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Transcript
1 Looking at Postmodern Performances of Canonical Plays Bilha Blum Seen from the specific angle of performance practice, the passage from modernism to postmodernism seems to have widely affected the very basics of stage direction, acting, stage design, and audience reception. When applied to text-to-stage processes, it has generated new theatrical modes, mainly directed at dismantling the conventional plot-character-space unity that characterizes modern drama, and also at diminishing the role of narrative embedded in it. Hans-Thies Lehmann goes as far as defining such postmodern performances as "postdramatic"1, i.e. as completely detached from a written play. As such performances tend to discard certain "fictive processes" naturally stemming from the visualization of drama, he argues that they fail to be "a description of the world by means of mimesis,"2 as usually dictated by conventional transferences of written plays to the stage. By further asserting that, in these performances, it is the body of the actor rather than the dramatic character that "becomes the centre of attention, not as a carrier of meaning but in its physicality and gesticulation",3 thus introducing "a simultaneous and multi-perspectival form of perceiving", to replace "the linear-successive [one]", Lehmann implies that postmodern performances, in opposition to dramatic theatre in which "the scene stands for the world,"4 are actually presentational and self-reflexive. The issue of presentation versus representation in postmodern theatre is also raised by Elinor Fuchs, who describes it, following Lehmann, as the kind of theatre in which psychologically-conceived characters, usually intended to reflect human beings in reality, are either dead or dying.5 This rather controversial statement relies on the intimate connection between dramatic characters in general, their relations with the 2 other elements of performance and the way in which they are constructed, and the various cultural shifts that often take place in society, especially those concerning the perception of both the self and the external reality. As a result, in lying at the core of depiction strategies, dramatic characters have always been a crucial element in performance and one of its most important and influential vehicles of meaning. In postmodern performances, however, due to what Fuchs defines as "the dispersed idea of self […] represented in many different ways"6, the validity of dramatic characters as the prime carrier of (modern) ideology that also determines the audience's point of view, is severely impaired. The "death of character" thus indicates the loss of its ability to quote rational reality, and results in the substitution of the focused referential frame or logocentric logic offered by modern drama, either by a multiplication of frames or the cancellation of frames altogether. Directly derived from notions reflective of postmodern thought such as relativity, indeterminacy, perspective, and plurality, a multifarious range of possible 'looking standpoints' is created, from none up to infinite, leaving the spectators' expectations for integrality, rationality, and unity of thought, utterly unfulfilled. In other words, the visual components of postmodern performances are seemingly presented on the stage as themselves, and are perceived as presentational rather than as representative of extra-textual reality or as its referent. Consequently, a critical change in what Maaike Bleeker terms "dominant modes of perception" becomes naturally established. Because "the [postmodern] performance appears to offer the audience more direct contact with what is present on stage",7 its focus is now mainly physical. Therefore, such performance not only acknowledges the passage from textuality to visuality so typical of this era, but it also attests to the supremacy of the latter over the former – and in this specific case, its supremacy over the textuality 3 of the play. Likewise, Bonnie Marranca, discussing New York contemporary performances, calls them collectively "Theatre of Images" and suggests that, in being devoted to creating "a visual grammar 'written' in sophisticated perceptual codes", their significance lies mainly in the "expansion of the audience's capacity to perceive".8 When the visualization of drama engages with established canonical plays, however, these new theatrical principles are often challenged and defied. In fact, as staging canonical plays presupposes not only the presence of a written text in performance but also one that is intimately connected with the cultural and theatrical tradition in which it was originally created, the issues of presentation versus representation and frame-multiplication often come into conflict. On the one hand, seen as "the true art of memory" 9 and because they are situated at the core of accepted cultural practices and beliefs that preserve past traditions, canonical plays remain visible behind the performance even if they are deconstructed, disguised, displaced, or merely alluded to. They have, as it were, a kind of "aura" – a "strange tissue of space and time" – that, according to Walter Benjamin, characterizes authentic artworks and guarantees their eternal value, and does not wither even when transferred to the postmodern stage. Furthermore, because "[t]he way in which human perception is organized – the medium in which it occurs – is conditioned not only by nature but by history"10 and, I would add, also by philosophical streams of thought, canonical plays are not only present in performance but they also regulate audience perception and reception. On the other hand, as stage realizations of canonical, almost venerated, plays nonetheless also apply by postmodern modes of theatrical expression, they thereby also tend to refute representation and, freed from the text, concentrate on creating a 4 sense of autonomous, immediate, existence. In fact, denying canonical plays' absolute authority in performance practice constitutes a theatrical equivalent to what JeanFrancois Lyotard calls the "incredulity toward metanarratives"11 that he believes presided over people’s ways of thinking and behaving in past times. Indeed, as Fuchs phrases it, plays, like Lyotard's metanarratives, are considered as "the enemy rather than the vehicle of theatrical presence" for they are also "an element of political oppression in the theatrical process, demanding submission to external authority". 12 In this sense, ideology and performance practice seem to share the same aspiration; namely, to liberate the present from the preeminence of myth and past tradition, both in form and content, following the considerable "progress in the sciences" and "the crisis of metaphysical philosophy"13 that have marked the rise of postmodernism. However, precisely because both canonical plays, whose inherent structural and thematic relevancy to their own and other social contexts elevates them to the status of masterpieces, and Lyotard's rather dictatorial metanarratives, are still equally recognized as an organic part of a consensual cultural tradition, they have the power to bring the past into the present and therefore retain their representational capacities. Indeed, as confirmed by actual postmodern realizations of canonical plays, although these function as a concretization of an homogeneous, unifying ideological force held responsible for narrowing the spectrum of looking standpoints that selfreflexive, presentational, modes of performance aim to widen, they are not, paradoxically, antagonistic entities. As the following examples of realistic plays' realizations indicate, they are able to create a unique kind of semiosis and meaningconstructing referentiality based on the performances' clearly presentational visual signs (as dictated by postmodern theatre modes), being closely intertwined with the representational attributes originating from the aura of canonical plays. 5 In DollHouse, Lee Breuer's version of Ibsen's well-known play, the question of textual authority in terms of the opposition between presentation and representation seems to be at the very center of directorial intentionality and visualization strategy.14 At its starting point, in stark opposition to the aesthetics of realism embedded in the original play, the spectators are confronted with an almost empty stage, framed by velvet curtains, and with several large brown cardboard boxes scattered around. After these are unpacked, an authentic, prettily decorated dolls’ house, together with matching miniature furniture and a variety of toys, are revealed. With the addition of one over-sized piano and another minute one placed on top of it, a tiny bed, a rocking horse and a small Christmas tree, this comprises the only scenery for the entire performance, with the exception of the last scene. When the first characters appear – Nora, Kristine, and Helene, played by exceptionally tall actresses who are continuously bending and crawling to accommodate to the size of the miniature props – it is already clear that size, scale, and proportions are one of this performance's main visual motives. This is later confirmed by the three male roles – Torvald, Dr. Rank, and Krogstadt – played by very short men, actually dwarfs. Judging from the characters' flat, two-dimensional appearance, which includes fluffy corset-dresses for the women and Victorian three-piece suits for the men, they are all evidently meant to perform as "icons or images"15 rather than as life-size characters. Contrasting binaries, such as big and small, tall and short, childish and mature, men and women – encounter each other to form an awkward, totally mismatched world picture – giving the stage the appearance of an illusory playground, strangely inhabited by adults of different sizes. Most peculiar of all is the unconventional manner in which these binaries are characterized: for example, the oversized women seem childish, weak, and subordinated, whereas the very short men are depicted as 6 powerful, self-confident, and authoritative, despite their size. Nora in particular, with her high-pitched voice, hesitant disposition, and constant crawling posture, appears completely overpowered by her small husband who, figuratively speaking, seems absolutely determined to reduce her to a doll-like status with which he can entertain himself. Despite the mismatched proportions displayed on the stage and Breuer's own declaration that in this performance "we deconstructed modernism",16 it is clear that his DollHouse is nonetheless a literal reading of Ibsen's (modern) play – indeed, a visualization of its inner conflicts that deal with social transgression and repression; or, in sum, a concretization of the play's sub-text in terms of visual signs. Moreover, even though the basically frontal acting, distressed poses, and extravagant gestures, accompanied by a live piano score, associate it with melodramatic silent movies and render the performance a somewhat comic, out-of-date style, quite distant from the grave realism of the original play, it is clear that the situation depicted, as in Ibsen's play, is meant to prove first and foremost how unfit, and unfair, this world is for women. However, while in Ibsen's play this is made evident through the text, the plot, and in particular, through the characters' actions – all serving as representational/referential signs pointing to the play's social milieu – Breuer, a true postmodernist artist, apparently chose self-referentiality (or indeed presentationality) visually materialized as his main strategic tool. Even so, he does not estrange the performance from its original version. By visualizing Ibsen's subtext or intentional representation of reality in a crudely literal manner, he actually reveals the play's intrinsic referential relation to its surrounding context and deciphers, or rather decodes, the major metaphor imbued in the text. In addition, as a result of the canonical status of the play and its wide popularity, it is the play and the illusory 7 world it contains, and not reality, which become at this stage the primary object of the referential attributes of the visual signs on the stage. A similar rather ambiguous attitude towards the canonical text is also evident in Thomas Ostermeier's version of Hedda Gabler, although his visualization strategy is quite different from that of Breuer.17 In this production, the sophisticated, up-todate, and yet austere set design features an art-deco style sofa and table, placed in a semi-transparent setting, with a concrete wall on one side and a glass one in the rear, forming a T-shaped structure. The addition of a rotating stage as well as an overhead mirror replacing the ceiling ensures that the characters are constantly on display, while occasional projections of live film disclose their actions even when they are offstage. Substituting a laptop computer (which she violently destroys using a hammer) for the pages of Lövborg's thought-provoking manuscript, which in the play-text Hedda sets on fire just before committing suicide, serves as a final visual touch, determining that the events of the performance are taking place in the present, right here and now. Although Ibsen's famous living-room, which originally functioned as a microcosm of nineteenth-century bourgeois society, serves as the sole dramatic space in this performance too, due to its transparency and the simultaneity of action achieved by the various visual devices on stage, it engenders a different, multiperspectival way of looking, in perfect accordance with postmodern terms. With each turn of the stage or each reflection in the mirror, with each film projection or each visual invasion of the characters' privacy, the spectators are actually "granted more direct access to the things as they are in themselves";18 and thus, they are drawn closer to the visual components of the room and its inhabitants. Precisely because the evocative power of the play's canonical aura is enhanced by the performance's multi- 8 perspectivity, whose "function", says Bleeker, "is not specular or passive but constitutive within the register of representation, of the order and meaning of things",19 the room retains its referential yet updated capacity and becomes a renewed microcosm of the synchronic reality. The final scenes in both DollHouse and Hedda Gabler offer a further critical approach to society, parallel to promoting the perception of the two performances' presentational visual signs as representational. In this sense, they both challenge postmodern modes of performance practice. In Breuer's production, the theatrical illusion rendered by the stage is defied in the end by a new and surprising theatrical situation in which Nora and Torvald sing, rather than speak, their final dialogue, while surrounded by a multi-level panel of mini-opera boxes with a pair of Victorian puppets in each. Instead of the iconic slamming of the door, Nora takes off her clothes and her blond wig and, naked and bold, standing up straight on her feet for the first time, she exhibits her true proportions and real identity as a freed contemporary woman. As her voice becomes the voice of social protest, her body becomes representational of the reality in which she lives. Likewise, the final scene in Hedda Gabler demonstrates the production's social concern, as the plurality of looking standpoints on which Ostermeier leans reveals Hedda's inability to control her own destiny even in a post-feminist era in which women are not supposed to feel entrapped. As the stage spins for the last time, the busy lives of the other characters and Hedda's bloodied body (left offstage in Ibsen's play-text) are juxtaposed, thus echoing a multilayered, estranged, transparent, society, for whom death, entangled with boredom, has lost its emotional effect. While enhanced by the spectators' collective memory of the play, it is the latent danger 9 contained in the interminable, constant, exposure derived from contemporary visual culture, that is emphasized here. Works Cited Benjamin, Walter, "The Work of Art in the Age of Reproducibility" in Selected Writings Volume 3, trans. Edmund Jephcott, Howard Eiland, and Others. Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2002. Bleeker, Maaike, "Look who's Looking!: Perspective and the Paradox of Postdramatic Subjectivity" in Theatre Research International, vol. 29, No. 1, 2004. Bloom, Harold, The Western Canon, New York, San Diego and London: Harcourt Brace and Co., 1994 Fuchs, Elinor, The Death of Character: Perspectives on Theatre after Modernism, Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1996. Lehmann, Hans Thies: Postdramatic Theatre, trans. Karen Jürs-Munby, London and New York: Routledge, 2006. Lyotard, Jean-Francois, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minessota Press, 1984. Marranca, Bonnie, The Theatre of Images, Baltimore and London: The John Hopkins University Press, 1996. 1 Hans-Thies Lehmann chose this term to define postmodern theatre. See: Postdramatic Theatre, trans. Karen Jürs-Munby. London and New York: Routledge, 2006. 2 Ibid, p. 69. 3 Ibid, p. 95. 4 Ibid, p.16. 5 See: Elinor Fuchs, The Death of Character: Perspectives on Theater after Modernism, Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1996. Though Fuchs parallels Lehmann concerning the depiction of characters in postmodern performances, in her survey of his book, she seriously objects to his use of the term "postdramatic". See: The Dramatic Review, vol. 53, No. 2, 2008, pp. 178-183. 6 Ibid, p. 9. 7 Maaike Bleeker, "Look who's Looking!: Perspective and the Paradox of Postdramatic Subjectivity" in Theatre Research International, vol. 29, No. 1, 2004, p. 29. 8 Bonnie Marranca, The Theatre of Images, Baltimore and London: The John Hopkins University Press, 1996, pp. XIV-XV. 9 Harold Bloom, The Western Canon, New York, San Diego and London: Harcourt Brace and Co., 1994, p. 35. 10 Walter Benjamin, "The Work of Art in the Age of Reproducibility" in Selected Writings Volume 3, trans. Edmund Jephcott, Howard Eiland, and Others. Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2002, p. 104. 11 Jean-Francois Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minessota Press, 1984, p. XXIV. 12 The Death of Character, p. 70. 13 Ibid. 14 DollHouse. Mabou Mines, New York, 2003. Directed by Lee Breuer. Set Design: Narelle Sissons. Maude Mitchell as Nora; Mark Povinelli as Torvald. 15 The Theatre of Images, pp. X-XI. 16 Lee Breuer in an interview held by Tom LeGoff, on February 27, 2009, published on the internet: http://gothamist.com/2009/02/27/director_lee_breuer_mabou_mines_dol.php 17 Hedda Gabler. Shaubhüne, Berlin, 2005. Directed by Thomas Ostermeier, Set Design: Jan Pappelbaum. Katharina Schüttler as Hedda, Lars Eidinger as Tesman, Kay Barthölomans Schulze as Lövborg. 18 "Look who's looking", p.30. 19 Ibid.