文化 hongse wenhua). Many such plays in Cantonese opera have received national art awards and extensive media coverage.10 Having identified the larger repertoire, we needed to understand if there were any changes that may have happened within the Cantonese opera form in a new sociopolitical context. In our book, we have suggested some possible changes, one of which is the choice of repertoire. In the goldfields, the audience composition shifted from family-based villagers working in agriculture and fishing to prospecting miners living with other fellow miners in mining camps. Because Cantonese opera allows its audience to request items for a program, we infer that the repertoire selection in Australia would probably take account of the audience of young, male, migrant labourers. Without children and extended family, elements in the repertoire that were meant to entertain children or appeal to women were likely reduced or taken out of the regular playbill. Comic elements would also have shifted to suit the new demographic, such as increased sexual innuendo that is designed to entertain a male audience. This is plausible partly because clowns in Cantonese opera have more freedom to improvise than other role types: they can cross otherwise strict lines of gender and age in their acting, and they can speak vernacular as they wish. The presence of Europeans in the audience may also have influenced the choice of repertoire. Reviews written by Europeans seem to suggest that there may have been more acrobatic routines and martial arts scenes added to the ending of performance events in the goldfields. Although this is not a change of repertoire but rather a predictable addition, it is definitely the one element that attracted the most enthusiasm from the European audience. In neither case were we able to assume the repertoire to be stable and available. Much more investigation of the historical record is required to establish the specific text(s) and how they might have been used. Newspaper records have been invaluable in assisting our research but given the partial documentation of these events (whether through language barriers or a lack of knowledge about the form), we have had to piece together a fuller sense of repertoire from performances elsewhere, relying also on a broad understanding of how the artform was consumed. From this research, we have the foundations for a much better elucidation of not only

10 Some examples of the “red culture” plays are Wedding on the Execution Ground (2007), Sister Jiang (2011), and Original Intention (2018).

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what was performed, but how the particular venues operated. This groundwork provides us with the basis for the next phase of our research which, in the case of the Queen’s, includes a more detailed investigation of a range of audience responses to a performance in this venue. Recreating these venues in virtual reality and then establishing the repertoire is just the first step towards a much broader research project which engages with virtual praxis.

References Anonymous. (1841a, April 24). Queen’s theatre. South Australian Register, p. 3. Anonymous. (1841b, January 5). Queenʼs theatre, Gilles Arcade, Currie street. South Australian Register, p. 1. Anonymous. (1841c, January 5). Queenʼs theatre. Advertising. Southern Australian, p. 1. Anonymous. (1841d, January 13). The Queenʼs theatre. Adelaide Chronicle and South Australian Literary Record, p. 3. Anonymous. (1841e). South Australia census. https://archives.sa.gov.au/finding-information/ discover-our-collection/registration-life-events/census-1841 Anonymous. (2020a). Population. South Australia History Hub. http://sahistoryhub.com.au/ subjects/population Anonymous. (2020b). South Australia: Aboriginal Australians 1837–1858. State Library of South Australia. https://manning.collections.slsa.sa.gov.au/sa/aborigines/1858.htm Brisbane, K. (1991). Entertaining Australia: An illustrated history. Currency Press. Chan, F.-N. 陈非侬. (2007). Sixty years of Cantonese Opera [粤剧六十年]. The Chinese University Press. Original work published in 1979. Chen, S. 陈守仁. (1989). Improvisational communication method in Cantonese Opera [粤剧即兴 运用之沟通方式]. In L. Jingzhi 刘靖之 (Ed.), Studies of folk music [民族音乐研究] (Vol. 2, pp. 221–230). Commercial Press. Drama Association Guangdong Branch [剧协广东分会] (Ed.). (1961). History of Cantonese Opera 粤剧历史. In Overview and synopses of Cantonese Opera repertoire [粤剧剧目纲要] (Vol. 1). Unpublished with limited circulation. Farrell, R. (2007). Sweat from the bones: Politics, Chinese acrobatics in Australia. PhD dissertation, La Trobe University. Foster, R., Hosking, R., & Nettelbeck, A. (2001). Fatal collisions: The South Australian Frontier and the violence of memory. Wakefield. Hall, K. F. (2007). Introduction. In K. F. Hall (Ed.), Othello: Texts and contexts (pp. 1–42). Bedford St Martin’s. http://www.xijucn.com/html/yue/20100311/15263_2.html Huang, W. 黄伟. (2008). Taboos and customs within Cantonese Opera’s red boat troupes [粤剧红 船班禁忌习俗]. Opera Arts [戏曲艺术], 29(2), 53–58. Huang, W. 黄伟. (2009). New exploration on the origin of Cantonese Opera: A study of the ‘eighteen scripts of the underworld’” [粤剧源流新探—以 “江湖十八本”为考察对象]. Academic Research [学术研究], 3, 143–160. Kemble, J. P. (1814). Shakespeare’s Othello. Revised by J. P. Kemble as it is Performed at the Theatres Royal. J. Miller. Lee, T.-S. (1986). Edward Gibbon Wakefield and Movement for Systematic Colonization, 1829–1850. PhD dissertation, University of California. Liang, S. 梁松生, & Jinxiang, D. 邓金祥. (1981). Memories of Qiong Hua [琼花忆语]. In Resources on the cultural history of Guangzhou [广州文史资料]. Guangdong People’s Publishing House. http://www.gzzxws.gov.cn/gzws//gzws/ml/24/200809/t20080912_7332.htm

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Liu, S. (2009). Theatre reform as Censorship: Censoring traditional theatre in China in the early 1950s. Theatre Journal, 61(3), 387–406. Love, H. (1985). Chinese theatre on the Victorian Goldfield 1858–1870. Australasian Drama Studies, 6, 47–86. Mak, S. H. 麦啸霞. (1940). A brief history of Guangdong Theatre [广东戏剧史略]. Guangzhou Committee for Opera Reform. Marsden, J. (2019). Theatres of feeling: Affect, performance, and the eighteenth-century stage. Cambridge University Press. Moody, J. (2007). Illegitimate theatre in London 1770–1840. Cambridge University Press. Neill, M. (2006). Introduction. In M. Neill (Ed.), The Oxford Shakespeare: Othello, the Moor of Venice (pp. 1–184). University Press. Ng, W. C. (2015). The rise of Cantonese Opera. University of Illinois Press. Prince, K. (2006). Shakespeare and the Victorian Periodicals. Routledge. Sendziuk, P., & Foster, R. (2018). A history of South Australia. Cambridge University Press. Shakespeare, W. (1604/2007). Othello. In Kim F. Hall (Ed.), Othello: Texts and contexts. Bedford St Martin’s. Siemon, J. R. (1986). ‘Nay, thatʼs not next’: Othello, V.ii in Performance, 1760–1900. Shakespeare Quarterly, 37(1), 38–51. Steer, P. (2017). On systematic colonization and the culture of settler colonialism: Edward Gibbon Wakefield’s A Letter from Sydney (1829). http://www.branchcollective.org/?ps_articles=philipsteer-on-systematic-colonization-and-the-culture-of-settler-colonialism-edward-gibbonwakefields-a-letter-from-sydney-1829. http://Creativecommons.org/licenses/by3.0/ The Sydney Gazette and New South Wales Advertiser. (1837, March 5). Drama, p. 2. Tompkins, J., Holledge, J., Bollen, J., & Xia, L. (2022). Visualising lost theatres: Virtual praxis and the recovery of performance spaces. CUP. Tompkins, J., & Xia, L. (2022). Mid-nineteenth-century Cantonese Opera performances in the Victorian Goldfields. In G. Bush-Bailey & K. Flaherty (Eds.), Making tracks: Touring performance and global exchange 1850–1950. Routledge. Wang, R. 汪容之. (2008). Sixty-five years of memories from Cantonese Opera Fans” [六十五年粤 剧戏迷杂忆]. In Selected essays on the study of Cantonese Opera [粤剧研究文选] (pp. 417– 418). Gongyuan Publishing. Warrington, L. (2014). Acting the moor: Critical response to performances of Othello in Australia and New Zealand, 1834–1866. Australian Studies, 6, 1–21. Xie, B. 谢彬筹. (1982). Cantonese Opera reform in late Qing and early republican eras [清末民初 的粤剧改良活动]. Academic Research [学术研究], 3, 87–92. Yang, D. 杨迪. (2019). Study of the historical Value of Set Scenes in Outline Plays in Cantonese Opera [从粤剧提纲戏编演看粤剧排场的历史价值]. Cultural Heritage [文化遗产], 6, 54– 61. Zeng, F. 曾凡安. (2010). Studies on theatre in late Qing period [晚清演剧研究]. Zhongshan University Press. Zhou, D. 周丹杰. (2015). Literature review of Cantonese Opera playscripts in Hong Kong University Archives [香港大学所藏粤剧剧本文献概述]. Cultural Heritage [文化遗产], 4, 47–156.

Joanne Tompkins (PhD, York U, Canada), is Professor Emerita of Theatre at the University of Queensland. She has just completed a 3-year term as Executive Director for Humanities and Creative Arts at the Australian Research Council. She was awarded an Honorary Doctor of Letters from Queen Mary, University of London in 2015. She is author or co-author of the following books: A Global Doll’s House: A Digital Humanities Approach (with Julie Holledge, Frode Helland and Jonathan Bollen, 2016); Theatre’s Heterotopias: Performance and the Cultural Politics of Space, 2014), Unsettling Space: Contestations in Contemporary Australian Theatre, 2006), Women’s Intercultural Performance (with Julie Holledge, 2000), and Post-Colonial Drama: Theory,

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Practice, Politics (with Helen Gilbert, 1996). She has published Visualising Lost Theatres: Recovering Social Interactions from the Spaces of Performance for Cambridge University Press in 2022, with Julie Holledge, Jonathan Bollen and Liyang Xia. Liyang Xia, PhD, is Associate Professor at The Centre for Ibsen Studies, University of Oslo. Her research areas include the reception history of Ibsen’s drama in Chinese theatre, Chinese traditional theatre and its practice both historically and today, and performance studies using digital approaches. She is a co-author of the book Visualising Lost Theatres: Virtual Praxis and the Recovery of Performance Spaces (Cambridge University Press, 2022). She is also a translator. She has translated Ibsen’s plays Peer Gynt (co-translator Zhiquan Xia) and Et dukkehjem (A Doll’s House) directly from Norwegian to Chinese.

Chapter 3

Virtual Praxis: Conducting Performance Research in Virtual Theatres Julie Holledge

Abstract It is impossible to travel back in time and capture the essence of a lost performance, but a new performance research methodology using virtual reality technology is reducing this epistemological gap. It has emerged from the Visualising Lost Theatres (VLT) project, which is predicated on the assumption that embedded in every live event are the material condition of its venue, whether this is the audience/performer relationship, the culture of spectatorship, the visual spectacle, or the techniques used by performers. The virtual theatres created by VLT are versatile performance research laboratories. This chapter will report on a number of experiments conducted by scholars and artists working inside these laboratories to translate archival documentation into spatial, visual and embodied data. This work is challenging conventional interpretations of the archive because the process of translating historical documents into three dimensional animate or inanimate forms highlights hundreds of practical problems not addressed in the ephemeral traces of a lost performance. Three examples of this virtual praxis will be presented: the reconstruction of written descriptions of set designs using the stage machinery available in the performance venue; examining a lost culture of spectatorship by reproducing elements of audience response; and the reconstruction of moments from a lost performance by actors using the performance techniques attributed to the original cast. Keywords Barnwell Theatre · British Empire · Ibsen · Komediehuset · Nationalism · Othello · Queen’s Theatre · Shakespeare · Stage technology · Theatre architecture · VR Visualising Lost Theatres (Tompkins et al., 2022) is a collaborative research project predicated on the assumption that embedded in every live event are the material

J. Holledge (✉) College of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences, Flinders University, Adelaide, SA, Australia e-mail: julie.holledge@flinders.edu.au © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2023 K.-k. Tam (ed.), Performance Arts: Research in the Age of Digital Revolution, Digital Culture and Humanities 4, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-19-9213-1_3

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condition of its venue, whether this is the audience/performer relationship, the culture of spectatorship, the visual spectacle, or the techniques used by performers. Virtual praxis conducted inside VR theatre models bridges the gap separating theorists and practitioners by creating a dialogue between two kinds of knowledge: the first gained in making, and the second in analysing, live performance. The production experience of our team of artists and digital modellers was crucial to the VR reconstruction of our lost theatres, but equally important was the long and rich tradition of scholarship on European theatre architecture and stage technology (Southern, 1951; Leacroft, 1973; Macintosh, 1993; Thorne, 1995; Camp, 2014). Both ways of knowing are essential to the translation of historical evidence into spatial and embodied data. By putting the archive to work in this way, we gained new insights into the symbiotic relationship between the material conditions of theatre venues and the performance genres and cultures of spectatorship that they house. It is not surprising that this interrelationship has been under theorised as testing the hypothesis that places of performance are instrumental in cultural production requires practical experimentation within lost theatres. It is only with the development of VR technology that we can partially overcome the loss of these architectural spaces. While many of our findings are published in our book, Visualising Lost Theatres (2022), this chapter concentrates on some of the detective work that underpinned the VR reconstructions of two of our lost theatres: the Queen’s Theatre in Adelaide, Australia, built in 1841 which still stands as an empty shell today with three extant walls, and Komediehuset in Bergen, Norway built in 1800 and destroyed by an allied bomb in 1944. While these theatres have long histories, the virtual models reflect their interiors is the middle of the nineteenth century when both venues were presenting aspects of the European Romantic repertoire. Neither of these theatres are noted for their architectural significance, they are colonial venues peripheral to the major cultural centres of Europe, nevertheless they are important sites for the study of aesthetic change in the practice of theatre. As a colonial theatre built on occupied land, the Queen’s contributes to the reception history of Shakespeare within the British Empire; while Komediehuset was associated with emergent nationalism in Norway (when the country was still officially under Swedish governance) and was the theatre where Henrik Ibsen (the so-called father of modern drama) did his apprenticeship in the 1850s. Our virtual praxis inside these immersive VR venues has focused on reconstructing aspects of lost performances from an era when visual traces are limited to occasional newspaper illustrations, design sketches, and rare daguerreotype portraits of actors. While studying practices of Romantic theatre has an obvious value to theatre historians, this research has relevance beyond discrete studies of an art form: examining auditoria can illuminate the social history of mass gatherings; depictions of human behavior on the stage can illustrate past patterns of social interaction; and by studying audience-performer interrelationships, we can surmise the shifts in subjectivity that were occurring outside the theatre. This chapter outlines the background research that informed the virtual reconstruction of the Queen’s and Komediehuset, as well as describing some of the

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experiments conducted within these immersive spaces to reconstruct performance techniques and modes of audience reception.

Auditoria, Stages, Scenery and Lighting Auditoria replicate the social organisation of the communities that use them; the seating or standing arrangements made for spectators and the exits and entrances reflect the gender, racial, class or caste structures of the wider society. Equally important to the study of auditoria is their impact on the performance techniques used by actors. The size and shape of the auditorium and the spatial relationship between the auditorium and the stage determines how performers use their bodies and voices to communicate with spectators. Whatever the genre of performance, actors will adapt the scale of their physical expression and the technical projection of their voices to suit the unique auditorium architecture. As there are many extant mid-nineteenth century European theatres, it may appear unnecessary to recreate the auditoria of these lost theatres, but although the exteriors of historic theatres are often preserved, their interiors are constantly changing to attract new spectators, accommodate new stage technologies, and conform to new building regulations. Each of these iterations redefines parameters of human interaction and obliterates another layer of a theatre’s past social and aesthetic history.1 The oblong footprints of the Queen’s Theatre and Komediehuset share a similar pattern: the auditorium takes up two-thirds, and the stage one-third, of the interior space; and these areas are separated by a deep orchestra pit. In addition, the auditorium floor in both theatres is raked and there are additional seating areas on upper levels. Beyond these generalities, there is a lack of archival documentation on the specific seating layouts of these auditoria: no visual records exist, and the only descriptions come from brief newspaper accounts of the Queen’s opening (“Queen’s Theatre” 8 Jan, 1841a: 1) and an account of the 1856 renovations written by the Chair of the Komediehus Board, Peter Blytt (1907: 89). More detective work was required to gather enough clues to reconstruct the VR interiors. Our investigation of the 1857 Komediehuset auditorium began with a set of survey drawings of the theatre that were commissioned by the Bergen City Council in 1938. As the footprint of the main building was almost unchanged throughout the life of the theatre, we used these plans for the exterior architectural form, but there were three major reconfigurations of the auditorium during the nineteenth century and our aim was to model the second. The written description of the second interior states that the walls were painted in Pompeii red, the benches from the earlier

1

Changes in the allocation of personal space in seating arrangements within theatres tend to happen slowly over time, which is why the sudden shifts triggered by COVID social distancing made the experience of sitting in alternate seats in a half full theatre so strange.

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Fig. 3.1 Sketch for Komediehuset renovations in 1870 by Peter Andreas Blix. Courtesy of The Theatre Archives, Section for Special Collections, Bergen University Library

auditorium configuration were replaced by benches with arm rests, and the central seating area in the gallery running around the walls of the theatre was partitioned off for visiting dignitaries. During the third renovation of the auditorium in 1870, the square gallery had been replaced by a dress circle with an imposing moulded façade and side boxes which obscured the original architectural form of the gallery. A box office seating plan from the 1850s showed the number of rows and seats, but it was only when we accessed the plans for the 1870 auditorium, as designed by architect Peter Andreas Blix, that the mystery of the shape of the original gallery was resolved. Among his drawings was a sketch where the new dress circle was superimposed over the original gallery in blue pencil (Fig. 3.1).2 There were no equivalent survey drawings or architectural plans to help us reconstruct the Queen’s auditorium of 1841, but there were three extant walls and a gutted interior with a bitumen floor from the time when the venue was a car park. Embedded in the walls were the marks of floor joists, showing the rake of the gallery, and indentations where the doors led to the upper storey retiring rooms. We were able to fix a position for the posts supporting the upper tiers of seating from an

2 We are indebted to Ellen Karoline Gjervan, the leading authority on Ibsen’s time at Det norske Theater, and Tove Jensen Holmås, the librarian at the Bergen University Theatre Archive (Teaterarkivet, UiB), for their help in sourcing the box office plans and the Blix architectural drawings. See Gjervan (2010, 2011, 2012).

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archaeological dig that excavated the stage area in the 1990s.3 We also referred to a rough ground plan that had been drawn up when the venue was leased as law courts in 1843, it showed the division between the auditorium and the stage and located the orchestra pit. Finally, there was the newspaper advertisement for the opening of the theatre that was offering tickets to the pit, dress circle, private boxes, and gallery, as well as suggesting the overall capacity of the theatre (“Queen’s Theatre” 5 Jan, 1841b: 1). All this evidence was converted into architectural drawings by Mary Moore and Peter Kelly, our theatre designer and production manager, but they still had one unsolved structural problem: the layout of the Queen’s was reminiscent of the British Georgian theatres that had square galleries, but the newspaper advertisement specified a dress circle.4 The Barnwell Theatre in England, built in 1814, provided the necessary reference for a dress circle created with angled straight panels supported by multiple posts.5 Moore adopted this architectural device and followed the conventions of British Regency theatres to create facades and pelmets to decorate the two tiers of seating; she also arranged the benches in the pit, circle, and gallery to accommodate the numbers of spectators that were mentioned in the newspaper accounts. Recreating these auditoria in virtual models, forced us to consider myriad practical problems about theatre architecture and seating arrangements. The most compelling realisation was that spectators were packed together, either standing or seated on simple benches, like commuters in today’s rush hour public transport. Implementing the box office seating plan in the Bergen model, and fitting 700 people onto the benches in the pit of the VR Queen’s, challenged our contemporary expectations of personal space in places of public entertainment. Reconstructing these auditoria also drew attention to the social stratifications of class and privilege that were reflected in the seating arrangements. The Queen’s pit was crowded, but elite spectators had private boxes and comfortable chairs. In most British theatres, the pit was more expensive than the upper gallery, but at the Queen’s access to the ‘gods’ was through the dress circle promenade room, while the pit had a different street entrance adjacent to the tavern attached to the theatre. Even though the VR model showed that the view of the stage from the upper gallery was inferior to the pit, and the heat of the Australian summer at the top of the theatre was probably unbearable, some spectators still paid more to use the fashionable entrance. Komediehuset had only one entrance and the personal space available in each of the seating areas was more or less the same, but this apparent egalitarianism was illusory as the theatre management offered a private performance for wealthy subscribers on Wednesdays, while Sundays were open for the public, and in some The summary of the findings of the archaeological investigations of the Queen’s site is recorded in the unpublished paper: “Queens Theatre Site” Conservation Study, Volume One, prepared by Heritage Group December 1990 for Austral Archaeology. 4 The Georgian Theatre in Richmond Yorkshire is an example of the typical square gallery configuration: https://www.georgiantheatreroyal.co.uk/ 5 Barnwell Theatre: https://capturingcambridge.org/barnwell/newmarket-road/38-newmarket-roadcambridge-buddhist-centre/ 3

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instances, their dogs. Sitting in all the different seating areas in the two immersive VR theatres, we could experience the egalitarianism of the spatial dynamic in Komediehuset and the enforcement of class distinction in the Queen’s. In addition, we had a visceral sense of how physical proximity in such crowded audiences might have impacted on the cultures of spectatorship in these theatres. From views in the auditoria, we moved to the views from the stage. The proportions of the playing spaces in Komediehuset and the Queen’s were roughly the same: the former had a little more depth than width, while the latter was closer to a square. In the mid-nineteenth century, both theatres had proscenium arches behind which perspective vistas were displayed using stage technology that originated in the European Baroque theatres. This machinery supported two-dimensional painted surfaces placed on multiple planes to create the illusion of three-dimensional fictional worlds. There were three basic elements used for these designs: first there were the cloths that dropped from the roof beams, distant vistas were painted on large cloths that covered the back of the stage, and additional cloths were used to create interiors and scenic features; secondly, there were the short cloths that were hung from roof beams to create interior ceilings or skyscapes; and thirdly, on the sides of the stage, there were multiple flats or wings painted as interiors or exteriors. The positioning of these scenic element ensured that the walls and roof of the stage were hidden or ‘masked’ from the spectators and that the scenic art on the two-dimensional surfaces created an illusion of depth using perspective drawing techniques tied to vanishing points. The machinery below the stage that supported the wings, and the cloth rolling system on the beams above the stage, facilitated the instant transformation of the stage picture in full view of the audience (Southern, 1962).6 It is rare to find archival evidence of the exact specifications of a theatre’s stage machinery, but some fascinating drawings have survived of the mechanism used for moving the wings on the Komediehus stage. The wings or flats were hooked to frames that moved in slots cut into the stage floor and these frames were supported by carriages that ran under the stage by means of ropes and winches. A maximum of ten wings were visible at any one time, five on either side of the stage, but hidden beside them were another set of wings ready to take their place when the carriages were moved during the scene change. The Komediehus drawings show the plan for the slots cut into the stage, the frame and carriage system (Fig. 3.2), and the rigging of the ropes and winches. With all these detailed drawings it might be assumed that it was a simple task to install this stage machinery in the VR Komediehus, but the exact placing of wings, borders, and drop-clothes in every theatre is tied to the architectural constraints of the building and the placing of floor joists and roof beams. The added complication was that the positioning of all the scenic elements had to support the overall perspective illusion of the figurative settings. 6

The machinery that moved the scenery was different in British and continental theatres, but from the auditoria the spectacular effects were largely the same. In British theatres the scenery was moved using grooves fixed to the floor and suspended from beams, while on the continent, slots were cut into the floor boards for carriages to move the wings and to allow set pieces of scenery to appear and disappear through the stage floor (Southern, 1951: 216, 286–296).

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Fig. 3.2 Sketch of frame and carriage system for the wings and lighting towers by Ole Johannessen. Courtesy of The Theatre Archives, Section for Special Collections, Bergen University Library

There was no equivalent documentation on the Queen’s stage machinery, though it was clear from the archaeological evidence that the basement beneath the stage had a reinforced floor to support the machinery that moved the wings, though the mechanism was somewhat different to the continental system used at Komediehuset. From the spectators’ viewpoint, the biggest difference in the stages of the two theatres was not their mechanisms for moving scenery, but the proscenium arch design. At Komediehuset, there were neo-classical columns set on plinths on either side of the stage that supported an impressive entablature to delineate the proscenium arch. This strong framing device separated the audience from the fictional world on the stage. In contrast, the Queen’s had an extended proscenium arch, painted in a style that echoed the auditorium facades and pelmets, that incorporated proscenium doors on either side of a deep apron stage. The proscenium doors were a stage feature derived from the Restoration Theatre in Britain and they were still in use in the early nineteenth century. Upstage of the doors, the inner edge of the proscenium created a frame behind which the wings, borders, and backdrops made up the changing stage picture. As these scenic elements filled a smaller area of the stage than in Komediehuset, only four wings were necessary to fill the upper playing space. Unlike the separations created between the spectators and the fictional world in Komediehuset, the shape and design of the Queen’s proscenium blended the auditorium with the stage. Our designer found that the dominant visual feature of the extended proscenium either side of the apron stage determined the decoration used on the wing flats. The effect of this aesthetic blending that harmonised the design of

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Fig. 3.3 Interior of Virtual Model of Komediehuset with Mary Moore’s Set for Ibsen’s Olaf Liljekrans. Courtesy of Mary Moore and Ortelia

the auditorium and the stage picture minimisied the separation between the auditorium and the stage and drew the spectators into the fictional world. To demonstrate the stage machinery in our two VR theatres, Moore designed a single setting for the stage of each theatre. In Komediehuset, she created the set for Act One of Olaf Liljekrans, an early play by Henrik Ibsen that premiered at the theatre in 1857 (Fig. 3.3)7 (Ibsen, 1970); and on the Queen’s stage she placed a design for Act 5 of Shakespeare’s Othello, the play performed when the theatre opened in 1841 (Fig. 3.4). With a set-design installed on each of our virtual stages, the next task was to consider the lighting. Three lighting sources were relevant to our project: gas, candle, and oil. In 1841, the Queen’s auditorium was candle lit on the opening night as oil lamps were not fitted for another 6 months, though it is possible that the foot and wing lights were oil lamps (Solomon, n.d., 10 November 1840). Komediehuset installed gas light in 1856 but continued to use Argand oil lamps for special lighting effects. As the lumen and the quality of the white light produced by gas, candles and oil are dependent on the availability of fuel sources, our experiments were highly speculative. Even though we could not identify the types of gas produced in Bergen in the middle of the nineteenth century, we decided to use the VR model of Komediehuset for our first lighting experiment as the theatre archive contained a detailed plan drawn up by the gasfitter who installed the flares in the auditorium and

7

https://ibsenstage.hf.uio.no/pages/event/77883

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Fig. 3.4 Interior of Virtual Model of the Queen’s Theatre with Mary Moore’s Set for Othello. Courtesy of Mary Moore and Ortelia

on the stage.8 We adjusted the angles of the lamps, the reflectors, and the intensity of the footlights, wing-light, auditorium chandelier and wall fittings to achieve a balanced coverage and illuminate the avatars that stood in for actors on the virtual stage. The only way we could prevent distracting shadows on the avatar faces and the flat planes of the wings and backdrops was to make full use of the auditorium chandelier. The result was a balanced if somewhat dull lighting state, as a consequence, the scenic art was re-worked with stronger colour contrasts to increase the visual dynamic of the stage picture.9

Inside the Performance Laboratories Once the reconstructions of Komediehuset and the Queen’s were completed with stage designs and lighting on the virtual stages, we embarked on using the models as performance laboratories. Our task was to take archival evidence on the performance techniques used in Olaf Liljekrans by the company at Komediehuset, and in Othello

8 Installation plans drawn up by Bonge, the gas fitter, are held at The University Theatre Archives, University of Bergen. 9 Martin White estimates that lighting levels in theatres today are approximately 70 times greater than those at the Drottningholm Palace Theatre in Sweden, a major late eighteenth century candlelit European theatre. https://www.bristol.ac.uk/drama/jacobean/research3.html

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by the company at the Queen’s, and interpret these documents through experimentation inside the virtual environments. The actor-researchers were provided with biographical information and reviews for the performers in these companies, as well as extracts from nineteenth-century acting handbooks. They worked within the virtual models “as if” they were real theatres, suspending their disbelief and sensing the space as if it was a material place, treating its proportions and features as the raw materials to underpin performance choices. There was an impressive ease with which the actor-researchers responded physically to the architectural forms of the theatres and the fictional spaces on the stages. Yet despite the similarities in the proportions and layouts of the buildings, their responses to the two environments were markedly different. The intimacy of the auditorium floor and the simplicity of the square gallery in Komediehuset reminded them of a non-conformist church hall, while the formality of the proscenium design and their immersion in the two-dimensional scenic world on the stage encouraged them to echo the flatness of the wings and present their bodies as two-dimensional figures to the audience. In contrast, the extended proscenium at the Queen’s with its easily accessible doors for entrances and exits to the apron stage, encouraged a more fluid and rounded three-dimensional physicality.10 In both of the VR theatres, they responded to the architectural form of the venue and the spatial dynamics of the fictional worlds represented on the stages, and their decisions about where to position themselves were determined by the relationship to the spectators and access to the stage lighting. All this initial exploration was undertaken by one actor at a time wearing the VR headset with the rest of the team watching on a display screen as they navigated the digital environment. Although an actor immersed in the virtual environment had to use a wand to teleport around the stages and auditoria, and they could not open doors or sit on the virtual furniture, this lack of materiality did not inhibit their explorations until they attempted to assume a character. An actor’s perception of filling a theatre and contacting an audience is intricately connected to the use of the upper body, particularly the arms and hands. Gesture is so integral to a stage performance, and its presence in the actor’s peripheral vision so fundamental, that its absence was unnerving. Yet this obstacle was nothing in comparison to the absence of a second performer. Arguably, avatars could have been used to overcome the actorresearchers’ isolation in the models, but an avatar, however sophisticated in its design, cannot replace the subtlety and spontaneity of the physical signs passed between actors that create the reacting/acting cycle of stage performance. To compensate for the limitations of the VR models, we developed a working method that doubled the actor-researchers’ spatial reality: the dimensions of the stage and the set design were marked up in the usual way on the rehearsal room floor,

10 In the nineteenth century, the romantic theatre tradition in Britain was seen as less formal and declamatory than the continental equivalent. Working within the VR Queen’s suggested that the proscenium design and its framing of the downstage playing space may have been partially responsible for this different approach to the performance on mid-century Romantic theatre.

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while headsets offered instant access to the VR models. Inside the virtual theatres the actor-researchers sensed the space and considered how the architecture and stage machinery impacted on the characterisation described in the archive evidence. They used muscle memory to recall the solutions and strategies conceived inside the models and reproduced them in the rehearsal room as performance material to be shaped through interactive experimentation. This virtual praxis, combining conventional rehearsal room practices and immersion in VR theatre models, allowed the actor-researchers to test archival descriptions and illustrations in relation to architectural form, scenic conventions, and lighting technologies. Inside the performance laboratories, artificial static poses depicted in the illustration of mid-nineteenth-century characterisations became gestural highpoints in a fluid technique of stage movement that reflected the material conditions of the theatres. Encouraged by these early results, we turned our attention to the most elusive aspect of any lost performance: the relationship between the audience and the performers. To explore whether the VR theatre models could facilitate research into this relationship, we devised a series of actors/spectator interactions that might have occurred on the opening night of Othello at the Queen’s.11 There were two parts to the experiment. First, the actors had to embody the acting style of a mid-nineteenth century performance of Othello (see Tompkins and Xia, Chap. 2), and secondly, they had to embody the responses of an 1841 Adelaide audience. All the historical documentation suggests that early colonial Australian audiences judged the success of a tragedy by the emotional contagion from the stage. This culture of spectatorship had more in common with present day performances of nineteenth century opera where spectators are encouraged to indulge in the emotion created through the music and treat the plot as incidental to this experience. This was the theatrical contract that our actor-researchers were trying to reconstruct in their performance of scenes from Othello (Fig. 3.5). They took the performance style of the famous early nineteenth-century London actor Edmund Kean as their model. His performance as Othello was described by George Lewes, the author of a popular nineteenth-century handbook on acting, as having ‘the lion-like fury, the deep and haggard pathos, the forlorn sense of desolation alternating with gusts of stormy cries for vengeance, the misgivings and sudden reassurances, the calm and deadly resolution of one not easily moved, but who, being moved, was stirred to the very depths’ (30). Reviews of John Lazar, who played Othello at the Queen’s, suggest nothing like this emotional depth, but he would have attempted the emotive style of acting made popular by Kean for his interpretation of the dramatic highpoints of the play. To embody this emotive technique, our actors followed Lewes’ advice, to be ‘true to nature in the expression of natural emotions, although the technical conditions of the art forbid the expressions being exactly those of real life’ (Lewes, 1875: 120).

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https://www.ausstage.edu.au/pages/event/107928

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Fig. 3.5 Portrait of Mr. Edmund Kean as Othello; Whole length; Print on paper; “G. Creed del et sculp. Published Oct. 16, 1818 by G. Creed, 31, Exeter St., Strand.” Courtesy of V&A South Kensington

To interpret Lewes, our actors exaggerated the physiological changes in the body that are associated with strong emotions and could be described as “natural” and subjected them to the “technical conditions” by fitting them to the dimensions of the theatre, while positioning themselves to catch the light from the wing and footlights and ensuring that their gestural representation of emotion was visible throughout the auditorium. The physical contortions that were necessary to work within these constraints shaped their moving bodies in ways that echoed some of the frozen poses recorded in the images of Kean. The next step was to find out if they could produce an empathetic response in spectators while using this exaggerated

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expression of emotional states as it was not sufficient for their gestures and vocal technique to merely indicate feeling, they had to trigger feeling responses in spectators that synchronised with those represented on the stage. Through a process of trial and error the actor-researchers uncovered ways of using their voices, breathing, and animated gestures, to trigger emotional responses in their rehearsal room spectators, while still performing in a heightened mode that fitted descriptions of the mid-nineteenth-century actors performing Shakespeare. Only when they had succeeded in this task, did they move to the next stage of the experiment, which was to embody the physiological responses of the 1841 audience. To achieve this, they moved into the VR auditorium to explore the spatial relationship between the different seating areas of the theatre and the stage, they assessed the distance in each of these areas from the dramatic action; sensed the personal space or lack of it on benches and chairs; and considered how the experience of sitting or standing might have created a sense of community and shared experience among the spectators (Fig. 3.6). Using all this information they considered the levels of emotional engagement that was possible with the characters on the stage from the different seating areas. The next part of the process involved the actors translating the emotions they had embodied as the characters on the stage into a variety of empathetic responses from spectators. In the romantic theatre, spectators were immersed in the emotional contagion from the stage, whereas today, when spectators watch realist theatre, television, and film, they are encouraged to interpret expressions of emotion as a clue to the inner psychology of the fictional character. Inhabiting an audience from 1841 required our actor researchers to suspend their usual habits of spectatorship in dramatic theatre; they had to resist any tendency to treat the emotional outbursts of fictional characters as some Freudian signifier of trauma in the characters’ backstories or judge their behaviour as an appropriate or inappropriate response to the cause-and-effect sequence embedded in the plot. Instead, they had to interact with the emotional display on the stage by mirroring the physiological changes embodied by the actor and engaging with the possibility that similar feelings were being repeated and magnified by the mass of bodies in the auditorium. They had to replace the pleasure of knowing why the story was unfolding in a particular way, with the pleasure of feeling the story as an embodied experience. Yet there was another dimension to this spectatorial practice of sensory reception that gave it a critical edge. The newspaper reviews of the early performances at the Queen’s Theatre suggest that spectators followed conventions established in mid-century London neighbourhood theatres of vociferously showing their appreciation of the physical and vocal techniques used by actors to project feeling across the footlights.12 In summary, our actor researchers synchronised their feeling with the imagined early colonial actors and fellow spectators, while simultaneously registering and responding to the techniques used by the performers to engineer this

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For a fascinating study of audiences in London neighbourhood theatres, see Davis and Emeljanow (2005).

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Fig. 3.6 Different audience views of the Queen’s stage from the back and front of the pit (top), from one of the dress circle boxes (middle right), and from the upper gallery (middle left and bottom). Courtesy of Mary Moore and Ortelia

communal experience. A description of this process and an analysis of the possible responses of an audience at the Queen’s in 1841 to Othello contextualised by the early colonial history of the state and its frontier wars can be found in our forthcoming publication, Visualising Lost Theatres. We are still developing the technical capacity to display in a digital form our research findings on audience-performer interactions within the VR Queen’s theatre. While we have not pursued the use of avatars as substitutes for actors on the virtual stage, there are distinct advantages in using avatars to populate virtual auditoria as it is impossible to recreate past conditions of spectatorship with a present day audience. To build a virtual audience, we are using motion capture technology to reconstruct a lost culture of spectatorship by recording a repertoire of responses devised by our actor-researchers. These movement files are being played through

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hundreds of avatars crammed onto the benches in the VR Queen’s auditorium. The results from this experiment are encouraging; they suggest it may be possible to embody aspects of audience behaviour within our lost theatres.13 Our starting point being that audience behaviour is the expression of the subjectivities available to a community attached to a theatre. While archival material can be used to infer a connection between spectatorship and the history of subjectivity within a given culture, working with virtual technology allows us to embody archival documentation and test out critical assumptions. Inside our nineteenth-century lost theatres in Europe and its colonies, we are reconstructing a collective practice of spectating that relishes emotional contagion, in contrast to present day tendencies that individualise and interiorise responses as personal reflections. This shift echoes the gradual development of subjective interiority that accompanied European industrialisation. We are beginning to see connections between the identity spaces embodied by actors on the stage, historical changes in subjectivity as reflected in the social behaviour of audiences, and the reconfigurations of seating and décor in auditoria. The further we move from Europe and the nineteenth century, the greater the challenge that lies in researching the audience/performer relationship, notably, in The Rose, our late sixteenth-century VR model of lost theatre, and in the VR model of a bamboo temporary stage in southern China that was used to present opera at village festivals. In conclusion, the VR lost theatres represent the last in a series of digital humanities techniques that we have applied to performance research. Past projects involve a collaboration with a broad network of scholars to build an event database in Australia that record events from the rich history of our continent’s performance history, we have also cloned the schema from this database for international partners to facilitate research into the cultural transmission of performance across national boundaries. Using data visualisation techniques, we have mapped lines of cultural transmission and charted the connections between artists and live events across space and time with network analyses. Our recent investigations of sites of performance employing virtual reality to reconstruct lost theatres has allowed us to explore the importance of place and architecture in the evolution of performance genres and to experiment with techniques of embodying the archive. With the application of all these digital humanities techniques, we have been able to reassess, re-evaluate and reconceptualise our field of research. Our work with virtual reality technology is still tentative and exploratory, but it is already creating new knowledge about the history of social gathering dedicated to the creation and reception of fictional worlds.

References Anonymous. (1841a, Jan 8 Friday). Queen’s theatre. Southern Australian (Adelaide). Anonymous. (1841b, April 24). Queen’s theatre. South Australian Register, p. 3.

13

See Chapter 3 in Tompkins et al. (forthcoming).

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Anonymous. (1990). Queens theatre site. Conservation study (Vol. 1). Prepared by Heritage Group for Austral Archaeology. Unpublished. Blytt, P. (1907). Minder fra den første norske scene i Bergen i 1850-aarene. Fr. Nygaard. Camp, P. (2014). The first frame: Theatre space in enlightenment France. Cambridge University Press. Davis, J., & Emeljanow, V. (2005). Reflecting the audience: London Theatregoing, 1840–1880. University of Iowa Press. Gjervan, E. K. (2010). Creating theatrical space: A study of Henrik Ibsen’s production books, Bergen 1852–1857. PhD dissertation, University of Bergen, Norway. Universitetet i Bergen. Gjervan, E. K. (2011). Ibsen staging Ibsen: Henrik Ibsen’s culturally embedded staging practice in Bergen. Ibsen Studies, 11(2), 117–144. Gjervan, E. K. (2012). Henrik Ibsen’s two stage renderings. Ibsen Studies, 12(2), 89–102. Ibsen, H. (1970/1856). Olaf Liljekrans. In J. W. McFarlane & G. Orton (Eds. & Trans.), The Oxford Ibsen volume I. Early plays (pp. 459–554) . Oxford University Press. Leacroft, R. (1973). The Development of the English playhouse. Methuen. Lewes, G. H. (1875). On actors and the art of acting. Smith, Elder. Mackintosh, I. (1993). Architecture, actor and audience. Routledge. Solomon, E. (n.d.). Letter book of Emanuel Solomon, 1840–1846. D7922(L). State Library of South Australia. Southern, R. (1951). Changeable scenery: Its origin and development in the British theatre. Faber and Faber. Southern, R. (1962). Rediscovery of the theatre. In R. Southern & I. Brown (Eds.), The Georgian Theatre, Richmond, Yorkshire: The story of the theatre (pp. 3–13). Georgian Theatre Richmond Trust. Thorne, R. (1995). Queen’s theatre. In P. Parsons & V. Chance (Eds.), Companion to theatre in Australia (pp. 471–472). Currency Press. Tompkins, J., Holledge, J., Bollen, J., & Xia, L. (2022). Visualising lost theatres: Virtual praxis and the recovery of performance spaces. Cambridge University Press.

Website AusStage. (2003–2021). www.ausstage.edu.au IbsenStage. (2021). https://ibsenstage.hf.uio.no

Julie Holledge, FAHA, has a PhD and BA (Hons) from Bristol University (UK) and is Professor Emerita in Drama at Flinders University. She has published extensively in the field of women’s performance and is author of Innocent Flowers: Women in Edwardian Theatre (Virago 1981); co-author of Women’s Intercultural Performance (Routledge 2000) and A Global Doll’s House: Ibsen and Distant Visions (Palgrave 2016); and co-editor of Ibsen Between Cultures (Novus Forlag 2016) and Ibsen on Theatre (Nick Hern 2018). As the Chief Investigator with AusStage, the Australian national performing arts research infrastructure project, she has pioneered e-research methodologies in the field of theatre studies. Her current work with the Visualising Lost Theatres project brings together her interest in the application of digital technologies to theatre historiography, her doctoral research into techniques of nineteenth century performance, 30 years of experience training actors and directors, and her research into the global production of plays by Henrik Ibsen.

Chapter 4

Stardust Orientalism, Virtual Praxis and Digital Construction: “Madame Butterfly” on Ice at the Stardust Hotel, Las Vegas, 1959 Jonathan Bollen

Abstract Ca C’est L’Amour, the 1959 production of the Lido de Paris revue at the Stardust Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas, included an interpretation of Madame Butterfly, performed on ice, as part of a three-part segment depicting scenes from traditional and modern Japan. While there is little that (now) seems Japanese about the performance, the overarching spatial-narrative locates Las Vegas at the centre, mid-way between Paris (as origin) and Tokyo (as destination), on an East-West map of world entertainment. Ca C’est L’Amour attracted an estimated audience of 800,000, drawn from the mobile, middle-class of predominantly white America, at a time when the spectacle of nuclear tests was attracting tourists to Las Vegas. This chapter explores the historical significance of “Madame Butterfly” at the Stardust by interrogating documentation (written reviews, photographs, 16 mm film) within a three-dimensional virtual-reality model of the venue. Applied to an investigation of this scene, the methods of digital venue construction and virtual performance praxis frame the Stardust’s orientalism as an international assemblage of industrial materiel. If, as Daisuke Miyao argues, “an important function of such a melodrama as Madame Butterfly was to contain the horror of modernity”—specifically, from an American perspective, “the rapid modernization and imperialistic expansion of Japan”—then an investigation of “Madame Butterfly” on ice at the Stardust in Las Vegas reveals the capture of the figure’s flow within a closed-circuit economy of hydraulic machinery, refrigeration equipment, electronic communications, amplified sound, projected lighting, synthetic fabrics, and artistic capital. Keywords Cold War · Digital materiality · Feminised image · Hollywood · Madame Butterfly · Puccini · Stardust Hotel Las Vegas · Stardust Orientalism · The exotic · Virtual praxis

J. Bollen (✉) School of the Arts and Media, University of New South Wales, Sydney, NSW, Australia e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2023 K.-k. Tam (ed.), Performance Arts: Research in the Age of Digital Revolution, Digital Culture and Humanities 4, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-19-9213-1_4

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Ca C’est L’Amour, the 1959 production of the Lido de Paris revue at the Stardust Hotel in Las Vegas, included an interpretation of Madame Butterfly, performed on ice by skater Marjii Lee, accompanied by arias from Puccini’s opera.1 The ice-skating formed part of “L’Amour Exotique,” a three-part sequence that also included “Au Pays des Ivoires,” a parade in costume of “old Japan,” and “Fantaisie Japonaise,” a dance of “modern Japan” performed by the Lido company. While there is little that (now) seems recognisably Japanese about the sequence, the spatial narrative of “L’Amour Exotique,” stretching across the world, locates Las Vegas at the centre, mid-way between Paris (as origin, the past) and Tokyo (as destination, the future), on an East-West map of entertainment. The Lido revue played at the Stardust from June 1959, giving fifteen shows a week in a theatre which seated around 750 people in a tiered cabaret formation. By October 1960, when the next edition of the Lido revue took over, Ca C’est L’Amour had attracted an estimated audience of 800,000. The Stardust audience were drawn from the mobile, middle-class of predominantly white America, at a time when the spectacle of nuclear tests was attracting tourists to Las Vegas. The “Madame Butterfly” sequence on ice is documented in written reviews, photographs, and a film shot in black-and-white during performances for the audience. This chapter explores the significance of the performance by interrogating the documentation within a three-dimensional virtual-reality reconstruction of the venue. Applied to an investigation of this scene, the methods of digital modelling and virtual performance reveal the Stardust’s orientalism as an international assemblage of industrial materiel.

Digital Materiel The English appropriation of the word “materiel” from the French is primarily associated with the military, where the word refers to the equipment and supplies used by an army or navy, “as distinguished from the personnel or body of people employed” (OED, 2001). This military usage is relevant to this chapter, which seeks to locate an analysis of performance at the Stardust within the international relations of military power, shaped by the past conflict of the Pacific War between America and Japan, and the ascendancy of America as a nuclear power during the Cold War. Distinguishing “equipment and supplies” from “the body of people employed” is equally relevant to the production of theatre, conceptualised as an assemblage of energetic bodies and material objects. In Real Theatre, for instance, Paul Rae draws on “assemblage theory to register the active roles played by nonhuman entities in the creation of theatrical events” (23) and trace “the interrelations of forces, agents,

1

Following the typographical conventions of the American sources on which I draw, this chapter refers to Ca C’est L’Amour and Madame Butterfly in their Anglicised form: Ca without cedilla; Madame rather than Madama.

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meanings, and affects” in performance (157) (Rae, 2019). Other meanings of “materiel” in English are also relevant for a study of theatre informed by materialist thinking. “Materiel” may refer to the “mechanical or formal part of an art,” to an artist’s “technique,” and to “that which is worked on or made use of in the course of any undertaking” (OED). “Materiel,” in these senses, is matter energised by action, both material technique and mechanical force. It may, then, seem counterintuitive to propose that digital methods of venue construction and virtual approaches to performance could yield a materialist analysis of performance from the past. Digital technologies have often been framed by narratives of disembodiment; digitisation is pitched as a dematerialising process that transforms matter into energy, liberating information from material substrates, releasing spirit-souls from their corporeal casings, and proliferating amorphous metaphors like Ethernet, cyberspace, virtuality, immersion and the cloud. Marianne van den Boomen and colleagues describe this conception as “digital mysticism,” an ideology of “technological determinism” which envisages the digital as “ontologically immaterial” (8) (van den Boomen et al., 2009). They propose, in response, a turn towards “digital materiality,” emphasising “the incorporation of the virtual into the material world” and recognising the digital as “stuff which may defy immediate physical contact, yet which is incorporated in materiality rather than floating as a metaphysical substance in virtual space” (9). Their “material understanding of digital artefacts” seeks to reveal the “dynamic connections between discourses, social appropriation, and technological design” (10) in an approach that aligns well with a materialist concept of theatre as a vibrant assemblage of bodies, objects and energies.2 In researching the showroom at the Stardust Hotel as a venue for the Lido de Paris revue, I drew on a range of archival material with which theatre historians often work. In this case, the materials include architectural plans, interior designs, theatre programs, press reviews, publicity, photographs and film.3 In particular, the blackand-white film from 1959, intercutting scenes of the Lido revue on stage at the Stardust with segments of the action backstage, provides an invaluable record of the performance, since there is no extensive collection of company records from the period, and apparently no extant written script, musical score or call sheets for the production. Across previous research projects in theatre history, I have applied various interpretive methods for assembling archival evidence to inform an analysis of performance from the past. Some of these methods seek to imaginatively re-animate performance by arranging artefacts in series, so that an illustrated story, for instance, energises a sequence of archival photographs of performance. In research on the Stardust, however, I adopted a different method. In addition to arranging artefacts in series to inform an analysis of performance, I used the Other accounts of ‘digital materiality’ are developed by Sarah Pink, Elisenda Ardèvol and Dèbora Lanzeni in Digital Materialities: Design and Anthropology and Fabio Gramazio and Matthias Kohler in Digital Materiality in Architecture (Gramazio & Kohler, 2008; Pink et al., 2016). 3 I undertook research on the Stardust as part of a collaborative project with Joanne Tompkins, Julie Holledge and Liyang Xia, published as Visualising Lost Theatres: Virtual Praxis and the Recovery of Performance Spaces (Tompkins et al., 2022). 2

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Fig. 4.1 Building the Stardust model in SketchUp with plans from Special Collections, University of Nevada, Las Vegas Libraries. Screenshot of model by Jonathan Bollen

evidence to build a virtual venue: a full-scale, three-dimensional, digital model of the Stardust showroom.4 Building the model of the Stardust showroom entails working most closely with architectural plans and interior designs (Fig. 4.1).5 But it also involves looking to other artefacts for evidence of an architectural kind. Over the course of the building process, I extrapolate the virtual construction into three-dimensions from floor plans, reflected ceilings, and side elevations drawn up by the architects. I translate the composition of intersecting lines and curves, drafted in pencil on paper using a ruler, compass and French curves, into planar surfaces and complex forms, set in threedimensional space using trackpad, mouse-pointer and keyboard. I also use photographs and film to approximate measurements and other details of construction missing from the architectural plans, and to determine the relative dimensions of elements from discontinuous series of measurements, distributed across the plans, or inferred from intersections in the model, including the relative elevation of stage, 4

The digital model of the Stardust showroom is available online at https://losttheatres.net. I used SketchUp 3D design software in building the model of the Stardust. The model is then translated by Ortelia into Autodesk Maya to create a format of the model suitable for use with the HTC Vive VR headset. 5 The digital model of the Stardust showroom draws on architectural plans and interior designs from collections at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, and Columbia University, New York. The Martin Stern Architectural Records include designs for the stage, fly-tower, dressing rooms, and showroom drawn by Jack Miller and Associates in Las Vegas on plans dated March–June 1958 (Stardust Hotel and Casino Flat Files 760–762, University of Nevada Las Vegas Library, Special Collections, MS00382). The Jac Lessman collection includes interior designs for the Stardust showroom drawn up at the same time in New York (Jac Lessman architectural records and papers, Drawings & Archives, Avery Architectural and Fine Arts Library, Columbia University, 1997.005).

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dressing rooms, staircases, podiums, and multi-tiered terraces across the showroom. As the model takes shape, as the walls are drawn up, the roof is installed, and the interior spaces are formed, I am able to trace the flow of performers, scenic elements, and stage machinery around the stage. Working with the film as evidence of action on stage and backstage, I am able to find where the segments of action fit within the venue, and then imaginatively retrace the missing flow between them. I am also able to map the camera positions within the showroom, control booths and other vantage points used in filming the performance, while distinguishing the camera’s points-ofview from the perspectives of the spectators seated across the showroom. This series of determinations illustrates how evidence of the performance inform the model’s instantiation of architectural plans. Segments of film showing how performers flow onto the stage, how the ice-rink rolls off the elevator beneath the stage, or how technicians backstage communicate cues to activate the elevators provide evidence that informs how the model of the building takes shape. In the model-building process, both the architectural evidence and the performance documentation are integrated as materiel “worked on” and “made use of” so that the materiality of the digital model incorporates the trace-forms of action from the performance. Reflecting on the “haptic insights” that emerge within the practice of “model making as historical methodology,” Cat Fergusson Baugh describes how “the computer provides a kind of structured pedantry” that requires the researcher to account for each element added to the design, “either through direct reference to source material or by proposition and hypothesis” (90). For Fergusson Baugh, “the processes of computer reconstruction” could be termed “re-enactment” given how closely it retraces the architect’s craft, “as the researcher not only asks what the architect did but also why and (crucially) how” (90). In modelling the Stardust, I felt I was likewise “re-enacting” the crafts of architect, engineer and builder working on the venue, and then working variously as stage manager, designer, choreographer and director to bring the performance imaginatively (back) to life. In reflecting on the historical epistemology of model making, Fergusson Baugh draws a distinction from Tim Ingold’s anthropology of “thinking through making,” which she characterises as an approach to “evidence as material rather than object” (94) (Ingold, 2013). For Ingold, material represents potential, open to transformation, whereas objects are fixed within narratives, known in advance. In a formulation for anthropology, archaeology, architecture and art, Ingold proposes that approaching evidence as material “is about bringing things back to life” (20). It follows, then, for Fergusson Baugh, that “[t]o treat evidence as material rather than object is to admit that even when distanced by time, the relationship between artefacts and the history that they represent remains vital and dynamic” (94) (Fergusson Baugh, 2018). Elsewhere, with colleagues on the Visualising Lost Theatres project, I have written about the “vital and dynamic” relation between performance and venue that becomes open to performance research in theatre history through “virtual praxis” with artists using virtual reality technology to perform “inside” the digital

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models of lost theatres we have built.6 In this chapter, using the digital model of the Stardust showroom as an example, I address the “history” that is represented by the artefacts used in building a digital model of the venue. Two observations about the process are worth making at the outset. The first is that the history of any venue is multiple, composed of many strands of materiality threaded together. In reconstructing lost theatres, we are fascinated by the array of historical materiel drawn into the orbit as research, after adopting an artefact-led orientation towards model construction. Reconstructing the Stardust, for instance, entailed historical research into building codes, water-flow metrics, refrigeration, fireworks, furniture design, nylon production, mid-century paint colours, hydraulic engineering, transistorisation, casino economics, transatlantic flights, the Argentine film industry, British pantomime, American tourism, hydro-electric power, atomic testing, and more—all of these threads are drawn in to form the materiality of the Stardust showroom as a venue for performance. The second observation is that modelling a theatre, both as a building constructed from an array of material strands, and as a venue hosting the dynamic assemblage of performance, casts the construction in material terms as a hub within an expansive network, a dense site of convergence, an intense knot where energy and matter converge. Even though the work on modelling the venue is digital, the process of reconstruction is material, as are the artefacts upon which it draws, and the knot within multiple histories that the venue forms. For just as the materiality of the venue is informed by the dynamism of the performance, the actuality of performance is informed by the materiality of the world. One emerging prospect of a digital-materialist approach to theatre history may be to shift the analytical relation between performance and the world. The analytical relation between performance and the world has often been rendered in representational terms: cut out from its context, the performance in some way represents the world that surrounds it or depicts an image of how that world could be. But rather than an image of the world reflected in performance, a digital-materialist approach may reconfigure the relation between performance and the world along the lines of figure to ground: the performance comes into focus within a perceptual field, continuous in its material extension with the world around it, made of the same stuff yet perceptually distinguished by its presentation on stage. In relation to performance at the Stardust, the orientalism of Madame Butterfly provides an example of this shift. In a studying how a feminised image of Japanese obedience, generated on European stages and popularised by Hollywood film, was “nationalised” by female stars in Japanese cinema, Daisuke Miyao observes how the character of Cio-Cio-San in Puccini’s Madame Butterfly functioned melodramatically to contain the threat of Japan’s military expansion in the early 1900s: “The ideological nature of the melodramatic narrative of Madame Butterfly was to make sense of the rapid

See Bollen, Holledge and Tompkins, “Putting Virtual Theatre Models to Work,” where we report on our virtual praxis “inside” digital models of lost theatres with artists using HTC Vive and Oculus Quest VR headsets (Bollen et al., 2021).

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modernisation and imperialistic expansion of Japan and to contain the modernising nation within the image of an obedient and self-sacrificing female living in a premodern space” (155; emphasis added) (Miyao, 2014). By comparison, a digital-materialist analysis of “Madame Butterfly” on ice at the Stardust in the 1950s, along the lines set out in this chapter, captures the skating figure’s choreographic flow within a closed-circuit economy of hydraulic machinery, refrigeration equipment, and synthetic fabrics held together by international aviation, electronic communications, and the postwar relay of military-industrial capital into the development of tourism, entertainment and trade between America and Japan. In other words, the materiel that is worked on to make up the performance at the Stardust is coextensive with the international relations that are structuring the world during the Cold War. What follows, then, is an analysis of “L’Amour Exotique,” the sequence of Ca C’est L’Amour at the Stardust in which “Madame Butterfly” on ice appears.7 What distinguishes the approach is that the artefacts that document the performance are analyzed as evidence in the process of reconstructing a digital model of the venue. The effect is to reveal the dynamic interaction between the energies of performing and the materiality of the building at points that are continuous in their extension with the world but could otherwise seem marginal to analysis. They include: the transport mechanism that brings the ice rink to the stage; the synthetic fabrics that dancers swirl to fill the spectacle on stage; and a trapdoor-and-staircase modification, cut into the stage floor, and installed specifically for Ca C’est L’Amour.

“Madame Butterfly” on Ice The “Madame Butterfly” ice ballet in Ca C’est L’Amour was performed on the “Great Ice Stage.” In actuality, this was a small ice rink, 30 ft by 15 ft (9.14 by 4.57 m), set in the stage apron, its rear edge parallel with the proscenium. The rink is elevated to stage level by hydraulic lifts in the basement. When not in use, the rink is stored in a cavity beneath the stage apron, where a refrigeration unit keeps the ice frozen. During the performance, the hydraulic lifts lower a portion of the stage floor to the basement; stagehands roll the rink onto lowered floor, and the rink is then elevated to stage level for the ice skating routine. As the routine ends, the process is reversed: the ice rink is lowered, rolled back into its cavity, and the hydraulic lifts return the lowered floor to stage level. The action of the stage machinery is coordinated with the flow of performers and scenic elements on the stage. When the rink is elevated, it carries the ice skater Marjii Lee and eight attendants in costume to the stage, along with a lattice-work temple gate and potted blossoms, while a slatted backdrop with a cherry blossom motif descends behind. Lee skates to 7

A shortened version of this analysis is included in Visualising Lost Theatres, chapter 5, where it forms part of a broader argument about tourism, choreography, and the design of attraction at the Stardust Hotel.

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Fig. 4.2 Marjii Lee as Madame Butterfly on ice, Ca C’est L’Amour, Stardust Hotel, Las Vegas, c. 1959 (Special Collections, University of Nevada, Las Vegas, Libraries; copyright owner is not known)

the aria, “Un bel di, vedremo” from Madame Butterfly and other musical excerpts from Puccini’s opera (Fig. 4.2). The singers, Beverly Richards as “La voix de Butterfly” and Jack Rains as Lieutenant Pinkerton, perform from the elevated auxiliary stage at stage-left, with the orchestra playing from the opposite auxiliary stage at stage-right. But why present “Madame Butterfly” on ice? On the one hand, the butterfly makes evident a long-running association between flying and skating, based on the affinity of gliding as a quality of motion.8 An eighteenth century treatise on ice skating named one figure the “Flying Mercury,” after the winged messenger of Greco-Roman mythology (Jones, 1772).9 On the other hand, serving anything on ice in Las Vegas was an engineering feat, demonstrating the modern convenience of the Stardust as a casino-resort offering an artificial oasis of entertainment in a desert environment. An ice-rink on the Stardust stage extended the air of refreshment afforded by the resort’s air conditioning, refrigerated food, chilled drinks, and swimming pool. It also demonstrated American achievement. Jonathan Rees recounts the significance of American enterprise and engineering in the world history of refrigeration (49), while the history of ice skating in Japan has been 8 In the terms of Laban movement analysis, the effort-action of gliding is defined by space: direct, time: sustained, weight: light. 9 See also Hines, Figure Skating in the Formative Years, on the history of ice skating (Hines, 2015).

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recounted, in part, through a series of American interventions (“An Early History”) (Rees, 2013; Skate Guard Blog, 2015). American enterprise is also credited with transforming ice-skating into commercial entertainment, exemplified by Sonja Henie, the world-champion figure skater from Norway, who transitioned to a successful career in Hollywood film and touring ice revue (Henie, Henie; Pedersen, 2016). By the 1950s, Henie’s “41 equined and bejewelled costumes, her use of toe-steps, her wide-eyed, cutesy, doll-like appearance” had popularised “figure skating as a feminine form of dancing on ice, rather than a competitive sport” (Adams, 2010: 237). The inclusion of ice skating at the Stardust in the Lido de Paris revue inherited Henie’s style through a series of associations with producer Arthur Wirtz and the Hollywood Ice Revue, which toured annually as a star-vehicle for Henie, 1937–1951, and continued touring without her, 1952–1956 (“Sonja Henie’s Ice Show”, 1937; “Sonja Henie Who Made”, 1951; “Wirtz Freezing”, 1956e). Jacqueline du Bief, who skated at the Stardust in the first Lido revue, was a world champion figure skater from France; she had toured America in 1952 for a rival revue in Ice Capades; she then skated with Hennie’s troupe in Europe in 1953 and toured between Europe and America with various troupes until 1957 (“Button Paces”, 1952a; “Wirtz Signs”, 1953c; “Hollywood Ice Revue”, 1953b; “Sportspalast, Berlin”, 1956d). Marjii Lee, who performed as “Madame Butterfly” in the Lido’s second Stardust revue, was also well-known on the ice revue circuits. She had first skated at the Lido in Paris in 1952 (as Margie Lee), then at Chicago’s Conrad Hilton Hotel in 1953–1954, and on an American tour with Wirth’s Hollywood Ice Revue, 1955–1956, before returning to the Lido in Paris for 1956–1957 (“Lido, Paris”, 1952b; “Conrad Hilton”, 1953a; “Wirtz Ice Show”, 1955b; “Hollywood Ice Revue”, 1956a; “Lido, Paris”, 1956b). On the ice stage at the Stardust in Las Vegas, Lee first skates in a kimono with flowing sleeves creating the illusion of butterfly wings as she spins in a fluid motionimage reminiscent of Loie Fuller’s “Serpentine Dance” (Fuller, 1913; Nelson & Ewing, 1997). She then removes the kimono to continue skating in a leotard. Lee’s routine is impressive, given the limited space of the rink on stage, combining difficult jumps and spins, including Illusion and Butterfly spins, which were also performed by du Bief.10 Towards the end of the routine, after stepping off the rink to acknowledge the applause, Lee returns to the ice where she is assisted back into her kimono. She continues to skate, concluding with a slow and sustained spin, while “gently as a feather, the four-ton ice rink is lowered into the basement below” (“Stardust Hotel 1959”). Under the spotlight, Lee’s descent is an image that symbolises the suicide of Cio-Cio-San.

Assistance with analysis of figure skating provided by Jack Hong. Dick Button attributes the Illusion spin to Jacqueline du Bief. Du Bief is photographed performing a Butterfly spin at the Empire Pool, Wembley, London (“Sequinned Butterfly”, 1956c; Button, 1955). 10

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Synthetic Fabrics In the program for Ca C’est L’Amour, the “Madame Butterfly” scene is the centrepiece of a three-part sequence called “L’Amour Exotique.” This is an orientalist fantasy in which the imperial encounter between America and Japan, as enacted in the operatic story of Madame Butterfly and Lieutenant Pinkerton, is sandwiched between scenes depicting old and new Japan. Traditional Japan is presented in “Au Pays des Ivoires,” a masked procession in which the Bluebell Girls and the Lido models, dressed in masks, wigs and ivory-coloured costumes represent iconic characters from medieval Japan. Appearing as geisha, samurai and merchants, they enter across a bridge upstage, and process downstage around the apron, skirting around the gap in the stage, where the floor has descended on the elevator for the ice rink to appear. Modern Japan, by contrast, is a futuristic scene, designated “Fantaisie Japonaise,” with a hectic city-scape score, rich in percussion. The Bluebell Girls in sunburstpleated capes and fans in hand, perform an angular dance with the male Arden Dancers dressed as bellhops. After the dancers have left the stage, the models in fashion gowns begin walking down, each with a birdcage balanced on her head. They mill around as tenor John Juliano, bare-chested as “L’Empereur” in a short kimono, sings a love ballad—“From one day when I found you, Till today when you are my own, From this day you‘ll not be alone, From this day on my heart beats for you”.11 The dancers then re-enter in swirling capes and the scene concludes with a flourish of fans and flowing fabric. In comparison with the orientalism of Japanese tradition in “Au Pays des Ivoires,” the modernity of Japan seems barely recognisable in the costumed scenography of “Fantaisie Japonaise”—beyond, perhaps, the spectacle of fans and sunburst pleats. Yet picking up the thread of argument, after Miyao has proposed that a function of the melodrama was “to contain the horror of modernity” (155) represented by a modernising, expansionist and imperialistic Japan, one may discern how the styling of the Lido’s fantasy of modern Japan in synthetic fabrics presents in a material form the ascendency of the industrial-military complex in Eisenhower’s United States as the dominant partner in postwar relations with Japan. Competition in the industrial production of synthetic fibers had shaped relations between America and Japan during the Pacific War. Constrained imports of Japanese silk spurred the war-time production of Nylon by DuPont in the United States—first, for parachutes for the army, and, secondly, for stockings to sell to women (Wolfe, 2008; Kativa, 2016). In the early 1950s, DuPont’s promotion of synthetic fibers for fashion textiles focused on collaborations with haute couture fashion houses in Paris. The uptake of DuPont fabrics initially by Christian Dior and Hubert de Givenchy was so successful that “by 1958, Pierre Balmain, Coco Chanel, Pierre

11

Juliano, who came to Las Vegas from Broadway to appear in Ca C’est L’Amour, had created the role of the Kralahome (Prime Minister) in Rodgers and Hammerstein’s The King and I; hence, his bare-chested costume recalls Yul Brynner’s appearance in the 1951 musical and 1956 film (Las Vegas Motion Pictures, 2019).

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Cardin, Jean Desses, Jacques Heim, Lanvin Castillo, Guy Laroche, Jean Patou, Nina Ricci, and Yves St. Laurent all used fabrics made from DuPont fibers, including rayon, acetate, nylon, acrylic, and polyester” (Blaszczyk, 2006: 511). On stage in Las Vegas, the yards of synthetic fabric, presumably American-made, frame the Stardust’s orientalism as an international assemblage of military-industrial materiel, even as Japan ramped up production of synthetic fibers, becoming second only to the United States by 1956 (Hirano, 2013: 87).

“A Transnational Mix” By the mid-1950s, interest in Japanese style was widespread across American entertainment, as an aspect of the “Cold War Orientalism” described by Christina Klein (2003). Across news reportage, popular journalism and Hollywood film, Naoko Shibusawa documents how postwar American culture generated new images of Japan, transforming the former war-time enemy into an “acceptable ally” whose interests aligned with American foreign policy during the Cold War (9) (Shibusawa, 2006). In a chapter on Hollywood’s sentimental promotion of friendship between America and Japan, Shibusawa draws particular attention to Sayonara, the Warner Brothers movie adaptation of James Michener’s novel with Marlon Brando and Miiko Taka, filmed on location in Japan and launched in December 1957 with a record-setting $2 million publicity campaign (“Sayonara Plans”, 1957c). In awe of Sayonara’s success, Variety promoted the popularity of Japanese style in entertainment for audiences across America: “The so-called ‘Japan Room’ in the U.S. is no figment of a press agent’s pipe dream. It is real. ‘Sayonara’ was boffo b.o. [box office] and three productions with Oriental backgrounds are skedded [scheduled] for Broadway this season” (Jampel, 1958). These Japanese productions heading to America included the Takarazuka revue (which toured the United States in 1959), kabuki from Shochiku (which toured in 1960), and the Bunraku-za from Osaka (which toured in 1962).12 As expressions of international friendship, racial tolerance, and cross-cultural encounter, Hollywood films like Sayonara resulted in “works of self-contradiction, a transnational mix of the exotic and the authentic,” as Ken Provencher explains: Sayonara sought “not to capture ‘authenticity’ as defined by the actuality of a Japanese location but to frame locations as authentically—that is to say, exotically— Japanese” (40, 44) (Provencher, 2014). In directing Sayonara, Joshua Logan also made a feature of Japanese theatre, with the American characters attending performances of no, kabuki, bunraku, and a female revue company modelled on Takarazuka. Logan had previously played a prominent role in the promotion of

12

The American impresarios and agents negotiating tours with theatre companies in Japan included Sol Hurok, Tom Ball, and Maurice Valency; see Park on Takarazuka (Park, 2015); Thornbury on Shochiku (Thornbury, 2008).

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kabuki tours to the United States in 1954 and 1955–1956, and he had given prominent roles in Sayonara to Japanese and Japanese-American actors, Miyoshi Umeki and Miiko Taka. Yet he cast the Mexican-American actor, Ricardo Montalbán, in the role of a famous Japanese kabuki actor, much as Brando in yellow-face had impersonated an Okinawan interpreter in the film of Teahouse of the August Moon in 1956 (Kitamura, 2020). A “transnational mix of the exotic and the authentic” may also describe the material threads woven into the presentation of “Madame Butterfly” on ice, linking the Stardust in Las Vegas to Paris via New York, and through Hollywood to Tokyo in Japan. One thread begins in anticipation of Sayonara’s success with an ice revue in New York. Evidently inspired by the forthcoming movie, Ice Capades opened its 1957 winter revue at Madison Square Garden in September with a “Madame Butterfly” sequence based on Puccini’s opera. In another thread, Margie Lee (as she was then billed) began skating as “Madame Butterfly” on ice in Paris for Donn Arden’s production of Prestige which opened at the Lido in December 1957: “The ice skating rink is neatly layercaked in for a Japanese motif number, with Margi [sic] Lee floating about shedding kimonos while she essays Mme. Butterfly” (“Lido, Paris”, 1957b). This was no coincidence: the set designer for Ice Capades in New York was Harvey Warren, who also designed settings for the Lido at the Stardust in Las Vegas. Warren and Arden were long-term collaborators; they had worked together with producer Frank Sennes at the Desert Inn in Las Vegas since 1952, and at the Moulin Rouge in Hollywood, formerly the Earl Carroll Theatre, which Sennes took over in 1954. In comparison with the contradictions of Japanese location in Hollywood films like Sayonara, the producers of theatrical revue in America were initially satisfied to amplify the orientalism of Japanese style. Photographs from Toujour Paris, an around-the-world travelogue revue at Sennes’s Moulin Rouge in Hollywood, even suggest that Arden and Warren’s traditional-to-modern design concept for “L’Amour Exotique” at the Stardust had previously been realised as “La Grande Muraille de China” in 1955. One photograph shows a Chinese traditional scene reminiscent of “Au Pays des Ivoires” at the Stardust with umbrellas, lanterns and fans; another shows a Chinese modern scene with birdcage headdresses, half-draped capes, and a multi-level setting that would re-appear at the Stardust in “Fantaisie Japonaise” (“Moulin Rouge”, 1955a).13 Arden and Warren’s innovation in staging at the Stardust—not possible on the revolving stage at the Moulin Rouge, nor part of the Lido revue in Paris—was to cut a trapdoor, 9 ft by 4 ft (2.74 × 1.21 m), in the upstage elevating section of the stage floor, and install a staircase for the Bluebell models to enter from the basement and then pose upon in tableau as the stage section was elevated. With this material remodelling of the Stardust stage, Arden and

13 The photographs from Toujours Paris appear in souvenir program, Moulin Rouge, Hollywood, c. 1956, in Donn Arden Collection, UNLV Special Collections, MS00425. Box 3. Warren is credited for stage settings and/or art direction on eleven of Donn Arden’s twelve Lido productions at the Stardust between 1958 and 1991 (Donn Arden Collection, n.d.).

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Warren built the set-scaffold for staging a multi-tiered tableau-backdrop to their fantasy concoction of contemporary Japan.14 In contrast with the exoticism of the Stardust’s orientalist Japan, other producers of entertainment for audiences in American began attributing the value of authenticity to companies of artists touring from Japan. In the months between Ice Capades opening with “Madame Butterfly” in New York and Margie Lee skating as Madame Butterfly in Paris, Frank Sennes sent his talent agent, Tom Ball, to Tokyo with the task of signing a cast of performers for a Japanese revue to open at the Desert Inn, Las Vegas, in November (“Vegas Scout”, 1957d). In fact, Arden was initially announced as producer for Geisha Girls, as he was the Desert Inn’s most prominent producer, although Ball is credited as producer when it opens, since Arden was in Paris working at the Lido (“Desert Inn”, 1957a). By the time the Lido at the Stardust was performing “Madame Butterfly” on ice within its portrait of “old and new Japan,” the rival New Frontier hotel and casino along the Las Vegas strip was presenting Holiday in Japan, an imported revue with 60 artists touring from Japan, brought to the United States by Steve Parker, husband-producer of Hollywood actress Shirley MacLaine (“New Frontier”, 1959c).15 Holiday in Japan was reviewed as one of the “Big Three of the imports” in Las Vegas, competing successfully with the Lido de Paris at the Stardust and the Folies Bergere at the Tropicana (“Chatter”, 1959a; Scully, 1959). In particular, Holiday in Japan was favoured: its “package sparkles because of its good taste and authority, in contrast to the somewhat nondescript Oriental Fantasy, quasi-Japanese revue at Frank Sennes’s Moulin Rouge, in Hollywood,” where Tom Ball had revived his formula from the Desert Inn (Green, 1960; “Moulin Rouge”, 1959b). When Holiday in Japan toured on to further engagements at the Latin Quarter nightclub in New York in August– September 1960, and to other cities across the United States and Canada, the New Frontier replaced it with Oriental Holiday, a revue with a mix of Japanese, Chinese and Asian-American artists, which later transferred to the Pigalle nightclub in London (“New Frontier”, 1960).

Conclusion In an essay on the 1956 film, The Teahouse of the August Moon, Hiroshi Kitamura argues that “existing scholarship largely treats U.S. Orientalism as a ‘national’ construction that was produced and consumed by ‘Americans’ in the United States” (268). Rather than study Teahouse within “a ‘domestic’ bubble,” Kitamura argues for “the positioning of Orientalist texts in an international and transnational 14 The plans for the trapdoor are detailed in Stardust Hotel Stage Remodel, Jack Miller and Associates, architectural plan, 28 May 1959, UNLV Special Collections, MS00382 Stardust Hotel and Casino Flat Files 760-to-762. 15 Parker and McLaine would collaborate on the production of My Geisha (1962), perhaps Hollywood’s strangest concoction of the exotic and the authentic in Japanese-American production.

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Fig. 4.3 Interior of the Stardust model looking across the auditorium to the stage (model design by Jonathan Bollen, technical production by Ortelia)

framework” by approaching Teahouse as a collaboration between film-makers in Japan and the United States and by analyzing how “the filmmaking process involved the active participation of U.S. and Japanese studios; the narrative text endured careful revisions as the production team sought to enhance the film’s marketability in the two countries; and Japanese movie-goers, like their U.S. counterparts, avidly consumed the film upon its release” (268). In shifting analytical focus from the image of “U.S. Orientalism” to the process of transnational filmmaking, Kitamura discerns how Teahouse was made from the materiel of international relations between artists, companies and audiences in America and Japan. “L’Amour Exotique” at the Stardust with “Madame Butterfly” on ice was not a transnational co-production to that extent. But, as I have sought to demonstrate through a digitalmaterialist analysis of performance artefacts within a virtual model of the venue (Fig. 4.3), the materiel of its production was likewise formed at a knot of international relations. The arc of “L’Amour Exotique” at the Stardust in Las Vegas reaches across the world, from Paris as origin to Tokyo as destination, on a world-map of entertainment brought closer by developments in aviation and international touring. With their emphasis on the technical innovations of staging spectacle—from electronicallycontrolled elevation and lavish costume-as-scenography to structural alterations of the stage—director-choreographer Donn Arden and scenic artist Harvey Warren manufactured Japanese style as a Euro-American synthesis, an exotic spectacle of postwar orientalism, draped in the fabric of industrial achievement. Yet they were also competing with artists from Japan whose entertainments were deemed more authentic by comparison. Within months of opening their second revue at the Stardust, the Lido’s French producers were travelling to Tokyo in search of Japanese

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artists to perform for their revues in Paris and Las Vegas (“Paris Lido’s”, 1959d). The extension of the producers’ ambit for the Lido reaching between Paris, Tokyo and Las Vegas indicates that Japan was not only an image of exotic fascination to be reproduced on stage. In the postwar redeployment of military-industrial materiel that forged the Cold War alliance with the United States, Japan became a material source of artistic capital in the world of entertainment.

References Adams, M. L. (2010). From mixed-sex sport to sport for girls: The feminization of figure skating. Sport in History, 30(2), 218–241. Anonymous. (1937, December 29). Sonja Henie’s ice show in Chi[cago] may gross $175,000, but disappoints. Variety, p. 45. Anonymous. (1951, August 29). Sonja Henie who made $10,000,000 with Wirtz exits after 16 years. Variety, p. 2. Anonymous. (1952a, September 17). Button paces ‘Capades’ to N.Y. click; Sonja Henie revue sock in Chicago. Variety, p. 66. Anonymous. (1952b, June 18). Lido, Paris. Variety, p. 52. Anonymous. (1953a, June 24). Conrad Hilton, Chi[cago]. Variety, p. 61. Anonymous. (1953b, December 30). Hollywood Ice Revue, Chicago. Variety, p. 53. Anonymous. (1953c, December 9). Wirtz Signs du Bief for ice revue spot. Variety, p. 65. Anonymous. (1955a, October 5). Moulin Rouge, H’wood. Variety, p. 61. Anonymous. (1955b, September 14). Wirtz ice show starts late but plays longer. Variety, p. 57. Anonymous. (1956a, January 18). Hollywood ice revue. Variety, p. 63. Anonymous. (1956b, December 19). Lido, Paris. Variety, p. 69. Anonymous. (1956c, April 5). Sequinned butterfly. The Stage, Ice Supplement, p. iii. Anonymous. (1956d, May 2). Sportspalast, Berlin. Variety, p. 67. Anonymous. (1956e, May 30). Wirtz freezing ‘H’wood ice revue.’ Variety, p. 49. Anonymous. (1957a, November 20). Desert Inn, Las Vegas. Variety, p. 69. Anonymous. (1957b, December 25). Lido, Paris. Variety, p. 47. Anonymous. (1957c, September 2). Sayonara plans. Broadcasting-Telecasting, p. 38. Anonymous. (1957d, September 4). Vegas scout inks Japanese talent for desert inn. Variety, p. 60. Anonymous. (1959a, August 5). Chatter: Las Vegas. Variety, p. 77. Anonymous. (1959b, December 23). Moulin Rouge, H’wood. Variety, p. 55. Anonymous. (1959c, July 22). New Frontier, Las Vegas. Variety, p. 52. Anonymous. (1959d, September 30). Paris Lido’s yearly layout change: Guerin & Fraday due here via Japan. Variety, p. 2. Anonymous. (1960, August 3). New frontier, Las Vegas. Variety, p. 55. Anonymous. (2001). Materiel. Oxford English Dictionary (3rd ed.). Oxford University Press. Blaszczyk, R. L. (2006). Styling synthetics: DuPont’s marketing of fabrics and fashions in postwar America. The Business History Review, 80(3), 485–528. Bollen, J., Holledge, J., & Tompkins, J. (2021). Putting virtual theatre models to work: ‘Virtual praxis’ for performance research in theatre history. Theatre and Performance Design, 7(1–2), 6–23. Button, D. (1955). Dick button on skates. Prentice-Hall. Donn Arden Collection. (n.d.). Special Collections, University of Nevada, Las Vegas, Libraries, MS00425. Box 3. Fergusson Baugh, C. (2018). Haptic insights: Model making as historical methodology. Theatre and Performance Design, 4(1–2), 83–100.

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Fuller, L. (1913). Fifteen years of a dancer’s life, with some account of her distinguished friends. Small, Maynard. Gramazio, F., & Kohler, M. (2008). Digital materiality in architecture. Lars Müller Publishers. Green, A. (1960, January 27). Las Vegas outstrips Paree: Nitery capital of the world. Variety, pp. 1, 20. Henie, S. (1940). Wings on my feet. Prentice-Hall. Hines, J. R. (2015). Figure skating in the formative years: Singles, pairs and the expanding role of women. University of Illinois Press. Hirano, K. (2013). The development of domestically produced synthetic fiber vinylon and its substitution of natural fibers: The case of Kurashiki Rayon. Japanese Research in Business History, 30, 85–111. Ingold, T. (2013). Making: Anthropology, archaeology, art and architecture. Routledge. Jampel, D. (1958, October 1). Everything from Kabuki to Bunraki Popsied for U.S. Variety, pp. 2, 16. Jones, R. (1772). A treatise on skating. Kativa, H. S. (2016, October 3). Synthetic threads. Distillations. https://www.sciencehistory.org/ distillations/synthetic-threads Kitamura, H. (2020). Runaway orientalism: MGM’s teahouse and U.S.-Japanese relations in the 1950s. Diplomatic History, 44(2), 265–288. Klein, C. (2003). Cold war orientalism: Asia in the middlebrow imagination. 1946–1961. University of California Press. Las Vegas Motion Pictures. (2019, January 16). Stardust Hotel 1959—Ca C’est L’Amour—16mm Film. YouTube. Uploaded. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g70RBZAlD6w Miyao, D. (2014). Nationalizing madame butterfly: The formation of Fe male stars in Japanese cinema. In D. Miyao (Ed.), The Oxford handbook of Japanese cinema (pp. 152–171). Oxford University Press. Nelson, R., & Ewing, M. (1997). Loie fuller, goddess of light Loie Fuller, Goddess of Light. Northeastern University Press. Park, S. M. (2015). Staging Japan: The Takarazuka revue and cultural nationalism in the 1950s– 60s. Asian Studies Review, 39(3), 357–374. Pedersen, M. (2016). Norwegianness in Hollywood: How the Hollywood version of Sonja Henie’s Persona was interpreted at home. Celebrity Studies, 7(3), 398–404. Pink, S., Ardèvol, E., & Lanzeni, D. (Eds.). (2016). Digital materialities: Design and anthropology. Bloomsbury Academic. Provencher, K. (2014). Bizarre beauty: 1950s runaway production in Japan. The Velvet Light Trap, 73(Spring), 39–50. Rae, P. (2019). Real theatre: Essays in experience. Cambridge University Press. Rees, J. (2013). Refrigeration nation: A history of ice, appliances, and enterprise in America. The Johns Hopkins University Press. Scully, F. (1959, October 21). Scully’s scrapbook. Variety, p. 84. Shibusawa, N. (2006). America’s Geisha Ally: Reimagining the Japanese enemy. Harvard University Press. Skate Guard Blog. (2015). An early history of Japanese figure skating. Skateguard. http:// skateguard1.blogspot.com/2015/04/an-early-history-of-japanese-figure.html Thornbury, B. E. (2008). America’s Kabuki-Japan, 1952–1960: Image building, myth making, and cultural exchange. Asian Theatre Journal, 25(2), 193–230. Tompkins, J., Holledge, J., Bollen, J., & Xia, L. (2022). Visualising lost theatres: Virtual praxis and the recovery of performance spaces. Cambridge University Press. van den Boomen, M., Lammes, S., Lehmann, A.-S., Raessens, J., & Schäfer, M. T. (Eds.). (2009). Digital material: Tracing new media in everyday life and technology. Amsterdam University Press. Wolfe, A. J. (2008, October 2). Nylon: A revolution in textiles. Distillations. https://www. sciencehistory.org/distillations/nylon-a-revolution-in-textiles

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Jonathan Bollen, PhD, is Associate Professor of Theatre and Performance Studies at the University of New South Wales in Sydney. His research traces the development of international touring, entrepreneurial diplomacy and commercial entertainment in the Asia Pacific region. He also has experience in the digital humanities, developing collaborative methods for theatre research and data visualisations of networks and tours. He is the author of Touring Variety in the Asia Pacific Region, 1946–1975 (2020) and co-author of Visualising Lost Theatres: Virtual Praxis and the Recovery of Performance Spaces (2022), A Global Doll’s House: Ibsen and Distant Visions (2016) and Men at Play: Masculinities in Australian Theatre since the 1950s (2008).

Part II

Spatial-History Digital Database for Humanistic Research

Chapter 5

Coded, Transcoded, Encoded, Mapped: Reading Film Adaptations of Ibsen’s Plays in the Digital Age Lisbeth P. Wærp

Abstract Henrik Ibsen has exerted a great impact in the world through his drama, which has been performed on the stage and adapted into film. His way of composing plots has even influenced the standard dramaturgy of the Hollywood film. For over a century, Ibsen’s influence can be found in the feminist movement, modern drama movement, film industry, and other spheres that shape the modern world. Since his influence is so wide ranging, covering many parts of the world, we need to have a new methodology that can help analyse the data from various sources and various historical periods. The National Library of Norway has done great job in collecting and archiving not only the works of Ibsen, but also the critical studies and performance records. Based on these records and archival materials, the Centre for Ibsen Studies has created a database, IbsenStage, which is also a search engine that has the function of visualising the worldwide reception of Ibsen with overviews in historical-geographical relations. This study of the five existing film adaptations of Ibsen’s An Enemy of the People (1882) is inspired by digital possibilities and resources, it makes use of digital tools such as the digital version of Henrik Ibsens Skrifter, the web database IbsenStage, the encode programme HandBrake, and Google My Maps in an investigation of how film adaptations from different historical periods and parts of the world relate to the place(s) and constellations of places in Ibsen’s drama. Keywords An Enemy of the People · Adaptation · Circulation · Mapping · Place · Heterotopia · Utopia · Dystopia · Setting · Anti-setting · Digital maps · IbsenStage · Distant reading · Close reading · Ein Volksfeind · En folkefiende · Ganashatru Ibsen’s plays provide film adaptors with canonised stories that have travelled worldwide, world literature that can be reinterpreted, retold, remediated, and resold. The most frequently adapted plays are some of the contemporary plays associated

L. P. Wærp (✉) Institute for Language and Culture, UiT—The Arctic University of Norway, Tromsø, Norway e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2023 K.-k. Tam (ed.), Performance Arts: Research in the Age of Digital Revolution, Digital Culture and Humanities 4, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-19-9213-1_5

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with the modern breakthrough. These are, paradoxically, the plays that represent the greatest challenge to film adaptors, since they feature settings that most often consist entirely of interiors. Dealing with adaptations of Ibsen to film has made me more and more aware of the significance of place in Ibsen, including the places outside the apartments, houses and homes: the garden, the street, the park, the small south Norwegian coastal town (perhaps the closest Ibsen gets to a favorite topography), cities, nature and landscape, regions. It is all there, even in the interior plays. Sometimes we are offered glimpses of streets, houses, parks, nature and landscapes through open windows and doors, other times we hear about the world outside in the dialogue. The characteristics of Norwegian regions and their nature and landscapes are systematically referred to in the dialogue of the plays and inextricably tied to the plot. This article aims to examine more closely how the five existing film adaptations of An Enemy of the People (1882) relate to places and constellations of places: Ein Volksfeind, Germany, 1937, Hans Steinhof An Enemy of the People, USA, 1977, George Schaefer Ganashatru, India, 1989, Satyajit Ray En folkefiende, Norway, 2004, Erik Skjoldbjærg An Enemy of the People, USA, 2007, Kamran Cahn

What story is told in these adaptations, how and why? The main focus will be on setting—place(s), and constellations of places, nature and landscapes, and on how the challenge of place is met. The chapter is based on an ongoing research project on adaptations of Ibsen’s plays to film. It is inspired by digital possibilities and resources, it makes use of digital tools such as the electronic version of Henrik Ibsens Skrifter, the web database IbsenStage, Google My Maps, and the encode program HandBrake, and also comments on the lack of such tools, for instance a film equivalent to the performance database IbsenStage.

Digital Maps, Distant Reading According to the performance database IbsenStage, A Doll’s House has been performed 4977 times since it was published in 1879 (Fig. 5.1). In comparison, An Enemy of the People has been performed 1877 times (Fig. 5.2). A closer look at the digital maps shows that certain parts of the world are represented with more performances than other parts: Considering Africa, for instance, only a few performances of An Enemy of the People are registered. We do see, however, that in both cases the performances are well spread on the world map. In addition, we see that the circulation has almost the same pattern. If film adaptations were put into the IbsenStage database as well (and they are going to be included), we could have compared the digital mapping of theatre performances with a mapping of the film adaptations. However, since there are only five film adaptations of An Enemy of the People, and we know their country of

Coded, Transcoded, Encoded, Mapped: Reading Film Adaptations of Ibsen’s. . .

Fig. 5.1 Map from IbsenStage showing performances of A Doll’s House all over the world (accessed 22 June 2022)

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Fig. 5.2 Map from IbsenStage showing performances of An Enemy of the People all over the world (accessed 22 June 2022)

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origin (Germany, USA (2), India, Norway), we can easily imagine such a comparison; and what we see if we do that, is that the basic pattern of circulation is again the same. The similarity between the patterns of circulation is intriguing, even though it is not evident why they look very much the same. Answers to this question would require studies of performances, adaptations, production history, distribution, reception, and a version of IbsenStage that includes not only film adaptations but also their worldwide distribution. However, film and theatre relate, and a film adapter does not rely on the adapted text only, but also on other versions of it, for instance theatre versions. In Christine Geraghty’s fine study of film adaptations of literature and drama entitled Now a Major Motion Picture. Film adaptations of literature and drama (2008), the main focus is precisely on how film adaptations draw on our sense of recall; not only of the original, but of other versions of the original too.

Close(r) Reading: Setting Ibsen’s An Enemy of the People The IbsenStage maps show that patterns of places repeat themselves. What about the places in Ibsen’s dramas and their adaptations? Italian literary scholar Franco Moretti states in Atlas of the European Novel, which is a study on the significance of places in literature, that “geography shapes the narrative structure of the European novel” (Moretti, 2009: 8). As he says, “Space is not the “outside” of narrative [. . .] but an internal force, that shapes it from within” (Moretti, 2009: 70). This also, I would argue, goes for Ibsen’s dramas. Even though the action in Ibsen’s 12 contemporary plays is always set in Norway, and even though the plays often consist of interior scenes only, in 9 out of the 12 plays the first stage direction indicates in which part of the country it is set, and in 8 of the plays also the characteristic landscapes of that area: Pillars of Society (1877) “The action takes place at the Bernicks’ house in one of the smaller coast towns in Norway.” Ghosts (1881) “The action takes place on Mrs. Alving’s country estate by one of the large fjords of Western Norway.” An Enemy of the People (1882) “The action takes place in a coastal town in Southern Norway.” Rosmersholm (1886) “The action takes place at Rosmersholm, an old family estate near a small coastal town in Western Norway.” The Lady from the Sea (1888) “The action takes place in a small fjord town, Northern Norway.”

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Fig. 5.3 Map showing places of the main action and places referred to in the dialogue in An Enemy of the People Little Eyolf (1894) “The action takes place on Allmers’s property, bordering on the fjord, twelve or fourteen miles from Christiania.” John Gabriel Borkman (1896) “The action passes one winter evening, at the Manorhouse of the Rentheim family, in the neighbourhood of Christiania.” When We Dead Awaken (1899) “The First Act passes at a bathing establishment on the coast; the Second and Third Acts in the neighbourhood of a health resort, high in the mountains.”

In addition, the characteristics of these Norwegian regions and their nature and landscaps are systematically referred to in the dialogue of the plays and inextricably bound the plot. Place matters in Ibsen. If we plot the places of An Enemy of the People on a digital map (I have used Google My Maps to create the map), the places of the main action as well as the places mentioned in the dialogue, we are dealing with a total of six places or localities: four of them in Norway and two outside of Norway (Fig. 5.3). The Norwegian localities are a small town on the southern coast of Norway, this town’s neighboring towns (all very close to each other), Norway’s capital, Christiania, and a small town far away in Northern Norway. The places outside of Norway

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are America, and a nameless island in the Pacific briefly mentioned together with a non-localised primeval forest (“urskog”). What can we read from this map? What we see is not only potentially significant single places, places that in themselves signify (something). We also see, as I will argue, a significant constellation of places, that, as I will also argue, the various film adaptations of Ibsen’s play reuse and/or transform in their own historically, ideologically and culturally significant ways to tell their stories. The first question, then, is: What do the places on the map signify? Place 1. The opening stage direction in An Enemy of the People informs us that the action is set in “a coastal town in southern Norway.” Typical for the coast of southern Norway is a coastal landscape characterised by low mountains, islands, islets and skerries and a good summer climate, and this particular Ibsen town is famous for its pure and healthy water. The town therefore has invested a lot of money in a health resort or sanatorium, that has become its most important income source. Sanatoriums, and health resorts, were a growing industry in the second part of nineteenth century Europe, even in Norway, where many were built in the southern part of the country. They were built in places with a good climate, fresh air and with pure and mineral rich fresh water which was considered healthy. They were built either as health resorts for recreation only, as sanatoriums, or as combinations offering medical treatment as well as recreation. The great health resorts and sanatoriums represent a special kind of place that, with reference to French philosopher Michel Foucault, can be referred to as heterotopias (Foucault, 1986), i.e. places that deviate from other, ordinary places, and fill a function in modernity. Understood in this way, as a heterotopia, the sanatorium in An Enemy of the People is a place with a culturally crucial function, where sick, stressed and tired urban people can rest and be restituated in healthy surroundings and be cured by a doctor. In this way its institutionalised practice has a counterbalancing effect to the negative effects of the industrialised and urbanised life of modernity that it thereby—indirectly—comments. The problem, however, is of course that it no longer functions like this in Ibsen’s play: Ibsen’s town is a town with a sanatorium that paradoxically produces more sickness instead of curing it, a health resort that is turned into a health risk resort, a heterotopy that has lost its function in modernity, because of the greedy, profit oriented and corrupt local authorities. Place 2. The capital. Doctor Stockmann sends his water samples to the capital of Norway. The reason for this is that the capital is the only Norwegian city that (in the nineteenth century) has a university and the necessary technical equipment to do an exact chemical analysis of the water. The relationship between the small southern coastal town and the capital is without conflict value: The capital is just bigger, has more power (the government) and better infrastructure (e.g., university). This relation is, as we shall see, recontextualised and transcoded in the German, Indian and Norwegian film adaptations of the play, where it is ascribed crucial conflict value and plot function.

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Place 3 (a group of places). Other Norwegian towns are also referred to in the play. First, the local authorities fear that the neighbouring towns, having their own sanatoriums, will take over the sanatorium patients if the news about the contaminated water is made public; and second, Dr. Stockmann threatens to go public in out of town newspapers. In this way the constellation small coastal town—neighbour towns is part of the conflict and plot composition of the play. Place 4. In addition to these southern coastal towns, a small town in Northern Norway, is represented too: Stockmann has worked for some years as a doctor in a small town in the northernmost part of the country. This is obviously considered a form of banishment, as it actually was regarded in the nineteenth-century Norway because of the long distance from the more urban south, lower infrastructure, harder climate etc. Subsequently, in his rebellious speech in act 4, Stockmann provides an extremely negative description of the inhabitants of the northern town as animals living in a rockery needing a vet more than a doctor. These utterances only contribute to a de-heroising of himself, and the audience, his antagonists, are shocked by them. His utterances are rooted, though, in widespread, stereotypical conceptions of the North, that not only are included in a centre-periphery dichotomy, but that also forms north-south dichotomy. This is, as we shall see, very differently exploited in the German adaptation. Place 5 and 6. America, referred to as “the free West”, and also an island in the Pacific Ocean, plus a non-localised primeval forest, are depicted as potential alternatives to the unfree, recklessly profit-minded and corrupt Norway. They are, however, disclosed as pure utopias: Not that it’s likely to be very much better out West either; it will be the same there too, with your liberal public opinions and your compact majorities and all the rest of the rigmarole. But things are on a bigger scale there, you see. They might kill, but they don’t torture. They don’t take a free man and put screws on his soul, as they do here. And if the worst comes to the worst, you can get away from it all. [Walks up and down.] If only I knew where there was a primeval forest or a little South Sea island going cheap. . . . (Ibsen, 1999: 87–88)

The idea of emigrating to America is simultaneously launched and rejected as utopian. Subsequently, Stockmann proposes other potentially good or better places, this time in places far away from civilisation—the good life on an island in the Pacific Ocean or in a primeval wood. Even these places are inextricably bound to the plot as the solution that, according to the internal logics of the play, does not exist. What this mapping of places shows, is a significant constellation of geographically rooted places disclosing a second, culturally and mythologically loaded 3-part constellation of places: The heterotopia (the healthful sanatorium)—the dystopia (the greedy, profit minded and corrupt town)—and the utopias or the conception of faraway good places—(the free West, the Pacific Island, the primeval woods). The five film adaptations of the play relate differently to this double constellation of places. The two adaptations that lean most heavily on Ibsen’s play, McQueen’s and Khan’s adaptations, simply reproduce it, whereas the three more creative ones recontextualise, transcode and create their own version of it. We shall examine these three closer, and more briefly McQueen’s and Khan’s adaptations.

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The German Adaptation: Hans Steinhoff’s Ein Volksfeind (1937) In the German 1937 black and white spoken film, interiors alternate with exteriors of town, surrounding coastal nature and landscapes with beaches and sailing ships, beautiful nature and landscapes revealed by several close-ups as heavily polluted. The action is ideologically coloured by the time of the adaptation—the transition between the Weimar Republic and the national socialist period of Adolf Hitler. Hans Stockmann, a doctor in the small German industrial town of Durrenhaus, is offered a job at a health resort in a town called Trimburg. In Ibsen’s play there is, as we have seen, a difference between the small town and the capital, but it has no conflict value. This difference is recontextualised and ideologically transcoded in the German adaptation, where it is turned into an opposition and ascribed a decisive plot function. Here, in a narratological perspective, the capital and the national authorities become the protagonist’s most important helpers in his fight against the antagonists, who are the corrupt local authorities: A representative of the Health Ministry arrives at Bad Trimburg, accuses the Board of corruption, dismisses it and makes Dr. Stockmann the new director of the health resort. The place is then closed for renovation. In this adaptation, Dr. Stockmann’s previous career as a doctor too is given a new function. Whereas in Ibsen’s play Stockmann’s previous career in the North belongs to the past, the German film opens with Stockmann working in the poor industrial town. He does everything he can to help his poor patients; he even provides them with food. When he is offered the job at Bad Trimburg, he therefore first rejects the offer referring to his poor patients (“My workers need me more than these spa visitors”). Later he refers to his previous career in a completely different way than Ibsen’s protagonist, who as we have seen refers to his career in Northern Norway in an extremely negative way, referring as he is to the inhabitants as animals. The German Stockmann, on the contrary, expresses strong empathy for his previous patients (“For years I was in a cheerless, smoky industrial town, trying to do my best to help poor, sick people”). This is part of this early German film’s unambiguously heroic portrayal of Stockmann. The story that it tells, is, however, not only about the hero doctor Stockmann, but just as much a heavily ideologically marked story about the excellence of the central authorities of the German Third Reich. Subsequently it has—of course—a happy end. Whereas both the heterotopian and the dystopian elements are represented in this adaptation, there is no utopian element. In Steinhoff’s 1937 adaptation, there is no conception of a better or good place elsewhere. It is the Third Reich.

Schaefer and McQueen’s American Adaptation (1977) In Schaefer and McQueen’s 1977 adaptation, An Enemy of the People, Dr. Stockmann is played by famous American action movie and blockbuster star

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Steve McQueen (1930–1980), who is also the executive director of the film. In the 1970s, McQueen was the best paid actor in the world. Today, he is known for his tough-guy action film persona. Allthough his visual appearance is totally unrecognisable in this particular film, his calm coolness persists. The trailer presents the protagonist in a way that recalls McQueen’s action movie roles just as much as an Ibsen protagonist: They couldn’t buy him. They couldn’t bury him. So they made him an enemy of the people.

They do overlap, though, in so far as Ibsen’s protagonist too is a courageous loner. On the DVD cover, Dr. Stockmann is included in the list of typical McQueen heros: “Stockmann joins a long line of McQueen heroes. Only this time, the hero isn’t armed with a gun. Just the truth.” What about the intention, why did McQueen choose to adapt Ibsen’s An Enemy of the People? McQueen’s explanation focuses on the play’s significance, modernity and topicality: An Enemy of the People has meaning to me. It reads as if it was written yesterday. I’ve seen a change in our society over the years, people aren’t straight—very rarely they are straight in business. I wanted to do something that was pure. (quoted from Terrill, 2005: 297)

The greater historical context might illustrate how topical the issue of corruption was at the time: The 1970s was the decade of the Watergate scandal. George Schaefer (1920–1997), who co-directed the film, is an American director primarily of television and Broadway theatre. The screenplay by Alexander Jacobs leans heavily on American playwright Arthur Miller’s adaptation of the play for the American stage, and Miller also personally assisted with the script. The action is neither transferred to our time, and nor to America: It is very faithfully set in a nineteenth century small Norwegian town, in wintertime. There are few exteriors in the film, but we are often allowed to see the snowy streets outside through the windows of the house. Making us see the outside world through the windows of the house is a technique, which is used in theatre performances too. According to Joanne Tompkins’ “Ibsen, Architecture, Set Design and Visualisation”, we even appear to see nature more and more replacing architecture, nature moving into the homes in contemporary theatre productions of Ibsen’plays (Tompkins, 2016). And Tompkins rightly claims, I think, that “The spatial underpinnings of Ibsen’s theatre and productions of his plays have not been explored as much as his use of language” (Tompkins, 2016: 23). It is not snowing in the adapted text, Ibsen’s An Enemy of the People, but snow is a well-known characteristic of the North and its climate. The falling snow might thus be read as a way of depicting the North, or more specifically Norway, but it might have a negative, symbolic meaning too, it might allude to the cold cynisism of the local community, as well as to the covering up of something (cf. the corruption motive). On the surface, this adaptation seems very loyal to Ibsen’s play when it comes to the plot composition as well, but the comic and otherwise negative sides of Ibsen’s

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protagonist are downplayed and the complexity, ambiguity and irony characterising Dr. Stockmann, and thereby the plot and the play, thus reduced. Moreover, the ending is changed. The very last scene presents us with a light, rather optimistic image: a happily laughing family covering the broken windows of their house. In addition, Stockmann is not allowed to ridicule himself by uttering—in the happy family tableau of the ending—the Ibsenian words about the strongest man being the one who is the most alone. So, allthough this film faithfully reproduces the double constellation of places, it removes crucial parts of the play’s complexity, ambiguity and irony, leaving us with a more straightforward, serious play about corruption.

Satyajit Ray’s Indian Adaptation: Ganashatru (1989) Indian Satyajit Ray is one of the greatest film directors in international film history, director of 36 films, and a true auteur. He has written the script, designed the sets and costumes, operated the camera and composed the music for almost all of his films. As one of his last films, he chose to adapt Ibsen. What then, makes a famous Bengali filmmaker adapt Ibsen’s An Enemy of the People? According to his biographers, Ray was at that time not allowed by his cardiologist to shoot on location or operate the camera himself due to several severe heart attacks. This made him decide to adapt a play: “If it had to be in the studio, it needed the strong dramatic structure of a play” (quoted from the 1989 DVD appendix). He also wanted the film to be contemporary and topical, and he was deeply concerned about the corruption of modern Bengali society. Together these elements made him choose Ibsen’s play. Ray’s adaptation culturally, as well as historically, transposes the setting from a small, unnamed Norwegian nineteenth-century town to a fictitious Indian 20th-century town: Chandapur. The effects of the contaminated water are much more fatal than in Ibsen’s play. Thousands have fallen seriously ill and many have died. The protagonist, Dr. Ashok Gupta, rightly fears a disastrous epidemic. In addition to the historical and cultural transposition, this adaptation adds an intriguing religious twist to the plot: The source of the contamination is the famous local Hindu temple. Its holy water—used for drinking—is seriously contaminated by sewage, a fact the religious, represented by the priests, refuses to accept. There are only two exteriors in this film, both from outside the temple, the source of the contamination, showing the deeply worried protagonist watching people drinking the contaminated, holy water of the temple. However, there is great variation in the interiors in this film. The camera is very mobile, and there are many close-ups. Ray admits to be experimenting with faces in this film, instead of landscapes. “I found that for once one could play with human faces and human reactions, rather than landscapes” (Robinson, 1989: 342). Also, foregrounded in the film by several close-ups, is a sample glass containing “holy” contaminated water and in this way the water and the outside world is brought inside the house. This visual object acquires powerful dramatic significance on screen, when handed over

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by a priest to the doctor, visualising the basic conflict at the core of the plot. Visually it is a small ordinary sample glass containing sludgy whitish water with a small green leaf. The leaf is basil, which according to the Hindu religion is supposed to purify impure water. As suggested by his biographer, Andrew Robinson, Ray’s sensivity for objects, and for form and colour, may have to do with his earlier practice as a painter: Ray’s early training as a painter undoubtedly gave him unusual sensitivity as a designer of his films. Without making them aesthetic, he infused them with a painter’s feeling for form, texture, colour and composition. (Robinson, 2005: 89)

In this adaptation the constellation small town-capital is ascribed plot value; whereas in Ibsen’s play Dr. Stockmann threatens to inform out of town newspapers, this is recontextualised and transcoded in a crucial way in the Indian film, when the journalist in fact quits in order to work freelance and present Dr. Gupta’s case in the big, influential newspapers of Calcutta. In this way the capital in this film too is ascribed a positive function in the plot as the protagonist’s helper. The protagonist has, however, more helpers in this adaptation: Not only the journalist, but the progressive and the artists, including even a theatre group. In this way the small town itself is changed compared to the town in the adapted Ibsen play: It is made less homogenous than it is in Ibsen’s play, representing a less compact majority, and thus less dystopian. The story that Ray tells is thus the story of an Indian society characterised by corruption and economic greed, and a doctor who, helped by a journalist, young progressive students and artists, refuses to continue to cause the sickness and death of thousands. Ray’s story is a socially and politically engaged story. It does not have a happy ending, as does the German version, but surely an optimistic ending (cf. Schaefer and McQueens American version).

The Norwegian Adaptation: Deconstructing the Place-Constellation—Nature and Landscape in Skjoldbjærg’s 2004 Adaptation Many film directors who exploit nature and landscape in their films make their locations look more or less like postcards. Norwegian film director Erik Skjoldbjærg is one of those who succeeds in making topography an integral part of their vision. In the Norwegian adaptation the action is transferred to our time and set partly in Oslo, the capital of Norway, and partly in a small fictitious place called Bredal. A great difference, as compared to the adapted text and the other film adaptations, is this film’s extensive use of exteriors, and more specifically, its exploitation of a Norwegian nature and landscape that does not occur in Ibsen’s play. Skjoldbjærg’s adaptation also differs from the other versions by collapsing the double constellation of places: Here dichotomies like capital/minor places, center/periphery, city/country, local/national, national/global, and good/bad places are abandoned. In this abandoning, the use of nature and landscape(s) is essential.

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The action takes place in Norway, but in other places than the ones used by Ibsen. Whereas in Ibsen’s play the capital is represented in the dialogue only, the first part of the main action of Skjoldbjærg’s adaptation takes place in Oslo. The second part of the main action (the longest part) takes place in the fictitious town Bredal, located in the western part of Norway. The action is thus not set on the southern coast of Norway, as is Ibsen’s main action, but in Oslo, located in the south-eastern part of the country, and (the main action) in the fictitious town of Bredal, located in the western part of the country. This is a significant change, and not only the change from small coastal town to the capital, but also the change from the southern part of Norway to the western: The western nature and its landscape(s) is very different from the Ibsenian southern. Wheras the southern coast is a horizontal, friendly landscape characterised by low mountains, rounded hills, islands, islets and and skerries, the western landscape is vertical and dramatic, characterised by high, steep mountains and long, deep fjords. Second, this western nature not only differs geographically and geologically from the southern coastal nature, but culturally too: To Norwegians the western nature with its high mountains, deep valleys and fjords is heavily loaded with symbolic meaning and cultural significance. Since the Romatic period it has been associated with the “real” Norway, the place where the roots of Norwegian culture and national identity are found. The first part of the film is filmed on location in Oslo. Stockmann’s employer, a big TV company, strongly dislikes his critique of a big milk company, since the milk company is their greatest sponsor, Stockmann quits and decides to start his own company. Subsequently the setting is shifted from the south-eastern located capital to the western small town. The film, that has been criticised for being too loosely composed, is therefore—it can be argued, as I hereby do—not badly composed, but composed as a filmic montage of two contrasted places and stories, the urban capital with its big, corrupt companies, versus the small, agrarian idealistic town in the western part of the country. The bottle plant makes the town, which is threatened by depopulation, prosperous. The locals invest their savings in it and work there voluntarily. As compared to the big, corrupt companies of the capital, this company is small and idealistic. When Stockmann finds out that the water is contaminated by toxic waste, the story of the first part of the film repeats itself, as the idealistic workers prove to be just as profit minded, reckless and corrupt as the employers of the big companies in the capital. The pattern of the filmic montage is thus a pattern of juxtaposition, repetition and deconstruction of dichotomies like small town/capital, center/periphery, local/ national, good place/bad place. The use of nature and landscape even contributes to an undermining of the dichotomy national/global, as the use of nature and landscape turns into a postnationalistic critique of Norway, of Norwegian identity and the image of Norway. The nature of Bredal is presented as pure, unspoiled and beautiful, and this is done in a way that mimicks the way tourist advertisements and postcard photos from the area present the landscape, focusing the spectacular mountains and the contrast between the lush, green vegetation and the white snow in the remote, bluish mountains. This is the front image of the DVD cover (Fig. 5.4) compared to a tourist advertisement

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Fig. 5.4 DVD cover

from www.roughguides.com (Rough Guides Ltd is a travel guidebook and reference publisher, owned by Penguin Random House) (Fig. 5.5). The distinctive western mountain- and fjord-landscape is clearly made to appear as beautiful and spectacular to us. Here is a screenshot from the film (Fig. 5.6). In his book Landscape and Film, Martin Lefebvre defines landscape in film as anti-setting or “space freed from eventhood” (Lefebvre, 2006: 22). Nature can, according to him, either be the place the action is set, or it can—as landscape—be

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Fig. 5.5 Tourist advertisement in Rough Guides

Fig. 5.6 A scene from the film En Folkefiende

an “independent subject matter.” In narrative films (like Skjoldbjærg’s), exteriors normally function as settings that frame the action and are subordinate to it. But a narrative film not only tells a story by images, it is also what Lefebvre calls “visual

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spectacle.” He therefore differentiates between two different spectator modalities: a narrative and a spectacular modality. We follow the story and contemplate the spectacular. As long as we contemplate, we stop following the story for a moment, even though it does not disappear completely from our consciousness. Thus, we contemplate the landscape in Skjoldbjærg’s film and are seduced by the beauty of it. But we soon pick the story up again only to experience that the landscape is not what it seems to be, —nature is not as pure and unspoiled as it looks, it is heavily contaminated by toxic waste. We recognise that we have been seduced and fooled in the same way that Stockmann the idealist is seduced and fooled both by the seemingly pure and unspoiled nature of his home town and by its seemingly idealistic and morally good inhabitants. What this indicates is a revelation of a nature and landscape that symbolise Norwegian identity and culture, a disclosure that subsequently goes far beyond the Bredal and Oslo communities: As such, this serves as a post-nationalistic critique of the Norwegian identity and complacency, as well as of the international image of Norwegians as pure, unspoiled and morally good. Bredal proves to be neither better nor worse than Oslo. This collapses the dichotomy in good-bad places as well as the dichotomy in the capital-small town, and the film leaves us without utopian conceptions about ideal places, ideal societies in a constellation reduced to a heterotopia and a dystopia. Not because utopian conceptions prove to be unnecessary, as in the German adaptation, but because dreams, hopes and belief in something better are reduced to illusions in this adaptation.

Kamran Cahn’s/AJ Cross’ American 2007 Adaptation Whereas the four previous adaptations are quality film productions, two of them even high-quality productions (Satyajit Ray’s and Erik Skjoldbjærg’s films), the most recent one, an American adaptation—AJ Cross/Kamran Cahn’s 2007 film—is of a lower quality. The main problem is not the reproduction of the series of interiors only, offering no glimpse of the outside world, even though the effect in this case is rather claustrophobic, but the overall adaptation of the play, as well as the staging, acting and shooting. The film presents us with amateur-like actors walking around in an apartment reading overly lengthy lines in an unengaged way (at times, they even forget their lines). According to adaptation theory, the process of adaptation involves two essential acts of appropriation and salvaging: one of interpretation (of the adapted work) and one of creation (a new work, the adaptation), cf. for instance Linda Hutcheon’s A Theory of Adaptation (2013). The film made by Kamran Cahn/ AJ Cross does not represent a noticeable interpretation of Ibsen’s play. It simply reproduces plot and protagonists, and also the double constellation of places, without any artistic interpretation and/or creative engagement. In comparison, Schaefer and McQueen’s film, also reproducing the double constellation of places in question here, do provide us with an interpretation of Ibsen’s complex, ambiguous and ironic

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plot, when turning it into a more straightforward, serious and optimistic play about corruption.

Concluding Remarks What this mapping of settings, places and landscapes shows—that we do not otherwise see, at least not as easily or clearly—is the significance of places and of the constellation of places in Ibsen’s play and its film adaptations. The five film adaptations of the play relate differently to this double constellation of places. The adaptation that leans most heavily on Ibsen’s play, Khan’s adaptation, simply reproduces it. Schaefer and McQueen’s adaptation also reproduces it, but in a less complex and ambiguous version characterised even by a tone of optimism, whereas the three more creative of the adaptations recontextualise, transcode and create their own significant version of it. When it comes to the question of how the challenge of place is met in these adaptations of Ibsen’s An Enemy of the People to film, Erik Skjoldbjærg’s playing with landscapes and Satyajit Ray’s playing with faces and objects (instead of his usual landscapes), represent two extremes and the most creative and artistically most interesting solutions. As a concluding remark, I would like to repeat my point that exteriors, or space—regions, towns, nature and landscapes—matter in Ibsen’s contemporary plays.

References Foucault, M. (1986). “Of other spaces. Heterotopias”. Diacritics, 16(1). Based on a lecture from 1967: “Des Espace Autres”. In Architecture/Mouvement/Continuité. Translated from French by Jay Miskowiec. Accessible online. web.mit.edu/allanmc/www/foucault1.pdf Geraghty, C. (2008). Now a major motion picture. Film adaptations of literature and drama. Rowman and Littlefield Publishers. Ibsen, H. (1999). An enemy of the people. In An enemy of the people; The wild duck; Rosmersholm (Oxford world’s classics) (J. McFarlane, Trans.) (pp. 1–106). Oxford University Press. Ibsen, H. (2005–2010). In V. Ystad (Ed.), Henrik Ibsens Skrifter (17 Vols.). University of Oslo and Aschehoug. Digital Version: https://www.ibsen.uio.no/skuespill.xhtml Lefebvre, M. (2006). “Between setting and landscape in the cinema”. In M. Lefebvre (Ed.), Landscape and film (pp. 19–60). Routledge. Moretti, F. (2009). Atlas of the European novel 1800–1900. Verso. Robinson, A. (1989). Satyajit Ray. The Inner Eye. André Deutsch Limited. Robinson, A. (2005). Satyajit Ray—A vision of cinema. I.B. Tauris. Terrill, M. (2005). Steve McQueen. Portrait of an American rebel. Plexus. Tompkins, J. (2016, July 4–6). Ibsen, architecture, set design and visualisation. Unpublished paper presented at the Conference on Digital Culture and Humanities, Hong Kong.

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Films An Enemy of the People, USA, 1977, George Schaefer. An Enemy of the People, USA, 2007, Kamran Cahn. Ein Volksfeind, Germany, 1937, Hans Steinhoff. En folkefiende, Norway, 2004, Erik Skjoldbjærg. Ganashatru, India, 1989, Satyajit Ray.

Digital Resources Google My Maps. HandBrake. Henrik Ibsen Skrifter, digital version. IbsenStage. www.roughguides.com

Lisbeth P. Wærp, dr.art., is Professor of Nordic Literature, Department of Language and Culture, University of Tromsø—The Arctic University of Norway. She is currently President of the International Ibsen Committee, University of Oslo. She organised the XIIIth International Ibsen Conference, in Tromsø, in 2012. She is head of The Hamsun/Ibsen Research Group from 2012. Editor of Edda 2005–2010. She has published four books: Overgangens figurasjoner. En studie i Henrik Ibsens Kejser og Galilæer og Når vi døde vågner (Figurations of Transition. A Study of Henrik Ibsen’s Emperor and Galilean and When We Dead Awaken), Oslo, Solum, 2002; Å lese drama. Innføring i teori og analyse (Reading Drama. Introduction to Drama Theory and Interpretation), Oslo, Universitetsforlaget, 2005/2009 (co-author Frode Helland, University of Oslo); Engasjement og eksperiment. Tarjei Vesaas’ Huset i mørkret (1945), Signalet (1950) og Brannen (1961) (Engagement and experiment. Tarjei Vesaas’ novels Huset i mørkret (1945), Signalet (1950) og Brannen (1961), Oslo, Unipub, 2009; and Livet på likstrå. Henrik Ibsens Når vi døde vågner (editor, anthology of articles on Ibsen’s When We Dead Awaken), Oslo: Cappelen Akademisk Forlag/LNU, 1999. In addition to articles on Nordic literature, especially Ibsen, she has also published on Hamsun, Fosse, Vesaas, and Arctic literature. She is currently working on a project on Scandinavian film adaptations of Ibsen’s works.

Chapter 6

Digital Ibsen: Tracing Houses and Homes in an Ibsen Play Astrid Sæther

Abstract The main focus of this chapter is placed on the play that has traditionally been called A Doll’s House in English, in Norwegian A Doll Home [Et dukkehjem] (my underlining). This study will incorporate some perspectives from Ghosts, The Lady from the Sea, Hedda Gabler, The Master Builder, and When We Dead Awaken, all prose plays dating from 1879 to 1899. It will examine Ibsen’s use of two Norwegian words, hus and hjem, or house and home. The source for this study of the use of these nouns is the new electronic edition of Henrik Ibsen’s Writings (HISe, 2014) which expands and facilitates access of Ibsen’s entire oeuvre, and enables the user to search for frequency of specific words and expressions. Its maneuverability allows one to quickly create cross references and bookmarks throughout his writings. Keywords A Doll Home · Ghosts · Hedda Gabler · Home · House · Ibsen · The Lady from the Sea · The Master Builder · When We Dead Awaken This study reflects a recent shift in Ibsen scholarship from an existential and psychological interpretation to a spatial understanding of the characters. Great significance is now attached to the setting of his plays and their architectural space: Where do the characters live, where do they come from, how do they move on stage, where do they exit? The places they inhabit, the houses they frequent, the doors being opened, closed, and passed through, whether windows are shut, light is sparse or bright; Ibsen’s detailed descriptions serve as metaphors in addition to conveying the atmosphere. How is the surrounding landscape—with its paths, roads, or the sea—described? The physical elements are depicted with exact precision in each play, and basic existential structures are related to the functions of building and dwelling. The large apartments with many rooms, windows and doors, in which

A. Sæther (✉) Faculty of Humanities, Centre for Ibsen Studies, University of Oslo, Oslo, Norway e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2023 K.-k. Tam (ed.), Performance Arts: Research in the Age of Digital Revolution, Digital Culture and Humanities 4, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-19-9213-1_6

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Fig. 6.1 Henrik and Suzannah Ibsen were living in Munich, in Hemmeterhouse, 2nd floor, 1885–1891. Photographer Gebhardt Heinz. Courtesy Rudolf Reiser, München 2002

Ibsen lived in Munich and Kristiania (now Oslo) (Figs. 6.1 and 6.2), may shed light on the playwright’s own experience and the architectural design in his plays. Mark Sandberg’s study on Ibsen’s architecture (2015) is an example of this trend in Ibsen research. He develops Daniel Miller’s theories (1997) about architectural structures reflecting society. In the nineteenth century, home and house were synonyms and its unchanging nature reflected social stability. There is a homology, Miller states, between the home and the exterior domains; the domestic interior is tied together with social relations and positions. This means that we can decode the structure and power conditions in society by studying the interior, the rooms and the organisations of the rooms. These studies form the background for my interest in Ibsen’s arrangement of physical space, how he arranged the space in gendered areas, how the rooms with the doors, windows, a (lack of) view can be studied as manifestations of psychic and social positions (or lack of) with consequences. A few words on the background for the new tools: During my years (from 1995 to 2015) at the Centre for Ibsen Studies, University of Oslo, a complete critical and annotated edition of Henrik Ibsen’s Writings (HISe), both printed and unprinted material, was published. It contains all of Ibsen’s plays, poems, articles, lectures, letters, drafts and notes. The print edition consists of 32 volumes, of which 16 volumes are Ibsen texts and 16 volumes contain commentaries from researchers. The electronic edition (HISe), based on the print edition, is an ongoing work first

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Fig. 6.2 Ibsen’s office, as he arranged it, in Arbiensgate (street) 1, from 1895 to 1906. Photo courtesy Centre for Ibsen Studies, University of Oslo. Source: Ibsen.net/NB

published in 2014 (Fig. 6.3). In addition to the texts, introductions, and commentaries that are found in the print edition, the electronic version includes transcriptions of all known manuscripts and all printed versions from Ibsen’s lifetime, as well as transcribed scores of Ibsen’s musical dramas and compositions for his poems. His entire production, from the first word on paper to the last printed edition before 1906, is documented. The electronic texts are encoded to enable a wide range of searches, allowing the user to move back and forth between various stages of a work in progress. The database contains digitised pictures pertaining to the playwright and his work. There are also links to facsimiles of all known manuscript material from Ibsen’s hand, and to his own drawings and paintings. Although this electronic tool makes it possible to approach Ibsen’s texts in new ways, a knowledge of Ibsen’s language, Dano-Norwegian, is required.1 In the following discussion, Ibsen’s use of the two Norwegian words, hjem and hus (home and house), will be highlighted. The definite forms of these nouns are hjemmet (the home) and huset (the house). Searching for hjem in the 12 contemporary plays yields 430 hits and hjemmet 41 hits. Searching for hus yields 176 hits, huset an additional 289 hits. This frequent use of hus and hjem led me to take a closer look at these concepts, starting with A Doll’s House. In Norwegian, we use the idiom hus og hjem (house and home). We will see that Ibsen transposes the idiom, so that it 1

For those who do not know Norwegian, a new project is being developed at the Ibsen Centre, The Multilingual Ibsen. The Multilingual Ibsen is a presentation of the works of Henrik Ibsen in the original Norwegian together with translations into various languages.

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Fig. 6.3 Henrik Ibsen’s Writings (Henrik Ibsens Skrifter, HISe). Screen capture 21 June 2022. Source: https://www.ibsen.uio.no/forside.xhtml

becomes hjem og hus (home and house). The home is normally a place for recreation, comfort and warmth, but this concept is gradually emptied. Ibsen dislodges the home and replaces it with a more temporary and random form of habitation. The home is turned into merely a place to live, a house. A house is a defined physical area for human activity. It also draws a boundary between human beings and nature. A house is a neutral concept without overtones. A home is usually understood as a positive representation of a house. But, as we will see in Ibsen’s text, elements of intimacy, coziness, and safety no longer exist; they have been replaced by feelings of boredom, passivity, and suffocation: in short, of imprisonment. In his book on Ibsen’s houses, Sandberg investigates how Ibsen in his contemporary plays gradually replaces the concept of hjem (home) with the concept hus (house). The importance of the home is diminished. Then, the positive virtues of the home are gradually repudiated. Finally, these two concepts change places, and the home becomes merely a house. This deconstruction of the concept of a home is to a unique degree a symptom of the breakdown of the traditional women’s role. And a doll home existence becomes a metaphor for the restriction that imposed role patterns create.2

Et Dukkehjem is a neologism as it literally means “a doll home.” Ibsen titled his play Et Dukkehjem/A Doll Home, without the possessive s.

2

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Now let us take a look at the Doll Home dwelling: It is a typical bourgeois middle class home from the latter part of the nineteenth century. The action takes place in the sitting room, an area that everyone was allowed to use; a busy space, with more than 33 entrances and exits during the three acts. There are no balconies or verandas to show us the surroundings. But two stairways lead to the apartment, the back stair for the servants, the main stairs for the family and visitors to the house. This is where Nora enters with the boy carrying the Christmas tree, and she does not close the main door behind her, an action that foreshadows her exit at the end. A long hall with several doors functions as the common meeting space for servants, guests, children and the couple: This is a space for information and confrontations; and the letter box is placed here. The sitting room has only one window, but four doors. One of them leads into Helmer’s studio, an area exclusively for men. The dialogue begins when he and Nora communicate without opening the door: “Is my little lark twittering out there?” (Fjelde, 1978: 125)3 From his studio Helmer controls the house, while he moves freely around. The single window is located further along the wall, but nobody can see the view. The homeless Mrs. Linde is the only one looking out. The outside world is thus hidden. By contrast, the letter box has a glass window that shows the contents: documents, visiting cards, contracts, and letters. It is a sign of the bourgeois citizen. Helmer controls the letter box, as he has the only key. Thus we do not see the outer physical world, but the box serves as a collective meeting point for the outer world, with documents that represent the past, threaten the present and portend the future. The spatial organization mirrors both class and gender divisions and the power structure of society. The men move about freely; they come and go. Mrs. Linde needs to be accompanied and is not allowed to receive male guests in her room. The women may not enter the men’s domain. The children sleep in the nurse’s room, and Helmer’s bedroom is well set aside from the rest. Nora’s coming and going are announced by sounds. The digital version clearly shows the distribution of hus and hjem: Apparently, Nora and Torvald are living happily together, in their beautiful, happy home, a peaceful and sorrowless home (A Doll’s House: 138), as she says. And when Nora is threatened, Torvald assures her: “Oh, how snug and nice our home is, Nora. You’re safe here. I’ll keep you like a hunted dove I’ve rescued out of a hawk’s claws” (A Doll’s House: 189). The crisis is clearly indicated when she says that “our house has been nothing but a playpen. I’ve been your doll-wife here, just as at home I was papa’s doll child” (A Doll’s House: 191). When Nora leaves, she says: “Tomorrow I’m going home”, but immediately she corrects herself: “I mean, to my old home place (hjemsted)” (A Doll’s House: 192) (Fig. 6.4). Torvald calls her insane for abandoning her home. Nora responds that she could not spend a night in a stranger’s room, and she repeats: “when a wife deserts her husband’s house just as I am doing, then the law frees him from all responsibility” (A Doll’s House: 195). She added:

3

All English translations are from Henrik Ibsen, Ibsen. The Complete Major Prose Plays, translated and introduced by Rolf Fjelde (New York, Penguin Book, 1978).

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Fig. 6.4 A Doll’s House, 1956, China Youth Art Theatre, Beijing. The image shows part of the Chinese scenographic design of the house. Photo courtesy of the Centre for Ibsen Studies, University of Oslo. Source: Ibsen.net/NB and https://ibsenstage.hf.uio.no/pages/event/76209

“The maids know all about keeping up the house” (A Doll’s House: 196), and “I am sure I’ll think of you often, and about the children and the house here” (A Doll’s House: 196). Their home has become the house. She no longer harbours illusions about a home; she has become an “unhomely” heroine, willing to lose everything in order to gain something new. In this way Ibsen has inverted the house and home dichotomy. He presents the house as the new, true, authentic concept: the house becomes reality. A “house” is something different and something more interesting than the empty, broken and deserted version: “home.” We can easily identify a number of Ibsen characters that seem to take the advantage of retreating to a neutral area: the house. They do this as a way of protecting themselves, and to escape imprisonment or being shut in. Choosing a house is to deny or escape the negative encumbrance that home includes.

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A number of homes in Ibsen’s plays are infected with illness and struck by death. In Ghosts the dead Chamberlain Alving had tainted the atmosphere at Rosenvold, where Mrs. Alving fought to become released from his legacy. She intended to free herself by establishing a home for poor children (an orphanage). But it was uninsured when it burned down, and the clever carpenter, Engstrand, immediately managed to take over the money available in order to open a house for seamen, called Captain Alving’s home. The irony is completed in the last scene where reality is still negated, and Osvald dies: “There now, the pain is over. You see how quickly it went. Oh, I knew it would—And look, Osvald, what a lovely day we’ll have. Bright sunlight. Now you can really see your home. (She goes to the table and puts out the lamp.)” (Ghosts: 275). Shortly afterwards, Osvald abruptly asks for the sun, and the drama ends in despair. Festive occasions characterize most openings of the Ibsen prose cycle, as in A Doll House (which opens on Christmas Eve) and Ghosts (a celebration of the orphanage being opened, Mrs. Alving’s commemoration of her husband, and Osvald’s homecoming). Another play that starts in apparent bliss and happiness is Hedda Gabler. The young couple has just returned from their long honeymoon and moved into their renovated, beautiful home. Yet, Hedda walks restlessly between windows and doors, pulling or withdrawing curtains, removing covers from the sofas and chairs. She is nauseated by the smell of lavender and cut flowers. The contrast between openness and limited space is obvious. She is the accidental inhabitant of a house which everybody believed to be her dream home. But the late Madame Falk’s villa turned out to become her prison, where she lived an absolute seclusion, totally dependent on her old aunts’ money and petit bourgeois style, with Judge Brack in the background as a threatening blackmailer. It is the architectonic randomness of marriage that interests Ibsen, according to Sandberg. Hedda Gabler recognizes her own mistake: She had never wanted an intimate, pleasant, bourgeois home; what she wanted was to live in a grand mansion, with riding horses and servants in livery: “It was part of our bargain that we’d live in society—that we’d keep a great house—” (Hedda Gabler: 720). Her husband (Jørgen) had longed for and is pleased to have “a house of my own and a home with a study” (Hedda Gabler: 702) (Fig. 6.5). But pleasant homes are for small people, according to Hedda, and the ultimate solution to her trapped situation is a bullet in the temple. The opening scenes in these plays show homes that are comfortable and express apparent family happiness. Ten of Ibsen’s 12 prose plays begin indoors; four of them take place in a single room, and three move among different locations indoors, whereas three follow a trajectory from inside to outside. Many of the homes are marked by the dead or by death. This is not to say that a personified force hovers over the house, but that the homes are dark and characterized by a vague inertia that cannot be extinguished. Dead traditions and social norms fill the rooms. This is also the case in The Lady from the Sea which opens on a sunny day in the summer. It is the birthday of the late wife of Doctor Wangel, to be commemorated with flowers and by flying the flag. But there is feeling of uneasiness, as the flag lies on the ground, a sign that something is out of order. The doctor’s new wife, Ellida,

Fig. 6.5 Hedda Gabler, Henrik Ibsen’s Writings (Ibsens Skrifter) (HISe). Screen capture 21 June 2022. Source: https://www.ibsen.uio.no/DRVIT_HG% 7CHGht.xhtml

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has come to this house all the way from her father’s lighthouse, in a liminal zone, on the very outer edge of society. The lighthouse, with its circular form, offered unlimited views of the ocean. Doctor Wangel wants a hustru, a housewife, who would cater for them, create a home, and Ellida should be the sun in the house. As she comments: “You couldn’t bear the emptiness in your house any longer. You were out after a new wife” (The Lady from the Sea: 662). But Ellida feels lost in his house: “I’ve been so completely without roots in this house, Wangel” (The Lady from the Sea: 672). Only once do we hear of her entering the house. She had emerged from the lighthouse, where she was used to a life among the changeable and untamed elements. In order to make her happy, the doctor had built a leaf hut, a small garden pavilion. In this hybrid combination of the architectural and the natural she spends her day, when she is not swimming in the fjord. The doctor goes back and forth between the veranda, where his daughters are sitting, and his wife in the arbor. Here in the garden pavilion she is able to pursue a passive, meditative existence, separated from the rest. Ibsen has moved the family outside the house, but we know little about the interior: it is cloaked in silence. The house seems to be evacuated. Doctor Wangel suggested that they should move out to a spot by the open sea—a spot where she could find a true home of her own liking. Ellida chooses to stay and take over the duties of the house. Will she become integrated in the home, or will she still long for the lighthouse? The more conciliatory ending has been interpreted as a renewed belief in marriage and homemaking. But the metaphors of enclosure and stagnation are still at work, for example in the contrasting pictures of the house fish (coy fish) and the great wild schools of fish; a combination that points clearly toward connotations of the domestic sphere as a degraded existence. The play ends, as Sandberg maintains, like a last gasp of a “workable home idea in Ibsen’s works” (Sandberg, 2015: 109). In The Master Builder, one of architect Solness’ building projects in the play is a home intended to replace his wife’s family home which had been lost in a fire. That home was (according to Solness) “an ugly, dark, overgrown packing case. And yet, for all that, it was snug and cozy enough inside” (The Master Builder: 823). It was at once oppressive and cozy, so its destruction brought both relief and grief to him. His new building activities also included “homes for people” on the ground that was cleared after the fire. This is a grand business idea, and also, Solness boasts, his life’s main accomplishment. With the original home gone, a true home is not a possibility according to his wife, Aline. Only the original house has an authenticity that is impossible to replace. Solness comes to accept that their new house can never be rebuilt, it would only be a place to exist. On the other hand, he constructed a lie: when the young people would be able “move into their own place,” these would be true homes, he believed, “comfortable, cozy, light-filled homes”. His conviction is not supported, as the stage directions describe what he has built as “low, dilapidated houses” located on the subdivided plot (The Master Builder: 824–825). The happy homes were never built; the houses remain small, ugly, and unambitious. Solness insisted on using the word house about his own, yet, he still clings to the idea of homes for others. When the architect fell while hanging a wreath on the tower of his

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own house, this indicates a disparity between the ideal, as Solness had described it (to Hilde), and the real evidence on stage and in the text. The play is more than an attack on the notion of domestic comfort and security. The devaluation of the term “home” is obvious: the promised castle of “Appelsinia” turns out to be a castle in the air. The play can be regarded as the graveyard of true homes. The fading possibility of rebuilding something on true foundations is demonstrated in Ibsen’s last play, When We Dead Awaken. A famous and rich artist, the sculptor Rubek and his wife, Maja, have been gone from their homeland, away from the “homely” as he calls it with contempt (When We Dead Awaken: 1033). They share a feeling of alienation on their return, nothing is familiar or known. They had left their new, impressive home in the capital, he said, immediately correcting himself to: their elegant mansion house. They also own a villa at Lake Taunitz, built on the grounds of a peasant’s house, small, but authentic. They go on weekends “to our old house”, says Maja, although the rustic house has been replaced by a large, magnificent, comfortable villa. They feel estranged at the expensive spa resort in Norway, a place where people go to recuperate, a space of diminished vitality (When We Dead Awaken: 1032). “Why do we not go back to our new house,” asks Maja. “We could have it so nice and cozy down there in our lovely new house—” Her husband retorts: “Why do you not call it our new home?” (When We Dead Awaken: 1032) Maja replies that she prefers the word house, “let us stick to that.” (ibid.) Rubek himself gives in to her way of seeing it when he, after saying home, switches back to Maja’s preferred phrase “house.” Later she oddly changes her opinion about the house; she says she experienced it as a “cold, dank cage, where there was neither sunlight nor fresh air, [. . .] but only gilded walls, with great stone phantoms spaced around them” (When We Dead Awaken: 1085). One senses that Maja’s denial of “home” is different from that of Solness, as there is no sense of loss or obvious disillusionment in her. She can talk of coziness and comfort, but not in a home. Sandberg sees this as a disciplined abstinence. The word house does not entail any sense of obligatory belonging, not to a husband, not to a family, not to a cultural context. Maja’s idea of housing is a temporary, accidental arrangement, far from a permanent and confined way of living. The romantic fantasy of a castle (in The Master Builder) collapses completely. Ulfheim’s so-called hunting castle, which he offers to her, is described in the stage directions as an old, half-dilapidated hut; according to Maja it is an old pig sty (The Master Builder: 1086). She has had enough of castles, and she does not regret the loss. This ramshackle shelter appears at the end of Ibsen’s last play, and represents the final remnant of houses and homes. Maja travels on, without regret, and her vitality and carefree behavior signal a new type of behavior, without bonds and ties: “I am free! I am free! I am free! No more living in cages for me! I am free as a bird. I am free!” (The Master Builder: 1092) It is clear that the existence she will seek in the future is a non-architectural mode of being. Ibsen constructed a number of houses, flats, and rooms for his dramatis personae. With characteristic resolution he returns thematically to architectural thinking, again and again. The problem he meets is that the existing edifice, represented by the old

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home as described in Ghosts, Rosmersholm, and The Master Builder, is not easily eradicated. Anthony Vidler (1992) claims that words like estrangement and unhomeliness have emerged as watchwords of our century, and a fundamental homelessness has moved into the position of “given” in modern society. Ibsen not only worked on de-masking the facades, he also challenged or undermined the habitual ways of thinking about homes and houses. He gradually exposed domesticity as an inferior form of existence. His perspective on the home shifts valence throughout his writing, but the interest in unmasking facades is constant. This study shows examples of how HISe, the new digital Ibsen website, can be of use in the field of humanities. This new electronic edition of Henrik Ibsen’s oeuvre gives the reader ample opportunity to search for, retrieve, compare, contextualize, maneuver in, check spelling of words, and study expressions in Ibsen’s original texts, written in Dano-Norwegian. Ibsen was a master of language; creating dialogues and shaping poetic images. His entire legacy is now accessible online, worldwide, with commentaries and information from outstanding scholars.

Afterword The above narrative on the use of the digital version of Henrik Ibsen’s Writings (HISe) might be extended. The digital archives (letters, manuscripts) have been most useful for my research when I was writing my recent book, I skyggen av Ibsen (In Ibsen’s Shadow, 2022). The book deals with Ibsen and his relationship with four young, talented and beautiful women, his so-called “Princesses.” The meetings took place successively from 1889 to1898. I have re-constructed their lives, before and after the meetings with Ibsen. The old Ibsen’s love affair with the women has so far been presented and analyzed from male points of view. However, my intention has been to understand their deep infatuation with the world famous dramatist from a female angle. I also intend to give them a “life” before and after they met Ibsen: Who they were? And how the relation affected their lives after he dropped them? The study called for close readings of diaries and letters. HISe proved very useful when searching for all relevant letters. Earlier researchers had to search for Ibsen’s letters in various books or archives. The letter database is organized in an alphabetical order and according to the dates of the letters. It also gives precise information on persons and places mentioned in the letters. A comparison of the letters Ibsen wrote to the four women rendered interesting stylistic similarities. These were easy to find when juxtaposed on the screen. Unfortunately, an English version of the database does not exist so far.

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References Ibsen, H. (1978). Ibsen. The complete major prose plays (R. Fjelde, Trans. and Introduced). Penguin Book. Ibsen, H. (2014). Henrik Ibsen’s writings. HISe (Electronic ed.). Centre for Ibsen Studies, University of Oslo. http://ibsen.uio.no/forside.xhtm; https://www.ibsen.uio.no/icons/img3.png Miller, D. (1997). Material culture. Why some things matter. Routledge. Reiser, R. (2002). Die Dichterstube Ibsens in Hemmeter-Haus Maximilianstrasse 32. Photographer Gebhardt Heinz. In A. Haüser (Ed.), Grosse Namen (pp. 102–107). Stiebner Verlag. Sæther, A. (2022). I skyggen av Ibsen: dikterens unge kvinner—en historie om kunst, makt og begjær (In Ibsen’s shadow: The poet’s young women—a story of art, power and desire). Gyldendal. Sandberg, M. (2015). Ibsen’s houses: Architectural metaphor and the modern uncanny. Cambridge University Press. Vidler, A. (1992). The architectural uncanny: Essays in the modern unhomely. MIT Press. Astrid Sæther, PhD, is Associate Professor Emerita at University of Oslo. She served as the first Director of the Centre for Ibsen Studies in 1998–2001 and had been Secretary to the International Ibsen Committee for 30 years. Her publications include I skyggen av Ibsen (2022), Suzannah: Fru Ibsen (2008); Ibsen og Brandes: Studier i et forhold (2006): Ibsen and the Arts: Painting, Sculpture, Architecture (2002); and Ibsen, Tragedy, and the Tragic (2003).

Chapter 7

A Performance History of Ibsen in America: Outlines, Conjunctures and Regional Diffusion Svein Henrik Nyhus

Abstract This chapter provides a survey of the performance history of Ibsen on the American stage in the period from 1879 to 1914. It highlights the transatlantic entanglement that characterised Ibsen’s early beginnings and traces the development of this trajectory through the efforts of actress Mary Shaw. The study especially focuses on Shaw’s tour of Ghosts and its catalytic function for the productions of Ibsen to follow, with an emphasis on spatial diffusion. The first part of the study approaches the topic with methods from digital humanities, while the second part sheds light on Shaw’s and other actresses’ involvement with Ibsen by ways of more traditional modes of historical theatre research. Keywords Ibsen · IbsenStage · Ghosts · Digital humanities · Transatlantic theatre · Regional diffusion The nature of Ibsen’s introduction to the American theatre in the period from 1879 to 1914 is a complex story. The initial display of reluctance and opposition to his plays is often explained by the lack of independent theatres in a highly commercial market, and more importantly, a discrepancy between reigning genteel moral values and the radicalism encountered in Ibsen’s plays. When Ibsen finally did become a permanent factor on the American stage two reasons are commonly given: The rise of political Progressivism and the contributions of two major theatre stars of the era, Mrs. Fiske and Alla Nazimova, both essentially Broadway-actresses. 1 With the data contained in IbsenStage an opportunity is given to nuance and expand this view. In this chapter, I will present an outline of the performance history

1

See Schanke (1988) and Øverland (1966) for a discussion of Ibsen as a barometer of the change in American culture at the time, and Thomas (2000) in addition to Carlson (2011) for case studies pertaining to the mentioned actresses. S. H. Nyhus (✉) Faculty of Teacher Education and Pedagogy, Department of Nordic Languages and Literature, Inland Norway University of Applied Sciences, Hamar, Norway e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2023 K.-k. Tam (ed.), Performance Arts: Research in the Age of Digital Revolution, Digital Culture and Humanities 4, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-19-9213-1_7

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of Ibsen plays in American in the period from 1879 to 1914. My main interest lies in the transnational interconnectedness that characterises the early phase of Ibsen’s American reception and what I perceive to be a critical conjuncture in the progress towards the American acceptance and appraisal of Ibsen—the underexposed contributions of actress Mary Shaw and the regional diffusion of performance taking place in 1903–1904. First a few words about the dataset. IbsenStage is an event-based relational database of the Ibsen’s plays on stage, which now holds close to 11,000 records from 1850 and up until the present day. The database is global in its scope. The basic unit in IbsenStage is the performing arts event, specified as a distinct happening defined by title, date/s and venue; typically, a performance or series of performances at a venue. Multiple presentations of the same production at different venues (e.g., touring productions) are recorded as separate events. The total of American events now counts 715 for the period between 1879 and 1914. This is a quite drastic rise from the 132 records that initially were gathered from secondary sources and theatre archives.2 By mining digitised historical newspapers and additional theatre archives these newfound events brings us closer to what we can assume to be the actual amount. With the increase in figures the use of methods from digital humanities becomes relevant. Here I will first apply some basic concepts borrowed from Franco Moretti’s term “distant reading.”3 Graphs and maps will guide the inquiry, while a more traditional approach will be used to consider the specifics of agents—that is individuals working within the theatre.

Significant Patterns and Global Comparison How does the performance history of Ibsen in American look quantitatively and what pattern does it depict? Below we see a graph (Fig. 7.1) that displays the annual distribution of events in America in the period from 1879 to 1914. What stands out here is first and foremost the dramatic number of increased events in 1903, 134 in total compared to 9 the previous year. In addition, 1903 heralds a 7 year period where there are a relatively large number of events. For the subsequent years the records are 79 events in 1904, 73 events in 1905, and in 1906 33 events are registered. Both the intensity and lasting effect of this shift signals a conjuncture in the American performance history. Another striking feature is the long period of relative inactivity, over 20 years, followed by an eruptive phase. How do we characterise this sequence of events? Something decisive certainly happened

2

This data was collected in a period from 2015 to 2019. The older dataset was drawn from the Repertoire Database from the website formerly know as Ibsen.net. 3 In Graphs, Maps, Trees: Abstract Models for a Literary History, Moretti notes that distance “is not an obstacle, but a specific form of knowledge; fewer elements, hence a sharper sense of their overall interconnections. Shapes, relations, structures. Forms. Models” (Moretti, 2005, p. 1).

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160 140 120 100 80 60 40 20 0 1879 1881 1883 1885 1887 1889 1891 1893 1895 1897 1899 1901 1903 1905 1907 1909 1911 1913

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Fig. 7.2 Global events compared with American events, 1877–1914

in 1903, but in order to decide if this pattern pointing to a slow assimilation of Ibsen is uniquely American, we will first compare it with another graph (Fig. 7.2). In Fig. 7.2, we see the American figures in relation to the global development. The graph displays several differences. Starting with the global peak in 1878, we know from the data in IbsenStage that it was mostly caused by the German success of The Pillars of Society. Likewise, the Nordic events dominate the global picture in 1882 to 1884. The only American peak that is indicative of some correspondence is in 1895 which points back to the global peak in 1893. But while both the peaks in 1889 and 1893 raise the activity for a prolonged number of years globally, the pattern is not reflected in American events. The long period of relative inactivity is therefore a distinct feature of the American case. The period from 1903 to 1909 is

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14 12 10 German

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Fig. 7.3 Events according to language and production origin, 1879–1902

more in accordance with what is happening globally, and it suggests a reflection of Ibsen’s rise in status as an internationally renowned playwright during the latter part of the 1890s. Contrasted with what we know about Ibsen’s reception in the European core countries at this time, the delimitation indicates that the American Ibsen-activity before 1903 was made up of diverse and scattered initiatives.4 The difference between the American and the global trajectories suggests that there was no strong and cohesive advocacy—an Ibsen-campaign—to promote the relevancy of the playwright during these first 20 years, as was the case with his assimilation in England, France and Italy. 5

A Transnational Dynamic The juxtaposition between American events and the global figures seems to suggest that American theatre was long out of touch with continental developments. But this notion is nuanced or altered when looking at another graph (Fig. 7.3). Here, we see a visualisation of the data in IbsenStage where the bars represent events according to production language, German, Scandinavian and English— meaning English-speaking American performers—and touring productions from Europe (both English and French).

4

For details about these scattered initiatives in the period before 1903, see Nyhus (2020a). For details on the Italian reception, see D’Amico (2011), for the British, see Postlewait (1986), for the French, see Sheperd-Barr (1997). 5

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Granted, these figures seem small compared to the larger numbers to follow later in the 1900s, but they reveal an interesting transnational dynamic in this incipient period. We notice that performances in German constitute a steady element. We also see that the highest peak in this period, the one in 1895, has a majority of events generated by European tours. Prominent stars of the day, like Janet Achurch, Herbert Beerbohm Tree and Gabrielle Rejane all played in principal American cities that year. Now, as a whole English-speaking American efforts make up 62% of the events during this period in question, and supports the hypotheses that the American mainstream theatre, neither from producing nor the receptive side was ready for Ibsen. The transnational composition, moreover, points to the fact that the many of these first performances of Ibsen were dependent on an historical precondition, namely the currents of immigration into America. Reaching its peak at the end of the nineteenth century, it in turn laid the basis for the establishment and growth of vital immigrant theatre communities. Relating to the development of Ibsen’s progress in the theatre these communities had three main functions. Firstly, it served as a recipient of new theatrical impulses prior to Ibsen’s renown in the English-speaking world. A clear example of this is the fact that The Pillars of Society (1879), Hedda Gabler (1892) and An Enemy of the People (1892) were all first performed in the German language, while Ghosts (1882) was first given in the Dano-Norwegian. Secondly, the touring circuits provided by immigrant theatres attracted European players to engage in tours overseas. Several famous German stars, Agnes Sorma, Ernst Von Possart and Friedrich Mitterwurzer played Ibsen when touring America with a wider repertoire. Thirdly, the immigrant theatre scene also functioned as wayside stations for immigrant actresses who would later have Broadway-success with the Norwegian playwright, as in the case of the aforementioned Alla Nazimova and Hedwig Reicher, to name some examples. In other words, immigrant theatre could also be perceived as a testing ground, both for artists who needed to develop their skills in Ibsen’s demanding roles, but also for mainstream managers who needed reassurance before venturing on a playwright that for large parts of this era was considered risky in terms of financial profit. In light of the depiction in Fig. 7.3, a question can be put forth: Is there a connection between the transnational dynamic and the steep rise of events that occur in 1903? In regards to the effects of the visiting European companies, the impact was limited. Only Herbert Berboom Tree’s visiting troupe garnered a response resembling a unison appraisal from American critics. Judging by numbers of events, these tours in 1895 did not, at least, immediately instigate a wave of new performances. The German American theatre was at the time of Ibsen’s introduction operative on a professional level in several American cities such as New York, Chicago, St. Louis, Cincinnati and Milwaukee. As I have documented elsewhere, the productions in German-American theatres, contributed to a heightened interest in Ibsen, much due to the quality of performance and as a reference point for ensuing

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120 100 Hedda Gabler

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Fig. 7.4 Ibsen-events according to play, 1879–1914

English-speaking productions.6 Yet, a more concrete example of a connection between the transnational and the domestic can be found in the career of actress Mary Shaw.

Mary Shaw and Ghosts Returning to the spike of events in 1903 and 1904, a graph (Fig. 7.4) visualising Ibsen-events according to play for the whole period in question shows a striking pattern. In Fig. 7.4, we see that, Ghosts, one of Ibsen’s most controversial plays in the time subsequent to its premiere in 1882, somewhat surprisingly stands out with the largest number of events from 1903 to 1904, 154 to be precise, and is therefore the most staged play in the years that mark what we might call Ibsen’s breakthrough. I will return to this notion, but first it seems pertinent to briefly consider why Ghosts, in particular, to a large extent is responsible for the quantitative rise. Had the grounds been prepared in any way to explain this development? In IbsenStage, Ghosts is only registered with five showings before 1903 in mainstream theatres. There was in other words, no indication that the play had been very popular. Critically it had been discussed in literary and theatrical magazines, but a representational verdict might be summed up in these remarks from The Critic from 1894: “In a word, the dullness and

6

Contemporary American theatre critic and historian Norman Hapgood called the German American stage “our only high class theatre” in The Stage in America, 1897–1900, pp. 135–149. For a full discussion of the German-American theatre and Ibsen, see Nyhus (2020b).

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gloominess of the piece are unredeemed by any humor, imagination or genuine power. In support of its pretense to social or scientific value, there is scarcely anything to be said” (The Critic, 1894, 24: 31). The appeal of Ghosts to artistic agents at this point must therefore be described as limited, which actuates the question of motive and the impetus behind the sudden rise of this play. Issues of motive can most readily be assessed from the level of agents. Examining the dataset for Ghosts in IbsenStage we find that 86 of these events in 1903–1904 are generated by tours led by Mary Shaw. This substantial portion signalises a new conjuncture in the narrative and prompts an investigation of Shaw’s involvement with Ibsen leading up to 1903. As is known, theatre is a collaborative art form which entails social networking; a production or performance, with the concomitant process of rehearsing, preparing and presenting can become a site for the blending of aesthetic preferences and practices among the participants. Moreover, positive experiences with a production can potentially lead to a further allegiance or devotion to a role or a playwright. It is relevant to ask if Shaw’s first tour of Ghosts to some extent was due to such common dynamics. From the data in IbsenStage we find that Shaw was also a part of the first American professional production of A Doll’s House called Thora in 1883, taking place in Louisville, Kentucky. The production was headed by the Polish actress and immigrant Helena Modjeska, who had used the German translation as basis for her own acting version (Holmgren, 2012: 234). Modjeska had already played Nora in Warsaw to great success, and although Thora was primarily negatively received it had consequences for Shaw’s professional life. Her friendship with Modjeska became a personal political awakening, eventually leading to her involvement with the suffragette movement (Auster, 1984: 76). Throughout her career Shaw would stay loyal to this cause and in her theatrical life seek material that corresponded with her beliefs.7 John D. Irving comments that Modjeska’s influence was not only political but also related to drama. Despite the critical failure of Thora, the experience of the performance made Shaw aware of “something more in Ibsen’s work” and she started, for the first time, to study his plays (Irving, 1978: 37). The production therefore marks itself as an important stepping stone for Shaw’s further interest in Ibsen. Later in 1889 Shaw again took her chances with Ibsen a second time when the opportunity arose to play Mrs. Alving in a matinee production of Ghosts in New York. Instrumental to her decision of trying out this demanding role was the fact that Emanuel Reicher would take seat as guest director. Reicher already had a significant resume with Ibsen in his association with Otto Brahm in the foundation of the Freie Bühne, and from his interpretations of Alfred Allmers in Little Eyolf at the Deutches Theatre in Berlin. For Shaw the lessons the instructor imparted became instrumental to her conception of Mrs. Alving (Fig. 7.5). She later described the effect of Reicher’s instructions: “In that instance I felt myself move into a different

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Mary Shaw also played, for instance, in a highly controversial production of Bernhard Shaw’s Mrs. Warren’s Profession in New York in 1905.

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Fig. 7.5 Mary Shaw as Mrs. Alving in Ghosts, 1903. Source: Theatre magazine, vol. 3, 1903, p. 100. https://archive.org/details/theatremagazine03newyuoft/page/108/mode/2up

plane. I knew I should never be the same kind of actress. The old faith fell from me and I was different. I was real and not a fancied metamorphosis.”8 Reicher promoted a naturalistic style with emphasis on natural voice to avoid the bombast of melodrama, rejecting stock types and “effective scenes” in order to “adapt the representation to the simplicity of nature and to show the picture of a complete human being to the audience” (Quoted in Irving, 1978: 39). In sum, these instructions helped Shaw fundamentally redefine her artistic approach and made her recognise the dramatic potential in Ibsen. She later elaborated on the experience in an interview, revealing how it had impacted her professional life: “[. . .] Ibsen has modified my whole artistic career. With the light that my training in Ibsen has given me I have been able to discover things in my Shakespearean parts of which I was unaware, and he has made me conscious of powers and capacities which I had not realised before” (Quoted in Irving, 1978: 40).

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“Mary Shaw Explains her faith in Ibsen,” The San Francisco Call, March 8 1908.

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Pointing to these influences helps to account for Shaw’s individual motivation and reveals the effect of artistic influence on the level between individual agents. But there is also an additional significance to these relations. As noted, the early American performance history is characterised by a transnational dynamic. In this perspective Modjeska, as a star, represents the trend of transatlantic flow of famous stage artists that would last during the whole period. Reicher’s role, on the other hand, underscores the significance of the transcultural exchange between the established theatre culture of German-American theatre and the mainstream American stage. In addition, he served as a transmitter of the aesthetic impulses from the German independent theatre movement. Shaw therefore becomes a vital point of coalescence, a nexus, for these characteristic strands of the American Ibsen-tradition. With her tours of Ghosts in 1903–1904 the effect of Ibsen’s European breakthrough on the American theatre is made manifest on an artistic level. Another episode further illustrates Shaw as a nexus of transatlantic impulses. While in London in 1899 she met William Archer, who encouraged her faith in Ibsen, which at the time, she explained, was starting to become “rock-ribbed.” Archer, Shaw further revealed, introduced “me to a fellow coterie of [Ibsen] enthusiast, so that when I came again to America, I was steeped in Ibsen’s theories” (“Mary Shaw explains her faith in Ibsen”, March 8, 1908). Although it is difficult to speculate what these theories were, the contact with Archer presumably enhanced Shaw’s understanding of Ibsen, which in turn might have strengthened her acting, but undoubtedly fueled her belief. There are no other sources documenting contact between Archer and other American stage artists. It is therefore significant that there was contact between the leader of the British Ibsen “campaign” and Shaw, and that he moreover gave her his support.

Commercial Aspirations and Regional Diffusion The significance of Shaw’s endeavors is emphasised in the role she continued to play for the further Ibsen’s further dissemination. Towards the end of 1902 she commenced a tour with Ghosts, visiting Baltimore, Washington D.C. and New York. Due to success, particularly in New York, theatrical managers suddenly saw the commercial potential in Ibsen. In 1903 George Brennan became Shaw’s manager and she embarked on a nation-wide tour with Ghosts ending in its run in 1904. Shaw told The San Francisco Call that upon completion of the tour she and the company had the feeling of being pioneers (The San Francisco Call, March 8, 1908). The feeling was entirely justified. The company was the first to play Ibsen exclusively, without having an additional comedy or melodrama on the bill. Moreover, it was also the troupe that played the most dates in a successive run and covered the largest geographical area. Overall, the tour was a success. In New York, for instance, the play was called a “a masterpiece of technique” (Democrat and Chronicle, October 11, 1903). The Chicago Tribune contended that the performance of Ghosts “may be seen several times and each repetition brings increase of interest and enjoyment”

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(Chicago Tribune, June 3, 1903). Most notable, however, was the regional appreciation the productions enticed. As Lawrence Levine has argued, literary elitism first took place in the latter part of nineteenth century America (Levine, 1988: 72). Up until this shift American audiences were generally a heterogeneous mass and Shakespeare, in particular, was a household name across different social strata. Regional critics did not therefore necessarily have a lesser literary competence than their colleagues in the larger cities. Many regional reviews, were in fact more concerned with the literary merit of Ghosts than the play’s reputation of offensiveness. Shaw revealed that the reception received in smaller cities and towns, “set me doing some hard thinking about the New York audiences and critics and those of the interior cities.” Both audience and critics in the provinces were less restricted and willing to give anything worthy serious consideration, she noted. A thorough review for the show in Rochester, which Shaw thought showed acumen and originality surpassing the response in New York City, was “distinctly encouraging, for it shows that the field for serious dramatic work is not restricted to a few great dramatic centers that would willingly be the dramatic arbiters” (The Minneapolis Journal, April 20, 1903). This regional appraisal spurred on further activity. Between 1903 and 1904 Brennan put together companies and booked venues for three new separate tours on the base of Shaw’s success: two with Ghosts and one with Hedda Gabler. Ghosts was mounted by companies headed by leading actresses Adelaide Fitzallen and Alberta Gallatin, while Elita Proctor Otis played lead in Hedda Gabler (Fig. 7.6). What is highlighted in this map is to what extent the event-peaks in 1903–1904 were a regional phenomenon. Out of the four companies, only the one led by Shaw played in the entertainment centers, New York and Chicago. Like the majority of Shaw’s stops, the cities visited by Gallatin, Proctor Otis and Fitzallen had a population well below one hundred thousand. Gallatin primarily performed in the South but also ventured West-Coast. Her ancestral background was seemingly an additional cause for a warm attitude to her work. The Philadelphia Inquirer, for instance, wrote that the “delight” her acting had caused in the South was in part due to Gallatin’s father having been a Confederate general during the American Civil War, in addition to having represented his district in Congress for several years (The Philadelphia Inquirer, July 19, 1903). This pre-established regional fame seemed to reflect favorably during certain parts of the Ghosts tour. Several reviewers remarked on her father’s position and on her popularity because of her loyalty to audiences in the South (The Fairmount West Virginian, October 9, 1905). Of these four tours, only Elita Proctor Otis’ performance of Hedda Gabler received lukewarm reviews. In Indianapolis, Otis’ hometown, the local paper suggested a religious interpretation. The play was strong, the reviewer noted, but Hedda was nonetheless described as the incarnation of evil and “the sort of woman against whom the prophet spoke.” Hedda’s vices were seen as exemplifying the need of the belief in God and unselfishness (The Indianapolis News, December 15, 1903). Such analysis was in fact not very pronounced in the reception, but Hedda was, against the dominant grain, a character who was frequently perceived as a destructive incarnation of evil or a demonic force. In Paducah, Kentucky, the play’s “message” was, moreover,

Fig. 7.6 The tours of Shaw (green), Gallatin (blue), Proctor Otis (purple) and Fitzallen (red) in 1903–1904

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read positively through a biblical lens: “Hedda Gabler is in no encouragement to do wrong in any form. On the other hand it teaches clearly and conclusively that the wages of sin is death; and a play that teaches such a lesson cannot be immoral” (The Paducah Sun, December 18, 1903). Adelaide Fitzallen’s tour with Ghosts fared better, and was launched with a reassuring statement: “The Success of Three Seasons. The most widely discussed play of the century—Ghosts.” The local newspaper reported that Ghosts had become one of the “strongest attractions on the road.” No drama, the notice continued, had caused so much discussion in the American public “and certainly no play leaves behind it a more pronounced impression in the minds of theatregoers” (The Times Dispatch, October 9, 1904). Surveying the reviews of the tour it is clear that that familiarity with the play was now taken for granted. In one of the first shows in Asheville, North Carolina, the local newspaper simply contended that so much had been written about the play that no review was necessary (Asheville Citizen-Times, October 30, 1904). In Anniston, Alabama a similar message was communicated: “Ibsen is no longer an unknown quantity in American theatricals. For two seasons this masterpiece Ghosts has played with enormous success from the Atlantic to the Pacific” (The Anniston Star, November 12, 1904). Such assessments bring us back the notion of a breakthrough. As mentioned, the drastic rise in events in 1903–1904, marking a period of heightened activity, suggests itself as a breakthrough from a quantitative perspective. Having examined dimensions of the dynamics producing this pattern, in addition to having surveyed the reception, it is possible to make the argument of a breakthrough in a more substantiated manner. Three points can be emphasised in this regard. Brennan’s involvement is the first indication of a change. Prior to 1903 the Ibsenproductions had been mounted by a heterogeneous mass of agents. Shaw’s success in New York sparked Brennan’s interest and laid the basis for a coordinated thrust into the commercial market.9 The manager’s organised launch of several tours was a new occurrence in the overall narrative. Moreover, while previous performances in the legitimate theatre had been commercial in their aim, the demand for Ibsen had not reached the critical point from where further venture was economically justified. Brennan was the first to exploit the burgeoning signs of Ibsen’s popularity, and his involvement marks a transition to a period where managers and producers who were more influential started to act on the potential of Ibsen as a commodity. In 1903–1904 Ibsen, in other words, had proved his commercial appeal. The wide geographical diffusion is another marker of development. Until 1902 entertainment centers like New York, Boston and Chicago had been, aside from the

There are no extant financial statements connected to the tours under Brennan’s management, but several notices reveal that Shaw’s shows made, if not lucrative, sufficient profit. The New York Times, for instance, reported: “Ibsen’s Ghosts which recently left New York to go on the road, has proved that Ibsen’s plays are money earners. The road receipts commenced with a $600 house in Worchester, Mass. and have ranged from that to $400 ever since. More than $2000 is regarded as profitable business when it is considered that there are only five persons in the cast and with scarcely any scenery to carry.” New York Times, 31 March 1903. 9

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performances in German-American stock theatres, the cities with the largest number and most acclaimed Ibsen-productions. Brennan’s opportune enterprise ushered Ibsen into the national touring circuit. Although unique in this regard, the routes traveled by these combination companies were linked to the growth of the national railroad network and the common practice of seeking profit in the provinces. Consequently, nearly every state in the country was granted a visit. The regional feature of these tours also implies a further change in the perspective of center versus periphery. Shaw’s tour was an example of common business logic; success in centers like New York and Chicago provided justification for sending Ghosts on the road and into the periphery. The routes followed by Gallatin, Proctor Otis, Fitzallen and Bogel, however, did not include these entertainment centers, but both started and ended in the regional areas. A likely interpretation of this new strategy is that Shaw’s reception in the provinces had been the litmus test of economic sustainability. Further affirmation was redundant and the regional market was seen as ready. Geographical diffusion also helped establish Ibsen as a national phenomenon. Reinforced by the quick succession in which the tours commenced, there was an observable acknowledgement of the dramatist on a wider, national scale. Anticipation was often present in the write-ups prior to the performances, but this local response was also explicitly linked to a wider national interest in Ibsen. In other words, we find in the reception of these tours a rising nationwide familiarity, indicating a clear development. Referencing Mary Shaw as the “pioneer woman interpreter of Ibsen in this country,” The Los Angeles Times for instance stated that “[. . .] never before has so much interest been taken in America in the grim realist of the North [. . .]” (“Ibsen in America,” August 14, 1904). When Proctor Otis visited Asheville the local paper underscored the playwright’s standing: “Henrik Ibsen is the dramatic author most talked of in the United States today, albeit but a few years since he was rarely mentioned except as a subject for ridicule” (Asheville Citizen-Times, “Hedda Gabler,” December 22, 1903). These three observations on the breakthrough can lead to a final remark about the issue of center and periphery during the whole period in question. While the events in 1903–1904 are characterised by wide spatial diffusion, this pattern is also repeated in the immediate years to follow. This prompts a question concerning the relation between region and entertainment centers in terms of event numbers, which can be answered quantitatively. From 1879 to 1914, there are 47 events registered in New York, 9 in Philadelphia, 30 in Chicago, 17 in Boston, 13 in Washington and 11 in San Francisco. This means that 82% of the events were performed on stages in mid-sized cities and towns, in addition to some in regional cities like Baltimore and Cleveland. This regional diffusion documents that Ibsen’s assimilation into American theatre occurred on a much wider geographical area than what has previously been acknowledged. As mentioned in the introduction, stars like Alla Nazimova and Mrs. Fiske surely were integral to Ibsen’s commercial success. But these actresses had their base on Broadway. A fuller assessment of Ibsen in American in this period, I will argue, must therefore take into account the fact that his popularity to a large degree also was a regional phenomenon.

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References Anonymous. (1894). The critic 24: 31. Anonymous. (1908, 8 March). Mary Shaw explains her faith in Ibsen. The San Francisco Call. Auster, A. (1984). Actresses and suffragettes. Women in the American theatre, 1890–1920. Praeger Publishers. Carlson, M. (2011). Ibsen’s a doll’s house in America. In E. Fischer-Lichte, B. Gronau, & C. Weiler (Eds.), Global Ibsen: Performing multiple modernities (pp. 21–33). Routledge. D’Amico, G. (2011). Domesticating Ibsen for Italy. Ph.D. Dissertation. University of Oslo. Hapgood, N. (1901). The stage in America, 1897–1900. Macmillan. Holmgren, B. (2012). Starring Madame Modjeska. On tour in Poland and America. Indiana University Press. Irving, J. D. (1978). Mary Shaw, actress, suffragist, activist (1854–1929). PhD Dissertation. Colombia University. Levine, L. E. (1988). Highbrow/lowbrow. The emergence of cultural hierarchy in America. Harvard University Press. Moretti, F. (2005). Graphs, maps, trees: Abstract models for a literary history. Verso. Nyhus, S. H. (2020a). Henrik Ibsen in the American theatre, 1879–1914. Ph.D. Dissertation. University of Oslo. Nyhus, S. H. (2020b). Ibsen in the German-American theatre. Ibsen Studies, 20(2), 154–185. Øverland, O. (1966). Americans debate Ibsen, 1889–1910. In H. Wasser & S. Skard (Eds.), Americana Norvegica: Norwegian contributions to American Studies (Vol. I). University of Pennsylvania Press. Postlewait, T. (1986). Prophet of the new drama: William Archer and the Ibsen Campaign. Praeger Publishers. Schanke, R. A. (1988). Ibsen in America: A century of change. Scarecrow Press. Sheperd-Barr, K. (1997). Ibsen and early modernist theatre, 1890–1900. Praeger Publishers. Thomas, A. (2000). Female interpreters of Ibsen on Broadway, 1896–1947: Minnie Maddern Fiske, Alla Naziova and Eva Le Galienne. Ibsen Studies, 1(1), 54–67.

Svein Henrik Nyhus received his PhD in Ibsen Studies at the Centre for Ibsen Studies, University of Oslo in 2020. He is an Associate Professor in the Faculty of Education, Inland Norway University of Applied Sciences. He has published articles on the reception of Ibsen in America.

Part III

Digital Culture in Performance Production

Chapter 8

Digitisation and New Modes of Ibsen Studies Sabiha Huq

Abstract The study comments on digitisation of Ibsen performances with specific emphasis on two modes of performance: theatre and film. Video recording of theatre performances and the marketing of commercially produced films through compact discs or CDs and digital versatile discs or DVDs have made it possible for the teachers and researchers to bring Ibsen back into discussion through performance analysis. Recorded theatre performances and clips extracted from them are shown while teaching that covers a significant portion of coursework on Ibsen. Ibsen scholars also use CDs or DVDs for their research. On the other hand, films based on Ibsen plays are also important sources for further studies. It has been evident that video recordings of performances and commercially produced DVDs have opened up more possibilities of further studies in the field of theatre and film because of their availability and easy access. On the other hand, recordings as such have given permanence to some of the stage performances that are not running in the theatre houses. Both kinds of recordings have enabled teachers and researchers rediscover Ibsen existent in different social and cultural milieus. The study also refers to the New Normal and modes of Ibsen performances that may necessitate new avenues of teaching-learning in theatre studies. Keywords A Doll’s House · An Enemy of the People · Cloud theatre · Covid-19 · Digitisation · Dr. Stockmann · En Folkfiende · Eventness · Film · Ghosts · Hedda Gabler · Hollywood · Ibsen · IbsenStage · Mediatisation · New Normal · Peer Gynt · Performance · Theatre · Yueju The present study draws examples from scholarly sources to show how digitisation has extended the field of Ibsen performance and research. It discusses three commercially produced DVDs of films based on An Enemy of the People written by Henrik Ibsen and adapted by directors living in diverse periods and places across the globe. The films are An Enemy of the People by George Schaefer in 1978,

S. Huq (✉) English Discipline, Arts and Humanities School, Khulna University, Khulna, Bangladesh © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2023 K.-k. Tam (ed.), Performance Arts: Research in the Age of Digital Revolution, Digital Culture and Humanities 4, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-19-9213-1_8

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Ganashatru by Satyajit Ray in 1990 and En Folkfiende by Erik Skjoldjbærg in 2005, and the chapter analyses how digitisation has made it possible to re-experience the important cultural elements that are not only apparent in these productions, rather they are the active agents that determine the films’ identities. These films have become cultural artifacts as they record socio-political environments of the three distinctive cultures at their specific junctures, and they are reinvented by generations of spectators through their digital recordings. The paper claims that digital technology has not only brought Ibsen closer to the common audience, but has also expanded the field of Ibsen teaching and practice, and extended Ibsen research to a certain degree. Recent research findings in Ibsen Studies are also referred to as case studies in order for explaining how video recordings have allowed Ibsen researchers discuss important cultural issues reconsidered via Ibsen plays. Finally, the study focuses on the post-Covid 19 theatre world, which looks for new modes of performances that signals an ever-changing field of theatre studies. Digitisation is a common word in the twenty-first century when people are familiar with Internet, social media, advanced cell phones (popularly called smart phones), etc. all of which are used to digitise and share information. We like to store information digitally so that we can access it anytime anywhere in the world. Erika Fischer-Lichte argues that performances are characterised by their “eventness”: In order to understand performances adequately, they are not to be held as works of art but as events. Since a performance comes into being by way of the interaction between actors and spectators, since it brings forth itself in and through an autopoietic process, it is impossible to label it a work. For when the autopoietic process has come to an end, the performance is not given as its result; rather, even the performance has come to an end. It is gone and irretrievably lost. It exists only as and in the process of performing; it exists only as an event. (Fischer-Lichte: Web)1

Fischer-Lichte’s flawless claim establishes performance as irretrievable as events take place only then and there. She also comments that the bodily co-presence of actors and spectators is a must in a theatre performance and “Likewise, it is not missed in a movie theatre or in front of the television. In this case, however, the bodily presence of the actors constantly threatened to disappear as the result of its own mediatisation” (Fischer-Lichte, 2008: 73). Several questions arise from here. Since performances are taking place in various parts of the world, how to proceed with performance analysis as it is impossible for every audience to be there at that time of event? How do we assess films and television productions as medium of knowledge production? The only way to retrieve and review a past event that will not be enacted anymore, is through secondary materials and digital recordings as such. Through digitisation they are made available for students and researchers for further studies. Digitisation has opened up new possibilities and avenues for performance studies, which is visible in the cases studied in the paper. On the other hand, films, 1 Fischer-Lichte’s article ‘Culture as Performance: Theatre history as cultural history’ published in the proceedings/Actas HISTÓRIA DO TEATRO E NOVAS TECNOLOGIAS is accessed online at http://ww3.fl.ul.pt/centros_invst/teatro/pagina/Publicacoes/Actas/erika_def.pdf [Accessed on 23 May, 2017]. No publication/upload date is mentioned on the site.

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especially commercial films, have a different dimension as they are connected with copyright, market value and commercial success of the film. However, the benefit of digitised versions of a film is its availability outside of the cinema hall; and one of the best uses of it can be in academic research, as Christian Schwarzenegger claims, the quality of sources, including their preservation as well as the ability to retrace, access and evaluate them, is decisive for a historical work (Schwarzenegger, 2012:120). The study specifically concentrates on Master’s and PhD theses produced by four different scholars across the field—the first three on stage productions and the fourth on film. Three films based on An Enemy of the People, which are history now, are discussed in the second part of the paper. What this paper argues is the availability of these films in DVDs that has made it possible to witness the cultural and political contexts described in them, which may assist a researcher to retrace the significance each production has in its specific temporality. Technical issues such as the making and marketing processes and commercial success of the films that are connected to their permanence and availability, are also important. A DVD of the film along with quantitative data on its sale and income are needed for the interest of researchers. Since this study is a qualitative one, and it was impossible to draw quantitative data due to several challenges, the discussion will be limited to the cultural aspects that can be redrawn through the available digital forms. These cultural aspects are important for researchers in the field of literature and theatre, and the stress is on how DVDs have smoothed the ways of such new historical research approach. Technology has also provided researchers with unimaginable support since easy ‘forward-backward’ playing and ‘freeze-frame’ mode lend a researcher the scope of scanning and focusing on the important aspects of the film.

Advantages and Glitches with DVDs A DVD can give a researcher almost an original impression of the film because in it pictures are usually released in theatrical mode. It does not compress the screen, and produces pictures in full width. As such, almost nothing technical of the original gets lost in a DVD. For a stage performance a video reproduction does not work in the same way because in a DVD the video recorded stage performance does not usually reproduce the audience’s view and the actor-space-audience relationship that dictates the meaning of a stage performance, cannot be reproduced and witnessed. Hence, a DVD is a last resort for theatre historiographers. However, a DVD can only be a supplement, not a replacement to movie-going for film researchers too. David Steritt comments that he never saw “a flat-screen, Blue-ray, all region set up of a DVD matching the crisp definition, nuanced color range, and aliveness of sound that a first rate 35 mm exhibition can provide” (2010: 22), but it must be added that not only the 35 mm film but the cellphone-talking, popcorn-gnashing and other moviehouse pests that Steritt feels gratified to get rid of, also create a romantic aesthetic moment for a moviegoer. These things make up the atmosphere upon which the film’s reception and appreciation by the general audience depends. A DVD is a good

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resource for a researcher only when the film does not go live in movie theatres, and it is the best among such recorded resources. It offers much more durable video storage medium than videocassettes and much higher quality video playback than VHS videos. These technical issues are elaborated by Walt Crawford in his delineation of DVD related technical issues in magazines published by American Libraries Association. DVDs are better archival medium than the earlier formats and can store library resources more efficiently. Moreover, it is easy to upload the film on websites from a digitised version. Once it is available on YouTube or similar sites, anyone can access it from anywhere in the world. Evidently, a DVD becomes vitally important for a film’s historiography, and this medium is strongly recommended for researchers who want to work on important cultural artifacts like the three films the paper wants to discuss.

Commercial Films Stored in DVDs: Ibsen in Digital Media As is stated earlier, a film on an Ibsen play is more suitable for a video disc as it is, unlike the transformation from stage to screen in the case of a stage production, a transformation from bigger to smaller screen. Ibsen’s plays have been turned into films since centuries. The paper, as is stated, focuses on three films based on An Enemy of the People to show what cultural elements they carry and how digitisation has made them available for researchers.

Film 1: An Enemy of the People The first of the films, An Enemy of the People, directed by George Schaefer, never made a commercial success though a Hollywood superstar played the protagonist. Steve McQueen was a famous and highly paid action hero and the role of Dr. Stockmann was not in tune with his action hero image. He signed the film at a turning point of his acting career and the film’s appreciation by the contemporary critics was mainly focusing on McQueen’s involvement with it, not on how the film impacted. The film did not earn box office profit, did not attract cinema critics, nor did it get awards, it was never properly released theatrically. Janet Maslin writes in a 1981 New York Times movie review: WHEN the late Steve McQueen appeared in “An Enemy of the People” in 1976, only to find that Warner Bros. was unwilling to release the film the following year, it sounded as if Mr. McQueen’s brush with Ibsen might have been genuinely disastrous. It wasn’t, but neither was it exciting enough to warrant an expensive, big-studio publicity campaign or to lure a large audience. (NYT, August 11, 1981, Web)

The distributing company Warner Bros. was at a loss about how the film could be promoted. McQueen’s lady-killer image of an action star was unrecognisable in the

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bearded and long haired Dr. Stockmann in the wordy play. By 1974 McQueen had become the highest paid Hollywood actor but he suddenly disappeared from acting and his comeback was through An Enemy of the People that was finally released in 1978. Alexander Jacobs adapted the script from Arthur Miller’s 1950 adaptation of the play. McQueen used his own company Solar Productions to produce it and became the executive producer. A poster of the film shows that a bearded McQueen alias Dr. Stockmann is surrounded by known and more popular images of McQueen from his earlier films. It shows that Warners did not confide in the film’s marketing on its own strength. It performed poorly and was quickly withdrawn from cinema. Altogether, the film remained highly obscure until Warners released its DVD in 2009. The DVD shows important features of the film. The adaptation was from Arthur Miller’s text, which built up in the context of McCarthyism in which accusation and treason became a central object. The film, apparently nothing more than a ‘canned theatre,’ portrays a claustrophobic environment because almost the whole of it except the public scene where Stockmann is to deliver his speech is carried out indoors. The quality of the camerawork is standard, and the film portrays a grayscale household picture with almost nothing to remember except the lights and glasses. The use of the light is interesting. The manually lit gas bulbs are lighted in the beginning scene by Catherine, Stockmann’s wife. In some following scenes the lights are kindled by Stockmann in which the meaning of the light become symbolic of enlightenment. Pressed with anxiety and rage, Stockmann seems to remove the darkness of the society through the lighting up of the rooms. The strongest element in the film, as it seems, is its comment on freedom of speech. The mayor of the city, Stockmann’s older brother, delivers a long speech in the public scene on freedom of speech, and asks the public to let Stockmann speak. Ironically, he moulded the gathering in advance in such a way that the public would not let Stockmann talk. This public scene is the attack on the pretension and falsehood of McCarthyism. The public scene also presents the other significant thematic elements in the film, i.e., the family bonding and a mutual trust and friendship with the young upon which Stockmann’s strength relies. His wife and children are his partners in the struggle. Emanuel Levy’s analysis of the social role of American films can be referred to here: The family and family-related values have always been a major cultural element of the American Way of Life. Indeed, the portrayal of the family in popular culture is an issue of great social and political significance because of the mass media’s functions in the socialization for gender and family roles. Notions of appropriate (and inappropriate) family structures and values are transmitted not only by the family, peer group, and formal schooling, but also by the mass media (fiction, film, television). (1991: 187)

According to him, in the 1970s the American films ignored or dismissed family life which had major come back towards the end of the 1980s. Conversely, American theatre was all the while preoccupied with family life. The film made in 1977 may have given importance on family life and ties perhaps because it borrowed the story from a theatre piece that was focusing on the issues. However, in this case, the film heavily suffered, as can be suspected, an anxiety of the McQueen influence, which is

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evident in the absence of any criticism of it separately from McQueen’s. Janet Maslin’s critique of the film is a witness to that: Mr. McQueen didn’t specialize in playing a loving father and husband; his manner was too believably that of a loner. Here, as Stockmann gathers around the dinner table with his loved ones, he seems so remote that the movie is filled with long and stony silences. Mr. McQueen responds to some of the play’s most impassioned speeches with a nearly expressionless stare. (Maslin, 1981)

American hero worship tradition is followed in the case of the film. McQueen’s long sabbatical after a film released in 1974 is usually the major focus in the comments and criticisms on the film. For example, in an interview titled “The best and worst of Steve McQueen: Marshall Terrill on his lifelong passion” Marshall Terrill writes, “He [McQueen] chose to go totally against type and rather than try and misrepresent the film, the studio canned it. My personal belief is that he chose the project to sabotage his First Artists deal [McQueen’s production company; And so the ultimate question is asked. . . Is Enemy any good?”. McQueen tried to promote the film, touring it through universities. He even gave public talks to popularise it. It seems that it was his struggle with his own shadows. However, the VHS version was finally released for viewers to watch at home and the film had occasional TV shows too. Its release in DVD in 2009 finally allowed the interested public to access it.

Film 2: Ganashatru The second film that this paper refers to is Ganashatru, directed by Satyajit Ray in 1990 and produced by the National Film Development Corporation of India (NFDC) . It stayed in the cinema for quite a long period. It was premiered in Cannes Film Festival in May, 1989, and was released in different Indian cinema halls throughout 1990. David Blakeslee (2014) writes: Since this is the first time that I’ve seen the film that amounted to Ray’s heroic “comeback” project after several years off due to health problems, I can’t really say how well it connected to assorted scandals and controversies of earlier eras. But I’m fairly confident that the social pressures and cultural dynamics at work in this film, itself an adaptation of Henrik Ibsen’s play from 1882, have been more or less constant across global civilization for well over the past 130 years since Ibsen first sketched out the rough outline of his drama. (Web)

Health concerns forced Ray to lessen the scope of his production, and it makes for a more succinct, incisive drama. Five years passed in between the The Home and the World and An Enemy of the People because the filmmaker was recovering from a heart attack he suffered near the end of The Home’s production. For this follow-up, Ray once again turned to an older text, this time updating it for a modern context. An Enemy of the People is an adaptation of the 1882 Henrik Ibsen play of the same name, transplanted to India and modernised. In this film Soumitra Chatterjee returns as Dr. Ashoke Gupta, a mild-mannered medical practitioner concerned about the

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increase of jaundice and hepatitis amongst the local population of his Bengali residence. These are diseases not common to the area, and he believes that an introduction of new contaminants to the water supply is responsible. Further investigation bears this out. Most troubling, though, is the pollution’s connection to the town’s Hindu temple. The holy water the worshipers partake in is infected, as well.

Film 3: En Folkfiende The Norwegian film En Folkfiende has expanded Ibsen’s dramatic storyline in which Thomas Stockmann becomes a twenty-first century individual who fights against a syndicate (Jensen & Tørdal, 2016). His additional advantage is link with the media. He is a nutritionist who willingly returns to the West Coast of Norway to start a spring water factory leaving behind his corporate job that earned him good money. The spring water factory is built using local community volunteer efforts. The beginning of the film thus indicates at an idealistic nature of the protagonist who looks for alternatives that would let the world free of the corporate grip. Stockmann discovers that the water of the spring is poisoned and the man responsible behind this is his own father-in-law who buried pesticides around the source of the water. The film produces a family drama. The film’s most significant element is its use of the Norwegian landscape. Fjords, sea, hills are beautifully focused on the screen, which is possible only in cinema. The DVD creates a similar visual space as almost nothing is lost on a comparatively smaller screen. Another important aspect is that the film allows Stockmann to be on the move all the time interacting with nature. There are many outdoor scenes. Thus, there is a constant scene shifting—Stockmann’s movements to and from the factory, and his home with an open fjord while that background heightens his inner claustrophobia when he is accused by the family and local people. His temporary imprisonment and the following abandonment by family increases the claustrophobic effect while Ibsen’s psychologically charged interior is aptly caricatured in the protagonist. The film representing such Norwegian landscape with its a Norwegian cultural milieu, was in discussions among Ibsen scholars, and articles are also produced on it. Lisbeth P. Wærp comments that Erik Skjoldbjærg, the director, and Nikolaj Frobenius, the script writer, aimed to make the film into a critique of the image of Norway (2015). She refers to an interview of Skjoldbjærg in which the director makes a link between the Norwegian self-image and Norwegian nature: Eg meiner at nordmenn sitt sjølvbilete er falskt unnselig. Eigentleg kjenner vi oss overlegne, som berarar av den “reine” moral, og eg trur det heng saman med det norske landskapet. Den reine, ubesudla naturen vi lever i. (Kulås 2005. I think that the Norwegian self-image is falsely modest. In fact, we feel superior, like representatives of “pure” morality, and I think it has to do with the Norwegian landscape. The pure, unspoilt nature that we live in.). (Wærp, 2015: 412–413)

The film, as such, has led to new discussions on aspects of Norwegian life. Norwegian Digital Learning Arena (NDLA) has used the film to discuss in the

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secondary school classroom and discussed aspects like use of symbols, colours, dramaturgy, loss and gain, so on and so forth. This film has become an integral part of teaching of Ibsen to the new students, and digital media has proven useful once again.

Ibsen Studies and the Function of Digital Ibsen: CD/DVD, DUO, IbsenStage Students and researchers all over the world have been using DVDs for theatre and film research since it was introduced in 1997. Centre for Ibsen Studies at the University of Oslo in Norway has produced several postgraduates and PhDs since its inception in 19912 and many of the students and researchers have referred to digitised materials on Ibsen that they used for their research. After completing the research, the scholars submit their theses to DUO or the digital archive of University of Oslo to let these be available to others. In that sense, a digital culture is thriving in the field of pedagogy. Henrik Ibsen was a dramatist of the nineteenth century, and most of his plays have been performed all over the world. IbsenStage3 is the largest performance database for all Ibsen productions across the globe. Researchers can trace the history of any Ibsen production sitting anywhere in the world through this site. This digitisation of information is a revolutionary attempt in Ibsen practice, and words are unnecessary to stress the importance of the database. Alongside, DVDs have played a great role in Ibsen practice since most of the performances taking place in contemporary time are turned into DVDs by the theatre houses, which remain available for interested researchers. Copyright materials are not commercialised but interested researchers get permission to watch the videos if the theatres are contacted. The old performances are sometimes revived from bootleg copies to video cassettes. Photographs are also made available through the theatres’ websites that are also valuable material for researchers. The following cases will show how scholars, while researching on Ibsen, were beneficiaries of DVDs of stage performances. Only a few monographs are referred to here and the examples, in no way, exhaust the list because the long line of Ibsen scholars across the globe has produced so many research articles that all cannot be accommodated within the present study.

2 Centre for Ibsen Studies started functioning as a full-fledged institution since 1993 though the official starting was in 1991. 3 The Ibsen stage performance database. Source: https://ibsenstage.hf.uio.no/

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Case Study 1 Sabiha Huq undertook PhD at the Centre for Ibsen Studies in 2010 on translations of Ibsen’s Peer Gynt.4 One of the three productions she studied was in Kannada5 language that had been translated by S. Raghunandan and was staged in 1995. When she started her work, she did not have enough primary material for study. She went for a field visit to Mysore and after much hard work could trace a recording of the premiere stored on a video cassette. The cassette was fungus-affected and she could not play it. The technical experts working in the IT section of University of Oslo cleaned the tape and copied the video into a DVD, which enabled Huq to understand how an Ibsen play became a site for cultural representation of contemporary India. Huq’s analysis of the play rested mainly on the DVD and this was supplemented by a few photographs. Huq’s is a strong example of how researchers in the field have acknowledged their debt to DVDs which made their research possible. Stage performances on Ibsen are, thus, given permanence through video discs. Moreover, the videos of the Norwegian or Bangla films accompanied by English subtitles is another great help for researchers and scholars. Thus, language barrier is also overcome to some extent. Other cultural elements, i.e., gestures and nuances also get more clarity through the process. Huq’s first orientation with the performance DVDs was through the coursework she had in her first year of Master’s studies. There she witnessed her teachers, especially the ones taking the course “Ibsen in Performance” were in favour of showing videos of performances of Ibsen. Frode Helland, Julie Holledge, Kamaluddin Nilu and Ellen Rees would regularly show video clips during their classes. Visiting researchers would also display a plethora of Ibsen reception in different cultures through playing clips from DVDs. Thus, teaching and learning in the MPhil in Ibsen Studies programme has been much dependent on digital media since a long time ago. Furthermore, inspired by the new teaching method and use of new materials that gave Huq a New Historical approach to research, she wrote her MPhil dissertation on two stage productions of Ghosts and A Doll’s House that were adapted in Bangla and staged in Bangladesh consecutively in 1996 and 2001. They were staged several times but none of the two became an ‘event’ for Huq since she lived in a faraway place away from the cultural centre of the country and missed all of those performances. Since she came across the new teaching methods at UiO and understood that there were ways to pursue the research she was interested in, she opted for secondary materials on those productions. DVDs provided by the theatre house that staged the play (Centre for Asian Theatre or CAT), were the sources of her study and she could retrieve important cultural aspects from it. The play based on Ghosts is titled Krishnabibar meaning ‘black hole’ and it evolves around the story of a rich widow Peer Gynt is a poetic play by Henrik Ibsen which was first published in 1867. Kannada is one of the scheduled languages of India and the official and administrative language of the state of Karnataka. 4 5

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with an unhappy past; a son who stays abroad; a maid who is raised like a foster daughter; a family friend who looks after the family properties, etc. The widow wants to give away everything left by her dead husband in support of his memory. She has built an orphanage that is going to be inaugurated. Family members and friends, dependants and workers—all are taking the last moment preparation for the inaugural ceremony (Huq, 2009: 58–59). The play presents two women: Rozina is a rebellious young woman and the alter-ego of Regine in the original; Aleya Begum is the Bengali counterpart of Mrs. Alving, a middle-aged woman who failed to free herself from her unhappy marriage because of the societal and religious pressures. The social evil is fought by these two women, and through them contemporary gender problems become apparent. The play attacks masculinity in a number of ways. First, the attack is on the father figure. Rozina knows that Entaz (Engstrand) is her father. He reminds her several times how he owns her as her father. But Rozina denies any authority of him. Mr. Rahman (Mr. Alving in the original), Aleya’s husband, became a failure as a father to his son Osman (Oswald) although he had been a role model to him in his early childhood. Second, a hegemonic presentation of the superiority of the male body is criticised in a symbolic way. Both Osman and Rozina are strong and young, but at the end of the play Osman becomes an invalid, and seeks help from either Rozina or his mother (Huq, 2009). As an aristocratic Muslim woman in the ‘mufassil’ (not the big city, a small town close to the villages), Aleya maintains ‘purdah’ in front of the males other than her son. Her sari’s end covers her head, and she upholds the docile behaviour of a respectable Muslim woman. It is expressed through the dialogues that she never had a chance to tell her parents that she loved Moulana Mannaf, a man she met in her youth who reappears as Pastor Manders. Her family was very strict, and she was married to Osman’s father without her consent (Huq, 2009). Putuler Itikatha is the second play discussed in the thesis. Lots of cultural issues are present in the production. Bangladeshi culture and gender politics are mostly prominent in the play. For example, the setting is double-spaced, and looks like a grand piano. A staircase connects the two-storied stage. Torvald’s study seems to be on the upper stage, and Nora stays on the ground floor except in one scene. This acts as a physical structure that is gendered. The man is the owner of the higher rank and that is why he always stays on top, and the woman of the house attends her guests down, which is her territory. Nora does not call Torvald by his name on the stage. She prefers to call him ‘Ei’ that is more like ‘Hey’ in English. It is traditionally believed that a woman should not call the husband by his name, because he is a revered person. The play maintains this through the arrangement of the physical stage. Torvald occupies the upper floor, and Nora is allowed to go to the bedroom to share his bed. The sexual connotation is there, and a woman’s position is more traditionally put on the stage. It becomes a Bangladeshi play despite the universality emphasised by the director. However, Huq comments that the body language and scenography are far more captivating than the dialogues that are less experimental (Huq, 2009). Huq comments on women’s situation in Bangladesh in the 1990s that is reflected in the play. A woman follows Nora’s path when she is pushed hard on the wall. Nora

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uses her physical charm to extract money from Torvald, and thus makes her body a commodity. Her situation is similar to that of a captive animal. Huq explains when an unemployed woman who has to depend on the husband’s money, uses her physical charms to get what she wants. On the other hand, she also comments on Nora’s low moments when she is lost in innermost thoughts and is preoccupied with something grave and dangerous that are effectively visible on the screen as Huq plays it. That stage performance uses four Noras, three being the shadows of the first. The shadows seem to be sharing the message that one Nora on the stage is not enough to show the different personalities that a woman has within her. Huq comments that Nora complied with the doll role Nora plays, according to Templeton’s remark, that to flatter her husband and to make her marriage ‘work’. However, after learning the truth Torvald despises her for it, she is forced to understand how she has humiliated herself (Huq, 2009). Huq could trace all these through watching the DVDs repeatedly, using backward and forward movements and freezing scenes for further concentration. Obviously, it could have been rewarding if she could visit the theatre to attend one of the shows, but as she could not, it is evidenced that the DVDs enormously helped her. She could not have been benefitted more had she used some other secondary source. Conversely, digital medium has been in use for sharing new knowledge. For example, Huq’s MPhil thesis is stored in Oslo University’s digital publications (DUO) as a PDF file and it can be viewed online by anyone from any corner of the world. This case evidences that digitisation has taken the stage performances quite a long way in the field of research and its dissemination.

Case Study 2 Ahmed Ahsanuzzaman completed his MPhil in Ibsen Studies in 2008 and his thesis titled “Relevance of Ibsen to Contemporary Bangladesh: A Study of Brand” relates to the CD (compact disc) produced in 2005 by the theatre house CAT. His own experience of watching the premiere in 2004 and the recapitulation of the stage performance through the CD enabled him to trace different cultural objects. Ahsanuzzaman writes: I attempt a performance analysis of Brand in Bangladesh to advance my claim that Ibsen was not imported to Bangladesh, but the spectators with their knowledge of the country’s social and political dynamics created the performance. As mentioned in the “Introduction”, the analysis will be based around my recollections of the première held on December 19, 2004 at the National Theatre of Bangladesh Shilpakala Academy in Dhaka as well as the production video CD (2005) and still pictures from the production. I will choose major turning points of the performance to argue how the audience through its responses, reactions and perceptions produced it. I will contend that it was because of this rich negotiation and transaction with the performance that Brand “in spite of its foreignness” turned out essentially to be a Bangladeshi performance and its author, Ibsen, a Bangladeshi dramatist of the twenty first century. (2008: 38)

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The play Brand opens with a group of pilgrims bearing crosses in their hands and slowly traversing the stage. Brand, the protagonist, clad in black and with a staff in his hand, enters the stage at the tail of the procession. The setting is a stormy day with wind blowing from all directions. Brand is joined by a peasant and his son. The peasant’s daughter is sick and Brand walks with them to hear her confession. The peasant gets scared at one stage as the storm blows harder, and asks Brand to stop. Brand replies, “e pathei amake jete hobe” (I must go on this way) (Ahsanuzzaman, 2008: 39). He reminds the peasant of his dying daughter and asks him if he is ready to sacrifice to insure her peaceful death. The peasant answers that he is ready to give up all he possesses for the poor girl. At that moment Brand catches him off guard and asks, “deben ki jiban apnar”? (But give your life too, have that cease?) (Ahsanuzzaman, 2008: 39). Through the discussion Ahsanuzzaman proves that in contemporary Bangladesh there was a rise of Islamic fanaticism and fanatics like Brand could go any length to establish their conviction. He referred to incidents like women being ostracised in a village as a punishment for using contraceptives, burning and banning several NGO schools, attacking on newspaper offices, placing a bill by Jamaat-i-Islami to make blasphemy punishable by death sentence, demolishing murals and artifacts in Dhaka city, and such that were reflected in the adaptation of Brand. This thesis is also part of the UiO digital archive, and became available to other researchers.

Case Study 3 Liyang Xia wrote her PhD dissertation on “Heart Higher than the Sky: Reinventing Chinese Femininity through Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler” in 2013. She has written on Chinese femininity and how Hedda or Hai Da (the Chinese counterpart) challenges the notion of Chinese femininity. She concludes by commenting that Hai Da faces difficulties as an aspiring woman in a patriarchal society in ‘ancient China’ (2013: 159). She continues: “in a fast-growing economy in today’s China, in which women aspire to the same things as men, traditional gender constructions still inhibit the freedoms of Chinese women, and yet there is a lack of an effective value system to shape a new femininity which allows women to truly achieve their aspirations” (2013: 159). She has documented films and video recordings for her study. Hedda Gabler produced in yueju6 form was watched by her in person, but for her research she had to use the video recording thoroughly.

6

Yueju is one of the most popular of Chinese opera genres, with the notable feature of having all roles played by women (source: Cohen 2012, mentioned in Xia, 2013: 163).

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Case Study 4 The fourth case of Ibsen research shows how a double-layered digitisation of an Ibsen play helped a scholar. Sarwar Jahan wrote his MPhil thesis on Ganashatru in 2010 at the Centre for Ibsen Studies, University of Oslo. Though Jahan had watched the film in a cinema hall in India sometime in 1992, he used the Eagle Home Entertainment’s DVD of the film (2008) exhaustively to conduct his research in 2010. Jahan amply discusses how the film has delved into Indian life and at the same time commented on the rising issues in contemporary West Bengal political and cultural scenario. He emphasises that the film has commented on Bengali cultural life with its linguistic, behavioral, religious aspects at large. The film changed a list of elements vital in the Ibsen drama, which Jahan discussed in his dissertation. He comments on the positive ending of the play: “Indian people basically visit cinema halls for entertainment and they expect to find their wildest dreams realised on the screen. Thus, Stockmann’s heroic egotism and pride in standing alone at the end may not have produced the same appeal with the cinema audience as it could with theatre spectators” (2010: 79–80). As such, Jahan’s study brings out important cultural aspects of the Indian adaptation of the play and video recording has been useful in his study. These four cases of Ibsen scholarship are representative of numerous others that have produced research components using digitised materials, and it can be safely said that Ibsen teaching has gone digital in the twenty-first century.

Ibsen and the New Normal: The Concept of Online Theatre Since the Covid-19 pandemic broke out in the world, physical lockdown has offered its challenges across the globe. Theatres remained closed for many months as crowd was prohibited. The new reality (popularly termed New Normal) that the world has seen, has impacted the theatre too, and online release of theatre productions started happening to cope with the situation. Along this line, theatre as entertainment has been channeled through new platforms. A Doll’s House became a lucrative text since it is an indoor family drama that talks about financial crisis and human relationships, all of which match with the fallouts of the pandemic. The first among these was A Doll’s House adapted and directed by İbrahim Çiçek under the Digital Stage project and was live streamed on Zorlu PSM’s YouTube channel at 8 pm on 20 January 2021 (Fig. 8.1). İbrahim Çiçek designed Digital Stage with a view to reviving the classical plays displaying problems from the past that continued through the present. He had stage and costumes designed by scenographer Ceyda Balaban and his adaptations were documented by video director Gizem Kızıl. Digital Stage platform of Zorlu Performans Sanatları Merkezi (PSM) or Zorlu Performing Arts Centre in Istanbul supported this project and started streaming adaptations of classical theatre pieces every Thursday evening in its YouTube

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Fig. 8.1 Nilperi Şahinkaya as “Nora” in A Doll’s House staged online from Istanbul. Source: Daily Sabah (2021), Internet

channel (Zorlu PSM, n.d.). According to the theatre house’s website, Zorlu PSM is one of the biggest and most equipped performance arts centres in Turkey with its Main Theatre having a capacity of 2190 spectators and its Drama Stage having a capacity of 678 people. One must understand why such a huge theatre needed to open an online platform in January 2021, right after the first gigantic blow of the pandemic stopped the world. A second example of Ibsen staged in the cyberspace is A Doll’s House 20/20 directed by Kyle Cassidy and produced by Laurel Tree Theater (2022), which is based in Philadelphia, USA, and was livestreamed during March 23–April 9, 2021 (Fig. 8.2). The story keeps the storyline of borrowing a large sum of money by Nora Helmer, and her being blackmailed by Krogstad. The twist is that Nora is covid affected and she is in quarantine in her own apartment. Bubble Chat, an app, keeps her connected with the outside world including her husband. Interestingly, the group name of the chatroom is called The Doll’s House, which Nora finally leaves by signing out herself. Nora’s story unfolds harsh reality of the pandemic, people’s desperation due to unemployment, and struggles for power—all these are enacted in an online platform. This is a story of female emancipation, in which Nora discovers her value as a human being. A third example of Ibsen in the cloud theatre is again of A Doll’s House directed by Blanche McIntyre and was staged online by The Royal Welsh College of Music and Drama on 13–19 October 2021. This play emboldens Nora who goes against a

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Fig. 8.2 Jessica Dalcanton as Nora in A Doll’s House 20/20. Screen capture from the livestreamed play

man-made society and asserts her societal role. Nora discovers her potential and chooses her role as a social being. This study aims at showing that these digital online productions not only help Ibsen to exist; they also give the old a new life, and since they are ready-to-go sources and can give the young students a sense of contemporaneity, they could be good teaching materials too.

Conclusion The study has tried to bring out the fact that video recordings of stage performances and DVDs of films are useful as secondary materials. The bygone performances are resurrected by such recordings and these may become valuable sources for scholars and researchers, which is emphasised through the examples of recent Ibsen scholarship. Important cultural aspects are exposed through the productions and reinvestigating them through the video recordings is a crucial act. As such, digital technology has enlivened recent Ibsen research. It is a time for global digital platform, and people have been exposed to harsh realities of the physical world that have necessitated online modes of communication, entertainment and even teaching-learning. Introduction of cloud theatres in the post-pandemic world is one glaring example of how fast and strongly we are moving towards a digital world. Ibsen studies and research must keep pace with this fast-changing global scenario.

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References Ahsanuzzaman, A. (2008). Relevance of Ibsen to contemporary Bangladesh: A study of Brand. MPhil Dissertation, University of Oslo. Retrieved June 2, 2017, from https://www.duo.uio.no/ bitstream/handle/10852/27212/AhsanuzzamanMPhilThesis-1.pdf?sequence=1 Blakeslee, D. (2014). A journey through the eclipse series: Satyajit Ray’s An Enemy of the People. Retrieved May 26, 2016, from http://criterioncast.com/column/a-journey-through-the-eclipseseries/enemy-of-the-people Daily Sabah. (2021, January 20). Ibsen’s famed ‘A Doll’s House’ streaming online. Daily Sabah. Retrieved May 25, 2022, from https://www.dailysabah.com/arts/performing-arts/ibsens-fameda-dolls-house-streaming-online?gallery_image=undefined#big Fischer-Lichte, E. (2008). The transformative power of performance: A new aesthetics. Routledge. Fischer-Lichte, E. (2017). Culture as performance: Theatre history as cultural history. Actas/ Proceedings. História do Teatro e Novas Tecnologias. Retrieved May 23, 2017, from, http:// ww3.fl.ul.pt/centros_invst/teatro/pagina/Publicacoes/Actas/erika_def.pdf Huq, S. (2009). Ibsen as understood in Bangladesh: Ghosts and A Doll’s House seen through the lenses of gender. MPhil Dissertation, University of Oslo. Retrieved June 1, 2017, from https:// www.duo.uio.no/bitstream/handle/10852/27196/ibsen-as-understood-in-bangladesh.pdf? sequence=1 Jahan, M. S. (2010). An enemy of the people transformed into Ganashatru: How local? MPhil Dissertation, University of Oslo. Jensen, T. A., & Tørdal, R. M. (2016). En Folkfiende. Retrieved June 1, 2017, from http://ndla.no/ nb/node/171443?fag=130693 Laurel Tree Theater. (2022). https://laurel-tree-theater.ticketleap.com/a-dolls-house-2020/ Levy, E. (1991). The American dream of family in film: From decline to a comeback. Journal of Comparative Family Studies, 22(2), 187–204. Maslin, J. (1981, August 11). McQueen in 1976 ‘Enemy of the People’. The New York Times. Retrieved May 21, 2017, from http://www.nytimes.com/movie/review?res=9500EFDA113 BF932A2575BC0A967948260 Schwarzenegger, C. (2012). Exploring digital yesterdays—Reflections on new media and the future of communication history. Historical Social Research/Historische Sozialforschung, 37(4(142)), 118–133. Sterritt, D. (2010). New lives on DVD for nontheatrical films. Cinéaste, 35(3), 22–27. Cineaste Publishers. Retrieved May 21, 2017, from http://www.jstor.org/stable/41690910 Wærp, L. P. (2015). The play-within-the-film: Peer Gynt in Skjoldbjærg’s En Folkfiende (A public enemy, 2004). Nordlit, 34, 411–426. Xia, L. (2013). Heart higher than the sky: Reinventing Chinese femininity through Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler. PhD Dissertation, University of Oslo. Zorlu PSM (n.d.) https://www.zorlupsm.com/en/visit/visit

Sabiha Huq is Professor of English at Khulna University, Bangladesh. She received her PhD in 2014 and her dissertation is on translations of Ibsen’s Peer Gynt in three different cultures. She has several articles on Ibsen published in books and journal to her credit. Her latest publication is The Mughal Aviary: Women’s Writings in Pre-Modern India (Vernon Press, 2022). She has jointly edited Ibsen in the Decolonised Theatre of South Asia (Routledge) that is supposed to come out in 2023. She is currently a member of the International Ibsen Committee.

Chapter 9

Artifact as Digihistory: Re-viewing Islamist Militancy in Bangladesh Through Ibsen’s Brand Ahmed Ahsanuzzaman

Abstract The study builds upon the old, yet forever new Keatsian concept of art as “sylvan historian” to study digitised artifacts as historical texts. Digital history comprising ‘digitexts’ is a rich archive which by both its overt and covert interpretations of events and incidents can retell history to us as did the Grecian Urn to Keats like a pastoral historian. Seen in this light an artifact becomes a popular/subaltern historian that registers history and comments on it as well. In this chapter, I look at the digitised Brand, directed by Kamaluddin Nilu and argue that by its critique of Christian fundamentalism it can function as digihistory in the context of Bangladesh. I will contend that Nilu’s Brand by its oblique critique of Islamist militancy is a digitext that negotiates Bangladesh politics and history in the early 2000s. Keywords Bangladesh · Bengali Muslims · Brand · Digihistory · Ghosts · Ibsen · Kamaluddin Nilu · Pakistan · Patriarchal THOU still unravish’d bride of quietness, Thou foster-child of Silence and slow Time, Sylvan historian, who canst thus express A flowery tale more sweetly than our rhyme: (Keats, “Ode on a Grecian Urn”: 1–4)

The Centre for Asian Theatre (CAT) premièred Brand at Bangladesh’s national theatre in Dhaka on 19 December 2004, which I was privileged to attend. It was translated and directed respectively by Munzur-i-Mowla and Kamaluddin Nilu. I wrote my M Phil thesis about the production with a view to showing its relevance to contemporary Bangladesh at the Centre for Ibsen Studies, the University of Oslo in

A. Ahsanuzzaman (✉) Department of English and Modern Languages, School of Liberal Arts and Social Sciences, Independent University Bangladesh, Dhaka, Bangladesh e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2023 K.-k. Tam (ed.), Performance Arts: Research in the Age of Digital Revolution, Digital Culture and Humanities 4, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-19-9213-1_9

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2008.1 The political dimension of performance is accentuated by performance scholars. Indeed, making Ibsen as his springboard, Frode Helland has shown how performance and power are intertwined (Helland, 2015). However, here I wish to read the three-part VCD of Brand that CAT released early 2005 as an artifact, the digitext, interrogating history and simultaneously interpreting it. A brief survey of Bangladesh history since 1947 will be helpful in viewing the digitised Brand as digihistory, reflecting upon Bangladesh in the 2000s. In 1947 the British Raj left the Indian sub-continent dividing it into two separate nations along the line of the notorious Radcliffe Award—Pakistan for the Muslims and India for the Hindus. The division instead of solving the communal problem aggravated it further as millions became homeless refugees, desperately trying to relocate themselves in places across the sub-continent where most of them had never been before. Partition was abrupt, violent and bloody in nature in the Punjab as Kushwant Singh’s deeply troubling historical novel Train to Pakistan (1956) reveals. It was however painfully slow but intensely pathetic in Bengal, the province which includes today’s Bangladesh, erstwhile East Bengal, and its neighbouring Indian state of West Bengal. The British colonisers had infamously partitioned the region (which then included Bihar and Orissa as well) into East and West Bengal first in 1905 and were compelled to reunite in 1911 in the wake of massive movements in the area. Famous Bengali filmmaker Ritwik Ghatak’s partition trilogy—Meghe Dhaka Tara (The Cloud-capped Star) (1960), Komal Gandhar (E Flat) (1961) and Subaranarekha (The Golden Thread) (1962)—is a humane depiction of the tragedy of Bengal partition. The agonisingly slow exodus from Bangladesh arguably has not stopped till this date. Contemporary Bangladeshi filmmaker of international repute Tanvir Mokammel’s national award-winning feature film Chitra Nadir Pare (Quiet Flows the River Chitra) (1999) is a poignant statement about the deeply tragic exodus from East Bengal. Mokammel’s film is a digitext, which re-views history from the margins with the protagonist, Sashikanta, the rather eccentric Hindu advocate in the lower court in a remote East Pakistan town, stubbornly refusing to migrate to West Bengal even though that was more or less the order of the day in the 1960s, the time the movie captures. However, Sashikanta gives in to his failing health, and his old aunt and daughter finally leave for the border en route to Kolkata, the unknown city. Nevertheless, the Bengali Muslims living in East Pakistan formed a distinctive and complex identity embracing Islam and Bengali nationalism which united them in their struggle for freedom in 1971. The Muslim League, the party that under Muhammad Ali Jinnah’s leadership was on equal footing with the Indian National Congress, virtually disappeared from the political scene when it was handed in a crushing defeat in the 1954 East Pakistan provincial elections. The stage was thus set for the advent of the fundamentalist party, Jamaat-i-Islami.2 It is interesting to note

The present chapter is partly based on the author’s MPhil thesis, “Relevance of Ibsen Contemporary Bangladesh: A Study of Brand” (University of Oslo, 2008). 2 The party has recently renamed itself as the Bangladesh Jammat-i-Islam. 1

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that Jamaat had adopted an “indifferent attitude to the creation of Pakistan” because its ideologue, Abul A’la al-Maududi, “was [. . .] critical of the lack of Islamic character in the leadership of the Muslim League and believed that such secularminded and westernised leadership was not capable of establishing an Islamic state in Pakistan” (Ahmad, 1991: 467–68). So, ever since its founding in 1941, Jamaat embraced fundamentalism as its basic creed and set as its objective “the establishment of the Islamic way (al-Deen) so as to achieve God’s pleasure and seek salvation in the Hereafter” (Quoted by Ahmad, 1991: 467). Wahhabite in spirit, Jamaat had received support from a section of the ulema (Muslim clerics) and allegedly the blessings of the oil-rich Saudi Arabia, which helped it to consolidate its organisational network over the years. It organised rallies, religious meetings, demonstrations, etc. to reach the masses with its plea to establish Pakistan as an Islamic state. Although gradual awareness of Bengali nationalism and political developments in East Pakistan jeopardised its mission, Jamaat had emerged as the most important Islamist political party by 1970. Because it opposed Bangladesh’s war of liberation in 1971 and actively collaborated with the Pakistani Army killing millions of innocent people, Jamaat went into hibernation for a brief period after independence. However, with the restoration of democracy in 1990 after years of military and quasi-military regimes since the brutal killing of the Father of the Nation Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman on 15 August 1975, Jamaat emerged as a formidable player in the country’s politics. It formed a liaison with the Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP), the party, which along with its allies won two-thirds majority in 2001 general elections, and the Jamaat chief and its secretary general were made the cabinet ministers by the BNP government led by Begum Khaleda Zia, the widow of the slain Army chief-cumPresident Ziaur Rahman. Nonetheless, both of them were convicted by the court for their crimes against humanity during Bangladesh war of liberation and hanged. One may say that a lenient attitude to Jamaat by both the major political parties as well as the failure of progressive secularist forces in orchestrating a massive campaign against it, and the patronage of the capitalist world which also includes the Middle East countries have contributed towards its emergence as a key political force in the country in the 1990s. Ali Riaz notes: In the fifteen years following 1975, as Bangladesh was ruled by military and militarydominated civilian regimes, religion and religio-political forces gradually occupied a definite space in the Bangladesh polity. The secularist political forces as well as right-of-center political parties began using religious idioms and icons to regain some religious legitimacy and to garner the support of the small but influential religio-political forces in their efforts to seize power. (Riaz, 2013: 74)

Fatwas Against Women in Bangladesh (1996)—a compilation documenting the ugly hands of Islamic fundamentalism—contains evidences of fanatical and fundamentalist acts during 1991–95 when BNP backed by Jamaat was in power. Page number 12 of the booklet contains a list of some select actions by the fundamentalists which were carried out in fulfilment of fatwas promulgated from time to time, although fatwas do not have any legal bearing in Bangladesh jurisprudence. It was precisely because of the fatwas that the imams, the Islamic clerics, refused to perform burial

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rites for children who had attended the schools run by the largest non-government organisation of the world, the Bangladesh Rural Advancement Committee (BRAC). The hanged Jamaat chief also moved a blasphemy bill in the national parliament “to give a legal cover to [persecute] secular and democratic sectors of society” (Lucas & Kapoor, 1996: 106). Over the last few decades, especially during the 2000s, the Islamic fundamentalists launched a series of coordinated attacks on the members and mosques belonging to the Ahmadyya Muslim Community of Bangladesh. The fundamentalists independently as well as collectively under a jihadist outfit named Khatme Nabuwat Anodolon (the movement to ensure the seal of prophethood) excommunicated the Ahmadyyas from Islam terming them kafirs (non-believers) and repeatedly persecuted them. It is pertinent to note that in Pakistan and some other Islamic countries including Saudi Arabia the Ahmadyyas are banned. Time after time the fundamentalists brought out violent campaigns with lethal weapons and pressed the Bangladesh government to officially call them non-Muslims. Although the government did not declare the Ahmaddyas non-Muslims, it imposed a ban on their publications. The government move, itself unconstitutional because the Bangladesh Constitution guarantees freedom of speech to all citizens, did not appease the zealots as they continued their attacks on the Ahmadyyas; they even killed an Ahmadyya chaplain. Instead of calling them Ahmadyyas, they derisively call them Qadiyaniat because they consider the Ahmadddya founder Mirza Ghulam Ahmad, who was born in Qadiyan in India’s Punjab in 1835 and died in 1908, an impostor and an agent of British imperialism. In their interpretation, “Qadiayanis/ Ahmadis are nothing but a gang of traitors, apostates and infidels” (Khatme Nabuwwat Academy, 2009) and their persecution is thus deemed a religious duty of all “true” Muslims. The Ahmaddyas across the world have repeatedly denied the fundamentalists’ claim. They identify themselves as Muslims and want to practice Islam in their own way. Hence the tormenting question: Have the fundamentalists have any rights to call them non-Muslims when they want to identify themselves as Muslims? The Qur’an grants people the right to exercise their religion freely: “There shall be no compulsion in religion” (The Qur’an: 2, 257). God even permits people to dissent: O ye who believe, obey Allah and obey His Messenger and those who are in authority among you. Then if you differ in anything refer it to Allah [. . .] if you are believers in Allah and the Last Day. That is the best and most commendable in the end. (The Quran: 4, 59–60)

The quotations from the holy book establish beyond doubt that the fundamentalists’ ways of thinking and subsequent violent actions against the Ahmadyyas are themselves a deviation from the preaching of Allah. In clear violation of God’s order, which insists on referring any disputed matter to Him, the fundamentalists of Bangladesh took the laws into their own hands and continued their onslaughts on the Ahmaddyas. Against this backdrop of fundamentalist resurgence, the plights of Taslima Nasrin, the noted feminist writer of the country, needs to be considered. In an interview published in the leading Kolkata-based English daily The Statesman on

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9 May 1994 Nasrin was “reported to have asked for a change” in the Qur’an, which she refuted and her rejoinder to this effect was duly published in the newspaper on 11 May. Nevertheless, the fundamentalist forces led by Jamaat “demanded [her] execution for her interview [. . .] and her trial for blasphemy” (Lucas & Kapoor, 1996: 57). The present situation is that Nasrin, facing a death-threat from the fundamentalists, is in exile. Because Nasrin had expressed her thoughts freely and categorically exposed the evil designs of the fundamentalists, they would chase her tirelessly. What the fundamentalists fear most is the exercise of free thought. The killings of the bloggers, publishers and human rights activists in the 2010s bear testimony to it. Indeed, it is the same fear that led them to swoop down on the country’s leading writer, Humayun Azad (1947–2004) on 27 February 2004 because he too had vehemently condemned fundamentalism and fanaticism in most of his works. The fundamentalists and fanatics made their terrible presence felt throughout the country especially between 2000 and 2005. By misinterpreting the message of Islam, which does not permit shedding of innocent blood, the fundamentalists killed many in its name. They openly expressed their disregard and hatred towards state institutions, including the judiciary, and declared that they would raze them to the ground as these, according to their interpretation, did not conform to the Qur’anic strictures. The court became the prime target of their bloody attacks and two judges were literally blown away on their way to the court. A section of journalists also suffered because they allegedly published damaging reports about the fanatics’ activities. The date 17 August 2005 will be remembered as a black day in the history of the country because on this day the extremists carried out a series of nearly simultaneous bomb attacks at sensitive places in all district headquarters, including the capital. Blessed by their politician bosses who featured in the then government, the religious bigots were prepared to do everything for establishing “the rule of God.” They refused to allow any faith or creed other than theirs to exist. The fundamentalists carried out deadly onslaughts on other popular forms of entertainment. The militant extremists bombed at the Ramna Square in Dhaka when the Bengali New Year celebrations were in progress on 14 April 2001. The gruesome attack killed 10 and injured about 50 innocent people who went to be a part of the festive occasion, which is being organised by the country’s leading cultural group Chhayanaut since the early 1960s. The banned militant outfit Harkat-Ul-Jihad al Islami (commonly known as HUJI) carried out the attack because it considered this sort of festivity against the spirit of Islam. Besides, the religious fanatics exploded several powerful bombs simultaneously in four cinema halls in Mymensingh, back then a district town and now one of the divisional headquarters, some 150 km away from the capital, in December 2002 killing 20 and injuring more than 200 people. The only “sin” those people committed was the sin of going to cinemas. The militants made the visitors at a folk fair known as Gurpukurer Mela and a cinema their targets of bomb attack in Satkhira, one of the remotest district towns on 28 September 2002 (Anonymous, 2008). Moreover, the fanatics attacked the ingenuous popular theatre form known as jatra several times. In mid-January 2005, their attacks on jatra in two rural areas left two killed and more than 60 people injured

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Fig. 9.1 A colourful dance performance of the youthful couples with Einar and Agnes in the upstage centre. Standing in the downstage centre on a snowy peak, Brand angrily looks on. Courtesy of the Centre for Asian Theatre (CAT), Bangladesh, 2004

(Anonymous, 2005). The fundamentalists attacked the mazars and other popular forms of entertainment because these do not have a place in their version of Islam. An uncompromising and unbending attitude is the key element of the Islamist fanaticism in Bangladesh and elsewhere in the world. The fundamentalists cannot stand anything, which goes against their interest and thinking. Hence, the Christian priest Brand (Fig. 9.1) with all his parochial ideas resembles the Bangladesh Islamists who would not stand anything other than their own version of Islam although Bangladesh has a long tradition of syncreticism that works towards establishing tolerance, fellowship and harmony among people belonging to different religious faiths. Nilu informs us that he decided to stage the play because he found that “Brand’s dogmatic approach is echoed among Islamist fundamentalists, that is, Islamic groupings [of the world including Bangladesh] who want to establish a world order based on Islamic law (Sharia)” (Nilu, 2007) (Fig. 9.2). To ground his argument Nilu gives a short account of the rise and flowering of fundamentalism spearheaded by Jamaat-iIslami in Bangladesh and elsewhere in the Islamic world. Nilu mentions the victimisation of the Ahmadyyas by the fundamentalists as well as the fanatics’ call to “stop all kinds of cultural activities, both modern and traditional, as these are considered anti-Islam” and “numerous suicidal and other violent attacks” carried out by the extremist groups. To me the most illuminating part of Nilu’s article is that

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Fig. 9.2 Brand treats Krishak (the peasant) mercilessly. Courtesy of the Centre for Asian Theatre (CAT), Bangladesh, 2004

where he presents a striking similarity between Brand’s ideas and those of the fundamentalists (Table 9.1). Although Nilu’s essay is revealing in many ways, it, in my opinion, has one significant limitation in that it does not employ the holy books to refute the fundamentalists’ claims. For example, though Nilu says that “the ten commandments of Christianity somehow are touched upon the play,” adding that “Brand can be said consciously to break the fifth commandment” (Nilu, 2007: 108), he does not have anything to say about the Mosaic code of “eye for eye, tooth for tooth” which

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Table 9.1 Comparison between Brand’s ideas and Islamic fundamentalism Brand’s basic ideas 1. Brand is of the view that God’s will is supreme 2. Brand advocates that belief and life are one —every action should be an act of God

3. For Brand, no compromise is acceptable —‘The spirit of compromise is Satan’ 4. Brand considers sacrifice absolute and required for personal salvation (reward) and to change people’s way of living and society

The basic ideas of Islamic fundamentalists According to Islamic fundamentalist, Allah’s will is supreme Islamic fundamentalists are of the view that every action should be an act of Allah; life should be lived according to the Qur’an and the Hadiths This is exactly the same for Islamic fundamentalists Islamic fundamentalists consider sacrifice of life to protect Islam and Jihad (war against non-believers) as absolute duties and required to achieve martyrdom (personal reward) and establish a society based on Sharia (Islamic law) (Nilu, op.cit., 118)

his Brand wants to establish on earth. Consequently, he does not consider Christ’s dismissal of the code as follows: “You have heard that it was said, ‘Eye for eye, and tooth for tooth.’ But I tell you, Do not resist an evil person. If someone strikes you on the right cheek, turn to him the other also. [. . .] Give to the one who asks you, and do not turn away from the one who wants to borrow from you. [. . .]” “You have heard that it was said, ‘Love your neighbour and hate your enemy.’ But I tell you, Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, that you may be sons of your Father in heaven. He causes his sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sends rains on the righteous and the unrighteous.” (Matthew 5: 38–48; The Holy Bible, 1979)

Had Nilu considered Christ’s preaching, he would have said that it is Brand’s prejudiced view of Christianity, which is responsible for his obsessive fanaticism. And, similarly, had he considered the relevant verses of the Qur’an, he would have asserted that Islam condemns fanatical activities and that the Islamists have misinterpreted the message of the religion for political gains only. Nonetheless, I am in agreement with Nilu that “[. . .] the contemporary relevance of Brand is basically political” (Nilu, 2007: 105). The political significance of performance involves an enquiry into the burning issues like overwhelming role of religion in national affairs and the rights of women. As a commentary on local politics, Brand could be appreciated as an eye-opener. It exposes the bankrupt politics of Bangladesh as it makes an oblique reference to the unholy nexus of politicians and religious leaders. The Bangladeshi Brand demonstrates that the authority in league with the clerics exploits the common people in the name of religion (Fig. 9.3). Although when compared with his Bangladeshi counterparts, Ibsen’s Nagarpal (Mayor) appears rather “angelic,” he too wants to hang on to power by any means. And he finds powerful allies in the clerics who lend support to him. The people of Bangladesh witnessed such distasteful nexus in the recent past. With the Talibans returning to power in Afghanistan, the fundamentalists’ dream of turning Bangladesh into an Islamic Revolution must have received a boost. That

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Fig. 9.3 Brand with the shaft in his hand in the centre stage as the lowly peasants slowly walk in the downstage centre. Courtesy of the Centre for Asian Theatre (CAT), Bangladesh, 2004

dream of a Talibanised Bangladesh can be a reality when fanatics like Brand will further cement their position in the country. In fact, the slogan with which the fundamentalists paraded the streets in the 2000s was “amra shobai taliban, Bangla hobe Afghanistan” (We are for the Talibans, Bangladesh will be Afghanistan).The fundamentalist heavyweights through their wide network across the country are reportedly working towards achieving that goal. Besides, in Nilu’s understanding, “Brand [. . .] provokes Agnes to commit suicide” and that is why in his production he “made her suicide explicit” (Nilu, 2007: 109). Agnes’s suicide caused by a religious fanatic has reverberations in the recent history of Bangladesh with quite a few women either committing suicide or receiving harsh treatment in the hands of mullahs for their alleged violation of Islamic codes. “At least 12 women of very young age have been made subject to fatwa and, in some cases amounting to death, in the year 1994 in different parts of Bangladesh” (Lucas & Kapoor, 1996: 76). The caretaker government (2007–2008) which had introduced “National Women Development Policy 2008” backtracked from its position following street agitation and violent protests by the religious forces who labelled it as “anti-Islamic.” As such, it will be pertinent to see what opportunities Nilu’s Brand provided for “[. . .] women in the audience [. . .] of moving beyond the hegemony of their cultural frameworks to question and disrupt the gender constructions that bind them” (Holledge & Tompkins, 2000: 177).

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As Nilu’s production reveals, Brand’s treatment of both his mother and his wife is inhuman and brutal. In Brand’s world women hardly exist. His is a patriarchal world view which reduces women merely to the second sex; they can be either mothers or wives but can never be at par with their male counterparts. The superior position that patriarchy bestows on man allows Brand to dictate terms to his mother, albeit in the name of “religious” demand although that demand itself has no solid basis in religion. That Brand’s mother could not marry the person she loved because her father had decided otherwise is indicative of the fact that patriarchy has silenced women in Bangladesh for long. Agnes by her decision to marry Brand resembles those new generation Bangladesh women who think that they have the right to choose their partners. Nevertheless, in some cases, the new generation women encounter the fate that Agnes faces in the performance. The pathetic realisation that their husbands, emissaries of patriarchy as they are, will seldom accommodate them in their world as individuals lead them to end their life in a manner similar to that of Agnes. The production then crystallised the plights of women in an overwhelmingly patriarchal Bangladeshi society. Seen from this light, Brand’s mother refusal to give up everything as demanded by Brand and Agnes’ suicide can be seen as conscious acts of women to subvert the patriarchal and fundamentalist hegemony that binds them (Fig. 9.4). How does Brand negotiate the sensitive issue of religion? The question was possibly of vital importance to Nilu because he had experienced the hostility of the fundamentalists when he produced Krisnabibar, an adaptation of Ghosts in 1996 in which he exposed the hypocrisy of the Islamic clerics. The exposition infuriated the fundamentalists. Nilu says that “[t]he fundamentalist newspaper Daily Inqilab [. . .] demanded the production to be banned because it was seen as threatening to Islam and harmful for the society” (Nilu, 2001: 124). Hence, Nilu had to be more careful about the production because compared with Krisnabibar, Brand was more aggressive and unswerving in its denouncement of fundamentalism and fanaticism. By retaining Brand’s identity as a Christian priest, Nilu thus made sure that the performance would not be readily seen as an attack on Islamism. However, the audience could readily identify the seemingly Christian Brand with the Islamists of the country. Indeed, sitting next to me in the auditorium was a renowned theatre personality of the country whom I had known for some time. He was scuffing his feet. He sarcastically told me, “You see, this is how mullahs love us.” In a little distance was sitting a man about forty. I heard him tell, “He is a fake, isn’t he?” Indeed, a fanatic like Brand became a reality in 2004. The recent Bangladesh history bears testimony that once brain-washed effectively, this newly-born Brand could become deadly to society. In the words of Towheed Feroze, an early reviewer of the performance (Fig. 9.5): [It] is in fact a look into fundamentalist insanity enveloping a person’s outlook on religion. People leave Brand, his wife dies and the Church melts away and in the end holding on to his ideas Brand dies. [. . .] The message? Let’s follow religion as it is written not forgetting that the imperfection in us is not a sin. (Feroze, 2004)

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Fig. 9.4 A deeply mournful Agnes in the centre stage holding the remains of Alf. Courtesy of the Centre for Asian Theatre (CAT), Bangladesh, 2004

The same prejudiced notion of Islam was at work behind the fundamentalists’ attacks on the mazars, the minority Ahmadyyas; it was because of this bleary understanding of the religion that they demanded removal of the baul sculptures from the capital. The fundamentalists were unable to see the difference between a piece of art and an idol. Even if it were meant for idol-worshipping, had the true knowledge of Islam prevailed, it would have been spared because Islam is a religion of tolerance, of mercy and of compassion.

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Fig. 9.5 The last scene. Brand dies in the arms of a caring Gerd. Courtesy of the Centre for Asian Theatre (CAT), Bangladesh, 2004

Indeed, in spite of its retaining foreignness, Brand assumed “a local significance” (Bharucha, 2000: 72) because it simultaneously presented the turbulent history of Bangladesh and interpreted it. With their knowledge of the rise of fundamentalism and extremism in the country, the audience could see Brand as a Muslim fanatic who with his parochial views towards religion wants to revive his brand of pristine Islam in the country. Hence, Brand’s potential as digihistory to comment on Bangladesh can hardly be over emphasised.

References Ahmad, M. (1991). Islamic fundamentalism in South Asia: The Jamaat-i-Islami and the Tablighi Jamaat of South Asia. In M. E. Marty & R. Scott Appleby (Eds.), Fundamentalisms observed (The fundamentalism project) (Vol. 1, pp. 467–468). The University of Chicago Press.

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Anonymous. (2005, January 16). 2 killed, 60 hurt in bomb attacks on Jatra shows. The Daily Star (Dhaka). Retrieved January 28, 2008, from www.thedailystar.net/2005/01/16/d50116010 55.htm Anonymous. The Jihadist terrorism in Bangladesh. Retrieved November 1, 2008, from www. muktadhara.net/page77.html Bharucha, R. (2000). The politics of cultural practice: Thinking through theatre in an age of globalization. The Athlone Press. Feroze, T. (2004, December 21). Review of Brand. New Age (Dhaka). Helland, F. (2015). Ibsen in practice: Relational readings of performance, cultural encounters and power. Bloomsbury Publishing. Holledge, J., & Tompkins, J. (2000). Women’s intercultural performance. Routledge. Khatme Nabuwwat Academy. (2009). Retrieved March 22, 2022; July 22, 2022, from https://www. gawaher.com/topic/726729-khatme-nubuwwat-academy-london Lucas, M.-A. H., & Kapoor, H. (1996). Fatwas against women in Bangladesh. Women Living Under Muslim Laws. Mokammel, T. (1999). Script and direction. Chitra Nadir Pare. Kino-Eyes Films. Nilu, K. (2001). Staging Ibsen in Bangladesh: Relevance and adaptation. In Proceedings of IX international Ibsen conference. Akademisk Forlag. Nilu, K. (2007). Contemporary relevance of Ibsen’s Brand—The case of Islamic fundamentalism. Ibsen Studies, 7(1), 105. Riaz, A. (2013). Inconvenient truths about Bangladeshi politics (2nd ed.). Prothoma. The Holy Bible. (1979). The holy Bible. Hodder and Stoughton. The Quran. (1971). The Quran. Translated and edited by Muhammad Zafrulla Khan. Curzon Press.

Ahmed Ahsanuzzaman received his PhD in Ibsen Studies at the Centre for Ibsen Studies, University of Oslo, in 2012. He is Professor of English at Independent University, Bangladesh (IUB), Dhaka. Before he joined the IUB, he was Dean of Arts and Humanities School and Head of English Discipline at Khulna University, Bangladesh. He is Editor-in-Chief of Litwrite Bangladesh, a peer-reviewed online journal of English writings and literary studies.

Chapter 10

Digital Operatic Precedents in Haruki Murakami’s Killing Commendatore Neil H. Wright

Abstract The novel Killing Commendatore (2018), by Haruki Murakami, references two famous operas, Mozart’s Don Giovanni and Richard Strauss’s Der Rosenkavalier, both of which are reflected in the narrative structure and character development of the story, so that the operas function as meta-narratives that amplify the essential themes of the novel. Readers who are familiar with these operas are thus equipped to enjoy the story on a more intimate level. In the novel, only analogue recordings of the operas are heard by the principal characters; but it is apparent that Murakami was familiar with a particular production of Der Rosenkavalier that is widely known in digital video form; Don Giovanni is also available on DVD in dozens of versions, and it is quite likely that Murakami, a connoisseur of both popular and classical music, is acquainted with several of them. It is also likely that among his readers are those who, as opera lovers with DVD collections, would easily recognise the scenes that are transposed into the narrative of Killing Commendatore. Such is the relation of digital culture and literature in this instance. Keywords Der Rosenkavalier · Digital culture · Don Giovanni · Doppelganger · Haruki Murakami · Killing Commendatore · Metaphor · Mozart · Opera · Theatrical drama Haruki Murakami’s novel Killing Commendatore1 (Vintage International, 2019) is a tour de force epic narrative featuring all the expected elements of Murakami wizardry: the quest of a male protagonist to find a disappeared female character; the advent of a numinous world into the mundane; a heroic journey into a mysterious Underworld; a series of puzzles for the reader to wonder about; and most notably, the

1

All references herein are from the Vintage International Edition of 2019, Trans. Philip Gabriel and Ted Gossen.

N. H. Wright (✉) Department of Foreign Languages and Humanities, Eastern Kentucky University, Richmond, KY, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2023 K.-k. Tam (ed.), Performance Arts: Research in the Age of Digital Revolution, Digital Culture and Humanities 4, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-19-9213-1_10

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allusive presence of musical classics which not only ground the fictive imaginary in relatable experience, as many readers will have listened to the very recordings that Murakami adduces, but also offer substantial clues as to the meaning of the work and even contribute to the unpuzzling of the plot. In fact, the most enigmatic figure in this novel, the Commendatore of the title, comes directly from a musical classic, Mozart’s opera Don Giovanni; and it is only by tracing his metamorphosis from the opera to the painting in which he appears, by Tomohiko Amada, thence to his borrowed form as the “Idea” that guides both the protagonist and the young girl, Mariye Akikawa, whom he wants to save and protect, that he may be fully understood. Moreover, the dramatic crisis of the narrator/protagonist is echoed and intensified by another opera, Strauss’s Der Rosenkavalier, to which he listens repeatedly, absorbing its themes of lost love, pathos and consolation. Scenarios in the novel are based on elements in specific DVD’s of both operas, which Murakami incorporates in his story, an interdisciplinary creation of digital sources and literary art. My reading of the novel is based on two scenes from Don Giovanni and three from Der Rosenkavalier. The first scene from DG is described in detail in the novel, so as to leave no doubt as to the genesis of the painting which gives the story its title and which graphically depicts the basic paradigm of the entire narrative. This is the scene in which Don Giovanni kills the Commendatore, father of the lady Donna Anna, with the appalled servant Leporello as witness. It is impossible to say what particular production may have inspired Murakami’s account of this scene. Donna Anna is usually off stage when the Commendatore is slain, but she returns immediately, thus the painter Tomohiko Amada composes his medieval Japanese version of the event with all four characters present. In some productions, as in the panoramic Mozart-Losey film version released on DVD under the Columbia Tri-Star label (2002), featuring conductor Lorin Maazel and the Paris Opera Orchestra, the Don and the Commendatore fight alone in the plaza of Seville (Fig. 10.1), and Donna Anna shows up shortly after the Commendatore has died and Giovanni has fled the scene. But suspicion falls also on the more recently marketed version of the opera in DVD form, that of Jonathan Kent and the Glyndebourne Chorus and orchestra under the Warner label (2011), a traditional theater version with a rotating platform so that each scene is framed, more or less like a painting. The other scene from Don Giovanni, the finale in which the ghostly statue of the Commendatore appears by invitation to dine with the libertine and ultimately to send him to Hell, is less conspicuously presented in the novel, but it does indeed occur as the diminutive Japanese Commendatore of Tomohiko’s painting (Fig. 10.2) accompanies the narrator to the home of the predator Wataru Menshiki where he is invisible, but not threatening to his host. Three scenes from Der Rosenkavalier echo and recapitulate the plot of the novel, one from each act. At the end of Act I of the opera, the Marschallin, an aging but dignified Viennese aristocrat, studies herself in a mirror and hears the clock toll 13 bells (Fig. 10.3), reminding her of the passage of time as she ponders having to give up her young lover Octavian (he is seventeen!) so that he can pursue a young woman of his own generation. In the novel, the narrator hears a Buddhist hand bell

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Fig. 10.1 The Commendatore challenges Don Giovanni in the Mozart-Losey Paris production of 1979 (screen shot from the Columbia Tri-Star 2002 DVD). Note the Moorish costume of the Commendatore, which is similar to the Asuka garb of Murakami’s Commendatore

ring repeatedly, which alerts him to the presence of the Commendatore in a pit near the house where he lives—the home of the absent Tomohiko Amada, where Amada left the mysterious Asuka style painting Killing Commendatore. In Act II, Octavian draws his sword on Baron Ochs to defend Sophie von Faninal, the young woman he loves and whom he must defend (Fig. 10.4), thus replicating the situation of the opening scene of Don Giovanni and also of the narrator, the young girl Mariye Akikawa, and the pederast Menshiki in the novel. What is of special interest, however, is the addition of an adventitious character from Act III of Der Rosenkavalier in Tomohiko’s painting: a strange man in the right lower corner emerging from a trap door, a peculiar fellow foreign to the Asuka period, whom the narrator calls “Long Face.” This character takes us directly to a particular production of Rosenkavalier distributed widely in DVD: that of conductor Herbert von Karajan with the Vienna Orchestra at the Salzburger Festspiele in 1984, released on DVD by Sony Classics in 2001. The long-faced figure emerges from a trap-door, at front center stage (Fig. 10.5), to spy on the unsuspecting villain of the piece, Baron Ochs, Menshiki’s facetious equivalent, who is trying to seduce a supposedly hapless young woman at an inn—a young woman who is really a young man, the Rosenkavalier Octavian who is the hero of the opera, as the narrator is the hero of the novel. In the end, Baron Ochs having been dismissed, the Marschallin surrenders herself to time and Octavian to his love Sophie (Fig. 10.6), just as the narrator of the novel gives up his young ward Mariye and is reunited with his wife Yuzu and their daughter Muro.

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Fig. 10.2 Asuka Prince Taishi Shotoku with his son and younger brother. Murakami’s Commendatore is similarly dressed, down to the shoes with upturned toes and the sword hung from the waist. Image taken from Wikipedia entry on “Taishi Shotoku” (January 2021); artist unknown, listed as Public Domain

As my understanding of the novel progressed, it became apparent that the paradigm of scene I of Don Giovanni, once announced, is repeated in six permutations, as follows: The lady Donna Anna Asuka Courtesan Viennese Girl Viennese Girl imago Mariye Akikawa Sophie von Faninal

Defender Commendatore Young Rebel Tomohiko Amada Narrator Narrator Octavian

Assailant Don Giovanni Asuka Feudal Lord Nazi Officer Commendatore Wataru Menshiki Baron Ochs

Witness Leporello Servant & Long Face Amada’s memory Amada Commendatore Marschallin

These six versions of the paradigm occur in the above order. (1) the first scene of Don Giovanni; (2) the Asuka period painting of Tomohiko Amada; (3) Amada’s tragic loss of a Viennese lover in 1938; (4) Amada’s fantasy of revenge, enacted in his hospital room by the Commendatore as the Nazi Officer and the narrator as Amada; (5) the situation of the narrator as he tries to save his young pupil Mariye

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Fig. 10.3 The Marschallin, in Act I of Der Rosenkavalier, Salzburger Festspiele production of 1984, examining her aging face in the mirror as she hears the clock toll 13 times; note the handbell on the table, which suggests the Buddhist handbell of the novel (screen shot from the Sony DVD of 2001)

Fig. 10.4 Octavian duels Baron Ochs in defense of Sophie von Faninal in Act II of Der Rosenkavalier (screen shot from the Salzburger Festspiele production of 1984, Sony DVD of 2001)

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Fig. 10.5 A long-faced spy emerges from a trap door in the inn where Octavian plots to expose the Baron Ochs as a sexual predator, no doubt the genesis of Murakami’s Underworld character, Long Face, who appears in both Amada’s painting Killing Commendatore and the revenge murder scene in Amada’s hospital room in the novel (screen shot from the Salzburger Festspiele production, Sony DVD of 2001)

Akikawa from the predator Menshiki; (6) the situation of Octavian the Rosenkavalier as he acts to save Sophie von Faninal from Baron Ochs. The two operas “book-end” the three situations in the plot of the novel. Don Giovanni establishes the paradigm, and Der Rosenkavalier, via the narrator’s listening regimen and the curious advent of “Long Face,” an emissary who guides the narrator to the Underworld via the trap-door, reinforces the moral and relational prescript of the narrative. Readers who do not know opera are informed by the narrator concerning the identity of the Commendatore and the events of scene I of Don Giovanni; but they would be unlikely to recognise the parallel configuration of the plot of Der Rosenkavalier, unless they went out of their way to look up the plot, and even then they would not discover the origin of the spy from the Underworld, Long Face, unless they came across the Salzburger Festspiele video recording in particular. Incidentally, the Underworld of the novel seems to be a metaphor for the creative imagination, as the Commendatore self-identifies as an “idea” and Long Face calls himself a “metaphor” (KC 592). The narrator has to complete an arduous journey through this Underworld in order to rescue Mariye Akikawa, the implication being that his Infernal odyssey, like that of Dante in the Divine Comedy, is salvific for himself as well as for Mariye.

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Fig. 10.6 Finale of Der Rosenkavalier, as the Marschallin surrenders Octavian to Sophie, and the young lovers unite in a dream song, “Ist ein Traum, kann nicht wirklich wein,” corresponding to the narrator’s surrender of Mariye Akikawa and his dream-world relationship with wife Yuzu and daughter Muro (screen shot from the Salzburger Festspiele production of 1984, from Sony DVD of 2001)

Mozart’s Commendatore Mozart’s Commendatore appears in the first and last scenes of the opera. In the opening scene, which is mirrored in Tomohiko Amada’s painting, the Commendatore enters to defend his daughter Donna Anna from the notorious libertine and sexual predator Don Giovanni, who has been after her for some time and may have cornered her at last in downtown Seville. Outraged by the interference of the old man, who threatens to interrupt his pleasure, the Don draws his sword and easily skewers his senior opponent; but the lady is saved due to the ruckus and the onset of decent citizens, and Don Giovanni must flee, thwarted once more in his pursuit of the virtuous lady. All four principals appear on stage during or after the fatal duel. In some productions, notably in the widely distributed Mozart-Losey panoramic film of 1979 (released on DVD in 2002), Don Giovanni and the Commendatore are alone when they fight, while Donna Anna and Leporello arrive shortly thereafter. Mozart’s Donna Anna is a comically absurd heroine, hilariously proud of her chastity and so determined to preserve it that not even her fiancé Don Ottavio can ever get to first base, let alone home plate, with her. The whole of the opera she successfully resists both the vigorous assaults of the overeager Don Giovanni and the impassioned entreaties of the frustrated Don Ottavio, without ever approaching harm or considering surrender, a true virgin ironpants to the

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end.2 We are given to wonder whether she ever needed a defender at all, so adept is she at foiling every kind of suitor. Nevertheless, the villain must have his due, and by the end of the opera, when a statue of the Commendatore has been erected in the square, Don Giovanni boldly addresses his erstwhile victim, inviting him to dine that evening as his guest. It is a fatal invitation. When the statue, presumably the Commendatore’s ghost, arrives at Giovanni’s castle in the finale, Giovanni does not hesitate to entertain him. Despite the desperate pleas of his servant Leporello, who announces the arrival of the terrible guest in fear and trembling, the Don bids him an amazed but confident, perhaps overconfident, welcome, whereupon the statue, some 12 ft tall, enters ominously, solemnly summoning Don Giovanni by name in a stentorian bass with a full octave leap downwards to the last syllable of the offender’s name. Then in an ascending chromatic duet, the two engage in a contest of moral wills, the Commendatore thunderously ordering Giovanni to “Repent” and the Don answering each command with a strident “No!” Finally, as the orchestra reaches a climactic coda of damnation, in forte volume and minor tonality, the stage opens and the statue drives Don Giovanni down to hell, surrounded by a corps of devils, as the infamous rake continues to refuse repentance and seems somehow even to relish his dramatic descent into the fiery realm where he belongs.3 There follows a brief happy chorus of relieved villagers who no longer have to worry about their daughters being deflowered before their time, while Donna Anna puts Don Ottavio off as usual. Both of the Commendatore’s scenes in the opera are reprised in the novel Killing Commendatore, with meaningful and significant, even overwhelming, differences that resonate in regard to the character of the Commendatore himself, to the roles of his fellow actors, and to the deconstructive dimension of the musical and artistic elements of the story. To these we may now turn our attention.

Killing Commendatore Decoded For reasons we are never given, other than his general interest in Western art and Viennese culture, Tomohiko Amada, a famous painter of feudal Japanese subjects in his heyday, the mid-twentieth century, chose to use the Commendatore and the opening scene of Mozart’s Don Giovanni to visually encode the tragic events of his own experience in Vienna in 1938 when he became involved in a plot to assassinate a Nazi leader during the Anschluss, the takeover of Austria by the German army. When the plot was discovered and prevented, Amada’s lover, a Viennese girl, was 2

This term I have gleaned from Salman Rushdie’s novel Shame, where it is the sobriquet of a similarly impregnable lady. 3 The finale of Don Giovanni, already one of the most well-known among opera-goers, was featured prominently in the popular film Amadeus, which premiered in 1984 and has been replayed countless times ever since on television. Today almost everyone with a TV would likely know the Commendatore as the avenging statue even if they did not know the honorific name.

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arrested and executed, while Amada himself was rescued by the Japanese authorities, ostensibly because Japan was already a German ally, and repatriated to Japan, where he sought privacy and solace in the mountain region of Odawara, living in the house on the east coast where he went on to become a highly regarded artist after the war. As a student and artist in Vienna, Amada had painted in the Western style and had developed a taste for Western classical music. When he repatriated to Japan, however, he specialised in traditional Asian art (Japanese feudal scenes), but he never lost his taste for Western music, as reflected in the extensive collection of recordings that he left in his house along with the painting Killing Commendatore, which he wrapped and hid in the attic.4 At the time of the present narrative, his house has been occupied by the narrator, an artist himself, who rents the place at a nominal price from Amada’s son Masahiko Amada, his friend from their days in art school. Interest in the painting begins when the narrator and main protagonist, never named, discovers the hidden piece in the attic, where he is drawn by noises from a small horned owl that comes and goes nocturnally. The painting is, according to the narrator, a stylistic and compositional masterpiece. In terms of the arrangement of figures it is a faithful reimagining of the first scene of Mozart’s opera (Killing Commendatore, hereafter KC 75–77). A young man, presumably a rebel of some sort and ironical counterpart of the aggressive Don Giovanni, fatally stabs an older “Commendatore,” a white-robed Japanese feudal lord, as a young woman, ostensibly Donna Anna, and a servant figure like Leporello, look on in horror. All are represented in Asuka period clothing and style, and the connection with the Mozart scenario is established by the title inscribed on an attached tag, “Killing Commendatore”. The white robe, the decorated sword, and the black shoes with upturned toes (KC 249–250) are identical to those in the famous portrait of the Asuka Prince Taishi Shotoku and his two sons (Fig. 10.2); but they also resemble the garb of the Commendatore of the Mozart-Losey version of Don Giovanni, who appears in a white Moorish gown and turban rather than the usual colonial military uniform (Fig. 10.1). There is, however, one added figure: in the lower right corner, a man with an elongated head, a thick black beard, and large eyes views the entire episode from a hole with a trap door, which he holds open as if he had just arrived from below. This man the narrator refers to as “Long Face” (KC 76); he is a visitor from the numinous Underworld that will unfold to the narrator as the story progresses.5

4

Tomohiko Amada ventured into Western culture where he totally immersed himself, adopting European style and technique as a painter, absorbing Western music, and taking a Viennese lover. He was then expelled, following the failed assassination attempt, and returned to Japan, where he became an Easterner again. This trope of migration and return occurs both in literature and in real experience of many Asian sojourners to the West, no doubt mirroring the experience of many Western visitors to the East. In Amada’s case, he retained two paramount loyalties to the West: his love of Western music and his memory of the Viennese girl. 5 Long Face later refers to himself, when the narrator actually encounters him in Tomohiko Amada’s hospital room where he kills the Commendatore, as a “Metaphor,” in contrast to the higher rank of “Idea,” from the Underworld. These iterations suggest that the Underworld is some sort of linguistic

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It takes the narrator quite a while to acquire enough information about Tomohiko Amada’s past to decode this painting, information that he gleans from the artist’s son Masahiko and also from Wataru Menshiki, a mysterious neighbor with vested interests that gradually become central to the narrator’s quest. It is the narrator’s ultimate conclusion that allegorically, in an analogy originally known only to the artist Amada himself, the Commendatore, who is a conspicuously noble and righteous upholder of virtue and law in the opera, represents in the painting the Nazi leader who was the intended target of the failed assassination in Vienna, a de facto tyrant and grim reminder of the loss of Amada’s lover, whom he thus avenges by depicting the assassination as a successful event rather than a disastrous failure.6 The painting thus became a realisation of Amada’s wish, a sort of Freudian wish fulfillment as might occur in a dream, which satisfied Amada’s need to express his long suppressed disappointment and rage. Presumably, this is what the old artist is doing when he, or his spirit, appears one night in his studio sitting on a stool and gazing fixedly at the painting, which the narrator had situated on a shelf in order to study it himself (KC 466–467). The Japanese woman in the painting, figuratively Amada’s Viennese lover in the role of Donna Anna, is thus the witness of her own redress, as she is treated to the defeat of the Commendatore not as father but as Nazi leader. Likewise, the fierce young rebel in the painting is no longer the transgressive Don Giovanni but is now a stand-in for Amada himself, a Nazi-killer protecting his dearest. The narrator is shocked by the extreme blood violence of the painting, which he describes at length (KC 70–74). Amada’s desire to see the Nazi surrogate actually murdered finds ultimate satisfaction later in the novel when the narrator stabs the Commendatore to death in Amada’s nursing home room (KC 584–586), a fulfillment that gratifies the old man’s desire as the action moves from the world of art, his painting, to the world of reality in front of him.

The Commendatore as Will and Idea If works of art pertained only to the lives and minds of the artists who make them, this novel would only be about the tragic history of Tomohiko Amada, the loss of his lover, and his subsequent need not only to immortalise that loss but to reverse it or redeem it by turning the tables on the evil that had led to it and in a sense caused it, also to compensate for his own humiliation and powerlessness in the face of that evil,

and conceptual deep structure, a collective or abstract realm of language and thought beyond or independent of organic minds. 6 At this point the reader must realise that the moral character of the Commendatore as a Nazi enforcer in the painting is directly reversed from the opera, where he is a defender of virtue. We are left to wonder why Amada chose this particular figure to embody the evil force that destroyed his lover and his Western identity. Could it be that he unconsciously felt that he was in fact guilty for betraying not only his Viennese lover but also his original Asian self and, like Don Giovanni, deserved the punishment he had suffered?

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which had deported him and deprived him even of the dignity of dying along with his lover. But this work of art, like all truly essential works of art, moves forward from its creator to address other lives and times and to acquire other meanings and analogical functions for ensuing generations. Thus Amada’s masterpiece becomes a paradigm for the narrator’s relationships with Wataru Menshiki, his wealthy neighbor, and with Mariye Akikawa, his 13-year old student, and her guardian aunt Shoko. This relation eventuates because the Commendatore of the painting, a so-called “Idea,” enters the fray on behalf of the young girl Mariye to protect her from the machinations of Wataru Menshiki, who thinks she is his own daughter but who apparently has designs that are sinister if not downright evil. Menshiki has had his own portrait painted by the narrator and has deviously arranged for the narrator to paint Mariye’s portrait too. This might not seem so nefarious, except that Menshiki avoids revealing his claim to the girl, her adoptive father and her aunt, and he enlists the narrator in this deception by paying him lavishly for his work. We never learn exactly what Menshiki might have in mind; but the narrator leads us to associate him with the sinister Man with the White Subaru Forester, whose portrait he also paints, a demonic presence whom he first encountered in a restaurant during his travels (KC 227–232) and who seems to be stalking him again at a stopover, on the way to meet the aged Tomohiko Amada, when he spots the White Subaru Forester (KC 557–559). There is an implied association between the tall demonic stranger and Wataru Menshiki that lurks in the narrator’s mind and which even seems to occur to Mariye herself when she is hiding in a closet in Menshiki’s house and he comes close to the closet door (KC 692–693). Earlier she had even warned the narrator against finishing the portrait of the Subaru Man, sensing his sinister nature (KC 374). Mariye, then, is the threatened girl, the Japanese Donna Anna of this third analogy, an allegory in the making, and the narrator becomes the young Japanese rebel who must defend her. Mariye is a gifted art student, a clever and precocious adolescent who worries about her undeveloped breasts, and a tomboyish adventuress who knows the mountain terrain and even has a secret tunnel leading from her father’s home to the Amada house.7 She reminds the narrator of his beloved sister Komi, who died at the age of 12 of a heart condition and whom he has missed and mourned ever since. Mariye comes to confide in the narrator as he paints her portrait, and he becomes her mentor and protector. Menshiki disguises his evil intent by directing his amorous attention to Mariye’s aunt Shoko, a mature and sensuous beauty, hence a legitimate sexual target; but even the narrator suspects that he may be seducing the aunt in order to gain access to the girl. Menshiki is thus the feudal lord and Nazi leader who must be thwarted. But all this depends on the guidance and

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Mariye’s tunnel and her wildly improbable incursion into Menshiki’s fortress home connect her as an adventuress with the narrator, who goes on a heroic journey through the Underworld and back, and the narrator’s sister Komi (Komiko), who bravely and foolishly went ahead of him into a cave when they were young. We are never told who dug this tunnel, which must be at least a quarter mile long, or how she came to find it. Likewise, we are never told who dug the pit where the ritual handbell first appeared, where the Commendatore and the narrator arrived from the Underworld, and where Mariye herself wound up after she escaped from Menshiki’s house.

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wisdom of the Commendatore, the “Idea” which has taken on the appearance of the Japanese feudal lord of Amada’s painting and who appears first to the narrator and later to Mariye to advise them. What then is this “Idea,” and how does it go about its business? The Commendatore stipulates firmly that he is an Idea, not a spirit (KC 253). A spirit would be the ghost of a particular being, probably a human or angelic being; but the Commendatore is not a being at all. He speaks in a formal and antique manner (it would be of interest to know how Murakami cast his language in Japanese—is it done so as to mimic Asuka period Nihongo?). He says “Affirmative” rather than “yes” and “Negative” rather than “no.” He refers to single interlocutors, either the narrator or Mariye, as “Friends,” suggesting that he has little concern with the ontological conditions of human existence. His smallness—he is only about two feet tall—and his seeming inability to act—as when he is trapped in the pit where he first emerged—reflect that he belongs to the realm of immaterial thought as opposed to physical existence. He even asserts that he is unaware of human feelings and is not even subject to the constraints of time and space. He can assume a variety of forms or appearances, though he observes that “We materialise when others become aware of us—only then do we take shape” (KC 444). He carries a tiny sword, which appears in the painting, but he never uses it, and neither can the narrator in the scene where the Commendatore directs him to commit his own murder (KC 574–586). Thus the narrator has to kill the Commendatore with a fish knife that had disappeared from his kitchen only to reappear magically in Amada’s hospital room. The Commendatore knows and controls the disposition of the knife just as he seems to have manipulated the Buddhist prayer bell that he had rung in the pit to bring attention to himself and attract the narrator into his scheme, a scheme to save Mariye that he must have known about from the beginning, since he can move freely into the future as well as the past. The Commendatore’s guidance aims at two results: first, to give Tomohiko Amada the satisfaction of watching him die, fulfilling the old artist’s deep-seated desire for vengeance and resolving the regret over his lover’s death; second, to help the narrator carry out his journey through the Underworld, which seems to be necessary in order to protect Mariye from her “evil father” Menshiki, who almost finds her in the closet when she trespasses to reconnoiter his home.8 On that occasion, he advises her to wait patiently until there is an opportunity to escape, which she does.9 The Commendatore appears to the narrator at odd intervals to offer

8 The Commendatore actually uses the term “evil father” referring to the Man with the White Subaru Forester (582), but it applies also to evil men of all sorts from antiquity to the present, and especially Menshiki because he is the immediate threat to Mariye and is also her father. 9 Commendatore’s reticence here, when he might have spirited Mariye away (if he could) or led her out of the house while Menshiki was away for a whole day, suggests that while he may foresee events, he does not control them. Perhaps he is bound by a code of non-interference similar to that of the Star Fleet in Star Trek explorations. On the other hand, he does give surreptitious advice, and how else may we account for the relocations of the Buddhist handbell and the vorpal fish knife than by his agency?

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advice, and we might suspect he is a projection of the narrator’s own unconscious mind, but for the fact that he also appears to Mariye in her hour of need in Menshiki’s closet. His awareness of future outcomes does not, however, affirm their certainty; apparently, he can enter the world of phenomena, observe it across the spectrum of time, even appear to die in it, without material efficacy or absolute prophetic agency. He is Idea animated by Good Will, no less and no more. We may well think of him as the personification of Schopenhauer’s primal causative Will, a Will that has come into being as Idea and that arises to inform and thus animate a solid yet otherwise vacuous World.10 It is quite possible that the Man with the White Subaru Forester is yet another such Idea, arising from the Will to Negation, a realisation of the faceless man that the narrator cannot paint in the Prologue but later succeeds in rendering vaguely before he decides wisely not to finish the portrait. As “Idea,” the Japanese Commendatore of Amada’s painting assumes bodily form in order to sacrifice himself, first as the Nazi officer for the sake of a man in the throes of a psychosis due to unassuaged grief and vengeance, and simultaneously for the sake of a young girl threatened by the predatory Menshiki, an embodiment of the operatic Don Giovanni and perhaps a twin of the Man in the White Subaru Forester, his devious alter ego. Menshiki is a more ambiguous figure than Don Giovanni, the Nazi officer, or the Subaru Man, but it is possible to attribute his good taste and keen intelligence, as evidenced in his meticulous home, impeccable dress, and well-tuned Jaguar cars, to demonic acuity rather than social sophistication. The Devil, we may recall, can pose as a gentleman. The Commendatore comments that “Menshiki has an ulterior motive for everything” (KC 447), a remark that the narrator recalls as he parries with Menshiki when they exchange histories (KC 459). Mariye senses danger, perhaps even depravity in him: “It’s like he’s always scheming about something. Like the wolf in ‘Little Red Riding Hood’” (KC 400). He seduces Shoko, who drives a modest Prius but is infatuated with Menshiki’s sleek and powerful Jaguars.11 But would he actually molest his own daughter? Is she really in danger when she sneaks into his home, or is she merely in trouble due to her

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I believe Murakami’s Commendatore is unique as a character who identifies as an Idea, but the Idea (Representation) would be impossible without the force of Will to project it into the arena of action and consequence. Hence the pattern here is distinctly Schopenhaueran rather than Platonic. Commendatore exists only because of the Will to nurture and protect. Schopenhauer insists on the mutual dependency of subject and object, Will and Idea; but Will has priority as the inner core of personhood, the “thing-in-itself” of existence. He introduces this thesis in chapter 19 of Volume I of his magnum opus The World as Will and Representation and expounds upon it at length in Volume II, “On the Primacy of the Will in Self-Consciousness” (201–244). Murakami’s story resonates to Schopenhauer’s metaphysics and also, perhaps, to the same philosopher’s esteem for music as the most direct expression of Will among the arts, “On the Metaphysics of Music” (Vol. II, 447–460). 11 Automobiles in this novel are directly expressive, even symbolic, of the owners. The narrator progresses from an old worn-out Peugeot 204 to a modest Corolla wagon that he never services or washes; Menshiki is known by his expensive Jaguars; Shoko drives a prim and efficient blue Prius; Masahiko Amada sports an unassuming but reliable old Volvo; and the Man in the White Subaru Forester projects the toughness and temerity that are the hallmark of Subaru. We are our automobiles, and they are us.

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adolescent adventurism? This we do not know, but perhaps we can trust the judgment of the Commendatore, who does take the trouble to visit Menshiki’s home, accepting the invitation proffered to the narrator and by proxy to the Commendatore himself. This visit, which takes place fairly early in the novel, imitates the dinner scene of the opera, but the outcome is totally dissimilar since the Commendatore takes no action against the presumed predator and is not even visible to Menshiki. As host Menshiki accepts that the Commendatore is there, sets a place for him at table, and there is no reason why he should dissimulate in front of the narrator (KC 282–283). The Commendatore thus gives up his “life,” insisting vehemently that the narrator must kill him, suffering a violent and bloody death (though all evidence of same immediately disappears), for what he deems to be a real assault looming upon Mariye Akikawa; furthermore, he does not carry out retribution like Mozart’s stern statue of Commendatore, nor does he act in any way like the Nazi leader he is meant to impersonate in Amada’s painting. By transforming the moral identity of the Commendatore, from the righteous father of the opera, to the evil Nazi leader of the Anschluss and to Menshiki, understood as the sublimated “Idea” from the Underworld (or from the Platonic Overworld), Murakami establishes that he is in truth the Idea of self-sacrifice, as he repeatedly offers himself in place of others, suffering death to save or to redeem them. This is who the Commendatore is, and this is why, as he himself insists, he must be killed (KC 574). So doing, he helps the good souls of this narrative, the narrator, old Amada, Mariye, and aunt Shoko, and prevents the onset of the dubious actors, Menshiki, the Subaru Man, and unknown others. That is what it means to be a Commendatore, literally a soldier and civic leader who takes upon himself responsibility for a community, an order of chivalry befitting only those who would give their lives for others.12

Der Rosenkavalier The narrator is a music lover; hence he is surprised and pleased by the extensive collection of Western classical music recordings in Amada’s home and frequently plays them while painting or relaxing there. In fact, there is a sense that the narrator, by living in Amada’s home, using his studio, listening to his recordings, and studying his secret painting “Killing Commendatore,” becomes a sort of doppelganger of the older artist, thereby inheriting the obligation to save the young girl Mariye, as Amada surely wishes he could have saved his Viennese lover. Amada’s collection is heavily laden with German musical classics (KC 110). The narrator never plays a recording of Mozart’s Don Giovanni (though he does play various

The title of Commendatore comes from the Italian, defined as “a member of an Italian honorary order of chivalry who ranks next above an officer and next below a grand officer” (www.merriamwebster.com). 12

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instrumental pieces by Mozart); but he does, at the suggestion of his guest and newly arrived portrait subject Menshiki, play Amada’s recording of another Viennese opera, Der Rosenkavalier by Richard Strauss.13 This modern romantic opera has such strong musical appeal to him that it becomes a favorite, so that he plays it again later in the novel on various occasions, once when he is alone (KC 443) and again when he entertains Shoko and Menshiki as guests (KC 456). It is clear that this musical program penetrates deeply into the narrator’s consciousness. Der Rosenkavalier is a musical drama evocative of the very motifs that are at work in the story of Killing Commendatore (the novel and the painting as well). It is a comedy with a serious turn, focusing on an aristocratic Austrian countess, the Marschallin, who involves herself in a scheme to save a young girl, Sophie von Faninal, from a crude sexual predator, the Baron Ochs (actually meaning “ox” in German); the cost to the aging Marschallin of this scheme is that she must give up her young lover Octavian, the Rosenkavalier (Knight of the Rose), because he has fallen in love with Sophie himself when he delivered the silver rose, a token of engagement, on behalf of Baron Ochs. The opera opens on the Marschallin and Octavian awaking after a night of pleasure in her bedroom, the sort of pleasure-love enjoyed in the novel by the narrator and his never-named lover, who drives a red Mini-Cooper, on many occasions, she as a wayward wife and he having been separated from his wife Yuzu for many months. Thus both the opera and the novel differentiate between love for pleasure, as witnessed in these instances, and love for real, as turns out to be the case with Octavian and Sophie and with the narrator and his wife Yuzu. In both works there is a predator and a potential young female victim who must be saved, Sophie von Faninal from Baron Ochs and Mariye Akikawa from Menshiki. There is, moreover, an over-arching theme in the opera that belongs to the Viennese Marschallin as she contemplates the onset of old age and the release of her young lover to a young woman who will love him as an equal over time. The focal scene comes at the end of Act I as she examines herself in a mirror and meditates in song upon the inevitable passage of time (Fig. 10.3). Time brings change, we are young, and then we grow old. “Time is a strange thing” she muses; “Sometimes I get up in the middle of the night and stop every clock” (Act I, “Die Zeit, die ist ein sonderbar Ding”). As she ponders her aging face, the clock bell rings 13 times, an ominous testament to fleeting time. Just so, the narrator is awakened at night and made aware of a mysterious presence, the Commendatore, by the ringing of a Buddhist hand held prayer bell, which eventually leads him to the pit which is the wormhole between this world and the Underworld of Ideas (KC 132). Later, when he finds himself compelled to make a painting of the pit in the woods, he becomes disoriented in time, persistent time that creeps on no matter what:

13

The narrator relates that the Rosenkavalier recording from Tomohiko Amada’s collection, which he (the narrator) listens to, is the one produced in Vienna and conducted by Georg Solti (110). Menshiki, obviously a connoisseur himself, is curious to hear the Solti rendition, being already familiar with those of Von Karajan and Erich Kleiber.

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Perhaps time really had stopped. Then again, maybe it kept nudging forward despite the fact that evolution, or anything resembling it, had ended. Like a restaurant approaching closing time that has stopped taking orders. And I was the only one who hadn’t figured it out. (KC 514)

That same day Mariye fails to appear in art class, and it is but a few days later, during the period of her disappearance, that he (the narrator) kills the Commendatore, enters the Underworld, and returns, having carried out the mission thrust upon him by the Commendatore to save Mariye and to avenge Tomohiko Amada. Likewise, in Act II Octavian, having arrived at the Von Faninal palace as the Rosenkavalier, actually draws his sword on the importunate Baron Ochs and wounds him in defense of a terrified Sophie (Fig. 10.4). In both cases, the hero (narrator and Octavian) has crossed a Rubicon, taken a stand against a predator in defense of an innocent heroine. In the final scene of the opera, which takes place in an inn where Octavian and his confederates conspire to expose Baron Ochs as a sexual predator, there are other elements that also appear in the novel. A curious trap-door opens on center stage and one of Octavian’s spies sticks his head up just like the Long-Faced Man in Amada’s painting and in his hospital room (Fig. 10.5); other spies peer from false portrait “windows” in the walls, prompting the Baron to complain that he feels he is being watched, as do both the narrator and Menshiki in the novel.14 The Marschallin, who arrives to chastise Ochs and free the young lovers (Fig. 10.6), pronounces that “There are things in this world we never believe exist, even when we are told of them” (Act III, “Hab’ mir’s gelobt”). And though the closing love duet of Octavian and Sophie, an ode to the blissful unreality of their love (Act III, “Ist ein Traum, kann nicht wirklich wein”), sends them beyond the curtain in ecstasy, an ironical contrast to the uncertain reunion of the narrator and his weirdly off-and-on wife Yuzu, the retrieval of Sophie’s handkerchief by the Moorish servant boy Mohammed serves as a reminder that after all, these things have really happened. The Marschallin’s meditative train of thought on surrender to time and change is impressed on and felt by the narrator, who has to bend his will toward evolving as a man, a painter, and a lover. The Commendatore has been an exemplum of such change, as he undergoes his own metamorphosis from the painting by Tomohiko Amada to the diminutive Commendatore who serves first as a guide and then as a sacrificial figure for Amada, Mariye, and the narrator. An Idea, after all, must assume many forms in order to have an impact on the world, and the Commendatore, who styles himself a shape-shifter (KC 253), has yielded to the demands of time and change in order to empower himself and to benefit others. The narrator does embrace change as he becomes a painter of essential portraits, capturing the inner life of his subjects (Menshiki, Mariye, The Subaru Man, The Pit in the Woods) and a mentor to Mariye who is at first a student but then almost a daughter or little sister, like Komi, 14

These visual elements would not be available to the narrator, since he is listening to a 33 rpm recording on stereo hi-fi, but they are quite prominent in the DVD of Der Rosenkavalier conducted by Herbert von Karajan in 1984, a live performance at the Salzburger Festspiele. It is evident that Murakami is familiar with this famous production, as it is the obvious source of the eccentric figure he calls Long Face.

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for him. He returns at the end to painting ordinary superficial portraits, but he also renews his relationship with his wife Yuzu and becomes a real father to the daughter Muro, whom he seems to have sired when he visited Yuzu in a dream (KC 491–492)—perhaps a dream like that of Octavian and Sophie. It is no accident, therefore, that Der Rosenkavalier persists in the narrator’s mind, for he like the Marschallin is forced to surrender to inevitable change in himself, to acknowledge the impact of time, and even to give up, save in memory, people he has loved: his sister Komi, his wife Yuzu for a time, his pleasure-lover, and Mariye too as she matures. All of this comes to him, or is reflected in him emotionally, from the richly melodic and scintillatingly nostalgic depths of Strauss’s symphonic score and the voices of the singers of Der Rosenkavalier. If, as the Commendatore insists, of Tomohiko Amada examining the painting Killing Commendatore, “he sees what he must see” (KC 581), it is also true that the narrator, like all of us, hears in music what he must hear. Like the narrator’s paintings, the ones that penetrate to the core of their subjects, including the landscape painting he makes of the pit which is the interface between physical and abstract realities, music and opera serve as the media of “Ideas” that both inform and move the people who study them. Perhaps, like the Commendatore, they help to guide us toward our destiny and may even save us unawares from danger or from an errant path. This is, apparently, the literary function of the operas Don Giovanni and Der Rosenkavalier in Murakami’s Killing Commendatore. Commendatore must be killed, but as an Idea he does not remain dead. He will always be alive as long as there are works of art, music, and literature to revive him and people to recognise and internalise him.

Afterword Anyone who has read Murakami’s novels and stories knows well enough that he is an ardent music lover who must have a large collection of records, CD’s, and DVD’s himself, not to mention access to the more recent streaming techniques; it is highly probable that the many references to musical works in his fiction constitute a sort of coded messaging to readers who share his extensive listening habits and are able to immediately grasp the implications of the specific performances he describes. In generations past, opera was the exclusive domain of the privileged upper middle class and aristocracy of the cities, those who had the means and opportunity to attend the opera theaters of Europe and the Americas. Only in Italy of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries did villagers and tradespeople get to see live opera. Today, live opera is even rarer than before, as many small opera companies in midsized cities have gone out of business, and live opera has become the preserve of those citizens in large metropolises who can afford ever pricier subscriptions. The digital world, however, has made opera and all kinds of music—jazz is Murakami’s other favorite—available to practically everyone who wants to hear or even see the great productions, not only of the present but also of the past. Digital media has been a

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great commercial success, but it has also inaugurated a cultural expansion of musical knowledge, as of many other kinds of knowledge, that deepens and broadens the mental and emotional landscape of human beings all around the globe. It has become the major avenue of exposure to opera for the vast majority of listeners everywhere—even the Met in New York has been televising its productions and serialising them online and in movie theaters—and it is the main medium of pedagogy in music history and music appreciation in schools and universities as well. Opera, like theatrical drama and the novel, mirrors the life of the modern world, from the sixteenth century to the present day. Murakami has shown us that this is true, with a story that spans the centuries from the age of Viennese opera to modern Japan. Digital culture has no doubt played a major role in his own artistic development and serves to enrich the background of many of his readers.

References Mozart, W. A. (2002). Don Giovanni. Mozart-Losey film of 1979, with Lorin Maazel and the Paris Orchestra. Columbia Tri-Star DVD, 2002. Mozart, W. A. (2010). Don Giovanni. Glyndebourne Festival Production of 2010, with Jonathan Kent and the Glyndebourne Chorus and Orchestra. Warner Label DVD, 2011. Murakami, H. (2019). Killing commendatore (2019) (P. Gabriel & T. Gossen, Trans.) (Vintage International ed.). Strauss, R. (2001). Der Rosenkavalier. Salzburger Festspiele Production of 1984, with Herbert von Karajan and the Vienna Orchestra. Sony Classics DVD.

Neil H. Wright is Professor Emeritus of Humanities, from Eastern Kentucky University in Richmond, Kentucky, USA. He earned the PhD in Interdisciplinary Humanities from The Florida State University, in 1982. He taught at Eastern Kentucky University in the Department of Languages, Cultures, and Humanities and in the Honors Program and served as Director of International Education from 1993 to 2013. From 1992 to 1998 he was Executive Director of the Kentucky Philological Association and President in 2002. His academic interests include Shakespeare studies, modern poetry, transnational fiction and cinema, and Western opera. He has traveled widely to attend and present at ACLA, CCLA, and AAC conferences and other comparative literature venues.

Part IV

Arts Tech and Experimentations in Stage Performance

Chapter 11

The Carp Fairy in the Digitalised Traditional Chinese Theatre Lily Li

Abstract In the era of new media, digital technologies present an unprecedented challenge to the survival of traditional Chinese theatre (xiqu 戏曲) due to the public’s modern aesthetic taste and their habit of online consumption of information and entertainment. However, digital technologies have also become an avenue for innovation and dissemination of traditional theatre art. This study examines and analyzes six digitalised stage performances of the Carp Fairy story in Peking opera (Jingju 京剧) and Yue opera (Yueju 越剧). In the fabulous mythological story, the Carp Fairy falls in love with the poor scholar Zhang Zhen 张珍, transforms into his betrothed rich girl and finally pursues her freedom and love after going through the painful ordeal of having her three scales removed. In my study, I explore the visual effects and distinctive features of digital presentation as they pertain to these traditional theatrical pieces that have evolved in the digital age. Digital technologies are often used to enhance recorded performances with visual effects, which have in turn inspired changes in recent live stage performances. In this way, digital versions of the Carp story have helped to refine and modernise the opera without sacrificing its traditional character. Keywords Aesthetics · Blue-Wave Fairy · Carp Fairy · Chasing the Carp · Digital enhancement · Digital technology · Little Mermaid · New media technology · Peking opera · Xieyi · Xieshi · Yue opera Traditional Chinese theatre (xiqu) art, built on long time-honored conventions, had been on the verge of marginalisation in mainland China, long before the advent of the digital age, because younger generations are attracted to other modern art forms than traditional theatre. In the era of new media, digital technologies present an unprecedented challenge to the survival of traditional theatre due to the public’s modern aesthetic taste and their habit of online consumption of information and

L. Li (✉) Department of Foreign Languages and Humanities, Eastern Kentucky University, Richmond, KY, USA © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2023 K.-k. Tam (ed.), Performance Arts: Research in the Age of Digital Revolution, Digital Culture and Humanities 4, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-19-9213-1_11

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entertainment. However, digital technologies might also be an avenue for innovation and dissemination of traditional theatre art so that traditional theatre can catch up with the times and gain a younger generational audience. Chinese digital technicians are exploring many ways of combining new media with traditional theatre. One way they have been successful is in digitalising stage performances, extending the traditional live theatre to screens of all sizes. This provides a more versatile and accessible space and more flexible range of time for the dissemination of traditional theatre. However, L. Cao 曹林 (2018), president of China Institute of Stage Design, points out that digital technologies could become a “double-edged sword” for traditional theatre art and could also possibly “speed up the decline of traditional theatre”; as he remarks, “The fundamental power for traditional theatre’s survival and development still relies on its own blood-making feature. If it doesn’t change itself in its textual contents and external form by accepting new ideas of the internet era, it is still hard to extricate itself from the predicament by simply relying on the stimulus of new media technology.”1 Therefore, it is imperative for traditional theatre to preserve its indigenous inheritance and to explore innovations in both dramatic presentation and technological effects. Traditional theatre, represented by Peking opera (Jingju) has three distinctive aesthetic characteristics: comprehensive, suggestive and formulaic.2 It reflects the theatrical view of xieyi 写意, portraying or presenting the essence or spirit, as opposed to the xieshi theatrical view, portraying or presenting life more realistically.3 The term xieyi, originally meaning freehand brushwork, is used to describe the characteristic method of traditional Chinese painting, which keeps the essence or spirit rather than the realistic appearance of things. Since the early 1960s, the famous drama director Z. Huang 黄佐临 (1984, 1990) started to develop his xieyi theatrical view based on Mei Lanfang’s 梅兰芳Peking opera performance, also known as “the Mei Lanfang theatrical view,”4 in contrast to the xieshi 写实 theatrical view reflected in the modern Chinese spoken drama (Huaju 话剧), dominated by Stanislavsky’s realistic theatre methods for a long time. Huang borrowed the art term xieyi to describe the four salient inner characteristics of traditional Chinese theatre: xieyi of life, movements, language and décor. He explains that life portrayed on the traditional Chinese theatrical stage is “not life as it is, but life as extracted, concentrated and typified”; actors’ movements are “eurythmicised to a higher plane”; the language is “elevated to lyrical height”; and the scenery is “designed to achieve a high artistic level.” Huang points out that the four salient inner characteristics, together with its four outer features, are the “sine qua non” of the traditional Chinese 1

My translation. In this study, all the translations from sources in Chinese are mine unless I cite it differently. 2 “综合性,虚拟性和程式化.” See Song (1994) 宋光祖 and Wang (2017) 王玉珍’s articles. 3 I prefer to keep the Chinese term xieyi 写意 in this study, feeling it expresses a unique meaning. Huang Zuolin translates it as “essentialism,” which I feel might be confused by Western readers with the philosophical term essentialism, versus existentialism. 4 His 1962 essay “On ‘Theatrical View’” (“漫谈 ‘戏剧观’”) became influential in Chinese theatrical fields. Also see Huang (1990).

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theatrical style (1984, p. 29).5 Huang’s view has been influential to my understanding of traditional theatre and its aesthetics.6 Traditional Chinese theatre has neither been stagnant in its form and content, nor isolated from modern technologies. As Cao Juan 曹娟 remarks, “traditional theatre in the 20th century kept moving forward while heeding the voice of reform. It is an art form moving back and forth between commerce and art” (43). She traces how it has explored and used modern technologies such as light, electricity, sound, and film to become more attractive and to raise its commercial value since the early twentieth century (42–43). It has also incorporated more realistic and complicated stage settings and props, adding to the traditional stage setting of “one table with two chairs.” Moreover, it has tried to keep up in the digital era. In recent years, stage artists and digital technicians have innovatively used digital technologies and created spectacular visual and aural effects on stage and screen, such as in the Peking opera The Royal Consort of Tang (Datang guifei 大唐贵妃) and the dance Night Banquet at Tang Palace (Tanggong yeyan 唐宫夜宴).7 All the innovations and experimentations with digital technologies have caused a sensation and attracted younger audiences to traditional theatrical art with its new appealing elements and forms. However, the use of digital technology in traditional Chinese theatre surely will add more complications to the ongoing debates over adhering to the xieyi theatre or progressing toward xieshi through the reform of traditional theatre, Peking opera in particular, since the May Fourth era.8 Generally speaking, the two opposing views are associated with solidifying the root versus bringing forth new ideas and forms. These oppositions are respectively represented by Wang Yuanhua 王元化 and Song Guangzu in recent years. Wang values cultural tradition and warns against making Peking opera more realistic: “The easily made mistake in reforming Peking opera is that people often forget the xieyi characteristic and draw it towards xieshi by the means of imitation. It is not that Peking opera does not speak of truthfulness; xieshi can manifest authenticity and xieyi can do so as well.” However, the opposite view, represented by Song, is that traditional theatre needs to reform itself by adding appropriate realism for authenticity, as Yue opera (Yueju) has successfully done. Thanks to its reform initiated by Yuan Xuefen 袁雪芬 and other artists by borrowing new ideas from modern spoken drama (Huaju) and film in performance style and stage design since 1942, Yue opera has become a new distinctive theatre combining xieyi and xieshi, which has had a great impact on many other local operas such as Huangmeixi 黄梅戏 and Pingju 评剧.9 Therefore, Song argues that it is valid to think that “Chinese traditional theatre has entered a new phase combining xieyi and

The four outer features are fluidity (scenes following one after another), plasticity (flexible in time and space), sculpturality and conventionality, “Mei Lanfang,” pp. 15–16. 6 Wang Yuanhua 王元化 and Jiao Juyin also have incisive thoughts on traditional Chinese theatre and its aesthetics. 7 Perf. by Zhengzhou Dance Company on Henan Spring Festival TV Gala in 2021. 8 See Weng’s anthology. 9 See Song’s article and historical materials on the Shanghai Yueju website ; Also see Gao & Lu (1994). 5

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xieshi,” embodying “the Yuan Xuefen theatrical view” (1994: 266).10 This new theatrical view represented by Yue opera has changed or even challenged the exclusive xieyi theatrical view represented by Peking opera. Therefore, Peking opera and Yue opera, two important forms of traditional theatre, currently represent two theatrical views with different aesthetics. As Peking opera adheres to the xieyi tradition, it retains the aesthetic characteristics of traditional theatre. Its stage is flexible in space and time, as conveyed in Zhang Houzai’s 张厚载’s expression “free in space and time” in the May Fourth era,11 indicated by Huang Zuolin as the “plasticity” feature of traditional theatre. In contrast, since Yue opera combines xieyi and xieshi, it introduces new aesthetics: in addition to its feminine aesthetic as a unique theatre of all-female performers,12 its performing style and stage design have added more realistic characteristics to its traditional xieyi aesthetics. Moreover, stage design in Yue opera always serves the aesthetic purposes of the whole performance. This difference between the two operas can be compared to that between traditional theatre and spoken drama, as Yue opera has been greatly influenced by spoken drama in stage design. The famous dramatist Jiao Juyin’s 焦菊 隐oft-quoted remarks, usually abbreviated, contrast traditional theatre and spoken drama: “Spoken drama derives performance from stage setting while traditional theatre derives stage setting from performance.”13 These discussions of the two operas are crucial to my study, as I explore how digital technology enhances or affects traditional theatre aesthetics. In recent years, the Carp Fairy story has been continuously performed on the stages of Peking opera (Fig. 11.1) and Yue opera (Fig. 11.2).14 The Carp Fairy myth is the Chinese mermaid story, like Andersen’s Little Mermaid: a fish, falling in love with a young man, transforms into a beautiful girl to be with him, a tale that ends tragically. However, the Carp story is a comedy with a happy ending: it has two doublings, Mudan and the Carp Mudan, the judge Baogong 包公 and the turtle Baogong 包公, resulting in comic dramatic effects; eventually, the Carp Fairy and her lover have a happy reunion after her sacrificial and painful transformation to become forever human. The opera is set in Bianliang 汴梁 (now Kaifeng, Henan), the capital of the Song dynasty (960–1279). Falling in love with the poor scholar Zhang Zhen, the Carp Fairy uses her magical arts, acquired from a thousand years of Daoist regimen, to transform into the beautiful rich girl Jin Mudan 金牡丹 (Gold Peony), betrothed to Zhang Zhen (Treasure) since childhood. The double causes a series of comical confusions. After the trial by the double Bao Gongs, Zhang Zhen is Hu Dao胡导 initiated this naming after Yuan Xuefen 袁雪芬, see Song 266. “假象会意, 自由时空” (Jiaxiang huiyi, ziyou shikong), translated as “fictitious in expressing meanings, free in space and time.” 12 Song (2005). 13 For a more detailed account of his comparison, see Jiao 474. 14 The Carp Fairy story traces back to a traditional Chinese play published in the late sixteenth to the early seventeenth century. It was preserved in the Xiang opera Chasing the Carp edited by Kang De 康德in 1950s. Tian Han 田汉 and his wife An E 安娥 played an important role in reviving the story in traditional theatre in late 1950s. 10 11

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Fig. 11.1 Carp Fairy in Peking opera, 2014 (All the pictures used in this study are screen captures from Internet sources taken by me, except for Fig. 11.2)

allowed to take the Mudan (Carp) identified by him as his loving wife, but the indignant father Premier Jin Chong 金宠 (Gold Worshipper) asks Daoist Master Zhang Tianshi 张天师 (Heavenly Master) to summon heavenly warriors to catch and kill the Carp, who is rescued in time by Guanyin 观音 (Goddess of Mercy). To be with her mortal lover, the Carp becomes human after suffering great pain having three fish scales removed. Zhang Zhen finally arrives, and the couple are happily reunited. There are various reasons for the popularity of the opera: the Carp Fairy and the young man’s love succeeds; the plot allows space and opportunity for the stage artists and technicians to innovatively create the three worlds (the human world, the water/natural world, and the heavenly/immortal world) and the mythological characters onstage, and for the technicians to use digital technologies to enhance the spectacle onscreen. Moreover, the experience of watching the performance onscreen is totally different from watching it in the theatre. Therefore, the digitalised version needs to be treated technologically to meet the screen audience’s expectations and to make up for the loss of the theatre experience, and to give the audience a new experience. This is why Yan Dewei 阎德威 calls the process of digitalising a stage performance “the third creativity,” as he explains, “instead of moving the performance from stage to screen, we should make it restore or elevate the stage performance by borrowing TV language [technology]” (319). This paper examines the visual effects and distinctive features of digital presentation as they pertain to stage performances by comparing six digitalised theatrical

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Fig. 11.2 Carp Fairy in Yue opera, 2009. Photo Hudiegu

productions on the Carp Fairy. The three versions of Peking opera Bibo xianzi 碧波 仙子 (The Blue-Wave Fairy)15 are performed by Beijing Peking Opera Company while the three versions of Yue opera Zhuiyu 追鱼 (Chasing the Carp) are performed by Shanghai Yue Opera House.16 As Peking opera and Yue opera represent two theatrical views with distinctive aesthetics, how do digital technicians follow their artistic rules and aesthetics when creating visual effects to accommodate the screen audience? How do digital technologies enhance or affect theatrical form and create new representations? How does the digitalised form enhance or affect theatrical aesthetics, and how does it create a new relationship between the theatre and the audience? Moreover, how do innovations via digital technology inspire changes in later stage performances, helping to refine and modernise the theatre without sacrificing its traditional character?

15

Also known as The Fairy of Azure Lake, see Wu et al 118. They are available on a widespread basis through databases of Chinese theatre online or other platforms. 16

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Three Digitalised Versions of Peking Opera The Blue-Wave Fairy In this section, I examine and compare the digital visual effects in three Peking opera versions of the Carp Fairy: the 2002 Audio-Matching-Video production (AMV), the 2014 Wu Haoyi 吴昊颐 and Bao Fei 包飞 production, and the 2019 Zhu Hong 朱虹 and Bao Fei production. The 2002 AMV version did not have a live audience while the two later versions did. Representing the xieyi theatrical view, Peking opera follows strict rules and conventions of stage performance and stage design to keep its xieyi aesthetics. How does digital technology enhance or affect theatrical conventions and xieyi aesthetics? How does digital technology affect the form and create new forms of expression? What happens to the xieyi theatre when digital technologies create more realistic visual effects of the water garden, running clouds, moving images of overlapping house-roofs on the street, flying figures, and the darkening sky for the storm? How do the visual effects in the digital versions inspire later stage performances? The 2002 AMV version, the earliest digitalised production of The Blue-Wave Fairy, needs a special introduction concerning digital traditions and special effects via post-production editing technologies. It is a video recording starring Zhang Chuyan 张雏燕 and Ma Shunde 马顺德, made in 2002 to match the 1982 audio recording featuring Zhao Yanxia 赵燕侠 and Liu Xuetao 刘雪涛.17 It is part of the famous government-sponsored cultural project entitled “China Peking Opera Audios-Matching-Videos Project” to rescue, preserve and revive Peking opera.18 Many artists, survivors of the Cultural Revolution (1966–1976), participated in this project. Yan Dewei, in charge of recording and digitalising the AMVs since 1994, refers to this project as “visualising the last songs (of Peking opera) onscreen.”19 The 2002 AMV version shows the digital tradition of replacing the curtains with the darkening screen (yinhei 隐黑) when transitioning to the stage setting of the next act. It also uses multiple camera shots for different perspectives onstage: distant for the whole stage setting or view, intermediate for two or more characters performing, close-up to show the characters’ facial expressions. This version uses some recently pioneered digital technologies, such as “carved images” (kouxiang 抠像), “overlapping images” (dieyin 叠印), and “pieced-together images” (huamian pinzu画面拼组),20 together with the camera panning effect, to create innovative and spectacular visual effects onscreen, inspiring the subsequent digital productions and even stage performances of the Carp opera. As Peking opera, following xieyi tradition, derives setting from performance, its stage apparatus tends to be minimal and suggestive; however, digital technologies Zhao played the first Carp Fairy in Peking opera, starting in 1959. About four hundred videos of performances were made to match the audio recordings by famous artists, see Yan’s article and the anthology by Tianjin CNCC. 19 The title of Yan’s article. 20 These TV technologies are often used in digitalising the AMVs (Yan 321). 17 18

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Fig. 11.3 The Blue-Wave Fairy, 2002 version

are often used to enhance the visual effects of the performance to create a background for the screen audience. The opening scene of the water world in this opera illustrates this tendency. This scene, heavy in dance and martial arts, presents a playful and happy water world, where the Carp and her fellow water creatures live and play and practice Daoism to become immortals. On a plain stage with the blue water painted or projected on the stage background, four pink shellfish and some green turtles and other water creatures play in the blue waves, represented by ten male dancers fluttering their blue capes adorned with billowing water wave patterns. In the turbulent water, the shellfish open and close their shells; the turtles perform acrobatic stunts; the two red-appareled carp dancers announce the imminent arrival of the lady Carp, who appears in all her regal splendor, magnificent in her red gown (Fig. 11.1). The 2002 version introduces this dance troupe, via a special technology of “overlapping images,” so that the dancers first appear as an array of opaque figures superimposed on the static background of the stage (Fig. 11.3). The dancers fade into view and quickly become the primary figures, displacing the background imagery as they perform their celebratory dance. A similar treatment of this scene occurs in the 2019 version. However, the 2014 version uses the camera panning effect: the camera pans from right to left over a few dancers fluttering their blue capes, highlighting their roles as waves of billowing water. The techniques in these three versions render the boundless and mutable water world enticing to the eyes of the screen audience and heighten the symbolism of the magic powers of the Carp Fairy and her fellow creatures. These visual effects emphasise the xieyi aesthetic of deriving setting from suggestive performance. The Peking opera stage background with painted images displays the setting to the theatre audience. In this opera, Premier Jin’s family estate is an important setting for several major scenes; the entire estate is realistically depicted on a painted skrim as the stage background: a full moon high in the middle of the sky, a pavilion with upturned eaves and a tall residence building connected by a winding path on the left,

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Fig. 11.4 The Blue-Wave Fairy, 2002 version

and the white garden wall on the upper right, all surrounded by the Blue Wave Lake (Fig. 11.4).21 This view of the estate illustrates the family wealth of Premier Jin and his exalted status; it also introduces the water garden, where the magic Carp lives. The estate is first seen in the early scene of the two lovers’ initial meeting in the study. At center stage is the interior of the study, with the view of the estate clearly seen outside in the two earlier versions but only vaguely glimpsed behind the transparent curtains of the study in the 2019 version. However, since the still background tends to go unnoticed onscreen, digital technologies are employed to transform a still plane figure to a more dynamic three-dimensional figure, offering a more realistic setting onscreen. Two digital versions preview the Jin estate before the study scene.22 The 2002 version shows us a 3D view of the whole Jin property onscreen, via the camera panning effect and the overlapping images technology. The camera moves in a circle from the pavilion on the left, across broad water, to upper right (the white garden wall) and then back to the left (the tall residence building). With new images gradually fading in and old images fading out, we see the overlapping images (Fig. 11.5), an illusory effect suggesting the expanse of the Jin property and their family wealth and status. This visual effect also designates the water garden as a mysterious place, where the Carp lives. The 2014 version also uses the camera panning effect to visualise the stage background: the camera moves swiftly from left to right, from the pavilion to the tall residence building. For the screen audience, the digital preview of the Jin estate

21 Bibo Tan (碧波潭) can be the Blue or Green Wave Lake/Pond. Based on the stage design, it suggests “blue” waves of the water in Peking opera, and “green” waves of lotus leaves in Yue opera. 22 This preview of the Jin estate seems to be inspired by the 1959 film version of the Yue Opera.

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Fig. 11.5 The Blue-Wave Fairy, 2002 version

constitutes a valuable introduction to his family wealth and status that would be evident to a theatre audience already familiar with the opera and its traditions but might be unknown to more remote or unfamiliar viewers. Digital technologies also enhance theatrical conventions with visual effects, as in scenes with a Daoban 导板. In the traditional theatre, an actor sometimes sings offstage an introductory line or two, called Daoban, to introduce a longer song he/she will continue onstage.23 The stage is plain until the actor enters. Sometimes, it takes 1 or 2 minutes for the actor to finish the Daoban lines offstage and appear onstage. Listening to the daoban line(s) while waiting for the actor to appear onstage is a unique experience in traditional Chinese theatre; it gives the audience the pleasure of anticipation. However, the screen audience may have a different feeling from the theatre audience, as there is nothing for them to see, no action but only a pause that is devoid of purpose, a “knotty problem” for technicians when digitalising the scene (Yan 321).24 In this opera, there are three daoban scenes, two by the Carp and one by Zhang Zhen.25 For the 1st daoban scene, two versions create visual effects. At this juncture, the Carp sings offstage a nanbangzi daoban 南梆子导板: “Jumping out of the cold pond and braving the silver fog, I rush onto the shore”26; then she appears onstage to sing about her admiration for the lonely young man. The 2002 version uses a “carved 23 Singing offstage is also used in Western opera, as for instance Don José in Carmen and Alfred in Die Fledermaus. 24 “伤脑筋的难题.” 25 The three daoban introduce three specific melodies to express different emotions: nanbangzi 南梆 子expresses a happy emotion, xipi 西皮 indignant and sad, and erhuang 二黄 excited and eager. For more details on Peking opera melodies, see Pan 56–61 & 78. 26 “跃寒潭, 冲银雾, 忙把岸上.”

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Fig. 11.6 “Carved image” in The Blue-Wave Fairy, the 2002 version

image” for this scene: upper left onscreen appears a small round screen, showing the Carp singing the daoban lines, with her fancy headdress and her upper body in her red gown, against the main screen of the stage where Zhang Zhen naps (Fig. 11.6). The 2014 version uses the view of the Jin estate for the camera panning effect: while the Carp sings offstage, the camera moves diagonally from lower left showing the water to upper right showing the garden wall, illustrating her movement from water to shore as sung in this daoban. These visual effects enrich the screen experience with expressive images, adding some movements to the static plain stage. For the second daoban scene, one version utilises overlapping images and camera visual effects. This is a street scene with the plain stage as the street and traditional style houses depicted on the stage background.27 Before he appears in distress onstage, unaware that the coldhearted Mudan is not his loving Mudan (Carp), Zhang Zhen sings offstage a xipi daoban 西皮导板line, “It’s hateful that Mudan is so cruel.” 28 The 2019 version uses overlapping images and the camera panning effect for this scene: we see onscreen the plain stage with the houses in the background, but then the house roofs gradually overlap in the background; the screen shows the camera panning effect of the house roofs moving left (Fig. 11.7), as if the scholar were running forward along the street. This version produces a more cinematic and realistic setting of the street scene for the screen audience. For the third daoban, one version uses digital visual effects, offering a more realistic setting onscreen. This scene is set in the wilderness, suggested by the stage background showing the blue sky with white clouds, sometimes with mountains

27 28

The 2014 version uses the garden setting for this scene but changes to the street setting after. “可恨牡丹心太狠.”

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Fig. 11.7 The Blue-Wave Fairy, the 2019 version Table 11.1 CPE camera panning effect, OI overlapping images, PS plain stage, SB stage background Version 1st daoban 2nd daoban 3rd daoban

2002 “Carved mage” PS PS

2014 SB (CPE) PS SB (CPE; OI)

2019 PS SB (OI; CPE) PS

below.29 The couple is travelling in the wilderness, where the heavenly warriors are soon to descend to capture her. Before they appear hand in hand onstage, the Carp sings offstage an erhuang daoban 二黄导板line, “We husband and wife are moving forward.”30 The 2014 version uses the camera panning effect and overlapping images for this scene: when the music rises, the screen switches from the plain stage to the white clouds gradually panning left; when the Carp sings offstage, the camera pans until the clouds overlap at her last high note, as if her song is reverberating in the running clouds while the couple is “moving forward” in the wilderness (Table 11.1). During the three daoban scenes, the 2002 and 2019 digital versions show the plain stage twice and the 2014 digital version shows the plain stage once, a combination of the theatre and screen experience. In every instance, digital effects serve to enhance the visual appeal of the daoban moment while preserving the original theatrical effect of the offstage singing, which previews the action about to happen onstage. Thus the theatrical tradition of the daoban sung behind the scene

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The 2019 version uses the traditional cloud patterns as the background. “夫妻双双向前进.”

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is kept intact. However, like the visual effects of the dynamic Jin estate, the digital visual effects of the moving overlapping house roofs and the running clouds via camera panning and overlapping image technology add more realistic settings in the digital versions. The stage of Peking opera is highly flexible in space and time. This opera exhibits such flexibility. In the scene of the storm arriving, though the background shows the sky with clouds, the stage represents first the sky and then the earth, through the performance of the four characters of Wind, Rain, Thunder and Lightning, symbolic of the storm. In the previous scene, the heavenly warriors led by the god Erlang Shen 二郎神 try to capture the Carp Fairy, who fights back supported by her fellow water creatures, in a spectacular display of dance and martial arts. When Erlang Shen summons the storm to aid him, the four deities respond offstage: “Coming!” while all the characters from both sides strike a pose and look upward in the same direction, suggesting the Four Elements are above in the sky. Subsequently, the four deities emerge on the empty stage as in the sky, with their symbolic costumes and attributes (a yellow flag for Wind, a raindrop silver tasseled costume for Rain, a hammer and a spike for Thunder and a pair of mirrors for Lightning goddess); then they dance and weave together vigorously onstage, meaning the storm is forming and descending from sky to earth. When they finally strike a pose together at center stage, it suggests they have landed on earth, and the storm arrives. The storm is accompanied with dramatic music mixed with sound effects of wind and thunder. The conceptual dualism of heaven and earth in this scene exists onstage as enacted by the actors, who create the impression of the sky or earth. However, the digital versions use visual effects for the Four Elements descending to enhance the conceptual dualism while providing spatial dualism onscreen and offering an increasingly realistic rendering of the storm arriving. The two earlier versions resort to digital imagery while the 2019 version reflects a radical change in presenting the storm onstage, inspired by earlier digital visual effects. In the 2002 version, while we hear “coming,” a smaller video of the Four Elements appearing upper left onscreen flies to upper right, then becomes bigger and bigger against the main screen of the stage, where all other characters look up to see them (Fig. 11.8). Finally, the digital frame with the Four Elements occupies the entire screen, as if they have flown down from sky to earth. This digital technology utilising two frames pieced together visualises the storm’s passage from heaven to earth. The 2014 version offers a similar visual effect of the storm descending with further added digital details. While we hear “Coming,” they appear vignetted in a small inset video upper left against a black background with flashes of lightning, moving diagonally from upper left to lower right, suggesting the storm’s arrival on earth (Fig. 11.9). The added digital flashes of lightning on the black background surrounding them are a step further towards a more realistic portrayal of the storm. The 2019 digital version reflects a radical change in presenting the storm onstage, inspired by earlier digital visual effects. With stage lighting, a painted sky on the stage background, and enhanced sound effects of wind-blown rain, the arriving storm is presented onstage more realistically; however, the painted traditional cloud patterns (yunwen云纹) representing the sky on the blue background maintains

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Fig. 11.8 “The four elements descending” in The Blue-Wave Fairy, the 2002 version

Fig. 11.9 The Blue-Wave Fairy, the 2014 version

xieyi aesthetics. The digital version focuses on the changing sky onscreen: the blue sky becomes darker and darker till pitch dark, while lightning flashes menacingly on the bottom (Fig. 11.8). When the black screen lights up, the view switches back to the brightened stage, where the four storm characters appear in person. From the sole use of the symbolic characters onstage to the more natural visual and enhanced aural effects via technology, this change, inspired by the previous digital effects, presents

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Fig. 11.10 Pieced-together images, 2014

a more spectacular and protracted event with both naturalistic and symbolic features onstage and onscreen, a careful addition of realism to xieyi aesthetics. Here, as with the 1st daoban, digital effects of the Four Elements descending in the two earlier versions are employed to keep the screen audience attentive and to gratify their desire to actually see the advent of vital actors about to take the stage and further the narrative. In both cases, approach of divine or immortal figures (the Carp and the storm deities) is prefigured by visual cues that prepare the screen audience to recognise and appreciate them. Moreover, the digital cinematic visual effects of the flying figures of the storm in the two earlier digital versions make them more realistic. As with the second and third daoban, the visual effects of the storm are produced for a realistic setting by using the still stage background in the 2019 production; however, the digital visual effects for the two daoban scenes are only seen onscreen while the visual effect of the changing sky for the storm is seen both onstage and onscreen in the 2019 version. The theatrical tradition of the daoban is kept intact in all three productions while digital visual effects present the storm onstage, adding realistic features to xieyi aesthetics. Finally, digital technologies are deployed to promote dramatic irony and humor. The doubling causes chaos at the Jin residence, as the two Mudans are so shockingly identical that neither the parents nor the servant girl can tell them apart. When they both show the same red birth mark on the left wrist, a secret to identify the real Mudan, the parents are sure that one of them is a spirit and dare not embrace either. Each double complains that her own parents cannot tell the real from the imposter, and both cry “this makes me shed tears.” The 2014 version uses the “pieced-together images” for this scene: as the rivals, standing apart onstage, sing the line, we see one Mudan onscreen, and then the other fades in from behind her and moves to the left as if the first Mudan splits into two, leaving the two identical Mudans side by side onscreen (Fig. 11.10). The audience can clearly see and compare their facial

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expressions, as one is crying in distress while the other (the Carp) steals a look around, smiling, and then facetiously mimics the real Mudan crying for her parents. In contrast, the 2002 version offers the smaller image of the two standing apart onstage, thus their facial expressions are hard to discern onscreen, while the 2019 version switches the screen from one to the other to show their close-ups so that the screen audience can see their faces.

Three Digitalised Versions of Yue Opera Chasing the Carp Representing a new Chinese theatre combining xieyi and xieshi aesthetics, Yue opera Chasing the Carp displays its distinctive aesthetic features onstage, despite a similar storyline to that of the Peking opera production. The three digitalised Yue opera versions under study are the 1989, 2009, and 2018 productions. Yue opera’s tradition of portraying love stories and its more realistic stage setting require different visual effects to satisfy the screen audience. How do digital technologies display and enhance the love theme for the screen audience? How do digital visual effects inspire changes in the content and the form of later stage performances? As Yue opera, generally an all-female opera, often portrays traditional love stories involving a talented young scholar and a beauty (caizi jiaren 才子佳人), the Carp Yue opera intensifies the love theme between Zhang Zhen and the Carp Fairy. Such scenes feature elaborate dances and romantic interludes. In this opera, the Carp does a fish dance in several acts as if swimming in the water (Fig. 11.2). She initially emerges onstage in her fish costume from the lotus pond and dances to transform into Mudan’s appearance in human garb.31 Later, the Carp launches a flood to fight the heavenly warriors by dancing with the traditional long white sleeves (water sleeves) attached to the costume; a group of dancers in blue dancing around her with their long sleeves represent turbulent water waves. The combat scenes in this opera are generally done through dances or dance movements imitating martial arts with four to eight actresses representing the heavenly troops,32 in contrast with a host of spectacular heavenly characters performing exciting martial arts and acrobatics in Peking opera. Moreover, stage design in Yue opera, influenced by film and modern spoken drama, always serves the aesthetic purposes of the whole performance, different from Peking opera, as previously discussed. Actors interact with various objects and images of the stage design, such as the moon in the stage background, a dramatic convention which does not occur in Peking opera. Additionally, stage lighting, such as side lights, back lighting, overhead lights and spotlights, is deployed to create an

31 However, in the 2018 Yue opera production, the Carp emerges onstage as the double Mudan, resembling the Peking opera productions. 32 The 2018 production added more martial arts and acrobatics to the combat scenes.

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atmosphere in these productions.33 Breathtaking visual effects are created onstage through lighting, such as the moon shining over the lotus pond, running clouds, the changing multi-colored magical water world, red lightning and “blood rain” in the scene of the Carp having her fish scales removed, and the Chinese-painting-style images of lotus flowers and leaves and plum trees projected on the stage background, and so on, all contributing to the aesthetics of the Yue opera stage performance. These stage visual effects are often a significant part of the whole visual aspect in the digitalised versions. The stage setting in Act 1 with the moon shining over the lotus pond is more natural but also more symbolic than in Act 1 of the Peking opera productions. The design offers space and depth to nature and to the immortal realm as well as to the human world, replacing the interior of the study in Peking opera. It shows a peaceful and harmonious scenario, three worlds in one. On stage left behind the window partly obscured by a bamboo grove, the scholar is reading late at night by candlelight. On stage left, shrouded in darkness, is the pond full of lotus flowers and leaves, where the Carp lives. At center stage are a stone table and two stone stools where the scholar and the Carp Mudan will first meet. The stage background features lotus flowers and leaves under the full moon shining high in the sky. The entire scene is unified by moonlight, as the full moon illumines the stage in blue light. This scene is symbolic of the harmonious coexistence of the three worlds: the moon above represents the heavenly world, stage right displays the human world (the study), and stage left (garden and pond) is the natural world. This arrangement also presents the Daoist idea of harmony between humanity and nature, Yin and Yang. The 1989 and 2009 productions share this stage design in Act 1, with more improved and elaborated details in the later version. The 2018 production removes the study window from the stage, leaving only the garden under the full moon as the center of attention. After all, the garden is a space shared by residents of both the human and natural realms. The full moon is also a romantic symbol of lovers being together in Chinese culture as well as in this opera, which deploys this love symbol ingeniously in the scenario of the full moon shining over the lotus pond in Act 1. Vicissitudes of human life are like different phases of the moon, as set forth by the famous Chinese poet Su Shi 苏轼: “People have sorrowful separations and joyful reunions, as the moon cycles from Dark Moon to Full Moon.”34 Thus, the full moon prompts one’s desire to be with the lover, as it makes Zhang Zhen feel lonely and desire to be with Mudan, his betrothed since childhood. Their falling in love with each other when they finally meet would be the moment of “when the moon is full, the lovers are together” (yue yuan ren yuan), also clearly expressed through an offstage narrating singer at the end of Act 1. But ironically, the scholar has no idea that his Mudan is the Carp Fairy. Digital technologies produce visual effects to highlight the symbolic meanings of the moon at the beginning of Act 1. In the 1989 version, we see the moon in the night

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Shanghai Yue Opera House is known for its innovations and creations with stage lighting. “人有悲欢离合, 月有阴晴圆缺.”

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Fig. 11.11 (a) (Left) and (b) (Right). Visual effects of the moon, the 2009 version

Fig. 11.12 The bigger moon onstage, the 2018 version

sky, then the camera pans left to the candlelight of the scholar in his study; but he leaves his work, drawn out into the garden under the moon. In contrast, the 2009 version uses overlapping images to enhance the dominant symbol of the full moon. When the curtain rises, we see a solemn scene: the study window on the left and the lotus pond on the right; the bright full moon high in the night sky, shedding blue light over everything. Then a bigger image of the full moon appears over the small moon on the dark blue screen (Fig. 11.11a), till the bigger moon occupies the middle of the screen (Fig. 11.11b), becoming the only image against the blue night sky. The digital visual effects of the moon in the 2009 version precede improvements of stage visual effects in the 2018 production, thus in its digital version. The 2018 version doesn’t utilise the overlapping or superimposed effect of the moon, as the image of the moon in the background is already much brighter and bigger via stage lighting technology than in the previous productions (Fig. 11.12). Thus the bigger and brighter moon onstage seems inspired by the digital visual effect of the moon in the previous digital versions.

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All three versions have enhanced another key moment to contrast the full moon with the male protagonist’s loneliness. These visual effects could be introduced because the actors interact with the moon, which doesn’t occur in Peking opera. Zhang Zhen is studying hard but ineffectually to prevail in the imperial exam to marry Premier Jin’s daughter Mudan. He has been engaged to her since childhood, but he could never even meet her due to his impoverished status and poor academic prospects. When the lonely protagonist comes out of his study and looks up to the full moon, he laments, “Alone, facing the bright full moon, I have all sorts of frustrations.”35 In all three versions, as he sings about the bright moon, the moon fades in right in front of his face (Fig. 11.13a–c), then he fades out till the full moon against the night sky occupies the screen. However, the 2019 version constructs a subsequent second visual effect of him facing the moon: he fades in again to face the moon till the moon fades out and vanishes from the screen. In all three versions, the moon in the background is too far away to appear next to his face; hence digital technologies bring the moon closer to him, intensifying Zhang Zhen’s loneliness and his desire to consummate the marriage with Mudan and to have a family. Digital technologies reinforce the symbolic meaning of the full moon in the love scene at the end of Act 1. After pouring out their admiration for each other, Zhang Zhen reminds her that he is not a match for Mudan in wealth and status, but Mudan (Carp) responds that a happy marriage is more important than fame and wealth and she will love him even if he fails the imperial exam. Then embracing together, they look at each other affectionately. At this juncture, an offstage female narrator sings: “If only the moon is full when the lovers are together, they will love each other forever.”36 Traditionally, the Carp Mudan leads him indoors, suggesting further intimacy. In both earlier versions, Act 1 ends with the loving couple indoors; we see them silhouetted, through the window, facing each other backlit by candlelight (Fig. 11.14). However, the 2009 version uses digital technologies to show his affectionate face superimposed on her silhouette (Fig. 11.15); then he puts out the candlelight. In both versions, their dark silhouette on the roundish window lattice against the candlelight behind them simulates the lovers framed in the full moon. However, in the 2018 version, this love scene changes from indoors to outdoors: as the offstage female narrator sings, the couple, embracing each other, look up together while the moonlight shines on them. Then the image of the couple gradually overlaps with the image of the moon fading in so that the visual effect is of the couple looking at the moon (Fig. 11.16). This new addition corresponds to the previous visual effect of Zhang Zhen facing the moon alone in all three versions. All three versions elucidate the message of the love theme related to the full moon. Digital technologies create visual effects during the lovers’ final reunion under the water and happy return to the human world. In the previous scene, the Carp has chosen to sacrifice herself to become human by having three scales removed by Guan Yin, to be with her love. When Zhang Zhen chases her into the water,

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“空对此一轮明月, 怎奈我百转惆怅.” “但愿得, 月圆人圆永相亲.”

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Fig. 11.13 (a) (upper), (b) (middle) & (c) (lower). Visual effects of the man facing the moon, the 1989, 2009 & 2018 versions

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Fig. 11.14 The lovers’ silhouette, 1989

Fig. 11.15 His face superimposed on her silhouette, 2009

determined to be with her in death, he is surprisingly reunited with her and her fellow water creatures. Both 1989 and 2009 versions use overlapping images for this dreamlike scene: as the offstage narrator sings “a narrow escape from death is not a dream,”37 we see the couple embracing each other, then a larger image of the couple overlapping with a smaller image (Figs. 11.17 and 11.18). Subsequently, when the lovers are sent back to the human world by the water creatures, there is a celebration with group dance and singing. When all the others strike their last pose at 37

“九死一生非梦境”.

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Fig. 11.16 Facing the moon together, 2018

Fig. 11.17 Reunion, 1989 version

the end of the show, an oversize image of the two lovers fades in and occupies the screen as the last image of the performance in both versions (Figs. 11.19 and 11.20). However, in the 2018 version, the stage performance makes a truly monumental change to the ending of the opera. Instead of having the Carp suffer alone as in previous versions, Zhang Zhen accompanies her through the entire painful experience. A duet dance of the lovers is added in this act: unable to dissuade the Carp from having her three scales pulled, Zhang Zhen rolls on the floor with her, holds and comforts her during the whole process. After the completion of the excruciating

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Fig. 11.18 2009 version

Fig. 11.19 An oversize image fading in, 1989 version

transformation, the whole stage turns red with “blood rain” (Fig. 11.21). This spectacular ordeal undergone by the lovers underscores their mutual devotion and constitutes a symbolic ceremony of marriage, in which they share all the agony and ecstasy of life, all they may experience in their whole lives together. When she wakes up in his embrace, the red stage light gradually recedes from downstage to upstage and the blue stage light takes over, presenting a changed setting of the full moon shining over the lotus pond, reminiscent of the setting in Act 1 (Fig. 11.12) but with a white bridge at center stage. Embracing each other, the lovers ascend the bridge, and look up to the full moon, shining benevolently on them (Fig. 11.22). The bridge, itself a symbol of transition, is brought forward from Act

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Fig. 11.20 2009 version

Fig. 11.21 “Blood rain,” 2018 version

3 when the couple danced and sang about the mythical White Snake legend—a famous story in which the lovers, Lady White Snake and her husband Xu Xian 许仙, are forever lost to one another on the “broken bridge” of that tale. The allusion is obvious in that the bridge is first viewed head on, so that only the near half is visible, but then from the side when the lovers have ascended it, so that we see it is whole and not broken. The bridge in this version is clearly the antithesis of the “broken bridge,” no longer a bridge of sorrow but here a bridge of hope and love, blessed by the blue light of the moon in a closing vision that needs no other enhancement, digital or otherwise. All three Peking opera versions replace the conventional second curtain (erdao mu 二道幕) with the darkening screen as a transitional device between acts but keep

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Fig. 11.22 The couple embracing under the full moon, 2018 version

it unchanged onstage. In contrast, the three Yue opera versions illustrate the evolution of the second curtain onstage from frequent use to reduced use and finally to none, indebted to the darkening screen. In traditional theatre, a second curtain is used to separate downstage from upstage as a transitional device between acts: while actors perform in front of the second curtain, the upstage setting can be changed for the next act. However, the second curtain is a problem, as it “makes the performance fragmented, slack and tedious due to its frequent closing and opening.” Therefore, the technology of “darkening screen” is used as a transitional device onscreen. This technology “speeds up the dramatic rhythm and strengthens the coherence of the plot and scenes” (Yan 321). In the 1989 version, we can see traces of the second curtain edited out, but it would be impossible for technicians to edit it out while the actresses are singing and performing. The darkening screen is introduced in this version as a transitional element between acts. In the 2009 version, the second curtain is reduced while the darkening screen is more often used; moreover, digital technologies also enhance the visual effects of the second curtain scenes. In the transitional scene between Acts 1 and 2, the lovers are on the way to the garden to see plum flowers. They support each other affectionately and walk by downstage in front of the second curtain: a larger image of them fades in while the small image fades out when they walk to the middle (Fig. 11.23); then a small image of them fades in again while the bigger image fades out, when they are about to exit the stage (Fig. 11.24). It creates the visual effect of their meandering path to the garden and seems to lengthen their time together, reinforcing the love theme. The 2018 stage performance completely abandons the second curtain as a transitional device, thus there is no need for technicians to use visual effects for the transitional scenes in this version. This production uses the darkened stage to change the setting: the stage lights dim at the end of the act and light up for the next act with a new setting. Obviously, this production is indebted to the digital versions.

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Fig. 11.23 Larger image fading in, 2009 version

Fig. 11.24 Small image fading in, 2009 version

Yue opera uses music and a solo or chorus singing offstage as a storytelling device between acts. In the scene of Zhang Tianshi (Heavenly Master Zhang) summoning the heavenly forces, he appears onstage, waving his duster in hand, as the chorus sings about his power. Both 1989 and 2009 versions employ digital enhancements to give substance to the heavenly authority of the Daoist Master. In the 1989 version, as the chorus sings, the thick fog gradually disperses, and the camera slowly zooms out to show the Master standing on a pastel cloud (Fig. 11.25). In the 2009 version, the scene starts with the brightened small image of him waving his duster from the clouds in the left upper corner against the dark stage (Fig. 11.26). As the chorus sings, an oversize image of the Master fades in onscreen, suggesting his immense and terrifying power.

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Fig. 11.25 Zhang Tianshi zooming out, 1989 version

Fig. 11.26 Overlapping images of Zhang Tianshi, 2009 version

However, the 2018 stage performance replaces this scene with an extended darkened stage, accompanied by the chorus singing offstage. While the two earlier versions depict the immense power of the Daoist Master visually, the 2018 version leaves the matter up to the imagination of the audience. Such transitional narrations sacrifice dramatic presence but render a more well-knit plot; meanwhile, the audience can focus on hearing the chorus on a black screen, following the convention of using the chorus as a storytelling device.

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Conclusion The innovations of digital technology have not only produced many fantastic and appealing variations/visual effects in the recent productions of the Carp Fairy in Peking and Yue opera but have also led to subtle enhancements and changes in stage performances via aesthetic feedback. We see an example of this aesthetic feedback in the use of the darkening screen for the second curtain as a transitional device between acts for the screen audience: the three Yue opera versions show that the advent of the darkening stage in the latest version is obviously indebted to the digital darkening screen. While Peking opera keeps the convention of the second curtain unchanged, Yue opera finally abandons it. In all instances, the darkening screen and stage speed up the dramatic rhythm for the audience, who are used to an accelerated, uninterrupted narrative style. As Peking and Yue opera represent two theatrical views, digital technicians have followed their respective artistic rules and aesthetics when creating visual effects in digital productions to accommodate the screen audience. Yue opera, which combines xieshi and xieyi, offers a more realistic stage setting easy to see and appreciate onscreen. Modern audiences easily understand and relish such digital effects as the moon and the images of the lovers, which highlight the love theme. Moreover, the digital visual effects of the symbolic moon have also inspired the bigger and brighter moon onstage in the latest production. In contrast, Peking opera, as a theatre of xieyi, has sought to preserve minimal and suggestive stage setting. Older audiences prefer a traditional aesthetic, but digital technicians have created visual effects enhancing the performance and background, which offer a more realistic and dynamic setting to accommodate the multifarious screen audience. In other words, the digital Peking opera versions seem to add more realistic elements to its xieyi aesthetics, moving towards the Yuan Xuefen theatrical view. The instance of presenting the storm onstage with both realistic and symbolic features in the latest Peking opera version, inspired by the digital effects of the storm, shows some xieshi effects added to the xieyi presence onstage; however, the stage performances in most cases remain unchanged. It remains to be seen whether there is a way to solve the inherent contradiction of xieyi and xieshi in Peking opera. Wang Xinhui 汪鑫卉 has clarified the matter concisely: “Now people desire realistic works of art, but traditional Chinese theatre is of xieyi.” Perhaps it is too speculative and too soon to conclude that Peking opera is destined to combine more xieshi with xieyi aesthetics in its stage performances; but the synthesis of these seemingly opposed theatrical principles is already happening in digitalised productions and is probably going to continue into the foreseeable future.

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References Beijing jingjuyuan 北京京剧院. (2014). Bibo xianzi 碧波仙子. Performed by Wu Haoyi 吴昊颐 and Bao Fei 包飞, digitalised by CCTV Theatre in the Air. www.youtube.com/watch?v= mMtVaAIpvbM Beijing jingjuyuan 北京京剧院. (2019). Bibo xianzi 碧波仙子. Performed by Zhu Hong 朱虹 and Bao Fei 包飞, digitalised by CCTV Theatre in the Air. www.youtube.com/watch?v=w0 y6AbzFZAg (1/2); www.youtube.com/watch?v=6OyaONteBgo (2/2). Beijing jingjuyuan 北京京剧院 (Beijing Peking Opera Company). (2002). Bibo xianzi 碧波仙子 (Blue Wave Fairy). Audio (1982) by Zhao Yanxia 赵燕侠 and Liu Xuetao 刘雪涛, video performed by Zhang Chuyan 张雏燕 and Ma Shunde 马顺德, digitalised by CCTV Theatre in the Air. www.bilibili.com/video/av41633609/ Cao, J. 曹娟. (2018). Xiqu wutai yishu 戏曲舞台艺术 (The stage art of traditional Chinese theatre). Anhui wenyi chubanshe. Cao, L. 曹林. (2018, February 13). Shuzi jishu gei xiqu yishu dailai le shenmo? 数字技术给戏曲艺 术带来了什么 (What has digital technology brought to traditional theatre art?). kknews.cc. kknews.cc/zh-my/culture/jq9eo26.html Gao, Y. 高义龙, & Lu, S. 卢时俊. (1994). Chongxin zouxiang huihuang: yueju gaige wushi zhounian lunwenji 重新走向辉煌:越剧改革五十周年论文集 (Towards another splendor: collected essays on the 50th anniversary of Yue opera reform). Zhongguo xiju chubanshe. Huang, Z. 黄佐临. (1984). Mei Lanfang, Stanislavsky, Brecht—A Study in Contrasts. In Z. Wu, et al. (Eds.), Peking Opera and Mei Lanfang: A guide to China’s traditional theatre and the art of its great master (2nd Printing) (pp. 14–29). New World Press. Huang, Z. 黄佐临. (1990). Wo yu xieyi xijuguan 我与写意戏剧观 (I and my xieyi theatrical view). Zhongguo xiju chubanshe. Jiao, J. 焦菊隐. (1986). Jiao Juyin wenji 焦菊隐文集 (The collection of Jiao Juyin’s Works) (Vol. 3). Wenhua yishu chubanshe. Pan, X. (1995). The stagecraft of Peking Opera. New World Press. Shanghai yueju yishu yanjiu zhongxin 上海越剧艺术研究中心. (2019, July 5). Yueju shiliao: wumei 越剧史料: 舞美 (Yue opera historical materials: stage design). Yueju.net. www.yueju. net/news.html Shanghai yuejuyuan 上海越剧院. (1989). Zhuiyu 追鱼. Performed by Qian Huili 钱惠丽and Wang Zhiping 王志萍, digitalised by Hong Kong Chia Tai Vision LTD. www.youtube.com/watch? v=UmNTI70Zu40 Shanghai yuejuyuan 上海越剧院. (2009). Zhuiyu 追鱼. Performed by Zheng Guofeng 郑国凤and Wang Zhiping 王志萍, digitalised by CCTV Theatre in the Air. www.youtube.com/watch?v= BD1bKxNz30c Shanghai yuejuyuan 上海越剧院. (2018). Zhuiyu 追鱼. Performed by Yang Tingna 杨婷娜and Yi Yaqin忻雅琴, Wang Wanna 王婉娜and Chen Xinyu 陈欣雨, digitalised by CIBN (China International Broadcasting Network). www.youtube.com/watch?v=PeOL6leWKr0 Shanghai yuejuyuan 上海越剧院 (Shanghai Yue Opera House). (1959). Zhuiyu 追鱼 (Chasing the Carp). Directed by Ying Yunwei 应云卫, performed by Xu Yulang 徐玉兰and Wang Wenjuan 王文娟, Tianma Film Studio. Song, G. 宋光祖. (1994). Cong Mei Lanfang dao Yuan Xuefen: lue lun xiqu de xijuguan de shanbian 从梅兰芳到袁雪芬:略论戏曲的戏剧观的嬗变 (From Mei Lanfang to Yuan Xuefen: on the changing theatrical view of traditional theatre) (pp. 257–266). Gao & Lu. www.yueju.net/news/374.html Song, G. 宋光祖. (2005). Gushou bing fazhan ‘nüxing xiqu’ benti—wei Shanghai yuejuyuan chengli wushi zhounian er zuo 固守并发展女性戏曲本体—为上海越剧院成立五十周年而 作 (Stick to and develop the ‘feminine theatre’ essence: written for Shanghai Yue Opera House’s 50th anniversary). Xiju yishu 戏剧艺术 (Theatre Arts), 6: 98–102. Tianjin shi zhonghuaminzu wenhua cujinhui 天津市中华民族文化促进会 (Tianjin City Chinese National Culture Commission) (Ed.). (2002). Zhongguo jingju yin pei xiang jingcui jinian wenji

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中国京剧音配像精粹纪念文集 (China Peking opera audios matching videos classics: commemorative essays). Zhongguo xiju chubanshe. Wang, Y. 王元化. (2000). Xulun: jingju yu wenhua chuantong 绪论:京剧与文化传统 (Introduction: Peking opera and cultural tradition). In S. Weng 翁思再 (Ed.), Jingju congtan bainianlu 京 剧丛谈百年论 (A hundred years of collected talks on Peking opera) (pp. 32–37). Hebei jiaoyu chubanshe. Wenxue bao 文学报, no.4. fanwen.qzjlw.com/RbnWVjxg/ Wang, Y. 王玉珍. (2017, November 16). Jingju yishu de san da meixue tezhen 京剧艺术的三大美 学特征 (The three major aesthetic characteristics of the Peking opera art). Sohu.com. www. sohu.com/a/204870081_99944477 Wang, X. 汪鑫卉. (2019, December 5). Shuzi meiti jishu dui chuantong xiqu yishu de jidian qifa 数 字媒体技术对传统戏曲艺术的几点启发 (Inspirations of digital media technology on the traditional theatre art). In Weixing dianshi yu kuandai duomeiti 卫星电视与宽带多媒体 (Satellite TV and Broadband Multi-Media) (Vol. 14, 112). m.fx361.com/news/2019/1205/ 6103729.html Weng, S. 翁思再 (Ed.). (1999). Jingju congtan bainianlu 京剧丛谈百年论 (A hundred years of collected talks on Peking opera). Hebei jiaoyu chubanshe. Wu, Z. 吴祖光, Huang, Z & Mei, S. (Eds.). (1984). Peking Opera and Mei Lanfang: A guide to China’s traditional theatre and the art of its great master (2nd Printing). New World Press. Yan, D. 阎德威. (2002). Rang juechang lixiang yingping: dianshi daoyan zhaji 让绝唱立像荧 屏—电视导演札记 (Visualising last songs (of Peking opera) onscreen: TV director’s notes) (pp. 318–324). Tianjin. www.sohu.com/a/422196484_654292

Lily Li, PhD, is a lecturer at Eastern Kentucky University where she teaches Chinese and comparative literature. She has published extensively on modern Chinese literature and film. She has organised conference panels at ACLA, AAS and CCLA. She is currently working on a book manuscript on Chinese writers in diaspora.

Chapter 12

Rethinking the Use of Multimedia Technology in the Theatre Minghou Liu

Abstract The use of multimedia technology on the theatrical stage has indeed vastly enriched stage designing and lighting, extended the spatial and temporal dimensions of stage performance and brought to the audience a new aesthetic experience. Nonetheless, I have found that when some directors overly rely on science and technology, more often than not, the expression of the innate substance of the theatrical art is inhibited. What is worse is that it could even result in the superseding of the secondary over the primary—the performance of the actors may become inundated. To make my point, I would take the Chinese performance Ghosts 2.0 staged in Beijing, and British performance, The Magic Flute produced by UK’s Company 1927 in collaboration with the Komische Oper Berlin, Germany, as examples for discussion and offer my views on the strengths and weaknesses of using technology. Keywords Company 1927 · Ghosts 2.0 · The Magic Flute · Multimedia · Theatre · Wang Chong In China today, the digital mass media on the Internet has penetrated into all aspects of people’s everyday life. In our life and work, mobile phones, computers, WeChat, micro-blog, iPad, TV, etc., have become indispensable. Every minute, these gadgets are transmitting millions of vivid and dramatic information. It has become so overwhelming that it exerts a powerful influence over people’s lives. In this digital high-tech era, the age-old theatre is inevitably transformed by the trends. More and more new media are used on the stage. For instance, quite a number of directors are exceedingly keen on using multimedia technology on the theatrical stage. The uses have indeed greatly enriched stage designing and lighting, extended the temporal and spatial dimensions of stage performance and brought to the audience entirely new aesthetic experience and enjoyment.

M. Liu (✉) Shanghai Theatre Academy, Shanghai, China © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2023 K.-k. Tam (ed.), Performance Arts: Research in the Age of Digital Revolution, Digital Culture and Humanities 4, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-19-9213-1_12

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I still remember the enormous curiosity displayed by the Shanghai audience when they first saw how theatrical troupes from abroad integrated moving multimedia images into stage performances. For a long time, people dwelt with relish upon the “miraculous visual effects” brought about by the digital imaging technology. Obviously, the development of science and technology has exerted a great impact upon arts and created boundless spheres for the development of the theatre. For instance, the development of stage lighting has broken through traditional boundaries of stage lighting by integrating digital imaging into it. Thereby the designers of revolutionary multimedia digital lighting are given wings on their inspirations. The moving digital images vastly expanded the space of the stage and achieved a great variety of artistic effects, such as moving human figures and changing scenes. Special effects of stage designing are also created. This magical charm of digital lighting is more often than not all the more impressive in large-scale performances. However, when the art of the theatre is technologised, new problems are created. I have noticed that once the director is overly reliant on technology, the presentation of the theatrical work may often be marred, and it may even cause a deviation from the dramatist’s purport.

Case 1: Ghosts 2.0, Beijing Ghosts 2.0 is staged by Beijing’s avant-garde director Wang Chong 王翀 and his Théâtre du Rêve Expérimental. Wang Chong was born in the 1980s. His stage productions like Ibsen in One Take and The Thunderstorm 2.0 toured mainland China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Oslo, Atlanta and other places. These productions roused great interest in the theatrical circles and the mass media. In August 2015, Ghosts 2.0 (Fig. 12.1) was staged in Shanghai’s Ming Art Gallery. This play borrows some part of the plot of Ghosts. Same as Ibsen’s Ghosts that deals with social and religious problems in Norway, Wang Chong’s Ghosts 2.0 deals with China’s social problems, such as corruption that is caused by people’s loss of belief. Ghosts 2.0 was sponsored by the Norwegian company, Ibsen International. The Norwegian Consulate General in Shanghai attached much importance to its performance and invited scholars, noted personages of the theatrical circles and the mass media to watch the play. Entering the hall without the framed stage, the audiences were seated at one side of the hall. The most eye-catching objects in this oblong space were the four video cameras and three large screens. In the process of the performance, the actors and actresses intentionally performed in front of the four cameras. When they moved or ran away from the cameras, they would from time to time run to the cameras to adjust the focus so that the audience could at all times see clearly the minute details of their sweating facial expressions. This integration of video imaging into stage performance in order to present enlarged facial expressions on the screen is one of the technical innovations of Wang Chong’s (Fig. 12.2). Wang Chong has his own interpretations in Ghosts 2.0, which go much beyond the critic’s views. In his production, he places an emphasis on China’s lost

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Fig. 12.1 Poster of Ghosts 2.0, 2014 (All illustrations in this study are screen captures from the Internet available in China). Théâtre du Rêve Expérimental. Permission by Wang Chong 王翀

generation in the post-1980s economic boom when people live in hypocritical relationships. For instance, in his Ghosts 2.0, the son Oswald is frustrated to find out that he has to suffer from syphilis inherited from his father who led a lascivious life. In a fury, Oswald runs wildly round the stage while bellowing like hell, and he flips out of his breast pocket scores of panties in all colours and shapes. The scene shows women’s underwear being scattered all over the stage, and at the same time, panties of all colours and shapes are shown on the three large screens. The scene shocks the audience with enlarged images projected on the screen (Fig. 12.3).

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Fig. 12.2 Ghosts 2.0, 2014. Directed by Wang Chong 王翀, Théâtre du Rêve Expérimental. © Photographer Zhu Lei 朱雷. Permission by Wang Chong

Fig. 12.3 Ghosts 2.0. Directed by Wang Chong, Théâtre du Rêve Expérimental. © Photographer Zhu Lei 朱雷. Permission by Wang Chong

The character of Oswald in Wang Chong’s Ghosts 2.0 is quite different from the Oswald in Ibsen’s Ghosts. In the original play Ghosts, Oswald merely pours out his griefs over his misfortune of being victimised by inheriting his father’s venereal disease. Oswald in Ibsen’s Ghosts is not characterised by violent and unrestrained emotions as the Oswald shaped by Wang Chong. Ibsen’s Oswald merely feels that he is unfairly wronged. He considers himself innocent, but has to shoulder his deceased father’s guilt and accept the retribution of fate. In Ibsen’s Ghosts,

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Fig. 12.4 Ghosts 2.0, 2014. Directed by Wang Chong. Infuriated Regina (centre). Théâtre du Rêve Expérimental. © Photographer Zhu Lei 朱雷. Permission by Wang Chong

Mr. Alving’s debauchery is more or less implicit. However, the Chinese director Wang Chong intentionally makes it explicit and has it exposed. And yet, it is exactly what Mrs. Alving tries to conceal. In Ghosts 2.0, by throwing the dirty underwear around, Oswald openly declares his inheritance of the venereal disease in a wild fury like a provoked wild animal. This doubtlessly heavy blow on his mother creates a dramatic scene on the stage. In the following scene, the maid Regina learns the truth. She is the illegitimate daughter of Mr. Alving who seduced her mother, a housemaid. Oswald is her halfbrother. Wang Chong’s Regina is not like the Regina in Ibsen’s Ghosts, in which Regina declares that she has no obligation to stay with the dying man and leaves the house without the slightest hesitation. However, Wang Chong’s Regina becomes hysterical. Wang Chong throws in a monologue for the maid, which is full of dirty swears for the sake of venting her anger. The maid is plunged into despair and fury because she originally wishes to marry the young master Oswald, leave the countryside and live a comfortable life in the city. Now her dreams are smashed. She bursts out swearing like a slut, cursing her mother, cursing her biological father, cursing all men, cursing the morals and values of the time. . . . Every curse is made up of extremely dirty words. On the big screens, the audience see the maid Regina’s twisted face and horrible eyes filled with hatred. In her unrestrained outburst, her robe slips off her shoulders and her figure is exposed (Fig. 12.4). At the discussion after the performance, I raised questions about the maid’s outburst: “What is the purpose of inserting this scene of the maid’s hurling swears?”

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Fig. 12.5 Ghosts 2.0, 2014. Directed by Wang Chong, Théâtre du Rêve Expérimental. © Photographer Zhu Lei 朱雷. Permission by Wang Chong

Wang Chong was not present at the discussion, but the answer given by the actress who played the part of Regina was quite ambiguous. In the scene, Regina was presented contrary to her psychological disappointment. Even if Regina and Oswald were not related by blood, as a maid it was utterly out of the question for her to get married into a wealthy family. She instantly turns from a tender and affectionate maid into a hysterical ferocious slut. Her unrestrained wild outburst and extremely vulgar curses are totally unreasonable. It is a wild deviation from the message of the original text in Ghosts. Apart from that, Ghosts 2.0 has also made explicit the possible hidden relationship between Mrs. Alving and Pastor Manders. Enlarged images suggestive of physical movements and intimate body language performed by the actors were shown on the big screens (Fig. 12.5). During the performance of Ghosts 2.0, there was no on-the-spot interaction or communication between the audience and the performers. The audience seemed to have been pushed out of door and reduced to eavesdropping. It is my view that the integration of multimedia images into the theatre is by no means just to satisfy some people’s curiosity for fashionable technical experimentation. I was very uncomfortable with the intensified projection of the intimate relationship between Mrs. Alving and Pastor Manders. Other than shocking the audience, what does the scene serve? This kind of alteration has brought to my memory the production of Uncle Vanya by the 12th graduating class of the Acting Department in the Shanghai Theatre Academy in December 2015. The young director of the production also used

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multimedia images. The director failed to have a full grasp of Chekhov’s drama, which should have a poetic mood with suggestive, rather than explicit, messages. In Chekhov’s play, the affair between Dr. Astrov and the professor’s wife Yelena and the scene of them love-making are depicted implicitly. However, the young director not only explicitly staged the love-making scene, but also had the enlarged lovemaking scene projected on the screen for the audience. This shocking presentation with close-up shots literally put me ill at ease. Not all the audiences are interested in peeping into people’s privacies, despite that this method of projecting the lovemaking scenes on the screen represents a new trend in theatre aesthetics. I don’t see any postmodernist elements in such performance, though some critics hailed it as an attempt to postmodernise the Chinese theatre. Without critical scrutiny of the postmodernist philosophy in the theatre and without concern for the original play’s aesthetic subtleties, the use of technology becomes merely a play of techniques. The biggest problem with Ghosts 2.0 is its explicitness in handling filmic images with sexual implications, which not only do not go well with plot development, but also deviate from Ibsen’s original play, thus making the filmic images too abrupt. When interpreting classic dramatic works, directors may well have their own views and interpretations. They may sometimes need to exaggerate certain scenes so as to create explosive effects in bombarding the audience. However, such scenes or images must be an integral part of the plot. A noted example is how the Japanese director Yukio Ninagawa staged Oedipus Rex in 1976 by adapting techniques of violence aesthetics borrowed from film art when in the last scene Oedipus stabbed his own eyes on the stage, creating a scene of bloodshed spilling the stage. The audience was well prepared for the shocking effect of the scene because it was part of the plot development when Oedipus’s true identity was revealed. Oedipus’s self destruction at the climax not only achieved stunning dramatic effects, but also roused the audience’s pity and fear for the misfortune and blunder in the wise Oedipus. Young directors in China, like Wang Chong, may need to rethink how to make their productions aesthetically more appealing than simply creating sensory shocking effects.

Case 2: Company 1927, UK The integration of technology into arts can indeed produce new aesthetics in performance. It challenges traditional performing arts with the actors ceasing to be the only dominant roles in a performance. When multimedia animation technology a performance, it creates new stage dimensions surprising effects. One example is the play The Animals and Children Took to the Streets produced by the UK Company 1927 (Fig. 12.6). This play won the Herald Angel Award at the Edinburgh Art Festival, the Best Work Award at the London Festival Fringe, the British Drama Award and many other awards. It toured to Shanghai in 2013. The performance takes the audience through an astonishing new world where there is drama, movie, animation, music and black humour. The stage is like a pop-up book

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Fig. 12.6 Poster of The Animals and Children Took to the Streets, Company 1927, UK. Permission by Beijing Yunhan Cultural Exchange Company

of comics. A few actors present stories of children in London’s poverty-stricken quarters. The dirty dilapidated apartment buildings, the children, the flies, the ice-cream vendor’s cart and so on are presented by multimedia animation technology. These images are part of the performance along with the actors. In fact, the entire performance is a merger of animation and live actors. It creates a scene which is both real and unreal. It is both a theatrical performance and a movie. Displayed on the screen are a great variety of lively and interesting dramatic scenes. The settings on the stage keeps changing all the time without a trace of changing physical stage properties. The synchronised display of acting, animation and movie is full of originality and creativity. The performance makes the audience reflect after hilarious laughs and ponder upon the social problems in society. Company 1927 came again to Shanghai in 2015 to stage Mozart’s opera The Magic Flute in collaboration with the Komische Oper Berlin of Germany. The performance was held at the Shanghai Grand Theatre. The production also took the form of synchronised performance of live actors and animation. From the

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Fig. 12.7 (a–c) are photos of The Magic Flute, Company 1927, UK, in collaboration with Komische Oper Berlin, Germany. Permission by Beijing Yunhan Cultural Exchange Company

beginning to the end, the singing and acting of the actors are accompanied with graphic animation projected on the stage. Graphic animation is primary theatrical language of performance (Fig. 12.7a). The Magic Flute has supernatural and magical elements. The Company 1927s stage production is specially designed with the intention of fully representing its magical and supernatural qualities. Hundreds of animation images and scenes are made in place of traditional stage design (Fig. 12.7b). The animations also function as the director as they lead the performance. The limits of traditional stage designing totally break down. Flutes fly across the screen. Small bells bounce around. Yellow flowers blossom in slow motion pictures. Elephants get drunk over cock-tail glasses. Opera singers are able to fly across planets and swiftly descend to the hell by taking an elevator. Images and symbols partially replace language. The massive use of animation gives the audience a completely new theatrical experience as if they were reading a magic book or watching an exotic film of contemporary opera (Fig. 12.7c). The Magic Flute co-produced by the British and German theatrical companies, gives the audience a new experience by its glamorous animation. And yet, the animation might inundate the actor’s performance and sidetrack the audience’s attention from the performers. While technology can enhance a performance, it sometimes may also downplay the performance when singing and acting become secondary to animated images. In contrast to the complex and forever changing multimedia stage setting, the actors look very tiny on the stage (Fig. 12.8). Human actors are reduced to having a secondary place in relation to the animated images.

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Fig. 12.8 The Magic Flute. Permission by Beijing Yunhan Cultural Exchange Company

This may indicate a different emphasis at the expense of live performance. Some balance between animation and live performance may be needed in The Magic Flute.

Reflections on Arts Tech in the Theatre The importance of stage design and lighting is no longer a question in stage performance. It is impossible to reject the use of multimedia digital technology in today’s performance. However, we must on guard against its overuse because the theatre is after all the art of the actors. All forms of technology can be tested. But the use of technology is not a guiding trend. In the high-tech era of digitalisation, China’s dramatists have many hurdles to overcome in search of ways to explore artistic expression. The theatre is the art of actors. Any other theatrical elements and modes of expression are meant to shape the characters and enhance performance. Scenic design, lighting, screen images and so on are technical gadgets meant to enhance a performance, of which the actors are the main focus. Considering art as virtual space, the German sculptor and art critic Adolf von Hildebrand (1847–1921) has made the point: By the visual values of space we mean those values of an object which issue only in purely spatial perceptions tending toward the general conception of a segment of space. By purely spatial perceptions we mean perceptions independent of the organisation or functioning of the object involved. Let us take a form which is given visual expression by contrasts of light and shade. Through their particular relations and respective positions, these different degrees of brightness and darkness affect the spectator as if they were actually modeling the object—

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a concerted effect is produced existing only for the eye, by factors which otherwise are not necessarily connected.1

In this statement, von Hildebrand is referring to virtual space in design, but his comment is relevant to the stage as space in art. The stage consists of virtual space with all elements of space, lighting, colour, dialogue, actors’ movements that form an organic unity in spatial relations. When some elements are emphasised at the expense of others, the whole will be ruined. So will the stage, if technology is used not as devices in support of performance. Another point of concern is how the theatre works in the digital age where theatre criticism is no longer the exclusive game of professional theatre critics. In the digital age, audiences can respond to a performance by posting their own views on such platforms as WeChat, blog and micro-blog. Fragmented criticisms and views are non-distinguished from professional criticism. The new mass media have changed people’s modes of social interaction, perception and cognition of the world. Information and knowledge are transmitted across time, space and boundaries by people who are non-experts. One example is the live HD broadcasting of Shakespearean stage productions by the British National Theatre Live. That makes possible for people worldwide to see the latest superb performances of Shakespeare’s plays, such as Hamlet, King Lear and Macbeth. For the Chinese audiences, it is an entirely new experience of watching a play online. What is presented to them is both a play and a movie. Seeing a HD video streaming of Shakespearean plays, the audience feel as if they were in the actual theatre where the play is being performed. They will experience an aesthetic satisfaction in virtual reality. This form of live transmission adopted by the British National Theatre Live has greatly changed the modern audience’s mode of watching stage performances. The creation of a sense of virtual existence is in itself a revolution of people’s mode of existence in the digital era. Actually, for quite some time in China there has been attempts in “modernising” the traditional theatre by “extending it to transmedia art.” A large number of classic traditional plays have been filmed or made into videos. Unlike the British National Theatre Live, what the Chinese theatre has done fails to target the international market. The cultural backgrounds of Shakespearean plays and Chinese operas may be entirely different and the needs of Chinese and western theatre-goers and drama scholars are likewise different, but there is one thing in common: both drive at the use of multimedia technology in classical performance. The new modes of theatrical performance transmission and of theatrical criticism have changed the traditional modes of teaching drama too. The educators must follow closely the ever-escalating innovation of knowledge in the modern times. They must follow closely the changes in the fields of literature and art brought about by IT revolution. A few years ago, Shanghai Theatre Academy established its virtual theatre workshop, which has provided a highly economical and efficient workplace of artistic experiment for

1

Adolf von Hildebrand, The Problem of Form in Painting and Sculpture, pp. 50–51. Quoted in Susanne K. Langer, Feeling and Form: A Theory of Art, p. 75. The Chinese translation of Langer is published by China Social Sciences Press, Beijing, 1986.

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the teachers and students in programmes of directing and stage design. In this newlyestablished virtual theatre workshop, there is a digitalised stage-monitoring system. Arts tech is used in stage deployment and overall stage monitoring and management. Digital technology has long since been used in the theatre, the movie industry, music and other art forms, with IT experts playing a more important role in artistic production.

References Ibsen International. (2014). Ghosts 2.0. https://ibseninternational.com/productions/ghosts-2-0/ Langer, S. K. (1953). Feeling and form: A theory of art. Charles Scribner’s Sons (Chinese ed.). China Social Sciences Press, 1986. Ninagawa, Y. (1976). Oedipus rex. Nissei Theatre. DVD (2005). Von Hildebrand, A. (1907). The problem of form in painting and sculpture. G. E. Stechert. Wang, C. 王翀 (Dir.). (2014/2015). Ghosts 2.0. Théâtre du Rêve Expérimental. Two rounds of performances: Beehive Theatre, Beijing, 6–7 September 2014; Ming Contemporary Art Museum, Shanghai, 7–9 August 2015.

Minghou Liu, PhD, Professor Emerita of Shanghai Theatre Academy. Currently member of expert review panels of Art Category of National Social Science Fund of China, Shanghai Culture and Art Development Foundation, Shanghai Magnolia Theatrical Performance Award and Shanghai Film Bureau. Director of International Association of Theatre Critic (China Section). Three times recipient of “Award of Outstanding Contribution to Development of Theatre in Shanghai.” Writer of the play Life in the Fog, which was awarded “Excellent Play” in the North China Theatre Festival.

Chapter 13

Staying Alive: The Plague and Performance in a Digital Age Angela C. Pao

Abstract In this study I will discuss stage performance with reference to three works: Bill Irwin and David Shiner’s Old Hats (2013, 2016), Peter Sellars’ 2009 staging of Shakespeare’s Othello, and Richard Eyre’s 2013 production of Ibsen’s Ghosts, performed on stage at London’s Almeida Theatre and live-captured for streaming by Digital Theatre. Each case brings out key aspects of prevailing pre-pandemic attitudes towards the role of mediatization and new technologies in the world of Anglo-American theatre, particularly as they concern performances of text-based drama. Taken together they offer insights into characteristics of live performance that resist transposition into mediated formats and thereby suggest specific qualities of “liveness” as realized in dramatic theatre. Keywords Plague · Performance · Theatre · Spatialisation · Mediatisation · Signature Theatre · Digital Theatre · Aristotle · Grotowski · Artaud · Shakespeare · Poetics · Old Hats · Othello · Ghosts · Kordian When I presented the first version of this chapter as a paper at the 2016 Hong Kong conference on Digital Culture, the “plague” in the subtitle alluded solely to Antonin Artaud’s visionary essay “The Theatre and the Plague.” For Artaud, the plague served as a powerful metaphor for a theatre that functioned as a form of contamination, infecting the internal organs of its spectators rather than addressing their eyes, ears and minds. As with the transmission of a virus, actual presence, direct contact between performers and audiences, was essential for that “infection” to take place. From this perspective, all mediated adaptations of or substitutions for live stage performance—cinematic, televisual or digital—were weakened, eviscerated forms of true theatre. In the intervening years, however, the COVID-19 pandemic transformed the specter of an uncontrolled deadly contagious disease for which

A. C. Pao (✉) Department of Comparative Literature, Indiana University, IN, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2023 K.-k. Tam (ed.), Performance Arts: Research in the Age of Digital Revolution, Digital Culture and Humanities 4, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-19-9213-1_13

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there was no medical prevention or cure from a distant historical event or a metaphorical analogy into a lived experience. As in past centuries, the closing of sites of public gathering, including theatres, was central to efforts to control the spread of the disease. Unlike the past, however, in the twenty-first century there were alternatives to live theatre. Recorded versions of live performances, heretofore largely regarded by practitioners and general audiences as impoverished replacements for the original enactment, became a lifeline. The conditions of distance and absence characteristic of analog, electronic and digital reproduction became virtues rather than deficiencies. Digital technology made possible virtual gatherings and shared experiences in real time. Theatre companies opened their digitised archives to virtual audiences, preserving established affiliations but also creating new communities of spectators which were no longer limited by geographical proximity. More people than ever before watched technologically mediated performances of plays, operas, dance and concerts. During the months it provided the only form of theatre attendance available, digital technology was elevated from being widely perceived as a means of recording and disseminating a live original to being appreciated as an ally of live performance rather than its rival or even a threat to its existence. Whether this emended view of the role of digital technology and the benefits of digitisation outlasts the gratitude born of crisis and deprivation remains to be seen. Already there are signs of the resilience of the pre-pandemic sentiments that prevailed among members of the theatre community. The re-opening of theatres has come with hearty re-affirmations of the unique irreplaceable qualities of live performance. However enduring or provisional pandemic-era adjustments to practices and attitudes linking digital technology and live performance may prove to be, the radical changes to theatre life brought about by the lockdowns give fresh impetus to discussions about the nature and relationships of live and mediatised forms of performance. My own ruminations center on three productions, two experienced as live in-person performances and one as an on-demand streamed performance. The first two works are Bill Irwin and David Shiner’s Old Hats (2013, 2016) and Peter Sellars’ 2009 staging of Shakespeare’s Othello. The third is Richard Eyre’s 2013 production of Ibsen’s Ghosts, performed on stage at London’s Almeida Theatre and live-captured for streaming by Digital Theatre. Each case brings out key aspects of prevailing pre-pandemic attitudes towards the role of mediatisation and new technologies in the world of Anglo-American theatre, particularly as they concern performances of text-based drama. Taken together they offer insights into characteristics of live performance that resist transposition into mediated formats and thereby suggest specific qualities of “liveness” as realised in dramatic theatre.

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Old Hats Old Hats was created by Bill Irwin and David Shiner for Signature Theatre (NYC) as a series of loosely linked vaudeville-style comedy sketches.1 The show was first performed in 2013 and revived in 2016. The opening curtain rises to reveal Irwin and Shiner fleeing in terror for their lives. Bearing down on them is a huge rolling boulder, an iconic quotation from the first Indiana Jones movie, Raiders of the Lost Ark. The inexorably advancing mass of rock is a digital projection. Placed in the larger context of the recurring themes of Old Hats, it serves as a comical but forceful metaphor for the dangers posed by state-of-the-art technology as it threatens to overtake and crush the puny humans trying to stay ahead of it. In Old Hats the threat posed by state-of-the-art technology in the theatre is but one instance of the encroachment of digital culture into all aspects of everyday life. The relationship of human beings and “the machines that we build to absorb ourselves” has been a longstanding subject of interest for Bill Irwin, who describes himself as someone who is consistently 10 years behind the current state of technology (“Clowning Around”: 7, 8). For Irwin, with his professional training as a clown and years of experience as a circus performer, this absorption is as much physical as mental: I have a fascination with how technology impacts our physical character. I think we are genetically inclining our heads forward now because we relate only to the thing in our hands so that our necks are not necessarily ever going to straighten up. So that’s my clown fascination: how we relate to our own image and the machines that we build to absorb ourselves. We think that we’re in control of these things. Somebody of my generation, I know we’re not. (“Clowning Around”: 8)

This rather Lamarckian notion of total absorption in one’s electronic devices morphing into a disfiguring surrender of control to those devices was the central premise for the sketch titled “Mr. Business.” The businessman in question feels incomplete without a cell phone in one hand and a tablet in the other (Fig. 13.1). Relating to the small screens in his hand rather than the world around him, he is literally consumed by his twenty-first-century doppelganger, his selfie self, which has grown from a miniaturized image to one of gigantic proportions. Tellingly, the disappearance of the human being into the maw of his hi-tech image is accomplished using a very old, very low-tech stage trick—the large background screen onto which the iPad image is projected contains large slits through which the performer passes. While the message of this episode warns against the subjugation of the human to the digital, the staging itself actually represents an alliance or integration of the most rudimentary staging techniques with the most advanced technology. With the notable exception of mixed media or intermedial forms of theatre and performance

1

A trailer for Old Hats which shows snippets of several scenes including the opening one can be found on the Signature Theatre website: https://www.signaturetheatre.org/shows-and-events/ Productions/2012-2013/Old-Hats.aspx. The website of the production’s designer G. W. Mercier includes a gallery of images: https://www.gwmercier.com/filter/one/Old-Hats

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Fig. 13.1 Bill Irwin as “Mr. Business” in Old Hats. Photo by G. W. Mercier

art, such alliances generally come with certain terms or conditions which are reflected in the very setting of Old Hats. As part of the regeneration of the vaudevillian tradition, designer G.W. “Skip” Mercier framed the scenes of Old Hats with a traditional proscenium stage, almost stereotypically rendered with a red velvet curtain, fasces-adorned gold border, and scalloped footlights. A pianist seated at the left side of the proscenium provides live musical accompaniment; on the right an easel sign-board announces the title of each act (Fig. 13.2). On the periphery of this faithful recreation of an old-fashioned popular theatre, however, digital technology makes a discreet on-stage appearance: the scene titles are announced not by hand-written or printed boards changed by a stagehand but by digital projections that use the signboard’s surface as a screen. This unobtrusive use

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Fig. 13.2 Stage model for Old Hats. Design and photo by G. W. Mercier

of digital technology simply affords a more efficient way of performing a familiar task or function and in no way draws attention to the substitution of the electronic for the human. Nothing distracts or detracts from the human performances. The message is clear: digital age technology is welcomed as a useful and even creative resource for live theatrical performances—as long as it is kept in its proper place. The impulse to restrict technology in general and digital forms in particular to a supporting role is especially strong in the case of dramatic theatre, where the Aristotelian hierarchy of theatrical elements devised specifically for tragedy but widely applied to all forms of drama still pertains for the most part. In the Western tradition of text-based performance, the aspects or components of theatre that create the setting or environment have never entirely escaped their designation in the Poetics as “spectacle,” least among the six elements of tragedy. In the twenty-first century, it is not uncommon to hear echoes of Aristotelian disparagement that set “spectacle” apart from plot, character, thought, diction and music: “As for the spectacle, it stirs the emotions, but it is less a matter of art than the others, and has least to do with poetry. . . . Indeed, spectacular effects belong to the craft of the property man rather than to that of the poet” (Aristotle: 43–44). Advances in technology have greatly widened the range of ways in which technology can be used to support a playwright’s text as interpreted by a director and actors. These same advances have also enticed directors to recalibrate the balance of theatrical elements and give the technological elements a more prominent semiotic role whereby they challenge as well as corroborate the messages delivered directly by the human performers. Richard Eyre’s Ghosts and Peter Sellars’ Othello are two productions that exemplify these two contrasting approaches, the former relegating technology to a traditional secondary function and the latter featuring technology in a starring role.

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Ghosts Eyre’s production of Ghosts was performed in London during the Almeida Theatre’s Fall 2013 season. The emotionally intense and visually striking final scene features a 5-min-long transition from night to a vibrant yellow, orange and red daybreak.2 Computer-assisted lighting design had made it possible to mimic nuanced and sustained natural sunrises and sunsets. Here, daybreak functions metaphorically as well as realistically—at this point, Helene Alving has to decide whether or not to help her son Osvald, who is showing the symptoms of advanced syphilis, end his life. In this scene, dawn is not a serene and welcome movement from darkness to light, but a violent breaking of repressive barriers to force family secrets and social hypocrisy out into the open. As the production’s lighting designer Peter Mumford described his work, “It’s like painting and editing at the same time, ‘painting’ to create an atmosphere both physical and psychological and ‘editing’ to create a sense of time and focus, telling the viewer what to look at” (Mumford, 2013). Such refinements to staging made possible by computerized hardware and software represent the most anodyne and uncontroversial way of integrating new technology into live theatre. The conventions of realism and illusionism are respected in that the machinery itself— whether mechanical, electronic or digital—either remains completely hidden from the spectators or if it is visible it is understood to be outside the diegetic frame. The focus throughout the four acts of the play remains on the actors’ performances. Eyre’s production of Ghosts was “captured live” by Digital Theatre from two special performances at London’s Trafalgar Studios on March 12 and 13, 2014. It is one of the dozens of recorded theatre performances of all genres (drama, musical theatre, opera, dance, concerts) available on Digital Theatre’s website (https://www. digitaltheatre.com). The welcoming banner on their home page reads: “Welcome to the new Digital Theatre. Your #1 Destination For Theatre Productions!” The streamed version of Ghosts does in fact offer an effective and satisfying experience. As an actor-centered production, Ghosts benefited fully from the camera’s ability to compensate for the loss of in-person immediacy and connection by offering closeups and optimal viewing angles to all spectators. While the details of the set or the nuances of lighting might be lost, since they functioned largely as background or to establish time and place, it sufficed for Internet viewers to have a broad view of the set and general impression of the lighting. During the critical final minutes of the final scene, it was the harsh vibrant colours of the rising sun that conveyed the emotional impact and carried the metaphorical message; the meticulously calibrated emergence of those colors was more a matter of technical virtuosity.

2

Richard Eyre’s production of Ghosts can be watched in its entirety through Digital Theatre: https:// www.digitaltheatre.com/account/library/1caeac0f-c8c8-4fc9-b672-dec71dd2de65 A still photograph showing the lighting effects at daybreak is included on the Almeida Theatre website: https://almeida.co.uk/whats-on/ghosts/26-sep-2013-23-nov-2013

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Fig. 13.3 Gregor Holzinger’s bed of screens in Peter Sellars’ Othello. John Ortiz (Othello) and Jessica Chastain (Desdemona). Photo by Armin Bardel

Othello In contrast, technology literally takes center stage in Peter Sellars’ Othello, a co-production of the Public Theater and LAByrinth Theater Company. It opened in New York City at NYU’s Skirball Center for the Performing Arts in September 2009 after having been performed at the Wiener Festwochen in Austria and the Schauspielhaus in Bochum, Germany over the summer. Electronic and digital equipment and images are used to provide an ongoing commentary on the action and indeed be part of that action. The set featured a large platform bed and headboard consisting of forty-five computer video monitors. Several standing microphones are arranged around the stage and the actors wear body mikes and sometimes cameras (Fig. 13.3). The function of the banks of screens evolves constantly as the monitors display abstract geometric forms; show images, often taken from popular media, that indicate setting, context (e.g. military life in combat), and themes (e.g. patriotism); or transmit live, real-time images and close-ups from the body cameras worn by the actors. This bed as stage was not an inert blank surface like a stage floor but a platform for delivering comments on the action, very much in the manner of the projections of epic theatre that forestall passive absorption in the dramatic action. Advanced technological capabilities made it possible for the commentary to be a constant running commentary rather than the occasional insertion. As such, the changing images competed with the actors for attention not only from the eyes but also the minds of the spectators as they worked to figure out the relationship of the images to the actors’ words and gestures.

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At the same time that the set offered a parallel stream of messages about the words and deeds of the characters of Othello, the on-stage cameras and monitors acted as instruments of surveillance, magnifying the scope and power of the spying human eye, a key theme in Othello. On his website, designer Gregor Holzinger describes the bed of screens as “an over-surveillanced point” that does not escape its own scrutiny—“An eye composed of many eyes, like the eye of a dragonfly, an eye that sees itself in itself, reflects itself, and the over-observed space of the bed.” Contributing to the impression of omnipresent technology was the characters’ use of cell phones to communicate in key scenes. For instance, this is how Roderigo informs Brabantio that his daughter has left his house to be with Othello. Shakespeare’s lines worked rather well in this case as Roderigo asks Brabantio “. . . do you know my voice?” (Shakespeare, 1999; I.1.93). The New York production of Sellars’ Othello was on the whole poorly received by drama critics not least because of his aggressive mediatisation of the staging. In his New York Times review titled “The General in His High-Tech Labyrinth,” Ben Brantley disparaged Sellars’ production as a “high-tech deconstruction of a classic” that resorted to “gimmickry” such as the use of the cell phones to make the “Shakespearean titans. . .just like us.” Many critics failed to grasp the connection between the images on the video monitors and the play. One of them, Marilyn Stasio (2009), wrote “Sellars misfires here with a fusillade of theatrical effects that, while initially arresting, fail to hit any obvious conceptual target.” Chief among these failed effects in her opinion was the scenic centerpiece: The problem might be their uncomfortable bed—a gigantic, futuristic structure composed of TV screens, none of them tuned to anything of interest. That bed is an eye-catcher, especially when viewed from the top of the house, but nothing projected onto its hard flat surface says anything about the play—other than make us speculate on what the Wooster Group might have done with those TV screens.

Stasio was not alone in not devoting sufficient attention to the screens to discern the full array of images and decipher their messages. Indeed, many would argue that any sustained diversion or division of attention away from the human performers was detrimental to the coherency and emotional impact of the play. For Sellars, however, the splitting of focus and attention demanded by highly mediatised productions of text-based drama was not a liability but an objective. In his foreword to Chris Salter’s Entangled: Technology and the Transformation of Performance, Sellars writes: The high-tech interface has been appealing to artists because it does have the potential to fragment and diversify the master narrative, offering simultaneous multiple perspectives, freshly negotiated interdependent vocabularies and the direct experience of ambiguity, the ineffable, and a sensory and mental landscape that lies above, below, and beyond ideology. . . (x–xi)

This statement by Sellars implies that incorporating mediatisation as part of the staging concept and process actually intensifies or enhances the quality of “direct experience” associated with theatrical “liveness.” If this is so, it should follow that the more heavily mediatised the staging of a live production is, the more it stands to

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lose from being converted to a mediatised format for dissemination; or, to put it more succinctly, the more mediatised a production is, the more it resists mediatisation as a whole. One possible explanation for this apparent paradox can be found by examining the “sensory landscape” mentioned above by Sellars.

The Sensory Landscape Categories and concepts from the model proposed by Lars Elleström to map out relations among all artistic mediums are helpful in pinpointing how mediatised productions in general and Sellars’ Othello in particular foreground liveness and at the same time resist transposition to mediated formats. In his essay “The Modalities of Media: A Model for Understanding Intermedial Relations,” Elleström identifies four “modalities” that can be used to characterise all forms of artistic expression and representation and their interrelationships: the material modality, the sensorial modality, the spatiotemporal modality and the semiotic modality. Elleström describes these modalities as “the essential cornerstones of all media” which together “build a medial complex integrating materiality, perception and cognition” (15). While his categories are not unproblematical, they provide a useful vocabulary and general distinctions for understanding the properties of live dramatic performances that resist mediated dissemination and in so doing offer additional insight into the distinctive qualities of live performance. Briefly, Elleström distinguishes the four modalities as follows. The material modality is “the latent corporeal interface of the medium” (17). Live theatre combines multiple interfaces consisting of the actors’ bodies, objects (sets and props) and sound waves. The material interfaces of film, television and Internet streaming are the flat surfaces of screens and sound waves. The sensorial modality is “the physical and mental acts of perceiving the present interface of the medium through the sense faculties” (17). The five senses of seeing, hearing, feeling, tasting, smelling are conceived of as the five principal modes of the sensorial modality. The human organs associated with each of these senses, the receptors, gather information, “sense-data” from the material interfaces of the various artistic media. Elleström notes that “Chiefly sight and hearing, the two cognitively most advanced faculties, deserve our attention in the context of media and arts, but not exclusively” (18). The spatiotemporal modality is more complex in that it involves a processing of the information gathered by the senses from the material interface: The spatiotemporal modality of media covers the structuring of the sensorial perception of sense-data of the material interface into experiences and conceptions of space and time. Media, like all objects and phenomena, receive their multilayered spatiotemporal qualities in the act of perception and interpretation. . . . (18)

The semiotic modality, the most complex of all, is based on or derives from the other three modalities:

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The semiotic modality thus involves the creation of meaning in the spatiotemporally conceived medium by way of different sorts of thinking and sign interpretation. The creation of meaning already starts in the unconscious apprehension and arrangement of sense-data perceived by the receptors and it continues in the conscious act of finding relevant connections within the spatiotemporal structure of the medium and between the medium and the surrounding world. (22)

Borrowing Elleström’s terminology to analyze the functioning and effect of the electronic and digital devices in Sellars’ Othello, the liveness of the on-stage performance is accentuated by the dialogical counterpoint created by the sensedata gathered from the “traditional” material interfaces of live theatre—the actors’ bodies and the objects, including the monitors and microphones as hardware—and the sense-data being collected from the screens as the material interface of the electronically displayed digital images. If the production were to be viewed in a digital format streamed over the Internet, however, the distinction between the material interfaces would disappear: bodies, set elements, props and the images on the monitors would all be experienced through the common material interface of the viewer’s own video screen, absorbed into the same sensory modality rather than communicating through different channels. The double digitisation of the screen images may be acknowledged mentally or intellectually, but sensorially there is no distinction in the way they are perceived as compared to the actors and objects. The reduction to a single material interface carries implications for the sensory modes through which a production or performance is experienced. As Elleström notes, in the creation, reception and analysis of artistic works, the faculties of seeing and hearing are heavily privileged as the primary bearers of meaning. The transference of a production from the stage to the screen, from a three-dimensional to a two-dimensional medium, does not alter the semiotic weight placed on the visual and the auditory. What is lost or missing in the process of transference from live to mediated can better be gauged if we shift the focus from the “distant” senses of sight and hearing to the proximate sense of touch that requires actual presence in the same space to be engaged. Live in-person performance alone makes tactile contact between audience members and the objects and people on stage a possibility—a possibility which has been increasingly suppressed as the social-cultural and theatrical conventions for separating the stage and auditorium have solidified the barriers between the two spaces. Epitomised by the late-nineteenth-century convention of the fourth wall, this division became so entrenched that its disruption was a powerful statement by twentieth-century theatre practitioners whose approaches to staging reinstituted touch or at least the possibility of touch as a significant sensory mode. In Jerzy Grotowski’s landmark production of Juliusz Slowacki’s Kordian (1962) audience members had the same tactile experiences as the actors as they moved around and sat on the same surfaces of the floors and the beds of the “mental institution.” In a much lighter vein, Old Hats constantly broke the plane of the proscenium frame and with it tactile barriers, most notably in a sketch set in an Old West saloon as depicted in old movies. The actors for the three principal roles—good cowboy, bad cowboy and saloon girl—were spectators who were physically pulled out of their seats by David Shiner as he came down from the stage and went through

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the aisles to find his ideal cast. Indeed, one of the risks of live performance is that the breach of the protective barrier may be instigated by any unruly spectators. The ability to engage the sense of touch, even if this remains a latent potential, is an essential and defining quality of theatrical liveness not only when considered in terms of direct physical contact between spectators and actors and objects but as part of the process of three-dimensional spatialisation. For human beings touch and sight are the primary external spatializing faculties through which we experience and understand three-dimensional spatial organisation by moving in and through spaces. Here “touch” is understood in the broadest sense of haptic experience which includes proprioception (the perception of the position and movement of the body in space) and kinaesthesia (the awareness of positioning and movement of the parts of the body). In live performance situations, distinctions between the spaces occupied by performers and spectators may be demarcated by various architectural or structural features but in the end the division is conceptual and a matter of convention. From a physical or physiological perspective, stage and auditorium or platform and pit are experienced as continuous spaces, no different from a piece of ground where performers are at the center and spectators gather around them.3 A set such as the one Gregor Holzinger designed for Sellars’ Othello relies on a sense of space experienced in three dimensions to achieve its full effect in that the negative spaces it creates are as important as the concrete visible and tangible elements. This is how Holzinger describes those empty spaces on his website: The bed as an onstage stage, the bed as the actual stage, a stage on the stage—and the stage space around the bed as an undefined “something beside.” The endless distance/“the elsewhere” interpreted, not as a linguistic construction but rather as a spatial universe, as different kinds of surrounding or interstitial spaces, to which abstract localities adjacent to reality itself are attributed, and parallel story lines/the “back-sides of the story”, the alternative realities of multiple intrigues, infidelities and deceptions are taking place(-s).

When a stage production is viewed on a two-dimensional screen, the stage space is perceived through the eyes alone as a virtual space. Inhabited spaces and unoccupied spaces alike are areas on a flat surface for the eye to roam over but not for elements for the body actually to move around or through. The constant looming presence of the empty or negative spaces is an integral part of the meaning-making apparatus of Sellars’ production. Transference to a small flat screen would negate the impact of these interstitial spaces, if they could be discerned at all in their entirety. The problem is not just that these spaces cannot be seen, it’s that they can only be seen.

3

In the realm of the arts, the fullest exploration or exploitation of haptic faculties and technologies can be found in works that would be categorized as art installations and performance art rather than in text-based dramatic productions. The chapter on “Tangible Play, Prosthetic Performance” in Mark Paterson’s The Senses of Touch: Haptics, Affects and Technologies offers an illuminating historical and philosophical perspective on how constructed environments and bodily performances explore “the viscerality of touch in a live-performance setting” and reshape “the aesthetic body through a multisensory virtual environment” (11).

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Staying in Touch The thought of characterising live theatre as first and foremost a theatre of touch may be a farfetched hypothesis in practical terms, but it finds complementary theories in both the history of the senses in Western philosophical thought and in modern theories of theatre. In his study A History of the Senses: From Antiquity to Cyberspace, Robert Jütte presents an overview of the hierarchies of the senses as devised by various ancient and modern systems of philosophy from around the world. With relatively few exceptions, sight and hearing are deemed the superior senses, usually with sight being accorded primacy; smell and taste consistently occupy a middle position. Touch, however, stands out for frequently appearing as both the highest and the lowest ranked of the senses. While the designation of “touch” as the most important of the senses invariably proceeded from creative misapprehensions about how the senses actually functioned in the absence of scientific knowledge, some of the [mis-]conceptions about the nature of tactile sensation resonate with the ideas of some of the leading figures in twentieth- and twenty-first century theatre. For instance, in his commentary on Aristotle’s De Anima, St. Thomas Aquinas supported Aristotle’s view that touch was first among the senses because it was “the root and ground” of the other four senses. The reasoning was that “touch is the basis of sensitivity as a whole; for obviously the organ of touch pervades the whole body, so that the organ of each of the other senses is also an organ of touch, and the sense of touch by itself constitutes a being as sensitive” (Jütte: 70). The premise that human beings possess such a unitary sensory system would appeal to theatre artists who envisioned a fully integrated total art work that would address all the senses—an ideal spectator for the fully integrated work of art. In the section of The Theatre and Its Double titled “Metaphysics and the Mise en Scène”, Artaud envisions the stage as “a concrete physical place which asks to be filled, and to be given its own concrete language to speak” (37). This concrete language is to be a language of the senses: I say that this concrete language, intended for the senses and independent of speech, has first to satisfy the senses, that there is a poetry of the senses as there is a poetry of language, and that this concrete physical language to which I refer is truly theatrical only to the degree that the thoughts it expresses are beyond the reach of the spoken language. (37)

He defines this “solidified, materialized language” as “consist[ing] of everything that occupies the stage, everything that can be manifested and expressed materially on a stage and that is addressed first of all to the senses instead of being addressed primarily to the mind as is the language of words” (38). The essential attribute of solidity can only be fully perceived through haptic sensation, either directly or through the unmediated evocation of haptic sense memory made possible by actual co-presence. Compared to his proposal for a theatrical language of the senses, Artaud’s vision of a theatre that would invoke the bubonic plagues of Europe and Asia has remained inspirational rather than realisable. But while, for the most part, his accounts of how the disease attacked the human body are fanciful, his central observation about how

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the presence of the plague affected societies proved to be all too accurate when COVID 19 spread in modern cities: “Once the plague is established in a city, the regular forms collapse” (23). While a full return to the pre-pandemic “normal” order remains questionable for the foreseeable future, the partial resumption of activities like traveling or attending family gatherings and celebratory events has reminded us all of how essential the sense of touch is for human beings, the form of contact that mediatised communication can never replace.

References Anonymous. (2016). Clowning around: An interview with the team behind Old Hats. Signature Stories, 15(Winter), 5–10. Aristotle. (1991). Poetics. In M. J. Sidnell (Eds.), Sources of dramatic theory: 1. Plato to Congreve (G. M. A. Grube, Trans.) (pp. 32–61). Cambridge University Press. Artaud, A. (1958). The theater and its double (M. C. Richards, Trans.). Grove Press. Brantley, B. (2009, September 27). The general in his high-tech labyrinth. New York Times. Web. Elleström, L. (2010). The modalities of media; A model for understanding intermedial relations. In L. Elleström (Ed.), Media borders, multimodality and intermediality (pp. 11–48). Palgrave Macmillan. Holzinger, G. https://gregorholzinger.space/Set-Design-Othello Jütte, R. (2005). A history of the senses: From antiquity to cyberspace (J. Lynn, Trans.). Polity Press. Mumford, P. (2013, November 9). Interview with Almeida theatre. “A word with lighting designer Peter Mumford”. https://almeida.co.uk/ghosts-a-word-with-lighting-designer-peter-mumford Paterson, M. (2007). The senses of touch: Haptics, affects and technologies. Berg. Sellars, P. (2010). Foreword. In C. Salter (Ed.), Entangled: Technology and the transformation of performance (pp. ix–xii). The MIT Press. Shakespeare, W. (1999). The tragedy of Othello. Arden Shakespeare. Stasio, M. (2009, September 28). Othello. Variety. Web.

Angela C. Pao, PhD, is Associate Professor Emerita of Comparative Literature at Indiana University. She has published extensively on American and French theatre. Her publications include the books No Safe Spaces: Re-casting Race, Ethnicity, and Nationality in American Theater (University of Michigan Press, 2010) and The Orient of the Boulevards: Exoticism, Empire, and Nineteenth-Century French Theater (New Cultural Studies) (University of Pennsylvania Press, 1998), as well as numerous articles on theatre and performance.

Index

A Acrobatics routines, 30 Adaptation, 13, 65, 75–91, 125, 126, 132, 133, 146, 213 Adelaide, South Australia, 4, 10–12, 19, 20, 22–26, 29, 40 A Doll Home, 13, 96 A Doll’s House, 13, 76, 95, 97, 98, 111, 129, 133–135 Aesthetics, 173, 174, 176, 177, 184–187, 198, 207 Almeida Theatre, 15, 214, 218 American theatre, 105, 108, 110, 113, 117, 125 Andersen, 174 An Enemy of the People, 13, 76, 78–85, 91, 109, 121, 123–126 Anschluss, 158, 164 Anti-setting, 88 Archer, W., 113 Architecture, 11, 19, 40, 41, 43, 49, 53, 59, 84, 94 Arden, D., 66–68 Aristotle, 217, 224 Artaud, A., 213, 224 Asuka Art, 154, 160 Audiences, 3, 22, 40, 56, 82, 112, 122, 145, 172, 201, 213 AusStage, 3, 5, 6, 12 Australia, 4–6, 10, 12, 20, 25–27, 29, 34, 40, 53

B Ball, T., 65, 67 Bamboo theatres, 4, 10, 12, 19, 27

Barnwell Theatre, 43 Bluebell Girls, 64 Blue-Wave Fairy, 176–186 Brennan, G., 113, 114, 116, 117 British Empire, 40 Broadway, 64, 65, 84, 105, 109, 117

C Cantonese opera, 4, 10, 12, 20, 27, 29–34 Carp Fairy, 14, 171–198 Cassidy, K., 134 Chan Fei-Nung (陈非侬), 31 Chasing the Carp, 174, 176, 186–197 Circulation, 32, 76, 79 Circus tents, 4, 12, 20, 27–29 Close reading, 3, 5, 12, 103 Cloud theatre, 134, 135 Comedy, 24, 25, 113, 165, 174, 215 Commendatore in Don Giovanni, 152–154, 156–158 as doppelganger, 164 as Idea, 163 as Nazi officer, 154, 163 in the painting Killing Commendatore, 153, 156, 159, 167 as self-sacrificial figure, 164 Company 1927, 15, 207–210 COVID-19, 133, 213, 225 Crawford, W., 124 Cultural Revolution, 33, 177 Culture, v, vi, 1–4, 7, 8, 10–15, 26, 34, 40, 44, 49, 52, 53, 65, 87, 90, 105, 113, 122, 125, 128–130, 158, 159, 168, 187, 215

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2023 K.-k. Tam (ed.), Performance Arts: Research in the Age of Digital Revolution, Digital Culture and Humanities 4, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-19-9213-1

227

228 D Daoism, 178 Death, 86, 99, 116, 132, 141, 145, 160, 162, 164, 194 Deng Jinxiang (邓金祥), 31 Desert Inn, Las Vegas, 66, 67 Digital culture, v, vi, 1–3, 8, 10, 13, 128, 168, 213, 215 Digital enhancement, 15, 194, 196 Digital maps, 76–80 Digital materiality, 57 Digital model, 3, 58–61 Digital technology, v, 1–4, 7, 8, 14–16, 57, 122, 171–177, 180, 183, 185–187, 189, 195, 198, 210, 212, 214, 216, 217 Digital Theatre, 15, 214, 218 Digitisation, v, 214, 222 Distant reading, 5, 12, 13, 15, 76–79, 106 Doppelganger Commendatore and White Subaru Forester Man, 161–163 du Bief, J., 63 DuPont, 64, 65 DVD, 13, 14, 84, 85, 87, 88, 121, 123–133, 135, 152, 153, 155–157, 166, 167 Dystopia, 82, 90

E Eighteen Scripts of the Underworld (jianghu shibaben 江湖十八本), 30 Ein Volksfeind, 76, 83 Electronic devices, 215 Elleström, L., 221, 222 Emotional contagion, 49, 51, 53 Emotional engagement, 51 Enclosure, 101 En folkefiende, 76, 89, 122, 127–128 Eventness, 122 Existential structures, 93 Exoticism (and exotic), 65–69, 209 Eyre, R., 15, 214, 217, 218

F Film, 1, 33, 51, 56, 75, 121, 138, 152, 173, 207, 221 Fischer-Lichte, E., 122 Frobenius, N., 127 Fuller, L., 63

G Gallatin, A., 114, 115, 117 Ganashatru, 76, 85–86, 122, 126–127, 133

Index Ghosts, 13, 15, 79, 99, 103, 109–114, 116, 117, 129, 146, 202, 204–206, 214, 217–219 Ghosts 2.0, 15, 202–207 Goldfields, Victorian, 4, 12, 20, 27, 32 Grotowski, J., 222

H Haptics, 59, 223, 224 Hedda Gabler, 13, 99, 100, 109, 114, 116, 117, 132 Henrik Ibsen’s Writings, 13, 94, 96, 100, 103 Heterotopia, 81, 82, 90 High-tech, 201, 210, 220 Hollywood, 60, 63, 65–67, 124, 125 Holzinger, G., 219, 220, 223 Home, 24, 27, 76, 84, 90, 94–99, 101–103, 126, 127, 152, 153, 160–164, 218 House, 14, 40, 76, 79, 84, 85, 93–99, 101–103, 116, 123, 128–131, 134, 153, 159, 161, 162, 181, 183, 205, 220 Huang Wei, 31 Huang Zuolin, 172, 174

I Ibsen, H., 3, 40, 75, 93, 105, 121, 138, 202, 214 IbsenStage, 5, 6, 12, 13, 76–79, 105–108, 110, 111, 128 Ice skating, 56, 61–63, 66 Idea Platonic vs. Schopenhaueran, 163 Identity spaces, 53 Illegitimate performance, 24, 25 Illness, 99 Illusionism, 218 Immigration, 109 Indigenous peoples, South Australia, 26 Interactive experimentation, 49 Interior, 22, 29, 40–42, 44, 46, 47, 57–59, 68, 76, 79, 83, 85, 90, 94, 101, 114, 127, 179, 187 Irwin, B., 15, 214–216

J Japan, 11, 56, 60–62, 64–69, 159, 168 Jessica Dalcanton, 135 Jiao Juyin, 173, 174

K Kean, E., 24, 49, 50 Kinaesthesia, 223 Komediehuset, 40–48

Index Komische Oper Berlin of Germany, 15, 208, 209 Kordian, 222

L LAByrinth Theatre Company, 219 Landscape, 76, 79, 81, 83, 85–91, 93, 127, 167, 168, 220–223 Las Vegas, 4, 11, 12, 20, 55–69 Latin Quarter, New York, 67 Lazar, J., 21, 23–26, 49 Lee, M. (Margie), 56, 61–63, 66, 67 Legitimate performance, 24, 116 Le Lido, Paris (venue), 57 Levy, E., 125 Lewes, G., 49, 50 Liang Songsheng (梁松生), 31 Lido de Paris (company), 11, 63, 64, 66–69 Little Mermaid, 174 Liveness, 214, 220–223 Li Wenmao, 32 London, 2–4, 7, 8, 10, 11, 15, 19, 21, 24, 49, 51, 63, 67, 113, 207, 208, 214, 218 Long Face, 153, 154, 156, 159, 166

M MacLaine, S., 67 Madame Butterfly, 11, 55–69 Mak Siu-Ha (麦啸霞), 31 Mapping, 2, 7, 76, 82, 91 Material modality, 221 Materiel, 11, 56–61, 65, 68, 69 McIntyre, B., 134 McQueen, S., 82–85, 90, 91, 124–126 Mediatisation, 214, 220, 221 Miller, D., 94 Modjeska, H., 111, 113 Moon, 178, 186–190, 192–195, 198 Moulin Rouge, Hollywood, 66, 67 Mozart, W.A. Don Giovanni, 152–154, 156–158, 160, 163, 164, 167 Multimedia, 8, 15, 201–212 Murakami, H. Killing Commendatore, 14, 151–168

N Nationalism, 40, 138, 139 National Theatre Live, 211 New Frontier hotel, Las Vegas, 67

229 New media technology, 14, 171, 172 New Normal, 133–135 Newspaper reviews/records/reports, 25, 34, 51, 116 Nilperi Şahinkaya, 134 Norwegian Digital Learning Arena (NDLA), 127 Nylon, 60, 64, 65

O Old Hats, 15, 214–217, 222 Orientalism, 11, 55–69 Ortelia, 3, 20, 29, 46, 47, 52, 58, 68 Othello, 4, 10, 12, 22–26, 29, 47, 49, 50, 52, 217, 219–223 Othello by William Shakespeare, 15, 20, 22, 46, 214

P Pacific War, 56, 64 Paris, 4, 11, 56, 64, 66–69, 152, 153 Parker, S., 67 Pastor Manders, 130, 206 Pearl River Delta, 4, 10, 12, 20, 27, 32, 33 Peer Gynt, 129 Peking opera (Jingju), 14, 172–187, 189, 194, 198 Performance, 3, 19, 40, 56, 76, 105, 121, 138, 166, 172, 201, 213 Performance research, 10, 11, 39–53, 59 Place, 80–82, 86–90 Poetics, 217 Proprioception, 223 Proximate senses, 222 Psychic, 94 Public Theater, 219 Puccini, G., 56, 60, 62, 66 Putuler Itikatha, 130

Q Qing era, 32 Queen’s Theatre, 4, 10–12, 20–24, 41, 43, 47, 52

R Rains, J., 62 Realism, 173, 185, 218 Regina, 205, 206 Regional diffusion, 13, 105–117

230 Reicher, E., 111 Repertoire, 20, 21, 25–27, 29–35, 40, 52, 106, 109 Revolutionary model plays, 33 Richards, B., 62

S Satyajit Ray, 76, 85–86, 90, 91, 122, 126 Sayonara (film), 65, 66 Schaefer, G., 76, 83–86, 90, 91, 121, 124 Schopenhauer, A. The World as Will and Representation, 163 Schwarzenegger, C., 123 Sellars, P., 15, 214, 217, 219–223 Semiotic modality, 221, 222 Sennes, F., 66, 67 Senses, 2, 22, 26, 34, 44, 49, 51, 57, 60, 79, 102, 106, 128, 135, 160, 163, 164, 211, 218, 221–225 Sensorial modality, 221 Setting, 27, 44, 46, 66, 76, 79–91, 93, 130, 132, 173, 174, 177–179, 181, 183, 185–187, 193, 195, 198, 208, 209, 216, 217, 219, 223 Shakespeare, W., 10, 12, 15, 20, 22, 24, 26, 46, 51, 114, 211, 214, 220 Shanghai Theatre Academy, 8, 206, 211 Shaw, M., 106, 110–114, 117 Shiner, D., 15, 214, 215, 222 Shotoku, T., 154, 159 Signature Theatre, 215 Skjoldjbærg, E., 122 Slowacki, J., 222 Social positions, 94 Solomon, E., 21, 46 Song Guangzu, 173 Soumitra Chatterjee, 126 Spatiotemporal, 221, 222 Spectacle, 11, 40, 56, 61, 64, 68, 90, 175, 217 Spectatorship, 7, 11, 26, 40, 44, 49, 51–53 Spoken drama (Huaju), 172–174, 186 Stage technology, 40, 41, 44 Stagnation, 101 Stardust Hotel, Las Vegas, 11, 55–69 Steritt, D., 123 Stockmann, Dr., 81–87, 90, 124–127, 133 Strauss, R. Der Rosenkavalier, 14, 152, 153, 155–157, 164–167

T Taiping rule/rebellion, 32, 33 The Animals and Children Took to the Streets, 207, 208

Index Theatre, 3, 19, 40, 56, 76, 98, 105, 122, 137, 171, 201, 213 Theatre (venue, performance), 4, 5, 8, 13, 28, 40, 84, 122, 218 Theatre architecture, 40, 43 The Lady from the Sea, 13, 79, 99, 101 The Magic Flute, 209, 210 The Master Builder, 13, 101–103 The Rose, 4, 11, 19, 53, 165 The Teahouse of the August Moon (film), 67 Tokyo, 8, 11, 56, 66–69 Touch, 15, 108, 222–225 Transatlantic theatre, 113 Travesties, 25

U Uncle Vanya, 206 United States of America, 10, 64–69, 76, 79, 117, 134 Utopia, 82

V Vidler, A., 103 Virtual praxis, 10, 11, 19–35, 39–53, 55–69 Virtual/virtual reality (VR)/VR technology, v, 1–4, 8, 10–12, 19–35, 39–53, 55–69, 210–212, 214, 223 VR auditorium, 51, 53

W Wang Chong, 202–207 Wang Yuanhua, 173 Warren, H., 66–68 When We Dead Awaken, 13, 80, 102 Wirtz, A., 63

X xieshi, 172–174, 186, 198 xieyi, 172–174, 177, 178, 184–186, 198 xiqu (戏曲), 32–34, 171

Y yueju, 132 Yue opera (Yueju), 173, 174, 176, 179, 186–198

Z Zorlu PSM, 133, 134