The Edinburgh Companion to Modernism in Contemporary Theatre 9781474495042, 9781474495059, 9781474495066

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The Edinburgh Companion to Modernism in Contemporary Theatre

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Edinburgh Companions to Literature and the Humanities Recent volumes in the series The Edinburgh Companion to Animal Studies Lynn Turner, Undine Sellbach and Ron Broglio The Edinburgh Companion to Contemporary Narrative Theories Zara Dinnen and Robyn Warhol The Edinburgh Companion to Ezra Pound and the Arts Roxana Preda

The Edinburgh Companion to Globalgothic Rebecca Duncan Forthcoming The Edinburgh Companion to Charles Dickens and the Arts Juliet John and Claire Wood The Edinburgh Companion to the Brontës and the Arts Amber Regis and Deborah Wynne

The Edinburgh Companion to Elizabeth Bishop Jonathan Ellis

The Edinburgh Companion to Science Fiction and the Medical Humanities Gavin Miller, Anna McFarlane and Donna McCormack

The Edinburgh Companion to Gothic and the Arts David Punter

The Edinburgh Companion to W. B. Yeats and the Arts Tom Walker, Adrian Paterson and Charles Armstrong

The Edinburgh Companion to Literature and Music Delia da Sousa Correa

The Edinburgh Companion to Jane Austen and the Arts Joe Bray and Hannah Moss

The Edinburgh Companion to D. H. Lawrence and the Arts Catherine Brown and Susan Reid The Edinburgh Companion to the Prose Poem Mary Ann Caws and Michel Delville

The Edinburgh Companion to Women in Publishing, 1900–2000 Nicola Wilson, Elizabeth Gordon Willson, Alice Staveley, Helen Southworth, Daniela La Penna, Sophie Heywood and Claire Battershill

The Edinburgh Companion to Nonsense Anna Barton and James Williams

The Edinburgh Companion to British Colonial Periodicals Caroline Davis, David Finkelstein and David Johnson

The Edinburgh Companion to Virginia Woolf and Contemporary Global Literature Jeanne Dubino, Catherine W. Hollis, Paulina Pajak, Celise Lypka and Vara Neverow

The Edinburgh Companion to Don DeLillo and the Arts Catherine Gander

The Edinburgh Companion to Irish Modernism Maud Ellmann, Sian White and Vicki Mahaffey The Edinburgh Companion to the Essay Mario Aquilina, Nicole B. Wallack and Bob Cowser Jnr The Edinburgh Companion to Vegan Literary Studies Laura Wright and Emelia Quinn The Edinburgh Companion to Modernism and Technology Alex Goody and Ian Whittington The Edinburgh Companion to Romanticism and the Arts Maureen McCue and Sophie Thomas The Edinburgh Companion to First World War Periodicals Marysa Demoor, Cedric van Dijck and Birgit Van Puymbroeck

The Edinburgh Companion to Literature and Sound Studies Helen Groth and Julian Murphet The Edinburgh Companion to the Eighteenth-Century British Novel and the Arts Jakub Lipski and M.-C. Newbould The Edinburgh Companion to Curatorial Futures Bridget Crone and Bassam El Baroni The Edinburgh Companion to the Spanish Civil War and Visual Culture Silvina Schammah Gesser, Eugenia Afinoguénova and Robert S. Lubar Messeri The Edinburgh Companion to the Millennial Novel Loïc Bourdeau and Christopher Lloyd The Edinburgh Companion to Queer Reading Jeremy Chow and Declan Kavanagh

The Edinburgh Companion to Modernism, Myth and Religion Suzanne Hobson and Andrew Radford The Edinburgh Companion to Modernism in Contemporary Theatre Adrian Curtin, Nicholas Johnson, Naomi Paxton and Claire Warden Please see our website for a complete list of titles in the series https://edinburghuniversitypress.com/series/ecl

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The Edinburgh Companion to Modernism in Contemporary Theatre

Edited by Adrian Curtin, Nicholas Johnson, Naomi Paxton and Claire Warden

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Edinburgh University Press is one of the leading university presses in the UK. We publish academic books and journals in our selected subject areas across the humanities and social sciences, combining cuttingedge scholarship with high editorial and production values to produce academic works of lasting importance. For more information visit our website: edinburghuniversitypress.com © editorial matter and organisation Adrian Curtin, Nicholas Johnson, Naomi Paxton and Claire Warden, 2023 © the chapters their several authors, 2023 Cover image: Chekhov’s First Play, performed at the Romanian National Theatre Festival, Bucharest, Romania. Photograph © Adi Bulboacă Cover design: Andrew McColm Edinburgh University Press Ltd The Tun – Holyrood Road 12(2f) Jackson’s Entry Edinburgh EH8 8PJ Typeset in 10 / 12 Adobe Sabon by IDSUK (DataConnection) Ltd, and printed and bound in Great Britain. A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978 1 4744 9504 2 (hardback) ISBN 978 1 4744 9505 9 (webready PDF) ISBN 978 1 4744 9506 6 (epub) The right of Adrian Curtin, Nicholas Johnson, Naomi Paxton and Claire Warden to be identified as the editors of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, and the Copyright and Related Rights Regulations 2003 (SI No. 2498).

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Contents

List of Illustrations viii Acknowledgementsxii (anti-)capitalsism: a manifesto Introduction: Sensing Modernism in Theatre Claire Warden, Nicholas Johnson, Adrian Curtin and Naomi Paxton

xv 1

Part I: Remembrance and Reconfiguration   1. Introduction: Playing with the Past, Attending to the ‘Lost’ Claire Warden

19

  2. ‘The Right to Revolution’: Ernst Toller’s Legacy on the British Stage Claire Warden

23

  3. Legacy, Embodiment, Activism: Pageant of Agitating Women39 Monica Prince and Anna Andes   4. Modernist Nostalgia and Contemporary Irish Dance Christopher Collins

45

  5. Reaching Out in Both Directions: Suffrage Theatre in the Twenty-First Century Naomi Paxton

62

 6. Shuffle Along (1921) and the Challenges of Black Modernist Performance on the Contemporary Stage Carrie J. Preston

81

  7. ‘Who Was This Woman?’ A Conversation about Remembering Modernist Figures through the Body Jessica Walker and Claire Warden

98

  8. An Ode to Black Women Modernists Adjoa Osei

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vi contents Part II: Restaging Drama   9. Introduction: Acts of Translation, Reimagining and Creative Destruction Adrian Curtin 10. Restaging Futurism and Joan Brossa: Provocation or Observation with a Glass of Champagne or a Cup of Tea John London 11. Marguerite Duras’s Theatre and the Boundaries of Modernism Lib Taylor

111

118 140

12. The (Dead) Centre Cannot Hold: Ontological Insecurity in Chekhov’s First Play159 Adrian Curtin 13. En-Staging Nora: Unruly Modernisms in Theodoros Terzopoulos’s Nora177 Konstantinos Thomaidis and Maria Vogiatzi 14. After and Against Strindberg: A Conversation about Missing Julie198 Kaite O’Reilly and Adrian Curtin 15. ‘A Voice She Did Not Recognise At First’: Touretteshero’s Neurodiverse Presentation of Samuel Beckett’s Not I206 Matthew Pountney 16. Pushing the Boundaries: Staging Western Modern(ist) Drama in Contemporary China Shouhua Qi

210

Part III: Transmission 17. Introduction: (Im)material Legacies, Living Traditions Claire Warden, Adrian Curtin, Nicholas Johnson and Naomi Paxton

233

18. The Theatre of Tadashi Suzuki at the Crossroads of Modernism Burç İdem Dinçel

243

19. Stanislavski on Skype Mark Westbrook

265

20. Raising Her Voice: Presenting the Lives and Writings of Virginia Woolf and Dame Ethel Smyth for a Contemporary Theatre Audience Lucy Stevens

270

21. Embodied Knowledge: A Brechtian Approach to Making Theatre with Young People Kerry Frampton

274

22. Appropriation, Abstraction and Appraisal: Modernist Legacies of Contemporary Dance Hanna Järvinen

277

23. Shaw and the Early-Twentieth-Century British Regional Repertory Movement304 Soudabeh Ananisarab

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contents vii 24. ‘Aquí no estamos en el teatro’: Impossible Plays, Queer Ghosts and Haunted Practices Jonathan Heron

319

Part IV: Slippages 25. Introduction: How Movements Might Move Nicholas Johnson

329

26. Ages of Arousal Penny Farfan

338

27. ‘Make the New Legible through Experimentation’: A Conversation on the (Ongoing) Avant-Garde Sascha Bru and Nicholas Johnson

350

28. Brecht as Slippage: Interrobang’s Dialogues with Modernist Theatre Machines Ramona Mosse365 29. ‘What Could Be the Theatre of Contemporary Life?’ A Conversation about the Work of Studio Oyuncuları, Istanbul Şahika Tekand and Burç İdem Dinçel

384

30. ‘How Do We Make a Room in the Theatre?’ A Conversation about Design for Pan Pan Theatre, Dublin Aedín Cosgrove and Nicholas Johnson

392

31. Samuel Beckett and Border Thinking Nicholas Johnson 32. The Writing on the Wall Isn’t There to Be Read: Unworking the Theatrical in the Figures of Adrienne Kennedy Kevin Bell

405

427

Afterword436 Olga Taxidou Event Scores (after fluxus)

439

Notes on Contributors

443

Index449

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Illustrations Figures Figure 1.1

The Children’s Peace Monument, Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park, Japan (photograph by Claire Warden, 2017). 20 Figure 1.2 The Hiroshima Peace Memorial, Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park, Japan (photograph by Claire Warden, 2017). 20 Figure 2.1 Women of Aktion (photograph by Karol Wyszynski, 2018). 28 Figure 2.2 Women of Aktion (photograph by Karol Wyszynski, 2018). 30 Figure 2.3 Women of Aktion (photograph by Karol Wyszynski, 2018). 33 Figure 3.1 Ida B. Wells (Diamond Gloria Marrow) in A Pageant of Agitating Women by Anna Andes and Monica Prince, Susquehanna University, USA, 2020 (photograph by Caleb Stroman). 41 Figure 3.2 Fannie Lou Hammer (Malaika Olaoye as Angela Davis, Alexis Jefferson as FLH, Lynn Buck as Gloria Steinem, left to right) in A Pageant of Agitating Women by Anna Andes and Monica Prince, Susquehanna University, USA, 2020 (photograph by Caleb Stroman). 42 Figure 5.1 Mary McCusker, Genevieve Swallow and Kate Smurthwaite performing as part of Stage Rights! A Living Literature Walk in the garden of the Actors’ Church, Covent Garden (photograph by Naomi Paxton, 2016). 65 Figure 5.2 Kiruna Stamell performing as part of Women and War: The West End and the Western Front at the Edith Cavell Memorial, London (photograph by Mari Takayanagi, 2017). 70 Figure 7.1 Jessica Walker as Suzy Solidor from All I Want Is One Night (photograph by Jonathan Keenan, 2016). 98 Figure 7.2 Jessica Walker in Scene Unseen (photograph by James Dacre, 2021). 100 Figure 10.1 Jonathan Allen relieves himself from the pain of Spain in his performance of a section of Joan Brossa’s Mourning (written in 1962 or before); part of Allen’s Vetllada (Soirée, after Joan Brossa), Pinter Studio, Queen Mary University of London, 23 May 2018 (performance stills from video recording © Jonathan Allen). 122 Figure 10.2 Light, movement and a wide range of performers’ sounds (re)create the performance of Synthesis of Syntheses (1920), by Guglielmo Jannelli and Luciano Nicastro; Futurist Orchestra, Amersham Arms, London, 19 February 2009 (performance still from video recording © John London). 123

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illustrations ix Figure 10.3 Involving the audience by appealing to their tastebuds and visual perspective. A floorplan shows how food and slide projections become part of Günter Berghaus’s production of Sempronio’s Lunch (1915), by Bruno Corra and Emilio Settimelli; VAR, University of Bristol, 15 December 1993 (© Drama Department, University of Bristol). Figure 10.4 Minimalist physical interaction, although absent from the stage directions of Brossa’s Mask Mother (1948), reinforces the verbal patterns of the text. María José Andrade and Philip Magee in the PartSuspended production of Actions and Post-Theatre of Joan Brossa, directed by Hari Marini; Pinter Studio, Queen Mary University of London, 24 May 2018 (photograph © Dani Harvey). Figure 11.1 India Song at Theatr Clwyd, designed by Iona McLeish, 1993 (photograph by Iona McLeish). Figure 11.2 Eden Cinema at Bulmershe Studio, University of Reading, directed and designed by Lib Taylor, 2005. Figure 11.3 Eden Cinema at Bulmershe Studio, University of Reading, directed and designed by Lib Taylor, 2005; the family with The Mother in the centre, Joseph and Suzanne at each side and The Corporal. Figure 11.4 Savannah Bay at Bulmershe Studio, University of Reading, directed and designed by Lib Taylor, 2007. Figure 11.5 Madeleine and the Young Woman in Savannah Bay at Bulmershe Studio, University of Reading, directed and designed by Lib Taylor, 2007. Figure 13.1 The scenic construction of Terzopoulos’s Nora in action (courtesy of Attis Theatre, photograph © Johanna Weber). Figure 13.2 Nora ‘operated’ by Torvald; Sophia Hill and Antonis Myriagos (courtesy of Attis Theatre, photograph © Johanna Weber). Figure 13.3 Nora as a ‘Clock’ (courtesy of Attis Theatre, photograph © Johanna Weber). Figure 13.4 Nora’s exit: hovering at the edge of the stage; Sophia Hill (courtesy of Attis Theatre, photograph © Johanna Weber). Figure 14.1 Heledd Gwynn and Tim Pritchett in Missing Julie by Kaite O’Reilly, directed by Chelsea Walker (photograph by Marc Brenner, courtesy of Marc Brenner and Theatr Clwyd). Figure 15.1 Jessica Thom in Not I by Samuel Beckett (photograph by James Lyndsay, courtesy of Touretteshero and Battersea Arts Centre). Figure 16.1 Ghosts 2.0, produced and directed by Wang Chong, 2014 (photograph by Zhu Lei, courtesy of Wang Chong). Figure 16.2 Online performance of Waiting for Godot, produced and directed by Wang Chong, 2020 (courtesy of Wang Chong). Figure 17.1 The Shabolovka Radio Tower, Moscow (photograph by Anastasia Fedosova, 2022). Figure 18.1 Yukiko Saito as Anna in Ivanov, directed by Tadashi Suzuki, Istanbul, 2006 (courtesy of IKSV).

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124

125 145 148

149 152 153 178 185 186 191 201 208 214 221 233 252

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x illustrations Figure 18.2 Chieko Naito as Clytemnestra in Elektra, directed by Tadashi Suzuki, Istanbul, 2010 (photograph by Ilgın Erarslan Yılmaz). 252 Figure 18.3 Akihito Okuno as Ivanov in Ivanov, directed by Tadashi Suzuki, Istanbul, 2006 (courtesy of IKSV). 254 Figure 18.4 Yoo Jeong Byun as Elektra in Elektra, directed by Tadashi Suzuki, Istanbul, 2010 (photograph by Ilgın Erarslan Yılmaz). 255 Figure 25.1 Das Ring des Nibelungen, directed by Frank Castorf, 2017 (© Bayreuth Festival/Enrico Nawrath). 331 Figure 28.1 Toolbox for audience members, Die Philosophiermaschine, Sophiensaele Berlin, January 2020 (photograph by Paula Reissig).366 Figure 28.2 Die Philosophiermaschine, Sophiensaele Berlin, January 2020 (photograph by Paula Reissig). 367 Figure 28.3 Dramaturgical sketch of the network structure of Die Philosophiermaschine, unpublished archival materials (courtesy of Interrobang). 375 Figure 30.1 All That Fall, Project Arts Centre, Dublin, August 2011 (photograph by Ros Kavanagh, courtesy of Pan Pan). 396 Figure 30.2 Embers, Samuel Beckett Theatre, Dublin, August 2013 (photograph by Ros Kavanagh, courtesy of Pan Pan). 396 Figure 30.3 Cascando, Samuel Beckett Theatre, Dublin, April 2016 (photograph by Ros Kavanagh, courtesy of Pan Pan). 397 Figure 30.4 Everyone Is King Lear in his Own Home, Smock Alley Theatre, Dublin, September 2012 (photograph by Ros Kavanagh, courtesy of Pan Pan). 399 Figure 30.5 Endgame, Project Arts Centre, Dublin, December 2019 (photograph by Ros Kavanagh, courtesy of Pan Pan). 399 Figure 30.6 The Rehearsal, Playing the Dane, Abbey Theatre, Dublin, May 2018 (photograph by Ros Kavanagh, courtesy of Pan Pan). 400 Figure 30.7 The Sleepwalkers, Samuel Beckett Theatre, Dublin, July 2019 (photograph by Ros Kavanagh, courtesy of Pan Pan/Dublin Youth Theatre). 401 Figure 30.8 A Doll House, Smock Alley Theatre, Dublin, April 2012 (photograph by Ros Kavanagh, courtesy of Pan Pan). 402 Figure 31.1 May B in performance (revival), RAMDAM, Sainte-Foy-lès-Lyon, April 2015 (photograph © Hervé Deroo, courtesy of Compagnie Maguy Marin). 416 Figure 31.2 May B in performance (original), the ‘three women’ section; la Maison des Arts de Créteil, January 1982 (photograph by Claude Bricage, courtesy of Compagnie Maguy Marin). 417 Figure 31.3 May B in performance (original), the ‘birthday cake’ section; la Maison des Arts de Créteil, January 1982 (photograph by Claude Bricage, courtesy of Compagnie Maguy Marin). 418 Figure 31.4 May B in performance (original), the ensemble fleeing; la Maison des Arts de Créteil, January 1982 (photograph by Claude Bricage, courtesy of Compagnie Maguy Marin). 419

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illustrations xi

Tables Table 5.1 Table 5.2 Table 5.3 Table 5.4

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Stage Rights! (2013). 75 Stage Rights! (2016). 75 A Particular Theatre: Shakespeare, Suffragists and Soldiers (2016).76 Women and War: The West End and the Western Front (2017). 77

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Acknowledgements

A

book of this length and scope is always the work of many hearts and hands, so the title ‘Companion’ is a fitting moniker: we could not have created it without extensive support from our communities, institutions, colleagues and friends. Foremost among those who trusted us and invested their energy and resources in the book, from its earliest days to final production, are the editors, reviewers and publishing teams at Edinburgh University Press. Jackie Jones, Susannah Butler, Fiona Conn and Caitlin Murphy have all been endlessly supportive in their stewardship of the volume. Thanks to Cathy Falconer for her exceptional copyediting. We thank the anonymous peer reviewers and the publishing committee of the press for their detailed and helpful feedback. In particular, we wish to thank Olga Taxidou, who was involved when the idea for a volume on this topic was still in a nascent state and who later agreed (during the book’s long adolescence) to contribute the Afterword. If we were to establish our own modernist collective that aimed to find ‘the new’ in contemporary theatre, we could hardly do better than to enrol our list of contributors, translators and ‘fixers’, who have all dedicated copious amounts of time during a global pandemic to help manifest this project. We acknowledge not only their creativity and scholarship committed to print here, but also the millions of hours of practice, research, composition, training, teaching and engagement that lie under the surface of the words and images on the pages. We thank all photographers, photographic subjects and rights holders who contributed visual documentation to this volume and permitted the reproduction of images (individual credits appear in the list of figures and in captions). Only one essay in the volume has appeared elsewhere, and we are grateful to all who agreed to its reprint here: Penny Farfan’s essay ‘Ages of Arousal’ originally appeared in Linda Griffiths, edited by Jacqueline Petropoulos, volume 9 in the series New Essays on Canadian Theatre, published by Playwrights Canada Press in 2018. We particularly thank all funders of research contained in these pages (for clarity and to comply with local requirements, all funders will be acknowledged within scholars’ individual chapters). Like our contributors, we as editors are also the beneficiaries of communities of practice. The University of Exeter and Trinity College Dublin have supported research leave for editors Adrian Curtin and Nicholas Johnson respectively, while the Modernist Studies Association awarded Claire Warden a travel grant in 2018 to complete related research at Yale University. Colleagues at the Trinity Long Room Hub, the Trinity Centre for Beckett Studies, the Beckett Summer School (2018–19) and the IFTR Beckett Working Group have all informed multiple stages of the editorial process. Our Trinity-based research assistant, Sophie Furlong Tighe, has been indispensable in supporting the editing process at several key stages.

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acknowledgements xiii It is a telling feature of scholarly life that many ideas that end up in print owe a substantial debt to ephemeral conversations held within classrooms or exercises in studios, and each editor has a specific cohort to thank in this regard. Claire Warden sends her thanks to the students at Loughborough University who performed Eugène Ionesco’s Rhinoceros in 2019 for helping her to see the way that modernism might be reconfigured on the contemporary stage. Adrian Curtin sends thanks to his colleagues at the Drama department of the University of Exeter and to the students who took the module Modernist Drama in Contemporary Theatre with him in 2022. Naomi Paxton thanks colleagues at the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama past and present, for stimulating conversations around context, legacy and co-production. Nicholas Johnson extends deep appreciation to Matthew Causey, who first asked him to become a teaching assistant for the survey course ‘Modernism and Postmodernism’, and he thanks the students and colleagues at the Department of Drama in Trinity College Dublin, especially all students of Modernism, Performance Art, Postmodernism and Theatre History 2 in its various guises over the years, as well as the Enemy of the Stars and David Fragments theatre-making ensembles. All editors thank their mentors and teachers, remembering especially those whose ideas have outlived them. Several contemporary theatre companies and venues have opened their time, rehearsal rooms, archives and contacts to us in connection with the volume, in particular Dead Centre, Compagnie Maguy Marin, Pan Pan Theatre, Scary Little Girls, Theatre Clwyd and Touretteshero. The editors lastly thank those individuals who went above and beyond in assisting this project in countless ways across the years of its development, in alphabetical order: Marc Atkinson Borrull, Marc Brenner, Philip Coleman, Burç İdem Dinçel, Jimmy Eadie, Anastasia Fedosova, Maggie Gale, Emily Johnson, Ros Kavanagh, Ben Kidd, Mick Martin, Rebecca Mordan, Bush Moukarzel, Valerie Ní Cheallaigh, Sally Nicholls, Kaite O’Reilly, Mauricio Quevedo, Gavin Quinn, Colm Summers, Mari Takayanagi, Céline Thobois, Miranda Fay Thomas and Jude Wright. You have all encouraged us and extended solidarity in small ways and large, enabling us finally to say to the reader who is reading this now: thank you too.

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To Laura Marcus (1956–2021), for her scholarship on modernism and for inspiring and encouraging younger scholars

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(anti-)capitalsism: a manifesto

we had been up all night, my friends and i, looking at one another in little boxes on the screen, peering into each other’s homes and offices, admiring our credibility bookshelves, our seats of learning, our endowed chairs, watching ourselves as we debated features and bugs and put one word in front of the other whilst deleting others, all the time thinking of our readers, our future critics and book reviewers (beautiful people all, so smart and so kind). hungry automobiles roared beneath our windows, though we could not hear them because our earphones cancelled noise. we became demented with writing, with language, with words, with letters, with cases, with titles of movements, with the power and importance and legitimacy that capitalisation ostensibly bestows. we wanted a weakened modernism, one that’s not so high and mighty, but admits fallibility, playfulness, plurality, a possibility of coming into being through myriad channels, not a tombstone with letters carved in capitals, not monuments but documents, not archives but repertoires, more bless than blast. we wondered about the length of time it takes for an art movement to achieve capital letter status, whether it is ideological to grant it this status, and whether it bestows on a movement a false sense of coherence or masks its internal contrariety. we looked to the holy bible, the chicago manual of style, now in its seventeenth edition, and to the association of art editors, but we found no church doors on which to nail our pages. we thought about distinguishing between named movements proposed by artists and aesthetics formulated by scholars and historians, using a mixture of upper- and lower-case letters, depending on context. we worried about the confusion that might occur if movement titles all had lower-case letters, potentially conflating nominal and adjectival usage, the futurist and the futuristic each having their distinct functions. we considered the importance of capitalising words in other contexts, for example, using capital letters for designations of racial identity as a mark of understanding and respect and as an acknowledgement of social construction.

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we pondered the utility of grammar and style, the importance of the leading capital, the quoted capital, respect for names (bell hooks especially), the conventions of foreign languages, the title case. then, with our faces covered in elbow grease, wrinkles, worry lines and frowns, amidst the anticipated complaints of colleagues and copy-editors, we dictated this word-assemblage to all who might read it on this planet and others: 1. despite the best efforts of autocorrection software, as editors we declare our sovereignty over what is or is not capitalised in this volume, undertaking to think seriously about the implications of each choice, and then to make every conceivable effort toward consistency. 2. because our core idea is that modernism lives today, dynamically incorporated into the flow of artistic and cultural influence, unruly and unbounded, having neither title nor propriety, from this day forward we shall no longer capitalise its constituent movements, giving them adjectival life independent of their historical formulation, awakening their founders and adherents from their dreams of solidity. 3. capital letters in our language situate, they do not necessarily elevate. they tend to reflect that a social construction has occurred: a city or ocean is lower case when it is a feature of the terrain (a ‘common’ noun), but the name of that place given and shared among a people at a particular time takes a capital (a ‘proper’ noun). there was once a scientist by a certain name, but the synthetic element named in his honour is properly called einsteinium. by making modernist movements lower case, we declare that they have become a natural feature of our landscape, but do not imply that their historicisation or contestation is at an end. 4. for the same reason, we do use capital letters for invented categories of centrality and periphery (as if we were not on a sphere!) as distinct from the cardinal directions west and east. 5. we note with interest the evolving contestation among style sheets as to whether it is appropriate, ethical and/or necessary to capitalise signifiers such as ‘black’ or ‘white’ when these colours are used to denote race (or racial constructions). we relish any opportunity to write and edit on shifting ground – to reflect this terrain properly, we have valued above all the free choice of contributors in this matter, encouraging them to speak directly to any such choices of style in (con)textual notes following their individual contributions. 6. to pacify our teachers, students, colleagues, editors and publishers and encourage clarity in dark times, we do not impose lower case on everything, as we have here. outside of this manifesto, convention still applies, and sentences begin appropriately, the pronoun for the self is still elevated at the expense of all the others, never fear. quotation remains precise, citation remains sacrosanct, and we make only small sacrifices at the altar of the manual of style. signed: nichola$ johnson adrian curt!n claire w@rden na%mi paxton

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Introduction: Sensing Modernism in Theatre Claire Warden, Nicholas Johnson, Adrian Curtin and Naomi Paxton

I

n approaching the question of whether modernism is still alive, meaningful and salient in contemporary theatre – and if so, how so – the editors of this volume have had the opportunity to discuss our own experiences in theatres around the world over the past twenty years. We have identified most often as audience members, but also as practitioners, facilitators, allies, critics and academics, in a rich variety of cultural contexts across four continents. What these conversations have revealed is a remarkable commonality that pre-dates our collaboration and marks one way of articulating the genesis of this book: each of us reports multiple occasions of sensing the presence of ‘modernism’ (as we understood it at the time) while experiencing a piece of theatre that is ostensibly new. This not only occurred in the case of obvious or external linkages, where the source material or dramaturgy explicitly referenced the avant-gardes of the early twentieth century, but also emerged in unanticipated locales, contexts and situations, often in cases where the rhyme between centuries seemed unconscious on the part of the makers. In online pandemic-era theatre, we found a strange revenge of naturalism (in work that surrounds actors with their own objects) alongside resonance with surrealism (in work that foregrounds the inner life of those objects), despite assurances that livestreaming marked a new era of drama. At experimental theatre festivals in Cairo and Fez, we saw non-narrative work composed mainly of coloured light and geometric shapes – except in lieu of referencing the Bauhaus, these works deployed abstraction to navigate political censorship. In the English theatre, we saw grotesquery and anarchy on stage that ostensibly owed a debt to Alfred Jarry – except the drama graduates who made the work in question claimed never to have heard of Ubu Roi. In the Irish theatre, we saw fierce young companies appear to rediscover the anti-audience activities of dada and futurism and marry them to the earnestness and eschatology of expressionism – except everyone said their strongest influence was the postdramatic, defined as whatever is happening in Berlin. While modernism seemed to keep arising by surprise, was it also disappearing from the places we would expect to find it? Retracing the footsteps of its canonical heroes, we made our pilgrimage to the Berliner Ensemble, only to find that we were seated next to an executive, attending a production that was essentially a museum exhibition of various orthodoxies; no one left or expressed the slightest dismay, and everyone applauded for twenty minutes. To find an example of épater les bourgeois we had to

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2 claire warden, nicholas johnson, adrian curtin and naomi paxton travel across the Atlantic, to a 2009 version of Eugene O’Neill’s 1928 Strange Interlude at the Goodman Theatre by the Neo-Futurists, whose five-and-a-half-hour production inspired walkouts and invective launched directly at the performers. Where modernism sometimes seemed the most alive was among our students, often before they studied it in depth: they wrote manifestos with abandon, they abjured the shibboleths of the prior generations and opted for the New, and they experienced the full cycle of the collective: non-hierarchy to autocracy, dissent to splinter groups that purported to be more loyal to the original non-conformist ideals (after which it all began again). Each of us, it seems, has heard at least once the echoing footfalls of a spectral or undead modernism. After encountering such an unruly and unclassifiable species in the darkness of the theatre, this book has come about to explore the next logical questions: what is it? Where does it come from, and where does it live? Who brought it, who is feeding it, and is it dangerous? And what, in the end, might this encounter with a thing we call ‘modernism’ mean, if all we can do is smell it somewhere in the room? These questions are difficult to answer, in part because of modernism’s ambivalent status in contemporary theatre. Some practitioners consciously position themselves in the ‘slipstream’ of influential figures from modernist theatre history, creating work that is in dialogue with artistic predecessors. Others choose to let their influences from modernism exist in their subconscious and manifest in a semi-unknowing manner. Relatedly, there are practitioners who make claims about artistic innovation in their own work that overlook historical precedents in theatrical modernism, just as modernists themselves were wont to trumpet their own originality and ignore or misconstrue the theatrical past. For practitioners who are knowledgeable about modernism, it can serve as creative inspiration, as something to be negotiated, avoided or rejected. Conversely, for practitioners and audience members who know little or nothing about modernism, or who are unsure about it – surely a perfectly understandable reaction to the term’s liquidity – the relevance of modernism to contemporary theatre is questionable or non-existent. This is borne out in discourse. Although there continues to be vigorous debate about modernism, it is largely academic. It is rare to encounter theatre artists who consider themselves modernists, even if they are making work that aligns with one or more aspects of modernism.1 This may partially be because the term itself is so slippery and has discrepant and contested usage. ‘Modernism’ can very easily become a free-floating signifier, abstruse and seemingly disconnected from present-day concerns. Most commonly, however, modernism is understood to be historical, even if its referential field and chronological beginning and ending points are not entirely known or are open to debate. This book enters this debate by thinking anew about modernism, especially its complex relationship with contemporary theatre. There is general confusion and uncertainty about this relationship and, therefore, a need to examine it critically, which scholarship has not yet done at length and in depth. We contend that modernism is not just a historical movement that has been uncomplicatedly superseded and replaced (for example by postmodernism, and then by post-postmodernism). Instead, we conceive modernism as an impulse that can be carried forward to the present, re-embodied and re-encountered in theatrical performance by performers and audiences both knowingly and unknowingly. We propose that modernist impulses persist even after modernism’s historical flourishing(s) and withering(s), and that this is a vital part of modernism’s legacy.2 Theatre, as an art form, makes this especially apparent, as it relies on collective

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creation by artists and audiences and can be perpetually remade and modified. Modernism in theatre can thus continually arise, like an actor getting up from the ground after their character has expired. This re-presentation need not take the form of zombified ‘museum theatre’. On the contrary, modernist impulses can – and do – spark contemporary theatre in electric and dynamic ways, continuing the modernist imperative to ‘make it new’ and to engage meaningfully with the complicated situation of living in the contemporary world, which is still challenged by modernity’s manifold ruptures. This book scrutinises how and why modernism continues to animate contemporary theatre and what this means for our evolving understanding of this complex global phenomenon.

The Meaning(s) of Modernism It is now a truism that ‘modernism’ is a notoriously difficult term to define temporally, geographically and categorically. Ástráður Eysteinsson acknowledges that it ‘may seem intolerably vague’.3 In contemporary scholarship, this has become even trickier as modernism has morphed and dissolved, with its accepted associations – often white, male, text-based, heteronormative, ableist, situated in Western metropolises – liquefying to include (and therefore make visible) practices and figures previously overlooked or marginalised. Modernist studies is no longer restricted to a specific historical period – for instance, 1890 to 1930, as framed by a famous guide in literary criticism from the late 1970s4 – or particular geographical areas, nor is European modernism assumed to be originary, singular or of primary importance.5 It would be strange to retain the periodisation of modernism selected by prior scholars indefinitely into the future, given that research from the 1970s was looking at literary movements only from a forty- to fifty-year horizon, and they were unaware of what might follow in the last third of the century. Notably, such research also pre-dated the digital revolution that has reshaped modernism’s global traces and legacies; one presumes that our historical and conceptual understanding of modernism has changed in the intervening decades. This is evident in the scholarly study of modernism. The field of (new) modernist studies has greatly expanded its temporal parameters and geographical reach, attending to transnational operations on a global scale.6 Paul K. Saint-Amour has referred to the ‘weakening’ of modernism, a ‘letting go of strength’, as critical orthodoxies crumble and the field of study is reconfigured. He observes: the less sovereign a hold the central term has upon the field it frames the more ferment and recombination can occur within that field, and among more elements. This seems to have been the case with modernist studies, which has flourished in proportion as the term modernism has softened its definitional gaze and relinquished its gatekeeping function – in proportion, again, as we have learned to focus on questions other than, ‘But is such-and-such a work really modernist?’7 We are excited and inspired by the ‘weakening’ of modernism and have no desire to maintain or reconstruct a modernist canon. Like Saint-Amour, we are in favour of a ‘weakened’ modernism that has stopped ‘playing bouncer’ and has started ‘playing host’.8 While not formally adhering to new modernist studies we are, nevertheless, inspired by the ‘expansion’ of what modernism might be.9 Our approach, for example,

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4 claire warden, nicholas johnson, adrian curtin and naomi paxton may be seen as an outworking of Sean Latham and Gayle Rogers’ project in Modernism: Evolution of an Idea, where what matters might be more the process of trying to make sense of our unsettled and unsettling relation to modernity’s complex expression in art and literature than the always insufficient cables of tradition or the shifting patterns we trace in iron filings of a past that may not yet be past.10 Likewise, we gravitate toward Jessica Berman’s formulation of modernism as a ‘constellation’, a configuration of practices and artworks beheld by the observer.11 We are more interested in modernism’s existence (in the past and as a recurring potential) than in defining its essence and fixing it in place. In short, we wish to use modernism as a lens through which to analyse cultural production without imposing a rigid interpretation on modernism itself. This might seem like wanting to have our cake and eat it too. Clearly there is a risk that the term ‘modernism’ could potentially lose shared meaning and become so capacious that anything and everything could come under its rubric. Moreover, while less restrictive bordering is welcome, there is a risk of encouraging an appropriating impulse: of remaking modernism as a catch-all that erases artistic and cultural difference, as well as getting caught up in increasingly labyrinthine nomenclatural debates and turf wars. So, let us be clear. There is a historical period (variously defined) to which ‘modernism’ can and does refer. There were artists who were historically identified as modernists; artists who self-identified as being part of named, avant-garde groups and who signed manifestos and collaborated on projects under the same banner; as well as artists whom critics associated with modernism as that term acquired greater critical usage (later in the twentieth century). All these figures and their works can be historicised. Many of the movements associated with modernism no longer have living adherents, and this marks an ending or a kind of death for the movements in question. Yet the legacy of modernism is sufficiently multifaceted and dynamic to allow it a degree of ongoing (posthumous) existence. Even though it may seem paradoxical, modernism can be understood to have historical endpoints in the twentieth century as well as continued operation in the twenty-first century, and not just as cultural memory or as part of scholarly research and educational curricula. In this book we use ‘modernism’ as a descriptor for a range of artistic work that roughly dates from the late nineteenth century, flourishes and expands worldwide before World War II, and continues to animate individual non-conformist artists into the late twentieth century. This work has some shared compositional characteristics as well as considerable stylistic diversity and many contradictory elements. We see a tight bond between modernity and aesthetic modernism, with the latter enfolding within the context of the former, driven by elements such as increased consumerism (in the context of a massive economic expansion fuelled by colonialism, capitalism and conflict), technological advancement (especially communication and transport), reconfigured perceptions of space and time, new media (phonography, photography, radio, film), mass urbanisation (prompted by factories and mines, but also by other factors such as the establishment of places of learning in cities), and large ‘earthquakes’ in understanding developed in numerous fields of study and prompted by world events. Among these seismic events may be counted theories of evolution, human existence,

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general relativity, the universe, germs, the unconscious, psychology, class consciousness, labour, industry, race, sex, sexuality, gender, personal identity, nationhood and human rights, as well as eruptions prompted by scientific discoveries (such as those in genetics and the subatomic world) and by political movements (such as women’s suffrage). Collectively, these developments prompted ontological shocks, epistemological crises and extensive reconsideration of what it meant to be human in the ‘modern’ world. If, to paraphrase Peter Brook, theatre is ‘life concentrated’,12 then the art form will inevitably reflect these fundamental cultural changes. In drama and theatre, the revolutions and fissures opened by modernity in philosophy, science, economics, politics and society corresponded with artistic experimentation in areas such as dramaturgy, characterisation, language, diegesis, mimesis, scenography, acting, performance style, embodiment, directing and audience engagement. The notion that art and its time reflect one another is a standard humanities formulation, as is the idea that periodisation is a discursive construct. Modernism can be periodised differently depending on the art form under investigation. For example, theatre historiography has tended to extend modernism into the second half of the twentieth century (thereby positioning Samuel Beckett as a ‘late modernist’ or a transitional figure into postmodernism).13 Modernism’s beginnings are also historiographically complex. Considering Great Britain as an example, we acknowledge the continuities between modernism, Victorianism and Edwardianism in the fin de siècle; there are ‘rough edges’ rather than ‘clean breaks’ in many instances, and ostensibly oppositional or notionally sequential cultural paradigms can – and do – simultaneously exist and interface.14 Artists can fuse cultural sensibilities and bridge historical periods in their work, and those living through these colossal changes, quite understandably, did this a lot. Categorisation has bearing on this too. In this collection we include consideration of the historical avant-garde rather than positioning it in strict opposition to modernism, believing that although one can make distinctions between various camps (on art’s relationship to everyday life and the idea of an autonomous artistic work, for instance), it is more fruitful to examine diverse practices in an integrated manner. We recognise that the joint formulation of modernism and modernity that we have outlined is not ideologically neutral. It is a linear progress narrative – a story we like to tell ourselves about ourselves – and, as such, it needs to be interrogated, challenged and left open to the emergence of other possible modernities and modernisms. As Kim Solga argues, ‘the modern’ is ‘an idea, an ideal’, a ‘cultural fantasy, one in which human beings across the earth invest and share unequally’; moreover, ‘the modern is performative – because the idea of modernity is something we, as humans, speak and act into being, rather than simply exist within’.15 Embedded in the performative cultural fantasy of ‘the modern’ is a dialectic ‘between what we understand as modern and what we do not, or between what our culture wishes to believe is modern about us in relation to what came before us/is other than us’.16 Hence, the idea of ‘the modern’, which is a relational term and thus a moving target, does cultural and ideological work that can serve to support colonialism and empire as well as ‘normative’ identities and geographical (and cultural) ‘centres’ and ‘peripheries’.17 Modernism can also resist or subvert these enterprises. The theoretical ‘weakening’ of modernism, previously mentioned, has endeavoured to counteract, or at least complicate, the insidious elements that can collect (and historically have collected) around the idea of ‘the modern’.

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6 claire warden, nicholas johnson, adrian curtin and naomi paxton Nonetheless, just because modernity is a cultural fantasy does not mean it is not discursively real, or that aspects of it have not been felt to be real by historical subjects and by people living today. Indeed, one can argue that we continue to live in the aftershocks of modernity, in ruins that can be as devastating as they are beautiful.18 We exist in the ‘long instant’ of modernism’s detonations, and we are still picking our way through that wreckage, surprised at the new elements that have formed since we last checked. Modernist artists made ideas and techniques (montage, stream of consciousness, framing environmental sound/noise as music) newly thinkable and do-able through their work. Modernism can therefore be understood as an unresolved site of possibility, whose unfinished business can be taken up by contemporary practitioners and scholars.19 This is its legacy, or its cultural afterlife: modernist impulses endure and continue to have implications. And that is our principal interest in this study: examining the ripples that come from the rocks that have been thrown in the water. In approaching modernism in this way this collection speaks to and, we hope, extends recent developments in modernist studies. For example, David James and Urmila Seshagiri have introduced the term ‘metamodernism’ to refer to ‘a significant body of late-twentieth and twenty-first century literature [that] consciously responds to modernist impulses, methods, and commitments’.20 They present modernism as ‘a moment as well as a movement’, a ‘period and [. . .] a paradigm’.21 Like us, they retain the traditional periodisation of modernism, not to shore up the canon but rather to understand how the aesthetic innovations associated with a particular period of modernity might reappear (with a difference) in a contemporary context. Their focus is on narrative fiction. Ours is on theatre, which we believe is especially suited to exemplify modernism as a dynamic force that moves through space and time. In later scholarship, James makes the case for modernism in the novel as participatory, dependent upon the relationship between writer and reader, even going so far as to claim that ‘the potential for thinking about modernist form in this way [is] a performative process rather than a means to an end’.22 This edited collection proposes a fleshed-out understanding of the performative nature of modernism by attending to the recalcitrant and oft-overlooked space of the theatre. As a typically communal art form that involves collaboration between artists, as well as between performers and audiences, theatre is inherently co-created; mutual participation is vital. What does this mean for modernism in theatre? A dramatist can write a play that they or others can consider to be modernist or to have modernist elements. Some modernist plays (closet dramas) are purposefully written not to be staged, but these are exceptional, and many have subsequently been staged anyway.23 Theatre, as distinct from drama, complicates the idea of a fixed or bounded modernist artwork, because different groups of people can reconstitute plays (or prior productions) in different places, at different times and in different ways. In any case, a playtext (or a source text) is not the sine qua non of modernism in theatre. In fact, an important school of thought in modernist theatre history, advanced by Antonin Artaud and Edward Gordon Craig among others, argued against the domination of theatre by the playtext and sought to develop the art of theatre as an independent entity. As theatre is a multi-disciplinary art form, there are multiple channels through which modernist elements can be presented, evoked or apprehended. A source text is only one of these channels. Another is the system through which a performance is rehearsed and developed (biomechanics, epic theatre, etc.). A third channel concerns scenography

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(including not only visual elements, but all aspects of the sensorial experience) and the creation of atmosphere. A fourth relates to place and space: the architecture, physical infrastructure and imaginative constitution of the performance event (a black-box theatre versus proscenium theatre). A fifth involves spectatorship and audience engagement: the manner in which audiences are incorporated into the performance and the mode of engagement they are invited to take (opposition, critical spectatorship, etc.). Modernism can enter the theatre event’s bloodstream, so to speak, through any of these channels; they do not all have to be present for modernism to be apprehended in a given production. Theatre can intrinsically help to ‘weaken’ modernism because of its putative ephemerality, its evocation of ideas of failure and incompletion, its composite nature and the fact that no single discipline or element is necessarily dominant.24 Performance elements can actually jar with one another and be compositionally discrepant – whence the rise of the director-auteur, the dramatist-as-director (‘directing’ the play on the page through lengthy and/or prescriptive stage directions), and the tradition of modernist anti-theatricality – as shown by the many modernist artists who productively resisted theatricalism by disrupting representation in creative ways.25 Has this thing (called modernism) appeared again tonight? There can be no one answer to this question, no magic formula for determining modernism in theatre. It is not a zero-sum situation in all cases. Semiotics and structuralism can only tell us so much; they are blunt tools in trying to make this determination. Theatre puts modernism into play. It gives it affective potential. A modernist text can serve as the basis for a theatrical production, but it is not a given that its modernism will ‘make it through’ or that an audience will apprehend it, depending on how it is staged, on the fuzzy logic of creativity and on individual audience members’ knowledge and perception. Equally, a newly devised piece of theatre can redeploy symbolist staging techniques, for instance, and put into the air a familiar scent, one that momentarily spirits us into the past. Subjectivity plays a part in this. We may not always be able to predict or precisely account for modernism in theatre, but we know it when we sense it. Or at least we think we do.

The Problem(s) of the Contemporary The other contested concept invoked in this book’s title is that of the ‘contemporary’, which has a wide range of use cases, most often as a temporal signifier. In ways that echo a pattern that is also true of modernism, it seems easier to discuss the distinction between ‘modern(ist)’ and ‘contemporary’ aesthetics in the visual or literary arts, rather than theatre: we visit some cities that have both a Museum of Contemporary Art and a Museum of Modern Art, and these imply different periods, distinct curatorial practices, even different architectures. But if this distinction is probed, it is revealing how quickly it crumbles: cutting-edge installation and performance art by living artists is presented often within institutions with ‘modern’ in the title, while those institutions that feature the most ‘contemporary’ works clearly depend on relations, ideals and concepts grounded in earlier twentieth-century artistic praxis (readymades, aleatory practices, installations, happenings and anti-art/anti-audience performative interventions). A painter in their mid-seventies might be exhibited at either type of institution; such a person could be born in 1945 and have strong memories (from their twenties) of 1968, only one generation removed from figures connected to (say) Paris in the 1920s. The applicability of this paradigm to theatre, where the line of the

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8 claire warden, nicholas johnson, adrian curtin and naomi paxton ‘contemporary’ is, if anything, harder to draw, is that it is embodied, networked and non-linear, spreading through influences that could not – and need not – be categorised strictly within an either/or. Performance cultures that emerge in specific locales form regional ecologies of interconnected collaborators who cannot be disentangled from their communities of practice; artists in one city might grow, change and thrive differently from those artists ‘planted’ in different ‘soil’, each adapting to local conditions. Without imposing a hierarchy based on these differences, what such a model celebrates is inclusion of those artists working in different environments and valorising the approach that arises organically from their conditions without judgement, as opposed to declaring that one year, everyone became modern or contemporary, a move that occludes the hidden value systems behind such determinations. While acknowledging that measuring artistic movements in centuries is equally as arbitrary as other available labels, this book will include theatre made since the year 2000 within its remit. Such work is simply twenty-first-century theatre in terms of its historical occurrence, but in our dynamic model, it generally has a precursor or seed from the previous century’s unfinished business, a flavour of revolutionary or reactionary politics that resonates with 1908 or 1933 or 1968 or 1989. Considering ‘modernism’ vis-à-vis ‘the contemporary’ – when both of these terms are so slippery and contested – is also designed to help us build a more flexible and sustainable model for how modernism might progress beyond these first two decades of the current century. Writing in 1999, Sara Blair already critiqued the framing of modernism as either a list of movements or a canon of ‘hermetic literary machines, indifferent to contemporary experience’, advocating instead ‘a set of ongoing activities’.26 She writes: ‘culture’ itself – what constitutes it, whose property it is, how it identifies or informs national or racial bodies – is a deeply political issue. And this fact, it can be argued, is Modernism’s most important contribution to the politics of its moment, and to those of our own.27 As an alternative model, then, we propose that after the earthquakes of modernism’s interventions, we are all living through ongoing assorted ‘crises’ that could be figured as aftershocks or ruins. Many of the breaches that modernism opened in the human or the work of art have yet to close, and where (limited) healing has occurred, the scar tissue is instructive. It is telling that as meta-, re-, post- and post-post- have all been tried as prefixes to inaugurate a new phase, an overcoming or a sublation of modernism, the morpheme underneath has remained. In one sense, this is simply a retelling of a familiar cyclical model of history, a rehashing of Jean-François Lyotard’s much-discussed claim that postmodernism precedes, or perhaps prepares, modernism.28 Lyotard notices that modernist art tends toward an anterior character, seeking to overthrow whatever came immediately before, deriving from this a disrupted form of temporality: [The postmodern] is undoubtedly a part of the modern. All that has been received, if only yesterday (modo, modo, Petronius used to say), must be suspected. [. . .] A work can become modern only if it is first postmodern. Postmodernism thus understood is not only modernism at its end but in the nascent state, and this state is constant.29

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Again, the examples drawn on to support this philosophical articulation (from 1979) of (post)modernism as a ‘constant nascent state’ cluster in the literary and visual arts. But theatre and performance would seem to support such a reading even more strongly: the clearly collaborative, embodied and affective ongoing revivification of materials and systems helps to move the discourse beyond a notionally ‘autonomous’ work of art, toward an understanding of art as an institutionally embedded praxis. By arising within institutions inhabited by people, modernism in contemporary theatre becomes more sharply political. Evidencing the legacies of modernism consciously and unconsciously expressed in contemporary theatre requires a material understanding of the commercial pressures and pace of the industry, especially an insight into how the commodification of knowledge and expertise has reinforced existing hierarchies of privilege. Such hierarchies tend to create an artificial separation between modernist theatrical texts on the one hand, and activist styles, forms or practices on the other. With content and form jostling for position in this way, how then can modernism and modernist praxis be confidently identified and accounted for in contemporary theatre and performance, and by whom? Can modernist legacies or tendencies be found in the architecture of a venue, set design, choice of playtext, rehearsal practices or performance styles, or even the commissioning of explanatory programme text? We have found that looking for engagement with modernism in contemporary theatre is about being willing to exist in a potentially uncomfortable and contradictory place of fluid definitions within both scholarly and industry contexts. As commercial theatre-makers reimagine the cultural artefacts of modernism for contemporary audiences, they often draw on an established canon of texts, literary figures in public history and familiar visual references to market or brand their work. While this in theory contextualises theatre as part of wider modernist artistic practice and thought, it may also be reductive and damaging in the longer term, reinforcing the dominance of privileged European creative and critical voices. Even so, instinctive and impulsive moves toward diversification and manifestos for better representation within the contemporary industry are able to expose and interrogate this reductiveness, recovering instead more radical histories of practice that have brought underrepresented voices and communities to the stage. Digital culture has been particularly important in this regard. Increased access to archival material through digitisation and the sharing of content through social media have brought the stories of ‘forgotten’ archives, suppressed ideologies and less familiar artists, texts or methodologies to new audiences and creatives. This visibility – with its recognition that while systems and materials can be revived and reinterpreted, what cannot be recreated is the kinaesthetic and sensory experience of the participation and spectatorship of modernist audiences – is potent. There is no obvious single market for modernist theatre praxis as such, and given its heterogeneity and dispersal, it cannot easily be contained or commodified. This creates opportunities for contemporary theatre-makers to consciously take an intertheatrical approach to their engagement with modernist work and ideas, informed by knowledge of how co-operative theatrical and social networks have influenced and continue to influence the facilitation of professional practice.30 The legacy of modernism in contemporary theatre is therefore a living one, with practitioners able to identify and cite modernist influences more easily than before, but also ever more able to question the ways in which those influences have been made visible.

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10 claire warden, nicholas johnson, adrian curtin and naomi paxton We are thus seeking in this volume to see modernism (again) through a contemporary lens, as well as to view contemporary theatre through a modernist lens. These are not magnifying lenses that will bring us closer to a more perfect or clearer understanding: they are irregular prisms that refract shifting patterns on the walls, often in unpredictable locations. What viewing modernism through the contemporary means, ultimately, is that our understanding of modernism has inevitably come to us in different media and after more history than those who analysed this phenomenon before us. We have the benefits of writing from within ongoing decolonial, postcolonial and anti-colonial movements, to highlight anew the embedded power relations in historical accounts of modernism (and the ongoing systemic risk of neocolonial configurations). We cannot unthink the suspicion of metanarratives, totalities, sameness, unities and ubiquitous capitalism bequeathed to us by poststructuralists and postmodernists, tools and frameworks that critics of the 1970s did not yet have. We also perceive telling continuities – to name only one central concern, the challenge to language as such – that seem to flower across modernist artworks early in the twentieth century, then expand into fierce contestation in philosophy around World War II, then go on to undergird postcolonial and postmodernist theories and practices in the mid and late twentieth century, yet come to us still unresolved today. It is these fertile strands of modernist DNA that we are curious to locate and identify, considering that their robustness and adaptability must have something to teach us about survival in the years ahead – perhaps not only for works of art, but for lives, communities and cultures under new and old threats. In effect, the tenacity and adaptability of aesthetic modernism is one of its most notable features, especially when the evidence of its irritant properties is so extensive. Modernism’s demise has been declared or sought by the powerful repeatedly across the political spectrum: first banned by name in the USSR in 1934, then criminalised and derided as ‘degenerate’ by Nazi Germany in 1937, then denounced as Communist in the United States in 1949 (by senators who had not, it seemed, been close readers of the 1934 First Congress of Soviet Writers memoranda nor visited Mayakovsky, Meyerhold or Malevich in prison). Remarkably, these struggles over cultural policies toward modernism are not confined to the twentieth century. In executive orders drafted in 2020, the American administration still saw fit to ban ‘abstract or modernist’ busts in its putative National Garden of Heroes, and to declare that ‘Brutalist or Deconstructivist’ designs may not be used for its federal buildings in future.31 Their incoherence aside, such proclamations illuminate a spark still in the wind, foretold by André Breton, that has yet to find its powder keg.32

The Pathway(s) through this Book This book brings together the work of more than thirty contributors from around the world to examine the influence of modernism in contemporary theatre, in essays of different lengths, types and voices. Although every aspect of the topic cannot be addressed, this collection provides a kaleidoscopic overview of some of the main ways that modernism continues to inform contemporary theatre practice. The book is divided into four parts, each with its own introduction. The first section explores how contemporary theatre practitioners ‘remember’ historical figures and groups associated with modernism, as well as specific modernist productions and aesthetic ideas, and then artistically reconfigure these remembrances in their work. These practitioners

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knowingly cite or invoke aspects of modernism, not to reproduce them unquestioningly, but rather to interface with theatre history and use it for contemporary purposes. The fraught politics of who and what is remembered and in what way – versus that which is forgotten, sidelined or ignored – is, of course, a central and complex question in such analysis. The book’s second part examines a related type of remembrance and reconfiguration in the form of contemporary productions of modernist plays and/or plays associated with modernist authors. Contemporary theatre that uses playtexts associated with modernism as its principal basis overtly signals connection to theatre history and to prior productions of particular plays. There is no shortage of modernist drama performed today, and this includes plays that have become canonical – part of a shared cultural repertory – as well as more obscure plays with a less storied performance history. Chapters in this section address the ways in which these plays are translated and adapted, in both linguistic and theatrical senses, for contemporary performance in different cultural contexts. Drama provides a material conduit that connects modernism to contemporary theatre via scripts. That said, drama is not the only means by which modernism is ‘carried forward’ into the present. Part III, ‘Transmission’, examines non-scripted elements of theatrical modernism, such as acting styles and training methods, performance practices, directorial approaches, programming styles and canon formation, which have all helped to shape contemporary theatre. Modernist ideas and practices can be embodied, ‘kept alive’ across generations, and they naturally migrate and mutate in the process. Authors in this section examine (im)material modernist legacies (constructive as well as destructive). This section highlights the inextricable entanglement of modernism in contemporary theatre, indicating how it is often present ideologically, even if it is not consciously adopted or widely known about. The final part takes ‘Slippages’ as its title and central organising concept. This set of essays draws attention to the fuzziness of terms, categories, disciplines, temporalities and histories that emerges when modernism is conceived as a dynamic flow, rather than as a period or event with a single, fixed terminus. Terminological distinctions are put under pressure and are shown to be flexible in their meanings and intra- and interrelationships. Straightforward or teleological progress narratives become harder to tell. Palimpsestic structures become apparent. Fluidity and boundary-crossing come to the fore in this section, as contributors investigate how contemporary theatre intermingles with the modernist past, messily and complicatedly, in accordance with modernism’s evasions of neat arrangements and demarcations. We believe these section topics offer a suitably spacious, yet sufficiently well-focused, means of exploring the interaction of complex global phenomena (modernism and contemporary theatre) that are both discursive and embodied. The section topics provide organisational coherence and a way of thinking about each part’s contents, but they are not mutually exclusive. On the contrary, there is substantial conceptual consonance between parts, and, in several instances, chapters could have been placed in another part with only minor reframing. Readers are thus encouraged to ‘think across’ the four sections and locate additional connections and crossovers. The first two parts take a broadly retrospective position on modernism, examining how contemporary practitioners look to the past and use historical figures and materials as creative fodder for the creation of new theatre. Chapters in the subsequent sections partake in

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12 claire warden, nicholas johnson, adrian curtin and naomi paxton retrospection, but are more oriented in the other temporal direction, examining how the modernist past has ‘flowed’ into the present and toward the future, revealing artistic continuity and demonstrating the folly of erecting fixed or impermeable borders between modernism and the contemporary, especially in relation to theatre. Contributors have been invited to write different types of essay, depending on their professional backgrounds, specialisms and interests. Chapters variously provide casestudy analyses, survey multiple texts and productions, focus on one or more historical figures associated with modernism to trace their legacy, theorise terminology, rethink historiography, reflect on the author’s or interlocutor’s artistic practice, respond to other essays in the volume or offer intellectual and creative provocation in the form of an artist-essay or manifesto. ‘Macro’ and ‘micro’ perspectives on modernism are thus offered throughout, though there is more ‘broadening out’ as the volume proceeds. Interspersed within each section are shorter contributions made by or with contemporary theatre practitioners and educators. Intermixing traditional scholarly analysis with practitioner-led writing in a non-hierarchical manner is intended to contribute to the ‘shaking up’ of orthodoxy to which this book aspires, to which modernist artists aspired, and many contemporary practitioners too. This is inadvertently an example of what Douglas Mao, in his recent edited collection The New Modernist Studies, prizes as the ‘anti-academicism of modernism [. . .] [which] might be understood as a welcome return to the oppositionality modernism cultivated’.33 Suggesting modernism as a catalyst to theatre practitioners who had not previously considered themselves to be working in its long detonation might be a boon for new modernist studies. Accordingly, we hope this collection will be of interest and utility to a varied readership, including students, teachers, practitioners and scholars of both modernist studies and theatre and performance studies, and that it will inspire readers to gain a more imaginative, flexible and intersectional understanding of modernism, especially as it pertains to contemporary theatre. We would be pleased if, for example, theatre-makers were to take away from this book a sense that modernism has import for, and bearing on, their own practice and are encouraged to respond to modernism more consciously going forward. But we are content for readers to engage with this book as they wish. It is entirely in the networked spirit of the contemporary for readers to dip in and out of the book to locate their own areas of interest across the volume; it is entirely in the irreverent spirit of modernism to cut up the book and draw it out of a hat, or to recombine sentences on analogue tape loops into an aleatory performance, or to shout whole chapters aloud from the treetops. In short, we envision this collection more like a gateway out of an enclosure than a new fence around one; we would rather think of the project as a source for play and experimentation with these ideas than any kind of final statement. This introduction has articulated our use of modernism as an expansive frame, an interartistic outworking of Berman’s notion of the modernist constellation, a network of diverse practices and conceptions. Although all the essays in this collection are meant to complement one another, readers should anticipate contradictions as well: the editors have not insisted that all contributors conform to the ideas about modernism articulated in this introduction. That would be an anti-democratic endeavour, and one not in keeping with the dialectic components of modernism itself. The book’s heterogeneity is, we propose, a feature, not a bug. We welcome differences of opinion that may appear within these pages or in subsequent works, seeing these as signs of intellectual

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pluralism and of the need for ongoing conversation and further studies. In addition, not every major exponent of modernist theatre gets attention here, nor have we prioritised the inclusion of canonical figures over less-well-known figures, especially artists who have been marginalised because of their backgrounds or identities. Readers who believe that any study of modernist theatre must surely include discussion, or at least mention, of a particular person, group, institution, topic, play or production may not find that expectation met. We have tried to strike a balance between the familiar and the (potentially) less familiar or unfamiliar, in an effort to indicate the breadth of theatrical modernism outside of canon formation and to allow for unique juxtapositions. The collection features discussion of modernist and contemporary theatre from around the world, thereby participating in the ‘global’ or ‘planetary’ turn in modernist studies.34 The motivation we share is to play host rather than bouncer ourselves,35 to invite readers to a sprawling and boisterous party in modernism’s honour in the vast compound where it has been known to hide.36 Part of the edifice is indomitably brutalist, and part is deconstructed; whether it is ‘beautiful’ is a subjective matter, but some do find it so. There are views out from its half-ruined towers as well as subterranean passages to explore, though it might be risky, since not everything is up to code. There are people dancing to Luigi Russolo’s intonarumori somewhere in the house under lighting by Loïe Fuller, and knots of earnest people are discussing capitalism and communism until dawn. Please join us – if we stay long enough and explore widely enough, we might run into the thing itself, which is rumoured to be alive in there; if we do not find it, then at least we will have the joy of the search.

Notes  1. Contemporary artists in other media have overtly signalled their connection to modernism, for example, Billy Childish and Charles Thomson, who co-wrote a manifesto for ‘Remodernism’ in 2000. See http://www.stuckism.com/remod.html (accessed 25 June 2021).   2. The persistence of modernism as a distinct field of study within academia, especially in literature and the creative arts, is also partly responsible for its ongoing (and mutating) ideas; in domains other than theatre, state-funded initiatives like the New European Bauhaus consciously invoke modernism in relation to helping interdisciplinary creativity to flourish in a contemporary context. See https://europa.eu/new-european-bauhaus/ index_en (accessed 14 July 2021).   3. Ástráður Eysteinsson, The Concept of Modernism (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2018), 1.   4. Malcolm Bradbury and James McFarlane, Modernism: A Guide to European Literature 1890–1930 (London: Penguin, 1978).   5. See Susan Stanford Friedman, Planetary Modernisms: Provocations on Modernity across Time (New York: Columbia University Press, 2018).   6. See Douglas Mao and Rebecca L. Walkowitz, ‘The New Modernist Studies’, PMLA 123, no. 3 (2008): 737–48.   7. Paul K. Saint-Amour, ‘Weak Theory, Weak Modernism’, Modernism/modernity 25, no. 3 (2018): 451.   8. Ibid. 453.   9. Mao and Walkowitz, ‘The New Modernist Studies’. 10. Sean Latham and Gayle Rogers, Modernism: Evolution of an Idea (London: Bloomsbury, 2015), 16.

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14 claire warden, nicholas johnson, adrian curtin and naomi paxton 11. Jessica Berman, Modernist Commitments: Ethics, Politics and Transnational Modernism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011), 7. 12. See Peter Brook, The Open Door: Thoughts on Acting and Theatre (New York: Theatre Communications Group, 1995), 11. 13. See Shane Weller, ‘Beckett and Late Modernism’, in The New Cambridge Companion to Samuel Beckett, ed. Dirk Van Hulle (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 89–102. 14. See Anne-Florence Gillard-Estrada and Anne Besnault-Levita, eds, Beyond the Victorian/ Modernist Divide: Remapping the Turn-of-the-Century Break in Literature, Culture and the Visual Arts (New York: Routledge, 2018). 15. Kim Solga, ‘Introduction: The Impossible Modern Age’, in A Cultural History of Theatre in the Modern Age, vol. 6, ed. Kim Solga (London: Bloomsbury, 2017), 1. 16. Ibid. 3. 17. See, for example, Richard Begam and Michael Moses, eds, Modernism and Colonialism: British and Irish Literature, 1899–1939 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007). 18. Julia Hell and Andreas Schönle, eds, Ruins of Modernity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010). 19. The same is true of romanticism. See Jacques Khalip and Forest Pyle, eds, Constellations of a Contemporary Romanticism (New York: Fordham University Press, 2018). 20. David James and Urmila Seshagiri, ‘Metamodernism: Narratives and Continuity and Revolution’, PMLA 129, no. 1 (2014): 88. 21. Ibid. 88. 22. David James, Modernist Futures: Innovation and Inheritance in the Contemporary Novel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021), 15. 23. See Martin Puchner, ‘Drama and Performance: Toward a Theory of Adaptation’, Common Knowledge 17, no. 2 (2011): 292–305. 24. For a lengthier discussion of this, see Claire Warden, ‘Responses to the Special Issue on Weak Theory, Part V’, Modernism/modernity Print Plus 4, no. 2 (August 2019), https:// modernismmodernity.org/forums/posts/responses-special-issue-weak-theory-part-v (accessed 21 June 2021). 25. Martin Puchner, Stage Fright: Modernism, Anti-Theatricality, and Drama (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002). 26. Sara Blair, ‘Modernism and the Politics of Culture’, in The Cambridge Companion to Modernism, ed. Michael Levenson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 158. 27. Ibid. 158. 28. See Jean-François Lyotard, ‘Réponse à la question, qu’est-ce que le postmoderne?’, in Le Postmoderne expliqué aux enfants (Paris: Seuil, 1986), 29–33. See also Fredric Jameson, ‘Preface: Regressions of the Current Age’, in A Singular Modernity (London and New York: Verso, 2012), 1–13. 29. Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984), 79. 30. Jacky Bratton, ‘Reading the Intertheatrical, or, The Mysterious Disappearance of Susanna Centlivre’, in Women, Theatre and Performance: New Histories, New Historiographies, ed. Maggie B. Gale and Viv Gardner (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000), 7–24. 31. See EO 13933, ‘Building and Rebuilding Monuments to American Heroes’, 26 June 2020, where it is written: ‘(iv) All statues in the National Garden should be lifelike or realistic representations of the persons they depict, not abstract or modernist representations.’ See https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2020/07/08/2020-14872/building-andrebuilding-monuments-to-american-heroes (accessed 22 September 2022). The February 2020 draft executive order (never signed) called ‘Making Federal Buildings Beautiful Again’

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32.

33. 34. 35. 36.

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states: ‘where applicable Federal public buildings are built in a style other than the preferred architectural style set forth in subsection (a) [Classical or Traditional] great care and consideration must be taken to choose a beautiful design that conveys the dignity, enterprise, vigor, and stability of America’s system of self-government. Architectural designs in the Brutalist and Deconstructivist styles, and the styles derived from them, fail to satisfy these requirements and shall not be used.’ See https://architexturez.net/system/files/Draft_of_Trump_ White_House_Executive_Order_on_Federal_Buildings.pdf (accessed 22 September 2022). This formulation appears in the 1944 writings of André Breton, published in English as Arcanum 17, trans. Zack Rogow (Los Angeles: Green Integer, 2004). The passage is discussed in detail in Alain Badiou, The Century, trans. Alberto Toscano (Cambridge: Polity, 2007), 141–7. Douglas Mao, The New Modernist Studies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021), 16. See, for example, Peter Kalliney, Modernism in a Global Context (London: Bloomsbury, 2016) and Friedman, Planetary Modernisms. Saint-Amour, ‘Weak Theory, Weak Modernism’, 453. See Kate McLoughlin, ed., The Modernist Party (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2013).

Works Cited Badiou, Alain. The Century, trans. Alberto Toscano. Cambridge: Polity, 2007. Begam, Richard and Michael Moses, eds. Modernism and Colonialism: British and Irish Literature, 1899–1939. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007. Berman, Jessica. Modernist Commitments: Ethics, Politics and Transnational Modernism. New York: Columbia University Press, 2011. Blair, Sara. ‘Modernism and the Politics of Culture’. In The Cambridge Companion to Modernism, edited by Michael Levenson, 155–77. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. Bradbury, Malcolm and James McFarlane. Modernism: A Guide to European Literature 1890–1930. London: Penguin, 1978. Bratton, Jacky. ‘Reading the Intertheatrical, or, The Mysterious Disappearance of Susanna Centlivre’. In Women, Theatre and Performance: New Histories, New Historiographies, edited by Maggie B. Gale and Viv Gardner, 7–24. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000. Breton, André. Arcanum 17, trans. Zack Rogow. Los Angeles: Green Integer, 2004. Brook, Peter. The Open Door: Thoughts on Acting and Theatre. New York: Theatre Communications Group, 1995. Eysteinsson, Ástráður. The Concept of Modernism. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2018. Friedman, Susan Stanford. Planetary Modernisms: Provocations on Modernity across Time. New York: Columbia University Press, 2018. Gillard-Estrada, Anne-Florence and Anne Besnault-Levita, eds. Beyond the Victorian/Modernist Divide: Remapping the Turn-of-the-Century Break in Literature, Culture and the Visual Arts. New York: Routledge, 2018. Hell, Julia and Andreas Schönle, eds. Ruins of Modernity. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010. James, David. Modernist Futures: Innovation and Inheritance in the Contemporary Novel. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021. James, David and Urmila Seshagiri. ‘Metamodernism: Narratives and Continuity and Revolution’. PMLA 129, no. 1 (2014): 87–100. Jameson, Fredric. A Singular Modernity. London and New York: Verso, 2012.

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16 claire warden, nicholas johnson, adrian curtin and naomi paxton Kalliney, Peter. Modernism in a Global Context. London: Bloomsbury, 2016. Khalip, Jacques and Forest Pyle, eds. Constellations of a Contemporary Romanticism. New York: Fordham University Press, 2018. Latham, Sean and Gayle Rogers. Modernism: Evolution of an Idea. London: Bloomsbury, 2015. Lyotard, Jean-François. The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984. Lyotard, Jean-François. Le Postmoderne expliqué aux enfants. Paris: Seuil, 1986. McLoughlin, Kate, ed. The Modernist Party. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2013. Mao, Douglas. The New Modernist Studies. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021. Mao, Douglas and Rebecca L. Walkowitz. ‘The New Modernist Studies’. PMLA 123, no. 3 (2008): 737–48. Puchner, Martin. ‘Drama and Performance: Toward a Theory of Adaptation’. Common Knowledge 17, no. 2 (2011): 292–305. Puchner, Martin. Stage Fright: Modernism, Anti-Theatricality, and Drama. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002. Saint-Amour, Paul K. ‘Weak Theory, Weak Modernism’. Modernism/modernity 25, no. 3 (2018): 437–59. Solga, Kim, ed. A Cultural History of Theatre in the Modern Age, vol. 6. London: Bloomsbury, 2017. Warden, Claire. ‘Responses to the Special Issue on Weak Theory, Part V’. Modernism/modernity Print Plus 4, no. 2 (August 2019). https://modernismmodernity.org/forums/posts/responsesspecial-issue-weak-theory-part-v (accessed 21 June 2021). Weller, Shane. ‘Beckett and Late Modernism’. In The New Cambridge Companion to Samuel Beckett, edited by Dirk Van Hulle, 89–102. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015.

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Part I: Remembrance and Reconfiguration

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1 Introduction: Playing with the Past, Attending to the ‘Lost’ Claire Warden

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s I write the introduction to this section on remembrance and reconfiguration, I feel somewhat surrounded by memorial. During the development of this volume, we have celebrated the emergence of dada (1918), a reimagining of what language might or might not mean, and the founding of the Bauhaus (1919), which transformed architecture and design. 2022, the year we conclude the preparation of this manuscript, is modernism’s annus mirabilis, 100 years since the publication of James Joyce’s Ulysses and T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land. While these centenaries are engendering celebrations, in the public imagination at least, these years are perhaps recognised more readily as markers of a century since the horrors of the Great War. In fact, all these memorialisations are fractured and fraught. In an artistic sense, the move away from (or at least weakening of) the canon has meant these anniversaries demand a more nuanced approach, a commitment to uncovering ‘lost’ artworks and figures obscured by the domineering modernist behemoths for so long. How to commemorate the Great War remains deeply problematic; jingoism and uncritical nationalism – two trends we certainly do not need more of in the 2020s – so often creep in. Modernism was infused with the troublesome matters of remembrance and reconfiguration from its inception. Despite Ezra Pound’s determination to ‘make it new’, modernism – whether the Variety Theatre sensibility of the futurists or the harking back to ancient Greece by Isadora Duncan – is constantly playing with the past. More than this, for all its professed modernity and futurity, modernism is more regularly defined by ‘memorial culture’.1 The proximity of death, war and violent revolution infiltrates not only the modernist imagination but also the landscape with statues, sculptures and gymnasiums erected to memorialise the dead.2 Indeed, it is impossible to escape the memorialising fingerprints of modernism in our contemporary landscape, though many of these traces are defined, not by the excitement of aesthetic experimentation or scientific wonder, but by mourning and melancholia.3 Alongside the Children’s Peace Monument in Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park (Figure 1.1), for example, an image of youthful optimism for the future, stands the Hiroshima Peace Memorial itself (Figure 1.2). The former Hiroshima Prefectural Industrial Hall is a modernist building, built in 1915 and designed by the Czech architect Jan Letzel. After the atomic bomb in 1945, it was one of the few buildings to survive the epicentre and now stands as a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Reading these two memorials contiguously enables a complex memorialising amalgam

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Figure 1.1  The Children’s Peace Monument, Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park, Japan (photograph by Claire Warden, 2017).

Figure 1.2  The Hiroshima Peace Memorial, Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park, Japan (photograph by Claire Warden, 2017).

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of horror, anguish and destruction with hope, creativity and amity. It is an amalgam that is replicated so often in our remembering of modernism. To remember modernism, then, is one of the characteristics of twenty-first-century human experience whether we like it or not. And this act of remembering is never straightforward; all commemoration is (or perhaps even should be) tainted with loss. As an art form, however, theatre has a distinctive relationship with remembrance and reconfiguration because of its perpetually shifting liveness. The theatre, as Rebecca Schneider has illustrated, makes it possible not just to remember modernism (and, indeed, other pasts, namely the American Civil War) but to re-enact it in the present, to embody the past today.4 Diana Taylor points to the quintessence of performance by delineating between what she terms the ‘archive’ and the ‘repertoire’, the former as memory existing as documents and objects, the latter as an unstable ‘embodied memory’ which ‘both keeps and transforms choreographies of meaning’.5 The contributions to this section reflect this oscillating back and forth between the historical and the contemporary, mapping the continuing legacies of modernism while being aware of the need to make it new again. They ask, following Schneider, what are the remains of performance and, indeed, how performance remains. My own chapter scopes the influence of German playwright Ernst Toller over his British contemporaries and today’s stage, examining this legacy as a way of comprehending lost histories of the Great War. It focuses on Bent Architect Theatre Company’s 2018 play Women of Aktion, which imagines conversations between Toller and British theatre innovator Joan Littlewood against the backdrop of a 1935 version of Toller’s anti-war play Draw the Fires. Monica Prince and Anna Andes’s contribution discusses the 2020 Pageant of Agitating Women which, like Women of Aktion, reimagines an earlier production to comment on overlooked histories of women. Prince and Andes are particularly committed to discussing the intersectional identities of contemporary women and to celebrating women who have been ignored in typical historiographical narratives. Christopher Collins’s intervention makes complex the notion of nostalgia on the Irish stage, concluding that myth can be both restrictive and enabling. The analysis is grounded in Teaċ Daṁsa’s MÁM from 2019, a piece that brought together artists from a variety of disciplines to navigate the place of nostalgia for the individual and collective in Irish culture. Naomi Paxton reflects on the way her own collaborative practice reimagines suffragette theatre, etched on to the city landscape. The theatrical interventions she discusses enact a feminist historiography with a lineage from the early twentieth century to the present day. The aim of Carrie Preston’s chapter is to narrate the history of the first black musical Shuffle Along, unpacking its political complexities by examining the 2016 revival. It presents the perceived ‘failure’ of Shuffle Along as emblematic of the difficulty of restaging and remembering black musical performance in the US. In an interview, singer and writer Jessica Walker describes how she, sometimes inadvertently, incorporates modernist legacy into her politicised practice. As she describes the way her work memorialises and updates modernist figures and aesthetics, Walker reveals the way that this lineage might enable a political form that can contribute to complex conversations in the contemporary. Finally, Adjoa Osei contributes a manifesto which makes the case for a reappraisal of modernist artistic practice through the innovations of black women. Alongside this she makes an additional intervention in a note about the ‘b’ in ‘blackness’ that has implications beyond the modernist enquiries of this book. This note reveals, more broadly, the difficulty of terminology, lexicon and definition as history is remembered. Ultimately, all these voices enable a reimagining of the ways

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we remember, celebrate and memorialise, and, particularly, the way that the liveness of theatre might complicate the very act of remembering by compelling a contemporaneity inherent in the form. Many convolute this issue by focusing on stories or people who have been ‘lost’ to typical theatre historiography: the unremembered and, therefore, the unreconfigured. All make the case for a more active, perhaps even critical remembering, a gesture that commits to attending to the ‘lost’. In these years of centenaries when we are struggling to find a lexicon for remembrance, the chapters act as a blueprint of sorts for ways of commemorating.

Notes   1. Alice Kelly, Commemorative Modernisms: Women Writers, Death and the First World War (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2020), 2.   2. Patricia Vertinsky and Sherry McKay, Disciplining Bodies in the Gymnasium: Memory, Monument, Modernity (London: Routledge, 2004), 5–7.   3. See Tammy Clewell, Mourning, Modernism, Postmodernism (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009) and Lecia Rosenthal, Mourning Modernism: Literature, Catastrophe, and the Politics of Consolation (New York: Fordham University Press, 2011). Both these books are particularly interesting given the premise of this collection because, by necessity, they are interested in legacy and the continuation (or at least ongoing effect) of modernism’s detonations.   4. Rebecca Schneider, Performing Remains: Art and War in Times of Theatrical Reenactment (London: Routledge, 2011).  5. Diana Taylor, The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003), 19–20.

Works Cited Clewell, Tammy. Mourning, Modernism, Postmodernism. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009. Kelly, Alice. Commemorative Modernisms: Women Writers, Death and the First World War. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2020. Rosenthal, Lecia. Mourning Modernism: Literature, Catastrophe, and the Politics of Consolation. New York: Fordham University Press, 2011. Schneider, Rebecca. Performing Remains: Art and War in Times of Theatrical Reenactment. London: Routledge, 2011. Taylor, Diana. The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003. Vertinsky, Patricia and Sherry McKay. Disciplining Bodies in the Gymnasium: Memory, Monument, Modernity. London: Routledge, 2004.

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2 ‘The Right to Revolution’: Ernst Toller’s Legacy on the British Stage Claire Warden

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n 1939, on the cusp of the Second World War, W. H. Auden wrote three elegies: ‘In Memory of W. B. Yeats’, ‘In Memory of Sigmund Freud’ and ‘In Memory of Ernst Toller’. The last is a melancholic ode to the exiled German poet, playwright and activist whom Auden and his collaborator Christopher Isherwood met in 1935 in Sintra, Portugal, while writing their play The Ascent of F6. In his essay collection Exhumations, Isherwood remembered Toller as ‘beautiful, with the immediately striking, undeniable beauty of a peacock, or a great lady of the theatre [. . .] He was all that I had hoped for – more brilliant, more convincing than his books, more daring than his most epic deeds.’1 Auden’s poem presents Toller, who took his own life at the Mayflower Hotel in New York in May 1939, as one of the ‘war-horses’, an ‘example to the young’. Here Auden suggests a potential legacy for the suffering artist, a legacy that might escape from the lonely hotel room where he languished in debt, haunted by images of children wounded and scarred by the Spanish Civil War. ‘What was it, Ernst,’ Auden asks, ‘that your shadow unwittingly said?’2 This chapter takes Auden’s question as its catalyst to track what indeed it was that Toller’s shadow unwittingly said and continues to say to British theatre. Later in the poem he encourages Toller to ‘lie shadowless’, to rest and allow the next generation to take up the mantle. The shadows had haunted him and, for Auden, led to his death. And yet, the question of what Toller left behind, the silhouette he casts, stands. For Toller’s work has a fascinating yet broken legacy on the British stage. In the 1920s his plays enjoyed unrivalled popularity amongst leftist theatre companies eager to discover activist voices that were also aesthetically experimental. Falling out of popularity, Toller was rediscovered in the 1980s and 1990s, and retains an influence over twenty-first-century theatre too. In this chapter I track this historiography, claiming Toller’s combination of poetry and politics as the key reason for his appeal. He can be read as part of an influential group of German émigrés who embodied the migratory nature of modernist culture more generally. This account contextualises a recent work: Mick Martin’s 2018 Women of Aktion for Bent Architect Theatre Company. Women of Aktion reimagines a particular moment in theatre history – a 1935 version of Toller’s play Draw the Fires (Feuer aus den Kesseln) in Manchester. Martin uses the play-within-a-play trope (a structure that re-emerged in modernist art) to both discover the ‘lost women’ of German First World War history and challenge the uncritical celebration of military history in that centenary year.

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‘Brüder zum Lichte einfor’3: Tracking the Light of Toller’s Shadow through British Theatre Historiography Ernst Toller arrived in Britain in September 1933 to testify to the Legal Commission of Inquiry into the Burning of the Reichstag, a counter-trial to the Reichstag Fire Trial which the Nazi leadership opened on 21 September 1933 in Leipzig. Although he travelled extensively, for the next three years he considered London his home.4 Toller showed interest in Britain’s industrial history well before setting down roots in the 1930s with his 1922 The Machine Wreckers (Die Maschinenstürmer), a play which explores the suffering of nineteenth-century Nottinghamshire weavers.5 This play received its British premiere in 1923 by the Stage Society at the Kingsway Theatre (London), produced by Ashley Dukes (who had seen the original production of this play the previous year at the Großes Schauspielhaus in Berlin), directed by Walter Nugent Monck of the Maddermarket Theatre in Norwich and starring Herbert Marshall, later a popular stage and screen actor. Dukes had reservations about Toller’s political views (‘of the sentimental left-wing rather than the communist order’) and later said he believed the German playwright’s creative period ended on his release from prison in 1925, where he had been incarcerated because of his involvement in the short-lived Bavarian Soviet Republic of 1919. Despite these misgivings, he said of Toller ‘for a while he wrote marvellous things, and touched expressionism with poetry’.6 The Machine Wreckers was described by trade unionist and Labour MP Ness Edwards in his book The Workers’ Theatre as ‘a real workers’ drama. It depicts the class struggle, the class problem; it exposes working-class weaknesses, arouses class emotions, and endeavours to carry its audience with it to make Lud’s prophecy become a living fact.’7 It has received a number of British revivals since the Stage Society’s version. It was reinterpreted by the Goethe Institute in 1978 at the Half Moon Theatre with a ‘claustrophobic nightmare-octopus which seemed to wind its tentacles around every person in the theatre’.8 Michael Billington criticised the ‘date[d]’ expressionist style yet, nonetheless, drew attention to this ‘diabolical, entrailed, all-engulfing machine [which] will haunt one for a long time to come’.9 It was also performed at Glasgow’s Citizens Theatre in 1984 with the cast reduced to just five members wearing grey masks.10 In 1995 Katie Mitchell revived it again for the Cottesloe at the National Theatre, using Ashley Dukes’s original English translation. Marvin Carlson described this production as ‘naturalistic with expressionistic touches and bridges’.11 Mapping the historiography of The Machine Wreckers illustrates the resilience of Toller’s work in Britain. It also begins to indicate the varied approaches to his plays. These versions of The Machine Wreckers changed the play’s genre, character list and set. In Britain, it would seem from this single example, producing Toller’s plays is less about presenting an ‘authentic’ version of the original and more about inventively exploring theme, atmosphere or technique. Toller’s plays first appeared in Britain in the production seasons of little theatres, subscription-based companies and small political collectives in the early 1920s. Marxist historian Raphael Samuel declared that ‘Ernst Toller’s dramas made by far the greatest impact on the labour movement, to judge by their reception in the socialist press, and their effect was heightened by the fact that when the first translations appeared the author was still in jail for his support of the Bavarian Soviet in 1919.’12 Toller’s reputation in Britain, then, was confirmed not only by the quality of his plays but also by

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an almost romanticised version of him as imprisoned class warrior. Tracking the early engagement with his prison play Masses Man (Masse Mensch), for instance, illustrates Toller’s popularity amongst leftist political theatre groups in the 1920s. Toller began writing Masses Man in 1919 before a private production in 1920 in Nuremberg and a landmark version at the Volksbühne in Berlin the following year. It is mentioned regularly in production lists and the publications of political groups in Britain. The Plebs League (the parent organisation of the National Council of Labour Colleges) completed a play-reading of Masses Man in 1924, an event that was described as almost a ‘religious ritual [. . .] [we] had saluted our martyred dead of many a workers’ revolution’.13 In their 1925–26 season, the People’s Theatre, Newcastle upon Tyne performed it in a ‘permanent setting, changing its appearance for the different scenes by coloured lighting’.14 It was presented by numerous experimental and political companies such as the Gate Theatre (1926) and the Woolwich Labour Thespians (1930).15 From the early self-proclaimed working-class theatres until the mid-1930s, Toller’s plays were esteemed mainstays of the British left – Toller’s brief visit to Britain in December 1925, during which he assisted the work of these small, activist collectives, seemed to cement his popularity.16 As I have said elsewhere, Toller and his plays mark ‘a central connecting point for a whole range of individuals’ in 1920s/1930s Britain.17 Toller’s plays have never achieved the sort of popularity in Britain they did during the 1920s and 1930s. However, they have not entirely fallen out of the canon. As one example, take the complex British performance history of his final play The Blind Goddess (Die Blinde Göttin) which premiered in Vienna in October 1932 and was published in Austria the following year.18 The play is a dramatisation of a real murder trial in Switzerland, in which the accused’s wife had been killed apparently through the administering of arsenic. However, there was a good deal of doubt about the solidity of the case due to flawed toxicology reports and the ignored suicidal behaviours of the wife. The play, which shifts between the naturalistic and the more theatrical (for example, the use of puppets), also confronts the theme of abortion as the maid, Marie, is imprisoned for this illegal act while womanising scoundrel Max, who tells her to have the abortion (he sarcastically plays a funeral march on the mouth organ when she tells him she is pregnant), experiences no consequences.19 The Blind Goddess was first performed in Britain at the Manchester Repertory Theatre in 1935 with Toller in attendance. The Manchester Guardian reviewed the production, reflecting on its combination of the ‘realistic’ with ‘abstraction’: ‘What makes the play so impressive is this sense of blind fate, by which the story of ordinary people is lifted all the time to tragedy.’20 In 1936 a new play appeared at the Abbey Theatre in Dublin. Entitled Blind Man’s Buff, it was described as being written by ‘Ernst Toller and Denis Johnston’ though, in actuality, it simply based the opening and closing scenes on Toller’s play.21 The first British version of this play was in 1950, as far as one can tell from theatrical records, at the Theatre Royal, Bristol.22 Like so many of Toller’s plays, The Blind Goddess seemed to drop out of theatre programmes for decades before re-emerging in the 1980s with two productions: in 1981 by Red Ladder and in 1982 at the Octagon, Bolton.23 It is the former production that I wish to explore in detail, as it reveals the way that Toller’s plays have been updated and reimagined for more modern British audiences. Red Ladder began as the Agitprop Street Players in 1968 and, since then, has performed community and political work, particularly focusing on non-normative playing

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spaces and audiences.24 The flyer for their production made clear the connection between the 1930s play and the 1980s British context: ‘Toller was writing in Germany at a time when attitudes were shifting towards fascism. His play has clear messages for Britain today, where some of the same attitudes exist and are beginning to gain ground.’25 This comparison was reiterated in the programme in terms not far removed from our own in the early 2020s: ‘Through the play he [Toller] seeks to expose those forces of ignorance, prejudice and oversimplification as they affect the evaluation of evidence and character in a court of law.’26 The playtext used was a new version, based on the original Edward Crankshaw translation, written by Michelene Wandor, author of influential critical books on theatre history, namely Understudies: Theatre and Sexual Politics (1986) and PostWar British Drama: Looking Back in Gender (1987). She retained the four lead characters – Dr Farber, Anna, Marie and Max – and, in classic expressionist style, incorporated two symbolic characters (Man and Woman) to play the other roles. Following Red Ladder’s intentions as laid out in the flyer and programme, the play grapples with the issues of injustice and truth, both of which were fraught concepts in early 1980s Britain, as they are today. The production seemed to be successful, especially given its obscurity. Ian Gasse, the Red Ladder administrator, in a letter to the Goethe Institute (who had granted the company £250 to fund the production), relayed that it had been seen by 4,025 people during its tour of Yorkshire, Scotland and the West Midlands.27 While Toller has by no means achieved the popularity of Bertolt Brecht, his plays, as illustrated by the fragmented performance history of The Blind Goddess, have not been entirely forgotten. In fact, Toller’s influence stretches further than simply contributing to the production lists of leftist theatre companies. His plays have inspired British playwrights to either adopt techniques and ideas, or rework the original playtexts into entirely new pieces. While there is inevitably some speculation here, two plays that seem to particularly show similarities with Toller’s plays are Stephen Spender’s Trial of a Judge (produced by Unity Theatre in 1938) and Ewan MacColl’s The Other Animals (produced by Theatre Workshop in 1948). Both, like Masses Man, use the prison as a literal presence and a metaphor for political repression. Both are written in episodic style, again like Masses Man, clashing naturalistic and expressionist styles. And both exhibit the poetic voice of Toller’s plays.28 In many ways these plays, alongside Velona Pilcher’s The Searcher (1929), represent a small but dynamic British expressionism. Both Spender and MacColl have direct connections with Toller. The latter, as this chapter goes on to discuss, was a member of the company that performed Draw the Fires in Manchester in 1935, but he first experienced Toller, according to his recollections, while a member of the Workers’ Theatre Movement, when he rehearsed scenes from Masses Man: ‘For a fifteen-yearold romantic this was very exciting stuff indeed.’29 Spender translated Toller’s Pastor Hall in 1938, though this was by no means a straightforward process. Given the period in which it was written, the debate about whether evil could be countered through non-violent action seemed to become dated before the year was out. There were also problems with the translation itself. In a letter to the translator in January 1939, the playwright said, ‘I myself feel that because of your respect for my version, you kept in the English version a more or less German form which reads well but is perhaps a little lacking in stage effect for the actor.’30 While neither MacColl nor Spender categorically claimed Toller as an inspiration for their respective plays, the similarities in style and politics are striking.

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Toller continues to inspire twenty-first-century British playwrights too. For example, Lee Hall’s play Bollocks (2002), situated in Northern Ireland, follows the story of Peter, a soldier who suffered a horrendous injury that leaves him with damaged genitalia. It is based on Toller’s play Hinkemann (1923), a play which has a long, contentious history on the British stage, having been banned in 1934 by the Lord Chamberlain. A licence was again refused in 1947. In the mid-1930s the censor seemed particularly offended by male impotence and rejected Hinkemann because of this theme.31 Another turn-of-themillennium British play to update Toller’s work is Mark Ravenhill’s Some Explicit Polaroids (1999).32 The lead character, Nick, comes out of prison after fifteen years to find the world has entirely changed. It is a reworking of Toller’s Hoppla, We’re Alive (Hoppla, wir leben) (1927). Like Hinkemann, this play has a controversial history in Britain. In 1929 Terence Gray, the director of the innovative Festival Theatre Cambridge, submitted Hoppla, We’re Alive to the censor. The Lord Chamberlain demanded a number of cuts and edits; Gray replied, with caustic wit, ‘May I have permission in each case to substitute the following formula: Scene, sentence, passage, exclamation, question, reply (as the case may require) deleted by order of the Lord Chamberlain’s department?’33 It is interesting that Hall and Ravenhill, writing tendentious plays about contemporary society, should turn to two of Toller’s plays that have particularly fraught histories on the British stage. Toller’s words and artistic processes seem to particularly resonate in modern Britain with all its tensions and enmities. Oliver Emanuel, for example, uses a quotation from Toller – ‘Most people have no imagination. If they could imagine the sufferings of others, they would not make them suffer so’ – to describe the intention behind his 2013 radio play, The Spare Room.34 The piece confronts the responsibility of a wealthy and peaceful nation (and its citizens) to asylum seekers. It would seem that Toller’s project remains a source of inspiration for artists seeking to address some of the most difficult and pressing societal concerns in Britain. Toller’s influence over British theatre illustrates the creative impact of German émigrés in the Nazi period. The presence of these artists, thinkers and makers on British soil influenced the country’s architectural and cultural output: figures such as Oskar Kokoschka, László Moholy-Nagy (Hungarian but forced out of Germany in 1933 as a foreign citizen) and Walter Gropius. Toller is, therefore, a component of far broader modernist interests in and first-hand experiences of exile, migration and travel. In her study Cosmopolitan Style, Rebecca Walkowitz suggests ‘replacing static models of modernist exile with more flexible, dynamic models of migration, entanglement and mixup’.35 Toller’s legacy in Britain is certainly as messy as Walkowitz suggests, a genealogy littered with moments of effusive praise, occasional reworkings, problems of translation, difficulties of determining direct influence, and fractured archival evidence. Nevertheless, it can certainly be claimed that Toller has impacted the British stage, his work a model for those seeking to create aesthetically and politically challenging theatre.

‘Where’s the bloody Manchester Soviet, eh?’36 Draw the Fires (1935) and Women of Aktion (2018) Toller’s play about the Kiel Uprising, Draw the Fires, was first performed in August 1930 at the Theater am Schiffbauerdamm in Berlin.37 While there were a couple of other German productions in the early years of Nazism, Draw the Fires received more interest

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Figure 2.1  Women of Aktion (photograph by Karol Wyszynski, 2018).

overseas, in versions in Riga (1931) and Tokyo (1932).38 However, its most well-known, and well-documented, production took place in Manchester in February 1935, later moving to the Arts Theatre Club at the Cambridge Theatre, London for a single performance.39 Toller directed this production alongside Dominic Roche, the resident director of the Manchester Repertory Theatre. Like Hinkemann and Hoppla, We’re Alive (and so many other pre-1968 plays) it underwent some alterations in accordance with the censor’s review in 1934 in preparation for performance. The documentation suggests that this was mostly to reduce the number of ‘bloodys’.40 Toller conceded to these changes and, a year later, regarded the negotiations with good humour: ‘The censor was satisfied, however, when we decided to say “ruddy” nine times and once “bloody”. That will show you that the British censor can be reasoned with.’41 The play was translated by Edward Crankshaw (who later went on to be an important commentator on the Soviet Union) with music composed by Austrian musician (and long-time artistic collaborator of Bertolt Brecht) Hanns Eisler, and differed from the original version, most importantly in the cutting of the Reichstag scenes (I and III) and, rather, beginning with the Boiler Room during the Battle of Jutland.42 From here, it narrates the rebellion of the troops, and the subsequent trial and execution of the chief agitator. Summing up the politics of the piece, one of the leaders of the rebellion, Köbis, exclaims at his court martial, ‘I despise you! The lot of you! It’s you who are the enemies of Germany, not the stokers in the English ships. They’re my pals. I sweated alongside them before the war, and I shall again after the war. It’s you who are our real enemies!’43 It advocates a pan-national working-class collective and rejects the lies of jingoism which mean that

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those in authority (economically, and/or politically) can exploit those ‘beneath’ them. By 1935, some five years after the original German production and at a time when the Nazis were strengthening their rule in Germany, the situation had shifted quite considerably. Changes to the play reflected this. As one example amongst many from the fragments of script: in the Manchester copy, Toller has handwritten two potential reworkings of Köbis’s accusation to his denouncers ‘Germany will listen to us – not to you’: ‘One day Germany will listen to us and you will be silent’ and ‘One day you will be silent and Germany will speak.’44 Both these options bring a sense of the future rather than the immediate and both maintain that the voices of hatred and oppression will be silenced, not just ignored. It is not a stretch here to say that Toller was thinking about the turmoil in his homeland as he annotated the script. The Manchester performance met with celebratory reviews. The Manchester Evening News said, ‘His [Toller’s] terrific, violent intensity of pacifist purpose takes possession of the Manchester Repertory Theatre’ while the Daily Dispatch referred to it as ‘the most eventful night in the history of the theatre [by which the journalist meant the Manchester Repertory Theatre, not the theatre in general]’.45 It was clear from reviews that Toller was also delighted with the result. The Stage recalled a curtain speech where he ‘had nothing but praise both for the talented company and to the land that now gives him a home’, while the Daily Dispatch cited Toller as saying ‘This is the first production of my life with all my ideas in it.’46 Such reviews, however, brush over tensions behind the scenes. One of these tensions focused on the opening sequence. Changes to the play’s narrative structure meant that the Manchester version commenced with an image of stokers at work. Actor and stage manager Stephen Wardale described this scene as a ‘sort of ballet – impressionistic: open the door; one man shoveled coal into the fire’.47 At first these stokers were played by conventionally trained actors but Toller deemed them unsuitable. Littlewood, then working at the Manchester Rep, suggested they approach the amateur actors of the recently formed Theatre of Action, a socialist company which began life as the Red Megaphones, performing sketches on town hall steps, and later (though this was by no means a straightforward genealogy) morphed into Theatre Workshop.48 Amongst the actors was Littlewood’s collaborator (and later writer of The Other Animals) Ewan MacColl, then Jimmie Miller. MacColl described the professional actors as, ‘more familiar with a cigarette-case than with shovels, [they] appeared to be incapable of delivering lines and heaving coal at the same time’.49 In his usual inflammatory style, MacColl went on to say that the trained actors ‘positively hated us and didn’t attempt to hide their hatred. Maybe it was because we brought an unwelcome sniff of the real world into their make-believe existence, the world of unemployment, dirt and deprivation.’50 There is the suggestion that this production marked the end of Littlewood’s work with the Manchester Rep as she joined with MacColl to create socialist theatre groups. However, a closer analysis reveals this as untrue and, in fact, it is again Toller who marks an ongoing relationship between Littlewood and the Manchester Rep at least through to the end of 1935. In their version of The Blind Goddess discussed above, produced later that year, Littlewood played the maid Marie; reviews said she ‘acted excellently’.51 It is this meeting between the celebrated German playwright and the forthright young actor, director and later reformer of the British stage, Littlewood, that forms

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the basis for Women of Aktion by Mick Martin. Produced by company Bent Architect in 2018, it confirms that Toller still throws a shadow over the contemporary British stage. Martin and collaborator Jude Wright set up Bent Architect in 2006, committed to creating theatre that gives a voice to the voiceless. Martin understands his play as a ‘challenge to the military’s own theatre’ (that is, its jingoistic pomp, parades and costuming), rather like Littlewood’s own most famous play Oh What a Lovely War in 1963. Martin sees Toller’s legacy as enabling British theatre-makers to use ‘the theatre and the stage as forums for political debate’.52 Women of Aktion begins with an imagined re-enactment of the meeting between Toller and Littlewood, during which Joan at first expresses her delight and excitement at meeting, in her words, ‘a proper boots on revolutionary!!’ and her readiness to participate in Draw the Fires.53 They are in full agreement about the theme of the piece – its anti-war sentiments – and the modernist aesthetics, particularly the use of the cyclorama. Martin dramatises the problem with the actors playing the stokers that MacColl discusses above. In a tone authentic to Littlewood, Martin’s character of Joan demands ‘Proper tattooed sweaty bastards you have to drag out of the fleshpots and gutters, not sipping cocktails with Noel Coward up in the friggin’ lounge’.54 Joan dismisses these actors as ‘Nothing but cankers on the arse of a great art form!’.55 In fact, MacColl himself appears later in the play as the character Jimmie, refusing to act in the London version of the play because Toller did not give a donation to his fledgling theatre company Theatre of Action.56

Figure 2.2  Women of Aktion (photograph by Karol Wyszynski, 2018).

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However, Joan begins to challenge Toller about the lack of women in his play: ‘Who are you to say women’s wars don’t count?’57 She accuses him of turning the story of the Kiel Mutiny into ‘something out of a boy’s adventure story’.58 Martin cites ‘Toller’s blindness to women’ and, while he told me he felt they may have been a ‘bit harsh on him’, Draw the Fires certainly does bear this out.59 The four female characters in Toller’s play reflect the typical mother/whore/wife tropes so often seen in phallocentric arts and culture. There is Lucie, the barmaid. There is Köbis’s sister, whom the prison authorities bring in to compel the stoker to confess to his role in the Uprising. Köbis’s response – ‘you can’t get me by this sort of low-down trick! [. . .] Hell! Pull yourself together, Anna. You’re a gutful kid, aren’t you? [. . .] Pull yourself together and don’t meddle in this sort of thing. It’s a man’s business’ – is inflected with a certain misogyny.60 There is a brief mention of a female socialist politician and there is the mother of an executed soldier. In essence, this could be claimed as a blind spot for Toller throughout his plays: Transformation for example focuses on the single struggling male character Friedrich in keeping with German expressionism’s concern with the man and either lack of interest or darkly sexualised interest in the woman.61 Beyond Draw the Fires, Toller does show more interest in women’s experience than most expressionist playwrights, namely in Masses Man, which follows the Woman (Sonia Irene) as she, like Köbis, is tried, convicted and executed for her political activism. However, he seems to regard war as primarily a male occupation and is unable (or unwilling) to fully grasp war’s impact on the female experience. Committed to uncovering the ‘lost’ women of the Kiel Uprising, Martin combines a historiographical study of the 1935 Draw the Fires with Joan as the mouthpiece to challenge Toller’s masculinist understanding of the events, extracts from Toller’s play which act as a metatheatrical play-within-a-play, and new stories unearthed during extensive research by Corinne Painter and Ingrid Sharp (Leeds University). This project illustrates the way that the academy can collaborate with contemporary makers to reimagine the legacy of modernism in terms of both theme and form. In essence, as the academic partners say, this is an act of ‘writing women back into their own history of revolutionary engagement’.62 In their recent article, Painter and Sharp recall that ‘through the interactions between Toller and Littlewood, Women of Aktion questions Toller’s authority to define and represent the revolution, asking whose stories we tell and how people make history, both as agents and as historians’.63 Gertrud Voelcker and Martha Riedl are historical figures, unearthed by Painter and Sharp during their research. They introduce themselves to Joan as if they exist on the same temporal and metaphysical plane. In essence, enacting a typically modernist temporal trick, Martin conflates three separate time periods: 1914 in Kiel, 1936 in Manchester, and 2018 in Leeds. Joan’s way of solving this is to simply acknowledge, ‘It’s a play love, get on with it!’64 In this, Women of Aktion resembles iconic modernist texts such as Luigi Pirandello’s Six Characters in Search of an Author (1921). Gertrud and Martha are notably more deferential than Pirandello’s The Father who tells The Manager ‘We bring you a drama, sir’ but the effect is the same.65 The characters are independent beings in search of an author (Pirandello) or a director (Martin) to ‘write’ them. In both cases, this augments a general sense of metatheatricality. Pirandello begins his play with the backstage figures of the theatre; Martin begins his by asking the audience to imagine Toller’s young wife Christiane as budget does not allow for a fourth actor. While this metatheatrical device is by no means unique to modernism – the classic version of

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this is the play-within-a-play in Hamlet – it re-emerges in the early twentieth century, illustrated most memorably by Flann O’Brien’s At Swim-Two-Birds (1939). The start of this book is notably ‘meta’: ‘One beginning and one ending for a book was a thing I did not agree with. A good book may have three openings entirely dissimilar and inter-related only in the prescience of the author, or for that matter one hundred times as many endings.’66 This modernist approach to characterisation illustrates Martin’s broader commitment to maintaining a sense of modernist style in this play. He imagined the actors as ‘storytellers’ rather than actors as such, reflecting Brecht’s idea of his actors as demonstrators.67 In addition, the painted backdrop design (created by Jude Wright) and the use of lighting and shadow reflect modernist theatre-making techniques. Martin acknowledged that the company was ‘consciously employing expressionist techniques and aesthetics’ in order to tell this story.68 Women of Aktion also continues the prison emblem seen in Toller’s plays and, indeed, in many of the British plays indebted to Toller’s legacy. One of the other ‘lost’ female figures given voice in this play is Hilde Kramer. Like Gertrud and Martha, she introduces herself to Joan. Hilde actively subverts the threefold model of femininity in Draw the Fires. As neither a mother nor a nurturer, she is denoted as a prostitute because she refuses the roles granted to her by society. In another metatheatrical moment, an actor playing an actor provides Joan and Hilde with the necessary terminology: ‘“A tool of oppression” ladies and gentlemen, that’s the term Joan’s reaching for, back then it wasn’t around unfortunately, but “tool of oppression” is the phrase and right she is too.’69 After the failed Munich Revolution, Hilde (like Toller) finds herself in prison with her mother Gabriele. Hilde complains about her situation; Gabriele responds, ‘Hilde, darling we’re prisoners anyway . . . jail cell or not we’re captive in every aspect of life . . . a life sentence of conformity, femaleness, form, etiquette, of what’s proper . . .’70 The play ends as a celebration of the ‘invisible’ women who broke through the prison cells of gender and made vital, but unrecognised, contributions to the ending of the First World War. In his scrapbook for the 1935 Draw the Fires, Toller includes an altered fragment of the Manchester version of the play. Köbis says, ‘I die with a curse upon the German military State’ but Toller has crossed this out and written, ‘Long live the German Revolution!’ Added in the mid-1930s, five years after he first wrote the script and at a time when Nazism was strengthening its hold over his homeland, Toller’s redaction is defiant. In fact, it could also act as a combative tagline for Bent Architect’s production, performed some eighty years later, the Revolution living again through the previously unheard voices of the women. The Revolution is reimagined afresh as an act of dissent that transcends time, geography and political context.

Conclusion: Countering the ‘Military’s Own Theatre’ Mick Martin explained the reasons why this meeting of two of the twentieth century’s most important, and arguably overlooked or misunderstood, political theatre-makers might still have a resonance for the twenty-first century, why it might be more than just a passingly interesting footnote of British theatre historiography. The First World War, he suggests, throws up many stories that have been deliberately or inadvertently ignored. In this period (he spoke to me in 2018) when we are commemorating the end of the War, it seems particularly important to find these stories, particularly as they cut

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Figure 2.3  Women of Aktion (photograph by Karol Wyszynski, 2018).

through the fetishising of war. The Toller/Littlewood meeting provided a catalyst for an alternative rendering of the politics and experience of the First World War. He cited the way that Toller enabled a return to a more experimental style of theatre-making. With only three actors and a piece of white fabric, and the age-old demand that it all ‘fits in the back of a transit van’, Toller’s non-naturalistic theatrical style provided an answer. In addition, Martin felt that this play enabled audiences to ‘make sense of the world now through the world then’. This play, like Draw the Fires before it, acted as a challenge to the ‘military’s own theatre’, its pageantry and spectacle.71 In 1963 Littlewood would, of course, devise her own play that extended her experience with Toller and posed a similar challenge to the orthodoxy of understanding war and making theatre: Oh What a Lovely War!. Toller has cast, and continues to cast, his shadow over British theatre history. While his legacy and continued presence on the contemporary stage is fragmented and often overlooked, Toller has offered politically radical and theatrically experimental British artists blueprints and source material for nearly a century. In 1934 he wrote an article that sums up the way his shadow might continue to speak to British theatre in the future: ‘It is our job to save this spiritual freedom in a time when reason is despised and the spirit reviled, in which machinery is more prized than man, in which quantity triumphs over quality and death over the living.’72 While Toller was here prophetically imagining the late 1930s, his words have particular resonance for the contemporary stage.

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Notes   1. Christopher Isherwood, ‘The Head of a Leader’, in Exhumations (London: Shenval, 1966), 125. Isherwood describes meeting Toller later, first in London two years later and then in New York. He was struck by Toller’s earnestness as he demanded funds for the Spanish Civil War refugees (an earnestness that seems to have rather put Isherwood off) and the change in his appearance.   2. W. H. Auden, ‘In Memory of Ernst Toller’, in Collected Poems, ed. Edward Mendelson (New York: Vintage, 1991), 249–50. Auden translated the songs for Toller’s 1936 play No More Peace (Nie Wieder Friede). There was a seeming disconnect between the play, described in one review as a ‘pessimistic tract’ (Reviews and programmes for ‘No More Peace’, 1936–1938, MS498, Box 2, Folder 25, Ernst Toller Papers, Yale University), and the songs, which had rather a music hall quality to them.   3. This line is taken from a short, handwritten poem. It is in multiple copies in the Toller archive alongside a scrapbook for the 1935 Draw the Fires. I speculate that this poem was distributed to the cast and crew during the rehearsal process. It can be translated as ‘Brethen, imagine the light’ (Papers removed from the last page of scrapbook with texts of Draw the Fires, 1935, MS498, Box 1, Folder 19, Ernst Toller Papers, Yale University).   4. Richard Dove, He Was a German (London: Libris, 1990), 208.   5. See Cecil Davies, The Plays of Ernst Toller: A Revaluation (Amsterdam: Harwood, 1996), 164–210, for a more complete historiography of The Machine Wreckers.   6. Ashley Dukes, The Scene Is Changed (London: Macmillan, 1942), 77.  7. Cited in Raphael Samuel and Tom Thomas, ‘Documents and Texts from the Workers’ Theatre Movement’, History Workshop 4 (Autumn 1977): 105.  8. Davies, The Plays of Ernst Toller, 207.   9. Michael Billington, ‘The Machine Wreckers’, The Guardian, 17 November 1978, 12. 10. Davies, The Plays of Ernst Toller, 209. 11. Marvin Carlson, ‘Katie Mitchell’s “The Machine Wreckers”’, Western European Stages 7, no. 3 (Winter 1995): 57. This production led to the publication of the playtext; see Ernst Toller, The Machine Wreckers, trans. Ashley Dukes (London: Nick Hern, 1995). 12. Samuel and Thomas, ‘Documents and Texts from the Workers’ Theatre Movement’, 105. 13. Richard Dove, ‘The Place of Ernst Toller in English Socialist Theatre, 1924–1939’, German Life and Letters 38, no. 2 (January 1985): 125, 127. 14. Norman Veitch, The People’s: Being a History of the People’s Theatre, Newcastle upon Tyne, 1911–1939 (Gateshead: Northumberland Press, 1950), 74. 15. Dove, ‘The Place of Ernst Toller in English Socialist Theatre’, 129. 16. Ibid. 128. In his article, Dove supplies a comprehensive timeline of British productions of Toller’s plays in the 1920s and 1930s which ably fills in some of the inevitable gaps in my own historiography here. 17. Claire Warden, British Avant-Garde Theatre (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 14. 18. Ernst Toller, Plays One, trans. Alan Raphael Pearlman (London: Oberon, 2000), 17. 19. Davies, The Plays of Ernst Toller, 394. 20. ‘Manchester Stage and Films: The Repertory Theatre The Blind Goddess’, The Manchester Guardian, 4 June 1935, 13. 21. John Spalek, Ernst Toller and his Critics: A Bibliography (New York: Haskell, 1973), 85. 22. Archival records for this play in Britain can be found here: https://calmview.bham.ac.uk/ Record.aspx?src=CalmView.Catalog&id=XMS38%2f531&pos=2 (accessed 22 September 2022). 23. Davies, The Plays of Ernst Toller, 405.

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24. See Andrew Davies, Other Theatres: Development of Alternative and Experimental Theatre in Britain (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1987), 164–6. See also Red Ladder, ‘Our History’, http://www.redladder.co.uk/about/history/ (accessed 22 March 2021). 25. ‘The Blind Goddess’, Red Ladder Archive, Brotherton Library, University of Leeds, MS1956/3/7 (1981). 26. Ibid. 27. Ibid. 28. For more about the resonances between these plays and Toller’s work see Claire Warden, ‘The Shadows and the Rush of Light: Ewan MacColl and Expressionist Drama’, New Theatre Quarterly 23, no. 4 (November 2007): 317–25 and Alexander Feldman, ‘Modernist Martyrdoms: Spender’s Trial of a Judge and Anglo-German Verse Drama between the Wars’, Modernism/modernity 28, no. 3 (September 2021): 535–58. 29. Ewan MacColl and Howard Goorney, eds, Agit-Prop to Theatre Workshop: Political Playscripts, 1930–50 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1986), xix. 30. Letter from Toller to Spender (28 January 1939). January 1–January 31 1939, MS498, Box 1, Folder 11, Ernst Toller Papers, Yale University. For more about this translation and its difficulties see Florian Alix-Nicolaï, ‘Exile Drama: The Translation of Ernst Toller’s Pastor Hall (1939)’, Translation and Literature 24 (2015): 190–202. 31. Steve Nicholson, The Censorship of British Drama 1900–1968, Volume 2: 1933–1952 (Exeter: Exeter University Press, 2005), 69. 32. Andrew Smith, ‘Play for Today’, The Observer, 31 October 1999, https://www.theguardian. com/theobserver/1999/oct/31/life1.lifemagazine2 (accessed 16 May 2021). 33. Steve Nicholson, The Censorship of British Drama 1900–1968, Volume 1: 1900–1932 (Exeter: Exeter University Press, 2003), 174. 34. Scottish Refugee Council, ‘The Spare Room’, https://www.scottishrefugeecouncil.org.uk/ the-spare-room/ (accessed 6 April 2021). 35. Rebecca Walkowitz, Cosmopolitan Style (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006), 6. 36. In Mick Martin’s play Women of Aktion, this is Joan Littlewood’s response to meeting Ernst Toller, whom she regards, initially, as a real revolutionary having led the Bavarian Soviet Republic (Mick Martin, Women of Aktion, unpublished play, 2018, 3). With sincere thanks to Mick Martin for generously sharing this play with me and for agreeing to the interview. 37. Toller, Plays One, 17. Pearlman translates Toller’s title as Rake Out the Fires (in the German Feuer aus den Kesseln) but the more regular translation, and the one I have chosen here, is Draw the Fires. 38. Davies, The Plays of Ernst Toller, 375. 39. Ibid. 376. 40. Letter from Lord Chamberlain’s Office, 29 December 1934, Correspondence 1934–1937, MS498, Folder 1, Ernst Toller Papers, Yale University. 41. Ernst Toller, Short Remarks on European Theatre, 15 December 1926, MS498, Folder 43, Ernst Toller Papers, Yale University. In the archive, this speech is dated 1926, though this is clearly impossible given the content. It was probably dated 1936. 42. This change can be seen in the acting version: ‘Draw the Fires! Typewritten acting version in 11 scenes 1935–1936’, MS498, Folder 17, Ernst Toller Papers, Yale University. 43. ‘Draw the Fires! Typewritten acting version’, MS498, Folder 17, Ernst Toller Papers, Yale University. 44. Scrapbook with text of Draw the Fires with notes and corrections in Toller’s hand, 1935, MS498, Folder 18, Ernst Toller Papers, Yale University. This sense is extended still further in the 1938 version for the US stage which begins with projections of Adolf Hitler and bomb-making factories in Germany and includes a Chorus and a Loudspeaker voice, comparative to those used by Living Newspapers. The play is again transformed into a warning

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but also an encouragement to action (‘Draw the Fires! Typewritten acting version in 10 scenes’, MS498, Folder 20, Ernst Toller Papers, Yale University). 45. Reviews and typed excerpts from reviews of Draw the Fires 1935, MS498, Folder 22, Ernst Toller Papers, Yale University. 46. Ibid. 47. Davies, The Plays of Ernst Toller, 377. 48. Robert Leach, Theatre Workshop: Joan Littlewood and the Making of Modern British Theatre (Exeter: Exeter University Press, 2006), 29. Littlewood told Toller to change the actors when, after putting up with their giggles and ignorance, she ‘could stand it no longer’ (Joan Littlewood, Joan’s Book (London: Bloomsbury Methuen, 2016), 82). 49. MacColl and Goorney, Agit-Prop to Theatre Workshop, xxxii. 50. Ibid. xxxiii. 51. ‘Manchester Stage and Films’, The Manchester Guardian, 13. 52. Mick Martin, interview with the author, Sheffield, 4 December 2018. 53. Martin, Women of Aktion, 3. With thanks to Mick for so generously sharing this script with me. This script is now available open access: http://archive.researchdata.leeds.ac.uk/704/7/ Women_of_Aktion_Script.pdf (accessed 23 September 2022). In this chapter I use ‘Joan’ when I am referring to the character (as Martin does in his play) and ‘Littlewood’ when referring to the historical figure. Later, I use ‘MacColl’ and ‘Jimmie’ in the same way. 54. Martin, Women of Aktion, 7. 55. Ibid. 7. 56. Ibid. 50. This may well be an apocryphal story. As so often with MacColl and Littlewood’s biographies, the overlaying of historical fact and fictional story is complex. 57. Ibid. 21. 58. Ibid. 28. 59. Martin, interview. 60. ‘Draw the Fires! Typewritten acting version’, MS498, Folder 17, Ernst Toller Papers, Yale University. 61. David F. Kuhns, German Expressionist Theatre: The Actor and the Stage (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 8. 62. ‘Women of Aktion: Putting Revolutionary Women Centre Stage’, https://ahrc.ukri.org/ documents/guides/women-of-aktion-putting-revolutionary-women-centre-stage/ (accessed 11 March 2020). 63. Corinne Painter and Ingrid Sharp, ‘Women of Aktion: Performance, Gender, and the German Revolution of 1918’, Feminist German Studies 37, no. 1 (2021): 43. 64. Martin, Women of Aktion, 11. 65. Luigi Pirandello, Three Plays, trans. Edward Storer (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1934), 7. 66. Flann O’Brien, At Swim-Two-Birds (New York: Penguin (Plume), 1976), 9. 67. Martin, interview. 68. Ibid. 69. Martin, Women of Aktion, 43. 70. Ibid. 48. 71. Martin, interview. 72. Ernst Toller, ‘The Modern Writer and the Future of Europe’, The Bookman 85 (January 1934): 381.

Works Cited AHRC. ‘Women of Aktion: Putting Revolutionary Women Centre Stage’. https://ahrc.ukri.org/ documents/guides/women-of-aktion-putting-revolutionary-women-centre-stage/ (accessed 11 March 2020).

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Alix-Nicolaï, Florian. ‘Exile Drama: The Translation of Ernst Toller’s Pastor Hall (1939)’. Translation and Literature 24 (2015): 190–202. Auden, W. H. ‘In Memory of Ernst Toller’. In Collected Poems, edited by Edward Mendelson, 249–50. New York: Vintage, 1991. Billington, Michael. ‘The Machine Wreckers’. The Guardian, 17 November 1978, 12. Carlson, Marvin. ‘Katie Mitchell’s “The Machine Wreckers”’. Western European Stages 7, no. 3 (Winter 1995): 57–8. Davies, Andrew. Other Theatres: Development of Alternative and Experimental Theatre in Britain. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1987. Davies, Cecil. The Plays of Ernst Toller: A Revaluation. Amsterdam: Harwood, 1996. Dove, Richard. He Was a German. London: Libris, 1990. Dove, Richard. ‘The Place of Ernst Toller in English Socialist Theatre, 1924–1939’. German Life and Letters 38, no. 2 (January 1985): 125–37. Dukes, Ashley. The Scene Is Changed. London: Macmillan, 1942. Ernst Toller Papers, MS498. Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut, US. Feldman, Alexander. ‘Modernist Martyrdoms: Spender’s Trial of a Judge and Anglo-German Verse Drama between the Wars’. Modernism/modernity 28, no. 3 (September 2021): 535–58. Isherwood, Christopher. Exhumations. London: Shenval, 1966. Kuhns, David F. German Expressionist Theatre: The Actor and the Stage. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. Leach, Robert. Theatre Workshop: Joan Littlewood and the Making of Modern British Theatre. Exeter: Exeter University Press, 2006. Littlewood, Joan. Joan’s Book. London: Bloomsbury Methuen, 2016. MacColl, Ewan and Howard Goorney, eds. Agit-Prop to Theatre Workshop: Political Playscripts, 1930–50. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1986. ‘Manchester Stage and Films: The Repertory Theatre The Blind Goddess’. The Manchester Guardian, 4 June 1935, 13. Martin, Mick. Women of Aktion. Unpublished play, 2018. Nicholson, Steve. The Censorship of British Drama 1900–1968, Volume 1: 1900–1932. Exeter: Exeter University Press, 2003. Nicholson, Steve. The Censorship of British Drama 1900–1968, Volume 2: 1933–1952. Exeter: Exeter University Press, 2005. O’Brien, Flann. At Swim-Two-Birds. New York: Penguin (Plume), 1976. Painter, Corinne and Ingrid Sharp. ‘Women of Aktion: Performance, Gender, and the German Revolution of 1918’. Feminist German Studies 37, no. 1 (2021): 38–60. Pirandello, Luigi. Three Plays. Translated by Edward Storer. New York: E. P. Dutton, 1934. Red Ladder. ‘The Blind Goddess’. Red Ladder Archive. Brotherton Library, University of Leeds, MS1956/3/7 (1981). Red Ladder. ‘Our History’. http://www.redladder.co.uk/about/history/ (accessed 22 March 2021). Samuel, Raphael and Tom Thomas. ‘Documents and Texts from the Workers’ Theatre Movement’. History Workshop 4 (Autumn 1977): 102–42. Scottish Refugee Council. ‘The Spare Room’. https://www.scottishrefugeecouncil.org.uk/thespare-room/ (accessed 6 April 2021). Smith, Andrew. ‘Play for Today’. The Observer, 31 October 1999. https://www.theguardian. com/theobserver/1999/oct/31/life1.lifemagazine2 (accessed 16 May 2021). Spalek, John. Ernst Toller and his Critics: A Bibliography. New York: Haskell, 1973. Toller, Ernst. The Machine Wreckers. Translated by Ashley Dukes. London: Nick Hern, 1995. Toller, Ernst. ‘The Modern Writer and the Future of Europe’. The Bookman 85 (January 1934): 380–2.

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Toller, Ernst. Plays One: Transformation; Masses Man; Hoppla, We’re Alive! Translated by Alan Raphael Pearlman. London: Oberon, 2000. Veitch, Norman. The People’s: Being a History of the People’s Theatre, Newcastle upon Tyne, 1911–1939. Gateshead: Northumberland Press, 1950. Walkowitz, Rebecca. Cosmopolitan Style. New York: Columbia University Press, 2006. Warden, Claire. British Avant-Garde Theatre. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012. Warden, Claire. ‘The Shadows and the Rush of Light: Ewan MacColl and Expressionist Drama’. New Theatre Quarterly 23, no. 4 (November 2007): 317–25.

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3 Legacy, Embodiment, Activism: Pageant of Agitating Women Monica Prince and Anna Andes

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s the house lights go dark, an actor appears in a pool of light on a bare stage with only a projection screen upstage. The projection screen reads ‘Cicely Hamilton (1872–1952)’. A performer enters. Hello. My name is Cicely Hamilton. In 1909, I wrote a play in support of the British women’s suffrage movement called A Pageant of Great Women.1 At the time, there was a ridiculous argument being promulgated that women didn’t need or deserve the vote because, historically, women were of no great consequence. Rubbish, of course. The aim of my Pageant was to silence such drivel. My Pageant included forty historically significant women – including two British queens, for heaven’s sake. Screen displays: picture of Cicely Hamilton as Christian Davies. Oh, look – there’s me. In my Pageant, I played the part of Christian Davies, an Irishwoman who dressed as a man and joined the British army in 1693. Screen displays: more images from A Pageant of Great Women. Oh, yes, look – more pictures. It was something. My Pageant was narrated by the allegorical figures of Justice and Prejudice. Justice was played by a woman and Prejudice was played by a man – of course. My Pageant was performed all over England by professional actresses and amateurs. Many local communities added their own Great Women to the Pageant. I was pleased, so very pleased by its activist fervor and its ability to rally the troops to the cause of women’s suffrage. But here we are over a century later – with another generation of activist playwrights, again challenging you, the audience, to think about women and voting rights. This Agitating Pageant you are about to see has over seventy historically significant women characters – you Americans always overdo things – but I appreciate the activist spirit of what will no doubt be a very crowded stage. You will also again meet in this Agitating Pageant the figures of Justice and Prejudice, but this time Justice is performed by a woman of color while Prejudice is played by a white woman. Now, to be clear – this does not mean that there weren’t American men trying to keep women from voting – of course there were. What it does mean is that there is a great deal more to this American story. Thank you.

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Cicely Hamilton exits the stage as Native Woman enters to provide an extended and nuanced Land Acknowledgement, claiming her right to launch the American story of voting rights. Following her departure, the allegorical figures of Prejudice and Justice enter, formally beginning Pageant of Agitating Women, a two-act chronological investigation of women’s voting rights in America. Throughout, Prejudice and Justice serve as interlocutors with both the audience and onstage characters, ever-present reminders of the complicated social tension at the heart of the Agitating Women pageant. Written for a premiere performance in March of 2020 at Susquehanna University in Pennsylvania, to commemorate the centennial of the 19th Amendment to the American Constitution which ostensibly granted women the right to vote, Pageant of Agitating Women is both a celebration and an interrogation of the historical and contemporary personages involved in the now generations-long political struggle in the United States around the issue of voting rights and enfranchisement. Cicely Hamilton’s British suffrage drama A Pageant of Great Women provided us with a template for creating a multi-voiced, inclusive, political and artistic platform. Hamilton’s text offered not only a structural and performative roadmap but also an ideological counterpoint for the developing, framing and articulating of our interrogation of the American women’s suffrage movements and ongoing voting rights injustices. By granting Cicely Hamilton herself the opening Prologue, we sought to send an immediate message to the audience that Agitating Women was thematically focused upon honouring our foremothers, growing from their examples, and learning from their missteps. Intransigent American political rhetoric is steeped in ideological references to hallowed ‘forefathers’ and ‘founding fathers’. We thus declare our opposition to such patriarchal framing of our history by scripting our playwriting foremother to herself proudly ‘set the stage’, claiming her historical relevance in her own voice. In fact, all the women who parade upon the Agitating Women stage follow suit, demanding to tell their own stories in their own words. With this opening monologue we acknowledge our gratitude towards Hamilton and her text, while simultaneously noting our planned separation from its limited vision. Not revealed to the audience in the opening monologue is the fact that Cicely Hamilton’s Great Women contained a third allegorical figure, Woman.2 Great Women begins when Woman enters ‘pursued by Prejudice’ and ‘kneels at the foot of Justice’.3 This Woman, presumably white, was an ‘everywoman’, a character meant to encapsulate the feelings, thoughts, struggles and desires of all women just as Hamilton’s Prejudice was meant to represent the patriarchal, misogynistic biases of all, presumably white, men. Thus, Hamilton’s twofold woman/women versus man debate, presided over by Justice, also presumably white, established a very clear thematic path and posed a very direct thematic question. Is Woman as worthy as Man of freedom (equality)? For us, this limited thematic vision provided an invaluable ideological counterpoint for the writing of our pageant. The true, problematic, white supremacist, racist story of American women’s struggle for the right to vote absolutely could not be reduced to the simple binary of Woman versus Man with each presumed to be white. Indeed, the American story was often Woman versus Woman and, all too often, white women versus women of colour. Therefore, as the character of Hamilton notes in the Prologue, Agitating Women recasts Justice as a woman of colour and Prejudice as a white woman because ‘there is a great deal more to this American story’.

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Next, we reconfigured Hamilton’s allegorical Woman as a collective embodiment of womanhood – in the opening and closing scenes of Agitating Women she appears with Justice and Prejudice as Black Woman, White Woman, Latina Woman, AsianAmerican Woman and Native Woman. This recasting of Woman as a multi-ethnic, multi-voiced collective in turn allowed us to embrace and reframe the structural path mapped out by Hamilton’s Great Women. In Hamilton’s pageant, Woman argues her case before Justice and against Prejudice by conjuring up categories of women who, in turn, visually command sections of the pageant – The Learned Women, The Artists, The Saintly Women, The Heroic Women, The Rulers and The Warriors. Each category features multiple women briefly introduced with a few lines by Woman with notes of their accomplishments – all supporting her argument that she is worthy of freedom. In Agitating Women, the ethnically defined categories of women introduced in the opening scene provided a structure for the chronological unfolding of their pageant, with other categories of Woman added along the way, such as formerly enslaved women, abolitionist women, working-class women, wealthy women, educated women, queer women, activist women and so on. Furthermore, and most significantly, unlike the many women of Hamilton’s pageant who are spoken of but do not speak themselves, the women of our pageant tell their own stories, often with full monologues, such as those by Harriet Tubman, Sojourner Truth, Lucy Stone, Doris Stevens and Ida B. Wells.

Figure 3.1  Ida B. Wells (Diamond Gloria Marrow) in A Pageant of Agitating Women by Anna Andes and Monica Prince, Susquehanna University, USA, 2020 (photograph by Caleb Stroman).

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Figure 3.2  Fannie Lou Hammer (Malaika Olaoye as Angela Davis, Alexis Jefferson as FLH, Lynn Buck as Gloria Steinem, left to right) in A Pageant of Agitating Women by Anna Andes and Monica Prince, Susquehanna University, USA, 2020 (photograph by Caleb Stroman).

While Hamilton’s ‘great women’ were embodied images, breathing, parading statues spoken of and not speaking up, our ‘agitating women’ use their voices. In fact, in Act 1, Scene 3, Harriet Tubman storms on stage thoroughly annoyed because Prejudice and Justice presume to speak for her, declaring, ‘Excuse me. I can speak for myself.’ Agitating Women greatly expands upon the ‘one category at a time’ structure suggested by Hamilton’s text as the categories of women are woven throughout the fabric of the narrative, not relegated to just one section. They appear in monologue, duologue and ensemble scenes, including scenes that record historical moments: the Seneca Falls Convention, the Underground Railroad, the Civil War, the American Equal Rights Convention, the March on Washington DC, the picketing of the White House, the Night of Terror, the scourge of lynching, and the Civil Rights Movement. Every named woman in Agitating Women once lived and breathed – some still do. Wherever possible, Agitating Women allows women to speak in their own historically recorded words, and in the same vein, historic images of as many named women as possible are projected behind them, an idea introduced in the Prologue with images of Cicely Hamilton.4 Thus, the women of our text are in tension with their own past selves, their understanding of themselves versus history’s accounting of them, each actor’s rendering of them set against their photographic embodiments.5

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The actors for the premiere production of Agitating Women at Susquehanna University included theatre students and non-theatre students as well as members of both the non-theatre faculty and staff.6 By using the Susquehanna community to perform Agitating Women, the production decisively embraced the performative history of Hamilton’s Great Women noted in the opening monologue. The spirit, purpose and political imperative of Agitating Women sought to unearth and celebrate forgotten women (Julia A. J. Foote, to name one example), while also interrogating popular misconceptions about idealised remembered women (white supremacist Susan B. Anthony). Additionally, it provided a stage for women to perform women and speak the words of their foremothers, while simultaneously offering an opportunity for some women to learn about and own their privilege (both as characters and as actors). Agitating Women also produced a scaffold for uplifting marginalised women of the suffrage movement whose voices remain ignored, dismissed or misrepresented, especially those of Native American women. In the penultimate scene of Agitating Women, three Native Everywomen take the stage. ‘Actions have consequences,’ one says. Communities striving for equality don’t just protest. We rise up and use our power at the polls. Inaction has consequences, too. When we choose not to use the privilege that finally became a right through blood and civil disobedience, we trust others to do what is best for us without our actual consent. Think about that. Choosing not to vote is choosing to let life happen to you instead of being an active participant in it. I refuse to be cheated out of my future. As a Native woman, I have always been here. In the final scene, after Prejudice, Justice and all the other agitating women flood the stage and tell the audience to vote, the three Native Everywomen step forward. All the performers move out of their way. They stand there silent, staring at the audience. After several beats, the stage clears, leaving them alone on stage, still silent, daring the audience to forget them. To celebrate the centennial of the 19th Amendment, one must be willing to interrogate. The American women’s suffrage movement is about more than the right to vote – it is about women in public, speaking and executing control over their own bodies. Agitating Women complicates the ‘single story’ of women’s voting rights by refusing closure. As one narrative ends on stage (the passage of the 19th Amendment), another continues (institutionalised racism), and still others begin (abortion ban legislation turning women into felons who lose their voting privileges, tying voter registration to street addresses to remove Native Americans from voting rosters). Our Pageant of Agitating Women showcases the foremothers who claimed space without invitation or training and often with little formal education or material support. It disrupts the monolith of Woman, prioritises the critical roles race and privilege play in voting rights, and practises the self-consciousness of an unfinished movement. With thanks to, and critique of, Cicely Hamilton’s Pageant of Great Women, Pageant of Agitating Women complicates the traditional Pageant form, obliterating previous ignorance and demanding action from all involved. ‘Fix the world’, the playwrights implore, ‘so we can stop writing.’

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Notes   1. Cicely Hamilton wrote A Pageant of Great Women in close collaboration with Edith Craig, who staged and costumed the initial production as well as several subsequent productions.   2. Rebecca Cameron offers an analysis of the problematic homogenising caused by Hamilton’s ‘Woman’ character in her article ‘From Great Women to Top Girls: Pageants of Sisterhood in Feminist Theatre’, Comparative Drama 43, no. 2 (2009): 143–66.   3. Hamilton, ‘Pageant of Great Women’, in Sketches from the Actresses’ Franchise League, ed. Viv Gardner (Nottingham: Nottingham Drama Texts, 1985), 43.   4. Costumed by Edith Craig.   5. Costumed by Elizabeth Ennis.   6. The cast also included one man who was not allowed on stage but was positioned in a seat in the audience. He performed the part of Frederick Douglass. The cast also included gender-non-binary performers.

Works Cited Cameron, Rebecca. ‘From Great Women to Top Girls: Pageants of Sisterhood in Feminist Theatre’. Comparative Drama 43, no. 2 (2009): 143–66. Gardner, Viv, ed. Sketches from the Actresses’ Franchise League. Nottingham: Nottingham Drama Texts, 1985.

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4 Modernist Nostalgia and Contemporary Irish Dance Christopher Collins

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ostalgia is a longing for the past that emerges at a time of unprecedented and uncomfortable change. Nostalgia haunts modernisms as a continual reminder of the importance of reflecting on the past when pursuing the new, which is why Stan Smith has argued that ‘modernism is a retrospective artefact, a movement constituted backwards’.1 Accordingly, modernist nostalgia is an act of remembrance that denies forgetting, reconfiguring the past in the present to reflect on the pleasures and pains of modernity. Modernist nostalgia provides unique perspectives on the contemporaneity of the past when anticipating the future and, as Tammy Clewell points out, ‘nostalgia offers a crucial vantage point from which to assess the embeddedness of modernism in myriad political contestations of the period’.2 My concern in this chapter is to examine the role and function of modernist nostalgia in twenty-first-century Irish dance to demonstrate how modernism is embedded in contemporary cultural conditions in Ireland. Claire Warden points out that modernisms are ‘fruitfully disquieted by the embodied, ephemeral art of dance’3 and to demonstrate this I will focus on MÁM, a contemporary Irish dance performance that premiered at the O’Reilly Theatre in Dublin, Ireland in September 2019. However, while my focus is on MÁM, my larger consideration in this chapter is to theorise the contemporary performance of modernist nostalgia in general, thereby considering the role and function of modernist nostalgia on an individual and collective level in contemporary Irish culture.

Tradition, Nostalgia and Mimesis: Teaċ Daṁsa’s MÁM MÁM was the result of eight weeks of improvisation in a community hall in the townland of Feothanach in the Corac Dhuibhne gaeltacht (district/districts in which the Irish language is the primary language) in west County Kerry, Ireland. Here, Michael Keegan-Dolan, in collaboration with his company Teaċ Daṁsa, traditional Irish musician Cormac Begley, and s t a r g a z e (a European orchestral collective of classical contemporary musicians), created MÁM, a non-narrative Irish dance performance that reflected on the role and function of nostalgia for traditional Irishness in contemporary Irish culture. Traditional Irish culture was deeply embedded and embodied in MÁM. ‘Teaċ Daṁsa’ is the old Irish for teach damsha (a house of dance), and the artistic direction of the company, founded in 2016, is to ‘forge deeper connections with traditions, language and the music of Ireland’.4 ‘Mám’ is an Irish language phrase in the gaolainn dialect which can mean an obligation or a handful of goodies but, as writer

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Manchán Magan wrote in his programme note, ‘mám’ commonly refers to a mountain pass. As Magan observes, mám connotes ‘both an escape route and an accessible entranceway, but can also be a place of danger, with ferocious funnelled winds and risk of exposure to the elements’.5 From this perspective, the name of the performance was an index for the obligations, possibilities and pitfalls of traditional Irishness in contemporary Ireland. Certainly, a salient theme in Keegan-Dolan’s choreography is a reconsideration of traditional Irishness: look at the Irish character, which is anarchic and wild and expressive, and at our writing and our music, and then look at our dance. I’d put my life on the line and say we for sure didn’t dance with our hands by our sides.6 For modernists like T. S. Eliot, tradition was not an orthodoxy to be followed but, rather, something to be experimented with. ‘If the only form of tradition, of handing down, consisted in following the ways of the immediate generation before us in a blind or timid adherence to its successes, “tradition” should positively be discouraged,’ Eliot wrote.7 Similarly, in MÁM traditional Irishness was under constant experiment. Throughout MÁM gesture and movement bearing the mimetic legacies and influences of traditional Irish set and céilí dancing were frequently complicated by the complete rejection of mimesis as the animated bodies of twelve international performers reached, raved, spun, shuffled and headbanged in a cacophonous multiplicity. Out of the small community hall in Feothanach a transnational modernist performance emerged that connected the local to the global: ‘I wanted to make a piece about meeting or more specifically what happens when different energies, traditions and personalities meet,’ Keegan-Dolan commented in an interview when MÁM toured to the Perth Festival in Australia in 2020.8 The emphasis on the meetings of traditions is important. In the film The Dance (directed by Pat Collins), which documented the rehearsal process, Keegan-Dolan repeatedly emphasised the importance of the freedom of exploration in the rehearsal room, which would be conducive towards a meeting of traditions.9 In so doing, tradition was reflected on as something that was at once profoundly enabling and restrictive. Throughout the performance the traditional Irish music played on Cormac Begley’s concertina was counterpointed and interrupted by the classical contemporary music performed by the seven musicians from the s t a r g a z e collective, not to mention the unexpected shrieks, howls, claps and slaps made by the performers who orchestrated the body as a percussion instrument. Writing for The Guardian after a performance at Sadlers Wells in London, Lyndsey Winship highlighted that MÁM ‘effectively plays out a story of modernity intruding on traditional life’.10 It was with significance that MÁM continually returned to reflections on traditional Irishness not just in dance and music, but also in traditional events in contemporary Irish culture: communions, weddings, funerals and wakes. The representation of these events might have begun with carefully choregraphed behaviour, but before long the stage was in chaos and, as a result, non-mimesis removed any coherent narrative from the performance. With each rejection of traditional Irishness, subjectivity became increasingly more fractured, and any stable reading of character based on spatial relationships or causal connections was radically deconstructed. In this way, choreography and music in MÁM mixed the mimetic and the traditional with the non-mimetic and the modernist as the performance dramatically shifted from structure to anti-structure. Yet,

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throughout the performance there was a continual return to the structuring principles of mimesis and traditional Irish culture, which I understand to be a hybrid imitation and representation of Irish language, music and dance as well as events that hold significant cultural significance in Irish society. However, mimesis of traditional culture could only be tolerated for a short while before movement embraced non-mimesis, which I understand to be frenzied and frenetic movement and music devoid of an imitation or representation of traditional Irish culture. Here, two traditions were meeting: the mimetic and the non-mimetic, or the traditional and the modern. The continual longing for, return to, and subsequent rejection of traditional Irishness in MÁM encapsulates the quintessence of nostalgia: moving on without ever letting go. The fluctuations between mimesis and non-mimesis in MÁM are integral to understanding MÁM as a modernist performance. Hans-Thies Lehmann reminds us that ‘the word mimeisthai originally meant “to represent through dance”, not to “imitate”’.11 MÁM used both mimesis and non-mimesis to represent, through dance, music and cultural events, what it means to have a nostalgic longing for tradition. Here, the emphasis on representation as opposed to imitation is important because it foregrounds the modernist sensibility that troubles and complicates the ability of any aesthetic to imitate ways of knowing the world. Following Aristotle’s consideration of mimesis, Matthew Potolsky points out that ‘mimetic artworks appeal only to our conventional beliefs about reality’.12 Seen from this perspective, MÁM’s modernist nostalgia doesn’t just question the capabilities of art to imitate traditional Irishness, it also calls into question the ways in which nostalgia distorts our very understanding of traditional Irishness in the contemporary moment where ‘all that was once directly lived has become mere representation’, as Guy Debord reminds us.13 According to the logic of modernist nostalgia in MÁM, it is not entirely clear just what a faithful, mimetic representation of traditional Irishness actually looks or feels like any more precisely because of the continuous descent into the chaos of non-mimesis. Yet, as Jacques Rancière has argued, ‘mimesis is not resemblance understood as the relationship between a copy and model. It is a way of making resemblances function within a set of relations between ways of making, modes of speech, forms of visibility, and protocols of intelligibility.’14 Following Rancière, MÁM demonstrated that mimesis is always carefully constructed and edited, just like nostalgia. As I will go on to explain, the reconfiguration of a mimetic representation of traditional Irishness is precisely the goal of modernist nostalgia in MÁM. In theorising what it means to perform modernist nostalgia, I will argue that MÁM created an unresolvable dialectic between tradition and modernity and culture and commerce. Here, the emphasis on culture and commerce is important. John Xiros Cooper has argued that ‘modernism, to put it bluntly, is, and always has been, the culture of capitalism’.15 Following Cooper, I am interested in the ways in which a nostalgia for traditional Irishness in the face of an ever-encroaching modernity demonstrates just how embedded Irish modernism as a culture of capitalism has become in contemporary Ireland. Traditional Irishness has become the very thing that modernism continually reacts to: mass culture. The realisation that traditional Irishness has become a commodity of mass culture poses interesting questions on the role and function of nostalgia in Irish modernisms. As Andreas Huyssen has made clear, the so-called ‘great divide’ between modernisms and mass culture is far more complicated and nuanced than a simple binary opposition.16 Examining modernist nostalgia in contemporary Irish dance exposes these complications and nuances, precisely because modernist

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nostalgia in MÁM mirrors mass culture in contemporary Ireland. Both onstage and offstage the nostalgic remembrance of traditional culture allows the past to be reconfigured in the present as something that paradoxically causes both an anxiety over the persistence of an outmoded culture that continually lingers, and an excitement for a new future that will shape the commercial consumption of culture. Such an emotional paradox is quintessentially modernist and, as Laura Frost has argued, ‘modernists disavow but nevertheless engage with the pleasures they otherwise reject’.17 Modernist nostalgia, then, should be thought of as something that renders and reconfigures the past as something that is painfully pleasurable. From this perspective, not only does nostalgia reveal the modernist tension between culture and commerce, it also reconciles and releases these tensions as it proceeds to explain that the modernist impulse to consume new culture is inextricably bound up with nostalgic reactions of pain and pleasure. Consequently, throughout I will argue that MÁM – in a typically modernist way – held a self-reflexive awareness of its complicity in and resistance to the totality of the Irish cultural industry in which traditional Irishness summons the pain and pleasure of nostalgia.

Commodified Authenticity and Irish Modernisms in Context European modernisms emerged as a crisis of modernity in which tradition was regarded with atavistic suspicion. However, as Terry Eagleton has argued, Irish modernisms have a different relationship to tradition than those held by other European modernisms because of Ireland’s insertion into a colonial, capitalist modernity which meant that the country had ‘not leapt at a bound from tradition to modernity’.18 Under colonialism, traditional Irishness punctured and pluralised modernity in Ireland because it was a continual reminder of an alternative temporality that did not harmonise with British colonialism. Reflecting on the emergence of Irish modernisms, Eagleton has argued that modernism springs from the estranging impact of modernizing forces on a still deeply traditionalist order, in a politically unstable context which opens up social hope as well as spiritual anxiety. Traditional culture provides modernism with an adversary, but also lends it some of the terms in which to inflect itself.19 As Eagleton has argued, Irish modernisms can be understood in relation to Karl Marx’s understanding of modernity as rapid and uneven development. In turn, this leads to Irish modernisms’ ruptured representation because a traditional culture has been arrested and accelerated into modernity. This explanation for the emergence of Irish modernisms in an unstable political, social and economic climate of the early twentieth century has made an uncanny reappearance in Ireland in the first two decades of the twenty-first century. Once again, traditional Irishness is being used to reflect on rapid and uneven development. Ireland was hit hard by the global economic downturn of 2007 to the extent that it was forced to relinquish its economic sovereignty by accepting a €440 billion EU bailout in 2008. The years before the economic recession were known as the years of the Celtic Tiger economy.20 The popular perception of the years of the Tiger economy is a culture of greed, excess and a radically uneven distribution of wealth. While there

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is truth in this perception, the cultural picture is more complicated. During the Tiger years there was a sustained growth in Irish-language schools and the establishment of a national Irish-language television channel and an urban-based Irish-language radio station, as well as the creation of degree courses in Irish at institutions of higher education. As Peadar Kirby, Luke Gibbons and Michael Cronin have argued, this should be seen as an ‘expression of the need in a society to source elements of a linguistic and cultural past to situate a people in the present, a need that has not disappeared with the radical economic changes in Irish society’.21 In his programme note for MÁM, Magan argued that the performance should be considered as a ‘musical and choreographic exploration of the spiritual and cultural powers that are emerging once again’.22 Magan’s index to the reawakening of spiritual and cultural powers is important. What has inevitably accompanied the resurgence in the Irish language and traditional culture is a nostalgic commodification of traditional Irish culture. In 2013, and at the height of austerity, the Irish government decided to sponsor The Gathering. Lasting for the entirety of 2013 and generating approximately €170 million in revenue, The Gathering invited the diaspora to gather both in Ireland and abroad for the purpose of cultural tourism. Foregrounding traditional Irish music and dance, Tourism Ireland marketed The Gathering with the aura of nostalgia, as ‘a chance for a people and its country to relive a glorious past and look forward to a vibrant future’.23 Also in 2013, the now annual festival of Turkfest was first held on the island of Inishturk off the west coast of County Mayo. Usually held on the first weekend in July, Turkfest attracts 200 cultural tourists who consume traditional cultural skills that range from fishing and cooking to Gaelic football and stargazing. Unlike The Gathering, in which a nostalgia for traditional Irishness was experienced vicariously through observing performance, Turkfest immerses consumers into a cultural industry of performative nostalgia. Seen together, The Gathering and Turkfest embody what Svetlana Boym has termed restorative nostalgia, that is, a nostalgia that looks to achieve a ‘transhistorical reconstruction of the lost home’ that attempts to protect ‘the absolute truth’.24 Furthermore, in both festivals nostalgia is instrumental in creating traditional Irishness as the commodified authentic of modernism. As Elizabeth Outka has argued, the commodified authentic provides a model for understanding some of the contradictions of modernism as inherent to modernism. It is not simply that modernists have contradictory impulses toward tradition and originality, toward the past and entirely new futures, toward commerce and the dream of a cultural space outside the marketplace; it is that modernism itself is about the vacillation among these various contradictions, its definition arising as much from this movement as from the extremes themselves.25 To think of traditional Irishness as the commodified authentic of modernism is to acknowledge the work of nostalgia in deliberately constructing and refashioning the past in the present as something that performs authenticity through mimesis. From this perspective, the performance of modernist nostalgia in contemporary Ireland can be interpreted as a performance of a complicated, mimetic construction of traditional Irishness at a time of uncomfortable post-recessionary change. Considering both festivals as mimetic performances of the commodified authentic demonstrates that restorative nostalgia is unable to protect an absolute truth because that truth is

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an artifice that is deliberately desired and constructed. As Rancière reminds us, mimesis ‘was the principle not of resemblance, but of a certain codification and distribution of resemblances’.26 In post-recessionary Ireland nostalgia for traditional culture inflects the pursuit of modernity as both a resistance to and an acceptance of a mass cultural industry. For Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, the cultural industry is a commercialisation of culture that ‘can deal with consumers’ needs, producing them, controlling them, disciplining them’.27 The consequence of which is that people feel compelled to participate in the cultural industry: ‘everyone must show that he wholly identifies himself with the power which is belaboring [sic] him.’28 Central to Adorno and Horkheimer’s theorisation of the cultural industry is that, due to the conspicuous consumption of culture, the use value of culture is replaced by the exchange value of culture. That is, capitalism turns traditional Irishness into a commodity form that has an exchange value. No longer does traditional culture have an autonomous use value. Rather, traditional Irishness is something that has to be consumed as mass culture, achieving a high exchange value in the marketplace of modernity. Reading these festivals through the lens of nostalgia affords a modernist consideration of the repeated return to traditional Irishness. Here, the festivalisation of traditional Irishness becomes symbolic of a commodified authenticity of the Irish cultural industry. As Outka has argued, the paradoxical desires that were intrinsic to the commodified authentic would become intrinsic to modernism: both nostalgia for an authentic commercial-free past, and the desire for an authentically new future, one not derived from outmoded traditions; both a dream of exclusivity and a select audience and at the same time a desire for ready accessibility and a wide market [. . .] one of the reasons that modernism became so notoriously difficult to define is that, like the commodified authentic, it encompasses all these contradictions.29 The paradox of a performed, commodified authenticity in festivals like The Gathering and Turkfest lies in the fact that tradition was artificially presented as the modern through mimetic representation. Here, nostalgia is able to reveal and reconcile the modernist tension between culture and commerce causing both pain and pleasure. As I will go on to explain, MÁM’s performance of modernist nostalgia can be viewed as a critique of this paradox. Yet, it is also worth pointing out that this paradox is identifiable in the emergence of Irish modernism in the theatre. Seen in the historical context of modernisms in Irish theatre, MÁM holds a legacy that extends back to the dance plays of W. B. Yeats and, in particular, his collaboration with performer and choreographer Michio Ito in At the Hawk’s Well (1916). In this dance play, Yeats explored ancient Irish myth through experimental dance, masks and ritualistic soundscapes, all of which were inspired by Japanese Noh theatre. With Ito playing the Guardian of the Well, the performance placed considerable emphasis on the moving body to create a new aesthetic out of traditional Irishness. In so doing, Yeats and Ito broadened the representation of Ireland and Irishness in performance, shattering the dominant frame of realism, and blending the spoken word with the dancing body. After the first (dress rehearsal) performance to an exclusive modernist coterie that included T. S. Eliot, Yeats excitedly wrote to his long-time friend and colleague Lady Augusta Gregory, telling her that ‘the form is a discovery and the dancing

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and masks wonderful’.30 Transnational modernist nostalgia had succeeded in blending ancient Irish myth and ancient Japanese theatre to create a radically new aesthetic of commodified authenticity. Just like The Gathering and Turkfest, the performance stood in paradoxical opposition to the mass culture of modernity in that the old was being consumed as the new. Viewed together, what The Gathering, Turkfest and At the Hawk’s Well all have in common is the search for traditional Irishness as the commodified authentic by means of performance. All three events are linked by performance in which the tradition masquerades as the new. As Outka points out, ‘the contradiction implicit in performing authenticity is the very contradiction that had to be upheld. Only in performance were the possibilities of the commodified authentic released, and only in action were its paradoxes sustained.’31 That is, consumers of all three events were made aware that they were consuming the commodified authentic of a constructed traditional Irishness. To the consumer this matters not, as long as the new is relentlessly pursued. MÁM can also be seen as a performance of the commodified authentic. However, MÁM’s performance of the commodified authentic exposed the paradoxical search for authenticity that nostalgia facilitates through a representation of the cyclical failure to learn from history. Elegiac longing, incessant repetition and certain failure, represented in MÁM’s fluctuations between mimesis and non-mimesis, can be read as an Irish modernist anxiety over the cyclicality of history. For James Joyce Irish history was, as Stephen Dedalus puts it in Ulysses, ‘a nightmare from which I am trying to awake’.32 Vincent J. Cheng points out that ‘to describe history in this way implies a complex relationship between the past, trauma, suffering, sleep, waking, forgetting, memory, amnesia, and repression’.33 These same complexities can be identified in the exposition of MÁM, which began like a nightmare. MÁM began with a girl in a white communion dress waking amidst low-hanging clouds of perfumed smoke to face a concertina player wearing the mask of a black ram. The mask is revealed to show Begley, and sitting in a row behind him are the twelve performers dressed in black, wearing black paper bags as balaclavas. The performers begin a ritualised slapping of the knees and clicking of the fingers. The syncopated clicks and slaps rise to a frightening crescendo before Begley begins playing traditional Irish dance music on his concertina. Begley’s music soon becomes a spell for the performers. The paper balaclavas are removed, and performers become hypnotiser and hypnotised with highly regulated mimetic movements of traditional Irish dance as the rhythm of the music becomes all-consuming. Fear subsides. The traditional and the familiar emerge. The girl stands in the middle of the stage watching with amazement and confusion as the ensemble jig, reel and glide around her. Yet, the rhythm inevitably begins to break down. Mimesis of traditional Irishness fails and the performance of highly individualised non-mimetic movement begins as traditional Irish dancing and music are abandoned. Throughout MÁM the cycle from mimesis to non-mimesis was continually repeated and it became clear that nostalgic longing for traditional Irishness created a void from which no progress was made. Even though the bodies were shaken out of routine behaviour, the nightmare of history continued. What Joyce understood, and what MÁM also demonstrated, is that nostalgia only leads to a void and the cyclical failure of history. In MÁM the aesthetic of mimesis that is so essential to the commodified authentic was rendered a false spectacle, confirming Jean Baudrillard’s point that ‘when the real is no longer what it was, nostalgia assumes its full meaning’.34 Yet,

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as Rancière has demonstrated, ‘the anti-mimetic revolution never signified renunciation of resemblance’ and, indeed, as Adorno also argued, it is through fragmented non-communication that the modernist artwork is able to communicate effectively.35 Through failure and fragmented form, MÁM provided an effective communication on how modernist nostalgia will always reconstruct and reconfigure the modern as an uncanny repetition of history to be consumed when faced with encroaching absence at a time of uncomfortable change. Indeed, this is why the performances of the commodified authentic in festivals like The Gathering and Turkfest are so marketable because, as Horkheimer and Adorno have argued, the cultural industry is willingly ignorant of history.

Pain and Pleasure While nostalgia is often thought of as a psychological affliction caused by modernity, it was originally thought of as an embodied algia (pain) just as much as a psychological one. In 1688 Johannes Hofer first recorded the symptoms of nostalgia in his Dissertatio Medica de Nostalgia as irregular heartbeat, loss of thirst and appetite, fever and general physical weakness. Furthermore, Hofer thought that nostalgia was a highly contagious disease that had the ability to afflict large numbers of people very quickly. Nostalgia as contagion was reflected in MÁM. A salient dramaturgy in MÁM was the effects of kinetic impulses that sparked ensemble movement. If one performer interrupted a mimetic representation of traditional Irish dance, the impulse to explore non-mimetic movement would quickly spread throughout the entire ensemble. In the void between mimesis and non-mimesis lurked the affect of nostalgia for traditional culture, which proceeded to rapidly spread like a contagion that had an effect of a return to mimesis. Exhausted bodies longed to go back to the routine and rhythm of traditional culture because of its presupposed restorative effects. Neither mimesis nor non-mimesis led to solace or pleasure. Accordingly, in MÁM the commodified authenticity of traditional Irishness was rendered an unsustainable and unsafe construct that offered both pain and pleasure. For example, in one scene in MÁM, a performer sat in a wooden chair (the kind of chair you might find in a chapel or community hall) observing traditional Irish dancing. Soon, his body began convulsing and tripping out to the beat of Begley’s traditional Irish music. Yet, before too long the stage was in chaos as chairs were picked up and thrown and spun in the air in what The Stage characterised as ‘a basic primal need to express physically what cannot be conveyed verbally’.36 With each subsequent encountering of traditional Irishness the discipline and expectation of traditional culture eventually became too much for the bodies to bear as members of the company deliberately forgot and failed traditional rhythm and routine movement as others abandoned rhythm and spiralled into excess. Moments such as this were exemplary of how MÁM embodied the aesthetic strategies of modernism by exposing traditional Irishness as a commodified authenticity of the Irish cultural industry that, when consumed, created the modernist affect of pleasure and anxiety. As Laura Frost explains, ‘the fundamental goal of modernism is the redefinition of pleasure: specifically, exposing easily achieved and primarily somatic pleasure as facile, hollow, and false.’37 In MÁM, the pleasure associated with consuming the commodified authentic of traditional Irishness was redefined as something that was, following Frost, facile, hollow and false. MÁM demonstrated that the consumption of nostalgia

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in Irish modernisms is never cheerful and always complicated. While the commodified authentic that modernist nostalgia creates will always masquerade as new pleasure it is, in fact, just a painful reconsideration of the past in the present that barely belies the anxieties and insecurities of modernity for those who create and consume it. The paradox of modernist nostalgia is not simply that the old is commodified and consumed as a new authenticity, but also that pain is experienced as pleasure. Throughout MÁM the nostalgic return to traditional culture only encouraged the violent, the instinctual and the repressed. From this perspective, non-mimesis in MÁM was a denial of any rose-tinted nostalgia for the Irish stereotype of dancing at the crossroads. Rather, MÁM’s modernist nostalgia summoned a critical reflection on Ireland’s traditional culture of corporeal repression as bodies were released and renewed. The emphasis on anarchic, wild and expressive movement and gesture in MÁM complicated any romantic nostalgia for the disciplined body. In 1935 the Irish political party Fianna Fáil introduced the Public Dance Halls Act, a social legislation that meant that all dances had to have public supervision; any dances in houses or at crossroads were deemed illegal and were interrupted by the police or the priest. This public legislation should be seen in context with a historical disciplining of the body in Irish society and culture by both State and the Catholic Church, creating what Aoife McGrath considers to be a ‘perpetuation of a culture of shame and taboo surrounding corporeal issues’.38 MÁM’s performance of modernist nostalgia, however, looked back far beyond 1935 to a time in which bodies moved more instinctually. Throughout the performance below-the-knee black dresses, black suits and ties, and heavy shoes were symbolically thrown off in what The Stage characterised as moments of ‘mass hysteria in response to ecstasy or fear’.39 If Irish modernisms can be seen as a reflection on the cyclicality and failure of history, then MÁM rewrote the historical shame and taboo associated with the body in contemporary Irish society and culture. All that was repressed re-emerged to shatter the commodified authenticity of traditional Irishness. Such emphasis on instinctual, non-mimetic movement to cleanse and restore both theatre and society placed MÁM in dialogue with the theatre of Antonin Artaud who, in turn, also looked towards the modernist primitivism of another Irish modernist, John Millington Synge, to create his theatre of cruelty.

Contemporary Irish Theatres of Cruelty On 6 August 1937 a penniless Artaud wrote to Art O’Briain, Minister Plenipotentiary at the Irish Legation in Paris, asking for research assistance for his proposed trip to Ireland: Je cherche depuis quelques années les sources d’une très antique tradition. Je les ai cherchées au Mexique, et la Nouvelle Revue Française du 1er août dernier vient de publier une relation de mon Voyage au Pays des Tarahumaras. Mais ces sources chez les hommes sont mortes là-bas. J’ai conçu le projet de retrouver en Irlande les sources vivantes, et vivantes chez les hommes vivants de cette très antique tradition dans sa forme occidentale. Ce n’est pas un projet littéraire, ce n’est pas un projet de musée, ce n’est pas un projet de savant . . . . . J’ai besoin pour cela d’atteindre le pays où a vécu John Millington Synge. D’être reçu par des gens, par les gens de làbas comme l’un d’entre eux.

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christopher collins (For a few years now I have been looking for the sources of an ancient tradition. I searched for them in Mexico, and the Nouvelle Revue Française from the 1st of August has just published a report on my travels to the land of the Tarahumaras. But the sources of these men are dead. I came up with a project to find in Ireland living sources, and living men living from this very ancient tradition in its western form. This is not a literary project, this is not a museum project, this is not a scholar’s project . . . . . For that I need to reach the country where John Millington Synge lived. To be received by people, by the people over there, like one of them.)40

O’Briain provided Artaud with a letter of introduction and on 14 August Artaud docked in Cobh, County Cork. He was convinced that he was in possession of St Patrick’s staff which needed to be returned to Ireland. Following his conviction, Artaud travelled across the country to the Aran Islands via Galway. In 1907 Synge had published his account of life on the Aran Islands, in which he concluded that life on one of the islands, Inis Meáin (Inishmaan), was ‘perhaps the most primitive that is left in Europe’.41 While on Inis Meáin Synge was repeatedly struck by the Aran Islanders’ steadfast belief in pre-Christian residual customs and beliefs in an age of rapid modernisation at the dawn of the twentieth century. This is what Artaud had been searching for: people living with ancient traditions in their Western form. While on the Aran Islands Artaud also became increasingly obsessed with pre-Christian residual culture, sending obscure magic spells back to André Breton in Paris. Upon leaving the Aran Islands and suffering from drug withdrawals, Artaud was imprisoned in Dublin’s Mountjoy Prison for vagrancy, from which he was deported back to France. Ireland did not leave Artaud’s thoughts, however, and his experience of what he perceived to be the existence of the primitive in the West would inform his emphasis on the spontaneity of the undisciplined body and the violent and fragmented gesture in performance. In Artaud’s theatre, the non-mimetic moving body is a reflection on primitivism, or a nostalgia for the pre-modern. For Artaud, primitivism summons the pre-modern past, creating a cruel cocktail of painful pleasure. There is nothing pleasant about nostalgia in Artaud’s theatre, in which the non-mimetic moving body exposes what he characterised as ‘a crucible of fire and real meat where, anatomically by stampings of bones, limbs, and syllables, bodies are remade’.42 The same demands placed on the non-mimetic moving body were continually present in MÁM, to the extent that the performance could be confused as contemporary Irish theatre of cruelty. ‘Using breathing’s hieroglyphics’, Artaud wrote, would ‘allow audiences to identify with the show breath by breath and beat by beat’.43 In a scene that followed the exposition of MÁM, Artaud’s emphasis on ritualistic communication to include shouts, groans and shrieks was mirrored in the twelve performers’ repetitive panting that slowly built to a harrowing crescendo. ‘In the anguished, catastrophic times we live in, we feel an urgent need for theatre that is not overshadowed by events, but arouses deep echoes within us and predominates over our unsettled period,’ Artaud wrote.44 In many respects, MÁM was also what Artaud had been searching for: a theatre of primitivism that would achieve the shock of the new by confronting the spectator with ancient traditions and hieroglyphic movements, gestures and sounds. Yet, Artaud did not want to commodify the authentic, but quite the opposite. He wanted to obliterate the commodified authentic by demonstrating that nostalgia for the past was not a luxurious bourgeois pastime and that the primitive stood in direct opposition to culture and commerce. For Artaud,

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modernist nostalgia necessitated a descent into darkness to summon an experience with all that had been repressed as painful pleasure. Similarly, primitivism in MÁM was not framed as a romantic, nostalgic antidote to the pressures of bourgeois modernity, but rather the commodified authentic summoned the painful pleasure of primitivism. In this performance nostalgia for traditional Irishness reflected a radiant darkness of the ensemble’s collective subconscious. From this perspective, non-mimesis in MÁM can be seen as a reflection on modernist primitivism that rejects any nostalgic desire to return to a sanitised traditional Irishness. In modernist primitivism, as Sinéad Garrigan Mattar explains, what is idealized is not what is most pure, noble and innately mannered, but what is most brutal, sexual, and contrary. Exploration of the subconscious of both the individual and society may show that these currents permeate civilization at some profound and inescapable level (and therefore are also implicitly ‘same’), but the primitive is conceived as alien to the civilized mind defining it, and therefore as being potentially threatening and profoundly enabling.45 Staging modernist primitivism in MÁM was an index towards Ireland’s failure to learn from a history of oppression and repression. While it was unsettling and disturbing to watch, it demonstrated that a modernist nostalgia has the ability to look past and not to mourn what has been lost or left behind, but, rather, to reveal that what has been repressed and forgotten has the potential to be both painful and pleasurable, both threatening and profoundly enabling.

Mourning and Collective Nostalgia Nostalgia is inextricably linked to the effects of mourning and loss. MÁM’s modernist choreography may have oscillated wildly from mimesis to non-mimesis and from structure to anti-structure, but it also had a sustained engagement with nostalgia’s emphasis on mourning. On the subject of mourning and nostalgia, Clewell has argued that nostalgia ‘entails an inability in some cases and deliberate refusal in others to reconfigure the self in light of the past’.46 For much of MÁM it seemed that the continual oscillation between mimesis and non-mimesis was not simply representative of the cyclicality of history, but also representative of the inability to reconfigure the self in light of the past. If nostalgia can be understood as a substitute for grief work, then modernist nostalgia in MÁM fixated on a never-ending traumatic cycle of lamentation towards which the performers were always drawn. Here, the mourning over a lost traditional Irishness was essential to the creation of the commodified authentic in that it was consciously and continually reconstructed in the present in an attempt to appease the mourning self. Indeed, this can be seen as another way in which MÁM was critical of the commodified authentic in that it self-consciously constructed a mourning for traditional Irishness. Yet, self-construction can be viewed positively. Reflecting on dramaturgies of trauma and the afterlives of modernisms in contemporary Irish theatre, Emilie Pine has argued that ‘one of the central practices in enacting trauma continues to be via a modernist aesthetic’.47 For Pine, trauma can be seen as a creative force: ‘at the same time as something is being destroyed through trauma, something else is always being made.’48 The same can be said of the performance of modernist

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nostalgia in MÁM, in that the performance encouraged the pursuit of the new in the light of the past. From this perspective, the mourning that nostalgia was associated with played a pivotal role when mediating between the individual and the collective in the performance. Indeed, Clay Routledge has argued that while nostalgia can produce positive and negative effects, it fundamentally provides people with an ‘opportunity to reassure themselves that they have had interpersonal success and that they are loved and valued by others’.49 In one reflection on traditional Irish culture, Begley played a haunting lament on the concertina as one performer performed a ritualised departure, slowly dancing across the entirety of the stage hugging and kissing all the other performers who mournfully observed the long-goodbye. The scene summoned a myriad of thoughts that ranged from Ireland’s traumatic history with emigration and exile, to reflections on loneliness, solitude, loss and grief. In so doing, the scene highlighted the importance of collective rituals and the importance for collectives to mark moments in time to be remembered in the future. In another scene in MÁM a performer deliberately struggled to remember steps, gestures and movements. In so doing his body repeatedly froze and, with a desperate reach to the sky, his limp body would fall heavily and dangerously to the ground before being rescued by members of the ensemble. All of this was punctuated by traditional Irish dance music. As Fintan O’Toole points out, Irish dance music is ‘circular, repetitive and predictable. It expresses a sense of life as being fixed and stable, of a community containing within itself all that needs to be known or experienced. It is, in other words, traditional.’50 In both of these scenes, MÁM placed an affective emphasis on a nostalgia for a sense of traditional community that the lonely individual could turn to. If nostalgia necessitates a process of mourning for something that simply cannot be forgotten, then these moments in the performance highlighted the work of mourning in modernist nostalgia that serves to remember the past in the hope of a better, collective, future. MÁM reminds us that modernist nostalgia is beneficial for the individual and the collective because of the emphasis it places on deliberately reconstructing and reconfiguring the past in the present. Following Adorno and Horkheimer, if the cultural industry precludes reflection, then it is important that key moments like this in MÁM embodied what Boym characterises as reflective nostalgia, ‘a form of deep mourning that performs a labor of grief both through pondering pain and through play that points to the future’.51 It was important that MÁM performed reflective nostalgia, focusing on the future of collective social relations. The turn towards nostalgia reaffirmed social bonds as the collective was reconfigured in light of the past. Here, collective nostalgia was performed as a coping mechanism and a fundamental aspect of modern life that facilitates a better understanding of self and the world, and not as something that is just melancholic or mournful. In this way, MÁM problematised Susan Stewart’s understanding of nostalgia as ‘the repetition that mourns the inauthenticity of all repetitions and denies the repetition’s capacity to define identity’.52 That MÁM demonstrated that the identities of collectives can be united through the power of nostalgia is significant in the context of contemporary Irish neoliberalism that alienates collectives as it proceeds to privilege and prioritise individualism. Seen from this perspective, there is little difference between the work of the modernist nostalgia in constructing the commodified authentic in MÁM and that of The Gathering and Turkfest. All three events mobilise modernist nostalgia not simply to create a consumption of the old as the new, but to remind us that nostalgia connects the isolated individual to the collective.

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Remembering the Future Reflecting on the lingering presence of modernisms in contemporary Ireland, Paige Reynolds reminds us that ‘a refusal to relinquish modernism in Ireland suggests that the modernist project is not complete; its quest to “make it new” lives on in a present-day Ireland marked by its formidable commitment to nostalgia, to memory, to commemoration’.53 If performing modernist nostalgia can teach us anything it is that looking back to the past as a means to understand the present and anticipate the future is integral to the progress of modernity. Certainly, for Keegan-Dolan, a critical analysis of the past in contemporary Irish culture is important: I think with Ireland we are terrified of ourselves and of admitting our pasts, and admitting the shits we are and I suppose Ireland has benefited very well out of its romanticism and beauty and Irish people are very friendly and aren’t we great talkers and aren’t we great? Irish people are also alcoholic, violent, devious, and are really good at fucking things up.54 Performing modernist nostalgia facilitates both a painful and a pleasurable awareness of those aspects of the past that need to be remembered, reconfigured and forgotten. MÁM’s performance of modernist nostalgia challenges contemporary Ireland to work through the past to better understand what has been left behind and what needs to be taken forward to the future, and how. Modernist nostalgia in MÁM was conducive towards a rejection of mimesis and an acknowledgement that traditional Irishness has become a deliberately constructed commodity of the cultural industry that reveals and releases the tensions between tradition and modernity, culture and commerce. When modernist nostalgia constructs the past as a commodity to be consumed, it doesn’t just reveal what has been repressed; it also signals and highlights the human need to continually consume the past. In so doing, the modernist tension between tradition and modernity, culture and commerce come together to reveal the continued presence of modernism in contemporary performance cultures. As Outka has argued, ‘nostalgia potentially becomes more useful, more powerful, and less dangerous, when it is wielded not as an overpowering longing but as a self-aware construction, capable of change.’55 Certainly, the self-reflexive performance of nostalgia in MÁM reminds us that the unresolved dialectics of tradition and modernity, culture and commerce are not just inherent to performing modernism in contemporary Irish dance, but also that they are still very much a concern in the performance of nostalgia in the Irish cultural industry.

Acknowledgements I am grateful to James Hickson (Trinity College Dublin) for helping me to think through the ideas in this chapter.

Notes   1. Stan Smith, The Origins of Modernism: Eliot, Pound, Yeats and the Rhetorics of Renewal (Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1994), 240.

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  2. Tammy Clewell, ‘Introduction: Past “Perfect” and Present “Tense”: The Abuses and Uses of Modernist Nostalgia’, in Modernism and Nostalgia: Bodies, Locations, Aesthetics, ed. Tammy Clewell (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 20.  3. Claire Warden, foreword to Dance, Modernism, and Modernity by Ramsay Burt and Michael Huxley (Abingdon: Routledge, 2020), xv.  4. Teaċ Daṁsa, ‘About Teaċ Daṁsa’, MÁM programme, Sadlers Wells, London, 5 February 2020.   5. Manchán Magan, ‘Programme Note’, MÁM programme, Sadlers Wells, London, 5 February 2020.   6. Michael Keegan-Dolan, quoted in Róisín O’Gorman, ‘Bodied Stories and Storied Bodies in Contemporary Irish Performance’, in Dance Matters in Ireland: Contemporary Dance Performance and Practice, ed. Aoife McGrath and Emma Meehan (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), 63.   7. T. S. Eliot, Selected Essays (London: Faber and Faber, 1999), 14.  8. Perth Festival, ‘More on MÁM with Creator Michael Keegan-Dolan’, https://www. perthfestival.com.au/news/2020/02/more-on-mam-with-creator-michael-keegan-dolan/ (accessed 20 March 2022).   9. Pat Collins, dir., The Dance (Cork, Ireland: Harvest Films, 2021). 10. Lyndsey Winship, ‘Mám review’, The Guardian, 6 February 2020, https://www.theguardian. com/stage/2020/feb/06/mam-review-michael-keegan-dolan-sadlers-wells-teac-damsa (accessed 23 September 2022). 11. Hans-Thies Lehmann, Postdramatic Theatre, trans. Karen Jürs-Munby (Abingdon: Routledge, 2006), 69. 12. Matthew Potolsky, Mimesis (New York: Routledge, 2006), 4. 13. Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (New York: Zone Books, 1995), 12. 14. Jacques Rancière, The Future of the Image, trans. Gregory Elliott (London: Verso, 2019), 73. 15. John Xiros Cooper, Modernism and the Culture of Market Society (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 23. Emphasis in original. 16. Huyssen argued that ‘the boundaries between high art and mass culture have become increasingly blurred, and we should begin to see that process as one of opportunity rather than lamenting loss of quality and failure of nerve’. See Andreas Huyssen, After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture and Postmodernism (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1988), ix. 17. Laura Frost, The Problem with Pleasure: Modernism and its Discontents (New York: Columbia University Press, 2013), 3. 18. Terry Eagleton, Heathcliff and the Great Hunger: Studies in Irish Culture (London: Verso, 1995), 274. 19. Ibid. 297. 20. The Celtic Tiger economy was a name first given to Ireland’s unprecedented economic growth by the American investment bank Morgan Stanley in 1994. The Tiger economy would peak in 1999, before beginning its decline in 2001 and its eventual death in 2008 with the global recession. 21. Peadar Kirby, Luke Gibbons and Michael Cronin, ‘Introduction: The Reinvention of Ireland: A Critical Perspective’, in Reinventing Ireland: Culture, Society and the Global Economy, ed. Peadar Kirby, Luke Gibbons and Michael Cronin (London: Pluto Press, 2002), 14. 22. Magan, ‘Programme Note’. 23. See, for example, ‘The Gathering – Ireland 2013’, https://www.youtube.com/watch? v=--jXitLu4zk (accessed 14 April 2021). 24. Svetlana Boym, The Future of Nostalgia (New York: Basic Books, 2001), xviii.

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25. Elizabeth Outka, Consuming Traditions: Modernity, Modernism, and the Commodified Authentic (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 156. Emphasis in original. 26. Rancière, The Future of the Image, 104. 27. Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. John Cumming (London: Verso, 1997), 144. 28. Ibid. 153. 29. Outka, Consuming Traditions, 13. 30. W. B. Yeats to Lady Augusta Gregory, 10 April 1916, in The Letters of W. B. Yeats, ed. Alan Wade (London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1954), 611. 31. Outka, Consuming Traditions, 17. Emphasis in original. 32. James Joyce, Ulysses (London: Penguin, 2000), 42. 33. Vincent J. Cheng, ‘Amnesia, Forgetting, and the Nation in James Joyce’s Ulysses’, in Memory Ireland, Volume 4: James Joyce and Cultural Memory, ed. Oona Frawley and Katherine O’Callaghan (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2014), 12. 34. Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, trans. Sheila Faria Glaser (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994), 6. 35. Rancière, The Future of the Image, 104. 36. Rosemary Waugh, ‘Mám review at the O’Reilly Theatre, Dublin’, The Stage, 4 October 2019, https://www.thestage.co.uk/reviews/2019/mam-review-at-oreilly-theatre-dublin-theenergy-of-an-ancient-rite/ (accessed 23 September 2022). 37. Frost, The Problem with Pleasure, 3. 38. Aoife McGrath, ‘Discomforting/Disarming Touch: Experiencing Affective Contradiction in Improvisatory Dance Performance’, in Dance Matters in Ireland: Contemporary Dance Performance and Practice, ed. Aoife McGrath and Emma Meehan (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), 86. 39. Waugh, ‘Mám review’. 40. Letter from Antonin Artaud to Art O’Briain, 6 August 1937, National Archive of Ireland Manuscript, DFA_P_34_119. Translation by Céline Christine Lehmann. 41. J. M. Synge, Collected Works, Volume 2: Prose, ed. Alan Price (London: Oxford University Press, 1966), 53. 42. Antonin Artaud, quoted in Stephen Barber, Antonin Artaud: Blows and Bombs (London: Faber and Faber, 1994), 11. 43. Antonin Artaud, Collected Works, vol. 4, trans. Victor Corti (London: John Calder, 1974), 106. 44. Ibid. 64. 45. Sinéad Garrigan Mattar, Primitivism, Science, and the Irish Revival (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 4. 46. Clewell, ‘Introduction: Past “Perfect” and Present “Tense”’, 6. 47. Emilie Pine, ‘The Modernist Impulse in Irish Theatre: Anu Productions and the Monto’, in Modernist Afterlives in Irish Literature and Culture, ed. Paige Reynolds (London: Anthem Press, 2016), 172–3. 48. Ibid. 170. 49. Clay Routledge, Nostalgia: A Psychological Resource (New York: Routledge, 2016), 53. 50. Fintan O’Toole, The Ex-Isle of Erin: Images of a Global Ireland (Dublin: New Islands Books, 1997), 156. 51. Boym, The Future of Nostalgia, 55. 52. Susan Stewart, On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993), 23. 53. Paige Reynolds, ‘Introduction’, in Modernist Afterlives in Irish Literature and Culture, ed. Paige Reynolds (London: Anthem Press, 2016), 4.

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54. Michael Keegan-Dolan, quoted in O’Gorman, ‘Bodied Stories and Storied Bodies in Contemporary Irish Performance’, 58. 55. Elizabeth Outka, ‘Afterword: Nostalgia and Modernist Anxiety’, in Modernism and Nostalgia: Bodies, Locations, Aesthetics, ed. Tammy Clewell (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 256.

Works Cited Adorno, Theodor and Max Horkheimer. Dialectic of Enlightenment. Translated by John Cumming. London: Verso, 1997. Artaud, Antonin. Collected Works, vol. 4. Translated by Victor Corti. London: John Calder, 1974. Artaud, Antonin. National Archive of Ireland Manuscript, DFA_P_34_119. Barber, Stephen. Antonin Artaud: Blows and Bombs. London: Faber and Faber, 1994. Baudrillard, Jean. Simulacra and Simulation. Translated by Sheila Faria Glaser. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994. Boym, Svetlana. The Future of Nostalgia. New York: Basic Books, 2001. Cheng, Vincent J. ‘Amnesia, Forgetting, and the Nation in James Joyce’s Ulysses’. In Memory Ireland, Volume 4: James Joyce and Cultural Memory, edited by Oona Frawley and Katherine O’Callaghan, 10–26. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2014. Clewell, Tammy. ‘Introduction: Past “Perfect” and Present “Tense”: The Abuses and Uses of Modernist Nostalgia’. In Modernism and Nostalgia: Bodies, Locations, Aesthetics, edited by Tammy Clewell, 1–22. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. Collins, Pat, dir. The Dance. Cork, Ireland: Harvest Films, 2021. Cooper, John Xiros. Modernism and the Culture of Market Society. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. Debord, Guy. The Society of the Spectacle. Translated by Donald Nicholson-Smith. New York: Zone Books, 1995. Eagleton, Terry. Heathcliff and the Great Hunger: Studies in Irish Culture. London: Verso, 1995. Eliot, T. S. Selected Essays. London: Faber and Faber, 1999. Frost, Laura. The Problem with Pleasure: Modernism and its Discontents. New York: Columbia University Press, 2013. Garrigan Mattar, Sinéad. Primitivism, Science, and the Irish Revival. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004. Huyssen, Andreas. After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture and Postmodernism. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1988. Joyce, James. Ulysses. London: Penguin, 2000. Kirby, Peadar, Luke Gibbons and Michael Cronin. ‘Introduction: The Reinvention of Ireland: A Critical Perspective’. In Reinventing Ireland: Culture, Society and the Global Economy, edited by Peadar Kirby, Luke Gibbons and Michael Cronin, 1–18. London: Pluto Press, 2002. Lehmann, Hans-Thies. Postdramatic Theatre. Translated by Karen Jürs-Munby. Abingdon: Routledge, 2006. McGrath, Aoife. ‘Discomforting/Disarming Touch: Experiencing Affective Contradiction in Improvisatory Dance Performance’. In Dance Matters in Ireland: Contemporary Dance Performance and Practice, edited by Aoife McGrath and Emma Meehan, 79–91. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018. Magan, Manchán. ‘Programme Note’. MÁM programme. Sadlers Wells, London, 5 February 2019. O’Gorman, Róisín. ‘Bodied Stories and Storied Bodies in Contemporary Irish Performance’. In Dance Matters in Ireland: Contemporary Dance Performance and Practice, edited by Aoife McGrath and Emma Meehan, 55–78. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018.

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O’Toole, Fintan. The Ex-Isle of Erin: Images of a Global Ireland. Dublin: New Islands Books, 1997. Outka, Elizabeth. ‘Afterword: Nostalgia and Modernist Anxiety’. In Modernism and Nostalgia: Bodies, Locations, Aesthetics, edited by Tammy Clewell, 252–61. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. Outka, Elizabeth. Consuming Traditions: Modernity, Modernism, and the Commodified Authentic. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009. Perth Festival. ‘More on MÁM with Creator Michael Keegan-Dolan’. https://www.perthfestival. com.au/news/2020/02/more-on-mam-with-creator-michael-keegan-dolan/ (accessed 20 March 2022). Pine, Emilie. ‘The Modernist Impulse in Irish Theatre: Anu Productions and the Monto’. In Modernist Afterlives in Irish Literature and Culture, edited by Paige Reynolds, 164–74. London: Anthem Press, 2016. Potolsky, Matthew. Mimesis. New York: Routledge, 2006. Rancière, Jacques. The Future of the Image. Translated by Gregory Elliott. London: Verso, 2019. Reynolds, Paige. ‘Introduction’. In Modernist Afterlives in Irish Literature and Culture, edited by Paige Reynolds, 2–8. London: Anthem Press, 2016. Routledge, Clay. Nostalgia: A Psychological Resource. New York: Routledge, 2016. Smith, Stan. The Origins of Modernism: Eliot, Pound, Yeats and the Rhetorics of Renewal. Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1994. Stewart, Susan. On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993. Synge, J. M. Collected Works, Volume 2: Prose. Edited by Alan Price. London: Oxford University Press, 1966. Teaċ Daṁsa. ‘About Teaċ Daṁsa’. MÁM programme. Sadlers Wells, London, 5 February 2019. Warden, Claire. Foreword to Dance, Modernism, and Modernity by Ramsay Burt and Michael Huxley, xii–xvi. Abingdon: Routledge, 2020. Waugh, Rosemary. ‘Mám review at the O’Reilly Theatre, Dublin’. The Stage, 4 October 2019. https://www.thestage.co.uk/reviews/2019/mam-review-at-oreilly-theatre-dublin-the-energyof-an-ancient-rite/ (accessed 23 September 2022). Winship, Lyndsey. ‘Mám review’. The Guardian, 6 February 2020. https://www.theguardian.com/ stage/2020/feb/06/mam-review-michael-keegan-dolan-sadlers-wells-teac-damsa (accessed 23 September 2022). Yeats, W. B. The Letters of W. B. Yeats. Edited by Alan Wade. London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1954.

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5 Reaching Out in Both Directions: Suffrage Theatre in the Twenty-First Century Naomi Paxton

D

espite the presence of numerous suffrage societies, suffrage shops, newspaper-sellers and activists on the streets of London in the first two decades of the twentieth century, there are few traces that remain as physical memorials to acknowledge the legacy, variety and impact of the Votes for Women movement. This is of course a problem not exclusive to suffrage histories, but for women’s history more broadly, with urban spaces dominated by monuments, statues and plaques that honour men and male histories. Urban feminist geographer Leslie Kern describes this as ‘patriarchy written in stone’1 and twenty-first-century feminist activists like Caroline Criado-Perez are working to make the past and present lack of visibility explicitly visible across their research and writing, not only inviting but demanding a reassessment of who is celebrated through public monuments as well as in popular culture, educational curricula and public histories. Similar attempts to claim more space for women writers and theatre-makers of the past and present are taking place in the theatre industry, in which generations of predominantly male producers and critics have, as Jill Dolan has noted, been ‘unconcerned with not just women’s work in the theatre, but with women’s place in the world’.2 Second- and third-wave feminist theatre-makers and organisations such as Sphinx Theatre Company, Tonic Theatre and Bechdel Theatre are among those attempting to tackle systemic sexist discrimination through exposing how this casual dismissal of women’s writing has affected perceptions of its artistic worth and commercial appeal, frequently working with scholars, archivists and practitioners to show how the reticence of mainstream commercial theatre producers, directors and critics to engage with femalecentred stories and to commission and develop women playwrights has resulted in the under-representation of women’s work within the canon of nineteenth- and twentiethcentury UK theatre. Feminist theatre historians and historians of feminist theatre are engaged not only in processes of rediscovery and reassessment, but also in critiquing and dismantling dominant histories of theatre that have ignored structures and biases that excluded women from training and working to their full potential in what Tracy C. Davis has called the ‘truly uneven’ playing field of the male-dominated industry.3 Jacky Bratton’s concept of an intertheatrical model of creativity, in which ideas and acts of collaboration, performance and spectatorship require nuanced interpretation and analysis informed by knowledge of co-operative theatrical and social networks, chimes with

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current discourse about commemoration, representation and absence in theatre history, public history, feminist historiography and feminist geography.4 Taking an intertheatrical approach to reassessing and reframing the work of earlytwentieth-century female-centred social, political and cultural networks in the theatre profession is vital, particularly when looking at the creative work commissioned and produced by two Edwardian suffrage societies: the Actresses’ Franchise League (AFL) and Women Writers’ Suffrage League (WWSL). The canon of suffrage plays – Susan Croft has recorded 120 that were performed between 1908 and 1914 – includes a variety of work for different audiences, from small-scale immersive site-specific interactions in purpose-built pop-up spaces to large-scale participatory work involving community and activist groups.5 Suffragist theatre professionals embraced and subverted the conventions of the theatre to articulate their understanding of how women’s exclusion from formal systems of politics intersected with inequality and discrimination at home, in education and the workplace, and in public life. Focusing on new writing rather than the adaptation of existing texts within the male-dominated canon, suffrage playwrights tackled issues including equal pay, economic inequality, domestic labour, sexism within the home and workplace, and poor conviction rates for men accused of sexual or domestic violence towards women and girls – concerns that remain all too relevant for twenty-first-century feminist campaigners. Despite decades of feminist revisionism, there remains an ongoing failure to think of urban sites [. . .] in terms of their female population. Equally, there is a failure to consider that women might have played some sort of active role in the spatial and material formation of the environments in which they dwelt or worked.6 Suffragist theatre professionals learned to be visible on the streets of towns and cities, particularly London, through non-violent and violent direct action, protests, processions, demonstrations, and activities like newspaper-selling and speaking at open-air meetings. Whilst not ‘in character’ in a traditionally theatrical sense, they were performing as part of the sisterhood of suffragists and engaging with the public in ways that were new to many of them. This public presence created a new dynamic between performers and their audiences as well as challenging preconceptions about the visibility of women and suffragists on the streets, and was a common experience that was explored in many suffrage plays. For example, At the Gates, written by AFL member Alice Chapin, is a short play performed for the Women’s Freedom League in London in March 1910 that centres around the experiences of a suffragette on the streets of Westminster. She talks to policemen, a male sympathiser and passers-by including a Seamstress, a Drunken Man and a Member of Parliament. These interactions allow Chapin to introduce a range of characters who can express what Susan Carlson has praised as complex political arguments that show different points of view around the campaign, as well as to highlight the potential dangers and threats of physical violence that arose for women who were daring to assert themselves as politically engaged and articulate in public space.7 Short plays, poems, cartoons and sketches inspired by encounters between members of the public and suffragists who were selling suffrage literature and newspapers on the pavements were frequently published in suffrage newspapers. Su’ L’ Pave by Henrietta Leslie, published in Votes for Women in January 1914 and subtitled ‘Being half an hour in the life of a paper-seller’, features comments from forty-three members of the public,

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giving an impression of the variety of voices for and against suffrage as well as of the hustle and bustle of the streets of Edwardian London. Newspaper-selling was not only a rite of passage for new campaigners but also part of the street theatre and branding of the campaign. Many of the most prominent suffrage organisations produced their own newspapers, something that Barbara Green sees as revealing the ‘savvy manipulation of modern print cultural forms’ by the suffrage movement.8 These papers embraced news and contributions from local, national and international women writers, creating a sense of sisterhood and camaraderie between activists as well as providing a forum for the articulation of shared experiences of campaigning. AFL and WWSL member Elizabeth Robins saw the female newspaper-seller as contributing to the perception of and prejudices against female bodies and voices in public space.9 By being visible and audible in public as part of a politically active female-led movement, the demonstrators, speakers and paper-sellers forced the creation of new spaces for women’s voices and presence in existing public areas.10 For twenty-first-century performers and researchers, taking the stories of the suffrage movement and its theatre on to the streets rather than on to theatre stages opens up questions about accessibility, relevance and public protest. Full productions in theatre spaces, set in the period in which the plays were written, contain, historicise and remove much of what made them successful in their own time – casts of openly activist performers, non-traditional venues and opportunities for audience reflection and discussion – often stifling what Susan Bradley Smith has called ‘the energy and inventiveness of suffrage theatre’.11 Honouring the ambition and legacy of the creative members of the AFL and WWSL and their rich history of inclusivity, resourcefulness, networking and engagement requires a multi-layered, multifaceted and inventive approach to sharing suffrage theatre in the twenty-first century that is as bold as they were. Scary Little Girls (SLG) is a matrifocal production hub based in London and Cornwall and led by artistic director Rebecca Mordan that produces plays, storytelling events, cabarets and Living Literature Walks. The walks have been part of the SLG portfolio since 2007, in a format originally based on Mark Rylance’s Sonnet Walks at Shakespeare’s Globe. SLG create bespoke walks which they describe as ‘site-specific events: part self-guided tour, part promenade performance’ across the UK and inspired by classic and contemporary writers and literature.12 Audience groups of no more than fifteen at a time meet at a pre-arranged place at timed intervals, are briefed and given written route guides, and then self-guide as a group along the route of the walk. They know that they will encounter performers and performances along the way, but the cast list and information about the pieces performed is only given out at the end of the walk. From 2013 to 2017 I co-produced four Living Literature Walks with SLG based on my research into suffrage theatre, the Actresses’ Franchise League and the presence of activist women in central London during the early twentieth century. These were Stage Rights! A Living Literature Walk (2013 and 2016), A Particular Theatre: Shakespeare, Suffragists and Soldiers (2016) and Women and War: The West End and the Western Front (2017). The locations for the walks – Covent Garden, the Strand, Bloomsbury – are not only rich in suffrage and theatre history, but are also familiar sites of exploration for generations of female writers and thinkers, including Bratton’s imagined female walker in the 1830s,13 Virginia Woolf’s search for a lead pencil in the 1930s,14 and Lauren Elkin’s exploration of her own and other women’s encounters with the city in the 2010s.15 In total thirty-eight performers were involved in the walks across twenty-seven locations, performing extracts from fourteen suffrage plays, seven

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other texts and five newly commissioned monologues. Every performer was either already familiar with or quickly introduced to the feminist ethos behind SLG’s work and the suffragist history that contextualised the pieces they were to perform. This understanding and engagement between different generations of feminist and activist creatives produced a stimulating development and rehearsal process underpinned by confidence and articulacy that seemed to align with the fundamentally communicative nature of suffrage theatre. The opportunity to create new characters and material was an especially exciting element of the walks, and the sharing of archival research opened up conversations with performers and audiences about hidden and marginalised voices and histories. While it is tempting to provide an exhaustive account of the connections, resonances and rationale behind the inclusion of every location and piece in each walk, this would fall outside of the scope and word length of this chapter. Tables with the full casts, locations and pieces performed are included at the end of the chapter, so key examples will therefore be highlighted from each walk as indicative of the depth of the research and care involved in the development process.

Stage Rights! A Living Literature Walk Was it a literary walk, or was it a theatre show that simply used the city and buildings as a vast stage-history soaked backdrop to explore the work of the Actresses Franchise League?16

Figure 5.1  Mary McCusker, Genevieve Swallow and Kate Smurthwaite performing as part of Stage Rights! A Living Literature Walk in the garden of the Actors’ Church, Covent Garden (photograph by Naomi Paxton, 2016).

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The first iteration of Stage Rights! A Living Literature Walk was performed across two weekends in April 2013. Devised to promote and accompany the publication of The Methuen Drama Book of Suffrage Plays, it featured five pieces drawn from those in the edited collection. The walk began in the foyer of the Theatre Royal Drury Lane, led the audience through and around Covent Garden and ended in the upper room of the Nell of Old Drury pub. Audience groups left the starting location at twenty-minute intervals between 2pm and 4pm, and the duration of the walk was between seventy and ninety minutes, depending on how quickly each group moved between locations. Each location and performance was site-specific, and the route guide included points of interest related to suffrage history and theatre history. In all there were twelve performers in nine locations, performing extracts from seven suffrage plays written between 1909 and 1913 and two specially commissioned pieces. Immersed as I then was in my second year of doctoral research, the creation of this walk was an exciting public engagement opportunity and one that connected with the ideas of collaboration, creativity and education that were the tenets of the AFL. Stage Rights! involved thinking carefully about how to represent the research through interactive means, bring suffrage stories and plays to life outside of a traditional theatre setting, and not assume audiences would have any prior knowledge about the suffrage movement, theatre history or Edwardian London. The first piece, spoken by Rebecca Mordan after she had welcomed the audience groups at the starting location, was an extract from The First Actress, a 1911 play set backstage at the Theatre Royal Drury Lane in 1661 on the night of the first performance given by a female actress. There were two original character encounters written for the 2013 walk. The Sleepless Woman by playwright Kate Kerrow is set on the morning after the 1911 Census boycott and an event at which a number of AFL members performed. Kerrow was given contemporary press reports, performance texts and some visual material from the event as inspiration to work with alongside her own research. The combination of the route guide and the information shared by The Sleepless Woman introduced the audience to the importance of shared experiences, camaraderie and sisterhood within the movement, the role of non-violent direct action in resistance, the popularity of vegetarianism and vegetarian restaurants among suffrage campaigners, and the Edwardian craze for roller skating. Leave the Theatre Royal by walking down the steps. Once outside turn to your left. Walk down Catherine Street towards the stage door of the Novello Theatre, currently showing Mamma Mia. You are passing the site of the Gardenia Restaurant at number 6 Catherine Street, a vegetarian restaurant that opened in 1908. Meetings and breakfasts were held here by both the Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU) and the Women’s Freedom League (WFL), and in February 1912, the Actresses’ Franchise League performed two plays here as part of a ‘Hard Up Social’ evening of entertainment. 200 women and 30 men had breakfast here at the Gardenia at 3.30am on the 2nd April 1911 when they opened to suffragists who were staging a Census boycott at the Aldwych Rinkeries on Kingsway.17 The performer playing the Sleepless Woman, wearing roller skates, waited opposite the Novello Theatre stage door and interrupted the audience groups by skating excitedly towards them whilst they were walking down Catherine Street.

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She holds an audience member’s hand to steady herself and bends over double, in a strong squat position, hands on thighs, and tries to catch her breath (Laughing and pointing to her skates) I’ve had these things on all night. I’ve skated right through – nine hours I was in the Aldwych Rink. Nine hours! My feet will be black and blue, but I don’t give a damn (she straightens up) not after such a night.18 The Sleepless Woman told the audience about her evening, and the effect Emmeline Pankhurst’s speech has had on her: Whenever my sisters speak to me like that, the words go right inside me and pile up like little gems, one on top o’ the other, until I’m filled up full and I can’t hold it in any longer and I scream out at the top of my beautiful big lungs, right up to the heavens – (Shouting) This is a civil war, and there will be no peace until we get the vote! And off my tongue, all those perfect, precious gems fall out, for others, ready to be collected and treasured. That’s how it works, you see. Together we all get braver and braver, and together we can go on all night, every night, until that day comes when we can stand up and say we did it.19 The second new character, Mrs Pancake, was intended to embody the negative physical and behavioural stereotypes of militant suffrage campaigners as depicted in the popular press and media, and in the lyrics and patter from anti-suffrage music hall songs.20 This negative stereotype was itself sent up by suffragist writers – for example, the suffragette character in Cicely Hamilton’s Anti-Suffrage Waxworks (1909) and Miss Finch in Netta Syrett’s Might Is Right (1909) – to expose the misogyny and reductiveness of the public mockery faced by militant campaigners. The actress playing Mrs Pancake, dressed like a pantomime dame version of a suffragette and riding a bicycle, was the only performer in period costume, reinforcing her position as a fictional creation stuck in time.21 Audience groups encountered Mrs Pancake as the penultimate stop on the walk. The character was likeable and playful, but our hope was that the previous encounters and the information given in the route guide had opened up a more nuanced awareness of the many issues suffrage theatre and the suffrage campaign was tackling and that this character would be received as more unrepresentative of the suffrage movement than the audience might have initially assumed. In hindsight, despite the intention to mock these mocking stereotypes, I felt uneasy about giving space to this character and she did not appear in the second iteration of the walk. The 2016 version of Stage Rights! featured seventeen performers, including six from the 2013 cast, and followed the same route as the previous walk. We wanted to acknowledge the ongoing legacy of feminist activism in the theatre, and the cast included feminist performers from different disciplines and different generations, including Mary McCusker, who co-founded feminist theatre company Monstrous Regiment in 1975, feminist activist and stand-up comedian Kate Smurthwaite, Genevieve Swallow, a comedian and member of sketch group Domestic Goddi, and Beth Watson, the founder of grassroots campaign group Bechdel Theatre in 2015. To make further links between feminists past and present, we invited campaign group 50:50 Parliament, founded in 2013, to put up posters and hand out flyers in the location for a duologue by AFL and

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WWSL member Christopher St John about divisive campaign tactics. Bringing together feminist performers from across a range of genres was part of representing the networks of creatives involved in suffrage theatre and entertainments, and how different generations worked together and learned from each other. For established writers and performers, suffrage theatre opened up new spaces for experimentation and fellowship away from the pressures of the mainstream theatre industry, while for emerging and ambitious creatives, the experience the AFL and WWSL provided gave them opportunities to make professional connections with influential individuals, to form close working alliances and friendships, gain experience and build profile, and be part of new, female and feminist-centred writing for the stage. The 2016 walk also explicitly highlighted the contribution of men to the suffrage movement by staging an extract from the 1913 one-act play 10 Clowning Street by AFL member Joan Dugdale, originally produced by the Men’s Political Union for Women’s Enfranchisement, outside the building that had been their Head Office. The themes in 10 Clowning Street of independence, work and representation ran throughout the pieces for this walk, including John Austin’s How One Woman Did It (1912) in which the character of Wilson dresses in male clothing and presents herself in a masculine way in order to avoid harassment on the street and increase her employment opportunities and wages. The themes were then developed in the third and fourth walks, which were both set in wartime.

A Particular Theatre: Shakespeare, Suffragists and Soldiers May I come in? You wrote to the Snapshots from Home League and said you wanted a photograph taken for your boy in France and I’m doing the work for this district. I’m Miss Holt.22 A Particular Theatre: Shakespeare, Suffragists and Soldiers was developed for the Being Human festival in 2016. Devised in collaboration with Dr Ailsa Grant Ferguson from the University of Brighton, the walk focused around the site of the Shakespeare Hut in Bloomsbury, which is now where the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine stands. The Hut, a large collection of mock-Tudor buildings, was erected on land on the corner of Keppel Street and Gower Street that had been bought by the Shakespeare Memorial National Theatre Committee in 1914. Intended to be the site of a monument to celebrate Shakespeare’s tercentenary and eventually to be the location of a new National Theatre, the land was offered to the YMCA in 1916 by Israel Gollancz as a contribution to the war effort. The Hut, which included a dedicated theatre space, was built for the use of Australia and New Zealand Army Corps (ANZAC) soldiers on leave in London, and their entertainment was organised and programmed by the President of the AFL. As Table 3 shows, there was a real mix of performance texts and locations, and rather than restrict the text to pieces only performed in the Hut during WWI, we wanted to acknowledge the wider suffragist and feminist history in the area and speak to the festival theme of ‘Hope and Fear’ by including information in the route guide about how the war affected the lives of professional performers. Grant Ferguson wrote that for her, the ‘various and apparently incongruous pieces in this immersive performance represent the hotchpotch of the Hut, both in terms of its performance culture and its multiple layers of heterotopia’.23

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The route of the walk guided the audience groups through a number of locations with multiple resonances: for example, a scene from Evelyn Glover’s A Bit of Blighty (1916) in a pub near St George’s Church where the memorial service for militant suffragette Emily Wilding Davison had taken place in 1913; an encounter with a lost soldier near the Russell Square home of Emmeline Pankhurst in which she founded the Women’s Franchise League in 1889, fourteen years before she would go on to found the Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU) in Manchester; and a poem by Mary Wollstonecraft performed in a bookshop on the street in which she wrote A Vindication of the Rights of Women in 1792. The bookshop specialises in magic, spirituality and the occult, themes that would have appealed to many suffragists and creative professionals involved in esoteric practices like theosophy or societies such as the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. For A Particular Theatre Kate Kerrow was commissioned to write a monologue based on Grant Ferguson’s research, drawing from press reports about the experiences of ANZAC service personnel in London during WWI, a guidebook for Kiwi soldiers on leave in London, archival material from the Shakespeare Hut and the Women’s Emergency Corps, and autobiographical accounts of women police and their encounters with service personnel in London during WWI. Audience groups met A Soldier on Leave, a young actor from New Zealand playing a young Kiwi soldier, lost in Russell Square and looking for the Hut. There were also playful elements that involved the audience as active participants – a performer was embedded with each group for the start of the walk, and each audience group was given a letter, a camera and a key, objects that they would use along the way to help the performers they encountered. The final stop of the walk was a marquee in an otherwise deserted Senate House Gardens, where Grant Ferguson and I greeted audience groups with hot cups of Gunfire tea, a mix of rum and black tea that was familiar to British and ANZAC armies during WWI. These interactive elements brought audiences into each encounter in a much more active way than in the Stage Rights! walks, creating a sense of anticipation throughout the event. A Particular Theatre overlaid a new story on the existing known literary history of the Bloomsbury area, inviting participants to reimagine and remap the whole physical space of the walk as well as repopulate the streets with ANZAC service personnel and busy working women. The final walk discussed in this chapter brought those women back into focus, again in wartime.

Women and War: The West End and the Western Front MARY: (suddenly and breathlessly) I’m sick of married women! Mr W: My dear girl! MARY: Yes I am! Sick of hearing girls exalted into heroines for – well just for mating! God knows I think marriage is the happiest state for woman if she gets the right man, but I never shall see that it covers her with glory! I love babies, but I never shall see that every woman who achieves one deserves the Victoria Cross! Heavens, the class of women I’ve most to do with in Hospital take all that side of life as a matter of course – with jobs like yours and Guy’s thrown in – I mean they’re often the bread-winners of the family into the bargain! You say I’ve lost my sense of proportion since I took up outside work? I say I’ve found it!24

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Figure 5.2  Kiruna Stamell performing as part of Women and War: The West End and the Western Front at the Edith Cavell Memorial, London (photograph by Mari Takayanagi, 2017). Women and War: The West End and the Western Front was produced as part of the Being Human festival in 2017 and combined my research into the AFL with my then role as part of the UK Parliament Vote 100 project. Table 4 shows fewer locations and pieces than those in the previous walks, but a route that was much longer, starting in Waterloo and ending in Covent Garden. There were eight performers in six locations, and extracts from three suffrage plays, one book written just after the war, and two new monologues. We thought it was imperative that the generalisations and misconceptions about women, war and the suffrage campaign that had made their way into popular histories – that when some women were given the vote in 1918 it was as a reward for their wartime work, for example – were challenged through the experience of the walk rather than just in the route guide. Audience groups met at the Feminist Library near Waterloo, and were given a postage stamp, a card and an electric tea light. Rebecca Mordan sang ‘Woman This and Woman That’ by Laurence Housman (1910), which had also featured in the 2016 Stage Rights! walk.25 Written originally for the WSPU before the war, all six verses were republished in The Women’s Dreadnought, the paper of the East London Federation of Suffragettes, in 1914 ‘because they seem to us even more topical than when they were written’.26 The overarching theme of women’s work and entrepreneurship during WWI, and the opposition many faced when offering their services, could be seen across the featured pieces. Audiences left the Feminist Library and began their walk by passing the London Ambulance Service building:

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The first permanent ambulance service in London was formed in 1879. Women were first employed as drivers for the service in 1915 and by July 1916 the London County Council Ambulance Corps was staffed entirely by women. Many skilled medical women wanting to help the war effort were discouraged from doing so. When Dr Elsie Inglis offered her services to the War Office in 1914 she was told to ‘Go home and sit still’. Instead she set up the Scottish Women’s Hospitals, which by 1917 had branches on the Western and Eastern Fronts. Actress and playwright Cicely Hamilton helped to set up the first 200 bed auxiliary hospital at Royaumont Abbey in France in 1914, remaining there until 1917, when she returned to England to join the WAAC (Women’s Auxiliary Army Corps). Actress Vera ‘Jack’ Holme, who had been Emmeline Pankhurst’s chauffeur, joined the Scottish Women’s Hospitals in 1914 as an ambulance driver, and was awarded the Samaritan Cross by the King of Serbia in recognition of her work. Although their skills were welcomed by women’s organisations abroad, female drivers found it harder to get work at home. For example, despite the willingness of London taxicab owners to let women drive, Scotland Yard refused to license them, stating that women could not handle luggage and would be ‘exposed to unpleasant experiences at night’. The Daily Mail reported in January 1916: ‘If Scotland Yard would sanction the experiment, a plentiful supply of women, trained drivers and well disciplined, could be obtained through such bodies of hard working, patriotic women as the Women’s Emergency Corps [. . .] These bodies have already offered to come to the aid of the cab companies and the public, but the police say “No”.’ The first female taxi driver, Marie White, was not licensed in London until 1977.27 Audience groups found their next performance in a community centre in Waterloo – an extract from Which, a 1914 play by Evelyn Glover about a young nurse who is asking her father for the freedom to pursue her career abroad. The story of this piece chimed with a building the groups passed on leaving the community centre but that we had been unable to secure for the performance: Now turn left along Cornwall Road. Continue towards the bridge ahead, casting a glance over your left shoulder before you walk under it. The brick building you can see houses The Union Jack Club, founded in 1907 by Ethel McCaul, an English nurse who served in the Boer War. McCaul was well travelled – she went to Japan and Manchuria in 1904 to explore the workings of the Japanese Red Cross, and published a book of her experiences that same year. She also established a nursing home in Marylebone, which she made available to the War Office for use as a military hospital at the outbreak of the war in 1914. The Union Jack Club was rebuilt in the 1970s and is still a club for servicemen and women today – and Ethel McCaul’s portrait hangs in the reception area.28 The first new piece of writing for the walk, Nell, moved away from the work of medical women in wartime and was based on an original character in Things a Bright Girl Can Do by Sally Nicholls (2017), a novel aimed at a Young Adult readership and set during WWI. The book features a burgeoning lesbian relationship between

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two characters, one of whom, Nell, is a working-class teenager from the East End of London who feels most herself when wearing male clothing and presenting in a masculine way. Nell was played by performer, activist and drag king Donna Powell. The audience groups for the walk encountered Nell when she approached them to ask for their help: Excuse me – you don’t happen to have a stamp, do you? I can’t find one for love nor money today. Got an important letter to post. My Dad normally always has a few, but he’s, well, not around. Nell reveals that her brother has died during an army training exercise, her father is in hospital in Liverpool after being hit by shrapnel whilst serving in Belgium, and she is living in a boarding house whilst working in a munitions factory to take some financial strain from her mother. She is proud of her involvement in the suffrage movement before the outbreak of war, and already aware of the diminished visibility of women in the workplace: My girl May says they won’t teach children about the munitionettes and the women who threw stones. She says it’ll be the peacemakers who’ll be celebrated. Peacemakers! Ha! Women fighting men ain’t heroes, are they? Fighting for freedom for the government, that’s heroic. Fighting for freedom against it – not bloody likely. They won’t teach about us at all. History ain’t folk like us. It’s kings and queens and Mr Lloyd George and swells like that. Nell shares her ambition with the audience: I ain’t never going to get married. I ain’t that kind of girl. I want to work in an office. With me own desk and typewriter. And people calling me Miss Swancott and fetching me biscuits. And I’d do shorthand and typing and. . . and write letters and things. Like them professional suffragettes, or them trade unionists. Miss Swancott, Secretary. Ain’t that rather grand? She reveals that she has been too nervous to post her application for secretarial college, and asks the audience groups to do it for her: You look lucky to me – bright and warm and honest. Would you post it? Oh go on! There’s a postbox just round by the front of the church. Thank you very much.29 The creation of Nell opened up the opportunity to directly target lesbian and queer audiences, as well as creative practitioners interested in new writing for the YA market about the suffrage movement and WWI. We were able to cross-promote Things a Bright Girl Can Do at the Feminist Library and through UK Parliament Vote 100, and the publishers set up a bookstall at the final venue. Later in the walk audience groups encountered a second new character, Constable Campbell of the Women’s Police Service (WPS), just off the Strand near the site where the Beaver Hut, the YMCA hut for Canadian service personnel on

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leave in London during WWI, had been. Run entirely by women, the WPS trained volunteers from the age of twenty-one but favoured recruits with life experience, welcoming married women and women in their forties and fifties and allowing women to rejoin voluntarily after they had had children. Constable Campbell made a recruiting speech, drawn from original WPS promotional and training material, autobiographical accounts from WPS members, and a report from a 1919 Home Office inquiry.30 The penultimate encounter with a performer in Women and War happened at the Edith Cavell memorial in St Martin’s Place. Cavell was a British nurse who helped over 200 Allied soldiers escape from German-occupied Belgium. She was arrested, found guilty of treason by a German military court, and executed by firing squad in October 1915. International protests followed her arrest and execution and her name was used by the AFL to help raise resources for one of their biggest wartime projects, the British Women’s Hospital Fund. Cavell’s memorial is close to the Coliseum, where the AFL held a fundraising matinee for the Fund in 1916 that included some sketches specially written by J. M. Barrie. Barrie’s 1918 play A Well-Remembered Voice is set around a séance, and a mother who desperately hopes her son, killed in the war, will speak to her from the spirit world. Whilst researching this piece and the psychics and mediums who preyed on grieving family members in wartime, I found a book by séance investigator Hereward Carrington, who published Psychical Phenomena and the War in 1920. Our performer joined the audience groups at the memorial and read an extract from a chapter of that book entitled ‘Communications with Soldiers who have “Died”’ – a simple but effective analogy about loss, grief and the unknown.31 The audience groups had been given a candle, and a piece of card with one of the words that featured on Cavell’s memorial – ‘Humanity’, ‘Devotion’, ‘Fortitude’ and ‘Sacrifice’ – which they were invited to leave at the foot of the memorial. It was a moment of stillness amid the bustle of a busy London area, and one that had a connection to the site, to the research and to the ways in which the impact of war was interpreted through performance, then and now. Although not directly drawn from a suffrage play or text, this moment spoke to my experience of developing the Women and War walk – the knowledge that it was impossible to accurately represent or truly understand the lives and work of women in wartime coupled with the desire to acknowledge and recover their contribution through engaging with ideas of memory, commemoration and legacy.

Reaching Out in Both Directions In the 21st century much of the most interesting work being made completely defies categorisation. That’s exactly what makes it so thrilling.32 Sharing the energy, variety and specificity of suffrage theatre within the SLG Living Literature Walk format has opened up different ways of engaging audiences and researchers in the marginalised histories of women’s activism and labour in the theatre industry. These walks have helped us to reach non-academic and nonspecialist audiences with academic and specialist research, and to create characters from that research that open up further possibilities to work with different narratives, performers and activists. Rather than telling the story of one individual

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over a period of time, the focus for these walks has been on themes that we then people with individuals, creating deliberately interactive and constructed encounters that happen in the moment, rather than on the page. These individuals then create fresh connections with verbatim testimonies, contemporary playtexts and actual or remembered locations and events. Revisiting the format and materials has allowed us to shift our gaze and experiment thematically. The 2013 iteration of Stage Rights! included a number of pieces that drew attention to the ways in which the anti-suffragist campaign was used in humorous ways by suffragist creatives, whilst in 2016 we moved the emphasis on to discourse around agency and direct action. Grant Ferguson described A Particular Theatre as ‘not so much “remembering” the Hut as exploring the intersection at which it existed – that metaphorical and literal crossroads’,33 and Women and War highlighted ideas of independence, patriotism and labour in a time of uncertainty and change. Mindful of Jill Lepore’s work on microhistory and biography that asks provocative questions about sympathy and intent,34 we tried to create moments that audiences would find accessible, relevant, memorable and moving both live and in their recollection of the event, but it is hard to know if these moments can do anything more than hint at the breadth of research in the development process, or move beyond reflection on what Bratton has defined as the ‘potency in the imagined memory’ of the countless people who have stood on the streets before us.35 Each encounter is a self-contained and site-specific performance that contributes to the whole experience, brought to life by a performer for that moment and that audience group. There is space for discussion and reflection at the end of the walk in which we can capture feedback and answer questions, but most of the discussion happens along the route, as is intended. Reflecting on the Living Literature Walks featured in this chapter and the collaborative and creative process of making them has been an interesting and valuable experience. As a researcher it was a privilege and a joy to reach out in both directions and take suffrage theatre out of the archive, off the page, on to the streets and into public space, and to do it playfully. The partnership with Rebecca Mordan and SLG offered new opportunities to connect the work directly with different generations of feminist activists, and the layering of representation across performers and campaigners generated a fresh energy around the work, with casts and audience members expressing an appreciation and sense of relief that there was a legacy of challenging systemic discrimination in the theatre industry that extended back further than many knew. Evaluating the experience and impact of these walks is an ongoing process, informed by our own collaborative experience as well as scholarship in theatre history, contemporary feminist practice, and feminist geography and historiography. Like the performers and writers of suffrage plays, we are unambiguous about the communicative impetus for our work – our desire to make women’s history visible and audible on the streets of London through walking, mapping, shared experiences and theatrical encounters. For feminist activists working in theatre in the twenty-first century these walks have been a way to reclaim a theatrical heritage, celebrate the disruptive presence of suffrage theatre in the archive, challenge and critique the absence of women’s history in public space, and share all of these with future generations of scholars, practitioners and audiences through personal encounters that are thematically linked and exist in multiple timelines.

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Casts, Locations and Texts for the Living Literature Walks Table 5.1  Stage Rights! (2013) PERFORMER

LOCATION

PERFORMANCE

Rebecca Mordan

Foyer of Theatre Royal Drury Lane

Extract from The First Actress by Christopher St John (1911)

Naomi Paxton

Corner of Catherine Street and Tavistock Street

The Sleepless Woman by Kate Kerrow (2013)

Sarah Ford, Steve Fortune and Laura Wickham

Garden of the Actors’ Church (St Paul’s Church, Covent Garden)

Extract from Tradition by George Middleton (1913)

Kathryn Martin and Bobbi O’Callaghan

The Porterhouse, Maiden Lane

Extract from Pot and Kettle by Cicely Hamilton and Christopher St John (1909)

Sally Mortemore

Robert Street

Woman’s Cause by Laurence Housman (1909)

Helen Millar

Adam Street

An Anti-Suffragist or The Other Side by H. M. Paull (1910)

Emma Fenney

Bull Inn Court

Extract from Her Vote by H. V. Esmond (1910)

Rosie Ede

Burleigh Street

Mrs Pancake by Naomi Paxton (2013)

Shazz Andrew

The Nell of Old Drury

The Mother’s Meeting by Mrs Harlow Phibbs (1913)

Table 5.2  Stage Rights! (2016) PERFORMER

LOCATION

PERFORMANCE

Naomi Paxton

Theatre Royal Drury Lane

Extract from The First Actress by Christopher St John (1911)

Sarah Annakin

Corner of Catherine Street and Tavistock Street

The Sleepless Woman by Kate Kerrow (2013)

Mary McCusker, Garden of the Actors’ Extract from How One Genevieve Swallow and Church (St Paul’s Woman Did It by John Austin Kate Smurthwaite Church, Covent Garden) (1912) Sally Mortemore

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Extract from The Women Writers at the Criterion by Elizabeth Robins (1910)

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PERFORMER

LOCATION

PERFORMANCE

Kathryn Martin and Bobbi O’Callaghan

La Tasca, Maiden Lane

Extract from Pot and Kettle by Cicely Hamilton and Christopher St John (1909)

David Hall, Nick Dutton, Beth Watson, Tempeste HepenstallBrown and Alice Robinson

Buckingham Street

Extract from 10 Clowning Street by Joan Dugdale (1913)

Charlotte Moore and Sophie Kisilevsky

Bull Inn Court

A Defence of Fighting Spirit by Christopher St John (1909)

Rebecca Mordan

Burleigh Street

Woman This and Woman That by Laurence Housman (1910)

Shazz Andrew

Joe Allen’s Restaurant, Exeter Street

The Mother’s Meeting by Mrs Harlow Phibbs (1913)

Table 5.3  A Particular Theatre: Shakespeare, Suffragists and Soldiers (2016) PERFORMER

LOCATION

PERFORMANCE

Rebecca Mordan

School of Advanced Study lobby

Extract from ‘Heroines’ by Alice Meynell, from A Book of Homage to Shakespeare (1916)

Kudzi Hudson

Institute of Historical Research

Extract from Antony and Cleopatra by William Shakespeare

Tyler Read

Russell Square

A Soldier on Leave by Kate Kerrow (2016)

Alice Robinson

Pied Bull Yard

Exit Music (For a Film) by Radiohead (1997)

Illona Linthwaite and Shazz Andrew

The Old Crown Pub Extract from A Bit of Blighty by Evelyn Glover (1916)

John Gorick and David Hall

Corner of Bedford Square

Extract from Julius Caesar by William Shakespeare

Jenny Ayres

Treadwells Bookshop

Extract from On Poetry by Mary Wollstonecraft (c. 1797)

Alison Child and Rose Wakley

The London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine

Extract from All the Nice Girls by Behind the Lines

Naomi Paxton and Ailsa Grant Ferguson

Malet Street Gardens

Gunfire tea and conversation

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Table 5.4  Women and War: The West End and the Western Front (2017) PERFORMER

LOCATION

PERFORMANCE

Rebecca Mordan

The Feminist Library

Woman This and Woman That by Laurence Housman (1910)

Cavin Cornwall and Faye Wilson

Waterloo Action Centre

Extract from Which by Evelyn Glover (1914)

Donna Powell

Secker Street

Nell, adapted by Naomi Paxton from Things a Bright Girl Can Do by Sally Nicholls (2017)

Josephine Liptrott

Adam Street

Constable Campbell, written by Naomi Paxton (2017) and based on the Women Police Service (1919) and Mary Allen’s The Pioneer Policewoman (1925) and Lady in Blue (1936)

Kiruna Stamell

Edith Cavell statue, St Martin’s Place

Extract from ‘Communications with Soldiers who have “Died”’ in Psychical Phenomena and the War by Hereward Carrington (1920)

Illona Linthwaite and The Club for Acts and Shazz Andrew Actors, Bedford Street

Extract from A Bit of Blighty by Evelyn Glover (1916)

Notes   1. Leslie Kern, Feminist City (London: Verso, 2020), 56.   2. Jill Dolan, The Feminist Spectator in Action: Feminist Criticism for the Stage and Screen (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 7.   3. Tracy C. Davis, ‘Edwardian Management and the Structures of Industrial Capitalism’, in The Edwardian Theatre: Essays on Performance and the Stage, ed. Michael Booth and Joel Kaplan (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 111–29; 113.   4. Jacky Bratton, ‘Reading the Intertheatrical, or, The Mysterious Disappearance of Susanna Centlivre’, in Women, Theatre and Performance: New Histories, New Historiographies, ed. Maggie B. Gale and Viv Gardner (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000), 7–24.   5. Susan Croft, Votes for Women and Other Plays (Twickenham: Aurora Metro, 2009).   6. Elizabeth Darling, ‘An Urban Experiment in Spiritual Motherhood’, in Suffragette City: Women, Politics and the Built Environment, ed. Elizabeth Darling and Nathaniel Robert Walker (London: Routledge, 2020), 9–32; 10.   7. Susan Carlson, ‘Comic Militancy: The Politics of Suffrage Drama’, in Women, Theatre and Performance: New Histories, New Historiographies, ed. Maggie B. Gale and Viv Gardner (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000), 195–215; 212.  8. Barbara Green, Feminist Periodicals and Daily Life: Women and Modernity in British Culture (Cham: Springer International Publishing, 2017), 3.

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  9. Elizabeth Robins, Way Stations (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1913), 184. 10. For more examples see Naomi Paxton, Stage Rights! The Actresses’ Franchise League, Activism and Politics 1908–1958 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2020). 11. Susan Bradley Smith, A Splendid Adventure: Australian Suffrage Theatre on the World Stage (New York: Peter Lang Ltd International Academic Publishers, 2020), 267. 12. For more see https://scarylittlegirls.co.uk/living-literature-walks/ (accessed 26 September 2022). 13. Jacky Bratton, The Making of the West End Stage: Marriage, Management and the Mapping of Gender in London, 1830–1870 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 23. 14. Virginia Woolf, Street Haunting: A London Adventure (San Francisco: Westgate Press, 1930). 15. Lauren Elkin, Flâneuse: Women Walk the City in Paris, New York, Tokyo, Venice and London (London: Vintage, 2017). 16. Lyn Gardner, ‘Don’t Box Me In: Why Label Art Forms?’, The Guardian, 9 May 2013, https://www.theguardian.com/stage/theatreblog/2013/may/09/dont-box-me-in-why-labelart-forms (accessed 26 September 2022). 17. Rebecca Mordan and Naomi Paxton, Stage Rights! A Living Literature Walk Route Guide, unpublished manuscript, 2013, 2. 18. Kate Kerrow, The Sleepless Woman, unpublished manuscript, 2013. 19. Ibid. 20. Found on CDs The Blaze of Day: The Suffragette Movement – A Documentary Survey, Pearl, 1992, and Gone Where They Don’t Play Billiards (Music and Mirth from the Halls on Phonograph Cylinders), Cylidisc, 2001; on the YouTube channel EMGColonel; and in Crew, Suffragist Sheet Music. 21. This is a reference to an occasion in January 1909 when comic Arthur Rigby, dressed as a pantomime dame, pretended to be a suffrage speaker from the top of a motor bus in Liverpool and was heckled and nearly physically assaulted by the crowd that gathered. The Era, 2 January 1909, 21. 22. Evelyn Glover, A Bit of Blighty, unpublished manuscript, 1916. 23. Ailsa Grant Ferguson, The Shakespeare Hut: A Story of Memory, Performance and Identity, 1916–1923 (London: Arden Shakespeare, 2019), 219. 24. Evelyn Glover, ‘Which’, in The Methuen Drama Book of Suffrage Plays: Taking the Stage, ed. Naomi Paxton (London: Bloomsbury Methuen Drama, 2018), 195–213. 25. Housman was an Honorary Male Associate of the WWSL, a founder member of the Men’s League for Women’s Suffrage, and co-founder of the Suffrage Atelier. He was a key organiser of the 1911 Census boycott, and wrote plays and poems for the AFL and articles and speeches for other suffrage societies, many of which were published by feminist and suffragist presses. ‘Woman This and Woman That’ is a parody of Rudyard Kipling’s poem ‘Tommy’ (1890), in which a British soldier contrasts the respect he is treated with in wartime to the disrespect he receives in peacetime. Kipling was a prominent and vocal anti-suffragist and Housman’s ‘Woman This and Woman That’ switches the focus of the piece on to the illogical and hypocritical treatment of women by the government in and out of peacetime. 26. The Woman’s Dreadnought, 12 December 1914, 156. 27. Rebecca Mordan and Naomi Paxton, Women and War: The West End and the Western Front Route Guide, unpublished manuscript, 2017, 2. 28. Ibid. 3. 29. Naomi Paxton and Sally Nicholls, Nell, unpublished manuscript, 2017. 30. Mary Allen, The Pioneer Policewoman (London: Chatto & Windus, 1925), 134–70. 31. Hereward Carrington, Psychical Phenomena and the War (New York: Dodd, Mead and Co., 1920), 301. 32. Gardner, ‘Don’t Box Me In’.

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33. Grant Ferguson, The Shakespeare Hut, 219. 34. Jill Lepore, ‘Historians Who Love Too Much: Reflections on Microhistory and Biography’, The Journal of American History 88, no. 1 (2001): 129–44. 35. Bratton, The Making of the West End Stage, 45.

Works Cited Allen, Mary. The Pioneer Policewoman. London: Chatto & Windus, 1925. Bradley Smith, Susan. A Splendid Adventure: Australian Suffrage Theatre on the World Stage. New York: Peter Lang Ltd International Academic Publishers, 2020. Bratton, Jacky. The Making of the West End Stage: Marriage, Management and the Mapping of Gender in London, 1830–1870. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011. Bratton, Jacky. ‘Reading the Intertheatrical, or, The Mysterious Disappearance of Susanna Centlivre’. In Women, Theatre and Performance: New Histories, New Historiographies, edited by Maggie B. Gale and Viv Gardner, 7–24. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000. Carlson, Susan. ‘Comic Militancy: The Politics of Suffrage Drama’. In Women, Theatre and Performance: New Histories, New Historiographies, edited by Maggie B. Gale and Viv Gardner, 198–215. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000. Carrington, Hereward. Psychical Phenomena and the War. New York: Dodd, Mead and Co., 1920. Croft, Susan, ed. Votes for Women and Other Plays. Twickenham: Aurora Metro, 2009. Darling, Elizabeth. ‘An Urban Experiment in Spiritual Motherhood’. In Suffragette City: Women, Politics and the Built Environment, edited by Elizabeth Darling and Nathaniel Robert Walker, 9–32. London: Routledge, 2020. Davis, Tracy C. ‘Edwardian Management and the Structures of Industrial Capitalism’. In The Edwardian Theatre: Essays on Performance and the Stage, edited by Michael Booth and Joel Kaplan, 111–29. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008. Dolan, Jill. The Feminist Spectator in Action: Feminist Criticism for the Stage and Screen. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. Elkin, Lauren. Flâneuse: Women Walk the City in Paris, New York, Tokyo, Venice and London. London: Vintage, 2017. Gardner, Lyn. ‘Don’t Box Me In: Why Label Art Forms?’ The Guardian, 9 May 2013. https:// www.theguardian.com/stage/theatreblog/2013/may/09/dont-box-me-in-why-label-artforms (accessed 26 September 2022). Glover, Evelyn. A Bit of Blighty. Unpublished manuscript, 1916. Glover, Evelyn. ‘Which’. In The Methuen Drama Book of Suffrage Plays: Taking the Stage, edited by Naomi Paxton, 195–213. London: Bloomsbury Methuen Drama, 2018. Grant Ferguson, Ailsa. The Shakespeare Hut: A Story of Memory, Performance and Identity, 1916–1923. London: Arden Shakespeare, 2019. Green, Barbara. Feminist Periodicals and Daily Life: Women and Modernity in British Culture. Cham: Springer International Publishing, 2017. Kern, Leslie. Feminist City. London: Verso, 2020. Kerrow, Kate. The Sleepless Woman. Unpublished manuscript, 2013. Kerrow, Kate. A Soldier on Leave. Unpublished manuscript, 2016. Lepore, Jill. ‘Historians Who Love Too Much: Reflections on Microhistory and Biography’. The Journal of American History 88, no. 1 (2001): 129–44. Mordan, Rebecca and Naomi Paxton. Stage Rights! A Living Literature Walk Route Guide. Unpublished manuscript, 2013 and 2016. Mordan, Rebecca and Naomi Paxton. Women and War: The West End and the Western Front Route Guide. Unpublished manuscript, 2017.

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Mordan, Rebecca, Naomi Paxton and Ailsa Grant Ferguson. A Particular Theatre: Shakespeare, Suffragists and Soldiers Route Guide. Unpublished manuscript, 2016. Paxton, Naomi. Constable Campbell. Unpublished manuscript, 2017. Paxton, Naomi. Stage Rights! The Actresses’ Franchise League, Activism and Politics 1908–1958. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2020. Paxton, Naomi and Sally Nicholls. Nell. Unpublished manuscript, 2017. Robins, Elizabeth. Way Stations. London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1913. Woolf, Virginia. Street Haunting: A London Adventure. San Francisco: Westgate Press, 1930.

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6 Shuffle Along (1921) and the Challenges of Black Modernist Performance on the Contemporary Stage Carrie J. Preston

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huffle Along, or, The Making of the Musical Sensation of 1921 and All That Followed, directed and written by George C. Wolfe, opened to great acclaim in the spring of 2016. The $12 million show closed at a loss after just 100 performances – 404 fewer than the Shuffle Along of 1921, which was one of the few shows of the decade to run more than 500 performances. What led to the abbreviated, disappointing run of Shuffle Along, or, The Making of. . .? Its veteran, controversial producer, Scott Rudin, blamed it on the upcoming maternity leave of six-time Tony Award winner Audra McDonald, who played the star role of Lottie Gee.1 Rudin brought a suit against insurer Lloyd’s of London for refusing to pay on two policies worth $14.1 million, a Non-Appearance policy and an Abandonment policy entitling producers to compensation if a performance had to be cancelled due to the ‘Death, Accident, or Illness’ of McDonald.2 Lloyd’s of London claimed that pregnancy is not a death, accident or illness and that the show did not need to close when it was playing at 101.25 per cent capacity during its final week.3 Shuffle Along, or, The Making of. . . boasted many stars, including Tony Award winners Brian Stokes Mitchell and Billy Porter, although it did not win any of the ten Tony Awards for which it was nominated. The litigious Rudin had failed in his bid to reclassify the show as a revival so it would not have to battle Lin-Manuel Miranda’s smash hit Hamilton, winner of eleven of its record-breaking sixteen Tony nominations. After four years of court battles, Rudin and Lloyd’s of London finally agreed to drop the insurance case in October 2020.4 There is much to unpack in this story of lawsuits, a dash of pregnancy-shaming, and duelling musicals deeply rooted in American history and commitments to performers of colour.5 This chapter will focus on how the ‘failure’ of Shuffle Along, or, The Making of. . . reveals the challenges of restaging and remembering modernist Black performance on contemporary stages. According to director George C. Wolfe, the 1921 Shuffle Along was crucial to the making of African American theatre and all that followed, but he avoided restaging many aspects of the show that perform racist stereotypes: ‘Terrible book, bad book,’ he pronounced to explain why he could only include snippets of the comic sketches, which, like the song and dance numbers, were largely derived from the blackface minstrel traditions.6 Wolfe united the ‘making of’ trope with the ‘show within a show’ structure so typical of the metatheatrical structures in modernist drama but not at all present in the 1921 Shuffle Along. Thus,

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Wolfe created occasions for the original Shuffle Along numbers to appear as rehearsals alongside a story about the artists who created and starred in the musical. Wolfe’s strategy aligns with the goal of remembering Black artists, but it attempts to forget Shuffle Along’s roots in the blackface minstrel tradition, which were the foundation for its historical success as well as its ability to offer multiple, even contradictory, political statements and to appeal to diverse audiences. Minstrelsy and its derivatives not only held the ambivalent fascination of American audiences well into the twentieth century, as Shuffle Along (1921) makes clear, but was crucial to the making of international modernist audiences. Minstrelsy is not typically considered within the framework of modernist theatre and modernist studies more generally, even as the field called ‘modernist studies’ has experienced an exciting renovation in the first two decades of the twenty-first century, as marked by Douglas Mao and Rebecca Walkowitz’s 2008 PMLA essay ‘The New Modernist Studies’. They noted that modernist studies was undergoing temporal and geographical expansion alongside attention to diverse cultural productions, technologies and the cross-pollination of aesthetic media. Productions like Shuffle Along, which featured the new musical and dance styles called jazz, as well as new stage technologies and diverse performers and audiences, should be emblematic of the ‘new modernist studies’. But, as scholars have extended the geographical boundaries of modernism, they tend to leap to the global and planetary, playing less attention to the more constrained geographies and actual tours of twentieth-century performance so well represented by Shuffle Along. The ‘Great Migration’ of Black Americans from the south to northern cities beginning around 1916 also transported musical and movement forms with deep roots in slave culture and blackface minstrelsy.7 Blues mingled with international musical forms (especially Spanish and French colonial styles) to produce jazz and ragtime, considered core achievements of American musical modernism. Jazz and ragtime provided the soundtrack for the Harlem Renaissance, a flowering or renewal of Black arts centred around New York’s Harlem neighbourhood – which reverberated with the rhythms of Shuffle Along. To recover the history of Black performance, scholars of modernism will need flexible interpretive strategies and a willingness to write about complex, ambivalent performances of race.

Blackface Minstrelsy and the Audience for Modernist Performance As the 1921 Shuffle Along exemplifies, minstrelsy garnered an ambivalently enthralled audience for the spectacle of performing racial difference in the modernist period. The music and dance of blackface minstrelsy and its derivatives, like tap dancing, defined a raced and gendered ‘Americanness’ and ‘modernity’ for national and international audiences after 1830. Minstrelsy trafficked in deep racial and gendered ambivalence, perhaps most obviously expressed in blackface performance and transvestism; minstrel shows appealed to a confounded fascination with the Black (male) body as both a source of entertainment and competition for the American working class.8 These themes are evident in Robert P. Nevin’s early (1867) and influential origin story of minstrelsy, or, as he wrote, ‘the circumstances—authentic in every particular—under which the first work of the distinct art of Negro Minstrelsy was presented’.9 T. D. Rice, the supposed inventor of blackface minstrelsy, was walking in Cincinnati when he overheard

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a voice ringing clear and full above the noises of the street, and giving utterance, in an unmistakable dialect, to the refrain of a song to this effect: Turn about an’ wheel about an’ do jis so, An’ ebery time I turn about I jump Jim Crow. [. . .] As a national or ‘race’ illustration, behind the footlights, might not ‘Jim Crow’ and a Black face tickle the fancy of pit and circle, as well as the ‘Sprig of Shillalah’ and a red nose? Out of the suggestion leaped the determination; and so it chanced that the casual hearing of a song trolled by a negro stage-driver, lolling lazily on the box of his vehicle, gave origin to a school of music destined to excel in popularity all others, and to make the name of the obscure actor, T. D. Rice, famous.10 The story brings Rice, an ‘obscure actor’ with the ‘merit’ of a ‘proper appreciation of his own capacity’ (which Nevin views as quite limited), into proximity with the ‘lolling’ stage-driver as singers of the same song.11 Rice appropriated ‘Jim Crow’ from the ‘Negro stage-driver’ and was launched to fame, while the inspirational singer remains unnamed in this and most other accounts. Rice’s apparent appreciation of ‘Jim Crow’ as a ‘national or “race” illustration’ is compared to the Irish song ‘Sprig of Shillalah’ (‘The Sprig of Shillelagh’), which was regularly performed in minstrel shows and indicates the nostalgia and primitivism associated with ‘national’.12 Blackface performance is presented in relation to the painted red-nose used to depict the stereotypical drunken stage Irishman, as both would ‘tickle the fancy’ of audiences.13 Minstrel shows and other cultural forms constructed American whiteness and Blackness in relation to the status of Irish and Jewish immigrants, and these racialised groups produced many of the blackface performers and audiences for minstrelsy.14 Minstrelsy allowed those marginalised by race or nationality, gender representation or sexuality, to play with these categories in a way that was couched in humour and fun – and was therefore ‘safe’ for the actors and less threatening to the dominant culture. While the origin stories tend to depict minstrelsy as a ‘national or “race” illustration’ with deep roots in American racial categories, recent scholarship has called attention to the transnational influences on the minstrel show.15 Accounts of blackface performance in England surface as early as 1377, and English pantomime featured a Black Harlequin character derived from Italian commedia dell’arte and other traditions of blackface clowning.16 American blackface minstrelsy, when it arrived with T. D. Rice to Great Britain in 1836, combined familiar and foreign elements to generate great enthusiasm. American minstrelsy was a ‘contagion’ that crossed international borders, class barriers and gender lines, as an enthralled, distressed James Kennard Jr noted in 1845: From the nobility and gentry, down to the lowest chimney-sweep in Great Britain, and from the member of Congress, down to the youngest apprentice or school-boy in America, it was all: ‘Turn about and wheel about, and do just so, / And every time I turn about I jump Jim Crow’. Even the fair sex did not escape the contagion: the tunes were set to music for the piano-forte, and nearly every young lady in the Union, and the United Kingdom, played and sang, if she did not jump, ‘Jim Crow’. [. . .] [Negroes themselves were not permitted to appear in the theatres, and the houses of the fashionable, but their songs are in the mouths and ears of all.]17

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Minstrelsy’s racial caricatures had transatlantic appeal, in spite of the distinct colonial and racial histories in the US and Great Britain.18 Kennard’s discussion of the ‘contagion’ of minstrelsy points to its popularity across class and gender divides, although his anxiety about women playing and singing minstrel songs reflects desires to protect the so-called ‘fair sex’, which was generally excluded from the public minstrel show. While women were not jumping ‘Jim Crow’ with their legs, the ‘Negro songs’ still invaded the ‘mouths and ears of all’.19 How did these audiences of different classes, genders and generations understand the racial identities of minstrel performers? Eric Lott claims that audiences often mistook blackface performers for Black men, so that ‘in the minds of many, blackface singers and dancers became, simply, “Negroes”’.20 Evidence indicates a more complicated reception as some audiences considered blackface minstrels to be ‘Negroes’ for the duration of the performance while recognising that they were white – or became white again – after they left the stage and removed the paint. Promotional materials for the more organised and successful troupes included the tongue-in-cheek claims that the Apollo Minstrels were the ‘only original Negroes traveling’ and Christy Minstrels were ‘the very pinks of negro singers’.21 If groups of white performers were the ‘only original Negroes’, it was partially because they were creating ‘original’ identities, versions of Blackness in which the pinkness of the skin that created them showed through quite intentionally. Audiences for minstrelsy in the nineteenth century enjoyed those performances of race and exhibited a false conscious/self-conscious racial ambivalence that suggests the instability of racial categories. The notion that a performer could put on blackface and become an ‘original Negro’ provoked laughter, horror and pleasure. Minstrelsy appealed to audiences by staging a hint of racial instability alongside comic stereotypes, generally maintaining the challenge to racial norms at provocative/entertaining rather than more radical/ frightening levels. This is not to say that most audiences in the nineteenth century or today subscribe to what theorists of race call ‘racial performativity’ or ‘the performative production of race’. The phrase refers to the idea that race is not a biological category, not even (or not fully) a cultural construct; instead, it is brought into being through performative speech acts and repeated enactments of identity or selfhood.22 While minstrelsy suggested the seemingly radical idea of racial performativity, the form more prominently featured racist, comedic appropriations of Black culture that did not overtly fight racism; in fact, the humour and fun may have inured audiences to oppression. Notions of minstrelsy’s progressive potential are not new, as indicated by the eminent abolitionist Frederick Douglass, who suggested that Black-blackface minstrels might be ‘instrumental in removing the prejudice against our race’.23 Douglass’s 1948 description of groups like the Christy Minstrels as the ‘filthy scum of white society’ is regularly cited.24 But a year later, he wrote of ‘Gavitt’s Original Ethiopian Serenaders’ with measured enthusiasm, concluding that some of the finer performers ‘may do much to elevate themselves and their race in popular estimation’.25 For Douglass, the fact that the ‘Ethiopian Serenaders’ were representing ‘their race’ contributes to their potential elevation (in contrast to the ‘filthy scum’ of white minstrels). Douglass’s description of Black-blackface minstrelsy leads him to suggest the instability of racial categories:

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The Company is said to be composed entirely of colored people; and it may be so. We observed, however, that they too had recourse to the burnt cork and lamp black, the better to express their characters, and to produce uniformity of complexion. Their lips, too, were evidently painted, and otherwise exaggerated.26 The goal of an impossible ‘uniformity’ of Blackness led the performers to blacken their faces and sing in a way that ‘was but an imitation of white performers, and not even a tolerable representation of the character of colored people’.27 Douglass recognised a double imitation, as minstrels imitate white performers imitating Black culture, which renders race a matter of uncertainty and gossip (‘said to be [. . .] and it may be so’). If race, at least in the minstrel show, is an ‘imitation of an imitation’, where is the original to be located?28 Douglass indicated the possibility that minstrelsy could construct new identities: ‘It is something gained when the colored man in any form can appear before a white audience; and we think that even this company, with industry, application, and a proper cultivation of their taste, may yet be instrumental in removing the prejudice against our race.’29 Douglass offered a sophisticated discussion of how Black minstrels could cultivate themselves as well as their audiences through performance. Blackface as it was practised by performers of all races well into the twentieth century was a complex phenomenon characterised by racial bigotry, to be sure, but also by deep ambivalence and even hopes to mitigate racism.

Shuffle Along’s Resistant, Ambivalent and Compliant Modernist Minstrelsy Linking minstrelsy and the modern musical, Shuffle Along set the familiar Blackblackface minstrel acts to the new and exciting music and dance rhythms of the early twentieth century: jazz. Shuffle Along staged racist stereotypes alongside challenges to the limits of Black representation at that time, including breaking taboos against depicting love between Black characters and Black women’s independence of men. Like the minstrel tradition, more generally, Shuffle Along staged resistance, ambivalence and compliance with the racial regime of the time. Sometimes all three were operating to different degrees in the same scene with different, even contradictory interpretations available to subsets of the audience. These racially charged, multilayered meanings were one of the primary legacies Shuffle Along adapted from the minstrel show, as well as a key to its success with multiracial audiences, constituting a complex modernist minstrelsy in musical theatre. Shuffle Along was the creative product of a fusion of two teams from the mixedmedia, interracial vaudeville circuits that had developed out of minstrelsy: the singersongwriter team of Noble Sissle and James Hubert ‘Eubie’ Blake, and the blackface comedy-dance duo Flournoy E. Miller and Aubrey Lyles. Sissle and Blake were billed as ‘The Dixie Duo’ in the vaudeville circuit, and they were one of the first so-called ‘Negro acts’ to play without blackface, although it was not always easy to avoid ‘blacking-up’, as Blake recalled: Some agent had a smart idea for an act for us. We were supposed to shuffle on stage in blackface and patched-up overalls. In the middle of the stage there was a big box

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carrie j. preston with a piano in it. The idea was to look at it as if it were from the moon and I’d say, ‘What’s dat?’ and Noble would say, ‘Dat’s a py-anner!’ and then we’d do our act.30

Sissle and Blake refused to ‘shuffle’ into the ‘py-anner-from-the-moon’ act, with its suggestion that Blacks are ignorant yet born with natural musical ability. Instead, they typically performed in starched and tailored tuxedos, although their music was derived from the minstrel style that had literally trained Blake; his first travelling job was as a buck (tap) dancer for the minstrel show In Old Kentucky.31 Sissle and Blake were recombining these musical influences and producing rags, blues and jazz for enthusiastic audiences. Miller and Lyles wore the ‘blackface and patched-up overalls’ that Sissle and Blake rejected, but their approach emphasised the resistance and ambivalence available in minstrelsy.32 They were particularly celebrated for tap dances and physical comedy routines, like a famous and much-imitated fight scene that was incorporated directly into Shuffle Along as ‘Jimtown Fisticuffs’. Although their brief dramatic sketches filled with small-town humour resembled the narrative scenes typically composing the third act of a minstrel show, they were performing one act in a larger vaudeville show.33 American vaudeville inherited much from minstrelsy but added a rule that there could only be one ‘black act’ per show.34 Therefore, the singer-songwriters Sissle and Blake could not meet the comedians Miller and Lyles in the vaudeville venues they toured. They shared the stage at a 1920 Philadelphia NAACP fundraiser – an event suggesting that vaudeville performance, even in blackface, was not universally considered a racist and demeaning entertainment.35 After another chance encounter in New York, the teams decided to build a full-length show from one of Miller and Lyles’s most popular skits, billed as ‘The Mayor of Jimtown’ or ‘The Mayer of Dixie’. Shuffle Along was born. Shuffle Along’s loose plot centres on a rigged mayoral election in the Black municipality of Jimtown. Miller and Lyles play dishonest partners in a grocery store, Steve Jenkins and Sam Peck, who run against each other for mayor. In keeping with their long history of cheating each other in business, the candidates both begin stealing from the store to buy votes and to hire the same detective, Keeneye, to reveal the other’s crimes. While developing the book for Shuffle Along, the creative team added a romantic love story: the honest candidate, Harry, can marry his beloved Jessie only if he wins the mayoral race – so Jessie’s father has dictated. Harry loses, Steve is elected mayor, and Sam becomes Chief of Police to enforce such laws as: Steve: (Taking pencil into hand) Here’s the first law I’m gwine to pass since I’ve been the Mayor. ‘Black cats must go.’ Black c c c c. Say, look here, Sam, how do you spell cat anyhow? Sam: What do you mean? One of dem jes’ plain everyday walkin’ ’round cats?. . . Steve: Der ain’t but six letters in it.36 Jimtown citizens complain that the mayor is misusing tax dollars to buy an automobile and hire five gorgeous stenographers who must ‘slam’ (salaam) the mayor when they leave his presence.37 Detective Keeneye, who also happens to be honest Harry’s best friend, promises to reveal the election fraud and install Harry as the rightful mayor – which would allow him to marry his beloved Jessie. Audiences never learn how he manages this feat because the final scene comprises song and dance numbers.

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Sissle and Blake’s score for Shuffle Along featured a mix of new songs commenting on the plot along with music from the team’s existing repertory. Most of the critical praise for the production focused on the score. The New York Times proclaimed (in the first use of ‘swing’ in connection with music), ‘The principal asset of “Shuffle Along”, which arrived at the Sixty-Third Street Music Hall last night with the distinction of being written, composed and played entirely by negroes, is a swinging and infectious score by one Eubie Blake.’38 This asset aside, the reviewer claimed the play was ‘extremely crude – in writing, playing and direction’, and ‘none of it is conspicuously native’ – by which term the reviewer may have meant ‘native’ to America or to peoples of African descent, but probably just meant ‘native’ as a racist synonym for ‘primitive’. Shuffle Along’s advertisements quoted from celebratory reviews of the music in the Evening Journal, which dubbed the play ‘A breeze of super-jazz blown up from Dixie’, and the Mail, which claimed, ‘The principal asset of the new entertainment is the dancing and the jazz numbers.’39 Jazz has garnered significant attention in modernist studies, judging by Alfred Appel’s Jazz Modernism: From Ellington and Armstrong to Matisse and Joyce (2004), and has continued to be the focus of works like Charles Riley’s Free as Gods: How the Jazz Age Reinvented Modernism (2017).40 But the ‘jazz’ in these titles does not centrally concern dances like the Charleston or Ballin’ the Jack, a move that is sung about and performed in Miss Ruth Little’s signature number ‘I’m Simply Full of Jazz’. Jazz did – and still does – encompass both musical and dance forms. When Miss Ruth proclaims that she would never get married ‘Because I’m simply too full of jazz’, she references both her song and dance, as well as some jazz spirit we might also call spunk or independence.41 From one perspective, Miss Ruth offers a proto-feminist argument that the modern jazzy girl does not need a man to take care of her. From another, she is a ‘hazy’ and ‘crazy’ young ‘razz’, in line with many stereotypes of silly or mad women.42 The number offers opportunities for reading a more serious social critique of the institution of marriage and gender roles partially hidden amongst racial and gendered stereotypes. David Savran argues that a mode of ‘double reading’ must have been available to some audiences, particularly the crowds of enthusiastic Black theatregoers – or they would not have attended Shuffle Along, sometimes again and again.43 The same was true for women, especially Black women, for whom Miss Ruth articulates a rebellious self-sufficiency through a modern jazz song-and-dance derived from minstrelsy, a style rarely performed by women. Minstrelsy was an all-male enterprise until the twentieth century, one that enabled men to dress in drag, play with sexualities, and perform other roles that did not align with the standards of masculinity while using femininity as the brunt of jokes.44 When Black women took the stage in minstrel-derived styles, they could tap into that resistance and ambivalence while presenting themselves in a manner that was less threatening to male privilege. Miss Ruth can use a jazz song and dance number about jazz to broach ideas that, in another context, might be considered more radical. Miss Ruth is so ‘full of jazz, jazz, jazz’ that she infects her viewers: ‘When they see me shake, it makes them shiver, / When I do a break it makes them quiver.’45 Her audience might shake and shiver with erotic desire, pleasure and/or horror, and they might be infected by her independence and determination not to marry along with her jazz dance. Shuffle Along’s dance style and choreography was so infectious that chorus girls were hired by other Broadway musicals to give dance lessons, and the

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production began offering Wednesday ‘Special Midnight Matinees’ primarily to teach the Shuffle Along style to actors and dancers who could not attend regularly scheduled performances because they were tied up in their own shows.46 These extensive dance lessons were yet another reason Wolfe could justify his long title ‘. . . and All That Followed’, although the original choreographer, Lawrence Deas, is never mentioned in Wolfe’s production.47 His decision to cut the choreography may have been motivated by concerns that the historical dances smacked of minstrelsy and racist stereotype. But it also marginalised the choreographer and followed patterns of devaluing artists whose primary focus is the body and movement – a pattern Eubie Blake bemoaned after producers for Shuffle Along in 1921 ‘brought in a white dance director named Walter Brooks to give the show “That Broadway touch.” He got two percent of the production, and Lawrence Deas who had done all the work, was paid off with a small amount of cash and dropped.’48 Deas does not even make it into the ‘historical program’ that was inserted in the playbill for the 2016 show, which is ahistorical given that the actual programmes consulted to produce the insert did, in fact, list ‘Dances by Lawrence Deas’.49

The Making of a Missed Opportunity to Stage the History of Black Modernist Performance What do contemporary critics, artists and audiences do with a hit created and performed by artists of colour that trafficked in racial insult and stereotypes of Black Americans as backward, corrupt and innately theatrical? With a show that allowed Black sweethearts to sing about their love on stage before white audiences, a ‘taboo’, even dangerous act50 that began to integrate the theatre auditorium?51 What do we do with the fact that Shuffle Along launched the star-studded careers of Josephine Baker, Paul Robeson and Florence Mills, and that the famous writer Langston Hughes referenced Shuffle Along as the musical that ‘symbolized Harlem’ and was even the reason he enrolled at Columbia University, so as to be close to the excitement?52 Wolfe claims, somewhat inaccurately, that we forgot and/or suppressed it: ‘Something huge happened and then something huge also happened – which was that we don’t know anything about it.’53 The company of the new Shuffle Along, or, The Making of. . . plaintively sings ‘They Won’t Remember You’, but Shuffle Along is prominent, even mythic, in musical theatre history, although much less so in modernist studies.54 Wolfe asks audiences to remember – but particularly to remember the artists who made Shuffle Along and whose careers it made. He did not invite audiences to remember the choreography or to confront the racial stereotypes the show needed to present in order to make a hit. Wolfe was certainly right to approach this material with care, as presenting racial stereotypes would offend, even traumatise, many contemporary theatregoers and risk supporting racist beliefs in other audiences. The story of the mayoral election and crooked campaign is barely present in Wolfe’s revision, which instead focuses on the conflict that developed amongst the four creators of Shuffle Along; Miller and Lyles were not benefiting from the money that Sissle and Blake were pulling in from the recordings and sheet music, and the writing/acting/dancing team wanted a share of those profits.55 That unprofitable text would have continued to cause trouble if it were included in Shuffle Along, or, The Making Of. . ., yet refusing to stage it allowed audiences to remember only the fun and palatable

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parts of the musical and the history of Black performance. Reviewer Kristin Moriah points out that this decision ‘denied an immersive experience of the original musical sensation and an understanding of what past audiences may have found compelling’.56 If appropriately contextualised in the ‘making of’ trope, the text could have offered opportunities not only to remember, restage and confront the history of racism, but to comment on contemporary white supremacy. Wolfe could not have imagined how Shuffle Along’s election plot would have resonated with audiences in the spring of 2016 when he decided to abandon the minstrelderived choreography and story of two crooked candidates buying votes after years of unethical business practices. The 2016 United States presidential campaign pitted billionaire real-estate mogul and reality TV star Donald Trump against Hillary Clinton, the former First Lady, then New York senator, then Secretary of State for the administration of President Barack Obama. Trump launched himself into the political spotlight as a supporter of the ‘birther movement’, which claimed that Obama, the US’s first Black president, was born in another country (maybe Kenya, given his father’s nationality) and was therefore not eligible to be president. Trump continued to push the ‘birther’ lie as a presidential candidate, years after Obama released his birth certificate in 2011.57 The election of Trump was widely considered a backlash against the Obama presidency and the more inclusive and multicultural society he represented. Shuffle Along’s story of a crooked campaign exposed by famous Detective Keeneye was not staged in the months before Donald Trump won the White House. If it had been, audiences might have heard similarities between Sam and Steve’s campaign rhetoric and that of the 2016 election: Sam: [. . .] What you talkin’ ’bout I ain’t got no right to be mayors of Jimtown? Steve (Loudly): It takes brains to be a mayor. You ain’t got brains enough to have a decent headache.58 If such attacks struck audiences as humorously absurd in 1921, they might seem less so today as social media offers new platforms for political insult. Trump tweeted, ‘Hillary Clinton should have been prosecuted and should be in jail. Instead she is running for president in what looks like a rigged election.’59 He retweeted an antisemitic meme with the title ‘Crooked Hillary - - Makes History!’, and the image of Clinton’s face over a picture of $100 bills next to a Star of David, symbol of Judaism, emblazoned with the words ‘Most Corrupt Candidate Ever’.60 While not conducted on Twitter, some of Sam and Steve’s banter was performed publicly around the ‘soapbox’: Steve: Ladies, Genlemenses, folkses and peopleses - - When I first entered this race for mayors of Jimtown I had not the least redea - Uncle Ned: That’s language. Steve: - - that there was a dark horse in the race. (CHORUS snickers. Sam looks around for a brick.) Steve: Surprised I was, I must say ver’ much heap surprised I was when I found dat dat dark horse was my own business parter. Tom: (To Sam) Now say something. Sam: Well I might be de dark horse but you (pointing to Steve) ain’t gwine never be no Black mayor.61

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By making the understandable decision not to stage this banter, Shuffle Along, or, The Making of. . . did not offer audiences the opportunity to consider the fictional campaign in Jimtown c. 1921 against the one going on outside the theatre. Such a comparison might have helped audiences recognise what has and has not changed in American race and gender relations – and politics – in ninety-five years. Many of the cuts in the 2016 Shuffle Along, or, The Making of. . . limited the possibility that audiences could find resistant, ironic or radical messages couched in the more demeaning depictions of race and gender. Multiple readings are available when the characters Uncle Tom and Old Black Joe sing and dance about themselves as ‘Jimtown electioners’ in a number that was not staged in 2016 and that both participated in and resisted the so-called ‘coon songs that had mocked Black political ambition since the 1980’s’.62 ‘Uncle Tom and Old Black Joe’ was written for the great tapper/ choreographer Charlie Davis, who played Uncle Tom, and another skilled dancer, Bob Williams, who originally played Old Black Joe. The number was most likely a ‘soft shoe dance, an early form of tap dance from the minstrel stage combining clog and shuffling techniques’.63 The ambivalence and opportunity for multiple readings is built into the character names and the virtuoso dance, particularly as it relates to and undermines the text.64 Uncle Tom is the title character in Harriet Beecher Stowe’s 1852 novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin, and while beloved by many abolitionists and sympathisers, the name also became a derogatory term for a subservient, forgiving Black man. Old Black Joe is a stereotypical name and was particularly famous as the title of a popular, nostalgic song by Stephen C. Foster around 1860 in which ‘Old Black Joe’ suggests that it was ‘better’ when slaves worked together in the cotton fields: ‘Gone are my friends from the cotton fields away.’65 For audiences who knew the song’s seeming nostalgia for slavery, the Old Black Joe character would have been deeply ironical performing next to Uncle Tom, especially as the virtuosity of their dancing in jazz and tap styles would have been anything but subservient, unassuming and nostalgic. Their expert, even ostentatious dancing and the strength of their embodiment put Black artistry centre stage in a way that might have alarmed or challenged audiences, without the racist Uncle Tom and Old Black Joe framework in place. The virtuosity of their dance supports Uncle Tom and Old Black Joe’s claims to ‘have elected every president since ’63 / The last one that we elected was old Booker T.’66 Booker T. Washington was an educator, activist and widely acknowledged leader of the African American community from 1890 until his death in 1915. Although not a president, he advised President Theodore Roosevelt but has been considered too accommodationist by some of the more radical arms of the civil rights movement.67 Uncle Tom and Old Black Joe’s claims about electing presidents since Booker T were simultaneously grandiose silliness and bitterly ironic given the fact that Black Americans lacked access to the polls during national elections, which were far from free and fair. Although the Fourteenth Amendment to the US Constitution gave African Americans the right to full citizenship in 1868, their votes were severely circumscribed through the 1965 Voting Rights Act and beyond. Regardless of the skill of their tap dance or how enthusiastically white audiences cheered, it would not ensure the right to vote. Uncle Tom and Old Black Joe, like the minstrel tradition song and dance, were available for ironic or subversive readings, while their self-deprecating humour and stereotypical characterisation would have entertained audiences in a non-threatening way if they did not get the satire. The 1921 Shuffle Along used the forms of minstrelsy

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in an exaggerated manner so as to critique them from within. Of course, these subversive moments were not and are not available to everyone; as with all satire, audiences must be ‘in the know’ about the form being critiqued. For some audiences, the racist banter and minstrel song and dance merely bolstered racist stereotypes. Contemporary audiences who are less aware of minstrel traditions are even less likely to get the satire, so it is understandable that Wolfe and his creative team abandoned the book. In the one instance when the contemporary performers in Shuffle Along, or, The Making of. . . donned blackface, the atmosphere was sad and demeaning. The characters seemed to be succumbing to racist demands rather than using the paint in the provocative, ironical, even performative manner sometimes achieved by historical minstrelsy and contemporary blackface performance. The 2016 Shuffle Along, or, The Making of. . . treated contemporary audiences to a sanitised Shuffle Along, one with less of the minstrel banter and offensive language that was necessary in 1921 if the show was to succeed with racially mixed audiences, one that did not register the continued failings of American politics. Since audiences were not asked to confront the racist script of Shuffle Along or navigate the discomfort of laughing at the humour while being offended, they could celebrate ‘how far we’ve come’ and congratulate themselves on being ‘woke’ enough about race to buy their tickets. Some audiences could convince themselves that everything has changed, and the musical only needed to ‘correct’ the historical record and be remembered. In fact, Black voters still face unconscionable challenges in accessing polls, and after the 2020 US election, Republican-led states have passed additional measures to disenfranchise minority voters under the guise of stamping out the fraud that, according to Trump, stole the election from him.68 Trump’s false accusations of election fraud stand in stark contrast to the reality of Russian interference in the 2016 election, which emerged during the drawn-out Special Counsel investigation headed by former FBI director Robert Mueller from May 2017 until March 2019. A US federal grand jury indicted thirteen Russians and three Russian businesses for meddling in the US elections to benefit Trump’s campaign.69 The report stopped short of saying that Trump obstructed justice or colluded with Russia, but many are not convinced. Several Keeneyes are still looking into it.

Notes   1. Michael Paulson, ‘“Shuffle Along” Decides It Can’t Go On without Audra McDonald’, The New York Times, 23 June 2016, https://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/24/theater/shufflealong-decides-it-cant-go-on-without-audra-mcdonald.html (accessed 26 September 2022).  2. Marissa Saravis, ‘Shuffle Along Down to the Courthouse: Broadway Producers Argue Actor’s Pregnancy Is an Accident Worth $14 Million’, Fordham: Intellectual Property, Media & Entertainment Law Journal, 19 November 2018, http://www.fordhamiplj. org/2018/11/19/shuffle-along-down-to-the-courthouse-broadway-producers-argue-actorspregnancy-is-an-accident-worth-14-million/ (accessed 26 September 2022).   3. Marc Hershberg, ‘Audra McDonald Stars in New Lawsuit’, Forbes, 14 November 2016, https://www.forbes.com/sites/marchershberg/2016/11/14/audra-mcdonald-stars-in-newlawsuit/#374562ea54c2 (accessed 26 September 2022).   4. Michael Paulson, ‘“Shuffle Along” and Insurer Drop Pregnancy-Prompted Lawsuit’, The New York Times, 21 October 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/21/theater/shufflealong-audra-mcdonald-insurer-pregnancy-lawsuit.html (accessed 26 September 2022).

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  5. Joanna Dee Das reads the incident as an ‘ugly and gendered battle over a woman’s body’ that is in keeping with the lack of attention to dance, choreography and women dancers in the production (93). See Joanna Dee Das, ‘Choreographic Ghosts: Dance and the Revival of Shuffle Along’, Dance Research Journal 51, no. 3 (2019): 84–96.  6. John Jeremiah Sullivan, ‘“Shuffle Along” and the Lost History of Black Performance in America’, The New York Times Magazine, 24 March 2016, https://www.nytimes. com/2016/03/27/magazine/shuffle-along-and-the-painful-history-of-black-performancein-america.html (accessed 26 September 2022).   7. Megan Pugh, America Dancing: From the Cakewalk to the Moonwalk (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2015).   8. Eric Lott, Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993).   9. Robert P. Nevin, ‘Stephen C. Foster and Negro Minstrelsy’, Atlantic Monthly 20, no. 121 (1867): 608–16; 610. 10. Ibid. 608–9. 11. Ibid. 608. 12. ‘Shillelagh’ is the Irish word for an oak club associated with St Patrick, and most versions of the song include a note of Irish nationalism; throughout the 1860s the Christy Minstrels sang ‘The Bonny Green Flag’ to the tune of ‘Sprig of Shillelagh’. See Robert Nowatzki, ‘Paddy Jumps Jim Crow: Irish-Americans and Blackface Minstrelsy’, Éire-Ireland 41, nos. 3/4 (2006): 162–84; 178. Listen to the tune posted by the Irish Traditional Music Archive, Dublin, 2018, https://www.itma.ie/digital-library/sound/cid-232155 (accessed 26 September 2022). 13. Nevin, ‘Stephen C. Foster’, 608. 14. The extent to which Irish Americans used minstrel shows to pursue racist agendas and establish their own whiteness is debated. See Noel Ignatiev, How the Irish Became White (New York: Routledge, 1995); Kevin Kenny, The American Irish: A History (New York: Routledge, 2016). Al Jolson, one of the most famous blackface performers, was a Lithuanian Jewish immigrant and, like many other Jewish and Irish Americans, not considered purely white by many in the first half of the twentieth century. Jolson was warmly embraced by the Black press and community. See Charles Musser, ‘Why Did Negroes Love Al Jolson and the Jazz Singer? Melodrama, Blackface and Cosmopolitan Theatrical Culture’, Film History 23 (2011): 196–222. 15. Nevin, ‘Stephen C. Foster’, 608–9. 16. Robert Nowatzki’s Representing African Americans in Transatlantic Abolitionism and Blackface Minstrelsy (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2010) argues that ‘despite the claims of nineteenth-century American cultural critics that minstrelsy was indigenous to the United States, Blackface performance was not originally American’ (71). 17. Lott, Love and Theft, 59. James K. Kennard Jr, ‘Who Are Our National Poets?’, Knickerbocker 26, no. 4 (1845): 331–41; 332–3. Insertion in the original. 18. Nowatzki, Representing African Americans, 71–6. 19. Kennard, ‘Who Are Our National Poets?’, 333. 20. Lott, Love and Theft, 20. 21. Ibid. 20. 22. Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York and London: Routledge, 1999). Foundational works on racial performativity include: Louis F. Mirón and Jonathon Xavier Inda, ‘Race as a Kind of Speech Act’, Cultural Studies: A Research Volume 5 (2000): 85–107; Nadine Ehlers, ‘Passing Phantasms/Sanctioning Performatives: (Re)Reading White Masculinity in Rhinelander v. Rhinelander’, Studies in Law, Politics, and Society 27 (2003): 63–91; Nadine Ehlers, ‘“Black Is” and “Black Ain’t”: Performative Revisions of Racial “Crisis”’, Culture, Theory and Critique 47, no. 2

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23. 24.

25. 26. 27. 28.

29. 30. 31. 32.

33. 34. 35.

36. 37. 38. 39. 40.

41. 42. 43.

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(2006): 149–63; John L. Jackson Jr, Harlemworld: Doing Race and Class in Contemporary America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), especially ‘White Harlem: Toward the Performative Limits of Blackness’. Frederick Douglass, ‘Gavitt’s Original Ethiopian Serenaders’ [The North Star (29 June 1849)], in The Life and Writings of Frederick Douglass, vol. 1, ed. Philip S. Foner (New York: International Publishers, 1950), 141–2. Frederick Douglass, ‘The Hutchinson Family—Hunkerism’ [The North Star (27 October 1848)], in Uncle Tom’s Cabin and American Culture, ed. Stephen Railton, Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities, University of Virginia, http://utc.iath.virginia. edu/minstrel/miar03bt.html (accessed 26 September 2022). Douglass, ‘Gavitt’s Original Ethiopian Serenaders’, 142. Ibid. 141. Ibid. 141. Judith Butler, ‘Imitation and Gender Insubordination’, in Literary Theory: An Anthology, ed. Julie Rivkin and Michael Ryan (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2004), 722–30. ‘If heterosexuality is an impossible imitation of itself, an imitation that performatively constitutes itself as the original, then the imitative parody of “heterosexuality” – when and where it exists in gay cultures – is always and only an imitation of an imitation, a copy of a copy, for which there is no original’ (723–4). Douglass, ‘Gavitt’s Original Ethiopian Serenaders’, 142. Robert Kimball and William Bolcom, Reminiscing with Noble Sissle and Eubie Blake (New York: Cooper Square Press, 1973), 80. Ibid. 43. David S. Thompson, ‘Shuffling Roles: Alterations and Audiences in Shuffle Along’, in Theatre Symposium, Volume 20: Gods and Groundlings (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2012), 97–108. Thompson points out that, ‘while their look may have been typical, even stereotypical, their materials set them apart. Miller and Lyles developed several routines that could easily be interpreted as either submissive or subversive, depending on the audience’ (100). Kimball and Bolcom, Reminiscing, 86. Ibid. 86. Brian D. Valencia, ‘Musical of the Month: Shuffle Along’, Billy Rose Theatre Division, New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center, 10 February 2012, https://www.nypl.org/blog/2012/02/10/musical-month-shuffle-along (accessed 26 September 2022). Noble Sissle and Eubie Blake [Flournoy E. Miller and Aubrey Lyles], Shuffle Along, ed. Lyn Schenbeck and Lawrence Schenbeck, Recent Researches in American Music 85, Music of the United States 29, 312. Sissle and Blake, Shuffle Along, 313. ‘“Shuffle Along” Premiere: Negro Production Opens at Sixty Third Street’, The New York Times, 23 May 1921, 20. Kimball and Bolcom, Reminiscing, 94. Alfred Appel, Jazz Modernism: From Ellington and Armstrong to Matisse and Joyce (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004); Charles A. Riley, Free as Gods: How the Jazz Age Reinvented Modernism (Lebanon, NH: University Press of New England, 2017). See also David Chinitz, T. S. Eliot and the Cultural Divide (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003). Sissle and Blake, Shuffle Along, 106. Ibid. 129–30. David Savran, Highbrow/Lowdown: Theater, Jazz, and the Making of the New Middle Class (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2009). Focusing on the number ‘Bandana Days’, Savran argues:

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carrie j. preston The piece can be interpreted as it was on opening night by Alan Dale as a simple, ‘jolly’ ‘“darky” musical comedy’ performed by actors who ‘reveled in their work.’ Or it can be seen, as it doubtlessly was by many African Americans in the audience, as an ironic reinvention of a racist formula that freely appropriates and satirizes the conventions of both minstrelsy and musical comedy. (75)

44. Lott claims in Love and Theft: Most of them [minstrel performers] were minor, apolitical theatrical men of the northern artisanate who pursued a newly available bourgeois dream of freedom and play by paradoxically coding themselves as ‘black.’ Marginalized by temperament, by habit (often alcoholism), by ethnicity, even by sexual orientation, these artists immersed themselves in ‘blackness’ to indulge their felt sense of difference. (53) 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50.

Sissle and Blake, Shuffle Along, 131, 110. Kimball and Bolcom, Reminiscing, 95. See Dee Das, ‘Choreographic Ghosts’. Ibid. 87. Ibid. 85. Charles McNulty, ‘How “Shuffle Along” Director George C. Wolfe Brought Back the 1921 Show That Changed Broadway Forever’, Los Angeles Times, 25 April 2016, http://www. latimes.com/entertainment/arts/theater/la-et-cm-george-wolfe-20160425-column.html (accessed 26 September 2022). 51. Thompson, ‘Shuffling Roles’. Shuffle Along is often credited as having desegregated the Broadway audience, but Thompson points to ‘caveats’: ‘Whereas Blacks had customarily been restricted to the balcony, the critic for Va­riety noted with apparent surprise that “colored patrons were noticed as far front as the fifth row” on opening night. In fact, ticketing remained decidedly restricted. Two-thirds of the orchestra seating was available to whites only. Variety reassured its readers that “the two races are rarely intermingled”’ (104). 52. Savran, Highbrow/Lowdown, 72. 53. McNulty, ‘How “Shuffle Along” Director’. 54. Jean Stearns and Marshall Stearns, Jazz Dance: The Story of American Vernacular Dance (New York: Da Capo Press, 1968, 1994); Allen Woll, Black Musical Theatre from Coontown to Dreamgirls (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1989); David Krasner, A Beautiful Pageant: African American Theatre, Drama, and Performance in the Harlem Renaissance, 1910–1927 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002). 55. Sullivan, ‘“Shuffle Along” and the Lost History’. 56. Kristin Moriah, ‘Shuffle and Repeat: A Review of George C. Wolfe’s Shuffle Along’, American Quarterly 69, no. 1 (March 2017): 177–86; 184. 57. Andrew Prokop, ‘Trump Fanned a Conspiracy about Obama’s Birthplace for Years. Now He Pretends Clinton Started It’, Vox, 16 September 2016, https://www.vox. com/2016/9/16/12938066/donald-trump-obama-birth-certificate-birther (accessed 26 September 2022). 58. Sissle and Blake, Shuffle Along, 170. 59. 7.23am, 15 October 2016. 60. Anthony Smith, ‘Donald Trump’s Star of David Hillary Clinton Meme Was Created by White Supremacists’, Mic, 3 July 2016, https://www.mic.com/articles/147711/donaldtrump-s-star-of-david-hillary-clinton-meme-was-created-by-white-supremacists (accessed 26 September 2022). 61. Sissle and Blake, Shuffle Along, 170–1. 62. Ibid. lxxii.

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63. Ibid. lxxii. 64. Lyn Schenbeck and Lawrence Schenbeck note, ‘The lyrics were undoubtedly “read” in various ways and “seen” variously as well, depending on the performers’ visual presentation’ (Sissle and Blake, Shuffle Along, lxxii). 65. Robert B. Waltz, ed., The Minnesota Heritage Songbook, https://mnheritagesongbook.net/ the-songs/addition-song-without-recordings/old-Black-joe/ (accessed 26 September 2022). 66. Sissle and Blake, Shuffle Along, 183–4. 67. Schenbeck and Schenbeck claim, ‘Many whites respected Washington’s achievements as well, so a reference to him in the show, even in a comic number, may not have registered as racist humor’ (Sissle and Blake, Shuffle Along, lxxii). 68. Amy Gardner, Kate Rabinowitz and Harry Stevens, ‘How GOP-Backed Voting Measures Could Create Hurdles for Tens of Millions of Voters’, The Washington Post, 11 March 2021, https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/interactive/2021/voting-restrictions-republicansstates/ (accessed 26 September 2022). 69. Matt Apuzzo and Sharon LaFraniere, ‘13 Russians Indicted as Mueller Reveals Effort to Aid Trump Campaign’, The New York Times, 16 February 2018, https://www.nytimes. com/2018/02/16/us/politics/russians-indicted-mueller-election-interference.html (accessed 26 September 2022).

Works Cited Appel, Alfred. Jazz Modernism: From Ellington and Armstrong to Matisse and Joyce. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004. Apuzzo, Matt and Sharon LaFraniere. ‘13 Russians Indicted as Mueller Reveals Effort to Aid Trump Campaign’. The New York Times, 16 February 2018. https://www.nytimes. com/2018/02/16/us/politics/russians-indicted-mueller-election-interference.html (accessed 26 September 2022). Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York and London: Routledge, 1999. Butler, Judith. ‘Imitation and Gender Insubordination’. In Literary Theory: An Anthology, edited by Julie Rivkin and Michael Ryan, 722–30. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2004. Chinitz, David. T. S. Eliot and the Cultural Divide. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003. Dee Das, Joanna. ‘Choreographic Ghosts: Dance and the Revival of Shuffle Along’. Dance Research Journal 51, no. 3 (2019): 84–96. Douglass, Frederick. ‘Gavitt’s Original Ethiopian Serenaders’ [The North Star (29 June 1849)]. In The Life and Writings of Frederick Douglass, vol. 1, edited by Philip S. Foner, 141–2. New York: International Publishers, 1950. Douglass, Frederick. ‘The Hutchinson Family—Hunkerism’ [The North Star (27 October 1848)]. In Uncle Tom’s Cabin and American Culture, edited by Stephen Railton. Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities, University of Virginia. http://utc.iath.virginia. edu/minstrel/miar03bt.html (accessed 26 September 2022). Ehlers, Nadine. ‘“Black Is” and “Black Ain’t”: Performative Revisions of Racial “Crisis”’. Culture, Theory and Critique 47, no. 2 (2006): 149–63. Ehlers, Nadine. ‘Passing Phantasms/Sanctioning Performatives: (Re)Reading White Masculinity in Rhinelander v. Rhinelander’. Studies in Law, Politics, and Society 27 (2003): 63–91. Gardner, Amy, Kate Rabinowitz and Harry Stevens. ‘How GOP-Backed Voting Measures Could Create Hurdles for Tens of Millions of Voters’. The Washington Post, 11 March 2021. https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/interactive/2021/voting-restrictions-republicansstates/ (accessed 26 September 2022).

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Hershberg, Marc. ‘Audra McDonald Stars in New Lawsuit’. Forbes, 14 November 2016. https://www.forbes.com/sites/marchershberg/2016/11/14/audra-mcdonald-stars-in-newlawsuit/#374562ea54c2 (accessed 26 September 2022). Ignatiev, Noel. How the Irish Became White. New York: Routledge, 1995. Jackson Jr, John L. Harlemworld: Doing Race and Class in Contemporary America. New York: Oxford University Press, 2001. Kennard Jr, James K. ‘Who Are Our National Poets?’ Knickerbocker 26, no. 4 (1845): 331–41. Kenny, Kevin. The American Irish: A History. New York: Routledge, 2016. Kimball, Robert and William Bolcom. Reminiscing with Noble Sissle and Eubie Blake. New York: Cooper Square Press, 1973. Krasner, David. A Beautiful Pageant: African American Theatre, Drama, and Performance in the Harlem Renaissance, 1910–1927. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002. Lott, Eric. Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class. New York: Oxford University Press, 1993. McNulty, Charles. ‘How “Shuffle Along” Director George C. Wolfe Brought Back the 1921 Show That Changed Broadway Forever’. Los Angeles Times, 25 April 2016. http://www. latimes.com/entertainment/arts/theater/la-et-cm-george-wolfe-20160425-column.html (accessed 26 September 2022). Mirón, Louis F. and Jonathon Xavier Inda. ‘Race as a Kind of Speech Act’. Cultural Studies: A Research Volume 5 (2000): 85–107. Moriah, Kristin. ‘Shuffle and Repeat: A Review of George C. Wolfe’s Shuffle Along’. American Quarterly 69, no. 1 (March 2017): 177–86. Musser, Charles. ‘Why Did Negroes Love Al Jolson and the Jazz Singer? Melodrama, Blackface and Cosmopolitan Theatrical Culture’. Film History 23 (2011): 196–222. Nevin, Robert P. ‘Stephen C. Foster and Negro Minstrelsy’. Atlantic Monthly 20, no. 121 (1867): 608–16. Nowatzki, Robert. ‘Paddy Jumps Jim Crow: Irish-Americans and Blackface Minstrelsy’. ÉireIreland 41, nos. 3/4 (2006): 162–84. Nowatzki, Robert. Representing African Americans in Transatlantic Abolitionism and Blackface Minstrelsy. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2010. Paulson, Michael. ‘“Shuffle Along” Decides It Can’t Go On without Audra McDonald’. The New York Times, 23 June 2016. https://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/24/theater/shufflealong-decides-it-cant-go-on-without-audra-mcdonald.html (accessed 26 September 2022). Paulson, Michael. ‘“Shuffle Along” and Insurer Drop Pregnancy-Prompted Lawsuit’. The New York Times, 21 October 2020. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/21/theater/shuffle-alongaudra-mcdonald-insurer-pregnancy-lawsuit.html (accessed 26 September 2022). Prokop, Andrew. ‘Trump Fanned a Conspiracy about Obama’s Birthplace for Years. Now He Pretends Clinton Started It’. Vox, 16 September 2016. https://www.vox.com/2016/9/16/12938066/ donald-trump-obama-birth-certificate-birther (accessed 26 September 2022). Pugh, Megan. America Dancing: From the Cakewalk to the Moonwalk. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2015. Riley, Charles A. Free as Gods: How the Jazz Age Reinvented Modernism. Lebanon, NH: University Press of New England, 2017. Saravis, Marissa. ‘Shuffle Along Down to the Courthouse: Broadway Producers Argue Actor’s Pregnancy Is an Accident Worth $14 Million’. Fordham: Intellectual Property, Media & Entertainment Law Journal, 19 November 2018. http://www.fordhamiplj.org/2018/11/19/ shuffle-along-down-to-the-courthouse-broadway-producers-argue-actors-pregnancy-is-anaccident-worth-14-million/ (accessed 26 September 2022). Savran, David. Highbrow/Lowdown: Theater, Jazz, and the Making of the New Middle Class. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2009.

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‘“Shuffle Along” Premiere: Negro Production Opens at Sixty Third Street’. The New York Times, 23 May 1921, 20. Sissle, Noble and Eubie Blake [Flournoy E. Miller and Aubrey Lyles]. Shuffle Along, edited by Lyn Schenbeck and Lawrence Schenbeck. Recent Researches in American Music 85, Music of the United States 29. Smith, Anthony. ‘Donald Trump’s Star of David Hillary Clinton Meme Was Created by White Supremacists’. Mic, 3 July 2016. https://www.mic.com/articles/147711/donald-trump-s-starof-david-hillary-clinton-meme-was-created-by-white-supremacists (accessed 26 September 2022). Stearns, Jean and Marshall Stearns. Jazz Dance: The Story of American Vernacular Dance. New York: Da Capo Press, 1968, 1994. Sullivan, John Jeremiah. ‘“Shuffle Along” and the Lost History of Black Performance in America’. The New York Times Magazine, 24 March 2016. https://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/27/ magazine/shuffle-along-and-the-painful-history-of-black-performance-in-america.html (accessed 26 September 2022). Thompson, David S. ‘Shuffling Roles: Alterations and Audiences in Shuffle Along’. In Theatre Symposium, Volume 20: Gods and Groundlings, 97–108. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2012. Valencia, Brian D. ‘Musical of the Month: Shuffle Along’. Billy Rose Theatre Division, New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center, 10 February 2012. https://www.nypl.org/blog/2012/02/10/musical-month-shuffle-along (accessed 26 September 2022). Waltz, Robert B., ed. The Minnesota Heritage Songbook. https://mnheritagesongbook.net/thesongs/addition-song-without-recordings/old-Black-joe/ (accessed 26 September 2022). Woll, Allen. Black Musical Theatre from Coontown to Dreamgirls. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1989.

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7 ‘Who Was This Woman?’ A Conversation about Remembering Modernist Figures through the Body Jessica Walker and Claire Warden

Figure 7.1  Jessica Walker as Suzy Solidor from All I Want Is One Night (photograph by Jonathan Keenan, 2016).

Claire Warden [CW]: Could you briefly explain who you are and what you do? Jessica Walker [JW]: I’m Dr Jessica Walker. I am a singer and writer. I trained at the Guildhall as an opera singer. I then diversified away into writing, initially for my own performance. I felt strangely unfulfilled creatively and had reached an age when I was confident enough to start creating myself. And I haven’t looked back. I then started researching my own work because it struck me that

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as a classically trained singer I was in a unique position. Generally, classically trained singers are quite passive in their work; they wait to be employed. Given that I was creating my own projects, I wanted to work out what was shifting in terms of my creative autonomy and the agency that lent me in my own career. I also looked at it in terms of the structures I was working in, how independent artists have become somewhat subservient to arts organisations. So unwittingly I became very politicised in this process. I hadn’t anticipated this as an outcome; I was just interested in taking things apart in a practice-as-research process. But I came out the other side completely changed. It changed the work I made but also my attitudes to the nature of work itself: what being an art worker means and how you are uniquely exploitable. It’s been a really interesting process for me because everything coalesced in a way I hadn’t expected. It made me want to empower the next generation of artists which has led to me working at the Royal Academy of Music in artist development, where the one thing I say to my students is ‘who are you as an artist? That is your starting point.’ They look at me as though I am completely mad, because they just want to go and practise their violin for eight hours, but after a bit of time, they do get what I am talking about. So, I have been on a massive journey over the past ten years from solely being an employed opera singer to doing all these different things. CW: How have you assimilated the legacy of modernism into your work? JW: When I started creating work I was looking at why I wanted to sing. There is an inevitable self-expression here but also the need to communicate with the audience. What are you communicating and why, and why do you need to express yourself through the sung voice? The moment you start singing you introduce a hyper-reality; you want to know ‘why is this person singing? Why does this have to be sung?’ So all my creative work has taken this as a starting point. I am also interested in trying to express different parts of my own identity through the lives of other people. So, I have taken historical figures – marginalised figures. I started with women in entertainment history from classical to music hall, looking at their identities, and putting their lives through my own personality. I did this first with Neil Bartlett, the director and writer, with The Girl I Left Behind Me, which was a study of male impersonators in music hall. I wouldn’t have said at the time that what I was doing was any expression of modernist thought – I’m a great believer in what Sondheim said about content dictating form – and I never start by thinking, ‘what influences am I taking on?’ But after the fact it occurs to me that most of the work I have made has modernist principles embedded in it. Even if you think about what Brecht says about non-linear narratives: all of my work has that, whether my cabaret work, which is often quite political, or my solo shows, which are moving in and out of different identities and different times, or the play that I wrote for the Royal Exchange about the life of cabaret artist Suzy Solidor. She was a singer in 1930s Paris. She read poetry, she sang, she was a businesswoman, she wrote novels, she had her own nightclub. She performed surrounded by her 225 portraits. In a

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way she embodied modernism itself. She was in Paris, fraternising with Cocteau and people like that. When I looked at how to tell her story I realised I needed to do it as if it were a night in her club. I’m doing her act, but there are two actors playing all the different people in her life. Time is fluid so in the one hour and twenty minutes of the piece you have snapshots of her whole life: her father is there, her lovers are there, her affair with Tamara de Lempicka is in the middle of this. So, you have the songs that she sang within a collage of her life. It strikes me that this is a very modernist approach, although I wasn’t thinking about this at the time. I didn’t want it to be a straightforward biography of her: I wanted people to come away thinking, ‘who was this woman?’ A lot of the cabaret programmes I have put together about themes such as forbidden love, peace, work (the latter was commissioned by the Wellcome Collection) also use non-linear ways of bringing together strands of political and social thought. This is a very modernist idea, I think. CW: Modernist artists often flit between art forms. How do the interartistic practices of modernism pre-empt your own approach? JW: Again, without consciously realising the modernist legacy, I have always been someone who has rejected genre as a concept because I have always loved all arts. I have never discriminated between outputs: I don’t understand it. And I think this is why it took me so long to find my own voice because I didn’t fit

Figure 7.2  Jessica Walker in Scene Unseen (photograph by James Dacre, 2021).

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in anywhere. This matters on so many levels – who reviews my work? A theatre critic? A music critic? Often if you fall between stools then no one does. It is only when you get an established enough profile that people realise you are this thing who does work that doesn’t necessarily fit in anywhere. A few years ago I was commissioned by Opera North to write a piece on the Armistice and they gave me free rein. I decided to tell the story of the female ambulance drivers in France. It was called Not Such Quiet Girls. I put a gay relationship at the centre of this. This was deliberate and it was provocative for an Opera North audience. And I told this through scenes that were imagined between the women there. There were three actors and the whole Opera North female chorus. It was a piece that interwove a play with the chorus singing anything from music hall songs and songs about the war, to the art songs of Rebecca Clarke, a wonderful underrated British female composer of the time. Some of this was instrumental. At the end composer Joe Atkins and I wrote a new song bringing the entire story into the modern day. It also had an amazing set that was like an installation; it had all this mangled metal which was suspended above the stage. It was twisted and quite ugly and the light shone through it. It was the only set we had. In a way you could not define this piece. This one encapsulates a lot of modernism but I am not sure that any of us would have said this at the time. CW: I am interested in this idea of modernism as a pre-emptive moment but which is often in the background. Would you say that it has more of a haunting effect? JW: It does. One draws on all one’s influences. And I have always been influenced by the Weill/Brecht and Eisler/Brecht collaborations, and the dissonance of their work. And later I have been interested in Marc Blitzstein who also translated a lot of Brecht’s work. Because I have always been interested in this material. I was involved in a production of Seven Deadly Sins at Opera North very early in my career (it was set in a boxing ring). A lot of my work has come from this tradition. So I have never had to really think about this or articulate it. It was just what I was drawn to. And I have been constantly drawn to the singers and the artists of 1920s France and the multi-disciplinary approaches they took. It is just what I have been drawn to. And it comes through my own work because it is what I find interesting and provocative. It is still so modern. There is nothing else that answers questions in the same way; I feel I can present things that don’t give everything on a plate. It is expressionist. It invites the audience to think about things. This way of delivering the material does this. I am trying to work things out as well in the work I create. This is part of the journey too. You wouldn’t write something if you knew what it all meant. I am grappling with things and I think the modernists were too. They were trying to work things out in their own work. CW: I love this idea that modernism allows us to think about ourselves in the process. We are learning through the doing.

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JW: Yes, I always think this is the case. I started exploring identity through the lives of others. Then as I got older and more confident, I have started to write about myself, which I never thought I would do. Even in that – this is what I have been working on throughout lockdown – I am exploring multiple identities through my own. I am thinking about gender and sexuality, and also ancestry, particularly the Jewish side of my identity which I didn’t know about until I was an adult. The music Joe [Atkins] has written for this goes from Debussy to something he has called ‘deranged funk’. We’ve got a music hall song in there. It thinks again about the male impersonator and why I have done that act. It asks what happens when you strip that away. Who have I become as a performer? It moves from artifice into the heart of things. Again this is a pretty modernist approach. There is a multiplicity all the way through; you don’t settle on one thing. CW: Are there particular modernist artists or practices that you have incorporated into your work that take risks or break away from conventional ways of making art? JW: Aside from the influences I have cited, I have looked at people who have lived their lives in a modernist way rather than just people who make work. What has always fascinated me – like Suzy Solidor who seemed to embody modernism or the male impersonators – are those people who lived totally outside of convention. Right back in the 1880s there was a male impersonator called Annie Hindle who sang a song called ‘Don’t put your foot on a man when he’s down’. This was an openly political song she sang dressed as a man. There are these historical people who lived against the rules, people like Gladys Bentley in the Harlem Renaissance who lived dressed as a man and sang blues. She was a massive star. Eventually she ‘became a woman again’ and married a man. There was Claire Waldoff, the Weimar singer. She was one of the Degenerate Artists who was banned. They burned all her records. She sang a song which was about a person who everyone fell in love with but no one was sure whether they were a woman or a man. She lived that Berlin free life – she lived with a woman and was butch – but paid for it. She had to escape and ended in poverty. I was very inspired by her because of the way she defied all the rules. One current work in progress is about the surrealist artist Leonora Carrington. I am working with a modernist composer called Phil Cashian and we are telling her life through five of her paintings. The opera singers will embody the paintings – they will actually be the paintings – and then be the characters in her life. Again, she was the embodiment of modernism: she wrote novels and an astounding memoir of her psychotic episodes. Her paintings are amongst the greatest of the surrealist movement. She was a lover of Max Ernst, exhibited with Picasso. There are these extraordinary people who were daring and political. I am interested in those who wrote in a modernist way, but I am more interested in those who lived like that. I’ve taken this into my work. People don’t expect voices and training like mine to be politicised. It is not expected at all. Songs that I have written – one in the tradition of Weill about the #MeToo movement or like ‘Wheels of Commerce’ which is pointing the finger at structures of arts organisations in this country – are all in a direct line from these

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modernist artists. By doing this I am stepping outside of known structures for an artist like me. CW: It is really interesting to think about stepping out of role. It is a very modernist approach – I am not just going to be a painter or I am going to be political when you don’t expect me to. It is challenging expectations. Many modernist artists are interested in social change. Do you see yourself as part of a genealogy of modernist political work? JW: Certainly in my current project for Brighton Festival called The People’s Cabaret. This is absolutely in a lineage with modernism. What we are doing is pairing the Weimar material – songs such as ‘Das Lila Lied’, the first gay anthem written in 1920 – with our modern responses. For this one, which is an amazing positive anthem, I have written a song called ‘Viral’, which is about a good friend of mine who died last year. He was HIV positive and gay, and the song is about how we have a vaccine for COVID-19 but still don’t have a vaccine for AIDS. It is looking at the politics behind this and the economic reasons. It is taking a historical song, and then asking: ‘what do I still need to protest about today? What is unfair today?’ We have Pirate Jenny from Threepenny Opera who is a maid who dreams about killing everyone and my contemporary equivalent is a woman working as a cleaner in a glossy city building, endlessly polishing a glass floor. She then goes to her cleaning cupboard downstairs and looks up at the glass ceiling. What is interesting is that the contemporary equivalents are nearly always more depressing than the ones written in the 20s and 30s when there was a lot of hope. You felt then that protest mattered. I have found it difficult to find hope. The composer, Luke Styles, might set them hopefully. That will be interesting to see. The historic one about racism is the ‘Ballad of Marie Sanders’ in which the protagonist is punished for having a Jewish lover. The modern equivalent is a song from a monument’s point of view who is being taken off his plinth and thrown into the river. He wonders what he’s done wrong. He is placed in a museum and is still wondering why people are hurling abuse at him. A singing statue is a fairly modernist idea! I am holding up a mirror and asking: ‘what has changed? How has it changed?’ Nothing has changed very much. Stylistically they are consciously mirroring the historic repertoire.

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8 An Ode to Black Women Modernists Adjoa Osei

I

n November 2021, dancer, singer and war spy Josephine Baker was interred at the Panthéon mausoleum in Paris. The lack of those of African descent within the Panthéon has been notable; moreover, the honour was clearly a male preserve, with just five women having been previously included. Josephine is the first black woman to receive this accolade, and it is particularly significant given that she is non-French. Ongoing arguments concerning her role as the ‘good migrant’ who can mediate difference within republican assimilationism must not take away from her achievements and stature as a European feminist icon. Black women artistes in the West have always been integral to the formation of worldviews that we would broadly define as modern and progressive in terms of how we understand female identity. However, many have not received due recognition, or they have fallen into anonymity with the passing of time and their histories are yet to be examined and explored. For example, the emergence of the feminist movement in 1920s France cannot be fully understood without taking into consideration the impact and influence of black women performers in the West during the early twentieth century. By the 1920s, women had dropped their corsets and had begun to discuss what we can term as their sexual revolution, which included debates concerning the place of women in the rapidly changing world. Many early-twentieth-century black women artistes can be thought of as sexual modernists and radicals who defiantly reconceived what it meant to be a woman.1 They share the key trait that they generally occupied an outsider space. Perhaps for this reason, they were freer to be creative and daring, ushering in exciting societal and cultural changes. They defiantly redefined notions of modern womanhood through sexual expression, sociability, and creative and intellectual experimentation. From the 1920s through to the 1940s, transnational black and mixed-race women performers staged modernist representations of black female subjectivity. These bordercrossing cosmopolitans embodied the various contours of an avant-garde zeitgeist that connected Europe and the Americas, bringing together art, intellectualism and politics in order to propose ways of being that were distinctly modern.2 Josephine Baker is perhaps the most well-known black woman modernist of that era. The African American performer lived in Paris from 1925. On stage, she reproduced, parodied and subverted exotic and erotic stereotypes about black women, and she therefore articulated new, modern ways of conceiving black femininity and sexuality in the midst of French negrophilia.3 But Josephine was much more than the nude, banana-skirt-wearing dancer to which popular culture has reduced her – she was a spy for the French Resistance during the Second World War. Generals and diplomats did not imagine that a young black woman could pose a threat when they whispered secret information to her. Without

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relinquishing her attachment to the US, Josephine chose to become a Parisian. And then there was Elsie Houston, a Brazilian mixed-race, classically trained soprano who was enmeshed in a circuit of transnational Trotskyists. She performed Afro-Brazilian and Afro-Cuban folk songs in the operatic mode. Arriving in Paris in 1926, Elsie positioned herself within the jazz age, offering audiences a Brazilian spin on this cultural phenomenon. Elsie proposed that Afro-Brazilian identity could be erudite, cosmopolitan, modern and imbued with various European influences, in particular those of the classical music genre. Combining different musical cultures, Elsie epitomises a cosmopolitan perspective. At that moment in history, the US was blighted by racial tensions in the form of segregation and Jim Crow laws; Brazil was in the midst of a racist branqueamento (whitening) project that consisted of an extensive network of racist laws and customs; and Western imperialism stifled the freedoms of people of colour in the colonies and in European metropoles. Josephine and Elsie occupied a space that enabled unbridled artistic and social freedoms, and yet they also negotiated gendered and racial limitations. They dialogued with, played to and subverted pervasive ideas of that moment – a balancing act that the majority of black women artistes during that era had to negotiate. Importantly, they opened a space that inspired other women of colour to imagine themselves as modern through the arts, while challenging patriarchy and racism. Alongside Josephine and Elsie there were others, such as African American dancer Zaidee Jackson, Cuban singer Rita Montaner and Guadeloupean dancer and model Adrienne Fidelin. The list of under-researched black women modernists is extensive. The stories of black women modernists who shaped avant-garde artistic and political cultures have an enduring influence in contemporary society. In the twenty-first century, black women continue to use performative spaces to inspire radical conversations about multiculturalism, transnationalism, femininity, race, language and identity. For example, during Notting Hill Carnival, black women perform a transnational, Afro-Caribbean-inflected Britishness through the streets of London. Today’s backdrop is that of the Windrush scandal and the international Black Lives Matter movement; the combined effects of racism and the inequalities of capitalism continue to impinge upon the lives of those of African descent. Recently, there has been greater interest within academia and cultural and creative institutions – both in Europe and in the Americas – in exploring representations of black female modernity in the performing arts and intellectual culture. Concomitantly, there has been a recognition of the need to include black women academics and curators in these discussions. Now, more than ever, European nations are asking the question: ‘What makes us who we are?’ This question cannot be holistically answered without the inclusion of black women. By centring women of colour – those who have, for centuries, moulded and shaped European societies – we can shed light on an unexpected and inspiring version of European history.

Addendum: On the ‘b’ in ‘Black’/‘black’ The practice of capitalising the ‘b’ in ‘Black’ is already commonplace in many academic contexts, in particular among scholars in the United States. However, this collection questions the act of capitalisation, so the matter of the capital ‘b’, or otherwise, for ‘black’ requires some explanation.

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In June 2020, Vice President of Associated Press John Daniszewski announced the decision to change the organisation’s writing style guide to capitalise the term ‘Black’ ‘in a racial, ethnic or cultural sense, conveying an essential and shared sense of history, identity and community among people who identify as Black, including those in the African diaspora and within Africa’. Daniszewski argues that ‘[t]he lowercase black is a color, not a person’.4 Philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah explores the arguments for and against capitalisation, suggesting that black as a racial designation is not a natural category, but rather a social and collective identity with a particular history that has emerged from the practice of racism: ‘a black person sometimes does things as a black person, is sometimes treated as a black person.’5 Capitalisation seeks to establish the notion of black people as an identity group, and can therefore enable discussions about cultural practices and experiences among its members. In part, it is the experience and the shared trauma of racism that bind people of African descent, or in other words, exogenous conditions brought about by the legacies of slavery and colonialism. Categorising numerous nationalities and ethnicities under the label ‘Black’, rather than using nuanced terms that seek to specifically place one’s origin in the world, such as African American, Afro-Caribbean, Afro-Brazilian or British Ghanaian (terms that, nevertheless, can also be problematic), could potentially perpetuate essentialist readings of the multitude of identities, cultures, histories and artistic works that people of African descent have created. Arguably, concerns of capitalisation in racial designation predominantly emerge from North American and European scholarly racial reasoning; that is to say, capitalisation reflects the matter of being black in the West. In the case of those who have descended from enslaved Africans, for whom slavery has obscured identifiable ethnicities, ‘Black can be a preferred ethnic designation.’6 In a Ghanaian setting, to declare oneself as ‘Black’ may have very little meaning where language, specific ethnic group, region of origin, and lineage bear far greater significance. Nevertheless, in a post-slavery, postcolonialism context, the effects of racism and the inequalities of capitalism can indeed be felt on the African continent and therefore the capitalisation of the ‘b’ can function as a sign that recaptures contact with African-descendent people in the diaspora and affirms our cultural capital. As Appiah highlights, we cannot ignore the dialectical relation between the labels ‘black’ and ‘white’ and the workings of racism, therefore capitalisation may better allow us to examine the creation of ‘Black’ as a racial identity, and racism as it is experienced in institutions and communities in 2020. The matter of self-identification is one that African-descendent people must be free to explore and decide on their own terms, irrespective of new trends in press media. Words, symbols and issues pertaining to capitalisation are complex. Some authors in this collection have opted to use a lower-case ‘b’ for black (and, indeed, lower case for many terms and designations), which generally conforms to UK academic conventions. Nevertheless, we acknowledge the significance of ‘black’ in its capitalised form, both in specific scholarly contexts and in the process of affirming one’s racial and cultural identity.

Notes  1. In Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Riotous Black Girls, Troublesome Women and Queer Radicals (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2019), Sadiya

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  2.

  3.  4.  5.   6.

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Hartman recognises young, ordinary African American women in late-nineteenth- and earlytwentieth-century USA as the ultimate flapper girls: ‘sexual modernists, free lovers, radicals, and anarchists’ who refused to be governed (xv). Similarly, in early-twentieth-century Paris, black women artistes relished the opportunity to redefine notions of modern black gendered subjectivity. In her book Bricktop’s Paris: African American Women in Paris between the Two World Wars (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2015), Tracy Denean Sharpley-Whiting draws attention to a transnational community of black women artistes and businesswomen in Paris during the interwar period, highlighting African American women in particular. For insights into Baker’s performances of primitivism in interwar Paris, see Mae Henderson, ‘Josephine Baker and La Revue Nègre: From Ethnography to Performance’, Text and Performance Quarterly 23, no. 2 (2003), doi:10.1080/1046293032000141338. John Daniszewski, ‘The Decision to Capitalize Black’, Associated Press, 19 June 2020, https://blog.ap.org/announcements/the-decision-to-capitalize-black (accessed 31 March 2022). Kwame Anthony Appiah, ‘The Case for Capitalizing the B in Black’, The Atlantic, 18 June 2020, https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/06/time-to-capitalizeblackand-white/613159/ (accessed 31 March 2022). Mike Laws, ‘Why we capitalize “Black” (and not “white”)’, Columbia Journalism Review, 16 June 2020, https://www.cjr.org/analysis/capital-b-black-styleguide.php (accessed 31 March 2022).

Works Cited Appiah, Kwame Anthony. ‘The Case for Capitalizing the B in Black’. The Atlantic, 18 June 2020. https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/06/time-to-capitalize-blackand-white/613159/ (accessed 31 March 2022). Daniszewski, John. ‘The Decision to Capitalize Black’. Associated Press, 19 June 2020. https:// blog.ap.org/announcements/the-decision-to-capitalize-black (accessed 31 March 2022). Hartman, Sadiya. Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Riotous Black Girls, Troublesome Women and Queer Radicals. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2019. Henderson, Mae. ‘Josephine Baker and La Revue Nègre: From Ethnography to Performance’. Text and Performance Quarterly 23, no. 2 (2003). doi:10.1080/1046293032000141338. Laws, Mike. ‘Why we capitalize “Black” (and not “white”)’. Columbia Journalism Review, 16 June 2020. https://www.cjr.org/analysis/capital-b-black-styleguide.php (accessed 31 March 2022). Sharpley-Whiting, Tracy Denean. Bricktop’s Paris: African American Women in Paris between the Two World Wars. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2015.

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Part II: Restaging Drama

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9 Introduction: Acts of Translation, Reimagining and Creative Destruction Adrian Curtin

O

pen a season brochure for a theatre today and you will most likely come across a new production of an old warhorse by one of the major playwrights associated with modernism. The promotional blurb may state that the play is as relevant and timely now as it was when it was first written – an overused turn of phrase, but often apposite. Many modernist plays are over a century old and have become canonical. Like the work of Shakespeare, they are regularly produced on the world stage in a wide variety of theatrical reimaginings. Indeed, some modernist plays have continually been produced since they were first staged. One would be hard pressed to find a single decade from the twentieth century in which there was not a production somewhere in the world of one of Ibsen’s plays, for example. Emerging and established directors love to tackle canonical texts, including modernist drama, stamping their vision on a play, sometimes transforming it almost beyond recognition. Theatre companies use modernist drama as inspiration for the creation of newly devised work.1 Playwrights continue to offer their own versions of modernist texts, creating works that are designated ‘after’ that of their predecessors.2 It isn’t only well-known plays that are reworked and re-produced, either. Little-known modernist plays, including texts that have rarely or never been performed before, also find favour among contemporary theatre-makers and practice researchers, especially those who are experimentally inclined. Decades after they were first conceived, relatively obscure offerings by modernist dramatists are belatedly being spotlit as theatre-makers transform these artistic curiosities and give them a new lease of life, using current technologies and staging practices. Conceiving a play as an extended ‘temporal and cultural process’ – as something that can perpetually be remade and modified through (re)writing and performance – means that modernist drama, like work from other genres, is not just a historical artefact but, potentially, a vital spark in contemporary theatre-making.3 (It’s alive!) A new production of a modernist play can theoretically be considered both modernist and contemporary, further blurring the lines between these categories, or else it can have elements of the former intermixed with other sensibilities, such as postmodernism. Conversely, it might not be regarded as modernist at all, or only in an outmoded manner that follows the letter, but not the spirit, of the movement. Slavishly reproducing or reconstructing historical staging methods and production scores will not necessarily make a production (seem) modernist, except as a period piece; indeed, ‘museum’ theatre might fail to evoke the restless, rule-breaking spirit of modernism and the avantgarde altogether. It is not a given, then, that staging a modernist play must inevitably

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yield modernist performance. Even when a modernist play underpins a production, modernism might only be nominally present, potentially apprehensible, ghosting the scene of performance. But ‘what’s so special about modernist drama?’, one might ask. After all, adapting and restaging old plays has been standard operating procedure in theatre for centuries. Nevertheless, the historical continuity of productions of dramatic modernism from the late nineteenth century onward – a practice that shows no sign of abating, two decades into the twenty-first century – is worth contemplating. Not all historical dramatic genres enjoy the same amount of attention from theatre-makers and audiences today as modernist drama does. One should not infer, though, that modernist drama is artistically superior to other forms of historical drama. There are factors other than artistic merit that help to account for modernist drama’s lengthy stage life. The capaciousness and diversity of the genre – its enfolding of radically disparate types of play – contributes to its endurance, outweighing the changing fortunes of any individual playwright. Relatedly, modernism’s aesthetic variety is attractive to contemporary theatre-makers, who can draw from among the many ‘isms’ of the avant-garde when revisiting modernist plays, blending and amending styles as they wish. It is also worth remembering that the modernist dramatic canon is ideologically (in)formed and connected to political projects such as nationalism, to systems such as patriarchy, and to phenomena such as eurocentrism and white privilege. Moreover, many modernist plays have cultural cachet by being linked to a ‘highbrow’ artistic movement that has been legitimated and co-created by the academy and elite cultural institutions; this cachet can rub off on theatre-makers who engage with the work and make it their own. The relationship between contemporary theatre-makers and their modernist predecessors is complicated and specific to each case. The idea of ‘masterworks’ of dramatic modernism can prompt ‘anxiety of influence’ on the part of contemporary dramatists, as Toby Zinman observes in a study of ‘replays’ (adaptations) of modern drama: The contemporary playwright’s need to re-play classic modern works reflects a paradox; on the one hand it suggests a need to assert oneself over the past, to defend against those limitations – sociological and aesthetic – and break out of that confinement. On the other hand, it acknowledges the power and persistent presence of those masterworks and a dwarfing of the contemporary playwright who often seems to feel overshadowed, even humiliated by the legacy; the defense is often mockery of the old.4 This is only one way of theorising the relationship, and one suspects that many writers who have adapted modernist drama would reject Zinman’s framing of their motivations. Contemporary playwrights and theatre-makers can also feel kinship with – or (partial) regard for – modernist dramatists; the imaginary relationship they have with their predecessors need not be neurotic or wholly adversarial. Equally, contemporary playwrights and theatre-makers can focus more on the source text than its creator. Many modernist plays feature compelling characters and stories that still resonate with people; revivals and adaptations can facilitate this connection. Contemporary theatre-makers can act as cultural (and linguistic) translators, enabling modernist plays to ‘speak’ to new audiences, forging cross-cultural and cross-temporal connections. They can help us to understand these plays in a new light by exposing their problematic elements,

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silences and lacunae. They can prompt us to reconsider our relationship to the past and to re-evaluate the present, questioning the idea of the modern, its legitimacy, and its everchanging associations. All historical drama can theoretically provide a potent resource for contemporary reimagining, but modernist drama has compositional elements that make (re)staging especially inviting. Modernist dramaturgy often favours semantic ambiguity and interpretative open-endedness, which makes the plays readily portable to new production contexts. They can ‘travel’ well through space and time. The ellipses and abstraction of modernist drama can take the form of incomplete statements, unanswered questions or ‘indeterminate, constitutive [blanks]’, to quote reader-response theorist Wolfgang Iser.5 Think of the pregnant pauses and portentous atmospheres of Maurice Maeterlinck’s symbolist plays, or the ‘extraordinary openness’ of Jean Genet’s Les Bonnes (The Maids, 1947), with its mirroring characters that notionally (self-)reflect consciousness as a void or a blank.6 Modernist drama often challenges us to make sense of it and to accommodate ourselves to (philosophical) senselessness, an existential proposition that still has valence for individuals in late modernity. Additionally, many modernist plays present unique staging challenges and can seem impossible to realise. Their formal experimentation can entice theatre-makers to try to stage ‘the impossible’, to respond to the original provocation and carry it forward by ‘remaking it new’, in good modernist fashion. Admittedly, this runs counter to the stated desires of some historical avant-gardists, such as F. T. Marinetti, who, in his futurist manifesto of 1909, decried the admiration of past artistic work, called for its destruction, and argued for the future irrelevance and obsolescence of the work of the futurist movement: To admire an old painting is the same as pouring our sensibility into a funerary urn, instead of casting it forward into the distance in violent spurts of creation and action. Do you wish to waste your best strength in this eternal and useless admiration of the past, an activity that will only leave you fatally spent, diminished, crushed? [. . .] The oldest of us is thirty: so we have at least a decade left to fulfill our task. When we are forty, others who are younger and stronger will throw us into the wastebasket, like useless manuscripts. —We want it to happen!7 Rightly or wrongly, contemporary theatre-makers have not thrown modernist drama in the wastebasket, even if Marinetti would have wished it so. However, neither is this work uniformly treated in a ministerial or reverential manner. Contemporary theatremakers frequently perform acts of creative destruction and intertemporal and intercultural translation that produce novel ways of re-engaging with modernist drama without junking it entirely, making it newly relevant in the process. The chapters in this section explore this fascinating, complicated practice in discussions and analyses centred on individual plays and productions as well as in broader surveys. The first contribution, by John London, offers a unique, comparative account of modernist provocateurs who experimented with ‘microdramas’ and brief performances.8 London focuses on the work of the Italian futurists and the Catalan writer Joan Brossa. He highlights the striking similarities between the sintesi (short plays) of the futurists and the poesia escènica (theatrical poetry) of Brossa, despite the cultural and temporal distance between the futurists and Brossa and their discrepant politics. Pace Marinetti’s stated desire for the work of the futurists to be binned in the future,

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London surveys performances of short plays by the futurists and by Brossa, and pieces inspired by them, from the late 1960s onward, and draws on his own experience – as translator, performer and director – of presenting these plays to contemporary audiences in English. London investigates whether it is possible to convey (something of) the original excitement of this material fifty to 100 years after it was premiered, if the original politics of this work can still be relevant, and how this work can, or should, be translated in both linguistic and theatrical senses. ‘[Prompted] by original writing, we should [. . .] go beyond it in our own interpretations,’ he concludes, to admit the risk of failure and of making mistakes, while noting that ‘these defiant texts continue to confound expectations’. The latter observation resonates throughout the section in different ways. The next two chapters continue the exploration of contemporary stagings of lesserknown (at least, in anglophone contexts) and difficult-to-realise or even ‘unperformable’ modernist drama. Lib Taylor conducts a performance analysis of three plays by Marguerite Duras – India Song (1976), Eden Cinema (1977) and Savannah Bay (1982) – that draw on antecedent modernist techniques. Taylor examines productions of these plays that were created in a postdramatic context and argues that Duras’s intermedial work ‘anticipates the radical formal shifts made by postdramatic theatre whereby sound and projected imagery become principal aesthetic and representational forms’. Taylor positions Duras’s work on the boundary between modernism and postmodernism and notes how the destabilisation of gender identity in Duras’s plays relates to contemporary concerns about gender identity and intersectional politics. Included in the productions Taylor analyses is practice research she conducted; she reflects on her directorial process in aiming to realise the compositional elements and potential of Duras’s texts. My chapter offers a complementary account of a recent production inspired by a relatively obscure ‘problem’ play, albeit one written by a canonical author. Dead Centre’s 2015 production Chekhov’s First Play is based on an early work by Anton Chekhov unperformed in his lifetime, commonly titled Platonov. Dead Centre undertakes a radical adaptation of this unwieldy, imperfect play, creating a palimpsestic, metatheatrical extravaganza that overtly departs from the source text but also revisits recognisably Chekhovian – and modernist – concerns. I use the concept of ‘ontological insecurity’, taken from psychology and sociology, to analyse Dead Centre’s play and show how it connotes the ‘longue durée of modernity’ by linking late-nineteenth-century Russia with twenty-first-century Ireland. The remaining chapters in this section address canonical works of dramatic modernism mutated in contemporary performance. A co-authored chapter by Konstantinos Thomaidis and Maria Vogiatzi constitutes this section’s other extended production analysis. Thomaidis and Vogiatzi write about Nora, a 2019 adaptation of Henrik Ibsen’s play A Doll’s House (1879) by Theatre Attis (Athens, Greece), directed by Theodoros Terzopoulos. The authors explore the encounter between what they describe as an ‘elusively modernist’ source text and an ‘elusively modernist’ director. Terzopoulos has a ‘slippery’ relationship to modernism, the authors note, and his practice also connects him to postdramatic theatre and postmodernism. This harks back to Taylor’s investigation of Duras’s ambiguous positionality earlier in the section, and calls ahead to the framing topic of the final section of this volume. Furthermore, Thomaidis and Vogiatzi’s consideration of Nora in the context of the crisis of neoliberal capitalism in Greece chimes with Dead Centre’s examination of post-Celtic Tiger Ireland in Chekhov’s First Play, discussed in

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my chapter, and with Christopher Collins’s analysis of the contemporary Irish dance performance MÁM, which featured in the previous section of this volume. Thomaidis and Vogiatzi’s consideration of how Nora intersects with post-#MeToo feminism complements Taylor’s analysis of Duras’s work. It also connects to the next chapter in the section, which is the first of two practitioner-led contributions that resonate with one another. The first practitioner-led chapter takes the form of a conversation I had with the playwright and theatre-maker Kaite O’Reilly about her recent adaptation of August Strindberg’s play Miss Julie (1889). O’Reilly’s play, titled Missing Julie, premiered in 2021. O’Reilly relocates Strindberg’s play to a Welsh manor just after the First World War and the 1918 influenza pandemic. The character of John in her play (Jean, in the original) is disabled, which adds a new twist to Julie’s sexual relationship with him. O’Reilly discusses, among other things, how and why she chose to adapt Strindberg’s play, how her feminism and disability politics inform her adaptation, and her relationship to Strindberg and dramatic modernism, more generally. Her play’s exploration of world crisis and consequent trauma parallels the COVID-19 pandemic and its aftermath, and the bewildering and unstable situation in which her characters find themselves offers another dramatic example of modern ‘ontological insecurity’. The counterpart ‘practitioner voice’ chapter in this section is written by Matthew Pountney, co-founder and co-artistic director of the arts company Touretteshero. Pountney discusses Touretteshero’s neurodiverse and bilingual (spoken English and British Sign Language) production of Samuel Beckett’s 1972 play Not I, which premiered in 2017, and featured Jessica Thom as Mouth. Thom has Tourettes Syndrome. Pountney reflects on the genesis of their production of Not I, the barriers they faced, and what he learned from the process. The challenge posed to the theatre-makers was considerable. As Pountney puts it: ‘How would a performer who cannot fully control the words that come out of her mouth perform a deliberately impenetrable monologue about a woman who cannot control the words that come out of her mouth?’ Rising to this challenge, Touretteshero shone a new light on Beckett’s play. The final chapter in this section creates a bookend with the opening chapter by surveying a range of work by multiple authors. Shouhua Qi considers the staging of ‘modern(ist)’ drama in contemporary China, featuring examples of drama associated with modernism as well as more recent examples that come from the modernist tradition. Playwrights whose work is discussed in this chapter include Henrik Ibsen, Oscar Wilde, Bertolt Brecht, Samuel Beckett, Eugène Ionesco, Lorraine Hansberry and Paula Vogel. Qi’s chapter points to the blurred line (or potential slippage) between ‘modernist drama’ and ‘modern drama’, especially in the contemporary Chinese context. Qi provides a historical overview of the introduction of Western modernist drama in China in the 1920s, its reintroduction in the 1980s, and its cultural afterlife in the twenty-first century. Qi examines how these plays are variously reimagined, experimented with, hybridised with traditional Chinese theatre forms, blended with postmodernism, and made to ‘speak directly to the sociocultural, moral and psychological concerns of target audiences’. Qi’s chapter highlights the unexpected, ongoing journeys of modernist drama across time and space. It brings to mind Lubomir Doležel’s concept of (literary) ‘transduction’, which, as J. Douglas Clayton and Yana Meerzon explain, ‘refers to [a] text’s transmission in time, across cultures or media, a transmission with some necessary

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transformations’.9 It is not only modernist texts that are transmitted and transformed across time and space, of course, but non-scripted ideas and practices too. These elements are treated in the third part of this volume, so I’ll say no more for now. To quote the character of Opener in Beckett’s radio drama Cascando, first transmitted over the airwaves in 1963: ‘And I close.’10

Notes   1. For example, the Wooster Group’s production of House/Lights (1997), which draws from Gertrude Stein’s libretto Doctor Faustus Lights the Lights (1938), and playing ‘the maids’, co-created by the Llanarth Group, Gaitkrash Theatre Company, Theatre P’Yut and independent artists Jing Hong Okorn-Kuo and Adrian Curtin, which toured Wales in 2014 and was partially inspired by Jean Genet’s Les Bonnes (The Maids, 1947).   2. The title page of Simon Stone’s adaptation of Yerma provides the following authorial chain: ‘by Simon Stone after Federico García Lorca’ (London: Oberon, 2017). Lorca’s name is presented in smaller font.   3. See Margaret Jane Kidnie, ‘Where Is Hamlet? Text, Performance, and Adaptation’, in A Companion to Shakespeare and Performance, ed. Barbara Hodgdon and W. B. Worthen (London: Blackwell, 2005), 117.   4. Toby Zinman, Replay: Classic Modern Drama Reimagined (London: Bloomsbury, 2014), 8.   5. Wolfgang Iser, ‘Interaction between Text and Reader’, in The Reader in the Text: Essays on Audience and Interpretation, ed. Susan R. Suleiman and Inge Crosman (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980), 109.   6. Jeanette L. Savona, Jean Genet (London: Macmillan, 1983), 69. My line of thought here has been inspired by Savona’s account of a point made by Jean-Paul Sartre in his book Saint Genet: Actor and Martyr (trans. Bernard Frechtman; New York: New American Library, 1964). Savona writes: ‘Sartre tends to describe the two maids as identical mirrors reflecting each other’s consciousness as a void or blank’ (58).   7. F. T. Marinetti, ‘The Founding and Manifesto of Futurism’, in Futurism: An Anthology, ed. Lawrence Rainey, Christine Poggi and Laura Wittman (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009), 52–3. Thanks to Claire Warden for reminding me about Marinetti’s stated desire to be junked.   8. I borrow the term ‘microdramas’ from John Muse’s book of the same name (2017).   9. J. Douglas Clayton and Yana Meerzon, ‘Introduction: The Text and its Mutations—On the Objectives of the Volume’, in Adapting Chekhov: The Text and its Mutations, ed. J. Douglas Clayton and Yana Meerzon (New York: Routledge, 2013), 5. See Lubomir Doležel, ‘Literary Transduction’, in The Prague School and its Legacy in Linguistics, Literature, Semiotics, Folklore and the Arts, ed. Yishai Tobin (Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 1988), 165–76. 10. Samuel Beckett, Collected Shorter Plays (London: Faber, 1984), 137.

Works Cited Beckett, Samuel. Collected Shorter Plays. London: Faber, 1984. Clayton, J. Douglas and Yana Meerzon. ‘Introduction: The Text and its Mutations—On the Objectives of the Volume’. In Adapting Chekhov: The Text and its Mutations, edited by J. Douglas Clayton and Yana Meerzon, 1–13. New York: Routledge, 2013. Doležel, Lubomir. ‘Literary Transduction’. In The Prague School and its Legacy in Linguistics, Literature, Semiotics, Folklore and the Arts, edited by Yishai Tobin, 165–76. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 1988.

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Iser, Wolfgang. ‘Interaction between Text and Reader’. In The Reader in the Text: Essays on Audience and Interpretation, edited by Susan R. Suleiman and Inge Crosman, 106–19. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980. Kidnie, Margaret Jane. ‘Where Is Hamlet? Text, Performance, and Adaptation’. In A Companion to Shakespeare and Performance, edited by Barbara Hodgdon and W. B. Worthen, 101–20. London: Blackwell, 2005. Marinetti, F. T. ‘The Founding and Manifesto of Futurism’. In Futurism: An Anthology, edited by Lawrence Rainey, Christine Poggi and Laura Wittman, 49–53. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009. Muse, John. Microdramas: Crucibles for Theater and Time. Ann Arbor: Michigan University Press, 2017. Savona, Jeanette L. Jean Genet. London: Macmillan, 1983. Stone, Simon. Yerma. London: Oberon, 2017. Zinman, Toby. Replay: Classic Modern Drama Reimagined. London: Bloomsbury, 2014.

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10 Restaging Futurism and Joan Brossa: Provocation or Observation with a Glass of Champagne or a Cup of Tea John London

Performance Preliminaries

T

he constant source of energy for Italian futurism since its founding (in 1909) was indisputably F. T. Marinetti (1876–1944), and the year of his death was the year Joan Brossa (1919–98) started writing for the stage in a Barcelona still recovering from the Spanish Civil War (1936–39). The chronological jump from the theatrical adventures of futurism to the main plays and actions of the Catalan poet would thus appear to indicate a considerable development within modernist performance, as well as a range of contextual differences. However, the similarities between these two bodies of work are striking. Both are part of a wider avant-garde aesthetic style (futurist art and literature; Brossa’s written and visual poetry). Both had strongly political features linked to the period of their creation, if at opposing ends of the ideological spectrum: futurist proto- and pro-fascism to Brossa’s anti-Francoism. And there are also significant parallels in form between the two. While both the futurists and Brossa were responsible for full-length plays, they also became known for short performative interventions often comprising under a page of stage directions or dialogue. The action is necessarily elliptical, psychologically consistent characters are absent, cause-and-effect dramaturgy disappears, time is compressed, and aural or visual effect sometimes takes over entirely. Negative Act (1915), by Bruno Corra and Emilio Settimelli, consists of the entry of a man who exclaims that something is fantastic and incredible, then tells the audience he has nothing to say to them.1 In one of Brossa’s Spectacle-Actions (written between 1946 and 1962), the instructions are to tell the audience of something exceptional, such as an accident or a piece of good news, create great interest, then suddenly refute what has been said and end the performance.2 In Old Age (1915), also by Corra and Settimelli, fifty years go by in three tiny acts in which a couple sit at a table opposite each other until they die.3 For Brossa, a meal becomes the span of life itself as waiters range from two boys (who serve the first course) to two old men (who serve the dessert and coffee), passing through two adolescents and two middleaged men for intermediate courses.4 Francesco Cangiullo’s Detonation (1915) consists merely of a gunshot, while the third part of Brossa’s Sargatana (1948–50), classified as a piece for ballet, has no dancer, just an arm holding a pistol which shoots into the air.5 When futurist theatre was rediscovered in the 1960s and 1970s, it was, to some extent, owing to a conscious relationship with the happenings movement and the

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European experimentalism of the period (although the UK did not form a great part of the revival).6 This meant that futurism could be recognised as a starting point in the historiography of what came to be known as performance art.7 Yet it was a mainstream historiography which did not include Brossa, because of his relative isolation in Francoist Spain (until the end of the dictatorship in 1975) and the fact he wrote in Catalan (a language prohibited or severely censored in the period). By studying in conjunction the performance possibilities of futurist ideas, visual material and short syntheses (or sintesi) and what Brossa called his theatrical poetry (or poesia escènica), I intend to see if there is a place for the Catalan innovator within this line of modernist aesthetics, and also to investigate how any of these pieces can still be relevant in the theatre. What happens when texts are performed in a period when their historical and geographical position is relocated? Is it possible to convey any of the original excitement of this material more than 100 years after the first shock caused by the futurists’ visits to London before the First World War?8 How can the original politics still be relevant? And how can these texts be translated in linguistic and theatrical senses? A focus on short pieces – usually lasting no longer than ten minutes – will allow us to analyse performances in their entirety. Problems of linguistic translation do not disappear. In fact they have dogged futurist theatre in English (reducing innovations and missing puns) and confused the limited foreign exposure of Brossa’s actions.9 Nevertheless, when the action is predominant or the dialogue reduced, language would not seem to be a barrier. Of course, it was precisely this brevity which initially made the short plays so suitable for different theatrical or non-theatrical venues since they could often be inserted into larger events (such as concert programmes or poetry recitals) or just occur in an informal setting, undertaken by people not professionally defined as actors. There is indeed a strong amateur component in the original performances of these texts. The first major manifesto of futurist theatre (1910) was entitled the Manifesto of Futurist Playwrights (before becoming The Pleasure of Being Booed/Whistled Off in later editions), but was signed by a group of poets, painters and a musician some of whom, as a recent editor reminds us, had never written a play in their life.10 Before the professional tour of the teatro sintetico in 1915, futurist evenings or serate were often a ragbag of provocations read out by those who could be persuaded to face aggressive audiences.11 In St Petersburg, in 1913, Mayakovsky advertised for performers for his futurist play by insisting that no actors should apply.12 They were substituted by university students, just as university students provided both collaborators and receptive audiences for Marinetti, from Florence, Padua and Naples in Italy to Cambridge in Britain.13 The first productions of Brossa’s plays were performed by friends in artists’ studios and the home of Joan Obiols was the venue for other stagings.14 University students were amongst Brossa’s keenest audiences and there is a record of at least one clandestine rehearsed reading of his theatre at the University of Barcelona (in 1962).15 It is therefore no coincidence that many of the performances discussed in this study are distant from the commercial circuit. In this sense, they constitute examples of the experimentalism in amateur theatre which, far from just reproducing professional hits, has an alternative history of fostering the most innovative new work.16 In Britain, for instance, amateur theatre has had a key role in staging the plays of Harold Pinter, James Saunders, Caryl Churchill and Tom Stoppard.17 The extent to which a non-professional setting may be the most suitable context for presenting futurism and Brossa will be a question related to their potential revival.

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Updating/Contradicting In 1970, a researcher who helped to re-establish the importance of futurist theatre warned that a prime danger of concentrating on the aesthetic aspects of futurist performance was that it became a sterile, purely formal evolution, having lost any precise link with the changing reality of human beings.18 The trouble is that the reality of futurism can dissuade us from making this link, especially because of two of its most prominent features: a fixation on modern machines and the promotion of questionable sociopolitical ideologies. The first, founding manifesto of futurism (of 1909), inspired by Marinetti’s car crash, lauded the ‘beauty of speed’, and ‘lissome flight of the airplane’.19 Hence the rapid brevity of the sintesi and examples such as Mario Scaparro’s A Birth (1920), which consists of visions of planes falling in love.20 The obvious problem resulting from the fascination with this technology is that it lacks the novelty it had at the time. (The Wright brothers had managed to lift up into the air only seven years before the beginning of futurism.) Time has also rendered unpalatable the glorification of war, trumpeted from the first manifesto as ‘the sole cleanser of the world’, and transformed into support for fascism by the majority of futurists.21 Although it is possible to interpret the initial phase of futurist theatre as anti-fascist in the sense that it was anarchic, the connection has stuck.22 A critic attempting – in 1971 – to rekindle interest in futurist contributions to the stage was convinced they had been ignored because of the assumption of the close connection between futurism and fascism.23 Marinetti was so confident of the speed of modern communication – trains, planes and the telephone – he could assert that ‘Time and Space died yesterday’.24 But it is technological and political development over time which has created quandaries for performance. The solutions range from adaptation to negation. When you allude to now-outdated gadgets on stage it is inevitably going to be quaint, rather than revolutionary. In a sintesi I wrote entitled A Futurist Doll’s House (in 2009), Nora made her exit in a car for the premiere, although it was a slow battery-powered children’s version, thus updating but simultaneously parodying the futurist obsession with speed. Perhaps more neatly, the play has references to mobile phones and microwave ovens, and Ibsen’s door slamming became the sound of an electric door shutting.25 More ambitious was a Canadian production of original sintesi (directed by Susan Bertoia and Gerald Vanderwoude, in 2007), based on the premise that Italian futurist performers had travelled into the twenty-first century so that their staging became influenced by new technologies, such as modern lighting, computer-generated projections and digital film. Email postings and calls on Facebook were used to organise some members of the audience in advance of the performance through a private website which described in detail what they had to do as participants in the show.26 While these approaches update technology, they also run the danger of obscuring the original by diminishing the unquestioning enthusiasm for machines the velocity of which is no longer so new nor so fast. After all, is it not logical that we should dismiss or laugh at the blind faith in outdated technology after the disasters of the twentieth century and the ecological consequences of industrialisation? (The Canadian production included a new dance with a vacuum cleaner.) It is more challenging to recreate that enthusiasm for the twenty-first century. The futurist dance, performed in London in 2009 by Rebecca Frecknall and her troupe, communicated the aestheticisation of aviation and modern

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weapons in Marinetti’s sketchy choreographic notations (of 1917). Jocelyn White’s soundscape included industrial noises which became an updated version of Luigi Russolo’s futurist noise intoners, modernised beats, but also propellers whirring as dancers imitated the flight of an aeroplane, lifted a miniature biplane in the air, stamped their feet or held up signs. Accompanied by the occasional presence of futurist painting and words-in-freedom, this was a performance which seduced contemporary viewers into the primary ebullience of the original.27 When it comes to the bellicose jingoism of which such machines were an integral part, denial has been the usual strategy. Nicolas Bataille affirmed that, for his 1967 revival of futurist sintesi in Paris and Tokyo, he had made an anti-military statement out of Marinetti’s exaltation of war.28 In the US performances during the 1990s, directed by Picasso Gaglione and Joe De Marco, the belligerent elements of futurism were transformed into ‘violent bursts of anger, disconnected from any political context’.29 When I founded what was to be a short-lived futurist movement in Jerusalem in 1997, its manifesto explicitly reversed Marinetti’s by declaring that Israel was – using a futurist insult – passéist or passatista, because it could not live in peace, and that war was no longer futurist since it had been so common in the twentieth century.30 This sophistry is in the realm of ludic inspiration rather than direct confrontation with a futurist text on war. An engaging example of what can be done with the latter is the recorded performance (from 2014) of Marinetti’s manuscript of words-in-freedom (probably from 1917), describing a night during World War I. As the camera focuses on different sections of the text and images, Luciano Chessa interprets them in a voice that is celebratory and lyrical, then disgusted or irritated by aspects of the text (the flies and mice) that describe Marinetti’s military experience.31 It may be a surprise to encounter such ambivalence, but when we are confronted by the projection of Marinetti’s inscriptions, it makes us fruitfully rethink the ideology of the movement through the handwritten evidence of its founder: war was not all joy. Brossa’s politics could appear less repellent, but just as outdated. A sung ‘Homage to the Vietcong’ (1967) has lost the potency it had in the year of its premiere (1968) during the Vietnam War.32 At the same time, Brossa was writing a series of highly innovative stripteases, including one with an identical title in which an American soldier forces a Vietnamese girl to strip. Then the stars and stripes fall off the American flag.33 When this homage was performed at the Barcelona Joan Miró Foundation in 2001 (directed by Antoni Artigues), the exercise seemed distinctly historicist. It can be far more provocative to update references. In Brossa’s action entitled Star a young man leads the audience through doors sealed by posters bearing a portrait of General Franco which he cuts through with a razor blade. Eventually they reach a rooftop where the Catalan flag is flying.34 For the 2001 production by Artigues we climbed stairs blocked by string holding up a picture of the Spanish rightist prime minister of the time, José María Aznar, which was duly cut in two so we could go up. The adaptation acquired added relevance given the support of Aznar for King Juan Carlos’s recent claim that the Spanish language had never been imposed on anybody (a direct contradiction of the Francoist censorship of Catalan, to name just one obvious example).35 Since the tension between Barcelona and Madrid has continued, several aspects of Brossa’s stance have not lost their applicability. After the 2017 unauthorised referendum on Catalan independence (and the brutal attempt to stop it by the Spanish authorities),

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Figure 10.1  Jonathan Allen relieves himself from the pain of Spain in his performance of a section of Joan Brossa’s Mourning (written in 1962 or before); part of Allen’s Vetllada (Soirée, after Joan Brossa), Pinter Studio, Queen Mary University of London, 23 May 2018 (performance stills from video recording © Jonathan Allen).

the British artist Jonathan Allen performed part of Brossa’s Mourning, written more than fifty-five years before. In it, a hunchbacked man discovers that his deformity has been caused by a Spanish flag which falls to the ground when he takes off his jacket.36 In 2018 Allen prolonged the pain provoked by the hump as he struggled to be centre stage, accompanied by minimalist music. (Other meanings of the title, El dol, are distress and deceit.) He found a rope to extract the flag while keeping his jacket on, and then displayed it quite overtly to an amused and appreciative audience (Figure 10.1).37

Expanding/Creating Allen’s interpretation of three and a half lines of stage directions entailed a highly interventionist role for the performer or director. Because so many of these writers were approaching theatre from outside the theatrical profession and because the texts were often suggestions or ideas for performance rather than precise indications, there is indeed a constant need to expand. This is beyond the usual blocking which accompanies any preparation for performance. Take the half-page of stage directions in the tantalisingly titled Synthesis of Syntheses (1920), by Guglielmo Jannelli and Luciano Nicastro. They include red and white light, a revolver shot, confused cries and a woman’s laughter.38 Since the first words indicate ‘empty stage’, it would seem that there are no actors on stage.

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But look at the interpretation of Abi Weaver and the Futurist Orchestra (2009) and you can see how the actors create the jumble of sensations, by alternating hurried movements and more traditional gestures, working with strobe lighting, and making no verbal sense: all in a condensed ninety seconds (whereas the text has no indication of the duration of the performance). There may not have been the blinding light of the original, but the flashes of sensory impressions allow for an intense visual and auditory experience (Figure 10.2).39 Sempronio’s Lunch (1915), by Bruno Corra and Emilio Settimelli, puts the eponymous character through life – from five years old to ninety – in five micro-scenes where meals are served (not dissimilar to Brossa’s action cited previously in which the waiters grow older serving the same meal).40 Günter Berghaus used costume design, lighting, live cooking and sound effects to create a production (in 1993) involving smell and taste as well as colour and movement. Actors gave out food to the audience (Figure 10.3).41 Although the text does not indicate that the sensations of the food should be transmitted, this interpretation can be considered true to the spirit of the movement, especially in the light of the Futurist Cookbook (of 1932).42 It was more dynamic than a version of the same play performed at the University of Nottingham (in 2009), in which the separate scenes were placed at intervals amidst a production with other sintesi, thereby decreasing the momentum and creating a more traditional, unfuturist, logicality to the progression.43

Figure 10.2  Light, movement and a wide range of performers’ sounds (re)create the performance of Synthesis of Syntheses (1920), by Guglielmo Jannelli and Luciano Nicastro; Futurist Orchestra, Amersham Arms, London, 19 February 2009 (performance still from video recording © John London).

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Figure 10.3  Involving the audience by appealing to their tastebuds and visual perspective. A floorplan shows how food and slide projections become part of Günter Berghaus’s production of Sempronio’s Lunch (1915), by Bruno Corra and Emilio Settimelli; VAR, University of Bristol, 15 December 1993 (© Drama Department, University of Bristol). Although not concerned with (often mechanical) speed like the futurists, Brossa was interested in non-verbal sound and in motion. He turned to theatre, in his own phrase, to ‘find the fourth dimension of the poem’ and this dimension was movement.44 Brossa insisted on this explanation, even if his plays seemed to contradict it. With no human intervention, Deaf-Mute (1947) consists just of a whitish room and a pause before the curtain comes down.45 (John Cage’s 4′33″, involving more movement, dates from 1952.) It can, of course, be argued that the lack of sound and action draws our attention to both. The length of the performance of Brossa’s play in Valencia (in 2012) – just over 100 seconds – definitely serves to accentuate the movement of the curtain and the absence of total silence, filled instead by coughs and ambient rustling.46 But since no sound is mentioned, is it wrong to perform the piece with music? There was appreciation of the musical accompaniment to the Deaf-Mute which began a production of Brossa’s work in Barcelona (in 1976), since it was thought to ‘undo the initial coldness’.47 When actors appear in Brossa’s short plays of the 1940s they often seem to do nothing. The two men in Mask Mother (1948) are indicated as being immobile as they alternate phrases on the same theme: ‘By the hand. / The shadow of the hand. / One hand. / Hands.’48 This goes on for sixteen more lines. While there is an incantatory force in the variations, having two actors stand still but clench each other’s hands and

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Figure 10.4 Minimalist physical interaction, although absent from the stage directions of Brossa’s Mask Mother (1948), reinforces the verbal patterns of the text. María José Andrade and Philip Magee in the PartSuspended production of Actions and Post-Theatre of Joan Brossa, directed by Hari Marini; Pinter Studio, Queen Mary University of London, 24 May 2018 (photograph © Dani Harvey).

move their fingers (especially thumbs) can serve to underline the words in a miniature choreography, as opposed to distracting us from them. This tactic, adopted in Hari Marini’s London production (in 2018), constitutes an implicit criticism that the movement within the rhythm of the words needs supplementing with a somatic equivalent and that the action should not be limited to men (Figure 10.4). Yet this is, perhaps, not so different from the interpretation required of Brossa’s instructions (to which I have already referred) in which the performer tells the audience of something exceptional and then refutes it.49 Marini’s version drew on the creative process of the performance itself by having an actor narrate how a performer (called Sophia), with whom the company had been rehearsing, went on holiday to Croatia, and then died, as a result of food poisoning. He made the audience stand up as a sign of respect and remembrance (hence increasing our physical involvement), before saying ‘None of that was true.’50

Presenting/Deforming As we have already observed, any possible impact is inevitably linked, not just to the period of performance and the sort of audience, but also to the location of the presentation. While this is true for all theatre, the presentational potential of these texts

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is accentuated by three factors: (1) their brevity on the page (they usually contain no indication as to duration, meaning they are flexible enough to be inserted into different contexts); (2) their experimentalism which stimulates performance beyond traditional theatrical spaces; (3) their relative obscurity which thus sustains their capacity to surprise. It is worth analysing how all three factors combine when considering Fortunato Depero’s Colours (1916), a two-page sintesi comprising just ‘four abstract individualities’ of colours making sounds.51 The combination of unintelligible onomatopoeia and allusion to colour provides good material for workshops connecting movement, image and sound. In 2009, the Futurist Orchestra worked on direct vocal recitation, whereas Luke Allder and his company opted for a sophisticated recorded track, to the sound of which they carried out live painting.52 But given that Colours was never performed by the futurists themselves, there is an implicit notion that Depero – primarily a visual artist – was pushing his ideas beyond the stage. So there is a logic in creating filmed versions, subsequently uploaded on to the internet. Paul Shuette (2015) is faithful to the cubic room of the text as we look down on the shapes suspended by the strings Depero indicated (although it is difficult to make their movements ‘mechanical’ as intended). Gabriele Marino’s crudely placed images (2009) are less successful than Nole Biz’s video animations in the interpretation by Elvira Maizzani (2004) where the original colours rapidly flick by in varying forms. In what could be understood as a synaesthetic provocation, music is the only thing heard while Depero’s sounds – such as ‘mom mom BLOM’ – appear in printed form on screen.53 Whatever the possibilities for simultaneous broadcast and the use of chat functions or Twitter, pre-recording futurist sintesi for computer screen consumption avoids live collective reaction or interaction in a traditional theatrical space. However, it is not clear that Colours is entirely reliant on a normal stage and auditorium or that it should be limited to the theatre. Cangiullo’s There Is No Dog (1915) is another example, consisting merely of stage directions: in the cold, a dog crosses a deserted street at night.54 Since the only character is ‘The One Who Isn’t There’, a play on words is being enacted: the Italian title Non c’è un cane is a phrase indicating ‘there’s not a soul there’, as well as meaning, literally, that there is no dog. Apart from the practical difficulties, placing a dog on an English-language stage will not convey this punning. Taking inspiration from the setting, I produced a version filmed outside on a street and used a toy bird instead of a dog, having retitled the piece Not a Dicky Bird [sic], thereby alluding to the rhyming slang – dicky-bird – for ‘word’.55 With a camera it was easier to focus on the punning object. People may come across these recordings by surfing the internet, but another possibility for chance encounter is to insert short pieces into non-theatrical contexts. One of Brossa’s actions involves an actor who appears with a pen and dips it into an inkpot, then making an exit. He does this seven times, then gives an envelope to a member of the audience, telling them to open it after fifteen minutes.56 I saw Brossa himself perform the piece (in 1995) in Berlin where it came as an unexpected part of a presentation by an academic, combined with a poetry recital. Brossa added a preliminary enticement by announcing at the start that he was going to ‘make a poem’, although the written message was undermined somewhat by being in pencil. There is a recording (from 1997) where Brossa makes the action last over nine minutes, even if that directly involves two members of a large audience, one to keep time (and wait only five, not fifteen, minutes) and the other to hold (then show the contents of) the envelope. But

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Brossa’s stage directions indicate that the table with the inkpot should be in the middle of a circle of chairs. I maintained this idea for my interpretation (in 2018), although it was a square rather than a circle and I unwisely rushed through the performance, realising there was much less audience atmosphere (and hence expectation) among twenty people than 100. Nevertheless, the surprise was maintained within an academic conference because the programme had announced it as a ‘reading of Brossa’s work’ and I had to hush the poet Lawrence Upton abruptly in the middle since he was chatting to somebody. (Many thought his startled reaction a planned part of the performance.) It should be added that the word on the piece of paper in the envelope to be read out is ‘FI’ (i.e. ‘THE END’).57 It can be just as invigorating when the audience is not quite sure what the performance is or even that they are being designated as the audience. At the beginning of a performance of three of my own actions in a private house (in 1992), I opened a bottle of champagne and served the audience. This corresponded to an action by Brossa entitled The Sea, although the willing participants could only realise that if they made the connection between what they had just drunk (and its bubbles) and the listing in the printed programme. It has to be admitted that Brossa’s instructions indicate a more plentiful supply of champagne, although placing the piece as an agenda item in a meeting (in 2016) caused equally pleasant consternation.58 Mischievously concealing individual performances has the potential to involve uninitiated audiences, but it does not allow for a prolonged consideration of an aesthetic. Placing short pieces together to make up an evening of entertainment (in the productions by Bataille, Bertoia/Vanderwoude, Artigues and Marini) is not just a way of enabling such concentrated appreciation. It also acknowledges the manner in which the futurists presented the teatro sintetico as well as their interest in popular forms known as variety theatre and music hall. In his manifesto The Variety Theatre (1913), Marinetti proclaimed the genre as the only kind of theatre closely involving the audience and lauded its gamut of different registers and techniques.59 It is not by chance that Brossa was also eloquently passionate about the music hall, praising it as anti-rhetorical and full of surprises. Brossa actually cited Marinetti’s admiration for Leopoldo Fregoli, the music hall quick-change artist, thereby recognising the continued avant-garde fascination with popular performance.60 In spite of these connections, music hall is clearly not suited for all innovations. Marinetti contradicted his own intentions and misjudged his music hall audience in London (in 1914) by giving them a fifteen-minute lecture.61 The technical proposals for futurist scenography made by Prampolini and Depero – with elaborate lighting, complex sound effects and typographical scenery – would require an overhaul of many existing venues.62 Yet while the noisiness of the music hall drowns out the subtlety of some sintesi, other features of futurism fit neatly into the rumbustious performer– spectator relationship of a relatively informal setting. For A Futurist Doll’s House I adapted Marinetti’s suggestion that the ticket for the same seat be sold to several people and provoked an argument in the performance space of a pub when an actor tried to eject a spectator. Shouting, laughter and heckling of the actors quickly became part of the show. The same tactic employed for raked seating in a formal setting made the equivalent audience member just acquiesce to moving out of her seat sheepishly.63 The main challenge in presenting a series of futurist plays is how to connect them and maintain the rhythm. Reviewers of the first tour of teatro sintetico (in 1915) complained

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that the intervals between sketches were protracted and boring.64 In contrast, Nicolas Bataille argued that the extended music-hall-style introductions to the plays in his production underlined the concision of the sintesi, although a show in Toronto (in 2008) went further by extensive use of ushers and waiters (moving closely next to an audience seated at tables), as well as a master of ceremonies.65 Bertoia/Vanderwoude’s production (in British Columbia) added a twist to this idea by having ‘noise-sound’ in the transitions and an emcee who spoke Italian accompanied by an English translator (who did not understand Italian).66 The show I produced in London, Let’s Murder the Moonshine (in 2009), made do with the ambient clinks and general noise from the bar in between performances, and the insertion of musical interludes by the Orchid Sinfonietta, while the announcement of each piece came in the form of a flickering screen caption, in imitation of early silent film. The screen device served to remind the audience of the longevity of the avant-garde they were witnessing. Issues related to presenting Brossa’s actions are similar, with the added complication that the impact of some of his pieces is reliant on quite small images or lettering which nevertheless have to be visible. In one, a man asks the first name of a female member of the audience. He writes the name on an apple which he shows to the audience. Another man comes on wearing a blindfold and eats the apple, then takes it off and says the name out loud.67 The group Bufons performed a version (in 1996) where the spectators were standing on either side of a platform and I remember how difficult it was to see the name, especially since it had been written on to the apple with knife incisions. Marini’s option (in 2018) to use a felt pen in front of raked seating worked much better, aided by focused lighting and an amiable presenter who had a closer relationship with the audience.68 Linking pieces such as this together is still a problem, often solved by music. Brossa does not tend to indicate any music for his stripteases, but when they are realised in silence (as done by Marini) they become rather concentrated pieces, closer to performance art than to the popular form Brossa was attempting to reinvigorate. The two projects based on Brossa’s texts, directed by the US artist Emily Mast, are worth mentioning in this context because of their general combination of sound and experimentation. For the first (in 2014), the audience followed performers outside and inside areas of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, led – at different times – by an itinerant percussionist, a tap dancer, a trumpeter, an accordionist and a dancer with a red balloon. For the second (in 2019), the artist–sound experimentalist Laia Estruch, wearing a red beret, sang repetitively and non-verbally through a megaphone, urging spectators through the streets of old Barcelona and into interior spaces, as well as accompanying pieces with illustrative or provocative noises.69 A striptease where we see just the clothes falling on to the stage was enriched by titillating variants on ‘Ah!’.70 And one action which worked particularly well in both of Mast’s productions consisted of a girl lighting a cigarette and smoking it.71 The pause to contemplate relative banality was welcome after the previous movement.

Inspiring/Laughing/Failing Rewriting Ibsen stimulated by futurist manifestos, adapting theatrical pieces for exclusive presentation on screen, and adding an extensive soundtrack constitute approaches which would seem to place these productions at a considerable distance

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from the original texts. Projects further removed from their claimed sources have included: cyber-futurism (2008), where the internet plays a role, a reimagining (2008) of the lost futurist film Vita Futurista (of 1916), and an attempt to create the ‘world of Brossa’ (2001).72 It is not difficult to spot futurist techniques from the 1960s onwards in Italian theatre, such as that of Luca Ronconi, Carmelo Bene and Romeo Castellucci.73 In parallel developments, it has been argued that contemporary Russian theatre is infused with Russian futurist practice.74 The Neo-Futurists, founded in 1988 in Chicago, were directly influenced by the Italian movement to create new miniature plays performed in rapid succession and their approach has proved popular across the USA.75 There is also a Neo-Futurist group in London.76 Likewise, Brossa’s theatrical aesthetic has become part of the twenty-first-century productions of directors such as Xavier Albertí and Calixto Bieito.77 But the more theatre is merely inspired by its modernist precursors, the more the originals fade into a colourless background (far from Depero’s Colours). As early as 1959, one critic was arguing that futurist influence was important, even though futurist plays did not possess any intrinsic value.78 Can contemporary revivals, then, have any role in proving the contrary? Haunting this question is Peter Bürger’s argument, glossing Adorno, that the neo-avant-garde ‘stages (inszeniert) for a second time the avant-gardiste break with tradition’ and ‘becomes a manifestation that is void of sense and that permits the positing of any meaning whatever’.79 If much of the meaning of futurism is dependent on its novelty then this is certainly diluted in a world where aesthetics have been transformed by technology and audience expectations have expanded. In sheer quantitative terms, different forms of screen have become the Western norm, whereas the futurists sought to harness the modernity in film and simultaneously fend off competition from the cinema by the brevity and compression of their theatre.80 (Even before the teatro sintetico, the theatre had been the location for futurist declarations and battles.) Elements such as anti-psychological characters, illogicality, tragic-comic registers and continuous surprises are not now new.81 Disdain of the audience and the deliberate involvement of spectators by breaking the barrier between stage and auditorium – thus urging that radical social and political change should ensue – cannot now guarantee that rotten fruit and vegetables will be thrown at performers or that fights will break out with the audience.82 Yet futurism can still hardly be considered mainstream. Most revivals of the sintesi are limited to one or two performances. An exception was Bataille’s selection which ran for a month in Paris (in 1967), but that was performed only three times a week, at midnight.83 This is hardly commercial theatre. So students or amateurs often have more time over a protracted period to experiment with different approaches to futurist innovations and a university theatre is as cheap and convenient as a commissioned alternative space (such as an art gallery). While the shock thus created may be limited by a context in which provocation is expected, the one-off performance can retain impact because there is no run to allow surprises to become familiar. We may not want to start a war or attack an institution, but we can still wonder at a life passing with dramatic speed and be made to contemplate the sound of colours. The wider context of post-war avant-garde performance is also relevant when considering the impact of old but still surprising innovations. Bataille explained that his actors performed in the same sincere and realist style he had employed for the

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premiere of Ionesco’s The Bald Prima Donna (in 1950). Since caricature was avoided, the dramatic situations appeared even stranger and more novel; an audience ignorant of futurist plays thought they were by young Italian authors.84 Brossa did not express the intention to provoke the same violent reaction as the futurists, but he shares Bataille’s approach by insisting that the dialogue in his theatre should be performed in a simple, non-rhetorical manner (and we could apply this to much of the speech and gesture in his actions).85 Although Brossa is appreciative of the functioning of traditional and popular theatre (in contrast to many creators of performance art), we have seen how many of his actions involve the audience in less aggressive ways than the futurists. Whereas the futurist sintesi look forward to absurdist theatre by their illogical actions and to performance art by mixing artistic media, many of Brossa’s actions anticipate and coincide with features of the happenings movement in other ways. They subtly assign the audience the same ontological status as the performers, acknowledge the setting (a room, the street) as not representing anything beyond itself, and revitalise the perception of banal activities.86 We discover things by walking with an actor or just looking at somebody smoking. Compare the incidental audience-participant drinking champagne and rethinking the activity because of its title (in Brossa’s The Sea) with a happening performed more than seven years later: Tom Marioni’s beer party at the Oakland Museum (in 1970), entitled The Act of Drinking Beer with Friends Is the Highest Form of Art.87 Restagings of Brossa’s actions tend to provoke laughter and admiration (especially when they are aesthetically accomplished). An audience survey I conducted after their exposure to his theatre in London (in 2018) led to comments highlighting innovation and ‘ironic play’, ‘joy of play’, ‘subversive humour’ or the adjective ‘delightful’.88 Reactions to twenty-first-century futurist revivals likewise underline the amusing nature of many elements while simultaneously detailing how unexpected the performances are.89 This is obviously distant from any potential tension derived from Brossa’s context of composition under Francoism and the weight of Italian bourgeois tradition against which the futurists were fighting. When the police or security guards have intervened in the revival of futurist theatre (in 2009), it has not – to my knowledge – resulted in the arrests which followed Marinetti’s exploits.90 Nevertheless, more research is required on the development of audiences and their self-awareness in relation to this kind of theatre.91 A preliminary analysis reveals that Bürger is misleading on at least two accounts. First, as we have seen from the admiration shared by Marinetti and Brossa for the music hall (and all the entertainers it comprises), it would be more accurate to talk of the development of a certain sort of tradition – perceived as such by the audience – rather than a break with it per se. Second, audience reception is not devoid of meaning, since it retains much of the initial surprise, admiration and humour which first greeted these pieces. Shouting back at the original futurist performers quickly became the norm and there was a degree of complicity in audience reactions which was also present in dadaist productions.92 For Brossa, this complicity was more intimate because his first performances were in front of friends.93 Besides, laughter was an integral part of the initial reaction to these experiments. It can be traced quite specifically in Italian performances and during Marinetti’s appearances in London in 1914 when he accompanied Russolo’s noise intoners, as well as in

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the parody and sarcasm with which English newspapers welcomed futurist art. Given Marinetti’s manipulation of the press and his overwhelming desire for any sort of publicity, it is not so clear where intended humour ended and comic derision directed at the futurists started.94 A similar ambivalence exists in the mixture of consternation and laughter during public productions of Brossa’s musical actions (in 1965).95 Moreover, if the criteria for the success of any revival are muddied, then we would do well to remember that there is a sense in which the risk of failure is written into the material under consideration. In Marinetti’s play The Naked Prompter (1929), a character called The Wind from the Stage rejects prompters, proclaiming: ‘Our own mistake is better than a hundred beautiful things suggested/prompted by others.’96 Paradoxically prompted by original writing, we should, therefore, go beyond it in our own interpretations. And the provocation of these interpretations will not always have the desired result because we will make mistakes. Hungry for a fight, Boccioni and Marinetti tracked down the journalist Francis McCullagh to his Surrey home, since he had strongly criticised Italian imperialism and Marinetti’s militarism in a book (published in 1913). McCullagh politely refused the invitation to a duel and, instead, invited the Italians in for afternoon tea.97 Whether it is with a glass of champagne offered by Brossa or the cup of tea offered to Marinetti, these defiant texts continue to confound expectations.

Notes   1. F. T. Marinetti, Emilio Settimelli and Bruna Corra [eds], Il teatro futurista sintetico (Piacenza: Ghelfi Costantino, 1921), 43; Michael Kirby, Futurist Performance, translations by Victoria Nes Kirby, 2nd edn (New York: PAJ Publications, 1986), 268.  2. Joan Brossa, Teatre complet: III: Poesia escènica 1958–1962 (Barcelona: Edicions 62, 1978), 377.   3. Marinetti, Settimelli and Corra [eds], Il teatro, 41–2; Kirby, Futurist Performance, 269–70.  4. Brossa, Teatre complet: III, 375; John London, ‘The Theatrical Poetry of Joan Brossa’, in Joan Brossa: Words Are Things, ed. Susan Copping and Zoë Shearman (London: Riverside Studios, 1992), 21.  5. Kirby, Futurist Performance, 247; Joan Brossa, Teatre complet: I: Poesia escènica 1945–1954 (Barcelona: Edicions 62, 1973), 456.   6. Günter Berghaus, ‘The Postwar Reception of Futurism: Repression or Recuperation?’, in The History of Futurism: The Precursors, Protagonists, and Legacies, ed. Geert Buelens, Harald Hendrix and Monica Jansen (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2012), 385–8; Manuela Foiera, ‘Italian Futurism on Stage: Synthetic Theatre in Translation’, in Drama Translation and Theatre Practice, ed. Sabine Coelsch-Foisner and Holger Klein (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2004), 313–18.  7. RoseLee Goldberg, Performance Art: From Futurism to the Present, rev. edn (London: Thames & Hudson, 1988); John Gray, Action Art: A Bibliography of Artists’ Performances from Futurism to Fluxus and Beyond (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1993).  8. Dominika Buchowska and Steven L. Wright, ‘The Futurist Invasion of Great Britain, 1910–1914’, International Yearbook of Futurist Studies 2, no. 1 (2012): 201–25.  9. Foiera, ‘Italian Futurism’, 314–16; John London, Contextos de Joan Brossa: l’acció, la imatge i la paraula (Barcelona: Publicacions i Edicions de la Universitat de Barcelona, 2010), 44. 10. F. T. Marinetti, Critical Writings, ed. Günter Berghaus, trans. Doug Thompson (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2006), 184.

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11. On the serate and the subsequent tour of rehearsed plays (the teatro sintetico), see Günter Berghaus, Italian Futurist Theatre: 1909–1944 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998), 85–155, 193–7. 12. Robert Leach, Russian Futurist Theatre: Theory and Practice (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2018), 27. 13. Berghaus, Italian Futurist Theatre, 197–9; Francesco Cangiullo, Le serate futuriste; romanzo storico vissuto (Naples: Tirrena, 1930), 96; Matteo D’Ambrosio, ‘Svegliatevi, studenti d’Italia!: il Futurismo e la gioventù’, in Luci e ombre del Futurismo: atti del Convegno internazionale LUSPIO (Libera Università degli Studi per l’Innovazione e le Organizzazioni): Roma 27–28 ottobre 2009, ed. Antonio Gasbarrini and Novella Novelli (L’Aquila: Angelus Novus, 2010), 67–95; Cedric Van Dijck, ‘Marinetti at the University of Cambridge’, Notes and Queries 65 (2018): 408–11. 14. Eduard Planas, ‘Les representacions de la Poesia escènica de Joan Brossa entre el 1947 i el 1959’, Caplletra 14 (Spring 1993): 87–101. 15. Jordi Marrugat, ‘El saltamartí’ de Joan Brossa: les mil cares del poeta (Tarragona: Arola, 2009), 194–5. 16. Sybil Rosenfeld, Temples of Thespis: Some Private Theatres and Theatricals in England and Wales, 1700–1820 (London: Society of Theatre Research, 1978), 9–15. 17. Helen Nicholson, Nadine Holdsworth and Jane Milling, The Ecologies of Amateur Theatre, corr. edn (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019), 71–2, 98–9. 18. Giovanni Antonucci, ‘Il teatro futurista oggi’, Studium 66, no. 5 (May 1970): 427. 19. Marinetti, Critical Writings, 13–14. 20. Kirby, Futurist Performance, 303–4. 21. Marinetti, Critical Writings, 14. On the politics of futurism, see Günter Berghaus, Futurism and Politics: Between Anarchist Rebellion and Fascist Reaction, 1909–1944 (Providence: Berghahn, 1996). 22. Ryan Helterbrand, ‘Ecstasies of War: Anti-Fascism in Italian Futurist Performance, 1909–1919’, Italica 92 (2015): 857–73. 23. David F. Chesire, ‘Futurism, Marinetti and the Music Hall’, Theatre Quarterly 1, no. 3 (July–September 1971): 55. 24. Marinetti, Critical Writings, 14. 25. John London, ‘Writing Futurist Drama in 2009: A Futurist Doll’s House’, in One Hundred Years of Futurism: Aesthetics, Politics, and Performance, ed. John London (Bristol: Intellect, 2017), 201; A Futurist Doll’s House, Amersham Arms, London, 19 February 2009, https:// www.youtube.com/watch?v=f0llgfVYD1o (accessed 25 July 2021). 26. Susan Bertoia, ‘Legacies of Futurism and Contemporary Interpretations of Futurist Drama in the BellaLuna and UBC Theatre Co-Production of FUTURISTI’, in Futurist Dramaturgy and Performance, ed. Paul J. Stoesser (Ottawa: Legas, 2011), 151–62. 27. Rebecca Frecknall, ‘The Possibilities for Dance: Words, Images, and Sounds in Freedom’, in One Hundred Years of Futurism, ed. London, 203–16; Futurist Dance, performed by Alice Sillett, Tracky Crombie, Naomi Grossett and Rebecca Frecknall, Amersham Arms, London, 19 February 2009, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_yY1O19tlfY (accessed 25 July 2021). 28. Giovanni Lista, ‘Nicolas Bataille: la scoperta del teatro futurista italiano’, Sipario 315–16 (August–September 1972): 31. A parodic attitude to fascism seems to have been taken in a production of futurist material mounted shortly after in Italy; see Giuseppe Bartolucci, Il ‘gesto’ futurista: materiali drammaturgici, 1968–1969 (Rome: Mario Bulzoni, 1969), 55–62. 29. Foiera, ‘Italian Futurism’, 314. 30. Giovanni Londra [John London], ‘Fondazione e manifesto del Futurismo israeliano’, in Futurismo in Israele, ed. Giovanni Londra (London: Theatre of the Page, 1998), 6.

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31. F. T. Marinetti, ‘The Carso = A Rat’s Nest: A Night in a Sinkhole + Mice in Love’, performed by Luciano Chessa, prod. Jen Sachs, John Paul Getty Trust, 2014, https://www. youtube.com/watch?v=HYrdMqrHi5k (accessed 25 July 2021). 32. Joan Brossa, Teatre complet: VI: Poesia escènica 1966–1978 (Barcelona: Edicions 62, 1983), 307–8. 33. Brossa, Teatre complet: VI, 270. 34. Brossa, Teatre complet: III, 400. 35. On this production by Artigues, entitled Vas més de pressa que Frégoli, and its context, see John London, ‘In Barcelona’, Plays International 16, no. 9 (June–July 2001): 30–1. 36. Brossa, Teatre complet: III, 406. 37. Jonathan Allen, Vetllada (Soirée, after Joan Brossa), Pinter Studio, Queen Mary University of London, 23 May 2018, recording, archive of Jonathan Allen. 38. Kirby, Futurist Performance, 289. 39. Guglielmo Jannelli and Luciano Nicastro, Synthesis of Syntheses, performed by the Futurist Orchestra, Amersham Arms, London, 19 February 2009, https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=zVEDS-dafIo (accessed 25 July 2021). For an account of the rehearsal processes leading to this kind of performance (although not about Synthesis of Syntheses specifically), see Abi Weaver, ‘W–I–F + V–I–F = EF’, in One Hundred Years of Futurism, ed. London, 217–30. 40. Kirby, Futurist Performance, 271–2. 41. Günter Berghaus, ‘On Taste and Other Senses: Synaesthesia in Renaissance and Avantgarde Performance’, Performance Research 23, nos. 4/5 (2018): 25–6. Performances took place in Bristol (1993) and Cardiff (1994). 42. F. T. Marinetti, The Futurist Cookbook, ed. Lesley Chamberlain, trans. Suzanne Brill (London: Trefoil Publications/San Francisco: Bedford Arts, 1989). 43. Gordon Ramsay, ‘Staging Futurism: Time, Space, Place, and the Performance of Futurist sintesi’, in One Hundred Years of Futurism, ed. London, 187–9. 44. Jordi Coca, Joan Brossa o el pedestal són les sabates (Barcelona: Editorial Pòrtic, 1971), 69; Agustí Pons, ‘Entrevista: Joan Brossa: “La vanguardia no existe; sólo existe la retaguardia”’, Destino 2151 (28 December–3 January 1978–79): 27. 45. Brossa, Teatre complet: I, 127; London, ‘The Theatrical Poetry’, 21. 46. Sord-mut. Peça en un acte. 1947. De Joan Brossa, Teatro Escalante, Valencia, 31 March 2012, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OLd_Lc3V_UQ (accessed 25 July 2021). 47. Joaquím Vilà i Folch, ‘Quiriquibú de Joan Brossa’, Serra d’Or 198 (15 March 1976): 59. 48. Brossa, Teatre complet: I, 141. 49. Brossa, Teatre complet: III, 377. 50. PartSuspended, Actions and Post-Theatre of Joan Brossa, Pinter Studio, Queen Mary University of London, 24 May 2018, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jnjg4smir48 (accessed 25 July 2021). 51. Kirby, Futurist Performance, 278–9. For an analysis and context, see Berghaus, Italian Futurist Theatre, 300. 52. Weaver, ‘W–I–F + V–I–F = EF’, 219–21; Luke Allder, ‘Depero and the Puzzle of Colours’, in One Hundred Years of Futurism, ed. London, 231–7; Fortunato Depero, Colours, performed by Luke Allder and others, Amersham Arms, London, 19 February 2009, https:// www.youtube.com/watch?v=d3fJemWn4rA (accessed 25 July 2021). 53. Fortunato Depero, Colors, dir. Paul Shuette, the Warp Whistle Project, 2015, https://www. youtube.com/watch?v=rYz2LFSNtyg; Fortunato Depero, Colori, dir. Gabriele Marino, 2009, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ict51WbO3AI; Fortunato Depero, Colori, dir. Elvira Maizzani, La DifférAnce, 2004, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XOYQiS6zxa8. All accessed 25 July 2021.

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54. Francesco Cangiullo, Non c’è un cane, in Marinetti e i futuristi, ed. Luciano De Maria, with Laura Dondi (Milan: Garzanti, 1994), 535; Kirby, Futurist Performance, 252 (although I am citing my translation). 55. Francesco Cangiullo, Non c’è un cane/Not a Dicky Bird, trans. and dir. John London, 2015, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fjDjTYkjtxw (accessed 25 July 2021). For a broader explanation of this sintesi and my production, see John London, ‘Translating Titles and Contents: Artistic Image and Theatrical Action’, in Translating across Sensory and Linguistic Borders: Intersemiotic Journeys between Media, ed. Madeleine Campbell and Ricarda Vidal (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019), 140–1. 56. Brossa, Teatre complet: III, 401–2. 57. John London, ‘In Berlin’, Plays International 11, no. 2 (September 1995): 25; Joan Brossa, Fi, Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona, 15 May 1997, https://vimeo. com/55889041 (accessed 25 July 2021); Joan Brossa, Fifty-First Action Show, performed by John London, Room 1.28, Arts One, Queen Mary University of London, 23 May 2018. 58. Brossa, Teatre complet: III, 403; London, ‘The Theatrical Poetry’, 22; Past Possibilities and Practice, performed by Kalinka Huber and John London, 27 Sidney Street, Oxford, 29 August 1992; John London, Past Possibilities and Practice: For Joan Brossa (Oxford: The Trilobites, 1992); Meeting of Department of Iberian and Latin American Studies, Room 1.31, Arts One, Queen Mary University of London, 21 September 2016. 59. Marinetti, Critical Writings, 185–92. 60. Joan Brossa, Prosa completa i textos esparsos, ed. Glòria Bordons (Barcelona: RBA Libros, 2013), 499–500, 552, 574–5. 61. Buchowska and Wright, ‘The Futurist Invasion’, 219. 62. Enric Prampolini, Futurist Scenography (1915), and Fortunato Depero, Notes on the Theatre (c. 1916), in Kirby, Futurist Performance, 203–6, 207–10. 63. Marinetti, Critical Writings, 190. The performances compared are A Futurist Doll’s House, Amersham Arms, London, 19 February 2009, already cited, and the same play performed at the Lecture Theatre, Arts One, Queen Mary University of London, 2 July 2009. 64. Giovanni Antonucci, Storia del teatro futurista (Rome: Edizioni Studium, 2005), 43; Berghaus, Italian Futurist Theatre, 195–6. 65. Lista, ‘Nicolas Bataille’, 31. For the Toronto show, entitled ScrABrrRrraaNNG, and further discussion on how to connect futurist plays in production, see Ramsay, ‘Staging Futurism’, 185–90. 66. Bertoia, ‘Legacies of Futurism’, 155–6. 67. Brossa, Teatre complet: III, 371. 68. Bufons, Casa de Cultura, L’Alfàs del Pi, 2 May 1996; photograph in Joan M. Oleaque, ‘Creativitat per a dies d’incertesa’, El Temps, 13 May 1996, 78; PartSuspended, Actions, 2018. 69. Emily Mast, The Least Important Things, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, recorded from performances 27–29 March 2014, https://vimeo.com/104976892 (accessed 25 July 2021); Emily Mast, This Line Is the Present, Barcelona, 8 November 2019, https://vimeo. com/525730434 (accessed 25 July 2021). 70. Brossa, Teatre complet: VI, 265. 71. Brossa, Teatre complet: III, 376. 72. Cortney Lohnes and Kimberley McLeod, ‘The Cyber-Futurist: Rethinking Futurist Performance via the Internet’, and Justin A. Blum, Gabrielle Houle and Mark David Turner, ‘Research for Production and Production as Research in Re-Living the Vita Futurista’, in Futurist Dramaturgy, ed. Stoesser, 163–72, 133–49; Joan-Anton Benach, ‘Brossa, más allá de sus fronteras’, La Vanguardia, 22 September 2001, 48. 73. Antonella Valoroso, ‘Futurist Theater: Theories, Experiments, Legacy’, in Futurismo: Impact and Legacy, ed. Giuseppe Gazzola (Stony Brook: Forum Italicum, 2011), 168–73; Alberto

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Bentoglio, ‘Futurism and Experimentation in Italian Theater in the Late Twentieth Century’, in Shades of Futurism/Futurismo in ombra: atti del convegno internazionale Princeton 9–10 ottobre 2009, ed. Pietro Frassica (Novara: Interlinea edizioni, 2011), 63–9. 74. Leach, Russian Futurist Theatre, 220–1. 75. Founding artistic director Greg Allen admits his inspiration in Janet Potter, ‘Too Much Light at 25: An Oral History’, Chicago Reader, 16 December 2013, https://www. chicagoreader.com/chicago/neofuturists-tml-twenty-five-years-history-anniversary/ Content?oid=11871597 (accessed 3 March 2019). On the Neo-Futurists, see also Chloe Johnston and Coya Paz Brownrigg, Ensemble-Made Chicago: A Guide to Devised Theater (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2019), 111–25; Adrian Curtin, ‘The NeoFuturists(’) Take on Eugene O’Neill’s Strange Interlude’, in Contemporary Approaches to Adaptation in Theatre, ed. Kara Reilly (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), 251–73. 76. The London Neo-Futurist group is called Degenerate Fox: https://degeneratefox.co.uk/ (accessed 20 October 2021). 77. Héctor Mellinas, ‘Humor i absurd: escenes brossianes’, in Acting Funny on the Catalan Stage: el teatre còmic en català (1900–2016), ed. John London and Gabriel Sansano (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2022), 101–14. 78. Joseph Cary, ‘Futurism and the French Théâtre d’Avant-Garde’, Modern Philology 57, no. 2 (1959): 113–21. 79. Peter Bürger, Theorie der Avantgarde (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1974), 85; Peter Bürger, Theory of the Avant-Garde, trans. Michael Shaw (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), 61. 80. Marinetti, Critical Writings, 186, 201. 81. See the summary of features in Noëmie Blumenkranz, ‘Le Théâtre de Marinetti: la subversion de l’espace et du temps’, in Présence de F. T. Marinetti: actes du colloque international tenu à l’UNESCO, ed. Jean-Claude Marcadé (Lausanne: L’Age d’Homme, 1982), 104–7. 82. For examples of such reactions to futurist music, the serate and teatro sintetico, see Berghaus, Italian Futurist Theatre, 122–32, 190–7. 83. ‘Spectacle Dada-Futuriste’, Cahiers Dada Surréalisme 2 (1968): 258. 84. Lista, ‘Nicolas Bataille’, 30–1. 85. Coca, Joan Brossa, 78. 86. Darko Suvin, ‘Reflections on Happenings’, TDR: The Drama Review 14, no. 3 (1970): 131, 133, 139. 87. In other actions by Brossa the (re)action of the audience is the performance or the audience are just left to do something unspecified (Brossa, Teatre complet: III, 376, 384, 393), hence anticipating this notion in art of the 1960s. For the latter, see The ‘Do-It-Yourself’ Artwork: Participation from Fluxus to New Media, ed. Anna Dezeuze (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2010). 88. Quotations taken from thirty-two questionnaires completed after the two days of talks, workshops and above all attendance at the performance by PartSuspended, Actions and Post-Theatre of Joan Brossa, Queen Mary University of London, 23–24 May 2018. 89. Bertoia, ‘Legacies of Futurism’, 160–1; Matthew Reza, ‘The Futurist Synthetic Theatre 2015’, review of Serata Futurista, Burton Taylor Studio, Oxford, 10–14 March 2015, The Oxonian Review, 12 March 2015, https://www.oxonianreview.org/wp/the-futuristsynthetic-theatre-2015/print/ (accessed 7 July 2019). 90. On the intervention of police and security guards in England in 2009, see John London, ‘Forward is Forewarned: On Practitioners’ Perspectives’, in One Hundred Years of Futurism, ed. London, 178; Ramsay, ‘Staging Futurism’, 189. 91. A good starting point would be the work in Carole Heim, Audience as Performer: The Changing Role of Theatre Audiences in the Twenty-First Century (London: Routledge, 2016).

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92. Emilia David, ‘Esibizioni artistiche e modelli teatrali dadaisti e futuristi. Esperienze performative a confronto’, Italianistica 47, no. 1 (2018): 175–92. 93. Coca, Joan Brossa, 43, 77. 94. Cangiullo, Le serate futuriste, 141–2, 275, 279; Arthur Croxton, Crowded Nights – and Days: An Unconventional Pageant (London: Sampson Low, Marston & Co. [1934]), 367– 8; John J. White, ‘London’, in Futurism: A Microhistory, ed. Sascha Bru, Luca Somigli and Bart Van den Bossche (Cambridge: Legenda, 2017), 61–6. 95. Germán Gan Quesada and Helena Martín Nieva, ‘“Peeping through the Theatre Curtain”: The Early Musical Actions of Joan Brossa and Josep M. Mestres Quadreny (1962–1966)’, in De fronteres i arts escèniques, ed. Núria Santamaria (Lleida: Punctum, 2015), 282–3. 96. Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, Teatro, ed. Jeffrey T. Schnapp, 2 vols (Milan: Arnoldo Mondadori, 2004), vol. 1, 405. 97. Buchowska and Wright, ‘The Futurist Invasion’, 214; Michael J. K. Walsh, Hanging a Rebel: The Life of C. R. W. Nevinson (Cambridge: Lutterworth Press, 2008), 74.

Works Cited Recorded Performances All performances were last accessed on 25 July 2021. Allen, Jonathan. Vetllada (Soirée, after Joan Brossa). Pinter Studio, Queen Mary University of London, 23 May 2018, recording, archive of Jonathan Allen. Brossa, Joan. Fi. Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona, 15 May 1997. https://vimeo. com/55889041 Brossa, Joan. Sord-mut. Peça en un acte. 1947. Teatro Escalante, Valencia, 31 March 2012. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OLd_Lc3V_UQ Cangiullo, Francesco. Non c’è un cane/Not a Dicky Bird, trans. and dir. John London, 2015. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fjDjTYkjtxw Depero, Fortunato. Colori, dir. Elvira Maizzani. La DifférAnce, 2004. https://www.youtube. com/watch?v=XOYQiS6zxa8 Depero, Fortunato. Colori, dir. Gabriele Marino. 2009. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v= ict51WbO3AI Depero, Fortunato. Colors, dir. Paul Shuette. The Warp Whistle Project, 2015. https://www. youtube.com/watch?v=rYz2LFSNtyg Depero, Fortunato. Colours. Performed by Luke Allder and others, Amersham Arms, London, 19 February 2009. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d3fJemWn4rA Frecknall, Rebecca and others. Futurist Dance. Amersham Arms, London, 19 February 2009. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_yY1O19tlfY Jannelli, Guglielmo and Luciano Nicastro. Synthesis of Syntheses. Performed by the Futurist Orchestra, Amersham Arms, London, 19 February 2009. https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=zVEDS-dafIo London, John. A Futurist Doll’s House. Amersham Arms, London, 19 February 2009. https:// www.youtube.com/watch?v=f0llgfVYD1o Marinetti, F. T. ‘The Carso = A Rat’s Nest: A Night in a Sinkhole + Mice in Love’. Performed by Luciano Chessa, prod. Jen Sachs, John Paul Getty Trust, 2014. https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=HYrdMqrHi5k Mast, Emily. The Least Important Things. Los Angeles County Museum of Art, recorded from performances 27–29 March 2014. https://vimeo.com/104976892 Mast, Emily. This Line Is the Present. Barcelona, 8 November 2019. https://vimeo.com/525730434

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PartSuspended. Actions and Post-Theatre of Joan Brossa. Pinter Studio, Queen Mary University of London, 24 May 2018. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jnjg4smir48

Published Material Antonucci, Giovanni. Storia del teatro futurista. Rome: Edizioni Studium, 2005. Antonucci, Giovanni. ‘Il teatro futurista oggi’. Studium 66, no. 5 (May 1970): 425–34. Bartolucci, Giuseppe. Il ‘gesto’ futurista: materiali drammaturgici, 1968–1969. Rome: Mario Bulzoni, 1969. Benach, Joan-Anton. ‘Brossa, más allá de sus fronteras’. La Vanguardia, 22 September 2001, 48. Bentoglio, Alberto. ‘Futurism and Experimentation in Italian Theater in the Late Twentieth Century’. In Shades of Futurism/Futurismo in ombra: atti del convegno internazionale Princeton 9–10 ottobre 2009, edited by Pietro Frassica, 63–9. Novara: Interlinea edizioni, 2011. Berghaus, Günter. Futurism and Politics: Between Anarchist Rebellion and Fascist Reaction, 1909–1944. Providence: Berghahn, 1996. Berghaus, Günter. Italian Futurist Theatre: 1909–1944. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998. Berghaus, Günter. ‘On Taste and Other Senses: Synaesthesia in Renaissance and Avant-garde Performance’. Performance Research 23, nos. 4/5 (2018): 22–8. Berghaus, Günter. ‘The Postwar Reception of Futurism: Repression or Recuperation?’ In The History of Futurism: The Precursors, Protagonists, and Legacies, edited by Geert Buelens, Harald Hendrix and Monica Jansen, 377–403. Lanham: Lexington Books, 2012. Blumenkranz, Noëmie. ‘Le Théâtre de Marinetti: la subversion de l’espace et du temps’. In Présence de F. T. Marinetti: actes du colloque international tenu à l’UNESCO, edited by Jean-Claude Marcadé, 93–109. Lausanne: L’Age d’Homme, 1982. Brossa, Joan. Prosa completa i textos esparsos. Edited by Glòria Bordons. Barcelona: RBA Libros, 2013. Brossa, Joan. Teatre complet: I: Poesia escènica 1945–1954. Barcelona: Edicions 62, 1973. Brossa, Joan. Teatre complet: III: Poesia escènica 1958–1962. Barcelona: Edicions 62, 1978. Brossa, Joan. Teatre complet: VI: Poesia escènica 1966–1978. Barcelona: Edicions 62, 1983. Buchowska, Dominika and Steven L. Wright. ‘The Futurist Invasion of Great Britain, 1910–1914’. International Yearbook of Futurist Studies 2, no. 1 (2012): 201–25. Bürger, Peter. Theorie der Avantgarde. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1974. Bürger, Peter. Theory of the Avant-Garde. Translated by Michael Shaw. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984. Cangiullo, Francesco. Non c’è un cane. In Marinetti e i futuristi, edited by Luciano De Maria, with Laura Dondi, 535. Milan: Garzanti, 1994. Cangiullo, Francesco. Le serate futuriste; romanzo storico vissuto. Naples: Tirrena, 1930. Cary, Joseph. ‘Futurism and the French Théâtre d’Avant-Garde’. Modern Philology 57, no. 2 (1959): 113–21. Chesire, David F. ‘Futurism, Marinetti and the Music Hall’. Theatre Quarterly 1, no. 3 (July–September 1971): 54–8. Coca, Jordi. Joan Brossa o el pedestal són les sabates. Barcelona: Editorial Pòrtic, 1971. Croxton, Arthur. Crowded Nights – and Days: An Unconventional Pageant. London: Sampson Low, Marston & Co. [1934]. Curtin, Adrian. ‘The Neo-Futurists(’) Take on Eugene O’Neill’s Strange Interlude’. In Contemporary Approaches to Adaptation in Theatre, edited by Kara Reilly, 251–73. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018. D’Ambrosio, Matteo. ‘Svegliatevi, studenti d’Italia!: il Futurismo e la gioventù’. In Luci e ombre del Futurismo: atti del Convegno internazionale LUSPIO (Libera Università degli

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Studi per l’Innovazione e le Organizzazioni): Roma 27–28 ottobre 2009, edited by Antonio Gasbarrini and Novella Novelli, 67–95. L’Aquila: Angelus Novus, 2010. David, Emilia. ‘Esibizioni artistiche e modelli teatrali dadaisti e futuristi. Esperienze performative a confronto’. Italianistica 47, no. 1 (2018): 175–92. Degenerate Fox. https://degeneratefox.co.uk/ (accessed 20 October 2021). Dezeuze, Anna, ed. The ‘Do-It-Yourself’ Artwork: Participation from Fluxus to New Media. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2010. Foiera, Manuela. ‘Italian Futurism on Stage: Synthetic Theatre in Translation’. In Drama Translation and Theatre Practice, edited by Sabine Coelsch-Foisner and Holger Klein, 307–23. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2004. Gan Quesada, Germán and Helena Martín Nieva. ‘“Peeping through the Theatre Curtain”: The Early Musical Actions of Joan Brossa and Josep M. Mestres Quadreny (1962–1966)’. In De fronteres i arts escèniques, edited by Núria Santamaria, 279–91. Lleida: Punctum, 2015. Goldberg, RoseLee. Performance Art: From Futurism to the Present. Rev. edn. London: Thames & Hudson, 1988. Gray, John. Action Art: A Bibliography of Artists’ Performances from Futurism to Fluxus and Beyond. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1993. Heim, Carole. Audience as Performer: The Changing Role of Theatre Audiences in the TwentyFirst Century. London: Routledge, 2016. Helterbrand, Ryan. ‘Ecstasies of War: Anti-Fascism in Italian Futurist Performance, 1909–1919’. Italica 92 (2015): 857–73. Johnston, Chloe and Coya Paz Brownrigg. Ensemble-Made Chicago: A Guide to Devised Theater. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2019. Kirby, Michael. Futurist Performance. Translations by Victoria Nes Kirby. 2nd edn. New York: PAJ Publications, 1986. Leach, Robert. Russian Futurist Theatre: Theory and Practice. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2018. Lista, Giovanni. ‘Nicolas Bataille: la scoperta del teatro futurista italiano’. Sipario 315–16 (August–September 1972): 30–1. London, John. Contextos de Joan Brossa: l’acció, la imatge i la paraula. Barcelona: Publicacions i Edicions de la Universitat de Barcelona, 2010. London, John. ‘In Barcelona’. Plays International 16, no. 9 (June–July 2001): 30–1. London, John. ‘In Berlin’. Plays International 11, no. 2 (September 1995): 24–5. London, John. Past Possibilities and Practice: For Joan Brossa. Oxford: The Trilobites, 1992. London, John. ‘The Theatrical Poetry of Joan Brossa’. In Joan Brossa: Words Are Things, edited by Susan Copping and Zoë Shearman, 20–3. London: Riverside Studios, 1992. London, John. ‘Translating Titles and Contents: Artistic Image and Theatrical Action’. In Translating across Sensory and Linguistic Borders: Intersemiotic Journeys between Media, edited by Madeleine Campbell and Ricarda Vidal, 125–45. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019. London, John, ed. One Hundred Years of Futurism: Aesthetics, Politics, and Performance. Bristol: Intellect, 2017. Londra, Giovanni [John London], ed. Futurismo in Israele. London: Theatre of the Page, 1998. Marinetti, F. T. Critical Writings. Edited by Günter Berghaus. Translated by Doug Thompson. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2006. Marinetti, F. T. The Futurist Cookbook. Edited by Lesley Chamberlain. Translated by Suzanne Brill. London: Trefoil Publications/San Francisco: Bedford Arts, 1989. Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso. Teatro. Edited by Jeffrey T. Schnapp. 2 vols. Milan: Arnoldo Mondadori, 2004. Marinetti, F. T., Emilio Settimelli and Bruna Corra [eds]. Il teatro futurista sintetico. Piacenza: Ghelfi Costantino, 1921. Marrugat, Jordi. ‘El saltamartí’ de Joan Brossa: les mil cares del poeta. Tarragona: Arola, 2009.

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Mellinas, Héctor. ‘Humor i absurd: escenes brossianes’. In Acting Funny on the Catalan Stage: el teatre còmic en català (1900–2016), edited by John London and Gabriel Sansano, 101–14. Oxford: Peter Lang, 2022. Nicholson, Helen, Nadine Holdsworth and Jane Milling. The Ecologies of Amateur Theatre. Corr. edn. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019. Oleaque, Joan M. ‘Creativitat per a dies d’incertesa’. El Temps, 13 May 1996, 78–9. Planas, Eduard. ‘Les representacions de la Poesia escènica de Joan Brossa entre el 1947 i el 1959’. Caplletra 14 (Spring 1993): 87–101. Pons, Agustí. ‘Entrevista: Joan Brossa: “La vanguardia no existe; sólo existe la retaguardia”’. Destino 2151 (28 December–3 January 1978–79): 26–7. Potter, Janet. ‘Too Much Light at 25: An Oral History’. Chicago Reader, 16 December 2013. https://www.chicagoreader.com/chicago/neofuturists-tml-twenty-five-years-history-anniversary/ Content?oid=11871597 (accessed 3 March 2019). Reza, Matthew. ‘The Futurist Synthetic Theatre 2015’. Review of Serata Futurista, Burton Taylor Studio, Oxford, 10–14 March 2015, The Oxonian Review, 12 March 2015. https://www. oxonianreview.org/wp/the-futurist-synthetic-theatre-2015/print/ (accessed 7 July 2019). Rosenfeld, Sybil. Temples of Thespis: Some Private Theatres and Theatricals in England and Wales, 1700–1820. London: Society of Theatre Research, 1978. ‘Spectacle Dada-Futuriste’. Cahiers Dada Surréalisme 2 (1968): 258. Stoesser, Paul J., ed. Futurist Dramaturgy and Performance. Ottawa: Legas, 2011. Suvin, Darko. ‘Reflections on Happenings’. TDR: The Drama Review 14, no. 3 (1970): 125–44. Valoroso, Antonella. ‘Futurist Theater: Theories, Experiments, Legacy’. In Futurismo: Impact and Legacy, edited by Giuseppe Gazzola, 158–75. Stony Brook: Forum Italicum, 2011. Van Dijck, Cedric. ‘Marinetti at the University of Cambridge’. Notes and Queries 65 (2018): 408–11. Vilà i Folch, Joaquím. ‘Quiriquibú de Joan Brossa’. Serra d’Or 198 (15 March 1976): 57–9. Walsh, Michael J. K. Hanging a Rebel: The Life of C. R. W. Nevinson. Cambridge: Lutterworth Press, 2008. White, John J. ‘London’. In Futurism: A Microhistory, edited by Sascha Bru, Luca Somigli and Bart Van den Bossche, 59–68. Cambridge: Legenda, 2017.

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11 Marguerite Duras’s Theatre and the Boundaries of Modernism Lib Taylor

Introduction

T

he work of Marguerite Duras is on the boundary between modernism and postmodernism, as this chapter will show through the analysis of performances of her work that were created within a postdramatic context.1 The destabilisation of gender identity in her plays resonates with contemporary concerns about gender identity and intersectional politics. My own theatre practice-as-research has centred on these issues since I directed (with Mike Stevenson) Simone Benmussa’s The Singular Life of Albert Nobbs in 1990, a play whose female protagonist ‘passes’ as a man.2 More recently, I have made performances (devised or developed from texts) that explore gender and the body, identity and subjectivity, through experimental uses of theatre space, sound and voice, often incorporating multimedia technologies. In this chapter my approach to Duras’s work is to see her as an example of a modernist woman writer (another example being Gertrude Stein3) whose theatre work is challenging to realise. The theatre forms that she developed from a context of high modernism are sites for exploring the performativity of gender, the destabilisation of identities, and the blurred boundaries between self and world, present and past, living and dead. Duras’s intermedial performance forms counterpoint live action with mediated sound, particularly recorded voice and music. The plays anticipate and explore contemporary questions of remediation, intermediality and the destabilisation of identities. They point forward to contemporary performance practices which have emerged in the light of postmodernist and postdramatic theatre. In the second half of the twentieth century Duras was a prolific writer, producing novels and essays, short stories and film scripts, as well as theatre plays. The critical reception of her work was primarily via the study of the writers of the Nouveau Roman,4 who were pushing at the boundaries of the literary conventions of character, narrative and action. They rejected story and character as the focus of narrative, unities of time and place, and structural conventions of beginning, middle and end. They focused instead on writing as an activity of meaning-production, with significance erupting in the moment of its creation or reception.5 Their works are characterised by disruption and fragmentation, ambiguity and reflexivity. In common with her contemporary Alain Robbe-Grillet, Duras was also in the French Nouvelle Vague cinema movement, both as a script writer and also as a director of her own films such as Hiroshima Mon Amour (1969).6 Prominence in the literary and cinematic fields

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brought her considerable recognition in French culture. Her novel L’amant (1984) was translated into forty-three languages and made into a popular film, The Lover (Jean-Jacques Annaud, 1992), but her theatre work made less impact in the Englishspeaking world, where, surprisingly, it has rarely been produced, despite her European eminence. The dominant theatre forms, whether of Broadway or the West End, had no place for Duras’s modernism. However, the formal experimentation of Duras’s work, her interest in gender and identity, and the significance of scenography and multimedia experimentation inherent in her staging are each emblematic of the ways that British as well as European theatre would develop in the twenty-first century. Like that of Samuel Beckett,7 her theatre work anticipates the radical formal shifts made by postdramatic theatre whereby sound and projected imagery become principal aesthetic and representational forms. In this regard, Duras’s work feels contemporary because it is almost always intermedial, especially in its ‘cinematic’ capacity to interweave image and sound in mutually supporting ways or for image and sound to diverge and work contrapuntally. Similarly, recorded voices and live bodies on stage may express different identities and belong to different spaces and times. I will look at three plays, India Song (1976), Eden Cinema (1977) and Savannah Bay (1982), which draw on antecedent modernist techniques.8 I will focus particularly on them as performances, rather than literary texts, to analyse how they open up spaces for the developments now associated with the postdramatic. Moreover, I argue that the overlapping concerns with gender, environment and colonialism in Duras’s work are rich resources for contemporary performances to explore intersectionality. The term was first coined only in 1989, and its extension beyond questions of race and gender to broader intersections of oppression and inequality is yet more recent.9 But, in my view, the challenges of performing Duras’s texts lead ineluctably towards this intersectional thinking. I saw India Song in 1993, just three years before Duras died, at Theatr Clwyd in North Wales.10 This was not my first encounter with the performance of a Duras play, but it was very significant for its insightful approach to the performance. In particular, the directors Annie Castledine and Annabel Arden’s integration of Iona McLeish’s design with sound and stage images brought out the complexity of Duras’s text. In the light of my experience of India Song and research on Duras’s plays, I decided to explore her work further via performance as practice-as-research. First, I worked on Eden Cinema in 2005, with a small group of young performers, and later, in 2007, I worked on Savannah Bay, with two professional actresses.11 My interest was in the negotiation of space and scenic design, the mediation of narration and voice-over, the exploration of gender identity and the female body, and the effects achievable through intermedial strategies on stage.

Duras’s Biography and its Relationship to Authorship One thread which promises to hold together the three plays discussed in this chapter is their relationship to the biography of Duras herself. However, while each of the plays, like her novels, returns repeatedly to incidents that seem to derive from Duras’s biography, this does not provide the central key to the interpretation of her work. It is never

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clear whether the characters and events on stage can be anchored by biographical facts, dates and historical events, nor can the places in which the action supposedly occurs be fully identified or located. In each play, there is also a continual blurring between memory and embodied experience, between past and present, and between fiction and actuality, so that the plays can be regarded less as a means to present or work over psychological turning points or historical political situations than as dreamlike combinations of fragmentary visions, musical evocations and inherited verbal phrases. Furthermore, characters, locations and events are continually rewritten across Duras’s work, so that a person introduced in one fiction may reappear in another, albeit in a minor role and as part of a reworking of events. Duras’s theatre has a splintered and disjointed form that seems deliberately to evade the notion of coherence and instead foregrounds the incompleteness or absence of what is being embodied for the audience. In these respects, Duras’s plays are reflexive and deconstructive, always aware of their own theatricality and the ways in which representation, identity and expression are deferred as soon as they are attempted. Some critical work has even described her drama as unperformable.12 Born in 1914, Duras grew up in French Indochina in the 1920s and 1930s.13 Both of her parents were teachers, middle-class colonialists but also relatively impoverished. Her father died when she was seven years old, but her mother remained in the colony and worked hard to keep the family going. The relationship of mother and daughter and the struggle to survive in Indochina are recurrent in Duras’s plays and in her prose and film screenwriting. But the versions of the story are significantly different, and the events are incomplete and continually reinvented. After her death in 1996, her biographer, Laure Adler, found a handwritten note on a small piece of paper in her archive which read: I say nothing to no one. Nothing about what goes through my life, the anger, the wild movements of my body towards that dark, hidden word pleasure. I am modesty, I am silence itself. I say nothing. I expressed nothing. About what is important, nothing. It is there, unnamed, untouched.14 Modernism is associated with the urban, and the great cities of Western Europe such as Paris, London and Berlin are referenced in the plays.15 But Duras’s writing about the colonial situation of her childhood in French Indochina also matches closely the preoccupations with authorship and authenticity that were being explored by her European modernist peers. There is a sense that the work is tied closely to the impressions, experiences and distinctive style of its author. The writing attempts to render her specific sensory experiences, desires and anxieties, while always failing to arrive at a valid or satisfactory representation. Language escapes the author, and experience escapes language. Duras’s repeated returns to the sights, smells and sounds of her earlier life ground her work in place, time and personal experience, but the repetition and deferral of these repeated motifs undercut their ability to connect her writing to any secure foundation. Her work is paradigmatic of postcolonial and postmodern re-examinations of the encounter with the other, and the encounter with the self in the guise of an other, where displacement and marginality become literary techniques that offer intense political and artistic reflection on personal experience.16

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Duras, Modernism and Contemporary Performance Duras’s approach to the materiality of theatre space is a key aspect of her experimental modernist practice and points forward to the concerns of contemporary performance. Her theatre space is never fixed or circumscribed, and this is a challenge for any director of her work. It shifts in a filmic way, without formal scenic changes, from representing the specific, for example, the inside of The Mother’s house in Eden Cinema, to an imagined location looking across a coastal landscape; from the material space of a hotel to a space of reverie in which one of the characters offers a metadiscursive reflection on the remembered past. Space does not necessarily make geographic or theatrical sense, as Duras says of India Song: The names of Indian towns, rivers, states and seas are used here primarily in a musical sense. All references to physical, human or political geography are incorrect: You can’t drive from Calcutta to the estuary of the Ganges in an afternoon. Nor to Nepal. The Prince of Wales hotel is not on an island in the Delta, but in Colombo.17 Space expands and contracts, shifts and is recontextualised by other elements of the performance. In addition to the visible scenographic elements, sound, voice and music construct theatre space and its affects. Duras writes her stage directions in ways that are both specific and also unhelpfully vague. Her language is instructive but poetic. Indeed, theatrical space is not just a backdrop for the action but a kind of essential matrix which bodies forth the drama. This is further complicated by the fact that in all three of the plays discussed here, the central characters are either dead or on the fringes of death. They are ghosts conjured up for the audience to see and thus entirely the product of the theatre illusion itself. The central figures around whom the action revolves in both India Song and Eden Cinema are dead, Anne-Marie Stetter in the former and The Mother in the latter. Madeleine, the elderly woman in Savannah Bay, is about to die, and her daughter, Savannah, who drowned years earlier, haunts the action via memories, sounds and the appearance of the unnamed Young Woman who triggers the recollections and reminiscences that comprise the play. In each of the works, Duras’s texts specify very little physical movement, and actors are required to linger statically on stage rather than to inhabit and own their space. In each play, the protagonists sit, stand or lie on stage, whether languidly resting in a colonial mansion, waiting for death in a humid farmstead, or as revenants temporarily haunting the space. Rather than embodying living, psychological characters, the performance style needs to show the characters’ barely present, uncertain status. All the activity and emotional tone are conveyed primarily by voice and music, slow-paced, meditative and often delivered from offstage rather than by the bodies that the audience can see. This collage of voices and music, moreover, also includes words and sounds that belong to the dead, to the past and to dreams. The staging of Duras’s work cannot be approached in conventionally expressive ways and requires forms of performance and scenography that can dissolve from the real and vital into the insubstantial and imagined. Performance aesthetics intended to express dreamlike, abstract or fantastical states were not new, but Duras brought a specifically gendered approach to such

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experimentation in theatre because of her own experimental prose writing and her interests in gender identities. Duras has much in common with modernist novelists developing stream-of-consciousness techniques, such as Virginia Woolf or Gertrude Stein. They too focus on sensation and the fusion of female characters’ present with memories of the past, as in the highly gendered mode of writing developed for Molly Bloom’s monologue at the end of James Joyce’s Ulysses.18 To address these concerns in theatre is a particularly challenging form of artistic experimentation, because of theatre’s necessary materiality as a performed, embodied event. It has been such issues that have been explored in postdramatic, phenomenological theatre which focuses on experience, sensation and affect rather than narrative, logic and materiality. Dramatists of the early twentieth century such as Piscator and Brecht had begun to experiment with intermediality – to create in one medium the aesthetic conventions of seeing and hearing in another.19 Intermediality is central to Duras’s theatre technique, especially in its use of sound, linking her back to those antecedents and also making her work adaptable to the intermedial and multimedia forms that are common in contemporary performance culture.

India Song Initially, India Song was commissioned by Peter Hall for the National Theatre in London but it was not staged in the UK until the 1993 Theatr Clwyd production nearly twenty years later. In 1975, however, Duras directed India Song as a French film, using a screenplay that was almost identical to the play script. By 1993, the play had perhaps become a more attractive project as both female directors and audiences were interested in feminist aesthetics and the forms of theatre towards which those aesthetics could lead. India Song is a collage of fragmented and incomplete stories which prompt the appearance on stage of the figure of Anne-Marie Stretter, the wife of the French Ambassador in Calcutta. We are told that Stretter is dead, conjured for the performance through the only partial memories of her enthralled followers and lovers. The stories about her are told by Voices which the audience hear but do not see; nobody is seen to speak on stage. The action is carried out against a through-composed ‘soundtrack’ of these indeterminate voices which struggle to recall Stretter through a set of imprecise, fragmented dialogues, interwoven into a sound world of music, Calcutta street sounds and intermittent rain, wind and birdsong. The filmic term ‘soundtrack’ is appropriate for this integrated approach to sound across the whole performance. The play begins in the Ambassador’s residence in French colonial pre-war India. The text states: A house in India. Huge. A ‘white people’s’ house. Divans. Armchairs. Furniture of the period of India Song. A ceiling fan is working but at nightmare slowness. Net screens over the windows. Beyond, the paths of a large tropical garden. Oleanders. Palm trees. Complete stillness. No wind outside. Inside, dense shadow. Is it the evening? We don’t know. Space. Gilt. A piano.20 Duras’s description of the setting evokes the lavish residence with its exotic gardens but does not conventionally define a stage set. Iona McLeish’s design for the 1993 performance (Figure 11.1) draws on the detail of Duras’s description and includes

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Figure 11.1  India Song at Theatr Clwyd, designed by Iona McLeish, 1993 (photograph by Iona McLeish).

colonial-style decor, a piano and net screens, but space beyond that is only implied or hinted at through colour and vague, shadowy shapes. A covering of dust, low lighting, the nightmarishly slow fan and slow voices suggest a place drained of vitality, particularly at the beginning of the performance when characters are still and hardly visible. A bicycle stands against some steps at the back of the stage where the room begins to mutate into the garden. Behind the net screens is a set of framed mirrors, which reflect characters on the stage as fragmented, disintegrating or split. The space must be flexible as the play shifts between narratives, temporalities and locations, none of which are precisely drawn but are instead suggested by the poetic language and the soundscape. Just as the geography is a collection of exotic names and places, so the stories told about Stretter come from a collection of Duras’s own writings.21 A set of mutable narratives are reformed and reshaped for the play; for example, Duras’s novellas Le ravissement de Lol V. Stein, Le vice-consul and La femme du Gange permeate India Song, distorting events, histories and relationships which have appeared in them. Just as the text is destabilised by its encounter with other fictions, so Stretter is the product of the displaced desires, perceptions and autobiographies of the Voices who project onto her history, weaving their own memories in an attempt to capture her fragmented identity. Carlos D’Alessio created a blues piano piece for India Song, initially for the film; subsequently it was used on stage at Theatr Clwyd. This piece of music, alongside 1930s popular dance music ‘Heure Exquise’ and excerpts from Beethoven’s 14th Variation on a Theme by Diabelli, comprise the musical elements of the soundscape. The poetic stage instructions reflect the effect of the music on the opening of the play:

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A tune from between the two wars, India Song, is played slowly on the piano. It is played right through, to cover the time – always long – that it takes the audience, or the reader, to emerge from the ordinary world they are in when the performance, or the book, begins. India Song still. Still. And now it ends. Now it is repeated, farther away than the first time, as if it were being played elsewhere.22 The melodic and nostalgic ‘India Song’ gives a haunting flavour to the performance, linking to the way in which Stretter’s elegant but silent figure haunts the stage as other sounds criss-cross it. Duras’s choice to use the Diabelli Variations seems to be not only because of its nostalgic tone, but also because of the almost obsessive way that Beethoven produced thirty-three different versions of the simple Diabelli motif over a period of four years. This notion of returning repeatedly and reworking the source, never arriving at a definitive version, echoes Duras’s own compositional technique. The melodiousness of the music contrasts with the cries of the beggars and the poor of the Indian street setting, resulting in a sound design in which imperialism clashes against colonisation and poverty. The Savannakhet Beggar Woman is ostracised both by the French colonisers and by the indigenous Indians, and her cries and songs provide a third discordant element in the soundtrack, leaving an overall impression of anguish and loss. There is a skeletal story in India Song, in which the elegant Stretter is having a love affair with Michael Richardson, who first appears as a character in the novella Le ravissement de Lol V. Stein. The secret affair is played out through a series of glances, touches and dances at an ambassadorial reception and through the following morning until Stretter apparently dies by suicide in the sea. The social milieu around Stretter, the diplomatic ‘set’ including the Vice Consul of Lahore, the Young Attaché and the Voices, all desire her. Her agency is restricted to manipulation of the men who seek to possess her, and as a desired yet elusive object she represents the colonial territory that the Europeans are attempting, ultimately without success, to master and comprehend. The Voices whisper as if intimately into the ears of the audience members, persuading them to notice and look for connections between voice, music, sound and body just as the desiring Voices seek to possess Stretter. Voice, authority and authenticity are destabilised by the collage of sound and voice, the fragmentation of the barely discernible narrative supposedly underpinning the piece and the play’s dissociation of image from sound. For the spectators, in eschewing the conventions of theatre and using a voice-over more commonly found in cinema, an active engagement in assembling the fragments of sound, music and visible evidence turns the audience into what Roland Barthes calls ‘operators’, assembling and composing the audio-visual score.23 In the Toneelgroep Amsterdam performance of the play at the Edinburgh Festival in 1999, the elements of sound, music and bodily performance were more radically separated.24 A group of musicians on stage was visible, and voice-over was relayed through loudspeakers attached to the blades of a very large rotating metal armature, turning above the stage. Its slow movement was reminiscent of the ceiling fans used in South-East Asian households, and Duras’s stage instructions specified: ‘Nothing moves, nothing except the fan, which moves with nightmare “unreality”.’25 The dominant effect of the sound was all the more striking when the Toneelgroep staged the performance in the round in the Netherlands,26 with the fan rotating above the audience’s heads with the Voices moving in and out of focus as the fan turned.

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Performing Eden Cinema When I directed Eden Cinema in 2005, I was interested in working with the dissociative, reflexive and fragmented signifying elements that I have identified in Castledine/ Arden’s and the Toneelgroep’s performances. The play is one of the examples of Duras’s variations on her own life story, since her mother made money after her husband’s death by playing the piano at the local picture house, the Eden Cinema. Moreover, she purchased a concession of land near the sea to grow crops but the land was prone to flooding and had poor-quality soil. Duras used this scenario for her novel Un barrage contre la Pacifique (1950) and it is reshaped for Eden Cinema. Duras’s own mother continued as a teacher and became wealthy, eventually returning to France. She had supported her daughter’s education in Saigon and France. However, the play describes The Mother’s attempts to keep the sea from flooding her land and the effort of running the concession. She will do anything to find money to build walls against the floods, including prostituting her daughter by encouraging a local man, Mr Jo, to marry her. But even her attempts to sell the flawed diamonds given to her daughter by Mr Jo fail and, in the end, the struggle and exhaustion cause The Mother’s death. The stage directions describe the setting of the play as: The stage is a large empty space surrounding another, rectangular space. The rectangular space represents a bungalow, furnished with chairs and tables of a Colonial type. Very ordinary, very worn, very poverty-stricken furniture. The empty space around the bungalow is the plain of Kam, in upper Cambodia, between Siam and the sea. Behind the bungalow there should be an area of light, representing the road used by hunters, which runs alongside the mountains of Siam. It is a simple large decor, allowing the actors to move around freely and easily.27 This is a far more material description of the stage than for India Song, though it is no more logical or coherent. The domestic space abuts the geographical locations in a seemingly random way, and the setting covers an immense tract of land. As with India Song, geographic locality is inexact. The sea is at once right next to the family house, with an ever-present danger of flooding both the crops in the fields and the house itself, but also at thirty kilometres distance, on the coast of Cambodia. Filmic scenes depict characters moving along the road between the house and the town, from the house to the forest and into abstract areas from which the narrative is told. My performance of Eden Cinema took place in a small black-box studio, on a floor space with no proscenium and an audience in end-on seating. I followed the stage directions by dividing the set into rectangular areas, but they intersected rather than framed each other completely, to emphasise the fluidity and overlapping of spatial relationships in the play. The bungalow was represented by the inner rectangle and there were aspects of the detail of props that signified the colonial period representationally, as did costume. There was a platform across the back and on stage left that functioned as a veranda but was also separated from the main room and produced a marginal space where The Mother and the indigenous servant, The Corporal, sat on the edge of the bungalow, watching but saying nothing. The veranda could also be transformed by lighting into abstract spaces from where Suzanne, her daughter, and

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Joseph, her son, delivered some of their narration. The intersected rectangles were surrounded by space used as roads, forest land or the Plain of Kam. The impossible geography of Duras’s text was indicated by the interrelationship of the flexible spaces within the performance, with spatial environments compressed unreally together. The sea is the most significant element in the play. It propels the narrative as The Mother attempts to control it. She needs money to build walls to hold it back but flooding destroys the concession and her hopes for those around her, her children and the indigenous population that worked the land. The Reading performance had a consistent backdrop across the rear wall showing film of a calm but ever-present and dominant sea looming over the bungalow. The wooden house itself looked bleached, as if it had regularly been washed out by the seawater. At intervals, barely distinguishable photographic images of the characters came into visibility from this seascape and then merged back into invisibility. Everything was dominated by the sea. Near the start of the play, The Mother explains: ‘nothing would grow in the plain. The plain didn’t exist. It was part of the Pacific. It was salt water; a plain of salt water.’28 The projected mise-en-scène attempted to visually express the ways that the sea infused and overwhelmed all the action and the characters. While my performance was not intended to comment directly on environmental issues, the resources of Duras’s text led me to staging decisions that connected the performance to current interests in ecology. Lisa Woynarski, for example, explores how a strand of contemporary performance that she describes as ‘ecodramaturgy’ works on the interconnections of performance with ecological crises, and their interconnections with other forms of inequality.29 The staging of Eden Cinema linked together the collapse in relationships within and between family, environment and colonial rule.

Figure 11.2  Eden Cinema at Bulmershe Studio, University of Reading, directed and designed by Lib Taylor, 2005.

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The centre of the play is The Mother herself, an enigmatic ‘object’ that language tried and failed to encompass. As in India Song, she is dead at the start of the play, but she haunts the performance and the theatrical space not only because of the stories about her, told by Suzanne and Joseph, but because of her physical presence, which, though passive, has proprietary ownership of the space. In India Song the space is the colonised body of Anne-Marie Stretter and in Eden Cinema the space is the drained and depleted body of The Mother. Then they talk of THE MOTHER, her past, her life. Of the love she inspired. The MOTHER remains motionless in her chair, expressionless, as if turned to stone, distant, separate – as is the stage – from her own story.30 It is as if the manifestation of the silent, still Mother brings forth her son and daughter to tell stories about her as they move around her on stage. At the same time, they bring her to life as the object of their storytelling since she ‘never speaks directly about herself’.31 The whole performance space is a kind of matrix or maternal body, in which identities and stories can be conjured and brought to life. At the same time, the spatial layers and boundaries give a sense of distance and separation from the story, as the stage directions about The Mother suggest (Figure 11.3). This sense that The Mother on stage is both alive and dead, both present and absent, recalling a past while also having been summoned up from her grave to have her story told, is reinforced by the deliberate fragmentation of the means of narration.

Figure 11.3  Eden Cinema at Bulmershe Studio, University of Reading, directed and designed by Lib Taylor, 2005; the family with The Mother in the centre, Joseph and Suzanne at each side, and The Corporal.

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Stage dialogue comprises some live conversation between Suzanne, Joseph, Mr Jo and occasional exchanges with The Mother; The Corporal never speaks. The majority of the dialogue is Suzanne’s and Joseph’s narration. The onstage figures of Suzanne and Joseph speak directly to the audience but a second Suzanne, created by recordings of Suzanne’s voice, also carries out the functions of narration as if she is omnipotent and looking on from far away. The temporality of the speech was thus mixed and confused, and ambient sound such as the lapping of the sea and recorded music of the piano gave a further sense of dreamy ambivalence. A considerable amount of early rehearsal time was taken up in the creation of the preformulated orchestrated score which drove the pace and tone of the performance. Though this did not exactly function as a master text, the work of matching the sonic text of ambient sounds, music and particularly Suzanne’s voice against the live performances was essential to the subtle pacing of the overall performance. The sound text (and the sound technicians) became important elements of the overall performance and were integrated into it early in the process. The effect was to question the reliability of the embodied actors as the primary means of audience engagement, and instead to suggest that the almost motionless and silent Mother might be more significant than the active characters moving around her. The present scene on the stage appeared as a past or a recreation conjured into life from another time. Throughout, the forces of the environment, a powerful strand of the sound design, especially the impact of the sea on the concession and its inhabitants, enfolded and pressurised the lives of the humans attempting to survive within its encompassing power. In my performance of Eden Cinema, the physical environment is one of the ‘things’ that Woynarski argues ‘have the potential to create effects on the world at large and in relation to humans. They can question the underpinning logics of the binary divisions between human/nonhuman and nature/culture. [. . .] One way of thinking about ecodramaturgies is recognising how more-than-human matter performs.’32 In common with other kinds of modernist performance, such as those of the futurists, Russian constructivists or in expressionism, forces beyond those of the intentional human individual, or indeed of humanity itself, were brought from background to foreground, creating complex interactions between living and dead, human and nonhuman forces.33 In common with other modernist reworkings of tradition, in ancient dramatic traditions such as those of the Greeks, the interactions of individual human characters in Duras’s theatre are set against an epic struggle between forces operating beyond the human world, with a sense of the ineffable that transcends humans’ conscious ability to comprehend or control. The sense of displacement is echoed throughout the play, as the family live among the indigenous people of Indochina. The Mother is positioned both among the colonial workers of Indochina and as a French coloniser. Ultimately she dies, and her body is removed. Her son Joseph concludes the play by addressing the indigenous population and the audience: Joseph: We’ll take her body far away. She was not of your race. Even though she loved you, even though her hope was your hope and she mourned the children of the plain, she was not of your race. She was always a stranger in your country. [Pause] All of us were always strangers in your country.34

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Finally, in a very contemporary way, Duras invites the audience to see the intersectionality in the relationship between The Mother’s failed authority, the unproductive farming concession that she abandons, and the depleted, impoverished colonial territory of Cambodia.

Performing Savannah Bay The simpler spatial arrangement of Savannah Bay and its less complex soundscape have perhaps meant that it is performed more frequently than either of Duras’s other two plays. But in common with them, at its centre there is a main character around whom stories revolve; in fact, there are two of them, an elderly mother, Madeleine, and Savannah, her daughter, who is dead and who does not appear in the play, but whose presence is invoked by storytelling. Madeleine, a dying actress, and a young unnamed woman, who seems to appear to Madeleine from nowhere, discuss Savannah, Madeleine’s past and her memories. Savannah’s name connects her to the play’s location, on a plain in a distant colonial country, though as in other texts, its geographical position is uncertain. It is the place where Savannah drowned, with her lover and on the day after her daughter, Madeleine’s granddaughter, was born. As in the other plays, the stage space is a collage of different marginal spaces, and represents not only a landscape but also the imagined body of its central figure. The stage directions are: An almost empty stage. In the foreground a table, with six chairs and two benches, swathed in dust sheets. Bare floor. All this occupies only a tenth of the total stage area, but it is here that Savannah Bay will be enacted. Behind the foreground area and separate from it is a large set designed to suggest a vast empty landscape. A pair of curtains – wood painted to represent red velvet – are parted to reveal a central vista stretching as far as the back wall of the theatre. This central space is flanked first by a pair of huge bright yellow marble pillars rising right up to the roof, then by a lofty dark green double door flung open and resembling the door of a cathedral in the Po valley. Through the opening lies first a band of almost black light, then the sea. The sea, which reflects a changing light now cold, now scorching and now sombre, is framed, like the scroll of the Law. Thus, the setting of Savannah Bay is separate from the representation of Savannah Bay – uninhabitable by the women who are its protagonists; apart.35 The separation between foreground and background is more strongly marked than in Duras’s other plays and the space is more self-consciously theatrical, with its levels of distance receding towards the back of the stage. The setting also extends the embodiment of Savannah into the material physicality of the set. The distant view of an idealised seascape connects to the quixotic dead Savannah as it changes in colour and mood. This is the place where she drowned, the sea that consumed her. As in my performance of Eden Cinema, an image of the sea was projected across the majority of the back of the performance space. The sea in this production, however, was fastmoving, brightly lit and attractive, signifying joy, energy, physical activity and leisure. The screen on which the sea was projected was layered with a collaged and unevenly textured coloured fabric, making the projection of the waves even more mobile and

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otherworldly. This back image was framed by the painted curtains and pillars, representing a theatre’s proscenium arch. Savannah’s space was the vital, ever-moving sea but within the space of a theatre, a place for constructed stories and fabricated characters. Following the directions set out in Duras’s text, the mise-en-scène in my performance emphasised theatricality and extended this into the front of the space where instead of the table and six chairs, I suggested that the area where Savannah Bay was enacted was Madeleine’s dressing room at the back of the theatre, though at the front of the performance (Figure 11.4). This also suggested that the audience was positioned at the back of the theatre, looking towards a performance from behind it, in the space rarely seen by the audience. Duras defines the area for enactment as ‘only a tenth of the total stage area’36 but the black-box studio I worked in was too small for that. The separation of the performing area from the rest of the set was achieved by using the painted theatrical proscenium as described in Duras’s text, with scraps of curtain added to further divide the stage from the back of the performing area. The front of the performance space, near the audience, was covered in dust and dustsheets covered a table on which were placed old photographs and books. Each of these set elements indicated the neglect and abandonment that both mother and granddaughter felt after the loss of Savannah, as well as suggesting the past, memory and reverie.

Figure 11.4  Savannah Bay at Bulmershe Studio, University of Reading, directed and designed by Lib Taylor, 2007.

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Figure 11.5  Madeleine and the Young Woman in Savannah Bay at Bulmershe Studio, University of Reading, directed and designed by Lib Taylor, 2007. The second character in the play is a Young Woman who enters Madeleine’s physical room, out of the blue. She also connects with Madeleine’s psychic space as she prompts memories from Madeleine, the recall of Savannah, Savannah’s child, a younger Madeleine and her life as a traveller in the Far East and as an actress. The Young Woman has no name but she has intimate knowledge of Madeleine’s life and she might be a younger version of Madeleine herself, or maybe of Savannah, or even Savannah’s abandoned daughter (Figure 11.5). Perhaps she is all three, shifting from one to the other. I dressed her in the same colours as Madeleine and occasional movements matched or linked the performers to hint at the characters’ connection. She enters to the sound of Edith Piaf singing ‘Les Mots d’Amour’, and she assists Madeleine in joining in the song and talks about its significance. She draws out the story of Savannah and her drowning from Madeleine, and enables Madeleine to talk about her travels searching for Savannah while continuing with her acting career. At the end of the play, the Young Woman leaves: Young Woman: Starting to search again. Madeleine: Yes. Everywhere. In all the cities in the world that are beside the sea. Young Woman: Shanghai. Calcutta. Rangoon. [Pause] And other places. . . [Pause] Bombay. . . Paris – Prague. . . Bangkok. . . Djakarta. . . Singapore. . . Lahore. . . Biarritz. . . Sydney. . . Madeleine: Saigon. . . Dublin. . . Osaka. . . Colombo. . . Rio. . . [Pause] And who knows? [Pause] Who knows?37

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She takes over the search for Savannah from Madeleine as the old woman fades away and Schubert’s Piano Quintet in C, D 956 plays. Savannah Bay demands fewer recorded sound elements than Eden Cinema, though the Piaf song at the beginning and the Schubert quintet at the end are very important theatrical moments. However, like Eden Cinema and India Song, the play is about memory, death and the past encroaching on the present and future. Thus, it opens itself up to the same poetic strategies as the other two plays, including the use of music and sound which emanate from Madeleine’s unconscious memories. I developed the sound for the performance which was not through-composed but which interrupted the text with calls for the lost Savannah that echoed around the theatre; the sound of the sea was a background to some moments and the cry of the abandoned child became a signifier of the loss which pervades the play. At one moment in the play the text states: Silence. THE YOUNG WOMAN takes MADELEINE for a long stroll. First upstage, to the door on the sea, a sort of altar opening on the ocean, on the light. This light darkens or glows coldly incandescent according to the fierceness or gentleness with which the two women summon up the memory of the girl who died in the warm sea of Savannah Bay. Then the stroll brings them nearer, to the curtain and the pillars. The whole thing takes about four or five minutes. They do not speak. After looking out to sea they look at their surroundings, then stop and look at the auditorium, the audience. All the time they are walking about, the Piaf song is being played on the piano.38 The two actors and I worked on this text in several rehearsals but found this very difficult to integrate into the performance: four or five minutes seemed a long time to sustain this section in which nothing much happened. My solution was to create a collage soundtrack reminiscent of the sound used in performances of India Song and Eden Cinema. As in those plays, it comprised many elements that signified Madeleine’s life, including not only music but also vocal cries, the sound of the Young Woman humming, a crying child and theatre applause that connected with other moments in the text which recalled Madeleine’s profession as an actress. During the lengthy walk, as a way of indicating the otherworldly, dreamlike experience of this sequence, lighting changed the backdrop of the filmed projection of the sea to red, making the stage space feel dark, rich and reminiscent of the inside of a body. As with all the performances of Duras’s work, the aim was to find substantive ways of conveying the layered, fragmented, distanced and repeated ways in which memories and experiences were fused and seen through the different points of view of the characters and were made material by means of the stage space itself.

Duras and Contemporary Performance The greatest challenges in directing Duras’s work are in the realisation of space. It has to indicate uncertain, shifting locations and flexible spaces that expand and contract according to the theatrical demands, but also abstract spaces which embody emotion and psychological states. Physical action is not the driving force of the plays but the psyche of the central female characters and the manifestations of death are necessarily

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embodied and material, and the disciplines of scenography, costume and lighting need to work alongside sound, music and performance style to make the insubstantial substantial, and the substantial insubstantial. Present and past, partial memory and certainty, one place and another, need to intermix while also remaining sufficiently distinct to suggest the imagined world that the characters inhabit. To make the plays too abstract would have the effect of removing the important interwar colonial setting for the stories, and its intersectional relationship with issues of gender and race that the plays explicitly raise. Anne-Marie Stretter, The Mother and Madeleine are Western colonisers, but feel themselves to be close to the dispossessed colonised people around them. In India Song, the people of India are represented by brief onstage action, and by sound in the soundtrack. There is a further problematic relationship with place introduced by the Savannakhet Beggar Woman, who is marginalised by both the local Indian population and the European colonial characters but is allied with Stretter in her out-of-place-ness. In Eden Cinema, The Mother is always close to the silent onstage male servant known as The Corporal, who embodies this marginal but always present colonial context. In all three plays, inasmuch as they are women attempting to negotiate their place in a hierarchical and patriarchal system, the women who occupy the stage are themselves in a sense colonised by the colonial environments in which they exist. It is women around whom the stories revolve. However, the women at the centre of two of the plays remain silent or almost silent and are spoken about rather than speaking of themselves. In the third, Savannah Bay, the woman has to be reminded of herself via the stories that construct her. Their distance from the present of the performance is emphasised even further by the fact that they are dead, or almost dead, ghostly figures conjured by the words of others. The performance methodology most appropriate to the realisation of Duras’s stage work has much in common with the modernist practice of collage. Her texts explicitly remark on how dissimilar spaces abut physically with each other, so that the stage is crisscrossed by boundaries and areas of marginality. Similarly, Duras writes about the characteristics required in the through-composed soundscapes that her playtexts demand, in which voice, music and sound effects drawn from different places, times, races and cultures are counterposed. The fragmentary elements of story, like the fragments of historical and cultural context that appear in the plays, are also patched together in a collage manner. The story of the mother and her children struggling to survive on a concession in South-East Asia is reworked across Duras’s texts, with no one version being more evidently the master of the others. The fact that the plays’ storylines seem to derive in part from the facts of Duras’s life does little to provide security of meaning. Indeed, the fact that these stories are different from each other, incomplete and ambiguous makes her authorial stabilisation of them less rather than more effective. The modernist conventions of collage derived from the visual art practices of cubism, relating to the relativisation of point of view and the attention given to the picture plane and the material physicality of the art object itself, rather than considering representation as a transparent window that gives access to the real. This reflexivity about the realisation of the artwork is brilliantly implemented in Duras’s extension of these techniques to theatre. Despite their lack of story, character, physical movement or emotional arc, the works are extremely theatrical. The teasing references to the collage fragments of story and character enable the performances to raise questions about how space, time and identity might be understood in the

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context of performance, and indeed how these planes of experience are themselves performative. In the Reading performance of Savannah Bay, the painted background theatre proscenium denoted a former kind of theatre, the formal space of high naturalism and illusionism. I was keen to represent this as a derelict space, not unlike the imagery in the film Vanya on 42nd Street (Louis Malle, 1989), for example. Here, a group of actors rehearse Chekhov’s play Uncle Vanya in a dilapidated New York theatre, where the stage and the proscenium are falling down and the actors are surrounded by bricks, rubble and debris. The naturalist play, intended for a traditional box set, is represented in a space where the elements of nineteenth-century theatre are literally crumbling away. The disconnection between the play and theatre space was striking and Duras’s dissociation between reflexive modernism and nineteenthcentury theatre space could be expressed in the staging of Savannah Bay. Just as the colonial and obsolete figures of Anne-Marie Stretter, The Mother, Savannah and Madeleine are dead, so is theatre, or at least so is the theatre of the past. This motif was also used in Katie Mitchell and Alice Birch’s 2018 ‘cinematic’ and intertextual theatre adaptation of Duras’s 1982 novella La maladie de la mort.39 Contemporary performances of Duras’s work have centred on her strategies of continual remediation and intermediality. It may be that Duras’s work will be increasingly recognised for how it pushes at the boundaries of modernism and opens the way to the kinds of multimedia, postdramatic theatre that have been at the forefront of the performance arts of the early twenty-first century.

Notes   1. Hans-Thies Lehmann, Postdramatic Theatre, trans. Karen Jürs-Munby (London: Routledge, 2006).  2. The Singular Life of Albert Nobbs, by Simone Benmussa, directed by Lib Taylor and Mike Stevenson, University of Reading, 5 December 1990.  3. Counting Her Dresses and other plays, devised and directed by Lib Taylor from five plays by Gertrude Stein (For the Country Entirely (a play in letters), Counting Her Dresses (a play), I Like It to Be a Play (a play), Captain Walter Arnold (a play) and A Play Called Not and Now), University of Reading, 8 December 2010; see https://www.academia. edu/88580508/Counting_her_dresses_and_other_plays_a_research_performance_based_ on_the_plays_and_texts_on_theatre_of (accessed 26 October 2022).   4. Stephen Heath, The Nouveau Roman: A Study in the Practice of Writing (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1972).   5. Roland Barthes, Critical Essays, trans. Richard Howard (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1972).   6. Peter Graham and Ginette Vincendeau, eds, The French New Wave: Critical Landmarks, rev. edn (London: British Film Institute, 2009); James Monaco, The New Wave: Truffaut, Godard, Chabrol, Rohmer, Rivette (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977).   7. Gabrielle Cody, ‘End Worlds without Ends in Beckett and Duras’, Theater 29, no. 3 (1999): 85–95.   8. Subsequent references to the plays will be to Bray’s English translation. Marguerite Duras, Four Plays, trans. and ed. Barbara Bray (London: Oberon, 1992).   9. Kimberlé Crenshaw, ‘Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics’, The University of Chicago Legal Forum 140 (1989): 139–67.

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10. India Song, by Marguerite Duras, directed by Annie Castledine and Annabel Arden, Emlyn Williams Theatre, Theatr Clwyd, Mold, 3 September 1993. 11. Eden Cinema, by Marguerite Duras, directed by Lib Taylor, University of Reading, 30 November 2005; Savannah Bay, by Marguerite Duras, directed by Lib Taylor, University of Reading, 28 November 2007. 12. Lib Taylor, ‘Performed Disembodiment in Duras’s Fictional Spaces’, Body, Space, Technology 7, no. 1 (2007), http://doi.org/10.16995/bst.153. 13. Laure Adler, Marguerite Duras: A Life, trans. Anne-Marie Glasheen (Illinois: University of Chicago Press, 2000). 14. Ibid. 8. 15. Terry Eagleton, Exiles and Émigrés: Studies in Modern Literature (London: Chatto & Windus, 1970). 16. Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture, 2nd edn (London: Routledge, 2004). 17. Duras, Four Plays, 120. 18. Stephen Heath, ‘Ambiviolences: Notes for Reading Joyce’, in Post-Structuralist Joyce: Essays from the French, ed. Derek Attridge and Daniel Ferrer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 31–66. 19. Ágnes Pethő, ‘Intermediality in Film: A Historiography of Methodologies’, Film and Media Studies 2 (2010): 39–72. 20. Duras, Four Plays, 122. 21. Susan Cohen, Women and Discourse in the Fiction of Marguerite Duras (London: Macmillan, 1993); Leslie Hill, Marguerite Duras: Apocalyptic Desires (London: Routledge, 1993). 22. Duras, Four Plays, 122. 23. Roland Barthes, Image-Music-Text, trans. Stephen Heath (London: Fontana, 1977). 24. India Song, by Marguerite Duras, directed by Ivo van Hove, Het Zuidelijk Toneel, Kings Theatre, Edinburgh, 31 August 1999 (first performance in the UK). 25. Duras, Four Plays, 122–3. 26. India Song, by Marguerite Duras, directed by Ivo van Hove, Het Zuidelijk Toneel, coproduction with Holland Festival, Amsterdam, 1998–99. 27. Duras, Four Plays, 49. 28. Ibid. 51. 29. Lisa Woynarski, Ecodramaturgies: Theatre Performance and Climate Change (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2020). 30. Duras, Four Plays, 49. 31. Ibid. 49. 32. Woynarski, Ecodramaturgies, 71. 33. Marvin Carlson, The Haunted Stage: The Theatre as a Memory Machine (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2002). 34. Duras, Four Plays, 95. 35. Ibid. 98. 36. Ibid. 98. 37. Ibid. 117. 38. Ibid. 112. 39. La maladie de la mort, by Marguerite Duras, adapted by Alice Birch and directed by Katie Mitchell, Lyceum Theatre, Edinburgh, 16 August 2018.

Works Cited Adler, Laure. Marguerite Duras: A Life. Translated by Anne-Marie Glasheen. Illinois: University of Chicago Press, 2000.

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Barthes, Roland. Critical Essays. Translated by Richard Howard. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1972. Barthes Roland. Image-Music-Text. Translated by Stephen Heath. London: Fontana, 1977. Benmussa, Simone. The Singular Life of Albert Nobbs. Translated by Barbara Wright. Richmond: Alma, 1977. Bhabha, Homi. The Location of Culture. 2nd edn. London: Routledge, 2004. Carlson, Marvin. The Haunted Stage: The Theatre as a Memory Machine. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2002. Cody, Gabrielle. ‘End Worlds without Ends in Beckett and Duras’. Theater 29, no. 3 (1999): 85–95. Cohen, Susan. Women and Discourse in the Fiction of Marguerite Duras. London: Macmillan, 1993. Crenshaw, Kimberlé. ‘Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics’. The University of Chicago Legal Forum 140 (1989): 139–67. Duras, Marguerite. L’amant. Paris: Minuit, 1984. Duras, Marguerite. Un barrage contre la Pacifique. Paris: Gallimard, 1950. Duras, Marguerite. Four Plays. Translated and edited by Barbara Bray. London: Oberon, 1992. Duras, Marguerite. La maladie de la mort. Paris: Minuit, 1982. Duras, Marguerite. Le ravissement de Lol V. Stein. Paris: Gallimard, 1964. Duras, Marguerite. Le vice-consul. Paris: Gallimard, 1963. Eagleton, Terry. Exiles and Émigrés: Studies in Modern Literature. London: Chatto & Windus, 1970. Graham, Peter and Ginette Vincendeau, eds. The French New Wave: Critical Landmarks. Rev. edn. London: British Film Institute, 2009. Heath, Stephen. ‘Ambiviolences: Notes for Reading Joyce’. In Post-Structuralist Joyce: Essays from the French, edited by Derek Attridge and Daniel Ferrer, 31–66. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988. Heath, Stephen. The Nouveau Roman: A Study in the Practice of Writing. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1972. Hill, Leslie. Marguerite Duras: Apocalyptic Desires. London: Routledge, 1993. Jefferson, Ann. The Nouveau Roman and the Politics of Fiction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984. Lehmann, Hans-Thies. Postdramatic Theatre. Translated by Karen Jürs-Munby. London: Routledge, 2006. Monaco, James. The New Wave: Truffaut, Godard, Chabrol, Rohmer, Rivette. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977. Pethő, Ágnes. ‘Intermediality in Film: A Historiography of Methodologies’. Film and Media Studies 2 (2010): 39–72. Taylor, Lib. ‘Performed Disembodiment in Duras’s Fictional Spaces’. Body, Space, Technology 7, no. 1 (2007). http://doi.org/10.16995/bst.153. Woynarski, Lisa. Ecodramaturgies: Theatre Performance and Climate Change. Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2020.

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12 The (Dead) Centre Cannot Hold: Ontological Insecurity in Chekhov’s First Play Adrian Curtin

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idway through Chekhov’s First Play (2015) – a production by the theatre company Dead Centre, inspired by an early, untitled work of Anton Chekhov – a demolition ball suddenly appears and smashes through part of the naturalistic set, a country house interior.1 A spotlight picks out an audience member, who rises and joins the actors on stage. Modern-day street noises are heard through the audience’s headphones, followed by electronic music. A flame is set alight on the demolition ball and the actors perform a synchronised dance to the music. Now, when they speak, they lipsynch to a recording of their own voices. This juncture marks a shift from a relatively conventional presentation of Chekhov’s play, at least with respect to the use of text and the acting style, to something more unpredictable and mysterious.2 The actors no longer perform Chekhov’s play, but rather a text that is more obviously authored by Dead Centre.3 The world of the play is relocated from nineteenth-century Russia to twenty-first-century Dublin. The recruited audience member is made to represent the hitherto unseen, but much discussed, character of Platonov and given private instruction via (visible) headphones. The stage action takes on a dreamlike, surrealist quality, with inexplicable occurrences, such as a pregnancy dissolving into gushing water. The characters undergo existential crises and out-of-body experiences, their identities ultimately becoming void as the actors remove their costuming. It is all very odd, and, on the face of it, very different to what Chekhov wrote. I remember sitting in the audience at the Battersea Arts Centre in London in October 2018 and feeling giddy and discombobulated as I experienced the performance, particularly the second half. I was caught between trying to follow what was happening, trying to make sense of it all, and being swept up by the dynamism of the performance and its peculiar affective mix of liberation and gloom – a signature Chekhov cocktail, served here with a twist. Chekhov’s First Play could be regarded as a postmodern production, given its ironic deconstruction of Chekhov’s text and its playful collage of intertexts, including sources from popular culture (for example, Miley Cyrus’s hit single from 2013, ‘Wrecking Ball’, which closes the show) and unannounced quotations from modernist literature (specifically, lines from Samuel Beckett’s Texts for Nothing), but that is not the conceptual frame I will use in this analysis.4 I will focus on one of the play’s major dramatic elements, which comes to the fore once the demolition ball hits. In Chekhov’s First Play the characters begin to lose touch with themselves, to come undone on a

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psychological level, and to disconnect from the world around them. They become ontologically unfixed – self-declared ‘nobodies’. Psychologists and sociologists have a term for this: ‘ontological insecurity’.5 This phenomenon does not figure prominently in Chekhov’s play. It does, however, feature in modernist novels and drama and is something that modernity, as a lived experience, can instigate. In this chapter I will investigate the role of ontological insecurity in Chekhov’s First Play and examine the way in which it was made available to the audience as a vicarious experience. In doing so I will highlight connections between modernist concerns, thematic ideas articulated in Dead Centre’s text, and the historical context of post-Celtic Tiger Ireland. W. B. Yeats’s famous line ‘Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold’ (from his 1919 poem ‘The Second Coming’) acquired new valence in Ireland following the collapse of the ‘Celtic Tiger’ economy in 2008, when the country experienced an identity crisis as its financial security, thought to be ‘solid’, melted into air.6 In transporting Chekhov’s characters to this time and place and amplifying their psychological disquiet, Dead Centre demonstrates how modernist concerns such as ontological insecurity still resonate with theatre-makers and audience members, especially when presented in a contemporary fashion. They can continue to fascinate us and, on occasion, to plague our thoughts.

Ontological Insecurity The term ‘ontological insecurity’ derives from the work of the psychiatrist R. D. Laing, who writes about it in his well-known book The Divided Self: An Existential Study in Sanity and Madness, published in 1960. The term and its correlate, ‘ontological security’, have subsequently been taken up by scholars in psychology, sociology, literary studies, and in the field of international relations.7 Laing uses the term ‘ontological insecurity’ to refer to individuals who do not feel themselves to be psychologically ‘continuous’ or experience themselves as ‘whole’ or ‘real’. Such individuals do not have a firm sense of their own identity and reality or that of others; they live, therefore, without existential assurances. Laing states: The individual in the ordinary circumstances of living may feel more unreal than real; in a literal sense, more dead than alive; precariously differentiated from the rest of the world, so that his identity and autonomy are always in question. He may lack the experience of his own temporal continuity. He may not possess an overriding sense of personal consistency or cohesiveness. He may feel more insubstantial than substantial, and unable to assume that the stuff he is made of is genuine, good, valuable. And he may feel his self as partially divorced from his body.8 Individuals who experience ontological insecurity may be threatened by ordinary life, Laing notes, and by the prospects of losing their autonomy and identity, becoming de-personalised, and entering into a paradoxical state of non-being. Laing cautions that ontological security can give way to ontological insecurity quite easily and is something to which we are all vulnerable. ‘In fact, we are all only two or three degrees Fahrenheit from experiences of this order,’ he remarks. ‘Even a slight fever, and the whole world can begin to take on a persecutory, impinging aspect.’9

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Theorists writing in the late twentieth century, such as the sociologist Anthony Giddens, adopted the term ‘ontological insecurity’ to describe a state that people can experience by virtue of living in late modernity (that is, the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries). Giddens argues that it is impossible to feel fully secure, ontologically speaking, in late modernity, given the various risks and dangers to which we are susceptible, such as the ‘possibility of nuclear war, ecological calamity, uncontainable population explosion, the collapse of global economic exchange and other potential global catastrophes’.10 (Insert pandemics into this list.) These spectres become part of our mental background by default, resulting in existential anxiety becoming commonplace, even if it is not always acknowledged to the self or to others. Risk-induced anxiety is coupled with a sense of ‘being caught up in a universe of events we do not fully understand, and which seems in large part outside of our control’, leaving us with more questions than answers, especially if one is agnostic or has no religious or spiritual belief.11 Hence, it is the lot of people living in late modernity to have ‘[feelings] of ontological security and existential ambiguity [co-existing] in ambivalence’.12 Arguably, ontological insecurity is not something that can potentially only be experienced by people living in late modernity but earlier in modernity as well. After all, modernity has widely been understood to involve rapid and profoundly destabilising social, scientific and technological developments that can upend the status quo and alter the way in which one understands oneself and experiences the world. Ontological insecurity may not be unique to modernity, but it still links to it strongly, and not just from the late twentieth century onward. As Marshall Berman has pronounced: To be modern [. . .] is to experience personal and social life as a maelstrom, to find one’s world and oneself in perpetual disintegration and renewal, trouble and anguish, ambiguity and contradiction: to be part of a universe in which all that is solid melts into air. To be a modernist is to make oneself somehow at home in the maelstrom, to make its rhythms one’s own, to move within its currents in search of the forms of reality, of beauty, of freedom, of justice, that its fervid and perilous flow allows.13 This captures the modernity of the late nineteenth and early to mid twentieth century as well as that of the late twentieth century (and onward). Berman optimistically proposes that one can make oneself at home in modernity’s maelstrom if one grapples with its challenges and endeavours to integrate them into one’s life. Ontological insecurity can serve as one’s psychological foundation and creative impetus. Some modernist artists who were willing and able to make themselves ‘at home’ in the ‘maelstrom’ of modernity have proceeded in this fashion. Laing makes a passing reference to ‘how a number of writers and artists of our time’ have endeavoured to communicate what being alive is like in the absence of ontological security (‘Life, without feeling alive’); he mentions Francis Bacon and Samuel Beckett and quotes from Waiting for Godot (1953).14 Literary and theatre scholars have taken this further, examining how the concept of ontological insecurity offers a useful hermeneutic with which to analyse the work of modernists such as D. H. Lawrence, Virginia Woolf, Samuel Beckett, Marguerite Duras and Eugène Ionesco.15 This supports the thesis that ontological insecurity is not just a feature of late modernity but is a longer-standing modernist concern, articulated and expressed in a variety of fashions, prompting formal experimentation

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vis-à-vis language, character, structure, form, dramaturgy, staging and so forth. Woolf’s experimental novel The Waves (1931), which features multiple streams of consciousness, is exemplary in this regard. The following statement made by the character of Rhoda chimes with Laing’s account of an individual suffering from ontological insecurity, previously cited: One moment does not lead to another. [. . .] I am afraid of you all. I am afraid of the shock of sensation that leaps upon me, because I cannot deal with it as you do – I cannot make one moment merge in the next. To me they are all violent, all separate; and if I fall under the shock of the leap of the moment you will be on me, tearing me to pieces.16 Chekhov’s work is not associated with ontological insecurity, though aspects of his writing, such as his penchant for characterological ambiguity, narrative openendedness, semantic abstraction and indeterminacy of meaning (aspects that align his work with modernism), allow it to be cultivated, as Dead Centre has done with one of his plays.

Chekhov’s Platonov The jumping-off point for Dead Centre’s play is an early work by Chekhov, now best known as Platonov, after the play’s principal character. The text was first published in Russia in 1923, after Chekhov’s death (in 1904), and is estimated to have been written in the early 1880s.17 Chekhov had tried and failed to have the play performed at the time of its composition, but soon abandoned it. Following its publication, it has acquired a peculiar status in Chekhov’s oeuvre. On the one hand, it has been criticised for its length (taking at least five hours to perform), unwieldiness (there are twenty named characters), unevenness and incongruity of tone, contrariety of dramatic modes (including tragedy, farce and melodrama), repetitiousness, long-windedness, and its plotting. On the other hand, it has also been lauded for some of these features. For example, its chaotic mish-mash of styles has been thought to suit the reality of Russia in the 1880s, which, following the emancipation of serfs in 1861, was undergoing a period of social flux and economic transition; increasingly indebted landowners were facing dispossession and a class of newly wealthy businessmen and entrepreneurs was emerging.18 Platonov is an impoverished village schoolmaster and the cause of much of the play’s (melo)drama because of his philandering and his transfers of affection from one woman to another, despite the fact he is married. Platonov’s undecidedness is a standout element of his character. Porfiry Glagolyev, an old landowner, remarks that Platonov is emblematic of the age: GLAGOLYEV SR.: In my opinion, Platonov is an admirable representative of our modern uncertainty. [. . .] By uncertainty I mean the present condition of our society: the Russian novelist feels this uncertainty. He finds himself in a quandary, he is at a loss, doesn’t know what to concentrate on. [. . .] Everything is so uncertain, so unintelligible. . .Everything is so confused. Everything is in such a hopeless muddle.19

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Given the stylistic inconsistency of this play and its hotchpotch elements, one wonders whether Chekhov was being self-referential here. In any case, Platonov’s state of confusion and uncertainty matches the play itself. Platonov likens himself to Hamlet. ‘Hamlet was afraid of dreams. I’m afraid of – life.’20 He castigates himself for being a wastrel, for not taking positive action to improve society but only toying with the affection of others. ‘As the years roll by, I can see myself growing fat, dull, and completely indifferent to everything except the lusts of the flesh, and then – death. A life completely ruined!’21 He is not far wrong, though his end comes sooner than he imagines. In a state of self-declared disrepair (‘I’m afraid I’ve gone all to pieces’) and delirium, he contemplates killing himself but decides to live, only to be shot with his own gun by one of the women he has seduced.22 Platonov’s (self-)destruction may be thought to have social resonance. As Raymond Williams has observed about nineteenth-century realism, and specifically about Chekhov’s work: ‘[A] disintegrating society extends its process into individual lives. It is not something external [. . .] but is directly lived, in the fibres of body and mind. In a disintegrating society, individuals carry the disintegrating process in themselves.’23 The social flux and ‘modern uncertainty’ of post-emancipation Russia contributed to the uneasy constitution of Platonov’s character, whose self-doubt and ambivalence are only a few steps removed from ontological insecurity. Unperformed in Chekhov’s lifetime, Platonov was first produced in Germany in 1928.24 Despite, or perhaps because of, its eccentricity, the play has been produced and adapted many times since, the world over, and given diverse titles.25 In endeavouring to make the play more readily stageable and ‘palatable’ to audiences, practitioners often abridge the text and amend the plot. Dead Centre has done something different. Rather than trying to make Chekhov’s play neater, more coherent or more straightforward, Dead Centre has made a virtue of the play’s aesthetic quirks by foregrounding them, using them as prompts for philosophical enquiry.

From Platonov to Chekhov’s First Play Dead Centre was founded in 2012 by Ben Kidd and Bush Moukarzel and is based between Dublin and London. The company produces experimental, technologically innovative work that consciously engages with modernism. Indeed, four of Dead Centre’s productions have been built around modernists and their work, including this chapter’s case study. Souvenir (2012) was based on Marcel Proust and his novel Remembrance of Things Past (1913–27), and also included material from Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin and T. S. Eliot. (S)quark! (2013) explored the linguistic experimentation of James Joyce, and was inspired by Joyce’s pet parakeets. Beckett’s Room (2019) evoked the presence of Samuel Beckett and his partner Suzanne Déchevaux-Dumesnil in their Paris apartment during the Second World War. This production developed out of an interest in Beckett’s early play Eleutheria (1947) and explored the historical circumstances that preceded its creation. Moreover, Beckett’s Room and Chekhov’s First Play are part of an ongoing ‘first plays’ project. (‘You have to have a shtick,’ Kidd jokes.26) Moukarzel and Kidd have also expressed interest in doing something with Bertolt Brecht’s first full-length play, Baal (1923). Moukarzel elaborates:

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We feel a great kinship with all three [Platonov, Eleutheria and Baal]: because they are bad works, rejected works. We have a strange affinity with bad works. They are excessive, dramatically incorrect, precocious. Perfect works don’t need me, I’m not about to direct The Cherry Orchard. These are unfinished plays for unfinished people. The audience feels closer to them, because of their incompleteness. We are not going to correct them, there is no dramaturgical tidying, we do not correct their texture which is schizoid and fractured. The incompleteness is instead metaphysical, and joyous.27 Kidd and Moukarzel used Platonov’s ‘imperfections’ as creative inspiration for an examination of mimesis, failure, existentialism, personal identity, authenticity, mortality and meaninglessness. Platonov provides the basis for the first part of the production, in particular, but Chekhov’s First Play is not beholden to Chekhov’s text and notably departs from it. Chekhov’s First Play is as much about the act of staging Chekhov’s play as it is about the play itself. In a metatheatrical fashion it highlights the text’s ‘imperfections’ and staging challenges, making them a cause of laughter and philosophical speculation. Moukarzel, who co-directed the production with Kidd, performs in it as The Director (listed as a character in the play). He gives an onstage preamble before the curtain opens. Once the curtain rises and the play ‘properly’ begins, he exits, but continues speaking to the audience (each of whom wears an individual headphone set) from offstage: commenting on Chekhov’s text, picking out key themes, making critical observations about the performance, and outlining his artistic intentions. For the first half of the play, then, the audience is invited to experience the production from the perspective of The Director, who mediates it, sometimes talking over it, as actors and filmmakers do on commentary tracks provided in digital media recordings. The Director says the purpose of his live commentary is to ‘explain what’s going on, what [the play is] about, and why you should like it’.28 The Director’s efforts to elucidate the ‘meaning’ of Chekhov’s text and to make the audience grapple with the ‘big’ questions it raises become part of the drama of Chekhov’s First Play, and are rendered both comic and tragic, which is appropriate, given the generic mixture of many Chekhov plays.29 The Director expresses dissatisfaction with the performance, and specifically with the actors’ shortcomings, rendering Chekhov’s play inadvertently comic, on occasion. The actor playing Glagolyev forgets his lines at one point, prompting the other actors to skip ahead in the text; the actor playing Voinitsev moves when he shouldn’t and constantly mispronounces Platonov’s name; the actor playing Triletsky overplays a line in The Director’s estimation and is criticised for it. (These ‘errors’ are all scripted, as in the popular comedy The Play That Goes Wrong.30) The Director decries the quality of the performance, calling it a ‘local talent show’, and becomes increasingly despondent.31 ‘It’s just so far from what I imagined. . .’ he remarks, later musing: ‘It’s so. . .aimless. . .Who are these people? What are they for?. . .’32 The audience is told it is witnessing a bad performance of a faulty play, but one The Director had hoped to transform into something with artistic worth. ‘Bad’ (i.e. unpopular, transgressive) artistic behaviour and risk of aesthetic failure are characteristic features of modernist art,33 which connects The Director’s articulation of the production’s defects, as he sees them, to this tradition, as does the production’s metatheatricality, which recalls Luigi Pirandello’s Six Characters in Search of an Author (1921).34

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The Director’s disgruntlement with his actors and his dismay about the production not matching his artistic vision correspond with Chekhov’s unease with theatre early in his career. Laurence Senelick reports that ‘Chekhov [. . .] approached the theatre and playwriting with a deep distrust, a fear that the demands of the stage would coarsen or distort his carefully wrought perceptions’ and regarded most actors as ‘vulgarians, thoroughly steeped in vanity’; nonetheless, Chekhov’s attraction to theatre persisted.35 Suspicion about theatre in the form of anti-theatrical prejudice is long-lived; however, a tradition within modernist theatre was especially motivated by an anti-theatrical dynamic. Martin Puchner has shown how figures such as Beckett, Brecht and Yeats opposed Wagnerian theatricalism and the ‘unmediated type of mimesis’ engendered by ‘the troubling presence of the human actor on the stage’ by introducing enhanced diegesis (descriptive and narrative strategies) on the page and in performance.36 In Chekhov’s First Play, The Director’s persistent commentary during the first part of the production is an overt example of diegesis disrupting mimesis. It offers a parodic illustration of a modernist director-auteur or, more latterly, of Regietheater (director’s theatre). At one point, The Director glibly remarks: ‘This play’s getting in the way of me explaining it.’37 He subsequently talks over the actors, whose volume in the audio mix is lowered so that The Director’s voice can be clearly heard through the audience’s headphones. Although Moukarzel co-directed the production, he should not be confused with his dyspeptic and selfcentred alter ego. Nevertheless, Moukarzel has privately commented on how the creation of Chekhov’s First Play was born out of both a love and a hatred for theatre, with the latter acting as a creative catalyst.38 Dead Centre may therefore be regarded as working within the tradition of modernist anti-theatricality – productively resisting theatre (or a particular mode of theatre) in order to transfigure the art form and remake it anew.39 Intriguingly, Platonov is part of what Dead Centre creatively resists in this production. Once the previously mentioned demolition ball swings into action, Chekhov’s play no longer holds sway. As Dead Centre, Moukarzel and Kidd have been very successful at circumventing traditional forms of theatre and successfully bringing forth their artistic ideas. The Director in Chekhov’s First Play is not so lucky. His staging of Platonov is artistically unremarkable, if not passé. The production’s inadequacy and perhaps his own personal inadequacies, too, appear to trigger ontological insecurity and send him into a depressive spiral. ‘I just haven’t been feeling myself lately,’ he muses. ‘And by lately, I mean ever. . . I mean, I haven’t been feeling myself ever. . . I’ve never felt like myself. . .’40 Speaking these lines, The Director’s voice begins to warble; in the production it gradually pitch-shifted downward, electronically, evoking vocal alterity. In performance, The Director’s vocal morphing was part of a broader theatrical flux, as darkness descended on the stage, the actors were spot lit, and an ominous ambient sound built in volume, creating a feeling of mounting pressure. The stage directions note that the actors ‘become detached from their drama, not looking at each other, but out, beyond themselves’.41 Anna repeats lines she has spoken earlier: ‘Do we matter? I have a feeling we don’t anymore’ and articulates a sense that the house is about to fall down around their ears.42 There is a gunshot sound, implying The Director has shot himself. The demolition ball hits and after the dust has settled, the stage directions state that ‘[the] characters have all altered’.43 The presentational mode alters too. The Director drops out; an audience member joins the ensemble as Platonov; the

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fictional world of the play switches to twenty-first-century Dublin; and the characters fall apart, spectacularly and ecstatically.

‘We’re falling to pieces’: Character Breakdowns It is not entirely clear who the characters are in the second part of Chekhov’s First Play. This is fitting, as it swiftly becomes apparent that the characters do not know who they are anymore either. The previously mentioned character alteration, stated in the stage directions, does not extend to the character names, at least as they are presented in the playtext, although, confusingly, Sofya once addresses Voinitsev as ‘Dylan’ and not as Sergey Pavlovich.44 Dylan Tighe performed the role of Voinitsev in the first production. This was not an error on the part of the actor who played Sofya. Dylan’s name appears in the line of dialogue in question in the published playtext. There is some blurring, then, between actor and character after the switch is made from nineteenth-century Russia to twenty-first-century Dublin. The major theatrical device used in this part of the play is the audience member who joins the ensemble as Platonov. Before The Director breaks off his commentary, he moots the idea that an audience member, a ‘real person’, would have been a good choice for the character of Platonov. And lo, as if by magic, this person appears. The audience member, who is recruited just before each performance begins, does not have any dialogue as Platonov (except for one word at the very end) but they interact with the other performers and follow private instructions given to them by co-director Kidd through headphones. The other performers engage with this person as Platonov and do not acknowledge the fact that they have come from the audience, though Sasha, Platonov’s wife, detects that something is off. ‘Are you OK?’ she asks. ‘You’re acting funny. [. . .] Have you changed your hair? No, that’s not it. Have you changed your . . . face?’45 Platonov is a focal point for the ontologically ambiguous characters in Dead Centre’s production, just as he is for the characters in Chekhov’s play. The Director notes how the characters are obsessed with Platonov, even though ‘he’s actually a rather useless failure’.46 For example, Voinitsev, who is revealed to be an actor, is much taken with Platonov’s way of being-in-the-world. ‘I’m a terrible actor,’ he tells Platonov. ‘I never know what to do with my hands. But you – you always seem so alive, so in the moment, so present. You seem so natural. It’s like you don’t even know your lines. Pure instinct.’47 This is ironic, of course, because the audience member playing Platonov doesn’t speak for the most part, is being told what to do, and is following a script, even if they are largely performing as themself. (Yet, there is always the possibility that they might not follow the directions they are given, elaborate on them, or do their own thing entirely.) Platonov is performed by a real person, but the character is devoid of substance. There is ‘no there there’, to quote Gertrude Stein.48 Chekhov’s Platonov, an emblem of ‘modern uncertainty’, in the words of Glagolyev, is reimagined in Dead Centre’s production as a cipher-character performed by a non-actor (in the technical sense), whose integration into the performance generates ontological shock and a ‘trembling’ of reality – a contemporary version of the original, aesthetic provocation of Chekhov’s realism. Platonov’s arrival coincides with increased ontological insecurity in the other characters, as articulated in their dialogue, and mimetic disruption in the mode of presentation.

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The actors do not speak live once Platonov joins them on stage. Instead, as the stage directions state, ‘All dialogue is now pre-recorded. The performers lip-sync their lines. They are losing their voices as they are losing themselves. At once liberated and truncated.’49 The ontological authenticity, or integrity, of the audience member cast into the role of Platonov throws the artificiality of the other characters into relief. The characters enter into flux: partying with Platonov, they soon begin to unravel ontologically and materially. Platonov’s ‘real-ness’ destabilises them. Anna removes her top, revealing scars left by a double mastectomy. ‘We’re falling to pieces. But we’ll rebuild ourselves,’ she says, prompting a sarcastic retort from Triletsky, whose beard subsequently falls off.50 Glagolyev, while speaking with Platonov, has a stroke and ‘falls out of himself’.51 In performance, the other actors extracted him from a body-suit of clothing, which they lifted away, leaving the actor playing Glagolyev in his underwear. Post-stroke, Glagolyev is no longer Glagolyev, but ‘nobody’. He introduces himself as such to Platonov. ‘Thank you, Platonov. I know that’s not your name. You’re nobody. I’m nobody too. Pleased to meet you.’52 Glagolyev is pleased to have fallen out of himself and to have become ‘nobody’. Formerly, it appears he had been a property developer, of which there were many during the ‘boom’ years of Ireland’s ‘Celtic Tiger’. GLAGOLYEV: It feels good not to have to drag that around. [. . .] I would’ve bought this house, if the banks had given me the money. I’d have turned it into apartments. And I would have paid them back, given time. Thank God they didn’t. I can’t imagine owning anything. Not now.53 The line about not being able to imagine owning anything becomes a refrain spoken by the other characters too. They experience an epiphany about themselves – a ‘moment of being’, to use Virginia Woolf’s phrase – except for them it is more like a moment of ‘unbeing’ as it leads to them all becoming self-declared ‘nobodies’, shorn of material possessions, capitalist ideology, social bonds and personal identity.54 Sofya, for example, having removed her skirt, tells Platonov that he has given her a ‘new lease of life’, saying: ‘I hate my marriage and capitalism and my student loan and how the modern consumer society separates us from ourselves.’55 If the characters previously were unknowingly separated from themselves due to social institutions and the socioeconomic forces of modern society, they now break from their former entanglements, opting out of everything. Entering into ontological drift, the characters resemble Chekhov’s Platonov, representative of ‘modern uncertainty’ and aimlessness. The character of Platonov was shaped by the social unrest of 1880s Russia, as previously outlined. The emancipation of the serfs and the coming of capitalism frayed social bonds and gave rise to disaffection, especially among the educated classes. In his commentary on Chekhov’s play, The Director observes that Platonov is ‘the embodiment of a generation who were over-educated, but useless, unnecessary. “The Superfluous Man” is what the Russians called this type.’56 Unlike Chekhov’s Platonov, however, the characters in Dead Centre’s production are content to become superfluous and existentially free-floating entities; indeed, they are desirous of this state. They have apparently been so frazzled by their late-capitalist society that they are happy to let everything go, including their debts and personal identities. Moukarzel, in an interview, proposes a through-line from the ‘superfluous man’ of Chekhov’s play to the indebted subject of late capitalism, noting

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how indebtedness determines behaviour and is steered by hegemonic social control and guilt.57 Partying with Platonov, the characters in Chekhov’s First Play come to realise how inauthentic and unfulfilling their lives were before – tied down and indebted, blinkered by ideology, and driven by materialist consumerism. ‘When we leave, we’ll be free,’ Sofya says to Platonov, adding: ‘And I don’t have to pay my student loan back if I’m not living in Ireland. Let’s go.’58 The characters’ epiphanies call to mind the national reckoning in Ireland, following the collapse of the ‘Celtic Tiger’ economy, that there had been ‘collective narcissism and acquisitive greed’ during the ‘boom’ years that had contributed to the financial crisis.59 Massive economic growth, latterly propelled by tax incentives for property investment, a host of ill-conceived construction projects, lack of financial regulation, and a credit ‘bubble’, proved unsustainable and resulted in the collapse of the property industry; negative equity amongst homeowners; bailout by the ‘troika’ of the European Union, the European Central Bank and the International Monetary Fund; and then a devastating programme of neoliberal austerity for years to come. The collapse of the ‘Celtic Tiger’ economy is referenced in Chekhov’s First Play, though the subject is not seriously discussed (unsurprising, given the party context). In the first part of the play, The Director notes that ‘the world’s supply of Viagra’ was produced in County Cork in the 1990s and then remarks: ‘It’s like the whole economy had a massive hard on that went floppy around 2008.’60 Later, during the party, Voinitsev drunkenly exclaims: ‘Down with business! Down with the Troika!’61 This flippancy does not disguise the profound sense of unease the characters articulate about their lives, however, which is linked to capitalism. The seemingly unstoppable economic growth of the ‘Celtic Tiger’ economy that ultimately led to financial ruin and misery is evoked in the idea of cancerous cells spreading uncontrollably and destroying the body from within (unease becoming disease). Triletsky tells Platonov that they are living in ‘the age of cancer. The age of unstoppable growth. It’s not just an illness, it’s us. It will take us all.’62 Anna’s double mastectomy scars, left exposed during the party, reinforce the point visually. Triletsky mocks the voice-overs that Voinitsev has done for banking adverts, including one for the Irish bank Permanent TSB. ‘I’ve got permanent TSB!! It’s terminal!’ jokes Triletsky, using gallows humour.63 Blood later pours from Triletsky’s mouth before he, too, joins with the others and becomes ‘nobody’. Capitalism is thus figured as a sickness from which the characters cannot recover, or from which they do not wish to recover, preferring instead to divest themselves of everything. In Chekhov’s play, the self-destructive Platonov ends up getting shot; in Chekhov’s First Play, the other characters, inspired by Platonov’s authenticity as a ‘real’ person, embrace ontological insecurity and become collective ‘nobodies’ – or, as the script designates them in one instance, ‘Everybody’, their voices having morphed together.64 Despite the characters’ apparent desire for self-erasure, their situation is bleak. They play Russian roulette whilst Voinitsev sings Nick Cave’s song ‘People Ain’t No Good’. The Director appears on stage, his head newly bandaged (suggesting he shot himself earlier), and announces that they have changed the ending of Chekhov’s play, reversing Platonov’s death. The Director takes Platonov’s place, articulating existential despair. ‘My soul is sluggish, stagnant. I’m tormented, without anything to believe in. I move through the human race like a shadow, and I don’t know who I am, what it is I want, why I’m alive.’65 Dead Centre has repurposed these lines from another early Chekhov

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play, Ivanov (first performed in 1887). They are uttered by the eponymous character before he shoots himself at the end of the play.66 The Director, too, shoots himself in the head, which is surprising, as he has just said: ‘I need to have courage. [. . .] I need to go on living.’67 However, the personal pronoun ‘I’, uttered by The Director here, appears to refer to Platonov. At the end of the play, the subject positions of The Director and Platonov are ostensibly switched. The Director: I need to stand up. Platonov stands up. I need to turn around. Platonov turns around. I need to take the microphone. Platonov takes the microphone.68 When The Director says ‘I need to go on living’, then, he is effectively speaking for Platonov. It is Platonov who needs to go on living. By extension, The Director is also referring to the audience, as Platonov is, effectively, their representative. In a roundabout way, then, audience members are being told they need to go on living, even if the characters have opted out of their lives. The play thus sends a mixed message about whether life is worth living. The play’s conclusion is both life-affirming and pessimistic, creating semantic ambiguity and cognitive dissonance.

‘IT WILL MELT YOUR MIND’: Experiencing the Performance Audiences were offered a powerful aesthetic experience with this production – bewildering and chaotic at times, irreverent, ironic, madcap and playful at others – and this experience had a subtle political charge (for instance, showing the psychological damage wrought by neoliberalism), even if it did not obviously ‘activate’ audiences or provide them with a clear ‘message’ or a plan of action for making social change. One of the striking features of the production was that the audience could vicariously experience something of the characters’ ontological insecurity, and not just by identifying with the characters. The dramaturgy and staging worked to destabilise the audience by being self-reflexive, dynamic, fluid and sensorially affecting, making one question what one was perceiving. This is a key aspect of Dead Centre’s aesthetic, as Karen Quigley observes: ‘Across their oeuvre, things keep shifting and changing – “the point”, our perspective, our priorities, our sympathies, the very air around us and our sense of what is real.’69 In Chekhov’s First Play the demolition ball marks a pivot point from the nineteenth century to the twenty-first century, from onstage naturalism to a melange of surrealism and contemporary ‘theatre of the real’ (provided by the audience member made to signify Platonov), but the altered dynamics are never explained.70 Ironically, the point at which The Director abandons his commentary is when it would prove most useful, but the audience is left without a guide for the second part of the play; they must make sense of its dream logic for themselves, or otherwise experience it without fully comprehending it. The result, at least for some audience members, was an intense and rewarding experience, as indicated by comments posted online. For example:

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• ‘IT WILL MELT YOUR MIND (in the best possible way)’71 • ‘My heart started beating in a way I normally associate with something else.’72 • ‘I CANT I JUST CANT!! @Dead_Centre you deconstructed me! Got in like a virus and ur still there gnawing away. What a experience! [sic] #ChekhovsFirstPlay [. . .] somehow sits in that strange in-between, in the world of the paradox. Broke everything revealed all. Deeply moving!73 • ‘The overall feel becomes, at least momentarily, that of a deranged drug addled music video, complete with wrecking balls, alcohol, drugs, and nudity.’74 The ‘mind melting’ experience Dead Centre made available to the audience was achieved by design and has aesthetic significance. The production’s sound design was instrumental in this regard. The fact that audience members were enclosed in headphones for the duration of the performance – wired headphones that block out ambient sound – meant they were better able to become ‘immersed’ in the performance, with no external acoustic distractions. The sound world of the performance was fascinating, but destabilising. Sound designer Jimmy Eadie has stated in an interview that there was ‘an attempt to confound the expectation of what you were seeing with what you were hearing’.75 This was especially evident in the second part of the performance when the actors all lip-synched their lines. This was odd to behold, especially as the actors were adept at lip-synching, so the illusion of audio-visual synchronism was often nearly complete, but the artificialness of the conjunction was nonetheless apparent. It defamiliarised the act of speaking on stage, lending a sense of unreality to the presentation, despite the ‘reality effect’ of having an audience member on stage as part of the ensemble. In a further link to modernism, this recalls Gertrude Stein’s observations about the unease she felt due to perceived audio-visual disjunction at the theatre: And now is the thing seen or the thing heard the thing that makes most of its impression upon you at the theatre, and does as the scene on the theatre proceeds does the hearing take the place of seeing as it does when anything real is happening or does the mixture get to be more mixed seeing and hearing as perhaps it does when anything really exciting is happening. [. . .] Does the thing heard replace the thing seen does it help or does it interfere with it. Does the thing seen replace the thing heard or does it help or does it interfere with it.76 Dead Centre enhanced what Stein perceived to be a basic phenomenological tension in theatre by presenting dialogue in a technologically mediated, filmic fashion, replacing live speech with a soundtrack. In Chekhov’s First Play the ‘thing seen’ and the ‘thing heard’ were artificially aligned through technological contrivance, a result of integrating recording and lip-synching. This contributed to a feeling of things being askew. When the fictional world of the play mysteriously shifted to contemporary Dublin, the sound design became much fuller and more present. (Hitherto, it had been quite spare.) Indeed, there was very little silence for the rest of the performance. The audience was immersed in a near-continuous stream of sound and music, in which the pre-recorded dialogue was mixed. Prominent use was made of electronic music, specifically a track from the German electronic group Moderat, which served as a grounding element or sonic ‘bed’.77 This six-minute-long instrumental track lent a laid-back, mildly hypnotic, techno

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vibe to the proceedings. It provided the musical basis for the actors’ choreography and also potentially entranced audience members with its unwavering, pulsating beat, looping arpeggios and repetitive harmonies. Listening to this music via headphones, audience members resembled attendees of a ‘silent disco’ or ‘silent rave’, except they were sitting in their chairs. Music of this sort can promote a trance state that can involve dissociative thought, hallucination, intense absorption, a feeling of being outside of one’s body, and a sense of oneness with other people.78 This is precisely the ontological state into which the characters are thrown once Platonov joins them and they become an amorphous collective (‘Everybody’), ecstatic in their own self-destruction. Additionally, the sound design featured components that sounded strange and were difficult to identify in the overall mix, such as a slowed-down extract from Miley Cyrus’s ‘Wrecking Ball’ song, NASA recordings of electromagnetic vibrations from space, choral music from Russian Orthodox masses, and binaural recordings made on the streets of Dublin.79 A potential, cumulative effect of the sound design was to put the audience into a vertiginous state of mind – pleasurable, but also somewhat overwhelming, like looking over a high precipice. In this way, audience members could acquire a heightened sense of the characters’ ontological insecurity. Their sense of time and space could become fuzzy, in keeping with the play’s fluid morph from nineteenth-century Russia to twenty-first-century Ireland, connoting the longue durée of modernity.

Conclusion This case study has revealed the subtle and overt ways in which contemporary theatremakers continue to be inspired by modernism. Playtexts are an obvious resource in this regard, and even when they are only partially restaged and radically altered, as in the example discussed in this chapter, they can still provide a fascinating link to the past. By including Chekhov’s name in the title of this play, Dead Centre highlights its engagement with a canonical figure in the history of modern drama, even if Platonov is an outlier in Chekhov’s oeuvre and the features of Chekhov’s writing associated with modernism are largely only nascent in it.80 The deeper connections between Chekhov’s First Play and modernism involve the play’s thematic content, specifically involving ontological insecurity, which featured prominently in the work of selected modernist writers and theatre artists who post-dated Chekhov (for example, Beckett). Dead Centre has taken up this theme by revisiting Chekhov’s text in the light of these modernists. Dead Centre’s play is infused with modernist ideas and aesthetics, as I have illustrated throughout this chapter, though it is also clearly connected to cutting-edge contemporary theatre practices. The play is an example of recent experimentation with ‘headphone theatre’, notably exemplified by Complicité’s The Encounter, which used a similar technical set-up to Chekhov’s First Play and premiered in the same year (2015).81 Additionally, the device of recruiting an audience member to participate in the performance resembles the use of ‘everyday experts’ (i.e. non-actors) in performance pieces devised by Rimini Protokoll, for example.82 In fusing modernist themes, ideas and aesthetics with contemporary approaches to theatre-making, Dead Centre demonstrates continuity between past and present. Theirs is a theatre that is consciously made after Chekhov, after Beckett, et al., which aims to continue their predecessors’ efforts to innovate artistically, to explore the complex dynamics of being

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human, and to allow audience members to feel (more) at home, potentially, in modernity’s maelstrom, with its ongoing ontological shocks.

Notes  1. Chekhov’s First Play premiered at the Samuel Beckett Centre, Dublin, in September 2015 as part of Dublin Theatre Festival. The production has subsequently toured in other countries. My observations about the performance derive from attending a performance at the Battersea Arts Centre in London in October 2018 and from a recording of the premiere performance in Dublin.   2. The first part of the performance is not simply conventional: the audience listens to the production via headphones and a director character, played by Bush Moukarzel, comments on the proceedings, often talking over the actors.  3. Dead Centre is the named author of the published text of Chekhov’s First Play. Bush Moukarzel and Ben Kidd, the artistic directors of the company, co-wrote and co-directed the play. In an interview I conducted with the directors, Kidd estimated that around 20 to 30 per cent of the text was written by Chekhov, most of which is in the first part of the play.   4. The end of Chekhov’s First Play features an excerpted line from Samuel Beckett’s Texts for Nothing (text 4): ‘Where would I go, if I could go, who would I be, if I could be, what would I say. . .’ Dead Centre, Chekhov’s First Play (London: Oberon, 2016), 55.   5. R. D. Laing, The Divided Self: An Existential Study in Sanity and Madness (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1965), 39–61.   6. W. B. Yeats and Seamus Heaney, W. B. Yeats (London: J. M. Dent, 1997), 39. Kidd mentioned to me in an interview conducted on 9 November 2018 that he and Moukarzel had Yeats’s line in mind when naming their company, Dead Centre.  7. See, for example, Stephen Frosh, Identity Crisis: Modernity, Psychoanalysis and the Self (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 1991); Anthony Giddens, The Consequences of Modernity (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1991); Doris Enright-Clark Shoukri, Studies in Ontology in Twentieth Century Literature (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2018); and Filip Ejdus, Crisis and Ontological Insecurity: Serbia’s Anxiety over Kosovo’s Secession (Cham: Palgrave, 2020).  8. Laing, The Divided Self, 42.   9. Ibid. 46. 10. Giddens, The Consequences of Modernity, 125. 11. Ibid. 2–3, 49. 12. Ibid. 139. 13. Marshall Berman, All That Is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity (New York: Penguin, 1998), 345–6. 14. Laing, The Divided Self, 40–1. 15. See, for example, Richard Schechner, ‘The Inner and the Outer Reality’, The Tulane Drama Review 7, no. 3 (1963): 187–217; David J. Kleinbard, ‘D. H. Lawrence and Ontological Insecurity’, PMLA 89, no. 1 (1974): 154–63; John Cash, ‘Waiting for Sociality: The (Re)birth, astride a Grave, of the Social’, in Waiting, ed. Ghassan Hage (Melbourne: Melbourne University Publishing, 2009), 27–38; and Shoukri, Studies in Ontology in Twentieth Century Literature. 16. Virginia Woolf, The Waves (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), 106–7. 17. David Magarshack, quoted in Anton Chekhov, Platonov (London: Faber and Faber, 1964), 9. 18. Stuart Young, ‘Making the “Unstageable” Stageable: English Rewritings of Chekhov’s First Play’, Modern Drama 52, no. 3 (2009): 326. One of the play’s defenders, Mikhail Gromov,

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remarked: ‘At one and the same time it is a drama, a comedy and a vaudeville; or more accurately, it is not any one of these three. But that said, it is chaotic in a way that bore a remarkable resemblance to the reality of Russian life.’ Quoted in Edward Braun, ‘From Platonov to Piano’, in The Cambridge Companion to Chekhov, ed. Vera Gottlieb and Paul Allain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 46. 19. Chekhov, Platonov, 26. 20. Ibid. 190. 21. Ibid. 97. 22. Ibid. 179. 23. Raymond Williams, Modern Tragedy, ed. Pamela McCallum (Peterborough, ON: Broadview Press, 2006), 175–6. 24. The play was premiered in Gera, south-east Germany, in a production directed by René Fülop-Miller entitled Der unnutzige Mensch Platonoff (That Useless Person Platonov). Braun, ‘From Platonov to Piano’, 48. 25. For more on the production history of this play, including adaptations of it, see Braun, ‘From Platonov to Piano’, and Young, ‘Making the “Unstageable” Stageable’. 26. Personal interview with Ben Kidd and Bush Moukarzel on 9 November 2018. 27. Quoted in Joseph Pearson, ‘Unfinished Plays for Unfinished People: Dead Centre in Berlin’, https://www.schaubuehne.de/en/blog/find-2016-brunfinished-plays-for-unfinished-peopledead-centre-in-berlin.html (accessed 11 February 2020). 28. Dead Centre, Chekhov’s First Play, 11. 29. Ibid. 11. 30. The Play That Goes Wrong, from the UK-based Mischief Theatre company, was written by Henry Lewis, Jonathan Sayer and Henry Shields and premiered in 2012. 31. Dead Centre, Chekhov’s First Play, 29. 32. Ibid. 29. 33. ‘To this day, no other name for a field of cultural production evokes quite the constellation of negativity, risk of aesthetic failure, and bad behavior that “modernism” does.’ Douglas Mao and Rebecca L. Walkowitz, ‘Introduction: Modernisms Bad and New’, in Bad Modernisms, ed. Douglas Mao and Rebecca L. Walkowitz (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006), 4. 34. ‘Chekhov is already long dead; at the end the surrogate author/the director has just killed himself. The character, Platonov, is left alone on stage to author the performance. With both the author and the director dead, Chekhov’s First Play enables a reversal of the characters’ quest from Pirandello’s Six Characters in Search of an Author. The character is seemingly liberated from his author(s).’ Silvija Jestrovic, Performances of Authorial Presence and Absence: The Author Dies Hard (Cham: Palgrave, 2020), 134. 35. Laurence Senelick, quoted in Anton Chekhov, The Cherry Orchard and The Seagull (Arlington Heights: AHM Publishing Corporation, 1977), vii. 36. Martin Puchner, Stage Fright: Modernism, Anti-Theatricality, and Drama (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002), 5. 37. Dead Centre, Chekhov’s First Play, 21. 38. Personal interview with Ben Kidd and Bush Moukarzel on 9 November 2018. 39. This is true of their other work too: for example, Beckett’s Room, which features invisible characters and no onstage actors, and To Be a Machine (Version 1.0) (2020) – a streamed performance with a live actor and an ‘uploaded’ audience. 40. Dead Centre, Chekhov’s First Play, 34. 41. Ibid. 36. 42. Ibid. 36. 43. Ibid. 37. 44. Ibid. 42. The Director makes this naming error earlier in the play too.

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45. 46. 47. 48.

Ibid. 39. Ibid. 23. Ibid. 49. ‘[Anyway] what was the use of my having come from Oakland it was not natural to have come from there yes write about it if I like or anything if I like but not there, there is no there there.’ Gertrude Stein, Everybody’s Autobiography (New York: Random House, 1937), 289. 49. Dead Centre, Chekhov’s First Play, 38. 50. Ibid. 45. 51. Ibid. 46. 52. Ibid. 46. 53. Ibid. 46. 54. Naomi Toth explains that, for Woolf, a ‘moment of being’ or ‘“shock” occurs when the “nondescript cotton wool” of “non-being”—that is, the humdrum, forgettable activities of daily life, associated with the normalised appearances of the world—is abruptly torn open’. Naomi Toth, ‘Disturbing Epiphany: Rereading Virginia Woolf’s “Moments of Being”’, Études britanniques contemporaines 46 (2014), http://journals.openedition.org/ebc/1182 (accessed 14 February 2021). 55. Dead Centre, Chekhov’s First Play, 48. 56. Ibid. 23. 57. See Pearson, ‘Unfinished Plays’. 58. Dead Centre, Chekhov’s First Play, 48. 59. Marcus Free and Clare Scully, ‘The Run of Ourselves: Shame, Guilt and Confession in PostCeltic Tiger Irish Media’, International Journal of Cultural Studies 21, no. 3 (2018): 309. 60. Dead Centre, Chekhov’s First Play, 16. 61. Ibid. 40. 62. Ibid. 47. 63. Ibid. 42. 64. Ibid. 52. 65. Ibid. 55. 66. See Anton Chekhov, Ivanov, trans. Paul Schmidt (New York: Dramatists Play Services Inc., 1999), 60. 67. Dead Centre, Chekhov’s First Play, 55. 68. Ibid. 54. 69. Karen Quigley, Performing the Unstageable: Success, Imagination, Failure (London: Bloomsbury, 2020), 93. 70. See Carol Martin, Theatre of the Real (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2013). 71. Callum Berridge (@callum_berridge), Twitter, https://twitter.com/callum_berridge/status/ 1061007041488187392?s=20 (accessed 15 February 2021). 72. Sean McGovern (@SeanMcGovernX), Twitter, https://twitter.com/SeanMcGovernX/status/ 1058838591932153862?s=20 (accessed 15 February 2021). 73. Tom Bostock (@BostockTom_), Twitter, https://twitter.com/BostockTom_/status/ 1059581276431224832 (accessed 15 February 2021). 74. David Keane, ‘Review: Chekhov’s First Play’, 30 September 2015, https://davidkeane. net/2015/09/30/review-chekhovs-first-play/ (accessed 18 February 2021). 75. Personal interview with Jimmy Eadie on 4 February 2021. 76. Gertrude Stein, Lectures in America (New York: Random House, 1935), 103. 77. The track in question, ‘A New Error’, appears on Moderat’s self-titled album from 2009. Jimmy Eadie stated in an interview with me that the idea of using this track came from the directors. 78. See Kathryn A. Becker-Blease, ‘Dissociative States Through New Age and Electronic Trance Music’, Journal of Trauma & Dissociation 5, no. 2 (2004): 89–100.

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79. Thanks to Jimmy Eadie for providing this information. 80. For a discussion of the role of Chekhov in this play, see Jestrovic, Performances of Authorial Presence and Absence, 131–4. 81. See Adrian Curtin, ‘Attending to Theatre Sound Studies and Complicité’s The Encounter’, in Literature and Sound, ed. Anna Snaith (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020), 360–7. Jimmy Eadie mentioned to me in an interview that he had been in dialogue with Gareth Fry, sound designer for Complicité’s The Encounter, about the technical set-up of that show when preparing for Dead Centre’s production. 82. See Miriam Dreysse and Florian Malzacher, eds, Experts of the Everyday: The Theatre of Rimini Protokoll (Berlin: Aleksander Verlag, 2008).

Works Cited Becker-Blease, Kathryn A. ‘Dissociative States Through New Age and Electronic Trance Music’. Journal of Trauma & Dissociation 5, no. 2 (2004): 89–100. Berman, Marshall. All That Is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity. New York: Penguin, 1998. Braun, Edward. ‘From Platonov to Piano’. In The Cambridge Companion to Chekhov, edited by Vera Gottlieb and Paul Allain, 43–56. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Cash, John. ‘Waiting for Sociality: The (Re)birth, astride a Grave, of the Social’. In Waiting, edited by Ghassan Hage, 27–38. Melbourne: Melbourne University Publishing, 2009. Chekhov, Anton. The Cherry Orchard and The Seagull. Translated by Laurence Senelick. Arlington Heights: AHM Publishing Corporation, 1977. Chekhov, Anton. Ivanov. Translated by Paul Schmidt. New York: Dramatists Play Services Inc., 1999. Chekhov, Anton. Platonov. Translated by David Magarshack. London: Faber and Faber, 1964. Curtin, Adrian. ‘Attending to Theatre Sound Studies and Complicité’s The Encounter’. In Literature and Sound, edited by Anna Snaith, 351–71. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020. Dead Centre. Chekhov’s First Play. London: Oberon, 2016. Dreysse, Miriam and Florian Malzacher, eds. Experts of the Everyday: The Theatre of Rimini Protokoll. Berlin: Aleksander Verlag, 2008. Ejdus, Filip. Crisis and Ontological Insecurity: Serbia’s Anxiety over Kosovo’s Secession. Cham: Palgrave, 2020. Free, Marcus and Clare Scully. ‘The Run of Ourselves: Shame, Guilt and Confession in PostCeltic Tiger Irish Media’. International Journal of Cultural Studies 21, no. 3 (2018): 308–24. Frosh, Stephen. Identity Crisis: Modernity, Psychoanalysis and the Self. Basingstoke: Palgrave, 1991. Giddens, Anthony. The Consequences of Modernity. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1991. Jestrovic, Silvija. Performances of Authorial Presence and Absence: The Author Dies Hard. Cham: Palgrave, 2020. Keane, David. ‘Review: Chekhov’s First Play’. 30 September 2015. https://davidkeane. net/2015/09/30/review-chekhovs-first-play/ (accessed 18 February 2021). Kleinbard, David J. ‘D. H. Lawrence and Ontological Insecurity’. PMLA 89, no. 1 (1974): 154–63. Laing, R. D. The Divided Self: An Existential Study in Sanity and Madness. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1965. Mao, Douglas and Rebecca L. Walkowitz. ‘Introduction: Modernisms Bad and New’. In Bad Modernisms, edited by Douglas Mao and Rebecca L. Walkowitz, 1–17. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006.

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Martin, Carol. Theatre of the Real. Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2013. Pearson, Joseph. ‘Unfinished Plays for Unfinished People: Dead Centre in Berlin’. 18 March 2016. https://www.schaubuehne.de/en/blog/find-2016-brunfinished-plays-for-unfinishedpeople-dead-centre-in-berlin.html (accessed 11 February 2020). Puchner, Martin. Stage Fright: Modernism, Anti-Theatricality, and Drama. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002. Quigley, Karen. Performing the Unstageable: Success, Imagination, Failure. London: Bloomsbury, 2020. Schechner, Richard. ‘The Inner and the Outer Reality’. The Tulane Drama Review 7, no. 3 (1963): 187–217. Shoukri, Doris Enright-Clark. Studies in Ontology in Twentieth Century Literature. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2018. Stein, Gertrude. Everybody’s Autobiography. New York: Random House, 1937. Stein, Gertrude. Lectures in America. New York: Random House, 1935. Toth, Naomi. ‘Disturbing Epiphany: Rereading Virginia Woolf’s “Moments of Being”’. Études britanniques contemporaines 46 (2014). http://journals.openedition.org/ebc/1182 (accessed 14 February 2021). Williams, Raymond. Modern Tragedy. Edited by Pamela McCallum. Peterborough, ON: Broadview Press, 2006. Woolf, Virginia. The Waves. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992. Yeats, W. B. and Seamus Heaney. W. B. Yeats. London: J. M. Dent, 1997. Young, Stuart. ‘Making the “Unstageable” Stageable: English Rewritings of Chekhov’s First Play’. Modern Drama 52, no. 3 (2009): 325–50.

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13 En-Staging Nora: Unruly Modernisms in Theodoros Terzopoulos’s Nora Konstantinos Thomaidis and Maria Vogiatzi

(Un)Setting the Stage

I

n the small, proscenium-arch theatre of Attis in central Athens a geometric installation of fourteen white doors occupies the entire length of the stage for Theodoros Terzopoulos’s Nora (2019).1 This architectural construction, designed by the director, is placed in intimate proximity to the auditorium, leaving only a small corridor in front of it for the actors to perform. The pre-recorded sound of a ticking clock fills the acoustic field for several minutes while the audience sits in silent anticipation of onstage action. Such soundless waiting and sensory honing-in of attention – presupposing ‘physical restraint, “engaged” listening, [and] limited vocalization from the audience’ – is, as Adrian Curtin reminds us, historically situated and only became part and parcel of a by-now-familiar ‘behavioral etiquette’ that emerged alongside modern European drama.2 In this instance, such silence is not (exclusively) a strategic mechanism for facilitating a zooming-in towards the stage. Forceful, warm light refracts against this visual backdrop of whiteness and reflects its brightness back to the spectators’ seats, making audience members watch each other fall silent and listen, individually and collectively, to the acousmatised clock: we hear its sound but cannot affix it to any visible source. This long moment of focused attentiveness to the ticking – a ‘symbol of time passing, but [. . .] also a cipher of silence’, as Ross Brown posits in relation to modernist sonic dramaturgy – undermines the separation of stage and proscenium and its conventional sonic ‘detachedness’.3 As audience members, we are, on the one hand, obliged by the end-on architecture to turn towards the slightly elevated stage, but at the same time, the unexpected proximity of the scenographic installation, the brightness that seems to spotlight both the doors and ourselves, and the ostinato of sound that surrounds us without any pretension that it emanates from a visible onstage object make us look and listen to ourselves and experience an uncanny ‘sharedness’ with the stage. We are rendered markedly aware of our ingrained modernist theatre-going etiquette and, although operating within the confines of a given architectural context that demarcates stage and auditorium, this durational beginning works to undercut division and seed the potential of unification, or at least of a more fluid rapport, between scenic and spectatorial space. This backdrop – a theatrical, non-representational scenography and an atmospheric blurring of the lines between audience and stage – will be explored to its limits by the three-actor cast of the production. Sophia Hill (Nora), Antonis Myriagos (Torvald) and

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Tassos Dimas (Krogstad) will embody a distilled, sixty-minute version of Ibsen’s A Doll’s House through demanding, meticulously designed physio-vocal scores. In complex choreographic compositions, they will appear and disappear through the doors – alone, in duets, in proximate or distant trios – in statuesque, oft-violent gestures and group configurations. Recurrently, ‘the characters appear partially on stage’ and ‘their body stays hidden behind the other side of the door. A hand, half a face, half a torso, denote their semi-present absence.’4 This is not only a dramaturgy of onstage gazing and listening, a play of theatrical onlooking and eavesdropping on other characters’ actions. It also functions as a reversal of realist conventions of theatrical attention, as the actors seem to be peering and listening into the audience as much as the audience watches and listens to them. The multiplicity of doors over-theatricalises and refracts Ibsen’s famous finale (Nora closing the door and leaving the house). Throughout the production, such multiplicity also facilitates a kaleidoscopic dramaturgy of inner, outer and in-between realities: the inside/outside of the house, of relationships, of the self, of the theatre. In this sense, the doors emphasise ‘the borderline of situations, the potential “crossing” towards the “other” or towards the inner self. A passage “towards” something/somewhere or an escape “from” something/somewhere.’5 One reviewer would go as far as to see the doors as ‘bipolar graves’ out of which ‘pour, emancipated, the spectres of Ibsenian roles’.6 Terzopoulos’s Nora attracted considerable coverage by reviewers, both in Greece and abroad. Michael Billington, for example, made it the core case study of an article reflecting on the state of Greek theatre in 2020 and regarded Nora as a prime example

Figure 13.1  The scenic construction of Terzopoulos’s Nora in action (courtesy of Attis Theatre, photograph © Johanna Weber).

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of an Athenian theatre that has ‘roared out of the crisis’ (perhaps a hasty assessment given the new health and economic crisis which Greece and its theatre organisations had to face a week after the publication of the article).7 However, given such international interest in the production, the director’s standing and the wealth of scholarly writing about his work on both classical Greek drama and actor training, it is surprising that there has been no systematic academic analysis of Nora to date. Even more surprising is that none of the reviewers or respondents to the piece have highlighted the unexpected turn of a director predominantly associated for decades with ancient Greek and postmodern texts to an emblematically realist, modernist play. In the past, Terzopoulos admitted: ‘I denounced realism from the very first moment of my entry to the field of art. [. . .] I couldn’t accept realism as representation of reality.’8 Further, his critical, albeit enigmatic, disposition towards modernism was summarised in his statement that he approaches exploration with ‘constant agony and reversal, yet not for proving modernism, because when it’s not proven, it is “modernistics”. In Attis, modernism always exists in the classically assimilated body of art.’9 Why, then, did Terzopoulos stage Nora at this particular historical conjuncture? How does the production speak to his ongoing exploration of performance technique and dramaturgy? In which ways does the piece dialogue with international modernism(s) and the geopolitical specificity of its Greek context?

‘I am happy’ as Textual Material Before we even see Nora, we hear her pretentious, vain and coquettish giggles – her high-pitched, staccato and then flowing coloratura laughter-of-a-voice simultaneously conjuring the vocalic bodies of a playful child and an excessively friendly, cartoonish puppet.10 She enters through one of the doors and it is this movement that reveals that the other sides of all the revolving doors are black. This is a stark juxtaposition to the first impression of the scenography imposed by the prologue and an intimation of the characters’ dualism. She wears a black gown, sits astride Torvald’s back and pulls her own hair fiercely above her head – a disturbing gesture, in contrast to her declaration of happiness, as if her hair is the rope of an invisible loop.11 Compulsively, as if she has no choice but to be happy, Nora speak-sings a poem in English (an addition to the original text) about the happiness and welfare of her family: So happy. I am happy. My husband is happy. My children are happy. Everybody is happy. And Ivan is happy. And Amy is happy. And Bob is happy. So happy. We are happy. I am happy. You are happy. I am happy. It’s Christmas, we are happy. It’s Christmas, we are happy.12 The text is delivered in a verging-on-straining head voice, in a repeated 3/4-metre, waltz-like rhythm. As the scene progresses, but also later in the production, this becomes a recognisable leitmotiv for Nora – sometimes performed in accelerated tempo leading to dynamic increase and audible panting. This opening speech does

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not originate in Ibsen’s script and is performed in English, unlike most of the other dialogue. This introduces an element of heteroglossia to the linguistic horizon of the performance, a tactic that Krogstad will also embrace throughout the piece when exclaiming ‘Miracle!’ in English or ‘Infernum Continuum’ in Latin. Given that he speaks such text during scenes when his character is not present in the play’s fictional time-space, utters it from a distance and frequently addresses it to the audience, these phrases materialise outside, third-party commentary directed to Nora or Nora and Torvald in Terzopoulos’s dramaturgical composition.13 Similarly to Nora, Krogstad frequently bursts out in highly stylised laughter; however, his lower, chest-bound iteration of laughter, although equally put-on, sounds more threatening or desperate in comparison to Nora’s chuckling performance of determined optimism. Nora’s opening rhyme, as later scenes will highlight, links her to Krogstad’s voiced-in-extremis textual universe and sets them both in opposition to Torvald; the banker/husband primarily speaks in finely structured, amply resounding text, embodying the bourgeois man as proprietor of text (and middle-class reason), Man-as-Logos.14 The repetition of the text, its musical treatment, its linguistic juxtaposition to the primary language used in the production (Greek) and its markedly physicalised delivery, expressed through breathing and accompanying whole-body movement, antagonise its semantic meaning and bring it to the realm of the glossolalic. Dimitris Tsatsoulis has identified glossolalia as a prominent textual/dramaturgical device in Terzopoulos’s performances and linked it to both literary and theatrical lineages ranging from dada, futurism and lettrism to Khlebnikov and Artaud.15 Such glossolalic performance invites a close, experiential listening to extra-verbal, non- or para-linguistic attributes of voiced utterance – such as rhythm, inflection, melodic and sonic texture – as expressions of the performer’s unique bodily idiosyncrasy within an aural field presumed as unified by language. In this case, the glossolalic that Nora embodies is a post-linguistic, highly aestheticised assimilation of her environment’s imperatives towards material happiness (song); nostalgia for an assumed pre-linguistic unity (visualised here by the androgynous creature sculpted by Myriagos/Torvald and Hill/Nora and by the suggestion that Torvald might be the one conducting this sung poem); and a force operating within language which could threaten its established order (bodily/material excess of textual delivery by Nora/Hill).16 Such delivery is not primarily concerned with being a key tool for a ‘trans-cultural theatre’ or with becoming ‘an independent signified’, as in previous productions by Attis.17 Nora’s ‘innocent rhyme’ stays deceptively close to something plausibly comprehensible, despite – or perhaps precisely because of – its heteroglossic and glossolalic performance, and this marks the potential of its distancing from both (patriarchal) order and (paternalistic) language. Terzopoulos has remarked about textual dramaturgy: I believe that the text must be abstracted. Yet, what does abstracting mean? It’s meaning without the meaning, the revelation of the deep meaning that lies underneath the apparent meaning, or the cause of the text. It is this whole dynamic of subversion, this meaning that undercuts the official meaning. This is another meaning which is necessary, because through abstracting interpretation and mobilising energy we are led to the mobilisation of the affect-full body.18

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In this case, the naïve and childish poem mobilises Nora’s affect-full body to subvert meanings inscribed on it by the world represented by Torvald. The new, ‘necessary meaning’ that emerges is an ironic comment on the obsessive pursuit of opulence and prosperity, the narcissistic impulse for ostentation and the illusion of control, all prevalent in capitalist society. This criticism particularly targets the middle class, the standard aspiration and pillar of capitalism. Ibsen wrote A Doll’s House at a time when the middle class was emerging; Torvald and Nora embody the hopes and fears of this class, aspiring to upward mobility and dreading social decline – this was a modern play examining the advent of capitalist modernity. For Terzopoulos, on the other hand, this criticism of capitalist modernity becomes performance material rearranged to investigate the collapse of late-modern capitalism. Terzopoulos directs, for the first time, a bourgeois drama, at a period when the middle class, specifically in Greece, is crumbling due to the debt crisis and is desperately trying to preserve its privileges and status.

Training Techniques as Dramaturgies of the Political In the first dialogue of the production, Torvald calls Nora pet names, while she responds with satisfied vocalisms confirming her subordination to him. The following dialogue, in contemporary terms, would be a paradigm of ‘mansplaining’, but also a comment on capitalism. Torvald reprimands Nora for being wasteful and explains condescendingly, as if speaking to an ignorant child, why they should never borrow money: Torvald: You bought things. Nora: Torvald! Torvald: You wasted money. Nora: Torvald! Torvald: You wasted money. Spendthrift. Spendthrift. Nora: Torvald, you’ll soon be earning a lot of money. Money, money. Torvald: My first salary is due at the end of the month. Nora: We can borrow money. Torvald: My thoughtless little mouse. Suppose I borrowed one thousand crowns and you spent it all for Christmas and on the New Year’s Eve a tile blew off the roof and knocked my head. . . Nora: Nonsense. Torvald: But suppose something happens to me. . . Nora: Nonsense. Torvald: And what about the creditors? Nora: Who cares about them? They are strangers. Torvald: Nora! No debt. No credit. Never. Never. Krogstad: Never. Never.19 Myriagos speaks Torvald’s text directly to the audience, never looking at Nora, with a deep voice that treads the line between self-assured conviction and self-doubting masculinity. Ibsen’s text was dramaturged by Terzopoulos to become elliptical and fragmented, so that words relating to money and economy prevail, interrupted or emphasised by Krogstad’s sarcastic laughter. This reflects Terzopoulos’s work on

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researching ‘cores of material’.20 When working with textual material, he discovers – through an elaborate process based on his training methodology – rhythmical or thematic units and, together with the actors, he elaborates them, builds upon them and tests their limits: ‘Speech is divested of its everydayness, what is sought is its nuclear rhythm, the vibrations of which pierce through the body.’21 Giorgos Sampatakakis has summarised Terzopoulos’s approach to physical-vocal training and devising thus: 1. The director constructs strategies for action and construction which refract the sociopolitical and cultural structures; 2. Such strategies do not imitate these structures but re-compose them on stage as new structures (anti-structures); 3. Such antirealist anti-structures collide with current cultural and interpretative expectations, producing ideological resistance.22 In this scene as well as in subsequent ones, Nora and Torvald do not deploy pedestrian movements or manner(ism)s of speaking, nor attempt to directly represent the current Greek context. Drawing from a long-standing collaboration with, and training under, Terzopoulos, they produce anti-structures that avoid any mimetic impulse but turn towards ideological resistance. Sampatakakis, like other scholars, has linked the biodynamic training method developed by Terzopoulos with lineages of formalist codification (Asian techniques such as kathakali, Meyerhold’s biomechanics, constructivism and Bauhaus) as well as the foregrounding of the actor’s body by Artaud, Grotowski and Suzuki. However, what differentiates Terzopoulos’s approach is that, in his case, formal distillation/abstraction and the preoccupation with the actor’s body are not only theatrically experimental but also geopolitically historicised and ideologised. As a member of the defeated Greek Left of the post-Civil-War era (1946–49), Terzopoulos’s memories are marked by ‘events (exile, torture, marginalisation) which produced a magnified image of physical and social cruelty’.23 Although, from the point of view of reception, the (repetitious, magnified, convulsive, energetic, ecstatic) physicality of Terzopoulos’s actors might appear as that of an aestheticised body in crisis, his process is rooted in a perception of the everyday body-as-already-in-crisis. Through a process of re-membering and re-structuring repressed historic memory, the body of the Attis actor is proposed as a new order of the physical, a ‘mature, politicised anti-body’.24 Torvald’s ‘mature, politicised anti-body’ incarnates the ideal of capitalism, neoliberalism and the ethics of self-achievement society. He is a young, straight, white, privileged man, climbing the ladder to the highest rank in the bank where he is employed, so he feels entitled to preach about economy ethics and advises Nora, with a degree of thinly veiled pride. It is a privilege and proof of status for a man of his class to be able to afford to provide for an elegant woman, prone to extravagance and luxury; Nora is the trophy wife who contributes to the accumulation of symbolic capital. Torvald, in the performance, reflects aspects of the homo economicus, in terms of his rationalism, pursuit of self-interest and preoccupation with economic terms. Nora opened in the Attis Theatre in 2019, almost a year and a half after the launch of the #MeToo movement, following the exposure of sexual abuse in Hollywood; in 2021 similar sexual abuse allegations flooded Greek society.25 A Doll’s House has come to exemplify Ibsen’s modernism, not only because it has sparked debate about the situation of women in the

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modern Western world and speaks for their attempt to claim an identity, but also because it demonstrates the futility of such struggle inside the incoherent context of the patriarchal family and society and the complexity of human relations in modernity.26 Ibsen himself would probably deny being a spokesman for the women’s movement. In his famous speech at the Norwegian Women’s Rights League in 1898, he claimed that he was mostly a poet and less a social philosopher and that his conscious thought was not to make propaganda but to describe humanity. This declaration has kindled a dispute among critics and scholars on whether Ibsen supported the women’s cause only as part of his general interest in freedom and self-determination.27 Terzopoulos’s primary intention – at least as expressed in his rare interviews – was not to rehearse topical feminist commentary; however, in his production of Nora patriarchy is interwoven with other social–political issues that preoccupy him: capitalism, materialism, neoliberalism, the Greek debt crisis, power and dependency relationships. In an earlier Terzopoulos production, Amor, loosely based on a poem by Thanasis Alevras and performed in 2013, at the heart of the Greek debt crisis, Antonis Myriagos, the actor cast as Torvald, played another homo economicus persona: a ‘barefoot broker’, the plaything of the omnipotence of capitalism and victim of the debt crisis, obsessively listing numbers, stock indices and interest rates. Nora seems to recapitulate and crown the trilogy Alarme, Amor, Encore, which Terzopoulos staged in the Attis Theatre over the decade 2010–2019, representing a tug-of-war over power in the realms of politics (Alarme), economics (Amor) and love/gender relationships (Encore). According to Chatzidimitriou, the productions represent a diversity of historic and everyday (civil) wars in a theatre that becomes a critical vision machine which challenges spectators to look from the perpetrator’s point of view, on the one hand, and, on the other hand, lay equal criticism on both the perpetrator and the victim. The above political tetralogy coincides with the emergence and establishment of the Greek economic recession, which is but an aspect of the wider European crisis that unveils the deeper cultural crisis of a civilisation once founded on the humanistic ideals of Enlightenment.28 Ultimately, Nora formulates and extends criticism about patriarchy in relation to capitalism and consumerism – androcentric systems that benefit from female oppression and that establish and reinforce gender roles and stereotypes. Such an approach echoes the ‘unitary theories’ which posit that patriarchy cannot possibly be considered independent from capitalism, a complex social order based on domination and relationships of exploitation.29 The social divide does not only separate individuals into classes, but also into sexes by creating active or productive individuals (men) and inactive or financially unproductive individuals (women), within the ideal of the new middle-class family. Men face the ideological pressure to fit into the socioeconomic model of the middle-class family, in which a man must be able to sustain a family, while the notion of the housewife slowly imposed itself as the hegemonic model for women. In wealthy families, they ensure the reproduction of social status (accumulation of symbolic capital), while in working classes, they reproduce the labour force.30 It is ironic that the imperative against debt (‘No debt. No credit. Never. Never.’) comes from the mouth of a bank manager (Torvald) and is echoed by a creditor (Krogstad). Krogstad is present throughout the scene with his acerbic interventions

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and sarcastic laughter. In fact, all three actors are always present on stage; even when we do not get to see them, or we do not see them in full – since usually only a part of their bodies emerges through the partitions of the doors – we know that they are standing there, peeping through the doors to see the other actors and the audience. Nora is always present and always-already watched, always-already overheard, both by the banker/husband Torvald and by the creditor Krogstad (in the closing scene, Dimas, the actor playing Krogstad, also embodies Nora’s father, the other male figure from Nora’s past). In A Doll’s House, the paramount concept of credit depicts the subordination and economic dependency of women, who were not eligible to borrow money and engage in any financial transaction. Terzopoulos’s Nora foregrounds credit not (only) in the context of the ‘women’s cause’, but under the prism of the Greek debt crisis. Yona Stamatis links the contemporary revival of the rebetiko music genre in economic-crisis Athens to Michael Herzfeld’s concept of crypto-colonialism, ‘the curious alchemy whereby certain countries, buffer zones between the colonized lands and those as yet untamed, were compelled to acquire their political independence at the expense of massive economic dependence’.31 Stamatis observes: The severe economic crisis in Greece that began in 2008 has resulted in increased resistance to Greek membership of the EU and the Eurozone. This was exacerbated by the predictably negative effects on the national economy of various austerity stop-gap measures that brought Greek debt to 146.2 per cent of the GDP in 2010 [. . .] and further limited Greek national sovereignty: ‘Bailout’ loans from the International Monetary Fund, the European Union and the European Central Bank were accompanied by a series of strict austerity measures in the form of new taxes and other economic regulations. The loan agreements included Greeks accepting increased external supervision as the application of austerity measures was supervised by a ‘troika’ team of representatives of the lenders.32 Although no mimetic representation of or direct allusion to this context is procured in Terzopoulos’s production, the dire situation of Nora bears striking similarities to the financial predicament of Greece. Forced to deal with the consequences of an unsustainable debt, being the recipient of blackmail, paternalistic interventionism and non-stop supervision (which also takes the form of expenditure tracking), and experiencing increasing insecurity, dependency and impoverishment, Nora becomes a metaphor for the domination of robust economies over poorer countries.

Nora’s (Modern) Voice: Yearning Another Soundscape In the conclusion of the opening scene, Torvald stands, grabs Nora by her hair and spins her around herself in an increasing rhythm, while she lists, at an equally increasing pace, her Christmas shopping. The original list of Christmas presents for children and for Torvald is supplemented by a catalogue of modern beauty products that Nora shops for for herself, each one followed by the emphatic addition of the chorus ‘for me’: shampoo for me, conditioner for me, body cream for me,

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Figure 13.2  Nora ‘operated’ by Torvald; Sophia Hill and Antonis Myriagos (courtesy of Attis Theatre, photograph © Johanna Weber).

face cream for me, eye cream for me, day cream for me, night cream for me, bb cream for me, concealer for me, mascara for me, highlighter for me, eyeliner for me, lipstick for me, botox for me.33 The stiff posture of Nora and her gown with the cut-outs revealing the joints in the elbows and the armpits enhance the image of a doll – or better yet a marionette, an automaton, a machine of materialistic consumerism. Torvald’s disturbing gesture of grabbing her hair – an act of violence itself – resembles pulling her strings or winding her, while Nora’s body becomes obedient and submissive to his dictations. Although appearing as an everyday, ‘playful’ feature of their relationship, violent bodily transgression underpins – in non-representational forms – most of Nora’s dialogue with Torvald. In their second scene together, after Krogstad visits Nora to ask her to mediate so that he keeps his job at the bank, Torvald presses Nora’s elbows behind her

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back, in a gesture that echoes police manhandling. When Nora rehearses the tarantella, Torvald holds her close to him with a revolving door between them; their physicality (not imitative of the dance) has a sustained pace, with only brief moments of abrupt, angular leg moves punctuating the sequence. In the extortion scene between the creditor-Krogstad and Nora, he holds her arms behind another door and operates them as clock hands – their steady pace, once again, a counterpoint to his threats. Nora’s body is de-individualised, wound up and operated like a machine: Nora-asPuppet, Nora-as-Door-Dance-Husband-Assemblage, Nora-as-Clock.34 The machine is a recurring theme in Terzopoulos’s work. As Penelope Chatzidimitriou notes, ‘it echoes the modern practice of theatre and its persistent interest in the body as a political entity. In the post-Brechtian political scene, the body is represented at its limits, as a suffering, tortured, raped, restricted, disciplined, extinct entity.’35 In his production Ajax, the Madness (based on the part of the first Messenger from Sophocles’ Ajax, 2004), the mythical persona becomes a death machine, which embodies violence and, in a frenzy, kills at random. In Mauser by Heiner Müller (2009), the three defendants become delirious automata of death, ‘which mechanically reproduce their “lesson” up to the point of gabbling heartbroken by repetition, this time with an assurance that they were recyclable objects’.36 The sequence of the Christmas gifts and beauty products is pronounced in an accelerated rhythm, which escalates, reaches a crescendo with the asthmatic repetition of the phrase ‘for me’, then fades out. The pronoun ‘me’ is coupled with the pronoun ‘I’ that emphatically sounds through the performance by the three actors to accentuate the anxiety, ambitions and, ultimately, impasse created by the primacy of the individualistic cult – intensified by the use of the pronoun ‘me’ in English instead of Greek as a direct reference to Western individualistic cultures.37

Figure 13.3  Nora as a ‘Clock’ (courtesy of Attis Theatre, photograph © Johanna Weber).

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Nora in this scene becomes a greedy machine that consumes compulsively, until exhaustion, without feeling satisfied, representing a fetishistic culture and its attempt to dominate time and materiality through the accumulation of commodities. Lacan has distinguished desire from jouissance; in this line of thought, what capitalism effects through the stratagems of advertisement is to inflate desire to such an extent that jouissance is always displaced.38 Renata Saleci notes about the anxiety of choice culture that ‘[t]he whole marketing system on which capitalism constantly relies engages the logic of desire and introduces the feeling that no matter what material goods we attain this is not “it”’,39 while Michel Houellebecq writes in his novel Les Particules Élémentaires that ‘in order for society to be functionable and antagonism to continue to exist, the desire should grow, expand and devour human life’.40 Patriarchy and capitalism are two connecting vessels that exploit and reinforce gender norms: capitalism fosters the stereotypes of the narcissistic female or the perfect housewife – ideally combined – to achieve an increase in consumption, while, simultaneously, it feeds and perpetuates those patterns. They both draw a dichotomy between productivity as male virtue and consumption as female weakness; the paradox is that while capitalism advances on female consumption, at the same time it shows contempt for it as a capricious and frivolous luxury. Ultimately, Nora’s body becomes a plaything claimed and devoured by both patriarchy, as depicted by Torvald’s symbolic act of violence, and capitalism, through its dictates for eternal beauty and youthfulness – which Nora embodies and envoices in automaton-like fashion.41 Such treatment of the modernist-capitalist ‘I’ – machinic, ever-desiring, with material-semiotic violence acted upon it – is a guiding principle in every scene Nora shares with either Torvald or Krogstad. However, there is a different trajectory to be followed when Nora is left alone (although always supervised and audited by the other two characters, or parts of their bodies peeking through cracks and gaps in the set, from a distance). In between dialogic – more accurately: intersubjectively cruel – scenes, Terzopoulos’s Nora is afforded monologic spaces of direct communication with spectators. In the first of these ‘monologues’, immediately after the opening scene with Torvald, Nora remains in the puppet position and narrates Torvald’s illness and the forgery of her father’s signature that guaranteed her a loan from Krogstad. Although still embodying the ‘puppet’, her narrative voice is now in a middle speaking range. Only at the end of the speech does she return to an aria-like head vocality to sing the phrase ‘amore mio’ (my love) – this time, in fully resonant, chiaroscuro opera sound, unlike her previously shrieking, infantile, high-pitched intonations. She even revisits the listing of her desires but this time in Greek: no need to render her needs heteroglossic in the absence of the paternalistic/crypto-colonialist other. Later, a short aside is delivered in an uncharacteristic pedestrian tone, which will soon ascend back to girllike vocality the moment Torvald returns. These are the first instances when Nora’s voice rehearses an ‘authenticity affect’.42 This indexes the emergence of a subject resisting its oppressive frame of performance and minimises the audience’s acoustic distance through vocal ‘de-estrangement’, inviting a more intimate mode of aural attention towards Nora.43 Nora’s second fully fledged monologue follows Torvald’s assertion that a lying mother ‘infects’ her children, his request of Nora to work on the tarantella dance and his refusal to help Krogstad. Nora’s monologue now traverses three disunited vocal topologies: (1) a restrained, mid-range speech that narrates facts or actions (for example, checking the

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mailbox) as if from ‘the outside’; (2) chokingly low, guttural expressions of turmoil and panic (‘God forbid, my children being left without a mother’); and (3) her familiar (from the prologue) shrill utterances that ventriloquise externally imposed demands (‘Torvald wants me to dance the tarantella’).44 While the disparity between Nora’s monolithically performative vocality in Torvald’s presence and her first monologue in spoken voice intimates her awareness of her non-performative self, this second monologue, accompanied by full-body convulsions, renders audible the frictions and fissures between various registers of voiced selfhood, either chosen (performed/non-performed) or involuntary (guttural sounds of panic). From this point onwards, all remaining monologues (the first after Torvald refuses to help Krogstad, the second after Krogstad’s final attempt at blackmailing Nora before leaving the letter in the postbox, and the third when Torvald goes to get the letter) are directly addressed to the audience in a prosaic vocal manner, often in whispers resembling radiophonic or cinematic voice, pushing the authenticity and intimacy effects to the extreme. The crisis scene between the couple, after Torvald reads the letter and discovers the truth, is also performed by both Hill and Myriagos in this ‘vocal close-up’ tone, in semi-darkness, through minimally audible dialogue – as if their unhappiness is never to be displayed to outsiders and as if the violence implied in their bodily assemblages of prior scenes has now crossed from emotional to unstageable physical or sexual abuse. Both actors speak for the first time in voices that approximate everyday speech, a register Torvald will soon relinquish in favour of his regular, impishly but positively intimidatory performance of manhood, after the second letter arrives and he assumes there is no longer cause for worry. On the contrary, Nora will remain in her no-longersinging, chest-voice, whispery intonations until her peremptory exit. For this, she will lean over and allow her body to glide from the stage to the audience in slow motion, the layers of her black dress steadily pouring over her, like dark, ever-moving/everflooding water. In the closing scene, we listen to Nora’s final words in an even more stripped-back voice; like her seemingly unending pouring over towards the audience, this last vocalisation promises that the process of figuring (and figuring out) a new voiced self is to be continued. According to Steven Connor, one ‘story about modernity would identify it with the apprehension of the self’s autonomous self-grounding, the positive precipitate of the act of expelling all inauthenticity and error from the self’.45 This rising of the self to itself through such ‘an act of autogenetic faith’ finds parallels in Nora’s trajectory within Terzopoulos’s production. The beginning establishes her as an allocentrically manipulated body-automaton and a quasi-operatic voice of quotidian bourgeois happiness. More than a comment on the original piece or an aestheticised interpretation of its meaning, her distilled, deconstructed psychophysicality resonates with Terzopoulos’s methodology and ongoing interest in ‘revealing the forms of Memory, of archetypes, shedding light to structure’. Terzopoulos aims to move beyond acting approaches that make ‘constant references to society, characters, writers’ and towards ‘magnifying’ time and helping the actor’s score/goals/actions ‘become abstract’.46 The aural dramaturgy of Nora’s physio-vocal score, however, also indicates Connor’s modernist, ‘expelling’ process towards autonomous, autogenetic selfhood. From the heightened performativity of the opening scenes, through the second monologue where multiple voices antagonise each other within Nora’s body, to the new, ‘natural’ voice of her final monologues and the entire closing section of the piece, Hill’s speech progressively

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becomes unusually pedestrian compared to both the first half of the performance and the non-realist treatment of text in other productions by Attis. However, for Connor, there is also a second ‘scenario’ for modernity and the modern self: there is after all nothing to guarantee the modern self – nothing, that is, except its abandonment, in the mode of reflection or of delirium, of all external guarantees. So, according to the other story, the absence or impotence of God, the Church, the king, tradition, makes the modern subject more liable to come apart at the seams than ever before. The very strength of the modern self is its weakness, just as its weakness is the ultimate source of its strength.47 This language of abandonment, of vanished guarantees, of coming apart at the seams, echoes Terzopoulos’s acknowledged intentions and methodological principles. Such unmaking of the (actor’s) self is not an end-goal in and of itself, but a pathway to new discoveries, towards ‘the unfamiliar, that which the actor does not understand [. . .], the unexpected, the uncommon, the paradoxical’.48 In this case, the performer-Nora does not merely divest herself of layers of acquired theatricality and oppression, towards a fixed idea of non-theatricality and resolved freedom. Nora’s vocal ‘authenticity effect’ still dialogues with Terzopoulos’s formal logic of ‘refraction/anti-structure/resistance through a new anti-body’ in that it is not a slavish copy of everyday or conventionally naturalist utterance, but a reinvention of quotidian speech through careful distillation, a voice that can sound pedestrian but not commonplace. Nora’s vocal body sheds and expels inauthenticity but does not return to a presumed authenticity located elsewhere, in the routine voicescapes of daily life. In Connor’s scheme, the invention of, and claim to, the modern self is not only an autopoietic move towards but also a move away from given guarantors of (self-)identification (for example, religion, tradition or monarchy). In this sense, it is crucial to listen not only to the structuring of Nora’s new voice but also to the wider soundscape against which it emerges. The first extortion scene between Krogstad and Nora is underscored by a recording of Johann Strauss’s waltz ‘The Blue Danube’ (1866), a piece that will return as an accompaniment in various occasions and even become the soundtrack of the penultimate scene, during which all three characters execute an elaborate movement sequence of pushing and closing the revolving doors with careless force. A second component of this pre-recorded soundscape is Samuel Barber’s Agnus Dei (1967), a piece that is heard for the first time when Torvald leaves the stage to find the letter and underpins Nora’s final monologue. Following the acousmatic ‘crisis scene’, the Agnus Dei returns as a persistent background to the final ten-minute section of Nora’s resolution to leave. The piece’s use of the soprano line in climactic, high-tessitura lines, the frequent breaking-free of the soprano from the homophonic movements of the other voices, and the sacrificial/messianic lyrics of the Latin liturgical text may create semiotic allusions to Nora’s individual predicament and the longing for a (personalised) miracle. Yet, Terzopoulos emphatically entangles it with Nora’s critique of accepted values – primarily matrimonial societal norms and religion. The audience in this production, although it gradually attunes to Nora’s finding of a new ‘authentic’ voice, never gets to hear the definitive sounds that foreground Nora’s psychology and self-realisation in Ibsen’s text: the tambourine of the tarantella

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and the infamous shutting of the door. Rather, the acoustic field is dominated by a classical piece primarily associated with bourgeois dances (‘The Blue Danube’) and a rendering of Christian music (Agnus Dei).49 During Nora’s painstakingly slow exit, what becomes audible in the sudden background silence – the lack of any musical soundtrack after several minutes of pre-recorded music – is Nora’s attempt at sustaining the ‘authentic’ voice she found in her monologues, for the first time in the presence of others, as well as the ‘guarantees’ she leaves behind: unselfconscious, bourgeois frivolity and Christian salvational religiosity. In the sonic and vocal dramaturgy of the piece, Terzopoulos foregrounds Nora’s new voice as a possibility-in-progress, an unfinished pointer to a future, and turns our sonic attention to the sociopolitical context encroaching on Nora. Nora unmakes herself not simply to make a new self but, crucially, to make space for a self that does not conform to what is already known, a self that is in the process of arrival without a guarantee that it will arrive, a self that, in this case, is primarily political and not exclusively psychological, a self yet-to-come.

En-Staging Nora In his first directorial encounter with a realist text,50 Terzopoulos’s staging renders A Doll’s House as a three-actor score, opts for an allegoric scenic installation of revolving doors as its ever-morphing set, and embraces his trademark, highly stylised body-voice work with the performers. In this encounter of an elusively modernist text with an elusively modernist director, Nora – in the original production conceived as a tranchede-vie character on a realist stage – is at first presented in full theatricality. Her gradual ‘expelling of inauthenticity’ is by no means a nod or return to realism. Vocally, she denounces her machine- and animal-sounding mannerisms in favour of an ‘authenticity effect’ vocalisation, but this is never resolved into quotidian speech. In line with this deconstructed ‘anti-voice’, her body sheds the extra-daily techniques assimilated through Torvald’s and Krogstad’s oppression, not in order to exit towards the spectators in an everyday fashion (a pedestrian walking-out of the door) but to embrace an ‘unfamiliar, uncommon, paradoxical’, liquid physicality that incorporates inconclusiveness. It is as if Nora realised that she had been performing for an entire world behind the doors all along – a semiotic audience epitomised by Torvald and Krogstad – and is now eager not to leave the theatre but to explore the possibilities of a new relationship with the phenomenal audience in her new state as an emerging ‘anti-body’, aware of the limits of its own stage(s). She began the production in outright theatricality; got de-theatricalised through processes of both ‘expelling’ towards autonomy and ‘leaving external guarantees behind’; and now occupies the borders of the stage in hovering, explorative descent.51 The dramaturgy of her de-theatricalisation rendered Nora aware of the limitations and conventions – the existence even – of her stage. Now, rather than performing a fait-accompli exit (an exit that would mark an untroublesome distinction between ‘problematic’ stage and ‘hopeful’ reality/non-stage), she discovers a new scenic ‘anti-body’ and a new way of inhabiting the architecture of her stage without equating it with, or reducing it to, her (doll’s) house. Like a perennial squatter troubling capitalist notions of property and ownership from within, Nora remains at the edge of the stage in ways that disrupt its prior functions and reimagine her own performative ‘antibeing’. Far from being uncomplicatedly, unambiguously de-staged, she is still en-staged, in adventurous, probing perpetuity – but no longer unwillingly theatricalised.

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Figure 13.4  Nora’s exit: hovering at the edge of the stage; Sophia Hill (courtesy of Attis Theatre, photograph © Johanna Weber). Such mining of theatricality for its expressive and semiotic potential nods to modernist lineage(s) of twentieth-century European formalist artists and the genealogy of twentieth-century European directors/actor trainers, such as Meyerhold, Copeau, Decroux and Grotowski, who articulated a non-naturalist approach to the performer’s physicality. It also appears in line with the known Terzopoulian preoccupation with dramaturgies of geometric structure. Alongside this expressed interest in form, in terms of both aesthetic kinship and concrete theatre-making methodology, the performance meets many of the criteria Dio Kangelari identifies as distinctly modernist: the ‘crisis of bourgeois ideology’ (encapsulated in Nora’s denouncing of the bourgeois soundscape) or the ‘critique of the instrumentalised condition of the human’ (Nora’s ‘anti-body’ that resists her puppet- or clock-like physicality), among others.52 At the same time, the performance, as outlined earlier, marks significant departures from these modernist lineages as well as from Terzopoulos’s prior work. For the first time an ‘almost-pedestrian’ vocal delivery enters the Terzopoulian aural field, not as an echo of the play’s realist past but as a promise of a different ‘anti-voice’ for Nora’s future. Moreover, unlike modernist director/actor trainers who pursued voice-body integration and for whom recorded sound would be anathema, Terzopoulos exposes the process of bodies and voices coming together or apart, without any presupposition of integration, and makes extensive use of recorded music to overflow the performance soundscape with markers of Christian-capitalist ideology. And, crucially, his formalism might be modernist in its underpinnings of abstraction, deconstruction and distillation, but, at least in Nora, it does not render form autonomous,53 nor does it

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prompt a complete ‘giving in to pure form’.54 Forms are always-already imbued with concrete historical experience55 and, in this case, are staged as unfinished processes of deconstruction and reconstruction. This is not merely a difficult-to-pin-down relationship to modernism. It is an instance of a slippery, unruly modernism, a ‘suspended modernism’ that is called forward when modernity is in crisis.56 The production was rehearsed and staged in precisely such a borderline moment of suspension: the highly debated, tangential emergence of Greece from a decade of financial crisis and the exploration of what the future might hold for the country. Marilena Zaroulia and Philip Hager have proposed thinking through the Greek crisis using the concept of stasis, an involuntary, externally imposed moment of pause that breaks down or highlights the inequalities and precarity associated with neoliberal capitalism and necessitates concentrated thinking on the politics of another future.57 Nora’s deconstruction/reconstruction, as exemplified in the imperceptibly evolving flow of her exit at the edge of Attis Theatre’s stage, engages such an understanding of stasis. It was necessitated and designed elsewhere (by Ibsen, by Torvald, by her father, by economic crisis) but it is potently generative in the here-and-now: as a categorical negation of an oppressive past and as a question mark towards futurity, an aporia that never collapses into either hope or desperation. If the aim of the modernist artist was ‘to extract from fashion the poetry that resides in its historical envelope, to distil the eternal from the transitory’,58 Terzopoulos’s Nora distils and poeticises but does not discard the historical envelope as something superficial, circumstantial and transitory. Rather, it proposes lingering on and grappling with the transitory as a pressing political demand and offers the transitional as the crucial paradigm for current historicity in the Greek context.

Notes   1. The production opened in Athens in 2019 and was repeated in 2020 (until the first lockdown) and 2022. The costumes were designed by Yiorgos Eleftheriades, the music by Panayotis Velianitis and the lights by Terzopoulos and Konstantinos Bethanis.   2. Adrian Curtin, Avant-Garde Theatre Sound: Staging Sonic Modernity (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 150.   3. Ross Brown, Sound: A Reader in Theatre Practice (London: Red Globe Press, 2009), 79.   4. Dimitris Tsatsoulis, ‘Το Θαύμα και η Κόλαση [The Miracle and the Inferno]’, Ημεροδρόμος [Imerodromos], 2 January 2020, https://www.imerodromos.gr/to-thayma-kai-i-kolasi/ (accessed 6 October 2022). All translations of Greek sources are the authors’.   5. Evi Proussali, ‘Νόρα: Η Ενσάρκωση μια Διαρκούς Εκκρεμότητας [Nora: The Embodiment of a Constant Suspension]’, The Press Project, 10 April 2019, https://thepressproject. gr/kritiki-theatrou-nora-i-ensarkosi-mias-diarkous-ekkremotitas/ (accessed 6 October 2022).  6. Giorgos Sampatakakis, ‘Μηχανή Ίψεν – Μικρό Σχόλια για τη “Νόρα” του Θεάτρου Άττις [Ibsen Machine: Short Note on “Nora” by Attis Theatre]’, Athens Voice, 25 March 2019, https://www.athensvoice.gr/culture/theater/531035_mihani-ipsen-mikro-sholio-giati-nora-toy-theatroy-attis (accessed 6 October 2022).  7. Michael Billington, ‘Triumph from Tragedy: How Greece’s Theatre Roared out of a National Crisis’, The Guardian, 2 March 2020, https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2020/ mar/02/triumph-from-tragedy-how-greeces-theatre-roared-out-of-a-national-crisis (accessed 6 October 2022).

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  8. In Giorgos Sampatakakis, Γεωμετρώντας το Χάος: Μορφή και Μεταφυσική στο Θέατρο του Θεόδωρου Τερζόπουλου [Geometrising Chaos: Form and Metaphysics in the Theatre of Theodoros Terzopoulos] (Athens: Metaichmio, 2008), 175–6.   9. Ibid. 182. 10. For the notion of the vocalic body, see Steven Connor, Dumbstruck: A Cultural History of Ventriloquism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 35–6. 11. Tsatsoulis, ‘The Miracle and the Inferno’. 12. Henrik Ibsen, Nora, adap. and trans. from German Theodoros Terzopoulos, trans. from Greek to English Maria Vogiatzi (Athens: unpublished script, 2019), 1. 13. Although originating with Bakhtinian thought, our use of heteroglossia dialogues directly with more recent work on feminist heteroglossic literature and creolisation, alongside feminist critiques of heteroglossia as forgoing questions of gender and as presupposing a horizon of (linguistic) equality. See Laurie A. Finke, Feminist Theory, Women’s Writing (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1992), and Isabel Dulfano, ‘Heteroglossia and Indigenous Feminist Writing and Theory’, Knowledge Cultures 3, no. 4 (January 2015): 116–30. 14. Feminist scholarship, including Irigaray and Butler, has long critiqued the identification of logos as reason and as the foundation of instrumentalist subject with masculinity. A comparative discussion is offered in Herta Nagl-Docekal, ‘The Feminist Critique of Reason Revisited’, Hypatia 14, no. 1 (Winter 1999): 49–76. 15. Dimitris Tsatsoulis, ‘Glossolalia: From Artaud’s “Langage Universel” to Terzopoulos’ “Nuclear Rhythm of the Word”’, ‘The Return of Dionysos’: A Tribute to Theodoros Terzopoulos Symposium, European Cultural Center of Delphi, 5–8 July 2018, 1–2, https:// www.academia.edu/37363976/GLOSSOLALIA_FROM_ARTAUD_S_LANGAGE_ UNIVERSEL_TO_TERZOPOULOS_NUCLEAR_RHYTHM_OF_THE_WORD_ (accessed 6 October 2022). 16. Ibid. 6. Tsatsoulis has written of Hill’s earlier approach to Jocasta: ‘Hill recites the text as a lamenting ritual, treating speech as a sound universe where the signifiers are more important than the signified. [. . .] [This] is a pure acoustic pre-linguistic expression of the lamenting glossolalic body.’ 17. Ibid. 3. 18. In Sampatakakis, Geometrising Chaos, 178. Emphasis in original. 19. Ibsen, Nora, 1–2. 20. Penelope Chatzidimitriou, Θεόδωρος Τερζόπουλος: Από το Προσωπικό στο Παγκόσμιο [Theodoros Terzopoulos: From the Personal to the Universal] (Thessaloniki: University Studio Press, 2010), 34. 21. Theodoros Terzopoulos, Η Επιστροφή του Διόνυσου [The Return of Dionysus] (Athens: Attis Theatre Publications, 2015), 58–9. 22. Sampatakakis, Geometrising Chaos, 23. 23. Ibid. 68. 24. Ibid. 69. 25. For a first assessment of #MeToo and Greek theatre, see Marissia Fragkou, ‘“No One Will Ever Be Alone Again”: Performance of Precarity and Solidarity amid the Greek #MeToo’, Didaskalia 167 (February 2022), https://didaskalia.pl/en/article/no-one-will-ever-be-aloneagain-performances-precarity-and-solidarity-amid-greek-metoo (accessed 6 October 2022). 26. Although lengthier elaboration is beyond the scope of this chapter, we treat patriarchy in the context of Ibsen’s play and Terzopoulos’s staging in particular as incoherent in the Gramscian sense of the incoherence of contexts that might appear commonsensical (and become oppressive precisely as a consequence of their unquestioned cohesion and matter-of-fact-ness). 27. Elettra Carbone, ‘Nora: The Life and Afterlife of Ibsen’s A Doll’s House’, in Introduction to Nordic Cultures, ed. Annika Lindskog and Jakob Stougaard-Nielsen (London: UCL Press, 2020), 109.

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28. Penelope Chatzidimitriou, ‘Revealing the Trauma Underneath: Theodoros Terzopoulos’ Mauser, Alarme, Amor and Endgame as a Political Tetralogy’, HASE 2015 Conference: ‘Rethinking Democracy in Language, Literature and Culture’, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece, 15–17 May 2015, https://www.academia.edu/12558459/Revealing_ the_Trauma_Underneath_Theodoros_Terzopoulos_Mauser_Alarme_Amor_and_Endgame_ as_a_Political_Tetralogy, 1 (accessed 6 October 2022). 29. See Lise Vogel, Marxism and the Oppression of Women: Toward a Unitary Theory (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2013). 30. Cinzia Arruzza, ‘Remarks on Gender’, Viewpoint Magazine, 2 September 2014, https:// viewpointmag.com/2014/09/02/remarks-on-gender/ (accessed 6 October 2022). 31. Michael Herzfeld, ‘The Absence Presence: Discourses of Crypto-Colonialism’, The South Atlantic Quarterly 101, no. 4 (Fall 2002): 900. 32. Yona Stamatis, ‘Singing the Nation: Contemporary Greek Rebetiko Performance as Carnivalesque’, Journal of Interdisciplinary Voice Studies 2, no. 2 (Spring 2017): 142. 33. Ibsen, Nora, 3. 34. On bodily scoring and violence in Terzopoulos’s work, see Eleni Varopoulou, ‘Prologue’, in Theodoros Terzopoulos and the Attis Theatre: History, Methodology and Comments, ed. Theodoros Terzopoulos, Eleni Varopoulou and Marianne McDonald (Athens: Agra Publications, 2000), 9–10: ‘The passage from motion to motion, gesture to gesture, sound to sound or rhythm to rhythm is in itself a violent change, hardly rational and of no psychological consequence.’ 35. Chatzidimitriou, From the Personal to the Universal, 184. 36. Giorgos Sampatakakis, ‘The Theatre of Theodoros Terzopoulos, Ideology and Aesthetics’, in Dionysus in Exile: The Theatre of Theodoros Terzopoulos (Berlin: Theater der Zeit, 2019), 21. 37. In relation to a previous production, Alarme, Chatzidimitriou, ‘Revealing the Trauma Underneath’, 6, notes: ‘The verbal fragments – often in English or in French – are as if they are the vehicle of capitalist and imperialist thought and action.’ 38. In Renata Salecl, On Anxiety: Thinking in Action (London and New York: Routledge, 2004), 62–3, 82–4. 39. Ibid. 32. 40. Michel Houellebecq, Les Particules Élémentaires [Τα Στοιχειώδη Σωματίδια] (Athens: Vivliopoleio tis Estias, 2017), 216. 41. We hear Nora’s voicing as ‘en-voicing’ in Carolyn Abbate’s sense: as an in-performance process that can upturn the subordination of women’s voices to predetermined scripts (in Abbate’s case studies male opera composers and librettists, in this case Ibsen’s text and Torvald’s ‘operation’). See Carolyn Abbate, ‘Opera; or, the Envoicing of Women’, in Musicology and Difference: Gender and Sexuality in Music Scholarship, ed. Ruth Solie (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 236. ‘Envoicing’ foregrounds the process of bringing voice and (its) body together – rather than accepting them as ontologically conjoined from the outset – and, hence, creates opportunities for singular, embodied female voices to acquire agency and subvert top-down authorship. For a contextualisation of Abbate’s work within lineages of feminist thinking on voice and its potential for theatrical performance, see Konstantinos Thomaidis, Theatre & Voice (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), 35–45. 42. Norie Neumark, ‘Doing Things with Voices: Performativity and Voice’, in Voice: Vocal Aesthetics in Digital Arts and Media, ed. Norie Neumark, Ross Gibson and Theo van Leeuwen (Cambridge, MA, and London: MIT Press, 2010), 114. 43. For a discussion of Nora’s monologues in Ibsen’s play, see Toril Moi, ‘“First and Foremost a Human Being”: Idealism, Theatre and Gender in A Doll’s House’, Modern Drama 49, no. 3 (Fall 2006): 273–4. 44. Ibsen, Nora, 10.

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45. Steven Connor, ‘Sound and the Self’, in Hearing History: A Reader, ed. Mark Michael Smith (Athens and London: University of Georgia Press, 2004), 54. 46. Terzopoulos, The Return of Dionysus, 66–9. 47. Connor, ‘Sound and the Self’, 54. 48. Terzopoulos, The Return of Dionysus, 67. 49. Terzopoulos used ‘The Blue Danube’ in a production of MedeaMaterial by Heiner Müller as a symbol of European bourgeois culture in a contemporary landscape of desolation and decomposition and a critique for a collapsing Europe. 50. Terzopoulos has only staged one naturalist text before, Mademoiselle Julie, in 2008. 51. Freddy Decreus, The Ritual Theatre of Theodoros Terzopoulos (London: Routledge, 2019), 11, has identified descent as a recurrent topic in Terzopoulian dramaturgy, linking it to ‘Persephone’s journey into Hades’ and other characters’ self-transforming visits to the underworld (Orpheus, Heracles, Odysseus), noting that ‘many characters staged [by] the director inhabited indirectly or metaphorically a personal kind of underworld, not capable as they were to restore connections with an upper world that looked alienating, dangerous and threatening’. These characters were ‘involved in a continuous process of loss and fall, of winning and losing’. 52. Dio Kangelari, ‘Όροι του “Μοντέρνου” στη Νεοελληνική Σκηνή [Terms of “the Modern” in Modern-Greek Stage]’, in II Panhellenic Symposium of Theatre Studies Annals, ed. Konstantza Georgakaki (Athens: Ergo, 2004), 369–70. 53. Eleni Vakalo has identified the autonomy of forms as key to modernity in visual arts. See Eleni Vakalo, Μοντέρνο – Μεταμοντέρνο: Συνδέσεις και Αποστάσεις [The Modern – The Postmodern: Links and Distances Between] (Athens: Vakalo School Publications, 2001). 54. Assessing earlier productions, Greek theatre critic Eleni Varopoulou argued that in Terzopoulos’s performances, the audience watches ‘the actor’s complete giving in to pure form’. See Varopoulou, ‘Prologue’, 11. 55. As argued in Sampatakakis, Geometrising Chaos. 56. Vassilis Boyatzis, Μετέωρος Μοντερνισμός: Τεχνολογία, Ιδεολογία της Επιστήμης και Πολιτική στην Ελλάδα του Μεσοπολέμου (1922–1940) [Suspended Modernism: Technology, Ideology of Science, and Politics in Interwar Greece (1922–1940)] (Athens: Eurasia, 2012). 57. Marilena Zaroulia notes: ‘stasis [. . .] emerges as an ethical process and practice, where “being beside oneself” disturbs capitalism’s temporalities and hierarchies.’ Philip Hager identifies ‘a polyrhythmia of stasis (meaning, following the Greek root of the word, stopover, stance, standstill and rebellion)’. Zaroulia, ‘At the Gates of Europe: Sacred Objects, Other Spaces and Performances of Dispossession’, 209, and Hager, ‘Towards a Nomadology of Class Struggle: Rhythms, Spaces and Occupy London Stock Exchange’, 52, both in Performances of Capitalism, Crises and Resistance: Inside/Outside Europe, ed. Marilena Zaroulia and Philip Hager (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015). 58. Kangelari, ‘Terms of “the Modern” in Modern-Greek Stage’, 368.

Works Cited Abbate, Carolyn. ‘Opera; or, the Envoicing of Women’. In Musicology and Difference: Gender and Sexuality in Music Scholarship, edited by Ruth Solie, 225–58. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993. Arruzza, Cinzia. ‘Remarks on Gender’. Viewpoint Magazine, 2 September 2014. https://viewpointmag.com/2014/09/02/remarks-on-gender/ (accessed 6 October 2022). Billington, Michael. ‘Triumph from Tragedy: How Greece’s Theatre Roared out of a National Crisis’. The Guardian, 2 March 2020. https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2020/mar/02/ triumph-from-tragedy-how-greeces-theatre-roared-out-of-a-national-crisis (accessed 6 October 2022).

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Boyatzis, Vassilis. Μετέωρος Μοντερνισμός: Τεχνολογία, Ιδεολογία της Επιστήμης και Πολιτική στην Ελλάδα του Μεσοπολέμου (1922–1940) [Suspended Modernism: Technology, Ideology of Science, and Politics in Interwar Greece (1922–1940)]. Athens: Eurasia, 2012. Brown, Ross. Sound: A Reader in Theatre Practice. London: Red Globe Press, 2009. Carbone, Elettra. ‘Nora: The Life and Afterlife of Ibsen’s A Doll’s House’. In Introduction to Nordic Cultures, edited by Annika Lindskog and Jakob Stougaard-Nielsen, 102–16. London: UCL Press, 2020. Chatzidimitriou, Penelope. ‘Revealing the Trauma Underneath: Theodoros Terzopoulos’ Mauser, Alarme, Amor and Endgame as a Political Tetralogy’. HASE 2015 Conference: ‘Rethinking Democracy in Language, Literature and Culture’, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece, 15–17 May 2015. https://www.academia.edu/12558459/Revealing_the_Trauma_Underneath_ Theodoros_Terzopoulos_Mauser_Alarme_Amor_and_Endgame_as_a_Political_Tetralogy (accessed 6 October 2022). Chatzidimitriou, Penelope. Θεόδωρος Τερζόπουλος: Από το Προσωπικό στο Παγκόσμιο [Theodoros Terzopoulos: From the Personal to the Universal]. Thessaloniki: University Studio Press, 2010. Connor, Steven. Dumbstruck: A Cultural History of Ventriloquism. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000. Connor, Steven. ‘Sound and the Self’. In Hearing History: A Reader, edited by Mark Michael Smith, 54–66. Athens and London: University of Georgia Press, 2004. Curtin, Adrian. Avant-Garde Theatre Sound: Staging Sonic Modernity. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. Decreus, Freddy. The Ritual Theatre of Theodoros Terzopoulos. London: Routledge, 2019. Dulfano, Isabel. ‘Heteroglossia and Indigenous Feminist Writing and Theory’. Knowledge Cultures 3, no. 4 (January 2015): 116–30. Finke, Laurie A. Feminist Theory, Women’s Writing. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1992. Fragkou, Marissia. ‘“No One Will Ever Be Alone Again”: Performance of Precarity and Solidarity amid the Greek #MeToo’. Didaskalia 167 (February 2022). https://didaskalia.pl/en/ article/no-one-will-ever-be-alone-again-performances-precarity-and-solidarity-amid-greekmetoo (accessed 6 October 2022). Hager, Philip. ‘Towards a Nomadology of Class Struggle: Rhythms, Spaces and Occupy London Stock Exchange’. In Performances of Capitalism, Crises and Resistance: Inside/Outside Europe, edited by Marilena Zaroulia and Philip Hager, 37–55. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015. Herzfeld, Michael. ‘The Absence Presence: Discourses of Crypto-Colonialism’. The South Atlantic Quarterly 101, no. 4 (Fall 2002): 899–926. Houellebecq, Michel. Les Particules Élémentaires [Τα Στοιχειώδη Σωματίδια]. Greek translation by Alexis Emmanuil. Athens: Vivliopoleio tis Estias, 2017. Ibsen, Henrik. Nora. Adaptation and translation from German by Theodoros Terzopoulos. Translation from Greek to English by Maria Vogiatzi. Athens: unpublished script, 2019. Kangelari, Dio. ‘Όροι του “Μοντέρνου” στη Νεοελληνική Σκηνή [Terms of “the Modern” in Modern-Greek Stage]’. In II Panhellenic Symposium of Theatre Studies Annals, edited by Konstantza Georgakaki, 367–70. Athens: Ergo, 2004. Moi, Toril. ‘“First and Foremost a Human Being”: Idealism, Theatre and Gender in A Doll’s House’. Modern Drama 49, no. 3 (Fall 2006): 256–84. Nagl-Docekal, Herta. ‘The Feminist Critique of Reason Revisited’. Hypatia 14, no. 1 (Winter 1999): 49–76. Neumark, Norie. ‘Doing Things with Voices: Performativity and Voice’. In Voice: Vocal Aesthetics in Digital Arts and Media, edited by Norie Neumark, Ross Gibson and Theo van Leeuwen, 95–118. Cambridge, MA, and London: MIT Press, 2010. Proussali, Evi. ‘Νόρα: Η Ενσάρκωση μια Διαρκούς Εκκρεμότητας [Nora: The Embodiment of a Constant Suspension]’. The Press Project, 10 April 2019. https://thepressproject.gr/kritikitheatrou-nora-i-ensarkosi-mias-diarkous-ekkremotitas/ (accessed 6 October 2022).

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Salecl, Renata. On Anxiety: Thinking in Action. London and New York: Routledge, 2004. Sampatakakis, Giorgos. Γεωμετρώντας το Χάος: Μορφή και Μεταφυσική στο Θέατρο του Θεόδωρου Τερζόπουλου [Geometrising Chaos: Form and Metaphysics in the Theatre of Theodoros Terzopoulos]. Athens: Metaichmio, 2008. Sampatakakis, Giorgos. ‘Μηχανή Ίψεν – Μικρό Σχόλια για τη “Νόρα” του Θεάτρου Άττις [Ibsen Machine: Short Note on “Nora” by Attis Theatre]’. Athens Voice, 25 March 2019. https:// www.athensvoice.gr/culture/theater/531035_mihani-ipsen-mikro-sholio-gia-ti-nora-toytheatroy-attis (accessed 6 October 2022). Sampatakakis, Giorgos. ‘The Theatre of Theodoros Terzopoulos, Ideology and Aesthetics’. In Dionysus in Exile: The Theatre of Theodoros Terzopoulos, 18–32. Berlin: Theater der Zeit, 2019. Stamatis, Yona. ‘Singing the Nation: Contemporary Greek Rebetiko Performance as Carnivalesque’. Journal of Interdisciplinary Voice Studies 2, no. 2 (Spring 2017): 137–56. Terzopoulos, Theodoros. Η Επιστροφή του Διόνυσου [The Return of Dionysus]. Athens: Attis Theatre Publications, 2015. Thomaidis, Konstantinos. Theatre & Voice. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017. Tsatsoulis, Dimitris. ‘Glossolalia: From Artaud’s “Langage Universel” to Terzopoulos’ “Nuclear Rhythm of the Word”’. ‘The Return of Dionysos’: A Tribute to Theodoros Terzopoulos Symposium, European Cultural Center of Delphi, 5–8 July 2018. https://www.academia. edu/37363976/GLOSSOLALIA_FROM_ARTAUD_S_LANGAGE_UNIVERSEL_TO_ TERZOPOULOS_NUCLEAR_RHYTHM_OF_THE_WORD_ (accessed 6 October 2022). Tsatsoulis, Dimitris. ‘Το Θαύμα και η Κόλαση [The Miracle and the Inferno]’. Ημεροδρόμος [Imerodromos], 2 January 2020. https://www.imerodromos.gr/to-thayma-kai-i-kolasi/ (accessed 6 October 2022). Vakalo, Eleni. Μοντέρνο – Μεταμοντέρνο: Συνδέσεις και Αποστάσεις [The Modern – The Postmodern: Links and Distances Between]. Athens: Vakalo School Publications, 2001. Varopoulou, Eleni. ‘Prologue’. In Theodoros Terzopoulos and the Attis Theatre: History, Methodology and Comments, edited by Theodoros Terzopoulos, Eleni Varopoulou and Marianne McDonald, 7–14. Athens: Agra Publications, 2000. Vogel, Lise. Marxism and the Oppression of Women: Toward a Unitary Theory. Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2013. Zaroulia, Marilena. ‘At the Gates of Europe: Sacred Objects, Other Spaces and Performances of Dispossession’. In Performances of Capitalism, Crises and Resistance: Inside/Outside Europe, edited by Marilena Zaroulia and Philip Hager, 193–210. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015.

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14 After and Against Strindberg: A Conversation about Missing Julie Kaite O’Reilly and Adrian Curtin

Adrian Curtin [AC]: What led you to adapt August Strindberg’s play Miss Julie? Kaite O’Reilly [KO’R]: I’d always found it interesting, but deeply problematic. It’s misogynistic, it could be argued, of course. Strindberg was a product of his time, but there was something about the character dynamics that stayed in my head. I started imagining putting the play in that extraordinary period between the World Wars. And, as a disabled person and a proudly identifying ‘crip’, I thought it could be very interesting to explore disability as one of the last taboos. When it was written, the taboo might have been class, between the haughty Miss Julie and her underling. We know there have been other productions in the past that have touched on race etc., and I felt that one of the last taboos was around disability. Even now, in 2022, people seem to be surprised when disabled people are romantically involved with non-disabled people. And I wanted to explore that as a taboo. I also wanted to set it in a period where it made sense to me. What if Julie’s mother was actually a New Woman and had been involved with the Welsh suffrage movement? I was really interested in what they called ‘the surplus women’ at that time in history. If you’re a woman in 1919, you’ve been bred for a certain future. You were going to be a wife, a mother, a housekeeper, and that’s right across all the classes. What happens if that is interrupted by one million men being slaughtered at the Somme? And I find the impact of ‘the surplus women’ fascinating. They became teachers. They became useful. And then the tension between the men coming back from fighting and women who had been showing their skills so strongly, keeping everything going during the First World War. First of all, the path that they were supposed to follow, for many of them, was now blocked off because their fiancés or possible future mates were not available because of the terrible death in the trenches. But not only that: they’re now supposed to move aside and become invisible to let the men have the jobs back again. And so that, in the context of the decisions that Miss Julie makes, was really exciting to me as a way of looking through the prism of that historical period – surplus women, the suffragists, the beginnings of having the right to vote, universal suffrage – but also more and more disabled people being visible on the streets, because many of the people returning from the First World War were often horrifically disabled.

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I thought this could be a really wonderful period to look at disability as a taboo. And also, of course, we’re just about to go into the Jazz Age – we’re about to go into the 1920s and the siren call of America, where you can go and reinvent yourself, in theory. AC: To what extent do the historical events that directly precede your play – the end of the First World War, the 1918 influenza pandemic, etc. – recontextualise the action and drive the decisions the characters make? KO’R: Those historical events are the drivers of my play. They also coincide with the notion of universal suffrage, free love, the notion of a woman not being a chattel but actually an equal who might participate equally in the sexual act, along with the man. It’s an exciting time period. AC: And a destabilising one. Part of what attracts John and Julie to one another in your play is a shared appreciation of the precarious nature of the world – how, as a result of the war, in particular, old structures and hierarchies have been shaken, taken apart, made topsy-turvy, and are being reassembled. This state of flux strikes me as being quintessentially modernist – an exhilarating, but also possibly terrifying, way of being. John and Julie imagine that they might be able to remake themselves as liberated people in a new, more modern world. KO’R: Absolutely – the idea of the old structures being shaken to the point that they could be collapsed, and that is because of the First World War. The first time they used the phrase ‘build back better’ – it’s familiar now to us – but it was used just after the First World War, and it was in newspapers, where they said it is our duty to build back better. The possibility of renewal, of being radical, of being revolutionary, was in things like Peg’s Paper, which was a very popular working-class women’s magazine at the time. It would give you household tips as well as romance stories, but it was saying it is our duty to build back better after the suffering. And so, for me, there was resonance for the time we are now coming out of – the pandemic – where we’re still not quite sure. It’s a similar thing that you just described, that state of flux. But for me it was also that sense of having to be revolutionary, doing things new, being different, just to make sure that the sacrifices in Flanders Fields and elsewhere were not in vain. The idea that you could build back better and make a better society. Have universal suffrage. Have more equality . . . just the lived experience of what women were doing, instead of keep the home fires burning. I deliberately set the play in a grand house in Wales, because that structure was so entrenched for so long – the Upstairs Downstairs . . . we knew where we all were. We knew God told us what our position was, and we held it. And then those structures that Julie would have been bred for were suddenly under threat. Because if you’ve already been out in the world, and been independent, and earned your money, you’re not going to then still be saying ‘yes miss, no sir’, and be there, ready for them to call on the bell any time they want. After the First World War, that was when the grand houses

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and that whole hierarchy and that societal structure collapsed, and that was particularly strong in Wales. That’s why I wanted to set the play in that time. It just felt everything had been shaken to the core. Everything you knew, whether it was your belief in God, whether it was your belief in your so-called betters, everything you thought about was rattled and began to be dismantled and was falling apart. And I chose to make Christine not the fiancée of Jean (or John, in my version) because I also wanted to look at somebody desperately trying to hold on to how things were. The fact that she’s widowed – it’s terrifying. Everything that she knew has gone – even Miss Julie, supposedly, her better. Miss Julie is behaving in this way! We know, historically, at that time there were all kinds of shenanigans going on in these great country houses at the weekend – parties with bed hopping and whatever else. And, in my play, John says: ‘You rely on our discretion to keep the surface of respectability as we serve you food and launder your stained sheets and more fool us, we do.’ So, for me, every single thing was under question, and falling apart, and being challenged, and there was a feeling that we can do better than the corruption of before. AC: Is that what led you to change the ending of the play? In your version John does not direct Julie to kill herself. Instead, the possibility is raised that they might follow through on their plan to leave as a couple. They might try to make a go of it and remake themselves and the world around them. ‘Let’s go,’ Julie says to John at the very end of the play, and there is an immediate blackout. This puts me in mind of Vladimir and Estragon at the end of Waiting for Godot, except without the contradicting stage direction ‘They do not move’. Your characters might go, but, either way, Julie will not end her life. KO’R: As John says in my play, ‘there’s been enough death’. I’m tired, I’m tired of women just having no alternative but to kill themselves. I’m tired of Hedda Gabler shooting herself. I’m tired of Miss Julie slicing her throat. I’m tired of all this shit . . . the representation that’s still going on that that is a woman’s only choice, and I think it does communicate something to contemporary audiences. If you’re seeing that, then it is carrying on those old lies that women have no power, no choice, no alternative. And yes, of course, in certain structures of society in the past it would have been completely, or almost completely, impossible to do anything else but end it all, because it’s the easiest or maybe the only option. But I really was determined. I’d just had enough. I’ve had enough of women dying or having to die because they desired. Because of desire. Because of female desire. And that’s also why I wanted John to be disabled, because that’s a taboo in so many ways. So many people still think that if you’re disabled, you are asexual or unable in some way. I wanted John desired by a woman who is fuelled by the sense of desire (Figure 14.1). And to have him be someone who will stand up to her, unlike her fiancé. John says to Julie in my play: ‘We’re modern, we’re made for New York – look at us: We’re the new breed.’ All that stuff was just really delicious for me to explore, to show other alternatives and possibilities against that particular time in history when so many things were changing.

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Figure 14.1  Heledd Gwynn and Tim Pritchett in Missing Julie by Kaite O’Reilly, directed by Chelsea Walker (photograph by Marc Brenner, courtesy of Marc Brenner and Theatr Clwyd).

I like the story to carry on in the audience’s head. I love ambiguity. It was lovely, talking to people after the show. People would often say to me ‘what happened (next)?’ and I’d say to them: ‘What do you think happened?’ And some would go: ‘I love the idea that Julie and John got in the dog cart and they go to Liverpool and then they go to America!’, because, of course, everybody is familiar with the great American novels. Of the people in the audience I spoke to, very few of them thought that Julie and John would be caught. Everyone wanted them to fly. AC: I wonder if that is partly because the character of John in your play is more sympathetic than Strindberg’s Jean, who is revealed to be a duplicitous cad. In your version, John and Julie seem more like kindred spirits, temperamentally and politically. KO’R: I would question whether Jean is, actually, a cad. I read a lot of translations of the original. Some follow that pattern, but some won’t necessarily have him as being a cad, but present him as being stuck in a structure and not able to imagine anything else, so he tells Julie ‘it’s off’. It’s a failure of his imagination, part of his indoctrination – that the bell rings, and the bell rings, and the bell rings, and my master calls . . . ‘If his lordship told me to slit my

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throat I would’ . . . Both John and Julie are interrupting their indoctrination and the rigid structures they’re in at a time when those rigid structures are suddenly wobbling. So I don’t see Jean as a cad, or he’s not necessarily a cad. AC: That’s very interesting. In thinking about Miss Julie in relation to all the different versions of it that exist – translations, adaptations, etc. – the characters are plural entities; they are fields of possibilities rather than fixed, unitary creations. There is no single Jean and no single Julie. And what we are doing in acts of reading, translating, analysing, adapting, performing is realising certain potentials in the characters. I wonder if the title of your play, Missing Julie, connects to this sense of characters as being fluid works-in-progress. In other words, one might take the title to mean that aspects of Julie have been ‘missed’ before and are now being captured, or that the character has previously been misunderstood or not fully realised. KO’R: The title of my play is a bit ambiguous, but it just seemed right. I like the idea you propose – not to say this person got it right and this person got it wrong. It’s always a reinterpretation. Missing Julie . . . I’m missing certain parts of Miss Julie out. I’m deliberately missing certain things. I think that perhaps we’ve missed possibilities of Julie in the past, but we’ve got different potential, perhaps, with her now. People will know that I am being playful with the title Miss Julie. But what drove me was what you said about that sense of constant iterations, that certain points or possibilities of that figure in the context of that dramaturgy and that story might have been missed opportunities in the past, and I’m actually exploring them in a new historical context whilst also staying pretty darn close to the original. Even the very problematic backstory (about Julie’s parents) where it stops the action. I kept being advised to cut that. But I’m in relationship with what the original was, the original structure, throughlines, sensibilities, and logic. And so my enjoyment is partly to go: ‘How can I create a different iteration that is also recognisable and still in dialogue in some way with the original?’ AC: I’m interested in the phrase you use to frame the play – Missing Julie (after Strindberg). What are you hoping to signal with the phrase ‘after Strindberg’? KO’R: [laughs] However people want to interpret it. I think it’s quite clear. As in, that acknowledgement that, yes, I’m taking from him. I am also coming after Strindberg (historically). Also, all the things we were saying about the iterations of this story and characters and dynamic – being part of this long line that comes after Strindberg. And hopefully there’ll be others after me, even though it’s so problematic, the original play, in so many ways in our contemporary contexts. But it’s a sign of greatness that something is constantly being reinvented and explored, and is being that vehicle yet again, whether it’s the ancient Greek playwrights, or whether it’s Shakespeare or Strindberg or Ibsen or Chekhov or whatever. We are endlessly fascinated by the story of Miss Julie and the combination of those three characters [Julie, Jean, Christine] in particular. We want to endlessly re-explore them from our context, from our time. So, even though my time is not 1919, there

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is such resonance for us in the early 2020s, post pandemic. ‘After Strindberg’ – it’s acknowledging him, but it’s also . . . not Strindberg. It’s Missing Julie by Kaite O’Reilly, after Strindberg. So it’s also to do with that acknowledgement that I’ve done something different, that I haven’t just repeated. Many of the plot points are the same, but there are also many things that are reinvented, so it’s also not fair, or appropriate, to then go ‘by Strindberg, in a version by Kaite O’Reilly’. AC: Is Strindberg someone who has loomed large in your artistic imagination? KO’R: I think he’s hung out there . . . he’s been there. Partly because I did a certain type of university degree and there are certain figures, characters, plays and periods that you study. Probably because Miss Julie got me at a very young age when I was first beginning to look at and study theatre scripts. I don’t know a huge amount about Strindberg. But you are aware of these great figures – and I don’t mean ‘great’ as in ‘brilliant’, necessarily, I mean as in ‘big’ – figures that are there in the landscape. AC: Do you think about yourself, as a playwright, in relation to those figures, as coming out of that tradition of dramatic modernism? Or is it removed from your thinking and practice? KO’R: That’s a really interesting question. I would say not – with Strindberg – in one way. And yet, in another way, I’d say yes. When I did Aeschylus . . . when I did Persians [for National Theatre Wales], it was a visceral feeling [of connection]. It was extraordinary. I absolutely felt that I was part of a lineage that was almost like a bloodline. The way I described it was like a rope that went, from me, all the way back (as much as we can tell through the translators and the different versions and all the rest) to that original voice. I felt that I’d come out of that lineage – the way that I worked, the way I engaged with it, the stupid amount of translations that I read. I can’t read Persians in the original. I don’t have ancient Greek, but I really felt that connection. With Strindberg, it’s almost like I’m deliberately taking a position against him, so as well as ‘after Strindberg’ it’s almost like ‘against Strindberg’, in a way. It does feel almost more like a slight opposition than a continuation of. Yes, I know how much I’ve gained from his work, and I know I’ve benefited. I’ve learned, I’ve been shaped, I’ve been guided, I’ve been directed by so much of that, by those writers that came before me. But I feel I’m a bit like the ‘uppity female’ standing up and going, ‘oh, by the way. . .’ to Strindberg. AC: That’s probably a healthy attitude to take, though, not just with regard to Strindberg but to modernism in general and to modernist drama – to acknowledge the influence and the inspiration, but to adopt an attitude of critical distance . . . the warm embrace that’s also the suspicious glance . . . in order not to replicate the problems that are inherent within it. Modernist work is often flawed in many ways. Yet it seems better to engage with the work and remould it than to conclude that it should be forgotten or ‘cancelled’. Instead we can have a healthy, antagonistic, affectionate, complicated tussle with all

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of that work, all of that history, and bring it with us, but keep questioning it, probing it. KO’R: I think that’s gorgeous. I love how you say that. When I was saying, with inverted commas, the ‘uppity woman’, in sign language, it’s that [points two index fingers at one another, leaving a space in between]. It’s taking someone on, but it’s not an aggression, like ‘fuck you’. AC: That sign is a bit like the famous Michelangelo painting in the Sistine Chapel, The Creation of Adam, with the figures of God and Adam nearly touching their index fingers. KO’R: But in that image God is the superior, coming down. . . AC: But there’s potential within the space between the two pointing fingers . . . almost meeting. . . KO’R: Absolutely. And it’s a frisson. And it’s almost equal. AC: Quite! I’d like to circle back to the issue of disability in Missing Julie. Did you wish to foreground or normalise John’s disability? It’s not discussed that much in the play, but I guess it’s embedded in a deeper way, so the characters don’t need to discourse about it. KO’R: It’s partly an acceptance of ‘this is how it is’, but it’s also partly the invisibility, where it’s so unimportant and of no consequence that it’s not talked about and it’s not referred to. Of course, in production we had a disabled performer playing John, who used a prosthetic and crutches. We actually got him an old leg, an archaic, vintage prosthetic from that period which was made from wood and tin, and is now over a hundred years old. And Tim [Pritchett], the actor, had to learn how to use it, because he uses a fabulous, light, carbon prosthetic himself, like the ones used by Paralympians. And he learned to move on this wooden-tin prosthetic, with crutches. So, part of it is about the movement, about the actuality. He rolled up his trouser leg. He wanted to. And we all thought the old prosthetic was very beautiful as well. He wanted to show and display that. As a theatre-maker I write things, knowing they will be – or assuming they will be – for production. I’m also aware of having an atypical body on stage, and the power of that in itself that isn’t necessarily referenced. I didn’t want us to all sit down and have a whole conversation about disability politics, because, also, the disability politics of that time are different from my radical politics. I’m a radical crip. That’s how I identify politically, culturally. That’s a very particular thing. And so the approach I took involved the lightest possible touch. Yet it’s imbued through the whole texture of the experience of that eighty-five minutes, or whatever it was, of theatre. And it is shocking when a character turns around and says ‘cripple!’. And it’s even more shocking – and I talked to a few audience members about this – when they go ‘Oh my god, the actor really is disabled’, as opposed to we’re pretending.

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AC: It’s not incidental either, of course, that John is not disabled from birth, or disabled during the war, but as a result of a hunting accident involving Julie’s father. KO’R: I wanted that. It fires when I’ve got him saying: ‘Well, they’ve a taste of their own medicine now. All those heroes hobbling home to a lukewarm welcome, unable to make ends meet. They’ll be out begging, cap in hand, unless we rethink our ways. And on the streets, those men with the shattered faces hidden behind tin masks . . . They know now how it is to be gawped at, shuddered over.’ AC: The returning soldiers have joined the ranks of the broken, who are the people you are championing – all of us, in fact. KO’R: John says: ‘That’s what real life is – being broken but carrying on, and the sooner we realise that, and make our world accordingly, the better.’ If you like, that’s where my crip politics come out. Because there is nothing wrong with being broken, or working class, or female. And the sooner we restructure our world accordingly, the better, and so the play is a call for that kind of inclusivity. For universal design. For a world and its structures that try not to have those value judgements. I work from the social model of disability that sees what disables as the barricades and the barriers that are attitudinal and physical in our society. It’s a social construct, just like gender. The medical model of disability works on a deficit – absolute deficit – model. So John, there, is challenging directly that notion of the deficit model. Because there’s no perfect body. We all think we’ve got some kind of ideal, and that’s unattainable, whereas actually we’re all in different ways broken, and that’s absolutely fine. AC: ‘Temporarily abled’ is how you once described it to me. We’re all only ever temporarily abled, if that. KO’R: It’s a slang. It came from the Disabled People’s Movement. They talked about TABs. And that was the ‘temporarily able bodied’. We’re all going to be disabled, because it’s the norm, whether through age, injury, war, accident . . . or our hearing starts going or our knees become arthritic, or whatever it may be. Disability is the norm. AC: That’s quite Beckettian, as a philosophy – that sense of being broken and carrying on in a state of brokenness and making the best of our lot, our fragile human condition. KO’R: Absolutely. I’ll go on – I can’t – I’ll go on.

Editorial Note This dialogue was conducted online on 14 February 2022. It was subsequently edited for clarity, precision and length.

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15 ‘A Voice She Did Not Recognise At First’: Touretteshero’s Neurodiverse Presentation of Samuel Beckett’s Not I Matthew Pountney

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he Equality Act of 2010 (UK) legally protects disabled people, or those with other ‘protected characteristics’, from discrimination. It requires employers and service providers to make ‘reasonable adjustments’ to ensure that disabled people aren’t disadvantaged because of their impairments or their physical or mental health conditions. That same year, in 2010, I co-founded Touretteshero with Jess Thom in response to her diagnosis of Tourettes Syndrome. Our aim was to celebrate the humour and creativity of the condition and change the world ‘one tic at a time’. Jess and I come from a background in adventure play and we fell into theatre by accident after being asked to sit separately from the rest of the audience while watching Extreme Rambling by Mark Thomas due to a complaint about Jess’s tics. This experience became the provocation for our first show, Backstage in Biscuit Land. In a monologue that we referred to as ‘the serious bit’, Jess says: ‘I was gutted. We were watching something about segregation, about separation, and I wasn’t welcome to watch it with other people . . . I couldn’t concentrate on what Mark was saying because I felt utterly, utterly humiliated, embarrassed and alone. I wanted to leave straight away and never come back. It felt like an experience I could not or should not access because it was damaging to me.’ We took Biscuit Land to the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in 2014 with the sole intention of seeing if we could do it, and with no idea what to expect. It sold out, won a Total Theatre award and went on to tour nationally and internationally for the next three years. In 2015, during a meeting with another theatre company, we mentioned that we were interested in creating a neurodiverse production of Samuel Beckett’s short play Not I. A member of the other company jokingly told us we would never get permission from the Beckett estate. We took this as something of a challenge and, using the Equality Act as a framework, I began wondering what ‘reasonable adjustments’ we could expect in order to make Not I work for Jess’s unique neurology. Whilst touring Biscuit Land we had many conversations with well-meaning theatre people who told us that, while they wanted to make their programme more accessible, they hadn’t found ‘the right type of work’. We became increasingly aware of a type of cultural curation which involved non-disabled programmers deciding what work should or should not be made accessible to disabled people. Staging a notoriously obtuse and non-accessible modernist monologue in an inclusive and accessible way seemed like a good way to

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challenge this preconception. Once again, we found ourselves not knowing if our theatrical ambitions would work, but trying anyway. I had first encountered Not I as an undergraduate at Goldsmiths in the early noughties. I vividly remember sitting in front of an old CRT monitor in the library and loading a video cassette of Billie Whitelaw’s 1973 BBC production into the machine. I found it claustrophobic and mesmerising, and I wanted it to stop almost as soon as it began. Fourteen minutes later, when Mouth’s urgent utterings finally faded into silence, I found myself wanting to experience it all over again. Years later, when Jess’s vocal tics intensified and began to have a bigger impact on her life, I found myself once more thinking about Mouth and her uncontrollable urge to tell. The first time we watched Not I together, Jess fell asleep. Somehow, though, it managed to become a creative reference for us, and over time the idea of our neurodiverse presentation took form. There was something absurdly appealing about the impossibility of the task, and about how deeply that resonated with our outsider understanding of Beckett’s work. How would a performer who cannot fully control the words that come out of her mouth perform a deliberately impenetrable monologue about a woman who cannot control the words that come out of her mouth? We didn’t know, but we were willing to ‘throw up and go’. There were many barriers to overcome: the stringent staging instructions, the perceived strictures of the Beckett estate, Jess’s own unpredictable body and mind, our decision to make ours a bilingual production of British Sign Language and spoken English, our determination to open up Beckett’s work to an assumed disabled audience, and our strategic ambition to introduce detailed discussion of disability arts, culture and politics into the academic study of Beckett’s work. As a disabled-led company, we have become aware of the privilege of risk-taking within the arts. By this, I mean we knew we had to get our approach to the Beckett estate just right and to ensure our production values were robust, not simply to achieve a positive outcome for ourselves, but also to safeguard future approaches to the estate by other disabled artists or disabled-led companies. We were conscious of the specific jeopardy that Jess faces as a disabled artist when performing to non-disabled audiences. She did not have the privilege of representing her voice alone, because in some ways she is representing the disability arts scene as a whole to anyone who is new to it, and unsure of its merits. Thankfully, the Beckett estate was extremely supportive of the production and there was no need for us to have recourse to the detail of the Equality Act. The estate made their own ‘reasonable adjustments’ to Jess’s contract to acknowledge that she makes involuntary noises and movements called tics. Jess will be performing Mouth in the Production during which her tics mean that there will be a chance of occasional involuntary vocalisations and movements during the performances. Yet it wasn’t until we began to explore the text in more detail that we began to understand quite how closely Mouth’s story matched Jess’s. As Jess says during her introduction to the piece: ‘I was stunned to find line after line that spoke deeply to my lived experience. So much so that if it hadn’t been written years before I was born, I might have been tempted to call a lawyer!’ By slowing the text down to learn it, Jess found within those garbled lines the voice she did not recognise at first. Far from being disembodied and abstract, we came to see Mouth as a real woman with real experiences to share. We wanted our Mouth to

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be someone the audience cared about and could relate to as much as we did. We knew that what had come to be the accepted way of staging the piece, with the performer strapped in place and lit by a distant spotlight, was not going to work for Jess’s body. The stage notes state: ‘Stage in darkness but for MOUTH, upstage audience right, about 8 feet above stage level, faintly lit from close-up and below, rest of face in shadow.’1 There is no explicit reference as to how the performer should be held in place or how they should be lit, so we interpreted these instructions from scratch using the social model of disability. The social model states that people are not disabled by their impairments but by the physical, systemic and attitudinal barriers that exist in society. Reframing the performance context and adapting the physical environment were central concerns from the outset. These intentions catalysed our own creative and logistical processes, but we also wanted them to be tangibly understood and perceived by the audience. To this end, we designed and built a see-saw structure that could seamlessly lift Jess in her wheelchair to the required height but allow her to come down quickly and safely if she needed to in an emergency. We used a custom-made hoody with inbuilt LEDs, which Jess could switch on and off using a button in the pocket in order to achieve the desired lighting effect. We wanted to make sure that she had control of her own illumination and that the light would move with the natural movements of her body. By designing a flexible audience space that allowed people to sit, lie or stand, as they preferred, we extended our commitment to creating an accessible and inclusive environment for all – performers, audience and ushers. These intentions were articulated by Jess before the lights faded and the performance itself began.

Figure 15.1  Jessica Thom in Not I by Samuel Beckett (photograph by James Lyndsay, courtesy of Touretteshero and Battersea Arts Centre).

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Note  1. Samuel Beckett, Krapp’s Last Tape and Other Short Plays (London: Faber and Faber, 2009), 85.

Works Cited Beckett, Samuel. Krapp’s Last Tape and Other Short Plays. London: Faber and Faber, 2009.

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16 Pushing the Boundaries: Staging Western Modern(ist) Drama in Contemporary China Shouhua Qi

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s the curtain rises, we see four camcorders set in the four corners of the stage, a large screen hanging at the back, and then four people marching on to the stage: Mrs Wen (Mrs Alving), her son An Shihua (Oswald), her maid Lu Jiana (Regina), and Lu Sichuan (Engstrand), her maid’s purported father. The four bring themselves to their designated camcorders in the four corners and then preen in front of the lenses, their faces projected on to the large screen, faces twisted with whatever secrets and demons they each harbour within themselves. Thus begins the 2014 production of Ghosts 2.0 in Beijing, an audacious reimagining of Henrik Ibsen’s 1881 play – an experimental, multimodal theatrical production that relocated the story to contemporary China.1 This chapter studies the staging of Western modern(ist) drama in contemporary China. It features examples of drama associated with modernism as well as more recent examples of ‘modern drama’ that come out of the tradition of modernism. It begins with a brief overview of the introduction of Western modernist drama in China in the 1920s and its reintroduction in the 1980s and then focuses on the first two decades of the twenty-first century, during which many modernist plays have been rediscovered and restaged. Such reimagined modernist classics are often characterised by an audacity to experiment, for example, hybridising traditional Chinese theatre art forms with those ‘imported’ from the West, blending both realist and (post)modernist theatre in the same theatrical event, and relocating the story from its source culture to today’s China to speak directly to the sociocultural, moral and psychological concerns of target audiences. Among these productions of reimagined modernist classics – notable for how they push the boundaries both artistically and sociopolitically – are Henrik Ibsen’s Ghosts (1881), Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest (1895), Bertolt Brecht’s The Good Person of Szechwan (1943), Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot (1953) and Eugène Ionesco’s Rhinoceros (1959). Also included in this chapter are Chinese productions of Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun (1959) and Paula Vogel’s How I Learned to Drive (1997). These examples of modern drama offer unique breakthroughs in a Chinese context, complementing those offered by earlier modernist plays. The production of A Raisin in the Sun is the first Chinese production of drama by an African American playwright, and the production of How I Learned to Drive is the first Chinese production to confront the complicated and disturbing issue of sexual abuse of a minor on the stage. The

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provocations of Western modern(ist) drama continue to resonate in contemporary Chinese theatre, regardless of the critical label attached to it.

The Introduction of Modernist Drama in China: A Long, Bumpy Ride Western modernist drama was first introduced in China during the New Culture Movement in the early decades of the twentieth century. The New Culture Movement was ‘directed toward national independence, emancipation of the individual, and rebuilding society and culture’.2 One of the earliest Chinese attempts at appropriating Western modernist plays was with Eugene O’Neill’s Emperor Jones (1920), which had fascinated theatregoers in London and New York because of its expressionist mode of storytelling. Upon returning to China in 1922, after having studied drama in the US, Hong Shen (1894–1955) wrote Yama Zhao, a loose, Sinicised adaptation of Emperor Jones that relocated the story to China at a time when strife between warlords was tearing the country apart. Despite (or rather, because of) the bold experiments with the expressionistic mode of theatre that had proved successful with the American source play and despite all the investment in promoting the show, Yama Zhao turned out to be a failure. When it was first staged in Shanghai in February 1923, the deeper Zhao Da, the protagonist of the play, ran into the jungle, both literally and psychologically, as he encountered each of the ghosts from his past, the more disengaged and perplexed the audiences became. Negative reviews ridiculing the production did not end until two months afterwards.3 Lessons learned from such adaptation endeavours must have been woven into the cultural, intellectual and literary backdrop against which Cao Yu (1910–96) wrote his own important modern Chinese plays, for example, Thunderstorm (雷雨1933) and The Wilderness (原野 1937).4 However, what China direly needed then were realist plays such as Ibsen’s A Doll’s House5 to rally a new generation of people against the repression of the old cultural traditions and to create a new culture (including literature and drama/theatre) by way of saving the country from its moribund fate. Indeed, such was the impact of Ibsen’s play in China, inspiring many a Chinese Nora on and off the stage, that 1936 was dubbed the Year of Nora.6 For decades, from the late 1930s to the late 1970s, especially during the Cultural Revolution (1966–76), Western modernist drama was largely absent from the Chinese stage due to complicated sociopolitical developments and factors.7 During the 1960s, for example, mainstream Chinese critics dismissed plays by Samuel Beckett and the avant-garde theatre he represented as ‘decadent’, anti-realism, anti-art, anti-social and human progress, the last whimper ‘on the eve of the collapse of capitalist ideology and the death of the capitalist system’.8 During the years immediately after the Cultural Revolution ended, there was a rebirth of arts and literature, much of it to nurse the deep wounds that were still raw in the national psyche. In terms of drama/theatre, however, much of what was staged, though bold as far as the subject matter was concerned, still adhered to the realist mode that had dominated in China for over half a century. As the immediate social and psychological needs were being met, theatre artists began to look for new ideas and new ways of representing life on the stage. Now that the floodgates to the outside

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world were opened once again, as had been the case during the New Culture Movement in the early twentieth century, all kinds of ideas, isms, fads, as well as modern science and technology, were gushing in, rolling across the cultural landscapes of a country thirsting for things new, different and modern. It was during these years that modernist classics, along with Greek tragedies and Shakespeare plays, were (re)introduced on a grand scale. The tsunami-like wave of new ideas swept up a generation of young artists, writers and college students alike, as is evidenced by terms such as ‘Brechtian fever’, ‘Sartre fever’ and ‘absurdity fever’.9 In the short span of just a few years after the Cultural Revolution was over, many modernist classics were (re)translated and (re)published, for example, Henrik Ibsen’s Peer Gynt (1867), August Strindberg’s The Ghost Sonata (1907), Eugene O’Neill’s The Emperor Jones (1920) and Desires under the Elms (1924), Luigi Pirandello’s Six Characters in Search of an Author (1921), Albert Camus’s The Misunderstanding (1944), Jean-Paul Sartre’s No Exit (1944), Morts sans sépulture (1946) and Dirty Hands (1948), Tennessee Williams’s The Glass Menagerie (1944), Arthur Miller’s The Death of a Salesman (1948) and The Crucible (1953), Eugène Ionesco’s The Bald Soprano (1950), Edward Albee’s The Zoo Story (1958) and The American Dream (1961), and Samuel Beckett’s Happy Days (1961). The homogeneity of the authorship of the plays listed here (all by white men) can be explained in part by the fact that for more than a century (since the late 1800s) the agenda of Chinese intellectuals and artists has been how to use the most ‘canonical’ (which happens to be both ‘white’ and ‘male’, for centuries) to serve the social and cultural needs of China, instead of striving for a fuller and more balanced representation in terms of gender, race and so on.10 This is partly why the examples discussed in this chapter go beyond ‘modernist classics’ to include a more diverse range of authors. Some of the aforementioned plays were adapted and staged too. It would be hard to imagine the drama and theatre scene in China in the decades following the Cultural Revolution without the introduction, translation and indeed adaptation of Western classics such as plays by Brecht, Beckett and Miller on the Chinese stage. Indeed, these Western classics arguably impacted Chinese dramatists, as indicated by plays such as Gao Xingjian’s The Bus Stop (车站 Chezhan) (1983), Liu Jinyun’s Uncle Doggie’s Nirvana (狗儿爷涅槃 Gouerye niepan) (1986), Wei Minglun’s Pan Jinlian (潘金 莲 1986), and Chen Zidu et al.’s The Story of Sangshuping (桑树坪纪事 Sangshuping jishi) (1988), remarkable accomplishments in the endeavours to revive modern Chinese drama and theatre.11 All of these Chinese plays have incorporated notable theatrical forms and elements from modernist classics, for example, fluidity of time and space, in addition to challenging old moral and cultural paradigms, aphorisms and taboos. The beginning of the twenty-first century saw China, after more than two decades of ‘reform and opening-up’, in a very different place from about a hundred years ago. It has developed into one of the biggest economies in the world and, despite all the persistent and profound challenges – sociopolitical, economic, environmental, cultural and otherwise – there is not the same sense of exigency or existential crisis any more. What the country seems to need now is consolidating and furthering its development in the face of challenges old and new. On the drama and theatre scene, Chinese artists are now much more confident than a decade or two ago when their primary concern was to understand Western

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modernist plays and try and ‘get it right’ when staging them. They are now much more interested in experimenting – finding their own voices and putting their own spin on a play, so to speak, for example, mixing different art forms and Sinicising the story to speak directly to the sociocultural, moral and psychological concerns of contemporary China.

Pushing the Boundaries Noteworthy among recent Chinese productions of modern(ist) drama that push the boundaries both artistically and sociopolitically are Henrik Ibsen’s Ghosts (1881), Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest (1895) and Paula Vogel’s How I Learned to Drive (1997). Ghosts 2.0, the 2014 production alluded to at the beginning of this chapter, was mounted by an experimental theatre company formed in 2008 by Wang Chong and a group of like-minded young artists. By the time of this 2014 production, Wang and his team had already produced a series of 2.0s – extreme remakes of modern Chinese classics such as Cao Yu’s Thunderstorm. One of the things Wang and his team did, in addition to interfusing real-time video and stage production into one multimodal theatrical event,12 was to relocate the story from late-nineteenth-century Norway to contemporary China, with all the main characters having Chinese identities. Still occupying a central place in this remake, Mrs Wen (Mrs Alving) is now counselled by Communist Party Secretary Man (Pastor Manders) on how to exorcise the ghost of her late husband, Lord Wen, by building him a shrine – a brand new orphanage. The main thrust for dramatic development, however, is An Shihua (Oswald), her son, a poster boy for the so-called ‘second-generation rich’ (fu’erdai), a pejorative term for children of the super-rich who have the reputation of being spoiled and living an anchorless, decadent lifestyle.13 The dark secrets that raise their ugly heads as the story unfolds give the audience a two-hour-long, hard and dazzling glimpse into what is amiss in the heart and soul of China today.14 Soon after the production begins, it becomes clear that with the real-time interactive video projection technology assuming a central role in the production, one pair of eyes can never be equipped to catch all that is happening simultaneously on the screen and on the stage. For the characters caught in the unfolding drama of the story, there is no place to hide under the watchful eye of the camcorders. Mrs Wen’s bedroom upstairs is no safe haven when it is projected on to the screen by the two downstage camcorders, showing it to be shrouded in the gloom of dark secrets. Neither do the ‘father/daughter’ (Lu Jiana/Lu Sichuan) co-conspirators downstairs have any privacy, any place of their own when they whisper and scheme: the two upstage camcorders follow their every move and project it on to the screen for everyone in the theatre (and, figuratively speaking, for the whole world) to see. Another marked creative licence this production took was with the character of Oswald. As Ibsen tells the story, Oswald is an innocent victim of his father’s sins. As Wang and his team retell the story in the 2.0 remake, An Shihua is more than just a victim. Toward the end of the play, as a furious An runs all over the stage, shouting ‘A father’s sin will be visited upon his children!’, the young man tosses out from the pouch hanging on his chest colourful women’s intimate wear, more than a hundred pieces of them, revealing the kind of lifestyle he has been living while a student in

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the US. ‘Mainstream’ Chinese audiences would consider this lifestyle ‘decadent’; they would not approve of a young man in possession of so many pieces of female intimate wear, whether for cross-dressing or kept as souvenirs of sexual encounters, legal or illegal. Also, in the original play the fire that destroys the orphanage happens offstage. In this 2014 Chinese remake, the ‘fire’ erupts on stage, as the main characters run around, scattering red and yellow powder, which dances under intense stage lights, as if the whole world were aflame. Then the screen rolls up to reveal a bare brick wall. Mrs Wen, barefoot, dishevelled, staggers toward the bare wall to face the naked truth forced out by her son’s return. Anguished beyond measure, she turns to look for her son, her pride, her hope, and her reason for being; she sees him on the floor, stripped from waist up, rolling in the fire toward the forward edge of the stage, his face (projected on to the big screen hanging at the back for the audiences to see) twitching in pain, his eyes filled with shock and terror. Mrs Wen runs to her son and holds him in her arms (Figure 16.1). In the context of China such a provocative remake of a Western play inevitably raised some eyebrows.15 Ghosts 2.0 was first performed in September 2014 at the Honeycomb Theatre (Fengchao juchang) during the Beijing Youth Drama Festival. In November that same year it was invited to the Tenth Shanghai International Contemporary Theatre Festival but was not staged because it failed to win approval by the festival’s review board. It is not hard to imagine why this play would make some people feel uncomfortable – not because of its dazzling experiments with technology

Figure 16.1  Ghosts 2.0, produced and directed by Wang Chong, 2014 (photograph by Zhu Lei, courtesy of Wang Chong).

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in storytelling, but because of the brutal honesty with which it dramatises some ugly realities of China today: corruption, hypocrisy, the decadent, soulless life of the nouveau riche (in contrast to the millions who are still struggling), and the gaping spiritual void in a country where many people do not pay much more than lip-service to the dominant credos.16 Equally worth noting is the 2015 production of Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest, or rather Not a Child’s Play (不可儿戏 Buke erxi). After enjoying much adulation and glamour in China in the early decades of the twentieth century, Oscar Wilde fell into a long eclipse from the 1940s all the way to the end of the 1970s. The dimming of his star during those years was caused by the dominant political ideology and cultural and literary discourse that found Wildean aestheticism and indeed ‘decadence’ not only useless, but also corruptive. The rehabilitation began soon after the Cultural Revolution was over. Today one can find Oscar Wilde just about anywhere: research articles, graduate theses, books of all types, and media. His plays have been performed on numerous school campuses too. However, unlike just about every other major Western playwright, Oscar Wilde did not see a professional production in mainland China until 2015.17 The adapter of The Importance of Being Earnest, or rather Not a Child’s Play in its Chinese reincarnation,18 in the capacities of both translator and director, is Zhou Liming (aka Raymond Zhou), a glamorous Wildean character (minus all the ‘scandalous’ baggage) on the cultural scene in China.19 Zhou chose Oscar Wilde for this 2015 endeavour because Wilde was one of his favourite Western authors when he was studying English at the Sun Yat-sen University in Guangzhou and because the par­al­lels between London of the late Victorian era and Beijing in 2015 ‘are un­canny in terms of class con­scious­ness, up­ward mo­bil­ity and all the trap­pings of the gilded age’.20 A sizeable (albeit still small in percentage in relation to the Chinese population) ‘leisure class’, conspicuous in consumption and every facet of lifestyle,21 has emerged in China, especially in major metropolises such as Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou, since the beginning of the new century. China, for better or for worse, is finally ready for a ‘trivial comedy’ for ‘serious’ and perhaps not so serious people alike. Zhou was fully aware of the creative licence, the ‘latitude’ he could (and perhaps would have to) take in adapting and directing this work for the Chinese stage, to give it ‘a uniquely Chi­nese twist’.22 He knew that a ‘faithful’ rendition of the play, faithful to both the spirit and the letter, even if done well, would be good for reading, but not good for the stage. All the culture- and place-specific references in the original play, such as Tories, Anabaptists and Shropshire, would leave typical Chinese theatregoers scratching their heads. So, Zhou retooled the story, from character names to locale to culturespecific references, to make it resonate with prospective audiences for this production. All of the main characters now have easily recognisable Chinese reincarnations. The basic plot of Not a Child’s Play still follows that of The Importance of Being Earnest although the setting is now Beijing, 2015. Some loss in this remake of the Wildean play is inevitable. For example, the rich meaning of the original title, The Importance of Being Earnest – the linguistic play with the word ‘earnest’ (homophonous to Ernest, the fictional brother of Jack Worthing, a linchpin for character and plot developments, loaded with comic irony mocking both the characters and the façade of ‘earnest’ respectability of the Victorian era) is simply untranslatable. Not a Child’s Play, a smart, attention-getting Chinese title, is no equivalent to the original

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because it has little to do with the characters caught in the comedy of manners very much of their own making. Nonetheless, by and large, like Wang Chong’s reimagining of Ibsen’s Ghosts, Zhou’s Not a Child’s Play is faithful to the spirit of Wilde’s The Importance of Being Ernest, a comedy of a bunch of nouveau riche leisure-class characters conspicuously and indeed earnestly pursuing trivialities in the ‘gilded age’ of twenty-first-century Beijing, a comedy that can be replicated in just about any major city across China today. A 2015 Chinese production of Paula Vogel’s How I Learned to Drive pushed different boundaries even further. Vogel’s drama is a memory play with scrambled chronology that follows Li’l Bit, now in her early thirties, as she revisits memories of her complicated and troubling relationship with Uncle Peck (husband of her maternal aunt), from pre-adolescence through teenage and college years to adulthood, to make sense of what happened during those years: sexual abuse, sexual coming of age, and guilt. Using ‘learning how to drive’ as an overarching metaphor and recurrent motif (for power and control), the dramatic action of the play and dialogues between Li’l Bit and Uncle Peck, along with a three-member Greek chorus, are loaded with sexual innuendos and double entendres. This 1997 play was inspired by Vogel’s reading of Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita (1955) because, as Vogel explained, ‘she was stunned to find herself sympathising with the narrator, Humbert Humbert, who sexually molests an adolescent girl’.23 She intended the play ‘to get the audience to go along for a ride they wouldn’t ordinarily take, or don’t even know they’re taking’.24 Since its premiere in 1997, many audiences on and off Broadway and on college campuses in the US have gone along for such a ride.25 Would Chinese theatregoers feel comfortable going along for such a provocative ride? It is not that Chinese people are particularly prudish when it comes to sex or sexuality. By the time How I Learned to Drive was staged in Beijing in 2015, Nabokov’s Lolita had seen at least fourteen Chinese translations, including a first mainland Chinese translation in 1988 and a full unexpurgated translation put out in 2005.26 A 1930s Chinese translation of D. H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover (1928), a novel that, thanks to its use of ‘obscene’ language and frank treatment of sexuality and sexual intimacy, had run into trouble with censors even in the United Kingdom, was republished in 1986.27 Moreover, Jinpingmei (Plum in the Golden Vase, or The Golden Lotus), a seventeenth-century Chinese novel that describes the debauchery of its main character, Ximen Qing, in explicit language, is one of China’s most popular novels, although many readers consider it not much more than pornography.28 However, there is a world of difference between publishing and reading novels such as Lolita and Lady Chatterley’s Lover and this venture (in the literal sense of the term: a risky or daring journey or undertaking) of Chinese and American theatre artists: American playwright Paula Vogel, director Michael Leibenluft,29 and Chinese cast and crew. According to Li Yangduo, the Chinese producer, staging this play was meant to force the audiences to confront and reconsider the serious social problem of sexual abuse of underage girls in China (although such an unambiguous sociomoral agenda for the play may not have been intended by the playwright): Sometimes what we need is not 阳春白雪 (Sunny Spring and Pure Snow; highbrow art), but works that confront the complexity of human nature and uncomfortable social phenomena that actually exist. Our hope is that the production of this play

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will encourage more people to care about underage girls, their place in the net of social relations, showing them more care and help.30 Due to the sensitive subject of the play, the production would not admit those eighteen years old and under, its restrictiveness comparable to the NC-17 (No One 17 and Under Admitted) in the Motion Picture Association film rating system used in the US. Also, sexually explicit scenes (for example, when Uncle Peck reaches inside underage Li’l Bit’s shirt to fondle her) were placed deep upstage, to put some distance from the audiences and soften the visual impact. The script, however, was a full translation, without expurgating anything, because to do so would change the whole play, its topic, theme and character portrayals.31 How did Chinese theatregoers feel after taking the ride? Yang Qianwu, a Beijing theatre artist, felt this was progress because in the past not even kissing would be allowed on the stage, which was abnormal: ‘As long as the theatre production was representing human nature from a positive perspective, not sensationalising sexuality and sexual relationships as a market gimmick, it would be perfectly fine.’32 Hu Kaiqi, the Chinese translator of How I Learned to Drive for the production, believed that staging such brutally honest plays was ‘not meant for indulgence and slumbering, but for rude awakening and enlightening’.33 It is not clear, though, how much moral awakening this production has prompted. After all, it has taken a while for the #MeToo movement to get started in China.34

Modernist Classics with Chinese Characteristics? The 2015 production of How I Learned to Drive, a joint venture of American and Chinese theatre artists, pushed the boundaries more in terms of content than artistry. Nonetheless, some Chinese productions of Western modern(ist) plays have been quite self-conscious in experimenting and putting their own spin on the source texts by incorporating traditional Chinese cultural elements, especially traditional Chinese theatre art, so productions assume subtle or marked Chinese characteristics.35 Noteworthy examples include the 2006 production of Ionesco’s Rhinoceros and the 2010 and 2013 productions of Brecht’s The Good Person of Szechwan under their respective Chinese titles The Good Person of Beijing (北京好人 Beijing haoren) and The Good Person of Jiangnan (江南好人 Jiangnan haoren). Ionesco’s Rhinoceros is an allegory or parable about the rise of fascism in Europe before the start of the Second World War,36 that is, how people, including the intelligentsia, can be ‘rhinocerised’, losing their individuality and becoming mindless members of a herd under the pressure of the dominant ideology.37 In 2006, Ning Chunyan, who had studied and worked in France for many years and earned a PhD in theatre from L’université Paris 8, directed a production in China. For this production, staged by the National Theatre Company of China, Ning tried to incorporate iconic Chinese cultural elements, for example, using ink and rice paper as a standin for rhinoceros that rampage across the stage, instead of having an actor portray the role. This use of ink and rice paper, which played a ubiquitous role in the form of big-character posters (大字报, dazibao) during the Cultural Revolution, seems to imply that ‘Rhinocerism’ is as native to the Chinese culture, history and people as it is anywhere else in the world. It was an ingenious way to explore the themes

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of conformity and mob mentality which, albeit universal, hit home acutely in the context of China.38 In this 2006 production, when the first Rhinoceros appeared in Act 1, it was represented by ink splashed on to the white background made of rice paper, signifying the first drop of evil in a world of pure innocence. The second time the Rhinoceros appeared (Act 2), it was represented by a ‘black cat’ soaked in ink tossed on to the stage and more ink splashed on to the white rice-paper background. The ‘black cat’ symbol is loaded with meaning from culture to culture, signifying good or bad, auspicious or ominous, and could even be read as a subtle jab at this well-known maxim from Deng Xiaoping, the architect of China’s ‘reform and opening-up’ policies in the years after the Cultural Revolution: ‘It doesn’t matter whether a cat is white or black, as long as it catches mice.’39 Close to the end of the play, when just about everyone in town, except for Bérenger, has succumbed to rhinoceritis, the rice-paper background is covered completely by black ink. Even in the midst of such oppressive doom and gloom, however, there is a glimmer of hope, in the form of one ‘unrhinocerised’ person left, Bérenger. Whether that lone soldier could take back the Planet of Rhinoceros, so to speak, or restore the world to its prelapsarian, pure, innocent state, is anybody’s guess. Besides, even that prelapsarian, Edenic world filled with innocent joy is more myth than reality. The 2010 and 2013 productions of Brecht’s The Good Person of Szechwan went further than incorporating traditional Chinese elements: they indigenised both the story and the form of theatre art so much so that they could stand alone as Chinese plays, although their connections with the source text would be apparent to anyone who has a nodding acquaintance with Brecht’s play. For Shen Lin, the creator of the 2010 remake of Brecht’s play, the primary goal was to make full use of the political potential of such a production to inspire thinking about the socio-economic realities of China in the twenty-first century and taking action to change things for the better. Artistically, it was experimental, so much so that The Good Person of Beijing effectively became a fully indigenised, present-day Chinese play. One audacious thing Shen Lin and his team did in this production, not without some political risk, was to move the setting of the play from early-twentiethcentury Szechwan (in south-west China) to twenty-first-century Beijing. As home to the echelons of the central government and Communist Party since 1949, Beijing is more than the name for a city; it is a symbol vested with much political significance, as sacred as the heart and soul of the People’s Republic. What is underneath all that glitters in this capital city? Arguably, egregious pollution, corruption and injustice as millions of ordinary people, native Beijingers and migrant workers alike, left behind by the high-speed train of state capitalism, struggle to survive.40 To bring the play up to date, Shen Lin and team gave the whole cast of characters new identities from present-day Beijing: Wang (Wong), a water seller in the original, still sells bottled water, but has morphed into a retired teacher of the night school of Plant 798, an electronics manufacturing plant in Beijing that shut down in 2002, its site having since been converted into a booming art zone; Shen Dai (Shen Te), the heroine of the play, is now a xitoumei (hair washing sister, hairdresser), a profession which in the parlance of today’s China carries a dubious reputation associated with prostitution; Yu Biao (Yang Sun), an unemployed pilot in the original, is now a young man with frustrated dreams of going to America to pursue advanced study – his visa

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application having been denied by the US embassy despite his impressive test scores; and Su Haogu (Mr Su Fu), a barber in the original, is now a man in his fifties, a moderately successful dealer in Chinese antiques, who walks around and parades his pride in Chinese culture – donning old Tang dynasty costumes, humming classical kun opera arias, and sipping Dragon Well tea. These characters, cartoonish caricatures they may seem, are real people in the sense that they ‘strut and fret’ amongst the theatregoers and just about anywhere in Beijing and across the country.41 Another daring thing Shen Lin and team did, artistically, to bring the production even closer home for audiences, was to remake the story into a Beijing quju, an obscure local opera (much less ‘glamorous’ than Beijing opera and such nationally and internationally known traditional Chinese theatre forms) that has evolved from old Beijing folk tunes by drawing from traditional operas and modern spoken drama,42 featuring simple traditional music instruments such as sanxian (three-stringed banjo) and bajiaogu (octagon drum). Throughout the performance a seasoned quju musician, a one-person band and chorus (in the sense of classical Greek theatre), a minstrel of sorts, sings, narrates and comments as well as providing musical accompaniment to Shen Dai, Wang and everyone else when they sing. To be true to the Brechtian idea of political theatre, and to make one last-ditch effort, before curtain-fall, toward achieving political theatre of sorts, the production had Shen Dai turn to address the audiences directly: ‘Don’t just look on, come and help me.’43 Produced in 2013 by a Zhejiang yueju troupe, The Good Person of Jiangnan44 is also set in present-day China. For this yueju remake of Brecht’s play, Shen Dai, a sing-song girl (geji), with gift money from the three gods, buys herself a decent-sized silk store, a business fit for the new locale for the story – Jiangnan being known for its elegant silk products. Mao Weitao (1962–), a star yue actor with many accolades, played the role of Shen Dai, while a handsome young actor played her love interest, Yang Sengang (Yang Sun). The ambition of Yang, who appears to be a Prince Charming of sorts earlier in the play, is to fly again, but, failing to realise his dream, Yang shows his true colours, revealing himself to be petty and manipulative. As the story unfolds, the Shen/Yang relationship takes centre stage and becomes the driving force of dramatic action – Shen’s dizzying joy of falling in love; the tender, delirious sweetness of having just tasted the forbidden fruit for the first time; her acute disappointment when the hope she has placed on her man fails to materialise; and her agonising despair when she finally sees through him for what he really is. In short, The Good Person of Jiangnan becomes a story of romantic love that has gone sour. Although not without its share of ‘alienation effect’, for example, use of signs, actors speaking to the audience directly, this yue remake of Brecht’s play presents the audience with a feast of singing, dancing (a mix of rap and jazz moves) and costumes, traditional Chinese and Western-style suit and tie – gratifying, perhaps, but not nearly as provocative as The Good Person of Beijing. It is more entertainment than political theatre, although the two are not necessarily mutually exclusive.45

Forging Ahead during COVID-19 The enterprising and experimental spirit of Chinese theatre artists persisted in 2020 as a harrowing pandemic was raging in China and elsewhere in the world. It expressed itself in historically significant productions of Beckett’s Waiting for Godot and Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun.

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In April 2020, Wang Chong, who directed the 2016 Ghosts 2.0 (discussed earlier), mounted a bold production of Beckett’s Waiting for Godot: the cast and crew, all sheltering in their homes in Beijing, Guangzhou, Wuhan (the first epicentre of the pandemic) and elsewhere, performing online, on the virtual stage, for hundreds of thousands of ‘theatregoers’ to see through live-streaming. This was not the first time Chinese theatre artists tried to mount Beckett’s play. In 1991, Meng Jinhui, at that time a young graduate student at the Central Academy of Drama (Beijing), directed a campus production by way of reconfirming his belief ‘in our existence’ and his determination never to ‘fall prey to the temptations of servitude’ and ‘to become an ornament in the scenery of falsehoods and affectations’.46 The year 1998 saw two professional productions of Waiting for Godot in China, one by Ren Ming and another by Lin Zhaohua, both established theatre artists at the storied People’s Art Theatre (Beijing). Ren Ming’s Waiting for Godot cast two young female actors as Didi (Vladimir) and Gege (Estragon) and relocated the story to a bar in present-day Beijing. Lin Zhaohua took an even more experimental approach by merging Beckett’s play with Chekhov’s The Three Sisters (1901).47 Wang Chong, who missed Lin Zhaohua’s 1998 production during its short run, saw the performance video years later and was profoundly shaken: ‘Lin shows us a bird’s eye view of humanity, of ourselves, with pity and fear. I feel as if I had performed the role of each of the three sisters. Vladimir is me. Estragon is me, too.’48 Wang did not have to wait long before he would have an opportunity to realise his own dream of taking on the challenge of directing Beckett’s play. In Wang Chong’s 2020 version of Waiting for Godot, Vladimir and Estragon morphed into a white-collar Chinese couple, which adds a gender and relationship twist to everything they say and do. Reminiscent of Ghosts 2.0, the actors playing Fufu (Vladimir), a young woman, and Ganggang (Estragon), a young man, perform in front of their smartphones as they video conference with each other; this was streamed for the hundreds of thousands to watch live. Their banter, while true to the spirit and sentiment of Beckett’s original play, was adapted so it flowed for real-time, real-life like delivery (Figure 16.2). Given how jealously Beckett guarded his play, from casting to stage design,49 it is very unlikely that he would have approved of Wang Chong’s Waiting for Godot (just as he would probably never have approved the remakes mounted by Ren Ming or Lin Zhaohua), historicised to a particular time and place, caught in a harrowing existential crisis. It is not known whether Wang Chong secured the permission of the Beckett estate for this particular production. Either way, he took considerable creative licence in this extreme remake and many among the hundreds of thousands who live-streamed via various social media platforms seemed to be pleased. Some were so ecstatic as to claim that the Chinese have finally understood Waiting for Godot – because now they know the answer to the question: ‘Who is Godot?’ For them, and perhaps for hundreds of millions of Chinese, the Godot they have been waiting for is the end of the pandemic, the reopening of the country, and the return to some level of normality – it does not have to be anything esoteric, archetypal or abstract.50 Around the time that Waiting for Godot was being staged virtually in Beijing, another breakthrough production was in the works, Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun, but due to the pandemic its planned live production for in-person audiences had to be postponed to September 2020. This was a case of a dream deferred for decades before it was realised, seemingly by the sheer luck of all the stars being perfectly aligned, so to speak, for it to happen. Although dramatic works by African American

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Figure 16.2  Online performance of Waiting for Godot, produced and directed by Wang Chong, 2020 (courtesy of Wang Chong).

playwrights such as August Wilson (1945–2005) had been noticed by Chinese scholars for quite some time,51 somehow no Chinese theatre artists had been motivated enough to try and put them on the stage.52 What got the ball rolling, so to speak, was the chance discovery, by a friend of Ying Da (1960–), well-known actor and director, of a handwritten Chinese translation of A Raisin in the Sun at an antiques market in Beijing. On the faded cover of the manuscript was signed the name of Ying Da’s mother: Wu Shiliang (1928–87), an accomplished and prolific translator of foreign literature. Ying Da’s father, Ying Ruocheng (1929–2003), was a prominent figure in modern Chinese drama and theatre who had translated Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman and portrayed Willy Lowman in the famous 1983 staging of the play in Beijing.53 Apparently, the manuscript, dated 1963, had travelled for decades, through the turbulence of the Cultural Revolution and other tumultuous social developments, to find its way to the right person at the right time. A Raisin in the Sun was inspired by Hansberry’s own family experience in the US in the 1940s, when they were part of a fight against racially motivated restrictive covenants, and by her memories of living ‘in a hellishly hostile “white neighborhood”’ and of her courageous mother during those difficult days.54 The play has won many accolades and seen many revivals since its debut on Broadway in 1959. For Ying Da, however, his stated motivation for staging the play was much more personal (to memorialise his mother by way of realising her long-deferred dream of introducing the play in China) than political. As a matter of fact, Ying vehemently denied that the timing of his decision to take on the play had anything to do with what was going on in the US, for example, Black Lives Matter and such movements against racial injustice.55 However, just because the director of a play chose not to acknowledge the sociopolitical relevance

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and significance of a play does not mean such relevance and significance does not exist or is not perceived by others. Beijing People’s Art Theatre, which sponsored this staging, highlighted the ‘special significance’ of its timing ‘when the US is aflame with racial injustice again’.56 One reviewer of the production had this to say: The significance of this play is that through its most vivid, honest, and persuasive representation it gives us an ideal angle to see and appreciate this fact: In America, a self-styled country of democracy, equality, freedom, and happiness, there is deeprooted discrimination, degradation, and oppression of racial minorities.57 Ying and his team had to decide how Chinese actors would portray African American characters on the stage, given the recent controversies over Chinese actors wearing dark makeup to ‘impersonate’ Africans in entertainment and advertisements.58 After consulting with theatre artists and scholars in the US, Ying Da took the ‘half-measure’ of lightly bronzing the actors’ faces and having them wear curly wigs.59 This 2020 staging of A Raisin in the Sun in Beijing may not have produced the same kind of sociopolitical and artistic impact as that of Death of a Salesman in Beijing in 1983, in which Ying’s father played an instrumental role. However, as the first Chinese production of a play by an African American playwright, it still amounts to a breakthrough, a dream long deferred, long overdue, and finally come true. In this fact alone lies its noteworthy significance and one can only hope that many more such productions will follow – soon. Although breakthroughs are hard to come by and are understandably few and far between, theatre artists with enterprising and experimental spirit can always try and push the boundaries, as is shown in the above discussions of Chinese productions of Western drama on the contemporary Chinese stage. Productions of modern(ist) drama, whether of established classics such as Ibsen’s Ghosts, Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest, Brecht’s The Good Person of Szechwan, Ionesco’s Rhinoceros and Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun or of more recent modern drama such as Vogel’s How I Learned to Drive, speak directly to the sociocultural, moral and other existential concerns of contemporary China by incorporating Chinese cultural elements or by indigenising both the story and the art form, thereby enriching, in no small measure, the cultural afterlife of this work.

Notes   1. This summary draws from Ge Luo, ‘Shishi yingxiang zhong de “Xinlangchao xiju” meixue: Qungui 2.0’ (New Wave Theatre Aesthetics in Real-Time Video Production: Ghosts 2.0), Wenyi shenghuo zhoukan (Art Life Weekly), 1 October 2014, https://site.douban.com/ zhoubao/widget/notes/3161169/note/434378249/ (accessed 11 October 2022).  2. ‘May Fourth Movement’, Britannica, https://www.britannica.com/event/May-FourthMovement (accessed 18 June 2021).  3. See Zhu Xuefeng, ‘Wenmingxi wutai shang de Zhaoyanwang: Hong Shen, Aoni’er yu Zhongguo zaoqi huaju zhuanxing xiju yishu’ (Yama Zhao on the Stage of ‘Civilised Drama: Hong Shen, O’Neill and the Art of Early Chinese Spoken Drama during Transformation), Xiju yishu (Theatre Arts) 3 (2012): 48–58.   4. Feng Tao, ‘Meiguo de beiju yu zhongguo de beiju: Cao Yu yu Aonei’er beiju renwu bijiao’ (American Tragedy and Chinese Tragedy: A Comparison of Tragic Characters by Cao Yu

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and O’Neill), Xiju (Drama) 1 (1998): 23–8; Liu Yue, ‘Lun Caoyu juzuo he Aoni’er de xiju yishu’ (On Cao Yu’s Dramatic Works and O’Neill’s Dramatic Art), Wenxue pinglun (Literary Reviews) 2 (1986): 112–25.   5. Toril Moi considers A Doll’s House ‘the first full-blown example of Ibsen’s modernism’. Toril Moi, Henrik Ibsen and the Birth of Modernism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 225.   6. See Shouhua Qi, ‘Reimagining Ibsen: Recent Adaptations of Ibsen Plays for the Chinese Stage’, Ibsen Studies 17, no. 2 (2017): 141–64.   7. During the war-torn decades of the 1930s and 1940s, many Chinese intellectuals and artists thought what China needed the most was arts and literature to rally the nation for survival. Then, during the decades from 1949 to the end of the 1970s, leftist ideology dominated and everything, including arts and literature, had to serve the agendas of the Communist Party. Apparently, Western modernist drama, dismissed as ‘decadent’, could not have been given a role to play during those decades. See Shouhua Qi, Western Literature in China and the Translation of a Nation (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 87–134.  8. Zhang Helong, ‘Guonei Beikete yanjiu pingshu’ (Review of Beckett Studies in China), Guowai wenxue (Foreign Literature) 3 (2010): 38.   9. See Shouhua Qi, Adapting Western Classics for the Chinese Stage (London: Routledge, 2018), 27–9, 161–3. 10. See Qi, Western Literature in China. 11. See Shiao-ling S. Yu, Chinese Drama after the Cultural Revolution, 1979–1989: An Anthology (Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press, 1996). 12. See Ge Luo; Ge Luo and Jia Yi, ‘Di si ci cai laicheng Shanghai de Qungui 2.0: Shi zheme yibu xi’ (Ghosts 2.0 Succeeds in Coming to Shanghai with the Fourth Try: Here Is What the Play Is About), Haoxi (Good Play), 10 August 2015, http://chuansong.me/n/1629791 (accessed 17 April 2017); Lin Yinyu, ‘Qungui 2.0 yingxiang zhiru xiju de kegui tansuo’ (Ghosts 2.0 Laudable Experiments in Injecting Real-Time Video Production into Play), Beijing qingnian bao (Beijing Youth Paper), 30 September 2014, https://ent.ifeng.com/a/ detail_2014_09/30/38958937_0.shtml (accessed 11 October 2022). 13. See Christopher Beam, ‘Children of the Yuan Percent: Everyone Hates China’s Rich Kids’, Bloomberg, 30 September 2015, https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2015-10-01/ children-of-the-yuan-percent-everyone-hates-china-s-rich-kids (accessed 5 April 2017). 14. See Lin Yinyu; Ge Luo. 15. See Ge Luo and Jia Yi, ‘Di si ci’. 16. See Louisa Lim, ‘Chinese Turn to Religion to Fill a Spiritual Vacuum’, NPR, 18 July 2010, https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=128544048 (accessed 7 May 2017); Katie Simmons, ‘China’s Government May Be Communist, but its People Embrace Capitalism’, Pew Research Center, 10 October 2014, https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2014/10/10/ chinas-government-may-be-communist-but-its-people-embrace-capitalism/ (accessed 11 May 2017). 17. This portion of the discussion draws from Qi, Adapting Western Classics, 107–15. See also Shouhua Qi, ‘The Importance of Being Oscar Wilde: Rise and Fall of Wilde’s Literary Fortune in China’, The British Library, https://www.britishlibrary.cn/en/articles/the-importance-ofbeing-oscar-wilde-rise-and-fall-of-wildes-literary-fortune-in-china/ (accessed 18 June 2021). 18. See Raymond Zhou, ‘A Wild Retake on a Wilde Classic’, China Daily, 2 June 2015, http:// www.chinadaily.com.cn/cndy/2015-06/02/content_20883131.htm (accessed 22 April 2017), and Zhou Liming, ‘Gaibian shi hanghuo, zai haolaiwu yidian ye bu diuren’ (Adaptation Is Mainstream Practice, No Loss of Face Even in Hollywood), interview, 27 June 2015, http:// www.vmovier.com/46965 (accessed 22 April 2017). 19. See ‘Raymond Zhou to Inaugurate Lecture Series of PKU News’, https://english.pku.edu. cn/news_events/news/campus/1307.html (accessed 11 October 2022).

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20. R. Zhou, ‘A Wild Retake’. 21. See Thorstein Veblen, The Theory of the Leisure Class, reissue (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009). 22. R. Zhou, ‘A Wild Retake’. 23. J. Wynn Rousuck, ‘Paula Vogel’s Road Home: How I Learned to Drive Has Propelled the Maryland-bred Playwright into Prominence and Given her License to Take on Projects and Issues Close to her Heart’, The Baltimore Sun, 3 May 1998, https://www.baltimoresun. com/news/bs-xpm-1998-05-03-1998123004-story.html (accessed 18 June 2021). 24. Ben Brantley, ‘A Pedophile Even Mother Could Love’, The New York Times, 17 March 1997, https://www.nytimes.com/1997/03/17/theater/a-pedophile-even-mother-could-love. html (accessed 18 June 2021). 25. The play’s revival production, originally scheduled for spring 2020 but postponed due to the COVID-19 pandemic, opened in April 2022. See Greg Evans, ‘How I Learned to Drive Starring Mary-Louise Parker and David Morse Announces Broadway Spring Opening’, Deadline, https://deadline.com/2021/06/how-i-learned-to-drive-broadway-mary-louiseparker-david-morse-opening-date-announcement-1234770450/ (accessed 18 June 2021). 26. See Yi Cong, ‘Shisi ge Luolita zhong yi ben zhi bijiao pinglun’ (Fourteen Chinese Translations of Lolita: A Comparative Review), Douban, 3 September 2013, https://www.douban. com/note/299911776/?type=like (accessed 20 June 2021). 27. See Qi, Western Literature in China, 143–5. 28. See ‘Jinpingmei’, Britannica, https://www.britannica.com/topic/Jinpingmei (accessed 20 June 2021). 29. See ‘Michael Leibenluft’, http://www.leibenluft.com/ (accessed 19 June 2021). 30. ‘Pulice xiju jiang zuopin nanian wo xue kaiche zai jing shou ying’ (Pulitzer Drama Award Winner How I Learned to Drive Premieres in Beijing’, Soho Culture, 12 May 2015, http:// culture.taiwan.cn/spot/201505/t20150512_9783335.htm?open_source=weibo_search (accessed 11 October 2022). 31. See Niu Chunmei, ‘“Da chidu” huaju ping liangxin she menkan’ (Conscience as Threshold for Sexually Explicit Play), Beijing Daily, 21 May 2015, http://www.chinawriter.com. cn/2015/2015-05-21/243013.html (accessed 24 April 2017). 32. Ibid. 33. Zhang Ting, ‘Bushi chenzui huo chenshui ershi jingxing he qingxing’ (Not Indulgence or Slumber but Rude Awakening and Enlightening), China Art, 12 June 2015, http:// www.cflac.org.cn/zgysb/dz/ysb/history/20150612/index.htm?page=/page_4/201506/ t20150612_297994.htm&pagenum=4 (accessed 20 June 2021). 34. See Gwyneth Ho and Grace Tsoi, ‘Will #MeToo Spread in China?’, BBC Chinese, 6 January 2018, https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-42577654 (accessed 21 June 2021). 35. Typically, Chinese adaptation endeavours assume one of four modes: fidelity (faithful to the original play in story, structure and production), indigenisation (appropriating the original play as inspiration and raw material to make a new Chinese play, especially in a traditional xiqu genre), hybridisation (interfusing two distinctive dramatic traditions into the same theatrical event), and experimentation (experimental in story, structure and production, whether it takes the form of xiqu, the more modern huaju, or a mishmash of the two). Of course, in practice there is considerable fluidity among the four modes. See Qi, Adapting Western Classics, viii–xviii. 36. See G. Richard Danner, ‘Bérenger’s Dubious Defense of Humanity in Rhinocéros’, The French Review 53, no. 2 (December 1979): 207–14, and Anne Quinney, ‘Excess and Identity: The Franco-Romanian Ionesco Combats Rhinoceritis’, South Central Review 24, no. 3 (2007): 36–52. 37. See Emrah Atasoy, ‘Rhinocerisation Process in Rhinoceros by Eugène Ionesco’, Turkish Academic Research Review 6, no. 1 (2021): 1–11.

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38. This portion of the discussion draws from Qi, Adapting Western Classics, 170–6. 39. See John Ruwitch, ‘China Now Tries to Tame Deng’s Black and White Cats’, Reuters, 17 February 2007, https://www.reuters.com/article/us-china-deng/china-now-tries-to-tamedengs-black-and-white-cats-idUSHKG19810720070218 (accessed 22 June 2021). 40. See Tao Yu, ‘Yong chuantong jiyi jihuo Bulaixite: Ping Shen Lin gaibian de Beijing haoren’ (Enlivening Brecht with Traditional Drama Techniques: On Shen Lin’s Adaptation The Good Person of Beijing), Shanghai xiju (Shanghai Theatre) 12 (2011): 18–19. 41. The name Yu Biao (Yang Sun) is apparently a combination of two names, Yu Jie and Jiao Guobiao, two independent writers and dissidents originally based at Beijing University. They were associated with the ‘Tonight I am an American’ (or ‘One Night American’) hoopla thanks to their public expression of sympathy to America in response to the 9/11 terrorist attack. For example, a stanza of a poem by Jiao goes like this: ‘If I can be born again, I’d want to be an American GI; / If I am doomed to die in war, I’d like to be the ghost of American precision missiles.’ See Zhao Zhiyong, ‘Shuwei haoren: Qianxi Bulaixite Sichuan haoren de liang chu zhongguo dangdai gaibian banben’ (What Is a Good Person: On Two Contemporary Chinese Adaptations of Brecht’s The Good Person of Szechwan), Wenyi lilun yu piping (Criticism and Theory in Arts and Literature) 4 (2013): 124–7. This portion of the discussion also draws from Gao Yin, ‘Beijing haoren dui Bulaixiete de dangdai chanshi’ (The Good Person of Beijing’s Contemporary Interpretation of Brecht), Xiju yishu (Theatre Arts) 6 (2011): 11–16, and Shi Yan, ‘Beijing haoren, haori duo mo’ (The Good Person of Beijing, Good Things Take Time to Grind), Nanfang zhoumo (Southern Weekend), 22 September 2011, E27. 42. See ‘Beijing quju’ (北京曲剧), http://baike.baidu.com/view/180607.htm (accessed 11 May 2017). 43. See Zhao Zhiyong; Shi Yan. 44. The term Jiangnan refers to the southern Yangtze River region, typically including Shanghai and large portions of Jiangsu and Zhejiang provinces. 45. This portion of the discussion draws from Fang Qijun, ‘Wunong ruanyu de Bulaixiete: Xin gainian yueju Jiangnan haoren guanhou’ (Brecht in Soft-Speaking Jiangnan Accent: Thoughts on New Concept Yueju Adaptation The Good Person of Jiangnan), Ningbo tongxun (Nongbo News Report) 8 (2013): 58–61, and Chen Xiangyuan and Hu Cheng, ‘Xiju gaige ying shenzhong “lijian”: Cong yueju Jiangnan haoren fansi Bulaixite “lijian” lilun de zhongguo hua’ (Drama Reform Should Be Cautious: Reflections on Sinicisation of Brecht’s ‘Alienation Effect’ Theory as Evidenced in the Yueju Remake The Good Person of Jiangnan), Fujian luntan (Fujian Tribune) 11 (2013): 117–21. 46. Meng Jinghui, ‘Wa shiyan jutuan zhi guanzhong’ (To Theatregoers from Frog Experimental Theatre), in Xianfeng xiju dangan (Avant-Garde Theatre Archives), ed. Jinghui Meng (Beijing: Zuojia chubanshe (Writers Press), 2011), 46–7. 47. See Qi, Adapting Western Classics, 41–53. 48. Quoted in Vista Kan Tianxia, ‘Ershi nian hou guanzhong kandong le San jiemei Dengdai geduo le ma?’ (The Audiences Now Understand Three Sisters Waiting for Godot Twenty Years Afterwards?), https://baijiahao.baidu.com/s?id=1613264929909457347&wfr=spid er&for=pc (accessed 7 June 2021). 49. See Linda Ben-Zvi, ed., Women in Beckett: Performance and Critical Perspectives (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1992), x. 50. ‘Yichang xiju ershijiu wan guanzhong’ (One Theatrical Performance with 290,000 Audiences), China Arts and Entertainment Group, http://www.caeg.cn/whjtgs/jtdt/202004/9ae 3ad40c028411fa9f32c673a2336bb.shtml (accessed 14 July 2020). 51. For example, History of American Drama (美国戏剧史) by Guo Jide (Zhengzhou: Henan People’s Press, 1993) has two chapters devoted to the development of African American drama.

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52. One can only speculate about the reasons why, including Chinese theatre artists’ apparent ‘obsession’ with the ‘canonical’ works whose authors (Shakespeare, Ibsen, Chekhov, Brecht, O’Neill, Miller and so many more) ‘happen’ to be white males. 53. See Arthur Miller, Salesman in Beijing (New York: Viking, 2008), and Ying Ruocheng and Claire Conceison, Voices Carry: Behind Bars and Backstage during China’s Revolution and Reform (New York: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2008). 54. Lorraine Hansberry, To Be Young, Gifted, and Black: Lorraine Hansberry in her Own Words, adapted by Robert Nemiroff (New York: Vintage Books, 1995), 20. 55. See Emily Feng, ‘First Chinese-Language Production of “A Raisin in the Sun” Is Staged in Beijing’, NPR, 3 September 2020, https://www.npr.org/2020/09/03/908274058/first-chineselanguage-production-of-a-raisin-in-the-sun-is-staged-in-beijing (accessed 18 June 2021). 56. ‘Yangguang xia de putaogan’ (A Raisin in the Sun), Beijing People’s Art Theatre, http://bjry. com/play/html/2020/01/20200817516.html (accessed 18 June 2021). 57. Zhong Yibing, ‘Yibu laizhi buyi de haoxi: Kan huaju Yangguang xia de putaogan’ (A HardTo-Come-By Good Play: Thoughts on Spoken Drama A Raisin in the Sun), Art Paper, 16 November 2020, http://wyb.chinawriter.com.cn/attachment/202011/16/3bcd5c94-f9684b77-91b0-983998245f9f.pdf (accessed 23 June 2021). 58. See Jane Perlez, ‘With Blackface and Monkey Suit, Chinese Gala on Africa Causes Uproar’, The New York Times, 16 February 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/16/world/ asia/china-africa-blackface-lunar-new-year.html (accessed 23 June 2021). 59. Ying Da consulted with Claire Conceison, who had worked extensively with Ying Ruocheng and Arthur Miller, and with Harvey Young, whose research on the performance and experience of race has been widely published and recognised. See Feng, ‘First ChineseLanguage Production’.

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Quinney, Anne. ‘Excess and Identity: The Franco-Romanian Ionesco Combats Rhinoceritis’. South Central Review 24, no. 3 (2007): 36–52. Rousuck, J. Wynn. ‘Paula Vogel’s Road Home: How I Learned to Drive Has Propelled the Maryland-bred Playwright into Prominence and Given her License to Take on Projects and Issues Close to her Heart’. The Baltimore Sun, 3 May 1998. https://www.baltimoresun.com/ news/bs-xpm98-05-03-1998123004-story.html (accessed 18 June 2021). Ruwitch, John. ‘China Now Tries to Tame Deng’s Black and White Cats’. Reuters, 17 February 2007. https://www.reuters.com/article/us-china-deng/china-now-tries-to-tame-dengs-blackand-white-cats-idUSHKG19810720070218 (accessed 22 June 2021). Shi, Yan. ‘Beijing haoren, haori duo mo’ (The Good Person of Beijing, Good Things Take Time to Grind). Nanfang zhoumo (Southern Weekend), 22 September 2011, E27. Simmons, Katie. ‘China’s Government May Be Communist, but its People Embrace Capitalism’. Pew Research Center, 10 October 2014. https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2014/10/10/ chinas-government-may-be-communist-but-its-people-embrace-capitalism/ (accessed 11 May 2017). Tao, Yu. ‘Yong chuantong jiyi jihuo Bulaixite: Ping Shen Lin gaibian de Beijing haoren’ (Enlivening Brecht with Traditional Drama Techniques: On Shen Lin’s Adaptation The Good Person of Beijing). Shanghai xiju (Shanghai Theatre) 12 (2011): 18–19. Veblen, Thorstein. The Theory of the Leisure Class, reissue. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009. Vista Kan Tianxia. ‘Ershi nian hou guanzhong kandong le San jiemei Dengdai geduo le ma?’ (The Audiences Now Understand Three Sisters Waiting for Godot Twenty Years Afterwards?). https://baijiahao.baidu.com/s?id=1613264929909457347&wfr=spider&for=pc (accessed 7 June 2021). ‘Yangguang xia de putaogan’ (A Raisin in the Sun). Beijing People’s Art Theatre. http://bjry.com/ play/html/2020/01/20200817516.html (accessed 18 June 2021). Yi, Cong. ‘Shisi ge Luolita zhong yi ben zhi bijiao pinglun’ (Fourteen Chinese Translations of Lolita: A Comparative Review). Douban, 3 September 2013. https://www.douban.com/ note/299911776/?type=like (accessed 20 June 2021). ‘Yichang xiju ershijiu wan guanzhong’ (One Theatrical Performance with 290,000 Audiences). China Arts and Entertainment Group. http://www.caeg.cn/whjtgs/jtdt/202004/9ae3ad40c0 28411fa9f32c673a2336bb.shtml (accessed 14 July 2020). Ying, Ruocheng and Claire Conceison. Voices Carry: Behind Bars and Backstage during China’s Revolution and Reform. New York: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2008. Yu, Shiao-ling S. Chinese Drama after the Cultural Revolution, 1979–1989: An Anthology. Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press, 1996. Zhang, Helong. ‘Guonei Beikete yanjiu pingshu’ (Review of Beckett Studies in China). Guowai wenxue (Foreign Literature) 3 (2010): 37–45. Zhang, Ting. ‘Bushi chenzui huo chenshui ershi jingxing he qingxing’ (Not Indulgence or Slumber but Rude Awakening and Enlightening). China Art, 12 June 2015. http:// www.cflac.org.cn/zgysb/dz/ysb/history/20150612/index.htm?page=/page_4/201506/ t20150612_297994.htm&pagenum=4 (accessed 20 June 2021). Zhao, Zhiyong. ‘Shuwei haoren: Qianxi Bulaixite Sichuan haoren de liang chu zhongguo dangdai gaibian banben’ (What Is a Good Person: On Two Contemporary Chinese Adaptations of Brecht’s The Good Person of Szechwan). Wenyi lilun yu piping (Criticism and Theory in Arts and Literature) 4 (2013): 124–7. Zhong, Yibing. ‘Yibu laizhi buyi de haoxi: Kan huaju Yangguang xia de putaogan’ (A HardTo-Come-By Good Play: Thoughts on Spoken Drama A Raisin in the Sun). Art Paper, 16 November 2020. http://wyb.chinawriter.com.cn/attachment/202011/16/3bcd5c94-f968-4b7791b0-983998245f9f.pdf (accessed 23 June 2021).

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Zhou, Liming. ‘Gaibian shi hanghuo, zai haolaiwu yidian ye bu diuren’ (Adaptation Is Mainstream Practice, No Loss of Face Even in Hollywood). Interview, 27 June 2015. http://www. vmovier.com/46965 (accessed 22 April 2017). Zhou, Raymond. ‘A Wild Retake on a Wilde Classic’. China Daily, 2 June 2015. http://www. chinadaily.com.cn/cndy/2015-06/02/content_20883131.htm (accessed 22 April 2017). Zhu, Xuefeng. ‘Wenmingxi wutai shang de Zhaoyanwang: Hong Shen, Aoni’er yu Zhongguo zaoqi huaju zhuanxing xiju yishu’ (Yama Zhao on the Stage of ‘Civilised Drama’: Hong Shen, O’Neill and the Art of Early Chinese Spoken Drama during Transformation). Xiju yishu (Theatre Arts) 3 (2012): 48–58.

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Part III: Transmission

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17 Introduction: (Im)material Legacies, Living Traditions Claire Warden, Adrian Curtin, Nicholas Johnson and Naomi Paxton

I

n Moscow stands the Shabolovka Radio Tower.1 Designed by Vladimir Shukhov during the Russian Civil War and completed in 1922, it is emblematic of a proletarianinspired avant-garde, not only in its design (reminiscent of the famous constructivist tower designed by Vladimir Tatlin in 1920), but also in its purpose: to affect the masses by transmitting radio waves across the new Soviet state. The tower still stands, rusting and decrepit – an obsolete yet strikingly beautiful emblem of modernism that perseveres despite the ever-encroaching city.2

Figure 17.1  The Shabolovka Radio Tower, Moscow (photograph by Anastasia Fedosova, 2022).

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234 claire warden, adrian curtin, nicholas johnson, naomi paxton Radio towers, many of which are still etched on our landscapes, were icons of modernity and technological progress in the early twentieth century, enabling a wide(r)scale transmission of information and culture. As a broadcast medium, radio was a ‘vital source of entertainment and information implicated in complex networks of transmission, reception and feedback’, notes Ian Whittington in his book on the BBC during the Second World War.3 Radio also provided a ready means for propaganda and misinformation to enter the home. Melissa Dinsman observes that radio was, and remains, a ‘medium historically connected to both the transmission of language and the military’, reminding us that modern mass media and communication technologies (including telephony, television and, more recently, the internet and social media) can be diverting and emancipatory as well as potentially destructive and repressive.4 Transmission is a tremendously generative keyword for both modernity and modernism, and it has special purchase in theatre and dance.5 Technologically enabled transmission of information, ideas and culture is not unique to modernity, of course, but new forms of media, such as radio, meant that transmission could happen more quickly and at greater scale; such transmission could also be more egalitarian in terms of access.6 Modernity supercharged a human universal – the conveyance of information from person to person, place to place, and generation to generation. This is fundamental to culture, which, as George Steiner notes, depends on ‘the transmission of meaning across time’ as well as ‘the transfer of meaning in space’.7 In modernity new technologies and infrastructures, including those pertaining to transportation (trains, cars, aeroplanes), altered spatio-temporal experience and led to increased and enhanced opportunities for informational and cultural exchange.8 In short, the ‘age of oil’ (and steel) facilitated an ‘information age’ in which modernity’s technological affordances yielded ever-greater accelerations and extensions of transmission, allowing a greater variety of messages – and messengers – to circulate through cultural space at ever-lower costs of entry. But this essentially quantitative change in transmission resulted in a qualitative change in society itself (a mechanism of historical evolution first outlined by G. W. F. Hegel in the Logic, adapted by Karl Marx in Capital and Friedrich Engels in Dialectics of Nature, and still salient in a number of fields today).9 Global modernism was powered by, and thrived as a result of, these new technological affordances and circuits of transportation, which also drove the tourist industry. The European railway system, for example, allowed for the movement of people between Moscow and other European capitals (and vice versa) at a greater level, rate and speed, and at decreased expense, than any previous time. This, in turn, facilitated personal and artistic exchange between Russian and Italian futurism, as well as between Russian, French and British avant-gardists (amongst others).10 Without such technological affordances and infrastructure (and the exploitation of fossil fuels), the aesthetic churn that is characteristic of modernism would have been far less dynamic. Furthermore, cultural borrowing and appropriation (notably by Euro-American artists) might have been reduced, along with colonialist aspects of modernism, such as the construction/exploitation of (non-Western) ‘Others’. This suggests, as many of the authors in this section detail, that transmission is neither an inherent good nor ideologically neutral; rather, it is a strong and multivalent force, rich in its implications for modernist artistic and cultural production. Aesthetic modernism thrummed for decades because of transmissions of all sorts, not only technological. Personal, ideational, spiritual, cultural and political messages

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were all propagated in new frequencies and forms, and scholars have picked up on various wavelengths. The collection Vibratory Modernism, edited by Anthony Enns and Shelley Trower, considers the importance of vibration in multiple fields of study and practice in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The book examines how modernist art (including theatre) responded to new-found understanding and practices of vibration. The editors note how the concept of ‘sympathetic vibration’ bridged science and occultism. It was ‘informed by an understanding of the body as borderless, and it explained how energy or expression or communication could be transmitted between and beyond bodies across space and time’.11 Theatre is an optimal medium for sympathetic vibration, given its overlay of the ‘here and now’ with the (imagined or historical) ‘there and then’, its operations of ghosting, surrogation, disappearance and the like.12 Nicholas Ridout, in an essay from the same collection, writes of theatre as a ‘vibratorium’, an ‘apparatus for the exploration of intersubjective or social affect and its transmission’.13 Ridout proposes that ‘modern theatre, with its electric light and its darkened auditorium, may [. . .] be understood to have facilitated a vibratory mode of sensory communication between actors and groups of fully active, even perhaps electrified spectators’.14 The transmission that happens ‘in the room’, body to body, gives theatre its phenomenological, spiritual and political power and makes possible its ‘great reckonings’.15 Attempting to account for such transmissions after the fact – although inherently difficult, especially if one was not present at the event – is a vital part of theatre scholarship, including work on modernism. As the global COVID-19 pandemic emerged during the making of this volume, the role of epidemiological transmission in theatrical modernism has also come into sharper focus, both metaphorically and historically. Scholars have explored the topic of bodily transmission in modernism in relation to influenza,16 for example, and theatre scholars have investigated the viral potential of theatre as an art form.17 Breathing on one another in close proximity in theatre has naturally acquired new valence, becoming the instigator of much debate, hardship and discontent, as well as creativity and innovation, since the advent of COVID-19.18 The same collective embodiment and copresence that makes theatre distinctive has lately become a site of risk, but this tension resonates with a specifically modernist legacy. Theatrical performance compels us to attend to the body as the site and receiver of transmitted practices while recognising, as so often in modernism, that glitch, miscommunication and malfunction can occur, both accidentally and on purpose. In their introduction to ‘Modernism on the World Stage’, Rebecca Kastleman, Kevin Riordan and Claire Warden foreground the body as ‘the essential vehicle of transnational modernist transmission and therefore an important site for accrued meanings’.19 Cross-cultural contact, which modernity has advanced, can produce crossed wires in communication, especially when multiple languages, translations, signifiers and knowledge systems are at play.20 Theatre complicates efforts to apprehend the operations of its various ‘senders’, ‘receivers’ and ‘messages’, because these components are often latent, slow to develop, and not always (fully) known. Just as the breath of one’s scene partner or audience neighbour could contain the hidden codes of a transformative virus or announce its presence with a loud cough, this section diagnoses both symptomatic and asymptomatic cases of modernism in contemporary performance. The idea of an ‘asymptomatic’ exchange helps to illuminate how the immaterial legacies of modernist theatre are not always apparent, even though they may be invisibly

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236 claire warden, adrian curtin, nicholas johnson, naomi paxton present and potent.21 Many contemporary theatre-makers express uncertainty about the ways in which modernism informs their thinking and practice, yet it remains a force in their firmament. Modernist ideas and aesthetics have entered into the cultural mainstream and have been absorbed and transmuted in the process, often to the point where their origins have been obscured. In any moment of new transmission (for example, in a teaching space or rehearsal room), modernist legacies can be partially to fully occluded, or simply not known. Histories, theories and practices that have passed from theatremaker to theatre-maker organically accrue creative distortions, like a convoluted game of ‘telephone’ down through the ages, and some of the mutations that result can be generative. One can think (and be told) that one is acting in accordance with Bertolt Brecht’s ostensible method or Konstantin Stanislavski’s so-called System, but one may not appreciate how ideas and practices have been mediated, filtered and perhaps transformed; equally, one can be unaware of the roles other agents, both foreign and domestic, have played in developing the content and sustaining its transmission.22 Modernism is a living tradition, as this book argues, so cultural adaptation is positive and necessary, indeed unavoidable. Therefore, criticising theatre-makers for ‘getting modernism wrong’ or for not knowing all the links in the chains of modernist transmission from past to present is misguided. In any case, what would it mean to ‘get it right’, other than to allow it to keep changing? To be sensitive to the conditions and implications of such changes is to trace both material and immaterial legacies, as with any other form of theatre history. Texts of various kinds (including, but not limited to, playtexts) are still extant and continue to circulate, with scholars, translators, editors and publishers participating in their ongoing dissemination and shaping their legacy. Many material objects relating to modernist theatre endure, such as props, costumes and set components, even if their stage lives may have ended and they are now housed in a museum or archive or, less fortunately, left to moulder in some forgotten corner – such objects still have residual power and stories to tell.23 Many sites of past modernist performance, such as theatre buildings, exist and continue to shape the energies of their inhabitants through their architecture. Even performance spaces that have disappeared from today’s landscapes can be recreated virtually for the purpose of analysis.24 Theatrical performance leaves behind all these material traces and remains, but it also ostensibly disappears, especially in its more abstract, intangible aspects. Immaterial legacies of modernist theatre, such as artistic practices, methods, ideas and ideologies, can nonetheless be positioned and traced. To some extent, theatre historians can reconstruct some of the networks in which modernist theatre-makers operated, how their work travelled, who encountered it, and how it was received, yet reconstruction always relies on the quantity and quality of available evidence. What this section also asks us to consider is how the body can function as an archive, a storehouse of knowledge that can be communicated from person to person; disregarding this embodied history replicates a ‘patrilineal, Westidentified (arguably white-cultural) logic of the Archive’, as Rebecca Schneider has argued.25 There are contemporary theatre-makers who carry this embodied knowledge of modernist theatre history – knowledge that is not available, or not available in the same way, elsewhere. This section seeks to invite such voices to crystallise their ways of knowing, however temporarily or provisionally, in textual form. Of particular interest as a site of immaterial transmission is the institutionalisation of theatrical modernism in education and training settings, the effects of which

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continue to mark the environments in which we operate as scholars and teachers. One of the editors of this book, Naomi Paxton, trained as an actor in the early 2000s. Her training was based in late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century realist and modernist approaches to text, stagecraft, voice and movement. At the time she perceived this work as a symbol of legitimacy – a version of Stanislavski’s ‘Magic If’ for the character of ‘the good performer’ in which the ‘given circumstances’ were conformity and ambition. The formalisation and gentrification of theatre training in the UK in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries – what Michael Sanderson has called the ‘increasing respectability’ of the profession – created systems of production and industry networks that privileged the ideas of European-educated men and some educated women.26 The transmission of this respectability formalised hierarchies of training methodologies, production values and performance styles that explicitly drew from a few modernist practitioners and writers, but did not always contextualise or critique their practice. For Paxton, the ideological frameworks of modernism were as ubiquitous when moving into professional life within the mainstream theatre industry as they were in the training environment. Has this changed? What disruptive, and perhaps even subversive, potential does modernism hold for (cultural) education today? This section offers a prismatic exploration of the topic of modernist transmission. The contributions ask questions about preservation, reverence and relevance, and they reflect on the historical weight of what modernism has come to mean for contemporary practitioners. In what ways and to what ends has modernist theatre history been transmitted into the present? What has been the flow of ideas and practices? How might we reconsider what we have received and how we have received it? This partially involves exploring tensions that adhere to established modernist theatrical works, especially those with production histories that have excluded or marginalised certain types of bodies or performers. Contributors draw attention to the ‘intangible cultural heritage’ of modernist theatre – aspects that can readily evade attention or recognition – as they endeavour to recover some of this heritage, which may exist as embodied knowledge.27 They critically reflect on material and immaterial modernist transmission by tracing lineages, endeavouring to name the ‘unnamable’ and rethinking the relationship between signal and noise. The section opens with two chapters that meditate on actor training as examples of modernist and contemporary transmission. Burç İdem Dinçel examines the nō and kabuki-inspired method of actor training devised by the Japanese director Tadashi Suzuki. Dinçel situates Suzuki at the ‘crossroads of modernism’, unlike other scholars who have associated Suzuki more with postmodernism and interculturalism. Dinçel links Suzuki to the aesthetics of Samuel Beckett via a shared tragic worldview informed by the ‘suffering body’. He outlines how Suzuki’s method and his Beckett-infused aesthetics effect transcultural praxis in indicative productions Suzuki has directed. In a complementary essay, acting coach Mark Westbrook writes about the practice of teaching acting students and coaching professional actors using online platforms such as Skype and Zoom, which became necessary in 2020 due to the pandemic. Westbrook outlines the limitations and opportunities of communicating ideas about acting derived from Stanislavski over the internet, by which means co-presence can only be virtual; delays in transmission and reception can hamper proceedings, as can other elements of the technologies. Westbrook reports that one can still see actors expressing ‘the life of the human spirit’ (a motivation that drove Stanislavski) in online performance.

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238 claire warden, adrian curtin, nicholas johnson, naomi paxton The next two chapters, also authored by practitioners, illustrate how the lives and work of modernists are taken up and further transmitted with political purpose in contemporary performance. Lucy Stevens discusses two performance pieces she created that use elements of modernist theatre to introduce audiences to Dame Ethel Smyth and Virginia Woolf, respectively. Stevens writes about being haunted by these ‘ghosts from our collective past’ via their textual remainders, such as memoirs, and argues that these figures continue to resonate with audiences in the context of contemporary patriarchy. She draws a ‘female line’ from Smyth and Woolf in the 1920s ‘leading to us, reflecting and informing what it is to be a woman in the 2020s’. In a companion piece, Kerry Frampton outlines how her theatre company, Splendid Productions, is inspired by the work of Bertolt Brecht, which Frampton had first encountered as a student, though she did not initially like or appreciate it. Splendid seeks to give its audiences of young people a sense of ownership of Brechtian methodology in the form of embodied knowledge, which, Frampton argues, is politically significant as it prompts them to engage with the world around them, to ask questions, to forego ‘binary thinking’, and to realise that they can effect change in society and in themselves. Modernist legacies are given further attention in the following pair of historiographically oriented analyses, which re-evaluate the ideological formations of modernist performance and their lingering influence. Hanna Järvinen questions the legacies of canonical artists from the early twentieth century in twenty-first-century dance, specifically the Orientalism of the Ballets Russes and Ruth St. Denis, the claims to abstraction in Loïe Fuller and Isadora Duncan, and the segregation of modern dance through universalising claims of kinaesthetic empathy. Järvinen uses contemporary examples by Pichet Klunchun, Ola Maciejewska, Eszter Salamon and Nora Chipaumire to show how ‘appropriation of the Other’ was at the heart of modernist dance (itself a problematic category, the author explains) and how the theoretical apparatus of abstraction (‘the principal quality of modernism’) privileges whiteness and Euro-American genealogies. Järvinen argues for the importance of rethinking canons and genealogies of dance and decolonising its practices and discourses, especially in relation to modernism and modernity. In her chapter, Soudabeh Ananisarab determines the influence of George Bernard Shaw, along with other individuals pursuing modernist agendas at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth centuries, on policies and practices shaping British regional theatres today. ‘Although “mindsets” have changed and a new “cluster of beliefs” has emerged’, writes Ananisarab, ‘boundaries between periods are never clear; often the residues of beliefs and practices in one phase will impact those in another’. The author shows how regional playhouses continue to operate on many principles that have their origins in the early years of the repertory movement. In a measured assessment of this particular legacy, Ananisarab observes that Shaw and his collaborators failed to resolve a series of tensions (for example, around target audiences, the function of theatre, and potential funding models) that remain problematic for regional theatres today. The final contribution, by Jonathan Heron, links back to the consideration of modernist transmission in training/education that began the section, whilst also acting as a bridge to the volume’s final section. Heron alternates between an academic voice and a practitioner voice in discussing two examples of university arts education in which modernist-inspired performance practice, based on the work of Federico García Lorca, intervened in or interrupted academic learning. Heron argues that students ‘benefit

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from a sustained creative engagement with modernism (and its variants) in order to develop a holistic approach to knowledge-making, academic literacy and queer studies’. Heron’s essay is sensitive to the ‘dynamics of queer poetic transmission’ as well as the ‘slippery quality of literary modernism in performance’, past and present. In sum, the chapters in this section investigate how the (im)material legacies of modernism affect contemporary practice and pedagogy in a variety of fashions and outcomes, with both positive and negative attributions. They invite us to consider how critical reflection on modernism can be transformative and empowering for artists, teachers, scholars and others, as we move further into the twenty-first century while hearkening to what has gone before. Transmission ends.

Notes   1. The tower is also referred to as the Shukhov Tower, after its designer, Vladimir Shukhov.   2. Jean-Louis Cohen, Maria Ametov and Christina Lodder, Building the Revolution: Soviet Art and Architecture, 1915–1935 (London: Royal Academy of Arts, 2011), 82.  3. Ian Whittington, Writing the Radio War: Literature, Politics and the BBC, 1939–1945 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2018), 2.   4. Melissa Dinsman, Modernism at the Microphone: Radio, Propaganda, and Literary Aesthetics during World War II (London: Bloomsbury, 2015), 5. The telephone preceded radio as a medium for transmitting culture, including theatre. See Adrian Curtin, ‘Recalling the Theatre Phone’, in Theatre, Performance and Analogue Technologies: Historical Interfaces and Intermedialities, ed. Kara Reilly (London: Palgrave, 2013), 214–31.  5. See Lesley Main, ed., Transmissions in Dance: Contemporary Staging Practices (London: Palgrave, 2017). Sally Gardner discusses the phenomenon of select, authorised ‘transmitters’ or ‘custodians’ of Yvonne Rainer’s famous piece Trio A in her article ‘What Is a Transmitter?’, Choreographic Practices 5, no. 2 (2014): 229–40.   6. For an examination of how information systems and communication networks such as news and postal services transformed Russia from the mid-sixteenth to the mid-nineteenth century, see Simon Franklin and Katherine Bowers, Information and Empire: Mechanisms of Communication in Russia, 1600–1854 (Cambridge: Open Book Publishers, 2017).  7. George Steiner, After Babel: Aspects of Language and Translation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 32.   8. See Stephen Kern, The Culture of Time and Space, 1880–1918 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003). Kim Solga writes about the expansion and contraction of ‘modern spatio-temporal experience’ in her introduction to A Cultural History of Theatre in the Modern Age, vol. 6 (London: Bloomsbury, 2017), 6.   9. See Robert L. Carneiro, ‘The Transition from Quantity to Quality: A Neglected Causal Mechanism in Accounting for Social Evolution’, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 97, no. 23 (2000): 12,926–31. 10. See Claire Warden, Migrating Modernist Performance: British Theatrical Travels Through Russia (London: Palgrave, 2016). 11. Anthony Enns and Shelley Trower, ‘Introduction’, in Vibratory Modernism, ed. Anthony Enns and Shelley Trower (London: Palgrave, 2013), 5. 12. See Marvin Carlson, The Haunted Stage: The Theatre as Memory Machine (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2003); Joseph Roach, Cities of the Dead: Circum-Atlantic Performance (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996); Peggy Phelan, Unmarked: The Politics of Performance (London: Routledge, 1993).

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240 claire warden, adrian curtin, nicholas johnson, naomi paxton 13. Nicholas Ridout, ‘The Vibratorium Electrified’, in Vibratory Modernism, ed. Anthony Enns and Shelley Trower (London: Palgrave, 2013), 216. 14. Ibid. 223. 15. Bert O. States, Great Reckonings in Little Rooms: On the Phenomenology of Theater (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985). 16. Elizabeth Outka, Viral Modernism: The Influenza Pandemic and Interwar Literature (New York: Columbia University Press, 2020). 17. Miriam Felton-Dansky, Viral Performance: Contagious Theaters from Modernism to the Digital Age (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2018); Pascale Aebischer, Viral Shakespeare: Performance in the Time of Pandemic (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021). 18. See the AHRC-funded projects ‘The Pandemic and Beyond: The Arts and Humanities Contribution to Covid Research and Recovery’ (https://pandemicandbeyond.exeter. ac.uk) and ‘Outside the Box: Open Air Performance as Pandemic Response’ (https:// openairperformance.com), as well as the Volkswagen Foundation-funded project ‘Viral Theatres: Post/Pandemic Performance in the Anthropocene’ (https://viraltheatres.org). All accessed 10 October 2022. 19. Rebecca Kastleman, Kevin Riordan and Claire Warden, ‘Modernism on the World Stage’, Modernism/modernity 4, no. 3 (2019), https://modernismmodernity.org/forums/modernismworld-stage (accessed 10 October 2022). 20. See Marvin Carlson, Speaking in Tongues: Languages at Play in the Theatre (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2009); Adrian Curtin, Avant-Garde Theatre Sound: Staging Sonic Modernity (New York: Palgrave, 2014), 101–15. 21. See Andrew Sofer, Dark Matter: Invisibility in Drama, Theater, and Performance (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2013). 22. See Paula Hanssen, ‘“[She] Made Suggestions. We Took Them”: Bertolt Brecht’s Women Collaborators’, in Bertolt Brecht in Context, ed. Stephen Brockmann (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021), 73–80. 23. Andrew Sofer, The Stage Life of Props (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2003). 24. Digital humanities methodologies more traditionally used to visualise ancient or early modern theatres have now been applied to modernist icons; for example, a 2011 digital reconstruction of the 1904 Abbey Theatre (damaged by fire in 1951 and no longer standing) can be found at https://blog.oldabbeytheatre.net/ (accessed 10 October 2022) and was developed by Hugh Denard with contributions from King’s College London and the Trinity Long Room Hub. See Anna Bentkowska-Kafel, Hugh Denard and Drew Baker, eds, Paradata and Transparency in Virtual Heritage (London and New York: Routledge, 2016). 25. Rebecca Schneider, ‘Performance Remains’, Performance Research 6, no. 3 (2001): 100. See also Diana Taylor, The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003). 26. Michael Sanderson, From Irving to Olivier: A Social History of the Acting Profession in England, 1880–1983 (London: Athlone Press, 1984), 15–17. 27. In 2003 UNESCO defined intangible cultural heritage as ‘the practices, representations, expressions, knowledge, skills – as well as the instruments, objects, artefacts and cultural spaces associated therewith – that communities, groups and, in some cases, individuals recognize as part of their cultural heritage’. https://ich.unesco.org/en/convention (accessed 4 April 2022).

Works Cited Aebischer, Pascale. Viral Shakespeare: Performance in the Time of Pandemic. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021.

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Bentkowska-Kafel, Anna, Hugh Denard and Drew Baker, eds. Paradata and Transparency in Virtual Heritage. London and New York: Routledge, 2016. Carlson, Marvin. The Haunted Stage: The Theatre as Memory Machine. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2003. Carlson, Marvin. Speaking in Tongues: Languages at Play in the Theatre. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2009. Carneiro, Robert L. ‘The Transition from Quantity to Quality: A Neglected Causal Mechanism in Accounting for Social Evolution’. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 97, no. 23 (2000): 12,926–31. Cohen, Jean-Louis, Maria Ametov and Christina Lodder. Building the Revolution: Soviet Art and Architecture, 1915–1935. London: Royal Academy of Arts, 2011. Curtin, Adrian. Avant-Garde Theatre Sound: Staging Sonic Modernity. New York: Palgrave, 2014. Curtin, Adrian. ‘Recalling the Theatre Phone’. In Theatre, Performance and Analogue Technologies: Historical Interfaces and Intermedialities, edited by Kara Reilly, 214–31. London: Palgrave, 2013. Dinsman, Melissa. Modernism at the Microphone: Radio, Propaganda, and Literary Aesthetics during World War II. London: Bloomsbury, 2015. Enns, Anthony and Shelley Trower, eds. Vibratory Modernism. London: Palgrave, 2013. Felton-Dansky, Miriam. Viral Performance: Contagious Theaters from Modernism to the Digital Age. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2018. Franklin, Simon and Katherine Bowers. Information and Empire: Mechanisms of Communication in Russia, 1600–1854. Cambridge: Open Book Publishers, 2017. Gardner, Sally. ‘What Is a Transmitter?’ Choreographic Practices 5, no. 2 (2014): 229–40. Hanssen, Paula. ‘“[She] Made Suggestions. We Took Them”: Bertolt Brecht’s Women Collaborators’. In Bertolt Brecht in Context, edited by Stephen Brockmann, 73–80. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021. Kastleman, Rebecca, Kevin Riordan and Claire Warden. ‘Modernism on the World Stage’. Modernism/modernity 4, no. 3 (2019). https://modernismmodernity.org/forums/modernismworld-stage (accessed 10 October 2022). Kern, Stephen. The Culture of Time and Space, 1880–1918. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003. Main, Leslie, ed. Transmissions in Dance: Contemporary Staging Practices. London: Palgrave, 2017. Outka, Elizabeth. Viral Modernism: The Influenza Pandemic and Interwar Literature. New York: Columbia University Press, 2020. Phelan, Peggy. Unmarked: The Politics of Performance. London: Routledge, 1993. Ridout, Nicholas. ‘The Vibratorium Electrified’. In Vibratory Modernism, edited by Anthony Enns and Shelley Trower, 215–26. London: Palgrave, 2013. Roach, Joseph. Cities of the Dead: Circum-Atlantic Performance. New York: Columbia University Press, 1996. Sanderson, Michael. From Irving to Olivier: A Social History of the Acting Profession in England, 1880–1983. London: Athlone Press, 1984. Schneider, Rebecca. ‘Performance Remains’. Performance Research 6, no. 3 (2001): 100–8. Sofer, Andrew. Dark Matter: Invisibility in Drama, Theater, and Performance. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2013. Sofer, Andrew. The Stage Life of Props. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2003. Solga, Kim, ed. A Cultural History of Theatre in the Modern Age, vol. 6. London: Bloomsbury, 2017. States, Bert O. Great Reckonings in Little Rooms: On the Phenomenology of Theater. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985.

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242 claire warden, adrian curtin, nicholas johnson, naomi paxton Steiner, George. After Babel: Aspects of Language and Translation. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998. Taylor, Diana. The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003. Warden, Claire. Migrating Modernist Performance: British Theatrical Travels Through Russia. London: Palgrave, 2016. Whittington, Ian. Writing the Radio War: Literature, Politics and the BBC, 1939–1945. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2018.

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18 The Theatre of Tadashi Suzuki at the Crossroads of Modernism Burç İdem Dinçel

Modernism (Un)bound

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very term comes with baggage, yet none carries a heavier load than modernism, to the point of bringing discourse and scholarship alike to a critical standstill. From this impasse, a rethinking of modernism’s ‘tragic’ aspect indexes the cautionary tale of an archaic figure who epitomises it: Prometheus. From the sheer rebellion against the tyranny of orthodoxy for the sake of humanity, to the conditions under which the consequential suffering takes place in the short run, the fable reverberates in the modernist thrust to go forward with an implied view to ‘make’ the future, while breaking away from the past. Still, the oft-mentioned modernist rupture (of modernity) is never ‘total’ – if anything, it is the aggregation and eventual explosion of the past knowledge into something wonderfully novel. Further still, as much as Prometheus harmonises with the modernist ethos, he throws the pathos of modernity into sharp relief too: for his fire can either translate into, say, BLAST, or morph into an atom bomb. It is here that the Promethean parable unfolds into what Günther Anders aptly deems ‘Promethean shame’,1 to strike one amidst many tragic notes on a global scale by directing focus to how humankind returns the favour in the long run. Prometheus, thus bound to the consequences of his actions, recedes into the background and continues to keep watch in the distant past, even after undergoing the pecks of the eagle and subsequently being released from shackles. The blend of this allegory into the present wager on the spatio-temporal transmission of theatrical modernism harks back to the once meaningful, now all-too-familiar charges levelled at modernism, specifically in the wake of Jean-François Lyotard’s memorable critique of its ‘nostalgia for the lost narrative’.2 That this muster call to abolish each and every master/meta-narrative has become – or, as Fredric Jameson insinuates in his foreword to Lyotard’s ‘report’, was3 – a historical grand narrative to begin with does not necessarily negate its contribution to the emancipation of modernist studies from the bonds of reductionism and conservatism in the long haul. It was, after all, this double bind that led to the constitution of a protected area – ‘comfort zone’4 in Susan Stanford Friedman’s terms – within the field, running over an identical canonised geohistorical ground and remaining hubristically closed to ‘other’ comparable phenomena occurring in numerous topographies of modernism. Although the tide has turned to an all-embracing direction,5 the impulse to define, and therefore tame, unruly modernism according to a set of aesthetic criteria stemming from the artistic

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climate of late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century Europe and the United States is omnipresent. And to make matters worse, the state of discursive affairs is such that it seems to stand at odds with the weight attributed to modernism above. These ceaseless definitional attempts and plunges into the so-called origins of the movement turn the notion into ‘an ingrained yet somehow weightless concept’,6 to use the words of Sean Latham and Gayle Rogers, who opt to deal with the burden on modernism by practically removing it. Whence Friedman adds insult to injury by asking for a ‘planetary’ view of the domain with pleasing assonance: ‘How are we to break the hold of the old modernist mold?’7 Responding, in part, to this timely question, but primarily looking upon the art of theatre as the medium par excellence to unbound modernism in the (t)here-and-now of performance, the current chapter zeroes in on the work of the critically acclaimed Japanese director Tadashi Suzuki – arguably one of the most enduring figures of contemporary theatre. Now spanning over sixty years, Suzuki’s career is crowned with achievements that crack the defence of the ‘high modernist’ Western theatrical stronghold in more ways than one. Retracing Zeami’s ‘true path to the flower’,8 the director’s pedagogical route culminates in the worldwide recognition of his nō- and kabuki-propelled ‘Suzuki Method’ as a compelling alternative to the ‘system-acting’ of Konstantin Stanislavski in general, and its Americanised version of ‘method-acting’ in particular. Coterminous with this pedagogy is Suzuki’s theatrical work, which broke new ground on the contemporary stage through the deconstruction of Western classics such as The Trojan Women, King Lear and The Three Sisters. Yet, the fact that Suzuki’s artistic praxis and training method could easily cut across cultural and linguistic barriers proved to be tempting for theatre scholars: they have been confident to subjugate his aesthetics under the brands of postmodernism and interculturalism9 without questioning too much the modernist intimations of de/re/construction and fragmentation, let alone those of culturally overarching dialogue. Be that as it may, a more subtle reading of the theatre of Suzuki points towards another terrain, in which modernism and all of its cognates congregate at a cultural crossroads and become the sinuous means of a relentless interrogation of the long-term repercussions of Westernisation10 in Japanese society, most notably in the Promethean aftermath of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Suzuki’s first-degree kinship with the Japanese avant-garde movement of the 1960s – angura, namely, ‘the underground’, or ‘the little theatre’, whose primary aim was to destruct shingeki, that is, the new (realistic) drama of Japan11 – makes this territory a contentious one, because it evokes the problematics of nomenclature and might cause a few eyebrows to raise. For example: both David G. Goodman12 and Peter Eckersall13 designate Suzuki as an avant-gardist on legitimate bases in their historicising studies on angura, where the former highlights the ‘nostalgic’ and ‘traditionalist’ facets of his theatre, while the latter lends an ear to its political overtones. That being said, settling on a mindful usage of the ‘modernist avant-garde’,14 as Claire Warden does, establishes equally legitimate bases. To conceptualise and contextualise Suzuki’s theatre within the framework of modernism exhumes its defining characteristics, one of which nests in the director’s affinity with the aesthetics of Samuel Beckett – another figure to crack the defence of the ‘high modernist’ fortress, this time from within. Nevertheless, what comes into prominence in the Suzuki–Beckett nexus is not just two distinct attacks on the canon, and its artistic devices thereof. Rather, it is

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the living philosophies of these figures that converse with each other in remarkable registers by deploying inter alia tropes associated with the grand narrative of tragedy and the ‘tragic’. As the present chapter intends to demonstrate, it is through this conversation that modernist and transcultural qualities of both praxes belie discursive brandings by espousing a ‘tragic worldview’, especially when (theatrical) modernism arrives at a crossroads in its everlasting journey. The tragic take on the world denotes a specific human condition that is particular and universal at once; the suffering body varies from culture to culture, whereas suffering per se is an ontological constant. And the translation of this worldview into theatrical practice divulges the niceties at hand: where Beckett articulates his tragic vision by way of a single narrative against the odds of ‘being born’/‘being on earth’, Suzuki does so by scaling the world back to a ‘mental asylum’, wherein the actors embody the ‘tragic’ idea by adopting the hallmark of the director’s Method, the ‘grammar of feet’. As it is, the modernist movement shapes up to be a transmissive agent extraordinaire to the extent that one of the most recurring tragic expressions of antiquity – ‘not to be born is best’ – gets transformed into Suzuki’s transcultural theatre via Beckett. Moreover, to be able to reveal the performative impact of the Beckett–Suzuki correlation on the current theatrical ecosystem, this study will conclude with analyses of such indicative productions by Suzuki Company of Toga (hereafter SCOT) as Ivanov (2006) and Elektra (2010), where suffering bodies themselves work in embodied praxis and testify to the sustained presence of modernism on the contemporary stage. Beforehand, however, this chapter is bound to make its methodological ‘radical move’, which, in the words of Dwight Conquergood, ‘is to turn, and return, insistently, to the crossroads’.15 The purpose of doing so is twofold: on one level, to tease out the weighty implications of this multi-layered simile for the transmission of theatrical modernism; and on another, to propose it as a conceptual tool to gain insight into the transcultural dynamics ingrained in the circulation of modernist ideas in view of the tragic theatre of Suzuki, from which his training method radiates.

Crossroads of Modernism For a pair of boundless phenomena fuelled by the Promethean fire, metaphors of machinery are the perfect match. In that regard, Garry Leonard supplies maybe the most captivating one: The internal combustion engine is a machine that requires explosion and repetitive rupture to produce smooth, continuous, forward motion. As such, it is an apt metaphor for modernity where a continually renewed series of ‘shocks’ is systematically converted into ‘progress’.16 Going hand in hand with Jürgen Habermas’s celebrated characterisation of modernity as ‘an incomplete project’,17 Leonard’s analogy is an ostensive offshoot of the modernist dictum to ‘make it new’, with which comes ‘the injunction to make it more’,18 as Steven Connor reminds in a tone echoing Terry Eagleton: ‘Modernism is in love with the extreme and excessive.’19 If the thermodynamics of modernity’s combustion engine is too complex, too composite, too compound to be compressed into one compact form of art, the theatre’s inborn feature to lay bare, as it were, any complicated

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machinery by virtue of brutal constructions promotes it to the highest artistic rank of modernism. Furthermore, the medium’s innate capacity to administer palpable shocks transfigures its expressive quality into an explosive one and dispatches the theatre to the front line of modernist transmission. And yet, unlike Leonard’s schema, neither modernity’s march nor modernism’s dissemination is smooth. Along the winding road towards the unknown ‘ideal’, there awaits a plethora of disruptions. The beauty of forward motion abides in the ways in which the act of moving onward takes stock of those interruptive situations with an eye to injecting their mores into the curious vectors of modernism. Viewed from this angle, the pluses and minuses of the combustive metaphor, not to say its allusions to the migration of modernist aesthetics, come out into the open. At best, it points the spotlight on the tantalising instant of explosion in a spirit that is true to modernism.20 At worst, it concurrently overlooks the more seductive build-up process leading to the eruption and the ensuing elusive tranquillity. As the theatre transmits modernism across time and space at the breakneck speed of modernity, it finds itself again and again on a collision course with tradition(s) ‘at the crossroads of culture’, to extend the range of the debate with Patrice Pavis: ‘This crossroads, where foreign cultures, unfamiliar discourses and the myriad artistic effects of estrangement are jumbled together, is hard to define but it could assert itself, in years to come, as that of a theatre of culture(s).’21 And it did: gaining wide discursive currency within the heyday of postmodern salvoes on the totalitarian narratives of modernism, the crossroads trope has been subsumed under interculturalism in theatre, Pavis being its vigorous advocate perhaps together with Richard Schechner, who went so far as to deny any meaning to the wordstock of the (modernist) avant-garde in the same year: ‘It should be used only to describe the historical avant-garde, a period of innovation extending roughly from the end of the nineteenth century to the mid-1970s (at most).’22 Aside from reproducing, pace Konstantin Stanislavski, the ‘through-line’ of the so-called postmodernist action that sought to confiscate such modernist practices as deconstruction, fragmentation, juxtaposition and (even more contestably) collage23 under the aegis of democratising theatre, the proponents of interculturalism also attempted, albeit ironically and somewhat inevitably, to drive a geographical wedge between the West and the Rest. Interestingly enough, this ran contra to their intentions to transcend any and every type of dichotomy ‘after the great divide’, to borrow the title of Andreas Huyssen’s seminal work.24 It is important to keep these preliminaries in sight because they shine a light on the blind, if not soft, spot of the broadsides against the modernist avant-garde, which, in essence, has always-already been intercultural. Indeed, from Vsevolod Meyerhold to Bertolt Brecht and from Antonin Artaud to Jerzy Grotowski, theatrical modernism has thrived on the cross-breeding of elements ‘handpicked’, if in crudo, from a pool of different technical and scenic conventions of the foreign, the ‘other’ so to speak. On that note, the cultural exchange between the historical avant-garde and Japanese theatre comes to the fore as a unique case in point, since it runs almost parallel to the construction of the ‘high modernist’ Western bastion. Here, as elsewhere in the migration of modernist precepts across continents, the theatre supersedes its literary counterpart in the sense that it had the embodied experience of encountering kabuki in San Francisco in 1899, long before Ezra Pound and William Butler Yeats (con)joined forces in elevating nō into one of the building blocks of ‘high modernism’ with Certain Noble Plays of Japan in 1916.25 As well as subordinating the status of literature – drama – to a mere

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catalyst, this fact also validates periodisation. Starting from the accurate moment of the fin de siècle and lasting until 1931, Europe and the United States formed their own ‘comfort zone’ for Japanese companies who toured overseas and then transplanted the ‘foreign’ into their home ground in due course: the Kawakami troupe, the Hanako troupe, the Ichikawa troupe and the Tsutsui troupe, to name but a few.26 In the light of these entanglements, the inherently bidirectional flow of modernist transmission takes on a new significance, which in effect triggers a need to attune the terminology to the delicacies of the interplay between the obviously performative cultures. To be sure, Erika Fischer-Lichte is the foremost scholar who encapsulated her critique of interculturalism in what she suggested as ‘interweaving performance cultures’ in its place on the basis that ‘the concept “intercultural theatre” implies a sharp division between “our” culture and “other” cultures, and should therefore be avoided’.27 This is a fair warning, one that identifies the problem and draws notice to the concept of agency, or to be more precise with Michelle Clayton, to ‘modernism’s moving bodies’28 caught at the crossroads of inevitable power relationships embedded therein. Given that modernism is in a constant state of flux, is on the permanent move, it can barely be confined to the vocabulary of inter, no matter how the sociocultural give-and-take happens in-between, at the crossroads, at ‘the contact zone’,29 as Susan Stanford Friedman would concur. Siting the theatrical corpus at the core of the crossroads literally puts flesh on the bones of the modernist in-betweenness; it lends a fresh impetus to the prefix of trans- that, in turn, can move this situation ‘across’ and ‘beyond’ in the same inclusive breath due to its etymological nature, without neglecting the merits of inter-, or post- for that matter. Thought along these ever-changing corporeal lines, what ‘appears precisely as the crossroads of a modernist decision’ can scarcely be ‘the postmodern’,30 as Barrett Watten would choose to believe, nor does the ‘deferred rendezvous at the crossroads’ betoken ‘a nebulous postmodernity’,31 as Pavis would say. Instead, the topos of the crossroads furnishes a distinctively modernist occasion for ‘transcultural interweaving’, to push the term that stands out as the least objectionable locution, regardless of its arbitrary utilisation in scholarship.32 The theatre of Tadashi Suzuki is situated at this extraordinary crossroads of modernism registered in the barren land of the catastrophe, despite its resemblance to a Potemkin village after the event, the evident explosion. There are, in actual fact, multiple reasons to contend that modernist phenomena rarely reach such an exceptional crossroads, where they coalesce into one and counteract the sociocultural aftershocks of modernity’s deadliest attainments in the hands of a theatre director, whose praxis engages with the exigencies of each point underlined in J’aime Morrison’s seamless description: ‘Crossroads are junctures that may imply hesitation or contemplation, conditions associated with stasis, but crossroads also reference the possibility for a new course of action or a change in direction’.33 Still, before probing deeper into Suzuki’s aesthetics, it is worth fertilising this conceptual landscape with contextual seeds spread by Fischer-Lichte, who reads the consequential fine prints of what may be considered as the first wave of ‘modernist interweaving’ between the theatres of Japan and Europe: ‘While Europeans strove for a de-literarization and re-theatricalization of theatre (and found their model in the performances of the Kawakami troupe), the [early] Japanese avant-garde [shingeki] strove for a new literary spoken theatre oriented toward psychological realism.’34 It is, likewise, worth nourishing these soil textures with the successive manners through which the Russian-influenced leftist shingeki has

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both been pressed into the service of progress and been recruited to repress traditional forms of Japanese theatre under the yoke of a disturbing political agenda during Japan’s rapid post-war recovery. David Jortner gets to the heart of the matter: ‘For the Occupation authorities, the goal of the stage was not to only use shingeki as a propaganda medium, but also to refine the Japanese theater along Western (i.e., American) realistic lines.’35 Jortner’s exposé operates as a backdrop to the bitter remarks that Fernand Braudel passes with respect to the sociological scheme of things in the 1960s, which ‘was far more catastrophic’ and ultimately gave rise to irredeemable changes in society by rendering individuals ‘“bi-civilized”, wearing Western clothes in the street but in the evening reverting to traditional Japanese costumes and habits’.36 Japan, in short, was stuck at a crossroads. So was modernism. Nowhere is this more apparent than the sphere of theatre, which, as Suzuki weighs in, ‘functions as a model for the whole cultural mechanism’,37 so much so that the clash between the two types of modernist avant-garde – shingeki on the one hand and angura on the other – might as well be taken as a reflection of the notorious Anpo conflict back in the 1960s and 1970s: by-product of a global psychological warfare that goes by the name of Cold War. On that score, Paul Allain’s comment on the Anpo demonstrations hits a raw nerve in which ‘Japan’s Hobson’s Choice fell broadly along the lines of either cultivating their alliance with America (and consequently continuing to accept US military bases and, potentially, nuclear weapons on Japanese soil) or the building of allegiances with the Soviet Union’.38 Japan’s reversal of virtually all of its material losses in the Second World War and the country’s swift metamorphosis into an industrial, economic and technological powerhouse did come with a heavy price. And it presented itself in the form of a pivotal paradox inscribed into angura, which, to use the words of David G. Goodman, ‘has achieved its greatest success, not when it aimed at some as yet undefined future utopian goal, but rather when it tried to recapture and rearticulate a lost or otherwise irretrievable past’.39 Sprung on the heels of the Anpo protests, whose mantra was nothing but ‘neutrality’, angura’s revolt against shingeki does more than bestow a truly modernist quality upon the former. It binds together the gamut of words associated, etymologically no less, with ‘modern’ at the crossroads of theatrical traditions. And though Goodman is reluctant to ascribe the role of a devout idealist to any angura artist, one can plausibly single Suzuki out thanks to his ethos, via which he would blaze the trail for transcultural dialogue by positioning himself outside binaries, boundaries, identities, politics and so on.40 This too is nowhere more apparent than Suzuki’s retreat to Toga-mura in 1976, after detonating a series of explosive charges in Japan (and abroad) with his Waseda Little Theatre’s (hereafter WLT) productions of On the Dramatic Passions I-II-III (1969–70) and The Trojan Women (1974). To that degree, Schechner’s time frame is right. Then again, what he mistakenly disregarded, and later came to admit, was the ongoing development of modernist experimentation and transcultural interweaving that are so visible in the works of ‘a very big cohort’41 to which he attaches Suzuki’s name, along with Eugenio Barba, Robert Lepage and so forth. Nonetheless, there is something wondrous about the director that not merely sets him apart from this lineage but, most of all, also makes Robert Wilson’s succinct assertion vis-à-vis Suzuki absolutely binding: ‘theatre that you have to rethink’.42 This is not simply because Suzuki had the Promethean foresight to pinpoint the populist direction where angura was heading43 and took the required steps in ‘inaugurating an age of decentralization’,44 by dint of which he would

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save the ‘empty’45 and ‘lonely’46 village of Toga from extinction. But this is precisely because he kept coming back to an archaic topos, where ‘three roads meet’ in an absolutely tragic fashion redolent of the decisive crossroads scene in Oedipus Tyrannus.47

Tragic Aesthetics of the Suzuki Method Tadashi Suzuki is not the sole modernist avant-gardist who took leave of the metropolis in pursuit of undertaking ‘holy’ theatrical experiments in rural laboratory settings. The director’s tactical move to replace the neon-lit skyscrapers of Tokyo with the mesmerising mountains of Toga as an artistic environment puts him on a par with his contemporary Jerzy Grotowski in the chain of modernist transmission – all in all, he was not heralded as ‘the Japanese Grotowski’48 as early as 1972 without reason. Notwithstanding its tilt towards cultural-cum-geographical split in a vein that immediately drew Suzuki’s ire,49 the connection proffers a direct line of inquiry into the methodological orbits of the two late modernists, both of whom have actually been respective hosts to each other in Japan (1973) and in Poland (1974–75). Here is what Suzuki had to say on Grotowski upon a couple of ‘encounters’ with him, the first of which dates back to the 1972 Théâtre des Nations Festival in Paris: I think Grotowski’s future is to be an eternal wanderer without a homeland. Or he will bury himself somewhere in Poland, will go crazy, and as a madman, in a conceptual and emotional sense, he will be isolated from those around him. With his character and makeup, I see no alternative. On the other hand, in that very same character, I see the guarantee that he will never rest content with what he has achieved, and he will not be sated with the paeans in France or anywhere else.50 This is a poignant, yet highly realistic estimate extrapolated from Grotowski’s visit to Japan in mid-August 1973 in the thick of his ‘paratheatrical’ phase that would start to evolve into that of ‘theatre of sources’ in 1976.51 Beneath Suzuki’s Promethean projection there dwell salient threads guided by his worldview that, in fact, cast a light on the tell-tale sign of modernism. As J. M. Bernstein accentuates (but alas, with surprising indifference to the theatre), ‘modernism is the tragic art of modernity; it is tragedy without action or event’; he then adds: ‘The responsibility of the modern artist is still to unify belief and emotion; only now the disastrous event, the objective pathos, is not a remote possibility, but has always already occurred.’52 Posed next to the agents of theatrical modernism, Bernstein’s picturesque53 accent falls on the vast catastrophic wasteland of modernity and its concomitant dynamics that would make a Vsevolod Meyerhold vanish into thin air; force a Bertolt Brecht into exile; or prompt a Samuel Beckett to muse over the shattered conditio humana with the strategic crossroads of ‘the capital of the ruins’54 in mind, within a year of when a seven-year-old Tadashi Suzuki was left wounded by the catatonic look of his mother, encircled by warplanes with stars and red suns on their wings, as the bombs fell.55 Seeing into the restless soul of Grotowski, a semi-Artaudian Dervish whirling around the globe to be syncopated with the impending stages of ‘objective drama’ and ‘art as a vehicle’, the director partakes in this credible tragic narrative to tie it off with the sensitive notions of (artistic) madness, isolation, not to mention exile – dire consequences of ‘pushing forward without doubt, despite the fact that we will never achieve what we set out to do. This is the essential, existential paradox that lies at the heart of the artist’s life.’56 As it is, Suzuki

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puts the entire paradox of (theatrical) modernism, and, by extension, of modernity, in a nutshell, whilst disclosing his affiliation with Beckett possibly more than Grotowski, who, at the end of the day, remains the most monastic of the three, though each of them managed to stay sane in an insane world mainly by pushing on and on and on. But on a technical layer, Suzuki does proceed from the point where Grotowski dismissed ‘the theatre of productions’57 and charts an expansive methodological trajectory wherewith he would overthrow particularly what the director himself regards as the ‘mutant form’ of Konstantin Stanislavski’s ‘System’ in the United States.58 Having recognised the value of An Actor Prepares ‘as one of the most illuminating books ever written on acting’, Suzuki focuses on the problematics of transmission: ‘in incorporating the Method into practice, a step was lost: the step where the actor must use his or her imaginative work to create a fictional space and experience emotions unique to the act of being onstage.’59 That said, where the master would base his ‘System’ on the psycho-technique, the sensei would dig deeper and deeper into the anatomy of the feet in search of the lost step in his own training methodology. In that respect, Suzuki’s recourse to Toga simultaneously upon the clean sweep over the Stanislavskidriven shingeki and his burst on to the international scene is alight with implications, each of which urges attention to the interlude in the midst of explosions. In one sense, by grounding Grotowski’s diatribe on ‘Rich Theatre’60 in ‘footwork’ Suzuki takes this ‘holy’ critique to formidable heights with his conceptualisation of ‘animal energy’, which, as Paul Allain underscores, ‘recognises an essential characteristic of performing – the need for the performer to survive on stage rather than “die”’.61 In another sense, by excavating a ‘grammar’ from his in-depth scrutiny of the feet the director pays tribute to Zeami, inasmuch as he ‘struggles to create a kind of eternal flower or continuity – a style that weaves the physicality of contemporary reality with those that inspired classic theatre like Noh and Kabuki’.62 In yet another correlated sense, by integrating conventional forms of Japanese theatre into his methodology with the purpose of transforming stylised human statues into (bio)mechanised units of acting, he nods to the nō- and kabuki-influenced praxis of Meyerhold, for whom the stage itself was nothing short of ‘a pedestal for sculpture’.63 And in that conclusive sense, Suzuki not only maps out the routes of modernist transmission, but also gathers the theatrical forces of ‘modern’ together to hold them still at the crossroads. Thence the director’s modernist reworking of Zeami’s yūgen – stillness – as detailed by Ian Carruthers: ‘Suzuki describes the actor in this state as like a racing car at the starting line (or a Boeing 747 on the runway just before take-off): engines are revving at high speed but brakes are on.’64 The supplementary technicalities of the Suzuki Method have been duly covered by the scholarship devoted to the director.65 Even so, what receives short or no shrift from the scholars is the tragic foundation stone upon which the aesthetics of the method hinges. Within this context, one might as well take Allain’s stress on ‘survival’ seriously, for its nuances go beyond the punishing particularities of the training and unveil the modes in which the director strikes a balance between the sacred and the profane. He does so by displacing, first and foremost, the body from its ‘comfort zone’ to put it on trial in the ‘danger zone’ of training – ‘a process of education, initiation’,66 in Suzuki’s words. And it is at this tight junction that the transcultural ingredients of the director’s modernist dialogue with antiquity heave into sight. Summoning the archaic practice of undergoing a rite of passage is one and the same with the manner in which he dovetails nō and kabuki with Attic tragedies as supreme theatrical events brought to life via

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animal energy to be embodied en masse before a real presence,67 without, of course, forgetting to honour those who passed away, which is why ‘the ancient Japanese stages were built on graves or mounds where the souls of the dead were considered to dwell’.68 Suzuki hardens this archaeological site with a provocative modernist exegesis: ‘The traditional roppō movement, literally to “stamp in the six directions,” can be interpreted to mean gesturing to the spirits, arousing their spiritual energy, confronting it and taking it onto oneself’,69 and takes his construal a step ahead: The illusion that the energy of the spirits can be felt through the feet to activate our own bodies is a most natural and valuable illusion for human beings. Noh is well blessed because it has cherished this idea right to the present. Graves and mounds can be regarded as wombs from which we have been born. In that sense the earth is a ‘Mother’ herself.70 On top of merging death with birth in a timbre resonating with no one but Beckett,71 Suzuki lays momentous emphasis on the act of ‘stamping’ and transforms it into an ontological and Brechtian Gestus, thereby painting the cycle of life in earthly light in the form of a modernist counterblast to the ‘blinding light of the bomb that the world saw in shock for the first time, just like the bomb itself saw the light of day’,72 as Günther Anders would have it. The tragic theatre of Suzuki is an aesthetic response to this Promethean bomb fallen on womb. Owing to the embodied knowledge of training in performances, Suzuki’s theatre elicits tragic wonder on stage by translating it into a modernist platform to delineate the cycle of life as an endless cycle of violence. As a matter of fact, the governing philosophy behind the training renders convincing theatrical answers to Bernstein’s demand that ‘what needs to be made visible now, brought to expression, is the violence that has already been done to the subject’.73 Contemplating the cycle of human life from womb to tomb in Toga-mura in the company of Beckett, Suzuki pauses at the vital moment of the bomb to en-grave the shell-shock into the suffering bodies crouched in foetal positions. He freezes everything there in a way reminiscent of a mie posture in kabuki that ‘punctuates movement and momentarily frames a character in a heightened pose’,74 to circle the discussion back to Allain. It is, in the last instance, this tragic tissue of training that issues forth in such nuclei as ‘sitting’ and ‘standing’ statues, both of which embody the fallouts of the tragic moment in absolute stillness by altering their shapes into ‘knitting’ (Figure 18.1) and ‘cursing’ (Figure 18.2) ones throughout the productions of SCOT – the company on which the survival of Toga depends.75 Thus, those who survive the taxing specifics of the training and are initiated into SCOT ensure the survival of the art of theatre. This, in return, transfigures the once ‘empty’ village of Toga into a rock-solid ‘headquarters’ of contemporary theatre today, over which digital culture holds sway more than ever. Hence the political façade of the organic bond between Toga and the director’s theatrical practice captured by Peter Eckersall: ‘A path away from old style politics towards iconoclastic communitarian and local identity oriented new left politics is apparent.’76 What is also apparent are the manners through which Suzuki extends the political-cum-aesthetic scope of his training from local to universal, by striving to keep modern theatre’s feet on the ground in the most ontological, tragic and secular senses of the expression: ‘The feet are the last remaining part of the human body which has kept, literally, in touch with the earth, the very supporting base of all human activities.’77

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Figure 18.1  Yukiko Saito as Anna in Ivanov, directed by Tadashi Suzuki, Istanbul, 2006 (courtesy of IKSV).

Figure 18.2  Chieko Naito as Clytemnestra in Elektra, directed by Tadashi Suzuki, Istanbul, 2010 (photograph by Ilgın Erarslan Yılmaz).

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‘We Are All Born Mad’: Ivanov and Elektra Reflecting the above-specified narrative arc uniting birth with death (or vice versa), an emergent late-modernist dramaturgy arches over Tadashi Suzuki’s recurrent conversation with Samuel Beckett. Again, as with the technical explications of the training, overall correspondences between Suzuki and Beckett have been duly drawn by the literature dedicated to them.78 All the same, what appear to be taken for granted, receiving scarce or no mention as a corollary, are the tragic lineaments of the dramaturgical fulcrum around which Suzuki’s deconstructive productions with SCOT pivot with a view to ‘ceaselessly scrutinize the mental epidemics that impede the sublime potential of the human race’.79 Crystallising his tragic worldview, the aforesaid scrutiny stands for the directorial equivalent of Suzuki’s notion of ‘grammar of the feet’, whose modus operandi rests on its assimilation ‘into the body as a second instinct, just as one cannot enjoy a lively conversation as long as one is always conscious of grammar in speaking. These techniques should be mastered, studied, until they serve as an “operational hypothesis”.’80 As it turns out, the tragic élan of Suzuki’s superlative dialogue with Beckett springs from the fashions in which he absorbs the author’s oeuvre into his theatre, until it becomes an intuitive aesthetic motor driving the productions of SCOT from Euripides to Anton Chekhov. The absent presence of Beckett in the tragic theatre of Suzuki vindicates this dramaturgical hypothesis that is very much at work in Ivanov and Elektra. It would be worthwhile to take heed of this late-modernist conversation, prior to delving into its resonances in these productions, each of which exemplifies the adage – ‘All the world’s a hospital, and all the men and women are merely inmates’81 – with which Suzuki overrides the ‘not to be born is best’ postulate82 of the grand narrative of tragedy and the idea of the ‘tragic’. In a dialect conjuring up the tragic imperative of Beckett’s ‘sad tale’83 on going on in the teeth of being born, the director repeatedly calls the ethics of humanity’s – modernity’s – triumph over nature into question: ‘When we die, we return to the earth. So we have no reason to struggle with nature.’84 To this, Beckett would reply plainly: ‘There’s no more nature.’85 Granted that tragic modernity leaves no place for humankind to return peacefully even after death, being on earth is tantamount to an incurable limbo condition in which one is ‘never at home in the world, but unable to be anywhere else than in the world’,86 as Steven Connor maintains in conjunction with Beckett’s ‘worldly’ modernism. Connor’s words do ring true for the liminal situation in which Japanese society was caught at the crossroads, at the dawn of its drastic ‘modernisation’. Considering that the effects of Japan’s modernisation continue well into the modernity of the current century,87 Suzuki’s prognoses on the ways of the frenzied world come to be markedly germane not only to the contemporary Japanese society but, above all, to the concerns of the present day.88 In Ivanov, the ‘danger zone’ of the training shifts to what Beckett would diagnose as the ‘dark zone’ of the modernist Magdalen Mental Mercyseat, to which Suzuki by and large equates the world. The author’s depiction of the ‘dark’ – a flux of forms and perpetual coming together and falling asunder of forms. The light contained the docile elements of a new manifold, the world of the body broken up into the pieces of a toy; the half light, states of peace. But the dark neither elements nor states, nothing but forms becoming and crumbling into the fragments of a new becoming.89

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Figure 18.3  Akihito Okuno as Ivanov in Ivanov, directed by Tadashi Suzuki, Istanbul, 2006 (courtesy of IKSV). – functions as a beautiful dramaturgical descriptor of the nuts and bolts of Suzuki’s blatantly modernist Ivanov. The director pulls no punches when it comes to deconstructing texts so as to make them ‘new’ and ‘less’ at the same time. And Chekhov gets his fair share of this directorial intervention too. With a brilliant strategy, Suzuki transforms all the secondary and tertiary characters in the play into ‘basket-people’ (Figure 18.3), murmuring ill voices in Ivanov’s head. Having Anna as a Beckettian dynamo nailed to her wheelchair,90 the director attains the bare minimum to address the kernel of Chekhov’s text, which boils down to a major case study on depression. Throughout, Suzuki zooms in on the next clinical phase in depression – madness – and its foregone conclusion: suicide. Wholly in tune with Chekhov, the director puts his finger on a sore sociological spot: how easily people can form opinions about others to the degree of being gravely judgemental. Fragmented, toyish and caricaturised ‘basket-people’ transmogrify their verdicts on Ivanov into suicidal notes in his head and drill them into his skull over the course of the production, until he too believes them and sees no option but putting an end to this misery of being ‘on earth’, for which there is ‘no cure’,91 as Beckett would chip in. Suzuki emblematises the sickness of the society with his incorporation of the popular enka song ‘Ukigusa gurashi’ into the production. It is first played via an inorganic recording device and afterwards sung along by the animally energised voices of the actors at moments when the gradually decelerating song begins to sound like a broken tape, before the actors themselves begin to stretch like marionettes and eventually burst like bubbles in the manga of Ivanov’s mind.

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If Ivanov illustrates Suzuki’s directorial bravura in offsetting non-animal energy with animal energy while navigating the ‘highs’ and ‘lows’ of modernist cultures, then Elektra shows his flair for delicate reworking of antiquity under the auspices of Euripides. The fact that ‘Beckett metaphorically dances with the Shinto goddess Ame Uzume no Kami [sic] on her overturned tub’92 in this production as well allows Suzuki to buttress the braces of his Elektra with the ontological bond between the author and the Attic tragedies, by employing Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s eponymous libretto as the axis around which the modernist dance itself is performed with utter animal energy. Suzuki’s destabilising gesture towards the grand narrative of tragedy and the ‘tragic’ comes into play once again through his dramaturgy, which Yukihiro Goto predicates on ‘two kinds of compositional devices common to Japanese literature: honkadori and sekai. Honkadori (literally, “taking a foundation poem” [and varying {-tori, -dori} it]) is a technique of classical poetry; sekai (literally, “world”) is basic to traditional drama.’93 Taking cognisance of Goto’s taxonomy, Suzuki can be seen as reverting to the ‘pure’ tragic maxim implicated in Elektra as honka and modulating (-dori, -tori) it to a different key that is central to Beckett – ‘We are all born mad. Some remain so’94 – under the baton of his worldview: ‘All the sekai is a mental asylum.’ The inclusion of musical terms into the analysis at stake uncovers the gist of the production: the animal-energy instigated percussions of Midori Takada via which the titular persona makes her entrance (Figure 18.4), whilst the chorus ‘flung’ out of an Endgame swirls around Elektra like a whirlpool, affording a ritualistic counterpoint to Beckett’s Quad.

Figure 18.4  Yoo Jeong Byun as Elektra in Elektra, directed by Tadashi Suzuki, Istanbul, 2010 (photograph by Ilgın Erarslan Yılmaz).

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As opposed to Euripides’ focus on how Orestes contrives a revenge plot with his sister to avenge the death of their father Agamemnon, Suzuki concentrates on the confrontation between the daughter and the mother in the oikos of Atreus: Clytemnestra and Elektra. In doing so, the director assigns the narrative tenets of the play to Takada, to whom he also hands the reins during the course of the production. Correlatively, in lieu of psychologising the horror of the vengeance plan, Takada’s intimidating soundscape assists in building embodied pressure around the stichomythic war of words exchanged between Elektra and Clytemnestra in tragic registers saluting the fast-paced dialogues of Vladimir and Estragon, or Hamm and Clov, while the ‘evil’ mother herself brandishes a ‘goad’95 straight out of Act Without Words II to threaten her similarly ‘sinister’ daughter. Suzuki-san stays true to his tragic word by giving a directorial-cumdramaturgical lesson in minimalism at the end: with a simple play of light, he projects the ‘sick’ light of the stage on to the spectators, serving as a reminder that ‘we are all’ trapped in this mentally ill sekai.

Theatrical Modernism Moving Onward Just as no trope conveys the urgencies of modernism better than ‘crossroads’, no word creeps into the scholarly discourse around the movement more frequently than ‘problem’. This is hardly surprising, because whether literary or theatrical, modernism does present itself as such and brings along its own problematics. ‘So make no mistake, the word “modernism” is a problem,’96 warn Sean Latham and Gayle Rogers in their ‘hardwired’ genealogy of the modernist idea from the vantage point of literature. In the meantime, the title of Graham Ley’s pithy piece comes across as an immediate red flag raised within the special context of theatre: ‘Theatrical Modernism: A Problematic’.97 Ley rightfully discerns the ‘dramaturgy’ of Samuel Beckett as a way out of the ‘problem’. But he does so at the expense of generating more questions than answers: does dramaturgy involve solely textual (re)working of the modernist material(s) for the stage? If so, how does that differ from ‘high’ Western literary modernism, in the final analysis? There surely must be something that not merely distinguishes theatrical modernism from other modernist artistic praxes but, more crucially, underwrites its sustainability in the twenty-first century. Reckoning dramaturgy as an indispensable component of the perception of theatre qua worldview, the present chapter has ventured into the perilous terra of modernism in tandem with a figure carrying the epithet ‘living legend’ for all the good reasons: Tadashi Suzuki, whose tragic theatre and training methodology harbour the common features of theatrical modernism. Thinking these traits side by side with the notion of transmission is of cardinal importance, insomuch as it generates more ‘living links’ than questions. The aesthetic rapport between Beckett and Suzuki is the most unmistakable modernist one. Still, as was displayed through the course of this chapter, there is more than meets the eye to Suzuki’s ‘post-war dream’ realised in the tragic dramaturgy of madness, which happens to provide entryways into modernist pasts, as well as into modernism’s possible futures (to play on the opening songs of Pink Floyd’s The Final Cut). After all is said and done, David G. Goodman’s identification of Suzuki as one of the most outstanding ‘traditionalists’98 of the angura movement holds the key for a sound closing note. Standing at the crossroads of transcultural modernism, Suzuki offers a

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concrete (re)solution to the movement’s fraught relationship with ‘tradition’. Translating the aesthetic conventions of the past into a ‘living’ transmission of innovation often capable of being regalvanised by the most deconstructive discoveries of directorial creation, Suzuki ranks as one of the utmost artists, who moves theatrical modernism onward with his already secured Beckett-fused legacy living in the ‘Viewpoints’ of Anne Bogart, for one, and in the ‘Biodynamics’ of Theodoros Terzopoulos, for another.

Notes   1. Günther Anders, ‘On Promethean Shame’, trans. Christopher John Müller, in Prometheanism: Technology, Digital Culture and Human Obsolescence, ed. Christopher John Müller (London: Rowman & Littlefield, 2016), 23–96.   2. Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984), 41.   3. Ibid. xi.   4. Susan Stanford Friedman, Planetary Modernisms: Provocations on Modernity across Time (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015), 50.  5. See, amongst many, Elisabeth Mudimbe-Boyi, ed., Beyond Dichotomies (New York: State University of New York Press, 2002); Peter Brooker and Andrew Thacker, eds, Geographies of Modernism (London and New York: Routledge, 2005); and Pamela Caughie, ed., Disciplining Modernism (London: Palgrave, 2009) for diverse scholarship, as well as Alys Moody and Stephen J. Ross, eds, Global Modernists on Modernism: An Anthology (London: Bloomsbury, 2020) for a recent compilation of a large number of twentieth-century statements from hitherto neglected modernist geographies.   6. Sean Latham and Gayle Rogers, Modernism: Evolution of an Idea (London: Bloomsbury, 2015), 2.  7. Friedman, Planetary Modernisms, 51–2.  8. Zeami, On the Art of the Nō Drama: The Major Treatises of Zeami, trans. J. Thomas Rimer and Yamazaki Masakazu (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984), 64–73.   9. The entry on Suzuki in the second edition of Paul Allain and Jen Harvie, eds, The Routledge Companion to Theatre and Performance (London and New York: Routledge, 2014), 86–8, serves as a snapshot of his reception within the realm of theatre (and performance) studies. The tendency to straightjacket Suzuki’s theatre into the dual brand of postmodernism and interculturalism is significant in that it explains the telling absence of modernism in this otherwise invaluable companion. 10. But see, at this early stage, Erika Fischer-Lichte, The Routledge Introduction to Theatre and Performance Studies, trans. Minou Arjomand, ed. Minou Arjomand and Ramona Mosse (London and New York: Routledge, 2014), 126–30, for a distant signal located at the equation between modernisation and Westernisation in the Japanese setting, as well as Friedman, Planetary Modernisms, 332–5, for a broader treatment. 11. See Tadashi Uchino, Crucible Bodies: Postwar Japanese Performance from Brecht to the New Millennium (London and New York: Seagull Books, 2009), 1–28, for an overview of the underlying tensions between angura and shingeki during the 1960s and 1970s. 12. David G. Goodman, ‘Angura: Japan’s Nostalgic Avant-Garde’, in Not the Other AvantGarde: The Transnational Foundations of Avant-Garde Performance, ed. James M. Harding and John Rouse (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2006), 258–60. 13. Peter Eckersall, Theorizing the Angura Space: Avant-Garde Performance and Politics in Japan (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2006), 59–64. 14. Claire Warden, Modernist and Avant-Garde Performance: An Introduction (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2015), 6.

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15. Dwight Conquergood, Cultural Struggles: Performance, Ethnography, Praxis, ed. E. Patrick Johnson (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2013), 43. 16. Garry Leonard, ‘“The Famished Roar of Automobiles”: Modernity, the Internal Combustion Engine, and Modernism’, in Disciplining Modernism, ed. Pamela Caughie (London: Palgrave, 2009), 222. 17. Jürgen Habermas, ‘Modernity—An Incomplete Project’, in The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture, ed. Hal Foster (Seattle: Bay Press, 1983), 3–15. 18. Steven Connor, Beckett, Modernism and the Material Imagination (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 9. 19. Terry Eagleton, Sweet Violence: The Idea of the Tragic (Oxford: Blackwell, 2003), 236. 20. One may only recall the explosion of manifestos issuing from several ‘isms’ of the movement, on which see Laura Winkiel, Modernism, Race and Manifestos (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008). 21. Patrice Pavis, Theatre at the Crossroads of Culture, trans. Loren Kruger (London and New York: Routledge, 1993), 1. Emphasis in original. 22. Richard Schechner, The Future of Ritual: Writings on Culture and Performance (London and New York: Routledge, 1993), 18. 23. See Amy Skinner, Meyerhold and the Cubists: Perspectives on Painting and Performance (Bristol: Intellect, 2015), ch. 4, for an extensive examination of the theatrical practice of Meyerhold as a collage praxis. 24. Andreas Huyssen, After the Great Divide (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986). 25. For the intricacies of this famous collaboration, see Daniel Albright, ‘Pound, Yeats, and the Noh Theater’, The Iowa Review 15, no. 2 (1985): 34–50. 26. The activities of the said companies, their reception abroad and their subsequent influence in Japan are well documented. See Jonas Salz, ‘Intercultural Theatre: Fortuitous Encounters’, in A History of Japanese Theatre, ed. Jonas Salz (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), 513–28, and Yoshihara Yukari, ‘Interlude: Early Influence from Europe’, in A History of Japanese Theatre, ed. Salz, 529–31, in addition to the sources cited in the former. 27. Fischer-Lichte, The Routledge Introduction to Theatre and Performance Studies, 131. 28. Michelle Clayton, ‘Modernism’s Moving Bodies’, Modernist Cultures 9, no. 1 (2014): 27–45. 29. Friedman, Planetary Modernisms, 80. 30. Barrett Watten, ‘Modernism at the Crossroads: Types of Negativity’, in Modernism, ed. Astradur Eysteinsson and Vivian Liska (Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2007), 231. 31. Pavis, Theatre at the Crossroads of Culture, 19. 32. Even though ‘transcultural interweaving’ is scattered here and there – see Youngmin Kim, ‘Yeats’s Noh and World Drama: Foreign Form in Tandem with Local Materials’, Neohelicon 46, no. 1 (2019): 81–96, esp. 81, 95, and Madeleine Scherer, Memories of the Classical Underworld in Irish and Caribbean Literature (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2021), 133 – a hard look at the ways in which the phrase is dropped affirms its too-casual employment. This observation regrettably holds true even for Erika Fischer-Lichte, Christel Weiler and Torsten Jost, eds, Dramaturgies of Interweaving: Engaging Audiences in an Entangled World (London and New York: Routledge, 2022), where one would expect to find a robust conceptualisation of ‘transcultural interweaving’. 33. J’aime Morrison, ‘“Tapping Secrecies of Stone”: Irish Roads as Performances of Movement, Measurement, and Memory’, in Crossroads: Performance Studies and Irish Culture, ed. Sara Brady and Fintan Walsh (London: Palgrave, 2009), 81. 34. Fischer-Lichte, The Routledge Introduction to Theatre and Performance Studies, 122. 35. David Jortner, ‘SCAP’s “Problem Child”: American Aesthetics, the Shingeki Stage, and the Occupation of Japan’, in Rising from the Flames: The Rebirth of Theater in Occupied Japan, ed. Samuel L. Leiter (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2009), 260.

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36. Fernand Braudel, A History of Civilizations, trans. Richard Mayne (London: Penguin, 1995), 297. 37. Tadashi Suzuki, The Way of Acting, trans. J. Thomas Rimer (New York: Theatre Communications Group, 1986), 68. 38. Paul Allain, The Art of Stillness: The Theatre Practice of Tadashi Suzuki (London: Palgrave, 2002), 13. For a comprehensive account of the Anpo rallies and its after-effects, see Nick Kapur, Japan at the Crossroads: Conflict and Compromise after Anpo (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018) with caution, insofar as his comprehension of modernism is concerned. 39. Goodman, ‘Angura: Japan’s Nostalgic Avant-Garde’, 251. 40. Cf. Suzuki: ‘I don’t think I’m representing Japan. I’m friends with directors from other countries, and in that sense I’m not isolated. However, I’m perfectly isolated in my country. I am very difficult to understand within Japan.’ Quoted in Vayos Liapis and Avra Sidiropoulou, eds, Adapting Greek Tragedy: Contemporary Contexts for Ancient Texts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021), 172. 41. Richard Schechner, ‘Theatre Alive in the New Millennium’, TDR: The Drama Review 44, no. 1 (2000): 5. 42. Tadashi Suzuki et al., SCOT: Suzuki Company of Toga, trans. Takahashi Yasunari, Kazako Matsuoka et al. (Tokyo: Japan Performing Arts Center, 1992), 82. 43. Cf. ‘The expression “Angura Little Theatre” gradually lost its Angura: the sympathy towards the “underground” of the previous generation was almost non-existent. At the same time, in the 1980s’ theatre culture, Angura experienced an enormous amount of popularization.’ Uchino, Crucible Bodies, 14. 44. Ian Carruthers and Takahashi Yasunari, The Theatre of Suzuki Tadashi (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), ch. 2. 45. Suzuki, The Way of Acting, 98–110. 46. Tadashi Suzuki, Culture Is the Body, trans. Kameron H. Steele (New York: Theatre Communications Group, 2015), 85–102. 47. The importance of ‘the encounter at the crossroads’ in Sophocles’ Oedipus Tyrannus is extensively canvassed. See Stephen Halliwell, ‘Where Three Roads Meet: A Neglected Detail in the Oedipus Tyrannus’, The Journal of Hellenic Studies 106 (1986): 187–90, and Justina Gregory, ‘The Encounter at the Crossroads in Sophocles’ Oedipus Tyrannus’, The Journal of Hellenic Studies 115 (1995): 141–6, for rigorous analyses. 48. Tadashi Suzuki and William O. Beeman, ‘Interview: “The Word Is an Act of the Body”’, trans. Kosho Kadogami, Performing Arts Journal 6, no. 2 (1982): 89. 49. Zbigniew Osiński, Grotowski and his Laboratory, trans. Lillian Vallee and Robert Findlay (New York: PAJ Books, 1986), 143. 50. Ibid. 141. 51. Following Zbigniew Osiński’s periodisation of Grotowski’s work in ‘Grotowski Blazes the Trails: From Objective Drama to Ritual Arts’, trans. Ann Herron and Halina Filipowicz, TDR: The Drama Review 35, no. 1 (1991): 95. 52. J. M. Bernstein, Against Voluptuous Bodies: Late Modernism and the Meaning of Painting (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2006), 295. Emphases in original. 53. Provided that his topic of study is late-modernist painting. 54. Samuel Beckett, Complete Short Prose (New York: Grove Press, 1995), 275–8. 55. Drawing on Richard Stayton’s account of Suzuki’s landmark production of The Trojan Women available in Carruthers and Yasunari, The Theatre of Suzuki Tadashi, 153. 56. Suzuki, Culture Is the Body, 102. 57. Suzuki himself gives the most corroborating evidence to consolidate this argument: ‘Grotowski has abandoned the “word” to too great an extent. I have been working within a Japanese frame to revitalize the Japanese word and help actors to take the word into the

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body. Grotowski’s drive to encourage independence of the body without the word is far too narrow in the end.’ In Suzuki and Beeman, ‘Interview’, 90. 58. Writing in 2002, Paul Allain gauges the global impact of the Suzuki Method: ‘It is impossible to quantify the extent of engagement with Suzuki’s training world-wide beyond noting that it surfaces in the work of practitioners across continents and countries, from Argentina through to Denmark.’ In Allain, The Art of Stillness, 95. 59. Suzuki, Culture Is the Body, 35–6. Emphases in original. 60. Jerzy Grotowski, Towards a Poor Theatre (London: Methuen, 1975), 19. 61. Allain, The Art of Stillness, 5. 62. Suzuki, Culture Is the Body, 53. 63. Vsevolod Meyerhold, Meyerhold on Theatre, trans. and ed. Edward Braun (London: Methuen, 2016), 109. Emphasis in original. 64. Carruthers and Yasunari, The Theatre of Suzuki Tadashi, 80. 65. See James R. Brandon, ‘Training at the Waseda Little Theatre: The Suzuki Method’, TDR: The Drama Review 22, no. 4 (1978): 29–42, for an early record of Suzuki’s training in WLT, and Allain, The Art of Stillness, ch. 4, for a later one. But above all, see Carruthers and Yasunari, The Theatre of Suzuki Tadashi, ch. 3, in which the scholarly evaluations of the Suzuki training from Brandon to Allain are discussed systematically. Also crucial to look at is Suzuki, Culture Is the Body, where the director elaborates on the adumbrations of the fresh set of exercises through which he synchronously sustains to fine-tune the Suzuki Method in concurrence with his ongoing research and protects it against becoming a rigid ‘dogma’, the ill fate inflicted on Stanislavski’s ‘System’. 66. Suzuki, The Way of Acting, 59. 67. Cf. Suzuki: ‘The actors’ bodies were oriented toward a center point in the theatre where the god was seated. Acting, therefore, was described as the act of facing god. The spectators, sensing the collective illusion of god, could enjoy this interactive dialogue. Just as there was usually a seat for the priest of Dionysus in the classical Greek amphitheatre, the Noh theatre has a shinjindōkyo, where the shogun and the Shinto god would sit together. In the Kabuki tradition, theatres are traditionally built with a yagura tower on the roof, from which the gods could descend and give permission for a performance to take place.’ In Suzuki, Culture Is the Body, 23. 68. Suzuki et al., Suzuki Company of Toga, 19. 69. Suzuki, Culture Is the Body, 72. 70. Suzuki et al., Suzuki Company of Toga, 19. 71. Cf. the root proposition of A Piece of Monologue: ‘Birth was the death of him’, in Samuel Beckett, Collected Shorter Plays of Samuel Beckett (London: Faber and Faber, 1984), 265. 72. Günther Anders, Die Antiquiertheit des Menschen Band. I (Munich: Verlag C. H. Beck, 1961), 253. Unless indicated otherwise, all translations are my own. 73. Bernstein, Against Voluptuous Bodies, 295. 74. Allain, The Art of Stillness, 117. 75. Cf. Suzuki: ‘If the village of Toga ceases to exist our work there must also end. Such is the interdependent relationship between company and village in a region like ours.’ In Suzuki, Culture Is the Body, 97. 76. Eckersall, Theorizing the Angura Space, 59. 77. Suzuki et al., Suzuki Company of Toga, 19. 78. Nearly every source cited in relation to Suzuki so far acknowledges the ways in which Beckett pervades through the director’s aesthetics. For perspectives from Beckett studies on that front, see Yoshiki Tajiri and Mariko Hori Tanaka, ‘The Reception of Samuel Beckett in Japan’, in The International Reception of Samuel Beckett, ed. Mark Nixon and Matthew Feldman (London: Continuum, 2009), 145–60, and Mariko Hori Tanaka, ‘The Legacy of Beckett in the Contemporary Japanese Theatre’, in Drawing on Beckett:

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Portraits, Performances, and Cultural Contexts, ed. Linda Ben-Zvi (Tel Aviv: Assaph Books, 2003), 47–59. 79. Suzuki, Culture Is the Body, 118. 80. Tadashi Suzuki, ‘Culture Is the Body’, trans. Kazako Matsuoka, in Acting (Re)Considered, ed. Philip Zarrilli (London and New York: Routledge, 2002), 163. 81. Suzuki, Culture Is the Body, 117. 82. This axiom is most controversially explored by George Steiner on various occasions. See, in sequence, George Steiner, The Death of Tragedy (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996), ‘Tragedy, Pure and Simple’, in Tragedy and the Tragic: Greek Theatre and Beyond, ed. M. S. Silk (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), 534–46, and ‘“Tragedy,” Reconsidered’, in Rethinking Tragedy, ed. Rita Felski (London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008), 29–44, for a thorough understanding of his line of reasoning. 83. Beckett, Collected Shorter Plays of Samuel Beckett, 287. 84. Suzuki, The Way of Acting, 86. 85. Samuel Beckett, Endgame (London: Faber and Faber, 1972), 16. 86. Connor, Beckett, Modernism and the Material Imagination, 9. 87. Cf. Starrs: ‘The Japan of the early 21st century is still very largely the product of the profound transformation that occurred in the wake of the Second World War.’ Roy Starrs, Modernism and Japanese Culture (London: Palgrave, 2011). 88. Cf. Suzuki: ‘The kind of message I’m trying to get across is one that criticizes the Japanese mentality and/or spiritual state. Yet my message is not just for the Japanese alone.’ In Suzuki, Culture Is the Body, 165. 89. Samuel Beckett, Murphy (London: Calder, 1963), 79. 90. See Figure 18.1. 91. Beckett, Endgame, 44. 92. Allain, The Art of Stillness, 20. 93. Yukihiro Goto, ‘The Theatrical Fusion of Suzuki Tadashi’, Asian Theatre Journal 6, no. 2 (1989): 108. 94. Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot (London: Faber and Faber, 1978), 80. 95. See Figure 18.2. 96. Latham and Rogers, Modernism, 1. 97. Graham Ley, ‘Theatrical Modernism: A Problematic’, in Modernism, ed. Astradur Eysteinsson and Vivian Liska (Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2007), 531–44. 98. Goodman, ‘Angura: Japan’s Nostalgic Avant-Garde’, 263.

Works Cited Albright, Daniel. ‘Pound, Yeats, and the Noh Theater’. The Iowa Review 15, no. 2 (1985): 34–50. Allain, Paul. The Art of Stillness: The Theatre Practice of Tadashi Suzuki. London: Palgrave, 2002. Allain, Paul and Jen Harvie, eds. The Routledge Companion to Theatre and Performance. 2nd edn. London and New York: Routledge, 2014. Anders, Günther. Die Antiquiertheit des Menschen Band. I. Munich: Verlag C. H. Beck, 1961. Anders, Günther. ‘On Promethean Shame’. Translated by Christopher John Müller. In Prometheanism: Technology, Digital Culture and Human Obsolescence, edited by Christopher John Müller, 23–96. London: Rowman & Littlefield, 2016. Beckett, Samuel. Collected Shorter Plays of Samuel Beckett. London: Faber and Faber, 1984. Beckett, Samuel. Complete Short Prose. New York: Grove Press, 1995. Beckett, Samuel. Endgame. London: Faber and Faber, 1972. Beckett, Samuel. Murphy. London: Calder, 1963.

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Beckett, Samuel. Waiting for Godot. London: Faber and Faber, 1978. Bernstein, J. M. Against Voluptuous Bodies: Late Modernism and the Meaning of Painting. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2006. Brandon, James R. ‘Training at the Waseda Little Theatre: The Suzuki Method’. TDR: The Drama Review 22, no. 4 (1978): 29–42. Braudel, Fernand. A History of Civilizations. Translated by Richard Mayne. London: Penguin, 1995. Brooker, Peter and Andrew Thacker, eds. Geographies of Modernism. London and New York: Routledge, 2005. Carruthers, Ian and Takahashi Yasunari. The Theatre of Suzuki Tadashi. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. Caughie, Pamela, ed. Disciplining Modernism. London: Palgrave, 2009. Clayton, Michelle. ‘Modernism’s Moving Bodies’. Modernist Cultures 9, no. 1 (2014): 27–45. Connor, Steven. Beckett, Modernism and the Material Imagination. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014. Conquergood, Dwight. Cultural Struggles: Performance, Ethnography, Praxis. Edited by E. Patrick Johnson. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2013. Eagleton, Terry. Sweet Violence: The Idea of the Tragic. Oxford: Blackwell, 2003. Eckersall, Peter. Theorizing the Angura Space: Avant-Garde Performance and Politics in Japan. Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2006. Fischer-Lichte, Erika. The Routledge Introduction to Theatre and Performance Studies. Translated by Minou Arjomand. Edited by Minou Arjomand and Ramona Mosse. London and New York: Routledge, 2014. Fischer-Lichte, Erika, Christel Weiler and Torsten Jost, eds. Dramaturgies of Interweaving: Engaging Audiences in an Entangled World. London and New York: Routledge, 2022. Friedman, Susan Stanford. Planetary Modernisms: Provocations on Modernity across Time. New York: Columbia University Press, 2015. Goodman, David G. ‘Angura: Japan’s Nostalgic Avant-Garde’. In Not the Other Avant-Garde: The Transnational Foundations of Avant-Garde Performance, edited by James M. Harding and John Rouse, 250–64. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2006. Goto, Yukihiro. ‘The Theatrical Fusion of Suzuki Tadashi’. Asian Theatre Journal 6, no. 2 (1989): 103–23. Gregory, Justina. ‘The Encounter at the Crossroads in Sophocles’ Oedipus Tyrannus’. The Journal of Hellenic Studies 115 (1995): 141–6. Grotowski, Jerzy. Towards a Poor Theatre. London: Methuen, 1975. Habermas, Jürgen. ‘Modernity—An Incomplete Project’. In The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture, edited by Hal Foster, 3–15. Seattle: Bay Press, 1983. Halliwell, Stephen. ‘Where Three Roads Meet: A Neglected Detail in the Oedipus Tyrannus’. The Journal of Hellenic Studies 106 (1986): 187–90. Huyssen, Andreas. After the Great Divide. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986. Jortner, David. ‘SCAP’s “Problem Child”: American Aesthetics, the Shingeki Stage, and the Occupation of Japan’. In Rising from the Flames: The Rebirth of Theater in Occupied Japan, edited by Samuel L. Leiter, 259–77. Lanham: Lexington Books, 2009. Kapur, Nick. Japan at the Crossroads: Conflict and Compromise after Anpo. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018. Kim, Youngmin. ‘Yeats’s Noh and World Drama: Foreign Form in Tandem with Local Materials’. Neohelicon 46, no. 1 (2019): 81–96. Latham, Sean and Gayle Rogers. Modernism: Evolution of an Idea. London: Bloomsbury, 2015. Leonard, Garry. ‘“The Famished Roar of Automobiles”: Modernity, the Internal Combustion Engine, and Modernism’. In Disciplining Modernism, edited by Pamela Caughie, 221–41. London: Palgrave, 2009.

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Ley, Graham. ‘Theatrical Modernism: A Problematic’. In Modernism, edited by Astradur Eysteinsson and Vivian Liska, 531–44. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2007. Liapis, Vayos and Avra Sidiropoulou, eds. Adapting Greek Tragedy: Contemporary Contexts for Ancient Texts. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021. Lyotard, Jean-François. The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. Translated by Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984. Meyerhold, Vsevolod. Meyerhold on Theatre. Translated and edited by Edward Braun. London: Methuen, 2016. Moody, Alys and Stephen J. Ross, eds. Global Modernists on Modernism: An Anthology. London: Bloomsbury, 2020. Morrison, J’aime. ‘“Tapping Secrecies of Stone”: Irish Roads as Performances of Movement, Measurement, and Memory’. In Crossroads: Performance Studies and Irish Culture, edited by Sara Brady and Fintan Walsh, 73–85. London: Palgrave, 2009. Mudimbe-Boyi, Elisabeth, ed. Beyond Dichotomies. New York: State University of New York Press, 2002. Osiński, Zbigniew. Grotowski and his Laboratory. Translated by Lillian Vallee and Robert Findlay. New York: PAJ Books, 1986. Osiński, Zbigniew. ‘Grotowski Blazes the Trails: From Objective Drama to Ritual Arts’. Translated by Ann Herron and Halina Filipowicz. TDR: The Drama Review 35, no. 1 (1991): 95–112. Pavis, Patrice. Theatre at the Crossroads of Culture. Translated by Loren Kruger. London and New York: Routledge, 1993. Salz, Jonas. ‘Intercultural Theatre: Fortuitous Encounters’. In A History of Japanese Theatre, edited by Jonas Salz, 513–28. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016. Schechner, Richard. The Future of Ritual: Writings on Culture and Performance. London and New York: Routledge, 1993. Schechner, Richard. ‘Theatre Alive in the New Millennium’. TDR: The Drama Review 44, no. 1 (2000): 5–6. Scherer, Madeleine. Memories of the Classical Underworld in Irish and Caribbean Literature. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2021. Skinner, Amy. Meyerhold and the Cubists: Perspectives on Painting and Performance. Bristol: Intellect, 2015. Starrs, Roy. Modernism and Japanese Culture. London: Palgrave, 2011. Steiner, George. The Death of Tragedy. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996. Steiner, George. ‘Tragedy, Pure and Simple’. In Tragedy and the Tragic: Greek Theatre and Beyond, edited by M. S. Silk, 534–46. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996. Steiner, George. ‘“Tragedy,” Reconsidered’. In Rethinking Tragedy, edited by Rita Felski, 29–44. London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008. Suzuki, Tadashi. ‘Culture Is the Body’. Translated by Kazako Matsuoka. In Acting (Re)Considered, edited by Philip Zarrilli, 163–7. London and New York: Routledge, 2002. Suzuki, Tadashi. Culture Is the Body. Translated by Kameron H. Steele. New York: Theatre Communications Group, 2015. Suzuki, Tadashi. The Way of Acting. Translated by J. Thomas Rimer. New York: Theatre Communications Group, 1986. Suzuki, Tadashi and William O. Beeman. ‘Interview: “The Word Is an Act of the Body”’. Translated by Kosho Kadogami. Performing Arts Journal 6, no. 2 (1982): 88–92. Suzuki, Tadashi et al. SCOT: Suzuki Company of Toga. Translated by Takahashi Yasunari, Kazako Matsuoka et al. Tokyo: Japan Performing Arts Center, 1992. Tajiri, Yoshiki and Mariko Hori Tanaka. ‘The Reception of Samuel Beckett in Japan’. In The International Reception of Samuel Beckett, edited by Mark Nixon and Matthew Feldman, 145–60. London: Continuum, 2009.

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Tanaka, Mariko Hori. ‘The Legacy of Beckett in the Contemporary Japanese Theatre’. In Drawing on Beckett: Portraits, Performances, and Cultural Contexts, edited by Linda Ben-Zvi, 47–59. Tel Aviv: Assaph Books, 2003. Uchino, Tadashi. Crucible Bodies: Postwar Japanese Performance from Brecht to the New Millennium. London and New York: Seagull Books, 2009. Warden, Claire. Modernist and Avant-Garde Performance: An Introduction. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2015. Watten, Barrett. ‘Modernism at the Crossroads: Types of Negativity’. In Modernism, edited by Astradur Eysteinsson and Vivian Liska, 219–32. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2007. Winkiel, Laura. Modernism, Race and Manifestos. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008. Yukari, Yoshihara. ‘Interlude: Early Influence from Europe’. In A History of Japanese Theatre, edited by Jonas Salz, 529–31. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016. Zeami. On the Art of the Nō Drama: The Major Treatises of Zeami. Translated by J. Thomas Rimer and Yamazaki Masakazu. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984.

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19 Stanislavski on Skype Mark Westbrook

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n March 2020, as we temporarily closed our acting school due to the Coronavirus pandemic, we prepared ourselves to teach two full-time practical acting courses online.1 At the time, we had no idea that we would be forced to teach voice, movement, acting and so forth via Zoom for almost six months. For the past ten years as an acting coach, I have regularly used online video communication software, such as Skype, to help actors prepare for auditions in major film, theatre and television projects all over the world. I have even taught a full term of classes for a studio in Sydney, Australia, from my bed in Glasgow via Skype. I knew that the technology was not always reliable, but when called upon to use tools like Skype and Zoom to train our COVID-stranded students, and facing uncertainty, I remained hopeful. Acting has always been an uncertain business. Every new project is different. When an actor receives a script, there is a new puzzle to solve, and for those without an established process to follow, uncertainty – and therefore self-doubt – is increased. I believe that when an actor prepares to tackle a new role, there are three essential questions that they ask themselves: ‘What should I do?’, Why should I do that?’ and ‘How should I do it?’. Actors should be able to rely upon an approach that pragmatically answers those questions and leads to confidence in their performance. The consistency and logic of Konstantin Stanislavski’s system remain effective for this task nearly eighty-five years after his death. Stanislavski is unquestionably the father of modern psychological acting. His work continues to influence actors, directors, writers and producers all over the world. I confess my own obsession with Stanislavski started aged fifteen, when I first read An Actor Prepares in the school library.2 His name is so synonymous with acting that once, during a routine stop by the police, an officer engaged me in a debate about the influence Stanislavski might have had on his favourite actor, Sean Connery. Stanislavski dedicated himself to continuous improvement in acting. He was an innovator who wasn’t afraid to break with tradition, and the revolution in acting that he caused was due to his ceaseless desire to improve. Of course, time has moved on. We are no longer reacting to the same antecedents as Stanislavski was. Scientific advancements in our understanding of the mind and the body have both vindicated and contradicted some of his core ideas. As such, it would be fair to say that the essence and spirit of Stanislavski should imbue the practical application of his techniques, rather than an actor slavishly following his system as a devotee. As Katie Mitchell has said: ‘When we talk about Stanislavski in our rehearsal rooms today, we are not always talking strictly about the work he developed.’3 After all, avoiding ancestor worship is a key aspect of modernism.

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Stanislavski’s tools are still effective because we do not stick to them slavishly. Instead, we work with tools inspired by Stanislavski, in his spirit, which are constantly tested, reviewed, amended and redeployed. Stanislavski endures because he does not require our devotion, but encourages our evolution of his techniques to suit our own contemporary professional needs. The Stanislavski toolbox that one brings to the online teaching and coaching of acting through software like Skype and Zoom has its limitations, but it also has opportunities.

Limitations Adaptation In life, when trying to achieve an outcome, we often meet resistance. At this point, we change our tactics and adapt our behaviour. This adaptation was a fundamental of Stanislavski’s approach to partnered scene work. To my mind, online video communication software reminds us of one major limitation of its use. The absence of the person’s presence physically in front of us constantly reminds us that we are not present with one another. The slight delay in transmission and reception can make adapting to the other actor’s behaviour less spontaneous and harder to achieve. Much of the Stanislavski-based Meisner work that I teach relies on the presence of the Other. Two actors staring at each other for considerable time in each other’s presence loses something when mediated by cameras, technology, screens and a time delay. This mediation can also frustrate improvisational etudes which are so key to Stanislavski’s work.

One-to-one training The practicality of coaching professional actors on Skype does not allow for training in complete systems of acting. One has to pick and choose those tools that work well enough on Skype, and that will result in an increased chance of success for the client. This does limit the toolbox, meaning we are unable to use things that work better in groups, with partners, or with physical contact.

Opportunities Due to the logocentric nature of Stanislavski’s work, much of the preparation for auditions or an actor’s work can still be done via online video conferencing software. The ‘table work’, as it is often known, allows the actor to logically process the scene they are working on.

Given Circumstances The basic Who, What, Where, When and Why of an actor’s preparatory work are probably best explained through Uta Hagen’s famous nine questions.4 ‘Given circumstances’

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can feel like the heaviest of analysis work, as we plough through the text to glean the facts from the scene. There is a second type of given circumstances that are less analytical and more practical. Allied to what in improvisation training is referred to as ‘base reality’, it is the internal logic that comes from understanding the given circumstances of the scene. If the actor has identified where they are – perhaps a bedsit in Glasgow, for example – then they can begin to think about how those given circumstances affect the artistic choices they make about how they interact with their environment. The creative opportunities for the actor come from the interaction between the facts of the play and our interaction with them in the fictional given circumstances.

Beats Trainee screenwriters are taught that the journey of a scripted ‘beat’ is from one emotional state to another. Acting a scene requires the actor to break down the journey through the scene into smaller units of action. These are often called bits, or beats, or sometimes even beads, depending upon how badly you think Stanislavski’s accent impeded his translator’s understanding. These bits serve several purposes. They allow a scene to be broken down into manageable chunks that can be easily rehearsed. They provide the stepping stones the actor must take to get from A to B in the psychological, emotional and narrative journey of the scene. But they also help to make the scene more captivating to watch – which in auditions means helping to convince the casting director that you might just have what it takes to play that role. By breaking an audition piece down into chunks and establishing the objectives in each chunk, the actions that the character takes become more varied, dynamic and engaging, progressing towards the climax of the scene.

Objectives Something is driving a character in this scene: some motivation, some need, some desire. It is best communicated to my clients as: ‘What does your character want the other character(s) to think, feel and do right now?’ These three questions hidden inside one question allow the actor to consider their character’s intention from three perspectives at once. The ‘think’ aspect requires that the actor imagine the ‘thought bubble’ above the head of the other actor if they achieve their ‘objective’. The ‘feel’ gives the actor a target for their actions, attempting to make their scene partner, or even a reader, feel something specific. And the ‘do’ focuses the actor on producing actionable results from the other actor. In this final part of the question, characters desire action from each other. Not just ‘understanding’ but the action that ‘understanding’ would bring. This is best expressed as a verb that the other actor could embody – if they were successfully affected.

Table work on Skype One of the big opportunities gained from using the Stanislavski approach with an online platform like Skype is that screensharing allows the entire process of script

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analysis to be a more collaborative experience. Operating like a giant interactive whiteboard of the scene, we can use tools like Google Docs to analyse it, easily organising units, beats, objectives and actions. This application of technology to assist with the detailed breakdown of a scene has been embraced by my students who wish to tackle difficult scenes from Chekhov, where establishing a pattern of behaviour is easier using grids, labels, colours, highlighting and notation. All of this is instantly shareable with their scene partner and the coach, who can then give instant coaching for improvement.

Subtext Stanislavski once said: ‘Spectators come to the theatre to hear the subtext. They can read the text at home.’5 To my mind, a good scene is the right ratio of original text and creative subtext. I do not use subtext simply for clients to rewrite the lines and come up with a paraphrased text. This rarely helps the actor to find the ‘life in their eyes’ that screen acting coach Patrick Tucker believes good actors have on camera.6 Instead, I interpret ‘subtext’ to mean the character’s own opinion on what they are saying. Without this feeling or opinion, the actor seems to lack the life that Tucker mentions. In Patrick Marber’s Closer, when the character of Alice tells her boyfriend Dan ‘I made sandwiches. No crusts’, it is really important for the actor playing Alice to understand exactly how her character feels about this line.7 The character is reminding her boyfriend that she loves him. What are Alice’s feelings at that moment? She loves him. She loves him so much that she stayed up late and made sandwiches, with no crusts, just as he likes them. Commenting on the line, with a strong feeling or opinion, in the shape of an ‘I’ or ‘You’ statement allows the actor to make a decision about how they feel. Alice could mean ‘I love you so much’, or she could mean ‘I’m scared you don’t love me any more’. Either way, the actor’s creative choice means that the text will take on the shape of the subtext and the tension between the two creates meaning for the audience. The actor’s commitment to this inner opinion gives the line and the actor the inner life that Stanislavski so desperately desired in his own performances.

Subtext work on Skype Once again, screensharing allows us to really go deep with the subtext work. Students and clients record themselves acting, and it is possible for the coach to play this video, stopping and starting the recording as we pick apart the subtext they have chosen. Replaying the video allows the student to see precisely what works and doesn’t work within the subtext and its influence on the performance. We can note the change in facial expression, eye contact, speech rhythm and vocal tone – all of which are influenced by good subtext work. This is only possible in the live context with the help of considerable equipment and technical knowledge.

The Life of the Human Spirit on Zoom Despite its many difficulties, it was possible to coach and rehearse a short adaptation of Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya on Zoom with the pandemic-struck students of 2020. One

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of the things that struck me was that although it had been entirely rehearsed online with actors in many different parts of Europe, there was something there in the eyes of the actors that was unmistakeable. Stanislavski was fascinated by and sought continuously to find what he called the life of the human spirit. I know exactly what he means. The lack of it can be seen in an actor on stage in person, and online with equal clarity. The fire is out. There is no life dancing in the actor’s eyes. Why does the spirit of Stanislavski’s work endure across time? Why was he still helping us in our online endeavours during the lockdown of 2020? Because he systematically attempted to allow the actor to bring the life of the human spirit to a role, to a performance. And for me, that spirit is as present on Skype as it is in person.

Notes   1.   2.   3.   4.   5.   6.

See www.actingcoachscotland.co.uk (accessed 11 October 2022). Konstantin Stanislavski, An Actor Prepares (London: Eyre Methuen, 1980). Katie Mitchell, The Director’s Craft (London: Routledge, 2009), 225–6. See Uta Hagen, Respect for Acting (New York: Macmillan, 1973). Sonia Moore, The Stanislavski System (New York: Penguin, 1968), 28. Quote from an online Zoom seminar Patrick Tucker gave for the Acting Coach Scotland students in September 2020.   7. Patrick Marber, Closer (London: Methuen, 2002), 43.

Works Cited Hagen, Uta. Respect for Acting. New York: Macmillan, 1973. Marber, Patrick. Closer. London: Methuen, 2002. Mitchell, Katie. The Director’s Craft. London: Routledge, 2009. Moore, Sonia. The Stanislavski System. New York: Penguin, 1968. Stanislavski, Konstantin. An Actor Prepares. London: Eyre Methuen, 1980.

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20 Raising Her Voice: Presenting the Lives and Writings of Virginia Woolf and Dame Ethel Smyth for a Contemporary Theatre Audience Lucy Stevens

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s a creative practitioner, actor, singer and theatre-maker, my recent focus has been on new small-scale touring theatre productions which tell the life stories of two twentieth-century women: the composer and writer Ethel Smyth, and the writer Virginia Woolf. Both of these women were writing and creating their work within the modernist period and used innovative narrative forms. They introduced experimental ideas and techniques in their work with the stream of consciousness as a narrative device. Ethel Smyth: Grasp the Nettle and Virginia Woolf: Killing the Angel were written for a single female performer with a pianist on stage, not a dramatic but a ‘neutral’ presence, as if in the orchestra pit. The scripts are compiled by editing text taken from the published autobiographical books, essays, letters and diaries written by these women into a dramatic structure. Solely drawing from their words provides an authenticity to the text, placing each character in her time, weighted with her phrasing, nuance and humour. These one-woman plays rely on the ‘drama’ to be built by the character’s journey, her preoccupation with her internal reality and her response to other characters and events. At all times, the performer is aware of and talking to the audience; there is no conventional ‘fourth wall’. The audience is required to leap in time and place with the character on her journey with minimal help from the set or props. These scripts are mostly drawn from Ethel Smyth’s eight published autobiographical books, letters and newspaper articles and Virginia Woolf’s memoirs, autobiographical and polemic essays, letters and diaries. Both women experimented in life-writing and narrative form. The text is delivered as a stream of consciousness; the character is her own storyteller. An intimacy develops between her and the audience, drawing them in as her confidants, privy to private thoughts and desires, and enabling an audience to suspend its disbelief; the actor ‘is’ the historical woman in question. Janet Gibson, convenor of the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Opera, remarked of the performance: ‘I am left with the distinct impression that I was in the presence of Smyth herself.’1 Paul Max Edlin, Artistic Director of Deal Music and Arts Festival (2003–10), has stated:

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Your performances of Ethel Smyth and Virginia Woolf have made a profound impression. Both interpretations are as different as the women’s own personalities. [. . .] You get right ‘inside’ the psyche of those you portray, and the telling impact on us is quite incredible. It is as if we are in the presence of these great ladies.2 Dame Ethel Smyth and Virginia Woolf shared a passion for autobiography, for women’s lives and their struggles and stories; they admired each other’s writings enormously. Virginia encouraged Ethel to continue to write her memoirs and they remained close friends until Virginia’s death. Both women argued for women’s equality professionally, domestically and politically. The overarching objective of these plays is to bring these women’s life stories to a contemporary theatre audience in an engaging, honest performance which connects our shared life experiences. In spite of the cultural and linguistic difference, the audience is able to connect the threads of their own lives, resonating with these women, individually and collectively. These historical women were at times pioneering, epic in their endeavours and conquests, but the everyday personal details, found in diaries or letters, glimpses of their battles, frailties and insecurities, are revealed to us. The performances allow the audience to witness their brilliance as well as their moments of powerlessness and vulnerability as women in the early twentieth century, and to empathise with them in solidarity. Music is an important and integral part of these performances and weaves through the script. It is provided by the pianist on stage, sung by the performer; occasionally there is pre-recorded sound. In Ethel Smyth: Grasp the Nettle, compositions by Smyth herself provide the musical score. In Virginia Woolf: Killing the Angel, songs that were written by Woolf’s female contemporaries weave through the text, creating a cultural tapestry from that moment in time. Music heightens an emotion, enriches a scene or gives time to a thought. Sung text allows a change of energy and direction or time to linger in an emotional state longer than spoken words on their own would allow. When the pianist underscores a scene with music, the performer shifts fluidly between spoken and sung words, both of which are integral to the storytelling. Often the performer only sings a phrase or a single verse and the pianist completes the song under spoken text, conscious of maintaining the integrity of the music and its importance in its own right. The choice of music and the composer play their part in the story. They are carefully selected to intersect with the spoken text: enhancing a moment, linking scenes or building on the emotional content. I first encountered Virginia Woolf’s polemic writing whilst researching the composer Dame Ethel Smyth. Although they knew and respected each other’s work, Ethel and Virginia met for the first time in 1930. The following year, they were both invited to speak on ‘Music and Literature’ in London at the National Society for Women’s Service (later renamed The Fawcett Society). Ethel’s talk about her composing travails was reportedly given with ‘superb humour’.3 Virginia’s speech concerned a woman writer’s need to be ‘herself’, with a free, uncensored imagination. This necessitated killing the ‘Angel in the House’.4 Reading this speech was a revelation. I immediately read her memoirs including ‘A Sketch of the Past’, which is her vivid account of life as a young woman in Victorian society, weighed down by the conventions of class and sex. I felt threads of my own experiences drawing

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directly from hers. The influence and nuance of patriarchal society, with its established cultural expectations, still resonate today. As ghosts from our collective past, our ‘Angels’ still haunt us. It was the relevance, brilliance and honesty of Virginia Woolf’s writing, along with her desire to tell the unwritten history of women’s lives, which inspired this dramatisation of her story. Weaving music written by British women composers who were her contemporaries, including her friend Ethel Smyth, connects the musical and narrative threads of their lives, art, choices and experience. As Virginia Woolf writes in Three Guineas: ‘a library where the songs of the singers rise naturally from the lives of the livers’.5 In Ethel Smyth: Grasp the Nettle the audience is introduced to Smyth’s music, her life, her personal passions and her indomitable spirit. Ethel Smyth would, notoriously, sit at the piano to play and sing through her Mass or operas and sing every part from bass to soprano to anyone with connections or influence across Europe. This inspired my presentation in Grasp the Nettle of her opera The Wreckers, singing extracts from the bass to soprano lines to introduce the audience to her opera and also to the eccentricity of her character and the extraordinary lengths to which she went to promote her work. Knitting historical creative women’s work and lives together is important to me and drives my artistic offering in reclaiming our history. Because women have often been absent from the artistic canons, we are unable to place them in the female line. As Woolf writes: ‘For very little is known about women. The history of England is the history of the male line, not of the female.’6 These plays do not attempt to pass judgement on these women’s work or try to define their output as ‘excellent’ or ‘worthy’. The fact that they achieved an enormous amount in their lives is relevant, but my main interest is in them and their lives as women. My goal is for an audience to feel they know them, have an insight into why they made their choices and how it felt for them to be a woman in the 1920s. I draw a female line leading to us, reflecting and informing what it is to be a woman in the 2020s. Audience members often remark that it is very difficult to define our performances. More than a play with music and not solely storytelling, they have an emotional journey which draws on realism. It is perhaps fitting that these modernist twentieth-century women are presented to a twenty-first-century audience with many elements of modernist theatre practice.

Notes  1. Lucy Stevens, ‘Performance Diary’, https://lucystevens.com/diary-2018/ (accessed 15 October 2022).   2. Email to the author from Paul Max Edlin, sent on 16 July 2021.   3. See the text of Virginia Woolf’s speech, and the footnoted quotation from Vera Brittain writing in her column ‘A Woman’s Notebook’ in The Nation on 31 January 1931, at pages xxvii and xxxv of The Pargiters (London: Hogarth Press, 1978), and the version of the same speech published under the title ‘Professions for Women’ in Virginia Woolf’s lifetime in The Death of the Moth (London: Hogarth Press, 1943), 149.  4. Woolf, The Death of the Moth, 150.   5. Virginia Woolf, Three Guineas (London: Hogarth Press, 1938).  6. Virginia Woolf, Women and Writing (London: Women’s Press, 1979), 44. The essay ‘Women and Fiction’ first appeared in The Forum in 1929.

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Works Cited Stevens, Lucy. ‘Performance Diary’. https://lucystevens.com/diary-2018/ (accessed 15 October 2022). Woolf, Virginia. The Death of the Moth. London: Hogarth Press, 1943. Woolf, Virginia. The Pargiters. London: Hogarth Press, 1978. Woolf, Virginia. Three Guineas. London: Hogarth Press, 1938. Woolf, Virginia. Women and Writing. London: Women’s Press, 1979.

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21 Embodied Knowledge: A Brechtian Approach to Making Theatre with Young People Kerry Frampton

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first experienced Brecht at college in the early 1990s during my A levels, and although I was a deeply political young person, I never drew the links between his theatre-making and the world I was living in. Brechtian practice seemed old, stale and irrelevant: a disassociated set of techniques that made for awful, earnest theatre which was awkward to perform and hard to watch. I didn’t like it. In 2001 I began leading workshops for English Touring Theatre’s ‘Practitioners Unplugged’ programme and through the process of devising and delivering practical workshops for young people I developed a brand new understanding and appreciation of Brecht. As a theatre company Splendid makes episodic, dialectical theatre – inspired by the work of Bertolt Brecht – that ultimately encourages our audience to consider and question the world they are living in.1 As makers of political work, we are keen for the theories and techniques of Bertolt Brecht to be reclaimed by the next generation of theatre-makers and applied with confidence and freedom. Brecht himself insisted that the energy and strength of drama depended upon a continuous process of testing, discussion and revision. When Splendid started in 2003 we consciously employed a Brechtian approach to our theatre-making. We were on a mission to engage a new generation of young people with social-political theatre whilst encouraging and empowering them to make their own. Epic theatre seemed like the obvious framework. It is thought-prodding, heartexposing, tightly structured, theatrical and deeply entertaining. It takes the obedient spectator and jolts them out of their passive state; it shouts: ‘Wake up and engage with the world!’ At its best it can ask big questions without dictating answers and can unearth the personal within the universal. At its heart Brechtian theatre is the theatre of and for change. As Peter Brook stated in The Empty Space (1968): ‘No one seriously concerned with the theatre can by-pass Brecht. Brecht is the key figure of our time, and all theatre work today at some point starts or returns to his statements and achievement.’2 The students’ ownership of Brechtian methodology is as politically significant as engaging them with the subject matter. Embodied knowledge is powerful and transformative. Unless theory is reclaimed, reinterpreted and made relevant it is a useless historical artefact. There are many frustrations and obstacles when teaching Bertolt Brecht: for example, an unhelpful reverence to his methodologies, which encourages a faithful adoption – holding them in a tight historical fist – rather than an adaptation of his

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ideas. In this way Brecht’s lifetime of thinking, writing, staging, collaboration and explorative practice is reduced down to a tick box of techniques by an exam board. This will often include long German words that are translated unhelpfully (the outdated use of ‘alienation’, for example, to describe the Verfremdung) and terms like ‘Gestus’ which are difficult to explain and tricky to unpack and model for both teachers and students. Even if the young people are confident in using these terms, their employment of the techniques does not guarantee effective or inspiring sociopolitical theatre. Brecht feels hard and dry. But, as with most things, in practice it is more nuanced and the methodology is implicitly rooted in every aspect of making theatre. Brecht remarked: ‘My whole theory is much naiver than people think, or than my way of putting it allows them to suppose [. . .] I wanted to take the principle that it was not just a matter of interpreting the world but of changing it, and apply that to theatre.’3 In Brechtian theatre, stories are told for a purpose; we are shown a story for a purpose. We as theatre-makers are seeking a way to understand society and to help comprehend the social condition we are in. Brechtian theatre promotes the idea that the world and human beings are changeable. Brecht asked: ‘How is the spectator to be made to master life when all that happens masters him?’4 The characters we present on stage make choices but equally we allow for the possibility another choice could have been made. No action or reaction is inevitable. A character’s politics and behaviour are a result of the dialogue that they’ve had with the world. By examining the link between characters and the society within which they exist, we can dissect the world we ourselves live in. We can pay close attention to what people are allowed and not allowed to do. By offering a dialectical approach to storytelling and theatre-making young people are automatically obliged to consider a viewpoint that may not align with their own. This promotes curiosity, objectivity and empathy. Brecht proposed: ‘Theatre is simpleminded if it is not multifaceted.’5 The epic theatre-maker considers how they can shift the audience’s perspective by staging arguments clearly, being theatrically manipulative, strategically interrupting the action and highlighting the contradictions. ‘Contradictions are our hope!’6 (Brecht). We epic theatre-makers must ultimately serve the social/political purpose of the play. ‘Don’t tell me,’ said Brecht to his actors, ‘show me’.7 This style of theatre requires visual clarity. There is equity between what is shown and what is said. For some students this opens out their experience in the classroom. The body of the actor is significant on the Brechtian stage and close attention is paid to the actor’s physicality, attitude and use of space. We ask: as a performer, what are you showing us and why? What is the purpose of your character in the play? Splendid has a political spine that runs through everything we do. In our creative adaptations we purposefully reposition the neglected, stereotyped and underwritten characters, placing them at the centre of the stories. In Kafka’s Metamorphosis, we ask our audience to contemplate: ‘What is Normal?’ We remove Odysseus in the Odyssey so that we can amplify the monsters and functional females who litter the story, and question the role of leadership using a bouffon chorus in Macbeth. We give a voice to the voiceless, subject the heroes to scrutiny, and seek out and stage these contradictions. In design we offer an economy of presentation. Simplicity is key. Any props, costume or set are there to serve the play and clarify the relationships, dialectics and social

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politics. The entire space is well lit and there is no separation between the audience and the actors, reminding everyone that this is a story being told, that it is live, that anything can and might happen and we are experiencing this together. Even our touring model is politically informed. Splendid performs predominantly in schools and colleges across the UK so that we can access and engage with a wider audience than a traditional theatre building might allow. We come to the students wherever they are in the country. We perform our productions in the spaces that they themselves make work in, in an environment that is territorially theirs, not ours. Everyone can access what we do regardless of income; they just have to be in school on the day we visit. Promoting a social-political approach to theatre-making has to include Brecht. For us, his methods move students away from binary thinking, raise the importance of the audience, and by employing an episodic structure they are able to enrich their devising process. Research and investigation of the material are vital and the underlying ideas have to be actively tested out on stage in front of an audience. Everything placed on stage communicates information to an audience: characterisation, physicality, vocality and use of space. There are no ‘accidents’ in Brechtian theatre. The work has to be underpinned by a clear understanding of what you are choosing to place before an audience and why you are making that choice. What are you drawing the audience’s eyes, ears or brains to? Why is that important? How are you going to do that?

Notes   1.   2.   3.   4.

See www.splendidproductions.co.uk (accessed 12 October 2022). Peter Brook, The Empty Space (London: Prentice Hall, 1995), 71–2. John Willett, Brecht on Theatre (New York: Hill & Wang, 1964), 248. Tom Kuhn, Steve Giles and Marc Silberman, eds, Brecht on Performance: Messingkauf and Modelbooks (London: Methuen Drama, 2014), 184.  5. Willett, Brecht on Theatre, 47.   6. Ronald Hayman, Brecht: A Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983), 344.   7. Bertolt Brecht and Carl R. Mueller, ‘Notes on Stanislavski’, The Tulane Drama Review 9, no. 2 (Winter 1964): 157.

Works Cited Brecht, Bertolt and Carl R. Mueller. ‘Notes on Stanislavski’. The Tulane Drama Review 9, no. 2 (Winter 1964): 155–66. Brook, Peter. The Empty Space. London: Prentice Hall, 1995. Hayman, Ronald. Brecht: A Biography. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983. Kuhn, Tom, Steve Giles and Marc Silberman, eds. Brecht on Performance: Messingkauf and Modelbooks. London: Methuen Drama, 2014. Willett, John. Brecht on Theatre. New York: Hill & Wang, 1964.

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22 Appropriation, Abstraction and Appraisal: Modernist Legacies of Contemporary Dance Hanna Järvinen

Plural Modernisms and Dance

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hen asked to contribute to this collection, I hesitated. ‘Legacies’ implies writing of contemporary work, and words like ‘abstraction’ and ‘modernism’ carry the historical weight of canonical accounts about what qualified as ‘art’ in the past. In the end, I chose examples of contemporary dance works by Pichet Klunchun, Ola Maciejewska, Eszter Salamon and Nora Chipaumire that, intentionally or not, reflect upon legacies of early-twentieth-century dance. Through these contemporary examples, I discuss how appropriation of the Other was at the heart of the modernism of both the Ballets Russes and Denishawn companies, and how what has been understood as ‘abstraction’ in the dancing of figures like Loïe Fuller and Isadora Duncan effectively constructs a framework of aesthetic evaluation that privileges whiteness and Euro-American genealogies. Relating references to Greek antiquity to pseudoscientific theories about ‘races’, and showing how ‘natural dancing’ implied cultivation of whiteness, I ask if these glorified past examples have been more significant for racial segregation of art/concert dance than for aesthetic, pedagogical or reportorial developments in the art form. The chapter finishes in the invention of ‘kinaesthetic empathy’ in the 1930s, arguing that this theoretical apparatus further limited all claims to innovation, novelty or aesthetic relevance to hegemonic whiteness. To think of ‘modernist legacies of contemporary dance’ is a terminological challenge, because categorisations of dance only superficially follow those of other arts. ‘Modernism’ is rarely used by dance scholars, either as a stylistic category or as periodisation; key terms like ‘abstraction’ also shift because in a corporeal art form, the performing body is always-already figurative. In creating a canon for the art form, certain dances have been set up as examples of ‘abstraction’ or defined as having other formal characteristics typical to what is seen as modernism in other arts. But this also means that the characteristics associated with ‘modernism’ rely on criteria derived from other arts rather than dance itself, so that dance and dancing bodies are conspicuously absent from discussions of ‘modernist dances’.1 As with discourses of oil painting or productions of Shakespeare, analysing dance requires fathoming the different genealogies and relations between forms, styles, corporealities, design principles, compositional paradigms and intertextual references in what is being danced and by whom in what context. Unlike in these forms, dance does not

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privilege text and writing, nor limit itself to one set of competencies: dancers and dances move from social and ritual formations to art or competitive contexts, and dances get adapted and constantly adopt different materialities, media and possibilities of mediatisation. Because dance changes, tracing the lineages of a particular movement practice may well require addressing participatory practices (social dances) and martial arts as well as staged or concert dance works operating within the institution of art (‘institution’ here in the Foucauldian sense of a formation of power that creates particular subject positions).2 Since aesthetic value judgements depend on familiarity with the culture in which the dance emerges, what kind of dancing is desirable or ‘good’ – whether in terms of skill, complexity, innovation or adherence to existing norms – is neither universal nor neutral. Rather, ‘the politics of art lies in its aesthetic function’.3 If ‘modernism’ is rarely used in dance, the term ‘contemporary’ is fraught with tensions. For one, all dance is, in essence, taking place in the present of the danced now – when danced, a dance is contemporary, co-present in time. As terms, ‘modern dance’ and ‘contemporary dance’ were practically interchangeable until the invention of the ‘classical’ dance forms in the interwar years also distinguished staged concert dance and professional art making from participatory forms.4 But ‘modern’ and ‘contemporary’ truly diverged as stylistic categories only in the 1980s, largely due to another term not corresponding to stylistic or period categories in other arts: ‘postmodern dance’, coined in the United States in the 1970s to indicate the practices of dance makers associated with the Judson Dance Theater (1962–64) in New York City. Postmodern dance is not postmodernist but rather contests some of the tenets of modern dance – such as that art required professional, trained bodies, emoting, virtuosity, and a particular relation to composition, phrasing and music.5 Since the makers of postmodern dance were interested in transmediality, untrained bodies executing pedestrian tasks, chance and fragmentation in composition, and self-referential irony, their practice may be seen as in some ways more akin to the modernists of other art forms than many of the modern dancers before them had been.6 At the same time, modern, postmodern and contemporary dance are not as distinguished by dance techniques or ideologies as they are by personal genealogies associated with particular schools, festivals and publications. Especially in Europe, ‘contemporary dance’ is an umbrella term for ‘vanguard’ art dance – dance shown in particular festivals, biennales and venues, and discussed by those with timely access to ‘the latest thing’. Although not all contemporary dance questions the terms and conditions of making choreography in the process of making it, let alone examines the ontological definitions and premises of the art form, it is often represented as ‘transcultural’ or ‘neutral’, as unmarked as ‘modern dance’ once was. The opposite of ‘contemporary dance’ is not, in fact, ‘non-contemporary’ – historical dance or dance no longer performed – but rather dances marked as ‘traditional’, ‘ethnic’, ‘social’, ‘sport’ or ‘entertainment’. Efforts of decolonising contemporary dance are increasingly questioning such divisions and hierarchies, including histories used to uphold canons.7 Simultaneously, since ‘contemporary’ is also used to distinguish a historical phase following the ‘modern’ dance of the first half of the twentieth century, for the past decade dance makers have increasingly questioned what could come after ‘contemporary’ – will there be ‘post-contemporary’ dance?8 As in dance studies, twenty-first-century scholars of modernism have become increasingly aware of the colonialist legacies of the Euro-American canon and the

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whiteness of the art institutions and gatekeepers that set standards of novelty against this established norm. In modernist studies, a common solution has been to opt for the plural ‘modernisms’ instead, giving the term both geographical and temporal reach.9 Yet, these modernisms-in-the-plural are still entangled with the idea of ‘modernity’ that underlies the -ism, and thus intimately tied with the European colonialist project. As with terms like ‘postcolonialism’, this resonance between modernism and modernity also tends to posit Europe (or a relation thereto) at the core of the issue, as the Ursprung, the normative point of comparison against which any difference is then defined. In chronological terms, this creates an inescapable belatedness in the emergence of modernity – and modernism – everywhere else, turning local practices into imitations of still hegemonic whiteness. Plural modernisms is better than the singular, white and usually male modernism, but advocating any such plurality nevertheless requires keeping in mind Arturo Escobar’s warning to constantly observe three processes: dominant modernity’s negation of other worlds’ difference, the resistance and excess constituted by subaltern subjects at the fractured locus of the colonial difference, and the challenges to the dominant modern core stemming from nondominant modern sources. In other words, all worlds need to broach the project of remaking themselves from the critical perspective of their historical location within the modern/colonial world system.10 Writing from the context of a former colony of first Sweden and then Russia, my affective resonances with ‘modernism’ significantly differ from hegemonic narratives of anglophone scholarship, where even dissent and discontent stem from a sense of alreadybeing-there, in modernity, at the heart of empire. In the following, I question the legacies of canonical artists from the early twentieth century in twenty-first-century dance: the Orientalism of the Ballets Russes and Ruth St. Denis, the claims to abstraction in Loïe Fuller and Isadora Duncan, and the segregation of modern dance through universalising claims of kinaesthetic empathy. My commentary relies on contemporary dance works by Pichet Klunchun, Ola Maciejewska, Eszter Salamon and Nora Chipaumire, whose practices have inspired the questions I ask of these historical materials.

Appropriation: Orientalism as Modernism In 2010, the contemporary dance choreographer Pichet Klunchun revisited a work created a century earlier in Paris: the ‘Siamese dance’ that the star of the Ballets Russes company, Vaslav Nijinsky, performed in Les Orientales (1910). Klunchun’s Nijinsky Siam (2010) builds on archival sources not only of Nijinsky dancing this short divertissement11 but of the sources the choreographer, Mikhail Fokine, has been said to have emulated in the re-creation of a ‘Siamese’ dance, and on sources of Nijinsky dancing other roles with remarkably similar body positions and gestures – notably L’Aprèsmidi d’un Faune (1912), Nijinsky’s first choreography and a canonical example of ballet modernism.12 Klunchun’s choreography is founded on his own dance training and understanding of the history of dance and theatre in Thailand, using nang yai shadow puppetry as well as extracts from archives variously projected on stage and included in the programme notes.13

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Nijinsky Siam is only in part critical re-enactment of a past dance, because it does not really seek to reproduce or reconstruct any of the Ballets Russes works it references. Rather, the work extracts or distillates European modernism’s relation with Thai dancing and the exotic Other more generally, repositioning Orientalism as a method by which European modernism emerges.14 Through references to L’Après-midi d’un Faune, a work that Nijinsky explicitly associated with cubism, it also directly links the one choreographer who explicitly associated their work with vanguard painting prior to the First World War with the specific hand gestures and positions of the head in khon dances.15 This is not to say Nijinsky consciously imitated khon in the manner that Picasso appropriated African masks, but rather that his dancing body carried the archive of all the dances he had ever danced.16 In a sense, Klunchun’s Nijinsky Siam points to how, since Nijinsky’s body would never have not danced Fokine’s ‘Siamese’ choreography in 1910, the basic ideas for the Faun and nymphs in his modernist work did not arise solely from observations of Archaic Greek art or cubist painters. L’Après-midi d’un Faune was first drafted in 1910 when Nijinsky had just been dancing Les Orientales. As Klunchun notes, he may well have also seen the troupe credited with ‘inspiring’ Fokine’s ideas of South-East Asian dance: the visit of the ‘Royal Ballet’ of khon dancers – Boosra Mahin’s dance company – to St Petersburg in 1900. The company was understood as ‘ballet’ because both forms had a long history and codified dance training – khon is ‘academic’ in the same sense as ballet, still often called ‘academic dance’ in Russia. Both forms also had a specific relation to the court and the ruling monarch: the visit to St Petersburg was part of a long-standing diplomatic exchange between the last Romanov emperors and king Chulalongkorn. As such, the Boosra Mahin company functioned like the export campaigns of Princess Maria Tenisheva and Sergei Diaghilev, funded by the Ministry of Court, to Paris; or how Khmer court dancers from Cambodia accompanied king Sisowath’s state visit to France in 1906.17 In the official Yearbook of the Imperial Theatres, Valerian Svetlov ended his account of the Boosra Mahin company visit by praising how The lead motifs of some of the dances [. . .] are original in their choreographic design and beautiful in their external form, intricate patterns, and combinations. These could enter into our European choreography as new elements, provided they are processed in an appropriate manner and adjusted to the requirements of our arts. Of course, an experienced choreographer could derive some benefit from them, like an experienced composer hearing the themes of Siamese national music, to which our hearing is unaccustomed, could build several melodies out of them, dressing them in musical form that can be perceived by the European ear.18 Svetlov acknowledges that Siamese music and dance are complex and have an innate beauty that is, however, culturally specific. For them to be ‘legible’ for Europeans, they need to be ‘translated’ into European conventions. In other words, the culture of the non-European Other is to act as inspiration for European art. This is precisely what Fokine did in his choreography for Les Orientales. In the dance canon, however, the intrinsic qualities of these Siamese dances transform into proof of the ‘ethnographic authenticity’ of Fokine’s great reform of ballet, the reason his ‘masterpieces’ are better than the exoticism and Orientalism of his

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predecessors. Fokine rescues ballet from a state of ‘decline’ in the nineteenth century, epitomised by the virtuosic ballerina inserting her favoured divertissement into any ballet.19 The canon glosses over how exactly Fokine ‘translated’ everything he appropriated, as well as how his Orientalism revolved around blackface and brownface stereotypes.20 Fokine did not care to learn the intricate corporeal reasoning, choreographic design or specific aesthetic of khon that Svetlov noted in his review. Rather, he assumed he could pick up entire dance traditions in a matter of days, and even set his ‘Siamese’ dance to Christian Sinding’s Rondoletto giocoso, op. 32/5. Whether the distinct lack of Orientalist influences makes this Norwegian composer’s music a more or less odd accompaniment for this divertissement is somewhat moot, but it is certainly as ‘Siamese’ as the choreography.21 One only needs to look at the series of photographs taken by Eugène Druet of Nijinsky in this role, which include the sole certifiable photograph of Nijinsky’s famous leap, to see how little the end result resembled khon.22 Fokine was by no means alone in his cultural appropriations. In American modern dance, the careers of Ruth St. Denis and Ted Shawn, who founded the Denishawn company and school in Los Angeles in 1915, also revolved around cultural appropriation. As Jane Desmond has analysed, St. Denis’s breakthrough piece Radha (1906) was an Orientalist hyperbole of ‘India’ as represented in popular imagery: a spectacle of ecstatic, female body clad in a revealing costume with trappings of spiritual awakening at the end of her erotic display.23 The brownface goddess portrayed by St. Denis danced to the 1883 Orientalist opera Lakmé by Léo Delibes; her choreography mixed ballet with Delsartism and skirt dancing. Popular in the 1880s, Delsartism taught bodily expression of emotions using statues from the antiquity to exemplify allegedly universal ways of conveying emotions.24 Skirt dancing, then again, was a British form of variety theatre dance that may have owed something to Indian ‘nautch’25 dancers. Despite the claims of some early-twentieth-century sources, St. Denis certainly had not ‘studied with East Indian natives’ or had ‘Oriental teachers’.26 However, crucial figures in the canonical narrative about modernism in dance – Fokine as ballet’s saviour whose works are still performed, St. Denis as one of the foundational figures of modern dance – rely on stereotypes and cultural appropriation of the exotic Other. Literally next to the article that advertised the forthcoming season of what became Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes company in the 21 April 1909 issue of Comœdia is a photograph of a Siamese woman in what the paper claims is a modified version of a Directoire-style (i.e. 1795–1804) dress.27 The accompanying text, like the advertised ballets of the Russians, frames the Other as stuck in the past, but also claims that such a dress would also find favour in the present, if imported ‘to our theatres or racetracks’ (‘dans nos salles de théâtre ou sur nos champs de courses’). However, modernity and fashion required not just circulation of the self via the exotic Other but a reworking by that Other: ‘It even makes you wonder if all our fashions would not benefit from coming back to us touched by the little hands over there.’28 Paradoxically, this is precisely how the French and later British critics tended to understand the Ballets Russes as recycling the tradition of ballet. It is also how the company has been positioned in scholarship, where contemporary Russian opinion is conspicuously absent. For the French spectators of the Ballets Russes, Fokine’s Orientalism quickly became proof of the Russians’ own Orientality – to the consternation of Russian dance critics. As separating the company from the Russian critical debate over ‘old’ and ‘new’ ballet allowed the Ballets Russes to appear more novel and unprecedented, the impresario

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Diaghilev and his coterie all too willingly went along with the French opinion. But whereas someone like St. Denis could be secure in their whiteness even when performing the Other, the assumed Orientality of the Ballets Russes also meant racialisation of the Russians that separated what they did from French art, and from modernity. The focal role of ‘race’ in contemporary discourses on art and culture resulted from the plurality of white races through which whiteness could become the unmarked, aspirational norm, but also constantly endangered and under threat.29 Jacques Rivière, still frequently credited for being one of the few critics who truly understood the modernism of The Rite of Spring (1913), exemplified this when he wrote of the Russian authors, Nijinsky, Stravinsky and Roerich: Between them and us lies the distance of one race from another. [. . .] Although it is impossible for them to communicate with us, when they are amongst themselves they have an extraordinary faculty to meld their souls, to sense and think the same thing in the plural. Their race is still too young to have constructed in each being these thousands of little differences, these delicate personal reservations, these light but insurmountable defences that shelter the threshold of the cultivated spirit.30 Notably, Rivière next used this thoroughly racist premise to attest that The Rite of Spring was biologically Other to French art – interesting but apart, much as Svetlov had written of the Boosra Mahin company in 1900.31 Even if he did not stoop to the nationalist fervour of some of his colleagues, exalting Rivière’s views effectively requires omitting his racism and actively forgetting how the modernism of The Rite of Spring was read in Russia as proof that Russian art was now in advance of that of Europe, deeply connected to the aesthetic traditions of Russian art, but in essence of the future. For example, the future People’s Commissar for Enlightenment of the Soviet Union, Anatoly Lunacharsky, deemed Roerich’s emulation of Paul Gauguin the most dated part of the work.32 In his praise of the work, the former Director of the Imperial Theatres, Prince Sergei Volkonsky, cited a colleague: ‘One of our critics in all amity favourably described it as “cubist icon-painting” where the archaic angularity of the movement unravels itself in front of us to the pipes of Slavonic Pan.’33 The disjunction between whose modernism is actually brought into focus in scholarship and for what reasons recalls how Klunchun’s contemporary khon dance has also been positioned as some kind of rescue of a ‘lost’ traditional art instead of a contemporary form in a sovereign continuum requiring genealogical understanding autonomous from white history.34 The transcultural argument of modernism reveals itself as flawed precisely when it is used in these ways of silencing discourses where ‘modernity’, ‘contemporaneity’ and ‘tradition’ do not fit the Eurocentric chronology.

Abstraction and the Technological Sublime The unmarked white norms of what kind of dancing qualifies as ‘modernism’ are nowhere more apparent than in the association of modernism with ‘abstract’ dance. In 2015, Polish choreographer Ola Maciejewska created Bombyx Mori, a work explicitly referencing the ‘abstract’ Serpentine Dance of another American ‘pioneer’ of modern dance, Loïe Fuller. Named after the silkworm that spins the fabric of the costumes, Bombyx Mori starts with three performers getting dressed in extremely voluminous

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black outfits. They twirl around and manipulate these costumes in the white box of the stage, three dark figures that occasionally collapse on to themselves or join as one, creating monochromatic silhouettes and shapes in and against the whiteness of the space. For the most part, the costumes mask the bodies of the dancers and their dance technique can only be guessed at from the directions their movement gives to the flowing material. At times, this comes close to watching abstract black splotches floating in whiteness, the semblance to human bodies lost underneath, even as the work provokes the question of those invisible bodies’ manner of creating specific effects.35 In a sense, Bombyx Mori achieves the abstraction credited to Loïe Fuller: it is a dance that divorces motion from any narrative, expression of emotional state or character, or the recognisably human (figurative) form. Relatively few dance makers have gone in this direction in the art form, and certainly not Fuller herself. Touring the United States in 1891, Fuller developed the Serpentine Dance, in which she manipulated the long, exceedingly wide hems of her high-waisted dress, on a stage lit with colourful electric lighting. The following year, she took her act to Europe, and in Paris, she quickly became an embodiment of the technological sublime, ‘the vertigo of a soul exposed by artifice’ on an empty stage without ‘the traditional placement of permanent or stable set in opposition to the choreographic mobility’.36 Nowadays, we are far too used to projections and the brightness of electric light to appreciate just how exceptional Fuller’s use and development of these scenographic devices was in the early 1890s – how her short bursts of turbulent fabric seemed to embody the possibilities of the most advanced technology of the day. Fuller performed a series of consecutive numbers of a few minutes each, changing costumes to fit the theme of each dance and stipulating numbered lighting cues for the light effects, so that the end result seamlessly merged dancer, costume and light.37 J. E. Crawford Flitch lists various harmonies of colour thrown upon the dress, but also strange and wonderful patterns of flowers and lace and barbaric designs. [. . .] Among the most famous of Loie Fuller’s dances were the Widow Dance, which she danced in a black robe, the Rainbow Dance, the Flower Dance, the Butterfly Dance, the Good-night Dance and the Mirror Dance. [. . .] [The Fire Dance] was originally designed for Loie Fuller’s play Salomé, in which it was the dance commanded by Herod. It was called ‘The Salute of the Sun,’ as it drew its inspiration from the effects of the sunset.38 In other words, critical responses to these performances were not spontaneous impressions; rather, they listed which themes Fuller chose to illustrate. Fuller’s choice to rename The Salute of the Sun as Fire Dance recalls the practice of renaming divertissements in ballet.39 Fuller’s art had obvious parallels to early cinema, which also relied on projected light and the short length of the film reel. J. E. Crawford Flitch disparages some contemporary impresarios for creating acts that ‘utilised the dancer as a backcloth and projected upon her photographs of the prominent people of the day!’.40 Like the numerous ‘Serpentine Dancers’ that Fuller bemoaned as stealing her ideas, such spectacles reveal Fuller’s importance as an embodiment of the technological sublime, but they also cut into her livelihood. In New York in 1892, Fuller unsuccessfully sued one Minnie Renwood Bemis for copying her work. This copyright suit has since become emblematic of how ‘abstract’ dance was too ‘advanced’ for the law, and how dance

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lacked the protection given to other arts.41 However, Anglo-American law deals with right to copy, not the moral rights of authors or the aesthetics of their art. Two years prior, the Algerian-born Madame Mariquita had registered herself as an author with the French Société des Auteurs et Compositeurs Dramatiques, attaining the right to royalties for creating (rather than merely arranging) dances.42 Whereas French law dealt with moral rights of individuals, copyright focused on products, which required something that could be copied – in theatrical works a dramatic arc, characters or themes. Danced works without such plots, such as ballet divertissements, were understood as relying on the virtuosic technique of the dancer, an inimitable corporeality that could not be copyrighted because it could not be copied. In terms of copyright, Fuller’s performances fell in between: they had no dramatic development but neither did they rely on her virtuosic corporeality – or at least not sufficiently to stop others from taking her scenographic ideas and running with them, much as she herself had done with the British skirt dancers of the 1880s. Just as Fokine skipped over the ‘new ballet’ of Aleksandr Gorsky to seem more innovative, in her autobiography Fuller creatively forgot to mention that two years prior to her Serpentine Dance, she had worked as a skirt dancer at the Gaiety Theatre in London. Fuller was employed as a stand-in for Letitia ‘Letty’ Lind who, with Kate Vaughan (Catherine Alice Candelin), is credited with inventing skirt dancing in the 1880s. In this popular British form, a solo dancer manipulated the layers of her voluminous hems, skipping and stepping to the accompaniment of a familiar piece of music, sometimes a song sung by the dancer herself. Like the cancan across the Channel, skirt dancing was a local form with roots in social dances, although it may also have taken influences from Indian dances – or the Orientalist versions of these performed on the same stages. Although contemporary sources mention a great number of skirt dancers with more or less training, little is known of what actually qualified as skirt dancing for contemporary spectators.43 In addition to skirt dancers, Loïe Fuller certainly omitted to mention performing an Orientalist ‘nautch dance’ in a play, even as she credited her invention of the Serpentine Dance to a present of ‘a skirt of very light white silk, of a particular shape, and a few pieces of spiderwebsilk’ that she received from India.44 The fabric is like a physical manifestation of how the anonymous, exotic materiality of the Other allows for a white author’s originality: it billows out of a vacuum, a gift for which the author has no one to thank as she drapes it over the names and movements of those she considers raw material for her art. The manner in which Bombyx Mori reiterates the Serpentine Dance exemplifies both the impact of the narrative of Fuller’s art as ‘abstraction’ to her legacy and the limitations of this specific practice due to the physical materiality of the costume and its movement. The voluminous fabric requires constant lift, and the limits this places both on pacing and on the movement qualities of the performers become rather apparent in an hour-long spectacle. To focus on this formal aspect of Fuller’s dances also bypasses the technological sublime that made her so significant to her contemporaries. The monochromatic, formal reworking fixes Fuller like the black-and-white images of her performances, as distant from the stage apparatus of shifting coloured lights that so impressed her admirers. Last but not least, the emphasis on abstraction and form ignores how the subjects of Fuller’s works related to contemporary ideas about dance, bodies, nature and ‘race’.45

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Interlude: Antiquity, ‘Natural Dancing’ and Whiteness Far from being restricted to the narrow form of modern dance, her variety has no other limits than those of reality and the life from which it derives. It is given all the breadth for instinctive evolving, on the sole condition of observing the laws of cadence. She is free as the choreute [i.e. chorist in ancient Greek theatre] who uses familiar gesture, as the ballerina who punctuates the grace of steps and turns with the rhythm of her deployed clothing – veil, tunic or coat that seems to have reincarnated the soul of Antiquity. But, after gloriously rediscovering, through brilliant intuition, the secret of the past, she seeks to supplement her discovery, to revise it by means of personal acquisitions. She intends to colour this animated statuary the illusion of which her dances constantly suggest.46 The dancer discussed here is not Isadora Duncan, whom early-twentieth-century histories of dance and textbooks alike credit with reviving the art of dancing in ancient Greece. The text is from a 1904 essay accompanying Pierre Roche’s book of illustrations of Loïe Fuller by Roger Marx, French man of letters and advocate of impressionist painting. Although Marx does not explicate what he means by ‘the narrow form of modern dance’, his manner of positioning Fuller is anything but accidental: a development that starts from the chorists of Greek theatre and continues through representations of antiquity (‘classical’ Greece and Rome) in ballet (a French court art) before emphasising revision of this tradition is the Eurocentric genealogy in a nutshell. Moreover, three pages later, Marx represents Fuller’s arrival in Paris as the year when ‘French taste attests to its weariness for the freedoms of fin-de-siècle choreography and for the exoticism of Muslim gyrations, as invariable as the chants that provoke them’.47 Whereas antiquity ensured the whiteness of Fuller’s dancing, it is this opposition to the sexualised Oriental Other’s monotonous ‘Muslim gyrations’ that positions her as the saviour of whiteness from the degeneracy of modernisation and the dangerous Other. Dressed in her Botticellian tunics, her feet bare and her movements seemingly improvised a decade later, Isadora Duncan became the embodiment of this rhetoric of white control over the unruly masses of variously primitive or degenerate Others. In nineteenth-century body culture, ancient Greece became an aesthetic norm because in pseudoscientific racism it was the epitome of white racial purity, as demonstrated by the white marble of Greek statuary. The connection between art and aesthetics on the one hand and science on the other went both ways: pseudoscientific racism relied on aesthetic qualia derived from Greek statues but represented as white features. Corporeal practices got draped not only in chitons of respectability of historical referents but also usefulness to contemporary science. Retrieving a lost, ‘primitive’ élan vital was a dynamic solution to cultural anxieties about the ‘decline’ of the empire and the race, linked to scientific racism, eugenics and degeneration theories.48 A means to improve the bodies of individuals, and, through individuals, the class, nation and race, the ‘natural’ body was never something inborn or uncultivated but rather required careful training. In dance, ‘natural dancing’ thus connoted culling tendencies to excess (seen in uncultivated ‘primitives’), emphasising ‘legibility’ of expression and symmetry, grace and harmony in movement.49 As Ann Daly points out, the manner that Duncan used to narrativise ‘nature’ as her only teacher quite explicitly racialised her practice as white – in opposition to the popular black ragtime dances

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of the day, but not against civilisation.50 As ‘natural’ and ‘barefoot’ dancing gained in popularity, the vectors of exclusion in dance discourse increasingly ran along both class and racial lines – the dangers of urban mass culture epitomised by both the syncopated, Afrodiasporic rhythms of tap and ragtime, and the uniform bodies of the chorus line.51 On stage, ‘antiquity’, like the Orient, had long served as a foil for representing nudity, but in the rhetoric of natural dancing, nudity symbolised a return to a nostalgic past of racial purity that also held the seeds of body-shaming. The argument was that the naked body could not lie, whereas modern fashions regularly did – especially the corset, which became the symbol of women abandoning their ‘natural’ place at home bearing and caring for children.52 Thus, instead of choosing the right undergarments for a fashionable silhouette, it became necessary for women to increasingly alter their bodies through dieting and exercise, and Isadora Duncan herself found critics evaluating her weight and appearance.53 Photographs of the almost always female, young and slim ‘natural’ bodies dancing in varying degrees of undress on sunny glades and/or with trappings of ‘antiquity’ from togas to broken colonnades promote an ideology about what kind of dancing was appropriate. Although using a new technology, they eliminated all signs of modernity from this visual representation, even as most dancers relied on the metropolitan urban spaces and theatrical apparatus for their performances. The pastoral imagery severed all connections between this ‘vanguard’ dance and new dances on popular stages, in ballrooms, exhibitions and amusement parks. They also obscured how class, gender and degree of privacy of venue conditioned nudity – how, until the 1920s, ‘nude’ performers usually wore full-body silk leotards.54 Like Fuller, Duncan had started off in dramatic theatre, and as with Ruth St. Denis, her practice owed much to American Delsartism, with its codified ideas of expressing emotion. Duncan first made her name performing in the semi-private salons of wealthy patrons in New York in 1898. As Samuel Dorf has argued, this allowed her to perform a kind of eroticism that would have been censored or at least condemned as pornographic on popular variety stages.55 However, Duncan was also capitalising on a veritable fashion for ‘antiquity’ as both a foil for staging nudity and a nostalgic saviour of whiteness from modernisation. In France, Laura Fonta had been reconstructing dance since 1881, followed by Maurice Emmanuel’s 1896 thesis on ancient Greek dances. Numerous ballets and operas included ‘Greek’ dances, and Phryné by Camille SaintSaëns was first performed in 1893. On more popular stages and in drawing rooms, tableaux vivants imitated contemporary fine art renditions of antiquity. In sport, the 1896 Summer Olympics organised by the International Olympic Committee in Athens were but one of many movements that referenced the ideal bodies of allegedly white ancients as a way to combat the ills of modernisation.56 In a form dominated by women displaying their bodies, ‘antiquity’, ‘nature’, ‘spirituality’ and ‘art’ functioned as rhetorical devices that separated these bodies from the undesirables – women who had to labour or sell their bodies, women who were not white or not-white-enough, not cultivated, cultured and classy enough. The turn of the century also saw a shift in celebrity culture through illustrated magazines, interviews and picture personalities, and protestations against the bad taste of the public went hand in hand with separation of the true art of the right kind of dance from what was liked by the public at large.57 The aesthetic of natural dancing celebrated the human body as an expression of health, beauty and life, meaning able, symmetrical, aesthetically pleasing and almost

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exclusively white bodies dancing select (again, white) dances to music composed in the European symphonic tradition. Its aesthetic was normative, restricting dance to movements to music that ‘correctly’ represented both emotion and morality, thus using ‘morality’ as the point of bifurcation between what qualified as art and what was degeneration, pornography or commercial copying.58 Later, the ideological similarities between eugenics, body culture and ‘natural dancing’ eased the alliance of modern dance with white supremacism both in the Third Reich and in the United States. The ‘harmonic gymnastics’ Genevieve Stebbins introduced to Delsartism owed much to Nils Bukh’s Swedish gymnastics – a system favoured by the National Socialists in the Third Reich; whereas in the 1910s, German Bewegungskunst (‘art of movement’) was combined with the eurhythmics developed by the Swiss piano pedagogue Émile Jaques-Dalcroze at the Hellerau school near Dresden.59 Hellerau fostered the emergence of the Ausdruckstanz (‘expressionist dance’) movement during the First World War: Mary Wigman, Rudolf von Laban, Kurt Jooss and Hanya Holm, amongst others, studied there. More important, however, was how the association of antiquity with racist ideals of whiteness neutralised aesthetic judgements, stylistic categories, and evaluation of novelty and innovation in ways that excluded dancers and dances from non-white genealogies. For the past century, the repertories taught by companies or works emphasised as masterpieces in dance pedagogy or scholarship have been overwhelmingly white because the theoretical apparatus taught to analyse the art form has favoured these white traditions and genealogies.60 Indeed, the 1930s also saw a major shift in how modernism was understood in dance – a shift in which modernism was redefined through the invention of ‘classicism’ and assimilation of Orientalism into the narrative of what qualified as ‘modern’ dance.61 This shift revolved around the question of ‘abstraction’ as a key component of modernism and a seemingly ‘universal’ system for understanding this abstraction in dance – kinaesthetic empathy.

Abstract Dance, or Exclusion via Kinaesthetic Empathy In 2018, the choreographer Miguel Gutierrez pointed out that to read dancing bodies or the dances they dance as ‘abstract’ or expressing only form or design still seems to require that the bodies dancing are explicitly unmarked, people ‘whose subjectivities have been naturalized’.62 Racialised bodies, in other words, are assumed always-already reliant on ethnicity, culture, tradition and context in ways that explicitly exclude their dances from the ‘purity’ of abstraction. In an art form reliant on the always-already figurative bodies of dancers, what even qualifies as abstraction? In the 1930s, the answer that formalism gave to this question was simple: abstraction was acquiring the essence of a particular art form. Formalist theories denounced narrative, context, and historical and cultural specificity of an artwork in favour of analysing formal characteristics like technique, composition or structure. In dance, the key formalist critics were John Martin and Edwin Denby, who distinguished three phases in art dance: the ‘classic’ dance of ballet, characterised by a prescriptive system of dance technique; the ‘romantic’ dances of the turn-of-the-century generation, focusing on expression of emotional states; and the ‘modern’ dance where movement itself was the sole substance of the art, arising from ‘an inner compulsion’ but emphasising ‘the aesthetic value of form in and of itself’.63 Unsurprisingly, for these

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American critics, the ‘purest’ forms of dance were American modern dance and plotless, neoclassical ballet. Formalists solved the need to explain both the ‘abstraction’ of this dance and how its ‘movement itself’ moved them through ‘kinaesthetic empathy’ (originally called ‘metakinesis’ by Martin). According to this theory, the special ‘dance sense’ (kinaesthesia) allowed a spectator to experientially understand any dance through an immediate, corporeal affinity (empathy) with what was being danced. There are a number of rather obvious problems in this. Physiologically, kinaesthesia denotes the sensorial apparatus by which human beings perceive their bodies in space and in movement (a combination of input from kinaesthetic receptors and other senses, notably balance, vision and touch). Observing kinaesthetic sensations and proprioception (how one’s body is and moves in space) can help shift focus in dance analysis and research from the extraneous to how a dancer understands and uses their body. This practice-led approach is not what formalist art theory wanted. Rather, as the reliance on sympathy or empathy attests, the focus was on observing and analysing the bodies and movements of others, regardless of gender, age, ability or familiarity with the techniques of a particular dance. The rhetorical trick of kinaesthetic empathy and abstract modern dance was twofold. First, the universality of kinaesthetic empathy meant that anyone qualifying as a connoisseur of dance (the dance critic) could look at any kind of dancing or human movement and make correct, objective value judgements of its worth (value). Second, since the closest thing to perfection in dance was abstraction, defined through the purity of kinaesthetic sensations in the connoisseur, all dances that either failed to convey this purity of sensation to the connoisseur or relied on qualities extraneous to kinaesthesia could be dismissed as of lower value than ‘pure’ dance. Kinaesthetic empathy, in other words, claims dance is a ‘universal language’, both transnational and ahistorical. It ignores that aesthetic judgement is always predicated on acculturation: aesthetic values are not universal, and understanding the aesthetics of a particular dance requires familiarity with the specifics of the culture from which that dance emerged – including whether this culture separates ‘dance’ from ‘music’, ‘theatre’, or specific life events or cultural practices.64 In this way, kinaesthetic empathy allows its inherent whiteness to become unmarked, creating a chiasmatic entanglement between dance as a ‘universal language’ and white aesthetic evaluation by which only some ‘dialects’ of this language qualify as art. It allows white authorities to speak with authority of forms they barely know, even claim to learn them as quickly as Fokine or Shawn in their day.65 It also designates a distinction in methodology, where aesthetic analysis is reserved for professional art dance and all other forms of dance are relegated into the realm of anthropology. Already fifty years ago, Joann Kealiinohomoku criticised this division by repositioning ballet as ‘an ethnic dance’. Especially within the Euro-American whiteness of the hegemonic forms of art dance, the deep connections between different kinds of dances are still being overlooked.66 Refusing to look at ragtime dances, tap, tango, maxixe, ‘nautch’, chacut, cancan, flamenco, and everything that was danced and performed in the same spaces as the canonical ‘modernists’ upholds segregation that keeps the canon of the art form white. The effect of this systemic whiteness can be seen in Eszter Salamon’s 2014 work MONUMENT 0: Haunted by wars (1913–2013), in which black dancing bodies

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move amidst grave markers into which are inscribed the years of wars and conflicts in Africa. The Christian crosses of the graves semantically attest to the active eradication of entire ways of life, and through this scenography, the work propagates a stereotypical notion of Africa as a continent of nothing but one ‘senseless’ outburst of violence after another. In no way does the work address how the dates on each marker connote a historically specific, local effect of the still ongoing colonialist interest in extracting human lives, natural resources and cultural artefacts through repeated economic, political, military and outright terrorist interventions. These are not the graves of Larbi Ben M’Hidi or Patrice Lumumba. Within Salamon’s MONUMENT series, this ‘Africa’ is quite ahistorical, a ground zero that is never referenced in the later parts of the series that tell the canonical history of (white) art dance.67 Although the white choreographer has asked the dancers to include movements from African dances they are familiar with, not identifying the locality and cultural specificity of the danced references meshes everything together, entangling regional characteristics, histories and specific contexts in which these dances are danced. In a sense, this is ‘abstraction’ in the sense of alienating movement material out of a number of cultures, but it is equally appropriation of that movement material that also deprives it and the bodies dancing of agency. The later parts of the series do not look back and acknowledge the substantive debt of what is understood as ‘contemporary dance’, today, to African and Afrodiasporic movement practices.68 Rather, the association between semi-nude black male bodies, ‘abstracted’ movement and violence recalls Stuart Hall’s analysis of negative stereotypes of black masculinity.69 In this way, MONUMENT 0 attests to how racism orients bodies in particular ways regardless of an individual’s intent.70 As, for example, Ayoko Mensah and Nadine Siegert have discussed, African contemporary dance choreographers have long struggled with the tension between ‘black’ and ‘white’ readings of their practice. In the African context, dances accepted as ‘contemporary dance’ for white stages are too ‘white’, a colonialist advocating of an alien aesthetic. In white contexts, the same dances are read through century-old stereotypes of black authenticity, wildness and references to traditions. For artists, this tension has very concrete consequences, from lack of government support to falling prey to what one or the other side perceives as ‘mere Africanist clichés’.71 Exploring this tension, Nora Chipaumire’s #PUNK 100%POP *N!GGA (2018) questions precisely the white narratives about Africa, black bodies, centres and peripheries, and histories inscribed in and through bodies that Salamon’s MONUMENT 0 propagates.72 Chipaumire sets up a three-part dance party lasting up to five hours, where intermissions function to change the performance installation and reposition stage and auditorium. The audience-participants are both invited to dance their hearts out and constantly jarred out of complacency by the sharp, political edge of what is said, sung and danced. Chipaumire and her DJ/dancer collaborators loudly push the audience into participation, calling for responses, inserting verbal and musical prompts, personal stories, exaggerated gestures and physical challenges until, in lieu of the usual applause ending the spectacle, participants just dance together on stage, gradually saying their goodbyes and drifting out of the space into the night. #PUNK 100%POP *N!GGA carves space for the dispossessed in more than one sense: in addition to commenting on Africanist contemporary dance, it questions the whiteness of the genealogies that qualify something as ‘contemporary dance’. By taking seriously, as

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corporeal techniques, the aggression of punk rock and the glamour of pop, it refutes the century of exclusion of all those ‘popular’ corporealities that, for the majority of dance aficionados, constituted the modern experience of the metropolis of the turn of the twentieth century.

Conclusion Perhaps the most lasting legacy of modernism in dance has been the limitations it has placed on what is vanguard and novel, conditioned by the whiteness of the conceptual, theoretical apparatus of abstraction. By focusing on appropriation and abstraction, I have drawn attention to how inclusion and exclusion operate through theoretical notions and stylistic categories as well as histories of great individuals and works that form the canons – canons that pretend to universality and stability but are, in effect, local and constantly shifting.73 Decolonising dance studies means focusing on alternative histories and genealogies of dance in its myriad forms, and discussions on how particular practices get categorised as ‘art’ or ‘cultural heritage’.74 By starting from Pichet Klunchun’s Nijinsky Siam I sought to posit the plural modernisms of recent scholarship not as belated reactions to the Euro-American hegemony but as hybrid returns, where local and familiar gets circulated through the previously irrelevant practices of those canonical Euro-American artists. If the narrative of modernism is flipped to begin not from the canonical white narrative that glorifies the Orientalism of the Ballets Russes, but from the traditions of khon, exported by Boosra Mahin’s entrepreneurship and connections to the court of king Chulalongkorn, then the Ballets Russes are ‘the little hands over there’75 that rework the tradition before it is repatriated in a contemporary form by Klunchun and his research team. The function of European modernism is thus to provoke both recognition and further experimentation in a genealogy where the white canon and white aesthetic judgements about what qualifies as ‘pure’ abstraction are no longer the norm. With Loïe Fuller and Ola Maciejewska’s Bombyx Mori, I discussed the repercussions of positioning abstraction as the principal quality of modernism. When dance is forced into fulfilling criteria of modernism predetermined by fine art, literature or music, why specific dancers mattered to their contemporaries tends to get lost. To address how ‘natural dancing’ and references to ancient Greece in Isadora Duncan’s works elevated certain kinds of dance into a cure for the ills of modernisation is to explore the racialisation of dance forms. Later, formalism, kinaesthetic empathy and ‘pure’ dance create a theoretical framework that upholds the whiteness of the ‘vanguard’ in art dance.76 Through silencing even outright racism of authors and in works deemed significant to ‘modernism’, scholarship has greatly contributed to the whiteness of contemporary repertories, pedagogies and theoretical apparatus. By comparing, in the last section, the different ‘Africas’ of Eszter Salamon and Nora Chipaumire, I sought to address the need to rethink genealogies of dance: not only what ‘modernisms’ were already present in the forms excluded from dance history a century ago, but how those modernisms are present in the dances of today. Since the 1990s, we have seen the emergence of a truly global dance community with mediatised online classes and new platforms, artistic interventions and outreach programmes in local communities, broadening of horizons for professional dance makers and alignment of academic and artistic work, and the increasing awareness of the

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unsustainability of the neoliberalist art market reliant on the social and economic precarity of these actors. With increasing diversity of dance makers in the contemporary art dance field, it is obvious that the canon of the art form cannot be ‘diversified’ by simply adding new individuals to the existing formation of power. Rather, canons have to be rethought to account for all the different genealogies of this contemporary dance. This requires decolonisation of theory, critical rethinking how the primacy of art dance over dance as a physical and aesthetic practice more generally was first established at the turn of the twentieth century, how ‘modernity’ has functioned in this discourse to guard its whiteness, and how the institutions of the art form can dismantle white privilege. Decolonisation requires concrete changes in what is understood as ‘art dance’: access, redirection of resources, reparations, methods used for analysing dance that do not begin and end in the epistemologies of the North, and histories and pedagogies that reassess who gets cited, promoted, understood as of valence to the future of the practice.

Author Statement regarding Typography I have requested that khon and other non-European names of dance and theatre practices in this text are not placed in italics. This would Other them through typography, as ballet would still have been kept as an unmarked (that is: white) form of dance. Also, I have chosen to use lower-case ‘black’ to resist erasure of the pluralities of black identities and experience beyond the United States.77

Notes   1. See, for example, how Bellow and Andrew omit discussion of movement qualities, choreographic composition or intertextuality in ‘[t]he key event of the dada group’s final soirée on 9 April 1919’, Sophie Taeuber’s Noir Kakadu (literally, Black Cockatoo, a reference to an Australasian bird that practically cries for comparison to all the white (European) swans of ballet, especially given the dancers wore African masks). Juliet Bellow and Nell Andrew, ‘Inventing Abstraction? Modernist Dance in Europe’, in The Modernist World, ed. Stephen Ross and Allana Lindgren (London: Routledge, 2015), 335.   2. See, for example, Cristina F. Rosa, Brazilian Bodies and their Choreographies of Identification: Swing Nation (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015).  3. Rebekah J. Kowal, Gerald Siegmund and Randy Martin, ‘Introduction’, in The Oxford Handbook of Dance and Politics, ed. Rebekah J. Kowal, Gerald Siegmund and Randy Martin (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017), 5. On failures in the white critical gaze, see also Charmian Wells, ‘Strong and Wrong: On Ignorance and Modes of White Spectatorship in Dance Criticism’, Critical Correspondence, 20 June 2017, https://movementresearch. org/publications/critical-correspondence/strong-and-wrong-on-ignorance-and-modes-ofwhite-spectatorship-in-dance-criticism (accessed 20 March 2020); Ananya Chatterjea, Heat and Alterity in Contemporary Dance: South-South Choreographies (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020).  4. For example, Beth Genné, ‘Creating a Canon, Creating the “Classics” in TwentiethCentury British Ballet’, Dance Research 18, no. 2 (2000): 132–62; Pallabi Chakravorty, ‘Dancing into Modernity: Multiple Narratives of India’s Kathak Dance’, Dance Research Journal 38, nos. 1/2 (2006): 115–36.  5. See, for example, Ramsay Burt, Judson Dance Theatre: Performative Traces (London: Routledge, 2006).

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  6. Frédéric Pouillaude, Le désœuvrement choregraphique: Étude sur la notion d’œuvre en danse (Paris: Libraire philosophique J. VRIN, 2009); cf. Bojana Cvejić, Choreographing Problems: Expressive Concepts in European Contemporary Dance and Performance (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), esp. 5–7.  7. Chia Yi Seetoo, ‘The Political Kinesthetics of Contemporary Dance: Taiwan in Transnational Perspective’, PhD dissertation, University of California, Berkeley, 2013, https:// escholarship.org/uc/item/5gg5d9cm (accessed 26 March 2018), esp. 17–18; Chatterjea, Heat and Alterity in Contemporary Dance, 1–23.  8. For example, Katja Praznik, ‘What about “Post Contemporary” Dance?’, Maska 19, nos. 84/85 (2004): 19; Victoria Looseleaf, ‘Modern vs. Contemporary’, Dance Magazine, 1 December 2012, https://www.dancemagazine.com/modern_vs_contemporary-2306900829. html (accessed 12 March 2021); Timmy De Laet, ‘From Contemporary Dance to Contemporaneous Dance: Choreographic Re-enactment and the Experience of Contemporaneity after (Post-)Modernity’, Documenta: tijdschrift voor theater 2 (2016): 64–89; Marten Spångberg, ‘Post-Dance, an Advocacy’, in Post-Dance, ed. Danjel Andersson, Mette Edvardsen and Mårten Spångberg (Stockholm: MDT, 2017), 349–93; Liisa Pentti, Hilde Rustad, Bo Madvig and Olga Sorokina, ‘After and Contemporary: Is There Dance after the Contemporary?’, roundtable discussion at the 13th International NOFOD Conference, Gothenburg, Sweden, 15 June 2017.   9. Stephen Ross and Allana Lindgren, ‘Introduction’, in The Modernist World, ed. Stephen Ross and Allana Lindgren (London: Routledge, 2015), 1–3. 10. Arturo Escobar, Designs for the Pluriverse: Radical Interdependence, Autonomy, and the Making of Worlds (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018), 210–11. Emphasis in original. 11. A divertissement is a dance displaying the virtuosity of the dancer(s) that does not develop the plot or characters of a ballet. Divertissements are ‘dance for the sake of dancing’, short numbers without plot or even much of a subject, which could be moved from one work to another with relative ease or performed as encores or as numbers between other acts in a variety show. Despite later professing a deep dislike of divertissements, Fokine composed many such dance numbers for the Ballets Russes. Divertissements also complicate the formalist justifications for what qualifies as ‘abstract dance’. 12. As Ann Hutchinson Guest and Claudia Jeschke have shown in reconstructing this work from Nijinsky’s 1916–19 notation, the ‘rigid, geometric stylization [. . .] straight lines and angles’ that Bellow and Andrew claim as characteristic of Nijinsky’s 1912 choreography are nowhere in this choreography, though they do characterise versions created by other choreographers after Nijinsky’s work had disappeared from the repertory and acquired the status of a masterpiece by a mad genius. Ann Hutchinson Guest and Claudia Jeschke, Nijinsky’s Faune Restored: A Study of Vaslav Nijinsky’s 1915 Dance Score and his Dance Notation System (Philadelphia: Gordon and Breach, 1991); Bellow and Andrew, ‘Inventing Abstraction?’, 332. In contemporary discourse, Nijinsky’s choreographies were associated with ‘inartistic’ movements of contemporary everyday life, and as such, the opposite to the musical impressionism of Debussy’s prelude to Mallarmé’s poem: Hanna Järvinen, ‘Dancing without Space: On Nijinsky’s L’Après-midi d’un Faune (1912)’, Dance Research 27, no. 1 (2009): 48–52. 13. For a short visual excerpt, see Pichet Klunchun Dance Company, ‘Nijinsky Siam’, promotional documentation, YouTube, 27 March 2012, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t2vgbYpo8Yc (accessed 23 February 2020). 14. Nic Leonhardt, ‘“From the Land of the White Elephant through the Gay Cities of Europe and America”: Re-routing the World Tour of the Boosra Mahin Siamese Theatre Troupe (1900)’, Theatre Research International 402 (2015): 140–55; see also Chatterjea, Heat and Alterity in Contemporary Dance, 57–8.

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15. Nijinsky in Charles Tenroc, ‘De la Peinture à la Danse: Nijinski va faire dans “L’Après-midi d’un Faune” des essais de chorégraphie cubiste’, Comœdia, 18 April 1912, 4; Järvinen, ‘Dancing without Space’. 16. On Picasso’s appropriation see, for example, Sieglinde Lemke, Primitivist Modernism: Black Culture and the Origins of Transatlantic Modernism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 32–41. 17. Leonhardt, ‘“From the Land of the White Elephant”’; see also Yevgeny D. Ostrovenko, ‘Russian-Thai Relations: Historical and Cultural Aspects’, Journal of the Siam Society 92 (2004): 117–28. Like the Boosra Mahin company, the Khmer dances were called ‘ballet’ in contemporary sources, but since this time, ‘Cambodian Royal Ballet’ has become a means to distinguish the reformed, court-approved version of both traditional Khmer dances (robam) and dance dramas (roeung) as a new ‘classical’ tradition of Khmer dancing. See, for example, Trudy Jacobsen, Lost Goddesses: The Denial of Female Power in Cambodian History (Copenhagen: NIAS Press, 2008), 155–60. Much as with other dance forms deemed ‘classical’, the selective process of inclusion and exclusion related to the establishment of a nationalist discourse, in which particular ideologies and ideals about the dancing bodies are retrospectively deemed more valuable than others. These ‘classical’ forms are fundamental to the canon even as they are often represented as antithetical to both modernity and modernism. See, for example, Chakravorty, ‘Dancing into Modernity’. 18. ‘Основные мотивы нѣкоторыхъ танцевъ [. . .] оригинальные по хореграфическому замыслу и красивые по внѣшней формѣ, по замысловатому рисунку и комбинацiямъ, могли бы войти, въ качествѣ новыхъ элементовъ, въ нашу европейскую хореграфiю въ соотвѣтственной обработкѣ, примѣненной къ требованiямъ нашего искусства. Опытный балетмейстеръ, конечно, могъ бы извлечь изъ нпхъ нѣкоторую пользу, какъ опытный композиторъ, на темахъ сiамской нацiональной музыки, непривычной для нашего слуха, могъ бы построить нѣсколько мелодiй, облачивъ ихъ въ музыкальныя формы, воспринимаемыя европейскимъ ухомъ.’ N. [Valerian] Svetlov, ‘Siamskii balet’, in Ezhegodnik Imperatorskikh Teatrov, sezon 1900–1901 g. (Yearbook of the Imperial Theatres, season of 1900–1901), ed. L. A. Gelmersen (St Petersburg: Izdanie Direktsii Imperatorskikh Teatrov, 1901), 298. Unless otherwise stated, all translations are my own. Svetlov was the pseudonym of Valerian Iakovlevich Ivchenko. 19. ‘Decline’, like ‘degeneration’, rests on an organic view of history where individuals, aesthetic styles and entire cultures rise, develop and fall like plants. 20. For this canonisation and its repercussions, see Hanna Järvinen, ‘Ballets Russes and Blackface’, Dance Research Journal 52, no. 3 (2020): 76–96. 21. Michel Fokine, Memoirs of a Ballet Master, trans. Vitale Fokine, ed. Anatole Chujoy (Boston and Toronto: Little, Brown and Co., 1961), 56–9. In this, Fokine was no different from Shawn; see Ted Shawn, Gods Who Dance (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1929), esp. xi. See Nicoletta Misler, ‘Ex Oriente Lux: Siamese Dancing and the Ballets Russes’, Annali dell’Università degli studi di Napoli ‘L’Orientale’ (Rivista del Dipartimento di Studi Asiatici e del Dipartimento di Studi e Ricerche su Africa e Paesi Arabi) 46, no. 2 (1988): 197–219, esp. 210–12. 22. The painter Jacques-Émile Blanche later used several of these photographs for his paintings of the dancer in 1910–13: Jean-Michel Pourvoyeur, ‘Images de Nijinsky en 1910 dans la Danse Siamoise des “Orientales”’, in Écrits sur Nijinsky, ed. Françoise Stanciu-Reiss and Jean-Michel Pourvoyeur (Paris: Chiron, 1992), 31–55. 23. Jane Desmond, ‘Dancing out the Difference: Cultural Imperialism and Ruth St. Denis’s “Radha” of 1906’, Signs 17, no. 1 (1991): 28–49. 24. Steele MacKaye and his pupil Genevieve Stebbins were American advocates of this method. Carrie Preston, Modernism’s Mythic Pose: Gender, Genre and Solo Performance (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 81 notes that the impulse to represent ‘dances of Eastern and/or “primitive” cultures, with varying degree of cultural naïveté and racism’ was

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already present in Delsartism. Also see Shannon L. Walsh, Eugenics and Physical Culture Performance in the Progressive Era: Watch Whiteness Workout (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020). 25. ‘Nautch’, as Chakravorty has pointed out (‘Dancing into Modernity’, 116–17), is a corruption of the Bengali word naach, meaning ‘dance’. In turn-of-the-century European discourses, any Indian women dancing could be characterised as ‘nautch dancers’ or ‘temple dancers’, usually with strong assumption that they were, in fact, prostitutes out to seduce. Although it is difficult to gauge how exactly influences between different practices may have travelled in the transcontinental variety circuit, travel they most certainly did. Priya Srinivasan has extrapolated the numerous problems with finding or interpreting documentation of nonEuropean dances in archives that privilege white authorship, as well as the consistent legal, economic and aesthetic erasure of dancers who performed these forms; see Priya Srinivasan, Sweating Saris: Indian Dance as Transnational Labor (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2011). For the complexities in archival encounters with ‘nautch’ dance, see also Prarthana Purkayastha, ‘Outing Pleasure and Indulgence: Indubala’s Scrapbook and the Red-Light Dances of Calcutta’, Contemporary Theatre Review 31, nos. 1/2 (2021): 14–33. 26. Caroline Caffin and Charles H. Caffin, Dancing and Dancers of Today: The Modern Revival of Dancing as an Art (New York: Dodd, Mead and Company, 1912), 86–7. Cf. Srinivasan, Sweating Saris, 67–102, on St. Denis and Indian dancers. 27. Georges Talmont, ‘L’art musical russe en France: Une saison d’Opéra russe au théâtre du Châtelet 18 Mai–15 Juin’, Comœdia, 21 April 1909, 1; ‘La Masque de Verre’, ‘Échos’, Comœdia, 21 April 1909, 1. 28. ‘C’est même à se demander si toutes nos modes ne gagneraient pas à nous revenir retouchées par les petites mains de là-bas’ (‘La Masque de Verre’, ‘Échos’). ‘Little hands’ exemplifies the subtle infantilisation of colonised peoples in white discourses that, in turn, justified the ‘need’ for colonialism by the ‘adult hands’ of Europeans. It is also a gendering of the Other as smaller, feminine, and reliant on old-fashioned manual dexterity rather than the large, masculine, industrialised European powers doing the dominating. 29. On plurality of white races, see Richard Dyer, White (London: Routledge, 1997), esp. 11–13; Nell Irvin Painter, The History of White People (New York: W. W. Norton, 2010), esp. 220–7, on racism as a particular concern within whiteness. 30. ‘Entre eux et nous il y a la distance d’une race à une autre. [. . .] S’il leur est impossible de communiquer avec nous, lorsqu’ils sont entre eux, ils ont une extraordinaire faculté de mêler leurs âmes, de sentir et de penser la même chose à plusieurs. Leur race est trop jeune encore pour que se soient construites en chaque être ces milles petites différences, ces délicates réserves personnelles, ces légères mais infranchissables défenses qui abritent le seuil d’un esprit cultivé.’ J[acques]. R[ivière]., ‘Le Sacre du Printemps’, La Nouvelle Revue française, August 1913, 309–13. 31. Jacques Rivière, ‘Le Sacre du Printemps’, La Nouvelle Revue française, November 1913, 706–30. 32. Anatoly Lunacharsky, ‘Russkie spektakli v Parizhe’, Teatr i iskusstvo 9 ([22] June 1913): 486–8. 33. ‘Одинъ изъ нашихъ критиковъ, изъ дружественно расположенныхъ, охарактеризовалъ именемъ “иконописнаго кубизма” ту архаическую угловатость движеній, которая развертывается передъ нами подъ звуки славянскаго Пана.’ Kniaz Sergei Volkonsky, ‘Russkii balet v Parizhe’, Apollon 6 (1913): 70–4. 34. Susan Leigh Foster, Choreographing Empathy: Kinesthesia in Performance (New York: Routledge, 2011), 197–207. 35. For a visual example, see ImPulsTanz, ‘Ola Maciejewska (FR/NL/PL) Bombyx Mori’, promotional video excerpt on YouTube, uploaded 15 June 2017, https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=g2z76oCtoxo (accessed 22 March 2021).

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36. ‘le vertige d’une âme comme mise à l’air par un artifice’; ‘la traditionnelle plantation de décors permanents ou stables en opposition avec la mobilité chorégraphique’. Stéphane Mallarmé, Divagations ([Paris]: Eugène Fasquelle, 1897), 179–82. Wikisource: https:// fr.wikisource.org/wiki/Divagations_(1897) (accessed 12 March 2021). As Julie Townsend suggests, Mallarmé’s essay on Fuller should be read as a continuation of his earlier essay on ballet, where Mallarmé characterised the dancer as a metaphor, whose corporeal writing suggests something a writer would require paragraphs to describe in words. Julie Townsend, ‘Synaesthetics: Symbolism, Dance, and the Failure of Metaphor’, The Yale Journal of Criticism 18, no. 1 (2005): 131–4; Mallarmé, Divagations, 171–8. 37. For publicity photographs, see Mrs. M. Griffith, ‘Loïe Fuller: The Inventor of the Serpentine Dance’, The Strand Magazine 7 (January–June 1894), https://www.victorianvoices. net/ARTICLES/STRAND/1894A/S1894A-LoieFuller.pdf (accessed 24 March 2020). In Loïe Fuller, Quinze ans de ma vie (Paris: Librairie Féliz Juven, 1908), 29, Fuller refers to numbering her lighting cues, not numbering her dances. 38. J. E. Crawford Flitch, Modern Dancing and Dancers (Philadelphia and London: J. B. Lippincott Co. and Grant Richards Ltd, 1912), 85; similarly, e.g., Mallarmé, Divagations, 179–82. 39. For example, the Blue Bird pas de deux from The Sleeping Beauty (1890) appeared in the repertory of the Ballets Russes as L’Oiseau de Feu (1909), L’Oiseau d’Or (1911), L’Oiseau et le Prince (1912) and La Princesse Enchantée (1916). As a staple in the wedding scene of the third act, the divertissement was also included in the two short versions of The Sleeping Beauty the company performed in 1921–22. 40. Flitch, Modern Dancing and Dancers, 85. Dance fascinated early cinematographers – La Carmencita (Carmen Dauset Moreno) performed in a commercially distributed film as early as 1894 (see Carmencita), and Max Skladanowsky (1895), Thomas Edison ­(1895) and Louis Lumière (1897) all experimented with filming ‘Serpentine Dancers’ (see, for example, Crissie Sheridan): Carmencita, film by William Heise, produced by W. K.-L. Dickson, United States: Edison Manufacturing Co. [1894], The Library of Congress, https://www.loc.gov/item/00694116/ (accessed 14 May 2019); Crissie Sheridan, film by William Heise, United States: Edison Manufacturing Co., 1897, The Library of Congress, https://www.loc.gov/item/96514903/ (accessed 14 May 2019). However, claims about Fuller inspiring an entirely new way of seeing movement are somewhat exaggerated. After working with shadow plays and developing quite a different kind of aesthetic of light, Fuller herself created one film in this, later, aesthetic (La lys de la vie, 1920). See Ann Cooper Albright, Traces of Light: Absence and Presence in the Work of Loïe Fuller (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2007), esp. 188–9, 196–7; Clare Parfitt, ‘“Like a Butterfly under Glass”: The Cancan, Loïe Fuller and Cinema’, International Journal of Performance Arts and Digital Media 5, nos. 2/3 (2009): 107–20. 41. See, for example, Giovanni Lista, Loïe Fuller: danseuse de la belle époque, 2nd edn (Paris: Hermann Danse, 2006 [1994]), 87–94; Albright, Traces of Light, 27–8; Anthea Kraut, Choreographing Copyright: Race, Gender, and Intellectual Property Rights in American Dance (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016), 43–81. 42. Sarah Gutsche-Miller, Parisian Music-Hall Ballet, 1871–1913 (Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2015), 302, n. 20. 43. Cancan was not what twentieth-century cinema has made it to be, and what contemporary materials reference is frequently misunderstood for this reason; see Clare Parfitt, ‘Capturing the Cancan: Body Politics from the Enlightenment to Postmodernity’, PhD dissertation, University of Roehampton, 2008. Lista (Loïe Fuller, 61) misrepresents skirt dancing as some kind of combination of flamenco and cancan, and makes very problematic claims about skirt dancing ‘degenerating’ by 1890.

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44. Fuller, Quinze ans de ma vie, 24: ‘une jupe de soie blanche très légère, d’une forme particulière, et quelques pièces de soie arachnéennes’. Similarly, see Griffith, ‘Loïe Fuller’, 542; Roger Marx, La Loïe Fuller: Estampes modelées de Pierre Roche, self-published artist book, printed in Evreux, 1904, 9. Cf. Kraut, Choreographing Copyright, 56–63; Kraut notes not only Fuller’s debt to skirt dancing, but that she may well have seen Indian dancers in World’s Fairs, and had certainly performed a ‘nautch dance’ in a play in 1887. 45. See Lista, Loïe Fuller, 90–1, 148, 217, 219, 265, 285–7, 382, 414, 455, for images by the same Eugène Druet who photographed Nijinsky’s ‘Siamese’ dancing. Lista fails to address all the critical problems with these representations, resulting in a confused mess where every representation with any semblance to Fuller appears as originating solely from her regardless of chronology. 46. ‘Loin de se restreindre au formulaire étroit de la danse moderne, sa variété n’a d’autres limites que celles-mêmes de la réalité et de la vie dont il dérive; toute latitude est laissée d’évoluer selon l’instinct, à la seule condition d’observer les lois de la cadence; libre au choreute d’utiliser le geste familier, à la ballerine de ponctuer la grâce des pas et des voltes par le rythme de son vêtement éployé – voile, tunique ou manteau semble s’être réincarnée l’âme antique; mais, glorieuse d’avoir retrouvé, par une intuition géniale, le secret du passé, elle veut ajouter à sa découverte, la rénover au moyen d’acquisitions personnelles; elle entend colorer cette statuaire animée dont ses danses suggèrent à tout instant l’illusion.’ Marx, La Loïe Fuller, 7. 47. ‘le goût français attestait sa lassitude pour les libertés de la chorégraphie fin de siècle et pour l’exotisme des girations musulmanes, invariables comme les mélopées qui se provoquent’ (Marx, La Loïe Fuller, 10). 48. Ancient and modern Greeks were separated in pseudoscientific racism, the characteristics of the former associated with whatever contemporary nation-state sought to represent itself as ‘white’ whilst the latter were fundamentally Turkish and Oriental. See Athena S. Leoussi, Nationalism and Classicism: The Classical Body as National Symbol in Nineteenth-Century England and France (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1998), 5–24, 59–60, 108–30, on resemblance to ancient Greeks in national/racial self-identification, and Greek athleticism as a politics of race in education. On Graeco-Roman idealised beauty as whiteness, see, for example, Painter, The History of White People, 59–71; Walsh, Eugenics and Physical Culture Performance, esp. 48. 49. Hanna Järvinen, ‘“Dancing Back to Arcady”: On Representations of Early TwentiethCentury Modern Dance’, in Dance Spaces: Practices of Movement, ed. Susanne Ravn and Leena Rouhiainen (Odense: University of Southern Denmark Press, 2012), 57–77; Walsh, Eugenics and Physical Culture Performance. 50. Ann Daly, Done into Dance: Isadora Duncan in America (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1995), 88–90, 112. 51. On mass culture as the opposite of modernism, see Andreas Huyssen, After the Great Divide (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986), esp. 47–58; on racialisation of social dances, moral purity debates related to the origin of tango and ragtime, and cultivation of the right kind of ‘natural’ bodies, see Theresa Jill Buckland, ‘From the Artificial to the Natural Body: Social Dancing in Britain, 1900–1914’, in Dancing Naturally: Nature, Neo-Classicism and Modernity in Early Twentieth-Century Dance, ed. Alexandra Carter and Rachel Fensham (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 58–72. Early-twentiethcentury books (for example, Caffin and Caffin, Dancing and Dancers of Today, 255–79) mention many black dances but credit only white performers as stars. They also describe ‘low’ dance forms with the same terms used for the ‘ills’ of urban life (see, for example, Flitch, Modern Dancing and Dancers, 98–9, on the Tiller Girls; cf. 103–4 on movement in cities).

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52. As Valerie Steele has shown, much of the anti-corset rhetoric was a conservative reaction to women’s rights movements; Steele, The Corset: A Cultural History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001), 59–85, 137–41. Suffragettes, in contrast, tended to advocate the latest fashions. See, for example, Wendy Parkins, ‘Taking Liberty’s, Breaking Windows: Fashion, Protest and the Suffragette Public’, Continuum 11, no. 3 (1997): 37–46; see also Julie Malnig, ‘Athena Meets Venus: Visions of Women in Social Dance in the Teens and Early 1920s’, Dance Research Journal 31, no. 2 (1999): 34–62, on how the appropriate kind of social dancing was represented in the popular press as a route to domestic stability. 53. Duncan complained of the pressures of dieting, though did not include any of the positively nasty reviews that criticised her appearance more than her dancing. See Isadora Duncan, My Life (London: Victor Gollancz, 1996 [1928]), 50. 54. Unlike how Toepfer represents them, these images are not documentations of live performances; Karl Toepfer, Empires of Ecstasy: Nudity and Movement in German Body Culture, 1910–1935 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997). See Rosemary Barrow, ‘Toga Plays and Tableaux Vivants: Theatre and Painting on London’s LateVictorian and Edwardian Popular Stage’, Theatre Journal 62, no. 2 (2010): 209–26; Sarah Woodcock, ‘Wardrobe’, in Diaghilev and the Golden Age of the Ballets Russes, 1909–1929, ed. Jane Pritchard (London: Victoria and Albert Museum, 2010), 129–63, esp. 143; Hanna Järvinen, Dancing Genius: The Stardom of Vaslav Nijinsky (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), esp. 127; Lela F. Kerley, Uncovering Paris: Scandals and Nude Spectacle in the Belle Époque (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2017), esp. 78–100, 140–51, 161–71. At the time, photography was a key technology for defining degeneration, criminality and racial characteristics, and as such, its representational practices were not ‘neutral’. See, for example, David Green, ‘Veins of Resemblance: Photography and Eugenics’, Oxford Art Journal 7, no. 2 (1984): 3–16; Devon Stillwell, ‘Eugenics Visualized: The Exhibit of the Third International Congress of Eugenics, 1932’, Bulletin of the History of Medicine 86, no. 2 (2012): 228–34. 55. Samuel N. Dorf, ‘Dancing Greek Antiquity in Private and Public: Isadora Duncan’s Early Patronage in Paris’, Dance Research Journal 44, no. 1 (2012): 3–27. 56. On tableaux vivants, see Barrow, ‘Toga Plays and Tableaux Vivants’, 219–26; on ballet and opera, see Sarah Gutsche-Miller, ‘Madame Mariquita, Greek Dance, and French Ballet Modernism’, Dance Research Journal 53, no. 3 (2021): 46–68; on sport, class and race, see Henning Eichberg, ‘Forward Race and the Laughter of Pygmies: On Olympic Sport’, in Fin de Siècle and its Legacy, ed. Mikulaš Teich and Roy Porter (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 115–31; Georges Vigarello and Richard Holt, ‘Le corps travaillé: Gymnastes et sportifs au XIXe siècle’, in Histoire du Corps, vol. 2: De la Révolution à la Grande Guerre, ed. Alain Corbin, Jean-Jacques Courtine and Georges Vigarello (Paris: Éditions Seuil, 2005), 313–77. 57. See, for example, Richard deCordova, Picture Personalities: The Emergence of the Star System in America (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2001 [1990]); Lenard R. Berlanstein, Daughters of Eve: A Cultural History of French Theater Women from the Old Regime to the Fin de Siècle (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001), 225–36, on celebrity culture. 58. See, for example, Duncan quoted in Flitch, Modern Dancing and Dancers, 106–8. For the racist connotations of the idea of smart minds in handsome bodies, see, for example, Painter, The History of White People, esp. 169–74. 59. The furniture workshop of Karl Schmidt at Hellerau, near Dresden, hosted Dalcroze from 1910 onwards. Soon, Dalcroze’s friendship with Adolphe Appia attracted theatre aficionados to Hellerau’s festival theatre from all over Europe. Although the beginning of the First World War led to the school’s closing, Dalcroze continued his work in Switzerland and the Hellerau school was reopened near Vienna in 1920. In the 1930s, some of the

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60.

61. 62. 63. 64. 65.

66. 67.

68. 69. 70. 71. 72. 73.

74.

hanna järvinen key figures of Ausdruckstanz, notably Rudolf von Laban, aligned themselves with Hitler’s regime, whereas others, like Kurt Jooss, chose exile. See, for example, Patricia Vertinsky, ‘From Dance under the Swastika to Movement Education: A Study of Embodied Culture’, in Performative Body Spaces: Corporeal Topographies in Literature, Theatre, Dance, and the Visual Arts, ed. Markus Hallensleben (Amsterdam: Brill/Rodopi, 2010), 43–55; Marion Kant, ‘German Gymnastics, Modern German Dance, and Nazi Aesthetics’, Dance Research Journal 48, no. 2 (2016): 4–25; Ana Isabel Keilson, ‘The Embodied Conservatism of Rudolf Laban, 1919–1926’, Dance Research Journal 51, no. 2 (2019): 18–34. Here, I draw a parallel with Ewell, who has shown the racist underpinnings of the hegemonic Schenkerian music theory in the United States; see Philip A. Ewell, ‘Music Theory and the White Racial Frame’, Music Theory Online 2, no. 2 (2020), https://mtosmt.org/ issues/mto.20.26.2/mto.20.26.2.ewell.html (accessed 22 February 2021). See, for example, Genné, ‘Creating a Canon’; Srinivasan, Sweating Saris, 103–15. Miguel Gutierrez, ‘Does Abstraction Belong to White People?’, BOMB, 7 November 2018, https://bombmagazine.org/articles/miguel-gutierrez-1/ (accessed 13 May 2020). John Martin, The Modern Dance (Princeton: Dance Horizons, 1989 [1933]), 6. On these critics, see, for example, Gay Morris, ‘Modernism’s Role in the Theory of John Martin and Edwin Denby’, Dance Research 22, no. 2 (2004): 168–84. Joseph Roach, ‘Kinesis: The New Mimesis’, Theater 40, no. 1 (2010): 2; Seetoo, ‘The Political Kinesthetics of Contemporary Dance’, 28, 44. For how this conditions a contemporary reality television dance show, see Melissa Blanco Borelli et al., ‘“I’ve danced my whole life, but none of that is useful at all”: Netflix’s We Speak Dance (2018), Vulnerability and Collaborative Critiques’, ‘The Popular as the Political’, special issue of Conversations across the Field of Dance Studies 38 (2018), https://journals.publishing. umich.edu/conversations/issue/60/info/ (accessed 21 October 2022). Joann Kealiinohomoku, ‘An Anthropologist Looks at Ballet as a Form of Ethnic Dance’, in Moving History/Dancing Cultures: A Dance History Reader, ed. Ann Dils and Ann Cooper Albright (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2001 [1970]), 33–43. For a trailer, see Trafó House, ‘Salamon Eszter (HU/D): / Monument 0: Haunted by wars (1913–2013)’, YouTube trailer, uploaded 2 November 2015, https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=H7oF4bBR_Ww (accessed 22 March 2021). For descriptions of the other parts of the series, see Eszter Salamon, artist’s website, list of works, https://esztersalamon.net/ Works (accessed 22 March 2021). Brenda Dixon Gottschild, The Black Dancing Body: A Geography from Coon to Cool (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003). Stuart Hall, ‘The Spectacle of the Other’, in Representation: Cultural Representations and Signifying Practices, ed. Stuart Hall (London: Sage Publications, Open University, 1997), esp. 262–4. Sara Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006), esp. 111–12. Ayoko Mensah, ‘Corps noirs, regards blancs: retour sur la danse africaine contemporaine’, Africultures 62 (2005): 164–71; Nadine Siegert, ‘Contemporary Dance from Africa as Creative Opposition to Stereotypical Images of Africanity’, Buala, 16 May 2010. For a teaser trailer, see Nora Chipaumire, ‘#punk’, Vimeo trailer, uploaded 28 February 2018, https://vimeo.com/257893128 (accessed 22 March 2021). See, for example, Tia DeNora, Beethoven and the Construction of Genius: Musical Politics in Vienna 1792–1803 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 4–8, 186–91; on dance, see Sherril Dodds, Dancing on the Canon: Embodiments of Value in Popular Dance (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), esp. 18–21. See, for example, Anurima Banerji and Royona Mitra, eds, ‘Decolonizing Dance Discourses’, special issue of Conversations across the Field of Dance Studies 40 (2020),

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https://journals.publishing.umich.edu/conversations/issue/72/info/ (accessed 21 October 2022); Chatterjea, Heat and Alterity in Contemporary Dance. 75. ‘La Masque de Verre’, ‘Échos’. 76. Chatterjea, Heat and Alterity in Contemporary Dance; Arabella Stanger, Dancing on Violent Ground: Utopia as Dispossession in Euro-American Theater Dance (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2021). 77. See Juliette Harris, ‘Should “black” be capitalized?’, Poynter, 8 July 2021, https://www. poynter.org/reporting-editing/2021/should-black-be-capitalized/ (accessed 11 April 2021).

Works Cited Ahmed, Sara. Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006. Albright, Ann Cooper. Traces of Light: Absence and Presence in the Work of Loïe Fuller. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2007. Banerji, Anurima and Royona Mitra, eds. ‘Decolonizing Dance Discourses’, special issue of Conversations across the Field of Dance Studies 40 (2020). https://journals.publishing. umich.edu/conversations/issue/72/info/ (accessed 21 October 2022). Barrow, Rosemary. ‘Toga Plays and Tableaux Vivants: Theatre and Painting on London’s LateVictorian and Edwardian Popular Stage’. Theatre Journal 62, no. 2 (2010): 209–26. Bellow, Juliet and Nell Andrew. ‘Inventing Abstraction? Modernist Dance in Europe’. In The Modernist World, edited by Stephen Ross and Allana Lindgren, 329–37. London: Routledge, 2015. Berlanstein, Lenard R. Daughters of Eve: A Cultural History of French Theater Women from the Old Regime to the Fin de Siècle. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001. Blanco Borelli, Melissa, Elena Benthaus, Claudia Brazzale, Royona Mitra, Cristina Rosa, Hanna Järvinen, Celena Monteiro, Heather Rastovac-Akbarzadeh and Meiver De la Cruz. ‘“I’ve danced my whole life, but none of that is useful at all”: Netflix’s We Speak Dance (2018), Vulnerability and Collaborative Critiques’. ‘The Popular as the Political’, special issue of Conversations across the Field of Dance Studies 38 (2018). https://journals.publishing.umich.edu/conversations/issue/60/info/ (accessed 21 October 2022). Brévannes, Raoul. ‘Le Gala russe’. Le Figaro, 19 May 1909, 4. Buckland, Theresa Jill. ‘From the Artificial to the Natural Body: Social Dancing in Britain, 1900–1914’. In Dancing Naturally: Nature, Neo-Classicism and Modernity in Early Twentieth-Century Dance, edited by Alexandra Carter and Rachel Fensham, 58–72. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. Burt, Ramsay. Judson Dance Theatre: Performative Traces. London: Routledge, 2006. Caffin, Caroline and Charles H. Caffin. Dancing and Dancers of Today: The Modern Revival of Dancing as an Art. New York: Dodd, Mead and Company, 1912. Carmencita. Film by William Heise, produced by W. K.-L. Dickson. United States: Edison Manufacturing Co. [1894]. The Library of Congress, https://www.loc.gov/item/00694116/ (accessed 14 May 2019). Chakravorty, Pallabi. ‘Dancing into Modernity: Multiple Narratives of India’s Kathak Dance’. Dance Research Journal 38, nos. 1/2 (2006): 115–36. Chatterjea, Ananya. Heat and Alterity in Contemporary Dance: South-South Choreographies. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020. Chipaumire, Nora. ‘#punk’. Vimeo trailer, uploaded 28 February 2018. https://vimeo.com/ 257893128 (accessed 22 March 2021). Crissie Sheridan. Film by William Heise. United States: Edison Manufacturing Co., 1897. The Library of Congress, https://www.loc.gov/item/96514903/ (accessed 14 May 2019).

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Cvejić, Bojana. Choreographing Problems: Expressive Concepts in European Contemporary Dance and Performance. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015. Daly, Ann. Done into Dance: Isadora Duncan in America. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1995. De Laet, Timmy. ‘From Contemporary Dance to Contemporaneous Dance: Choreographic Reenactment and the Experience of Contemporaneity after (Post-)Modernity’. Documenta: tijdschrift voor theater 2 (2016): 64–89. DeCordova, Richard. Picture Personalities: The Emergence of the Star System in America. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2001 [1990]. DeNora, Tia. Beethoven and the Construction of Genius: Musical Politics in Vienna 1792–1803. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995. Desmond, Jane. ‘Dancing out the Difference: Cultural Imperialism and Ruth St. Denis’s “Radha” of 1906’. Signs 17, no. 1 (1991): 28–49. Dodds, Sherril. Dancing on the Canon: Embodiments of Value in Popular Dance. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. Dorf, Samuel N. ‘Dancing Greek Antiquity in Private and Public: Isadora Duncan’s Early Patronage in Paris’. Dance Research Journal 44, no. 1 (2012): 3–27. Duncan, Isadora. My Life. London: Victor Gollancz, 1996 [1928]. Dyer, Richard. White. London: Routledge, 1997. Eichberg, Henning. ‘Forward Race and the Laughter of Pygmies: On Olympic Sport’. In Fin de Siècle and its Legacy, edited by Mikulaš Teich and Roy Porter, 115–31. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990. Escobar, Arturo. Designs for the Pluriverse: Radical Interdependence, Autonomy, and the Making of Worlds. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018. Ewell, Philip A. ‘Music Theory and the White Racial Frame’. Music Theory Online 2, no. 2 (2020). https://mtosmt.org/issues/mto.20.26.2/mto.20.26.2.ewell.html (accessed 22 February 2021). Fensham, Rachel. ‘Nature, Force and Variation’. In Dancing Naturally: Nature, Neo-Classicism and Modernity in Early Twentieth-Century Dance, edited by Alexandra Carter and Rachel Fensham, 1–15. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. Flitch, J. E. Crawford. Modern Dancing and Dancers. Philadelphia and London: J. B. Lippincott Co. and Grant Richards Ltd, 1912. Fokine, Michel. Memoirs of a Ballet Master. Translated by Vitale Fokine. Edited by Anatole Chujoy. Boston and Toronto: Little, Brown and Co., 1961. Foster, Susan Leigh. Choreographing Empathy: Kinesthesia in Performance. New York: Routledge, 2011. Franko, Mark. The Work of Dance: Labor, Movement and Identity in the 1930s. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2002. Fuller, Loïe. Quinze ans de ma vie. Paris: Librairie Féliz Juven, 1908. Genné, Beth. ‘Creating a Canon, Creating the “Classics” in Twentieth-Century British Ballet’. Dance Research 18, no. 2 (2000): 132–62. Gottschild, Brenda Dixon. The Black Dancing Body: A Geography from Coon to Cool. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003. Green, David. ‘Veins of Resemblance: Photography and Eugenics’. Oxford Art Journal 7, no. 2 (1984): 3–16. Griffith, Mrs. M. ‘Loïe Fuller: The Inventor of the Serpentine Dance’. The Strand Magazine 7 (January–June 1894). https://www.victorianvoices.net/ARTICLES/STRAND/1894A/ S1894A-LoieFuller.pdf (accessed 24 March 2020). Guest, Ann Hutchinson and Claudia Jeschke. Nijinsky’s Faune Restored: A Study of Vaslav Nijinsky’s 1915 Dance Score and his Dance Notation System. Philadelphia: Gordon and Breach, 1991.

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Gutierrez, Miguel. ‘Does Abstraction Belong to White People?’ BOMB, 7 November 2018. https://bombmagazine.org/articles/miguel-gutierrez-1/ (accessed 13 May 2020). Gutsche-Miller, Sarah. ‘Madame Mariquita, Greek Dance, and French Ballet Modernism’. Dance Research Journal 53, no. 3 (2021): 46–68. Gutsche-Miller, Sarah. Parisian Music-Hall Ballet, 1871–1913. Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2015. Hall, Stuart. ‘The Spectacle of the Other’. In Representation: Cultural Representations and Signifying Practices, edited by Stuart Hall, 223–79. London: Sage Publications, Open University, 1997. Harris, Juliette. ‘Should “black” be capitalized?’ Poynter, 8 July 2021. https://www.poynter.org/ reporting-editing/2021/should-black-be-capitalized/ (accessed 11 April 2021). Huyssen, Andreas. After the Great Divide. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986. ImPulsTanz. ‘Ola Maciejewska (FR/NL/PL) Bombyx Mori’. Promotional video excerpt on YouTube, uploaded 15 June 2017. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g2z76oCtoxo (accessed 22 March 2021). Jacobsen, Trudy. Lost Goddesses: The Denial of Female Power in Cambodian History. Copenhagen: NIAS Press, 2008. Järvinen, Hanna. ‘Ballets Russes and Blackface’. Dance Research Journal 52, no. 3 (2020): 76–96. Järvinen, Hanna. ‘“Dancing Back to Arcady”: On Representations of Early Twentieth-Century Modern Dance’. In Dance Spaces: Practices of Movement, edited by Susanne Ravn and Leena Rouhiainen, 57–77. Odense: University of Southern Denmark Press, 2012. Järvinen, Hanna. Dancing Genius: The Stardom of Vaslav Nijinsky. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. Järvinen, Hanna. ‘Dancing without Space: On Nijinsky’s L’Après-midi d’un Faune (1912)’. Dance Research 27, no. 1 (2009): 28–64. Kant, Marion. ‘German Gymnastics, Modern German Dance, and Nazi Aesthetics’. Dance Research Journal 48, no. 2 (2016): 4–25. Kealiinohomoku, Joann. ‘An Anthropologist Looks at Ballet as a Form of Ethnic Dance’. In Moving History/Dancing Cultures: A Dance History Reader, edited by Ann Dils and Ann Cooper Albright, 33–43. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2001 [1970]. Keilson, Ana Isabel. ‘The Embodied Conservatism of Rudolf Laban, 1919–1926’. Dance Research Journal 51, no. 2 (2019): 18–34. Kerley, Lela F. Uncovering Paris: Scandals and Nude Spectacle in the Belle Époque. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2017. Kowal, Rebekah J., Gerald Siegmund and Randy Martin. ‘Introduction’. In The Oxford Handbook of Dance and Politics, edited by Rebekah J. Kowal, Gerald Siegmund and Randy Martin, 1–24. New York: Oxford University Press, 2017. Kraut, Anthea. Choreographing Copyright: Race, Gender, and Intellectual Property Rights in American Dance. New York: Oxford University Press, 2016. Lemke, Sieglinde. Primitivist Modernism: Black Culture and the Origins of Transatlantic Modernism. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998. Leonhardt, Nic. ‘“From the Land of the White Elephant through the Gay Cities of Europe and America”: Re-routing the World Tour of the Boosra Mahin Siamese Theatre Troupe (1900)’. Theatre Research International 402 (2015): 140–55. Leoussi, Athena S. Nationalism and Classicism: The Classical Body as National Symbol in Nineteenth-Century England and France. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1998. Lista, Giovanni. Loïe Fuller: danseuse de la belle époque. 2nd edn. Paris: Hermann Danse, 2006 [1994]. Looseleaf, Victoria. ‘Modern vs. Contemporary’. Dance Magazine, 1 December 2012. https://www. dancemagazine.com/modern_vs_contemporary-2306900829.html (accessed 12 March 2021).

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Lunacharsky, Anatoly. ‘Russkie spektakli v Parizhe’. Teatr i iskusstvo 9 ([22] June 1913): 486–8. Mallarmé, Stéphane. Divagations. [Paris]: Eugène Fasquelle, 1897. Wikisource: https:// fr.wikisource.org/wiki/Divagations_(1897) (accessed 12 March 2021). Malnig, Julie. ‘Athena Meets Venus: Visions of Women in Social Dance in the Teens and Early 1920s’. Dance Research Journal 31, no. 2 (1999): 34–62. Martin, John. The Modern Dance. Princeton: Dance Horizons, 1989 [1933]. Marx, Roger. La Loïe Fuller: Estampes modelées de Pierre Roche. Self-published artist book, printed in Evreux, 1904. ‘La Masque de Verre’. ‘Échos’. Comœdia, 21 April 1909, 1. Mensah, Ayoko. ‘Corps noirs, regards blancs: retour sur la danse africaine contemporaine’. Africultures 62 (2005): 164–71. Misler, Nicoletta. ‘Ex Oriente Lux: Siamese Dancing and the Ballets Russes’. Annali dell’Università degli studi di Napoli ‘L’Orientale’ (Rivista del Dipartimento di Studi Asiatici e del Dipartimento di Studi e Ricerche su Africa e Paesi Arabi) 46, no. 2 (1988): 197–219. Morris, Gay. ‘Modernism’s Role in the Theory of John Martin and Edwin Denby’. Dance Research 22, no. 2 (2004): 168–84. Ostrovenko, Yevgeny D. ‘Russian-Thai Relations: Historical and Cultural Aspects’. Journal of the Siam Society 92 (2004): 117–28. Painter, Nell Irvin. The History of White People. New York: W. W. Norton, 2010. Parfitt, Clare. ‘Capturing the Cancan: Body Politics from the Enlightenment to Postmodernity’. PhD dissertation, University of Roehampton, 2008. Parfitt, Clare. ‘“Like a Butterfly under Glass”: The Cancan, Loïe Fuller and Cinema’. International Journal of Performance Arts and Digital Media 5, nos. 2/3 (2009): 107–20. Parkins, Wendy. ‘Taking Liberty’s, Breaking Windows: Fashion, Protest and the Suffragette Public’. Continuum 11, no. 3 (1997): 37–46. Pentti, Liisa, Hilde Rustad, Bo Madvig and Olga Sorokina. ‘After and Contemporary: Is There Dance after the Contemporary?’ Roundtable discussion at the 13th International NOFOD Conference, Gothenburg, Sweden, 15 June 2017. Pichet Klunchun Dance Company. ‘Nijinsky Siam’. Promotional documentation, YouTube, 27 March 2012. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t2vgbYpo8Yc (accessed 23 February 2020). Pouillaude, Frédéric. Le désœuvrement choregraphique: Étude sur la notion d’œuvre en danse. Paris: Libraire philosophique J. VRIN, 2009. Pourvoyeur, Jean-Michel. ‘Images de Nijinsky en 1910 dans la Danse Siamoise des “Orientales”’. In Écrits sur Nijinsky, edited by Françoise Stanciu-Reiss and Jean-Michel Pourvoyeur, 31–55. Paris: Chiron, 1992. Praznik, Katja. ‘What about “Post Contemporary” Dance?’ Maska 19, nos. 84/85 (2004): 18–19. Preston, Carrie. Modernism’s Mythic Pose: Gender, Genre and Solo Performance. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011. Purkayastha, Prarthana. ‘Outing Pleasure and Indulgence: Indubala’s Scrapbook and the RedLight Dances of Calcutta’. Contemporary Theatre Review 31, nos. 1/2 (2021): 14–33. R[ivière], J[acques]. ‘Le Sacre du Printemps’. La Nouvelle Revue française, August 1913, 309–13. Rivière, Jacques. ‘Le Sacre du Printemps’. La Nouvelle Revue française, November 1913, 706–30. Roach, Joseph. ‘Kinesis: The New Mimesis’. Theater 40, no. 1 (2010): 1–3. Rosa, Cristina F. Brazilian Bodies and their Choreographies of Identification: Swing Nation. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015. Ross, Stephen and Allana Lindgren. ‘Introduction’. In The Modernist World, edited by Stephen Ross and Allana Lindgren, 1–13. London: Routledge, 2015. St.-Johnston, Reginald. A History of Dancing. London: Simpkin, Marshall, Hamilton, Kent, & Co, 1906.

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Salamon, Eszter. Artist’s website, list of works. https://esztersalamon.net/Works (accessed 22 March 2021). Seetoo, Chia Yi. ‘The Political Kinesthetics of Contemporary Dance: Taiwan in Transnational Perspective’. PhD dissertation, University of California, Berkeley, 2013. https://escholarship. org/uc/item/5gg5d9cm (accessed 26 March 2018). Shawn, Ted. Gods Who Dance. New York: E. P. Dutton, 1929. Siegert, Nadine. ‘Contemporary Dance from Africa as Creative Opposition to Stereotypical Images of Africanity’. Buala, 16 May 2010. https://www.buala.org/en/stages/contemporarydance-from-africa-as-creative-opposition-to-stereotypical-images-of-africanity (accessed 22 March 2020). Spångberg, Marten. ‘Post-Dance, an Advocacy’. In Post-Dance, edited by Danjel Andersson, Mette Edvardsen and Mårten Spångberg, 349–93. Stockholm: MDT, 2017. Srinivasan, Priya. Sweating Saris: Indian Dance as Transnational Labor. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2011. Stanger, Arabella. Dancing on Violent Ground: Utopia as Dispossession in Euro-American Theater Dance. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2021. Steele, Valerie. The Corset: A Cultural History. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001. Stillwell, Devon. ‘Eugenics Visualized: The Exhibit of the Third International Congress of Eugenics, 1932’. Bulletin of the History of Medicine 86, no. 2 (2012): 206–36. Stuart, Charles Douglas and A. J. Park. The Variety Stage: A History of the Music Halls from the Earliest Period to the Present Time. London: T. F. Unwin, 1895. Svetlov, N. [Valerian]. ‘Siamskii balet’. In Ezhegodnik Imperatorskikh Teatrov, sezon 1900– 1901 g. (Yearbook of the Imperial Theatres, season of 1900–1901), edited by L. A. Gelmersen, 295–8. St Petersburg: Izdanie Direktsii Imperatorskikh Teatrov, 1901. Talmont, Georges. ‘L’art musical russe en France: Une saison d’Opéra russe au théâtre du Châtelet 18 Mai–15 Juin’. Comœdia, 21 April 1909, 1. Tenroc, Charles. ‘De la Peinture à la Danse: Nijinski va faire dans “L’Après-midi d’un Faune” des essais de chorégraphie cubiste’. Comœdia, 18 April 1912, 4. Toepfer, Karl. Empires of Ecstasy: Nudity and Movement in German Body Culture, 1910–1935. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997. Townsend, Julie. ‘Synaesthetics: Symbolism, Dance, and the Failure of Metaphor’. The Yale Journal of Criticism 18, no. 1 (2005): 126–48. Trafó House. ‘Salamon Eszter (HU/D): / Monument 0: Haunted by wars (1913–2013)’. YouTube trailer, uploaded 2 November 2015. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H7oF4bBR_Ww (accessed 22 March 2021). Vertinsky, Patricia. ‘From Dance under the Swastika to Movement Education: A Study of Embodied Culture’. In Performative Body Spaces: Corporeal Topographies in Literature, Theatre, Dance, and the Visual Arts, edited by Markus Hallensleben, 43–55. Amsterdam: Brill/Rodopi, 2010. Vigarello, Georges and Richard Holt. ‘Le corps travaillé: Gymnastes et sportifs au XIXe siècle’. In Histoire du Corps, vol. 2: De la Révolution à la Grande Guerre, edited by Alain Corbin, Jean-Jacques Courtine and Georges Vigarello, 313–77. Paris: Éditions Seuil, 2005. Volkonsky, Kniaz Sergei. ‘Russkii balet v Parizhe’. Apollon 6 (1913): 70–4. Walsh, Shannon L. Eugenics and Physical Culture Performance in the Progressive Era: Watch Whiteness Workout. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020. Wells, Charmian. ‘Strong and Wrong: On Ignorance and Modes of White Spectatorship in Dance Criticism’. Critical Correspondence, 20 June 2017. https://movementresearch.org/ publications/critical-correspondence/strong-and-wrong-on-ignorance-and-modes-of-whitespectatorship-in-dance-criticism (accessed 20 March 2020). Woodcock, Sarah. ‘Wardrobe’. In Diaghilev and the Golden Age of the Ballets Russes, 1909–1929, edited by Jane Pritchard, 129–63. London: Victoria and Albert Museum, 2010.

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23 Shaw and the Early-Twentieth-Century British Regional Repertory Movement Soudabeh Ananisarab

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avid Hare, writing in his introduction to Bernard Shaw’s Heartbreak House (1920) at the turn of the millennium, discusses the consequences of public underfunding on the repertoire of plays presented at regional playhouses. According to Hare, while Anton Chekhov and Oscar Wilde remained popular, ‘the most eminent victim of this enforced shake-down has been the problematic figure of Bernard Shaw’.1 Once immensely popular with playhouses outside London, Shaw’s drama was, at the time in which Hare was writing, and still is, rarely revived in regional theatres. Although Shaw is largely absent from the stages of these playhouses, his influence, alongside a number of other individuals pursuing modernist agendas at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth century, is evident in the policies and practices shaping these theatres. As this chapter will demonstrate, the emphasis on variety and innovation, improvements in acting and staging practices, and decentralisation that continue to inform the activities of regional theatre in Britain is traceable to the early years of the repertory movement and reflected in Shaw’s close collaborations with the initiatives that emerged in this period. Shaw’s involvement with the movement also influences the ways in which this aspect of British theatre history is contextualised and discussed. Shaw and other collaborators failed to resolve a series of tensions that continue to remain problematic for regional theatres. The British regional repertory movement officially began in 1908 when Annie Horniman, a wealthy heiress and patron of the theatre, established the first of such companies after purchasing the Gaiety Theatre in Manchester. In 1894, having recently inherited a large sum of money from her grandfather and organised and funded the rituals of the Golden Dawn, Horniman sponsored a season of drama at the Avenue Theatre, London, which included Shaw’s Arms and the Man; this was the first performance of Shavian drama outside the circle of private societies.2 Horniman continued her support for the stage through her financial backing of the Abbey Theatre in Dublin on which she spent £13,000 and which she then allowed the Irish Players to use for free.3 Later, due to disagreements over the emphasis on national drama, Horniman separated from the Abbey. However, as James Moran argues, Horniman’s later establishment of the repertory seasons at the Manchester Gaiety Theatre was largely influenced by her experiences in Dublin.4 Horniman began her work in Manchester with a trial season at the Midland Hotel Theatre in 1907 before moving to the Gaiety Theatre the following year. In a letter to the press preceding this opening season, Horniman and her artistic director, Iden

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Payne, summarised their aims as pursuing ‘a regular change of programme’ with an emphasis on ‘present-day British writers’ involving a ‘permanent Manchester stock company’.5 Soon other cities followed suit with repertory companies operating on similar policies appearing in Glasgow, Liverpool, Bristol and Birmingham. The aims and principles of the repertory movement in its early years can be summed up as: the establishment of a repertory system (whether the short-run or true repertory); the offering of a high quality and varied repertoire of plays [. . .]; the improvement in standards of acting and staging; the securing of civic or state patronage; and the forging (or reforging) of the vital links that must exist between a theatre and its community.6 Perhaps unsurprisingly, Shaw was involved with the repertory movement from its early years with his work often featured in the repertoires of such theatres. In 1902, Shaw identified his drama as ‘repertory plays’ which ‘command an audience for about two to three weeks’: ‘Look at Arms and the Man, that would have been a financial success if it had not run for too long. No, my public can only be reached by means of a theatre that produces repertory plays, or through books.’7 Shaw’s theatre, as the production of Arms and the Man demonstrated, was unlikely to sustain a long run; it was, however, frequently featured in the repertoire at Manchester. The earliest production was Shaw’s Widowers’ Houses in 1907; this was then followed in subsequent seasons with Press Cuttings (1909), Candida (1909), The Man of Destiny (1910), How He Lied to Her Husband (1911), The Devil’s Disciple (1912) and Major Barbara (1914). Indeed, Shavian drama was often also produced by other regional reps: The Observer reported on the first season of the Glasgow Repertory Theatre in 1910 that ‘it has produced no less than fourteen wholly new pieces’, in addition to the same number of plays not seen in London and ‘eight other plays chiefly Mr. Bernard Shaw’s’.8 The most extensive of such collaborations occurred in Birmingham, where the founder of the Birmingham Repertory Theatre – the first purpose-built playhouse housing a repertory company, founded in 1913 – Sir Barry Jackson mounted ambitious stagings of Shaw’s drama, including the British premiere of the cycle play Back to Methuselah in 1923. Later in 1929 he established the annual Malvern Theatre Festival, initially dedicated to Shaw’s drama. While during its twelve seasons between 1929 and 1949 the Festival fluctuated in the extent of its association with Shaw, in total the Festival presented twenty-one different Shaw plays including six British premieres, two of which were world premieres.9 The regional repertory movement has undergone many changes since the years of these first initiatives; indeed, some of the initial repertory companies mentioned ceased to exist as early as the end of the First World War. If many of the specific theatres and ventures with which Shaw collaborated no longer exist, how can one trace the legacy of these earlier initiatives and relationships in contemporary British theatre? Anthony Jackson identifies a change in terminology occurring in the 1980s from ‘repertory’ to ‘regional’ that proves helpful in navigating these shifts and turns whilst illuminating continuities: But as the 1970s gave way to the 1980s, there had developed for many, an association of ‘rep’ with ‘old-fashioned’, even of ‘second-rate’, not surprisingly as theatres endeavoured to re-position themselves in a rapidly-changing world

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in which they had to assert their contemporaneity [. . .] The gradual switch of terms merely reflected what had been taking place ever since the creation of the ‘alternative reps’: a change of mind-set, the ending of one kind of campaign, one cluster of beliefs about what to value in theatre for the contemporary age.10 Many theatres described as ‘regional’ are part of a new phase of a movement that began in the early twentieth century. Although ‘mindsets’ have changed and a new ‘cluster of beliefs’ has emerged, the study of history has shown that boundaries between periods are never clear; often the residues of beliefs and practices in one phase will impact those in another. This chapter seeks to explore these continuities to demonstrate that while some policies, aims and emphases behind the work of regional theatres have changed over the decades, playhouses in the regions continue to operate on many principles that have origins in the early years of the repertory movement.

Programming Ironically, the story of Shaw’s collaborations with the regional reps begins in London. At the turn of the century, a series of new and in some ways unconventional theatrical ventures emerged in the capital, pursuing a more experimental repertoire of plays and opposing some of the dominant practices of the West End such as the long run and actor-manager system. These included the Stage Society (1899–1939), the Independent Theatre (1891–98), and most notably, for its scope and impact, the Vedrenne-Barker seasons at the Royal Court (1904–07).11 Shaw was closely involved with many of these initiatives as they became the main platform for the performance of his then aesthetically and politically radical work. His first play, Widowers’ Houses, a fierce attack on slum landlordism, was initially performed by the Independent Theatre Society in 1892. The Stage Society followed with its production of Mrs Warren’s Profession in 1902, a play in which Shaw criticised middle-class morality for its disregard of economic circumstances through a sympathetic portrayal of the play’s titular character, a former prostitute and owner of a series of brothels. By the end of the final season of the Vedrenne-Barker project in 1907, 701 of the 998 performances staged at the Court had been penned by Shaw, covering eleven of his plays.12 Despite attracting an impressive list of visitors, including the Conservative Prime Minister, Arthur Balfour, in 1905, the Vedrenne-Barker seasons were never financially sustainable. It was the eventual demise of this initiative, in addition to those preceding it, that cemented in Shaw’s view the need to pursue similar experimental theatre undertakings outside of London. Shaw returned to events at the Court some forty years later in the context of discussions around the establishment of a National Theatre to emphasise that events at the Court proved that instituting such a playhouse seeking to produce experimental work was impossible in the capital: as debts began to accumulate, ‘so the firm went down with its colours flying, leaving us with a proved certainty that no National Theatre in London devoted to the art of the theatre at its best can bear the burden of London rents and London rates.’13 Regional repertory theatre companies and playhouses followed many of the policies and practices established at the Court, producing, as Shaw predicted, a more varied and experimental repertoire of plays outside London. Like the VedrenneBarker seasons, the regional reps, in their early years, were closely intertwined

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with the New Drama movement to which Shaw’s early plays belong: ‘contextually and scenically realistic’ drama centred on discussion that would also be available in print for ‘readers of serious modern literature’.14 This focus on debate resulted in topical plays that probed pressing social issues. It is not then, as Rex Pogson highlights, surprising that the regional repertory movement began in Manchester, a place to which many of the reforming movements of the nineteenth century were closely connected: ‘national education, sanitary reform, women’s suffrage, public libraries, the after-care of criminals; all these things either had their start in Manchester or became centred there.’15 The Manchester Gaiety Theatre under the direction of Horniman reflected these concerns in the plays performed on stage. In October 1907 Shaw’s Widowers’ Houses received its first public performance in Manchester, ‘where housing and slum problems were far from old-fashioned and rent exploiters still active’.16 This play remained a popular choice at the Gaiety; it was revived on four occasions between 1908 and the outbreak of war in 1914. Similarly, in Birmingham, another emerging industrial city with a repertory company, decisions regarding programming at times reflected local concerns. As Claire Cochrane contends, between 1914 and 1918 the Birmingham Repertory Theatre staged experimental work that undermined nationalist narratives abundantly found in the plays of this period. Tapping into existing objections to the war in Birmingham, the Birmingham Rep staged plays including the work of John Drinkwater that explored the ‘inevitability and the human cost of the war’, in addition to Shaw’s Inca of Peruselam.17 To this list one can also add another play in which Shaw satirises war, Arms and the Man, first staged in Birmingham in 1917. This emphasis on engaging with local concerns continues to inform the work of regional theatres, although at times with contrasting aims and results. A shift towards the ‘local’ is viewed by some as an alternative to the ‘tide of McDonaldisation’ that the rise of a global economy encourages, providing ‘subtlety, complexity, diversity and colour’ to the theatre.18 The prominence of the local in this narrative is closely tied to issues of accessibility as regional theatres attempt to find new and innovative ways of engaging with a broader and more diverse demographic in their vicinity. On the other hand, the presence of politically radical work in the repertoires of the early reps – a convention that emerged from the rise of the New Drama, then a novel and in some ways revolutionary movement – resulted in accusations of coterie audiences, a reputation that continues to haunt some regional theatres. This tension is neatly summed up in the events surrounding the British premiere of Shaw’s The Apple Cart in Malvern as part of the first season of the Malvern Theatre Festival in 1929. This play depicts a world in which national differences are gradually blurred as countries move towards a universal monoculture with the United States as its main advocate and prescient symbol. This view is presented through the character Vanhattan, the American Ambassador who, alluding forward to ideas of globalisation, claims that ‘The United States [. . .] have absorbed all the great national traditions, and blended them with their own glorious tradition of Freedom into something that is unique and universal’.19 Such mores were then reflected in the planning and marketing of the Festival through which the event was presented as a way to oppose the development of this monoculture and preserve English traditions to a visiting audience of tourists. Ironically, the Festival, partly due to its connections with Shaw and his controversial political views, specifically his associations with socialism, faced stern local opposition in Malvern, which was then a Conservative stronghold.

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A way to untangle some of these contradictions and tensions is to consider the place of regional initiatives, as envisioned by those involved in the early years of the movement, in a larger theatrical ecosystem, thus shifting the focus from the work of individual playhouses to the co-existence of multiple kinds of theatres, which provided artists with opportunities for an increase in accessibility and programming and variety. Tracy C. Davis views the achievements of the Independent Theatre Society in broadly similar ways, arguing that these are ‘chiefly on the organisational side of theatre praxis’. She writes: ‘it is in this realm that [the Independent Theatre Society] offered an alternative to the commercial stage as well as to other contemporaneous experiments in theatre production.’20 More specifically, Davis views the Independent Theatre as ‘the original ancestor of the British fringe theatre’.21 It is difficult to conceive that Shaw and other supporters of modernist agendas in this period considered possible or pursued a complete take-over of British theatre by their ideals. Shaw’s close collaborator and friend, Harley Granville Barker, writing in a revised edition of the influential Schemes and Estimates for a National Theatre, a privately distributed tract in 1904 and later published in 1907, insisted: ‘in the interests of both authorship and of acting, a fair proportion of Repertory Theatres ought to co-exist with the actor-managed and longrun theatre.’22 Despite his close collaborations with the regional reps, Shaw certainly did not solely focus on these theatres either. Throughout his career, Shaw continued to look for opportunities in the West End, much like those managing the early regional repertory playhouses – as we will see, touring was a key feature of their work.

Decentralisation Between January 1895 and May 1898, Shaw worked as a theatre critic for the Saturday Review, using this opportunity not only to comment on specific productions but to suggest a reform of all aspects of British theatre, from the plays produced to the habits of audiences. In a piece published on 14 March 1896, Shaw criticised centralising theatre in the West End, a policy which in his view only benefited two classes of people: the critics, ‘who never pay for their seats’, and the aristocracy. Shaw concluded that the only way for England to ‘become a playgoing public’23 is to ‘discard our fixed idea that it is the business of the people to come to the theatre, and substitute for it the idea that it is the business of the theatre to come to the people’.24 These comments, which as Anthony Jackson argues ‘anticipate one of the major debates on arts funding that was to run through the nineteen sixties and seventies’, reflect two diverging viewpoints amongst members of the Shakespeare National Theatre Committee: ‘while [William] Archer campaigned unceasingly for the establishment of a national, centralised repertory theatre in London, Shaw was beginning to see a greater challenge and possibly more pressing need, which was to extend the national repertory idea to encompass towns and cities throughout the country.’25 In 1929, Shaw reiterated these views on the need to decentralise British theatre from its focus on London upon his arrival in Malvern, appealing to the Malvern Council for support: Our government unlike those of other countries has no Ministry of Fine Arts, but the Malvern Council has its committee which looks after the municipal Theatre and Gardens. You can therefore imagine the feelings with which I turn to that local body here which gives us a thing London has absolutely refused to do.26

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Supporters of the National Theatre movement pursued the establishment of a statesubsidised theatre based primarily on models in France and Germany. Paris had two state-supported theatres, the Théâtre-Français and Odéon, and in German cities support of local theatres and opera companies was viewed as ‘a civic responsibility’.27 Shaw, a member of the Shakespeare Memorial National Theatre (SMNT), arrived in Malvern with these European models in mind, aiming to attract the financial support of the Malvern Council in order to secure a radical alternative to the West End model. The views of Shaw’s close collaborator on the Festival and personal friend, Sir Barry Jackson, on the significance of decentralisation aligned with Shaw’s as he also emphasised the German model as one worth emulating. The Observer quoted Jackson in January 1929 explaining that centralising theatre in London was a ‘mistake’ and that like Germany, in which there are ‘a dozen and more towns beside Berlin in which there are theatres producing original work’, he hoped that Malvern’s success could highlight the viability and necessity of establishing a similar model in Britain.28 In the nineteenth century, aided by the expansion of the railway system and the growing popularity of actor-managers and star performers, regional theatres were increasingly used as venues for presenting the work of London touring companies. As George Rowell claims, although such groups brought to regional audiences ‘standards of performance and presentation [. . .] never previously experienced’,29 touring often ‘fell to “second line” companies’ led by ‘commercial managers to whom financial return was paramount’.30 The reps attempted to reverse this pattern in two significant ways: firstly by touring their productions to other regional theatres, London, and sometimes internationally, and secondly by emphasising the importance of providing an alternative theatre not governed by financial interests. I will return to this latter point. Shaw and other key individuals involved in the regional repertory movement succeeded in showing the potential and benefits of a system based on a more mutual exchange of plays. Touring was a key feature of the work of the initial repertory companies from the movement’s inception in the early years of the twentieth century. Horniman’s company first toured London in 1909, transferring productions to the Coronet Theatre for a three-week season with a repertoire of plays that included Shaw’s Widowers’ Houses. An overseas tour followed in 1912; the company visited His Majesty’s Theatre, Montreal, remaining there for six weeks presenting two plays penned by Shaw, Candida and Man and Superman. The Gaiety’s London and overseas tours would later also reach the capital’s Court Theatre (1913) in addition to the Fine Arts and Studebaker theatres in Chicago (1913). The Birmingham Rep extended this tradition further with performances at prominent London playhouses including the Regent, the Court, the Kingsway and the Queen’s. Although not all of these productions resulted in financial profit, the Birmingham Rep’s endeavours in London became prestigious affairs, reflected in Jackson’s knighthood in 1925, and at times box-office successes. The list of plays presented in London is populated with contributions from Shaw, including a long run of The Apple Cart at the Queen’s, starting on 17 September 1929 and lasting for 285 performances.31 The regional reps also toured and received productions from other regional theatres: for instance, the Birmingham Rep’s 1921 production of Shaw’s Getting Married later reached Bristol’s Prince’s Theatre, the annual summer Shakespeare Festival in Stratford, the Gaiety Theatre in Hastings, Ramsgate’s Palace Theatre and Southampton’s Grand Theatre. The involvement of

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Shaw, Britain’s most prominent living playwright of the early to mid-twentieth century, in these exchanges of productions had significant implications: it raised the status and thus attention directed at the work of regional theatres – Shaw premieres were often reported in the national press – signalling such collaborations to other playwrights as productive and desirable. The seeds sown then have borne fruit in abundance. This exchange of plays between regional theatres and playhouses in the capital is now a common occurrence. A cursory glance at recent British theatre history reveals a pattern of critically acclaimed productions originating in regional playhouses including the work of some well-known and celebrated playwrights: Gurpreet Kaur Bhatti, David Edgar, Tanika Gupta, Dennis Kelly, Lucy Prebble and Simon Stephens – to name just a few – have all collaborated with regional playhouses and companies. Notable productions resulting from such collaboration include East Is East (Tamasha Theatre Company, the Royal Court and the Birmingham Rep, 1996), Taking Care of Baby (Hampstead Theatre and the Birmingham Rep, 2007), Pornography (Traverse Theatre and the Birmingham Rep, 2008) and Enron (Headlong Theatre, Chichester Festival Theatre and Royal Court, 2009). Although, as the following discussions around funding will demonstrate, complete decentralisation remains an unachieved goal, regional theatres are now significant and prestigious producers of new work.

Funding The New Drama movement in Britain was intrinsically tied to demands for a New Theatre, theatres with rotating bills as opposed to long runs and targeting ‘a sector of the theatregoing public who thought of themselves as intellectuals, and who felt that they could see plays and stagings that could not otherwise be presented by commercial theatrical management’.32 For many managers seeking long runs, experimentation equated to substantial financial risks, presenting a recurring obstacle in the way of any attempts to stage new and unconventional plays. Shaw and other experimental theatre-makers in turn pursued state subsidy, redefining the function and need for theatre in the process. They strategically justified their request on moral grounds, insisting that theatre must be considered as a public enterprise with a purpose to educate, like museums, galleries and libraries. Shaw played a key role in constructing and perpetuating this narrative. On one occasion, writing in 1909, he asserted: I have been pointing out to the country for the last twenty years that our population is now an urban and not an agricultural population; that as the church censuses show, urban populations go to theatres instead of to places of worship [. . .] To continue in the face of these facts a boundless endowment of libraries and charities whilst leaving the theatre to prostitute itself further and further on the plea that ‘they who live to please must please to live’ is really to abandon the most potent factor in the formation of our national conscience and character to the survivors in a competition in which the most scrupulous go to the wall.33 Shaw was not alone in making such claims. Barker asserted that advocates for a National Theatre ‘must plead for the drama as something more than casual entertainment, as an art worthy to rank with other fine arts, and as having its spiritual functions

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too’.34 To that end, writing in 1922, Barker suggested an exemplary theatre functioning as an ‘instrument of social betterment’.35 He encouraged ‘wider uses of dramatic art’, arguing that any institution should strike a balance between ‘the art’s intensive cultivation in the production of plays’ and ‘its extensive use as a means of general education’.36 Barker’s proposals combined the functions of school and theatre; equipped with classrooms and lecture halls, Barker’s playhouse advanced ‘a wider intention than the training of actors’ to integrate drama into a ‘scheme of social welfare’.37 At least one regional rep implemented this approach with Shaw’s involvement. In Birmingham, the Birmingham Rep’s Playgoers’ Society, established in 1920, aimed to offer audience members opportunities for further discussion of drama in general and the work of the Birmingham Rep specifically. Shaw was the first invited guest to speak to the society when he delivered a lecture on ‘The First Actors’; an esteemed list of experts followed, including theatre director W. Bridges Adams, and critics James Agate and Ivor Brown.38 Again in Malvern, Jackson pursued similar educational policies. In addition to the plays, the Festival offered accompanying events such as balls, exhibitions, tea-time talks and lectures – in some seasons, one on the play and another on its historical context – involving a list of influential participants and speakers like scholars and critics Allardyce Nicoll and Lascelles Abercrombie. It is plausible to view these initiatives as predecessors to the wider educational schemes that followed later in the century, particularly the establishment of Theatrein-Education teams at a number of repertory theatres in the 1960s and 1970s. These teams ‘broke through the traditional boundaries that had tended to separate entertainment from education’, taking ‘educational programmes into local schools using theatre techniques and exploring new ways of using the theatre medium to great effect’.39 As Steve Ball explains, Theatre-in-Education has ‘in its “classic” sense as practised through the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s’ largely disappeared. However, educational policies continue to inform the work of regional theatres that have since adopted ‘a more holistic approach to Theatre Education’ including a ‘shift in emphasis from “outreach” programmes and projects to “in-reach” activities which provide opportunities to engage with the whole theatre’. Some of these activities, like the lectures in Birmingham and Malvern, ‘seek to enrich the theatre-going experience by providing pre- and post-show events for ticket holders including post-show discussions’.40 Another consequence of these early-twentieth-century campaigns was of course state subsidy for the theatre – an outcome that took many decades to materialise. The National Theatre building was not completed until 1977, and government funding only became a reality following the establishment of the Council for the Encouragement of Music and the Arts (CEMA) in January 1940. In the meantime, Shaw sought other ways of securing financial support for his endeavours. In line with his assertion in the 1890s that ‘as a prudent man, I always make friends with able desperadoes, knowing that they will seize the citadel when the present garrison retires’,41 Shaw collaborated with wealthy benefactors, including those associated with regional playhouses, like Horniman and Jackson. As we have seen, Shaw also pleaded with local government for support. In addition to his comments directed at the Malvern Council, Shaw advised Jackson to adopt a similar approach in Birmingham. In response to a disheartened letter from Jackson in 1928 – he had temporarily closed the theatre in 1924 due to poor ticket sales and recently suffered losses in London – Shaw wrote extensively on the lessons learnt in the capital and once again insisted that regional

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theatres could expect more promising prospects partly due to the possible involvement of municipal bodies: ‘But in the suburbs or in the provinces large theatres, moderate prices, and morning dress might make the manager’s situation, if not eligible, at least bearable. Finally, the municipality might take it on if there had been sufficient propaganda of the municipal idea to make that step popular and possible.’42 Eight years later, similar, albeit small, steps were taken in Birmingham. Consecutive losses prompted Jackson to announce that he was unable to undertake another season. A committee was appointed and negotiations eventually culminated in the Trust Deed of January 1935 through which Jackson transferred his interest in the Birmingham Rep to a Local Trust, in effect handing over the theatre to the city. The Board of Trustees included representatives from a number of local bodies including the City of Birmingham, the University of Birmingham, the Rotary Club, the Repertory Playgoers’ Society and the Birmingham Civic Society.43 Disappointingly, Shaw did not live to witness the full scale of post-war state subsidy. In its early years, the Arts Council of Great Britain operated on similar principles and aims to those suggested by Shaw and his collaborators. CEMA’s Chairman John Maynard Keynes – a member of the Bloomsbury Group who, like Shaw, were ‘irreverent, sceptical and critical of Victorian convention’44 – also viewed the arts as a force for social good, claiming in similar terms to those adopted by Shaw that ‘prostituting’ the ‘divine gift of the public entertainer’ to commercial interests would lead to its ‘exploitation and incidental destruction’.45 To that end, he played an instrumental role in the development of the Arts Council, operating on a model of ‘making grants of public funds, through semi-autonomous government bodies to private individuals and privately operated arts institutions’.46 Since then, the role of state subsidy in Britain has remained controversial, having undergone many negotiations and revisions: periods of generous funding in the 1950s and 1960s were followed by the Thatcherite ‘desire to wean everyone from what was seen as over dependence on the welfare state’, resulting in an emphasis on securing commercial benefactors.47 Since then, increased public spending in the arts by the Labour governments of the 1990s and the first decade of the twenty-first century was once again followed by cuts in 2010; the search for a sustainable business model continues. Controversies surrounding the balance of funding between London and the regions have also emerged, as demonstrated in numerous reports seeking to address these inequalities over the decades. These can be viewed as an extension of the debates around decentralisation earlier in the century. With these developments in mind, many regional theatres today, however, continue to operate on a model with its foundations firmly situated in the campaigns of the early twentieth century; funding is sought from multiple sources including central and local bodies in addition to business sponsors.

Theatre Historiography The emphases in the discourse produced and used by Shaw and other key modernists on separating theatre from commercial interests, and the moral and spiritual possibilities of drama, brought with them influential value judgements. According to Shaw and his collaborators, the production of ‘serious’ drama was impossible in a system where success was solely measured through ticket sales. By extension, this outlook presented performances that drew box-office sales as frivolous and

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insignificant, reflecting an apparent contempt for the ‘popular’. The middle-class intellectual elite behind this modernist initiative pursued two interconnected aims: to reform the British stage and to refine the tastes of audiences. Shaw’s justification for the establishment of a National Theatre in 1930 exemplifies this perspective: Without regard to strict commercial considerations, a National Theatre should be able to do the best work in the best way and not go in for that horrible policy of giving the public what it likes [. . .] There was needed some institution to give the public the best until they learned to like it.48 Statements like this, many of which exist, suggested that commercial success and artistic value moved in opposite directions, privileging the work of the writer, the ‘written drama’, over the ‘materiality of the stage’.49 This implied that the criteria for determining success in theatre need not include financial sustainability; merely the production of now-canonical European drama was sufficient for making these distinctions. Such claims failed to correspond with the realities of the system in which these individuals operated, as demonstrated through their own practices and involvement with theatre. Cary M. Mazer views the New Drama and New Theatre movements as the ‘product of the tension between what the theatre was and what theatre activists wanted it to be’ – in other words, the result of incongruities between the status of theatre production as a ‘form of industrial production’ and the aim of such individuals to liberate theatre from material conditions.50 It is not then surprising that the history of these movements is populated with ventures, including a number of regional repertory companies, that failed to endure and remain financially sustainable; as I have argued elsewhere, these failures are worth acknowledging.51 Furthermore, the continued involvement of Shaw and others with the West End reflects the contradictions in the public statements made by these figures and the nature of their own private motivations and endeavours. Despite such contradictions, the narratives constructed by Shaw and other proponents of modernist agendas have produced a lasting legacy in contemporary British theatre historiography. For a long time accounts describing this period ignored popular and commercialised entertainment, which they viewed as ‘the Other to the art of theatre’.52 Jacky Bratton traces the origins of this narrative to the 1830s, when ‘radical intellectuals appropriated the frustration and anger of people oppressed by the entrenched self-interest of the ruling classes, and turned their demand for freedom of expression and of work in the arts and the entertainment trade into a redefinition of rights, values and cultural capital that favoured an intellectual elite’.53 This was later solidified through the ‘Modernist project’ as this earlier ‘attempt to take possession of the stage for a particular class fraction finally came to fruition’.54 Similarly Cochrane observes the existence of a skewed narrative originating in this period that excludes the ‘experience of community audiences’, and ‘also fails to acknowledge the material circumstances that control the lives of the majority of jobbing theatre-workers and artists’.55 Of course, a number of scholars have since addressed this imbalance, and the work of Bratton, Cochrane and Mazer are prime examples. Nonetheless, the longevity of this narrative leaves much that requires reconsidering and recuperating, particularly as the influence of these debates extends far beyond accounts of theatre

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history to include ‘the practice of theatre, its cultural work, even its funding and its training practices’.56 The project to decentralise theatre beginning in this period is also at work in contemporary British theatre historiography. Many scholars are producing research that shifts accounts of twentieth-century theatre history away from a prevailing concern with London. Perhaps, in conjunction with this work, both theatre historians and Shavian scholars would also benefit from paying more extensive attention to Shaw’s regional connections. Ironically, Shaw himself had an ambivalent attitude towards the regions. They were, as I have demonstrated, great producers of his works and he did on many occasions champion their cause. However, he always did so with one eye firmly on the West End and other major metropolitan areas. Writing in 1939 to Jackson, probably prompted by a now-lost letter in which Jackson expressed resentment over Shaw’s decision to award the world premiere of The Apple Cart – a play Shaw had initially written for the Malvern Festival – to Warsaw, Shaw responded with a disparaging comparison that reflects this tension in his involvement with regional theatres: Now get a map of Europe large enough to make Worcestershire perceptible on it, and stick a pin into the Malvern Hills. Then contemplate Poland, and stick a pin into Warsaw. Compare the two. Reflect on their relative histories, their magnitudes, the parts they have played in the development of Christian civilization, and anything else that may occur to you.57 Shaw was acutely aware of the ways in which the prestige attributed to a production is deeply intertwined with the location of performance. It is long overdue for us as theatre historians and Shavian scholars to correct this imbalance. By shifting our focus from London to the regions as the locations in which experimental work was emerging in the early twentieth century, we can illuminate a significant aspect of British theatre history of the period and of Shaw’s career that continues to influence contemporary theatre scholarship and practice.

Notes   1. George Bernard Shaw, Heartbreak House, ed. Dan H. Laurence (London: Penguin, 2000), vii.  2. Rex Pogson, Miss Horniman and the Gaiety Theatre, Manchester (London: Rockliff, 1952), 8. The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn was a secret occult group formed in March 1888. Horniman joined in January 1890, followed closely by Yeats only two months later. Horniman eventually stopped her payments to the Order and broke ties with them over concerns with Samuel Mathers’ leadership. Horniman was unhappy with Mathers’ spending, ‘political posturing’ and the sexual nature of some of the rituals. See Sheila Gooddie, Annie Horniman: A Pioneer in the Theatre (London: Methuen, 1990).  3. Pogson, Miss Horniman and the Gaiety Theatre, 11.   4. James Moran, ‘Pound, Yeats, and the Regional Repertory Theatres’, in Regional Modernisms, ed. Neal Alexander and James Moran (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2013), 90.  5. Pogson, Miss Horniman and the Gaiety Theatre, 26.   6. Anthony Jackson, ‘The Repertory Movement: Summary, Assessment, Conclusion’, in The Repertory Movement: A History of Regional Theatre in Britain, by George Rowell and Anthony Jackson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 173–4.

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  7. ‘Mr. Bernard Shaw on Plays’, The Manchester Guardian, 13 May 1902, 12.   8. ‘Dramatis Personae’, The Observer, 17 April 1910, 8.   9. The plays to receive their British premieres in Malvern were The Apple Cart (1929), Too True to Be Good (1932), The Simpleton of the Unexpected Isles (1935) and Buoyant Billions (1949). Geneva (1938) and In Good King Charles’s Golden Days (1939) also had their world premieres in Malvern. The Malvern Theatre Festival was on hiatus during the war years. 10. Anthony Jackson, ‘From Rep to Regional: Some Reflections on the State of Regional Theatre in the 1980s’, in The Glory of the Garden: English Regional Theatre and the Arts Council 1984–2009, ed. Kate Dorney and Ros Merkin (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2010), 23–4. 11. Prior to the Vedrenne-Barker seasons, Barker was an upcoming actor who had worked with William Poel and played the role of Eugene Marchbanks in a production of Candida by the Stage Society (1900). William Archer laid the foundations for the VedrenneBarker seasons when he recommended Barker to J. H. Leigh of the Court Theatre, who was searching for a director to produce Shakespeare’s Two Gentlemen of Verona. Barker agreed on the condition that he and Leigh’s manager, Vedrennne, would also be permitted to hold six matinees of Candida, which had not yet had a public performance. This marked the beginnings of the Vedrenne-Barker seasons at the Court and a deep personal and professional relationship between Shaw and Barker. Barker, alongside Shaw, played a pivotal role in the promotion of the ideals of the New Drama and New Theatre movements. 12. Jan McDonald, ‘Shaw and the Court Theatre’, in The Cambridge Companion to George Bernard Shaw, ed. Christopher Innes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 261. 13. George Bernard Shaw, ‘Granville Barker: Some Particulars’, Drama 3 (Winter 1946), published in Shaw on Theatre, ed. E. J. West (London: MacGibbon & Kee, 1958), 262. 14. Cary M. Mazer, ‘New Theatres for a New Drama’, in The Cambridge Companion to Victorian and Edwardian Theatre, ed. Kerry Powell (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 208. 15. Pogson, Miss Horniman and the Gaiety Theatre, 191. 16. Ibid. 33. 17. Claire Cochrane, ‘A City’s Toys: Theatre in Birmingham 1914–1918’, in British Theatre and the Great War 1914–1919, ed. Andrew Maunder (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), 229–30. 18. Kate Dorney and Ros Merkin, ‘Introduction’, in The Glory of the Garden, 2. 19. George Bernard Shaw, The Apple Cart, in Bernard Shaw: Political Plays, ed. Dan H. Laurence (London: Penguin Books, 1986), 120. 20. Tracy C. Davis, ‘The Independent Theatre Society’s Revolutionary Scheme for an Uncommercial Theatre’, Theatre Journal 42, no. 4 (December 1990): 448. 21. Ibid. 447. 22. Harley Granville Barker and William Archer, Schemes and Estimates for a National Theatre (London: Duckworth & Co., 1907), xvi–xvii. 23. George Bernard Shaw, ‘On Nothing in Particular and the Theatre in General’, in Our Theatres in the Nineties, Vol. II (London: Constable, 1932), 67–73. 24. Ibid. 70. 25. Anthony Jackson, ‘First Steps’, in The Repertory Movement: A History of Regional Theatre in Britain, 20. 26. ‘Open Air Theatre: Mr. Shaw’s Suggestion and a Promise’, The Manchester Guardian, 31 August 1929, 16. 27. Jean Chothia, English Drama of the Early Modern Period 1890–1940 (London: Longman, 1996), 14.

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28. Quoted in Vivian Elliot, ‘Genius Loci: The Malvern Festival’, SHAW: The Journal of Bernard Shaw Studies 3 (1983): 197. 29. George Rowell, ‘The Nineteenth-Century Background’, in The Repertory Movement: A History of Regional Theatre in Britain, 12. 30. Ibid. 13. 31. George Bernard Shaw and Sir Barry Jackson, Selected Correspondence of Bernard Shaw: Bernard Shaw and Barry Jackson, ed. L. W. Conolly (London: University of Toronto Press, 2002), 45. 32. Mazer, ‘New Theatres for a New Drama’, 208. 33. George Bernard Shaw, ‘Draft Letter to Millionaires’, British Library, Add MS 45296, folder 214. 34. Harley Granville Barker, The National Theatre (London: Sidgwick & Jackson, 1930), 1. 35. Claire Cochrane, Twentieth-Century British Theatre: Industry, Art and Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 46. Cochrane draws on Barker’s words here, specifically his discussions on using theatre as a ‘weapon of social betterment’ (The Exemplary Theatre (Boston: Little Brown and Company, 1922), 16. 36. Barker, The Exemplary Theatre, 72. 37. Ibid. 94. 38. T. C. Kemp, The Birmingham Repertory Theatre: The Playhouse and the Man (Birmingham: Cornish Brothers Limited, 1943), 56. 39. Anthony Jackson, ‘1958–1983: Renewal, Growth and Retrenchment’, in The Repertory Movement: A History of Regional Theatre in Britain, 94–5. 40. Steve Ball, ‘Regional Theatres as Learning Resources’, in Learning through Theatre: The Changing Face of Theatre in Education, ed. Anthony Jackson and Chris Vine (London: Routledge, 2013), 155–6. 41. Shaw, Our Theatres in the Nineties, 19–20. 42. Shaw and Jackson, Selected Correspondence of Bernard Shaw, 32 (June 1928). 43. Kemp, The Birmingham Repertory Theatre, 57. 44. Anna Upchurch, ‘John Maynard Keynes, the Bloomsbury Group and the Origins of the Arts Council Movement’, International Journal of Cultural Policy 10, no. 2 (2004): 204–5, doi:10.1080/1028663042000255817. 45. The Collected Writings of John Maynard Keynes, vol. 28, ed. Elizabeth Johnson and Donald Moggridge (London: Macmillan Press, 1982), 344. Quoted in Upchurch, ‘John Maynard Keynes’, 209. 46. Upchurch, ‘John Maynard Keynes’, 203. 47. Dorney and Merkin, ‘Introduction’, in The Glory of the Garden, 5. 48. Geoffrey Whitworth, The Making of a National Theatre (London: Faber and Faber, 1951), 176–7. 49. Jacky Bratton, New Readings in Theatre History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 11. 50. Mazer, ‘New Theatres for a New Drama’, 210. 51. Soudabeh Ananisarab, ‘In Pursuit of a New Theatre: The Case of the Malvern Festival’, Studies in Theatre and Performance (November 2021), doi:10.1080/14682761.2021.200 6925. 52. Bratton, New Readings in Theatre History, 8. 53. Ibid. 68. 54. Ibid. 12. 55. Cochrane, Twentieth-Century British Theatre, 6. 56. Bratton, New Readings in Theatre History, 11. 57. Shaw and Jackson, Selected Correspondence of Bernard Shaw, 100 (10 March 1939).

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Works Cited Ananisarab, Soudabeh. ‘In Pursuit of a New Theatre: The Case of the Malvern Festival’. Studies in Theatre and Performance (November 2021). doi:10.1080/14682761.2021.2006925. Ball, Steve. ‘Regional Theatres as Learning Resources’. In Learning through Theatre: The Changing Face of Theatre in Education, edited by Anthony Jackson and Chris Vine, 155–67. London: Routledge, 2013. Barker, Harley Granville. The Exemplary Theatre. Boston: Little Brown and Company, 1922. Barker, Harley Granville. The National Theatre. London: Sidgwick & Jackson, 1930. Barker, Harley Granville and William Archer. Schemes and Estimates for a National Theatre. London: Duckworth & Co., 1907. Bratton, Jacky. New Readings in Theatre History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Chothia, Jean. English Drama of the Early Modern Period 1890–1940. London: Longman, 1996. Cochrane, Claire. The Birmingham Rep: A City’s Theatre 1962–2002. Birmingham: Sir Barry Jackson Trust, 2003. Cochrane, Claire. ‘A City’s Toys: Theatre in Birmingham 1914–1918’. In British Theatre and the Great War 1914–1919, edited by Andrew Maunder, 215–34. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015. Cochrane, Claire. Shakespeare and the Birmingham Repertory Theatre: 1913–1929. London: Society for Theatre Research, 1993. Cochrane, Claire. ‘Theatre and Urban Space: The Case of Birmingham Rep’. New Theatre Quarterly 16, no. 2 (May 2000): 137–47. Cochrane, Claire. Twentieth-Century British Theatre: Industry, Art and Empire. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011. Cochrane, Claire and Jo Robinson, eds. The Methuen Drama Handbook of Theatre History and Historiography. London: Bloomsbury, 2019. Davies, Andrew. Other Theatres: The Development of Alternative and Experimental Theatre in Britain. London: Macmillan, 1987. Davis, Tracy C. The Economics of the British Stage 1800–1914. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Davis, Tracy C. ‘The Independent Theatre Society’s Revolutionary Scheme for an Uncommercial Theatre’. Theatre Journal 42, no. 4 (December 1990): 447–54. Dorney, Kate and Ros Merkin, eds. The Glory of the Garden: English Regional Theatre and the Arts Council 1984–2009. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2010. ‘Dramatis Personae’. The Observer, 17 April 1910, 8. Elliot, Vivian. ‘Genius Loci: The Malvern Festival’. SHAW: The Journal of Bernard Shaw Studies 3 (1983): 191–218. Elsom, John and Nicholas Tomalin. The History of the National Theatre. London: Cape, 1978. Gale, Maggie B. ‘Theatre and Drama between the Wars’. In The Cambridge History of TwentiethCentury English Literature, edited by Laura Marcus and Peter Nicholls, 318–34. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. Gooddie, Sheila. Annie Horniman: A Pioneer in the Theatre. London: Methuen, 1990. Kemp, T. C. The Birmingham Repertory Theatre: The Playhouse and the Man. Birmingham: Cornish Brothers Limited, 1943. Kennedy, Dennis. Granville Barker and the Dream of Theatre. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985. Keynes, John Maynard. The Collected Writings of John Maynard Keynes, vol. 28. Edited by Elizabeth Johnson and Donald Moggridge. London: Macmillan Press, 1982.

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MacCarthy, Desmond. The Court Theatre 1904–1907: A Commentary and Criticism. London: A. H. Bullen, 1907. McDonald, Jan. ‘Shaw and the Court Theatre’. In The Cambridge Companion to George Bernard Shaw, edited by Christopher Innes, 261–82. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Matthews, Bacche. A History of the Birmingham Repertory Theatre. London: Chatto & Windus, 1924. Mayer, David. ‘Towards a Definition of Popular Theatre’. In Western Popular Theatre, edited by David Mayer and Kenneth Richard, 257–77. London: Methuen & Co. Ltd, 1977. Mazer, Cary M. ‘New Theatres for a New Drama’. In The Cambridge Companion to Victorian and Edwardian Theatre, edited by Kerry Powell, 207–21. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. Merkin, Ros. ‘Liverpool’. In The Cambridge Companion to Theatre History, edited by David Wiles and Christine Dymkowski, 91–103. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012. Merkin, Ros. Liverpool Playhouse: A Theatre and its City. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2011. Miller, C. Brook. ‘Late Capitalism and the United States in the Apple Cart’. SHAW: The Journal of Bernard Shaw Studies 26 (2006): 118–34. Moran, James. ‘Pound, Yeats, and the Regional Repertory Theatres’. In Regional Modernisms, edited by Neal Alexander and James Moran, 83–104. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2013. ‘Mr. Bernard Shaw on Plays’. The Manchester Guardian, 13 May 1902, 12. Nicholson, Helen, Nadine Holdsworth and Jane Milling. The Ecologies of Amateur Theatre. London: Palgrave, 2018. ‘Open Air Theatre: Mr. Shaw’s Suggestion and a Promise’. The Manchester Guardian, 31 August 1929, 16. Pogson, Rex. Miss Horniman and the Gaiety Theatre, Manchester. London: Rockliff, 1952. Robinson, Jo. ‘Becoming More Provincial? The Global and the Local in Theatre History’. New Theatre Quarterly 23, no. 3 (August 2007): 229–40. Rosenthal, Daniel. The National Theatre Story. London: Oberon Books, 2013. Rowell, George and Anthony Jackson. The Repertory Movement: A History of Regional Theatre in Britain. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984. Shaw, George Bernard. The Apple Cart. In Bernard Shaw: Political Plays, edited by Dan H. Laurence, 7–139. London: Penguin Books, 1986. Shaw, George Bernard. ‘Draft Letter to Millionaires’. British Library, Add MS 45296, folder 214. Shaw, George Bernard. ‘Granville-Barker: Some Particulars’. Drama 3 (Winter 1946). Published in Shaw on Theatre, edited by E. J. West, 259–67. London: MacGibbon & Kee, 1958. Shaw, George Bernard. Heartbreak House. Edited by Dan H. Laurence. London: Penguin, 2000. Shaw, George Bernard. ‘On Nothing in Particular and the Theatre in General’. In Our Theatres in the Nineties, Vol. II, 67–73. London: Constable, 1932. Shaw, George Bernard. Our Theatres in the Nineties, Vol. II. London: Constable, 1932. Shaw, George Bernard and Sir Barry Jackson. Selected Correspondence of Bernard Shaw: Bernard Shaw and Barry Jackson, edited by L. W. Conolly. London: University of Toronto Press, 2002. Trewin, J. C. The Birmingham Repertory Theatre: 1913–1963. London: Barrie and Rockliff, 1963. Turnbull, Olivia. Bringing Down the House: The Crisis in Britain’s Regional Theatres. Bristol: Intellect Books, 2008. Upchurch, Anna. ‘John Maynard Keynes, the Bloomsbury Group and the Origins of the Arts Council Movement’. International Journal of Cultural Policy 10, no. 2 (2004): 203–17. doi:10.1080/1028663042000255817. Whitworth, Geoffrey. The Making of a National Theatre. London: Faber and Faber, 1951.

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24 ‘Aquí no estamos en el teatro’: Impossible Plays, Queer Ghosts and Haunted Practices Jonathan Heron

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his chapter offers two examples from university arts education in which performance practice intervenes in, or interrupts, academic learning. Each example is carefully selected to demonstrate the various ways in which modernist theatre can be engaged within a cultural education to combine an interdisciplinary approach with ideas from queer studies. Ultimately, I argue that students benefit from a sustained creative engagement with modernism (and its variants) in order to develop a holistic approach to knowledge-making, academic literacy and queer studies. To reimagine an alternative future for the arts, I reach back to the queer past and invite the ghost of Federico García Lorca (1898–1936) to haunt the modern-day university campus. This essay is underpinned by two accounts of performance practice within a research-intensive university: (1) a new version of Play without a Title by David Johnston, produced by Fail Better Productions at the University of Warwick, transferring to the Belgrade Theatre Coventry (2008); and (2) a workshop process exploring After Lorca by Jack Spicer at the same university, in consultation with Spicer scholar Daniel Katz, by the Warwick Student Ensemble (2012). Finally, there is reflection on ‘haunted practices’ in the interdisciplinary environment that emerged at Warwick Arts Centre (2014–19).1 The essay itself will move between an academic and a practitioner voice – a disruption that will be marked by the use of italics and the present tense for practice – and each section makes creative use of a different translation of Lorca’s line from Play without a Title, ‘Aquí no estamos en el teatro’, as variously: ‘We’re not in the theatre here’ (Bauer, 1983), ‘We aren’t in the theatre here’ (Edwards, 1994) and ‘This is not the theatre’ (Johnston, 2008). These shifts in translation influence the form and content of each section and remind the reader of the multiple transmissions between literary modernism and live performance. The essay also makes playful and poetic use of the concepts of ghosting and haunting in theatre practice, as a way of thinking through the practitioner’s methods of transmitting text through performance.

‘We’re not in the theatre here’: Impossible Plays We are not in the theatre here. We are back at university as resident artists. We are no longer producing theatre for paying audiences. We are working with a student ensemble. They have been offered this project as an extracurricular opportunity which

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merges practices from drama education and actor training through ‘open-space learning’. The first project they are devising, as part of the Fail Better Residency at the CAPITAL Centre, is a new version (and world premiere) of Lorca’s ‘Comedia sin Titulo’ which David Johnston has translated as ‘Play without a Title’, and a much punchier delivery of the text than early translations. His script has the Director saying ‘This is not the theatre’ as opposed to the more passive ‘We’re not in the theatre here’. We are working with Johnston and his assistant in rehearsal and we have replicated a full professional process for the ensemble, before their academic term begins. This is an immersive learning experience for them as actors, suspending their student identities, which requires a professionalism and poise that they seem to enjoy. It is predicted, but not expected, that these students will explore professional careers or formal training in theatre after they graduate from the university. The work is shown on campus in October 2008 for students and staff and the production is placed on the curriculum of five modules across at least three departments. The members of the production team freely give their time to attend lectures to promote an education programme around the project and return to prepare the ensemble for a transfer to the local Belgrade Theatre Coventry. The affective impact of the production explored the theatre of the ‘impossible’, a term coined by Lorca in relation to his later drama. For Maria Delgado, ‘these “impossible” plays are positioned alongside Poet in New York as embodiments of the surrealist ethos in Spain, discernible also in Alberti’s Concerning the Angels and Buñuel and Dali’s Un Chien andalou’.2 She continues, noting that the ‘impossible’ works do provide alternative modes of dramatic composition that eschew the cumulative effect of the three-act tragedy. When Five Years Pass, The Public and Play without a Title all signal an acknowledgement of the breathing, kinetic relationship between the moving living body and its performance environment.3 The Warwick production emphasised this relationship in its design by Nomi Everall, with scenography that took a cross-section of a theatre building as its starting point. By focusing on theatrical thresholds (backstage/wing, stage/proscenium, auditorium/ box), the company created different moods using Laban efforts, so that each body moved according to different physical states in each section of the set. The audience itself was placed within a black-box drama studio, looking into this cross-section of a theatre which also featured an onstage audience. Returning to Delgado: Overt theatricality becomes the prism through which both characters and audience are given a threshold of revelation. Rather than tell stories, all three prioritize the theatrical experience itself with its inherent reliance on audience reciprocity and reflection. It is perhaps not surprising that The Public and Play without a Title gravitate around situations in a theatre with the spectator as voyeur often positioned against the actor as agent [. . .] Lorca moves beyond a theatre of utility.4 These impossible plays also take on an expressionist quality, which Delgado notes, and an important aspect of their textual status is as unfinished works and dramatic

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fragments.5 The 2008 production approached this text as a new play (in a new translation) and as an unfinished fragment of literary modernism. The ‘ghost’ of the author was ever-present in the rehearsal process, not only because Lorca stages an author/ director/auteur character as the protagonist, but also because the character is shown to be cancelling a performance. When we compare these dramatic ideas with the biographical circumstances surrounding the play, we evoke multiple ‘ghostings’ in performance: Lorca’s death and the search for his corpse, Lorca’s ‘impossible’ plays that could not be staged in his lifetime, the queer characters that could not be performed but feature heavily in these plays (most notably in The Public), and the Spanish revolutionaries from the 1930s that break into the theatre in this play. As Delgado reminds us: ‘The theatre of politics appears not so distant from the politics of theatre [. . .] The Author distrusts performance but has chosen to work within it [. . .] For theatre, like the forest of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, is a transformative space.’6 Lorca, within this context, is a queer modernist haunting the contemporary stage. Queer modernism, then, requires some unpacking here. Ben De Witte argues ‘that an unapologetically queer reading might shed new light on the play’s reputation and self-declared status as an “impossible” drama or “poem to be booed at”’7 in an article that positions The Public as an example of queer modernist theatre. Like Play without a Title, The Public ‘undoes the safe distance between spectator and spectacle, blurring the lines between the action on stage and the spectator’s fantasies and associations, such that audience members may feel so exposed and ashamed that they want to intervene’.8 This central insight around undoing boundaries, whether spatial or cultural, has significant value to the 2008 production under discussion, the 2012 After Lorca workshops that followed, and the subsequent Emerge Festivals between 2014 and 2019.9

‘We aren’t in the theatre here’: Queer Ghosts We aren’t in the theatre here. The student ensemble is exploring a series of texts in the Humanities Studio through workshops that fall outside of their formal studies. The current context is student engagement and alumni development work for the Institute for Advanced Teaching and Learning (IATL) which superseded CAPITAL in 2010. Two years on, we are applying the findings from the ‘open-space learning’ project and engaging students from all three faculties in an extracurricular programme that uses theatre practice to develop their creative skills to enhance their current studies and improve their cultural literacy as future graduates. The ensemble is composed of students from English and Theatre but also Economics and Maths, which develops a more interdisciplinary approach to student engagement. One of the devised projects this year is a workshop process on ‘After Lorca’ by Jack Spicer, with the guest academic Daniel Katz invited into the studio. The ensemble workshop Spicer’s poetry with reference to Lorca’s drama, drawing upon our previous experience of staging ‘Play without a Title’. The American poet Jack Spicer (1925–65) was born in Los Angeles and attended the University of California at Berkeley, where he engaged in the local political and literary scene. Subsequently dubbed the ‘Berkeley Renaissance’ (another kind of transmission here), his circle included fellow poets Robin Blaser and Robert Duncan.

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His literary output includes After Lorca (1957), which Spicer considered the start of his ‘real work’, ostensibly composed of translations of Lorca’s work, the faithfulness of which Lorca questions. There are also eleven original Spicer poems masquerading as translations, combined with six ‘programmatic’ letters to Lorca in which Spicer articulates his poetics and his personal woes about poetry, love, and his contemporaries.10 Working with these poems through open-space workshops allowed the student ensemble to use performance practice as a research method to adapt and examine these texts as poetry and drama. By re-embodying the two characters of Lorca and Spicer, as implied by the text, they developed devising strategies for a performance piece based on the poetry. Fundamentally, this approach gave us an opportunity to hear the poems spoken, but also to embody the gaps between the Spicer poems and the Lorca letters, to reach into the space between translation and adaptation to find something performable. As Gizzi notes in his preface: [Spicer] would write later that ‘The ghosts the poems were written for are the ghosts of poems. We have it second-hand. They cannot hear the noise they have been making.’ He’s covering Lorca, not quite in the way a rock band covers a tune but in the way a bandage covers a fatal wound. Poetry cuts deep. Lorca may have been murdered, but he’s alive in this book and now too is Spicer. At its root, poetry is a haunted practice calling to the dead, crossing boundaries again and again.11 Spicer’s Lorca notes the following, about the whole creative endeavour: ‘It seems to me the waste of a considerable talent on something which is not worth doing. The younger generation of poets may view with pleasure Mr. Spicer’s execution of what seems to me a difficult and unrewarding task.’12 However, Katz argues for a higher valuation: AL is undoubtedly a central work in the venerable tradition of modernist translation outlined by Steven Yao. Finally, its figuration of itself as a homoerotic collaboration between ‘Lorca’ and ‘Jack’ and its outline of the dynamics of queer poetic transmission through the Whitman-Lorca-Spicer network it establishes, render it a crucial work of queer poetics.13 Katz’s view of the impact of ‘queer poetic genealogies’ on Spicer particularly interested the ensemble who were devising a performance response to the text in 2012. Having Katz in the studio to respond directly to the work, as well as having access to both literary executors (Gizzi and Kevin Killian), leant a gravitas to the process and a connection to California, the work of the San Francisco Poets Theater in particular. Katz’s work on correspondence14 has been of particular value to the theatrical process, as it allowed the ensemble to understand the poetic nuance of queer letter writing in performance. The notion of letters passing between queer ghosts, then re-embodied in the university studio, transmits texts from Lorca to Spicer to contemporary bodies through the haunted practice of performance.

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‘This is not the theatre’: Haunted Practices This is not the theatre. This is the practitioner voice. This voice has queered this essay in the same way it queers the curriculum through cultural interventions. The voice is responsible for subverting curricula by inviting students to step away from their home disciplines to collaborate as a performance ensemble. Over time this group will become an alumni network which we are mapping out in 2014, as we prepare for our first graduate arts festival Emerge, in partnership with Warwick Arts Centre, our professional arts venue on campus. We look ahead to alumni artists coming back to work with students themselves, closing the gap between student and alumni identities as well as between presumed amateur and professional roles. We look ahead to five years of festivals and workshops where we facilitate learning between graduate companies and student artists, and support them to take their first steps towards professional practice through this network. We are opening up a space beyond campus to develop new possibilities, work experience opportunities and direct access to the theatre practitioners. We are collaborating across the university through IATL, bringing students from the arts and sciences together. In this final section I will take forward the thematic strands and relate them to university cultures that continue to ‘haunt’ the curriculum. When we teach the impossible plays of queer modernism, such as Lorca’s Play without a Title, a reflexive dimension is introduced to the study of literary modernism – through marginal works and unpublished writing fragments – so queer ghosts are honoured, especially queer modernists who continue to ‘haunt’ university curricula. They have unfinished business, in the manner of a ghost story, but we also have unfinished business with them. I will return to the notion of ‘haunted practices’ in order to consider another transmission of the arts and humanities within an interdisciplinary curriculum, where the creative arts have an enduring value within higher education. Firstly, it is worth restating that the study of literary modernism is greatly enhanced by performance practice, whether co-curricular or otherwise. Drama education coevolved with literary studies, and all our disciplines remain provisional, whether we are located in faculties or departments of arts, culture, education, media or performance.15 Secondly, we remember our queer ghosts every time we teach them, and the example of Lorca, via Spicer, has given us a rich seam of work that has been characterised as ‘Lorca’s afterlives’16 or ‘Apocryphal Lorca’.17 For the former: it is also evident in the lyrics of Marc Almond, the former Soft Cell frontman, for whom homosexual affirmation has been indelibly bound up with the location of a sensibility that views both writers, like Wilde, Rimbaud and Cocteau, as enabling resources that allow for the articulation of ‘other’ voices.18 Thirdly, haunted practices are always-already at play when we teach literary modernism, whether textual, theatrical or queer. Our pedagogical practices have much to gain from our creative practice and vice versa. Whenever we invite artists and alumni back to our campus, we summon new ghosts of performance to haunt our teaching and research. The notion of ‘the haunted stage’19 has been extensively disseminated, but I am arguing here for a haunted practice, a contemporary mash-up of modernist memories and desires for a queer future, whenever and wherever that is possible. As Spicer writes to Lorca: ‘You are dead and the dead are very patient.’20

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Author’s Note The performance projects discussed above would not have been possible without the contributions of David Johnston (Play without a Title) and Daniel Katz (After Lorca). Furthermore, the practice itself was greatly enhanced by a succession of Warwick students and Fail Better collaborators between 2008 and 2014, but here I particularly want to acknowledge the major contribution of designer Nomi Everall. Finally, I would like to dedicate the chapter to the memory of Kevin Killian of the San Francisco Poets Theater, who freely gave of his time to talk about the queer ghosts of Spicer and Lorca and record a video message for the students during the process.

Notes   1. My own context as practitioner-researcher is unusual, having moved into higher education in 2007 as part of a major collaboration between the University of Warwick and the Royal Shakespeare Company; see Nick Monk et al., Open-Space Learning: A Study in Transdisciplinary Pedagogy (London: Bloomsbury, 2011). From 2010, this centre for creativity and performance (CAPITAL Centre, 2005–10) merged with the Reinvention Centre to form a new Institute for Advanced Teaching and Learning, where I am currently serving in a crossfaculty professorial role as Director. My departmental context is therefore highly interdisciplinary, drawing upon my theatre background in student engagement and curriculum development projects with science, engineering and medicine, as well as the social sciences and the arts. It is within that context that I argue for holistic and inclusive curricula that combine approaches from the arts and humanities with other disciplines, not simply so that students acquire additional methods and skills, but primarily to enhance their epistemic and cultural literacies to take on big problems through collaborative work. One mission for the university in this context, then, is to liberate, transform and repair society. This is informed by a body of critical pedagogy and a history of modernism, with reference to contemporary theatre practice, specifically work with Lorca’s texts as examples of queer modernism.   2. Maria Delgado, Federico García Lorca (Abingdon: Routledge, 2008), 122.   3. Ibid. 138. ‘The dramaturgy that Lorca was to refer to as his “real objective” (OCIII 631) remarkably filtered into the public domain only from the 1970s, beginning with When Five Years Pass, scheduled for production in late 1936 but not produced in Spain until 1978, forty years after its first print run. The Public, published in its extant incomplete form, did not appear until 1976, opening at Milan’s Piccolo Theatre in Lluis Pasqual’s premiere production ten years later. The single act of PWAT, now often known as The Dream of Life, was first published in 1976 and premiered, again by Pasqual, for Spain’s Centro Dramatico Nacional, 1989.’ See Delgado, Federico García Lorca, 121.   4. Ibid. 139.   5. ‘Unfinished at the time of Lorca’s death [. . .] [PWAT was conceived] as a three-act venture with the first act set in Madrid’s Español Theatre, the second in a morgue visited by the Actress and the Authors and the third in heaven populated by Andalusian angels, where the Author ends his Everyman-like journey.’ See Delgado, Federico García Lorca, 165.   6. Ibid. 166.   7. Ben De Witte, ‘Dramatizing Queer Visibility in El público: Federico García Lorca in Search of a Modern Theatre’, Modern Drama 60, no. 1 (2017): 27.   8. Ibid. 27. De Witte also recalls the work of queer scholar Heather Love, who ‘links “the indeterminacy of queer” (as opposed to gay or lesbian) to the “indeterminacy, expansiveness, and drift of the literary – particularly the experimental, oblique version most closely associated with modernist textual production”’ (28).

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  9. The Emerge Festival ran from 2014 to 2019 at the Warwick Arts Centre in partnership with the Institute for Advanced Teaching and Learning. As a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, the 2020 festival was postponed and then relaunched in 2021. 10. Peter Gizzi, Preface to After Lorca by Jack Spicer (New York: New York Review of Books, 2021), xiii–xiv. 11. Ibid. xv. Emphasis added. 12. Jack Spicer, After Lorca (New York: New York Review of Books, 2021 [1957]), 3. 13. Daniel Katz, The Poetry of Jack Spicer (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2013), 53. 14. Not only is the book composed entirely of a set of (at times fictive) verse translations of poems and another set of (fictive) prose letters, but it uses a single term to define them both: ‘correspondence’, which designates both the finding of any English term to translate a Spanish one, and the imaginary exchange of letters between ‘Lorca’ and ‘Jack’. Thus, the ‘correspondence’ between ‘Jack’ and ‘Lorca’ must be said to correspond to and translate the accompanying ‘translations’, in a rhetorical economy in which the translations correspond to and translate the letters too. See Katz, The Poetry of Jack Spicer, 53. 15. See Gavin Bolton, Acting in Classroom Drama: A Critical Analysis (Stoke-on-Trent: Trentham Books, 1998). 16. Delgado, Federico García Lorca. 17. Jonathan Mayhew, Apocryphal Lorca: Translation, Parody, Kitsch (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009). 18. Delgado, Federico García Lorca, 191. 19. See Marvin Carlson, The Haunted Stage: The Theatre as a Memory Machine (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2003). 20. Spicer, After Lorca, 10.

Works Cited Bolton, Gavin. Acting in Classroom Drama: A Critical Analysis. Stoke-on-Trent: Trentham Books, 1998. Carlson, Marvin. The Haunted Stage: The Theatre as a Memory Machine. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2003. Delgado, Maria. Federico García Lorca. Abingdon: Routledge, 2008. De Witte, Ben. ‘Dramatizing Queer Visibility in El público: Federico García Lorca in Search of a Modern Theatre’. Modern Drama 60, no. 1 (2017): 25–45. García Lorca, Federico. The House of Bernada Alba/Play without a Title. Translated by David Johnston. London: Oberon Books, 2008. García Lorca, Federico. Plays Three: Mariana Pineda, The Public, Play without a Title. Translated by Gwynne Edwards. London: Methuen Drama, 1994. García Lorca, Federico. The Public and Play without a Title: Two Posthumous Plays. Translated by Carlos Bauer. New York: New Directions, 1983. García Lorca, Federico. El público/El sueño de la vida. Edited by Antonio Monegal. Madrid: Alianza Editorial, 2000. Gizzi, Peter. Preface to After Lorca by Jack Spicer. New York: New York Review of Books, 2021. Katz, Daniel. The Poetry of Jack Spicer. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2013. Mayhew, Jonathan. Apocryphal Lorca: Translation, Parody, Kitsch. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009. Monk, Nick with Jonathan Heron, Jonothan Neelands and Carol Chillington Rutter. Open-Space Learning: A Study in Transdisciplinary Pedagogy. London: Bloomsbury, 2011. Spicer, Jack. After Lorca. New York: New York Review of Books, 2021 [1957].

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Part IV: Slippages

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25 Introduction: How Movements Might Move Nicholas Johnson

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truggling to write at the midpoint of the twentieth century amid the cultural devastation and material depredation of post-occupation Paris, Samuel Beckett opened his novel The Unnamable with three questions: ‘Where now? Who now? When now?’1 Tackling (respectively) the dynamics of space, embodiment and time, these questions, asked in a novel that takes the form of a long monologue, might make us think of theatre. They engage the reader in the process of building a world; they announce a voice striving to come into existence, emerging from an otherwise empty space. They expose the authorial condition directly to the audience, thus complicating the notion of ‘character’ as conventionally understood. Even while they stabilise the novel’s beginning with the appearance of a logical progression, they also announce that identity, position and temporality are no longer part of ‘given circumstances’, but instead that all three are subject to radical instability (and not only in the realm of art). It was during this novel’s composition that Beckett turned to the theatre – he said ‘to get away from the awful prose I was writing at the time’2 – and wrote En attendant Godot in a matter of months. It is no accident that Beckett, whose work has been variously classified and reclassified as avant-garde, high modernist, late modernist, postmodernist and sui generis outside all categories, becomes almost a patron saint of this volume’s last pages (having already haunted many that came before).3 Part IV, entitled ‘Slippages’, represents a performative refusal to submit to strict boundary conditions: its theme is the persistence of temporal, spatial, embodied, conceptual, political, generic and technological slippages in what ‘defines’ modernist or contemporary theatre. Having already noted the capaciousness of the term ‘modernism’ and the challenge of attending to its historical specificity even as its vector travels into the ‘contemporary’, what this section highlights is the role of elasticity, porousness, fluidity, flexibility and transformation in how these concepts continue to operate. In this book’s introduction, the editors returned to the affective character of modernism and underlined the embodied nature of its thought; previous sections have addressed the qualities of memory, reimagination and transmission as revealing the enduring impulses of modernism. The category of ‘slippage’ emphasises the role of freedom in such impulses: it offers a conceptual tool to articulate that sense of flow, disallowing the binding of modernist thought under the sign of temporary nations, constructed ethnicities, provisional dates, literary regulations or rigid politics. One of the great ironies of encyclopedia entries on the ‘isms’ of the avant-garde is that its unstable, messy, shifting networks of people are

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called ‘movements’, yet they are so easily shorn of all dynamism in the retelling. Their signal images – paintings, photographs, texts – often appear to be two-dimensional and static. The contributors in this section turn to the theatre to find how such movements might still move. Seeking to preserve conceptual openness while providing meaningful (and scholarly) clarity poses numerous challenges, even at an ontological level, as has been extensively theorised in poststructuralism.4 Both modernism and contemporary performance clearly exist, in the sense that they are discourses with a literature, a heritage and a praxis. But to pin these terms down – to arrive at a stable definition about what boundary conditions might allow us to know, in a strictly logical sense, whether a work is or is not modernist – would require a more monolithic narrative of modernism than its actual history allows. The strategy this section takes with such aporias is to turn to multiplicity: its diverse voices, approaches and examples align with those who, in performance studies, have rejected the ‘booby-trap’ of ‘all false binaries’.5 In Fredric Jameson’s major study The Modernist Papers, he offers a related pathway: The prospects change somewhat when we understand that getting out of binary oppositions may often mean, not so much doing away with them, as multiplying them and using the initial ideological starting point as the beginning of a more complicated construction which is at the same time a more complex diagnosis.6 As a complex diagnostic tool, then, a concrete example of modernism in contemporary performance may help to illuminate some of the ‘slippages’ under discussion in this section. From 2013 to 2017, the German director Frank Castorf directed Richard Wagner’s Ring cycle at Bayreuth, a venue that is both the heart of Wagner’s ongoing legacy as well as a vital organ – perhaps the lungs? – of nineteenth-century aesthetic culture in Germany. Castorf led one of the leading avant-garde venues of Berlin, the Volksbühne am Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz, from 1992 to 2015, having a profound impact on the post-reunification evolution of contemporary theatre and theatre theory (indeed, Castorf is a major figure of what has been theorised as ‘postdramatic’ theatre by Hans-Thies Lehmann and others).7 Born in 1951 in East Berlin, the capital of the German Democratic Republic (DDR), Castorf has written extensively in several programme notes about the influence of growing up under a communist government, noting how artists of that origin – unlike their ‘postmodern’ counterparts from West Germany – tend to consider each production as a contribution to ideology, considering themselves ‘however ironically’ as ‘failed politicians’.8 Certainly, Castorf did not shy away from a political reading of Wagner’s Ring (see Figure 25.1). As a scenographic image, created by the designer Aleksandar Denic, this rendering of the Siegfried section invokes numerous layers of meaning. The arrangement of the four figures mimics the American monument to four ‘founding fathers’ at Mount Rushmore, but substitutes Karl Marx, V. I. Lenin, Josef Stalin and Mao Zedong, mixing American, Prussian, Russian and Chinese references (but inside a German cultural temple). Countries of origin, of course, are not the only political geographies invoked by these faces’ presence, since the figures – aside from being tied to transnational workers’ movements and extensively commemorated in monuments across the communist and post-communist world – are now fully incorporated into the global network of popular culture. Beyond the ‘Ostalgie’ stands and shops that continue to dot Berlin’s

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Figure 25.1  Das Ring des Nibelungen, directed by Frank Castorf, 2017 (© Bayreuth Festival/Enrico Nawrath). commercial landscapes, selling reproductions of ‘commie tat’ alongside actual DDR antiques from the 1970s and 1980s, digital culture has led to a vast acceleration of cultural references to these figures. Images of all four have been digitised to appear on T-shirts, stickers, tattoos, toilet paper and novelty candles, not to mention memes, where they stand in (problematically) for leftward political leaning in general – their historical particularities, distinct ideologies and (in some cases) atrocities subsumed into the flow of commodification. Facing these tangled ironies, Castorf and Denic have imagined such a monument cast in stone rather than pixels. The design is dominating yet provisional, with the scaffolding marking it as a building site or work in progress, in the process of either construction or restoration. Aside from creating the artistic impression of a temporary structure on its way to permanence, the audience also knows (in the frame of attending Bayreuth) that the structure is temporary in actuality: the stones cannot possibly be solid, but must be the work of scene painters and set dressers. Finally, it is unmissable that this design is appearing not just in any theatre, but in the theatre that originated the Wagnerian concept of Gesamtkunstwerk, of a fusion of music, drama, literature, visual art and myth that would generate sufficient power to elevate humanity.9 Intended as an intervention, the production was received as such. The 2013 premiere of the first part of the cycle led to some of the most adverse audience and critical reactions in the history of the festival (for Castorf and his creative team, not the musicians).10 Opera audiences who had cultivated lifelong passion for Wagner’s music as an auditory experience found themselves colliding suddenly with the politicised

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aesthetics of the German contemporary theatre, where Castorf was regarded as a master. But where is the strict difference between opera and theatre today, formally speaking? When artists and audiences move freely between them, it underscores a slippage in genre: this is ‘opera’ by virtue of it being Wagner at Bayreuth, yet it is also ‘theatre’ because of who Castorf is and how he works, and audiences sought to separate these in the moment of reception (to little avail).11 The image raises questions of ideological stability, a second slippage: is this Ring set in the ‘West’ or the ‘East’, and what would those words mean in this context? Is this image (or another in the cycle set in a Caspian oil field) redolent of capitalism or communism? If a German audience member identifies with Wagner’s tale as a fundamentally national one (noting, of course, the dark history and uses to which Wagner was put in the twentieth century), but also identifies as a liberal democrat, is that coherent? And is the director’s Marxism any less indigenously German than Wagner’s Ring? ‘Slippage’ has two other definitions that dovetail nicely with the project of this final section: one from the ‘outer world’ of capitalist flow (where now?), and one from the ‘inner world’ of the mind (who now?). In economics and finance, the word denotes a change in price between an asset’s expected sale value in the market and the actual price at which it is sold (whether positive or negative change – the same term can be used).12 Clearly, the ‘value’ of selecting Castorf to direct at Bayreuth did not trade initially on the cultural market at the anticipated rate, but his productions may also ‘appreciate’ over time – sometimes controversy can be good for canonicity, as any student of modernism knows. How we should value the work of art (or the work of artists) remains one of the most salient questions today for the cultural sector, in a time marked by the continued dominance of capitalist systems, ongoing ecological disasters and growing inequality. At the individual level, ‘cognitive slippage’ is a diagnostic term in psychology for a range of ‘formal thought disorders’ that manifest through the unusual use of language, generally with concepts that are in fact related, but not in a consistent or anticipated way. For a person experiencing cognitive slippage, standard linguistic or structural categories give way: one idea or word might arise within one category, but then lead to another idea within the same series that does not ‘belong’ in that same category despite being related (the series Castorf, Stalin, Mao, Warhol, Lenin, Yoko, Marx, Duck Soup, Ibsen, Vinge and Müller, for example).13 Associated with schizotypal diagnoses and alogia in patients with dementia, it arises from the inability to disregard exogenous connections.14 But while twentieth-century diagnostic criteria were busily formalising scales to identify such slippage as maladaptive, modernism (and postmodernism) used cognitive slippage extensively as a creative tool, wielded to great effect by the surrealists in their critique of rationality. Alogia, language games, structural non-conformism and category resistance are also, practically and politically, modernist. Both types of slippage – market and cognitive – have to do with expectations undergoing revaluation and categories collapsing or liquefying, often because of factors in the environment. It is this same collapse of stability (and the quest to stabilise chaos back into order) that has been a through-line of modernity up to the present, creating the initial conditions for aesthetic modernism as well as the durability of its tactics and insights today. Though the strategies and technologies of working in the ruins of old order have changed, the structural feature of ‘slippage’ has emerged repeatedly – notably, both modernity and postmodernity have been previously theorised as solids turning into liquids, beginning in the mid-nineteenth century. One of

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the most famous metaphors in the 1848 Communist Manifesto was the call by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels to ‘melt the solids’, but Zygmunt Bauman rightly points out that the nineteenth-century solution was to replace what had been destroyed with different solids.15 Bauman coined the term ‘liquid modernity’ in the 1990s as a way out of what he already perceived as the blind alley of ‘postmodernism’ as a term. Through the metaphor of liquidity and ‘lightness’, he sought to revise five (or six?) ‘orthodox narratives of the human condition’: emancipation, individuality, time/space, work and community.16 Since the creative arts productively develop within, and respond to, these same categories, it should come as no surprise that the parameters of aesthetic modernism are continually subjected to questioning and revision. The authors appearing in this section have been invited to reflect on how a more liquid cultural space has practically brought modernism into contemporary performance. Presenting a blend of examples that trouble or exceed traditional categories, the chapters put emphasis on assorted temporal, regional, generic, technological, philosophical and political slippages (including in what constitutes ‘theatre’, ‘modernism’ or ‘contemporary’ as such). In the opening chapter, Penny Farfan elaborates the thorny questions of adaptation and gender invoked by Ages of Arousal, a 2007 play by Linda Griffiths. The chapter draws extensively on the Canadian playwright’s own dramaturgical notes and paratextual commentary, revealing the inner workings of an artistic process that Griffiths describes as not an ‘adaptation’ of George Gissing’s novel The Odd Women (1893), but rather a ‘dance of thievery and creativity’ with the author. In her ‘restaging of feminist history in her early twenty-first-century adaptation of Gissing’s nineteenthcentury novel’, Farfan argues, ‘A processual and provisional utopian performative emerges [. . .] In turn, that performative foregrounds the processual and utopian nature of adaptation as it evolves stories to new critical contexts through the dual gesture of replication and transformation.’ Farfan’s chapter reads closely into a single example of performance to extrapolate a feminist dramaturgical poetics, poking more holes in the porous wall between novel and drama in the process. In a contrasting approach, the second chapter seeks to map the contemporary progress of a vast theoretical and terminological debate, namely the question of what ‘avant-garde’ means today. Sascha Bru, a leading voice in avant-garde studies, provides a rich overview of recent debates, developments and practices in how the term is understood, applied and taught, reflecting particularly on its relation to ‘modernism/modernity’ and the discourse of the ‘postmodern’ or the ‘contemporary’. For maximal accessibility and to bring the voice of Bru as a teacher/presenter to the fore, the chapter is structured as a dialogue, but is also annotated with a robust set of scholarly sources from this rich sub-field. Blending the styles of scholarly performance analysis and dialogue with practitioners is the third chapter of Part IV, ‘Brecht as Slippage’, by Ramona Mosse. Mosse analyses a 2020 piece by the German performance collective Interrobang, entitled Philosophiermaschine (The Philosophising Machine), a participatory experience in which audience members are invited to take self-guided journeys through archival recordings of philosophers Hannah Arendt, Karl Jaspers and others. Mosse writes that ‘Interrobang’s performances explore the underlying structures of contemporary society by developing participatory performance formats and theatrical installations that combine “game, fiction and narration”’, noting particularly this project’s blended use of analogue and digital technologies and its indebtedness to Bertolt Brecht and Heiner Müller. In a metagesture worthy of the performance under discussion, Mosse’s essay concludes with a

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‘recording’ of her own, in which Interrobang’s co-artistic directors Nina Tecklenburg and Tillmann Müller-Klug speak in their own voices. The next two chapters are ‘practitioner voices’, also styled as dialogues, that seek to recover and re-elevate features of modernism in contemporary performance that have fallen outside of critical discourse or that trouble existing categories. The first of these is a dialogue between Şahika Tekand and Burç İdem Dinçel exploring the groundbreaking work of Studio Oyuncuları from Istanbul, Turkey, which has reworked classics from Beckett to Greek tragedy, as well as developing a training method under the name ‘performative staging and acting’. As well as linking her work to modernism and its convoluted legacy in Turkey, Tekand thinks critically about how her work and its reception reveal the ‘hegemonic mindset that regulates the policies of the culture industry’, which she calls a ‘flawless apparatus of this dominant system’ rooted in a West that constructs Turkey as East (and thereby still subordinate), even though it bridges the European and Asian continents. Following Tekand is a discussion with the Irish designer Aedín Cosgrove, perhaps best known for her role as co-artistic director of Pan Pan, one of the most significant, prolific and experimental Irish theatre companies of the past three decades. Cosgrove’s testimony stresses the importance of considering scenographic and design praxis, often under-served in a modernist canon that valorises directors, playwrights and authors of manifestos. She also speaks to the ‘slippage’ from modernism to the contemporary in visual terms, revealing the roots of some of her ideas in art history; the chapter is extensively illustrated with her designs. Consolidating and extrapolating from the thread of Beckett in contemporary performance that both Tekand and Cosgrove inaugurate, my own essay ‘Samuel Beckett and Border Thinking’ considers wideranging interdisciplinary questions around the intermedial legacy of Beckett and its assorted boundaries. Considering both Beckett and his work as migrants, the essay is structured around four definitions of interior and exterior borders, linking the ongoing epistemic violence of ‘centre/periphery’ constructions in cultural production with the actual violence entailed in contemporary immigration policies. The chapter invokes the decolonial theories of Gloria Anzaldúa, Walter Mignolo and Madina Tlostanova to consider how the ‘rigidities’ of firm lines in Beckettian praxis might be rethought, presenting some outcomes of practice-as-research conducted with the Samuel Beckett Laboratory (the 2018–19 ‘Mapping Beckett’ workshops in Poland), as well as analysing the boundary-defying work May B (1981/2021) by Compagnie Maguy Marin. To finish the section, Kevin Bell offers a musically written rereading of Adrienne Kennedy, who in his telling ‘narrates the scene of writing as a material takedown of “consciousness”’. Noting her deployment of deep subtextual sources, ‘whether familial, literary, cinematic or pop-cultural’, Bell shows how Kennedy’s writing (especially writing about writing) might ‘momentarily dislodge from the industrial network of racial–capitalist valuation that informs their every gesture of their absolute aloneness within that network’. Ending with a discussion of the underanalysed play An Evening with Dead Essex from 1973, Bell shows how a modernist futurity remains inscribed (yet still unstable) in Kennedy’s slippages between fact and fiction, theatre and media. He writes: Whatever sense of ‘identity’ emerges through Kennedy’s plays is both more and less than the exercise in subjective fragmentation and identification meditated upon so

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obsessively by Kennedy scholars. It is an unrelenting interrogation and outcome of the suffusion of textual, filmic and other mediatic transmissions and implantations that (over)determine and (dis)organise such identifications. Despite being selected for their heterogeneity of approach, the diverse voices of scholars and artists (and scholar-artists/artist-scholars, translator-teachers, thinker-nomads, hyphenate-hyphenates . . .) collected here often echo one another. Their desire to render the more complex diagnosis, their attention to the politics of aesthetics, their questioning of social and epistemic justice, their breadth and depth of reference: all point toward a collective resistance to the reification and commodification of modernism. They hint instead at its liquefaction, of a modernism flowing and perhaps flooding today’s culture, rising and mingling and irreversibly inhabiting whatever new vessels we devise. Where artificial borders have been drawn, they do not plant a flag on one side or the other: they hang bunting over the line. When? Now.

Notes   1. Samuel Beckett, The Unnamable, ed. Steven Connor (London: Faber and Faber, 2010), 1. Beckett’s original French text opens with the questions in a different order: ‘Où maintenant? Quand maintenant? Qui maintenant?’ See Samuel Beckett, L’Innomable (Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1953), 7.   2. Quoted in Colin Duckworth, ed., A Casebook on ‘Waiting for Godot’ (New York: Grove Press, 1967), 89.   3. For a discussion of how Beckett has been endlessly reclassified in terms of modernism, see Shane Weller, ‘Samuel Beckett and Late Modernism’, in The New Cambridge Companion to Samuel Beckett, ed. Dirk Van Hulle (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 89–102.  4. ‘On what “table”, according to what grid of identities, similitudes, analogies, have we become accustomed to sort out so many different and similar things? What is this coherence – which, as is immediately apparent, is neither determined by an a priori and necessary concatenation, nor imposed on us by immediately perceptible contents?’ Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (New York: Vintage, 1994 [1971]).   5. Dwight Conquergood, ‘Performance Studies: Interventions and Radical Research’, TDR 46, no. 2 (Summer 2002): 153.   6. Fredric Jameson, The Modernist Papers (London: Verso, 2007), xiii.   7. Castorf’s directing is a signal example of ‘plethora’ and ‘extremes’ in Lehmann’s description. See Hans-Thies Lehmann, Postdramatic Theatre, trans. Karen Jürs-Munby (London and New York: Routledge, 2006), 90–1.   8. Ibid. 122.   9. For more on how Wagner’s idea of Gesamtkunstwerk lured many – including his former critics like F. T. Marinetti, who ultimately widened its scope to include city life (sports, fashion and architecture) – with this ‘humane’ rationale, see Walter L. Adamson, Embattled Avant-Gardes: Modernism’s Resistance to Commodity Culture in Europe (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007). 10. Even in a German operatic tradition where booing is not uncommon, these were torrents of opprobrium by all accounts, greedily drunken in by a smiling Castorf over the course of ten minutes during the curtain call. See Martin Kettle, ‘Castorf Has Become the Villain of the Bayreuth Ring Cycle’, The Guardian, 2 August 2013, https://www.theguardian.com/ music/musicblog/2013/aug/02/frank-castorf-bayreuth-ring-cycle (accessed 5 May 2022).

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11. In the context of modernism, generic slippage between theatre, opera, music, ballet and visual art has a long tradition: it reaches back at least to the work of Alexey Kruchenykh, Mikhail Matyuchin and Kazimir Malevich in Victory over the Sun (1913) and the collaboration between Erik Satie, Pablo Picasso and Jean Cocteau with the Ballets Russes on Parade (1917). In the German context, Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht are key innovators of the Songspiel that raised related questions of hybridity and instability in genre. See Stephen Hinton, Weill’s Musical Theater: Stages of Reform (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012). For a good summary (in English) of the extensive critical discourse around Wagner and genre, see Nikolaus Bacht, ed., Music, Theatre and Politics in Germany: 1848 to the Third Reich (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006); Matthew BribitzerStull, Alex Lubet and Gottfried Wagner, eds, Richard Wagner for the New Millennium (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007); John Deathridge, Wagner Beyond Good and Evil (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008). 12. See Adam Hayes, ‘Slippage’, Investopedia, https://www.investopedia.com/terms/s/slippage. asp# (accessed 25 July 2022). 13. Whimsical though the series is, the final relational leap between Ibsen and his most radical contemporary interpreters (Vegard Vinge and Ida Müller) reveals something important about how slippage might operate in theatrical terms: Despite its intertextuality and wild alteration of the plays’ dialogue and structures, Vinge and Müller’s work is distinct from preceding post-modern, deconstructive Ibsen productions. Utilizing the aesthetic tropes developed by those experimental traditions – repetition, collage, temporal distortion, the intrusion of the ‘real’ – what Hans-Thies Lehmann has broadly termed ‘postdramatic theatre’ – Vinge and Müller are distinct in that they employ these tactics not to deconstruct but rather to mythologize Ibsen as the lynchpin in an unending continuum of grand narratives, linking the modern to the contemporary and beyond. To illustrate this continuity, the plays’ themes are expressed through historical and contemporary characters and narratives drawn from television, opera, film, theatre, literature, and popular music and culture. Despite the eclecticism of references, each has its origin, either materially or thematically, in the author’s texts. These elements combine in a dramatic landscape governed by what Raymond Williams identifies as the crux of Ibsen’s work: the duality of the modern subject who is impelled by his or her individuality but who is inevitably crushed by the weight of cultural inheritance.

See Andrew Friedman, ‘A Twenty-First Century Ibsen: Vegard Vinge and Ida Müller’s IbsenSaga’, Ibsen News and Comment 33 (2013): 3, https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.2307/26575889 (accessed 14 October 2022). Emphasis added. 14. See Paul E. Meehl, ‘Schizotaxia, Schizotypy, Schizophrenia’, American Psychologist 17, no. 12 (1962): 827–38, doi:10.1037/h0041029. 15. See Zygmunt Bauman, Liquid Modernity (Cambridge: Polity, 2000), 4, 143. 16. Ibid. 8.

Works Cited Adamson, Walter L. Embattled Avant-Gardes: Modernism’s Resistance to Commodity Culture in Europe. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007. Bacht, Nikolaus, ed. Music, Theatre and Politics in Germany: 1848 to the Third Reich. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006. Bauman, Zygmunt. Liquid Modernity. Cambridge: Polity, 2000. Beckett, Samuel. L’Innomable. Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1953.

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Beckett, Samuel. The Unnamable. Edited by Steven Connor. London: Faber and Faber, 2010. Bribitzer-Stull, Matthew, Alex Lubet and Gottfried Wagner, eds. Richard Wagner for the New Millennium. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. Conquergood, Dwight. ‘Performance Studies: Interventions and Radical Research’. TDR 46, no. 2 (Summer 2002): 145–56. Deathridge, John. Wagner Beyond Good and Evil. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008. Duckworth, Colin, ed. A Casebook on ‘Waiting for Godot’. New York: Grove Press, 1967. Foucault, Michel. The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences. New York: Vintage, 1994 [1971]. Friedman, Andrew. ‘A Twenty-First Century Ibsen: Vegard Vinge and Ida Müller’s IbsenSaga’. Ibsen News and Comment 33 (2013): 3–8. https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.2307/26575889 (accessed 14 October 2022). Hayes, Adam. ‘Slippage’. Investopedia. https://www.investopedia.com/terms/s/slippage.asp# (accessed 25 July 2022). Hinton, Stephen. Weill’s Musical Theater: Stages of Reform. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012. Jameson, Fredric. The Modernist Papers. London: Verso, 2007. Kettle, Martin. ‘Castorf Has Become the Villain of the Bayreuth Ring Cycle’. The Guardian, 2 August 2013. https://www.theguardian.com/music/musicblog/2013/aug/02/frank-castorfbayreuth-ring-cycle (accessed 5 May 2022). Lehmann, Hans-Thies. Postdramatic Theatre. Translated by Karen Jürs-Munby. London and New York: Routledge, 2006. Meehl, Paul E. ‘Schizotaxia, Schizotypy, Schizophrenia’. American Psychologist 17, no. 12 (1962): 827–38. doi:10.1037/h0041029. Weller, Shane. ‘Samuel Beckett and Late Modernism’. In The New Cambridge Companion to Samuel Beckett, edited by Dirk Van Hulle, 89–102. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015.

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26 Ages of Arousal Penny Farfan

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anadian playwright Linda Griffiths’s Age of Arousal (2007) is recognisably based on George Gissing’s novel The Odd Women (1893), yet she described her play as ‘wildly inspired’ by Gissing’s text rather than an adaptation of it.1 Griffiths’s resistance to categorising Age of Arousal as an adaptation may be explained in part by her ambivalence about the Merchant Ivory production company’s popular movie adaptations of classic British and American novels. Recalling her research process for Age of Arousal, she wrote of ‘dreaming [her] way through many hours of perfectly produced costume drama’ while ‘[feeling] guilty at the same time’: The lack of edge, the sometimes saccharine devotion to form. No matter how well these dramas serve the original authors, it’s hard to get a sense of the groundbreaking nature of their work through the mists of time. It all looks so . . . acceptable. I was determined that Age of Arousal would blast past reverence into new territory.2 To recapture something of the original newness of Gissing’s novel about the emergence of modern gender roles and related ideas about female sexuality in the late nineteenth century, Griffiths chose to foreground sex in a more explicit way than was possible for Gissing as a writer bound by the social and literary conventions of his time.3 She also wanted to correct some residual misogyny that she perceived in Gissing’s text, despite his extraordinary accomplishment in portraying so many central female characters together in a single work. In Griffiths’s note at the start of the published text of Age of Arousal, she describes her approach to Gissing’s novel as taking ‘his basic characters and situation and leap[ing] off a cliff’ that she was ‘dying to leap off’. Her writing of Age of Arousal was, in her words, a ‘dance of thievery and creativity [. . .] danced with Gissing floating above, patron saint or appalled spectre’.4 In A Theory of Adaptation, Linda Hutcheon notes a critical tendency to view popular adaptations of canonical literary works as ‘inferior and secondary’ to their source texts.5 This paradigm aligns with Griffiths’s ambivalence about Merchant Ivory-style movie adaptations, yet Hutcheon also posits an alternative view of adaptation that resonates with Griffiths’s description of her work on Age of Arousal as involving both thievery and creativity. Adaptation, Hutcheon argues, is a ‘palimpsestic’ art that acknowledges the source text but is also inevitably a departure from it. An adaptation is thus double in nature: both ‘process and product’, interpretation and creation, persistence and change, ‘repetition without replication’, ‘a derivation that is not derivative—a work that is second without being secondary’. Approaching ‘adaptations

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as adaptations’, Hutcheon proposes, entails engaging this ‘double nature’ and also recognising that adaptations pay homage to but may also contest their source texts.6 While Griffiths resists categorising Age of Arousal as an adaptation in order to justify her departure from Gissing’s novel and differentiate her play from its source, her programme note for the play’s premiere at the Enbridge playRites Festival of New Canadian Plays at Alberta Theatre Projects in Calgary in 2007, and also the substantial playwright’s note and research essay with which she chose to frame the published text, make clear that the play is in fact an adaptation in precisely the double sense that Hutcheon theorises. In this chapter, I resist Griffiths’s resistance to categorising Age of Arousal as an adaptation and instead, following Hutcheon, approach the play as an adaptation in order to understand it as at once an interpretation of a prior text and a distinct creation in its own right. Expanding on Griffiths’s claim that her primary intervention in relation to The Odd Women was to add ‘the element of sex’, about which Victorian standards of decorum precluded explicit discourse for both Gissing and his characters,7 I reflect more broadly on how her play plays with time, and particularly with feminism’s times. Exemplary of the double nature that Hutcheon identifies as fundamental to adaptations, Griffiths’s adaptation revisits Gissing’s novel through what she calls her ‘time travel’8 across several key ‘ages of arousal’ in the interlinked personal and political senses definitive of feminism. In doing so, the play raises questions about the status and future of feminism in Griffiths’s own present/historical moment (circa 2007) and about Griffiths herself as the interpreter/creator of Age of Arousal, an adaptation of a canonical nineteenth-century text. As an adaptation, I argue, Age of Arousal is palimpsestic not only in its relation to The Odd Women but also in its relation to the history of feminism. The Odd Women is one of a cluster of British ‘New Woman’ novels of the 1890s that arose in response to a historical moment when women were believed to outnumber men and those who were unpaired with a husband were perceived as ‘superfluous’ or –  in Gissing’s words about the central characters of his novel – ‘odd in the sense that they do not make a match; as we say “an odd glove”’.9 The idea of the ‘odd woman’ was closely related to the emergence of the cultural figure of the so-called ‘New Woman’ in the 1880s and 1890s, a period of what Gissing regarded as ‘sexual anarchy’ during which unmarried middle-class women upset the prevailing social order as they began to experience financial independence through employment outside the home and, with it, greater personal autonomy.10 The ‘oddness’ of being unpaired with a husband and thus outside the ideal of middle-class womanhood took on sexual resonances as unmarried women explored alternative relationships beyond the bounds of heterosexual marriage and the patriarchal nuclear family.11 In Gissing’s novel, Mary Barfoot and Rhoda Nunn are cohabiting friends and colleagues who together operate a school that provides professional training, including typewriting, to unmarried middle-class women experiencing financial difficulties. The return of Mary’s cousin Everard from abroad complicates Mary and Rhoda’s relationship, awakening in the younger and financially less secure Rhoda a romantic desire that threatens to unsettle her commitment to exemplifying for her ‘odd women’ students the possibility of leading a fulfilling life outside of marriage.12 Everard is attracted to Rhoda because her progressive thinking as a New Woman makes her not only a more interesting female companion, but also a more challenging sexual conquest, particularly given her ‘nun’-like aspects. Over the course of the novel, his

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attachment to Rhoda develops to the point that he proposes to her, initially suggesting a free union to test the completeness of her devotion to him and then revising his offer to legal marriage. Everard and Rhoda’s efforts to form an ideal relationship are complicated, however, by their own ingrained concerns about power, dominance and trust between men and women, and these concerns are intensified by a secondary plot line arising from Rhoda’s offer to provide secretarial training to three acquaintances from childhood, the unmarried sisters Alice, Virginia and Monica Madden, who have fallen on hard financial times following the death of their father. The Madden sisters prove to be less-than-ideal students, particularly Monica, the youngest and prettiest of the three and therefore the one with the best prospects of marriage. Monica marries securely but unhappily and falls into an illicit relationship with another man before realising her misjudgement of her lover’s character and also that she is pregnant by her husband. Through an unfortunate chance, Everard is mistakenly presumed by Rhoda to be Monica’s lover, but he refuses to prove his innocence, demanding instead that Rhoda trust him completely. Monica, soon to die in childbirth, clears Everard of any part in her downfall, yet Rhoda still finds herself unable to trust him fully or to see how their relationship can match her ideal, whether within or outside of the institution of marriage. Their relationship ends, and at the close of the novel, Rhoda, now forever ‘odd’ but flourishing in her work, cradles Monica’s orphaned daughter, who has been left by her father to be raised by her aunts. In the novel’s final sentence, Rhoda, having seen something of Monica in the baby’s eyes, murmurs, ‘Poor little child’.13 Patricia Ingham has likened The Odd Women to a maze that winds its way through the intersections of gender, sexuality and class as they play out in relation to the institution of marriage, arguing that while the novel ends in an impasse on every issue it confronts, ‘the impasse reflects not stasis but turbulence out of which change can result’.14 The ideal relationship of equality and trust between man and woman – what Nora in Henrik Ibsen’s foundational ‘New Woman’ play A Doll’s House (1879) refers to as ‘the miracle of miracles’15 – remains in the future. In Age of Arousal, Griffiths reduces Gissing’s larger cast of characters to six – Rhoda, Mary, Everard, Monica, Virginia and Alice – dropping Monica’s husband, along with a number of minor characters and subplots that echo the novel’s main plots and themes. Foregrounding sexuality to create what Jerry Wasserman has called ‘an erotic portrait of a turbulent era’,16 Griffiths also transforms the homosocial relationship between Mary and Rhoda into a lesbian one; makes Everard a gynaecologist rather than an engineer and involves him in a sexual relationship with Monica; portrays Monica as a ‘multi-amorous’ pioneer of ‘free lovism’ who embarks on a personal campaign for ‘erotical freedoms’ that is doomed by the lack of adequate birth control;17 and has Virginia travel to Germany – hotbed of early sexology research, including on transvestism18 – where she discovers freedom in cross-dressing and communing with other crossdressing women, gaining control of her alcoholism until she returns to England and resumes dressing as a woman in compliance with conventional expectations regarding gender and sexuality.19 Even readers and spectators who are not familiar with the plot and characters of The Odd Women will recognise the departure of Age of Arousal from Victorian literary convention through Griffiths’s use of what she calls ‘thoughtspeak’ –  essentially giving voice to the subtext as she extrapolates it from Gissing or invents it herself, often articulating sexual content unspeakable in the characters’ social context, where decorum is crucial, as it was in Gissing’s own literary-historical moment as a

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writer. These ‘wild uncensored outpourings’ register as anachronistic, yet at the same time, despite being more explicit than was possible for Gissing and his characters, they retain traces of the original historical context of the novel, for example, through the use of quaint and comical terms like ‘doodle’ and ‘quim’ for male and female genitals respectively.20 While such changes foreground ‘the element of sex’ that Griffiths identified as her key intervention in adapting Gissing’s novel, her most significant revision may in fact be the time in which she chose to set her play. Age of Arousal takes place in 1885, yet the play’s opening scene, entitled ‘The Dream’, establishes sixty-year-old Mary Barfoot as a former suffragist who is haunted by her past experience of forced feeding to end her hunger strike during her imprisonment for militant suffrage activism and who has retreated from direct political struggle to found her school for women. In the ‘Time Travel’ section of her essay on her research for the play, Griffiths explains that in Age of Arousal, time is collapsed, inverted, stomped on, in an effort to straddle important points in Britain’s struggle for women’s rights. It’s all true, just rearranged. The play is set in 1885. The time period that encompasses all aspects of the play is from 1869 to 1914. Forty-five years. Adding that while ‘the militant feminist movement [. . .] arguably began with the first arrest in 1905’, she explains that she wanted her play to be ‘set in deep Victoriana’, with ‘the fusty velvets, the tight corsets, the claustrophobia of a world about to ignite’, so that ‘a blast of modernity’ would ‘come from underneath the dust bunnies of Victorian England’.21 Mary’s dream of her prison experience is thus in a larger sense Griffiths’s own ‘idea’ or ‘dream of Victorian England’ – a ‘fabulist construct’ or fantasy premised on Gissing’s text yet comparable in its time-travelling to science fiction.22 Griffiths’s revision of historical chronology links her seemingly primary focus on ‘the sexual lives of the women’23 in Age of Arousal to the history of feminism, opening onto larger questions about the status of feminism not only in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries but also at the time of her adaptation of Gissing’s novel in the early twenty-first century. In theorising adaptation, Hutcheon draws on the scientific analogy of Darwinian evolution, ‘where genetic adaptation is presented as the biological process by which something is fitted to a given environment’. In doing so, Hutcheon proposes ‘think[ing] of narrative adaptation in terms of a story’s fit and its process of mutation or adjustment, through adaptation, to a particular cultural environment’. As she explains, ‘Stories also evolve by adaptation and are not immutable over time. Sometimes, like biological adaptation, cultural adaptation involves migration to favorable conditions: stories travel to different cultures and different media. In short, stories adapt just as they are adapted.’24 In Adaptation and Appropriation, Julie Sanders similarly likens the transformation of source texts through the process of adaptation to a kind of genetic adaptation.25 She notes, moreover, that adaptations are often motivated or influenced ‘by movements in, and readings produced by, the theoretical and intellectual arena as much as by their so-called sources’, and she lists feminist and queer theory among other critical developments informing contemporary adaptations.26 Sanders’s observation resonates with Griffiths’s remark that as she worked on Age of Arousal, her ‘research on the women’s suffrage movement and the Victorian

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age took precedence’ over Gissing’s novel, which she began deliberately to avoid, ‘refusing to read it again’.27 It is certainly unusual for a play to include not only a lengthy playwright’s note but also a research essay and an annotated bibliography of suggested titles for further reading, yet that is how Griffiths chose to frame the published text of Age of Arousal. Her research essay ranges across such topics as Victorian gender norms and sexual ideology, the institution of marriage, spinsters and lesbians, the male-dominated medical profession, and the suffrage movement, and while her bibliography includes maleauthored cultural studies such as Steven Marcus’s The Other Victorians: A Study of Sexuality and Pornography in Mid-Nineteenth-Century England, it is most heavily weighted towards feminist historiography of the 1970s and 1980s. For example, Susan Kingsley Kent’s Sex and Suffrage in Britain 1860–1914 (1987) is identified by Griffiths as a crucial resource for her research and is annotated in her bibliography as follows: Without a doubt the most brilliant of all the books I read. A main source for an understanding of feminist thought at the time and the philosophies that opposed them. Especially good on the pre-militant movements of 1860 to 1906.28 The bibliography also includes a section on ‘Modern Theory’29 by second-wave feminists like Germaine Greer, a few of whose words, Griffiths admits in the notes at the end of her essay,30 were actually incorporated into the dialogue of Age of Arousal.31 Griffiths’s restaging of proto- and first-wave feminism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was thus informed by, and filtered through, key texts of second-wave feminist historiography and literary and cultural criticism. In this way, her play quite literally reflects Katherine Kelly’s observation of ‘an affinity between the thinking of Western feminist historiographers from the 1970s forward and the creative work of [. . .] feminist playwrights who have used the drama to “make the bones sing”’ – that is, ‘to recover the silenced histories of women’ and ‘reimagine women’s past lives as a first step toward living a more just present and future’.32 As Griffiths’s research process for Age of Arousal illustrates, feminist historiography has made women’s and feminist history available as ‘a useable past’ for women theatre artists and their audiences in what Kelly describes as ‘a selective retrieval of past events that, from the vantage point of the present, opened a door – perhaps briefly – on the possibility of building a women’s community’.33 Jerry Wasserman has pointed out that Griffiths was ‘one of the few Canadian playwrights to have emerged in the 1970s and remained active well into the twentyfirst century’.34 Griffiths might thus be seen to have played a part in the emergence of the second wave of feminism that motivated much of the research that she drew upon in writing Age of Arousal. Beyond her acclaimed gender-shifting solo performance Maggie and Pierre (1980), about Canadian prime minister Pierre Elliott Trudeau, his wife Margaret Sinclair Trudeau and a fictional reporter captivated by their relationship, Griffiths’s early work included playing the title role in John Sayles’s 1983 film Lianna, about a woman who leaves her husband when she discovers her lesbian sexuality and who subsequently revels in, but also struggles with, the social realities of her new identity. Griffiths also performed in celebrated feminist playwright Caryl Churchill’s Fen at the Public Theater in New York in 1984, and her own later dramatic canon includes a number of plays centring on female characters, most notably Jessica (originally developed in 1982 with Maria Campbell and Paul

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Thompson; revised in 1986), The Duchess: AKA Wallis Simpson (1998) and Alien Creature: A Visitation from Gwendolyn MacEwen (1999). While Age of Arousal is informed by second-wave feminist historiography, theory and criticism, it was written in the early twenty-first century from the perspective of third-wave feminism. As Kelly states, Griffiths ‘reimagine[d] the first wave through the revisions of the third’, ‘acknowledging lesbian love and attending to class differences that first-wave feminists have been charged with having ignored’.35 Moreover, Kelly argues, by resequencing historical events in Age of Arousal so that the suffrage campaign pre-dates ‘New Woman events from the 1880s, such as the advent of typewriting and independent living for unmarried women’, Griffiths was able ‘to direct emphasis in the historical past’, ‘relegat[ing] the campaign for the vote to a heroic past and focus[ing] her characters’ energies on struggling for economic independence and sexual self-understanding, issues resonant with today’s audiences’.36 Kelly’s observation is certainly correct, yet Griffiths’s programme note for the 2007 premiere of the play at Alberta Theatre Projects in Calgary’s EPCOR Centre for the Performing Arts begins by acknowledging the feminists of the first wave and earlier as her ‘philosophical ancestors’ and ends by noting that ‘just outside the Epcor Centre is a sculpture dedicated to these ancestors – we walked by it every day on our way to rehearsals. It’s Nellie McClung and her gang, celebrating that, in 1929, women became legal “persons.”’37 Beyond subverting the subversion of historical chronology that distinguishes her play, in which first-wave political activism is made to pre-date the present action of the plot set in 1885, Griffiths here brought Age of Arousal and its seemingly historical gender and sexual politics into the present moment by locating the play in relation to contemporary Calgary, where the feminist past is a notable feature of the downtown landscape. Barbara Paterson’s bronze sculpture of the ‘Famous Five’ – McClung, Emily Murphy, Henrietta Muir Edwards, Louise McKinney and Irene Parlby, who together fought for women’s right to be recognised as ‘persons’ eligible to serve in the Canadian Senate – is prominently situated across from the Centre for the Performing Arts (now Arts Commons) and alongside Olympic Plaza on 8th Avenue, installed in 1999 to commemorate the seventieth anniversary of the women’s legal victory. As Kelly and Shelley Scott both note,38 the critical context for Griffiths’s adaptation of The Odd Women was third-wave feminism’s increased sensitivity to diversity and complex intersectional identities across gender, sexuality, class and race. Thus, whereas Gissing’s characters are all oriented, whether successfully or not, toward heterosexual relationships – including Mary, whom Gissing represents as having at one time been in love with her much younger cousin Everard and as initially being angry at and jealous of Rhoda’s developing relationship with him because of her own lingering romantic feelings – Griffiths represents a broader spectrum of sexual and gender identities. This spectrum ranges from Mary’s lesbianism; to Rhoda’s bisexuality; to Monica’s polyamorous desires encompassing Everard and other male lovers but also, seemingly, Mary (‘Flirting, can’t stop flirting, my body does it all by itself’); to Virginia’s cross-dressing; to Alice’s celibacy or asexuality (‘the sex act is not a necessity for everyone, not a necessity for me’).39 In Sexual Anarchy (1990), the title of which is borrowed from Gissing’s statement about his era, Elaine Showalter links nineteenth-century debates about odd women to comparable media-fuelled debates a century later about the toll exacted by second-wave feminism on women’s personal happiness and how women influenced

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by feminist advances risked becoming modern odd women, so to speak, by delaying marriage to establish their careers and in doing so compromising their ability to find husbands and experience motherhood.40 This conservative ‘backlash’ against the gains of second-wave feminism, documented by Susan Faludi in her 1991 bestselling book of that title, anticipated yet also differed from the neoliberal phenomenon of post-feminism that arose in the 1990s alongside the emergence of third-wave feminism. As defined by Angela McRobbie, post-feminism is ‘an active process by which feminist gains of the 1970s and 1980s come to be undermined’, with popular culture in particular being ‘perniciously effective in regard to this undoing of feminism, while simultaneously appearing to be engaging in a well-informed and even well-intended response to feminism’.41 McRobbie’s key example of post-feminist popular culture is Bridget Jones’s Diary, initially a newspaper column by Helen Fielding that traced the romantic trials of a thirtysomething singleton (odd woman) and later a bestselling novel (1996) in the chick-lit genre as well as a popular film adaptation (2001), both of which were followed by sequels. As McRobbie explains in her account of the operations of post-feminism, through ‘tropes of freedom and choice’ ascribed to ‘the category of “young women”, feminism is decisively aged and made to seem redundant’. In this way, she argues, post-feminism positively draws on and invokes feminism as that which can be taken into account, to suggest that equality is achieved, in order to install a whole repertoire of new meanings which emphasise that it is no longer needed, it is a spent force.42 At the end of her essay on her research for Age of Arousal, Griffiths admits to having sometimes felt ambivalent about being labelled a feminist. She acknowledges, however, that through her occasional small betrayals of feminism, she ‘cheated [her] own sense of self’.43 There is something uncomfortable in Griffiths’s choice in Age of Arousal to represent Mary and Rhoda as lovers only to have Rhoda find Mary to be not quite enough in the face of Everard’s masculine sex appeal,44 of which she becomes aware in the course of Griffiths’s invented scene of his gynaecological examination of Mary, and then to have Mary tacitly threaten to exercise her class privilege and economic power over Rhoda in order to hold on to her as a lover, thus killing Rhoda’s desire for her entirely. Nevertheless, Age of Arousal represents an important affirmation of feminist commitments and concerns, particularly against the context of post-feminism in popular culture in the 1990s through to the present.45 Like Lucas Hnath in his recent play A Doll’s House, Part 2 (2017), Griffiths ironises the idealism of Gissing’s nineteenth-century proto-feminists and her own twentyfirst-century transformation of them into first-wave feminists by having them envision their goals as achievable in the comparatively near future.46 In the final speech of Age of Arousal, Rhoda says first to Virginia and Alice, ‘The fire has been lit, it is burning through society with ferocious speed, no household is safe, the world is moving’, and then to Monica’s baby daughter, now named after her mother, ‘In thirty years, it will all be accomplished’.47 This closing line – seemingly so different from Gissing’s original ending – has sometimes been played for laughs, yet it might also be seen to have an air of wistfulness and melancholy,48 pointing toward a future moment for the characters (circa 1915) that is almost a century before the future occupied by the audiences of Griffiths’s

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play in 2007 – a future in which the extent of the attainment of the goals of her historical characters remained an open question. On the one hand, then, the play’s ending suggests an alternative model for raising children, with Virginia now ‘dashingly dressed in men’s clothing’ and the school that she and Alice dream of opening in Gissing’s novel presciently envisioned as ‘Day Time Care’.49 On the other hand, were she to live to be 100 years old, the orphaned baby girl to whom Rhoda’s forward-thinking final line is addressed would die in 1985, in the midst of feminism’s second wave. Griffiths herself died in September 2014, a month before the sexual assault scandal relating to Toronto-based CBC radio host Jian Ghomeshi broke in the news and on the cusp of a wave of sexual abuse and misconduct scandals in the film and media industries, as well as in the heart of Toronto’s theatre community.50 The #MeToo movement – an example of the use of social media for feminist activism that has been seen by some as indicative of feminism’s fourth wave51 – made patently clear that neither the sexual liberation nor the professional and financial autonomy of which Griffiths’s nineteenth-century characters dream has yet been fully attained.52 The ending of Age of Arousal might thus be understood less as a joke than as the essence of the play’s ‘fabulism’, to return to Griffiths’s previously cited term – a moment of ‘utopia in performance’ in Jill Dolan’s sense: that is, of utopia not as something already arrived at but, rather, as ‘always in process, always only partially grasped, as it disappears before us around the corners of narrative and social experience’.53 Age of Arousal’s ‘fabulous’ ending, gestically crystallising the ‘fable’ that is at play in the play, thus offers ‘fleeting intimations of a better world’54 that is utopic not only for Rhoda and for Monica’s baby in the context of the late nineteenth century, but also for Griffiths’s own contemporary and future audiences. Dolan writes that ‘performance’s simultaneity, its present-tenseness, uniquely suits it to probing the possibilities of utopia as a hopeful process that continually writes a different, better future’.55 Kelly’s description of the feminist history play genre suggests a similarly utopic dimension in women playwrights’ use of feminist historiography in theatrical restagings of women’s and feminist history: The feminist history play embodies a contradiction: it has emerged from a critical [. . .] response to oppression within and exclusion from the national story, but it is also skeptical of the completeness and truth of any historical narrative, including its own. Thus the feminist history play offers itself as a provisional, sometimes ironical, and often open-ended commentary on the desire to know the past, to inherit a past, and the likelihood that such knowledge and inheritance is imperfect.56 As noted previously, Hutcheon has pointed out that ‘stories adapt just as they are adapted’, while Sanders has observed that adaptations ‘frequently [. . .] adapt other adaptations’ and that adaptation is a kind of ‘incremental literature’.57 A processual and provisional utopian performative emerges through Griffiths’s poignantly ironic pointing toward a more perfect feminist future at the end of her restaging of feminist history in her early-twenty-first-century adaptation of Gissing’s nineteenthcentury novel. In turn, that performative foregrounds the processual and utopian nature of adaptation as it evolves stories to new critical contexts through the dual gesture of replication and transformation. This ironic looking forward from the end

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of Age of Arousal may in turn establish grounds for further adaptations of Gissing/ Griffiths in relation to as-yet-unknown future ages of feminist arousal.

Notes  1. Linda Griffiths, ‘Playwright’s Note’, in Age of Arousal (Toronto: Coach House Books, 2007), 8–9.   2. Linda Griffiths, ‘A Flagrantly Weird Age: A Reaction to Research, Time Travel and the History of the Suffragettes’, in Age of Arousal (Toronto: Coach House Books, 2007), 137.   3. Griffiths, ‘Playwright’s Note’, 10.   4. Ibid. 8.   5. Linda Hutcheon with Siobhan Flynn, A Theory of Adaptation, 2nd edn (London and New York: Routledge, 2013), 4.   6. Ibid. 9, 7, 9, 4, 6, 20.   7. Griffiths, ‘Playwright’s Note’, 10.   8. Griffiths, ‘A Flagrantly Weird Age’, 136–7.  9. Patricia Ingham, ‘Introduction’, in The Odd Women by George Gissing, ed. Patricia Ingham (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), vii; quoted in Elaine Showalter, Sexual Anarchy: Gender and Culture at the Fin de Siècle (New York: Viking, 1990), 19. 10. Quoted in Ingham, ‘Introduction’, xvii, and in Showalter, Sexual Anarchy, 3. 11. Ingham, ‘Introduction’, vii. 12. As Rhoda says, ‘My work involves not just teaching but being an odd woman.’ See Linda Griffiths, Age of Arousal (Toronto: Coach House Books, 2007), 99. 13. George Gissing, The Odd Women, ed. Patricia Ingham (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 371. 14. Ingham, ‘Introduction’, xix. 15. Henrik Ibsen, A Doll’s House, in Four Major Plays, trans. James McFarlane and Jens Arup (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 86. 16. Jerry Wasserman, ‘Linda Griffiths’, in Modern Canadian Plays, vol. 2, ed. Jerry Wasserman, 5th edn (Vancouver: Talonbooks, 2013), 387. 17. See Griffiths, Age of Arousal, 93, 94, 82. 18. German sexologist and homosexual rights advocate Magnus Hirschfeld (1868–1935), for example, did extensive research on ‘the third sex’ and ‘sexual inversion’ and is credited with having coined the term ‘transvestism’. See Jeffrey Weeks, Coming Out: Homosexual Politics in Britain from the Nineteenth Century to the Present (London: Quartet Books, 1977), 129. In Age of Arousal, Everard and Rhoda discuss the new science of sexology (68) and Virginia reveals that she got the idea of going to Berlin to ‘learn to smoke and wear trousers’ from pamphlets in Mary and Rhoda’s house (75). These references to sexology may be another dimension of Griffiths’s ‘time travel’, given that the field was still in its earliest stages in 1885 when Age of Arousal is set. Karl Heinrich Ulrichs’s studies had by then been published, but Hirschfeld’s work in the field began in the 1890s, as did that of British sexologist Havelock Ellis. Richard von Krafft-Ebing’s Psychopathia Sexualis was published in German in 1886. 19. Griffiths’s Virginia discovers in Berlin that she wants ‘to be a woman, yet dress as a man’ (111), but she remains uncertain about her sexual identity due to her fear of transgressing heterosexual norms. Explaining to her sister Alice why she returned to London, Virginia recalls, in a striking passage, an aborted moment of sexual contact with one of her Berlin friends: One night I shared a bed with one of them, which we often did for sisterly economy, but this night she reached out for me, I do not know what I felt, will never know, for I began to gasp. I looked down at the locket with Mother and Father’s hair intertwined

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and saw the hair was growing out of the locket ’round my heart, then around my throat, pulling tight, strangling me, Mother and Father and yes, you Alice and Monica were above me calling to me that I had betrayed you and as I lay there I knew it was so. I found myself beating my friend, my hands squeezing, throttling her neck, I nearly killed her. I left on the next train. (110) 20. Griffiths, ‘Playwright’s Note’, 13; Griffiths, Age of Arousal, 60, 93. 21. Griffiths, ‘A Flagrantly Weird Age’, 136. 22. Griffiths, ‘Playwright’s Note’, 12, 10–11. 23. Griffiths, ‘A Flagrantly Weird Age’, 138. 24. Hutcheon, A Theory of Adaptation, 31. 25. Julie Sanders, Adaptation and Appropriation (London and New York: Routledge, 2006), 12. 26. Ibid. 13. 27. Griffiths, ‘Playwright’s Note’, 9. 28. Linda Griffiths, ‘Further Reading’, in Age of Arousal (Toronto: Coach House Books, 2007), 169. Italics in original. 29. Ibid. 171. 30. Griffiths, ‘A Flagrantly Weird Age’, 167. 31. Griffiths refers to Greer, Betty Friedan and Kate Millett as ‘“first-wave” modern feminists’ (‘A Flagrantly Weird Age’, 137), by which she appears to mean that they were the early thinkers of feminism’s second wave in the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s, the actual first wave being in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and encompassing the campaign for women’s suffrage. 32. Katherine E. Kelly, ‘Making the Bones Sing: The Feminist History Play, 1976–2010’, in Contemporary Women Playwrights: Into the Twenty-First Century, ed. Penny Farfan and Lesley Ferris (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 199. Kelly’s essay title ‘Making the Bones Sing’ refers to Suzan-Lori Parks’s essay ‘Possession’. 33. Ibid. 206. 34. Wasserman, ‘Linda Griffiths’, 387. 35. Kelly, ‘Making the Bones Sing’, 207. 36. Ibid. 207. 37. Linda Griffiths, ‘Playwright’s Note: Age of Arousal’, programme, Enbridge playRites Festival of New Canadian Plays, Alberta Theatre Projects, EPCOR Centre for the Performing Arts, Calgary, 31 January–4 March 2007, 8. 38. Kelly, ‘Making the Bones Sing’, 207; Shelley Scott, ‘Sickness and Sexuality: Feminism and the Female Body in Age of Arousal and Chronic’, Theatre Research in Canada 31, no. 1 (2010): 41–2, 52. 39. Griffiths, Age of Arousal, 45, 100. Italics in original. 40. Showalter, Sexual Anarchy, 35–6; see also Scott, ‘Sickness and Sexuality’, 53. 41. Angela McRobbie, ‘Post-Feminism and Popular Culture’, Feminist Media Studies 4, no. 3 (2004): 255, doi:/10.1080/1468077042000309937. 42. Ibid. 255. 43. Griffiths, ‘A Flagrantly Weird Age’, 166. 44. Griffiths, ‘Playwright’s Note’, 19; see also Griffiths, Age of Arousal, 103. 45. See Rosalind Gill, ‘Post-postfeminism? New Feminist Visibilities in Postfeminist Times’, Feminist Media Studies 16, no. 4 (2016): 610–30, doi:10.1080/14680777.2016.1193293. 46. In Hnath’s sequel to Ibsen’s A Doll’s House, Nora returns to her husband Torvald’s house fifteen years after walking out on him because she needs to obtain the divorce that she mistakenly assumed he had arranged in the immediate aftermath of her departure. At the end of the play, she observes that in the years since she left her marriage, the world has not changed as much as she expected it would in terms of the attainment of freedom, but

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that it will some day and that she hopes she will live to see it. Married for eight years and the mother of three children in Ibsen’s original 1879 play, this older Nora, returning home circa 1894 and performed in the Broadway premiere by sixty-one-year-old actress Laurie Metcalf, would of course have been long dead by the time Hnath scripted her forwardlooking parting words in his 2017 play. 47. Griffiths, Age of Arousal, 133. 48. Jerry Wasserman’s observation that Rhoda’s closing line is one of Age of Arousal’s ‘biggest laugh lines in production’ (‘Linda Griffiths’, 390) is confirmed by Kevin Prokosh’s review of a 2009 production by Theatre Projects Manitoba, in which he states that ‘Griffiths has the last laugh with the parting joke about the inevitability of gender equality in the early 20th century’; ‘Play Wins Arousing Round of Applause’, Winnipeg Free Press, 21 March 2009, https://www.winnipegfreepress.com/arts-and-life/ entertainment/arts/play-wins-arousing-round-of-applause-41620357.html (accessed 17 October 2022). Similarly, Adrian Chamberlain’s preview of a 2017 production by Theatre Inconnu in Victoria, British Columbia, quotes director Wendy Merk as stating that the play ‘concludes on a cheekily ironic note, in which a character predicts all feminist battles soon will be won’; ‘Director Chose Linda Griffiths Play for Abundance of Female Roles’, Times Colonist (Victoria, BC), 16 February 2017, http://www.timescolonist.com/director-chose-linda-griffiths-play-for-abundance-of-female-roles-1.9970903 (accessed 17 October 2022). Calgary Herald critic Bob Clark’s comment that Age of Arousal ‘poignantly broadens to embrace the future’ suggests that the original production at Alberta Theatre Projects captured the more ambivalent tenor of Griffiths’s ending; ‘Griffiths Arouses Greatness: Comic Drama Witty, Inventive’, Calgary Herald, 17 February 2007. 49. Griffiths, Age of Arousal, 128, 130. Italics in original. 50. In early 2018, Albert Schultz stepped down as Artistic Director of Toronto’s Soulpepper Theatre in response to accusations of sexual assault and harassment alleged by four actresses to have occurred between 2000 and 2013. The Jian Ghomeshi story broke in the Toronto Star shortly after Ghomeshi himself announced on Facebook that he had been fired by the CBC for his involvement in rough sexual practices that he claimed were consensual; see Kevin Donovan and Jesse Brown, ‘CBC Fires Jian Ghomeshi over Sex Allegations’, Toronto Star, 26 October 2014, https://www.thestar.com/news/canada/2014/10/26/ cbc_fires_jian_ghomeshi_over_sex_allegations.html (accessed 17 October 2022). Criminal charges were laid against Ghomeshi relating to a number of incidents with different women that were alleged to have taken place between 2002 and 2008. Although acquitted of those charges at his trial in 2016, Ghomeshi later signed a peace bond and formally apologised to a separate complainant, Kathryn Borel, for sexually inappropriate behaviour at work at CBC between 2007 and 2010. 51. For a summary of the debate about whether social media activism constitutes a fourth feminist wave, see Gill, ‘Post-postfeminism?’, 613. 52. The #MeToo movement on Twitter arose in October 2017 in relation to the exposure of widespread sexual abuse of women over several decades by Hollywood movie producer Harvey Weinstein, which in turn gave rise to a wave of similar accusations against numerous other men. 53. Jill Dolan, Utopia in Performance: Finding Hope at the Theater (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2005), 6. 54. Ibid. 2. 55. Ibid. 13. 56. Kelly, ‘Making the Bones Sing’, 211–12. 57. Hutcheon, A Theory of Adaptation, 31; Sanders, Adaptation and Appropriation, 13, 12.

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Works Cited Chamberlain, Adrian. ‘Director Chose Linda Griffiths Play for Abundance of Female Roles’. Times Colonist (Victoria, BC), 16 February 2017. http://www.timescolonist.com/directorchose-linda-griffiths-play-for-abundance-of-female-roles-1.9970903 (accessed 17 October 2022). Clark, Bob. ‘Griffiths Arouses Greatness: Comic Drama Witty, Inventive’. Calgary Herald, 17 February 2007. Dolan, Jill. Utopia in Performance: Finding Hope at the Theater. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2005. Donovan, Kevin and Jesse Brown. ‘CBC Fires Jian Ghomeshi over Sex Allegations’. Toronto Star, 26 October 2014. https://www.thestar.com/news/canada/2014/10/26/cbc_fires_jian_ ghomeshi_over_sex_allegations.html (accessed 17 October 2022). Faludi, Susan. Backlash: The Undeclared War against American Women. New York: Anchor Books, 1991. Gill, Rosalind. ‘Post-postfeminism? New Feminist Visibilities in Postfeminist Times’. Feminist Media Studies 16, no. 4 (2016): 610–30. doi:10.1080/14680777.2016.1193293. Gissing, George. The Odd Women. Edited by Patricia Ingham. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000. Griffiths, Linda. Age of Arousal. Toronto: Coach House Books, 2007. Griffiths, Linda. ‘A Flagrantly Weird Age: A Reaction to Research, Time Travel and the History of the Suffragettes’. In Age of Arousal. 135–68. Toronto: Coach House Books, 2007. Griffiths, Linda. ‘Further Reading’. In Age of Arousal. 169–72. Toronto: Coach House Books, 2007. Griffiths, Linda. ‘Playwright’s Note’. In Age of Arousal. 8–22. Toronto: Coach House Books, 2007. Griffiths, Linda. ‘Playwright’s Note: Age of Arousal’. Programme, Enbridge playRites Festival of New Canadian Plays, Alberta Theatre Projects, EPCOR Centre for the Performing Arts, Calgary, 31 January–4 March 2007, 8. Hnath, Lucas. A Doll’s House, Part 2. New York: Theatre Communications Group, 2018. Hutcheon, Linda with Siobhan Flynn. A Theory of Adaptation. 2nd edn. London and New York: Routledge, 2013. ProQuest EBook Central. Ibsen, Henrik. A Doll’s House. 1879. Reprinted in Four Major Plays. Translated by James McFarlane and Jens Arup. 1–86. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008. Ingham, Patricia. ‘Introduction’. In The Odd Women, by George Gissing. Edited by Patricia Ingham. vii–xxv. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000. Kelly, Katherine E. ‘Making the Bones Sing: The Feminist History Play, 1976–2010’. In Contemporary Women Playwrights: Into the Twenty-First Century, edited by Penny Farfan and Lesley Ferris, 199–214. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. McRobbie, Angela. ‘Post-Feminism and Popular Culture’. Feminist Media Studies 4, no. 3 (2004): 255–64. doi:10.1080/1468077042000309937. Prokosh, Kevin. ‘Play Wins Arousing Round of Applause’. Winnipeg Free Press, 21 March 2009. https://www.winnipegfreepress.com/arts-and-life/entertainment/arts/play-wins-arousinground-of-applause-41620357.html (accessed 17 October 2022). Sanders, Julie. Adaptation and Appropriation. London and New York: Routledge, 2006. Scott, Shelley. ‘Sickness and Sexuality: Feminism and the Female Body in Age of Arousal and Chronic’. Theatre Research in Canada 31, no. 1 (2010): 37–56. doi:10.3138/tric.31.1.37. Showalter, Elaine. Sexual Anarchy: Gender and Culture at the Fin de Siècle. New York: Viking, 1990. Wasserman, Jerry. ‘Linda Griffiths’. In Modern Canadian Plays, vol. 2, edited by Jerry Wasserman, 5th edn, 387–90. Vancouver: Talonbooks, 2013. Weeks, Jeffrey. Coming Out: Homosexual Politics in Britain from the Nineteenth Century to the Present. London: Quartet Books, 1977.

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27 ‘Make the New Legible through Experimentation’: A Conversation on the (Ongoing) Avant-Garde Sascha Bru and Nicholas Johnson

Nicholas Johnson [NJ]: Since the mid-2000s, you have been one of the most prolific and dedicated voices researching, publishing and speaking about the concept and history of the avant-garde, especially in the creative arts. For readers of this book who are hoping to think more about modernism and its relationship to the contemporary, one of the issues that many will confront is the endless circulation of different terms connected to the topic, and how to sort out the prefixes – paleo, proto, retro, neo and post – applied to all these terms. When we realised that an accessible philosophical dialogue about the avant-garde might be more useful than a survey essay, we thought that you would be the ideal person to ask: is ‘avant-garde’ still a useful term? And in what ways might its usage enrich a discussion of either ‘modernism’ or the ‘contemporary’? Sascha Bru [SB]: I think we need to make a distinction here between different groups qualifying what counts as avant-garde: artists, critics and the market. It is obvious that in the late-capitalist market the term ‘avant-garde’ is something of a marketing tool with currency reaching well beyond the field of art or theatre: Mercedes has a line of ‘avant-garde’ cars. Software and fashion designers, advertisers – all appear prone to affix the term to their products. On the surface, this seems to mean very little, were it not for the fact that such use of the term also marks how the market today still displays a certain reverence for the liveliness, innovativeness and futurity of the avant-garde by trying to retrofit, co-opt and integrate it. This is meaningful, I would say. We know that capitalism tends to be rather selective in choosing its most enduring fetishes; that the avant-garde would still rank among these lays bare that it still comes with a surplus value that hasn’t quite been exploited to the full. To artists, the term ‘avant-garde’ has always been an ambivalent one. Few artists in the twentieth century have drawn on this label as a self-denomination. We don’t need to revisit the term’s entire Begriffsgeschichte here,1 but in the case of the early-twentieth-century avant-gardes, the so-called historical avantgardes, for instance, only a handful of artists used this label to qualify their work, the terms ‘new art’, ‘modern art’ or the names of movements to which these artists adhered being employed far more frequently. The same goes for so-called neo-avant-gardists and perhaps more so still for contemporary artists.

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NJ: How widely is the term still being deployed in today’s academic research and artistic practices, would you say? SB: A proper answer here would have to start with the recognition that the (albeit quaint or queer) ‘tradition’ of the avant-garde for the most part, if not exclusively, has been shaped by critics and theorists (including those belonging to the avant-garde itself). It’s in critical discourse and theory, with ups and downs, that the term ‘avant-garde’ has most clearly played a key role as a distinct aesthetic category – one of the peculiar facets of this category being that its very tenor or definition is precisely what’s been up for debate for more than a century now. In European academia, ‘avant-garde studies’ has at the same time always been a sort of marginal thing, even in the history of theory – by which I mean critical theory with a capital T. The luminaries of Theory as well started out from the margins, writing on the avant-garde, yet from there they’ve always fed the centre as well. And this process is still in place today, although ‘avant-garde studies’ is also a thing now, it calls itself that as an academic discipline. When you enter that discipline or field today, for instance by attending the conferences of the EAM (European Network for Avant-Garde and Modernism Studies), you encounter people from all sorts of disciplines in the humanities, as well as practising artists, and the one thing they share is this interest in what they think is the avant-garde. This shared interest incites lively debate, and it is safe to say that today talk of a contemporary avant-garde once again resounds loudly.2 NJ: Is there a working definition of the term that you find capacious enough to cover all these use cases, for artists as well as scholars? SB: As I have shown elsewhere, we still lack a universal or sanctifying theory of the avant-garde – all major theories of the avant-garde that have gained wider currency, from Clement Greenberg or Peter Bürger and beyond, have been overtaken by a watershed of historical facts proving them wrong.3 Yet the critical search for such a theory remains important, I believe. Few critics would disagree with me when I say that we can understand the avant-garde in a generic way as an aesthetic force that marries technological and artistic experimentation on the level of signification with a radical, immanent social-political commitment to reimagine the world. This is an admittedly vague understanding, and it is one that gains fuller meaning only by historically situating concrete practices. Yet if we as scholars and critics of the arts give up our interest in the avant-garde so understood, it also means that we give up our task of critique, deny the possibility of autonomy, and accept that the arts have no role to play in imagining social-political change. Whether one believes in the imminence of global revolution or not, I for one believe that the arts today have an important (pre-)conceptual role to play in letting us experience how we could organise our culture and social systems differently. So, in a very general way, yes, I would definitely say that the term ‘avant-garde’ is still useful, if not crucial, today. NJ: It is interesting that the term’s growing salience is happening alongside the decreasing use of ‘postmodernism’ as a set of concerns – can we think of this

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as another way in which ‘modernism’ in its old forms is moving into the contemporary? How does the avant-garde relate to the durability of modernity as a concept and the importance of aesthetic modernism? As we have described it in this book, the moment of detonation is still unfolding: it’s all the same underlying crises for almost two centuries now, the same concerns, about how to conform, what to do in the aftershock of violent change, how to live within institutions. Postmodernism seemed like it might be offering a different route into those discussions, and there was certainly a theoretical flowering that caused us to look differently at modernity or modernism, but actually that’s now sort of incorporated – or has collapsed – into the old discourse. There is some impulse that is still there, oscillating across a number of related terms. I wonder if that map is something that you broadly agree with or would critique? SB: How the term relates to modernism is another story. Modernism, like the avant-garde, is a critical construction. If we take it to signify a period concept (as is done by literary scholars in the ‘new modernist studies’, for example) or to mean, more narrowly, a collection of artistically experimental practices and artworks to have come about during, roughly, the late nineteenth century and first half of the twentieth, then modernism and the avant-garde do display a lot of overlap, regardless of the fact that there exist different (linguistic) traditions in research. The not-so-minor point to add here, though, is that the avant-garde, as an aesthetic category, is much older than modernism, dating back to revolutionary socialism, and that in the later course of the twentieth and early twenty-first century, it has also proven to be a rather persistent and agile notion in that it seems to have travelled with a lot of ease beyond the modernist ‘period’ into our own. And here again, the role of the term in critical discourse and theory has been key. Traditional surveys of the history of the avant-garde usually argue that since the 1980s, the heydays of the avant-garde have been over. This turning point is also visible in the case of theatrical and performance arts. The ‘Eulogist School’ in American theatre and performance studies – as Mike Sell has called (American) critics proclaiming the death of the avant-garde – most frequently locates the moment of the true avant-garde’s demise in theatre and performance also at this stage.4 For Richard Schechner, Arnold Aronson and David Savran, for instance, the death of the American avant-garde more or less came after the first years of the Wooster Group, that is, shortly after The Performance Group had segued into it.5 Yet, however selective and West-centric views of the alleged demise of the avant-gardes since the 1890s may be (and we may wish to return to this), recent decades also have seen signs of a revival of the avant-garde across the arts. It struck me, for example, that in a round-table discussion on the nature of ‘contemporary art’ among Okwui Enwezor, Daniel Birnbaum and others, the first topic of debate turned out to be how and where to locate the avantgarde today.6 Talk of the avant-garde again abounds today, also in the West. I see it with my younger students, with practising artists, but also and perhaps mainly in criticism, where the term is making something of a return. This is perhaps indicative of another generic feature of the avant-garde, namely that it is, in the words of Rainer Rumold, a ‘crisis phenomenon’7 – that is, it is an

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aesthetic force that reaches wider visibility mainly during moments of deeply felt cultural crisis, when massive societal and political changes unravel that as yet seem illegible or difficult to grasp through (representational) conventions. That we are currently going through a historical phase rife with crises goes without saying. Yet it is perhaps one of the least-studied functions of the avant-garde that it is a force that above all seeks to make the new legible through experimentation, and to suggest alternative critical choices for society in the process. Perhaps Manfredo Tafuri is the one to have come closest to studying this facet of the avant-garde – Tafuri was at the same time also the one to be the most critical of it: all avant-garde attempts to make the new legible, all its attempts to (as it were) make the condition of modernity liveable, according to Tafuri in the end always get co-opted to serve capital.8 NJ: I’d like to pick up on the centre/periphery dichotomy and explore the power dynamics that you have located in the terminology. Some of the strongest critiques of the avant-garde emerged from our longing for historical redress over modernity’s many crimes, but there’s also a double action there, because what has actually renewed the avant-garde, in my view, is diversification. Scholars and artists are clearly working to bring new narratives and ideas that were bubbling up in previous avant-gardes – ideas that perhaps geographically, or because of gender and patriarchy, or other systems that were in operation at the time, were left out of prior academic discourse. By looking beyond a malecentred, dominant Paris- or Berlin-based narrative that made a lot of history books in the 1970s and 1980s, we end up seeing that something much more interesting and dynamic was actually happening in the avant-garde. The reclamation of narratives that go beyond the Iron Curtain, or into Asian or African strands, has actually facilitated renewal and inclusion, and is a healthy reminder that scholarship is dynamic in this area, not static. SB: I can only agree with that. It’s definitely the case that the avant-gardes – both the historical and the neo-avant-garde and even more recent exploits that tie in with the tradition – for a lot of counter-cultural initiatives and emancipatory projects offer a lot of templates. The avant-garde is a phenomenon that flowers best in moments of crisis. And those moments of crisis, most of the time, occur when certain social and political major shifts are in the process of becoming, and yet they’re not entirely legible yet. So it seems to me no accident that we are presently seeing a sort of revival of the notion of the avant-garde. You were of course right when you said earlier that many problems we are facing now are still the same problems we’ve been facing for at least a century, if not for two centuries. We still struggle in the West with the same systemic crisis in democracy; we still live in the Anthropocene, we’ve just given it a name now; our cultures are still far from being decolonised, and on a global scale we are still witnessing the sprawling of capitalism, albeit now in a multipolar market. All these things are part of the modern world we inhabit, yet they constantly also require adapted aesthetic templates of legibility and visibility to make them experiential and to offer resistance to the at times imperceptible symbolic violence that forestalls solutions. And that’s in part where the avant-garde comes

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in – it’s been there since revolutionary socialism, so it more or less coincides with what we generally consider to be modernity. Throughout, its movements have mushroomed, come to the foreground, retreated, come to the foreground again, without ever fully disappearing. Scholars tend to temporalise or periodise the avant-garde’s history, but in actual fact it’s always going on somewhere. Today we’re seeing it mainly going on outside of the West and outside of (Western) Europe, which leads some colleagues to all sorts of pessimistic estimations about where we’re heading as a Western culture – and perhaps there is an argument to be made for that: if you live in a culture that can only reproduce itself, that can only see tomorrow as an extension of today, that culture is in peril. We’ve seen it historically happen before. There is also, at the same time, something acutely imperialist about those assumptions, because they seem to exclude, right from the beginning, that possible solutions might also be coming from outside the West. Apparently, that is not even an option of contemplation for some. But it’s definitely also, from that perspective, essential to keep looking at, and for, the avant-garde. NJ: Is this agenda still aligned with anything that was argued in postmodernism or poststructuralism, do you think? SB: Discussion of postmodernism, for the most part, took as its starting point the already overly simplified critical understanding of modernism and made it into its bête noire. Modernism allegedly was essentialist, sexist and misogynist, racist and colonialist, overly cerebral and medium-specific, retrograde, Eurocentric and imperialistic, anti-environmentalist, culturally myopic. All these currents, to be sure, do reside within modernism and also in the historical avant-gardes, so to an extent I can see that it was important to face the demons and cast them out. Yet now that the dust has settled, I also believe it is clear that we definitely never entered a phase of postmodernity (at least in the sense of ‘post’ meaning ‘after’ or ‘overcoming’ modernity). The social and political problems we face are still those of modernity. Perhaps for these reasons, in the study of the avant-garde, ‘postmodernism’ is a term that has little currency any more, except perhaps to vaguely indicate a period in post-war aesthetics. The aesthetic avantgarde is after all a modern concept par excellence: it has been with us since the aftermath of the French Revolution, and that it is with us today still is perhaps another indication of the fact that modernity is far from over. NJ: How useful do you find the term ‘neo-avant-garde’? SB: When we teach students the history of the avant-gardes, our story usually goes as follows: after a handful of European artists across disciplines in the latter half of the nineteenth century started to experiment with and expand the potential of their art forms (we could think of Adolphe Appia, Edward Gordon Craig, Alfred Jarry and others here in the case of theatre), the first decades of the twentieth century first saw the arrival of the ‘historical’ or ‘classic’ avant-garde. This heroic phase in the history of the avant-garde, which saw a watershed of movements or ‘isms’, came to a halt with the installation of totalitarian regimes

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and the Second World War, after which we witness the emergence of the ‘neoavant-garde’. The neo-avant-garde marks a shift also in geographical terms, as it is often said to have moved the centre of its activity from the European continent to North America. What happened after the ‘neo-avant-garde’ is a matter of debate and even lacks a proper name. Many scholars agree, however, that from the 1980s onward the heydays of the avant-garde in Europe and the US appeared to have been over, the term ‘post-avant-garde’ being used most frequently to denote this new phase in the history of the avant-garde. Now in reality, of course, this oversimplified periodisation proves above all that: an oversimplification. Already in the first half of the twentieth century the avantgarde was a global phenomenon, as I have shown elsewhere, and the avantgarde here never really stopped, but moved: many historical avant-gardists got scattered to the four winds (often by war) and simply continued to work and spread their ideas elsewhere. This proved essential in making younger, postwar generations aware of the avant-garde – generations that are captured by the label ‘neo-avant-garde’ today. In this sense it still proves a useful term, I find. For while we can of course see a lot of continuity between the historical avant-gardes and, say, CoBrA, fluxus happenings, conceptual art, the Situationist International, it is also clear that the neo-avant-garde took the avant-garde in dramatically new directions. It is the term ‘post-avant-garde’ we may wish to reconsider. NJ: Do you find that ‘slippage’ might be a useful concept in theorising the avant-garde? SB: Proclamations of the death of the avant-garde have been with us since the early twentieth century. Already in the ‘Founding and Manifesto of Futurism’, Marinetti foresaw the death or end of futurism, for example. This observation ties in with the meaning of ‘slippage’ as a reduction or loss of something, but it also evokes the sense of slippage as a failure of something to happen or finish on time: indeed, the avant-garde, despite its ceaseless obituary, doesn’t finish on time; it lingers, ghostly, returns, fades, comes back. But the concept of slippage is perhaps the most useful in its financial or economic sense, that is as the difference between an expected result and the real result. An enormous amount of creative and critical energy was invested by the historical avant-garde in exploring and documenting a wide variety of aesthetic agendas and programmes. In the practice of art, though, these agendas and programmes are constantly repeated in difference, rebooted, bent and discovered anew, perhaps in keeping with Walter Benjamin’s claim that ‘In every era the attempt must be made anew to wrest tradition away from conformism that is about to overpower it’.9 This constant renewal, to come after the observation that the energy that had gone in avant-garde production was subject to slippage and did not quite yield the envisioned results, is what is perhaps most striking in the history of the avant-garde. NJ: Do you think there is a case to be made that the avant-garde is still too fundamentally West-centric, in either its history or its more contemporary manifestations?

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SB: We have already begun to answer this question, because it is clear that the practices that could count as avant-garde are not exclusively located in the West. What is West-centric is the dominant critical gaze. For one, as I have already indicated, the avant-garde was a global phenomenon also in the first half of the twentieth century. The number of avant-garde groupings in Latin America before the Second World War alone makes New York dada, for instance, appear a piddling force. But we also had avant-garde exploits in Japan (the MAVO movement, for instance), in China and on the African continent. It is true that these exo-European avant-gardes each time came about after contact with European avant-gardists, but what they tapped into above all was these European avant-gardists’ anti-Europeanness; it was an entirely different, post-imperialist Europe that many avant-gardists were after. Put differently, when we also look at the historical avant-gardes in (East) Central, Northern and Southern Europe, it becomes obvious that to the avant-gardes, Europe had no centre – and its cultural West-centric and bourgeois view of Europe for this reason had to be done away with. It also should not come as a surprise, therefore, that the ‘post-avantgarde’ in regions outside of Europe as well continues to thrive. In our multipolar world it no longer seems to be the West that is the main site of avant-garde activity. Read John Conteh-Morgan to observe how, for instance, in sub-Saharan theatre the avant-garde continued to be operative as an anti-colonialist force through the work of Nigerian Femi Osofisan, the Kenyans Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o and Micere Mugo, the Ivorian Bernard Zadi Zaourou, or the Congolese Sony Lab’ou Tansi.10 Formal experiment and commitment to political change have lost nothing of their meaning here. I think this may in the longer run be the work awaiting avant-garde studies, namely to chart the global avant-garde, past and present. This might also go some way in countering overly pessimistic assessments of the fate of culture today: as I said, it’s rather imperialist to assume that change could or would not be able to come from outside the West. NJ: What do you make of Mike Sell’s broadening of the term ‘avant-garde’ to include consideration of activity that is not artistic, per se, but is produced by minority groups who seek to challenge political power? SB: There are three ways to answer this question. First, let us not forget that the term ‘avant-garde’ was once also widely used to signal perceived progressive political factions. You may recall that for Lenin there could be only one avantgarde, the Party; so, to call minority groups contesting political power ‘avantgarde’ is entirely in keeping with the term’s meaning and history. Secondly, we could say that a confrontation with the aesthetic avant-garde, to recall JeanFrançois Lyotard, always leads to the question ‘do we know what art is?’, the answer coming back from the avant-garde always being ‘not yet’. So perhaps the phrase ‘not artistic, per se’ is problematic from this perspective: who is to say that the counter-cultural movements Sell alludes to do not also count as art? Let me make a digression here: immediately after the First World War, the Italian futurists went to the election with what is (to my knowledge) the only political party ever to have been launched by artists and to have advocated that artists take over practical politics. In the expanded notion of art set forth already in the

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early-twentieth-century avant-gardes, not just all forms and topics for contemplation but also all practices in culture and everyday life became potential material for art. The Italian futurists also looked to political practices in this sense, and we know where that led to. It is, in any case, not so strange then to include counter-cultural or oppositional minority rights groups as partial inheritors of (part of) the avant-garde tradition, a tradition Joseph Beuys, among others, was to resuscitate as well in his Green (Party) performances. A third way to answer your question would be to say that the avant-garde tradition has done away, or at least tried to do away, with our very definition of art understood as a collection of individual art forms. This book deals with theatre and the performance arts, but we know that in the history of the avant-garde that was only part of the story. And because we as scholars and critics also operate within institutional frames that allow us to see only part of that story, perhaps the broader picture might also be escaping us. It may well be that there are other reasons not taken into account by Sell for calling such initiatives avant-garde – though Sell is a laudable scholar whom I take very seriously. What I am trying to get at is that the avant-garde is an agile, complex and variegated phenomenon that also requires interdisciplinary research, and that this research might go some way in taking away certain zones of speculation and introduce some certainty when it comes to such questions. NJ: I am reminded that we do need to ensure that we cover something specifically theatre-related! What do you suppose to be the contemporary legacy of the modernist theatrical avant-garde? SB: This is a difficult question, as it presupposes that there ever was such a thing as a unified historical ‘theatrical avant-garde’. It is not impossible to bring, say, the already varied theatrical exploits of the Bauhaus, expressionism, Brecht, Artaud, Meyerhold, the Russian and Italian futurists, the dada performances, the surrealist gatherings on stage, Spanish ultraist recitals of texts and so on together under a single label. They deserve to be, because they all have clear avant-garde credentials. Yet to isolate their overall legacy is less easy. I suppose that the most lasting role of these theatrical and performance exploits has been to radically expand the notion of theatre itself, or, perhaps better, to bring the art form in touch again with the variety of things it had once been until it ended up being what it was in bourgeois culture of the later nineteenth century. As an ensemble the historical avant-gardes laid bare the potential of all the constituent elements of the performance arts and their interrelation with all other arts. In a way it cast the doors wide open. To unpack the legacy of experimentation with each of these constituents would have to start from the recognition that historical avant-garde theatre was a complex set whose elements must also be taken apart and then traced further. When we do so, it is not difficult to argue that the formal features Hans-Thies Lehmann associates with postdramatic theatre can all be seen as a continuation of earlier twentieth-century avant-garde performance practices.11 NJ: Where do you see the avant-garde going in the future?

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SB: The avant-garde is by no means dead, as we have both kept saying, but to illustrate that we must do both historical and conceptual work. Conceptual, because it means we have to question the term ‘post-avant-garde’, which I have already mentioned.12 This ambivalent term has been used to signal a phase after the avant-garde in a double sense: the post-avant-garde either comes or chases after the avant-garde. In the first passive sense – the post-avant-garde being that which comes after the avant-garde – the avant-garde is indeed over and done with, having entered the mausoleum phase of retrospectives, of Marina Ambramović at the Museum of Modern Art, so to speak. It is striking (when looked at geographically) that the term in this sense is most often used to denote practices in Western Europe and the US. By contrast, and here we enter the moment of historical work, it is abundantly clear that beyond these regions the avant-garde has been far from over since the 1980s. Since the fall of the Berlin Wall, in post-socialist states, for example, it has become very clear that the avant-garde never vanished. Having been denied access to their own historical avant-gardes under communism, many artists since the early 1990s have turned their backs and have come to reconsider their own avant-garde past. The term ‘retro-avant-garde’13 is often used in these contexts, because we are dealing here with artists wishing to loop or bring back part of the avant-garde and revive it today. The Slovenian NSK and its many exploits in performance (including Laibach) but also the IRWIN group could be mentioned as an example here – the scholarly historical work of Miško Šuvaković and Aleš Erjavec should perhaps also be raised.14 Phenomena such as NSK demonstrate that artists since the 1980s into our own century haven’t given up on the avant-garde tradition, but rather overtly tap into it again, taking it in new directions under an altered state of modernity. NJ: When I think of altered states and the next phase of the avant-garde, I find myself thinking a lot about technology, and how it forms a challenging new topos for this discourse, because the idea of centre and margin becomes fairly incoherent when we think about the internet, virtual realities or digital culture: technological exchange rebalances some of those flows of information, allowing them to become less grounded in geography, or in the nation-state as an operator. For an artist working mainly digitally and living in Berlin, Google’s or Meta’s online content policies start to have more real-world salience than what the government of Germany says, and this shift is fairly new. Imperialism is not absent from the exchange, but now power is displaced to a group of executives in San Francisco, instead of the terrain in which an artist is actually operating. Have twenty-first-century technologies changed or displaced the avant-garde because of that feature? Might the changing spaces in which people are interacting artistically and creatively lead to a future shift in our thinking about the spheres of the avant-garde, spatially speaking? SB: In the multipolar world we now inhabit, the internet has definitely eased, well, global communication among artists and creative forces, and it’s definitely the case that it has also impacted many artists’ perception of the world, of course. It is also the case that the internet has diffused power previously held in

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the hands of Western states. Yet on a global scale states now also just wage war on the internet. Originally, when we had the internet, it was believed by many to be a conduit for global revolution. Yet just as with television, a large proportion of avant-garde artists seem to have believed that the revolution will not be televised. If it comes at all, it will be on the streets. So to lay all of your eggs in the basket of a technological determinism or a mediated determinism might not be very useful when we try to arrive at a better understanding of the avantgarde, today or in the past. Recall that a century ago the historical avant-garde was already able to construct a global network, long before social media. In any case, to place the avant-garde in its entirety at the forefront of technological advances is wrong, I think. On a very banal level, most artists operating in the margins of officially sanctioned art only gain access to new technologies when they’ve become widely available and have been commercialised. The avantgarde is more like a formation of flowering weeds on the field of technology. NJ: I’m interested in the ways that artistic medium has played a role in a lot of the creative leaps that we see in the avant-garde, and often a dual role that combines elements of creation and destruction. Do we see similar creative leaps already happening online, or will that only become visible later? Will the online avant-garde just be a collective of hackers trying to take down the whole rest of the system? SB: Well, these two impulses, creation and destruction, have been with the avant-garde since the beginning. Although usually, destruction is just a moment to get to reconstruction – usually. When we think of avant-garde artists, we normally imagine them impatiently seizing the moment of crisis and adding to it, you know, to make things worse and to add aesthetic chaos to the already raging chaos, until we get to the breaking point. Yet, destruction can never be total: it is to some extent always rhetorical, critical. But there’s also another aspect of the avant-garde that we don’t usually associate with it: its constructive patience. It’s almost like what Schiller had prescribed already in the third of his Aesthetic Letters, that the role of the artist is to remove every little cog in the social clock and to replace it without the clock itself ever stopping. I find this a more rewarding way to look at the avant-garde, at least in the longue durée: as a force that has been engaged with the introduction of new objects, new abodes or whatever, clothing, design and so on, that gradually impact and change the world – which is not to deny, of course, that the experience of this change in an audience momentarily can be very intense. And this is also where technology comes in perhaps more meaningfully: for the avant-garde here too has been mainly showing us what else could be made of technologies, new and old, in disclosing ignored possibilities through experimentation with technological means of signification. Hacking is part of this, of course. But to the generation of postdigitals that continue to work in the tradition of the avant-garde, I think the internet has now become just one more cultural facet to be roped into a larger cross-art experiment. It has become a very important archival tool for many performers, for instance. Especially with groups that seem to retain from art perhaps only the relative autonomy it endows their activist interventions with,

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it is often the only source available to those who were not present in situ. I’m thinking here of groups like Chto Delat, Chainworks, Critical Art Ensemble, La Lecha, Dialogue, Le Group Amos or WochenKlausur, whose interventions in the public space are at times as locally impactful as they are globally ephemeral. The online world here indeed does allow alliances and exposes congenialities that before would have been difficult to recognise: artists in the heart of Africa, Latin America, India or Austria for that matter can now see, learn from and interact with others working independently from them. In the process, they also employ digital means to write alternative cultural or art histories. NJ: Thinking generationally brings me to your role as a teacher of the avantgarde, which is where I would like to conclude. I’ve become more interested lately in the role of universities and the key role they played in so many movements, hothousing the people who would go on to innovate these ideas or protecting the ideas that were right at the edge – we can see that in the last century, universities have consistently been spaces that were democratic enough to be attacked, to be considered dangerous by autocracies or the forces of orthodoxy. But I wonder a lot about modern academia and the neoliberal university, and the extent to which the context in which we work is still accepting of that type of displacement from the centre, or tolerant of the creativity and danger that’s involved in the making of an avant-garde. So I feel this tension in the ways in which academia can, on the one hand, sustain the avant-garde – give a name to it, teach it, illuminate it, spread it, share it as a discourse – but on the other hand, I still wonder whether academic labour, whether by students or staff, is a space in which such radicalism remains possible. The other challenge of teaching about these topics, obviously, is that teaching unfolds chronologically, so the chronological ends up dominating so much of our thinking about syllabi or sequence: one thing is building on another in a linear manner. Whereas with the avant-garde, it seems to me you have these anachronistic and sometimes asynchronous leaps: someone is vaulting over their own historical moment to see ahead to what could happen, and someone far ahead is vaulting backwards to see what this avant-garde person did. I have found in my courses on the avant-garde that they seem to happen more in a spiral structure, that I’m always paratactically going over the same non-conformist terrain and just leaping between time frames, which is very different from the teleological progression narrative that is so dominant in the Enlightenment tradition of teaching. Given all this, I wonder if teaching about the avant-garde has also caused you to think differently about teaching itself. What have you learned about the avant-garde from teaching it? Has your identity as a teacher of the avant-garde informed some of your scholarship, or what are your thoughts on a pedagogy of the avant-garde? SB: That’s a complex set of questions. Let’s start with what you observe about the, let’s say, anachrony of the avant-garde and the strange way in which the avant-garde seems to move through history – I prefer not to use the term ‘anachronism’ as this somehow suggests the avant-garde would fall outside of history. That in itself is, I think, one of the things we still need to come to terms with.

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I believe that in the very unruly historical moment where we see the historical avant-gardes coming up, in the slipstream of historicism that marked the visual and performance arts around the turn of the century, these historical avantgardes realised something about art in general, namely that all of art to some extent is anachronic and doesn’t fit the chronologies we as historians or scholars set out; artworks simply keep on referencing into the future, but also, they can compress larger stretches of time, make old stuff look very contemporary and so on. And it seems to me that especially the historical avant-gardes realised that this general characteristic of art – performance art/theatre included – can also be used to think about time and history differently, by toying and experimenting with alternative – we would probably have to call them pre-conceptual – views and experiences of history that part ways with conventions in modernity and prefigure the potential of revolution in the now. It has often been observed that what ultimately defines contemporary art since the 1990s is its investigation of time and history under a condition of ‘contemporaneity’, that is, a condition that recognises the co-existence of multiple cultural temporalities and views of history. In my view this resonates strongly with the search begun with the historical or modernist avant-gardes, so this would be another way of illustrating that the avant-garde is definitely not over. How I put that and other insights on the plate of students is another question, of course, because reading the avant-garde at any point and place implies also that we are aware of dominant conventions. I want my students to learn these conventions first. This is best done reflectively by taking recourse to a formalist moment, I’ve come to see. In the myriad discourses we throw at our students, it’s just the act of reading (with the full sensorium) that is essential when teaching the avant-garde, I find. When you give a student a one-page concrete poem or an abstract artwork, for example, and announce that we’re going to analyse this in depth for two hours, they have no idea how to get started. Once they get to see the depth and the structure of things, and then try to extrapolate that to experience the world around them differently, through new eyes as changed persons, I usually go home pleased as a pedagogue. The key is to show students that what they think is possible within the conventions of signification they have internalised is a limited set: there is so much more beyond that, and what they think is possible is such a limited list of options among a wide archive of possibilities. Teaching the avant-garde can show that. NJ: Do we know what the avant-garde is? SB (smirks): Not yet.

Editorial Note This dialogue has been compressed and edited from both written and oral interview formats, including exchanges via email in January 2022, with a recorded interview on 18 January 2022. Transcription and editing support were provided by Sophie Furlong Tighe.

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Notes  1. Karlheinz Barck, ‘Avantgarde’, in Ästhetische Grundbegriffe: Historisches Wörterbuch in sieben Bänden, vol. 1, ed. Karlheinz Barck (Stuttgart: Metzler, 2010), 544–77.  2. See, among others, John Roberts, Revolutionary Time and the Avant-Garde (London: Verso, 2015); Gregory Sholette, The Art of Activism and the Activism of Art (London: Lund Humphries, 2022); Marc James Léger, ed., The Idea of the Avant-Garde and What It Means Today, vol. 1 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2015) and vol. 2 (Bristol: Intellect, 2020); Adam Pendleton, Black Dada Reader, ed. Stephen Squibb (Cologne: Walther Koenig, 2019), and Adam Pendleton, Pasts, Futures, and Aftermaths: Revisiting the Black Dada Reader (Cologne and New York: Walter Koenig/DABA, 2021); Olivier Quintyn, Valences de l’avant-garde: Essai sur l’avant-garde, l’art contemporain et l’institution (Paris: Questions Théoriques, 2015); Stevphen Shukaitis, The Composition of Movements to Come: Aesthetics and Cultural Labour after the Avant-Garde (London: Rowman & Littlefield, 2016); Marc James Léger, Don’t Network: The Avant-Garde after Networks (Colchester: Minor Compositions, 2018); Mikkel Bolt Rasmussen, After the Great Refusal (Alresford: John Hunt, 2018).   3. See Clement Greenberg, ‘Avant-Garde and Kitsch’, Partisan Review 6 (Fall 1939): 34–49, and Clement Greenberg, ‘Towards a Newer Laocoon’, Partisan Review 7 (July–August 1940): 296–310; Peter Bürger, Theory of the Avant-Garde, trans. Michael Shaw (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984).   4. Mike Sell, Avant-Garde Performance and the Limits of Criticism (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2005), 13.  5. Richard Schechner, ‘The Decline and Fall of the (American) Avant-Garde’, Parts 1 and 2, Performing Arts Journal 5, no. 2 (1981): 48–63 and 5, no. 3 (1981): 9–19; Arnold Aronson, American Avant-Garde Theatre: A History (New York: Routledge, 2000); David Savran, ‘The Death of the Avant-Garde’, The Drama Review 49, no. 3 (2005): 10–42.   6. Craig Garrett, ‘Round-Table Discussion with Daniel Birnbaum, Connie Butler, Suzanne Cotter, Bice Curiger, Okwui Enwezor, Massimiliono Gioni, Bob Nickas, Hans Ulrich Obrist’, in Defining Contemporary Art (London: Phaidon, 2011), 455–65.   7. Rainer Rumold, The Janus Face of the German Avant-Garde: From Expressionism Toward Postmodernism (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2002), 37.  8. Manfredo Tafuri, The Sphere and the Labyrinth: Avant-Gardes and Architecture from Piranesi to the 1970s, trans. Pellegrino d’Acierno and Robert Connolly (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1987).  9. Walter Benjamin, ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’, in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt (New York: Schocken Books, 1969), 253–64. 10. See, for example, John Conteh-Morgan with Dominic Thomas, New Francophone African and Caribbean Theatres (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010). 11. See Hans-Thies Lehmann, Postdramatic Theatre, trans. Karen Jürs-Munby (London and New York: Routledge, 2006), 15. 12. The term ‘post-avant-garde’ is an overdetermined one, and different scholars tend to stress either the ‘post’ prefix or the ‘avant-garde’ in the compound denomination. The term is/was widely used in discussions of 1980s neo-expressionism, the Italian transavanguardia, American ‘Bad’ Painting, German heftige Malerei and even behind-the-IronCurtain art of the same period (see, for example, Éva Forgács, ‘“Today Is a Beautiful Day”: The “New Sensibility” or “New Subjectivism” in the Hungarian Post-AvantGarde of the 1980s’, Umění/Art 59, nos. 3/4 (2011): 274–84). Yet the term also soon became entangled with other notions ranging from postmodernism (Howard Fox, AvantGarde in the Eighties (Los Angeles: LACMA, 1987); Charles Jencks, ‘The Post-AvantGarde’, Art and Design 3, nos. 7/8 (1987): 5–20; Ben Highmore, ‘Home Furnishings:

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Richard Hamilton, Domesticity and “Post-Avant-Gardism”’, in Neo-Avant-Garde, ed. David Hopkins (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2006), 243–61), to (post)colonialism and globalisation (Ottmar Ette, Literatur in Bewegung: Raum und Dynamik grenzüberschreitenden Schreibens in Europa und Amerika (Weilerswist: Velbrück Verlag, 2001), chapter 8; Claus Clüver, ‘Mapping the Avant-Gardes’, Journal of Romance Studies 11, no. 1 (2011): 11–19). Andreas Gelz uses it to characterise French debates in the 1980s, during which many nouveaux romanciers placed themselves past the putative end of the avant-garde, opening the end of art’s (institutional) signifying potential more generally. See Andreas Gelz, Postavantgardistische Ästhetik: Positionen der französischen und italienischen Gegenwartsliteratur (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1996). 13. For good discussions of the post-socialist retro-avant-garde, see Tyrus Miller, ‘Retro-AvantGarde: Aesthetic Revival and the Con/Figuration of Twentieth-Century Time’, Filozofski Vestnik 28, no. 2 (2007): 253–65, and Inke Arns, ‘Objects in the mirror may be closer than they appear! Die Avantgarde im Rückspiegel. Zum Paradigmenwechsel der künstlerischen Avantgarderezeption in (Ex-)Jugoslawien und Russland von den 1980er Jahren bis in die Gegenwart’, PhD dissertation, Humboldt University, 2003. 14. Dubravka Djurić and Miško Šuvaković, eds, Impossible Histories: Historic Avant-Gardes, Neo-Avant-Gardes and Post-Avant-Gardes in Yugoslavia, 1918–1991 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006); Aleš Erjavec, ed., Postmodernism and the Postsocialist Condition: Politicized Art under Late Socialism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003).

Works Cited Arns, Inke. ‘Objects in the mirror may be closer than they appear! Die Avantgarde im Rückspiegel. Zum Paradigmenwechsel der künstlerischen Avantgarderezeption in (Ex-)Jugoslawien und Russland von den 1980er Jahren bis in die Gegenwart’. PhD dissertation, Humboldt University, 2003. Aronson, Arnold. American Avant-Garde Theatre: A History. New York: Routledge, 2000. Barck, Karlheinz. ‘Avantgarde’. In Ästhetische Grundbegriffe: Historisches Wörterbuch in sieben Bänden, vol. 1, edited by Karlheinz Barck, 544–77. Stuttgart: Metzler, 2010. Benjamin, Walter. ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’. In Illuminations. Edited by Hannah Arendt. 253–64. New York: Schocken Books, 1969. Bolt Rasmussen, Mikkel. After the Great Refusal. Alresford: John Hunt, 2018. Bürger, Peter. Theory of the Avant-Garde. Translated by Michael Shaw. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984. Clüver, Claus. ‘Mapping the Avant-Gardes’. Journal of Romance Studies 11, no. 1 (2011): 11–19. Conteh-Morgan, John with Dominic Thomas. New Francophone African and Caribbean Theatres. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010. Djurić, Dubravka and Miško Šuvaković, eds. Impossible Histories: Historic Avant-Gardes, Neo-Avant-Gardes and Post-Avant-Gardes in Yugoslavia, 1918–1991. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006. Erjavec, Aleš, ed. Postmodernism and the Postsocialist Condition: Politicized Art under Late Socialism. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003. Ette, Ottmar. Literatur in Bewegung: Raum und Dynamik grenzüberschreitenden Schreibens in Europa und Amerika. Weilerswist: Velbrück Verlag, 2001. Forgács, Éva. ‘“Today Is a Beautiful Day”: The “New Sensibility” or “New Subjectivism” in the Hungarian Post-Avant-Garde of the 1980s’. Umění/Art 59, nos. 3/4 (2011): 274–84. Fox, Howard. Avant-Garde in the Eighties. Los Angeles: LACMA, 1987. Garrett, Craig. ‘Round-Table Discussion with Daniel Birnbaum, Connie Butler, Suzanne Cotter, Bice Curiger, Okwui Enwezor, Massimiliono Gioni, Bob Nickas, Hans Ulrich Obrist’. In Defining Contemporary Art, 455–65. London: Phaidon, 2011.

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Gelz, Andreas. Postavantgardistische Ästhetik: Positionen der französischen und italienischen Gegenwartsliteratur. Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1996. Greenberg, Clement. ‘Avant-Garde and Kitsch’. Partisan Review 6 (Fall 1939): 34–49. Greenberg, Clement. ‘Towards a Newer Laocoon’. Partisan Review 7 (July–August 1940): 296–310. Highmore, Ben. ‘Home Furnishings: Richard Hamilton, Domesticity and “Post-Avant-Gardism”’. In Neo-Avant-Garde, ed. David Hopkins, 243–61. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2006. Jencks, Charles. ‘The Post-Avant-Garde’. Art and Design 3, nos. 7/8 (1987): 5–20. Léger, Marc James. Don’t Network: The Avant-Garde after Networks. Colchester: Minor Compositions, 2018. Léger, Marc James, ed. The Idea of the Avant-Garde and What It Means Today, vol. 1. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2015. Léger, Marc James, ed. The Idea of the Avant-Garde and What It Means Today, vol. 2. Bristol: Intellect, 2020. Lehmann, Hans-Thies. Postdramatic Theatre. Translated by Karen Jürs-Munby. London and New York: Routledge, 2006. Miller, Tyrus. ‘Retro-Avant-Garde: Aesthetic Revival and the Con/Figuration of TwentiethCentury Time’. Filozofski Vestnik 28, no. 2 (2007): 253–65. Pendleton, Adam. Black Dada Reader. Edited by Stephen Squibb. Cologne: Walther Koenig, 2019. Pendleton, Adam. Pasts, Futures, and Aftermaths: Revisiting the Black Dada Reader. Cologne and New York: Walter Koenig/DABA, 2021. Quintyn, Olivier. Valences de l’avant-garde. Essai sur l’avant-garde, l’art contemporain et l’institution. Paris: Questions Théoriques, 2015. Roberts, John. Revolutionary Time and the Avant-Garde. London: Verso, 2015. Rumold, Rainer. The Janus Face of the German Avant-Garde: From Expressionism Toward Postmodernism. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2002. Savran, David. ‘The Death of the Avant-Garde’. The Drama Review 49, no. 3 (2005): 10–42. Schechner, Richard. ‘The Decline and Fall of the (American) Avant-Garde’, Part 1. Performing Arts Journal 5, no. 2 (1981): 48–63. Schechner, Richard. ‘The Decline and Fall of the (American) Avant-Garde’, Part 2. Performing Arts Journal 5, no. 3 (1981): 9–19. Sell, Mike. Avant-Garde Performance and the Limits of Criticism. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2005. Sholette, Gregory. The Art of Activism and the Activism of Art. London: Lund Humphries, 2022. Shukaitis, Stevphen. The Composition of Movements to Come: Aesthetics and Cultural Labour after the Avant-Garde. London: Rowman & Littlefield, 2016. Tafuri, Manfredo. The Sphere and the Labyrinth: Avant-Gardes and Architecture from Piranesi to the 1970s. Translated by Pellegrino d’Acierno and Robert Connolly. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1987.

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28 Brecht as Slippage: Interrobang’s Dialogues with Modernist Theatre Machines Ramona Mosse

I

enter a large hall with three big tables. The room is lit in a warm, purple-tinted light that makes it seem like a party space. An expansive web of strings stretches across the entire space with little pieces of notepaper hanging at approximately eye level. Each table has around ten spaces to sit at. The individual space is set up with an old-fashioned analogue push-button telephone keypad, attached to a pair of headphones instead of a telephone receiver. The tabletops are covered in a psychedelic blackand-white wave pattern – like soundwaves or, at a stretch, an avant-garde tablecloth from the 1970s. This is apt, because I have entered what could be called a sound bar for philosophers. Next to each phone is a small wooden toolbox that accompanies me through the evening (see Figure 28.1): a set of different coloured pens for notetaking, paper clips, notepaper, dextrose goodies as brain food, and a set of Gedankenzettel (literally, notes for thought), some of which already have evocative images on them (a keyhole, for example). I find a seat, put the headphones on and start listening. This is the setting of Philosophiermaschine (The Philosophising Machine), which opened in January 2020 at one of Berlin’s major independent performance spaces, the Sophiensaele, and was conceived by the German performance collective Interrobang. Interrobang was founded in 2011 by co-artistic directors Nina Tecklenburg and Tillmann Müller-Klug, and its performances explore the underlying structures of contemporary society by developing participatory performance formats and theatrical installations that combine ‘game, fiction and narration [. . .] as a means of emphatic questioning – as an interrobang’.1 In doing so, Tecklenburg and Müller-Klug prominently explore analogue and digital technologies as an interface for their theatre games and draw repeatedly on the history of radio drama with aurally based formats: Callcenter Übermorgen (2013) has participants enter into phone booths; The Müllermatrix (2016) brings GDR playwright Heiner Müller back to life in an elaborate audio installation; and most recently, Deep Godot (2021) offers a one-on-one conversation with an AI that is auditioning to become one’s caregiver in later life. Die Philosophiermaschine combines many of these aspects. Here, it is not only a single playwright or AI that speaks, but several key political philosophers of the twentieth century: Hannah Arendt and Karl Jaspers are joined by the voices of fellow thinker T. W. Adorno, writer and activist James Baldwin, as well as East German dissident and philosopher Rudolf Bahro and the Russian–American writer and proponent of laissez-faire capitalism Ayn Rand,

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Figure 28.1  Toolbox for audience members, Die Philosophiermaschine, Sophiensaele Berlin, January 2020 (photograph by Paula Reissig). among others. Together they make up a multi-optional journey through a set of thinking paths (German: Gedankenstränge) that the audience participants can select from by using the touchpad of their telephone in order to decide which philosophical concept or theme they might want to explore. The crux of this interactive audio game lies in the fact that its vocal score is not, strictly speaking, a journey into authentic archival audio footage of Arendt’s and Jaspers’s speeches and interviews – instead, each soundbite has been laboriously pasted together from a series of archival audio reels with the cuts still audible. In other words, Interrobang has these philosophers ventriloquise according to their dramaturgical score, allowing them to manipulate Jaspers, Arendt and the others in their speech. The choral refrains by Jaspers and Arendt exemplify this approach and create an aural landing page for the performance: Wir fragen immer weiter und jetzt fragen wir Dich: Willst Du jetzt einen . . . Gedankenaustausch . . . dann wähle die 1 (-44)2 Oder willst Du anderswo weiterfragen, dann wähle die 2 (-983) We have more and more questions, and now we ask you: Do you want an . . . exchange of thoughts . . . then choose 1 Or do you want to ask into a different direction, then choose 23 Audience members are given the chance to go on their own private research journey, exploring the philosophers’ positions on empathy, climate, children’s philosophy,

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courage, racism and machine philosophy, or follow various biographical stories. Intermittently, they are also given the option to use the ‘toolbox’ in front of them. In an act of integrated ‘audiencing – that is the doing of spectating’,4 they draw or write down thoughts and responses and hang them up on the strings that cut through the space. Over the course of several performance evenings, the audience creates a highly individualised and playful philosophical dialogue with these voices of dead thinkers and actively co-creates the installation at the Sophiensaele into a collaborative thinking space that harbours traces of each single audience member’s experience on the notepapers. Thinking becomes materialised in space. In this manner, the Philosophiermaschine stages the literal making of the public sphere in the form of the external public brain that spans as a web of notes across the performance space (see Figure 28.2). With these short glimpses into Die Philosophiermaschine, I would like to open this chapter by contending that contemporary theatre’s engagement with modernism occurs in the shape of playful dialogues and slippages. I argue that Interrobang’s method of devising a machine to ventriloquise modern philosophers models two core factors of the resurgence of modernism in contemporary theatre: (1) slipping and sliding into specific playwrights, sites and concepts of modernism opens up contemporary performance to a less theoretically overdetermined definition of theatre beyond the question of embodiment versus dramatic text; (2) modernism’s own obsession with theatre machines makes it a privileged site for exploring another slippage from industrial to digital technology, capturing how they determine social interactions. Using Interrobang’s performance

Figure 28.2  Die Philosophiermaschine, Sophiensaele Berlin, January 2020 (photograph by Paula Reissig).

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work as a case study, I will investigate how modernist technologies and ideas reappear in and are reappropriated by contemporary performance. My particular focus lies on how contemporary performance engages with Bertolt Brecht – unquestionably one of the most prominent figures of theatrical modernism – as a monolith of theatrical theory but also as an experimental practitioner who has more to offer than epic theatre. That is to say, Brecht reappears as slippage. His modernism reveals itself through his avid experimentation with media, thus emphasising modernism’s fundamental staging of technology. Brecht’s reimagination of the theatrical frame through technology thus provides a productive foil for contemporary performance makers such as Interrobang.

Theatre Machines and the Idea of Modernism To ask about modernism in contemporary theatre is to ask for a story about the complex and contradictory lineages from modernism via postmodernism into the present. These complexities already start with the notoriously difficult framing of modernism itself. Part of the complication lies in a disciplinary slippage between theatre and literary historiography, which have privileged different terminologies. Thus, individual playwrights such as Beckett or Brecht may shape modernism in line with their dramatic output in literary studies, while theatre studies shifts the emphasis on to the idea of the avant-garde’s break from the dramatic tradition generally and naturalism in particular. In his illuminating overview of modernist theatre, Stefan Hulfeld suggests that ‘theatre historiography fails to address modernity’5 because of its foregrounding of the naturalism debate. Hulfeld argues for the modernist stage as engaged in a re-theatricalisation and ‘return to theatre as a collective spectacle’, shaped by the parallel but incongruent processes of democratisation and commercialisation of arts and culture.6 In doing so, Hulfeld also calls for a revised perspective on the modernist theatre canon by including operettas such as Lehar’s The Merry Widow or circus and cabaret performances. In contrast, Martin Puchner defines modernism as inherently anti-theatrical: ‘a suspicion of the theatre plays a constitutive role in the period of modernism, especially in modernist theatre and drama.’7 Puchner’s idea of the anti-theatrical means not so much a rejection as a revision of the idea of theatre. Toril Moi supports Puchner’s concept of a strong anti-theatrical impetus in modernism that, to her, is based in a suspicion of, or ideology against, the public nature of theatre, because its fundamental dependence on a public audience runs counter to the central modernist claim of aesthetic autonomy.8 This co-existence of various kinds of competing modernisms in the early twentieth century in turn increases the challenges of locating modernism in the contemporary context. Despite Hulfeld’s and Puchner’s differing assessments of the theatrical or anti-theatrical drive of modernist theatre, they unite insofar as they chart modernism’s fundamental extension of the idea of theatre beyond previously existing frameworks of literary genre, aesthetic function or social role. Given this apparent diversity of definitions, another approach might therefore be more promising in identifying modernism in contemporary performance: asking not what modernism is, but rather who is a modernist. In that case, the figure that looms particularly large is that of Bertolt Brecht, given his global stature as twentieth-century playwright, theatre theoretician, practitioner and artistic director of the Berliner Ensemble. Puchner even explicitly equates Brecht with modernist theatre: ‘So unquestioned is Brecht’s impact on the canon of the modern theater that his term epic theater has frequently been used

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to describe modernist theater at large.’9 The simple equation of ‘epic equals modernist’ may, however, no longer bear as much relevance, given that Brecht studies in the late twentieth and twenty-first centuries has made such an effort to highlight Brecht’s work with aesthetic media beyond the monolith of epic theatre.10 Brecht’s own modernism expands beyond his famous rupture of the dramatic with the epic. In other words, the reframing of modernism and of Brecht go hand in hand. Fredric Jameson has done so through his championing of Brecht as dialectician and performative theorist in Brecht as Method (1998). I would like to reframe Brecht here by drawing on Brecht’s extensive experimentation with media and engagement with emerging technologies, because it is in this context of intermediality that Brecht and modernism might be traced in contemporary performance practices. Brecht’s play with media and technology is prolific. It spans from considering theatre itself as a technology to be rebuilt with the tools of epic intervention to an expansive engagement with the use of photography, radio and media technologies in general. In his theoretical texts, Brecht directly discusses the impact of technology both on social life and on individual perception. Most famous in this context is probably a passage from A Short Organum for the Theatre, in which Brecht describes the immense impact of technology on all aspects of human life: I who am writing this write it on a machine which at the time of my birth was unknown. I travel in new vehicles with a rapidity that my grandfather could not imagine; in those days nothing moved so fast. And I rise in the air: a thing my father was unable to do. With my father I already spoke across the width of a continent, but it was together with my son that I first saw the moving pictures of the explosion of Hiroshima.11 His reflection on machines such as the typewriter, the car or the aeroplane are deeply intertwined with a changing sense of history – in the guise of a personal history – insofar as these technologies emerge from, but also in turn shape and accelerate the experience of, historical time. This experience of and with technology importantly fuels Brecht’s approach to his theatre work. His model books may serve as an apt example in this context. As a new form of theatrical archiving, they originate with Brecht’s collaboration with Charles Laughton on Galileo in Constructing a Role: Laughton’s Galileo during his American exile and subsequently become a pervasive tool of both documentation and experimentation during Brecht’s artistic direction at the Berliner Ensemble. With their combination of performance photographs, blocking sketches, dramaturgical dialogues and descriptions, Brecht’s model books distil a process of constant rebuilding by seeking to capture and transpose the performance experience from the stage on to the page; as I have suggested elsewhere, they highlight Brecht’s understanding of the theatre as a ‘laboratory of intermedial practices’ because of this process of transposition that challenges what either book or performance can do.12 To continue with a related but separate example from Brecht’s theatrical models: in the 1948 production of Antigone in Chur, Brecht opted to place a record player visibly on stage, which played the experimental soundscape for the performance. Here, the record itself becomes the alienating effect, both to the cultural contexts of Greek tragedy and to the apparently primitive setting that the set designer Caspar Neher together with Brecht had chosen for this Antigone.

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As the artistic director of the municipal theatre in Chur, Hans Curjel, put it: ‘The optical conception of antiquity emerged; an unelegant, primitive antiquity of the cyclops.’13 The record player fitted into neither the idealised nor the primitive version of antiquity. The model books are only one example of Brecht’s intermedial practice that is shaped by what Astrid Oesmann and Matthias Rothe have pinpointed as a strong processuality and preoccupation with ‘unfinished forms’ that mark Brecht’s understanding of theatre.14 Hans-Thies Lehmann and Helene Varopolou highlight this sense of process orientation further when addressing themselves to ‘the other Brecht’,15 casting the eponymous idea of Brecht as itself unfinished, forever shifting, forever sliding: That is why we want to offer a different definition of what actually constitutes the revolutionary nature of your thought and practice. You have been a ‘Kippernikus’ of the theatre by toppling what theatre meant and by introducing a radically different concept. You imagined the theatre as no longer being staged for but rather as a scenic practice with the audience = participants.16 The idea of such a scenic practice as a joint venture with active audience participants is importantly facilitated also through technology. Brecht turns into a case of slippage. When Brecht opens a radio speech in 1927 with the words ‘our plays embrace part of the new things that came into the world long before the world war’, he literally refers to his own play Man Equals Man which was about to be broadcast via the new technological medium of the radio, and to which his very speech provided the opening.17 Its protagonist Galy Gay offers a particularly apt reflection on Brecht’s complex engagement with technologies, since the play turns Gay into a machine for whom death and consumption go hand in hand. And yet, Brecht in his opening radio speech for the broadcast of Man Equals Man sketches instead ‘this new human type’ that will emerge in the age of technology and concludes: ‘It is my belief that he will not let himself be changed by the machines but will himself change the machine.’18 Thomas Pekar goes so far as to say that Brecht was keen to newly define the relationship of man and technology as such when discussing the role of machines in Lindbergh’s Flight (1929).19 Certainly, Brecht understood radio not just as a tool for broadcasting theatre, but instead experimented with it as part of developing his Lehrstück (learning play) concept and pointed to radio’s potential for a dispersed form of theatre that would reach beyond the confines of the auditorium. Technology here enables a revision of what theatre means or could become. Brecht’s use of radio and this idea of a participatory understanding of the radio play shapes Lindbergh’s Flight (later Flight across the Ocean); in fact, the radio is not only a medium of broadcasting, but also steps into the role of the chorus itself. Yet, the radio is only one of the two types of machines that loom large in the play: the aeroplane with which Lindbergh managed his feat of crossing the Atlantic, and the radio, a new medium of communication and the medium of choice for Brecht’s own staging of the piece. The play closes with Lindbergh being carried off, showing signs of weakness while ‘our engine held out’ in an endorsement of the machine.20 This is followed by a cantata offered by the chorus/ radio that hails the invention of the aeroplane: ‘At that time, when humanity / began to know itself’.21 Notably, self-knowledge and technological innovation (instead of a Cartesian cogito) go hand in hand. As Pekar shows, this altered relationship between

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humans and machines ultimately extends to rethinking the ‘theatre apparatus’ as a site for reconditioning audience perception in light of technological innovation.22 When it came to the performance itself, Brecht staged the piece in Baden-Baden on a split stage with the orchestra and chorus on the one side and the audience in the singing role of the pilot on the other, creating ‘a learning experience through technology, one that fermented critical thinking rather than identification’.23 In other words, intermedial exchange between theatre and radio worked both ways: radio contributed to the creation of the Lehrstück-concept, but likewise theatre informs Brecht’s demands on and vision for radio. This becomes evident in ‘The Radio as an Apparatus of Communication’, where Brecht explicitly states that the function of radio in his age remains still underdeveloped: radio is one-sided when it should be two-. It is purely an apparatus for distribution, for mere sharing out. So, here is a positive suggestion: change this apparatus over from distribution to communication. The radio would be the finest possible communication apparatus in public life, a vast network of pipes. That is, it would be if it knew how to receive as well as to transmit, how to let the listener speak as well as hear, how to bring him into a relationship instead of isolating him.24 Brecht’s emphasis on the dialogical quality of the radio as a medium is striking here. Flight across the Ocean demonstrates precisely this altered vision of the medium, in which the audience is not merely a passive receiver. Instead, it talks back and enters into a lively exchange, realising the emphasis of co-creation that is inherently dialogical.

Contemporary Dialogues with Philosophy Machines With hindsight, one might say that Brecht’s ultimate goal for Flight across the Ocean, namely to write a live radio play for a participating audience, only comes to its most complete realisation in the Zoom theatres of the ongoing COVID pandemic, whose biggest innovation lies not in expanding various streaming formats but in creating dispersed forms of ‘talking back’ as an audience. Yet, the participatory performance formats that constitute an important part of independent theatre today are another productive way in which Brecht’s Lehrstück, as much as his media experiments, resonates in contemporary theatre practice.25 Interrobang’s ‘participatory immersive game settings’ are a particularly interesting case in point here, because their use of media focuses on ‘auditive forms of art and media like the radio play or feature’.26 Often that leads to an actor-less theatre, in which the performance is split between machines and audience members. I will use the latter part of this chapter to analyse Die Philosophiermaschine through the lens of Brecht’s modernist media experiments as they had become realised in his participatory Lindbergh’s Flight staging in Baden-Baden in 1929. Interrobang’s playful thought experiment with dead philosophers captures both Hulfeld’s re-theatricalisation through its exploration of the gamification of political positioning and Puchner’s anti-theatricalism in its focus on a process-oriented mental theatre that avoids spectacle. Crucially, Die Philosophiermaschine experiments with the creation of a technologically mediated public space that reimagines the philosophical dialogue at the core of Hannah Arendt’s and Karl Jaspers’s own intellectual interactions. Dialogues with and through machines are, then, what become transposed

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from the modernist to the contemporary context, offering resonances from the second Industrial Revolution, with its invention of cars and aeroplanes, to the digital revolution and its forceful reshaping of the public communication and politics today. To begin with the machine: one crucial performer in the room of Die Philosophiermaschine is the telephone apparatus. With its retro-quality, the push-button telephone that audiences interact with throughout the performance is a curious mash-up of digital and analogue technologies, since the telephone pad has been connected to an artificial intelligence that transforms it into a performative gaming device with which to select between various philosophical concepts and listen in on what different philosophers have said about them. The old-fashioned clunkiness of the push-button telephone makes the audience participants more aware of the machine that mediates than the slinky interface that a more contemporary iPhone or iPad would offer. It also runs parallel to the grainy quality of the sound recordings themselves, which do not hide but rather highlight the historical age of the philosophical sound materials. The telephone as a gaming device is a familiar sight in Interrobang performances: The Müllermatrix (2016) reanimates the voice of playwright Heiner Müller from the many audio interviews he gave throughout his life; ThAEtrophone (2013) channelled Brecht’s concept of thaeter in the Messingkauf Dialogues and worked as a telephone-box installation in theatre vestibules, which allowed participants to record their ideas about the future of theatre. The telephone as a communication device and symbol of mediated dialogue has a central position that reflects Interrobang’s interest in investigating social communication in the twenty-first century. Dialogue, however, also plays a crucial role for the two philosophical protagonists of Die Philosophiermaschine, Hannah Arendt and Karl Jaspers. Bound together by a lifelong friendship, Arendt and Jaspers engaged in an active intellectual dialogue in the form of a letter exchange. Their thinking is also a thinking together, thinking as a form of dialogue. They activate the Platonic tradition of the philosophical dialogue and ‘the transcendental nature of the principle of – [that] only those positions that can be communicated to others can be true’.27 In building a new kind of philosophical dialogue that draws on Socrates and his ability to identify the blind spots and gaps in the thought processes of his counterparts, Arendt and Jaspers try to rebuild a sense of public agora after National Socialism.28 This sense of dialogical exchange becomes the principle upon which the theatrical encounter of Die Philosophiermaschine is based. However, the exchange of thoughts has become dispersed temporally as well as spatially. It is a dialogue with the dead, across history, and it puts in conversation thinkers from different cultural and geographical spaces – Ayn Rand, Rudolf Bahro, James Baldwin – who did not necessarily engage in such a direct conversation. In turn, the philosophical dialogue partners at the centre of this philosophising machine debate not so much with each other as with the audience, re-animated through the power of recording technology. Moreover, their words are cobbled back together by virtue of editing technology. As they state in the introduction of this machine theatre: Was ist . . . hier . . . eigentlich los?29 Wo sind wir hier? Wer . . . sind wir hier? Ich (. . .) bin ich (Ein ‘ich’ von Jaspers, eins von Arendt). (. . .) und du bist du? Zusammenmontierte Stimmen aus dem philosophischen Jenseits (aus 1) Aber . . . sind wir . . . das wirklich?

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Sprechen . . . wir oder . . . werden wir ,,, gesprochen? Oho! Aha! Haha! (hier ein Lachen finden aus den Interviews, geisterhafte Effekte auf die Stimmen) Denken wir oder . . . werden wir . . . gedacht? Was . . . denkst . . . Du? Bist . . . Du . . . ein . . . lebendiger Teil unserer Philosophiermaschine ? (What is . . . happening . . . here? Where are we here? Who . . . are we here? I (. . .) am me (one ‘I’ from Jaspers, another from Arendt) (. . .) and you are you? Montage of voices from the philosophical afterlife (from 1) But . . . is this . . . really us? Do we . . . speak . . . or . . . are we being . . . spoken? Oho! Aha! Haha! (find an instance of laughter from the interviews, spooky effects on top of the voices) Do we think . . . or . . . are we being . . . thought? What . . . do you . . . think? Are . . . you . . . a . . . living part of our philosophy machine?)30 The crucial question of ‘Do we . . . speak . . . or . . . are we being . . . spoken?’ poses itself forcefully, as Interrobang creates the sense of live encounter with Arendt and company through radical montages, as in the example above. Here, every gap marked by dots highlights the switch to another piece of audio footage. In other words, even individual sentences of a dead philosopher speaking are being cobbled together from various sources. Not only does Interrobang make this intensive editing technique visible in the script, but it is also audible in the recordings. The speech rhythms and quality of the voices gain a different quality: they are recognisably those of Jaspers and others, but their halted pace is a product of the heavy montage process and gives them an artificial quality – Adorno channelled by Siri, so to speak. Finally, the dialogue that is being created here also extends in another direction beyond the dead philosophers and instead into the temporally dispersed audiences across various performance nights. The network of notes that are strung across the performance space at the Sophiensaele puts the audience members in dialogue with each other, materialising the interwoven ways in which their dialogue extends in multiple directions and might resonate across space and time. Interrobang’s machine performance is an exercise in listening as much as thinking techniques. The act of listening becomes staged as a polyphonic and multiple act, in which the participants divide their aural and visual attention: they follow the grainy voices of Arendt, Jaspers and company into their various avenues of thinking. Simultaneously, the participants watch a performance of attentive listening – in the shape of the other participants, scribbling, wondering, musing. And while that act connects and relates each of the participants, each journey is also singular, since there are so many options to pursue in the network of ideas that the audience can choose from via numbers on their telephone pads. In providing this dual experience of listening and watching for the audience, Interrobang comes close to Brecht’s own vision of Flight across the Ocean, in which he explicitly refers to the performance as an exercise for the audience as ‘the listener of the one part of the text and speaker of

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the other [pilot-]part’.31 The privileging of listening – practising listening, watching others listen – ultimately is a political act that connects the content of Die Philosophiermaschine and its discursive journeys into extremism, climate change, freedom and democracy to its form as a listening machine. Listening is marked as a primarily democratic act. Susan Bickford is among an increasing number of political scientists who have explored this auditive dimension of democracy that Interrobang playfully opens up in its performance.32 Bickford directly connects the concepts of listening and citizenry: Listening to another person cannot mean abnegating oneself; we cannot but hear as ourselves, against the background of who we are. But without moving ourselves to the background, we cannot hear another at all. [. . .] This interdependence, in which speaker and listener are different-but-equal participants, seems particularly apt for describing listening as a practice of citizenship.33 This idea of a ‘different-but-equal’ relationship between speaker and listener shapes the performance experience of Die Philosophiermaschine. It stages performance as a multioptional and interactive communication process that moves through a web of concepts. In this approach, Interrobang’s dialogue machine for modern philosophy can be understood as resonating with Lehmann and Varopolou’s concept of ‘the other Brecht’ and their sense of Brecht paving the way for a ‘theatre as no longer being staged for but rather as a scenic practice with the audience = participants’. The audience is asked repeatedly to enter into a live act of communication, as in this passage with Karl Jaspers from the script: Was sich nicht in Kommunikation verwirklicht, (. . .) ist ohne genügenden Grund. Selbstgewissheit ist die verführendste Form (. . .) für das (. . .) Ausbleiben der Kommunikation. Daher fordert die Philosophie: ständig Kommunikation suchen, sie rückhaltlos wagen, (. . .). (Reihenfolge der letzten beiden Sätze getauscht)34 -65 65 Maschine Willst Du . . . die Kommunikation . . . jetzt . . . wagen? Dann wähle die Eins What does not become realised in communication, (. . .) does not have a sufficient foundation. Self-assurance is the most seductive form (. . .) that leads to the (. . .) failure of communication. That is why the philosophy demands: to seek out communication continually, to dare it without unreservedly (. . .). (Switched sequence of the last two sentences). -65 65 Machine Do you . . . want to dare . . . to communicate . . . now? Then please press one.35 Daring to communicate lies at the heart of Interrobang’s performance work and ties into the group’s goal of analysing how communication in the digital age actually occurs and gains in complexity. That is why Die Philosophiermaschine is not only a game played on one of the most prolific modern communication devices, the

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telephone, but also a labyrinth of philosophical knowledge paths; ultimately, the performance builds an expanding network of knowledge exchange across audiences. The citations from the script already give an impression of the complexity of material and montage that create the auditive experience of Die Philosophiermaschine. In addition, Figure 28.3 provides an overview of the multiple paths into which the performance branches and allows a sense of how the different philosophical topics and individual philosophers interconnect throughout the performance. The sketch shows how two different shapes interact to create the particular knowledge network of Die Philosophiermaschine. The backbone or skeleton of the structure is made up of three recurring components: the introduction (dividing into Jaspers and Arendt-path), a general question menu and the closing sequence. From there, different topics branch off, cluster and interconnect with one another, allowing for a multitude of passages through the material and the ultimate sense that each decision (‘please press one for . . . please press two for . . .’) comes with the knowledge that no single audience member will be able to cover all the different network nodes in a single performance. Ultimately, each audience participant builds their own performance out of the building blocks shown in the sketch below, highlighting the unfinished process of philosophising. With this method of perpetual building and rebuilding of performance experiences, Die Philosophiermaschine picks up on more than just Brecht’s Lehrstücktheory; here, the process-oriented method of his model books resonates strongly, taking apart theatre into its components. In this case, Die Philosophiermaschine asks us to build our own narrative out of the web of modern philosophical positions that

Figure 28.3  Dramaturgical sketch of the network structure of Die Philosophiermaschine, unpublished archival materials (courtesy of Interrobang).

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have shaped the present but that also remain partially at odds with each other. The telephone performance allows us to talk to the dead in order to tell our own story of how these ideas of modernity resonate today. Ultimately, Interrobang significantly draws on Brecht’s learning plays and his media experiments and thus enters into a direct dialogue with modern and modernist theatre history. It also offers an answer to Lehmann and Varopolou’s call for finding even further ‘other Brechts’ that have slipped away and fallen through the cracks behind the dominating shape of epic theatre. Its participatory gaming theatre, however, is not an embrace of Lehmann’s postdramatic and postmodern reframing of a Brechtian legacy. Instead, it is a return to a novel sense of storytelling and narrative, as Interrobang’s Nina Tecklenburg herself suggests in her academic study Performing Stories on contemporary theatre: ‘The performances in question allow us to think narrative differently: not so much a closed story as a finished product but rather as a process of making stories; not so much a distancing from the events as an approach to the world as an embodied practice.’36 Interrobang’s Philosophiermaschine is a case in point for such an embodied practice of narrating. In doing so, it highlights another kind of machine that differs from Brecht’s aeroplanes, automobiles or radios. Instead, the machines of digital media that force us into perpetual acts of self-narration, as Tecklenburg suggests, takes centre stage.37 In these critically engaged stagings of our contemporary digital machines, Interrobang and other contemporary performance makers come closest to modernist practices that have either slipped away or have remained underdeveloped at the time.

Dialoguing with Interrobang In an article on dialogical games, it seems only fitting to close with another iteration of dialogue, this time in order to allow the makers of Die Philosophiermaschine to speak themselves about their devising processes with machines in greater detail, and to explore their entanglements with theatrical modernism and Brecht as well as his dramatic heir, Heiner Müller, specifically. In this excerpt from our Zoom interview in February 2022,38 the co-artistic directors Tillmann Müller-Klug and Nina Tecklenburg give insight into their dramaturgical methods and motivations and the role that modernist and contemporary machines take in their performance work: Nina Tecklenburg [NT]: Going back to our beginnings in 2011: [. . .] for me, coming from theatre studies, there existed an interesting new space of artistic exploration. My question at that time was: how can you make a performance that is beyond, you know, the presumption of co-presence or physical presence? How can you have people in a room together that are part of a performance that also forces them somehow to communicate via technology? Throughout our work, the telephone has been really interesting for us, and that interest has stuck and continues to be important in Philosophiermaschine (The Philosophising Machine) because of the connotations of a telephone as being an apparatus that takes you into another time, like a time machine. We drew on all these cultural references and instances, also from film history etc., that explore the telephone as a time machine. In The Matrix, for example, there’s this old phone that rings and that takes you into the centre of the Matrix – it’s a little machine into another world. And we were interested in that.

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The telephone is also a very old machine that has this analogue touch which we were deliberately tapping into. We wanted to play with the analogue aspect. [. . .] Tillmann Müller-Klug [TM-K]: Just to add that: it’s a strategy often used in science fiction movies to take old stuff and change it a little; that makes it look more futuristic than if you try to invent something totally new. We like to use old items of technology and combine them with newer ones. One thing which is always very important for us is that we use digital technology in an analogue space where it usually wouldn’t have a part. It is very Brechtian, it’s a way of creating an alienation effect: usually you only phone someone if they are not physically there. In Callcenter Übermorgen (Call Centre of the Future, 2013), the fun part is that you phone someone who may be just three yards away, but you don’t know exactly where. No one would actually need a phone here, you know? But the alienation is that you still use it. NT: I think this is what’s changed during the pandemic for us: the kind of rhetoric we used before was to take something from the digital world and place it in a live situation of physical co-presence. We use the theatrical setting as a tool of alienation to make people aware of the mechanisms of digital communication. What exactly changes when you place mediatised communication – which implies a physical distance – in a setting of physical proximity? We wanted to explore that on a social and ethical level. [. . .] And The Müllermatrix (2016) is a key project as a precursor to Philosophiermaschine. Ramona Mosse [RM]: Can you maybe summarise Müllermatrix briefly for everyone here? NT: Yes, sure, so Müllermatrix was a commission from the HAU Hebbel am Ufer Theater; they were doing a Heiner Müller Festival together with the International Heiner Müller Society. And this wasn’t really something that we had ever done before, you know. We hadn’t really worked with literature as such. We usually devised our own work and wrote our own text. I remember that we gave ourselves a bit of time to think about it all. And then we came up with this idea, which was a game changer in our own practice. We basically combined different techniques that we had used before: we used the montage of original sound material that we had explored in previous pieces. And, of course, there was Till’s background as a writer of radio plays that also engaged with machines. You should listen to Till’s old radio plays: in almost every play there is some kind of machine there, little audio machines that give you instructions, etc. So, Till, there definitely is this affinity in your artistic biography already that goes back to when you were a teenager, actually. Anyway, it’s a kind of long Müller-Klug tradition. On the one hand, we had this sound montage, and on the other hand, we developed this multi-optional dramaturgy that we connected to the telephone, drawing on the idea of a call centre and the multiple choices it implies.

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We were interested in doing something with the audio material around Heiner Müller, with everything that he recorded. We basically listened to all his audio material: his readings, interviews or speeches that he gave. It gave us a big variety of materials; some would be poetic, some political, some personal. It allowed us to juxtapose these different qualities of audio texts by Heiner Müller. The telephone we had already used previously in Callcenter Übermorgen, and it became a time travel machine or a world travel machine with which you could enter into these different fictional dimensions. As for the Müllermatrix, the telephone connects you to the past, yet we claim that Heiner Müller is with you in the moment of actual listening. Müllermatrix allowed us to create the basic dramaturgical technique that also guides Philosophiermaschine: what is the material that we are looking for? How do we compose it so that it creates the illusion of an encounter with someone who is actually dead? How do we create this authenticity effect? In order to achieve this kind of composition, we looked for two types of texts in the original audio material. On the one hand, we had specific subjects that we wanted to cover and that we wanted the participants to engage with. That was what happened on the level of content. On the other hand, there was the level of conversation with Heiner Müller that we wanted to create. So we searched for self-referential moments in his talks and interviews that he gave, in which he would refer to the actual situation he was in, such as ‘I need a break right now’. Or ‘Can we continue now?’, ‘Can you hear me?’ or ‘I need a cigar now!’. We also looked for passages in his literary texts in which the audience is directly addressed in the second person singular or plural. We were looking for some kind of theatricality in the text. That was the big task, actually, to make Heiner Müller come alive. TM-K: That also answers the question of why we chose [Hannah] Arendt and [Karl] Jaspers as the centre of Die Philosophiermaschine. The advantage of working with audio material from dead people is, of course, that it is absolutely clear that their material is manipulated. We like that, and it’s also fun if they talk with these audible cuts. We don’t want to hide the cutting. It’s quite Brechtian: we don’t hide anything but want people to hear that there are edits and that there’s a machine. With dead people you don’t ask whether the person worked in the studio with us. It’s clear that we twisted the footage. At the same time, it’s important for us that you hear the real original voice rather than the voice of an impersonator. That means there are actually not so many philosophers to whom we could apply our particular montage technique. [. . .] We needed philosophers that were dead and who left us with rich audio material. For the way we work, we usually need transcripts of all the material. Together with our colleague Peggy Mädler we then started by going through the text transcripts, not the audio files. Once we had the time codes, we went through the actual audio bits. To create interesting texts and to make those texts feel alive, we needed at least forty to fifty files. Otherwise, we wouldn’t have enough material to let the philosophers say anything meaningful within the context of our piece. Arendt and Jaspers were good because they also talked so much about philosophy on a meta level: what is philosophy? That’s why they were great hosts, and we could stage them as guides for the audience and as the main operators of

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the machine. The other philosophers spoke on specific topics and were invited by Jaspers and Arendt. For them, we didn’t need so much audio material, as for example in the case of the East German philosopher [Rudolf] Bahro. So, we first search the field to see what is possible with the material that we have. We look at the audio files on multiple levels: content, theatrical quality and how it fits into the overall concept. For this project Jaspers and Arendt stood out. They are a really good couple in a way. They did know each other and had this special connection. NT: We started off with a working title – something like ‘Ghosts 2021’ – and we were interested in this idea of ghosts and ghosting. That is what we thought had been fascinating about Müllermatrix, that it creates a ghost-effect, that you are communicating – in the here and now – with someone who is known to be dead and whose words from the past still have something to say about the times we live in. This creates an uncanny effect. Talking about machines and the tradition of machines: I want to come back to why we chose to do this initial Müller project. Our interest in machines relates back not only to Brecht but to Heiner Müller, who used a lot of tech and machine-related metaphors. So, we thought it would be interesting to somehow lock Müller into a machine as much as he felt locked into all sorts of political systems and systems in general. [. . .] Our general artistic approach to Heiner Müller was to use his own literary technique [of appropriation] against him: we are taking his texts and spoken words and rewriting – thus re-editing – them according to twenty-firstcentury needs. TM-K: That is also another big point in Die Philosophiermaschine. We don’t want to totally distort these philosophers. We would not let Arendt or Jaspers say something that would have them turn in their graves, so to speak. Yet, we are still not completely ‘true to the work’, we take a lot of liberties. We don’t want to build a Frankenstein’s creature but try to catch the spirit of these thinkers. NT: Another criterion for choosing Arendt and Jaspers: we wanted them to have lived through the Second World War. We wanted them to have experienced this moment of utter crisis from very different perspectives and speak from the centre of the twentieth century. And there is this restriction of who actually left archived audio material. We could not have taken someone like Brecht – too old. And we had a couple of philosophers we were really interested in but couldn’t find enough audio material of [. . .] And if we did this again or if we had more time, we still have a list of philosophers we would like to add to the Philosophiermaschine to open the piece up a little. Now it’s very much focused on West German post-war philosophers. RM: Can you say some more about the way the technology operated: after the research and the textual work, where does the AI come in? TM-K: Yeah, I mean, we developed this technique in Callcenter Übermorgen. Basically, I don’t know if you’ve seen them, but we have created these huge

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diagrams, these ‘decision trees’. On a technical level, for every little passage, you need a number – we call them fields. So, if you are in one field, you press ‘1’ and go to another field. So, it’s coded and we used a diagram for visualisation. Georg, the creative coder we work with, then came up with a programme which you can feed with the graphic and which transfers the graphic into machine code. That was a big step for us: we could visualise it and it would be immediately translated. After this step, there is a lot of testing. NT: Yes, we had to test all the different possible paths to make sure that the transitions between the different forking paths and options worked. You just need to go over it again and again. TM-K: The AI part in The Philosophising Machine is more of a claim than a reality in certain ways. The audience responds in a variety of ways: some really think the system makes up everything while this is actually devised by us and then transposed. In our most recent piece Deep Godot (2021), the technology is actually more advanced. Here, the AI mixes the music and generates the language – it’s more high-tech. NT: Philosophiermaschine is basically an audio hypertext that you navigate through. TM-K: An important technique for us is the dialogue. The machine responds to your input. Thus you have the sense that the philosophers respond to what you do. (Cut to end of ‘Die Philosophiermaschine’:) Signal Beep Setze . . . gleich . . . die Kopfhörer . . . ab, schließe die Denk-Box. . . und gehe durch den Raum. Nimm Dir Zeit, erforsche (versteht man nicht gut, bitte verbessern) . . . die . . . Gedanken-Zettel und folge . . .. den . . . Denkenspuren . . . der anderen. Unsere kollektive künstliche Intelligenz ermöglicht uns gemeinsam zu denken. Wenn du fertig . . . bist, . . . verlasse . . . den Raum Auf Wiederhören Telefontuten. Signal Beep Put . . . off . . . the headphones . . . close the thinking box . . . and move through the space. Take your time, explore (difficult to understand, please improve) . . . the . . . thinking notes . . . and follow . . . the thought traces . . . of the others. Our collective artificial intelligence allows us to think together. When you are finished . . ., leave . . . the space. Goodbye. Telephone beeping.39

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Notes   1. Interrobang, ‘About Us’, https://www.interrobang-performance.com/en/what/ (accessed 5 November 2021).   2. All quoted excerpts come from an unpublished script by Interrobang, with kind permission of the authors. Strand 21_1_, from which I quote here and later in the text, includes all interactive segments by Hannah Arendt and Karl Jaspers, in which Jaspers’s and Arendt’s original sound material is cut together by Interrobang to allow them to give direct instructions to the audience in choosing multi-optional paths through the performance piece. The numbering system in brackets at the end of the line identifies the different fields to which the textual paths in the script lead; the field numbers are used for programming the entire script into a system of forking paths.  3. Interrobang, Philosophiermaschine, 21_1_ Strecke 99 Maschinenphilosophie und ENDE (21_1_ Stretch 99 Machine philosophy and ENDING), unpublished script, 2020, n.p.  4. Matthew Reason, ‘Participatory Audiencing and the Committed Return’, in Staging Spectators in Immersive Performances: Commit Yourself!, ed. Doris Kolesch, Theresa Schütz and Sophie Nikoleit (London and New York: Routledge, 2019), 100.   5. Stefan Hulfeld, ‘Modernist Theatre’, in The Cambridge Companion to Theatre History, ed. David Wiles and Christine Dymkowski (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 16.   6. Ibid. 18–19.  7. Martin Puchner, Stage Fright: Modernism, Anti-Theatricality, and Drama (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002), 1.  8. Toril Moi, ‘Ibsen, Theatre and the Ideology of Modernism’, Theatre Survey 45, no. 2 (November 2004): 250–1.  9. Puchner, Stage Fright, 139. 10. See, for example, Roswitha Mueller’s Bertolt Brecht and the Theory of Media (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1989), Lothar van Laak’s Medien und Medialität des Epischen in Literatur und Film des 20. Jahrhunderts (Munich and Paderborn: Wilhelm Fink, 2009) or Matthew Wilson Smith, The Total Work of Art: From Bayreuth to Cyberspace (New York and London: Routledge, 2007). 11. Bertolt Brecht, Brecht on Theatre, trans. and ed. John Willett (New York: Hill & Wang, 1992), 184. 12. Ramona Mosse, ‘Fragment und Modell: Brechts Theaterästhetik der Zukunft’, in Brecht und das Fragment, ed. Astrid Oesmann and Matthias Rothe (Berlin: Verbrecher Verlag, 2020), 78. 13. Hans Curjel, Gespräche auf der Probe (Zurich: Sanssouci Verlag, 1961), 11. 14. Astrid Oesmann and Matthias Rothe, ‘Zur Einführung’, in Brecht und das Fragment, ed. Astrid Oesmann and Matthias Rothe (Berlin: Verbrecher Verlag, 2020), 23. 15. Hans-Thies Lehmann and Helene Varopolou, ‘Brechtbrief’‚ The Brecht Yearbook/Das Brecht-Jahrbuch 40 (December 2016): 5. 16. Ibid. 8. 17. Bertolt Brecht, ‘A Radio Speech’, in Brecht on Theatre, 17. 18. Ibid. 18. 19. Thomas Pekar, ‘Apparate und Körper: Überlegungen zu Brechts Radiolehrstück Der Ozeanflug’, The Brecht Yearbook/Das Brecht-Jahrbuch 40 (December 2016): 52–66. 20. Bertolt Brecht, Collected Plays 3, ed. John Willett (London and New York: Methuen Drama, 1997), 18. 21. Ibid. 18. 22. See Pekar, ‘Apparate und Körper’, 60. 23. Paula Hanssen, ‘The Flight of the Lindbergh, St. Louis Symphony Orchestra’, review, Communications from the International Brecht Society (2017), https://e-cibs.org/issue-12017/#hanssenstart (accessed 18 October 2022).

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24. Bertolt Brecht, ‘The Radio as an Apparatus of Communication’, in Brecht on Theatre, 52. 25. The independent performance collective Rimini Protokoll might be most renowned internationally in this context, but other Northern European independent collectives working with participatory formats include SIGNA, with their immersive multi-day world building, and Turbo Pascal and their interactive gaming structures. 26. Interrobang, ‘About Us’. 27. Vittorio Hösle, ‘Interpreting Philosophical Dialogues’, Antike und Abendland 48, no. 1 (2002): 74–5, doi:10.1515/9783110241600.68. 28. See Ingeborg Nordmann, ‘Das Miteinander Sprechen und Handeln’, in Hannah Arendt: Lektüren zur politischen Bildung, ed. Tonio Oeftering, Waltraud Meints-Stender and Dirk Lange (Wiesbaden: Springer Nature, 2020), 94–5. 29. Text styling corresponds to the script draft, kindly shared by the authors. All brackets and ellipses appear as in the original script. Underlinings mark a switch in voice between Arendt and Jaspers. 30. Interrobang, Philosophiermaschine, 21_1_ Strecke 99 Maschinenphilosophie und ENDE (21_1_ Stretch 99 Machine philosophy and ENDING), n.p. 31. Quoted in Hanssen, ‘The Flight of the Lindbergh’. 32. See also Andrew Dobson, ‘Listening: The New Democratic Deficit’, Political Studies 60, no. 4 (2012): 843–59, doi:10.1111/j.1467-9248.2012.00944.x, and Laura Kunreuther, ‘Sounds of Democracy: Performance, Protest, and Political Subjectivity’, Journal of Cultural Anthropology 33, no. 1 (2018): 1–31, doi:10.14506/ca33.1.01. 33. Susan Bickford, The Dissonance of Democracy: Listening, Conflict, and Citizenship (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1996), 33–4. 34. In the original script, this text is coloured in pink to mark a late edit in the script itself. 35. Interrobang, Philosophiermaschine, 21_1_Strecke 99, n.p. 36. Nina Tecklenburg, Performing Stories: Erzählen in Theater und Performance (Bielefeld: Transcript, 2014), 41. 37. Ibid. 26. 38. The Zoom interview by the author with Nina Tecklenburg and Tillmann Müller-Klug took place on 11 February 2022. 39. Interrobang, Philosophiermaschine, 21_1_Strecke 99, n.p.

Works Cited Bickford, Susan. The Dissonance of Democracy: Listening, Conflict, and Citizenship. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1996. Brecht, Bertolt. Brecht on Theatre. Translated and edited by John Willett. New York: Hill & Wang, 1992. Brecht, Bertolt. Collected Plays 3. Edited by John Willett. London and New York: Methuen Drama, 1997. Curjel, Hans. Gespräche auf der Probe. Zurich: Sanssouci Verlag, 1961. Dobson, Andrew. ‘Listening: The New Democratic Deficit’. Political Studies 60, no. 4 (2012): 843–59. doi:10.1111/j.1467-9248.2012.00944.x. Hanssen, Paula. ‘The Flight of the Lindbergh, St. Louis Symphony Orchestra’, review. Communications from the International Brecht Society (2017). https://e-cibs.org/issue-1-2017/#hanssenstart (accessed 18 October 2022). Hösle, Vittorio. ‘Interpreting Philosophical Dialogues’. Antike und Abendland 48, no. 1 (2002): 68–90. doi:10.1515/9783110241600.68. Hulfeld, Stefan. ‘Modernist Theatre’. In The Cambridge Companion to Theatre History, edited by David Wiles and Christine Dymkowski, 15–32. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012.

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Interrobang. ‘About Us’. https://www.interrobang-performance.com/en/what/ (accessed 5 November 2021). Interrobang. Script for Philosophiermaschine. 2020. Unpublished. Used with kind permission of the authors. Kunreuther, Laura. ‘Sounds of Democracy: Performance, Protest, and Political Subjectivity’. Journal of Cultural Anthropology 33, no. 1 (2018): 1–31. doi:10.14506/ca33.1.01. Laak, Lothar van. Medien und Medialität des Epischen in Literatur und Film des 20. Jahrhunderts. Munich and Paderborn: Wilhelm Fink, 2009. Lehmann, Hans-Thies and Helene Varopolou. ‘Brechtbrief”. In The Brecht Yearbook/Das Brecht-Jahrbuch 40 (December 2016): 4–17. Moi, Toril. ‘Ibsen, Theatre and the Ideology of Modernism’. Theatre Survey 45, no. 2 (November 2004): 247–52. Mosse, Ramona. ‘Fragment und Modell: Brechts Theaterästhetik der Zukunft’. In Brecht und das Fragment, edited by Astrid Oesmann and Matthias Rothe, 59–80. Berlin: Verbrecher Verlag, 2020. Mueller, Roswitha. Bertolt Brecht and the Theory of Media. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1989. Nordmann, Ingeborg. ‘Das Miteinander Sprechen und Handeln’. In Hannah Arendt: Lektüren zur politischen Bildung, edited by Tonio Oeftering, Waltraud Meints-Stender and Dirk Lange, 93–103. Wiesbaden: Springer Nature, 2020. Oesmann, Astrid and Matthias Rothe. ‘Zur Einführung’. In Brecht und das Fragment, edited by Astrid Oesmann and Matthias Rothe, 7–26. Berlin: Verbrecher Verlag, 2020. Pekar, Thomas. ‘Apparate und Körper: Überlegungen zu Brechts Radiolehrstück Der Ozeanflug’. In The Brecht Yearbook/Das Brecht-Jahrbuch 40 (December 2016): 52–66. doi:10.7722/9781782049036.006. Puchner, Martin. Stage Fright: Modernism, Anti-Theatricality, and Drama. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002. Reason, Matthew. ‘Participatory Audiencing and the Committed Return’. In Staging Spectators in Immersive Performances: Commit Yourself!, edited by Doris Kolesch, Theresa Schütz and Sophie Nikoleit, 88–101. London and New York: Routledge, 2019. Smith, Matthew Wilson. The Total Work of Art: From Bayreuth to Cyberspace. New York and London: Routledge, 2007. Tecklenburg, Nina. Performing Stories: Erzählen in Theater und Performance. Bielefeld: Transcript, 2014.

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29 ‘What Could Be the Theatre of Contemporary Life?’ A Conversation about the Work of Studio Oyuncuları, Istanbul Şahika Tekand and Burç İdem Dinçel Translated by Verda Habif and Tulu Ülgen

Burç İdem Dinçel [BİD]: Modernism has an intricate history in Turkey’s theatrical climate, one that is associated with Westernisation. I am basically talking about a past in which the quest for ‘synthesis’ in the 1940s and 1950s was refined in the extreme political theatre of the 1960s and 1970s, and resurfaced under the name of ‘hybrid’ artistic works of the 1980s and 1990s, where artists tended to turn their backs on modernist aesthetics due to the postmodern wave that was dominating the period. Your journey with the Studio Oyuncuları starts exactly at this point. In the years when this rejection was experienced most severely, you began by making a modernist statement, so to speak: Happy Days by Samuel Beckett. What were the motives that led you to this statement, while modernism itself was going through transformations, fractures and slippages in that postmodern wave, which, arguably, soon became clear to have no vitality, or sustainability for that matter? Şahika Tekand [ŞT]: The political theatre experience in Turkey in the 1960s and 1970s that you mentioned had a textual focus; blazing the trail for a ‘new’ form was not on the cards. It was more concerned with what was said than with what was done on stage. Theatres that did seek form acted mostly in the convention of Bertolt Brecht’s demonstrative approach. Thanks to the formal kinship between Brecht’s demonstrative form and traditional oriental demonstrativeness, the Turkish audience was receptive to this sort of theatre, which, in turn, was quickly accepted. Whilst it is certainly true that artistically very good examples of this type of theatre were staged in Turkey, tackling the question of meaning as an issue intrinsic to the ‘form’ itself was often perceived then, as nowadays, unnecessary. In the early 1980s, change in the world was so intense and rapid that it was almost tangible. The idea that ‘since we can’t change the world, let’s play games’ was embraced and spread at an incredible speed. It was the times when shiny aspirations for the dolce vita ensuing from the ‘irresponsible lightness’ of the

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postmodern era and liberal capitalism were rising. Humanity was convinced that it could not change the world and chose to live life by playing ‘games’ and discharging itself from responsibilities . . . The times when creating a form, even mentioning the idea of a method became virtually a sin; contemporary art turned into a game of politically correct oppositionism in safe, insincere spaces, wherein such concepts as ‘live performance’, ‘process’, ‘reality of the present moment’, ‘objectivity’ were shallowed . . . This, in return, set the scene for a highly functional ‘domesticated opposition game’. And this was precisely what the system needed. Hence my modernist reflex. The theatre, which is live, which has to be live, and whose ‘liveness’ can by no means be translated into any other form of expression, has become for me a point of resistance, where I can intervene in life in the way I know best. It all started with the questions: what could be the theatre of contemporary life? Would it be viable to make a contemporary, principled, skilful, artistically responsible ‘game playing’ and theatre that could reach out to the present-day audience, who barely related to the old narrative theatre forms? This, to be sure, was not merely a pursuit of inventiveness or difference. It was a search for a path to find a real connection with the contemporary spectating area, which operates on a completely different set of perceptions and responds to the objective world in tandem with its ever-changing auditory and visual means. To connect with these tools through the art of acting and theatre, both of which essentially spring from a dissatisfaction with life, is identical with the act of opposing and interfering with life in such a vein that shapes the ‘present moment’ with the aim of creating an entirely ‘new’, ‘human-made’ reality. It was, therefore, feasible to start with a proposition against the existing situation and seek its results in practice via which an alternative theatrical form as such could be introduced. The search for a new path must first and foremost be intellectual in art, especially in theatre, because it is undertaken in an environment of thought and culture, where the world system does enforce inventions. Every new thing that appears – even if it opposes the ways in which the system functions at the time of its appearance – is reproduced, put into mass production, democratised (!), made acceptable and stylish. Only if innovation is a necessity – a material or intellectual necessity – can it be ‘new’ and present itself as an alternative to the old and prevalent. If not, it becomes a compromise that is far from changing the status quo. And to make matters worse, invention turns into a variation that is immediately pressed into the service of the system. Under those circumstances, I, as an individual, opposed the ‘transformation of life into a game’ by the system. And as an artist, I situated the concept of ‘game’ at the heart of my staging method. This was the epitome of my desire to construct a structure that opposes the aforesaid transformation. It is no coincidence that this journey started with Beckett. The conscious incompleteness of Beckett’s texts opens up space for what uniquely exists when it is performed. The manner in which Beckett fashions his plays as double-layered structures by superimposing the dramatic narrative with what is happening on stage not only taught me a lot, but also gave rise to extraordinary opportunities for the creation of the performative on stage. For someone like me, who works with a view to constructing the layers of

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. . . 386 s¸ahika tekand and burç idem dinçel ‘life/game/play’ on stage together with ‘human/game player-actor/dramatis persona’ in acting at simultaneous and superposing levels, Beckett’s works allow for maximum affordances. BİD: I would like to expand on your Beckett stagings during the early years of the Studio Oyuncuları, for they are the results of an intensive research process whereby you reckoned with your stint in cinema.1 Happy Days (1993), Five Short Plays (1994) – Act Without Words I, Act Without Words II, Breath, Play and Come and Go – and Endgame (1997) all used montage technique, which you functionally transplanted from the medium of cinema to contemporary theatre. Beckett meets with Sergei Eisenstein and Vsevolod Meyerhold in your theatrical praxis. It is, I believe, at this common ground that modernism proves to be the dynamo of a dynamic theatre, such as yours, that constantly seeks the ‘new’. Even so, inclined to downgrade the movement as a phenomenon that expired in the 1970s (or even earlier), critical discourse hardly gives credit to modernism in contemporary theatre. And yet, there is your modernist practice negating those and similar claims. ŞT: In lieu of opting for a thorough critique of modernity or modernisation, postmodern thought, which is diversified in itself, chose to adopt a critical attitude towards modernism, which is diversified in itself too. Ultimately, it established an intellectual and cultural milieu that perfected the manners through which the dominant world system functions. That said, do not the world, the nature, let alone the brutal operation of life blatantly repudiate almost every claim of the postmodern discourse today? The modernist reflex evaluates the ‘new’ on the basis of defining, discussing and interrogating it in its interconnections. As I mentioned earlier, the hallmark of theatre that cannot be matched with any other form of expression is its ‘liveness’. Concordantly, its prime determinant is what happens in the ‘present’, in a limited time and space. The here-and-now of performance, as well as how it is realised, generates both the form and the story of the performance. What acquires a decisive role is not so much the dramatic textual narrative as the story of the performance and how it is made visible, audible and acted. Simply put: the ‘how’ is crucial, not the ‘what’. In my opinion, one can speak of artistic creativity only when the ‘what’ is embedded in the ‘how’. Theatre, pace Meyerhold, is the art of ‘doing’. ‘Doing’ itself is closely related to ‘time’. Whether you want it or not, time progresses, flows, changes owing to the essence of the conditions of its existence – the grammar of the fiction constitutes the ‘how’ of all this. Principally, what one calls montage already exists in the dramaturgy of all sorts of fiction. Staking claims on montage as technique, cinema merely, albeit spellbindingly, accelerated and diversified the flows and sequences that formerly seemed unfeasible in a live performance. By making it possible in a human-made, synthetic ‘new’ reality on the live stage, I have metamorphosed this speed and diversification into the objective and necessary instruments of the ‘game’, which forms the backbone of my theatrical design. The abstract finds its expression in the play area; to be specific, in how the objective reality of the present and the dramatic action is created therein. In my

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Beckett stagings from day one, the determining factor has been the honest sharing of the here-and-now by the spectating and the playing area in an encounter, where the objective existed as the sole thing expressing the abstract. Not just in my productions of Beckett, but in all my plays, I transform Beckett’s definition of lifespan through Hamm – ‘the end is in the beginning and yet you go on’2 – into the span of the play for the actors and all other play elements alike. I literally transform the stage into a simulation room in which the live space is translated into a game area that shapes up to be a zone of existence and responsibility for all the actors and other constituents of the stage, such as light, sound, decor and so on, each of which I always maintain as ‘players’. Actors, who are voluntarily exposed to the conditions of the game on stage, realise the action under these performative parameters. At all times, I aim to create a ‘new’ grammar, a ‘new’ formal language that can be read, learned and questioned by the audience, that is to say, by the spectating area. BİD: You have a modernist vision that transcends cultural and geographical borders. Instead of pursuing tradition in the ‘local’, you zoom in on universal human conditions. Within the framework of modernism, however, what the ‘culture industry’ expects from a theatre-maker working in a ‘non-Western’ geography is to include the ‘local’ one way or another and politicise the material at hand through ‘intercultural’ means. Otherwise, the artist’s works are always in danger of going unnoticed, if not being outright ignored. My preceding and ongoing implied reference to the modernist dictum to ‘make it new’ appears to be of special relevance here. For instance, the timeless production of Five Short Plays is likely the first in the world (after Beckett’s death) to gather and present Beckett’s selected ‘dramaticules’ under one bill, followed by the European tours. Nevertheless, the name that is registered in the ‘official’ records in that respect is Katie Mitchell and her 1997 production of Beckett Shorts; even though it consists of different pieces, the same staging strategy is at work. Does not the academic literature’s depiction of modernism, with its eyes transfixed on continental Europe and the United States, point to a much bigger problem than the challenges of discourse in this context, particularly for theatre artists like you who are ‘far’ from, yet also ‘near’ to, that geography? ŞT: The narrow-mindedness or overlooking behaviour of Western academic circles does not surprise me that much. That being said, although I have witnessed many times over the years that the West does appreciate a good work when it sees it, I have likewise experienced many times how distant and stingy it can be when it comes to giving credit to the innovativeness of ideas and the authenticity of an artistic claim. More specifically, if you are someone who is adamant on swimming against the tide imposed by the dominant culture, it is nearly impossible not to come across this attitude. Even in Turkey, there was such a preconceived opinion that this type of innovation could merely come from the West. It was only after many years that some scholars and critics began to talk and wrote about my ‘performative staging and acting method’. I think the problem is rooted in the geography I live in. Deep inside, there is either a belief in the illusion that the West is a priori democratic, right, just and

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. . . 388 s¸ahika tekand and burç idem dinçel so forth, or a widespread mediocrity stemming from that deception. The economic-cultural influence and power of the West conduces towards these kinds of deformations all over the world. This, probably, is the natural consequence of the hegemonic mindset that regulates the policies of the culture industry, which, in fact, is a flawless apparatus of this dominant system. All in all, insofar as giving credit where it is due, the common problem of both the West and the East boils down to the tunnel vision at play. Neither of the parties deals with the actual sources of why the dominant is dominant; each of them succumbs to the power of what is in force. After a point, this leads to blindness. Whilst it manifests itself in the West with an attitude of looking down, it causes blind anger or an inferiority complex in geographies outside the West. Nonetheless, from my critical, self-evaluative standpoint, I do not take any cognisance of these issues. I am on stage; I am going to do what I have to do and then I will exit. BİD: Aside from your stagings of Beckett, your modern reworkings of Attic tragedies do stand out in your more than thirty-year-long career. The Oedipus Trilogy (Where Is Oedipus?, 2002; Oedipus in Exile, 2004; Eurydice’s Cry, 2006),3 the subsequent Anti-Prometheus (2010), not to mention the tours varying from Delphi to Toga, ensured the international success and recognition of the Studio Oyuncuları. At the end of the day, what comes to the fore in these works is a modernist machine confronting the audience with constructivist stage designs, while at the same time inviting the recipients to co-create the tragic meaning in the hic et nunc of the theatrical performance. In essence, these productions are the fruits of what you just referred to as your ‘performative staging and acting method’. How did modernism and modernist staging devices feed into your contemporary methodology? Where does modernism fit within the overall scaffold of the method? ŞT: As I hinted at previously, what triggered the emergence of the method in the first place was the answer that I wished to give to life in general, and to the postmodern trend in particular. Postmodern thought stripped the notion of ‘game’ of its principles and presented it in a way devoid of ethics. Then again, the raison d’être of ‘game’ abides in its (ir)rationality, its isolation from life with regard to time and space, its relationship between the abstract and the objective, as well as in its synthetic quality – its principles can easily be absorbed and reshaped in critical terms if needs be. It was these features of ‘game’ that furnished an occasion for me to create an ‘honest’ form that could stand in stark opposition to the ways in which the postmodern current was blurring the demarcation line between life and play. During the course of the development of the method, I thought often about notions deep-seated in modernism: ‘conflict’, ‘other’, ‘de/re/construction’, montage in contrast to bricolage, the dialectics of ‘borders’ and ‘freedom’, to name just a few. Amidst these, concepts of ‘conflict’ and ‘other’ are the main points of departure, building blocks if you like, of the method. For example, one of the most important and exciting facts of acting, for me, is the combination of these two through performance, where the ‘otherness’ of the actor treats the dramatis persona in conflictual manners as the third-person singular in the precise sense that

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Beckett employs it in Company: ‘He speaks of himself as another.’4 The actor performs on behalf of the ‘other’ and may concurrently be in conflict with being a game player and with a dramatic character. It is through this amalgam that the theatrical motor behind the actor’s performance on stage is set in motion. This performative context leaves no place for the ‘as if’ of what is performed on stage. Furthermore, it is solely in this mode that the spectator can ‘display a certain mental activity’,5 thereby to complete the ‘as if’ without necessarily being detached from the ‘present time’. Consciously left incomplete, the play can be completed only by virtue of the act of spectating. BİD: What you just hinted at is apparent in your stagings of the ancient Greek tragedies, because they were based on this performative ethos. Concurrently evoking a skēnē, a huge television screen, a colossal computer monitor, the constructivist set of Where Is Oedipus?, for one, enabled you to strike a balance between the scenic conventions, traditions if you prefer, of antiquity and those of theatrical modernism. ŞT: I regarded the spectators themselves as both the players and the eventual solvers of a crossword puzzle. In Oedipus in Exile, they were the witnesses of an Athenian trial that was constructed by more or less the same modernist scenography, which was also in place in Eurydice’s Cry, where the structure itself was deconstructed, signifying the waning authority of Kreon – the system, obviously. In Anti-Prometheus, I calculated the performance in such a way that it could gradually evolve into an autonomous machine, illustrating how punishing playing the ‘game of forgetting’ can be and how the system turns the modern human beings into robots by ordering them what to do and when. BİD: Along with Attic tragedies, perhaps the most universal human condition comes into play: the notion of the ‘tragic’. When dovetailed with modernity, there arises a truly tragic picture indeed, and modernism comes to be the aesthetic frame around that image. From your perspective, the conception of the ‘tragic’ is one and the same with the act of posing an aesthetic question vis-à-vis the position of human in the predominant order, namely, the system. In a certain sense, this dramaturgical thrust illustrates the modes through which political theatre can be made without imposing any response upon the audience. The Studio Oyuncuları’s most recent work Io (2019) makes this case all the more palpable. Still, what sets this production apart from the others is the way in which you deconstruct mythology with an eye to creating a ‘new’ tragedy in the present by pointing the spotlight on the tragic situation of a figure ignored from antiquity to modernity: Io. Does not your assertion that the text itself is an original rather than a rewriting amount to a modernist stance in and of itself? ŞT: I am not sure whether this is tantamount to taking a modernist stand or not. Maybe. Having said that, the governing reason behind this emphasis was my obligation to give ‘new’ voice to mythology from an alternate angle as a retort to the general tendency that regards these works as rewritings of ancient Greek texts. It is funny, because I was even approached by academics or critics who

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. . . 390 s¸ahika tekand and burç idem dinçel were asking which text Io is a rewriting of, or whose play it actually is. I think this is an indication of how the aforementioned attitude towards the West permeates through intellectual circles in Turkey. But I can say this: my modernist reflex urges me to translate the basic tenets of the ancient tragic form into those of a contemporary one, so as to foreground the fundamental conflict that is the sign of our times. The last quarter of the twentieth century was a time frame in which modern human beings lost their tragedy and were consequently condemned to a tragic life. In my view, that period of history will be written in the future as a dark era during which unprincipledness, not confronting errors, and not being accountable are deemed as the greatest successes. The mentality of ‘anything goes’ achieved just that. All the same, the tragic form of writing cannot be thought irrespective of the notions of error, confrontation, accountability and principles. It is impossible to construct a tragedy when one abolishes any of these dramaturgical-and-ethical ingredients. This is why today, with these aspects alone, ancient Greek tragedies address the exigencies of the current state of affairs in the world. Every day the system introduces us to brand-new exalted figures and objects of desire, new gods. No one argues, no one objects; everybody welcomes these as they are. It is against this backdrop that I penned Io and wished to write an original contemporary tragedy that is grounded in the ‘tragic’ idea of today: the conflict between the new gods of the system and human beings. I zeroed in on Io, on whom no tragedy has been written, since it is a mythological figure who could be the voice of those whose stories and destinies are not considered worthy of being told. What I wanted to write was a text that concomitantly clashed with Zeus – the god of the rulers – and with mythology as it has been told hitherto. BİD: On top of being a theatre company, the Studio Oyuncuları is also an educational institution, demonstrating that a different sort of education than the one provided by state conservatoires and universities can also exist in Turkey. Let us conclude by touching briefly on the relationship between modernism and pedagogy. From the viewpoint of a trainer, what is your take on this subject? ŞT: Pedagogical approaches are tight-knit with worldviews. The kind of individuals one wants to raise for the world is the result of the kind of world one wants. At the Studio Oyuncuları’s acting workshops, we primarily work on our own method with the newcomer actors, directors, writers or candidates thereof. We are chiefly running a programme to cultivate artists, who can devise and translate everything they devise into the language of the present time and their bodies – curious, objector, resistant, stubborn, suspicious, searching artists, who can proffer something ‘new’ in the face of the old. It is these traits that we try to spark in the minds of the participants, so that they can subsequently send potential shockwaves across society through theatre. This, in a word, was what theatrical modernism did in its historical context and continues to do so now in its contemporary context.

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Editorial Note This dialogue is based on a series of written question/answer exchanges (via email) between Dublin and Istanbul in October/November 2021. It has been translated, editorially distilled and shaped to create continuity in the discussion, as well as edited for brevity and clarity.

Notes  1. Mostly renowned for her collaborations with the Turkish auteur Ömer Kavur, Şahika Tekand appeared in the latter’s cult classics, such as Anayurt Oteli (Motherland Hotel) and Gece Yolculuğu (Night Journey), both produced in 1987, as well as Akrebin Yolculuğu (Clock Tower), with which she put an end to her cinema career in 1997 to focus entirely on theatre.   2. Samuel Beckett, Endgame (London: Faber and Faber, 2009), 41.   3. The Turkish titles (with the corresponding Theban plays in English) were as follows: Oidipus Nerede? (Oedipus Tyrannus), Oidipus Sürgünde (Oedipus at Colonus), Evridike’nin Çığlığı (Antigone).   4. Samuel Beckett, Nohow On (New York: Grove Press, 1996), 18.   5. Ibid. 7.

Works Cited Beckett, Samuel. Endgame. London: Faber and Faber, 2009. Beckett, Samuel. Nohow On. New York: Grove Press, 1996.

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30 ‘How Do We Make a Room in the Theatre?’ A Conversation about Design for Pan Pan Theatre, Dublin Aedín Cosgrove and Nicholas Johnson

Nicholas Johnson [NJ]: First, thank you so much for speaking with us about your design practice. For our readers, it would be helpful if you would open by talking a little bit about your career, just to position the stages you have gone through to become a working artist in the contemporary Irish and international theatre. What does that trajectory look like so far, at the point you find yourself in your practice? Aedín Cosgrove [AC]: Well, I actually haven’t ever done anything else. Gavin Quinn and I set up Pan Pan as a partnership company straight after college.1 In order to fund the work, of course, I did lots of other small jobs. But it’s essentially my all – all my working has been in the theatre. Occasionally I would get paid for lighting – it was easier to be paid as a lighting designer then, even while you were quite young and not very good! The company was just: ‘find some money, put something on’ for a long time. NJ: Was your focus, even from education forward, always on design and scenography, mainly the visual elements? How do you see design linked to the other art forms that are involved in making theatre work, and do you accept the role of ‘designer’ as a title in and of itself, or do you have another way of thinking about it? AC: It was 100 per cent collaborative between Gavin and me, with the ideas for performance influencing and speaking to the scenography. At the time he was more interested in working with the actors, and I was more interested in making the scenography concrete and doing the sort of work that makes that happen. But we didn’t have strict lines – the two things were always together, sort of like in an amateur way, when you’re working on student projects, and also because it is 100 per cent collaborative. We were sure about the idea that Pan Pan should be a different theatre experience than what was happening in other companies that we were seeing: we wanted to have our own voice, so we fell into the roles of ‘you work with the actors, because you have the words and skills for that, and I’ll work with the scenography’. But each informs the other, you know.

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NJ: So in that early model of the company as an ensemble act between the two of you, were you drawing there on models – either that you had studied in school or that you saw around you? What were the inspirations for that, or was it purely organic? AC: No, we were drawing from everything we could find that was inspiring – you know, like everybody does, I think, before you find your own voice. We were really fascinated by the avant-garde, especially futurism, dadaism. That was the dynamic around at the time. The futurist manifestos and all those strange little non-narrative plays they wrote, it was sort of the punk rock of theatre, you know? And this was the late 1980s, post-punk, when we started: it seemed to speak to us in a very contemporary way, even though it came from the early part of the century. NJ: You both attended Trinity College Dublin, and the 1980s in Ireland were not known for being exactly at the vanguard of liberalism – had you studied the futurists and dada as part of the curriculum at the university, or did you find them on your own? AC: Well, we hadn’t studied them as curriculum in drama, but I had done history of art, and I think in a normal arts degree anyway, you sort of come across these things just by being in a university. I know everybody had that Thames & Hudson futurist book.2 And if you just sort of dug a little deeper, it was the sort of things that were going around at the time. I do think we found them by being in education, even though there was no module on it. NJ: You were studying drama and history of art as a two-subject degree, while Gavin was studying classical civilisation and drama. In the course of your studies, was there a lot of reference around you to the avant-garde? Was there something specific that attracted you to this, in terms of the cultural ecosystem of Ireland in the late eighties and early nineties? AC: We didn’t see very much, but what we did see obviously had a high impact, because it would have been so different to what was on in the main houses.3 You know, Project Arts Centre was very, sort of, alive at the time.4 Because of – I don’t know what, maybe some sort of government scheme – we saw a lot of work that travelled from Russia or Poland because of perestroika and then the coming down of the Wall. It was the first time that artists were allowed to travel, and just because they would travel for quite little money, it suddenly became possible to see all this great work from Russia and Poland that seemed to have been very influenced by constructivism and the avantgarde. Even if there was no such thing as projecting surtitles at the time, we just had to go and watch it all in Polish, it didn’t matter – you didn’t have a clue what they were saying, and it didn’t matter. It was a poor theatre, they just had a couple of props, although a lot of the Russians had beautiful puppets. This was all very different from anything we had seen that was produced in Ireland.

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NJ: In the foundation of Pan Pan, how explicit were these links to the past avant-gardes? Were you drawing specifically on particular movements or models, or was this just part of the background that informed the desire to do something new? AC: Sort of a combination of both, really. We actually did produce a few of the Italian futurist sintesi plays, and that was the very first thing we went on tour with. That was more like student work. Once it became the company for real, we made our own work. NJ: I remember that there was a lot of interest in the company’s early years, especially in the setup of the Pan Pan International Symposium (1997–2003), to create more opportunities for Irish companies – and Ireland in general – to have contact with European work. Is there a link here where that kind of educational, community-building and networking side of the company was engaging in streams of avant-garde exchange as well? AC: I think the symposium happened because we’d had these people from Poland coming in, and the first time we decided we had anything that we would be able to tour was to a festival in Kraków. It was the International Kraków Festival of Experimental Theatre, and it was kind of mind-blowing at the time that there would be a festival of experimental theatre, you know? So when we managed to get invited to that and met everybody there, I think the symposium arose to say to Dublin: loads of this work is happening, you know? One of the ideas of the experimental festival was that everybody sat down and ate food together, you know, in this kind of old Eastern European way of doing things, and they encouraged everybody to go and see the others’ work. And we just absolutely couldn’t believe it: when we put on our show, there’d be a line outside the theatre dying to come to see our work, whereas in Dublin it was our mothers and a couple of pals, you know? So we decided to do a little festival where it was artists hosting artists. We had a ban on talking about funding. The idea was to invite people to come and talk, and there were other young companies in Ireland as well, and we’d invite them to come and talk. NJ: I’m really interested in the ways that there is a current and flow between movements across time and between borders. In a way, the company couldn’t really have existed without crossing borders – am I reading that correctly, that it really depended on transfer and transition between these different spaces and times, for the company to become what it was? AC: I really think it did. I mean, if we hadn’t known that it was possible in this kind of poor theatre way, we didn’t really feel that we needed any sort of enormous budget to put something on. We could see that people were making interesting work out of tin cans and string, you know. Scena Plastyczna KUL, this amazing Polish group, brought me in to show me their lighting, and they literally had light bulbs and tin cans and people holding them, because they had

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loads of people. Without having your mind opened to the possibility of that, you’d never be able to have ideas that didn’t involve something expensive – it was all about constructing something from nothing. NJ: Absolutely. What I’d like to know more about would be some of the specific projects that Pan Pan has done where modernism is coming into the contemporary theatre. What is the company’s engagement with key modernist figures, or key modernist texts or ideas? It’s clear that Samuel Beckett has been a big engagement of the company’s for the last ten years, but I’m also curious about the beginning of the company’s career. AC: Well, Beckett is the first one that leaps to mind, because apart from the Shakespeare text that we did a lot of, mostly, we’ve been reacting to other texts or making our own texts, like for example making a text connected to Anton Chekhov’s The Seagull or a text connected to Oscar Wilde’s De Profundis. A clear modernist text is Beckett, but I think Beckett’s always been everywhere. Certainly for me, anyway, you can’t say that it doesn’t have an influence on your work, and actually trying to escape his influences was an interesting journey for me. Because the pieces are written specifically, the way they come out of the darkness, and I would have lit loads of them in college – I was looking through the Collected Works, and I feel like I’ve lit every play now, according to the instructions of Beckett. So I had a definite idea in All That Fall (2011–present; see Figure 30.1) to escape the Beckett lighting, to move a million miles away from it, to escape the black, white and grey, to escape all that ‘obvious’ Beckettian texture and all that. I think it was a bit of a journey trying to see theatre in a different light, see it without it being carved out of the darkness, and it was definitely something that I made a conscious decision to do. I think All That Fall brought me there, even though most of it was in the dark. But the darkness meant a different thing then. It was more of an internal meditation. And when the lights came on, they didn’t light anything in particular. And then when you left with an impression, it was an impression of colour, not an impression of greyness, so I was very happy about that. All of our Beckett productions have been more or less installations. Maybe when it came to Embers (2013–14; see Figure 30.2), then, the idea of the scenography for that was more to do with being confronted with the image of mortality, of your own mortality. We started the show with the lights on, and then you were again allowed to go – I think with Beckett’s work you have to be allowed to relax and let the text happen to you. You can only be guided by what is possible, so you can’t do anything to distract from that. It’s very hard for me to find the words for those kind of things, but I guess the inspiration was ‘being under the being under’ – this kind of being, being dead or being under the sea. The sound of the stones, the way he describes it – it was maybe just chiming or running along the text in this nice way. Nothing is being shown or not shown. You could have a good experience in Embers by closing your eyes and opening them occasionally; you didn’t have to follow anything, you just had to connect with what the actors were saying. And the actors were present

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Figure 30.1  All That Fall, Project Arts Centre, Dublin, August 2011 (photograph by Ros Kavanagh, courtesy of Pan Pan).

Figure 30.2  Embers, Samuel Beckett Theatre, Dublin, August 2013 (photograph by Ros Kavanagh, courtesy of Pan Pan).

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and live-performing, speaking inside the skull, but they weren’t moving, you couldn’t see them clearly. Then Cascando (2016, theatrical version; 2019–present, outdoor version), of course, is a journey. Once we were doing radio plays we were in a sound world, and the scenography was to let your body walk through the sound – it was an exciting project because you could be there in your body. I actually loved when we did Cascando inside, though it’s been brilliant to do it outside as well. The first thing about the inside version was that when the door of the Beckett Theatre opened, there was just this black wall in front of you that you couldn’t see behind, and I just loved that – something really unexpected when you open a door. And then you had to go into this black labyrinth, like you had no other choice, that was it. You go because you follow the person in front of you; you didn’t even have to tell anybody that, that’s what everybody does. And just to turn the corners, there was a sort of fleeting light that would be just enough to get you around, so you could concentrate. You were doing the journey, you could hear the journey, and what was around you was glimpses, you know, side images. And when we all got in together into the centre of the maze (see Figure 30.3), and one lot were walking one way, we lit the other side through the two-way mirror, so you were just conscious that you could see that you were part of this. I’m in this group. I’m not an individual. So that idea, I think, was a modernist idea – maybe it is. It’s no longer just actors in the scenography, they’re completely and utterly linked: it was the audience and the sound and the text, and everybody’s body being in the text. I think Beckett might have liked that one.

Figure 30.3  Cascando, Samuel Beckett Theatre, Dublin, April 2016 (photograph by Ros Kavanagh, courtesy of Pan Pan).

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NJ: There seems to be a pattern in the Pan Pan Beckett work to do with elastic genres. In 2014 the company also did the lecture-performance of Quad with the Irish Modern Dance Theatre and with Jimmy Eadie’s live sound, which obviously still had the idea of colour and thinking about colour versus black and white – after the company staged pieces that were originally for the medium of radio, I was interested in how this took a work originally for television and refracted it into dance, sound, light and a mathematics lecture, all taking place with a live theatre audience. And most recently, WHAT IS THE WORD (2020–present) comes from Beckett’s poetry as a source and started out just as recorded sounds, but it has an interesting dual life now as a cinema piece, also with an installation/gallery version emerging. Do you think there is a feature here of using Beckett’s intermedial work, his work not written originally for theatre, to push theatre forward? AC: Yes, exactly. We had been dying to do a poetry project – more than anything, poetry is a huge influence in our work and in my own scenography. You know, you are trying to make everything poetic, in the way that it just fits together perfectly, the way poems do. But then, how do you put images to poems? Like, what is that? And the only real concept was that we were trying to film light, to film the quality of light, without showing anything. It was a nice project to do, and Ros Kavanagh (videography) is such a brilliant image-maker, you know. NJ: Endgame (2019) is now also in the company’s Beckett series, and it’s distinct from the others in that it is a playtext – and a highly specific and, historically speaking, a notionally restrictive one. How is the challenge different there, for you as a designer? AC: It’s totally different. But the key in Endgame is to answer: where are we located? Where are we located in this playtext? And on the one hand, we are located in the theatre. You know, that’s the first thing. So we went back to a thought we had in a previous project, Everyone Is King Lear in his Own Home (2012; see Figure 30.4), which was the only time I recreated a room. It was the concept that we were going to do the play in Andrew Bennett’s flat, but recreate Andrew Bennett’s flat in the theatre. The challenge for me there was: how do I tell the audience that this is not a flat? I’m not trying to say that you’re located in this flat. You’re located in a flat that has been recreated in the theatre. NJ: Yes, it’s a real challenge, because how will people know? My abiding memory of that performance is of the pallets on which the room was standing, as though it was a movable apartment that had been lifted by forklifts into the theatre. AC: It was great to find that solution for it, because I really enjoyed making the flat. I mean, you could put it on anything else, but the pallets were stronger because you had this imagination of it being ripped out of somewhere and put somewhere else, rather than just being rebuilt as a replica in the theatre. So coming to Endgame (see Figure 30.5), I was like: what is this room? This room is in the theatre. How do we make a room in the theatre? And Gavin gave a great answer. He said that the play was located within the constraints of what you

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Figure 30.4  Everyone Is King Lear in his Own Home, Smock Alley Theatre, Dublin, September 2012 (photograph by Ros Kavanagh, courtesy of Pan Pan).

Figure 30.5  Endgame, Project Arts Centre, Dublin, December 2019 (photograph by Ros Kavanagh, courtesy of Pan Pan).

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have to do in the play. That it is located sort of inside the artwork, because you have to make these steps, go to these windows. So this became the idea: we made the room from discarded opera sets, given to us by the Irish National Opera, and we pieced it together in the workshop. Nobody knew they were discarded opera sets – there was no way of making that clear; I was hoping there would be, but of course opera sets are so massive. So you are only seeing a sort of arc or a corner or whatever, but after a while I felt it didn’t matter. NJ: No, I don’t think it mattered that it was opera specifically – I think that’s a good Easter egg, but I think it does matter that they were discarded sets, and people did grasp that. It looked like something built in the ruins of a theatre, a legacy assembled out of detritus with rough paint, like post-industrial, posttheatre protection of the last survivors, that kind of idea. I think it did come across, based on some of the readings that I’ve heard people give. What I found interesting in looking at Endgame was that there was already a lot of Beckett, even of that play specifically, in Pan Pan’s earlier work. I’m thinking specifically of The Rehearsal, Playing the Dane (2010–18; see Figure 30.6), in which there is an extended Endgame quote in the visuals of that piece, with a blind figure in a wheelchair and a field of dustbins – it’s haunted by Endgame in the way that Beckett just haunts the image vocabulary of making contemporary theatre. There’s a way, as you said, that it’s inescapable. Are there earlier examples of that where one piece you were doing was penetrated by another, or other examples of modernist figures who you return to again and again? I’m thinking, from looking at your work, often about Bauhaus design principles or Kandinsky’s use of colour and line: these are big gestures that haunt the mind. And then, when it

Figure 30.6  The Rehearsal, Playing the Dane, Abbey Theatre, Dublin, May 2018 (photograph by Ros Kavanagh, courtesy of Pan Pan).

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comes time to make our gestures or images in the theatre, we can’t forget these moments in our past ideas of images. Is this common in the company’s imageworlds, this kind of slippage in a flow of cross-reference? AC: My gut reaction is that it’s very common. You know, everything informs everything else. I find the stuff that I make myself, even if I try to fight it, it always comes out the same. And if somebody else was looking, they’d say: oh yeah, it adds up, it adds up to something. But for me I always think I’m making a radical departure, and then it ends up looking the same. In recent years, I’ve tried to move away from the idea of cutting things out of the darkness, and having a more broad look at the whole environment. I mean, you always do that in lighting anyway, but you’re often doing a big focus on the actor. Moving away from that, you feel like you’re moving from one art movement to another, you know. I can’t think of anybody that I would say particularly: I love those paintings and want to be like that, or I love that movement. I suppose, essentially, me myself: I’m a minimalist. I have to justify everything that goes on stage completely, every tiny thing. And if that makes me a minimalist, then I’m a minimalist. And that affects me even if there is a kind of chaos – like we had a nice chaos in The Sleepwalkers (2019; see Figure 30.7). The idea was to bring the essence of that old house that Dublin Youth Theatre had in Gardiner Street, and try to bring that into the theatre.

Figure 30.7  The Sleepwalkers, Samuel Beckett Theatre, Dublin, July 2019 (photograph by Ros Kavanagh, courtesy of Pan Pan/Dublin Youth Theatre).

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But the house was a completely chaotic sort of space, and when we brought it in, we lined everything up nicely. I’m finding I don’t escape that, because I don’t like looking at mess – I love looking at mess if somebody else made it. But for me, I can’t seem to – well, I might try the next project, to break that a little bit. NJ: There does seem to be a sort of grid tendency, or a structured pattern, once these things hit the stage, for you. AC: Yeah, for me – I’ll try and fight it again next time. Maybe it’s in the fight that a lot of these things come out and feel new. Maybe it’s just in that kind of battle that I hoped to stop trying to line everything up. NJ: Some of what we’ve been discussing reminds me of the revolutionary quality of naturalism in its time – the fight against melodrama and more structured fictions, and because there is so much emphasis in the avant-garde on surrealism and dada, we can forget that the naturalists were modernists too. I’m interested in your design engagement with figures like Ibsen in A Doll House (2012–13; see Figure 30.8) and with Chekhov in The Seagull and Other Birds (2014–16). What do you think contemporary theatre and the Irish avant-garde can still do with naturalism? How can they be invigorated when we draw on them as a source?

Figure 30.8  A Doll House, Smock Alley Theatre, Dublin, April 2012 (photograph by Ros Kavanagh, courtesy of Pan Pan).

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AC: I think A Doll House is one of my favourite shows we ever did. Ultimately, I think all our work is just trying to be truthful. So what is the difference between naturalism and truth? In A Doll House we had the truth of the performances – the performers being the people that they are – and the truth of the scenography was that it was Christmas. Christmas has an atmosphere around it, this anxiety and attention. If you’re bringing those in, are they true? Does anybody want to go in and see a recreated environment? I don’t think they do. I think people would much rather go in and see truthful performances. In Ibsen’s time, I suppose they were recreating environments to get away from the painted ones, the false ones, you know. So we can have another – it’s only another step to try and distil the essence of the ideas of why the play was set at Christmas. NJ: My last question, and forgive me if this is kind of hunting for a last word, but I know you are heavily involved in mentoring early-career designers and students in various institutions, and this is a space where modernism (perhaps with a capital M!), and all these movements with their ‘isms’, keep getting discussed in pedagogy and learning. I’d be curious to know what you would say to someone who just asked, from a very naïve perspective, what is modernism, or what can I do with modernism as a designer, what is it for? I’m not hunting for a definition, but what does it mean to you, its utility as a term? How should we use modernism today, as makers of theatre? AC: I would definitely say to anybody working in theatre to look at visual art, I suppose, and the reason why the modernist movements happened. A student can’t be so naïve today as to think that modernism isn’t already there – I mean, modernism might already be old-fashioned for them. But the art movements of the modernists help us more than anything with abstract thinking. How do you think about things abstractly? If you were to study what these artists say about it, it gives you a way into knowing. Why were the modernists modern? What was behind what they were trying to break down? Like I was saying earlier, in Pan Pan we only knew at the beginning that we were going to be contemporary. And that doesn’t mean that contemporary ideas are really new – all the ideas in play are universal about, you know, love and sadness and death. But we were going to find a contemporary way to put across these ideas. And that’s what the modernists were doing as well, so that we must always, always be modernists, you know.

Editorial Note and Disclosure This dialogue derives entirely from a video interview conducted on 17 December 2021; it has been edited for length and clarity. Transcription was supported by Sophie Furlong Tighe. Nicholas Johnson discloses an ongoing financial and artistic relationship (since 2012) with Pan Pan Theatre Company, both as a festival/conference programmer (in which capacity he has paid the company) and as dramaturg/author (in which capacities the company pays him).

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Notes  1. Pan Pan Theatre Company was established in Dublin in 1993 by Aedín Cosgrove and Gavin Quinn (as co-artistic directors). As of 2022, the company has created forty-three new theatre and performance pieces, designed and run influential international theatre symposia in Dublin, created a platform for development work for early-career artists, and toured worldwide, receiving multiple national and international awards. See https://www. panpantheatre.com/ (accessed 18 October 2022) for production history and additional information about the company.   2. Probably referring to Angelo Bozzolla and Caroline Tisdall, Futurism (New York: Thames & Hudson, 1985).  3. Ireland’s ‘main houses’ of the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries are the Abbey Theatre, the national theatre founded in 1904 by Lady Augusta Gregory and W. B. Yeats, and the Gate Theatre, founded in 1928 by Hilton Edwards and Micheál MacLiammóir. While the early Abbey was best known for its nationalist aims and was involved in key preindependence articulations of Irish culture and post-independence consolidation of mainly Irish playwrights, the Gate was founded partly to bring European and American modernist theatre to Ireland, as well as indigenous work that was at the edge of acceptability in conservative Catholic culture; in its first season it produced work by Henrik Ibsen, Eugene O’Neill and Oscar Wilde. The dynamic of the two theatres in the twentieth century is probably best captured by Dublin’s taxi drivers, some of whom referred to the two theatres as ‘Sodom and Begorrah’. They remain the dominant recipients of Irish theatre funding today.   4. Project Arts Centre began its life in November 1966 as a season of experimental work at the Gate Theatre, re-establishing itself as a multi-arts venue in various locations around Dublin in 1967, 1969 and 1972; it has been housed at its present home on East Essex Street since 1974. Ireland’s first and busiest arts centre, its purpose-built facility is a home for alternative and contemporary arts, including two theatres, a gallery, a bar and several resource spaces for artists and critics. See https://projectartscentre.ie/ (accessed 18 October 2022) for current programming.

Works Cited Bozzolla, Angelo and Caroline Tisdall. Futurism. New York: Thames & Hudson, 1985.

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31 Samuel Beckett and Border Thinking Nicholas Johnson

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amuel Beckett (1906–89) remains a central figure in the complex of ideas called ‘modernism’, and his still-evolving legacy continues to inform ‘contemporary’ aesthetics. How might Beckett’s specific relationships to different kinds of borders, and his concomitant status as a ‘border thinker’ avant la lettre, illuminate new terms of engagement with modernism’s residual cultural energy? More than just providing a spatial or geographic reading of Beckett’s literature or a biographical account of his quasi-exile, this chapter zeroes in on how modernist approaches to conceptual and actual boundaries – their establishment, negotiation and modes of transgression – continue to be salient today. It will use Beckett’s own life and praxis, including the contemporary remediation and renegotiation of his works and their afterlife, as a throughline that reveals border thinking as a key modernist strategy. Examples drawn from contemporary experimental practice, in both academic/pedagogical and professional contexts, bear out the boundary-crossing nature of Beckett’s achievement: as a novelist and playwright in both French and English, he leaves a legacy which increasingly crosses the global landscape without much regard for political borders. Instead, in geographic, linguistic and philosophical terms, Beckett’s oeuvre discloses the persistent and the porous nature of the boundary itself. ‘Border thinking’ is a term that describes the state of epistemic resistance to binary options, borrowed from decolonial theories of sociology and politics (attributed most often to Gloria Anzaldúa and Walter Mignolo, both writing at the turn of the current century). That this essay connects with a range of disciplines, sources and vocabularies from outside of Beckett studies will, it is hoped, structurally and formally help to drive home the point about the provisional nature of epistemic boundaries. The term’s conceptual origins can be traced to the Bandung Conference, a gathering of Asian and African states held in Indonesia in 1955, and the 1961 Belgrade NonAligned Conference. In both of these locations, dozens of nation-states gathered to reject the terms of the world’s political choice of either communism aligned with the Soviet Union, or capitalism aligned with the United States. These groups of nations chose to de-link from both, to sidestep the terms in which the question was asked (as opposed to answering), and to dedicate themselves to the embodiment and enactment of decolonisation. Praxis is central to the idea of border thinking, in that if one rejects the hegemonic language, structures and subjectivities on offer from the powerful, then one is left with the local, the communal, the lived and the embodied. In essence, a group of nations constructed by the voice of power as being on the ‘outside’ opted to refuse to be circumscribed by this hegemonic discourse. Thus, as Walter Mignolo and Madina Tlostanova state it, ‘border thinking is the epistemology of the exteriority; that is, of the

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outside created from the inside.’1 Border epistemology is contrasted with imperial epistemology; Mignolo speaks of an ‘immigrant consciousness’ rejecting the theo-politics and ego-politics of knowledge that had claimed universality, because the price of such universality was the suppression of sensing and the body, and a deep intolerance to any form of resistance. In such a bind, the immigrant may either accept their inferiority, or else assimilate into a culture that has discursively constructed them as lesser, usually by participating in the perpetuation of the cycle of epistemic violence on others, achieved above all by learning the language of the oppressor. The border thinker, by contrast, does not accept that these two options are the only ones available.

Terrain It is easy to establish biographically that Samuel Beckett, like nearly all Europeans of the twentieth century, knew the exterior side of borders well: namely, that they can change on the map without notice or consent of the governed. He was born in Dublin in 1906, in an Ireland that was a colony of the British Empire. His family was from the Anglo-Irish and Protestant community, which was historically wealthier and more powerful than the Catholic majority.2 Ten years old during the Easter Rising of 1916, he watched part of the city burning from the hills to the south of Dublin. When he began boarding school in Enniskillen, County Fermanagh, it was part of his own country; when he returned after the summer of 1922, in the wake of a war of independence and a civil war, it was part of the newly partitioned ‘Northern Ireland’. As Ireland was neutral in the Second World War, he was compelled neither to remain in France nor to involve himself in the conflict. However, having made Paris his permanent home since 1937, he noted (of the German occupation) that ‘you simply couldn’t stand by with your arms folded’ and, in another context, that he preferred France at war to Ireland at peace.3 He worked for the Resistance, fled the Gestapo, and survived in the unoccupied zone in the south until 1945.4 Although most critical attention has focused recently on Beckett’s intellectual evolution and political commitments arising from these wartime experiences, it is important, but easy to forget, that Beckett was first a migrant and later a refugee.5 Beckett thus also knew the performativity of the passport, playing out in the theatre of the checkpoint: the same document’s presentation could lead to bodily security or death, depending on context. This tension between high-stakes stricture and profound indeterminacy hints at a formal feature that strongly distinguishes Beckett’s writing in both form and content. Having been born into a relatively conservative milieu before Ireland’s independence, Beckett (and his works) had to cross borders both physically and linguistically to achieve his artistic and personal aims.6 As he slipped between states, Beckett engaged more freely in pushing his own boundaries: his varied experiences in (among others) London, Kassel, Berlin, Stuttgart, Paris, Roussillon and Saint-Lô – and certainly the German language as well as French – were central to his surpassing the limits of what had previously been attempted in literature, theatre or the many other media in which he engaged in a (more or less) revolutionary manner. With the rapid expansion of technologies that followed urbanisation in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, mobility became one of the key (meta)narratives of modernism with good reason: transit and telegraphy reshaped all cultural work, and Beckett’s was no exception. In fact, because of both the range of media in

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which he worked and the specific interval of the century – bridging from analogue technologies of recording and broadcast to the dawn of the digital era – Beckett’s oeuvre is a particularly potent test case for demonstrating how such expansion occurs across the boundaries of form.7 The critical struggle to release Beckett from hazy notions of universalism, nihilism, absurdism or neutrality-by-association has been long, but the field has increasingly come to terms with a political Beckett more committed, and more public in his commitments (through petitions and other material acts of association and support), than previously assumed. By delving into archival particularity, scholars have yielded telling evidence of Beckett’s sensitivity to, and alignment with, a broadly anticolonial/decolonial project, noting especially his ironclad commitment in matters of freedom of expression for literary artists and the press. Emilie Morin has indicated with definitive clarity that aside from his work in the Resistance, Beckett was engaged with the anti-apartheid movements in Britain and Ireland and the ANC in South Africa, Black Panthers and civil rights protestors in North America, dissenters imprisoned by the Soviet Union and across the Eastern European sphere, and those threatened by autocracy in Chile, Turkey and Spain, among others.8 With careful unpicking of subtle resonances in the French texts, Morin shows how the Algerian War of Independence marked Beckett’s work indelibly, yet her work is also sensitive to how Beckett does not conform to expectations of ‘openly politicised literature’, providing in its place ‘evocations, layers, suggestions, echoes, cultural ciphers, lone allusions’, befitting an author who deals so much with ‘uncertainty, with exile, with various forms of displacement and deferment’.9 James McNaughton illustrates how the historical crises of the century shaped underlying political techniques within Beckett’s aesthetic production, regularly represented in comic-satirical and critical modes, identifying how the patterns and mechanisms of complicity, atrocity and propaganda are evinced in the work, linking Beckett’s experiences of colonialism with his direct witnessing of the Holocaust.10 Describing these arguments in the frame of a ‘political turn’ in Beckett studies, of which their own collection is surely a key part, Helen Bailey and William Davies write: ‘In order to fully appreciate the extent of the political in Beckett Studies, it is necessary to set the historical alongside and in dialogue with theoretical, philosophical and linguistic approaches.’11 They do not forget the theatre as a space that always-already combines these approaches, writing in the next paragraph that ‘since live performances must by nature be situated in the contemporary moment’, they can provide ‘a mode of political expression for communities trapped in contexts of oppression and suffering’ or ‘an accurate expression of their own political situation’.12 As already signalled, the theoretical approach of this chapter will be ecumenical, even transdisciplinary, and this is by necessity. Conceptually, to read Beckett as a border thinker is to sit ‘in between’ multiple discourses in order to absorb and mingle their richness fluidly, inspired by the concept of nepantla developed by Gloria Anzaldúa, as well as by the related (and central) concept of the ‘liminal’ in performance studies.13 Each section of the argument that follows has been built around questions that represent some form of impasse, not unlike a body of water or barrier in the landscape, in the face of which the crossing of a conceptual boundary is the only choice. Resonant with the material at hand, this move also mimics Beckett’s own grappling with the ‘conceptual’ landscape founded in language – what we might call the ‘internal’ borders or the borders in the mind. Underlying

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symbolic/linguistic boundaries will be the focus of the next section, which opens by revivifying the resonance between early Eastern thought (specifically Taoism) and Beckett’s suspicion of binarism in all its forms. Second, this study turns to the ‘external’ features of human culture associated with the rise of the nation-state and the anthropological and sociological phenomenon of borders, whose proliferation over the last century has proved to be both a consequence and a source of conflict. It links these explorations to the power structures that have shaped the international reception of Beckett, questioning the logic of ‘centre/periphery’ that still shapes scholarly narratives and limits the global frame of reference for his work, despite academics’ awareness of decolonial movements and postcolonial critiques. The final section thinks through how borders function in practice and performance, looking at two main instances from pedagogical and professional contexts: the ‘Mapping Beckett’ workshops of the Samuel Beckett Laboratory (2018–19) and the dance piece May B (1981, revived 2015). Limits and lines – like the border between the audience and the stage, or the strictures of a text – may give substantive meaning to the encounter unfolding between bodies in the theatre, but creativity is also partly defined by the ways in which such borders are transgressed. What is notable about all these borders discussed here – whether internal, external or theatrical – is that none of them escapes fundamental revision during the twentieth century. This chapter argues that Beckett’s work indexes many of these changes, namely in its treatment of language, subjectivity and space, and that the expansion and transgression of borders in his work is an unfinished, ongoing project today.

Borders of the Word the Border, that vast nonexistent territory where freedom and metamorphosis are common currency. Roberto Bolaño, ‘Exiles’14 There are four main definitions of ‘border’ as a noun, the first two of which are essentially political: it can refer to ‘a line’ separating two countries, administrative divisions or other areas, but also ‘a district’ near the border between two areas. Already this elasticity alone is fascinating: a term that ostensibly denotes the line itself is also used in our language to speak of an indeterminate space surrounding that line, on both sides of the line.15 One can be twenty-five miles from an international border and say, ‘I’m on the border’, keep travelling, arrive at the administrative line, and say again: ‘I’m at the border’ – reflecting this reality, there are border patrol checkpoints well within the interior of the United States.16 Perhaps it is the strange indeterminacy of the term in English that generates the third definition, which is the figurative use of the ‘edge or boundary of something’ or the ‘part near it’, which is what academics tend to mean when they speak of the ‘borders of our research interests’ or ‘borders of the discourse’. Finally, as practitioners will be aware, the word ‘border’ has a technical definition in live theatre: it is the name of the short, wide, black curtain that is hung most frequently at the proscenium arch, dictating the boundary between stage and audience in a traditional end-on theatre space, a theatrical architecture that is

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associated with the project of modernity, above all the expansion of indoor electric lighting (since a border is commonly used to disguise the front line of rigged lighting instruments over the stage). Borders and boundaries are phenomena ingrained in the conceptual landscape of human beings, beginning with the structure of language itself. Some of the first lessons that infants learn force semiotic distinctions between ‘this’ and ‘not this’ – thus initiating the apparatus of identity and difference. A potent strand of the Western philosophical tradition, built on foundations of logic and rational distinction achieved through linguistic description, is enamoured of clear demarcations between objects, temporal events and abstract concepts.17 Though a more negative tradition interested in aporias, undecidables, remainders, supplements and erasures has marked the (long) twentieth century, language as a tool of philosophy and literature cannot be escaped, even by the most stringent critics of false unities, arbitrary dualities and failed words.18 The politics that arises from the use of language as such – from the inevitability of division of the world, self-construction within it, social/group identification for survival – is inflected with symbolic violence, which is historically the key precursor to violence against subjects.19 Modernism in literature, notable for aesthetic strategies that made valiant attempts to undermine language, could never escape the fact that the tools of the critique were themselves the enemy. With our conceptual realm structured as it is, it is little wonder that human history is marked by physical borders as sites of contestation. By 2012, twenty-three years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, twenty-six new walls, fences and barriers between nations had been built.20 At the time that writing this chapter began in 2019, refugees from wars waged by Europe, together with economic migrants from countries marred by European colonialism, were being turned away from land by European naval forces.21 The forced separation and incarceration of children, the prosecution of their parents in mass trials, and the deportation of Central Americans in credible fear for their lives back to so-called ‘failed states’ – states whose instability, more often than not, derives from the vast American demand for narcotics and imperial misadventures – reflect the policy of the United States, not to mention the will of millions of its citizens.22 It is tempting to conclude, particularly with sensitivity to postcolonial theory and the study of the attendant power imbalances when many of these borders came to be artificially drawn, that the existence of the border itself is the problem. But would the abolition of state borders affect the borders in the mind? Though it may seem at first to be an oblique tactic to overcome this impasse, ancient Chinese philosophy proffers several relevant and practical solutions to rethink Beckett ‘from the outside’ and address how his work might engage the linguistic and philosophical dimensions of the border. Beckett was aware of Taoism and Buddhism through his education (via Arthur Schopenhauer), referencing the figure of Lao Tzu in some of his works (That Time and the posthumously published prose fragment The Way).23 In the quest for a more fluid, dynamic and dialectic form of ‘border thinking’, there is a remarkable confluence to be found between Taoist thought and Beckett’s strategies. In the elliptical writings of the Tao Te Ching, attributed to Lao Tzu, an awareness of the ideological force of language pre-dates its familiar twentieth-century adherents, like Louis Althusser or Jacques Derrida, by at least twenty-four centuries. In the Tao Te Ching, chapter 32 (in D. C. Lau’s translation) reads:

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The way is for ever nameless. Though the uncarved block is small No one in the world dare claim its allegiance. [. . .] Only when it is cut are there names. As soon as there are names One ought to know that it is time to stop.24 An alternative translation of the same passage, by Gia-fu Feng and Jane English, demonstrates the underlying instability of this text, and models its typical resistance to being read dogmatically: The Tao is forever undefined. Small though it is in the unformed state, it cannot be grasped. [. . .] Once the whole is divided, the parts need names. There are already enough names. One must know when to stop.25 The Tao Te Ching achieves its rigorous critique of name, word and language by creating informational gaps, doubts and ambiguities. It is literally ‘thinking the border’ – according to one legend of the work’s origin, Lao Tzu composed the writings at the border of China as a way to escape the country, giving the text to the border guards when challenged. Contrary to the Confucian tradition of morality heavily based in societal demarcations and teachings using stories about named individuals, Taoism elevates these aporias as manifestations of yin (the flowing, the transient, the absent, the dark, the feminine: all that the fixed border is not).26 Taoist ontology, vitally, rests on the void surrounding an object, not on the object itself; a parallel is thus drawn between emptiness and potential. The presence of a name, seen in proto-Althusserian terms as an interpellation or a calling into being, is divulged as an act of violence, referred to variously as ‘cutting’ or ‘severing’ an object (or subject) from this constitutive void. Naming becomes a way of killing things. What is extraordinary about the Taoist connection to Beckett is the similarity of their solutions to the paradox of writing, reached across such a long span of time. If aporia is a categorical precondition of the writing act, then to express this by means of writing is a kind of performance of Nothing, even though the book is, and does contain, something. It is a unity of ‘affirmations and negations invalidated as uttered, or sooner or later’,27 a spoken unspeakable, an exalted failure, which can be glimpsed in early Chinese thought as clearly (and, at times, as impenetrably) as in Beckett’s project. The Tao acknowledges the presence of a border and questions such demarcations: it does not claim to go beyond or transcend, but rather to regard it with suspicion. The same incredulity toward interpellation recurs throughout European aesthetic modernism (sometimes transmitted through Orientalist appropriation, but other times seemingly sui generis). Analysing Beckett’s writing from the immediate post-war period, Marjorie Perloff attributes the method to Stéphane Mallarmé:

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Beckett’s poetic war fictions fuse a curious literalism with the Mallarmean principle that to name is to destroy. To use words like war, Vichy, Resistance, Auschwitz, atom bomb would inevitably be to short-circuit the complexity of the experiences in question [. . .] hence the extreme ellipsis, indirection and indeterminacy of the tales – an indeterminacy that allows the reader a good deal of space.28 Contemporary scholarship on the anthropology and sociology of borders resonates with the terms that have been engaged thus far. Writing on the blog of the North American Conference on Latin America, Josiah Heyman offers a critique of the wall as manifesting conceptual divisions: A border divides in and out, here and there, self and other. It not only distinguishes, but it separates, actively pushing the sides apart. A wall, then, is a materialization of divisive thinking. Simplification often accompanies this process of drawing distinctions. Border lines slice apart gradation, making apparently clear and evident that which actually blends across society and space. Border lines also clarify – and in important ways deny – ambiguity, the simultaneity of differences and opposites. Yet, the world is gradated and ambiguous, and border thinking can easily oversimplify.29 That delineation can both ‘clarify’ and ‘deny’ ambiguity is a precise statement of the dialectic at work in border thinking within Beckett’s writing and his living legacy. Dispassionately viewed, many borders present themselves to be necessary or helpful. Linguistically, the clarity, force, insight and poetry that is available as a result of the clear differences between words is a necessary supplement to the violence inherent in language. Biologically and subjectively, the boundary of the skin holds organs in and infections out.30 Even national borders, the agents of so much suffering in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, can locate their justification in the pragmatics of protection. One cannot easily ask a family to remove the walls of a home, to let in the elements and expose themselves in private moments – so at what point does it become reasonable to ask a tribe, a village, a city, a nation, a religion, a gender, a race, a human or the planet to open its gates to all who wish to enter it, without any regard to values or differences?31 At the interior level, it appears that ‘borders’ are more a question of biology and interpersonal affinities – the deeply tribal part of the human brain that determines which bodies are worthy of protection – than they are of geography. From his actions, Beckett seems to bear this out: he clearly had attachments to more than one nation-state, crossing borders with a sense of his own integrity and loyalty focused on relationships with the people around him, his colleagues and friends, irrespective of what passport they carried. And from his notebooks and novels, poems and plays, letters and articles, he displays a constant alertness to the power of language as a system of borders itself, yet harbouring ongoing suspicion of any firmness in that terrain.32 By questioning language as the foundation of identity, Beckett is aligned with modernity more broadly, which is nothing if not concerned with endlessly redrawing the boundaries of what is acceptable, what can be protected, what fits in the museum or the academy, what is allowed to be taught, to be said, to be put on stage.

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Borders in the World Borders exist in the exterior world on at least two different planes that are immediately obvious: first, the geographic or physical features of the land, and second, the plane of physical (or now digital) representation. When crossing, for example, the Oder/Odra River into Poland from Germany, the geographic logic that lies behind the division of two countries is readily apparent: a large, volatile body of water acts as a natural separator and requires effort to cross. On the map, this river is just a thin blue line, and the changing meaning of that line can have real-world consequences, at the same time the river remains present and unmoved in the real world. Humans understand intuitively that where the line is drawn on paper is a fiction, albeit a meaningful one, and that moving a theoretical border does not make the river go away. This age-old distinction is almost a banality, but it sets up an important relation between the map and the territory, brilliantly staged by Jorge Luis Borges: In that Empire, the Art of Cartography attained such Perfection that the map of a single Province occupied the entirety of a City, and the map of the Empire, the entirety of a Province. In time, those Unconscionable Maps no longer satisfied, and the Cartographers Guilds struck a Map of the Empire whose size was that of the Empire, and which coincided point for point with it. The following Generations, who were not so fond of the Study of Cartography as their Forebears had been, saw that that vast Map was Useless, and not without some Pitilessness was it that they delivered it up to the Inclemencies of Sun and Winters. In the Deserts of the West, still today, there are Tattered Ruins of that Map, inhabited by Animals and Beggars; in all the Land there is no other Relic of the Disciplines of Geography. Suárez Miranda, Viajes de varones prudentes, Libro IV, Cap. XLV, Lérida, 165833 This is the complete short story ‘On Exactitude in Science’ by Borges, and both the historical narrative and the apparent source are fictions. Borges invents an imaginative history in which the map and the territory converge, and he follows this event to a conclusion that is both logical and absurd. The same story is later cited and exploited by Jean Baudrillard, in his seminal and prescient work from 1981 Simulacra and Simulation, in which he inverts the story to show how the map increasingly invents the territory, how we live in the map rather than the territory, and perhaps that it is in the tatters of the real in which we exist today; indeed, his phrase ‘welcome to the desert of the real’ that responds to this story has made it into both pop culture (via The Matrix) and later critical theory (as Slavoj Žižek’s title for his meditation on the meaning of 9/11).34 This collision between map and territory is so well understood, and now so much more intense as a result of digital culture, that it is simply embedded in vision – yet it also cracks open any idea of the border as something solid and factual, as opposed to something fluid and fictional. Theorists based in drama and performance studies are mainly interested in conceptualising borders as embodied, experienced and performed: the implications for how one’s humanity is phenomenologically felt at the moment of crossing one of these lines ultimately creates a border culture. This ‘embodiment’ of the border is perceived more

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vitally and viscerally than the underlying political configurations.35 Again drawing on the case of crossing the Oder/Odra, it is extraordinary that after so many centuries of struggle over the nature and meaning of Poland’s borders, getting over the river is currently – perhaps briefly – possible without presenting any documents at all, except a train ticket. One notices the border only because of the language in which one is being addressed or the currency in which one is asked to pay for tea, but as far as policies of mandatory revision, biometric data capture, visa challenges or militarised checkpoints are concerned, there is no border there. Borders can also be performed in online spaces: since Ireland’s borders with Northern Ireland (on the island) and with Great Britain (in the sea) have been the subject of strenuous negotiations and disputes in the post-Brexit era, a Twitter account (@BorderIrish) posting under the name ‘The Irish Border’ has been offering commentary in the voice of the border itself, mingling irreverent satire with sharp critique.36 At least in those two instances, where once there were barriers, now there is (relative) liquidity across lines: crossing an international border on a train without noticing it is theoretically possible. And where there is no challenge directly to the body, what remains of the border? Metaphorically speaking, certain ‘edges’ akin to political borders – some becoming hardened, others liquefying – also exist within Beckett’s textual and critical landscapes. What may seem paradoxical is the extent to which Beckett defines ‘sharp lines’ within his texts, not only in terms of mapping specific spatial or embodied constructs, but also in terms of setting required actions or prohibiting deviations. The Beckett estate is somewhat infamous among theatre practitioners for being restrictive in the types of interventions it will allow; this perception results in tension, chiefly in his work for the theatre, between mathematically precise delineations – actors at specific heights (Not I, That Time), taking numbered steps in strips of light (Footfalls), stuck on plinths (Catastrophe), or held in containers awaiting a cue (Play, Endgame) – and the rhizomatic profusion of possible meanings or methodologies as actors, directors, designers and dramaturgs read ‘between the lines’.37 Building on the terms introduced above, there is a ‘sacred’ component grounded in apparent certainties (author, text, intention, copyright) and an ostensibly ‘liminal’ element (artists, audiences, spaces, affordances) that is more unstable.38 But like Borges, Beckett is fond of foregrounding the illogic of all excessively deterministic systems: as Beckett’s work travels along widening circuits of world literature and ‘viral’ online transmission, it becomes much harder to contain in any way.39 Whatever ‘mandatory revision’ existed within his texts in the past is gradually weakening. A future horizon is already apparent in which the international literary and theoretical exchange of Beckett, embroiled in an increasingly globalised world economy of both cultural commodities and the market of ideas, becomes more free. Since the further expansion of Beckett’s work and thought through media, adaptation, publication, education and artistic production seems logically inevitable, it is worth considering what could prevent its progress: where do the hard borders remain, and how could such migrations be halted or diverted? There seem to be two risks that are immediately identifiable. First, although Beckett’s reception across national borders has begun to be mapped, a dynamic of centres/peripheries and attendant imbalances of power remains, meaning that more scholarly and critical work needs to be done to illuminate transcultural and translational legacies of Beckett beyond Europe and anglophone countries. Mark Nixon and Matthew Feldman have gathered excellent evidence of ‘trends and patterns within a network of critical and cultural

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exchange’ alongside ‘the realization that there exist many “Becketts”, read through specific cultural, historical and political situations’ – they even note the influence of modernism, as a ‘movement’ that has led to Beckett’s global expansion.40 But the collection in which this claim appears covers only 18 per cent of the world’s countries, almost all of them wealthy democracies.41 The second barrier to Beckett’s expansion is what happens in those democracies: namely, the ‘politics of marketisation’, which Helen Bailey and William Davies call ‘the rather unpalatable act of making Beckett more palatable’, which can arise as a cost alongside the benefits of ‘radical stagings and reconceptions that transplant his writing into unique political contexts’.42 In this model, there may be more Beckett, but his border thinking – his thinking the entire human experience from the outside, his challenge to metaphysical and linguistic (not only political) borders – can become domesticated and utterly defanged. Whether through appropriation by the Irish state, misinterpretation by Silicon Valley, destructive protectiveness by those who manage copyright, or simply through canonisation in all its senses, there is a risk that Beckett’s radical destabilisation of established truths is increasingly concealed.43 This diagnosis raises many questions that point toward modernist futurities, however unanswerable they may ultimately be: is such containment simply a historical process associated with the culture industry, a natural reaction of any self-protecting capitalist framework to threatening ideas? Or is it a more pernicious form of censorship and neutralisation than those that Beckett fought within his lifetime? What forms of teaching, learning, reading, analysing or performing Beckett intervene, and what methods allow artists, writers, academics and teachers to keep Beckett’s transgressive modernism alive in today’s cultures?

Transgressing Borders: Beckett in Performance Despite the obvious challenges to its implementation, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights is clear on the right of individuals to move across borders, stating in Article 13 that ‘Everyone has the right to freedom of movement and residence within the borders of each state’ and that ‘Everyone has the right to leave any country, including [their] own, and to return to [their] country’.44 Surprisingly, in Article 19, the issue of frontiers comes up again in relation to free expression: ‘Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.’45 Which frontiers? As written, this could mean that information and ideas may be shared among nations, but it also seems to hint at an idea familiar from studies of intermediality: that ideas might be shared across the borders of a work or genre, that artists may think across conceptual lines without interference, and that expression may transgress the frontiers of media. This chapter concludes by reflecting on two representative instances of how such boundary-crossing praxis can occur now. The first example is drawn from a university context, where practice-as-research into Beckett develops the field in several ways: besides the access to expertise in multiple disciplines and standard academic resources of information, networks and space, greater experimentalism and risk-taking is possible than in public-facing or commercial performance. The Samuel Beckett Laboratory (hereafter the Lab) was

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founded at Trinity College Dublin in 2013 to develop ‘fundamental research’ into Beckett in performance. Forming temporary ensembles of students, scholars, performers, directors, designers and technicians, the Lab explores texts (frequently manuscripts, drafts, letters or work not intended for performance), themes (sound, voice, movement) or specific performance ‘problems’ (failure, gender, media) in a theatre or a studio; these projects are then archived, with the results sometimes leading to publications in diverse disciplines.46 As part of its agenda of ‘de-centring’, the Lab also conducts outbound experiments at festivals, conferences and as a guest of other universities. In May of 2018 and 2019, two ‘satellite’ workshops of the Lab –  Mapping Beckett I and II – convened at the Teatr na Plaży in Sopot, Poland, as part of the between.pomiędzy festival, to explore ‘maps, borders and boundaries in the work of Samuel Beckett’ in and through performance, and to ‘consider spaces, geographies and environments that might be called “Beckettian”’.47 By design, the Lab does not require prior familiarity with Beckett or any professional qualifications or experience: its primary purpose is to de-hierarchise and demystify the knowledge of the writer, to intervene in the ‘epistemic encampments that pervade academic communities’.48 In keeping with this, participants were sent out into the landscape in and around the theatre – dramatically set on a beach, with the back door of the stage opening directly onto the Baltic – to introduce their own ‘Beckettian images’ of their environment as source material for devised performances. Young participants with no prior experience of Beckett were provided with maps, graphs, diagrams and doodles that appear in Beckett’s published scripts and in his Theatrical Notebooks, shorn of context, and asked to generate performances based on them. After days of such activities, and after documentation and reflection cycles had concluded, the collective determined that there are five main avenues of dealing with boundaries and borders in Beckett, listed in the contemporaneous notes as follows: 1) clearing (getting documents in order to be permitted across a given line) 2) invading (entering without permission, sometimes with violence involved) 3) challenging (calling attention to inconsistencies/injustices, getting the border moved) 4) smuggling (penetrating elements through the border without detection) 5) obviating (erasing the border or obviating the need for it, often through technology) Though this list arose from the creative, embodied explorations of non-experts, it somehow reveals enduring features of working within Beckett’s texts (in rehearsal or studio) and of producing Beckett in the world (as a director or programmer). Such workshops may seem at first to have limited impact when weighed against a major premiere or publication, but they create community on multiple levels, something that most ‘outputs’ of research do not. They connect people around the fundamental questions that linger behind the worlds in the text, wielding the power of imagination to make an encounter with those texts more personally meaningful. When the workshops work – especially those conducted far away from the named ‘Centres’ in Dublin, Reading and Antwerp – they can rapidly bring Beckett’s insights into the bodies of people who have no other reason to associate with him. What becomes of these seeds in their new soil is unpredictable, but as instances of ‘international reception’, such systems ensure that the legacy of the writer is localised and still evolving.

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In the professional realm, a work that has crossed all manner of boundaries is May B, a dance piece based on Beckett’s oeuvre created by the French choreographer Maguy Marin (with Beckett’s permission) in 1981. Revived in 2015 to great acclaim, the piece has now been performed hundreds of times and continues (at the time of writing) to tour widely. What does it mean to ‘dance’ Beckett’s oeuvre? Ten bodies move through the space in heavy white makeup and clad in white robes, sometimes reading as nightdresses (as in Nacht und Träume or Quad, both works for television) and other times as hospital gowns (as in the novel Malone Dies, perhaps); they have sandpaper on the soles of their shoes that makes steps audible (as in the performances of Footfalls). The performance opens with intense silence and darkness; when text is first spoken, it is broken into its component sounds, repeated, fragmented and turned into music. The style of movement is that of the biomorphic at war with the geometric: as Tanztheater it constantly invokes the rigours of modernity, but then critically invokes modernism’s interruptions and irreverence, playing the sacred against the liminal as an engine of human drama. Frequently sexual and scatological, at times military and mechanised, sometimes ludic and languid, movement is always collective: the choreography seems attuned to the problems of group behaviour and group survival, against an atomised or nihilistic reading of humanity in ruins (see Figure 31.1). Images are created constantly that feel Beckett-adjacent, but generally they evoke more than one possible source or reading; when three women gather downstage to play with their lips, chant, cackle and scream, their logorrhoea recalls Not I (but without full

Figure 31.1  May B in performance (revival), RAMDAM, Sainte-Foy-lès-Lyon, April 2015 (photograph © Hervé Deroo, courtesy of Compagnie Maguy Marin).

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Figure 31.2  May B in performance (original), the ‘three women’ section; la Maison des Arts de Créteil, January 1982 (photograph by Claude Bricage, courtesy of Compagnie Maguy Marin). scenographic focus on the mouth), at the same time as the triumvirate calls up thoughts of Play and Come and Go (see Figure 31.2). Whether the source text is character-driven, gendered or narrative in nature does not matter in the least: the performance is of the difficulty of speech, inviting critical reflection on language as such. In a later passage of the performance where many characters appear who seem to specifically gesture (through costume) towards the best-known pseudocouples of Beckett’s theatrical output – a Hamm/Clov pair from Endgame, a Pozzo/Lucky pair from Waiting for Godot – an older woman parts the central curtain to bring her blind husband out on to the stage. These two, the focus of the ‘birthday’ to which these other characters are invited, are strangers at the party: they appear to be Maddy and Dan Rooney, from All That Fall, a radio play that was explicitly blocked from stage adaptation on multiple occasions. This moment reveals how intermediality has irrevocably marked Beckett’s reception, and that this was even apparent during his own lifetime when this image was invented: yet it is so clear, in the hands of clown-mime-dancers, that they all belong in the same world (see Figure 31.3). But what world is it, and when? In the most affecting passage of the production, the ensemble – now dressed in shawls and coats and hats, most carrying suitcases – forms a diagonal line across the stage, progressing slowly downstage toward the apron. It is clear that there is reluctance and fear in their steps, a sense of leaving behind, of heading into something unknown. In a theatrical gesture that (shockingly) still has the capacity to shock, the company breaks the frame of the proscenium for the first time – one actor helps another down off the stage, at which point they begin to run, as

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Figure 31.3  May B in performance (original), the ‘birthday cake’ section; la Maison des Arts de Créteil, January 1982 (photograph by Claude Bricage, courtesy of Compagnie Maguy Marin).

though the aisle along the stage were a train track in a station just about to be bombed. Using the actual theatre’s access system around whatever side door is available, the queue of people escaping is recharged: more and more bodies keep flowing toward the escape, then circling back, then escaping again, until we have seen each member of the company in rotation several times. The point is made: there is an endless loop of those seeking asylum, a long litany of the century’s disasters, infinite villages and cities in situations that force people to leave them. The border of the stage, the border curtain, has become all borders. In the context of Beckett’s writing, the displacement of people naturally invokes the Second World War, and a woman clutching a shawl might seem to be the image of a European Jew. In the original production, the same image would likely have been redolent of Vietnam, which had its most significant refugee crisis in 1978–79.49 In 2015, it would be impossible not to see the Syrian or Libyan asylum seeker on the stage, all the more so if the piece is seen on tour in Turkey. In 2022, the dance speaks to audiences again of European war, and nothing on stage has to change for this to be the case: the original system, borderless and fearless in its investigation of Beckett, is both the map and the territory, crossing time and collapsing space, performing the embodiment of a refugee consciousness (see Figure 31.4). Merely by the dancers moving across the prepared ground, the chalk dust rises. Over the course of the evening’s dance, it overtakes the entire stage, and slowly lifts to fill the space of the whole room. From a pile first traced on the ground like a map, gridlines criss-crossed by footsteps until the map is unintelligible, it gradually becomes just the air – first seen as a medium giving the light itself shape and form, and then

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Figure 31.4  May B in performance (original), the ensemble fleeing; la Maison des Arts de Créteil, January 1982 (photograph by Claude Bricage, courtesy of Compagnie Maguy Marin).

ultimately becoming the audience’s breath. It is through this same progression – the same indifference to form as the wind – that Beckett becomes a feature of the cultural landscape, passing from lines to air. His words and images are left behind like a little pile of chalk: walking in them, they mark our clothes and our footsteps, and after long enough has passed, all of us are breathing him. It leaves a faint, dusty, mineral taste on our tongues.

Acknowledgements and Author’s Note This research has been supported by the Trinity Centre for Beckett Studies, the Trinity Long Room Hub and the Department of Foreign Affairs (Ireland). The research could not have progressed without the collaboration of the 2018 between.pomiȩdczy festival in Poland and the support of Joanna Warecka and Klaudia Łączyńska. In addition to the artists and sources identified in the bibliography and notes, the practice and research for this chapter arose from a collective process with the satellite session of the Samuel Beckett Laboratory in Sopot, Poland, in 2018, co-facilitated with Jonathan Heron and supported by Tomasz Wisniewski, Alexandra Wachacz and other members of the University of Gdańsk Samuel Beckett Seminar. For permissions and photographs, I thank Laure Delavier and Loli Hidalgo at the Compagnie Maguy Marin. Thanks to Céline Thobois and Burç İdem Dinçel for translation support and research assistance.

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Finally, I am grateful to the El Paso/Juárez community of the borderland, especially the journalist Patrick Timmons and my sister Vanessa Johnson, whose discussions and enactments of ‘border thinking’ have informed this research in countless ways.

Notes   1. Walter Mignolo and Maria Tlostanova, ‘Theorizing from the Borders: Shifting to Geo- and Body-Politics of Knowledge’, European Journal of Social Theory 9, no. 2 (2006): 206.  2. Ronan McDonald notes that Beckett’s class background, which he calls ‘the professional Protestant bourgeoisie’, receives less attention than ‘Catholic Irish’ or ‘landed ascendancy’ in Irish studies (47), and thereby tends to ‘slip through the net of orthodox stories of Ireland’, while also being ‘overlooked by the politically motivated efforts to hear marginal, submerged or politically disenfranchised voices’ (48). McDonald notes how the ‘interstitial, liminal, inconclusive, indeterminate nature of Beckett’s work’ can challenge – by virtue of its rejecting narratives of progress – ‘reductive, binary terms between tradition and modernity, bad metanarratives and good micro-narratives, authority and plurality’ (48). See Ronan McDonald, ‘Groves of Blarney: Beckett’s Academic Reception in Ireland’, in Plural Beckett Pluriel: Centenary Essays/Essais d’un Centenaire, ed. Paulo Eduardo Carvalho and Rui Carvalho Homen (Porto: Flup e-Dita, 2008), 33–51. Further nuances of Beckett’s class position in Irish society have been discussed by several scholars, most notably in Seán Kennedy, ed., Beckett and Ireland (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010). See also Willy Maley, ‘Bend It Like Beckett: Class Rules in Irish Literature’, Irish Review 47 (2013): 63–85, https://www. jstor.org/stable/43829394 (accessed 19 October 2022).   3. Quoted in James Knowlson, Damned to Fame: The Life of Samuel Beckett (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996), 279; quoted in Ruby Cohn, ‘Joyce and Beckett: Irish Cosmopolitans’, ‘The Beckett Issue’, James Joyce Quarterly 8, no. 4 (1971): 385, http://www.jstor. org/stable/25486929 (accessed 19 October 2022). For further detailed discussion of Irish neutrality as it pertains to Beckett, see chapter 4 of William Davies, Samuel Beckett and the Second World War (London: Bloomsbury, 2020).   4. Beckett’s wartime journeys were fertile ground for theatre and fiction in the late 2010s, including the novel A Country Road, a Tree by Jo Baker (New York: Doubleday, 2016) and Dead Centre’s Beckett’s Room (2019, Gate Theatre, Dublin, and subsequent tours), an experimental play that tells the pre-war, mid-war and post-war story of Beckett’s apartment at 6 Rue des Favorites, without the use of any onstage performers.   5. See Rodney Sharkey, ‘Towards a Modernism with Meaning: Beckett’s Refugees’, in Beckett and Politics, ed. William Davies and Helen Bailey (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2021), 281–300.   6. I have written elsewhere about Beckett’s experience of censorship and his numerous creative strategies for circumventing it; it is possible to frame Beckett’s works themselves as ‘refugees’ from Ireland in this context. See Nicholas Johnson, ‘A Theatre of the Unword: Censorship, Hegemony and Samuel Beckett’, in Ireland, Memory and Performing the Historical Imagination, ed. Chris Collins and Mary Caulfield (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 36–54.  7. Substantial critical interest, combining both the archival and theatrical research traditions, has collected in recent years around media and technology in Beckett. Key texts include: Anna McMullan, Beckett’s Intermedial Ecosystems (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021); Balazs Rapcsak, Mark Nixon and Philipp Schweighauser, eds, Beckett and Media (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2022); Galina Kiryushina, Einat Adar and Mark Nixon, eds, Samuel Beckett and Technology (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2021).  8. Emilie Morin, Beckett’s Political Imagination (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017).

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  9. Emilie Morin and Rhys Tranter, ‘Interview: Samuel Beckett’s Political Imagination’, blog post, 5 July 2018, https://rhystranter.com/2018/07/05/samuel-beckett-politics/ (accessed 1 August 2022). 10. James McNaughton, Samuel Beckett and the Politics of Aftermath (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018). 11. Helen Bailey and William Davies, ‘Introduction’, in Beckett and Politics, ed. William Davies and Helen Bailey (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2021), 9. 12. Ibid. 9. 13. Anzaldúa’s concept of nepantla derives from a Nahuatl word that is focused on the process of change from one space or state to another, and it is one foundation of her theories of social change; she also uses it to describe how she experiences the act of writing. The term has developed an influential literature in education and sociological theory. See Gloria E. Anzaldúa, Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books, 1987), 276. The term ‘liminal/liminality’ in performance studies will be discussed further, but its origins extend from the anthropological writings of Victor Turner, especially his chapter ‘Liminality and Communitas’, in The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1969), 94–130, in which the term is closely tied to the concept of ritual and the sacred. Jon McKenzie writes: ‘What is performance? What is Performance Studies? “Liminality” is perhaps the most concise and accurate response to both of these questions.’ See Jon McKenzie, Perform or Else: From Discipline to Performance (New York: Routledge, 2001), 50. 14. Roberto Bolaño, ‘Exiles’, in Between Parentheses: Essays, Articles, and Speeches, 1998–2003, ed. Ignacio Echevarría, trans. Natasha Wimmer (New York: New Directions, 2011), 53. 15. Considerable philosophical energy has been expended on this problem; one personal source for this argument can be found in Wittgenstein’s axiom ‘An indefinite boundary is not really a boundary at all’. See Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe (Oxford: Blackwell, 1953), I, §99, 45e. 16. In addition to running hundreds of offices across nearly every country in the world, the US Border Patrol uses a fairly broad definition of ‘border’: ‘The Border Patrol’s jurisdiction – 100 miles into the interior from the US international border and coasts – covers two-thirds of the population in the country.’ See Todd Miller, Border Patrol Nation: Dispatches from the Front Lines of Homeland Security (San Francisco: City Lights, 2014), 10. 17. Writing in the Metaphysics, Aristotle defines boundaries in terms of concrete objects: ‘“Limit” means (1) the last point of each thing, i.e. the first point beyond which it is not possible to find any part, and the first point within which every part is’; see Metaphysics V, 17, 1022a4–5. It is straightforward and intuitive to progress this definition to temporally defined events or even abstract concepts, though Aristotle goes on to note in the same section: ‘“limit” has as many senses as “beginning”, and yet more; for the beginning is a limit, but not every limit is a beginning.’ See The Basic Works of Aristotle, ed. Richard McKeon (New York: Modern Library, 2001), 770. 18. This structural feature fascinated Ludwig Wittgenstein, who wrote in the Tractatus LogicoPhilosophicus that ‘The limits [Grenzen] of my language mean the limits of my world’ (5.6). See Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, trans. D. F. Pears and B. F. McGuinness (London and New York: Routledge, 2006), 68. An alternative translation of Grenzen here would be ‘borders’. 19. This mechanism is discussed extensively in Slavoj Žižek, Violence: Six Sideways Reflections (London: Profile Books, 2008). 20. Reece Jones, ‘Why Build a Border Wall?’, NACLA Report on the Americas 45, no. 3 (2012): 70. 21. One of the strangest Irish cultural intersections with state power is the naming of an Irish Defence Forces naval vessel after Samuel Beckett in 2014, in a ceremony conducted next

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22.

23.

24. 25. 26.

27. 28. 29. 30.

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nicholas johnson to the bridge also named for Beckett. The result is that the LÉ Samuel Beckett is patrolling the waters of the European border, although in line with Irish neutrality and the stated values of the Defence Forces, it is intended to operate mainly as a rescue vessel (and, when duty calls, to substitute in for the LÉ James Joyce). See Olivia Kelleher, ‘LÉ Samuel Beckett Rescues 118 Migrants in Mediterranean’, Irish Times, 19 October 2016. The evidence of child separation at the US Border as a conscious policy of collective punishment is compellingly put forward in Caitlin Dickerson, ‘“We Need to Take Away Children”: The Secret History of the US Government’s Family Separation Policy’, The Atlantic, 7 August 2022. See Angela Moorjani, Beckett and Buddhism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021); see also Patrick Armstrong, ‘Samuel Beckett and the Sinic World’, in Influencing Beckett/Beckett Influencing, ed. Anita Rákóczy, Mariko Hori Tanaka and Nicholas E. Johnson (Budapest and Paris: Károli Gáspár University of the Reformed Church in Hungary/Éditions L’Harmattan, 2020), 45–59. Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching, trans. D. C. Lau (London: Penguin Books, 1963), 37. Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching, trans. Gia-fu Feng and Jane English (New York: Random House/ Vintage, 1972), 32. Recent work on Beckett and gender has explored the political implications of Beckett’s critique of identity in illuminating ways; see especially the introduction to a special journal issue on sex and gender in Beckett: Pascale Sardin, Stéphanie Ravez and Jean-Michel Gourvard, ‘«Pénétrer dans l’arène sexuelle» – Sexe et genre dans l’œuvre de Samuel Beckett’, Samuel Beckett Today/Aujourd’hui 34 (2022): 1–10, doi:10.1163/18757405-03401001. Samuel Beckett, The Unnamable, ed. Steven Connor (London: Faber and Faber, 2010), 1. Marjorie Perloff, ‘“In Love with Hiding”: Samuel Beckett’s War’, The Iowa Review 35, no. 1 (Spring 2005): 99, https://www.jstor.org/stable/20151994 (accessed 19 October 2022). Emphasis added. Josiah Heyman, ‘Border Thinking: Exclude or Relate?’, blog post, North American Conference on Latin America website, 27 February 2017, https://nacla.org/blog/2017/02/27/ border-thinking-exclude-or-relate (accessed 2 August 2019). Skin and the haptic have been fertile concepts in both modernism and Beckett studies within the past decade, producing new monographs in each field. See Abbie Garrington, Haptic Modernism: Touch and the Tactile in Modernist Writing (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2013); Trish McTighe, The Haptic Aesthetic in Samuel Beckett’s Drama (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013). The idea of containment and the drama resulting from its constitutive constraints have been fruitful grounds for modernist practice at least since Maurice Maeterlinck’s Interior (1895), a play for marionettes. The scenography of naturalism and symbolism crystallises an enduring fascination with the representation of interiors; see Morag Shiach, ‘Modernism, the City and the “Domestic Interior”’, Home Cultures 2, no. 3 (2005): 251–67. Beckett is no different, especially in his work for film, television and prose. For a political reading of Beckett and confinement, see James Little, Samuel Beckett in Confinement: The Politics of Closed Space (London: Bloomsbury, 2020). Beckett deploys a range of strategies in this regard, from eliminating language altogether (Act Without Words I and II, Quad), to framing the creation of narrative as a form of torture (Rough for Radio II, As the Story Was Told), to explicitly calling for a ‘literature of the unword’ that would agitate against ‘grammar and style’ (the ‘German Letter’ of 1937), to titling his final poem comment dire/what is the word. Paradoxically, however, he was also extremely fastidious about text, translation, proofreading and finding le mot juste. Jorge Luis Borges, ‘On Exactitude in Science’, in Collected Fictions, trans. Andrew Hurley (New York: Penguin, 1998), 325.

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34. See Jean Baudrillard, Selected Writings, ed. Mark Poster (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1988), 166–84; Slavoj Žižek, Welcome to the Desert of the Real: Five Essays on September 11 and Related Dates (London: Verso, 2002). 35. See, for concrete examples of embodied border performances in North America and the Caribbean, Ramón H. Rivera-Servera and Harvey Young, eds, Performance in the Borderlands (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011). 36. This Twitter handle is now credited as the author of a 256-page book featuring many of the significant tweets. See @BorderIrish, I Am the Border, So I Am (New York: HarperCollins, 2019). 37. For a detailed discussion of how contemporary practitioners have negotiated these notional strictures in the decade of work from 2009 to 2019, see Nicholas E. Johnson and Jonathan Heron, Experimental Beckett: Contemporary Performance Practices (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020). 38. This argumentation is indebted to Joy Crosby, ‘Liminality and the Sacred: Discipline Building and Speaking with the Other’, Liminalities: A Journal of Performance Studies 5, no. 1 (April 2009): 1–19, http://liminalities.net/5-1/sacred.pdf (accessed 19 October 2022). 39. For discussion of the spread of memes and radical ‘acts of identification’ with Beckett online, especially in the COVID-19 pandemic era, see Nicholas Johnson, ‘Viral Beckett’, in Samuel Beckett and Technology, ed. Galina Kiryushina, Einat Adar and Mark Nixon (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2021), 255–61. 40. Mark Nixon and Matthew Feldman, eds, The International Reception of Samuel Beckett (London: Bloomsbury/Continuum, 2011), 11. 41. The editors were naturally aware of this limitation and hoped to extend the analysis further in subsequent work. Conferences like ‘Borderless Beckett/Beckett sans frontières’ (Tokyo, 2006) and ‘Staging Beckett at the Margins’ (Chester, 2014) sought to develop tools for troubling and questioning geographic limitations on Beckett in the twenty-first century, but as even the name of the latter conference suggests, they found it hard to avoid slipping into the othering of the ‘marginal’. For the most recent scholarship on these issues, see Thirthankar Chakraborty and Juan Luis Toribio Vazquez, eds, Samuel Beckett as World Literature (London: Bloomsbury, 2020). 42. Bailey and Davies, ‘Introduction’, 11. 43. Since his 2006 centenary, Ireland has recuperated Beckett to fold him into the ‘Irish writer’ market through acts of identification like Dublin’s Samuel Beckett Bridge (designed by Santiago Calatrava and shaped as a harp on its side) and the naming of the naval ship (see n. 21); for discussion of how Beckett’s notion of ‘failure’ has been co-opted and misunderstood, see Jonathan Heron, ‘#failbetter’, Journal of Beckett Studies 30, no. 1 (2021): 82–99, doi:10.3366/jobs.2021.0330; Eva Kenny, ‘A Fetish for Failure’, Dublin Review of Books 118, no. 1 (January), www.drb.ie/essays/a-fetish-for-failure (accessed 3 August 2022). 44. UN General Assembly, ‘Universal Declaration of Human Rights’, 10 December 1948, 217 A (III), https://www.un.org/en/about-us/universal-declaration-of-human-rights (accessed 1 August 2022). 45. Ibid. Emphasis added. 46. See Jonathan Heron, Nicholas Johnson, Burç İdem Dinçel, Gavin Quinn, Sarah Jane Scaife and Áine Josephine Tyrrell, ‘The Samuel Beckett Laboratory 2013’, Journal of Beckett Studies 23, no. 1 (2014): 73–94, doi:10.3366/jobs.2014.0087; Jonathan Heron and Nicholas Johnson, ‘Critical Pedagogies and the Theatre Laboratory’, Research in Drama Education 22, no. 2 (2017): 282–7, doi:10.1080/13569783.2017.1293513. 47. These phrases come from the preparatory pack that was emailed to the twenty workshop participants. 48. Heron and Johnson, ‘Critical Pedagogies’, 282.

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49. In 1981, François Mitterand was undertaking major immigration reforms, and French immigration policy was being discussed extensively in the press; see Margo Deley, ‘French Immigration Policy since May 1981’, International Migration Review 17, no. 2 (Summer 1983): 196–211.

Works Cited Anzaldúa, Gloria E. Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza. San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books, 1987. Aristotle. The Basic Works of Aristotle. Edited by Richard McKeon. New York: Modern Library, 2001. Armstrong, Patrick. ‘Samuel Beckett and the Sinic World’. In Influencing Beckett/Beckett Influencing, edited by Anita Rákóczy, Mariko Hori Tanaka and Nicholas E. Johnson, 45–59. Budapest and Paris: Károli Gáspár University of the Reformed Church in Hungary/ Éditions L’Harmattan, 2020. Bailey, Helen and William Davies. ‘Introduction’. In Beckett and Politics, ed. William Davies and Helen Bailey, 1–16. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2021. Baker, Jo. A Country Road, a Tree. New York: Doubleday, 2016. Baudrillard, Jean. Selected Writings. Edited by Mark Poster. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1988. Beckett, Samuel. The Unnamable. Edited by Steven Connor. London: Faber and Faber, 2010. Bolaño, Roberto. ‘Exiles’. In Between Parentheses: Essays, Articles, and Speeches, 1998–2003. Edited by Ignacio Echevarría. Translated by Natasha Wimmer. 49–60. New York: New Directions, 2011. @BorderIrish. I Am the Border, So I Am. New York: HarperCollins, 2019. Borges, Jorge Luis. ‘On Exactitude in Science.’ In Collected Fictions. Translated by Andrew Hurley. 325. New York: Penguin, 1998. Chakraborty, Thirthankar and Juan Luis Toribio Vazquez, eds. Samuel Beckett as World Literature. London: Bloomsbury, 2020. Cohn, Ruby. ‘Joyce and Beckett: Irish Cosmopolitans’. ‘The Beckett Issue’, James Joyce Quarterly 8, no. 4 (1971): 385–91. http://www.jstor.org/stable/25486929 (accessed 19 October 2022). Crosby, Joy. ‘Liminality and the Sacred: Discipline Building and Speaking with the Other’. Liminalities: A Journal of Performance Studies 5, no. 1 (April 2009): 1–19. http://liminalities. net/5-1/sacred.pdf (accessed 19 October 2022). Davies, William. Samuel Beckett and the Second World War. London: Bloomsbury, 2020. Deley, Margo. ‘French Immigration Policy since May 1981’. International Migration Review 17, no. 2 (Summer 1983): 196–211. Dickerson, Caitlin. ‘“We Need to Take Away Children”: The Secret History of the US Government’s Family Separation Policy’. The Atlantic, 7 August 2022. Douglas, Mary. Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo. London: Routledge, 2002. Garrington, Abbie. Haptic Modernism: Touch and the Tactile in Modernist Writing. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2013. Heron, Jonathan. ‘#failbetter’. Journal of Beckett Studies 30, no. 1 (2021): 82–99. doi:10.3366/ jobs.2021.0330. Heron, Jonathan and Nicholas Johnson. ‘Critical Pedagogies and the Theatre Laboratory’. Research in Drama Education 22, no. 2 (2017): 282–7. doi:10.1080/13569783.2017.1293513. Heron, Johnson, Nicholas Johnson, Burç İdem Dinçel, Gavin Quinn, Sarah Jane Scaife and Áine Josephine Tyrrell. ‘The Samuel Beckett Laboratory 2013’. Journal of Beckett Studies 23, no. 1 (2014): 73–94. doi:10.3366/jobs.2014.0087.

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Heyman, Josiah. ‘Border Thinking: Exclude or Relate?’ Blog post, North American Conference on Latin America website, 27 February 2017. https://nacla.org/blog/2017/02/27/borderthinking-exclude-or-relate (accessed 19 October 2022). Johnson, Nicholas. ‘A Theatre of the Unword: Censorship, Hegemony and Samuel Beckett’. In Ireland, Memory and Performing the Historical Imagination, edited by Chris Collins and Mary Caulfield, 36–54. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. Johnson, Nicholas. ‘Viral Beckett’. In Samuel Beckett and Technology, edited by Galina Kiryushina, Einat Adar and Mark Nixon, 255–61. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2021. Johnson, Nicholas E. and Jonathan Heron. Experimental Beckett: Contemporary Performance Practices. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020. Jones, Reece. Border Walls: Security and the War on Terror in the United States, India, and Israel. London: Zed Books, 2012. Jones, Reece. ‘Why Build a Border Wall?’ NACLA Report on the Americas 45, no. 3 (2012): 70–2. Kelleher, Olivia. ‘LÉ Samuel Beckett Rescues 118 Migrants in Mediterranean’. Irish Times, 19 October 2016. Kennedy, Seán, ed. Beckett and Ireland. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010. Kenny, Eva. ‘A Fetish for Failure’. Dublin Review of Books 118, no. 1 (January). www.drb.ie/ essays/a-fetish-for-failure (accessed 3 August 2022). Kiryushina, Galina, Einat Adar and Mark Nixon, eds. Samuel Beckett and Technology. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2021. Knowlson, James. Damned to Fame: The Life of Samuel Beckett. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996. Lao Tzu. Tao Te Ching. Translated by Gia-fu Feng and Jane English. New York: Random House/Vintage, 1972. Lao Tzu. Tao Te Ching. Translated by D. C. Lau. London: Penguin Books, 1963. Little, James. Samuel Beckett in Confinement: The Politics of Closed Space. London: Bloomsbury, 2020. McDonald, Ronan. ‘Groves of Blarney: Beckett’s Academic Reception in Ireland’. In Plural Beckett Pluriel: Centenary Essays/Essais d’un Centenaire, edited by Paulo Eduardo Carvalho and Rui Carvalho Homen, 33–51. Porto: Flup e-Dita, 2008. McKenzie, Jon. Perform or Else: From Discipline to Performance. New York: Routledge, 2001. McMullan, Anna. Beckett’s Intermedial Ecosystems. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021. McNaughton, James. Samuel Beckett and the Politics of Aftermath. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018. McTighe, Trish. The Haptic Aesthetic in Samuel Beckett’s Drama. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. Maley, Willy. ‘Bend It Like Beckett: Class Rules in Irish Literature’. Irish Review 47 (2013): 63–85. https://www.jstor.org/stable/43829394 (accessed 19 October 2022). Mignolo, Walter and Maria Tlostanova. ‘Theorizing from the Borders: Shifting to Geo- and Body-Politics of Knowledge’. European Journal of Social Theory 9, no. 2 (2006): 205–21. Miller, Todd. Border Patrol Nation: Dispatches from the Front Lines of Homeland Security. San Francisco: City Lights, 2014. Moorjani, Angela. Beckett and Buddhism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021. Morin, Emilie. Beckett’s Political Imagination. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017. Morin, Emilie and Rhys Tranter. ‘Interview: Samuel Beckett’s Political Imagination’. Blog post, 5 July 2018. https://rhystranter.com/2018/07/05/samuel-beckett-politics/ (accessed 19 October 2022).

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Nixon, Mark and Matthew Feldman, eds. The International Reception of Samuel Beckett. London: Bloomsbury/Continuum, 2011. Perloff, Marjorie. ‘“In Love with Hiding”: Samuel Beckett’s War’. The Iowa Review 35, no. 1 (Spring 2005): 76–103. https://www.jstor.org/stable/20151994 (accessed 19 October 2022). Rapcsak, Balazs, Mark Nixon and Philipp Schweighauser, eds. Beckett and Media. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2022. Rivera-Servera, Ramón H. and Harvey Young, eds. Performance in the Borderlands. Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. Sardin, Pascale, Stéphanie Ravez and Jean-Michel Gourvard, ‘«Pénétrer dans l’arène sexuelle» – Sexe et genre dans l’œuvre de Samuel Beckett’. Samuel Beckett Today/Aujourd’hui 34 (2022): 1–10. doi:10.1163/18757405-03401001. Sharkey, Rodney. ‘Towards a Modernism with Meaning: Beckett’s Refugees’. In Beckett and Politics, edited by William Davies and Helen Bailey, 281–300. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2021. Shiach, Morag. ‘Modernism, the City and the “Domestic Interior”’. Home Cultures 2, no. 3 (2005): 251–67. Turner, Victor. The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1969. UN General Assembly. ‘Universal Declaration of Human Rights’. 10 December 1948. 217 A (III). http://www.un.org/en/universal-declaration-human-rights/ (accessed 1 August 2022). Wittgenstein, Ludwig. Philosophical Investigations. Translated by G. E. M. Anscombe. Oxford: Blackwell, 1953. Wittgenstein, Ludwig. Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. Translated by D. F. Pears and B. F. McGuinness. London and New York: Routledge, 2006. Žižek, Slavoj. Violence: Six Sideways Reflections. London: Profile Books, 2008. Žižek, Slavoj. Welcome to the Desert of the Real: Five Essays on September 11 and Related Dates. London: Verso, 2002.

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32 The Writing on the Wall Isn’t There to Be Read: Unworking the Theatrical in the Figures of Adrienne Kennedy Kevin Bell

I convinced myself it was original. Adrienne Kennedy, People Who Led to My Plays1

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utside of the musics to which their own temporalities have trained, explorative Black writings and films are the figural zones in which to most reliably find one’s perceptual registers altered by Black people who, in James Baldwin’s words, ‘are not controlled by the American’s image of them’ – but who are animated instead by those private sounds and visions that know no negation or exclusion; no fixities of beginning or end; no identity that does not mutate; and no power either to assert or to relinquish power.2 Yet, these same phantasmal sounds, colours, textures and times take indissoluble hold in the shaping of the works bearing their mark. In her 1987 preface to a collection of her (then) nearly three decades of plays, Adrienne Kennedy illustrates the working ferocities of this imagistic abduction from anthropomorphic representation: Without exception the days when I am writing are days of images fiercely pounding in my head and days of walking . . . in Ghana across the campus of Legon, in Rome through the Forum, in New York along Columbus Avenue, and in London, Primrose Hill (hadn’t Karl Marx walked there?). Walks and coffee, all of which seem to put me under a spell of sorts . . . I am at the typewriter almost every waking moment and suddenly there is a play. It would be impossible to say I wrote them. Somehow under this spell they become written.3

The amnesic intervals in which the plays ‘become written’ as if by alien hand, inscribing invisibly the spaces of cities traversed incessantly and the durations of moments wakened interminably to the force of their own clamours, are what disclose the futurity of those plays in their incommensurability to the presumably ‘understood’: plays whose linguistic and aural-visual opacities articulate tenacious rapport with the subtextual depths of their sources, whether familial, literary, cinematic or pop-cultural. Doubly dispossessed by the images besieging her and by the supplements through which to reassign the burden of finding terms for them, Kennedy narrates the scene of writing as a material takedown of ‘consciousness’. ‘Auteurial agency’ is scattered by the unrelenting procession of pictures and sounds that can only be channelled through ‘other’

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exertions and materialities – secondary means and objects through which to tableau an inner transfixion. Its unrealised insistences anchor Kennedy to the typewriter, even as they momentarily dislodge from the industrial network of racial-capitalist valuation that informs their every gesture of their absolute aloneness within that network. If Kennedy continually walks the edge of this circumference, it is because she is already drawn to it by some problematic routinisation of categories holding its system in place. The spasmodic pictures and utterances that curve her analysis out from ensnarement in dialectical frames do not re-present any ‘contrasting’ primordiality to that system – rather, they realise the severities of abjection, anxiety and terror that at once demand and rupture such systematic impositions of order. Kennedy’s caffeinated drift through the world is an obsessively inattentive drill in the service of such exorbitant images. It is a closure of concentration nearly somnambulant in the totality of its movement from ‘dramatised’, mimetic intention into experimental, involuntary intensity. Electrified by the caffeine’s associative accelerant, Kennedy’s scenes constantly disclose the desertion of anthropomorphic pathos, even in their frequently extreme pitches of emotional and physical furore. What emerges across the plays is a consistency of collisions between cities of selves; an interpenetration of visceralities and reflexivities in a writhing weave of mutual instruction and erasure. Two fragmentary examples: When I have the baby I wonder will I turn into a river of blood and die? My mother almost died when I was born. I’ve always felt sad that I couldn’t have been an angel of mercy to my father and mother and saved them from their torment [. . .] The one reality I wanted never came true . . . to be their angel of mercy to unite them. I keep remembering the time my mother threatened to kill my father with the shotgun. I keep remembering my father’s going away to marry a girl who talked to willow trees.4 After David returned sometimes we walked at night in Rock Creek Park. I reread Wretched of the Earth to try to understand what you had been through. Your symptoms:            

idiopathic tremors hair turning white paroxysmal tachycardias muscular stiffness anxiety and feeling of imminent death heavy sweating fits

We never got to see Frantz. Alice and I went to the hospital in Washington where we thought he was. We were not admitted. I still read from his life and search for the cause of his illnesses and death.5 Hardly the instrument of any piloting regime of dramatic ‘consciousness’, but more precisely a running function of the ever-mutating and therefore auto-intervening site of cognition itself, Kennedy’s writing presents an unbroken recutting of accumulating

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phantasms, private events and figural shards from film, literature, history and ubiquitous telemediatic drone. In the first textual excerpt, from A Movie Star Has to Star in Black and White (1976), the introductory words of Kennedy’s autobiographical protagonist, a young, pregnant Black woman named ‘Clara’, are spoken not by Clara herself, but by the actor ‘Bette Davis’. Davis is seated at a table on the deck of the ocean liner from the 1942 film Now, Voyager, and she speaks Clara’s words to the film’s co-star ‘Paul Henreid’. Spoken in other scenes either by actors ‘Shelley Winters’ and ‘Jean Peters’ (who ‘themselves’ speak, at different moments respectively, to ‘Montgomery Clift’ or to ‘Marlon Brando’ who, like Henreid, themselves never speak) or by herself, ‘Clara’ is introduced as ‘a bit role’ by the iconic, torch-bearing ‘Columbia Pictures Lady’. Clara later remembers her husband Eddie carping that her copious diary-writing reduces her to being a spectator of her own life. Eddie reads the movement of writing – Clara’s writing, anyway – not as the active, idiosyncratic creation of a new form, but as the mimetic and passive consumption of someone else’s – ‘like watching a black and white movie’. In the second example, taken from The Film Club (A Monologue by Suzanne Alexander) the lead character tries to grasp the ordeal of her husband, now returned from an unexplained fifteen-month kidnapping and detention somewhere in West Africa, beginning in the winter of 1961. Suzanne channels Frantz Fanon’s contemporaneous writings throughout the play, in this scene referring specifically to the clinical studies of mental illness in colonised and state-tortured Algerians mentioned toward the end of The Wretched of the Earth. Suzanne cites that text’s numeration of bodily symptoms as evidentiary markings of brutalities that her husband – a successful Black American intellectual and colleague of Fanon – had endured after being taken into custody while the couple lived in Ghana. ‘The winter of 1961’ is hardly a random historical framing. Fanon’s death from leukaemia in a Bethesda NIH hospital on 6 December of that year silently structures a haunting reverberation into a text already organised by loss and terror. For Suzanne’s monologue includes a Washington Post report that implies her husband’s disappearance to be politically motivated by his investigation of an earlier plot against Fanon’s life – a suspicion that underscores the then widely held view that Fanon was assassinated. Continuing to ‘read from his life’, Suzanne is not only suspended in what might be a very public ‘cold case’, but attempting a by-the-book diagnosis of her husband’s enduring physical symptoms of colonialist, anti-Black violence. To ‘read from the life’ in this instance is to read from its lapses – and as Kennedy’s citational signposts illustrate repeatedly throughout the plays, writing unfolds from within sequencings of the same foundational absences. The dead friend and mentor’s essays on the detoxifying, self-transformative effects of anti-colonial revolution and fighting are not the only texts treated as salutary conduits in the play. The extremely anxious Suzanne and her sister-in-law Alice are prescribed by a ‘Dr. Freudenberger’ to do theatrical readings of Bram Stoker’s Dracula, which, the therapist believes, ‘will distract you while you are waiting for your husband’.6 Freudenberger’s ‘theater’ quickly becomes the new subject of a creative practice that Alice and Suzanne had already established before David Alexander’s vanishing. Alice films their assigned readings of Stoker, adding to their ‘Film Club’s’ burgeoning oeuvre of ‘adapted’ Hollywood films, again featuring Bette Davis.

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Part of what these fragments reflect is that in Kennedy’s work, such imagistic and textual displacements and reprojections neither defer nor describe what it is to go under. Rather, these pivots embody and redistribute, as operational elements within an aesthetic system, the tidal effects of such abduction or loss – which is also perceivable as a mode of becoming. Such fragments implicate among their effects the spectator or reader, who necessarily proceeds from the very dissolution of identificatory constancy. This would be the ideal spectator who, in a condition of negotiating the work’s figurations, becomes imbricated with the unannounced proliferation and blurring of spectral voices, faces and styles deriving from the textual, cinematographic, media-technological provenances ceaselessly reshuffling and reconstituting the ‘culture’ that reproduces in these spectators/consumers the anxious urgency for some resolving consolidation of ‘the human’, of ‘identity’, of consciousness – an inherited desire whose radical impossibility is staged over and again as the foundation of all of Kennedy’s work. Such adaptation’s audacity resides not only in its indifference to the representational networks and formal traditions whose insubstantiality it so routinely denudes. As Elin Diamond points out, part of the charge of Kennedy’s citational manoeuvring across Hollywood iconography has to do with its rupturing of the industry’s implacable and ongoing anti-Blackness. While Diamond follows the historical lead referenced by the character of the ‘Mother’ in Movie Star (after the character has described the Jim Crow seating practices of the Georgia movie-houses in which she had grown up), she could just as accurately be describing the structural impossibility of there having been Black counterparts to such ‘stars’ as Davis, Peters, Clift, Brando or Henreid: ‘“Facing” these movie stars in their delicious black and white celluloid simulations is, for the spectator of Kennedy’s Movie Star, to face as a Verfremdungseffekt the occluded black.’7 At the same time, Kennedy’s citational gambits are no more reducible to games of ‘racial’ inversion (which Diamond in no way suggests) than they are to psychoanalytic mappings of subjectivist identification (which Diamond argues influentially). For in Kennedy’s work, what each textual reference, each iconic face or voice, each new mask, each re-visionary ‘adaptation’ shatters is the presumed continuity of that text, face or name with what it claims to name. What her every citational gesture sets loose is the unmappable enormity of what precedes, escapes and ‘outlives’ each name, face, title or style of any referential marker inserted into the figural system of any of her plays. Werner Hamacher’s meditations on language, writing and philology devote particular attention to a question that Kennedy’s work excavates inexhaustibly: Citation makes the intention of whatever has been cited indeterminate – and more exactly, it exposes the very in-determination through which it was citable in the first place. What loses its determination in this way, however, can never appear as a finished product of the power of imagination or formation (Bildung). Indeterminate it remains despite the changing determinations it may undergo, open in all futures and withdrawn from the effort of propositional discourse to establish it in a sentence.8 This originary indeterminacy keeps Kennedy’s work not only ‘open to all futures’, implying passage through all traditions, styles, masks, personas and signatures, but necessarily open also to their erasures, emptyings and inversions – the possibilities of which are opened by the very demand that any word or image make itself understood.

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Whatever ‘fiercely pounding’ images push Kennedy to the other side of such negation or ‘propositional discourse’ seal her work at the same time within an insomniac enthralment, an incessant displacement – before a field of visions and questionings that impinge upon thought and thereby demand thought’s continual exertions in language and image, while at no point submitting to accountability or capture within its modes of expressivity. It is this incapacity of any of her figures to secure finality of their own perspectives that underwrites ironically the unfolding sense of monologue that shapes Kennedy’s greater body of work – even as it proceeds from the amnesic incapacity of its ‘author’ to fully account for the work’s gravitation beyond any dialectical ensnarement within the genealogical arc of its references. It is the same gravitation that enables its penetration by, and rapport with, ‘everything’ external to it. Hamacher’s own citing of The Gay Science illumines this aspect of Kennedy’s plays: Everything that is thought, made into poetry, painted, composed, even built and imagined belongs either to monological art or to witnessed art. The latter also includes the apparently monological art that involves belief in God, namely the lyric poetry of prayer. For there is as yet no solitude for the pious – this invention we alone, the godless, have made. I know of no deeper distinction in the entire optics of an artist than this: whether he looks out with the eyes of a witness toward his developing art-work (toward ‘himself’) or whether he ‘has forgotten the world’, the essential aspect of every monological art – it rests on forgetting; it is the music of forgetting.9 It can be suggested that the first note in Kennedy’s own ‘music of forgetting’ is the deleting of the ‘author’ option in the modern system of exchangeabilities competing for transcendent status. And what begins to surge through the spaces opened by the liquidation of the very demand for such identity – by the death of that God – is a flooding of images, intensities and tones liberated from their own provenances; from Hollywood cinema, to mass commercial journalism, to psychoanalysis, to the theorisation and movement of Black revolutionary action and figural production. Unleashed in this fountain of forms are the unresolved psycho-ambiguities of an oeuvre whose most ‘playful’ moves – such as having Bette Davis speak the desire and the analysis of an anonymous, young Black American woman – represent at the same time the most visceral guttings of the West’s most predatory addictions, including and not limited to categorical violences of ‘race’ and ‘gender’ through which it continues to rely upon anti-Black and misogynist violence and negation for its own sense of selfhood. Very much like the torrential ‘river of blood’ into which Clara’s mother converts during Clara’s birth (as recalled by ‘Bette Davis’), the structuring profusion of Kennedy’s imagistic impulses gives life to forces that flood and sweep away the evaluative power of any ‘one’ origin or ‘gaze’ presumably installed by or aligned with ‘Kennedy’: All art and all philosophy, every thought and every discourse that has an addressee, arise in the last instance out of a belief in God, and all unfold as conscious or involuntary theodicies. In contrast to the social and therefore also theological art of dialogue with another, monological art – including the art of thinking to the extent that it is intended neither for others nor for oneself – is theocidal. It knows

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no other and acknowledges no god who could authorize its destination. Dialogical thought, action, and life are forms of prayer. The only life capable of monologue would be a life without gods, life no longer in need of an addressee who would bestow meaning on it in order to make suffering bearable [. . .] Only the life into whose solitude no god reaches would be singular [. . .] As long as the addressee is not ‘forgotten’ – which does not mean ‘repressed’ or ‘unconscious’ – there is no individuality.10 Whatever sense of ‘identity’ emerges through Kennedy’s plays is both more and less than the exercise in subjective fragmentation and identification meditated upon so obsessively by Kennedy scholars. It is an unrelenting interrogation and outcome of the suffusion of textual, filmic and other mediatic transmissions and implantations that (over)determine and (dis)organise such identifications. An Evening with Dead Essex (1973) offers an under-analysed example of her work’s exploration of the pre-defuncted conditions of Black and American identity’s own emergence – and of how that pre-voiding may clear space for entirely ‘other’ modes of ‘community’ and ‘art’. Driven by the actual event of a mass shooting by a young Black man in New Orleans earlier that year, it opens a system of self-suspensions in its play-within-a-play complex, installing figural evocations through the staged disorder of photographic imagery, newspaper/telemediatic reportage and a diversity of ambient objects. In other words, Dead Essex theorises radical Black figuration’s generative grasp of its auto-failure within the matrices of Western representation. It is the impossibility of either extricating as a single reality the bullet-shredded body of ‘dead Mark Essex’ from its sensational restagings across American front pages in January 1973, or retrieving any authoritative sense of how Mark Essex may have imagined his participation in the world during his twenty-three years, that most comprehensively gives Kennedy’s play the revisionary power to ‘cast’ these self-installed Western representational registers as the firmament of racial capitalism’s deadening hum of consumerist white noise. Mark Essex is understood within those regimes as ‘the New Orleans Sniper’, who throughout the day and night of 7 January 1973 terrorised the city from the roof of the downtown Howard Johnson’s hotel. Mike Davis’s return to the scene is among the more effectively succinct: A young Black Navy veteran who [. . .] had almost no formal weapons training, Essex boldly attacked the headquarters of the New Orleans Police Department on New Year’s Eve, 1972. After killing a Black police cadet and wounding a white lieutenant, Essex escaped to a nearby warehouse where he ambushed a K-9 unit and killed another cop. For a week he eluded a vast manhunt before suddenly reappearing in the Downtown Howard Johnson Hotel across the street from City Hall [. . .] By nightfall on 7 January 1973, Essex – now bunkered on the roof of Howard Johnson – had militarily defeated the entire New Orleans Police Department. He had shot 10 police officers (killing five, including a deputy chief) and 11 white civilians (killing four) while withstanding thousands of rounds of police fire without a wound. Ultimately a Marine helicopter was brought in and after taking numerous hits from Essex in three runs at the hotel, a police sharpshooter finally killed the one-man Black liberation army. When the coroner received what remained of Essex he counted 200 bullet wounds.11

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Such are ‘the facts’, as recharged in Davis’s 2013 synopsis of decades of journalistic rehash. But it is only within weeks of the attack itself that Kennedy seizes the means of mediatic projection, repurposing its disseminative war machinery in the fragmentary charting of a Black theatrical collective’s own nervous ignition upon and inversion of the authority of these materials. What unfolds between the Black actors/characters of Dead Essex (the actors are to use their actual names and ‘play themselves’) is neither conversation nor argument between pre-constituted ‘points of view’ attempting to either refute or merge into preset ideologic traffic patterns of recycled explanation of Essex’s attack. The conflict is not between each other, but rather with the fundamental otherness of the whiteover-Black organisation of the US. For Dead Essex never leaves the material scene of globalised epistemological and imagistic transmission; the mediatic nerve-centre of commercialist informational processing, workspace of incessant writing, reading and editing, of study and distraction; of documentation and dispersal of textual overload, turned in this play to knowledge’s cinematographic rupture instead of its ‘dramatised’ reproduction. This is how Kennedy sets the action: Studio in a film company on West 47th Street Screening room Screen, projector Posters, rolled and stacked in shelves Tape recorder A phone table with a typewriter, chairs on the table, piles of newspaper clippings, photographs. The area is made to look enclosed and dim except for one center glaring ceiling light. To the rear with his back to the audience, the PROJECTIONIST (the only white character) at the projector. The floor should be black or very dark, all the furniture should be dark, except for glaring silver film cans and white, rolled-up posters.12 Any stray element, whether visual, sonic or linguistic, whose momentary salience unfastens from this compressed archive might trigger the director’s demand for his projectionist to flash from one randomised, photographic image (perhaps of Essex’s Naval portrait; perhaps of a crowded, Midwestern state fair; perhaps of his ramshackle New Orleans apartment walls and ceilings, posthumously photographed by police, covered with words he had not organised into narrative) to another image. This visually incremental amplification of Kennedy’s spare plot is not generated by the actors’ reproduction of scripted signification, but by what is freighted in the systematic flattening of that anthropomorphic insistence – by what unfolds instead within the work’s withdrawal from and insomniac engrossment with the mediatised spaces, objects, vocabularies and temporalities that articulate the interanimation of self and spectacle that obliterates and consumes Blackness in the same moment that it attracts it. Everything depends on the rhythm of the shuttling of the photographs in the foreground; or the actors’ intensive, needle-in-a-haystack rummaging of the countless boxes of Essex’s ‘material’, critical antenna attuning to anything upon which to ignite perceptually and negatively; randomly inexhaustible particularities plucked from the unending self-broadcast of the racial-capitalist world order.

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To flash the slide projector forward, as the interior play’s ‘Director’ frequently commands, is for him to fall back into the fascinations of his material’s depths, exposing the Director’s authority as more of a subjection: as an obligation to the impersonal force of whatever it is in the material that now directs him. ‘Getting there’ – as he names the notyet-achieved taste of his troupe’s performative alignment with his driving phantasms on the final night of its rehearsal – is the spasmodic movement of radical becoming in figuration and in life, within which the Director, his players and their objects of investigation are held intractably as they try to divine from photos, news clippings and a few personal objects Essex’s own odyssey from the rural childhood of belief ‘in those white Kansas faces’, to what Essex described to psychologists and family as his years of racist abuse and neglect as a young Naval enlistee.13 It is the compulsion of the slide projector’s repeated shuttling from one photo’s archiving and rupture of what it records – the interval between demand and the detour of a penetrating image – that isolates the turning toward an image as a breaking from that image’s promise of cognitive manifestation. It is Kennedy’s mechanical re-pivoting of Rene Char’s inescapable and unaddressable query: ‘What is reality without the dislocating energy of poetry?’14 Its gravitation is at once a detaching from the negational logics grounding visuality’s implicit contract. In the space of this magnetising draw that is also a withdrawal, Kennedy’s flash of the projector opens on to deep time.

Notes   1. Adrienne Kennedy, People Who Led to My Plays (New York: Theatre Communications Group, 1987), 44.   2. James Baldwin, ‘On Being Black in America’, interview by Nathan Cohen, Encounter, Canadian Broadcasting System, 11 December 1960. https://www.cbc.ca/player/play/ 728074819742 (accessed 19 October 2022).   3. Adrienne Kennedy, The Adrienne Kennedy Reader (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2001), 10.   4. Ibid. 64–5.   5. Ibid. 180.   6. Ibid. 175.  7. Elin Diamond, ‘Rethinking Identification: Kennedy, Freud, Brecht’, New Series/Theater Issue, The Kenyon Review 15, no. 2 (Spring 1993): 95.   8. Werner Hamacher, Premises: Essays on Philosophy and Literature from Kant to Celan, trans. Peter Fenves (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999), 170–1.  9. Ibid. 168. Hamacher’s seminal essay ‘Disgregation of the Will’, an analysis of the very concept of individuality, draws its strength from first isolating the fiction that ‘binds’ or reifies ‘individuality’ as a concept – namely, ‘that incomparably unique beings are all individuals in equal measure’ (167). The problem inheres in the non-questioning acceptance of individuality’s representations as a subjective ‘will’, of ‘objectivity, unity, and possible substantiality’ (168) – an inertia that constitutes social life in ‘the rigor mortis of canonical forms’ (148). ‘Disgregation’, for Hamacher, means a radical ‘dis-herding’, in which those inherited forms are ‘outlived’ by any and all whose passions and impulses feel the deadness of those forms falling away from them. These are individuals who perceive their own emergence where such habit-forms are defunct. This is clearly a Nietzschean register into which Hamacher taps by citing fully a passage from The Gay Science positing as creative any practice or gesture whose exertion exceeds the judgement of any arbiter or auditor. 10. Ibid. 170.

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11. Mike Davis, ‘Christopher Dorner and the Exterminating Angels’, The Rag Blog, 15 February 2013, https://www.theragblog.com/mike-davis-christopher-dorner-and-theexterminating-angels/ (accessed 19 October 2022). 12. Kennedy, Reader, 117–18. 13. Ibid. 120. 14. Rene Char, ‘For a Saxifrage Prometheus – On Touching the Aeolian Hand of Hölderlin’, in This Smoke That Carried Us: Selected Poems, trans. Suzanne Dubroff (Buffalo: White Pine Press, 2004), 146.

Works Cited Baldwin, James. ‘On Being Black in America’. Interview by Nathan Cohen. Encounter, Canadian Broadcasting System, 11 December 1960. https://www.cbc.ca/player/play/728074819742 (accessed 19 October 2022). Char, Rene. ‘For a Saxifrage Prometheus – On Touching the Aeolian Hand of Hölderlin’. In This Smoke That Carried Us: Selected Poems. Translated by Suzanne Dubroff. 146. Buffalo: White Pine Press, 2004. Davis, Mike. ‘Christopher Dorner and the Exterminating Angels’. The Rag Blog, 15 February 2013. https://www.theragblog.com/mike-davis-christopher-dorner-and-the-exterminatingangels/ (accessed 19 October 2022). Diamond, Elin. ‘Rethinking Identification: Kennedy, Freud, Brecht’. New Series/Theater Issue, The Kenyon Review 15, no. 2 (Spring 1993): 86–99. Hamacher, Werner. Premises: Essays on Philosophy and Literature from Kant to Celan. Translated by Peter Fenves. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999. Kennedy, Adrienne. The Adrienne Kennedy Reader. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2001. Kennedy, Adrienne. People Who Led to My Plays. New York: Theatre Communications Group, 1987.

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Afterword Olga Taxidou

S

‘

ensing’ is one of the first words in this book. What are we saying when we say that we are ‘sensing modernist theatre’? Are we gesturing towards the phenomenological turn in performance studies, in many ways practised and initially theorised by modernist performance? Are we citing the Greek ‘sense’ of the aesthetic, aesthesis, that also locates it in lived experience through the senses and our bodies? Or is it just a feeling? This affective reading of modernist performance is in many ways enacted throughout this book: in the ways it addresses memorialisation, memory, tradition and experimentation; in the ways it combines different discourses from archival research to manifesto. Indeed, we might say that it enacts a performance itself and invites us to occupy any position we wish along the genealogy of performance theory and theatre historiography – two disciplines that forged themselves within modernism from its anthropological/ritualistic flourishes to its avant-garde radicalism. It’s no coincidence, I think, that Raymond Williams coined the phrase ‘structure of feeling’ initially in the early 1950s, when critically discussing the performing arts, modernist cinema and drama. In trying to read the relationships between the playtext and the performance, Williams uses the phrase to discuss the function of dramatic conventions (theatricality, as we might say, in a sense already practising performance theory). Later the phrase became more evocative and was used to address the complex and allusive ways literary and theatrical conventions are passed on through time, and how they ride the interconnected timelines of past/present/future. Again, in a sense this quest for the so-called ‘ideology of form’ had its parallels in the Frankfurt School, where ‘theatricality’ itself becomes a type of objective correlative, as that dynamic force (structure of feeling) that connects the past with the present and, significantly, propels it into the future. The Brecht/Benjamin/Adorno/Beckett debates that place theatre centre stage in discussing ideas about autonomy and engagement still resonate, as much for the continuously evolving lexicon they helped to forge as for their passion and flair. There was a time in modernism when these debates were a matter of life and death. It was also a time when theatrical performance comes into its own, positioned as an autonomous aesthetic activity, quintessentially modern, but also part of a genealogy of performing arts that ranges from the Greeks, to Chinese acting, to kabuki, bunraku and kathakali. It takes its place amongst the modernist ‘sciences’, like anthropology, psychology, sociology and quantum theory. The scientism of Brecht had bolder predecessors. In aesthetic terms, it revives and rehearses the ancient quarrel (interestingly already termed ‘ancient’ by Plato, perhaps it is also always the battle between the ancients and

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the moderns). And, as ever, this is enacted through the discourses of theatricality and anti-theatricality. Its modernist metamorphosis casts a long shadow over twentieth- and twenty-first-century legacies of performance, especially its ethico-political efficacy. So it is no coincidence that contemporary forms of radical protest re-engage tropes like agit-prop, Living Newspaper, and of course the Meyerhold/Eisenstein/Brecht/Piscator nexus. Whether consciously or not, these forms are transmitted through structures that are affective, embodied, but almost impossible to pin down. Already, however, I seem to be locating modernism within the more-or-less standard period markers of the late nineteenth century, and expanding (depending on the critical school) throughout the twentieth in various ways. However, the works presented in this book all refer to theatre made since 2000. What does it mean to ‘unleash’ modernism from the constraints of periodisation and historicism? What does it mean to sense it as a pose, a style, an impulse? What does it mean to view modernism as a dynamic potentiality, rather than a final result? In many ways, it’s the theatrical ‘model’ (in the Brechtian sense) that allows us to revisit periodisation in this radical fashion.1 The ways theatrical modernism has helped shape contemporary theatrical practices, consciously or unconsciously, also embody the ways the past can resurface, illuminate, disrupt the present in a manner that is more reciprocal and dialectical, rather than positivist and developmental. And the Benjaminian notion of the constellation is apt here as creating a mode that is visual, spatial and iconic. Crucially, for the constellation to be morphed into a recognisable form, we need to assume some distance. And distance is also what this book is asking us to take, not only from the past but also from our own present. In the ways it combines essay, memoir, manifesto, interview and archival research, and in the ways it draws on methodologies and approaches in dialogue with performance studies, the book asks us to step back and reconsider modernism as both a historical and a contemporary phenomenon. This toing and froing in terms of reception is again drawing on performance analysis, and on a basic premise of theatricality: that it in some ways always revives/translates/adapts the past, and that ‘adaptability’ or ‘translatability’, as Benjamin would say, renders ‘strange’ both the past and the present. The only other term I can think of that has the same reach – in terms of genre, culture and politics – is ‘classicism’, again perhaps rehearsing the argument that the ancient quarrel is always a debate with some notion of ‘modernity’ and ‘modernism’. Reading modernism and/in performance as a constellation of possibilities teaches us that perhaps the ‘model’ is more useful than the paradigm; perhaps process has more aesthetic and political efficacy than the final product, and perhaps potentiality rather than result is more critically and aesthetically exciting. We may not have a clear or programmatic idea of what looking at modernism this way does to modernism itself, but we have a pretty good sense of it.

Note   1. For the Brechtian uses of the term ‘model’, see Bertolt Brecht, Brecht on Performance, ed. Tom Kuhn, Steve Giles and Marc Silberman (London: Bloomsbury, 2018), in which the following quotation from Brecht appears: ‘For the model is not constructed in order to fix for all time the way the production should work, quite the contrary! The prime emphasis is on development: changes are to be provoked and made perceptible; sporadic and anarchic

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olga taxidou acts of creation are to be replaced by creative processes whose changes proceed by steps or leaps. The model [. . .] must be regarded as by definition incomplete. The very fact that its shortcomings cry out for improvement should stimulate the theatres to use it’ (149).

Works Cited Brecht, Bertolt. Brecht on Performance. Edited by Tom Kuhn, Steve Giles and Marc Silberman. London: Bloomsbury, 2018.

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Event Scores (After fluxus) Adriolas Johtin

Help! Ask someone you know if they can tell you what modernism means. Then ask a stranger.

Slippage Play with this book as a material object. Let it slip from your hands but catch it before it hits the floor. If you are accessing an e-book, get your hands on a hard copy of any book to perform this action.

Just Cut It Out, Okay? Take scissors and cut out your favourite phrase or sentence in this book. Affix the cut-out text to your fridge or leave it in a public space. If you have accessed a library book, tread carefully.

Mental Theatre Restage a modernist drama in your mind.

You’re a Poet and You Don’t Know It Make a poem using only words taken from one or more chapter titles in this book.

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Transmission Turn on the radio. Navigate between stations. Find some noise. Channel Jean Cocteau’s 1949 film Orphée. Listen out for communications from dead modernists.

Imaginary Friends Have a pretend conversation with one of the contributors of this book.

Modernism Against Humanity A party game: form teams, and give absolute power to a Tsar. The Tsar opens this book to any page on which the word ‘modernism’ appears; the teams must rewrite the sentence, substituting a shocking or offensive term in place of ‘modernism’. The team that writes the most appalling sentence, in the judgement of the Tsar, gets a point.

Trigger Warning If you sense the spirit of modernism approaching in an artistic work or in everyday life, announce it to those present so they are in the know and can prepare for its arrival.

Weak Modernism Brew one of the toxic concoctions described in the futurist cookbook, but mix it with something genteel, like elderflower.

ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ Go to the index. Pick any word. Go to the relevant page in the book and see how quickly you can find the word in question. Pick another word and try to increase your speed.

4’33” Read the book in total silence. You may use any instrument or combination of instruments, and the reading may last for any duration.

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Wink Wink Write a review of this book in an academic journal in which you accurately summarise the contents, note with approval the playfulness and ingenuity of the authors, and then, in the final paragraph, politely point out some minor shortcomings before providing a pithy statement that could be used as a promotional blurb.

Blah Blah Blah Take a leaf from Elevator Repair Service’s 2012 production of Gatz, which verbalised The Great Gatsby. Read The Edinburgh Companion to Modernism in Contemporary Theatre aloud, cover to cover, as part of a durational performance that should not exceed twenty-four hours. Intermissions are optional.

Buzzwords Leaf through this book. Take a swig of something (Fizzy Lifting Drink, perhaps?) whenever you see the words ‘analyse’, ‘investigate’, ‘explore’, ‘argue’, ‘hermeneutic’, ‘paradigm’ and the phrase ‘the ways in which’.

Very Punny Find a restaurant or café in your region named after an avant-garde figure or movement. Book a table for two. Arrive alone. When the host asks if anyone will be joining you, introduce them to this Companion.

A Spurt of Blood Donate a pint. You may become light-headed and start seeing extraordinary, disturbing scenes and images. (Watch out for scorpions.)

Exquisite Corpse Dress up to the nines, pucker your lips, dab some rouge on your cheeks, lie down, stay still, and do your best impression of a posthumous surrealist. (Choose your location carefully.)

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Regenerate Art After reading this book, plant it in your garden. If it has begun to sprout, then modernism is still alive. If the sudden frost disturbs its bed, keep the dogs far hence, and replant it after the thaw. Something will grow there eventually.

Copyleft Do you have any dusty reel-to-reel voice recorders, film-based cameras, camcorders, VCRs or cathode-ray televisions? Good. Make an unauthorised recording or remediation of this book using an outmoded analogue technology. Store the result in a bunker or time capsule with clear instructions to leave it sealed until 2093, to avoid prosecution.

In Memoriam Conduct a private ceremony of remembrance for a modernist of your choice.

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Notes on Contributors

Soudabeh Ananisarab is Lecturer in Drama at Birmingham City University. She is a Shavian scholar and theatre historian with a focus on regional theatre histories. In addition to her work on Bernard Shaw, she has previously published on the dramatic writings of D. H. Lawrence and John Millington Synge and reviewed for the Theatre Notebook and International Yeats Studies. She is currently working on her first monograph exploring Shaw’s collaborations with the British regional repertory movement. Anna Andes is Associate Professor and Chair of Theatre at Susquehanna University, Pennsylvania. Her scholarship focuses on suffrage-era British and American women playwrights. Her publications include articles and book chapters with particular focus upon the plays of Cicely Hamilton, Elizabeth Robins and Rachel Crothers. She is also a director, with her production credits including Hamilton’s Diana of Dobsons, Robins’s Alan’s Wife and Rebecca Lenkiewicz’s twenty-first-century suffrage drama Her Naked Skin. Kevin Bell is Associate Professor of English at the Pennsylvania State University and author of Ashes Taken for Fire: Aesthetic Modernism and the Critique of Identity (2007). He is a specialist in avant-garde figurality and materialist inscription in Black American literature and film and in transatlantic literary modernisms. He is now completing an interpretive study of Black experimental writing and film made since the mid-1960s and is editor of the ‘Black Spring’ blog at Modernism/modernity. Sascha Bru is a professor at the Arts Faculty of the University of Leuven (Belgium). He has produced over a dozen books devoted to European avant-garde culture, including Democracy, Law and the Modernist Avant-Gardes (Edinburgh University Press, 2009), The European Avant-Gardes, 1905–1935 (Edinburgh University Press, 2018), and the co-edited volumes The Oxford Critical and Cultural History of Modernist Magazines, Europe 1880–1940 (2013) and Crisis: The Avant-Garde and Modernism in Critical Modes (2022). Christopher Collins is Associate Professor of Drama at the University of Nottingham. His research expertise is in twentieth- and twenty-first-century Irish theatre and per-

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formance, with a specific focus on memory, history, forgetting and nostalgia. He is the author of Theatre and Residual Culture: J. M. Synge and Pre-Christian Ireland (2016), and is the co-editor of Ireland, Memory and Performing the Historical Imagination (2014). Aedín Cosgrove is co-artistic director of Pan Pan Theatre Company and as a set and lighting designer has worked extensively in Ireland and internationally. Recent work with Pan Pan includes Endgame by Samuel Beckett at Project Arts Centre Dublin (2019), The Temple at Melbourne Malthouse Theatre, and Eliza’s Adventures in the Uncanny Valley at Samuel Beckett Centre Dublin (2018). She won an Irish Times Theatre Award for Best Lighting for her work on All That Fall (2011) and the Best Set award for The Rehearsal, Playing the Dane (2010) and Best Lighting with Paul Keogan for Faraway (2017). Adrian Curtin is Associate Professor of Drama at the University of Exeter. He is the author of Death in Modern Theatre: Stages of Mortality (2019) and Avant-Garde Theatre Sound: Staging Sonic Modernity (2014). He has co-edited special issues of Theatre and Performance Design and the Open Library of Humanities. He is a contributing editor for New Theatre Quarterly. Burç İdem Dinçel is a research associate at the Trinity Centre for Beckett Studies, Trinity College Dublin. He has published extensively on Theatre and Translation Studies and is the author of Last Tape on Stage in Translation: Unwinding Beckett’s Spool in Turkey (2012), as well as the co-editor of Metamorphoses of Ancient Myths (2017). Penny Farfan is Professor of Drama at the University of Calgary and the author of Women, Modernism, and Performance and Performing Queer Modernism, as well as many articles and book chapters on modernism and performance and on contemporary women playwrights. She is also the editor with Lesley Ferris of Critical Perspectives on Contemporary Plays by Women: The Early Twenty-First Century and Contemporary Women Playwrights: Into the Twenty-First Century, and a past editor of Theatre Journal. Kerry Frampton is Artistic Director and founder of Splendid Productions. She is a director, writer, designer, visiting lecturer and professional clown. Kerry has twenty years of experience in creating social-political theatre that is audience-centred, joyfilled, heart-exposing, anarchic and brain-prodding. Alongside this she has developed a huge programme of practical, theory-based drama workshops for young people and created theatrical teaching resources that are used all over the world. Verda Habif is an actress, dramaturg, performer trainer and deputy artistic director of the Studio Oyuncuları theatre company. She is also a PhD candidate in Theatre Criticism and Dramaturgy at Istanbul University. Her scholarly work on the history of Jewish theatre and on the reception of Attic tragedies has appeared in international journals and edited collections. Jonathan Heron is Professor and Director at the Institute for Advanced Teaching and Learning at the University of Warwick. He co-convened the Performance-asResearch Working Group (IFTR, 2013–16) and co-founded the Beckett Laboratory with Dr Nicholas Johnson (TCD), with whom he co-edited two special issues of

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the Journal of Beckett Studies (2014, 2020) on performance and pedagogy. He was Artistic Director of Fail Better Productions and a core member of Beckett and Brain Science (AHRC, 2012) and Modernism, Medicine and the Embodied Mind (AHRC, 2015). Hanna Järvinen is University Lecturer at the doctoral programme of the Theatre Academy of UNIARTS Helsinki, Finland. She is Honorary Visiting Research Fellow at the Centre for Interdisciplinary Research in Dance at De Montfort University, Leicester, and holds the title of Docent in Dance History at the University of Turku, Finland. Her interests in authorship and canonisation have led her to theoretical discourses of postcolonialism and decolonisation, as well as questions of materiality and contemporaneity in art practice. The author of Dancing Genius (2014) and several edited collections in her native Finnish, she has also published in, for example, The Senses and Society, Dance Research, Studies in Costume and Performance, Dance Research Journal and AVANT. Nicholas Johnson is Associate Professor of Drama at Trinity College Dublin, where he cofounded the Trinity Centre for Beckett Studies. His books include Experimental Beckett (with Jonathan Heron, 2020) and Bertolt Brecht and the David Fragments (1919–1921) (with David Shepherd, 2020), as well as four edited collections on Beckett. Directing credits include Virtual Play (2017–19), The David Fragments (2017) and Enemy of the Stars (2014–15). He works as dramaturg with Pan Pan, OT Platform and Dead Centre. Adriolas Johtin is Professor of ’Pataphysics at the University of Zembla. They have published widely on the work of Alfred Jarry, Tristan Tzara and John Shade. They are Artistic Director of thĕātrum imāginārium, a neo-avant-garde performance collective, and deputy editor of the Journal of New Institutional Critique. John London is Professor of Hispanic Studies and director of the Centre for Catalan Studies, Queen Mary University of London. His books include Reception and Renewal in Modern Spanish Theatre (1997), Contextos de Joan Brossa (2010) and the edited volumes Theatre under the Nazis (2000) and One Hundred Years of Futurism (2017). He has translated over twenty plays for performance and his own plays, such as Right (1999), The New Europe (2000) and Nex (2005), have been performed on the London fringe and subsequently published. Ramona Mosse is Head of Theatre at the University of the Arts in Zurich, Switzerland. Previously, she was the Principal Investigator of the Volkswagen Foundation-funded research project ‘Viral Theatres: Post/Pandemic Performance in the Anthropocene’ at the Freie Universität Berlin. Her work on modern drama and intermedial performance practices has been published in journals such as Theatre Journal, Anglia, International Journal of Performance Arts and Digital Media and Global Performance Studies. She is co-editor of Erika Fischer-Lichte’s Routledge Introduction to Theatre and Performance Studies (2014). Ramona holds a PhD in English and Comparative Literature from Columbia University. Kaite O’Reilly is a multi-award-winning poet, playwright and dramaturg who writes for radio, screen and live performance.

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Adjoa Osei is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Trinity College, University of Cambridge. She is a cultural historian whose research is actively interdisciplinary, exploring themes that are at the intersection of Performing Arts, Brazilian Studies, Afro-Latin American Studies and Francophone Studies. As a BBC New Generation Thinker, Adjoa has a growing portfolio of public engagement and media work. Naomi Paxton is Public and Cultural Engagement Fellow at the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama, University of London. She received the TaPRA Early Career Research Prize in 2019 for her body of work on suffrage theatre, which includes events and curated exhibitions at the National Theatre and UK Parliament, a monograph with Manchester University Press (2020) and two edited collections of suffrage plays with Methuen Drama (2013, 2018). Naomi is also a professional broadcaster, cabaret performer, comedian and magician. Matthew Pountney is co-founder and co-artistic director of the disabled-led creative arts company Touretteshero. Matthew has a background in inclusive adventure play, performance and video. More recently he has directed Backstage in Biscuit Land and Not I, as well as working on large-scale events with partners such as Tate, Battersea Arts Centre and the Barbican. Carrie J. Preston is the Arvind and Chandan Nandlal Kilachand Professor and Director of Kilachand Honors College, Professor of English and Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies, and the founding Co-Director of the Initiative on Forced Displacement at Boston University. She is the author of Modernism’s Mythic Pose: Gender, Genre, and Solo Performance (2011) and Learning to Kneel: Noh, Modernism, and Journeys in Teaching (2016). She is currently working on a new book entitled Complicit Participation: The Liberal Audience for Antiracist Theater, a critical examination of the political and pedagogical work of audience participation in antiracist theatre. Monica Prince teaches activist and performance writing as an assistant professor at Susquehanna University, Pennsylvania. The author of How to Exterminate the Black Woman: A Choreopoem, Instructions for Temporary Survival and Letters from the Other Woman, she serves as the editor-in-chief of the Santa Fe Writers Project. Her next choreopoem, Roadmap, will be published in 2023. Shouhua Qi is Distinguished Visiting Professor at Yangzhou University and Professor of the Department of English at Western Connecticut State University. His research has appeared in The Cambridge Quarterly, Comparative Drama, Classical Receptions Journal, Theatre Research International, The Ibsen Review, The Eugene O’Neill Review and other journals. Qi has authored more than twenty books, including Culture, History, and the Reception of Tennessee Williams in China (2022) and Adapting Western Classics for the Chinese Stage (2018). Lucy Stevens is an actor, classical singer and theatre-maker. She creates new small-scale productions to tour throughout the UK and internationally. Music, song and the spoken word weave seamlessly through text drawn from autobiographical writings. Ethel Smyth: Grasp the Nettle, Kathleen Ferrier Whattalife! and Virginia Woolf: Killing the

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Angel have featured on BBC 2 and BBC Radio 3 and 4. In 2020 Lucy recorded Dame Ethel Smyth: Songs and Ballads with Somm Recordings. Olga Taxidou is Professor Emerita of Drama and Performance Studies at the University of Edinburgh and Visiting Professor in Hellenic Studies at New York University. Her most recent books include The Edinburgh Dictionary of Modernism (co-edited with V. Kolocotroni, 2018) and Greek Tragedy and Modernist Performance: Hellenism as Theatricality (2021). She also creates adaptations of Greek tragedies; her Medea was directed by Lee Breuer in 2018 with Maude Mitchell in the title role alongside a chorus of puppets. Lib Taylor is Professor Emerita of Theatre and Performance at the University of Reading. She has published on the body in performance, women’s theatre and contemporary British theatre. She is a theatre director and deviser of multimedia research performances, including stagings of Marguerite Duras’s Eden Cinema and Savannah Bay and the theatre writings of Gertrude Stein. She was Principal Investigator of the AHRC/EPSRC-funded project ‘User Not Found: Social Media Technologies as Immersive Performance’. Şahika Tekand (actress, director, playwright) founded her individual acting studio in 1988 and her theatre company the Studio Oyuncuları in 1990. She has also held the title of Associate Professor since 2013. She developed her own method, ‘Performative Staging and Acting’. Garnering critical acclaim with the implementation of this methodology on stage, Tekand has been invited to and has participated in many international festivals with her ensemble. She has also received numerous awards with her productions, both as a performer and as a director. Konstantinos Thomaidis ​​is Senior Lecturer in Drama, Theatre and Performance at the University of Exeter. His books include Voice Studies (2015), Theatre and Voice (2017) and Time and Performer Training (2019). For the special issue ‘What Is New in Voice Training?’ he received the Honorable Mention for Excellence in Editing at the 2020 ATHE Awards. He co-edits the Journal of Interdisciplinary Voice Studies and the Routledge Voice Studies book series. Tulu Ülgen is an actress and lecturer of acting and dramaturgy at the Studio Oyuncuları in Istanbul. She is the author of Fiction, Illusion: In Between Acting, Experience, Truth (2018). Maria Vogiatzi graduated from the Faculty of Education and the School of Drama of Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, specialising in Drama and Performance Analysis. She has attended workshops about theatre translation and participated in theatre conferences. She has collaborated with the State Theatre of Northern Greece and the Athens–Epidaurus Festival. Since 2007 she has collaborated with Theodoros Terzopoulos and Attis Theatre (Greece) as Executive Manager of its activities in Greece and its international tours. Jessica Walker creates and performs genre-defying work. Recent commissions include Voices of Power for the Three Choirs Festival, Cabaret Macabre for BYMT, Not Such Quiet Girls for Leeds Playhouse/Opera North, and All I Want Is One Night for the

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448

notes on contributors

Royal Exchange Theatre. Her last three writer/performance projects were the New York Times Critic’s Pick at Brits Off Broadway. Forthcoming projects include The People’s Cabaret for Brighton, Norfolk and Norwich, and O. Festival Rotterdam. She is Senior Lecturer in Artist Development at the Royal Academy of Music. Claire Warden is Professor of Performance and Physical Culture at Loughborough University. Her research focuses on interdisciplinary modernism, performance practices and the intersection of sport and art. She is the author of three monographs, including the British Academy-funded Migrating Modernist Performance: British Theatrical Travels through Russia. She is also the founder and academic lead of the Arts Council-funded Wrestling Resurgence project and a past Chair of the British Association for Modernist Studies. Mark Westbrook is the Co-Principal at Acting Coach Scotland. After his education at the Universities of Kent, Utrecht and Nottingham, he trained at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland and the Atlantic Theater Company’s Acting School in New York. His clients appear in theatre, film and television productions all over the world.

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Index

9/11 attack, 225n, 412 Abbate, Carolyn, 194n Abbey Theatre, 25, 240n, 304, 404n Abramović, Marina, 358 abstraction, 1, 10, 25, 113, 126, 143, 147, 154–5, 162, 180, 182, 188, 191, 207, 220, 236, 277–303, 361, 386–8, 403, 409 Actresses’ Franchise League (AFL), 63–8, 70, 73, 78n Adorno, Theodor, 50, 52, 56, 129, 163, 365, 373, 436 aeroplane, 121, 234, 369–70, 372, 376 agit-prop, 437 Agitprop Street Players see Red Ladder Alberta Theatre Projects, 339, 343, 348n Alberti, Rafael, 320 Albertí, Xavier, 129 Algerian War of Independence, 407, 429 Allain, Paul, 248, 250–1 Allen, Jonathan, 122 Althusser, Louis, 409–10 ANC (South Africa), 407 Anders, Günther, 243, 251 Andes, Anna, 21 Pageant of Agitating Women, 21, 39–44 angura, 244, 248, 256, 257n, 259n Anthropocene, 353 anti-theatricality, 7, 165, 368, 371, 437 Anthony, Susan B., 43 Anzaldúa, Gloria, 334, 405, 407, 421n Apollo Minstrels, 84 Appel, Alfred, 87 Appia, Adolphe, 297n, 354

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Appiah, Kwame Anthony, 106 Archer, William, 308, 315n archive, 9, 21, 27, 34n, 65, 69, 74, 142, 236, 279–80, 294n, 333, 359, 361, 366, 379, 407, 415, 420n, 433, 436–7 Arendt, Hannah, 333, 365–6, 371–3, 375, 378–9, 381n Aristotle, 47, 421n Aronson, Arnold, 352 Arts Theatre Club, 28 Artaud, Antonin, 6, 53–4, 180, 182, 246, 249, 357, 441 artificial intelligence (AI), 365, 372, 379–80 Atkins, Joe, 101–2 Attis Theatre, 182–3 Auden, W. H., 23, 34n Austin, John, 68 How One Woman Did It, 68 Auschwitz, 411; see also Holocaust automobile, 86, 120, 250, 369, 376 autonomy (individual/personal), 99, 160, 188, 190, 282, 212, 339, 345, 389 autonomy (works of art), 5, 9, 50, 191, 195n, 351, 359, 368, 436 avant-garde, 1, 4, 5, 104–5, 111–12, 118, 127–9, 211, 233–4, 244, 246–8, 329–30, 333, 350–64, 393–4, 402, 436 Bacon, Francis, 161 ‘Bad’ Painting (movement), 362n Bahro, Rudolf, 365, 372, 379 Bailey, Helen, 407, 414 Baker, Jo, 420n Baker, Josephine, 88, 104, 107n Bakhtin, Mikhail, 193n

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450 index Baldwin, James, 365, 372, 427 Ballets Russes, 238, 277, 279–82, 290, 292n, 295n, 301n, 336n Bandung Conference, 405 Barba, Eugenio, 248 Barker, Harley Granville, 308, 310–11, 315n Barrie, J. M., A Well-Remembered Voice, 73 Barthes, Roland, 146 Bartlett, Neil, 99; see also Walker, Jessica Bataille, Nicolas, 121, 127–30 Battersea Arts Centre, 159, 172n Baudrillard, Jean, 51, 412 Bauhaus, 1, 19, 182, 357, 400; see also New European Bauhaus Bauman, Zygmunt, 333 Bayreuth Festival, 330–2, 335n Bechdel Theatre, 62, 67 Beckett, Samuel, 5, 115–16, 141, 161, 163, 165, 171, 205, 206–9, 211, 219–20, 237, 244–5, 249–51, 253–7, 329, 334–5, 368, 384–9, 395–8, 400, 405–26, 436 Act Without Words I and II, 256, 386, 422n All That Fall, 395–6, 417 As the Story Was Told, 422n Breath, 386 Cascando, 116, 397 Catastrophe, 413 Come and Go, 417 comment dire/what is the word, 398, 422n Company, 389 Endgame, 255, 386, 398–400, 413, 417 Footfalls, 413, 416 ‘German Letter’ of 1937, 422 Malone Dies, 416 Nacht und Traüme, 416 Not I, 115, 206–9, 413, 416–17 Play, 413, 417 Rough for Radio II, 422n Quad, 255, 398, 416, 422n Texts for Nothing, 159, 172n That Time, 409, 413 Theatrical Notebooks, 415 The Unnamable, 329, 335n Waiting for Godot, 161, 200, 210, 219–21, 329, 417 The Way, 409 Beecher Stowe, Harriet, 90 Begley, Cormac, 45–6, 51–2, 56

8055_Curtin et al.indd 450

Beijing People’s Art Theatre, 220, 222 Beijing Youth Drama Festival, 214 Being Human Festival, 68, 70 Belgrade Non-Aligned Conference, 405 Bene, Carmelo, 129 Benjamin, Walter, 163, 355, 436–7 Benmussa, Simone, 140 The Singular Life of Albert Nobbs, 140 Bennett, Andrew, 398 Bent Architect Theatre Company, 21, 30, 32 Women of Aktion, 23, 27–38 Bentley, Gladys, 102 Berghaus, Günter, 123–4 Berlin Wall, 358, 409 Berliner Ensemble, 1, 368–9 Berman, Jessica, 4, 12 Berman, Marshall, 161 Bernstein, J. M., 249, 251 between.pomiędzy Festival (Gdańsk), 415 Beuys, Joseph, 357 Bieito, Calixto, 129 Billington, Michael, 24, 178 biomechanics, 6, 182; see also Meyerhold, Vsevolod Birch, Alice, 156 Birmingham Repertory Theatre, 305, 307, 309–12 Birnbaum, Daniel, 352 Black Lives Matter movement, 105, 221 Black Panthers, 407 blackface, 81–6, 91, 222, 226n, 281; see also minstrelsy Blair, Sara, 8 Blake, Eubie, 85–8 Shuffle Along, 21, 81–97 Blaser, Robin, 321 BLAST, 243 Blitzstein, Marc, 101 Boccioni, Umberto, 131 Bogart, Anne, 257 Bolaño, Roberto, 408 Boosra Mahin Dance Company, 280, 282, 290 Borel, Kathryn, 348n Borges, Jorge Luis, 412–13 Bradley Smith, Susan, 64 Bratton, Jacky, 62, 64, 74, 313 Braudel, Fernand, 248 Brecht, Bertolt, 26, 28, 32, 99, 101, 144, 163, 165, 212, 218–19, 236, 238, 246, 249, 251, 274–6, 333, 336n, 357, 365–83, 384, 436–7, 437n

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index 451 Antigone, 369–70 Baal, 163–4 Galileo, 369 The Good Person of Szechwan, 210, 217–18, 222 Lindbergh’s Flight/Flight across the Ocean, 370–1 Man Equals Man, 370 Messingkauf Dialogues, 276 Seven Deadly Sins, 101 Threepenny Opera, 103 Breton, André, 10, 54 Brexit, 413 Brighton Festival, 103 Brook, Peter, 5, 274 Brossa, Joan, 113–14, 118–39 Brown, Ross, 177 brutalism, 10, 13, 15n bunraku, 436 Bürger, Peter, 129–30, 351 Butler, Judith, 93n, 193n cabaret, 99–100, 103, 368 Cage, John, 124 4’33”, 124, 440 Campbell, Maria, 342 Cangiullo, Francesco, 118, 126 capitalism, 4, 10, 13, 47–8, 50, 105–6, 114, 167–8, 181–3, 187, 190–2, 195n, 211, 218, 332, 334, 350, 353, 365, 385, 405, 414, 428, 432–3 car see automobile Carlson, Marvin, 24 Carlson, Susan, 63 Carrington, Hereward, 73 Carrington, Leonora, 102 Carruthers, Ian, 250 Cashian, Phil, 102 Castellucci, Romeo, 129 Castorf, Frank, 330–2, 335n Cavell, Edith, 70, 73 Celtic Tiger, 48, 58n, 114, 160, 167–8 censorship, 1, 121, 216, 414, 420n Chainworks, 360 Chapin, Alice, 63 Char, Rene, 434 Chatzidimitriou, Penelope, 183, 186 Chekhov, Anton, 114, 156, 159–76, 202, 253–4, 268, 304, 395, 402 The Cherry Orchard, 164 Ivanov, 169, 245, 252, 253–5

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Platonov, 162–5 The Seagull, 395, 402 Three Sisters, 220, 244 Uncle Vanya, 156, 268 Cheng, Vincent J., 51 Chessa, Luciano, 121 Childish, Billy, 13n Chipaumire, Nora, 238, 277, 279, 289–90 Chong, Wang, 213–14, 216, 220–1 Ghosts 2.0, 213–15 Waiting for Godot (online), 220–1 Christy Minstrels, 84, 92n Chto Delat (Saint Petersburg), 360 Chunyan, Ning, 217 Churchill, Caryl, 119, 342 cinema, 129, 140–58, 188, 283, 293n, 295n, 334, 386, 391n, 398, 427, 430; see also film Citizens Theatre (Glasgow), 24 Clarke, Rebecca, 101 classicism, 15n, 112, 287–8, 293n, 296n, 437 Clayton, J. Douglas, 115 Clayton, Michelle, 247 Clewell, Tammy, 45, 55 climate, 48, 244, 366, 374, 384 Clinton, Hillary, 89 CoBrA, 355 Cochrane, Claire, 307, 313 Cocteau, Jean, 100, 323, 336n, 440 cogito (René Descartes), 370 Collins, Pat, 46 comedy, 78n, 81, 84–6, 94, 95n, 129, 131, 164, 173n, 215, 216, 341, 407 commedia dell’arte, 83 communism, 10, 13, 24, 218, 223n, 330, 332–3, 358, 405 Compagnie Maguy Marin, 334, 416–19 May B, 334, 416–19 Complicité, 171, 175n The Encounter, 171 Conceison, Claire, 226n Confucius, 410 Connery, Sean, 265 Connor, Steven, 188–9, 245, 253 Conquergood, Dwight, 245, 330 constructivism, 150, 182, 233, 388, 393 Conteh-Morgan, John, 356 contemporary art, 7, 291, 352, 361, 385; see also performance art Cooper, John Xiros, 47

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452 index Copeau, Jacques, 191 Corra, Bruno, 118, 123–4 Cosgrove, Aedín, 334, 392–404; see also Pan Pan Theatre Company COVID-19 pandemic, 103, 115, 219–21, 235, 265, 325n, 371, 423n; see also pandemic-era theatre Craig, Edith, 44n Craig, Edward Gordon, 6, 354 Crankshaw, Edward, 26, 28 Crawford Flitch, J. E., 283 Criado-Perez, Caroline, 62 Critical Art Ensemble, 360 critical theory, 351, 412; see also Frankfurt School Croft, Susan, 63 Cronin, Michael, 49 culture industry, 334, 387–8, 414 Curjel, Hans, 370 Curtin, Adrian, 177 Da, Ying, 221–2, 226n dada, 1, 19, 130, 180, 291n, 356–7, 393, 402 Dalcroze, Emile Jacques, 287, 297n Daly, Ann, 285 Daniszewski, John, 106 Darwin, Charles, 341 Das, Joanna Dee, 92n Davies, William, 407, 414 Davis, Charlie, 90 Davis, Mike, 432–3 Davis, Tracy C., 62, 308 Davison, Emily, 69 Dead Centre, 114, 159–76, 420n Beckett’s Room, 163, 173, 420n Chekhov’s First Play, 114, 159–76 Deal Music and Arts Festival, 270 Deas, Lawrence, 88 Debord, Guy, 47 Debussy, Claude, 102, 292n decolonisation, 10, 238, 278, 290–1, 334, 353, 405, 407–8; see also imperialism and postcolonialism deconstruction, 13, 46, 142, 159, 170, 188, 190–2, 244, 246, 253, 257, 336n, 389 deconstructivism, 10, 15n Decroux, Étienne, 191 Delibes, Léo, 281 Delsartism, 281, 286–7, 293–4n

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democracy, 12, 222, 246, 332, 353, 360, 368, 374, 385, 387–8, 414 Denby, Edwin, 287 Denic, Alexandar, 330–1 Denishawn Company, 277, 281 Depero, Fortunato, 126–7, 129 Derrida, Jacques, 409 Desmond, Jane, 281 Diaghilev, Sergei, 280–2 Dialogue (art collective), 360 Diamond, Elin, 430 digital culture, 9, 251, 331, 358, 412; see also internet and social media Dinsman, Melissa, 234 disability, 115, 198–200, 204–5, 206–8 Dixie Duo, 85; see also Blake, Eubie and Sissle, Noble Dolan, Jill, 62, 345 Doležel, Lubomir, 115 Domestic Goddi, 67 Dorf, Samuel, 286 Douglass, Frederick, 44n, 84–5 dramaturgy, 1, 52, 113, 118, 148, 150, 162, 164, 169, 177–81, 190–1, 195n, 202, 253–6, 324n, 333, 366, 369, 375–8, 386, 389, 413 Drinkwater, John, 307 Druet, Eugène, 281, 296n Dublin Theatre Festival, 172n Dublin Youth Theatre, 401 Dugdale, Joan, 68 10 Clowning Street, 68 Dukes, Ashley, 24 Duncan, Isadora, 19, 238, 277, 279, 285–6, 290, 297n Duncan, Robert, 321 Duras, Marguerite, 114–15, 140–58, 161 Eden Cinema, 114, 141, 143, 147–51, 154–5 Hiroshima Mon Amour, 140 India Song, 114, 141, 143–7, 149, 154–5 Savannah Bay, 114, 141, 143, 151–6 Eadie, Jimmy, 170, 398 Eagleton, Terry, 48, 245 EAM (European Network for Avant-Garde and Modernist Studies), 351 East London Federation of Suffragettes, 70 The Woman’s Dreadnought, 70

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index 453 Easter Rising of 1916, 406 ecodramaturgy, 148, 150 ecology, 8, 120, 148, 161, 332; see also environment Eckersall, Peter, 244, 251 Edlin, Paul Max, 270 Edinburgh Festival, 146 Edinburgh Fringe Festival, 206 Edwards, Henrietta Muir, 343 Edwards, Hilton, 404n Edwards, Ness, 24 Eisenstein, Segei, 386, 437 Eisler, Hanns, 28, 101 Elevator Repair Service, 441 Eliot, T. S., 19, 46, 50, 163 The Waste Land, 19, 442 Elkin, Lauren, 64 Ellis, Havelock, 346n Emanuel, Oliver, 27 The Spare Room, 27 Emerge Festival (Warwick Arts Centre), 321, 323, 325n Emmanuel, Maurice, 286 Enbridge playRites Festival (Calgary), 339 Engels, Friedrich, 234, 333 English, Jane, 410 English Touring Theatre, 274 Enlightenment, the, 183, 360 Enns, Anthony, 235 ensemble, 42, 51–2, 55–6, 165–6, 170, 319–23, 357, 393, 415, 417, 419 environment, 8, 63, 141, 148, 150, 155, 180, 208, 212, 237, 249, 267, 276, 319–20, 332, 341, 354, 401, 403, 415; see also ecology Enwezor, Okwui, 352 epic theatre, 6, 274–5, 368–9, 376; see also Brecht, Bertolt Erjavec, Aleš, 358 Ernst, Max, 102 Essex, Mark, 432–3 Estruch, Laia, 128 Euripides, 253, 255–6 Elektra, 245, 252–6 expressionism, 1, 24, 26, 31, 101, 150, 211, 287, 320, 357, 362n Eysteinsson, Ástráður, 3 Faludi, Susan, 344 Fanon, Frantz, 429 Fawcett Society, 271

8055_Curtin et al.indd 453

feminism, 21, 62–74, 78n, 87, 104, 115, 144, 183, 193n, 194n, 333, 339–46, 347n, 348n Feminist Library (London), 70, 72 Feng, Gia-fu, 410 Festival Theatre (Cambridge), 27 Fianna Fáil, 53 Fidelin, Adrienne, 105 Fielding, Helen, 344 film, 4, 46, 120, 128–9, 140–58, 217, 265, 283, 295n, 336n, 342, 344–5, 376, 398, 422n, 429, 433, 440, 442; see also cinema First World War, 19, 21, 23, 32, 33, 68–73, 115, 119, 198–9, 280, 287, 297n, 305, 356; see also Second World War Fischer-Lichte, Erika, 247 fluxus, 355, 439; see also happenings Fokine, Mikhail, 279–81, 284, 288, 292n Fonta, Laura, 286 Foote, Juli A. J., 43 Foster, Stephen C., 90 Frankfurt School, 436; see also critical theory and culture industry Frecknall, Rebecca, 120 freedom, 33, 40–1, 46, 63, 66, 71–2, 94, 105, 121, 161, 183, 189, 222, 274, 385, 307, 313, 329, 340, 344, 347, 374, 388, 407–8, 414 Fregoli, Leopoldo, 127 Friedan, Betty, 347n Frost, Laura, 48, 52 Fuller, Loïe, 13, 238, 277, 279, 282–6, 290, 295n futurism, 1, 19, 113–14, 118–39, 150, 180, 234, 355–7, 393–4, 440 Futurist Orchestra, 123, 126 Gaiety Theatre (London), 284 Gaiety Theatre (Manchester), 304, 307 Gaitkrash, 116n game, 236, 333, 365–6, 371–2, 374, 382n, 385–9, 440; see also interactivity Gate Theatre (Dublin), 404n, 420n Gate Theatre Company (London), 25 Gathering, The (Republic of Ireland), 49–52, 56 Gauguin, Paul, 282 Gavitt’s Original Ethiopian Serenaders, 84 Gibbons, Luke, 49 Giddens, Anthony, 161

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454 index Genet, Jean, 113 The Maids, 113, 116n Gesamtkunstwerk, 331, 335n; see also Wagner, Richard Gestus, 251, 275; see also Brecht, Bertolt Ghomeshi, Jian, 345, 348n Gibson, Janet, 270 Gissing, George, 333, 338–49 The Odd Women, 333, 338–40, 343 Glasgow Repertory Theatre, 305 globalisation, 307, 363n, 413, 433 Globe Theatre, 64 Glover, Evelyn, 69, 71 A Bit of Blighty, 69 Which, 71 Goethe Institute, 24, 26 Goodman, David G., 244, 248, 256 Goodman Theatre (Chicago), 2 Gorsky, Aleksandr, 284 Goto, Yukihiro, 255 Gramsci, Antonio, 193n Grant Ferguson, Ailsa, 68–9, 74 Gray, Terence, 27 Green, Barbara, 64 Greenberg, Clement, 351 Greer, Germaine, 342, 347n Gregory, Lady Augusta, 50, 404n Griffiths, Linda, 333, 338–49 Ages of Arousal, 333, 338–49 Alien Creature: A Visitation from Gwendolyn MacEwen, 343 The Duchess: AKA Wallis Simpson, 343 Jessica, 342 Maggie and Pierre, 342 Gropius, Walter, 27 Grotowski, Jerzy, 182, 191, 246, 249–50, 259–60n Group Amos, Le, 360 Guildhall (School of Music and Drama), 98 Gutierrez, Miguel, 287

Hamilton, Cicely, 39–44, 71 A Pageant of Great Women, 39–40, 43, 44n Anti-Suffrage Waxworks, 67 Hansberry, Lorraine, 210, 220 A Raisin in the Sun, 219–22 happenings, 7, 118, 130, 355; see also fluxus Hare, David, 304 Harlem Renaissance, 82, 102 Hartman, Sadiya, 107n headphones, 159, 164–66, 170–1, 172n, 365, 380 Hebbel am Ufer Theater (HAU) (Berlin), 377 heftige Malerei, 362n Hegel, G. W. F., 234 hegemony, 168, 183, 277, 279, 288, 290, 334, 388, 405 Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, 69, 314n Herzfeld, Michael, 184 Hindle, Annie, 102 Hiroshima Peace Memorial, 19–20 Hirschfeld, Magnus, 346n Hitler, Adolf, 35n, 298n Hnath, Lucas, 344 A Doll’s House, Part 2, 344, 347–8n Hofer, Johannes, 52 Hofmannsthal, Hugo von, 255 Holm, Hanya, 287 Holme, Vera ‘Jack’, 71 Holocaust, 407, 418; see also Auschwitz Horkheimer, Max, 50, 52, 56 Horniman, Annie, 304, 307, 309, 311, 314n Houellebecq, Michel, 187 Housman, Laurence, 70, 78n Houston, Elsie, 105 Hughes, Langston, 88 Hulfeld, Stefan, 368, 371 human rights, 5, 414 Hutcheon, Linda, 338–9, 341, 345 Huyssen, Andreas, 47, 58n, 246, 296n

Habermas, Jürgen, 245 Hagen, Uta, 266 Hager, Philip, 192, 195n Half Moon Theatre (London), 24 Hall, Lee, 27 Bollocks, 27 Hall, Peter, 144 Hall, Stuart, 289 Hamacher, Werner, 430–1, 434n

Ibsen, Henrik, 111, 114, 120, 128, 178–97, 202, 332, 336n, 340 A Doll’s House, 178, 181, 182, 184, 190, 210–12, 340, 347–8n, 402–3 Ghosts, 210, 213, 216, 222 immigrant see migrant imperialism, 105, 131, 146, 194n, 280, 282, 354, 356, 358, 406, 409; see also decolonisation and postcolonialism

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index 455 Inglis, Elsie, 71 interactivity, 66, 69, 74, 260n, 268, 366, 374, 381n, 382n; see also game interdisciplinarity, 13, 319, 321, 323, 334, 357 intermediality, 114, 140–1, 144, 156, 334, 369–70, 414, 417 internet, 126, 129, 234, 237, 358–9; see also digital culture and social media Interrobang, 333–4, 365–83 Callcenter Übermorgen, 377–9 Deep Godot, 365, 380 Müllermatrix, 365, 372, 377–9 Die Philosophiermaschine, 333, 365–7, 372–6, 380 ThAEtrophone, 372 intersectionality, 12, 21, 114, 140–1, 155, 343 intertextuality, 156, 159, 277, 291n, 336n intertheatricality, 9, 62–3 Ionesco, Eugène, 130, 161, 210, 212, 217, 222 The Bald Prima Donna / The Bald Soprano, 130, 212 Rhinoceros, 210, 217–8, 222 Irigiray, Luce, 193n Irish Modern Dance Theatre, 398 Irish National Opera, 400 IRWIN (Slovenia), 358; see also NSK Iser, Wolfgang, 113 Isherwood, Christopher, 23, 34n Ito, Michio, 50 Jackson, Anthony, 305, 308 Jackson, Sir Barry, 305, 309, 311–13 Jackson, Zaidee, 105 James, David, 6 Jameson, Fredric, 243, 330, 369 Jannelli, Guglielmo, 122–3 Jarry, Alfred, 1, 354 Ubu Roi, 1 Jaspers, Karl, 333, 365–6, 371–5, 378–9, 381n jazz, 82, 85–7, 90, 105, 199, 219 Jim Crow (laws), 83–4, 105, 430 Johnson, Nicholas, 423n Johnston, David, 319–20, 324 Johnston, Denis, 25 Blind Man’s Buff, 25 Jooss, Kurt, 287, 298n Jortner, David, 248

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Joyce, James, 51, 144, 163 Ulysses, 19, 51, 144 Judson Dance Theater, 278 kabuki, 237, 244, 246, 250–1, 260n, 436 Kafka, Franz, 275 Kaiqi, Hu, 217 Kandinsky, Wassily, 400 Kangelari, Dio, 191 Kastleman, Rebecca, 235 kathakali, 182, 436 Kavur, Ömer, 391n Kawakami Troupe, 247 Kealiinohomoku, Joann, 288 Keegan-Dolan, Michael, 45–6, 57 Kelly, Katherine, 342–3, 345 Kennard, James, 83–4 Kennedy, Adrienne, 334–5, 427–35 An Evening with Dead Essex, 334, 432–4 The Film Club (A Monologue by Suzanne Alexander), 429 A Movie Star Has to Star in Black and White, 429–30 Kent, Susan Kingsley, 342 Kerrow, Kate, 66, 69 The Sleepless Woman, 66–7 Keynes, John Maynard, 312 Khlebnikov, Velimir, 180 khon, 280–2, 290, 291 Kidd, Ben, 163–5, 172n Kirby, Peadar, 49 Klunchun, Pichet, 238, 277, 279–80, 282, 290 Kokoschka, Oskar, 27 Krafft-Ebing, Richard von, 346n Kraków Festival of Experimental Theatre, 394 Kruchenykh, Alexey, 336n Laban, Rudolf von, 287, 298n, 320 Lacan, Jacques, 187 Laing, R. D., 160–2 Lao Tzu, 409–10 Latham, Sean, 4, 244, 256 Lau, D. C., 409 Laughton, Charles, 369 Lawrence, D. H., 161, 216 Lecha, La, 360 Lehár, Franz, 368 The Merry Widow, 368

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456 index Lehmann, Hans-Thies, 47, 330, 335n, 336n, 357, 370, 374, 376 Lehrstück, 370, 371, 375–6; see also Brecht, Bertolt Lempicka, Tamara de, 100 Lenin, V. I., 330, 332, 356 Leonard, Garry, 245–6 Lepage, Robert, 248 Lepore, Jill, 74 Leslie, Henrietta, 63 lettrism, 180 Letzel, Jan, 19 Ley, Graham, 256 liminality, 407, 413, 416, 420n, 421n, 423n Lin, Shen, 218, 219 Lind, Letitia, 284 Littlewood, Joan, 21, 29–31, 33, 35n, 36n liveness, 21–2, 385–6 Living Literature Walks, 64–6, 74 Living Newspaper, 35n, 437 Llanarth Group, 116n London Ambulance Service, 70–1 Lorca, Federico García, 116n, 238, 319–25 Lott, Eric, 84, 94n Lunacharsky, Anatoly, 282 Lyles, Aubrey, 85–6, 88, 93n; see also Blake, Eubie Lyotard, Jean-François, 8, 243, 356 McCaul, Ethel, 71 Maciejewska, Ola, 238, 277, 279, 282, 290, 294n McClung, Nellie, 343 MacColl, Ewan, 26, 29–30 The Other Animals, 26, 29 McCusker, Mary, 65, 67 McDonald, Audra, 81 McDonald, Ronan, 420n McGrath, Aoife, 53 MacKaye, Steele, 293n McKinney, Louise, 343 MacLiammóir, Micheál, 404n McNaughton, James, 407 McRobbie, Angela, 344 Maddermarket Theatre (Norwich), 24 Mädler, Peggy, 378 Maeterlinck, Maurice, 113, 422n Magan, Manchán, 46, 49 Malevich, Kazimir, 10, 336n Mallarmé, Stéphane, 292n, 295n, 410–11

8055_Curtin et al.indd 456

Malvern Theatre Festival, 305, 307, 309, 311, 314, 315n Manchester Repertory Theatre, 25, 28, 29, 305–7 Mao, Douglas, 12, 82 Mao Weitao, 219 Mao Zedong, 330, 332 Marber, Patrick, 268 Closer, 268 Marcus, Steven, 342 Marin, Maguy see Compagnie Maguy Marin Marinetti, F. T., 113, 118–21, 127, 130–1, 335n, 355 Mariquita, Madame, 284 Marshall, Herbert, 24 Martin, John, 287–8 Martin, Mick, 23, 30, 31, 32, 35n; see also Bent Architect Theatre Company Marx, Karl, 48, 234, 330–3, 427; see also Engels, Friedrich Marx, Roger, 285 Mast, Emily, 128 Matrix, The, 376, 412 Mattar, Sinéad Garrigan, 55 Matyuchin, Mikhail, 336n MAVO movement (Japan), 356 Mayakovsky, Vladimir, 10, 119 Mazer, Cary M., 313 Meerzon, Yana, 115 Meisner, Sanford, 266 melodrama, 162, 402 Men’s Political Union for Women’s Enfranchisement, 68 Mensah, Ayoko, 289 Merchant Ivory, 338 metatheatricality, 31–2, 81, 114, 164 Metcalf, Laurie, 348n #MeToo movement, 102, 115, 182, 193n, 217, 345, 348n Meyerhold, Vsevolod, 10, 192, 191, 246, 249–50, 357, 386, 437; see also biomechanics Midland Hotel Theatre (Manchester), 304 Mignolo, Walter, 334, 405–6 migrant, 83, 92n, 104, 218, 334, 406, 409, 422n; see also refugee Miller, Arthur, 212, 221 Death of a Salesman, 221 Miller, Flournoy E., 85–6, 88, 93n; see also Blake, Eubie Millett, Kate, 347n

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index 457 Mills, Florence, 88 minimalism, 122, 125, 188, 256, 401 misogyny, 31, 40, 67, 198, 338, 354, 431 Mitchell, Katie, 24, 156, 265, 387 Mitterand, François, 424n minstrelsy, 81–91, 92n, 94n; see also blackface modernity, 3–6, 19, 45–8, 50–3, 57, 82, 105, 113–14, 129, 160–1, 171, 181, 183, 188–9, 192, 195n, 234–5, 238, 243, 245–7, 249–50, 253, 279–82, 286, 291, 293n, 332–3, 341, 352–4, 358, 361, 368, 386, 389, 409, 411, 416, 420n; see also postmodernity Moholy-Nagy, László, 27 Moi, Toril, 223n, 368 Monck, Walter Nugent, 24 Monstrous Regiment, 67 Montaner, Rita, 105 Mordan, Rebecca, 64, 66, 70, 74 Moriah, Kristin, 89 Morin, Emilie, 407 Morrison, J’aime, 247 Moukarzel, Bush, 163–5, 167, 172n Mueller, Robert, 91 Mugo, Micere, 356 Müller, Heiner, 186, 195n, 333, 372, 376, 378, 379 Mauser, 186 MedeaMaterial, 195n Müller, Ida, 332, 336n Müller-Klug, Tillmann, 334, 365, 376–80 Murphy, Emily, 343 Muse, John, 116n museums, 1, 7, 54, 103, 128, 130, 236, 310, 358, 411 ‘museum theatre’, 3, 111 National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), 86 National Theatre Company of China, 217 National Theatre (London), 24, 144, 306, 308–11, 313 National Theatre Wales, 203 naturalism, 1, 24–6, 33, 156, 159, 186, 189, 191, 195n, 368, 402–3, 422n; see also realism Nazism (National Socialism), 10, 24, 27, 29, 32, 287, 297–8n, 372 Neher, Caspar, 369

8055_Curtin et al.indd 457

neo-avant-garde, 129, 350, 353–5; see also avant-garde neo-expressionism, 362n Neo-Futurists (theatre company), 2, 129 neoliberalism, 56, 114, 168–9, 183, 192, 291, 344, 360 nepantla, 407, 421n Nevin, Robert P., 82–3 New Drama movement (Britain), 307, 310, 313, 315n New European Bauhaus, 13n new modernist studies, 3, 12, 82, 352 New Woman (cultural movement), 198, 339–40, 343 newspapers, 63–4, 131, 199, 270, 344, 432–3; see also Living Newspaper Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, 356 Nicastro, Luciano, 122 Nicholls, Sally, 71 Things a Bright Girl Can Do, 71 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 434n The Gay Science, 431 Nijinsky, Vaslav, 279–82, 290, 296n Noh/nō, 50, 237, 244, 246, 250, 251, 260n Notting Hill Carnival, 105 Novello Theatre (London), 66 NSK (Neue Slowenische Kunst), 358; see also IRWIN Obama, Barack, 89 Obiols, Joan, 119 O’Briain, Art, 53–4 O’Brien, Flann, 32 Octagon Theatre (Bolton), 25 Odéon (Paris), 309 Odyssey (Homer), 275 Oesmann, Astrid, 370 Olympic Games, 286 O’Neill, Eugene, 2, 211, 404n The Emperor Jones, 211 Strange Interlude, 2 Ono, Yoko, 332 opera, 98–9, 102, 187–8, 194n, 219, 270, 272, 281, 286, 297n, 309, 331–2, 335n, 336n, 400 Opera North, 101 Seven Deadly Sins, 101 O’Reilly, Kaite, 115 Missing Julie, 115, 198–205 O’Reilly Theatre (Dublin), 45

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458 index Orientalism, 238, 279, 280–7, 290, 384, 410 orthodoxy, 1, 3, 12, 33, 46, 171, 243, 333, 360, 420n Osei, Adjoa, 21 Osofisan, Femi, 356 O’Toole, Fintan, 56 Outka, Elizabeth, 49–51, 57 Painter, Corinne, 31 Pan Pan Theatre Company, 334, 392–404 All That Fall, 395–6 Cascando, 397 A Doll House, 402–3 Embers, 395–7 Endgame, 398–400 Everyone Is King Lear in his Own Home, 398–9 Pan Pan International Symposium, 394 The Rehearsal, Playing the Dane, 400 The Seagull and Other Birds, 402 The Sleepwalkers, 401–2 Quad, 398 WHAT IS THE WORD, 398 pandemic of 1918 (influenza), 115, 199, 235 pandemic-era theatre (post-2020), 1, 115, 161, 203, 219–22, 235, 240n, 265–9, 325n, 371, 377; see also COVID-19 Pankhurst, Emmeline, 67, 69, 71 Parade, 336n Parlby, Irene, 343 Paterson, Barbara, 343 Pavis, Patrice, 246–7 Paxton, Naomi, 62–80 A Particular Theatre: Shakespeare, Suffragists and Soldiers, 64, 68–9 Stage Rights! A Living Literature Walk, 64, 65–8, 69, 70, 74 Women and War: The West End and the Western Front, 64, 69–73, 74 Payne, Iden, 304–5 pedagogy, 239, 244, 277, 287, 290–1, 323–4, 360–1, 390, 403, 405, 408; see also training Pekar, Thomas, 370 People’s Theatre Company (Newcastle upon Tyne), 25 perestroika, 393 performance art, 7, 119, 130, 361; see also contemporary art

8055_Curtin et al.indd 458

performance studies, 12, 330, 352, 412, 421n, 436–7 performativity, 5–7, 40, 43, 84, 91, 105, 118, 140, 156, 188, 190, 245, 247, 329, 333–4, 345, 369, 372, 385, 387–9, 406, 434 Perloff, Marjorie, 410 Perth Festival, 46 Picasso, Pablo, 102, 280, 336n Pilcher, Velona, 26 The Searcher, 26 Pine, Emilie, 55 Pink Floyd, 256 Pinter, Harold, 119 Pirandello, Luigi, 164 Six Characters in Search of an Author, 31, 164, 173n Piscator, Erwin, 144, 437 Plato, 372, 436 Plebs League, 25 Poel, William, 315n Pogson, Rex, 307 postcolonialism, 10, 106, 142, 279, 408–9; see also decolonisation and imperialism postdramatic theatre, 1, 114, 140–1, 144, 156, 330, 336n, 357, 376 post-feminism, 344 postmodernism, 2, 5, 8–10, 111, 114–15, 140, 142, 159, 179, 237, 244, 246–7, 278, 329–33, 351–2, 354, 362n, 368, 376, 384–6, 388 postmodernity, 247, 332, 354 poststructuralism, 10, 330, 354 Pound, Ezra, 19, 246 Powell, Donna, 72 practice-as-research, 99, 140–1, 334, 414 Prampolini, Enric, 127 Prince, Monica, 21 Pageant of Agitating Women, 21, 40–4 Project Arts Centre (Dublin), 393, 404n Prometheus, 243–5, 248–9, 251 Proust, Marcel, 163 Public Theatre (New York), 342 Puchner, Martin, 165, 368, 371 punk, 289–90, 298n, 393 Qianwu, Yang, 217 queerness, 41, 72, 239, 319–25, 341, 351; see also sexuality Quigley, Karen, 169

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index 459 Quinn, Gavin, 392–3, 398, 404n; see also Pan Pan Theatre Company race, 8, 21, 40–1, 43, 51, 81–95, 103, 104–7, 141, 146, 150, 155, 221–2, 238, 277, 279, 282, 285–91, 296n, 297n, 298n, 334, 343, 367, 427–34 radio drama, 27, 116, 118, 233–4, 365, 370–1, 377, 397–8, 417, 440 railroad see train Rainer, Yvonne, 239n Rancière, Jacques, 47, 50, 52 Rand, Ayn, 365, 372 Ravenhill, Mark, 27 Some Explicit Polaroids, 27 realism, 14n, 25, 50, 129, 163, 166, 178–9, 182, 189–92, 210–11, 237, 244, 247–9, 272, 307; see also naturalism Red Ladder Theatre Company, 25, 26, 35n refugee, 34–5n, 406, 409, 418; see also migrant Renwood Bemis, Minnie, 283 resistance, 48, 50, 66, 85–7, 182, 184, 189, 266, 279, 332, 335, 338–9, 353, 385, 405–6, 410 Resistance, The (French), 104, 407, 411 Reynolds, Paige, 57 Rice, T. D., 82–3 Ridout, Nicholas, 235 Riley, Charles, 87 Rimini Protokoll, 171, 382n Riordan, Kevin, 235 Rivière, Jacques, 282 Robbe-Grillet, Alain, 140 Robeson, Paul, 88 Robins, Elizabeth, 64 Roche, Dominic, 28 Roche, Pierre, 285 Roerich, Nicholas, 282 Rogers, Gayle, 3–4, 244, 256 Ronconi, Luca, 129 Roosevelt, Theodore, 90 Rothe, Matthias, 370 Routledge, Clay, 56 Rowell, George, 309 Royal Academy of Music, 99 Royal Court Theatre (London), 306, 310 Royal Exchange (Manchester), 99 Royal National Theatre (London) see National Theatre (London)

8055_Curtin et al.indd 459

Rudin, Scott, 81 Rumold, Rainer, 352 Russolo, Luigi, 13, 121, 130 Rylance, Mark, 64 Sadlers Wells (London), 46 Saint-Amour, Paul K., 3 St. Denis, Ruth, 238, 279, 281–2, 286 St John, Christopher, 68 Saint-Saëns, Camille, 286 Salamon, Eszter, 238, 277, 279, 288–90, 298n Saleci, Renata, 187 Sampatakakis, Giorgos, 182 Samuel, Raphael, 24 Samuel Beckett Centre (Dublin), 172n Samuel Beckett Laboratory, 334, 408, 414–15, 419 Sanders, Julie, 341, 345 Sanderson, Michael, 237 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 116n, 212 Saunders, James, 119 Savran, David, 87, 93n, 352 Scaparro, Mario, 120 Scary Little Girls (theatre company), 64–5, 73–4; see also Paxton, Naomi Schechner, Richard, 246, 248, 352 Schenbeck, Lawrence, 95n Schenbeck, Lyn, 95n Schmidt, Karl, 297n Scena Plastyczna KUL, 394–5 scenography, 5–6, 127, 141, 143, 155, 177, 179, 283–4, 289, 320, 330, 334, 392–3, 397–8, 403, 417, 422n; see also sound design Schiller, Johann Christoph Friedrich von, 359 Schneider, Rebecca, 21, 236 Schultz, Albert, 348n Scott, Shelley, 343 Second World War, 23, 104, 163, 248, 261n, 355–6, 379, 406, 418, 420n; see also First World War Sell, Mike, 352, 356–7 Senelick, Laurence, 165 Seshagiri, Urmila, 6 Settimelli, Emilio, 118, 123, 124 sexuality, 31, 56, 83, 87, 93n, 94n, 101–4, 107n, 115, 194n, 199–200, 216–17, 285, 314n, 323, 324n, 338–46, 416; see also queerness

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460 index Shakespeare, William, 68, 111, 202, 212, 226n, 277, 395 Hamlet, 32 King Lear, 244 Macbeth, 275 A Midsummer Night’s Dream, 321 Two Gentlemen of Verona, 315n Shakespeare Hut, 68–9 Shakespeare Memorial National Theatre, 68, 309 Shakespeare’s Globe, 64 Shanghai International Contemporary Theatre Festival, 214 Sharp, Ingrid, 31 Sharpley-Whiting, Tracy Denean, 107n Shaw, George Bernard, 238, 304–18 The Apple Cart, 307, 309, 314 Arms and the Man, 304, 305, 307 Back to Methuselah, 305 Heartbreak House, 304 Mrs Warren’s Profession, 306 Widowers’ Houses, 306, 307, 309 Shawn, Ted, 281, 288, 293n Shen, Hong, 211 Yama Zhao, 211 shingeki, 244, 247–8, 250, 257n Showalter, Elaine, 343 Shukhov, Vladimir, 233, 239n SIGNA, 382n Situationist International, 355 Smith, Stan, 45 Smurthwaite, Kate, 65, 67 Smyth, Dame Ethel, 238, 270–3 The Wreckers, 272 Socrates, 372 Siegert, Nadine, 289 Sinding, Christian, 281 sintesi, 113, 119–39, 394 Sissle, Noble, 85–8; see also Blake, Eubie social media, 9, 89, 120, 220, 234, 345, 348n, 259; see also digital culture and internet and Twitter socialism, 24, 29, 31, 307, 352, 354, 358, 363n Société des Auteurs et Compositeurs Dramatiques, 284 Solga, Kim, 5, 239n Solidor, Suzy, 98–100, 102 Sondheim, Stephen, 99 Sophiensaele (Berlin), 365–7, 373 Soulpepper Theatre (Toronto), 348

8055_Curtin et al.indd 460

sound design, 121, 124, 126–8, 146, 150, 153–5, 165, 170–1, 177, 189–91, 256, 271, 369, 372, 397, 398; see also scenography Spanish Civil War, 23, 34n, 118 Spender, Stephen, 26 Trial of a Judge, 26 Sphinx Theatre Company, 62 Splendid Productions, 238, 274–6 Sprig of Shillalah, 83 Stage Society, 24, 306, 315n Stalin, Josef, 330, 332 Stamatis, Yona, 184 Stamell, Kiruna, 70 Stanislavski, Konstantin, 236, 237, 244, 246, 250, 260n, 265–9 Stanford Friedman, Susan, 243–4, 247 stargaze (theatre company), 45, 46 Stebbins, Genevieve, 287, 293n Stein, Gertrude, 116n, 140, 144, 166, 170 Steiner, George, 234, 261n Stevens, Lucy, 238, 270–3 Ethel Smyth: Grasp the Nettle, 270–2 Virginia Woolf: Killing the Angel, 270–2 Stewart, Susan, 56 Stoker, Bram, 429 Stone, Simon, 116n Yerma, 116n Stoppard, Tom, 119 Strindberg, August, 115 Miss Julie, 115, 198, 201–3 Studio Oyuncuları, 334, 384–91 Anti-Prometheus, 388–9 Endgame, 386 Five Short Plays (Beckett), 386–7 Happy Days, 384, 386 Io, 389–90 Oedipus Trilogy, 388–9 Styles, Luke, 103 suffrage, 39–40, 43, 62–80, 198–9, 297n, 307, 341–3 surrealism, 1, 102, 159, 169, 320, 332, 357, 402, 441 Susquehanna University, 40, 43 Šuvaković, Miško, 358 Suzuki, Tadashi, 182, 237, 243–64 Suzuki Company of Toga (SCOT), 245, 251, 253 Svetlov, Valerian, 280–2, 293n Swallow, Genevieve, 65, 67 symbolism (movement), 7, 113, 422n

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index 461 Synge, John Millington, 53–4 Syrett, Netta, 67 Might Is Right, 67 tableaux vivants, 286, 297n Taeuber, Sophie, 291n Tafuri, Manfredo, 353 Takada, Midori, 255–6 Tansi, Sony Lab’ou, 356 Tanztheater, 416 Taoism, 408–10 Tatlin, Vladimir, 233 Taylor, Diana, 21 Teaċ Daṁsa, 21, 45 MÁM, 46–61 Teatr na Plaży (Poland), 415 technology, 120, 129, 212, 213, 214, 265–8, 283, 286, 358–9, 365–83, 415, 420n, 442 Tecklenburg, Nina, 334, 365–6, 376–80 Tekand, Şahika, 334, 384–91; see also Studio Oyuncuları telegraphy, 406 telephone, 120, 220, 234, 236, 239n, 365–6, 373–8, 380, 433 television, 49, 89, 234, 265, 298n, 336, 359, 389, 398, 416, 422, 442; see also video Tenisheva, Maria, 280 Terzopoulos, Theodoros, 114, 177–97, 257 Nora, 114, 177–92 Theater am Schiffbauerdamm, 27 Theatre of Action, 29 Theatre Clwyd (Wales), 141, 144 theatre festivals, 1, 50, 52, 146, 172n, 278, 305, 307, 310, 314, 321, 323, 415 Théâtre des Nations Festival, 249 Théâtre-Français (Paris), 309 Theatre P’Yut, 116n Theatre Royal (Bristol), 25 Theatre Royal Drury Lane, 66 Theatre Workshop, 26, 29 Oh What a Lovely War!, 30, 33 Thĕātrum Imāginārium, 445 Thom, Jessica, 115, 206–8 Thompson, Paul, 342–3 Thomson, Charles, 13n Tlostanova, Madina, 334, 405 Toller, Ernst, 21, 23–38 Draw the Fires, 23, 27–32 Hinkemann, 27–8 Hoppla, We’re Alive, 27–8

8055_Curtin et al.indd 461

Masses Man, 25–6 Pastor Hall, 26 The Blind Goddess, 25–6, 28 The Machine Wreckers, 24 Toneelgroep Amsterdam, 146–7 Tonic Theatre, 62 Touretteshero, 115, 206–8 tragedy, 25, 129, 162, 164, 237, 243, 245, 249–53, 255–6, 320, 334, 369, 388–90 train (transport), 120, 218, 234, 347n, 413, 418 training (actors and dancers), 11, 29, 43, 62, 71–3, 86, 98–9, 102, 105, 179, 181–4, 191, 236–8, 244–5, 250–7, 265–9, 278–80, 284–5, 311–14, 320, 334, 390; see also pedagogy transdisciplinarity, 324n, 407 transvanguardia, 362n Trinity College Dublin, 393, 415, 419 Trower, Shelley, 235 Trump, Donald, 14–15n, 89, 91 Tsatsoulis, Dimitris, 180 Turbo Pascal, 382n Turkfest (County Mayo), 49–52, 56 Twitter, 89, 126, 348n, 413, 423n; see also social media typewriter, 72, 339, 369, 427–8, 433 Ulrich, Karl Heinrich, 346n ultraism, 357 Union Jack Club, 71 Unity Theatre, 26 urbanisation, 4, 406 utopia, 248, 303, 333, 345 Varopolou, Eleni, 195n Varopolou, Helene, 370, 374, 376 vaudeville, 85–6, 173n Vaughan, Kate, 284 Verfremdungseffekt, 275, 430; see also Brecht, Bertolt Victorianism, 5, 215, 271, 312, 339–42 Victory over the Sun, 336n video, 126, 170, 207, 213, 220, 265–9, 324, 398; see also television Vinge, Vegard, 332, 336n virtuality, 220, 236, 237, 358 Vogel, Paula, 115, 210, 213, 222 How I Learned to Drive, 216–17 Volkonsky, Sergei, 282

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462 index Volksbühne am Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz, 25, 330 Vote 100 Project, 70–2 Wagner, Richard, 165, 330–2, 335n, 336n Waiting for Naomi, 439 Waldoff, Claire, 102 Walker, Jessica, 21 All I Want Is One Night, 98 Not Such Quiet Girls, 101 People’s Cabaret, The, 103 Scene Unseen, 100 The Girl I Left Behind Me, 99 Walkowitz, Rebecca, 27, 82 Wandor, Michelene, 26 Wardale, Stephen, 29 Warden, Claire, 45, 235, 244 Warhol, Andy, 332i Waseda Little Theatre, 248, 260n Washington, Booker T., 90, 95n Wasserman, Jerry, 340, 342, 348n Watson, Beth, 67 Watten, Barrett, 247 Weaver, Abi, 123 Weill, Kurt, 101–2, 336n White, Marie, 71 Whitelaw, Billie, 207 Whittington, Ian, 234 Wigman, Mary, 287 Wilde, Oscar, 213, 215–16, 222, 304, 323, 395, 404n De Profundis, 395 The Importance of Being Earnest, 215–16, 222 Williams, Bob, 90 Williams, Raymond, 163, 336n, 436 Wilson, August, 221 Wilson, Robert, 248 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 421n WochenKlausur, 360

8055_Curtin et al.indd 462

Wolfe, George C., 81–2, 88–9, 91 Shuffle Along, or the Making of the Musical Sensation of 1921 and All That Followed, 81, 88–91 Wollstonecraft, Mary, 69 Women’s Franchise League, 69 Women’s Freedom League (WFL), 66 Women’s Police Service, 72–3 Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU), 66, 69 Women Writers’ Suffrage League (WWSL), 63–4, 68, 78n Woolf, Virginia, 64, 144, 161­, 167, 174n, 238, 270–3 The Waves, 162 Three Guineas, 272 Woolwich Labour Thespians, 25 Wooster Group, 116n, 352 Workers’ Theatre Movement, 26 Woynarski, Lisa, 148, 150 Wright, Jude, 30, 32; see also Bent Architect Theatre Company Yeats, W. B., 23, 50, 160, 165, 172n, 246, 404n At the Hawk’s Well, 50, 51 Certain Noble Plays of Japan, 246 YMCA, 68, 72 Young, Harvey, 226n Yu, Cao, 211 Thunderstorm, 211, 213 Zaourou, Bernard Zadi, 356 Zaroulia, Marilena, 192, 195n Zeami, 244, 250 Zhou, Raymond, 215–16 Zinman, Toby, 112 Žižek, Slavoj, 412, 421n Zoom (software), 237, 265–9, 371, 376

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