The Dramaturgy of the Door 9781315543680

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The Dramaturgy of the Door

The Dramaturgy of the Door examines the door as a critical but under-explored feature of theatre and performance, asking how doors function on stage, in site-specific practice and in performances of place. This first book-length study on the topic argues that doors engage in and help to shape broad phenomena of performance across key areas of critical enquiry in the field. Doors open up questions of theatrical space(s) and artistic encounters with place(s), design and architecture, bodies and movement, interior versus exterior, im/materiality, the relationship between the real and the imaginary, and processes of transformation. As doors separate places and practices, they also invite us to see connections and contradictions between each one and to consider the ways in which doors frame the world beyond the stage and between places of performance. With a wide-ranging set of examples – from Shakespeare’s Macbeth to performance installations in the Mojave Desert – The Dramaturgy of the Door is aimed at performance makers and artists as well as advanced students and scholars in the fields of performance studies, cultural theory, and visual arts. Stuart Andrews is a writer, researcher, and Co-Director of Performing City Resilience. Matthew Wagner is a Senior Lecturer in Theatre and Performance at the University of Surrey.

Routledge Advances in Theatre and Performance Studies

Women’s Playwriting and the Women’s Movement, 1890 –1918 Anna Farkas Theatrical Performance and the Forensic Turn James Frieze Mummers’ Plays Revisited Peter Harrop Hypertheatre Contemporary Radical Adaptation of Greek Tragedy Olga Kekis After the Long Silence The Theatre of Brazil’s Post-Dictatorship Generation Cláudia Tatinge Nascimento The Bible and Modern British Drama From 1930 to the Present-Day Mary F. Brewer Moving Relation Touch in Contemporary Dance Gerko Egert The Dramaturgy of the Door Stuart Andrews and Matthew Wagner For more information about this series, please visit: www.routledge.com/ Routledge-Advances-in-Theatre--Performance-Studies/book-series/RATPS

The Dramaturgy of the Door

Stuart Andrews and Matthew Wagner

First published 2020 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2020 Stuart Andrews and Matthew Wagner The right of Stuart Andrews and Matthew Wagner to be identified as authors of this work has been asserted by them in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in- Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in- Publication Data Names: Andrews, Stuart, 1975 – author. | Wagner, Matthew D., 1970 – author. Title: The dramaturgy of the door / Stuart Andrews and Matthew Wagner. Description: Abingdon, Oxon ; New York, NY : Routledge, 2020. | Series: Routledge advances in theatre & performa | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2019024736 (print) | LCCN 2019024737 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Doors in the theater. | Theater— Philosophy. Classification: LCC PN2091.D66 A53 2020 (print) | LCC PN2091.D66 (ebook) | DDC 792.02/5 — dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019024736 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019024737 ISBN: 978 -1-138 - 68465-2 (hbk) ISBN: 978 -1-315-54368 - 0 (ebk) Typeset in Bembo by codeMantra

Stuart dedicates this book to his family, for whom doors are always open, left on the latch, lit with the warmth of light inside, or both half open and closed (in the case of a particular 1980s stable door). Long may we open doors to one another with love, with welcome and, where appropriate, with gusto. Matt dedicates this book to Mary Ann Wagner, who always encouraged me to look for, and go through, as many doors as possible, and to Miranda and Miles, for whom I will always try to do the same.

Contents

List of figures Acknowledgements Preface: time with doors

viii ix xi

Openings: doors remembered 1 1 The dramaturgy of the door 7 2 At home with doors: practising architectural elements 30 3 “This is the door”: threshold phenomena in Shakespearean dramaturgy 52 4 Bodies at doors, bodies with doors 68 5 Together at doors: situating spectators in the city 99 6 The Janus effect: doors and theatrical time 127 Closings: doors reflected 147 Index

155

Figures

0 0.1 0 0.2 0 0.3 0 0.4 0 0.5 0 0.6 0 0.7 0 0.8 0 0.9

Exterior door, Lautrec, France xi Garden gate, Freshwater, Isle of Wight xii Walled-up door, Lautrec, France xiii Shop door, New Orleans xiii Interior doors xiv Interior door xv Gate with misaligned bolt xvi External door xvi Vilhelm Hammershøi – inv. 111WH Interior. “The Four Rooms”, (1914) Oil on canvas, 85 x 70.5 cm, Ordrupgaard, Copenhagen xvii 0 0.10 Residence, Puycalvel, France xviii 0 0.11 Robert Fludd, “The Theatre”, Ars Memoriae, 1619 xviii 0 0.12 External door xix 0 0.13 Rehearsal door xix 0 0.14 Disused door, Isle of Wight xx 0 0.15 External door xxi 0.1 Residence in Paekakariki, New Zealand 2 0.2 French doors, Freshwater, Isle of Wight 4 1.1 Shakespeare’s Globe, Richard II, 2015 7 1.2 29–31 Oxford Street, London 7 2.1 Spectators at 87 Hackford Road, London, June 2014 35 2.2 Miller and Whalley reflecting on the politics of the back door, January 2015 43 2.3 Whalley opens the far passageway door, January 2015 48 3.1 Macbeth Act 2, Scene 3 52 4.1 A–Z Wagon Stations 83 5.1 Interior of BAC: posters affixed to walls during London Stories: Made by Migrants 108 5.2 Annie Wong, Quotidian Chinese, 2016 in the installation space of The Wisdom of the Poor: Communal Courtyard by Song Dong, 2011–2013 at the Art Gallery of Ontario 115 5.3 Wisdom of the Poor: Communal Courtyard, 2011–2013 121 6.1 Janus, illustration by Charlotte Yonge, 1880 136 6.2 Templum Jani, Peter Paul Rubens, c. 1635 138 7.1 Rehearsal door 148

Acknowledgements

Doubling the normal number of authors for a monograph also appears to double the always extensive debts of gratitude that a project such as this one creates. It seems only fitting, though, to begin our expressions of thanks with the British Academy/Leverhulme Small Research Grants scheme. We may have only ever opened one or two doors in this project had they not supported our early work. In the same vein, we owe immeasurable thanks to the key people involved in that work, beginning with our artist/collaborators: Lee Miller, Joanne ‘Bob’ Whalley, and Annie Ruth. These three not only brought worlds of expertise and creative vision, but they were also indispensable in helping us learn that early lesson of slowing down at, and paying attention to, doors. Alongside them we had outstanding help on the project from Hannah Megan Lane and Bella Sabbagh, both of whom went well beyond the call of duty in the ways they partook in the research: Bella readily stood in as a performer and was immensely gracious and thoughtful in both practical work and in conversations and reflections thereafter. Hannah documented our emerging work on the project, contributed thoughts and ideas from within this process and took images from beyond the immediate scope of our project, several of which we include in our preface. We would also be terribly remiss not to acknowledge and thank the participants and auditors/respondents in our workshops: Abi, Michael, Julia, Corey, Alice, and finally, Dave Hockham, for procuring us some doors with which to play in the first place. In a similar vein, our deep gratitude goes to all who presented work at or attended the symposium which inaugurated the project in 2014. Of particular note here is Chris Romer-Lee, Director and Co-founder of Studio Octopi, and CEO of Thames Baths, who presented at the symposium and with whom we have enjoyed a continuing conversation about doors and also, more broadly, intersections between performance and architecture. We are grateful to the Delfina Foundation, for allowing us to host our symposium in their building in Victoria, London, particularly as Studio Octopi had, then, recently redeveloped the building and introduced varying forms of door to bring light and movement into the building. We thank Chris and also Mike Pearson, both of whom, along with Hannah, kindly contributed images for our photo essay. We became fascinated by the ways in which we might begin

x Acknowledgements

the book with actual, material doors, as they were important to people, to us and to others, and we are delighted to include these contributions. As the research progressed, we were extraordinarily fortunate to have the good will and wise advice of colleagues in the discipline including Tim Fitzpatrick, Gay McAuley, and Juliet Rufford. As we tested out ideas on this project, we very much valued their interest in the work and the thoughts they offered which helped to light the way. We are equally grateful to colleagues here in Theatre and Performance at the University of Surrey for their support, particularly Adam Alston, who attended the first symposium and was always ready to talk through the project with us, and Patrick Duggan, who has offered detailed and excellent advice as we expanded the project. As ever, we owe huge debts of gratitude to our editors and their teams at Routledge. Ben Piggot was enthusiastic about the project from the beginning, and he has been unerringly encouraging. And Laura Soppelsa and Lucia Accorsi have been generous and patient as the project neared completion. A version of Chapter 2 was previously published in Contemporary Theatre Review (27:4), “At Home with Doors: Practising Architectural Elements in Yes, These Eyes Are the Windows and Between 13 and 15 Steps”. We are grateful to be able to include this work here. In the pages that follow, we speak often of the ways in which doors can be personal; how we subjectively and individually encounter doors is a significant concern in this book. In this vein, on a more personal note, we would like to thank Andrew and his family for hosting our writing retreat two years running on the Isle of Wight; as will become evident, that location offered no small measure of inspiration and fruitful ground upon which to carefully and slowly consider doors. Finally, Stuart would like to thank Ellen, for believing in this idea from the very start, for checking in on it along the way, for asking unerringly good questions, and for looking both to the detail and the distance. To family, particularly Laura and Sophie and families for being remarkably okay about my being more off radar than I might have been when working on this. To Elka, who, at ten months old, is just beginning to fathom doors, and who makes me wish we’d written about the sensory experience of glass doors. I would also like to thank Geraldine (Gerry) Harris, who has offered wisdom and excellent humour over a period of time that is, in domestic parlance, probably quite a long sweep, although I sense we would both prefer to imagine it as a light brush. And for Matt, as ever, there is an impossible debt to be paid to Debs: first for her care, her advice, and her understanding of what it takes (especially in terms of time) to pursue and complete a project like this; and secondly for keeping a sharp eye out for interesting doors, from Shere to Puycalvel, and listening to me wax on about them. Some of the images that follow are from those wanderings, for which I am also grateful to Julian and Irina, for making possible our journey to France: vive La Bastide! Lastly, and always, love and thanks to Miranda and Miles: along with your Nonna, this book is for you.

Preface Time with doors

Over the course of our investigation into doors, one thing has become increasingly clear. Like any object of study, doors require time. Once we started consciously paying attention to the door, in artistic practice and in everyday life, we found ourselves pausing, lingering, slowing down when we encountered doors. Over and over again we were struck by their materiality, by their texture and tactile qualities, and by the many ways in which pausing at a door alters everything: movement, conversation, cognition, mood, breath, and above all, our capacity to attend to what is right in front of us. We will have much to say about these ideas in the pages that follow, but before we begin, we thought it important to share this act of slowing at the door. We invite you, therefore to spend a little time with doors.

Figure 00.1

Figure 00.2

Figure 00.3

Figure 00.4

Figure 00.5

Figure 00.6

Figure 00.7

Figure 00.8

Figure 00.9

Figure 00.10

Figure 00.11

Figure 00.12

Figure 00.13

Figure 00.14

Figure 00.15

xxii Preface

Photo credits Figure 00.1 Exterior door, Lautrec, France Photo credit: Matt Wagner Figure 00.2 Garden gate, Freshwater, Isle of Wight Photo credit: Matt Wagner Figure 00.3 Walled-up door, Lautrec, France Photo credit: Matt Wagner Figure 00.4 Shop door, New Orleans Photo credit: Stuart Andrews/Patrick Duggan Figure 00.5 Interior doors Photo credit: Hannah Megan Lane Figure 00.6 Interior door Photo credit: Stuart Andrews Figure 00.7 Gate with misaligned bolt Photo credit: Hannah Megan Lane Figure 00.8 External door Photo credit: Stuart Andrews Figure 00.9 Vilhelm Hammershøi – inv. 111WH Interior. “The Four Rooms”, (1914) Oil on canvas, 85 x 70.5 cm, Ordrupgaard, Copenhagen Photo credit: Anders Sune Berg Figure 00.10 Residence, Puycalvel, France Photo credit: Matt Wagner Figure 00.11 Robert Fludd, “The Theatre”, Ars Memoriae, 1619 Figure 00.12 External door Photo credit: Stuart Andrews Figure 00.13 Rehearsal door Photo credit: Matt Wagner Figure 00.14 Disused door, Isle of Wight Photo credit: Matt Wagner Figure 00.15 External door Photo credit: Mike Pearson

Openings Doors remembered

Doors remembered 1 Matt: It is December 1977, and the door to the attic is locked; a kind of game amongst three children unfolds – who can find and steal the skeleton key from Dad, to discover what kind of Christmas endeavours he has been busy with up there? We search: cupboards, bedside tables, a drawer in the hallway. Then into his study: an old wooden roll-top desk. The roll top is raised, the surface covered with books and papers. The centre drawer opens, but the top left-hand side one does not. But it does rattle, the same way the attic door rattles as we tried in vain to open it. This memory surfaces palpably as I am working frantically, some 38 years later in summer 2015, to find another key to unlock another door. On this occasion, the effort is time-sensitive in a more pressing way: I am with a different group of people, and we have only 17 minutes to get this door unlocked. Again, we labour urgently, noisily, shouting instructions, rattling locks, hunting for a way to open one door that will, hopefully, in turn provide the means of opening yet another door. It’s another game, this time in a converted warehouse in North London, where we have paid a tidy sum to be locked in a room and set the task of ‘escaping’ by solving a series of puzzles, each one producing a key. I had played long ago at being locked out, even as we were ‘really’ locked out; we play now at being locked in, even as we are ‘really’ locked in. Like so many elements of play and performance, the ‘remembered doors’ I trace here facilitated a shuttling between reality and fiction, between the imagined and the immediately material. If, as has so often been noted, the body in performance is possessed of a peculiar kind of duality – both self and other, actor and character – surely the door in performance is not only possessed of a similar duality, but it also radiates and fosters that duality in its immediate surroundings. The door offers a tantalising kind – no, many tantalising kinds – of in-betweenness. In between 1977 and 2015, I am standing at another door; it is this one:

2  Openings: doors remembered

Figure 0.1  R esidence in Paekakariki, New Zealand Photo credit: Matt Wagner

This door, of thin wood and thinner rippled ‘privacy’ glass, opens onto a porch and then onto a garden, at the bottom of which is a pohutakawa tree, and then onto a beach and then the Tasman Sea and, in this image, finally onto a portion of Kapiti Island, a mile or so off the west coast of New ­Zealand, about 25 miles north of Wellington. It is a door that was, in some sense, my door – the front door to a small dwelling I called home for about four years. During that time, perhaps counter-intuitively and some might even say perversely, I often preferred to sit or stand just inside this door – a position very like the one represented in the photo – rather than outside, on the porch, or in the garden, or on the beach. It was a habit that I had noted while living there, but without ever really giving it much thought. But this particular ­image – afforded by looking through the doorway, with my sight taking in both door and aperture – is the one that has remained with me long since I packed and carted my belongings through that door for the last time. As we began our current investigation into doors, this was the first door that came to my mind; it is one of the doors that I carry with me, and part of the

Openings: doors remembered  3

goal of these brief opening pages is to bring forward from the hinterlands of our lives the doors we carry with us, and in the process, to mark the fact that many of us do carry doors with us, in multiple and often surprising ways. So why this door? And why (our developing interest in doors has prompted me to ask) did I prefer that inside perspective? Was I just cold? Lazy? Avoiding the sun? Sometimes. But the real reason – and that which is most salient here – is that without being consciously aware of it, I was engaged in a kind of transformation of spaces. The natural world – the garden, the beach, the sea, the sunset – can be engaged with in many ways, but two seem to stand out: you can put yourself into it, or you can invite it into your space, into yourself, as it were. Remaining just inside the house, but keeping the door open, was a way of allowing all that was outside – and as the image suggests, it was quite an expansive outside – into my own interior spaces, by which I mean both ‘my’ house and ‘me’. This was not so much a matter of the open door insinuating a possibility of me going out there, but rather one of realising (making real) the possibility of out there coming in here. It was a door of ‘letting in’, and as such, a door which fundamentally transformed the space on this side of it. The house itself, like the actual door, was small and a bit ramshackle – two bedrooms, kitchen, bathroom, and a small lounge. But the open door made it nearly palatial, like that trick of putting up mirrors to make a room seem bigger. This phenomenon strikes me as particularly germane to doors in performance: in what ways might a door ‘let in’ the world(s) beyond the stage (or the site of performance) – the abstractions and realities, the expansiveness, the difference of ‘out there’? And in what ways might such a practice be therefore understood as transformational, a fundamental altering of the performative space itself, the person/character in that space, the mood and understanding of the audience? Further questions arise: to what degree are the phenomena I describe here attributable to that particular door, per se, and to what degree are they attributable to ‘doorness’? What is the relationship between door and doorway, especially as we come to think (as will be evident in this book) of doors as thresholds? In what ways is the transformation I posit above literal, and in what ways is it figurative or metaphorical? Here, I touch upon a theme that occupies much of my thinking about doors, and about performance in general, and that is the interplay, between materiality and immateriality, presence and absence – an interplay that saturates performative activity. The doors I describe above are, as the title of this chapter suggests, ‘doors remembered’; but memory floats on that wave between the real and the imagined, between the present and the absent. Just like a child’s game, just like performance; just like being able to be on both sides of a door at once.

Doors remembered 2 Stuart: I begin with the doors at which we determined much of this book. Two doors, with windows either side, French windows, each door comprising

4  Openings: doors remembered

Figure 0.2  F rench doors, Freshwater, Isle of Wight Photo credit: Stuart Andrews

a tall glass panel in a wooden frame. On the right-hand door, there is a brass handle and a key attached to a chain. Being fixed to the door, the key indicates these are doors to be unlocked from inside, not used as a formal entrance. It is early January and, by sunset, the frost on the field at the front has barely thawed since it set in overnight. A few sheep appear on the grass outside, followed shortly afterwards by the farmer, Andrew, who owns this cottage and lives in the house next door. We unlock the door, there are introductions, we explain we’re writing a book about performances of doors. He tells us about the murmuration of starlings circling above. A brief, genial exchange. As we close the door, it’s clear the room has become cold. We go back to writing, willing the room to warm again. Another door, this time in a performance. This door is probably hardboard. I’m sitting at a small wooden table in a hotel bedroom. An old, once grand hotel in an English coastal resort. There’s barely anyone else in the place. I’m a property developer, suit jacket cast off on the bed, I seem to remember there being a glass of whiskey, and a set of children’s wooden blocks, set up as if they were a town. The door to the room opens. A small group of spectators is invited to look into the room. They stand quietly as I knock down a few of

Openings: doors remembered  5

the blocks, razing the town in a few absent-minded moves. The spectators are whispered away to other rooms and the door closes behind them. Since we started this investigation, we have begun to notice the detail of doors. The style, the chips and cracks, the slide, weight and fit of a door, the act of passing through. This has needed to be an active process of attending, a process that takes time. It is all too easy to miss the detail of a door. This is probably unsurprising, doors are most likely selected or designed to fit with a building. Individual elements of architecture are, in the main, intended to contribute to the whole, rather than remain somehow distinct.1 Even where they might comprise a focal point, they rarely call for attention in isolation. Grand, weighty doors tend to be constituent parts of grand and weighty buildings. On the days we go out looking for doors, when we stop to really look, we come back brimming with stories and questions. There is, we have found, much to be understood from doors, about the ways in which doors divide or delineate place, about what happens when we pass by or through, or meet others at the threshold. To enquire into doors involves looking a little longer, noticing the design, form, condition of a door. It involves such attentiveness as we try a door, look for signs of use, and reflect on the implications of a particular door for those within and without. In 1863, the Subject Matter Index of Patents Applied for and Patents Granted records 30 items under the category “Doors and Gates: Door Furniture”. Many of these are listed as “improvements” to fastenings, furnishing or manufacture. In small ways, patent by patent, the door was being reformed and refashioned. As we reflect on doors here, I begin to wonder how each innovation, each “improvement” re-crafts the experience of using and of living with a door. As doors become more secure, perhaps we feel safer, but also more separate from the world. As doors move more smoothly, as there are fewer creaks, I wonder how they transform our experience of place and, particularly, of crossing from one place to another. I recall a visit to a narrow house squeezed onto a plot between existing properties, as part of Open House London (https://openhouselondon.org.uk), an event in which many buildings across London are open to the public for one weekend each ­September. It was here that I first experienced glass doors that, with a small electrical charge, become instantly opaque. By attending to the detail of the doors, to their age, their form and operation, we might better understand how they shape the places in which we find ourselves. Further, we might begin to understand the impact of changes to the form of doors, the impact of automation, the risks of developing nostalgia for older forms, and the possibilities for future innovation and transformation. In the chapters that follow, we ask, over and again, how we, and others, perform doors. In so doing, we recognise that as artists intervene in everyday life, as they rethink and rework the world, so they allow us to look again, to wonder at its ways, at what is here, and at our relation to and situation in that world – as artists and spectators – to consider our part in things. Through

6  Openings: doors remembered

this project, we have become powerfully aware of the value of the door as a point of focus for artistic practice, particularly in performance and the live experience of doors, which in many ways are predicated upon ‘doors remembered’. As it may take time to focus on doors within an entire building, so it does in art and performance. And, we are unlikely to see doors in quite the same way. As we take in a door, whether together, whether alone, we bring worlds of experience to bear on our sense of that door. Memories of knocking, bolting, latching, pushing-to, pulling fast. Memories of waiting, ‘should we knock again?’, of doors closing behind us. We judge what is secure, appropriate, and what lies beyond: ‘Is it safe?’ ‘Let’s wait a little longer.’ ‘Maybe no one’s there.’ ‘Don’t open the door without a grown-up present.’ We are intrigued by the ways that artists attend to doors; we want to know how doors contribute to and make sense within a work, as part of a whole and as a critical element in itself. For us, for this book, a door – remembered, imagined, performed, perceived – is the beginning of an enquiry, an unravelling, an opening.

Note 1 See our discussion of elements of architecture, drawing particularly on work by Pierre von Meiss, in Chapter 2.

Reference Woodcroft, B. (1865). Subject-Matter Index of Patents Applied for and Patents Granted: For the Year 1863. London: George Edward Eyre and William Spottiswoode.

Chapter 1

The dramaturgy of the door

Figure 1.1  S hakespeare’s Globe, Richard II, 2015 Photo credit: Matt Wagner

Shakespeare’s Globe, 2015: an extra façade, both on stage level and balcony level, is created for a production of Richard II. This addition seemed to serve two key purposes: 1) to be painted with a slightly faded, chipped gilt, offering an air of decaying glory and excess; and 2) to provide five doors on both stage and balcony level. On the stage level, the central doors were positioned slightly forward (downstage), and they were arched, double doors. The four flanking doors on each level (two on either side) were single, and antiquated in appearance, each with a rusted sliding bolt visible from on-stage (suggesting the stage space itself is an interior

Figure 1.2  29–31 Oxford Street, London Photo credit: Stuart Andrews

September 2013. I follow emailed instructions to a door on Oxford Street, a broad shopping street in the West End of London. The door is situated between shop-fronts. It is open and I cross into a small hallway, from which steps lead up to the first floor. There is a small ticket desk and, tickets checked, I climb the stairs and open a door with a small window, entering what might be an office or storage space. As I walk in, a performer greets me, as if we are long-time colleagues. This is the farewell party and last hurrah for the

8  The dramaturgy of the door

location). Throughout the production, for the most part, these single doors were used as simple ingress and egress. But the fact that they were there – as a clearly added, intentionally present part of the mise en scène – is worthy of note. Multiple ways in and out of the playing area creates a specific kind of stage world. In addition to the ten doors crafted for this production, the performers (as is often the practice at the Globe) also made use of the four ‘audience’ entrances into the Yard of the theatre: ten material doors and four immaterial (‘implied’) doors. What kind of performance needs 14 doors?

London Mortgage Company, in Cheese [a play], a performance by FanSHEN. Outside the door, I had been about to see a show, but, while passing through the door, I was invited to become part of the world of the performance. The invitation caught me as I was crossing from one place to another, shaping the place into which I was arriving, revealing a very different world to that on the other side. As I watched others walk through the door, I found it difficult to discern the world I had left behind. What happens when artists include existing doors in performance? How do they, and we as spectators, practise existing doors, and what do they and we leave behind in using these doors to cross from one place to another?

Our Opening, ‘Doors remembered’, details a very few of the doors that we recall and carry with us; they are personal to us. That introduction, and the preceding photo essay, are ways of foregrounding the materiality of doors, and of the activities and practices that occur at and with them. Those two sections also attempt to move us from doors in the everyday toward the principal focus of this book: doors in theatre and performance. As co-writers, we come to the subject from different backgrounds, both in terms of scholarly expertise and performance practice and, as such, we read ‘theatre and performance’ as entailing a broad set of creative practices in the arts.1 Core to our approach is a fascination with the performance of doors, whether in a written play, on a stage, in a gallery installation, or in projects in which artists find or create work in specific places. As such, while our areas of work differ, we share a set of interrelated questions, and curiosities, about both performance and doors that have brought us to this project. These questions, which underpin this book, might be summed up in the following terms: 1 What are the key kinds of artistic practices of and with doors, and what do these contribute to our understanding of performance? 2 In what ways are doors ‘dramaturgical’? 3 In what ways do some of the basic elements of performance practice – particularly place, text, body, audience, and time – illuminate our understanding of doors in theatre and performance, and, conversely, how does a study of doors inform and perhaps expand our understanding of those elements?

The dramaturgy of the door  9

These questions might be gathered together under one larger query: what is the dramaturgy of the door? To begin unpacking that query, let’s briefly consider the examples above. In Cheese [a play], FanSHEN performed an invitation at the moment of entering a room. The performers added a context and conditions to the act of passing through each door. At the door to the building, our tickets were checked, and we prepared to watch a show. At the door to the room, we became spectators and also ex-employees attending a party to bid farewell to a now insolvent mortgage company. The glass panel of the internal door blurred the boundary between the places either side. This, then, was not a hermetically sealed world, separate from everyday life; instead, it re-framed everyday life from within the performance. Situated on one side of a door, one’s view and experience of the world beyond is framed by that performance. The door appeared not to be ‘used’ again until the end of the show, when spectators began to leave, although throughout the performance, it borrowed the corridor to imply that the world of the performance extended beyond the room, or certainly did not contradict the action of the play.2 On the night I (Stuart) saw the show, there was a post-show discussion, which meant it was some time before many in the room left. As we did so, in the act of leaving through each of these two doors, we were simultaneously leaving a party, a job, a performance, a discussion, and leaving behind performers who had also been co-workers of a kind for the duration of the show. We were also leaving an office to which we would, most likely, never return. On the street, it was difficult to imagine that such other spaces existed between the broad shopfronts, or that companies on the street might be in any danger of insolvency at all, such was the scale of consumption in the surrounding shops. And yet, after most of the shops had shut, looking in through closed doors, the resonance of the doors in Cheese [a play] prompted questions of the viability of companies and the risks for those that worked the other side of each door. Turning from ‘found’ doors in Oxford Street to carefully crafted, bespoke doors on the stage of Shakespeare’s Globe, the answer to the question posed above about the production of Richard II is, in one sense, fairly simple. No production needs 14 doors. But as another inhabitant of the Globe might suggest, “O, reason not the need” (King Lear, II.ii.430).3 Perhaps the question is not precisely the right one: it is not so much a matter of needing a certain number of doors, but rather a matter of what happens when there are 14 (or ten, or two) doors? What material effect does the presence of a door have on performance? Those familiar with the history of the new Globe theatre, and the scholarship and debates that have surrounded it over the past three decades, may well recognise such a question: as will be detailed later in this book, much has been said about whether the original Globe theatre had two or three doors at stage level (never mind five on each level). Such debates speak, at the very least, to the dramaturgical impact doors might have, on either specific performances or on theatrical spaces and conventions more broadly.

10  The dramaturgy of the door

This particular production of Richard II is a good example. On one hand, the doors operated as fairly conventional signifiers. They – along with the activities that took place at them – let the audience know where in the world of the play we were: inside or outside, in one room or house, or another. They also stood, in not always uncomplicated ways, as signifiers of class and status: the principal characters mostly used the flanking doors, the un-named characters mostly used the audience entrances, and the lead characters had the right of use of the central doors. An exception to this pattern, however, might help sketch the idea of the ‘dramaturgy of the door’ that we are pursuing. Early in the play – but, notably, after the pattern of aligning points of entrance with character class had been established – comes a significant scene transition, between I.iv and II.i. During I.iv, King Richard is at court and has determined to lay claim to the estate of John of Gaunt’s banished son; he then receives news that Gaunt is “grievous sick” (I.iv.53) and, we are told, very much on his death bed and has begged Richard to visit him. For the scene transition, then, King Richard and his train (in this production, about four or five other characters) need to leave the stage so the scene can move to Ely House, the residence of John of Gaunt. But Gaunt also needs to be wheeled in on a bed or wheelchair, signifying the severity of his illness, and as such, he requires the use of the central double doors for his entrance at precisely the moment that the king and his courtiers are making their exits. The king and his train, therefore, leave by one of the single doors upstage left, which produces a stark effect of undermining his status and authority, especially as their exit necessitates a kind of awkward queuing up at the door, a process which is a far cry from the tone of a ‘regal’ exit. One might argue that this effect contributes nicely to the production: a subtle way of foreshadowing the much more material and consequential undermining of the king’s authority that will come later in the play. Or one might argue that this moment, operating as a conflict of signifiers, creates a muddy and uncomfortable effect, undermining not only the character in the play, but the event of the play (or at least the scene) in itself. Our point here, and that which we wish to explore in greater detail in the following pages, is that the doors – which were created specifically for this p­ erformance – have a direct and material impact upon the action of the stage and on how the audience may receive and respond to that action. The doors, in other words, are significant components of the dramaturgical make-up of the performance. In taking up this term, ‘the dramaturgy of the door’, we are positioning the door alongside other elements of performance that constitute the dramaturgy of a particular artistic practice. We are arguing, in other words, that doors are part of the composition of performative activity much in the same way that bodies, words, or specifically delineated spaces or places might be. Where present, physically or figuratively, doors contribute to the dramaturgical weave of the performance, or the “work of actions in the performance”,

The dramaturgy of the door  11

as Eugenio Barba defined dramaturgy (Barba and Savaresse, 1991, p. 66). In more detail, Barba suggests that: The word ‘text’, before referring to a written or spoken, printed or manuscripted text, meant ‘a weaving together’. In this sense, there is no performance which does not have ‘text’. That which concerns the text (the weave) of the performance can be defined as ‘dramaturgy’, that is, drama-ergon, the ‘work of the actions’ in the performance. (ibid.) In the first place, Barba’s definition helps locate the idea of dramaturgy beyond the realm (and dominance) of what we might conventionally understand as ‘the text’ – that is, the scripted play text, the piece of dramatic literature. As will become evident in the pages that follow, our interest is in doors as they occur and operate in a range of artistic practices; later in this chapter, we will mark out some of the parameters of that range, but what is crucial here is that our sense of dramaturgy is not burdened by an exclusive association with ‘plays’, but is instead a more expansive means of understanding the ways in which ‘performance’, broadly construed, comes into being.4 This desire to maintain some attentiveness to performance practice has its roots in the project’s genesis. The current book began life as a funded research project, running between April 2014 and March 2015.5 The project comprised a one-day symposium and two four-day laboratories: one on doors on stage, and one on doors in performances of place. We are not positioning this book as a collection of findings from that project, nor are we laying claim to practice-­ as-research as a central methodology; our thinking and our approaches have expanded since then. But it is important to mark here, at the outset, the predominantly practice-led developmental stages of the research; this is partly because we refer to some of the work undertaken in those stages as the book progresses (most notably, but not exclusively, in Chapter 2, when Stuart uses the laboratory on doors in everyday performance as a key case study), and more broadly because the conceptual and practical underpinnings of that work inevitably haunt the analyses in these pages. Indeed, it is from those underpinnings that the idea of doors participating in a dramaturgical weave of actions emerged. Our interest in arts and architecture practice, in specific doors, in understanding doors as a place, an object and a threshold led us to invite colleagues in the project and the field to offer contributions to our photo essay. Chris Romer-Lee, an architect, selected a painting, Interior (1914), by Vilhelm Hammershøi (see Figure 00.9). The title appears to underplay the depth of the interior, the multiple interiors, one leading off from another. In a text accompanying the image, Chris writes: It wasn’t until art school when I encountered Vilhelm Hammershøi’s paintings that I began to think more specifically about the door as a powerful device in architecture. The hanging of a door determines the exact transition from one space to the next but also how the spaces within are encountered. I often reflect on this & Hammershøi’s paintings when designing.

12  The dramaturgy of the door

In the text that accompanies his image (Figure 00.15), Mike Pearson writes: Our front door: French Gothic – in rock-faced Pennant Sandstone with Bathstone liners and patterned tiles; favoured style of William Burges, preferred architect of the 3rd Marquess of Bute. On their Cardiff land, the Butes offered leases to speculative builders, whilst maintaining exclusive control of materials and layouts. The result: a robust, terraced cityscape that escaped demolition thanks to the Leasehold Reform Act (1967). Portal into reflections on fabric, design, planning, civic history, political intervention, contemporary archaeology… (Mike Pearson, 2018) Their images and reflections situate doors as being central to understandings of architecture and performance practices. The two images sit in interesting relation depicting, in one, internal doors and, in the other, a door that is viewed externally (but which also, we assume, has an interior). Doors speak to ways that things are done, be that entering a room or building a section of a city. Doors become interesting as forms, as parts of buildings and environments, as mobile, as embodied, as inspiration, as a tool of politics, planning, structuring the world – and more. These images, and responses to images, return us directly to the idea of the ‘weave’. In addressing doors in and as performance, we want to suggest here that the door often stands as a significant part of such a performative weave: as one of the actions, where those actions may be layered, complex, and where the detail of the actions may not be easily read from the material forms alone. Doors, despite our interest in material forms, might be difficult to account for without varying approaches in order to determine, in Barba’s terms, their ‘actions’. How is a door an ‘action’? For Barba, In a performance, actions (that is, all that which has to do with the dramaturgy) are not only what is said and done, but also the sounds, the lights and the changes in space […] The objects used in the performance are also actions. They are transformed, they acquire different meanings and different emotive colourations. All the relationships, all the interactions between the characters or between the characters and the lights, the sounds and the space, are actions. Everything that works directly on the spectators’ attention, on their understanding, their emotions, their kinaesthesia, is an action. (Barba and Savaresse, 1991, p. 66) That transformation is affected by virtue of these actions being in the weave, by them working together. As Barba suggests, “[w]hat is important is to observe that the actions come into play only when they are woven together, when they become texture: ‘text’” (Barba and Savaresse, 1991, p. 66). What is especially illuminating about Barba’s sense here is the way in which he ­a llows objects – things which might otherwise seem static, inanimate, without

The dramaturgy of the door  13

agency – to be active.6 As we will detail shortly, one of our key understandings of doors plays upon this notion of the door as object, but only insofar as it is simultaneously object, place, and threshold, all in dynamic tension with one another.7 Such an understanding implies a few key things: first, that doors are not fixed and static entities, but are active and affective. Change occurs over the course of interaction, of performance. Second, that such change is of the order of transformation. This is a key point which will surface throughout this book: especially in a performative context, doors change that which comes into contact with them. They transform places and spaces, bodies, conversations, even our sense of time. In turn, doors are also themselves transformed by these things. A door is activated by a body (perhaps obviously), but, as Barba would suggest, also by a light, a sound, a word or words, or the ­simple – if marked – passing of time. Through such actions, doors are practised, worked, worn, in ways that will begin to mark and alter their physical form. To posit a dramaturgy of the door, therefore, acknowledges that the door is more than a simple, static object, more than a functional means of entry/exit; it comprises material forms, practices, memories and experiences, divisions of place, restrictions and facilitations of freedom, and more. In other words, thinking of doors in terms of dramaturgy highlights the way(s) in which they partake in the woven fabric of performance, and the ways in which such participation can often engender the processes of transformation that are so frequently a fundamental part of performance. As we noted in taking up dramaturgy as a term, we are interested in understanding the significance of the door across a range of artistic projects. In the following chapters, we address the performance of the door in projects that take place on stage, in a gallery, and in domestic dwellings, and those that may be understood as ‘installation’, ‘performance’, ‘theatre’, or more openly as ‘artistic practice’. We consider works that reflect on a particular place, and/ or objects from a place, are in some way autobiographical or that present a version of an existing play text. In part, this selection of artworks is practical; we each bring experience of writing on different areas of artistic practice. However, more fundamentally, it also speaks to our broader sense that it is productive to attend to the operation of a specific element of arts practice in varying projects and kinds of practice. Such work enables us to reflect on connections and contradictions of the door in performance, to escape separations that can sometimes be drawn between differing types of arts practice, and to triangulate our understanding of doors in performance by researching multiple and often markedly different activities. While recognising the distinctions between these case studies, we reflect on each one in terms of performance. This is, similarly, partly practical, as we write from and to the field of theatre and performance. Yet, it is also to emphasise the live, sensed experience of a door in or as artistic practice. In focusing on the door in performance, we seek to contribute to the growing body of writing on performance, principally by scholars in the arts, particularly

14  The dramaturgy of the door

theatre and performance. Such research is wide-ranging, and researchers bring multiple perspectives to a range of practices, which may include obviously artistic practice but also extend to researching practices of everyday life as forms of performance.8 In the projects here, we focus on work by artists, and the ways in which they practise doors in their work. In further work, there may well be a case for research on the significance of doors beyond arts practice on theories of performance. If the scope of performance activity we consider establishes one set of parameters, another set is determined by the scope of doors themselves. The old joke goes something like this: ‘When is a door not a door? When it’s ajar.’ In determining the actual entities that we would examine, we have had to ask and re-ask that question (thankfully without always resorting to that particular punchline as an answer). Were we, for example, wanting to include things like car doors, or (in the familiar spaces of theatre performance) trap doors in our investigations? What about ‘door-like’ things, or those entities that may serve the function of a door (such as a tapestry or curtain), or what about sliding doors? Where do doors that people do not fully traverse – cupboard doors, wardrobe doors, and so on – come into play?9 The brief answer to these questions is that our current study is not intending to offer a survey of doors in all their varying types (both in everyday usage and in performance). Rather than thinking in terms of type or kind, our interest lies primarily in the materiality of doors, both in terms of the door as a material entity in its own right, and in terms of the material effect that that entity might have on performance. The materiality of the door, therefore, emerges as a key trope in tracing the way(s) doors occur and operate in performance.10 This does not mean that a door need always be visible – as the discussion of Macbeth will demonstrate in Chapter 3, for example, a door may be audibly material. But it does mean that the scope of this project does not usually take in figurative or metaphorical doors, or doors as they might exist as a ‘theme’, in a literary sense. More significantly, it means that we need to address the overlap between doors and doorways – this issue will become particularly important shortly, when we discuss, borrowing from Pierre von Meiss, the ‘tripleness’ of doors, in that they are places, objects, and thresholds at once. Finally, it is worth noting that our focus does include, at points, doors which are ‘connected’ to performance – that is, the stage door, for example, or the doors that audiences pass through in order to partake in performance and which may impact on that performance. Gay McAuley makes a valuable point in this respect in discussing the doors to the theatre at St. Quentin en Yvelines. She notes the monumentality of the building […] the windows and doors along the front of the building must be over thirty feet high, and, although the door that people actually use to gain access to the building is normal height, it is placed off to one side, which rather gives one the impression

The dramaturgy of the door  15

of using the tradesman’s entrance. The doors within the theatre are also extremely high, and I was reminded of Henri Lefebvre’s observation that “verticality and great height have ever been the spatial expression of potentially violent power”. (1999, p. 53) During the course of this discussion, McAuley also notes how such architectural scale, in direct relation to the human body, can imply a marked power relationship. For “the individual theatregoer”, she notes, “the experience of climbing a huge flight of steps or entering the building through a massive doorway may be rather a reminder of the individual’s lack of power” (1999, p. 52). Here, she looks to Edward Casey, who notes a “disparity in scale” between human bodies and not only buildings, but the openings or apertures into buildings (ibid.). Such disparity, for McAuley and Casey, serves as an enactment of certain kind of power and control. While we agree, what seems prevalent to us here is a sense of the material quality of the doors at hand, and the way(s) in which doors can ‘speak’ to something of a bodily engagement, a tactility, an encounter with the material world. This is perhaps good ground on which to turn to some of the key critical perspectives which underpin this book, beginning with that sense of material culture we have just been discussing, alongside an architectural perspective that has underscored for us not only that very materiality, but also the importance of considering the door as an aspect of everyday, lived experience. As we discuss in more detail in Chapter 2 (previously published in Andrews 2017), doors have received considerable attention in practices and theories of architecture. We are interested in the ways in which architects understand doors and how this might inform understandings of doors in performance and, we hope, begin a conversation between performance and architecture on the dramaturgy of the door. For the architecture theorist, Pierre von Meiss, doors comprise one of several thresholds in architecture. As threshold, the door enables one to cross from one place to another (2013, p. 215). Additionally, Meiss contends that a door comprises both a place and an object, and he also finds that thresholds “have three roles that they assume to varying degrees” (p. 215). In the case of the door, these are the “utilitarian” role of allowing passage, the “protective” role of controlling passage, and the “welcoming” role of making “meaningful passage” (pp. 215–216). Meiss’s reading of the door through multiple forms and roles is particularly exciting in terms of performance. As Cathy Turner observes, theatre “tends towards ambivalence, instability, contradiction or paradox” (2015, Kindle Loc 3947). To engage with the door is to engage with conflicting places, forms and with the worlds either side. This said, little has been written on the door in theories of arts practice, particularly performance, which we address in more detail below, and in Chapter 2. By attending to material doors and practices of engaging with these doors in specific projects, we focus on the

16  The dramaturgy of the door

complexity of practising the door in artistic projects. In so doing, we attend to the instabilities, the difficulties, the multiplicities of the door as a form, and the implications of working with a form that is multiple and, dramaturgically, particularly and powerfully active in performance. There is increasing interest in intersections of artistic practice and architecture. This can involve specific instances of collaboration between artists and architects, and work within a single company or organisation. Writing on art and architecture, Jane Rendell reflects on projects emerging from each discipline that challenge the conventional boundaries of both (2008). In architecture, the blurring or extending of boundaries is particularly ­evident in the work of Diller Scofidio + Renfro (DS+R), based in New York. DS+R has created a series of artistic works that construct or intervene in particular places, often through technology. Notably, in Blur Building (Switzerland, 2002), DS+R constructed “an architecture of atmosphere – a fog mass resulting from natural and manmade forces” (Diller Scofidio + Renfro, 2002). Blur Building both extended understandings of architecture, and created an installation in which those who immersed themselves in the fog were able to encounter and experience a reimagined natural form. This blurring of disciplines was notably marked in 2015, when Assemble, an architecture collective, won the Turner Prize (UK). Assemble work across art, design, and architecture, and focus particularly on engaging communities in design processes. The Turner Prize was awarded for a project in Granby Four Streets in Toxteth, Liverpool, in which Assemble worked with Granby Four Streets Community Land Trust to renovate houses and create a community workshop. The award of a significant art prize to architects is a compelling sign that categories are shifting, particularly in terms of acts of creating or intervening into existing places. Writing on architecture and performance, Juliet Rufford offers “a study of each discipline through the conceptual framework of its ‘other’” (2014, p. 86). She reflects particularly on Heiner Goebbels’s Stifters Dinge (trans: Stifter’s Things, Lausanne, Switzerland, 2007), based on the life and work of Adalbert Stifter. Goebbels created a “site-specific performance installation” (Rufford, 2014, p. 78), ­comprising technological effects, including a set that, for Andrew Clements, “inches menacingly towards the audience” but involved no performers (2012). The ‘work’ existed as a performance for a seated audience, and in a tour, with the effect that spectators experienced the project in multiple forms. Similarly, and in terms that extend to dramaturgy, Cathy Turner focuses on “the conceptualisation and production of space in the theatre event” (2015, Kindle Loc 164). In so doing, she distinguishes her work from that which might analyse the design of theatre buildings. Turner is interested in architecture and dramaturgy as modes of construction: one of making buildings, the other of making events – and the contribution of dramaturgy to “attempts at building in the twentieth century and beyond”, and to constructing worlds

The dramaturgy of the door  17

in performance that reveal the “new possibilities” of “reinvented” approaches to place (2015, Kindle Loc 3948, 3961).11 In conceiving of the door through performance in this book, we are interested in understanding doors and, by extension, architecture, and, in Turner’s terms, the ‘possibilities’ for practising alternate worlds. Chapter 2, for instance, recognises established interest in ‘elements of architecture’, notably in work by Pierre von Meiss and Rem Koolhaas. The chapter, and the preceding publication, find that ‘elements of architecture’ have not been a significant part of debates on performance and place, specifically performance and architecture in writing in the arts. There, we consider the significance of practising the door as an initial step in a more substantial project of reflecting on the ways in which artists might practise elements of architecture. Where that chapter focuses on doors that pre-existed their use by artists in performance or installation, in the book as a whole we take a broader perspective, opening up discussion on the ways in which artists find, make or remake doors and practise these as critical ‘elements’ in specific performance projects. If the door has a visible presence in the study of architecture and design, it is notably less visible in the study of theatre and performance. A few specific exceptions require mention: there is some interest in the door in scenography and, as suggested earlier, as a part of the critical intersections between performance and architecture. Of particular note here is the work of Arnold Aronson. As will become evident in the following pages, Aronson made significant strides in positioning doors as crucial elements of the history, practice, and philosophy of performance scenography. In brief, he posits that doors might be thought of as “the most profound technological and scenographic development in the history of theatre” (2004, p. 332). He crystalises this position in his 2004 article, “Their Entrances and Their Exits: Getting a Handle on Doors”, and that perspective permeates his subsequent collection of essays, Looking Into the Abyss (2005).12 For Aronson, the introduction of doors to Classical Greek theatre presented “practical implications [with] changes to the structure and rhythm of the drama”, but also “profound implications on a metaphoric, symbolic, and philosophical level” (2004, p. 332). These implications, practical, philosophical, and those drawn from critical thinking are precisely what we wish to further understand in this book. In addition to Aronson’s contributions, Gay McAuley’s work, as noted above, stands out as an instance of paying attention to doors during the swell of interest in theorising spatiality and space in performance that characterised much of the 1990s and 2000s.13 For McAuley, doors are one aspect of the ways in which performance practices are materialised in space and place. A more focused version of the same idea might be found, for example, in the swell of interest in stage architecture that surrounded the advent of the new Globe Theatre, on the South Bank (again, in the 1990s and 2000s). As we

18  The dramaturgy of the door

will detail in Chapter 3, Shakespeare studies in particular saw, during this time, a considerable rise in work debating the number and functions of doors in the original two Globe theatres of the early seventeenth century. Here, the interests of archaeology, spatial theory, architecture, urban planning, theatre (and literary) history, and contemporary performance all overlapped and have become ‘written’ on this particular site in the city itself. Doors, of course, comprise only one aspect of this multivalent writing, but the studies of the number and nature of doors on stage, alongside the efforts to create both antiquarian and modern access to that stage (a contemporary foyer giving way to authentically reproduced doors to the theatre building itself ) speak to the significance of doors in all the overlapping interests noted above. On balance, then, while there has been notable attention paid to doors in various critical pursuits, that attention can be considerably developed in terms of theatre and performance theory, and we might echo here Aronson’s sense of the way(s) doors seem positioned in the perception of performance watchers/auditors: “Our stages, our movies, our television shows, depict rooms with doors; characters come and go, opening and closing doors, and yet we rarely notice unless the action is intended to draw attention to itself ” (2004, p. 331). Surely, there is scope – and, we would argue, necessity – to expand our attention to and understanding of this almost ever-present element of performance. Our speaking of the door here as an ‘element’ of performance is purposeful: at the start of this chapter, we listed three key questions that anchor our project, the third of which was: In what ways do some of the basic elements of performance practice – particularly place, text, body, audience, and time – illuminate our understanding of doors in theatre and performance, and, conversely, how does a study of doors inform and perhaps expand our understanding of those elements? As we will detail shortly, this question helped to shape the focus and in some measure the structure of the book, in the sense that we initially imagined each chapter as an enquiry into the relationship between doors and one of these core elements. But before describing how our sense of that structure – and thereby the points of focus for each chapter – has evolved into its current state, the question above begs some explication on the very notion of ‘core elements of performance practice’. While debates are certainly ongoing about what constitutes theatre and performance, and even if it is appropriate to think in terms of set definitions or fundamental elements for these art forms, our premise here is that the five elements listed above play a significant part in most of the activity that would today be considered under the rubric of theatre and performance. As above – with our comments on performance

The dramaturgy of the door  19

itself and on the scope of doors to which this project attends – our aim in listing, and utilising as a starting ground, ‘core elements’ of performance is not to nail down an absolute and unchanging definition of the art forms; rather, it is to recognise that they provide a point of departure, by which we might begin to attend to a range of arts practices. To engage, for instance, in any of the performances that serve as examples in the following pages, is to partake in an embodied experience. Similarly, such engagement will usually involve an encounter with specified place(s), delineated time(s), audiences, and text(s). One may detect in all of this a certain danger, an edging toward essentialism, or the spectre of a phenomenological approach to our study (which many critics may still count as virtually synonymous with essentialism). And while it would be inaccurate to claim that phenomenology is the methodology we adopt in the book, this particular aspect of the book – the look to core elements as a starting point – does indeed have its roots in performance phenomenology. We have in mind here an argument of Bruce Wilshire’s, in his exploration of the relationship between theatre and metaphor. Wilshire states that “phenomenological methods, if employed sufficiently flexibly and imaginatively, can disclose essential characteristics of theatre art, that is, characteristics without which the event would not be theatre art” (1982, p. 15). As noted earlier, in the context of our current project, we are of course expanding Wilshire’s use of ‘theatre art’ to a broad bandwidth of work that we find it productive to consider in terms of theatre and performance, but the principle Wilshire expresses remains salient. One might identify certain characteristics – or core elements – of performance activity without which the event might reasonably be counted as something other than performance activity. Wilshire goes on to acknowledge that such ‘essential characteristics’ are probably very broad and very few; he is also writing, of course, on the cusp of a critical age which saw a strong move away from any talk of essentialism, ‘cores’, or ‘universal truths’. And while the lessons of that age and the caution against the “terrors of essentialism” (as Jean-Francois Lyotard phrased it, in conjunction with his postmodern “war on totality”)14 should not go ignored, recent decades have also seen a resurgence in the search for what phenomenologists often call fundamental structures of experience, particularly in the field of theatre and performance scholarship. In introducing their volume on phenomenology and performance, for instance, Bleeker, Sherman and Nedelkopoulou argue that “phenomenology speaks to fundamental concerns of performance making, starting with questions about how audiences encounter performance” (2015, p. 4). Similarly, Stuart Grant (with reference to Elizabeth Hart) notes how the increasing use of phenomenology in theatre and performance studies in the past decade is directly tied to the increasing interest on the part of critics and scholars in the materiality of the basic things of performance. He cites Hart’s observation that “to reclaim the materiality of props, lighting, stage space, costumes, and of course the human body

20  The dramaturgy of the door

itself … theorists and practitioners of theatre have increasingly turned to phenomenology” (Grant, 2019, p.34). Grant then goes on to describe in contemporary critical culture a strong and continuing – and phenomenologically inflected – “concern with the materiality of performance, with exploring and expounding the experience of the performer and the audience member, with bodies in time and places” (ibid.). Such a concern has strong resonance with our project here, which, as noted earlier, pays particular attention to the materiality of doors, and their interactions with other material elements of performance. Proceeding, then, from a starting point of identifying particular elements of theatre and performance with which doors may interact and be mutually informative, we found the complexities and the degrees of overlap between such elements at once fascinating and frustrating. That overlap is born out in the chapters that follow, wherein it becomes impossible – or at least unwise – to speak of time, for example, without also speaking of space and place. Perhaps most notably, in Chapter 4, we began with the task of investigating how doors and performing bodies interact, and this led to an exploration of the use of stage space to frame bodies (on one hand), and of the ways in which bodies inhabit specific environments and ecosystems such as the desert (on the other). The trajectory of the book, then, and the way it intersects with these foundational ‘core elements’, is something like a journey through multiple doors. We follow this current chapter by picking up, in a way, where Doors Remembered left off: with an exploration of doors as they contribute to performances of home. In its broadest construction, we are interested here in the relationship between doors and place(s). How, we ask, do artists make sense of the doors to – and within – dwellings, how do they practise these doors to articulate and reflect on relationships between a dwelling and the street on which it is situated? Chapter 3 then turns to Macbeth to work through some of the ways we might understand the relationship between doors and the play text. This involves an admittedly limited usage of that term ‘text’; it also, as the chapter makes evident, speaks to doors as occupying a particular role in the spatial composition of theatrical activity, but similarly looks forward to the end of the book in suggesting that doors stand as temporal as well as spatial phenomena. In Chapter 4, we shift both the focus of study and our approach to co-­ writing; Chapters 2 and 3 were each written more or less independently, with Stuart speaking to his expertise on place and performance in Chapter 2, and Matt working through his specialism on Shakespearean dramaturgy for Chapter 3. We were also eager, however, to bring our individual perspectives to bear on the same topic: what would Stuart make of the relationship between doors and bodies, and how would that compare to the way Matt would approach the same question? Chapter 4, then, is loosely centred upon this question of the interaction between the door and the body, but for Matt,

The dramaturgy of the door  21

this entailed a return to the world of the ‘play’ and the stage, in this case the dramaturgy of Pinter rather than Shakespeare. The question of embodiment led to one of how doors frame bodies, and how they might contribute to a ‘movement’ between material presence and material absence, especially where the body is concerned. As above, this inevitably overlaps with other elements, most notably (again) place and text. For Stuart, the question of the body appeared as a question of bodies in specific environments, and so he looks to one of the most iconic and extreme environments, the desert. ­Chapter 4, then, traces the role of the door on stage as it frames the performing body, and then, in a very specific ecosystem, as it houses, protects, and in many ways defines the body. For the final two core chapters, we again each approach a single elemental starting point. In Chapter 5, Stuart addresses the question of the door and the audience, looking first at the experience of being led, as a small group of spectators, to events in rooms in Battersea Arts Centre (London) and a gallery installation in Toronto, in which spectators were able to walk around a reconstruction of housing in Beijing. In each case Stuart asks what it means for spectators to be situated with others (whether actual or imagined) at doors in a city. Finally, in Chapter 6, Matt considers the ways that doors contribute to the unique temporality of the theatre. Looking back to Macbeth, but also moving into the world of Chekhovian dramaturgy, this chapter explores the effect that doors have on rhythm and pace, on what we might call the framing or suspension of time, and on the overall temporal character of a scripted scene on stage. Across all of these chapters, our case studies and the points of focus we identify in them are necessarily limited; again, the book is not designed as a comprehensive study of all doors in all conventions of theatre and performance. Rather, it is structured to offer a kind of cross-section of how doors operate in various modes of performance, and the questions that emerge when we begin to consider these doors in terms of key elements of performance. Approaching the topic in this fashion, we hope, allows for both detailed and careful studies of very specific instances of performance, and for a sense of scope and breadth in contributions to theories of theatre and performance. It also allows for our individual voices to come forward at times, and for the discourse about doors in performance to be articulated precisely as that: as discourse, and dialogue. To this end, we close the book in a fashion that echoes and furthers the opening: our conclusion is intended to be less a summary of key, proven ‘findings’, and more a gesture toward the continuation of the dialogue we hope this book begins. For this concluding chapter, we speak to and across each other’s work and perspectives, offering responses to the ideas presented in the body of the book. These responses are prompted both by the ‘finished’ chapters – whereby, for example, Matt will carry forward ideas about doors in the desert – and also by our very early work on the topic, hearkening back to the practice-based research project mentioned

22  The dramaturgy of the door

earlier, well before the book was begun. Here, our aim is to offer a way to further the discourse, partly by looking forward, and partly by returning to the origins of the project. Thinking through the pieces of this book, the ways they came into being, and our methods of working (both in terms of critical approaches to a topic and in terms of processes of writing and co-writing), signals the importance of identifying some of the specific concerns and interests – both critical and performative – that are implicit in our work. These are individual interests that drive the ways each of us approach much of our work, both in this project on doors and elsewhere. In developing the book, we would often speak together of this in terms of the ideas, ideology, and mindsets that ‘lurk beneath the surface’ of our writing, our debating, our logic and theorising. To bring some of those latent mindsets closer to the surface, we want to temporarily switch pronouns here, and write from the singular first-person perspective rather than the plural. As the preceding few paragraphs suggest, a great majority of Matt’s approach to the study of theatre and performance is firmly grounded in phenomenology. This is not so for Stuart – hence the important note above that the book itself is not written or offered as a ‘phenomenology of the door’. However, my (Matt’s) own approach to the world of theatre and performance makes it difficult for my contributions to our work to avoid looking rather like a phenomenology of doors. I have in mind here what has become something of a habitual desire on my part to pursue elementary questions about whatever field of study I currently occupy.15 As noted above, a phenomenologist might call this a quest for fundamental structures of experience – how we encounter and experience doors in performance, for example – and, as I write about elsewhere, a phenomenologist might identify my approach as being grounded in processes of Husserlian reduction. But while both might accurately characterise my frame of mind when I look at doors in performance, it would be overstating the case to suggest that I am employing a full, intentional, or conscious phenomenological method in this current project. Two other interlinked concerns haunt much of my work, and therefore haunt this book as well. One of these has been touched on already, and it is a concern Stuart and I share: a deep interest in the experience of material things, especially within performance. My engagement with the question of materiality has often been characterised, though, by a desire to understand the material in relation to its opposite (or shadow), the immaterial. I understand theatre and performance as particularly potent environments for a kind of transfer or shuttling between the material and the immaterial. How that happens, to what degree, and to what effect are questions that routinely occupy my scholarship. The second involves another dichotomy, that between presence and a­ bsence. One might think readily of a ‘character’ like Godot here: an extraordinarily present absence. Or, in broader terms, one might think of the ways in which

The dramaturgy of the door  23

certain conventions of theatricality (such as realism and naturalism) train us to ‘look past’ what is overtly right in front of us – a footlight, a painted door on a wall – and see instead what isn’t actually there: the sunlight, or a ‘real’ door. These material presences become, in such cultural habits, profoundly absent. Both these concerns will become apparent in the following pages as I try to unpack the ways in which doors, within those potent environments of theatre and performance, aid in the absenting of a presence, or in the making material of an immaterial entity. Finally, it feels important to note that for this project especially, I carry with me much of its earlier manifestations. When we began this work – which, as noted earlier, had its genesis not initially as a book project, but as a funded, practice-based research project – we identified a series of things that doors do in performance. We hypothesised that doors engage in processes of transformation, that they both conceal and reveal, that they invite and exclude, and that they separate and conjoin. A focus on the transformative capabilities of doors has emerged as perhaps the most prescient for me as the work has developed, but all of my thinking about doors in performance is still shaped in part by the dichotomous activities listed above, and each of them may be waiting around various corners of this book. For Stuart, this work offered a chance to reflect on the ways in which doors can construct, condition but also reveal and reduce distinctions between places. By introducing or removing a door, we may create and combine places. Alternatively, by placing a door on the point of distinction between existing places, we may begin to open up new dialogues and opportunities for passage between those places, or certainly point to the possibility of new practices of meeting or crossing. As I reflect on Border Door in Chapter 2, by placing a door on the US/Mexico border, Richard A. Lou reimagined acts of crossing that border. In terms of my interests in place, our work on the door speaks directly to my research on the ways in which artists practise home. Chapter 2 deals with two projects in domestic dwellings, one of which Matt and I developed as part of our initial project on the door. Chapter 4 looks at structures for temporary dwelling in the desert, Chapter 5 considers doors and migration from one home to another, and doors to wardrobes that inhabitants have moved from inside to outside a home. Our sense is that homes are critical sites for encounters with doors, and so the connection seems relevant as a theme within this study, but it also served to advance my broader project on thinking about performances of home. For each of us, focusing on doors has provided a compelling opportunity to advance our individual thinking about specific aspects of theatre and performance. In much of my work, I am concerned to understand the ways in which artists make sense of place. In that doors contribute to experiences and understandings of place, I was particularly intrigued to understand how artists might attend to doors in their engagement with place. This work speaks specifically to my interest in architecture, not merely of domestic dwellings,

24  The dramaturgy of the door

and our funded project on the door allowed us to reflect on doors with an architect, Chris Romer-Lee, who, in particular, drew our attention to texture as a critical term in engaging with architecture.16 At our symposium on the door, Romer-Lee spoke of the textures of different door handles. As Meiss suggests, “[o]ne rarely touches walls, and so our touching of doors becomes a critical, if not principal, mode by which we physically encounter architecture, certainly the physical limits of architecture” (2013, p. 166). Methodologically, the work spoke to my interest in working dialogically, with a colleague, and understanding the ways we each make sense of artistic practice, whether through separate or connected ideas, practices and concerns. I have long thought the grass may be greener in disciplines where collaborative projects and collaborative writing are the norm. It has been fascinating working collaboratively on this book, on being aware of very significant and fundamental connections and also, as one might expect, differences of approach. What, for instance, are the key terms of a project? What is the lie of the land? Having gone through stages of query and reflection, my sense is that we understand what matters to each other. As a result, I have become particularly interested in the possibilities that collaborative writing offers for writers to think, separately and together, in a sustained conversation, and thereby to enable each another to trace and pursue what matters in their thinking. In our case, and in working on this book, our conversation focused on the significance of particular doors. As such, we write with close attention to the doors in our world and in the projects that we discuss in the following chapters. A corollary of this collaborative working has been the fascination in the work that others do with material with which we are both concerned. While we have approached this work from different perspectives, it has been fascinating to observe the ways in which others take ideas on journeys. It seems appropriate that a book written by two people is marked by the ideas and approaches of each one. We have sought to retain indications of this joint authorship, in order to point to the possibilities this can bring to a project and the relevance of variations in alignment, in the mismatchings that we sense may be productive to those working in different areas of the arts, or indeed beyond. The project has been marked by our time spent at doors. Early on, I remember Matt showing me the view from his home in New Zealand. On his phone, brightly illuminated, the image revealed a neat slice of sea and sky; here was a view of a way of living, of being ‘inside’ while acutely aware of the world ‘outside’. What transformations are possible on such a threshold? What threshold was, in fact, here at all? The ease with which Matt had framed the view suggested he was very comfortable with the world outside his home. He spoke of sharing barbecues on the porch with his near (and only) neighbour. I wondered if he locked the door, and if the light screen door ever felt entirely closed at all. While we always understood this as a book about doors in performance, we would gesture to, try out, and talk at doors in our daily life, as if to keep

The dramaturgy of the door  25

us alert to the significance of the door, lest we miss its impact. I recall these moments here less in reverie, more to indicate a critical point that we went out of our way to take account of the significance of doors. Once we began to work practically with doors, our conversation began to shift. As we ran the two performance ‘laboratories’ mentioned earlier, each comprising a series of practical experiments and points for reflection, we asked artists to create workshops in which we, the investigators, would participate. Our intention had been to invite others to attend to doors through their existing practices, to experience and reflect on the ways in which they would gesture, try out and talk at doors. The laboratories allowed us to reflect on the action and experience of practising particular doors and, in collaboration with others, finding points of perspective on doors and ways of reflecting on the effects of such work. Some of that thinking finds its way here, notably in Chapter 2. At one point, between workshops, Lee Miller (whom we had commissioned to run a workshop, with Bob Whalley) asked if their work was okay, if the workshops were doing what Matt and I had wanted. At that stage, in what was very exploratory work, we had been keen to retain an open brief, our only concern being that we sought to reveal things that we had discovered during the laboratory. What became apparent there was the scale of the work, and that processes of enquiry into the door were likely to be far longer, and more complex than we had initially anticipated. In bringing this material together, we escaped after New Year, two years running, to a small converted barn on the Isle of Wight. We sat typing in a kitchen/sitting room (in fact, I am writing this now), while looking out at the fairly new French windows we identify in the introduction. This year, we know the family who own the barn a little better, we are more familiar with the door, with the view onto which it opens. We’ve learned the way out under an arch, along to a gate (which, a sign instructs us, must be kept closed) and down unlit lanes to a local pub. This, our second year here, we are putting ideas in place, part crafting, part laying out the fabric of the book. At this point, we are at risk of writing doors as if we know them entirely, of making arguments as if they can be neatly latched and locked top and bottom. Yet, we are also becoming aware of other doors here, the stable door that we have never used, the hallway door that is ajar but we have never closed. Earlier, while it was still light, we paused in conversation to watch a pheasant walk up to and past the French windows. In that moment, we became aware of the fragility of the door, the ways in which the world can press in on interior worlds for a time. While we have begun to make some conclusions on the door, which we will share in the following chapters, we are acutely aware that these are partial, the signs of only having lived with close attention to the door for a few short years. Architecture is familiar, whether it has long been known to us, in which we know our way in the dark, or whether we are discovering for the first time. The familiarity of architecture requires a long process of attention, enquiry and reflection – as Miller and Whalley recognised and as we have come to understand in our continuing study.

26  The dramaturgy of the door

We wonder next year, when this book will be done, how we will maintain our practical critical attention to the door, whether awareness of, and enquiry into, the door will have become a familiar part of our experience of architecture. We wonder about habitual awareness of doors, about those whose lives and work make them acutely attentive to doors and how such sustained attention might transform one’s sense of the world. The project has been marked by our time at doors, and the writing herein is of course marked by the pronoun ‘our’ (to which we have now returned). As will be evident by now, the processes of collaborative writing we have undertaken come in a variety of forms. At times – such as throughout most of this chapter, or the Closings – we write ‘together’ in the sense that we discuss, debate, tease out, and then type, shuffle paragraphs around, and try to impose a certain logic and orderliness to what appears on the page. At other times – such as in our Openings, and parts of Chapter 4 – the writing is more individually crafted, but retains the sense of ‘we’ – the voice in these sections is ‘ours’, even if the individual words and sentences might be singularly created. And at yet other times, the voice is more singular, as is the case for the small sections in this chapter above, or for the more individuated chapters that follow (Chapters 2 and 5 for Stuart, and 3 and 6 for Matt – though we have intentionally maintained the plural ‘we’ in these chapters). This process, and these variations, seem important to mark, not only in the sense of providing clarity and information about who, precisely, is ‘speaking’ through these pages, but also because the process itself speaks to a sense of developing and unfolding much like – and possibly inextricable from – our understanding of doors in itself. That we have worked together, and how, is of course a part of the result, the content, of this book much in the way that any particular and definable methodology might be. What has been especially gratifying has been what we might call a thematic resonance between our subject matter and our working method: we have come to the door from different sides, and we have worked at, through, and apart from that threshold, and like a door itself, our work on doors both distinguishes us and brings us together.

Notes 1 Wagner’s work has primarily been with dramaturgy, text, and stage-based theatre, with areas of focus and practical experience in conventions such as Shakespearean performance and mid-twentieth-century ‘absurdism’. Both research and creative practice are often anchored in a phenomenological approach to performance. Andrews is concerned with the ways in which artists and companies practise place in art installation and performance. He is particularly interested in projects that address architecture and environment, and is currently writing a monograph on performances of home, and collaborates with Dr Patrick Duggan on Performing City Resilience (https://performingcityresilience.wordpress.com), an ongoing research project that investigates intersections between arts practice and city resilience strategy.

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2 See Chapter 5 for a discussion of ‘borrowing’ place through doors. 3 Unless otherwise noted, all references to Shakespeare’s plays in this book are from The Norton Anthology (1997). 4 As Michael Chemers introduces the topic, he suggests that “Dramaturgy is a term that refers to both the aesthetic architecture of a piece of dramatic literature (its structure, themes, goals, and conventions) and the practical philosophy of theatre practice employed to create a full performance” (2010, p. 3). For us, the emphasis is very much on the sense of practical philosophy of and critical enquiry into performance, although as will become evident, we are also interested (especially in Chapter 3) in how doors contribute to the ‘architecture’ of plays. The crucial point concerns the sense of dramaturgy as a kind of holistic apprehension of performance activity, and the ways in which we might understand the role of doors within that holistic view. For other useful approaches to dramaturgy, see Turner and Berhndt (2008) and Mary Luckhurst (2006). 5 See Andrews and Wagner (2014). 6 This sense of the active, subjective agency of objects will become increasingly important throughout the book, especially in Chapter 4, and builds upon similar existing scholarship; see especially Rayner (2006), Sofer (2003), Baudrillard (1999), Monks (2012, 2013), and McKinney (2015). 7 See Pierre von Meiss’s (2013) definition of doors, discussed in Chapter 2. 8 See, for instance, Scott Magelssen (2007) on heritage theme parks. 9 In the event, we determined to discuss both: cupboard doors in Chapter 2, wardrobe doors in Chapter 5. 10 Clearly, the scope of literature on materiality and material culture is too broad to reference fully here, but our interests may be summarised by Max Van Manen, who writes of the role of materiality in terms of “lived things”. He suggests that “[t]he existential theme of materiality may guide our reflection to ask how things are experienced with respect to the phenomenon that is being studied. […] With almost any research topic we can ask, how are ‘things’ experienced and how do the experience of things and world contribute to the essential meaning of the phenomenon” (2014, p. 307). Van Manen’s perspective is explicitly phenomenological, which is not true of our approach in this book, but in this respect his suggestion resonates strongly with our desire to understand how doors are experienced, and how the experience of the door, as a material, lived thing, contributes to our understanding of doors and their performative context. 11 See also Turner and Berhndt (2008). 12 This collection includes a chapter version of the 2004 article. 13 McAuley’s own Space in Performance (1999) remains one of the central and most influential examples of this interest, but see also Chaudhuri (1995), and Chaudhuri and Fuchs (2002), or Kobialka (1998) as significant representatives of the intersections between theatre theory, historiography, and philosophies of space. 14 See Lyotard (1992, p. 16). 15 A common introductory referent to my work, for example, is the observation by Gaston Bachelard that his phenomenology, his ‘poetics of space’, is a “microscopic phenomenology […] strictly elementary” (1964, p. xv). Bert O. States echoes this when he suggests that “the elementary problems demand the most complex consideration because the elementary is always what stands beneath its manifestations” (1994, p. 2). For States, the fact that we can never fully solve the elementary problems is precisely what makes them alluring, and necessary. 16 Chris Romer-Lee is Director and Co-founder of Studio Octopi (architects) and CEO of Thames Baths.

28  The dramaturgy of the door

References Andrews, S. (2017). “At Home with Doors: Practising Architectural Elements in Yes These Eyes Are the Windows and Between 13 and 15 Steps”, Contemporary Theatre Review, 27(4), pp. 462–480. Andrews, S., and Wagner, M. (2014). “The Door: A Practical Study of Site, Object, and Threshold in Theatre and Performance.” BA/Leverhulme Small Research Grant, SRG 2013–2014 Round. Aronson, A. (2004). “Their Entrances and Their Exits: Getting a Handle on Doors”, NTQ, 20(4), pp. 331–340. Aronson, A. (2005). Looking Into the Abyss. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press. Bachelard, G. (1964). The Poetics of Space. Trans. Maria Jolas. Boston: Beacon Press. Barba, E., and Savaresse, N. (1991). A Dictionary of Theatre Anthropology. The Secret Art of the Performer. London: Routledge. Baudrillard, J. (1999). Revenge of the Crystal: Selected Writings on the Modern Object and Its Destiny. Ed. and Trans. Paul Foss and Julian Pefanis. London: Pluto Press. Bleeker, M., Sherman, J., and Nedelkopoulou, E. (eds.) (2015). Performance and Phenomenology: Traditions and Transformations. London: Routledge. Chaudhuri, U. (1995). Staging Place: The Geography of Modern Drama. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press. Chaudhuri, U., and Fuchs, E. (eds.) (2002). Land/Scape/Theater. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Chemers, M. (2010). Ghost Light: An Introductory Handbook for Dramaturgy. Carbondale and Evansville: Southern Illinois University Press. Clements, A. (2012). “Goebbels: Stifters Dinge – Review”, The Guardian, 24 May (online). Available at: www.theguardian.com/music/2012/may/24/goebbels-stiftersdinge-cd-review (accessed: 6 January 2018). Diller Scofidio + Renfro (2002). Blur Building: Swiss Expo 2002. Available at: https:// dsrny.com/project/blur-building?index=false§ion=projects&tags=installation (accessed: 6 January 2018). FanSHEN (2013). Cheese [a play]. 29–31 Oxford Street, August–September 2013, writer Nikki Schreiber, dir: Rachel Briscoe and Dan Barnard. Grant, S. (2019 Forthcoming). “The Essential Question: So What’s Phenomenological About Performance Phenomenology?” in Grant, S., McNeilly-Renaudie, J., and Wagner, M. (eds.) Performance Phenomenology: To the Thing Itself. London: Palgrave. Kobialka, M. (ed.) (1998). Of Borders and Thresholds: Theatre History, Practice, and Theory. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Luckhurst, M. (2006). Dramaturgy: A Revolution in Theatre. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lyotard, J. (1992). The Postmodern Explained. Trans Julian Pefanis and Morgan Thomas. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Magelssen, Scott. (2007). Living History Museums: Undoing History Through Performance. Lanham, MD: The Scarecrow Press. McAuley, G. (1999). Space in Performance: Making Meaning in the Theatre. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. McKinney, J. (2015). “Vibrant Materials: The Agency of Things in the Context of Scenography”, in Bleeker, M., Sherman, J., and Nedelkopoulou, E. (eds.) Performance and Phenomenology: Traditions and Transformations. London: Routledge.

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Meiss, P. von (1990). Elements of Architecture: From Form to Place + Tectonics. Trans Theo Hakola. Lausanne: EPFL Press. Meiss, P. von (2013). Elements of Architecture: From Form to Place + Tectonics. Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge. Monks, A. (2012). “Human Remains: Acting, Objects, and Belief in Performance”, Theatre Journal, 64(3), pp. 355–371. Monks, A. (2013). “Collecting Ghosts: Actors, Anecdotes and Objects at the Theatre”, Contemporary Theatre Review, 23(2), pp. 146–152. Rayner, Alice (2006). “Presenting Objects, Presenting Things”, in Krasner, D., and Saltz, D. (eds.) Staging Philosophy: Intersections of Theater, Performance, and Philosophy. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Rendell, J. (2008). Art and Architecture: A Place Between. London and New York: I.B Tauris. Rufford, Judith (2014). Theatre and Architecture. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Shakespeare, W. (1997). The Norton Anthology. Ed. Greenblatt, S. New York: W.W. Norton and Company. Sofer, Andrew (2003). The Stage Life of Props. Ann Arbor: The University of M ­ ichigan Press. States, Bert O. (1985). Great Reckonings in Little Rooms. Berkeley: University of California Press. States, Bert O. (1994). The Pleasure of the Play. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press. Turner, C. (2015). Dramaturgy and Architecture: Theatre, Utopia and the Built Environment. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Turner, C., and Berhndt, S. (2008). Dramaturgy and Performance. Basingstoke: P ­ algrave Macmillan. Van Manen, Max. (2014). Phenomenology of Practice. Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast Press. Wilshire, B. (1982). Role Playing and Identity: The Limits of Theatre as Metaphor. Bloomington: University of Indiana Press. Woodcroft, B. (1865). Subject-Matter Index of Patents Applied for and Patents Granted: For the Year 1863. London: George Edward Eyre and William Spottiswoode.

Chapter 2

At home with doors Practising architectural elements

I distinctly remember arriving home from my first term at university.1 Having been cooped-up in a ‘study bedroom’ as autumn became winter, I remember being astonished by the experience of returning home for Christmas, of family opening the front door, and light, warmth and welcome spilling out into the night. The moment was a critical stage in that formative first journey home, in which I took in the world inside the home from outside. In the last couple of years, Matt and I have become fascinated by the ways in which artists practise doors, primarily doors in houses and homes. In this chapter, I consider two projects in which doors were critical elements, to begin to question the significance of doors in installation and performance. To varying degrees, and as we identify in the introduction, artists and curators have focused on doors in their engagements with place, whether attending to existing doors, or introducing doors into a place. In Between the Door and the Street (2013), Suzanne Lacy invited women to hold conversations on the ‘stoop’, the steps up to the doors of residential buildings, on Park Place, Brooklyn. By reworking established practices of conversation on the stoop, Lacy enabled participants to hold conversations that crossed between ‘private’ and ‘public’ realms of home and street, which spectators were invited to ­observe.2 In Border Door (1998), Richard A. Lou installed a door on the Mexico/US border. Where Lacy’s work enabled acts of engagement between places, Lou revealed the limited signs of distinction between places either side of the border. Border Door appeared incongruous in the landscape, it questioned the purpose and logic of the border, and reimagined modes of crossing. As Lou observes, the door enabled migrants to cross the border “with dignity” rather than humiliation (Lou, cited in Latorre, 2012). As we observe in the introduction, despite this interest in doors, there has been relatively little scholarly work on doors in arts practice, particularly in terms of place. This may be because doors, and other architectural forms, are so familiar that they escape attention, or so much a part of a place that it seems inappropriate to separate them out for analysis. Yet, as an established architectural element, and in the context of recent interest by architects and architecture theorists in ‘elements’, it seems important to consider the ways in which artists practise

At home with doors  31

doors in installation and performance, and how such work may enrich our understanding of performances of place and point to the possibilities of artistic practice of architectural elements. In this chapter, I address artists’ treatment of specific doors in two projects. In Yes, These Eyes are the Windows (2014), Saskia Olde Wolbers created an installation at 87 Hackford Road, London, where Vincent van Gogh had once rented a room (1873–1874). Olde Wolbers is, primarily, a video artist, who creates films of small underwater sets. Here, she constructed an installation in a full-size house, which was temporarily uninhabited and in a poor state of repair. The work was developed with Artangel, an arts commissioning agency in London, which has supported several projects in houses.3 Olde Wolbers introduced objects into rooms and speakers that played an audio work, created for the installation.4 Many of the internal doors were open and visitors spent half an hour in the house, after which time the doorbell rang to signal that they should leave. Yes, These Eyes are the Windows focused primarily on Arthur and Shirley Brown’s 60-year residence at No. 87, during which time they modernised the house throughout, only to find, in 1971, that Van Gogh had once rented a room upstairs. The installation reflected on this discovery and the ways this affected their life in the house. The discussion that follows addresses the form and position of specific doors and the ways each one marked relations between places, experiences of place and acts of crossing between places. I situate this discussion within the context of the house having fallen into disrepair. The house had been built close to the Effra, one of London’s now underground rivers, which had long threatened the structure. The Browns used their knowledge of Van Gogh’s tenancy to try and protect the house from proposed demolition. While, ultimately, the house was ‘saved’, the discovery led to considerable public interest in the house, often expressed by way of strangers knocking at the front door. The second project was part of our initial collaborative research project on the door (Andrews and Wagner, 2014). We refer here to the second of two practical ‘laboratories’, which each comprised a series of workshops. In this laboratory, we commissioned Lee Miller and Joanne ‘Bob’ Whalley to explore doors in their home in Totnes, Devon. Miller and Whalley collaborate on projects that enquire into everyday practices, and the laboratory grew from such investigations. Tasks included preparing an evening meal, being taken on a guided tour of doors, and surveying entrance doors to local houses. Workshops were interspersed with opportunities for emerging discussion, to reflect on and generate findings. Access to Miller and Whalley’s house is via a passageway, with doors at either end, which takes approximately 13 to 15 steps to walk, and which gave rise to a working title, Between 13 and 15 Steps. I am interested in knowing how these projects develop our understanding of the door in artistic engagements with place. In this work, I attend to the ways in which artists practise doors when responding to place, and enable

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spectators or participants to engage with doors in practical, embodied ways. This study develops my own broader investigations into the ways artists practise places of crossing and engage in performances of home. The two projects take quite different approaches to the door. Olde Wolbers used the front door to begin and end the installation and, variously, left interior doors open, closed and ajar. The second project was developmental and specifically premised on understanding the door through artistic engagement with a home. Doors were a distinctive part of the first piece and the core focus of the second. For each project, I discuss the material form of doors, their context and the acts and implications of practising specific doors. My intention – and our joint intention throughout this book – is to demonstrate the significance of artistic treatment of doors as an intriguing phenomenon in its own right. I am also particularly concerned to evidence the broader value of engaging critically and creatively with architectural elements, particularly the door. In discussing each project, I find that doors necessarily position people and places in a practical relationship, of varying sorts. By addressing acts at the intersection of places, we can discern particular ways in which artists understand, articulate and reimagine relations between places, the form and richness of conversation between places, the effect of one place on another and, thereby, our relation with both the place we are in and places to which we are connected. In Chapter 1, we identify considerable work in architecture theory and practice on the door.5 In 2014, as Director of the 14th International Architecture Exhibition, Rem Koolhaas focused on ‘fundamentals’, and curated the Elements of Architecture exhibition, with accompanying publication, Elements, in which the door comprised one ‘element’ (2018). In 2013, Pierre von Meiss published a substantial revision of Elements of Architecture: From Form to Place (1990), which we discuss in more detail in Chapter 1, particularly in terms of the form and function of doors. By addressing artistic practice of architectural elements, we may impact on how such elements are understood both in and beyond the arts. Writers and architects have long explored the ways in which individuals encounter architectural elements, notably doors, and how these situate people in particular relationships. Peter Kohane and Michael Hill observe that early modern architecture focused on the body, that doors and windows “could be likened to the sensory apertures of living beings”, and that these framed and “theatricalised” bodies, situating them in distinct ordering systems (2006, p. 153). As they suggest of doors and windows, Use was not defined as mere functionalism, but in terms of performance; decoration was keyed to status, of the building and its occupant, but also of the door or window within the hierarchic order of the building itself; the symmetry of fenestration contributed to the decorum of the city. (ibid.) For Kohane and Hill, the emergence of modernist architecture led to a reduction in “the theatricality of openings” (2006, p. 141). While a broad

At home with doors  33

survey, focused on European architecture, their work demonstrates the ways in which doors and windows have been used to perform and sustain systems, structures and identities. Such findings are echoed in studies of specific types of door, notably Laurent Stalder’s finding that victims caught in early revolving doors “deviated from the typical body foreseen for this machine” (cited in Azeri 2015, p. 226). Doors enable certain practices, and, while they may allow for some variation, unexpected or prohibited use can have significant consequences for body and identity. In everyday life, we engage with doors through practice and describe them through a lexicon of terms, which includes those that describe movement. Doors can ‘swing’ and ‘strike’ at a ‘plate’, incorporate parts that ‘stop’, ‘jamb’ and lock movement, and ‘stick’, creak, warp and ‘rattle’ in their frames.6 By practising a door, we become familiar with its touch, weight and idiosyncrasies, with it expanding and contracting, and with leaving it open, ajar or pushed to. We learn its fit in the frame. The ways in which we sense and practise a door resonate with phenomenological approaches to architecture, a body of work that informs much of this book. As Juhani Pallasmaa reflects, I cannot remember the appearance of the door to my grandfather’s farmhouse in my early childhood, but I do remember the resistance of its weight and the patina of its wood surface scarred by decades of use … (1996, p. 54) Pallasmaa finds his remembered experience outlasted any visual memory. Perhaps this is because the door is one of few architectural elements that moves with our touch. In recalling the sensation and movement of a door, we remember ourselves at a particular point in life, in and between places. In using doors in everyday life, we make them legible, through situated, embodied, lived practice. As Michel de Certeau observes, we can craft everyday “ways of using the constraining order” of a place to establish “a degree of plurality and creativity”, which he identifies as “an art of being in between” (1988, p. 30, emphasis in the original). We may or may not perceive a door as part of a ‘constraining order’, nor those who practise doors as necessarily ‘weak’, as in de Certeau’s discussion of strategies and tactics, but a door does impose a frame, it can constrain movement and doors are familiar forms in the maintenance of order, notably a prison cell door (ibid.). In the arts, it becomes particularly critical to understand how artists engage with a door, whether as an extension to or reimagining of everyday practices, or as evidence of strategies and tactics in play. By attending to the ways artists practise doors, we are able to chart distinct ways in which they respond to the materiality and limits of place. Further, we can reflect on what their work reveals about details of place including the framing of body and identity in specific contexts and conditions, the touch and movement of a door, actual or implied constraints to movement, and the significance of using (or not using) particular doors.

34  At home with doors

As architects and architecture theorists are reflecting on elements, it seems appropriate that, as artists and researchers, we look to the practices by which we understand and engage with these elements in the arts, particularly given established interest in place in performance. While it may seem reductive to look at elements in isolation, it also seems valuable to understand how they might inform artistic engagement with place, whether singly or in combination. On one level, such work investigates artists’ relationships with elements and, on another, allows us to open up what may prove to be previously hidden layers of detail in artistic engagements with place. Gay McAuley reflects on the significance of doors in theatre, both those in a theatre venue and doors that separate on- and off-stage worlds. She considers the significance of varying forms of doors, or “material means providing” access (1999, p. 87).7 She recognises the potential for a contrast between perceptions of doors and the places onto which they open, for instance, the promise of the world beyond a stage door and, at times, the “bleak” and “unmarked” reality (p. 67). In drawing together this variety, McAuley finds that, in the theatre, “the nature of the door articulates the relationship between the here and the beyond” (p. 87). Situating this discussion of doors within her broader study of space in theatre venues, McAuley reveals ways theatre-­ makers might address architecture as a critical constituent of performance. Her work invites us to look further at the door – an invitation we take up in this book as a whole. In this chapter, I respond by focusing on the ways in which artists practise doors, particularly those in and to a house. Doors are particularly relevant to emerging work on mobile performance and the ways artists and spectators cross between places. In theorising mooring performance, in response to work by Hannam, Sheller and Urry on moorings, I reflect on the significance of acts and places of mooring at “the intersection of land and water”, and before and after journeys (Andrews, 2015, p. 505). There are clear connections between the mooring of a boat at the intersection of land and water, and performance at a door between ‘here’ and ‘beyond’. In both cases, it is important to investigate how artists attend to objects, places, thresholds and acts of crossing, in order to understand what happens when artists or participants inhabit a crossing, or pass from one place to another. Similarly, both arts practice and analysis can begin to unpick the differences between places that connect at moorings or doors. Further, work on moorings suggests that artists and researchers can productively chart the ways in which acts, objects and places of crossing, whether at moorings or doors, define places that connect for a time. Research and practice on moorings and performance points to the impact of an artist’s actions on “limits” between places, a term used by Meiss in theorising architecture (2013, p. 215). In this context, while doors connect, they also separate. Where doors are locked, blocked up, abandoned, unused or disused, the places beyond become, variously, other, separate, excluded, or forgotten. Such separation risks creating a form of “islandisation” in which “continuous natural habitats” are “fragmented into disjunctive pieces”, thereby reducing biodiversity (Diamond,

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1975, p. 130). By closing doors or restricting access, individuals, whether artists or not, may contribute to and may even construct difference where previously none may have existed, with the effect that some excluded places become unsustainable in critical ways. In such cases, a door does not merely separate worlds but leaves them fragmented and diminished. For Jane Jacobs, as noted earlier, the connection between house and street is vital to the life of cities, but may be similarly critical to the life of other contexts and communities. In investigating the ways artists practise doors in houses, I am acutely aware of this broader context in which practices at doors impact on surrounding environments and on those who engage with these environments. The two projects I discuss here both took place in domestic dwellings, one owned but empty, one owned and inhabited. Kohane and Hill suggest that, “[w]ith regard to doors, there are two sorts of movement, namely the entry into the building and then circulation within it” (2006, p. 142). Consequently, I focus on acts at entrance doors, before considering those of circulation at two additional doors in each project. By addressing artistic practice of doors in each work, I set out how these artists treated and practised specific doors, addressed doors as points of intersection between places, and, thereby, conceived of and contributed to relationships between adjoining worlds.

Figure 2.1  S pectators at 87 Hackford Road, London, June 2014 Photo credit: Stuart Andrews

36  At home with doors

Yes, These Eyes are the Windows It is almost 8.30 pm on a warm June evening in 2014. In ones and twos, six spectators gather outside 87 Hackford Road, London, a Georgian terraced house that has seen better days (see Figure 2.1). Paint peels from the walls and the garden has a wild air. The brown front door, scuffed in places, has old, brass fittings: house number, doorknob, letterbox, and two holes from which a door-knocker may have been removed. Both of its two original glass panes have been boarded up from inside, and the glass in one is missing. To the other, a reinforced glass pane, a printed sheet of paper has been taped. The words read: You are invited. Ring the doorbell once at your allotted time. Enter together. Close the door behind you. We will begin. My voice and my light will guide you through the house. I will guide you up through my floors. Others will be present. But follow me. After our conversation is over you are free to wander through my rooms. When the doorbell goes new visitors will be waiting. All leave together. Go on your way. Spectators were invited inside, as if by the house itself. For Artangel, “the house [was] narrating its own story of the search for elusive traces of the ­famous artist” (Artangel website for Yes, These Eyes, Image 5 of 12). This was one of a number of works in which artists have created installations or performances that reimagine architecture, sometimes involving performers, ­sometimes not.8 It seems particularly critical to reflect on the door in this seam of work that so directly focuses on architecture and in which any ­human actions often constitute a relatively minor, or obscured part in an event. In this case, the process of reimagining began at the front door. Front doors have long been understood as critical points of transition. As Céline Rosselin notes, “the threshold of the front door, being between the private and the public space, is of special importance” (2006, Kindle Loc 687). Rosselin identifies considerable anthropological interest in thresholds, notably by Arnold Van Gennep, who discusses thresholds in terms of time and specific stages of life (1960, pp. 188–189). While these may seem far removed from the apparent ordinariness of a door, Van Gennep identifies doors, particularly entrance doors, as significant thresholds, which differ ­according to building type. For Van Gennep,

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the door is the boundary between the foreign and domestic worlds in the case of an ordinary dwelling, between the profane and sacred worlds in the case of a temple. Therefore, to cross the threshold is to unite oneself with a new world. (1960, p. 20) We can extend Van Gennep’s approach to address specific doors in particular buildings, the conditions and context in which these doors operate as thresholds, and the practices that take place at those doors. However, by opening the front door of No. 87, it was difficult to discern features of the ‘new world’ into which we, as spectators, were crossing. There was no interaction on the doorstep, nor any negotiation of the conditions of entrance. We were crossing without being entirely aware of the consequences. What became apparent was that it was not the crossing itself that was significant. While the door remained open, we were still free to slip away. But, by closing the door, we separated ourselves from one world and committed ourselves to another, in this case, unknown. Conventionally, Rosselin observes, in everyday life, we might expect a host to open and close a door, demonstrating that we are welcome. But what happens when the host has died, moved away, or when we are, to varying degrees, permitted to let ourselves in? In developing this project, Olde Wolbers invited people who knew about Van Gogh and about the house, to meet her there. As an artist temporarily engaged with the house, Olde Wolbers invited in people who knew more about the house than she did herself. In devising the work and in the timed installations, she demonstrated that it can be productive to draw attention to and revise acts and conditions of welcoming visitors or entering a house. In the installation, this sensation of revision was particularly acute in those first moments in the darkened hall, in which spectators were situated between doors, neither entirely outside nor inside, left to attend to their position of being held both in and out of places for a time. For Meiss, “a well-defined entry hall prevents one from seeing into an apartment’s more private spaces” (2013, p. 219), which he finds speaks to what Roderick Lawrence identifies as a persistent desire for “sequences of privacy” from exterior to interior (ibid.). A hall is a place to shift one’s practices from outside to inside – in Rosselin’s terms, “a protective and neutralizing zone to prevent or ease transition from the public to the private world” (2006, Kindle Loc 704). To understand a hall, Rosselin demonstrates we must address the means by which we are enclosed or, in this case, by which we, as spectators, enclosed ourselves in the private world. The experience revealed ways in which doors and acts, in combination, condition one’s entrance into a building. The lack of personal invitation, the written rules and long moments waiting in the hall indicated that we, as outsiders, were permitted but not entirely welcome. A spectator tried the door to the right, which opened easily. Perhaps it had been released remotely, perhaps it had been unlocked all the time. We walked

38  At home with doors

into the living room and, moments later, a voice began speaking, played from a portable speaker. The narrative spread on speakers through the house, which we followed more or less individually. The voice, which appeared to be that of the house, reflected on the Blue Plaque on the wall outside the house, for which the Browns had petitioned, in the hope it would preserve the house from demolition. The plaque commemorates Van Gogh’s short stay at the house and the voice noted that, as Arthur Brown had feared, it utterly transformed the relationship between house and street at the front door.9 The voice continued, After its unveiling, the crowd on the street has stormed through my front door like they owned the place. Since then, journalists, psychic readers, souvenir-seekers, the odd crank, and you started populating the pavement outside. (Olde Wolbers, 2014, emphasis added) It was curious to be addressed in this way and the moment contributed to the sense of awkward address established at the front and living room doors, that we were suffered, rather than welcome. Akiko Busch reflects that, “[i]f there is any part of the home that does not belong exclusively to the people who live there, it is the front door” (1999, p. 37). The plaque compounded Busch’s observation. Having argued for the plaque, the Browns may have felt obliged to admit the gathering crowds. As the plaque focused public attention on the house, it was little wonder that some responded by seeking admittance, with varying senses of entitlement. By situating spectators within this ‘crowd’, Olde Wolbers revealed long-established practices of attention and reluctant welcome at the door, in which the public intervened in a private place. We stood, awkwardly, as a passer-by peered at the house for a time and then walked on. From inside, despite being aware of our own position, the sensation was unsettling, even threatening. The bathroom door

While most of the doors stood wide open, the bathroom door had been wedged ajar, allowing only a narrow view of a faded blue room. It was unclear if we were allowed or expected to enter to this room, although there was just space to squeeze through the gap. Inside, the decay was clearly apparent. There was rubble in the bath and the ceiling had split, revealing a beam that had twisted out of shape, perhaps through water from the River Effra. From inside, the door appeared half-closed, obscuring the landing and there were no obvious speakers in the room, which separated the room from the remainder of the house. The partially open door has long been a compelling form, as Vaughan Hart identifies in Christian and, earlier, pagan iconography, in part because

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it makes a particular offer. Hart records that, on Roman tombs, a half-open door “represented hope for the soul’s resurrection”, yet without the security of “eternal life” offered by the open door (1996, p. 189). In the home, a half-open door can offer a quite different sense of promise or release. Gaston Bachelard reflects that, On May nights, when so many doors are closed, there is one that is just barely ajar. We have only to give it a very slight push! The hinges have been well oiled and our fate becomes visible. (1964, pp. 222–223) For Bachelard, a single door, even ‘just barely ajar’, reveals the promise of life beyond the home, a ‘fate’ that appears predestined. A door left ajar is a chink in defences, a precious allowance, giving at the lightest touch. In reflecting on a quite different door left ajar, in the painting, Interior with a Woman Standing (Vilhelm Hammershøi, 1905), Subha Mukherji recalls Bachelard, suggesting that “the lure of the image lies partly in the infinite possibilities of what ­Gaston Bachelard might have called objects that may be opened” (2011, p. xvii). How, though, do such doors open? As Beci Dobbin observes, Leona Toker finds that “a door that has come ajar” is a critical image in the writing of Vladimir Nabokov (Dobbin, 2011, p. 30). Where Bachelard sensed fate at a half-open door, Toker finds it envisages “escape, (mis)adventure or death”, acts we may make, discover and that are done to us (ibid.). To differing degrees, Olde Wolbers and these writers ask that, whether in art or everyday life, we attend to the state of a partially open door, the reasons for its openness, the possibility of altering its position, the promise or portent it implies, and how we might act in response. In attending to such details, we begin to understand the ways in which a partially open door situates individuals at a point between worlds and, in so doing, reveals the tenuousness of their connections and the ease of separation from particular places. Perhaps the bathroom door came ajar of its own accord, but it was then caught or pushed against the warp of the wooden floor, its ‘infinite possibilities’ run aground. The house had been moving for some time, welling up, joists and joints weaving off course. These movements unsettled any possibility of our controlling doors, of closing off one place from another. They pointed to the inevitability of change in an unattended house. As the house opened up, so neatly separated rooms returned to an interconnected world with little place for doors. The door fixed ajar was one of a number of breaches appearing in the house: a broader project of decay in which the house itself was opening and closing by turns. Squeezing between door and jamb, I sought to experience the possibility beyond. In so doing, I became acutely aware of contributing to long-standing practices of testing and breaching both thresholds and limits in the house, by the water that had long destabilised its structure, and by people pressing to see inside.

40  At home with doors

The bedroom door

Van Gogh was rumoured to have rented a top-floor room in the house. The door stood wide open and, from the landing, the whole room was visible, paper peeling from walls and ceiling. The door evidenced the Browns’ renovation, in the form of a thin wooden panel presumably tacked over panelling. Having discovered their famous resident soon after decorating, Laura Allsop suggests that the Browns may have been unsure whether to reverse their handiwork and, ultimately, left the house to decay around them. The result was a door that revealed more about the Browns’ transformations than Van Gogh’s life a century earlier. The Browns had, purposefully, limited any sense of threshold here; such panels were intended to smooth the fuss of earlier decorative styles. In that moment, wide open, the door obscured little and led directly into the room, with light streaming through windows ahead. In their work on aural culture, Barry Blesser and Linda-Ruth Salter discuss the effects that an open doorway can have on perceptions of place (2007, p. 44). Their work suggests that the open door would have reduced the sensation of crossing into the room. Had the door been closed, the landing would have been darker, the sound more constrained, the sense of enclosure greater. Busch reflects that “the bedroom is the place where we engage in some of our more formative experiences, the landscape of affecting and profound personal revelations” (1999, p. 118). While she recognises that perceptions of bedrooms and sleeping arrangements vary over time, the soundtrack revealed that Van Gogh had particularly affecting feelings for his landlady’s daughter, Eugenie Loyer. The recorded voice wondered if Loyer was Van Gogh’s first love, if she inspired his decision to begin painting and if her child might have been Van Gogh’s. The plain surfaces almost entirely obscured the door that Van Gogh would have known and smoothed away any such signs of experience and revelation. The open door offered no obstructions to limit vision or slow a crossing and no need to learn its particularities. Indeed, it allowed in light, which softened the distinction between room and landing. The Browns’ and, later, Olde Wolbers’s finding or setting of the open door both diminished past formations of place and of this threshold, which would have allowed distinct worlds and experience to form either side. Olde Wolbers’s piece was not explicitly about doors. Yet, investigating the doors in Yes, These Eyes are the Windows begins to reveal that forms and practices of doors are critical to Olde Wolbers’s account of 87 Hackford Road. In the brief time before the house was remodelled, the artwork allowed visitors to reflect on the Browns’ treatments of doors, particularly drawing members of the public to the front door, smoothing away signs of the past and, ultimately, in their reluctant acceptance that they were unable to hold back either the river, or the tide of visitors. Olde Wolbers’s artwork revealed that the treatment of doors establishes particular offers and expectations of the security of the place we are in and of the possibilities of places beyond. It also revealed that, by attending to the position or state of a door, in art or

At home with doors  41

everyday life, we can better understand a given door, the relation between worlds either side, and the ways in which we cross between these worlds. In the remodelling of the house, it remains to be seen whether, how, and to what effect internal and external limits and thresholds will be re-set, how water and ‘the crowd’, which have so affected practices of the doors at the house, will be treated, and how passers-by will respond as they stop to look in from the street.

Between 13 and 15 steps The second case study took place at the home of Lee Miller and Joanne ‘Bob’ Whalley in Totnes, Devon. The house is tricky to find. In between two shop fronts on the High Street, a black door leads onto a narrow, permissive passageway. At the end of the passageway is a second door, with a mechanism that takes practice, and which leads into a small courtyard.10 Miller and Whalley’s house is one of the houses on the courtyard. There are two entrances, ostensibly a ‘front’ door and ‘back’ door, although these are only a few feet apart. At night, the passageway is impossibly dark. If I ask Lee Miller, he’ll tell me to count 13 steps from the first door before opening the second. If I ask Bob Whalley, she’ll shake her head wryly and tell me it is, in fact, 15 steps, although, often, she doesn’t count at all, but trusts she will know the door in the dark. Whalley and Miller have lived at this house since 2007, and, for the past few years, I have visited them there once or twice a year. As performance-makers, academics and a married couple, they create dialogic work that reflects, in part, on their life together, although they had never performed publicly in their home. Matt and I were interested in knowing how they might attend to the door at home in arts practice and commissioned them to conduct one of our four-day practical research ‘laboratories’, comprising workshops on the door, in January 2015. I participated in this laboratory. Matt and I invited a filmmaker, Hannah Lane, to document the work, and a performer, Bella Sabbagh, to participate. Both had been involved in our symposium and first laboratory. Miller, Whalley and I discussed the laboratory on email and in a preparatory discussion beforehand. Miller and Whalley invited me to stay at their house during the project, and Matt and I rented a house in Totnes for Lane and Sabbagh, so they would also experience being ‘guests’ of a kind in a house. Miller and Whalley focused the laboratory on invitation and threshold at the door, and employed their established working practice. They prepared material in advance, refined this a day ahead and left time to respond to emerging activities and findings. They set out to attend to their own acts of living with doors and they invited Lane, Sabbagh and I to participate in and discover and reflect on our own acts within this process. They determined that the work would focus on doors to rooms and doors within rooms. Tasks included a tour of the 27 doors in the house (once cupboard doors are

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included, it appears that houses can be surprisingly well served by doors); exploring, adding to and cooking food from kitchen cupboards; an installation in the passageway; and a survey of doors in Totnes. Throughout, Miller and Whalley initiated and encouraged conversation, often over tea and homemade cakes around the kitchen table, which had, itself, once been a door to an old farm building. The laboratory concluded with a sharing of food and findings for some of Miller and Whalley’s close friends. For Miller and Whalley, this kind of investigation “spirals out from the domestic”, in this case “looping” in guests.11 During the laboratory they reflected that Lane, Sabbagh and I became, in their terms, increasingly ‘resident’ in the work, house and home. They shared and invited us to practise their tricks of using the old, particular doors and so implicated us in critical practices of their home. Miller and Whalley’s spiral approach reflects their established interest in John Law’s argument that, “[i]f the world is complex and messy, then at least some of the time we’re going to have to give up on simplicities” and “teach ourselves to think, to practise, to relate, and to know in new ways” (2004, p. 2). They planned that the work would emerge from the ‘messiness’ of their home, from noticing and investigating familiar practices and testing variations. In so doing, Miller and Whalley recognised the project would contribute to their own spiral of attending to and reflecting on the architecture of the house and activities of everyday life. As this is an old house, built around 1585, activities focused particularly on issues affecting doors in old buildings. In reflecting on the work here, I focus on three doors that became particularly significant to our spiralling investigation of doors: the back door, larder door, and passageway door to the street. The back door

The house was built as two shops, a butcher’s and a baker’s, with rooms above. When converted into a house, the separate entrances became front and back doors. They are both blue-grey in colour and both open onto the hall. The windows in the front door are large, the door smartly finished and the interior doormat recessed. The back door is more roughly fashioned, with a small glass pane and a loose mat on an exterior flagstone. A small set of bells hangs from the handle. Miller and Whalley primarily use the back door to the house and had, until recently, blocked the front door with furniture, although Whalley currently uses the front door for acupuncture clients. In one workshop, Miller and Whalley stood outside the house to reflect on the doors and, later, tested the experience of welcoming people at the front door from inside. For Miller and Whalley, back doors offer a mode of encounter with the world that is rooted in class distinction and community. In the UK, back doors have often been associated with local, working-class community life. In his 1987–1988 study of a Hampshire village (UK), Michael Mayerfield Bell documented perceptions that “moneyed residents” used front doors

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Figure 2.2   M iller and Whalley reflecting on the politics of the back door, ­J anuary 2015 Source: Still image taken from footage by Hannah Megan Lane.

and “ordinary people” back doors (1994, p. 51). Past practices of back doors evaded formality and, at times, the law. Carolyn Downs observes, One elderly blind woman in Lancaster earned a good living as a bookmaker. She used to leave her back door open, and bets were placed on the shelf by the door, a slip of paper wrapped round the stake […] (2014, p. 112) Standing outside the back door (see Figure 2.2), Miller and Whalley reflected on this house, houses in which they had lived previously, and the importance of class identity in choosing to use the back, rather than front door. The back door became a place to reflect on the relation between a house and community. It was clear their engagement with the door was powerfully felt and, as they talked, Whalley rested against the closed door. The door offered security, not because it was closed, but because of a promise of openness. For Miller and Whalley, interior and exterior worlds blur at a back door, rather than meeting at a neat intersection. In their conversation and action, the exterior of the door was intimately connected to the world inside the house, an effect heightened by the staged series of doors to the house. Standing in the courtyard, we were implicated in a world of permissive rather than fixed entrances that led, eventually, into the house itself. We tried the front door. Miller and Whalley opened the door, invited us in and stepped back, awkwardly, to let us into the hall. I recall my own visits, knocking and watching through the back-door window, being waved through by Miller, amidst cooking, or Whalley at the table. Testing the front

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door brought more mannered, co-present practices of welcome, through which outside and inside were sharply delineated. Access involved a process of those inside going to the door, opening up the interior, enabling others to enter. The process felt stilted, transactional. It echoed the uneasy, impersonal entrance at the front door in Olde Wolbers’s work and Busch’s broader observation that “[m]ost car-dependent Americans know that their front door is rarely opened and entered”, instead that it contributes symbolically to “that elusive composition of rooms, objects, and ideas we think of as home” (1999, p. 33). The effect of using the door was a palpable, resounding sense of unease, as if Miller and Whalley had let us into a house that was not their own. It appeared that Miller and Whalley were more comfortable with welcome at a distance, in which visitor/guest and resident/host meet well away from a threshold: waved in at windows, rather than let in at doors. Where back doors constitute permissive thresholds, the act of opening is done from outside, and meetings take place within a room, rather than at a threshold. This said, opening this particular back door drew the attention of Miller and Whalley’s two Dalmatians, William and Stephen, who whirled around, inside and out, further unsettling any formality of welcome. By practising a back door, visitors are able to find their way for a time, retaining a connection with their own world as they cross into that of others. During discussions, Miller and Whalley explained that, at times, they have been aware of people outside the doors. One afternoon, Miller found a man standing, crying, in the courtyard, looking at the house. The last time the man had stood there, his grandmother had died and was being carried through the back door.12 Miller asked him in, aware theirs is an old house, which had been inhabited by and important to others before them. It was, Miller explained, as if this history transcended conventional limits of house ownership, framing ownership in terms of sensitively managing limits. While Miller and Whalley were aware of their own histories of doors, they had also become aware of past practices in this house, their own emerging practices there, and of navigating new events in the light of this emerging knowledge. They were, themselves, on a spiral of ‘becoming resident’, becoming increasingly familiar with ways of practising this house as home. Both the laboratory and Olde Wolbers’s installation indicate that a front door can impose and regulate relations between people in ways that may be difficult to escape once inside. Conversely, the laboratory suggests that back doors allow for more extended negotiation of crossing, with less formal framing and where performances of entrance are less tied to specific acts of welcome at thresholds. While there is more analysis to be done with doors in arts practice, these works demonstrate there is value in attending closely to particular doors, especially those in domestic dwellings. Future work might look further at whether acts at front doors offer productive points of connection between home and neighbourhood. By attending more closely to how artists articulate and reimagine practices of doors between places, researchers

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might offer critical perspectives on the design of doors to and within homes. Certainly, the projects here revealed that attending to the particularities of practising doors allows artists to address a place, from within and without, and began to reveal the ways in which people situate themselves, and are situated by others, in or between places. Internal doors

Whalley explained that theirs is a house of “extraordinary doors” and that few work as you might expect. Miller and Whalley walked us through the house, opening doors, explaining idiosyncrasies and the cupboards and rooms onto which doors opened: a meat-cupboard that closes with a heavy iron bar, the sitting room door that opens with a will of its own, and the door to the attic, barely 4 feet high. In so doing, they revealed the life they live in the house. There was a playful precariousness to each door, which they were reluctant to ‘fix’. Miller and Whalley live in dialogue with doors, in ways enhanced and enlivened, rather than troubled, by a door slipping its catch. Acts of opening and closing doors contribute to a closely held set of practices by which we make ourselves at home. As Bachelard reflects, If one were to give an account of all the doors one has closed and opened, of all the doors one would like to re-open, one would have to tell the story of one’s entire life. (1964, p. 224)13 In taking us through their house, Miller and Whalley told a story of their life within, showing, sharing and discovering. It became acutely apparent that doors do not just constitute individual architectural elements, but that they operate in combination, as critical elements of a place and our nuanced experience of that place. Miller and Whalley reflected that the doors add a “grammar” to their patterns and movements in the house. In inviting us to become resident, they encouraged us to become familiar with the detail of this grammar, certainly with the downstairs doors. We learned the tactility, weight and duplicitous workings of these doors. Again and again, we practised closing fast the sitting room door, to craft Miller and Whalley’s enclosing of the room on cold January evenings. Beyond learning this grammar, the laboratory became an opportunity to enter into a dialogic practice with Miller and Whalley, contributing to daily practices of individual doors and carefully, cautiously, but inevitably, life within their home. The effects of this work continue. A couple of years after the project, Whalley found the laboratory remained a powerful influence on her sense of doors in the house. The larder cupboard door

On the first evening, Miller and Whalley proposed we look through the kitchen cupboards, add something we felt was missing and cook dinner from

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their ingredients and ours, to become familiar with using the doors and the interior and exterior they defined. We were drawn to the larder, a cupboard brimming with flours, cereals and spices, its old, panelled door over-painted in cream. Cupboards offer the means for practices and possibilities. In adding to cupboards, we altered these possibilities in ways Miller and Whalley would discover in subsequent spirals of the work. It became clear that doors intervene in a place, interrupting the flow within a room, in this case through opening or closing doors, leaving them open or ajar, or reaching into a place that was both here and beyond. As we sat down to eat, we closed the doors around us, remaking a single place, in which we sat together. Unlike other doors in this chapter, the larder and these kitchen cupboard doors were premised on reaching in and out, rather than passing through. While John Horton and Peter Kraftl consider cupboard doors in their exploration of “clearing out a cupboard”, this experiment suggests that cupboards require further investigation, as places that are within yet separate to, and which transform a place (2012, pp. 25–45). This extends Kohane and Hill’s sense of movement at doors as ‘circulation’. At open cupboard doors, we remain in one place and stretch beyond it, finding other worlds through sight and touch. Yet, these worlds beyond doors are limited and of a different order to Arnold Aronson’s sense of the door as “a sign of the liminal, the unknown, the potential, the terrifying, the endless” (2004, p. 340). While doors bring a fascination for the world beyond, so they also allow us to attend to the re-crafting of worlds that are quite ordinary and familiar. The passageway door

There are two doors to the passageway, one to the street, the other to the courtyard. Miller and Whalley led a discussion just inside the door from the street and, later, we opened and closed doors along the passageway, testing ourselves to find each door in the dark. One evening, Miller and Whalley invited us to sit in the passageway, which they had set out with seats, blankets, a rug, a picture on the wall and a film of a fire in a grate. We sat, listening to the talk and laughter of passers-by and the thrum of passing cars. After recent rain and so close to the street, sounds were sharp, more so as the door to the street did not quite fit the frame. At any moment, someone might have pushed open a door at either end. Meiss describes “[t]he soft, progressive, threshold of some of Frank Lloyd Wright’s houses”, which allows gradual entrance to each dwelling (2013, p. 219, emphasis in original). The door between street and passageway constituted such a threshold. Yet, this was also a relatively unclear threshold. Miller will often have to ask people on the street to move out of the way, as if the door comprises an indiscernible breach in the limit and practices of the street, a threshold beyond the limits of perception. The door itself is loosely determined. It might, in fact, be a gate, although the small brass door handle suggests an internal, even a cupboard door, and the door fits within the range of doors to houses,

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shops and passageways on the street. The ‘soft, progressive threshold’ continues in highly sensory ways: the cooler, quieter, darker passageway is an entirely different environment from the street. Miller describes the passageway as a “semi-domestic decompression chamber”, in which he feels the “powerful” effect of “the weight of air between doors”. For Whalley, when the street is quiet, the passageway becomes an anechoic chamber, in which one hears only one’s heartbeat.14 They will, independently, often wait a while before opening the far door (see Figure 2.3). Miller will lean back and rest against the door, trusting no one will follow; occasionally, Whalley will dance. Despite their life and work together, and their experience in this very particular house, neither Miller nor Whalley had spoken about how they experience and practise this door, yet they each identified it as critical to their daily life, their sense of the world and their home. It is not that experiences and practices of place must be shared; in part they are significant as personal moments of reflection and reorientation. However, such acts reveal closely worked understandings of place, which, without attention, we run the risk of missing and under-valuing, if not losing entirely. In these case studies, both Olde Wolbers, and Miller and Whalley demonstrated that, extending Meiss’s theory, doors are critical places, objects and thresholds that we experience through practice. The more we understand about how artists practise doors, the more we can begin to chart how they articulate interconnecting places, and contribute to, intervene in and reimagine these places of intersection and the places beyond. By attending to individual artworks, we can trace how artists understand and practise a door as a critical element in their engagement with place. The work by Olde Wolbers and by Miller and Whalley enables us to actively reflect on the ways in which we practise doors in everyday life. It asks that we attend to the effects and implications of past and present practices of particular doors, and address the intersection of places, in this case within a home and between a home and its surroundings. As the projects here, and in the other chapters in this book, demonstrate, artists practise and reflect on doors in very different ways. While in Yes, These Eyes are the Windows, Olde Wolbers opened up a house by revealing and commenting on material forms, Miller and Whalley created opportunities for practical encounter and conversation. As artists reveal detail of place and crossings at doors, so doors may, in turn, impact on an artists’ practice. For Stewart Brand, a “house and its occupants mould to each other twenty-four hours a day, and the building accumulates the record of that intimacy” (1995, p. 7). In Olde Wolbers’s installation, there was no such daily moulding in the house as a home. Instead, the work invited spectators to consider past mouldings in a house, at a point of impending remodelling. Miller and Whalley confessed to feeling uncomfortable creating fictions in their home, perhaps because fictionalising familiar practices might place at risk a precious, closely held, and lived accumulation and ‘record’ of intimacy. As performance-­m akers who have often reflected playfully on their life and

Figure 2.3  W halley opens the far passageway door, January 2015 Source: Still image taken from footage by Hannah Megan Lane.

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work together, they found, to their surprise, that working at home asked for a different approach. Beyond their own lives, Miller and Whalley were acutely aware of past inhabitants’ sense of the house and of the dwellings and the lives of those close by. In each project, it appeared that the ways in which artists work with a door are conditional on their particular personal connection with a place and the ways in which a building is practised (or not), in this case as a home. By attending to the ways in which artists practise doors, we contribute to an emerging conversation between performance and architecture: on acts in dialogue with forms and structures, in this case at the door. By going further, and addressing other elements of architecture in performance and in everyday life, we might better understand our experiences of practising place and, thereby, the worlds in and between which we find ourselves. By investigating how artists practise elements of architecture, we can open up significant new conversations on performances of place, by identifying, evidencing and reflecting on the significance of interactions with familiar forms, hidden in plain sight, which are critical to processes of attending to, experiencing and articulating intersecting places, and determining our relationship to people and place. In so doing, it is vital we recognise the breadth of experiences of specific elements, from the ordinary to the extraordinary. As the projects in this chapter, and elsewhere in the book, demonstrate of the door, ordinary acts prove particularly compelling if not, in their own ways, extraordinary. By performing such acts, by opening up and closing fast, by pushing away and pulling to, by waiting at, squeezing between or passing through, we enter into a complex and close engagement with place and the ways in which we pass from the place we are in to that which lies ahead.

Notes 1 Andrews previously published a version of this chapter in Contemporary Theatre Review (2017), and, as such, this chapter is written, primarily, with the singular, rather than the plural pronoun that we use in the remainder of the book. I am grateful to the editor and anonymous reviews for their considered and valuable advice on this work. We are particularly grateful to Lee Miller and Joanne ‘Bob’ Whalley for welcoming our project into their home, and to the British Academy and the Leverhulme Trust for supporting this research. 2 See for example Jane Jacobs (1993), discussing writing on the stoop. 3 See also Rachel Whiteread’s House (1993) and Gregor Schneider’s Die Familie Schneider (2004). 4 Olde Wolbers worked on the audio installation with Lu Kemp (director), Elena Peña (sound designer), Daniel Pemberton (composer), and Tom Brooke (performer). 5 Writers have also addressed the door as metaphor, notably, David Carr reflects on the museum as an “inviting door” (2006, p. 26). 6 Terms drawn from E.R. Hann (1949, pp. 194–198). 7 For further writing on doors on stage, see Arnold Aronson, 2004, 2005, and Tim Fitzpatrick, 2011. 8 See, for instance, Heiner Goebbels, Stifters Dinge (2007), also co-commissioned by Artangel, and NVA, Hinterland (Cardross, Argyll and Bute, 2016).

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9 The Blue Plaques scheme, currently administered by English Heritage, commemorates people and events by installing blue plaques on the front of buildings in London. English Heritage, “Blue Plaques.” Available at: www.english-heritage. org.uk/visit/blue-plaques/ [accessed: 4 October 2015]. 10 The passageway runs on through a further door and another street, but I have rarely been taken this way. 11 Quoted dialogue from this laboratory comes from archived video footage of Andrews and Wagner (2014). 12 There is established literature on whether the door is an appropriate threshold for the deceased. Effie Bendann noted, in 1930, that “[t]he custom of carrying out the corpse by some other way than that of the ordinary door is very common” (2010, p. 57). 13 In response, McAuley questions whether it may be possible to “recount the ­h istory of Western theatre by telling the story of the doors that link the on to the off” (1999, p. 87). 14 An anechoic chamber is designed to absorb sound entirely and so eliminate echo.

References Allsop, L. (2014). “A House as Art: Van Gogh’s London Home”, AnOther Magazine. Available at: www.anothermag.com/art-photography/3591/a-house-as-art-vangoghs-london-home (accessed: 20 April 2016). Andrews, S. (2015). “Surge, Sway and Yaw: Mooring Performances in The Boat Project and A Room for London”, Contemporary Theatre Review, 25(4), pp. 502–517. Andrews, S., and Wagner, M. (2014). “The Door: A Practical Study of Site, Object, and Threshold in Theatre and Performance.” BA/Leverhulme Small Research Grant, SRG 2013–2014 Round. Aronson, A. (2004). “Their Entrances and Their Exits: Getting a Handle on Doors”, NTQ, 20(4), pp. 331–340. Aronson, A. (2005). Looking Into the Abyss. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press. Artangel. (2014). Yes, These Eyes are the Windows. Image 5 of 12. Available at: www. artangel.org.uk/projects/2014/yes_these_eyes/slideshow/photograph_by_­ marcus_ j_leith_4 (accessed: 4 October 2015). Azeri, S. (2015). “Evolving Concepts, Revolving Doors”, Space and Culture, 18(3), pp. 220–229. Bachelard, G. (1964). The Poetics of Space. Trans. Maria Jolas. Boston: Beacon Press. Bell, M. (1994). Childerley: Nature and Morality in a Country Village. Chicago: Chicago University Press. Bendann, E. (2010). Death Customs: An Analytical Study of Burial Rites. Abingdon: Routledge. Blesser, B., and Salter, L. (2007). Spaces Speak, Are You Listening? Experiencing Aural Culture. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press. Brand, S. (1995). How Buildings Learn: What Happens After They’re Built. New York: Penguin Books. Busch, A. (1999). The Geography of Home: Writings on Where We Live. New York: Princeton Architectural Press. Carr, D. (2006). A Place Not A Place: Reflection and Possibility in Museums and Libraries. Oxford: Altamira Press. de Certeau, M. (1988). The Practice of Everyday Life. Berkeley: University of California Press.

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Diamond, J. (1975). “The Island Dilemma: Lessons of Modern Biogeographic Studies for the Design of Natural Reserves”, Biological Conservation, 7(2), pp. 129–146. Dobbin, B. (2011). “‘The Queer Part Doors Play’ in Nabokov’s Laughter in the Dark”, in Mukerji, S. (ed.) Thinking on Thresholds: The Poetics of Transitive Spaces. London: Anthem Press. Downs, C. (2014). “Working Class Gambling Entrepreneurs”, in Taylor, P. and Wagg, P. (eds.) Work and Society: Places, Spaces and Identities. Chester: University of Chester Press, pp. 95–120. Fitzpatrick, T. (2011). Playwright, Space, and Place in Early Modern Performance: Shakespeare and Company. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, p. 143. Hann, E.R. (1949). “Keeping Doors at Their Best”, Popular Mechanics, 92(6), pp. 194–199. Hart, V. (1996). “Sigurd Lewerentz and the ‘Half-Open Door’”, Architectural History, 39, pp. 181–196. Horton, J., and Kraftl, P. (2012). “Clearing out a Cupboard: Memory, Materiality and Transitions”, in Jones, O. and Garde-Hansen, J. (eds.) Geography and Memory: Explorations in Identity, Place and Becoming. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Jacobs, J. (1993). The Death and Life of Great American Cities. New York: The Modern Library. Kohane, P., and Hill, M. (2006). “The Decorum of Doors and Windows, from the Fifteenth to the Eighteenth Century”, Architectural Research Quarterly, 10(02), pp. 141–156. Koolhaas, R. (2018). Elements of Architecture. Cologne: Taschen. Latorre, G. (2012). “Border Consciousness and Artivist Aesthetics: Richard Lou’s Performance and Multimedia Artwork”, American Studies Journal, 57. Available at: www. asjournal.org/57-2012/richard-lous-performance-and-multimedia-artwork/ (accessed: 17 September 2015). Law, J. (2004). After Method: Mess in Social Science Research. Abingdon: Routledge. McAuley, G. (1999). Space in Performance: Making Meaning in the Theatre. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Meiss, P. von (1990). Elements of Architecture: From Form to Place +Tectonics. 1st edition. Trans Theo Hakola. Lausanne: EPFL Press. Meiss, P. von (2013). Elements of Architecture: From Form to Place + Tectonics. Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge. Miller, L., and Whalley, B. (2015). Between 13 and 15 Steps. Performance Workshop, Totnes, 12–15 January 2015, in Andrews, S., and Wagner, M. (2014) “The Door: A Practical Study of Site, Object, and Threshold in Theatre and Performance.” BA/Leverhulme Small Research Grant, SRG 2013–2014 Round. Mukherji, S. (ed.) (2011). Thinking on Thresholds: The Poetics of Transitive Spaces. London: Anthem Press. Olde Wolbers, S. (2014). Yes, These Eyes are the Windows, 87 Hackford Road, London, 19 June 2014. Pallasmaa, J. (1996). The Eyes of the Skin: Architecture and the Senses. Chichester: John Wiley & Sons. Rosselin, C. (2006). “The Ins and Outs of the Hall: A Parisian Example”, in Cieraad, I. (ed.) At Home: An Anthropology of Domestic Space. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press. Van Gennep, A. (1960). The Rites of Passage. Trans. Monika V. Vizedom and ­Gabrielle L. Caffee. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.

Chapter 3

“This is the door” Threshold phenomena in Shakespearean dramaturgy

Figure 3.1  M acbeth Act 2, Scene 3 Source: Illustration by H.C. Selous, c. 1864

In Chapter 1, we cited Arnold Aronson’s claim that “The door […] is the most profound technological and scenographic development in the history of theatre” (2004, p. 332). There is perhaps a taste of hyperbole here, but in this chapter, we want to test some of that claim, using Shakespeare’s Macbeth as a principal lab. This is, of course, not to suggest that a single play can represent

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or encapsulate all the ways in which doors operate in or contribute to theatrical texts, or prove a point about the whole of the ‘history of theatre’, but it is to further our argument that paying attention to doors can help illuminate the dramaturgical structure and composition of a play. In other words, we are asking what a door might be and what it might do in text(s) for the theatre. Following on from, and perhaps inverting, that query, we also want to ask how ‘text’ on stage – especially spoken language – is affected by proximity to a door. Clearly, we’ve opened up a critical can of worms with these particular questions: what do we mean by ‘text’, and text for the theatre? Why use only one kind of ‘play text’ to ask these questions? We should start by saying that our use of the term ‘text’ here is not meant to imply a Derridean connotation of wholeness (in the sense that everything is ‘text’), nor is it an implication of wovenness or ‘texture’ that we pointed to (in Barba’s use of the term) in Chapter 1. Rather, our usage is more elemental – and perhaps elementary  – in the sense that we count words, written and spoken, as a core element of theatre and performance, alongside elements like place and body. It is this logocentric sense of text that we are interested in here: the crafting and deployment of language – the wordsmithing, as it were – that is an integral part of most conventions of theatre and performance that we have under consideration in this project. As we suggested earlier, there has been, and no doubt will be, considerable debate about whether or not ‘text’, or words, are a necessary component of theatre, and our aim is not to posit outmoded and narrow definitions of theatre that are inherently dependent upon the play or script. Rather, we want to recognise the ongoing role of the written play, and of the spoken word, in theatre and performance, and in particular, we want to consider in this chapter the written play as a manifestation of the role of language in these art forms. It is an admitted and necessarily narrow focus, but in our aim to ask about how doors work with, and within, certain elements of theatrical activity, focusing some attention on the relationship between doors and play(s) seems an important aspect of that enquiry. What follows, then, is something of an ‘old school’ exercise in textual analysis, wherein we consider the ways in which doors appear in, and affect, a play text.

Playing with doors The word ‘door’ appears in the First Folio of Shakespeare’s Macbeth a grand total of four times.1 Yet despite this less than awesome figure, doors themselves might be counted as highly instrumental to both the composition of the fictional world of the play and to considerations of its theatrical staging. So with a nod to Aronson’s claim, noted above, let us begin by proposing that the overall trajectory of Macbeth might be fruitfully read by tracing these four dialogued mentions of doors. They are as follows:

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1 First, as Macbeth is arguing with himself about whether or not to kill his king, he states (citing as a reason for not murdering Duncan): “he’s here in double trust: / First, as I am his kinsman and his subject, / Strong both against the deed. Then as his host, / Who should against his murderer shut the door, / Not bear the knife myself ” (I.vii.12–16); 2 Then, as Lady Macbeth frets while her husband is in the act of killing Duncan, she says, to the audience, “He is about it. / The doors are open; and the surfeited grooms / Do mock their charge with snores” (II.ii.4–6); 3 Third, when Macbeth leads Macduff to the door of Duncan’s chamber, revealing (however duplicitously) the murder of the king, he bluntly intones “This is the door” (II.iii.50); 4 Finally, as the newly crowned king, Macbeth tells a servant to guard the door while he plots, with two murderers, the killing of his friend ­Banquo: “Now go to the door, and stay there until we call” (III.i.72). Though brief, it does appear that we may have something of the gestus of the play mapped across these four flashpoints: (1) contemplate shutting the door against the murderer; (2) leave the door open to let in the murderer; (3) pass through a door to encounter a king’s corpse and return, bringing in a world of murder and “horror, horror, horror”; and (4), go and guard the door against righteousness, law, and goodness (out there) while further horrors are plotted (in here). If it seems that we are matching Aronson’s flavour of hyperbole with our own, it might be worth tracing some of the scholarship from the past few decades which has been concerned with doors on the early modern stage. While this literature may not go so far as to claim doors as the most important element of Shakespearean stage practice, it does establish fairly firm ground on which to suggest that doors played a significant part in the era’s stagecraft and especially in the ways in which many of the era’s plays were written. In particular, the work of Mariko Ichikawa, Tim Fitzpatrick, Tiffany Stern, and Andrew Gurr has laid a critical foundation for discourse on the architectural and staging possibilities of the door in early modern performance.2 Much of this work, however, has been (very fruitfully) focused on the factual or pragmatic dimension of theatrical doors: how many actual doors, in fact, were there on the early modern public stage? How did these doors conduct or delimit stage movement, especially entrances and exits, and determine acting practices? How did doors play into some of the standard scenes of early modern drama (like the ‘discovery’ scene, or moments of entrapment, imprisonment, or escape)? Elaborating on this line of enquiry, scholars such as Jennifer Low and (again) Tim Fitzpatrick have considered broader dramaturgical implications of doors. Low, for instance, looks to the door of the Abbey in The Comedy of Errors first as a simple means of generating theatrical tension, and then as a richer and more significant means of spatialising and presenting the play’s

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deep concern with temporality. A more comprehensive proposition comes from Fitzpatrick, who has proposed that doors partake in – and indeed are crucial to – broader dramaturgical systems of early modern theatre. He suggests, for example, that the Shakespearean stage operated according to a ­relational-spatial system, whereby fictional location and the use and nature of place on stage was determined relationally: not so much a question of where we are in the world of the play, but a question of how a sense of ‘here’ relates to and is determined by a sense of ‘there’. Doors, he notes, were pivotal in establishing and maintaining this system; indeed, they were “the two most potent signifiers in this system” (2011, p. 143). Fitzpatrick’s system is, of course, not without its problems or its critics;3 what is of interest to us here is the centrality he gives to doors in the explication of his system. In this respect, his approach (like Low’s) is one that counts the door as a key component of certain phenomena endemic to Shakespearean theatricality, and of the overall dramaturgy of the Shakespearean stage. Whether one agrees with his assessment that the Globe originally had two doors (not three), and however far one adopts his relational-spatial system, his work, alongside that of the scholars mentioned above, offers a productive precedent for considering the door as a rich and illuminative point of focus in an analysis of dramaturgy and stage praxis. It is this approach that we propose to take up and expand upon here, particularly from a perspective by which we might count the door as a specific and potent kind of threshold – a site and object which allows for, and indeed generates, passages through time and space that deeply affect the nature of a play and its staging.

Thresholds and passages A consideration of the material and pragmatic elements of doors on Shakespearean stages is likely to attend first to questions of movement, chiefly with respect to the comings and goings of performers but also perhaps to that of audiences or to the transportation of set pieces on and off stage. Doors allow – or impede, as some arguments have it – the movement of the actors, and they delineate the on-stage world of the play’s fiction from the off-stage world of the theatre building’s ‘reality’. Clearly, however, there is more than the question of movement at hand here: issues of audibility (for the monitoring of cues), of sight lines (both for the backstage performers and stage hands and, perhaps problematically, for the audience toward the backstage), of aesthetic design and consistency, and of the power and fashion of a character’s entrance or exit all come into play. Moreover, returning to some of the key practices we mentioned in Chapter 1, doors in Shakespeare partake in broader theatrical processes of bringing together and/or keeping separate (spaces, time frames, worlds, realities), of inviting and/or excluding (characters, audiences, or broader abstractions, such as the ‘people’ being invited into Hell in Macbeth’s Porter scene), and of concealing and/or revealing (characters,

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scenes, plot turns, set pieces). It is in such respects that Meiss’s sense of the door as threshold comes into greater relief, for the notion of a threshold carries with it much weightier implications of change. Crossing a threshold indicates some kind of fundamental transformation, either in the person or thing which crosses, or in the spaces and places on either side – or, indeed, in both. Meiss turns to Pierre Bourdieu to make this point, recalling how the latter counted the door as that “point at which the world reverses in on itself ” (1990, p. 148).4 Something vital – another world, perhaps, or an extension of the one we are currently experiencing – is always just on the other side of a Shakespearean door, and it is being actively concealed, or revealed, or held apart, or brought ‘here’. That which crosses the thresholds of such doors, in either direction, is far more than simply a collection of actors or set pieces. To explore what might be involved in that ‘far more’, we can look, for example, at the diptych that so occupied Shakespeare throughout his career: sex and death. Doors are often figured in the plays as a means of sexual access and entry, such as with Pandarus, who is termed to be of the “hold-door trade” (Troilus and Cressida, V.xi.31.19), a usage that resonates with that of the Duke of Bourbon in Henry V as he desperately tries to rally his troops at Agincourt: [O]nce more back again; And he that will not follow Bourbon now, Let him go hence, and with his cap in hand, Like a base pander, hold the chamber-door Whilst by a slave, no gentler than my dog, His fairest daughter is contaminated. (IV.v.10–15) To cross the threshold of a door is, in these instances, not only imbued with the weight of sexual engagement, but even more so with the inference of pandering, dishonour, and rape. The anti-hero of The Winter’s Tale, Leontes, King of Sicilia, provides a similar motif as he publicly accuses his wife of infidelity, calling upon those gathered around to “look on her, mark her well”, and insisting that as soon as one might “praise her but for this her without-door form”, such praise sticks in the throat and is followed immediately by “the shrugs, the hum or ha” that articulate her adultery (II.i.67–73). Hermione’s ‘without-door form’ is itself a phrase layered with a double meaning: on the one hand, it refers to her physical appearance, her ‘outward show’ as Hamlet might call it, and as such is implicitly distinguished from her inner being, her person, the soul that resides within the form, behind the body’s ‘door’. On the other hand, the phrase calls forth a tension between the public and the private: the Queen’s ‘without-door form’ is her public persona, again in direct opposition to who she is – and what she does – at home, ‘indoors’. The rhetorical image of the door becomes one of a very material and real threshold, the crossing of which involves sex, adultery, jealousy, injustice, tyranny. It is, moreover, telling that

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the figure of the door arises here just as Leontes crosses his own threshold from (semi-)privately held suspicions – hitherto articulated only to the audience and to his courtier Camillo – to very open and public accusation: the speech containing the lines cited above begins with “You my lords, / Look on her, mark her well” and ends with “but be ’t known, / From him that has most cause to grieve it should be, / She’s an adulteress” (II.i.66–80). Later in the play, Shakespeare offers a subtle but powerful resonance of this imagery when the Old Shepherd finds the infant Perdita, abandoned in Bohemia: among his other exclamations, he surmises that the infant is the result of “some behind-door work” (III.iii.71). The figure of the door thus emerges, for Shakespeare, as yet another way of rhetorically manifesting sexuality, and more specifically, illicit female sexuality. It also engages potential discourses on power and hegemony, particularly with respect to the person/character who controls or ‘holds’ the door. From the pseudo-comic abuses of such power, evident in Dromio, Macbeth’s Porter, or even Pandarus, to the darker exercises of authority that we find with Macbeth, Lady Macbeth, or Leontes, the holder of a door (or its image) is endowed with a very real and material puissance over the fictional and the meta-theatrical world of the play. The door is also figured as a threshold between life and death, perhaps subtly in The Winter’s Tale – as the focus on Hermione’s ‘without-door form’ marks the beginning of her march toward ‘death’ – but more prevalently elsewhere in the canon. Mercutio, for example, refers to his fatal wound received of Tybalt as “not so deep as a well, nor as wide as a church door; but tis enough, ’twill serve” (Romeo and Juliet III.i.93). At the culmination of the same play, Romeo violently pries open the door to the Capulets’ tomb, addressing it as “Thou detestable maw, thou womb of death” (V.iii.45). Here is a physical door and figurative language combining to turn the material door on stage into a threshold of life and death: a devouring ‘maw’, a fatal womb. The imagery here recalls the gates of Hell from mediaeval cycle plays: that doorway through which devils entered this world, and sinners exited it.5 As was Shakespeare’s wont, he then has his hero turn the imagery around, as Romeo encounters what he believes to be the corpse of Juliet: looking on her ‘dead’ body, and embarking on his last kiss, he refers to his own lips as the ‘doors of breath’: Eyes look your last! Arms take your last embrace! And lips, O you The doors of breath, seal with a righteous kiss A dateless bargain to engrossing death. (V.iii.112–115) The figurative door here – the lips, the mouth (rather than the ‘maw’ of the tomb) – is that which, being open, allows for life. And while the rhetoric of ‘sealing’ serves the primary function of confirming a ‘bargain’, it also carries with it the imagery of sealing shut, in tomb-like fashion, those ‘doors of breath’.

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Perhaps more famously, and more explicitly, than the examples rehearsed above, Macbeth’s Porter turns the knocking at the door into a game of ferrying all kinds of humanity through Hell’s gate, as imagined sinners cross the threshold from mortality to eternal damnation (II.iii). Here, the door is both physical and figurative all at once – the Porter imagines the gate of Hell, and often in performance ‘mimes’ the opening of an imaginary door, and as such heightens the theatrical irony of the scene: opening an illusory door while ignoring the urgency at the ‘real’ one.6 At the same time, the ‘real’ door to Macbeth’s castle (the “south gate”, as mentioned by Lady Macbeth) is likely offstage and not physically visible, but it is aurally on stage, and indeed the knocking on that door becomes one of the most materially present elements of this scene, as well as of the preceding scene. Implicit in that knocking are all three of the roles that Meiss attributes to doors in their capacity as thresholds: the utilitarian, the protective, and the welcoming (recall here Chapter 1, p. 15). The knocking marks out the ‘South Gate’ as the pragmatic means of access for Macduff and Lennox into Macbeth’s castle. The fact that it is locked, and not allowing that access – and that the control over the door is in the less than competent hands of the Porter  – underscores both the protective role, and the irony inherent therein under the current circumstances. And the eventual welcome afforded to Macduff, as we will see shortly, constitutes highly “meaningful passage” (Meiss, 1990, p. 216). The door-as-threshold serves all these roles, and in all of them, it also makes key contributions to the transformational nature of the performance event: the knocking, and the entrances that follow, fundamentally change the people and space of the change, and that change is mitigated by the dramaturgical presence of the door.7

“The Doors are Open” – Macbeth and the letting in of horror We opened this chapter with reference to four explicit mentions of doors in Macbeth; in the first, wherein Macbeth notes that as Duncan’s host, he should “against his murderer shut the door / Not bear the knife myself ” (II.i.15–16), the rhetorical figure of a door is raised, and, importantly, it is a figure of shutting the door. The importance of this image of closing a door lies in the way(s) in which doors were read in terms of safety and security, and such reading comes to fruition when it is rounded out by the second direct mention of a door in the play. This is from Lady Macbeth (a complementary opposite, or kind of foil, for Macbeth at this stage of the play), who has prepared the way for her husband’s regicide by drugging the king’s grooms and leaving open the doors to Duncan’s chamber: He is about it. The doors are open; and the surfeited grooms

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Do mock their charge with snores: I have drugg’d their possets, That Death and Nature do contend about them, Whether they live, or die. (II.ii.1–8) In the wider context of Lady Macbeth’s speech, we might take her simple statement that the doors are open merely on its narrative face value: the lines serve to inform the audience that Macbeth is ‘doing the deed’, how he is going about it, and (in terms of character development) the hand that Lady Macbeth has had in it. But the image of open doors will have also carried a further resonance, one of being unprotected (recalling, for instance, Shylock’s almost paranoid instructions to his daughter to “lock up my doors” and “shut doors after you. / Fast bind, fast find” (Merchant of Venice II.v.28 and 51–52)). The placement of doors at the centre of such concerns about security is echoed in roughly concurrent treatises on architecture, such as Henry Wotton’s Elements of Architecture (1624). Wotton refers to doors and windows as “In lets of men and light”, capturing in one brief phrase both the danger and benefit of architectural aperture; but he is more explicit about the danger, when he insists, as a general caution, that “they be as few in number, and as moderate in dimension as may possibly consist with other due respects; for in a word, all openings are weakenings” (1970, p. 53).8 It does not, moreover, take much effort to hear in Wotton’s comments a latent but potent sense of male anxiety over female sexuality (much as was discussed above), which, in early modern England, was a direct concern of domestic security. Perhaps even more dauntingly, the ‘open doors’ to which Lady Macbeth refers will likely have foregrounded not just a sensitivity about domestic (in) security, but one concerning public or national safety as well. As we will develop in greater detail in Chapter 6, the image of open doors resonates with the classical iconography of the Roman god of doors, Janus. For the Romans – and still evident in the Renaissance – when the state was at war, the doors of Janus’s temple would be left open; conversely, peacetime would be signalled by a shutting of the temple doors.9 As Lady Macbeth, therefore, enters the stage (very possibly through a door) and paints a picture for the audience of ‘open doors’ paving the way to regicide, that picture – and the doors at the centre of it – forms more than a passing reference in her speech. They constitute a significant contribution to the dramaturgy of the scene, specifically, as Stijn Bussels characterised the drama of the period, to the creation of an “atmosphere of threat and strong pathos” (2011, p. 44),10 and the foreshadowing of the entrance of “horror, horror, horror” some 135 lines later. The doors, in other words, even when only rhetorically referenced, help to transform the space of the stage, the world of the play. If the imagery of open doors in a performance of Macbeth helps to manifest the onset of war and strife, the third reference to doors in the play goes a step further toward localising that manifestation. Like Lady Macbeth’s noting that “the doors are open,” Macbeth’s statement to Macduff that “this is

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the door” (II.iii.50) appears on face value to be a simple and perhaps purely pragmatic utterance: he is merely directing Macduff toward Duncan. But the overall trajectory of the scene sets this door up as a highly charged threshold: it is that thing and place on the stage beyond which lies the body of Duncan, and before which lies a (very short-lived) world still innocent of the knowledge of that murder. Macbeth’s stopping at the door – his marking of it, but distinct avoidance of using it himself – underscores those few feet of stage space, and establishes that site/object/threshold as the point upon which the scene, and indeed the forward motion of the play, turns. It also signifies a markedly equivocal relationship, at this point of the play’s narrative, with the power attendant on ‘holding’ doors: Macbeth partly controls this door – Macduff must be shown to it – but he also must cede that control to Macduff. Moreover, he has an obvious knowledge of, but absolutely no control over, what Macduff will find on the other side. As Macbeth underlines this door, he sets the world of the play on a precipice, and the door becomes the axis upon which that play world turns: one hemisphere of that world is pre-­murderous and benign, marked by the innocence and un-presumptuous nature of Macduff’s lines that bring him through the door, “I’ll make so bold to call upon him” (II.iii.50). The other hemisphere, again marked by the lines that usher in Macduff’s return over this threshold, is the realm of post-murderous, threefold horror. As such, the door to which Macbeth gestures functions as a very real, very potent element in the composition of this pivotal scene in the play. It is, moreover, all the more potent for the way in which the scene is both preceded and initiated. Indeed, the ‘character’ (if you will) of a door emerges two scenes earlier, and stitches together the action across the scene division from II.ii–II.iii. It is shortly after Lady Macbeth, in II.ii, announces that the ‘doors are open’ at line 5 that the knocking begins at line 56. In between these two events, we have the entrance of Macbeth from the murder, and, among other things, his report that he heard “a voice cry sleep no more” (II.ii.34ff ). The prophesied deprivation of sleep – a condition later made manifest in Lady Macbeth’s famous sleepwalking scene – stands as a cosmic response to the murder of the king as a literal disturbance of a natural order. Just as Lennox’s subsequent description of the terrors of the night (“lamentings heard in the air, strange screams of death” and the very “feverous” shaking of the earth (II.iii.53–60)) describes Nature’s response to an unnatural deed, so the absence of sleep (“Nature’s second course” (II. ii.38)) realises a similar disruption to nature, order, and peace. That specific disturbance – the denial of sleep – is then made material by the incessant knocking that begins at line 56. The Folio stage directions call for “a knock” (or knocking) ten times over the course of roughly 56 lines – nearly once every five lines. The knocking itself is then, of course, compounded by the Porter’s repetition of the words “knock, knock” following each noise during his monologue; and finally, it is punctuated by Macduff’s lines which

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accompany Macbeth’s (re-)entrance, wherein he answers his own question: “Is thy master stirring? / Our knocking has awaked him” (II.iii.41–42). The door here, though not visible to the audience, is inescapably, materially present, and it is the door and the sounds made upon it that bring into the material world the condition of ‘sleep no more’. Moreover, it is the door that sews together the action of the two scenes: night into morning, the domestic to the public, and a transformation into Macbeth’s “looking like the flower” (his public persona, his ‘without-door form’, as it were, in II.iii), from his “being the serpent beneath it” (his private substance, capable of committing the murder in II.ii). In the space of about 90 lines – roughly six or seven minutes of stage time – the materialisation of disturbance makes a transition, via the agency of doors, from a rhetorical suggestion of insecurity and sleep deprivation (which is reported and individualised), into the physical noise of pounding on an unseen door (which is present and collective, in terms of the household), to the passage over a specific, marked threshold and the return, which is accompanied by horror, horror, horror. That horror with which Macduff returns – the horror which cannot be conceived or named by tongue nor heart (II.iii.63) – is of course the deepest, most powerful, and most widespread disturbance of nature in the play, as the later exchange between Ross and the Old Man attests: Thou seest the heavens, as troubled with man’s act, Threatens his bloody stage. By th’ clock ’tis day And yet dark night strangles the travelling lamp. Is’t night’s predominance, or the day’s shame, That darkness does the face of earth entomb, When living light should kiss it? OLD MAN: ’Tis unnatural, Even like the deed that’s done. (II.iv.5–11) ROSS:

Our argument here is that if Macbeth’s murder of his king disturbs the natural order – to the degree that in the fictive world of the play, the earth shook (as Lennox reports in II.iii) and the day literally darkens – the language and narrative plotting which paints that disturbance for us is underpinned by the theatrical engagement with doors. In addition to being a “means by which a sense of place or location (both onstage and offstage) can easily be established” (Fitzpatrick and Johnston, 2009, p. 6), it is the reference to doors (by Lady Macbeth) that establishes the contextual and symbolic hinterland of the horrors to come, and it is the knocking on the door that manifests the approach of those horrors (and, recalling De Quincey, the need to deal with them). Finally, it is the marking out of a specific door as a pivotal threshold which facilitates the transformation of the stage space from one of peace, sleep, and natural order, to one of war, disturbance, and a “masterpiece of confusion” (III.iii.65).

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Not to be overlooked, of course, is the emphasis placed on doors by the ‘game’ the Porter plays at the start of II.iii, a passage which is worth citing in full here: Enter a Porter. Knocking within Porter: Here’s a knocking indeed! If a man were porter of Hell Gate, he should have old turning the key. Knock. Knock, knock, knock! Who’s there, I’th’name of Beelzebub? Here’s a farmer, that hang’d himself on th’ expectation of plenty. Come in time! Have napkins enow about you, here you’ll sweat for’t. Knock. Knock, knock! Who’s there, in th’ other devil’s name? Faith, here’s an equivocator, that could swear in both the scales, against either scale, who committed treason enough for God’s sake, yet could not equivocate to heaven. O, come in, equivocator. Knock. Knock, knock, knock! Who’s there? Faith, here’s an English tailor come hither for stealing out of a French hose. Come in, tailor, here you may roast your goose. Knock. Knock, knock! Never at quiet! What are you? But this place is too cold for hell. I’ll devil-porter it no further. I had thought to have let in some of all the professions that go the primrose way to th’ everlasting bonfire. Knock. Anon, anon. Opens the gate. I pray you remember the porter. (III.ii.1–21) Apart from anything else, the Porter’s thrice-repeated act of performing the opening of a door carries about it something of the force and presence of the three Witches (“thrice to thine, thrice to mine, / And thrice again to make up nine” (I.iii.35–36)). The echo here is in both the ritual-like repetition of the Porter’s words and actions and in the sense that both Porter and Witches are engaged in a practice of creating the conditions into which darkness and evil can enter. In this sense, the Witches operate as a different kind of doorholder: guardians over and facilitators of ‘passage’, opening their domain in Act IV to Macbeth (“Open, locks / Whoever knocks” (IV.i.46–47)), and then ushering in the spirits from the netherworld in the same scene. In addition, the playing at being a ‘Porter of Hell Gate’ contributes to the synergy between material and immaterial doors: indeed, a substantial core of the comedic potential of the scene lies in the fact that the Porter is calling up and responding to imaginary doors while simultaneously ignoring the ongoing and escalating demands of the ‘real’ door. He neglects his real job of opening a real

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door for real guests by way of performing an imagined job of opening imagined doors to imagined (and permanent) guests. The mechanics of Shakespearean theatre here operate in such a way that what is imaginary and rhetorical soon transforms, almost seamlessly, into a material reality as Macduff and Lennox take the place of the Porter’s farmer, equivocator, and tailor. Perhaps most importantly, the Porter’s game performs a central gesture of letting in: “I had thought”, the Porter concludes his game by saying, “to have let in some of all professions that go the primrose way to the everlasting bonfire” (II.iii.18– 20). The Porter’s imagined threshold is, of course, an opening of the passageway to Hell, allowing travel for one kind of being and in one direction – humans from Earth and mortality to Hell and eternity. But the opening is (Janus-like) dual in nature: if one opens the gates of Hell to bring people toward the ‘everlasting bonfire’, moving from here to there, what else might actually come from Hell, crossing the threshold in the other direction, moving from there to here? Almost immediately after the ‘game’ is over, the gate to Hell that the Porter had repeatedly opened does indeed allow travel in this other direction, as Hell and confusion is ushered onto the stage. It is no stretch, of course, to perceive these elements of the Porter’s scene as having marked thematic resonances across the play, but again, our point here is that such resonances are underpinned and indeed activated by an encounter with doors. As such, we are arguing that the door is established – by the context, language and movement of these scenes – as a threshold which not only allows the mechanistic passage of people and things between the realms of on- and off-stage, but also facilitates the passage of immaterial qualities and ‘realities’ of performance. The door partakes in the change to the very tenor of the world of Macbeth, as it is literally through the door that such change appears. The door in II.iii is a threshold which both separates and brings together two directly contrasting conditions of existence. More importantly, it is a threshold which, when crossed, effects a fundamental transformation in both the crosser(s) and the space(s) on either side. There is a final explicit mention of doors in the play, which occurs when Macbeth instructs his servant to wait by the door while he speaks with the two murderers, arranging the killing of Banquo. The text calls for a bit of decoding here: Macbeth’s instructions are for the servant to “go to the door” (III.i.72, our emphasis), but this is followed immediately by a stage direction for the servant to exit. The logical implication, especially given Macbeth’s instruction to “stay there till we call” (ibid.), is that the servant exits the stage and we are to imagine the character standing just on the other side of the door, guarding it against intrusion. Macbeth never calls for him again, and we do not see him again in this scene; but for a short while, our attention is directed toward the door and what is on the other side, much as was the case with the door to Duncan’s chamber earlier in the play. Picking up on Fitzpatrick’s argument once more, we might well imagine that in terms of stage space and set design, this door is precisely the same as the door used for

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Duncan’s chamber in II.iii, even though it is now representing a different room in a different part of the castle; but what the door helps to establish firmly in the audience’s perception of the world of the play is the marked relationship between here and there. We do not need to know exactly which room in the castle we are in; we only need to know that this space has a door that can be guarded from the other side. In all likelihood, most audiences will soon forget about this door and the servant on the other side as we attend to Macbeth plotting the murder of his friend; but for the moment, the door helps to establish the tenor of secrecy and malice that brews on stage. If we take the stage directions in most modern editions of the play to heart – or even imagine that they provide likely and workable notes for stage action – there is further specific use of this door. In III.iv, the ‘Banquet scene’, one of the murderers from the scene detailed above returns to report on the killing of Banquo as Macbeth hosts a feast. Macbeth and Lady Macbeth are in the middle of addressing their guests when the murderer appears: Pronounce it for me, sir, to all our friends, For my heart speaks they are welcome Enter First Murderer to the door. MACBETH: See, they encounter thee with their hearts’ thanks. Both sides are even; here, I’ll sit I’th’midst. Be large in mirth; anon we’ll drink a measure The table round. – Goes to the door. There’s blood upon thy face. FIRST MURDERER . ’Tis Banquo’s then. MACBETH. ’Tis better thee without than he within. Is he dispatched? FIRST MURDERER . My lord, his throat is cut; That I did for him. (III.iv.13–16) L ADY MACBETH:

Their conversation continues for 15 lines before the Murderer exits and Lady Macbeth comes to usher Macbeth back to the table. Space, on the Shakespearean stage, is malleable; we have long been accustomed to the fact that both the size and the dramaturgical use of the early modern stage allows for the expansion or compression of geometry: characters who are, in reality, only a few feet apart may not hear each other even while they speak in voices loud enough to reach the auditors in the upper balconies. This phenomenon is not dependant on doors, but like so much of our argument through this book, we suggest that it is here amplified by the door. Speaking at the door both marks out a significant space (that of the border, the edge of the room, the threshold between here and there, between secrecy and openness), and it aids in the ‘stretching’ of the rest of the stage space. Because the speech occurs at the door, the distance between Macbeth and the banquet guests expands, so that we may hear his conversation with the Murderer while they do not.

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In equal measure, the fact that this conversation takes place at the door has an impact on the nature and quality of the speech itself. A conversation at a door is liminal, both in terms of time and space: it is imbued with a strong sense of imminent ending, wherein one or more of the participants will not long be here. As such, the tone, pace, and sense of urgency in such speech is affected by its proximity to the door. At the same time, the door makes something like a stage whisper, for example, unnecessary; because the action and the speech take place here, at this specific site on the stage, the audience is allowed to hear the words differently from the other characters. In this respect, it is the door that helps make Macbeth’s conversation with the Murderer theatrically possible; the latter would not be welcome at the nobles’ feast, and Macbeth, of course, cannot leave the room (if the audience is to be privy to the speech). As such, the door marks the Murderer as a being who does not belong here (as one who is from ‘there’, the other side of the door), and who can only stay near the room’s edges; and that process in turn forces Macbeth to marginalise himself, as he must align himself spatially with the Murderer, one foot in the world of regal society and one foot leaning outside of that world. In one further turn, this phenomenon brings us, the audience, along with it, particularly in the sense that a small part of Macbeth’s speech is likely directed toward us, rather than the Murderer. As he receives the news of Fleance’s escape, Macbeth steps out of the conversation with the Murderer: FIRST MURDERER: Most royal sir, Fleance is scap’d. MACBETH: Then comes my fit again. I had else been

perfect,

Whole as the marble, founded as the rock, As broad and general as the casing air; But now I am cabin’d, cribb’d, confined, bound in To saucy doubts and fears. (III.iv.19–24) There is no explicit direction here for these lines to be an ‘aside’, but his description of his state of mind is surely for our benefit, not the unnamed Murderer’s. The penultimate line above, moreover, takes on added potency from being spoken at a door, that element of architecture which can close us in, confine a space. The door helps to materialise the condition he speaks of here, just as it helped earlier to materialise the condition of ‘sleep no more’. And that materialisation lands upon the audience; speaking at the door, in this sense, has an effect that is not unlike that of a soliloquy: it implicates the audience, by virtue of association, with the ideas and activities of the speaker. Like a soliloquy or an aside, the speech at the door is marked by the fact that we hear it while other characters do not, and that brings us into the sphere of those speakers, and we partake in those words.11 The effect is then redoubled by Macbeth uttering words that are not for the Murderer, even if the latter can hear them. The door is a threshold which transforms both the things that pass through it, as we’ve seen earlier, and the things which occur at it.

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Threshold phenomena We have used in this chapter’s title the phrase ‘threshold phenomena’, by which we mean to indicate theatrical encounters in which a marked and material instance of crossing or transformation appears. The materiality of such appearance(s) is, of course, significant; as Bachelard noted, “[h]ow concrete everything becomes in the world of the spirit when an object, a mere door, can give images of hesitation, temptation, desire, security, welcome and respect” (1964, p. 224). With respect to Macbeth, it would be necessary to add to Bachelard’s list a darker set of images concerning danger, tyranny, and (self-) destruction. And as Bachelard’s sentiment suggests, beyond manifesting these kinds of threshold phenomena, doors also, and perhaps more importantly, generate them, creating, in the focused space of the theatre, condensed encounters with the space and time of liminality and the very act(s) of ‘passing’.

Notes 1 Various contemporary editions, of course, might see this total increase with the addition of stage directions, such as in the Arden Shakespeare, 2nd edition, which mentions doors at III.iv.8 (sd) and III.iv.12 (sd). 2 See for example Fitzpatrick (1995, 2011); Fitzpatrick and Johnston (2009); Ichikawa (2005, 2006, 2013); Stern (2001); Gurr (1999, 2001); and Egan and Gurr (2002). 3 Indeed, Ichikawa and Fitzpatrick have long been on opposite sides of the debate about how many doors the Globe theatre originally had, and why. 4 The reference is specifically to the quality of the threshold: “Thresholds and ‘spaces’ of transition become ‘places’ in their turn: ‘places in which the world reverses itself ’. Steps, eaves, doors, balconies, windows …, are all regulators of this inversion” (Meiss, 1990, p. 148). 5 Such imagery is, of course, also prevalent in Macbeth during the Porter’s scene. 6 The theatrical potency of the scene – its ability to generate tension and performative affect – was long ago traced in some detail by Thomas de Quincey. He ruminates at some length about “why the knocking at the gate in Macbeth should produce any effect” at all, especially the effect he cites of the scene “reflect[ing] back upon the murderer a peculiar awfulness and a depth of solemnity”. He comes to the conclusion that the scene is in fact the pivotal one in play, as it constitutes the human and worldly reaction to the “devillish” deed that has been done: “the knocking at the gate is heard; and it makes known audibly that the reaction has commenced: the human has made its reflux upon the fiendish; the pulses of life are beginning to beat again” (De Quincey, 1886, n.p.). 7 We will continue a related vein of this argument in Chapter 6, where we consider the relationship between space and time, and argue for the ‘chronotopic’ nature of doors – that is, the way(s) in which they stand as both spatial and temporal thresholds. 8 One connotation here, of course, would have to do with the structural soundness of a building: to include too many doors or windows would weaken the physical strength of the walls. But the added connotation of security is also evident here, especially in conjunction with his description of doors as ‘in-lets’. 9 See pp. 136–140 for further discussion on the significance of the iconography of Janus. 10 See again Chapter 6, p. 139. 11 For a good discussion of how the architecture and structure of the stage space at the Globe contributes to this phenomenon, see Penelope Woods (2015).

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References Aronson, A. (2004). “Their Entrances and Their Exits: Getting a Handle on Doors”, NTQ, 20(4), pp. 331–340. Bachelard, G. (1964). The Poetics of Space. Trans. Maria Jolas. Boston: Beacon Press. Bussels, S. (2011). “Making the Most of Theatre and Painting: The Power of Tableaux Vivants in Joyous Entries from the Southern Netherlands”, in van Eck, C. and Bussels, S. (eds.) Theatricality in Early Modern Art and Architecture. Oxford: Wiley Blackwell, pp. 37–47. De Quincey, T. (1886). Essays. London: Ward, Lock and Co. Shakespeare Online, 10 August 2013. Available at: www.shakespeare-online.com/plays/macbeth/knockingatgate.html. Egan, G., and Gurr, A. (2002). “Promptings, Backstage Activity, and the Openings onto the Shakesperian Stage”, Theatre Notebook, 56, pp. 138–142. Fitzpatrick, T. (1995). “Shakespeare’s Exploitation of a Two-Door Stage: Macbeth”, Theatre Research International, XX, pp. 207–230. Fitzpatrick, T. (2011). Playwright, Space, and Place in Early Modern Performance: Shakespeare and Company. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, p. 143. Fitzpatrick T., and Johnston, D. (2009). “Spaces, Doors, and Places in Early Modern Staging”, Theatre Notebook, 63(1), pp. 2–19. Gurr, A. (1999). “Stage Doors at the Globe”, Theatre Notebook, 53, pp. 8–18. Gurr, A. (2001). “Doors at the Globe: The Gulf between Page and Stage”, Theatre Notebook, 55, pp. 59–71. Ichikawa, M. (2005). “‘Maluolio Within’: Acting on the Threshold Between Onstage and Offstage Spaces”, Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England, 18, pp. 123–145. Ichikawa, M. (2006). “Were the Doors Open or Closed? The Use of Stage Doors in the Shakespearean Theatre”, Theatre Notebook, 60(1), pp. 5–29. Ichikawa, M. (2013). “Shylock and the Use of Stage Doors”, Theatre Notebook, 67(3), pp. 126–140. Low, J. (2011). “Door Number Three: Time, Space, and Audience Experience in The Menaechmi and The Comedy of Errors”, in Low, J. and Myhill, N. (eds.) Imagining the Audience in Early Modern Drama, 1558–1642. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 71–91. Meiss, P. von (1990). Elements of Architecture: From Form to Place + Tectonics. Trans Theo Hakola. Lausanne: EPFL Press. Selous, H.C. (1864). Illustration of Macbeth, Act 2, Scene 3, in Cowden Clarke, Charles and Cowden Clarke, Mary (eds.) The Plays of William Shakespeare. London, Paris, and Melbourne: Cassell and Company, Limited. Shakespeare, W. (1997). The Norton Shakespeare, ed. Stephen Greenblatt. New York: W.W. Norton and Company. Stern, Tiffany (2001). “Behind the Arras: The Prompter’s Place in the Shakespearean Theatre”, Theatre Notebook, 55, pp. 110–118. Woods, P. (2015). “Skilful Spectatorship? Doing (or Being) Audience at Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre”, Shakespeare Studies, 55, pp. 99–113. Wotton, Henry (1624). Elements of Architecture (Reprint: Amsterdam and New York: Theatrum Orbis Terranum Ltd and Da Capo Press, 1970), pp. 52–57.

Chapter 4

Bodies at doors, bodies with doors

One of our aims in this book is to bring different perspectives and areas of expertise to bear on the question of the dramaturgy of the door. In the previous two chapters, and in the two that follow this one, we each began with core elements of study (Place and Text, Audience and Time) that are cognate with our individual backgrounds: Stuart has experience in researching performance and place, and in investigating how these construct specific artistic events, and Matt’s work is often focused on plays and theatrical texts, and he has worked widely on the question of temporality. In this chapter, though, we adopt a slightly different approach; instead of aligning the core element (bodies) with one or the other of our specialisms, we wish to see what those specialisms might bring to the same element, the same field of study. Like Chapter 1, then, this chapter is co-written, but with a slightly different method and a slightly different brief in mind. We set ourselves the task of each addressing, in our own way(s), the broad question of how doors and performing bodies relate to one another. The answers, as will become evident, are very different in both substance and approach, but we also found that they share a concern with the ways in which the relationship between doors and bodies illuminates our understanding of the relationship between the material and the immaterial, between presence and absence, and between experiences of particular – and challenging – environments. We begin with the body on stage, and then move to the body in the desert, in each case considering the ways in which doors can frame our experience of embodiment.

“Two doors” A body stands in a doorway, framed by both the materials of the set (the wood and metal of the door and doorway), and the light which emanates from behind him, “intens[ely] burning into the room” (Pinter, 1991, p. 314). It is the end of Harold Pinter’s short 1991 play, Party Time, and this is the first time that this door has been used as a point of entrance or in connection with human movement. It has, however, been used in other ways throughout the performance – the light which burns from offstage here has periodically risen

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and faded over the duration of the play, although no one on stage has taken any notice. This door seems to exist in a world that is separate from that occupied by the inhabitants (people and objects) of the rest of play. It is, in many respects, a door for the audience, not the players, save perhaps one. There is a second door, firmly grounded in the fictional world of the play, used and/or noticed by the characters. Like a body on stage, this door is both a performer and a character; it allows (or bars) passage between the apartment and the hallway (in the fictional world of the play) and the onstage and offstage realms of the theatre (in the material world of the playhouse). In this sense, the door performs a similar labour to many other elements of theatrical activity: it conjoins not only physical spaces, but specific realities, namely those of the fictional play and of the immediate world of the theatre (wherein we recognise ourselves as audience members, watching actors on a painted set). Passing through this door turns a performer into a character, or vice versa; the body morphs. This transformation is not, of course, always and only dependant on a door, but it is in this case (and many others) facilitated by the door. The body in the doorway speaks, and the things of the theatre – words, bodies, light, audience, space and place – coalesce around a door. The speech (which we will examine in detail below) is of things that exist and things that don’t; we are told of a state of non-being, of darkness and absence, by a physical being that is manifestly present, shrouded in bright light. In this half of the chapter, we’d like to use this short play as a means to consider the ways in which doors on stage can help to frame the materiality of the performing body – and by frame, we mean something beyond the ocular and geometrical. How do doors draw attention to and even shape the material presence of the performing body, a presence which is also ever cloaked in the absence that attends upon ‘fiction’ and ‘representation’? Perhaps a more precise way of forming the question is to ask how doors participate in what we might call an exchange between corporeal presence and absence. A few of the key terms of this question are anchored in the thinking of Maurice Merleau-Ponty. Perhaps most obviously, the language of embodiment he developed, and particularly of the lived body, can help to unpack some of the issues here involving the relationship between bodies and doors. In a well-known dictum from Phenomenology of Perception he observes “the body is the vehicle of being in the world, and having a body is, for a living creature, to be intervolved in a definite environment” (1962, p. 94). This condition of ‘intervolvement’ finds unique expression in the phenomenon of double-framing provided by doors in performance: the first frame – the performance itself – allows us to intensify, and focus on, the relationship(s) between bodies and spaces, by virtue of the limits imposed on each: this is the here-and-nowness of theatricality, in which we are (ideally) attending to these bodies in this particular space and the ways in which they interrelate not only with other bodies, but with a very defined and finite environment. Doubling that intensification is the frame of a door or doorway; as alluded to

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in Chapter 3, a body at a door is particularly charged: it is on a verge, almost fully present (coming) or almost absent (going). The frame of a door ‘zooms’ in the focus of the theatrical frame, and it does so in a way that heightens the interplay between presence and absence. More recent – and more performance-oriented – work has taken up this investigation of the relationship between bodies and their immediate environments, specifically in terms of how the body relates to space(s) and object(s). Jose Gil observed how the dancer’s body secretes the space around it, rather than moves through it, and he likens this to the relationship between the actor and the stage (2006, p. 21); this observation, in turn, seems rooted in various theories of social space(s), such as those of Henri Lefebvre or Michel de Certeau.1 And even more recent explorations, such as Stanton Garner Jr’s, Rachel Fensham’s, or Joslin McKinney’s continue and expand this task, as Fensham puts it, “of examining how bodies, objects, and media interact in the mise en scene in order to understand how reception contributes to the production of theatrical meaning” (2009, p. 26).2 Of course the task is not that simple or singular, and we are interested in examining here such interactions with an eye toward their performative affect, as well as their hand in the production of theatrical meaning; in other words, our goal is to unpack both what we apprehend and what we comprehend when doors and performing bodies interact. Joslin McKinney’s work is a good example, and helps to narrow the scope of the task we have in hand now. McKinney sets out to demonstrate how objects and spaces have subjective agency, and she does so through the use of Merleau-Ponty’s work on intersubjectivity and exchange. As McKinney points out, Merleau-Ponty’s later work seeks, in part, to dismantle the binary opposition of subject and object. His notions of reversibility and exchange are a part of a wider project of positing a mode of being wherein the perceiving subject is not looking at the world from a distance, but rather from within. This is not to say that the subject disappears, or fuses with the object, but rather the hierarchical nature of the relationship dismantles. For McKinney, in terms of performance practice, this offers us the opportunity to pursue a “phenomenology of materiality” (2015, p. 121), which she addresses via a specific scenographic focus, in that she is exploring the “interaction and exchange between the human and the nonhuman in scenography” (p. 121). In this case, the automatic identification of the human with the subject and the non-human (scenographic) with the object fades. And this is where, for us, doors come into play: if, as McKinney suggests, “[u]sing Merleau-Ponty, it is possible to understand how the seer and the seen are bound in a reciprocal relationship and how reversibility between subjects and objects applies to the experience of scenography” (p. 122), then we argue that such an understanding includes and is perhaps exemplified by the figure of the door. More specifically, the phenomenology of materiality she posits offers a good framework for one of the key arguments we want to make here about doors and

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performing bodies: that the interaction between the door and the performing body is one wherein subjective agency is shared and shuttling – the door is possessed of a ‘vibrant materiality’, in McKinney’s terms – and moreover, that interaction facilitates an ongoing exchange between material and immaterial phenomena. The conjunction of the door and the performing body, in other words, plays a significant role in the way in which theatrical activity can presence an absence, and/or make absent that which appears present. A closer look at Merleau-Ponty, and particularly his later work, the unfinished set of notes The Visible and the Invisible, can be helpful here. For Merleau-­Ponty, the visible and the invisible are not binary opposites, but rather complementary components of being in the world through the lived body. In his notes, he comments that [t]he invisible is not the contradictory of the visible: the visible itself has an invisible inner framework (membrure), and the in-visible is the secret counterpart of the visible, it appears only within it, it is the Nichturpräsentierbar which is presented to me as such within the world – one cannot see it there, and every effort to see it there makes it disappear, but it is in the line of the visible, it is its virtual focus, it is inscribed within it (in filigree). (1968, p. 215, original emphasis) In their introduction to Merleau-Ponty’s work, Lewis and Straehler put it like this: “The invisible is not the opposite of the visible, but its interior or depth. It is the depth of this world inscribed within the visible – a peculiar absence which is not absolute, or a ‘negativity which is not nothing’ (VI, 151/198)” (1968, p. 206). We think here of two sides of a door, one present visibly, and one present invisibly – the visible is grounded in, has its depth in, the invisible, and each is a necessary component of the other. For Merleau-Ponty, this becomes a question of the relationship between ideas (an invisible sensation) and their material expression or articulation in the visible, sensory world, and that relationship is negotiated by the body, which is both “the body sensed and the body sentient” (p. 138). He turns eventually to Proust to make his point, suggesting that “Literature, music, the passions, but also the experience of the visible world are […] the exploration of an invisible and the disclosure of a universe of ideas” (p. 149). Crucially, though, “this invisible, these ideas […] cannot be detached from the sensible appearances” (p. 149). As Lewis and Straehler underscore, ‘the idea’ is “the depth of the sensible” (p. 206, our emphasis); and our sentient and sensed bodies are capable of perceiving both surface (visible) and depth (idea/­invisible), partly because like that which we perceive, our lived bodies are also both surface and depth. For us, this has two principal implications for the relationship between doors and performing bodies. The first is that the conjunction of doors and bodies in performance can activate not only the perception – the ­apprehension – of both surface and depth, but the theatricalised movement between them. Depth

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becomes surface, and vice versa, in performance, and we are suggesting here that doors are a part of that operation. This is partly because doors are inherently instances of reversibility: as noted above, there is always the other side of the door, and the visible presence of one side tends to point us toward the invisible other side, which may entail either the literal, material other side of the door itself, or that which is immediately beyond it (in terms of space, objects, people, worlds). Perhaps more precisely, the visibility of the door brings to us its invisibility; and that flow is underscored by the encounter with a performing body, which is always shuttling between the visible and the invisible, on the basic level of being simultaneously a character and a performer. Merleau-Ponty speaks of the body as the “pivot of the world” (1962, p. 94), in the sense the body is always at once perceived by the world and the means through which the world is perceived. We’d suggest that when bodies and doors collude in the amplified field of performance, there is a doubling of that pivot action, and the flow between the visible and the invisible, the sensibly present and absent, the material and the immaterial is similarly amplified. This is a key component of the door’s dramaturgical function in performance: it acts with and as a body to open up this movement between the material and immaterial. We have used the trope of ‘reversibility’ a few times here, and this is of course a key part of Merleau-Ponty’s later work. It is, in short, the notion that our experience of the world, via the vehicle of the lived body, is always one wherein perception is reversible: the world perceives me just as I am perceiving the world. To return to McKinney’s work noted earlier, this condition can account for an understanding of the agency of objects: scenography, for example – or a door, in particular – is active and is its own kind of subject. Both McKinney and Merleau-Ponty are careful about degrees of literalness here: Lewis and Straehler, for instance, note that “Merleau-Ponty points out that reversibility is always on the verge of happening but is ‘never realized in fact’ (VI, 147/194). Although the roles of perceiving and being perceived can be reversed […], there is never complete coincidence, but rather a delay” (1968, p. 200). That said, the suggestions traced here imply the possibility of doors as active and of having agency. In some respects, this returns us to the argument we outlined in Chapter 1, and to the notion of the door as an ‘action’, in Eugenio Barba’s sense. Here, that argument finds some greater specificity in terms of the door’s relationship with the body. If Merleau-Ponty’s ideas of reversibility, and of the interconnectedness between the visible and the invisible, offer among other things the possibility of understanding objects and environments as active, then the door in performance not only falls within the scope of such possibility, but it takes on a more nuanced and engaged function dramaturgically. Consider, as a brief example, the locked door at the end of Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard (Chekhov, 2002, pp. 345–346). There is a brief but heavily weighted moment in this scene between the shutting up of the house, the sound of which – including the locking of doors – pointedly marks an absence and an end, and the entrance of the aged servant Firs, who has been forgotten

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and left behind. In this moment, devoid of material, visible human presence, we have that invisible “negativity which is not nothing”, in Merleau-Ponty’s terms. The family is no longer present, but their absence is a presence unto itself. We would argue that much of this phenomenon is facilitated by the door through which they exited, coupled with the sensibly perceptible sound of the doors being locked once the actors have left the stage. The door helps the space to speak, to borrow now from Artaud.3 It has an agency of its own. But it only helps; it is a part of an interaction with bodies – bodies which, as characters, pass through the door, and as performers or performance makers (stage hands, perhaps) create the sound of the door. That agency is confirmed, and highlighted, by the subsequent entrance and actions of Firs, who finds himself unable to pass through the same door: Firs: [Going to the door, trying the handle]. Locked. They’ve gone … [Sits down on the sofa]. They’ve forgotten all about me … It doesn’t matter … I’ll sit here a moment. (Chekhov, 2002, p. 345) Like the door, the performer’s corporeal presence – in its movement and then, as he lies down to sleep, perhaps to die, in his stasis – also outlines the absence of those who have just left. Doors and bodies swing, or pivot, upon a continuum of material presence and material absence. This sense of the subjective agency of doors was highlighted in our early laboratories on doors on stage (Andrews and Wagner, 2014). In those workshops, we ran a series of exercises exploring the scene from The Cherry Orchard noted above, and the performer playing Firs commented afterward how he was initially unsure about the recipient of his lines, especially the first few sentences, cited above: was this akin to a Shakespearean soliloquy wherein he should be talking to the audience, or was he talking in a more ‘psychologically realistic’ fashion to himself? In working through the scene, however, he found the he instinctively simply addressed the lines to the door. The door refused him passage, and so, he ‘replied’ to the door’s action by addressing his lines to it. The door – not unlike the “dear, revered bookshelf ” that Gayev addresses directly in Act One – becomes an active player in the scene; and in the case of the final scene, it is directly linked with the frailty of the aged human body. We might crystalise much of this in Merleau-Ponty’s figure of the chiasm. A good deal of the examination thus far has skimmed across the waters of reversibility, of intervolvement and of movement or shuttling between the visible and the invisible, the sensibly perceptible and that which we perceive as the depth of sensory encounters. Merleau-Ponty locates the centre of such ideas in the chiasm, that which facilitates an embodied exchange, “between me and the world, between the phenomenal body and the ‘objective’ body, between the perceiving and the perceived” (1968, p. 215). It is, ultimately, this notion of exchange that we think is crucial to an understanding of the ‘intervolvement’ between the door and the body. For us, it is an exchange between the

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material and immaterial realities of performance, much akin to the relationship Merleau-­Ponty traces between the visible and the invisible. Implicit in the idea of exchange is movement, and potential movement in multiple (or at least dual) directions; equally implicit is the idea of joint or shared agency. The material and the immaterial are part of a meeting, an encounter, wherein neither is ‘subject’ to an other (object). Merleau-Ponty, in linking the chiasm – the instance of exchange – with the notion of reversibility, puts it like this (in the unpolished working notes to The Visible and the Invisible): Reversibility: the finger of the glove that is turned inside out – There is no need of a spectator who would be on each side. It suffices that from one side, I see the wrong side of the glove that is applied to the right side, that I touch the one through the other (double ‘representation’ of a point or a plane of a field) the chiasm is that: the reversibility. […] In reality there is neither me nor the other as positive, positive subjectivities. There are two caverns, two openesses, two stages where something will take place – and which both belong to the same world, to the stage of Being. (1968, p. 263) As we move back into considering specific doors in performance, we want to do so in terms of asking how they might be a part of facilitating such a chiasm. In the broader scope of this book’s aims – to articulate specific components of a dramaturgy of the door – we suggest here that one aspect of the door’s dramaturgical function is the way it facilitates an exchange between subjectivities, which might be corporeal (in terms of the bodies of performers and audiences, or the bodies of a performer and a character), but, more broadly, might be thought of as the subjectivities of materiality and immateriality. One reason to term it as such is, akin to the breaking down of hierarchical binaries noted earlier, an attempt to place the material and the immaterial into shared, reciprocal, reversible relationship with one another, wherein both are apprehended and comprehended as part of the same world, the same ‘stage of Being’. Pinter’s Party Time is a strong example, in that the play works in large measure as an exercise in presencing that which is unseen, not materially ‘here’. On its surface, this might seem a fairly simple exercise in making visible the atrocities of oppressive power that lie just beneath the surface of any seemingly ‘civilised’ society. Premiering in 1991, in the wake of the fall of the Soviet Union and the scrambling for power that ensued across much of Central and Eastern Europe, Party Time’s national and civic location is not explicitly determined in the script; but the play puts on stage a picture of the power elite in what could easily be Bucharest, Prague, or Budapest, or, as the premiere production overtly suggested, London.4 Just off stage are the streets of a city in uprising and, inevitably, the vicious suppression of such unrest. The onstage setting is almost entirely confined to a large room in the flat of

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the party’s host, Gavin. The audience never sees the outside world or even hears it – there are no distant gunshots, sirens, or explosions. But reference to these events – focused primarily on the question of what has happened to Jimmy, the brother of one of the party goers – helps to establish a pattern of making the world ‘out there’ present in here. Like his dialogue, Pinter’s stage directions, particularly in terms of his description of the room, are sparse and crisp: five brief lines describe “A large room. Sofas, armchairs, etc.” (1991, p. 281). But among these lines, Pinter explicitly points out “Two doors. One door, which is never used, is half open, in a dim light” (ibid.). The party goers have a few rare entrances (but, like Sartre’s No Exit, no egress) through the other door, which operates as a realistic set piece. In keeping with the conventions of theatrical realism (upon which the play draws but to which it does not fully adhere), this door into the party serves to delineate the room, define the fictional place of the play, and allow us to imagine the extension of that place beyond the confines of the stage. Behind the door – the ‘invisible depth’, as it were, in Merleau-Ponty’s terms – lies not the green room, but the deadened streets which are being ‘cleansed’ by a tyrannical militia, under the direction of the party’s host. In this respect, the door functions, within the fiction established by the play, as a specific kind of threshold, one which separates the conditions of danger and safety. Out there is peril: a “bit of a round-up”, as Gavin lightly terms it late in the play (p. 313); in here is sanctuary – but only, of course, if one has an invitation, if one is permitted to cross through the door (recall again Meiss’s identification of both the utilitarian and protective roles of doors-as-thresholds). Notably, such a crossing only occurs twice, both in the opening moments of the play, to allow the entrance first of Dusty, wife of one of the power elite at the party, and then of Dame Melissa, who stands as the ‘old money’ of the society. Each of these entrances briefly bridges the two worlds of inside/outside, safety/danger: Dusty’s entrance is marked by her immediate concern for the fate of her brother: “Did you hear what’s happened to Jimmy? What’s happened to Jimmy?” (p. 284). Her questions are quickly brushed aside, though, and the conversation returns to telling Gavin all about a new country club that has opened up. Melissa’s entrance is punctuated by a description of the outside world that is “like the black death” (p. 286). She continues with an account of her journey to the party: The town’s dead. There’s nobody on the streets, there’s not a soul in sight, apart from some … soldiers. My driver had to stop at a … you know … what do you call it? … a roadblock. We had to say who we were … it really was a trifle … (ibid.) This door then marks the bodies on stage in a particular way: it stamps them, by virtue of their being on this side of it, as un-harmable. Those who come through, or who are already here, are not subject to the violence that we

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hear is occurring outside – not while they are here, at any rate. As the play progresses, we come to understand that Jimmy – absent from the party – is among the victims of the ‘round-up’. He is, not unlike a character such as King Lear, both literally and figuratively out of doors. Being on that side of the door exposes him to bodily harm, just as Lear’s being shut out of doors exposes his body to the elements. The extent of the danger – and the fact that it lies away from the immediate ‘here’, on the other side of the door – is brought home by the threats Dusty receives, particularly from her husband, as she continues to question Jimmy’s whereabouts, and thereby defy the heads of power. “Perhaps you’ll kill me when we get home?” she asks her husband Terry; “Do you think you will?” (p. 301). Their exchange which follows marks the fact that anywhere other than this particular flat – including Dusty’s own home – is not safe: Do you think you’ll put an end to it? Do you think there is an end to it? What do you think? Do you think that if you put an end to me that would be the end of everything for everyone? Will everything and everyone die with me? TERRY: Yes, you’re all going to die together, you and all your lot. DUST Y: How are you going to do it? Tell me. TERRY: Easy. We’ve got dozens of options. We could suffocate every single one of you at a given signal or we could shove a broomstick up each individual arse at another given signal or we could poison all the mother’s milk in the world so that every baby would drop dead before it opened its perverted bloody mouth. (pp. 301–302)5 DUST Y:

Though seemingly unobtrusive, the door to the flat, by fulfilling its simple and understated job of separating fictional places, also enacts specific and material instances of marking bodies. Party Time is, however, perhaps dominated by a different door: this door exists not so much in the realm of theatrical realism, and it operates as a different kind of threshold, serving a different kind of dramaturgical and theatrical function. It is the upstage door, half open, behind which a light periodically “burns into the room” (p. 298), and, in the play’s final scene, from which emerges the figure of Jimmy. The play is structured in a series of nine informal scenes, which are demarcated by lights in one area of the room/stage coming up on a group or pair of characters while the rest of the room fades. These scene transitions are further punctuated on three occasions by this upstage door and the light beyond it, which “gradually intensifies [and] burns into the room” (pp. 298, 309). As our attention is drawn to this door over the course of the play, the performance crafts a material presence of Jimmy even in his bodily absence, just as it has crafted a material presence of danger within the safety of the immediate space. In this sense, the door stands in for the body, and the body is imagined – and made present – both behind the door (in a way that straddles the realms of representational and

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presentational theatre), and in/as the door. The door becomes, in a significant and material way, the notably absent ‘Jimmy’. At the end of the play, after Gavin has made a speech to the assembled company about the ‘round-up’ coming to an end and the resumption of “normal services” (p. 313), and after the performance has established the upstage door as standing in for Jimmy, there is one final scene transition which takes us out of the realistic setting of Gavin’s flat and to a kind of no-where and no-when. Pinter alters his stage directions slightly for this third iteration of increasing the light behind the door: The room lights go down. The light from the door intensifies, burning into the room. Everyone is still, in silhouette. A man comes out of the light and stands in the doorway. He is thinly dressed. (p. 313)6 In this moment, the combination of the door, the light, and the body facilitate a kind of alchemical transformation: the materially present door, which had been standing in for, as well as concealing, Jimmy, now gives way to a materially present body. But, partly by virtue of “stand[ing] in the doorway”, that body is only marginally ‘here’. Indeed, the short speech that follows serves to articulate and effect as much of an absence as a presence: Sometimes I hear things. Then it’s quiet. I had a name. It was Jimmy. People called me Jimmy. That was my name. Sometimes I hear things. Then everything is quiet. When everything is quiet I hear my heart. When the terrible noises come I don’t hear anything. Don’t hear don’t breathe am blind. Then everything is quiet. I hear a heartbeat. It is probably not my heartbeat. It is probably someone else’s heartbeat. What am I? Sometimes a door bangs, I hear voices, then it stops. Everything stops. It all stops. It all closes. It closes down. It shuts. It all shuts. It shuts down. It shuts. I see nothing at any time any more. I sit sucking the dark. It’s what I have. The dark is in my mouth and I suck it. It’s the only thing I have. It’s mine. It’s my own. I suck it.

JIMMY:

‘Jimmy’ here is an entity of the past: “I had a name. It was Jimmy.” The ‘I’ that is speaking, the present body, is without identity, and, as the speech progresses, without time, without sensory perception, without being.7 Darkness engulfs the subject, and, notably, the subject engulfs the darkness. The light behind the door, which had previously established a pattern of intensifying and burning, now gives way to darkness in both language and, ultimately, in sensory perception, as these final lines lead to a blackout. The door is the pivot in all of this: it lets in darkness and a deathly kind of absence just as it simultaneously and paradoxically lets in light and a physical, living, bodily presence.

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We wrote earlier in Chapter 3 of Bourdieu’s notion that the door is that site where the world reverses in on itself. The end of Party Time seems to be an excellent example of such a reversal, which is also of the order of reversibility that Merleau-Ponty has in mind. For Merleau-Ponty, such reversal is a phenomenon of perception: the perceiving body is only and always able to perceive because it is itself perceptible. In seeing Jimmy, we are seeing an absence, and we are pointedly aware that an absence is seeing us, speaking to us. In the fictional world of the play, Jimmy has been rounded up, removed; he is, like Dusty’s prediction of her own future, very possibly already dead. But it is more than a ghost, theatrical or otherwise, that we are perceiving in the figure of Jimmy: it is a body on a threshold, both here and not here. It is both the visible, in Merleau-Ponty’s terms, and the invisible which grounds it. Like perceiving both sides of a door – one visible and available to the senses, the other invisible and perceived through the visible – we see here two sides of Jimmy, a presence and an absence. If we take Merleau-Ponty to heart, moreover, such seeing expands beyond the realm of cognition. The point is not that we, as enlightened audience members, perceive and understand the relationship between the visible and the invisible because the actor playing Jimmy stands in a doorway. Rather, such sensible perception is a matter of being in the perceived, in a lived and fully experiential way. For Merleau-Ponty, “sensation is literally a form of communion” (1962, p. 246). Using the example of perceiving colour, he states The sensor and the sensible do not stand in relation to each other as two mutually external terms, and sensation is not an invasion of the sensor by the sensible. It is my gaze which subtends colour […] or rather my gaze pairs off with colour […] and in this transaction between the subject of sensation and the sensible, it cannot be held that one acts while the other suffers the action, or that one confers significance on the other. (1962, p. 248) In the case of perceiving Jimmy, such terms of communion seem entirely apt: the framing of the body in the door creates this paradoxical present absence in very much the same way that a perceiving audience is both here and not here. We ourselves, as audience to this particular kind of theatrical event, exist in the same duality as the actor/character, partly – to follow Merleau-Ponty’s thinking – because we perceive and commune with that duality. The body in the door, then, as a ‘sensible’ – but, crucially, not passive – object to be sensed, generates a corporeal condition with which we commune. As has perhaps become evident through this book, we are here touching on a recurrent motif that drives a good portion of our interest in doors in performance: the relationship between the material and the immaterial, between presence and absence, and more particularly, between present absences and

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absent presences. For us, doors – and in particular, as above, doors in conjunction with bodies – aid in the theatrical activity of ‘presencing’ an absence or ‘absenting’ a presence; they are a pivot on which the realms of the material and the immaterial swivel. The performing body, among other functions, always serves to ground the world of a play in a material reality: the body is real, it is present, it is living, and as such, it lends those attributes to the ‘fiction’ or the ‘illusion’ of performance.8 When the body and the door come together in performance, that fluidity of material reality seems to increase. James Knapp writes of this fluidity in terms of Shakespearean drama, but in a way that may help to make our point here. He likens theatrical activity to the work of the early modern scientist and alchemist, John Dee. In a “letter apologeticall” published in 1599 defending his natural philosophy against charges of magic, John Dee thanks God for giving him the ability “incessantly to seek” after divine truth ‘by the true philosophical method… proceeding and ascending (as it were) gradatim from things visible, to consider of things spiritual: from things bodily, to conceiue of things spirituall: from things transiorie, and & momentanie, to meditation of things permanent: by things mortall (visible and invisible) to have some perceiverance of immortality.’ (2012, p. 385) In Dee’s argument, Knapp sees the work of the theatrical image, of which we would suggest the figure of Jimmy standing in the doorway is a prime example. For Knapp, the theatrical image is a material, sensory phenomenon which is particularly well suited to allow access through its materiality to the immaterial. As Knapp puts it, “The image experienced in time—rather than harnessed by reason—exceeds understanding and leads to a brief encounter with something immaterial” (2012, p. 387). He then goes on to liken this type of phenomenon to the perspectives offered by Merleau-Ponty. For Knapp, the chiasm “is akin to Dee’s method of advancing gradatim from ‘things visible’ to ‘things spiritual,’ ‘incessantly seeking after a glimpse of something greater than mortality’” (p. 387). We have cast much of the above in terms of this notion of exchange, and what we hope is emerging here is a demonstration of the ways in which doors and bodies join together in performance to facilitate an exchange between the material and the immaterial, the visible and the invisible. Bodies have a tendency to do this partly (though not wholly, of course) by virtue of their dual existence as performer and character; doors are similar in that they are at once a ‘real’ door, made of wood or metal, possessed of a vibrant and subjective materiality (to return to McKinney’s argument), and also an imagined door, an element in a fictional, illusory world. But that is true of any object on stage, as Bert States notes when he borrows Peter Handke’s observation that “in the theater, light is brightness pretending to be other brightness, a chair is a chair pretending to be another chair” (1985, p. 20). What sets the

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door apart from other objects is its inherent two-sidedness, bringing into relief this sense of there always being an ‘invisible’ that grounds the visible, and alongside that duality, the simple fact that a door, by nature, is made to show you both sides, to swing open or slam shut, or, as in Party Time, to stand partly open in a way that will conceal and then reveal that which is on the other side. It is, finally, also the threshold-aspect of doors that is prominent here: Jimmy stands in the doorway, on the very border between here and there, between presence and absence, materiality and immateriality. And it is fitting, perhaps, to draw this idea to a close with that example, since it demonstrates not only the dramaturgical function of the door in performance, but the dramaturgy of the door as it affects and is affected by another fundamental element of theatre, the body. ***

At doors to the desert: practising doors between art and environment Our knowledge and experience of deserts is distinctly limited. In 2016, Andrews spent a few days in Dungeness, which has, at varying times, been claimed as the only desert in the UK, due to its low rainfall, although the UK Meteorological Office rejects this definition (Gani, 2015). Wagner lived for a year in Tempe, AZ, but forays outside of the city and into the desert were rare. This aside, we are acutely aware that deserts constitute a compelling environment to consider in terms of doors. Deserts can provide challenging environments, they can be difficult to map neatly – the borders of deserts can tend to blur with surrounding land. Doors can offer protection but also, by implication, separation from the local environment. What is it, we wonder, to situate a door, a fixed material form, in an environment where limits can be indistinct? How might this situate us in relation to the desert, how might it frame the desert? What practices does a door in the desert enable and restrict? What is the relation between the places that a door brings together and keeps apart – principally where this drawing together and separation involves a building in the desert? There is significant evidence of arts practice on borders, yet less so on art that marks out borders and invites new thinking about living between art and environment. In seeking to understand the ways in which artists might introduce doors in their work, and thereby attend to distinctions between their work and the environment in which it is situated and with which it is engaged, we are particularly drawn to work in the desert. Artists and architects have long been drawn to deserts, particularly the south-western deserts of the USA, to investigate and reflect on practices of attending to and living in a particular environment, whether for temporary or more permanent habitation. Particular instances of this work have involved the introduction of art or architecture to a pre-existing environment

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and, necessarily, means of crossing from building to surroundings and back again. Part of this work has involved some form of temporary encampment, in which doors may take varying forms. In 1965, Clark Richert and Eugene and JoAnn Benofsky created Drop City, in the high desert outside Trinidad, Colorado. The purpose had been to allow participants to develop their practice of ‘drop art’, in which they ‘dropped’ artistic interventions into everyday life. Erin Elder reflects that “[a]t Drop City lifestyle was cultivated as art; acting out an alternative reality was the project at hand” (2012, p. 7). The structures, including the doors, were constructed from found and repurposed objects. The primary structure, the geodesic dome, was designed by Buckminster Fuller. In the kitchen dome, particularly, the rectangular shape of the door stood out against the triangular sections and the shape of the dome. In this work, doors comprised a distinctive form that was separate to the dome and the surroundings, drawing attention to the distinction between interior and exterior, and to this, the point of crossing. While Drop City was grounded in arts practice, other projects have emerged as a combination of practices and disciplines, particularly involving architecture. Notably, in 1970, Paulo Soleri developed Arcosanti, an ‘urban laboratory’ in the Sonora Desert north of Phoenix, Arizona. These projects identified the desert as a critical environment for exploring alternative practices of living in and engaging with a place. The rectangular doors of Arcosanti contrast with large curved windows or sections of wall. In some instances, the curving walls form archways of a kind, sheltering doors from the sun. There are contrasts here, of straight and curving lines, of large entrance porches and relatively ordinary doors. To practise such doors is to pass through alternate forms, shapes and scales that draw attention to the act of crossing between architecture and environment. There is related interest, in architecture, in designing innovative habitable dwellings that are appropriate for specific environments. There has been particular interest in developing such structures in and in response to US deserts. This is notable in work by Frank Lloyd Wright, and in subsequent projects that follow and re-conceive of this work. In 1927, Wright and his staff designed Ocatillo Desert Camp in Chandler, Arizona. Paul Laseau and James Tice describe the camp as “an irregular space with buildings made of wood and canvas canopies and diagonal wood walls” (1992, p. 158). As they reflect, this design echoed Wright’s perception of this place, ‘“I felt there could be no obvious symmetry in any building in this great desert”’ (ibid., p. 158). Peter Banham (1982) notes that the camp had been constructed to plan the San Marcos of the Desert hotel, which was abandoned after the 1929 Wall Street Crash. Wright left the camp and designed and built Taliesin West (1937), a winter home and site of the Taliesin Fellowship for apprentice architects. As Bruce Pfeiffer and Victor E. Sidy note, apprentices and, later, architecture students, would create personal dwellings in the desert as part of their time at the site (2011). At and in response to Taliesin West, Wright,

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his apprentices and, latterly, architecture students have reflected on ways in which they might engage with this particular desert environment, in the form of dwellings that situate individuals in this particular place for a time. Both the camp and student accommodation offer temporary experiences of an environment, and opportunities to find and become familiar with practices of living in a place. In this section of the chapter, we discuss Andrea Zittel’s A–Z Wagon Stations, a series of small, individual dwelling units in the Californian high desert. Zittel is a visual artist who conceives of her work as ‘investigative living’ and who lives and works in part at A–Z West, an area of over 70 acres in the high desert in southern California, close to the Joshua Tree National Park (USA). Zittel named the land and project with the ‘A–Z’, that she has used for many of her artworks and also for A–Z East, a separate site in Brooklyn. In so doing, she references both her initials and the breadth of her work, which includes mobile and sited structures, the ‘uniform’ she herself wears and material objects for living. A–Z Wagon Stations are situated around a communal kitchen, and inhabitants have access to shower and toilet facilities. Each Wagon Station has two doors: one a small door enabling access and ventilation, the other a curved hatch that constitutes a significant part of the structure. A–Z West is open for public and private group tours, and the Wagon Stations can be rented for short stays during a month in spring and another in autumn. In reflecting on Zittel’s work here, we are particularly interested in the ways in which the doors to A–Z Wagon Stations frame individual experiences of being enclosed in and between the living unit and within the surrounding environment. Through this work, we are interested in understanding how, by addressing A–Z Wagon Stations, we can advance understanding of the form and practice of points of crossing between art-architecture and a specific environment, and the ways in which artists mark distinctions between architecture and environment. In particular, we are drawn to these as ‘mobile’ structures - moveable with some limited preparations, and places of temporary stays. These are not, then, entirely permanent structures, they mark out a limited form of separation from the environment, before needing repair and, at times, replacement. There is, we reflect, something intriguing about creating a temporary and limited context in which to engage with an environment, and enabling individuals to live, for a time, in that context. We write about A–Z Wagon Stations from a distance, which we find an uncomfortable practice, given our interests in attending to individual experiences of practising place. As Philipp Kaiser and Miwon Kwon recognise, it can be challenging to access projects that are set at some distance from existing institutions, both in practical and financial terms (2012). Yet we are aware there can be value in writing at a remove. Notably, writers and artists have documented their search for Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty, sometimes not finding it at all. In 1997, Tacita Dean created Trying to Find the Spiral Jetty, a sound work recorded in a car, following instructions to the site (Dean, 1997). Such work reveals that to travel to find an artwork is, in part, an experience of a work. Recognising

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Figure 4.1  A –Z Wagon Stations Source: We are grateful to Andrea Zittel and Sadie Coles HQ for granting permission for us to use this image

that there can be value in writing about works we have not directly experienced, in this chapter, we focus our discussion on an interview with Lisa Balik, who stayed in the Wagon Stations in 2016, and we also refer to images of the work, provided by Sadie Coles HQ, which represents Zittel in the UK. Balik (née Stenhaug) was interviewed for the Parsons School of Design blog (Design Studies, 2016), and her discussion of the challenges and discoveries of living at the site led Andrews to interview Balik for this chapter in June 2018. This, a half chapter in The Dramaturgy of the Door, is a point of departure on this topic of artistic projects that are situated in and in dialogue with environments, particularly those that enable but also pose a challenge to human habitation. Of course, it would be possible to conceive of such artworks as reconfiguring and becoming a part of an environment, and yet the temporary, mobile form of works such as A–Z Wagon Stations, enabling visitors to make temporary stays in structures that can be entirely closed off through doors, indicates a connection to but also distinction from the surrounding environment. From this initial work, we find there is much to be gained by study of doors in and to environments, and regard this a test piece, to point to the potential of further study. In the context of a changing climate, it is becoming increasingly critical that we reflect on our relation to environments, particularly those that are undergoing transformation and those that pose challenges for habitation.9

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In addressing Zittel’s work, this chapter speaks to issues of the ways in which we live, and conceive of living in a place, particularly in places that involve challenge or extremity. In this initial study of Zittel’s work, we find that conditions that make human life particularly challenging become acutely evident at the door. Similarly, that doors can speak to and entirely transform our sense of architectural limits, and invite modes of living in which inhabitants experience and actively negotiate environmental conditions in a building, rather than simply seeking to protect inhabitants and limit, assuage and control those conditions. While we focus here on art projects in US deserts, there is international interest in desert architecture, both in terms of existing, local and traditional architecture, but also contemporary design and innovation. In particular, our work addresses design in the context of a challenging, and changing, climate. Writing on architecture in Yazd, Iran, Parinaz Keshtkaran sets out a series of “architectural principals [sic]” for “acceptable levels of human comfort in adverse climatic conditions” (2011, p. 428). In particular, she identifies particular ways of practising architecture to manage temperature that attend to the conditions of a place. In Yzad, Keshtkaren describes an underground air trap beneath a house that is used to catch the cool night air. In this context, closed external doors become critical for keeping out the heat of the day and open internal doors for allowing air to flow through a house. She writes, On summer nights, when people usually sleep on the roof or in the yard, the air trap gets the cold, night winds and spreads the cold air all over the house, and since the doors are closed, the house remains cool during the morning. (2011, p. 436, emphasis added) Where Keshtkaran reflects on ways to cool an entire building, Marwa Dabaieh considers the ways in which architects construct buildings to create places for individuals to negotiate and to remain cool themselves. Writing on the earthen architecture of desert oases in Egypt, Dabaieh finds that a “cool recess in their doorways” allows residents to “socialise and talk to each other in parallel when finishing their household activities without being visible to the outside” (2011, p. 51). As Dabaieh’s work reveals, the challenges of particular environments also provide opportunities for architects to create spaces of engagement and disengagement, openness and enclosure, encounter and respite. The doorway becomes a vital and protected place in which to attend to life outside the home, while being connected to life and activities within. On one level, of course, this is about creating temperate architecture, and dealing practically with the possibilities of sustainable architecture, using local materials and designs to address local conditions. On another, it involves understanding the ways in which architecture can enable physical, embodied engagement with the local environment. It involves the shapes and forms

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of buildings, of places in and between those buildings and, critically, at the points of access, of entrance and exit, and the ways in which doors enable inhabitants to situate themselves in and in relation to building and environment. In each case, it involves understanding the ways in which artists and architects might practise and create opportunities for others to practise doors. By addressing doors in the desert, we seek to extend established and more recent practices of determining the limits of a place and the ways we can live in, and respond to, a particular, local environment. This focus on both place and practices is evident in readings of desert-based experimental living projects. Following Karvonen and van Heur (2014), Evans et al. caution against projects that prioritise design and technology, rather than politics and society. They suggest that, in Arcosanti and a separate project, Masdar City, in Abu Dhabi (United Arab Emirates), “the more interesting learning is occurring in ways that were not intended by the designs: through organic and political struggles” (2016, p. 233). In conceiving of architecture in the context of a particular environment, we need to consider both the practical issues of maintaining buildings that are habitable, but also, in the context of climate change, to think openly and imaginatively about the ways in which architecture can enable and enhance life in that environment. We need to investigate the ways in which artists and architects invite inhabitants to negotiate their relation between a building and the environment. This takes on particular significance at doors, through which bodies cross in and out of spaces, and with which they manage heat, light and the passage of air. As Mark A. Cheetham observes in his study of artistic engagement with nature since the 1960s, “a wide range of contemporary eco-art practices revolves around issues of borders and boundaries” (2018, n.p.). Yet, he recognises that, [e]cological and environmental science stresses connectedness and ultimately challenges the imposition of hard boundaries between geographical zones, species, and even the realms of the organic and inorganic. (ibid.) Cheetham identifies a “tension” between this sense of a connected world and a tendency, in local contexts, “to erect and maintain political, economic, and physical boundaries” (ibid.). He draws attention to the potentials of Lorraine Code’s notion of “ecological thinking” (2006), and Philippe Descola’s sense of an “ecology of relationships” which re-orders existing understandings of “nature and society, humans and non-humans, individuals and collectives, in a new assemblage” (Philippe Descola, cited in Cheetham, 2018, n.p.). Cheetham calls for an awareness of environmental science and ecology in contemporary approaches to arts practice and environment. He recognises that such thinking calls for, in Code’s terms, “a revised mode of engagement with knowledge, subjectivity, politics, ethics, science, citizenship, and

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agency that pervades and reconfigures theory and practice” (Code, cited in Cheetham, 2018, n.p.). In this context, he proposes the term ‘ecotone’, “[t]he boundary between adjacent ecosystems”, as a productive way of conceiving of and addressing borders in terms of ecology (ibid.). Writing on Nordic art and ecology, Bonnie Fortune makes a similar case, reflecting on the significance of the ‘edge effect’, which Cheetham finds occurs in an ecotone. Fortune cites Nils Norman, who suggests that [t]he edge effect is this idea that the more edge you create, the more biodiversity you create. Where a meadow meets a forest or a piece of water meets a meadow, two different ecologies meet. Two different kinds of landscapes meet … that is where you find the most biodiversity at that edge. (Norman, cited in Fortune, 2014, p. 9) For Fortune, the term ‘edge effect’ is particularly important because Nordic countries might all too easily be read, reductively, as an edge. Instead, she offers ‘edge’ as a term that is generative, that is richer than a single ecology. As she observes, “artists are working to develop critical and resilient culture that produces new understandings about how we relate to the landscape” (2014, p. 11). Fortune’s reference to the edge effect invites two readings. Firstly, it suggests that it may be valuable to make, practice and reflect on art that occurs on and engages with ‘edges’ of particular ecologies. Secondly, as both Cheetham and Fortune indicate, it points to the potential for an as-yet undefined and expanded sense of diversity, not simply biodiversity, at the ‘edge’ between art or architecture and an environment. Baz Kershaw suggests that we might employ the terms “‘theatre ecology’ and ‘performance ecology’ [to] reference theatres and performances as ecosystems” (2007, p. 15). Drawing on his experience of theatre-making, he finds “there are complicated and unavoidable interdependencies between every element of a performance event and its environment” (p. 24). Our interest here, is in the ways in which we might better understand the meeting of arts practice and environment, potentially two separate though interconnected and ‘interdependent’ ecosystems. In attending to Zittel’s work, we are interested in the potential for doors to provide material forms that invite and enable practical interaction at an edge, and that bring two worlds into dialogue. Specifically, we seek to understand the ways in which we might understand the edge effect between Zittel’s artistic intervention and the local environment. There are risks in this work, of perpetuating a reading of hard borders between arts practice and a particular place, rather than a more open reading of intersecting and interconnected relationships. On one level, doors offer a rather distinct, material border, but they are also a threshold, a point of crossing, of passage. An unlocked door, an open door, a permissive door, a door ajar can be a compelling invitation to cross, and one that focuses attention on the point of crossing, that draws attention to intersections and interrelations.

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A –Z Wagon Stations The back door

From inside, the smaller of the two doors is mustard coloured, and set between two metal structural supports in the rear wall of the A–Z Wagon Station (see Figure 4.1). There is a metal bolt, a narrow gap along the top of the door and a hinge down one side. Alix Browne notes that the footprint of the A–Z Wagon Station is rectangular, five by seven feet in size, large enough for a double mattress, with a few inches to spare top and bottom (2016). During her stay in one of the A–Z Wagon Stations, Balik recalls that she and others there at the time “would use the backdoor for entering and leaving the wagon at most times. We used this door as we would use more traditional doors, despite the small size” (Balik, 2018). Balik found that the back door offered a familiar form and process, a door to unlatch, to push open, to cross through the frame, and push again to close. Despite the marked difference from the back door in Miller and Whalley’s experience of their home, and writing on the back door in US and UK culture (see Chapter 2), we are caught by the similar properties of a back door for Balik. Indeed, the diminutive size of the door appeared to extend the informality of the door, although not the ease of using such a door. The Wagon Stations are positioned around the base of a hill and the back doors open onto and mark out a place that is somewhat separate from the vista that is evident when opening the front door. As such, Zittel’s work involves moving through a series of spaces, from the small living unit, the door to a partially screened, partially protected area, and then to the more open space of the camp and the views of the surroundings. We might understand this in terms of ecological thinking about intersecting ecosystems. As Lance Hosey reflects, in terms of design for sustainable architecture, “[e]cology obliges us to think of design as a continuous stream of influence at every scale” (2012, p. 8). Hosey refers to the twentieth-century Finnish architect, Eliel Saarinen’s advice, to “consider every object within its next larger context—a chair within a room, a room within a house, a house within a street, and so on” (ibid.). This approach invites us to look for connections, for a ‘continuous stream’, even at points of threshold, and thereby potential separation. From this perspective, Zittel’s work asks that we attend to the journey from interior to exterior and, in so doing, offers a model by which art practice opens us to the richness of an edge, undermining any apparent starkness between one place and another. The small size of the Wagon Station and of the back door complicates the process of leaving/entering the unit. It asks inhabitants to discover and become proficient at finding places to hold, places to lodge a foot, ways of reaching, turning, releasing. Balik’s experience indicates that there is particular value in attending to the physical, embodied experience of crossing between architecture and environment, especially when our concern is the edge between

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these and when that edge is made difficult to navigate. In Chapter 2, we attended to work in phenomenological approaches to architecture; there is, similarly, interest in geography on “practising architecture” ( Jacobs and Merriman, 2011, p. 211). Mark Paterson asks “how might […] haptic or ‘more than visual’ knowledges be conceptualised, whether implicitly or explicitly, by designers, practitioners or visitors alike?” (2011, p. 264). Our sense is that performance offers a vital means of addressing this question, of attending to the practice of a place and to making sense of this practice. There is more to understand here, about forms and practices at the edges of ecosystems and the ways we might understand these beyond readings of biodiversity. We might, for instance, look further at the kinds of movements, the sense of security, ease and comfort with material objects and architectural forms, and with the changing environmental conditions that we discover in passing across an edge. In this context, Balik’s experience of A–Z Wagon Stations offers an instance of artists introducing and drawing attention to the practice of interconnected worlds, of places with particular conditions that require specific actions and sequences of movement. The hatch door

A second ‘door’, a curved front hatch, comprises one long side and the roof of the Wagon Station. A vertical transparent panel takes up about a third of this hatch, the remainder is a single piece of curved metal. There is a number printed on the exterior. The hatch lifts up on hydraulic springs, not unlike the boot of an estate car or station wagon, creating a form of awning. This mechanism and the title of the work reveal this, in part, as a playful rethinking of ‘station wagon’ cars. With the large hatch closed, there is limited room to manoeuvre in the Wagon Stations. In her stay in one of the A–Z Wagon Stations, Balik found that, Life inside the wagon was challenging at first as you can barely sit upright in it. But after a few days your movements adjusted to the space. At first a simple task such as putting on a sweater or tying your shoe would involve elbows hitting the aluminum door and frustration due to lack of mobility, but by the 3rd day you were changing outfits, reading books and making tea inside the wagon. (Balik, 2018) For Balik, living in the Wagon Station involved adapting and re-learning familiar acts in the confines of the structure. This was enhanced by the privations of the site, not least the limited space for belongings. In asking inhabitants to rethink what is necessary or possible within the limits of a structure, the wagons and encampment provide a valuable context through which to reflect on the ways in which practitioners of architecture attend to

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such limits in their practice and growing experience and awareness of a structure. Zittel has explored these themes before. In Free Running (1999), she was “locked in a basement in Berlin for a week, without human contact or timepieces” (Moxley, 2013). In contrast, in the Wagon Stations, the interior was connected to the exterior. While being enclosed within A–Z Wagon Station, Balik reflects that the transparent panel meant she was inside the structure and also visible from outside. While Balik found herself, initially, uncomfortable with this visibility, she reflects that after those first few days, “you realise that you have the privacy you need”. There were few people around, “nobody is watching. Anyone passing by is simply just passing by” (Balik, 2018). Moreover, at night “the window would provide a spectacular view of the desert night sky” (Balik, 2018). While Balik was, herself, enclosed, so she was aware that the panel revealed the expansive space beyond, of desert and sky. Through this construction, Zittel brings near and far into combination. The panel calls inhabitants to rethink and to rework their sense of limits through their daily acts and experiences in and beyond the Wagon Station, and note changes to these during their stay in the encampment. Where the front door created a sense of enclosure, it also opened the Wagon Station to the encampment. Balik remembers that, unlike the back door, The front door was more of an experience – it was special. Using this door would open up the entire space to the outside. It would strip away your privacy, and the wagon would enter a shared space with the other wagons that were in proximity. The 12 wagons were placed in small clusters, and our wagon was placed together with two other wagons on a flat piece of land between desert rocks. We would open up the front door when we were “home” and we would use the extra space to relax. (Balik, 2018) As Balik reflects, to open the hatch door is to open the Wagon Station to the encampment and, more broadly, desert, to reduce any sense of boundary, or edge. Balik finds herself at ‘home’ in the Wagon Station and encampment. It opens to create an awning or shade. The effect is transformative, opening up the entirety of the small interior and so making it a much fuller part of the encampment as a whole. There is something compelling about the contrast of places either side of a door. Describing his experience of staying in the Alhambra Palace, Washington Irving recalls, From these gloomy apartments, a narrow blind corridor and a dark winding staircase led down an angle of the tower of Comares, groping along which and opening a small door at the bottom, you were suddenly dazzled by emerging into the brilliant antechamber of the Hall of Ambassadors, with the fountain of the court of the Alberca sparkling before you. (Irving, 1853, p. 37)

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In Balik’s experience of the Wagon Station, the opening of the door removed any sense of an enclosed interior. To open up the door reconfigured the architecture as a part of this site, rather than separate, temporary and mobile. The absence of limits speaks to established perceptions of the American south-west. In their exhibition, Ends of the Earth: Land Art to 1974, Philip Kaiser and Miwon Kwon reflect on the emergence of land art and tendencies to create art away from familiar art markets. They recognise that such work echoes similarly familiar readings of the American south-west. the deserts of the American Southwest, with their formal beauty and apparent empty frontiers, ripe for fantasies of Manifest Destiny as well as visions of endlessness and timelessness (of being outside history), captured the artistic imaginations of many American artists. (2012, p. 19) In an area associated with ‘visions’ of apparently ‘empty frontiers’, ‘endlessness’ and ‘timelessness’, there is something compelling about considering the embodied, rather than primarily visual experience of inhabiting an edge. In following this approach, we take up Kaiser and Kwon’s sense that there are alternative ways of conceiving of the deserts of the American south-west. We also recognise Joe E. Watkins’s observation that, “[w]ithin the contiguous United States, the American Southwest is unique in that it is home to the largest number of Native peoples who have continuously occupied their original homelands and retain their languages, customs, beliefs, and values while participating fully in the twenty-first century” (2014, p. 51). As Elias et al. note, “180 federally registered tribal nations” live in the south-west (2018). In contrast to visual readings of the desert, embodied engagement focuses attention on lived experience of the desert. This is necessary both to recognise the American south-west as a lived environment, but also to recognise challenges of climate change to life in the desert. As Prein et al. recognise, “The SW may already have transitioned to a drier climatic state leading to higher drought risk” (Prein et al., 2016, p. 1272). In response, they suggest that this “calls for more interdisciplinary research incorporating decision-­ making, economics, and hydrological information to identify ways to sustain rural livelihoods and food production” (ibid.). By attending to the intersection of art, architecture and environment, by enabling individual engagement and management of this intersection, artists are able to imagine and test experiences of inhabiting a place, living in and between ecosystems. Zittel’s encampment is not a work premised on experiences of climate change, but changes to weather – heightening temperatures, increasing aridity and more severe storms – are likely be felt acutely in A–Z Wagon Stations. For Balik, using the front door was complicated by the weather conditions. As she comments, When the wind would blow up we would struggle to close the front door. In times of rain we would rush back if we were out hiking to make

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sure both doors were properly closed. At times the wagon would feel like a ship at sea where the front door would be its sail. (Balik, 2018) Balik’s experience of weather echoes the experiences of artists and writers in art spaces, cabins, huts and sheds, particularly during short-term residences. For Tracey Warr, “[t]he appeal of sheds and huts is their inside/outside paradox” (2016, n.p.). Warr describes Outlandia, “a small and simple off-grid wooden space suspended in the forest, facing the looming mountain” created by London Fieldworks in Scotland (ibid.). Outlandia is used for residencies, by artists and those in a diverse range of fields. For Warr, “Outlandia creates an intimacy with its surroundings and the seasons, as you watch weather coming fast up the Glen” (ibid.). The edge between such small, sometimes mobile, structures is not necessarily secure, events in the environment may test and ultimately breach these structures. Yet, they also allow for the diversity that characterises the edges of the ecosystems. As a storm brings sand, leaves, under, around or through doors to such spaces, so it adds complexity, richness, diversity of forms and materials, organic and inorganic, to the edge. While artists or architects may introduce a door to the limit of a building, this is only part of a series of processes by which an edge, and an emerging diversity of forms and practices begins to take shape. Encampment

Initially, Zittel developed the Wagon Stations to provide accommodation for artists. In a first iteration, Zittel invited friends to stay and to customise the Stations and the area around them. Over time, the structures suffered in the desert and Zittel replaced them with a single, standard design, and now rents them for short stays. Zittel describes them as being “between retreat, a residency and a normal campground” (Zittel, 2015). The encampment comprises a series of cabins set close to a communal kitchen – a series of counters, covered by a roof but without walls, doors or windows. A compost toilet and shower are situated close by. Residents meet Zittel at the kitchen at 10am each morning for a ‘Power Hour’ of tasks, but, for the remainder of the day and night, they are free to find their own way of spending time. To live in the Wagon Stations is, then, to live in and between a series of ‘stations’ in the desert, to navigate doors by day and night. The work comprises part of Zittel’s broader project, which she identifies as “an institute of investigative living” (http://zittel.org). As she reflects, “I knew I would end up living a somewhat experimental life, more than I knew I would end up being an artist” (2011, p. 13). While Zittel is engaged in arts practice, she is also concerned with experiments in practices of living and the material forms that such practices require. The design of the encampment speaks to practices in architecture of incorporating external space into building design. Such work unpicks any neat distinctions between internal and external – and, particularly, internal and

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external doors. To cross from one part of a building to another is to temporarily leave a building before re-entry or entry into an entirely separate structure. This is particularly evident in the Tucson Mountain Retreat (2012), by DUST, a house and design studio in Tucson, Arizona: The program of the home is divided into three distinct and isolated zones; living, sleeping, and music recording/home entertainment. Each zone must be accessed by leaving the occupied zone, stepping outside, and entering a different space (Frearson, 2013) In Zittel’s encampment, inhabitants engage in a similar practice, of living in and between buildings. To inhabit the Tucson Mountain Retreat, or the Wagon Station encampment, is to become familiar with crossing between buildings and the context in which they are situated – a context affected by weather, season, the time of day or night and the particular conditions and microclimate of each crossing point. The practice of each one invites inhabitants to become familiar with edges and limits, with interior and exterior, and to live with, rather than apart from, the environment in which each building, or collection of buildings, is located. Zittel is not alone in investigating ways of living in desert conditions. As she reflects, people have always been drawn to the desert and have had their own ‘desert fantasy’. She notes, particularly, that NASA (the National Aeronautics and Space Administration) has a base in the Mojave, finding similarities with her own sense of “living on an alien landscape” (2015). Notably, NASA tested the Mars Rover, Curiosity, in the Mojave. Zittel finds herself fascinated that the Mojave “is the landscape that was chosen to be most representative of another planet” (ibid.). She recognises that her interest in alien life is evident in the design of the Wagon Stations – reflective aluminium structures that sit lightly on the land and in contrast to the colours and shapes of the desert. Where NASA maintains clear limits between internal structures and the desert, in preparation for the inhospitable environment of Mars, Zittel invites visitors to investigate, to navigate limits, to manage inhospitable conditions but also to be open to the desert and, in Balik’s terms, create a sense of home that crossed the limit of interior and exterior. Writing on doors and windows in space architecture, Andreas Vogler and Jesper Jørgensen (2004) reflect that “space connection interfaces like doors and windows act like ‘sensory organs’ of the building”. As such, they allow light and air to flow in and out of a building. In their work, they look to the possibilities for “a closer connection between architecture, anthropology and psychology in designing space habitations, as a part of a new concept of environmental design strategy in space habitats” (ibid.). By attending in clear and focused ways to performances of the door, we can begin to reveal, to practise and to reflect on embodied practice of the ‘closer connection’ that Vogler and Jørgensen seek. The Wagon Stations are difficult structures, in an environment that already poses challenges, particularly of climate and weather conditions. They ask that inhabitants become familiar and proficient with living in a restricted, limited form.

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Yet, the structures also incorporate means of shaping and controlling the experience of living though simple acts, albeit those that become complicated by approaching storms. Through acts of opening and closing the structure, by revealing near and far, inhabitants re-conceive of the limits in which they live – a practice that is embodied and durational, lasting days and nights. Zittel’s work demonstrates that there is something compelling about a practical engagement in managing limits – as a practice that alters with our growing experience of a place, and with the shifting conditions of a particular environment. Zittel’s work questions the ease of neat separations, of hermetically sealed environments that are in some way dislocated from the surroundings. It values the rattle of a structure in a storm, the strictures of size, the testing of dis/comfort – all of which speaks to lived engagement with, rather than simply in, architecture, and the context in which a particular structure is situated. In A–Z Wagon Stations, the two doors draw attention to the practice of being inside and outside in a challenging environment: in and out of the light, the heat of the day, the cool of the night and the high winds of the high desert. In Zittel’s work, and throughout this book, we find that the form and practice of doors reveals much about the ways artists make sense of and engage with specific environments, particularly those that may unsettle, challenge but also, with knowledge, care and consideration, sustain life. A–Z Wagon Stations demonstrates the potential for artists to introduce, practise – and invite others to experience, practise and come to understand an environment, to help us rethink the diversity that is possible at edges, and the structures we might construct to live in relation to specific places. Balik’s experience of the doors reveals the degree to which the form and sense of limits to a doorway can have a sustained and substantial effect on one’s sense and practice of a place. Zittel’s work, understood through Balik’s experience, reveals that living on the edge of art/environment is sensed, physical, and can involve active engagement with, navigation and management of doors, to take account of conditions and one’s sense of comfort and ease with being in a place – and being connected to other places for a time. In that inhabitants of the A–Z Wagon Stations are able to open and close the doors, they determine the degree of enclosure and openness, separation and connection, albeit limited to the prescribed operation and arc of each door. To use the rear door is to rework a familiar practice, to make a staged series of steps to the surrounding environment. To open the main door is to remove one side of the structure, to reveal almost the entirety of the interior and turn the roof into an awning. It is, in Meiss’s terms, to replace a ‘limit’ with a ‘threshold’ (Meiss, 2013, p. 215). To unpack and pack belongings at the beginning and end of a stay involves visitors climbing onto the bed, or standing outside the Wagon Station. In enabling such an action, Zittel intervenes in more usual practices; where one acts within single places, here thresholds offer a means of acting across places. The A–Z Wagon Stations suggested that, as points of crossing and as means of passing from one place to another, doors provide critical places and forms

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that contribute to the shaping and forming of bodies, and to sensed experiences of place, and that can sustain or unsettle the primacy of vision in individual engagements with place. In specific ecosystems, particularly those with challenging climatic conditions, it seems likely that the conditions of these ecosystems may mark and condition people as well as places. Our interest here is in projects in which artists engage with doors in order to draw attention to – and reimagine approaches to – art, architecture and environment. In so doing, we point to the possibility for theories and practices of art and performance to make a compelling contribution to conceptions and practices of place. In environments that pose challenges for human habitation, doors become critical for the safety of the individuals inhabiting structures in those environments. Yet, there is a danger that we might perceive doors as means of protection only, looking to the possibility of their being open and closed, rather than the practice of using these doors, and attending to the experiential effects of practising doors in the context of a challenging and changing conditions. Given this, the potential of our work here is that we better understand the possibilities of engaging with place in terms of ecosystems, where borders may take varying forms and operate over varying distances, and may be gradual, shifting, and indistinct. Given growing international concern for environment and environments in transition, it seems critical that we better understand the ways in which the arts can contribute to contemporary thinking on the edges of ecosystems.10 In so doing, we become able to open up existing definitions and, specifically, move beyond interest in biodiversity at edges to, principally, address a compelling diversity of practices.

Notes 1 Both Lefebvre and de Certeau were instrumental in the poststructuralist and postmodern move toward understanding as not a fixed, a priori entity but a complex and dynamic set of social relations. See Lefebvre (1991) and De Certeau (1984); see also Soja (1989), who gathered and expanded many of these ideas. 2 Garner Jr’s work remains a key building block in our understanding of how we apprehend bodies and spaces in performance, and particularly the way the embodiment of performer(s) and audience(s) interrelate. See Garner Jr (1994), Fensham (2009), and, as elaborated on below, McKinney (2015). 3 Artaud noted of the theatre that “the problem is to make space speak, to enrich and furnish it; like mines laid in a wall of flat rocks, that suddenly give birth to geysers and bouquets” (1976, p. 250). For more on this idea, and a further exploration of the theories of space noted above, see Danowski and Wagner (2005). 4 See Billington (1991, 1996, pp. 330–333). 5 It is worth noting that the exchange continues in a manner which combines horrific threat with superficial playfulness, as Dusty asks if her imagined murder will be fun for her, and Terry suggests she should have “a lot of sexual anticipation”. They end the exchange with Terry’s declaration that he still loves her, as Dusty is “the mother of [his] children”, and Dusty repeats her line of questioning with “Oh, incidentally, what’s happened to Jimmy” (pp. 302–303).

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6 The previous two iterations of this stage direction read as follows: “The lights in the room dim. The light beyond the open door gradually intensifies. It burns into the room. The door light fades down. The room lights come up […]” (pp. 298, 309). 7 Pinter explored a similar dynamic, dissociated from the door, a decade earlier in A Kind of Alaska (1982). Here, as Adeline Arniac writes, the depiction of a woman, Deborah, awaking from a prolonged coma facilitates a disjuncture between body and identity. For Arniac, a crucial aspect of this phenomenon is the fact that material body is exposed on stage in a vulnerable state: “A Kind of Alaska stages the usually invisible and silent body of the diseased, evolving from the erasure and absence of coma to a theatrical presence” (2017, para. 3). This presence is material and inescapable, but as Arniac suggests, it also evinces an absence in terms of both Deborah’s current identity and her lived past – an ‘absent time’ which, as Arniac points out, is described by the doctor in the play as a state of having been “nowhere, absent, indifferent” (ibid.). Where Pinter uses disease, vulnerability, and the narrative device of the coma in A Kind of Alaska, he uses the door to similar effect in Party Time. 8 See Wagner (2014) for a further discussion of this point. 9 In 2007, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reported that deserts in the USA would become hotter and drier as a result of climate change (see L. Bernstein, P. Bosch, O.A. Canziani, et al. “Synthesis Report.” In A. Al-lali, R. Bojarui, S.A. Diaz, et al. (eds.) Climate Change 2007: Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, vol. 74. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. 2007. The IPCC report of 2014 pointed specifically towards decline in agriculture in California (chapter 26, North America, p. 1462). While our concern here is human engagement and habitation with place, we situate this in a broader definition of life in an environment. There is growing evidence of the critical importance of sustaining life in deserts in order to preserve existing ecosystems. In their study of microbial communities in ‘Aridsol’ (dry soil) in the south-western USA, Theresa A. McHugh et al. find that climate change and, specifically, ‘precipitation and temperature’, pose particular challenges for microbial communities and lead to alterations in the ecosystem. They conclude that “microbial communities in the arid Southwest could contribute to shifts in ecosystem function as wetting and drying cycles fluctuate with climate change” (www.researchgate.net/publication/320131620_Climate_controls_prokaryotic_community_­composition_in_ desert_soils_of_the_southwestern_United_States#pf b [accessed: 26 June 2018]). 10 See, for instance, Sakai, S. and Umetsu, C. (2014). Social-Ecological Systems in Transition. Tokyo: Springer.

References Andrews, S., and Wagner, M. (2014). “The Door: A Practical Study of Site, Object, and Threshold in Theatre and Performance.” BA/Leverhulme Small Research Grant, SRG 2013–2014 Round. Arniac, A. (2017). “‘I was simply obeying the law of the body’: Dispossession and Exposure of the Vulnerable Body in Harold Pinter’s A Kind of Alaska”, Études britanniques contemporaines [online], 53. Available at: http://journals.openedition.org/ ebc/3762. DOI: 10.4000/ebc.3762. Artaud, A. (1976). “Theater of Cruelty (First Manifesto)”, in Sontag, S. (ed.) Selected Writings. New York: Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux. Balik, L. (2018). Personal Correspondence. May–August.

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Banham, P. (1982). Scenes in American Deserta. Salt Lake City: Peregrine Smith. Billington, M. (1991). Party Time (Review), The Guardian, 8 November 1991. Available at: www.haroldpinter.org/plays/plays_partytime.shtml. Billington, M. (1996). The Life and Work of Harold Pinter. London: Faber and Faber. Browne, A. (2016). “Andrea Zittel”, Apartamento, 18 (Autumn–Winter 2016–2017), pp. 36–71. Cheetham, M. (2018). Landscape into Eco Art: Articulations of Nature Since the ’60s. University Park, PA: Penn State University Press (e-book version). Chekhov, A. (2002). The Cherry Orchard, in Plays. Trans Peter Carson. London: Penguin Books. Code, L. (2006). Ecological Thinking: The Politics of Epistemic Location. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Dabaieh, M. (2011). A Future for the Past of Desert Vernacular Architecture (doctoral thesis), Lund University. Available at: http://lup.lub.lu.se/search/ws/ files/5906883/2224661.pdf (accessed: 2 August 2018). Danowski, C., and Wagner, M. (2005). “Hearing Ghosts and Speaking Spaces: A Conversation with Performance”, Text and Performance Quarterly, 25(2), pp. 171–185. Dean, T. (1997). Trying to Find the Spiral Jetty. De Certeau, M. (1984). “Walking in the City”, in The Practice of Everyday Life. Trans. Steven Randall. Berkeley: University of California Press. Design Studies School of Art and Design History and Theory (2016). “Lisa Stenhaug of Design Studies on Andrea Zittel’s Wagon Station Encampment & Challenging ‘what is’ – Design Studies.” Available at: http://adht.parsons.edu/­designstudies/ lisa-stenhaug-of-design-studies-on-andrea-zittels-wagon-station-­encampmentchallenging-what-is/ (accessed: 13 June 2018). Elder, E. (2012). “How to Build a Commune: Drop City’s Influence on the Southwestern Commune Movement”, in Auther, E. and Lerner, A., West of Centre: Art and the Counterculture Experiment in America, 1965–1977. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, pp. 3–22. Elias, E., Reyes, J., Steele, C., et al. (2018). “Diverse landscapes, diverse risks: synthesis of the special issue on climate change and adaptive capacity in a hotter, drier Southwestern United States”, Climatic Change, 148, p. 339. DOI: https://doi. org/10.1007/s10584-018-2219-x. Evans, J., Karvonen, A., and Raven, R. (eds.) (2016). The Experimental City. London: Routledge. Fensham, R. (2009). To Watch Theatre Essays on Genre and Corporeality. Brussels: P.I.E. Peter Lang. Fortune, B. (ed.) (2014). The Edge Effect: Art and Ecology in the Nordic Landscape. Chicago: Half Letter Press. Frearson, A. (2013). “Tuscon Mountain Retreat, by DUST”, Dezeen. Available at: www.dezeen.com/2013/05/03/tucson-mountain-retreat-by-dust/ (accessed: 2 August 2018). Gani, A. (2015). “Dungeness ‘desert’ estate goes on sale for £1.5m”, The Guardian. Available at: www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2015/aug/10/britains-only-desertgoes-on-sale-for-15m-dungeness-estate (accessed: 31 July 2018). Garner Jr., S. (1994). Bodied Spaces: Phenomenology and Performance in Contemporary Drama. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

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Gil, J. (2006). “The Paradoxical Body”, trans. Andre Lepecki, TDR: The Drama Review, 50(4), pp. 21–35. Hosey, L. (2012). The Shape of Green: Aesthetics, Ecology and Design. Washington, DC: Island Press. Irving, W. (1853). The Alahambra. London: Henry G. Bohn. Jacobs, J.M., and Merriman, P. (2011). “Editorial: Practising Architectures”, Social & Cultural Geography, 12(3), pp. 211–222. Kaiser, P., and Kwon, M. (2012). Ends of the Earth: Land Art to 1974. Los Angeles: Museum of Contemporary Art. Karvonen, A. and van Heur, B. (2014). “Urban Laboratories: Experiments in Reworking Cities”, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 38, pp. 379–392. Kershaw, B. (2007). Theatre Ecology: Environments and Performance Events. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Keshtkaran, P. (2011). “Harmonization Between Climate and Architecture in Vernacular Heritage: A Case Study in Yazd, Iran”, Procedia Engineering, 21, pp. 428–438. Available at: https://ac.els-cdn.com/S1877705811048697/1-s2.0S1877705811048697-main.pdf ?_tid=0d8eeb43-8991-4580-9ef9-829d2a6556ef &acdnat=1524848536_7bbbf89c3142bd4b50d860ab819755d8 (accessed: 2 August 2018). Knapp, J. (2012). “Phenomenology and Images: Static and Transformative Images in Shakespeare’s Dramatic Art”, Criticism, 54(3), pp. 377–389. Laseau, P., and Tice, J. (1992). Frank Lloyd Wright: Between Principle and Form. New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold. Lefebvre, H. (1991). The Production of Space. Trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith. Oxford: Blackwell. McKinney, J. (2015). “Vibrant Materials: The Agency of Things in the Context of Scenography”, in Bleeker, M., Sherman, J., and Nedelkopoulou, E. (eds.) Performance and Phenomenology: Traditions and Transformations. London: Routledge. Meiss, P. von (2013). Elements of Architecture: From Form to Place + Tectonics. Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge. Merleau-Ponty, M. (1962). Phenomenology of Perception. Trans Colin Smith. London and New York: Routledge. Merleau-Ponty, M. (1968). The Visible and the Invisible. Ed. Claude Lefort, trans. Alphonso Lingis. Evanston: Northwestern University Press. Moxley, A. (2013). “Andrea Zittel Speaks at SAIC”, FNewsMagazine. Available at: http://fnewsmagazine.com/2013/10/expanding-constricted-space/ (accessed: 2 August 2018). Patterson, M. (2011). “More-than visual approaches to architecture. Vision, touch, technique”, Social & Cultural Geography, 12(3), pp. 263–281. Pfeiffer, B.B., and Sidy, V.E. (2011). Under Arizona Skies: The Apprentice Desert Shelters at Frank Lloyd Wright’s Taliesin West. Petaluma: Pomegranate Communications. Pinter, H. (1991). Party Time, in Plays IV. London: Faber and Faber, pp. 279–314. Prein, A.F., Holland, G.J., Rasmussen, R.M., Clark, M.P., and Tye, M.R. (2016). “Running dry: The U.S. Southwest’s drift into a drier climate state”, Geophys. Res. Lett., 43, pp. 1272–1279. DOI:10.1002/2015GL066727. Soja, E. (1989). Postmodern Geographies: The Reassertion of Space in Critical Social Theory. London: Verso.

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States, Bert O. (1985). Great Reckonings in Little Rooms. Berkeley: University of California Press. Vogler, A., and Jørgensen, J. (2004). “Windows to the world – Doors to Space – a reflection on the psychology and anthropology of space architecture.” Available at: http://spacearchitect.org/pubs/ESA-ESTEC-20040518-Vogler.pdf (accessed: 2 August 2018). Wagner, M. (2014). “Wheresoever the Body Is: Image, Matter, and Corporeality on Shakespeare’s Stage”, Early Modern Culture Online, 5(1), pp. 11–30. Warr, T. (2016). “Geo Graphy”, in Gilchrist, B., Joelson, J. and Warr, T. (eds.) Remote Performances in Nature and Architecture. London: Routledge, Apple Books: n.p. Watkins, J. (2014). “‘ANASAZI’ No More: Ancestral Pueblo Cultures of the ­A merican Southwest”, Warrior, R. (ed.) in The World of Indigenous North America. ­London: Routledge. Available at: https://books.google.co.uk/books?hl=en&lr= &id=XQgcBQAAQBAJ&oi=fnd&pg=PA51&dq=living+in+the+american+ s o u t h w e s t & o t s= i v e M 3 - r q b a & s i g = i k- _y g s X N wZ k 0 s 9 7 R 7 H mV M m 5J5k#v=onepage&q=living%20in%20the%20american%20southwest&f=false. Zittel, A. (2011). Lay of my Land. New York: Prestel. Zittel, A. (2015). “Wagon Station Encampment”, YouTube Video. Available at: www.youtube.com/watch?v=-93teK4M9Fg (accessed: 2 August 2018).

Chapter 5

Together at doors Situating spectators in the city

As we recall in the introduction, in the first few days of January 2017 we rented a house to work on this book. While ruminating and writing our way through the early days of a new year, we found ourselves increasingly drawn, physically and critically, to the French doors of the kitchen/living room, and the still, snow-dusted world beyond. We became acutely aware that experiences of being located at that these doors, of working, wondering, cooking up and looking out were quite different when we were situated at the doors together and separately. Alone, I (Andrews) found myself distracted by the view, taking in the form of the building, the choice of doors, the gardens just out of sight: I asked questions of the window and the view, ‘when was this added?’, ‘what would it be to live here?’ When looking together, the doors provided a point of focus to conversation and provided material forms to anchor our thinking. In reflecting on these experiences, we began to sense that there is something significant about being situated at doors, with or without others. We became particularly interested in the possibilities of making sense of individual doors in cities, and to recognise instances when individual doors and/or performances of these doors might constitute small but critical parts of a given city. In attending to the ways artists situate spectators at doors in cities here, we seek to understand the ways in which artists make sense of themselves and others in and in relation to a city, whether in part or as a whole. In reflecting on being situated at doors, we pick up a thread from ­Chapter 2, and Andrews’s conversation with Lee Miller and Bob Whalley at the back door of their house. There, we were interested in Miller and Whalley’s response to doors in their role as makers of work. We sought to discover their sense of the significance of particular doors to their understanding of their house and the connection of the house to the courtyard, the street and Totnes, the town in which they live. Here, we are interested in understanding the ways in which artists locate spectators at doors, and what attending to this practice reveals about a particular work and the practices with which it is concerned. Our interest is in what artists offer to those at doors, how they frame this within a work and what this reveals about performances of doors. In line with our overarching interest with material doors, we are particularly

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concerned with artistic projects that invite spectators to experience doors up close, to engage with their material form, to cross (or not) from one place to another, and to reflect on and perhaps contribute to practices at these doors. There are many instances of projects in which artists situate spectators at doors and, at times, invite them to approach and pass through. Such close-up experience is particularly evident in one-to-one performance, which involves one performer and one spectator, and in moments of one-to-one performance in large immersive performances. Such forms have emerged particularly at the Battersea Arts Centre (BAC), in South-West London (UK). In Salon Adrienne (commissioned for BAC ‘Octoberfest’ 2005, re-performed 2013), Adrian Howells performed as Adrienne, a trainee hairdresser, at ‘Ocean’, a working salon a short walk from the BAC. Spectators entered Ocean for a one-to-one performance, in which Howells reworked practices and experiences of hairdressing to invite spectators to ‘take a long hard look’ at themselves in the mirror (Off WestEnd.com, n.d.). In The Masque of the Red Death, the theatre company Punchdrunk took over much of the BAC building to stage an immersive performance, in which spectators roamed the building, moving in and between scenes. In these works, crossing through doors involved passing into a place of performance, it comprised a tangible act of moving from one version of reality to another. In the first, the act of crossing was relatively familiar, crossing into a hairdresser’s, and yet this was somehow different: the performance engaged and intervened in the familiar. In the second, Punchdrunk repurposed material features of the building to reveal Edgar Allan Poe’s narrative, often some way from a familiar reality. There is allied work on one-to-one performance as it exists in immersive performance, in which individuals are selected from an audience roving around a site and taken to a separate area, at times a room, for a one-to-one moment of performance. As Adam Alston observes, “[t]hese one-on-ones are much sought after in Punchdrunk’s work. They segregate audience members, often behind closed doors” (2016, p. 134). Alston reflects that these are evidence of a broader approach in immersive theatre, which values “entrepreneurial participation”. As he suggests, “[i]f participants risk stepping into the unknown, they are rewarded with more to experience” (ibid., p. 133). For Alston, such work is “predicated on entrepreneurialism, personal responsibility, and risk-taking”, and values “privacy and individualism” (ibid.). As Alston notes, in such moments, doors can play a significant part in separating out and privileging certain spectators. In this chapter, we discuss two projects in which artists situated spectators at multiple doors in a city, and, thereby, at points of crossing that, in each case, spoke to contemporary, and at times contentious, practices as they affected cities – specifically, immigration, informal architecture, temporary habitation, and redevelopment. We are concerned to understand the ways in which artists conceive of urban environments, and experiences of these environments, through the form, position and practice of doors.

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We look first to London Stories: Made by Migrants (2016), a ‘storytelling festival’ at the BAC. This was the second London Stories event, following the first in 2013, and followed the BAC ‘One-on-One’ festivals held in 2010 and 2011. Guides led small groups of spectators to six rooms in the building.1 In each room, a ‘performer’ recounted their experiences of ‘coming to live in London’, whether their own journey or one in which they were implicated (Battersea Arts Centre, n.d.). While this was an event in an arts centre, those performing had responded to a call for “people from all backgrounds and of all ages”, that noted, “[n]o experience of performance is necessary” (ibid.). The event made use of rooms throughout the BAC, and spectators were led on routes through the building, past numerous doors, before being directed to a specific door for each ‘performance’. The work concluded with an exhibition of objects that related to the stories of each of the performers who had contributed to the project. Secondly, we consider Communal Courtyard (Art Gallery of Ontario (AGO), Toronto, 2016), created by Song Dong, a visual artist who lives in Beijing, China. Song Dong works in a range of forms, including sculpture, performance and audio/visual work. His projects often involve collaboration with his wife, the artist Yin Xiuzhen. In 2018, he held a retrospective of key works from the past 25 years at Pace, Seoul, in South Korea. Song has created a series of artworks that explore everyday life and that focus particularly on salvaging and repurposing architectural materials. Several of these have included salvaged doors, particularly Through the Wall, in which Song created an installation from door and window frames (Song, 2016). Communal Courtyard comprises 100 panels cut from the front of old Chinese armoires, free-standing wardrobes, each of which includes a door. Song positioned these in the gallery to mark out walls of dazayuan, dwellings that have been constructed in traditional Beijing courtyard houses, siheyuan.2 Versions of Communal Courtyard have been shown at the Venice Biennale (2011) and in Miami (2014). It was installed at AGO from January to July 2016. In installing the work in the AGO, Song selected artworks from the gallery’s collection to install in the gallery, which spectators could observe through glass panels in the doors, in the gaps around and between the doors, and reflected in the mirrors on some of the doors. He also borrowed a John De Andrea sculpture of a woman standing alone, which he situated in one of the ‘rooms’ (Mack, 2013). Spectators were able to walk around the installation, and to attend workshops and performances by five local artists in the ‘courtyard’ between doors. The work comprises part of Song’s The Wisdom of the Poor series, in which he seeks to value the practices by which people with limited resources are able to use those resources to greatest effect. In reflecting on these projects, we discuss specific doors, situations into which artists locate spectators, and practices of those doors as practices of a city, particularly in the context of challenges posed by contemporary issues. We question the ways in which the artists situated spectators at and either side of doors: together with or apart from other people, inside or outside definable

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places and in the context of critical contemporary debates on practices of place. We are keen to discover the significance of being situated at a door, particularly in the context of particular architecture in a city, or an area of a city. In so doing, we seek to understand the ways that performances of a door can intervene in and understand critical practices of living in and articulating one’s experience of a city. In addressing each project, we find that doors offer compelling points at which to reflect on the relation between self and others, changing forms and uses of architecture and critical issues in contemporary cities. In each case, we find that being situated at doors can reveal points and possibilities of change, ways in and out, and means of conceiving of people and place. There is increasing interest, internationally, in reimagining cities in terms of experiences of place. Recent work in this vein has focused on ‘placemaking’, creating ‘liveable cities’ and involving local stakeholders in collaborative and ‘co-design’ approaches.3 Such work emerges, in part, as a response to Jane Jacobs’s critique of cities in the USA and her call for renewed attention to individual experience of cities (1993). In Chapter 2, we reflected on Jacobs’s work on the significance of the door to the city street. For Jacobs, the door separates the private and public realm, making it a critical point at and by which those who live in a city engage with that city. Jacobs draws attention to the significance of local areas in a city, to networks and, in New York, to local shops, in which Jacobs found that those living in an area would engage and contribute to the life of that area of a city (ibid.). Writing from the perspective of Dutch urban planning, Ward Rauws and Gert De Roo identify a shift from “control-oriented planning practices to a more adaptive approach to planning” (2016, p. 1069). They suggest that, rather than know a “particular future configuration”, planners can “generate ‘possibility spaces’ within which urban structures can take shape and development processes can unfold” (ibid., p. 1053). Rauws and De Roo recognise that in an uncertain world, such an approach becomes critical, allowing adaptation to future forms, of which it may be difficult to conceive in the present. Their work demonstrates that specific, localised initiatives tailored to specific cities – and areas in those cities – might be developed to broker effective relationships between planners and those living and working in those places. This becomes critical because, as Gray Read reflects, architecture impacts upon the practices and the people who inhabit a place. For Read (2016), The quality of urban life and the choices people make have much to do with how architecture organizes and presents people to each other and how it opens to the improvisations of life or resists them. (p. 4) In this chapter, we are concerned with the ways in which doors contribute to experiences of a city, in the context of increased attention to individual experiences of place. Our sense is that, by attending to the forms and practices

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of doors in a city, we can begin to unpick experiences of that city in ways that may help us rethink that city, both in the present and for the future. We recognise Marichela Sepe’s work on automated doors, a familiar feature of cities, particularly retail environments, but one that risks alienating users. Sepe reflects that “[i]n consumer venues today there is all too little contact with the street” (2013, p. 52). For Sepe, “tactile sensations involve perception in close-up” (ibid.). She cites Cesare Pergola (1997), who argues that, the handle, however small, has a key role to play in the context of a door, wall or overall architecture, bestowing a touch of vitality: a handle immediately tells us whether a door is being used or not: if it was used recently it may even still be warm to the touch. But what can we expect of an automatic door in a supermarket or airport, which is not even touched? (Pergola, cited in Sepe, 2013, p. 52)4 Without the warmth of touch, or the marking and smoothing of established use, those who practise automated doors lose a critical opportunity to sense a city and to determine the practices of others who may have passed through a place before them. In considering the projects here, we are particularly concerned with what close attention to doors can reveal about experiences of a city. While loss of tactility may separate us from others in a city, it can also reduce the significance of pushing at a door to enter a building. That weight might limit those who do not feel welcome in a building from deciding to cross the threshold. There was a marked contrast between the old, wooden entrance door to Whitechapel Public Library in East London, which opened onto an enclosed dark corridor, and the openness of the Idea Store, which replaced the library on a nearby site. In the latter building, the act of entering a building was, to use Meiss’s term, ‘progressive’, a flow, rather than a distinct act of opening and passing through (2013, p. 219). Doors can exclude and limit access, requiring those who are seeking access to feel enabled to cross the threshold. There is, then, a challenge, between a desire to enable tactile, embodied experience, and that to create easier, more accessible places, or refine existing places in such ways. As the move from the library to Idea Store in Whitechapel reveals, doors can constitute a critical element in transformations of place. Relatedly, Esra Yaldız et al. reflect on changes to the square in front of Konya Government Hall, in Turkey. Among the alterations to this place, they cite changes to the doors and lifts as having impacted on the form and identity of the square. For Yaldız et al. (2014), The arrangements in the city square in front of Government Hall, usage of the place under the square as bazaar, the doors and elevators placed in the middle of the square for entrance and exit of the bazaar caused this place to lose its characteristics. (p. 227)

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In that doors reveal the places onto which they open, and reveal expectations or conditions of entry, to alter the doors to a place is to alter perceptions of that place. Similarly, as in Konya, to introduce access to one place can be to diminish another, intervening, in this case as a physical form and by reordering one place to allow access to another. The square in Konya suggests that, to alter a place, we must attend to local perceptions of a place, and to local interest in the placing of points of crossing to other places. This is not necessarily to preserve limits and points of access as they might always have been, but to recognise and take account of the situated understanding of the form and limits of a place and its relation to other places, which may not be apparent in the material form alone. In their treatment of doors in a city, artists are able to articulate, unpick or entirely transform existing perceptions and practices of that city. In Dries Verhoeven’s Niemansland (No Man’s Land, initially staged in Utrecht, 2008), 20 spectators were each met by a migrant to the city, who led them through the city. During the performance, spectators were taken to a line of sheds. Spectators each stood facing a shed door, before stepping inside. Once inside, they were both in and separate from the city, in temporary spaces, which would be removed following the work. In interview with Adam Czirak, Verhoeven comments that “Theatre situations give me the possibility to let people look at things they would maybe pass by in a museum or in normal life” (Verhoeven, cited in Czirak, 2011, p. 83). There is something unsettling about introducing such a door to a city, a door that is within and yet separate to that city. In her discussion of Sisters Academy, “a school of an imagined future society where the sensuous and poetic mode of being is at the centre of all action and interaction”, Gry Worre Halberg reimagines a school and the practices of those within: “we have stepped out of our everyday selves to explore new modes of being and being together” (2017, pp. 132, 135). If we are to reconceive of place through the arts and if this might open up new perspectives on planning and living in places, then it becomes particularly intriguing to not simply draw attention to the familiar but to reimagine the familiar and to imagine entirely new forms and practices for places in the future.

London Stories: Made by Migrants We’re in the entrance hall to the Battersea Arts Centre, Battersea, London (UK). It is a Saturday evening in November 2016 and, outside, the sky is already dark. The hall is situated between the main door to the BAC and the internal doors to the foyer. I join a queue to reach a line of tables, at which staff check tickets and allocate us to a London borough. In part the process appears practical, it separates us from those with whom we had arrived. On another, it locates us in London. Once through this process, spectators gather in their boroughs in the foyer. A woman addresses the room, welcoming

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spectators to the event. Guides, one for each group, lead spectators to various parts of the building. In our case, we walk a short distance, up the marble staircase to benches on the first-floor landing. There, we wait to be taken to the first London ‘story’. The wooden door

The door to the room is wood panelled. It is old, perhaps as old as the building, which opened as Battersea Town Hall in 1893, but which is now Battersea Arts Centre. It is a tall, grand, rather imposing door, one of several around the landing. While these vary, there are similarities in their design and in the colour and polish of the wood. We stand close by with a guide, there are five or six of us, none of us seems to know the others. The guide knocks at the door, clearly but quietly. I don’t hear a response from inside. The knock appears to be a sign of entry, rather than a request, a code to alert the performer. The guide indicates to us that we can walk through. The door is pushed open, perhaps by the guide, perhaps by spectators, it swings open into the room, slowly, smoothly. It is a door of not inconsiderable weight. Passing through, I notice that the door shows signs of wear, particularly at the base. Inside, the room is similarly grand and similarly worn. It is dimly lit. A woman sits by a window, across the room from us, in a circle of empty chairs. A bright light points towards us, which makes it difficult to see the woman’s face. I have a memory that the door is not quite closed. Quietly, the woman describes the events that led her to move from her home village, her home country, to the UK and to London. Her account is difficult to take in: the murder of members of her family, being held against her will, fears for her safety, and being helped to escape through a forest early one morning. The woman tells us about her time in London. She describes a market, and finding fruit there, as she once might have done in the village in which she had lived. The woman holds a piece of a paper in her lap and looks to it occasionally. As she talks, I am aware of sounds from the street below, still early on this Saturday night. We are, for the duration of this performance, set at a distance from the bustle of the busy street outside, the performers and spectators elsewhere in the building, the bar that is most likely filling up downstairs – but this separation is limited. The door might easily be pushed open, the street can be heard through the window. We are only a flight of stairs and a few doors from the street. I find myself wondering if the market the woman found is local to the BAC. I imagine meetings at the market, conversations, exchanges, I wonder at the woman’s front door, her connection to the street. I am caught by her calm, quiet description. The woman finishes her account, we thank her. I am acutely uneasy that we are about to walk away, that people will walk away from the woman’s account of these events for the rest of the evening, and again and again in the performances to come. The others are beginning to gather their things. Quietly, we make our way out though the door.

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As we recognise in Chapter 2, and the article that precedes it (Andrews, 2017), Bachelard observes that a door, even one that is “just barely ajar”, indicates life in the world beyond. In that chapter, we attend to a door that is fixed ‘ajar’. Here, in my memory at least, the door to the room was almost closed and at rest against the frame. It seems useful and important to reflect on this state, as it is practically and performatively different from a door that is ajar. We might push or pull a door so that it does not quite close, whether purposefully or by accident. Alternatively, a door, by way of its hanging, or the strength of a breeze, may rest in this position. We might choose for a door to be at rest, or it may rest there against our intention, perhaps rattling against the frame. In contrast to a door that is ajar, we are far less able to sense the space beyond a door at rest against its frame – and attempts to do so may require us to be in closer proximity to the door. Yet, the door resists the separation of spaces that occurs with the closure of a door. Reflecting on Henry James’s short story, The Jolly Corner (1908), Robert Harbison observes that “[c]losing a door is the most elementary transformation of nothing to something” (2000, p. 94). Confused at who might have closed a particular door, James’s protagonist, Spencer Brydon, reflects that he might perhaps then have gone into the room and, inadvertently, automatically, on coming out, have drawn the door after him. The difficulty was that this exactly was what he never did; it was against his whole policy, as he might have said, the essence of which was to keep vistas clear. ( James, 2005, n.p.) Harbison and James point to the significance of closing, or not closing a door. James, in particular, demonstrates that the act of closing or not closing a door can be bound up in one’s identity. In not closing a door entirely, we retain connection with the world beyond, we allow for others, for the breeze, for light and sound, for actions and conditions in the world beyond to impact on our world. In this particular performance, that sense of connection with the world was particularly important. The openness of the room counteracted the affecting account of reasons for migration. In turning ‘nothing to something’, closing a door restricts the multiplicities of meaning and experience, in ways that, in that instance, might have proved all the more difficult to attend to. Whether, in this case, the door was actually closed or almost closed, I had a strong sense that it was far from secure. The sounds from the street revealed the proximity of the room to the world outside. Similarly, being located at the top of the stairs, I was aware that the room was easily accessible from the public space of the building and from the world beyond. Our experience of entering the room for this performance indicated that a knock from outside the room would more likely result in someone entering than constitute a request that required a response. The grandeur of both the door and room

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pointed to the previous history of the building as a town hall, and to public, rather than private use. While the performance was bound up with experiences of leaving and making an alternate home, it was performed in a place that was other than ‘home’. Indeed, the signs of wear to the door and to the room, and the use of temporary lighting pointed to a room that was in process, that had, perhaps, been left consciously ‘unfinished’ to avoid securing any particular reading of the room. In being aware of the world outside the room, we are reminded of Simmel’s essay, “Bridge and Door” (1994). Here, Simmel suggests that a bridge comprises “the line stretched between two points”, while, “life flows forth out of the door from the limitation of isolated separate existence into the limitlessness of all possible directions” (p. 8). As the woman spoke, so she identified and reflected on places beyond the room, both those at some distance and those within the city. In a room where thresholds are open, however little, perhaps even however actual or perceived, it becomes possible to chart and follow routes out and into the world. Critically, the project invited speakers to share and reflect on their journey here, and their life in, or in relation to, the city. In so doing, it created a context in which they might address the particular ‘directions’ they had taken, the ‘roads’ they had followed, both beyond and within the city. I was reminded of the welcome in the foyer, and the framing of the event as being performed by people who were sharing their own experiences. We were gathering to discover people through their experience of migration, their life in London and the ways in which they make sense of these experiences and practices. The white door

The door has been painted white, or manufactured to give this appearance. We have reached the end of a section of landing, which ends at the door and at a small waiting area, furnished with wooden benches. The wall in which the door is situated and the walls of the waiting area have been painted white. This is an internal door and may be intended for domestic d­ wellings – I remember living in a house with similar doors many years before. Yet, the narrowness of the corridor, the white-painted walls – without other ­decoration  – and, particularly, the waiting area contrast with this reading. The door is closed, perhaps we are early, perhaps the scene is running over time. We sit for a while, waiting for the next ‘story’. A few of the spectators read postcards that the guide handed to us after each story, which speak to issues of migration in the UK. In this, a moment of rest, I find I am still unsettled by the first ‘scene’, and I wonder at the story we will hear next. I become aware that there is someone in the next room, that they are, most likely, telling a story to others that, soon, they will share with us. I become aware of the process of entering these rooms, attending to an individual’s experience of migration, leaving, closing the door and walking quietly away. I wonder

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Figure 5.1  I nterior of BAC: posters affixed to walls during London Stories: Made by Migrants Source: Joyce Nicholls.

what it might be like to attend all of the scenes in this event, to hear each of the contributors recounting and reflecting on their experiences. There are 82 rooms in the BAC. As the guide leads us between rooms and between scenes, they take us through the building. We pass brick walls, walls painted and/or clad in black, we ascend and descend flights of stairs, up and down steps, and follow twists and turns in corridors. As we work our way through the building, we pass posters on the walls that depict headlines from national newspapers, reporting, often negatively, on the effects of migration on the UK, some recent, some from decades earlier (see Figure 5.1). As we walk, we are led past doors, including some that we will later use ourselves, some that we won’t. We pass groups of spectators gathered at doors, waiting for admittance. While the scenes are clearly critical elements of the work, this time between, of being led through the building, is also significant. It provides space, time and activity through which to reflect on the scenes, to re-orient and re-focus. The walk is also a chance to experience areas of the arts centre that are out of the way and a building that is fascinating for the passageways that connect the myriad rooms. The walk is all the more charged as, in March 2015, the BAC was significantly affected by fire, which included the destruction of the Grand Hall. Looking back now, at images of the building after the fire, I am surprised that I registered so little of the fire damage.

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Perhaps the areas most damaged by fire were out of bounds, perhaps the need to follow the guide and to watch for steps, twists and turns distracted my ­attention, perhaps the weight of each scene was enough to focus upon. In reflecting on the ways in which individuals experience environments, Pierre von Meiss identifies the significance of the “[d]ynamics of path”, in which “daily excursions, single or repeated, contribute to the image we forge of our environment” (2013, p. 230). For Meiss, as individuals make sense of a particular environment, they also construct “archetypes or modes of spatial awareness in order to confront and evaluate new situations” in the future (ibid.). For Meiss, this can occur in urban environments or in single buildings. He writes, primarily, to advocate for clear, comprehensible forms, particularly in any ‘main lines’ or routes in a building or urban plan. However, he also recognises that “disorientation” can prove “stimulating, making for surprise and the pleasures that go with discovery” (ibid., p. 231). In walking through the building, I was aware of finding familiar forms: the marble stairs and polished wood doors of Victorian civic architecture, the black painted walls of a backstage theatre space, and, more incongruously, what appeared to be domestic doors set in neat, white-painted architraves. I was acutely aware that we were off the main line, the main route, and following a path that involved passing through areas that had been built and reworked, used and re-used at different times in the long history of the building. There are connections here with Henry Plummer’s (2016) theorisation of “marginal zones”.5 For Plummer, The climb up to an unfinished attic or descent into a dark cellar is never an entry to neutral space, but a venturing into uncertain depths where anything could happen. These domains are excluded from daily life and harbour their own memories and secrets, touching a nerve deep in the psyche that magnifies our sense of adventure. (p. 162) Here, it was the corridors, the landings, the stairs and the points of waiting at doors, rather than the rooms themselves that suggested a sense of venturing, the route that seemed to evade familiar uses of the building – although BAC staff may resist claims to any ‘usual’ use of the building. The walk led us to experience particular doors and took us past others, and so drew attention to the multiple forms and uses of the building and, thereby, to multiple ‘modes of spatial awareness’ and of practising space. This was, then, a plural work, encompassing but also retaining the distinctiveness of individual performances, and the particularity of the specific doors and the rooms beyond. This plurality spoke to the project of the performance, of this being a work premised on stories of the city. To experience the building was to experience accounts of the city. As we walked through each of the doorways, we listened to stories of inhabitants of the city. In navigating the corridors of the building, we

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might have been walking streets in the city. This was a process of meeting and mapping, of listening to people in the city as a way of conceiving of the city. As with the first scene, I found myself wondering where speakers lived in the city (aware they may have lived in multiple places), wanting to discover their experience of doors to home, and how the homes of the speakers might appear if set out on a map of the city. In reflecting on the performance in terms of a dynamics of path, we are acutely aware of another path, that which migrants, or their friends or family, took to reach the UK – a path they took away from daily excursions in a place that, previously, they had known as home. We are drawn to Mohsin Hamid’s novel, Exit West, in which the protagonists, Saeed and Nadia, escape the unnamed city in which they live through a series of black doors that begin to appear both in the city and in other places in the world. As Hamid writes, Rumours had begun to circulate of doors that could take you elsewhere, often to places far away, well removed from this death trap of a country. Some people claimed to know people who knew people who had been through such doors. A normal door, they said, could become a special door, and it could happen without warning, to any door at all. Most people thought these rumours to be nonsense, the superstitions of the feeble-minded. But most people began to gaze at their own doors a little differently nonetheless. (2017, p. 69) As Saeed and Nadia discover and pass through the black doors, they find themselves transported to other places in the world. At one point, they step through a door and find themselves in London. Soon after, they become aware of more black doors appearing in the city, of other migrants arriving from the unnamed city and of a growing military response to the doors. In Hamid’s work, the black doors place the unnamed city within reach. Rather than watching reports of migration on the news, of distant, other, places from which people feel compelled to leave, people in London are connected to these places through doors on the streets on which they live. In Simmel’s terms, Hamid’s doors become bridges of a kind, stretched from one place to another. Exit West reveals that, while London Stories: Made by Migrants imagines London in the BAC, the doors in the BAC also point to routes, the paths that each speaker has taken from places beyond city and country. The door to each room in the performance speaks to a door in a place now left behind – one to which few of the speakers may feel comfortable or able to return.

Communal Courtyard There are, we are told, 100 doors in the gallery. Each one is situated in what had once been the front of a free-standing wardrobe. The artist, Song Dong,

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has cut these frontages free from the wardrobes of which they were a part, creating ‘panels’ that are no longer free-standing and where the doors no longer open onto the wooden wardrobe interiors. Song has attached plain, untreated wooden batons to the sides of these individual panels, and joined these batons, and thereby the panels, together, to form lines and shapes of wardrobe frontages. While each panel has a door, and while the designs are similar, there is considerable variation. Many of the panels contain both a door and a window, some of the wider wardrobe frontages incorporate two windows either side of a narrow door. Many of the wardrobes have two doors, although these can vary in size. In some cases, the doors occupy a full half side of the wardrobe frontage, in others, they sit above one or more drawers. Some of the doors have mirrors inset into the frame, others have window glass, behind which there is often a turquoise curtain. One, a wide wardrobe frontage, appears to have a central middle door, with windows either side, each with a curtain, though one of these windows might be part of a door that opens. From the exterior, the type, colour and finish of the wood vary from light, honey-colour to richer, and in a few cases dark, tones. There is considerable variation in the detail of design, particularly in the choice of door handles, in the shape and style of the two front feet, and the colour of the curtain. From the interior, the frontages are more similar. The wood is rough, there are plain frames, secured with batons, there are untreated wood panels and the fixings and signs of construction are clearly evident. The doors have been connected together to form shapes in the gallery although, from the ground floor, it is difficult to get a sense of these. The doors might have been set out as a maze; it is not possible to see all of the doors or to take in the whole of the work. From higher up, it becomes apparent that the frontages have been connected together to form a number of shapes, some stretched, some elongated. The frontages face inwards, with the rough edges facing out. Spectators are able to walk around the exterior of these spaces, looking in through the glass panels of the doors. In some cases, where there is no curtain, or the curtain only partially covers the window, this is easy; in other cases, spectators would need to look more closely through gaps where the curtain does not quite reach the edge of the window. Most of the doors are closed, although, in one case at least, one of the doors is open and visitors can step into one of the spaces that has been defined by the enclosed frontages. When looking, or walking in to these spaces, spectators see in, and see reflections of the space from mirrors in other doors. Song Dong has also selected and installed specific artworks from the gallery collection, which are visible through and in combination with the installation of wardrobe frontages. The area between each self-contained space comprises a path or corridor, sometimes broad, sometimes narrow, which gives the impression that this might indeed be a maze. In part of the gallery, the pathways open out into an area intended for live performance. During the installation, the AGO invited local artists to each undertake a residency and to present performances in this area.

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In titling this project Communal Courtyard, Song identifies the work as ­being engaged with traditional courtyard houses (siheyuan). In that Song grew up – and currently lives and works – in Beijing, and has long engaged with life in the city, there is logic in reading the work in the context of Beijing, although courtyard houses exist in urban and rural areas elsewhere in China.6 These courtyard houses comprised large, multi-room dwellings set around a central courtyard. Several houses would share a ‘hutong’ or alleyway off a main street. As Yi Wang notes, the courtyard house had been “the typical form of traditional housing in Beijing” (2016, p. 71). Donia Zhang finds that increasing urbanisation in the early to mid-twentieth century and growing costs of living led “many households to start renting out rooms” (2016, p. 11). Further, Zhang notes that, With the People’s Republic of China in 1949, the country’s population expanded rapidly. Subsequently, the evolved 4–5 family courtyard houses increased capacity to shelter over 10 families upon their children’s marriages. (ibid.) Song observes that “the various families living in these courtyards expanded their private space by constantly encroaching on public space” (2015, p. 181). For Zhang this turned “the ordered enclosures into disordered quarters” (2016, p. 11), which became known as ‘dazayuan’, a term that Campanella translates as “big cluttered courtyards” (2008, p. 149). In part, this process was architectural, with residents adding, informally, to their individual dwellings. It also occurred through old furniture being left in the communal space, in close proximity to dwellings. Song comments that, following the Cultural Revolution, the period of “reform and opening” of China to the world led to increased access to consumer goods and less need for the old and large wardrobes from earlier decades (2015). Song notes that families would place these outside their houses, as additional storage: “by borrowing the right to temporarily place furniture in such spaces, people obtained userights to the land and the right to occupy the space the wardrobes stood in” (p. 174). Subsequently, the apparent messiness of the dazayuan contributed to a process of moving inhabitants from these dwellings to new apartments elsewhere in the city. Song’s work is closely bound up in this series of transformations to the courtyard house and, thereby, to the ways in which we might understand the limits of a dwelling, both in terms of form (through architecture and furniture) and the navigating of these limits through multiple points of access to both architecture and dwelling. As such, this work speaks to emerging interest in the contemporary rethinking of categories of architecture and furniture. Anna Yudina identifies “significant overlap” between furniture and architecture (2015, p. 8). She traces two approaches: the first of “architecture-­ to-furniture”, in which architecture is designed to allow for multiple uses; the second of “furniture-to-architecture” in which furniture “morphs into

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micro-architecture” (ibid.). Primarily, Yudina is concerned with new projects that take up these approaches. In addressing Communal Courtyard, we are concerned with Song’s reworking of existing forms, in this case frontages that are no longer connected to the remainder of the wardrobe and so no longer neatly identifiable as a piece of furniture, but also not entirely architecture. In that they mark out distinct spaces in the gallery, we might understand the frontages as a form of room divider, a means of augmenting or impacting upon and reworking existing architecture. As the frontages speak to an established practice of using furniture as an extension to architecture in Beijing, we might understand them as documenting, modelling and inviting reflection upon furniture and architecture, and their interrelation. Song’s work suggests that it may be productive to identify and attend to work that exists between the categories of furniture and architecture, that is neither (or no longer) one thing or the other, but, instead, speaks to both.7 In that Communal Courtyard addresses architecture and furniture, the work asks that we rethink the place of furniture in relation to architecture. By situating furniture frontages as architectural forms, as screens and a form of limit, Song invites us to recognise the furniture outside dazayuan as being between architecture and furniture, as comprising critical elements of urban environment, neither entirely within or outside a dazayuan house. In terms of doors, by situating furniture on the edge of architecture, inhabitants expand the number and use of doors in engaging with a dwelling, which takes on particular significance in the Communal Courtyard by which Song titles the installation. To position wardrobes in a communal place, is to extend the limiting effect of a dwelling with thresholds. Song’s interest in furniture in the hutong and dazayuan echoes existing scholarly concern with urban environment. In reflecting on ways to approach urban environments, Nigel Bertram points to the value of “thinking simultaneously at different scales, from furniture to structure and infrastructure” (2016, p. 1). He is concerned here with identifying “combinations of what might normally be separated into different categories” in order to understand the city “in terms of relationships” (ibid.). In this context, Song’s work speaks to the importance of this (re)use of furniture outside architecture to experiences of Beijing. Separately, Song recognises that efforts to move inhabitants of hutongs to contemporary buildings, particularly flats, involves the loss of this marginal, furniture space and the means of access to these units. As he writes, changes to the material form of dwelling units impact on those who live in the city. For Song, [t]he relationships between family and family, between who is living here and who is living there, have changed. So have the relationships among individuals within the same family. Nothing is so multifaceted anymore; everything is much narrower and more clearly spelled out. Perhaps I am infatuated with a slowly vanishing type of relationship between people. (Song, cited in Dal Lago et al., 2000, p. 86)

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While this may the case, it also seems evident that Song is engaged in revealing and debating the form and practice of adapting and inhabiting dwellings in Beijing, both in the present and through the changing form and practice of the courtyard house. Specifically, Song frames Communal Courtyard in a broader project, The Wisdom of the Poor, which addresses practices by which individuals made life possible in challenging economic circumstances. Chiu-Ti Jansen reflects that in The Wisdom of the Poor, Song draws on “his fascination with how the impoverished Beijing population was adept at scavenging windows, doors, doorknobs and electrical outlets to create whimsical living quarters as extensions of their cramped corridors” (2013). Song Dong has worked with reclaimed materials before. In Door Plates, he prised 100 door plates from the doors of buildings that had been scheduled for demolition. For Song, “[a]mong people living in the same hutong there exists a very special degree of familiarity” (Song cited in Dal Lago et al., 2000, p. 86). The work speaks directly to his experience of growing up in a hutong. As he remembers, [w]e would throw stones at these enameled plates, which would chip away to illegibility. The plates were considered the symbol of the house, a trademark of the compound behind that door, and that’s why we had such fun destroying them. (ibid.) Long afterwards, the chipped red square signs point to a way of life in houses that are now no longer standing. As the door plates point to the life within houses, so the wardrobe doors in Communal Courtyard indicate particularities of life as it extended from the house to the courtyard onto which they once opened. The door with the turquoise cur tain

The wardrobe panel appears to incorporate two doors (see Figure 5.2). From inside, the door to the left takes up half the panel. While there is a single wooden frame around the edge of the door, the door has been fashioned from two panels. The upper and main panel appears to be a form of hardboard and may be the rear of a mirror. The lower and smaller panel has a clear grain and may be polished on the other side. There is a small, light metal block on the door frame that may be the rear of a lock. The other side is more complex. There appears to be a full-height door, with a clear glass panel in the top half of this door. From the rear, the glass appears rectangular, but at the front, it is apparent that one or perhaps two pieces of wood provide a curved frame to the top of the glass. There is a small black block attached to the door which, again, may be a lock. There appear to be two drawer fronts that would be visible when the right door is opened. In that the drawer fronts obscure the door panel, it is not fully clear whether there is a distinction between the top and bottom half of the door, or whether only part of the panel opens. The lower panel of the door

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has a similar grain to that on the left, again suggesting it might be polished on the outside. A turquoise curtain hangs at the window, fixed at two points, one either side and above the line of the window. The curtain sags, perhaps because the wire on which it hangs has lost tension and elongated over time, perhaps because the wire was strung too loosely. To the left, it has slipped down the wire, leaving a thin gap through which spectators can see through the glass, as if out from the wardrobe to the room in which it is situated. The curtain hangs in loose folds and gathers towards the bottom, although then straightens, indicating that there may be another wire along the base of the glass. Song notes that “most of the wardrobes date from between 1950 and the late 1970s”, and would have been “handmade by itinerant carpenters who would go from street to street looking for work” (Song, 2015, p. 181). While the wardrobes are similar, the AGO notes that each is personalised (ArtGalleryofOntario on Twitter, 2016). Those made between 1966–1976 will have been affected by having been designed in the context of the Cultural Revolution in China. During this time, Song notes that beauty was understood as being “simple and humble” (AGO, 2016). Song observes that, at the time,

Figure 5.2  A nnie Wong, Quotidian Chinese, 2016 in the installation space of The Wisdom of the Poor: Communal Courtyard by Song Dong, 2011–2013 at the Art Gallery of Ontario. Photo: Leah Maghanoy © Art Gallery of Ontario. We are grateful to Annie Wong, Song Dong and Pace Gallery Beijing for allowing us to use this image. The doors being described are situated in the left-hand side wardrobe panel in this image.

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the colour of the curtains would have been selected for its associations with nature, which would have been regarded as more appropriate than, say, the red of the flag (ibid.). In preparing the installation, Song notes that each was “collected from a Beijing family”, but recognises that the wardrobes will have changed hands many times since being owned by those who commissioned their construction or saved coupons for their purchase (ArtGalleryofOntario on Twitter, 2016a). While Song recognises that international audiences may be unfamiliar with the ‘background’ of the work, he notes that Chinese spectators have suggested that, given the similarities in furniture, “people say ‘this [is] not your home, it’s my home’” (Song, speaking at AGO, 2016). As Song observes, “we have the same life” (ibid.). For Bachelard, the wardrobe is a critical structuring element in the home. He suggests that, “[i]n the wardrobe there exists a centre of order that protects the entire house against uncurbed disorder” (1994, p. 79). To open the door to such a wardrobe is to discover the particular structure of personal items, an order that emanates from the wardrobe and grounds the remainder of the home. We observe a similar perspective on the wardrobe in Peruvian writer Julio Ramon Ribeyro’s reflection on his father’s wardrobe. For Ribeyro, [t]he wardrobe in Dad’s room was not just another piece of furniture, but a house within the house. Inherited from his grandparents, it pursued us from move to move, gigantic, cumbersome, until it found its definitive place in the master bedroom in Miraflores. (2003, p. 572) In contrast, the wardrobes that interest Song – certainly, those that he depicts in Communal Courtyard – are those that were no longer a part of life within the walls of the home, but which extended those limits of the home. Where Ribeyro’s father’s wardrobe found its place in the master bedroom, these wardrobes were removed from the bounds of the house, placed adjacent to the house, extending but also at one remove from the house, certainly from the bedroom in which one might open them to dress and undress, to engage in dialogue with the order or disorder within. As such, they risked creating apparent disorder, by contributing to the informal use of the dazayuan, by broadening the footprint and multiplying the points of access to the home. Where Bachelard describes wardrobes in terms of order, Saulo B. Cwerner writes that a wardrobe “commands a set of distinctive and identifiable spatial practices: forms of structuring, delimiting, and organising clothes, as well as the social meanings and identities articulated by these forms” (2015, p. 80). To stand at the door of a wardrobe is to attend to the order, the spatial practice, the ways of living in the world that are inscribed in the interior of the wardrobe. To bring forth items from a wardrobe, to add or return items, is to engage in dialogue with the conditions of that wardrobe and, thereby, the world beyond. In Communal Courtyard, many of the doors were closed and, in all cases, their interiors had been removed. It was no longer possible to open a door,

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look in and engage in acts of give and take, order and disorder. The installation invited spectators to attend to the interior of the wardrobes, as if standing inside the wardrobe. There was something unsettling about positioning spectators, standing, at the door to a wardrobe, as if they might be discovered, as if others might open the wardrobe doors upon them. As Marie Reynolds considers, the experience of situating oneself within a wardrobe can be significant. In her poetry, in which she engages in part with health and with illness, she describes the significance of being enclosed in a wardrobe and then releasing herself back into the world. For Reynolds, I could hear the world beyond us, too – muffled sounds of people passing in the alley. I sat in the darkness, listening. We were happy that year, the doctors cautiously optimistic. Inside the wardrobe, a child’s game – I could be lost, I could be found. I knew that when I pushed open the doors, daylight would come streaming. (Reynolds, 2015, p. 92) With only the front of these wardrobes remaining, the doors no longer led to the enclosed interior, sounds were no longer muffled, there was no opportunity to be lost, except perhaps among the snaking passages in the room, and little chance of being found or of pushing open the doors. While some doors were open, in the main, spectators attended to closed doors, to the events in the space and to the artworks Song had installed in the gallery, in combination and conversation with the artwork. We might understand this act of standing behind specific wardrobe doors in the context of the Cultural Revolution, in which furniture was opened, upturned, belongings cast out into the room, disorder created within Bachelard’s heart of the home, particularly in light of the fact that that the work opened on the 50th anniversary year of the Cultural Revolution. Reports of the Cultural Revolution are relatively limited. Writing in The Guardian in the UK, Tom Phillips notes that Beijing, “continues to stifle academic research into the Cultural Revolution” (Phillips, 2016). In The Globe and Mail (Canada), Nathan Vanderklippe finds that, while there are documents from the time period, few researchers have discussed this material (Vanderklippe, 2016). Of the material available, there is a particular seam of work that comprises autobiographical writing and reflection. Jie Li cites an inhabitant of an alleyway house in Shanghai, who describes searching a house during the Cultural Revolution: It was elegantly decorated and very tidy when we entered, but when we left, all the drawers were turned inside out and the wardrobe tumbled to the ground. (Li, 2015, Kindle Loc 2434)

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In this context, and viewed from inside, the locks appear slight and the panels thin. They offer a light threshold, particularly given the window in many of the doors or elsewhere on the panels. These are not doors to be barred, to be barricaded, perhaps purposefully, to allow for the contents to be searched, to offer little resistance. In door after door in the installation, the centre of order appears distinctly vulnerable. The borrowed doors

A woman sits at a Singer sewing machine, her back to a set of interconnected doors that form an enclosed space. The door behind her and to her right is that which we describe above. To the woman’s left, there are other structures formed by intersecting wardrobe fronts. The sewing machine is built into a polished wooden stand; a flap of the table has been folded out and leans, a long way from being flat. The woman sits with her right foot, sandal removed, pressed on the pedal; a light illuminates the needle. A short distance away, a younger woman sits on the floor, scissors in hand, talking with spectators. There are baskets of fabric, small cushions, and small triangles of paper, some white, some orange, that have been laid out in neat rows. The event, Quotidian Chinese, comprised Annie Wong’s artist residency at Communal Courtyard. In this work, Wong reflected specifically on her relationship, and that of her sister, with her mother, who moved, as a refugee, from China to Canada in 1980 (Wong, 2017). Wong invited her mother and sister to perform in the event, in order to reflect on their daily experience of “the complexities of language, labour and loss shaped by the Canadian Chinese diaspora” (Wong, 2017, p. 75). In one of four performances in the residency, Wong addressed the sewing “homework” that her mother had brought home from ‘sweatshops’, her first employment in Canada. In another, Wong replayed the family practice of making wontons, this time with paper torn from dictionaries. Wong describes the latter practice as “an intimate and domestic ritual between mothers and daughters”, yet, in their case, the task was complicated by the lack of a “common language” (ibid., p. 77). In situating these practices in Communal Courtyard, Wong temporarily relocated her family’s everyday practices in Toronto to this reworking of a Beijing dazayuan and hutong, which had been such critical structures in domestic life the city until the latter part of the last century. In reflecting on the work, Wong finds that “[s]imply holding space together, spending time and demonstrating care are enough to generate meaningful experiences” (ibid., p. 78). Whether engaged quietly in domestic tasks, or in discussion and reflection on the work – and its significance in their lives – Wong’s performance paid close attention to everyday experience at home. Critically, Quotidian Chinese occurred outside the home, in public rather than private, although in a performance that took place in only part of the installation, and which would have been experienced differently by those who passed by, as opposed to those who stopped to engage and contribute to the work of the performance.

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In line with current interest in synergies and intersections between artistic and architectural practices, there are growing numbers of projects in which artists and architects have created spaces in which other artists are subsequently invited to perform. In Folly for a Flyover (2011, UK), Assemble, an architecture studio, created a performance venue in the ‘undercroft’ beneath a motorway in Hackney Wick, London (Assemble, n.d.). Having created the structure, Assemble invited artists to perform in the space (ibid.). Where Folly for a Flyover resembled a conventional venue, with raked audience seating, Communal Courtyard offered only a particular open area for performance. As a result, performances took place in a part of the installation, rather than forming the prime focus for the work. As Song reflects, “[a]llowing artists to display their works within the work of another artist also challenges the notion of art as a highly individualistic activity” (Song, 2015, p. 181). The effect was one of multiple practices rather than a singular form. It was difficult to identify quite where Quotidian Chinese took place. While it was situated in a courtyard in the gallery, separate to the enclosed dazayuan, formed from enclosed collections of doors, it was also situated close to the rear of some of these wardrobe panels and the closed wardrobe doors. Here, then, was a performance about the difficulties of practising everyday life, performed in a space that was both in the open, in the gallery, and behind closed doors. Song’s work suggested that the actions between the properties within the dazayuan were private, protected, carefully screened by doors, by closed curtains. As such, when Wong reflected on her experience of family life, she did so within the ‘wardrobe’ that, for Bachelard, orders the house. This, the rough finish of the interiors suggested, was a place out of sight. Yet were one to stand in the middle of one of the dazayuan, it would have been easy to see aspects of this performance through gaps where curtains failed to completely cover the glass in each door. The work pointed to the difficulty of finding privacy and opportunity to address difficulties about life in the home. In reflecting on Communal Courtyard Dong draws attention to the practice of borrowing in both landscape design and in the practice of living in dazayuan. For Song, [i]n traditional Chinese aesthetics, and landscape design, the term ‘jiejing’ refers to ‘borrowing’ the surrounding scenery to create a more beautiful, harmonious home or garden. This concept can be extended to include ‘jiequan’ the habit of borrowing space (or borrowing the right-of-way) from one’s neighbors to create more aesthetically pleasing, functional or harmonious urban spaces. (Song, 2015, p. 169) In inviting artists to become resident in Communal Courtyard, Song and the AGO invited them to ‘borrow’ the space and, in so doing, negotiate their own use of the space. Song observes incursions into dazayuan are, to some degree, agreed by inhabitants. As he writes, neighbours must “come to their own compromises in their relationships with one another. They are in

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competition with each other, and at the same time, they are a collective with common interests” (ibid., p. 180). Similarly, the residency performances were selected and approved by Song and the AGO. The combination of artworks pointed to the potential for individual practices in Communal Courtyard, and, thereby, for this communal space to be a site for intensely personal reflections, by individuals or by members of a family, who shared something of their life together. Christopher DeWolf takes up a similar term, “borrowed spaces”, in his discussion of the ways in which people living and working in Hong Kong augment architecture through decoration (DeWolf, 2017). He describes Hong Kong’s “informal spaces, its palimpsest streets” that have “accrued so many layers of life through the years” but which he finds are now being “homogenised” (ibid., n.p.). DeWolf demonstrates the significance of practising places, although he refers specifically to the physical augmentation of the street, rather than individual actions in those places. In Song’s terms, DeWolf ’s borrowing speaks to jiequan, rather than jiejing – resulting in individuals altering places beyond the home. As Wong’s work reveals, it is also possible and valuable to conceive of borrowing through performance and in ways that are less invasive, more jiejing than jiequan. As artists engage in the borrowing of one another’s works, so they speak to critical issues and practices in those works, in this case, to the practice where individuals, separately or in combination, reworked the limits of their homes. The door with the mirror

The front of this door is dark in colour, it has been polished but the finish is imperfect, and there is particular wear around the bottom edge. In structure, the wardrobe resembles that of the one above, except that, here, the glass panel might also form part of a door. There are three drawers under this panel and another drawer under the long mirror on the main (and perhaps only) door. That said, this drawer may be an illusion and a way of filling the gap under the mirror. The handles of the drawers are plain wood, there is a green latch towards the top of the door and there may be handles to one (or both) doors but these are indistinct in the image from which we are working. The distinction between handles and latch suggests the latter was a later addition, perhaps because the door does not quite close. The mirror in the door reflects other wardrobes in the room. The wardrobe that is closest, with a centre door and two curtained side windows, appears misshapen in the reflection. Mirrors are a familiar feature in the doors. In the bright, clean light of the gallery, some mirrors appear clear, while others are worn and reflect little. For Song Dong, “each of the wardrobe doors holds the memory of its previous owner” (ArtGalleryofOntario on Twitter, 2016b). He comments that, “I hope there is a spiritual dialogue between visitors and those who looked in these mirrors before” (ArtGalleryofOntario on Twitter, 2016c). In attending to the doors, spectators necessarily encountered

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Figure 5.3  W isdom of the Poor: Communal Courtyard, 2011–2013 Installation © 2018 Song Dong, courtesy of Pace Gallery

the mirrors in the doors and, thereby, reflections of themselves and others. Song goes further, to suggest that, in seeing these reflections, one might also discover the reflection of the life of those who previously used this wardrobe. This notion, of seeing oneself and others in the mirror on a freestanding wardrobe, has received some attention elsewhere. Indeed, where much theorisation of wardrobes focuses on the interior, discussion of the significance of a mirror draws attention to the door and the position and practice of those who stand at, and may open, a door. This is particularly evident in Ribeyro’s reflection on the wardrobe that had belonged to his father. He recalls his father’s practice of looking at himself in the mirror, and so to absent relatives, more than looking himself, he’d look at those who had looked at themselves in it. He would say then: “Don Juan Antonio Ribeyro y Estada used to look at himself here and knot his bow tie before going to the cabinet meeting” […] His forefathers were captive there, at the back of the mirror. He saw them, and he saw his own image superimposed on theirs, in that unreal space, as if by some miracle they were again inhabiting, together, the same time. Through the mirror, my father entered the world of the dead, but he also made sure that through him his forebears gained access to the world of the living. (2003, p. 573) Ribeyro recalls that, when growing up, he had been playing with a child who had been visiting, and the child had kicked a ball through his parents’ bedroom window and broken the mirror. Ribeyro writes that, for his father, Losing the mirror, the wardrobe had lost its life […] From then on, we never heard him talk about his ancestors. The disappearance of the mirror had automatically made them disappear. His past stopped tormenting him, and he leaned rather oddly toward his future. (ibid., p. 576) Mirrors are fragile. In her study of domestic life in Shanghai, Jie Li recalls her mother following her father out one night, correctly believing him to

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be having an affair. When Li’s mother confronted her father, he “broke the mirror on her wardrobe, getting his fists all bloody” (Li, Kindle Loc 925). In a bedroom, a room so focused on personal relationships, these recollections suggest the mirror on a wardrobe extends beyond the actual, the present. If doors to a wardrobe reveal the relative order or disorder of a life, of a house, the mirror on such a door speaks of a past order of people who have looked into it previously. Both the mirror and this order are forever at risk of events and the actions of those in the room in the present. Song has addressed such work before. In Broken Mirror (1999), he filmed urban spaces, each one reflected in a mirror. While filming, he broke each mirror with a hammer, fragmenting and revealing the fragility of both the mirror and the urban environment. To break a mirror is to remove the appearance of depth, to return our attention to the surface, to the separation, rather than connection with a perceived world beyond. In a door, Song’s work suggests the presence or the breaking of a mirror can powerfully affect our sense of ourselves, and the place in which we stand. With the door mirrors intact, albeit sometimes worn, we might understand the mirrors in Communal Courtyard as retaining some sense of past lives, whether or not spectators observe this or are able to engage in ‘spiritual dialogue’. While the mirrors remained, the wardrobes themselves had been altered in an entirely different way, in the forced separation of the front from the remainder of each structure. From straight on, facing into the mirror, it might be all too possible to imagine the interiority of the wardrobe – an alternative illusion to that of past faces in the mirror, both illusions pointing to what had once been but was no longer present.

Together at doors The projects we considered here, London Stories: Made by Migrants and Communal Courtyard, point to the significance of being together – or apart – from others at doors. Both projects drew attention to the form, situation and practice of doors, as a means of being together with or apart from others. In each project, we found that doors offered compelling forms through which to practise and to reflect on the definition of and relation between self and others, on changing forms and use of furniture and architecture and on critical issues in contemporary cities. In London Stories: Made by Migrants, we were together with others in person: our guide, other spectators and particular speakers. We were also invited to meet individuals who had experienced migration, in the context of headlines that spoke of migrants as being ‘others’, as being separate to ‘us’. As such, the work reimagined others through the individual details of a person, their perspectives, their practice of a space, of a door, of engaging with us – their temporary visitors, and the form and structure of the event. In Communal Courtyard, spectators may have found themselves together with other spectators and performers. They may also have found themselves

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together with others in less tangible ways, with the ‘other’ of their own reflection in the mirrors of doors, with the others who had owned the wardrobes at varying points, with their ancestors, and with those who had lived through the Cultural Revolution, where the design of the wardrobe was a critical statement of compliance, and in which domestic space might, at any point, be investigated and up-tuned by others. Finally, in the most recent incarnation, the doors in Communal Courtyard spoke to the situation of the doors outside the home, on (and, thereby reforming) the edge of the home, in a communal context. Both projects repurposed existing doors, those in the BAC and those Song introduced to AGO. Both were situated in arts institutions – one in a public gallery, one in a series of rooms in the BAC. Both involved multiple doors, and, in so doing, referenced a part or the whole of a city. Both addressed issues and practices in a city, of arrival to a city, of making sense of a city from within, of reflecting on one’s past in a city in the present. As such, both projects pointed to experiences of life in contemporary cities, and particularly to the varying and at times vulnerable situation of living in a city. In both London Stories: Made by Migrants and Communal Courtyard, the material detail and situation of each door and the potential to see through, or the practice of being guided through, all became critical in attending to, and perhaps attempting to, determine the identity of those whose stories were bound up in each door. In the former work, we met those behind the doors at which we gathered. In the latter, there were only indications of who those people might have been. In each project, we recall both the words of the then Chief Curator of the AGO, Stephanie Smith, to “slow down, look closely” at Communal Courtyard, and our own sense of the importance of paying attention to, and spending time with doors, which we introduce in the Photo Essay (AGO, 2016). Whether waiting for a performer at a door in London Stories: Made by Migrants or being situated with spectators and performers at wardrobe doors in Communal Courtyard, it became apparent that doors offer a compelling means of addressing and reflecting on the places in which people live and the politics of those places. Doors reveal the agency of individuals (and the limits of this agency), the conditions of a place, the sense of stability or change in a place, and the potential for security or removal from a place. Doors situate us in relation to others – in the moment, with those who have used a particular door in the past, and perhaps even with those who may come to do so in the future.

Notes 1 In the 2013 event, groups had been limited to two people. 2 For further detail on the transformations to courtyard houses and neighbourhoods, see Campanella (2008). 3 See, for instance, work by Project for Public Spaces (USA) and Liveable Cities (UK), and, for a review of definitions of place in the context of urban regeneration, Ujang and Zakariya (2015).

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4 Sepe cites Pergola (1997, p. 52), text in Italian. 5 In proposing this work, Plummer (2016) cites Robert Venturi’s work on ‘residual space’, see Venturi (2008, pp. 78–84). 6 For a contrasting example of urban courtyard homes in Shanghai, see Li (2015). 7 We are aware that Louise Bourgeois’s longstanding project The Cells asks similar questions and that there is work to be done to consider the ways in which her artworks speak to readings of the door. As this is such a substantial body of arts practice, we save this for fuller investigation on a future occasion.

References Alston, A. (2016). Beyond Immersive Theatre: Aesthetics, Politics and Productive Participation. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Andrews, S. (2017). “At Home with Doors: Practising Architectural Elements in Yes, These Eyes Are the Windows and Between 13 and 15 Steps”, Contemporary Theatre Review, 27(4), pp. 462–480. Art Gallery Ontario (AGO) (2016). “AGO Livestream | Song Dong”. Available at: www.youtube.com/watch?v=JrSd9-loMd8 (accessed: 28 July 2018). ArtGalleryofOntario on Twitter (2016a). “The wardrobe was a prized piece of furniture; each was personalized & collected from a Beijing family. #SongDongAGO.” Available at: https://twitter.com/agotoronto/status/692010624495263744. 26-116 (accessed: 28 July 2018). ArtGalleryofOntario on Twitter (2016b). “‘I think each of the wardrobe doors holds the memory of its previous owner.’ #SongDongAGO, opening tomorrow.” Available at: https://twitter.com/agotoronto/status/693123373212131328. 26-1-16 (accessed: 25 July 2019). ArtGalleryofOntario on Twitter (2016c). “‘I hope there is a spiritual dialogue between visitors and those who looked in these mirrors before.’ #SongDongAGO.” Available at: https://twitter.com/agotoronto/status/692013848023269376. 26-1-16 (accessed: 25 July 2019). Assemble (n.d.). “Folly for a Flyover.” Available at: https://assemblestudio.co.uk/projects/folly-for-a-flyover (accessed: 28 July 2018). Bachelard, G. (1994). The Poetics of Space: The Classic Look at How we Experience Intimate Places. Boston, MA: Beacon. Battersea Arts Centre (n.d.). “CALL OUT: LONDON STORIES MADE BY MIGRANTS”. Available at: www.bac.org.uk/content/42052/to_archive/call_out__ london_stories_made_by_migrants (accessed: 1 August 2018). Battersea Arts Centre (2016). London Stories: Made by Migrants. Bertram, N. (2016). Furniture, Structure, Infrastructure: Making and Using the Urban Environment. London: Routledge. Campanella, T.J. (2008). The Concrete Dragon: China’s Urban Revolution and What it Means for the World. New York: Princeton Architectural Press. Cwerner, S.B. (2015). “Clothes at Rest: Elements for a Sociology of the Wardrobe”, Fashion Theory, 5(1), pp. 79–92. Czirak, A. (2011). “The Piece Comes to Life through a Dialogue with the Spectators, not with the Performers: An interview on participation with Dries Verhoeven”, Performance Research, 16(3), pp. 78–83.

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DeWolf, C. (2017). Borrowed Spaces: Life Between the Cracks of Modern Hong Kong. Penguin UK. Halberg, G.W. (2017). “Sisters Academy: Radical Live Intervention into the Educational System”, in Experiencing Liveness in Contemporary Performance: Interdisciplinary Perspectives. London: Routledge, pp. 130–156. Hamid, M. (2017). Exit West. London: Hamish Hamilton. Harbison, R. (2000). Eccentric Spaces. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Jacobs, J. (1993). The Death and Life of Great American Cities. New York: The Modern Library. James, H. (2005). The Jolly Corner by Henry James. n.p.: Project Gutenberg. Available at: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/1190?msg=welcome_stranger. Jansen, C.-T. (2013). “The Art of Doing Nothing in Contemporary China: Song Dong at Pace Gallery”, Sothebys.com, 20 February 2013. Available at: www.­ sothebys.com/en/articles/the-art-of-doing-nothing-in-contemporary-chinasong-dong-at-pace-gallery (accessed: 25 July 2019). Lago, F.D. et al. (2000). “Space and Public: Site Specificity in Beijing”, Art Journal, 59(1), pp. 74–87. Li, J. (2015). Shanghai Homes: Palimpsests of Private Life. New York: Columbia University Press. Mack, J. (2013). “Great Collectors and Their Ideas: Martin Magulies”, ArtReview, (December 2013), pp. 54–56. Meiss, P. von (2013). Elements of Architecture: From Form to Place + Tectonics. Routledge. Off WestEnd.com (n.d.). “About: Salon Adrienne.” Available at: www.offwestend. com/index.php/plays/view/10335 (accessed: 12 March 2018). Pergola, C. (1997). La Città dei Sensi. Firenze: Alinea Editrice. Phillips, T. (2016). “China breaks official silence on Cultural Revolution’s ‘decade of calamity’”, The Guardian (online). Available at: www.theguardian.com/ world/2016/may/17/cultural-revolution-reduced-to-footnote-as-communist-­ party-says-china-has-moved-on (accessed: 2 August 2018). Plummer, H. (2016). The Experience of Architecture. London: Thames & Hudson. Available at: https://thamesandhudson.com/the-experience-of-architecture9780500343210#gallery. Rauws, W. and De Roo, G. (2016). “Adaptive planning: Generating conditions for urban adaptability. Lessons from Dutch organic development strategies”, Environment and Planning B: Planning and Design, 43(6), pp. 1052–1074. Read, G. (2016). “Introduction: The Play’s the Thing” in Feuerstein, M. and Read, G. (eds.) Architecture as a Performing Art. London: Routledge, pp. 1–14. Reynolds, M. (2015). “The Cherry Wardrobe”, Prairie Schooner, 89(1), pp. 92–92. Ribeyro, J.R., and Penuel, J. (trans.) (2003). “The Wardrobe, Forefathers, and Death”, The Antioch Review, 61(3), p. 572. Sepe, M. (2013). Planning and Place in the City. Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge. Simmel, G. (1994). “Bridge and Door”, Theory, Culture and Society, 11(1), pp. 5–10. Song D. (1999). Broken Mirror. Song D. (2015). Song Dong. Berlin: Hatje Cantz. Song D. (2016a). Communal Courtyard. Art Gallery of Ontario. Song D. (2016b). Through the Wall. Basel. Ujang, N., and Zakariya, K. (2015). “The Notion of Place, Place Meaning and Identity in Urban Regeneration”, Procedia – Social and Behavioral Sciences, 170, pp. 709–717.

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Vanderklippe, N. (2016). “Suppressed records revealed 50 years after China’s Cultural Revolution”, The Globe and Mail (online). Available at: www.theglobeandmail. com/news/world/suppressed-records-revealed-50-years-after-chinas-cultural-­ revolution/article30028854/ (accessed: 23 July 2018). Venturi, R. (2008). Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture. 2nd edition. New York: Museum of Modern Art. Verhoeven, D. (2008). Niemansland (No Man’s Land). Wang, Y. (2016). A Century of Change: Beijing’s Urban Structures in the 20th Century. Switzerland: Springer. Wong, A. (2017). “Quotidian Chinese”, Performance Research, 22(4), pp. 75–78. Yaldız, E., Aydın, D., and Sıramkaya, S.B. (2014). “Loss of City Identities in the Process of Change: The City of Konya-Turkey”, Social and Behavioral Sciences, 140, pp. 221–233. Yudina, A. (2015). Furnitecture: Furniture That Transforms Space. London: Thames & Hudson. Zhang, D. (2016). Courtyard Housing and Cultural Sustainability: Theory, Practice, and Product. Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge.

Chapter 6

The Janus effect Doors and theatrical time

[Re-enter Macbeth and Lennox] Had I but died an hour before this chance I had lived a blessed time. (II.iii.89–90)

When Macbeth shows Macduff to Duncan’s door, and the latter passes through it and then returns, two fundamental transformations occur. The first, detailed in Chapter 3, is spatial. But as we alluded to then, there is also a second, temporal transformation occurring. After Macduff’s passage (and return) through this particular door, bringing with him the ‘horror, horror, horror’ of the post-regicidal event, Macbeth himself makes the same journey. He passes offstage through the door into Duncan’s chamber to ‘discover’ the king’s body (and frame and slay the king’s grooms), and then, like Macduff, returns again as quoted in the epigraph above. There are, of course, strong echoes of a theological fall from grace here: to ‘live a blessed time’ carries Edenic connotations, and Macbeth’s rhetoric suggests that a particular paradise has been irrevocably lost. The world of the play is now ‘fallen’, a condition triggered theatrically by the repetition of passing through this specific door. In one sense, the temporal transformation taking place here seems simple enough: it is a linear change, in keeping with the inability to reverse time, or return to a prior, happier, state of being. That ‘break’ in time, if you will, is signalled by Macbeth’s lines, which very clearly delineate a ‘before and after’ situation: the before was a blessed time, the after is a time not worth living. Narratively, it is the murder itself that causes this rupture; but performatively, in the material environment of the theatre, it is the threshold of the door, that activates it. We don’t encounter the deed itself or the corpse of Duncan; we encounter instead the emergence of Macbeth through the door, which the play has already marked as significant and active. But there is also a subtler temporalisation taking place here, which brings together, and accentuates, the co-existence of differing temporal schemata. On the broadest level, this might be thought of in those Edenic terms noted above: the very nature of that aspect of Christian theology is not simply that we have lost paradise,

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but also that we are always aware of that loss. The squandered and now absent paradise always haunts us, thus keeping us ever in the presence of both divine time (eternity) and mortal time (finitude). In the theatrical moment cited above, we have a crystallisation of both temporalities, as underscored by Macbeth’s duplicitous explanation of his killing of the two grooms: O! Yet I do repent me of my fury, That I did kill them. MACDUFF: Wherefore did you so? MACBETH: Who can be wise, amaz’d, temperate and furious, Loyal and neutral, in a moment? No man. (II.iii.104–107) MACBETH:

Two contrary realities cannot co-exist ‘in a moment’, Macbeth suggests. But we know by now – and at this instant in particular – not to trust his word, and in fact the theatre itself is, at this very instant in the play, telling a different story. Contrary temporalities can and do co-exist ‘in a moment’, and here, they coalesce around the door. In this sense, one of the key avenues of enquiry about doors in performance that we raised early in this study comes into relief – the way in which doors both conjoin and separate. Here, it is a set of temporalities that are being conjoined and separated by the door – a before and after, the Edenic and the fallen, the eternal and the finite. This marked juxtaposition of different times, and different ways of being in time or being ‘en-timed’ (the way we might think of being embodied), points toward the main goal of this chapter, which is to work through the ways in which doors help to structure time, to give time a shape and a material, palpable presence, in theatre and performance. Perhaps the simplest of these is the notion that doors establish a rhythm, as Aronson put it (2004, p. 332). But in the pages that follow, we’d also like to expand that slightly to trace some linkages between rhythm and other temporal experiences, such as pace, duration, and repetition. Secondly, we argue that doors can help to frame, and in some instances to suspend, time – they can offer not only temporal breakages (as described above) but also temporal ‘bubbles’ and, perhaps most notably, temporal limits: doors are extraordinarily effective in materialising certain time(s) (that of an individual, or a lifestyle) coming to an end. Finally, we want to suggest that the above processes – and indeed, the very notion of doors giving time a ‘shape’ – indicates the deeply intertwined nature of time and space; as David Ian Rabey has suggested, “[a] theatrical performance explores ways to spatialize time, to delineate time’s motion in spatial terms: [… it] foregrounds the ways that time involves […] change, depicted through […] spatial motion” (2016, p. 45). As such, we examine the ways in which doors might be understood as ‘chronotopic’, as being of both time and space, and the impact such an understanding has upon the dramaturgy of the door. To think of the door in terms of temporality may require a slight shift in our usual perspective. Part of this shift, as noted above, is to consider the relationship between time and space; in this sense, we are looking to the door

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as a site. But the threefold definition of the door we have used throughout the book – as site, object, and threshold – comes into play here as well. Just as space(s) can be considered in temporal terms, so too can objects. It may be useful here to briefly turn again to some cognate thinking on architecture, and in particular the relationship between architecture, time, and performance. Amanda Yates and Gemma Loving-Hutchins, for instance, provide an excellent foray into the ways in which architectural practices are rooted in specific modes of temporality. Indeed, the word ‘practice’ becomes key to some of their thinking. They cite Sanford Kwinter’s work in arguing for a consideration of architecture as not a static object but a “time-based spatial field” (Yates and Loving-Hutchins, 2015, p. 47) or, in Kwinter’s terms, a “system of forces”: as Kwinter puts it, “the object – be it a building, a compound, a site, or an entire urban matrix … would be defined now not by how it appears, but rather by practices: those it partakes of and those that take place within it” (cited in Yates and Loving-Hutchins, 2015, p. 38). We would include the door in Kwinter’s list of what ‘the object’ might be, and indeed, his suggestion that we consider not static appearances but practices dovetails neatly with our entire approach to understanding the dramaturgy of the door, wherein we are seeking to describe how doors partake in specific performative practices, in conjunction with particular elements of performance. Key to this chapter is the idea that a consideration of practices is by definition temporal, in the sense that practices unfold over and through time. Kwinter also suggests, in the same passage cited above, that architecture might be thought of as a “part of a system of forces that give shape and rhythm to the everyday life of the body” (ibid.). Again, this sense of giving shape and rhythm is a useful approach for the way in which we understand the door: as a part of a collection of active objects, sites, bodies and practices that establish rhythm, movement, and temporal definition.1 On a broad level, then, doors are temporal objects in the same sense that architecture might be seen as a temporal practice; this is even more so the case in performance, bounded as it is by very specific temporal frames. We might begin to unpack the details by focusing on the ways doors contribute specifically to rhythm and temporal flow; and there is perhaps no more fruitful ground for such an enquiry as the world of Chekhov and fin de siècle realism. Aronson argues that “the door sets up a rhythm – it is the visual equivalent of a metronome – that not only regularizes the action but sets up expectations” (2004, p. 332). Aronson is discussing here a sequence in The Marx Brothers’ A Night at the Opera, but as he goes on to detail, the idea is not specific to cinema, nor is it confined to comedy (though there is an obvious correlation between rhythm, comic timing, and the use of doors) – we might recall here the description we offered in Chapter 1 of the doors in the 2013 production of Richard II). Aronson’s point is that beyond the obvious use of the door for physical comedy – the establishing and then breaking of movement patterns, for example – doors structure elements of performance in more subtle ways. The rhythm in The Marx Brothers film is comedic,

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and the use of the door shapes the physical movements of the actors; but the door also sets up an expectation (or expectations), and such a sensibility – ­anticipation, or our protentive faculties, as Edmund Husserl would have it – is temporal in nature.2 It is a means of angling our attention away from the present moment and toward the future, and the door can help to focus and direct that attention. And the ways in which we attend to either the present or the future – or, perhaps, more to the point, the ways in which we fail to attend to either the present or the future – is the very stuff and substance of Chekhovian dramaturgy. Rhythmically speaking, we might consider the temporal patterning of the whole of The Seagull, for example. The play is structured in four acts, with an indeterminate fictional time passing between Acts One and Two, and a similar passage between Acts Two and Three; by contrast, two years – a ­duration that seems at once as vague as the other passages and also quite specific – lapse between Acts Three and Four. These passages of time are, of course, contrasted in our immediate experience of the performance by the ‘real’ time that lapses between each act – perhaps only a few moments, where there is no interval, or perhaps 15 minutes or so, where there is an interval. In this sense, the play is structured (like many others) in such a way that our experience of time is self-contradictory, as we encounter both the time of the play and the time of the world at once. This is not unique to Chekhov, of course; what is particularly interesting about The Seagull, in this respect, is that the first two acts of the play are set externally, while the latter two have interior locations. Temporally speaking, it is not difficult to characterise the first half of the play as more indeterminate – with a rhythm that is quieter and slower – and the second half as more fixed, marked, and pressing. The metronome, as it were, speeds up once the action of the play moves indoors. In Acts One and Two, we have a slightly diminishing sense of openness, a freedom from fixidity: first we are in “part of the park of Sorin’s estate” (Chekhov, 2002b, p. 83), and though our view, and imagination, of the expanse is blocked by the makeshift stage that Treplyov has established, this stage opens onto that expanse. As Treplyov describes it, “The curtain, then the first pair of wings, then the second, then empty space. No sets. You look straight at the lake and the horizon” (p. 85). This gesture toward openness is echoed in the abortive play that Treplyov puts on, which is set 200,000 years in the future, with no living characters, no identifiable location in space or time: it is a world of negation, of nothingness. Of course, this world is short lived, both on Treplyov’s stage and on Chekhov’s. The consistent interruption of the auditors of Treplyov’s stage keeps us anchored in the chartable present, and spurs Treplyov to drop the curtain prematurely. Later, as the action moves to Act Two, we move closer to the house, onto a croquet lawn; the lake is still visible, but marginalised, and the house is now also visible. The action here involves reading, arguing, and the threat of Arkadina and Trigorin leaving; it also involves Treplyov shooting the seagull

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and laying it at Nina’s feet. But all this is still possessed of certain languid tenor, interspersed by a long conversation between Nina and Trigorin and, notably, a shorter one between Paulina and Dorn wherein the former tries (not for the first, or last, time) to convince Dorn to take her away with him, uttering what might be thought of as a refrain or chorus of the play, “Our time is passing” (p. 105). The first half of the play, then, has a slow-moving, late afternoon or hot midday, lethargic feel to it. And there are no doors. The second half of the play moves inside, and while it would be stretching things to suggest the pace radically increases (this is Chekhov, after all), the interior location and the presence of “Doors to the right and left” (p. 112) of the room – that is, the presence of definable and limited ways in and out of the world to be created on stage – crafts a more determinate rhythm as well as a greater sense of urgency. Here, for example, is a moment early in the act where Trigorin is physically caught between Nina and Arkadina: NINA [PENSIVELY ]:

Yes, the seagull …

[A pause] We can’t talk anymore, they’re coming … before you go give me two minutes, I beg you … [Goes off left; simultaneously ARKADINA enters right with SORIN wearing a frock-coat and a decoration, then YAKOV busy with the packing.] ARK ADINA: Stay at home, old thing. With your rheumatism, ought you to be going about visiting? [To Trigorin] Who went out just now? Nina? TRIGORIN: Yes. ARK ADINA: Pardon, we’re in the way … (p. 114) Such an exchange can, of course, happen in an outdoor setting, and is not dependent on doors to successfully convey narrative meaning or character development. But the presence of the doors intensifies the tenor and the timing of the conversation; in this context, knowing the doors are there amounts to knowing an interruption is imminent. Indeed, moments earlier in this scene, Chekhov makes a point of bringing Yakov through the room “from left to right carrying a trunk” (p. 113) as a way of both disrupting and dramaturgically structuring a conversation between Masha and Trigorin.3 As Aronson pointed out, the rhythm the doors establish is not so much a regularity of action, but a sense of anticipation. We expect activity, change, movement because the doors signal the possibility and the likelihood of such things. And Chekhov uses this element to alternately frustrate and satisfy such expectations. In the midst of a heated argument between Treplyov and Arkadina, for instance, the two hurl insults at each other, and Arkadina looks ready to storm off (as she has done before); and the doors allow her a possible exit, an escape from the situation. But instead, she “walks to and fro, upset” (p. 118), shifting from rage at her son to sympathy and conciliation; the pathway she

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traces on the stage echoes the one traced by Yakov crossing earlier (entering and exiting), and in the heat of the argument, we very possibly anticipate her exit, but it doesn’t come. In contrast, moments later, as the two have reconciled, Treplyov agrees not to have a duel with Trigorin, but begs Arkadina, “Only, Mama, don’t let me see him … it’s hard for me … more than I can stand” (p. 119). And, perfectly on cue, as it were, the next line of the play is “[Enter Trigorin]” (ibid.). Doors in The Seagull serve as spatial and temporal delineations, but they are, crucially, not steadfast, absolute delineations. Like the lives Chekhov depicts, there is at once a sense of stasis and unstoppable forward motion. The doors suggest borders, shape, confinement, but always in an imperfect and refutable way. Aronson makes a similar point about scenography in Chekhov in general, when he describes a strong tradition in designing Chekhov’s plays as an ongoing tension between naturalism and symbolism; much of the twentieth century, he suggests, saw a “continued […] atmospheric, nonnaturalistic approach” (2005, p. 124) to set design for Chekhov’s major plays. One effect of this approach was to make “walls, doors, and especially windows […] ephemeral, transformable elements” (ibid.). He goes on to cite designer Josef Svoboda in saying that these elements (and windows in particular) “lead us to all of Chekhov’s atmosphere [wherein] the interiors are not bordered or limited, but diffused” (ibid.). This diffusion, we argue, is both spatial and temporal; the doors especially establish, and then allow for the dispersal of, limits, and that dispersal often occurs in the form of rhythmic disruptions, facilitated by the doors. This rhythmic sense of expectation builds toward the end of the act, when, following the departure of the company from the room as they prepare to travel to the train station and back to Moscow, we are left alone with the empty space: [All go out right. The stage is empty. Offstage there is the usual noise of people saying goodbye. The maid returns to take the basket of plums from the table and goes out again.] (p. 123) Prior to this, Arkadina and Trigorin have argued about his infatuation with Nina; and, as cited above, Nina has begged Trigorin for two minutes of his time before they leave. Trigorin has also found the thinly coded message she left for him: “If ever you need my life, come and take it” (p. 119). We are fully primed for a meeting between Nina and Trigorin, and the doors have afforded such meetings as well as the avoidance of such meetings regularly throughout this act. And as we sit looking at an empty room, hearing the sounds of people just beyond, fully expecting the door to open, Chekhov almost cruelly toys with us by having not Trigorin, but the maid re-enter. Our expectation of the door opening is fulfilled, but not in the way we imagined. Then, as earlier, after frustrating our anticipation, he satisfies it: the maid exits, and Trigorin immediately enters from the right, looking for his walking stick, and he meets Nina coming in from the left, looking for him.

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Our sense of rhythm in the act – and alongside that, our temporalised look to the future, our protentive sensibility – is structured and made more acute by the use of doors. The doors help us be in, and feel, time, just as we might argue that in the earlier acts, the absence of doors helped us be without, or feel the absence of, time. It is worth pausing here to note that it is of course not only our (i.e., the audience’s) sense of rhythm or temporal experience that is in the frame here. Nor is it only the protentive sense of anticipation that the doors in Chekhov affect. If, as we argue above, the doors have a marked impact on the rhythm of performance, that affect extends to the practices and processes of acting as well. David Wiles has noted how rhythm, emotion, and acting unfolded in the collaboration between Chekhov and Stanislavski: Rather than understand emotion in the dimension of space – demarcated by a particular gesture or facial expression – [Stanislavski] placed emotion by this means [of Tempo-rhythm] in the dimension of time. In his work on Tempo-rhythms, Stanislavski encouraged actors to find the different tempos for external action and inner feeling, and so, for example counterpointed the inner turmoil of Chekhov’s three sisters against their display of outward calm. Students were taught to use the metronome between such inner and outer rhythms. (2014, pp. 45–46) Wiles is making these comments in the context of a discussion on memory and acting – another dimension of temporality. And, as we will see shortly, this relationship between memory, emotion, and time will come to the fore in the closing scenes of The Seagull. Similarly (looking ahead toward the end of this chapter), the relationship between time and space is foregrounded here – in some respects, Stanislavski (and by extension Wiles) is maintaining a separation between the temporal and the spatial, but clearly, in the act of performance, these two dimensions overlap, and the emotions established by the work on rhythm (the temporal) are ultimately expressed in both time and space, written on the body (and its movements through space) and on the material elements of the set, and, most importantly, articulated in part by the use of doors. This use of doors to frame temporal experience is crystalised in the final act of the play. Here, the number and type of doors increase: “One of the reception rooms in Sorin’s house […] Right and left are doors leading to rooms inside the house; at centre, French windows onto the terrace” (Chekhov, 2002b, p. 124). Chekhov’s stage directions (here and in what follows) call for three subtly different types of doors. The door on the right can be locked; the door on the left has no lock, and the French windows, which serve as doors in this scene, are both open and of course translucent. As above, there is at once delineation and diffusion; the doors in the room offer three levels of solidity and visibility in terms of accessing the world outside, and, of course, in terms of that world outside gaining access or perception here. As before, all three doors help to establish the rhythm of the act, both facilitating entrances and exits

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and also crafting an anticipation of such movement. But here, rhythm and expectation are both sharply altered by the physical act of locking or barring two of the three doors, and the doors not only impact upon the pace of the action, but they also suspend, and thereby frame, time. Halfway through the act, after the room has been established as one wherein people may come and go freely – in spite of it having been also established as specifically Treplyov’s space – Nina appears at the French windows. After entering, she is adamant that the room be secured against interruption: NINA: Someone’s here. TREPLYOV: There’s no one. NINA: Lock the doors or they’ll come in. TREPLYOV: No one will come in. NINA: I know Irina Nikolayevna is here. Lock the doors. TREPLYOV: [Locking the right-hand door and going towards the left-hand one]: There’s

no lock on this one. I’ll block it with an armchair. [Puts an armchair against the door]. Don’t be afraid. No one will come in. Treplyov’s assurances, in fact, hold up: no one does come in during their conversation. But the fact that the left-hand door has been marked as unlockable, and that the French windows loom centre stage, keeps the threat of disruption, and the sense of diffuse, porous boundaries, live throughout the entire scene. However, like Nina, we become satisfied with the temporary security of the room. The key, of course, is that it is temporary. The flow of time through the play, manifest in the earlier flow of people through the room, here stops, or, at least, becomes suspended. The locking of the doors takes us out of the normal temporal movement of the day, and provides a marked separation. Time in here is not the same as time out there – very much akin, perhaps, to the same temporal phenomenon that occurs when the lights of a theatre dim and the doors to foyer are shut. As Nina relaxes, she says to Treplyov “Let’s sit down […] We’ll sit and talk and talk” (p. 137). There is, briefly, a sense of having all the time in the world. The locking of the doors fixes us in the here and now, in a kind idyllic present, that is only itself, unburdened by the future. Bert States says something similar about the function of a chair in realism, and by extension, of the very act of sitting down. For States, “if we reduce the realistic theater to its single most important property, we arrive, in effect, at the chair” (1985, p. 43). The logic here is that the chair suspends movement and pins us in the world created on stage. “Like the science that inspired it”, States suggests later, “realism was essentially an art of pinning things down” (1985, p. 61) and the chair helps to do that. His example is from Ibsen – “Well, let’s have that nice little chat, Mrs. Tessman” (p. 45) – and there is something very resonant between that moment of stage realism and this one here in Chekhov: only here, it is a double-act of ‘pinning us down’, worked through the simple actions of locking the doors and then sitting down to ‘talk and talk’.

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But to say that such a moment is unburdened by the future is not fully accurate. All time, returning to Husserl, carries the weight of both past and future; there is no singular, only-present, ‘now’ that we can inhabit. Time, in this room with semi-locked doors, will always leak in – that is, in fact, precisely why the doors in this instance are semi-locked. The fact that one door doesn’t have a lock, and that the French windows provide the possibility for both perception and movement through them, highlights the fact that this suspension of time (by definition) cannot last. Moreover, it is not only a case where the future will eventually press in upon the room (Nina leaves, through the French windows, after they sit and talk and talk), but also one where the past is constantly present. Indeed, part of the temporal irony of the scene is that by locking the doors and suspending time, keeping the future and other senses of the present out, Treplyov and Nina have also locked the past in. The bulk of their conversation skips, in fits and starts, between what was and what is, as with Nina’s attention to the world just outside the room: “Late yesterday evening I went to look in the garden to see if our theatre was still there. And it’s still standing. I cried for the first time in two years, and I got relief, things became clearer in my heart. You see, I’m no longer crying” (Chekhov, 2002b, p. 137). Who they were and who they are swirls with some confusion in the room; Nina professes to have found some clarity, but repeats motifs such as “what was I talking about?” and, of course, a shifting sense of identity in terms of “I am a seagull. No that’s not right”. It is only on her exit, when the flow of time resumes, that both she and Treplyov seem to find some certainty about who they are and what their future might be. Nina escapes to continue, however unhappily, the course she has set herself on; and Treplyov, having become a respected writer, destroys his manuscripts and goes off stage, through the door that has a lock, and shoots himself. Throughout the play, then, we can chart at least two temporalising activities of the doors: they are key in establishing the rhythm of the action and setting a pace and a sense of expectations, on one hand, and they also aid in the very suspension of time that (perhaps paradoxically) allows for the tracing, the presencing, of past and future through the present lived moment. The variable porosity of the doors in Act Four is very much a part of the dramaturgical manipulation of time on Chekhov’s stage; and that manipulation, in turn, is very much a part of the way in which the stage can frame or materialise our experience of time. Much of the preceding description and analysis builds to a point of conceiving the door in performance in both spatial and temporal terms. We return here again to our threefold definition of the door as site, object, and threshold, now layered somewhat with the sense that site(s) are potentially temporal fields of relations, and with the understanding that what occurs in a site of performance – particularly where doors are concerned – may contribute to the framing or mitigating of temporal experience. Similarly, the notion of the threshold needs to be understood in both spatial and temporal

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terms, and pressing the point a bit further, we might argue that the threshold is one of those phenomena wherein time and space cannot be separated. Significantly, this is not to suggest a kind of fusion or blending, wherein both elements – time and space – become a new element, each disappearing in the process. Rather, we are in the arena of what Bakhtin called the ‘chronotope’, and what Heidegger called ‘timespace’. We will return to both of these terms shortly, but to begin unpacking the ways in which doors can be understood as being instances of ‘timespace’, we would like to take a brief digression into the world of classical mythology, and frame the remainder of this discussion in some terms connected with the Roman god Janus. This will also allow us to fold Shakespearean dramaturgy back into the discourse, and thereby consider the temporal nature of doors across different theatrical traditions. Janus is perhaps more often recognised as a manifestation of duplicity ­( literally showing the world two faces) and temporal vision (his two faces looking simultaneously to the past and the future), but in more general terms, he was the god of passages, thresholds, and transitions (Figure 6.1). As such, he was also the deity associated with beginnings and endings, in particular

Figure 6.1  J anus, illustration by Charlotte Yonge, 1880

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those that are aligned with birth and death, as well as the temporal frame around any significant event, including and especially wars (a point which will become more salient shortly).4 To perceive the door through the lens of the god of doors illuminates the degree to which the door is both a spatial and a temporal phenomenon. Clearly, this is reflected in the sense of Janus being the god of beginnings and endings, but perhaps more importantly, it is manifest in the sense of Janus presiding over transition and passage: a god of thresholds which are of both time and space. Here, we may readily hear, in equal measure, the multiple meanings of ‘passage’: a place, a journey through space, the passing of time, and the ‘rite of passage’, the act of transformation. There is, of course, considerable scholarship on the multi-valent understanding of ‘passage’; returning briefly to Yates and Loving-Hutchins’s work on the temporal nature of architecture, they cite Brian Massumi’s argument that Event space is characterized not by its ‘boundedness, but [by] what elements it lets pass, according to what criteria, at what rate, and to what effect. These variables define a regime of passage’ (2006, p. 85), establishing architecture as a dynamic threshold rather than a static boundary. (Yates and Loving-Hutchins, 2015, p. 38) Perhaps more fundamentally, and shifting from the architectural to the anthropological, we might return to Arnold Van Gennep’s Rites of Passage, to which we referred in Chapter 2. As noted there, Van Gennep offers some focus specific to doors and time, noting that “to cross the threshold is to unite oneself with a new world” (1960, p. 20). He goes on to directly link such spatial crossings (and spatial ‘new worlds’) with temporal ones: the door is the boundary between two stages of life, so that in passing under it a person leaves the world of childhood [or illness, etc.] and enters that of adolescence. (p. 60)5 For Van Gennep, it is the passing through (or ‘under’) a door that constitutes the temporal shift, but we might also recognise the door as a material instance of spatialising time. Recall Jennifer Low’s account (from Chapter 3) of the Abbey door in The Comedy of Errors as such an instance. Low argues that “The play’s use of that [Abbey] doorway, creating almost a visual tableau of the expression ‘Time reveals all things,’ promotes a sense of perspective and focus. Rather than opening out expansively, the narrow doorway finally represents an opportunity for the characters to go back in time […]” (2011, p. 72). And, considering both Van Gennep and Low, what is perhaps especially important to note is that the ‘passage’ in question can be multi-directional: in Van Gennep’s example, the door stands as a threshold between present and future; in Low’s treatment, it is a threshold between present and past; and as noted

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above, in Chekhov, the doors seem to temporarily (if imperfectly) lock out the future and close in the past. Janus, god of doors and passages, looks both ways. At various points in European history, the materialisation of Janus’ presence and influence further underscored the significance – and material ­consequence – of the door. Within the classical Roman context, for example, the doors of the Temple of Janus were literally left open in times of war, the open door signifying the ‘letting in’ of war and strife. In the early modern context, seventeenth-century Europe picked up on such imagery in multiple fashions. Consider, for example, the depiction of the Temple of Janus by Rubens (Figure 6.2, c. 1635). The imagery in Rubens’s Templum Jani, which is highly theatricalised, situates doors as arbiters of war and peace: on one side of the frame of the central door, through which the manifestation of war threatens to enter, figures representing Tranquillity and Security are striving to close the door; on the other side, figures embodying the Ferocity of War are pulling the doors open.6

Figure 6.2  Templum Jani, Peter Paul Rubens, c. 1635

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By way of context, Stijn Bussels compares Rubens’s study with an earlier (and more benevolent) image celebrating the arrival of peace to Antwerp in 1549 with a ceremonial shutting of doors, which, according to Bussels, expressed the pax Augusta by showing the Roman Emperor on one side and Charles and Philip on the other. They announced peace by closing the temple doors. Whereas in 1549 a bright future had been promised, in 1635 a horrible present was deplored, since in the Temple of Janus the open doors announced war, and the Furies were shown breaking out. (2011, p. 43) Crucially, in both examples, the door is the point at which things can go right or wrong; and in the Rubens study especially, this point is rendered in highly dynamic fashion, wherein the image is markedly active, the struggle current and ongoing, the stakes exceedingly high (as illustrated, on the Ferocity of War side of the image, by a soldier’s brutal treatment of a woman), and the outcome uncertain. As Gaston Bachelard wrote in The Poetics of Space, “[t]he door schematizes two strong possibilities, which sharply classify two types of daydream. At times, it is closed, bolted, padlocked. At others, it is open, that is to say wide open” (1964, p. 222). It is worth hearkening back to Macbeth here once more, and to draw a parallel between the door in Macbeth and those in Rubens. One does not need to look hard to see that as Macbeth finds things, opening the door just a crack amounts to the same thing as throwing it ‘wide open’ – in his case, letting in the horrors of Rubens-esque Furies. Such a parallel is, in fact, highlighted by the theatricality of the imagery in Rubens, wherein the doors – as we have been arguing throughout this book – are figured as active. Here again, we have a shift in perspective from an object or a site as an instance of ‘static’ architecture to one where the door demonstrates a subjective and active agency; it partakes in a process, a practice, the unfolding of an event. As Bussels points out, Rubens goes to considerable lengths to utilise stage-related imagery and composition in order to “increase the impact of the image” (2011, p. 44). And in the image itself, the ‘letting in’ of the Furies (or War) is very much positioned as a theatrical ‘entrance’ onto a stage, complete with a suggested backstage area (or tiring house) and a cast of characters already on stage, all focused upon the central entrance of a new, and devastating, plot-changing, figure. Bussels makes this point fairly forcibly, as he suggests that many of the figures in Rubens’s image “clearly corresponded to equivalents in the theatre at the time”, wherein, he suggests, “the plays of the first half of the seventeenth century created an atmosphere of threat and strong pathos and invested much effort and ingenuity in impressive appearances of the Furies and fearsome ghosts” (p. 44). We can hear in Bussels’s comment very strong echoes of Macbeth, where we encounter, of course, witches vanishing into thin air, the ghost of Banquo haunting the stage, and a parade of demons and spirits prophesying Macbeth’s future.

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In these examples, doors not only operate and become significant in terms of manifesting concerns about war and peace, strife and security, but they are also active agents in establishing the dynamism and impact of theatricality, be that on an actual stage or a painted image. All of this points to the ways in which doors partake in structuring our experience of time, and, by extension, the spatio-temporal nature of theatrical doors. The concept of space-time, and the inextricable nature of the two, is not new, and indeed has received attention across disciplines of arts, philosophy, physics, and theology. As alluded to above, two of the more apt models, for this project, of understanding space-time come from Bakhtin and Heidegger. Bakhtin’s ‘chronotope’ is literally a unit or instance of ‘timespace’, and for him it is a crucial trope in our apprehension of literature because it captures the intrinsic connectedness between temporal and spatial relationships [and] it expresses the inseparability of space and time (time as the fourth dimension of space) […] In the literary artistic chronotope, spatial and temporal indicators are fused into one carefully thought-out, concrete whole. Time, as it were, thickens, takes on flesh, becomes artistically visible; likewise, space becomes charged and responsive to the movements of time, plot, and history (1981, p. 84). If, for Bakhtin, time becomes ‘artistically visible’ in the encounter with literature, we suggest the examples traced thus far demonstrate that in the performative encounter, one key means of making time visible involves the careful, dramaturgical use of the door. The door, in Bakhtin’s words, is a part of the ‘flesh’ of time. Jeff Malpas thinks this issue through in terms of Heidegger’s development of ‘timespace’; as Malpas describes, “[t]he idea of the unity of time with space, expressed in the notion of ‘timespace’ (Zeitraum) is a central development of Martin Heidegger’s thinking as it moves away from the problematic treatment of time and space that is evident in Being and Time” (2015, p. 25). The ways in which we understand our being within, and in relation to, time was of course central to Heidegger’s entire project, and while he never explicitly addressed it in these terms, there a strong performative element to that relation. In one respect, we have already been alluding to this performative element in the ways in which doors partake in specific practices and activities; for Malpas, “In Heidegger […], time is thus understood in relation to activity, and it is activity, we might even say performance, that marks out the otherwise static and lifeless field of spatiality” (2015, p. 27). While depicting spatiality as static and lifeless might edge toward the extremity of such an argument, Malpas’s point is that for Heidegger, time is constituted in doing, and, equally, doing must occur somewhere. Stuart Grant takes the argument somewhat further, in contending “that Heidegger’s transformed orientation of the questioning to the problem of Being is essentially performative” (2015, p. 215). As

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Heidegger himself puts it, a potentially revised title for the grand question of Being “might read, instead of Being and Time: Clearing and Presence” (1993, p. 449). The active nature of clearing, which appears as vital to Heidegger’s thinking about truth (as an active, unfolding process, rather than a static ‘fact’) and art (understood as a process of unconcealment), places us in the processual, ongoing realm of doing, of performing. For Grant, the nexus of time, activity, Being, and performance comes in the figure of Heidegger’s Augenblick: “the moment of the coming forth of ‘time-space’” (2015, p. 213). Grant points out that a more colloquial way of putting this exists in our sense of ‘being in the moment’, but the idea here goes well beyond the connotation of ‘realistic authenticity’ (in terms, let’s say, of acting) or even of careful, focused attention to a stage or performance environment. As Grant puts it, The ‘being-in-the-moment’ to which performers refer when the performance is ‘working’, when the musician feels that ‘the groove is in the pocket’, when the improvised moment is flowing, is a condition of holding open the clearing in which performance brings-forth its unrepeatable singularity. (2015, p. 225) This ‘condition of holding open’, in various guises and to differing degrees, marks Heidegger’s description of truth, of art, and – as Grant argues – of Being itself.7 Most notably for this current discussion, a condition of holding open implies engagement in both time (the ongoing, durative, and active nature of ‘holding’) and space (the locational, geometrical quality of ‘open’). At the risk of what might seem too easy, or too trite, a comparison, the image of holding open a door may be instructive here, both in terms of understanding the unity of timespace, as Heidegger (and Grant and Malpas) discuss it, but more importantly, of understanding how we might see doors as performative instances of timespace. To hold open a door is to not only engage in activity oneself, partaking in both spatial (being at the door) and temporal (holding it open for a certain duration) phenomena; it is also to create the conditions for other kinds of ‘bringing-forth’. Grant defines Heidegger’s Augenblick as both “moment” and “site”, and here again we have an echo of the door as site, object, and threshold, now with the idea of threshold as being not only temporal in nature, but of being possessed of a specific kind of temporality – that of the moment, the instance of time which allows for a bringing forth. Malpas, speaking of performance more broadly, offers an excellent summary: “Performance is not a primarily temporal phenomenon, but is rather itself a working out of a certain timespace, a timespace created by the performance itself […] and in which the performance is itself brought forth” (2015, p. 35). Analogously, we might say that doors, especially in performance, are neither primarily temporal nor spatial, but rather they are ‘chronotopic’: instances of a ‘working-out’ of temporal and spatial transitions, passages, transformations.

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It is probably fruitful at this point to return to some more concrete examples in theatrical practice, and some of those which we have looked at already  – such as the door in Macbeth – demonstrate the way in which a door operates as both a spatial threshold and a temporal one, wherein passing through a door constitutes a fundamental change in the temporal character of the world on stage. On a more metatheatrical level, we might briefly note that passing through the doors of any performance venue serves a similar time-altering function. The inverse is also true: being barred from passing through a door similarly plays a significant role in constituting the time of the theatrical world. As Wagner has written about elsewhere, one of the clearest examples of the chronotopic nature of doors can be found in the theatre of Tadeusz Kantor, and especially with Kantor’s ‘Doors of Death’ (Today is my Birthday, 1989).8 These doors not only facilitate the intrusion of the past, as a kind of ‘letting in’ – people, events, objects, memories, all long dead, flooding into the space of here and now – but they also create in space a fusion of past, present and future, especially, as Michal Kobialka notes, in the gap between the doors and the frame which fronts them on stage (Kobialka, 2016, p. 15). Death, inevitably and invariably, is our temporal direction (the future), but here, Kantor mitigates that fact, intertwining it with the immediacy of present and past experience. The Doors of Death are irreducibly both spatial and temporal: crossing them is a product of, and effects change in, both categories. To consider the door in the terms outlined above builds toward a suggestion that theatrical doors – akin to theatrical time – heighten our sense of simultaneous experiential difference; in other words, they facilitate and accentuate the ways in which theatre and performance generate an experience of encountering different but co-existent schemata of time, space, or body (a phenomenon perhaps most widely recognised in the co-existence of performer and character in one body). It is, of course, time that most interests us in this chapter: the time on this side of the auditorium door is, for audiences, markedly different from the time on that side of the door. Yet the two times are both separated and conjoined by the door, and our experience of them comes together at the door: two radically different temporal schemata existing simultaneously, even if only for a moment. The same can be said of the stage door or the green room door for performers. Similarly, doors on stage (in the world of the play) separate and bring together drastically different temporal schemes. We might conclude by looking briefly at one of the more iconic uses of a door in modern theatre, Nora’s final exit in Ibsen’s A Doll’s House. There are resonances here of the perspective we brought to bear on The Seagull; again, we have a room full of doors, and again, these establish both a sense of expectation and rhythm. One might even suggest that Ibsen is more pronounced in his use of the doors to craft and exaggerate our anticipation, with both Nora and Mrs. Linde frequently listening at one of the four doors in the room,

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waiting for the arrival, or checking for the presence, of other characters. Perhaps the most explicit instance of this is in the final act of the play, when Helmer retires to his study, behind closed doors, to read the letter that will seal Nora’s fate. And as was the case in The Seagull, the careful use of multiple doors creates a sense of the singular moment, a heightened and compressed temporality, wherein (to borrow from Grant), the performance “brings forth its unrepeatable singularity”, in Nora’s first, and aborted, attempt to leave: [Helmer] goes into the study with the letters in his hand, and closes the door. Nora (wild-eyed, fumbles around, seizes Helmer’s cloak, throws it around herself, and whispers quickly, hoarsely) Never see him again. Never. Never. Never. (Throws the shawl over her head.) Never see the children again. Them too. Never. Never. Oh – the icy black water! Oh – that bottomless – that! Oh, if only it were all over! Now he’s got it, he’s reading it. Oh no, no! Not yet! Goodbye Torvald! Goodbye my darlings! She turns to run into the hall. As she does so, Helmer throws open the door of the study and stands there with an open letter in his hand. (Ibsen, 1981, p. 92) Nora’s speech here conflates the future and the present in rapid, oscillating fashion, and the brief image that results – Nora on her way out, and Helmer framed in an interior doorway – captures in spatial form this coming-­together of future and present. And again, as with Chekhov, the doors are used to control and mitigate the situation, as Helmer locks the front door to keep Nora in. In this moment, our awareness of the front door – which in most productions, and in Ibsen’s stage direction, is in fact off stage, and can only be heard, not seen – begins to become more acute. Nora has attempted (and failed) to reach it; shortly thereafter, the front door bell rings, bringing the letter that promises salvation for Nora and Torvald. From this point forward, the room feels less locked-down; Nora moves through a doorway to the remainder of the house to change clothes, and then again later to retrieve her travelling bag, and all through their conversation, we are partly aware of the unseen front door. When the doorbell rings, noted above, bringing the second letter from Krogstad, Ibsen includes the stage direction “Helmer starts”; the noise, like the knocking on the door in Macbeth, alarms him. This effect of being startled by the noise of the door is precisely what we are set up for in the final moment of the play. Ibsen allows two exits for Nora. One is visible, into the hallway, but not final: the play is still alive, and there is just enough time for Helmer to reiterate the hope of “the miracle of miracles”, that which would allow them to be together. But then, Nora’s second, final exit, invisible but painfully audible, brings about multiple changes in time. The first is, of course, in the world of the play: the slamming of the front door initiates a new and alien world, with an indeterminate duration, for Nora outside of this room. It equally brings about a new and alien world for Helmer within. The temporal structures of

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both sites are altered. Equally powerfully, of course, the slamming of the door brings the entire theatrical experience to a close. Passage through that door ends the world of the play, and brings upon us the imminent passage through other doors (in the auditorium) which will end the event. In this respect, the slamming of the door not only helps this particular performance to ‘bringforth itself ’ (borrowing again from Heidegger and Grant), but it also sits as a bringing-forth of ‘Performance’ itself, more broadly. The temporal frame of theatre – the fact that the play takes place in determinate time, with a definitive end – is heralded by the slamming of the door. The doors in Ibsen, then, operate very much in the sense that Fitzpatrick argues, as a relational system, establishing not so much specific sites (though that may also be true), but a potent and fundamental sense of ‘here’ and ‘there’.9 But they also and simultaneously establish an equally potent sense of ‘now’ and ‘then’, where ‘then’ might be read as the past or the future. The threshold Nora crosses is immutably temporal just as it is immutably spatial; indeed, as perhaps both Heidegger and Janus might have it, the doors demonstrate the inextricability of time and space, and through that demonstration, they stand and function as powerful instances of a performative chronotope.

Notes 1 Recall here the note on the agency of objects, and scenography more broadly, that we raised in Chapter 4 (see McKinney, 2015). 2 Husserl’s understanding of time is grounded in part by the idea that the present moment is in fact always layered with the past and the future, by virtue of our human faculties of inherently looking back (retention) and forward (protention) simultaneously. For an excellent precis, see Dostal (1993, p. 146). For further treatment of the linkage between Husserl’s sense of temporality and theatrical time, see Wagner (2011). 3 Although they do not directly discuss doors, see John Di Stefano and Dorita Hannah’s essay, “Suspended Moments” (2015), for an account of the potency of temporal disruption in performance. Their focus is on the disruption(s) that unfold when the ‘real’ world intrudes on the theatrical world unexpectedly; but the principles they unpack may also be seen in the crafted disruptions that occur within the world of the play. 4 See Michael Lipka, who notes the nominal existence of Ianus Quirinis and Ianus Quirini, as two iterations of the “god of the beginning of war” (2009, p. 74). 5 Van Gennep, 1960, p. 60. It is important, of course, to acknowledge that Van Gennep is referring here to specific and localised social customs – in this case, a rite endemic to purification ceremonies in Minhow. But while the details of such rites, and the understandings of the doors that accompany them, may be localised, he also notes that similar trends are widespread globally and culturally (see especially pp. 18–22). 6 Rubens, moreover, uses this imagery elsewhere, as in his Consequences of War (1638–1639), which positions Janus’ temple on the perimeter of the canvas, again with doors open. 7 See especially Heidegger, “The Question Concerning Technology” (in Heidegger, 1993, pp. 318–319) and “Origin of the Work of Art” (pp. 186–187). 8 See Wagner, 2011, especially pp. 66–68. 9 See Chapter 3, p. 144.

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Shakespeare, W. (1997). The Norton Shakespeare. Ed. Stephen Greenblatt. New York: W.W. Norton and Company. States, B. (1985). Great Reckonings in Little Rooms. Berkeley: University of California Press. Van Gennep, A. (1960). The Rites of Passage. Trans. Monika V. Vizedom and Gabrielle L. Caffee. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Wagner, M. (2011). Shakespeare, Theatre, and Time. London: Routledge. Wiles, D. (2014). “Situated Structures”, in Theatre & Time. Basingstoke: Palgrave. Yates, A., and Loving-Hutchins, G. (2015). In Performance and Temporalisation: Time Happens. Eds. Stuart Grant, Jodie McNeilly, and Maeva Veerapen. London: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 37–52.

Closings Doors reflected

It is January 2018, and we are talking through the final stages of the project, and how to best frame the work that we have done. The French doors that Stuart mentioned in our Openings chapter, that we unlocked only from the inside, are shut and locked against the cold. Among other sensations in the room is the feeling that this may be our last time in this space, with these doors. We discuss the fact that the book – and in particular its ‘content’, the collection of examples and case studies we have gathered – has expanded in terms of our original definitions of both doors and performance. But we also identify a desire for the early forms of the work, especially the practical laboratories from 2014, to be present. Stuart makes the point, during this conversation, that this whole ‘thing’ “began as a project”, not a book.1 But beginnings are tricky. In a fanciful sense, we might say that this investigation began in childhood, with doors remembered, with the rattling of locked attic doors and the like. In a more explicit and material way, it did begin as a practical investigation, unfolding in and through creative practice. I remember the extraordinarily weak, thin, and fragile feeling – a tactile ­sensation – of the rehearsal door we used for our workshops on Doors on Stage in 2014 (Figure 7.1).2 At one point, during one of the improvised exercises, one of our participants nearly knocked the door over entirely, and without breaking character, settled it back in place and repositioned the metal weight which, nominally, held it in place. In the introduction, Stuart reflects, ‘[a]s doors move more smoothly, as there are fewer creaks, I wonder how they transform our experience of place and, particularly, of crossing from one place to another’. That increasing smoothness seems to also extend to our experience of the body, our sensations of tactility. I am reminded of the Szymborska poem that I showed to Stuart early in the project, “Love at First Sight”, which imagines two lovers having ‘met’ prior to their first conscious meeting, through activities, for example, such as both using the same door, touching the same door handle.3 I am also put in mind of Chris Romer-Lee’s observation that for an architect, the door is perhaps first and foremost the door handle, as it is that which constitutes the human interaction:

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Figure 7.1  R ehearsal door Photo credit: Matt Wagner

doors, of course, are all about touch for us [architects], in particular. We’re always pushing doors open, using the handle to open them; we’ve talked a lot about what happens behind the door, but first of all you’ve got to open the door. [… He shows us a picture of a door handle.] Here’s a very high handle, which implies a big push to open this door.4 In Chapter 4, Matt describes Firs, in The Cherry Orchard, “trying the handle”. He is, of course, attempting to leave the building but discovers it is locked. At the same time, he is “trying the handle”, trying its feel, its weight. In the context of our investigation, I wonder at the type of handle, its relation to the door, the degree to which we might read the entire house through this handle and, further, contrast the handle and house with the events of the changing world beyond the door. Matt reflects that, in a practical workshop, a performer playing Firs felt that he was addressing the door, speaking to it, in response to it being locked. The more we slow our attention at and to doors, and attend to the detail of doors, the more we begin to understand broader issues in the world of – and the worlds either side of – the door.

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We are back, again, to the materiality of the door, to its relationship with the body. Another one of our workshops involved an improvisation on the idea of walking into the wrong room. In this case, the door becomes a site and object of safety – the specific ‘thing’ to which the body clings – and a means of escape from an uncomfortable situation. One participant described the scenario afterward by vividly and expressively, with wide arm gestures, suggesting that “if I’d had to [pull] open the door to get out around it, it would have been a much more awkward movement for escape”. I think again here of the production of Richard II (see Chapter 1), and the role the doors played there in marking – and perhaps undermining – the corporeal presence of the king. Such marking is also evident in Pinter’s Party Time, as Matt discusses in Chapter 4, and there are echoes between his discussion of doors to a domestic dwelling in Party Time and my own on domestic doors in London Stories: Made by Migrants (Chapter 5). To have passed through a door and to be inside a room is to have found a way through to safety. In Party Time, this is about privilege – in London Stories: Made by Migrants, and for those speakers who had themselves experienced migration as a result of fear for their lives, it may be more about luck. In the first case, the use of the door speaks to a network of connections, a protected set of inhabitants of the city. In the second, the performances are separate, the speakers do not all meet together, although some did spend time in an exhibition following the series of stories. In this latter case, we might understand the doors in the arts centre as having stood in for doors in and to the city, across the city, without neat means by which those with experiences of migration might make connections with one another. In each case, the performance of doors conferred safety and connection, or lack of connection, to others. Doors, then, enable (and restrict) our capacity to make sense of our situation in a place, in these cases a city, and our relation to the others who also live in that place. That process of making sense of our situation, and the role that doors can play in it, might be captured in the figure of the aeroplane door, and by returning to a question of touch. Echoing a comment in the preface, Stuart writes in Chapter 5 of the ways in which tactility is diminishing in urban spaces, particularly with the increased use of automatic doors. I think here of aeroplane doors. These are doors which most of us never actually touch, which are always ‘attended’ by flight crew on our entry and exit, but which – if we watch the crew open or close the doors – require significant force and effort to operate. I have developed a habit, a practice, I don’t know from where, of touching the aeroplane door every time I get on a plane; this is an awkward move, as the door is folded back again the hull of the plane, almost as if it is no longer a door at all, and on top of that, my hands are usually full. Of what is this practice born? Perhaps it is an instinctive desire to maintain some touch – some glimmer of control and connection – in an environment where we absolutely surrender control of our fate.

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The degree to which activity at a door is connected to our control – or loss thereof – of our fate has been a recurrent motif throughout the book. Matt writes of this with respect to The Seagull, in Chapter 6, and I am thinking that, much like ‘Big Brother’ in Nineteen Eighty-Four, there is the sense, when near a door, of never entirely being alone or separate. There are parallels here with my own sense of the importance of agency at a door, the degree to which one can control access to a door. This may involve agency that is extra to a door, in order to counteract our perceived lack of control. Where we feel the need to push furniture against a door, we reorder the world to resist the expectations that a particular door imposes upon that room and those within. In a related vein, Stuart notes the overlap between furniture and architecture in Chapter 5 (citing Yudina), and that opens up for me a new way of seeing the mise en scène of Chekhov described in Chapters 4 and 6. Gayev’s bookcase, the armchair ‘locking’ the door, and indeed the doors themselves seem to participate in this sense of “morph[ing] into micro-architecture”. I wonder now about the added overlap with temporality: if architecture might be conceived of in temporal terms, as we discuss in Chapter 6, does that ‘temporalise’ the object of furniture that morphs into micro-architecture? Further, if we’re asking questions based on this work, how do doors bring together character and architecture? As Matt suggests in Chapter 3, Macbeth seeks to maintain “one foot in the world of regal society and one foot leaning outside of that world”. While, for much of the play, Macbeth seems to maintain this project, it is a game with markedly high stakes. Doors, it becomes clear, in this context are rather too ordinary, too easy to open, to leave unlatched, too difficult to fully secure to be without risk of breach. If one were to attempt to hold apart two entirely separate worlds, one might not, by choice, use a door. As Macbeth continues in this line, his own fortune and the architecture that he inhabits appear to come together, so that any test or challenge to that architecture becomes a potential challenge to Macbeth himself. As such, events at doors become particularly significant, for they reveal the solidity or fragility of Macbeth himself. And Macbeth does not, as Matt reminds us, work alone. By speaking to the audience at doors, Macbeth draws that audience into his work, implicating them in his marshalling of worlds. Reflecting on this idea, I feel drawn to look out from this work to the practice of other makers of creative work, to consider how close they bring us to the door, whether they sit us well back or place us close enough to touch the door, to sense the events beyond. In looking to the ways that artists frame the world beyond the door, it is also critical to attend to the position that they take up and that which they invite us to adopt in experiencing their work. This is perhaps nowhere so evident as in the discussion of doors in deserts. In thinking about the opening to that section in Chapter 4, I wanted to have one of many random images of a door in a desert – a quick search reveals there are

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a fair few of these online. We didn’t include these, but I was left wondering what makes that subject compelling in an image? Stuart writes of the ways in which doors border and frame, and I suspect the thing that draws me to the image of a door in a desert is the anomalous, disharmonious nature of it – the introduction of a frame in what can appear to be a frameless environment. This in turn makes me reflect again on the operation of doors on the other end of the spectrum: the stage. Here, the door is a frame in a frame, and its function seems not only apt to its environment, but so much a part of that environment that, as Aronson suggested, we don’t really take notice. On the one hand (in the desert), the frame stands out because there is nothing to frame; a frame in the desert seems an impossibility. The impossible door. Or a door which is incapable of fulfilling some of its ‘doorness’. On the other hand (on stage), the frame performs its function almost invisibly, because everything is framed and the act of framing is already endemic to the encounter with theatre. And of course, there are doors in deserts, as Andrea Zittel’s work evidences, and the doors on stage often aren’t real doors in the way they might be off stage. I also suspect that part of what draws me to such an image is a similar disjuncture between doorness and the instance of a door in the desert, and I think this is where the presence of the body is perhaps key. As noted throughout the book, I think very much in terms of the things doors do – conjoin and separate, reveal and conceal, invite and exclude. But what happens when the opposite sides of such binary pairs are – or appear to be – exactly the same? The door in the desert conceals something on its other side, but when that something is revealed, it turns out to be exactly what is on this side. We are invited to, or excluded from, exactly where are. Perhaps above all, I’m drawn in this section of the chapter to Stuart’s description of doors ‘in and to’ an environment. I think this resonates with my comments just preceding, but even more so, it resonates with the perspective I sought to bring to bear on Pinter. The status of being ‘in and to’ an environment seems to me to strongly echo Merleau-Ponty’s insistence on the reversibility of perception: we perceive (look to) the perceived only because we are always already a part of (within) what we perceive. *** we kept coming back over and over again over the past four days to the sound of the door, or the sound of keys or the sound of locking […] That adds an awful lot to what a door can do, if it’s got a voice.5 There are manifold ways in which doors have a voice, and can ‘speak’. Our intent in positing, and trying to articulate the details of, a dramaturgy of the door has been to offer a collection of new perspectives on how doors operate in theatre in performance. The use of the term dramaturgy is meant to imply

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the degree to which we understand doors, when present, as contributing to the overall weave of a performance event. To borrow again from Chemers (see Chapter 1, p. 27, fn4), this entails the ‘aesthetic architecture’ of performance in practice. We are conflating his terms and usage here intentionally; as the preceding pages will have demonstrated, we find doors to be significant and highly affective threads in both the crafting of plays and the unfolding of ideas and practices in performance. To speak of the dramaturgy of the door is, on one hand, to speak of the door as significant contributing factor to the construction of performance. It is also, on the other hand, to speak of such contributions in terms that are specific and non-representative. Analysing the doors in Macbeth or A–Z Wagon Stations is not a means of analysing all doors or of extrapolating from that analysis an ‘absolute’ contribution of doors. This would be tantamount to suggesting that a performer’s function and status, the way in which s/he contribute to the weave of performance, is the same in Macbeth as it is in Yes, These Eyes Are Windows – a performance which has no live performers in the same sense of the word that we might use for Macbeth. Our case studies are, as will be evident by now, highly specific to us as individuals, and they are intended as exercises in exploring some of the means and methods by which one might apprehend and comprehend doors in performance. We hope to have shown, along the way, how doors might have a material impact upon other key things of theatre and performance: doors frame and affect the performing body in particular ways, for instance – ways that facilitate and underscore a mobility between the realms of materiality and immateriality. Doors play a vital role in the performative production of the place(s) we identify with – particularly those we identify as being ‘home’. Doors establish and frustrate rhythm and temporal experience, they situate spectators, they contribute to the construction of plays. Doors are not necessarily the most important element of theatre and performance practices (although we sense they’re decidedly more important than they’re often given credit for); they may not even be a constitutive element. But where they are present – and they are frequently present – they are a significant and multifaceted thread of the weave of performance practice. We remember, and reflect, many doors: doors of our childhood, doors of yesterday or two hours ago (as we write these final lines, the door to Matt’s office refuses to shut tightly; something is wrong with the latch. We leave it open, and spend much of the afternoon crossing between our offices, which are usefully next door to each other, on a long summer afternoon). Doors of workshops, of homes, of performances. We began this book with memories of doors that, somehow, we carried with us; to these, we have added and reflected upon others. In so doing, we hope this leads to compelling reflections and ruminations, and to the sense that it has been worth slowing down, looking closely, and spending time with doors.

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Notes 1 We refer here to our initial work on the door for the BA/Leverhulme grant (Andrews and Wagner, 2014). Unless otherwise noted, the quoted dialogue in this chapter comes from recordings of our conversations during the writing process, and/or from archived video footage of the workshops from those 2014 laboratories. 2 We are intentionally allowing the pronoun usage to become more fluid here. To write repeatedly of ourselves in the third person (‘Matt remembers …’) seems awkward and unnecessary, and at this stage of the book, we are less concerned with identifying which of us is speaking, and more concerned with moving freely between the ideas that circulated over the course of this project. 3 See Szymborska (1993). The poem actually utilises the door twice: “They’re both convinced / that a sudden passion joined them. / Such certainty is beautiful, / but uncertainty is more beautiful still. […] I want to ask them, / if they don’t remember – / a moment face to face / in some revolving door? […] There were doorknobs and doorbells / where one touch had covered another / beforehand” (pp. 197–198). 4 Symposium: “The Door: Site, Object, and Threshold in Performance”, Andrews and Wagner (2014). 5 Andrews and Wagner (2014).

References Andrews, S., and Wagner, M. (2014). “The Door: A Practical Study of Site, Object, and Threshold in Theatre and Performance.” BA/Leverhulme Small Research Grant, SRG 2013–2014 Round. Szymborska, Wislawa (1993). “Love at First Sight”, in View with a Grain of Sand. Trans. Stanislaw Baranczak and Clare Cavanagh. San Diego, New York, and London: Harcourt Brace and Company, pp. 197–198.

Index

Note: italic page numbers refer to figures and page numbers followed by “n” denote endnotes. absence: presence and 22–3 agency 73 AGO see Art Gallery of Ontario (AGO) Alston, Adam 100 Andrews, Stuart 26n1 architecture 137 Arcosanti 81, 85 Aronson, Arnold 17–18, 52, 128–9 Art Gallery of Ontario (AGO) 101 Assemble (architecture collective) 16 A-Z Wagon Stations (Zittel) 83, 82–4, 86–94, 152 BAC see Battersea Arts Centre (BAC) Bachelard, Gaston 27n15, 39, 106, 116, 119, 139 back doors 42–5 Bakhtin, Mikhail 136, 140 Balik, Lisa 83, 87–92 Banham, Peter 81 Barba, Eugenio 11–12 Battersea Arts Centre (BAC) 100, 101, 104–10, 108 Bell, Michael Mayerfield 42–3 Bendann, Effie 50n12 Benofsky, Eugene 81 Benofsky, JoAnn 81 Between 13 and 15 Steps (Miller and Whalley) 31, 41–7, 43, 48 Between the Door and the Street (Lacy) 30 Blesser, Barry 40 Blue Plaques 50n9 bodies 71–2, 79 Border Door (Lou) 30 Bourdieu, Pierre 56

Bourgeois, Louise 124n7 “Bridge and Door” (Simmel) 107 Broken Mirror (Song) 122 Brown, Arthur 38 Busch, Akiko 38, 44 Bussels, Stijn 59, 139 Casey, Edward 15 Cells,The (Bourgeois) 124n7 Certeau, Michel de 33 Cheese [a play] (FanSHEN) 7, 7–9 Cheetham, Mark A. 85–6 Chekhov, Anton 72–3, 129–34, 148, 150 Chemers, Michael 27n4 Cherry Orchard,The (Chekhov) 72–3, 148 Clements, Andrew 16 Comedy of Errors,The (Shakespeare) 54–5, 137 Communal Courtyard 101, 110–22, 115, 121, 122–3 Consequences of War (Rubens) 144n6 cupboard door 45–6 Cwerner, Saulo B. 116 Dabaieh, Marwa 84 Dean, Tacita 82 death 57 de Certeau, Michel 70, 94n1 Dee, John 79 de Quincey, Thomas 61, 66n6 De Roo, Gert 102 desert 80–6, 83, 95n9 DeWolf, Christopher 120 Diller Scofidio + Renfro (DS+R) 16 Di Stefano, John 144n3

156 Index

Dobbin, Beci 39 Doll’s House, A (Ibsen) 142–4 Door Plates (Dong) 114 doors: back 42–5; in composition of performative activity 10–11; cupboard 45–6; front 44; internal 45; partially open 38–9; passageway 46–7, 48; rhythm and 129–30; time and 128–9, 133–4, 137–8; types of 14 doorways 14 Downs, Carolyn 43 dramaturgy: defined 11, 27n4 Drop City 81 DS+R see Diller Scofidio + Renfro (DS+R) Duggan, Patrick 26n1 DUST 92 Elder, Erin 81 Elements of Architecture (Wotton) 59 Elements of Architecture: From Form to Place (von Meiss) 32 Ends of the Earth: Land Art to 1974 (Kaiser and Kwon) 90 FanSHEN 7, 7–9 Fensham, Rachel 70 Fitzpatrick, Tim 54–5 Folly for a Flyover 119 Fortune, Bonnie 86 Free Running (Zittel) 89 front door 44 Fuller, Buckminster 81 Garner, Stanton, Jr. 70 Gil, Jose 70 Globe Theatre 17, 55; see also Shakespeare’s Globe Goebbels, Heiner 16 Granby Four Streets 16 Grant, Stuart 19, 140–1 Halberg, Gry Worre 104 Hamid, Mohsin 110 Hammershøi,Vilhelm 11, 39 Handke, Peter 79 Hannah, Dorita 144n3 Harbison, Robert 106 Hart, Elizabeth 19–20 Hart,Vaughan 38–9 Heidegger, Martin 136, 140–1 Hell 58, 63

Henry V (Shakespeare) 56 Hill, Michael 32–3, 35 horror 58–65 Horton, John 46 Hosey, Lance 87 Husserl, Edmund 130, 135, 144n2 Ibsen, Henrik 142–4 Interior (Hammershøi) 11 Interior with a Woman Standing (Hammershøi) 39 internal doors 45 Irving, Washington 89 Jacobs, Jane 102 James, Henry 106 Jansen, Chiu-Ti 114 Janus 136, 136–8, 138 Jolly Corner,The (James) 106 Jørgensen, Jesper 92 Kaiser, Philipp 82, 90 Kantor, Tadeusz 142 Kershaw, Baz 86 Keshtkaran, Parinaz 84 Kind of Alaska, A (Pinter) 95n7 Knapp, James 79 knocking 60–1 Kobialka, Michal 142 Kohane, Peter 32–3, 35 Koolhaas, Rem 17 Kraftl, Peter 46 Kwinter, Sanford 129 Kwon, Miwon 82, 90 Lacy, Suzanne 30 Laseau, Paul 81 Lefebvre, Henri 70, 94n1 Li, Jie 121–2 Lipka, Michael 144n4 London Stories: Made by Migrants 101, 104–10, 108, 122–3, 149 Lou, Richard A. 30 “Love at First Sight” (Szymborska) 147, 153n3 Loving-Hutchins, Gemma 129, 137 Low, Jennifer 54–5, 137 Loyer, Eugenie 40 Lyotard, Jean-Francois 19 Macbeth (Shakespeare) 14, 52–4, 58–65, 66n6, 127–8, 139, 150, 152

Index 157

Malpas, Jeff 140–1 Massumi, Brian 137 materiality 22, 27n10 McAuley, Gay 14–15, 17, 27n13, 34 McHugh, Theresa A. 95n9 McKinney, Joslin 70–2 Meiss, Pierre von 14–15, 17, 32, 37, 46, 56, 75, 103, 109 Merchant of Venice (Shakespeare) 59 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice 69–74, 78–9 Miller, Lee 25, 31, 43, 99; see also Between 13 and 15 Steps (Miller and Whalley) mirrors 120–2, 121 Nabokov,Vladimir 39 Niemansland (No Man’s Land) (Verhoeven) 104 No Exit (Sartre) 75 Norman, Nils 86 Ocatillo Desert Camp 81 Olde Wolbers, Saskia 31–2; see also Yes, These Eyes are the Windows (Olde Wolbers) Outlandia 91 Pallasmaa, Juhani 33 partially open door 38–9 Party Time (Pinter) 68–9, 74–8, 80, 94n5, 149 passages 55–8 passageway door 46–7, 48 Paterson, Mark 88 Pearson, Mike 12 Performing City Resilience 26n1 Pergola, Cesare 103 Pfeiffer, Bruce 81 Phenomenology of Perception (MerleauPonty) 69–70 Phillips, Tom 117 Pinter, Harold 68–9, 74–8, 80, 94n5, 95n7, 149 Plummer, Henry 109 Poetics of Space,The (Bachelard) 139 practices 129 presence: absence and 22–3 Quotidian Chinese (Wong) 115, 118 Rabey, David Ian 128 Rauws, Ward 102 Rendell, Jane 16

reversibility 70, 72–4 Reynolds, Marie 117 rhythm 129–30 Ribeyro, Julio Ramon 116, 121 Richard II (Shakespeare) 7, 7–10, 149 Richert, Clark 81 Rites of Passage (Van Gennep) 137 Romeo and Juliet (Shakespeare) 57 Romer-Lee, Chris 11, 24, 27n16, 147 Rosselin, Céline 36–7 Rubens, Peter Paul 138, 138, 139, 144n6 Saarinen, Eliel 87 St. Quentin en Yvelines 14–15 Salter, Linda-Ruth 40 Sartre, Jean-Paul 75 Seagull,The (Chekhov) 130–4, 150 separation 34–5 Sepe, Marichela 103 sex 56–7 Shakespeare, William 7, 7, 10; see also Comedy of Errors,The (Shakespeare); Henry V (Shakespeare); Macbeth (Shakespeare); Merchant of Venice (Shakespeare); Romeo and Juliet (Shakespeare); Troilus and Cressida (Shakespeare) Shakespeare’s Globe 7, 7–10; see also Globe Theatre Sidy,Victor E. 81 Simmel, Georg 107 Sisters Academy 104 Smithson, Robert 82 Soleri, Paulo 81 Song Dong 101, 110–16, 119–20, 122 Space in Performance (McAuley) 27n13 Spiral Jetty (Smithson) 82 Stalder, Laurent 33 States, Bert O. 27n15, 79 Stifters Dinge (Stifter’s Things) (Goebbels) 16 subjective agency 73 Szymborska, Wisława 147, 153n3 Templum Jani (Rubens) 138, 138, 139 threshold phenomena 66 thresholds 15, 55–8 Tice, James 81 time: doors and 128–9, 133–4, 137–8; in Macbeth 127–8 Toker, Leona 39 Troilus and Cressida (Shakespeare) 56

158 Index

Trying to Find the Spiral Jetty (Dean) 82 Turner, Cathy 15–16 Tuscon Mountain Retreat (DUST) 92 Vanderklippe, Nathan 117 Van Gennep, Arnold 36–7, 137, 144n5 Van Manen, Max 27n10 Verhoeven, Dries 104 Visible and the Invisible,The (MerleauPonty) 71, 74 Vogler, Andreas 92 Wagner, Matt 26n1 Wang,Yi 112 Warr, Tracey 91 Watkins, Joe E. 90 weave 12

West, Taliesin 81 Whalley, Joanne ‘Bob’ 25, 31, 43, 99; see also Between 13 and 15 Steps (Miller and Whalley) Wilshire, Bruce 19 Winter’s Tale,The (Shakespeare) 56–7 Wong, Annie 115, 118, 120 Wotton, Henry 59 Wright, Frank Lloyd 46, 81–2 Yates, Amanda 129, 137 Yes,These Eyes are the Windows (Olde Wolbers) 31–2, 35, 36–41, 47 Yin Xiuzhen 101 Zhang, Donia 112 Zittel, Andrea 82–4, 86, 91–4, 151