Critical Theory and Performance
THEATER: THEORY/TEXT/PERFORMANCE
Series Editors: David Krasner and Rebecca Schneider
Founding Editor: Enoch Brater
Recent Titles:
A Beckett Canon by Ruby Cohn
David Mamet in Conversation edited by Leslie Kane
The Haunted Stage:The Theatre as Memory Machine
by Marvin Carlson
Staging Consciousness:Theater and the Materialization of Mind
by William W. Demastes
Agitated States: Performance in the American Theater of Cruelty
by Anthony Kubiak
Land/Scape/Theater edited by Elinor Fuchs and Una Chaudhuri
The Stage Life of Props by Andrew Sofer
Playing Underground:A Critical History of the 1960s Off-Off-Broadway
Movement by Stephen J. Bottoms
Arthur Miller's America:Theater and Culture in a Time of Change
edited by Enoch Brater
Looking Into the Abyss: Essays on Scenography by Arnold Aronson
Avant-Garde Performance and the Limits of Criticism:Approaching the
Living Theatre, Happenings/Fluxus, and the Black Arts Movement
by Mike Sell
Not the OtherAvant-Garde:The Transnational Foundations ofAvant-Garde
Performance edited by James M. Harding and John Rouse
The Purpose of Playing: Modern Acting Theories in Perspective
by Robert Gordon
Staging Philosophy: Intersections of Theater, Performance, and Philosophy
edited by David Krasner and David Z. Saltz
Critical Theory and Performance: Revised and Enlarged Edition
edited by Janelle G. Reinelt and Joseph R. Roach
Critical Theory
and Performance
REVISED AND ENLARGED EDITION
Edited by
Janelle G. Reinelt and Joseph R. Roach
The University of Michigan Press
Ann Arbor
Copyright © by the University of Michigan 2007
All rights reserved
Published in the United States of America by
The University of Michigan Press
Manufactured in the United States of America
@ Printed on acid-free paper
2010 2009 2008 2007 4 3 2 1
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in
a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any
means, electronic, mechanical, or otherwise, without the
written permission of the publisher.
A CIP catalog record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Critical theory and performance / edited by Janelle G. Reinelt and
Joseph R. Roach.- Rev. and enl. ed.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN-13: 978-0-472-09886-6 (cloth : alk. paper)
ISBN-so: 0-472-09886-1 (cloth: alk. paper)
ISBN-13: 978-0-472-06886-9 (pbk. : alk. paper)
ISBN-so: 0-472-06886-5 (pbk. : alk. paper)
1. Theater-Philosophy. I. Reinelt, Janelle G. II. Roach, Joseph R.
PN2039.C75 2006
792.01-dc22 2006050195
Acknowledgments
Grateful acknowledgment is given to the following publishers for permission to
use copyrighted material:
"What Is to Be Remembered?: Tourism to Ghana's Slave Dungeons," by Sandra
L. Richards, Theatre Journal 57, no. 4 (2005): 617-37. Reprinted by permission
of The Johns Hopkins University Press. © The Johns Hopkins University
Press.
"Representing History: Performing the Columbian Exposition," by Rosemarie
Bank, Theatre Journal 54, no. 4 (2002): 589-606. Reprinted by permission of The
Johns Hopkins University Press. © The Johns Hopkins University Press.
"Brecht and the Contradictory Actor," by John Rouse, Theatre Journal 36, no. 1
(1984): 25-41. Reprinted by permission of The Johns Hopkins University
Press. © The Johns Hopkins University Press.
"Not-About-AIDS," by David Roman, GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies
6, no. 1 (2000): 1-28. Reprinted by permission of Duke University Press.
"Immobile Legs, Stalled Words: Psychoanalysis and Moving Deaths," by Peggy
Phelan, in her Mourning Sex: Performing Public Memories (London and New
York: Routledge, 1997), 44-69. Reprinted by permission of Taylor & Francis
Books Ltd.
"Invasions Friendly and Unfriendly: The Dramaturgy of Direct Theater," by
Richard Schechner, in his The Future of Ritual (London and New York: Routledge,
1933), 45-93. Reprinted by permission of Taylor & Francis Books Ltd.
Copyright© by the University of Michigan 2007
All rights reserved
Published in the United States of America by
The University of Michigan Press
Manufactured in the United States of America
@Printed on acid-free paper
2010 2009 2008 2007 4 3 2 1
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in
a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any
means, electronic, mechanical, or otherwise, without the
written permission of the publisher.
A CIP catalog recordfor this book is availablefrom the British Library.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Critical theory and performance I edited by Janelle G. Reinelt and
Joseph R. Roach.- Rev. and enl. ed.
p.cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN-13: 978-o-472-09886-6 (cloth: alk. paper)
ISBN-1o: o-472-09886-1 (cloth: alk. paper)
ISBN-1y 978-o-472-06886-9 (pbk. : alk. paper)
ISBN-10: o-472-06886-5 (pbk. : alk. paper)
1. Theater-Philosophy. I. Reinelt, Janelle G. II. Roach, Joseph R.
PN2039.C75 2006
792.01- dc22 2006050195
Acknowledgments
Grateful acknowledgment is given to the following publishers for permission to
use copyrighted material:
"What Is to Be Remembered?: Tourism to Ghana's Slave Dungeons," by Sandra
L. Richards, Theatre Journal 57, no. 4 (2005): 617-37. Reprinted by permission
of The Johns Hopkins University Press.© The Johns Hopkins University
Press.
"Representing History: Performing the Columbian Exposition," by Rosemarie
Bank, Theatre Journal 54, no. 4 (2002): 589- 606. Reprinted by permission of The
Johns Hopkins University Press. © The Johns Hopkins University Press.
"Brecht and the Contradictory Actor," by John Rouse, Theatre Journal 36, no. 1
(1984): 25-41. Reprinted by permission of The Johns Hopkins University
Press. © The Johns Hopkins University Press.
"Not-About-AIDS," by David Roman, GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies
6, no. 1 (2000): 1- 28. Reprinted by permission of Duke University Press.
"Immobile Legs, Stalled Words: Psychoanalysis and Moving Deaths," by Peggy
Phelan, in her Mourning Sex: Performing Public Memories (London and New
York: Routledge, 1997), 44- 69. Reprinted by permission of Taylor & Francis
Books Ltd.
"Invasions Friendly and Unfriendly: The Dramaturgy of Direct Theater," by
Richard Schechner, in his The Future ofRitual (London and New York: Routledge,
1933), 45---93· Reprinted by permission of Taylor & Francis Books Ltd.
In Memory of
Dwight and Bert
Contents
Preface to the Second Edition xi
Introduction to the First Edition 1
Performance Analysis 7
Marvin Carlson
Semiotics and Its Heritage 13
Bert 0. States
The Phenomenological Attitude 26
Jim Carmody
Alceste in Hollywood: A Semiotic Reading of The Misanthrope 37
Josette Feral
Every Transaction Conjures a New Boundary 49
Postcolonial Studies 67
Joanne Tompkins
Performing History's Unsettlement 71
Sandra L. Richards
What Is to Be Remembered?: Tourism to Ghana's Slave
Castle-Dungeons 85
Phillip B. Zarrilli
For Whom Is the King a King? Issues of Intercultural
Production, Perception, and Reception in a
Kathakali King Lear 1o8
Critical Race Theory 135
Jill Lane
Black/face Publics: The Social Bodies of Fraternidad 141
Daphne Lei
Virtual Chinatown and New Racial Formation: Performance
of Cantonese Opera in the Bay Area 156
Harry J. Elam, Jr.
Reality / 173
CONTENTS
viii
Theater History and Historiography 191
Thomas Postlewait
Theater Events and Their Political Contexts: A Problem in the
Writing of Theater History 198
Rosemarie K. Bank
Representing History: Performing the Columbian Exposition 223
Susan Leigh Foster
Kinesthetic Empathies and the Politics of Compassion 245
After Marx 259
David Savran
Shadows of Brecht 268
Bruce McConachie
Historicizing the Relations of Theatrical Production 284
John Rouse
Brecht and the Contradictory Actor 295
Gender and Sexualities 311
Ellen Donkin
Mrs. Siddons Looks Back in Anger: Feminist Historiography
for Eighteenth-Century British Theater 317
Jill Dolan
Practicing Cultural Disruptions: Gay and Lesbian
Representation and Sexuality 334
Kate Davy
Fe/male Impersonation: The Discourse of Camp 355
David Romdn
Not-About-AIDS 372
Psychoanalysis 395
Elin Diamond
The Violence of "We": Politicizing Identification 403
Ann Pellegrini
Staging Sexual Injury: How ILearned to Drive 413
Peggy Phelan
Immobile Legs, Stalled Words: Psychoanalysis and
Moving Deaths 432
CONTENTS
ix
Performance Studies 457
Richard Schechner
Invasions Friendly and Unfriendly: The Dramaturgy of
Direct Theater 462
Dwight Conquergood
Performance Theory, Hmong Shamans, and Cultural Politics 482
Una Chaudhuri
Animal Rites: Performing beyond the Human 506
Mediatized Cultures 521
Philip Auslander
Live from Cyberspace, or, I Was Sitting at My Computer This
Guy Appeared He Thought I Was a Bot 526
Herbert Blau
Virtually Yours: Presence, Liveness, Lessness 532
Sue-Ellen Case
Dracula's Daughters: In-Corporating Avatars in Cyberspace 547
Contributors 563
Index 569
Preface to the Second Edition
In the first edition of Critical Theory and Performance, having pondered competing
strategies for organizing the material into categories, we wrote,
"There is no doubt that a different taxonomy would have produced a different
book, but the present plan seeks to provide a preliminary map to the
field as it looks to us today." Nearly fifteen years ago, the field changed, in
part because it has consolidated some of the methodologies and critical
practices that were the focus of the first edition. Relying again on "the field
as it looks to us today," we have reworked the sections into which the volume
is divided, once again noting continuity and change. We are as convinced
as ever of the provisionality of these categories.
We begin with a section titled "Performance Analysis," an umbrella
term affording discussion of how actual performances are approached. The
sections "Semiotics" and "Phenomenology" address two major theoretical
understandings of how performances make meanings, affect audiences,
and create innovation. Cultural Studies, which once seemed like a discrete
category of emerging interdisciplinary work and therefore was a section in
the first edition, has developed until it broadly characterizes a familial affiliation
across fields. We have created new sections for "Postcolonial Studies,"
"Critical Race Theory," and "Performance Studies," where some material
from the previous edition appears alongside new essays. The section
"Feminism(s)" in the first edition has become "Gender and Sexualities,"
and we have added a section "Mediatized Cultures," as the burgeoning influence
of technological innovation has made serious theorizing of the virtual
and the global a necessary part of what we do.
During the past decade, performance studies has emerged in relation
to theater studies in such a way that new generations of Ph.D. students
engage with scholarship that touches on the many points of mutual
interest between these different but fruitfully interdependent terrains.
Performance studies now maintains a focus group within the Association
for Theatre in Higher Education, is everywhere integrated into programs
sponsored by the American Society for Theatre Research, and has its own
international organization and journal. Theater studies, meantime, continues
to develop, as can be seen from picking up any one of the field's
key journals, from Theatre Journal to Theatre Research or Theatre Survey. The
Drama Review (TDR) continues to emphasize performance studies, but not
to the exclusion of scholarship that would be at home in any of the other
journals, just as Theatre Journal publishes many "crossover" essays. The
same authors can be found in Theatre Journal, Modern Drama, or Performance
Research International. In academic departments, colleagues who
were trained in one or the other tradition teach side by side and frequently
collaborate. Indeed, today more of their students than ever are
cross-training in theater and performance studies.
If there was a "theory explosion" at the time we were assembling the
PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION
xii
first edition of this book, there are now those who think the "age of theory"
is over. We do not. Theory has changed and transformed our field by
enlarging the very conceptions of performance, returning performance
history and criticism to philosophy, and overhauling the traditional delineations
between texts and performances, as we described in the first
edition. These changes have had long-term consequences for how we
think and write and perform. In addition, much of the theory of the past
decade has been absorbed into scholarship in such a way that it is taken
for granted-not as visible, perhaps, in its conceptual vocabulary and
syntax as when we were first learning about these theories and what they
could do, in the context of performances, to bring new ideas forward.
Theory has provided fresh starting points each time someone begins a research
project or rethinks familiar terrain. There is no going back, and we
have no doubt that a decade from now, the scholarly and artistic situation
will be somewhat different again, while having consolidated many of the
theoretical insights of this generation's work.
When we envisioned the first edition of this book, jotting ideas on a
bar napkin in Lawrence, Kansas, in 1988, there was no comparable resource
easily available for course use. Creating a second edition, we are
aware of other volumes that now provide their own perspectives on the
relationship between theory and performance. We hope it will be useful
to compare and contrast not only the changes we chronicle, but also the
various competing ways of organizing materials in order to construct an
intellectual history of the field. For the most part, this book is limited to
North American scholars; other regions and nations apprehend the architecture
of the field rather differently. The international conversations
about these topics have provided both of us with professional stimulation
and satisfaction during recent years, and have influenced the character of
our own thinking.
J. G. R. and J. R. R.
Introduction to the First Edition
To take up a book on critical theory and performance is immediately to
encounter the topography of post. There are postmodernism, poststructuralism,
post-Marxism, postfeminism, postcolonialism-all designating
a departure from something prior. Of course, the use of the prefix post is
incrementally problematic: in the case of postmodernism and poststructuralism
it indicates that there once was a monolith called "modernism" or
"structuralism" that is now definitively defunct; in the case of post-Marxism
and postfeminism it marks as "over" certain political theories that are in
fact changing but vitally alive. As for postcolonial, any informed observer
would be justified in wondering what possible accuracy it might have in
this presently quite colonial world.
By way of introduction to critical theory and performance, postmodernism
offers a good starting point. The term reappears frequently in the
essays that follow, but it has no chapter of its own. Perhaps this is so because
postmodernism represents neither a category nor a method but,
rather, as Jean-Francois Lyotard has observed, a "condition." The condition
it represents reflects the collapse of categories themselves, an implosion
that has been attributed to the media-saturated powers of capitalistic
production and consumption. Postmodernity has been described as a culture
of "hyperrepresentation" in which objects lose their authenticity and
become indefinitely reproducible and representable as commodities.
"Eclecticism," Lyotard writes, "is the degree zero of contemporary general
culture: one listens to reggae, watches a western, eats McDonald's
food for lunch and local cuisine for dinner, wears Paris perfume in Tokyo
and 'retro' clothes in Hong Kong; knowledge is a matter for TV games."1
Even nature, which it was once art's theoretical purpose to imitate, becomes
a fabrication, a representation of itself, as in the television commercial
that shows various species of marine animals joyously applauding
petrochemical conglomerates for rescuing the environment from toxic
spills. Postmodernism embraces simulations; it distrusts claims to authenticity,
originality, or coherence. Postmodernism appropriates the popular
debris of retrospective styles; it vacates modernist belief in progress and
the perpetual avant-garde. Postmodernism inspires pluralism; it deflates
master narratives and totalizing theories.
As editors of this volume, we acknowledge the impact of postmodernism-and
of the pluralistic eclecticism it inspires-on critical theories
of performance as well as on performances themselves. Performance
research and practice both have found in postmodernity a positive stimulus
to creative work, an opening out and up of imaginative possibility
whereby the emotive and cognitive, the popular and the esoteric, the local
and the global can come into play. In his study of the development of performance
art, for instance, historian of the American avant-garde Henry
M. Sayre substitutes the category-resistant term undecidability for pluralism
CRITICAL THEORY AND PERFORMANCE
2
in order better "to describe the condition of contingency, multiplicity, and
polyvocality which dominates the postmodern scene."2 In one of the most
quoted essays of the last decade, anthropologist Clifford Geertz welcomes
the emergent "genre blurring" among collapsing disciplinary categories,
and he places performance, which he terms symbolic action, at the head of
an agenda for the "refiguration of social thought."3
The exhilaration produced by the blurring of genres cannot be denied,
but it makes our necessary task of developing a taxonomy, of organizing
the contents of this book and introducing them, a kind of performance
in its own right, one that certainly encourages us to leave room for
improvisation, but also one that compels us to make choices. We take note
here of the ongoing critique of postmodernism by such theorists as Jirgen
Habermas, Fredric Jameson, and Christopher Norris, one of the burdens
of which is the slackness of its politics amid its play of shimmering surfaces.4
In face of the postmodern multiplicity of performance research, we
accept responsibility for the politics of the categories we have constructed.
These politics intensify most sharply, predictably enough, as we approach
the most contested boundaries. Feminism, for example, became a
plural section in our first discussions, but equal representation of its divergent
positions exceeds not only our grasp but also our reach. We also
chose not to develop separate categories on the basis of racial, ethnic, or
national differences, though, of course, work pertaining to ethnicity appears
throughout the collection. Similarly, we chose not to make a category
out of theories of gay male and lesbian performances, though several
essays pertain to these topics, including one on the politics and representation
of AIDS. We do not intend to efface important differences, but neither
do we wish to create taxonomic ghettoes to contain them. We did not
include a section on the pure aesthetics of performance, transcending the
realm of ideology, because we could not imagine one.
Each of the eight sections below begins with an introduction to the
major critical theories pertinent to what we inclusively call performance.
Each introduction also includes the identification of seminal texts and key
terminology, and each is followed by several essays that demonstrate how
the critical theory is used by practitioners in the field. Each of the essays
collected here, however, might have found an appropriate place in more
than one of our sections. There is no doubt that a different taxonomy
would have produced a different book, but the present plan seeks to
provide a preliminary map to the field as it looks to us today. Three categories-Marxism,
feminism(s), and, arguably, cultural studies-derive
from an explicitly doctrinal yet interdisciplinary position or set of positions.
Others-semiotics, psychoanalysis, and history-organize themselves
around their respective disciplinary practices and methodologies.
Still others-deconstruction, hermeneutics, and phenomenology-represent
philosophically based strategies of reading and interpretation. This is
not to say that the discipline of history is without a doctrinal aspect or that
Marxism lacks a philosophical basis; on the contrary, it is to recognize that
categories overlap in complex networks of influence and affiliation.
INTRODUCTION TO THE FIRST EDITION
3
We have sought to recognize such affiliations-and at the same
time to open up a space for taxonomic improvisation-in three ways.
First, we have sometimes included essays with a methodological base in
one field within categories organized around another. The essays by Kate
Davy (in "Feminism[s]") and David Romain (in "After Marx"), for example,
share the topic of gender critique in performances by gay male
artists. While Ellen Donkin's theater historical essay joins the section on
feminism(s), Marvin Carlson's consideration of Mikhail Bakhtin's theories
of dialogic play resides in "Theater History and Historiography"
and so forth. Second, we have provided what we hope is a rigorous system
of cross-referencing in which the keywords are appropriately glossed
and indexed. Third, we have invited two of our contributors, Herbert
Blau and Sue-Ellen Case, to conclude the volume by writing summary essays
under the rubric of "Critical Convergences," momentary sites where
ideas come together but do not come to rest.
Much of the turbulence generated by performance and performance
scholarship, which has proved productive and frustrating by turns, stems
from the divisions created by the diverse institutional sites of research in
the field. These include departments of theater, performance studies,
communication, literature, media studies, and anthropology-and their
respective professional associations. The dialectics that they produce include
theory versus practice, history versus theory, dramatic text versus
stage performance, performance (as a high culture form like most performance
art) versus theater (as a popular form like circus), and theater (as a
high culture form like the production of classic plays) versus performance
(as popular culture, including rituals and social dramas). Some of these
divisions, such as the almost completely separate institutional development
of both dance research and musicology, may explain omissions from
this book, which we hope future scholars will address.5
While it clearly emphasizes the extraliterary, the collection contains a
number of essays concerned with traditional dramatic texts. The range and
diversity of performance genres do, however, enter the collection in juxtaposition
to and in potentially subversive dialogue with canonical and
other texts: a Hmong shaman, a King Lear in the mode of Indian kathakali,
stand-up comics, a circus sharpshooting act, jazz, and performance art
all exert pressure on the dominant status of the text as the privileged object
of critical theory and on the exclusivity of high culture forms as its central
domain. Yet, while this collection goes beyond the canon, it also remains
canonical since part of the appeal of the new theory is its ability to enhance
and revitalize traditional texts. Theory has also, we believe, inspired new
ways of creating texts and performance events, or, at least, created a new
climate for their inception, and some of the essays discuss this work. Indeed,
we see an inherently political character to the performance analysis
that has emerged from critical theory; it revises, challenges, rewrites, interrogates,
and sometimes condemns received meanings.
We have collected these essays, however, with a sense that they belong
to a particular tradition. Theory, as a discursive literature devoted to
CRITICAL THEORY AND PERFORMANCE
4
fundamental principles, has had a longer history in the academic study of
theater than in almost any other discipline in the humanities. Venerable
anthologies such as Barrett Clark's collection of dramatic theory and criticism
introduced generations of theater students to Plato and Lodovico
Castelvetro, August Schlegel, and Emile Zola-broad reflections on general
theories of art and literature-at a time when English departments
emphasized New Criticism, the close reading of particular literary masterpieces.6
Many theater departments require a course in theory, separate
from dramatic literature and theatrical history. In theater and drama studies,
the search for general structural principles across a variety of historical
periods and genres has produced some significant theoretical statements.7
Moreover, theatrical performance has assembled an impressive array of
theoretical writings concerning stage practices, including, for example,
Richard Wagner and Adolph Appia on the social and aesthetic role of the
total work of art, Vsevolod Meyerhold and Bertolt Brecht on the political
implications of that role, and (prophetically) Antonin Artaud on its disintegration
into fragments of autonomous gesture and obsolete languages in
a culture with "no more masterpieces."8 Many of the theatrical practitioner/theorists,
such as Constantin Stanislavski in acting and Robert Edmond
Jones in stage design, have exerted a continuing day-to-day influence
on the curriculum and pedagogical approaches of theater programs.9
Our collection does not prove that there is nothing new under the
sun. There has been a theory explosion, and it has had important consequences
for both theater studies and other humanities as well. First, it
has enlarged the conception of performance in ways not envisioned in
the traditional study of drama and therefore reduced some of the separation
of specialties between theater history, theory/criticism, and theater
practice, a trend strongly reflected by the movement between categories
in this collection.
Second, the "new" theory has returned the humanities to philosophy:
performance history and criticism, along with other humanities disciplines
such as English, modern languages, and history, have returned to
a fundamental examination of the underlying assumptions that govern
their own methodology in particular and their understanding of objects of
inquiry in general. Both epistemological and metaphysical questions have
been reopened, and they have forced a reassessment of all that has "gone
without saying" for too long. Some of these fundamental issues have involved
the nature of representation and its relationship to a reality it
doubles/produces/defies; the exact relationship is precisely the question.
The twin problems of agency and subjectivity, what constitutes them and
how they work, also return studies of performance to philosophical questions
of the nature of the self, to what used to be called "philosophical anthropology."
In fact, much of the "new theory" derives from the work of
philosophers (or perhaps "post-philosophers"): Jacques Derrida's critique
of metaphysics, Paul Ricoeur's phenomenology, J. L. Austin's speech / act
theory, and Jean-Frangois Lyotard's conception of the postmodern all constitute
traditional philosophical thought or its undoing by philosophers.
INTRODUCTION TO THE FIRST EDITION
Of course, philosophy has always spilled over into other discourses (some
think it colonizes all academic disciplines); to this list we can add, among
others, Lacan's revision of Freud, Raymond Williams's and Fredric Jameson's
revisions of Marx, and Foucault's epistemological critique. Even to
begin to make such a list is to realize how intensive and productive the
theory explosion has been.
Finally, the new theory has provided a methodology and an impetus
to specify the meaning of an old cliche: a text is different on the stage than
it is on the page. Theory has done so principally by radically questioning
the idea of what a text is. Semiotics, for example, has provided notions of
multiple sign systems coinciding in performance. The difference between
a playscript and a performance text can be theorized and articulated. The
audience can finally be interrogated as to its role in the production of
meaning. There are concrete reasons why a show differs from night to
night, venue to venue, cast to cast. Perhaps most important, performance
can be articulated in terms of politics: representation, ideology, hegemony,
resistance.10 In a way, theory gives theater back again to the body politic.
Ironically, the history of the discipline of theater studies is one of
fighting for autonomy from English and speech departments, insisting on
a kind of separation from other areas of study. It was necessary, politically
necessary, to claim this distinctiveness, even at the expense of becoming
somewhat insular and hermetic-a result that unfortunately became true
of many departments of theater. Now, however, it is even more necessary
to recognize and insist on the interdependency of a related series of disciplines
and also on the role of performance in the production of culture in
its widest sense.
J. G. R. and J. R. R.
NOTES
1. Jean-Francois Lyotard, "Answering the Question: What Is Postmodernism?"
in The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans. Geoff Bennington and
Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), 76.
2. Henry M. Sayre, The Object of Performance: The American Avant-Garde since
1970 (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1989), xiii.
3. Clifford Geertz, "Blurred Genres: The Refiguration of Social Thought" in The
American Scholar 49 (1980), reprinted in Critical Theory since 1965, ed. Hazard
Adams and Leroy Searle (Tallahassee: Florida State University Press, 1986), 514-23.
4. Jirgen Habermas, "Modernity: An Incomplete Project," in The Anti-Aesthetic:
Essays on Postmodern Culture, ed. Hal Foster (Port Townsend, Wash.: Bay
Press, 1983); Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism
(Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1991); Christopher Norris, What's
Wrong with Postmodernism: Critical Theory and the Ends of Philosophy (Baltimore:
Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990). See also Jonathan Arac, ed., Postmodernism
and Politics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986).
5. For the stimulating dialogue between dance scholarship, theater history, and
performance theory, see Susan Leigh Foster, Reading Dancing: Bodies and Subjects in
CRITICAL THEORY AND PERFORMANCE
6
Contemporary American Dance (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986); and
Philip Auslander and Marcia B. Siegel, "Two (Re)Views of Susan Leigh Foster's
Reading Dancing," TDR: A Journal of Performance Studies 32, no. 4 (1988): 7-31.
6. Barrett H. Clark, European Theories of the Drama (1918; rev. ed., New York:
Crown, 1965); and Bernard F. Dukore, Dramatic Theory and Criticism: Greeks to Grotowski
(New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1974).
7. See, for example: Bernard Beckerman, Dynamics of Drama: Theory and Method
of Analysis (1970; reprint, New York: Drama Book Specialists, 1979); Michael Goldman,
The Actor's Freedom: Toward a Theory of Drama (New York: Viking Press, 1975);
Manfred Pfister, The Theory and Analysis of Drama, trans. John Halliday (Cambridge
and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988).
8. Key modernist texts are anthologized in Eric Bentley, ed., The Theory of the
Modern Stage: An Introduction to Modern Theatre and Drama (Harmondsworth: Penguin,
1968); and E. T. Kirby, ed., Total Theatre (New York: Dutton, 1969).
9. For a comprehensive survey of theatrical theory, which charts the boundaries
of the subject, see Marvin Carlson, Theories of the Theatre: A Historical and Critical
Survey from the Greeks to the Present (Ithaca and London: Cornell University
Press, 1984).
10. For a collection of essays that acknowledge the political articulations of performance,
see Sue-Ellen Case and Janelle Reinelt, eds., The Performance of Power:
Theatrical Discourse and Politics (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1991).
Performance Analysis
It seemed to me (around 1954) that a science of signs might stimulate
social criticism, and that Sartre, Brecht, and Saussure could concur
in this project.
-Roland Barthes
It is impossible ... to decompose a perception, to make it into a collection
of sensations, because in it the whole is prior to the parts.
-Maurice Merleau-Ponty
Perhaps what we do most in theater and performance studies is analyze
performances. Large portions of our classroom hours are devoted to discussing
texts and performances, and the relationships between them; or
between historical performances, and their conditions of production and
reception. Underlying many of our debates about the difference between
live and mediated experiences of performance is some idea about what
constitutes performance and also about what constitutes the experience of
attending a, or to, performance. Outside the United States, particularly in
Europe, curricula in theater and performance studies almost always include
classes in performance analysis. From Sweden to Germany, concentrated
attention is paid to the pedagogy of performance analysis. Although
this prescription is sometimes not the case in the United States,
most North American curricula include introductory level courses in
which students are expected to attend and write about performances. We
foreground performance analysis in this volume as a preeminent activity
of the field, embracing the need to examine tools and processes whereby
such analyses are conducted.
Semiotics and phenomenology, long in conversation with each
other, have emerged over the last decade as major methodologies of performance
analysis. Deconstruction, on the other hand, has become more
important for its wide-ranging philosophical contributions than for its
earlier analytic deconstructive procedures. We have organized this section
using semiotics and phenomenology as key performance tools; other sections
of the book, in particular "After Marx," "Psychoanalysis," and
"Gender and Sexualities," will be seen to be the home of current reflections
on Derrida and deconstruction.
CRITICAL THEORY AND PERFORMANCE
8
Perhaps the most prolific theorist of performance analysis, French
scholar Patrice Pavis, is exemplary of the development of this practice. His
books and articles have proposed methods for analyzing all elements of
performance, including the mise-en-scene, the actor, auditory, visual, and
spatial aspects of performance, and spectators' experiences. He was an
early proponent of semiotics and a maker of systems and charts, but he
also has always recognized their limitations. Pavis acknowledges the need
to keep transcending rational and cognitive methods in order to find adequate
modes of analysis for the affective and embodied aspects of analysis
and spectatorship. In his recently translated Analyzing Performance, he develops
a narrative in which the 198os saw a reaction against the segmentation
and overly organized categories of semiotics in favor of a "global"
reaffirmation of materiality and libidinal investments. Urging the development
of a systematic synthetic process for maintaining the cognitive emphasis
on meaning in tandem with the embodied experiences of energy
and flow, Pavis summarizes the current challenge of performance analysis:
"The description of a performance always negotiates the space between a
totalizing demand for synthesis and an empirical individualization, between
order and chaos, between abstraction and materiality."1 Before exploring
what such a negotiation entails, however, it is necessary to revisit
the terrain of theatrical semiotics and phenomenology in order to grasp the
specifics of their approaches.
Semiotics developed out of linguistics. Early theoreticians of the sign
such as Ferdinand Saussure and Charles Peirce saw that the structure of
language was useful for understanding the structure of any sign system.
Languages make meanings only differentially; that is, within a given language,
words only derive meaning by reference to other words. The particular
language system makes meanings possible through rules, conventions,
distinctions. Since not only language but also human behaviors and
customs are signs that operate within the organizing patterns of social systems,
Saussure called for a "science of semiology."2 Claude Levi-Strauss,
doing structuralist anthropology, recognized the affinity between cultural
and linguistic analysis and explicitly linked his work to semiology.
Signs, following Saussure, are divided into signifiers and signifieds.
The signifier is the sound, or mark, that stands in for the signified, which
is the concept, or meaning. Together they point to the referent, which is
the actuality referenced. The letters p e a c h form a word signifying the
concept "peach" and may be used to point to a particular round, yellow
piece of fruit. Each of these connections is, however, arbitrary. That is, a
different group of markings might just as well serve as signifier for the
signified peach. Meanings are therefore conventional. Furthermore, signifiers
establish their meaning by reference to what they are not: peach is understood
as not apple or perch. Thus, meaning is the functional result of the
difference between signs, and always might be otherwise. If meaning is
always only present in difference, the stability of any particular sign system
overturns. A specific signifier means not only in relation to one other
signifier that it is not, but to a whole tissue of signifiers, potentially end-
PERFORMANCE ANALYSIS
9
less, through which meaning moves and slips in an elusive play of signification.
From this view meaning is actually always absent, because it
never simply "is" present in the sign. Furthermore, the reading is not authorized
by any stable center of meaning, any structure or system that is
not itself implicated in the play of signification.
A fascinating series of photographs by David Hockney illustrate
some of these ideas. Hockney combined a number of separate shots into
composite or collage pieces called "joiners." In "Noya and Bill Brandt
with Self-Portrait," a series of Polaroid photos of Noya and Bill Brandt are
on the floor while the figures of Noya and Bill look down at them. Fortynine
photos make up the whole collage, which represents Noya and Bill
looking at themselves through the photo fragments. The spaces in between
the photos form a grid that simultaneously overlays and undergirds
the whole. Each piece of the composition can be assigned meaning
in relation to the pieces around it, and, as the eye moves, the composite
meanings change-different photos are foregrounded, different ways of
seeing come into prominence and recede. Bill has, from one standpoint,
two heads; Noya has four feet. They are looking at twelve or thirteen
Hockneys. Because of the grid, the edges of the photos are seen as distinct
for each individual photo and also as arbitrary in that they do not represent
"real" edges. Edges are made or composed, have no transcendent authority.
Taken as a whole, the photographs make up a kind of language
that can be read, but the units are not stable or fixed. The center of the collage
seems to move, and the spaces between emphasize the ephemeral
unity of the collage. The eye looking seems to slip, to be unable to "fix" on
anything-or is it the surface that is slippery?
In terms of semiotics, the meaning of the whole emerges from the relations
between the varying units making up the composition, each of
which as a signifier derives its value from its position within the picturesystem.
However, these signifiers are not stable; each only composes itself
into a sign in relation to what it is not-and the mobility of the composition
keeps the indeterminacy of the system on view. While the relational
aspects of this "system" are the key to discerning meaning, meaning is
clearly linked to cognitive processes and reading competencies on the
part of the spectators.
However, there is another way to grasp the experience of looking at
the photographs, one that stresses the experiential and perceptual aspects
of looking, and posits that which is seen as a gestalt of stimuli that is given
to be grasped in its partialness by an apprehending subject. This method
is phenomenological.
As a philosophical school or movement, phenomenology has developed
many versions and emphases as it has evolved historically. The bestknown
early proponent of phenomenology was Edmund Husserl, who at
the turn of the century and into its early decades, based his effort on describing
the initial encounter that strikes the senses when subjects meet objects,
believing that knowledge comes through bracketing off all presuppositions
about the nature of experience in order to focus on the structure of
Fig. 1. David Hockney, "Noya and
Bill Brandt with Self-Portrait."
Photo credit: Rogers, Coleridge and
White Ltd.
.......... ..
the objects as given to consciousness.3 Knowledge lies in the relationship
between consciousness and its objects, and is not inherent in the object, nor
is it a property of a unified preexisting subject. Husserl called this the
"phenomenological reduction," and he privileges conceptual and cognitive
activity, thus relying on the concept of a transcendental ego.
Unlike Husserl's idealism with its emphasis on mental processes
and transcendental subjectivity, Maurice Merleau-Ponty's contribution to
phenomenological analysis was to insist on the materiality of the body,
and the lived experience of being implicated in a body.4 As Elizabeth
Grosz explains, "Merleau-Ponty locates experience midway between
mind and body. Not only does he link experience to the privileged locus
of consciousness; he also demonstrates that experience is always necessarily
embodied, corporeally constituted, located in and as the subject's incarnation.
Experience can only be understood between mind and body
or across them-in their lived conjunction."5 If experience is relational,
then, it is constituted in the encounter between something that is always
only partially available to perception, showing itself from a limited given
aspect to an embodied subject who is itself constituted through its bodily
orientation and its spatial, sensory, and perceptual orientation to the stimulus
in question.
Furthermore, the body is both subject and object of consciousness,
and while all knowledge comes through the body, the body is not identical
to consciousness: it does not totally coincide. Thus, "the body I touch never
coincides with the body that touches."6 Experience is, then, not only the experience
of the world; it is also the experience of an aspect of one's own
subjectivity-experiencing. It is profoundly self-reflexive and mobile.
Returning to the Hockney collage, we can read it phenomenologi-
10
PERFORMANCE ANALYSIS
11
cally as well as semiotically. Within the frame of representation, Noya and
Bill are seen looking at images of themselves. They are each seeing different
versions of the photos, experiencing different relations between themselves
as embodied and themselves as images. As a metaphor for lived experience,
the collage emphasizes the fragmentation and partiality of both
the viewers and the images, but taken as a whole, also emphasizes their
coherence, their integration. Moving beyond the mimetic properties of the
collage, it is also possible to include the spectator of the collage in the relations
under examination, recognizing that any posited viewer is herself
an embodied subject grasping in a primary way an experience of looking
at, in which the content is also the experience of looking at, and so on, and
so on, in infinite regression.
Common then to both semiotics and phenomenology is the notion
that the object or mark operates as a kind of signifier that through the
hermeneutic process is linked to a signified. In place of this language of
the sign, phenomenology uses the discourse of the givenness of phenomena
and the apprehension of embodied consciousness.
In recent performance analyses, both semiotic analysis and phenomenological
analysis are often unself-consciously embedded within the interpretations
offered. A number of scholars have also explicitly used one or
another of these approaches and argued on behalf of them. Erika FischerLichte,
for example, has developed a comprehensive semiotics of theater,
arguing that theater makes use of signs of signs produced by cultural systems.7
In this metalevel of functioning, theater's signs are not identical to
these other signs, but are iconic in relation to them. Theater is thus always
a special case. Stan Garner, from a different perspective, argues in Bodied
Spaces that the opposition between semiotics and other deconstructive
theories and phenomenology is falsely predicated on a narrow and nonhistorical
characterization of phenomenology, and urges a reconsideration
of the ways the theatrical event is illuminated by analysis of its phenomenological
complexity: "From the phenomenological point of view,
the living body capable of returning the spectator's gaze represents a
methodological dilemma for any theoretical model-like semiotics-that
offers to describe performance in 'objective' terms. Alone among the elements
that constitute the stage's semiotic field, the body is a sign that
looks back."8
Both semiotics and phenomenology have by now given rise to
highly developed applications to theater and performance studies, not
only in the work of Fischer-Lichte and Garner, but in the work of Marvin
Carlson, Susan Melrose, Bruce Wilshire, and Bert States, to name the most
prominent.9 In 1992, States was already arguing for the possibilities of seeing
semiotics and phenomenology as compatible rather than hostile
methods of analysis. Indeed, he cites a passage from an earlier book by
Patrice Pavis (Languages of the Stage) in order to illustrate that "descriptive
methods of semiology and phenomenology are almost equally in evidence."
0 These methods have become the primary methods of performance
analysis in our field, and learning to recognize them-whether
CRITICAL THEORY AND PERFORMANCE
12
they are explicitly associated with one or the other theory, or are implicitly
embedded together within an analytic discourse-is a significant and useful
task for performance scholars.
In the interests of pursuing this goal, we have printed States's
prophetic essay together with a new essay by Marvin Carlson. These two
contributions give concentrated accounts of the contours of phenomenological
and semiological approaches to theater and performance studies.
Following these overviews, two exemplary performance analyses show
how these theories can work in practice. Jim Carmody's essay demonstrates
a particularly sophisticated use of semiotic analysis to parse a production
of Moliere's Misanthrope. This is followed by an essay by FrenchCanadian
scholar Josette Feral, who in her eclectic and wide-ranging
analysis employs techniques from both semiotics and phenomenology as
the implicit, embedded substructure of her performance descriptions and
analysis.
J. G. R.
NOTES
1. Patrice Pavis, Analyzing Performance: Theater, Dance, and Film, trans. David
Williams (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2003), 18.
2. Saussure's key concepts were published after his death in 1913. See Course
in General Linguistics, trans. Wade Baskin (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1966).
3. Key texts by Husserl include Logical Investigations (19oo00), Ideas Pertaining to
a Pure Phenomenology and Phenomenological Philosophy (1913), Lectures on the Phenomenology
of Inner Time-Consciousness (1928), and Cartesian Meditations (1931).
4. Key texts by Merleau-Ponty include The Primacy of Perception (1945) and
The Visible and the Invisible, published after his death in 1961.
5. Elizabeth Grosz, Volatile Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Feminism (Bloomington:
Indiana University Press, 1994), 95. This is an excellent account of phenomenology
and its uses for feminist theory. Much of Grosz's explication is applicable to performance
theory.
6. Stanton B. Garner, Jr., Bodied Spaces: Phenomenology and Performance in Contemporary
Drama (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994), 30.
7. Erika Fischer-Lichte, Jeremy Gaines, and Doris L. Jones, The Semiotics of
Theater: Advances in Semiotics (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992).
8. Garner, Bodied Spaces, 49.
9. See for example, Marvin Carlson, Theatre Semiotics: Signs of Life (Bloomington:
Indiana University Press, 1990); Susan Melrose, A Semiotics of the Dramatic Text
(London: Macmillan, 1994); Bruce Wilshire, Role Playing and Identity: The Limits of
Theatre as Metaphor (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982); Bert O. States,
Great Reckonings in Little Rooms: On the Phenomenology of Theater (Berkeley and Los
Angeles: University of California Press, 1985), and The Pleasure of Play (Ithaca: Cornell
University Press, 1994).
10. Cf. p. 11.
Semiotics and Its Heritage
Marvin Carlson
Sue-Ellen Case's Feminism and Theatre (1988), the first book-length study
devoted to the theoretical foundations of a feminist theater, called for a
"new poetics," drawing upon a wide range of theoretical strategies to
develop alternatives to the traditional patriarchal systems of analysis of
dramatic form, practice, and audience response. "For the reader who is
unfamiliar with these new theories," Case suggested, "an effective starting-point
for the intersection of new theory with performance and feminist
poetics may be found in the field of semiotics."1
I will return later to consider the significant relationship Case rightly
pointed out between semiotics and the development of modern feminist
theory in the theater, but I begin with this striking statement by one of theater's
leading contemporary theorists in order to point out that in almost
every area of the complex field of modern theatrical theory, as it has developed,
let us say, from the 198os onward, a similar claim might be made.
Wherever one looks for an "effective starting-point for the intersection of
new theory with performance," one almost invariably comes back to the
emergence of semiotics in the late 196os and 1970s as providing a grounding
vocabulary, procedural model, and basic orientation for future work,
even work that specifically defined itself in opposition to the semiotic enterprise,
such as much so-called poststructuralist and deconstructionist
theory and practice.
Semiotics was proposed as a new approach to the study of human social
behavior by the father of modern linguistics, Ferdinand de Saussure,
in his major work, the 1916 Course in General Linguistics. There Saussure
called for a "new science" of semiology within the general field of social
psychology that would study "the role of signs in social life."2 The sign,
which Saussure proposed as the basic unit of human communication, was
a social construct that united a meaning (the "signified") with an abstract
representation of that meaning (the "signifier"). Thus in the English language,
the signified concept of a particular type of quadruped has been
culturally bound to the written signifier dog.
Linguistic theorists throughout Europe built upon Saussure's work
throughout the following century, but the strategies of his proposed new
science also came to be applied to the analysis of a wide variety of cultural
phenomena, including the arts. The first major investigations in this
area were undertaken between the two world wars by a group of theorists
in Czechoslovakia, collectively known as the Prague Linguistic
Circle. These theorists became particularly interested in how Saussure's
semiotic analysis might be extended to art objects, and a number of them,
such as the folklorist Petr Bogatyrev and the avant-garde theatrical director
Jindfich Honzl, focused attention upon the semiotics of theater. Two
13
CRITICAL THEORY AND PERFORMANCE
14
central concerns-continuing concerns-of theater semiotics were already
clearly apparent in the writings of these theorists. One was the multiplicity
and variety of signs in the theater, which added to the kinds of
linguistic signs explored by Saussure, the visual signs of costumes,
scenery, and properties, the auditory signs of music and sound effects,
and the most central and complex sign of all, the living body of the actor.
The other concern involved the double operations of all such signs, existing
simultaneously as present material objects and as signifiers of absent
signifieds, so that an audience is aware both of an actor and the character
that actor is portraying. Later theorists would characterize these two
somewhat contradictory but essential functions as phenomenological and
semiotic.
The work of this first generation of theater semioticians was largely
forgotten, especially in Western Europe, until the late 196os, when semiotics
reemerged as a major tool in the rapidly developing field of cultural
studies. Central to the rediscovery of semiotics was the work of Roland
Barthes. Barthes contributed very little directly to the application of semiotics
to the study of theater and performance, although he provided a
brief but provocative statement concerning the "density of signs" in the
theater and the usefulness of semiotics to the study of Brecht within a
1963 interview in what was then the leading French journal devoted to
contemporary criticism, Tel Quel.3 Nevertheless, his very broad definition
of the field provided important encouragement for other theorists with a
particular interest in theater. In his major work on the subject, the highly
influential Elements of Semiology in 1964, his laying out of the new field
might almost have been written with theater and performance particularly
in mind. Here he asserted that semiology "aims to take in any system
of signs, whatever their substance and limits; images, gestures, musical
sounds, objects and the complex association of all of these, which form the
content of ritual, convention or public entertainment: these constitute, if
not languages, at least systems of signification."4
The appearance of Barthes's Elements of Semiology inspired a number
of French theorists to explore the possibilities of a semiotic analysis of theater,
and during the late 196os and early 1970s almost all the writings in
this new field were in French. The first book-length study of the subject
was Tadeusz Kowsan's 1970 Litterature et spectacle dans leurs rapports esthtiques,
thematiques et semiologiques, although Kowsan had begun publishing
his speculations in this area as early as 1968. In addition to recalling the
earlier work of the Prague linguists, Kowsan proposed two strategies that
would occupy much of the attention of the theater semioticians of this period,
the categorizing of the various sign "systems" utilized by theater
(Kowsan suggested thirteen, including costume, makeup, word, and gesture)
and the establishment of a minimal "signifying unit" to aid the
process of analysis (a heritage from linguistic theory that after considerable
futile search, theater semioticians finally abandoned). An important
international review for the interdisciplinary study of semiotics, Degris,
was founded in Brussels in 1972 by Andrd Helbo, who was to become one
SEMIOTICS AND ITS HERITAGE
of the leading theorists in this field. A special issue in 1975, Semiologie de la
representation was the first major collection of essays on this subject.
During the 1970s semiotics developed rapidly in France and Italy,
studying the sign systems utilized in a wide range of cultural activities,
among them language, literature, music, cinema, architecture, and theater.
In France, Kowsan and Helbo were followed by two extremely influential
semioticians of theater, Anne Ubersfeld and Patrice Pavis, while in
Italy major new contributions to the subject were provided by Franco
Ruffini, Marco De Marinis, and, to a lesser extent, Umberto Eco. Although
some of these, Ubersfeld in particular, tended to focus their analysis, as
theater theorists historically have tended to do, upon the literary text, others
followed Kowsan and Helbo in applying semiotic analysis to the living
performance. Two highly influential articles by De Marinis bore the
provocative title "The Spectacle as Text," and urged that theatrical performance
be subjected to semiotic analysis just as a literary text might be,
through careful study of its creation and manipulation of signs. Such
analysis, along with the closely related question of the actual or potential
relationship between the semiotic systems of the literary text and those of
the performance, had by the end of the decade become central analytic
concerns. The use of semiotic analysis for the study of particular productions
was most highly developed by French theorists, especially at the
Paris Centre National de Recherche Scientifique, which published during
the 196os and 1970s a number of model studies in its series Les voies de
la creation th&atrale.
Semiotic analysis of theater and performance was much later in
coming to the English-speaking world. During the 196os and 1970s students
of theater in England and America who did not read French or Italian
had access only to the translated works of a few generalists like
Barthes, whose comments on theater were provocative but not extensive,
and, much more important, the writings of a new generation of film theorists,
who recognized and demonstrated the importance of this new critical
methodology well before it came to the attention of their colleagues in
theater. The pioneering work of Peter Wollen (Signs and Meaning in the
Cinema, 1969) and Christian Metz (Film Language: A Semiotics of Cinema,
1974) provided useful and stimulating introductions to semiotic theory,
even though the film, as an art of images, did not present the phenomenological
challenges to traditional semiotics that eventually had to be addressed
by theater theorists. Even so, theorists like Wollen and Metz could
have provided a ground for the development of semiotic analysis in English,
but in fact such analysis did not develop until the 1980s, when the
first introductory works in English devoted specifically to drama and theater
finally appeared. The first of them was Keir Elam's The Semiotics of
Theatre and Drama in 1980, which provided for English-speaking theater
scholars an extended introduction to the basic concepts not only of Saussure
but also of the hitherto largely unknown Prague Circle writings on
the theater. Elam's book was widely read and discussed, although its own
suggested methodology, strongly orientated toward linguistic analysis,
CRITICAL THEORY AND PERFORMANCE
16
was not specifically widely imitated. Elam, with his emphasis upon dramatic
discourse, attracted almost no imitators. The rather cumbersome,
pedantic, and linguistically oriented model of semiotic analysis that he
applied to the opening scene of Hamlet lacked the flexibility and openness
to production values provided by the work of such continental theorists
as Kowsan, Helbo, and De Marinis.
The first such continental theorist to gain significant attention in the
English-speaking world was Patrice Pavis, a collection of whose essays
were translated in 1982 as Languages of the Stage.5 Although Pavis had produced
a number of important semiotic analyses of particular plays and
productions during the previous decade, particularly of the works of
Marivaux,6 this new collection, as he noted himself, reflected a change in
the field, away from global systemization or global analysis and toward
considerations of more specific objects or phenomena. Somewhat surprisingly,
few semiotic analyses of particular productions have appeared, although
a detailed questionnaire to guide such analysis and two sample
analyses were offered by Pavis and others in a 1987 collection of essays
edited by Helbo,7 subsequently translated into English. Jim Carmody's
"Alceste in Hollywood," which appeared in the first edition of the present
anthology in 1992, and again in this revised edition, applies semiotic
analysis not to a global analysis, but to specific elements in a particular
production, selected for their potential to reveal much larger and more
general artistic and cultural concerns that are implied by their use. Una
Chaudhuri's 1986 study of the work of Jean Genet, No Man's Stage,8 offered
another illuminating use of semiotic analysis applied to individual
plays or productions, but such analyses remain, as Carmody remarked in
1992, "remarkably rare."
What has happened instead is that a wide variety of other theoretical
approaches grounded in or heavily indebted to semiotic theory have
appeared in Europe and America from the 1970S onward, taking the heritage
of semiotics in directions quite unexpected by the first theorists to
apply it to theater, drama, and performance. Like modern semiotics itself,
these new directions were in many cases based upon continental and particularly
French theory, which in the late twentieth century exerted a profound
and continuing influence throughout the academic world and particularly
in America. The developments in late-twentieth-century theory
are both complex and highly intertwined, but in terms of influence upon
the analysis of theater and performance, two general developments
both growing out of earlier work in semiotics-proved of particular importance.
One of these developments, a wide variety of approaches gathered
under the general heading of poststructuralism, often defined itself
in opposition to semiotics and to its closely related field of study, structuralism,
which, like semiotics, utilized analytic strategies derived from
modern linguistics to consider the text as an object whose meaning can be
interpreted in terms of its symbolic patterns. The other, equally diverse in
its applications, did not oppose semiotics, but sought to take it in a new
direction, by focusing not on the production but upon the reception of the
SEMIOTICS AND ITS HERITAGE
17
sign. Both of these developments had an enormous effect on the study of
theater and performance in the closing years of the twentieth century.
In theatrical theory, the poststructuralist reaction to semiotics manifested
itself most significantly in a challenge to the analytic rigidity of
semiotic analysis, especially as applied to a living art like theater. An early
expression of this concern came from a leading poststructuralist theorist,
Jean-Frangois Lyotard, inspired by a panel at an International Theatre Festival
in Venice in 1972, where a group of primarily European theorists attempted
to apply the new strategies of semiotic analysis to a series of Japanese
performances. Lyotard subsequently denounced the "semiotic
imperialism" that in his opinion turned the living art of the Japanese into
a "lifeless object" for analysis.9 On more directly theoretical grounds, Lyotard
challenged the entire theory of signs as developed by classical linguistics,
since it was based upon absence, the sign by definition standing
in for a primary, but not present, reality. Like most poststructuralist theorists,
Lyotard found this absent ground of meaning philosophically unacceptable,
insisting that all positions were relative, shifting, and negotiable
and that a theater that sought to reflect life and consciousness accurately
should be built, as life and consciousness themselves were, not upon the
"representative substitutions" of signs, but upon the "libidinal displacements"
of flows of psychic energy.10
Lyotard's opposition between absence and presence and between
structuralist stability and poststructural flux was echoed in a variety of
ways in theorists of the next decade, and was particularly important for
those developing a theoretical grounding for the concept of performance,
especially in an attempt to separate it from conventional theater. Thus, for
example, Josette Feral, in a key essay in Modern Drama called "Performance
and Theatricality" (1982), distinguished between these two fields
of activity in terms extremely close to those of Lyotard. Theater, Feral suggested,
was based upon the semiotic, built of representation, of signs of an
absent grounded reality, while performance deconstructed the semiotic
codes of theater, creating a dynamic of "flows of desire" operating in a living
present.11
In this same issue of Modern Drama Michael Kirby called for a "nonsemiotic
performance" that would free itself from representation and signification
entirely,12 but few theorists supported so extreme a position.
Marvin Carlson argued that any presentation of an activity as theater or
performance would inevitably initiate a semiotic process within an audience,
and America's leading poststructuralist theater theorist, Herbert
Blau, rejected the idea of an "unmediated" performance that could avoid
semiotic codifications, since consciousness itself was invested with the
dynamics of repetition and reproduction upon which the process of signification
was based.13
Still other theorists, while acknowledging that the processes of consciousness
inevitably introduced semiotization into reception, argued
that, especially in a living art like theater, where the audience member encountered
objects and bodies that had a substantial existence as bodies
CRITICAL THEORY AND PERFORMANCE
18
and objects in addition to their semiotic use within the performance, the
actual encounter must also be considered in any complete analysis of the
reception process. Thus what Bert O. States characterizes as "the phenomenological
attitude" in his essay of that name (which follows in this volume)
offered not so much an alternative as an important supplement or
even correction to traditional semiotic theory. States himself provided
some of the most important applications of phenomenological theory to
theater and performance, particularly in his 1985 collection of essays, Great
Reckonings in Little Rooms.14 Here, in addition to phenomenological analyses
of particular theater devices and practices, States suggests a continual
doubled perception on the part of the audience, concerned on the one
hand with the semiotic meanings and messages of the performance, and
on the other with the direct perceptual impact of real bodies and objects.
Such a blending of semiotics and phenomenology was the concern
of several of the major new studies of theater and performance of the late
198os. Andre Helbo in his French Les Mots et les Gestes (1983) and his English
The Theory of the Performing Arts (1987) characterized theater as a
"site of confrontation" between semiotic concerns with meaning and representation
and poststructuralist concerns with flows of desire. Thus the
tension in French performance theory of this period, between structuralist
stability and poststructural flux, expression of signification and its denial,
absence and presence, was brought to the center of performance itself,
and even more specifically to the figure of the actor, a site of both signification
and desire.15 A closely related dual consciousness in theater was
developed by Jean Alter in A Sociosemiotic Theory of Theatre (1990), which
spoke of the theater as employing two complementary dynamisms, a
semiotic, information-bearing referential function and a phenomenological
performant function involving direct experience16
Phenomenologically oriented performance theorists, whether interested
in relating phenomenology to semiotics or not, nevertheless shared
with their semiotically oriented contemporaries a growing interest in the
contextualization of performance, and especially in the largely neglected
area of reception. The shift that occurred in modern semiotic studies in the
late 1970s and early 198os was clearly described by Teresa de Lauretis, a
pioneer in the use of semiotic theory in both feminist and film studies. De
Lauretis characterized it as a shift "away from the classification of sign
systems, their basic units, their levels of structural organization, and towards
the exploration of the modes of production of signs and meanings,
the ways in which systems and codes are used, transformed or transgressed
in social practice."17
Marco De Marinis, who has been one of the most astute theorists in
assessing the state of semiotic analysis in the theater and in predicting the
various stages in its development, published an important review essay
in 1983 arguing that theater semiotics, having established itself internationally
as a major critical approach, was now at a crossroads. It must either
continue its developed interest in the structural analysis of literary or
performance texts or move beyond such case-by-case analysis to develop
SEMIOTICS AND ITS HERITAGE
19
what De Marinis characterized as a "pragmatics of theatrical communication,"
engaging the historical and sociological context of both stage realization
and reception.18 The importance of the shift described by de Lauretis
and De Marinis can hardly be overstated, since it converted theater
semiotics from a stimulating but limited method of analyzing production
techniques and strategies within the art form itself to a method of exploring
the relationships between the theater and its entire surrounding culture,
relationships that would provide the basis for much of the most innovative
and significant theoretical work of the following years.
The simple communication model employed by the first modern
theater semioticians essentially assumed that the creator of a sign (a playwright,
actor, director, designer), wishing to convey a particular "signified"
to a reader or spectator, selected and then offered the proper verbal,
visual, or aural "signifier" associated with that message. The spectator's
role was essentially passive and given little attention. The Prague School
theorists had been well aware of the limitations of this simple stimulusresponse
model; indeed, Jan Mukafovsky had specifically called attention
to a certain "indeterminacy in the specific referentiality of the work of
art,"19 but it was probably less a memory of that previous insight than the
rise of reception theory in Germany during the 1970s that led theater
semioticians to recognize that the process of the sign's reception and interpretation
is as important to its understanding as the hitherto privileged
process of its creation and presentation.
The key theorist in connecting reception theory to modern semiotics
was Umberto Eco in his 1979 book The Role of the Reader. Eco is probably
the best known of the modern semioticians, not so much because of his
extensive and important theoretical writings, but because of his best-selling
novel, The Name of the Rose, which ingeniously wed semiotic theory to
popular historical and detective fiction. Eco's interest in semiotic analysis
is extremely broad, and his specific writings on theater semiotics are few,
but nevertheless his contribution to this study has been considerable. His
essay "Semiotics of Theatrical Performance," appearing in the Drama Review
in 1977, was for most English-speaking students of theater the first
example of the new critical approach, and his attention to reception, soon
taken up and moved to a central position in semiotic analysis by De Marinis
and others, fundamentally altered the landscape of international semiotic
theory.
The attention to reception changed not only the way semiotic analysis
was practiced, but also the way semiotics came to view its own history
and development. More and more attention was paid to a hitherto neglected
contemporary of Saussure, the American philosopher Charles
Peirce, who quite independently of Saussure had developed a massive and
complex "formal doctrine of signs" based not on linguistics but upon logic,
to which he gave the name semiotics (the name that has largely replaced
Saussure's semiology). Much of Peirce's system is built upon triads, one of
the most fundamental of which is sign-object-interpretant. The third term,
involving the manner in which the sign is understood, built reception into
CRITICAL THEORY AND PERFORMANCE
20
the basic semiotic formula, in a way that Saussure's binary signifier-signified
did not. A similar emphasis is found in Peirce's basic definition of a sign:
"something which stands to somebody for something in some respect or
capacity."20 Other aspects of Peirce's system gained much currency during
the 198os, particularly his typically triadic division of types of signs into
icons, indexes, and symbols, describing three different relationships between
signs and objects. Icons bore some actual resemblance to their objects
(such as realistic paintings), indexes "pointed to" their objects (as
smoke to fire), and symbols were related to their objects only by cultural
convention (the way most language works). This triad, especially the icon,
was much utilized by theater semioticians, since iconicity is so widespread
in performance (especially in realistic drama, where almost everything on
stage is iconic).
It was the Peircian emphasis upon reception and cultural placement
of the sign, however, that made him particularly interesting to the new
generation of theorists emerging at this period. The very title of Jean
Alter's 1990 book, A Sociosemiotic Theory of Theatre, suggests this new orientation,
and indeed Alter suggested that theater analysis should emphasize
not signification, a term he believed was now too closely associated
with the old style of rather abstract semiotic analysis, but instead
referentiality, which studied the specific contextualization of a sign, its
meaning as a "concrete manifestation at a given time and in a given
space."21
The cultural placement of the sign also called attention to the imprint
of ideology upon signification, the realization that theatrical signs
produced meaning according to the values, beliefs, and ways of seeing
operating in their specific performance culture. It was primarily feminist
theorists of theater, like Sue-Ellen Case and Jill Dolan, who called attention
in the late 198os to the importance of this insight for their analysis. As
Case observed, semiotics, as a tool for describing the cultural encoding of
a sign, could be used to reveal "the covert cultural beliefs embedded in
communication." For this new generation, semiotics was no longer a
study of the elements of theatrical communication based on an assumption
of an objective and value-free selection of signs by the artist, but
rather of the way in which the signs thus selected worked to reinforce the
dominant ideology or beliefs of their cultural context.22
Semiotic film theory was much more productively utilized by feminist
theater theorists than by others seeking to develop a semiotic approach
to theater analysis. From the work in the early 198os of E. Ann
Kaplan, Kaja Silverman, and Teresa de Lauretis23 came the concept of
women as sign instead of a biological or natural reality, a "fictional construct,
a distillate from diverse but congruent discourses dominant in
Western cultures."24 Since the Western theater has almost exclusively been
produced by and for men, the depiction of women within this theater, in
both the literary texts and the physical representation on stage, contributes
directly to the patriarchal ideology of gender. By revealing the dy-
SEMIOTICS AND ITS HERITAGE
21
namics of this process, hitherto generally accepted as natural rather than
culturally constructed, semiotics provided the first step toward the development
of alternative practices.
The shift in modern semiotics from meaning as created by an authorartist
to meaning as cocreated by a work and its audience was also of great
importance to feminist theater theory. Again feminist film semioticians led
the way in this area, considering the implications of the presentation of
woman in films created with the unacknowledged but ubiquitous assumption
of a male viewer. Combining the insights of semiotics, feminism, and
reception theory with the contemporary French psychoanalytic theory of
Lacan and others, film theorists developed the important concept of the
"male gaze," a term and concept that proved extremely important to feminist
theater theorists as well. According to Lacan, the creation of the concept
of self (always understood to be male) is achieved at the cost of alienation
from libidinal self-satisfaction, an alienation that the self perpetually
seeks vainly to overcome through the manipulation of symbols, a process
that forms the basis of activities like theater. The male subject has created
and supports the theater as a site for the playing out of his always unfulfilled
desire, his gaze there directed toward the ever elusive object of that
desire, the woman, or the Other. Women spectators can participate only in
this system of representation by adopting the male gaze, by viewing performances
from the male perspective.
As feminist theorists sought during the 198os to develop a concept
of theater that would not be dominated by male concerns, semiotics continued
to provide a useful critical framework for their explorations. Recognizing,
as Case noted, that "within the patriarchal system of signs,
women do not have the cultural mechanisms of meaning to construct
themselves as the subject rather than the object of performance,"25 a number
of theorists sought to imagine an alternative, authentically female
drama, which would be, as Linda Walsh Jenkins proposed, "replete with
female signs."26 Certain of these theorists turned again to modern French
psychoanalytic theory, not however to Lacan, but to French theorists and
authors like Julia Kristeva, Luce Irigaray, and Helene Cixous, who were
challenging the male-oriented tradition of Freud and Lacan to seek a
ground for a literary and artistic woman's voice. Kristeva posited a more
emotional, poetic, and decentered "language of the mother" opposed to
the logical, abstract, and discursive "language of the father." Although
Kristeva somewhat confusingly called the mother's language "semiotic"
and the father's "symbolic," the sort of distinction she was making resonated
with the distinction being made at this same time between the logical,
discursive, "semiotic" art of theater and the emotional, free-flowing
"phenomenological" art of performance. Indeed, Josette Feral, drawing
particularly upon Irigaray, supported feminist performance on precisely
these grounds.27 Despite the essentialist quality of this dichotomy, the
feminist artists of the 198os in both England and America found performance
a particularly attractive form for the expression and exploration of
CRITICAL THEORY AND PERFORMANCE
22
their concerns. During the 199os the work of Peggy Phelan offered an
important new approach to a feminist art in reaction to the semiotic
process. Also drawing upon continental psychoanalytic theory, Phelan
argued that the traditional system of signification was based upon the
absence of women, "unmarked" by semiosis. For Phelan, women are
"the hole in the signifier," offering an aspect of reality "which [is] unsayable,
unseeable, and therefore resistant to representation."28 Rather
than attempt to develop an alternative female semiotics, which might
only reproduce the existing system, Phelan works to theorize the more
difficult and original task of exploring and celebrating the "unmarked"
of absence and disappearance.
Although modern feminist theory and practice in theater and performance
has been extremely varied, three general approaches are often
suggested. The one I have just been describing, seeking to develop an
alternative theater of "female signs" quite distinct from the traditional
patriarchal semiotic, has been characterized as "radical" or "cultural"
feminism, as distinct from "liberal" feminism, which seeks to develop
opportunities for female expression within the existing system. The third
general approach, "materialist" feminism, draws not so much upon
modern psychoanalytic theory, like radical feminism, but rather upon
modern cultural and political theory, particularly the various strains of
neo-Marxism represented by such performance and cultural theorists as
Antonio Gramsci, Louis Althusser, Raymond Williams, Walter Benjamin,
and Bertolt Brecht.29
Roland Barthes's relation of semiotics to the theories of Brecht in
1963 has already been mentioned as one of the first modern statements
applying semiotic theory to performance, but a quarter of a century
passed before this relationship was developed theoretically, this time by
feminist scholars. Brecht anticipated a semiotic approach, Barthes suggested,
by his view of the theatrical sign as part of an alterable system of
signification.30 Brecht's system, calling attention to the machinery of signification
and thus to the constructedness of the theatrical sign as well as
of the culture that produced it, hoped to bring his audience to realize that
both sign and culture were thus not natural and inevitable, but susceptible
to change. Materialist feminists were alerted to the applicability of
this insight to their own project of cultural change by a highly influential
1988 essay by Elin Diamond, "Brechtian Theory/Feminist Theory."31 Similarly
Janelle Reinelt, in her "Rethinking Brecht," from 1990, pointed out
that feminists could work "to interrupt and deconstruct the habitual performance
codes of the majority (male) culture," so as "to emphasize the
possibility of change, that things might be other."32 Sue-Ellen Case, in "Toward
a Butch-Femme Aesthetic" (1989) argued that lesbian performance
provided a particularly productive site for such subversion. Drawing
upon Jean Baudrillard's idea of "seduction" as a process of semiotics
rather than the natural order, Case argued that butch femme seduction is
not only "always located in semiosis," but transforms all presumed realities
"into semiotic play."33 A decade later, Mary Brewer's study, Race, Sex,
SEMIOTICS AND ITS HERITAGE
23
and Gender in Contemporary Women's Theatre (1999), announced as its basic
principle "that representation is a process of semiosis or meaning-making,"34
and proceeded with a nuanced semiotic materialist analysis of a
wide variety of performances in England and America involving the issues
of its title.
This significant shift toward materialist analysis in the later 198os
was by no means restricted to feminist performance theory, but could
also be found across the international spectrum of drama and performance
analysis. The shift in the semiotic heritage from sign systems to
the social context of signification during the 198os, noted, as we have
seen, by de Lauretis and De Marinis, resulted in a rich variety of new approaches
to theater analysis. The social and cultural contextualization of
dramatic texts, especially those of Shakespeare, became the major concern
of the American New Historicists, headed by Stephen Greenblatt,
and of the British cultural materialists, such as Alan Sinfield and Richard
Dollimore, who in turn influenced British gender and racial performance
studies such as Brewer's. In both America and England, the work done
by feminist theorists in exploring the gender codes inscribed in representation
served as a model for the gender studies of queer theorists and
for theorists interested in the relationship between performance, representation,
and ethnicity or social class. The role of performance and representation
in the construction of national identity, in intercultural contact,
and in colonialism and its aftereffects engaged theorists around the
world. Significantly, two of the European scholars who had become leaders
in the field of theater semiotics during the 198os, Patrice Pavis in
France and Erika Fischer-Lichte in Germany, turned their attention during
the following decade to the analysis of intercultural performance.
Pavis characterized his new concern as the placement of performance
texts "within contexts and cultures," seeking "to appreciate the cultural
production that stems from these unexpected transfers."35 Guillermo
G6mez-Pefa, one of the leading theorists and practitioners of performance
art in the late twentieth century, noted in the introduction to his
2000 study, Dangerous Border Crossings, that both his books and performances
were particularly concerned with "crossing extremely volatile
geographic and cultural borders."36 A leading American work of performance
theory of the 1990s, Joseph Roach's Cities of the Dead (1996), combines
a study of cultural contact with one of cultural memory as encoded
in performative practice. The convergence between performance studies
and the growing international interest in cultural studies emphasized
the importance of performance in establishing and questioning all sorts
of cultural and social spaces, from those involved with the formation of
individual identities, to those negotiating sites of ethnic, national, and
intercultural contact. Fittingly, this section of the present collection concludes
with a new essay by Josette Fdral, who like Pavis and others has
been centrally involved with semiotics and performance analysis
throughout the complex theoretical evolutions of the past quarter of a
century.
CRITICAL THEORY AND PERFORMANCE
24
NOTES
1. Sue-Ellen Case, Feminism and Theatre (New York: Methuen, 1988), 115.
2. Ferdinand de Saussure, Course in General Linguistics, trans. Wade Baskin
(London: Fontana, 1974), 15.
3. Roland Barthes, Critical Essays, trans. Richard Howard (Evanston, Ill.:
Northwestern University Press, 1972), 261-62.
4. Roland Barthes, Elements of Semiology, trans. Annette Lavers and Colin
Smith (London: Jonathan Cape, 1967), 9.
5. Patrice Pavis, Languages of the Stage, trans. Susan Melrose et al. (New York:
PAJ Publications, 1982).
6. Collected in Patrice Pavis, Marivaux a l'dpreuve de la scene (Paris: Sorbonne,
1986).
7. Andre Helbo, Thedtre: Modes d'approache (Brussels: Editions Labor, 1987).
8. Una Chaudhuri, No Man's Stage (Ann Arbor, Mich.: UMI, 1986).
9. Quoted in Ricard Salvat, El teatro de los afios 70 (Barcelona: Ediciones Peninsula,
1974), 261.
10. Jean-Francois Lyotard, Des dispositifs pulsionnels (Paris: Union gendrale
d'editions, 1973), 96.
11. Josette Feral, "Performance and Theatricality," Modern Drama 25, no. 1
(1982): 178.
12. Michael Kirby, "Nonsemiotic Performance," Modern Drama 25, no. 1 (1982):
110.
13. Herbert Blau, "Universals of Performance; or, Amortizing Play," Sub-stance
37-38 (1983): 143.
14. Bert O. States, Great Reckonings in Little Rooms (Berkeley and Los Angeles:
University of California Press, 1985).
15. Andre Helbo, Les mots et les gestes (Lille: Presses Universitaires, 1983), 49-50.
16. Jean Alter, A Sociosemiotic Theory of Theatre (Philadelphia: University of
Pennsylvania, 1990), 32.
17. Teresa de Lauretis, Alice Doesn't: Feminism, Semiotics, Cinema (London: Macmillan,
1984), 167.
18. Marco De Marinis, "Semiotica del teatro: Una disciplina al bivio?" Versus
34 (January-April 1983): 125-28.
19. Jan Mukafovsky, Kapital aus der Aesthetik (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp,
1946), 97.
20. Charles Peirce, Collected Papers (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 1931-58), Vol. 2, 247.
21. Alter, Sociosemiotic Theory of Theatre, 32.
22. Case, Feminism and Theatre, 117. See also Jill Dolan, The Feminist Spectator as
Critic (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1988).
23. E. Ann Kaplan, Women and Film (New York: Methuen, 1983); Kaja Silverman,
The Subject of Semiotics (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983); de Lauretis,
Alice Doesn't.
24. De Lauretis, Alice Doesn't, 5.
25. Case, Feminism and Theatre, 12o.
26. Linda Walsh Jenkins, "Locating the Language of Gender Experience,"
Women and Performance Journal 2, no. 1 (1984): 6.
27. Josette F~ral, "Writing and Displacement: Women in Theatre," trans. Barbara
Kerslake, Modern Drama 27, no. 4 (1984): 550-60.
SEMIOTICS AND ITS HERITAGE
28. Peggy Phelan, Unmarked: The Politics of Performance (London: Routledge,
1993), 10.
29. Most books on feminism and theater, headed by Case and Dolan, offer
some variation of these three categories. They were apparently first proposed and
discussed by Alison M. Jagger in her Feminist Politics and Human Nature (Totowa,
N.J.: Rowman and Allanheld, 1983).
30. Barthes, Critical Essays, 263.
31. Elin Diamond, "Brechtian Theory/Feminist Theory: Toward a Gestic Feminist
Criticism," TDR 32 (Spring 1988): 30-36.
32. Janelle G. Reinelt, "Rethinking Brecht: Deconstruction, Feminism, and the
Politics of Form," Brecht Yearbook 15 (1990): 99.
33. Sue-Ellen Case, "Toward a Butch-Femme Aesthetic," in Making a Spectacle:
Feminist Essays on Contemporary Women's Theatre, ed. Lynda Hart (Ann Arbor: University
of Michigan Press, 1989), 295, 297.
34. Mary Brewer, Race, Sex, and Gender in Contemporary Women's Theatre (Brighton:
Sussex Academic Press, 1999), 1-2.
35. Patrice Pavis, Theatre at the Crossroads of Culture, trans. Loren Kruger (London:
Routledge, 1992), 2. See also Erika Fischer-Lichte, ed., The Dramatic Touch of
Difference: Theater, Own and Foreign (Tiibingen: D. Kolesch, 1990).
36. Guillermo G6mez-Pefia, Dangerous Border Crossings (London: Routledge,
2000), 7.
The Phenomenological Attitude
Bert 0. States
All things exist as they are perceived: at least in relation to the
percipient.... But poetry defeats the curse which binds us to be
subjected to the accident of surrounding impressions. And whether
it spreads its own figured curtain, or withdraws life's dark veil from
before the scene of things, it equally creates for us a being within our
being. It makes us the inhabitants of a world to which the familiar
world is a chaos. It reproduces the common universe of which we
are portions and percipients, and it purges from our inward sight
the film of familiarity which obscures from us the wonder of our
being. It compels us to feel that which we perceive, and to imagine
that which we know. It creates anew the universe, after it has been
annihilated in our minds by the recurrence of impressions blunted
by reiteration.
-Percy Bysshe Shelley, A Defense of Poetry
This passage becomes less dated when you consider that it was written
nearly a century before Victor Shklovsky's attempt to align the method of
criticism and the function of art in the now famous concept of perceptual
"defamiliarization."1 If anything, Shelley's language is even more "phenomenological"
than Shklovsky's, but what we learn from Shelley is that
a phenomenological attitude toward the world (or what Husserl calls the
"phenomenological standpoint") does not depend on knowing the "science"
of phenomenology. It is rather an ability to see through "the film of
familiarity" that blunts "the scene of things" through its reiteration. Those
in whom this attitude "exists to excess," Shelley goes on, are called poets;
but they might also be called critics. Indeed, they could be any "inhabitants"
of the world who have a natural gift for the epoche, or the capacity
to put into perceptual brackets "the accident of surrounding impressions"
and to see what phenomenologists call "the things themselves." So right
off, when we speak of criticism in the phenomenological mode, we are referring
less to a relentless methodology or a deep philosophical concern
for the nature of consciousness than to an attitude that manifests itself with
varying degrees of purity and one that may come and go in a given exercise
as critical objectives change. It would be nice if we had a less pretentious
(or at least shorter) term for this kind of commentary, if only to avoid
hints of "scientific" aspiration, but the best I have been able to manage is
neoimpressionism, and that opens even more embarrassing risks in an age
that seems bent on exposing the myth of a reliable self.
Nevertheless, phenomenological criticism is a form of impressionism-or,
as Maurice Natanson calls it, "methodological solipsism."2 It is
some comfort to add, however, that the impressionists were very good
painters of phenomena, in the strict sense of that word. In their own way
26
THE PHENOMENOLOGICAL ATTITUDE
27
they were painting a perceptual critique of the real world, much as the
critic of theater might try to show that the world of a play is opaque, geometrical,
primordial, dense, sparse, and so on. To close the circle, criticism
derived from the phenomenological attitude is highly mimetic in its methodology.
That is, owing to the nature of its project, phenomenological criticism-like
phenomenology itself-tends to rely strongly on some variation
of figural description, or "proof" by metaphor. On this account it is
probably the most personal form of critical commentary and hence is a
useful counterbalance to the increasingly impersonal methodology in so
much of today's criticism.
I am not implying that we should all run out and buy a pair of
philosopher's brackets; but if one were looking for an alternative to the
radical skepticism of deconstruction and postmodernism-its "uninhibited
questioning of everything," as Eugene Goodheart puts it3-one can find it
most readily in the phenomenological attitude that uninhibitedly accepts
everything it sees. Indeed, the aim of phenomenological criticism seems to
be the reverse of the aim of deconstruction in that it seeks, as Mikel
Dufrenne puts it, "the-being-at-the-end-of-oppositions in which idea and
thing, subject and object, noesis and noema, are dialectically united."4 It is
no contradiction of this claim to add that deconstructive philosophy is intimately
connected with the phenomenological movement (especially with
Heidegger and Husserl) as to basic questions of being, meaning, and consciousness.
I am referring mainly to the practice of deconstruction as it descends
from philosophy into criticism-the species we encounter regularly
in our journals (sometimes without a single mention of the D-word) where
the aim is to show the paradox of presumed identity, the retreat of meaning
before the finger of definition, or to demonstrate how a text "has already
dismantled itself" before the critic arrives.5 Phenomenological criticism,
however, posits a stopping place, as it were, at the starting place, not
of all possible meanings but of meaning and feeling as they arise in a direct
encounter with the art object. A phenomenological approach offers a critique
of what cosmological physics might call "the first four seconds" of
the perceptual explosion. It is beside the point to claim that the first four
seconds are always tainted by a lifetime of perceptual habit within a narrow
cultural frame. It is only the moment of absorption that counts; what
conditions the moment and what follows it are somebody else's business.
I am not using the expression "first four seconds" in a strict durational
sense, as the physicist might speak, however literally or loosely, of
the first four seconds of the "Big Bang." I intend it as referring to the "moment"-soon
or late-in which an object or an image establishes itself in
our perception as something, as Shelley puts it, that "creates for us a being
within our being [and] compels us to feel that which we perceive." Such
an experience is commonly delayed or prevented by all sorts of everyday
significations that attend the appearance of any object or image. Moreover,
it is one thing to have such an experience (when one has it), another
to know what to do with it from an analytical standpoint. It turns out to
be an immensely complex problem.
CRITICAL THEORY AND PERFORMANCE
28
Adolf Reinach, for example, a student of Husserl, is said to have devoted
an entire semester studying the ways in which one experiences a
mailbox.6 This makes a nice joke on the philosopher, but there is more to
a mailbox than meets the eye. No matter how much you fondle it, study
it, turn it this way or that, or walk around it, a mailbox will always look
you straight in the face, like a cat that won't let you get behind it. Most
people aren't bothered by this problem, but the fact that you can never see
all of a mailbox raises the imponderable question of the frontality of
everything in the world before the eye of consciousness. This is the foundational
problem of phenomenology. For this frontal quality of all experience,
as Husserl says, is what keeps the world from being all me:7 if I could
see all sides of a mailbox at once, if I could perceive its interior, its composition,
its angles and curves, its materiality, its field of world relationships,
its functions, its vicissitudes, its history, and its deterioration in one
grand cubistic glance, in what sense can it be said to be exterior to me, of
the world rather than of myself? Such "vision" could only occur at what
we may safely call the "Divine Standpoint." Moreover, if inside the mailbox
we should discover a letter written by God containing a definitive description
of all that a phenomenologist could possibly-ideally-want to
know about a mailbox, we would be no better off because language itself
contains an even more virulent form of frontality. In this frontality we perceive
one word or phrase at a time and the rest hides or slides into a
"backside" along with the mailbox we are ignoring as we read the divine
description of what a mailbox is.
In one way or another this problem takes us to the base of all our concerns
with the problematics of meaning: the central terms of our critical
discourse-presence, representation, repetition, deferral, difference, aporia, supplementation,
referentiality, indetermination-can be treated as variations on
the principle of frontality. For frontality is not simply the perception of the
surface facing us; it carries with it what Husserl calls the "apperception" of
the rest of the object that is, in "a kind of" way, "co-present" even though
unseen: "what is there perceptually motivates [belief in] something else
being there too."8
It is easy to see why phenomenologists are drawn to the theater metaphor
so often. In what other art form is the frontality of experience more
amply demonstrated? In what other art form do we apperceive so much
rotundity in what we merely perceive ("the vasty fields of France," etc.)?
Before the world, Sartre says, we are as spectators at a play.9 Moreover,
theater is the paradigmatic place for the display of the drama of presence
and absence; for theater, unlike the mailbox, produces its effect precisely
through a deliberate collaboration between its frontside ("on" stage) and
its backside ("off") whereby anticipation is created through acts of entrance
and exit (the recoil of the world beyond), and finally between the
frontside illusion (character and scene) and the backside reality (the actor,
the unseen stage brace that "props" up the illusion). Beyond all this, theatergoing
in itself is a kind of bracketing, or epoche, in which we willingly,
if not involuntarily, suspend our belief in the empirical world and attend
THE PHENOMENOLOGICAL ATTITUDE
29
to a half-reality already "reduced" by the premeditations and manipulations
of a series of prior and present artists. As a consequence, phenomenology
cannot look at a theater stage in the way that it looks at the simple
mailbox, which has no such illusionary pretentions (unless it is placed
on a stage). What is required, then, is still another suspension that does
not cancel the first or throw us altogether out of the illusion into reality,
or throw reality altogether out of the illusion, but brackets what each
would convey exclusively and retains as "co-present" both what we
have consented to disbelieve (reality) and the belief we have temporarily
"willed" in its place (the illusion). Merleau-Ponty suggests that the modern
phenomenologist/painter strives to show "how the world becomes
world";10 the phenomenological critic strives to show how theater becomes
theater-that is, how theater throws up the pretense that it is another
kind of reality than the one constituting the ground on which its
pretense is based.
We see this most clearly in stage scenery. If one looks at the stage setting
in the spell of the epoche, one sees that it is the means of creating the
illusion that there is no scenery there but only a world, a reality (of sorts).
Scenery comes into existence in order to deny that it exists-a duplicity at
the heart of carpentry. You may ask: isn't this really a description of naturalistic
scenery? What about stylized scenery? obvious scenery? scenery
in which trees and chairs are played by actors? It really makes no difference.
Even in these forms, in calling attention to itself, in seeming to say,
"I exist. I am nothing but scenery!" scenery is lying, or speaking with the
permission of the mimesis. Even in Brecht's tacky world where scenery
deliberately remains scenery ("built to last three hours"), it is nevertheless
fabricated in such a way that its fabrication constitutes the illusion. "It
must be clear that the play is taking place in a theater," the designer may
have said to the carpenters. "Make the scenery look like badly designed
scenery." Whereupon the carpenters labor skillfully to bring about this
slapdash failure, this nondisguise of bad art, this backside become
frontside, this absence become presence, of which the newspaper critic
(with luck) will write, "Y's settings are brilliantly conceived to produce
the illusion that the play is taking place in a theater."
The epoch (roughly synonymous with bracketing and reduction)
bears some resemblance to Michelangelo's notion that the sculptor releases
the statue from the stone in which it is imprisoned. That is, in order
to appear as an essence that has its "being within our being," as Shelley
says, the phenomenon must be released from its perceptual bondage in
the "natural" world-or, indeed, from its collaboration with other phenomena
in the same theatrical illusion. Since the case of stage scenery is a
relatively simple one, let us apply the idea to one of the most immaterial,
yet fundamental, phenomena in the theater experience: our perception of
character. Is it possible to isolate an entity called character, the behavioral
essence that characters in a play are said to possess? Immediately, we are
faced with a perceptual problem expressed most succinctly in Henry
James's famous definition of character and incident: "What is character
CRITICAL THEORY AND PERFORMANCE
30
but the determination of incident? What is incident but the illustration of
character?"11 So there is character, seemingly linked to incident (action) as
indissolubly as Escher's swimming fish are linked to the birds flying
"through" them. And the problem is complicated still further by the fact
that the character is being played by an actor who is not the character but
who forms the entire perceptual ground from which any such essence as
character can appear.
So, if we are supposedly perceiving character as a persistent essence
in individual behavior, in what way can we say that it is distinct from the
person of the actor? How can we know it? How do we feel its being? Is its
persistence not the simple persistence of, say, Olivier playing Othello? Finally,
there is the problem that any character seems to undergo changes as
the incidents lead to different moods and the display of different traits. As
we say, character "develops." So what is it in the character phenomenon
that persists? If character changes with every scene, or within single
scenes, or even constantly, where do the eye and ear get the notion that
something called character is iterating itself, always being itself, in this
chaos of different and differing phenomena in the stage world?
I set up these resistances in the spirit of the epoch itself, for they are
the kinds of things that must be chiseled away, or bracketed, before we
can release the "figure" of character from the overall illusion and determine
that there is, indeed, an aspect of Othello that cannot be charged exclusively
to Olivier's personal persistence and something that is phenomenally
distinct from incident and survives all changes and so-called
development.
Othello's character is not my topic here, but, if one were pursuing an
essense of Othello, it would be found through Husserl's principle of copresence.
Or, to paraphrase another phenomenologist, the presence of one
"side" of Othello in a given scene, and the absence of all the other "sides"
of the Othello of previous scenes, "are what becomes present."12 If Othello's
character accumulates ("changing" as it goes), it is accumulating according
to an Othello "law" determined, in the first place, by Shakespeare's sense
of consistency in his creation and, in the second place, by Olivier's interpretation
of that consistency. As for Olivier lending his visible "weight" to
Othello's invisible character, this is obviously a strong factor: Othello's
character would be very different were John Gielgud playing him. But
then Olivier's actor-character would be very different if he were playing
Hamlet rather than Othello. In any event there is an essence of Othello on
the stage at all times that never changes or at least never violates an invisibly
circumscribed field of behavioral potentiality. (Othello, for example,
would never-like Hamlet-wonder how long a man might lie in the
earth ere he rot; nor would Othello "scan" his vengeance so scrupulously.)
Othello is always a formation of presence and absence; his character is
never absent or present in the way that one of his traits (say, anger) is present
or absent. Othello's character may be likened to a sphere revolving in
space: it may reveal different sides or features as it turns, but it always remains
the same sphere, it always continues around "the backside."
THE PHENOMENOLOGICAL ATTITUDE
31
You may well ask what one can do with such information. Isn't it finally
rather obvious? Indeed it is. Phenomenology, as Bruce Wilshire says,
"is the systematic attempt to unmask the obvious."13 Like Shelley's idea
of poetry, phenomenology is an effort to recover what in our experience
has been "annihilated . . . by reiteration." In order to gain a systematic
idea of how theater affects us, we need (among other things) an awareness
of character essence and the contribution of its persistence to the
stream of radically changing events we call a plot. This is one of the basic
tensions through which theater becomes theater. Still, it is only one kind
of phenomenological problem. Another might involve an examination of
character as a perceptual locus of "hidden" cultural assumptions. It
would be interesting, for example, to conduct a comparative phenomenology
of different kinds of character essense (Greek, Shakespearean,
Restoration, "psychological," naturalistic); or, to put it another way, what
were playwrights in a given period making character of (what is its
DNA?) that may have been beneath their own awareness? Such findings
might serve very well in the context of New Historical criticism, which itself
involves a seeing of what absences may be co-present in artifacts we
have heretofore regarded as things that are entirely present to the eye.
I want to turn now to the question of how one recognizes a phenomenological
description. Earlier I said that the phenomenological attitude
might be present in almost any critical exercise. Reader-response criticism,
for example, has a heavily phenomenological bent insofar as it is
concerned with the transaction between consciousness and text. I detect it
less often in semiotic discourse, but this may be a judgment based on my
sampling of semiotic literature. In any case Umberto Eco's description of
the complementarity of semiotic and phenomenological practice offers a
useful way of sorting the differences:
A rereading.., of Husserl's discussions might induce us to state that
semiotic meaning is simply the socialized codification of a perceptual
experience which the phenomenological epoche should restore
to us in its original form .... Phenomenology undertakes to rebuild
from the beginning the conditions necessary for the formation of
cultural units which semiotics instead accepts as data because communication
functions on the basis of them. The phenomenological
epoche would therefore refer perception back to a stage where referents
are no longer confronted as explicit messages but as extremely
ambiguous texts akin to aesthetic ones.14
This is hardly a denial that semiotics may adopt the phenomenological attitude
for its own purposes. Indeed, Keir Elam argues that "any semiotics
worthy of the name ... is eminently phenomenological, and the reverse
may well also be true."'5 The degree of truth in this statement would depend
on where one draws the line between semiotics and phenomenology.
It is my sense that as long as semiotics holds the notion that all things (on
a stage, for example) can be fully treated as signs-that is, as transparent
CRITICAL THEORY AND PERFORMANCE
32
codes of socialized meaning-it cannot adopt the phenomenological attitude
in any "eminent" way. Husserl is quite plain on this point: "The spatial
thing which we see is. . . perceived, we are consciously aware of it as
given in its embodied form. We are not given an image or a sign in its place.
We must not substitute the consciousness of a sign or an image for a perception."16
Of course, Husserl is not talking here about perception as it occurs
in the theater where we are confronted by images and signs. But in the
theater something is also itself as well; we can always (if we choose) see an
object on a stage as we see, say, a bird in a feeder, and, though the bird in
the feeder may be a sign of spring, it is not the sign of a bird. More complexly,
however, in the theater we see an object in its "embodied form" as
having a double aspect, one of which is significative, the other (like the
bird) self-given; and when we treat one of these aspects to the exclusion of
the other-it doesn't matter which-we are not taking a phenomenological
attitude toward what has been intentionally set before us on the stage.
At a play Dufrenne says, "I do not posit the real as real, because there is
also the unreal which this real designates; I do not posit the unreal as unreal,
because there is also the real which promotes and supports this unreal."17
Phenomenology occurs in the "seam" between these two faces of
the object.
Still, in principle, Elam is right. There is no reason that the phenomenological
and the semiotic attitudes cannot compatibly blend into each
other. Let me cite a passage from Patrice Pavis's Languages of the Stage that
will illustrate what I take to be a fusion of semiotic-in this case, semiological-and
phenomenological interests. Here is Pavis explaining why
the mime's "universe of gesture is [only] contaminated" by the spoken
word:
When the body tries to say too much, and with too much wit, the
body is "talkative," overstated by an overly precise story and
discourse.
The mime should therefore be left alone, and his only dialogue
should be the one established between what he does and what he
does not do, between normative gestures and their poetic deviation:
the comparison between two universes of differing coherence and
modality, between our immobility and the limits of our body, and
his movements and original mode of existence creates the dialogue
in the spectator.
But this dialogue is only initiated-with Amiel as with all mimes
when the body begins to unfold, tears itself from inert matter and
sketches in a narrative.18
The topic here is "the discourse of the mime" and how we "read" the sequence
of mime gestures. Hence we find words like modality, gestural narrativity,
framing, segmentations of gesture, codification, and so on, which belong
to "the discourse" of semiotics and semiology. But it seems to me
that descriptive methods of semiology and phenomenology are almost
THE PHENOMENOLOGICAL ATTITUDE
33
equally in evidence in this passage: discourse could easily be replaced by
presence or appearance, or, in Pavis's own words, the "original mode of existence"
of the mime-the essence of the mime, to invoke the classical
phenomenological term. Here the body of the mime appears before me in
all of the economy and purity of gesture that results from the mime's selfdeprivation
of an audible voice. Through Pavis's description I sense exactly
why the power of the mime rests in the "dialogue between what he
does and what he does not do"-in brief, between what is present and
what is absent.
I suspect I knew all this already, and it is certainly "obvious" to me
now. The point is that I didn't know I knew it, and there is all the value of
such a description. What is obvious is also what is transparent and therefore
unseen-like a dead metaphor or, to invoke Brecht's example, like the
face of the watch on your wrist. And the peculiar effect of the phenomenological
statement is that of discovering something in the backyard of
your memory that has somehow bypassed awareness-"Sight,"
Bachelard says, "says too many things at one time"19-or has got there
without being consciously processed as a "datum" of experience. It is at
once forgotten and remembered. I take the passage, then, to be (whatever
else it is) an example of phenomenological reduction because it puts on
hold all codes of communication, all referentiality in the content of the
mime's narrative, in order to "rebuild from the beginning," as Eco says,
the primordial form of the mime's body. The mime has not yet become a
"sign" or a "cultural unit"; he or she is simply the realization of a certain
potential in human expressiveness.
Roland Barthes's project in Mythologies is to write a semiology of the
bourgeois world by analyzing the language of its myths. Myth is a "pure
ideographic system" that steals its meanings from one order of signification
and plants them surreptitiously in another. The delicacy of Barthes's
semiological problem in these essays-tracing a myth back to its origins
in a "first language"-requires that the invisible be made visible, since the
myth (plastic, steak and chips, ornamental cooking) is exactly what we
cannot see because we are too busy living it. Here is where he calls upon
the phenomenological eye. Barthes has always been a closet phenomenologist.20
He cannot resist the lure of the "absolute," the pursuit of the
essence of the culturally disguised thing, until he corners it and it turns
and faces him openly. Here he is-semiologist, phenomenologist (who
could possibly sort out the voices?)-tracking the essence of Greta
Garbo's face in order to tell us why we have "deified" it:
It is indeed an admirable face-object. In Queen Christina, . . . the
make-up has the snowy thickness of a mask: it is not a painted face,
but one set in plaster, protected by the surface of the colour, not by
its lineaments. Amid all this snow at once fragile and compact, the
eyes alone, black like strange soft flesh, but not in the least expressive,
are two faintly tremulous wounds. In spite of its extreme
beauty, this face, not drawn but sculpted in something smooth and
CRITICAL THEORY AND PERFORMANCE
34
friable, that is, at once perfect and ephemeral, comes to resemble the
flour-white complexion of Charlie Chaplin, the dark vegetation of
his eyes, his totem-like countenance.21
For me the most striking image in this passage is "the dark vegetation of
his eyes." This is its punctum, as Barthes would say, or the element "which
rises from the scene, shoots out of it like an arrow, and pierces me"22 (just
as the puntcum of the Pavis passage is: "the body begins to unfold, tears
itself from inert matter and sketches in a narrative"). Who has ever
thought of Chaplin's eyes in this way, yet who does not instantly see "the
connection"? Who does not a moment later see the connection between
Chaplin and Garbo as this dark vegetation drains, like intertextual
makeup, out of Chaplin's face into hers and thence into the whole granular
black white world of "early" film? But for a split second, before the
image begins giving in to these significations, one sees only something absolutely
new, and the response, as Baudelaire might say, is instantaneous
laughter in the soul. For on one of its levels this is a kind of pure joke, an
adventure in grotesque. And what is grotesque but the creation of a new
phenomenon, something without a history of signification or, rather (in
this case), something with two histories-eyes and vegetation-that have
been fused and abbreviated in a bridge of recognition, something both arbitrary
and right: arbitrary because it is an unanticipated confusion of
realms, right because the old Chaplin eyes that one has always overseen in
the ensemble of the famous face suddenly shoot out of the scene and
pierce you.
To claim these felicities of expression as the property of phenomenology
would be rather like claiming that a bird was yours because it flew into
your feeder. If anything, phenomenology and semiology borrow them
from the poet and the artist, and this is really the sense of my discussion.
The larger frame of Shelley's remark that poets possess a certain attitude
"in excess" is that poets are those who are able to observe "a certain
rhythm and order [in] natural objects," or "[ that] relation subsisting, first
between existence and perception, and secondly between perception and
expression." The poet's language, therefore, is "vitally metaphorical [in
that] it marks the before unapprehended relations of things and perpetuates
their apprehension." This sentiment can be found over and over in
the literature of phenomenology. Consider the simple statement that the
phenomenological attitude "is admittedly a difficult process to describe,
so Husserl used many different metaphors"23-beginning, incidentally,
with the three key metaphors (bracketing, reduction, and the epoche) that
form the basis of phenomenological method. Or again:
what usually happens is that the [phenomenologist] will project a
single imaginative variant, but one that is strategic, crucial, and usually
colorful, one that brings out a certain necessity in the thing we
wish to examine. It is not easy to capture the right imaginative vari-
THE PHENOMENOLOGICAL ATTITUDE
ant, to pick out the dramatic, vivid example that shows a necessity.
We need fantasy to do so. Thus we need imagination to be good at
philosophical analysis.24
In view of our interests here the term phenomenological can be
thought of as pertaining not to a subfield of philosophy or a scientific
movement but, instead, to the mode of thought and expression the mind
naturally adopts when questions relating to our awareness of being and
appearance arise. Thus defined, the mission of any form of phenomenological
critique is to describe what Cezanne called "the world's instant,"
by which we mean not simply a paintable instant but also any instant that
is perceptually "apprehended" as carrying, or leading to, an intuition
about what it is and what it is doing before our eyes. Thus phenomenology
is forced, through the sheer poverty of scientific language in the face of subjective
experience, to say (to itself and to its reader), "It is like this: the eyes
are [like] dark vegetation," or "The mime's body tears itself from inert matter."
For there is no other way to trap an essence in "frontal" expression,
since essence is not a kind of information or a "fact" of matter (like valence
or specific gravity) but, rather, a transaction between consciousness and the
thickness of existence, something that keeps on going around the back but
is also here as well. In the phenomenological sense essence, one may say, is
founded in a personification through which the world is invested with a
human consciousness: perception and object become synonymous. Thus
the impulse toward mimesis in phenomenological commentary, so noticeable
in Heidegger, Husserl, Merleau-Ponty, Sartre, and Bachelard, would
seem to be an attempt to forestall the retreat of the object into signification
(understood as its infinite cultural referentiality), to arrest it in a radical defamiliarization
that names without defining and pictures without limiting.
The essence is at once caught and freed, as it is in experience itself.
NOTES
1. See Victor Shklovsky, "Art as Technique," in Russian Formalist Criticism: Four
Essays, trans. Lee T. Lemon and Marion J. Reis (Lincoln: University of Nebraska
Press, 1965), 3-24. Robert Scholes calls attention to the similarity between the Shelley
passage and Shklovsky's concept of defamiliarization in Structuralism in Literature:
An Introduction (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1976), 174-75. Scholes is
interested in the structuralist parallel between Shelley and Shklovsky, whereas my
own interest is strictly phenomenological, though I trust it is apparent that I have
no desire to label either Shelley or Shklovsky as phenomenologists.
2. Maurice Natanson, "Solipsism and Sociality," New Literary History 5 (1974):
243.
3. Eugene Goodheart, The Failure of Criticism (Cambridge: Harvard University
Press, 1978), 14.
4. Mikel Dufrenne, The Phenomenology of Aesthetic Experience, trans. Edward S.
Casey, Albert A. Anderson, Willis Domingo, and Leon Jacobson (Evanston, Ill.:
Northwestern University Press, 1973), xlix.
CRITICAL THEORY AND PERFORMANCE
36
5. J. Hillis Miller, "Stevens' Rock and Criticism as Cure, II," Georgia Review 30
(1976): 341.
6. Hans-Georg Gadamer, Philosophical Hermeneutics, trans. David E. Linge
(Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1977), 133.
7. Edmund Husserl, Cartesian Meditations: An Introduction to Phenomenology,
trans. Dorion Cairns (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1960), 109.
8. Husserl, Cartesian Meditations, 109-10.
9. Jean-Paul Sartre, The Psychology of Imagination, trans. Bernard Frechtman
(New York: Washington Square Press, 1968), 82.
10. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Primacy of Perception and Other Essays on Phenomenological
Psychology, the Philosophy of Art, History and Politics, ed. James M.
Edie (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1964), 181.
11. Henry James, The Art of Fiction (New York: Oxford University Press, 1948),
13.
12. Robert Sokolowski, "The Theory of Phenomenological Description," in Descriptions,
ed. Don Ihde and Hugh J. Silverman (Albany: State University of New
York Press, 1985), 17. Sokolowski's statement reads: "If we focus on the present
and the absent as such, a new dimension becomes thematic for us. It is not the case
that this side is present and the other sides are absent, but rather [the present of
this side and the absence of those sides] are what becomes 'present.'"
13. Bruce Wilshire, Role Playing and Identity: The Limits of Theatre as Metaphor
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982), 11. Wilshire's book is a basic text
in the phenomenology of theater.
14. Umberto Eco, A Theory of Semiotics (Bloomington: Indiana University Press,
1979), 167.
15. Keir Elam, review of my Great Reckonings in Little Rooms, in Times Literary
Supplement, March 7, 1986, 250.
16. Edmund Husserl, Ideas: General Introduction to Pure Phenomenology, trans.
W. R. Boyce Gibson (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1952), 136.
17. Dufrenne, Phenomenology of Aesthetic Experience, lo.
18. Patrice Pavis, Languages of the Stage: Essays in the Semiology of Theatre (New
York: Performing Arts Journal Publications, 1983), 56.
19. Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, trans. Maria Jolas (Boston: Beacon
Press, 1969), 215.
20. "I am too much of a phenomenologist to like anything but appearances to
my own measure" (Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, trans.
Richard Howard [New York: Hill and Wang, 1981], 33).
21. Roland Barthes, Mythologies, trans. Annette Lavers (New York: Hill and
Wang, 1972), 56.
22. Barthes, Camera Lucida, 26.
23. David Stewart and Algis Mickunas, Exploring Phenomenology: A Guide to the
Field and its Literature (Chicago: American Library Association, 1974), 26.
24. Sokolowski, "Theory of Phenomenological Description," 23. For an excellent
overview of the role of metaphor in phenomenological description, see David Levin's
"The Poetic Function of Phenomenological Discourse," in Phenomenology in a
Pluralistic Context, ed. William L. McBride and Calvin O. Schrag (Albany: State University
of New York Press, 1983), 216-34. On the question of metaphor as description,
see George E. Yoos, "A Phenomenological Look at Metaphor," Philosophy and
Phenomenological Research 32 (1971): 78-88. On the more general matter of metaphor
as an aspect of philosophical language, see James M. Edie, Speaking and Meaning: The
Phenomenology of Language (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1976), 151-94.
Alceste in Hollywood: A Semiotic
Reading of The Misanthrope
Jim Carmody
A code cannot be destroyed, only "played off."
-Roland Barthes, "The Death of the Author"
Alceste, the familiar protagonist of Moliere's classic comedy Le Misanthrope,
is a quintessentially seventeenth-century Parisian creature, the product of a
culture far removed in time and space from contemporary Hollywood. Yet
Robert Falls's mise-en-scene of this play asks us to accept the proposition
that Alceste "belongs" in the Hollywood of 1989.1 The semiotics of this
transplantation, this translation, are the subjects of this essay.
There are, in this essay, at least two semiotic readings of Moliere's
script in play: Robert Falls's mise-en-scene and my own reconstruction of
that mise-en-scene.2 Furthermore, neither of these readings should be understood
as the work of a decontextualized subject. The "Robert Falls
mise-en-scene" emerges as the product of a collective effort to engage
with the signifying processes of Moliere's seventeenth-century theater,
the signifying processes of twentieth-century, not-for-profit, American
theater, and the ways in which those discursive practices combine dialectically
in the variety of subjectivities that constitute any group of artists
working on a common project.3 Similarly, this essay emerges from my
own dialectical engagement with the discursive practices already mentioned
as well as those of contemporary theater aesthetics and semiotics,
not to mention the institution of the American "research" university. Neither
this essay nor the Falls mise-en-scene can ultimately be understood
semiotically apart from the specific cultural realities in which they are embedded
and which they can be seen as embodying.
Although the basic theoretical foundations for the semiotic analysis
of mise-en-scene were established many decades ago, actual examples of
such analysis are remarkably rare.4 Indeed, there exists no general agreement
among theater semioticians as to how such an analysis ought to proceed
or even which kinds of semiotics are likely to produce the most fruitful
results. For the purposes of this essay, I have chosen to adopt what has
become a characteristic strategy of semiotics (as well as poststructuralism
in general) and concentrate on what traditional theater criticism might
consider marginal or relatively unessential signifiers of the Falls mise-enscene:
a piece of exercise equipment that remains partially invisible for
most of the performance, the final bow taken by the actress playing Cdlimene,
and an excerpt from the subscribers' newsletter at the Goodman
Theatre. Readings of these signifiers will, in turn, lead to considerations of
the cultural sign "Molire" and the semiotics of restaging classic texts in
the American theater.
37
Fig. 1. The Misanthrope, act 3, La Jolla Playhouse (1989). From left, Arsinoe and Celimene.
Photo credit: Jim Carmody.
Throughout the following discussion, it sbould be understood that I
am not arguing for a specific hierarchy of codes or of signs in this miseen-scene.
Falls has systematically refrained from providing a master code
(apart from suggesting that the spectator think in terms of analogies, a
suggestion I will discuss later); the spectator cannot find an indication of
what the "correct" interpretation might be (i.e., what the director wants
the spectator to think). Instead, the spectator is confronted by a number of
theatrical and cultural codes that continually collide, avoiding the kind of
resolution in an aesthetically and ideologically unified "work" that we
have been conditioned to anticipate in a classic comedy. Falls refuses to
synthesize these disparate codes; instead, he obliges us to read them
against each other and through each other. In this, Falls may be following
Brecht's advice with respect to the "separation of the elements" (which
many have recognized as one of the primary semiotic ideas of twentiethcentury
theater).
From 1666 Paris to 1989 Hollywood
An imposing piece of exercise equipment, a postmodern blending of Universal
weight machine and high-tech guillotine, stands close to center
stage in George Tsypin's creation of Celimene's Hollywood home. This
scenic element, with its wealth of bicultural signifieds, offers a provisional
entry into the complex semiotics of Robert Falls's 1989 mise-en-scene of
Moliere's 1666 play, The Misanthrope.
Although fully visible to the spectators for at most fifteen minutes,
38
ALCESTE IN HOLLYWOOD
39
the guillotine blade that "takes the place of" the expected counterweight
in the machine makes an unmistakable reference to the French Revolution
that ended the ancien regime, of which the early years of Louis XIV's reign
(the 166os) are the acknowledged cultural highlight. Moliere's Le Misanthrope
is among the celebrated masterworks of that grand siecle-indeed,
the play is commonly regarded as the paradigmatic French classical comedy.
Tsypin's visual reference to the French Revolution is reinforced when
Arsinoe pulls one of the wires on the machine to send the blade racing
dangerously down toward Celimene, who is reclining on the bench.
The guillotine blade can also be read in the context of the cultural
codes of "Southern California" or, more specifically, the "Hollywood"
community. The oversize weight machine in Celimene's dressing room is
no mere decoration. This Celimene works hard to stay in shape and enjoys
displaying her well-toned body to Alceste and the others in her circle.
Celimene wears a different costume each time she makes an entrance, and
in many scenes she appears to move from one consciously adopted pose
to another, a behavior that most of the other characters manifest to a lesser
degree. These frequent changes of costume and even more frequent
changes of pose emphasize the extent to which the sociosexual economies
of this microcosm privilege display as the currency of their power exchanges.
Celimene enters for her workout dressed in a stretch-nylon,
black workout combination with pink trim, carrying a white gym towel
and a bottle of Evian mineral water (a sign that invokes both Frenchness
and Southern California "health consciousness").5
The La Jolla audience usually greeted this first entrance with a laugh
of recognition, anticipating the customary satirical comment on the California
"fitness lifestyle." But no such comment is made in this scene. Instead,
the presence of the exercise-guillotine machine provides an ironic
frame for the bitter dispute between Celimene and Arsinoe by drawing
our attention to the ways in which notions of aging and physical attractiveness
serve as the axis of dissension between the two "friends." The
presence of the guillotine suggests that the physical effort of staying in
shape is only one negative aspect of the endless search for attractiveness
and of the equally endless competition for attention that characterizes the
Hollywood milieu as its codes of conduct emerge in this production.
I begin this discussion of the Falls production by focusing on the exercise-guillotine
machine, even though the distinctive contour of the guillotine
blade remains invisible to the audience until the machine is moved
into place for Celimene's exercise session (Moliere's Misanthrope 3.4). Following
the intermission, which is taken at the end of act 3, the guillotine
blade is turned perpendicular to the proscenium line and becomes once
again invisible for the final two acts. This very invisibility, however, becomes
significant during the coda that Falls stages following the final exit
of Philinte and Eliante, which traditionally marks the conclusion of the
play. Immediately following that exit, C6limine returns to the stage, once
again dressed in workout clothing, carrying a small white towel and a
portable tape deck. She lays her towel on the bench, pushes the play button
CRITICAL THEORY AND PERFORMANCE
40
on her tape deck, lies on her back, raises her knees, reaches up for the hand
rings, and begins to exercise by raising and lowering the weight/ guillotine
blade. She is working hard, and her exhalations are audible over the music.
Now that the exercise machine appears only in profile, the spectator can
see that the blade of the guillotine is precisely aligned with Celimene's
neck. As the lights fade, we watch Celimene work at what appears to be the
Sisyphean task of "saving her neck" from the blade.
Falls's mise-en-scene of The Misanthrope resolves on Celimene's response
to the events of the play. Indeed, the mise-en-scene encourages the
spectator to shift focus from Alceste, the title character and the spectator's
presumed center of orientation, to Celimene. Falls echoes this emphasis
on Celimene in the curtain call when Kim Cattrall (Celimene) steps forward
to take a final solo bow. In Moliere's text, Philinte has the final line,
a line that directs our attention to Alceste, who, we presume, is already en
route to the desert refuge of his choice. This focus on Celimene, however,
like the image of the guillotine, invites us to reread the mise-en-scene
from a perspective that is quite different from that urged on us by Moliere's
own dramaturgy and the history of its reception.
More than three centuries of accumulated commentary have read The
Misanthrope as a play about its protagonist, Alceste, the amoreux atrabilaire
who is named in the play's title. The fact that Moliere himself played the
part of Alceste and the assumption (dating from the time of the first production)
that Celimene was a fictionalized version of his wife, Armande,
have been taken as "proof" of the author's intention-that the play should
express his (Moliere's) criticisms of his contemporaries' (particularly his
own wife's) social behavior. Indeed, this titillating blend of the real with the
fictional has undoubtedly been a factor in the play's popularity over the
centuries and has added a layer to its acquired meaning (both the La Jolla
Playhouse and Goodman Theatre programs reminded the spectators of the
play's autobiographical nature). Of course, all classic texts accumulate significance
over time as the endless cycles of interpretation create a complex
web of intertexts that all contemporary readings inevitably confront. Robert
Falls's reading of The Misanthrope, as embodied in his mise-en-scene,
must therefore be seen not only as a reading of Moliere's script but also as
a reading of the traditions of understanding that have become attached to
it during three and a half centuries of readings and performances.
Theatrical Coding and Local Semiosis
A consideration of Celimene/Kim Cattrall's final bow offers a particularly
useful example of the ways in which Robert Falls stages collisions between
a variety of codes as a way of provoking the spectator to work at
his or her own reading of the many signifiers deployed in this mise-enschne.
Indeed, what emerges as the decisive strategy of this mise-en-schne
is Falls's insistence on not resolving tensions that arise from the juxtaposition
of theatrical and cultural codes whose differences are more apparent
than their similarities. Seen in this light, the mise-en-schne (including
ALCESTE IN HOLLYWOOD
41
the exercise-guillotine machine as well as the final bow of the actress playing
Celimene, which I have taken as emblematic of the production as a
whole) can best be understood as the kind of text described by Roland
Barthes in his celebrated essay "The Death of the Author":
A text is not a line of words releasing a single "theological" meaning
(the "message" of the Author-God) but a multi-dimensional space in
which a variety of writings, none of them original, blend and clash.
The text is a tissue of quotations drawn from.., many cultures and
entering into mutual relations of dialogue, parody, contestation, but
there is one place where this multiplicity is focused and that place is
the reader, not, as was hitherto said, the author.6
Thus, the final bow, like the entire text of the mise-en-scene, should be understood
as a site of "contestation" where the individual spectator contends
with the "tissue of quotations" assembled for these performances of
The Misanthrope. Only the individual spectator can construct, from this
"variety of writings," the final, subjective significance of this theatrical
event.
I have pointed out that Kim Cattrall is the only performer who takes
a solo bow, which I have interpreted as manifesting the director's desire to
position Celimene as the focal figure in his mise-en-scene. But Falls's desire
to reconfigure Moliere's dramaturgy by decentering Alceste cannot, in
itself, account for the way in which the bow itself is performed. Cattrall
steps forward in the usual manner from the line of actors to take her solo
bow, and the spectator may respond to this movement by reading it as the
customary acknowledgment of the "star" performer's special contribution.
The bow itself, however, blends a traditional deep curtsy with a flexing
of both biceps in a gesture of exultant triumph. The flexing of biceps
immediately calls attention to itself by invoking the range of metaphors
suggested by the presence of the exercise-guillotine machine throughout
the play (the actress takes her curtain call wearing the same workout costume
she wears in the coda). Furthermore, this gesture of triumph seems
to run counter to the implications of the final sequence in which we see
Celimene struggling with the guillotine blade of her exercise machine.
Upon further reflection, however, the bow calls to mind an even more
complex series of questions: Should the spectator assume that this bow indicates
that Celimene emerges unchastened from the multiple rejections
she suffers during act 4? If so, how should the spectator understand, in retrospect,
Celimene's social behavior throughout acts 1 through 4? If Celimene
remains unchastened and unrepentant, should the spectator understand
the triumphant bow as a challenge to the traditional reading of the
play? Or should the spectator read this final sign as "the-film-actress-fromHollywood"
claiming a victory for her character when nothing in the rest
of the play suggests that one was earned?
The bow invokes a number of theatrical and cultural codes simultaneously:
the suggestions of traditional femininity conveyed by the "classical"
Fig. 2. The Misanthrope, act 2, La Jolla Playhouse (1989). From left, Celimene and Alceste.
Photo credit: Jim Carmody.
decorum of the "leading lady's" bow are contested by (but, interestingly
enough, not replaced by) a flexing of the biceps, which proposes a contemporary
celebration of the athleticized female body. In this final moment of
the mise-en-scene, when the code of classical theater (our received notions
of how The Misanthrope "should" be performed) is subverted for the last
time, two representations of the female emerge in/from the body of the
same actress. Since spectators' personal ideologies frame their readings of
all aspects of a mise-en-scene, each individual will either privilege the "classic"
misogynist representation of this character that our culture has inherited
from literary and theatrical history or will privilege the representation
of a contemporary autonomous woman. To put it more bluntly, the spectator
can choose to see Celimene from the perspective of Alceste or to see Alceste
from the perspective of Celimene. (It is interesting to note how audiences
usually greeted Alceste's final invitation to Celimene to share his
desert life with an explosion of derisory laughter.)
Mise-en-Scene and the Classic Text
Questions such as these, however, cannot be considered in isolation, as
this mise-en-scene participates in a long tradition of restaging texts that
belong to the canon of acknowledged dramatic masterpieces. Like all
other such mise-en-scenes, the Falls production of The Misanthrope generates
much of its significance by responding to that tradition of critical and
theatrical interpretation in certain ways. Three hundred and twenty-three
years and formidable linguistic and cultural differences separate the first
42
ALCESTE IN HOLLYWOOD
43
production of Le Misanthrope from Robert Falls's adaptation of Neil Bartlett's
translation.7 In the period from 1666 to 1989, the play acquired and
shed layer upon layer of accumulated commentary, performance traditions,
and translations. Many of these layers remain both accessible and
influential. Indeed, from a semiotic perspective, the play known as The
Misanthrope is, for all practical purposes, absolutely indistinguishable
from the many layers of interpretation and ranges of signification that
have become attached to it over time, which is another way of saying that
the play is what we familiarly term a classic. Falls's adaptation and miseen-scene
of Bartlett's "version" of Le Misanthrope can be read as a response
to the tradition of restaging classic texts as well as to the dramaturgy of
an individual text by Moliere. It can also be read as an exploration of a
range of problems that Marvin Carlson has discussed in the context of
what he calls "local semiosis."8 Using the theories of Clifford Geertz as a
point of departure, Carlson asserts that the creative process "must inevitably
be conditioned by the artistic tools of the artist's own culture and
by the ways that culture defines and interprets artistic artifacts . . . Such
a view. . . is surely a useful corrective to the naive assumption that such
a work makes . . . a specific 'aesthetic' statement, the same for all audiences,
whatever their cultural background."9
In Onstage, the Goodman Theatre's subscriber newsletter, Falls
writes about his approach to the problem of local semiosis:
The world of Alceste and Celimene-the world of the intrigue and
backbiting of Louis XIV's court-is a world that's turned up again
and again in countless forms in the centuries since. I'd heard of other
productions that had set the play just before the French Revolution,
in the 1920s, in the 1930s... but I knew immediately that I was going
to set the play in 1989 in the Hollywood Hills.
I've always had a love-hate relationship with Hollywood....
There's no doubt in my mind that the world of agents, actors,
screenwriters and producers provides a perfect modern analogue to
Moliere's world.
From that core idea came . . . the design of the set and costumes
(using photos of Madonna's new house in the Hollywood Hills as inspiration),
and the discovery of a brilliant new verse translation...
which we've adapted further for our setting.10 We're sure that our
first show this year will bring our season maxim alive: Then is now,
the great works of the stage reflect our time just as they reflect times
past and future.11
In this "director's note" Falls shares with his subscribers some of the ideas
that helped shape his semiotic reading of the play. Even though these
words were not spoken from the stage, contemporary theater semiotics
recognizes them as an integral part of the mise-en-schne in that they provide
the spectator with information that conditions the spectator's ability
to interpret the cultural and theatrical codes deployed on stage. Goodman
Fig. 3. The Misanthrope, act 2, La Jolla Playhouse (1989). From left, Philinte, Clitandre, Acaste,
Eliante, Celimene, and Alceste. Photo credit: Jim Carmody.
subscribers came to performances having already read these words. Even
those who had not read Onstage had almost certainly been exposed to the
same ideas in newspaper articles, in reviews (many of which quoted or
paraphrased the Onstage piece), and in the program distributed to spectators
at the theater.12
Falls describes his perception of Hollywood as "a perfect modern
analogue to Moliere's world" as the "core idea," the origin of all other
artistic choices in the production. Several reviewers, however, criticized
the production for its failure to provide a "perfect" analogy, pointing out
that Arsinoe's seventeenth-century prudishness, for example, had no
counterpart in contemporary Hollywood. But such criticisms fail to appreciate
the nature of analogy, which does not pretend to eliminate all
differences between the two entities that are being compared. Although
he writes "then is now" (a rhetorical gesture that has become a commonplace
since Jan Kott's Shakespeare Our Contemporary), Falls is not suggesting
that 1666 Paris and 1989 Hollywood are identical. Indeed, his miseen-scene
succeeds in performance precisely because it continually draws
our attention to both the similarities and the differences between 1666
and 1989.
As Falls himself points out, setting the play in a period other than
the seventeenth century is by now a traditional gambit. But it is difficult
to establish an analogy between "then" and "now" if the dialogue refers
only to the codes of the culture in which the play was first written and
performed. In the case of The Misanthrope, the words of Moliere in the
"standard" translation of Richard Wilbur (a translation that privileges lit-
44
ALCESTE IN HOLLYWOOD
erariness over theatricality and the demands of local semiosis) would
sound utterly foreign in the context of George Tsypin's postmodern setting.
Neil Bartlett's translation, on the other hand, offers a language that
sounds indigenous to the Tsypin scenography and the culture it invokes.
Bartlett's translation (brilliantly) preserves Moliere's twelve-syllable
rhyming alexandrines, the names of the characters, and Moliere's formal
mode of address (e.g., Sir, Monsieur, Madame, etc.). Bartlett makes no attempt
to employ anything other than contemporary English/American,
with the result that the characters speak a language that is not only instantly
comprehensible but laden with contemporary cultural resonance
(an advantage that the actors enjoyed in Moliere's time). At the same time,
the poetic texture of Bartlett's language is rich in unexpected rhythm and
rhyme, pun and paradox. But Bartlett's translation does more than provide
the actors with a contemporary language: it provides them with the
language of contemporary Hollywood. Thus, the often wide gap in productions
of classic plays between the cultural frame of reference of the
classic spoken text and the cultural frame of reference of the contemporary
text of the mise-en-scene is, with the exception of character names
and French modes of address, almost inconspicuous.
Accustomed to attending foreign plays performed in translation, the
spectator may automatically consider the foreign character names insignificant.
As a result of the same habit of mind, the spectator may
choose to ignore the fact that the characters address each other with a formality
that seems strange indeed in the context of the Hollywood Hills.
What the spectator cannot fail to notice is that Bartlett has chosen to retain
Moliere's twelve-syllable line, a verse form that is utterly unfamiliar in the
English-speaking theater. The easy accessibility of the contemporary vocabulary
is offset by the strangeness of the verse form and the foreignness
of certain elements of speech. While Bartlett worked hard and effectively
to make the analogy between 1666 Paris and 1989 Hollywood persuasive,
he clearly never intended to efface the cultural and temporal divide that
separates the two:
The whole point of translating this play has been to make an elaborate
and provocative game out of the collision of the formality of
classical French verse and the vivid recognizability of contemporary
speech.... [The Misanthrope] is completely un-English. I wanted the
translation to sound foreign, like a foreign work of art, even though
the language is comprehensible.13
Bartlett never allows the spectator to forget that he or she is dealing with
a play from another culture and another time. Indeed, at one point in act
2, Bartlett blatantly reminds the audience of the classic status of The Misanthrope
when he has Eliante quote two lines from the play in French,
the same two lines that Molibre gives her to speak at that precise moment:
"L'amour pour ordinaire, est peu fait h ces lois, / Et l'on voit les
amants vanter toujours les choix." She goes on to translate those lines
CRITICAL THEORY AND PERFORMANCE
46
and the rest of the speech: "Love is blind and not subject to the Laws. /
Lovers are used to Love without Good Cause. / No Matter how foolish,
the Loved One seems wise . . . / Le Misanthrope. Act II. It's my own
translation."14
While Bartlett's citation from Le Misanthrope draws attention to the
cultural status of Moliere's play, it also calls attention to the extraordinary
degree to which citation permeates both the Bartlett/Falls text and
the mise-en-scene. The first line of the translation/adaptation is an obvious
citation: "What's up doc?" Although there are several equally recognizable
citations, the unfamiliar verse form in tandem with the often
bizarre juxtapositioning of the formal with the vulgar works to make the
spoken text sound artificial, as if the entire play were nothing but a tissue
of citations. Alceste's final speech provides a good example of this
phenomenon:
I hope you'll be happy, from the depth of my heart
And that you will be faithful 'til Death Do You Part.
Crippled by injustice, and spat upon by shits,
I'll book a one way ticket out of this Abyss
I'll fly to some city that isn't run by Vice,
Where a good man can be as honest as he likes.
Similarly, the scenography borrows visual ideas from a variety of periods
and cultures, using the visual language of postmodernism to provide a
hospitable setting for the intertextualities of Bartlett's and Falls's recreation
of Moliere's classic text.
Like the translation, the Falls mise-en-scene both advocates and undermines
the analogy between Moliere's culture and our own. At best, the
analogy only partially obscures the foreignness of Moliere's play, just as
Moliere's play only partially illuminates the Hollywood culture. Although
Falls and Bartlett succeed in persuading us that the two cultures
have much in common, they do not try to persuade us that they are identical.
In fact, as I have tried to suggest, they have devoted at least as much
creative energy to subverting the proposed similarity as they have to promoting
it. Ultimately, the unusual richness of this mise-en-scene results
precisely from the many ways in which Falls and Bartlett bring the theatrical
and cultural codes of seventeenth-century France and contemporary
Southern California to play off each other.
In a brief essay such as this, it is impossible to describe at sufficient
length the semiotics of such important elements of mise-en-scene as
scenography, costumes, lighting, music, blocking, and acting styles.
Each of these topics requires many pages of description before even the
most basic analysis can begin. Instead, as I indicated earlier, I have chosen
to deal only with the semiotics of selected marginal details, hoping
that they will convey the semiotic wealth of this quite extraordinary
mise-en-scene.
ALCESTE IN HOLLYWOOD
47
NOTES
Chapter epigraph from Barthes, "The Death of the Author," in Image-Music-Text,
trans. Stephen Heath (New York: Hill and Wang, 1977), 144.
1. Robert Falls (director/adapter), Neil Bartlett (translator), George Tsypin
(sets), Susan Hilferty (costumes), James F. Ingalls (lighting), Rob Milburn (sound),
Walter Bilderback and Richard Pettingill (dramaturges), David Darlow (Alceste),
William Brown (Philinte), Del Close (Oronte), Kim Cattrall (Celimene), Christina
Haag (Eliante), David Alan Novak (Clitandre), John Douglas Carlile (Acaste), and
Peggy Roeder (Arsinoe). The play was first performed at the La Jolla Playhouse in
La Jolla, California, on August 20, 1989. After its initial run, the set and costumes
were transported to Chicago, where the production opened on October 10o, 1989 as
the first production of the Goodman Theatre's 1989-90 season.
2. Patrice Pavis provides a detailed discussion of mise-en-scene as a form of
semiotic reading in Languages of the Stage: Essays in the Semiology of the Theatre
(New York: Performing Arts Journal Publications, 1982), 131-61.
3. Throughout the present article, I attribute to "Robert Falls" the authorship
of the performance text, which is the subject of this discussion. Such an attribution
is, of course, a habitual one in the discussion of production, but it is important to
remember that the Robert Falls of this essay is a fictional construct that stands for
the real Robert Falls and all those involved in this mise-en-scene.
4. The most thorough presentation in English of these theoretical foundations
can be found in Keir Elam, The Semiotics of Theatre and Drama (London: Methuen,
1980). Since the 1960s, the theater research group at the Centre National de
Recherche Scientifique in Paris has published a number of semiotic readings of various
productions in the series Les Voies de la Creation The trale. The sixth volume
of the series includes a particularly impressive analysis by Tadeusz Kowzan of
Roger Planchon's influential mise-en-scenes of Le Tartuffe in the 1960s and 1970s.
5. This relationship between Frenchness and Southern California "health consciousness"
is developed differently in the character of Alceste, who smokes
French cigarettes. Alceste is the only smoker in the play. In addition, Alceste's interest
in French culture marks him as an outsider in Hollywood. Instead of the
"old song" that Moliere gives Alceste to sing in act 1, Bartlett has Alceste put
Jacques Brel's "Ne Me Quitte Pas" on the turntable and provide a simultaneous
translation.
6. Barthes, Image-Music-Text, 146-48.
7. Bartlett's "English" version of The Misanthrope was first performed at the
Edinburgh Festival in 1988 by the Red Shift Theatre Company. The text of this English
version can be found in Berdnice (Racine), Le Misanthrope, The School for Wives
(Moliere) (London: Absolute Classics, 1990). All quotations from the "American"
version are from The Misanthrope by Moliere, a new version by Neil Bartlett, further
adapted by Robert Falls (Chicago: Goodman Playscripts, 1989). The American version
was reprinted in American Theatre 7, nos. 4-5 (1990).
8. Marvin Carlson, Theatre Semiotics: Signs of Life (Bloomington: Indiana University
Press, 1990), 110-21.
9. Carlson, Theatre Semiotics, 111.
10. Bartlett's "English" version located the play in London's media world.
11. Onstage (Goodman Theatre series) 4, no. 1 (1989): 1.
12. Interestingly enough, the La Jolla Playhouse program included no statement
from Robert Falls. The playhouse program included an extract from Bartlett's
CRITICAL THEORY AND PERFORMANCE
48
"A Letter to the Company," twelve citations from the "Maxims of La Rochefoucauld,"
a brief biography of Moliere (which emphasized the autobiographical nature
of the play as well as his difficulties with his wife), and two reproductions of
seventeenth-century artworks-an engraving from the 1682 edition of the Oeuvres
de Moliere and the well-known painting of Moliere breakfasting with Louis XIV. This
last image appeared over the caption, "Power Breakfast: Louis XIV with Moliere at
Versailles."
13. Neil Bartlett, "A Letter to the Company," Performing Arts (San Diego) 2, no.
9 (1989): LJP-6. The La Jolla Playhouse program appears as a separately paginated
insert after page 20 of Performing Arts.
14. Eliante's speech occurs at act 2, scene 4,11. 711-30. Bartlett's version slightly
abridges Moliere's text.
Every Transaction Conjures a
New Boundary
Josette Feral
At a 1995 conference in Brussels entitled "Culture as Diversity," a photographer
presented a research project he had conducted over some years.
Every year he had taken aerial photographs of certain neighborhoods in
order to observe what changes took place. The results were clear: initially
the fences and walls designed to separate properties disappeared due to
a deliberate attempt to create open spaces and facilitate communication
and exchange. Eventually though, the fences reappeared over the years,
creating new divisions and separations-the only real difference was that
these new boundaries appeared in slightly different places.
The photographer's testimony is significant in more than one way. It
expresses two tendencies of both individuals and the structures they create:
contradictory and simultaneous movements of opening and enclosure.
Indeed, despite the fact that today's dominant discourses are almost
unanimous in their call for an opening towards the Other-be that other
a place, a country, a culture, a discipline, or an art form-there is a parallel
tendency toward isolation or enclosure, as though an opening at one level
is achieved only at the price of an enclosure at another.
The photographer's story is a metaphor for the ideas I would like to
explore in this essay. My investigation will cover four main areas: (a) this
double movement of opening and enclosure that seems to characterize
both individuals and the structures they put into place; (b) the creation of
particular spaces determined by these openings and enclosures, be they
physical or imaginary; (c) the relationship to time of these movements, be
they simultaneous or alternations; (d) the self-referential nature of theater
art as it illuminates this phenomenon, allowing us to better comprehend it.
I should like to suggest that the "trans-action," which is the central
theme of this essay,1 is in fact a form of this tendency toward opening. It
is also my suggestion that this opening is always accompanied by a quasisimultaneous
phenomenon of enclosure.
To begin, let me give a small linguistic overview of the central concept
of our discussion. The notion of transaction seems particularly appropriate
to help us grasp the nature of today's artistic and social endeavors between
cultures. It appears to be even more useful than the notions of interculturality
or intertextuality, which do not place enough emphasis on the idea of
"displacement." The prefix trans brings forward a sense of transition that
clearly evokes a movement between point A and point B. Moreover the
word action carries the idea of a will to trans-act and of a resulting impact.
In order to come to grips with the interrelations involved in theatrical
transactions, a phenomenological interpretation seems more appropriate
49
CRITICAL THEORY AND PERFORMANCE
than a strict semiological approach limited to the performance itself. Semiology,
however, does provide the starting point of objective tools and is the
ground upon which this performance analysis rests.
Transaction is a theme that conjures notions of exchange, influence,
translation, transcription, transformation, transfusion, transparency, transgression,
transmission, or transit. It is a single concept expressed in many
modalities. These modalities recur in different fields: in culture, where
one speaks of transcultural, intercultural, and multicultural; in the arts, as
in transartistic and transdisciplinary; in geography, as in transgeographic
and transnational;2 in politics, as in transpolitical; in economics, as in
transeconomic; and also in genetics (transgenic) as well as in gender and
sexuality (transsexual).
Over the past thirty years the prefix trans has invaded numerous
discourses, carrying with it an inevitable positive charge. It is used liberally
as much in the hard sciences as it is in the social and human sciences:
one thinks of cultural studies, anthropology, performance studies, theater
studies. Linking it to the word actions, as in transactions, implies movement,
change, a dynamic and deliberate desire to move from one point to
another.
Certain contemporary theorists, Edgar Morin for example, suggest
that despite the fact we live in an era when such notions have become the
dominant discourse, and when it is no longer possible to envision either
the world we live in or the arts we practice without referring to them, the
actual practices that surround us do not demonstrate this "trans-actional"
opening:
Disciplines are closed in on themselves and do not communicate
with each other. Phenomena are increasingly fragmentary, and we
cannot conceive of their eventual unity. At the same time, territorial
nationalisms assert themselves. Indeed, one observes that while political
frontiers may have been altered, they still exist. They reaffirm,
rather than dissolve themselves.3
While we can detect a general tendency to make national, economic,
political, and cultural frontiers more porous, we also detect its opposite.
Simultaneous with this opening, a reterritorialization is occurring, one
that is as much political as cultural and artistic. The notion of "territory"
has come under scrutiny in the last ten years, namely in the works of
Homi K. Bhabha, Arjun Appadurai, Akhil Gupta, and James Ferguson.
Taking up the distinction made by Deleuze and Guattari in A Thousand
Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, these scholars remind us that notions
of identity and of the state have long been associated with that of territory,
the latter being the foundational concept of the nation. The idea of
national sovereignty has thus long been legitimized through the existence
of a defined "territory," defined according to geographic borders. However,
with today's numerous migrations of people and with the porousness
of national borders, the notion of territory is no longer self-evident.
EVERY TRANSACTION CONJURES A NEW BOUNDARY
A new cartography has been instated whereby subjects are more and
more "deterritorialized," that is, severed from the country or culture to
which they are originally linked and "reterritorialized" according to new
parameters more akin to the localities they live in, localities defined
through "human sociality" rather than geographic borders.4 This analysis
suggests that despite a global movement toward openness-toward
transactions of wider and wider embrace-we also endlessly create zones
of exclusion and isolation. We create new boundaries.
In the pages that follow I investigate the political consequences of
these movements of opening and enclosure as well as the artistic procedures
that accompany them and what their existence implies for theater
research. My discussion will draw on two theatrical performances presented
at the Festival du Theatre des Ameriques: Groupov's Rwanda 94
and Alain Platel's Allemaal Indian (the title of which means, "We Are All
American Indians").5 Both performances have been presented in numerous
festivals and are perhaps familiar to many.
Politics: Territory versus Location
Rwanda 94 is a performance about the genocide in Rwanda. Over a period
of five years, the performers of the Groupov, a Belgian Company in Liege,
met with survivors of the war and recorded their accounts. They conducted
historical research and readings, and traveled to Rwanda. Their
research centered on the three months (April through June 1994) during
which eight hundred thousand Tutsis were massacred by Hutus, who
represent 80 percent of the Rwandan population. Based on the testimonies
and information they had gathered, five actors undertook the task
of assembling a coherent whole. They strove to create a dignified performance
suited to the subject matter. They also sought to avoid both sensationalism
and the simple anecdotal documentary form.
One of the authors of the performance is Yolande Mukagasana, a
Tutsi woman who witnessed the genocide. She has written two powerful
biographical works: La mort ne veut pas de moi (1997) and N'aie pas peur de
savoir (1999).6 The six-hour-long performance begins with forty minutes of
her testimony recounting her experience of the three months of killings.
She describes the death of her husband who, along with thousands of
other Tutsis, was taken from his home and repeatedly struck with a
machete, his hand cleaved from his body before her eyes. She describes
the death of her three children, ages eighteen, sixteen, and thirteen. The
youngest, Nadine, was buried alive after throwing herself into a burial pit
in order to escape the blows of machetes. The testimony is overwhelming.
Every night, Yolande Mukagasana relives those three months, her struggle
and fears and her betrayal at the hands of friends and neighbors, people
she saw on a daily basis, in whose company her children had grown up,
and who were the first to mark them for slaughter. Mukagasana's narrative
is told in a very "neutral" voice-at least she tries to keep it neutral
and undramatic-rather than revealing her emotions, fears, feelings of
Fig. 1. Belgian Theatre Company Groupov's production of Rwanda 94. Photo by Lou Herion.
guilt and pain. Although her account is broken by tears as she evokes these
painful events, she recounts not so much her pain as the events that took
place in Rwanda.7 Exhibiting neither pathos nor the desire for vengeance,
she serves as a through-line for history, narrating her flight and her terrible
sense of failure as a mother.
The performance alternates between fiction and reality: testimonies,
films of the genocide, the songs of the dead. The performance even includes
a lecture by Jacques Delcuvellerie, the director, who explains in forty-five
minutes the history of the Tutsi and Hutu ethnic groups in Rwanda, the
political and economic events that led up to the genocide, and the lack of
action on the part of the outside world, which seemed to prefer to remain
ignorant of the events. These elements come together to create a performance
that is at once a theater piece and a shocking testament to the bloody
massacre of an entire ethnic group, a massacre the rest of the world witnessed
without being able, or without being willing, to intervene.
What Is at Stake in This Performance?
Through its historical and fictional account of the horrors, this work reveals
what scholars such as Appadurai, Gupta, Ferguson, and Bhabha,
following Deleuze and Guattari, have argued repeatedly with precision.8
These researchers have demonstrated how the idea of self that a nation,
state, or individual creates is intimately linked to the notion of territory.9
These concepts are in a profound state of crisis due to the growing disassociation
between the idea of state and the idea of nation, on the one
hand, and the idea of nation and that of territory, on the other. Territory
52
Fig. 2. In the bar of the Hotel Intercontinental, Rwanda 94. Photo by Lou Herion.
here is the key concept as it transcends the traditional geographic borders
of the state, revealing communities founded on such variables as mutual
interests, morphology, common history, economic situation, or political
concerns. The synchronization of an ideal territory with an ideal state in
a nationalist vision legitimizing a single ethnicity creates the conditions
for the wars of extermination or of ethnicity of which the twentieth century
was far from innocent. This is what the performance Rwanda 94
demonstrates.
The term ethnic war is inappropriate here, where a large group claiming
ethnic unity attacked a much smaller and defenseless group. Given
the massive inequality of the opposed forces, genocide is the only appropriate
term. Through a detailed presentation of the origin of Rwanda's
two ethnic groups, the performance shows how migrations from one part
of the country to another led to conflict between the legislated ethnic subregions
and their actual ethnic composition. The performance also reveals
that differentiation on the basis of ethnicity is, in the case of Rwanda, a
holdover from a Belgian colonial policy dating from 1920. The population
was required to divide itself into ethnic groups, divisions that were unimportant
and unproblematic prior to the colonial period.
In a masterful lecture that is part of the play, Delcuvellerie tells the
story of these ethnic divisions and wars. He states that the divisions took
place along morphological and economic lines decided by the Belgians:
the Tutsi was more likely to own land and property, to be tall and have
fine features; the Hutu to have stronger Negroid features and to be laborers.
The attempt to make a national census ran into numerous problems,
according to the performance, as many Hutus and Tutsis failed to
53
Fig. 3. The musicians supporting Rwanda 94. Photo by Thilo Beu.
conform to the general categories. A simple solution was proposed: all
residents with more than ten cows were declared Tutsis; those with less
than ten were therefore Hutus.
While this classification system strikes us as absurd, it was actually
adopted, and it contributed to the horrors that occurred in Rwanda in
1994. It is symptomatic of a moment in history when an entire population
found itself obliged to define itself in terms of ethnicity. Far from endorsing
the idea that an individual is a member of a vast set wherein interaction
brings people closer together, this "self-definition through ethnicity"
created boundaries between individuals, racial frontiers drawn with
broad and arbitrary strokes.
My goal is not to describe the Rwandan situation and its complex history,
but to underscore how the performance created by the Groupov allows
us to witness, in the context of an artistic presentation, observations
already confirmed by political realities. The performance suggests that the
rulers of Rwanda at the time, as well as all the people who contributed to
the massacre, had the idea that the sovereignty of the nation-state rests implicitly
on the ideal of ethnic coherence. Therefore the expulsion and in this
case even the murder of those considered inferior or ethnically different
was justifiable. The play also reminds us that despite the fact that the territorial
basis of the nation-state is rapidly eroding, states are the major
players in a global scene that really needs the idea of territorially based
sovereignty.10 The play also stresses that when an isomorphic relationship
among the people, the territory (concerned with integrity, survival, policing,
and subsistence), and the legitimate sovereignty is destabilized, violence
can erupt.11 Arjun Appadurai explains why this happens:
54
EVERY TRANSACTION CONJURES A NEW BOUNDARY
What ethnic plurality does (especially when it is the product of population
movements within recent memory) is to violate the sense of
isomorphism between territory and national identity on which the
modern nation-state relies... : What diasporic pluralisms particularly
expose and intensify is the gap between the powers of the state
to regulate borders, monitor dissent, distribute entitlements within
a finite territory and the fiction of ethnic singularity on which most
nations ultimately rely. In other words, the territorial integrity that
justifies states and the ethnic singularity that validates nations are
increasingly hard to see as seamless aspects of each other . . . . Put
another way, since states, territories and ideas of national ethnic singularity
are always complicated historical productions, diasporic
pluralism tends to embarrass all narratives that attempt to naturalize
such histories.12
Isomorphism also deals with the notion of space, a space that is
again deemed isomorphic to an ethnic group. The Hutus perceived the
Tutsis as a threat to their space and thus attempted to send them back to
"Abyssinia," which was supposedly one of their places of origin. Arjun
Appadurai continues:
In the history of culture theory, territory and territoriality have
played an important role: in a general way, the idea that cultures are
coherent, bounded, contiguous and persistent has always been underwritten
by a sense that human sociality is naturally localized and
even locality-bound. The concern of anthropologists with rules of
residence and their relation to descent groups and other social formations,
for example, is based on a continuing sense that territorial
realities of one or other sort both bound and determine social
arrangements.... There is still a wide spread sense that human beings
are conditioned to demand spaces of allegiance that are extensions
of their bodies.13
The relationship between individuals, the collective, and their space is essential
in the tragic events that happened in Rwanda and in the performance
of Rwanda 94. From the political situation as presented, the audience
can gather that the arguments that justified the killings were based
on conceptions of spatialized "cultures" where one space is envisioned as
being naturally disconnected from the next. This disconnection seems to
have always been prevalent. An alternative to that would be to consider
space as naturally connected rather than naturally disconnected.
Rwanda 94 illustrates the conclusions drawn by scholars in a variety
of fields. Sociologists, anthropologists, economists, and political observers
underline the fact that while a discourse of opening to other cultures prevails,
often simply by virtue of large-scale migrations, there is a simultaneous
and opposite tendency toward enclosure and exclusion. This tendency
is, in many countries, charged with violence and expresses itself in
CRITICAL THEORY AND PERFORMANCE
56
the massacre of perceived minorities in defense of territorial sovereignty.
In other words, the play reminds us of the fact that, although acculturation
is expanding in the world, new nationalisms, often tied up with ethnic separatism
and state-level turbulence, are on the rise. The play shows that
while boundaries may be geographic, they are more often ideological and
constitute a process by which we imprison one another in a single origin,
culture, religion, or ideology. Through this process of identification we can
exclude another from our shared space. This would seem to be the final
program of the discourse of enclosure and exclusion: to clear the space.
Now, how can a performance go against the signs of enclosures that
it narrates? How can it go beyond the intelligent deconstruction of what
it tells? To be more specific, how does it contribute, beyond the evocation
of tragic events, to the transformation of a restricted and exclusive vision
of a territory, nation, or ethnic group? How can it facilitate an openness allowing
future transactions?
There are numerous levels to any answer: some are dependent on
contingent, nonartistic factors; others are the direct consequence of specifically
artistic choices. For instance the ethnic exclusionism that characterized
the events in Rwanda in 1994 was not repeated onstage: one of the
performers was Hutu, a presence that was not recognized by the narrative,
yet it was a modest, but important opening.14 The play had an impact
beyond its artistic aspects: the actors came to constitute a Rwandan diaspora
(along with their Belgian colleagues), as some of them applied for
refugee status in France and Belgium.15 This, too, contributed to the disintegration
of a vision fusing geographic space with ethnic identity. Here
identities were no longer categorically attached to a single country or ethnic
group. They were dictated by their link to the present, a present tied,
of course, to their specific past, but not a past determined by nostalgia and
refusal. It is a present of transitional space or a frontier space, a space that
Homi Bhabha has defined as being the third space marked by cultural and
political diaspora.
At the artistic level, openness was signified within the performance
itself as an affirmation of the identities and unique trajectories of the individuals
who had composed it. It denied the binary logic that divides Rwandans
into Tutsis and Hutus, replacing it with a more complex logic born of
multiple origins where the present is not merely the consequence of the
past, nor a rupture with it. It is a present paradoxically characterized by
discontinuity, complexity, and a multiplicity of experience. This was carried
through a narrative that presented many points of view: those of the
victims, of the murderers, of the media, of the politicians, of foreign governments-stressing
that there is no easy answer to this difficult situation.
So, by resisting a categorical grand narrative, the structure of the performance
reveals a hybridization of genres. The play mixed forms ranging
from direct accounts, confession, and autobiography to the classic lecture
(a good forty-five minutes!), a violent public address-"if you refuse to listen,
you are collaborating with the oppressor!"-critical analysis, microfictions,
oratorio, electronic media, documentary, and the cantata. The epic
Fig. 4. Is this the third space? Chez Jacob in Rwanda 94. Photo by Lou Herion.
style of the piece avoided blaming the public, crusading for justice, or posing
acts of vengeance. It also avoided the potential pathos of its subject
matter. The hybridity of its collages, montages, and patchworks was an
eloquent response to the ethnic "purification" described by its narrative.
Deterritorialized Space
The second performance I describe is very different in its nature and inspiration.
I might even describe it as an opposite to Rwanda 94. Its theme,
form, and characters evoke the daily environment of the Occident. No
natural or human cataclysm marks this work. The enclosures described in
Rwanda 94 are self-evident. In Allemaal Indian, the opposite movement is
highlighted-the opening of public spaces, the circulation of individuals,
and the absence of strong notions of identity.
Allemaal Indian is the third piece in a trilogy in which director Alain
Platel translates today's world onto the stage. This performance also
translates the phenomenon of acculturation, a liberating force according
to some and a factor in the disappearance of identity for others. Whether
or not we adopt an optimistic or pessimistic attitude to this phenomenon,
it is a dominant factor in many of our lives, information globe-trotters and
transnational immigrants that we are.
What is the story of Allemaal Indian? On stage are two houses complete
with rooms, levels, doors, windows, stairs, roofs, and hallways; the
doors and windows open, close, and slam. Blinds rise and fall. Banal
scenes of everyday life roll by, indoors and out, juxtaposed seemingly
without any connection, linked only by the continuities of common space
57
Fig. 5. In a small space, filled with everyday things: a "microstory." From Alain Platel's production
of Allemaal Indian. Photo by Kurt Van der Elst.
and the hazards of individual desires. Through the windows of the
houses, or in the space between the two houses, is seen a poorly defined
public area-perhaps a sidewalk, alley, or road. The audience observes
the lives and activities of two families in a working-class neighborhood.
The action could be happening anywhere. The families represented are
dysfunctional: mothers or fathers are absent, parents are overwhelmed,
children play at threatening each other with real weapons. Each character
has a "defect": one is mentally handicapped, another blind; one is a suicidal
housekeeper, one a burned-out mother; there is an immigrant seeking
social acceptance, a son who rejects his mother after her return from psychiatric
incarceration, a teenage girl seeking her absent father.
The performance is a series of microstories that when linked create
fragmented and multiple relationships between the twelve characters. Beyond
the violence and alienation inherent in these relationships, a certain
clumsy tenderness appears to haunt the interactions of these lost characters.16
An immigrant from Montenegro named Kosovo, expresses her delight
in finding herself in Belgium by singing the national anthem. At the
same time one of her neighbors scrawls, "Kosovo Go Home" in his window.
In the absence of a single dominant narrative, the links between the
characters are created using the space defined by the two houses. We are
witnesses to a space inhabited by the small things of everyday life. Relationships
are imposed by the simple fact that the characters are neighbors.
The separation between the interior and exterior space is erased. The entire
stage becomes a vast living area for a reconstituted community of disparate
elements.
58
Fig. 6. The proxemics of close living in
Allemaal Indian. Photo by Kurt Van der
Elst.
The extreme openness of this area is remarkable. Everything is visible,
even the insides of the houses. Intimacy is banished and every action
on the stage is revealed to the gaze of the public. Individuals have relinquished
their private space, yet each struggles to rid himself or herself of
the others' presence, viewing them as intruders. Despite these furtive attempts
at staking boundaries, we have the impression that space is no
longer related to individual identities. The performance presents a tableau
of a receding private arena in the face of the devouring public sphere,
which offers up everything in its grasp to the eyes of the audience. The individuals
who are subject to this phenomenon can no longer tell the difference
between what should be shown in public and what should be
concealed in intimacy. An opening to the world has been replaced by a
defensive self-contraction in the face of the outside world's persistent invasion.
As Homi Bhabha comments of such a process: "This results in redrawing
the domestic space as the space of the normalizing, pastoralizing,
and individuating techniques of modern power and police: the personal is
political; the world in the home."17
The performance space, which is neither presented as a totality nor
totally presented, is never invested with symbolic meaning. Simultaneously
integral and fragmented, it is transitional, a space of passage and
crossing rather than a place of identification. It is a representation of those
undefined zones, reterritorialized sites inhabited by individuals without
.........stable points of reference. ...
NOMiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii~ iiiii~ iiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii~i
N ': iiii::iii iii!?iiiiiii::i:iiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii:iiiii i iiii
\ v:============= ============================================ ====== = =======
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th tes rsneveigte sitruders. Despite these furtii iat
lon er eatred oenvuaenessoftis.arearormanceable.eythingisbvisoflerecendhinspidesftehaeaihoue.Infacyfthe
baniendubicsercto
whoersgeis everyhngiedgrs to the eyes off theicudiualsheeindiidal
othersre sujcttoiewingthemeno i lngrdr.Dsietelte rifafeetem
tween whating houdesownavtipresicnthat shoudceisn
concerarled t inivdacy. idoeninges.theperordmasnceenrepaedatbyeau
dfes elconratiarn in the face of the usdevorld'spersicspetein
vasion. As Homi Bhabha comments of such a process: "This results in redrawing
the domestic space as the space of the normalizing, pastoralizing,
and individuating techniques of modern power and police: the personal is
political; the world in the home.''17
59
Fig. 7. Seeing and being seen have become the modus vivendi in Allemaal Indian.
Photo by Kurt Van der Elst.
As a place of exploration or passage, the space represented on stage
becomes the simple receptacle of daily acts. It is a zone between home and
foreign ground, between inside and outside, between known and unknown,
between friendly surroundings and an antagonistic neighborhood.
More and more, these spaces reflect the universe in which we live.19
What Does This Performance Express?
This performance expresses several things:
1. The opening of the space corresponds to the opening of the individuals
who inhabit it and to their absence of strong individuality.
In this structure, individuals are defined by their relationship
with others. This vision of today's Western societies has been
clearly articulated by Baudrillard.
2. The space is devoid of symbolic meaning. It is merely the location
of activity. It is malleable and can be explored in all its multiple
facets. It does not imprison; rather it opens onto other(s') territories,
should one desire to explore them.
3. The perpetual crossing of this space creates networks within it
that themselves instantly create sets of new trajectories. The space
becomes a place of crossings, where limits endlessly transect
themselves. The crossing of boundaries necessarily transforms all
hegemonic material or culture, all hierarchical space. It contaminates
space. Space becomes interstitial to the people. It is what
connects them, not what divides them. It allows for real transactions
based not on dichotomist or one-way relations, but a network
of movements and exchanges.
60o
EVERY TRANSACTION CONJURES A NEW BOUNDARY
61
4. The border, in this instance, does not refer to a fixed topology but
rather to an interstitial zone, a "zone of displacement and deterritorialization,"
as Gupta and Ferguson state, a zone that "shapes
the identity of the hybridized subject."20 In such a space, it is no
longer possible to invoke the orthodox idea of culture. Here one
can only witness "a clustering of cultural practices that do not belong
to a particular people or to a definite place."21 It is not a hybrid
space but a space of hybridity. It stresses the production of
locality as a dimension of social life, as a structure of feeling, and
as co-presence to the other. It even tends, through the character of
the immigrant, to show that certain places, which are local spaces
for some, are translocal for others, showing the complexity of the
new space we live in. This translocality could express different
forms of human organization. If we reverse this vision-as Gupta
and Ferguson have rightfully suggested-and substitute the idea
that spaces are naturally interconnected, then countries, nations,
or even ethnic groups could no longer use this argument in the
service of violence and a fight for power. Gupta recommends that
when one starts from the "premise that spaces have always been
hierarchically interconnected, instead of naturally disconnected,
then cultural and social change becomes not a matter of cultural
contact and articulation but one of rethinking through connection."22
This interconnection of space is rendered possible by the
importance given to localities (translocalities) or transcommunities
rather than to large territories.
5. In this space, identity appears as the effect of homelessness, of a
rootlessness that is not the direct result of historical, social, or political
conditions. Here the subject is endlessly transplanted in
space and time along with the multiple aspects of his environment.
No longer obsessed by notions of fixed identity, the subject
becomes the seat of mutant hybrid identities resulting from transactions
with the environment.23
Many scholars in the field of cultural studies have underlined the
benefits of such opened spaces, these borderless zones of passage defined
as translocalities. However, they have also noted the individual's tendency
to reterritorialize space in reaction to this destabilizing force.
This brings us back to our point of departure, to alternation of opening
and closure. The paradox in this play is that although it is a fair illustration
of today's tendency in Western cultures to indulge in open spaces,
at the same time the characters try to close the doors, shut the windows,
get out or get in to escape the other, and yet in the next moment they will
reopen shutters, open doors, go toward the other. They are always drawing
limits, a border between themselves and the others. Yet this border is
always moving, vanishing, reappearing elsewhere. It remains as a constant
possibility, like an elastic membrane, a porous line, which has to be there
as a potentiality in order to be crossed, like those described by Gupta and
CRITICAL THEORY AND PERFORMANCE
62
Ferguson: "Border zones are now becoming spaces of complex quasi-legal
circulation of persons and goods. The border between US and Mexico, is
an excellent example of one kind of translocality."24 Similarly many tourist
zones may be described as translocalities. The characters seem to be in perpetual
flight from this zone of radical openness and flux. Though they are
seemingly at ease in this openness, one can wonder if it is not after all a
form of enclosure.
From the Artistic to the Theoretical
This brings me to the final consideration: the role of the artistic. I should
like to attempt a reconciliation of the views expressed by these two performances.
Despite their decidedly opposite visions of spaces, nations,
and identities, and also despite the opposite kind of transactions that they
evoke-visions of exclusion and enclosure contrasted with depictions of
radical openness-I should like to point out that both pieces contain, and
are even driven by, the same active ingredients, of which they are the negative
and positive image respectively. If we consider the meaning of these
two performances and what they propose about the nature of individuals,
how their narratives unfold and what aesthetics are employed to express
them, we will indeed conclude that they share important characteristics.
What do these performances present? Both present the dissolution
of the individual identities represented on stage. In the first case, individuals
recount their personal histories, their loss of a personal identity in the
face of a forced fusion with the identity of an ethnic group. Without individual
traits, dominated by their ethnic status, they are completely defined
and condemned by it. They are stripped of their roles of mother,
wife, or daughter and become mere numbers in a mass of victims.
In Allemaal Indian, the characters maintain their roles as mother, son,
or husband, but these roles are lifeless, made up of so many superficial actions
as to be without consequence. The banality of daily life is presented
in random interactions that leave the spectator with the impression of witnessing
the disintegration of individual identity. How does this disintegration
herald the hybridity of the new subject that is to come, as some
have repeatedly asserted? The question remains unanswered.
The second characteristic linking the two performances is that in
both of their universes, the private has become public. It is impossible to
find refuge in the intimacy that makes the subject an individual. Life is
lived in view of all, motivating Allemaal Indian's characters' perpetual attempts
to close the blinds, doors, and windows and yet to live openly. Life
also becomes inconceivable without the constant gaze of the collective.
Privacy is also negated in Rwanda 94, but the negation is imposed by
the outside force of the genocide. In Allemaal Indian, it seems that the characters
themselves have chosen to accept the lifestyle where the private
sphere has become public, banishing intimacy. The subjects have become
the subjugated objects of their fellows' gaze, a gaze that ignores distinctive
signs and recognizes only what renders subjects similar to one an-
EVERY TRANSACTION CONJURES A NEW BOUNDARY
63
other, without differences and indifferent. In both cases, the events of
daily life become spectacular-objects of spectacle-like the documentary
footage used in Rwanda 94 where smiling assassins mug for the camera in
front of a pile of dead bodies, as though they were so much game brought
in by so many hunters.
The third characteristic is that, surprisingly, both these universes are
concerned with violence. Both performances take place in universes that
are spaces of "trans-actions." While this violence differs in force, intensity,
and meaning, it would be naive to imagine that only the forced exclusion
of Rwanda 94 is charged with violence. Intolerable in the barbarity depicted
in Rwanda 94, violence is also present in a defused way in Allemaal
Indian. In tiny acts of cowardice and betrayal, this violence is continually
present. It colors human relations, appearing suddenly disguised as play.
Certainly these performances differ in force and in violence. Where
Rwanda 94 creates a clear and categorical distinction between the oppressors
and the victims, Allemaal Indian presents a system of interactions revealing
the circularity of events and relationships between individuals.
Micronarratives are linked in the chaos of the insignificant actions of daily
life, whereas in Rwanda 94, the micronarratives link together to present a
coherent whole-the narrative of ethnic cleansing. In both cases, we are
confronted with chaos. In Rwanda 94, it is a chaos arising from the abolition
of what appeared to be a political order. In Allemaal Indian, the chaos
is structural. Life itself appears destructured, and its events have become
unimportant.
Finally, in both performances one has the impression that any notion
of ethics has been abandoned, but for different reasons. In one case this is
due to the upending of the social order, which is itself no doubt based on
a certain kind of violence. In the second case it seems impossible to institute
any notions of rights and responsibilities in a space devoid of social
or political homogeneity because of its openness. In this second instance
we are confronted with a vision of society based on a lack of boundaries
between individuals and spaces, one where the only remaining normative
structuring force is the interactions between individuals.
It is tempting to say that in both these performances we enter the
third space that Homi Bhabha would like to see emerging from these transitional
identities.25 It is a space produced by cultural and political diasporas,
a frontier zone without readily identifiable frontiers. Indeed the
strength of these two performances comes from their incarnation of the
complementary and opposite nature of all transactions: their transcendent
necessity and imminent danger.
In both cases, boundaries remain and indeed must be preserved.
These borders are not merely geographical, national, or ethnic perimeters-they
are boundaries that reveal the urgent necessity that what is private
remain so. Where the private becomes completely public, the subject
disintegrates, replaced by the spectacle of himself, as Guy Debord has
ably demonstrated.26
Let us return to the theater and our role as scholars in the field of
CRITICAL THEORY AND PERFORMANCE
64
theater studies. What have we to say to all this? What positions and discourse
should we hold given the artistic practices we witness? If we content
ourselves with performing the familiar inventory of artistic forms
and practices, we risk establishing a useful but arbitrary formalism. Likewise
if we are satisfied with revealing the correspondences between artistic
creations and the world, or between those productions and the discourses
they hold about the world, our approach again is of limited use.
Research and scholarship are finally only interesting in the case where
they discover avenues of exploration as yet unsought.
The genius of these two performances is that they allow us to take
part in the creation of new territories and to observe that boundaries are
constructive when they remain porous. They permit us a critical distance
and perspective on our present reality. Likewise this porosity affirms
the reality of the theater, which appears as a frontier zone where things
may be said that escape easy and rapid political categorization. The theater
is in this way comparable to those points of transit where the demands of
the world are suspended: airports, hotels, train stations. The theater becomes
a frontier zone, which in itself is more interesting than the spaces it
links-after all, it is at the frontier where transactions are possible.
By revealing the new forces at work in the world, by making visible
the elements that compose the universe that surrounds us, by highlighting
contradictions and hidden factors, the theater is a revelatory force. It
becomes an important cognitive tool where the messages it transmits
have important conceptual consequences. Theater permits the interpretation
of a world not easily interpreted by classical categories. It plays a dialectical
and critical role, one that facilitates and accompanies us on our
journeys through performance.
NOTES
1. This essay was originally delivered as a keynote speech at the International
Federation for Theatre Research conference "Trans-actions: Culture and Performance,"
Sydney, July 8-13, 2001.
2. Arjun Appadurai, "Sovereignty without Territoriality. Notes for a Postnational
Geography," in The Geography of Identity, ed. Patricia Yeager (Ann Arbor:
University of Michigan Press, 1996), 40-58.
3. Edgar Morin, Science avec conscience (1982; reprint, Paris: Edition du Seuil,
Collection Points, 1990), 124.
4. Appadurai states: "'Deterritorialisation' generates various forms of 'reterritorialization.'
Not all reterritorialization is counternationalist or nativist. Reterritorialization
can involve the effort to create new localized residential communities
(slums, refugee camps, hostels) that rest not on a national imaginary but only
on an imaginary of local autonomy or of resource sovereignty. In such 'transit
communities,' there is frequently an effort to create and defend various forms of
rights.., that allow the displaced community to continue its reproduction under
unstable conditions by assuring reliable access to the material needs of reproduction.
.... Territory thus can be seen as the crucial problem in the contemporary cri-
EVERY TRANSACTION CONJURES A NEW BOUNDARY
65
sis of the nation-state, or, more precisely, the crisis in the relationship between nation
and state.... Insofar as these minorities (as guest workers, refugees, or illegal
aliens) enter into new polities, they require reterritorialization within a new civic
order, whose ideology of ethnic coherence and citizenship rights they are bound
to disturb, since all modern ideologies of rights depend, ultimately, on the closed
(enumerated, stable, and immobile) group of appropriate recipients of state protection
and patronage." "Sovereignty without Territoriality," 54-57.
5. This festival occurs every two years and usually presents works by theater
and performance artists from North America, Latin America, and Europe.
6. The translation of these titles in English is Death Does Not Want Me and Be
Not Afraid to Know.
7. The spectator can feel the presence of these emotions and feelings, but they
are contained by Mukagasana as she tells the compelling story to which she has
committed herself. It is precisely her efforts to tell her story with objectivity that
makes it so powerful and so emotionally disturbing for the spectator.
8. See, for example, Arjun Appadurai, Apres le colonialisme: Les consequences
culturelles de la globalisation (Paris: Payot, 2000), 322, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions
of Globalization (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 229,
and The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1986), 329. See also Homi Bhabha, Nation and Narration
(London: Routledge, 1990), 333, and The Location of Culture (London: Routledge,
1994), 285; Akhil Gupta and James Ferguson, Culture, Power, Place: Explorations in
Critical Anthropology (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1997), 33-51. For
Deleuze and Guattari's foundational ideas, see A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and
Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (London: Athlone Press, 1988), Anti-Oedipus:
Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. R. Hurley, M. Seem, and H. Lane (New York:
Viking Press, 1977), and On the Line, trans. John Johnston (New York: Semiotext(e),
1983). See also Deleuze, Critique and Clinic (Paris: Editions de Minuit, Coll. Paradoxe,
1993), Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton (New York: Columbia University
Press, 1994), and Empiricism and Subjectivity: An Essay on Hume's Theory of
Human Nature, trans. Constantin V. Boundas (New York: Columbia University
Press, 1991).
9. Although this territory can be conceived of as a geographic space situated
within well-defined limits, it can also refer to a virtual territory occurring in the
imagination. The state of Khalistan, which nationalist Sikhs project as their ideal
homeland, is an example of such a territory.
10. The notion dates back to the agreement associated with the Westphalian
peace settlements of 1648. It is on that occasion that the principle of territorial sovereignty
becomes the foundational concept of the nation-state.
11. It was, of course, assumed by the "genocidaires" who believed that this isomorphism
was about to be broken although they were representing 80 percent of
the population.
12. Appadurai, "Sovereignty without Territoriality," 57. Appadurai's writings
are of broader scope than those of Rustom Bharucha, who studies interculturalism
through the prism of art forms. Appadurai's analysis is more political and thus
more appropriate to the political and social content of performances such as
Rwanda 94 and Allemaal Indian.
13. Appadurai, "Sovereignty without Territoriality," 53.
14. It was, in fact, a Tutsi who had changed ethnic groups (as it happens in
Rwanda) because he was poor. He therefore became Hutu. However, the public
was not informed of such a fact.
CRITICAL THEORY AND PERFORMANCE
66
15. Indeed, fearing that they might ask for refugee status, the Canadian Government
had not granted some of the artists a visa. It is only the pressure exerted
by the media and the theater community that brought a change and opened the
borders.
16. It is interesting to note that young people seem to identify with this presentation.
The fragmented images, techno music, and chaotic reality that they
evoke are in synch with the sensibilities of today's youth.
17. Bhabha, The Location of Culture, 11.
18. Akhil Gupta, in the same vein as Deleuze's earlier work on the same subject,
notes that the "transnational public sphere has certainly rendered any strictly
bounded sense of community or locality obsolete. At the same time, it has enabled
the creation of forms of solidarity and identity that do not rest on an appropriation
of space where contiguity and face-to-face contact are paramount. In the pulverized
space of postmodernity, space has not become irrelevant: it has been reterritorialized
in a way that does not conform to the experience of space that characterized
the era of high modernity.... For, it is not only the displaced who experience
a displacement. Even people remaining in familiar and ancestral places find the nature
of their relation to place ineluctably changed and the illusion of a natural and
essential connection between the place and the culture broken." Gupta and Ferguson,
Culture, Power, Place, 55.
19. See Marc Aug,, Culture, iddologie et socidtd (Paris: Le Monde diplomatique,
Hors serie, 1997), Maniere de voir (Paris: Mars, 1997), Non-places: Introduction to an
Anthropology of Supermodernity, trans. John Howe (London: Verso, 1995), The Anthropological
Circle: Symbol, Function, History, trans. Martin Thom (New York: Cambridge
University Press, 1982). A Sense for the Other: The Timeliness and Relevance of
Anthropology, trans. Amy Jacobs (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), and
La construction du monde (Paris: F. Maspero, 1974), 141.
20. Gupta and Ferguson, Culture, Power, Place, 48.
21. Gupta and Ferguson, Culture, Power, Place, 49.
22. Gupta and Ferguson, Culture, Power, Place, 35.
23. "We have argued that deterritorialization has destabilized the fixity of
'ourselves' and 'others.' But it has not thereby created subjects who are free-floating
monads . . . Instead of stopping with the notion of deterritorialization, the
pulverization of the space of high modernity, we need to theorize how space is
being reterritorialized in the contemporary world." Gupta and Ferguson, Culture,
Power, Place, 50.
24. Gupta and Ferguson, Culture, Power, Place, 44.
25. Bhabha, The Location of Culture, 36-39.
26. Guy Debord, La socidtd du spectacle (Paris: Champ Libre, 1971), 170.
Postcolonial Studies
Postcolonial studies designates a body of critical theory about Western imperialism
and its consequences, especially the cultural politics of relations
between colonizers and the colonized, and the representations of those relations.
Postcolonial theorists practice a particular kind of "critique," a
method of scrutinizing colonialist and anticolonialist discourses and assessing
their implications for the human subjects who make and bear
their meanings. Pointing out that "more than three-quarters of the people
living in the world today have had their lives shaped by the experience of
colonialism," the authors of the early and influential The Empire Writes
Back: Theory and Practice in Post-Colonial Literatures (1989) take their title
and their epigraph from Salman Rushdie: "the Empire writes back to the
Centre." They evoke the spectral binary of colonial periphery and metropolitan
center, which, historically overdetermined by the vicissitudes of a
long geopolitical struggle, still haunts what they call the "perceptual
framework" of the postcolonial world. This includes its problematic assignment
of identities along racial and ethnic lines and its complicit cultural
productions (see "Critical Race Theory" in this collection).1
Drama and other kinds of performance figure prominently in both
the construction of this colonial framework and the postcolonial critique
that aims to dismantle it. The most authoritative precursor to postcolonial
studies, Frantz Fanon, a Francophone psychoanalyst and activist in the
cause of Third World liberation, titled his most frequently cited book Black
Skin, White Masks (1952), and in it he wrote: "A drama is enacted every
day in colonized countries." The drama to which Fanon refers, quoting
Jacques Lacan, occurs between the Self and the Other as defined by colonialism
and its discontents. Here, as in the more intimate setting of family
drama, "the Other is perceived on the level of the body image, absolutely
as the not-self-that is, the unidentifiable, the unassimilable."2 Fanon's
drama of black skin and white masks did not end with the independence
movements of the 196os, nor is it containable ahistorically within psychoanalysis.
According to the single most important book in postcolonial
studies, Orientalism, Edward Said's generative study of Western knowledge
of the non-West, history has divided the world into a "we-they" dichotomy
on the mental maps of once and future empires, in which
67
CRITICAL THEORY AND PERFORMANCE
68
"they"-say, the Palestinians-subsist as a political nullity.3 The construction
of "we" in this context presents as vexed a problem as the construction
of "they." For whom does an author speak when using the first-person
plural? Who are we? (See also "Psychoanalysis" in this volume.) This
problem of postcolonial positionality-the assumption of authority for
the position from which one is entitled to speak-provokes Gayatri Spivak's
celebrated question about permission: "Can the subaltern speak?"
(The "subaltern" refers to the silenced, colonized subject, which cannot
"know or speak itself.") It also motivates her double-edged answer:
"Clearly, if you are poor, black, and female, you get it in three ways."4
Moreover, positionality instigates Homi K. Bhabha's formulation of "mimicry"
as the prevailing mode of (post)colonial relations, a sly, ambivalent
repetition, a performance that produces "a subject of a difference that is
almost the same, but not quite" or, less delicately, "almost the same, but
not white."5 To speak globally of the postcolonial moment of the present
is to underestimate neither the lingering effects of the former project, including
the resistant agency that subjects deploy against it, nor the clear
and present danger of its return as neocolonialism. Postcoloniality is a
long-running drama with multiple plots and many characters but as yet
no denouement.6
Australians Helen Gilbert and Joanne Tompkins define postcolonial
drama, actual and metaphoric, as a "re-action" to empire, by which they
mean to emphasize "how plays and playwrights construct discursive contexts
for an artistic, social, and political present by enacting other versions
of the pre-contact, imperial, and post-imperial past on stage."7 That historical
meaning of postcolonial drama, extended to include tourist performance,
obtains in each of the essays that follow in this section, beginning
with Tompkins's own "Performing History's Unsettlement." She treats
four plays, each from one of the former "settler colonies" of Great Britain
(Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, Canada), which some would exclude
from postcolonial studies because of their dominant "whiteness"
and the particular history of South African apartheid. Tompkins here
makes a case for their inclusion. Despite their stylistic differences, each of
Tompkins's plays discloses a distinctive effect of the colonial experience or
its residue in shaping relations of identity and difference among the inhabitants
of the former colony. In Josie Ningali Lawford's Ningali, it is the requickening
of Australian Aboriginal ethnic consciousness that dramatizes
the historic consequences of internal (and internalized) colonization. In
Lorae Parry's Eugenia, it is transvestism as a dramatic metaphor for New
Zealand, a country that "fails to recognize itself, partly because its own
identity has not been established independently of its colonizer." In Reza
de Wet's Crossing, it is an allegory of the return of the dead to the living
that "unsettles" South African history by having the dead represent, as
they so often do in colonies and former colonies, displaced social relations.
Finally, in Djanet Sears's Harlem Duet, the "four-hundred-year history of
African Americans and African Canadians" is played out in what the playwright
intends as an "exorcism" of "the effects of race and sex on the lives
POSTCOLONIAL STUDIES
69
of people of African descent." Among those exorcised spirits must be numbered
the dramatic roles-Shakespeare's Othello, for instance, and the
mask of blackface minstrelsy-that have been used to define and contain
the descendants of the most systematic of all imperial and colonial depredations,
the Middle Passage.
Like Djanet Sears's dramatization of the historic burden of African
diasporic identities in the present, Sandra L. Richards's "What Is to Be Remembered?
Tourism to Ghana's Slave Castle-Dungeons" confronts her
own and others' memories of the Atlantic system, but Richards reports in
the first person from the scene of the "forts" erected along the West
African coast by the slave-taking European empires. Here for several centuries
captives from the African interior were imprisoned until they embarked
on slave ships through the infamous "Door of No Return." The
most harrowing of colonial monuments, castle-dungeons are now among
the most popular of tourist destinations in the postcolonial world. Supported
in part by UNESCO's "World Heritage" initiative, they are pitched
to attract dollar-bearing "cultural tourists." Tourism currently employs
more people worldwide than any other industry, and tourist performance
is a growth area in scholarship.8 Generally, the colonialist encounter of
privileged metropolitan traveler and picturesque "native" is reenacted
wherever locals perform for tourists, but the issue here is complicated for
Richards by the double consciousness of African Americans staging a sentimental
journey of return to this bitter Eden. She reports that in the
empty chambers of the slave forts well-to-do African Americans perform
unbidden as historical reenactors, taking the supernumerary roles of their
anonymous ancestors: "Tourists imagine themselves as standing in, as
artifacts or surrogates, for those whose names can no longer be recalled."
Richards carefully delineates the conflicting agendas of visitors from
America and Europe and the local Ghanaian project of putting together
attractive vacation packages, which include sunbathing, shopping for
jewelry, and dining in a restaurant and bar located in the main castle-dungeon
itself. Thus, Richards shows, the excruciating negotiation of colonialist
history and postcolonialist experience is packed into the contradictory
itinerary of a contemporary holiday pilgrimage.
Another kind of postcolonial negotiation appears in Phillip P. Zarrilli's
account, which he has updated for this edition, of the Franco-AngloIndian
reception of the multinational production of the Kathakali King Lear.
Shakespeare, as the talismanic canonical figure held up to colonials as the
acme of metropolitan culture, has proved a touchstone for postcolonial critiques,
of which the Caribbean novelist George Lamming's Calibanic reading
of The Tempest in The Pleasures of Exile (1960) is exemplary. The Kathakali
King Lear, however, purported to be a truly intercultural production: it
adapted Shakespeare's tragedy to the tradition of the kathakali, or "story
play," a highly conventionalized form of dance-drama from Kerala, India.
Zarrilli, studying the reception of the production, recounts the prior controversy
surrounding Peter Brook's Mahabharata, a problematic attempt to
"universalize," through intercultural performance, the local knowledge of
CRITICAL THEORY AND PERFORMANCE
70
the Sanskrit epic.9 But here the ancient subcontinental form takes aesthetic
pride of place as the organizing structure and style into which Shakespeare's
plot and characters are incorporated, culminating in a performance
at the restored Globe Theatre itself. The result intrigued and discomfited
critics in both the former colony and the former metropole. They
wrote back to an empire, which, like Lear's kingdom, no longer has a center,
but which has dissolved into fractious parts, still burdened with the
ambivalent yet fertile consequences of their fateful union.10
J.R.R.
NOTES
1. Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin, The Empire Writes Back:
Theory and Practice in Post-Colonial Literatures (London: Routledge, 1989), 1.
2. Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, trans. Charles Lam Markmann (New
York: Grove Press, 1967), 145, 161.
3. Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Pantheon, 1978), 26-27.
4. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, "Can the Subaltern Speak?" in Marxism and
the Interpretation of Culture, ed. Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg (Urbana:
University of Illinois Press, 1988), 294-95.
5. Homi K. Bhabha, "Of Mimicry and Man: The Ambivalence of Colonial Discourse,"
in The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994), 86, 89.
6. As Ngugi wa Thiong'o notes in Decolonizing the Mind: The Politics of Language
in African Literature (London: James Curry, 1981), "Drama is closer to the dialectics
of life than poetry or fiction.... [It] encapsulates within itself this principle
of the struggle of opposites which generates movement" (54)"
7. Helen Gilbert and Joanne Tompkins, Post-colonial Drama: Theory, Practice,
Politics (London: Routledge, 1996), 107.
8. The foundational study is Dean MacCannell's The Tourist: A New Theory of
the Leisure Class (1976; New York: Schocken, 1989).
9. See Rustom Bharucha, Theatre and the World: Performance and the Politics of
Culture (London: Routledge, 1993), 68-87. See also Bharucha, "Foreign Asia/Foreign
Shakespeare: Dissenting Notes on New Asian Interculturality, Postcoloniality,
and Recolonization," Theatre Journal 56 (200oo4): 1-28; and Ania Loomba, Postcolonial
Shakespeares (London: Routledge, 1998).
o10. For the deterritorializing of classical imperialism in the age of globalization,
see Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge: Harvard University
Press, 2000) and subsequent commentary: Empire's New Clothes: Reading Hardt
and Negri, eds. Jodi Dean and Paul Possavant (London: Routledge, 2004).
Performing History's Unsettlement
Joanne Tompkins
History is not the past: it is a consciousness of the past used for
present purposes.
-Greg Dening
[T]he idea of mapping the historical landscape depends on the
construction of perspective, a view from the present, around which
the panoramas of history are made to revolve.
-Felix Driver
Driver's revolving panoramas and Dening's consciousnesses of the past
must be plentiful, since there are any number of "present purposes" for
which history might be helpful. In postcolonial studies, refiguring history
remains one of the predominant tropes for the decolonization of texts,
bodies, minds, and nations, precisely because imperial agents maintained
strict control over the interpretation of history, as a key mechanism for exerting
authority over a people. Postcolonial reinterpretations of history
have adopted several strategies: recovering suppressed or lost histories,
recognizing the authority in myths and other oral transmissions of the
past, valorizing unofficial versions of history as well as official documents,
and remapping imperial settlements of space and land.1 An increasingly
articulated (re)use of history as a means for exploring postcoloniality
is a self-reflexive performance of cultural specificity, individual
subjectivity, and theatricality. Among the late-twentieth-century plays
that address the anxiety of historical unsettlement are Josie Ningali Lawford's
Ningali from Australia, Lorae Parry's Eugenia from New Zealand,
Reza de Wet's Crossing from South Africa, and Djanet Sears's Harlem Duet
from Canada. While a degree of revisionism occurs in any nation that permits
reevaluation of its national mythologies, in some former colonies this
reevaluation is highly charged, politically and socially.
These plays were first performed in countries whose claim to postcoloniality
is often questioned: the former settler colonies (Australia, Canada,
New Zealand, and South Africa) are most frequently excluded from a
field itself subject to substantial critical debate.2 The extent of imperialism's
historical and geographical reach unsurprisingly provokes debate about
the parameters of the field.3 Critics of former settler colonies tend to argue
that they are industrialized and predominantly white, which restricts
interpretations of postcolonialism to a black/white, poor/rich frame.4
The United States has traditionally been discounted because of its political
and economic weight: its connection to imperialism tends now to be
as an imperial agent in its own right. It is, however, possible to include
some aspects of American society in a postcolonial relationship outside an
71
CRITICAL THEORY AND PERFORMANCE
72
American nationalist context, and Harlem Duet provides a model: it is written
by a Canadian about the postcolonial history of descendants of slaves
transported from Africa to North America.5 South Africa's postcolonial
status is also complicated by the overt racism of apartheid. Yet the lengthy
process of dismantling apartheid, like decolonization, "helps us realize the
limitations of thinking of 'colonial' and 'post-colonial' as distinct, rather
than intermingled conditions which vary according to the historical and
cultural specifics of the place."6
Moreover, to dismiss settler colonies from postcolonial studies is to
confirm any power ostensibly invested in "whiteness," rather than attempting
to dismantle its authority. Richard Dyer maintains that race (including
whiteness) "is never not a factor, never not in play."7 While racial
identity is now well acknowledged to be a complex construction, "whiteness"
is still often exempt from analysis. The complexity of whiteness is
evident in the historical experience of many subjects of former settler
colonies who held a "not quite/not white"8 status vis-a-vis Europeans,
figured as authentically "white." The effect of this "colonial cringe" is an
enduring and debilitating performance anxiety on a global stage. The ambivalence
of the settler colonial subject position is exacerbated by the
whitewashing of history since settler colonies were established by unsettling-dispossessing-indigenous
peoples. A third factor, the displacement
of people from one nation to another as a result of imperial maneuvers,
has substantially altered the demographics of settler nations that
accepted large numbers of migrants following the two world wars. Such
countries are no longer uniformly "white," if they ever could be considered
so. The ongoing reconstitution of the population of such former settler
nations suggests the necessity of a relatively frequent reevaluation of
national identity, or at least an opportunity to accommodate diversity.
Yet national identity is, of course, often a closely guarded, even sacred,
entity. Its unsettlement can be more disruptive than the shift in
demographics itself. Such unsettlement has been evident in a backlash
manifested most clearly in right-wing politics in several former settler
colonies.9 Subscribers to these political positions tend to share a fear of
losing their place in that society by losing their land or being otherwise
disenfranchised. The resultant instability has been best articulated in Australia
by Ken Gelder and Jane M. Jacobs as the "uncanny," which
elaborate[s] a modern Australian condition where what is "ours"
may also be "theirs," and vice versa: where difference and "reconciliation"
co-exist uneasily. In an uncanny Australia, one's place is always
already another's place and the issue of possession is never
complete, never entirely settled.10
A sense of instability is also pronounced in other countries comprised of
indigenous and settler populations, particularly in contexts where "the
nation seems suddenly to have become unfamiliar to itself."11 Unsettle-
PERFORMING HISTORY'S UNSETTLEMENT
73
ment, then, registers a fundamental unfamiliarity confronting the self, national
mythologies, and perceptions of the present and the past.
In politics and popular culture, this unfamiliarity promotes nostalgia
for the days of traditional values and knowing where one stood (often
the speaker's childhood years). Theatrical manifestations of this national
and/or individual unfamiliarity tend to opt not for a wholesale return to
a closed field of representation but for a strategic reengagement with history
and difference. The means by which they attempt to achieve this is
the performing body, which by definition offers access to an unsettled,
strategic system of representation: performance is uncanny in its own
right since the actor "is" and "is not" the character s/he plays. Performance
has thus been effective in staging postcolonial resistance to imperial
control: among its possibilities, it takes place in a communal location,
it is able to enact historical inequities quickly, it can mimic, it displays race
and alterity in a manner that does not merely exploit, it facilitates the use
of multiple languages, and it can manipulate the borders of geography,
history, and subjectivity. As a result, history itself does not hold the power,
but rather the performance of history is the dominant factor in the iteration
of the past. Performance is a potentially dangerous genre that can encourage
political engagement outside the theater building.
The plays discussed here capitalize on performance itself. They perform
multiple subject positions, trying out various possibilities and strategically
playing different roles. This self-reflexive performance of anxiety
is not a mere metaphor for multilayering, "appearances versus reality" illusion,
or the play-within-a-play model. By deliberately juxtaposing at
least two different times, the texts play with both history and performance
to stage some of the manifestations of the uncanny in unsettlement
such as indigeneity and other race matters, migration, and gender. The
plays reconfigure unstable representations of self, place, history, race,
identity, and nationhood in divergent ways to reconstruct culturally specific,
contemporary subject positions in a manner that continues to challenge
the frames of the former settler colonies from which they emerge
and the borders of the larger field, postcolonial studies. The act of taking
on a different role does not always yield the desired results, but its effect
generates a broader subjectivity by looking beyond a national history to a
personal history, while not forgetting how the national history has shaped
the individual.
Ningali: Living with History
In one way, Ningali, by Josie Ningali Lawford, Angela Chaplin, and
Robyn Archer, is the most conventional example of historicizing the present
in its recounting of how a young Aboriginal woman comes to understand
the importance of her ancestral heritage, since indigenous history
is integrally interconnected with the present: the one-woman play recalls
the importance of the direct cultural connection between the past and the
CRITICAL THEORY AND PERFORMANCE
74
present. Lawford explains her own history by introducing the audience
to her extended family whose spirits appear to be on stage and by dancing
her tribal dance: the space of the stage and the duration of performance
transform to incorporate thousands of miles and thousands of
years of "[m]aybe the oldest culture in the world."12 It encompasses the
spatial memory contained in each dance and the cultural memory encapsulated
in the Wambajarri language, reinforcing Lawford's close connection
to her people's land, their language, and their dreaming, as well as
to her living relatives.
Ningali is, however, more than an Aboriginal play reiterating an ancient
claim to the land: amid the layers of ancient and recent Aboriginal
history, the narration of Lawford's life constructs a specific, individual
subjectivity. Her journey moves from Fitzroy Crossing in northern Western
Australia to Perth (for high school) to Anchorage, Alaska (on an
American Field Scholarship), to Sydney (the Aboriginal and Torres Strait
Islander Dance Theatre), to performance in the national tour of the first
Aboriginal musical, Bran Nue Dae. The specificity of Ningali's story is
staged theatrically as well as narratively: as she plots her self on the stage,
it becomes clear that the stage floorcloth depicts a somewhat abstract
image of Lawford herself, so that "during the course of the performance,
Ningali Lawford inscribes her story on the landscape of her face."13 The
performer's body acts upon a representation of the performer's own face
as the play constructs a complex individual subjectivity in conjunction
with an extensive, well-defined cultural backdrop.
The narrative that describes Lawford's life as a performer is also an
imbricated performance of different theatrical traditions, reinforcing the
effect of Lawford's image in the set. Ningali is part monodrama, part standup
comedy routine, part a performance of contemporary and indigenous
music and dance, and part indigenous history. The performance of the
stand-up routine and the country-and-western singing are Western in style
but Aboriginal in content, as the collection of performance styles marks a
somewhat hybrid fluidity between the individual and the community.
These performance styles form the play's narrative structure as much as
Ningali's life itself does, representing somewhat abstractly the multiple
subject positions that generate her subjectivity.
Of the performance modes, tribal dance is the most important for
the performance of history's unsettlement. Less entertainment than a direct
connection to the culture's history, Lawford's dancing body is aesthetically
beautiful on stage as well as representing an act of political engagement
in which history is made current and present with each step of
the dance. Formerly a means of marking the land and telling dreamtime
history, tribal dance holds a more significant memory function now that
Ningali's family no longer has access to the land from which the dances,
language, and culture emerged, having been forced to move by the
(white) owners of the land. The power of the dance is in some respects
transferred to language, a signifier of the physical culture that the
Wambajarri are lucky enough not to have lost with their lands. Ningali
PERFORMING HISTORY'S UNSETTLEMENT
learns the impact of her grandfather's advice that keeping language at
least keeps as much of the law and culture as possible:
He told me, Ningali, you can go anywhere you want
Do anything you want, be anyone you want
But don't forget your language
Because your songs, your dreaming, your stories
Are in your language
And if you lose your language
You are nothing.14
A visit to a group of Inuit people in Alaska reinforces the meaning of these
words. Language itself becomes a performance strategy: Ningali is performed
in English, Wambajarri, and kriol (a combination of the two).
Ningali plays on the likelihood that audiences outside Fitzroy Crossing will
understand only the English, briefly repeating many of the scenes in a different
language, always heavily punctuated with telling gestures. The fluid
movement from one performance style to another underscores possible
ways of constructing and maintaining subjectivity. The layers of indigenous
history and of personal history are clearly differentiated, yet intertwine to
perform the complicated subjectivity of one indigenous Australian.
Ningali reinterprets the supposedly settled history of Australia:
while Ningali's experiences may suggest a somewhat effortless intervention
into the world of contemporary performance in Australia, the play's
backdrop depicts the relatively recent dispossession of the land on which
she was born. A specific example of the uncanny Australia described by
Gelder and Jacobs, this land belongs to Ningali's family by virtue of an
ancient historical connection, but others, who feel that the land belongs to
them, hold the deed. The performance of history's panoramas in Ningali
helps merge various subject positions to construct an example of a contemporary
subjectivity for Aborigines in Australia that attempts to engage
with the effects of dispossession.
Eugenia: Gendering History
Whereas the trope of performance structures Ningali, the process of performance
is the basis of Lorae Parry's Eugenia,15 about a transvestite
woman in New Zealand in 1916. In its focus on the boundaries of gender,
Eugenia stages the performance of gender and gender roles as high school
students in 1996 rehearse a play about Eugenia's life. Eugenia (also called
Jack)16 Martelli migrates from Italy to escape poverty and discrimination
regarding her transvestism. In faraway New Zealand, she takes the opportunity
to start again-as a man-but she soon finds that the prejudices
of the Old World also travel to the New World. In addition, the promised
land does not live up to its name: many migrants face disappointment
with "God's own country" (a common description of New Zealand) and
the disdain expressed toward them by longer-standing settlers.7
CRITICAL THEORY AND PERFORMANCE
76
Eugenia enacts an unsettlement in a country that, in Gelder and Jacobs'
words, fails to recognize itself, partly because its own identity has
not been established independently of its colonizer. Against the backdrop
of an influx of migrants from non-Anglo-Celtic countries, most (male)
New Zealand citizens in 1916 were loyally fighting in Europe although
the British Empire was waning economically, politically, and even ceremonially,
and the massive losses of New Zealand, Canadian, Australian,
and Irish soldiers in the front lines of battle forced these colonies to reevaluate
their relationship to the imperial center. The violent, misogynist Vincent,
one of the lodgers in the house Eugenia inhabits, who lied about his
health to escape the war, symbolizes the caliber of most of the play's remaining
male characters, together with the unwelcome migrants who
were perceived to be potentially disloyal. The prospect of unsettling the
cultural composition of New Zealand by accommodating women, migrants,
and the Maori population (although the play does not have a
Maori presence) is only a distant possibility for the characters of 1916, for
whom alterity is equated with danger and fear.
Eugenia's status as an "alien," an Italian rather than an Anglo-Celtic
New Zealander, marks her as different enough, but her transgression of
the conventional gender boundaries alienates her much more from the
majority of the play's population. The men in particular vehemently object
to her actions, which threaten their own perceptions of sexuality. The
threat is so great that Eugenia is eventually framed for the murder of Violet
and hanged, ostensibly in order to prevent further disruptions to the
social order. The police report at the trial reads, "The dwelling that had
been designed for the sacred ceremonies of motherhood became a ribald
clubhouse for the mock rites of masculinity."18 Eugenia's challenge to gender
roles extends beyond her male dress: she carries out sexual relationships
with various women (only Mrs. Bassani recognizes her biological
gender) and marries Violet. She carries with her a box containing several
artificial phalluses. The stage directions stipulate that the audience never
sees the contents of the box, but the characters who do are horrified by
what they consider to be a sacrilege. The gender difference is in some respects
confined to the box, encouraging questions about just which part
of the anatomy epitomizes gender.
The performance of various panoramic slides of history's unsettlement
is achieved by staging the process of performing gender. The contemporary
narrative characters thus learn to act gender and to ask the
questions that help them determine subject positions for themselves. In
the first moments of the play, the actor playing Eugenia comes onto the
stage dressed in women's clothes and takes them off to reveal men's
clothes, the discarded clothing swept off the stage. The audience sees Eugenia
work out acting "male" through both costume and mannerisms,
and the actor playing her must also frequently change roles to become a
female teacher in the 1996 narrative. Both "male" and "female" are thus
foregrounded as performance. The performing body is the object of attention
not in a sexually charged way (although there are physical attractions
PERFORMING HISTORY'S UNSETTLEMENT
77
among several of the women characters) but to propose that gender can
be enacted, rather than innate.
Eighty years later, the students rehearse their controversial reconstruction
of Eugenia's story. The audience sees fragments of the 1916
scenes re-played by the same group of actors who are now playing the
young students, thus intensifying the process of performing gender. Not
surprisingly, all gender, character, and time boundaries become blurred as
actors in 1916 and in 1996 say the same lines simultaneously, and several
of the 1996 characters become able to "see" several of the 1916 characters.
Georgina, the teacher (whose role is paired with Eugenia's) "sees" Violet,
Eugenia's wife, and the two of them become attracted to each other across
the decades and the divide between life and death.19 The students are also
encouraged to try to "dance" Eugenia's story in their performance, since
their discursive attempts to understand Eugenia remain inadequate.
Eugenia's 1916 narrative ends with her being hanged for murder, in
addition, one surmises, to crimes against "nature," while the student production
succeeds in proving that Eugenia did not kill Violet (rather, Vincent
was the likely perpetrator). The 1996 narrative ends with the play
being canceled by the school board, which deems the subject material inappropriate.
Gender remains a substantial location of unsettlement, used
in this case to conceal fears of cultural and racial alterity. The characters'
performance of the possibility of transformation from role to role-and
gender to gender-provides the means for a strategic reengagement with
representations of difference as they have been articulated in history. By
displaying the performance of gender in a manner that is controversial to
the characters of 1916 and 1996, Eugenia reminds its audience that postcolonial
studies has yet to explore gender as fully as it might.20
Crossing: Memorializing History
The performative transformation that is liberating in Eugenia disrupts a
traditionalist reading of history in Crossing.21 Reza de Wet's play invokes
Afrikaans drawing room melodrama of the 1930s, "aimed at articulating a
sense of national ethnic identity,"22 but its staid setting is quickly overturned
as the play turns a performance of seance, hypnosis, and nostalgia
for history's dead into a "lurid gothic spectacle animated by an ironic postmodern
fascination with kitsch."23 The play is set in South Africa's north
in 1910 and 1930, and while these two times are juxtaposed, the present
cannot be forgotten. Hermien and Sussie, twins in their fifties, run a guesthouse
near the bank of a river that floods annually. The domineering Hermien
hides Sussie from the world because of the substantial hump on
Sussie's back. They perform a "sacred duty,"24 warning gold and diamond
diggers about the river's rages. Those who ignore the warnings are usually
swept to their death, and the sisters recover their bodies to give them a
Christian burial. The ghost of one dead soul refuses to rest quietly, so the
sisters conduct a s~ance to help her remember her baptism name. The
s~ance transports them back twenty years when an itinerant showman and
CRITICAL THEORY AND PERFORMANCE
78
his young assistant visited the house and then left abruptly, becoming victims
of the river.
Hermien and Sussie's duty memorializes a chapter of Afrikaans history
wherein the souls of people long dead are more important than the
lives or conditions of the living. The women keep mementos of people
they have never known as reminders of their deaths, not their lives. These
mementos give the women an almost sexual delight, particularly Sussie,
who has only ever seen Hermien, her mother, the two visitors whose spirits
are called up again by the seance, and dead bodies. The memorializing
of the dead bodies is a closed system that accommodates no other races or
histories. The women's cycle of activity-unheeded warnings, dead bodies,
memorializing the dead bodies-is broken not by racial unrest or cultural
clash but by souls that can't be kept quiet, as if to signal that the veneer
of Christian piety is about to be disrupted.
Crossing unsettles expectations of performance itself in the complicated
seance: Hermien is both herself and the spirit of Ezmerelda until
Ezmerelda emerges as separate actor/entity. When Maestro joins them,
Hermien momentarily also "becomes" him before he gains his own embodiment
and Hermien can become herself again, albeit a version of herself
from twenty years earlier. When the seance begins, Hermien as the
medium loses control over her own being, leaving Sussie to probe the
spirit for answers. Maestro is a hypnotist, and Ezmerelda, whose revealing
clothes are all too big for her, his reluctant helper. Claiming to make
dreams come true, Maestro hypnotizes diggers into thinking that they
have found enormous nuggets, but the popularity of his act likely owes
more to the opportunity he offers men to fondle Ezmerelda. The layers of
performance are further multiplied by Ezmerelda's references to all the
other women who have played the role of "Ezmerelda," dressed in the
same clothing and even to Maestro's gleeful account of raping her and
his subsequent purchase of her from her mother. The performance of
these roles intensifies the uncanny aspect of performance: it becomes difficult
to determine the "edge" of the characters when they take on each
other's roles.
The process by which the characters perform multiple roles unsettles
both history and individual subjectivity. In the sample of his performance
that Maestro executes for the sisters, he demonstrates what Ezmerelda
does on stage, but the stage directions indicate that he "is not imitating
Ezmerelda but seems rather to be embodying her."25 The embodiment of
various characters points to one of the essential elements of the play's use
of performance: like hypnosis or a seance, the agency of the actor is minimal
(even if a seance tires its medium). All the characters embody someone
else, enacting a different person in a manner that is not as simple as metaperformance,
mimicry, or imitation: they temporarily transform into their
targets. This incestuous living in each other's bodies continues to be represented
performatively: Maestro hypnotizes Ezmerelda, whose extreme
compliance suggests an almost total absence of being outside him (predicated,
perhaps, on the violence that meets her occasional attempts to resist
PERFORMING HISTORY'S UNSETTLEMENT
79
him). The characters articulate a functionality rather than an essence or
identity.
De Wet's work is usually allegorical, and while allegorical characters
are by definition functional, that functionality in Crossing results from the
closed historical system that makes the present stagnant rather than invigorating
it. In Crossing, the narrow history that the sisters worship and in
which Maestro and Ezmerelda also participate, allows no room for other
physical characters: it requires the few to embody others to satisfy the demands
of history. The excess of history contributes to the disintegration of
individual subjectivity, the play's allegory being the effects of the historical
excess and the disintegration of the self. The unsettling excess of performance
reveals the actions of an unchecked and circular history.
Ezmerelda's spirit is not lulled by the seance: hearing her real name
does not fix her identity, and the sisters' sacred duty no longer appears to
have divine backing. Ezmerelda belongs neither to God nor to a glorious
Afrikaans history: she belongs to Maestro, who names her and fixes her
as his property, her function defined by "Ezmerelda's" name and clothes.
Perhaps the most significant achievement of Maestro's performance in
Crossing is his transformation of Sussie from acquiescing to Hermien's almost
violent control to a sensual woman who leaves the confines of the
house. Maestro's spirit succeeds in seducing Sussie to join him in the
swollen river, twenty years after he drowned. She escapes the brutality of
Hermien's service, but in "becoming" the next Ezmerelda, she escapes
one cloistered, deadening existence for another, playing Ezmerelda, while
a third-literal death in the river-is the most likely outcome.
The histories that are recounted-both the history of duty that the
women enact and the Maestro's performance history-overtake the characters'
individual subjectivity: their functions within "history" are more
important than they are in themselves. Whereas Lawford productively intertwines
an individual and tribal identity in Ningali, the twins in Crossing
give over their identities to the preservation of a vacuum-like national history
that glorifies the dead for no particular gain while Ezmerelda's identity
is given over to a sexual exploitation that symbolizes the incestuous,
seedy undercurrent to the sisters' ostensibly pure world. Crossing deflates
the history of South Africa, insisting that the development of individual
subjectivity cannot be completely eclipsed by the construction of a national
identity in contemporary, postapartheid South Africa. The play's
enactment of performance and transformation unsettles a closed historical
system of representation in order to productively develop subjectivity
and identity.
Harlem Duet: "Trapped in History"
If subjectivity crumbles in Crossing, the characters in Djanet Sears's
Harlem Duet are plagued by too many possible representations that trap
the main character, Billie, in a maze of historical roles that she did not devise
and that she does not want to claim.26 Whereas Ningali integrates the
CRITICAL THEORY AND PERFORMANCE
80
overlapping histories that define the indigenous title character, Billie
seeks to shed some of the history that she is forced to enact. Harlem Duet
encompasses the four-hundred-year history of African Americans and
African Canadians as it continues to affect people in the twenty-first century.
This complex play is set in Harlem in three eras (186o, 1928, and the
present), but its narrative sweep incorporates Shakespeare's Othello in its
performance of the history of racism and recovery. The play focuses on
Billie, the black woman Othello leaves for the white Desdemona who
"appears" only as an offstage voice or a disembodied arm at a door.27 The
scenes in 186o (with "Him" and "Her") and in 1928 ("He" and "She")
stage previous manifestations of Billie, whose relationship with Othello
also disintegrates over the white woman. These scenes might be figments
of Billie's overwrought imagination (all three couples are performed by
the same pair of actors), but they also have their own reality. The multiple
representations of the couple intensify their performances of staged
African bodies and the effects of racism.
Harlem Duet may appear to be another version of Shakespeare's
play, given the names (Othello, Desdemona/Mona, and Chris Yago,
which recalls lago and Cassio), plot details (Othello, an academic at Columbia,
will teach the summer courses at Cyprus that Chris Yago expected
to get), several lines of Shakespeare's text, and the handkerchief.
Yet Sears's play uses the idea of Othello-particularly the idea of Othello as
a play about race-rather than relying on Shakespeare's play itself.
The 1928 Harlem Renaissance scenes find He in a small dressing
room preparing for a performance. Mona has given him the opportunity
to leave his black minstrel role to play Pericles, Hamlet, and Macbeth. In
scene 9 of act 2, He rehearses the role of Othello, although such parts do
not materialize because She cuts his throat. Othello's incomplete performance
is just one example of the thwarted and forced performances of
race throughout the play. A discussion of involuntary performance of the
black subject takes place in 186o when Him and Her talk about Cleotis, a
fellow slave, whose penis sits in formaldehyde in the hardware store for
viewing at a price. Her compares Cleotis with Saartjie Baartman, the Hottentot
Venus, whose naked body was also placed on show for paying audiences
while she was alive and after her death. For the 1928 Othello as
minstrel and as Shakespearean hero, and the 186o mutilated slave, the
performance of self is involuntary, signifying the other's (white) representation
of black subjectivity.
Harlem Duet performs history as well as race, Shakespeare, and
African American/African Canadian cultures. Each scene's musical introduction
mixes blues or jazz music with excerpts from speeches of wellknown
African American figures (Marcus Garvey, Martin Luther King,
Malcolm X, Louis Farrakhan, Paul Robeson-himself an Othello-and
Christopher Darden). The panoramic view of African American history
includes a lengthy and dynamically performative history, and discussions
of the practices of affirmative action and black versus white feminism, in
addition to the realities of being black in North America today. Yet behind
PERFORMING HISTORY'S UNSETTLEMENT
81
the celebration of this history lies the history of how people of African descent
have been represented. For Billie, Othello's betrayal of her for a
white woman also betrays the history forged by Africans. Othello's "defense"
of the history of how whites represent Africans ensnares Billie in a
historical and ideological minefield that threatens to destroy the her. Her
landlord explains that it's "[1]ike she's on some archeological dig of the
unconscious mind." Billie claims that she is "[t]rapped in history. A history
trapped in me."28 The history of racism and prejudice plays out in
Billie's mind as profound personal and historical unsettlement, affecting
her physically and psychically, resulting in a breakdown.
The introduction of Billie's father, allegorically named Canada, recalls
Him and Her discussing going to Nova Scotia (Canada's home) to escape
the Civil War and to find the freedom that the underground railroad
would provide some slaves. Canada arrives to help her recover herself. His
namesake nation, however, has hardly been a refuge for people of African
descent. The history of Africans in North America-comparable on this
point to indigenous North Americans-does not stop at the forty-ninth
parallel. Sears's home is Canada, but the African history in Canada has too
many connections to the history of the United States to be limited by the
political border, and it is reasonable that postcolonial studies accommodates
the analysis of issues such as racism and the representation of the descendants
of the imperial enterprise of slavery, rather than rigidly stopping
at national (arbitrary) boundaries.
The play is not, then, about African Americans or African Canadians
as "different." Rather, it attempts to normalize racial difference: Sears's introduction
discusses her desire to live in a world where her niece will
"have access to a choir of African voices, chanting a multiplicity of experiences."29
Sears's play attempts to accomplish this by peopling the stage
with a full cast of African actors, privileging the performing African body.
Harlem Duet is, she explains, about beginning an "exorcism" of "the effects
of race and sex on the lives of people of African descent"30 but, as Billie's
illness indicates, there are centuries of damage to repair before she
can construct a personal identity that draws on the wealth of African history,
not on a history of racist representations that predetermines her role,
identity, and place.
It would be convenient to read "history" as a scapegoat in Harlem Duet, as
a refuge in Crossing, as a haunting presence for some characters in Eugenia,
or as just "dreamtime" in Ningali. The plays' disruptions of simplistic
interpretations insist that history be open to reinterpretation, reevaluation,
and rehearsal when it forms part of the process by which the present
is understood. The unsettlement of history can disturb the surface of apparently
settled nations, individuals, and texts to reveal gaps in representation,
inadequacies of national identities, cultural misunderstandings
within a nation, the return of long-forgotten ambivalences, and personal
dislocation.
While postcolonial former settler colonies are predisposed to the
CRITICAL THEORY AND PERFORMANCE
82
ambivalence of unsettlement, it can also emerge in other apparently stable
discourses such as globalization. The connection between the two is not
as distant as one might imagine: postcolonialism could be seen as one reaction
to a historical form of globalization-imperialism. Its artificially
rendered, worldwide sameness could also come to unsettle globalization's
figuration of history, culture, and individual subjectivity, the analysis
of which might generate a greater understanding of the place of cultural
specificity and personal autonomy.
Finally, it is the performance of the historical, cultural, and personal
conditions of settler postcolonialism that rereads ambivalence not as hesitance
but as dynamic potential. While theater continues to be a useful general
metaphor for the rearticulation of history, performance also operates
as a specific, self-reflexive trope of unsettlement in contemporary theater
that may be termed postcolonial. The strategic performance of the inadequacies
of some histories for use in the present illustrates the necessity of
continuing to rethink the effects of colonialism.
NOTES
Epigraphs are from Greg Dening, Mister Bligh's Bad Language (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1993), 17o; and Felix Driver, "Geography's Empire: Histories
of Geographical Knowledge," Environment and Planning D: Society and Space
10 (1992): 23-40.
1. For critical texts that address history in postcolonial theatrical contexts, see
Christopher Balme, Decolonizing the Stage: Theatrical Syncretism in Post-Colonial
Drama (Oxford: Clarendon, 1999); and Helen Gilbert and Joanne Tompkins, Postcolonial
Drama: Theory, Practice, Politics (London: Routledge, 1996).
2. David Chioni Moore notes that the field is remarkably "autocritical" in "Is
the Post- in Postcolonial the Post- in Post-Soviet? Toward a Global postcolonial
Critique," PMLA 116, no. 1 (2001): 112. For examples, see any of the following:
Peter Childs and Patrick Williams, An Introduction to Post-Colonial Theory (London:
Prentice Hall/Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1997); Leela Gandhi, Postcolonial Theory: A
Critical Introduction (Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 1998); Ania Loomba,
Colonialism/Postcolonialism (London: Routledge, 1998); Stephen Slemon, "The
Scramble for Post-Colonialism," in De-Scribing Empire: Post-colonialism and Textuality,
ed. Chris Tiffin and Alan Lawson (London: Routledge, 1994), 15-32. Each of
the many introductions to the field maps the postcolonial world differently: compare,
for instance, Childs and Williams, Gandhi, and Loomba to Dennis Walder,
Post-colonial Literatures in English: History, Language, Theory (Oxford: Blackwell,
1998); and Bart Moore-Gilbert, Postcolonial Theory: Contexts, Practices, Politics (London:
Verso, 1997).
3. For Loomba, careless use of the term severs the discourse's political underpinnings:
"Postcolonialism becomes a vague condition of people anywhere and
everywhere, and the specificities of locale do not matter" (Colonialism/Postcolonialism,
17). Moore, on the other hand, argues-contentiously--that the term can
apply to nations of the former Soviet Union, maintaining that the expanse of nations
that can claim to have been colonized is the field's strength ("Is the Post- in
Postcolonial the Post- in Post-Soviet?" 112).
PERFORMING HISTORY'S UNSETTLEMENT
83
4. For a fuller account of the history and role of settler colonies, see Anna
Johnston and Alan Lawson, "Settler Colonies," in A Companion to Postcolonial Studies
(Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), 360-76.
5. For one of many explanations of the potential of the United States as postcolonial,
see Jenny Sharpe, "Is the United States Postcolonial? Multinationalism,
Immigration, and Race," Diaspora 1, no. 2 (1995): 181-99.
6. Walder, Post-colonial Literatures in English, 156.
7. Richard Dyer, White (New York: Routledge, 1997), 1.
8. Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994), 92. See
also Carrie Dawson, "Never Cry Fraud: Remembering Grey Owl, Rethinking Imposture,"
Essays on Canadian Writing 65 (1998): 120-40.
9. The rise of the Alliance Party in Canada coincided with the popularity of
Pauline Hanson's One Nation Party in Australia, both sharing ultraconservative
platforms. The Alliance Party remains the official opposition in Canada. One Nation
won no seats in the 2001 federal election, but the ruling Liberal Party has
taken a substantial step to the right, adopting many of Hanson's policies. The appeal
of these movements followed the somewhat comparable notoriety of Eugene
Terreblanche (whose name even means "white land") in South Africa, who attempted
to segregate a portion of the country in which apartheid could continue.
New Zealand's bicultural society enables the descendants of the mostly AngloCeltic
settlers (pakeha) and Maori to co-exist, but it leaves little space for the increasingly
immigrant population, or those who fit neither category.
10. Ken Gelder and Jane M. Jacobs, Uncanny Australia: Sacredness and Identity in
a Postcolonial Nation (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1998), 138. This version
of the uncanny is particularly urgent in Australia because of the government's
specific refusal to officially reconcile indigenous people and the settler
population.
11. Ken Gelder and Jane M. Jacobs, "Uncanny Australia," UTS Review 1, no. 2
(1995): 151.
12. Josie Ningali Lawford, Angela Chaplin, and Robyn Archer, Ningali, unpublished
(1994), 26. Ningali premiered at Deckchair Theatre in Fremantle, Western
Australia, in 1994. The play is about the life of the woman who wrote it and who
performs it. To avoid confusion, I refer to "Lawford" when I am referring to the
author of the play and "Ningali" when I am referring to the character.
13. Helena Grehan, Mapping Cultural Identity in Contemporary Australian Performance
(Brussels: Peter Lang, 2001), 76.
14. Lawford, Ningali, 14.
15. Eugenia premiered at Taki Rua Theatre, Wellington, New Zealand, on January
19, 1996. Lorae Parry, Eugenia (Wellington: Victoria University Press, 1996).
Parry is well known for playing with the bounds of gender: she and Carmel McGlone
are famous for performing Digger and Nudger (none-too-bright male New
Zealanders) in comedy sketches.
16. While it is customary to refer to transvestites by their preferred gender role,
the play and its title focus on female subjectivity and female gender roles more
than their male counterparts, so I refer to the main character as "Eugenia" and
"she."
17. Ironically, the experience of settler subjects who were not "white" enough
is revisited upon migrants in former settler colonies.
18. Parry, Eugenia, 11.
19. Parry, Eugenia, 72.
20. An example of a text that does address these issues is Anne McClintock,
CRITICAL THEORY AND PERFORMANCE
84
Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Context (New York: Routledge,
1995).
21. Crossing premiered in Afrikaans at the Grahamstown Festival, July 4, 1994.
The English-language premiere was at the Nico Arena Theatre, Cape Town, October
22, 1994. Reza de Wet, Crossing, in Drama for a New South Africa: Seven Plays,
ed. David Graver (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999), 166.
22. David Graver, introduction to Crossing, in Drama for South Africa, 166.
23. Graver, introduction, 166, 167.
24. De Wet, Crossing, 173.
25. De Wet, Crossing, 185, 186.
26. Djanet Sears, Harlem Duet (Victoria, B.C.: Scirocco, 1997), 101. The multiaward-winning
Harlem Duet premiered at the Tarragon Theatre in Toronto in April
1997, produced by Nightwood Theatre.
27. Sears, Harlem Duet, 47.
28. Sears, Harlem Duet, 30, 101.
29. Djanet Sears, "Notes of a Coloured Girl: 32 Short Reasons Why I Write for
Theatre," introduction to Harlem Duet, 12.
30. Sears, "Notes of Coloured Girl," 14-15. The play weaves another strand
into the idea of "exorcism." Billie's name is short for Sybil, a "seer of the future"
and a "sorceress" (Harlem Duet, 81), which Sears takes from Othello. The only activity
that engages Billie in her depression is her alchemical work with herbal
remedies and poisons, and she impregnates Othello's handkerchief with poison.
As Amah says, "if this kind of stuff truly worked, Africans wouldn't be in the situation
we're in now" (Harlem Duet, 10o2), leaving the audience to decide whether
or not the poison is effective enough to kill the third Othello.
What Is to Be Remembered?: Tourism
to Ghana's Slave Castle-Dungeons
Sandra L. Richards
Travel mobilizes many calculations concerning the possible identities of
the host and the tourist: will the people and place be sufficiently interesting,
that is, unlike or different from me and my environment, to warrant
the time and money spent journeying to this other space? Will they be sufficiently
like me, so that the social organization of services and space will
not require my constant decoding? Will this location be heavily commercialized,
or will the locals appear more interested in communicating with
me than in simply having me spend money? Who, in fact, am I? That is,
how do I wish to present myself in relation to what I hope to find at my
destination?
Additionally, the project of memory, upon which travel to historical
sites or heritage tourism is built, raises other issues familiar to theater
scholars: Like theater, memory is constructed through processes of selecting,
repeating, forgetting-willfully as well as unconsciously-and reassembling
narratives. It operates through the conflation of chronological
time, for the more vivid a memory, the more it produces the affect of existing
in the present. Memory serves a presentist agenda, even though its
subject is the past. No matter how much we strive for a full recuperation
of a past event, our selection of facts, the emphases we devote, and the
meanings we make are determined by our location in the present;' we remember
for some purpose, most often expressed as a need to learn how
the past can instruct our present and future. Like theater directors and designers,
curators of a successful heritage site-that is, one that continues
to attract visitors/audiences-seek to shape a necessarily multifaceted,
complicated history into a comprehensible narrative that is affectively
present; like theater practitioners, they seek to transform an abstract absence
into a palpable presence.
To all these issues of identity and difference, role playing, required
labor disguised as voluntary hospitality, and mediated authenticity, cultural
travel to slave sites adds several more: How is a history of pain to be
represented so that people will want to visit (and revisit) the site? Must a
teleology of progress away from the original source of pain be invoked?
Whose story is to be narrated? If that enslavement meant being dispossessed
of one's body, let alone of any material possessions, how is absence
to be memorialized?
James Clifford has asked, "How do different populations, classes,
and genders travel? What kinds of knowledges, stories, and theories do
they produce?"2 Partially because I like to travel, and because I agree with
Clifford's subsequent comment that "[a] crucial research agenda opens
85
CRITICAL THEORY AND PERFORMANCE
86
up" (173), I have begun to research African American travel to slave sites
in the Black Atlantic. This account, based upon trips taken between 1997
and 1999,3 focuses on the memorialization of the transatlantic slave trade
at Elmina and Cape Coast castles in southern Ghana. I analyze performances
of identity, determined by tourist brochures, Web media, and the
organization of museum spaces and displays; in some instances, I offer
my own memories, because I believe they partially mirror the reactions of
other black American tourists. Whereas travel media encourage African
Americans to imagine ourselves as family members returning to a welcoming
home, the memorial sites produce, for both hosts and "returnees,"
more contradictory responses that register the tension and dissimilarity,
as well as unifying bonds, of "family." Funded by international agencies,
multinational corporations, and the Ghanaian government, patronized by
visitors from Ghana, other African nations, Europe, the United States and
the Caribbean, Ghana's castle-dungeons are, in fact, "contact zones," defined
by cultural studies scholar Mary Louise Pratt as
a space of colonial encounters, the space in which peoples geographically
and historically separated come into contact with each other
and establish ongoing relations, usually involving conditions of coercion,
radical inequality, and intractable conflict.4
Moreover, the museum displays housed in these structures enact a
series of provocative, hegemonic surrogations that argue for the need for
a more difficult or noncoherent, multiperspectival memorial that honors
disparate histories, yet re-members threads with which a shared future
might be fashioned.
Tourism is reputedly the world's largest industry.5 According to the
Travel Industry Association of America, heritage travelers stay in hotels
more frequently and for longer periods of time, fly rather than drive, visit
more destinations, and generally spend more money than their "non culturally-oriented,
traveling counterparts." Further, "[T]he profile of the minority
travelers makes the picture for heritage tourism even brighter, for
African Americans' favorite activities are shopping, visiting historical
places, and attending cultural events or festivals, all of which rank above
the participation level of other groups."6 In Ghana, tourism ranks as the
third-largest producer of foreign exchange.7 The most frequented destination
is the southern coast, known as the Central Region of Ghana, where
the castle-dungeons are located. Given the centrality of slavery to the creation
of an African diaspora in the Americas, some will question my use of
the term "tourists" rather than "pilgrims." Though many travelers may emphasize
the spiritual dimension of their journey, I retain the former term in
order to signal our collective inability to escape a mediatized cultural economy,
whose commodification and circulation of information, images, and
desire so saturate our daily environment as to nearly pass for invisible, with
the result that discourses of authenticity and agency mask our identities as
consumers selecting from a number of externally determined options.8
WHAT IS TO BE REMEMBERED?
87
Casting Oneself: Tourist, Returning Daughter, Or... ?
Semioticians Umberto Eco and Marco De Marinis argue that a text constructs
its own reader or spectator as a necessary condition of its potential
for meaning. Thus, travel brochures attempt to anticipate and structure
the roles the visitor might choose to play. Anthropologist Edward Bruner
argues that tourists, headed for less developed areas of the Third World,
hunger for confirmation of their image of a precolonial past:
The Other in our geography is a sight of disgust; the Other in their
[own] geography is a source of pleasure. In our place, the Other is
pollution; in their place, the Other is romantic, beautiful, exotic. In
our geography, the elite pay not to see the Other, keeping them distant
or hidden, whereas in their geography, the Western elite pay for
the privilege of viewing and photographing. There is racialization at
home and a primitivization over there, in exotica.9
This assertion makes sense only if the elite is presumed white. In the
United States, African Americans constitute the Other; our skin color
marks us as unwanted on the terrain of elites or tolerated as an exception
that proves the rule of black inferiority. In amassing the capital required
to travel to Ghana, we are economically more elite than many of our other
black (or white) compatriots-for example, a round-trip ticket from
Chicago to Accra, Ghana cost approximately $1,300 in the summer of
1999. We possess more financial resources than most of the locals with
whom we will come in contact. Yet, as will be discussed, many of us also
require, for reasons quite different from those of white elites, that continental
Africans play the precolonial role.
During my visits to the castle-dungeons at Cape Coast and Elmina, I
have observed three broadly defined categories of visitors: local people,
most of whom are school-age youths on field trips; Europeans; and diaspora
Africans, that is, black people from the historic, slave-derived diasporas
of the Caribbean and the United States as well as from newer diasporas,
constituted by economic and/or political instability and war.10 In this
essay, I use "diasporic Africans" to refer to blacks from slave-derived societies
in the Americas, while the more restrictive "African Americans"
refers to blacks from the United States. Of the African Americans whom I
have met directly or observed through videos of their trips, some were
members of a Pennsylvania community college program attending the biennial
international theatre festival known as PANAFEST; others were
members of an intergenerational community-based study group who
hoped the trip would play a significant role in the confidence-building and
values orientation that their teenagers were undergoing in a rites of passage
program. And, a group from the St. Paul Community Baptist Church
in Brooklyn, New York had journeyed to Ghana's castle-dungeons as part
of an innovative, multidisciplinary performance program designed to redress
the trauma of slavery. I suspect that many of us beyond the teen
CRITICAL THEORY AND PERFORMANCE
88
years had, prior to arriving in Ghana, experienced the thrill of Alex Haley's
genealogical achievement, popularized in Roots (the Reader's Digest serial,
the 1976 book, the American television series, or the video). Unlike Haley,
many are unable to identify the exact location of familial origin, but inspired
nonetheless, we posit our roots in Africa wherever experiences resonate
with, or seem familiar to what we have encountered-emotionally,
intellectually, or imaginatively-in black American communities. Thus, we
journey to Africa, hoping to briefly escape American racism and experience
racial dignity at its source.
In fact, speaking from a variety of self-interested positions, various
texts depict the would-be traveler as desirous of an Edenic origin. African
American travel writer Deborah Barfield headlines her article about her
trip to Senegal, Ivory Coast, and Ghana, "Trip to the Motherland Is Painful,
Educational."12 Implying that no particular African nation is her ancestral
home, Barfield deploys the trope of return to a space of loving
acceptance by the mother whose biological connection guarantees acceptance
of the (lost) child. Though she notes occasional tensions between
travelers and hosts, she closes her piece with guide Joseph N'diaye of
Senegal saying, "I was mistaken about the door of no return [used by captives
to begin their transatlantic passage]. You guys are back."13 The accompanying
photographs of a woman and child carrying water on their
heads and of a young man, wrapped toga-like in traditional Ghanaian
kente cloth, are eye-catching in marking the difference between diaspora
visitors and locals.
The communications conglomerate AT&T also appeals to a longing
for ancestral connection in its "I found them" print advertisement. With a
man and a young girl photographed in a rural environment devoid of any
national or ethnic markers, it dramatizes an unseen character phoning
home to exclaim, "RIGHT HERE. RIGHT NOW. I've found our blood, our
people. Not just our roots but the whole doggone tree."14 Similarly, the
Pan African historical theatre festival, PANAFEST, which up until 1999
was supported by the Republic of Ghana as well as the Organization of
African Unity, mobilized the trope of family, adopting as its 1997 subtheme
"Uniting the African family through development."15 Likewise,
Topmount Tours utilized the discourse of family but stressed for potential
PANAFEST visitors the appropriateness of Ghana-rather than other
African nations or branches of the family-as a vacation destination. Noting
that three castles have been declared World Heritage monuments, its
text moves with astonishing rapidity from the pain of enslavement to the
titillation of desire with "Let your dreams come true. Come and experience
the country your ancestors probably came from." Invoking the
names of such Pan African leaders and Ghana residents as Trinidad-born
George Padmore and African American W. E. B. Du Bois, it appeals to
pride in black achievement before settling on the comfortable scenario of
"Come for a reunion. Share in the family ceremonies that mark events like
child-naming...",6
Seeking to entice as many tourists as possible to spend their dollars
WHAT IS TO BE REMEMBERED?
89
in Ghana rather than in nearby Senegal or Benin, the Ghana Tourist Board
adopts a more multivocal approach on its Web home page. It suggests a
variety of roles for the tourist below a beautiful, full-colored picture of a
prepubescent girl in ceremonial dress, complete with kente cloth, gold,
trade beads, and fly whisk. One can become the sophisticated owner of
experiences unknown to the traveling masses: "Nestled in the heart of the
Gulf of Guinea on the West Coast of Africa is a jewel. This jewel is one of
the best secrets in Africa." Europeans and white Americans can be sun
worshippers: "Welcome to Ghana. A land of miles and miles of sundappled
beaches," while diasporic Africans seeking a glorious history, or
all lovers of fine jewelry, will also find roles to their liking: "the home of
Asante and the land of gold. Ghana offers some of the best travel experiences.
Come in and explore." The attractive home page on the Web suggests
that the tourist will experience a hospitable, exciting environment
once in Ghana.
The reference to Asante and gold is double-voiced and illustrates a
crucial point about these castle-dungeons as contact zones. The Asante
built empires of significant geographic reach, organization, and wealth, a
tremendous achievement for black diasporans, who study people of
African descent in school only in relation to slavery or quests for civil
rights. But the abundance of gold was what originally drew Europeans
into trade with West Africa, until the trade in black bodies proved more
profitable. In being invited to "let your dreams come true," in witnessing
a durbar or parade of traditional chieftains and their supporters, where so
much precious material, such as gold and kente, is on display, Africans in
the diaspora are encouraged or seduced to cast ourselves amongst the victors,
amongst the powerful and rich architects of empire. But on the site
of Elmina and/or Cape Coast castle, where the slave dungeons seem to
emit their own odor and presence, such self-fashioning is much harder to
achieve; the fractured quality of "family" and "home" is much more apparent
to travelers from the African diaspora.
Geographies of Performance
While the tourist has a variety of roles in which she can imagine herself
prior to arrival, on the castle-dungeon grounds she is both spectator and
actor, alternating between distanced observation and imaginative selfidentification.
As spectator, she has paid for the privilege of looking at
and photographing everything and everyone within her field of vision.
As actor, she moves through a space that, given its sometimes constraining
physical dimensions and coupled with the impact of the guide's narrations,
transforms into an antagonistic environment; further, given her
companions' video cameras, she may provide a spectacle for the nonvacationing
folks back home. But first, let us consider the history that has
shaped the terrain through which this specta(c)tor is moving.
Ghana boasts the distinction of having sixty castles, forts, and lodges
built along its three-hundred-mile coastline.7 The Portuguese were the
CRITICAL THEORY AND PERFORMANCE
90
first to protect their trading interests by building Sao Jorge da Mina, or St.
George's castle, at Elmina in 1482; thereafter, the Dutch, Swedes, Prussians,
Danish, and British all competed for dominance, with many fortifications
changing hands as one European power triumphed over another. With the
abolition of the slave trade, these structures were often used as colonial administrative
offices and prisons; after independence in 1957, some functioned
as schools or military training academies; Christiansborg castle in
the capital, Accra, has served as Ghana's seat of government since 1876.18
Given the importance of the transatlantic slave trade to world development,
UNESCO has designated the largest of these fortifications, popularly
known simply as Elmina castle, and nearby Cape Coast castle, located
approximately eighteen kilometers to the west, as World Heritage
monuments in accordance with its World Heritage Convention:
there are some parts of heritage which are of such outstanding value
to the world as a whole that their protection, conservation and transmission
to future generations is a matter not just for any one nation
but for the international community as a whole.19
A variety of national and international organizations, including the
Ghana Museum and Monuments Board, the US Agency for International
Development, the United Nations Development Programme, and Shell
Oil (Ghana) Limited, have funded the conservation of these sites. Expenditures
also included new drainage systems, toilet facilities, and, in the
case of Elmina, a new town market that benefits locals directly by providing
needed infrastructural development, and indirectly by rendering the
environment attractive to foreign visitors. Interestingly, although these
castle-dungeons are reputed to have "outstanding value to the world as a
whole," the former colonial power of Britain, whose nationals played significant
roles in the transatlantic trade, is not listed among the donors.
As spectator, I remember the exterior of Elmina castle-dungeon as
startling in its offensive whiteness (see fig. 1). Nestled close to the ocean,
the town's central area appears relatively small, with its narrow streets
filled with cars, pedestrians, and shopkeepers whose wares spill out onto
the sidewalks. Its architecture an eclectic mix of European colonial and
more modern designs, the town boasts no building higher than two stories,
and most structures are painted in faded yellow ochres, pastels, or
white that register the harmful effects of intense sun and salt-water humidity.
But given preservation efforts, this castle-which is not only the
biggest building in the town of Elmina but also the largest of all the structures
built on Ghana's coast-sparkles with its fresh white paint.20 Utterly
distinct from its surroundings, the structure is a silent but undeniable
monument to the international dimension of the slave trade.
Several sections within the castle loom large in my memory's eye/I
and temporality. In re-viewing those spaces, I do not necessarily see myself
in those rooms, but I re-experience some of the bodily distress they
engendered. In writing, I create another mediated memory that I hope to
WHAT IS TO BE REMEMBERED?
91
communicate to another. Further, I attempt to adopt a suitable, yet selfcontradictory
"both/and" language: a language that resists the disorder
that lurks at the edge of this mediated memory and that mimics-in
miniature-what I imagine were the emotions of the enslaved, and threatens
to render me, like them, hysterical. A defensive language that
nonetheless seeks to acknowledge their trauma and my inheritance.
As a distanced spectator, I view the officers' quarters located on the
second floor. There is no furniture or other material artifact on display in
any of these rooms. Thus, they seem amply spacious; several of them also
face the ocean and enjoy a refreshing vista and cool cross-breezes. Connecting
them to the lower level is a narrow stairway that leads to the enslaved
women's dungeons. As the architecture makes amply clear and as
the guides explain, from their bedrooms officers had access to an interior
balcony that looks onto a small, completely enclosed square. Enslaved
women would periodically be herded into this courtyard, and those unfortunate
enough to attract the officers' fancy would then be sent up the
narrow stairs. Though history books have only recently, with the impact
of second-wave feminism, begun to study the gendered dimensions of
slavery, the physical structure stands as a text both waiting to be read and
provoking questions: Who prepared these women for their encounters
with European officers? What did townspeople know, and how did they
react to the palpable horrors of the slave castle? Or, in that Europeans had
these structures built from plans presumably developed elsewhere, were
other women systematically abused like these Africans? These are questions
that I think to ask after the fact, when I am home again in the safety
of my office.21
But, on site, as I descend from the officers' balcony to the women's
pens and courtyard below, and as additional senses come under attack, it
is hard to preserve an emotional distance. Dark, with mold and mildew
plainly visible on the wall, some of the dungeons receive their only air
source from what was once a magazine storage for armaments, meaning
that overcrowded female captives would have inhaled sulphur in addition
to the odors of bodily fluids and fear. Surprisingly, a stench that momentarily
catches and stops the breath remains. It activates the imagination,
destroying temporal distinctions and flattening historical and
individual subjectivities into one force-field of pain. Tour guides generally
evidence no notice of this emotional shift but continue with their script,
pointing out that if a woman were found to be pregnant, she would not
be shipped into slavery. Left unstated is the implication that sensing the
traumas yet to come, women would have desired rape. Left unstated is
any information about what happened to pregnant women. Given the
project of memorialization that Elmina enacts, these silences or forgettings
enact a second wounding. But in the relative safety of reflection, I
must acknowledge that even if guides were to supply additional data,
that would not fully assuage a sense of loss; whether I knew then that representation
is bound to fail before the enormity of the historical violence,
I do not remember.
Fig. 1. Front view of Elmina castle. Photo by Snoop Cards, reproduced with permission.
The passage connecting the male and female dungeons and leading
to the infamous "door of no return" offers little relief from the identification
that memory has effected, because we tourists are required to re-enact
in some small measure an aspect of the captives' experiences. The area is
dark, severely limiting one's ability to see what comes next; the visitor
must bend down and then move single file toward the spot where the enslaved
would have entered boats to take them out to the waiting ships. For
many who had been marched hundreds of miles from the interior, this moment
would have marked their first sight of the ocean and another stage
of their descent into the unknown. Guides inform visitors that when the
Europeans traded mainly in material goods, this passageway was much
broader, but once commerce switched to humans, castle administrators decided
to severely constrict the space so as to prevent attempts to escape.
Part of the pain of walking through the lower levels of this castledungeon,22
of imagining the life that transpired here, relates to absence.
I can smell what I imagine is the stench of suffering, but no material
scrap remains inside the dungeons. Scholarship on Jewish Holocaust memorials
helps clarify the analysis of my responses to Elmina and Cape
Coast. Theater studies scholar Vivian Patraka has noted that in the initial
fund-raising letters,
There is an overpowering sense of desire in all these descriptions, a
need to create an utterly convincing spectacle that will say it all, stop
time and space, prevent denial and make the suffering known. Of
course, no representation can do that [.. .] How could the unspeakable
genocide be spoken?23
92
WHAT IS TO BE REMEMBERED?
93
While I agree with Patraka's assertion that no mountain of artifacts,
such as the spoons, shoes, or family photographs one encounters in the
US Holocaust Memorial Museum can diminish the "enormity of the absent
referent,"24 I am deeply impressed by that amassing of pedestrian
materials that stand in for the moment-whether fairly immediate or
decades long-before the disappearance of millions of Jews. No such collection
at Elmina or Cape Coast marks the captives' history as free people.
While a few chains and leg irons are on display, nothing stands in for the
pretraumatic moment, whose representation might rescue victims from
the category of commodified abstraction and allow visitors to appreciate
the particularity of their lives.
This absence of artifacts performs African diasporic identity, for dispossession
of a specific history, loss of a coherent, complex universe of
values and practices, constitute the very grounds of our identities in the
Americas. Faced with this absence and burdened by the oppressive presence
of the confining castle-dungeon walls, some black tourists give free
rein to their imaginations. Memory thus becomes a creative act, akin to
the method Toni Morrison deployed when she began writing Beloved as
an answer to the lack of interiority in the slave narratives:
... on the basis of some information and a little bit of guesswork you
journey to a site to see what remains were left behind and to reconstruct
the world that these remains imply. What makes it fiction is
the nature of the imaginative act: my reliance on the image-on the
remains-in addition to recollection to yield up a kind of truth. By
"image," of course, I don't mean "symbol"; I simply mean "picture"
and the feelings that accompany the picture.25
Tourists fill a violent absence with the materiality of their own bodies;
they imagine themselves as standing in, as artifacts, for those whose
names can no longer be recalled. Analogous memories of dispossession
enable them to step into the role of surrogates but pose the danger that
these present-day actors will suture the aching disappearance of the forever-lost
ancestor with their own subjectivity. They produce a problematic
fiction that nonetheless contains the moral truth that every life deserves
the honor of acknowledgment. Down in the bowels of the earth,
the minister from St. Paul Community Baptist Church prays to "God, ...
[who] saw it all,"26 as his group prepares to leave Elmina castle. Against
the lack of narratives of their genealogy, against the vicious distortions
that have constituted their representation and life chances in the modern
world, against the possible amnesia of history, these tourists invoke a divine
justice to validate their presence. They sing in a halting, flatted, blues
style, "Remember me, remember me, Oh Lord, remember me." Sound,
particularly the moans and silences between words, becomes memory
and chronotope, propelling these travelers back through the racialized
violence of the Jim Crow South, plantation slavery in the Americas, the
watery graveyard of the Atlantic, to the dungeons of West Africa. Sound
CRITICAL THEORY AND PERFORMANCE
94
becomes a mode of representation and comfort, holding out the hope of
eventual rescue.
So far, my narrative has focused on the African American tourist, who
moves from spectator to actor, as she tours Elmina castle. But what about
the guides: what roles do they assume, and how does the specta(c)tor respond
to them? If, as performance studies scholar Barbara KirshenblattGimblett
argues, tourism-and by extension, heritage-is an "export industry"
in which the local is produced for outsiders,27 then an anomaly lies
at the heart of the promotion of these structures. Slavery is not integral to
how most Ghanaians define themselves. To attract tourists, Ghanaians
must remember a history they learned to forget.
Though the nation's record number of castles and forts might seem
like a giant history book readily available for the reading, meaning is not
inherent in an object but resides in the narratives that we ascribe to it.28
Until relatively recently, slavery was not a subject taught in Ghanaian
schools or transmitted orally in informal settings. The men serving as
guides have not only received academic, content-specific training, but like
other actors, they also calibrate their performances to produce a desired
audience response. They construct their narrations according to particular
spaces, indigenous linguistic practices, and the composition of the touring
group. That is, three categories of people occupied Elmina and Cape
Coast castle-dungeons during the period that is being memorialized:
European officers and soldiers, captives marched from the interior, and
castle slaves. While the slave trade significantly affected local life, indigenous
people were largely separate from day-to-day operations within the
castle confines. Thus, for the most part they do not enter the guides'
scripts, and the production of locality, discussed in the upcoming section
on exhibition semiotics, pales against the monumentality of the trade, signaled
by the very buildings themselves.
Indigenous languages and custom prefer indirection in dealing with
subjects of great sensitivity.29 Thus, guides offer the history of each room
in understated terms. Mr. Charles Adu-Arhin, with whom I have toured
Elmina and whom I have seen on videotape, rarely uses the term "slave,"
substituting instead "captive." The distinction is subtle but important, for
as scholar Marimba Ani has argued, "slave" connotes an ontological category
of character or essence, while the term "captive" alludes to the violence
required to deprive a person of his/her freedom.30 Typically, these
storytellers deploy euphemisms, such as "women were put in the family
way," when referring to rape. Given a linguistic penchant for the passive,
they produce a discourse in which there are victims but few identified
perpetrators or accomplices, even though the fact of African involvement
in the slave trade is acknowledged. This history may belong to Ghanaians,
but they are missing from its performance.
Though the guides may perform a self-erasure, they often engage in
some casting of their own before the tour even begins. Through the exchange
of backstage anecdotes and experience gained from actual tours,
they have learned to cast racially and avoid placing disparate tourists into
interracial groupings. Seemingly, white visitors remain spectators, who,
WHAT IS TO BE REMEMBERED?
while moved by the tour, have the luxury of utilizing the space afforded
by linguistic indirection to maintain a sense of distance between themselves
and their European ancestors. But once in the dungeon areas, diasporic
Africans are likely to succumb to memory's temporality, in which
past and present identities merge; African Americans, in particular, are
known to respond with uncontrollable tears or to direct their anger at
whites, seen as the contemporary agents of a historic oppression. The visitors'
shift to surrogates-spectacularly interacting with the narratorguides
and the environment-discomforts guides, challenging them, perhaps,
to rethink their cultural definitions of acceptable behavior and to
remember slavery from the perspective of the victims.
Visitors' responses to these tours vary. As recorded in the guestbook,
many people of various nationalities and races remark that Elmina offers
an impressive monument to a human atrocity that must never be repeated.
In contrast to what I have described, some college students report
feeling nothing; others object to the commercialism of the gift shop, where
they are encouraged to wait before the tour begins; several omit any reference
to the trip from their journals entirely; while some find the experience
too intense to capture on paper.31 On site, many African Americans
choose to document their presence. Not only do they attempt to take photographs
in the subterranean dungeons, I have also observed people line
up their cameras so that guides can take their pictures against the
panoramic background of the ramparts facing the sea. Perhaps, like me,
they are relieved to be free of the dungeons and troubled by the incongruity
of such physical beauty at the site of human horror. But it would
appear that at such a moment, they are also simultaneously enacting conflicting
roles. As vacationers, they conform to the expectation of displaying
evidence of themselves having an enjoyable trip32; as "family" members,
they produce an ambiguous document, a competing memory of a
beautiful vista that preserves the perspective of the enslavers and omits
reference to the trauma of the ancestors they have come to memorialize.
Other black Americans consent to having themselves videoed, but with
their dark glasses and grim expressions, refuse the role of smiling tourists
who engage the camera's gaze. Some appear stunned by the heat, smells,
and sights; their faces betray no emotion.
Backstage Contact Zones
Having analyzed performances of memory that passage through the castledungeon
engenders, I wish to turn to the backstage production area before
coming forward again to scrutinize the ethnographic identities that the
production team enacts in wall exhibitions. In the backstage contact zone,
various actors, who share a history but exist in unequal power relations to
each other, began meeting in the early 1990s to establish a definition of the
memorial object and a protocol for remembering. Their roles and objectives
were varied: on the national level, Ghanaian government officials
had identified tourism as a "priority area in the overall developmental
programme of the economy."33 Their decision to link both castle-dungeons
CRITICAL THEORY AND PERFORMANCE
96
to the development of a national park suggested that heritage (or for that
matter, environmental) tourism is primarily a means to increase national
prosperity. Having secured technical assistance from agencies such as Conservation
International, the Midwest Universities Consortium for International
Activities (MUCIA), the United States branch of the International
Council of Monuments and Sites, and the Smithsonian Institution, the
Ghanaian government coupled foreign expertise with staff from the Ghana
Wildlife Department, the National Commission on Culture, the Ghana
Museums and Monuments Board, the University of Ghana at Legon, and
Cape Coast University.34 In addition, African Americans resident in Ghana
became involved in conservation disputes. Ghosting all these stakeholders
was the "world as a whole" for whom, according to the UNESCO designation,
these heritage sites have "outstanding value."
One particular controversy demonstrates the complex, competing
claims of memory, responsibility, and ownership that characterize these
sites. In 1993, in keeping with a concern for tourist comfort and revenue,
local museum officials decided to open a restaurant-bar above the male
dungeon at Cape Coast (fig. 2).35 They reasoned that a restaurant would
encourage visitors to stay longer and possibly learn more, but as the discussion
on exhibition semiotics demonstrates, various stakeholders
adopted different definitions of the object of study. African Americans felt
this decision was analogous to opening a restaurant in a cemetery and
further, that work on the structure went beyond preservation to a renovation
that would "whitewash" the structures' history of oppression.36 Local
Ghanaians wanted to utilize the museum as an opportunity to display
their history, of which slavery was a small, albeit significant, part, while
members of the Council of Chiefs of Edina (Elmina's traditional name)
were angered at not being properly consulted in the Central Region Development
Commission's planning for (tourism) development.37
The controversy about preservation protocols and tourist comfort
points to larger issues that, given historical disjunctures, different linguistic
codes and socialization processes-and asymmetrical economic as well
as political resources-resist easy resolution, tropes of a (re)united family
notwithstanding. Ghanaians have inherited diverse historical and cultural
legacies, resulting in ambivalent responses to slavery.38 While all recognize
the horror of the trade, some local coastal residents are the descendants
of people who prospered from the transatlantic slave trade; some
benefited not from slavery per se but from the Western-style education
that was introduced as a result of trade and thus historically prepared
them to occupy important positions in a modernizing colonial Gold Coast
and in the subsequent postcolonial Ghana. Various ethnic traditions forbid
discussion of slave ancestry, even though in a northern community
like the historic market town of Salaga, which served as an important
nineteenth-century depot for both the trans-Saharan and Atlantic slave
trades, elderly people can still identify enslaved ancestors and their descendants.
This ability to remember enslaved individuals, coupled with
the taboo surrounding slavery, suggests that communities invest consid-
Fig. 2. The restaurant-bar, later removed, within Cape Coast castle-dungeon in
1992. Photo by Nathan Kwame Braun, reproduced by permission.
erable psychic energy in maintaining silence around a public secret. Yet,
artists and other cultural workers have broken this taboo: as early as 1965,
dramatist Ama Ata Aidoo tackled issues of national relationships to the
slave-derived diaspora in The Dilemma of a Ghost, and in 1970 she dramatized
the disastrous impact of slavery on local culture in Anowa.39 More
than two decades later, Kwadwo Opoku-Agyemang continued the discussion
among the well educated with his Cape Coast Castle: A Collection of
Poems (1996), and Ghana TV's 1999 airing of a fifteen-part program documentary
on the nation's slave sites shattered some of the silence among
the general public.40
Some diaspora Africans have shouted loudly into that silence, demanding
in the mid-199os that their conceptualization of the site as a sacred
memorial, free of human manipulation, prevail.41 African Americans
in particular are viewed as overly sensitive, domineering, and hypocritical.
Reacting perhaps to failed fund-raising efforts, Francis Duah, the regional
director of Ghana's Museum and Monuments Board, has said of African
Americans, "They come in here and they cry and throw themselves on the
ground, but they don't want to contribute anything to what we're doing.
Then they want to have a big say in what we do."42 The Ghanaian expectation
that African Americans would contribute funds to this preservation
project strikes some African Americans as insensitive to the price of death
and alienation that their ancestors have already paid and that they continue
to suffer.43 But this position, of course, ignores the facts that African
Americans on average have considerably more financial resources than
most Ghanaians and come from a diaspora to which many Ghanaians aspire.44
Yet, when all of these parties-Ghanaians from the tourism and
development as well as academic sectors; American technocrats from
museum, conservation, and development arenas; and expatriate African
97
CRITICAL THEORY AND PERFORMANCE
98
Americans critical of dominant American institutions-sit down to negotiate,
African Americans are structurally in the weakest position: the sites
are Ghanaian, and though they assert the status of historical insiders,
African Americans are political outsiders. They have no governmental or
philanthropic organizations that will argue their viewpoint; they represent
no organized constituency with resources to support their opinions. In
fact, their position replays their dispossessed, liminal status as citizens of
a nation that historically has trampled on their rights, and as fictive kin to
a nation whose borders, languages, and customs largely exclude them.
Exhibition Semiotics
James Clifford has observed that when the concept of a contact zone is applied
to museums, one recognizes that their collections become "ongoing
historical, political, and moral relationship[s]-a power-charged set of exchanges,
of push and pull."45 Such is the case in the Elmina and Cape
Coast castle-dungeons, where, like object theatre, the wall displays reenact
a drama of struggle among stakeholders to reach consensus over
what the structures memorialize. The result is a series of surrogations in
which one narrative has been selected, for reasons of ideology, political
power, or economic clout, to stand in for others,46 and some memories
have been forgotten entirely in order to make possible the remembrance of
other stories. On these walls and in accompanying brochures, a progress
narrative stands in place of a narrative of defeat; the local history of the
Central Region takes the place of histories of northern Ghanaian communities
from which captives were taken; and African Americans perform as
metonyms for diaspora Africans in the Americas. Further complicating
this series of displacements is the seeming tendency of guides to ignore the
exhibit spaces entirely, for on the three or four tours I have taken of the
Elmina and Cape Coast castle-dungeons, they have consistently neglected
to mention these areas. Apparently for them, the English-language, textbased
exhibits are irrelevant to the tour experience.
The wall displays and published materials betray an ideological imperative
embedded in tourist sites dedicated to the memory of horror.
That is, tourism is a leisure activity that travelers undertake, to varying
degrees, with the expectation of experiencing a pleasant release from
daily realities; heritage tourism assumes a continuity between past and
present, with progress understood as an "inevitable, natural process."47
Remembrance of pain, brutality, and victimization is generally unappealing
and thus bad for business. Even those who cast themselves as seriousminded
pilgrims, rather than fun-seeking tourists, are likely to produce
concomitant narratives of resilience, justice, or transcendent purpose,
thereby reassuring themselves that their ancestors' lives and their own
have some meaning other than degradation. Indeed, these are the memories
that African Americans produce in travel accounts, poems, or videos.
Further, the memory of oppression raises issues of the responsibility, complicity,
and guilt of the original perpetrators, accomplices, and possibly of
WHAT IS TO BE REMEMBERED?
99
their descendants-questions that do not offer an escape from reality, but
confront visitors with ethnic or racial tensions analogous to what they
may experience at home. Thus, administrators of these sites must devise
a means of softening the horror by effecting a substitution in which a
healthy actor or progress narrative stands in for the dehumanized body
and tale of abjection.
Though disagreeing on the specific memorial agenda, Ghanaians
and diasporic Africans share a particular imperative to construct a triumphalist
narrative. Such stories empower us, who are marginalized
within global networks and/or within a specific nation-state, to struggle
toward greater agency. Thus, area residents eager to tell their history, as
well as other black visitors, are likely to receive with pride such exhibits
as Elmina's "People, Neighbors, Culture" that include a historical sketch
of royal women at a durbar and information about Prempeh I, the late
nineteenth-century Asante king who resisted British imperialism and was
imprisoned at Elmina for four years.48
But placed toward the rear of the exhibit hall is an eight-sided set of
panels that is likely to provoke controversy among Afrocentric visitors,
both local and foreign, because here adoption of European culture seems
to constitute progress. Documenting "the Impact of European Contacts,"
the panels group together a blank rock slate, a jar, and a Readers' Guide Abstract
from March 1992. No explanatory placard accompanies these items,
so the viewer is left to surmise that knowledge production in Ghana was
dependent upon the evolution to written texts. Included in this area are
pictures of Christian church services and attractive, biracial children
dressed in their Sunday best (see fig. 3); omitted are any references to institutional
practices that denigrated indigenous African religions or facilitated
colonialism. One can also read about the influence of European
tongues on local languages, but there is no indication of linguistic transfers
from indigenous people to Europeans. Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett's observation
that ethnographic displays reflect the cognitive understandings
of their producers is relevant here,49 for "developed entirely by Ghanaians,
a showcase for their new expertise [in museum practice, acquired as a result
of collaboration with Smithsonian officials],"5° the exhibit performs
the memory of a colonial education in which value resides in the European
metropole and flows outward to backward peripheries.
The obligatory progress narrative takes a different trajectory in the
Cape Coast museum brochure, "Crossroads of People, Crossroads of
Trade." Developed by a content team of Ghanaian scholars and implemented
by Ghanaian and Smithsonian museum professionals,51 the
brochure focuses on periods before and after slavery. Not only can one
read of trans-Saharan trading networks that predate European arrival in
West Africa, but one can also learn about the contemporary economy,
family structures, indigenous religious practices, and education. Interestingly,
"The Road to Freedom" section of this brochure, though it summarizes
African American and Ghanaian histories, features a photograph not
of anticolonial struggles in Ghana but of the American NAACP Silent
CRITICAL THEORY AND PERFORMANCE
100
Protest March of 1917. Consistent with the wall displays discussed below,
this choice of photograph performs (African) American hegemony. In fact,
Ghanaians are visually represented in this booklet only by contemporary
color photographs.
As in the printed brochure, a similar situation prevails in the Cape
Coast exhibits: displays document not only the establishment of complex
city-states around looo A.D., but also the continued existence of institutions
like the political-military asafo companies that combine traditional
chieftaincy-related responsibilities with contemporary civil society obligations.
Thus, it would appear that the demand for a representation of
local history has been satisfied, for as Christine Kreamer, an American
museum specialist who worked at Cape Coast, writes:
For the African owners and custodians of these historic structures,
many were and continue to be reluctant to reduce the interpretation
of these sites to a singular theme.... [M]oving beyond the singular
theme of the slave trade allows Ghanaians to tell other stories
deemed important to them, including those that celebrate the vibrant
cultural life of communities surrounding the forts and castles
today.52
With an emphasis on color and light, representation of the history
and culture of the Central Region not only partially relieves the oppressiveness
of the dungeons, it also stands in for representation of the "moment
before" northern Ghanaians were enslaved.
But inhabitants of the Central Region are not the only surrogates.
African American achievements occupy considerable wall space, while
photographs of the Ghanaian independence struggle-which resulted in
Ghana becoming the first sub-Saharan African nation to achieve independence-are
confined to one wall. Further, black Americans function as
metonyms for other Africa-descended peoples in the Americas, even
though scholars estimate that only five percent of the approximately ten
million captives arriving in the Americas came to North America, and
Akan speakers constituted the largest ethnic group exported to Jamaica.53
That African Americans had captured center stage was the result of
considerable backstage drama, or what Clifford terms "[the] push and
pull" of "power-charged exchanges." Dr. Vera Hyatt, director of the Smithsonian
team, remembers that the idea to include the African diaspora in
the exhibit originated with the Ghanaian intellectual community.54 By
1994, the Ghanaian and expatriate teams were facing mounting criticism in
local and American newspapers about their conservation practices. Attendees
at an international symposium held in the capital of Accra negotiated
competing stakeholder claims with a resolution that did not pre-empt the
likelihood of further conflicts, for they concluded that "the cultural heritage
of all the different epochs and powers should be presented, but also
that areas symbolizing the slave trade be given reverential treatment."55
Many officials feared the possibility of additional public criticism when the
Fig. 3. Priest blessing a baby. This photo was part of the "Impact of European
Contacts" exhibit at Elmina castle-dungeon in 1997. Photo by S. L. Richards.
PANAFEST theater festival would bring hundreds more diasporic
Africans to the Central Region. Though members of the Smithsonian implementation
team disagreed about content and direction,56
the history of the African Diaspora ended up dominating ninety
percent of the space in this section, completely eclipsing Ghana's
own freedom story which was reduced, unfortunately, to just one
lone panel and a single photo of Kwame Nkrumah, Ghana's first
president.57
On the museum walls, the "history of the African diaspora" is, in
fact, the history of black people in the United States. Missing from the
frantic implementation activities, apparently, were voices arguing for
Ghanaian national interests, for nationalist histories of specific Caribbean
islands and Latin America, or for a transnationalist position that would
adopt the Black Atlantic as the proper frame of reference. Ironically,
though the many stakeholders in this contact zone project espoused varying
antagonistic positions, they united to forget certain memories. Centering
African Americans, they perform American hegemony and its corollary,
Ghanaian neocolonial dependency.58
Experience in theater production-or museum display-teaches
that meaning is made at the level of research and design, implementation,
and spectator responses. Without careful, sustained attention paid to the
histories, assumptions, and power relations that bring people together as
well as divide them, and a commitment to work through difficulties toward
a shared objective, without time devoted to building and then enacting,
through community involvement and through spatial and exhibition
design (what Clifford terms the dynamic "moral relationship" that
101
CRITICAL THEORY AND PERFORMANCE
102
inheres in museum collections), controversy will continue to haunt these
memorial projects. And even such careful collaboration offers no sure
guarantee against disputes, because individuals are also socialized to
(re)act from their relational, sometimes cross-cutting, positions in structures
of asymmetrical power. Yet, heritage tourists, unlike their "sand 'n
surf" counterparts, bring to the memorial site a receptivity to new information
and a curiosity, often informed by considerable academic preparation.
Presented, in a variety of media both at home and onsite, with a complex
narrative that does not disguise its fissures, they may prove themselves
ready to tackle the contact zone challenges of polyfocus and polyvocality
in which they, along with multiple other competing protagonists and plots,
present themselves for re-membering.
The final surrogation to be discussed brings me back to the beginning
of my paper, where I posed the question of difference as an identity
the host must enact. Here, the medium is a video that noted film maker
Kwaw Ansah of Film Africa produced in order to synthesize the topics
Cape Coast visitors would encounter on the wall panels. Rather than erasing
recent colonial history, this document places its citizenry in an ambiguous,
ahistorical time zone. Constructed around the premise of an elderly
woman relating the history of the community to youngsters, the
movie features such scenes as young girls' initiation into womanhood, an
assembly of chiefs, and communal merrymaking after a hard day's work.
Presented as representing the past, the color footage is drawn from scenes
that appear to be contemporary. Thus, in this video the Ghanaian present
doubles as a precolonial past and is characterized by its difference from,
rather than its similarity to, the rest of the developed and developing
worlds.
Ghana, and by extension Africa as a whole, seems situated in a
chronological period in which time has either stopped, or the past is identical
to the present. Recall the AT&T advertisement, in which the excited
caller finds his roots not in the city, in the person of someone operating a
computer, running a factory, or working in a hospital. As constructed by
this ad and the Barfield newspaper feature, as well as by countless other
travel materials, continental Africans are visible to many diaspora
Africans only to the extent that they appear to be different, located in a
time frame impervious to change. True enough, many Africans do lead
lives that have not changed in some respects from those of their ancestors.
But that one unchanging aspect of life is allowed all too often to stand in
as the sole, distinctive marker of Africanness. The exotic Other, no matter
where she or he is located, attracts tourist dollars.
"Our Tradition Is a Very Modern Tradition"59
Most often, this distinctiveness is given the name of "tradition." In that it
is unlike the West, tradition seems to afford both Ghanaians and diasporic
Africans a shared zone of purity, free from the contamination of slavery
or colonialism. But I am also reminded of a 1997 incident that occurred
WHAT IS TO BE REMEMBERED?
10o3
when PANAFEST visitors were invited to participate in a village naming
ceremony. At one point, a voice could be heard over the crackling amplifier,
"The ceremony is about to begin. You will see something traditional.
This ceremony is as our fathers have always done it." What we visitors
could, in fact, see was the backs of camera and video people who had
rushed forward into position, thereby blocking our view. Obviously, "tradition"
had changed over time, assimilating, as Wole Soyinka argues, new
technologies into its elastic framework of knowledge without losing its
character.60 The trope of tradition can be mobilized, as in the naming ceremony
incident, to authorize an event in which both participants and
spectators willingly suspend beliefs in authenticity or an accurate reproduction
of the past.61 Or, as numerous African writers have dramatized, it
can be deployed to defend a hierarchical, oppressive status quo and disable
a quest for a more equitable future.62
The castle-dungeons represent one stop on a tourist itinerary that
often includes a visit to nearby Kakum National Forest, to the village of
Bonwire, famed for its kente cloth that has become a commodity symbolic
of black pride, and further north to Kumasi, the historic seat of the Asante
empire. Though in the oppressive castles diasporic visitors enact conflicting
identities-emotionally distraught surrogates for enslaved ancestors,
smiling tourists, quarrelsome members of a reunited African family, or disruptive
critics complicit with American hegemony-the appeal of Ghana
(or other West African nations) as a site that marks one's ancestral beginnings
or measures the distance one's resilient ancestors traveled, remains
strong. The challenge for tourist and host alike is to discern the agenda behind
tropes of tradition and family performed along the way.
The Asante people of Ghana encode some of their most important
proverbs in visual symbols. One is the Sankofa bird, whose body is poised
to take flight in one direction, while its head is facing the opposite direction.
The Sankofa bird represents the proverb, "Go back and fetch it."63 Presumably,
the bird looks at any number of resources available to him and
chooses the one best suited for his trip. In journeying to these slave sites,
travelers need ask: Who are we? How are "we" constituted such that we
share an identity with "them," or conversely, have adversarial interests?
What morsel(s) of wisdom from the past are we to collect from these sites
of memory? Toward what future(s) are we-and they-poised for flight?
NOTES
I am grateful to the Dean's Offices in Northwestern University's Weinberg College
of Arts and Sciences and School of Communication, as well as to the Program of
African Studies, for funding to support this research. Like its author, this paper
has traveled and benefited from feedback along the way; I am particularly grateful
to Mae Henderson and Daniel Walkowitz, who generously read and commented
on an earlier draft when we were fellows at the Stanford Humanities Center
in 2001-2002.
The term castle-dungeon is a contested one: though these large structures have
CRITICAL THEORY AND PERFORMANCE
104
historically been termed "castles" in European accounts, in the 199os IMAKHUS
Okofu and other diasporic Africans suggested that the word "dungeon" be added
to acknowledge the victims' perspective. The Ghana Tourist Board and The Ghana
Museums and Monuments Board did not accept this suggestion, which emerged
from the international symposium and controversy discussed in the "Exhibition
Semiotics" section of this essay.
1. See Paul Connerton, How Societies Remember (Cambridge University Press,
1989); Paulla A. Ebron, "Enchanted Memories of Regional Difference in African
American Culture," American Anthropologist 100.1: 94-105; Iyunola Osagie, "Historical
Memory and a New National Consciousness," Massachusetts Review 38, no.
1 (1997): 63-83.
2. Quoted in bell hooks, Black Looks: Race and Representation (Boston: South
End Press, 1992), 173.
3. I have visited Ghana on at least three occasions: in February 1998, I was fortunate
to participate in a tour that included twelve Africa-based scholars, a sevenperson
technical crew, and one other African American academic and retraced
slave routes from Ghana's southern coast all the way north across its border with
Burkina Faso. This tour was funded by the Ford Foundation as part of a larger,
multiyear initiative, "Transcending Boundaries," that linked the University of
Ghana Legon's African Humanities Institute with the Institute for Advanced
Study and Research in the African Humanities at Northwestern University and
with CODESRIA, the Council for the Development of Social Science Research in
Africa, headquartered in Dakar, Senegal. A second segment of the trip took the
group westward to Abomey and Ouidah in Benin.
4. Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (London:
Routledge, 1992), 6.
5. Dennis Kennedy, "Shakespeare and Cultural Tourism," Theatre Journal 50.2
(1998): 175-88.
6. Bernetta Hayes, "Claiming Our Heritage is a Booming Industry," American
Visions (1997): 44.
7. Chris Abotchie, "International Tourism in Ghana: Socio-Cultural Impacts,"
Legon Journal of the Humanities 9 (1996): 1-29; Joseph Akyeampong, "An Overview
of Ghana's Tourism Industry," Business Watch, February-March 1999: 51-52.
8. Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization
(Minnesota University Press, 1996), 42; Susan Willis, "Memory and Mass Culture,"
in History and Memory in African-American Culture, ed. Genevieve Fabre and
Robert O'Meally (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), 178-87.
9. Edward M. Bruner, "Tourism in the Balinese Borderzone," in Displacement,
Diaspora, and Geographies of Identity, ed. Smadar Lavie and Ted Swedenburg
(Durham: Duke University Press, 1996), 16o. What makes this assertion all the
more puzzling is that Bruner writes with a good deal of insight about the castles of
Ghana. See Edward M. Bruner, "Tourism in Ghana: The Representation of Slavery
and the Return of the Black Diaspora," American Anthropologist 98.2 (1996): 290-304.
10. Ghana Tourist Board data for 1999 indicate that out of 41,406 visitors to
Cape Coast Castle alone, 79.18% were Ghanaians; nationalities of the foreigners
were not reported. I am grateful to Devin Griffin for sharing this information
with me.
11. For further information on St. Paul's program, known as "Commemorating
the Maafa," see its Web site, www.spcbc.com.
12. Deborah Barfield, "Trip to the Motherland Is Painful, Educational," Florida
Today 26 July 1998: Fi.
WHAT IS TO BE REMEMBERED?
105
13. Ibid., F2.
14. I believe this ad has appeared in a number of black magazines. See American
Visions 12.5 (October-November 1997), in which this two-page spread appears
on the back of the front cover and on the opening page of the magazine, before
even the table of contents.
15. In 1999, the subtheme was revised slightly and became "Uniting the
African Family" (PANAFEST '99 Official Souvenir Brochure).
16. Status of the Tourism Industry in Ghana, http://www.africaonline.com.gh/
Topmount/whyghana.html. Accessed 2001.
17. Albert van Dantzig, Forts and Castles of Ghana (Accra: Sedco Publishing
Limited, 1980), i.
18. van Dantzig, Forts and Castles of Ghana, ix; Christine Mullen Kreamer, "Contested
Terrain: Cultural Negotiations and Ghana's Cape Coast Castle Exhibition,
'Crossroads of People, Crossroads of Trade,"' in The Atlantic Slave Trade in African
and Diaspora Memory, ed. Ralph A. Austen (Durham: Duke University Press, forthcoming).
An earlier draft is accessible through the Africana Conference Paper
Index, located within Northwestern University Library's Africana Collection.
19. Kwesi Anquandah, Castles and Forts of Ghana (Atalante/Paris: Ghana Museums
and Monuments Board, 1999), 8.
20. Other visitors to Elmina may have different memories, for the building's
appearance changes, depending upon how recently it has been repainted in order
to withstand the harmful environmental effects.
21. Information on relationships between castle occupants and townspeople is
limited; see A. W. Lawrence, Trade Castles and Forts of West Africa (London:
Jonathan Cape, 1963); Theresa A. Singleton, "The Slave Trade Remembered on the
Former Gold and Slave Coasts," Slavery and Abolition 20.1 (1999): 150-69.
22. Interestingly, most African American travel accounts omit any reference to
the officers' quarters and public spaces; it's as though these above-ground areas at
Elmina or Cape Coast castle made no impact on the authors' memories. See, for
example, Opal Palmer Adisa, "Accra Drums Me Home," in Go Girl! The Black
Woman's Book of Travel and Adventure, ed. Elaine Lee (Portland: Eighth Mountain
Press, 1997), 53-60; Renee Kemp, "An Apology in Ghana," in Lee, Go Girl!, 87-88;
Daniel Jerome Wideman, "Singing Sankofa," in Giant Steps: The New Generation of
African American Writers, ed. Kevin Young (New York: Perennial, 200ooo), 298-307.
23. Vivian M. Patraka, "Spectacles of Suffering: Performing Presence, Absence,
and Historical Memory at U.S. Holocaust Museum," in Performance and Cultural
Politics, ed. Elin Diamond (London and New York: Routledge, 1996), 94.
24. Ibid., 99.
25. Toni Morrison, "The Site of Memory," in Out There: Marginalization and Contemporary
Cultures, ed. Russell Fergusen (New York: New Museum of Contemporary
Art; Cambridge: MIT Press, 1990), 332.
26. "Ghana Slave Dungeon Document-St. Paul Community Baptist Church"
(Brooklyn, New York).
27. Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, "Afterlives," Performance Research 2.2
(1999): 1.
28. Richard Handler and Eric Gable, The New History in an Old Museum: Creating
the Past at Colonial Williamsburg (Durham: Duke University Press, 1997); Barbara
Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, Destination Culture: Tourism, Museums, and Heritage
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998).
29. Kwesi Yankah, Speaking for the Chief: The Okyeame and the Politics of Royal
Akan Oratory (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995).
CRITICAL THEORY AND PERFORMANCE
o106
30. Marimba Ani, "Remarks" (paper presented at the 3rd Pan African Historical
Theatre Festival [PANAFEST '97], Cape Coast, Ghana, 1997).
31. I was fortunate to be given access to student journal reports submitted as
part of Stanford University's African and African American Studies Program's
2001 Spring Learning Expedition to Ghana; in addition, Melinda Wilson shared
portions of a journal kept on her Vanderbilt University-sponsored trip to Ghana.
32. Citing the statistic that "vacationers take 70% of all photographs shot
worldwide" (7), Michelle Citron also discusses the convention of the smiling subject.
See Citron, Home Movies and Other Necessary Fictions (Minneapolis: University
of Minnesota Press, 1999).
33. Status of the Tourism Industry in Ghana.
34. Kreamer, "Contested Terrain," par. 2, 15; Status of the Tourism Industry in
Ghana. Christine Kreamer graciously shared with me an electronic version of her
pre-publication manuscript; therefore I am citing this article by paragraph.
35. Bruner, "Tourism in Ghana," 294.
36. IMAHKUS Vienna Robinson, "Is the Black Man's History Being Whitewashed?,"
Uhuru 9 (1994): 48-50.
37. Bruner, "Tourism in Ghana," 297.
38. Kofi Anyidoho, "Memory and Vision," in Ancestrallogic & Caribbeanblues
(Trenton: Africa World Press, 1993); Kwadwo Opoku-Agyemang, "Colonial History
and the Slave Experience as Themes in Modern African Literature," in Nationalism
vs. Internationalism: (Inter)National Dimensions of Literatures in English, ed. Wolfgang
Zach and Ken L. Goodwin (Tubingen: Stauffenburg Verlag, 1996), 219-28.
39. Ama Ata Aidoo, Anowa (London: Longman Drumbeat, 1970); Christina
Ama Ata Aidoo, The Dilemma of a Ghost (New York: Collier Books, 1965).
40. Kwadwo Opoku-Agyemang, Cape Coast Castle: A Collection of Poems (Accra:
Afram Publications [Ghana] Limited, 1996). Entitled "Slave Routes: A Trail So
Long Gone," the television program documented the 1998 trip which I had joined
(see n. 3). The African Humanities project was overseen by Kofi Anyidoho of the
University of Ghana, Legon; Doris Adabasu Kuwornu served as the director of the
television project.
41. Stephen Buckley, "Heritage Battle Rages at Slavery's Sacred Sites,"
Guardian 11 May 1995, 11. In addition, I remember informal conversations with Jamaican
activist and tour leader Pauline Petinaud, aka Miss P, during PANAFEST
'97, when she complained that plans to hold a popular music performance at Cape
Coast castle amounted to irreverent dancing on ancestors' graves.
42. The former director of the ministry of tourism, Mohammed ben Abdallah,
suggests that this seemingly intemperate comment may have been prompted by a
history of failed promises. African American performers Isaac Hayes and Dionne
Warwick had promised to contribute to preservation efforts, but to date, no funds
have been forthcoming. Similarly, African American expatriate and long-time
Ghana resident Dr. Robert Lee was forced to abandon plans to preserve Fort
Abandze, presumably in part because African Americans proved unresponsive to
his fundraising efforts. Mohammed ben Abdallah, interview with the author,
spring 2000. See also Kreamer, "Contested Terrain," par. 40.
43. Stephen Buckley, "U.S., African Blacks Differ on Turning Slave Dungeons
into Tourist Attractions," Washington Post 17 April 1995, Alo.
44. On this latter point, see Caryl Phillips, The Atlantic Sound (New York: Alfred
Knopf, 2000).
45. James Clifford, Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997), 192.
WHAT IS TO BE REMEMBERED?
10o7
46. Joseph Roach, Cities of the Dead: Circum-Atlantic Performance (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1996), 2-3.
47. Elli Lester Roushanzamir and Peggy J. Kreshel, "Gloria and Anthony Visit
a Plantation: History into Heritage at 'Laura, a Creole Plantation,'" International
Journal of Hospitality and Tourism Administration 2, no. 3-4 (2001): 185.
48. Patience Essah, "Slavery, Heritage and Tourism in Ghana," International
Journal of Hospitality and Tourism Administration 2, no. 3-4 (2001): 31-50. Prempeh I
was imprisoned at Elmina and then exiled in 1899 to the Seychelles in order to forestall
local alliances that might have threatened the British position in the European
"scramble for Africa." What goes unnoted is a history of painful ironies, for Prempeh
I was head of the Asante Empire, whose wealth and power were built upon
the transatlantic slave trade. Defending the freedom of the Asante people, Prempeh
I and his predecessor fought troops from the British West Indies who, in all likelihood,
were the descendants of enslaved Africans exported across the Atlantic.
49. Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, Destination Culture, 2-3, 17-78.
50. Vera Lawrence Hyatt, "Ghana: The Chronicle of a Museum Development
Project in the Central Region" (Washington, D.C.: Office of International Relations,
the Smithsonian Institution, 1977), 28.
51. Kreamer, "Contested Terrain," par. 15.
52. Ibid., par. 13.
53. Michael Gomez, Exchanging Our Country Marks: The Transformation of
African Identities in the Colonial and Antebellum South (Chapel Hill: University of
North Carolina Press, 1998), 18, 107.
54. Hyatt, "Ghana," 13.
55. Kreamer, "Contested Terrain," par. 38.
56. Christine Mullen Kreamer, email, 6 February 2002.
57. Kreamer, "Contested Terrain," par. 26.
58. Kreamer (par. 46) asserts that Ghanians working on the project tended to
interpret this debate over the object of memorialization as an imposition of Western
imperialist values. In this instance of surrogation, appeals to racial solidarity
and the trope of family have been trumped by Americocentrism. For a critique of
hegemonic African American performance, see Stuart Hall, "What Is This 'Black'
in Black Popular Culture?," in Black Popular Culture, a Project by Michelle Wallace,
ed. Gina Dent (Seattle: Bay Press, 1992), 21-33.
59. Christopher Waterman, "'Our Tradition Is a Very Modern Tradition': Popular
Music and the Construction of a Pan-Yoruba Identity," Ethnomusicology 34.3
(1990): 367-79.
60. Wole Soyinka, Myth, Literature and the African World (Cambridge University
Press, 1978), 54.
61. Edward Cohen, "Authenticity and Commoditization in Tourism," Annals
of Tourism Research 15 (1988): 371-86.
62. For a representative sample of plays and critical statements, see Biodun
Jeyifo, ed., Modern African Drama, Norton Critical Editions (New York: W. W. Norton
& Company, 2002).
63. Adolph H. Abgo, Values of Adinkra Symbols (Kumasi: Ebony Designs and
Publications, 1999), 4; Alfred Kofi Quarcoo, The Language of Adinkra Symbols
(Legon: Sebewie Ventures Publications, 1994), 17.
For Whom Is the King a King?
Issues of Intercultural Production,
Perception, and Reception in a
Kathakali King Lear
Phillip B. Zarrilli
The Interculture of Production
It has become commonplace to assume that "culture" is both reflected
within and simultaneously invented by the webs of signification knit into
the performative moment. Performance as a mode of cultural action is not
a simple reflection of some essentialized, fixed attributes of a static monolithic
culture but an arena for the constant process of renegotiating experiences
and meanings that constitute culture. Critical theorist Susan Bennett
expands this notion of the interactive state of flux in the relationship
between culture and performance, noting that
both an audience's reaction to a text (or performance) and the text
(performance) itself are bound within cultural limits. Yet, as diachronic
analysis makes apparent, those limits are continually tested
and invariably broken. Culture cannot be held as a fixed entity, a set
of constant rules, but instead it must be seen as in a position of inevitable
flux.,
It is also a commonplace of the postmodern condition that we cannot credit
metanarratives like the concepts of "culture" or discrete "performance traditions"
within "cultures,"2 that we indicate our awareness of such incredulity
by using quotation marks, and then we go ahead and use such
dangerous words laden with the baggage of their metanarratives because
we recognize that "there are times when we still need to be able to speak
holistically of Japanese or Trobriand or Moroccan culture in the confidence
that we are designating something real and differentially coherent."3
If "culture" and "cultural performances" as fixed metanarratives
have been quoted out of existence, where is "culture" and where are "its
performances" to be located in a postmodern world? Ethnographic historian
James Clifford asserts that
the world's societies are too systematically interconnected to permit
any easy isolation of separate or independently functioning systems
.... Twentieth-century identities no longer presuppose continuous
cultures or traditions. Everywhere individuals and groups improvise
local performance from (re)collected pasts, drawing on
foreign media, symbols, and languages.4
io8
FOR WHOM IS THE KING A KING?
109
Indonesian novelist-playwright-poet Putu Wijaya describes the superhuman
effort required to exist in this jumble of identities prompted by a
"world dominated by the media, by consumption, and by global cultural
flows":5
To discuss an Indonesian poet does not merely mean to discuss the
poetry of the man because the poet also writes prose, essays, drama,
critiques, travelogues.., articles about the economy, philosophy...
gossip, pornographic stories.., and so forth. Nor can we write of the
joys and sorrows in the life of a teacher only from the perspective of
his work at school because he also raises chickens.., is a councilman
for his neighborhood.., as well as being.., a law student, a Moslem
scholar ... a fan of pornographic movies, a royal servant, a gambler
and a shaman.
... The above descriptions present a complex but also superhuman
phenomenon . . . Complex because we find that cultural
roles are inexorably entwined with one another so that no characteristic
stands alone. The phenomenon is labelled "super" because we
sometimes have a difficult time imagining that people can have so
many roles and statuses in life.6
While sharing Clifford's point of view and appreciating Putu's ironically
poetic self-definition, I would qualify both by suggesting that, even
if individual and group identities are being shaped in an interculture of
juxtaposition and disjuncture, the reflexive awareness of and attention to
this condition is primarily part of the discourse of an educated and/or
artistic elite. Although twentieth-century identities no longer necessarily
presuppose continuous cultures or traditions, there are nevertheless many
contexts within which either "the world" or at least some more framed
and circumscribed arenas of experience are imagined as continuous, and
where tradition is cast in the role of maintaining and authorizing a particular
form of continuity within that particular experiential arena.
Given the provocative choice by James Clifford of interpreting our
postmodern condition and the breakdown of metanarratives with either
a L6vi-Straussian "narrative of entropy or loss... [as] an inescapable, sad
truth" or "a more ambiguous 'Caribbean' experience . . . reconceived as
inventive process or creolized 'interculture,'"7 I have chosen the latter. I
will examine the relationship between performance and interculture by
focusing primarily on one experiment-a recent South Indian kathakali
dance-drama version of Shakespeare's King Lear.
On July 28, 1989, I attended the inaugural performance of a South
Indian dance-drama (kathakali) version of Shakespeare's King Lear (Kathakali
King Lear) on the proscenium stage of the Victorian-styled V. J. T.
Hall, Trivandrum, Kerala, India. The European premiere took place on
September 2, 1989, at the Festival of Rovereto, Italy, followed by two and
one-half months of performances in the Netherlands, France, and Spain.
A second international touring production appeared in Singapore as part
CRITICAL THEORY AND PERFORMANCE
110
of its Twenty-fifth Independence Day celebrations and at the Edinburgh
Theatre Festival in August 1990.8 Programmed as part of the "Globe to
Globe" annual international festival intended to "explore the impact of
Shakespeare on other cultures," the third and most recent production of
Kathakali King Lear was performed at Shakespeare's (reconstructed) Globe
Theatre, London from July 6-17, 1999.
Australian playwright-director David McRuvie and French actordancer
Annette Leday originally conceived Kathakali King Lear, which was
coproduced by their Association Keli (Paris) with the internationally
known Kerala State Arts Academy (Kerala Kalamandalam, Cheruthuruthy,
Kerala, India). Scripted by McRuvie in English and originally translated
by Iyyamkode Sreedharan (poet and then Secretary of the Kerala
Kalamandalam) into Malayalam (the regional language of Kerala, kathakali's
home state), Kathakali King Lear was choreographed and staged collaboratively
by McRuvie, Leday (who also played Cordelia), and a group
of highly regarded senior kathakali artists: K. Kumaran Nayar (King
Lear), C. Padmanabhan Nayar (King Lear), Kalamandalam Gopi (France),
K. P. Krishnankutty Poduval (percussion), T. K. Appukutty Poduval (percussion),
Madambi Subramaniam Namboodiri (vocalist).
With its Western content, its highly conventionalized kathakali miseen-scene
and techniques, its collaborative process of conceptualization
and realization, and its performances in continental Europe, Edinburgh,
Singapore, and Kerala, Kathakali King Lear was certainly intercultural in
both its production and reception. Prompted in part by my agreement
with and desire to pursue Susan Bennett's assertion that "production and
reception cannot be separated, and a key area for further research is the
relationship between the two for specific cultural environments, [and] for
specific types of theatre,"9 I will use Kathakali King Lear as the primary example
through which to analyze the relationships among production, perception,
and reception.
What Is Kathakali?
Kathakali is one among many indigenous performing arts of Kerala,
India. At the historical moment of its emergence as a distinct genre of performance
during the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, it was
given the new name kathakali, denoting a hybrid formed by borrowing
from a number of Kerala's traditional arts. The name kathakali literally
means "story play" and refers to the performance of dramas written by
playwright-composers in a highly florid Sanskritized Malayalam based
on India's epics and puranas-first the Ramayana, then the Mahabharata,
and later from the Bhagavata Purana.10
On a bare stage using only a few stools and an occasional property,
three groups of performers collectively create kathakal.i performances:
actor-dancers, percussionists, and vocalists. Traditionally constituting an
all-male company of actor-dancers, the performers use a highly physicalized
performance style embodied through years of training to play a
FOR WHOM IS THE KING A KING?
111
variety of roles, including kings, heroines, demons, demonesses, gods, animals,
and priests. Each role is easily identifiable to a Malayali audience as
a particular character type with its own inhering characteristics by the codified
makeups and elaborate, colorful costumes. The actor-dancers create
their roles by using a repertory of dance steps, choreographed patterns of
stage movement, an intricate and complex language of hand gestures (mudras)
for literally "speaking" their character's dialogue with their hands,
and a pliable use of the face and eyes to express the internal states (bhiva)
of the character. The percussion orchestra consists of three types of drums
(centa, maddalam, and itekka), each with its own distinctive sound and role
in the ensemble, and brass cymbals, which keep the basic rhythmic cycles
around which the dance-drama is structured. The two onstage vocalists
keep the basic time patterns on their cymbals and sing the entire text, including
both third-person narration and first-person dialogue in a vocal
style where elaboration and repetition are common characteristics. Performance
traditionally began at dusk, and it took all night to perform a thirtyto
forty-page text.
Kathakali's dense performance structure provides many opportunities
for narrative and performative elaboration on the basic story/text, enhancing
the realization of the aesthetic ideal of rasa-tasting or savoring
the major moods unfolded in the drama. Kathakali has always appealed to
a wide cross-section of Malayalis. The easily recognizable characters, colorful
makeup and costumes, and those scenes played with broad dramatic
action, mime, and dance combine to make kathakali entertaining and
pleasing for the general audience, which knows the stories well but is not
attuned to reading its nuances. Its more subtle and codified modes of performance
appeal to connoisseurs in the audience educated to appreciate
these nuances.
Kathakali King Lear
From its inception, Kathakali King Lear was intended to be more than a superficial
dressing up of Shakespeare's Lear in colorful kathakali costumes
as an exotic novelty for Western audiences. Rather, it was to serve as an
intercultural experiment in production and reception, opening in Kerala
for Malayali audiences and then touring continental Europe. Leday and
McRuvie wanted the production to speak equally to both its original audiences.
For Malayalis the production was intended to provide a kathakali
experience of one of Shakespeare's great plays and roles. Assuming
that many in the European audience would know Shakespeare's play, the
production was intended as an accessible way of experiencing kathakali
and the aesthetic delight of rasa. For Leday and McRuvie, kathakali's "rich
means of expression and its intensity of effect" seemed an appropiate performative
means through which to "find a theatrical expression for the
larger-than-life dimension and explosive power of the play."12
Following theater semiotician Patrice Pavis, the lengthy process of
adaptation and translation that created Kathakal.i King Lear might best be
Fig. 1. Kathakali King Lear. Goneril (right) bows before her father as Cordelia (left) asks
herself, "What shall Cordelia speak? Love, and be silent." Photo credit: Annette Leday and
David McRuvie.
described as a series of reelaborations of text, gesture, and choreography
into a new frame.13 The process began with McRuvie's reelaboration of
the King Lear text to conform with kathakali's theatrical criteria in length,
action, and number of characters-a process that radically transformed
the original. The typed English adaptation ran barely twenty pages for the
two-hour-plus performance. The action focused exclusively on Lear and
his three daughters. The Gloucester subplot was completely cut, as were
Kent, Cornwall, and Albany. Only eight characters appeared, including
Lear, his three daughters (Cordelia, Goneril, and Regan), the King of
France (in a somewhat expanded role), the Fool, mad Tom, and a soldier.
Each of the nine scenes-(1) King Lear Divides His Kingdom (fig. 1); (2)
The Departure of Cordelia and France; (3) At Goneril's Palace; (4) At
Regan's Palace; (5) The Storm (figs. 2, 3, 4); (6) The Return of Cordelia and
France; (7) The Reconciliation of Lear and Cordelia; (8) The Battle (fig. 5);
and (9) The Death of Lear (fig. 6)-was organized around one or two
major dramatic actions. The first scene, for example, enacted the division
of the kingdom and banishment of Cordelia. The second scene dramatized
the wedding and departure of Cordelia and France in which
Cordelia expresses her sorrow at leaving her father and pledges herself to
her husband.
McRuvie rendered his English adaptation into a somewhat simplified
version of the three major components of a traditional kathakali performance
script: narrative passages (sloka) in third person describing the
context of the action, dialogue passages (padam) sung by the onstage vocalists
and spoken by the actors through hand gestures, and passages
(attam) delivered in gesture language and mimetic dance by the actors but
112
Fig. 2. In the midst of the storm, mad Tom is discovered by Lear and the Fool.
Lear: "Unaccommodated man is not more but such a poor, bare, forked animal
as thou art." Photo credit: Annette Leday and David McRuvie.
not sung by the onstage vocalists. The sloka and padam were then translated
into Malayalam and set in the appropriate musical mode for the vocalists
and rhythm for the percussionists.
The production ensemble also carried out a series of specific spatial,
gestural, choreographic, and musical reelaborations of McRuvie's translated
text to fit kathakali's theatrical conventions-a process that required
reinterpretation of a number of kathakali conventions as well as the creation
of one new role (vesam). Since the vesam, literally "dress, mask, disguise,"
which is the "whole outward appearance, shape,"14 determines not only
the external contours but also the internal nature of each character an actor
plays, the decision on each vesam was the actor's beginning place in trying
to create roles for which there was no tradition to follow.15 A few roles were
obvious and easy to select: the heroic King France, who marries Cordelia,
defeats her evil sisters, and attempts to return Lear to his throne, had to be
played as a pacca, the primarily green-colored, ideal, heroic, kingly type of
character. Cordelia, the devoted, loving, chaste daughter, had to be played
as a female minukku, or "radiant" type, whose makeup has a golden hue.
Mad Tom was played as a teppu with a smeared black-face, a special category
for characters close to animals in nature.
The selection of vesam for the other major characters, including
Goneril, Regan, the Fool, and Lear, generated considerable controversy in
Kerala. For Lear the "knife" (katti) ve sam was selected since its mixture of
green and red symbolized his combination of kingly and turbulent attributes.
In keeping with kathakali convention, the role of Lear was split into
two parts, each to be played by a senior kathakali actor: the fully costumed
Lear who appears at the opening of the play in court through the
moment in the storm scene when he removes his crown and ornaments to
113
Fig. 3. Lear is revealed after he
has removed his ornaments and
crown to be like mad Tom at the
\ Kalamandam dress rehearsal. A
kgreat deal of controversy was raised
when Kumaran Asan appeared
bareheaded and virtually without
makeup. Photo credit: Kunju
InI Vasudevan Namboodiripad.
become like mad Tom and the partially costumed mad Lear on the heath.
For Goneril and Regan the kari vesam, typically used for demoness roles,
was selected, and they were costumed in black and blue, respectively,
symbolizing their primitive nature. Finally, for the Fool, no kathakali
vesam existed; the brahman clown (vidfsaka), however, who serves as the
king's court fool in the tradition of staging Sanskrit dramas (kutiyattam)
from which kathakali historically derived much-provided a model
adapted for the production.
Appropriate ways of enacting each role and scene were developed
in the collaborative rehearsal process. Beginning with the basic vesam in
which each role was to be played, the spatial, choreographic, gestural, and
musical elements were carefully reelaborated to fit the nonindigenous
narrative and the peculiarities of the story's characters. Vasudevan Namboodiripad,
former superintendent of the Kerala Kalamandalam, who
served as an advisor for the production, explained that Leday and McRuvie
made sure that the production was more than a superficial appropriation
of kathakali conventions and techniques:
Thought had to be given to not only the outer structure of kathakal1i,
but also to the inner structure and nuance. For example, for King
Lear's initial entrance with his "curtain look" (tiranokku) [i.e., gradual
revelation of a character behind a handheld curtain], you retain
the visible structure of the look but you may change the inner struc-
114
Fig. 4. For the Trivandrum performances and tour, more of the original costume
and makeup were kept for Kumaran Asan's mad Lear. The trial scene in which
Lear says, "Anatomize Regan; see what breeds about her heart." Photo credit:
Annette Leday and David McRuvie.
ture of the nuance of expression in the look. The ultimate purpose of
the curtain look is kept, but these subtle changes are made. Otherwise,
it is just a copy of the same scene from any other curtain look
of any other play in the repertory. To accomplish this, you must have
people like Padmanabhan Asan [playing Lear] who have the capacity
to analyze the character's inner state or condition (bhava). From
this analysis every phrase must be worked out in detail.16
This sensitivity to the nuance of expressive interpretation was one
reason for the decision that Leday would play Cordelia. McRuvie explained
his view of the centrality of the Cordelia role to me: "What makes
King Lear great is a great king, which is rare. Second in making the king is
the Fool. But the one thing that can ruin it is Cordelia."17 To McRuvie's decidedly
Western eye, potential disaster threatened if one of the young
male actors specializing in female roles (strivesam) were to act the "delicate
role of Cordelia" in what McRuvie correctly characterized as "their
boyish quality.., that becomes kind of campy."1'8
The lengthy process of reelaboration created a completely new performance
text that would provide both Malayali and European audiences
with a new performance experience-a kathakali-style production of
Shakespeare.
Production, Perception, and Reception
Although Kathakali King Lear was originally reelaborated for continental
European and Malayali audiences, in fact, it played for audiences in four
115
Fig. 5. Goneril and Regan in battle. Photo credit: Annette Leday and David McRuvie.
quite different cultural locations on its two tours: not only Kerala and continental
Europe but also Singapore and Edinburgh and, much later, London.
Both between and within each set of cultural boundaries there are
"different viewing publics,"19 each of which brought to the production
not only their own native cultural assumptions but also an increasingly
global flow of ideas, images, and information, all of which affected their
expectations about what they would experience, their perceptions and
categories for understanding that experience, and therefore how they received
and responded to Kathakali King Lear. How are we to understand
the reception of Kathakali King Lear among such diverse audiences?
Phenomenologist Maurice Natanson explains that our perceptions
are shaped by a consciousness that posits horizons of probabilities, which
constitute expectations.20 In performance, expectations are created in four
interdependent ways: (1) the daily experiences and cultural assumptions
that inform the experience each spectator brings to the performance; (2)
performance experiences similar to or different from the one that each is
having now; (3) expectations created by publicity, word of mouth, and so
on; and (4) what happens within the frame of the performance one is attending.
In this fourth mode, a set of expectations is created as the performance
is enacted.
The way in which kathakali structures an audience's experience creates
the possibility for a particular range of meaning very different from
other genres of performance, whether American psychological realism or
Japanese Noh. Likewise, the way in which a Shakespeare play and its
characters create the possibility for a particular range of meaning is very
116
Fig. 6. Lear: "She's gone forever." Photo
credit: Annette Leday and David McRuvie.
\ \\ \\
different from other types of dramas such as the kathakal.i play Na.a Caritam
or Peter Pan.
As theater semiotician Marco De Marinis, following Umberto Eco,
asserts: "Production and reception are strictly linked even though they obviously
do not altogether coincide . . . [A performance] text postulates its
own receiver as an indispensable condition not only of its own, concrete
communicative ability, but also its own potential for meaning."21 We have
seen how kathakali, as a genre of performance, postulates both a general audience
and one of connoisseurs educated to receive a range of cultural
meanings implicit in the conventions used to enact its stories. Each specific
kathakali play-in-performance articulates a specific set of meanings for both
these generic audiences as well as its particular audiences. Like other
adaptations of kathakali, such as P. K. Devan's one-hour performances for
tourists in Ernakulam, Kerala,22 Kathakali King Lear postulated its own receiver
in the process of reelaboration described above and possesses its
own potential for meaning different from other kathakal.i.
When kathakal.i performances of Indian epic stories are held for Kerala
audiences, it may often be said with reception theorist Anne Ubersfeld
that the "signs refer to what corresponds to them in the experience of the
spectator. The fictional universe set before him [sic] summons up the referential
universe of the spectator, that of his personal as well as his cultural
117
CRITICAL THEORY AND PERFORMANCE
118
experience."23 In intercultural performance, however, codes and conventions
easily read by those within one culture may be opaque to those
outside.
Those working interculturally have evolved a number of different
production strategies for dealing with this fundamental problem. Peter
Brook's production of India's great epic Mahabharata demonstrates one
strategy. For Brook "art means extracting the essence from every detail so
that the detail can reveal itself as a meaningful part of an inseparable
whole."24 Brook problematically assumes that if one can erase all the cultural
codes in the way of reaching a hypothetically universal "reality of
zero" common to all humanity, then "geography and history cease to
exist."25 Brook works with an international acting company whose style
attempts to reach this zero state of communication by removing any cultural
marks that might require of the audience the ability to read any special
cultural codes. Consequently, "to tell [the Mahabharata] we had to
avoid evoking India too strongly so as to not lead us away from human
identification, but also we had to nevertheless tell it as a story rooted in
Indian earth." 26
If Brook erases distinctive cultural codes in his attempt to be universal,
Leday and McRuvie chose to challenge their European audiences by
maintaining as much of kathakali's structure and technique as possible.27
Given the facts that Kathakali King Lear was originally reelaborated for two
quite different audiences, played in four quite different geographical and
cultural contexts, and that it has conventions or content nonindigenous to
one or more of its audiences, I want to ask the following questions: Who
was the receiver postulated by the production? What potential meanings
were implicit in the production? What meanings were read into the production?
Specifically, how was the production received?
European Reception: From "Curiosity" to "Bewitching
Ritual" to a "Moving Performance"
For anyone seeing something from outside one's own "culture" for the
first time, there is bound to be some degree of difference in assimilation
and understanding of what is being seen and heard between an indigenous
and nonindigenous audience. Moreover, as Anne Ubersfeld explains,
when he is faced with signs which he does not understand to which
he cannot give a name (objects, gestures, discourse), which do not
refer to anything in his experience, or, more simply, which pose a
problem for him, the spectator's own inventiveness is stimulated: it
is up to him to manufacture the relationship between the sign and
its intelligibility, or its relationship to the world.28
The West has a long and continuing history of manufacturing a variety of
meanings for nonindigenous customs, persons, or cultural artifacts and
performances it could not (or did not wish to) understand. Historically, the
FOR WHOM IS THE KING A KING?
119
West took this experience of difference and encapsulated it in a series of
discourses on the cultural Other.29 In the Western-initiated colonial drama
of subjugation and domination, India was cast in several key roles. Most
important, as South Asian historian Ronald Inden relates, for empiricists
and rationalists that role was "THE unchangeable" and/or "THE absolutely
different" (and therefore inscrutable and dominatable), and, for romantics,
the "SPIRITUAL OR IDEAL" Other.30As the period of colonial expansion
reached its final climax at the turn of the nineteenth century, this drama of
subjugation and domination was played out symbolically rather than literally
at the "world's" fairs31 and even at Coney Island and other amusement
parks where exotic Indian nautch dancers were featured in the Durbar of
Delhi. Our abilities to read, understand, assimilate, and even participate in
Indian performance have been shaped by these discourses of Otherness,
which feed both our imagination of Otherness and the way we describe it.32
Kathakali King Lear generated all these responses and more. In continental
Europe, the original production was received with great and near
universal acclaim by French dance critics, who filled their columns with information
on kathakali interspersed with comments ranging from F. C.'s
vacuous but appreciative "a splendidly colorful show,"33 to Pichot's more
adamant expression of appreciation-"a dazzling marriage" of kathakali
and Shakespeare filled with "intensity, energy, and extravaganza."34 Not
surprisingly, in Shakespeare's home, responses focused on the production
as a specific interpretation of Shakespeare's Lear rather than on kathakali
per se. The colorfully opinionated British theater press greeted the Edinburgh
Festival performances with less than universal praise. Responses
ranged from Michael Billington's cynical scorn ("Empty gestures of a frustrating
Lear")35 to Charles Spencer's appreciative evocation of the production
as both exotic and mysterious ("Hypnotic power of an Indian
Lear")36 to Randall Stevenson's grudging appreciation ("Beat of a different
drum"), which marveled that even if "Shakespeare transformed into the
traditional, colourful, highly stylised dance drama of Kerala... doesn't
sound entirely promising . . . [it is] one of the most enthralling performances
of the Festival."37 The one near universal point of agreement
among most of the British press was that Kathakali King Lear had, as Tom
Morris put it, "little to do with Shakespeare."38
Beyond the general praise and blame, there were those like the reviewer
from the Cannes-Matin/Nice-Matin who found the production inscrutable
and difficult to decode: "we do not have all of the keys to this
code, which allows us only sporadically to decipher them."39 For the
writer from La Presse de la Manche the only pleasure of the production was
the spectacle of the costumes: "The costumes are the main attraction of the
show at least for the western audience, incapable of understanding the
complex language of the hand and face gestures, somewhere between
mime and a sign language conversation."40 For Sergio Trombetta from La
Danse this inscrutability made the spectacle fascinating: "The interplay of
the dance, the facial expressions and the hands remain impenetrable and
fascinating."41
CRITICAL THEORY AND PERFORMANCE
120
Grandmontagne, writing for Le Telegramme responded to the difficulties
of reading the production by inventing kathakali as a timeless, Jungian,
dreamlike world:
Without any training, you can appreciate this theater by allowing
yourself to be invaded by the music, by the rhythms; by marvelling
at the splendid, glittering, colorful costumes, the make-up that completely
re-sculpts the actors' faces and makes them timeless even
while accentuating the expression of each individual character...
You can, without any training, be subjugated, letting the music
intoxicate you.42
Pierre Gilles responded similarly, finding in the production a realization of
an Artaudian reverie in which "the drama of the aging King Lear... [was]
promoted to the ranks of the sacred, rendered to the 'primitive destination'
of theater-which Artaud sought-and, therefore, to the universal."43
The most extreme problem with response is when either too many
demands are made on the spectators so that they withdraw their participation
or when audience members are unwilling to make any attempt to
respond to the performance and therefore withdraw their participation.44
It appears that the latter may have been the case for John Percival of the
London Times, who, in a remarkably snide, nothing short of racist, tonguein-cheek
commentary entitled "Lear's heath at half blast," ungenerously
wrote of the vocalists as "two fellows with skirts, bare chests and cymbals,"
of Tom as a "dirty little chap," of the adaptation as "crippling," and
the production as a "curiosity."45
If, for some, Kathakali King Lear was inscrutable-or all spectacle
for others, the production communicated at more than a level of surface
exoticism. I think it an oversimplification to assume with Bennett that
"audiences are at best 'fascinated' with performances that do not fall into
their cultural experience, performances that resist or deny the usual channels
of decoding."46 Randall Stevenson provides a balanced and sensible
account of his fascination with kathakali's spectacle, his simple enjoyment
of its exciting moments of obvious and colorful action, as well as the subtler
way in which the performance affected him:
From the opening moment, when the screen brought on to signal
scene changes drops to reveal magnificently poised and costumed
performers, Kathakali offered spectacle and simple excitement. The
two onstage percussionists add a mesmeric heartbeat to every move
and turn onstage-creating a devastating prelude to the storm, for
example-while the singers who chant the narrative fill in tone and
colour for every scene. More subtly, what seems "simple" spectacle
quickly communicates a great deal of emotion. Stylized movement,
minute repeated hand gestures, progressively indicate Lear's poised
withdrawal, even before Goneril's ecstatic devil dance steals a vision
of insanity and the stresses which create it.
FOR WHOM IS THE KING A KING?
121
The argument I want to make regarding the kind of European reception
of Kathakali King Lear represented by Stevenson's review depends upon a
prior understanding of the Malayali reception.
Malayali Reception: From "Bouquets" to "Brickbats"
Although Kathakali King Lear was coproduced by the premiere Kerala
state government arts school, featured some of the most distinguished
performers of the kathakali stage, played well over thirty performances on
its continental tour and at Edinburgh, and, with the important exceptions
noted above in the British press, was generally appreciated and praised
on tour, Indian Express journalist Paul Jacob recalled, one year after the
original production, that it opened in Kerala to "no great critical or popular
acclaim."47 As early as the January 1989 experimental staging of four
scenes at the Kerala Kalamandalam, the production aroused considerable
controversy in Kerala, a situation reflected in the Hindu staff writer's report
that "comments from the spectators . . . came out in the form of a
mixed bag of bouquets and brickbats."48
In Kerala during the final months of rehearsal before the production
opened, I read and heard the artistic and aesthetic "brickbats" thrown at
it while I attended rehearsals or conducted numerous interviews with
those involved in the first production. Debated both within rehearsals as
well as in the public and press, the controversy swirled around the following
five issues, all having to do with the "sense of appropriateness"
(aucityam bodham) in kathakali: (1) Were non-Indian, nonepic, nonmythic
stories like Lear appropriate for the kathakali stage? (2) To what degree
was the title character of Lear kingly? (3) Was the selection of the katti
vesam appropriate for Lear, or should the heroic pacca have been selected?
(4) During the storm scene, was it appropriate to have Lear "realistically"
remove part or all of his kingly accoutrements and typifying makeup, or
should his relative "nakedness" have been imagined by the audience? (5)
Was it appropriate to borrow the clown's (vidtsaka) makeup and costume
directly from kutiyattam?
All five issues are part of a continuing "internal cultural debate"49
within the kathakali cultural community over the limits of experimentation
within the tradition.5° Since the dawn of the modern institutional era of
kathakali's history with the founding of the Kerala Kalamandalam by the
great Malayali poet Vallathol in 1930, kathakali has been adapted both
by practitioners from within the tradition and by artists and entrepreneurs
from without. Some of these adaptations, such as the Kathakali King
Lear, are responses to an increasingly intercultural, global artistic economy,
while others have been shaped by the complex contemporary sociopolitical
and economic realities within Kerala itself.51 As there are wide
differences of opinion on these issues, my task here is to represent several
parties to the debate, situate each point of view so that the terms of argument
informing each are clear, and discuss how this internal debate
shaped perception and reception of Kathakal.i King Lear.
CRITICAL THEORY AND PERFORMANCE
122
Given limitations of space, I want to explore Malayali response to
the production primarily through the eyes of one of the most visible and
certainly the most outspoken champions of a radically conservative interpretation
of the kathakali tradition, Appakoothan Nayar, one of the
founders of the Margi Kathakali School in the capital city, Trivandrum. An
engineer by training who holds a graduate degree from the University of
Michigan, Appakoothan Nayar is the architect of the uniquely styled Kerala
Kalamandalam theater where kathakali is regularly performed. His response
to Kathakali King Lear was straightforward and blunt: "I could not
stand it . . . Even though there are thirty performances abroad, after five
years, nobody here will remember it. It will die a natural death."52 To understand
Appakoothan Nayar's negative response, it is necessary to explain
the aesthetic that informs his point of view.
Appakoothan Nayar differentiates between two levels of aesthetic
realization. The first and "lower" aesthetic he calls "sensual" or "worldly"
because it limits reception to the feelings of the five senses. Such reception
is a simplistic and immediate sensual response; that is, "when you see
[touch, taste, feel, etc.] a thing you like it, but it doesn't go to the mind."
An example is the appearance of an everyday character like the mahout
in Kamsavadham, where the spectator's simple recognition of the character
could be characterized as sensual, immediate, and based on what one sees
in daily life.
In contrast is what Appakoothan Nayar calls an "aesthetics of the
mind," that is, an act of reception that resonates long beyond the immediate
apprehension of the five senses. It is an aesthetic built on the cultivation
of the aesthetic sensibilities of the connoisseur's tasting and savoring
of rasa.53 This interpretation of kathakali's aesthetic as "of the mind" is
derived from kutiyattam and the classical Sanskrit drama tradition. Sanskrit
scholar Barbara Stoler Miller calls the aesthetic of the most celebrated
Sanskrit poet, Kalidasa, an "aesthetic of memory" and identifies
Sanskrit theater as a "theater of memory."54 In many Sanskrit dramas
such as Kalidasa's Sdkuntala and Bhasa's The Vision of Vasavadatta, the act
of remembering is both a literal mode of reconciling and relating love-inseparation
and love-in-union and remembrance of a "deeper metaphysical
kind."55
Indian epistemologists hold that whatever we perceive by means of
the sense organs leaves an impression on the mind. Memory occurs
when a latent impression is awakened. Indian literary theorists define
memory as a recollection of a condition of happiness or misery,
whether it was conceived in the mind or actually occurred. In what
is considered one of the key passages of Sanskrit aesthetics, the
tenth-century Kashmiri philosopher Abhinavagupta explains what
Kalidasa means by "memory." It is not discursive recollection of
past events, but rather an intuitive insight into the past that transcends
personal experience, into the imaginative universe that
beauty evokes.56
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123
In kathakali this aesthetic of mind is accomplished through extended
narrative and performative elaboration of the basic story and
playtext. An example from the first of Unnayi Warrier's famous series of
four plays, Nala Caritam, will illustrate the process. The first of the Nala
plays dramatizes the budding love of King Nala and Damayanti from
the moment they hear of each other's perfection and beauty. The play
opens with a scene intended to awaken Nala's imagination to
Damayanti's beauty. The sage Narada is visiting Nala when he suggestively
implants the idea in Nala's mind that he should "waste not [his]
birthright"; that is, it is time to consider marriage. Having implanted the
idea of marriage in Nala's mind, Narada goes on to describe Damayanti
in florid poetic terms:
In Kandinapur there lives a beauty,
A gem among women,
Damayanti by name.
Even the devas have fallen in love with her.
But mark me.
Jewels rightfully belong to kings.
The devas may claim only yagnas (sacrifices) offered in their honour.
Perfect one, paragon among kings,
Strive to win this jewel for your wife.57
The poetic conceits imbedded in this padam provide opportunities for the
actor to embody each image through gesture language, thereby serving as
the vehicle for the creation of an image of Damayanti not only in Nala's
mind but also in the mind of the spectator.
There follows an interpolation (attam) in which Narada assures Nala
that he will win Damayanti, since she already has set her heart on him
alone. Immediately after Narada's departure, Nala enacts the following
loka in which the actor embodies Nala's state of mind at that moment:
"Having heard Narada's words, and the words of other travellers, Nala's
mind, already immersed in thinking about Damayanti, became pained by
his longing for her."58 This is a moment of consummate "interior" acting
in which he embodies cinta bhava (one of the thirty-two transitory states
[satichari bhava] of the Natyasastra), best translated as a state of "reflecting."
Nala's reflections on Damayanti cause him pain because he is unsure
whether he will actually realize union with her. The actor, lingering over
these moments of reflection, must take sufficient time to allow his elaboration
of Nala's inner mental state to be relished by the audience. Unlike
the semiotically more complex reading of an actor's delivery in hand gestures
of the specific dialogue of the text, reception of this particular scene
does not depend upon technical knowledge but on an audience that
knows the story as well as the actors and therefore possesses a similar set
of associations regarding Nala's character, state of mind, and the possible
associations conjured in that state.
From Appakoothan Nayar's point of view, it is precisely moments
CRITICAL THEORY AND PERFORMANCE
124
such as this that are the epitome of the aesthetic that informs his perspectives
on kathakali in general and his critique of Kathakali King Lear in particular.
For Appakoothan Nayar the two major problems with the latter
are its all too brief two-hour running time and its nonepic characters. In
contrast to Kathakali King Lear, where everything is cut short, Appakoothan
Nayar is proud of the fact that the recent Margi production of
Warrier's Nala Caritam expanded its running time to thirty total hours to
allow more performative elaboration than usual. Appakoothan Nayar
told me how one friend commented: "If you go on like this it will come to
365 days." To which he said:
"It will go on to one thousand days!" And this is precisely why I
don't like Kathakali King Lear. The potential for elaboration must be
there. In most [new] kathakali they simply translate the text into
gestures and say, "that's kathakali." But that is not kathakali! You must
take the text and see how much scope there is for expansion and
decoration.
From Appakoothan Nayar's perspective, it is impossible to elaborate
nonepic stories because the characters are "not fit for kathakali." Unlike
epic characters, who "never existed" and therefore must be created in
the imagination of the spectator, Lear, like Jesus, Karl Marx, or Franklin
Roosevelt, is for Appakoothan Nayar an historical figure who at one time
existed and for whom therefore one already has a set of associations.
Although one has images of epic characters, the image is not supported
by any visual comparison because the characters never existed.
Ravana is supposed to have ten heads and twenty hands-can
he ever have existed in any stage of human evolution?59 Lear's features
you know because he was a human being. But in the case of
Ravana, he is the concretization of a concept.... The concretization
of the abstract is there [in ritual and theatrical arts] in order to reach
the abstract.60
For Appakoothan Nayar kathakali is a metaphysical theater of the imagination
where the spectator "creates [each character] in his mind," and for
Appakoothan Nayar the spectator's ability to freely imagine, or "take in
his mind," a Lear was disrupted because, he says, "I have that [previous]
image [of Lear] in mind."
Lest Appakoothan Nayar's metaphysical theater of the imagination
be perceived as unproblematic, I want to situate his discourse in the larger
debate over the role of the past in the Indian present by reflecting on the
astute observation by South Asian poet and scholar A. K. Ramanujan: "In
a culture like the Indian, the past does not pass. It keeps on providing paradigms
and ironies for the present, or at least that's the way it seems.''61
On the one hand, Appakoothan Nayar's argument against Kathakal.i King
Lear is constructed from an aesthetic paradigm of the past-the rasa aes-
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125
thetic-and his institution is an attempt to insure that this aesthetic remains
central to kathakali's creativity in the future.62 It is a paradigm written
for and from the privileged position of the traditional patron-connoisseur
for whose pleasure kathakali was originally created. While his is an
inventive form of intercultural discourse in its use of the Western intellectual
icons of history and evolution as part of its argument against experimentation,
it is a reactionary one that does not historicize his own perspective
and then stakes exclusive claim to interpreting what is or is not
appropriate within the tradition and what qualifies as a legitimate form
of experimentation. Appakoothan Nayar's critique implies a denial of
the validity of experiments attempting to reach audiences other than connoisseurs.
Such experiments range from Kathakali King Lear to populist
adaptations with little elaboration for Malayali mass audiences at annual
temple festivals to the 1987 production of Humanity's Success (Manavidyam),
the latter of which was a dramatized critique of imperialist aggression
authored by Iyyemgode Sreedharan (translator of Kathakali King
Lear), staged primarily for leftist political audiences.63
Aesthetic Congruence and Kingly Dissonance
Although Kathakali King Lear evoked little aesthetic delight in Appakoothan
Nayar and some other kathakali connoisseurs, for at least some
among the European and Malayali audiences the subtlety of kathakali's
interior acting was communicated. I refer especially to the penultimate
and ultimate moments of pathos in the production-the seventh and
ninth scenes of the production in which Lear is first reunited with
Cordelia, then dies from grief over her loss.
His crown having been placed beside him by the Fool, Lear slowly wakes.
Cordelia stands back, but the fool urges her to present herself to Lear.
Lear sits up.
Lear: I do not know whether I am alive or dead. I do not remember
these clothes.
Cordelia: Sir, do you know me?
Lear: I fear I am not in my right mind, but I think you are my child.
Cordelia: Yes! I am, I am your child!
Lear: You have cause to hate me.
Cordelia: No cause, no cause.
Lear: Forgive me, I am old and foolish.
They embrace. The Soldier appears. He claims Cordelia and the Fool as prisoners.
[After their departure] Lear picks up his kiridam [crown].64
In the battle that ensues during the eighth scene, Regan orders her soldier
to kill his prisoners, Cordelia and the Fool. The order sends France into a
wild fury, played out in kathakal.i's typical stylized battle choreography as
he slays both Regan and Goneril. As the final scene opens, the vocalists
create a transition from the cacophany of battle with its loud-sounding
CRITICAL THEORY AND PERFORMANCE
126
drums to the pathos of loss and death as they sing the opening loka in a
slow rhythm, reporting what has happened, and telling what will happen:
"The young Queen and the King's Fool have been brutally murdered.
The old King finds his beloved daughter dead. He dies from grief
and so ends his terrible suffering." Even though the Western audience
cannot understand what the vocalists are singing, the pathos carried by
the music alone sets the appropriate mood. The handheld curtain is lowered
to reveal Cordelia's body.
Lear enters in full katti vesam. He walks slowly but stands very straight.
Lear approaches Cordelia. He turns her head and recognizes her. He
screams with grief. He falls down beside his daughter.
Lear: I know when someone is alive or dead. My child is as dead as
earth.
In spite of reservations about certain aspects of the production, reviewers
of the Edinburgh performances in particular focused much of
their positive commentary on Lear's pathos over the loss of Cordelia. Although
Tom Morris, writing in the Times Literary Supplement, responded to
most of the production with "remote fascination," it was different with the
closing scene: "at Lear's cry over the dead Cordelia, magical and spotlit,
there is a frightening and uninterrupted moment of agonized theatrical
communication." For Randall Stevenson of the Independent, who
responded positively to the shape, contours, and variety of the entire production,
the closing scene in which Lear dies of grief was also a profoundly
moving moment:
Lear's concluding rhythmic keening over Cordelia, picked up by the
percussion, provides almost the first remotely human sound from
performers rather than the accompanying singers.
It both wrings the heart and moves the performance forward into
another dimension: towards the awesome, elemental world from
which Shakespeare's original vision was compounded.
Among Malayalis who responded at least in part favorably, V. Kaldharan
acknowledged that both Kumaran Nayar and Padmanabhan Nayar were
"successful in portraying the full depth of King Lear's sorrow (karuna
rasa)."65
I would suggest that the emotive resonance that Stevenson describes
was a moment of aesthetic congruence when at least some among the Edinburgh
audience experienced the resonance of aesthetic delight similar
to, if not the same as, a Malayali connoisseur's arousal of rasa. As steeped
in Shakespeare as a Kerala audience in the Mahabharata and Nala story,
at least some in the Edinburgh audience share a knowledge of Lear's
mental state equal to that of the actors playing the roles. The knowledgeable
audience "knows" that Lear's mental state moves from his deranged
FOR WHOM IS THE KING A KING?
127
wandering, forgetfulness, and impromptu ravings to one of the dawn of
remembrance when he awakes from his sleep.
McRuvie's sparse text allows the kathakali performer the performative
time necessary to embody through internal acting the appropriate
bhavas-in scene 7, cinta bhava, "reflection" or "remembrance." Lear, in a
dreamlike state of forgetfulness, awakens to Cordelia and the Fool. In the
process of remembering, he gradually recalls Cordelia, his loss of her, his
foolishness in rejecting her, and the mental agony of their separation. Although
the tone and specific dramatic context and circumstances are quite
different, Lear's act of reflection, or remembrance, is similar to that of
Nala. The scene is that moment of classic Western recognition in which
Lear realizes his loss. It makes possible the Western audience's experience
of Lear as a tragic character.
As staged at Edinburgh, the entire final scene could be characterized
as Lear's grieving cry over the loss of his beloved daughter. When Lear
returns in the final scene to discover the dead Cordelia, he is resplendent
in his full costume and makeup. With only one line "spoken" during the
entire scene, Padmanabhan Nayar was free to elaborate, through interior
acting, doka bhava-that is, the pathos of his loss-and the moment-bymoment
search for any signs that she might still be alive. Since he was
playing Lear as a katti-type character considered less refined than the idealized
kingly pacca roles, he was permitted by convention to utter sounds.
In his brilliant elaboration of this long dramatic moment, Padmanabhan
Asan chose to make full use of the psychophysical means of embodiment
in the kathakali repertory, subtly uttering whimpers through the control of
his breath and manifesting other signs of the grief of loss such as trembling.
The sounds and signs of Lear's grief gradually draw out of him his
own life force (prana-vayu) so that he collapses beside his daughter, dead
of grief.
The narrative and mimetic simplicity of these scenes meant that it
was unnecessary for the Western audience to be able to read kathakali's
codified gesture language to follow or appreciate the action. Given the familiar
trajectory of both the Lear story and the narrative of pathos, at least
some in the Edinburgh and European audiences savored karuna rasa
pathos-the closest emotional tone in Indian theater to Western tragedy.
Kathakali King Lear's success at communicating pathos is not unproblematic.
The positive reception of Padmanabhan Nayar's empathic cry of
loss over Cordelia unquestionably assumes a modernist paradigm of the
main character's emotional state as the essence of the pleasure of dramatic
reception. It was also a problem for some in the Malayali audience-how
could one appreciate a play in which the predominant rasa, or
flavor of aesthetic delight, is pathos and in which the king does not act
like a king? Understating the case somewhat, Malayali reviewer Vinita
noted, "It is unusual to conclude a kathakali on a tragic note."66
But even more problematic was Lear's behavior. Kathakal.i actor
Nelliyode Vasudevan Namboodiri, who played the role of the Fool in the
CRITICAL THEORY AND PERFORMANCE
128
original experimental staging of the storm scene and Goneril on the second
tour, described his problems with understanding Lear: "When
Lear's older daughters tell him they love him so much, and Cordelia
says she can only give half her love, he believes all these things. It is difficult
to believe that Lear, at 80 years of age, with all his life experience,
would respond this way to his daughters!"67 V. Kaladharan raised the
same problem in his Mathrabhumi article, noting that even master percussionist
Krishnankutty Poduval, who helped conceive the production,
was puzzled by the fact that Lear would "forgo his daughter who is prepared
to share her love between her father and her husband."68 Given
the fact that social convention dictates that a daughter will naturally give
her love to her husband and that tragedy and the individual human
weaknesses that prompt Lear's downfall have little resonance in Kerala
culture, where human kinship was historically idealized and related to
maintenance of the cosmic order, Lear's behavior toward Cordelia appeared
to some Malayalis naive, even silly. As Kaladharan concluded,
for those in the audience for whom Lear could not be perceived as a king,
"the theme which is important for a Western audience becomes totally
awkward for an Indian audience."69
Conclusion
Although Kathakali King Lear was conceived ideally as an intercultural
project to be performed for Kerala and European audiences, the commercial
realities (over thirty performances abroad and two in Kerala), the
Western Lear narrative, and McRuvie's directorial eye naturally shaped
the production for a primarily Western theatergoing public. It may not
have been, therefore, as well received by Malayali audiences as by Western
audiences, but it brought to its Western audiences an integrity hard to
find in a number of other intercultural experiments. In contrast to Peter
Brook's naturalized Mahabharata, which "flattened" the Indianness of the
epic's cultural markers and suppressed India's codified performance
techniques,70 Leday and McRuvie's project intentionally kept an active
tension between a simplified Shakespeare narrative played in a fully codified
theatrical and choreographic reelaboration of that narrative.
Kathakali King Lear was an intercultural project conceived and developed
with the full cooperation of leading kathakali artists. For an artist such as
Padmanabhan Nayar, developing and acting the role of Lear was considered
a consummate and appropriate professional acting challenge that he
relished at this point in his career as a performer-a fact too often ignored
by critics and theorists who have not interviewed members of the cast.
With its collaborative process of creation, the meanings and experiences
that the production made available were constrained by the limitations
the artists themselves strategically selected and by the preconceptions
and (relatively open or closed) horizon of expectations of its varied
audiences. The production was never intended as a postmodern experiment,
but as a meeting between kathakal.i techniques, aesthetics, and sen-
FOR WHOM IS THE KING A KING?
129
sibilities and Shakespeare's King Lear. It did not, and could not, reach
some hypothetically universal realm of communication.71
NOTES
1. Susan Bennett, Theatre Audiences: A Theory of Production and Reception
(London: Routledge, 1990), 101.
2. Jean-Francois Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report of Knowledge,
trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 1984), xxiv.
3. James Clifford, The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-Century Ethnography,
Literature, and Art (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988), 230.
4. Clifford, The Predicament of Culture, 231, 14.
5. Arjun Appadurai and Carol A. Breckenridge, "The Situation of Public Culture,"
in Modern Sites: Consumption and Contestation in a Postcolonial World (in
press), 3.
6. Putu Wijaya, "Indonesian Culture," trans. Ellen Rafferty (unpub. MS, 1986).
7. Clifford, Predicament of Culture, 14-15. See also Arjun Appadurai, "Disjuncture
and Difference in the Global Cultural Economy," Public Culture 2, no. 2 (1990):
1-24; Appadurai and Breckenridge, "Situation of Public Culture"; Appadurai and
Breckenridge, "Why Public Culture?" Public Culture 1, no. 1 (1988): 5-9; and other
articles in Public Culture.
8. Kathakali King Lear program, Shakespeare's Globe Theatre, 1999. The 1999
Kathakali King Lear followed the Bankside performances of a Zulu Macbeth and
Cuban Tempest in 1997 and 1998. The second and third productions, no longer associated
with the Kerala Kalamandalam, used a new Malayalam translation by K.
Marumakan Raja, several new cast members, and some revisions in the staging.
My analysis of the European performances focuses on the second European and
Edinburgh performances (viewed on videotape), and the numerous reviews they
generated. Although I did see the production again at Shakespeare's Globe Theatre,
due to limitations of space, I do not extend my analysis to this most recent
incarnation.
9. Bennett, Theater Audiences, 114. See also Marco De Marinis, "Dramaturgy of
the Spectator," TDR 31, no. 2 (1987): 100-114.
o10. The two great Indian epics (Ramayana and Mahabharata) and puranas (a
diverse collection of wisdom and stories that "become the bibles of popular Hinduism"
[William Theodore De Bary, Sources of Indian Tradition (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1958), 1:323]) are the sources of most traditional modes of
storytelling and performance. Of the eighteen major and eighteen minor puranas,
the Bhagavata Purana is the most popular and widely circulated. Especially dear to
devotees of Visnu, this purana tells the story of the life of Lord Krishna.
11. On women kathakali performers, see Diane Daugherty and Marlene Pitkow,
"Who Wears the Skirts in Kathakali?" TDR 35, no. 2 (1991): 138-56.
12. Annette Leday and David McRuvie, Kathakali King Lear (program) (Paris:
Keli, 1989), 1.
13. Patrice Pavis, "Dancing with Faust: A Semiotician's Reflections on Barba's
Intercultural Mise-en-schne," TDR 33, no. 3 (1989): 37-57.
14. Rev. H. Gundert, A Malayalam and English Dictionary (Mangalore: C. Stolz,
1872), 995.
15. The actor uses the vesam to cover and thereby "transform" himself when he
CRITICAL THEORY AND PERFORMANCE
130
assumes a role. For a discussion, see Pramod Kale, The Theatric Universe: A Study
of the Natyasastra (Bombay: Popular Prakashan, 1974), 58-59.
16. Vasudevan Namboodiripad, interview by the author, December 9, 1989.
17. David McRuvie, interview by the author, Septemer 29, 1989.
18. McRuvie was referring to the fact that actors who play female roles receive
special training in three modes of expression used exclusively for playing many
female roles: a coy, "pretended" shyness; a pouting contempt; and, similarly, a
pouting anger. In all three modes of expression, there is clearly a set of quotation
marks put around each emotional state that says, "This is pretended" or "I don't
really mean this." Therefore, when a female character is enacting this special shyness
toward her beloved, the subtext is, "I'm just acting shy and you can really
have me." Although there are a few strong and less submissive female roles
played in which shyness, contempt, and anger are expressed more directly without
the quotation marks, they are the exception rather than the rule. Consequently,
McRuvie's hesitancy about using a male kathakali actor for the role of Cordelia.
19. Bennett, Theatre Audiences, o101. See also Marvin Carlson's important essay
on the "local habitation" of performance, "Local Semiosis and Theatrical Interpretation,"
in Theatre Semiotics (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990).
20. Maurice Natanson, Phenomenology and the Social Sciences, vol. 1 (Evanston,
Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1973).
21. De Marinis, "Dramaturgy of the Spectator," o102.
22. See Phillip B. Zarrilli, "Demystifying Kathakali," Sangeet Natak 43 (1979):
48-59.
23. Anne Ubersfeld, "The Pleasure of the Spectator," Modern Drama 25, no. 1
(1982): 131.
24. Jean-Claude Carriere, The Mahabharata, trans. Peter Brook (New York:
Harper and Row, 1987), xiv.
25. Richard Schechner, "Talking with Peter Brook," TDR 30, no. 1 (1986): 55.
26. Schechner, "Talking with Peter Brook," 68. For a critique, see Rustom
Bharucha's "Peter Brook's 'Mahabharata': A View from India," in Theatre and the
World (Columbia, Mo.: South Asia Publications, 1990), 94-120.
27. Similar to Brook, Barba seeks a form of metacultural communication, but,
rather than erasing cultural distinctions, he has his group of international actors
each keep her distinctively enculturated movement vocabulary while developing
the mise-en-scene, thereby seeking to reveal "culture... through cultures" (Pavis,
"Dancing with Faust," 53).
28. Ubersfeld, "Pleasure of the Spectator," 133.
29. For a comprehensive overview, see Edward Said's Orientalism (New York:
Pantheon Books, 1978).
30. Ronald Inden, "Orientalist Constructions of India," Modern Asian Studies
20, no. 3 (1986): 401-46.
31. See Burton Benedict, The Anthropology of World's Fairs (Berkeley: Lowie Museum
of Anthropology, 1983); and Robert W. Rydell, All the World's a Fair (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1984).
32. One of the earliest performance examples of our mystification of India is
Ruth St. Denis's creation of her 1905 "Radha" where she danced the role of this
"spiritual other." See Joan Erdman, "Performance as Translation: Uday Shankar in
the West," TDR 31, no. 1 (1987): 64-88.
33. F. C., "'Le roi Lear' en Kathakali!" Progres, November 21, 1989.
34. Nadine Pichot "Le Roi Lear en Theatre Kathakali: Intensite, force et feerie,"
Semaine Cdte d'Azur, December 8, 1989.
FOR WHOM IS THE KING A KING?
131
35. Michael Billington, "Empty Gestures of a Frustrating Lear," Guardian, August
17, 1990.
36. Charles Spencer, "Hypnotic Power of an Indian Lear," Daily Telegraph, August
17, 1990.
37. Randall Stevenson, "Beat of a Different Drum," Independent, August 18, 1990.
38. Tom Morris, "A Midsummer Night's Dream," Times Literary Supplement, August
24, 1990.
39. "L'histoire du 'Roi Lear' Contee en Kathakali," Cannes-Matin (Nice-Matin),
November 26, 1989.
40. "Le Roi Lear Version Kathakali: Un Spectacle Haut en Coleurs," Presse de la
Manche, November 9, 1989.
41. Sergio Trombetta, "Le Roi Lear," Danse, October 3, 1989.
42. Cl. Grandmontagne, "Le 'Roi Lear' par le Theatre Kathakali: Deroutant
Mais Superbe," Telegramme, October 9, 1989.
43. Pierre Gilles, "L'automne Indien du Roi Lear," Quest France, September 15,
1989.
44. Ubersfeld, "Pleasure of the Spectator," 133.
45. John Percival, "Lear's Heath at Half-Blast," Times (London), August 17,
1990.
46. Bennett, Theatre Audiences, 10o3.
47. Paul Jacob, "King Lear Coming Again," Indian Express (Kochi ed.), August
5, 1990.
48. "'King Lear' in Kathakali," Hindu, January 13, 1989.
49. D. Parkin, The Cultural Definition of Political Response (London: Academic
Press, 1978).
o50. The paradigmatic past is present for the kathakali actor each time he approaches
any important role on stage. The "sense of appropriateness" guiding his
acting is imbibed first and foremost from his teacher, from the traditional method
of playing each role taught in training, from observation of senior actors (especially
his own teacher) playing the role on stage, and, finally, from his own understanding
of what is appropriate in each dramatic context.
The degree to which performers feel responsible for creating only what they interpret
as appropriate to the context is illustrated in the great kftiyattam actor
Guru Ammannur Madhava Chakyar's account of how and why he "modified
slightly" his enactment of Bali's death scene in Balivadham ("The Death of Bali").
After recounting his family's traditional right to perform the play, he recalls how,
"of all the actors I saw in my childhood, Kitangur Rama Chakyar, who took the
role of Bali, remains indelibly engraved in my memory. His Bali was unrivalled indeed"
(G. Venu, Production of a Play in Kftiyattam [Irinjalakuda: Natankairali,
1989]: iv). Eventually, as he grew older and matured as an actor, "the rare fortune
of acting Bali descended" on him and, in his words, he was
emboldened to [make the slight modification] by the training I received from
Bhagavatar Kunjunni Tampuran of the royal family of Kodungalloor. I went to
Tampuran, who had done deep research in the art of drama, to learn the art
strictly according to the principles laid down by Bharata [author of the authoritative
Nfityadtstra]. I was his student for two years. He taught me also the
minute details of climacteric breathing. This particular training took about
forty days. The various Svasas [breaths or internal winds] . . . are controlled,
one after another, appropriately to make the death-throes realistic. This is the
essence of my modification. (v)
CRITICAL THEORY AND PERFORMANCE
132
Although Kathakali King Lear was a new production for which no precedents
had been set for particular roles, nevertheless there was very real pressure felt by
some of the actors that they might be severely criticized for transgressing the
boundaries of appropriateness. This was especially true of junior actor Balasubramaniam,
who was playing the role of the Fool in a vesam over which controversy
raged up to and past the official opening production.
51. For a discussion of specific adaptations, translations, and transformations
that have shaped kathakali to suit a particular audience, see Phillip B. Zarrilli, The
Kathakali Complex (Delhi: Abhinav, 1984), and most recently Phillip Zarrilli, Kathakali
Dance-Drama: Where Gods and Demons Comes to Play (London: Routledge, 2000).
52. Appakoothan Nayar, interview by the author, October 24, 1989.
53. On rasa, see Rachel Van M. Baumer and James R. Brandon, Sanskrit Drama
in Performance (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1981), 209-57; and V. K.
Chari, Sanskrit Criticism (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1990).
54. Barbara Stoller Miller, Theatre of Memory: The Plays of Kalidasa (New York:
Columbia University Press, 1984).
55. Miller, Theatre of Memory, 40.
56. Miller, Theatre of Memory, 40.
57. V. Subramanya Iyer, trans., Nala Caritam Attakatha (Journal of South Asian
Literature) lo, nos. 2-4 (1975): 211-48.
58. Trans. M. P. Sankaran Namboodiri.
59. Ravanna and Raman are adversaries in one of India's two great epics, the
Ramayana. Ravanna is the ten-headed demon-king of Lanka who captures
Raman's wife, Sita, and whom Raman rescues with the help of the devoted monkey-god,
Hanuman.
60. P. C. Namboodiri made the same point when he contrasted the historical
characters who appeared in a locally initiated and produced World War II kathakali
(Hitler [the evil red beard], Roosevelt, Chiang Kai-shek, and Stalin [the heroic
beneficient "green" character type]) with epic characters: "They are real human
beings you have seen either in motion pictures or in photos. But you don't know
what Shiva is. People can only imagine what is his exact nature. The costumes fit
only such characters. So realism in that [historical] way is not appropriate to a
dance-drama like Kathakali" (quoted in Judith Lynn Hanna, The Performer-Audience
Connection [Austin: University of Texas Press, 1983], 162).
61. A. K. Ramanujan, "Classics Lost and Found," in Contemporary Indian Tradition:
Voices on Culture, Nature, and the Challenge of Change (Washington, D.C.:
Smithsonian Institution Press, 1989), 133. For a provocative study of the manipulation
of the past in the creation of the present, see David Lowenthal, The Past Is a
Foreign Country (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985).
62. See my extensive discussion of the history and context of this contemporary
interpretation of connoisseurship as a "theatre of the mind" in Kathakali
Dance-Drama (33-38).
63. Suresh Awasthi follows a similar logic in his damning argument that the
production "violated" kathakali conventions, and was not a "true intercultural experiment"
since it did not merge two performance cultures ("The Intercultural Experience
and the Kathakali 'King Lear,'" New Theatre Quarterly, 9, no. 34: 172-78).
For a full account of the leftist experiment, see my analysis, "when Marx met imperialism
on the kathakali stage," in Kathakali Dance-Drama (196-205).
64. David McRuvie, Kathakali King Lear, MS, 1989.
65. V. Kaladharan, "The Problems Raised by King Lear Kathakali" Mathrabhumi,
August 13, 1989.
FOR WHOM IS THE KING A KING?
133
66. Vinita, "The Heart-Rending King Lear," Deshabimani, February 5, 1989. The
only Sanskrit drama in which it could be argued that pathos plays a major role is
Bhasa's play Urubhangam. In the katiyattam repertory, the style of acting Bali's
death is filled with pathos and may have served Padmanabhan Nayar as a model.
67. Neliyode Vasudevan Namboodiri, interview by the author, September 25,
1989.
68. Kaladharan, "Problems Raised."
69. Kaladharan, "Problems Raised."
70. Pavis, "Dancing with Faust."
71. Since the original version of this essay was published in 1992, a number of
theorists and critics have written about the essay or the production. I refer the
reader especially to the discussions of W. B. Worthen (TDR 39, no. 1 [Spring 1995]:
13-28) and Susan Bennett (Performing Nostalgia: Shifting Shakespeare and the Contemporary
Past (London: Routledge, 1996), 69-74). Worthen and Bennett limited
their discussions to either my essay on Kathakali King Lear or that of Suresh
Awasthi. Apparently neither consulted the extensive literature available on experimentation
within the kathakali tradition available in print at that time, nor was
Awasthi's perspective on kathakali placed within a wider critical context. I would
encourage the reader to read between these essays, and my own book-length
analysis of these issues, which expands beyond the limitations of an essay of this
length, Kathakali Dance-Drama: Where Gods and Demons Come to Play.
Critical Race Theory
Today the word race not infrequently appears in quotation marks. This
usage signals a well-founded wariness of a dangerous idea, one with so
many sharp edges that it's hard to pick up. To limit its propensity to
wound, critical theorists first historicize it. For millennia, the best authorities
attributed differences among peoples to climate and temperament:
those living nearest the equator, such as Africans, were regarded as sanguine
and intelligent, builders of pyramids; those hailing from northern
climes, such as Germans, were thought phlegmatic and stupid.1 Beyond
the place where the North Wind originated, however, according to the ancient
Greeks, dwelt "the Hyperboreans," the members of the oldest and
most virtuous human race, who were thought to have lived blissfully for
a thousand years of perpetual spring under their cloudless sky. "Race" as
a concept has clearly long justified the scare quotes by which it is here circumscribed,
but history has not always rendered it so.
Over the past several centuries, many impressionistic concepts of
human difference accrued to the word race, which developed from a breeding
stock of animals into an elaborated anthropological taxonomy, dividing
the species known to itself as "the human race" into a putatively settled
but in fact ontologically shaky array of subgroups-tribal, regional,
national, or continental. During the European Enlightenment, the problematic
question of "race" prompted spurious answers from "science,"
which in turn offered convenient rationalizations for the world-historical
projects of slaveholders, colonizers, nationalists, and segregationists. In the
eighteenth century, the comparative anatomist Johann Friedrich Blummenbach
proposed a fivefold scheme of racial classification-Caucasian,
Mongolian, Malayan, Ethiopian, and American (Indian)-based on the
pseudoprecision of skull measurements and a spectrum of white, yellow,
brown, black, and red skin. Many variations on this scheme have been
tried since Blummenbach, none ultimately durable, but each consequential
for someone. Such taxonomies typically catalog various kinds of phenotypical
(visible) differences between and among people from different
parts of the world, but they have also assigned to those differences a host
of dubious and sometimes fantastic meanings. By the middle of the nineteenth
century, Joseph Arthur, comte de Gobineau, in The Inequality of
135
CRITICAL THEORY AND PERFORMANCE
136
Human Races (1853-55), organized such a taxonomy into a hierarchy of
races, at the apex of which he placed "the Nordic strain" of "the Aryan
race," a construct as mythical in its way as "the Hyperboreans" of ancient
times, but incalculably more catastrophic in its effects. Such treatises as
Gobineau's typically expand their purview to refer to invisible characteristics
as well, further opening the door through which haphazardly invented,
cynically fabricated, or genuinely hallucinated ideas of human difference
can enter. At this point, when the discredited but remarkably
persistent notion that race is the primary determinant of human traits and
capacities joins with a belief in the inherent superiority of one racial group
over others, "race" metastasizes into racism.2
To complicate the issue, marginalized groups trying to maintain solidarity
in the face of racist oppression have sometimes claimed a positive
racial identity for themselves, though here the appeal is more often ultimately
to a network of shared social and cultural experiences than it is to
a biologically determined essence.3 Affiliation through the common experience
of a particular place of origin, ancestry, language, religion, set of
customs, traditional food (or all of these things together) can best be described
by the word ethnicity, derived from ethnos, the Greek word for a
nation or a people, and akin to ethos, meaning custom. Such terms can also
inhere in nationality, cognate to native and nativity, historically meaning
the circumstances of a person's birth, now more commonly the legal relationship
of allegiance between an individual and a state. In practice, however,
ethnic and national identities can overlap with racial ones (indeed,
sometimes they are intentionally confounded), not only exposing the
often confused and arbitrary nature of categories of human difference, but
also potentially mobilizing their prolific and dangerous power. This includes
the power of the modern nation-state to assign racial identities to
its subjects by law and the power of culture to impose them extralegally
by custom.
The project of critical race theory is to diminish the danger by deconstructing
racial categories themselves, while critiquing the laws and customs
that authorize, enact, and promulgate them.
This critique has been most stringently applied against the vestiges
of essentialism, the assumption that human differences are constituted as
fixed types with innate and immutable characteristics. Against essentialism,
critical race theory deploys the idea of hybridity. Paul Gilroy defines
it as "the instability and mutability of identities which are always unfinished,
always being made."4 Like the word race, hybridity derives from
the classifying terminology of botany and zoology, where it means heterogeneity,
the mixture of individuals of different races, breeds, or varieties.
In human terms, it means mixing not only DNA, but also backgrounds,
cultures, and traditions. Even though some may still disavow or ignore its
prevalence, hybridity characterizes the actual lived experience of much of
the world under conditions of diaspora, migration, and exile (see the section
"Postcolonial Studies" in this volume). Where hybridity is acknowledged,
as it has been recently by the U.S. Census, it appears in the form of
CRITICAL RACE THEORY
137
hyphenated identities, moving far beyond such crude binary distinctions
as "black" and "white" into multiply variegated crossovers and recombinations.
Such dynamic transactions trouble efforts to legalize received
racial taxonomies, but the success of critical race theory in undermining
essentialized categories has recently emboldened neoconservatives in
their efforts to undo affirmative action and other instruments of legal redress
for the historic consequences of racism. If race does not (or ought
not) legally exist, their reasoning goes, then it cannot provide the basis for
special protection any more than it can be used to justify discrimination
under the national constitution.
The problem with this reasoning is that "race" does exist. It exists
in much the same way that theatrical and other performances exist-as
copies without originals (see the section "Performance Studies"). It exists
as an alternative, hypothetical reality, which does not make its existence
any less consequential. It exists, for instance, as a legal fiction like
"the reasonable man," in whose elasticity of nonbeing the law finds a
measure and a model for the behavior of everyone. It exists, in other
words, as an imaginary realm populated by experientially improbable
but imaginatively plausible personae, unforgettable characters from
"Mammy" to "Madame Butterfly." Like dolls with stereotypical features,
such effigies or avatars can be forced to work as stand-ins or stunt
doubles for vast human constituencies (see the section "Mediatized Cultures").
In the creation of subjectivity-the interior experience of being a
particular subject (one who is placed under the control of a designated
authority or regime of self-sameness)-such effigies work variously as
objects of desire, identification and imitation or ambivalence, repulsion
and disidentification. And they work very hard. They "interpellate" (or
"hail") human subjects, summoning them into illusory fullness of being
by letting them act out whoever they think they are or to act out against
whoever they think they are not. This coincidence of techniques-between
the construction of racialized identities or subjectivities and putting
on shows-provides ample occasion for critical interventions by
theorists and practitioners of performance.
The first essay in this section, Jill Lane's "Black/face Publics: The Social
Bodies of Fraternidad," delineates the racialized entertainments that
were immensely popular in nineteenth-century Cuba. She shows how
racial mimicry, especially as it appears in a performance tradition such as
blackface (in which it is typically gendered as well as raced), presents a historically
dense theoretical problem. She links her argument to recent work
on racial impersonation, demonstrating how it both reflects and creates attitudes,
practices, and beliefs in groups as small as a local audience or as
large as a nation. "Race" is historically implicated in the construction of
what Benedict Anderson has influentially called "imagined communities."
Such enclaves create in turn the possibility of modern subjectivities under
the legal summons of nationality. As Lane has extensively demonstrated
elsewhere, teatro bufo, in which white actors danced, sang, and acted in
blackface for white audiences (impersonating effigies like the comic negrito
CRITICAL THEORY AND PERFORMANCE
138
or the sexy mulata), rallied the cause of Cuban anticolonial nationalism
under the subversive mask of blackness. But here Lane explores the counterperformance
of the velada, a contestatory multimedia demonstration of
black Cuban identity and dignity. She posits the development in nineteenth-century
Cuba of "a black public sphere," making her own use of Jirgen
Habermas's concept of the European bourgeois public sphere as a zone
of civic expression. The public sphere, operating neither as formally as a
state-sanctioned institution nor as informally as private life, but rather separately
as an alternative forum of public opinion, produced printed discourse
as well as theatrical and paratheatrical performances from the
Enlightenment onward. Participants in the public sphere, however, universalized
as "abstract citizens" in theory, were in practice privileged white
males. Performances of the Cuban black public sphere, Lane shows, put another
face on the abstract citizen. Her keyword Fraternidad suggests, however,
that even though the face of the citizen was no longer exclusively
privileged and white, it was still conspicuously male. Even the favored
symbolic body of the Cuban interracial conversation, expressed in the
steamy danz6n and identified with the island "herself," was only provisionally
gendered female and black for the duration of her erotic dance to an
African beat. When the cue finally came for the dancer to speak as a subject,
the role was taken over by a man, one hailed as a criollo (Creole), or nativeborn
Cuban of (white) European descent. His macho anticolonial stance
performed not only Cubanidad in the face of his Iberian colonial oppressors,
but also Latinidad in the face of his anglocentric cousins, even as the North
Americans prepared an expansionist and exclusionary agenda of their own
in the racial crucible of nation and empire.
The imposing claims of "the native-born" in defining the limits of
imagined community highlight the vexed experience of the immigrant,
especially the racialized immigrant, in the construction of nationality, on
the one hand, and subjectivity, on the other. As a self-proclaimed "nation
of immigrants," the United States has historically put its idealized selfconception
to severe tests, especially with regard to the taxonomically
surreal but culturally formidable category of the doubly alienated "foreign-born
nonwhite." Legally excluded from citizenship (and for some
time excluded altogether by special quotas, which were not fully abolished
until 1965), the Asian immigrant in particular became a "figure,"
which, in the words of Lisa Lowe, "has served as a 'screen,' a phantasmatic
site, on which the nation projects a series of condensed, complicated
anxieties regarding external and internal threats to the mutable coherence
of the national body."5 Writing specifically about the theater,
Karen Shimakawa calls this experience "national abjection."6 While seeking
racial equality against the imposition of discriminatory laws, AsianAmerican
immigrants have also struggled to maintain their ethnic identities
and cultural traditions in the face of both imposed and self-generated
assimilationist pressures. Performance at once incites this struggle and
embodies it.
In "Virtual Chinatown and New Racial Formation: Performance of
CRITICAL RACE THEORY
139
Cantonese Opera in the Bay Area," Daphne Lei takes up the historic and
contemporary revival of a venerable theatrical genre. Its early productions
in nineteenth-century San Francisco were tellingly mistaken for
"Ethiopian minstrelsy," while its current ones self-consciously perform traditional
"Chineseness" to the rising generation of "ABCs" or "Americanborn
Chinese." Lei documents what she calls the "paratheatrical" elements
involved in the tenacious act of putting up these shows despite declining
numbers of both audience members and skilled performers. She resists the
tendency to use such performances to define ethnic traditions as "timeless,"
which would be to deny them temporal coexistence (or "coevalness"
in the words of anthropologist Johannes Fabian) with other activities such
as the contemporary productions of the Asian American Theatre Circle.
More broadly, Lei takes up Chinatown itself as a performance, one expressed
not only as an actual (though evidently elusive) physical place
once a ghetto, now a destination-but also as a "virtual" site of vicarious
tourism, visited by what she calls its "tangential citizens" in their sometimes
fitful dreams of what it means to be both Chinese and American.
Critical race theorists often cite W. E. B. DuBois on the bifurcating
pressures of the phenomenon he named "double-consciousness," a divided
subjectivity conducive to psychic conflict but also to potential clairvoyance
as the result of a special kind of performance: "One ever feels this
two-ness,-an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled
strivings, two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged
strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder."7 DuBois hints at the capacities
required to conduct what Harry Elam calls a "reality check"-an
actorlike ability to reimagine and thus defamiliarize the given circumstances
of "race" in America, "experiencing the grotesque, the unfamiliar
in familiar circumstances." Beginning with the highly dramatized funeral
of fourteen-year-old Emmett Till, who was savagely beaten to death for a
supposed transgression against the normative protocols of ocular circumspection
between the races, Elam works through several representations of
racially charged violence, attending in each case to the "moment that traumatically
and productively ruptures the balance between the real and representational."
He features the Rodney King case and its representationally
magnified aftershocks. In 1991 uniformed officers of the LAPD beat an
African-American man after stopping him for a traffic violation, and a year
later the officers were acquitted. As Robin Bernstein notes, neither the incident
nor the outcome was "unique or even unusual."8 What was unusual-a
"reality check" in Elam's account-is that a bystander videotaped
the beating and that his tape was broadcast. By the time of the acquittal,
most Californians-and much of the world-had seen the tape repeatedly,
and in the ensuing protest rioters torched buildings across twenty-five
blocks of central Los Angeles. Anna Deavere Smith's Twilight: Los Angeles,
1992 along with the apocalyptic finale of Spike Lee's Bamboozled give Elam
occasion to enlarge upon the real consequences of imaginary differences,
which in some demonstrable ways have changed only nominally from
those that once divided the sanguine and phlegmatic into separate and
CRITICAL THEORY AND PERFORMANCE
140
opposed corners of the perilous earth and deferred the possibility of living
together in harmony to the people who lived beyond the North Wind.
J.R.R.
NOTES
1. See Mary Floyd-Wilson, English Ethnicity and Race in Early Modern Drama
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003); Kim F. Hall, Things of Darkness:
Economies of Race and Gender in Early Modern England (Ithaca: Cornell University
Press, 1995); and Roxann Wheeler, The Complexion of Race: Categories of Difference in
Eighteenth-Century British Culture (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press,
2000).
2. See Les Back and John Solomos, eds., Theories of Race and Racism: A Reader
(London: Routledge, 2000).
3. Kimberly W. Bentson, Performing Blackness: Enactments of African-American
Modernism (London: Routledge, 2000).
4. Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (Cambridge:
Harvard University Press, 1993), xi. See also Gilroy's Against Race: Imagining
Political Culture Beyond the Color Line (Cambridge: Harvard University Press,
2000).
5. Lisa Lowe, Immigrant Acts: On Asian American Cultural Politics (Durham,
N.C.: Duke University Press, 1996), 18.
6. Karen Shimakawa, National Abjection: The Asian American Body Onstage
(Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2002).
7. W. E. B. DuBois, The Souls of Black Folk (New York: Vintage, 1986), 8-9.
8. Robin Bernstein, "Rodney King, Shifting Modes of Vision, and Anna Deavere
Smith's Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992," Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism 14
(2000): 121-34.
Black/face Publics: The Social Bodies
of Fraternidad
Jill Lane
"On that memorable night.., we threw down the gauntlet
against those who, with cynicism and unabashed ill-will
insist.., that we have not so much as knocked on the doors
of progress," wrote the black Cuban exile Pedro D'Aguirre
from Panama to the activist newspaper La Fraternidad (Fraternity)
in the fall of 1888. The night in question-12 July 1888
marked the first so-called velada or "soiree" for the black community
held in Havana, which staged an extensive evening of
performance, including oratory, poetry, and a three-act
drama, along with original classical music, and hours of social
dance, featuring that Cuban favorite, the danzdn. Held
only two years after the official end of slavery, this night of
elegant performance hosted by La Fraternidad revealed for
D'Aguirre and others that, despite continued white resistance
to supporting black education and black integration in the
larger public sphere, black Cuba nonetheless excelled at
white Cuba's most valued measures of "culture" and
"progress"-the performing arts. "You should be proud,"
wrote D'Aguirre, "for having placed the cornerstone of that
magnificent monument to our dignity."1
This letter lends insight into the central dynamics of the Cuban black public
sphere that emerged between abolition of slavery in 1886 and the beginning
of the final war for independence in 1895.2 First, D'Aguirre's letter
makes clear that the black public sphere exceeded the boundaries of
the island; newspapers like La Fraternidad and its counterpart La Igualdad
(Equality), were read in an extensive community of predominantly black
Cubans that encompassed a local audience as well as a network of Cuban
exiles throughout the Caribbean, Central America, and in New York,
Tampa, Miami, and Madrid. A strong commitment to an international
or more accurately, a hemispheric-black community informed much reporting;
features explored the state of black Americans in the United
States, Haiti, Jamaica, or elsewhere in the Caribbean and Central American
region, often comparing quality of life, political successes, or continued
racial oppression with conditions in Cuba. At the same time, nationalist
and anticolonial sentiment saturated the editorial pages of this black
press: throughout the period, black patriot-intellectuals used the press to
advocate for a racially integrated Cuban national future, and provided
one of the most dynamic and articulate sites of anticolonial critique in
Cuban letters at any time in Cuba's colonial history.3 Thus the public that
141
CRITICAL THEORY AND PERFORMANCE
142
was both constituted and represented by this press evinced both a black
transnational solidarity and a transracial national solidarity.
While the press was a crucial tool in the constitution of this complex
black activist public, performance played an equally constitutive role. As
D'Aguirre's anecdote illustrates, the fact that black Cubans had publicly
performed in those genres widely associated with education and culture
served as evidence-factual, bodily evidence-of black talent, equal to
those of any white European. The veladas were regularly staged by black
mutual aid societies across the island after 1888; each time, countless reviews
and editorials affirmed their important role as manifest "proof" of
black creativity, innovation, and "progress." The reviews also circulated
the impact of these performances in the broader transnational public to
whom that press was addressed. Thus it is that a single evening of performance
in Havana could indeed become so meaningful to a black Cuban
exile in Panama City. Print became a means for circulating the special
work of these elaborate social performances, while performance buttressed
the claims to political, social, and juridical equality advocated in
the press.
The very same theaters used to host veladas for the black community
also regularly staged popular theatrical performances from the teatro
bufo repertoire for a white criollo (Cuban-born) audience. Like the veladas,
the teatro bufo combined multiple genres-dance, music, drama
in a single evening of entertainment. Favoring comic and vernacular genres,
however, the teatro bufo was most valued for its representations of
"African" presence in Cuba, through the dissemination of social dance
and music that combined Spanish and (ostensibly) African rhythms and
choreography (the guaracha and later the eroticized danz6n were the famous
signatures) or through its wealth of blackface stock characters, from
the negrito to the mulata, played by white actors in blackface. While the veladas
were lauded by the black press for their racially integrated, if overwhelmingly
black, audiences, the teatro bufo performances were witnessed
by racially segregated and predominantly white audiences. Yet the
teatro bufo, like the veladas, was imagined by audiences as a vital site for
the articulation of an emergent national sentiment: the negrito and the
danz6n, as we shall see below, were imagined foremost as "Cuban," attaining
the status of popular symbols of the Cuban, as the island moved
toward anticolonial war. Thus both the teatro bufo and the veladas carried
enormous representational burdens, producing persuasive understandings
of the "Cuban" through performance, and relying on embodied representations
of race to do so.
In the pages that follow, I outline the complex role of performance,
in relation both to print culture and to discourses of race, in the constitution
of Cuban black and blackface publics in the critical years leading up
to the final war of Cuban independence. If events like the veladas sued for
public acknowledgment of the rights and rewards of black participation
in a larger Cuban public sphere, the teatro bufo's reliance on modes of
racial impersonation more often mapped the conditions of impossibility
BLACK/FACE PUBLICS
143
for such black public life and citizenship, underscoring the normative expectations
of whiteness (and maleness) associated with the homosocial
bonds of fraternity, equality, and liberty. The impasse between these competing
embodied social imaginations hinges, I suggest, on the uses and
abuses of racial impersonation in the attempt to control the terms and
practices of the newly emergent public sphere in Cuba.
Black/face Public Spheres
The term public sphere appears with frequency in black activist oratory and
press in the interwar years, particularly in the writings of Juan Gualberto
G6mez, Cuba's leading activist for racial equality and Cuban independence.
In 1893, he wrote in La Igualdad: "We want equality in all that is related
to public and social relationships. We respect the prejudices that our
[white] neighbors might encourage in their homes, which we will never
enter. But in the public sphere we want the end of differences based solely
on skin color."4 Invoking an important social geography of race relations,
Gomez considers the "public" racism that informs institutional, legal and
other cultural segregation as fundamentally separate from the "private,"
petty racism that motivates whites to exile blacks from their homes. As
such, antiracist activism in the postslavery era focused on gaining legal
access to all aspects of the "public sphere" of Cuban society at large.
G6mez's insistence on separating the public and private spheres is
striking, not least because the notion of a "public" sphere was only just
gaining currency for all Cubans in this period. As a result of concessions
in the aftermath of the Ten Year's War that provided for relaxation on censorship
of the press and of the theater, and to some extent allowed free assembly,
along with new constitutional rights, including limited electoral
representation in the Spanish Cortes, Cuba witnessed the development of
a significant public sphere for the first time in its colonial history. Here we
might use the term public sphere in the sense lent to it by Jirgen Habermas
and his many subsequent interlocutors. While I would extend the term
well beyond the liberal bourgeois sphere he suggests, the notion of a public
sphere is generative for the study of anticolonial culture, as it designates
a site of discursive deliberation and imagination between "citizens"
or other social subjects that is by definition distinct from the "official" discourse
of the state or colonial apparatus, and distinct from the private
realm alongside which it emerges.5 In Cuba, this public sphere (or
spheres, as was the case) was the site in which Cuban subjects gradually
organized themselves as a public and publicly as "Cubans" for the first
time. Those publics emerged in constant relation to-and against-official
colonial discourse on the one hand, and to those structurally excluded
from that discourse as nonsubjects (or noncitizens)-including women,
blacks, Asians-on the other. The latter, for their part, negotiated this
same terrain in the formation of contestatory counterpublics that allowed
for different coordinates of inclusion.
The very meaning of the "public" was deeply contested in relation
CRITICAL THEORY AND PERFORMANCE
144
to race in Cuba's anticolonial context. Just as Partha Chatterjee insists
that we must account for the constitutive role of colonial and anticolonial
contexts in the development of postcolonial nationalism, so too can we
examine how notions of the public sphere in Cuba's anticolonial context
were constituted in ways that may contrast sharply with Europe.6 In
Cuba, the European ideal of the public sphere as a stable site of fraternal
deliberation between social subjects arrived well before its reality: in a
context divided by race, definitions of the public sphere were the terrain
over which men struggled at both discursive and material levels. Antiracist
critiques by G6mez invoked an enlightenment discourse of universal
(male) access to the public sphere, grounded in notions of fraternity
and equality; at the same time, these invocations sought to reveal and
eradicate the implicit racial exclusion on which the developing public
sphere appeared to be based.
The public sphere in anticolonial Cuba further raises important
questions about the social poetics of print in relation and in contrast to
performance. Whereas Habermas advances an understanding of the public-publicity-grounded
in textual, literary practice, in Cuba, I suggest,
the new sense of "publicity" in the interwar years-from 1878 to 1895
was specially manifest in a wealth of embodied, performance practices.
Across the country the interwar years witnessed the sudden proliferation
of new spaces for public gathering and performance behaviors: cafes,
dance balls, masquerades, revived carnival activities, innumerable social
dances held on almost every night of the year outside of Lent, roller-skating
clubs, baseball clubs for all regions, classes, and races, and the building
of new theaters-which were used as often for social and political
gatherings as for plays.7 What made these performance-related activities
notable was not only their new scope and scale, but their being repeatedly
claimed and marked as "Cuban."
I suggest we consider how the techniques of performance-of music,
dance, theater, and of impersonation and spectatorship-organized this
new Cuban publicity of the 188os and early 189os, rather than assume the
primacy of print. Further I suggest that doing so may reveal a complex
colonial tension between the cultures of print and those of performance.
The implications of this suggestion are several. First, print culture has
been understood as foundational to the formation of not only of Habermas's
public sphere, but to the formation of the nation, as articulated by
its pioneer theorist, Benedict Anderson. Where Habermas bases the development
of the bourgeois public sphere on the rise of print culture, Anderson's
famous account in his Imagined Communities bases the rise of nationalism
on what he calls print capitalism.8 Their related critiques share
an investment in the idea of print, as well as a series of assumptions about
the necessary relation between literacy, national community, and the formation
of subjectivity. For both theorists, a community of readers is the
stuff by which the public sphere or national community is made; both are
constituted through a foundational moment of social projection in the activity
of reading. Michael Warner describes this experience as "social sub-
BLACK/FACE PUBLICS
145
jectivity," one in which "we adopt the attitude of the public subject,"
marking our identity with others; in so doing, we momentarily disavow
our own particularities of class or gender or race, thus also "marking to
ourselves our nonidentity with ourselves."9 Through the ongoing production
of this social subjectivity the nation is "imagined" (per Anderson),
and the public is "incorporated" (per Habermas). For both nation
and public, the culture and technology of print provide the mediating
ground between the private imagination and social incorporation; print
culture enables the production of the social body.
What kind of body is this virtual, imagined, and textually produced
social body? Warner explores the formative contradiction of this virtual
social body, arguing that the process of social incorporation demands a
corresponding process of "disincorporation" from each of its subjects. The
bourgeois public sphere, he writes, "claimed to have no relation to the
body image at all"; in theory, citizen-subjects of any race, gender, sexuality,
or class could partake of the process of becoming "public" subjects,
since the public sphere was, by definition, structured through a process of
disembodied self-abstraction. The technology of print thus carried the
utopian promise that no actual body would be required to create the new
social body, hence its appeal to liberal, enlightenment discourse-a theory
not unlike or unrelated to that informing enthusiasm for new virtual technologies
today.
In practice, however, the public sphere, like Anderson's nation, continued
to rely on features of some bodies: "Access to the public came in
the whiteness and maleness that were then denied as forms of positivity,
since the white male qua public person was only abstract rather than
white or male.... [E]ven while particular bodies and dispositions enabled
the liberating abstraction of public discourse, those bodies also summarized
the constraints of positivity."10 Both nation and public sphere thus
safeguard privilege for certain bodies, a privilege that is disguised and
elaborated-rather than averted-by the technology of print culture. This
bourgeois, liberal print culture, then, maintains a relation of bad faith
with the bodies of its subjects: even as it promotes a disembodied, virtual
community, its process of selective disincorporation exiles some groups
women, people of color-by forcing them to acknowledge their own positivity
as the mark of their difference from the "public" norm. Consigned
to bodies, rather than the public subjectivity of reading, they are denied
complete entry into the public sphere.
What kind of social body, then, might a theatrical imagination make
possible? What different economy of public representation emerges
through the technology of performance? In posing this question, I make
no attempt to use performance as a means to recuperate liberal-individualist
notions of an ideal public sphere, nor to propose an inherent goodfaith
relation between self and body through performance, nor even to
suggest that the representation of bodies through performance is any less
mediated than it is through print or other media. Not only would such
claims be suspect, nothing in the Cuban historical context I examine
CRITICAL THEORY AND PERFORMANCE
146
would support them: Cuban blackface performance, for one, was very
much a process of "disincorporating" blackness in order to "incorporate"
a white racial norm. I pose the question to better understand the insistent
presence of alternate forms of publicity in Cuba's anticolonial culture,
especially that of racial impersonation. In posing this question, then, I
attempt to understand the crucial difference between impersonation and
incorporation in the constitution of public spheres in relation to race.
Two key historical examples elaborated below, one from the beginning
and the other at the end of the interwar years, will suggest that if the
European liberal bourgeois public sphere imagines that it has no body,
Cuba's most certainly does, and-I contend-it is in blackface. The anticolonial
public sphere "has a body" because, by simple virtue of violating
the unspoken norms of positivity defined by the peninsular Spanish citizen,
the white criollo subject could not quite occupy the sphere of unmarked
public subjectivity. By the fact of his birth he-and it is he-could
not fully "disincorporate" (from) himself to join the dominant public
sphere, whose normative range was defined by peninsular-born subjects
who enjoyed greater political freedom and social rank than those born in
Cuba. The public sphere constituted through print was both materially
and discursively tied to peninsular constellations of power, educated literacy,
and social subjectivity. As Angel Rama's seminal study of the Latin
America, Lettered City, suggests, the "documentary umbilical cord" that
brought Spanish letters-in all senses of the word-to the Americas provided
"the linguistic models for [Latin American] letrados" or the elite class
of American-born, literate bureaucrats, the compradors, that brokered
power for the metropole. The "rigid semantic system of the city of letters,"
writes Rama, which discursively interlinked legal and literary practice,
"required the most univocal language possible."11 Competency in such
language was required for participation in the public sphere defined by the
lettered city, and formed the basis of elite criollo power; yet in this colonial
context, full competency was premised on birthright, excluding even elite
criollos from the highest echelons of social and political power.
Emerging through this discursive grid of literate power, we can
imagine the populist criollo subject retreating into the otherwise undervalued
domain of embodied subjectivity as a tactical maneuver, providing
an alternate site from which to critique the dominant ideological
structure and mount his own bid for power. This Cuban public sphere indulges
embodied performance practices as viable alternatives to the print
models proposed (but then prohibited) by Spanish colonial rule. Such will
be evident in the anticolonial and often nationalist enthusiasm for the
danz6n that emerged in both black and white dance halls in the city of
Matanzas in 1878, and was popularized both through the teatro bufo and
in black social gatherings like the veladas, ten years later. This rhythmwhich
used "African" syncopation to mark its difference from peninsular
norms-enabled a distinctly national and public "structure of feeling," in
Raymond Williams phrase, not easily understood or tamed by the peninsular
"lettered city." At the same time, however, white criollos performed
BLACK/FACE PUBLICS
147
an identical repressive operation on blacks in Cuba, prohibiting their participation
in the field of letters and literacy during slavery and impeding
it thereafter, thereby consigning them, too, to the domain of the body and
of performance. The black patriot intellectuals who organized the elegant
veladas of the late 188os and early 189os, made counterclaims not only in
the realm of performance, but in direct relation to "literate" culture: theirs
was, to borrow an insight from Houston Baker, a "stolen literacy"-by
which he means a "radically secular and critical structure of feeling
gained from reading and writing."12 Oratory, recitations of poetry, and
drama were the markedly literate performance media through which
black publicity made its bid to enter the white city of letters.
The field of performance, then, represents not a site for unproblematic,
reciprocal racial mixing and exchange-a mestizaje of African and
Spanish rhythm-as some would have it in telling the history of Cuban
music, dance, and theater, but the contrary: performance was a site of profound
social contestation and negotiation. Both Paul Gilroy and Joseph
Roach have persuasively illustrated the importance of performance to
social formations in the Americas, particularly in the production and contestation
of racialized national discourses.13 Warning against essentialist
notions of nation and race, both understand performance as central to the
diverse cultural traditions that participated in the making of anticolonial,
postcolonial, and national cultures in America; this was so in part because
performance was already central to the native American or African traditions
that became forcibly engaged in the story of European colonization.
Even more, however, both suggest that the story of American conquest,
colonization, and its aftermath itself produced historically unprecedented
social circumstances that required the complex cultural processes of public
memory, surrogation (in Roach's term), and self-invention that performance
makes possible. The penchant for racial impersonation in Cuba's
anticolonial period, then, should be understood in this wider context, and
should signal the ways in which understandings of the "public" and of
race were mutually formative.
Public Bodies and National Rhythm
From its controversial arrival in 1878, the discourse surrounding the
danz6n encapsulated a contradiction between a notion of national
rhythm, which kinesthetically hailed Cubans, interpellating them, into
the developing national community, and what Barbara Browning has
called "infectious rhythm," a virulent form of racial and sexual contamination
of the social body.14 Operating in dialectical counterpoint, these
competing interpretations of the danz6n presented a contradictory
Cuban social body, invested with competing gender and racial coordinates.
For some, the dance offered a new structure of feeling for developing
notions of Cubanness; as such, it was a specially erotic and racialized
form of national embodiment. The backlash against the danz6n enacted
in the press was, in turn, a discourse about the racial contamination of
CRITICAL THEORY AND PERFORMANCE
148
this newly public "Cuban" social body. The tension between dance and
text, in turn, speaks to the tensions between performative impersonation
and discursive incorporation.
The first attack on the dance was launched in the local press in November
1878 with the question, "ijprogresamos?!" (is this progress?).15
The critic went on to say that whereas refined women (whom he calls
"most dignified mothers") in years past might have enjoyed watching a
dance similar to the danz6n performed by their slaves during carnival,
they certainly never danced such a dance, which he describes as a "voluptuous
melody, slow, ardent, inciting, conceived in African brains to the
heat of this tropical ground."16 To the nation's shame, now the daughters
of these most dignified women actually dance the dance themselves. Is
this the direction of progress? The distinction he makes between watching
and performing is crucial: viewing a pleasing performance and actually
taking pleasure from performing it organize totally different registers of
social conduct. While the former is tolerable and does not challenge the
social differences between the refined woman and her slave, the latter
contaminates the social body itself.
Those defending the dance did so by calling into question the critic's
understanding of the ontology of rhythm itself. Neither rhythm nor choreography
determines the meaning of the dance, wrote a dissenting commentator
the following day, but rather the dancers themselves. A similar
critic addressed his female readers thus:
know that this humble essayist considers you as pure and virtuous
when you dance the danz6n as when you do not. Certain dances do
not make people decent, instead decent people make decent all
dances.17
According to this rehearsal of a racist trope not new to Cuba, apparently
whiteness, here described as "pure" and "decent," is more contagious
than blackness: if a white woman dances an African dance, she whitens it.
Ana L6pez notes that the creation of national space in dance "simultaneously
invokes and elides the differences that constitute it, thus also laying
bare the traces of its production."'18 Here the danz6n is a site for the production
of Cubanness (here coded as white and embodied as female),
whose very constitution requires a repressed African or black source.
In 1881, several conservative newspapers launched an all-out attack
on the danz6n, which had in two short years become Cuba's dominant
entertainment form. Said one: "Havana is a scandal . . . On every street
corner in respectable neighborhoods they [dance] from night until dawn,
[bothering] peaceful neighbors and lur[ing] inexperienced girls from their
homes."19 The attack reprised two central objections: its "Africanizing" effects
and its sexual impropriety, as an excerpt from one tirade illustrates:
[I]ntellectual regeneration and . . . progress will be impossible
among us so long as there are fathers who take their daughters, the
BLACK/FACE PUBLICS
149
virgins of the nation [virgenes de la patria], to the madness of today's
dance. And [the danz6n] deserves no other name ... it is nothing
other than a degeneration of the African tango.20
Both charges elaborated a more fundamental premise: the rhythm operated
as a palpable contagion on real and figurative social bodies.
Broadcasting images of Cuba's white virgins willingly giving in to
the seductions of this powerful African rhythm, conservative critics implied
that Cuban men could not control their women, much less their own
political affairs. Female chastity and political independence were, apparently,
firmly interconnected: "Without modesty" announced one moralist,
"there is no mother possible, no good society, nor dignified people, nor
dignified spirit, nor noble spirit, nor free country."21 White women are the
discursive currency-the object to be rescued, exchanged, or lost-between
rival white male ideological positions on Cuba's fate; "she" is the
public body over whose control and racial purity white men compete.
So why did liberal Cuba celebrate the dance, given that it left them
vulnerable to such pointed criticism? What form of sociality did this
dance help structure? The teatro bufo, which played a crucial role in developing
and disseminating the danz6n throughout the period, illustrates
some answers. Ram6n Moralez Alvarez's musical play El proceso del Oso
(The trial of El Oso), performed in 1882, is especially revealing. In the play,
we are told that the conservative attack on the danz6n by the press has
reached such a pitch that Terpsichore herself decides to convenes "all resident
dances" in Cuba to participate in a trial of the latest and most
"voluptuous" version of the danz6n, "El Oso," or "the bear."22 The play
illustrates how liberal Cuba strategically resignified the dance's racial and
sexual associations so that it would finally be heard-felt, danced-not as
African, not infectious, but instead as Cuban. The primary conceit of the
play is that each dance is anthropomorphized and made to embody the
social, class, and racial characteristics of the region where it developed.
Hence we have the ultrarefined white female European minud (minuet);
the foot-stomping throaty white male Spanish zapateo; the drum-beating
blackface African Congo; and so on. Combined, their entries map a folkloric
genealogy of Cuban dance, and more: a social, sexual, and racial profile
of Cuban culture itself.
The character representing the Danz6n finally enters the stage as the
culmination of this parade of dances; his introduction resignifies the contemporary
critiques in important ways. Danz6n begins by announcing
that "the girls ask for me with screams, and even the old women get moving
to the sound of jentra, guabina!"' (the latter being lyrics to a popular
danz6n).23 Here we find the dance still associated with extraordinary seductive
powers over women, but the play no longer allows these women
to stand in for the body of Cuba. Now Cuba is the danz6n itself, presented
here as a virile young man, whose powers of seduction are now harnessed
in service of a virile nationalism. Anticipating Cuba's revolutionary independence
in the years to come, Danz6n insists that whereas the French
CRITICAL THEORY AND PERFORMANCE
150
revolutionaries went to the gallows singing the "Marseillaise," the
Cubans will surely meet their destiny singing "La Mulatica Revoltona,"
or "The Sashaying Mulata," a popular danz6n. Casting Cuba as a virile
male allows the play to protect his/Cuba's body from difficult questions
of social reproduction raised in relation to Cuba's "patriot virgins."
Cuba's white virgins are no longer threatened by the danz6n (to the contrary,
the play implies that they are well satisfied by the dance); rather,
pro-Spanish conservatives should beware the seductive political powers
of the dance.
El Oso's actual trial, which follows these lengthy danced introductions,
suggests that the affective value of the dance cannot be assessed
through legal, spoken, or written means-which is to say, through textually
grounded discourse. Both the prosecution and defense offer haughty dissertations
that do no more than parody the inadequate discourse already
available in the press. The character Danz6n offers to translate the whole
tiresome defense into what he calls plain "Cuban": Cuba needs the danz6n,
he says, because "in intertropical countries everything should be candela"
which, among other things, means hip, hot, cool, all the rage, and in the
groove.24 For his part, the latest danz6n, El Oso, is all rhythm and entirely
candela: he has no lines in the play, and he presents no defense other than
the rhythm itself, to which everyone on stage is-we are told-compelled
to move at his very appearance. The tribunal is impressed and drops all
charges. This simple conclusion advances another rather remarkable theory
on the power of rhythm: it suggests that national sentiment and character,
here Cubanness, can be expressively carried in and by bodies organized
and persuaded through rhythm.
Like El Oso, women are central to the discourse, but have no speaking
parts; they are all rhythm. For those women, who just keep dancing,
perhaps the danz6n provides an instance of what Jose Piedra has evocatively
called "hip poetics," a form of "feminist posturing of African origin"
that has historically allowed women (usually of color) to negotiate a
public arena whose sexism and racism might otherwise render them invisible
and speechless: dance provides them a "signifying bodily attitude."25
The danz6n, it appears, offered liberal criollos their own signifying
bodily attitude, a way of inhabiting its national identity, a structure of
feeling that defined the contours of what it meant to be Cuban. For many
white Cubans, the danz6n was itself a form of erotic choreographic blackface
that allowed them to live, to embody, their sense of public self-that
is, their social subjectivity-in a tantalizing way that "felt" African, transgressive,
non-Spanish, anticolonial, candela, and, as such, Cuban.
Fraternidad
Almost ten years later, black patriot-intellectuals began a series of important
interventions into the developing public sphere, articulating an
alternative vision of the Cuban. Juan Gualberto G6mez and his colleagues-among
them the patriot Jos6 Marti, then in exile in the United
BLACK/FACE PUBLICS
151
States-sought to define a Cuban public imaginary that was also
grounded in notions of race and homosocial relations. For G6mez, the
new Cuban public would be grounded in an ethic of fraternity, which
first implied fraternity between men of color (or, in the important term
he popularized, "la raza de color" or "the race of color") in the struggle
against the legacy of slavery and continued racist practice. Toward this
end, G6mez had founded the Directorio Central de las Sociedades de
Color (Central Directory of Societies of Color) to consolidate the resources
and political power of Cubans of color. At the same time, it implied
fraternity between Cubans, both black and white, in the struggle
for a free Cuba.26 Informed by the experience of the Ten Year's War, in
which white, black, and mulatto men had fought in a relatively integrated
revolutionary army, this radical view of the Cuban insisted that
anticolonialism and antiracism were inextricably related and mutually
reinforcing projects. Historian Ada Ferrer captures the view of these veterans:
"the nation-born of the physical, moral, and spiritual embrace of
black and white men-transcended race and converted white and black
into Cuban."27
For patriot-intellectuals like G6mez, the Cuban national project
would not combine the races or even integrate them, but transcend race
itself, forming a radically new form of social fraternity. "From the instant
that differences in the public and social spheres do not exist between
whites and blacks," an editorial from the Directorio wrote, "there will not
exist the organization of a race." Toward that end, the leadership of the
Directorio advocated and eventually won crucial concessions from the
Spanish colonial government in late 1893 that ended official racial segregation
in public life in Cuba, and granting blacks equal access-in theory
if not always in practice-to all areas of theaters, cafes, and public parks;
integrating public schools; ending the practice of separate official birth
rolls for people of color; and granting blacks equal access to the courtesy
titles Don and Dona, which had previously been reserved for whites only.
Acting in the name of "la raza de color," G6mez understood activism
based on race as a key step toward the eradication of race as we know it:
"the man of color will consent to live in order to give birth to a man without
adjective. In this supreme hour," the editorial stated with optimism,
"the gravest Cuban problem will be satisfactorily resolved."28
Only a few months later the Cuban teatro bufo answered that optimism
with the play, written by Laureano del Monte and performed in
blackface, Con don, sin don, ayer y hoy (With Don and without Don, yesterday
and today), a deeply racist satire of G6mez and this landmark civil
rights legislation. As the title suggests, the play proposes a review of recent
Cuban history, analyzing the social place of blacks with and without
access to the courtesy titles Don and Dona.29 The first two scenes, "yesterday,"
are set on a plantation in 1850, while those of "today" illustrate three
contemporary scenes of black social life. Each scene, it turns out, is a scenario
in which black protagonists have the opportunity to prove their social
or moral standing; this scathing play, more reactionary than any in the
CRITICAL THEORY AND PERFORMANCE
152
teatro bufo repertoire, presents a catalog of their failures, in which the
black characters, almost all men, only prove their unworthiness-yesterday,
today, and presumably tomorrow-to share in the social or moral
standing that the term Don designates for whites.
If we return to that "memorable night" at the Teatro Jane in July 1888
when the first black velada was held, we find a series of performances
original poetry, political oration, serious drama-marshaled on behalf of
a cause that the organizers called both "philanthropic and patriotic."
Called the "Velada G6mez-Fraternidad," it was a benefit for G6mez, who
was then in uncertain exile in Madrid, and hosted by the activist newspaper
he had helped found. It explicitly enjoined a community of literate
readers to partake of "cultured" performance in the name of an activist
social cause: a new fraternidad that advanced the cause of Cuba and
Cubans of color:
This is the true solidarity of interests that should exist and never be
forgotten between Cuban men of color; without forgetting that our
solidarity does not exclude-to the contrary, it [demands] another solidarity-that
of the interests of the patria [the nation] which are shared
by all of its sons.30
For many black Cubans, both in Havana or as readers of the paper in
other countries, the very idea of a full theater of black spectators, enjoying
public oratory and performing arts offered proof positive of black social
progress, a performance that occasioned meaningful pride and hope in
the face of ongoing racism.
As the veladas became a central and regular activity for virtually all
black sociedades in the years following, evidence suggests that they began
to act as structures for a utopian political imagination-a space for imaginative
social rehearsal as important as, if entirely different from, that offered
by the teatro bufo to white criollos. A velada held in 1889 was described
by a commentator in Fraternidad as an "essentially democratic
festivity," in which one could witness "mixing in agreeable intercourse
white men and black men, the noted man of letters with the humble man
of industry or arts. In that balcony an aristocratic white Lady, in another
a virtuous black woman worker." He continues, in a remarkable commentary,
"We viewed that grandiose picture, and could not help but exclaim:
if only it were always so! if the performance of that night could transcend
[these walls], to inform all acts of social and political life in this country,
another would be the destiny of Cuba!"31 While still mapped along vectors
of class, race, and gender, this site of interracial performance-focused
on the audience more than the stage-engenders a political hope
that otherwise has no form of representation.
Perhaps the commentator is too pessimistic about the force of such
events. But let us nonetheless pursue his wish: why didn't these veladas
succeed in transcending the limits of the theater and reshaping the destiny
of Cuba? The answer might be found, in redux, in that blackface play, Con
don, sin don, ayer y hoy. Consider just the middle scene, entitled "El Meet-
BLACK/FACE PUBLICS
153
ing," a satire of the Directorio and G6mez through the blackface negrito
character, Don Juan Gualberto. When J. Gualberto begins his speech, "Hoy
que nuestra rasa de color . . ." [Now that our race of color...], he is met
with angry grumbling from the crowd. He quickly corrects himself: "He
dicho de color, sin acordarme de que ya todos somos blancos" [I said "of
color," forgetting that now we are all white]. The lesson to be drawn in the
joke- which is repeated through out the scene-is stark: blackness and
political identification are mutually exclusive; by definition, the political
sphere is a domain of whiteness. No matter what G6mez says or does in
this arena, he will be heard not as a black man, but as a black man in whiteface.
The fact that a white actor plays him in blackface behaving as though
in whiteface only compounds the inability of any credible black political
identity to emerge through this frame.
The contrast between these two scenes is striking. In one theater, we
have the teatro bufo, where white actors and predominantly white audiences
indulged a range of racially marked entertainments celebrated as
"Cuban": performing virile danzones and mean little plays like Con don,
sin don along with comic skits filled with blackface negritos or seductive
brownface mulatas. Just down the street, literally, a theater attended by a
socially committed black community, performing oratory, classical music,
poetry, and serious drama, celebrated as evidence of black participation in
a new transracial "Cuban" public.
If the white criollo public sphere that developed in the anticolonial
period relied on the medium of performance, more often than print, to organize
its sense of publicity, I suggest that it did so as a necessary alternative
to European, colonial models of sociality based in the culture of print.
But this performance also provided the means to incorporate and thus
control the insistent influence of (and white desire for) African or black cultures.
The fact of blackface dramatized this exclusion of black people from
the public sphere, even as it underscored the intense, almost obsessive,
concern on the part of white authors, actors, and audiences over the problem
of race and public representation-social, political, and theatrical. The
velada could not quite extend its social power beyond the theater because
it could not command discursive or material control over the intertwined
meanings of blackness and impersonation-simulated blackness as a particular
structure of Cuban feeling-that were, by 1893, already central to
the making and maintenance of normative white Cuban fraternidad.
NOTES
-. Pedro D'Aguirre, letter to the editor, La Fraternidad, October 20, 1888. "En la
noche, en la memorable noche del 12 de Julio hemos arrojado el guante a la faz de
aquellos que con tanto cinismo y desenmascarada maldad afrirman... que todavia
no hemos ni siquiera todaco a las puertas del progreso .... Orgullosos debeis estar
por haber colocado la primera piedra angular del magnifentisimo monumento de
nuestra dignificaci6n." All translations from the Spanish are mine unless otherwise
noted.
2. I translate the word negro as "black" throughout. Throughout the nineteenth
CRITICAL THEORY AND PERFORMANCE
154
century, Cuba was famous for its carefully calibrated distinctions regarding race:
the meanings of words such as pardo, moreno, mulato have no exact English equivalents
(due to a related but different history of racialization in the United States).
Unlike some recent historians, I have not used the term Afrocuban to refer to blacks
born in Cuba (or negros criollos) since the term Afrocubano postdates and is an important
consequence of the history of racialized national identities told here. The
term Afrocuban remains controversial in Cuba; see, for one relevant discussion, Rogelio
Martinez Fure, "A National Cultural Identity?" in Afro-Cuban Voices: On Race
and Identity in Contemporary Cuba, ed. Pedro Perez Sarduy and Jean Stubbs (Tampa:
University Press of Florida, 2000), 154-61.
3. For further discussion of the black press, see Ada Ferrer, Insurgent Cuba:
Race, Nation, and Revolution, 1868-1898 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina
Press, 1999), especially chap. 5, "Writing the Nation." See also Pedro Deschamps
Chapeux, El negro en el periodismo cubano en el siglo XIX (Havana: Ediciones R, 1963).
4. La Igualdad, February 4, 1993, trans. Aline Helg in Our Rightful Share: The
Afro-Cuban Struggle for Equality, 1886-1912 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina
Press, 1995), 39.
5. Jirgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry
into a Category of Bourgeois Society, trans. Thomas Burger and Frederick
Lawrence (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1991).
6. Partha Chatterjee, The Nation and Its Fragments (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 1993).
7. See Louis A. Perez, On Becoming Cuban: Identity, Nationality and Culture
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999).
8. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and
Spread of Nationalism, 2nd ed. (London: Verso, 1991).
9. Michael Warner, "The Mass Public and the Mass Subject," in The Phantom
Public Sphere, ed. Bruce Robbins (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
1993), 234.
10. Warner, "Mass Public," 239.
11. Angel Rama, The Lettered City, trans. John Charles Chasteen (Durham,
N.C.: Duke University Press, 1996), 33, 59.
12. Houston Baker, Critical Memory: Public Spheres, African American Writing, and
Black Fathers and Sons in America (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 200ool), 7.
13. Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (Cambridge:
Harvard University Press, 1993); Joseph Roach, Cities of the Dead: CircumAtlantic
Performance (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996).
14. Barbara Browning, Infectious Rhythm: Metaphors of Contagion and the Spread
of African Culture (New York: Routledge, 1998).
15. El Diario de Matanzas, November 7, 1878, in Osvaldo Castillo Failde, Miguel
Faflde Perez: Creador del danz6n (Havana: Editora del consejo nacional de cultura,
1964), 122-23. I have benefited from Castillo Failde's exhaustive review and frequent
transcriptions of articles, editorials, and reviews related to the danz6n in the
Cuban press of the 188os. I cite both his text and the original publication.
16. "voluptuousa melodia, pausada, ardiente, incitante, concebida en cerebros
africanos al calor de este suelo tropical."
17. El Diario de Matanzas, October 9, 1879, in Castillo Failde, Miguel Faflde Prez,
134-35. "Sabed que este humilde gacetillero os considera tan puras y tan virtuosas
cuando bailais el danz6n como cuando no la bailais. Determinados bailes no
hacen decentes alas personas, sino las personas decentes hacen decentes todos los
bailes."
BLACK/FACE PUBLICS
155
18. Ana M. L6pez, "Of Rhythms and Borders," in Everynight Life: Culture and
Dance in Latin/o America, ed. Celeste Fraser Delgado and Jose Esteban Mufioz
(Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1997), 324.
19. La Aurora del Yumurf, September 3, 1882, in Castillo Failde, Miguel Failde
Perez, 158-59. "Habana es un escandalo.... En cada esquina de culta poblaci6n se
estaciona de la noche a la mafiana un organillo, que con sus chillonas notas molesta
a los vecinos pacificos y saca de sus casas alas inexpertas muchachas."
20. El Aprendiz [de Regla], July 22, 1881, in Castillo Failde, Miguel Failde Perez,
144-45. "La regeneraci6n intelectual y por consecuencia el progreso seri imposible
entre nosotros mientras haya padres de familia que ... lleven a sus hijas, virgenes
de la patria, al desenfreno del baile de hoy dia [que] no es mas que una degeneraci6n
del tango africano."
21. D. Luis Arias, La Aurora del Yumurf, August 28, 1881, in Castillo Failde,
Miguel Failde Pdrez, 152. "Sin pudor, no hay madre posible, no hay sociedad buena,
ni pueblo digno, ni espirit6 digno, ni espirit6 noble, ni paises libres."
22. Ram6n Morales Alvarez, El proceso del oso, ajiaco bufo-lirico-bailable, in Teatro
bufo, siglo XIX, vol. 2, ed. Rine Leal (Havana: Editorial Arte y Literatura, 1975), 9-
56. The play was first published in Havana, by Imprenta La Nueva Principal, in
1882. It was performed by the Bufos de Salas at the Teatro Torrecillas, January 28,
1882.
23. Morales Alvarez, El proceso del oso, 126. "Las nifias me piden a gritos... y
hasta las viejas se embullan al son del... ientra, guabina!"
24. Morales Alvarez, El proceso del oso, 54. "[E]n los paises intertropicales todo
debe ser candela."
25. Jose Piedra, "Hip Poetics," in Delgado and Mufioz, Everynight Life, 96.
26. Juan Gualberto G6mez, "Programa del Diario 'La Fraternidad,'" in Por
Cuba Libre, ed. Emilio Roig de Leuchsenring (Havana: Editorial de Ciencias Sociales,
1974), 243-72. Originally published August 29, 1890.
27. Ferrer, Insurgent Cuba, 126. Ada Ferrer suggests that this "homosocial" embrace
sidesteps the sexualized discourse of mestizaje by virtue of this all-male
imagination. I am more tempted to read the investments in multiracialfraternidad
as, precisely, a form of hom(m)osocial mestizaje.
28. Translated in Philip A. Howard, Changing History: Afro-Cuban Cabildos and
Societies of Color in the Nineteenth Century (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University
Press, 1998), 198-99.
29. Laureano del Monte, Con don, sin don, ayer y hoy, caricatura trdgico-bufa, lirico
bailable en un acto y 5 cuadros, y en prosa (Havana: Imprenta El Aerolito, 1894). The
music was by "M. F.," possibly Miguel Failde. The play was first performed at the
Teatro Alhambra, February 23, 1894.
30. La Fraternidad, July 9, 1888. "Ista es la verdadera solidaridad de intereses
que debe existir y nunca olvidarse entre los hombres de color cubanos; sin olvidar
tan poco que esa solidaridad de nuestros intereses no excluye, antes al contrario,
impone de manera imprescindible, otra solidaridad: la de la de los intereses de la
patria que son communes ai todos sus hijos."
31. La Fraternidad, January 22, 1889. "Contemplamos aquel cuadro grandioso
por el eternal espiritu que lo animaba, y no pudimos menos que exclamar: 'Si
siempre fuera asi, si el especticulo que esta noche se da, tranciendiera afuera, e informara
todos los actos de la vida politica y social de este pais, otro fuera el destino
de Cuba.'"
Virtual Chinatown and New Racial
Formation: Performance of Cantonese
Opera in the Bay Area
Daphne Lei
The Most Chinese Place of All
"Where is Chinatown?" It was a spring afternoon in San Francisco in
2001. I was walking on Grant Avenue when a man approached me with
this question. Chinatown? This was Chinatown. Or did he mean something
even more "Chinese" than this famous Chinatown street? I pointed
in the direction of the dragon "gate" at the end of the street.' That is probably
the most Chinese place of all, at least in the sense that the gate suggests
the official entrance to a Chinese city. "Is it worth seeing?" He asked
again. I paused and said, "Sure.... Since you are here already, why not
take a look?" I could not think of a better response. Worth seeing? Is Chinatown
worth seeing? Are Chinese worth seeing? How does one evaluate
a fake "town" representing a culture and ethnicity anyway?
I looked around. Crowded narrow streets, colors, smells, goods, impatient
drivers and pedestrians, people, people, people. Chinese, nonChinese,
Chinatown Chinese, non-Chinatown Chinese, Chinatown nonChinese,
non-Chinatown non-Chinese. Both the man and I seemed to
believe my "Chinese" authority because of my ethnicity in this short encounter;
but at the same time, I had the urge to tell him that I was just a
visitor, as much as he was. He came to Chinatown for his tourist pleasure;
I came to Chinatown for my academic research. We both need our Chinatowns,
yet our Chinatowns were very different. As a diasporic Chinese academic,
do I have more right to study Chinatown than he does? Can I
claim Chinatown because of my "cultural heritage" or "ethnic pride"?
My research on Chinese immigrant theater (in the form of Cantonese
opera) in nineteenth-century America brought me to San Francisco.
From the first documented performance to today's occasional productions,
Cantonese opera in the Bay Area has had a continuous history
of over a century and a half. Today's Cantonese opera, like many traditional
arts in the age of global technology, is "aging" quickly or even
"dying." However, I want to argue that in performances of Cantonese
opera, a new kind of energy is being generated to create a virtual Chinatown,
and a new racial formation is also emerging. The amateur opera
performance, both theatrical and paratheatrical, promulgates a racial
split, between the new Chinese ethnicity and the virtual Chinatown residents,
between performers and audiences, between trans-Pacific horizontal
connections and vertical Chinese American memories. The virtual Chinatown
is constructed by economics and politics, by technology and
156
VIRTUAL CHINATOWN AND NEW RACIAL FORMATION
157
academic discourse, and, most interestingly, by Cantonese opera lovers.
Within the virtual reality, Chinatown functions as the audience and witness
for the amateur performance; however, the new racial formation is itself
a performance for a larger non-Chinese audience and a performance
for the new Chinese themselves. The racial split-both the prerequisite
and result of the amateur Cantonese opera performance-coincides with
performer/spectator divide in theater. However, this split has to be incomplete
in order for identification/community building process to
begin. An incomplete racial split, a new racial formation and the creation
of the virtual Chinatown all constitute a Chinese performance for the
global spectators in a very localized theater venue.2
Early Cantonese Opera in the Bay Area: A Sketch
A consideration of early Cantonese opera performances is necessary in
order to understand the present situation. On October 18, 1852, Tong
Hook Tong mounted the "first" Cantonese opera performance in the
United States (in American Theatre, on Sansome Street, San Francisco).3 In
many ways, the development of Cantonese opera in the Bay Area resembles
the history of Chinese immigration in the United States: In the
early period, it is a history of survival, but in the age of multiculturalism
and globalization, a once alien art has taken on new meanings. Cantonese
opera, a southern regional opera sung and spoken in the Cantonese dialect,
does not enjoy the same prestige as Beijing opera (the national
opera) or kunqu (an elite drama) within China, but enjoys popularity in
southern China, as well as in the Chinese diaspora. Just as the dialect Cantonese
was regarded as a "lingua franca" by some overseas Chinese, this
local and "lowly" opera was pushed to the forefront to represent Chinese
theater in the New World in the nineteenth century.
The apparent success of Tong Hook Tong inspired many more
troupes to visit California. Throughout the nineteenth century, Cantonese
opera saw a slow but steady development.4 The earliest companies followed
their audience of Chinese laborers to San Francisco-which, from
Gold Rush days, was known by Chinese as "Gold Mountain"-but nonChinese
were also drawn to the performances for their novelty. Novelty
notwithstanding, the preconceived notion of "Chinese" performance was
already well established before the first wave of Chinese performance.
The taste for Chineseness basically included two kinds of Chinese performance:
the display of genuine Chinese persons (a Chinese giant or
Siamese twins), or drama with Chinese themes but without Chinese cast
members (such as The Orphan of China, produced in both French and English
versions starting in the eighteenth century).5 The Chinese Other, 185o-
1925, a collection of plays with Chinese subjects, attests to the vogue of
"playing Chinese" in the nineteenth century and into the early twentieth
century.6
The production of Cantonese opera in the nineteenth century was
measured not only against established notions of "Chineseness," but also
CRITICAL THEORY AND PERFORMANCE
158
against "Americanness." Contemporary American theatrical conventions
became the standard for such appraisals: Chinese theater had no wings or
drops, no curtains, no female players, no footlights, no set, and no props.
Reviewers tended to focus on the unfamiliar sound of Chinese opera: the
music was "an interminable humming, banging, scraping, and screeching
of Chinese fiddles, pipes, cymbals and gongs."7 Some of the "curious
looking" musical instruments were said to be inspired by "Ethiopian minstrelsy."8
The dialogue was totally unintelligible, but "throw in a few 'ch's
and 'ts's into the common caterwaul of the midnight cat, and you have the
highest art of the Chinese stage."9 The audience is seen as an anonymous
crowd, consisting of mostly "men, all dressed in the cold blue denim of
Chinatown and all wearing soft round hats."10
References to animals and to other ethnic minorities put Chinese
theater in a very strange category in the nineteenth-century cultural configuration.
Chinese theater, as a token representation of Chinese culture,
is further racialized, bestialized, and exoticized. The earliest wave of Chinese
immigration corresponds to the Gold Rush, but anti-Chinese sentiments
became strong when labor surplus became a social problem in the
187os and 188os. I have argued elsewhere that this quasi-ethnological
writing of Chinese theater in a time of political and economic instability
can be seen as a way of rebuilding the American frontier and national consciousness.11
Chinatown in the nineteenth century was to be preserved
and visited by tourists, to be studied by anthropologists, to be reported on
by newspapers and magazines. The exoticness or savagery of Chinatown
is to be experienced on tour and collected as souvenir. It was a custom for
nineteenth-century tourists in California to bring home Chinese shawls as
presents.12 For Americans, visiting Chinatown was like visiting China; for
Europeans, visiting Chinatown was a way of experiencing America's peculiar
"multicultural" quality. It was indeed a global experience before the
age of globalization.
Contemporary Cantonese Opera in the Bay Area:
Theatrical versus Paratheatrical
The recent major influx of Cantonese opera artists started in the 198os, after
the introduction of China's Open Door Policy. Once famous "national"
(guojia ji) actors, these singers, now retired from professional performance,
devote their time to teaching Cantonese opera.13 Most of them have established
their own theater organizations and teach Cantonese opera classes
on weekends. I generally categorize the participants in the Cantonese
opera scene into three generations: the sifu-master generation (in their sixties
and seventies), a second generation of middle-aged, middle-class immigrants
(thirties to fifties), and a third, relatively small generation of
young ABCs (American-born Chinese, in their teens and twenties).
The sifu are responsible for introducing, teaching, and transmitting
the art, but are not necessarily the major performers. In a production, they
often take on the title of "artistic director," but they actually serve as "act-
VIRTUAL CHINATOWN AND NEW RACIAL FORMATION
159
ing and singing coaches." The ABC generation is drawn into this rather
"archaic" and "foreign" art because of their parents' involvement. Most of
the youngsters dance as little fairies or play nonspeaking roles at the
edges of their parents' spotlights. Some of them have gone through the
typical rebellion phase of second-generation Chinese Americans-first rejecting
their parents' cultural heritage, then falling in love with the art at
the college age. A website to serve the Bay Area Cantonese opera community
was launched in 2002 through the efforts of these youngsters.14
The second generation furnishes the driving force in today's Cantonese
opera circle. The major players of this generation are middle-class,
middle-aged women.15 Although prospects might seem dim for Cantonese
opera, there are regular performances at least once a year, with sizable
audiences. Support comes both from the performers within the show
(the actors) and from volunteers and sponsors (whom I consider the
paratheatrical performers) surrounding the show. Very often, the performers
are responsible for securing production costs, either by coming
up with the capital themselves or by soliciting funds from others. That
Cantonese opera performance today remains at an amateur level is partly
a result of financial constraints. Once funds have been raised, the performers
will seek help from sifu-to coach new songs or to "tune up" old
ones, and to "supervise" the performance. "Training" in Cantonese opera
in the Bay Area today is very performance-oriented; it is indeed a kind of
extended rehearsal. There are no systematic actor-training programs like
those in China. The most regular training probably takes place at weekend
singing lessons and at karaoke parties. Performers are also responsible
for their own costumes, which are often expensive.
The paratheatrical performance is at least as important as the theatrical
performance-local politicians and gentry, as well as local businesspeople,
inevitably get involved and "perform" for the show. On the
day of the show, paratheatrical performance starts with the flower baskets
with sponsors' names in the lobby and also in front of the proscenium.
A standard program is about four to five hours long and usually
consists of five to seven scenes. Framing these theatrical performances
are numerous speeches, award-presentations, and photo opportunities
with VIPs. Because no one is making a profit, it is important that every
sponsor be recognized and "present" in the performance. The emcees are
responsible for the paratheatrical performance-introducing eminent
speakers, congratulating performers, handling awards, and controlling
photo opportunities. Since multiple scene changes are a standard practice,
the paratheatrical performances between scenes actually contribute
to the continuity of the entire performance. In the Tri-Valley charity performance
of July 8, 2001, there were speeches and award presentations
before and between performances, but extra sponsors' names had to be
announced during intermission. At the cast party, held at a Chinese
restaurant, the paratheatrical performance continued. As food and liquor
were consumed, there were more expressions of gratitude, more photos,
and more speeches. The paratheatrical performance was very organized
CRITICAL THEORY AND PERFORMANCE
16o
and extremely efficient. It was a performance with a well-tested formula
and almost without surprises.
The Need for a Chinatown: Virtual versus Actual
Productions of Cantonese opera are costly for a few reasons: The run is
usually no longer than a single performance. Local technical support is
very limited, so set and costumes are very often imported from Hong
Kong or China. There is no designated space for rehearsal or performance,
so rent is often the largest portion of the production budget. There are not
even enough musicians to form a complete Cantonese opera orchestra, so
when there is a big production, musicians are flown in from New York or
Vancouver. And finally, because Cantonese opera is a "dying" art, there is
not a large enough audience to support the box office. Whereas the genre
would traditionally have benefited from numerous active professional
actors and enthusiastic audiences, what is left now is a great number of
amateur opera-lovers who are not willing to give up. But, how can they
survive under such harsh circumstances?
Chinatown becomes a necessary component in this configuration.
The virtual Chinatown is both a prerequisite and a by-product of Cantonese
opera performance: a virtual Chinatown has to be created in order
for the players to perform for Chinatown, but the Chinatown becomes
part of the performance of a new racial formation. The desire for a virtual
Chinatown signifies a need for a new Chinese ethnicity in the age of
globalization.
There are three prerequisites for the creation of a virtual Chinatown:
demographics (the Chinatown Chinese), virtual time, and virtual space.
Chinatown Chinese
Amateur performances of Cantonese opera often take on the trappings of
a quasi-religious charity event-the performance is for the benefit of
"Chinatown seniors.116 The theater patron is recognized as a "great charitable
person" (da shanren), who occupies a favorable position in the cycle
of Buddhist reincarnation. Instead of being rewarded in the next life, all
the charitable persons are "recognized" on stage, now. Therefore, the
awards presented between scenes are "appreciation awards." What is recognized
is not artistic merit, but services or financial contributions, both
charitable deeds. Performers and sponsors also congratulate each other as
"great charitable persons" in one-page inserts in the program.17 One common
congratulatory phrase is "Charity is the utmost happiness, merit is
without limits" [Weishan zuile, gongde wuliang]. The words "charity" (shan)
and "merit" (gongde) have strong religious associations. Besides purchasing
tickets, this is the most direct way for everyone to chip in for the performance.
In the Red Bean Opera House, donations were listed with
donor names and amounts on slips of pink paper posted on the wall, imitating
the style of donation records in Buddhist temples.8
VIRTUAL CHINATOWN AND NEW RACIAL FORMATION
161
Some sponsorship comes in the form of charity tickets. Usually a
block of tickets will be purchased for local senior homes. At the Tri-Valley
charity performance of 2001, 300 tickets were purchased for San Francisco
and Oakland Chinatown senior housing projects. In the Red Bean Anniversary
Performance in 2003 (July 5 and 6, 2003), 150 tickets were given
to seniors. Charity tickets guarantee larger audience participation, and
senior citizens are probably the audience members best prepared to understand
the art of the "last generation." Moreover, many middle-generation
opera lovers have fond memories of seeing operas with grandparents
in childhood. This can be seen as an act of commemorating "home."19
The fact that "Chinatown" residents have to be bused in to see a Chinese
performance warrants further examination. Unlike a century earlier,
the Chinese performance is no longer from Chinatown, but for Chinatown.
Although there is a continuous supply of new Chinese immigrants, the
real strength of Cantonese opera nowadays comes from the middle-class,
middle-aged generation, who usually live in the East Bay and other suburban
areas. Some of them are successful professionals and some are
wealthy housewives, but most of them came to this country when they
were young, so Cantonese opera is for many of them the only memory of
"home." As the Great Star Theater, the last Cantonese opera theater in the
United States, no longer functions as a regular performance space, and all
the sifu and amateur performers live outside of Chinatown, the Cantonese
opera circle is moving farther and farther away from Chinatown. In the
new dispensation, Chinatown is refigured as the recipient of charity and
a justification for the important business of paratheatrical performance.
Senior Cantonese opera lovers become the virtual population of "Chinatown
Chinese" who exist only during a performance.
Virtual Time
The virtual Chinatown can exist only in a virtual time, but virtual time itself
is a complex matter. Chinatown, traditionally seen as the epitome of
China, is inevitably "old," as the word ancient or old always precedes
China in the nineteenth-century imagination. The senior audience corresponds
to this misconception of Chinatown. On the other hand, an "ethnic"
community in the United States often has a difficult time shedding
the FOB, or "fresh off the boat," image. Based on these two stereotypes,
Chinatown is easily seen as a space occupied by newly arrived senior citizens!
In the Cantonese opera circle, although the "oldness" of the audience
is part of the virtual Chinatown configuration, it is more appropriate
to speak of the virtual time of the opera itself. G. R. MacMinn described
Chinese opera as "being very old from the beginning"; it "did not change
with time."20 The staleness of Chinese civilization, represented by the "ancient"
Chinese theater in the New World, is part of the Americanized rendition
of German idealist notions.21 Without the ability to progress, to
make history, China stays forever in the past. A look at a recent performance
of Cantonese opera at the Great Star Theater strangely reveals the
CRITICAL THEORY AND PERFORMANCE
162
negotiation of time. The full-length play The Lioness Roars was on the bill
for July 5, 2003, as part of the celebration for the seventh anniversary of
the Red Bean Opera House. Despite the ticket-checker at the entrance, the
border of the theater was blurred, as the doors to the auditorium remained
open and audiences wandered in and out throughout the entire
performance. Time ceased to matter, as the curtain was twenty minutes
late and the performance lasted more than four hours. Audiences ate,
chatted, moved around, but did not miss special moments to cheer or applaud.
The freedom of the audience reminds us of the old Chinese theater
practice, but also resembles the theatricality of the auditorium before the
era of the fourth wall. Moreover, the staging is surprisingly reminiscent of
nineteenth-century American practices. As noted earlier, while nineteenth-century
Chinese theater was always evaluated as "non-American,"
now all the negative criticism has been answered, and present-day Cantonese
opera theater includes curtains, footlights, drops, set and props,
and women players! The most obvious nineteenth-century theater practice
is the extensive use of backdrops and footlights on a proscenium
stage. Despite certain modern artifacts such as microphones and dry ice,
the Great Star Theater seemed to have been frozen in a virtual time: the
old Chineseness, the nineteenth-century Americanness, along with the
FOBness of the Chinatown residents create a peculiar virtual time for
Cantonese opera.
Virtual Space
The virtual Chinatown does not correspond to the actual-the San Francisco
Chinatown with the "official" dragon gate entry. As a matter of fact,
the 1906 earthquake and fire all but eliminated Chinatown, and many
Chinese reestablished their residences in East Bay or on the peninsula.
The recent boom in the Silicon Valley also stretched areas of Chinese habitation
much farther. The San Francisco Chinatown seems minuscule compared
to the Chinese population of the whole Bay Area. The Red Bean
Opera House is located in Oakland, and most opera lovers do not live in
Chinatown. The senior audiences are bused in from various locations.
For tourists, the dragon gate of Chinatown is the representation of
Chineseness reduced to token size. For Cantonese opera lovers, the Great
Star Theater (636 Jackson Street, San Francisco) is probably the best symbol
of today's Cantonese opera performance. Built in 1925, with a facade
that recalls a pagoda, the Great Star was used regularly as a Cantonese
opera playhouse as well as a movie theater until the turn of the century.
The only Cantonese opera theater in the United States now faces the possibility
of being torn down by developers. Cantonese opera lovers started
the "Saving the Great Star Theater" campaign in 2001. Initiatives have included
soliciting letters to local government and politicians as well as
staging fund-raising performances. Samuel and Elaine Wong, CPAs,
opera lovers and patrons, are key players behind the campaign. Mr. Wong
dreams of renovating the theater and establishing a space for training ac-
VIRTUAL CHINATOWN AND NEW RACIAL FORMATION
163
tors and housing visiting artists. Mrs. Wong also emphasizes the historical
value of the contents of the Great Star. Early movie projectors still sit in
the projection room on the second floor, and she argues that attention
should be paid to preserve and restore such "historical objects."22 However,
the decrepit building is barely functioning, and the renovation will
require a large infusion of capital.23
Jackson Street was one of the "theater" streets in the second half of
the nineteenth century.24 Cultural memories of a specific site are like writings
on palimpsest-the current meaning cannot be obtained without
some erasure of previous memories; however, since erasing is never complete,
the current cultural memory is always multilayered. The Great Star
Theater, on the other hand, is a different matter. It is approximately on the
original site of Royal Chinese Theatre in 186os, but since the earthquake
eliminated Chinatown, claiming originality in the reconstructed Chinatown
amounts to superficially inventing an originality, establishing a virtuality
that transcends time and natural disasters.
The 1906 earthquake not only eliminated Chinatown, it also "cleaned
up" the old Chinatown. The dark alleys, opium dens, secret tunnels, brothels,
gambling quarters, and leper houses were all buried under the rubble.
For anti-Chinese citizens, the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act was the government's
effort to control Chinese immigration, and the 1906 earthquake was
perhaps a demonstration of "God's will" to eliminate Chinatown. Originally,
Chinatown was to be rebuilt as a tourist site in a different location,
according to San Francisco mayor E. E. Schmitz. This enraged the Chinese
community. After intervention from Chinese diplomats and financial help
from China, Hong Kong, and the local Chinese communities, Chinatown
was rebuilt at the original site. A kind of social reform-modernization
and Westernization, was also taking place within the Chinese community
at this time. There was a deliberate effort to create a new image for the new
Chinatown-the ideal new Chinatown was clean and modern, free of
gambling, prostitution, idol worship, and queues!25 Safer and cleaner, the
new Chinatown was also more Chinese. Many of the new buildings had
Chinese-looking balconies, balustrades, and pagoda-like roofs.26 The formation
of the nineteenth-century Chinatown had corresponded to the
Gold Rush immigration, but the reconstruction was to meet a new standard
that, by its scrupulous self-regulation, would help to fend off antiChinese
sentiments. The result was an even better tourist attraction.
The Great Star is a building that bespeaks such ambitions: it is a modern
building with a pagoda-like roof and a Chinese facade for the upper
level. It is now flanked by "non-Chinese-looking" shops on narrow Jackson
Street. The Chinese building almost disappears behind surrounding big
store signs and parked cars. To rescue the Great Star is also to rescue deliberately
established Chineseness, and also to celebrate a hopeful mentality
that was born with the Republic of China in the early twentieth century. To
bring Chinese performance back to this theater is to restore a token that is
different from the dragon gate. The dragon gate is for non-Chinese tourists,
but the Great Star is for the opera lovers of virtual Chinatown. It is tourism
CRITICAL THEORY AND PERFORMANCE
164
at a different level-it is revisiting the old artistic tradition as well as a glorious
national moment.
New Racial Formation: Horizontal Connection
versus Vertical Memory and Deconstructing the
Model Minority Myth
"Celebrate cultural heritage!" "Celebrate ethnic pride!" Cantonese opera
today is very often presented in the form of celebration. However, ethnic
pride and cultural heritage can be celebrated only with selected racial memory.
Contemporary Chinese American writers proudly include traditional
art as part of their performance language (as in the display of Beijing opera
in David Henry Hwang's M. Butterfly and Chay Yew's Red), or address
the painful experiences of the early immigrants as part of collective Chinese
American memory (as in Genny Lim's Paper Angels), but the Cantonese
opera circle has a very different approach: the celebration relies on the erasure
of vertical Chinese American memory and on an emphasis on the horizontal
(both domestic and trans-Pacific) connections. History has to be interrupted,
time has to stop, for the celebration to take place.
Race, as a social construct, changes with time. Race does not explain
a historical phenomenon, but is rather the name assigned to the phenomenon,
as Barbara Jeanne Fields argues; however, racial constructs and
racial prejudices still have to negotiate with history. As Fields writes,
The preferred solution is to suppose that, having arisen historically,
race then ceases to be a historical phenomenon and becomes instead
an external motor of history; according to the fatuous but widely repeated
formula, it "takes on a life of its own." The shopworn metaphor
thus offers camouflage for a latter-day version of Lamarckism.
In other words, once historically acquired, race becomes hereditary.27
In the case of Chinese racialization in the United States, the major historical
factor is immigration policies. As Michael Omi and Howard Winant
point out, "the racial order is equilibrated by the state-encoded in law,
organized through policy-making, and enforced by a repressive apparatus."28
Chinamen, coolies, laundry workers, and house servants constituted
the early Chinese stereotype, which was replaced in the 196os by the
newer stereotype of the "model minority"-the hard-working, successful,
and complaisant Chinese.29
This quasi-official recategorization continues a long process of racial
reconfiguration. During the nineteenth century, the newly "introduced"
Chinese race was most easily understood in the context of existing racial
stereotypes, and the slavelike treatment of Chinese laborers may well
have reflected a nostalgia for the slavery of the pre-Civil War era.30 Likewise,
the "model minority" stereotype must be understood in its relation
to stereotypes of other minority groups. As a typical formulation of the
problem put it, while the government needed to spend hundreds of bil-
VIRTUAL CHINATOWN AND NEW RACIAL FORMATION
165
lions on "negroes and other minorities," "the nation's 300,000 ChineseAmericans
are moving ahead on their own-with no help from anyone
else."31 The new racial product was ideal because it was comparatively
"cheap" and "low-maintenance." In the new millennium, can we consider
both the Chinaman and model minority dated racial stereotypes? How do
contemporary Chinese Americans negotiate their minority status? If certain
aspects of the old racism are still in circulation, how will Chinese
Americans ever get beyond such minority racialization?
Today, a process of demarcation and fragmentation is taking place
within Cantonese opera performance, and a new kind of Chinese race is
being constructed. The new Chinese is successful, well established, and
well connected, both domestically and internationally. The refusal of the
collective early Chinese immigrant memory certainly separates the new
Chinese from the early coolie class; however, this process has also erased
memories of Cantonese opera in the nineteenth century. In the Bay Area
Cantonese opera circle of the present day, the senior performers consider
themselves pioneers. In a sense, the early Cantonese opera, which was
rather successful for a time, is deliberately forgotten. All the pain and suffering
of ancestors and the struggles of first-generation Cantonese opera
performers, along with Chinese theater buildings in which they played,
were buried in the earthquake of 1906.
In the meantime, another kind of memory is being constructed and
maintained. For the senior performers, links to the homeland are still
strong. As "prominent artists," they keep alive memories of their own
past glories. Though retired in a foreign country, most of the artists were
once "state" performers whose profession was sponsored by the Chinese
government. It seems that such state recognition is still important for
these artists. The business card of Master Wong Chi-Ming, for instance,
lists his various connections: the Oakland Asian Cultural Center (now defunct),
a Chinese radio station (AM 1450), opera instructor, and "national
first-class actor" (guojia yiji yanyuan). While many of the artists speak of
certain painful aspects of the national past (the Cultural Revolution, for
instance), national honor still plays an important part in forming their
identities.
This kind of "national" recognition does not necessarily correspond
to the "nation." Memories of national recognition and glory recall what
Fanon terms a "passionate search for a national culture." The "dignity,
glory, and solemnity" of the past constitutes the imagined national culture,
and the "claim to a national culture in the past does not only rehabilitate
that nation and serve as a justification for the hope of a future national culture."32
The glorious past is expressed also on a lower level, in the artistic
family genealogy. It is a common practice for disciples to take on the last
names of the masters in their stage names, and many of the artists trace
their art to particular lineages of Cantonese opera. These affiliations always
warrant recognition. For instance, in one of the rare English program
biographies, Lam Siu Kwan is identified as "Prominent Chinese Opera
Artist, honored to be First Class Performing Artist of China, member of
CRITICAL THEORY AND PERFORMANCE
166
People's Republic of China National Drama Society. Past Vice President of
Guang dong [sic] Drama Institute." It continues: "Miss Lam is daughter of
Famous Artist Chiu-Kwan Lam. Student of Lan-Fong Chiu." Her husband,
Master Pak Chiu-Hung, "started his art career at the age of 16, student of
Kui-Wing Pak (prominent artist)."33 The national recognition and artistic
genealogy are cherished precisely because they cannot be presented in the
United States in any "legalized" ways. Performing Cantonese opera becomes
an efficacious process of recalling a "home" that always exists in the
beautiful past and across the Pacific.
A kind of national recognition is also visible in the middle generation,
but now it is both American national recognition and connections
across the Pacific Rim. Today's Cantonese opera circle is also well connected
with local economics and politics, and each performance serves as
both an artistic and a social event. This is typical for community theater.
In the case of Cantonese opera, however, this connection is essential because
of the high production costs and because of the nature of an immigrant
art. At the political level, local bureaucratic involvement is mandatory
and welcome. For instance, a brief and casual congratulatory letter
from the mayor (or someone with the same political weight) in the program
forges a quasi-official connection. Interestingly, most letters share a
very similar language: "I commend [the group's name] for its commitment,
dedication and service to preserving the art . . ." (Willie Brown,
2000),34 "I would like to compliment.., on its commitment, dedication,
service and devotion to preserving the art...." (Henry Chang, 2000),35 or
"I would like to commend ... for their commitment, dedication and service
to preserving a beautiful part of Chinese culture" (Leland Yee,
2001).36 The formulaic language of the letters from "American" officials to
"Chinese" community further strengthens the borders between "American"
and "Chinese American." Chinese have to be congratulated for
doing something Chinese, for being Chinese. However, the informal connections
with local and state government are presented as official approval
or official sanctions for an alien art.
Between native home and diaspora, between racial discrimination
and simulation, between politics and economics, Cantonese opera practiced
by the second generation is a perfect vehicle for subtly negotiating
all the possibilities. The horizontal connection-both trans-Pacific and
with local economics and politics-demarcates a new territory for Chinese.
The feeling of "Yes, I'm Chinese, but I'm not that kind of Chinese"
reflects the mentality of the new Chinese racialization. That kind of Chinese
is the coolies, laundry workers, FOBs, the restaurant and sweatshop
workers. That kind of Chinese can only exist in the vertical memory,
which is essential for constructing the virtual Chinatown.
Guillermo G6mez-Pefia, speaking of the dark side of globalization,
points out that "compassion and philanthropy" are not part of any major
agenda in globalization. "Free" trade means that only those who have the
power to determine the terms can trade, and the whole Third World has
been turned into a sweatshop. "It is economic-darwinism.com. Only the
VIRTUAL CHINATOWN AND NEW RACIAL FORMATION
167
digitally fit will survive." The digitally unfit corresponds to the economically
and racially misfit. As he also observes, in the United States, unsurprisingly,
the majority populations in prisons are blacks and Latinos.37
Typically, race is class; the darker you are, the harder it is for you to succeed
in the white society. However, within the Chinese American communities,
as noted earlier, the racial formation is closely related to immigration,
so that the racialized class is also temporized. From the earlier coolie
class to today, Chinese ethnicity is constantly being reconstructed according
to legal and political measurements. Does this racial split between
opera performers and Chinatown audiences, between charity donors and
recipients, paint a better picture of Chinese ethnicity in the Unites States?
Do successful Chinese Americans shed their model minority status because
now they have designated another minority? Rather than being exploited,
this new minority is to be helped, not as welfare receivers, but as "artistic"
charity recipients, and their "helper" is not American taxpayers, but the
new Chinese. Lisa Lowe speaks of the confinement of "Asian capital":
Asian participation in the United States has been historically linked to the
economic sphere, first in labor and later in both labor and capital. The economic
success of Asian Americans is always lauded, but that also implies
a discouragement of political involvement.38 This is the syndrome of the
pacified model minority-economically successful and politically content.
Now the economic success of these opera lovers is expressed in "art," a
form of cultural capital that can resist capitalist vulgarism but can still be
given and received as charity. The prestige that the performers receive is
not produced by doing art, but by doing "amateur" and "charity" art.
Opera practiced by wealthy amateurs is a long tradition in Chinese
theater history. Traditionally, professional actors never enjoyed high social
status, and the distinction between singing girls, actors, and prostitutes is
very often blurred. Well-to-do opera-lovers, when practicing the art, feel
the need to remain amateurs. Piao xi (literally "performing drama in an amateur
status"), a special term reserved for amateur theater lovers, is also an
indicator of the performer's class. In the piao xi context, performing as pastime
can be considered "art," whereas performing professionally is vulgar.
In today's Cantonese opera circle, the piao xi goes even further; it is combined
with charitable giving and the invention of virtual Chinatown. Performing
is to give, not to receive; performing is art, not profession.39 With
the increasing importance of Asian economy and speed of globalization,
"Asian (Asian American) capital" should no longer be seen as a confinement,
or an index for model minority's inability for political engagement;
on the contrary, it is a bridge that connects home and diaspora, Asia and
America, the new gold mine and the declining empire. Many of the Cantonese
opera lovers have business ties with China or Hong Kong, and their
actual capital speaks of both economic and political power. Sponsoring
Cantonese opera performance is not just a gesture of preserving cultural
heritage or indulging oneself in luxurious pastime, it is also a demonstration
of economic and political connections with Asia. It is an opportunity
to reexamine the significance of this new racial formation.
CRITICAL THEORY AND PERFORMANCE
168
From the first Tong Hook Tong company to today's amateur performance,
the history of Cantonese opera is always in the process of reconstruction,
as many factors such as the 1906 earthquake, anti-Chinese sentiment,
and U.S. immigration policy contribute to the erasing and
rewriting of this history. Setting aside interruptions from "outside" the
Chinese community, the most significant erasing and rewriting probably
come from "within" or "around" the Chinese community. The deliberate
forgetting of vertical memory and the emphasis on horizontal connection
open a racial split and create a virtual Chinatown. It is among all these
complicated measures-racial split, erasure and reconstitution of memories,
charity events, and so on-that Cantonese opera finds a place for survival
in the new millennium.
While old cultural and geographical borders seem to be disappearing
for Chinatown residents, new boundaries are created by tangential
Chinatown citizens. I see myself holding the passport of such a person.
Tangential Chinatown citizens also have the putative status of "insiders,"
as most of them are "Chinese" to a certain degree.40 This tangential Chinese
nation includes politicians, businesspeople, academics, Cantonese
opera lovers, and others, who do not live in but live "on" Chinatown. Chinatown
is the recipient of charity and the topic of political or academic
discourse, although it does not itself participate in the discourse in any
direct way. Chinatown is also the symbol of home, cultural heritage, and
ethnic pride, presented to "outsiders" by tangential citizens in the discourse
of multiculturalism. In presenting the cultural heritage to "outsiders,"
the tangentialists demonstrate the ability to cross the Chinatown
border because to the outsiders, they are Chinese-the insiders. On the
other hand, the practice of traditional art and charity events elevate the
status of the amateur players. In the context of Cantonese opera, the virtual
Chinatown, created by websites, scholarly articles, and charity tickets
and donations to senior homes, undergoes constant transformation according
to its tangential citizens' reconfiguration. The tangentialists can
cross the border easily precisely because they create the border themselves.
The racial split is incomplete, the borders are porous, the virtual reality
is actualized in every performance, disappears under the mask of
"real" Chinatown afterwards and regenerated as a different persona for
the next performance. The virtual Chinatown, though it seems passive,
actually galvanizes the performance of Chineseness by tangential Chinatown
citizens, and Cantonese opera, though it necessarily remains amateur,
draws its lifeblood from this crossing between virtual center and real
periphery.
NOTES
1. The dragon gate, located at the corner of Grant Avenue and Bush Street,
was given by the Republic of China in 1969. Very often, tourist guides use this
gate as the "beginning" or "entrance" of Chinatown, but one rarely speaks of the
VIRTUAL CHINATOWN AND NEW RACIAL FORMATION
169
area's "ending" or "exit." For instance, a travel website, iNetours.com, features
"Chinatown in San Francisco," with this opening sentence: "San Francisco's Chinatown
begins at the dragon-crested gate at Grant Avenue and Bush Street." See
http://www.inetours.com/Pages/SFNbrhds/Chinatown.html.
2. I have discussed the notion of incomplete split and multiple splits in various
contexts in Operatic China: Staging a Chinese Identity across the Pacific (New York: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2006). A more detailed account on some aspects of the contemporary
amateur Cantonese opera performance can be found in Chapter Four of the
book ("San Francisco Chinatown, Cantonese Opera and the New Millennium").
3. It is the first "documented" Chinese opera "dramatic" performance known
to current scholarship, although earlier nondramatic performances (such as acrobatics)
by Chinese troupes are also documented. The bill on that opening night included
"THE EIGHT GENII offering their congratulation to the High Ruler Yuk
Hwang, on his birthday," "Too Tsin made High Minister by the Six States," "Parting
at the Bridge of Parkew of Kwan Wanchang and Tsow Tsow," and "THE DEFEATED
REVENGE." See Alta California, October 16, 1852.
A number of scholars have studied the early history of Chinese theater in California
and discussed the significance of this company. See, for instance, Lois Foster,
Peter Chu, et al., "Chinese Theatres in America," Federal Theatre Project, 1936,
unpublished [San Francisco Performing Arts Library & Museum has a Lois Rather
(a different name for Lois Foster) collection, in which one can find a copy of the
original manuscript and an updated version]; Donald Riddle, Flying Dragons,
Flowing Streams: Music in the Life of San Francisco's Chinese (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood
Press, 1983); and Annette Ke-Lee Chan, "A Performance History of Cantonese
Opera in San Francisco from Gold Rush to the Earthquake," Ph.D. diss.,
University of California, Davis, 1993. My article "The Production and Consumption
of Chinese Theatre in Nineteenth-Century California," Theatre Research International
28, no 3 (2003): 1-14, and Chapter 1 ("Chinese Theatre and the Eternal
Frontier in Nineteenth-Century California") of Operatic China also cover certain
aspects of this company as well as the history of Cantonese opera in the nineteenth
century.
Tong Hook Tong has received a generous amount of scholarly attention; however,
the history of the company remains obscure. Its name is given as Hook Took
Tong, Hong Took Tong, Hook Tong Hook, Tung Hook Tong, and so on, depending
on the source. Tong Hook Tong sounds as exotic as Hook Took Tong. Without proper
documentation, it is impossible to verify the "real" name for the "first" Cantonese
opera company.
4. Just a few examples here: In 1855, the Chinese Dramatic Company performed
at the Sacramento Theatre, and Shanghai Theatre opened on Dupont Street
in San Francisco; a Chinese troupe from Hong Kong performed at Maguire's Opera
House in 186o; and in 1865, a group of Chinese jugglers and acrobats performed at
New Idea Theatre. On January 27, 1868, a more ambitious Chinese company, Hing
Chuen Yuen, better known as the Royal Chinese Theatre, built a new theater on
Jackson Street in San Francisco.
5. For more examples, see James S. Moy, Marginal Sights: Staging the Chinese in
America (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1993), 7-22.
6. Dave Williams, ed., The Chinese Other, 1850-1925 (Lanham, Md.: University
Press of America, 1997).
7. San Francisco Bulletin, December 6, 1856.
8. San Francisco Bulletin, March 5, 186o.
9. Helen Hunt Jackson, Bits of Travel at Home (Boston: Roberts Bros., 1893), 71.
CRITICAL THEORY AND PERFORMANCE
170
o10. Gertrude Atherton, My San Francisco: A Wayward Biography (New York:
Bobbs-Merrill, 1946), 55
11. See Lei, "Production and Consumption," and Operatic China. Many theater
reviews (either in newspaper or in travelogues) focus on what I call "paratheatrical"
performance rather than theatrical performance. Instead of performance style
or dramatic action on stage, such writings often comment on the peculiar behavior
or custom of Chinese. They resemble a quasi-ethnographic report of Chinese/Chinatown
culture or people.
12. J. D. Borthwick, Three Years in California (1851-54) (Edinburgh: William
Blackwood, 1857), 79.
13. Master Pak Chiu Hung (Bai Chaohung), Lam Siu Kwan (Lin Xiaoqun, Pak's
wife), Leung Jing (Liang Jing), and Wong Chi-Ming (Huang Zhiming) are the major
senior figures, the master teachers, the sifu in the Bay Area Cantonese opera circle.
Most of the names of the Cantonese opera artists are spelled in Cantonese. For purposes
of clarification, I also supply the Mandarin pronunciation in pinyin.
14. "Bay Area Cantonese Opera," http://www.pearlmagik.com/bayareacan
toneseopera/Home.htm. Stacy Fong is the webmaster.
15. My article "Can You Hear Me: The Female Voice and Cantonese Opera in
the San Francisco Bay Area," S & F Online, http://www.barnard.edu/sfonline/
ps/lei.htm, discusses the second-generation women's contribution to Cantonese
opera.
16. For instance, the performance on July 8, 2001, raised seven thousand dollars
for a local elderly organization and five thousand dollars for the Salvation
Army. The performance on February 20, 1999, was a fund-raising event for American
Asian Elderly Humanitarian Society, and the performances of January 26 and
28, 2001 were for saving the landmark Great Star Theater.
17. The cost is about three hundred dollars for a page. A program typically has
thirty to fifty pages of such inserts.
18. These donations, usually in small amounts, are contributions to the Opera
House, not to any specific performance. The small space of Red Bean Opera
House, located in the heart of Oakland Chinatown, is the office for administration
and meetings, classroom for weekend lessons, space for rehearsals and parties. In
a sense, this is a temple of Cantonese opera. There is also a small shrine for theatre
gods in the cramped office.
19. Laura Ma, a major performer and the producer for a number of productions,
feels strongly about purchasing tickets for seniors, because her grandmother
exposed her to Cantonese opera during her childhood in Hong Kong (interview
by the author, September 3, 2003).
20. G. R. MacMinn, The Theatre of the Golden Era in California (Caldwell, Idaho:
Caxton Printers, 1941), 507. He is consulting B. E. Lloyd's Lights and Shades in San
Francisco of 1876.
21. China, Hegel held, is a nation that does not possess "History" because of
its lack of Spirit. Since Chinese individuals obey state or family without free will,
they are incapable of making linear, progressive history. Georg W. F. Hegel, The
Philosophy of History, trans. J. Sibree (New York: Dover, 1956), 116-38.
22. Elaine Wong, interview by the author, July 8, 2001.
23. My recent visits confirm that, beyond cosmetic repairs, the building needs
a serious modernization. Electrical connections will not support present needs, so
extra power will have to be brought in for performances; the auditorium needs
much better fire-proofing, and the problem of basement flooding has to be solved.
24. In 1867, Hing Chuen Yuen (Royal Chinese Theater), was opened on Jack-
VIRTUAL CHINATOWN AND NEW RACIAL FORMATION
171
son Street (north of Jackson, between Dupont [Grant Avenue] and Kearny). Liu
Boji states that on Jackson Street, in 1877, there were four theaters (Nos. 621,
62312, 626, and 730); in 1878, two (Nos. 618 and 623) and in 188o, two (Nos. 623
and 626). See Liu Boji, Meiguo huaqiao shi (The history of American Chinese overseas)
(Taipei: Xingzhengyuan qiaowu weiyuanhui, 1976), 616. Both Lois Rather
and Donald Riddle also discuss Chinese theaters on Jackson Street. See Rather,
53-56; Riddle, o101.
25. For the reconstruction of San Francisco Chinatown after the 1906 earthquake
and the changing mentality of Chinese Americans during that time, see the
chapter "A Changing Mentality, 1906 to 1913," in Yong Chen's Chinese San Francisco:
1850-1943 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 200ooo), 162-85.
26. Riddle, Flying Dragons, 136.
27. Barbara Jeanne Fields, "Slavery, Race and Ideology in the United States of
America." New Left Review 181 (May-June 1990): 100-101.
28. Michael Omi and Howard Winant, Racial Formation in the United States:
From the 196os to the 199os (New York: Routledge, 1994), 84.
29. For instance, a report in U.S. News and World Report, December 26, 1966,
demonstrates the typical depiction of Chinese Americans as a "model minority."
Chinese Americans are seen as "thrifty, law-abiding and industrious people-ambitious
to make progress on their own." See "Success Story of One Minority
Group in U.S.," in Roots: An Asian American Reader, ed. Amy Tachiki et al. (Los Angeles:
Continental Graphics, 1971), 6-9.
30. In such rhetoric, Chinese simply inherit all the negativity of "negroes."
They share similar racial stereotypes and suffer similar discrimination. This is
even expressed in iconography. Many cartoons depict Chinese with "African" features.
See Dan Caldwell, "The Negroization of the Chinese Stereotype in California,"
Southern California Quarterly 53, no. 2 (1971): 123-31.
31. "Success Story," 6.
32. Frantz Fanon, "On National Culture," in The Wretched of the Earth, trans.
Constance Farrington (New York: Grove Press, 1966), 169-70.
33. Both quotations are from the program of Chinese Cantonese Opera Art Performance
and Demonstration, Little Theater, Stanford University, May 4, 2001, 5-6.
34. Willie L. Brown Jr. was mayor of San Francisco. This letter appears in the
program for the Red Bean Fourth Anniversary Performance, May 6 and 7, 2000,
Great Star Theater, San Francisco.
35. Program for the Red Bean Fourth Anniversary Performance. Henry Chang,
Jr. was vice mayor of Oakland.
36. Leland Yee was a member of Board of Supervisors of the City and County
of San Francisco. See performance program for "California Chinese Orchestra,"
March 18, 2001, at Yerba Buena Center, San Francisco, 2. Chang and Yee, both Chinese
Americans, seem to be addressing the Cantonese opera circle from an American
position.
37. Guillermo G6mez-Pefia, "The New Global Culture" TDR 45, no. 1 (2001): 10.
38. Lisa Lowe, "The International within the National: American Studies and
Asian American Critique," Critical Critique 40 (Fall 1998): 37.
39. This also explains the separation between opera performers and musicians.
In the Cantonese opera circle, musicians are the only people who demand
payment for their service-the whole cast and the production staff are volunteers.
The monetary reward marks their professional status, but also violates amateurs'
high ideals of pro bono performance. To perform is considered a charity event,
not a way to make a profit. We also see an economic gap: unlike the middle-class
CRITICAL THEORY AND PERFORMANCE
172
amateur actors, most musicians have to work on low-wage jobs. Traditionally,
musicians were on stage, sharing the performance space with actors. In the Cantonese
opera circle, the musicians' performance takes place on the margin-in the
orchestra pit. The paratheatrical performers, such as sponsors when they give
speeches or receive appreciation awards, appear to enjoy more stage attention
than musicians.
40. Most Cantonese opera participants are ethnic Chinese who speak Cantonese.
But there are also non-ethnic Chinese who participate in the larger business
and political circle or view the art from an academic perspective.
Reality /
Harry I. Elam, Jr.
There is no reality except in action.
-Sartre
On September 4, 1955, in Chicago at the funeral of her son, Emmett Till,
Mamie Mobley determined to leave the casket open, exposing his completely
disfigured face to a national audience of mourners. The reality of
his badly beaten, mutilated face (he was killed on August 28, 1955 for the
audacity of looking at a white woman) stood in stark contrast to the picture
of the smiling, handsome, light-eyed, young black boy of fourteen
that hung inside the lining of the casket. This performative moment
performative in how it impacted the viewing and doings of its audience-as
orchestrated by his mother intentionally induced a discomfort,
a restless dissatisfaction on the part of its audience. Powerfully, Ms. Mobley's
calculated action of revealing the unspeakable body juxtaposed to
the piquant, boyish, innocent face in the photograph, created for the audience
what I am calling here a "reality check," a moment that traumatically
ruptures the balance between the real and representational. It is a
moment that, in the dissonance, generates demands that the relationship
between the real and representation be renegotiated. Reality checks
brusquely rub the real up against the representational in ways that disrupt
the spectators and produce new meanings. Most significantly, reality
checks, in the unease that they cause audiences, can excite social action.
Accordingly, the audience reacted vociferously to the funeral of Emmett
Till; the NAACP soon became involved and demanded the trial of his
murderers. The event, the reality check, catalyzed the anger of the spectators,
which enabled them to translate long-held frustrations over racial
injustices into social resistance. As such reality checks stir the psyche and
impel reconsiderations of the intersections of the real and representational,
they produce diverse performative responses and expose the complex
possibilities of a politics of blackness.
From the very outset, I want to make explicit that I will restrict my
exploration of this notion of the reality check to black expressive culture.
For while its potential applicability may escape such racial constraints,
my sense of the reality check foregrounds the unique interrelationship of
performance and reality within African American history and culture.
Discussing the work of playwright August Wilson, Alan Nadel suggests
"reality is authorized for black Americans by performance."1 Further, as I
discuss in more depth elsewhere, the history of African American performance
is always already implicated in the history of African American social,
cultural, and political struggles for freedom.2 The particular collisions
of the real and the figurative have proved consequential for African
173
CRITICAL THEORY AND PERFORMANCE
174
Americans, and the meanings of blackness have depended on conscious
negotiations with representational economies. During slavery and its aftermath
blackface minstrel images of happy darkies reinforced stereotypes
of black inferiority in the white imaginary against which blacks repeatedly
needed to struggle. Intense ideological battles over how to
represent the "New Negro" and how to define the "criteria of Negro Art"
figured prominently in the work of African American scholars and artists
of the 1920s. One could argue that the entire cultural energy of the Harlem
Renaissance, in fact, attempted to refocus the politics of representation toward
reimagining the meanings of blackness. In the 196os, the introduction
of the slogan "Black is beautiful" similarly sought to invert negative
associations of blackness in fields of representation. More recently, the
hip-hop adage of "keeping it real," even as it connotes remaining true to
one's roots within the black urban community, equally reflects or embodies
a politics of representation.
Within this politics of representation, realness and "authentic"
blackness depend on outward displays, dress, style, and attitude. Paul
Gilroy in "to be real..." famously argues, "Now it is the clothed rather
than the unclothed body that supplies the visual signatures of the authentic
black self.... To be inauthentic is sometimes the best way to be real."3
Realness reifies the power of the visible, the marked and recontextualized
meanings: for example, wearing Tommy Hilfiger jeans or Ralph Polo
shirts-seemingly apparel of the white mainstream-can constitute black
street realness. Unmasking realness as representation does not undo its
power but rather compels a different model for understanding the relation
of the real to representation. Gold teeth might function as a performative
display, a sign of authenticity or realness for black rappers, from the
South particularly, that mark their relationship to their southern 'hood.
The Wall Street Journal cynically notes that the chief profiteer from this
realness, the dentist of choice that installs these teeth, the "Rapper Dentist
Daddy," is a white Roman Catholic, Ronald Cunning of Montclair, California,
who has worked on the teeth of such rappers as C-Murder and
Master P.4 The Wall Street Journal, however, misses the point. The fact that
this white dentist makes money on this symbol of black rapper realness
does not negate the impact or cultural capital of the representation. In fact
the symbol of gold teeth becomes unmoored from its association with
white dentistry by its placement and significance on, or this case in, the
black body. It constitutes a real even as it refers to it. Accordingly, political
or cultural efficacy is not indexed to an ur-real but to a real negotiated
through representation.
Reality checks inform these processes, as they can change the negotiations,
with resulting political and social consequences. Context is critical
for such reality checks, as the spectators' unease comes from experiencing
the grotesque, the unfamiliar in familiar circumstances. In the case
of Emmett Till, the occasion was a funeral, a time for mourning and remembering.
While portraits of the deceased in happier times are common
to such services, Ms. Mobley disrupted the conventional funeral obser-
REALITY /
175
vance and memorializing through public display of the dismembered
body and its brutalized face, devoid of features. Consequently, the viewing
audience could not avoid or ignore the dissonance between the reality
of the faceless body and the image of a serene, boyish, bodiless face. The
anonymity of the inhumanly distorted visage contrasted sharply with the
school photo of a boy who belongs to somebody, to his mother. Such
school photos speak to happier days. They present the child as a face; the
photo cut off just below the shoulders, without any materiality, without
any hint of sexuality. Till's schoolboy portrait in its serenity screams out,
counterposed to the violence that is now written on his body. It is the
body, on the other hand, the black flesh, the anonymous black flesh, that
his white attackers and other white people imagine and portray as dangerous,
as threatening, as sexualized, as the embodiment of a generalized
deviant, black masculinity. Yet the face in the photo in its revelation of
personality, identity, and not sexuality puts the lie to and checks white
racist representations. The body and the portrait negotiate an unseen representation
for the audience, most clearly articulated in the legal defense
of his white attackers: the reports, some documented, some unsaid, about
Emmett Till not being a naive fourteen-year-old boy, but a sexual predator,
the stereotypical black rapist, or soon to be one. The reality check of
his image-the sweet school picture-speaks for the mouthless face
wordlessly countering the false representations of him being circulated by
the men who killed him so brutally.5
Through this reality check, Emmett Till becomes a representation
that is racially galvanizing. Not merely aestheticized or politically cynically
or maudlin, it is rather an image that marshals the energies behind
the movements of representation. Such moments of reality check call not
for individual empathy and mourning but communal understanding and
action. Reality checks, as such, reconstitute the spectators as a collective;
they potentially racialize and colorize the black audience members in collective
blackness. Ghosted by past histories of lynchings, beatings, and
murders of black boys, the black audiences experience the reality of the
injustices reaped upon Emmett Till, who now stares the spectators in the
face. He checks their reality, dredging up racial narratives and stirring up
unrest. Reality checks call black and white spectators, in different ways, to
account, to "check" themselves and their attitudes.
Such checks and their potential social and cultural efficacy, their
provocative collisions between the real and the representational, emerge
only in the period Walter Benjamin refers to as "the age of mechanical reproduction."
The advent of film and other representational technologies
not only introduced the ability to rapidly create, transmit, and disseminate
representations but also caused, Benjamin notes, "the most profound
change in their impact on the public."6 Benjamin argues that mechanical
reproduction, the lithograph, the photograph, irrevocably altered the relationship
between a work of art, its audience, and its authenticity. Authenticity
in this case signals "the essence of all that is transmissible from
its beginning, ranging from its substantive duration to its testimony to
CRITICAL THEORY AND PERFORMANCE
176
the history which it has experienced."7 The rapid reproducibility of the
photograph, therefore, does not allow for the authenticity of the singular
image or the authority of the object. It does, however enable a new type
of efficacy-not a nostalgia for the past but in its dissemination a new social
force to rapidly reach so many individuals. In the case of Emmett Till,
Jet magazine photographed his open casket at the funeral and distributed
hundreds of thousands of these images across the country. Certainly, the
horror of this image had a profound effect on Jet's readership and even
its sales. Yet, the outrage, voyeurism, empathy generated by the
grotesque photograph alone do not constitute a reality check-it does not
produce a collision between the real and representational. Nor can this
picture, because it was so often reproduced, conform to Benjamin's notion
of "authenticity." Still the iterability does allow for the representation
to be serviceable. While it is not, in Benjamin's terms, authentic, it
does have a social utility. The juxtaposition of the other photograph, the
smiling high school boy Emmett next to the open casket creates a different
dynamic as it reauthorizes that photograph, recontextualizes its
meaning and the authenticity of that performative moment. For Benjamin,
the loss of authenticity in the age of mechanical reproduction resulted
in the dissociation of art from its social utility and "its original use
value." Thus the age of mechanical reproduction introduced the notion
of art for art's sake. Yet, within the domain of the reality check, the representation
becomes reinvested with social utility. That photograph of
Emmett Till no longer was just a photograph. Put in dialogue with the
open casket, it produced social unrest and political action as the NAACP
and other voices demanded justice.
Rodney King as Reality /
The videotaped beating of Rodney King by members of the Los Angeles
Police Department on March 3, 1991, perhaps even more graphically
demonstrates the potential of reality checks to generate and reinvigorate
the social efficacy of representation. The King video, shot by George Holliday
outside of his house, dramatized the accessibility of home video
technology and changed the potentialities of television news dissemination;
no longer would the production of news be solely in the hands of the
media establishment. To be sure, the abuse of other black men at the
hands of police officers along America's highways and byways, the dangers
of Driving While Black, certainly haunted the filmed attack on Rodney
King. However, the Holliday video provided a novel form of evidence
of such police actions, providing seemingly irrefutable proof of the
violation of a citizen's civil rights. The familiar venue of the evening news
now became the arena for the assertion of this horrific display, the eightyone
seconds of baton blasts and kicks caught on film by Holliday. Shown
repeatedly on the evening news, the raw video footage functioned as a reality
check testifying to and validating the actual experiences of other
black men victimized by the police. The beating as televised performance
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177
rubbed the real and the representational in ways that generated outrage
and spawned racialized and politicized actions.
Through the televised mediatization and dissemination, the beating
gained a new potency and charge. Benjamin argues that the "aura" of a
work of art "withers in the age of mechanical reproduction."8 According
to Benjamin the aura-the sense of uniqueness, significance, or distance
contained in a work of art, no matter how proximate the work may be
is lost in the mechanical age because of the easy reproduction of the
image. As attested to by the social authority of the King video, the realm
of reality checks offers an important amendment to Benjamin's theory.
The King video in its early presentation had something akin to "aura,"
conveying a singular, compelling presence, despite the fact that it was disseminated
across the country and the world. As Houston A. Baker notes,
"The eighty-one second video tape captured in lurid, shaking, chiaroscuro
the 'scene of violence.' And the tape's circulation made the president
of the United States himself declare that it sickened him."9 The video
has become art, a tableau, a chiaroscuro in its light and shade, black and
white. But, as the quote suggests, the president was compelled to comment
on the video not because it was artistic but because it was so widely
circulated. It is not its "aura" but the fact of its replication that sickens
him. Yet I must caution that the repeated reiteration and overexposure of
the video also had the potential to deaden its impact and the sensitivities
of the audience as "teleabolitionists networks played the video for us
night and day."10 In a segment of Anna Deavere Smith's film Twilight: Los
Angeles, 1992 entitled "AA Meeting," Juror #7 Maria, a juror in the second
trial, the civil rights trial of the four officers charged in the Rodney King
beating, recalls her experience of watching the Holliday video during the
trial.
The thing is we lost our humane [humanity] in there. Because we
saw the tape over and over again, Rodney King became like a doll
like a little doll. You know even me. I lost my humane [humanity] in
there. You know, at first like I told you, you know the first time I
watched it, I was crying and everything. But by the end I could just,
you know ... pfft... watch it with a soda.11
Juror #7's remarks reveal both the initial social authority of the video and
how in its repetition the aura and, for that matter, the reality check withered
away.
With its originary social and moral power, the videotaped beating of
Rodney King as reality check compelled subsequent performances that
acted to address or redress the represented social wrong. Smith's film Twilight:
Los Angeles, 1992, adapted from her performance piece commissioned
by the Mark Taper Forum after the Los Angeles riots, as well as the two
trials and the riots themselves, all constitute performative responses to this
reality check. Responding to the outcries for justice, the first trial, the
criminal case against the four police officers became a performance before
CRITICAL THEORY AND PERFORMANCE
178
a national audience. As the performance scene moved to Simi Valley, because
of all the publicity surrounding the case in Los Angeles, and the notguilty
verdict was returned, another racial narrative haunting the video
emerged; the powerful, pejorative stereotype of black criminality and Rodney
King as dangerous black predator. This derogatory imagery of black
masculinity as social threat, used effectively in the George H. W. Bush reelection
campaign's Willie Horton advertisements, now found utility in
the defense strategies to portray King not as victim but as victimizer, a deviant
felon under the influence of drugs. This racialized defense enabled
the white jurors to perceive the force employed by the police officers to
subdue King as necessary rather than excessive. The subsequent riots, or
uprisings, became another social performance enacted in response to the
outrage at the not-guilty verdict. Ghosted by the histories of racial conflagrations,
including the Watts Riots in Los Angeles 1966, the riots in Los
Angeles 1992 displayed again on video before a national audience the
seething racial tensions, the anger and frustration of so many caught
within cycles of poverty and discrimination. So like Till, King became the
face, the catalyst for outrage.
While the uprisings, lootings, and burnings that followed the Simi
Valley verdict graphically revealed the unrest of L.A.'s black urban poor,
they also testified to the potential for reality checks to elicit problematic
performative responses. Perhaps in reaction to black customers' sense of
repeated mistreatment, perhaps as retaliation for the recent killing of a
young black girl, Latasha Harlins, by a Korean shop owner in Los Angeles,
black rioters with focused vehemence destroyed Korean American
owned stores in South Central. These acts at times constituted "misplaced
aggression," for as Jerry G. Watts points out, "Korean-Americans do not
numerically dominate the Los Angeles police force nor do they constitute
the power elite of the city."12 Critics such as Watts have argued that while
the riots in their destructive force engendered feelings of empowerment
or even racial solidarity, their impact was ephemeral, as these moments of
nihilistic revolt did not constitute a well-organized or sustainable politics
of black liberation.13 Yet this sociological view fails to recognize how these
performative responses to this reality check reified race as political and
social reality. The riots-untheorized acting out against Korean American
shop owners as localized symbols of capitalistic hegemony and racism
voiced black difference and constructed separate and unequal performances
of race on and through this angry and violent difference. The Korean
Americans constituted an oppressed minority group that was not
helped by the white police-the police did not stop the black rioters from
burning down their stores-and were generally outside the systems of
media representation on television and films. And yet the hierarchies of
oppression still placed them in a position superior to black people. Comedian
Richard Pryor joked that the first word of English that immigrants
learn to say on coming to America is "Nigger."4 Accordingly, due to their
relative prosperity and their social proximity, much like that of Jewish
merchants to black rioters in the 196os, the Korean Americans became a
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symbol of oppression and a visible object of black unrest and protest.
Mrs. Young-Soon Han, a Korean American and former owner of a liquor
store, in "Swallowing the Bitterness," the penultimate piece in Twilight:
Los Angeles, sorrowfully concludes, "I wish I could live together with eh
[sic] Blacks, but after the riots there were too much differences." What
she fails to recognize in her powerful declaration of injustice and racial
difference is how Koreans participate in and are complicit with the systems
of oppression that place African Americans on the bottom of the social
ladder.
The verdict also had the effect of producing unsettled and unsettling
performances of whiteness as well as blackness or "Koreanness." The
white Anonymous Man in Twilight: Los Angeles, a juror in the Simi Valley
trial, reports:
We've been portrayed as white racists. One of the most disturbing
things, and a lot of the jurors said that the thing that bothered them
that they received in the mail more than anything else, more than
the threats, was a letter from the KKK saying "We support you, and
if you need our help, if you want to join our organization, we'd welcome
you into our fold."15
Contradicting the notion of former police chief Daryl Gates and other
whites who repeatedly claimed that the beating had nothing to do with
race, the Ku Klux Klan recognized the verdict as a racial declaration. The
potential to read the verdict along strict lines of racial allegiance, to affirm
both white supremacy and black nationalism, testifies to the ways in
which racial politics both informed and were informed by the performance
of this verdict that was supposedly a performance of justice. Moreover,
it demonstrates that performances that emanate from reality checks
can be both reactive and reactionary, their agenda potentially inchoate but
also always racialized.
As reality checks induce a series of performances, they also produce
new audiences and audiences within audiences. They function in dichotomous,
symbiotic inversions of witnessing and participation, impotence
and action. Present in the Holliday video, ringing the body of Rodney
King, is a line of police officers who do not stop the beating but watch as
others baton and kick him. Equally, Holliday himself and his camera bear
witness to the assault. His video camera becomes an active participatory
reaction, documenting for those not present what transpired. For those
viewing the video first on the evening news, the brutality of the performance
event and its distance or separation from these viewers both in
time and as representation caused not only a feeling of unease but momentary
powerlessness, the uneasy experience of feeling the inability to
strike back or stop the beating. The funeral of Emmett Till caused a similar
discomfort and temporary inadequacy for the spectators.
The question is, how does this moment of insufficiency as a viewing
audience translate into active participatory performances in the aftermath
CRITICAL THEORY AND PERFORMANCE
18o
of the reality check? What I want to suggest is that witnessing becomes a
dynamic and participatory process. Here in this theory of witnessing, I do
not reference the psychological trauma of bearing witness associated with
Holocaust survivors and slave narratives,16 but rather the sociological
concept of an "engaged witness." Joshua Miller writing in "The Discovery
of What It Means to Be a Witness: James Baldwin's Dialectics of Difference,"
notes that an "engaged witness scorns detachment in favor of the
vision of proximity and intimacy-even when such intimacy requires an
ocean between the viewer and his subject."17 Intimacy with the King
video meant moving beyond the ocean of passivity that usually defines
television viewership to become not simply a witness of, but a witness for,
King. The unease such witnesses feel is palpable. From the vantage point
of such an engaged witness, the events have an intimate and inescapable
effect. Such active witnessing then produces a variety of interpretative responses.
In the case of both Emmett Till and Rodney King mass protests
followed, as well as trials for the offenders.
The beating of white truck driver Reginald Denny by two black men
that occurred during the Los Angeles riots provides a compelling riff on
this formula of audience inaction and action. The violent attack on Denny,
who was yanked from his truck at the intersection of Florence and Normandie
streets, the zone noted as the flashpoint for the riots as the streets
of Los Angeles exploded in chaotic looting, vandalism, and racial attack.
The beating was caught live on video from an overhead KCOP television
news helicopter. The television reporter high in the sky, physically distanced
from the event but also separated by news coverage codes of noninvolvement,
voiced his dismay not only at the beating but also at the
other witnesses who watched close by and did not respond. Yet four
African Americans, who actually saw the beating live on television, determined
to act and came to Denny's defense. Their engaged witnessing
translated into action as they cradled Denny in their arms, put him in
their car, and hurried him to the hospital. Denny in a segment of Twilight,
relates, "There was a weird common thread in our lives that's an extraordinary
event, and here is four people-the ones in the helicopter-and
they just stuck with it, and then you got four people who seen it on TV
and said enough's enough and came to my rescue" (io8). Dissatisfied
with the unease of impotence, these people felt compelled to respond. Yet
even this response was racialized, as the actions of these African American
"good Samaritans" stood in contrast to the "black barbarians" who
beat Denny. Moreover Denny's white body as innocent victim was held
up in contrast to deviant black body of King, who was driving his
Hyundai at excessive speeds under the influence of the drug PCP. Paul
Parker, the chairperson of the "Free the LA Four Plus Defense Committee,"
the organization that grew up around the four young men arrested
for Denny's beating, exclaims to Anna Deavere Smith, "Oh, Reginald
Denny, this innocent white man. But you didn't hear nothin' about all
these other victims until the day of the trial came" (Twilight, 173). Denny's
beating, his white victimage, for conservative pundits became a way of
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countering the injustice suffered by King and of submerging the greater social
and political significance of the explosions in the streets of Los Angeles
under the heading of black criminality. In responding to Denny, his black
saviors refute the racial stereotypes, the news accounts and depictions of
black rioters as depraved and out of control. For them the Denny beating
on live television constituted another reality check that rubbed the real of
his attack against the representation of black savage indifference to it. The
discomfort in the witnessing of this image demanded action.
Anna Deavere Smith's performance piece Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992,
I would argue, is indirectly built on the principle of reality checks. From
the opening montage, Smith informs us that the words she uses are those
of the actual figures that she portrays. Consequently, she juxtaposes the
real of their speech with the stage representation of these figures in a way
that exposes a productive tension, an excess between the expression of
character and the real of their words.18 Her performance is haunted by the
actual incident of Rodney King and the spectators' knowledge of the functioning
of the real figures such as Reginald Denny, Maxine Waters, and
Daryl Gates. In her performance, Smith engages character through language,
reiterating verbatim their speech habits, replete with "ahs"
"umms," and colloquialisms. Inverting psychological approaches to acting,
Smith works from the outside in; rather than beginning with inner objectives
and psychological urges, she starts with language. Smith writes,
"Words are not an end in themselves. They are means to evoke the character
of the person who spoke them."19 Certainly in repeating typological
features such as speech patterns, Smith runs the risk of stereotyping her
figures, of creating caricatures. Yet her approach is never mimetic, not an
act of mimicry but always based on the juxtaposition of the real and representation,
always negotiating the gap between the actual figure and her
stage constructions. Smith relates to anthropologist Dorinne Kondo,
I don't believe that when I play someone in my work, that I "am" the
character. I want the audience to experience the gap. Because I know
they experience the gap, they will appreciate my reach for the other.
This reach is what moves them, not a mush of me and the other, not
a presumption that I can play everything and everybody, but more
a desire to reach for something that is clearly not me.20
Through a series of juxtapositions, Smith's reality check riffs in Twilight
defamiliarize the familiar. Smith reveals aspects of the grotesque that
surround and inform the beating of King and the civil disturbances that
ensued after the Simi Valley trial: Daryl Gates justifies his decision to go
to a fund-raiser as the unrest first broke out; a white real estate agent,
Elaine Young, discusses being holed up at the Beverly Hills Hotel during
the riots; a Korean American medical student, Chris Oh, describes his
stepfather being shot; Rodney King's aunt guardedly discloses her reaction
to the verdict. With humor, irony, and pathos Smith explores and exposes
these scabs, these ugly layers of the events and conflicts in ways
CRITICAL THEORY AND PERFORMANCE
182
that do not bring closure but express the profound impact of a wound that
is still open, still festering. In the film version of Twilight, Smith disrupts
her narrative with video clips from the riots, from the trial, from the beatings
of Rodney King and Reginald Denny. For example, prior to her performing
of Juror #7's reaction to the King video, Smith's film shows the
actual videotaped beating. Within this context the video has the potential
to regain its symbolic authority, lost in continued iterations. Moreover, it
and the other video representations of historic events become part of the
filmic representation; the ghosts of the past become present, "checking"
the words and memories of the characters and the spectators. Their interpolation
and recontextualization offers spectators the opportunity not
simply for remembering and reviewing but for critical dissonance and
renegotiation of new meanings.
In her polyvocal performance, Smith puts into conversation diverse
voices and perspectives that would not ordinarily be in dialogue. Twilight
ends with the juxtaposition of the Mrs. Young-Soon Han questioning the
possibility of ever bridging the tension between blacks and Koreans
"the fire is still there," she says-and Twilight Bey, the young black organizer
of the gang truce who calls for moving beyond the present liminality,
racial prejudices, and balkanization into a new social order and communication.
"I can't forever dwell in the darkness. I can't forever dwell in the
idea, of just identifying with people like me and understanding me and
mine" (Twilight, 255). The disjunctive conjunction of these two figures, as
well as the other opposed voices and opinions in the piece, places the job
of synthesis within the domain of the audience.
Through the portrait of Twilight and the other figures, Smith's performance
augurs the chance for the audience to "reach across ethnic
boundaries,"21 to embrace a more humanistic vision of America that enables
racial difference. She imagines the work as "a call for community."22
Such is the nature of her self-proclaimed "Search for American Character":
Through troubling American diversity, she seeks to discover a collective
American sensibility. What then, in Smith's Twilight performance
of the potential that I discussed earlier, for reality checks to racialize audiences,
to construct a particular code of blackness? Twilight testifies that
racializing does not necessarily mean essentializing, that the spectatorial
response to reality checks is not simply a one-dimensional black moment.
Rather, reality checks can elicit racialized responses but also can facilitate
the audience's reconsideration of identity politics and racial stratifications.
Smith's construction of diverse racial and gendered perspectives on
and through her own black body testifies to the problematic nature of
racial categorization even as the performance affirms the historical significance
of race and its contextualized meanings.
Checking Bamboozled
Not simply homogenizing but problematizing race and blackness, reality
checks provoke an increased awareness of race as lived experience and as
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a critical social, political and historical construct. Spectators must position
themselves accordingly. Bamboozled (2000), Spike Lee's subversive satire,
on the media's commodification and exploitation of blackness, climaxes
in a violent disruptive sequence, a disturbing reality check that critiques
racial posturing as it testifies to the interconnections of race, reality, and
representation. A fictitious black militant rap group, the Mau Maus, kidnaps
Mantan (Savion Glover), the tap-dancing, blackfaced star of the New
Millennium Minstrel Show, and murder him during a live broadcast across
the Internet and worldwide television-a public execution, a heightened
escalation of "reality television." His actual killing is rubbed against the
representation of his dancing before a televised audience. The grotesque
is interpolated into the familiar. Like conventional programming, the Mau
Maus schedule the "Dance of Death" for broadcast at 1o P.M. Eastern time.
Prior to his murder, the Mau Maus compel Mantan to literally dance for
his life, firing their weapons at his feet, in a final exhilarating display. The
dance is wrought effect, a tense performance with powerful consequences,
a requiem for the doomed Mantan and his career as a new milleninum
minstrel. As his skillful feet furiously bang out a furtive, futile,
pleading rhythm, the Mau Maus encircle him, spraying out gunfire, as a
virtual audience worldwide watches anxiously. The Mau Maus mean to
punish Mantan for crimes against blackness. They believe that his blackface
television performances degrade black people. So they now force him
to perform in order to demean him. They seek to reduce him to representation,
to hold his dance up to the viewing audience as a dangerous racial
farce. They force him to dance without makeup in a performance that is
as painful for him to perform as it is for an audience to witness. This reality
check calls into question the tension between Mantan's art and his artifice
as his minstrel shuffling has actual effects and real-life consequences.
Yet the audience does not like this grotesque "dance of death," it
is a performance of blackness heavily layered, a reality check that purposefully
elicits complex and contradictory racialized responses.
In their desire to censure minstrelsy through the murder of Mantan,
the Mau Maus raise a question that is reiterated in Bamboozled: Who has the
right to perform blackness and to determine how it is performed? Named
for the legendary Kenyan Mau Mau that led a dramatic rebellion in 1952
against British colonialism, these contemporary Mau Maus seem totally removed
from that history and any awareness of its meanings in relationship
to their own self-serving enactment of black-on-black violence. The Mau
Maus distort that history in their destructive act, their public execution of
Mantan as purported revolution. Fantasizing the event prior to its enactment,
Big Black likens the murder of Mantan to an earlier expressive act of
black protest, a significant reality broadcast around the world: "This shit
has to have some fucking symbolism to it, some sustenance. This shit gotta
be like John Carlos and Tommy Smith at the '68 Olympics, you know what
I'm sayin'! Some big shit!" Carlos and Smith on the Olympic medal stand
in Mexico City, with black gloved fists held high and heads bowed as the
American national anthem played, reflected on the growing black unrest
CRITICAL THEORY AND PERFORMANCE
184
at home and put the lie to America's homogenizing propaganda as "the
home of the free and land of the brave." The Mau Maus' violence, however,
does not recapture Carlos and Smith's revolutionary spirit but misconstrues
and warps it.
In their willingness to take another black life, in their embrace of a
new black cultural nationalism, in their embodiment of a representational
urban black "realness" throughout the film, the Mau Maus lack of any
"real" revolutionary agenda-"What are you rebelling against?" Sloan
(Jada Pinkett) asks Big Black (Mos Def), her brother and the leader of the
group. These new ministers of culture, these prophets of rap, the Mau
Maus have taken on afrocentric names that in their excess satirize the processes
of rap naming, the history of Black Muslim naming as well as the
rhetoric of afrocentricity-Big Black, Smooth Black, Mo Black, Double
Black. Like so much of gangsta rap, the Mau Maus attack conventional capital
and consumption even as they affirm the primacy of production and
consumption. While the Mau Maus believe that Mantan must be killed,
they still envy his fame as a star on television with a billboard on Times
Square. They have even auditioned for the New Millennium Minstrel Show
themselves. The Mau Maus berate Mantan as a "handkerchief head Uncle
Tom nigger," but the film shows them creatively swathed in a variety of
head scarves and wraps. As Michael Rogin points out, the Mau Maus "condemn
minstrelsy even as they embody its stereotypes."23 They exhibit a
vacuous activism, oppositionality gone awry. Just as the black rioters who
destroyed Korean-owned stores in Los Angeles vented a misplaced frustration
that did not displace white hegemony and authority, the Mau Maus
misdirect their racial fervor onto Mantan as the symbol of black degradation
rather than the white producer (Michael Rappaport) or the whiteowned
corporate structures that control the politics of his representation.
Orlando Patterson in Rituals of Blood theorizes that lynching in all its inhumanity,
constituted an act of ritualized blood sacrifice, a rite of segregation
that served to redress the crisis of postslavery transition and uncertainty
for white America.24 By figuratively and actually removing the threatening
"black beast," these acts affirmed the baseness of blackness and valorized
the privileges and sanctity of whiteness. The perverse and perverted blood
sacrifice of Mantan by black hands ritualistically removes the offending
Uncle Tom but does not reify a new power of blackness; rather like blacking
up or Mantan's final dance, it is disturbingly painful to watch. The
murder of Mantan does not change or rebel against the material system of
oppression but sadly and painfully affirms the power of representation and
ultimate power of the dominant hegemony. Consequently, the reality check
of this grotesque dance of death puts the lie to the Mau Maus' empty black
nationalist posturing. It asks the spectators to question the Mau Maus'
racial and representational politics.
The poignant ironies of Mantan's current struggle for survival inform
this reality check. As the Mau Maus hold Mantan prisoner, Spike Lee
cuts back to a scene from the New Millennium Minstrel Show where a white
sheriff puppet fires his shotgun at the feet of a blackface minstrel puppet
REALITY /
185
likeness of Mantan, including his dreadlocks. The smiling minstrel puppet
dances gaily as upbeat music plays. The real "Dance of Death" that
follows repeats and revises this conjunction of violence and entertainment,
of pleasure and pain. The next moment reveals Mantan dancing furiously
as the Mau Maus, adorned with blackface masks to hide their
identity, shoot at his feet. The sound and sparks of gunfire, the urgent beat
of his feet now are the only soundtrack. The tradition and memories of
minstrelsy, the repeated commodification of black cultural expression in
America, the legacy of the black body as the site for perverse, voyeuristic
desire, haunts this scene and checks the spectators. As in the televised trials
of O. J. Simpson, the daily hearings on Clarence Thomas and Anita
Hill, the black body becomes the renewable source of public spectacle and
entertainment.
As with the case of Rodney King, video technology becomes a powerful
authority and signifier in this reality check, raising interest and outrage
as an audience within an audience watches, impotent to act. Certainly
this scene is informed by earlier usages of video representations of
the racial real such as the Holliday video.25 It also repeats and revises the
genre of reality television. Within reality television the audience peers in
as Peeping Toms as others embarrass themselves or push the edges of decency
or the bounds of human life and will. Yet, within this moment from
Bamboozled, we as film audience not only have the experience of watching
this representation but also of how this violent, "real" programming impacts
on another viewing audience. Spike Lee cuts from the murder dance
scene to the reactions of Delacroix, the black middle-class television executive
who first hired Mantan and created the New Millennium Minstrel
Show, and to his assistant Sloan, the love interest of Mantan and sister of
Mau Mau leader Big Black, as they become "engaged witnesses" to these
events. By showing the audience within to us as audience without, the
scene operates as a reality check within a reality check. For Delacroix and
Sloan must check their own complicity in the commercial trafficking of
blackness and the exploitation of Mantan that results in this public ritual
of blood sacrifice. The camera jump-cuts back and forth from these spectators
to the dance of death, filmically highlighting the dialectic between
intimacy and distance. This sequencing reveals Delacroix and Sloan as
active witnesses; each of them painfully watches and roots for Mantan to
somehow dance for his life and freedom; each prepares an interpretative
response. With the death of Mantan, Delacroix, now himself in blackface,
symbolically destroys all the "Negro memorabilia" that he had been collecting
and had been proliferating in his office, haunting him with their
smiling faces. The imperative of participatory spectatorship makes Sloan
a witness for Mantan. She is all the more conflicted because her brother, Big
Black, is his chief executioner. Driven to performative action in response
to this reality check, Sloan takes a gun and threatens, then accidentally
kills, her former boss, Delacroix.
Bamboozled resolves in a series of performative responses to the climactic
reality check that is the murder of Mantan. As the self-satisfied
CRITICAL THEORY AND PERFORMANCE
186
Mau Maus exit the site of the execution, all but one are gunned down in a
hail of bullets, another excessive display of brutality toward people of
color by Mayor Giuliani-prior to his September 11, 2001, redemption as a
national hero-and New York's finest, who, of course, arrive at the scene
too late to save Mantan. This disproportionate police response-itself a
repetition and revision of the Rodney King beating, the police "accidental"
murder of Amado Diallo, cut down in hail of forty-one bullets, the violation
and torture of Abner Louima-serves as a perverse performance of
whiteness. It evidences the power of whiteness-under the guise of justice,
protecting law and order-to subdue the offending black hordes. On the
morning of December 4, 1964, the Chicago police attacked the apartment
of the Black Panther Party and with a hail of unprecedented and unreturned
gunfire killed leader Fred Hampton and one other Panther, while
wounding four others. The police action quelled the threat raised by
Hampton and the militant Chicago Black Panther chapter. The police assault
in Bamboozled remembers but also pollutes this memory, as the
would-be revolutionary Mau Maus, misguided in their symbolic violence
in defense of blackness, now in their death ironically might become mistaken
black martyrs.
For the only Mau Mau alive, this massacre serves as a reality check
that racializes him and confirms for him, as well as for the film's audience,
the profound power of visuality in determining race. The one Mau Mau
not killed appears to be white, despite his dress and his verbal dexterity
with black urban vernacular. This white Mau Mau proclaims his blackness
as the police handcuff him and hustle him unharmed from the scene. He
shouts, "I'm black: one-sixteenth, one drop of black blood is all that's required.
Why didn't you kill me?"26 His rap name with the Mau Maus is in
fact "One-sixteenth Black," so his call out to the police at once recites his
name, outing his unmarked racial history, and calls for their recognition of
his identity. His invocation of the one-drop rule takes us back to an earlier
time of identity politics, of racial performances and a history of passing.
Yet his declaration of blackness must be seen within a different representational
context and history in which the politics of visibility, the fact that
he looks white, holds real meaning for the charging police. The police attack
forces One-sixteenth Black to become an engaged witness to the annihilation
of his fellow Mau Maus in an assault that serves as a traumatic reality
check for him. He suffers the pains of impotency as others around
him fall victim to the violence. The dialect of intimacy and distance plays
out as, despite his desire for closeness with his slain compatriots, the police
move him away. They racialize him through their actions as white, but
One-sixteenth Black in this violent reality check attempts to perform blackness
all the more.
One-sixteenth Black's declaration of blackness interrogates the relationship
of the racial real and the representational. While the viewing audience
may experience a dissonance when it first sees One-sixteenth Black
with the other Mau Maus, no mention is ever made of his physical difference;
he is accepted as one of them. In fact, he voices a virulent afrocen-
REALITY /
187
trism and speaks with and to them against the ways in which white hegemonic
culture has distorted the meanings of blackness. One-sixteenth
Black raps to the call and response of his fellow Mau Maus,
B-L-A-K. BLAK. The darkest of all colors, the opposite of white.
Know what I'm sayin', like a member of an African people. But
check it out, here's where the grey people try to trick us with their
slickery and slick us with their trickery. Peep the connotations of
that. GLOOMY. DEPRESSING. EVIL. WICKED. ANGRY. SULLEN .... BLAK
OUT. BLAK LISTED. BLAK BALL. Black hat is bad luck. Bad guys wear
black. Must've been a white guy who started all that.
His performance, his use of the derogative vernacular designation of
whites as "grey people," distances him from whiteness. He fights the appearance
of whiteness through gestures, language, vernacular codes, and
even clothing associated with urban blackness. One-sixteenth Black has
"kept it real" in his devotion to the Mau Maus, to the streets and to the
Mau Maus' version of hip-hop black cultural nationalism. The real reflects
ironically on the representational, as DJ Surge, a white rapper from the allwhite
early 198os rap group 3rd Base portrays this character. The group
3rd Base preceded a wave of commercially successful white rappers such
as Eminem in troubling the racialization of rap music, and whether others
can legitimately perform music that arose from the black urban environs
and whose "realness" in performance depends on one's representational
proximity to that 'hood. With the globalization of rap and its spread into
what George Clinton refers to as "the vanilla suburbs," how rap is a performance
of blackness or who has the right to perform rap realness are
and have been highly contested questions. In Bamboozled, One-sixteenth
Black believes that his biology, his status as one-sixteenth black, enables
him to perform blackness. Yet his reckoning comes in the moment of danger,
when the police do not shoot him. Within this critical context, his
black blood is read as performance, while his visible whiteness is read as
real. For it is the governing factor that excludes him from the ultimate performance
of blackness: being killed by the exemplars of white power. As
he cries out to join his black brethren, he recognizes that his final test of
authenticity is to die: he actually weeps because he is not martyred. Onesixteenth
Black's visible representation in the eyes of the police, however,
does not support his desire for, and claim of, black realness. A new awareness
of race, realness, and performance arrives for him courtesy of this
reality check.
Through this reality check the film suggests that in the lived world
"blackness" is often simply how one looks; it's straightforwardly physical,
not theoretical or "constructed"; its meanings are contextual and not
negotiable at the moment the cops decide whom to shoot. In that moment,
the question of "who is really black" is not a question of semantics at all.
Blackness is not negotiable in all places at all times. It is a moment of crisis,
a threat of actual death and punishment that rubs the real against the
CRITICAL THEORY AND PERFORMANCE
188
representational in profound ways. Engaged witnesses come to understand
that the "Fact of Blackness," as Frantz Fanon calls it, can kill you.27
Junebug (Paul Mooney), Delacroix's father and a black comic, muses during
his routine in Bamboozled, "Everybody wanna be black but no body
wanna be black. It confuses me. They all act black, sound black. I hope
they start hanging niggers again so we'll find out who's black."
At times, as in Bamboozled, the performative responses of witnesses
for are not positive. In part this is because the performative rejoinders
elicited by reality checks are not necessarily politically organized and premeditated;
but rather reality checks evoke emotive, inchoate political expressions
that may in time evolve into a more coherent politics. They have
the potential for positive political action. It is not accidental that realty
checks do not necessarily produce an organized politics. They are in fact
outside the usual political machinery precisely because of frustrations
with traditional politicking and politicians. Thus, reality checks challenge
conventional political means, constituting what Leontyne Price in the film
of Twilight calls the "angry howl." Invoking emotional, enraged, and even
violent social responses and cultural performances, reality checks attest to
the power of race, that the social constructions and reconstructions of
blackness in the United States have real life-and-death costs and consequences.
Foregrounding the interlocking, mutually constitutive relationship
between the real and the representational, reality checks both gesture
toward and help constitute a map of social reality that demands our cultural
and racial responses.
NOTES
My thanks to Michele B. Elam for her criticism and insight; our many conversations
on reality checks have greatly informed this article.
1. Alan Nadel, "Boundaries, Logistics, and Identity," in May All Your Fences
Have Gates, ed. Alan Nadel (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1994), 103.
2. See Harry J. Elam, Jr., The Past as Present in the Drama of August Wilson (Ann
Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2004), introduction.
3. Paul Gilroy, "to be real... ," in Let's Get It On: The Politics of Black Performance,
ed. Catherine Ugwu (London: Institute of Contemporary Arts; Seattle: Bay
Press, 1995), 29.
4. Lisa Bannon, "Word of Mouth Helps 'Rapper Dentist Daddy' Corner the
Flashy Market," Wall Street Journal, July 19, 2001, 1.
5. Many thanks to Michele Elam for this observation.
6. Walter Benjamin, "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,"
in Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, trans. Harry Zohn, ed. Hannah
Arendt (New York: Schocken, 1968), 219.
7. Benjamin, "Work of Art," 221.
8. Benjamin, "Work of Art," 221.
9. Houston A. Baker, "Scene... Not Heard," in Reading Rodney King: Reading
Urban Uprising, ed. Robert Gooding-Williams (New York: Routledge, 1993), 42-43.
io. Baker, "Scene ... Not Heard," 43.
11. Anna Deavere Smith, Twilight: Los Angeles, dir. Mark Levin (PBS Pictures,
REALITY /
189
2001). Subsequent citations in the text that do not include a page number are to
this filmed version.
12. Jerry G. Watts, "Reflections on the Rodney King Verdict and the Paradoxes
of the Black Response," in Gooding-Williams, Reading Rodney King, 245.
13. Watts, "Reflections," 246.
14. Richard Pryor, Is It Something I Said? Track 3. Prod. David Banks (Los Angeles:
Warner Brothers Records, 1975).
15. Anna Deavere Smith, Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992 (New York: Anchor, 1994),
73. Subsequent citations in the text that include a page number are to this volume.
16. For a discussion of such trauma see Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub, Testimony:
Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History (New York:
Routledge, 1992).
17. Joshua Miller, "The Discovery of What It Means to Be a Witness: James
Baldwin's Dialectics of Difference," in James Baldwin Now, ed. Dwight McBride
(New York: New York University Press, 1999), 337.
18. The 1992 Pulitzer Prize committee removed Smith's Twilight from consideration
for the prize in playwriting because the jurors determined that since
Smith did not actually write the words to the play, it did not meet the criteria for
the competition.
19. Smith, introduction to Twilight: Los Angeles, xxiv.
20. Dorinne Kondo, "(Re)Visions of Race: Contemporary Race Theory and the
Cultural Politics of Racial Crossover in Documentary Theatre," Theatre Journal 52
(2000): 96.
21. Smith, introduction to Twilight: Los Angeles, xxvi.
22. Smith, introduction to Twilight: Los Angeles, xxiv.
23. Michael Rogin, "Nowhere Left to Stand: The Burnt Cork Roots of Popular
Culture," Cineaste 26, no. 2 (2001): 15.
24. Orlando Patterson, Rituals of Blood: Consequences of Slavery in Two American
Centuries (New York: Basic Civitas, 1998), 173-79.
25. Interestingly, Spike Lee, due to financial limitations as well as aesthetic dictates,
shot much of the movie in digital video rather than on film.
26. In a version of Bamboozled available at http://www.imsdb.com/Scripts/
Bamboozled.html, the response of One-sixteenth Black is quite different in this
scene than the version in the film.
"The Mau-Mau's [sic] come out of the factory high as a kite. Each has a big
fat joint or a 64 oz. of DA BOMB. They're also doing a free-style rap about
their execution.
ON CHEVY SUBURBAN
They get in when the squak of police walkie-talkie's clicks.
BIG BLACK
It's the man!
What follows is a horrifying display of firepower. All the Mau-Mau's [sic]
bodies are doing the Bonnie and Clyde Sonny Corleone Dance of Death as
bullets tear into them and the Suburban. Not one of them is able to get a shot
off. The shooting stops. The twitching stops. All's quiet. 1/16th Black comes
out with his hands up.
CRITICAL THEORY AND PERFORMANCE
190
1 / 16TH BLACK
Don't shoot! Don't shoot! I've
been held hostage. They made me
part of them against my own free
will. Don't shoot!
The cops quickly pounce on 1/16th Black.
1 / 16TH BLACK (coNT'D)
I'm WHITE. I'm WHITE! Look at me,
I'm white!"
27. Frantz Fanon, "The Facts of Blackness," in Black Skins, White Masks, trans.
Charles Lam Markmann (New York: Grove Press, 1967).
Theater History and Historiography
Historians often begin their accounts of the discipline of theater history
with the same anecdote of irretrievable loss. The seventeen-volume compilation
of sources on the ancient theater, assembled in the reign of Augustus
by Juba II of Mauretania, disappeared. Only fragments of its
mouthwatering table of contents-lost treatises on special effects, scene
painting in perspective, and mask wearing, for instance-could be reconstructed
from other sources. This parable of disinheritance articulates a
wistful sense of incompletion, which seems to haunt theater historians
generally, even when documents do survive intact, because of the evanescence
of performance itself. Some profess to find themselves "in the unenviable
position of the art historian who plans to evaluate the lost paintings
of Polygnotus and Zeuxis."1
This self-consciousness about the perceived contradiction of writing
the history of so notoriously transient a form as theater suggests a point of
entrance for critical theory. As they reflect on the fragility of their subject,
theater historians struggle with the problems of historiography-theories
of writing about history. Not the least of these problems is the absence of
the transcendental signified (call it performance) from the linguistic or
pictorial residue that historians optimistically call "sources," a word that
holds out the false promise of authentic origin. The source materials with
which historians of performance most frequently work might more descriptively
be called, following Jacques Derrida, "marks" or even "traces."2
These are the echoes of voices, erased even before they are fully transcribed,
which historians try to recover from that disorderly repository of
silent artifacts, fugitive contexts, and hypothetical audiences-the past. In
this sense no document can survive intact, and even the particularly Western
preoccupation with trying to write everything down-ethnography,
biography, historiography, choreography, and the rest-cannot put Juba
back together again. Perpetually reminded of irretrievable loss, then, theater
historians should be among the most receptive to the theoretical problems
of interpretation and representation; and increasingly, they have become
so, but not without a fight.
In the 198os and 1990s, the critical and interpretive approaches of
feminist, postcolonialist, and New Historicist scholars clashed with the
191
CRITICAL THEORY AND PERFORMANCE
192
residual positivism of traditional theater history. Descended in part from
the nineteenth-century "objective school" of historians led by Leopold
von Ranke (1795-1886), positivist historians expressed one version or another
of the ambition of the founding generation of German and American
theater historians to develop "a scientific approach to theatrical facts"
consistent with the methods of Theaterwissenschaft.3 Whether scholars acknowledged
the influence of positivism-to some it seemed to be just
common sense, not a theory in its own right-Theaterwissenschaft separated
the study of historical documents, the supposed repository of objective
facts, from the study of the works of dramatic literature, the supposed
domain of subjective imagination. In this division of labor, historians
were to reconstruct the past from solid documentary evidence, while literary
critics and theorists were left to interpret the mysteries of dramatic
form. This dichotomy has to some extent continued to divide the field,
sometimes vexing its relationships with "literary" theory and the departments
that teach it, for instance, or at other times further mystifying the
role that dramaturgs are expected to play as intellectual ambassadors
without portfolio to the production process.
Theory has troubled the framework not only of what can count as a
document, but also of what can count as a fact. It has shaken the assumption
that there is a fundamental difference between literary texts and
other kinds of texts. It has suggested alternatively that all forms of writing-indeed,
all representations-are as distanced from the real world as
literature was once thought to be. Under the aegis of performance studies,
theory has emphasized the concept of the repertoire of living performances
to complement the archive of research materials,4 a trend that has
proved particularly successful in the work of dance historians and musicologists,
but which has general implications for all performance researchers.
Above all, theory since the 196os has featured a heightened
consciousness about the strategies whereby the historical facts are made
to signify in different social, cultural, and political contexts.
A number of metahistorians or historiographers have influenced
theater and dance historians in formulating their strategies of interpretation,
but the ideas of four might best characterize the diversity of interdisciplinary
approaches: Hayden White, Michel Foucault, Stephen Greenblatt,
and Walter Benjamin. Proposing a "poetics of history" based on
conventions of narrative, White set forth a "tropology," a limited number
of rhetorical patterns that recur whenever stories, including factual histories,
are told and heard.5 In a series of highly influential studies of medicine,
penology, and sexuality, Foucault advanced a theory of historical
knowledge that organizes all writing into categories of discourse-the
rules that govern what statements can or cannot be made within different
institutional contexts and structures. He also foregrounded the body-as
disciplined, punished, diagnosed, and sexed-as the principal site of social
practice and meaning.6 Reexamining the situation of early modern
plays in relationship to what Shakespearean scholars previously viewed
as their cultural "background," Greenblatt wrote that "history cannot
THEATER HISTORY AND HISTORIOGRAPHY
193
simply be set against literary texts as either stable antithesis or stable
background, and the protective isolation of those texts gives way to a
sense of their interaction with other texts and hence the permeability of
their boundaries."7 As an alternative to the uninvited term New Historicism
to describe work that centered on this theory-inflected concept of "intertextuality,"
Greenblatt proposed cultural poetics, adapting Hayden
White's "poetics of history" to the rapidly developing interdiscipline of
cultural studies. Practitioners of cultural studies generally embraced the
idea that culture is the occasion and instrument of struggle between
groups of people with different amounts of power or, at least, different
kinds of power. These relative powers shape, among other things, what
counts as history, as Marxist theorist Walter Benjamin hauntingly suggested
shortly before his death in 1940 while fleeing the Nazi occupation
of France. Exploring the theoretical limit of the usefully recoverable past
at a time of political catastrophe, he epigrammatically critiqued Ranke's
positivism but simultaneously proposed an alternative process of laying
a claim to historical truth: "To articulate the past historically does not
mean to recognize it 'the way it really was' (Ranke). It means to seize hold
of a memory as it flashes up at a moment of danger." Assessing a highstakes
struggle to remember the past-with the collective memory of the
likely victims as a last-ditch tactic of resistance against the "scientific"
rewriting of history by the apparent victors-Benjamin concluded: "Only
that historian will have the gift of fanning the spark of hope in the past
who is firmly convinced that even the dead will not be safe from the enemy
if he wins."8
Facts do matter. They matter so much that historians never stop interpreting
and debating their significance. Without denying the facts, for
instance, that in 1989 an excavation at a London building site uncovered
the architectural footprint of the Elizabethan Rose Theatre, theory interrogates
such facts to educe the tangled interests by which they have been
historically produced and the different ways in which they have been experienced
by stakeholders in their unstable meanings. Contested by land
speculators, corporations, the "heritage industry," and the theater community
itself, the Rose excavation seemed to precipitate yet another bitter
episode in the struggle for the legitimating possession of cultural patrimony
by gay men, for instance, in the face of contemporary homophobia.
It did so on a site marked by its association with productions of plays by
Christopher Marlowe, who was accused in his own time of having said,
"all they that love not tobacco and boys were fools."9 On such sites (and
by such sites) the trace of the past is marked.
In Theatre/Archaeology (2001), Mike Pearson and Michael Shanks go
so far as to compare the historical site of a performance to a crime scene:
"We ask: What has happened? The temporality of these spaces is one of
aftermath-the traces left behind. Time is fractured as present appearances
are haunted by indeterminate pasts, events now gone and evident
only in their alienated traces. Here the alienated trace is the precondition
of meaning."o Proposing a strategy of interpretation, they speak of the
CRITICAL THEORY AND PERFORMANCE
194
need for a "forensic archaeology," emphasizing the argumentative and
rhetorical dimension of probative work in theater history as well as the
factual. To apprehend meaning from a crime scene or a site of performance,
they conclude, always requires a leap of interpretation. Interpretation,
in turn, requires as detailed as possible an understanding of the relationship
between events and their contexts. Sometimes this relationship
is a long and fiercely guarded secret. Sometimes it is hiding in plain sight.
Sometimes the scene has been "salted." There is no reason to assume the
innocence of the archive: to select is to tamper. For these reasons forensic
investigation into the history of performance favors what Paul Ricoeur
aptly called a "hermeneutics of suspicion," in which the narrative sleights
of hand of the stories told, no less than the motives of the storytellers
themselves, must be scrutinized.11
In "Theater Events and Their Political Contexts: A Problem in the
Writing of Theater History," Thomas Postlewait suspects nearly everyone.
He lays out in fine detail the evidence from a richly documented but complex
crime scene in Jacobean London. The event in question is a performance
of Thomas Middleton's A Game at Chess, an anti-Spanish topical
satire got up by the King's Men at the Globe Theatre in 1624. For Postlewait
the playtext is no more or less reliable a document than any other in
the poetics of history. Middleton's drama a clef enjoyed a popular but (as
it turned out, illegal) run of nine performances, an extraordinary hit for
the time. Unfortunately, the law forbade stage representations of living
royals or court officials, and the Spanish ambassador, whose colleague
was lampooned and humiliated, complained to the king. Silenced, the
company ceased playing for ten days, and Middleton evidently went into
hiding. Postlewait rigorously interprets the presumed facts about the reception
of the production in the context of the diplomatic, religious, and
national issues current at the end of the reign of James I. He is interested
in complicating what he identifies as the New Historicist reduction of the
politics of early modern drama into the simple binary opposition of "containment
or contestation, subservience or subversion." That familiar story
is far too simple to escape suspicion. For Postlewait, the facts suggest a
much richer interplay of interests, designs, personalities, and factions. To
elucidate the performance, reaching for a totality he knows will exceed his
grasp, he wants "to encompass all of the political locations of the historical
event and its contexts." The Benjaminian memory that might flash up
before Postlewait's reader is that of the early modern consolidation of the
nation-state apparatus, with its hypothetically totalized powers of diplomatic
hegemony abroad and surveillance at home, a most presciently ambitious
game of chess indeed.
Like Postlewait's meditation on A Game at Chess, Rosemarie Bank's
"Representing History: Performing the Columbian Exposition" questions
received narratives by revisiting a paradigmatic event and its manifold
contexts. The exposition, which opened in Chicago in 1893, ostensibly
commemorated the four-hundredth anniversary of the founding event in
American history. It operated as a world's fair, foregrounding the emer-
THEATER HISTORY AND HISTORIOGRAPHY
195
gent culture of the host country in a series of exhibitions, collections, and
shows. It also occasioned the influential address of Frederick Jackson
Turner, "The Significance of the Frontier in American History," which he
delivered to the Chicago meeting of the American Historical Association
that year. Placing the complex network of public events in the context of
the history that the participants were engaged in performing (and thereby
in part creating), Bank focuses on the powerful representation of Native
American peoples at the exposition. These ranged from learned academic
displays of ethnographic objects in the hard-to-find Anthropological
Building to highly visible commercial exhibitions of live Native peoples,
epitomized by the successful residency of Buffalo Bill's Wild West. A
number of scholars have previously documented and deplored this whole
genre of embodied performance as exploitative and racist. Conceding
their views in part, Bank, following Foucault, nevertheless critiques their
binary narratives of passive "show Indians" and grasping impresarios
and white-supremacist audiences. She finds evidence of agency in the
construction of native "authenticity" that the shows delivered and, therefore,
in the history that the performers (re)wrote. She finds a certain dignity
in the strategies by which the actors reclaimed their historical role in
evading or resisting the tidal wave of genocidal ruin that is predominant
narrative of the American frontier. Perhaps the most poignant test of
Bank's recuperative thesis is her reconstruction of the ceremonial reenactment
of Columbus's landing, featuring nine Sioux in full Plains Indian regalia
standing in for the long-since exterminated Arawaks. Their very
presence contested what too often passed and still passes for a famous
historical "fact": that Columbus discovered America in 1492. What they
contested was the Eurocentricity of the word discover, which suggests the
original revelation of a previously uninhabited continent. At the moment
when Turner proclaimed "the closing of the American Frontier," in the
year of the "battle" at Wounded Knee, did these Native Americans also
seize a memory that flashed before them, performing an act of forensic
archeology in the middle of the vast crime scene of the North American
continent? Bank shows why their anachronistic reenactment struck much
more deeply into authenticity than mere historical accuracy could have
done, as the Sioux performed the Native Americans' part in Columbus's
encounter with America, the consequences of which are ongoing for all
Americans and the entire world.
Unlike Postlewait's microhistory of a single production or Bank's account
of one dimension of an enormous event, Susan Foster's "Kinesthetic
Empathies and the Politics of Compassion" highlights several key points
in two hundred years of dance reception theory, from the philosophe M. le
Chevalier de Jaucourt's "Compassion" to the modern dance critic John
Martin's "inner mimicry." Like Postlewait, however, Foster's keyword is
politics. Like Bank, her object is embodied performance. Drawing on eighteenth-century
ideas of imaginative sympathy, she substitutes vividly corporeal
practices-the precarious balance of the rope dancer, for instance, or
the bodies falling from the burning World Trade Center on September 11-
CRITICAL THEORY AND PERFORMANCE
196
for the philosophical abstractions of Adam Smith. Her idea is that the
kinesthetic sense (the infrequently acknowledged sixth sense of somatic
position and movement) not only provides for a heightened consciousness
about the position and trajectory of one's own body, but it also allows for
imaginative identification with the motion, attitude, and fate of another's.
This sketches out both a theory of reception and the history of an idea.
Kinesthetic empathy is not transhistorical; it adapts to the contingencies of
the contemporary context, including the modern technologies of communication
that broadcast movement and mediate it. Yet at the same time,
Foster's understanding of the distinctiveness of current practices posits a
knowledge of historical movement patterns and styles, which she has established
authoritatively in Choreography and Narrative.12 Dedicated to
Hayden White, her mentor, this book shows Foster's strategy, also evident
in her essay here, of incorporating dance performance into the history of
consciousness itself as a central but heretofore undervalued trope of historical
meaning, an underexplored repertoire of embodied knowledge. Foster
also shows conclusively that although writing the history of performance,
even the most transient, is not theoretically impossible, it is impossible
without theory.
J.R.R.
NOTES
1. A. M. Nagler, A Source Book in Theatrical History (New York: Dover, 1959), ix.
2. Jacques Derrida, "Signature Event Context," in Limited Inc, trans. Samuel
Weber (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1988). See Mark Franko and
Annette Richards, "Actualizing Absence: The Pastness of Performance," in Acting
on the Past: Historical Performance Across the Disciplines, ed. Franko and Richards
(Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 2000), 1-9.
3. Nagler, Source Book, xxi. For a sympathetic account of the pioneers of theater
history, see Michael Quinn, "Theaterwissenschaft in the History of Theatre Study,"
Theatre Survey 32 (1991): 123-36. For a critique of the underlying assumptions of
Theaterwissenschaft, see Bruce A. McConachie, "Towards a Postpositivist Theatre
History," Theatre Journal 37 (1985): 465-86.
4. Diana Taylor, in The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in
the Americas (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2003), argues that "writing
has served as a strategy for repudiating and foreclosing the very embodiedness it
claims to describe" (36), too hastily dismissing the repertoire as ephemeral when,
in fact, it provides the continuity of cultural memory for many people.
5. Hayden White, Tropics of Discourse: Essays in Cultural Criticism (Baltimore:
Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978).
6. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan
Sheridan (New York: Vintage, 1979) and The History of Sexuality, vol. 1, trans.
Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage, 1980).
7. Stephen Greenblatt, "Towards a Poetics of Culture," in The New Historicism,
ed. H. Aram Veeser (New York: Routledge, 1989), 1-14. For an application of similar
principles to the history of performance, see Peter Stallybrass and Allon White,
The Politics and Poetics of Transgression (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1986).
THEATER HISTORY AND HISTORIOGRAPHY
197
8. Walter Benjamin, "Theses on the Philosophy of History," in Illuminations,
ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken, 1969), 255.
9. Peggy Phelan, "Uncovered Rectums: Disinterring the Rose Theatre," in
Mourning Sex: Performing Public Memory (London: Routledge, 1997), 73-94.
so. Mike Pearson and Michael Shanks, Theatre/Archaeology (London: Routledge,
200ool), 61.
11. Paul Ricoeur, Freud and Philosophy: An Essay on Interpretation, trans. Dennis
Savage (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1970), 32-36.
12. Susan Leigh Foster, Choreography and Narrative: Ballet's Staging of Story and
Desire (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996).
Theater Events and Their Political
Contexts: A Problem in the Writing of
Theater History
Thomas Postlewait
The primary task for all historians, once they have finished their research
and begun to write, is to describe and interpret the relations between
events and their possible contexts. The abiding problem is to specify not
only the defining traits of any context but also the causal features that contribute
to the making of the event. With this task in mind, I want to consider
how theater historians use the concept of politics to define and explain
the relations between a theater event and its conditions.1 Of course,
this topic is far too complex to cover in a single essay, so I will illustrate
the problem with one specific event: the 1624 production of Thomas Middleton's
A Game at Chess, the anti-Spanish play staged in London at the
Globe Theatre by the King's Men. The production took place from August
6 (Friday) to August 16 (Monday), nine continuous days, not counting the
two Sundays when theaters were closed.2 It was the longest-running play
during the English Renaissance. This play, which T. S. Eliot called "that
perfect piece of literary political art," can serve as a touchstone for an
analysis of the relation between theater and politics (or event and context).3
1 also take it up because, as R. C. Bald noted, "more is known about
A Game at Chesse [sic] than about any other pre-Restoration play."4
Middleton's play is a political satire, written in the allegorical mode.
The allegory is based upon the game of chess. The play pits the white
players, representing England and Protestantism, against the black players,
representing Spain and the Catholic Church. The White King is James
I, the Black King is Philip IV of Spain. The white players also feature the
White Knight, who is Charles, the Prince of Wales (who would become
king in 1625), and the White Duke, who is George Villiers, the Duke of
Buckingham. Buckingham was the lord admiral and the "favorite" adviser
of King James I. In addition, the white pieces feature a treasonous
White King's Pawn who represents the Earl of Middlesex (Lionel Cranfield).5
Middlesex had served as lord treasurer and advocated a policy of
accommodation with the Spanish, especially the marriage of Prince
Charles to Donna Maria, the Infanta of Spain.6 Another key character is
the vulnerable White Queen's Pawn, who represents not only Protestant
purity and innocence under the assault of Jesuit deviousness and lust but
also the Protestant forces in the Palatinate region of the German states that
the Hapsburg armies, both Austrian and Spanish, had recently invaded.
The major characters among the black pieces include the "Fat
Bishop" who represents Marc Antonio de Dominis, archbishop of Spalatro.
When de Dominis came to England in 1616 he had converted to
198
THEATER EVENTS AND THEIR POLITICAL CONTEXTS
199
Protestantism and was taken up by James, who put him in charge of the
Hospital of the Savoy, which he administered with severe austerity. But in
1622, seeing opportunities for himself in the papal state, he reverted to
Catholicism and returned to Italy. In consequence, by 1624 he was despised
by many people in England, inside and outside of the government.
The dominant black player, however, is the Black Knight, a Machiavellian
figure who represents the Spanish envoy Don Diego Sarmiento
de Acufa (1567-1626), who became conde de Gondomar in 1617.7 Between
1613-18 and 1620-22 Gondomar was the resident Spanish ambassador
in England, exerting considerable influence over James and his foreign
policy.8 From 1618 forward Gondomar had encouraged a marriage
between Prince Charles and the Spanish Infanta. Appealing to James's desire
to keep England out of the continental wars, Gondomar tried to manipulate
James into a marriage agreement that would, at the very least,
avoid military battle against the Spanish troops in the German states and
the Netherlands. Gondomar even hoped that eventually England, with a
Catholic queen and the possibility of Catholic children, might one day return
to the Catholic fold. James, for his part, hoped that a marriage agreement
would induce Spain to withdraw its troops from the German states
where his son-in-law, Frederick of Bohemia, and his only daughter, Elizabeth,
were struggling unsuccessfully to defend Protestant causes.
Most Protestants in England feared and hated Gondomar. They
were also opposed to the marriage negotiation. Indeed, in February 1623
when Prince Charles and Buckingham went to Madrid in order to negotiate
a marriage contract and to convince Spain to withdraw its military
troops, James faced growing resistance to his foreign policy. Even key
members of the Privy Council expressed their concerns over Catholic influence
on James and their anger about the military assaults on the Protestant
states in Germany. Thus, when Prince Charles and Buckingham returned
from Madrid in October 1623 without a Spanish bride, the country
exploded in public celebrations. Bonfires, church bells, and large crowds
greeted Charles along his route from Portsmouth to London. The city became
a festival of happy citizens, shouting "Long live the Prince of
Wales." Tables of food and wine lined the streets, candles burned in windows,
and over one hundred "blazing piles were counted in the short distance
between St. Paul's and London Bridge."9
Charles and Buckingham immediately shifted to the anti-Spanish
cause, thereby aligning themselves with the prowar campaign both inside
and outside of the central government. Their new position helped to galvanize
the Parliament, which James had called into session in February
1624. In May 1624, after several months of struggle between Parliament
and the king (with Charles and Buckingham often acting as mediators),
James agreed to support a war effort if Parliament voted him a series of
subsidies to pay for both the war and his debt-ridden government. Thus,
the Spanish influence on James and his foreign policy subsided. For a few
months during the summer of 1624 the country was in a frenzy of antiSpanish
campaigns and prowar preparations. When the Earl of Oxford,
CRITICAL THEORY AND PERFORMANCE
200
Henry de Vere, and the Earl of Southampton, Henry Wriothesley, led the
newly formed army through London streets in July (a few weeks before
the production of A Game at Chess), the city erupted with celebrations almost
as exuberant as those that had greeted Charles nine months earlier
upon his return from Spain.10
Quite explicitly, then, A Game at Chess represented current events of
1623 and 1624. Despite the fact that James had issued an edict that forbade
stage representations of living royalty and governmental advisers, the
King's Men obtained approval of the play from Henry Herbert, Master of
the Revels.11 James knew nothing about the plans to produce the play,
which was staged when he was out of town (on his annual summer
progress to country estates). Observers at the time had no doubt about the
political significance of the play and production. John Woolley, writing
the day after it opened, was amazed by how explicit it was in displaying
the "devilish plots and devices" of Count Gondomar. Woolley commented
that "assuredly had so much been done the last year, they had
every man been hanged for it." Sir George Lowe, two days after the production
opened, noted that the play "describes Gondomar and all the
Spanish proceedings very boldly and broadly, so that it is thought that it
will be called in and the parties punished."12 In a dispatch to Madrid, the
Spanish ambassador, offended by the satire, described the concluding
scene of the production: "The Prince of Wales [as the White Knight] ...
heartily beat and kicked . . . Gondomar into Hell, which consisted of a
great hole with hideous figures."13
In its nine days of performance, A Game at Chess attracted at least onetenth
of London's population. Many people were turned away each day,
for the playhouse was packed an hour before performance.14 The play
probably could have run longer, but when James found out about the production-because
of an official complaint by the Spanish ambassador extraordinary,
Don Carlos Coloma-he ordered the closing of the playhouse.
He also demanded an inquiry into the whole matter. Traveling with the
king, Sir Edward Conway, secretary of state, wrote to the London-based
members of the Privy Council on August 12. He expressed the king's displeasure
and charged the council members to begin an investigation:
His Maiestie hath receaued information from the Spanish Ambassador
of a very scandalous Comedie acted publikly by the Kings Players,
Wherein they take the boldnes, and presumption in a rude, and
dishonorable fashion to represent on the Stage the persons of his
Maiestie, the Kinge of Spaine, the Conde de Gondomar, the Bishop of
Spalato, &c. His Maiestie remembers well there was a commaundment
and restraint giuen against the representinge of anie moderne
Christian kings in those Stage-playes, and wonders much both at the
boldnes nowe taken by that Companie, and alsoe that it hath ben permitted
to bee soe acted, and that the first notice thereof should bee
brought to him, by a forraine Ambassador, while soe manie Ministers
of his owne are thereaboutes and cannot but haue heard of it.1s
THEATER EVENTS AND THEIR POLITICAL CONTEXTS
201
Conway also wrote to Ambassador Coloma, assuring him that "justice
will be done in this matter with the proper publicity."16
James ordered "severe punishment" of the guilty parties.17 The stage
production apparently surprised and angered him, but the evidence does
not clarify which aspect of the event most concerned him: the subject matter
of the play, the stage representation of living royalty and governmental
figures, the playwright's audacity in ignoring edicts against such representations
and topics, the audacity of his own King's Men in staging the
play, the Spanish complaint and his need to address it, the embarrassment
or frustration that he felt over his own theater company being the guilty
parties, the possibility that he would have to face more public controversy
over Spain, or the need to contend with yet another political and religious
controversy over foreign relations. Any one or all of these factors might
have contributed to his demand that those responsible should be punished.
One thing was obvious: he was frustrated that his own governmental
ministers had failed to keep him informed.
The Privy Council questioned various people, including the players
of the King's Men and Henry Herbert, who had licensed the play. The
players swore that "they added or varied from the same nothing at all."18
The Globe production, they insisted, was based upon the text that the
Master of the Revels had approved. As evidence, they gave the Privy
Council the manuscript of the play that had been signed by Herbert.
(There were actually several manuscripts circulating at the time, so what
Herbert approved was likely an earlier, shorter version of the production
text.) In its report to the king, the council rebuked Herbert, but then left to
the king the tasks of reading the play, questioning Herbert, and administering
punishment. As far as we can tell, no such examination of Herbert
occurred. Whatever the case, he continued in his office without interruption.
And the King's Men, though restrained from playing for ten days, returned
to business as usual by the end of August.19 Middleton himself apparently
went into hiding. It's possible that he was tracked down and
imprisoned temporarily, but the evidence is quite sketchy. Basically, no
one received any significant punishment, despite assurances to the Spanish
ambassador that justice would be done, with publicity.
So, besides the obvious political satire, what is the political context
for this event? What did it mean to the various people involved? How and
why did it occur, given the censorship powers (and obsessions) of the
Crown? The standard explanation is that Herbert licensed the play on
June 12, despite its representation of royalty, because he was sympathetic
to its message. He did not identify any "dangerous matter" in the manuscript.
But we do not have any evidence that he was motivated by political
considerations. Indeed, we must wonder why Herbert would open
himself to the possibility of the king's anger and punishment, perhaps endangering
his own position and income. He had just taken over as Master
of Revels a year before, when James had knighted him. By licensing the
play, did he make a political mistake or a political calculation?
Various theater scholars, believing in the possibility of a political
CRITICAL THEORY AND PERFORMANCE
202
intrigue, have speculated that Herbert was urged on by the anti-Spanish
faction in the Privy Council.20 If so, perhaps he felt that he had the protection
of key people at court, including his distant relative William Herbert,
third Earl of Pembroke, who was one of the richest men in England and
held the powerful position of lord chamberlain.21 Also, though we have
no direct evidence, Henry Herbert might have had the support of the
Duke of Buckingham, and even the tacit sanction of Prince Charles. For
example, John Woolley, in a letter to his friend William Trumbull (dated
August 20, 1624), speculates that the prince and duke "were all loath to
have it forbidden, and by report laughed heartily at it."22 Both the prince
and Buckingham are represented in positive terms in the play. If any of
these key people supported and protected the Master of the Revels, the
playwright, and the King's Men, this could explain the light punishments
for all involved. So the argument goes.
Andrew Gurr, for example, argues that "the King's Men were disloyal
to James in 1624 with A Game at Chess, when they adopted the court
party line favoured by William Herbert, Lord Chamberlain and third earl
of Pembroke.... The anti-Spanish faction at court must have backed the
play and protected Herbert as well as the company from its consequences."23
But as Gurr acknowledges, the Earl of Pembroke was increasingly
opposed to the Duke of Buckingham, whose growing political power
over James had begun to displease the lord chamberlain (141). So why
would Pembroke support a play that celebrated Buckingham's triumph
over the Spanish? Gurr admits that the historian Thomas Cogswell makes
"a very strong case against any direct court role in the play's production"
(143). And Gurr acknowledges that "on paper, of course, [which is] the
only extant form of evidence, nobody was willing to admit that they had
been directly involved in the plot" (144-45). Perhaps, then, it might be prudent
to modify "must have backed the play" with a more tentative "may
have backed the play."
In contrast to Gurr's speculation, Jerzy Limon makes a case for court
intrigues that approached the status of a grand conspiracy. Although
Limon acknowledges that the evidence is sketchy or nonexistent, he argues
for "a consciously contrived campaign, initiated and sponsored by a
group of politicians, whose goal it was to use all means available to win
the support of both nobility and the commons."24 Specifically, Limon
credits the Duke of Buckingham and Prince Charles with orchestrating
the "war party," the theaters, the playwrights, and the Protestant pamphleteers.
Given this control from the top, "the players and playwrights
felt secure enough to engage themselves in what seemed to be anti-royalist
campaign initiated by the new court party of Prince Charles and the
Duke of Buckingham."25 Thus, behind the scenes, Charles and Buckingham
instigated and carefully controlled the production of A Game at Chess.
This circumstantial argument, freed from the need of collaborating evidence,
allows Limon to posit that the playwright and players were subservient
to a powerful faction of like-minded people within the central
government.
THEATER EVENTS AND THEIR POLITICAL CONTEXTS
203
Yet it is also possible to argue, by contrast, that A Game at Chess reveals
the politics of subversion rather than the politics of control. That is,
the event reveals the supposed subversive aims of the playwright and
players who challenged the central government. Margot Heinemann, for
example, has claimed that A Game at Chess served as a catalyst to the "oppositional
politics" of the court and Parliament.26 She contends that "in its
political and religious radicalism," the play goes "well beyond what its
noble patrons would normally have countenanced."27 A Game at Chess,
like a handful of other plays in 1623-24, was "critical of the policy of the
crown," and should be seen as nothing less than "a turning-point in relations
between the government and the nation" (237). It thus fueled "a
much longer post-Reformation crisis of authority, in which the theatres
help to form the 'mentalities' to which they will later appeal, not only at
court and among the political elites but more widely among London citizen
audiences" (238).
Moreover, the anti-Catholic plays at the theaters in the 162os contributed
to the subsequent Puritan resistance to Charles I, who would lose
his head twenty-five years later. By so arguing, however, Heinemann is
making one of the common fallacies in argument: post hoc, ergo propter hoc.
Despite these conjectures, it is impossible to establish a cause-and-effect
relationship between A Game at Chess and the beheading of Charles. The
"turning-point" that she discovers is located in her assumptions, not in
the evidence. Nor is it possible to demonstrate that Middleton's satire had
any influence upon political developments in the 163os and early 164os.
But this expansive argument allows us to believe that the Renaissance theater,
capable of shaping beliefs and guiding actions, was a decisive political
force in the era.
Heinemann's argument flounders because (1) she presents a reductive
and inaccurate conception of "Puritan" ideology and identity; (2) depends
upon an overly neat formula that reduces 1624 politics to a battle
between royal authority and Puritan opposition; (3) misreads or ignores
the historical evidence, which suggests that a number of contending political
agendas were operating at the time; and (4) wishes to grant to theatrical
activities a political influence on governmental policy and public
beliefs that cannot be demonstrated conclusively.28
Not surprisingly, several scholars, including T. H. Howard-Hill,
Richard Dutton, and Thomas Cogswell, reject conspiratorial and subversive
conjectures.29 In his study of the Office of the Revels, Dutton writes:
"While we cannot rule out the possibility of a conspiracy behind A Game at
Chess, there is no evidence for it, and it remains an unnecessary conjecture.
The play itself is really no more inflammatory than many others of the period;
only the circumstances of its presentation, heightened by the 'personnating
of Gondomar,' made it so conspicuous and created a furore."30
T. H. Howard-Hill, who has spent a fair part of his scholarly career
on the study and editing of this play, is even less committed to any argument
about the conspiratorial or oppositional nature of the play and production.
He argues that there are three levels of allegory in the play: moral,
CRITICAL THEORY AND PERFORMANCE
204
religious, and political, and that the political is the least significant. "In
short, A Game at Chess is more powerful as a moral-religious allegory related
loosely to contemporary political circumstances than as an allegorisation
of specific political events."31 Howard-Hill's dismissal of political
meanings may be too guarded, for the Spanish ambassador's response
demonstrates that the contemporary references were perceived as politically
insulting. Moreover, political motives and religious motives cannot
be neatly separated into two distinct aspects of behavior in an era of religious
wars. Still, Howard-Hill does put us on guard against court intrigues
and conspiracies. And he reminds us that by the summer of 1624 the whole
nation, including James, had taken an anti-Spanish, prowar position. The
play was basically in accord with the new national policy.
What, then, are we to think? Here we have the most famous and important
case of a political drama in Renaissance England, but we cannot
agree on even the basic features of the political context for the production,
its reception, and subsequent events. Indeed, we cannot even agree that it
had a specific political context. The evidence is open to a wide range of
interpretations. It is possible, of course, to construct the political context on
the basis of a series of suppositions, but these kinds of arguments are held
together with standard rhetorical tropes and weasel words ("it seems
likely," "it is plausible that," "surely they intended," "perhaps," "possibly,"
"this would seem to suggest," "it must have been possible," "it is not coincidental
that," "common sense dictates that," and so on). No historian, of
course, can avoid qualifying phrases; necessarily, a historian negotiates
between matters of possibility and plausibility. But when tentative propositions
and conjectures transform quickly into apparent facts and proofs,
historical analysis becomes suspect.
Stalemate? Should we throw up our hands in defeat? Assuming that
we cannot prove court involvement and intrigue, where, then, should we
locate the political aspects of this famous play and production? Should we
abandon our contextual methods of constructing the event, and instead
return to the play itself? Obviously, the play and its production carried
topical references that spectators easily recognized, given the political situation
at the times. It is quite appropriate, then and now, to identify the
political references (e.g., Buckingham, Count Gondomar) and to interpret
the satiric purpose of the political themes (e.g., anti-Spanish and antiCatholic
messages). But this kind of topical analysis fails to satisfy most
scholars today. We insist that the concept of "politics," when applied to
theatrical events, encompasses more than mere topical references and motifs.
The political context extends beyond such indexing.
Unfortunately, most of the scholarship of the last few decades on
"early modern" theater in London constructs the political context in terms
of either containment or contestation, subservience or subversion.32 The
texts, actions, and events of the era achieve their significance within either
the ideological practices, aims, and discourses of the controlling rulers
and social elites or the transgressive tactics and oppositional strategies of
the theater artists and their audiences. Whether the topic is public or court
THEATER EVENTS AND THEIR POLITICAL CONTEXTS
205
performance, Shakespeare or Jonson, censorship or cross-dressing, the
working formula for explaining the operation of politics gets reduced, far
too often, to a basic binary of centralized power versus selective (even
cunning but usually inconsequential) modes of subversive resistance.33
Surely, though, politics can be understood in a more complex manner
than these popular ideas on the dynamics of power. For example,
whatever one's interpretive idea for constructing the overall context, the
following sixteen factors that contributed to the politics of 1624 in England
would need to be considered:
1. The Duke of Buckingham's campaign to hold onto power. After his
rapid rise as James's favorite, Buckingham carried out a series of
political moves to consolidate and expand his power, including
his new position as lord admiral. For example, in 1624, following
the failure of the marriage negotiations, he shifted to the antiSpanish
faction, for reasons of political cunning as well as commitment.
Likewise, his simultaneous alignments with Charles
and James called for great political skill.34
2. Prince Charles's growing sense of power. Upon his return from
Madrid, the young prince began to assert himself against James,
his father; he emerged as a decisive voice in the government in
late 1623 and 1624.
3. Prince Charles's anger, even his sense of humiliation. Charles was
frustrated and embarrassed by the failed marriage negotiations
in Madrid in 1623; his pride was wounded, so he needed to
demonstrate to the English and Spanish that he was more than a
political pawn.
4. Prince Charles's concern for his sister. Worried over the fate of his
sister Elizabeth and her husband in the Palatinate wars, Charles
used the prowar issues and factions in 1624 to address, perhaps
relieve, his sense of obligation and care. Personal feelings merged
with political events, if not religious commitments. His religious
beliefs were less clearly articulated than his political agendas at
this time.
5. The maneuvers of prowar aristocrats. A group of powerful prowar
aristocrats, including Pembroke, Belfast, Nottingham, Oxford, and
Southampton, played a major role in the changing politics of the
early 162os. James had held them at bay between 1621 and 1623,
and even imprisoned Oxford and Southampton after the 1621 Parliament,
but by 1624 they had been released from the Tower and
had reasserted themselves in matters of national policy.
6. The decreasing power of the pro-Spanish faction within the Privy Council.
The miscalculations and lessening power of a group of Privy
Council leaders who had been supporters of the Spanish policy,
including the Earl of Arundel (Thomas Howard, who was a
Catholic) and the Earl of Middlesex (Lionel Cranfield, who had
advanced under the patronage of Buckingham but had committed
CRITICAL THEORY AND PERFORMANCE
206
himself to an accord with Spain), opened the door for the prowar
factions and for the shifting aims of Buckingham and Charles.
7. The general collapse of the Howard family. The Howards had gained
great power after the death in 1612 of Robert Cecil, Earl of Salisbury
and paramount statesman for James. As architects of James's
governmental policy, the Howards controlled the Privy Council
for several years. Henry Howard, Earl of Northampton, served as
lord of privy seal; Charles Howard, Lord of Effingham and Earl
of Nottingham, served as lord admiral until 1619; and Thomas
Howard, first Earl of Suffolk, served as Lord chamberlain (1603-
1614) and lord treasurer (1614-18). They favored an alliance with
Spain and opposed parliamentary campaigns for the Protestant
causes. But because of corruption, incompetence, and faulty political
decisions, they failed to halt the rise of Buckingham, who had
displaced them by 1624.
8. The patronage system of rewards and favors. This reward system
was distributed not only by James but also by the various governmental
leaders, such as Buckingham. Almost anything could
be brokered. Throughout the reign of James this patronage system
of honors, titles, trade monopolies, offices, and pensions
determined many of the political alignments and obligations,
thereby setting up a political world of clients and a network of
corruption.35
9. The new assertiveness of the House of Commons. Under the leadership
of such people as Sir Edward Coke and Thomas Wentworth,
the Commons was able to unify as "an overwhelmingly
Protestant assembly on an issue involving religious prejudice
and national honor."36 In the process, the Commons, in uneasy
partnership with the House of Lords, forced the issue with
James on subsidies and war.
so. The political leadership of the House of Lords. The Lords was guided
by key members of the Privy Council, including Henry Wriothesley,
Earl of Southampton, and William Herbert, Earl of Pembroke.
They were able to control and direct political factions
within the divided government, thereby slowly shifting James
away from Spain and the pro-Spanish advocates.
11. The anti-Catholic and anti-Spanish constituencies around the country.
Throughout the reign of James, various constituencies around
the country were strongly anti-Spanish and anti-Catholic. The
feelings were strong; indeed, the growing support for intervention
in the Palatinate, in support of the Protestant princes and
against the Hapsburg Catholics, was at its highest emotional
pitch in 1624.
12. The loss of power by the Spanish envoys. Although Count Gondomar
had been very influential in his dealings with James, the Spanish
envoys in 1623 and 1624 began to lose their suggestive power
over the English court. For example, in May 1624 the Spanish en-
THEATER EVENTS AND THEIR POLITICAL CONTEXTS
207
voys attempted to slander Buckingham so that James would
doubt his motives and loyalty, but their charges against him failed
to convince James. With that, the Spanish envoys lost much of
their substantial influence over James and his policies.
13. The vociferous rhetoric of the pamphleteers. In 1623 and 1624, after
years of tight control on publications, the pamphlets began to
flow off the presses. Pamphleteers such as Thomas Scott, John
Gee, and John Reynolds not only inflamed the "godly" congregations
who supported the Palatinate venture but also supplied
vital information, ideas, and rhetoric for the growing anti-Spanish
sentiment in Parliament and the country. For example, Gee's
anti-Spanish The Foot out of the Snare sold over five thousand
copies in March and April 1624. It was followed by a second edition
in early May. Then by late May he published New Shreds of
the Old Snare, which also sold quite well. At this time a "culture
of slander" spread through English society in speeches, gossip,
pamphlets, plays, and books, filling-even overwhelming-the
courts with trials for libel, defamation, sedition, and blasphemy.37
The systems of control, such as press censorship, could
not silence the many voices.
14. The pulpits as political and religious forums. Inside and outside of
London, the pulpits, including the pulpit at court, served as
communicative centers for commentary on political issues and
national policy. Various sermons, some of highly inflamed rhetoric,
presented critiques of James's Spanish policy of neutrality
and pushed for a Protestant confrontation with Catholic powers.
A number of sermons focused on the religious war in the Palatinate.
Despite royal proclamations about what should and
should not be said, the pulpits were often beyond the control of
licensing and direct government supervision. Even governmental
reprimands of preachers for venturing into explicit political
criticism failed to curtail the sermons.
15. The distribution of political ideas and controversies. By 1623 political
ideas and controversies were spread not only by the printing industry
and book market, which continued to grow, but also by
the burgeoning school system that had created an educated gentry
who actively debated political issues and increasingly involved
themselves in politics, both locally and in London.38
16. The thousands of alehouses. In England alehouses were everywhere,
in great number. One existed for every one hundred people. In
these alehouses, pamphlets were read aloud and discussions
poured forth on current events. The alehouses provided forums
for commentary on the collapse of the Spanish marriage, the daily
debates in the Commons during the spring of 1624, the news from
the Palatinate, the gossip about governmental divisions and political
struggles, and the new fascination with both Prince Charles
and Buckingham as harbingers of England's destiny.
CRITICAL THEORY AND PERFORMANCE
208
Politics had many voices, many agendas, and many locations. From the
Privy Council to the alehouses and pulpits, voices were raised in dialogue
and dispute.
And at the center of all of this activity the king tried to rule. Pushed
and pulled by the contending factions and factors, he still attempted to hold
to and carry out his political agendas. So any catalog of political conditions
must return to James, who, despite his age, maintained a fairly vigorous
role in governance. At times the events seemed to control him. Yet he also
continued to direct many aspects of the foreign policy. And though the plan
for a Spanish marriage had failed (for many reasons, including the politics
in Madrid and Rome), he was soon able to negotiate an alliance with the
French-in part because of the new power behind the French throne, Cardinal
Richelieu. This alliance would culminate in 1625 with Charles marrying
Henrietta Maria, the French sister of Louis XIII. Despite the Protestant
nationalism in England, James was still able to negotiate a marriage to a
Catholic-a marriage that Charles accepted, whatever his misgivings. Of all
things, then, England's political scene was being controlled, at least in part,
by a dead man. Thirteen years after the death of Cecil, his cunning policy
of playing France against Spain was still guiding the country.
Constructing Contexts for Theatrical Events
As the preceding catalog suggests, A Game at Chess was hardly a unique
political event in 1624; it was tied to these various conditions that contributed
to the sociopolitical environment of the government. Moreover,
the participating individuals and parties of 1624 were motivated by issues
and commitments that often pulled in opposing directions. Within both
the Privy Council and Parliament, for example, people were divided, anti
and pro, on various aspects of the political issues, from religion, marriage,
and war to trade matters, taxes and levies, and foreign alliances. And
everyone was concerned about the rising power of Buckingham. So, however
we construct the sociopolitical context and its many components
parts, we must see that theater events occur within (or in relationship to)
these situations and conditions, from the psychology of Charles to the activities
in the alehouses. At the same time, I want to suggest that these sociopolitical
conditions-complex and contradictory as they are-provide
but one of several possible settings and registers for the politics of theatrical
events. Politics, defined as kinds of actions, attitudes, events, and
ideas, can be assigned to a number of locations or facets of theatrical
events. I therefore want to suggest that when we attempt to construct the
contexts for theatrical events, such as A Game at Chess, we need to acknowledge
that the political dimensions of these events can be discovered
in any and all of the following ten contextual locations.
Scripts and Texts
Politics can be located in the idiolect of each specific manuscript and published
text. In the case of A Game at Chess we have three published quartos
THEATER EVENTS AND THEIR POLITICAL CONTEXTS
209
of the play. Quarto 1 was published in London (1624/25). Quarto 2 is a
reprint of quarto 1, but quarto 3 (1624/25), published in Leiden (a Protestant
stronghold), is a new edition, based upon a manuscript different from
the one used for quarto 1. Besides the published quartos, there are six
extant manuscripts, with one written in Middleton's own hand and another
partially so. Three manuscripts are in the hand of Ralph Crane, the
scrivener of the King's Men. He and Middleton had worked together before,
so we can assume that Crane was a trusted scribe for preparing a text
for production and publication. And yet, as T. H. Howard-Hill notes,
Crane removed some of the sexual and scatological slander that Middleton
had directed at Jesuits.39 Richard Dutton also points out that Crane,
though "extremely professional" in bringing order out of Middleton's
manuscripts, "became an editor of the text, as much as a copyist, and was
not heavily constrained by considerations of what Middleton wrote."40
These idiolects in the manuscripts and the quartos suggest that Middleton
and Crane viewed the political meanings and functions of the play differently.
Also, the manuscripts reveal that the play was changing and developing
during 1624.
The earliest of the six manuscripts, probably written between March
and June 1624, is 310 lines shorter than quarto 3. Among other things, it
lacks the character of the Fat Bishop, who represented Marco Antonio de
Dominus, former archbishop of Spalatro. This character, likely added during
rehearsal, was probably written to accommodate the acting skills of
William Rowley, a popular actor. He was also the coauthor with Middleton
of The Changeling, two years earlier. Perhaps Rowley contributed to
the revision, or at least parts of it (yet another idiolect to be investigated).
So we have not one but nine manifestations of the play, each of which reveals
idiosyncratic political intentions and meanings.41 The manuscripts
and published quartos thus provide not only possible registers of Middleton's
shifting political tactics and aims over several months but also signs
of additional contributors who expressed their own political perspectives.
Part of the challenge we face is to figure out which of these versions were
approved by the Master of the Revels. In turn, we want to trace the changing
political agendas and contributions that emerge with each version of
the play.
Intentions of Individuals
Politics can be located in the intentions, aims, decisions, and actions of the
individuals or agents who produce the performance text. In the theater
we are always concerned with not only the playwright but also the players,
whose particular traits, choices, purposes, values, needs, dispositions,
projects, and programs contribute to the meaning of the production (and
each performance). Because the play was licensed by Henry Herbert,
Master of the Revels, on June 12, but not performed until August 6, it is
quite likely that some of the revisions in the manuscripts and the quartos
(e.g., development of the Fat Bishop as a significant character), reveal contributions
of the players, as Howard-Hill insists: "There is no reason to
CRITICAL THEORY AND PERFORMANCE
210
doubt that the significant wrenching of the play from the playwright's
fundamental conception was inspired by the theatrical company after
Middleton had shown them his early script."42
Besides the addition of the substantial role for Rowley, the players
created a series of visual codes that added specific political meanings to
the production. For example, as Don Carlos Coloma noted in an ambassadorial
letter back to Spain, the players took care to dress the Black King
to look like the young Philip IV: "the king of blacks has easily been taken
for our lord the King, because of his youth, dress, and other details."43 Just
as the paintings of VelAzquez (e.g., the ones in the Prado and the Frick
Collection) capture and express aspects of young Philip (including the infamous
chin), so the actor who portrayed the king articulated his own version
of Spanish pomp and power. Likewise, great effort went into representing
Count Gondomar, the Black Knight. Clearly, Don Carlos Coloma
was responding to the politics of impersonation and representation, not
simply to the politics of the dramatic text itself.
The nature of performance, with the necessary presence of actors before
the audience, can be seen as part of the history of the body.44 In recent
years historians have begun to pay attention to the material body and its
place within specific systems of cultural meanings, including political
meanings. For example, scholars of Renaissance theater have been especially
interested in matters of gender representation and cross-dressing on
the stage. Theater, of course, invites spectators to respond to the possible
iconic, indexical, and symbolic signs of costuming, scenery and properties,
lighting, and acting style, as John Holles's letter of August 11, 1624,
reveals, "one of the white pawns, with an under black doublet signifying
a Spanish heart, betrays his party to their advantage."45 Clearly, some
spectators were quite astute in their ability to read the symbolic codes of
costuming for their political meanings.
In the case of A Game at Chess, we can discover political signs in not
only the black and white costuming but also the stage properties and gestures
that were used to identify Count Gondomar. The title page of
quarto 1, which represents the Fat Bishop, the Black Knight (Gondomar),
and the White Knight (Buckingham), provides a possible guide to some
of the costuming (though we must read this iconography carefully, relating
it to other evidence such as descriptions in letters). The players made
substantial effort to represent major figures accurately (e.g., the cut of
their beards). In addition, the players enhanced the beginning of act 5,
which was staged for a special entrance of the Black Knight (Count Gondomar).
The members of the King's Men had acquired or replicated both
the special litter and the chair of Count Gondomar, the former Spanish
ambassador, who suffered from anal fistula-abnormal abscesses in the
bowels.46 During his stays in London, many people had seen him in his
special chair, with a hole cut into the seat.47 Also, this chair is represented
on the title page of Thomas Scott's The Second Part of Vox Populi, published
and widely read in 1624. The hole in the seat is clearly visible. For
Scott and his readers, Gondomar's fistula had become the emblem of the
THEATER EVENTS AND THEIR POLITICAL CONTEXTS
211
man. The pamphleteer John Reynolds also identified Gondomar with his
fistula.
So, the players, by representing Gondomar in such accurate detail,
including his bodily ailment and his recognizable gestures, added special
political poignancy to the satire, over and beyond what the dramatic text
itself represented. Textual references, such as jokes about "buttocks" and
"flies" in act 2, were thus played up. And in act 2 Middleton had the Fat
Bishop describe the Black Knight as the "fistula of Europe, whose disease
I undertook to cure." At the conclusion of the play, when the players
brought his litter and chair on stage for the first time, the White Knight
proceeded to strip the Black Knight of his devilish hypocrisies. Then the
actors playing the Black Knight and the other black pieces were herded
and kicked into a large black bag that appeared on stage as a kind of
Hell's Mouth for the Spanish. In this manner, the Black Knight, "the
mightiest Machivael-politician / That e'er the devil hatched" (5.3.204-5)
was theatrically disemboweled-to the delight of thousands of spectators.
Thus the visual codes of the production added their own political meanings
to the text. Gondomar's fistula represented not only a flaw in his
character but also the supposed moral corruption of Spain, the Jesuits,
and the Catholic Church.
Traditions of Drama and Theater
Politics can be located in the conventions, traditions, canons, codes, styles,
norms, genres, and recurring patterns of drama and theater that any specific
text or performance draws upon and uses. That is, each text, besides
expressing an idiolect, is also written in an intertextual grammar and syntax.
A Game at Chess is one of several allegorical plays of the era that supported
the Protestant cause and attacked Roman Catholicism. Earlier in
the century the series of "Elect Nation" plays championed British Protestantism
against Catholicism, the Jesuits, and the Hapsburgs in Rome and
Spain. And at the time of the struggle in the Palatinate, other plays spoke
to these matters (e.g., Massinger's The Bondman). In order to understand
the special nature of the politics of A Game at Chess, we need to see how it
is both similar to and different from these other plays and performances,
which provided subgenres of conventions and meanings. In turn, various
other plays and productions of the era provided codes and conventions
that helped to construct the political context for this specific production.
Nationalist and Religious Campaigns
Politics can be located in the recurring nationalist and religious campaigns
that characterized not only the generic features of plays such as A Game at
Chess but also other kinds of entertainment, including masques and lord
mayor's shows that took up the politics of the day. For example, the popular
lord mayor's shows of both Thomas Middleton and John Webster appealed
to local and national sentiments. Thus, in 1617 Middleton made fun
CRITICAL THEORY AND PERFORMANCE
212
of the Spanish in The Triumph of Honour and Industry, which was performed
for the lord mayor's inauguration.48 And in 1624 John Webster's lord
mayor's show celebrated English sea power-at just the same time that the
lord admiral, Buckingham, was visiting the fleet and pushing for a show
of sea power against Spain. Of course, the defeat of the Spanish Armada in
1588 provided justification and themes for these political acts. Likewise,
Ben Jonson's masque Neptune's Triumph at the Return of Albion, though canceled
at the last minute, celebrated the return of Prince Charles to England,
after the failed negotiation for the Spanish marriage. Both Prince Charles
and the Duke of Buckingham "took a keen interest in the preparations for
Neptune's Triumph . . . , Jonson's Twelfth Night masque for 1623-24."49 Despite
their busy schedules after returning from Spain, they rehearsed their
roles in the masque over a number of days. But just before performance,
James insisted on the removal of certain anti-Spanish lines. Then the performance
was abruptly canceled, officially because of James's illness, but
most likely because of complaints from the Spanish ambassador. A few
months later, though, Jonson successfully produced another masque, the
Masque of Owls, which was performed for Prince Charles at Kenilworth on
August 19 (three days after the last performance of A Game at Chess).
Among other things, it presented a nasty satire of a Spanish scholar who
was calculating the benefits of the Spanish match. James may have been
angry about A Game at Chess, but the court was still quite receptive to antiSpanish
entertainment.
The Theater as an Organization
Politics can be located in the social and economic organization of theater
itself-its management procedures, its business practices, and its commercial
aims. Theatrical commerce included, but was not limited to, the
patronage system. Of course, it is significant that the King's Men, of all
companies, was the one to present Middleton's play. In 1624 thirteen men
ran the company as sharers, including John Heminge and Henry Condell,
the editors of the folio edition of Shakespeare's plays, published the year
before. That edition, instead of being dedicated to the king, who was the
company's patron, was dedicated to the earls of Pembroke (William Herbert)
and Montgomery (Philip Herbert). As lord chamberlain and overseer
of the Master of the Revels in 1624, Pembroke was an important figure
for the players. And he was a critic of the Spanish policy. Not
surprisingly, then, scholars have been tempted to locate the significance of
the production of A Game at Chess in the politics of patronage. But this fact,
which too easily leads us into conspiratorial arguments about political
subversion, tends to blind us to basic business practices of the London
theater companies.
The players ran a commercial enterprise. Thus, we might consider to
what extent the production, which purposefully appealed to the antiSpanish
mood of 1624, was calculated to deliver a quick profit for the players.
John Woolley reports in a letter of August 11 that "the Players looseth
THEATER EVENTS AND THEIR POLITICAL CONTEXTS
213
no time, nor forbeareth to make hay while the Sun shyneth, acting it every
day without any intermission and it is thought they have already got near
a thousand pound by it."5o This substantial profit agrees with other calculations
at the time that the players were taking in between one and two
hundred pounds a performance. Thus, each day they were getting ten to
twenty times what they were paid for a court performance-motive
enough for the venture. Patronage was all well and good, but it delivered
only a fraction of the income of the theater companies. So publishing
Shakespeare's plays or staging a play on a hot topic paid the bills and provided
the profit, thereby satisfying the politics of economic self-interest.
Social Organizations External to the Theater
Politics can be located in the social, economic, and political organization
of the society itself, outside of the theater-that is, in the communal, national,
and international systems of governance that define and order
human activities. As I have pointed out in my earlier catalog of sixteen sociopolitical
factors that operated in England alone, the idea of politics
should not be reduced to a singular, hegemonic version of centralized
power and control. Nor should our analysis be limited to the politics of
compliment and contestation. Even if we focus on the specific activities
and decrees of the national government, we need to recognize that the political
situation was constructed out of the motives, ideas, and activities of
the various people in the court, the Parliament, town, and country. Even
when some people were aligned on one aspect of the political agenda,
they were often moving in different directions from one another on other
aspects. Thus, the court factions, in and beyond the Privy Council, were
not only divided over Spain and war in the Palatinate but also splintered
into various groups on such matters as diplomacy, military assignments,
new court appointments, the need for a parliamentary session, a possible
French marriage match, tax levies and subsidies, matters of common law,
and the licensing and censorship of the anti-Catholic pamphlets. And political
matters were even more complex and contradictory beyond the
royal center. As soon as we start to track political attitudes and practices
in such places as the booksellers' stalls in St. Paul's and the alehouses
around the country, we find various oppositional factions and ideas that
cannot be reduced to the monolithic idea of the Puritan opposition. Moreover,
the multifarious political landscape changed rapidly during the
weeks and months of 1624 and 1625, so flux and multiple perspectives defined
the situation.51
Political Discourses
Politics can be located in the available political discourses and rhetorical
styles of the era. For any writer the conventions and traditions of each form
of expression contribute to what is written and how it is written. For example,
political satire has certain recurring traits, typologies, and themes.
CRITICAL THEORY AND PERFORMANCE
214
Thus, the seemingly specific and unique aspects of a work, such as Middleton's
play or Scott's political pamphlets, may be, under closer examination,
a rather general pattern of available rhetorical discourses (e.g., the
patterns of Juvenal or Horace in Ben Jonson's satires). We need to be able
to distinguish between the particular and general discourses in order to
understand how political language achieves its levels of meaning. In the
case of A Game at Chess, the general pattern derives, at one level, from allegorical
drama, including the rich heritage of morality plays and interludes,
followed closely by the city pageants (e.g., the annual lord mayor's
shows). Middleton's audience was familiar with this heritage, which was
predominantly allegorical, so the political ideas of the play derived their
meaning and function from the conventions of the interlude, the morality
play, and the city pageants as well as from the specific political events and
historical conditions.
Beyond the discourses of dramatic genre, Middleton's play was influenced
by political tracts and sermons. The pamphlets, as Thomas Cogswell
points out, poured off the presses: "The most remarkable change in
1624 was the flood of anti-Catholic literature openly available for sale. The
major genre of theological literature, which had been conspicuous by its
absence from booksellers' stalls at the height of the Anglo-Spanish entente,
made a dramatic reappearance in 1624 both in sheer numbers and
in the virulence of the contents."52 For Cogswell, the production of the
play is to be understood as part of the expansive pamphlet rhetoric of
1624. Because Middleton draws directly upon the pamphleteers for
speeches in his play, the rhetoric of play and pamphlets shared a political
and religious agenda.
Dozens of religious and political pamphlets caught Middleton's attention,
but he was most taken by Thomas Scott's Vox Populi, first published
in 1620, with a second version in 1624. He drew upon both texts of
these political pamphlets, sometimes transferring passages unchanged
into his play. Scott had been the former chaplain for William Herbert,
third Earl of Pembroke and lord chamberlain. He was profoundly antiSpanish.
At times he was forced to live in exile in Holland, but by 1624
Scott and England were in basic accord.53 Although Middleton's play
should not be confused with Scott's assaults on the government, the two
writers shared certain anti-Spanish and anti-Catholic agendas. In consequence,
the political ideas articulated in Scott find a sympathetic, yet reformulated,
voice in Middleton's drama. Beyond the pamphlets, we
should attend to the political speeches in Parliament, a number of which
were also published at the time. Likewise, the political discourse in 1623
and 1624 found expression in the well-crafted sermons delivered from the
pulpits, including those at St. Paul's.
More generally, the rhetorical manuals and essays of key Renaissance
writers (e.g., Erasmus, Francis Bacon, and others) provided models
of discourse, derived from classical rhetoric. The "commonplaces" of this
discourse, rather than an individual's own political ideas, may be the or-
THEATER EVENTS AND THEIR POLITICAL CONTEXTS
215
ganizing principle for key aspects of the texts we interpret. In other
words, the communicative systems themselves, as Quentin Skinner,
J. G. A. Pocock, and other scholars of political discourse have noted, establish
acceptable and preferred ways of articulating meaning. Thus,
what we credit to Middleton may in fact belong, in equal measure, to Cicero
or Seneca.
Cultural Ideologies
Politics can be located in the general mentality, ideology, or zeitgeist of a
culture-its basic system of beliefs, assumptions, and practices. At this
level of inquiry we are confronted with the problems and temptations of
generalization, as they operate in our historical categories and our modes
of analysis. In part, we need to craft sophisticated ideas of mentality or
ideology. Everyone today is quite ready to dismiss the reductive idea of
an "Elizabethan world picture," but most of the models of the court as a
centralized power are equally reductive. Likewise, our ideas of a pervasive
theatricality that somehow defines all aspects of London culture and
society are too simple.54 There are, though, some promising signs that historians
are attempting to develop a multidimensional model of the concept
of mentality.55
In addition, we need to attend to how our period concepts, which I
have considered elsewhere,56 lead us to posit certain organizing ideas for
an epoch. For example, what would be the appropriate period concept for
this era in British history: the Renaissance or the early modern age? Both
concepts are suggestive yet inadequate, the one privileging humanism
and the classical revival, the other privileging the new economic, scientific,
and urban developments. Neither concept does justice to the religious
struggles of the era, stretching from Henry VIII's break from Rome
to the Puritan Commonwealth. As the production of A Game at Chess illustrates,
any study of the politics for this era is also an investigation into religious
issues. By 1624, the Thirty Years War (1618-48) had commenced,
and was defining, even controlling, both national and international politics.
We now recognize that the military struggle in the Palatinate, where
Elizabeth, James's daughter and Charles's sister, was in political duress,
represented but one small aspect of the intertwined struggles that were
transforming Europe. This is a reminder that the religious battles may be
a better guide to ideology and mentality than either the rebirth of humanist
learning or the development of early mercantile and bureaucratic society.
If A Game at Chess, as the longest-running play of the whole era, provides
a basis for understanding the political conditions and contexts of
the era, it does so because of its direct engagement with the religious
struggles. We thus need to see that politics cannot be separated from religion
during the reign of the early Stuarts. But our period concepts, such
as "early modern era," may lead us to slight, distort, or even ignore these
religious factors that shaped the politics of 1624.
CRITICAL THEORY AND PERFORMANCE
216
Reception of the Work and Event
Politics can be located in the reception rather than the production of the
artwork; that is, in the audience's responses, perceptions, and modes of
understanding. Those processes of recognition, acceptance, rejection, accommodation,
interpretation, and evaluation are the register and final site
of the meaning of theater in any culture. Who were those twenty-five to
thirty thousand people in attendance during the nine days of A Game at
Chess? The audience was probably predominately adult males. Perhaps
one-third to one-half of the men in London saw the production. Of the
gentry and nobility, the percentage was likely even higher for men. How
can we construct political meaning apart from their reception? For example,
in one of his letters John Chamberlain states that the play drew "all
sorts of people old and younge, rich and poore, masters and seruants, papists,
and puritans, wise men, et[c] churchmen and statesmen as sir henry
wotton, Sir Albert morton, Sir Beniamin Ruddier, Sir Thomas Lake, and a
world besides; the Lady Smith wold haue gon yf she could haue persauded
me to go with her, but I could not sit so long, for we must haue
ben there before one a'clocke at farthest to find any roome."57 In turn, the
Spanish ambassador, in correspondence back to Madrid, reported that
"all the nobility still in London" had seen the production, and some of the
Catholics "secretly."58
In recent years we have begun to analyze audience reception (e.g.,
horizons of expectation, reading formations, attendance patterns), but we
need to expand and refine our methods of research and analysis, especially
if we seek to understand the political features of the spectators.
Surely, the political meaning of the production was interpreted quite differently
by the range of spectators, from papist to puritan, from master to
servant. We can be assured that Sir Thomas Lake, the former secretary of
state who had ties to the pro-Spanish faction but yet was a moderate in his
religious positions, was not offended by the play and production in the
ways that the Spanish ambassador was. And he surely responded to certain
political meanings that would not have occurred to his servant. But
despite his ability to understand most of the references and allusions, his
response is not the "correct" one. The political meanings of the event find
their significance in the full and various responses of the many distinct individuals.
Indeed, each spectator's response is another kind of idiolect
out of which a cumulative construction of the audience reception and its
political features can be made.
So, in conclusion, political meanings can be located in any and all of
these nine locations, from the idiolect of a single manuscript to the observations
and understandings of a diverse group of spectators.
The Historian's Perspective
There is yet another location that intersects with all nine of the locations
identified here: that is, the perspective of each historian. The task of de-
THEATER EVENTS AND THEIR POLITICAL CONTEXTS
217
scribing and analyzing political meanings is shaped by not only our historical
methodologies but also our historical perspectives. Necessarily, our
own political understanding contributes to how we recognize, describe,
and analyze the other nine contextual locations of political meanings and
causes. Yet the minute we shift our attention to this last location of the political,
we confront a number of key problems in historiography, from research
methods to writing strategies. Of course, in our "postpositivist" age
we readily admit that it is impossible to investigate the political context of
past events from a neutral perspective. This "subjective" condition does
not lessen, however, the need to tell the truth about the past events as best
we can. Historical study is not merely a solipsistic narrative that we project
upon past events. Our challenge, then, is to do justice to the complex,
sometimes contradictory nature of politics in a theatrical event.
Ideally, as we apply our methodological tactics and interpretive
strategies as historians, we would encompass all of the political locations
of the historical event and its contexts. Of course, no historian achieves
the ideal. But that's no reason to be satisfied with a neat binary of text and
context that, in turn, produces an oppositional politics based upon the
power equation of authority and resistance. Even if we fail to realize a
comprehensive analysis, we can begin to show, as I have attempted to do
in this analysis of the production of A Game at Chess, that the theatrical
event can be described and studied from many political perspectives. The
relationship between theater and politics is a complex topic; our job is to
do justice to its complexities. Achieving multiple perspectives is surely an
appropriate and worthy aim of historical scholarship.59
NOTES
1. By focusing on Middleton's A Game at Chess in this current essay, I am attempting
to apply the political model that I developed in "The Idea of the 'Political'
in Our Histories of Theatre: Texts, Contexts, Periods, and Problems," Contemporary
Theatre Review 12, no. 3 (200ool): 1-25. This earlier essay, in turn, has been
revised for a chapter in my forthcoming book, The Cambridge Introduction to Theatre
Historiography (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007).
2. There is some disagreement on the starting date. T. H. Howard-Hill, who is
usually the most reliable of scholars, sets the date at August 5, Thursday. R. C.
Bald, G. E. Bentley, and others have set it at August 6. The letter of complaint by
the Spanish ambassador, Don Carlos Coloma, to King James states, "The Actors
who are called 'the King's,' today and yesterday presented a comedy so scandalous,
impious, barbarous, and so offensive to my royal master." The date of his
letter is Saturday, August 17 (Gregorian calendar, which is the seventh on the Julian
calendar). George Lowe wrote on Saturday, August 7, that "there is a new
play called the Game at Chess acted yesterday and today." And John Holles, writing
on Tuesday, August 1o, states that the play had been "allreddy thrice acted
with extraordinary applause." That is, it had been performed on Friday, Saturday,
and Monday. So the production opened on Friday, August 6. See T. H. HowardHill's
Revels edition of the play for his comments and the letters from Coloma and
Lowe (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1993), 17, 193, and 199.
CRITICAL THEORY AND PERFORMANCE
218
3. T. S. Eliot, "Thomas Middleton," in Selected Essays, 2nd ed. (London: Faber
and Faber, 1934), 166.
4. R. C. Bald, preface to A Game at Chesse by Thomas Middleton, ed. R. C. Bald
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1928), ix.
5. The White King's Pawn also has some characteristics of Sir Toby Matthew,
an English Catholic who was pro-Spanish.
6. Parliament impeached and convicted the Earl of Middlesex (Lionel Cranfield)
in May 1624, after James had abandoned the negotiations with Spain; James
agreed to commit himself to the war party, and he refused to defend his lord treasurer,
who had made the political mistake of resisting not only James but also
Prince Charles and Buckingham, who had been his mentor and protector. See
Menna Prestwich, Cranfield: Politics and Profit under the Early Stuarts (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1966).
7. There was no question about the identification of Gondomar in the play.
For example, in a letter of August 11, 1624, John Woolley refers to "the play of
Gundomar." And Paul Overton, in a letter two days later, notes, "At the globe
playhouse is dayly presented an odious play against Spaine, but principally Gondomar,
and the Jusuits." For these letters see A Game at Chess, ed. Howard-Hill,
app. 1, items 6 and 1o, pp. 198 and 201.
8. For example, Gondomar played a significant role in convincing the king in
1618 to execute Sir Walter Raleigh, who had been imprisoned in the Tower. On
Gondomar, see Charles H. Carter, "Gondomar: Ambassador to James I," Historical
Journal 7 (1964): 189-208.
9. Samuel Rawson Gardiner, Prince Charles and the Spanish Marriage: 1617-
1623, 2 vols. (London: Hurst and Blackett, 1869), 2:423.
10. The Earl of Oxford had been imprisoned in the Tower for twenty months
in 1622 and 1623 because of his attacks on Count Gondomar and his advocacy for
war in Europe; James released him on December 30, 1623, after Prince Charles and
Buckingham had returned from Spain. The Earl of Southampton, once a patron of
Shakespeare in the 1590s, had been placed in the Tower in 1621 for six months because
of his advocacy for Protestant causes. He also led the corruption case
against Francis Bacon, lord chancellor. He was to die of fever in Europe in late
1624, leading troops in the Netherlands.
11. In fact, King James had issued a series of edicts that attempted to control
criticism of the government. On December 24, 1620, "A Proclamation against Excesse
of Lavish and Licentious Speech of Matters of State" was published. Francis
Bacon had written it for James. In June 1621 another proclamation attempting to
control speech was issued. And on September 25, 1623, a proclamation was published
against "sundry seditious, schismatical and scandalous" imported books.
Henry Herbert had just been appointed Master of the Revels in 1623; nonetheless,
despite the government campaign to censor speech and writing, he approved A
Game at Chess.
12. Letters reprinted in appendix 1 of Howard-Hill's edition of the play, items
2 and 3, PP. 192-93. Spelling corrected to modern form.
13. Letter reprinted in appendix 1 of Howard-Hill's edition of the play, item 5,
p. 194.
14. See letter from John Chamberlain to Sir Dudley Carleton, Saturday, August
21, 1624, reproduced in appendix 1 of Howard-Hill's edition of the play, item 21,
p. 205.
15. Sir Edward Conway, letter of August 12, 1624, reproduced in appendix 1 of
Howard-Hill's edition of the play, item 8, p. 200.
THEATER EVENTS AND THEIR POLITICAL CONTEXTS
219
16. Conway, letter, 201. Ambassador Coloma had doubts, however, that appropriate
action would be taken. On August 18, he wrote to Count Olivares in
Madrid: "It remains to be seen whether the punishment that will be given to the
actors and the author of the play will prove that the king's indignation against
them is genuine." Quoted in T. H. Howard-Hill, Middleton's "Vulgar Pasquin": Essays
on "A Game at Chess" (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1995), 103.
17. Conway, letter in Howard-Hill's edition of A Game at Chess, 200.
18. From the Revels documents, as reproduced in N. W. Bawcutt, The Control
and Censorship of Caroline Drama: The Records of Sir Henry Herbert, Master of the Revels,
1623-73 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), 154.
19. Indeed, despite assurances to the Spanish ambassador that the players were
insolent and would be publicly punished (see appendix 1, item 9 in the HowardHill
edition of the play), James evaded such punishment. He told Sir Edward Conway,
secretary of state, that he was unwilling "to punish the innocent or utterly to
ruine the Commpanie." From State Papers, Domestic; James I, vol. 171, no. 75; SPi14/
171, reprinted in Howard-Hill's edition of the play, appendix 1, item 22, p. 206.
20. The foreign affairs select committee of the Privy Council had twelve members:
John Williams (dean of Westminster and lord keeper of the seal), Sir Richard
Weston (Chancellor of the Exchequer), Thomas Howard (Earl of Arundel and Surrey),
William Herbert (Earl of Pembroke and lord chamberlain), James Hay (Earl
of Carlisle), Sir Edward Conway (secretary of state), Lionel Cranfield (Earl of Middlesex
and lord treasurer), Sir George Calvert (also secretary of state), Ludovic
Stuart (Duke of Richmond and Lennox), James Hamilton (marquis), Arthur
Chicester (Lord Belfast), and George Villiers (Duke of Buckingham and lord admiral).
The pro-Spanish faction included Williams, Weston, Howard, Cranfield, and
Calvert. Villiers had been pro-Spanish until he returned from Spain in October
1623, and then he became a leader, along with Herbert, of the anti-Spanish faction.
21. E. K. Chambers and Richard Dutton have argued that Henry Herbert likely
received the Revels office because of the intervention of his distant cousin, the lord
chamberlain. But N. W. Bawcutt disputes this proposition. He points out that there
is no evidence for such patronage. "There may have been some complex political
manoeuvring by which [Sir John] Astley was eased out [of the office of Master] in
favour of Herbert, but other explanations are possible" (Control and Censorship, 34).
At the same time, we might note that Herbert took over as Master on July 24, 1623;
on August 7 he was knighted by James I at Wilton, the estate of the Earl of Pembroke,
the lord chamberlain. This at least suggests the possibility of patronage by
Pembroke, though it implies nothing about possible protection for the production
of A Game at Chess a year later. Still, one of the estates that James visited during his
1624 progress was that of the Earl of Pembroke. James was at his estate on August
7, a day after the production opened. Pembroke was anti-Spanish, so did he know
of the production, and thus invite James at just the time of the opening? If one is
drawn to conspiracy theories, it is tempting to conjure with Pembroke.
22. John Woolley, letter reprinted in appendix 1 of Howard-Hill's edition of the
play, item 17, p. 203; spelling modernized.
23. Andrew Gurr, The Shakespearian Playing Companies (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1995), 140, 141.
24. Jerzy Limon, Dangerous Matter: English Drama and Politics I623/24 (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1986), 2.
25. Limon, Dangerous Matter, lo; also see 131.
26. See Margot Heinemann, Puritanism and Theatre: Thomas Middleton and Opposition
Drama under the Early Stuarts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
CRITICAL THEORY AND PERFORMANCE
220
1982). See also Albert Tricomi, Anti-Court Drama in England, 1603-1642 (Charlottesville:
University of Virginia Press, 1989).
27. Margot Heinemann, "Drama and Opinion in the 162os: Middleton and
Massinger," in Theatre and Government under the Early Stuarts, ed. J. R. Mulryne and
Margaret Shewring (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 246.
28. For the counterargument to Heinemann, see, for example, Thomas Cogswell,
"Thomas Middleton and the Court, 1624: A Game at Chess in Context," Huntington
Library Quarterly 42 (1984): 273-88. Also see works listed in the next note.
29. Richard Dutton, Mastering the Revels: The Regulation and Censorship of English
Renaissance Drama (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1991); Dutton, Licensing,
Censorship, and Authorship in Early Modern England: Buggeswords (Houndsmill,
Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2000); T. H. Howard-Hill, "Political Interpretations of Middleton's
A Game at Chess (1624)," Yearbook of English Studies 21 (1991): 274-85;
Howard-Hill, "The Origins of Middleton's A Game at Chess," Research Opportunities
in Renaissance Drama, n.s. 39 (1988): 39-63; Howard-Hill, introduction to his
edition of A Game at Chess; Howard-Hill, Middleton's "Vulgar Pasquin"; Thomas
Cogswell, The Blessed Revolution: English Politics and the Coming of War, 1621-1624
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989); Cogswell, "Middleton and the
Court."
30. Dutton, Mastering the Revels, 245. Dutton continues his statement in this
manner: "As with so many other plays that attracted official attention, it did not
offend 'authority' as such but one element within the complex balancing of powers
that constituted the government of England, and one that was unusually exposed
and insecure. In this case, for the reasons I have outlined, that element was
the king himself" (246). Ten years later he writes that "the root issue seems likely
to have been that of impersonation of royalty and its representatives, rather than
the offensive nature of the play in general" (Licensing, Censorship, and Authorship,
146).
31. Howard-Hill, introduction to A Game at Chess, 43.
32. I recognize, of course, that literary scholars have taken up the topic of theater
and politics from various perspectives, including the matters of censorship,
the antitheatrical tracts, the attempts of the London city fathers to control the theaters,
the themes and references in political and historical plays, the power of the
court, etc. But it is striking how often the studies draw upon one of two models
that set up an opposition between central control and authority, on the one hand,
and individual or communal resistance or subversion, on the other. This dichotomy
is pervasive. It shows up in much of the scholarship on A Game at Chess,
just as it defines many of the studies of other plays and playwrights.
33. In general terms, then, the political actions of individuals, groups, movements,
and specific theatrical organizations are placed within two interrelated
contextual paradigms: (1) governments, cultural institutions and practices, economic
systems; and (2) large historical mentalities of an era or period that define
the major operations of a culture, and perhaps even blanket the culture with ideological
or hegemonic control over thought, discourse, and practices.
34. On Buckingham, see Roger Lockyer, Buckingham, The Life and Political Career
of George Villiers, First Duke of Buckingham, 1592-1628 (London: Longmans,
1981).
35. See, for example, Linda Levy Peck, Court Patronage and Corruption in Early
Stuart England (Boston: Unwin Hyman, 1990).
36. Robert E. Ruigh, The Parliament of 1624: Politics and Foreign Policy (Cambridge:
Harvard University Press, 1971), 90.
THEATER EVENTS AND THEIR POLITICAL CONTEXTS
221
37. See M. Lindsay Kaplan, The Culture of Slander in Early Modern England
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997).
38. See F. J. Levy, "How Information Spread Among the Gentry, 1550-1640,"
Journal of British Studies 21 (1982): 11-34.
39. Howard-Hill, Middleton's "Vulgar Pasquin."
40. Dutton, Licensing, Censorship, and Authorship, 156.
41. For a summary of the textual record, see the informative introduction by
Howard-Hill in his edition of the play.
42. Howard-Hill, Middleton's "Vulgar Pasquin," 70.
43. Letter reprinted in appendix 1 of Howard-Hill's edition of the play, item 5,
p. 194.
44. For a survey, see Roy Porter, "History of the Body," in New Perspectives on
Historical Writing, ed. Peter Burke (University Park: Pennsylvania State University
Press, 1991), 206-32. For instance, Porter writes: "There is abundant scope for political
historians and political scientists to be more sensitive to the power realities
produced by the exercise of the state's authority over the bodies of its subjects"
(225).
45. The Letters of John Holles, 1587-1637, 3 vols., ed. P. R. Seddon (Nottingham,
1983), reprinted in A Game at Chess, ed. Howard-Hill, 199.
46. See Gurr, Shakespearian Playing Companies, 142.
47. The title page of Thomas Scott's Second Part of Vox Populi (1624)-one of the
pamphlets Middleton drew upon-represents Gondomar, and shows both his litter
and his special chair, with the hole in the seat. A reproduction appears in the
Howard-Hill's edition of the play, 47.
48. See R. Malcolm Smuts, "Occasional Events, Literary Texts and Historical
Interpretations," in Neo-Historicism: Studies in Renaissance Literature, History and
Politics, ed. Robin Headlam Wells, Glenn Burgess, and Rowland Wymer (Woodbridge,
Suffolk: D. S. Brewer, 2000), 179-98.
49. David Riggs, Ben Jonson: A Life (Cambridge: Harvard University Press,
1989), 290.
50. Reprinted in appendix 1 of Howard-Hill's edition of the play, item 6, p. 198;
spelling modernized in some cases.
51. The historical scholarship on the complexity of governmental politics of
1623 and 1624 is quite substantial. For some recent historical studies, including
studies of the reign of James I, consult these books (and their bibliographies):
Cogswell, The Blessed Revolution; Glyn Redworth, The Prince and the Infanta: The
Cultural Politics of the Spanish Match (New Haven: Yale University Press, 200oo3);
Peck, Court Patronage; Ruigh, The Parliament of 1624; Conrad Russell, Parliaments
and English Politics, 1621-1624 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979); Kevin
Sharpe, ed., Faction and Parliament: Essays on Early Stuart History (Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 1978); Kevin Sharpe and Peter Lake, eds., Culture and Politics in Early
Stuart England (London: Macmillan, 1994); R. Malcolm Smuts, Court Culture and
the Origins of a Royalist Tradition in Early Stuart England (Philadelphia: University
of Pennsylvania Press, 1987); Johann P. Sommerville, Politics and Ideology in England,
1603-1640, 2nd ed. (London: Longman, 1999); Lockyer, Buckingham. Also
see Roger Lockyer's James VI & I (London: Longman, 1998). His annotated bibliography
is a good introduction to the scholarship on James.
52. Cogswell, The Blessed Revolution, 281.
53. Too neatly, Margot Heinemann places Scott in an oppositional camp: "Scott
was a radical in politics as well as religion, continuing as a political refugee in
Holland to issue pamphlets full of polemical praise for Parliament as the greatest
CRITICAL THEORY AND PERFORMANCE
222
hindrance to Spanish plots, and the Dutch republicans as the models of democracy
and prosperity" ("Political Drama," The Cambridge Companion to English Renaissance
Drama, eds. A. R. Braunmuller and Michael Hattaway [Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1990, 202). Yes, but what was radical in 1621, when James
was tilting toward Spain, became national rhetoric in 1624, when the country was
preparing for war.
54. I attempt to address this issue in the book that Tracy C. Davis and I
coedited, Theatricality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003).
55. See, for example, Linda Levy Peck, ed., The Mental World of the Jacobean
Court (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991); J. G. A. Pocock, ed., The Varieties
of British Political Thought, 15oo-18oo (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1993); Sharpe and Lake, Culture and Politics; and Anthony Fletcher and Peter
Roberts, eds., Religion, Culture and Society in Early Modern Britain (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1994). In addition, there has been substantial work
on popular culture, led by the writings of Peter Burke, such as Popular Culture in
Early Modern Europe, rev. ed. (London: Scolar Press, 1996).
56. Thomas Postlewait, "The Criteria for Periodization in Theatre History,"
Theatre Journal 40, no. 3 (1988): 299-318; "The Concept of Period Style in Cultural
History," Nordic Theatre Studies, special international issue (1990): 52-55; "The Sacred
and the Secular: Reflections on Writing Renaissance Theatre History," Assaph
12 (Spring 1997): 1-31.
57. Reprinted in appendix 1 of Howard-Hill's edition of the play, item 21, p.
205.
58. Reprinted in appendix 1 of Howard-Hill's edition of the play, item 5, PP.
194-98.
59. With gratitude, I acknowledge the very helpful commentary of my colleague
in the Department of English, Richard Dutton, who read a draft of this
essay and graciously participated in a class meeting on A Game at Chess. He
guided my graduate students and me through some of the documentary difficulties
and challenges in reconstructing this major event in British theater history.
Representing History: Performing the
Columbian Exposition
Rosemarie K. Bank
The United States lies like a huge page in the history of society. Line
by line as we read this continental page from west to east we find
the record of social evolution. It begins with the Indian and the
hunter; it goes on to tell of the disintegration of savagery by the
entrance of the trader, the pathfinder of civilization.
-"The Significance of the Frontier in American History"
Frederick Jackson Turner
It is not a circus, nor indeed is it acting at all, in a theatrical sense,
but an exact reproduction of daily scenes in frontier life as experienced
and enacted by the very people who now form the "Wild
West" Company.
-Illustrated London News, April 16, 1887
All was simulacrum: the buildings, the statues, and the bridges were
not of enduring stone but lath and plaster.
-Claude Bragdon, Chicago History, 1893
Scholars have not been slow to notice the collisions and contradictions
presented by and represented in the Columbian Exposition in Chicago in
1893. Alan Trachtenberg depicts it as the culminating spectacle of what he
calls "the incorporation of America" in the nineteenth century. Richard
Slotkin examines the fair as the high point in the performance history of
"Buffalo Bill's Wild West" and traces the show's role in the creation of the
"gunfighter nation." Richard White explores the connection between
Frederick Jackson Turner and Buffalo Bill and representations of the frontier
that offered images of peaceful or of violent conquest (Turner presented
his "frontier thesis" at the American Historical Association convention
during the fair, and William F. Cody's "Buffalo Bill's Wild West"
performed next to the fairgrounds). Historians of the fair itself and of organizations
contributing to it (such as the Smithsonian Institution and the
Bureau of Indian Affairs) have produced a rich literature often critiquing
the fair's racist and sexist organization and displays, while historians of
Buffalo Bill and Wild West shows examine the man, the productions, their
performers, their publicity, and their impact upon U.S., indeed international,
culture in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. A substantial
scholarship has also taken up Frederick Jackson Turner and the impact of
his view of American history. Many recent studies about these subjects reflect
a revised view of U.S. history, and specifically of "the frontier," indebted
to scholarly research exposing much that is deplorable about the
223
CRITICAL THEORY AND PERFORMANCE
224
policies and behavior of the U.S. government and white Americans toward
Amerindians.'
What more needs to be said? What more can be said about these
large and complex subjects, particularly in the foreshortened format of a
chapter? Two issues seem to rise from the extensive (and increasing)
scholarly literature about the Columbian Exposition, Frederick Jackson
Turner's frontier thesis, and Buffalo Bill's Wild West that can, at least, be
located, if hardly excavated, here. First, there is the legacy of binary thinking
about history to which the late Michel Foucault alerted us. It is the
legacy of seeking to drive out commanding narratives, "to pacify them by
force," in order to replace them with our own. Rather, Foucault argues,
the task is to map propositions "in a particular discursive practive, the
point at which they are constituted, to define the form that they assume,
the relations that they have with each other, and the domain that they
govern." The injustices of history and of historical writing simultaneously
do the work of the appeal of commanding narratives and of their undoing.
The binary view is particularly obstructive for, second, what I have
elsewhere called theater culture, that is, the interconnection between performance
and culture and culture and performance. Representation is not
a single but a multiple and simultaneous relationship-performer to audience
to role to culture to venue to cast to means of production to image,
and so on-which defies the analysis it is so frequently given in cultural
histories as an ahistorical problem or "reality."2
While "unreal" cultural phenomena carry social responsibility with
them because they can produce "real" effects (that is, attitudes, thoughts,
emotions, and behaviors), theater historians have been slow to formulate
a way of talking about representation that considers this responsibility
without recapitulating antitheatrical prejudice. This chapter will look at
different representations of and at the Columbian Exposition-itself a
simulacrum-in order to consider their interactions and constitutions as
performances. What is an intellectual performance (the Anthropology Department's
ethnographic exhibits on the fairground, for example, or Frederick
Jackson Turner's paper)? How do the effects it produces vary from
site to site and audience to audience? What characteristics do these kinds
of performances share with performance more conventionally construed
(Buffalo Bill's Wild West, the Indian Village on the Midway) and what truth
claims did each make? My focus will be "the frontier" (or "Wild West") and
Amerindians, but parallels with representations of women, African Americans,
and foreign nationals at the Columbian Exposition will be evident to
students of these subjects. Further, since these subjects involve the theater
historian in the interrogation of a large (and growing) body of historiographical
scholarship concerning cultural constructs-about fairs, museums,
popular entertainments, and tourism, for example, but also the cultural
constructions of anthropological and historical scholarship-it is
hoped the wider application of performances at the Columbian Exposition
to their subjects will not wholly be erased by the omission of material and
arguments that an essay of this brevity must perforce omit.3
REPRESENTING HISTORY
225
It is not difficult to characterize the Columbian Exposition as a dream scenario,
the "White City" (with full racial inflection) of a power elite, simulating
for a mass audience its own sense of beauty, control, hierarchy, and
self-secured success. Certainly, these words and their containing synonyms
are those of contemporaneous participants and accounts, and have
contributed to the projection of the Columbian Exposition as a dream site
in subsequent histories of it. Recent analyses of the fair and its Columbian
project, taking the dream projection literally, depict the "White City" as
far from utopian, indeed, as a distopic, malevolent site that, by design or
indifference, featured exhibits and interpretations that produced intensely
racist, sexist, and ethnist effects. The demon scenario is the flip
side of, and depends upon, the utopian site to make its case. Rather than
this binary negation and its positing of failed perfection, when the
Columbian Exposition and its World Congresses are repositioned as performances
of a far from ordered world, they become visible as heterogeneous
spaces more nearly resembling Foucault's idea of a heterotopia, a
countersite "in which the real sites, all the other real sites that can be
found within the culture, are simultaneously represented, contested, and
inverted."4
Despite valiant efforts to promote the orderly display of goods, art,
artifacts, technology, and natural products, the Columbian Exposition
was a jumble of material spilling from building to building and displaced
from site to site throughout the 553-acre fairgrounds and its adjoining 8oacre
Midway Plaisance. Henry Adams, reflecting upon his two visits during
the summer of 1893, observed:
The Exposition itself defied philosophy. One might find fault until
the last gate closed, one could still explain nothing that needed explanation
. . . since Noah's Ark, no such Babel of loose and ill-joined,
such vague and ill-defined and unrelated thoughts and half-thoughts
and experimental outcries as the Exposition, had ever ruffled the surface
of the Lakes.5
The Department of Ethnology and Archaeology at the Exposition
("Department M") typified the confusion and disorder characterizing fair
display. Frederic Ward Putnam, head of Harvard's Peabody Museum of
American Archaeology and Ethnology, was appointed director of the department
early in 1891. Putnam's acceptance terms committed the fair's
managers to support original research. Squads of unpaid graduate students
from universities around the country were put into the field to locate and
dispatch materials to Chicago. Their finds were augmented with fieldwork
gathered and sent by government employees (mostly military officers
attached to U.S. embassies in Latin America) and supported by existing
collections. Though this essay features the displays of Putnam's Department
M, it was not the only noncommercial exhibitor of ethnographic
material. In addition to state-sponsored and foreign displays, large collections
sent by the Smithsonian Institution were separately administered and
CRITICAL THEORY AND PERFORMANCE
226
displayed, chiefly in the U.S. Government Building. In addition, the U.S.
Bureau of Indian Affairs, opposed both to ethnology and ethnologists (Indian
commissioner Thomas Morgan thought them "the most insidious
and active enemies" of Indian assimilation through education), constructed
its own attempt to evade the "savage" past, a schoolhouse/residence
on the fairgrounds, with both mounted displays and a rotating
cadre of Indian students, studying, making handicrafts, singing songs for
visitors, and the like.6
Originally slotted for 16o,ooo square feet in the Liberal Arts Building
and a 1,ooo-foot strip of land along the lagoon for outdoor exhibits, Putnam's
displays found their home not there at the center of things, but at
the tail end of the fairgrounds, close to the livestock exhibit and sewer
works, in a building charitably described as "unpretentious and devoid of
all ornamentation." Blocked off from the lake by the Forestry Building
and a loop of the Intramural Railway, the Anthropological Building gave
up 30,000 of the ground floor's 52,804 square feet of display space to the
Bureau of Corrections and the Bureau of Sanitation and Hygiene, and surrendered
still more space to large exhibits sent by foreign countries-362
domestic but 452 foreign collections, by one count, on the ground floor
and the gallery above it. One commemorative album of the fair observed,
"Only a comparative sprinkling [of visitors] invades the territory south of
the Stock Pavilion. So much is to be seen in the northern part of the
grounds ... that the majority are fain to content themselves with a hasty
survey of this region from the Intramural railway." The marginalization
of the ethnographic exhibits affected the impact of live displays on the
fairground itself.7
The eight rooms of laboratories in the north end of the Anthropological
Building, organized by Franz Boas and staffed by professors from the
University of Wisconsin and the newly established University of Chicago,
offered fairgoers comparative craniology, anthropometry, and "exhibits
referring to the development of the white race in America." Significant to
the cultural staging of the "native" is Department M's "introduction to
America of the 'life group,'" a form of ethnographic display utilized by
Boas, at Putnam's instruction, that featured manikins "'dressed in the garments
of the people, and arranged in groups so as to illustrate the life history
of each tribe represented.'" Descendants of the wax figures in evidence
in Charles Willson Peale's museum in Philadelphia in the 1790s,
"only in 1893 were groups of such costumed figures arranged in dramatic
scenes from daily life and ritual" in a museum context in the United
States, a context more Barnum than Boasian in shifting the display of ethnological
artefacts from the descriptive to the performative. As Ira Jacknis,
the historian of this process, observes, "the life group was a presentational
medium allowing these cultural connections to be seen," and, "not
surprisingly, the life groups were enormously popular with visitors."8
The performative aspect of displays became troubling to anthropologists,
as did the entertainment aspect of museum display. In the flush of
the Columbian Exposition, however, display cases, photographs, and re-
REPRESENTING HISTORY
227
constructions indoors led seamlessly to living people in the "Ethnographical
Exhibit" out-of-doors. Although Robert W. Rydell locates Department
M's "exhibits of Dakota Sioux, Navajos, Apaches, and various northwestern
tribes on or near the Midway Plaisance," which, in his view, "immediately
degraded them," there were only two outdoor displays of living
Native peoples on the fairground itself (there was, indeed, a commercially
operated American Indian Village on the Midway). The "Esquimaux Village,"
at the fair's Northwest Pond, was a commercial exhibit owned and
operated by the J. W. Skiles Company of Spokane on a site not really
"near" the Midway Plaisance, though more so than Department M's noncommercial
Ethnographical Exhibit, situated near the South Pond and the
Anthropological Building, which could not be further away from the Plaisance
and still be on the fairgrounds.9
Putnam had instructed Boas to arrange the fourteen-some Indian
"villages" making up the outdoor Ethnographical Exhibit of his department
"with historic accuracy, in strict chronological sequence," that is, geographically
north to south. Contemporary accounts identify the display
as including "Esquimaux" from Labrador to the north, then a Cree family
and Haida/Fort Rupert peoples from Canada, Iroquois from the northeastern
United States (there are also photos of a "Penobscott Village"),
Chippewa, Sioux, Menominee, and Winnebago from the northeastern and
midnorth states, Choctaws from Louisiana, Apaches and Navajos from
New Mexico and Arizona, Coahuilas from California, and Papagos and
Yakuis from the U.S.-Mexico border region. (Publicity claims the Indians
"lived" in their reconstructed dwellings, but it is not clear if they stayed
there after hours.) During the day, the ethnological Indians cooked,
worked, talked with visitors (if they could), played musical instruments,
sang, and danced.10
The conflation of real and faux continued to the south of the "villages,"
where the Anthropological Department had erected a simulation of
the ruins of Yucatan, "made of staff by means of papier-mache." The six
sections of the ruins were separated by a walkway from a commercial representation
of the cliff dwellings at Battle Rock Mountain in Colorado, reproduced
by the H. J. Smith Exploring Company (at one-tenth actual size)
as a series of rooms stocked with relics-including human remains-along
an ascending pathway: "Admission 25 cents; catalogue o10 cents." In this
heterotopic play of imaged and real, science, culture, entertainment, and
history moved freely through sites at once false and true, each offering its
own view of the work and culture of the "real" America and Americans.11
While there were only two outdoor exhibits on the fairgrounds involving
what the Indian Bureau (intending disparagement) called "show
Indians," Smithsonian, state, and foreign exhibits also included live displays.
In addition to housing a large Smithsonian exhibit called "Women's
Work in Savagery"-eighty cases of Amerindian embroidery, hide work,
pottery, baskets, looms, and implements-the Women's Building, for example,
featured a Navajo weaver working her loom on a staircase landing
(dubbed the "Indian Alcove"), one of surely many living accompaniments
CRITICAL THEORY AND PERFORMANCE
228
to the Indian figures prominent in the fair's artwork and statuary. In addition
to Amerindians working in "show" capacities producing artifacts,
many Indians appeared at the fair's special events. During the May 1, 1893,
opening festivities, William F. Cody (at his own expense) invited a hundred
Sioux from Pine Ridge, Standing Rock, and Rosebud to watch the ceremonies
from the balcony of the Administration Building, along with his
own employees-including ghost dancers, Kicking Bear, Two Strike, Jack
Red Cloud, Rocky Bear, Young Man Afraid of His Horses, and Short Bull,
in full regalia. On Italian Day, twelve Sioux, in full Plains dress, played the
Columbus "welcoming party" of Arawaks, to shouts of "Bravo" and "Encore!"
from the audience. On Chicago Day (October 9, 1893), near the close
of the fair, Chief Simon Pokagon of the Potawatomi used the occasion to
speak against the treatment accorded the descendants of his father's generation,
who had deeded the land to Chicago in 1833 that became the site
for the Exposition.12
Though Cody's guests may not have been paid performers, the
Sioux were hardly Arawaks, and Simon Pokagon (given the occasion) was
both "official" and "entertainment," the distinctions that designated
members of the public, delegations and dignitaries, ethnographic display
personnel, exhibit demonstrators, and show Indians at the Columbian
Exposition were extremely fluid. Indeed, such boundaries are hardly less
porous today. The interactions and interrelationships among these roles
helped turn the fair's intellectual and pedagogic intentions into a performance.
Sometimes the transfer was direct. The performances the
Kwakiutl gave, for example, first shown to Franz Boas, were "rituals
that in some cases were no longer practiced," according to Curtis Hinsley.
Chosen for their show quality, ethnographic "classics" "blocking out
the changes of time," anthropological subjects are frozen in the past by the
progressive scenario of the exposition. Performance, however, is live and
critiques even the ideas it enacts. That critique is visible in Indians watching
the hoopla commemorating the quadracentennial of Columbus's arrival
in America at the fair's opening, in Indians playing (other) Indians
in an enactment of that event (doing it their way, the Plains way, which
had become the Indian performance by 1893), and in the analysis by
Simon Pokagon of what these events had wrought. Some scientists at the
exposition may have thought their intellectual order of things triumphant,
but fairgoers as well as Indians would have been hard-pressed
not to grasp the performative nature of the fair exchange. The juxtaposition
of equally false official and commercial exhibits stressed to fairgoers
their constructed rather than "real" nature, while the difficulty of finding
order as an audience, when assaulted by acres of disorderly and simulated
phenomena, creates points of detachment from the intellectual performance
of the "dream city."13
Though we may never know how many Amerindians labored in
show capacities at the World's Columbian Exposition or how many appeared
at the fair's special festivities, we do know their presence helped
create and define the event, and that they were vocal, as well as visible, in
REPRESENTING HISTORY
229
shaping the performances fairgoers saw. Central to issues of agency in
this regard is the degree of autonomy as performers that show Indians enjoyed.
Culture and commerce clearly went hand in hand at the fair, a fact
of life for theater and shows in the United States in the nineteenth century.
The "reality" of the exposition as a show was emphasized when five families
in the Esquimaux Village successfully sued to break their contract
with their manager, the J. W. Skiles Company, and opened their own show
outside the fairgrounds. In this, these performers functioned like other
paid professionals at the time. The Indians in the Anthropology Department's
Ethnographical Exhibit were similarly transported, housed, and
paid, though the terms and conditions of work are currently unclear. The
students at the BIA Indian School exhibit and those at the Carlisle Indian
School exhibit of student industrial work in the Liberal Arts Building, on
the other hand, appear to have been boarded rather than treated as paid
employees. Theater historians will need to compare the contracts, conditions,
and compensation of exposition Indians, show Indians on the Midway,
and those at Buffalo Bill's Wild West (and compare these, in turn, to
the contracts, conditions, and compensations accorded similar but nonIndian
acts), in order to gauge the degree of economic freedom and performative
autonomy show Indians enjoyed.14
Opposition to show Indians and antitheatrical prejudice deny that
employees (performers) are employees and that what they are doing is a
performance, forestalling compensation in the first case and input into
what is performed in the second. Whether the view of Amerindians performed
on the fairground was that of the preservation of the customs and
artifacts of "vanishing" Indians, that of the inculcation of the skills necessary
to assimilate, or that of the representations of show Indian acts and
artistry, however, Trennert emphasizes that "the public drew little distinction
between official and commercial Indian displays," either at the
Columbian or at subsequent world's fairs. Moreover, as it became clear
"old" Indian culture, not new, had the public fancy, the BIA gave up education
exhibits and proposed in later years to offer nonstudent "Indians
'dressed in native costume and carrying on native handicrafts, weaving,
bead and leatherwork, making jewelry and baskets, work in birch bark,
etc.,' right in the school building." In time, the bureau even constructed its
own "village" near the conventional school exhibit where, in one case,
"Geronimo and a group of Apache prisoners from Fort Sill" signed autographs
and sold bows and arrows.15
The perils of the performative for Columbian scholars like Putnam
were most sharply drawn on the Midway Plaisance, which operated
under the auspices of his department, but whose exhibits came under the
management of Sol Bloom (in later years, Bloom observed that putting
Putnam in charge of the Midway was "about as intelligent a decision as it
would be today to make Albert Einstein manager of Ringling Brothers
and Barnum and Bailey's Circus"). It is not difficult to locate the White
City and, particularly, the Midway Plaisance, as sites for the expression of
racism. While "visitors apparently experienced little overt discrimination
CRITICAL THEORY AND PERFORMANCE
230
in public facilities at the fair"-and all the world came to see the
Columbian Exposition-access to exhibit space on the fairground was restricted
(Buffalo Bill, African Americans, and Indians were among those
denied it) and displays emphasized "the stages of the development of
man on [at least] the American continent," which created a heirarchy of
races detrimental to nonwhites. Recent histories of world's fairs view the
Midway Plaisance as the malevolent topos par excellence. Indeed, Robert
W. Rydell considers the development of midways (ambivalent in Chicago,
but endorsed by fairs thereafter) "'living proof' for the imperial calculations"
of "American elites to establish their cultural hegemony," in part
through the midway's "anthropologically validated racial heirarchies."
For these, Rydell concludes, "the World's Columbian Exposition became
the standard with which every subsequent fair would be compared."16
The racism in contemporaneous material about the Columbian Exposition
is wholly evident, but the binary strategies of negation that reveal it
evade the complexities of participation by Amerindians (and other races
and nationalities) in cultural performances during the fair, and can betray
a lingering antitheatrical prejudice against performing itself. Against Rydell's
charge of degradation, L. G. Moses argues, for example, that "neither
the newspaper accounts nor the agency records that contain comments by
and about Indians bears this [degradation] out." Performers complicate
unitary readings and performance resists binary interpretations. Thomas
Roddy and Henry "Buckskin Joe" De Ford, for example, managed a troupe
of sixty show Indians from various tribes on the Midway that performed a
gash show in which Chief Twobites and Joe Strongback had four slashes
cut between the shoulder blades and a rope laced through, to the horror of
a Chicago Tribune reporter who wrote in protest against the act. The performers
filed no complaints. Was this "abuse" or even "torture," as the reporter
saw it, or is there a show context for even this act? Michael Chemers
has suggested that critics of "freak" shows operate from unproblematized
moral positions that are presumed to transcend the sociohistoric forces
shaping those positions. Characterizing such views as ahistorical and frequently
influenced by "backplanted" prejudices, Chemers argues that
these positions often ignore the political and economic factors that influence
performers and "unduly privileges an elitist hegemony which has
traditionally dominated historical research" concerning "high" and "low"
art. Similar issues have been raised concerning burlesque shows and performances
classified as pornographic, but also medicine shows, carnival
and circus acts, magic shows, a variety of popular performers, and Wild
West shows (and, indeed, voices against iconographic or living representation
of any kind have been raised throughout history). Autonomy
weighs little if a performative choice is viewed as "so bad, I don't care if it
is voluntary."17
Performances on the Midway Plaisance, the grittiest and most commercial
part of the fair, invite critiques of how audiences and managers
behaved and of the shows performers offered. Much has been written
about the first two (audiences and managers), but the third is not always
REPRESENTING HISTORY
231
transparent or even known. Were Chief Twobites and Joe Strongback really
gashed, for example, or was theirs indeed a simulation for which the
Tribune reporter was the "mark"? What was the act intended to show
bravery? savagery?-and why show it? Where on the Midway was the act
done? How often could it have been done? Maps of the Midway Plaisance
show (but often omit) an "Indian Village" to the west of the Ferris wheel,
yet in addition to the Roddy and De Ford show, accounts identify P. B.
Wickham's exhibit of "Sitting Bull's Cabin" (rivaling the one on Buffalo
Bill's campground and another in the North Dakota State exhibit), which
featured nine Sioux, including Rain-in-the-Face, who had petitioned the
fair managers for (and been denied) control over or influence in Native
American representations on the fairgrounds. Did the Wickham exhibit
on the Midway offer a countersite in which the Sioux found the agency to
perform their culture as they deemed appropriate? Were show Indians on
the Midway the class of duped subjects their well-wishers and the Indian
Bureau characterized them as being, or did their view of what constituted
culture or performance not conform to the senses of propriety and advantage
dictated by managers (fair and commercial), anthropologists, reporters,
audiences, or historians?18
The White City and its Midway can be seen as a heterotopia of contesting
sites-the "real," the faux, and the simulated; the educational, the
aesthetic, and the entertaining; the state-sponsored, the fair-sponsored,
and the commercially produced. The World Congresses reflecting the ideologies
driving the White City may also profitably be viewed as heterotopic
performances rather than unitary or utopic/distopic spaces. The
heavily subscribed World Congresses were held in the just completed
"Permanent Memorial Art Palace" (today's Art Institute of Chicago) and
organized with near military precision into twenty Departments with 224
divisions, which ran the duration of the exposition (May 15 through October
28, 1893). The World's Historical Congress, World's Congress of FolkLore,
and World's Congress on Philology and Literary Archaeology were
in the Literature Department, while remaining branches of archaeology
and ethnology were assigned to various congress departments. The divisions
in the work of the newly founded science of anthropology, whose International
Congress was also organized by the fair, reflect what Curtis
Hinsley identifies as "much confusion" at the time concerning the relationships
among environment, native philosophies and religions, myths, art,
practical activity, and paleontology, within larger controversies about nature
versus nurture and artifacts versus contexts. Otis Mason's address on
behalf of the Smithsonian exhibit, for example, counseled anthropologists
to view Indians racially, on the one hand urging the distinctive features of
each culture, on the other the inevitable extinguishing of cultures that
failed, as Mason would later say, to "blend into 'the proper flow of true culture
. . . the flow of world-embracing commerce.'"19
Frederick Jackson Turner's paper to the American Historical Association,
"whose ninth annual meeting was held in conjunction with the
World's Historical Congress, with a programme practically identical,"
CRITICAL THEORY AND PERFORMANCE
232
might have passed with good, but not distinguished notice, on a hot July
12 evening ("the afternoons being devoted to the Exposition at Jackson
Park"). The up-and-coming historian and his thesis concerning the Frontier
in American history, however, had powerful friends, and provided
the unifying narrative that eluded science. As a player in the "world" performed
by the Columbian Exposition, Turner's thesis simultaneously affirms
and negates constructs of "the native" and "the American" enacted
there. To be sure, the evolution on display at the fair and at the World's
Congresses had itself shifted significantly, as Foucault observes:
In the eighteenth century, the evolutionist idea is defined on the
basis of a kinship of species forming a continuum laid down at the
outset (interrupted only by natural catastrophes) or gradually built
up by the passing of time. In the nineteenth century, the evolutionist
theme concerns not so much the constitution of a continuous table
of species, as the description of discontinuous groups and the analysis
of the modes of interaction between an organism whose elements
are interdependent and an environment that provides its real conditions
of life. A single theme, but based on two types of discourse.20
The discontinuous groups evolving in Turner's view of the closed
frontier conceptualized already conventional views. Richard White, in
comparing Turner's and Buffalo Bill's Wild West, sees Turner's frontier as
arguing the (chiefly) peaceful settlement of an (envisioned) empty space, a
process Joaquin Miller poeticized as "A kingdom won without the guilt /
Of studied battle." Into this utopia, Turner inserted the frontiersman, his
scholarly embodiment of James W. Steele's "sons of the border," a type of
man clothed by western life "with a new individuality" that could "make
him forget the tastes and habits of early life, and transform him into one of
that restless horde of cosmopolites who form the crest of the slow wave of
humanity which year by year creeps toward the setting sun." More directly
influential, Turner's biographer Wilbur R. Jacobs observes, were the
early volumes of Theodore Roosevelt's The Winning of the West, positing
the heroic border warrior as a "type of man [who] marked a stage in the
evolutionary process of society's development," the type more significant
to Turner's view of historical development than the study of individuals.21
Gifted with a copy of the paper, Roosevelt (the man who would subsequently
claim that his use of the term Rough Riders had nothing to do
with Buffalo Bill's Wild West) wrote Turner, "I think you have struck some
first class ideas, and have put into definite shape a good deal of thought
which has been floating around rather loosely." Indeed, Turner's writing
depends upon accessible images:
The wilderness masters the colonist. It finds him a European in
dress, industries, tools, modes of travel, and thought. It takes him
from the railroad car and puts him in the birch canoe. It strips off the
garments of civilization and arrays him in the hunting shirt and mo-
REPRESENTING HISTORY
233
cassin. It puts him in the log cabin of the Cherokee and Iroquois and
runs an Indian palisade around him. Before long he has gone to
planting Indian corn and plowing with a sharp stick; he shouts the
war cry and takes the scalp in orthodox Indian fashion.
"At the frontier," Turner thought, "the environment is at first too strong
for the man." Perceived as a boundary line, or grid of lines that had
marched from east to west, from frontier to ranches, to farms, to manufacturing,
and to cities, Turner's frontier marches in file to fill in the image of
an empty space. The 1890 census had declared this frontier line dissolved,
and Turner's thesis offered a closed (and nostalgic) explanation of its significance
and a history of its passing. Though himself a son of the
(Mid)west, of the open prairies and plains, Turner's thesis is an urbanist
view of the glory (and cost) of progress: the White City rising where log
cabins and the homes of the Potawatomi once stood.22
Historians have not failed to note the many aspects of American history
Turner's thesis omits-economic explanations, class antagonisms,
imperialism, the development of American capitalism and its connections
to world economies, among them-and the many sins of interpretation it
commits (emptying the land, tying the development of national democracy
to the pioneer, separating American history from political history
elsewhere in the world, sectionalizing diversity, nativism, and the positing
of a unique American spirit, name some of the trangressions cited). So
initially successful was the thesis among historians, however, that, by the
1930s, "the American Historical Association was branded one great
Turner-verein." Poised historiographically somewhere between racial and
geographic determinism, Turner's frontier mapped a terrain simultaneously
closed and opened, a history written yet just beginning to write itself,
in the discontinuous discursive mode of nineteenth-century American
evolutionism described by Foucault and evident at the Columbian
Exposition and its congresses. Aided to influence by Herbert Baxter
Adams (the secretary of the AHA and Turner's doctoral advisor at Johns
Hopkins), who referred to the paper several times in his report of the proceedings,
Turner's frontier is irrevocably the environment of the Indian,
but it is a frontier of change. In it, the frontiersman "must accept the conditions
which it furnishes or perish, and so he fits himself into the Indian
clearings and follows the Indian trails. Little by little he transforms the
wilderness."23
It is curious to find this frontier described as a line, "the meeting
point between savagery and civilization," bounded and filled in edge to
edge, when Turner's thesis simultaneously creates a frontier that is a
space, "not the old Europe" bordered anew, but a space shaped and inhabited
by those "who grew up under these conditions . . . the really
American part of our history." Turner segments the space, envisioning it
in developmental stages-"line by line we read this continental page from
west to east"-from frontier to city, but his is actually a history of simultaneous
spaces, even in the moment Turner wrote of these spaces as past.
CRITICAL THEORY AND PERFORMANCE
234
Those present spaces were very much on view at the Columbian Exposition
in Buffalo Bill's Wild West, to which Cody had specially invited the
historians on the afternoon of Turner's presentation, an invitation that the
procrastinating young scholar had to decline.24
What, then, is the intellectual "performance" of Frederick Jackson
Turner's frontier thesis? In bringing Turner's frontier and Buffalo Bill's
Wild West into the same display space, Richard White's essay for the Newberry
Library's 1994-95 exhibit rightly underscores the absent Amerindian
players who suffer equally in peaceful and in violent stories of the American
frontier. Both scenarios argue, however (as does the Columbian Exposition
site), the presence rather than the absence of those key players. To be
sure, Frederick Jackson Turner had neither artifacts, art technology, nor Indians
to assist him. Like any dramatist, Turner had only the word to offer,
but it was not the detached word of the novelist (still less the objective, scientized
language of the ideal historian of the 189os), rather the representative,
imaged language of the playwright in which "actors" perform history.
So effective was Turner's staging that it came to enjoy the same representative
afterlife of performance material. Other Columbian scholars used
even more elements of performance. Washington Matthews, for example,
illustrated his lecture "Sacred Objects of the Navajo" during the Folk-lore
Congress with both specimens (baskets, painted sticks) and phonograph
records of Navajo music. Confronting the limitations of verbal description
by offering to play Indian, as Barbara Kirschenblatt-Gimblett observes,
Matthews and other congress speakers who offered enactments sought to
make "the apparently trivial interesting by performing ethnography."
Captain H. L. Scott, of the Seventh U.S. Cavalry, went further still toward
the performative by using show Indians from Buffalo Bill's Wild West to illustrate
his lecture for the Folk-lore Congress, "The Sign Language of the
Plains Indians" (the folklorists were invited to be Cody's guests the same
afternoon as the historians, July 12, 1893).25
Buffalo Bill's Wild West represented still another "history," one that
served as both site and countersite for the histories offered by the
Columbian Exposition and its congresses. The show brought these sites together
in one performative display, one simultaneous showing of the simulation
that had, by 1893, become the history of the "native" and the
"American." Cody's "campground, arena, and grandstand" next to the fairground
offered foot-weary fairgoers a chance to sit down and to enjoy the
entertainment they sought at the exhibition (and perhaps at its congresses).
A specific construction of history and the authentic came with a seat at Buffalo
Bill's Wild West. "It is not a 'show' in any sense of the word, but it is a
series of original, genuine, and instructive OBJECT LESSONS," a broadside
promised patrons, "in which the participants repeat the heroic parts they
have played in actual life." William F. Cody and his show Indians had lived
the frontier they invoked, and their acts in the Wild West program for
Chicago reflected that. International contingents of cavalry and show riders
had been added to the Wild West during the European tour that preceded
the exposition, and Cody's general manager, Nate Salsbury, opened the
REPRESENTING HISTORY
235
Wild West for business in April 1893, before the fair itself commenced, to assure
high quality for the exposition's international audience.26
From the grand review introducing "Buffalo Bill's Wild West and
Congress of Rough Riders of the World," through its seventeen acts, to the
farewell salute by the entire company, the show underscored the presence,
rather than absence, of Indians and the frontier. Present as evidence
were people and things to materially attest to the reality of Indians and
frontiers: performers who had been frontier scouts, wagons that had carried
emigrants across the prairies, an "authentic" Deadwood Mail Coach,
Indians who were not only truly Indians, but Indians who had (like
William F. Cody) lived the history of bison hunts, skilled riding, battles
with U.S. Cavalry, and ghost dancing (if not of attacking wagon trains or
stage coaches), and bison who nearly were (as the program declared) "the
last of the known Native Herd." That these persuasive presences told audiences
a tale they wanted to hear made the Columbian Exposition the
show's most successful season (186 days of continuous performance in
one location, from April 26 to October 31, 1893, before six million people,
clearing an estimated million dollars).27
At the time of the Columbian Exposition in Chicago, Buffalo Bill's
Wild West had just completed two triumphal tours abroad before the
crowned heads and millions of other Europeans. The show trumpeted this
achievement as a "wondrous voyage." Like Columbus, the PR none too
subtly implied, the Wild West (as America) had completed a journey that
paralleled the trajectory of W. F. Cody's (and American) life, "from prairie
to palace." Now one with the great nations of the world, the Wild West
wrote a history in which the Indian wars were a thing of the past and "the
Former Foe-Present Friend, the American" (as a poster captioned an Indian
portrait) was one among the many who now took the name American
as their own. The warrior life celebrated in the Wild West had vanished,
but the Indians themselves remained. In Buffalo Bill's Wild West, the
"dead" rose up from the dust of the arena, rode on as well as off, were
there for the opening act at the start and for the salute that ended the show.
Historian L. G. Moses has recently observed, "Indians survived [the] 'Winning
of the West,' both in reality and then as portrayed in the shows." Furthermore,
he argues, "Show Indians had won the battle of images," for, although
Buffalo Bill's Wild West portrayed Indians "heroically and
sympathetically as a vanishing American" way of life, it did not portray
them- as did the Indian Bureau, the ethnologists, or Turner's frontier thesis-
as savages without history or culture.28
Of the visions of history, ethnology, and performance escaping the
"New World" of the Columbian Exposition and Buffalo Bill's Wild West
in 1893, the closed and the open, the positive and the negative, the publication
of more show-tolerant histories in recent years offers ground for recovering
subjects erased by racism. In Vine Deloria's view, for example,
"Unlike the government programs, the Wild West treated Indians as mature
adults capable of making intelligent decisions and of contributing to
an important enterprise." Nate Salsbury, for example, the Wild West's
CRITICAL THEORY AND PERFORMANCE
236
general manager, refused to control how show Indians spent their salaries
or, beyond exercising "a constant vigilance that they do not fall into the
hands of tradesmen who are sharpers," to assume a patronizing posture toward
an Indian performer who, in Salsbury's words, both "knows the
value of a dollar quite as well as a white man," and who "is quite capable
of choosing his occupation and profiting by it."29
Show-tolerant history does not deny the presence of the racism that
histories like Rydell's, Slotkin's, and White's have been at pains to reveal,
but it does suggest both that the performative is ubiquitous and that it resists
too narrow a reading. Examining issues of authenticity, for example,
a pursuit at the heart of much of performance analysis, widens the analytical
field for viewing the Columbian Exposition, its congresses, and Buffalo
Bill's Wild West. Vine Deloria suggests how and why show Indians
were able to put themselves into the "authentic" world of Buffalo Bill's
Wild West:
Instead of degrading the Indians and classifying them as primitive
savages, Cody elevated them to a status of equality with conti[n]gents
from other nations. In so doing, he recognized and emphasized
their ability as horsemen and warriors and stressed their
patriotism in defending their home lands. This type of recognition
meant a great deal to the Indians who were keenly aware that American
public opinion often refused to admit the justice of their claims
and motivations. Inclusions of Indians in the Congress of Rough
Riders provided a platform for displaying natural ability that transcended
racial and political antagonisms and, when, contrasted with
other contemporary attitudes toward Indians, represented one that
was amazingly sophisticated and liberal.
In this world, attack acts are a demonstration of skills valued by performers
as well as by audiences. As Deloria concludes, "the Wild West served
to give them confidence in themselves by emphasizing the nobility of
their most cherished exploits and memories." This Wild West was a
shared history and memory, a jointly occupied arena in which competing
claims for authenticity could be presented and evaluated.30
Viewing the new world of the Columbian Exposition as a heterotopia
permits historians to see "simultaneously represented, contested,
and inverted" countersites. Some of those contests are evident in the experiences
of show Indians at the fair, in their contracts and living conditions
no less than in what they performed and how audiences received
them. Today, more than a century after the Columbian Exposition, "Buffalo
Bill's Wild West" is a featured part of Euro-Disney, by 1997 the most
popular of its performing attractions, drawing over three million people
to a two-a-day, ninety-minute performance (with barbeque), for which the
1,o58-capacity house is consistently sold out. According to R. L. Wilson,
nearly all the enactors are from the United States, and several of the Native
American performers claim descent from show Indians who worked
REPRESENTING HISTORY
237
with William F. Cody. That there is pride among Amerindian performers
in being performers and a willingness to be part of the Wild West tradition
should not be surprising. "Spirit Capture," an exhibition mounted and
catalog published by the National Museum of the American Indian,
records a long history of show Indians and Indian shows, including performers
with Buffalo Bill, the Seneca Edward Cornplanter's Indian and
Minstrel Show (active in 1899), a performance of Hiawatha given by the
Iroquois of the Cattaraugus Reservation in New York in 1906 (it toured
the United States and Europe), the participation of Porcupine (a
Cheyenne) in the forty-fifth anniversary re-creation of the Battle of Little
Big Horn in 1921, and Navajo dancers entertaining a tourist train in 1963.
Most Americans have seen native performers, "show Indians" and amateurs,
in some capacity, recently as part of the Indian-centered opening
ceremonies of the 2002 Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City.31
Is it the case that audiences don't know the difference between the actual
and the assumed, the real and the simulated, or is performance the canny
creation of a self-conscious perception of the simultaneous presence of actual
and assumed, real and simulated, and of the cultural assumption of
the other as self? If, in addition, elements of stagings of this kind can be
located in anthropology, history, folklore, and disciplines not conventionally
considered performance or performative, theater historians can increasingly
locate elements of those disciplines in their own. This essay has
that wider world of the Columbian Exposition in view and a heterotopic
historiographical strategy for what it perceives as a heterotopic historical
site. What can be said about the theater culture of a Columbian Exposition
that takes in Turner's frontier thesis, Buffalo Bill's Wild West, and the fair
involves their very insistence upon their authenticity: the common belief
that the exposition showed what the "real" America (the United States)
had accomplished in a hundred years, Turner's thesis the "true" history
of that America, and Buffalo Bill's Wild West an "exact" reproduction of
the frontier life lived by those who enacted it. The form these discourses
assumed, the domain they sought to govern, the internal relationships
among their constituent parts, and their relationships with other discourses
help theater historians consider authenticity within representation,
where Rydell's, Slotkin's, and White's histories assume it does not
reside.32
It seems likely that fairgoers in 1893 moved among the real and the
simulated, the actual and the assumed, and were able to "get" contradictions
offered by the site. Moreover, it is significant that, at the putative end
of America's Columbian period, the end of its frontier, and at the supposed
vanishing point for Amerindians, there is a contest concerning
what and who constitutes the "native" and the "American." Histories tell
us this contest reflects power's insecurity-company owners over workers,
nativists over immigrants, men over women, racist whites over nonwhites,
and so on-and all these contests are evident in the wider performances
of the Columbian Exposition in 1893. My ongoing work with
CRITICAL THEORY AND PERFORMANCE
238
stagings of "the native," however, suggests as well the emergence of a
"new world" at the time of the fair, constructing the Indian as the American
and insisting upon the authenticity of its version of that story. At the
same time, the "native" is enacted in ways that underscored the real-life
distance between and within competing representations in, for example,
the three performance spaces considered here.33
NOTES
I would like to thank the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Phillips
Fund for Native American Studies of the American Philosophical Society, the
American Society for Theatre Research, and the Research Council of Kent State
University for their support of the larger project of which this work is a part. They
are not, of course, responsible for my interpretations or conclusions.
1. Alan Trachtenberg, The Incorporation of America: Culture and Society in the
Gilded Age (New York: Hill and Wang, 1982). Richard Slotkin, Gunfighter Nation:
The Myth of the Frontier in Twentieth-Century America (New York: Atheneum, 1992),
and see his "Buffalo Bill's 'Wild West' and the Mythologization of the American
Empire," in Cultures of United States Imperialism, ed. Amy Kaplan and Donald E.
Pease (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1993), 164-81. Richard White, "Frederick
Jackson Turner and Buffalo Bill," in The Frontier in American Culture: An Exhibition
at the Newberry Library, August 26, 1994-January 7, 1995, ed. James R. Grossman
(Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1994), 7-65.
Studies of the Columbian Exposition are numerous. Among very many, see
Robert W. Rydell, All the World's a Fair: Visions of Empire at American International
Expositions, 1876-1916 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), but see also
the early chapters of his World of Fairs: The Century of Progress Expositions
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993) and Rydell, John E. Findling, and
Kimberly D. Pelle, Fair America (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press,
2000); Neil Harris, Wim de Wit, James Gilbert, and Robert W. Rydell, Grand Illusions:
Chicago's World's Fair of 1893 (Chicago: Chicago Historical Society, 1993);
Robert Muccigrosso, Celebrating the New World: Chicago's Columbian Exposition of
1893 (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 1993); R. Reid Badger, The Great American Fair: The
World's Columbian Exposition and American Culture (Chicago: Nelson-Hall, 1979);
Norman Bolotin and Christine Laing, The Chicago World's Fair of 1893: The World's
Columbian Exposition (Washington, D.C.: Preservation Press, 1992); Jeanne Madeline
Weiman, The Fair Women (Chicago: Academy Chicago, 1981); Edo McCullough,
World's Fair Midways (New York: Exposition Press, 1966); and chapter 6 of
Neil Harris, Cultural Excursions: Marketing Appetites and Cultural Tastes in Modern
America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990). For the Smithsonian and
Bureau of Indian Affairs, see Curtis M. Hinsley, The Smithsonian and the American
Indian: Making a Moral Anthropology in America (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian
Institution Press, 1981); and Robert A. Trennert, Jr., "A Grand Failure: The Centennial
Indian Exhibition of 1876," Prologue 6, no. 2 (1974): 118-29, and "Selling
Indian Education at World's Fairs and Expositions, 1893-1904," American Indian
Quarterly 11, no. 3 (1987): 203-20.
For Buffalo Bill and his Wild West, see (among very many) L. G. Moses, "Indians
on the Midway: Wild West Shows and the Indian Bureau at World's Fairs,
1893-1904," South Dakota History 21 (Fall 1991): 205-29 and his Wild West Shows
REPRESENTING HISTORY
239
and the Images of American Indians, 1883-1933 (Albuquerque: University of New
Mexico Press, 1996); Joy S. Kasson, Buffalo Bill's Wild West: Celebrity, Memory, and
Popular History (New York: Hill and Wang, 2000); Don Russell, The Lives and Legends
of Buffalo Bill (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1960) and his The Wild
West (Fort Worth, Tex.: Amon Carter Museum of Western Art, 1970); Paul Reddin,
Wild West Shows (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1999); Sarah J. Blackstone,
Buckskins, Bullets, and Business: A History of Buffalo Bill's Wild West (Westwood,
Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1986); R. L. Wilson with Greg Martin, Buffalo Bill's Wild
West: An American Legend (New York: Random House, 1998); Jack Rennert, 1oo
Posters of Buffalo Bill's Wild West (London: Hart-Davis, MacGibbon, 1976); Henry
Blackman Sell and Victor Weybright, Buffalo Bill and the Wild West (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1955); and William F. Cody's Life and Adventures of Buffalo
Bill (Chicago: Stanton and Van Vliet, 1917).
For Frederick Jackson Turner, see Ray A. Billington, The Genesis of the Frontier
Thesis: A Study in Historical Creativity (San Marino, Calif.: Huntington Library,
1971) and Frederick Jackson Turner: Historian, Scholar, Teacher (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1973); Wilber R. Jacobs, The Historical World of Frederick Jackson
Turner (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1968); and George R. Taylor, ed., The
Turner Thesis: Concerning the Role of the Frontier in American History (Boston: D. C.
Heath, 1949). There are also reference works about Turner, among them William
E. Marion, Frederick Jackson Turner: A Reference Guide (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1985); and
John Wunder, ed., Historians of the American Frontier: A Bio-Bibliographical Sourcebook
(Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1988). Turner's papers are at the Huntington
Library (where Billington was senior research associate).
Among very, very many studies of white-Indian interactions, see those by
James Axtel, Robert F. Berkhofer, Jr., Fergus M. Bordewich, Peter Nabokov, Roy
Harvey Pearce, Frances Paul Prucha, Michael P. Rogin, and, of course, the work of
Vine Deloria, Jr., George Vizenor, James Welch, and (particularly for our context)
Philip J. Deloria's Playing Indian (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998).
2. Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge and the Discourse on Language,
trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith (New York: Pantheon, 1972), 155-56. For theater culture,
see Rosemarie K. Bank, Theatre Culture in America, 1825-1860 (New York:
Cambridge University Press, 1997).
3. In addition to Deloria's Playing Indian, see Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett,
Destination Culture: Tourism, Museums, and Heritage (Berkeley and Los Angeles:
University of California Press, 1998) for an exploration of ethnographic objects
and agencies of display. These boundaries are also explored by performance and
theater historians. See, for example, Christopher R. Balme, "Cultural Anthropology
and Theatre Historiography: Notes on a Methodological Rapprochement,"
Theatre Survey 35, no. 1 (1994): 33-52 and his "Staging the Pacific: Framing Authenticity
in Performances for Tourists at the Polynesian Cultural Center," Theatre Journal
50, no. 1 (1998): 53-70; Dennis Kennedy, "Shakespeare and Cultural Tourism,"
Theatre Journal 50, no. 2 (1998): 175-88; and Bank, Theatre Culture.
4. Rydell's All the World's a Fair is exemplary among recent scholarly studies
characterizing the Columbian Exposition (and other fairs) as a demon scenario,
but see also Slotkin, Gunfighter Nation; Muccigrosso, Celebrating the New World;
and Hinsley, Smithsonian. Michel Foucault, "Of Other Spaces," Diacritics 16, no. 1
(1986): 24.
5. For acreage, see The Best Things to be Seen at the World's Fair, John J. Flinn,
comp. (Chicago: Columbian Guide Co., 1893), 12. Henry Adams, The Education of
Henry Adams, ed. Ernest Samuels (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1974), 339-40.
CRITICAL THEORY AND PERFORMANCE
240
Adams's assessment of this disorder was grim. "For a hundred years, between
1793 and 1893," he reflected, "the American people had hesitated, vacillated,
swayed forward and back, between two forces, one simply industrial, the other
capitalistic, centralizing, and mechanical." The fair, Adams concluded, made clear
America had "slipped across the chasm" (see Hinsley, Smithsonian, 231).
6. Putnam was in charge of the exhibits on the Midway as well as those of Department
M. The racist aspects of this relationship have often been noted by scholars
(see particularly Rydell, All the World's a Fair, chap. 2). For the Bureau of Indian
Affairs, see Trennert, "Selling Indian Education," 210-11. Located near Putnam's
Anthropological Building and its outdoor Ethnographical Village, the BIA's Indian
School was described by the secretary of the Board of Indian Commissioners
as "a little, mean-looking building in the midst of those grand and imposing structures"
(see Moses, "Indians on the Midway," 214 n. 11; and Muccigrosso, Celebrating
the New World, 151). Encircled by the southeast loop of the fair's Intramural Elevated
Electric Railway, the school operated May 15 through October 1893.
7. Rossiter Johnson, A History of the World's Columbian Exposition Held in Chicago
in 1893, vol. 2 (New York: D. Appleton and Co., 1898), 316. According to Rand McNally's
Handbook of the World's Columbian Exposition (Chicago: Rand McNally, 1893),
90, the Anthropological Building measured 415 feet long and 225 feet wide. For the
assessment of the area's appeal, see The Columbian Gallery: A Portfolio of Photographs
from the World's Fair (Chicago: Werner Co., 1894), unpaginated. The quoted matter
is from a caption to "Down in the Windmill Section," as the area was called.
8. Johnson, History, 329-31, and 356 for the "white race" quote. The academics
in the laboratories included Joseph Jastrow from the University of Wisconsin, who
ran the Psychology Section, and H. H. Donnaldson of the University of Chicago,
who ran the Neurology Section. Ira Jacknis, "Franz Boas and Exhibits: On the Limitations
of the Museum Method of Anthropology," in Objects and Others: Essays on
Museums and Material Culture, ed. George W. Stocking, Jr. (Madison: University of
Wisconsin Press, 1985), 81 and 76. The "life group" is related to the "habitat
group" for animals, said to have been introduced by the Biologiska Musket in
Stockholm when it opened in 1893 (see A. E. Parr, "The Habitat Group," Curator 2
[1959]: 119). Jacknis notes (99) that Boas's model maker at the American Museum
of Natural History in New York, Casper Mayer, took plaster casts of faces and
body parts from the life: "These casts came from diverse sources: some were collected
along with the artefacts in the field. . . , some from the visiting circus or
Carlisle Indian School, and some from occasional visits of natives to New York."
Such figures, Jacknis observes, deserved a performance setting; thus the museum
introduced "the staged, theatrically lit diorama, popularized after 1910" (102).
Hinsley, Smithsonian, 112, cites an unpublished paper by Jacknis adding that
"without the proper control of scholarly texts subject to 'professional' standards,
an exhibit could in fact feed the taste for racist exoticism that it was meant to
curb." For Rydell's discussion of the Anthropological Building's laboratories, see
All the World's a Fair, 57.
For Peale's use of wax figures to contrast the "races of mankind" in 1797, see
Charles Coleman Sellers, Mr. Peale's Museum: Charles Willson Peale and the First
Popular Museum of Natural Science and Art (New York: W. W. Norton, 1980), 92; and
my "Archiving Culture: Performance and American Museums in the Earlier Nineteenth
Century," in Performing America: Cultural Nationalism in American Theater,
ed. Jeffrey D. Mason and J. Ellen Gainor (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan
Press, 1999), 37-51.
9. For Rydell's certainty that the Native Americans who participated in all
REPRESENTING HISTORY
241
these exhibits were "degraded" and "the victims of a torrent of abuse and ridicule,"
see All the World's a Fair, 63. Concern that peoples from the Arctic have time
to acclimatize to Chicago, and their show's need for a water feature, brought the
performers to their priviledged location in the autumn, near the "official opening"
of the exposition (October 12, 1892), well before the "Grand Opening" (May 1,
1893) that admitted the public to the fairgrounds. Rydell identifies the performers
in the Esquimaux Village as Inuit.
o10. Flinn, Best Things, 63. The Columbian Gallery, n.p. Handbook, 89-91. Johnson,
History, 331-32. The ethnographical exhibits were located between the Anthropological
and Dairy buildings and the elevated tracks on the east, South Pond on the
west (where the Viking Ship from Norway and Indian canoes and kayaks were
moored), and, on the north, the Indian School (situated near the mock-ups of the
Nif~a, Pinta, and Santa Maria). Guidebooks also feature a photograph of a "Mayan
Woman and Child" and identify an exhibit of a group of Arawaks from British
Guiana. Presumably they were not Putnam's "wards" (as one source calls the inhabitants
of these "villages"). There was also a "pioneer" log cabin on the grounds.
11. The molds for the ruins of Yucatan were "taken from the original ruins by
Edward H. Thompson, the United States consul to Yucatan, under Professor Putnam's
instructions." They included a simulation of a figure of Kukulkan, "the
great feathered god" (Handbook, 86-90).
12. Weimann, The Fair Women, 402-4; and see Rydell, All the World's a Fair. Amy
Leslie depicted Cody's guests and performers as the "vanishing Indians," whom
she saw picturesquely retreating in the face of Columbian culture ("Amy Leslie at
the Fair," Chicago News, May 1, 1893); and see Moses, "Indians on the Midway,"
214-15. See also Muccigrosso, Celebrating the New World, 151; Moses, Wild West
Shows, 134-35; and Kasson, Buffalo Bill's Wild West, 192-93. For other protests, see
the text and notes 11 and 15. Twenty-three of the thirty ghost dancers imprisoned
at Fort Sheridan were paroled to Cody and toured Europe with him prior to the
fair. At least some were still with him in Chicago in 1893.
13. Curtis M. Hinsley, "The World as Marketplace: Commodification of the Exotic
at the World's Columbian Exposition," in Exhibiting Cultures, ed. Ivan Karp
and Steven Levine (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1991), 350.
John C. Ewers, Indian Life on the Upper Missouri (Norman: University of Oklahoma
Press, 1968), chap. 15, "The Emergence of the Plains Indian as the Symbol of the
North American Indian," 187-203. A cartoon depicting "a major event! Indian
woman throws out dishwater," burlesqued both the performative and quotidian
character of ethnographic displays.
14. Hinsley reports the fourteen Kwakiutl from Fort Rupert in British Columbia
"slept on the floor of the Stock Pavillion" ("The World as Marketplace," 349).
What this means and whether the Kwakiutl used it before or while their own and
the livestock exhibits were installed-sleeping with the livestock seems unlikely
for a variety of reasons-is currently unclear to me. Putnam had control of a dairy
barn next to the Anthropological Building, which he used as an annex until he lost
the barn to a cheese exhibit. For the Carlisle exhibit, see Trennert, "Selling Indian
Education," 209-11. Emma Sickles wrote to the New York Times, after her discharge
from Putnam's staff, that Amerindian exhibits at the fair showed Indians as savages
in need of government education, while "every means was used to keep selfcivilized
Indians out of the Fair" (Rydell, All the World's a Fair, 63). I take Sickles to
mean the Indians were civilized, but in ways other than those dictated by the BIA
and Department M.
15. Trennert, "Selling Indian Education," 213-18.
CRITICAL THEORY AND PERFORMANCE
242
16. Sol Bloom, The Autobiography of Sol Bloom (New York: G. P. Putnam and
Sons, 1948), 119; and see Badger, The Great American Fair, 81; Rydell, All the World's
a Fair, 61-62; and Hinsley, "The World As Marketplace," 348. See Rydell, All the
World's A Fair, 53, 57, 236, and 71, for the quotes. Rydell charts the migration of
some Columbian personnel or their views to the Pan-American Exposition at Buffalo
in 1901 (see All the World's a Fair, 130 and 137).
17. Moses, "Indians on the Midway," 217. For the Midway show, see Harris et
al., Grand Illusions, 16o-61. Michael Chemers, "On the Boards in Brobdignag: Performing
Tom Thumb," New England Theatre Journal 12 (2001): 81-82, and 86 and 81
for the quotes, respectively. For an Indian defense of working as show Indians for
Buffalo Bill's Wild West, see Moses, Wild West Shows, 101-2.
18. Omission of the Indian Village from maps suggests a late opening, after
guides to the fair were printed. For an indication of some of the Indian acts there,
see Moses, Wild West Shows, 139. He observes that "none [of the Midway Indians]
apparently possessed a contract, which violated Bureau [of Indian Affairs] procedures."
For Rain-in-the-Face and petitions by Indians to have exhibits at the fair,
see Harris et al., Grand Illusions, 16o. In addition to Indian defenses of their show
Indian work, see also Ewers, Indian Life, 201-3.
19. Rossiter Johnson, A History of the World's Columbian Exposition Held in
Chicago, vol. 4 (New York: D. Appleton and Co., 1898), 501 and 412. Hinsley, Smithsonian,
110o. Jacknis, "Franz Boas and Exhibits," ,o8. The "confusion of views"
among the fair's anthropologists deserves detailed study that cannot be given
here. For Otis Mason, Smithsonian curator of ethnology, see Rydell, All the World's
a Fair, 58-59, and Hinsley, 110o-12.
The congresses published their proceedings. Particularly germane to this essay
are C. Staniland Wake, ed., Memoirs of the International Congress of Anthropology
(Chicago: Schulte, 1894); Helen Wheeler Bassett and Frederick Starr, eds., The International
Folk-Lore Congress of the World's Columbian Exposition, Chicago, July 1893,
vol. 1: Archives of the International Folk-Lore Association (Chicago: Charles H. Sergel,
Co., 1898); and Herbert Baxter Adams, ed., Annual Report of the American Historical
Association for the Year 1893 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1894).
20. Johnson, History, 4:169. Foucault, Archaeology of Knowledge, 36.
21. White, "Frederick Jackson Turner." White argues Turner reflects the peaceful
conquest side and Buffalo Bill's Wild West the violent conquest side of the
same frontier, stories that contradict each other. The verse is from "Westward Ho"
(see Joaquin Miller, The Complete Poetical Works of Joaquin Miller [San Francisco:
Whitaker and Ray, 1897] 187-88). White cites it on p. 18, and see p. 26 for his quoting
from Steele's popular 1873 history. Jacobs, Historical World, 4.
22. For Roosevelt's less than paean to Turner's originality, see Jacobs, Historical
World, 4, and White, "Frederick Jackson Turner," 10. Thomas Jefferson made observations
in 1824 similar to Turner's:
Let a philosophic observer commence a journey from the savages of the Rocky
Mountains, eastwardly toward our seacoast. These [the Indians] he would observe
in the earliest stage of association living under no law but that of nature,
subsisting and covering themselves with the flesh and skins of wild beasts. He
would next find these on our frontiers in the pastoral state, raising domestic
animals to supply the defects of hunting. Then succeed to our own semibarbarous
citizens, the pioneers of the advancing civilization, and so in his
progress he would meet the gradual shades of an improving man until he
would reach his, as yet, most improved state in our seaport towns. This, in fact,
REPRESENTING HISTORY
243
is equivalent to a survey, in time, of the progress of man from the infancy of creation,
to the present day.
See Avery Craven, "Frederick Jackson Turner," in Taylor, The Turner Thesis, 102-3.
For the Turner quotes, see Turner, The Significance of the Frontier in American History,
facsimile of the 1894 Annual Report of the American Historical Association (Ann
Arbor: University Microfilms, 1966), 201 and 207.
23. For opposition to the thesis, see Taylor, The Turner Thesis; Jacobs, Historical
World; Billington, Frederick Jackson Turner, and Genesis, 172-76 (for the Turnerverein,
3-4). Turner, Significance of the Frontier, 201.
24. Turner, Significance of the Frontier, 200, 207. For Buffalo Bill's invitation, see
Billington, Genesis, 166. Turner did tour the fair, evidently after his presentation
(171).
25. Bassett and Starr, International Folk-Lore Congress, 227-47 for Matthews,
206-20 for Scott, and 14 for Cody's invitation. See also Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, Destination
Culture, 33-34 for the folklore congress, 34 for the quoted matter. Kirshenblatt-Gimblett
observes (288 n. 37), "Anthropologists frequently 'played Indian' as
a way of demonstrating what was difficult to describe verbally."
26. Rennert, ioo Posters, back cover for the broadside. Slotkin (Gunfighter Nation,
67) states the salutatory notice "was added to the program of the 1886 Wild
West and ... appeared in every program thereafter." (There is a clear similarity of
language between it and the April 16, 1887, excerpt from the Illustrated London
News fronting this essay.) Of the joining of the Wild West and the Congress of
Rough Riders of the World, Slotkin asserts, "Beside each American or European
unit rode representatives of horsemen of the non-white tribesmen recently conquered
by the imperial powers" ("Buffalo Bill's Wild West," 173).
27. The acts are listed in Buffalo Bill's Wild West and Congress of Rough Riders of
the World, Historical Sketches and Programme (Chicago: Blakely Printing Co., 1893),
in the collection of the Newberry Library, Chicago. Wilson (Buffalo Bill's Wild West,
159) gives the opening date as (April 26, 1893, but his closing date of October 31,
adds up to 189 days, not 186. Annie Fern Swartwout's Missie: An Historical Biography
of Annie Oakley (Blanchester, Ohio: Brown, 1947), 204, says the show was open
a month before the fair itself. The most quoted attendance figure for the fair is
27,539,041.
28. The "wondrous voyage" and "from prairie to palace" themes appeared in
posters for Buffalo Bill's Wild West. See Rennert, ioo Posters, 27 and 110. For the
Indian as definition of the American, see Rennert, 52. Moses, Wild West Shows, 194
and 149.
29. Vine Deloria, Jr., "The Indians," in Buffalo Bill and the Wild West, an exhibition
of the Brooklyn Museum of Art, Carnegie Institute, and Buffalo Bill Historical
Center (New York: Brooklyn Museum of Art, 1991), 53-55. Moses, (Wild West
Shows, 116) locates Salsbury's letter among records at the Pine Ridge Reservation
and compares Salsbury's figures to those stated in Wild West contracts in the Federal
Archives and Record Center (see 305 n. 24). See also Luther Standing Bear, My
People the Sioux (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1928), 260-61, who traveled with Buffalo
Bill's Wild West and reports Cody's defense of equal, indeed preferential,
treatment of the show Indians in his company.
30. Deloria, "The Indians," 53-54.
31. See Wilson, Buffalo Bill's Wild West, 254-55, for photos from Euro-Disney
and 256 for details about the show. Cowboy hats are issued to all who will wear
them. Reproduction Wild West posters are available in the gift shop, and a western
CRITICAL THEORY AND PERFORMANCE
244
bar (with dance hall girls) awaits thirsty patrons nearby. Tim Johnson, ed., Spirit
Capture: Photographs from the National Museum of the American Indian (Washington,
D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1998), 32, 140, 150, and 152. The people and
buildings of the fair also had a history. Frederick Ward Putnam and Franz Boas
went to work for the Field Columbian Museum, housed in the Fine Arts Building
after the fair closed, opening as the Field Museum on June 2, 1894. A new building
was completed after World War I, which is today the Field Museum of Natural History
in Chicago. The Fine Arts Building cum original Field Museum was renovated
(under the sponsorship of Julius Rosenwald of Sears, Roebuck) and is today's Museum
of Science and Industry in Chicago.
32. I emphasize that Rydell, Slotkin, and White are not wrong about the racism
in the three sites and that a show-tolerant perspective of them could not erase race
because race defines these scenes.
33. Alan Trachtenberg, The Incorporation of America, notes, apropos power's insecurity,
the Dawes Severalty Act of 1887 concerning immigrants, the corporate
image offered by the "white city," and the Pullman strike of 1894. Joy Kasson's
final take on Buffalo Bill resonates in the context of the Columbian "world": "an
apt hero for the modern era, an age when images have become indistinguishable
from what they purport to represent and the content of national identity seems
identical to its performance" (Buffalo Bill's Wild West, 273).
Kinesthetic Empathies and the Politics
of Compassion
Susan Leigh Foster
Hills roll and mountains rise, though they are perfectly stationary;
the rolling and the rising are activities in us when we look at them.
-John Martin, Introduction to the Dance
The body is stooped, almost crumpled. It shuffles across a stage, or perhaps
a screen, or even a street. How might another body witnessing this
body imagine what it is feeling? How might the viewing body grasp the
shuffling body's sensations of tension, fatigue, or achiness? How might the
viewing body fathom the motivation, desire, or emotion contained within
(or is it attached to?) this slumping figure? On what basis might the viewing
body claim to apprehend what the shuffling body is experiencing?
European and American concert dance traditions have long presumed
that the viewing body can and does sense something about what
the shuffling body is feeling. They rely on a potential for some kind of empathetic
connection between bodies that would enable a transfer of meaning
from performing body to observing body. Influential dance critic John
Martin, quoted in the epigraph, argues beginning in the 1930s that this
empathetic connection is founded in a universal capacity of humans to
register the dramatic tension of motion. Promoting a modernist aesthetic
agenda that envisions all human experience as sharing common underlying
values and concerns, Martin conceptualizes the dancing body as capable
of unmediated contact with viewers. Every body, he imagines, is endowed
with the same access to movement's meaning because of its ability
to register the tensility and dynamism of all other bodies.
Postcolonial and gender studies have persuasively contested and
dismantled Martin's claim, providing invaluable techniques for historicizing
and particularizing experience. Yet they continue to grapple with
the nature and constitution of what is shared or communal within experience.
In order to re-conceptualize both the individual and the social, they
must continue to ask: Is there something we could call women's experience?1
Or can the subaltern speak?2 These debates recur in theories of
dance spectatorship: how and what do viewers feel watching another
body twist, sink to the ground, or burst into the air? How and what can
scholars claim about what viewers might have felt watching another body
performing in some past moment and/or distant place? These epistemological
dilemmas lie at the center of dance studies, and they have equal
relevance for theater and performance studies and the humanities more
generally. Is there any framework within which to affirm a located and
partial understanding of another body's situation? Is there the potential
245
CRITICAL THEORY AND PERFORMANCE
246
for an empathetic sharing of experience during the moment of witnessing
another body?
Responding to these questions, this essay sketches out the contours
of a genealogy of what I will call kinesthetic empathy. Following Foucault,
it delineates three tropological constructions of the empathetic moment,
emphasizing the historical specificity and conceptual cohesiveness of
each. Although the term "empathy" originated in the late nineteenth century
German research on perception and aesthetics, this essay reaches
back to examine its eighteenth century French and English antecedent
"sympathy."3 Historians of the eighteenth century concepts of sympathy
and sensibility can justifiably argue for the distinctiveness of sympathy,
yet their interpretations of its meaning have largely ignored the physical
experience of feeling what another body is feeling.4 My aim is to insert
physicality into the dynamics of exchange during any moment when a
person claims to know something about another's experience. At the same
time, I will be using corporeality to leverage a perspective from which to
examine how empathetic connections have changed historically. I will
argue that the conditions under which viewers connect to what they see
on stage have altered profoundly over the past three centuries. The ability
to differentiate between sympathy and empathy can thus be found in the
corporeal experience and consequent transformation of identity that each
entails. I want to affirm the potential for bodies, in all their historical and
cultural specificity, to commune with one another, yet I want to foreground
what is at stake in terms of power relations when they begin to interpret
one another.
How, for example, could we theorize empathy in conjunction with
the World Trade Center and Pentagon bombings?5 What were observers
offered that would help them to understand how, specifically, these bodies
negotiated the violent disruption caused by these hostile acts? Shown
on television were repeated screenings of the footage of the planes bursting
into flames as they hit the towers. Networks reran the same three- to
ten-second clips over and over again. In an effort to give an overview of
the disaster, cameras focused on shots from a distance rather than document
the local interactions at street level.
As the world grappled with this cataclysm's immensity, what was
the experience of bodies attempting to escape from the Trade Center towers?
Single- and double-file lines descending in near darkness; someone
breaking into a vending machine and dispersing soft drinks; one- to fiveminute
waits before being able to descend another few steps; a few
inches deep in water; a few jokes; a few reassurances from those who
lived through the 1993 bombing; a lot of patience; a lot of efforts to assist
those who could not travel quickly; the anxiety of choosing which stairway
or elevator; the incredible burn in calf muscles from standing, holding,
descending.6
These details, like those now arriving daily concerning the plights of
people in Afghanistan, Iraq, Darfur, or skid row, to name but a few, call on
our bodies to commiserate. But how might we imagine their bodies' tra-
KINESTHETIC EMPATHIES AND THE POLITICS OF COMPASSION
247
vail without presuming knowledge of the other? Is there any way for us
to understand their physical experience without invoking a universalizing
moral stance? Is there any way to speak to, but not for, these bodies?
Empathy's Stages
The emphasis on the pictorial at the expense of the corporeal in the media
coverage of the World Trade Center bombings resonates with a much earlier
construction of visuality, one elaborated primarily in the eighteenth
century. In his entry "Dance" for Diderot's Encyclopedia, M. le Chevalier
de Jaucourt examines the spectacularity of the tightrope dancer, and the
pleasure that this form of entertainment affords. Jaucourt proposes that
the performance offers viewers an unusual sense of identification with the
performing body because of its treacherous and suspenseful relationship
to gravity, the potential hazards that may befall it. This spectacle, one that
"agitates the soul," that worries, frightens, and provokes fear and alarm,
instills in the viewer a heightened sense of attentiveness.7 Observing the
dancers' precarious positioning, Jaucourt argues, the viewer experiences
the stirring up of emotion that instinctually arises when we see those like
ourselves in peril. This surge of emotion, arising mechanistically within
the viewer's own body, prompts pleasure, the product of the connection
between one's own body and that of the other. For additional clarification
of this sensation, Jaucourt refers his readers to the Encyclopedia's entry on
compassion.
The discussion of compassion expands on Jaucourt's analysis by focusing
on the feelings that extend toward those less fortunate. As in the
spectacle of the tightrope dancer, pleasure derives from the rush of feeling
toward another, even when the circumstances of that individual are disagreeable
or repugnant. Those who have experienced affliction are more
susceptible to feeling compassion toward another, and this is why people,
desirous to place themselves in a situation where they might feel compassion,
attend public ceremonies of punishment: the onlooker's participation
in this scenario of retribution invites a rush of feeling that affirms as
it enhances one's humanity and one's potential for acting humanely toward
those of lesser circumstance.
Adam Smith, economist and theorist of sympathy, clarifies this interpretation
of public punishment by reminding observers that they can
never know directly another's pain or joy.8 In The Theory of Moral Sentiments
Smith insists that observers project themselves into the role of the
person they are observing, and, through an act of imagination, take on
that person's feelings. The actual physical experience of pain, Smith argues,
is not accessible to the observer to any significant degree. Rather, the
circumstances in which the pain is endured form the basis for imagining
the other's plight. The observer exercises the imagination by carefully assessing
the scene in which the person is enmeshed, and the scene must be
read for its narrative by evaluating the clues signaling the status of its actors
and the "general idea of some good or bad fortune that has befallen
CRITICAL THEORY AND PERFORMANCE
248
the person" (6). Sympathetic feelings develop as the narrative, a series of
tableaux vivantes, unfolds before the viewer's eyes.
The viewer's feelings about the scene consist in a relation of scale or
amount, one to another. Propriety and impropriety, decency and ungracefulness,
gratitude and resentment, all form a reticulated chart of emotions,
each related to the next based on degrees of intensity. The social standing
of the performing bodies provides a template that aids the viewer in interpreting
where and how each feeling is located within the scene (292).
For example, Smith assesses Louis XIV's comportment this way:
The sound of his voice, noble and affecting, gained those hearts
which his presence intimidated. He had a step and a deportment
which could suit only him and his rank, and which would have been
ridiculous in any other person. (76)
The nobility of the king's voice and step confirms his status, even as his
role as king guides viewers' evaluation of his performance.
Thus as tightrope dancer and king walk forward along their distinctive
paths, they set in motion a scene that summons participants and observers
into their designated places. Coquettish yet determined, vulnerable
and accomplished, the dancer delights viewers by courting and then
rebuffing the moment when she might fail to control weight and gravity.
Imperious and surveillant, purposefully ponderous, the king commands
his courtiers into obeisance, inspiring their awe and also their insecurity.
Dancer and king both play the scene, play in the scene, as part of its inherent
logic, setting in motion an inevitable empathetic connection to
their presence.
Engulfed by Empathy
When John Martin invokes an empathetic connection between dancer
and audience in order to provide a rationale for the new modern dance,
he alleges that a very different process unites viewing with performing
bodies.9 Viewers comprehend the dance, he asserts, through their capacity
for "inner mimicry," a kinesthetic miming of the tensile progressions
of the musculature specified in the choreography (47-52). Martin grounds
inner mimicry in a fundamental physical reactivity to all events: we
pucker when we witness someone tasting a lemon, and when they yawn
or cry, feel similar impulses. Not only events but also objects elicit this
kinesthetic responsiveness. In walking through a building, Martin continues,
we sense its verticality and mass, the openness or closedness of its
spaces. As children we even imbue objects with the same capacity to feel
that we have.
Whereas Smith doubts that sympathizing entails a physical experience,
Martin adamantly asserts that viewers can and do engage with an
entire range of bodily sensation. He even extends his claims to include responses
to inanimate as well as animate actions:
KINESTHETIC EMPATHIES AND THE POLITICS OF COMPASSION
249
Since we respond muscularly to the strains in architectural masses
and the attitudes of rocks, it is plain to be seen that we will respond
even more vigorously to the action of a body exactly like our own.
We shall cease to be mere spectators and become participants in the
movement that is presented to us, and though to all outward appearances
we shall be sitting quietly in our chairs, we shall nevertheless
be dancing synthetically with all our musculature. Naturally these
motor responses are registered by our movement-sense receptors,
and awaken appropriate emotional associations akin to those which
have animated the dancer in the first place. It is the dancer's whole
function to lead us into imitating his actions with our faculty for
inner mimicry in order that we may experience his feelings. (53)10
Viewers' bodies, even in their seated stillness, nonetheless feel what the
dancing body is feeling-the tensions or expansiveness, the floating or
driving momentums that compose the dancer's motion. Then, because
such muscular sensations are inextricably linked to emotions, the viewer
also feels the choreographer's desires and intentions.
Like Jaucourt, Martin presumes a spontaneous and mechanical connection
between the viewer's perception of and feelings about the dancing
body. Yet for Jaucourt, that connection is determined by the logic of
the scene-the self-evident cause-and-effect relationships among the
body's instability, the narrowness of the rope, and the extent of the fall for
the tightrope dancer, or, in Smith's example, the ceremonial orchestration
of the king's procession. Martin, in contrast, asserts an intrinsic intertwining
of muscular action and emotion that prompts us to feel the flatness of
the rock as calming and the vertiginous heights of the building as causing
our spirits to soar.
Smith argues that knowledge about the physical world is based on
the experience of evaluating objects in proportion to their surroundings.
This understanding of the physical world builds up over time so as to become
as habitual as a reflex:
In my present situation, an immense landscape of lawns and woods,
and distant mountains, seems to do no more than cover the little
window which I write by, and to be out of all proportion less than
the chamber in which I am sitting. I can form a just comparison between
those great objects and the little objects around me, in no
other way than by transporting myself, at least in fancy, to a different
station, from whence I can survey both at nearly equal distances,
and thereby form some judgement of their real proportions. Habit
and experience have taught me to do this so easily and so readily,
that I am scarce sensible that I do it. (191)
Like social standing, the observer compares objects according to whether
they are closer or farther away, greater or smaller in stature. Unlike Martin,
who enters into and inhabits objects, taking on their internal structure
CRITICAL THEORY AND PERFORMANCE
250
and dynamics, Smith appraises the relative attributes of all objects so as
to make a just comparison among them. He projects himself to their various
vantage points, but then stands apart, cultivating his judicious ability
to interpret each object's standing within the scene. Martin, in contrast,
merges with each object, becoming one with it.
In the same way that Martin's viewer delves into movement's emotional
meaning, so too, the dancer, executing that movement, experiences
a version of what the movement is representing because of the intrinsic
connection between movement and emotion. Choreographer, dancer, and
viewer all undergo the same progression of feelings. Jaucourt, in contrast,
does not claim that the dancer must necessarily feel the emotions the
viewer feels. The shivers of alarm that the tightrope dancer inspires result
from the sudden recalibration of weight and balance necessary to avert the
fall, and Jaucourt focuses on just such moments, arguing that they command
the viewer's most concentrated and discerning attention. But is the
dancer feeling fear? Not necessarily. Jaucourt would probably accede to
the argument that as a professional the dancer long ago substituted for the
fearful response to danger a set of techniques for controlling alarm. Rather
than feeling afraid, Jaucourt's dancer experiences heightened awareness of
visual, tactile, and proprioceptive information and uses this information to
rectify the body's situation. Martin's dancer, however, must replicate the
emotion intended by the choreographer and embedded within the movement.
Only when the dancer is engulfed by feeling can the message be
fully felt by the viewer.
Both Jaucourt and Martin make their claims for empathetic physicality
in order to rationalize a capacity for human understanding across racial,
class, and cultural barriers. Jaucourt's argument fits well within the developing
discourse of Enlightenment sensibilit, contributing to the foundation
it establishes for a universal capacity to empathize with the other. As elaborated
in Diderot's writings on the theater or in Noverre's theories of
dance, the human ability to sense the joyfulness or sorrowfulness of another's
situation connects all humans. Nowhere is this capacity more
clearly demonstrated than in the human ability to decipher bodily gesture
and movement. Thus Diderot gleefully uncovers his ears at the end of the
play and proclaims that he has understood everything, and Noverre argues
that dancers' faces function as pathways to their souls.11
Smith utilizes his conception of the empathetic potential among all
humans to argue for the liberation of slaves, praising the inherent courageousness
of "the savage" and disdaining the slave traders whose "brutality
and baseness, so justly expose them to the contempt of the vanquished"
(300). Yet he does not share Diderot's and Jaucourt's willingness
to ignore class-based differences. Empathetic connections rely on, even as
they bridge, the distinctive behavior of rich and poor. It is by "changing
position," by viewing others not from one's own place or from theirs, but
"from the place and with the eyes of a third person," that a feeling for others
develops (Smith 192). This third position mediates differences in class,
thereby establishing an impartial, omniscient perspective that is poten-
KINESTHETIC EMPATHIES AND THE POLITICS OF COMPASSION
251
tially available to all, even though, as Smith acknowledges, those of better
means will more easily project themselves into impartiality.12
Whereas Smith uses the notion of an impartial position to ground
his argument for a universal application of empathetic responses, Martin
relies on inner mimicry to secure the proposition that dance functions as
a universal language. Underlying the many different patterns of choreography,
a common emotional core of experiences unites all human kind
and communicates itself easily through dance. Such a proposal justifies
Martha Graham's impersonation of Native Americans in dances such as
her American Document (1938), just as it rationalizes Helen Tamiris's embodiment
of the plight of the Negro in her solo Negro Spirituals (1929) and
her group work How Long Brethren (1937).23 And Martin's claims justify an
even broader form of artistic omniscience in which the dancer represents
the deepest and most essential qualities of humanity itself.
Eighteenth-century theories of sympathy conceptualize bodily
movement as yet another, albeit the most fundamental, in a hierarchy of
communicative systems. Because of its rudimentary yet powerful eloquence,
movement can "speak to all nations of the globe" (Noverre 16).
Martin, in contrast, imagines movement as the transparent vehicle of an
inmost, and hence, pan-human emotional realm. In the same way that
muscular action intrinsically links to emotion, so, for Martin, the individual
psyche replicates the tensile patterns of the universal human condition.
Where Smith and Jaucourt see the body necessarily engaging with a
system of rules and conventions in order to convey any meaning, Martin
presumes that the body spontaneously maps the contours of the psyche,
the veracity of its pronouncements a direct product of its connection to interiority.
Unlike Jaucourt's dancer who engages the body in the tasklike
project of representing hazard, Martin's dancer uses the body to convey
life's deepest truths.
Both Jaucourt's and Martin's theories of danced physicality deny
difference, yet as this brief comparison makes evident, they utilize remarkably
different techniques in the construction of their transcendental
epistemologies. Jaucourt builds empathy out of a reading of the scene in
which the imperiled individual plays a role. As in Diderot's bourgeois
dramas, so effectively ironized in the Conte de Valmont's famous staging
of himself as benefactor in Les Liaisons Dangereuses, the object of identification
garners sympathy from the dire conditions represented in the surrounding
tableau.14 The viewer interprets this scene, pulled into the
predicament, either physical or social, by the human capacity to assess the
storyline.
Martin, more focused on individual than social circumstances, dismisses
the scene, or more precisely, relocates scene-like properties within
the individual dancer's psychic interior. Differentials of status, circumstance,
or need are staged within the body. The "dialogues" created in these
internal scenes yield the distinctive movement impulses and qualities of
which the dance is composed. The result, a psychological rather than social
portrait, impels viewers into the inner landscape of the danced character.
CRITICAL THEORY AND PERFORMANCE
252
Once there, the viewer feels his or her own version of the emotions summoned
up by both choreographer and dancer.
Empathic connection to the eighteenth century tight rope dancer is
mobilized through a sameness that is constructed from, even as it transcends,
social hierarchies of difference, whereas empathy towards the
early twentieth century modern dancer derives from a sameness based on
the notion of pan-human psychological experience. For Jaucourt the universality
of the tight-rope dancer's performance stems from the universal
applicability of categories such as safety and danger, fortune and misfortune,
advantage and disadvantage. Any social encounter, regardless of its
distinctive details, can be measured and evaluated in terms of standard
hierarchies of worth, merit, and security. For Martin the precision of social
context blurs, its details vanish, and what endures are the universal psychological
variables that all human interaction produces.
Flickering Empathies
Can this historicization tell us anything about our contemporary experience
of empathy? How is embodiment being constructed in this moment
marked globally by massive migration and intensive electronic mediatization,
a moment that Arjun Appadurai has called "modernity at large?"15
What kind of empathy is promoted when the TV camera zooms in for a
close-up shot of the weeping victim, held for approximately ten seconds,
followed by the cut-away, usually to a commercial? Or when the Foley
generated sound track for the fight scene delivers a drastically enhanced
auditory rendering of the battering of flesh? Or when dentists, shop clerks,
and lovers all don surgical nylon to mediate contact between bodies?
Techno-theorist N. Katherine Hayles characterizes the informatics
of these material conditions as indicative of a paradigm shift from information
exchange based on presence-absence to that organized around
pattern/randomness.16 Contrasting the one-to-one relationship between
keystroke and letter that typewriter technology provided with the densely
encoded layerings of functions that one touch of the computer keyboard
provokes, Hayles argues that contemporary bodies are spliced into circuits
whose codes reiterate and then suddenly mutate. Not only have we
become cyborgs, imbricated within a vast array of prosthetic enhancements
to physicality, but we operate by accessing and implementing
codes based on the pattern/randomness principle that structure technological
and also social life. Traveling along these circuits, identity coalesces
around the changing point of view (what Hayles, following cyberpunk
author William Gibson, calls the "pov") that the subject exercises as
the body moves.
Exemplary of this new construction of identity, the cell-phone user
moves through the day one ear frequently attached to a small device that
enables conversation with anyone who has access to a telephone. The exquisite
proximity to the grain of the voice that telephones offer-as if inside
the mouth alongside the vocal chords-is coupled with complete
KINESTHETIC EMPATHIES AND THE POLITICS OF COMPASSION
253
physical mobility. The cell phone registers the slightest obstacle to breathing,
yet the rasping or sucking or snorting juxtaposes with ambient noises
of traffic, loudspeakers, or muzak so as to further foreground the immediacy
of the caller's voice. A seemingly ideal solution for people on-thego,
the cell phone allows them to revel at whim in the intimacy of the
other's voice, to push the envelope of urgency in deal-making, or to feel
connected and reachable at all times.
The novelty of this cyborgian configuration is evident in the glee
with which callers so frequently describe their physical location to someone
who is not present.17 They announce, "I'm getting on the plane now,"
or "I'm headed toward the restaurant," or even, "I'm over here on the corner;
can't you see me?" Walking down the street, the only thing fixed
about the body is the arm pressing the phone to the ear. It becomes the
stable reference while everything else in the environment circulates.
Those not yet fluent in cell-phone protocol stand still to make or receive a
call. They feel, especially, the vertiginous rush as the train takes off, while
the voice on the other end of the phone talks on. Before, the body's motion
alone produced the changes in volume or vision that it experienced. Now
the apparatus modulates those differences so that they no longer correlate
directly with physical changes.
Like Gibson's pov, the cell-phone user constructs identity from the
multiple codes and cues, electronic and material, that stream past. Both
caller and codes are in motion. Information, always partial and specific, is
synthesized moment by moment from scattered sources. Much of the information
is composed of images, reflecting actual events, that can be replayed
endlessly, making it possible to re-view and examine events from
different angles. In-formed bodies are pressed to learn not only how to access
codes, but also to decipher how the format in which the codes are presented
affects their meaning. For example, the television viewer must assess
the victim's distress as framed within the close up/commercial syntax,
or fathom the body's damage as conveyed through Foley electronics. And
viewers must process codes and their formats while themselves in motion,
discriminating between the contexts in which their own movements are responsible
for producing difference and those where they are not.
Cell-phone technology also collapses prior divisions between public
and private space. Earlier systems of communication required the person
in public space who was trying to contact another person to reach them at
a stable location either at home or at work, but not in a public space and
not on the move. Public space could contact private space but not vice
versa. Now, public space exists as a net of contacts and potential contacts
in which the actual whereabouts of the body, constantly changing, moves
through varieties of public and private space, always contactable. And
private space frequently leaks into the public as callers speak unpredictably
and as if into a void in public about business or pleasure.8
During the September 11th crisis, it was these voices, reporting it
live, that proffered a new dimension of corporeal situatedness. Located in
between the televised panoramic shots of downtown New York and the
CRITICAL THEORY AND PERFORMANCE
254
published autobiographical details of those inside which emerged only
many days after the attacks, these, in many cases last, conversations, between
occupants of the buildings or the airplanes and their loved ones,
connected humans as never before. Despite the briefness of the dialogue
and the stereotypic exchanges of love, these technologically mediated vivifications
of bodily presence fleshed out a new embodiment, resistant to
technology's pressures towards dematerialization.
As September 11 made clear, cyborgian bodies do not connect with
one another, feel for one another, by staging and then deciphering pictures
of themselves as eighteenth century bodies did. Nor do they sense
the tensile relation between core and surface that renders motivation, repression,
and emotion corporeal as Martin suggests is possible. Instead,
they catch fugitive, flickering glimpses of one another's corporeal status
as it transits, blurred into the prosthetic devices that intensify even as they
obscure physicality.
In this world where intimacy, proximity, and even subjectivity are
constantly reconfigured, Smith's impartial vantage point for assessing
need and dispensing compassion does not exist. Nor is there an opportunity
to become engulfed by the dynamic tension of an otherness through
"inner mimicry." As public and private collapse onto the site of the individual
body, its ability to elicit or impart compassion from others is being
relocated into a new set of framing devices-a new technology of compassion.
No longer stimulated by the self-evident logic of the scene or by the
interiorized dynamics of the human condition, compassion is now entwined
with the apparatuses, increasingly digitalized, that hurtle images
of bodies from one side of the world to the other. To sort through how
bodies can, might, or should feel towards one another in this cyborg culture
will require a new and flexible kinesthetic ethics.
Dancing bodies have already grasped this technology of compassion
and have begun to choreograph dialogic interactions with it. They have
begun to articulate how both dancing and viewing bodies negotiate their
new cyborg status. Take, for example, Bill T. Jones' mixture of live and televised
bodies in Still/Here. These bodies, wrapped in light and movement,
blur the difference between virtual and real even as they proclaim their enduring
presences and celebrate the labor of continuing to be. Or, consider
Rimini Protokoll's critical commentary on theater and cell-phone culture,
Call Cutta, in which audience members in Berlin are given cell phones
through which they are contacted by phone bank workers in Calcutta who
walk them through the city as theater all the while endeavoring to establish
a more intimate and enduring relationship with the viewer as customer.
Or, remember the all-woman rap group TLC who entered the maledominated
rap music scene in the early 1990s, devising choreographic
strategies that commented on their identity as women of color performing
for a multi-ethnic viewership in live stage and MTV productions.19
Even TLC's forerunners, the late 1970s break dancers, signalled this
new paradigm of empathic connection by showing a body composed of,
and versatile at accessing codes. Like the eighteenth century tightrope
KINESTHETIC EMPATHIES AND THE POLITICS OF COMPASSION
255
dancer, break dancers taunted and triumphed over the destiny of gravity.
And like her, they appropriated moves from elsewhere so as to choreograph
a commentary on social inequalities. Her passes and cabrioles, abducted
from an aristocratic Baroque dance vocabulary, signalled her mastery
over the codes that preserved class difference. Similarly, break
dancers' splicing together of vocabularies ranging from those of martial
arts to Capoiera to signature moves of pop stars demonstrated their familiarity
with the world stage even as their own performances took place on
street corners decimated by innercity poverty. The tightrope dancer's audience,
however, followed the clearly unfolding narrative of her transit
across the rope, whereas break dance viewers moved quickly from one citation
to the next, connecting with a fragment here, an audacious balance
there. This versatility with the codes signals dancers' skill at deciphering
and responding to the random/pattern organization of the social. Viewers
are drawn into their circle of dancing as they are able to sort out and
savor the valiant mixing of types of information.
Thirty years after its initial appearances in decimated innercity
neighborhoods, hip-hop circulates globally, born on airwaves, tape, and
digital media, as a sign of resistance and empowerment. Homogenized,
sanitized, morphed into generic versions of idiosyncratic and regional innovations,
it nonetheless prevails as the ciphering practice that enables
performers and viewers to access the codes necessary to their survival. I,
for one, look forward to seeing the transformation wrought by its popularity
in dance studios across this country where young girls who once
studied ballet and tap now cut their dancing teeth on poppin and lockin.
In this circulation of corporeal imagery, the digitized versions of
bodies themselves do not represent the dire future of physicality and live
dancing bodies its hope. Rather, dancing, itself enmeshed within cyborgian
matrices, reveals how physicality is constructed and how its connection
to the social might feel. Martin was not misguided to assert that viewers
feel something by watching bodies moving. Yet, as this essay has
undertaken to demonstrate, the structuring of that empathetic moment
changes over time. At this moment in history, more than ever, bodies must
assess how they are connecting one with another as well as what they are
feeling from that connection. Historicizing empathy constructs, not a vantage
point, but a trajectory from which to interrogate this how and what
of corporeality.
NOTES
1. Gender studies has exposed the heteronormative assumptions involved in
the gendered roles played out in the emphathetic moment: the viewer, masculinized
and ennobled by his apprehension of the predicament in which the feminine
object of his gaze finds herself, expands to occupy her position as well as his own.
In his claims to sympathy, the masculine observer places under erasure the specificity
of the feminine figure and the differentials of power that organize their
CRITICAL THEORY AND PERFORMANCE
256
respective positions. See Joan Scott, "Experience," in Feminists Theorize the Political,
ed. Judith Butler and Joan Scott (London: Routledge, 1992), 22-40.
2. Postcolonial readings of these differentials of power demonstrate their connection
to economic and cultural forms of imperialism. They elucidate the ways
in which compassion towards the "primitive" and "underdeveloped" other justifies
occupation and governance of the other by the colonizing power. See Gayatri
Spivak, "Can the Subaltern Speak?" in Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, ed.
Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grassman (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988),
271-313.
3. For an excellent overview of the history of the term empathy, see David
Krasner's essay "Empathy and Theater," in "Staging Philosophy: New Approaches
to Theater and Drama," ed. David Krasner and David Z. Saltz (Ann
Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2006), 255-77.
4. A notable exception is Joseph Roach's The Player's Passion: Studies in the Science
of Acting (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1985).
5. This essay was originally written four months after the bombings and was
envisioned, in part, as a contribution to the discourses on corporeality and politics
that they generated.
6. I offer these few details gleaned from a composite account of three workers'
distinctive choices and their distinct consequences published in the Los Angeles
Times five days after the events. See Scott Gold et al., "You're on the 87th Floor
and Something is Terribly Wrong," Los Angeles Times, September 16, 2001, D1+.
7. Jaucourt describes the dancer's encounter with gravity this way: "Quand
ce sauteur, ce voltigeur fait un faut entre deux epees pretes a le percer si, dans la
chaleur du mouvement, son corps s'cartoit d'un point de la ligne qu'il doit
d'&crire, il devient un objet digne de toute notre curiosit&." M. le Chevalier de Jaucourt,
"Dance," Encyclopdie; ou Dictionnaire raisonne des sciences, des arts, et des
metiers, par une socidtd de gens de lettres, ed. Denis Diderot (Paris: Briason [etc.],
1751-65), 630.
8. Adam Smith explains, "The objects with which men in the different professions
and states of life are conversant being very different, and habituating them
to very different passions, naturally form in them very different characters and
manners. We expect in each rank and profession a degree of those manners which,
experience has taught us, belonged to it," A Theory of Moral Sentiments (Amherst,
NY: Prometheus, 2000), 292. Subsequent references are given in the text.
9. For further perspectives on Martin's role as an apologist for modern dance,
see Mark Franko's essay "History/Theory-Criticism/Practice," Corporealities, ed.
Susan Leigh Foster (London, New York: Routledge, 1996), 25-42.
10. John Martin prefaces this example by explaining: "The perception of any
object has both these aspects inseparably; on the one hand we are concerned with
what it is and on the other with what it is doing.., we are aware of its state of action
only in terms of our own experience of it; we look out from it, in a sense, instead
of looking merely at it." Introduction to the Dance (New York: Dance Horizons,
1968), 51-52.
11. Denis Diderot, "Lettre sur les sourds et muets." [1751], Oeuvres Completes
de Diderot, ed. J. Assizat (Paris: Gamier Frbres, 1875); Jean Georges Noverre, Letters
on Dancing and Ballets, trans. Cyril W. Beaumont, Reprint (New York: Dance
Horizons, 1966).
12. According to Laura Hinton, it similarly secured a new division of labor in
terms of gender. She notes that Adam Smith gendered sympathy as a male spectatorial
and ethical practice. For Smith, sympathy, unlike humanity, requires no-
KINESTHETIC EMPATHIES AND THE POLITICS OF COMPASSION
257
bility and generosity, and as he notes "Humanity is the virtue of a woman, generosity
of a man." The Perverse Gaze of Sympathy: Sadomasochistic Sentiments from
Clarissa to Rescue 911 (Albany: State University of New York, 1999), 27.
13. Focusing on the production of danced spirituals by both white and black
choreographers, dance historian Susan Manning argues that the universal subjectivity
of the white dancing body prevails until the 1940's. After World War II modern
dance choreographers integrate their companies, allowing both white and
black bodies to represent the concerns of the dance. At the same time, a number
of African-American choreographers come to prominence, yet they are burdened
in their fame by the presumption that they will undertake choreographic projects
that specifically address African-American themes and values. Pearl Primus'
Strange Fruit, Alvin Ailey's Revelations, and Donald McKayle's Rainbow Round My
Shoulder, canonical works in the African-American dance tradition, all portray life
in the South and provide vivid images African-American community. See Susan
Manning, "Danced Spirituals: The Performing of Race, Gender, and Sexuality in
American Modern Dance 1930-1960," Of the Presence of the Body, ed. Andre Lepecki
(Middleton: Wesleyan University Press, 2004), 82-96.
14. For a fuller analysis of this and other literary scenes where empathy is
staged, see David Marshall's summary of the debates over the artificiality of theatrical
representation and the influence of these debates on eighteenth century
theories of empathy in The Figure of Theater: Shaftesbury, Defoe, Adam Smith and
George Eliot (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986).
15. See Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996).
16. N. Katherine Hayles, "Virtual Bodies and Flickering Signifiers," October 66
(1993): 69-91.
17. My use of the term cyborg is indebted to Donna Haraway's explication of
the term in "Manifesto for Cyborgs," however, I am not imbuing it with the feminist
resistive potential assigned to it by Haraway.
18. This merging of public and private spaces mimics the collapse of inner
and outer space described by Haraway in her analysis of the history of immunology
in Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (New York: Routledge,
1991). Haraway argues that metaphors governing the conceptualization of
the immune system as "a final frontier," or the last bastion of holism providing
integrity to the individual reiterate the ways that science and science fiction
summon up outer space. And she historicizes this equation of inner and outer as
occurring within the late twentieth century developments in cell biology and
astronomy. See also "A Manifesto for Cyborgs," Socialist Review 15, no. 2 (MarchApril,
1995): 65-107.
19. For a much fuller account of the history of break dancing and women's
participation in it, see Tricia Rose, Black Noise: Rap Music and Black Culture in Contemporary
America (Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University Press; University Press of
New England, 1994).
After Marx
Pronouncements on the death of socialism, Marxism, communism, and all
associated systems of thought and social organization marked the period
of the early 1990s. The historic changes that swept Eastern Europe supposedly
meant the death of Marxism as a political option and also as a
scholarly practice. Triumphalists proclaimed the victory of capitalism as a
world system surpassing all others, winning the Cold War, and marching
toward a New World Order.1 At that time, it seemed important to insist
that Marx still had some things on offer, even if we had historically overshot
the period of his largest influence. Strangely enough, looking back on
the past decade, Marx seems more than ever to be a philosopher for our
current times. Although he often appears as eclipsed (even college students
have little knowledge of or interest in him, and many assume he
was a historical mistake of some kind), his approach to capital offers stilluseful
tools for understanding global capital expansion.2 The rapid
growth of virtual communications technologies also requires an analysis
of the relationship between contemporary modes of production and the
chief institutions that sustain them (media, education, and government).3
As Marx's and Freud's notions of commodity fetishism combine into analytics
for a thoroughly saturated postmodern subjectivity, even the idea
of "totalization" needs reexamination before being presumed to be discarded
on the theoretical junkyard of outdated and exhausted concepts.4
Teaching about Marx, however, is truly a different challenge than it
has been in the past. Reviewing my teaching over a thirty-five-year period,
there is now a pressing need to fill in more historical background, to
present "common" concepts like class struggle carefully, even to doctoral
students, because their assumption in starting out is often that the concept
of class is completely obsolete. In a recent doctoral seminar, a skeptical
Romanian student, who lived through the revolution in Romania in 1989-
90, put it to me bluntly: "What is it that we should salvage from Marxism,
rather than just throwing him away and starting over? I really want to
know." The stimulating and difficult challenge of this question was knowing
where and how to start. To address someone who knows Marxism in
a very complex way as a series of texts and doctrines that were both
studied and then applied in a concrete regime challenges one to deal with
259
CRITICAL THEORY AND PERFORMANCE
260
theory and practice at once, and to begin right away with some discernment
of fine points. To address other students who have never read any
Marxian primary text, and who know only secondhand bits and pieces of
his work almost as folklore, requires beginning with some of the historic
debates about what Marx "really" said and meant, and with the ways
thinkers coming after Marx have elaborated or revised the basic writings.5
Obviously, these are two rather different, although related approaches.
But my five doctoral students made up a small social group, and my task
was to design not one-on-one tutorials, but a way for us to study-as a
group-Marxism and its usefulness for performance.6
The pedagogical strategy that would adequately meet these challenges
is still evolving in my classroom, but I can present a list of concepts
that, reworked or revised, still constitute a central set of Marxist concepts
worthy of preservation: These include an understanding of all human activity
as embedded in forms of production; an analysis of economic forces,
capital, commodities and money, exchange and use valuation; an emphasis
on social relations as mutually structuring and yet contradictory and
uneven networks of economic, political, cultural, and informational systems,
and a reliance on sophisticated forms of ideology critique to enable
us to discern our own historical formation and that of its relation to the
past and future. While notions of the ultimate progress of history toward
a final stage of achievement of justice and equality may now seem impossible,
a continuing faith in the possibility of social change and the power
of reason to revise and improve previous modes of knowing is still a central
feature of any contemporary critical Marxism.
Marx believed that the fundamental fact of human life was its productivity
and that human beings were defined by their capacity to produce.
This primacy of production results in various forms of social organization
in various periods. Capitalism arose when goods and services no
longer had a use value, that is, an intrinsic value for the producer, but instead
acquired an exchange value through circulation in a market. Labor
was thus separated from any instrumental benefit of toil, and surplus
value became the new objective of economic activity. Workers produced
for a wage, not a needed object, and owners could alter the relationship
between the wage and the established quantity of goods produced. The
notion of Marxist alienation is precisely this gap between the maker of
something and its direct use or benefit. Because of the understandable antagonism
between the owners and the makers (workers), Marx saw an inevitable
class struggle in which the interests of these groups were always
at odds.
For traditional Marxism, economics provides the explanatory principle
par excellence. Sometimes called economism, this view holds that
political and cultural events can be explained by economics-in other
words, that a causal relationship exists between the economic mode of
production in a given time and its political, social, and cultural institutions
and practices. Of course, the complex and contradictory forces at
work in any moment of reality do not neatly conflate into a clear or uni-
AFTER MARX
261
fied set of economic circumstances; nevertheless, "in the last instance," reality
is shaped by economic pressures.
Marx called this economic motor the base, and considered all other
aspects of society (law, domestic relations, politics, religion, culture) the
superstructure. To pursue the spatial aspects of these metaphors, society's
institutions are supported by a foundation, which is constituted by the
real relations of production at a particular stage of economic development.
Of course, as Raymond Williams has pointed out, these metaphors
imply a static, unchanging set of relations, which is misleading because
this "foundation" is neither uniform nor static.7
While in capitalism a central part of the hegemonic formation is
comprised of the relations of production, the conditions necessary to continually
validate capital and its accumulation imply a set of political and
cultural practices that are always potential sites of struggle, not reducible
to a last economic instance. For Chantal Mouffe, for example, a poststructuralist
thinker whose work over the last twenty years has been central to
a revisioning of Marxism for a postmodern age, "all social relations can
become the locus of antagonism insofar as they are constructed as relations
of subordination." The democratic discourse that is our historic
legacy in the West conflicts with all existing practices of subordination, at
least theoretically. "People struggle for equality not because of some ontological
postulate but because they have been constructed as subjects in
a democratic tradition that puts those values at the center of social life."8
The economic basis of production shares with political and cultural production
the work of constructing the whole of sociality.
Gayatri Spivak, Stuart Hall, Rey Chow, and other postcolonial and
cultural studies critics (with a keen eye on race and ethnicity) have been
developing theories of transnational economics and culture that, indebted
to Marx, nevertheless revise his explanatory principles. Rey Chow
discusses Spivak's insistence on "value" as more than labor's index or
representation, explaining how Spivak's insistence on use value as differential
and material (in contrast to exchange value, which is always predicated
on abstraction) resists economic or cultural reductionism: "Reading
Marx after reading Derrida, Spivak is thus able to force a
heterogeneous and improper 'economic text' to emerge [from Marx]. ...
Not letting go of the economic means not accepting the privileging of one
term over the other in the binary opposition between economic and cultural,
and thus not accepting the happy stability of either economism and
culturalism (the latter being merely an inverted version of economism)."9
Taking Marx's notions of value and commodities into world markets,
these critics point out how economics and culture are intertwined in new
technological flash-points. As Spivak explains in an interview, "I'm not
going to spell out the whole argument for you because this is Marx's
basic argument-if it is attended to, then there is a possibility of suggesting
to the worker that the worker produces capital, that the worker produces
capital because the worker, the container of labor power, is the
source of value. By the same token it is possible to suggest to the so-called
CRITICAL THEORY AND PERFORMANCE
262
'Third World' that it produces the wealth and the possibility of the cultural
self-representation of the 'First World."'10
These revisions of Marxist ideas about production have necessarily
gone hand in hand with new formulations of class relations. Identity theories
of gender, sexuality, race and ethnicity, as well as other identity markers
have thoroughly challenged the notion of economic class as a structuring
principle of struggle between those that own the means of production
and the workers. Critics have pointed out that multiple affiliations and internalized
commodification produce cross-class identifications. As Spivak
points out, developing further her notion of value as differential, "the
question of Value in its 'materialist' articulation must be asked as the cappuccino-drinking
worker and the word-processing critic actively forget
the actual price-in-exploitation of the machine producing coffee and
words."11 In other words, coffee and computers are fetishized, cut off from
their networks of productive relations, and seem to stand alone as desired
objects-even for individuals who might seem "to know better": workers
who may afford cappuccino but only as token symbolic capital in an otherwise
disadvantaged situation, and cultural critics for whom their means
of production (computers) are often linked to foreign sweat shops in Third
World countries where women make microchips for pennies.
Critics of color such as Stuart Hall have rethought questions of class
to provide greater complexity and transcendence of the binary class/race.
In interpreting Gramsci2 as adopting a "non-reductive approach to questions
of class," Hall lays the groundwork for his own point of view: "We
would get much further along the road to understanding how the regime
of capital can function through differentiation and difference, rather than
through similarity and identity, if we took more seriously this question of
the cultural, social, national, ethnic and gendered composition of historically
different and specific forms of labour."13 Here Hall moves to a complex
notion of identity formation without giving up the role of economic
class in determining specific subject positions. Both/and becomes, in the
best of these theorists, a strategy for valuing Marx while reading him for
a present postmodern age.
Similarly, the way that actual individuals think about and experience
their realities is often a contradictory and multi-faceted process.
Marx accounted for these self-perceptions through the concept of ideology.
It has been perhaps the most important Marxist idea for cultural critics,
and it has been substantively revised during its long history. Traditional
Marxism has had a reflection theory of ideology that is akin to a
reflection theory of representation, wherein the economic base produces
certain distortions or myths about the nature of reality held by subjects as
false consciousness. The Frankfurt school of critical theory accomplished
pioneering work in this area, beginning in the 1930s. Walter Benjamin,
Marx Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno, and Herbert Marcuse recognized the
necessity of theorizing mass culture and cultural production in general as
constitutive of social consciousness, mediating and not just reflecting the
economic formation.14
AFTER MARX
263
In the 198os, Louis Althusser rejected earlier formulations of ideology
as uncritical empiricism and sought to develop a "scientific" understanding
of ideology as a constitutive practice that produces and reproduces
life, freeing it from relegation to the status of superstructure. This
became one of the most powerful theories of ideology, combining certain
aspects of Lacanian psychoanalysis with a pessimistic view of the subject,
completely confined within an ideological mirror. For Althusser, the function
of ideology is to position subjects within a specific organization of reality,
making available certain fixed relations that pass for the whole of sociality:
"In ideology men do indeed express, not the relation between
themselves and their conditions of existence, but the way they live the relation
between them and their conditions of existence. This presupposes
both a real relation and an 'imaginary' lived relation."15 Thus, ideology is
persuasive as well as coercive; that is, it "hails" subjects into an acceptable
position, rather like the operations of psychoanalysis's unconscious. Althusser
names this process "interpellation." Following Lacan, Althusser
saw subjects positioned in language and discourse in a once-and-forever
interpellation. While in the 1990s Althusser's theories passed into the history
of Marxism after serious criticism of the unhistorical and fixed nature
of his theory, the concept of interpellation remains powerful and suggestive
to many thinkers.
Both Slavoj Zizek and Judith Butler have worked within Althusser's
basic paradigm to produce their own, more nuanced versions of subject
formation and ideological coercion. Butler, for instance, argues that recognizing
the strength of the law to determine and constrain identity can also
mean exploring how to refuse the invitation to interpellation, to fail to respond
to the "hail," or to respond in ways that are counter to the expected
behaviors. "Under what conditions," she writes, "does a law monopolize
the terms of existence in so thorough a way? Or is this a theological fantasy
of the law? Is there a possibility of being elsewhere or otherwise,
without denying our complicity in the law that we oppose? Such possibility
would require a different kind of turn, one that, enabled by the law,
turns away from the law, resisting its lure of identity, an agency that outruns
and counters the conditions of its emergence."16 In this way Butler
retains the powerful analysis of interpellation as disciplining and forming
subjects according to the law, but also posits a resistant strategy capable
of modifying the finality or completeness of any particular interpellation.
Her theory of ideology is embedded in Althusser and through him, Marx,
but makes its own contemporary turn away from the laws of either inevitability
(Althusser) or false consciousness (Marx).
While Butler has argued stubbornly for a way to resist the strength
of the law, Zifek, falling under a stronger psychoanalytic influence from
Lacan, is paradoxically pessimistic while committed to political analysis
and struggle. On the one hand he believes in ideological critique and its
knowledges, while on the other negating any possibility for the subject to
combat or modify the structures that entrap and repress. The Real, for
Zifek, is the kernel of repression, the elusive gap that resists recognition
CRITICAL THEORY AND PERFORMANCE
264
(the sublime object of ideology, to cite his most famous book title). Not
only can we not get at it, we are ourselves on empty ground: It is "possible
to assume a place that enables us to maintain a distance from ideology,
but this place from which one can denounce ideology must remain empty,
it cannot be occupied by any positively determined reality."17 Nevertheless
it is Zizek, perhaps more than any other philosopher, who is constantly
in dialogue with Butler and other important post-Marxist thinkers
such as Alain Badiou, Jacques Rancire, and Ernesto Laclau. His 1999 The
Ticklish Subject: The Absent Centre of Political Ontology is one of the most
complete attempts to rethink the Left in a postpolitical age in print, and
his frequent analysis of film and sometimes theater as well as cultural performances
make important links to our field. As he writes in his introduction
to The Ticklish Subject, "While this book is philosophical in its basic
tenor, it is first and foremost an engaged political intervention, addressing
the burning question of how we are to reformulate a leftist, anti-capitalist
political project in our era of global capitalism and its ideological supplement,
liberal-democratic multiculturalism."18
The essays that follow answer the question, "What should we salvage
from Marxism?" in ways that direct our attention to the difference
Marx makes to our scholarly and artistic approaches to performance.
David Savran recognizes the continuing utility of class analysis in a supposedly
classless age, and celebrates a certain form of Enlightenment
thinking-believing that rational thought and scientific inquiry produce
new knowledges, even if such knowledge is always in need of being reexamined
and surpassed. He also insists on embracing some causal explanations-the
language in Marx of "determination"-although he illustrates
how a complex and mobile understanding of determination
provides explanatory power without becoming "vulgar," as in the old familiar
term, "vulgar Marxism," by which scholars dismissed what they
took to be Marx's too simplistic reduction of the motor of history to economic
determinism. Savran reads Marx through Brecht to keep the affiliations
with theater very close, and through Pierre Bourdieu to keep an active
sociology of culture at center stage. Savran illuminates Rent as his
prime example of a contemporary and popular performance that can only
be understood when it is historicized, subjected to an analysis of its mode
of production, its relation to other "overdetermined" forces such as the replacement
of class politics by identity politics, the collapse of elite and
popular into each other, and the high-stakes investment of capital that
makes the term nonprofit theater obsolete today.
Bruce McConachie demonstrates the difference it makes to theater
history and historiography to use a Marxist framework when doing historical
research. He writes about "production" in both its theatrical and
economic sense, employing Raymond Williams's method of locating and
explicating keywords to highlight the power of the term, and to insist that
"the shift in usage from manager to producer and the emergence of production
to denote the producer's actions consequently marked a significant
AFTER MARX
265
stage in the transformation of dramatic entertainment under capitalism."
Like Savran, McConachie calls for an active sociology of culture as key to
the analysis of performance; Raymond Williams and Pierre Bourdieu
were/are primarily Marxist or neo-Marxist sociologists. Both Savran and
McConachie also provide extensive discussions of the basic Marxist terms
base and superstructure and their relations, showing how they have been
redefined and revised by thinkers coming after Marx to create a theory of
ideology that does not rely on a simple determination of culture and its
institutions by the economic base, but rather posits a reciprocal and constantly
changing cocreation of the entire range of human activity and its
representations.
John Rouse completes this section with an essay that has become a
classic for teaching Brecht. Rouse captures both a detailed description of
how the actor (and the director) functions in a Brechtian theater, and also
offers an explanatory analysis of how practice and theory inform each
other and relate dialectically in what Marx called praxis (the mutual and
inextricable process of reflection and action at once). Here, Rouse extends
Savran's discussions of the role of social determinants and the need for
historicization through concrete discussions of the actor's craft: "Historical
determinants-the economic, political, and social factors that influence
the social conditions of any historical period-must not simply be
made recognizable. They must be made recognizable as constitutive elements
in the individual occurrences between human beings." Brecht himself,
like Marx, has been labeled obsolete in recent years and yet has not
passed out of theatrical training or tradition. He continues to be a reference
point, even if only for argument, for many contemporary artists and
scholars, whether they are practitioners such as Ann Bogart or theorists
and critics such as Katrin Sieg.19 Since the first edition of Critical Theory
and Performance, Fredric Jameson, the foremost American Marxist thinker,
has published a major opus on Brecht (cited in Savran), and classroom
syllabi for theater and performance studies continue to have need of
Brecht on Theatre for many purposes.20 Outside the United States, where
Brecht productions have never flourished, Brecht's plays continue to be
mounted and produced, often revised into almost unrecognizable forms,
but then, Brecht would have loved that, as he believed the process of constant
revision was how history moved dialectically beyond itself into
something called a future.
Fredric Jameson, in fact, made one of the most important pronouncements
about Marxism at the time of its supposed demise-that the
task of imagining utopia is "the most urgent task that confronts Marxism
today."21 As Jill Dolan and others in our field have argued, the utopian
imagination is peculiarly well suited to performance, whose modus
operandi is always after all the subjunctive, "What if?"22 The final thing to
be salvaged from Marx is hope and a desire to envision a utopian horizon
of possibility for equality and justice and plenty, even if, as Derrida tells
us, it is always unreachable and undecidable.23
CRITICAL THEORY AND PERFORMANCE
266
How long
Do works endure? As long
As they are not completed.
Since as long as they demand effort
They do not decay.24
J.G.R.
NOTES
1. See, for example, a key text from that time: Francis Fukuyama, The End of
History and the Last Man (New York: Maxwell Macmillan International, 1992).
2. Gayatri Spivak in particular has insisted on Marx's writings on value and on
money as critical for an analysis of global culture. See, for example, "Scattered
Speculations on the Question of Value," in The Spivak Reader, ed. Donna Landry
and Gerald Maclean (New York: Routledge, 1996), 104-40, and "Practical Politics
of the Open End," in The Post-colonial Critic, ed. Sarah Harasym (New York: Routledge,
1990), 95-112.
3. Jacques Derrida remarks on the usefulness of the Communist Manifesto, "I
know of few texts in the philosophical tradition, perhaps none, whose lesson
seemed more urgent today.... No text in the tradition seems as lucid concerning
the way in which the political is becoming worldwide, concerning the irreducibility
of the technical and the media in the current of the most thinking thought....
And few texts have shed so much light on law, international law, and nationalism."
Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International,
trans. Peggy Kamuf (New York: Routledge, 1994), 13.
4. Slavoj Ziek is a good example of someone who has worked beyond Marx
and Freud to produce theories heavily indebted to both while staking out his
claim to a materialist Lacanian analysis. See The Sublime Object of Ideology (New
York: Verso, 1989), Enjoy Your Symptom! Jacques Lacan in Hollywood and Out, rev. ed.
(New York: Routledge, 2000), and The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Centre of Political
Ontology (New York: Verso, 1999).
5. A basic source of the "humanist" Marx is Eric Fromm's Marx's Concept of
Man (New York: Frederic Ungar, 1961). It is still an excellent pedagogical tool for
explaining key ideas from the mode of production to theories of the commodity,
use and exchange value, and many other basic features of Marx's writings.
6. The class was specifically Post-Marxist British Theory and Theatre, and we
read Raymond Williams, Stuart Hall, Angela McRobbie, Paul Gilroy, and Richard
Dyer alongside contemporary playwrights such as Mark Ravenhill and Sarah
Kane.
7. Raymond Williams, "Base and Superstructure in Marxist Cultural Theory,"
in Problems in Materialism and Culture (London: Verso, 1980), 31-49.
8. Chantal Mouffe, "Hegemony and the New Political Subjects: Toward a Concept
of Democracy," in Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, ed. Cary Nelson
and Lawrence Grossberg (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988), 91. This collection
of key theoreticians' revisions of Marxist theory was very influential during
the 1990s and remains important today as a record of scholarship just at the
time of the collapse of socialism.
9. Rey Chow, Ethics after Idealism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press,
1998), 35.
AFTER MARX
267
lo. Spivak, "Practical Politics," 96.
11. Spivak, "Scattered Speculations," 124.
12. Antonio Gramsci (d. 1947), Althusser, and Williams have been key theorists
in the history of Marxist revision and development. Gramsci is best known for his
concept of "hegemony," one of the most productive theories for contemporary
thinkers such as Hall and Mouffe. His major works are in Selections from the Prison
Notebooks, ed. and trans. Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith (London:
Lawrence and Wishart, 1971).
13. Stuart Hall, "Gramsci's Relevance for the Study of Race and Ethnicity," in
Stuart Hall: Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies, ed. David Morley and KuanHsing
Chen (New York: Routledge, 1996), 436.
14. For an overview of their contribution, see Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination:
A History of the Frankfurt School and the Institute of Social Research, 1923-1950
(Boston: Harvard University Press, 1973).
15. Louis Althusser, For Marx, trans. Ben Brewster (New York: Pantheon, 1969),
233.
16. Judith Butler, "'Conscience Doth Make Subjects of Us All': Althusser's Subjection,"
in The Psychic Life of Power (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997),
130.
17. Slavoj Zizek, "The Spectre of Ideology," in The Zizek Reader, ed. Elizabeth
Wright and Edmond Wright (Oxford: Blackwell, 1999), 70.
18. Zizek, The Ticklish Subject, 4.
19. See Ann Bogart, A Director Prepares: Seven Essays on Art and Theatre (New
York: Routledge, 2001); and Katrin Sieg, Performing Race, Nation, and Sexuality in
West Germany (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2002).
20. This compilation of Brecht's theoretical writings continues to be the major
introduction to Brecht's thinking in English. Bertolt Brecht, Brecht on Theatre: The
Development of An Aesthetic, ed. and trans. John Willett (New York: Hill and Wang,
1978).
21. Fredric Jameson, "Cognitive Mapping," in Nelson and Grossberg, Marxism,
89-90.
22. "My concern here is with how utopia can be imagined or experienced affectively,
through feelings, in small, incremental moments that performance can
provide." Jill Dolan, "Performance, Utopia, and the 'Utopian Performative,'" Theatre
Journal 53 (October 200ool): 460.
23. "There is an avenir for justice and there is no justice except to the degree
that some event is possible which, as event, exceeds calculations, rules, programs,
anticipations and so forth." Jacques Derrida, "Force of Law: The 'Mystical Foundation
of Authority,'" in Deconstruction and the Possibility of Justice, ed. Drucilla
Cornell et al. (New York: Routledge, 1992), 27.
24. Bertolt Brecht, "About the Way to Construct Enduring Works," in Poems,
1913-1956, ed. John Willett and Ralph Manheim (New York: Methuen, 1976), 193.
Shadows of Brecht
David Savran
Remember that we have met together in a dark period, when men's
behaviour to one another is particularly horrible and the deadly
activities of certain groups of people are shrouded in almost impenetrable
darkness, so that much thought and much organization is
needed if behaviour of a social kind is to be dragged into the light.
-Bertolt Brecht, The Messingkauf Dialogues
If Marxism were a coherent philosophy, an uncomplicated set of social
practices, or a straightforward political program, it would be easy to write
an essay that analyzes how it has been, and might still be, applied to the
study of theater, performance, or any other mode of cultural production.
But as Marx himself recognized, "Every useful thing"-and what good is
Marxism if it be not a useful thing?-"is a whole composed of many properties;
it can therefore be useful in various ways."1 Founded as a mode of
dialectical analysis and revolutionary praxis that aims to abolish class
domination and make good on an overdue messianic promise, Marxism
is multiform and contradictory, a totalizing perspective on that which defies
totalization, a science that flouts the laws of scientific knowledge, a
philosophy that questions the very bases of philosophy-in short, a set of
tools with a multitude of possible applications. It is little wonder then that
some of the work of the most provocative and influential Western Marxists-including
Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin, Louis Althusser,
C. L. R. James, Stuart Hall, Raymond Williams, and Fredric Jameson
could be styled deconstructionist, or that Jacques Derrida himself has
been drawn in Specters of Marx to mourn, resuscitate, and claim (more
problematically, I believe) that deconstruction radicalizes and supersedes
"the tradition of a certain Marxism, in a certain spirit of Marxism."2 Or that
the most celebrated Marxist to work in the theater, Bertolt Brecht, should
remain, fifty years after his death (and some fifteen years after the demise
of his last home, the Democratic Republic of Germany), a continuing
source of inspiration and controversy, veneration and disquiet.
Despite the debates that have swirled around Brecht's aesthetics, political
allegiances, collaborative methods, and relations with women, few
would deny that he casts a very long shadow over twentieth- and twentyfirst-century
theater. His shadow, however-the particular convergence
of authority, controversy, provocation, ideology critique, and aesthetic
and political activism that his name evokes-is limned by the boundary
between the light of reason and a certain darkness, both the "dark period"
in which he, and we, live and his own sense of irony and desire to vex.
Like modernity itself, his project remains frustratingly incomplete. Brecht
may be absent from the scene, but, like the ghost of King Hamlet, he has
268
SHADOWS OF BRECHT
269
not quite finished playing his part. He has inveighed against tyranny, exited,
and left in his wake dark traces of suspicion, longing, guilt, and
hope. Like Derrida's reiterative specter, he is the "ghost" who "never
dies" but "remains always to come and to come back."3 Brecht's immortality
is in part the result of his success-as playwright, theorist, and director-at
recasting dialogues about the politics of art and consolidating
and popularizing a theater that is as a rule stamped "Marxist." Drawing
on the work of Marx, Lenin, Piscator, the Russian formalists, Chinese actors,
and Walter Benjamin (to name only the most obvious), he dealt both
theatrical realism and agitprop a one-two punch from which they have
never fully recovered, developed a formula for a historical materialist
dramaturgy, and codified a self-consciously performative and politically
engaged mode of acting and mise-en-scene. But for Brecht, Marx was not
simply one influence among many. Only after he had begun reading Capital
in 1926 did he discover that, in his own words, it was "this man Marx"
who "was the only spectator for my plays I'd ever come across."4 While
in exile in California during World War II, he so strongly supported both
Soviet Communism and Stalin's war against the Nazis that, in the "eyes
of most European and American leftists who knew him in the forties,
Brecht was a Stalinist."5
It is little wonder, then, that Brecht has been hailed (and sometimes
decried) for "aim[ing]," in the words of Lee Baxandall, "to be the Marx of
the post-capitalist, post-subjectivist theatre."6 Because his plays and theoretical
writings alike maintain such a vigorous dialogue with Marxist theories
and practices, his many admirers-from Peter Brook and Giorgio
Strehler to Augusto Boal and Luis Valdez-have used him as both an emblem
of and guide to revolutionary theater praxis. But Brecht himself was
not only being coy when he declared to the House Un-American Activities
Committee (HUAC) (in what James Lyon calls a uniquely "polite exercise
in cunning and duplicity"): "I was not a member or am not a member
of any Communist Party."7 For he was, like Marx himself, one of the
great comic ironists who delighted in the perpetual undecidability and
manipulability of signification itself. ("The surgeon who has heavy responsibilities,"
Brecht wrote, "needs the little scalpel to lie lightly and
easily in his hand.")8 Fredric Jameson rightly emphasizes that despite his
allegiances, "Brecht never exactly had a system to teach, not even 'Marxism'
in the form of a system."9
Brecht's unparalleled influence has ensured that it is impossible
even to think about the impact of Marxism on theater and performance
as well as on scholarship in both fields-without considering the work of
this most cunning of theorists. (I suspect that many readers of this essay
did not begin, as I did not, to think seriously about Marxism until reading
Brecht's plays and his theoretical essays.) Yet as Jameson suggests, Brecht
proves an unreliable point of reference not because he failed to engage a
host of issues that pass as Marxist but because his theories and practices,
spanning some thirty-odd years, remain ambiguous, contradictory, wayward,
and enigmatic. There is no other theater theorist (with the possible
CRITICAL THEORY AND PERFORMANCE
270
exception of Artaud) who proselytizes more emphatically, tirelessly, and
programmatically for what is finally an impossibly revolutionary theater.
This is surely one reason why Brecht's work, much like that of his friend
Walter Benjamin, lends itself to being constantly rediscovered and reinterpreted
in light of changing critical (and theatrical) vernaculars, from postmodernism
and feminism to deconstruction and identity politics.
The mutability and elusiveness of Brecht's shadow means of course
that his theatrical shorthand can be, and has been, co-opted for nonpolitical
purposes by a great many theater and performance artists (including
Joseph Beuys, Allan Kaprow, Richard Foreman, and Laurie Anderson)
whose works rarely or never engage Marxist theory. It also guarantees that
any analysis of the relationship of Marxism to theater and performance
that uses Brecht prescriptively does so at its peril. For if nothing else, Brecht
has taught us the singular importance of adopting "a critical attitude" toward
not only theater, culture, and politics, but all those things we take for
granted.10 The very cornerstone of his aesthetic, Verfremdung (meaning estrangement
or alienation), was designed to reveal the historicity and constructedness
of every imaginable orthodoxy, including (presumably) Marxism
itself. If Jameson is correct in maintaining that Brecht's beliefs were
founded upon "an attitude hostile to system in general"-including Marxism-then
using Brecht's work as a foundation for a purportedly Marxist
mode of analysis would be a malapropism of epic proportions.11
Yet the early years of the twenty-first century may be an opportune
moment to take another look at the shadow that Brecht casts, in the second
decade after the fall of the Soviet Union, as the American empire attempts
to remap the world in line with its economic interests by waging
a war against terrorism abroad and dissent at home, as globalization proceeds
apace under the aegis of multinational corporations more rich and
powerful than most nation-states, as the redistribution of wealth in the
United States continues relentlessly upward, as the mass media continue
to undergo an unprecedented concentration, as the Third World is increasingly
exploited and immiserated in the name of free trade, and as
effective opposition to these developments seems virtually foreclosed.
Communism has been consigned to the ashcan of history while actually
existing capitalism, Aijaz Ahmad observes, is giddy in triumph but "is itself
mired in stagnation and riven by its own contradictions, becoming in
the process more threatened and threatening than ever before."12 This is
"one of those moments," Samir Amin notes, "when the gluttons hold their
orgy," when brutal regimes of accumulation routinely neutralize and depoliticize
Marxist references, when, for example, the most famous call to
arms ever penned-"Workers of the world, unite!"-inscribed on the
sidewalk outside the Memphis Central Library, is reduced to a cipher, a
musty quotation that is no longer "ideological" "in the context of the history
of mankind."3 Among dozens of quotations inscribed on the sidwalk
outside the new Memphis Public Library, Marx's call to arms provoked a
firestorm of protest, outraging two county commissioners, a city councilman,
and hundreds of indignant citizens.
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271
The urgency of reviving and renewing a Marxist hermeneutic has
been heightened-ironically-by its very success, by the relentless cannibalization
of Marxist discourse since the 1970s by what is now called "theory."
Open almost any theater or performance studies journal at random
and you will discover numerous buzzwords derived in part from the rich
tradition of Marxist critique: ideology, hegemony, class, social formation,
historical conditions, matter, materialism, colonialism, exploitation,
power, and so on. At the same time, however, if the contributors to these
journals were asked if they or their work were Marxist, the vast majority
would plead the Fifth. For many progressive intellectuals, Marxist modes
of analysis have been displaced by a proliferation of posts: -modernism,
-structuralism, -feminism, -humanism, and -Marxism itself. As Stuart Hall
notes, "many young intellectuals have passed through the revival [of
Marxist theory] and, after a heady and rapid apprenticeship, gone right
out the other side again."14 Although as Brecht's own testimony before
HUAC reminds us, the reluctance to be labeled a Marxist has a long history
that, in the United States at least, is a reasonable (if regrettable) response
to a long history of anticommunist conspiracy and agitation. The
success of McCarthyism and later, the backlash that followed the 196os,
made American intellectuals especially susceptible to the seductions of
formalism and poststructuralism and to the radical textual politics that by
the late 198os had largely supplanted the intellectual activisms associated
with both the Old and the New Lefts.
Once poststructuralism became the lingua franca of academic discourse,
most "post-" theoretical work adopted Foucauldian epistemologies
that have effectively replaced Marxist frames of analysis. I do not
have the space to launch a lengthy critique of Foucault (who will have to
stand in here as the mascot of "post-" theory), but let me note three of
what I consider his most aggressively anti-Marxist formulations. First, his
theory of power/knowledge (derived more from Hobbes and Nietzsche
than Marx) functions to equate all forms of administration, to obviate oppositional
insurgencies, to atomize the body politic, to dismiss the category
"class," and to substitute a subtle (and almost imperceptible) form of
micropolitics for class politics. Second, his theory of history, founded as it
is on the idea of nearly arbitrary and inexplicable epistemological ruptures,
precludes (and effectively ridicules) any and all structures of determination.
Third, his deep-seated critique of modernity virtually equates
liberal capitalism with Marxism as two nearly indistinguishable forms of
domination, surveillance, and control that justify themselves through an
arrogant and deceptive appeal to progress, enlightenment, and scientific
reason.15
I realize of course that my very enunciation of those things that Foucault
abandons and derides betrays my own beliefs about what might
constitute-and what would be worth preserving in-a Marxist frame of
analysis. That is why I am anxious, if not exactly to take refuge in Brecht's
shadow, then at least to use his name as the pretext for setting forth a set
of principles or methods, despite the fact that I well know the danger that
CRITICAL THEORY AND PERFORMANCE
272
any set of theoretical prescriptions (if only inadvertently) may congeal
into a dictatorial and unreliable formula. In this moment of capitalism's
presumptive triumph, however, I think it worth taking that risk. For despite
the claims of "post-" theorists, "the fundamental modalities of capitalism,"
Neil Lazarus and his coauthors note, "have not been disturbed"
since Marx's own time. Globalized capitalism has been and remains "a
world system of combined and uneven development based on the private
ownership of the means of production, the exploitation of labor power,
and the priority of profit over need."16 In the second decade after the fall
of the Berlin Wall, Brecht's plays continue to be performed and his theories
studied, but for most theater practitioners and scholars he remains as
ghostlike a presence as Marx. Given this situation, I think it as important
now to try to mourn and resuscitate Brecht as to mourn and resuscitate "a
certain spirit of Marxism," knowing (in Derrida's words) that "in this interminable
task, the ghost remains that which gives one the most to think
about-and to do. Let us insist and spell things out: to do and to make
come about, as well as to let come (about)."17
Given the legacy of so-called vulgar Marxism-a reductive and ultimately
ahistorical analysis of society and culture that, for any self-respecting
Marxist, always describes what someone else is doing-the first challenge
in taking up "this interminable task" requires confronting the
complex, mutual constitution of those concepts and principles that historically
have been associated with Marxist modes of analysis. One cannot,
for example, consider the question of ideology without addressing the
very considerable problems associated with the terms base/superstructure
and determinism. In his now classic (and yet to be superseded) volume
Marxism and Literature (1977), Raymond Williams confronts this challenge
by complicating "the key concepts of Marxist cultural theory" and analyzing
the history and interdependence of each.18 Since I have neither the
space nor erudition to emulate Williams, I will elide a number of crucial
issues-the irreducibility of class, class struggle, and dialectical analysis;
the necessity of taking up a global perspective on even the most apparently
local of phenomena; the importance of examining what counts as
materiality in historical materialism; and the obligation to analyze the
economic and social position and function of intellectuals as producers of
knowledge and guardians of the academy's gates.19 I want instead to
focus on one principle, one "interminable task" that happens to comprise
the foundation of Brecht's method: historicization. For Brecht this entails
debunking the aura of "timelessness" and universality that afflicts both
"bourgeois theater" and bourgeois culture more generally. It requires that
events be made strange, rendered "remarkable" and "unique" so they
will illuminate "the entire structure of a society at a particular (transient)
time"-and provoke social change.20 It requires, in short, the cultivation
of a sense of "astonishment" on the part of spectator and critic alike.21 For
the goal of Brecht's historicist dramaturgy is always "to expose the
world's mechanism on a grand scale and to copy it in such a way that it
would be more easily serviced."22 By practicing a mimeticism that keeps
SHADOWS OF BRECHT
273
"impermanence always before our eyes,.. . our own period can be seen
to be impermanent too."23 This principle is the same that Jameson uses
as a slogan to introduce The Political Unconscious-"Always historicize!"-and
which he there describes as "the one absolute and we may
even say 'transhistorical' imperative of all dialectical thought."24 For historicization
through dialectical analysis is the only way to expose the
structural contradictions that inform both a work of art and "the entire
structure of a society." It demands that one not only remember but also
analyze the very mechanics of forgetting. Or as Bourdieu puts it: to historicize
means to "reconstruct the history of the historical labour of dehistoricization."25
(This task seems an especially urgent one these days,
when politicians, pundits, and journalists seem to drink of the river
Lethe every morning.) If historicization represents both a refusal to forget
and a form of contextualization, it must be an "interminable task."
For a dialectical movement that ceases moving in order to produce a
static and timeless totality is antithetical to Marxist thought because
"[t]otality is not," Jameson warns, "available for representation, any
more than it is accessible in the form of some ultimate truth."26 The unfeasibility
of a totalizing theory, however, must not forestall dialectical
thinking but rather impel it forward all the more urgently.
As an example of historicization on the fly, let me consider the significance
of a theater piece that appropriates Brechtian techniques in a
slapdash way but which Brecht himself would likely view with puzzlement
insofar as it seems to epitomize the most seductive and narcotizing
characteristics of bourgeois theater. I am referring to the musical Rent by
Jonathan Larson, not by accident the most popular American play of the
final decade of the twentieth century. How can one even begin to understand
its significance unless one details that constellation of elements that
comprises its historical context:
the gentrification of New York's East Village
the prolonged economic boom of the 199os that particularly benefited
the Broadway theatergoing classes
the transubstantiation of high into low, La Boheme into rock opera,
as the occasion for slumming by members of these affluent
classes
the resurgence of a bourgeois individualism so aggressive that it
permits even abjection to be fashioned as volitional
the disappearance of bohemianism (aka the counterculture) and
the rewriting of its social critique as cynical parody
the mainstreaming of hip-hop; the triumph of multiculturalism as
a spectacle of difference
the romance of miscegenated cultural forms
the romance of miscegenation
the tragic mulatta updated as Latino drag queen in the wake of
Paris is Burning
the commodification of queer and queer wannabe culture
CRITICAL THEORY AND PERFORMANCE
274
the Disneyfication of Times Square (courtesy of Rudy Giuliani), in
which the Nederlander Theatre, gussied up to look dilapidated,
becomes a theme park of abjection
the intensifying pressure on nonprofit theaters to support themselves
by developing commercial fare for Broadway
the increasing obsolescence of the categories highbrow, middlebrow,
and lowbrow
the trickle-up effect of MTV-style editing, graphics, and rhythms
into almost every form of American culture
the clever and timely construction of the Rent brand-name (and
logo) as meaning broker and lifestyle philosophy at precisely the
moment when all America is being branded by the likes of Starbucks,
Nike, and the Gap
the increasingly volatile relation in musical theater, especially
after Sondheim, between social critique and old-fashioned
amusement
the sentimental mythologization of Larson's death on the eve of his
immortality
And so on.
One problem with the simple enumeration of elements is that it
tends-as all lists do-to equate each of them, flattening out the differences
and confounding systematic analysis. If they all bear equal weight,
how can one possibly come up with a coherent narrative about Rent or
its position in U.S. culture? Yet reformatting these contextual elements in
a hierarchical sequence is just as problematic. If one chooses to privilege
economic relations at the expense of social attitudes, ideologies, and the
intentions of the artists involved in the making of the piece, one could
be accused of reproducing a crude binary opposition between base and
superstructure that has long beleaguered Marxist theory. (How can one
isolate economic relations anyway when virtually all the elements I listed
above have economic components or implications?) If one takes the opposite
tack, one risks being labeled an idealist, formalist, or aestheticist.
Raymond Williams's solution seems to me the most useful and precise.
He points out (drawing on Engels's own assertions) that the elements
traditionally associated with base and superstructure "are in practice indissoluble:
not in the sense that they cannot be distinguished for purposes
of analysis, but in the decisive sense that these are not separate
'areas' or 'elements' but the whole, specific activities and products of real
men."27 Williams insists, like so many other Western Marxists, that
"[c]ultural work and activity are not now, in any sense, a superstructure."
"On the contrary," he adds, "they are among the basic processes"
of "a formed social and economic structure."28 This mutual imbrication
of the economic and the cultural became particularly significant and indisputable
with the explosion of mass culture during the twentieth century.
It therefore has become all the more urgent that a Marxist critique
seek to discover and map the interactions between and among all these
SHADOWS OF BRECHT
275
elements and the contradictions they produce and reproduce. "[A]bove
all," Brecht emphasizes, "knowledge manifests itself. .. in knowing better,
i.e. in [knowing] contradiction."29
Yet even Williams's formulation does not quite solve the problem of
base and superstructure insofar as it is indissolubly linked to that of determination.
For if one completely jettisons the difference between the economic
and the ideological, for example, it would be difficult to lay claim to
a mode of analysis that could be called Marxist. As Williams bluntly declares
(well aware how vexing this issue is), "A Marxism without some
concept of determination is in effect worthless." As an antidote to a crude
economism, however, Williams takes up the now widely deployed concept
(borrowed from Freud and Althusser) of overdetermination, meaning "determination
by multiple factors." For Williams, "'overdetermination'... is
an especially useful way of understanding 'contradictions' and the ordinary
version of 'the dialectic,' which can so easily be abstracted as features
of a theoretically isolated (determining) situation or movement, which is
then expected to develop according to certain (determinist) laws."30
Overdetermination, in other words, complicates what would otherwise be
a reductive causal relationship and problematizes the dynamics of eventuation.
It is a way not only of exposing contradictions but also of suggesting
the multiples factors that produce them. At the same time, overdetermination
can itself devolve into a self-neutralizing paradigm unless one
attempts, if not exactly to privilege economic relations (understanding
how complex and multiform they are), then at least to engage with the
idea that they are decisive and irreducible. In theorizing (over)determination,
Stuart Hall rewrites Althusser's celebrated phrase-determination by
the economic "in the last instance"-so it reads, "in the first instance." He
argues that to discover in the end only economic relations, as Althusser
does, is to try to coax "the lost dream or illusion of theoretical certainty"
into reality. But to begin with them means to establish "the open horizon
of marxist theorizing-determinancy without guaranteed closures."
"Marxism is surely correct," Hall adds, "to insist that no social practice or
set of relations floats free of the determinate effects of the concrete relations
in which they are located."31 But determination is always multiple, contested,
partial, provisional.32
A somewhat less problematic component of historicization entails
the analysis of how any performance or piece of theater functions and is
positioned in the field of cultural production as a whole. This analysis
involves an examination not only of relations of production, distribution,
and consumption but also of how culture is imagined and hierarchized
at any given moment. Brecht referred to this complex of interlocking
systems as the "apparatus," "the public entertainment machine" that
in most cases imposes its "views as it were incognito." He upbraids bourgeois
artists because they mistakenly imagine "they have got hold of the
apparatus which in fact has got hold of them" and, as a result, profoundly
underestimate the extent to which their own work is fashioned and in effect
held hostage by the very apparatus they believe they are managing,
CRITICAL THEORY AND PERFORMANCE
276
manipulating, and even subverting. Because "art" under modern capitalism
is always "merchandise," Brecht's apparatus keeps spitting it out like
a gargantuan sausage machine.33
A detailed analysis of the apparatus must be in fact a branch of the
sociology of culture of which there is a long, rich, Marxist tradition that
includes the work of Gramsci, Benjamin, Bourdieu, Williams, and Hall
and the Birmingham school. Williams defines it as the study of "different
types of institution and formation in cultural production and distribution,
and . . . the linking of these within whole social material processes."34
Williams himself contributed signally to the development of this field in
books like Culture and Society and The Long Revolution. Addressing itself to
the complexity of this enterprise, his theorization of the sociology of theater
and performance is worth quoting in full:
[A] sociology of drama, already concerned with institutions (theatres
and their predecessors and successors), with formations
(groups of dramatists, dramatic and theatrical movements), with
formed relationships (audiences, including the formation of audiences
within theatres and their wider social formation), would go on
to include forms, not only in the sense of their relations to worldviews
or structures of feeling but also in the more active sense of
their whole performance (social methods of speaking, moving, representing,
and so on).35
This daunting project could be considered a kind of radicalized theater
history that, for example, would be able to move with ease from an accounting
of ticket prices to the formal imperatives governing dramatic
forms, from the geographical distribution of theaters to the class composition
of audiences and production companies, and from theater's position
in the cultural hierarchy to the philosophical and ideological content
of specific plays.
Perhaps the closest thing to a system that might carry out
Williams's project is the historical sociology of Pierre Bourdieu, whose
mode of radical historicization and contextualization provides an invaluable
guide to dissecting "the relationship between systems of thought,
social institutions and different forms of material and symbolic power."36
Having long and deeply engaged with Marxist social theory (as well as
with structuralist anthropology and linguistics), Bourdieu has developed
a brand of sociological analysis that attempts both to displace and transcend
the binary oppositions base/superstructure, individual/society,
subjective/objective, idealism/materialism by deconstructing the (to his
mind, false) opposition between a highly individualistic subjectivism
and an objectivism that "bracket[s] individual experience and subjectivity
and focus[es] instead on the objective conditions which structure
practice independent of human consciousness."37 Like Williams, Bourdieu
"rejects the idea that social existence can be segmented and hierarchically
organized into distinct spheres, such as the social, the cultural,
SHADOWS OF BRECHT
277
the economic." In place of this hierarchy, Bourdieu "conceptualizes the
social world as a series of relatively autonomous but structurally homologous
fields of production, circulation, and consumption of various
forms of cultural as well as material resources."38
For Bourdieu, the concept of field is perhaps the key to his historical
sociology of culture. He defines a field as a social structure, an arena "of
production, circulation, and appropriation.., of goods, services, knowledge,
or status" that is configured by the range of "competitive positions
held by [social] actors."39 A field (whether economic, political, judicial, educational,
religious, theatrical, etc.) is a hierarchically organized, institutional
framework, "a universe . . . of belief," "a structured space with its
own laws of functioning," a kind of marketplace (whose boundaries are
never sharply drawn), which may in turn be composed of several subfields.40
"To think in terms of field," Bourdieu emphasizes, "is to think relationally."41
As he notes, meaning is always and only produced in relation
to the structures of particular fields and the struggles between and among
agents that in turn will always transform the fields' structures. For "[t]he
meaning of a work (artistic, literary, philosophical, etc.) changes automatically
with each change in the field within which it is situated."42 A piece
of theater, then, cannot be a passive reflection (or mere effect) of economic
and social relations because it is always actively involved in the propagation
and transformation of these same relations. Its structure, content, and
rhetoric are the result not of the solitary contemplation or collaboration of
artists but of an agonistic social process that is predicated less on aesthetics
and truth-value than on the competition for legitimation and social
power. For the object of all struggles within a field is capital-or forms of
power-of which Bourdieu specifies four different kinds that are always
unequally distributed: economic (money and property), cultural (artistic,
cultural, and educational knowledges and competences), social (acquaintances
and social networks), and symbolic (prestige, celebrity, honor, etc.).
Bourdieu's theory of fields and capital permits a detailed economic
analysis of art, society, and culture that deals with issues of class interests
and values in a complex way, that definitively debunks the idea of
art for art's sake, that relentlessly foregrounds and elucidates contradictions,
and that recognizes-and yet does not, like Adorno, condemn
art's status as a commodity in industrial and postindustrial societies. He
uses the concept of field to displace the notion of apparatus, which he describes
as "the Trojan horse of 'pessimistic functionalism'" in part because
it does not acknowledge social struggle (even Brecht's use of the
term suggests the futility of opposition). The field, on the other hand, is
constituted and constantly being transformed by skirmishes between
and among the different forces of orthodoxy and heterodoxy. Because it
is radically historical and dialectical, it is always open to the possibility
of radical change. For as Bourdieu insists, "There is history only as long
as people revolt, resist, act."43
To return to my example and spin an explicatory narrative: Rent represents
a site of struggle between economic and symbolic capital, on the
CRITICAL THEORY AND PERFORMANCE
278
one hand, and cultural capital, on the other, at a moment when there is almost
no consensus in the United States as to what qualifies as cultural competency
or value. Its triumph at the box office and its string of awards cannot
disguise the fact that it tends to be regarded by critics and theatergoers
alike as either stockpiling or squandering massive amounts of cultural capital
(that is, it is either brilliant or inept). Indeed, the ever-dwindling disparity
in contemporary urban culture between getting and spending
which is in part precisely what the play is about-is the mark of a society
in which the binary opposition between high and low is increasingly obsolete
(not unlike theater itself), but in which the opposition still retains a
residual purchase. Rent's strategy of racial, sexual, and cultural mixing
manages to combine an appeal both to the would-be hip and relatively affluent
(but few) supporters of what used to be called elite culture as well as
to the less affluent (but far more numerous) partisans of mass culture. The
musical's cross-class-but still doggedly bourgeois-appeal may represent
the triumph of nonprofit theater, but its massive acquisition of multiple
forms of capital testifies to the very obsolescence of the category "nonprofit"
at the moment when American theater has become increasingly
standardized and mass-produced and the so-called nonprofits depend inordinately
on the development of popular fare (that deliberately muddies
the distinction between elite and popular forms, between the orthodox and
the heterodox) in order to balance their books.
Rent is also unmistakably the product (and producer) of a society in
which class politics have been completely supplanted by identity politics
based on race, ethnicity, gender, and sexuality. And while there is no question
but that they have had a tremendously salutary impact on certain
egalitarian struggles in the United States over the past forty years, the category
"class" remains massively undertheorized or ignored in most identitarian
initiatives. It is hardly surprising then that the subculture that
Rent fashions is one for which poverty and abjection are the sign of cultural
capital (as they were for both the nineteenth-century bohemians and
the first avant-garde) but also a matter of personal choice. Most of Puccini's
genuinely destitute dramatis personae are transformed into the
naughty, downwardly mobile, incompletely oedipalized adult children of
upwardly mobile suburbanites. This last feature clearly marks the play as
a product of a resurgence of bourgeois individualism since the mid-197os
that tends to regard social status as volitional. Yet this triumphalist individualism
is unable to disguise the fact that Rent's gain is predicated upon
loss. It must, as a result, also be seen as the symptom of a deeply melancholic
society that has pounded the last nail into the coffin of what was
once an oppositional culture. For just as the musical cannot bear to let
Mimi really die, so does it attempt (if I may be forgiven for borrowing a
page from Freud) a melancholic sustenance of the ghost of a leftist counterculture
that it refuses to mourn because it cannot recognize that the patient
has expired. It is a play whose appeal is predicated at once on death
and the denial of death: the death of characters within the play, of the
Rodgers-and-Hammerstein formula musical, and of the author (in this
SHADOWS OF BRECHT
279
case, quite literally), as well as on the disappearance (and gentrification)
of both the old East Village and the old Times Square whose raffish
charms it manages to preserve and mummify, much like the statues filling
its near neighbor, the contemporaneously installed Madame Tussaud's
Wax Museum on Forty-second Street.
The kind of faux existentialism that comprises Rent's message ("No
day but today") and what the popular press would call its lifestyle philosophy
("There is no future / There is no past / I live this moment / As my
last") is clearly a product of a society that has largely turned its back on Enlightenment
projects and epistemologies.44 To that extent, and despite its
Brechtian trappings, the musical is as un-Brechtian as could be. It is also
clearly emblematic of an apocalyptic, "post-" society that is extremely wary
of rationalism and rationality, science, and ideas of social progress. For just
as a Marxist critique must hold on to some version of determinism, so must
it retain its foundation in the Enlightenment project. This critical enterprise
requires a refutation of the belief in the synonymy of rationality with instrumental
reason-the logic of domination and the will to power-that
characterizes so much "post-" theory. The simple equation of rationalism
with imperialism, fascism, sexism, racism, and the like is, to paraphrase
Habermas, an astounding oversimplification of modernity.45 As Lazarus
and his coauthors point out, it is also "a category mistake. It is to convert
the legitimate critique of the one-dimensionality of instrumental reason,
through displacement and hypostatization, into a radically ahistorical arraignment
of Enlightenment."46 Although the attack on instrumental reason
is often justified in the name of Horkheimer and Adorno (and their
Dialectic of Enlightenment), even they recognize the progressive dimensions
of scientific rationality. After all, they maintain, "[S]ocial freedom is inseparable
from enlightened thought."47
Despite the oversimplifications of "post-" theorists, scientific rationality-as
Habermas, Bourdieu, and Lazarus and his coauthors well understand-is
by no means simply a handy camouflage for the will to
power. Rather, theoretical-scientific knowledge has provided the foundation
for the construction of capitalist modernity and might yet again for a
different and less exploitative economic system. As Lazarus and his coauthors
argue, "capitalism produced an interest in accurate knowledge about
the world that outstripped even its short-term strategic goals of converting
knowledge into power and money." This knowledge, in its most progressive
form, "breaks with everyday, common-sense, pre-reflexive, and doxic
perceptions of the world." It thereby functions (in the spirit of Verfremdung)
as a way of making strange that which is taken for granted, insofar
as it is able "to integrate isolated or 'local' phenomena into a broader explanatory
scheme" that "can contradict appearance." As a dialectical and
experimental form of knowledge, it seeks "to construct a way of accounting
for processes in the world that can be tested, corrected, and, crucially, disproved."
Finally, it "entails a self-reflexive stance toward the methods of scientific
experimentation, interests of scientific knowledge, and material
forces determining the conditions of scientific practice."48 Or as Brecht puts
CRITICAL THEORY AND PERFORMANCE
280
it in his Life of Galileo, his own analysis of scientific rationality (and critique
and historicization of the debilitating disconnection between science and
morality), "The pursuit of science . . . deals in knowledge procured
through doubt. Creating knowledge for all about all, it aims to turn all of
us into doubters."49 By recognizing that theoretical-scientific knowledge
must always be positioned on the terrain of skepticism, Brecht seems to anticipate
what Habermas would later describe as "the irreversibility of
learning processes, which.. . can only be repressed or corrected by better
insights." On this basis, Habermas argues for the incompletely realized potential
of scientific knowledge: "enlightenment can only make good its
deficits by radicalized enlightenment."50 Given the ever-expanding international
division of labor, however, this enlightenment must be as radically
inclusive and global in its scope as in its method. For it is only "a popular
internationalism," according to Samir Amin, "that can engender a
genuinely universalist value system, completing the unfinished projects of
the Enlightenment and the socialist movement."51 It is perhaps no accident
then that Brecht's Galileo hides his masterwork, the Discorsi, in a globe. For
if his (or any!) scientific work is to fulfill its promise, it must combat the
brutal polarization that passes these days for globalization and "put forward
a universalist view of [the] future."52
For the theorists cited above, enlightenment, rationality, and scientific
knowledge are vexing concepts, but ones that a Marxist analysis cannot do
without. For they describe not a straight and narrow path to utopia but
rather a rigorous dialectic of trial and error, confidence and doubt that aims
to drag "deadly activities. . . into the light."53 Or as Bourdieu describes it,
"Enlightenment is on the side of those who turn their spotlight on our blinkers."54
This is precisely the process that Brecht dramatizes and interrogates
in Galileo, ventriloquizing through the title character that "science's sole aim
must be to lighten the burden of human existence." This deeply humanist
and literally global-project requires the abjuration of "knowledge for
knowledge's sake" insofar as the latter is likely to produce not advancement
but "a progress away from mankind."55 The figure who speaks these words
is one of Brecht's typically fallible heroes who is utterly incapable of practicing
what he preaches. He is thereby produced (like Shen Te or Mother
Courage) as a character who, because he is inadvertently turned against
himself, ends up sabotaging his most cherished dreams. It is then hardly coincidental
that the penultimate scene of the play discovers him (Icarus-like)
nearly blinded from having stared too long at the sun. With his failing eyesight
he takes his place as one in a series of tragic, or in his case, pseudotragic,
figures (like Oedipus or Gloucester) who are blinded for their inability
to see the truth. Struggling to catch sight of the geese that a peasant has
brought him as a gift and thinking his daughter has stepped into the lamplight,
he is unable to tell the difference between the light and the darkness.
Virginia. And what's wrong with your eyes this time? You should
have been able to see them [two plucked geese] from where you
are.
SHADOWS OF BRECHT
281
Galileo. You're in the shadow.
Virginia. I'm not in the shadow.56
In the one play by Brecht that is most explicitly about science and enlightenment
and that is rife with metaphors of darkness and light, the title
character is fashioned a creature of the shadows, one whose figure both
generates and blocks the light of scientific rationality. In that sense, he is
much like his creator during our own "dark period." Like Galileo, Brecht
appears to us less the specter that Derrida believes Marx has become than
the shadow, the one whose dark silhouette falls across the stage-but only
because he turned the lights on in the first place. Taking up Brecht's project-and
the spirit of Marxism-requires attending to the light every bit
as much as to the darkness, to reason and the utopian promises of history
every bit as much as to error and doubt.
NOTES
1. Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, vol. 1, trans. Ben Fowkes
(New York: Vintage, 1977), 125.
2. Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning,
and the New International, trans. Peggy Kamuf (New York: Routledge, 1994), 92.
3. Derrida, Specters of Marx, 99.
4. Bertolt Brecht, Brecht on Theatre: The Development of an Aesthetic, ed. and
trans. John Willett (New York: Hill and Wang, 1964), 24.
5. James K. Lyon, Bertolt Brecht in America (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 1980), 297.
6. Lee Baxandall, "Bertolt Brecht," in A Dictionary of Marxist Thought, ed. Tom
Bottomore (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1983), 56.
7. Lyon, Bertolt Brecht in America, 329-30.
8. Bertolt Brecht, The Messingkauf Dialogues, trans. John Willett (London:
Methuen, 1965), 94.
9. Fredric Jameson, Brecht and Method (London: Verso, 1998), 2.
10. Brecht, Brecht on Theatre, 78.
11. Jameson, Brecht and Method, 24.
12. Aijaz Ahmad, "Reconciling Derrida: 'Specters of Marx' and Deconstructive
Politics," in Ghostly Demarcations: A Symposium on Jacques Derrida's Specters of
Marx, ed. Michael Sprinker (London: Verso, 1999), 96.
13. Samir Amin, Spectres of Capitalism: A Critique of Current Intellectual Fashions
(New York: Monthly Review, 1998), 8; Carissa Hussong, quoted in "A Fuss Over
Marx in Memphis," New York Times, December 29, 2001, A13; see also Derrida,
Specters of Marx, 31.
14. Stuart Hall, "The Problem of Ideology: Marxism without Guarantees," in
Stuart Hall: Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies, ed. David Morley and KuanHsing
Chen (London: Routledge, 1996), 25.
15. For useful critiques of Foucault, see Alex Callinicos, Social Theory: A Historical
Introduction (New York: New York University Press, 1999), 274-82; Jorge Larrain,
Ideology and Cultural Identity: Modernity and the Third World Presence (Cambridge:
Polity, 1994), 91-97; Christopher Norris, Deconstruction and the "Unfinished
CRITICAL THEORY AND PERFORMANCE
282
Project of Modernity" (New York: Routledge, 2000), 119-35; and Aijaz Ahmad, In
Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures (London: Verso, 1992).
16. Neil Lazarus, Steven Evans, Anthony Arnove, and Anne Menke, "The Necessity
of Universalism," differences 7, no. 1 (1995): 80.
17. Derrida, Specters of Marx, 98.
18. Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1977), 5.
19. For a authoritative analysis of the last issue, see Jill Dolan, Geographies of
Learning: Theory and Practice, Activism and Performance (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan
University Press, 200ool).
20. Brecht, "Alienation Effects in Chinese Acting," in Brecht on Theatre, 96-98.
21. Brecht, The Messingkauf Dialogues, 48.
22. Brecht, The Messingkauf Dialogues, 67.
23. Brecht, "A Short Organum for the Theatre," in Brecht on Theatre, 190.
24. Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic
Act (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1981), 9.
25. Pierre Bourdieu, Masculine Domination, trans. Richard Nice (Stanford: Stanford
University Press, 200ool), 82.
26. Jameson, The Political Unconscious, 55"
27. Williams, Marxism and Literature, 80.
28. Williams, Marxism and Literature, 111.
29. Brecht, The Messingkauf Dialogues, 89.
30. Williams, Marxism and Literature, 83, 88.
31. Hall, "The Problem of Ideology," 45; see also Louis Althusser, "Ideology
and Ideological State Apparatuses (Notes towards an Investigation)," in Lenin and
Philosophy and Other Essays, trans. Ben Brewster (New York: Monthly Review
Press, 1971), 135.
32. The concept of overdetermination that I am proposing here is much like
that which Samir Amin (in a critique of Althusserian Marxism) describes as underdetermination.
He disparages overdetermination because he reads it as an
oversimplification, a process in which economic, political, ideological, and cultural
"determinants" function in concert, "all work[ing] in the same direction."
His theorization of underdetermination, in contrast, is closer to Williams's (and to
my) understanding of the highly conflictual nature of overdetermination: "each of
the determining factors is governed by its own logic, whether its status be that of
last-analysis determinance (economics) or dominance (political in tributary systems,
economic in capitalism, or, as I maintain, cultural in the communist future).
These specific logics are autonomous and complementarity among them does not
necessarily ensue, even spontaneously. They frequently clash with each other, and
it is a priori impossible to foresee which of them will predominate." Amin, Spectres
of Capitalism, 50.
33. Brecht, "The Modern Theatre is the Epic Theatre," in Brecht on Theatre, 34-35.
34. Williams, Marxism and Literature, 138.
35. Williams, Marxism and Literature, 139.
36. Randal Johnson, "Editor's Introduction," Pierre Bourdieu, The Field of Cultural
Production: Essays on Art and Literature, ed. Randal Johnson (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1993), 1.
37. Johnson, "Editor's Introduction," 3-4.
38. David Swartz, Culture and Power: The Sociology of Pierre Bourdieu (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1997), 40.
39. Swartz, Culture and Power, 117.
SHADOWS OF BRECHT
283
40. Pierre Bourdieu, "The Production of Belief: Contribution to an Economy of
Symbolic Goods," in Field of Cultural Production, 82; Johnson, "Editor's Introduction,"
6.
41. Pierre Bourdieu and Loic J. D. Wacquant, An Invitation to Reflexive Sociology
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 96.
42. Pierre Bourdieu, "The Field of Cultural Production, or: The Economic
World Reversed," in Field of Cultural Production, 30-31.
43. Bourdieu and Wacquant, Invitation to Reflexive Sociology, 102.
44. Jonathan Larson, Rent libretto, Dreamworks compact discs DSMD2-500ooo3,
1:15. Because there are no page numbers, I identify the source of lyrics by citing
act and song number.
45. Jirgen Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity: Twelve Lectures,
trans. Frederick Lawrence (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1987), 112.
46. Lazarus et al., "The Necessity of Universalism," 112.
47. Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans.
John Cumming (New York: Continuum, 1987), xiii.
48. Lazarus et al., "The Necessity of Universalism," 122, 120.
49. Bertolt Brecht, Life of Galileo, trans. John Willett (New York: Arcade, 1994),
107-8.
50. Habermas, Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, 84.
51. Samir Amin, quoted in Lazarus et al., "The Necessity of Universalism,"
125.
52. Amin, Spectres of Capitalism, 66.
53. Brecht, The Messingkauf Dialogues, 42.
54. Quoted in Katha Pollitt, "Pierre Bourdieu, 1930-2002," The Nation, February
18, 2002, 10.
55. Brecht, Life of Galileo, lo8.
56. Brecht, Life of Galileo, loo.
Historicizing the Relations of
Theatrical Production
Bruce McConachie
The producer does what the title says. He or she leads out, leads
forth, leads through. The producer is the total organizing human
being who generates the impulse from the organization.
-Zelda Fichandler
I never call myself a producer.... I'm part of this place. That's all.
I'm part of this place, part of the work we do, part of all the people.
-Ellen Stewart
The emergence of the word production to mean the process of putting together
a stage performance and the event resulting from this process is
fairly recent. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, this usage dates
from 1894, when the Westminster Gazette noted that "the production of the
Greek play" was "the great event of the past week." Before 1894 English
writers termed a theatrical event a show, a presentation, or a performance.
These words acquired the general sense of their present theatrical definitions
soon after the development of public playhouses in England in the
late sixteenth century. From that time until the 189os, however, English
had no single word that encompassed the many processes leading up to
stage presentation. During these three hundred years theater artists might
"found" companies, "build" costumes and scenery, "cast" plays and
"stage" them, but these preperformance activities were not understood as
making a total production. Similarly, English writers had no apparent
need to introduce the verb produce and the noun producer in theatrical
parlance until the 189os.1
The etymological predecessor of theatrical production developed in
the discourse of political economy. Production in the sense of the manufacture
of goods for market exchange began in 1776 in Adam Smith's The
Wealth of Nations. Several economists elaborated and expanded the term's
economic denotations during the nineteenth century. John R. McCulloch
spoke of "the production of utility, and consequently of exchangeable
value, by appropriating and modifying matter already in existence" in
1825. Henry Fawcett defined capital as "wealth which has been appropriated
to assist future production." Henry George further expanded the
meaning of the term in his statement that "production is always the
mother of wages." And the Manchester Examiner reported in 1885 that, because
the market was glutted, "production has of late been largely going
into stock." Although production retained earlier, noneconomic meanings,
its primary usage by the 189os referred to the productive processes and
results of industrial capitalism.2 Hence, when the Westminster Gazette first
284
HISTORICIZING THE RELATIONS OF THEATRICAL PRODUCTION
285
termed a theatrical event a production, its readers probably understood
that the occasion involved the investment of capital and the hiring of
labor to create and sell a product on the entertainment market in the expectation
of generating a profit.
Why do producer and production emerge in theatrical discourse at the
end of the nineteenth century? In what ways did production link artistic
and economic activity in the 189os? And why did it take three hundred
years for English writers to denote the process of putting together a show
with a single word? The likely answers to these questions have significant
implications for the ways in which theater historians construct explanations
of past productions. Most immediately, etymological understanding
can help the historian to avoid the problem of "presentism," unthinkingly
reading current practices back into the past. Further, probing the history of
the word can reveal the difficulties historians face in constructing contexts
and causalities to explain the relations of theatrical production in the past.
It can also suggest a possible strategy for overcoming these difficulties.
Such an investigation is important because theater historians in general
have been much more attentive to the means rather than the relations
of theatrical production. Scholars know a lot more about the probable stagings
of Shakespeare's plays, for instance, than about the company hierarchy
within the King's Men and the system of patronage that supported
and legitimated the company's existence. While some of this ignorance is
due to the paucity of the historical record, the general tendency to focus on
means rather than relations has to do with the predeliction of many historians
of artistic practice to separate the aesthetic from the practical.3
Lack of attention to the social and economic relations of production
has been especially deleterious to understanding the sweeping changes
that occurred in the Western theater during the nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries. In particular, constructions of American theater history
could benefit from a fresh look at the productive relations of stock companies
before 1870, the similarities between acting stars and nineteenth-century
capitalists, and the relations among producers, playwrights, and directors
at the turn of the century. Reexamining these institutional social
relations on the basis of a neo-Marxist understanding of cultural production
constitutes the chief example of this essay. Its primary direction, however,
is to historicize theatrical production, toward which exploring the etymology
of the word is a necessary first step.
As to why theatrical production and its related terms borrowed economic
meanings in the 189os, one explanation might be that the demand
for certain kinds of shows and the means of producing them were changing.
Artistic and audience desire for aesthetically unified performances
and the complexities of staging realistic plays required greater coordination
of all the theatrical elements, especially acting, scenery, and lighting,
and this led to the emergence of dictatorial, innovative producer-directors.
This explanation constructs a causal relation linking changes in demand
and productive means to a fundamental alteration in the social relations
of theatrical production: aesthetic desires and new technologies
CRITICAL THEORY AND PERFORMANCE
286
cause producers to centralize theater making under their own control.
This is the conventional explanation linking the development of stage realism
and institutional changes in the theater at the end of the nineteenth
century, and it seems to account for the emergence of production in theatrical
discourse and its ties to economic meanings.4
But is this an adequate explanation? To begin with, it's driven mainly
by ideas: playwrights, theorists, directors, and others with new concepts
and commitments create a theater that fits their aesthetic ideals. Also, this
historical construction sidesteps the issue of power relations among the
makers of theater, thus calling into question its causal probability. To account
for these disparities of power, one alternative explanation might be
that capitalists, seeing new opportunities for profit, constituted themselves
as producers and rationalized their empowerment on the grounds that
they could best offer the public what it wanted. Theater historians have
used this explanation, too, to link the rise of realism with the development
of theatrical monopolies.5
This alternative construction may gain in credibility, but it simply
runs causality in the other direction: the relations of theater production
now determine audience demand and the deployment of new technologies.
Further, it raises the problem of completeness similar to the "ideadriven"
explanation offered above. Why, in other words, should materialistic
motives be more central to historical actors than ideational ones? This
question begs a larger one: what structural historical forces beyond individual
control may have shaped turn-of-the-century Western culture and
society-and consequently its theater? This issue, in turn, takes the historian
beyond a consideration of causal relations among discrete historical
phenomena that are narrowly theatrical and into the broad context of social
and economic history. But, once there, how is the theater historian to
proceed?
A likely answer to the third question raised above-why it takes the
English language so long to come up with one word to denote all the
processes of "production"-suggests one promising direction for the historian
at sea in contextuality. The usual etymological explanation for all
such questions is that writers of English needed several words; one word
wouldn't do. Until the 189os theater making was considered to be a group
activity involving several crafts: playwriting, acting, scene painting, and
so on. To be sure, managing was thought necessary to coordinate these
crafts for performance, but a manager was not a "producer"; though usually
controlling the affairs of a stock company, the manager remained
more of a master craftsman than a capitalist, as nineteenth-century writers
understood these words.6 The shift in usage from manager to producer
and the emergence of production to denote the producer's actions consequently
marked a significant stage in the transformation of dramatic entertainment
under capitalism. A parallel transformation in practice and
discourse had already occurred in most other crafts. The making of textiles
didn't become production, for instance, until capitalists gained control
and ownership of the separate crafts of spinning, weaving, cutting,
HISTORICIZING THE RELATIONS OF THEATRICAL PRODUCTION
287
etc. As in the theater, group creation gave way to individual production,
the "individual" being either a capitalist or a corporation, the legal extension
and enhancement of individual power under capitalism.
This discussion of the possible reasons why language denoting most
of the activities of theater making devolved from several words to one
master term suggests that theater historians must begin with a general
sense of the totality and dynamics of historical cultures to fashion complete
explanations of theatrical production. Hermeneutically examining
possible interpretations within a notion of totality can generate a more persuasive
and complete explanation of the emergence of production in the
189os than constructing causal chains linking such discrete, isolable phenomena
as audience demand, business greed, artistic innovation, and new
technology. The foregoing discussion also suggests that focusing on the
general relations of production within this historical totality can lead the
theater scholar to an understanding of productive relations within specific
theatrical formations.
The implications of this etymological exploration are consonant
with Raymond Williams's approach to historical investigation and explanation.
Working out of the traditions of Marxism, Williams fashioned
guidelines for exploring the dynamic relations of production within a social-cultural
totality, which are especially useful for theater historians. He
began by questioning the conventional interpretation of the base-superstructure
metaphor, the usual starting point in Marxism for relating the
means and relations of production to the culture of any historical period.
In the preface to his Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, Marx
stated:
In the social production of their life, men enter into definite relations
that are indispensable and independent of their will, relations of production
which correspond to a definite stage of development of their
material productive forces. The sum total of these relations of production
constitutes the economic structure of society, the real foundation,
on which rises a legal and political superstructure and to which
correspond definite forms of social consciousness. The mode of production
of material life conditions the social, political, and intellectual
life process in general.7
Early Marxists understood from this and similar statements that the productive
base determines the cultural superstructure; some even thought
that the social relations of material production, such as those found in
heavy industry, must control the form and content of cultural practices in
any historical era.
Like many neo-Marxists, Williams criticized this reading of the basesuperstructure
metaphor for its rigidity and reification:
I would say that each term of the proposition has to be revalued in
a particular direction. We have to revalue "determination" towards
CRITICAL THEORY AND PERFORMANCE
288
the setting of limits and the exertion of pressure, and away from a
predicted, prefigured and controlled content. We have to revalue
"superstructure" towards a related range of cultural practices, and
away from a reflected, reproduced or specifically dependent content.
And, crucially, we have to revalue "the base" away from the
notion of a fixed economic or technological abstraction, and towards
the specific activities of men in real social and economic relationships,
containing fundamental contradictions and variations and
therefore always in a state of dynamic process.8
For Williams "the base" must be seen as the social and economic activities
of a totality that also includes specific cultural practices, not as foundational
relations that somehow reproduce themselves in a separate cultural
sphere.
Williams's synthesis of base and superstructure within a social-cultural
totality plays upon ambiguities in Marx's writings concerning the
nature of production. In his introduction to the Grundrisse Marx, focusing
on how society reproduces itself, concluded: "Not that production, distribution,
exchange and consumption are identical, but that they all form
the members of a totality, distinctions within a unity." Marx made a similar
point in the next section of his introduction on distribution: while "a
definite production thus determines a definite consumption, distribution
and exchange as well as definite relations between these differing moments.
. ., production is itself determined by other moments." As Marxist
critic Ben Fine concludes, "There is no simple relation between production
and the rest of the economy, mode of production, or social
formation. Indeed, even what constitutes an object of production is ambiguous
[in the writings of Marx]." Fine adds that "it would be a mistake
to see Marx's or Marxism's understanding of production as being exclusively
preoccupied with material production. At a general level it is concerned
with the reproduction of the social formation as well as of the
economy."9
Williams would agree. To understand the social relations of production
broadly conceived, he turns to Gramsci's notion of hegemony. "For
hegemony supposes the existence of something which is truly total,
which is not merely secondary or superstructural," states Williams, "but
is lived at such a depth, which saturates the society to such an extent ...
that it corresponds to the reality of social experience very much more
clearly than any notions derived from the formula of base and superstructure."
For Williams hegemony centers on a "system of practices, meanings,
and values" that legitimates the interests of historically dominant
social groups.10 The social relations resulting from the complex and dynamic
interplay among groups within hegemonic systems are the prime
movers of history for Williams, producing both material goods and nonmaterial
meanings and values.
Williams's shift from a base-superstructure model to a concept of
hegemonic totality emphasizing productive relations allows him to de-
HISTORICIZING THE RELATIONS OF THEATRICAL PRODUCTION
289
velop procedures for the historical analysis of culture that are both encompassing
and revealing. He defines culture as "a signifying system
through which . . . a social order is communicated, reproduced, experienced,
and explored."11 Culture, then, includes material and nonmaterial
phenomena, both of which are central to the process of affirming and reproducing
(as well as challenging) hegemonic social relations. These historical
formations produce cultural products much as they produce automobiles
and race relations, but, insists Williams, art, literature, and
theatrical performances are not consummable goods like some of the
other products of hegemony. Williams enjoins critics and historians to
shift their definition of a "work of art" from an object to a practice. Rather
than attempting to isolate the art object and, in Kantian fashion, separate
out its inherent components, the historian should investigate the nature
and conditions of its historical practice. For the theater historian this
means close attention to the social relations and means of producing the
material realities of historical theaters (scripts, acting companies, playhouses,
scenery, etc.) as well as to the nonmaterial response of situated audiences
in historical periods.
In The Sociology of Culture Williams outlines methods and concepts
for analyzing cultural production. His insights in chapter 2, "Institutions,"
are particularly useful for theater historians. Assuming that his
theoretical constructs are no more than a "set of working hypotheses,"
Williams considers the variety of productive relations that have existed
historically in cultural institutions, including the theater.12 Some early societies,
notes Williams, provided directly for what he terms "instituted
artists"; the Celtic bards, for instance, were officially recognized as a part
of the ruling structure of Celtic society. Williams distinguishes between
"instituted artists" and artists supported by patronage, noting, however,
that some overlap between the types has occurred. The craftsmen of
Dionysus in ancient Greece exemplify such an overlap, since both the
polis and wealthy patrons supported their theatrical productions. Regarding
patronage production itself, Williams lists several types.13 For the historian
concerned with distinguishing between the social relations that
sustained and constrained much of Moliere's theater (retainer and commission
patronage) and Shakespeare's public productions (protection and
support patronage), this typology is vital. It also speaks to the structural
tensions inherent in state funding of the arts (the public as patron).
Williams devotes most of this chapter to artistic production for the
market, the last distinctive kind of social relationship to develop historically
in the production of culture. Within this form Williams distinguishes
among several types of market production: (1) artisanal; (2) postartisanal,
which includes a further distinction between the producer selling his
work to (a) a distributive intermediary or (b) a productive intermediary;
(3) market professional; and (4) corporate professional.14
This last set of distinctions for artistic production within institutions
provides a particularly helpful set of coordinates for mapping the
changes in productive relations that occurred in the American theater
CRITICAL THEORY AND PERFORMANCE
290
during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Using Williams's
ideas to examine what is conventionally called "stock company production,"
for instance, it is apparent that this term is too general to encompass
the variety of social relations involved in making and presenting
theater during most of the century. Insofar as company managers were
independent makers of theater who offered their troupe's work for direct
sale on the local market, these managers and their craftspeople were "artisans."
While the success of managers and their companies depended
primarily on the market, it was also linked to a lingering form of "sponsorship
patronage," most evident in the yearly benefits taken by each
actor. Stock company managers also engaged in "postartisanal" theatrical
production, specifically as "distributive intermediaries," when they
jobbed in stars or contracted with entire companies to perform on their
stages. Warren and Wood, managers of the Chestnut Street Theatre Company,
for instance, gave half of their seasons over to stars, ballet, and
opera companies in the early 182os, and they prided themselves on their
conservative management.15 In short, stock company production involved
three significantly different kinds of social relations: sponsorship
patronage, artisanal market, and postartisanal market production.
Had the contributors to American Theatre Companies, 1749-1887 distinguished
among these relations of production, they would have written
a very different book. As it is, most of these scholars focus on the artisanal
productions of the companies themselves and largely ignore their managers'
attempts to cultivate the patronage of the elite or bring national
stars to their local theaters. The preface to American Theatre Companies
even muddies a clear focus on artisanal market production by announcing
that "theatre is a communal art, arising out of the coordinated efforts
of the members of a group." Such statements mystify relations of superordination
and subordination within theater companies and between
companies and the market.16
Like stock company production, the "star system" must be broken
down into its component parts to see the different productive relations
operating within it. Unless these distinctions are made, theater historians
run the risk of assuming that most stars were not entrepreneurs. One
American theater historian, for instance, waits until his narrative reaches
the 189os to label a section of his book "Enter the Businessman."17 On the
contrary, when stars such as Edwin Forrest and Charlotte Cushman temporarily
worked with a local stock company to present their repertoire,
the star and the manager of the company functioned, through contractual
agreement, as distributive intermediaries of the star's talent. Like their
counterparts among energetic artisans in the mid-nineteenth century, the
major American stars elevated themselves from craftsperson to capitalist
by taking control of their own careers and charging what the market
would bear for their services. This change in productive relations led to
altered social relations within the theater. Actor Otis Skinner recalled that
"caste distinctions were observed" whenever a star rehearsed with a stock
company.8
HISTORICIZING THE RELATIONS OF THEATRICAL PRODUCTION
291
The star system benefited other capitalists besides the stars themselves.
A few company managers, such as Thomas Hamblin at the Bowery
Theatre in New York, created minor stars who remained contractually
committed to them and earned their distributive intermediaries handsome
profits through their appearances with other companies. Other
businessmen made money in the star system by controlling the distribution
circuit through which the stars traveled. E. A. Marshall, for instance,
established a touring circuit in the early 185os that began at his enormous
Broadway Theatre in New York (seating capacity 4,500), included his own
theaters in Boston, Philadelphia, Baltimore, and Washington, and extended
to allied theaters in Cincinnati, Louisville, St. Louis, and New Orleans.
The emergence of "combination" companies after the Civil War
streamlined the distributive system of relations but did not alter its fundamentals.
Stars, now "in combination" with a full company of actors,
continued to work with other capitalists to profit from the distribution of
their theatrical products.19
The monopolistic power exerted by the Theatrical Syndicate and later
by the Shuberts did, however, change the fundamentals of show business
from distributive to productive intermediary relations. Williams notes that
the main distinction between the two types of postartisanal relations is
that, in the second, the maker of the artwork (or performance, in this case)
no longer profits directly from the sale of his or her product. Rather, the
productive intermediary "invests in the purchase of a work for the purpose
of profit; it is now his relations with the market which are direct." The initial
maker is typically reduced to "offering his labour to produce works of
a certain known type."20 The Shuberts acted as productive intermediaries,
for instance, not only when they produced a show themselves but also
when they leased one of their many playhouses to a non-Shubert producer,
since contracts typically specified that theater owners would share in the
profits of Broadway hits. In both cases the Shuberts hired actors, musicians,
and scenic artists for their known abilities to create successful shows and
marketed the product of the labor of those creative others.
Early-twentieth-century producers like the Shuberts did not directly
hire playwrights, however. Playwrights had become market professionals,
Williams's term to denote "a participant in the direct market process of the
sale of his work." The International Copyright Agreement of 1886, by recognizing
the products of writing as transferrable private property, effectively
constituted, notes Williams, "a specific kind of social relationship
which can be defined as a form of professional independence within integrated
and dominant market relations."21 Athough this copyright agreement
gave playwrights more leverage with producers, it bound their work
more closely to the market. Plays simply became the land upon which producers
could build shows by hiring labor and investing capital. This sense
of the economic utility of scripts survives in the lingo of Broadway and
Hollywood today: producers buy "options" on "properties" they are considering
for future "development." The playscript, like real estate, is necessary
to the process of capitalist production in the entertainment industry.22
CRITICAL THEORY AND PERFORMANCE
292
Unlike playwrights, play directors did not become market professionals.
Williams's discussion of the relations of artistic production in market
capitalism implicitly contradicts the conventional historical wisdom regarding
the "rise of the director." According to Helen Krich Chinoy in
Directors on Directing, the late-nineteenth-century director "filled so pressing
a need that he quickly pre-empted the hegemony that had rested for
centuries with playwrights and actors . . . The appearance of the director
ushered in a new theatrical epoch. His experiments, his failures, and his triumphs
set and sustained the stage."23 In truth, directors had and continue
to exercise less independence than playwrights and far less power than
producers in the modern theater. Most early directors in the United States,
like Augustin Daly and David Belasco, should rather be called producers,
since their artistic control depended fundamentally on their economic
hegemony over the relations of production within their companies. Indeed,
directors who were not primarily producers did not emerge in the American
theater until 19oo00. A 1906 article in the magazine The Theatre paragraphed
the leading directors of the decade. Among the more than thirty
listed were William Seymour ("heads the Charles Frohman stage department
. . . a firm disciplinarian, yet suave, kindly in manner"), Ned Wayburn
(works for Klaw and Erlanger, "his specialty is the management of
chorus girls"), and George W. Marion (directs musicals for producer Henry
W. Savage, "handles his forces with a firm hand"). Hired by the Syndicate,
the Shuberts, and other producers to stage their shows and keep order in
their casts, these functionaries were more like factory foremen turning out
formulaic products than artistic innovators.24
In Williams's terminology play directors were (and substantially remain)
"corporate professionals," salaried employees akin to newspaper
writers in publishing since neither can copyright their work. Significantly,
one of the directors noted in the 1906 article accused another of stealing a
piece of stage business that he had invented. Lacking copyright protection,
he could only advocate the formation of an association among directors to
adjudicate such matters.25 Unlike most other theater artists "effectively or
wholly employed within the new corporate structures," however, play directors
did retain a small measure of individual economic power. Whereas
unions now bargain with producers over the wages of scenic artists, musicians,
costumers, and actors, directors negotiate individually on the basis
of a minimum contract set by the Society of Stage Directors and Choreographers,
which is not a union.26
Historicizing the relations of theatrical production opens up the possibility
of a more complete historical sociology of the theater, a subdiscipline
still in its infancy in theater studies. Were such a sociology to follow
in the pathbreaking tradition of Raymond Williams, it would require extensive
empirical and theoretical investigations into the sociohistorical
conditions necessary for the emergence of various kinds of theater, the relations
between historical forms of theatrical expression and the dominant
ideology of a historical period, and the functions of theater in reproducing,
modifying, or contradicting hegemonic relations of production.
HISTORICIZING THE RELATIONS OF THEATRICAL PRODUCTION
293
Such studies could transform the discourse of theater history as it is
presently taught and written in the United States.
When I wrote this article in 1991, I drew from recent research for my historiographical
examples. For this revised edition, some of my examples
may be updated. In particular, I would turn to Tracey C. Davis's The Economics
of the British Stage, 1800-1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2000) as a positive example of a work that takes seriously the complexities
of economic history recognized by Raymond Williams.
NOTES
Chapter epigraphs from Zelda Fichandler, "The Arena Stage"; and Ellen Stewart,
"La Mama Experimental Theatre Club," in Producers on Producing, ed. Stephen
Langley (New York: Drama Books, 1976), 78, 138.
1. Oxford English Dictionary (O.E.D.), 2nd ed. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1989),
12:564-68. The verb produce was used as early as 1836 to mean "introduce," in the
sense of a manager producing an actor or play to the public. This meaning of the
word, however, did not carry with it the actions associated with preperformance
preparation.
2. O.E.D., 12:566.
3. See Joseph R. Roach, "Theatre History and the Ideology of the Aesthetic,"
Theatre Journal 41, no. 2 (1989): 155-68. Roach discusses "the widely shared historiographical
assumption of theatre scholars, derived from German idealist philosophy
and eighteenth-century theories of art, that the aesthetic exists as an autonomous
category, transcending the sublunary sphere of power relations and
ideologies" (155).
4. See, for example, the first four chapters of Oscar G. Brockett and Robert
Findlay's Century of Innovation: A History of European and American Drama since
1870 (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1973), 1-119. Brockett and Findlay discuss
the emergence of the director but have little to say about other changes in the
productive relations of the theater.
5. See Garff B. Wilson, Three Hundred Years of American Drama and Theatre (Englewood
Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1982), 149-62. Wilson relies on Jack Poggi, Theater
in America: The Impact of Economic Forces, 1870-1967 (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University
Press, 1968).
6. According to the O.E.D., a master craftsman is "a workman who is qualified
by training and experience to teach apprentices and to carry on his trade on his
own account" (9:443). A capitalist, on the other hand, is "one who has accumulated
capital; one who has capital available for employment in financial or industrial enterprises"
(2:863). Typically, theatrical managers had little accumulated capital
and did not own their means of production. The actor-managers of the late nineteenth
century, such as Henry Irving and William Gillette, however, were transitional
figures, as I explain below.
7. Karl Marx, preface, Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (New
York: International, 1970), 1.
8. Raymond Williams, "Base and Superstructure in Marxist Cultural Theory,"
in Problems in Materialism and Culture (London: NLB, 1980), 34.
9. Grundrisse, quoted by Ben Fine in "Production," in A Dictionary of Marxist
CRITICAL THEORY AND PERFORMANCE
294
Thought, ed. Tom Bottomore (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1983), 396,
397; see also "Base and Superstructure," "Forces and Relations of Production,"
and "Reproduction" in the Dictionary.
10. Williams, Problems in Materialism and Culture, 37, 38. For more on hegemony
and its uses in scholarship, see my article "Using the Concept of Cultural
Hegemony to Write Theatre History," in Interpreting the Theatrical Past, ed. Thomas
Postlewait and Bruce A. McConachie (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1989),
37-58. Williams's notion of a hegemonic totality goes beyond the sense of the concept
of hegemony as deployed by Gramsci, who retained a base-superstructure
explanation for the production of culture.
11. Raymond Williams, Towards a Sociology of Culture (New York: Schocken
Books, 1982), 13.
12. Williams, Towards a Sociology, 35.
13. Williams, Towards a Sociology, 36-44.
14. Williams, Towards a Sociology, 44-56.
15. Regarding Warren and Wood, see my article "William B. Wood and the
'Pathos of Paternalism,'" Theatre Survey 28, no. 1 (1987): 1-14. For an overview of
changes in productive relations in the American theater during the nineteenth
century, see my article "Pacifying American Theatrical Audiences, 1820-1900," in
For Fun and Profit: The Transformation of Leisure in the United States, ed. Richard
Butsch (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1990), 47-70.
16. American Theatre Companies, ed. Weldon B. Durham (Westport, Conn.:
Greenwood Press, 1986), vii.
17. Wilson, Three Hundred Years, 16o.
18. Otis Skinner, Footlights and Spotlights: Recollections of My Life on the Stage
(1923; reprint, Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1972), 58.
19. See the 1881 obituary on Marshall in the New York Clipper, included in
Joseph Ireland's Extra-Illustrated Records of the New York Stage, Harvard Theatre
Collection, vol. 2, pt. 13, 35. On combination companies, see Poggi, Theater in
America, 3-8.
20. Williams, Towards a Sociology, 45.
21. Williams, Towards a Sociology, 47, 48.
22. Stephen Langley, Theatre Management in America: Principle and Practice, rev.
ed. (New York: Drama Book Publishers, 1980), 96-101.
23. Helen Krich Chinoy, "The Emergence of the Director," in Directors on Directing:
A Source Book of the Modern Theatre, ed. Toby Cole and Helen Krich Chinoy,
rev. ed. (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1963), 3.
24. Edward Fales Coward, "The Men Who Direct the Destinies of the Stage,"
The Theatre: Illustrated Magazine of Dramatic and Musical Art, July 1906, 188, 189.
25. Frank Smithson accused Ben Teal of stealing an S formation involving
members of a chorus line. See the "Ben Teal File," Robinson Locke Collection,
New York Public Library, Lincoln Center.
26. Williams, Towards a Sociology, 51; on current theatrical unions and societies,
see Langley, Theatre Management, 109-23.
Brecht and the Contradictory Actor
John Rouse
Much scholarly material has been written on the subject of Brecht and the
actor. The vast majority of this material, however, has focused on Brecht's
various theoretical statements about acting, absolutizing them into an inviolate
theory of so-called Epic performance and getting caught up in
vaguely generalized comparisons between Brecht's "system" of acting and
Stanislavski's.1 I would not want to deny the partial validity of these discussions
or impugn the assistance they have given several generations of
theater people in understanding and making use of Brecht's accomplishments.
Such discussions tend, however, to undervalue the fact that Brecht
was not primarily a theoretician who sometimes directed in order to exemplify
his principles, but rather a director who continually modified or reconstituted
his theories on the basis of what he learned from his practice; as
Brecht told a group of students in 1954, "One mustn't think of it as if there
were someone with a specific conception of theater that he wants to impose
at all costs."2 The Short Organon (1948), for example, is not Brecht's ultimate
statement about either theater in general or acting in particular.
Rather, it is a position paper summarizing Brecht's thinking about his theater
work up to around 1947. During the remaining nine years of his life,
Brecht constantly modified this thinking on the basis of his directorial and
dramaturgical work at his Berliner Ensemble-as the many and varied
amendments, clarifications, and counterstatements to the Organon collected
in volume 23 of the Berliner and Frankfurter Ausgabe make perfectly clear.
I am not attempting to insinuate that we should replace an absolutized
characterization labeled "Brecht the theoretician" with an equally
absolutized characterization that could be labeled "Brecht the director."
Rather, I am suggesting that we cannot adequately understand Brecht's
thinking about the theater in general, and certainly not his thinking about
acting, until we complement consideration of his theoretical perspectives
with consideration of his practical work. This is hardly a task that can be
accomplished in a single essay. Consequently, I should like here to sketch
an overview of Brecht's work with his actors, or, more precisely, an
overview of what Brecht expected the actor to contribute to the total complex
of a theatrical production and how he worked with the actor to fulfill
this requirement. I should point out that this discussion will itself be fairly
theoretical; only a pure description of Brecht's day-to-day work with his
actors could hope to be anything else.3 I shall hope at least, however, to
indicate the value of reconsidering the theoretical concepts Brecht develops
in the Organon and the Messingkauf Dialogues in the light of his theater
practice.
My discussion will concentrate on only one phase of Brecht's practical
work. Since Brecht was able to work concretely for an extended period
295
CRITICAL THEORY AND PERFORMANCE
296
of time with a carefully selected ensemble only during his postwar years
at the Berliner Ensemble, this period can rightly be given priority for our
discussion. Besides, it was the results of this work, as exemplified in the
Ensemble's guest performances in Paris and London, that influenced
practical theater men like Giorgio Strehler, Roger Planchon, William
Gaskill, and Peter Brook-and through them the entire European theater
of the mid-twentieth century.4
Even more significantly for our purposes, an overview of Brecht's
work with his actors at the Berliner Ensemble underlines with particular
clarity both the shift of emphasis that results when we consider Brecht's
theory in light of his practice and some of the consequences of that shift.
Brecht's theoretical writings abound with references to acting methods,
both particular and general. As we shall see, however, Brecht was far less
concerned with acting method than he was with the interpretive basis of
the actor's work. In fact, as Brecht once told Peter Palitzsch during a discussion
on Stanislavski, his theatrical activity was not centered around
the actor
as a point of departure. Stanislavski directs primarily as an actor, I
direct primarily as a playwright . . . He begins with the actor. ...
[You] can also hear me say that everything depends on the actor, but
I nevertheless begin completely with the play, its requirements and
demands.5
This begins as a statement defining the relationship between director and
actor and ends up as a statement defining the relationship between director
and text. The abrupt transition is instructive: Brecht reveals himself as
a director who gives the text (or rather, as we shall see, his interpretation
of the text) absolute priority. The actor's work, and the director's work
with the actor, may be critically important, but they are important only insofar
as they serve to realize the director's interpretational ends.6 If we are
to understand what is unique about Brecht's work with the actor, therefore,
we must first examine his directorial goals in terms of his work on
the text. Only then can we adequately discuss the actor's particular contribution
to the fulfillment of these goals and the particular kind of rehearsal
process through which the actor develops this contribution.
The Brechtian theater's most fundamental principle is its commitment
to social change. The dramaturgical principle most basic to fulfilling
this commitment is, in turn, that the theater must attempt to present society
and human nature as changeable. Theater does not, however, depict either
society or human nature directly, but rather through interpretive examples.
As Brecht defines it, theater "consists of the production of living
illustrations of historical or imagined occurrences between people."7 This
definition serves as the foundation both for Brecht's general theater theory
and for his directorial work on individual dramatic texts. Using Brecht's
general perspective, the core of any text may be examined as a total composition,
a structuring together in time of all the individual occurrences
BRECHT AND THE CONTRADICTORY ACTOR
297
that take place between the play's characters.8 The original author's interpretation
of his historical experience becomes visible in the character of the
occurrences he chooses to illustrate and in the way in which he structures
these occurrences together. Directorial interpretation, in turn, proceeds
through the reworking of the occurrences illustrated and the restructuring
of their relationship to each other. Brecht uses a special term to describe
both the original composition of incidents and its interpretational recomposition,
calling both "fables." He also emphasizes the predominant role of
the interpretational fable in production work: "Everything depends on the
fable; it is the heart of the theatrical production."9
The first question such an interpretive approach must answer is
whether one stresses the occurrences between characters or the characters
themselves. Brecht is quite specific in his demand that production must
shift focus away from the characters themselves to what happens between
them. As he puts it, "From what happens between them, people get
everything that can be discussed, criticized, changed."10
This shift already carries with it a shift from the individual to the
group and from the psychological to the sociological. In themselves,
however, these shifts are not sufficient. Brecht sets two further requirements
that clarify the ideological framework within which interpretation
must take place. First, both the fable's occurrences and the relationship
between them must be examined dialectically. As Brecht notes, the dialectical
approach treats
social conditions as processes and pursues these in their contradictions.
Everything exists to this perspective only inasmuch as it transforms
itself . . . This is also true for the feelings, opinions, and behavior
of men, through which the contemporary mode of their social
life together expresses itself.11
Brecht's theater, then, concentrates on "the contradictions in people and
their relationships." At the same time, however, a dialectical theater must
also reveal the "determinants under which [these contradictions] develop;"12
further, it must reveal these determinants critically. Both these requirements
are essentially part of the same concern-the depiction of the
contradictory process through which men structure and restructure their
lives and the critical examination of the ways in which these structures are
used by men to repress other men. Historical determinants-the economic,
political, and social factors that influence the social conditions of any historical
period-must not simply be made recognizable. They must be
made recognizable as constitutive elements in the individual occurrences
between human beings:
One clearly must not think of historical determinants as dark powers
(backgrounds); rather, they are made and maintained by men (and
will be changed by them): they are constituted by what is being
done right now.13
CRITICAL THEORY AND PERFORMANCE
298
Brecht is speaking here not about reality, but about the theatrical illustration
of reality. The theater is for him precisely the place best suited to examine
the social conditions in any historical period as constitutive elements
in human relationships. This examination is what the director
undertakes together with the actors as they structure out the fable's examples
of the moment-by-moment occurrences between people.
The first step in applying this general interpretational framework to
a specific text involves the prerehearsal work of the director and his dramaturgical
colleagues. The text is treated as a historical document. The
background of the text and its author are painstakingly researched in
order to identify both the historical character of the social life being illustrated
and the determinants that influence it. The text is then subjected to
a dialectical analysis that reads its structures back into the historical experiences
they mediate. Finally, the text's fable is recomposed in brief sentences
that describe the fundamental action of each individual occurrence.
Or rather, the sentences describe each occurrence as the production will
elaborate it; Brecht's theater is true to its interpretation of the text, not necessarily
to the text itself, which may be left relatively untouched or drastically
restructured.
The precision with which this dramaturgical approach focuses on
each separate interaction between the play's characters is well illustrated
by Brecht's directorial breakdown of the first scene of his own Mother
Courage:
Recruiters roam the country looking for cannon fodder.
Courage presents her family, acquired in various theaters of war, to
a sergeant.
The market woman defends her sons with a knife against the
recruiters.
She discovers that her sons are succumbing to the recruiters, and
prophesies an early soldier's death for the sergeant.
In order to scare them away from the war, she also lets her children
draw the black mark.
As a result of a small bit of bargaining, she ends up losing her
brave son anyway.
The sergeant prophesies something for Courage: he who would
live off the war must also give it something.14
As in the Stanislavski approach, this scene is broken down into its
"beats"; indeed, the American-Stanislavskian term is an excellent equivalent
to Brecht's "individual occurrence" (Einzelgeschehnis). From a Stanislavskian
perspective, however, Brecht's breakdown remains a director's
description of the fable rather than an actor's. The basic actions and relationships
between all the characters in each beat have been sketched in,
but the description does not center on any individual character's objectives,
nor has a through-line of motivation been developed to link the various
beats together. The concentration of effort at the level of the beat al-
BRECHT AND THE CONTRADICTORY ACTOR
299
lows an assimilation of Stanislavski's acting methods to Brechtian interpretational
ends.
Brecht's actors were not encouraged to structure the separate beats
smoothly together. On the contrary, Brecht considered the transitions between
beats as significant as the beats themselves, and he demanded that
these transitions occur dialectically. Each beat can be examined as a selfcontained
entity in which a particular interaction takes place or a particular
situation arises. As Manfred Wekwerth points out, the personal and
social forces that determine these relationships can change in respect to
each other, bringing about an alteration in the situation; this change is
marked by the evolving of one beat into another. On the other hand, each
determining factor can suddenly pass over into its opposite, bringing
about a completely new situation, marked by a sudden leap from one beat
to the next.15 There need be no more unity either of character or of action
between the beats than there is between the self-contained scenes around
which Brecht's dramaturgy is structured on a larger scale. Indeed, Brecht
made extensive use of all the possibilities inherent in a disunity of action
in order to present the "development of characters, conditions, and events
as discontinuous (in leaps)."16
The director's paramount task in rehearsals is to structure the dialectical
transitions between beats and the historically determined interactions
between characters in the beats themselves. The descriptive reconstitution
of the fable is already a first step in the development of a
theatrical interpretation, but the fable still needs, of course, to be elaborated
using all the means of the theater. Most importantly, the fable depends
on the actors, since they physically enact the events out of which
the fable is composed. Consequently, their activities need themselves to
be structured to achieve what appear, at first glance anyway, to be fundamentally
directorial results. We shall, therefore, move from our consideration
of Brecht's prerehearsal work to a consideration of the actor's
contribution to his finished theatrical interpretation, putting aside for a
moment the rather surprising process through which the actor perfected
this contribution.
As Brecht states, the most important procedure by which the fable is
presented to the audience is "the blocking, that is, the placing of the characters,
the determination of their position regarding each other [there is a
pun here in the German: "Stellung" refers both to physical and attitudinal
position], changes in this position, entrances and exits. The blocking must
tell the story intelligently."17 The pun in the midst of what seems otherwise
a fairly straightforward description of blocking should alert us that
Brecht is talking here about something quite different from traffic directing.
In English arrangement perhaps comes closer to what Brecht is aiming
for- an absolutely transparent physical elucidation of the fable. As Peter
Palitzsch puts it, "The blocking and the Gestus of the actors tell the fable
in such a way that one could discover what is happening even if one
couldn't hear anything. Transformations in the dialectic are marked on
stage through transformations in the blocking."8
CRITICAL THEORY AND PERFORMANCE
3oo00
The importance of this kind of physical elaboration of the fable is reflected
in the term "Gestus," a word Brecht made up based on the German
for "gesture" (Geste) and which he somewhat confusingly defined in several
different ways. Each of the fable's individual occurrences has what
Brecht calls a "Grundgestus".19 On one level, this Grundgestus is simply
the production staff's interpretation of each textual beat. Underlying this
Grundgestus, however, is the "gesellschaftliche," or "social" Gestus: "the
mimetic and gestural expression of the social relationships in which the
people of a particular epoch stand to each other."20 The notion of Gestus is
thus, as Giorgio Strehler has pointed out, at bottom not an aesthetic but a
sociological one-sociological in that it allows historical determinants to
be concretely manifested in the physical elaboration of the motivated actions
that move the characters from beat to beat.21
This notion of the physical manifestation of historical determinants
goes beyond the use of blocking to include the actor's smallest physical
gesture. As Hans Curjel noted while observing Brecht rehearsing his 1948
Antigone, "The directorial method was based on investigation and varied
experimentation that could extend to the smallest gestures-eyes, fingers....
Brecht worked like a sculptor on and with the actor."22 Curjel was
also impressed by the ability of this approach to clarify and enliven the
transitions between beats: "Certain pregnant behavioral motifs were extended
over long passages of text and situation, to then be transformed into
new gestures, basic behavior, or movement structures as if on hinges."23
The second beat in the first scene of Brecht's 1950 adaptation of
Lenz's Der Hofmeister (The Private Tutor) provides an excellent example of
this kind of detailed physical interpretive work. Having just told the audience
in the prologue that he intends to sell himself as a private tutor,
Lauffer approaches and bows to the Major (his prospective employer) and
to his brother the Privy Councilor, who are discussing the terrible state of
the economy. The two ignore Lauffer, even when he repeats his bow three
more times. In the middle of the fourth bow, he curses them under his
breath. He then exits.
The beat is a brief one, but as staged it provided its audiences with
some essential interpretive information about the relationship between
the play's characters. In the first place, the "bow" that the actor Hans Gaugler
developed for his character was a highly stylized, highly exaggerated,
very funny bit of actor technique. It was also far more elaborate than
the "natural" bows of the period (Lenz's play takes place around 1774),
and it went lower to the ground or to the feet of the Major, as the case may
be. First established in this beat, it was used as a "quotable" gestural leitmotiv
for Lauffer throughout the production.24
As performed by Gaugler, LAuffer's bow also became a fine example
of Brecht's concept of Verfremdung. Despite all the critical blood that has
been spilled over it, the term's basic definition is quite simple: "A defamiliarized
illustration is one that, while allowing the object to be recognized,
at the same time makes it appear unfamiliar."25 Brecht's definition will, I
hope, clarify why I have rejected either "alienation" or "distancing" in
Fig. 1. iLauffer's bow. (Modellbuch des Berliner Ensembles, Bertolt-Brecht-Archiv.)
favor of "defamiliarization" as a translation of the term; Brecht's ultimate
point is that a spectator will not think about anything happening on stage
if cliched conventions or a mistaken naturalism make what is happening
appear familiar to him. Everyone knows, for example, that people bowed
to each other in the eighteenth century, so why should a bow be the stimulus
for a critical social examination of an interpretation of occurrences
between people? As Gaugler executed it, LAuffer's bow became a Gestus
that defamiliarized itself, forestalling any possibility of its being accepted
as simply a customary greeting rather than the conscious action of a man
who wants something from another man with more economic power.
This meaning is not, of course, explicit in the bow itself. Rather, it is
a significance the audience could be led to recognize within the context
both of Lauffer's expressed intentions in the prologue (written by Brecht,
not Lenz), and of the discussion on economic matters which the bow interrupts
(by directorial design). The audience could, however, work
through to this recognition only if instructed to examine the bow as an object
of analysis.
Partly for this reason, the bow was emphasized twice over in performance.
First, it was repeated four times, each bow more aggressively
fawning than the last. The Major's and Privy Councilor's repeated ignoring
of Liuffer's greeting thus became clearly the result of a conscious
choice. Second, the bow was defamiliarized by the text itself.26 As LAuffer
executes his last, most fawning bow, he curses his two "betters" under his
breath: "Der Teufel hol Euch, Flegel" [Go to the devil, louts].27 LAuffer's
language here (especially the choice of "Flegel") recalls the manner in
which people like the Major talked to their servants, and not vice versa.
301
Fig. 2. The Gestus of the servile bow repeated in a later scene between the Tutor and his
employer. (Modellbuch des Berliner Ensembles, Bertolt-Brecht-Archiv.)
LAuffer's bow, its conscious rejection by the Major and Privy Councilor,
and Lauffer's response to this rejection all provide the audience not
simply with information about Lauffer but about the character of the
play's social relationships. Even as he grovels before them, Lauffer holds
his interlocutors in contempt; and they return the favor. The dialogue in
the beat following LAuffer's exit underlines this: the Major discusses his
intention to hire this "lickspittle," as the Privy Councilor calls him,28 because
he comes cheap. Established in the bow and the reaction to it, the
scene's underlying social Gestus is developed after LAuffer's exit.
LAuffer's bow illustrates the degree to which the dramaturgical and
directorial interpretation of the script depends not only on the actor's gestural
work on his characterization but on his gestural work in interaction
with his fellow actors. Gaugler's exaggeration of his character's "natural"
behavior is also as good a practical example as we are likely to get of
Brecht's concept of the actor standing beside his role in performance, at
once demonstrating and commenting on his character's behavior.
Our example from the Hofmneister is particularly clear in part because
the beat's Grundgestus is focused in a single character Gestus, in part because
this Gestus is so highly exaggerated. Such exaggerations are, however,
better suited to comic texts than to straight dramatic ones. Indeed,
Brecht once mentioned to Giorgio Strehler that his defamiliarizing acting
style was much easier to achieve in comedies, since the comic form tends
itself to defamiliarize its characters and events.29 This is one reason why the
Ensemble tended to use a much less gesturally overelaborated style in its
productions of serious texts, including such Brecht texts as Mother Courage.
302
BRECHT AND THE CONTRADICTORY ACTOR
303
This difference was, however, primarily one of degree. Brecht and
his actors used stylization and exaggeration of gesture, intonation, or
tempo in some of their most serious productions, although with a different
emotional emphasis and a different balance between playing the role
and demonstrating it. One of the best-known "emotional" moments in
Brecht's theater work, for example, is Helene Weigel's silent scream in the
1951 Courage (a Berliner Ensemble revival of a production originally
staged in 1949). As she hears the salvo that signals the execution of her
son Swiss Cheese, Weigel's Courage is seated on a low stool with her
hands in her lap. She clenches her rough skirt, leaning forward with a
straight, tense back as if shot in the stomach. At the same time, she thrusts
her head straight back against her shoulders; her mouth tears open until
it seems that her jaw will break, but no sound comes forth. For a moment,
her whole physicality has the impossible, angular contortion of one of Picasso's
screaming horses in Guernica. Then she snaps her mouth shut,
brings her torso and head back into alignment, and collapses the tension
in her torso, slumping in on herself.
The moment is justifiably famous, both as an example of Weigel's
unmatched skill as an actress and as an example of the type of carefully
elaborated physicality the Ensemble's actors were expected to develop in
fulfilling their responsibility to the production's interpretation. It is also
an unabashedly emotional moment-an emotionality, however, carefully
controlled and used both by Weigel and by the production developing
around her. In the first place, the very physicality of the moment moves it
beyond the level of naturalistic grief with which an audience can empathize.
We are shocked, stunned, shaken by Courage's grief, but we are
not allowed to share it on the plane of petty emotional titillation. The technically
accomplished extremity of Weigel's acting, in short, defamiliarizes
Courage's grief through the very demonstration of that grief.
Moreover, both Brecht's play and his production allow Courage
this intensely human moment in order to illustrate for the audience the
basic social contradiction out of which the character is built. Courage is
both businesswoman and mother. Or rather, she tries to be both; the social
realities of the total war from which she tries to profit as businesswoman
prevent her from fulfilling her responsibilities as mother. She has
been confronted with a nearly impossible economic choice-either lose
her son or pay a sum that will cost her the wagon, her only means of supporting
herself and her daughter. But she has tried to avoid making this
choice in attempting to deal her way out. Just prior to the execution,
Courage has sent the prostitute Yvette offstage to bribe the soldiers holding
Swiss Cheese. She is unwilling, however, to pay the ruinous sum demanded,
and sends Yvette back again and again to bargain. Just before the
salvo, she turns to the army chaplain whom she is hiding from his socalled
religious enemies and comments haltingly that perhaps she has
haggled too long. Sounds of gunfire teach both her and the audience that
her delay is indeed costly. Courage bears responsibility for her own extreme
moment of grief-a lesson underlined in performance by the simple
Fig. 3. Mother Courage's "silent scream" in directorial context. (Modellbuch des Berliner
Ensembles, Bertolt-Brecht-Archiv.)
expedient of having the chaplain, who is seated on a stool next to Courage,
get up and walk away from her in the middle of her scream. Brecht allows
Courage her grief, but he also uses it to provide his audience with the necessary
data for a dialectical analysis of his play's social relationships.
Weigel's scream, although unusual in its degree of technical accomplishment,
illustrates the way in which Brecht combined the actor's gestural
elaboration of role with the careful elaboration of emotive and textual
contexts. The characters' reactions to the scream provide Brecht's
audiences insight into the social contradictions affecting even the most
seemingly personal, emotional behavior. As with LAiuffer's bow, this gestural
elaboration could extend to the development of a basic physical Gestus,
centered on one or a series of quoted gestures, even for a straight dramatic
character. Courage provides several examples of such a Gestus,
modified to suit the development of a dramatic character. One of the better
known is Weigel's treatment of money. Every time she received payment
in the course of her play's performance, Weigel's Courage would
"mistrustfully" bite the coin to make sure it was real.30° Now, this kind of
gesture is certainly something many creative directors or actors might invent
while working on the play-assuming they understand the play's dialectics
properly.
Still, Brecht's productions developed their fables so clearly, not because
of any special magic, but because Brecht and his actors went to the
trouble to understand and outline in performance vocabulary the story
they were telling. Without the aid of Brecht's Modellbuch (a photographic
and descriptive record of a Berliner Ensemble production intended to
guide interpretation elsewhere), for example, it is doubtful that a director
working within the conventions of the German theater of 1949 would
304
BRECHT AND THE CONTRADICTORY ACTOR
305
have thought through to the telling variation of Courage's treatment of
money Brecht and Weigel used at the very end of the play. Courage's
daughter Kattrin has been shot trying to alert the city of Halle to an impending
enemy attack. Courage is now alone. She must drag her wagon
herself back into the war, back into the train of the army that feeds her.
She cannot afford to wait to bury Kattrin herself, so she pays a peasant
family to bury her daughter for her. She fishes a handful of coins from the
leather purse at her waist, starts to hand them to the peasants, looks at the
coins, hesitates, slowly puts one coin back in her purse, then gives the rest
over in payment. Even as she displays her character's total personal collapse,
Weigel demonstrates once again the basic contradiction between
businesswoman and mother that has led to that collapse.31
This last example, like the others we have examined, illustrates the
degree to which Brecht expected his actors to serve directorial interpretation
and, at the same time, the degree to which this interpretation depended
on the actor's contributions. On the other hand, the examples do
not reveal the dominance of any single all-powerful acting technique, let
alone the dominance of a global acting methodology, over either the
actor's work or the director's demands. On the contrary, the examples reveal
the application of virtually the full range of customary actor technique,
from vocal and physical flexibility to precise emotional control.
This fact, in turn, has a significant corollary: "There is no technique that
cannot be used in Brecht's theater, so long as it serves to expose the contradictions
in processes in such a way that they can be pleasurably recognized
by the spectator and lead to his own transformation."32 In fact,
Brecht not only encouraged the use of a wide variety of performance techniques,
he structured his rehearsal process in a way that allowed these
techniques to be subsumed in the service of his interpretational ends.
Since the nature of this process has a great deal to do with the strengths
of performances like Hans Gaugler's or Helene Weigel's, we will profit by
turning back to it here.
Our examples from the Hofmneister and Mother Courage have underlined
the degree to which the detailed Fabelbau-the building up of the
fable- is the principal goal not simply of prerehearsal analysis but of rehearsal
itself. The kind of detailed analysis of beats we saw in Brecht's
Courage breakdown provides an anchor-point in rehearsals; when problems
arise, one can check to see whether the fable is being told in the most
effective way, or whether the right fable is being told. At the same time,
the concrete discoveries made by the actors, director, and dramaturgs
during rehearsals are used to fine-tune the analysis of the fable as its concrete
theatrical elaboration is developed. The precise choreographic effect
of LAiuffer's repeated bows, for example, is not something a directorial
team can plan beforehand.
Or, at least, this effect is not something Brecht and his coworkers
planned beforehand. Although Brecht went into rehearsals with a detailed
description of the text and concrete plans for initial blocking to provide
a structure for the exploration of character relationships, he did not
CRITICAL THEORY AND PERFORMANCE
306
begin rehearsals with a specific scheme of the final physical production.
He knew what his goals were, but not the concrete measures necessary to
achieve them. Consequently, he could maintain that "we develop pretty
much from nothing, exploring the most varied possibilities. We speak the
text, move around within the situations. Slowly we try to find out what is
interesting. That is then kept, other things are let fall. We then develop the
characterizations, and also the blocking."33
This kind of leisurely approach to the building up of the concrete
production is clearly an essential safeguard against the impatient tendency
to impose directorial decisions on the actor from outside-to treat
the actor like a puppet. Consequently, Brecht took this approach seriously.
Carl Weber remembers the first time he watched the Ensemble at work:
Brecht, his assistants, and the actors stood around, smoked, talked,
laughed. Every so often an actor would go up on stage and try one of
thirty ways of falling off a table. Weber thought everyone was taking a
break, until the horseplay went on long enough to make him realize he
was watching the rehearsal,34 a rehearsal one suspects, devoted to the
serious business of discovering the one way of falling off a table that will
illuminate concretely its historical determinants.
Brecht's actors were encouraged to make their own discoveries
subject only to Brecht's dramaturgic principle that the fable retain dominance
over its characters. Brecht suggested that this process of discovery
and elaboration takes place in three broad and overlapping phases. The
first of these extends through reading rehearsals and the early blocking
rehearsals. It involves making a first acquaintance with the character by
continually asking why he does what he does: "You look assiduously for
contradictions, for deviations from type, for the ugly in the beautiful and
the beautiful in the ugly."35 This is also the phase during which the actors
most intensely fulfill a specifically dramaturgical responsibility, studying
the fable and familiarizing themselves with the results of the production
staff's background work: "The study of the role is at the same time a study
of the fable; more precisely, it should at first be a study of the fable.... For
this, the actor must mobilize his knowledge of the world and of people,
and he must ask his questions as a dialectician."36 An actress playing
Mother Courage, for example, would be expected to note that in one beat
she attempts to protect her children by rigging the business of drawing
for the black spot, while in the very next beat she ignores her children
completely in order to swing a deal over a belt buckle, thereby letting Eilif
get stolen out from under her nose. She would not, however, be asked to
bridge this contradiction by developing a complex character conception;
rather, this contradiction is the element to be explored in rehearsal.
Clearly, this first phase is crucial. If the actor is not able to think along the
same lines as the directorial staff, she will not be able later to teach her
directors what they need to learn.
The second phase continues the work already done, but in an antithetical
direction-one in which more than a few theoretical purists have
assumed Brecht was not interested. As Brecht describes it, "The second
BRECHT AND THE CONTRADICTORY ACTOR
307
phase is that of identification with the character [Einfihlung], the search
for the character's truth in a subjective sense. You let it do what it wants
to do; to hell with criticism as long as society provides what you need."37
The actor must explore his character in all the detail demanded by the
most naturalistic director, but the criterion for selection among his discoveries
remains the character's social behavior. Brecht never denied that
there were character elements outside the realm of social determination,
but he frequently pointed out that such aspects "hardly belong to the constitutive
elements of the illustration of reality."38 Indeed, as Werner Hecht
puts it, "We don't want 'characters' in the literal sense of the word on our
stage, that is, people with engraved, unchangeable peculiarities that at
best unfold themselves monadically. What interests us about people is
their way of behaving, the historically conditioned reactions."39 With this
orientation, it is hardly surprising that "Brecht in fact almost never spoke
about the character of the stage figure during rehearsals, but rather about
his way of behaving; he said virtually nothing about what a man is, but
rather what he does. And when he did say anything about character, he
related it not to the psychological but the sociological."40
In fact, Brecht rarely spoke about individual characters in isolation.
Rather, he exhorted his actors to create their characters dialectically with
each other, to react rather than act: "The smallest social unit is not the individual,
but two people. We create each other in life, too."41 Hence,
Brecht could describe his second phase as one in which the actor lets the
character react to the other characters, to the milieu, to the fable. As Brecht
rather unepically puts it, "This collecting process proceeds slowly until it
then nevertheless takes a leap-until you leap into the final character,
unite yourself with it."42
Only when the work of this "naturalistic" or "Stanislavskian" phase
has been completed can the third, antithetical, more properly "Brechtian"
phase begin.43 During this phase the actor, having come to identify with
his character, to know it from the inside, examines it once again "from outside,
from the point of view of society," and attempts to recapture the "mistrust
and astonishment of the first phase."44 It is primarily during this
phase that the actors and director, using the insights won from a critical reexamination
of the social behavior of the characters they have come to
know intimately, structure the final composition of gestures and positions
that will elaborate the fable concretely in performance. The actor's goal
during this phase is not, however, to reject everything he has learned during
the second phase lest the audience be contaminated by unepic playing.
Rather, as Brecht points out clearly in one of his 1954 appendixes to the
Organon, the actor's ultimate goal in performance is to achieve a dialectical
unity between the gestural presentation of the character in his social relationships
and a realistic emotional foundation won through identification:
Ignorant heads interpret the contradiction between playing (demonstration)
and experiencing (identification) as if only the one or the
other appeared in the actor's work (or as if according to the Short
CRITICAL THEORY AND PERFORMANCE
308
Organon one only plays, according to the old technique one only experiences).
In reality it is, of course, a matter of two competing
processes that unite in the work of the actor . . . Out of the struggle
and the tension between the two antipodes . . . the actor draws his
real impact.45
Brecht, of course, did develop and discuss a number of his own techniques
intended to enforce the dialectic between "playing" and "experiencing."
Most of these techniques were, strictly speaking, rehearsal exercises,
such as having the actor speak the character's lines in the third
person or speak the stage directions along with her lines. Many of these exercises
were, in fact, used at the Berliner Ensemble, particularly during the
early productions, most notably the Hofmneister. They were, however, included
when useful during the second and third stages of the actor's work
and without theoretical discussion about their epic purpose. Brecht knew
that the practical workshop is not the place for theoretical discourse.46
Indeed, Herbert Blau is quite correct when he maintains that
Brecht's approach to acting is "more a matter of the environment created
around the actor than a methodology of acting itself."47 The concentration
of communal effort on the interpretation of dramatic texts may be seen as
one element of this environment; the use of a leisurely approach to building
up a production is another; the time committed to this approach a
third.48 Underlying all of these, however, is the creation of true ensemble
working methods. Only when directors, designers, dramaturgs, and actors
work continuously together using a shared dramaturgical approach
and developing group methods to explore a number of productions treating
texts from different historical periods and different genres can they
create the common vocabulary necessary to allow the ensemble members
to use their particular training, experience, and techniques toward the creation
of a production that bears the stamp not just of individuals but of a
recognizable whole. That is something we should keep in mind when we
try to characterize the distinctive quality of Brecht's work with the actor,
and certainly if we try to make practical use of it.
NOTES
1. For an example of this absolutizing tendency, see Timothy J. Wiles's discussion
of Brecht in The Theater Event: Modern Theories of Performance (Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 1980). The tendency toward generalized comparisons
with Stanislavski mars one of the most recent contributions to the discussion on
Brecht and the actor, Margaret Eddershaw's otherwise frequently interesting examination,
"Acting Methods: Brecht and Stanislavski," in Brecht in Perspective, ed.
Graham Bartram and Anthony Waine (New York: Longman, 1982), 128-44.
2. Brecht, in a discussion with students and professors at the Universitit Greifswald,
1954, "Uber die Arbeit am Berliner Ensemble," in Brecht im Gesprach, Diskussionen,
Dialogue, Interviews, ed. Werner Hecht, (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp,
1975), 123. All translations in this essay are the author's.
BRECHT AND THE CONTRADICTORY ACTOR
309
3. Today, fifty years after Brecht's death, such invaluable discussion based on
rehearsal observation is virtually impossible to come by. However, a monograph
by John Fuegi, Bertolt Brecht: Chaos, According to Plan (New York: Cambridge University
Press, 1987), provides detailed accounts of Brecht's work with his actors.
Fuegi had access to Brecht's coworkers, to tape recordings and notes of rehearsals,
and to his own vast knowledge and experience of Brecht's theater.
4. On the other hand, concentration on Brecht's work with actors at the Berlin
Ensemble precludes consideration of such aspects of his work as the interrelationship
of theory and practice during the late 1920s when Brecht was evolving his
theory of the Lehrstficke, the learning plays.
5. Brecht, Gesammelte Werke in 20 Banden, ed. Werner Hecht (Frankfurt am
Main: Suhrkamp, 1967), 16:865. Hereafter, the Gesammelte Werke will be cited as GW.
6. Given the fairly widespread misconception represented by Eddershaw's
statement that Brecht founded the Berliner Ensemble "primarily to facilitate the
perfect staging of Brecht's own plays" ("Acting Methods," 137), it should be
stressed that Brecht and his actors developed their interpretational techniques for
the full range of the world's dramatic literature, from Sophocles' Antigone to
Synge's Playboy of the Western World. Of the Ensemble's fifteen most important
productions during Brecht's lifetime, only four were of plays by Brecht.
7. BFA 23: 66.
8. See BFA 23: 92.
9. BFA 23: 92.
o10. BFA 23: 92.
11. BFA 23: 82.
12. BFA 23: 287.
13. BFA 21: 79-80.
14. BFA 25: 181 has altered the format of this list, which is printed in paragraph
form, the individual sentences being separated by bullet points.
15. Manfred Wekwerth, Schriften: Arbeit mit Brecht (Berlin [East]: Henschel,
1975), 119. Roland Barthes provides an excellent discussion of the dialectical development
of beats in the first scene of Mother Courage, using photographic illustrations,
in his "Seven Photo Models of Mother Courage," trans. Hella Freud
Bernays, Drama Review T37 (Fall 1967): 44-55.
16. BFA 23: 311.
17. BFA 23: 177.
18. Peter Palitzsch, in an interview with Artur Joseph for his Theater unter vier
Augen: Gesprdche mit Prominenten (Cologne: Kiepenheuer und Witsch, 1969), 178.
19. BFA 23: 92.
20. BFA 22.2: 646.
21. Giorgio Strehler, Fur ein menschlicheres Theater, trans. and ed. Sinah Kessler
(Berlin [East]: Henschel, 1977), 87-88.
22. Hans Curjel, "Brechts Antigone-Inszenierung in Chur 1948," rpt. in Die
Antigone des Sophokles: Materialien zur "Antigone," ed. Werner Hecht (Frankfurt am
Main: Suhrkamp, 1967), 137-38.
23. Curjel, "Brechts Antigone-Inszenierung in Chur 1948," 138.
24. For further discussion on Brecht's use of "quoted" gestures throughout a
production, see Walter Benjamin, Versuche uber Brecht, 2nd ed. (Frankfurt am
Main: Suhrkamp, 1967), 26-27.
25. BFA 23: 81.
26. Kithe Rfilicke-Weiler points this out in Die Dramaturgie Brechts: Theater als
Mittel der Verdnderung, 2nd ed. (Berlin [East]: Henschel, 1968), 206.
CRITICAL THEORY AND PERFORMANCE
310
27. BFA 8: 322.
28. BFA 8: 322.
29. Brecht, as reported by Hans Joachim Bunge, "Uber eine Neuinszenierung
der Dreigroschenoper: Ein Gespraich zwischen Brecht und Giorgio Strehler am
15.10.1955 fiber die bevorstehende Mailainder Inszenierung," in Bertolt Brechts
Dreigroschenbuch: Texte, Materialien, Dokumente, ed. Siegfried Unseld (Frankfurt am
Main: Suhrkamp, 1960), 134.
30. Ruth Berlau, Bertolt Brecht, et al., Theaterarbeit: 6 Auffihrungen des Berliner
Ensembles (Dresden: VVV Dresdner Verlag, 1952), 264.
31. See Brecht's description, BFA 25: 238-39.
32. Manfred Wekwerth, "Brecht-Theater in der Gegenwart" (Stockholmer
Seminar 1978), in Aktualisierung Brechts, ed. Wolfgang Fritz Haug, Klaus Pierwo,
und Karen Ruoff (Berlin: Argument-Verlag, 1980), ,o8.
33. Brecht, "Uber die Arbeit am Berliner Ensemble," 125.
34. Carl Weber, "Brecht as Director," Drama Review T37 (Fall 1967): 102-3.
35. BFA 23: 227.
36. BFA 23: 292.
37. BFA 23: 228.
38. BFA 22.1: 393.
39. Werner Hecht, Sieben Studien fiber Brecht (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp,
1972), 151.
40. Kaithe Riilicke-Weiler, in Sinn und Form, 2nd special Brecht issue, 1956, as
quoted by Albrecht Schone, "Bertolt Brecht: Theatertheorie und dramatische
Dichtung," in Zu Bertolt Brecht: Parabel und episches Theater, ed. Theo Buck
(Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1979), 39.
41. BFA 23: 88.
42. BFA 23: 228.
43. This labeling of Brecht's second and third phases is Peter Palitzsch's, as
quoted by Hans Daiber, Deutsches Theater seit 1945 (Stuttgart: Reklam, 1976), 218.
44. BFA 23: 228.
45. BFA 23: 291.
46. See Herbert Blau, "The Popular, the Absurd, and the Entente Cordiale," Tulane
Drama Review 5, no. 3 (1961): 121.
47. Blau, "The Popular, the Absurd," 121.
48. Brecht's productions are, of course, famous for rehearsal periods lasting six
months or longer. As Peter Palitzsch has pointed out in a personal interview
(March 3, 1979), however, Brecht's early productions at the Berliner Ensemble
were often worked up relatively quickly; the Hofmeister had only about nine
weeks of rehearsal, for example. Brecht began to indulge in long rehearsal periods
during his last years, when he was both very ill and intent on developing his
young directors and actors. The issue is not whether a Brechtian approach needs
six months of rehearsals, but that it needs as long as necessary to proceed effectively
through Brecht's three phases.
Gender and Sexualities
The entire arena that is the concern of this section has been subject to
dynamic revisions. Starting out under the rubric of "feminism," early
scholarly investigations of gender and sexualities quickly became "feminism(s)."
This change to the plural referred both to the differences in ideology
and practice among feminists, and to the different kinds of research
activity engaged in by these pioneering scholars. The plural acknowledged
the diversity of race, class, age, sexual preference, location, and
many other attributes marking the positions of women engaged in feminist
activity, both scholarly and artistic.1 In time, acknowledgment of the
diversity of human identities required a proliferation of categories: male,
female, and transgenders; heterosexual, gay, lesbian, bi-, and transsexualities.
Sometimes, but not always, these have been collected under the
sign queer. Other times it has seemed important to hold onto the more
specific signifiers. For example, the field of masculinity studies contains
perspectives that might or might not be considered queer, depending on
how queer is defined and on how the scholars in question choose to affiliate.
"GLBT" studies has become an acronym, allowing a shorthand
while explicitly naming the sexuality options. For this section we have
decided on "Gender and Sexualities" as the umbrella term, as it makes
room for the rapid changes in these areas of study and provides a more
specific and inclusive look at the variety of work being produced by performance
scholars.
The turning century witnessed the waning of large-scale political
movements in support of identity politics. This is not to deny the ongoing
commitments to social action and political struggle on the parts of many
feminist, GLBT, and queer activists; it does acknowledge, however, that
the size and power of those movements has diminished in comparison to
their peak in the 1970s and early 198os (feminism) and the middle and late
1980s and early 1990s (GLBT and queer constituencies). The diminution
of this political activism has been especially problematic for scholarly
movements that were originally predicated on activism. As Sue-Ellen
Case has written, "Within feminism, the relationship to the activist movement
significantly altered the object and structure of scholarly discourse.
Although this relationship no longer pertains in the same way as it did in
311
CRITICAL THEORY AND PERFORMANCE
312
the 1970s, there is still an intermingling of these projects."2 Working
through the terms of identity, then, and also appearing whenever the follow-through
into actual practice of theoretical insights is at issue, scholarship
dealing with gender and sexuality almost always renegotiates its social
contract.
The emergence of queer theory, in fact, can be seen as an attempt to
respond to the unsatisfactory exclusions of terms such as feminist or gay
and lesbian; it also emerged as a political project to try to build a new, more
broadly affiliated group in the face of the AIDS epidemic. Ultimately, it
was a critique of identity categories from within a commitment to struggle
on behalf of identities: "Queer is not a conspiracy to discredit lesbian and
gay; it does not seek to devalue the indisputable gains made in their name.
Its principal achievement is to draw attention to the assumptions that intentionally
or otherwise inhere in the mobilization of any identity category,
including itself."3 However, in the negative locution of this citation, the inevitable
tensions accompanying the inclusions/exclusions of naming
groups is clear. These debates have marked theater and performance
scholarship during the last decade, although most scholars have little
trouble recognizing affinities between scholars operating under different
nomenclatures. Jill Dolan's book Geographies of Learning both explicates the
stakes in these namings and also performs an exemplary negotiation of the
terms in her own eclectic usages.4 It also specifies the challenge for actualizing
theory in practice. About the first gay and lesbian theater conference
in 1995, Dolan writes, "Despite the promise, perhaps, of the coalitional
concept of queer, we remained, I think, two hundred or more gay men and
lesbians and others, some of whom perceive themselves as thinking, some
as doing, some as consuming. For queer theater to really flourish, perhaps
we need a community that thoughtfully, passionately, and responsibly
goes about engaging in all three."5
Among the intellectual currents swirling around these identity questions
during the last decade, one of the most important contributions for
theater scholars came from philosopher Judith Butler. With the publication
in 1988 of her essay "Performative Acts and Gender Constitution"
in Theatre Journal, her ideas have been a flashpoint for feminists and queer
theorists who work in performance and theater studies.6 Arguing that
gender is not stable nor based on any ontological principles, Butler argued
that gender, and more radically, sex itself is "an identity tenuously
constituted in time-an identity instituted through a stylized repetition of
acts."7 Gender, then, is performative-it comes into being as repetition of
"the mundane manner in which these [sex-related] constructs are produced,
reproduced, and maintained within the field of bodies." Using
the theatrical metaphor of "acts," she pointed out that in performance, an
act is a shared experience and collective action:
The act that one does, the act that one performs, is, in a sense, an act
that has been going on before one arrived on the scene. Hence, gender
is an act which has been rehearsed much as a script survives the
GENDER AND SEXUALITIES
313
particular actors who make use of it, but which requires individual
actors in order to be actualized and reproduced as reality once
again.9
Although Butler was uncomfortable with this close association with actual
performances and attempted to move away from it in later writings, this
passage was, I believe, the germ of the proliferating use of her theories in
work that looked at gender in performance and related representations.
Two books by Butler, Gender Trouble and Bodies That Matter, followed
in 1990 and 1993. The first explored the possibilities for resistance
in the theory of gender as a stylized repetition of acts, and tended to
stress the freedom to explode by hyperbolic repetition (as in drag), or to
deviate from prescribed gender behaviors as a way of rebelling against
fixed gender categories. This freedom, however, was modified substantially
in Bodies That Matter because scholars had seized on the libratory
promise of her earlier theories, and Butler realized that she needed to
stress the constraints, the entrapments of the sedimentation of repeated
acts. "Gender is not to be chosen and ... 'performativity' is not radical
choice and it's not voluntarism,"1o she said in correction. Nonetheless,
the notion of gender as a performed style, established through repetition
before a community, and not based on any essential or biological traits,
provided performance scholars with a strong explanation for how styles
of femininity and masculinity become established through cultural and
theatrical performances, and how they might be challenged by modifying
or exploding those styles in representation.
A great deal of feminist and queer performance scholarship grew
out of these suggestive ideas. Some of it fell into the trap of seeing the citation
of a gender norm as being in itself subversive. The usual problem
with deconstructive acts-that the binary terms are kept intact within the
new representation-remained underconsidered in some of this work.
However, in her recent writing, Judith Butler has moved beyond her
early ideas on gender, and this work continues to be productive for performance
theory-pertinent not only to this section of the volume. She
has developed both psychoanalytic theories of the subject and Marxist
theories of ideology in pursuit of a poststructuralist account of subject
formation that does not capitulate to an apolitical adjustment to normative
society. In her reading of Bourdieu in combination with Althusser
(see Savran in "After Marx"), she outlines an understanding of the way
the body acts in representation through regularized or ritualized practices
to produce an incorporated memory: "Here the apparent materiality
of the body is recast as a kind of practical activity, undeliberate and yet to
some degree improvisational."11 These notions go a long way toward explaining
the combination of freedom and constraint operating through
bodies in representation and allow room for the appearance of novelty,
even as they caution against grand expectations. Butler has not been the
only theorist of gender and sexuality important to theater and performance
studies (consider, for example, Eve Sedgwick, Douglas Crimp,
CRITICAL THEORY AND PERFORMANCE
314
Donna Harraway, or Chandra Talpade Mohanty), but she has been one of
the most influential in this past decade.
Feminist critics and theorists in theater and performance studies
continue to produce a large body of work sensitive to issues of coherence
and affiliation, yet insistent on keeping the project of feminism at the forefront
of scholarly thinking. Building on psychoanalytic and materialist
theories of the body, Rebecca Schneider's The Explicit Body in Performance
makes claims for the historically situated female body and its meanings in
representation without succumbing to essentialism.12 Alicia Arriz6n, writing
from her identity positions as a Latina lesbian, has contributed Latina
Performance: Traversing the Stage, and Stacy Wolf published A Problem Like
Maria: Gender and Sexuality in the American Musical.13 Una Chadhuri, in a
book not ostensibly about gender and sex, Staging Place: The Geography of
Modern Drama, nevertheless brings an acute critical consciousness of gender
issues into every page of her analysis.14 Charlotte Canning continued
one of the original strands of feminist scholarship, the desire to record for
history the often ephemeral and hard to document work of women theater
makers, in Feminist Theatres in the USA.15 During the last ten years, established
scholars have also continued to publish, for instance Sue-Ellen
Case's The Domain-Matrix, Elin Diamond's Unmaking Mimesis, Peggy Phelan's
Mourning Sex, and Gay Gibson Cima's Performing Women: Female
Characters, Male Playwrights, and the Modern Stage.16 All three of the essays
in the "Psychoanalysis" section could easily fit here as well: Ann Pelligrini's
essay, especially, illustrates an analytic method that borrows from
Judith Butler and tackles some of the arguments within feminism concerning
its contemporary relevance.
Another fruitful area of new work concerns the gender and sexualities
of the masculine. Australian R. W. Connell writes as a social scientist,
clearing a path for systematic study of men and their diversity without
the defensiveness evident in some work from the "men's movement,"
whether the myth-inspired ideas of Robert Bly or the overtly reactionary
politics of the Promise Keepers.17 While feminists have sometimes
looked skeptically at this work, they have at other times embraced it and
engaged in it. Eve Sedgwick's work on men would be one obvious example,18
and in another recent book entitled Masculinity Studies and Feminist
Theory: New Directions, Judith Kegan Gardiner argues that "nuanced
feminist analyses of masculinities are necessary to adequately theorize
gender studies."19 In theater and performance studies, a number of important
books have been published in this area. Robert Vorlicky's Act Like
a Man (1995) was perhaps the first full-length study to take American men
and their representations in our national drama as its subject.20 By that
time, David Savran's Communists, Cowboys, and Queers (1992) had developed
a complex understanding of the straight Arthur Miller and the gay
Tennessee Williams that included their different appropriations of masculinity
in a heterosexist culture, and the Cold War ideological tropes of
masculinity and nation within which they were both positioned. Savran
has published several other masculinity projects, including Taking It Like a
GENDER AND SEXUALITIES
315
Man (1998).21 In addition, a significant literature has grown up concerning
gay men and the AIDS epidemic, most notably David Romin's Acts of Intervention:
Performance, Gay Culture, and AIDS22 (1998). Performance artist
Tim Miller has also written extensively about his work in the context of
questions of masculinity.23
For this edition, we have invited several contributors to reconsider
and revise their essays from the first edition. Ellen Donkin has enhanced
her account, an example of feminist historiography, of Sarah Siddons's
ability to assert her autonomy and subjectivity in the moment of eighteeth-century
reception (see her postscript). Jill Dolan discusses how her
own essay on lesbian representations of sexuality looks to her now, ten
years later. Kate Davy's essay stands up well as originally published, a
testament to the multifaceted writing on gender and sexuality that was already
growing in our field at the time of the first edition. David Roman
represents the focus on masculinity with his contribution and concurrently
continues his work on representation in the context of AIDS.
In looking back on over twenty-five years of theater and performance
scholarship on gender and sexuality (Helen Krich Chinoy and
Linda Walsh Jenkin's pioneering Women in the American Theatre was published
in 1981 and serves as a marker for the upsurge of second-wave
feminism in our field), I want to stress continuity and productivity.24 Once
theater and performance scholars started working with theories of gender
and sexuality in the context of committed social action, they radically
transformed our field. As I wrote in 1992, "Traces of the feminist project
can be found in every section of this book, even when the essays were
written by men."25 In new and somewhat different ways, that's still true.
J.G.R.
NOTES
1. Cf. the first edition of this volume Critical Theory and Performance (Ann
Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1992), 226.
2. Sue-Ellen Case, "Feminism and Performance: A Post-Disciplinary Couple,"
Theatre Research International 26 (July 2001): 145-46.
3. Annamarie Jagose, Queer Theory: An Introduction (New York: New York University
Press, 1996), 126, quoted in Donna M. Nudd, Kristina Schriver, and Terry
Galloway, "Is This Theater Queer? The Mickee Faust Club and the Performance of
Community," in Performing Democracy: International Perspectives on Urban Community-Based
Performance, ed. Susan C. Haedicke and Tobin Nellhaus (Ann Arbor:
University of Michigan Press, 2001), 105. In the article from which this definition
was cited, the authors discuss the ramifications of thinking through identity categories
and the use of the term queer.
4. Jill Dolan, Geographies of Learning: Theory and Practice, Activism and Performance
(Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 2ool).
5. Dolan, Geographies of Learning, 105.
6. Judith Butler, "Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in
Phenomenology and Feminist Theory," Theatre Journal 40, no. 4 (1988): 519-31.
CRITICAL THEORY AND PERFORMANCE
316
7. Butler, "Performative Acts," 519.
8. Butler, "Performative Acts," 595.
9. Butler, "Performative Acts," 526.
10. "The Body You Want; Liz Kotz interviews Judith Butler," Artforum 31
(1992): 84.
11. Judith Butler, Excitable Speech (New York: Routledge, 1997), 154. See also
her The Psychic Life of Power (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997).
12. Rebecca Schneider, The Explicit Body in Performance (New York: Routledge,
1997).
13. Alicia Arriz6n, Latina Performance: Traversing the Stage (Bloomington: University
of Indiana Press, 1999), and Stacy Wolf, A Problem Like Maria: Gender and
Sexuality in the American Musical (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2002).
14. Una Chaudhuri, Staging Place: The Geography of Modern Drama (Ann Arbor:
University of Michigan Press, 1995).
15. Charlotte Canning, Feminist Theatres in the USA (New York: Routledge,
1996).
16. Sue-Ellen Case, The Domain-Matrix: Performing Lesbian at the End of Print
Culture (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996); Elin Diamond, Unmaking
Mimesis (New York: Routledge, 1997); Peggy Phelan, Mourning Sex (New York:
Routledge, 1997); Gay Gibson Cima, Performing Women: Female Characters, Male
Playwrights, and the Modern Stage (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993).
17. R. W. Connell, Masculinities (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California
Press, 1995).
18. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial
Desire (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985).
19. Judith Kegan Gardiner, ed., Masculinity Studies and Feminist Theory: New Directions
(New York: Columbia University Press, 2002), 1.
20. Robert Vorlicky, Act Like a Man: Challenging Masculinities in American Drama
(Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995).
21. David Savran, Communists, Cowboys, and Queers: The Politics of Masculinity
in the work of Arthur Miller and Tennessee Williams (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 1992), and Taking it Like a Man: White Masculinity, Masochism, and
Contemporary American Culture (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998).
22. David Roman, Acts of Intervention: Performance, Gay Culture, and AIDS
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998).
23. Tim Miller, Body Blows: Six Performances (Madison: University of Wisconsin
Press, 2002).
24. Helen Krich Chinoy and Linda Walsh Jenkin, Women in American Theatre:
Careers, Images, Movements: An Illustrated Anthology and Sourcebook (New York:
Random House, 1981).
25. Critical Theory and Performance, 229.
Mrs. Siddons Looks Back in Anger:
Feminist Historiography for
Eighteenth-Century British Theater
Ellen Donkin
Theater history is full of accounts of women performers in conflicts of various
kinds. Some occur in relation to audiences, others with playwrights
or managers, and some among the women performers themselves. The
history of women's performance has been shaped by these disparate incidents.
Gathered up and taken as a whole, they tell a larger story. One such
story is this: that in all areas of theater, but particularly in performance,
women have made repeated efforts to establish a point of view that is distinct
from that of men. In performance these efforts usually took the form
of subverting dramatic texts that failed to reflect the reality of women's
lives. Some of these attempts to subvert were conscious; many were not.
In theoretical terms we can formulate as follows: that the history of
women's performance is the history of a struggle for a subject, rather than
an object, position in representation. In Britain women performers have
attempted to undermine this positioning ever since they were legally allowed
onstage. Among the most interesting of these attempts was a night
in October 1784 on which the actress Sarah Siddons (1755-1831) came into
sharp conflict with her audience and subsequently forced them to look at
women onstage in a completely different way.
This positioning of women as object on stage has a distinct moment
of inception in British history. When Charles II returned from France in
166o and decreed that actresses might appear on the legitimate stage, it
marked the beginning of a shift in British consciousness. The appearance
of women on stage constituted not only an aesthetic development for the
theater but also a change in society at large. By occupying the stage
women now routinely occupied public space, not just on the stage but
also in the public imagination. This change touched off some deep anxieties
and initiated a series of tacit negotiations about the conditions under
which women would be allowed to occupy public space. The theater became
a venue for negotiating gender roles.1
The initial contract was straightforward. Women in the British theater
might occupy space on stage, but only as an object of desire or
ridicule. There was no place on the stage for a woman's own assessment
of the world she lived in. She might have opinions of that world offstage,
and she might even voice them in private life, but not in a public theatrical
event. It wasn't just that the plays provided her with limiting stereotypes
of female behavior but that her very body on the stage implicated her in
a certain relationship with the viewing audience. The notion of the actress
as prostitute was an expression of this relationship. It had little to do with
317
CRITICAL THEORY AND PERFORMANCE
318
her private conduct offstage and everything to do with the projected desires
of the viewing audience.
The career of Nell Gwyn points up some of the larger problems
faced by actresses throughout theater history. Nell Gwyn was in fact a
prostitute, but contemporary commentators seized upon her work as an
actress and her activities as a prostitute as somehow intrinsically related,
as this bit of verse spells out:
Next in the Playhouse she took her degree
As men commence at University.
No doctors, till they've masters been before;
So she no player was till first a whore.2
Moreover, by 1668 Nell Gwyn had become a mistress to Charles II.3
Charles was an enthusiastic theatergoer, and his presence in the theater,
amid the common knowledge that he was sleeping with Nell, reinforced
the audience's disposition to view any woman onstage carnally. The theater
itself was shaped in such a way that for most of the audience it was
possible to watch Charles watching Nell. In fact, it was difficult to do anything
else.4
Theoreticians have called this kind of carnal looking "the gaze" and
have asserted that the gaze in our culture is male.5 In other words, the
way events and characters unfold in representation tends to reward the
eye of the heterosexual male subject. The woman in representation functions
as object to this subject gaze; she is the one looked at rather than the
one who does the looking. The Restoration gaze, with Charles and the audience
as a collectively male-identified subject and Nell Gwyn as female
object, constituted a paradigmatic contract, a "technology of gender," that
reinforced an old set of power relations even as it appeared to give women
a new place in representation.6
It was not until much later, in 1899, that the notion of a female subject
had been sufficiently formulated for one actress to speak about it. The
turn-of-the-century American actress Mary Shaw wrote that "the
woman's point of view was usually not respected by manager, producer
or actor." This failing resulted in the appearance on stage of heroines who
"talk and act not as real women would, but as men think that women
ought to talk and act."7 Shaw's analysis suggests that a strong subject position
for women is one that is necessarily grounded in women's experience
rather than on men's fantasies about that experience. She concluded
that there was an urgent need for a different kind of drama, one that included
believable women characters in believable circumstances.
But in eighteenth-century Britain there was no such drama, and the
obstacles for actresses in mainstream theater seeking a strong subject position
were considerable. Even as mainstream theater offered employment
and a certain provisional membership in the power structure, it placed
women in roles that reified their position as object, not just in the world of
the play but also, by extension, in the world at large. Theorists have made
MRS. SIDDONS LOOKS BACK IN ANGER
319
a useful distinction between "women" and "Woman." By performing
these roles the actress publicly reinforced a notion of Woman. That notion
of Woman had a positioning effect on real women, on the way they lived
their lives, on what men expected from them, and on what they expected
from themselves.8 As she performed Woman, these cultural expectations of
women circled back to the actress in performance through the demands of
a very vocal audience. This circling back created a potential closure in the
system that made change difficult to accomplish or even to conceive.
Two factors, however, made possible the disruption of this relatively
closed system. The first has to do with the nature of performance. One of
the most important lessons of semiotics for the theater has been the idea
that performance and text constitute two distinct sets of signs that are
more or less equally weighted in the way an audience assigns them importance.
The text of a play in performance is not privileged as "truer"
than the actions of actors on stage or any other component of production.9
This idea has important bearing on the female subject in performance history.
It suggests that, in spite of texts that reinforced an existing ideology
about Woman, actual performances by women could maintain a certain
degree of autonomy from that text and create a very different set of messages
for the audience.
So, although the popular drama of the eighteenth century is full of
roles in which heroines (to quote Mary Shaw again) talk and act only "as
men think women ought to talk and act," gifted actresses found ways to
perform powerfully inside these texts all the time. They had to. The irony
of their position was that, although audiences demanded from the text the
comfort and familiarity of the norms of Womanhood, what in fact they responded
to in performance was something that potentially ruptured that comfort
and familiarity. That something was female subjectivity, which registered the
contradictions, the anger, the desire, the humor, the powerlessness, and the
perspective of the female subject in history. For the audience this kind of
performance was a form of voyeurism. Under no circumstances were they
interested in seeing this unpredictable and powerful presence work itself
free of the constraints of the narrative. But they were captivated nonetheless
by the potential for danger, the ripple of excitement, the spectacle of agony,
as the actress gave them a glimpse of the power inside.10
As a general rule, the playtexts themselves cooperated. Most popular
plays provided at least one scene in which the actress could explode into a
vitality and power that were absent from the rest of her role. These were
the scenes in which she made her "hits," or "points," as they were called.
Necessarily, any such scene was carefully contained and rationalized by
the plot. But to judge from various memoirs and reviews, in spite of this
containment, these scenes resonated in memory long after the details of the
plot were forgotten. These scenes functioned as pry bars; they penetrated
the ideological closure of representation and created a space in which
women, not Woman, could be heard onstage, if only momentarily. They
did not solve the problem of a fully developed female subject onstage, but
they kept something alive.
CRITICAL THEORY AND PERFORMANCE
320
The second factor that challenged this closed system was audience
reception. In the eighteenth century reception played a complex role in
this destabilization process. Keir Elam writes: "In sponsoring the performance,
the audience issues, as it were, a collective 'directive' to the performers,
instructing them to provide in return a bona fide product (or production)
of a certain kind-hence the outrage of certain spectators whose
expectations are openly flouted, as was the case with various 196os experiments.
The audience's relative passivity as 'receiver' is in fact an active
choice which imposes certain obligations on the elected 'senders."'11
Elam's observations are useful because they remind us of the way in
which audience expectation shapes performance, especially around the
way women are represented onstage. What needs revising for our purposes,
however, is his characterization of the audience as passive, even as
he argues against that passivity. Indeed, eighteenth-century audiences
can in no sense be thought of as passive. They had the power to determine
the survival of both plays and performers. They were far more powerful
than the press. Based on audience response, a theater manager would decide
from night to night whether to run the show or rotate it out of the
repertory. These audiences were unconstrained in registering their approval
or disapproval of any aspect of performance. I call them "shouting"
audiences.12 One contemporary analogy is the parliamentary institution
in which the prime minister makes herself or himself available once
a week for questions and answers in the House of Commons. Depending
on the volatility of the issue, a barely contained multiplicity of shouting
voices are heard, both singly and in chorus, alternating with the (rehearsed)
statements of the prime minister.
This legitimated parley between audience and performers meant
that the "reception loop" of performer to audience back to performer
again was an extremely tight one. If innovation was introduced successfully
onstage, it could be ratified by audience response instantaneously.
The press participated in this process, but only after the fact. When a
breathing, murmuring, commenting, laughing audience responded positively
to something new in a performer's work, it cemented that change
on the spot, and the performer was given permission to continue and
build on it. This was not the leisurely process of reader-response; it had
more in common with deals being made in the pit of a commodities exchange.
So, although it can be argued that production and performance as
a whole tended to reinforce dominant ideology, that process was by no
means monolithic. In a single evening the "horizon of expectations" for an
audience could change; what had been unacceptable in the Wednesday
evening performance by one actress could be found plausible and moving
on Thursday in the performance of another actress, opening up new possibilities
for playwrights and actresses alike.13 The playhouse, as we have
noted, functioned as a liminal space in which gender roles were negotiated
and renegotiated. In this process the audience was a wild card. Innovation
did not happen often, but when it happened, it happened fast.
These two factors, the autonomous nature of performance and the
MRS. SIDDONS LOOKS BACK IN ANGER
321
power of audience reception, were to play important parts in the story
that follows. During this evening in the career of Sarah Siddons "the balance
of forces maintaining a particular hegemony" became unstable, and
the audience accepted the terms of a new "contract" for women on the
stage.14 This contract marked an important change for women in performance;
it opened the way for a more complete female presence on the English
stage.
October 5, 1784, was Mrs. Siddons's opening night at Drury Lane for
the 1784-85 season. She had just returned from a summer season of work
in Dublin, during which she had been accused (unjustly, as it turned out)
by two fellow actors, West Digges and William Brereton, of first refusing
to perform in their benefits and then of charging an exorbitant sum for appearing.
On this particular evening, as Mrs. Siddons came onstage for the
first scene of the play, she was greeted by an audience so hostile that it
was impossible to perform. The auditorium was filled with derisive calls
of "Off! Off!"
It was no happenstance that hostilities broke out on this particular
evening. Mrs. Siddons was moving into the zenith of her career; no
woman performer in memory had so captivated the British public. The
spring before she had been painted by Joshua Reynolds as the Tragic
Muse. She was joining a hall of fame that included celebrities like David
Garrick. This outbreak was an overt challenge to her membership in that
power structure.
The background to this incident is supplied by at least three different
accounts, one of them by Wally Oulton, a contemporary chronicler of
the theater; the second by James Boaden, Mrs. Siddons's first major biographer;
and the third by Mrs. Siddons herself. It is not certain that Oulton's
is an eyewitness account, but Boaden was present on the evening in
question, and Mrs. Siddons was the unwilling principal in the event. I will
quote Oulton's account first, in full:
On Mrs. Siddons's first appearance this season, in the part of Mrs.
Beverley in The Gamester, she met with strong opposition, on account
of some malicious reports concerning her conduct, during her last
visit to Dublin; where, as insinuated, she refused to perform for the
benefits of Messrs. Digges and Brereton, who were then dangerously
ill. Mrs. Siddons did agree to perform for the first gentleman
without any gratuity, and for Mr. Brereton on very moderate terms;
but when the benefits were commencing she was in reality taken ill,
being confined to her bed for a fortnight. On Mrs. Siddons's appearance
this season, her applauders had the majority; she repeatedly
courtseyed to the audience, and seemed as if she wished to exculpate
herself from the charges brought against her in the Public Papers:
the tumult however encreasing Mr. Kemble came on, bowed
respectfully to the audience, and took his sister by the hand, and as
the noise continued, both retired. In about six minutes after, Mrs.
Siddons came on again, and addressed the audience, declaring that
CRITICAL THEORY AND PERFORMANCE
322
everything should be explain'ed to the satisfaction of the public, and
that she had been most unjustly traduced. The theatre still continuing
in an uproar, she retired again; and Mr. King came forward; he
said Mrs. Siddons's reception had discomposed her so much, she
prayed the Indulgence of the House for a short time, and the Performance
should go on: upwards of forty minutes elapsed before the
curtain rose for the play, when Mrs. Siddons's friends having obtained
silence, she went through her character with astonishing
firmness, and she was announced for the part of Lady Randolph on
a succeeding night. The malice of Mrs. Siddons's enemies became
soon apparent, and all terminated to her credit.15
There are three things about Oulton's account that are worth reflection.
The first is that the disruptions that night were apparently much
more compelling than the actual production itself. In any event, they take
up far more space than his comments on the performance of the actual
text. The second is that the furor over her alleged failure to perform in the
benefits described was disproportionate to the size of the infraction and
should probably make us suspicious. In point of fact, Mrs. Siddons had
performed a benefit for Digges, at considerable personal expense and
trouble, and her failure to perform for Brereton was the result of legitimate
illness and conflicting contractual obligations. In any case, Digges
was a member of the Daly company in Dublin, where Mrs. Siddons had
been working during the summer, and was hardly known to London audiences.
Brereton was much better known, but only because he had
costarred with Mrs. Siddons as Jaffier to her Belvidera in Otway's Venice
Preserv'd. His claim to fame depended upon her choice of costar. It is interesting
to note that by the fall of 1784 Mrs. Siddons was increasingly
turning to her brother, John Philip Kemble, to play roles of this kind, and
Brereton (correctly) felt himself in danger of being replaced.16 Brereton's
resentment was vented publicly through a series of newspaper columns
and found a ready response in the audience at large. The furor, then,
which allegedly was about Digges and Brereton, is more likely to have
been produced by them.
The third arresting aspect of Oulton's report is the term astonishing
firmness. What exactly does Oulton mean? Is he expressing admiration for
the actress's composure under pressure? Is it astonishing firmness in the
context of a stereotypically compliant character for whom firmness is a
peculiar but interesting acting choice? Is it some combination of his
awareness of her composure under pressure inside the context of the character?
Why is this firmness "astonishing"?
We learn more from Boaden, whose account includes a detailed description
of the event and of the letters to the newspaper leading up to it
(2:105-18). He reports that Brereton, who was to play Lewson in The
Gamester that evening, was backstage the entire time of this uproar in the
theater and that his failure to appear onstage to quell the angry crowds
by vindicating Mrs. Siddons was highly incriminating. "How keenly
MRS. SIDDONS LOOKS BACK IN ANGER
323
envy follows great success," comments Boaden dryly (2:81). Boaden reiterates
Oulton's description of Kemble leading Mrs. Siddons offstage, in
a kind of "masquerade of womanliness," a deliberate attempt to create a
scenario of rescue and maidenly distress.17 Boaden then reconstructs
Mrs. Siddons's address to the audience when she subsequently came out
alone, after the six-minute interlude described by Oulton above.18 He
writes:
After some interval, calls for her became less mixed with opposition
and she came again onstage, but alone and thus addressed the audience:
"Ladies and Gentlemen: The kind and flattering partiality
which I have uniformly experienced in this place would make the
present interruption distressing to me indeed, were I in the slightest
degree conscious of having deserved your censure. I feel no such
consciousness. The stories which have been circulated against me
are calumnies. When they shall be proved to be true, my aspersers
will be justified: but till then, my respect for the public leads me to
be confident that I shall be protected from unmerited insult." (2:115)
Boaden comments:
It was not very usual to hear a lady on such occasions; the delicacy of
the sex, while it becomes accustomed to repeat the sentiments of others,
shrinks from the seeming boldness of publicly uttering their
own. But there was a male dignity [my emphasis] in the understanding
of Mrs. Siddons that raised her above the helpless timidity of
other women; and it was certainly without surprise, and evidently
with profound admiration, that they heard this NOBLE BEING assert
her innocence and demand protection.., if I were to mark the moment,
which I should think she most frequently revolved, as affording
her the greatest satisfaction, the fortitude of this night and its enthusiastic
reception by all who heard and saw it, seem most worthily
to claim so happy a distinction. (2:116)
Boaden's conjecture that these events were pivotal in Mrs. Siddons's career
is borne out in her own memoirs (although with one complicated
twist, as we shall see).19 In this tiny volume of thirty-three pages, written
in the last year of her life, the events leading up to and including October
5, 1784, occupy fully seven pages at the end. The remaining several
decades of her career are compressed into a handful of paragraphs on the
final page. Contemporary commentary reinforces Boaden's conjecture;
one publication reported the event as a "very aweful trial-a trial which,
in great measure, determined her future fame-perhaps her residence in
this metropolis."20
Boaden's account has two important claims on our attention. The first
is that his report of the events clearly suggests that Mrs. Siddons, by dint
of personal conviction and courage, routed the opposition single-handedly.
CRITICAL THEORY AND PERFORMANCE
324
The second is his use of "male dignity" to describe her self-presentation
during this climactic moment. The term male applied to Mrs. Siddons suggests
that some aspect of gender construction had gotten muddy in this
moment of confrontation.
We turn finally to Mrs. Siddons's own account of the events of October
5. We hardly recognize it as the same set of events. First of all, she
makes no mention of Brereton and instead places the blame squarely on
the Irish manager Daly, her employer during the summer of 1784, and accuses
him of having engineered the entire confrontation long distance.
Daly was a womanizer and a notorious nuisance,21 but in this instance
Mrs. Siddons is also closing family ranks. Brereton, who died in 1787 in a
madhouse at Hoxton, left a widow named Priscilla who subsequently
married Mrs. Siddons's brother and costar, John Philip Kemble. This same
Priscilla was an actress in The Gamester company the night of the disturbance,
a fact that is not recorded either by Boaden or Oulton, playing
Charlotte to Mrs. Siddons's Mrs. Beverley in the opening scene of the
play. "Mrs. B. [Brereton] was mean enough to sneak off the stage and
leave her [Mrs. Siddons] to stand the insults of a malicious party tho' she
knew the whole disturbance was on her account and that her husband
had at least been obliged to contradict the reports that concern'd him."22
Out of respect for her brother's memory Mrs. Siddons avoids casting aspersions
on either of the Breretons, and the intriguing reference to the disturbance
being on Mrs. Brereton's account is not illuminated, although
there were rumors circulating at the time that Brereton was in love with
Mrs. Siddons.23 The uproar in the theater perhaps suited both the Breretons,
Mrs. Brereton for reasons of personal jealousy and Mr. Brereton for
reasons of professional jealousy.
Second and most important, Mrs. Siddons's narrative of the events
makes no mention whatever of her speech to the audience, the speech that
Boaden is at such pains to reconstruct. Instead, she states that after her
brother rescued her from the stage she went offstage and fainted. According
to her, it was only the combined efforts of Mr. Siddons, John Philip
Kemble, and Mr. Sheridan (Richard Brinsley), together with the prospect
of her children living in want, that enabled her to go back onstage and
face her audience. All this in six minutes, if we are to believe Oulton's account.
"I fainted . . . I was besought by husband, my brother, and Mr.
Sheridan to present myself again before that audience by whom I had
been so cruelly and unjustly degraded, and where, but in consideration of
my children, I never would have appeared again" (31).
Then, suddenly, the crisis is over, and she is in the midst of the first
act. She makes no mention whatever of her speech of self-defense to the
audience. It is as if it never took place. "But what was my astonishment to
find [myself], on the rising of the curtain, recieved [sic] with a silence so
profound that I was absolutely awe-struck and never yet have been able to
account for this surprising contrast, for I really think the falling of a pin
might have been heard upon the stage" (31; my emphasis). But both
MRS. SIDDONS LOOKS BACK IN ANGER
325
Boaden and Oulton report that she did address the audience directly, and
Boaden, if not always unbiased, can certainly be trusted as a reliable reporter
of events as he saw them.
What then are we to make of the fact that these reports do not tally?
How is it that, at the very moment in which Boaden observes with obvious
admiration a "male dignity" in Mrs. Siddons, her own memory fails
her completely? How are we to reconcile Oulton's observation of "astonishing
firmness" with a woman who has just fainted and can only be persuaded
onto the stage again by the manly intervention of husband and
brother? Sheridan's sister Betsy, who visited with Mrs. Siddons a few
days afterward, noted that "she seems hurt to the soul, but her feelings
seem to be more of the indignant kind than any other."24 One wonders
where the indignation is to be found in her own account.
Some of the answers to these discrepancies are suggested by a more
careful look at the text of the play.25 The Gamester, by Edward Moore, is a
moral fable about the evils of gambling and has as its central character a
Mr. Beverley, who, in spite of a devoted wife (Mrs. Siddons's role) and an
infant son, gambles away their considerable livelihood and reduces them
to desperate poverty. Mrs. Beverley, however, can only exclaim her continuing
devotion and need for him. Her lines read like a litany of disclaimers
to the subject position. She says to her sister-in-law: "I live but to
oblige him," and to her desperate and obsessed husband, "I have no
wants when you are present, nor wishes in your absence but to be blessed
with your return." This devotion reaches a ludicrous climax when she
hands over to Beverley her remaining handful of jewels, even though this
remnant of family fortune is all that protects her and her son from utter
destitution. Elizabeth Inchbald's trenchant remarks on the play in her
1808 anthology suggest that, from a woman's point of view, the play
stretched credibility. She describes Mrs. Beverley as "egregiously impassioned
by conjugal love."26
It is tempting to equate a strong subject position with strong emotional
display in performance, but a careful distinction must be made. The
role of Mrs. Beverley, although it had no claim to a strong female subject
position, had several opportunities for an actress to display strong emotions.
In one key scene Mrs. Beverley is approached by the sordid Stukely,
who hopes to seduce her in a moment of weakness and desperation. The
rejection of Stukely was a potential "hit" for the actress playing Mrs. Beverley.
In a blaze of righteous fury she says to Stukely: "Would that these
eyes had Heaven's own lightening [sic], that, with a look, thus I might
blast thee! Am I then fallen so low? Has poverty so humbled me, that I
should listen to a hellish offer, and sell my soul for bread? Oh, villain! villain!"27
1t was one of those moments in which the performance of the text
gave the actress an opportunity to hint at a powerful subjectivity within
the confines of a recuperative plot, affording the audience excitement
without serious risk to ideological expectations. Mrs. Beverley's "egregious"
loyalty to Mr. Beverley flew in the face of logic and even of survival
CRITICAL THEORY AND PERFORMANCE
326
itself. But it was precisely designed to reinforce the intrinsic rightness of
laws that prevented women from having any legal or financial identity
apart from their husbands. In plays like The Gamester these laws were seen
to reflect a preexisting condition of nature. As the play demonstrated,
Woman herself would not have wanted things any other way.
But on the night of October 5 something happened that dislodged
expectations in a more substantive way. If we can believe Oulton and
Boaden, Mrs. Siddons, an actress whose reputation had been built upon
never breaking character, stepped outside of both character and dramatic
narrative, turned in righteous anger, and looked back at her audience. In
that moment she registered what she thought of them. She forced her audience
to deal with her, not as object but as speaking subject. She expressed
personal indignation and disdain, without the benefit of a recuperative
plot. In other words, she reversed the direction of the gaze. The
audience now had the experience of being the object of a female gaze in
the theater, and it created a shift in power relations.
That power shift was, as Boaden and Oulton confirm, collectively
ratified by audience reception. In the intervening forty minutes Mrs. Siddons's
terms for appearing onstage without harassment were unconditionally
accepted. When she reappeared, the impact of that power shift
continued to resonate inside the performance of Mrs. Beverley, to such an
extent that Oulton records an "astonishing firmness." It was impossible
that night for the audience to view Mrs. Siddons as Mrs. Beverley without
the memory of the earlier outburst. This must have been particularly true
during the scene in which she spurned Mr. Stukely. The confrontation
forty minutes before had created a springboard into a performance of
Mrs. Beverley that oscillated at high frequency between actress as subject
and character as object.
Mrs. Siddons had destabilized the Restoration contract. She had opportunistically
grasped a hostile audience by the throat and renegotiated
the terms under which she would appear. It was by no means a conscious
effort to establish herself as "female subject" (even if the category had existed);
it was simply a gritty determination to survive. But its consequences
were important: it opened up a space in representation that had
not been there before, and the audience at that historical moment registered
its willingness to accept the change.28
One may argue that this assertion of the female subject was a wobbly
imposition on a play that made no real room for the female subject within.
Nevertheless, it was an important start. It had the effect of putting Mrs.
Siddons's performance as Mrs. Beverley in quotation marks; the acting
was seen to be a production of the actress and not coextensive with the actress.29
This distinction made possible a different complexity of female
presence both on the stage and in the audience. The price of being able to
fantasize about or identify with Mrs. Beverley was the concomitant awareness
of Mrs. Siddons herself as a subject. In some sense, the audience had
been put on notice. Even as they watched her, they were aware that she
was also watching them. They no longer occupied a safe space in the house
MRS. SIDDONS LOOKS BACK IN ANGER
327
from which to survey the body of the actress, as they had in 166o. The actress
was now in a position to look back.
The distinction between the female subject inside representation and
the female subject outside representation is an important one.30 The moment
in which Mrs. Siddons established herself as a female subject was
without question outside of the text of this play. She spoke in her own
words and delivered her indignation not to a culturally approved target
(Mr. Stukely) but to the immediate source of the trouble, the audience.
Her voices as outraged actress and outraged character need to be carefully
distinguished. She could not yet claim a full subject position inside of
dramatic narrative, but clearly something had taken place. Perhaps one
way to distinguish between a female subject inside and a female subject
outside representation might be to make a distinction between subject
voice and subject position. When we speak of Mrs. Siddons playing Mrs.
Beverley, for example, she is a subject voice. In spite of the ideologically
sanitized role she plays, certain moments of the play allow for displays of
power and rage that gesture in the direction of female subjectivity. When,
however, we speak of Mrs. Siddons confronting her audience directly
with her indignation about their outrageous behavior, we describe a subject
position, because her presence has not been neutralized by an ideologically
sanitizing plot and character. In a different kind of play, and in a
different century, Mrs. Siddons theoretically could have occupied a subject
position inside of a playtext. But it was eighteenth-century London,
and the play was The Gamester. In order to fully occupy a subject position
Mrs. Siddons had to step outside of the play. In a broad sense her indignant
address to the audience was structurally necessitated by the failure
of representation itself to find adequate space for her subjectivity within
the play. In speaking to the audience directly, however, she empowered
the existing subject voice within the play and opened up certain possibilities
for the future in playwriting and in women's performance.
When Boaden speaks of Mrs. Siddons's having a "male dignity," it
may be his way of describing the taking of a subject position. He understands
the subject position, in this case speaking for oneself, as a male activity:
"the delicacy of the [female] sex shrinks... from the seeming boldness
of publicly uttering their own [sentiments]" (2:116). In his efforts to
describe what he sees her doing that night he falls back on the only terminology
he has at hand. In doing so he exposes the inadequacy of the analysis.
Mrs. Siddons becomes the locus in which assumptions about femaleness
and maleness lose meaning. Maleness, in this instance, reveals itself
as a constructed social position and not as a biological statement of fact.
The remaining mystery is Mrs. Siddons's own failure to record this
moment of confrontation in her memoirs. One wonders if the omission
was a conscious or an unconscious one. Certainly it would appear that
she had little to lose by telling the truth as she remembered it; her career
was long since over, and she was in the last year of her life. I suspect her
recorded amazement at confronting a suddenly quiet audience is not
simply a coy invention. It is as if someone else had quieted the audience.31
CRITICAL THEORY AND PERFORMANCE
328
This experience of claiming a strong subject position constituted such an
aberration that it was difficult to incorporate into consciousness. How
was she to think of herself at once as the embodiment of Womanhood
and as having a "male dignity"? Her unprecedented position of power in
the theater was contingent upon her persuasiveness as Woman, both in
public and in private life. In the grid of her consciousness, which had
been so powerfully shaped and informed by the roles she played, there
was no precedent for aberrant "male" behavior.32 Without a place to
lodge, the memory of this incident split off and drifted away.
We see in this drifting away the consequences of a lifetime of work
in mainstream theater. Mrs. Siddons was someone who could operate defensively
and powerfully in her own behalf but could not consciously remember
having done so.33 She was, in effect, a split subject.34 It is a
chronic temptation in feminist revisions of theater history to imagine that
oppression created a group of women who were not allowed to speak
about what they knew. In fact it appears that the situation was more complicated:
that they didn't know what they knew.35 Mrs. Siddons's participation
in this moment of change had guaranteed neither her recognition
of that change nor her ability to build on it. She was, like her audiences,
caught up in the fluxes of history, a history in which she participated
without control or consciousness.
Nonetheless, there had been change. Mrs. Siddons continued to
work, and audiences continued to be more or less disruptive, but never
again did she face just another noisy crowd. The neutralized claims of that
1784 opening night audience would ever after be present in the audiences
that followed. It was a modest legacy but an important one.
Fredric Jameson has written that a careful analysis of incidents in
mainstream culture like this one will uncover traces of other cultural
voices, opposing voices that have been marginalized and muffled. This
multiplicity of clear and muffled voices is in some instances the only
record left to us of an underlying social struggle, one that history books
are usually at pains to simplify or eliminate.36 In this case both the hegemonic
and the oppositional voices belonged to Mrs. Siddons. The contradictory
voices of Mrs. Beverley, of the memoirs, and of the indignant
speech to the audience were all generated by the same person. In this
sense Mrs. Siddons's career is paradigmatic. Any woman whose survival
and financial independence rest upon her ability to represent herself as
Other, in ways that are deeply at odds with her experience, is likely to
show these curious signs of conflict and struggle.
Without gender as a category of inquiry, the significance of these
multiple voices is lost, and the political implications of anecdotes like this
one become, to use Jameson's term, unconscious. The feminist theater historian
must identify material like this as a form of politically unconscious
theater history and begin the work of extricating the female performer
from the ideological apparatus in which she worked. The story lies in the
gaps and contradictions between the voices-not in what they tell us but
in what they avoid or do not remember.
MRS. SIDDONS LOOKS BACK IN ANGER
329
Postscript for the New Edition
Many years ago my father, who was assistant stage manager for a Broadway
show called Too Many Girls, had the miserable task of firing a young
woman in the chorus line who was pregnant and just starting to show. It
is reasonable to conclude that the pregnant body onstage in the 1930S was
not seen to be an economic asset. It is another way of saying, I suppose,
that pregnancy did not participate in the erotic imagination of heterosexual
males in the audience. Nevertheless, we run a risk by allowing such
assumptions to slip into the mainstream of our thinking about actresses in
earlier centuries.
There is a wrinkle to the Siddons narrative, one that I confess completely
eluded me in the original edition of this essay, but that in the intervening
years has seemed to me full of possibilities. A central fact of this
incident, at least from Mrs. Siddons's point of view, was that she was over
four months pregnant. Her son George was born on February 27, 1785, the
sixth of seven children. A host of questions arise. Was her courage under
fire in part a function of her condition, a response grounded not just by indignation
on her own behalf, but an inchoate instinct to defend her
young? Was she showing? Was the use of classical draperies as costume a
way to disguise her condition for as long as possible, or did it in fact draw
attention to her blooming profile, setting in motion certain undercurrents
of response. Are we to imagine eroticism and gallantry in the male members
of her audience, together with identification and empathy in the female
members of the same audience?
Boaden, who is among her most ardent and meticulous observers,
makes absolutely no mention of her condition, oblique or otherwise, so it
is perfectly possible that it simply did not register with most members of
the audience. But even if her condition was well disguised in October
1784, it would have been hard to ignore when she performed a historic
Lady Macbeth, beginning on February 2, 1785, through February 26, the
day before she delivered. She then appeared again on March 5 as Lady
Macbeth, and again on March 8, this time as Desdemona in Othello. Did
the shift in her condition influence the choice of roles? Was a pregnant
Lady Macbeth a more logical choice than a pregnant Desdemona?
I am struck by how difficult it is, short of working deductively from
birth records, to discover which among the actresses of the period was
performing onstage gravid, and who was not. There seems to be very little
that alludes to pregnancy, coded or uncoded, in the backstage printed
gossip. A feminist historian may feel compelled to think things through
one more time. When culture swept us up into a collective heterosexual
male gaze relative to the actress onstage, what in fact was being gazed
upon? Was pregnancy part of what Charles II and his audience saw onstage?
Had it incorporated itself into the erotic imagination before the fact
of women onstage or after? Did it find coded language in audience gossip,
or in reviews?
Judith Schneid Lewis, in her book about pregnancy and childbirth
CRITICAL THEORY AND PERFORMANCE
330
among English aristocrats, comments that "at no time during the century
1760-1860 does there seem to have been any social taboo against appearing
visibly pregnant in public, contrary to popular myth."37 In fact, it is
the period after pregnancy (commonly called confinement) that actually
had somewhat stricter rules about aristocratic women staying indoors for
at least a month after delivery. In this sense, Mrs. Siddons's public pregnancy
is arguably less controversial than her decision to return to the
boards one week after delivery. Or, another interpretation might simply
be that her pattern of behavior through pregnancy is normative for aristocratic
women, but after delivery is normative for working-class women.
But the fact of public pregnancy being socially acceptable begs the larger
question of whether or not pregnancy itself functioned in the public imagination
as a source of erotic pleasure.
The notion of the pregnant body onstage in theater history suggests
a gold mine of cultural investigation, but like most gold mines, it appears
to be located underground. The work begins with a biography that includes
the birth dates of children and a simple act of subtraction. It is reasonable
to suppose that actresses worked as long as they could for economic
reasons, but what indeed was the point at which the erotic became
grotesque, and the lady had to be let go? Or, as in the case of Mrs. Siddons,
who arguably had a great deal more influence over the conditions of her
employment than a chorus girl in any century, was pregnancy itself part
of the erotic equation?
NOTES
1. See Victor Turner, From Ritual to Theatre: The Human Seriousness of Play (New
York: Performing Arts Journal Publications, 1982), 11, in which Turner suggests
theater as a means to scrutinize sociocultural systems.
2. Roy MacGregor-Hastie, Nell Gwyn (London: Robert Hale, 1987), 35. This bit
of verse was written by Rochester.
3. MacGregor-Hastie, Nell Gwyn, 82.
4. Feminist film theorists have called this process of watching as if through
someone else's eyes "suture." See Kaja Silverman, The Subject of Semiotics (New
York: Oxford University Press, 1983), 194-236.
5. Laura Mulvey's essay "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema," in Screen 16
(1975): 6-18, has been extremely influential. See also Silverman's discussion of this
article in The Subject of Semiotics, 222-25; and E. Ann Kaplan, in Women and Film:
Both Sides of the Camera (New York: Methuen, 1983), 14. This theoretical work has
had far-reaching implications for our discipline. The gaze of the theater historian,
which has held a position of lofty ungendered neutrality for decades, may now be
seen to be male.
6. See Teresa de Lauretis, Technologies of Gender: Essays on Theory, Film, and Fiction
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987), ix.
7. Alice M. Robinson, Vera Mowry Roberts, and Milly S. Barranger, eds., Notable
Women in the American Theatre (New York: Greenwood Press, 1989), 786-87.
8. Sue-Ellen Case, Feminism and Theatre (New York: Methuen, 1988), 7. For a
wonderful case in point, see also James Boaden, Memoirs of Mrs. Siddons (London:
MRS. SIDDONS LOOKS BACK IN ANGER
331
Henry Colburn, 1827), 1:301, who describes fashionable women of the day imitating
the actress Sarah Siddons in "deportment. . . utterance . . . and dress." Hereafter
page numbers for Boaden will be cited in the text.
9. See Susan Bassnett-McGuire, "An Introduction to Theatre Semiotics," Theatre
Quarterly 1o (1980): 47-53.
1o. My thanks to Michael Wilson for pointing out to me that Mrs. Siddons was
always at her best in scenes in which she spurned an immoral lover.
11. Keir Elam, The Semiotics of Theatre and Drama (New York: Methuen, 1980),
96.
12. I have borrowed the term from African-American culture, in which "shouting"
or "calling" are approved ways for audiences to respond at certain public
events.
13. For a discussion of the term horizon of expectations, see Robert Holub, Reception
Theory (New York: Methuen, 1984), 42-44.
14. Janelle Reinelt, "Speculations on Spectatorship: Dominant Hegemony and
the Historical Moment," Proceedings of the International Federation for Theatre Research
(Stockholm: Nordic Theatre Studies, 1990), 128-31. Reinelt here is developing
ideas from Antonio Gramsci's "Analysis of Situations: Relations of Force," in
Selections from the Prison Notebooks, ed. and trans. Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey
Nowell Smith (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1977).
15. Wally Chamberlain Oulton, The History of the Theatres of London (1771-95;
reprint, London: Martin and Bain, 1796), 1:134; hereafter page numbers will be
cited in the text.
16. Brereton's career only lasted another year, to November 1785, after which
he disappeared from the Drury Lane roster permanently. Reports were that he declined
rapidly into mental illness and died at Hoxton Asylum in 1787. After November
1785, Kemble did in fact take over many of Brereton's former roles. See
Charles Beecher Hogan, ed., The London Stage, I66o-I8oo, pt. 5, vol. 2, (Carbondale:
Southern Illinois University Press, 1968), for night-by-night records of performances
at Drury Lane.
17. See Sue-Ellen Case, "Toward a Butch-Femme Aesthetic," in Making a Spectacle,
ed. Lynda Hart (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1989). She cites
Joan Riviere's discussion of "the masquerade of womanliness" as a way to understand
how heterosexual women in positions of power will perform a certain coquettishness
or helplessness in order to "avert anxiety and the retribution feared
from men" (291).
18. Roger Manvell states that this was a prepared speech; unfortunately, he
does not cite his source. See Sarah Siddons: Portrait of an Actress (London: William
Heinemann, 1970), 113.
19. The Reminiscences of Sarah Kemble Siddons, 1773-1785, ed. William Van
Lennep (Cambridge: Widener Library, 1942). These memoirs also cite the appearance
in the pit of a man who speaks out in Mrs. Siddons's behalf, "impelled by
benevolence and a manly feeling for the oppressed," and helping to create an aura
of heroic rescue from persecution in her account (30). Hereafter page numbers will
be cited in the text.
20. Town and Country Magazine, October 1784, 510.
21. He had made a pest of himself to many others, including Mrs. Siddons's
good friend, the actress and playwright Elizabeth Inchbald, during the 1782-83
Dublin season.
22. Betsy Sheridan's Journal: Letters from Sheridan's Sister 1784-1786 and 1788-
1790, ed. William Le Fanu (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1960),
CRITICAL THEORY AND PERFORMANCE
332
32. Betsy Sheridan was unable to attend opening night because her father was ill,
so this information comes to us secondhand, probably through her brother.
23. See Mrs. Clement Parsons, The Incomparable Siddons (1909; reprint, New
York: Benjamin Blom, 1969), 101. Parsons mentions an infatuation but does not
give her source.
24. Betsy Sheridan's Journal, 32.
25. The play is printed in The British Theatre, ed. Elizabeth Inchbald, vol. 14
(London: Longman, Hurst, Rees and Orme, 18o8), together with an introduction
to the play by Mrs. Inchbald.
26. Inchbald, The British Theatre, 37, 30, 4.
27. Inchbald, The British Theatre, 46.
28. Janelle Reinelt, "Feminist Theory and Performance," Modern Drama 31
(1989): 55. "Novelty on a historical scale, finally, emerges when a specific historic
moment, a confluence of events and forces converge which makes radical change
possible. Subjects are able to grasp the new social formation as it coalesces and to
position themselves in relationship to it."
29. Elin Diamond, "Brechtian Theory, Feminist Theory," Drama Review 32
(1988): 90. "Looking at the character, the spectator is constantly intercepted by the
actor/subject, and the latter, heeding no fourth wall, is theoretically free to look
back.., no one side signifies authority, knowledge, or the law" (my emphasis).
30. See de Lauretis, Technologies of Gender, 10o: "Women are both inside and outside
gender, at once within and without representation."
31. See Thomas Postlewait's "Autobiography and Theatre History," in Interpreting
the Theatrical Past, ed. Thomas Postlewait and Bruce McConachie (Iowa
City: University of Iowa Press, 1989), 268: "These actresses.., go out of their way,
with few exceptions, to offer a life story that credits to others key aspects of their
strength, their purpose, their identity." It is also true that contemporary biographers
tend to cooperate in that process. Manvell's account of Mrs. Siddons frequently
assigns agency to the men in her life; see his Sarah Siddons, 115.
32. See Silverman, Subject of Semiotics, which for our purposes suggests that
unconscious and cultural determinants play a strong role in omissions of this
kind: "The concept of subjectivity, as we shall see, marks a radical departure from
this philosophical tradition [of individualism] by giving a more central place to
the unconscious and to cultural overdetermination than it does to consciousness" (126;
my emphasis).
33. See Carolyn Heilbrun, Writing a Woman's Life (New York: W. W. Norton,
1988). It is interesting to consider Heilbrun's argument from the perspective of
this essay. She and Postlewait both argue that women writing their autobiographies
omit their own agency in their lives, crediting others with having inspired
or educated or guided them (see note 31 above). One of the implications of this
study is that these omissions may be unconscious because representation in the
culture offered a woman no models for assigning agency to herself.
34. Sue-Ellen Case, "From Split Subject to Split Britches," in Feminine Focus: The
New Women Playwrights, ed. Enoch Brater (New York: Oxford University Press,
1989), 127-34, gives a helpful analysis of the way the split subject manifests itself
in dramatic literature.
35. See Christopher Bollas, The Shadow of the Object (New York: Columbia University
Press, 1987), 73, in which Bollas describes these unconscious contents as
"the unthought known" and suggests that, under certain kinds of pressure, they
will "split off" from the subject. He cites a clinical example of a patient whose
rage at and need for his parents split off so that he could present to them the af-
MRS. SIDDONS LOOKS BACK IN ANGER
333
fability that he knew they would reward. These feelings reemerged much later in
analysis.
36. See Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious (Ithaca: Cornell University
Press, 1981), 85-86.
37. See Judith Schneid Lewis, In the Family Way (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers
University Press, 1986), 124. Lewis provides substantial and detailed documentation
based on the biographies of fifty aristocratic women. Another valuable source
for this period is Jacques Gelis's History of Childbirth (Boston: Northeastern University
Press, 1991).
Practicing Cultural Disruptions:
Gay and Lesbian Representation
and Sexuality
Jill Dolan
Preface for the New Edition
"Practicing Cultural Disruptions" was written over ten years ago, when
the politics of the United States and of gay and lesbian culture were
markedly different. As I review the essay, I find myself wondering not
only at the historical sea change we've since experienced (or suffered), but
also at my own personal change of political values and theoretical concerns.
If my basic argument in this essay was that representing explicit
gay and lesbian sexual practice offers the most transgressive example of
activism through performance, at this remove I can no longer say with
certainty that I agree with myself. I used transgressive a lot in my scholarship
in the early 199os; I have noticed that now, in the early twenty-first
century, the word progressive fits more easily into my worldview. I'm not
sure if this is my age speaking (that is, the difference between myself at
thirty-five years old and myself at forty-five), and I certainly won't generalize
that everyone becomes less concerned with transgression once they
get older. My work always announces my most radical ideas; my own history
dictated that my scholarship became, at certain points of my life, the
site of rebellions I had never staged elsewhere. My scholarship is a place
to imagine, to work out the "what if" scenarios that are the stuff of theater
and performance, as well as of politics and ideas.
I find that my own commitments have moved elsewhere from those
expressed in this essay, away from goading transgressors on to extremes of
queer outlaw behavior, and closer, I'm afraid, toward what I condemn in
my argument as "assimilative" strategies. Of course, what "assimilative"
or "transgressive" means can only be read in context, like any piece of representation,
whose meaning is never secure, but always changing, shifting,
held up for debate and dissent. I am no longer sure that successful transgression
is possible, in a world that works so hard to condemn and contain
it. The military state-which includes the United States, after September
11, 2001-tolerates performative political rebellions like antiglobalization
demonstrations as little as the public sphere accepts publicly funded unconventional
cultural representations. Samuel Delaney, in his book Times
Square Red, Times Square Blue, describes how the Giuliani administration
in New York City destroyed the gay male sexual culture that thrived in
the porn theaters and sex shops along Forty-second Street, replacing
them with whitewashed Disney stores, safe mainstream theaters and cinema
multiplexes, and national chain stores peddling corporate brands.
334
PRACTICING CULTURAL DISRUPTIONS
335
Through Delaney's personal and historical work, and the political and theoretical
work of writers like Michael Warner, groups like Sex Panic, and
other academic/activist scholars and organizations, the battle to support
thriving, visible representations of sexual diversity and antiassimilationist
sexual practice has moved literally into the streets. Sexual outlaws-particularly
queer men-don't always stage open political protests, but perform
public acts of disregard for dominant morality by having sex in parks
and streets and bars and baths, once again.2 The arguments of these now
"queer" (as opposed to "gay" or "lesbian") theorist/activists in some ways
take up the case for explicit sexual visibility that I make in "Practicing Cultural
Disruptions."
In 1990, contemplating how to transgress dominant values, I countered
"mainstream" morals with what I thought I knew as "gay and lesbian
community standards" to build my argument for the efficacy of
flaunting live representations of outlawed sexual practice. Now, I
wouldn't presume to think this amorphous queer community holds a
common standard of sexual behavior. How sex should be practiced and
expressed has been debated since the first homophile organizations
formed in the 1950s, deciding to build a discourse of sameness that they
hoped would absorb gay men and lesbians into dominant cultural life.3
Stonewall allowed the "deviants"-the drag queens, bar queens, bar
dykes-to rewrite gay and lesbian political mission statements, boasting of
their difference from the heterosexual norm. Even now, more than thirty
years after Stonewall, the "national queer community" is a mythical site of
discursive struggle. Competing nonprofits like the Human Rights Campaign
or the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force presume to represent its
widest interests; media and political commentators (mostly conservative)
circulate false, if convenient, notions of a universalized queer "agenda."4
But queer community is much more varied and more often local than national,
determined by the vagaries of geography, of race and class, of degrees
of access to a queer public sphere and its attendant, various cultural
expressions. Reading back, I now find it rather bold and naive that I assumed
gay and lesbian standards for representations of sexual practice
would inevitably be more permissive and transgressive.
Pornography, which I valorize in this essay, remains an excessive site
for explicit sexual display, a representation over which United States culture
vociferously, even viciously, fights. This battle has more recently focused
on the Internet, as Congress debates how best to protect children
from representations of unbridled adult sexuality, and how to stop child
pornography from proliferating unchecked. In some ways, these conservative
legislators argue from the same basic premise I embrace here: that
viewing pornography causes action. While I insist such action would productively
upset the applecart of dominant cultural proscriptions about
sexuality, conservative commentators see porn as a prescription for perversion
and deviance that will erode the true moral fabric of American life.
Maybe we are arguing the same effect, from different political directions. I
have never thought of myself as someone who believes representation
CRITICAL THEORY AND PERFORMANCE
336
directly incites action; that, for example, because some adolescents who
watch stunt people take stupid risks on reality shows go out and repeat
them, encouraged by their idealization on television, these shows should
be banned. But I do argue in this essay that staging explicit representations
of marginalized sexual practices in performance could incite direct cultural
change. I still trust the social efficacy of performance; I still consider performance
a place to show what too often is not seen or imagined or imaged
elsewhere. But I now believe that social change happens by accretion, in
slow, attenuated ways that are difficult to measure without the long view
of history. Likewise, I am less convinced that the shock value of explicit,
live pornography provides the most widely useful model for changing
dominant ethics, or that embodying upsetting new practices always offers
the fastest way to instantiate a new, more flexible public morality.
At the same time, queer performance will always shock those who
have never seen or contemplated alternative sexual practices or alternative
emotional and affective lives. Queer performance remains vulnerable
to those same definitions of dominant "community standards" that have
only been more restrictively defined since the 198os and 1990s. The damage
done by the National Endowment for the Arts debacle changed the
terms of this work, making artists a bit more watchful of where they perform,
for whom, and how. Holly Hughes, for example, was touring
Preaching to the Perverted, a retrospective memoir about her experiences as
a national pariah, in 2000 and 2001, ten years after her horrid betrayal by
the federal government. At the same time, Tim Miller, although still unveiling
his queer body as a sign of both his self-aestheticism and his politics,
was touring Glory Hole, a personal/political performance about U.S.
immigration policies that forbid international queer couples from staying
together after the visitor's visa runs out. In 2002, Miller decided to leave
Los Angeles for London, to be able to continue his long-term relationship
with his Australian partner.5
Peggy Shaw and Lois Weaver, whom I chide in this essay for what I
then considered their assimilationist politics in Anniversary Waltz, have in
fact redefined and complicated their domestic situation with a transatlantic
commute and have opened their performance partnership to both
solo work and collaborations with other queer performers. Their piece, It's
a Small House But We Live in it Always, is a melancholy, ambivalent examination
of relational power dynamics and the long-term costs, as well as
benefits, of sustaining a sexual and affective partnership. Anniversary Waltz
might have been more radical than I gave it credit for in 1990, because at
least it camped up the conventions of marriage instead of valorizing them,
as the gay and lesbian political movement toward marriage rights would
do by the mid-199os (advocacy work that continues in the new century).
Whether or not they would marry, given the civic right, more and
more white lesbian couples seem to want to be soccer moms, changing the
face of lesbian communities with their attention to childcare, schooling,
and other family matters. Who would have thought, ten years ago, that
motherhood would be a more important political issue for lesbians than
PRACTICING CULTURAL DISRUPTIONS
337
the right to visible, diverse, explicit sexual practices (even "sexpert" Susie
Bright is now a mother).6 These categories-of "mother" and "sex radical"-are
not necessarily contradictory, although they might be in the cultural
imagination. I am curious (perhaps even wary) of what all of this
child rearing will mean for lesbian politics. I did think that Rosie O'Donnell's
public coming out in 2001 as America's exemplary lesbian adoptive
mother was an activist strategy, since adoption rights for gay and lesbian
couples, or for queer men and women leaving straight marriages who
want to secure visitation rights or custody of their children, remain contested
in American politics, leaving queer parents frighteningly vulnerable.
Although I now have my doubts about my basic position in "Practicing
Cultural Disruptions," I still agree with parts of my argument. bell
hooks's notion of identity as a performative "doing," rather than an ontological
"being," remains persuasive to me, and useful in thinking about
queer performance practices. Although I write here that "most representations
of lesbian and gay sexuality remain mired in realist images of
lifestyle and identity that fail to exceed the heterosexual frame," it is remarkable
that queers have managed to move into a public representational
frame at all. The exploits of Ellen DeGeneres and Anne Heche, and
Melissa Etheridge and Julie Cypher, while just as tabloid tawdry as the exploits
of Bill and Hillary, at least found a place in U.S. public culture, in
ways that make familiar and (for better or worse) perhaps less deviant the
complications of queer lives. So Anne and Julie returned to men; their
choices, irritating as they might be for those who want to keep the queer
ranks tight, make their lives examples of those performative "doings" of
identity. The film Kissing Jessica Stein (2001), although finally only liberal
in its exploration of a straight woman's experiment with lesbian sexual
practice, still means something, as it garners good reviews and delighted
word of mouth from straight and queer viewers. In its own way, it too explores
lesbian identity as a "doing" rather than a "being." The girl finally
returns to the guy, but her lesbian relationship isn't erased by her heterosexual
choice. None of these representations, regardless of how one reads
them politically, were available in the early 1990s, when it seemed to me
that the only way for queers to claim public space was by transgressing it
with bold explicitness, rather than being absorbed by it progressively (in
the temporal and political senses of that word).
In queer and feminist cultures-rather than the celebrity culture in
which television and music and movie stars and fictional characters play
out their comings out and breaking ups-butch-femme representations
and practices have also changed in the last decade, in ways that make
"Practicing Cultural Disruptions" read differently. The rift between lesbian
"cultural feminists"-those who criticized butch-femme as imitating
male-identified heterosexual models and who generally railed against
pornography of all kinds-and those proporn, "prosex," queer-identified
feminists and lesbians, has ceased to be the main attraction of feminist or
queer media or discourse. The divisions among feminists (which I once
contributed to reifying in my application to performance of the "liberal,
CRITICAL THEORY AND PERFORMANCE
338
cultural, materialist" taxonomy) seem less useful to employ now, since the
complications of culture and politics make those three categories parsed,
small, and finally only descriptive rather than proscriptive.7 When lesbian
cultural feminism was the dominant ideology in Madison, Wisconsin, in
1989, the acts at the Variety Show were transgressive, and dykes who practiced
S-M or other unconventional sex and publicly performed butchfemme
or other nontraditional gender identities were resolutely marginalized.
Performing in the Variety Show, these dyke outcasts took over a
public space that was hegemonic in its own cultural feminist or essentialist
way. I can only speculate, since again, queer communities are ideologically
and politically and culturally diverse all over this country and this
world, but I have a feeling that now, those acts would be received as reiterations
of more commonly understood and accepted possibilities for sexual
expression and practice.
Butch-femme also resonates differently now that the transgender
movement has become more visible and vocal. The spectrum of gender
and sexual practices has expanded exponentially, as transgender rights
activists articulate still more ways of practicing the doings of identity.8
Butch-femme categories bleed together as well as farther apart, newly inflected
by more and more possibilities for cultural and subcultural expression.
Peggy Shaw's performances Menopausal Gentleman and To My Chagrin
both complicate her status as a butch icon of queer performance by
describing her female hormonal changes and her relationship with her
biracial grandson.9 The first embodies all the contradictions of her physical
and performative identities, as well as the grief and losses of aging,
while the second inhabits a space in which the queer family is as diverse
as the beating of each person's heart (most eloquently described when
Shaw opens her man's shirt and a videotape of her grandson playing is
projected over her bare breasts).
Corporate culture and transnational capitalism, too, have bound
butch-femme style and queer representations to dominant fashion, as
more and mainstream images appropriate what were once subcultural
signs legible only to those who knew how to read them. Now, it seems
every Sunday New York Times Magazine runs a not so ambiguous queer ad
(usually with women). Perhaps this co-optation bodes evil, signaling the
inability of subcultures to remain transgressive or dissenting for long, as
Dick Hebdige predicted in the early 198os.10 Perhaps these images are
only prurient. Or perhaps this apparent visibility, as Judith Butler and
Peggy Phelan might argue, makes queers more vulnerable to repressive
state apparatuses.11 I can only think that this current state of representational
affairs cuts both ways, that while we regret the siphoning off of
their transgressive potential, reading these signs as somehow progressive,
rather than only assimilative, might not be such a bad thing.
If I argued in this essay for explicit visibility, perhaps the fact that
queerness seeped into national advertising provided an unexpected site
in which to imagine gay and lesbian desire, however white and upper
class its representations in those forums. HBO programmed African
PRACTICING CULTURAL DISRUPTIONS
339
American lesbian filmmaker Cheryl Dunye's prison film about incarcerated
women, Stranger Inside, in 2001, with its often cross-race, explicitly
sexual scenes between women; the network's series, Six Feet Under, too,
often represented explicit (and cross-race, if middle-class) queer sex. I
don't mean to take a liberal turn here by suggesting in a very old-fashioned
critical way that the proliferation of queer images on television and
in film and performance is only good. But "Practicing Cultural Disruptions"
argues for the kind of explicit visibility that's become surprisingly
more available to a wider, more varied public audience, despite the condemnation
it receives from conservative commentators.
Performance, though, perhaps because of the constraints of liveness,
lags a bit behind in proliferating more explicit queer practices.12 My argument
in this essay about the formal constraints of realism, with its insistence
on romance and eroticism over more gritty queer sex, still rings true
for me. In theatrical representation or performance, too many queer plays,
especially those by or about lesbians, remain tied to realist formulas in
which their heroines fall into romantic love that somehow precludes representations
of sexual practice. Diana Son's Stop Kiss, for instance, although
formally interesting with its flashback and forward structure, still
punishes its straight women leads for daring to kiss in public as they finally
consummate their flirtation and what had been their platonic intimacy.13
(At least in Kissing Jessica Stein, the women get hurt only emotionally,
not physically, for their lesbian tryst.) The play ends by suggesting
that Sara and Callie's relationship will now be one of loving caretaking
and caregiving, as they fight to stay together over the claims of the physically
damaged woman's family and her erstwhile boyfriend. Sara's socially
inflicted disability, in Stop Kiss, implies that once again, sexual practice
is exiled from lesbian experience in representation (although of course
disability rights activists or scholars would find much to critique in such
a nonsexualized portrayal of a disabled woman).
Only Paula Vogel, who won a well-deserved Pulitzer Prize for How I
Learned to Drive, risks formal and sexual experimentation, in plays like And
Baby Makes Seven and Hot 'n' Throbbing.14 That critics-feminist and otherwise-seem
flummoxed by Vogel's plays is a healthy indication of their
potential to critique sexual and gender norms. In performance, perhaps
the closeness of performers to spectators, and that too real sweat of the actors'
bodies, requires formal experimentation and a leap out of the realist
frame to represent explicit sexual practices, into forms that make spectators
aesthetically, as well as politically, uncomfortable in productive ways.
On the other hand, as Janelle Reinelt points out, perhaps the charge of the
natural, "fleshly body" has been reduced by its wider availability in other
mediatized visual forms, such as television, film, and the internet, which
make sexual practices appear "naturalized," rather than shocking, when
they are represented on live bodies.5
Finally, in trying to reframe "Practicing Cultural Disruptions" for a
twenty-first-century readership, I have to say that the essay still prods me
to sharply define the terms on which I would like to see queer performance
CRITICAL THEORY AND PERFORMANCE
340
make its political and aesthetic claims on public life. If I have become too
domesticated by my own life trajectory to completely believe in my earlier
arguments about transgression, "Practicing Cultural Disruptions" still
challenges me to think about how lesbian and queer performance can tell
"us" (and I mean that in the most exclusive and inclusive human ways, simultaneously)
something different about how our material, emotional,
and sexual lives might be led. I still believe we need a "theory of reception
based very materially.., on an invitation to participate in the seduction of
alternative locations of desire"; I just no longer believe that such a goal is
only accessible through the explicit excess of pornographic performance.16
Consider these scenarios, circa 1989:
1. At an art gallery and performance space in downtown Milwaukee,
a long table at the entryway is set with colorful mints and peanuts
and pink napkins decorated with black-lined hearts and flowers
that announce, "Happy Anniversary Peggy and Lois." The festive
tone announces a real anniversary framed as a performance called
Anniversary Waltz, which celebrates the ten-year relationship of
Peggy Shaw and Lois Weaver, cofounders with Deborah Margolin
of the lesbian and feminist performance troupe Split Britches. Anniversary
Waltz combines bits of classic Split Britches performances
with a smattering of new material, held together with vaudevillian
patter about relationships. The piece purports to offer a look at
lesbian longevity; instead, although it shifts through the lesbianspecific
iconography of butch-femme relationships, it constructs an
innocuous glimpse into a more generic notion of coupleness.
2. Theatre X, also in Milwaukee, mounts a production of Robert
Chesley's Jerker, or the Helping Hand, a play whose structuring device
is pornographic phone sex between two gay men, one of
whom eventually dies of AIDS. The text describes scenes of nonconventional
sexual fantasy that inspire both men to masturbate.
But the performers never enact the sexual fantasies or the masturbation
indicated by the text. Their bodies remain clothed and untouched,
as their encounters move from completely anonymous,
graphically sexual calls, to a relational intimacy based on knowledge
of each other's voices and yearnings.
3. The fourth annual Lesbian Variety Show in Madison, Wisconsin,
is disrupted by two acts that employ butch-femme and sadomasochistic
iconography. In the context of a mostly lesbian cultural
feminist celebration of femaleness, actions that represent
taboo sexual practice intrude on the Variety Show's worship of
gender difference.7 The transgressive performances are decried
in the local feminist press as representations of violence against
women, and guidelines are drawn up to guard against the inclusion
of such images in next year's show.
PRACTICING CULTURAL DISRUPTIONS
341
In the cultural and political climate of the 199os, what do gay and
lesbian representations like these mean? Do their meanings read as assimilative
or transgressive, now that dominant regimes of power and knowledge
are once again branding homosexual representations as pornographic
and obscene? Guidelines to artists seeking to receive or keep their
funding, recently released by the National Endowment for the Arts
(NEA), rely on the Supreme Court's 1973 definition of obscenity in the
Miller v. California decision. Obscenity is defined as work that (1) the "average
person, applying contemporary community standards, would find
appeals to the prurient interest"; (2) that "depicts or describes sexual conduct
in a patently offensive way," particularly-according to the NEA
homoerotic and sadomasochistic activities; and (3) "lacks serious literary,
artistic, political, or scientific value."8
This definition relies on the commonsense knowledge of a generic
viewer to determine obscenity. Historically, this viewer most resembles
the white, heterosexual, male senator from North Carolina, Jesse Helms,
whose outcry over the Robert Mapplethorpe and Andres Serrano exhibits
prompted that the new language of censorship be attached to all of the
NEA's funding awards.19 The determination of behavior considered
"patently offensive" is based on the standards of his dominant cultural
community. If gay or lesbian community standards were applied to test
obscenity, and if the assumed spectator of artistic work were a lesbian or
gay man, commonsense connotations of prurience would certainly shift.20
But as the feminist antiporn movement exemplifies, the radicalism of
such a shift cannot always be assumed. Some commentators even point to
"the complicity of the anti-pornography movement in the larger moral
panic" that, in part, has prompted the renewed vigilance over obscenity.21
As Daphne Read notes presciently, "It seems reasonable to fear that new
legislation [developed by Catharine MacKinnon and Andrea Dworkin]
aimed at censoring or regulating pornography might be used more broadly
to repress gays and lesbians, artists, and others . . . in spite of a feminist
presence in the political process."22
Foucault suggests that throughout history, what appears to be the
repression of sexuality actually proliferates different ways in which it enters
discourse, some of which resist hegemonic power.23 Perhaps the regressive
outlawing of gay and lesbian images as prurient and obscene will
prompt the reradicalization of their meaning effects in the 1990s. Perhaps
representations of gay and lesbian sexuality will regain their potential to
disrupt hegemonic meanings by invoking the excess of sexual practice,
after a brief period of neutralizing assimilation into the dominant discourse
on sexuality as alternative lifestyles and identities.
The furious discussion promoted by the congressional compromise
measure to Helms's proposed amendment to the NEA appropriations bill
is focused on representations of bodies, desire, and spectatorial pleasure
that transgress the boundaries of white heterosexual propriety. For instance,
Mapplethorpe's pleasurable citing/sighting of black male bodies in
classically sculpted poses, often with penises erect, implies sexual practices
CRITICAL THEORY AND PERFORMANCE
342
anathema to the virulently racist and homophobic likes of Senator Helms.
By offering homosexual and cross-racial visual pleasure in flesh, they visually
flaunt a rejection of compulsory white heterosexual practice.24 Exhibited
in galleries and museums, the photographs take public representational
space to image eroticized organs that simply by virtue of being seen,
contest dominant cultural regimes of knowledge and power about sexuality
and race.
The possibility for transgression in such representations lies in the
hint of sexual practice and seduction they envision, not in the gay lifestyle
to which they refer, which superficially has come to resemble the quotidian
routines of heterosexual relationships. Teresa de Lauretis, writing on
lesbian representation, cautions that it is exceedingly difficult to alter the
"standard of vision, the frame of reference of visibility, of what can be
seen," since "the conventions of seeing, and the relations of desire and
meaning in spectatorship, [remain] partially anchored or contained by a
frame of visibility that is still heterosexual."25 As a result, most representations
of lesbian and gay sexuality remain mired in realist images of
lifestyle and identity that fail to exceed the heterosexual frame.
The representation of sex politics as lifestyle, prompted partly by
the "personal is political" slogan of the early white feminist movement,
and more recently by transnational capitalism, has limited efficacy in a
culture in which lifestyles are so easily assimilated, commodified, and
neutralized by dominant ideology. Black feminist theorist bell hooks suggests
that the emphasis on identity and lifestyle in white feminism, for
example, has contributed to the movement's elitism and defused its ability
to move social discourse. "To emphasize . . . engagement with feminist
struggle as political commitment," hooks says, "we could avoid
using the phrase 'I am a feminist' (a linguistic structure designed to refer
to some personal aspect of identity and self-definition) and could state 'I
advocate feminism.''"26
Saying, "I am a lesbian" has been validated in cultural feminist discourse
as speech that breaks the silence of lesbian existence under heterosexual
hegemony. But in the 1970s and 198os, lesbianism's too rigid
attachment to an identity politics of gender by terms such as "womanidentification"
recloseted active sexual practice.27 Cultural feminism reified
same-sex female relationships as a new and better version of the heterosexual
family, a claim that has limited potential for changing the
dominant discourse on how sexuality organizes culture and experience.28
Anniversary Waltz, for example, is ultimately an assimilationist lesbian text
because of its emphasis on romance and familial relations rather than sexual
ones.29
A somewhat idealized lesbian family anchors the text's narrative of
the vicissitudes of Weaver and Shaw's relationship-their partnership is
inscribed as a marriage, from the pink table napkins on display in the
lobby to textual references to the now twenty-year-old daughter the couple
raised. Although Weaver and Shaw mock the conventions of heterosexual
marriage by "lesbianizing" the familiar, deprecatory popular cultural pat-
PRACTICING CULTURAL DISRUPTIONS
343
ter about such relationships, their own partnership, though played as
camp, remains the somewhat romanticized center of the text.
When they began performing together in the early 198os Weaver's
and Shaw's personal and performative butch-femme role-playing lent the
couple a certain notoriety.30 The antisex rhetoric of cultural feminism
made their butch-femme display of sexual possibilities and practice-informed
by what appeared to be an appropriation of heterosexual and
male/female gender roles-a transgressive representation in feminist and
mainstream contexts.31 Early productions at the WOW Cafe, where Split
Britches primarily performed, were often decried in feminist media as politically
regressive because they employed butch-femme iconography and
role-playing.
But in Anniversary Waltz, Weaver and Shaw play with butch-femme
iconography and roles only by trading the costumes of gender evenly between
them. As the piece progresses through bits of the couple's performative
and personal history, they peel off layers of costuming to reveal the
signs of the opposite role underneath. Their manipulation of butch-femme
solely as clothing moves it away from the transgressions of its historical
signification. Rather than referring to sexual practice, like the Mapplethorpe
photographs, the images that comprise Anniversary Waltz focus resolutely
on lesbian lifestyles. Under the rubric of a long-term relationship
the transgressive difference of alternative forms of lesbian sexuality once
represented by the complexity of butch-femme drops out. Its costumes become
empty sets of gendered clothing without referents to sexual practice
or more than the most polite, nostalgic evidence of desire.
Extending hooks's analogy to "I practice lesbian sex" (in all its varieties)
rather than "I am a lesbian" would initiate a discourse that might
displace the emphasis on lifestyles and relationships, and break open the
sanctimonious strictures of politically correct lesbian identifications. A renewed
focus on marginalized sex acts, instead of romantic, familial relationships,
might reassert the transgressive quality of lesbians who enter
the public sphere as representations. De Lauretis's cautionary analysis
ends by apparently suggesting that only butch-femme lesbians can enter,
together, the heterosexual frame of vision.32 Making sexual practice blatantly
visible on gendered bodies that wear this deconstruction of compulsory
heterosexuality might still be a productively alienating act.33
Such a move might indicate a return to historical definitions of "deviant"
sexuality as acts, rather than people. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, for
instance, writes that in histories of sexual taxonomy, "the proscription of
particular acts called 'sodomy' (acts that might be performed by anybody),
[were] displaced after the late nineteenth century by the definition
of particular kinds of persons, specifically 'homosexuals."'34 Emphasizing
the individual person over sexual acts or practice available for performance
by any body inscribes homosexuality and lesbianism as biologically
essentialized problems of lifestyle, rather than as social practices that
comprise sex acts accomplished with agency differently through history.35
The choice of sex acts is what marks gay and lesbian bodies as
CRITICAL THEORY AND PERFORMANCE
344
different agents within history. Judith Butler proposes, "As an intentionally
organized materiality, the body is always an embodying of possibilities
both conditioned and circumscribed by historical convention. .. the
body is a historical situation. . . a manner of doing, dramatizing, and reproducing
a historical situation."36 In the 1950s, for example, lesbian bodies
coded with butch-femme iconography represented a transgressive accomplishment-the
naming and practice of lesbian desire in a violently
heterosexist climate. Lesbians who represented themselves as butchfemme
in the 1970s bore traces of its courageous history, as they refused
to retreat to the closet built by feminism. Even lesbian bodies of the 198os
and 1990s, when visible in representation, retain traces of the history of
butch-femme resistance to dominant ideology that can still be accessed as
transgressive. The disruption it symbolized can be realized by actively
representing the desire and sexual practice to which butch-femme once
referred. As Joan Nestle remarks, "For gay people, history is a place
where the body carries its own story."37
The Mapplethorpe debacle indicates that speaking homo or lesbian
sex, as opposed to identity, in public forums is still transgressive enough
to activate the machinery of state power. Even if, as Foucault cautions,
such transgressions do not exceed the discourse on sexuality but only set
the poles of one extreme, the sex practice to which they refer contests the
hegemonic principles of sexual difference that heterosexuality reifies.
Representations of sexual practice that deviate from heterosexual acts
threaten pornographic excess at sites accustomed to inscribing sex only as
erotic, romantic love according to a heterosexual model.
In her book on hard-core film pornography, Linda Williams offers a
useful working definition of pornography as "the visual (and sometimes
aural) representation of living, moving bodies engaged in explicit, usually
unfaked, sexual acts with a primary intent of arousing viewers."38
Making visible gay male or lesbian bodies in motion, engaged in sex acts,
is perhaps one radical way to disrupt dominant cultural discourse on
sexuality and gender. The "primary intent of arousing viewers" might inaugurate
a theory of reception based very materially-instead of psychoanalytically-on
an invitation to participate in the seduction of alternative
locations of desire.
It could be argued, then, that representing any sex act publicly is
transgressive. Williams, in fact, argues that explicitness will demystify
what Foucault calls the transcendent secret of sex. I agree, and intend to
suggest that imaging gay and lesbian sex in the public sphere, rather than
imagining it in the private, moves toward Foucault's notion of a different
economy of bodies and pleasure.39
Some performance forms and contexts, however, seem more capable
than others of accomplishing the "making seen" of such sexual practice.
Homosexuality's assertion of the same can hardly be accommodated in
bourgeois realism, for example, which asserts moral and sexual bipolarity-right/wrong,
good/bad, and male/female-and maintains heterosexual
difference as its organizing principle.40 In his article on dramatiz-
PRACTICING CULTURAL DISRUPTIONS
345
ing gay male history, John Clum organizes his textual explications by designating
certain plays as either "outside/heterosexual" or "inside/homosexual"
perspectives on gay subject matter.41 But the "inside" gay male
texts in Clum's analysis that use realism to inscribe their heroic lovers into
discourse exemplify the dominant culture's inability to see or to image the
marginalized sexual practice that at least partly girds a definition of homosexual
identity. Clum's discomfort with defining homosexual identity
solely as sexual practice, signaled by his article's title ("A Culture that
Isn't Just Sexual"), leads him to argue in favor of the representation of gay
lifestyles rather than gay sex.
Nestle suggests the reverse, insisting that for gay men and lesbians,
"Being a sexual people is our gift to the world."42 But traditional theatrical
forms tend to work structurally to keep the sexual gifts of gay and lesbian
subjects invisible. Even in the texts Clum examines as favorably exploring
gay male identity, realism approves the male lovers' sexuality as moral
and right because it is romantic, not physical, and usually rewards their
celibacy with death. There's a move in these "inside" texts toward the
"outside" perspective, which legislates that sexuality be heterosexuality
or not be imaged at all.
For example, in the incipient realism, for example, of Martin Sherman's
Bent (1979) and Robert Chesley's Jerker, both of which Clum discusses
in his article, sex is exiled to a nonphysical plane.43 Bent opens on
the day after, the postcarnal denouement of Max's one-night stand with a
leather-clad gestapo flunky. Their evening of anonymous sex, replete with
intimations of sadomasochistic (S-M) play, is implicitly punished when
Schutzstaffel (SS) troops storm Max's apartment. The wilder side of gay
male sex is tinged with amorality by its quick equation with Nazi terror.
The physicality of sex at least referred to in the first scene is then
elided situationally by the play's content. Once Max is interred in a camp,
he and Horst, the gay man he meets there, are constrained to verbal sex,
the possibility of physical union eternally deferred by the watchful eyes
of the guards. The men's surreptitious exchanges serve as a trope for the
way realism operates on marginalized sexuality. Under the eyes of the
dominant culture, gay male sex must be expressed furtively, described
but not performed, and must culminate in orgasms of affirming emotional
love rather than physical transport-that is, erotics rather than
pornography.
Williams suggests that the distinction between erotics and pornography-often
posed by both dominant culture executors like the Meese
Commission, as well as by antiporn feminists, who too frequently travel
similar ideological terrain-is loaded with moralizing that stifles a more
productive inquiry into the representation of sex:
The very notion of erotica as "good," clean, non-explicit representations
of sexual pleasure in opposition to dirty, explicit pornographic
ones is false. . . . The one emphasizes desire, the other satisfaction.
Depending on who is looking, both can appear dirty, perverse, or
CRITICAL THEORY AND PERFORMANCE
346
too explicit .. . We need to see pornography in all its naked explicitness
if we are to speak frankly about sexual power and pleasure
and if we are to demystify sex.44
Privileging erotica over pornography is particularly troubling in gay and
lesbian representations, since the nonexplicitness of erotica continues to
mask the difference of gay and lesbian sex. Likewise, realism helps formally
to repress references to active sex, cloaking bodies and pleasure
under a domestic guise of romantic propriety. Pornography exceeds realism
by lifting the cloak to reveal the action; its explicitness offers material
investigations into the discourses of power, as well as pleasure.
Chesley's Jerker, since it is less realist than Bent at the outset and
marks itself as explicitly pornographic, at first holds out potential to represent
transgressive sexual practice in a radical way. Jerker, or the Helping
Hand, is subtitled A Pornographic Elegy with Redeeming Social Value and a
Hymn to the Queer Men of San Francisco in Twenty Telephone Calls, Many of
Them Dirty. First performed in 1986, the text is marked by the constrained
sexuality of a community plagued by AIDS. The play confines its graphic
descriptions of sexual practice to literally disembodied phone sex between
two gay men, never performing their fantasies to set in motion the
pornography of desiring, visible, moving homosexual bodies. Although
they never meet, Bert and J.R. fall in love over the phone shortly before
Bert dies of AIDS. The move toward an ill-fated romance disqualifies
Jerker as pornography, because as Williams says, paraphrasing Susan Sontag,
porn is never primarily about the formation of a couple.45
Jerker's subversive potential lies in the ten or so phone calls before its
descent into empathy for the loving and the dead. The phone calls begin
as completely anonymous and aggressively sexual, almost clinical descriptions
of sometimes sadomasochistic sex play. But the calls progress to
an intimacy that makes the sex scenes they describe emotional, erotic, and
relational, rather than pornographic. The fantasies culminate in J.R.'s fairy
tale about three men who simply sleep together and don't have sex at all.
Theatre X's 1989 production of Jerker chose several Brechtian techniques
to resist the text's pull toward theatrical and ideological convention.
A male narrator was placed at a table behind the bifurcated set, from
which he read aloud the stage directions. The directions throughout the
published text indicate that the men literally "jerk off," although their
erections, given realism's politesse, are carefully hidden under their bedclothes
or their underwear. The two actors playing J.R. and Bert for Theatre
X were fully clothed through the entire play, and, although they verbally
announced their orgasms, they never touched their bodies. Often
the performers' actions resisted the instructions read from the text.
Such a Brechtian intervention worked on the representation of gay
male sexual practice in several ways. First, it quite literally refused to embody
it by maintaining the distance of intellectual description. The fantasies
related by J.R. and Bert were relegated even farther from physical
inscription in representation because they remained narrative, and even
PRACTICING CULTURAL DISRUPTIONS
347
their orgasmic effects went unimaged. The inversion of the Brechtian
gestus to nonshowing, nonaction, perhaps exemplified gay male social
relations in the age of AIDS-sex relegated to telephone technology and
history, imagination and nostalgia, and exiled, still, from representation.
Second, while gay male sex was verbalized in the Theatre X production,
by choosing not to visualize it, the production suppressed the transgressions
of pornography in favor of erotics and failed to actualize pornography's
disruptive potential. Enacting the culminating masturbatory
orgasms of Jerker's sex fantasies might have been a more radical transgression
of the ethical bourgeois performance space, less aesthetic than the critical
distance imposed by even the Brechtian frame. The noninteraction of
the performers would have adequately maintained the commentary on the
isolation of sex bound by AIDS.
Because of its ideological and formal movement away from pornography
into erotic realism, Jerker fails as a truly radical explication of gay
male representations of sexual practice. But few lesbian texts come to
mind that at least match Jerker's frank descriptions of sex. The characters
in Jane Chambers's and Sarah Dreher's realist plays, for instance, fall in
and out of romantic love, but they rarely engage in anything more sexual
than a hug or a kiss.46
Lesbian sexual practice remains repressed in these plays by the exigencies
of propriety-both of the dominant culture and of the lesbian cultural
feminist discourse on sexuality. The distinction in lesbian cultural
feminism between erotics and pornography is marked by the iconographic
representation of power on female bodies. Hegemonic antiporn feminism
so successfully infiltrated lesbian discourse in the 198os that even erotica
has been flattened out and carefully monitored for any evidence of politically
incorrect sex practice. As Foucault might observe, however, such
regimes of power seem inevitably to breed resistance. The 198os also saw
the "implantation of perversions" within lesbian communities.47 The new
visibility of sadomasochistic practices and representational styles seemed
to replace butch-femme as the location of cultural feminist anxiety over
imagining or imaging sexual practice between women.
But while "avant-garde" lesbians begin to textualize practices that
cultural feminism still decries as pornographic, representing S-M as sexual
style is still read as a violent invasion of lesbian cultural feminist erotic
images. The fourth annual Lesbian Variety Show in Madison, Wisconsin,
exemplified the friction between these opposing discourses. The Variety
Show is a product of the city's lesbian cultural feminist community,
whose demography is best generalized as young, middle-class, and
white. In 1989 the show's preferred representations of the eroticized feminine
body were disrupted by the intrusion of representations of gender,
power, and sex that its context could only inscribe as pornographic.48
The first half of the Variety Show presented poets and musicians
who crooned lesbian love verse in repetitive rhythms and equally repetitive
chords. The cultural feminist-inspired ethos of "woman spirit" hung
in the air like a musky mist, and spectators generally applauded the acts
CRITICAL THEORY AND PERFORMANCE
348
of empowering verbalization and sometimes interpretive movement that
celebrated the erotics of femininity.49
Two back-to-back acts in the second half of the show broke the aura.
In the first, two women performed a lip-synch and dance routine to the
rock song "Push It," by Salt 'n' Peppa. As the song began, one woman entered
wearing a black leather vest, jeans, boots, and handcuffs at her
waist, lip-synching and snapping her fingers to the beat. The lip-synching
liberated this act from the naturalized cultural feminist representational
economy in which the Variety Show had been trading, into a gay male
performance tradition in which dressing up in gender roles and impersonating
singers has a long subcultural history.5° Suddenly, the Variety
Show's feminine aesthetic was disrupted by a large gay woman in butch
clothing, furiously moving her lips to a rock song in a context that idealized
soulful folk as its most appropriate cultural expression.
Rather than Weaver and Shaw's trading of gendered clothing, this
act used its leather and lace to tease out the seduction of butch-femme as
sexual roles. When the first woman's partner entered the stage, the butchfemme
dynamic and all of its class connotations were secured. The second
woman wore high-heeled black shoes, fishnet stockings, and only pasties
on her breasts. She danced into the space to seduce the first woman, and
the two acted out the song in a way that referred to sexual practice as it
had not been before during the long evening. The sheer display of their
bodies, layered with butch-femme and vaguely S-M iconography, inscribed
the act within bar dyke culture, outside the hegemonic meanings
of middle-class white feminism.
The next act outdid the transgressions of the first. In a much more
stylized performance that quoted the conventions of bodybuilding contests
as well as gay lip-synch spectacles, two women power lifters performed
an interpretation of Barbara Streisand's song "Prisoner." The pun
was intended, since the act's content included relatively explicit references
to S-M.
As in the first act, bodies were present here in full force, clearly sexualized
and also insistently gendered, an admission of difference that the
staunchly feminine show could not contain. At the song's open, one woman
stood facing the spectators with her arms crossed over her bare chest,
wearing black jeans, black boots, a black watchcap, and mirrored sunglasses.
As the Streisand song began, she flexed her well-defined muscles
in a display that flattered her V-shaped body. Uncrossing her arms revealed
her breasts as small flaps of skin; the practiced, constructed power
of her body seemed to have tampered even with her biology. Femininity
was startlingly absent.
Her partner, wearing a white tank T-shirt, cut-off jean shorts, and the
ubiquitous black boots, knelt at her feet in apparent supplication. The two
began a dance of sorts in which they posed and manipulated the power
dynamic their bodies described. When the woman in shorts produced a
studded collar, which she offered to the woman in the mirrored sunglasses,
indicating she would like to wear it, the audience booed loudly,
PRACTICING CULTURAL DISRUPTIONS
349
and the performers broke their severe demeanor and laughed. Once the
collar was fastened around the kneeling woman's neck, the one in mirrored
sunglasses pulled her into sexualized positions of dominance and
submission.
At the song's end, however, the power dynamic abruptly shifted as
the kneeling woman rose to her feet and picked up in her arms the
woman with mirrored sunglasses, who waved coyly to the audience and
was carried off. The abrupt shift seemed to intend parody and also, for
those willing to read it, offered a political meaning about the fluidity of
power positions in sex and perhaps in gendered relationships and representation
as well.
This act proved a radical disruption of a safely eroticized female
space, by transgressors who performed sexual seduction through a complex
assumption and deconstruction of gender roles inflected with power.
For some lesbian spectators, myself included, the scene was clever and seductive,
a reference to the "variety" of lesbian sexual practice. The performers'
obvious self-consciousness seemed to intend the kind of playful
discussion about lesbian sexual potential launched by proponents like
Susie Bright. But the scene has been described in the Madison radical feminist
press as a pornographic act of violence against women. Newspapers
for months after the event carried emotional outpourings that testified to
the suffering this act caused. Relying on what Williams calls "naive realism,"
spectators claimed the images of so-called violence actually caused
violence to be inflicted.51
As Williams suggests, after Walter Kendrick, pornography is really
only defined by its censorship.52 While Jesse Helms legislates against publicly
funded displays of gay male sexuality in representation, the lesbian
cultural feminist community perpetrates its own censorship by legislating
the correct representations of lesbian sex. Imaging the explicit relationship
between power, gender, and sex offends cultural feminist propriety.
Writing about sadomasochistic heterosexual pornography, Williams
comments that in art "real sex, like real death, is unaesthetic and therefore
out of place."53 Because gay male or lesbian sex is completely out of
place-unimaged, unimagined, invisible-in traditional aesthetic contexts,
the most transgressive act at this historical moment would be representing
it to excess, in dominant and marginalized reception communities.
The explicitness of pornography seems the most constructive choice
for practicing cultural disruptions.54
NOTES
1. Samuel Delaney, Times Square Red, Times Square Blue (New York: New York
University Press, 1999).
2. See, for example, Michael Warner, The Trouble with Normal: Sex, Politics, and
the Ethics of Queer Life (New York: Free Press, 1999); Lauren Berlant and Michael
Warner, "Sex in Public," in Michael Warner, Publics and Counterpublics (New York:
Zone Books, 2002), 187--208. For alternative arguments about public sex practices,
CRITICAL THEORY AND PERFORMANCE
350
see Gabriel Rotello, Sexual Ecology: AIDS and the Destiny of Gay Men (New York:
Dutton, 1997); and Michelangelo Signorile, Life Outside: The Signorile Report on Gay
Men: Sex, Drugs, Muscles, and the Passages of Life (New York: HarperCollins, 1997).
3. For one version of this history, see John D'Emilio and Estelle B. Freedman,
Intimate Matters: A History of Sexuality in America (New York: Harper and Row,
1988). See also Lillian Faderman, Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers: A History of Lesbian
Life in Twentieth-Century America (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991).
4. For a wonderfully funny explication of the fabricated moral panic about
"queer agendas," see Holly Hughes, Preaching to the Perverted, unpublished manuscript,
discussed in Jill Dolan, "Performance, Utopia, and the 'Utopian Performative,'"
Theatre Journal 53, no. 3 (200ool): 455-79. See also Richard Meyer, "'Have you
Heard the One About the Lesbian Who Goes to the Supreme Court?': Holly
Hughes and the Case Against Censorship," Theatre Journal 52, no. 4 (2000): 543-52.
5. See Tim Miller, Glory Hole, in Body Blows (Madison: University of Wisconsin
Press, 2002). For a discussion of Miller's life choices and his activism around
same-sex immigration rights, see Donna Perlmutter, "About to Say Goodbye, Obstreperous
as Ever," New York Times, November 17, 2002, sec. 2, p. 31.
6. See Susie Bright's The Sexual State of the Union (New York: Simon and
Schuster, 1998) and her website http://www.susiebright.com. See also Susie
Bright, Susie Bright's Sexual Reality: A Virtual Sex World Reader (Pittsburgh: Cleis
Press, 1992), and Susie Sexpert's Lesbian Sex World (Pittsburgh: Cleis Press, 1990).
Bright was one of the first lesbian-feminist activists who publicly claimed the right
to sexual variety and experimentation.
7. See Jill Dolan, The Feminist Spectator as Critic (1988; reprint, Ann Arbor: University
of Michigan Press, 1991).
8. See, for example, Judith Halberstam, Female Masculinity (Durham, N.C.:
Duke University Press, 1998); Leslie Feinberg, Transgender Warriors (Boston: Beacon
Press, 1996); Kate Bornstein, Gender Outlaw: On Men, Women, and the Rest of Us
(New York: Routledge, 1994); and Leslie Feinberg, Stone Butch Blues (Ithaca, N.Y.:
Firebrand Books, 1993).
9. See Peggy Shaw, Menopausal Gentleman, unpaginated, unpublished manuscript,
1997, and To My Chagrin, unpublished manuscript, 2001. I'm grateful to
Shaw for giving me a copy of these texts. See also Dolan, "Performance, Utopia,"
for a reading of Menopausal Gentleman.
10. See Dick Hebdige, Subculture: The Meaning of Style (New York: Methuen,
1979).
11. Judith Butler, "Imitation and Gender Insubordination," in Inside/Out: Lesbian
Theories, Gay Theories, ed. Diana Fuss (New York: Routledge, 1991); and Peggy
Phelan, Unmarked (New York: Routledge, 1993).
12. The exception here might be the proliferation of plays that require gay men
to get naked, such as Robert Schrock, Naked Boys Singing (see www.nakedboyssinging.com);
David Dillon, Party, unpublished manuscript, 1992; Terrence
McNally, Love! Valor! Compassion! (New York: Plume, 1995); Terrence McNally and
David Yasbik, The Full Monty (New York: Applause, 2002); Simon Morley and
David "Friendy" Friend, Puppetry of the Penis: The Ancient Art of Genital Origami,
www.puppetryofthepenis.com; and Mark Ravenhill, Shopping and Fucking (London:
Methuen, 2002). While these performances aestheticize mostly white male
naked men, they remain voyeuristic and titillating, rather than shocking representations
of actual sexual practice. Shopping and Fucking offers a more graphic representation
of queer sex as a weapon of humiliation. Live theater is also willing to
indulge straight male (and female) nudity for its voyeuristic value-see, for in-
PRACTICING CULTURAL DISRUPTIONS
351
stance, Stanley Tucci and Edie Falco in the 2002 Broadway revival of McNally's
Frankie and Johnny at the Clare de Lune and Kathleen Turner and Lorraine Bracco in
the 2002 Broadway theatricalization of The Graduate.
13. Diana Son, Stop Kiss, in American Theatre 16, no. 6 (1999): 26-44.
14. Paula Vogel, How I Learned to Drive, in The Mammary Plays (New York: Theatre
Communications Group, 1998) and Hot 'n' Throbbing (New York: Dramatists
Play Service, 2000).
15. Janelle G. Reinelt, e-mail to the author, November 25, 2002.
16. See David Savran, "Choices Made and Unmade," Theater 31, no. 2 (200ool):
89-95, who argues for a "sociology of the theatre" that takes into account the kind
of reception practices and modes of production to which I bring attention here.
17. By "cultural feminism," I mean to indicate a strain of feminist ideology and
politics sometimes called "radical" or "essentialist," which reifies gender differences
and privileges female values as inherently superior to male ones. Although
some commentators feel the designation "cultural" is inappropriate, because it allows
this brand of feminism apparently to corner the market on culture, Alice
Echols's distinction between this more recent strain of feminism and the radical
feminism that preceded it in the late 1960s and early 1970s is most persuasive. See
Echols, Daring to be Bad: Radical Feminism in America, 1967-1975 (Minneapolis: University
of Minnesota Press, 1989).
18. See William H. Honan, "Endowment Tightens Obscenity Rule," New York
Times, July 11, 1990, B3.
19. For an excellent discussion of the political issues raised by the Mapplethorpe
and Serrano exhibits and a chronology of the events surrounding the NEA
censorship debates, see Peggy Phelan, "Serrano, Mapplethorpe, the NEA, and
You: 'Money Talks,' October 1989," TDR 34, no. 1 (1990): 4-15. American Theatre
continues to detail the controversy over government funding for the arts. For interdisciplinary
essays on arts funding controversies in the United States, see also
Grant H. Kester, ed., Art, Activism, and Oppositionality: Essays from "Afterimage"
(Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1998).
20. For a cogent, poststructuralist feminist explication of the ideological implications
of commonsense knowledge, see Chris Weedon, Feminist Practice and Poststructuralist
Theory (London: Blackwell, 1987), 75-80.
21. Daphne Read, "(De)Constructing Pornography: Feminisms in Conflict," in
Passion and Power: Sexuality in History, ed. Kathy Peiss and Christina Simmons,
with Robert A. Padgug (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1989), 282.
22. Read, "(De)Constructing Pornography," 281.
23. See Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, vol. 1, trans. Robert Hurley
(New York: Vintage, 1980).
24. See, for example, Robert Mapplethorpe, Black Book (New York: St. Martin's,
1980). See also Kobena Mercer's "Reading Racial Fetishisms: The Photographs of
Robert Mapplethorpe," in Welcome to the Jungle (New York: Routledge, 1994), 171-
220; and Phelan, Unmarked.
25. Teresa de Lauretis, "Sexual Indifference and Lesbian Representation," in
Performing Feminisms: Feminist Critical Theory and Theatre, ed. Sue-Ellen Case (Baltimore:
Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990), 33, 35.
26. bell hooks, From Margin to Center (Boston: Beacon Press, 1984), 29.
27. This history of lesbian suppression under both radical and cultural feminism
is now well documented. See, for example, Sue-Ellen Case, "Toward a ButchFemme
Aesthetic," in Making a Spectacle: Feminist Essays on Contemporary Women's
Theatre, ed. Lynda Hart (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1989), 282-99,
CRITICAL THEORY AND PERFORMANCE
352
as well as her rethinking of her ideas in "Toward a Butch-Feminist Retro-Future,"
in Cross-Purposes: Lesbians, Feminists, and the Limits of Alliance, ed. Dana Heller
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997), 205-20; and Echols, Daring to be
Bad. See Adrienne Rich, "Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence," in
Powers of Desire: The Politics of Sexuality, ed. Ann Snitow, Christine Stansell, and
Sharon Thompson (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1983), 177-205, for the
quintessential text on "woman-identified women."
28. See Jan Clausen, "My Interesting Condition," Out/Look 2, no. 3 (1990): 11-
21, for a painfully honest discussion of the political and emotional strictures of life
in a "new" lesbian family.
29. I attended the performance discussed below on June 29, 1990, at the Walker
Point Art Center in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.
30. See Sue-Ellen Case, "From Split Subject to Split Britches," in Feminine Focus:
The New Women Playwrights, ed. Enoch Brater (New York: Oxford University
Press, 1989), 126-46; "Toward a Butch-Femme Aesthetic"; and Dolan, Feminist
Spectator as Critic, esp. chap. 4, "The Dynamics of Desire," 59-81, for explications
of Weaver's and Shaw's personal and performative roles. See also Sue-Ellen Case,
ed., Split Britches: Lesbian Practice, Feminist Performance (New York: Routledge,
1996), which collects the troupe's plays, as devised and performed by Lois
Weaver, Peggy Shaw, and Deb Margolin.
31. For theoretical work on butch-femme role-playing as politically and culturally
transgressive, see, for example, Case, "Toward a Butch-Femme Aesthetic";
Madeline Davis and Elizabeth Lapovsky Kennedy, "Oral History and the Study of
Sexuality in the Lesbian Community: Buffalo, NY, 1940-1960," in Hidden from History:
Reclaiming the Gay and Lesbian Past, ed. Martin Baume Duberman, Martha
Vicinus, and George Chauncey (New York: New American Library, 1989), 426-40;
Davis and Kennedy, "The Reproduction of Butch-Fem Roles: A Social Constructionist
Approach," in Peiss and Simmons, Passion and Power, 241-56; Kennedy and
Davis, Boots of Leather, Slippers of Gold: The History of a Lesbian Community (New
York: Routledge, 1993); Joan Nestle, A Restricted Country (Ithaca, N.Y.: Firebrand
Books, 1987); Nestle, The Persistent Desire: A Femme-Butch Reader (Boston: Alyson,
1992); Sally Munt, ed., Butch/Femme: Inside Lesbian Gender (London: Cassell, 1998);
Esther Newton, Margaret Mead Made Me Gay: Personal Essays, Public Ideas (Durham,
N.C.: Duke University Press, 2000); Halberstam, Female Masculinity; Amber
Hollibaugh and Cherrie Moraga, "What We're Rollin Around in Bed With: Sexual
Silences in Feminism," in Snitow, Stansell, and Thompson, Powers of Desire, 394-
405; Amber Hollibaugh, My Dangerous Desires: A Queer Girl Dreaming Her Way
Home (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2000); Lynda Hart, Fatal Women: Lesbian
Sexuality and the Mark of Aggression (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
1994); and Hart, Between the Body and the Flesh: Performing Sadomasochism (New
York: Columbia University Press, 1998).
32. de Lauretis, "Sexual Indifference," 39.
33. See Elaine Marks, "Lesbian Intertextuality," in Homosexualities and French
Literature, ed. George Stambolian and Elaine Marks (Ithaca: Cornell University
Press, 1979), in which, referring to Monique Wittig's Le corps lesbien, she suggests
that images "sufficiently blatant.., withstand reabsorption into male literary culture"
(375). The analogy might hold here.
34. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, "Across Gender, Across Sexuality: Willa Cather
and Others," in Displacing Homophobia: Gay Male Perspectives in Literature and Culture,
ed. Ronald R. Butters, John M. Clum, and Michael Moon (Durham, N.C.:
Duke University Press, 1989), 59. See also Sedgwick's Epistemology of the Closet
PRACTICING CULTURAL DISRUPTIONS
353
(Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1990) and Tendencies
(Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1993).
35. See Davis and Kennedy, "Reproduction of Butch-Fem Roles," for further
discussion of essentializing versus more historical, social constructionist definitions
of lesbian and homosexual identity.
36. Judith Butler, "Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology
and Feminist Theory," in Case, Performing Feminisms, 272. See also her
Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1990);
Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of "Sex" (New York: Routledge, 1993);
and Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative (New York: Routledge, 1997).
37. Nestle, A Restricted Country, 9.
38. Linda Williams, Hard Core: Power, Pleasure, and the "Frenzy of the Visible"
(Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1989), 30. For another
feminist reading of pornography, see Laura Kipnis, Bound and Gagged: Pornography
and the Politics of Fantasy in America (New York: Grove Press, 1996).
39. See Foucault, History of Sexuality, 156-59.
40. For an explication of lesbian subjectivities marginalized by realism's ethical
and heterosexual codes, see Jill Dolan, "'Lesbian' Subjectivity in Realism:
Dragging at the Margins of Structure and Ideology," in Presence and Desire: Essays
on Gender, Sexuality, Performance (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1993),
159-77.
41. John Clum, "'A Culture that Isn't Just Sexual': Dramatizing Gay Male History,"
Theatre Journal 41 (1989): 169-89.
42. Nestle, A Restricted Country, 10o.
43. Martin Sherman, Bent; Robert Chesley, Jerker, or the Helping Hand, both in
Out Front: Contemporary Gay and Lesbian Plays, ed. Don Shewey (New York: Grove
Press, 1988), 79-147, 449-91.
44. Williams, Hard Core, 227. Unfortunately, Williams's own text ends by describing
newer porn films, created either by women or for heterosexual couples,
which, although they explore options among a range of sexual practices, retain the
monogamous ideal of the heterosexual couple as their textual and spectatorial
standard; see, in particular, 229-79.
45. Williams, Hard Core, 151.
46. See, for example, Jane Chambers, Last Summer at Bluefish Cove (New York:
JH Press, 1982); and Sarah Dreher's 8 X io Glossy and Ruby Christmas, in Places,
Please! The First Anthology of Lesbian Plays, ed. Kate McDermott (Iowa City, Iowa:
Aunt Lute, 1985), 41-92 and 137-92. Holly Hughes's raucous play The Well of
Horniness (in Shewey, Out Front, 221-52) is reminiscent of Jerker in its use of language
to break the taboo of homosexual discourse, but its transgressions remain
verbal and cloaked in subcultural references. The Well's radio play genesis also
works to repress the pornographic effects of bodies in motion to the margins of the
text, although now that the text has been circulated more widely, it has been
staged and performed in much more physically explicit ways. See also Rosemary
Keefe Curb, ed., Amazon All Stars: Thirteen Lesbian Plays with Essays and Interviews
(New York: Applause, 1996), a formally and thematically diverse collection.
47. See Foucault, History of Sexuality, 36-49. He writes, "The implantation of
perversions is an instrument-effect: it is through the isolation, intensification, and
consolidation of peripheral sexualities that relations of power to sex and pleasure
branched out and multiplied, measured the body, and penetrated modes of conduct"
(48). Cultural feminism's isolation of lesbian "deviant" sexualities saw porn
magazines like On Our Backs and Bad Attitude wrest their own piece of public
CRITICAL THEORY AND PERFORMANCE
354
discourse to transgress the law of politically correct sex developed by cultural
feminist ideology. Pat Califia, S-M advocate and founder of the S-M support
group Samois, published Sapphistry, a sex manual and disquisition on lesbian sexual
variation that was in its third edition by 1988 (Tallahassee, Fla.: Naiad Press,
1988). Califia is now transitioning as a female to male (FTM) transsexual. Susie
Bright, editor of On Our Backs and author of its Susie Sexpert columns, has published
flamboyantly frank compilations of her essays, all of which describe and
celebrate a loosening of lesbian sexual mores (see, for example, Susie Sexpert's Lesbian
Sex World, Susie Bright's Sexual Reality, and The Sexual State of the Union).
48. I attended the performance discussed on November 18, 1989, at the Barrymore
Theatre in Madison, Wisconsin.
49. I don't mean to be facetious here, but I do mean to evoke the self-righteousness
of these performances and the sanctimonious response they evoked.
50. The disjuncture between gay male and lesbian subcultures prompted by
cultural feminism has been well documented, in an effort to forge new alliances
between the two groups as sexually stigmatized communities. Borrowing from
gay male subculture, therefore, is a transgressive act in a cultural feminist setting.
See, for a historical example of feminism's betrayal of gay men, Rich, "Compulsory
Heterosexuality." For historical work on lesbian and gay male alliances, see
Nestle, A Restricted Country; and Gayle Rubin, "Thinking Sex: Notes for a Radical
Theory of the Politics of Sexuality," in Pleasure and Danger, ed. Carol Vance
(Boston: Routledge, 1984), 267-318. In the twenty-first century, of course, the term
queer has come to represent political and cultural alliances and coalitions among
lesbians and gay men, as well as bisexuals and transgender/transsexual people of
all races, ethnicities, classes, and abilities.
51. See, for example, Feminist Voices (Madison), December 15-February 8, 1990,
4, 6, and February 9-March 8, 1990, 11-13; Wisconsin Light (Milwaukee) January
11-24, 1990, 5, 11. On "naive realism," see Williams, Hard Core, esp. 184-228.
52. Williams, Hard Core, 12. See also Walter Kendrick, The Secret Museum:
Pornography in Modern Culture (1987; reprint, Berkeley and Los Angeles: University
of California Press, 1996).
53. Williams, Hard Core, 38.
54. I would like to thank Stacy Wolf for her insightful comments in discussions
around the issues in this article and for her thoughtful responses to early drafts
and to the new preface. I'd also like to thank my research assistant and colleague,
Paul Bonin-Rodriguez, for his help documenting the new preface and updating
references in the original notes.
Fe/male Impersonation:
The Discourse of Camp
Kate Davy
In the course of what is still a relatively brief history of feminist criticism
in theater, much has been written about work that originated in a womanrun
performance space in New York called the WOW Cafe.1 As a collective
endeavor, WOW (Women's One World) has no single artistic vision guiding
its productions; at base it is a producing organization that allows members
of its collective to showcase work. The result is a wide range of offerings
each season representing enormously disparate production types and
performance styles. WOW is as much a community as it is a theater, and
because any member of the collective can produce and perform-including
women with no previous training or experience in theater-shows at
WOW vary as much in quality as they do in approach. WOW might be
considered a kind of preeminent community theater, which is not to suggest
that its importance lies primarily in its sociology. Some of the most
significant feminist theater of the last decade was created by women who
started out at WOW, and most of those women continue to work there.
Despite vastly different artistic abilities and sensibilities, however, a
common and compelling feature of WOW performances can be identified,
one that distinguishes WOW work from that of other theaters. WOW productions
represent lesbian sexualities on the stage and presume lesbians
as the audience. Lisa Kron, a professionally trained actress and longtime
WOW director and performer, admits, "Sometimes our theatre is really
rough. But the audience we play for needs us. Lesbians never see themselves
represented. And seeing yourself represented is what makes you
feel you have a place in the world."2
The world as constituted by lesbians and inhabited by lesbians is
the premise from which most WOW productions proceed, a premise whose
consequences radically shift the nature of the performative address. These
are not "coming out" plays addressed to straight audiences in a bid for understanding
and acceptance. Nor are they plays about lesbian relationships
within separatist communities. Instead, parody is the staple of WOW
productions, parodies that take on a wide range of forms from reworkings
of classical texts to spoofs on genres such as the detective film, the romance
novel, and the television talk show, soap opera, or sitcom. Some WOW
artists employ avant-garde strategies to make essentially nonnarrative
work, pieces structured more like a poem than a plot. Performance pieces
that construct lesbian spectatorial communities tend to drop from the performative
address the heterosexuality that underpins hegemonic representations,
what Monique Wittig might describe as the cultural products of
"the straight mind."3 For spectators whose sole experience with dominant
355
CRITICAL THEORY AND PERFORMANCE
356
culture is one of either being erased entirely or foregrounded as tragically
"Other" against a (hetero)sexuality inscribed as fiercely normative, the experience
of being addressed as if inhabiting a discursive space, an elsewhere
eked out in the gaps of hegemonic representations, is both profound
and exhilarating.
Traditionally, regardless of genre, what has marked WOW productions
is that they are peopled entirely with lesbian characters. In Heart of
the Scorpion, for instance, Alice Forrester's 1984 parody of the romance
novel-a form that can scarcely be imagined outside of heterosexual dating
and mating-all the couples were lesbian couples. There was only one
man in the play, and "he" was represented by a life-size, homemade-looking
stuffed dummy with a somewhat piglike face. He had no lines. Using
a television talk show format for her nightclub act entitled Carmelita Tropicana
Chats, Carmelita addressed her "studio audience" and, by extension,
her entire television viewing audience as if all were lesbians.4 The cast of
Lisa Kron's 1988 production Paradykes Lost, which loosely followed a conventional
murder mystery formula, included a detective, an ingenue and
her grande dame aunt, a couple (one of whom had a history, in the form
of a liaison, with the detective), a butler, and an assortment of eccentric
singles. Kron used butch-femme as a cultural paradigm for lesbian sexuality
to build a play in which all the characters had women's names, all
were played by women, and all were explicitly identified as lesbian in the
dialogue. None of these productions constructs a world "out there" of
heterosexual culture that the world of the play and its characters are up
against. As a result, the operations of heterosexuality as an institution are
made visible by the unrelenting and rather jolting presumption that heterosexuals
do not exist.
Configuring plays peopled almost exclusively with lesbian characters
represents one strategy for making work that insists on a lesbian
worldview. Of course, it is not the only way to create a theater for lesbians,
a theater that responds to lesbian subjectivities. But until recently it has
been a central and crucial strategy for WOW, one that has distinguished
it from its gay male counterpart, that is, camp, or "theater of the ridiculous,"
in which men impersonate women in narratives peopled for the
most part by heterosexual characters. In 1988 a group of WOW artists
began to experiment with representing heterosexual couples during their
improvisational rehearsal process. Although the idea was abandoned before
the piece opened, the notion of cross-dressing was in the air and hotly
debated among WOW practitioners.
Within the year the idea was played out in a production of Sheridan's
School for Scandal, directed by Alice Forrester and Heidi Griffiths. All
the roles were played by women; male characters were played in drag. In
his review of the production for the Village Voice Robert Massa bemoaned
the fact that the production inadequately commented on the play's sexism,
"as if the point of women's theater were simply to cast, not to recast."5
He said that, as a spectator, "you soon forget all the roles are
played by women." And in the final line of the review he maintained that
Fig. 1. Claire Moed as Sir Oliver .
Surface and Babs Davy as Sir
Peter Teazle in School for Scandal.
Photo credit: Dona Ann
McAdams.
01 \\\
"even the ones playing female characters appear to be in drag." In other
words, it was possible to read this School for Scandal as cast entirely with
men. How can agency for women be realized representationally in a theatrical
configuration that once again, like all hegemonic discourses, privileges
the male voice and erases women as speaking subjects?
Massa's gloss on School for Scandal is, of course, particular and, as
such, a matter of reception. Like all spectators, Massa brings to every encounter
with any performance his own relationships with discourses and
practices in society, relationships that influence in significant ways how
meaning is produced and how a performance is read. It is through institutions
and their attendant discourses and practices that readers learn how
to read cultural artifacts. Spectators who believe that lesbian women are
gender-reversed inverts, for example, might read WOW's School for Scandal
as exemplary lesbian theater in which the female characters are played by
mannish lesbians in drag. But I think not. Women are effaced in School for
Scandal because there is no institutionalized paradigm for reading male
impersonation. Female impersonation, on the other hand, has a long, rich
history, from classical theater and film to television (Jack Benny, Milton
Berle, Jamie Farr, Red Skelton, Flip Wilson, Jonathan Winters), in which
men are not subsumed. On the contrary, female impersonation, while it
357
CRITICAL THEORY AND PERFORMANCE
358
certainly says something about women, is primarily about men, addressed
to men, and for men.6 Male impersonation has no such familiar institutionalized
history in which women impersonating men say something about
women.7 Both female and male impersonation foreground the male voice,
and, either way, women are erased. Moreover, it is in the discourse of camp
humor that female impersonation is firmly embedded.
Camp has been a central descriptor of theater of the ridiculous since
its beginnings in the work of John Vaccaro, Ronald Tavel, and Charles Ludlam
in the mid-196os. The same has not been true for lesbian theater. While
reviewers might deem a particular piece "campy," camp has not been a
central identifying feature of WOW work, nor has it been a standard part
of the collective's rhetoric. WOW performances have been compared to
theater of the ridiculous as having a certain affinity in their farcical style
and the use of irony and double entendre, two core characteristics of camp.
Like theater of the ridiculous, WOW artists borrow scenarios from classical
and popular performance forms as sources for their work. But until 1988
WOW performers did not adopt the heterosexual imperative that drives
these narratives. They did not impersonate women and men in heterosexual
couplings. Impersonation is the arena in which camp falls short as a definitive
characteristic of most WOW work. The butch of butch-femme gender
play is engaged in lesbian representation, not male impersonation. I
contend that, as the notion of camp has circulated among WOW practitioners
in recent years, it has garnered a certain currency that has noticably
influenced the work.
As 1990 began, Anniversary Waltz, a production by WOW's cofounders,
Lois Weaver and Peggy Shaw, used a wedding conceit as the
frame of reference for a piece about their ten-year relationship as theater
artists and lovers. Weaver donned a traditional white wedding dress and
veil and clutched a bridal bouquet for the opening scene of the piece during
which they talked about being "married" without really foregrounding
the fact that, as lesbians, this is not one of their civil rights. As 1990
came to a close, the Five Lesbian Brothers (Maureen Angelos, Babs Davy,
Dominique Dibbell, Peg Healey, and Lisa Kron) staged Voyage to Lesbos
(II), a narrative that focused on the wedding day of an on-again, off-again
lesbian. While her future husband remained in the wings, his "dick" and
its pleasures were pivotal.8
The reasons why WOW work is changing are many, and not all have
to do with the issues surrounding impersonation. From an economic perspective
the desire to move out of the fourth-floor walk-up loft space that
currently houses WOW and seats only fifty spectators is understandable.
Some WOW artists are weary of scratching out an existence in what they
think is becoming a ghetto for lesbian theater. Shaw once commented
with pointed irony that "when lesbians make it to off-Broadway, it's the
boys who are doing it."9 She was referring to drag performer Charles
Busch's long-running off-Broadway show Lesbian Vampires of Sodom. In
emulating "the boys'" success at moving into mainstream venues, there is
perhaps the inclination to think that one must adopt the boys' performa-
FE/MALE IMPERSONATION
359
tive strategies. Lesbian Vampires of Sodom is generally heralded as the epitome
of camp.
In her groundbreaking book Mother Camp: Female Impersonators in
America, Esther Newton defines camp as a system of humor and states that
"the drag queen is its natural exponent."10 Explicating this assertion is, in
essence, the project of her book, a work that includes, as a footnote, the
following:
There are also women who perform as men: male impersonators
("drag butches"). They are a recognized part of the profession, but
there are very few of them . . . The relative scarcity of male impersonation
presents important theoretical problems. (5 n. 13)
My argument focuses on the fact of this "scarcity of male impersonation"
and posits that it has something to do with the inability of camp to serve
lesbian women engaged in theatrical endeavors in the same ways it serves
gay men. In Newton's definition camp "depends on the perception or creation
of incongruous juxtapositions" (io6). She explains that, while any very
incongruous contrast can be campy, "masculine-feminine juxtapositions
are, of course, the most characteristic kind of camp" (o107). It could be said
that WOW's project has been to sidestep the fierce binarism that drives
masculine-feminine heterogendering, a binarism that, by its very nature,
subsumes and erases women. My project is twofold: (1) to investigate the
subversive potential of cross-dressing for gay male theater as it is embedded
in the discourse of camp; and (2) to delineate the dangers of this same
discourse for articulating a feminist subject position vis-a-vis the dynamics
of butch-femme gender play in lesbian theater.
When asked to explain the significance of the title of her book Newton
writes, "'Mother Camp' as an honorific implies something about the relationship
of the female impersonator to his gay audience. A female impersonator
will sometimes refer to himself as 'mother,' as in 'Your mother's
gonna explain all these dirty words to you'" (xx). She then describes the
drag queen as "a magical dream figure: the fusion of mother and son" (xx; my
emphasis). Here Newton makes a gesture toward reception, that is, the
hold and effect the drag queen has on his audience. The preponderance of
female impersonation-across representational forms and addressed to
very different spectatorial communities-suggests that in the intersection
of representation and response there is something both magical and compelling
about a cross-dressed male.
Of the cross-dressed female's relationship to her counterpart in popular
nineteenth-century theater, Peter Ackroyd writes:
The male impersonator, the actress in trousers, seems . . . to lack
depth and resonance... [and] is never anything more than what she
pretends to be; a feminine, noble mind in a boy's body. It is a peculiarly
sentimental, and therefore harmless reversal. The female impersonator,
on the other hand, has more dramatic presence-the
CRITICAL THEORY AND PERFORMANCE
360
idea of a male mind and body underneath a female costume evokes
memories and fears to which laughter is perhaps the best reaction.11
In 1928 Jean Cocteau wrote an essay on "a magical dream figure,"an
American acrobat named Vander Clyde who performed an enormously effective
and popular drag act in Parisian music halls under the name "Barbette."
Ostensibly writing about the virtues of skill and concentration
using Barbette as a model of professionalism, Cocteau produced instead a
brief treatise on reception vis-a-vis female impersonation. What Cocteau
finds so compelling about Barbette's turn is his ability to seduce the eye
of the beholder into believing he is a woman when the empirical evidence
suggests otherwise. He describes how Barbette's gown, with its
tulle shoulder straps, does not conceal the absence of breasts and how his
acrobatic act demands he use his body and muscles in such a way that "he
doesn't look very feminine."12
Cocteau invites the reader to join him in the audience and explains,
"When Barbette comes on, he throws dust in our eyes. He throws it all at
once, so violently that he can then concentrate only on his work as an acrobat.
From then on his male movements will serve him instead of giving
him away" (223). This metaphor of dust blinding the audience to the
"truth" about Barbette invokes not only what Barbette himself does to
enact the gender role of the "Other" but the mystifications of the entire
theatrical apparatus that support the illusion as well. It is also clear from
Cocteau's description of his own spectatorial response that the duplicitous
nature of this "illusion of woman," this absent presence, is the source
of his fascination. He writes: "Barbette moves in silence. In spite of the orchestra
which accompanies his act, his graceful poses and perilous exploits,
his turn seems to be far away, taking place in the streets of dream,
in a place where sounds cannot be heard, it seems to be summoned by the
telescope or by sleep" (224).
Here Cocteau describes his spectatorial intervention in terms of fantasy,
a fantasy evoked by the distance between himself and Barbette, who
is faraway, unreachable, dreamlike, unavailable to consciousness. Fantasy
is also evoked by the condition of absence constitutive of the experience
of watching film. Indeed, Cocteau relates the effect of Barbette's turn to
film: "The cinema has supplanted realistic sculpture. Its marble figures, its
large pallid heads, its shapes and shadows with splendid lighting replace
what the eye previously demanded from statues. Barbette derives from
these moving statues. Even when one knows him, he cannot lose his mystery"
(224).
Cocteau is not so much blinded by the dust Barbette throws in his
eyes as transfixed by it, suspended by the duplicity of the image Barbette
constructs. Cocteau contends that Barbette retains his status as enigma
even for spectators who have already witnessed his turn and know he
will pull off his wig at the finish of his act to reveal his masculine self.
Cocteau would attribute Barbette's mystery to his ability to send mixed,
incongruous signals of masculine and feminine in the guise of a single
FE/MALE IMPERSONATION
361
gender, seducing even those spectators who know better into once again
believing he is a woman.
But I think it also has to do with the ways in which the image of
woman circulates in the representational economies of dominant culture,
especially since Cocteau identifies the experience of watching film as the
source from which Barbette's sense of mystery is derived. The absence of
live objects and bodies constitutive of film resonates profoundly with the
absence of woman as speaking subject in the construction of woman as
presence, as body. The appropriation of this construction by male performers
marks a kind of cultural neologism in the form of an image that
resists definition and at the same time generates an excess of meanings.
The strict polarization of man/woman in heterogendering precludes the
possibility of reading men in drag "holistically." Female impersonation
provides, in short, a seemingly endless source of fascination because, unlike
male impersonation, the man who appropriates his "opposite" is not
simultaneously effaced by it.
The intensely felt sense of mystery Cocteau describes is an apt description
of the effect Charles Ludlam creates when he plays women's roles
in his Ridiculous Theatrical Company productions-an effect he places in
the service of very different ends. In his extraordinary 1973 production of
Camille Ludlam played Alexandre Dumas fils' Marguerite, the Lady of the
Camillias, as well as Greta Garbo's version of the character from the 1937
film to Bill Vehr's Armand Duval in full period costume.13 Unlike the narrative
construction of Barbette's act-his supposed simulation of a woman
and subsequent transformation into a man-Ludlam's hairy chest was
clearly visible above the cut of his gown, signaling his status as male from
his first entrance. Hence, in the process of enacting the passionate and
doomed love affair between Marguerite and Armand that dominates the
Camille narrative, Ludlam and Vehr made manifest the desire of two men
for each other. At the same time, like Barbette, Ludlam conjured a credible
representation of a woman despite clearly visible evidence to the contrary.
In his review for Women's Wear Daily Martin Gottfried wrote that "Ludlam
becomes quite believable as Camille." Writing for the NewYork Times, Clive
Barnes called Ludlam "a completely convincing Camille."14
In playing Marguerite, Ludlam negotiated a position somewhere between
a Brechtian presentation of the character and an illusionistic portrayal,
a position between the parameters Barthes articulates when he
writes that "the Oriental transvestite [actor] does not copy Woman but
signifies her; not bogged down in the model, but detached from its signified;
Femininity is presented to read, not to see: translation, not transgression."15
Although Ludlam mostly played the role for comic effect, he also
played it earnestly in moments where he milked the pathos of a scene,
hushing the audience, to seduce them into "seeing" a woman as a kind of
"setup" for moments when he dropped the character altogether to deliver
a line or two as his actor/playwright/gay-male self.
In the final act, for instance, Marguerite on her deathbed-her penniless,
consumptive state played earnestly by Ludlam-calls to her faithful
Fig. 2. Charles Ludlam as Marguerite
Gautier and Bill Vehr as
Armand Duval in Camille. Photo
credit: John Stern.
maid, "I'm cold. Nanine, throw another faggot on the fire!" Nanine replies,
"There are no more faggots in the house." Dropping the character, Ludlam
sits bolt upright, surveys the audience skeptically, and says plaintively,
"No faggots in the house?" Then he throws his dust, returns the character
to her deathbed, and says, "Open the window, Nanine. See if there are any
in the street."16
In a piece entitled "Reading Past the Heterosexual Imperative" I argued
that male drag emphasizes the illusionistic qualities of impersonation
in that the actor attempts to simulate that which he is not, the Other. Instead
of foregrounding dominant culture's fiercely polarized gender roles,
men's camp assumes them and plays them out. I concluded that male
camp tends to reinscribe, rather than undermine, the dominant culture paradigms
it appropriates for its farce and means to parody.17 In this characterization
of gay male theater I was thinking specifically of Ludlam's
Ridiculous Theatrical Company on the west side of Greenwich Village,
using it as a means for clarifying what lesbian performance at WOW in the
East Village is not. Since then, the torturous experience of the Milwaukee
Repertory Theater's heterosexist production of Ludlam's play Irma Vep has
jolted me into a reconsideration of what Ludlam's theater is not.
The Mystery of Irma Vep, subtitled A Penny Dreadful, is a pastiche of
popular, sensationalistic Victorian plots to which Ludlam adds recognizable
touches from Dracula, the Sherlock Holmes's tale Hound of the
BaSkervilles, and Hollywood films. The action takes place at Mandacrest, a
362
Fig. 3. Richard Halverson as Lady
Enid and Jim Cunningham as her
maid in The Mystery of Irma Vep.
Milwaukee Repertory Theatre.
Photo credit: Mark Avery.
mansion on the English moors, where a new wife has come to replace the
enigmatic and recently deceased woman whose portrait dominates the
living room-clearly, a reference to Hitchcock's Rebecca. The play's four
male characters and four female characters are all played by the same two
male actors in a tour de force of disguise, impersonation, and breathtakingly
rapid costume changes.
The palpable desire of two men for each other, which permeated
Camille and drove the original production of Irma Vep in which Ludlam
played Lady Enid to Everett Quinton's Lord Edgar, was utterly absent
from the Milwaukee Repertory Theater's production.m Instead, the actors
maintained their status as traditionally masculine men foregrounding
their ability as actors in a kind of competitive duel of caricature constructions.
They never touched at all suggestively, and the stage kiss called for
in the script was not executed. The intelligent, lovelorn Lady Enid came
across as a dithering frump. The touch of disdain these manly men projected
at having to play women's parts (a touch required in order to maintain
enough distance from gay male performance) cast a misogynous pall
over the entire event. In the production's final gesture, one meant to confirm
and punctuate the heterosexuality that inscribed this homophobic
rendering of Ludlam's work, the actors took their bows then turned
squarely to each other and shook hands.
363
CRITICAL THEORY AND PERFORMANCE
364
Ironically, but accurately, two of the four reviews of the production
use the word straight to describe the acting style. The critic for Milwaukee's
major morning newspaper wrote, "They play their absolutely ridiculous
(that is, in the famed Ridiculous Theatrical Company sense of the word)
roles absolutely straight."19
The homoerotic potential of the script-after all, the roles could have
been cast with a woman and a man-was manifest through the performative
strategies of camp in the performance text of the original production.
Wayne R. Dynes writes in the Encyclopedia of Homosexuality that "camp is
not grounded in speech or writing as much as it is in gesture, performance,
and public display. When it is verbal it is expressed less through direct
statement than through implication, innuendo, and intonation."20 Gay audiences
for Ludlam's production of Vep laughed delightedly at double entendres,
such as the line "How do you take it?" delivered pointedly by the
maid (Everett Quinton) as "she" served tea to Lady Enid (Ludlam). Taken
aback, Lady Enid replies, "I beg your pardon?" The maid, tongue in cheek,
explains, "Your tea, miss." When Lady Enid insists that she takes it plain,
the maid says both caustically and knowingly, "That's queer." To which
Lady Enid replies, in a moment of camaraderie and with a conspiratorial
tone, "Queer?" (770). Even in the absence of such innuendo it is possible
for particular readers to understand the text as homoerotic. Following the
publication of Ludlam's collected works, for instance, Neil Bartlett-who
had never seen an original Ridiculous Theatrical Company production
wrote in his review of the collected plays that Irma Vep is "an alarmingly
true metaphor of the love between two men."21
Ludlam does not represent homosexuality by writing plays about
gay couples. Ludlam's male actors flaunt their sexuality, their desire for
each other, in texts he constructs out of pieces of classical and popular narratives.
They play the heterosexual couples that people these scenarios,
flaunting and thereby presenting the gay male under, alongside, and outside
of the straight male and female characters valorized in these canonized
texts. Ludlam opens a window in representation, takes the faggots he
sees in the street and puts them on the stage, making their desire for each
other visible.
More important, perhaps, homosexual practice is implicit in this
presentation of homoerotic desire. Earl Jackson, Jr., argues that male homosexuality
both promises and threatens to disestablish "the transcendence
of the phallus from the penis, disinvesting male genitalia (and hence biological
identity) of their former privilege to universal principles of order
and signification."22 In a cogent explication of the ways in which male homosexuality
opposes, by not participating in, the Oedipal triangle, Jackson
states, "Male homosexual desire for the penis does not require the penis to
be hypostatized into a universal principle, embracing female subjectivity
and sexuality as well" (471). Ludlam's making visible of homoerotic desire
signals homosexual practice, the subversive site of all that phallocratic culture
attempts to suppress, contain, and eradicate.
That a dominant culture venue such as a regional theater could so
FE/MALE IMPERSONATION
365
effortlessly erase, render invisible in its (re)production, any representation
of the marginalized group that generated the original cultural product,
raises a plethora of thorny issues related to appropriation, context, and
address. But it also raises questions about the nature of Ludlam's texts as
destabilizing forces, questions about his theater's potential to subvert and
disrupt dominant culture's system of representation.
In an interview I conducted with Ludlam during a subsequent run
of Camille in 1974 he argued emphatically two seemingly contradictory
positions for the production. He maintained that his rendering of Camille
is not an expression of homosexuality and, at the same time, that it represents
a form of coming out. In the space of these contradictions lies the operating
principle of camp. In his comedies Ludlam adheres to a set of aesthetic
universals, one of which he identifies as the theatrical convention of
men impersonating women both historically and across cultures.
Ludlam casts his portrayals of women in the great tradition of transvestism
in the classical theaters of the Greeks, Elizabethans, and Japanese.
Of his form of impersonation he says, "This is nothing new. It has nothing
to do with homosexuality. I use it as a theatrical device. It distances the performer
from the role. It takes more art to play a role that is very unlike
yourself. You must use everything; you must use your imagination to the
utmost to create the impression."23 And the impression he creates undeniably
works for "mixed audiences." "It is not a gay audience," he explains.
"Although a lot of gay people do see it, an enormous number of straight
people also come-couples clutching each other and weeping at the death
scene, hugging each other all the closer." He thinks this is true because
Camille "transcends gay. It's a love story. It's the story of Adam and Eve.
It's the romantic ideal questioned and rethought."
Ludlam locates the "homosexual overtones" of his Camille in the
narrative's dynamics of forbidden love. But his rethinking of the romantic
ideal is manifest in his (re)casting; if Camille is the story of Adam and Eve,
Ludlam's version has two Adams. Of his casting choices he says, "I think
it's presenting a positive image. I think it's coming out on a certain level.
But I don't think it's gay. It's a matter of being able to see the story freshly,
without prejudice. It's a matter of giving the audience a new vision instead
of reinforcing fixed habits of thought." In other words the play is
not gay inasmuch as its address is not exclusively homosexual, but within
the dynamics of the production the machinations of homosexuality surface,
"come out," and are rendered visible in the pockets, gaps, and fissures
of an ultimately less-than-monolithic heterosexual configuration.
This is Ludlam's way of dismantling prejudice, of gesturing toward a new
vision, of negotiating a partially closeted, partially out-of-the closet artistic
and political stance, a stance played out in the contradiction of camp.
Dynes writes, "Undeniably, camp is subversive, but not too much
so, for it depends for its survival on the patronage of high society, the entertainment
world, advertising, and the media" (189). This may help to
explain why lesbian theater work produced on the other side of the Village
has not moved, as Ludlam's work has, into mainstream venues. The
CRITICAL THEORY AND PERFORMANCE
366
Milwaukee Rep is unlikely to present plays with titles like The Lady Dick,
The Well of Horniness, or Paradykes Lost.
In her essay "Toward a Butch-Femme Aesthetic" Sue-Ellen Case delineates
a strategy within lesbian discourse and performance practice
aimed precisely at challenging dominant culture and the violence of its attendant
discourses.24 Camp is a central player in an argument that picks up
where Teresa de Lauretis ends in her essay entitled "The Technology of
Gender."25 In this essay de Lauretis makes an important critical move in
distinguishing and moving away from the ideologically bound female subject
position to a more promising and, therefore, more encouraging feminist
subject. She locates the subject of feminism in the micropolitical practices
and cultural productions of feminism and characterizes it as existing
both inside and outside of gender as ideological representation in that this
subject moves between two contradictory spaces. De Lauretis explains:
It is a movement between the (represented) discursive space of the
positions made available by hegemonic discourses and the space-off,
the elsewhere, of those discourses: those other spaces both discursive
and social that exist, since feminist practices have (re)constructed
them, in the margins (or "between the lines," or "against the grain")
of hegemonic discourses and in the interstices of institutions, in
counter-practices and new forms of community. (26)
De Lauretis locates the feminist subject in this "elsewhere," engendered
there in the tension created by the condition of inhabiting the two kinds
of spaces at once, conscious of the pull in contrary directions.
The female subject, on the other hand, is trapped in hegemonic discourses
as "woman," the always already spoken-for construction that replaces
women as speaking subjects in representation. This construction is
anathema to women as historical beings and social subjects because it signifies
a (feminine) essence intrinsic to all women, thereby reducing them to
"nature," "mother," and, ultimately, the object of (male) desire. "Woman"
replaces women and marks their absence. In this configuration the lesbian
is doubly missing in that even her absence is not inscribed. This is both her
oppression and her promise as a destabilizing force.
De Lauretis not only distinguishes between the female subject and
the subject of feminism, she also identifies the female subject position as
inescapably trapped in the phallocratic contract of heterosexuality. Borrowing
Irigaray's notion of "hom(m)osexuality" as the term of sexual
(in)difference, that is, the term that signifies a single practice and representation
of the sexual-male-de Lauretis identifies hom(m)osexuality
as in fact the term of heterosexuality.26 Thus, when she states that, in order
to begin the process of change, "we must walk out of the male-centered
frame of reference in which gender and sexuality are (re)produced by the
discourse of male sexuality" ("Technology," 17), she means that, at the
level of discourse, we must walk out of the hom(m)osexual frame and its
phallocratic contract, the heterosexual contract.
FE/MALE IMPERSONATION
367
In a brilliant theoretical maneuver Case recuperates the lesbian
butch suppressed historically by the feminist movement, reassimilates recent
feminist theoretical strategies, and maps the butch-femme subject position-one
that provides, in her words, "a ground that could resolve the
project of constructing the feminist subject position" (289). In other words,
a position outside the heterosexual contract.
In her project Case employs camp as a strategy in combination with
the discourse of the butch-femme couple "to provide the liberation of the
feminist subject" (286). My only quarrel with her project, a project that has
been enormously influential in constructing an alternative to the female
subject, is her use of camp. Because she invokes camp as a "discourse," instead
of merely using its salient elements, the baggage of camp discourse
is imbricated in her argument. The result is that the subject position she
constructs does not walk out of the hom(m)osexual frame of reference as
effectively as it could, for camp as a discourse is both ironically and paradoxically
the discourse of hom(m)osexuality, that is, male sexuality.
In Case's scheme camp is a neutral non-ideologically bound discourse
in that it is produced by both gay men and lesbians out of the condition
of being closeted. Furthermore, it is available as a strategy for other
marginalized groups in much the same way that "coming out" is available
for assimilation as a euphemism for heterosexuals coming out of
whatever it is they come out of, except, of course, the closet of homosexuality.
In using camp generically, Case falls into the same trap de Lauretis
identifies when the word homosexual is used to refer to both gay men and
lesbians "sliding inexorably, it seems, into its uncanny hommo-sexual
double" ("Sexual Indifference," 163). The tools that camp provides-artifice,
wit, irony, exaggeration-are available to butch-femme gender play
separate from the ways in which they are inscribed by camp as a historically
marked phenomenon.
Equally significant to camp as a discourse, as a system of signs, is the
cross-dressed male, who is not merely an element or an instance but a central
figure. Cocteau's Barbette and Ludlam's Marguerite are figures that
incorporate and subsume the sexuality of the Other, of woman. Like the
construction "woman," the cross-dressed male specularizes the phallus,
providing a screen on which anxieties of castration and loss of the privileged
phallus are projected and compensated for through the dynamics of
fantasy. The cross-dressed male plays the absence of women from phallocratic
discourse; woman as signifier is profoundly empty.
In theorizing the subversive potential of gay male discourses and
practices, Jackson notes:
Throughout history, for various reasons, male homoerotic practices
have been supportive of, rather than subversive to, hegemonic conceptions
of masculinity. Even in the postmodern, late capitalist societies
of the twentieth century, male homoerotic discourses are often
reinscribed within the very patriarchy they would seem to countermand.
(459)
CRITICAL THEORY AND PERFORMANCE
368
As a discourse with a historical specificity, camp undermines the attempt
to construct a subject position that hopes to resonate with what
Audre Lorde describes as a "house of difference." Lorde's house filled with
difference(s) suggests for de Lauretis "a more complex image of the psychosocio-sexual
subject ... which does not deny gender or sex but transcends
them" ("Sexual Indifference," 164). This is the challenge Case takes
on and meets in theorizing her "dynamic duo," as she refers to the butchfemme
couple, out of and within recent feminist theories of the psychoanalytic
notion of "womanliness as masquerade." Case's dynamic duo "play
on the phallic economy rather than to it" (291), foregrounding its fictions
as fiction by negotiating its "realities" between two lesbian women.
I have argued that the iconography of butch-femme culture present
in performances at WOW is not about cross-dressing ("Reading Past,"
156). Wearing the gender of the "other" sex is not the point. Nor is it about
drag in the sense of simulation. No attempt is made to hide the lesbian beneath
a mask of male or female gender identity; to fool the audience, even
momentarily, is not the objective. As a dimension of erotic identity, butchfemme
is about sexuality and its myriad nuances. It is also about gender
in that it appropriates gender in its social articulation and representational
construction. In butch-femme iconography, attributes that in dominant
culture are associated with strict gender roles are not sex-class specific.
Worn by lesbians, these attributes have meanings for lesbians in a
same-sex, lesbian culture that do not necessarily symbolize conformity to
rules of gender behavior and the oppositional dynamics of polarized gender
roles.
The articulation of desire in the dynamics of butch-femme gender
play in lesbian performance positions this performance outside heterosexuality
both as a social institution and as a representational model, by realigning
what Jill Dolan describes as the "dynamics of desire" between
performance and its spectators. Dolan writes, "When the locus of desire
changes, the demonstration of sexuality and gender roles also changes."27
Butch-femme as a signifying practice in lesbian theater differs from male
drag performance in that it dismantles the construction "woman" and
challenges male sexuality as the universal norm. It challenges the heterosexual
contract that de Lauretis identifies as "the very site in which the social
relations of gender and thus gender ideology are re-produced in
everyday life" ("Technology," 17).
Case's butch-femme subject position is successfully articulated outside
the hom(m)osexual frame of reference, where it could have broader
play if it were not encumbered by camp. Positioned inside a lesbian discourse
that is every bit as artificial as camp in its gender play of phallocratic
fictions, the butch-femme subject position, like its original referent
in the butch-femme couple, is more lethal to hegemonic discourses than
Charles Ludlam's Marguerite and Charles Busch's "lesbians of Sodom."
Butch-femme gender roles played in the streets and on the stage signify,
through lesbian desire, Irigaray's "goods that refuse to go to market"
and Wittig's lesbian subject who is not man/not woman.28 As such, butch-
FE/MALE IMPERSONATION
369
femme artifice is so much more a part of lesbian discourse than camp discourse
that it not only resists assimilation, because it is too dangerous, but
it allows for the play of other differences as well.
Dynes emphasizes that "camp is always presented with an invisible
wink" (190). But, instead of realizing the promise and threat of its subversive
potential for imagining and inscribing an "elsewhere" for alternative
social and sexual realities, the wink of camp (re)assures its audience of the
ultimate harmlessness of its play, its palatability for bourgeois sensibilities.
When the butch-femme subject winks, phallocratic culture is not reassured.
Camp is neither good nor bad; it is just more or less effectively deployed.
In the context of gay male theater and its venues camp is indeed
a means of signaling through the flames, while in lesbian performance it
tends to fuel and fan the fire. How gay and lesbian theater as cultural production
might effect social change outside of gay and lesbian contexts demands
an examination of how its subversive meanings can be articulated
and sustained in a hegemonic culture "bent" on benign assimilation or
discursive and political eradication.29 This seems to me the most crucial
project for the future if change is the goal. Change is not possible, as de
Lauretis so graphically puts it, "without altering the existing social relations
and the heterosexual structures to which our society, and most others,
are securely screwed" ("Technology," 21).
NOTES
1. See, among others, my article "Constructing the Spectator: Reception, Context,
and Address in Lesbian Performance," Performing Arts Journal to (1986): 43-
52; Jill Dolan, The Feminist Spectator as Critic (1988; reprint, Ann Arbor: University
of Michigan Press, 1991); and Alisa Solomon, "The WOW Cafe," Drama Review 29,
no. 1 (1985): 92-101.
2. Lisa Kron, as quoted by Dorothy Chansky, in "WOW Cafe: A Stage of Their
Own," Theatre Week, September 24-30, 1990, 39-41.
3. Monique Wittig, "The Straight Mind," Feminist Issues 1 (1980): 103-11.
4. See my piece "Heart of the Scorpion at the WOW Cafe"; and Jill Dolan,
"Carmelita Tropicana Chats at the Club Chandalier"; both in Drama Review 29, no. 1
(1985): 52-56 and 26-32.
5. Robert Massa, "Comedy of Womanners," Village Voice January o10, 1989, 97.
6. In the chapter entitled "Lesbian Feminism and the Gay Rights Movement:
Another View of Male Supremacy, Another Separatism," in her book The Politics
of Reality: Essays in Feminist Theory (Trumansburg, N.Y.: Crossing Press, 1983), 128-
51, Marilyn Frye links effeminacy, as a style, with what she calls the "gay institution
of the impersonation of women" and writes: "What gay male affectation of
femininity seems to me to be is a kind of serious sport in which men may exercise
their power and control over the feminine .... Some gay men achieve, indeed,
prodigious mastery of the feminine .... But the mastery of the feminine is not feminine.
It is masculine" (137). In the text she asserts that female impersonation is a
"mockery of women"; in a footnote, however, she amends her position with "the
realization that gay effeminacy has so little to do with women that it is not even
primarily the mockery of women I had thought it was" (151 n. 3).
CRITICAL THEORY AND PERFORMANCE
370
7. This is not to suggest that male impersonation was uncommon in certain
periods. See Laurence Senelick, "The Evolution of the Male Impersonator on the
Nineteenth-Century Popular Stage," Essays in Theatre 1 (1982): 29-44. See also SueEllen
Case's discussion of the salon of Natalie Barney as a form of "personal theatre"
in which women performed for all-women audiences (Feminism and Theatre
[New York: Methuen, 1988], 50-53).
Homer Dickens's book What a Drag: Men as Women and Women as Men in the
Movies features a surprisingly large number of women in drag. But with the exception
of Marlene Dietrich, Greta Garbo in Queen Christina, and Julie Andrews in Victor/Victoria,
few are memorable. This is the point: there is a familiarity about many
of the men in drag that denotes, I think, a certain convention inscribed in the popular
imagination. Given the relatively forgettable nature of much male impersonation,
it is ironic when, in her book Hollywood Androgyny (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1985), Rebecca Bell-Metereau points out that "in distinct contrast
to the relative rarity and negative connotations of female impersonation before
1960, females dressed in male clothing appear frequently in American film" (66).
8. While I juxtapose these two productions to indicate a certain shift in perspective,
the differences between them are paramount. Anniversary Waltz employs
a number of heterosexual tropes but is not subsumed by them; it maintains its lesbian
stance. Shaw and Weaver work through some extraordinary nonheterogendered
positionalities within a butch-femme representational economy. Voyage to
Lesbos, on the other hand, is obsessively concerned with heterosexuality in a failed
attempt to critique it. Without much of a leap, it could be read as a play about lesbian
"penis envy."
9. Peggy Shaw and Lois Weaver, interview by the author, New York City,
spring 1985.
o10. Esther Newton, Mother Camp: Female Impersonators in America (Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 1972), xx; hereafter page numbers will be cited in the text.
11. Peter Ackroyd, Dressing Up: Transvestism and Drag: The History of an Obsession
(New York: Simon and Schuster, 1979), 102.
12. Cocteau's World: An Anthology of Writings by Jean Cocteau, ed. Margaret
Crosland (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1972), 224; hereafter page numbers will be
cited in the text.
13. I saw the original production in the spring of 1973 at the 13th Street Theatre
in New York City as well as every subsequent revival of it. Readers familiar
with the experimental theater scene in those days will appreciate the following
anecdote: When I interviewed Ludlam in the fall of 1974, I mentioned to him that
the Living Theatre's Julian Beck and Judith Malina were in the audience the first
time I saw Camille and that I was struck by their stoicism in the face of such high
comedy. Ludlam responded, "Oh, but they came back stage afterwards and said
that they loved it; they just thought it was irrelevant, that it had nothing to do
with reality."
For a reading of Ludlam's Camille that is quite different from mine, see Stefan
Brecht, Queer Theatre (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1978), 88-93.
14. Martin Gottfried, "The Theatre: Camille," Women's Wear Daily, May 15,
1974; Clive Barnes, "Stage: An Oddly Touching 'Camille,'" New York Times, May
14, 1974. These reviews are from the first revival of Camille in the spring of 1974.
The original production opened in the spring of 1973. Both reviews were obtained
from the files of the Ridiculous Theatrical Company, New York.
15. Roland Barthes, Empire of Signs (New York: Hill and Wang, 1982), 53. I am
grateful to Laurence Senelick for bringing this citation to my attention.
FE/MALE IMPERSONATION
371
16. The Complete Plays of Charles Ludlam, ed. Steven Samuels and Everett Quinton
(New York: Harper and Row, 1989), 246. All subsequent references to Ludlam's
plays are taken from this collection and are cited in the text.
17. See my essay entitled "Reading Past the Heterosexual Imperative: Dress
Suits to Hire," Drama Review 33, no. 1 (1989): 153-70; hereafter page numbers will
be cited in the text.
18. I attended the Milwaukee Repertory Theater's production in the Stiemke
Theater in September 1989 as well as Ludlam's original production in his theater
at One Sheridan Square in New York in November 1984.
19. Jay Joslyn, "Rep's Spoof 'Irma Vep' Smashingly Successful," Milwaukee
Sentinel, September 18, 1989. A review also appeared on the same day in the
evening paper, the Milwaukee Journal, by Damien Jaques, in which he conflated
camp with drag, then used "camp," "campiness," and "high camp" to describe
what he saw.
20. Wayne R. Dynes, "Camp," in Encyclopedia of Homosexuality, ed. Wayne R.
Dynes (New York: Garland, 1990), 189; hereafter page numbers will be cited in the
text.
21. Neil Bartlett, "Just Ridiculous," American Theatre, April 1990, 50-51.
22. Earl Jackson, Jr., "Kabuki Narratives of Male Homoerotic Desire in Saikaku
and Mishima," Theatre Journal 41 (1989): 470; hereafter page numbers will be cited
in the text.
23. Charles Ludlam, interview by the author, New York City, October 13, 1974.
Before beginning the interview, I asked Ludlam to say something to be sure the
recorder was picking up his voice. Hence, the first words on the tape are "This is
Charles Ludlam speaking for posterity." He died of AIDS on May 28, 1987. All
subsequent quotations are from this interview.
24. Sue-Ellen Case, "Toward a Butch-Femme Aesthetic," in Making a Spectacle:
Feminist Essays on Contemporary Women's Theatre, ed. Lynda Hart (Ann Arbor: University
of Michigan Press, 1989), 282-99; hereafter page numbers will be cited in
the text.
25. Teresa de Lauretis, "The Technology of Gender," in Technologies of Gender:
Essays on Theory, Film, and Fiction (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987),
1-3o; hereafter page numbers will be cited in the text.
26. Teresa de Lauretis, "Sexual Indifference and Lesbian Representation," Theatre
Journal 40 (1988): 156; hereafter page numbers will be cited in the text.
27. Jill Dolan, "The Dynamics of Desire: Sexuality and Gender in Pornography
and Performance," Theatre Journal 39 (1987): 173.
28. Luce Irigaray, "When the Goods Get Together," in New French Feminisms:
An Anthology, ed. Elaine Marks and Isabelle de Courtivron (New York: Schocken,
1981), 110; Monique Wittig, "One is Not Born a Woman," Feminist Issues 1, no. 2
(1981): 47-54.
29. Susan Sontag's enormously influential "Notes on 'Camp,'" in her collected
essays Against Interpretation (New York: Dell, 1966), 275-92, strikes me as exemplary
of benign assimilation. She nearly edits homosexuals out of camp and
deems it a fundamentally apolitical phenomenon.
Not-About-AIDS
David Roman
Soon after the 1996 International AIDS Conference in Vancouver, where
the success of protease inhibitors was officially announced, there was a
great deal of talk in the United States about the end of AIDS, and much of
it implied that the need to talk about AIDS had ended as well. Reports
both in the popular media and in lesbian and gay publications suggested
that we had reached the end of the AIDS epidemic. While acknowledging
that most people across the world lacked access to the new drugs, these
accounts put forward the idea that the AIDS crisis was now over. In the
absence of a cure or vaccine, this "end of AIDS" discourse is striking. In
his controversial article, "When AIDS Ends," published in the New York
Times Magazine on November 10o, 1996, Andrew Sullivan writes: "A difference
between the end of AIDS and the end of many other plagues: for the
first time in history, a large proportion of the survivors will not simply be
those who escaped infection, or were immune to the virus, but those who
contracted the illness, contemplated their own deaths, and still survived."'
Cover articles in other major publications of the period further
demonstrate this shift in AIDS discourse and share in its assumptions,
from Newsweek's "The End of AIDS?" issue, on December 2, 1996, to Time
Magazine's selection of Dr. David Ho, a pioneer of this new AIDS treatment
research, as "Man of the Year," which indicates that an understanding
of AIDS as a manageable condition rather than a terminal one had
taken shape. In late 1996, AIDS returned to the forefront of U.S. culture
only to announce its departure. Not surprisingly, the "end of AIDS" discourse
soon led to a general lack of media interest in AIDS, and to calls
from gay figures for "post-AIDS" identities and cultures.
These developments surfacing in the late 199os have left me wondering
what it means to continue prioritizing AIDS in discussions of contemporary
gay culture and politics. How might we return our critical attention
to AIDS in light of the shifts in the political, cultural, and sexual
climates of the late 199os and early twenty-first century? In this essay I explore
two central questions: how might the "end of AIDS" itself be understood
as an AIDS discourse that tells us much about our current relationship
to AIDS, and how are artists living with HIV/AIDS responding to
recent calls for "post-AIDS" identities and cultures?
In Dry Bones Breathe, perhaps the most telling book of 1998, Eric
Rofes, a longtime progressive gay activist, argues that contemporary gay
culture needs to disentangle itself from the dated AIDS-as-crisis model
that characterized the gay community's response in the first decade of the
epidemic.2 Rofes, unlike most commentators, is careful to explain that he
is speaking specifically about gay male culture in America and that "postAIDS"
does not necessarily mean the end of AIDS. "This admittedly con-
372
NOT-ABOUT-AIDS
373
troversial term," Rofes writes, "claims that the communal experience of
AIDS-as-crisis has ended," but it "does not imply that the epidemic of
AIDS is over" (75). Despite drawing such distinctions and making an
overall effort to remain sensitive to those living with HIV/AIDS, Rofes
suggests that "it may be time for gay men to abandon the acronym 'AIDS'
altogether" (72).
While many commentators have questioned the concept of postAIDS,
most of their critiques are cast as expressions of concern about a
new wave of infection among the very subjects who imagine themselves
living in a "post-AIDS" world: urban gay men. Michelangelo Signorile's
September 1998 Out article, "641,086 & Counting," is typical. Signorile argues
that "we are headed toward an unqualified disaster."3 This disaster,
"in which a new generation of gay men become as immersed in the horrors
of AIDS, disease, and death as previous generations," is taking shape
because of the message and belief that AIDS is over. Signorile's title,
"641,086 & Counting," invokes Larry Kramer's 1983 New York Native
essay, "1,112 and Counting," which helped inaugurate the AIDS activist
movement. Kramer's title simultaneously registered the number of AIDS
cases at the time of its publication and predicted more cases in the future.
The article, as Kramer put it, was meant to "scare the shit out of you."4 In
"641,086 & Counting," Signorile sounds the alarm for a new generation of
gay men. "Will it take massive death and suffering for us to wake up once
again?" he asks near the end of his critique of post-AIDS rhetoric.5 His effort
to motivate gay men is modeled on Kramer's foundational rhetoric of
early 1980s AIDS activism in the hope that, this time around, such rhetoric
will counter apathy and denial.6
Surprisingly, Signorile neglects to account for the global shifts in
AIDS demographics since 1983. Few critics of end-of-AIDS rhetoric, in
fact, seriously question the assumptions that condition the post-AIDS discourse
either globally or in the context of the United States. This discourse,
as Phillip Brian Harper argues in response to Sullivan's essay, invests
in a specific category of "racial-national normativity"-or, as Harper
more bluntly puts it, in "U.S. whites," who are its implicit subjects.7 He recasts
Sullivan's speculation that, for many in the United States, HIV infection
"no longer signifies death" but "merely. .. illness" to mean that, for
Sullivan, the deaths of "those not included in his racial-national normativity"-that
is to say nonwhites and those living outside the United
States-"effectively do not constitute AIDS-related deaths at all."8
While I completely agree with Harper on this issue, I am less interested
in similarly disassociating myself from Sullivan; Harper's opening
sentence, "For quite a while now, I have strongly suspected that Andrew
Sullivan and I inhabit entirely different worlds," rings false for me, given
that my world often does literally overlap with Sullivan's regardless of
my disagreement with many of his assertions.9 I have often seen Sullivan
in the bars, vacation resorts, commercial spaces, and sexual publics that I
visit throughout the Unites States. My point here is that we, as gay men,
sometimes share social and sexual worlds with those with whom we may
CRITICAL THEORY AND PERFORMANCE
374
politically disagree. Rather, I am more interested in thinking through what
was meant by the end-of-AIDS discourse that began circulating in queer
culture in the late 1990s. This discourse, as we have seen, takes many
forms. Claims for the end of AIDS and a post-AIDS discourse might be
best understood not as markers of a definitive and identifiable moment of
closure but as the next development in the discursive history of AIDS. For
Sullivan, it means putting forward his experience optimistically and
naively as the normative experience of AIDS, without much concern with
the effects of his rhetoric on others; it is a normalizing process that demonstrates
a lack of self-consciousness, what we might call a "discourse undetectable."
For Rofes, who asks us to consider abandoning the term AIDS, it
means "finding a new language that captures our experience."10 For Signorile,
who is concerned with HIV prevention, it means returning to the
language of early 198os AIDS activism. For Harper, who advocates a more
"conscious and responsible discursive engagement," it means interrogating
the social normativity that these end-of-AIDS pronouncements enforce.11
Given these different meanings and competing claims, the language
about the end of AIDS might be considered yet another moment in
what Paula Treichler terms "an epidemic of signification," the ongoing
evolution of cultural meanings and values attached to AIDS that help
shape how it is understood.12 Both the end-of-AIDS and the post-AIDS discourses
participate in a larger social phenomenon that encourages us to believe
that the immediate concerns facing contemporary American culture,
including queer culture, are not-about-AIDS.
We see the tension arising from the end-of-AIDS claims played out in
the United States especially around the topics of race, money, and the law.
In 1998, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention,
blacks accounted for 57 percent of all new HIV cases in the country even
though they constituted only 12 percent of the population. In Los Angeles,
where I live, Latinos accounted for nearly 50 percent of new cases in 1998.
Nationally, half of all new infections occurred in people under twenty-five.
These statistics are no doubt what led Mario Cooper, former chair of the
national AIDS lobby group, AIDS Action Council, and founder of Leading
for Life, an organization that advocates for African American AIDS awareness,
to assert that "AIDS isn't over. For many in America, it's just beginning."13
In 1998, Leading for Life helped spur the Congressional Black
Caucus to lobby the Clinton administration to declare AIDS in the black
community a "public health emergency" so that the Department of Health
and Human Services could allocate funds to counter AIDS where it is most
prevalent. Federal funding for treatments, prevention strategies, and support
services in black and Latino communities subsequently rose by $156
million. The AIDS-as-crisis model now adopted by the national black leadership
often posits queer communities against minority communities to
make its point even though its origins are to be found in the gay community's
efforts to organize around AIDS. This tactic departs from earlier understandings
of AIDS in communities of color, which put forward the idea
that AIDS was only one of a series of interrelated catastrophes that affected
NOT-ABOUT-AIDS
375
U.S. racial minorities and therefore that it should not be prioritized over
other pressing issues.
If by 1998 the AIDS-as-crisis model was beginning to be viewed as
dated and ineffective in the gay community, the new "AIDS emergency"
or AIDS-as-crisis discourse among black and Latino leadership was
proving successful in channeling political energy to fight AIDS in communities
of color. In a peculiar reversal, the lesbian and gay leadership
began to follow the discarded logic of the earlier AIDS discourse used by
the black and Latino leadership by promoting the restructuring of AIDS
service organizations (ASOs) to accommodate other non-AIDS-related
health issues facing the community and by prioritizing other political issues
over HIV/AIDS prevention and treatment. While white gays arguing
for the end of AIDS regularly neglect to account for increasing infection
rates among racial minorities, leaders in communities of color
regularly discount queer people in the AIDS emergency discourse that
calls attention to AIDS in their communities. Queers of color do not fare
well in these scenarios. In fact, homosexuality and race are generally
imagined as oppositional.
This opposition between race and sexuality places groups in competition
for funding and other resource allocations. As Cathy J. Cohen explains
in The Boundaries of Blackness,
Often this struggle for money has been framed as a battle between
resource-rich and overly indulged white gay communities and poor
and largely ignored black and Latino communities. Of course, a case
can be made that white gay men have received and controlled the
lion's share of available AIDS funding; this simple dichotomy, however,
does little to advance the interests of any group working for
more AIDS funding.14
Consider, for example, how Patsy Fleming, former White House director
of national AIDS policy, in an attempt to point out the economic discrepancies
between queer communities and communities of color around the
issue of AIDS, inadvertently reinforces this binary when she recounts her
visit to two ASOs in the same city. As reported by the Los Angeles Times,
"One [ASO] predominantly served white homosexual men and the other
served low-income blacks and Latinos, and both were conducting fundraisers
at the same time. While the first group expected to raise $1 million,
the second dreamed of bringing in $100oo,ooo."'15 Fleming's attempt to call
attention to the need for more and better resources in communities of
color comes across as an either-or. That is, the plight of low-income blacks
and Latinos affected by HIV is played against the seeming financial security
of white homosexual men, even though, clearly, not all white homosexual
men or ASOs that provide services to them enjoy this security.
The end-of-AIDS claims have contributed significantly to the decline
in monetary donations, both individual and corporate, to ASOs. Despite
the booming economy at the end of the twentieth century, which
CRITICAL THEORY AND PERFORMANCE
376
saw private donations to nonprofits increase by 7 percent annually during
1997 and 1998, ASOs reported disturbing decreases in AIDS funding. The
main reasons for the drop in AIDS philanthropy in this period were AIDS
burnout, the growth in non-AIDS-related organizations catering to lesbian
and gay communities, and the sense that AIDS was over.16
The "end of AIDS," however, does not explain the legal backlash
against people with HIV. Legislation has shifted the emphasis from protecting
the civil liberties of people with HIV to protecting the public from
people with HIV. Calls for mandatory testing, especially among prisoners
and pregnant women; for name reporting and partner notification;
and for the criminalization of HIV transmission are increasing. Despite
the Supreme Court's 1998 ruling that people with HIV are protected by
the Americans with Disabilities Act, the legislative trend shows that
"we've moved from a period where civil rights and civil liberties for a
person with HIV prevailed to a compulsory and punitive approach."17
Prisoners, immigrants, pregnant women, and the poor are the most vulnerable
to prosecution. The legislative trend is directly linked to cultural
anxieties stemming from the fact that new advanced drug therapies help
people with HIV live longer than previously expected. As Sean Strub,
publisher of POZ, puts it: "Combination therapy, in our enemies' eyes,
enables us 'AIDS carriers,' not only to 'live longer' but, more important,
to 'infect more.'''18 If this is so, how are we to understand what is meant
by the end-of-AIDS pronouncements? The social, cultural, and medical
problems that structured this moment in AIDS history have been rendered
invisible by this discourse. This invisibility is supported by the lesbian
and gay media, which positioned marriage and the military as the
two main political sites of the late 1990s at the expense of AIDS.19
Mainstream lesbian and gay political organizations and media
shifted their priorities as AIDS moved more and more into the developing
world and into previously underrepresented groups throughout the
United States including communities of color, poor women, and the incarcerated.
This rise of marriage and the military as key issues for mainstream
lesbian and gay culture underscores the symbolic centrality of
marital coupling and military service to the health and defense of the nation.
This move to make marriage and the military central to a new gay
politics can be seen as an attempt to normalize gay and lesbian culture by
associating it with the most traditionally recognized forms of national
duty and social and civic responsibility. The discourse about the end of
AIDS both helps to make this possible and helps displace AIDS onto the
lesser-developed world. But if mainstream American lesbian and gay politics
and media reassign AIDS to the shadow of gay marriage and the military,
where might we find a discourse about AIDS that both marks the
significant changes that surfaced in the wake of the 1996 International
AIDS Conference in Vancouver and also acknowledges the political necessity
of foregrounding AIDS?
Historically, performance has proved a powerful means of intervening
in the public understanding and experience of AIDS and of counter-
NOT-ABOUT-AIDS
377
ing neglect of it by the larger culture. Performance is a cultural practice
that does more than illustrate the social and historical context in which it
is embedded.20 At its best, it shapes and transforms the way we understand
and experience our lives. In Acts of Intervention: Performance, Gay Culture,
and AIDS, I argue that AIDS performance is both a political intervention
and an embodied theorization. Performance has provided a different
perspective on the events reported in the dominant media, including those
of gay culture. In the remainder of the essay, I consider the work of two
performers with HIV, Bill T. Jones and Neil Greenberg, in light of the shifts
in AIDS discourse I have been describing. What does it mean to live with
HIV after the AIDS crisis has supposedly ended? How might we consider
the relationship between AIDS and the performing arts if contemporary
culture is "not-about-AIDS"? What follows is a discussion of two dancerchoreographers
whose work helps us think through the contradictions and
challenges of "the end of AIDS." Examining the work of these artists allows
us to track and affirm some of the cultural work around HIV that performance
is able to represent, work that traditional print culture and
media have been much less successful in accomplishing. But why privilege
performance?
I focus on these choreographers and on dance studies for a number
of reasons. First, the work of these artists stands out as among the most
compelling I have seen in the past decade. It has enabled me to think
through many of the challenges AIDS continues to provoke even when
the work itself might not be about AIDS at all. Second, dance provides a
unique entrance into theorizations of the body, temporality, and sociality,
and yet it remains marginal to debates and discussions in cultural studies,
queer theory, and lesbian and gay scholarship. This essay responds to recent
calls in my own primary fields, theater/performance studies and
American studies, to incorporate dance and dance research into the mix.21
Third, dance-like the rest of the arts-often enacts a kind of counterpublicity
to dominant discourses, including not only those advanced by the
mainstream media but also contemporary discourses about lesbian and
gay life, which increasingly resist and disavow the radical politics on
which the gay and lesbian movement was founded. Unfortunately, the
performing arts remain marginal to most discussions of contemporary
queer life, whatever one's politics. This essay sets out to counter that marginalization
by placing the performing arts at the heart of the national culture
to see what these performances might tell us about contemporary
life. Finally, dance can communicate a discourse of resistance, an embodied
language of cultural memory, especially for groups that have suffered
oppression throughout their histories.22
In New York City, in 1994, Neil Greenberg and Bill T. Jones each premiered
an ensemble dance that has become something of a signature
work. The titles of these dances, Greenberg's Not-About-AIDS-Dance and
Jones's Still/Here are telling reminders of how AIDS was understood at
that moment.23 Still/Here was based on "survival workshops" Jones conducted
throughout the United States with people facing life-threatening
CRITICAL THEORY AND PERFORMANCE
378
illness, including AIDS. Jones describes the participants as "of all ages,
classes, races, sexual preferences, and states of health."24 In its promotional
materials, the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company describes
Still/Here as follows:
At the heart of Still/Here are the "Survival Workshops: Talking and
Moving About Life and Death." The first was conducted in November
1992, in Austin, Texas as an experiment to see what, if anything,
could be collected from the experiences of people living with lifethreatening
illness that would inform a dance/theatre work. After it
was completed, we realized that the participants living on the front
lines of the struggle to understand our mortality are in possession of
information-is their knowledge a gift or is it a burden? The participants'
generosity of spirit and willingness to express their experience
both with words and gestures was both exhilarating and terrible.
They are the essence of Still/Here: their gestures inform the choreography,
their words the lyrics, their images the stage. They will always
be Still/Here. This work is dedicated to them.25
Jones, whose lover and collaborator, Arnie Zane, died of AIDS in 1988,
often refers to AIDS in his work and in the public discourse that accompanies
it (fig. 1).26 Red Room (1987) is a dance that Jones composed during
Zane's final two years with AIDS and performed at Zane's 1988 memorial
service at New York City's Joyce Theater. Forsythia (1989) sets out, in part,
to memorialize Zane and includes Jones and Arthur Aviles dancing to a
tape-recorded voice-over of Zane describing his dreams. D-Man in the Waters
(1989) is dedicated to Damien Acquavella, a dancer with AIDS who
was a member of the company. As Acquavella's health deteriorated, Jones
improvised ways to honor Acquavella's desire to continue to dance despite
his diagnosis. In Last Night on Earth, Jones's autobiography, Jones explains
how AIDS and dance converged in D-Man: "I promised Damien
there would be a place for him in the dance. As he could no longer walk
by the time of the debut, in 1989, I carried him on stage, offering my legs
as he executed the arm movements of what would have been the solo.
When Damien could no longer perform, I chose not to replace him in the
piece. Oddly asymmetrical groupings now mark his absence. Damien
passed in June of 1990."27 Uncle Tom's Cabin/The Promised Land (1990) included
a number of AIDS references, beginning with the title, which Zane
suggested from his hospital bed. The three-hour multimedia performance
even incorporated a religious figure from the local sponsoring community,
whom Jones would ask a series of questions ending with the provocation
"Is AIDS punishment from God?"28 This unscripted conversation
was meant to, in Jones's words, "conjure this ephemeral, unquantifiable,
potentially deadly thing called Faith."29 But it also helped set the context
for how AIDS was understood by certain communities. While none of
these works is exclusively about AIDS, each is informed by the sociohistorical
contexts, including the deeply personal experiences of Jones and
Fig. 1. Bill T. Jones in prologue to We Set Out Early... Visibility Was Poor. Photo © Johan Elbers.
his company members, of the late 198os. Jones's artistic work during this
period was at the forefront of these issues even as it meditated on broader
cross-cultural and transhistorical themes.
Although Jones had tested HIV-positive in 1985, his HIV status did
not become part of the public discourse on his work until 1990, when he
was interviewed for a cover story in the Advocate. "Somewhere in this
comfortable conversation," Jones later recalled of the interview,
I must have mentioned that I was positive-most casually, I'm sure,
because I don't think we discussed it or its ramifications during the
interview. The fact appeared, however, in the first column of this
prominent profile. I was concerned.... From then on, every review
that would once have said "Bill T. Jones, tall and black, Arnie Zane,
short and white" read "Bill T. Jones, tall, black, HIV positive." I had
to deal with it.30
Thus the disclosure of Jones's HIV status is something that he could not
fully control or determine. Having mentioned his status to a reporter in
an aside, Jones has found it presented as a major feature of his life and
work by nearly everyone who has written on him since.31 And yet despite
this unintended outing of his serostatus, Jones bravely took on the burden
of representation that came with this disclosure and with his increasing
celebrity. For many people at the time, he was the most visible person
379
Fig. 2. Members of the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Company performing in Still/Here. Left to
right: Gabri Christa, Odile Reine-Adelaide, Maya Saffrin. Photo © Beatriz Schiller.
with HIV in the performing arts. As he admits in Last Night on Earth, "I
had to deal with it."
In Still/Here, Jones combines spoken text, selected from survival
workshop dialogue and arranged by Kenneth Frazelle and Vernon Reid,
who also composed the music; images, including photos and videos of
the survival workshop participants, created by Gretchen Bender; and
movement, sometimes based on the gestural language of the participants,
that he choreographed for his dancers. Still/Here is danced by the
members of the company and not the participants from the survival
workshops (fig. 2). The choreographic language, as Jones explains, "frequently
relies upon a lone performer who is watched, touched, tracked,
or supported by the group" (fig. 3).32 At one point, at the beginning of his
process, Jones had considered disbanding his company and working
with a company of HIV-positive dancers. He decided against this idea for
two main reasons. First, the company was a way to honor the memory of
Zane; second, Jones had assembled over the years an extraordinary
group of dancers.
During its New York premiere at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, Arlene
Croce, the prominent dance critic for the New Yorker, refused to review
Still/Here but nonetheless dismissed it as "victim art" in the very pages
where a review would have run. Croce claimed that Jones "thinks that victimhood
in and of itself is sufficient to the creation of an art spectacle" and
380
Fig. 3. Members of the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Company performing in Still/Here. Left to
right: Maya Saffrin, Odile Reine-Adelaide, Gabri Christa, Daniel Russell, Rosalynde LeBlanc,
Lawrence Goldhuber, Gordon F. White (in rear), Torrin Cummings (in rear), Arthur Aviles.
Photo © Johan Elbers.
that Jones and his audiences are "co-religionists in the cult of the Self."33
She presumed that since Jones was HIV-positive, any meditation he might
have on the time-honored theme of mortality must be narrowly understood
to be autobiographical, what she deridingly terms "the cult of the
Self." Croce's polemical and dismissive misrepresentation of Still/Here
framed the national discussions of the work to such an extent that virtually
every review of the dance mentioned it. Still/Here, which I saw performed
in 1994 at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, had little relation to the victimhood
charge that Croce had imagined. Instead of representing victimhood,
the piece was a beautiful and moving meditation on mortality and the various
means by which people from diverse human backgrounds come to
terms with it. As someone who was immersed in the AIDS community, had
experienced the deaths of friends, and was witness to the challenges of
those living with HIV, including one of the participants in the survival
workshops whose image, voice, and reflections were incorporated into
Still/Here, I found the work filled with hope and danced with creative resilience.
Still/Here, as Marcia Siegel has noted, "evokes a sort of 1970s positivism,
an almost poignant faith that supportive friends and self-awareness
can help even those who are imperiled to live bravely."34
Whereas Still/Here received such unprecedented media attention for
a contemporary dance event that it catapulted Jones into the national limelight,
few people outside of the dance world are familiar with Neil Greenberg's
work. Greenberg danced with Merce Cunningham before founding
his own five-member company, Dance by Neil Greenberg, in 1987.35 Not- 381
Fig. 4. Neil Greenberg performing
in Not-About-AIDSDance.
Photo © Alice Garik.
About-AIDS-Dance (fig. 4) premiered in New York City almost six months
before Still/Here. It was performed at the Kitchen, one of New York City's
leading dance venues, from May 5 to May 8, 1994, and again, as an encore
performance, from December 13 to December 17, 1994. The New York Times
named it "one of the year's 10 best" dance events, and it received a 1995
Bessie Award for outstanding dance and performance. Not-A bout-AIDSDance
inaugurated a trilogy of pieces, including The Disco Project (1995) and
Part Three (1998), that tracks Greenberg's experience of HIV in the context
of the life changes he and his fellow company members underwent during
a four-year period. This personal information is provided by texts projected
onto the back wall of the performance space. The texts always express
Greenberg's point of view, regardless of who is dancing (fig. 5). At no
point do the dancers themselves speak. Not-About-AIDS-Dance refers to
what David Gere calls the "silent signification" that characterizes most
dances in the 1980s and early i990s: the reluctance of choreographers to
identify their work with AIDS despite the sense that the work may be
about AIDS in some way.36 Greenberg's ironic title is meant to call attention
to this phenomenon and to distance his own work from it. The title is
meant to intervene in this silence by invoking the very rhetoric that enables
it. Not-About-AIDS-Dance extends beyond this silent signification in the
dance world to comment on the cultural silence and suppression of AIDS.
The dance itself begins in silence with Greenberg paying tribute to
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About-AIDS-Dance (fig. 4) premiered in New York City almost six months
before Still/Here. It was performed at the Kitchen, one of New York City's
leading dance venues, from May 5 to May 8, 1994, and again, as an encore
performance, from December 13 to December 17,1 994. The New York Times
named it "one of the year's zo best" dance events, and it received a 1995
Bessie Award for outstanding dance and performance. Not-About-AIDSDance
inaugurated a trilogy of pieces, including The Disco Project (1995) and
Part Three (1998), that tracks Greenberg's experience of HIV in the context
of the life changes he and his fellow company members underwent during
a four-year period. This personal information is provided by texts projected
onto the back wall of the performance space. The texts always express
Greenberg's point of view, regardless of who is dancing (fig. 5). At no
point do the dancers themselves speak. Not-About-AIDS-Dance refers to
what David Gere calls the "silent signification" that characterizes most
dances in the i98os and early i99os: the reluctance of choreographers to
identify their work with AIDS despite the sense that the work may be
382
Fig. 5. "This is the song I
danced to when I broke up
with the married man. (Years
ago. Before AIDS.)" Justine
Lynch performing in The
Disco Project. Photo © Tom
Brazil.
his brother, Jon, who died of AIDS-related complications. Through projected
texts we are told, "This is the first material I made after my brother
died." Justine Lynch, one of the dancers, performs the material. The rest
of the company, which is dressed in white tank tops and shorts, quickly
joins her, and the movements are repeated in solos and quartets. The projections
introduce the company members and offer reference points for
them and for the dance. "Jo is dancing that same material again" and
"Ellen was a big pothead in high school" are among the first things we are
told. The information is generally personal and conversational. Short,
idiosyncratic fragments pulled from popular music break the silence that
forms the primary score for the dance. In another section, Greenberg incorporates
"found movements," the physical gestures he observed while
his brother was in a coma: rolled-back eyes, fingers pointing to the head,
stillness (fig. 6). He performs this section alone and without musical accompaniment.
The projections state the following:
This is what my brother Jon looked like in his coma.
He was in a coma 2 days before he died of AIDS.
I'm HIV+.
But this part of the dance isn't meant to be about me.
Later Greenberg will tell us that he is asymptomatic. But now, even
though he is memorializing his brother, he is also positioning his audience
383
Fig. 6. "This is what my
brother Jon looked like in his
coma." Neil Greenberg performing
in Not-About-AIDSDance.
Photo © Tom Brazil.
to consider his own HIV status in relation to his brother's death. Throughout
Not-About-AIDS-Dance, text projections will mention others who died
while Greenberg was creating the piece. These deaths structure and condition
the dance. The list of them seems unending:
I went away in August.
When I came back I learned Ed Hartmann and Jon Falabella had
died.
On Labor Day Richard Wolcott died.
When I came back from Richard's funeral I learned David Hagen
had died.
Within a week Donald Greenhill died.
It was quieter then for awhile.
In this section, as Leigh Witchel aptly observes, "the projections progress
faster than anywhere else in the dance, and then, like the announcement,
there is a diminuendo and it does seem quieter for a while."37 But only for
a while. Not-About-AIDS-Dance ends with text projections that inform us
of more deaths, each marking a moment in the dance's composition and
thus a moment in history: "At this point in the making of the dance my
friend Ron Vawter died." A quartet forms and then disbands from the
stage to stand at opposite ends of the performance space. The four
dancers join Greenberg, who is watching from the wings. The movement
is repeated. Another slide announces yet another death: "At this point in
the making of the dance my friend Michael Mitchell died." The quartet repeats
the choreography. Before we hear of more deaths, the dance
abruptly ends. Not-About-AIDS-Dance therefore not only memorializes
the dead but also calls attention to the relentless dying that occurred dur-
384
NOT-ABOUT-AIDS
385
ing the dance's making, between July 1993, when Jon Greenberg died, and
May 1994, when the dance premiered.
Both Still/Here and Not-About-AIDS-Dance were created and performed
in the midst of what we can only describe as the "AIDS crisis," a
period of deep skepticism about the possibility of survival, a period
marked by the continued acceleration of HIV infections and AIDS-related
deaths. Greenberg and Jones created work that reflected on mortality and
was understood at the time to be-on some level and to varying degrees-"about
AIDS." In Not-About-AIDS-Dance, Greenberg, for example,
shares his own experiences with HIV, but in Still/Here Jones does not.
While we need to consider these works in this particular cultural and historical
context, it is equally important to recognize that both works set
AIDS within a larger meditation on loss, illness, survival, and everyday
life. Still/Here, for example, is also "about" other life-threatening illnesses.
Not-About-AIDS-Dance is also "about" the various other issues, serious
and banal, facing the members of the company. (For one dancer, Christopher,
the dance is not about anything discernible. "Christopher wants his
dancing to speak for itself," we are told.) It also memorializes non-AIDSrelated
deaths that the company has experienced. These dances are at
once about AIDS and not about AIDS, insofar as they are never reducible
to, or exclusively concerned with, the AIDS crisis.
This paradox of being both about and not about AIDS becomes all
the more evident when we consider the work these choreographers created
in the end-of-AIDS or post-AIDS discursive moment. During the
1997-98 season, Jones premiered We Set Out Early... Visibility Was Poor,
and Neil Greenberg premiered Part Three.38 Unlike Jones's earlier work, We
Set Out Early contains no text, image, or narrative to organize its meaning.
The seventy-minute dance is performed in three sections; the music is by
Stravinsky, Cage, and the contemporary Latvian composer Peteris Vasks.
Much has been said of the work's abstractness; given Jones's emphatic addressing
of social issues previously, his reluctance to provide a "message"
here strikes many critics as noteworthy. Indeed, the work is said to be not
only abstract but "non-linear, with little narrative structure"; it "luxuriates
in the freedom of pure movement"; Jones, it seems, "is tired of talking."39
Jones himself admits that the piece "started with the music, not from
an idea I wanted to express." "I've been talked about so much," he explains.
"It's difficult for many journalists to talk about the work because
they're so busy talking about me. I made a work I really did not want to
have to talk about; I truly wanted it to be a theatrical, visual experience."40
Jones does not imply that AIDS is over simply because he does not speak
about it in We Set Out Early. Nor are his comments a disavowal of AIDS.
We Set Out Early, unlike earlier work that secured Jones's celebrity, does
not address social or cultural concerns. In fact, one might even argue that
his celebrity-which both arises from and exceeds his race, sexuality, and
serostatus-now enables him to create work that is not about these issues.
In the context of AIDS, Jones's much publicized HIV-identity serves as a
precondition for a post-AIDS piece of work.
CRITICAL THEORY AND PERFORMANCE
386
While We Set Out Early may not address a particular social subject,
Jones has plenty to say about this piece. He recognizes that dance communicates
cultural meaning and that therefore We Set Out Early still makes a
social statement. "The social messages are there, yes, but they are not
overt," Jones explains. The piece "is about how we live and if there is subversion
in it, it's by the example of the company, which is a cast of nations,
touching each other, celebrating our bodies and humanity through movement."41
For Jones, the message is to be found in the image of the performing
bodies of the dancers.
Given Jones's own views of We Set Out Early, I find his discussions of
the artistic process for it especially interesting. Jones explains that he
learned from the participants in the survival workshops preparatory to
Still/Here that the key to survival is to identify what matters most to you
and then give yourself over to it. For Jones, what mattered was dance. "I
looked around and, lo and behold, I was so glad to find out that I really
loved dancing, as a primary art form. OK, I would give myself to that.
Don't talk about things, because we can dance, we can see who you are,
your race, your sexuality, what you're afraid of."42 Since Still/Here Jones
has become interested in finding a personal dance vocabulary; he works
with Janet Wong, his rehearsal director, to codify his movements so that
they can be learned by the company. We Set Out Early, for example, was
created first through the music: "The music became the map and I followed
the map with my body and the company followed my body."43 The
creative process began in the studio with Jones dancing to the Stravinsky
score. Jones videotaped himself and then studied his movement with
Wong. Together they decided which sections worked. Wong then learned
the sections herself and taught the movements back to Jones and to the tenmember
company. In Jones's words: "I start out alone, approaching the
music purely as rhythm and texture. I work with Janet, then the company
comes into it, and I respond to their personalities and shapes.... I choose
and edit, but I also listen and see what people naturally give back."44
Throughout this process Jones's body is positioned as the exemplary
body, whose movements are studied, rehearsed, and then performed by
the other dancers. His body is the filter through which the dance is made.
Because Jones's body, like all bodies, is marked by race, gender, age, sexuality,
and serostatus, and other vectors of identity, all of which he has explicitly
addressed in much of his earlier work, his body helps make the
meaning of the dance too. In the end, however, this is not to say that We
Set Out Early is about Bill T. Jones. Rather Jones's material body, along
with the artistic body of his work, helps organize our responses to the
dance. Whether Jones is engaged in an explicit production of meaning (as
in Still/Here, which is interspersed with video, voice-over, and Jones's
public statements about the survival workshops), or in a kind of resistance
to meaning (as in We Set Out Early, in which there is no narrative or
text to provide the dance with an anticipated social message; Jones's own
statements about the piece concern artistic process almost exclusively),
the meanings of Still/Here and We Set Out Early are shaped in part by his
NOT-ABOUT-AIDS
387
artistic career. In other words, the history of his work's production and reception
informs how we think about his choreography in the present. We
Set Out Early cannot but signify in relation to Still/Here and its reception.
Yet this history should not completely determine our understanding of
Jones's work. In short, it is not productive to reduce his dance to the issue
of identity even if it is at the heart of many of his earlier works.
Jones himself does not dance in We Set Out Early. (He did not dance
in Still/Here either.) However, when I saw it performed in Los Angeles in
1998, he performed a short solo as a prologue to the evening's program.
Dancing to the third movement of Beethoven's String Quartet no. 16,
Jones demonstrated with exuberant physicality and grace what is possible
for artists with HIV. The dance was not about AIDS, but if it had anything
to tell us about AIDS, it was, to paraphrase Jones's own words, by the example
of the dancer celebrating his body and humanity through movement.
Jones, we might say, is still here.
If Jones is often read in the context of AIDS regardless of what his
work might actually say about it, Neil Greenberg, whose career has generated
less national media attention, remains less marked by his serostatus.
But instead of obscuring his serostatus, Greenberg continues to find it
politically necessary and artistically useful to mark explicitly his relationship
to AIDS. He also asks us to consider each installment of his trilogy in
relation to the previous ones and to work that predates the trilogy. His
dancers perform sections of his earlier works in the newer pieces and inform
us in text projections that he is doing it. Thus the work builds meaning
through self-referential systems that reflect on the physical process of
Greenberg's HIV status and the artistic process of his choreography. The
last dance of his trilogy is itself composed of three parts. In fact, Greenberg
calls the dance Part Three and gives each section a subtitle: Part Three
(My Fair Lady), Part Three (Judy Garland), and Part Three (Luck). Part Three
(My Fair Lady) incorporates music by Lerner and Loewe from the film
soundtrack as well as traces of music from Jimmy Somerville and the
Communards, and from Judy Garland (fig. 7). Part Three (Judy Garland) includes
musical selections from Garland's career, including "Somewhere
Over the Rainbow." Part Three (Luck) is danced without musical accompaniment
and is the only section of Part Three with projected texts.
In Part Three (Luck), the text projections bring the lives of the company
since The Disco Project up to date. We learn, for example, that "Ellen
is moving to L.A." and "Justine now has a boyfriend." Greenberg's own
updates are presented during his three solos. In "Neil's Solo 1 of 3," we
learn that he is on protease inhibitors: "I started taking the pills last February";
"by March, my 'viral load' tested undetectable." From this moment
on, dance issues and health issues intersect.45 Consider, for example,
the full text projections in "Neil's Solo 3 of 3":
I was sick in October.
Unexplained high fevers that sent me into the hospital
Right when we were to start work on this dance.
Fig. 7. Dance by Neil Greenberg's Part Three (My Fair Lady). Left to right:
Christopher Batenhorst, Neil Greenberg, Paige Martin. Photo © Tom Brazil.
I had a complete recovery but it was scary.
I think it was just the flu.
Whatever.
We lost some rehearsal time.
As we see in Not-About-AIDS-Dance, when the dance is about AIDS, it is
also about dance and its production. In Greenberg's trilogy, AIDS is not
just a theme; it is a constraint placed on the dance itself. It informs and
conditions the process of the dance from its creation, its rehearsal, and its
performance.46
Greenberg's insistence that we not lose sight of his HIV status, or of
the way in which it continues to inform his choreography, is a comment
on the cultural tendency to relegate AIDS to the margins of cultural inquiry
and expression. Like the trilogy as a whole, Part Three (Luck) makes
public what is assumed to be private. It brings into the public sphere a
discourse for AIDS that is not about closure or finality or "the end of
AIDS" but is about process, including the changing of our understanding
of AIDS. Unlike the first two dances in the trilogy, Part Three (Luck) does
not address others with HIV. Although deeply personal, it is not meant to
be a universalizing claim for these new treatments. Greenberg offers the
following insight:
I had to make a new piece, because I had to update the audience. In
Not-About-AIDS-Dance, I enacted my brother's death by showing
what he looked like in a coma. By doing so, I implicitly asked the au-
388
NOT-ABOUT-AIDS
389
dience to imagine my dying of AIDS. Now I'm on the new drugs, my
viral load is undetectable. I've told my parents and the company, and
I feel I have to tell the audience. If I asked the audience to get involved
with me, I have a responsibility not just to leave them dangling.47
Part Three (Luck) also references Greenberg's sense of loss in the face of the
company's dispersal. (Two of the original dancers, whose lives are also
documented in the trilogy, have moved on to other projects.) Greenberg
considers it unlikely that the complete trilogy will be performed again.
"The year I made Not-About-AIDS-Dance, I wanted to make that moment
stand still," he explains in the context of the trilogy's final performance in
the spring of 1998; "[In Part Three (Luck)] I had to deal with the emotional
trauma of not being able to hold onto the moment anymore."48 The trilogy
memorializes Greenberg's brother, Jon; his lover, Frank; and many of his
friends who died during the period in which the dances were made. It
also marks the dramatic shifts that the new drug therapies have effected
for many people in the United States. At the same time, it counters the
"not-about-AIDS" discourse that characterizes contemporary gay culture.
Greenberg's work is especially important in helping us think about how
to address both the experience of AIDS and its erasure from the cultural
landscape of gay and lesbian politics. In fact, Not-About-AIDS-Dance, and
the trilogy it launches, forces that erasure into visibility within the space
of performance. Greenberg refuses to normalize AIDS or to imagine it as
"over"; he seeks instead a new creative vocabulary with which to address
the continuing challenges of living with HIV.49
The final section of the last dance in the complete trilogy is subtitled
Luck because, as Greenberg states, "I have been lucky. For some reason the
virus in my body didn't kill me before these new drugs came along, so
that's luck. Or is it? To me, dancing is about delving into such questions."50
Greenberg's comment on dance call attention to the role that the
performing arts can continue to play in helping us think through the challenges
of AIDS. Delving into the complex and challenging questions we
face, as Greenberg reminds us, is not the exclusive domain of writers, activists,
cultural analysts, or scholars. And the forces that perpetuate this
divide between writers and performers and that set up a binary between
theorists and artists need to be aggressively challenged. The arts play a
critical role in the culture and, in the case of AIDS, sometimes provide the
means to move through the impasse of stalled rhetoric and political confusion.
As we have seen, Greenberg and Jones show us ways to move forward,
both in our recognition of the important historical shifts and medical
breakthroughs concerning HIV/AIDS, and in our need to continue to
focus our energies on AIDS. These works were among the first successful
attempts to think through an idea of change without lapsing into an endof-AIDS
discourse premised on either disregard or disavowal. These choreographers
offer ways of moving through the world without succumbing
to the post-AIDS sentiments surfacing in the late 1990s and shaping
queer culture in the early twenty-first century.
CRITICAL THEORY AND PERFORMANCE
390
NOTES
My thanks to the editors, Janelle G. Reinelt and Joseph R. Roach, for sustained engagement
with my work and career. Thanks also to Carolyn Dinshaw, David
Halperin, Viet Nguyen, and Richard Meyer for reading and commenting on earlier
drafts of this chapter. My thanks to Neil Greenberg and Bill T. Jones for their
work and for the critical conversations we had about it.
1. Andrew Sullivan, "When AIDS Ends," New York Times Magazine, November
10, 1996, 1. The title of Sullivan's essay shifts from the magazine's cover title,
"When AIDS Ends," to an internal publication title, "When Plagues End: Notes on
the Twilight of an Epidemic." Further confusion results from the magazine's cover
graphic, which highlights Sullivan's text and the phrase "the end of AIDS." Chip
Kidd, who designed the cover, explains that "the prose was so strong that it became
key." (Janet Froelich, "Cover Boy: Interview with Chip Kidd," New York
Times Magazine, November 1o, 1996, 51.) My reference to Sullivan's essay follows
the magazine's cover title and byline "'When AIDS Ends' By Andrew Sullivan."
For a full discussion of this image and Sullivan's essay, see Phillip Brian Harper,
"Gay Male Identities, Personal Privacy, and Relations of Public Exchange: Notes
on Directions for Queer Critique," Social Text 52-53 (1997): 5-29. Eric Rofes also
discusses Sullivan's essay and the discrepancies in its title in Dry Bones Breathe:
Post-AIDS Identities and Cultures (Binghamton, N.Y.: Harrington Park Press, 1998).
Rofes points out that yet another phrase-"After AIDS"-is used in the layout of
the printed pages of the essay. Rofes also includes a discussion of Newsweek's "The
End of AIDS?" cover image and article and responses to these essays from gay and
lesbian writers whom I do not discuss in this essay.
2. See Rofes, Dry Bones Breathe. This book is marked by a vision of gay culture
that is much more expansive than that of most contemporary gay male commentators.
He considers the experiences of many of those who are often left out of the
profile of what passes for gay male community: queer youth and queer elders,
gays who live outside of urban centers, and gay men of color.
3. Michelangelo Signorile, "641,086 & Counting," Out, September 1998, 72.
4. Larry Kramer, "1,112 and Counting," New York Native, March 14-27, 1983.
See also Kramer's own account of this essay in Reports from the Holocaust: The Making
of an AIDS Activist (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1989).
5. Signorile, "641,086 & Counting," 188.
6. While fear might force people to pay attention to AIDS in the short run, it
hasn't been very successful as the basis for an HIV prevention campaign (see Walt
Odets, In the Shadow of the Epidemic [Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1995]).
Nevertheless, Signorile argues for the return of fear in a prevention campaign directed
at gay men in "Don't Fear the Fear," Advocate 13 (1999): 51-55.
7. Harper, "Gay Male Identities," 8. But see also Cathy Cohen's important book
The Boundaries of Blackness: AIDS and the Breakdown of Black Politics (Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 1999), in which she argues that with the arrival of protease
inhibitors a new racist discourse has emerged in the popular media around the
question of access: "In the case of reports on protease inhibitors, a troubling discourse
has already developed. It seems that protease inhibitor therapies require
great discipline, since a patient's medication must be taken, in some cases, every
eight hours on an empty stomach. Further, without strict adherence to the defined
regime with regard to the medication, it is possible that a virus resistant to these
drugs might develop and spread. Thus the question of which patients or people
with AIDS have 'enough discipline' to receive these new therapies is now a central
NOT-ABOUT-AIDS
391
part of a new generation of AIDS reporting. Journalists are openly discussing and
writing about who should be allowed such treatment" (184).
8. Harper, "Gay Male Identities," 8.
9. In Love Undetectable, Sullivan revisits his earlier essay, admitting that the
hostile public response from many gay men "took my breath away." In an effort
to clarify his claims, Sullivan writes: "But this end, of course, was laden with paradox.
As the plague relented in one world, it was busy redoubling its might in another,
in countries far away, and against people who had nothing with which to
counter it." (See Sullivan, Love Undetectable: Notes on Friendship, Sex, and Survival
[New York: Knopf, 1998], 33.)
so. Rofes, Dry Bones Breathe, 72.
11. Harper, "Gay Male Identities," 27.
12. Paula A. Treichler, How to Have Theory in an Epidemic: Cultural Chronicles of
AIDS (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1999).
13. Mario Cooper, "Two Nations Under Plague," POZ, January 1999, 20.
14. Cohen, The Boundaries of Blackness, 113.
15. Elizabeth Shogren, "Clinton to Boost Minority AIDS Funding," Los Angeles
Times, October 28, 1998, A9.
16. See Liz Galst, "Check in the Mail?" POZ, December 1998, 42. Galst provides
accounts from various ASOs on the decline in AIDS philanthropy.
17. Lawrence O. Gostin, director of Georgetown University/Johns Hopkins
University Program on Law and Public Health and a member of the advisory
committee of the CDC, as quoted in Lynda Richardson, "Wave of Laws Aimed at
People with HIV," New York Times, September 25, 1998, Al.
18. Sean Strub, "S.O.S.," POZ, December 1998, 13.
19. The cultural repercussions of this shift in the lesbian and gay movement as
it relates to gay marriage are detailed by Michael Warner, for whom the most urgent
concerns include attacks on queer sexual culture and the isolation of queer
counterpublics from "national organizations, magazines, and publics." Warner
ends his essay with the claim that "any argument for gay marriage requires an intensified
concern for what is thrown into its shadow" ("Normal and Normaller:
Beyond Gay Marriage," GLQ 5 [1999]: 159). AIDS, I argue, is one of the issues
thrown into this shadow.
20. David Roman, Acts of Intervention: Performance, Gay Culture, and AIDS
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998).
21. See, for example, Jane Desmond, "Embodying Difference: Issues in Dance
and Cultural Studies," in Meaning in Motion: New Cultural Studies of Dance, ed. Jane
Desmond (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1997), as well as the important
essays in that volume by Susan Leigh Foster, Norman Bryson, and Randy Martin,
each of whom argues the critical interdisciplinarity possibilities of dance studies.
See also Everynight Life: Culture and Dance in Latin/o America, ed. Celeste Fraser
Delgado and Jose Mufioz (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1997); and Susan
Leigh Foster, ed., Choreographing History (Bloomington: Indiana University Press,
1995).
22. Alberto Sandoval and I write on this process in "Caught in the Web: Latinidad,
AIDS, and Allegory in Kiss of the Spider Woman, the Musical," in American
Literature 67, no. 3 (1995): 553-85
23. My discussion of these works is based in part on performances I saw of
Still/Here in 1994 at the Brooklyn Academy of Music and of Not-About-AIDS-Dance
in 1994 at the Kitchen in New York City. I also saw Dance by Neil Greenberg's The
Disco Project at Highways Performance Space in Santa Monica in 1995 and his
CRITICAL THEORY AND PERFORMANCE
392
complete trilogy, comprising these two works and Part Three, at Playhouse 91 in
New York City in 1998. I saw Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company perform
We Set Out Early... Visibility Was Poor at Royce Hall in Los Angeles in 1998. I am
indebted to the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company for photographs and
press packets and to Dance by Neil Greenberg for photographs, videos, and press
packets.
24. Bill T. Jones with Peggy Gillespie, Last Night on Earth (New York: Pantheon,
1995), 252.
25. From the promotional material supplied by the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane
Dance Company.
26. Identity issues, as Gay Morris points out, have been evident throughout
Jones's career. "What He Called Himself: Issues of Identity in Early Dances by Bill
T. Jones," in Dancing Desires, ed. Jane Desmond (Madison: University of Wisconsin
Press, 2000).
27. Jones, Last Night on Earth, 194.
28. Uncle Tom's Cabin/The Promised Land was performed in over thirty-five
cities, and Jones was never quite sure how these questions would be answered in
advance.
29. Jones, Last Night on Earth, 220.
30. Jones, Last Night on Earth, 250. The actual Advocate quote reads as follows:
"Even now, I would like to have straight men in my company, but I worry if I
could trust them. There's a stigma associated with our company because someone
in it died of AIDS and because I'm HIV-positive. I want to get on with my life and
deal with my artistic collaborators, but I still expect someone to scorn me. I find
that most people are curious to know what AIDS is like, but they are scared too."
Douglas Sadownick, "The Dancer Speaks Out," Advocate, February 27, 1990, 38.
31. Some critics have gone so far as to suggest that Jones's artistic success is
due to his HIV status and race. In a New Yorker profile, Henry Louis Gates Jr.
quotes a critic who states that "the reason he's getting so many awards so soon is
that people aren't gambling on his surviving: they're giving it to him now." Gates
reports, "It is clearly a commonplace, albeit usually an unspoken one, that the fact
that Jones is both HIV-positive and black has more than a little to do with his having
received so many laurels so early in his career." "The Body Politic," New
Yorker, November 28, 1994, 124. By now the irony of these claims is self-evident. In
1994, however, they conveyed the sense of urgency surrounding HIV/AIDS, even
if the claim about Jones's success makes little sense. If HIV-positive black gay
artists are the new darlings of the elite media, how is it that no other artists are
named in Gates's essay or in the larger cultural discourse of the period? Leaving
aside the implications of tokenism, such comments displace attention from the
artistic work and set up Jones-and other artists with HIV-as undeserving of
whatever critical acclaim they may receive.
32. Jones, Last Night on Earth, 259.
33. Arlene Croce, "A Critic at Bay: Discussing the Undiscussable," New Yorker,
December 26, 1994, 54-60. For responses to Croce's condemning rhetoric, see
Richard Goldstein, "The Croce Criterion," Village Voice, January 3, 1995, 8; Deborah
Jowitt, "Critic as Victim," Village Voice, January 10, 1995, 67; Frank Rich,
"Dance of Death," New York Times, January 8, 1995, Ai9; and, last but not least, letters
from Tony Kushner, bell hooks, and others published in New Yorker itself, January
30, 1995, 10-13. For a context for which to place Still/Here, see my collaboration
with Tim Miller, "Preaching to the Converted," Theatre Journal 47, no. 2 (1995):
169-88. The bibliography on Bill T. Jones is impressive. For the dance context, see
NOT-ABOUT-AIDS
393
Marcia B. Siegel, "Virtual Criticism and the Dance of Death," in The Ends of Performance,
ed. Peggy Phelan and Jill Lane (New York: New York University Press,
1997); Jennifer Brody, "Opening Sequences," in Desmond, Dancing Desires; and
Morris, "What He Called Himself." For studies that place Jones's work in African
American cultural contexts, see Maurice Wallace, "The Autochoreography of an
Ex-Snow Queen: Dance, Desire, and the Black Masculine in Melvin Dixon's Vanishing
Rooms," in Novel-Gazing: Queer Readings in Fiction, ed. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick
(Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1997); and Sharon Holland Raising
the Dead: Readings of Death and (Black) Subjectivity (Durham, N.C.: Duke University
Press, 2000).
34. Siegel, "Virtual Criticism," 249.
35. For an excellent introduction to Neil Greenberg's career see Rick Whitaker
and Don Daniels, "A Conversation with Neil Greenberg," Ballet Review, Spring
1997, 1-12.
36. David Gere, "How to Make Dance During an Epidemic," Ph.D. diss., University
of California, Riverside, 1998.
37. Leigh Witchel, "Neil Greenberg's Trilogy: A Survival's Tale," Ballet Review,
Fall 1998.
38. Both choreographers remain prolific. Shortly after the premier of Part
Three, Greenberg choreographed for Mikhail Baryshnikov's White Oak Dance Project
and premiered This Is What Happened, a dance-noir trio, set to Hitchcock film
music by Bernard Herrmann at New York's PS 122 in the spring of 1999. Soon after
We Set Out Early, Jones collaborated with Jessye Norman in How! Do! We! Do! as
part of the New Visions series produced by New York's Lincoln Center in the
summer of 1999, and he premiered Out Some Place, a full company dance, at the
American Dance Festival in Durham, North Carolina. Both Jones and Greenberg
danced at these events. Both artists continue to premier new work throughout the
United States and abroad.
39. Karen Campbell, "Dance: Choreographer Jones Sheds New Light On 'Visibility,'"
Boston Herald, May 31, 1998, 39; Lewis Segal, "Clarity of Vision in Visibility
was Poor," Los Angeles Times, May 11, 1998, F3; Elizabeth Zimmer, "The Word From
Bill T. Jones: He's Moving Beyond Words," New York Times, October 4, 1998, sec. 2,
p. 12.
40. Zimmer, "Word From Jones," 12.
41. Rohan Preston, "Bill T.'s Exultant Adventure," Minneapolis Star Tribune,
September 25, 1998, Ei.
42. Jennifer Fisher, "Q & A: Bill T. Jones; Moved To Seek A Connection," Los
Angeles Times, May 6, 1998, F1.
43. Preston, "Bill T.'s Exultant Adventure," E1.
44. Fisher, "Q & A," F1.
45. AIDS is not the only topic that Greenberg addresses in his solos. The second
solo, for example, announces, "Last summer I fell in love."
46. Greenberg has explained to me that he was running a fever during the final
performances of the trilogy in 1998.
47. Ann Daly, "A Chronicle Faces Death and Celebrates Life," New York Times,
March 29, 1998, sec. 2, p. 52.
48. Daly, "A Chronicle Faces Death," 52
49. Others in the performing arts are also exploring this new creative vocabulary.
While this essay is specifically concerned with only two artists, Jones and
Greenberg, I do not mean to present them as the norm in terms of their health issues
or artistic concerns or even their public responses to AIDS. Nor do I intend to
CRITICAL THEORY AND PERFORMANCE
394
position them against each other, as if the response of one were to be valued over
that of the other. Instead, I am interested in the work that artists with HIV are creating.
I have written on other recent work by artists in "On the Unfashionability of
AIDS-Arts Today," Artery: The AIDS-Arts Forum, an electronic journal available at
http://www.artistswithaids.org/artery/symposium/symposium_roman.html.
I also discuss another dancer-choreographer, Paul Timothy Diaz, whose work
Dia de los vivos (1996) both conjures and revises traditional Day of the Dead rituals,
in my essay "Latino Performance and Identity," Aztlan 22 (1997): 151-68. For a
full-scale study of AIDS and performance, see my book Acts of Intervention; for a
full-scale study of AIDS and dance see Gere, "How to Make Dance." Finally, for
new literature on women and AIDS see the excellent anthology Gendered Epidemic:
Representations of Women in the Age of AIDS, ed. Nancy L. Roth and Katie Hogan
(New York: Routledge, 1998).
50. Mike Steele, "Prolific Dancer Greenberg Comes With New Work," Minneapolis
Star Tribune, March 1, 1998, F1.
Psychoanalysis
Psychoanalytic theory and criticism have always been held suspect by a
substantial number of scholars and artists. The reasons for this resistance
are widespread, reaching back to an earlier era in the 1950s when Freudian
"readings" seemed reductive or even absurd (penis envy always did have
a hard time sounding credible), or to the 1970s humanistic therapy trends
of "primal therapy," Esalen Institute encounter weekends, and perhaps the
most well-known of them all, Eric Berne's Transactional Analysis. Some of
us, myself included, benefited in a number of ways from this culture, but
today it can bring smiles of embarrassment to those old enough to remember
those "put your mother in the chair" gestalt exercises.
There were, of course, powerful thinkers and practitioners who
were being taken very seriously as they recast their field: R.D. Laing, Wilhelm
Reich, and most influentially, Jacques Lacan. Their intellectual projects
were not laughable, although some thought them extreme. Feminists
challenged the misogyny that seemed so long embedded in the history of
psychoanalysis, and gay folks seldom found any psychoanalytic theory
that could fit or was helpful. Still, in 1973 Juliet Mitchell's Psychoanalysis
and Feminism urged women to see that "psychoanalysis is not a recommendation
for a patriarchical society, but an analysis of one. If we are interested
in understanding and challenging the oppression of women," she
wrote, "we cannot afford to neglect it."'
For theater scholars, it would seem that some form of psychoanalytic
thinking is difficult to avoid. Acting theories often borrow or rework
notions of emotional memory, unconscious repressions, psychic identifications
and substitutions, and many other traditional psychoanalytic categories.
Yet here too, as Anthony Kubiak has pointed out, the use of psychoanalysis
as an analytic tool "will always raise eyebrows," either because
it is presumed ahistorical or because of discomfort with the key concept of
the unconscious.2 Yet performance brings the individual and the social together
in its staging of symbolic repetitions. As both Kubiak and Herbert
Blau point out, "what is 'really' happening is never the substance of what
I am 'really' seeing. It is in this sense that we say theater always occurs elsewhere."3
Thus the scene seen is usually a gesture toward a scene unseen,
but implied, prescient but not present. For Blau, "There is a certain kind of
395
CRITICAL THEORY AND PERFORMANCE
396
thinking that I associate with the thought of the theatre . . . the kind of
thought that is deliberately, even relentlessly, subjunctive and provisional
. . . trying out an idea, taking it back again. . . putting it up for
grabs in the exhaustive play of perception that, at some limit approaching
meaning, always seems to escape, thus keeping meaning alive."4
Through the 1990s, a growing body of work has countered the fear
of ahistoricity and reworked Freud and Lacan for poststructuralist and
postmodernist purposes-and also sometimes for political purposes.
Feminists, queers, and people of color have developed hybrid theories of
subject formation, subjection, abjection, and resistance. Theater historians
have sometimes followed Kubiak's path toward historical psychoanalytic
readings: "I believe historical knowledge can be had, but following R. G.
Collingwood and Hayden White, I also believe any reading of history involves
rereading the fantasy that structures the historical narrative."5
Psychoanalysis, then, grew in its usefulness as it seemed to provide
tools to probe the elusive, receding notions of Reality and the Subject that
turned especially suspect in the theatrical world of simulacra and mediatized
spectacles. Perhaps because performance, directly involves corporeal
individuals breathing, thinking, speaking, moving in front of other
similar organisms, intimate questions of human behavior have always
been central to performance. This "intimate geography" of the self concerns
interior private experience, conscious and unconscious desires, expressions,
significations. The attempt to get outside of the ongoing
process of this interior living in order to see and understand how it happens
constitutes a metatheatrics of everyday life: trying to see the invisible,
to make present what seems to be eternal absence, to affirm what
may be undecidable. In life (perhaps in therapy) as in art (perhaps on
stage), there is a desire for interpretation, for discernment. Freud, limited
by his gender and his late early twentieth-century assumptions about science,
nevertheless began to probe the nature of human consciousness and
this intimate geography.6
Freud viewed human life as a materially grounded struggle to ensure
survival. The pleasure principle, in dialectical relationship with the
reality principle, compels individuals to forgo personal gratification in
order to obtain other goals, ultimately connected with survival. If one denies
or delays gratification too often or too systematically, neurosis ensues.
Sometimes, however, a creative tension comes from this displacement
of psychic energy-a creative tension that may produce works of
art, knowledge, civilization itself.
From many perspectives, human beings are divided within themselves.
Freud divided the subject into unconscious and preconscious in
The Interpretation of Dreams (1900) and into id, ego, and superego in his
later work (e.g., New Introductory Lectures [1933]). For the earlier Freud the
unconscious was the seat of primary processes seeking gratification in the
most direct way possible, while the secondary processes of the preconscious
mediated and delayed gratification, responding to cultural determinants
by insisting on circuitous ways of achieving pleasure. Since the
PSYCHOANALYSIS
397
two reacted to one another, the unconscious as well as the preconscious
(and of course the conscious) was materially grounded in culture. In his
later work Freud tended to stress the overlap between conscious and preconscious
and to describe the id as pure drive for pleasure, uncontrolled
by cultural prohibition. The ego is the seat of adjustment to the reality
principle, and the superego is a kind of bank of repressions and taboos
that also functions as an image of the ideal other, usually based on the father.
The preconscious and the ego (and in earlier Freud the unconscious)
are engaged in producing symbolic activities such as sublimation, displacement,
and dreamwork, all aimed at synthetic pleasures when direct
pleasures are forbidden.
According to Freud we have certain basic needs that are mediated by
our dependence on a "family" who meets these needs in infancy; enter the
oedipal crisis. Since children are learning language at about the same time
that they discover sexual difference, sexuality and language become intertwined.
The child must learn how to negotiate the desire for the mother
(source of direct pleasure, e.g., the breast) over and against the authority of
the father. Simultaneously, he or she must learn the symbolic order, the determinate
network of social roles that are legitimated by society and authorized
by the father. Repression of desire is thus the price for successful
socialization.
While this semiotization of the psyche was only implicit in Freud,
Jacques Lacan significantly modified the intimate geography under discussion
through his insistence that the unconscious is structured like a language.7
Bringing a semiotic and an anthropological analysis to traditional
Freudian categories, he saw that sublimation, transference, and dreamwork
were all aspects of signification. In addition, Lacan also brings to
bear the marks of the existential thinkers in France who wrote so prolifically
about human alienation. Freud, while explaining that human beings
did not have access to all parts of their "selves," was still not given to ruminating
on the dark night of the alienated soul who wished to recover
and become congruent with the en soi but who was condemned to the positioning
knowledge only of the pour soi. I am referring to Jean-Paul
Sartre's distinction between the in-itself, that essence of self which is inert,
unknowable, only definitive at death, and the for-itself, which is basically
consciousness, a transparent contentless self that seeks to "know" the initself
in order to be whole. This notion from Being and Nothingness seems to
brood over certain aspects of the psychoanalytic project as configured as
lack by Lacan, intensifying the connotations of loneliness and loss.8
Psychoanalysis provides a dramatic scenario for the subject, and
both Freud and Lacan figure it as a journey that leads to differentiation:
first of self from other, then of male from female; finally the self joins sociality,
becoming again connected to a social body while at the same time
retaining a fundamental difference from it.
In a way, all psychoanalytic narratives are romantic; they are based
on nostalgia for a prior state of bliss-connectedness, wholeness, undifferentiation-which
birth inevitably interrupts. The path of human life is
CRITICAL THEORY AND PERFORMANCE
398
toward ever more acute detachment from this primordial experience of
unity. The infant first feels connected to the mother's body and to all objects
in its environment, then gradually comes to recognize the difference
between itself and Other, while also having its body colonized into territories
or zones of various (cultural) functions; pleasure zones, to be sure,
but here, not there, and thus already within a regulating economy, which
will also teach "so much," not more, and now, not then. Achieving consciousness
is itself possible only when accompanied by a loss of fundamental
self-knowledge. One enters language and conceptual categories
only by forfeiting direct contact with internal needs and drives. Selfknowledge
is bartered for social knowledge, and social knowledge is always
coercive.
For Lacan, transcending Freud, the oedipal crisis is not just a crisis
of the body; it is refigured as a social crisis of language acquisition. The
fear of castration is not just the fear of losing or lacking the male appendage;
it is the fear of not having the power to participate in the maledetermined
logic of signification. The phallus, symbol of this ruling order
rather than of the physical penis, is the sign of the paternal realm of agential
activity, which conforms to the law of the Name of the Father, to use
Luce Irigaray's terminology.9 Thus, the biological and familial relations of
the child to its world become intimately tied to the sociality of which he
or she is an inevitable effect. The conflation of physical and familial with
social and juridical produces the intimate geography of the self, a geography
of inner splintering and outer alienation.
For female subjects this narrative is obviously especially distressing.
Since the Symbolic Order into which human beings are inducted is a phallocratic
one, women cannot really enter discourse. Irigaray, one of Lacan's
students and an important feminist critic, writes that "the feminine occurs
only within models and laws devised by male subjects. Which implies that
there are not really two sexes, but only one. A single practice and representation
of the sexual.., this model, a phallic one, shares the values promulgated
by patriarchal society and culture, values inscribed in the philosophical
corpus: property, production, order, form, unity, visibility . . . and
erection."10 For male subjects there is some sorrow in the separation of
internal knowledge from social knowledge at the stage of language acquisition/oedipalization,
but for female subjects there seems to be only exclusion
from the symbolic order: castration comes home with new meaning
what is lacked is the means to signify. We will come back to this dilemma
after examining a particularly suggestive aspect of Lacan's psychoanalytic
account of the subject.
The "mirror stage" might be seen as one of the Lacanian enhancements
of Freud which is especially useful for performance theory. Here
the individual child first "sees" his image outside of himself and identifies
this "picture" of a unified self as itself (always "his" with Lacan). It is,
however, utterly Other, an ideal self, a culturally constituted self (since by
now perception too has been conditioned). The child will henceforward
desire to recapture and to be congruent with this image of self, will also
PSYCHOANALYSIS
399
mourn for the lost self, which is forever absent. While this "loss" is not the
primordial loss (which is the moment of sexual differentiation in the
womb, when the child is unable to "be" both female and male), it is a central
experience of self-alienation and also of desire for the Other, even at
the same time that this Other is a version of the self.
This notion of the mirror stage has been especially useful for theater
studies because of the analogy between it and the mimetic mirror of the
stage, which reflects representations of the self and its world. The social
construction of the representations leaves no doubt that the reflection in
the stage mirror is also Other, not identical to any viewing selves, and not
"accurate" about any so-called human nature but, rather, a socio-cultural
construct of ideal images. Besides demystifying the nature of such representation,
however, Lacan provides an explanation of why spectators are
in thrall to these representations, why their desiring apparatus is in motion
each time a stage mirror simulates this experience. Many of the basic theoretical
questions of dramatic theory touch on this psychological process:
the role and purpose of aesthetic experience, the Aristotelian notion of
catharsis (what happens to spectators when they view), the Platonic/Aristotelian
debates about the danger/good of mimesis, the question of presence
in acting theory (or, more historically, the association between the
character of the actor and the character of the play), the modern discourse
on the role of empathy, and the benefits of alienation in receiving representation.
All these topics can be seen as intimately linked to the paradigm of
the mirror stage, and, while psychoanalysis provides other pertinent areas
of investigation for performance theory, this section concentrates its major
focus on the issue of identification and its role in subjectification.
There is much more productive work in this area than what we have
been able to present here.11 Especially important is Jose Mufoz's theorization
of "disidentification" as a refusal of negative representations by "rehabilitating"
these images as a site of resistance and revaluation, while not
discounting their liability or history. Developing his notions in the tradition
of Freud but in dialogue with other theorists such as Eve Sedgwick, Michel
Pecheux and Judith Butler, he strikes a decidedly materialist note (see After
Marx on Althusser and interpellation), proposing that queers of color, particularly,
can use disidentification as a strategy to work on and against
dominant ideology: "Instead of buckling under the pressures of dominant
ideology (identification, assimilation) or attempting to break free of its inescapable
sphere (counteridentification, utopianism), this 'working on and
against' is a strategy that tries to transform a cultural logic from within, always
laboring to enact permanent structural change while at the same time
valuing the importance of local or everyday struggles of resistance."12
Whether with Elin Diamond one theorizes paths of identification that
through destabilizing an "I" can produce a "we" or even a productive contradictory
dissonance, or with Muffoz, concentrates on transforming the
terms of the identification through "working on and against" the meanings
of the first term, theater and performance scholars have politicized mimesis
and its effects.
CRITICAL THEORY AND PERFORMANCE
4oo00
The essays collected here share three features crucial to a productive
use of psychoanalytic theory for performance hermeneutics. They connect
the internal psychic processes of subject formation and modification to social,
material reality, and insist on reading classic texts by Freud, Lacan,
Irigaray, and Kristeva in support of this fundamental presupposition
about the material and historical foundations of psychic life. Second, they
each offer accounts of identification as sources of healing and expansion
for women-rather than as sources of violence, obliteration, or ventriloquy
(being taken over, penetrated and occupied). Third, they insist on the
connections between the body and the mind in psychic life as in physical
life, providing a role for the body to "lead" in therapeutic conversations
as well as to follow, and to partner with other bodies, even dangerous
bodies, in moving through trauma.
In the course of these essays, most of the essential psychoanalytic
terms of Freudian/Lacanian analysis are redeployed for ends specific to
performance: pleasure principal, trauma theory, hysteria, melancholia,
identification, transference, and the oedipal scenario. Since all three authors
write from a feminist perspective, the redeployment is also specific
to feminist performance theory. In addition, all three make use of narratives-create
narratives-in order to present their cases. For Elin Diamond,
the spectator who laughs after seeing Hedda Gabler and says "we are
all Hedda," might be producing a much more rebellious and useful set of
identifications than women spectators who weep at the spectacle. For Ann
Pellegrini, looking to see what ambiguities and alternative versions of history
the fractured narrative of How I Learned to Drive enables, there are retrievable
bits of memory and trauma that are valuable aspects of subject
formation. For Peggy Phelan, a fictional narrator who is a wounded ballet
dancer enables a "talking cure" to reveal itself as a partnered dance between
language and movement that structures the psyche in time. Contrary
to the pessimism often associated with traditional psychoanalysis
(with its emphases on regression, determinism, and Thanatos), these three
essays search for and find transformation, healing, movement, and self-reproduction
in their creative uses of psychoanalytic theory for performance
analysis.
We grouped these essays to emphasize and consolidate the immensely
productive uses feminist performance scholarship has made of
these psychoanalytic materials-in spite of the misogynist history and
tendencies of much of its tradition. The size and shape of this contribution
was only vaguely palpable ten years ago. It is well-established today. It is
a more difficult question whether or not this methodology will continue
to follow this line of development in the future.
One theoretical strand that offers an alternative to Freudian and Lacanian
based psychoanalysis is Deleuze and Guattari's schizoanalysis. In
Anti-Oedipus (1977) and A Thousand Plateaus (1987), they criticized the
psychoanalytic concepts of desire in Freud and Lacan, insisting on the inseparability
of social production from desiring-production.3 Their claim,
"There is only desire and the social, and nothing else," leads to an analysis
PSYCHOANALYSIS
401
of forms of capitalist organization and its "desiring machines," and a theory
of revolution which relies on micropractices, flows and intensities to
subvert the causal determinations at work in a given social field.14 Their
desire is productive; they reject the notion of lack, and deny that desire is
best described as an attempt to regain a lost object. Instead, they write,
"Lack refers to a positivity of desire and not desire to a positivity of lack."15
Theater and performance theorists have used these ideas in their
broad outlines, but only a few scholars have so far connected schizoanalysis
to our field. Timothy Murry included Deleuze's "One Less Manifesto"
in his important collection of French writings on theatricality, Mimesis,
Masochism, and Mime.16 Bryan Reynolds's recent book, Performing Transversally,
owes a considerable amount to Deleuze's ideas although Reynolds
reworks them for his own original theories of transversality. Borrowing the
concept of "any-space-whatever" from Deleuze's writing on cinema,
Reynolds is interested in the interaction among elements of experience that
are hallucinatory or nonchronological, that when mixed simultaneously
with other elements that are chronological and causal, create a state of
questioning, of possibility, or transversality. Putting people into this situation
enables them to move beyond the boundaries of their own subjective
territory: "Similar to empathizing, people can engage in transversal movements
by performing the unfamiliar social identity of another, by acting
"as if" they were someone else.... The time-image [Deleuze's name for a
virtual presentation of time] insofar as it creates the conditions for an anyspace-whatever,
engages with alternative subjectivities and encourages
transversal movements."17 The salient point for this section on Psychoanalysis
is that the goal of theorizing a way for subjects to combat the domination
of their desire through regimes of forced identification is common
to all the projects we have been describing. Our scholars desire theater and
performance to facilitate this psychic struggle.
J.G.R.
NOTES
1. Juliet Mitchell, Psychoanalysis and Feminism (New York: Vintage Books,
1975), xiii.
2. Anthony Kubiak, Agitated States: Performance in the American Theatre of Cruelty
(Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2002), 8. In his study, Kubiak argues
that Lacan is deeply invested in notions of theatricality, pertinent to scholars
of performance and theater.
3. Kubiak, Agitated States, 14.
4. Herbert Blau, The Dubious Spectacle: Extremities of Theater, 1975-2000 (Minneapolis
and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2002), 319.
5. Kubiak, Agitated States, io.
6. For a useful secondary source see Jean Laplanche and Jean-Bertrand Pontalis,
eds. The Language of Psychoanalysis, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (New
York: W.W. Norton, 1973).
7. Lacan's major work can be found in a collection of his lectures, Ecrits: A
CRITICAL THEORY AND PERFORMANCE
402
Selection, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: W.W. Norton, 1977); an excellent introduction
is Elizabeth Grosz's Jacques Lacan: A Feminist Introduction (New York and
London: Routledge 1990).
8. Cf. Sartre on consciousness: "Consciousness is a being such that in its
being, its being is in question in so far as this being implies a being other than itself."
Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, trans. Hazel E. Barnes (New York:
Citadel Press, 1966), lxii.
9. Luce Irigaray along with Julia Kristeva, Helene Cixous and Catherine Clement
together constitute the major French feminists who have responded to Freud
and Lacan, and who are associated with l'dcriture feminine. A now classic secondary
source is Alice A. Jardine's Gynesis (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985).
1o. Luce Irigaray, This Sex Which Is Not One (New York: Cornell University
Press, 1985), 86.
11. For a recent collection that provides a good sense of the scope of psychoanalytic
scholarship in the field, see Psychoanalysis and Performance, eds. Patrick
Campbell and Adrian Kear (New York and London: Routledge, 200ool).
12. Jose Mufioz, Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics
(Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), 11-12.
13. Giles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia,
trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem and Helen R. Lane (New York: Viking Press,
1977); and A Thousand Palteaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi
(Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 1987). For an excellent
book that connects and explains their theories relation to other political thinkers,
see Paul Patton, Deleuze and the Political (London and New York: Routledge, 2000).
14. Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, 28-29.
15. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 91.
16. Timothy Murray, Mimesis, Masochism, and Mime (Ann Arbor: University of
Michigan Press, 1997).
17. Bryan Reynolds, Performing Transversally: Reimagining Shakespeare and the
Critical Future (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), 120. For a recent essay using
A Thousand Plateaus to develop an alternative reading strategy, see Peter Dickerson,
"Travels with Tony Kushner and David Beckham, 2002-2004," Theatre Journal
57, no. 3 (2005): 429-50.
The Violence of "We":
Politicizing Identification
Elin Diamond
Preface for the New Edition
This article, written in 1991, laid the groundwork for chapter 5 of Unmaking
Mimesis: Essays on Feminism and Theater (Routledge, 1997), where
I explore the political meanings made available by Adrienne Kennedy's
theater of multiple and shifting identifications. Since then, other theorists
have elaborated a notion of "disidentification"-see, for example,
Jose Esteban Muffoz's Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance
of Politics (University of Minnesota Press, 1999), which demonstrates
how minority and queer artists recycle and transform oppressive
discourses for their own cultural purposes. Given the importance of
disidentification as a strategy of resistance, to understand how and why
identification shapes social and sexual identity, and how it also destabilizes
identity, seems all the more urgent. Identification may be "hardwired"
in the human psyche-unlike disidentification, it can never be a
strategy-but its theorization is complex and various. In the slide from
"I" to "we," it may be difficult to distinguish between narcissism and
political practice or to discern how violence moves from the discursive
to the actual.
In La Jeune Nee (The Newly Born Woman), Helene Cixous takes a brief moment
to describe the dangerous pleasures of identification. She strategically
takes up the hysteric's position, presenting her own history as a
random series of passionate identifications: She is Penthesileia, Achilles,
an eagle, a vulture, as well as all of Freud's hysterics and their narrative
counterparts: "I have been all the characters Dora played, the ones who
killed her, the ones who got shivers when she ran through them, and in
the end I got away, having been Freud one day, Mrs. Freud another, also
Mr. K..., Mrs. K... and the wound Dora inflicted on them."1 Cixous's
gender crossings are of course intentional: she is performing the originary
bisexuality Freud attributed to all hysterics. In a later section, speaking,
as it were, in her own voice, Cixous recapitulates the delights of the
process: "One never reads except by identification. But what kind? When
I say identification, I do not say loss of self. I become, I inhabit. I enter.
Inhabiting someone at that moment I can feel myself traversed by that
person's initiatives and actions."2 With her usual metaphoric accuracy,
Cixous is describing the mimetic pleasure of identification-becoming or
inhabiting the other on stage or in spectatorial fantasy: I stand in for her,
act in his place. Such acts are distinctly imperialistic and narcissistic: I
403
CRITICAL THEORY AND PERFORMANCE
404
lose nothing-there is no loss of self-rather I appropriate you, amplifying
my "I" into an authoritative "we."
The link between identification and the authoritative "we" has figured
into reception theory since Plato and Aristotle, although students of
drama and performance are more familiar with the unrigorous "we" of
the traditional critic who projects her or his subjective impressions and
analyses on all members of a theater audience, as in "we feel Hamlet's remorse"
or "we understand Hedda's frustration." One of the effects of such
rhetoric (in which the emotions and thoughts of others are assumed to follow
our model) is a fictitious but powerful sense of community that buttresses
but also conceals the narcissistic claims of the critic. Interweaving
discussions of Plato and Aristotle with psychoanalytic theory, I will suggest
that the dominance of dramatic realism (mid-nineteenth century to
the present) has promoted this preemptory "we," and that phenomenological
criticism, while it offers invaluable insights into theatrical consciousness,
propounds the problem by eliminating historical contradiction.
I will end by suggesting that psychoanalysis, read through a feminist
materialist lens, might suggest a different kind of reception. Though identification
seems to promote the annihilation of difference-and thus violence
to the other-it may also suggest the problematizing of models that
support such violence. Rather than upholding a strong unitary subject that
constrains others to become copies of ourselves, identification might be
understood as a psychic activity that destabilizes the subject. Rather than
upholding a social status quo, identification might be seen as producing
historical contradiction. Because it bridges the psychic and the social,
identification has political effects. This leads me to suggest that perhaps
we (feminists and others involved in a cultural critique) might begin to
politicize our identifications.
Let's return briefly to Cixous's statement:
One never reads except by identification. But what kind? When I say
identification, I do not say loss of self. I become, I inhabit. I enter. Inhabiting
someone at that moment I can feel myself traversed by that
person's initiatives and actions.
A deconstructive, post-Freudian writer, Cixous characteristically
both affirms and unravels her pleasure. On the one hand she presents the
terroristic thrill of standing in for the other; on the other hand is the terror
of "feel[ing] traversed" by her. Throughout Freud's many discussions of
identification, this doubleness reigns. Identification never loses the aspect
of introjection-the primitive incorporation of the rivalrous other as with
the ur-father of the Mosaic tribe. Yet even in his more schematic formulations
in, for example, The Ego and the Id (to which we will return), the little
boy who wants "to be his father and take his place everywhere"-especially
in the mother's bed-is eventually haunted by imagined bodily
violence: castration. Cixous herself, even as she praises the delights of
identification, imagines a violation of the self. In a parenthetical aside fol-
THE VIOLENCE OF "WE"
405
lowing the citation above, she writes: "Actually that feeling of being traversed
by the other disturbed me. When I was younger I was afraid because
I realized I was capable of mimicry." Being the other, feeling the
other traversing her, abolishes distance and difference, that which is necessary
to establishing the boundaries of the self. To identify is apparently
not only to incorporate but to be incorporated. To be radically destabilized.
Plato's loathing of the theater begins here: not only is the drama a
third-order copy of ideal forms, but the mimetic performer and the spectator
who vicariously participate in such imitations produce the instability
of unitary identity that constitutes the membership of the ideal republic.
What is refreshing about reading the sections of The Republic that deal with
recitation and performance is that Plato never underestimated desire, both
its inaccessibility to consciousness and its relationship to power. Giving
himself up to the performance, identifying with the pain of the tragic hero,
the male spectator risks loss of control when he leaves the theater. "Womanish"
or clownish activity at performances might lead to a breakdown in
gender roles or disciplined behavior in society. "Few," says Socrates, "are
capable of reflecting that to enter into another's feelings must have an effect
on our own: the emotions of pity our sympathy has strengthened will
not be easy to restrain when we are suffering ourselves."3
Plato would understand the definition of identification offered by
Laplanche and Pontalis because it confirms his worst fears:
The psychological process whereby a subject assimilates an aspect,
property, or attribute of the other and is transformed, wholly or partially,
after the model the other provides. It is by means of a series of
identifications that the personality is constituted and specified.4
Identification, then, is psychological, that is, partially unconscious and
not immediately accessible to rational scrutiny; this alone makes it something
to be feared. More troubling, the subject takes on, takes in features
of the other and is "transformed" wholly or partially in conformity to that
model. This implies that the subject has no prior identity; rather identity
is formed in the crucible of identifications; the subject is "specified," distinguished
from all other subjects not by his immortal soul but by his
identifications, and these identifications stem not from disciplined reason
but from desire, what Plato calls a "weakness in our nature" or a "trick of
illusion."
Aristotle tamed such fears, making imitation the central and enabling
heuristic of the developing human. As he writes in chapter 4 of The Poetics,
we learn by imitation. At the theater of the great tragedians, who offer us
exemplary characters and emplotments of their suffering, we spectators
become uplifted through the purgative actions of catharsis. We identify
with the ideal and universal referents the performers embody. I use "we"
advisedly. Ironically Plato's wish for spectatorial discipline in spite of
mimesis becomes possible in Aristotle because of mimesis. Pity and fear
may appear to be private emotions, but they are registered collectively, as
CRITICAL THEORY AND PERFORMANCE
406
the final effect of spectatorial identification with the heroes of tragedy
those, as Aristotle is at pains to tell us, who are good but flawed, whose
actions are probable if horrific, in other words who invite an edifying
identification from the audience. These constructive models of human behavior
are good for communal health, offering heroic Olympian images
(as Nietzsche said of this Apollonian art) in which Greek male spectators
would find reflected back to them the superiority of their culture. (Of
course, women and slaves would not appear in these heroic mirrors; as
Aristotle notes in chapter 15 of the Poetics, their cultural referents-actual
women and slaves-were too inferior for stage life.) For Aristotle, then,
identification combines catharsis with social discipline: built on the universally
upheld virtues of consistency and causality, catharsis adjusts its
spectators to accept the truth and rightness of the hero's destiny and the
play's action. In such acceptance, the spectator reaffirms his place-his
role-in the polis.
It is the universalizing model of truth, the reinscription of a social status
quo, the enforcing of cultural discipline that has brought classical
mimesis under critical scrutiny in this century. For self-reflexive modernists
and contemporary culture critics, mimesis was and is not merely a
morphological issue, proposing likenesses between made objects and their
real or natural counterparts, between characters and real performers. Classical
mimesis is profoundly epistemological, a way of knowing and judging
the truth. It sets up normative rules of inclusion and exclusion by
which a text, be it the text of a play or the text of someone's behavior, may
be judged. Not surprisingly, mimetic discourse, when it emanates from
spectators and critics, tends to enlist such comforting abstractions as nature,
truth, reality, humanity, human nature, and common sense in its
"analyses." Such abstractions tend to mystify the critic's identificatory investments
in her objects of study-that is, the appropriation of authors and
texts to her perspective so that they become extensions of her own desires
and ideologies. (Isn't this precisely what black feminists have correctly
found wanting in the texts of some white feminists? Because she was identifying
with her own whiteness-and by extension identifying whiteness
with female sexuality-Judy Chicago didn't see that of all the plates in her
Dinner Party creation, the Sojourner Truth plate lacked a vagina. Because
she was identifying with eurocentric models of literary authority, Ellen
Moers didn't see that she had excluded women of color [except Lorraine
Hansberry] in her Literary Women, a foundational text of Anglo-American
feminism. What is revealing in both cases is that as feminists, Chicago and
Moers thought they were producing new sites of "we"-a "we" that empowered
women, but that in fact excluded many women.)5
Dramatic realism produces precisely the conditions that allow for the
creation of a smugly self-identifying spectator-critic, and the creation in
the late nineteenth century of aggressively bourgeois "we." Not only does
realism tirelessly play out the Oedipal family drama, it follows the curve
of Plato's condemnation of mimesis but inverts the valuation. The lifelike
stage sign reinforces the epistemology: an objective world for the referent
THE VIOLENCE OF "WE"
407
is not simply implied, it is reaffirmed in the activity of reception. Which is
to say, realism is more than an interpretation of reality passing as reality; it
produces "reality" by positioning its spectators to recognize and verify its
truths. Naturalizing the relation between character and actor, setting and
world, realism's project is always ideological, drawing spectators into
identifications with its coherent fictions. It is through such identifications
that realism surreptitiously reinforces (even if it argues with) the social
arrangements of the society it claims to mirror. My favorite example-a deceptively
simple example-comes from an account of the reception of
Hedda Gabler in London in 1891. In her memoir Ibsen and the Actress, Elizabeth
Robins, who premiered the role of Hedda and other Ibsen heroines,
quotes one of her female spectators:
How should men understand Hedda on the stage when they didn't
understand her in the person of their wives, their daughters, their
woman friends? One lady of our acquaintance, married and not noticeably
unhappy, said laughing, Hedda is all of us.6
Here identification creates "we" with a vengeance. Not only does the
spectator see and reproduce a real relation between sign and referent, she
achieves through her identification a satisfying group identity; through
Hedda the spectator becomes "all of us." By her capture in this illusory
mirror, she eliminates difference between herself and others and, at least
on the surface, any sense of historical contingency.
A phenomenological account of reception would applaud the
woman spectator's rapt involvement with Hedda as the essence of theatrical
consciousness. Post-Husserlian phenomenology concerns itself
with acts of perception that comprise both the particularity of a subject's
perspective and the essence of the object perceived. The dramatic
image-in this case, Robins's bringing to presence the fiction that is
Hedda-allows the spectator to bracket empirical considerations and to
see Hedda whole, as an "all" that expresses the truth of "us." That theater
should be particularly receptive to phenomenological description is
not surprising. Like Kant, Husserl understood a phenomenon as that
which "appears to consciousness." But for consciousness there is no "unknowable
world behind the appearances"; what matters is what appears
"in person"7-the performance, one might say-not the play. Husserl's
famous reduction-wherein a transcendent subject suspends belief in a
causally related, empirically organized world in order to focus on the
specific ontology of the object-is analogous to the bracketed otherness
of the theater space, where, as Bert O. States puts it, "there is no ontological
difference between the object and the image." Rather, "theater ingests
the world of objects and signs only to bring images to life. In the
image, a defamiliarized and desymbolized object is 'uplifted to the view'
where we see it as being phenomenally heavy with itself."9 States's emphasis
on perspective ("where we see it") and the being-ness of the object-turned-image
rehearses Husserl's famous dictum-philosophy must
CRITICAL THEORY AND PERFORMANCE
408
return "to the things themselves," beginning with a description of things
as they appear to a particular consciousness.
To phenomenological consciousness Merleau-Ponty adds another
element of particular importance to theater reception, that is, the lived
presence of the body: "the word 'here' applied to my body does not refer
to a determinate position in relation to other positions or to external coordinates,
but the laying down of the first co-ordinates."10 Rather than
being an object of, the body anchors us to, consciousness, and it is that particular
embodied relation that brings to light the essence of the play's action
and characters. The body-turned-image has, as Gaston Bachelard
puts it, "an entity and a dynamism of its own.., a direct ontology";1 or,
as States puts it, "philosophy in the theater must unfold itself, literally, as
the thinking of a body."12
But suppose we turn down the intensity of the phenomenological
spotlight and wonder what body is in view, what body is viewing? Can
bodies either perform or perceive outside of the material markings of gender,
race, or ethnicity? And can the mode of seeing that is called phenomenological
be devoid of desire? Interestingly, when phenomenological
methods are used to discuss theatrical identification, both the desire and
the material specificity of perceiving subjects tend to drop out. Bruce
Wilshire, for example, understands identification as a strong heuristic
whereby spectators and actors explore the mimetic structure of all human
relations: "Through the actors' deliberate identifications with and standings
in we discover our largely undeliberate identifications-with and
standings-in."13 He continues, in a nice turn of phrase, "the actor models
modeling, enacts enactment," which "reveals" to the audience "our involvements."14
For Wilshire, then, the spectator's identification with
Hedda reveals her continuing identification with others, which the theater
and its actors enact for her. She learns from Hedda that "my fellow
human beings are a picture of myself."'15 Wilshire would not view this response
as narcissistic or appropriative but as a means of achieving a transcendent
wholeness. In this respect, the phenomenological account of reception
reinscribes the effects of dramatic realism, leaving in place the
coherent subject/spectator while asserting "universal and enduring" conditions
that undergird the humanity of the object (character). Moreover,
the phenomenologist's perceptions denude both subject and object of historical
specificity: "Great variability in their [the objects'] manifestation
and intensity from culture to culture and age to age does not undermine
but just the reverse, it undergirds their generality."16 Similarly, Austin
Quigley seeks a generalized universal enlightenment for his spectators,
eliding any notion of gendered representation or reception, of power hierarchies
within the apparatus of representation or within the historical
context. He assumes instead that the spectators' "shared culture" and
"shared humanity" will help them move from "temporary disorientation"
to "subsequent reorientation,"'7 another way perhaps of linking
identification with models of cultural discipline. Of the contemporary
theater phenomenologists, only States refers (though only once) to identi-
THE VIOLENCE OF "WE"
409
fication in the more problematic relation to subjective desire: "the actor is
someone like us who consents to serve as the channel through which the
poet's art can be brought out of the realm of imitation and briefly detained,for
our narcissistic pleasure, in the realm of being" (my italics).18
Would a psychoanalytic account permit the material specificity we
hunger for? We might separate Lacanian and Freudian views of identification
by proposing two distinct readings of the Hedda Gabler example.
For Lacanians, the married woman's capture by the image of Hedda
would be explained by the narcissistic lures of the mirror stage that carry
over from early infancy, through childhood, and into adulthood. Lacking
controlled motor development, the infant sees its image in the mirror as a
coherent whole, thus misrecognizes itself as a complete autonomous
other. Introjecting this mirror image as an ideal ego or identificatory
model, the child spends the rest of its life desiring versions of it-at, for
example, Hollywood movies.19 In Lacan, identification, always in the register
of the imaginary, is narcissistic-the perceived other is always a version
of me. Difference, contradiction are all occluded in the subject's initial
and continuing capture in the mimetic mirror.
In Freud identification is also narcissistic, but complicated by the very
thing that Lacanian identification leaves out-namely historical contradiction.
Let me briefly review a number of relevant texts. In The Interpretation
of Dreams, identification for Freud was merely a feature of hysterical mimicry,
enabling his patients, he said, "not only to express their own symptoms,
but those of a large number of other people."20 The hysteric-and
this is surely Cixous's pose in The Newly Born Woman-will enter, become,
inhabit because she wants to "play all the parts." In "On Narcissism"
(1914), mimicry is replaced by the idea of substitution. This troubling and
in many ways confused essay has drawn fire for its outrageous acts of naming:
homosexuals are demonized because their love-objects are not true
others but only versions of themselves; women are denigrated because like
children and cats they are incapable of forming attachments to others.
What is crucial to this discussion is that here Freud associates identification
with a decathexis of the object, a turning inward instead of outward toward
the other.
In Mourning and Melancholia (1917) this turning inward is replaced by
the notion that identification substitutes for losing the other. The ego introjects
a lost object that is then set up inside the ego and becomes a model of
identification, and thereby changes the ego. By the time he writes Group
Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego (1921), Freud will say that the ego is
transformed by such identifications. In fact in this essay he decides that
identification occurs not only to compensate for loss, as in Mourning and
Melancholia, but occurs continually, throughout psychic life. We are continually
taking in objects we desire, continually identifying with or imitating
these objects, and continually being transformed by them. In other words,
identification in Freud always works both ways: it is an assimilative or appropriative
act making the other the same as me, or me the same as the
other, but at the same time causes the I/ego to be transformed by the other.
CRITICAL THEORY AND PERFORMANCE
410
This suggests that the borders of identity, the wholeness and consistency
of identity, are transgressed by every act of identification.
The Ego and the Id is the famous 1923 text in which Freud remaps the
topography of the psyche-the unruly id, the "reason[able] and common
sens[ical]" ego, and the proscriptive and disciplinary superego are all
given their local habitations. Yet in this essay Freud affirms that identification
is a constitutive part of psychic life: The process, he says, occurs in
all phases of development, and "makes it possible to suppose that the
character of the ego is a precipitate of abandoned object choices and that
it contains the history of those object choices."21
In other words, it would be impossible to conceptualize a subject in
the process of identification who would not be engaged, however unconsciously,
with the history of her identifications, which is at least partly the
history of her psychic life with others. Moreover, the ego, which Freud
uses interchangeably with the self, is here conceived as an effect of continued
transformation. He even writes an amusing dialogue between the
ever accommodating ego and the insatiable libido.
When the ego assumes the features of the other it is trying to make
good the id's loss by saying "Look you can love me too, I am so like
the object."22
And in this imitation of the other the ego transforms and transforms again.
Identification, says Freud, builds the character of the ego. Like all Freud's
theatrical metaphors, this one emphasizes construction over essence. The
ego, this representative of reason and common sense, is a theatrical fiction.
Permeable and transformable, it is a precipitate of the subject's psychic history
with others. The humanist notion of identity as a model that the self
enacts over time, that is unique, unified, coherent, and consistent, is belied
precisely by the temporality, the specific historicity of the identification
process.
Might we situate Elizabeth Robins's spectator, however provisionally,
in an identification process? We would not attempt to reconstruct her
imaginary, but would remember the highly gendered cultural context in
which her identifications took place. In male Victorian accounts of spectatorship
at Ibsen's plays, women were accused of behaving like hysterics
not only entering into the passion and morbidity of fictional characters
but also imitating them, passionately weeping into their handkerchiefs.
Interestingly, in her own testimony of identification, the woman spectator
is laughing.
For the governesses, schoolteachers, and married women who sat in
these matinee audiences, aware of, if not contributing to the contemporary
scandal of women's suffrage, perhaps the destruction and suicide of
Hedda Gabler validated their antipatriarchal tendencies. The Married
Woman's Property Act of 1882 (nine years before the play's London debut)
gave women the right to their own property after marriage, but these and
earlier reforms hardly introduced social and sexual equality between gen-
THE VIOLENCE OF "WE"
411
ders. (Is this why she was laughing?) Thinking of Ibsen's 1891 spectators
as historical subjects, as bourgeois consumers yet not full citizens, complicates
the coherence of a spectatorial "we." Is it possible to think of a spectator's
self-affirming "all of us" as an empowering social fantasy? Might
we think of her identifications as having a distinctly political edge? With
her laughing reference to "all of us" the spectator is perhaps suggesting a
new social arrangement, one that transforms her more than it defines or circumscribes
Hedda. Viewed this way, she does not reinforce a social status
quo, but arguably describes a new if temporary social space-a space occupied
by women in matinee performances of Ibsen's plays. It seems
ridiculous from our vantage point to see realism in the service of revolution,
yet cultural subjects entering into and inhabiting powerful roles may
be capable of self-transformation-may even be capable of transforming
the social space of theater spectatorship into the theatricalized space of social
contestation.
Only by attending to the projections, the narcissistic, self-transforming
fantasies of historical subjects can we begin to imagine a politics of
identification-a politics that dismantles the phenomenological universals
of transcendent subjects and objects; that places identity in an unstable and
contingent relation to identification; and that works close to the nerves dividing
and connecting the psychic and the social.
NOTES
1. Helene Cixous and Catherine Clement, The Newly Born Woman, trans. Betsy
Wing (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1975), 99.
2. Cixous and Clement, The Newly Born Woman, 148.
3. Plato, The Republic, trans. Francis Cornford (New York: Oxford University
Press, 1966), 338 (X-6o5b).
4. J. Laplanche and J-B. Pontalis, The Language of Psychoanalysis, trans. Donald
Nicholson-Smith (New York: Norton, 1973), 205.
5. See Alice Walker, "One Child of One's Own: A Meaningful Digression
Within the Work(s)-An Excerpt," in All the Women Are White, All the Blacks Are
Men, But Some of Us Are Brave, ed. Gloria T. Hull, Patricia Bell Scott, and Barbara
Smith (New York: Feminist Press, 1982), 37-44.
6. Elizabeth Robins, Ibsen and the Actress (London, 1928), 18.
7. John F. Bannan, The Philosophy of Merleau-Ponty (New York: Harcourt,
1967), 8.
8. Bert O. States, Great Reckonings in Little Rooms: On the Phenomenology of Theater
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), 35.
9. States, Great Reckonings, 37.
10. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Colin Smith
(London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1962), 100.
11. Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, trans. Maria Jolas (Boston: Beacon
Press, 1958), xii.
12. States, Great Reckonings, 133.
13. Bruce Wilshire, Role-Playing and Identity (Bloomington: Indiana University
Press, 1982), 14.
CRITICAL THEORY AND PERFORMANCE
412
14. Wilshire, Role-Playing and Identity, 16.
15. Wilshire, Role-Playing and Identity, 26.
16. Wilshire, Role-Playing and Identity, 69.
17. Austin Quigley, The Modern Stage and Other Worlds (New York: Methuen,
1985), 63.
18. States, Great Reckonings, 128; emphasis added.
19. Cf. Laura Mulvey, "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema," Screen 16, no.
3 (1975): 6-18.
20. Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, trans. James Strachey (New
York: Avon, 1900), 183.
21. Freud, The Ego and the Id, in Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological
Works, vol. 29 (London: Hogarth Press, 1971), 29.
22. Freud, The Ego and the Id, 30.
Staging Sexual Injury: How I Learned
to Drive
Ann Pellegrini
Memory believes before knowing remembers. Believes longer than
recollects, longer than knowing even wonders.
-William Faulkner, Light in August
So by taking flight into the ego love escapes extinction.
-Sigmund Freud, "Mourning and Melancholia"
Disclosure and Deferral
Paula Vogel's How I Learned to Drive (1997) opens with the lure of a secret:
"Sometimes to tell a secret, you first have to teach a lesson."1 In substituting
a lesson for a secret, the narrator, Li'l Bit, in some sense reverses her
own story; she also shows herself to be as sly a teacher as her Uncle Peck,
who promised to teach Li'l Bit how to drive. However, as we will discover,
in place of this lesson, or maybe alongside it, Li'l Bit is given a secret
whose unfolding drives the narrative forward and back again.
Li'l Bit's lesson plan-Sometimes to tell a secret, you first have to teach a
lesson-may not flatter the teachers among us. After all, her formulation
effectively proposes pedagogy as a kind of knowledge deferred. Lured by
a secret, the audience (and would-be pupil) finds itself in a curious kind
of classroom with a charming, if somewhat unreliable, teacher. Call it the
pedagogy of bait and switch or, if this sounds better, pedagogy's swerve.
Over the course of the roughly ninety-minute play, this narrative
swerve undoes straightforward connections between event and representation,
experience and understanding, past and present, injury and impression.
The audience's access to what happened to Li'l Bit, to her "secret,"
comes through her narration of it. We never see the reality, but only
its representation. In other words, we are watching a play. But it is not as
if Li'l Bit has immediate access to her own experience either. Indeed, there
are numerous moments in the play when Li'l Bit seems to withhold crucial
information from us. Does this make her an unreliable narrator? Perhaps.
But it also suggests the unreliability of memory itself. That is, what
if the secret Li'l Bit will not or cannot tell is unknown to her?
To be sure, what is past can never be returned, nor returned to, in its
original form. When memory retrieves, it does so with a difference; it remembers.
However, the cut between memory and event is attenuated to
the point of fracture in the case of trauma. Trauma has a particularly
vexed relation to time and knowledge. As Cathy Caruth suggests in Unclaimed
Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History, a book that has helped to
413
CRITICAL THEORY AND PERFORMANCE
414
reinvigorate trauma theory, in psychoanalytic terms trauma is a wound
that is experienced too soon to be known or narrated.2
In describing trauma as an injury ahead of its time (ahead of it's
time?), Caruth is building on Freud's discussion of trauma in Beyond the
Pleasure Principle. In this study, composed in the aftermath of World War
I, Freud puzzles over the striking fact that traumatic illness is far more
likely to arise in cases where there was no apparent physical injury.3 A
wound to the body, he seems to suggest, provides a brake against trauma
by absorbing the blow and by offering undeniable evidence of what has
happened. But, evidence to whom and of what? What happens when the
severity or even the reality of physical injury is contested by others, as can
happen in cases of sexual violence? In courts of law, though not only
there, a victim's claims of sexual assault or abuse often hinge on whether
or not her (or his) injuries are visible to others, whether because the
bruises are still fresh or they photographed well. It may even be that, for
some victims of sexual violence, trauma results not from the initial violating
event, but from the refusal or inability of others to recognize the
wound or blow to the body. In yet other cases, the trauma of sexual violence
may have very little or nothing to do with the violation of sexualized
bodily zones, but may rather lie elsewhere, in a somewhere or something
else that cannot be named or recognized. I will come back to this
suggestion later in my discussion of melancholia's holding power. For
now, I simply want to flag the uneasy place of the body in Freud's account
of trauma.
In a passage he himself calls "far-fetched speculation,"4 Freud paints
a striking picture of a "living vesicle" that both reaches out into the world
and is affected, touched, by it.5 He tells us that "this little fragment of living
substance" would be overwhelmed and even killed but for the presence
of a "protective shield."6 He goes on to describe this protective shield
as being built up, like so many layers of dead skin, out of the residue of
formerly organic materials. Although Freud does not say this exactly, it
seems to me that what he is describing is the precarious suspension, or inbetweenness,
of the embodied subject. For the bodily envelope offers
multiple points of contact and crossing (skin, eyes, mouth, nose, ears, genitals,
anus) even as it also marks the space of difference between one self
and another, between inner and outer worlds. Ordinarily, this protective
shield is strong enough to manage and reduce the energies that bombard
embodied consciousness. However, some external stimuli are so strong
that they break through the protective shield. Trauma thus involves a violent
breaking through or rupture in consciousness.
In her gloss on Freud, Caruth points out that the traumatic kernel of
trauma is not the precipitating event itself nor even the force with which
stimuli storm and overwhelm consciousness; trauma rather emerges at
the juncture of destructive event and its survival.7 Something awful has
happened, but what exactly, and to whom? Where am "I"-where is the
"I"-in relation to the concussive event? In trauma, what is outside has
come inside, been internalized, without being hypercathected or bound.8
STAGING SEXUAL INJURY
415
The subject of trauma thus suffers from an inability to narrate and in some
profound sense even know her own experience as her experience.
In other words, there is a profound disconnect between what is experienced
and what is apprehended or assimilated. This gap in knowledge is
the crisis or, in Caruth's terms, the "enigma of survival."9 This epistemic
gap also opens up the question of referentiality, frustrating simple models
of experience and reference, event and representation. At first glance, this
might seem to end the possibility of history. However, Caruth proposes
that, in fact, "it is here, in the.., bewildering encounter with trauma-both
in its occurrence and in the attempt to understand it-that we can begin to
recognize the possibility of a history that is no longer straightforwardly
referential."1o Coming to terms with trauma and the disturbance it poses
to correspondence theories of truth "permit[s]," in her words, "history to
arise where immediate understanding may not."11
Where the story of trauma is concerned, then, narrative gets out
ahead of both audience and narrator. And yet, telling trauma's story becomes
the working condition of coming to know it. This is the "behindsight"
of traumatic knowledge,12 its deferred action, or Nachtraglichkeit, in
the language of psychoanalysis. The French translation of Nachtraglichkeit
is still more evocative: apres-coup, or, literally, "afterblow." Of course, part
of the problem with trauma is precisely its resistance to the literal, to the
thing itself, and it may be this resistance to the literal that also makes the
literary and, yes, the theatrical such resonant sites through which to think
trauma anew.
But, for now, back to behindsight: The very backwardness of this relation
between representation and traumatic event upends conventional
ways of thinking about truth and the evidence of experience. For we are
confronted not simply with deferred action, but with deferred revision.
How do you tell a story whose founding events you have not, on some
very basic level, yet experienced? Where telling precedes knowing, what is
the status of the truth that is told? What's more, can the important feminist
project of bringing sexual violence (feminism's privileged injury) into
the light of day survive this severing of representation from "the real"? In
the context of trauma, the metaphor of survival is a loaded one. Thus, to
pose the question as I just have-as a matter of the survival of feminist politics-is
to link the future of feminism, its revitalization, to a different way
of thinking about and encountering feminism's own past.
Disordered Time, Feminist Revisions
Certainly, How I Learned to Drive stages Li'l Bit's encounter with her own
past, but it does so out of time, in at least two ways. If we conceive of
trauma as a break in the mind's experience of time, then the piecemeal
quality of Li'l Bit's narration reiterates trauma as its symptom. And yet,
this very piecemeal quality also gets at the restlessness of memory and
psychic life. In a sense, all memory, and not just traumatic memory, performs
a kind of "deferred action" on the self. Li'l Bit's narrative, then,
CRITICAL THEORY AND PERFORMANCE
416
brings us to see not simply the belatedness of trauma, but the revision that
just is memory. We travel with Li'l Bit backward and forward in time,
viewing snapshots, out of sequence, out of time, as Li'l Bit's story comes
together, and falls apart, in pieces.
An antichronology: launched in an indeterminate present, the play
jumps back to 1969, shifts forward ever so slightly to 1970, when Li'l Bit
is kicked out of college: "Some say I got caught with a man in my room.
Some say as a kid on scholarship I fooled around with a rich man's
daughter. I'm not talking. But the real truth is I had a constant companion
in my dorm room-who was less than discrete. Canadian V.O. A fifth a
day" (21). The narrative falls further back, into 1968 and a drunken dinner
celebrating Li'l Bit's driver's license, leaps ahead to 1979, before reversing
course to 1967, 1966, 1965; and then it's Christmas 1964 (when Li'l Bit assigns
herself the task of rescuing Uncle Peck from himself); from there, a
stutter step to 1969 and Li'l Bit's eighteenth birthday, a fall backward to
1962, and, then, finally, move forward again-or is it back?-to an indeterminate
present.
Throughout, How I Learned to Drive wonderfully captures the work
of memory as it recomposes a life but not necessarily in the self-same
order. The play of memory that is Li'l Bit's self-narration refuses the tidy
linearity-and pious teleology-of even a reverse chronology. The play
thus depathologizes the life lived in pieces. This is one of the play's richest
feats: by telling Li'l Bit's life in pieces, but out of order (a li'l bit at a time?),
How I Learned to Drive perpetually defers the future, but in the cause of reopening
its possibilities. Let me try that again, put it another way: Out of
this disordered time, we catch sight of another way to live it. How I
Learned to Drive refuses a conception of identity as an always already, a
story that could only have one ending and one beginning; indeed, a story
whose ending is foretold in-scripted by-the beginning.
This notion of the determining impact of an event in the past is a holy
grail of much of the therapeutic and popular discourse on trauma, especially
sexual trauma. But even if we allow that traumatic events have psychical
effects (and this seems a crucial allowance), this does not mean that
the effects are fully determined-as if a life lived in the wake of trauma
could only unfold one way: very badly. To be sure, How I Learned to Drive
does not shrink from showing Li'l Bit's woundedness, but, no less significantly,
it neither assigns her wounding to any one event nor makes injury
the whole of her story, the hole in her self. Instead, the play helps us to see
something of the contingency of identity, the accidents of identification,
desire, and loss that trace the body's edges. This other way of seeing affords
a glimpse, however fleeting and fractured, of new ways of telling
and living a life. This play, this life, could be told differently, we learn, with
different endings, surprising detours, and suspended beginnings.13
This is not the only one of Vogel's plays that circles back on itself to
disorganize principles of cause and effect, before and after.14 But this formal
device works especially well in a play whose concerns include incest
and its afterlife. And yet, How I Learned to Drive is hardly reducible to a
STAGING SEXUAL INJURY
417
story about the trauma of incest; in fact, the play rebukes precisely this
kind of reduction.
This rebuke, along with the pressure the play puts on positivist accounts
of history and truth, runs headfirst into some cherished and hardfought
feminist claims about sexual injury, especially the particular injury
identified as childhood sexual abuse. In a cultural and political context in
which girl's and women's accounts of sexual violence are still greeted
with skepticism, the suggestion that women do not have unmediated access
to what really happened is bound to produce alarm. But, as theater
studies scholar David Savran has pointed out, for Vogel, "feminism
means being politically incorrect. It means avoiding the easy answer
that isn't really an answer at all-in favor of posing the question in the
right way. It means refusing to construct an exemplary feminist hero."15
Vogel's brand of incorrect feminism takes dead but loving aim at received
ideas, and she does not spare even her "own," that is, feminist, gay, and
lesbian communities.
Feminists-both clinicians and nonspecialists-fought to expand the
category of trauma and "post-traumatic stress disorder" (PTSD) from its
focus on "masculine" injuries like shellshock or war trauma to include
such "feminine" injuries as incest and rape. This victory has not come
without cost, however. On the one hand, as Ann Cvetkovich also notes,
the broadening of PTSD to include rape, domestic violence, and other
kinds of sexual violence may give victims access to medical care, including
mental health care, otherwise denied to them.16 The diagnostic category
PTSD, after all, is not just the specialized language of therapists and clinicians;
since its inclusion in the 1980 edition of Diagnostic and Statistical
Manual, PTSD has also been used by insurance companies to determine
what is and is not covered (for those lucky enough to have health care coverage
in the first place). PTSD also performs a legitimating function that resounds
beyond the office walls of therapists and HMOs. For a culture in
love with science, diagnosis makes it real. By contrast, the one who suffers
in silence from something without name does not suffer at all. (This is
Betty Friedan's "feminine mystique" three decades on, and counting.) And
the one who loudly suffers from nothing at all? She is a hysteric.17
On the other hand, the medicalization of sexual violence risks depoliticizing
it. A therapeutic focus on the victim and on the dynamics of
her individual family effectively brackets the social; larger intersubjective-and
sociopolitical-components of trauma are thereby lost to analysis.
This inward turn is, unfortunately, in keeping with larger trends in a
commodified feminism, a "therapeutically absorbed feminism," in Pamela
Haag's stinging words.18
Somewhat paradoxically, the diagnostic category PTSD simultaneously
individualizes and normalizes, or homogenizes. Janice Haaken, herself
a feminist therapist, yet one of the most outspoken critics of dominant
feminist clinical and political discourse around trauma, worries that the
umbrella category PTSD elides crucial differences among traumatic events
and responses to them. As she points out, when one diagnostic category
CRITICAL THEORY AND PERFORMANCE
418
covers the Holocaust, child abuse, war trauma, political terrorism, and religious
cults, more may be obscured than revealed. Additionally, and
specifically where incest is concerned, she argues that the PTSD label
leaves out of view the ambivalence that characterizes the relations of many
"victims" to their "perpetrators." There is a complexity and variability to
victim/perpetrator relations that PTSD cannot lay hold of or recognize.19
This inability, Haaken suggests, contributes to the Manichaean pitch of
trauma narratives, and especially narratives of sexual trauma, which depict
all-or-nothing stories of good versus evil.20
Moreover, it is not just the ambivalent relations between "victim"
and "perpetrator" that get written out; the complexity of the victim's relations
to the other adults in her immediate circle also disappears. Just
think here for a moment of the mother-daughter conflict in How I Learned
to Drive. This is not the classic incest story in which the mother refuses to
see what is happening to her daughter, or sees but remains helpless to
"save" her. In fact, Li'l Bit's mother sees what's coming before "it" happens
and gives a warning, albeit one that takes the form of blaming the
daughter in advance for anything that might go wrong. The motherdaughter
conflict, though, is not between seeing and not seeing incest, but
between seeing and not seeing Li'l Bit. The mother cannot see in her
daughter what Uncle Peck sees, recognizes, supports-a seeing that he
also comes to exploit, of course.
Once framed as a stark contest between good and evil, helpless victim
and all-powerful perpetrator, what conscious space remains for either
ambivalence or moral ambiguity? (Psychic space is another matter, of
course; the unconscious is nothing if not roomy.) In fairness, this casting
out of ambiguity and insistence on the inherently traumatizing effects of
adult-child sexual contact does make sense culturally: as feminist responses
to backlash against feminism in general and as feminist attempts
to focus attention on sexual abuse in particular. In the face of renewed and
often virulent cultural battles over gender roles and the meaning of sexuality
in women's lives, the hardening of the therapeutic and feminist line
on childhood sexual abuse has its logics. Where sexuality is at once consigned
to silence and compelled to speech and where women's sexuality
is the especially fraught site of this double burden, one of the few ways
for women to speak legitimately about sex is to speak from the position of
victim. Speaking as victim inoculates women or, more accurately, some
women (since race and class crucially mediate which women get counted
as victims) against the charge of unruly desire. The irony of this new feminist
command to speak our injury is that it too may perform a silencing
all in the name of liberation.
I want to be very clear what I am not arguing here. I am not denying
the sobering reality of violence against women; I am not rehearsing bynow
familiar accusations that feminists-and women in general-just
need to get over it, where "it" refers to sexual violence in particular; I am
not casting my voice with Camille Paglia, Katie Roiphe, Christina Hoff
Sommers, and other self-appointed feminist champions who want to res-
STAGING SEXUAL INJURY
419
cue women from so-called victim feminism. Although one would scarcely
know this from reading mainstream media accounts of feminism, the diversity
of feminist thinking about sexual violence and about the stakes of
designating something as a specifically sexual violence defies reduction to
catchphrases like "victim feminism."
Nonetheless, there is yet reason to scrutinize dominant feminist approaches
to the question of sexual violence. Much feminist effort has
been devoted to exposing and analyzing the ubiquity verging on normalization
of violence against women, and rightly so. Rape, domestic battery,
incest are far too common experiences. However, to say that these
are too-common experiences in the lives of many women and girls does
not mean that they are experienced the same, in common. Nor does it
make violence or the threat of violence the structuring condition of
women's sexual subjectivity. What's more, this focus on sexual danger
leaves little or no room to ask about women's pleasure and what might
enable it. There is a far more complex story to be told here, a story about
the way second-wave feminist thinking about violence, sexuality, and the
body has been narrated and, in that narration, narrowed.
Certainly, the essays gathered together in Carole S. Vance's still
timely 1984 anthology, Pleasure and Danger,21 reveal that second-wave feminists
were hardly of one mind on the matter of women's sexuality. The
volume collected papers and talks given at the 1982 "Scholar and the Feminist"
conference at Barnard College. Contributors acknowledged and analyzed
the myriad social and psychic forces bearing down on women, but
they also refused to conceptualize women's sexuality as a uniform or singular
experience. Instead, contributors moved to complicate and even disrupt
the category of "woman" by introducing such "other" critical differences
as race and class. This productive feminist disruption also carried
over to the category "sexuality," for it too is inflected-and complicated
by race and class. Just as crucially, contributors to the volume did not reduce
sexuality or sex to a matter of sexual object-choice or sexual orientation.
Rather, essays by Joan Nestle, Amber Hollibaugh, and Gayle Rubin
among others dared to address sexual identifications and practices that
did not fit into neat boxes-feminist, lesbian, or otherwise-about what
women's bodies and women's pleasures were for.
The feminist possibilities on view in Pleasure and Danger were not
universally applauded by other feminists; far from it. The volume and the
1982 Barnard conference were assailed by some antipornography feminists
as worse than no feminism at all; indeed, Vance and the other contributors
were accused, in sometimes vitriolic terms, of actively promoting violence
against women.22 The controversy around Pleasure and Danger is just one
example of a feminism embattled over sex and violence. However, that
feminists disagreed-and still disagree-profoundly over these matters
need not spell the end of feminism. If anything, we might rather see contestation
and difference as the very ground of a feminist politics.23
As Pamela Haag makes clear in her 1996 genealogy of second-wave
feminist debates over violence, victimization, and sexed embodiment, the
CRITICAL THEORY AND PERFORMANCE
420
unified subject of feminism is not and never was. In a brave and necessary
essay, Haag returns to the feminist archives to reveal that for many 1970S
feminist activists and theorists (and these categories are not mutually exclusive),
violence was not understood as some external force that shattered
a previously unified subject and a previously intact body. Rather,
thinking, writing, and acting with and against the often violent backdrop
of 196os and early 1970s American politics, they came to see that the
body-subject was itself created in and through multiple forms of violence:
from the structural violences of racism and sexism to the psychic demand
(one backed up by social force) that subjects, if they are to be subjects,
must legibly represent their "sex" and their "race" to other subjects. As
Haag points out, the feminist recognition that subjects became subjects
not despite violence, but in some sense through it, was not a romanticization
of violence as "good" for women. Rather, it opened up the possibility
of agency in the wake of violence. Perhaps agency is even thinkable as a
traumatic wakening out of violence, a suggestion that links the question
of agency to Caruth's "enigma of survival."
The possibility that violences of various sorts are among the constitutive
conditions of embodied subjectivity energizes much recent feminist
and queer discussions about injury, agency, and embodiment. Importantly,
this suggestion is not tantamount to claiming that women are defined
by our violability. The latter assertion leaves little room for agency;
within its terms, every woman is a victim waiting to happen. Moreover,
given the heterosexual parameters of this rape script, every man is a rapist
waiting to attack.
With literary scholar Sharon Marcus,24 we need to ask, what if this
very presumption-that women are defined by our violability-produces
as its effect the truth it purports simply to tell: passive, victimized
women? To ask this also means asking some hard questions about the
privileged injury that is rape. Within one influential strand of feminism,
rape is the very paradigm of injury; it is an injury to woman in her sex
and, to the extent that woman's sex defines her, rape is thus an injury to
her in her very core. (Feminists did not invent this privileging of the sexual,
of course; but the feminist strain represented by Catharine MacKinnon,
Andrea Dworkin, and the antipornography movement more broadly
has reiterated the privileging of the sexual.) Rape and other sexual injuries,
according to this line of thought, are inherently traumatic and peculiarly
devastating. However, by foreclosing what rape or incest might
mean in the life experience of any particular woman (or man, for that matter),
we define out of the category "woman" or "raped" any woman for
whom rape or incest is not the worst thing that could have happened to
her. The complexity of women's responses to rape and other forms of violence
cannot be comprehended by the demand to narrate violation and
only violation, whether that narration be conducted in accord with a legal
vocabulary of assault or a medicalizing vocabulary of injury.
Must a rape narrative conform to naturalized cultural scripts of injury
and innocence in order to be legitimated as a real injury? What pre-
STAGING SEXUAL INJURY
421
existing patterns of meaning-making and intelligibility shape what can be
told, what can be heard? What would it take for us-for feminists-to be
able to tell different stories, messy in all their complexity and ambiguity?
Here is where Paglia and the others are actually in sync with the very feminism
they rebuke: As Mary Gaitskill perceptively argues, both those who
accuse feminists of being crybabies and those who would prescribe the
exact order, down to the word order, of a consensual sexual encounter
paper over the complexities of sex and injury.25
Gaitskill makes this observation in the midst of telling the story of her
own nontraumatizing experience of rape. For Gaitskill, being raped by a
stranger was less traumatic than her various experiences of emotional cruelty.
In the case of this rape, she says, she did not need to ask how or
whether she had contributed to it; it was not about her, even if it was done
to her. The rape was bad, but "not especially traumatic."26 Gaitskill's selfreporting
does not fit into the cultural narratives of rape and sexual injury
that are currently available, and yet, this is all the more reason to take her
account seriously. As with the swerve orchestrated by Vogel's How I Learned
to Drive, Gaitskill teaches by deviating from the expected path.
On the Value of Getting It Wrong
To get a sense of the intervention How I Learned to Drive makes into
trauma theory and, especially, into mainstream feminist accounts of sexual
injury, we need to ask what the secret is that Li'l Bit cannot or will not
tell. Ultimately, the secret Li'l Bit has to share is not the secret of sexual
abuse at the hands of Uncle Peck. Anyway, this is not much of a secret at
all, for it is the rare audience member who comes to the play not knowing
in advance that incest is one of its basic plot points. Moreover, for any audience
member still in the dark, Vogel makes short work of bringing incest
into the open-all the better to defamiliarize it as "the" secret that
must be told. This defamiliarization does not quell the play's ability to
disturb, however; it incites it.
Let's return, briefly, to the opening scene of the play and Li'l Bit's
mischievous turn from confessing to teaching. As Li'l Bit walks us through
our first lesson, she gently segues from an unspecified present to an "early,
warm summer evening." "It's 1969," Li'l Bit informs us, locating us in the
chronology of her past, "And I am very old, very cynical of the world, and
I know it all. In short, I am seventeen years old, parking off a dark lane
with a married man on an early summer night" (7-8). It's a driving lesson,
although not her first one, we will later find out, and the sexual banter
between the couple is alive with come-ons and refusals:
Peck: [] I've got the mind of a boy scout.
Li'! Bit: A horny boy scout.
Peck: Boy scouts are always horny. What do you think the first Merit
Badge is for?
Li'! Bit: There. You're going to be nasty again.
CRITICAL THEORY AND PERFORMANCE
422
Peck: Oh, no. I'm good. Very good.
Li'l Bit: It's getting late.
Peck: Don't change the subject. I was talking about how good I am.
(Beat) Are you gonna let me show you how good I am?
Li'l Bit: Don't go over the line now. (9-10)
The man asks the girl to let him caress and kiss her breasts, his reward for
not taking a drink all week. She relents, but to his desire or hers-or both?
Her measured response-"Li'l Bit closes her eyes, carefully keeps her
voice calm," advise the stage directions (12)-walks the line between desire
and resignation. Nonetheless, there's a light, teasing quality to the
scene, which defies the revelation to come: "Uncle Peck," she breaks his
reverie, "we've got to go. I've got graduation rehearsal at school tomorrow
morning. And you should get home to Aunt Mary" (12).
I suggested earlier that there are moments in the play when Li'l Bit
seems to hold something back from the audience. But it's important to
distinguish, as best we can, between those scenes in which Li'l Bit knows
more than she says and those in which she discloses more than she
knows. The scene rehearsed above belongs to the former category, in
which the narrator exerts control over what we know and when we know
it. Li'l Bit suspends identifying the married man as her uncle until late in
the first scene. This is a wonderful setup to the rest of the play, because,
through it, we get wonderfully set up. One conventional depiction-older
(married) man and younger woman-turns into another, less depicted
perhaps, but no less "ordinary" scenario (denials notwithstanding).
Thus, it seems to me that Li'l Bit's "secret"-if that is the right word
for it-lies elsewhere than incest. As her narrative is pieced together, we
get a sense of the ambivalence that characterizes her relation to Uncle
Peck. Maybe this is the secret she has to tell and teach: not the brute fact
of her violation and betrayal, but an ambivalent admixture of love and
hate, desire and identification, pleasure and danger. Indeed, this is one of
the features of How I Learned to Drive that makes it such a refreshing break
from form: Li'l Bit is an active, unruly subject of desire; she is not simply
prostrate before the other's desire for her. Moreover, Li'l Bit's desire for
Uncle Peck is not purified of danger any more than her love for him is untouched
by fear and even hate.
There are numerous scenes that make clear Li'l Bit's desire for Uncle
Peck as well as her identification with him. Buckle your seat-belts and fast
forward to 1979: Li'l Bit is twenty-seven; she's on a "long bus trip to Upstate
New York" during which she picks up a high school senior (40). Afterward,
she tells us, "I lay on my back in the dark and I thought about
you, Uncle Peck" (41). This direct address to Uncle Peck, calling him into
presence, becomes indistinguishable from her imaginative identification
with him: "Oh. Oh-this is the allure. Being older. Being the first. Being
the translator, the teacher, the epicure, the already jaded. This is how the
giver gets taken" (41). She addresses this reverie of praise and wonder to
Uncle Peck even as she assumes his position, a redoubling of desire at and
STAGING SEXUAL INJURY
423
as the site of identification. This is a glimpse, then, not of the reiteration of
predation ("Who did it to you, Uncle Peck? How old were you? Were you
eleven?" [86]-questions without answer), but of desire's melancholy
turn inward into identification.
My invocation of melancholy here is deliberate. In his famous discussion
in "Mourning and Melancholia," Freud traces an analogy between
mourning (which he considers a normal psychological response to
loss) and melancholia (which he describes as a pathological response).27
He is seeking to show what mourning and melancholia have in common
and, especially, where they differ. Along the way Freud resorts to a range
of metaphors to describe the process of melancholia: figures of flight,
falling, shadows, wounds. "Mourning and Melancholia," written in 1915
and first published in 1917, is part of Freud's evolving theory of identification,
the topography of the ego, and the formation of conscience. His
puzzlement at the quality of ego's attachment to loss and the force with
which lost objects continue to affect the ego also anticipates his investigation
of trauma and the death drive in Beyond the Pleasure Principle.
Both mourning and melancholia are a relationship to loss, and in
both cases the ego suffers profound loss of interest in the outside world,
inhibition of all activity, loss of capacity to love, and painful dejection.
However, the melancholic suffers a blow to the inner world that seems to
exceed the loss itself. "In mourning, " Freud tells us, "it is the world which
has become poor and empty; in melancholia it is the ego itself."28 This
diminution of self is marked by lacerating reproaches to self-regard,29 a
self-abasement not present in mourning; the mourner might lash out at a
world suddenly bereft of his (or her) lost object, but does not, Freud says,
turn the fire on himself. If mourning is characterized by dejection, melancholia
is marked by abjection.
There is one more crucial difference between mourning and melancholia,
a difference that bears on Li'l Bit's secret and its retreat from understanding.
In melancholia, the subject may know well whom he or she
has lost, but not what is lost. Melancholia, then, involves an object loss that
is withdrawn from consciousness and absorbed into the ego. Lost, yet unrecognized
as loss, the lost object cannot be mourned as gone. And yet, this
nonrecognition of loss does not spare the subject of melancholia; the unknown
loss produces internal work similar to that undergone in mourning.
However, it is a kind of psychic work that defies understanding; neither
the subject of melancholia nor those who surround her know what it
is that absorbs her. This defiance even of self-understanding results in
part from a change in the ego; in the place of an object that cannot be
mourned, there comes an identification with the lost object or, perhaps
even, with loss itself. All unknowing, Freud observes, "the shadow of the
object fell upon the ego."30 But the psychic pull of melancholia also derives
from the ambivalence of the ties that bound, and still bind, the subject
to its lost and unmourned object.
Now there is much in Freud's discussion of melancholia that we
might wish to contest. For example, his opening distinction between
CRITICAL THEORY AND PERFORMANCE
424
mourning and melancholia depends on another, between "normal" psychological
responses and "pathological" ones-ultimately, a distinction
that does not quite hold. Indeed, it cannot even hold for Freud; when he
returns to the topic of identification and the constitution of the ego in
Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego (1921) and The Ego and the Id
(1923), "normal" processes of identification come more and more to resemble
the melancholic model of object-identification he has initially diagnosed
as pathological in "Mourning and Melancholia."31
A related problem has to do with depoliticization. To pathologize
melancholia is also to treat it as an individual problem and remove it from
the social.32 Curiously, this hermeneutic bracketing of the social, a bracketing
I have earlier criticized in the clinical and pop cultural discussion of
trauma, follows melancholia's path from the outside in. That is, within the
terms of Freud's analysis, melancholia is an inward turn that cuts the subject
off from the world around her. This is also what ego psychology's individualizing
diagnosis of melancholia effects: a flight from the world.
We might ask, both with Freud and against him-which is to say,
with Freud but also with Paula Vogel-what refusals and blind spots in
the social require the withdrawal into and burial within the self of Li'l
Bit's ambivalent relation to Uncle Peck. By "refusals" and "blind spots," I
do not refer to a cultural refusal to see or acknowledge the "reality" of incest
and adult-child sexual contact. (This latter, when it does get spoken
about, can only be spoken as "abuse," a term that squeezes out all moral
ambiguity and also evacuates the category of childhood.)33 Rather, I mean
the assertion that these experiences necessarily wound the one who undergoes
them and, not only that, that this is all these experiences amount
to: loss and more loss. The simultaneous refusal to recognize incest and
adult-child sexual contact and insistence, when they do break the horizon
of the visible, that such experiences injure and traumatize without spare
may be part of what propels such experiences inward and away from consciousness
in the first place (a firstness that is displaced in favor of the immediacy
of trauma). In view of this, far from pathologizing this inward
turn, we might rather marvel at the melancholic's rebellious refusal-"revolting"
is Freud's term (but he does not mean it approvingly, whereas I
do)-to get over it and give up so despised an object or object-relation.
Dare to Witness
Let's turn again to How I Learned to Drive and its ambivalent course of desire
and identification. It's fall term 1969, Li'l Bit's freshman year in college.
Uncle Peck counts down to her eighteenth birthday in December,
then pays a birthday call. The scene of their encounter makes clear her desire
for him-and her confusion:
Peck: Li'l Bit. Listen. Listen. Open your eyes and look at me. Come
on. Just open your eyes, honey. (Li'l Bit, eyes squeezed shut, refuses)
All right then, I just want you to listen. Li'l Bit-I'm going to ask
STAGING SEXUAL INJURY
425
you just this once. Of your own free will. Just lie down on the
bed with me-our clothes on-just lie down with me, a man and
a woman.., and let's.., hold one another. Nothing else. Before
you say anything else. I want the chance to... hold you. Because
sometimes the body knows things that the mind isn't listening
to... and after I've held you, then I want you to tell me what you
feel.
Li'l Bit: You'll just.. . hold me?
Peck: Yes. And then you can tell me what you're feeling. (8o-81)
And so, they lie together, the man holding the woman. As Li'l Bit and her
uncle lie together, on an unadorned bed, discrepancies between body and
word, between what we desire and what we can allow ourselves to have
(or become?), play out before us. The Greek Chorus steps onto the stage,
intoning a "Recipe for a Southern Boy." Without leaving Uncle Peck's
side, Li'l Bit joins in the litany, praising, in turn, his "warm brown eyes,"
"warm hands," the "slouch of the fishing skiff in his walk," "sweat of cypress
and sand," and at last "his mouth" (81-83). Speaking her desire, she
comes quite nearly to enact it, leaning into his body, breath to breath, as if
to kiss his mouth. Then, abruptly voice breaks from body: "I've got to get
back" (83). Asked by her uncle if she really feels nothing, Li'l Bit lies, "No.
Nothing" (84). After sending him away, after saying no to his desire and
hers, Li'l Bit will never see him again. It will take him "seven years to
drink himself to death" (85).
The afterwards of this refusal and this death is another memory, but
one that takes Li'l Bit and the audience further back than the beginning.
It is 1962, Li'l Bit's first driving lesson, the first time Uncle Peck crossed
the line. In this, the penultimate scene of the play, Li'l Bit, the woman
whose memories have been the driving force of the play thus far, exchanges
the role of narrator for that of spectator and witness. Her life, her
lines (lifelines?) now spoken by the Teenage Greek Chorus, Li'l Bit
watches and listens as her own story unfolds before her, as if it were happening
to someone else, as if it were a scene in someone else's life. A play
even. The stage directions for this scene yoke the work of memory and the
work of theater:
The Teenage Greek Chorus member stands apart on stage. She will
speak all of Li'l Bit's lines. Li'l Bit sits beside Peck in the front seat.
She looks at him closely, remembering. (88)
Li'l Bit takes her seat in the theater of memory. Only now, at this late juncture
in the play, a play whose temporal indices are as revisable as memory
itself, do we witness what precipitated Li'l Bit's flight from her body and
into her head. She is eleven; she will be thirty-five "before you know it"
(91). She lives both times at once.
Throughout this scene, as the Teenage Greek Chorus takes Li'l Bit's
part, she watches herself remembering, objectifies her memory as her self.
CRITICAL THEORY AND PERFORMANCE
426
The Teenage Chorus stands to the side of the "action" and speaks Li'l Bit's
confusion and fear as Uncle Peck places the eleven-year-old girl on his
lap, behind the wheel of his car, and then reaches up under her shirt. Simultaneously,
we witness another encounter in time. As Li'l Bit listens to
her own story, words now spoken by another, she climbs back into the car
of memory. We hear one story even as we watch another unfold before us
in the shared space-time that is live performance. At the same time that
the Teenage Greek Chorus gives voice to Li'l Bit's fear ("Uncle Peck
what are you doing" and, then, "Uncle Peck-please don't do this" [90]),
she leans back into her uncle and reaches up to stroke his face, giving us
to wonder if it is the eleven-year-old girl touching him or the adult
woman, in memory willing connection with the lost man who taught her
love and loss at once.
The accumulated weight of Li'l Bit's memories teaches us at what
cost she learned to drive and learned to love; she retreats into the fire in
her head, leaves her body behind, feels shame at and in her body. "That
day was the last day I lived in my body" (90). These are the first words
she speaks when she resumes her place as teller of her own story. But the
last words of the Teenage Greek Chorus-Li'l Bit's eleven-year-old self
echo at her back, "This isn't happening" (90).
This doubling-of time, of Li'l Bit-is readable as the splitting off
that characterizes trauma. But I want to resist this reading. Instead, I am
struck by the doubling, or standing in, that is witness and that is also the
intersubjective occasion of the self. The scene I have just described is one
of two moments in How I Learned to Drive that explicitly represent what it
means to remember trauma and bear witness, a remembering and a witnessing
that blur the lines between self and other, inside and out, past and
present (34-35).
Let's briefly consider the other scene in which How I Learned to Drive
seems to reflect self-critically on bearing witness. On a drive home from a
drunken 1968 celebration with Uncle Peck, Li'l Bit falls asleep, and as she
sleeps Uncle Peck walks downstage towards the audience and begins another
lesson, a fishing lesson, for the never-seen Cousin Bobby. But the
scene of pedagogy turns-as had happened before with Li'l Bit-somewhere
else. In some productions of How I Learned to Drive, the actress
playing Li'l Bit is stationed off to the side while this scene unfolds, as if
she has awakened from sleep-or has fallen into a dream?-and is watching
Uncle Peck "seduce" Cousin Bobby. The uncertain status of the
scene-is it a dream; a memory (but if so, whose); a speculation on Li'l
Bit's part that Uncle Peck must have done something like this to someone
else, so why not to Cousin Bobby?-is only enhanced by the fact that we
never see Cousin Bobby. The actor playing Uncle Peck speaks his lines to
an empty space and mimes interactions with a body that is not there. In
some sense, then, we are being asked whether it is possible to witness
what we have not seen. This is a question with deep ethical import, for it
raises questions of our responsibility to and before others whom we may
never know.34
STAGING SEXUAL INJURY
427
Vogel also recognizes that there is another deep and deeply ethical
challenge she has presented her audience: how to witness what you cannot
bear to see. In her opening notes on casting, for the Teenage Greek
Chorus Vogel "strongly recommend[s] casting a young woman who is 'of
legal age,' that is, twenty-one to twenty-five years old who can look as
close to eleven as possible." "If the actor is too young," Vogel worries,
"the audience may feel uncomfortable" (4). Now, this is a striking worry
for a play that is all about discomforting audience members' presumptions.
But, of course, there is discomfort and there is discomfort. What distinguishes
one kind of discomfort from another? What, in other words,
makes discomfort bearable, even if it scarcely feels that way at the time?
Vogel's proposed solution pivots on the peculiar status of the live
body of performance. On the one hand, Vogel cautions directors to cast an
actress who can plausibly play-"look"-eleven; on the other hand, she
wants to make sure the audience knows full well that the Teenage Greek
Chorus, the actress who will speak as the eleven-year-old Li'l Bit, is really
(in life and off stage) and most definitely not eleven.
The casting choice (which is also an acting direction) certainly seems
in keeping with the Brechtian leanings of How I Learned to Drive: its suggested
use of screens for the slide projection of traffic signs; musical interludes
to signal mood shifts and mark time; a narrative that circles back on
itself, revising as it goes; and defiance of simplistic notions of "good"
characters versus "bad." Making visible to the audience the chronological
discrepancy between the Teenage Greek Chorus and the actress playing
her could thus be understood as a kind of "alienation effect," intended to
open up a critical distance between actress and role as well as between
character and audience. This interpretation is fine as far as it goes, but
does not adequately get at the charge of the live body of performance.
One of the distinctive features of theatrical representation is its involvement
of bodies in shared time and space. On stage, actors and actresses
do not just speak characters' lines but embody them, bringing flesh
to word, gesture to figure. Just as crucially, there are, on the "other" side,
the witnessing bodies of the audience. In the peculiar alchemy of live performance,
these lines of division-between onstage and off, actor and
role, actor and audience-can blur or otherwise be confounded. This
crossing over is both the risk and the thrill of theatrical representation.
The risks can only be ratcheted up in a play whose story line revolves
around (even as it is not reducible to) such a morally freighted
topic as incest. Ultimately, the audience of How I Learned to Drive is called
to witness not the moral clarity of injury, but the messy ambiguities and
ambivalences of lived embodiment, and these complexities are played out
in and across real bodies in shared space and time. Perhaps, if the audience
is to bear witness to what is before them, they must not see what they
already think they know. Perhaps, just perhaps, to see too close to the
"real" would alienate in the wrong way, potentially pushing the audience
back from the uncomfortable lessons the play has to teach. In many respects
the dare of How I Learned to Drive-the dare not just to see, but to
CRITICAL THEORY AND PERFORMANCE
428
witness, not just to experience, but to comprehend-is the dare of theater
itself.
The association between theater and witnessing is a long-standing
one; the English word theater comes from the ancient Greek verb theaomai,
"to view, gaze at, behold." "Behold" is perhaps the best translation of this
deponent verb, for it preserves the self-reflexivity otherwise lost to translation.
As a deponent verb, theaomai has no active form, but is used in the
middle voice to communicate the active sense of viewing (as opposed to
being viewed). The middle voice, though, reverberates with the promise
(and risk?) of a double movement: out into the world and back onto the
self. Theater, when it works, is the activity of witness-an activity that
takes place, as it were, on both sides of the stage. The challenge to spectators
is not just to sit and watch a play, as if the play were some passive object
to be quickly consumed and passed; rather, spectators, if they are also
to be witnesses, are in some fundamental sense taken in and transformed
by what they watch. (And here's another reason I like to translate theaomai
as "behold." I like its grasping-ness, the way in which one kind of sensory
perception, sight, is explained in terms of another, touch.) This is more
than empathic identification. Witnessing as beholding requires an openness
to the surprise of the other-and of the self.
In the excruciating final scene of How I Learned to Drive, Li'l Bit tells
us, "The nearest sensation I feel-of flight in the body-I guess I feel
when I'm driving" (91). That she should feel most alive while driving
seems counterintuitive. For wasn't the car the scene of her trauma, the
place where Uncle Peck had unfettered access to her? However, if, as I
have suggested above, Li'l Bit's trauma and her secret are bound up in all
that she has loved and lost in Uncle Peck, a love and a loss whose high toll
do not cancel out their value for Li'l Bit, then it may only be while driving
that she gets to have him again-by being him. For the length of the drive,
she is not pressed to get over him or get over herself. If the price tag for
getting over the loss is letting go of an object and an object-relation that
the world tells you was not worth having in the first place, then this
melancholy refusal to get over it already is not destructive of the self, but
may even be constitutive of its ongoing life.
In the topsy-turvy world of How I Learned to Drive, Li'l Bit's rituals
of remembrance and revision, as she moves us and herself back and forth
in time, enact a truth-telling that, in Ann Cvetkovich's words, "def[ies]
simple notions of disclosure."35 Importantly, the play proposes that this
defiance of conventional expectations of how memory works and of
knowing our own stories and communicating them to others does not
mean that understanding and healing injury is impossible, but is the very
condition of forging a different relation to injury and to identity. But we
cannot do so, the play suggests, unless we stop seeking for hard-and-fast
truths and instead allow for the ambivalence of an arrival that is at once
too soon and too late.
None of us can meet the past again face to face; we are always too
early or too late. But this suspension of time, even as we move through it,
STAGING SEXUAL INJURY
429
might be the condition for another kind of meeting. The final image of the
play presents melancholia shorn of pathology (judgment from others) and
shame (judgment of self). Li'l Bit steps out of the past and into the car:
Ahh... (Beat) I adjust my seat. Fasten my seat belt. Then I check the
right side mirror-check the left side. (She does) Finally, I adjust
the rearview mirror. (As Li'l Bit adjusts the rearview mirror, a faint
light strikes the spirit of Uncle Peck, who is sitting in the back seat of the
car. She sees him in the mirror. She smiles at him, and he nods at her.
They are happy to be going for a long drive together. Li'l Bit slips the car
into first gear; to the audience) And then-I floor it. (92)
Where the live recedes, there is memory's psychic life of witness, and perhaps
theater's too-if we open ourselves to its lessons.
NOTES
I want to thank Sharon Holland and Janelle Reinelt for their incisive and detailed
written comments on this essay. I also benefited from the opportunity to present
earlier versions of this essay to audiences at the University of California, Irvine;
the University of Illinois, Chicago; and Columbia University. Finally, I want to
single out the following friends and colleagues for their critical encouragements
along the way: Jennifer Brody, Mark Canuel, Ann Cvetkovich, Jill Dolan, Lisa
Duggan, David Eng, Janet R. Jakobsen, Tom Lee, Molly McGarry, and Rebecca
Schneider.
1. Paula Vogel, How I Learned to Drive, in The Mammary Plays (New York: Theatre
Communications Group, 1998), 7. Subsequent references are given in the text.
2. Cathy Caruth, Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History (Baltimore:
Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996).
3. Sigmund Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, in The Standard Edition of the
Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. 18, ed. James Strachey (London:
Hogarth Press, 1955), 12.
4. Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, 24.
5. Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, 27.
6. Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, 27.
7. Caruth, Unclaimed Experience, 58.
8. Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, 31; Caruth, Unclaimed Experience, 131-
32 n. 5.
9. Caruth, Unclaimed Experience, 58.
10. Caruth, Unclaimed Experience, 11.
11. Caruth, Unclaimed Experience, 11.
12. The term "behindsight" is borrowed from Lee Edelman, "Seeing Things:
Representation, the Scene of Surveillance, and the Spectacle of Gay Male Sex," in
Inside/Out: Lesbian Theories, Gay Theories, ed. Diana Fuss (New York: Routledge,
1991), 101.
13. In this regard, How I Learned to Drive not only intervenes in trauma theory,
but also checks the developmental flow of most psychological theory, which
posits neat stages through which individuals pass en route to normal adulthood.
Even Freud, for all his hedging, ultimately succumbs to a developmental bias.
CRITICAL THEORY AND PERFORMANCE
430
(Witness the arc of The Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality.) Vogel's playful vocabulary
of "drives" and "driving" productively and punningly engages Freud's
notion of the drive, which figures so crucially in his developmental model of
human sexuality. But, this engagement with Freud's drive theory is also a rebuttal,
since How I Learned to Drive ultimately refuses to map sexual development or maturation
more generally along the lines of a linear progress narrative. How I Learned
to Drive might thus serve as a generative case study for a nondevelopmental psychological
theory. I pursue this possibility at greater length in Against Childhood
(Beacon Press, forthcoming). See also Elspeth Probyn's lovely essay on the place
of childhood in gay and lesbian narratives, "Suspended Beginnings: Of Childhood
and Nostalgia," GLQ 2, no. 4 (1995): 439-65.
14. David Savran neatly summarizes Vogel's anti-Aristotelian style in "Loose
Screws," his introduction to "The Baltimore Waltz" and Other Plays (New York: Theatre
Communications Group, 1996), ix-xv, especially xiii.
15. Savran, "Loose Screws," xii.
16. Ann Cvetkovich, "Sexual Trauma/Queer Memory: Incest, Lesbianism, and
Therapeutic Culture," GLQ 2, no. 4 (1995): 366.
17. Janice Haaken, "The Recovery of Memory, Fantasy, and Desire: Feminist
Approaches to Sexual Abuse and Psychic Trauma," Signs 21, no. 4 (1996): 1069-94,
especially 1078.
18. Pamela Haag, "'Putting Your Body on the Line': The Question of Violence,
Victims, and the Legacy of Second-Wave Feminism," differences 8, no. 2 (1996): 24.
19. Haaken, "Recovery of Memory," 1079. See also Cvetkovich, "Sexual
Trauma/Queer Memory."
20. Haaken, "Recovery of Memory," 1083.
21. Carole S. Vance, ed., Pleasure and Danger: Exploring Female Sexual Imagery
(1984; New York: Pandora Press, 1992).
22. In feminist histories of "second-wave feminism," the 1982 Barnard conference
has often been set down as the opening battle in the feminist "sex wars."
There are strong historical reasons to resist doing so, however. This way of telling
the story overlooks the fact that women's sexuality was already a matter of heated
debate among nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century U.S. feminists. In addition,
it also leaves out broader cultural currents and debates over sexual identity and
practices that influenced the direction(s) of feminist sexual politics. See Lisa Duggan
and Nan D. Hunter, Sex Wars: Sexual Dissent and Political Culture (New York:
Routledge, 1995).
23. For a helpful discussion of the value of feminist political differences, see
Janet R. Jakobsen, Working Alliances and the Politics of Difference (Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 1998).
24. Sharon Marcus, "Fighting Bodies, Fighting Words: A Theory and Politics of
Rape Prevention," in Feminists Theorize the Political, ed. Judith Butler and Joan W.
Scott (New York: Routledge, 1992), 385-403.
25. Mary Gaitskill, "On Not Being a Victim," Harpers, March 1994, 35-44.
26. Gaitskill, "On Not Being a Victim," 42.
27. Sigmund Freud, "Mourning and Melancholia," in The Standard Edition of
the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. 14, ed. James Strachey (London:
Hogarth Press, 1957), 243-58.
28. Freud, "Mourning and Melancholia," 246.
29. Freud, "Mourning and Melancholia," 244.
30. Freud, "Mourning and Melancholia," 249.
31. For a rich discussion of melancholia as at the heart of subject-formation,
STAGING SEXUAL INJURY
431
see Judith Butler, The Psychic Life of Power (Stanford: Stanford University Press,
1997).
32. For a valuable treatment of melancholia that redraws it through the social
and political register of Asian American identity and difference, see David Eng
and Shinhee Han, "A Dialogue on Racial Melancholia," Psychoanalytic Dialogues
10, no. 4 (2000): 667-700. See also Douglas Crimp's important "Mourning and Militancy,"
October 51 (Winter 1989): 3-18.
33. For a provocative feminist discussion of moral panic around the specter of
childhood sexuality, see Judith Levine, Harmful to Minors: The Perils of Protecting
Children from Sex (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002).
34. For helpful discussions of the ethical dilemma of bearing witness to the
trauma of the other, see Caruth, Unclaimed Experience; and Shoshana Felman and
Dori Laub, Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History
(New York: Routledge, 1992).
35. I am here borrowing from Ann Cvetkovich's important discussion of the
ambivalence of telling and healing trauma in Dorothy Allison's novel, Bastard Out
of Carolina. See her "Sexual Trauma/Queer Memory," 360-61.
Immobile Legs, Stalled Words:
Psychoanalysis and Moving Deaths
Peggy Phelan
I
I have had a long and, if I may say so myself, distinguished career as a member
of the corps de ballet in the New York City Ballet, or NYCB as we call it. We were
entrusted with preserving the works of George Balanchine, without a doubt the
master choreographer of this century. Even as a young girl I longed to dancebefore
I had ever seen a ballet. I cannot explain this deep urge in me. It just is. Or
perhaps was. But I get ahead of myself, like James Joyce's daughter Lily. "Lily was
so busy she was literally run off her feet." Joyce's daughter was a dancer, and
surely he learned from her how peculiarly the feetflee the body after a long dance.
Anyway, I have devoted my life to dance, and it is my greatest happiness to feel I
have been able to interpret accurately and passionately some of the movements
Balanchine imagined.
Most of my colleagues at NYCB viewed their work in the corps as a kind of
advanced apprenticeship, a necessary stepping-stone toward their real goal,
which was to become a principal dancer. I myself, however, was content to remain
a member of the corps. I have certain physical limitations (I am not as tall as the
ideal ballerina needs to be), but more importantly, I was not dedicated enough to
put my body through the disciplined work, especially in relation to the precise
technique of dancing on pointe, that cannot be sidestepped by any aspiring principal.
I was happy to make a relatively anonymous contribution to Balanchine's
expansive vision. My ex-husband liked this in me and often remarked that I was
one of the few remaining women who understood the value of subsuming individual
ambition for a larger collective purpose. To my distress I soon found it much
easier to give myself fully to the work of Balanchine than to my marriage; I believed
in the vision of Mr. B. wholeheartedly but discovered I could not sustain
the faith needed for marriage.
But I digress. I do not want to burden you with the details of my personal
life. Rather, I would like to tell a different story altogether, one that I hope will
play some small part in opening a long-deferred conversation between dancers
and cultural theorists, more particularly, those interested in psychoanalysis and
questions of the feminine body. For reasons that I hope will be apparent a bit further
on, Ifind it necessary to frame my entry point into the conversation by making
some mention of the events that led to my interest in the relationship between
dance and psychoanalysis.
Once I realized that my marriage was ending and that I would not be on
the same career path as most of the corps, I found that I had a small amount of
time and psychic freedom to pursue certain questions that had surfaced from
time to time in my life but had always been put aside to dedicate myself to dance.
432
IMMOBILE LEGS, STALLED WORDS
433
I found, for example, that I had a certain appetite for finance and a rather surprising
interest in science, especially kinesiology. Moreover, I became interested
in risk-gain ratios and found myself calculating what the percentages of injuring
knees, hips, and ankles would be in relation to the number of hours the troupe
rehearsed, divided by the number of hours we performed. I made charts to include
travel time via airplanes, and compared these with charts of travel time
and crime statistics on the New York subway. I realized that all my years counting
at the bar and doing various exercises had given me a deeply intimate kinship
with numbers. I had come to order my habits of thinking in relation to numbers
and found that I had a strange facility for understanding the ways in which
they could be combined and divided. It seemed to me that numbers had an inner
logic, a sort of affinity for certain other numbers, that I found comforting. Numbers
seemed to be a kind of music that extended from dance into a richly layered
world whose movements I wanted to graph, to plot, to layout-as if on an enormous
clock that everyone in the whole world could see. This rather late and large
ambition threw me at first.
My ex-husband was (actually is) something of a computer wizard, and
some of the calmest times we had together were spent choreographing numbers
across a computer screen. After we divorced, I became almost obsessive about creating
a fantastical virtual ballet on the computer. My efforts in this regard were
made all the more pleasurable by the possibility of imagining movement as pure
form. It was only later that I realized my passion for computers was a way of
grieving. Having felt the deep pain of realizing that my marriage was a misstep,
I was in danger of losing my way everywhere. I had devoted most of my life to
placing one foot in front of the other, and suddenly I was profoundly unsure about
where to step. As my feet tapped away under my chair and my fingers typed on
the keys, I began to feel that the lack of direction in my feet might be cured by the
mapping my fingers were making on the keyboard. I was transferring the hesitation
in my feet to the plotting of my calmer hands. A strange form of grieving,
perhaps, but for me a helpful one.
After a while I came to realize that my computer plan could not be realized.
I simply did not know enough about the deep structure of statistics and computation
to do what I most wanted to do-develop a computerized version of Balanchine's
elegant ballets. I dreamed that if I could learn these skills, I might bring the
beauty of Balanchine to an audience who had never heard of him or seen his work.
I went to the NYCB directors and explained my vision. They were supportive
but in a vague, immaterial way. I wanted them to fund my study at the
Courant Institute of Mathematics at New York University, where my exhusband's
best friend was a professor. He had assured me that the institute would
admit me as a special student. Unfortunately, the tuition there was considerably
more than I could afford, and since I would not be enrolled in a degree program,
I was not eligible for financial aid. The ballet directors were not forthcoming with
the fees, however, and I could not bring myself to push the matter beyond my
broad hint. The NYCB had to devote itself to preserving Balanchine's real ballets
first and foremost, and while I thought my project in virtual ballet was certainly
compatible with that mission, I also knew it would take several years and promised
only uncertain results.
CRITICAL THEORY AND PERFORMANCE
434
Despite my intellectual acceptance of the directors' decision, I grew depressed
and somewhat despondent during rehearsals. I had been a member of the
corps for twelve years and it was increasingly difficult for me to maintain my enthusiasm
for practice. I spent about six months in this inattentive condition.
Then one evening during a sparsely attended performance of Mozartiana at Lincoln
Center (it was sparsely attended because there was a snowstorm and I was
thinking about how I might plot the risk-injury ratio of audiences from Manhattan
versus New Jersey) when I extended my right leg in the air above my waist,
as I had done thousands upon thousands of times, I heard my hip crack.
After the bone was set and I was in the hospital recovering, I thought about
the ironies of my injury. I had been plotting the probabilities of injuries for about
three years. I wondered if I had somehow known in advance that I would break
my hip. Was my statistical frenzy an elaborate form of self-explanation, selfjustification?
I also considered the irony of my injury occurring during a performance
of Mozartiana. While Balanchine choreographed it, he spoke often of the
death of Mozart and the kind of smooth order his music represented (perfect integers).
Tchaikovsky's Suite No. 4 sets Mozart's piano pieces for an orchestra, and
Balanchine used Tchaikovsky's score to illustrate how music could be seen and
dance could be heard. As the music builds on the principal drive of the piano, so
too did the corps elaborate the central drama of the four principals. Balanchine
privately referred to the role of his principal dancer in one sequence as a dance for
"the angel of death." Publicly, the sequence is called "Prayer." Balanchine's choreography
in Mozartiana struck me, in its simplicity, as his most spiritually
searching work; it was my personal favorite. But if you asked me what it was
"about," I could not say. It was more of a feeling than anything else for me-a
feeling of searching, of longing.
As I lay in the hospital bed, I tried to hear my own longing. While my injury
was extraordinarily painful and I dreaded being immobile, I had to admit
that somewhere part of my spirit-felt liberated. I was out of the corps for at least
eight months, possibly a year. I had reasonable amounts of insurance, and on the
third day of my convalescence the ballet directors came and rather sheepishly told
me they had paid the fees for Courant. I was to be the first injured ballerina to enroll
in the prestigious institute.
But as is so often the case in human affairs, when I arrived at Courant I was
immediately overwhelmed. I had been essentially self-taught. I could not decipher
any of the language in which these professors spoke. They were on a planet so remote
that what I needed to join them there was beyond whatever resources I had
or even wanted to summon. Professional mathematicians seemed so different from
professional dancers that I began to think my plan utterly mad, impossible.
This became clear after the fifth lecture of Introduction to Statistics. Enrollment
was so large the course was held in the psychology building, which had
large lecture theaters. The course was designed for social scientists. The professors
at Courant told me quite frankly that it was the easiest of all their offerings
and that it would ground me in the basic language of computation necessary for
instruction in "higher" mathematical forms. By the end of the fifth lecture, however,
I was totally lost. I could not find an entry point despite my most heroic efforts
to concentrate. I sat in the lecture hall dejectedly, waiting for the pain in my
IMMOBILE LEGS, STALLED WORDS
435
hip to subside. Absentmindedly, I began doodling with some numbers on my
notepad and did not notice for some time that a new group of students had filled
the room and a new class begun, something having to do with psychology. By the
time I began to listen I could feel the force of Providence resetting my bones. This,
after all, was what I had been moving toward, but as in the best choreography, I
never would have guessed where I would wind up from where I had started.
The lecture was being given by a young, apparently serious but not especially
talented, lecturer. She seemed at times quite over her head. I liked that. Suddenly
I did not feel as if I were the only one at sea. I actually could follow most of
what she said. I rushed to the bookstore and began reading voraciously. This class
was going to answer all the questions I did not even know "were mine."
What follows is a long version of my interpretation of the lecturer's remarks.
She is not a dancer, but most of what she said was so applicable to dance
that I have, with her permission, entwined our thoughts. I asked her if I could use
her name since so much of the work is hers, but she insisted that all teachers want
this kind of collaboration to happen. She prefers to remain an unmarked presence
in my text.
II
In the inaugural text of classical psychoanalysis, Josef Breuer and Sigmund
Freud's Studies on Hysteria of 1895, remarkable attention is given to bodies,
and to body parts, that will not or cannot move. The first of the five case
histories collected in Studies, Breuer's account of his treatment of Anna O.,
and the last, Freud's account of his treatment of Elisabeth von R., contain
especially fascinating and often overlooked notions of the relationship between
the body and truth, the body and time, and the body and language.
Here, we would like to recast the usual critical approach to Studies on Hysteria
that accents the invention of the talking cure, and review another hope
for a psychical cure that these early case histories also express. This cure
had as its foundation a deep faith in the "truth" of bodily performances.
The psychoanalytic session, at least as it was conceived in these early
case histories, involved the acting out, the performative elaboration, of the
symptom. While the case histories chart several different notions of performance-ventriloquism,
imitation, "possession"-we will concentrate here
on the ideas of dance and movement that inform Studies. Following the
lead of Freud and Breuer, we will be concerned with paralytic feet and eloquent
thighs, and with the transfers enacted in psychic and physical movements
and "obstructions."
Dragging feet, feet with sharp cramps, feet that swell and limp, feet
that are suddenly too heavy to move, feet that support legs frozen in
contractions, give Studies on Hysteria a strange rhythm and rocky gait. It
is on the basis of these aching feet that psychoanalysis proposes a new reproductive
system for the female body (all five of the case histories are of
women). In Breuer's analysis of Bertha Pappenheim, whom he names
Anna O., "when the first of her chronic symptoms disappeared," the contracture
of her right leg, the psychoanalytic method was born:
CRITICAL THEORY AND PERFORMANCE
436
These findings-that in the case of this patient the hysterical phenomena
disappeared as soon as the event which had given rise to
them was reproduced in her hypnosis-made it possible to arrive at
a therapeutic technical procedure which left nothing to be desired in
its logical consistency and systematic application.'
Returning suppleness and motion to Anna O.'s right leg enables both
Anna O. and psychoanalysis itself to "take a great step forward" (35). In
the disappearance of the contraction in the right leg, the technique "which
left nothing to be desired" was born.2
The birth of psychoanalysis requires the re-production and representation
of the "event" that triggered the contraction of Anna O.'s right leg.
In that reenactment psychic and physical movement are restored. The psychoanalytic
reproduction of the symptomatic body requires two people. In
these early histories, the patient and the doctor connect both physically
and psychically. Freud eventually theorized the psychical contact in the
transference and countertransference. In Studies, however, the physical
contact between the doctor and the patient is instrumental to the cure. "But
she would never begin to talk until she had satisfied herself of my identity
by carefully feeling my hands."3 Peter Swales has documented that when
Freud told Sandor Ferenczi about his early years as an analyst he admitted
that when he analyzed Frau Cicilie M., whose history is documented in
Studies, "he had even lain on the floor, sometimes for hours at a time accompanying
[her] through hysterical crises."4 For both doctors, although
for different reasons, the physical cure presented too many risks. Psychoanalysis
moved away from embracing the body and refined the talking
cure. A technique that depended too heavily upon touch was a huge risk
for an epistemological revolution whose visionary leader was determined
to be, above all scientific. Studies, almost unwittingly, was two different approaches
to the cure-and the psychoanalytic movement followed the one
that left the body untouched.
Like blind men first learning Braille, the fingers of Freud and Breuer
press and prod the somatic utterances of their patients' hysterical bodies.5
The doctors apply mental and physical pressure to the indecipherable
bodily signifier, the symptom, until it "joins in the conversation." Different
body parts of the patient join the doctor in an ongoing conversation
whose subject is no longer strictly speaking "her" body but is rather "their
body," the body being made and manipulated in their discursive and
physical interaction. In his history of Elisabeth von R., Freud describes
this technique that "left nothing to be desired":
[H]er painful legs6 began to "join in the conversation" during our
analyses .... If... by a question or by pressure upon her head I
called up a memory, a sensation of pain would make its first appearance,
and this was usually so sharp that the patient would give a
start and put her hand to the spot. The pain that was thus aroused
would persist so long as she was under the influence of the memory;
IMMOBILE LEGS, STALLED WORDS
437
it would reach its climax when she was in the act of telling me the
essential and decisive part of what she had to communicate, and
with the last word it would disappear. I came in time to use such
pains as a compass to guide me; if she stopped talking but admitted
that she still had a pain, I knew she had not told me everything, and
insisted on her continuing her story till the pain had been talked
away. Not until then did I arouse a fresh memory.7
The "arousal" of a fresh memory reproduces a fresh body, one newly
made in the somatic and verbal performance Freud and Elisabeth enact.
Putting his hand on her head causes pressure to build; her hand flies to a
different body part that is then verbally massaged. Freud transforms Elisabeth's
leg's contribution to the conversation into a truth-meter, a somatic
lie-detector.8 Although Freud doubts his patient's verbal starts and stops,
her narrative's beginnings and endings, for him her thigh does not lie.9
In Studies, Freud and Breuer tried to find the history of the symptom.
Their search for history has led many scholars to use a kind of shorthand
in describing the relation between history and hysteria: hysteria is a disease
that is the consequence of a jumbled narrative, an incoherent autobiography,
a failure of historical accounts.10 But it would be more accurate to
say that hysteria is the disease through which psychoanalysis imagines a
history of the symptom and the patient discovers that her body's history
must be spoken. The imposition of narrative order, an imposition rehearsed
when the doctor composes his account, imposes psychic order on
the body.11 What is profoundly startling to realize, however, is that the
body does not contain such an order independent of this narrative imposition.
Psychoanalysis suggests that the body's "truth" does not organize
itself narratologically or chronologically. The body does not experience the
world in the way that consciousness does: the aim of psychoanalysis is to
find a way to suture the body into time's order (time's truth is its order).
The equally logical task of suturing consciousness to bodily "truth" remains
outside the official domains of mainstream science, and thrives in
New Age philosophy and alternative medicine.
Dance can be said to be the elaboration of possible temporalities for
the body that are interpreted in movement; and psychoanalysis can be said
to be the elaboration of possible narratives for the body that are interpreted
(or displaced) in the body's symptom. Dance frames the body performing
movement in time and space. While it is true that bodies usually manage
to move in time and space, dancing consciously performs the body's
discovery of its temporal and spatial dimensions. For many dancers, of
course, dancing is timing. Lacking a good sense of timing, some people
abandon dancing.
I feel an overwhelming need to interrupt the partnering that I am doing
here. The following few paragraphs constitute my solo writing. Perhaps I
have secretly longed to be a principal dancer and have been renouncing that
desire all this time. So much of my past is lost to me now. Anyway:
CRITICAL THEORY AND PERFORMANCE
438
When I began to dance Balanchine's ballets as a teenager I entered his
system of time. I became one of a number of bodies he wanted to move, and
my body became for him a type of number. While Balanchine generated his
numbers from the music, I generated mine from the measure of my limbs'
movements. Looking back, I can now see that Balanchine's choreography
cured a certain fear of being lost that I sometimes had before I fully became
a dancer. On those rare occasions when I did not practice or rehearse for a
day or two, I would remember that vague feeling of drift that I had experienced
prior to my training. It was as if I could not find a place to land,
a way to be in the world. Dancing gave me that place, that way of counting.
With a broken hip I was in danger of losing a certain mental equilibrium.
As I read the psychoanalytic case histories over and over I would listen
to Mozart as a way to keep my body in the time to which it had grown
accustomed.
Soon I began to see aspects of my own past in these histories that inspired
me to revise my relation to my training. This absorption with my past
startled me, for dancers are disciplined to think in the present tense exclusively-to
be fully in the moment. Remembrance is replaced by "reconstruction,"
a present performance of dances that have been rescored in notation
practices that are only now becoming common ways to preserve dance.
Freud's favorite word for psychoanalysis was reconstruction. I began to
see a deep similarity between the process of reassembling the movements
that constitute dance and the psychic remembering and working through of
psychoanalysis. While ballet is dedicated to "beauty," psychoanalysis is
dedicated to "health." But both practices are very close.
Physical movement and psychic transference allow for a revision of the
body's relation to its own past. Psychic transference is the work accomplished
in the actual analysis itself and then repeated in the analyst's act of
composing and publishing the case history. Breuer's record of Anna O.'s
cure reenacts the process by which his discursive interpretation "surmounts"
the questions raised by her body. However, in the translation of
the somatic symptom into the discursive cure, another movement occurs. In
addition to moving simply and elegantly from the logic of the symptom to
the logic of discourse, the body makes another move. It dances. Something
central to the vitality of the body cannot be contained by even the most exhaustive
psychoanalytic cure.
For my lecturer this "something" is the irreducible symptom offemininity
itself. Jacqueline Rose argues that "hysteria is assimilated to a body as
site of the feminine, outside discourse, silent finally, or at best, 'dancing.'"12
But Rose and my lecturer seem to assume that talking is better
than dancing, that language is more expressive than somatic utterances. I
myself cannot accept this assumption. Moreover, the argument about hysteria
and femininity neglects the question of what Breuer and Balanchine
wanted to cure in their own bodies. Breuer's copious note-taking and Balanchine's
breathtaking choreography answered some need in them that had
little to do with the women upon whose bodies they sought to pose their
deepest questions.
IMMOBILE LEGS, STALLED WORDS
439
Like dancers and choreographers, Freud and Breuer admitted that the
body can express things that consciousness and its discursive formations
cannot. Within psychoanalysis, these bodily expressions are called symptoms.
Symptoms are somatic expressions that signal the work of repression;
they are the bodily placeholders for material that consciousness cannot fully
absorb. Symptoms are condensed indexes of a not yet consciously narrativized
event. Therefore, symptoms can only occur in the present tense;
once the event finds a past tense, the symptom (temporarily) disappears.13
Within the terms of psychoanalysis, bodies are symptomatic; some symptoms
are dangerous, but most are not. Although we tend to think of a symptom
as a pathology, we will use the word here in the genuine psychoanalytic
sense, to refer to bodily expressions not yet interpreted.
From a dancer's point of view the symptom is one way of understanding
a movement phrase. Movement phrases are somatic expressions that are
condensed versions of particular techniques. They consolidate a specific
physical gesture in the dance even while pointing to the broader movement
vocabulary from which the phrase is derived. Likewise, the symptom registers
a particular "something" that the body can only perform symptomatically
(a cough, a paralyzed arm), while also pointing to something that
eludes conscious narration. In dance, the exclusions of movement choices,
which are fundamental to establishing the technique from which the phrase
emerges, function in a way similar to the repressions of the unconscious.
They are as vital to the legibility of the movement phrase itself as symptoms
are to the legibility of a particular subjectivity. A failed movement phrase,
in my case, a broken hip, might be an expression of some dis-join that my
body must dis-play precisely because I cannot name it. (Some injuries of
course are the result of bad choreography: if everyone in the troupe keeps
breaking bones, perhaps it is the choreography that needs to be reset.)
Psychoanalysis is the performance in which the doctor and the patient
interpret a symptom that gives the body temporal coherence. Part of the
burden of establishing temporal order for the body, for both dancing and
psychoanalysis, often falls to narrative since one of the things that narrative
generates is temporal order. But even without narrative, dance organizes
its movement across temporal schema often carried by music. And in
this sense, dance, like psychoanalysis, helps join the body to time. But just
as the proliferation of dance styles throughout history and across cultures
implicitly suggests the enormous range of temporal possibilities within
movement performances, so too do the interpretations of the symptom
emerge from historically and culturally specific meanings and values. Psychoanalytic
symptoms and their interpretations are subject to historical,
political, and cultural pressures. We can see that certain diseases, for example
hysteria at the turn of the century and depression now, achieve a cultural
currency that instigates a change in the technique of the cure. Thus
the technique of the talking cure surmounts the technique of hypnosis, and
the techniques of pharmacology, especially Prozac, have surmounted the
talking cure.
But again, I get ahead of myself. In the interests of clarity I here move
CRITICAL THEORY AND PERFORMANCE
440
offstage until the end of our collaborative analysis of the first case histories
of psychoanalysis. The corps will come back, as bodies always do.
III
The first symptoms Anna O. and Elisabeth von R. developed were sympathetically
reproduced somatizations of their fathers' pain. These symptoms
were the result of a kind of stilling kinesthetic empathy: each
woman became partially paralyzed. The somatic symptoms were motivated
by the daughter's desire to show love for her father by lending him
her own body. If she could transfer the pain in her father's body into her
own, she believed, she could help her father live. When the somatic symptom
(paralysis) failed to keep the father alive, new, more dangerous hysterical
symptoms emerged.
Anna O.'s paralysis was a mimetic response to her father's stillness.
As he lay in bed struggling to breathe and as she anticipated his final loss
of breath in the stillness of death, she herself became spectacularly still.14
Through paralysis Anna O. attempted to sacrifice her own youthful active
body to the stillness encroaching upon her father's. If the stillness could
have another body on which to alight, if the stage could be larger, perhaps
the stillness would not have to engulf her father's body so completely that
he would expire.
Anna O.'s cough, her breath's stutter step, began the night she
heard the dance music playing. "She began coughing for the first time
when once, as she was sitting at her father's bedside, she heard the
sound of dance music coming from a neighbouring house, felt a sudden
wish to be there, and was overcome with self-reproaches. Thereafter,
throughout the whole length of her illness she reacted to any markedly
rhythmical music with a tussis nervosa [nervous cough]."15 So let us set
the stage: she hears the music playing while she sits near her father's
bed. He is dying. She is watching. She is watching and not dying. Outside,
dance music is playing. Her foot starts tapping involuntarily. She
stills it. Sharp intake of breath, a slight, hastily silenced cough. All she
wants to do, all she wants to do, is dance. The rhythm of the music is infecting
her body. Her blood picks up a little speed; she's remembering
the two-step. And her romance with her father is that she cannot live
without him. She is her father's daughter. His girl. The apple of his eye.
She is going to nurse him back to life. She will tell him nursery rhymes,
fairy tales. ("He joked with her in English, Na, how are you, Miss
Bertha?1116 Na, how are you, Papa? Papa don't die. Papa Pappenheim...)
The music playing inside and outside her body. In the still of the night...
Time is the bed and Then and Now are breathing in and out and you are
one of the ones there waking, waking with a stretch joining Then and
Now. Mourning the loss of him and of her body's dance . . . Laid out
there, stiff in the sheet of time, he sleeps. And she stifles her cough. Finding
her mourning breath.
In concluding his analysis, Breuer returned to Anna O.'s desire to
IMMOBILE LEGS, STALLED WORDS
441
dance and noted, "The patient could not understand how it was that
dance music made her cough; such a construction is too meaningless to
have been deliberate. (It seemed very likely to me, incidentally, that each
of her twinges of conscience brought on one of her regular spasms of the
glottis and that the motor impulses which she felt-for she was very fond
of dancing-transformed the spasm into a tussis nervosa)."'17 By coughing
instead of dancing, Anna O. changed the beat of desire within her body.
Her timing, one could say, was off.
Breuer's respect for the "meaningless" connection between dance
music and coughing is remarkable. The very triviality of dance music produced
both the desire to dance (to escape the deadly seriousness of father's
illness) and the repression of this desire (dancing is inappropriate
because of the gravity of her father's illness). Anna O.'s body registered
the damping of her desire through the disease of the cough. In the face of
her father's impending death, marked by his audible struggle to breathe
(he suffered from a subpleural abscess), a daughter with a conscience
trained to "twinge" could not permit herself to dance and also could not
deny her desire to dance. Her cough signaled her body's effort to renounce
her conscious renunciation of dancing. Her resistance to renunciation
creates the conflict that gives life to the symptom. "Overcome with
self-reproaches," her body was caught in the space between sitting and
dancing, between moving and watching, between exhaling and inhaling,
between living and dying; gulping air in and pushing it out at the same
time, she coughed, again and again.
Registering her somatic and temporal unmooring, the cough stood
in for a larger uncertainty about how to move after the law of the father
has been shaken, rendered mortal. Her psyche was "stuck in time," and
to get her moving, Breuer and Anna returned to the events of the past:
A year had now passed since she had been separated from her father
and had taken to her bed, and from this time on her condition became
clearer and was systematized in a very peculiar manner. ...
[N]ow she lived like the rest of us, in the winter of 1881-2, whereas
[under daily hypnosis] she lived in the winter of 188o-1 ... She was
carried back to the previous year with such intensity that in the new
house she hallucinated her old room, so when she wanted to go to
the door she knocked up against the stove which stood in the same
relation to the window as did the door in the old room.... But this
transfer into the past did not take place in a general or indefinite
manner; she lived through the previous winter day by day. I should
have only been able to suspect that this was happening, had it not
been that every evening during the hypnosis she talked through
whatever it was that had excited her on the same day in 1881, and
had it not been that a private diary kept by her mother in 1881 confirmed
beyond a doubt the occurrence of the underlying events.8
This reliving of the past year continued till the illness came to its
final close in June, 1882.19
CRITICAL THEORY AND PERFORMANCE
442
Anna O.'s submission to the flow of time thus became for her a betrayal
of her father. For she had promised him she could not live without him.
What was unbearable to Anna O., as to most survivors, was that she had
already survived the trauma that she had dreaded for so long. Anna O.
placed herself back in 188o with Breuer as witness and repeated the birth
of her first set of somatic ("failed") symptoms. She wanted Breuer to assure
her that she did everything she could possibly do to avert the trauma
of her father's death. She described, in meticulous detail, the advent of
each symptom. For example, she noted the io8 times she failed to notice
that someone entered the room in which she was; off in her "private theatre"
she was selectively deaf to someone's entry. The first time that this
selective deafness occurred, the visitor was her father. In recounting each
of these symptoms, Anna O. "relived" them in the presence of Breuer and
thereby transformed her private theater, the intimate space of her psychic
secrets, into a social space. More particularly, she described the advent of
her symptoms in the exact order in which they occurred; if she made an
error in the chronology she had to begin all over again. By lining her
symptoms up in the past, she could use their narrative order as a way of
getting past them. (One can only wonder at the tedium these tales must
have engendered: there were 303 instances of mishearing or deafness
alone.)20 The search for the first time invariably revealed a failed moment
with her father: she failed to see him, or hear him, or understand him.
Having introjected him, she could not recognize the moment when he
"joined in the conversation." Discovering that her father was both an integral
aspect of her internal landscape and a person who walked in and
out of rooms without consulting her, threw her. She both craved and
dreaded the idea that he was independent of her. The pain of this "separateness"
foreshadowed the separateness that would occur when he died.
In reliving each of these moments with Breuer, who emphatically had not
died, Anna O. performed the successful talking cure. Every time Breuer
had to interrupt their scheduled visits, the "cure" suffered a setback.
By reliving the previous year in such excruciating detail Anna O.
made plain that we refuse such repetition as a way of securing psychic
health. This is a psychic adaptation-there is nothing endemic to time itself
that makes it impossible for the body to relive it.21 And there is nothing
in the body itself that makes such reliving impossible. The body, in
short, does not share consciousness's faith in narrative order. The uneven
join between the body and a conscious relation to time is filtered through
the expansive and expressive force of the unconscious.
This psychic adaptation to the convention of linear, progressive time
is one of the founding principles of the social contract, a contract that in
turn establishes the classificatory system by which doctors define mental
health. The body is always a disciplined entity; one part of its disciplinary
training is temporal-linguistic; another part is temporal-physical. Psychoanalysis
developed the temporal-linguistic route to the cure in part by creating
the talking cure as a performative speech act whose utterances
transformed the body. From a system of disarticulated limbs, contrac-
IMMOBILE LEGS, STALLED WORDS
443
tions, and paresthetic seizures, psychoanalysis sought to reproduce a freemoving,
coherent, vital body.
The psychic stage on which Anna O. and Breuer danced was a stage
attended by other corpses. Breaking open her "private theatre" for Breuer
required opening other tombs. Six years before she was born, Anna O.'s
older sister, Flora, had died. When Anna was eight, her sister Henriette
died. Thus Anna O. was literally her father's "one and only" surviving
daughter: she inhabited a private theater in part because her sisters had
left it. Anna O.'s real name, Bertha, was the name of Breuer's mother and
of his eldest daughter. (Bertha's father's name was Sigmund.) Breuer's
mother had died when he was three; at the time of her death she was
about the same age as Anna O. when she began her conversations with
Breuer.22 These deaths are the historical frames through which the death
of her father was experienced, interpreted, and transcribed.
In their somatic and verbal conversations, Breuer and Anna O.
learned something about the relationship between language and the body.
Anna O.'s conversations with Breuer were not performances in which her
body found words, so much as performances in which her body found
time, and more particularly, found its past. Passing into language, the somatic
symptom passes into the past. To put it in a slightly different way: if
we think of psychoanalysis as a mode of psychic choreography, we can see
the symptom as the body's psychic movement. Psychoanalysis and choreography
are two different modes of performing the body's movement.
Each seeks to give the body a system of time.
The reproduction and realignment of the symptom suggest a different
way to map the body's relation to time and to death. Her father's
death terrified Anna O. because she was at once remembering it and anticipating
it. Her eye symptoms-periodic blindness and what she calls
"clouds"-like her conscious renunciation to dance signaled by the
cough-both confirmed and disavowed her image of death. Taking care
of her father was traumatic for Anna in part because it reminded her that
she had already survived death. This is the genius of her symptom. The
analysis with Breuer allowed her to transfer her image of death within a
narrative structure that assigned images to referents, people to places,
events to time.
To say that trauma must be relived or reenacted in order to be "surmounted"
assumes that trauma is or was a lived event. But trauma is an
event of unliving. The unlived event becomes traumatic precisely because
it is empty; trauma reveals the intangible center of breath itself. As an
event of unliving, trauma is a performance in and above the real:
On one occasion our whole progress was obstructed for some time
because a recollection refused to emerge. It was a question of a particularly
terrifying hallucination. While she was nursing her father
she had seen him with a death's head. She and the people with her
remembered that once, while she still appeared to be in good health,
she had paid a visit to one of her relatives. She had opened the door
CRITICAL THEORY AND PERFORMANCE
444
and all at once fallen down unconscious. In order to get over the obstruction
to our progress she visited the same place again and, on
entering the room, again fell to the ground unconscious. During her
subsequent evening hypnosis the obstacle was surmounted. As she
came into the room, she had seen her pale face reflected in a mirror
hanging opposite the door; but it was not herself she saw but her father
with a death's head.23
The repetition of the event, the second visit to the relative, reproduced the
symptom. She again saw the face, and like Saul upon seeing the face of
God, she fell.24 With this fall, she stopped moving physically and her psychic
progress became "obstructed." Reenacting the scene and again losing
consciousness, she fell into her body. In the act of fainting she became
"pure body." She was the body who fell. To rejoin her body to consciousness,
nothing less than the image of death had to be re-moved. This is the
transfer that the analysis enacted.
Transfer. Transit. Transference. At the heart of psychoanalysis is an
ideology of movement, of the curative potential of moving. Under hypnosis
after the reenactment, Anna O. was able to "surmount" the psychic impasse
that made it impossible for her to move forward. The trauma that
arrested her body's movement also "obstructed" her psychic progress.
While narrating her experience for Breuer, a transfer/ence took place. "But
this transfer into the past did not take place in a general or indefinite manner."25
The act of narrating allowed her to interpret the trauma of the unlived
event for the first time-and the interpretation created the cure.
On the rehearsal of the original trauma, "she had seen her pale face
reflected in a mirror hanging opposite the door; but it was not herself that
she saw but her father with a death's head." The analytic cure is enacted
in the transfer, the psychic movement necessary for integrating the image
of death into her history. Ascribing the image of death to her father, Anna
O. positioned herself as the survivor, as the one who, despite falling faint,
would witness the death of her father and her own death as the apple of
his eye, but would again move, again live. From a killing glance in the
mirror that made her fall to the safe rehearsal of the hallucination with
Breuer, she was able to make her trauma history by giving it to her father,
who was already "safely" dead. The phrase "but it was not herself she
saw" interprets the trauma. The analysis generated the curative interpretation
by moving the image of the death's head to her father's corpse and
taking it away from her own face.
It is important to notice that the interpretation also betrays another
level of the unconscious relations among Anna O.'s symptoms. The interpretation
suggests that the image of her father's skull was superimposed
on her image of her own face. Her body reproduced an image of his (hollow)
body that the mirror reflected. Such a substitution involves a psychic
blurring, a confusion, about the boundaries between her body and his.
This blurring occurred across verbal languages as well: during the analysis
she translated languages unconsciously and often made sentences out
IMMOBILE LEGS, STALLED WORDS
445
of several different languages. Insofar as language reproduces the body
(at least in the talking cure), Anna O.'s case suggests that bleeding between
languages might also portend bleeding across bodies. To this idea
we will return.26
Anna O.'s hallucination of the death's head stands behind the second,
remarkably similar hallucination that Breuer believed was the "root
of her illness." While nursing her father, "She fell into a waking dream
and saw a black snake coming towards the sick man.... She tried to keep
the snake off, but it was as though she was paralyzed. Her right arm, over
the back of the chair, had gone to sleep and had become anesthetic and
paretic; and when she looked at it the fingers turned into little snakes with
death's heads (the nails)."27 Having already experienced the image of the
death's head in the mirror, Anna O. may well have believed that the
image was in her body, oozing out of her eyes and her fingernails. She was
determined not to let the death's heads alight on her father's body. The
analytic rehearsal allowed her to let the image of death escape her body.
The willful resummoning of the traumatic image of the death's head
made possible a different interpretation of its meaning.
The final hallucination that was itself a repetition of the previous
one was also reenacted and, as in Aristotelian poetics, catharsis was
achieved. "On the last day-by the help of re-arranging the room so as to
resemble her father's sickroom-she reproduced the terrifying hallucination
which constituted the root of her illness."28 This transference signaled
the passage in which the memory of death's presence became a memory
of his death: this time, the death's heads are located at the edge of her
body, on her fingernails, in her body rather than in the mirror reflecting
that body. Lodged inside her body, this image is "the root" that Breuer
wants to pull. But in order to do so, he must, as it were, stand in for the
father. Taking Breuer's hands into her own-"But she would never begin
to talk until she had satisfied herself of my identity by carefully feeling
my hands"29-she transferred her image of death to Breuer, who, in turn,
helped her interpret the image of the death's head as her father's. In this
sense, her father's death was almost reassuring. The certainty of his death
gave her the psychic freedom to return to the trauma of the death's heads
oozing out of her body. "The one thing that nevertheless seemed to remain
conscious most of the time was the fact that her father died."30 The
firm fact of his death allowed her to put her symptom in the past. Anna
O.'s own body was thus liberated from the psychic death spaces to which
she had assigned it during her "absences." Her analysis enacted a movement,
a passage, a physical and psychic transference from her body to the
body of her father. Breuer bridges that transference.
No longer her secret repressed vision, the trauma dissolved as Anna
O. gave her image of death away. Once the trauma had been placed in the
past, her body no longer reproduced the vision, and her symptomatic
blindness was, in Breuer's phrase, "removed."31 Finding an event in the
past, the death of her father, from which to divide the present from the
past, also allowed Anna O. to find a map for her body's movement.32
CRITICAL THEORY AND PERFORMANCE
446
Surmounting her fainting fall, she, like psychoanalysis itself, took "a great
step forward." The contracture in her right leg disappeared and she
moved again, psychically, back into 1882, and physically, out of the sickroom
(her father's and her own).
IV
Hysteria, at least in the original and defining case of Anna O., involves the
use of the patient's body as a stage for the body of the other. (This is why
hysteria has so often been associated with women-and historically with
their wombs.) In Anna O.'s case, at her entry into hysteria, she attempted
to lend her body to her father. But he had somehow already inhabited her;
and her introjection (Freud's later term) of him made it impossible for her
to separate her body far enough from his to lend it to him as he fought
death. Thus she may have felt herself to be responsible for his death.33
Traumatized by her images of the death's head reflected in the mirror, and
snakes oozing from her fingernails, Anna O. was unsure if she herself had
somehow died when her father did.
Insisting that her memories of events of unliving were communicable
(across the supple syntax of English, German, French, Italian, and
Yiddish) and therefore survivable, Breuer helped Anna O. discover a
newly animated body. As this body translated its history into stories for
Breuer, Breuer translated their mutually embodied history into stories for
Freud.
In such translations, different bodies are reproduced. We shall discuss
only one. A crucial aspect of the cure involved the reenactment of the
trauma. The cumulative weight of these performances may have encouraged
Anna O. to mark her body itself as autoreproductive. Her body had
been "reconstructed" by her well-timed conversations with Breuer. The
body they made was a profoundly new body, one outside the usual order
of human reproduction.
This is the frame through which the tricky matter of Anna O.'s hysterical
pregnancy must be seen. In an account full of errors,34 Jones, whom
Jean Laplanche calls "the historian of Freud's thought,"35 claims:
It would seem that Breuer had developed what we should nowadays
call a strong counter-transference to his interesting patient. At
all events he was so engrossed that his wife became bored at listening
to no other topic, and before long, jealous. She did not display
this openly, but became unhappy and morose. It was long before
Breuer, with his thoughts elsewhere, divined the meaning of her
state of mind. It provoked a violent reaction in him perhaps compounded
of love and guilt, and he decided to bring the treatment to
an end. He announced this to Anna O., who was by now much better,
and bade her good-bye. But that evening he was fetched back, to
find her in a greatly excited state, apparently as ill as ever. The patient...
was now in the throes of an hysterical childbirth (pseudo-
IMMOBILE LEGS, STALLED WORDS
447
cyesis) the logical termination of a phantom pregnancy that had
been invisibly developing in response to Breuer's ministrations.
Though profoundly shocked, he managed to calm her down by hypnotizing
her, and then fled the house in a cold sweat. The next day
he and his wife left for Venice to spend a second honeymoon, which
resulted in the conception of a daughter.36
Jones's contention that Breuer broke off the analysis because of his wife's
jealousy is not borne out by the published case history, Breuer's notes about
the treatment, or the correspondence he maintained with Bertha's mother.37
Anna O. herself decided upon the day that would end her analysis (June 7,
1882) and had accelerated her "chimney sweeping"38 in order to complete
her cure. Nor is Jones's implicit suggestion that Breuer displaced his "phantom"
paternity by "really" impregnating his wife in Venice credible.
Mathilde had delivered their youngest daughter, Dora (!), on March 11,
1882, three months before Anna O.'s treatment ended.39
Nonetheless, Jones's story, however phantasmal, is worth pausing
over. A certain satisfaction emerges in this resolution of the history, a satisfaction
that is hard for some readers to ignore. For if Anna O.'s performance
of a phantom pregnancy has a certain allure, it comes from thinking
of Anna O.'s body as something that cannot be contained by the case
history. Independently of Breuer, she went on to mark the effect of their
collaborative reenactments by performing her new self as an autoreproductive
body. Moreover, the pregnancy signifies the supplement that cannot
be contained or interpreted by the talking cure, no matter how exhaustive,
no matter how loving. For many feminists, this excess is
femininity itself-that part of Anna O.'s body that remains outside the
discursive frame of the always already "masculine" discursive case history.40
This excess marks the place of the trauma at the heart of Freud's
theory of sexual difference. As Freud developed psychoanalysis, he constructed
a theory of anxiety about sexual difference in which penis envy
and the castration complex are psychic responses to the fear of somatic absence.
But as Anna O. experienced the end of her analysis, an analysis
about her response to her father's death, she created a bodily act that was
both curative and traumatic.
It is necessary to emphasize that the entire report of Anna O.'s phantom
pregnancy comes from Freud and his historian-and not from Breuer
or Anna 0.41 In his own version in The History of Psychoanalysis, Freud admits
that Breuer never said this [that Anna had fallen in love with Breuer]
"to me in so many words, but he told me enough at different times to justify
this reconstruction of what happened."42 Freud, of course, had his
own reasons for wanting to believe in Anna O.'s love for Breuer: it was the
most convincing proof of his theory of the "universal nature" of the transference.43
Since so much of Freud's history has passed for "the truth" of
the history of psychoanalysis, and because the story of Anna O.'s pregnancy
is continually repeated in critical commentary about this history,
and finally because psychoanalysis itself insists that the phantasmatic
CRITICAL THEORY AND PERFORMANCE
448
event and the real event can be equally traumatic, we offer this reading of
Anna O.'s phantom pregnancy.
Significantly, Anna O.'s pregnancy returned her to her body, in
much the way that her fainting spell returned her to her body when she
saw the image of the death's head in the mirror. The pregnancy marks
her body as sexed, that is to say, as a body other than her male father's
or her male doctor's. Anna O.'s body sought a way to carry the hollow,
the phantasmatical presence of the dead breath of the other, her father, in
her own living body. Her pregnancy was an attempt to make room in her
body for the loss she felt at the double death of both her father and herself
as his daughter when he died. What is remarkable about the story of
her phantom pregnancy is that it registers the attempt to render the fullness
of loss somatic.
The somatic reproduction of the trauma of absence is, and can only
be, a phantom. The trauma is traumatic because it unveils the material
and affective force of the phantom. Anna O.'s reproduction of her father's
hollow skull in the analysis is matched by the hollow swelling of her hysterical
womb after the analysis. Anna O.'s pregnancy is the reproduction
of an event of unliving, a spectacular performance, that makes her body
into a living crypt. Accepting her father's death allowed Anna O. her own
"rebirth." She sought to mark the entwining of these events by causing
the breath of his death in her (swelling) body. His death changed her
body, and she wanted her body to display that change by filling it with
the life of his death.
The reasons Anna O. might settle on pregnancy as a way to mark
and to make her body into this expansive utterance are overdetermined.
Anna O. must have heard in her name (Bertha) "a birth" in English, the
language of her initial conversations with Breuer. At the end of her conversations
with him, perhaps she wanted to signify the (re)generation of
that language in and on her body.
Ten years after her treatment with Breuer, Bertha Pappenheim
emerged as a "new woman." She was one of the founders of the Jewish
feminist movement in Germany. She became a writer and politician. She
devoted herself to caring for unmarried women with children (mothering
those she had not conceived-perhaps another return of the repressed).
She lent her body and her life to the making of history, particularly to the
making of Jewish feminist history.44
Anna O.'s case history, with or without her phantom pregnancy, represents
the birth of psychoanalysis. Like all origins, it is also a termination
point. It marks the end of historical narratives that assume that pasts are
past. "For after the uncomfortable birth of psychoanalysis, time was no
longer what it had been, 'before' and 'after' entering into new and hitherto
unexamined relations of complicity and interference. . . . Psychoanalysis
is . . . time and counter-time at once."45 These intricate relations
of complicity and interference are the performances that structure the history
of the present. These interfering complicities mark the beat of our
bodies' dance through the swelling and expiring choreography of time. It
IMMOBILE LEGS, STALLED WORDS
449
is therefore appropriate that the last lines of the case of Elisabeth von R.,
which concludes Studies on Hysteria, should end on the dance floor:
In the spring of 1894 I heard that she [Elisabeth von R.] was going to
a private ball for which I was able to get an invitation, and I did not
allow the opportunity to escape me of seeing my former patient
whirl past in a lively dance. Since then, by her own inclination, she
has married someone unknown to me.46
Having seen Elisabeth von R.'s legs joining in the conversation of a different
lively dance, Freud connects her dancing to marrying. Always partnered
by "unknown" bodies (including our own), we attempt to turn
time47 into a bed still enough to lie on. In the still of the night we believe
we will be held-until then we hold our own bodies stiff. The legacy of
psychoanalysis allows us to see that bodies can be endlessly remade, rechoreographed,
outside the traditional architectonics of human reproduction.
Psychic health is in part contingent upon the body finding its rhythm
in words and time. Choreography and psychoanalysis would do well to
join in a conversation about the body's time.
The Return of the Corps
The "logical termination" of the first feminine body reconstructed by the
talking cure experiences a phantom pregnancy-or at least Jones introduces
the phantom of a phantom pregnancy at the origin of the talking
cure. At the "origin" of psychoanalysis we find a hysterical woman, and
at the end of her cure she experiences (or is said to experience) an hysterical
pregnancy, a somatic event that frames a false or unfulfilled origin, a
physical and psychic event with no source in the biological real. Therefore,
as Jane Malmo argues, the question becomes, "[A]re all origins hysterical?"48
Perhaps the answer is yes, to the degree to which origins are associated
with births and therefore with women. Femininity is that part of
bodies which logic can treat only as a question: the feminine body, the
psychoanalytic body, can take only an interrogatory form. Is she or isn't
she? Is she or isn't she making it up? Hysterical pregnancy stages the
drama of the question of "the body"-traumatized body, the seductive
body, the pregnant body-on the body of women.
As a phantom, hysterical pregnancy is the somatic form that raises
the question of the woman's desire in relation to masculine logic and culture.
What does she want? with him? with herself? for herself? Part of
what is captivating about the hysterical pregnancy is that the baby never
appears; the pregnancy is overwhelmingly powerful because it makes
visible the possibility of a body clinging to a permanent present. (One is
pregnant as long as one is hysterical. Nine months has nothing to do
with it.)
It is here that the phantom pregnancy rejoins the question of dance.
Anna O.'s phantom pregnancy points to the limit of the talking cure.
CRITICAL THEORY AND PERFORMANCE
450
Insisting that her performative symptom always exceeds narration and
the will to mastery enacted by "masculine" discourse, Anna O.'s phantom
pregnancy is her body's long-deferred, long-desired, and long-renounced
dance. At the end of the cure, she partners herself and touches,
perhaps for the first time, her feminine body. And it swells. Her hollow
hollers. (And he "fled the house in a cold sweat.")49
One of the biggest problems with reading dance as psychic symptom
is that it suggests that dance refers to something other than itself,
something behind or beyond the movement itself. Within psychoanalysis,
somatic utterances usually refer to something that needs to be unearthed.
Dance demonstrates that somatic utterances do not necessarily refer to
anything other than movement itself. Ballet, for example, makes manifest
technique, discipline, and study, but what it "expresses" is bodily movement.
(Admittedly this movement is patterned; strictly speaking, spasms
might be closer to "pure" movement than dance is.)
Additionally, the emphasis that psychoanalysis gives to the past can
seem irrelevant to an art form that can exist only in the present tense. Arlene
Croce, writing about the problem of reconstructing Balanchine's ballets,
especially his Agon, notes, "Like all ballets, it has no past; it happens
in the moment."5° But if the ballet is to have a future, it must, like Anna
O., face the question of history and the attendant challenge of its reproduction/reconstruction.
As Balanchine's ballets enter pedagogical institutions,
conscious interpretation of technique is turned into science. The
success of this interpretation is dependent upon the femininity of the Balanchine
ballerina. The success or failure of Balanchine's ballet will be
measured by her performance of his movement phrases. She will be required
to have a technique that leaves "nothing to be desired," and she
will be measured according to her skill at reproducing his vision of her
moving. And the performance of this transfer/ence is the true agon of
both the history of ballet and the history of hysteria.
The irreducible kernel of femininity, as a symptom forever in need
of interpretation, also returns us to the challenge of reproduction and reconstruction.
For if the psychoanalytic symptom is feminine, once it is
"re-moved," how is femininity reenacted? The conjunction of Anna O.
and Balanchine's ballerina suggests that femininity is reenacted through
the reproductive body-through a staging of the body as reproductive in
the case of Anna O., and as a "reconstruction" in Balanchine's ballet. That
such manifestations can only be reconstructions and therefore to some degree
phantasmatical underlines the power of transit, of the force of transferences
and transformations, to which both bodies and time continually
cling. Moreover, these reconstructions are peculiarly feminine, suggesting
that the mimicry and masquerade we have so long associated with femininity
are themselves attempts to reproduce what is not there. Anna O.'s
phantom pregnancy carries the intangible center of her father's last
breath; her pregnancy gives an image to femininity's desire to find a way
to carry that which is lost.
Patriarchal culture's violent renunciation of femininity has helped to
IMMOBILE LEGS, STALLED WORDS
451
create a feminine body capable of renouncing that renunciation. The feminine
body is, profoundly, an autoreproductive body, one that continues
to reproduce symptoms and movement phrases that dance across the slippery
stage of the paternal order.
Solo Steps Again
Whatever else my broken hip was attempting to express, it had something to
do with the bafflement I felt not knowing where to put my feet after the music
of my own marriage had faded. Lost in a time that seemed to have no order
(once the past becomes present it is hard to know where to step), I lost the
rhythm of my own limbs' utterance. Computing was an attempt to put that
loss in my hands and head, to transfer the grief in my feet that formed the
root of my own illness. While I cannot say I am now cured, I can say that
observing this psychoanalytic dance has taught me a different way to reconstruct
the loss that numbs me even while I number myself one of the very
fortunate witnesses of a past I might be able to bear in the near future.
The dance that language cannot capture, the beckoning music that animates
our flesh keeps us moving beyond the limits of our limbs. While the
corps keeps time, the dance moves beyond the physical bodies on which it is
staged. My attempt to choreograph Balanchine's ballets for the computer
screen was based on the belief that his work exists independently of his
dancers. I am not sure I quite believe this now. For the dance in its very discipline
and formal measure reminds us of a beckoning formlessness to
which we are at once attracted and repelled. Dance and psychoanalysis capture
two different ways of framing bodies that gesture toward and away
from the formlessness of their own flesh.
NOTES
1. Sigmund Freud and Josef Breuer, Studies on Hysteria, in The Standard Edition
of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. and trans. James Strachey,
vol. 2 (London: Hogarth Press, 1895), 35.
2. Freud and Breuer, Studies on Hysteria, 35. Insofar as psychoanalysis is a theory
of desire, Breuer's description of its technique as that "which left nothing to
be desired" is overdetermined.
3. Freud and Breuer, Studies on Hysteria, 30.
4. Peter Swales, "Freud, His Teacher and the Birth of Psychoanalysis," in Freud:
Appraisals and Reappraisals, ed. Paul E. Stepansky (Hillsdale, N.J.: Analytic Press,
1986), 50.
5. For more on the instances and justifications for massaging patients see
Freud and Breuer, Studies on Hysteria, 51-56. Also see Swales, "Freud," for full discussion
of Freud and Breuer's relationship.
6. Freud and Breuer, Studies on Hysteria, 168; more precisely, her right thigh.
7. Freud and Breuer, Studies on Hysteria, 148. This passage and the sexual connotations
of its language, "arouse," "climax," and so on, are thoughtfully analyzed
by Joline Blais, "Perverted Plots: Rewriting Hysteria in Jean Rhys and Marguerite
Duras," unpublished manuscript, 1995.
CRITICAL THEORY AND PERFORMANCE
452
8. These "critical" words rejoin their conversation-but we can only press on
the textual body that the doctors have created, and, of course, on our own.
9. This formulation of the body as "joining in" is a common one in Freud's
case histories. In the wolf-man's history, for example, Freud notes: "his bowel
began, like a hysterically affected organ, to 'join in the conversation"'; in Sigmund
Freud, "From the History of an Infantile Neurosis," in Standard Edition, vol. 17
(London: Hogarth Press, 1918), 76.
1o. This reading of hysteria is ubiquitous; for representative examples, see
Elaine Showalter, "On Hysterical Narrative," Narrative 1, no. 1 (1993): 24-35;
Steven Marcus, Freud and the Culture of Psychoanalysis: Studies in the Transition from
Victorian Humanism to Modernity (Boston: G. Allen and Unwin, 1984); and Deborah
Elise White, "Studies on Hysteria: Case Histories and the Case Against History,"
MLN 104, no. 5 (1989): 1034-49. Showalter's essay also provides an excellent survey
of the literature.
11. Sometimes it may impose an "excess" of order. Breuer's narrative case history
ends with Anna O.'s cure, but as Albrecht Hirschmuller has demonstrated,
Breuer knew that Anna was not "well" when the analysis concluded. (She was,
however, "well" when Breuer wrote his case study.) See Albrecht Hirschmuller,
The Life and Work of Josef Breuer: Physiology and Psychoanalysis (New York: New
York University Press, 1989). Breuer's "act" in writing the case study is a willful
reimagination of the past of their sessions no less than Anna O.'s conversations
with Breuer were a reimagination of her own past. And our narrative reconstruction
here repeats the act of reimagining the past that they reimagined together. In
joining their conversation, we experience, again, the physical and psychic imperatives
to discipline the textual body and learn, again, how much an "act" of imposition
that ordering was-for Breuer, for Anna O., for us.
12. Jacqueline Rose, Sexuality in the Field of Vision (London: Verso, 1989), 28.
13. For Lacan the symptom is never "gone." But the analysis can achieve the
cure by realigning the analysand's relation to the symptom, to the inevitability of
castration. For Freud, the symptom does "disappear," but because of "somatic compliance"
the same body part might become symptomatic again as the patient faces
other traumas.
14. In the "Preliminary Communication" of Studies, Freud and Breuer report
Anna O.'s paralysis: "A girl watching beside a sick-bed in a torment of anxiety, fell
into a twilight state and had a terrifying hallucination, while her right arm, which
was hanging over the back of her chair, went to sleep; from this there developed a
paresis of the same arm accompanied by contracture and anesthesia. She tried to
pray but could find no words; at length she succeeded in repeating a children's
prayer in English" (Studies on Hysteria, 4-5). In Breuer's case history, the "prayer" is
a nursery rhyme. The case history, like psychoanalysis more generally, partakes of
the nursery rhyme, the fairy tale, and the prayer. In Anna O.'s case the allegorical
implications are especially hard to ignore: a young unmarried woman cares for her
father; she exhausts herself and falls ill; he dies; when he does, she becomes even
sicker. The mother calls in the good doctor who loves her like a father and cures her.
And they all live happily ever after. In embryo, then, here are the same seeds that
develop into narratives of revolution (the ailing father and the death of the state);
of romance (the reintegration of the household); of scientific progress (from chaos
to clarity); and of redemption (from suffering to salvation via faith in the cure).
15. Freud and Breuer, Studies on Hysteria, 40.
16. From Breuer's original notes (the notes he used to compose his case history)
in Hirschmuller, Life of Breuer, 279. Anna O.'s talking cure is doubly marked
IMMOBILE LEGS, STALLED WORDS
453
as translation from one sign system (the body) to another (speech) by virtue of the
fact that she unconsciously translates everything into English (see Freud and
Breuer, Studies on Hysteria, 26). The echo of her father's call in English ("Na, how
are you, Miss Bertha?") is most likely reproduced as Breuer hypnotizes her and
asks her, in English, how she is. She eventually "joins in the conversation" by
(re)producing nursery stories. This interpretation lends credence to Freud's (early)
view of the transference-here, from the father to the doctor.
17. Freud and Breuer, Studies on Hysteria, 43-44. It seemed very likely to me, incidentally,
that each of these repetitious citations was an attempt to partner-for
my lecturer and I are both also very fond of dancing-to partner Anna O.'s stutter
step with prose.
18. For Anna O.'s mother, one of her daughter's most alarming symptoms
was the loss of her ability to speak her "mother tongue" (German); it is therefore
fitting that it is her mother's words, her private diary, that maps Breuer's reading
of the temporal "truth" of Anna O.'s symptoms.
19. Freud and Breuer, Studies on Hysteria, 33; Breuer's emphasis.
20. But perhaps the process of uncovering held its own allure. Breuer notes
that during these recitations, Anna O.'s deafness would increase and he had to
write down his questions in order to be "heard" (Freud and Breuer, Studies on Hysteria,
37).
21. The repetition of course marks the time as "different"-that is to say, as a
"second" time. In physics, classical thermodynamics proved that the same events
can occur forward or backward in time. Much of Freud's theory of the drives is
predicated on classical thermodynamics. For a discussion of contemporary
physics' notion of a "second time," see Peggy Phelan, Unmarked (New York: Routledge,
1993), 126-29.
22. For an exhaustive tracing of these and other correspondences, see
Hirschmuller, Life of Breuer, 129-30.
23. Freud and Breuer, Studies on Hysteria, 37.
24. For a fine reading of fall, fallen, and falling in Freud's case histories of
women, see Diana Fuss, "Freud's Fallen Women: Identification, Desire, and 'A
Case of Homosexuality in a Woman,'" Yale Journal of Criticism 6, no. 1 (1993): 1-23.
25. Freud and Breuer, Studies on Hysteria, 33.
26. For now, though, let me just note that in the bleeding from Breuer's German
to the English of the Studies on Hysteria this question of translation is reenacted.
I am satisfied that what I say here about the English text applies as well to
the German.
27. Freud and Breuer, Studies on Hysteria, 38.
28. Freud and Breuer, Studies on Hysteria, 40.
29. Freud and Breuer, Studies on Hysteria, 30.
30. Freud and Breuer, Studies on Hysteria, 33.
31. When blindness, the absence of sight, vanishes, the eye decides it is safe
to return. Note that the symptom that negates must itself be negated before
it can disappear. Thus the double narrative transcribed by Breuer also corresponds
to the double narrative (the two negations) that enable the symptom's
"removal."
32. Michel de Certeau argues that the "making of history" always requires the
production of a division between the past and the present. Insofar as psychoanalysis
is the search for the history of the symptom, the "historical cure" reproduces
the interpretation of this division. See Michel de Certeau, The Writing of History,
trans. Tom Conley (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), 1-15.
CRITICAL THEORY AND PERFORMANCE
33. Lacan's famous dictum, "Woman is the symptom of man," is reversed by
Anna O. Her father is her symptom. One wonders what transpired between the
two of them. I know the "truth" is not recoverable, but when I read this in Breuer's
case notes, I wonder: "One evening she told me a true story of long ago, how at
night times she would creep in to eavesdrop on her father (at that time, night
nurses could no longer put up with her), how she slept in her stockings for this
reason, then on one occasion she was caught by her brother, and so on. As soon as
she was finished she began to cry out softly, demanding why she was in bed with
her stockings on" (in Hirschmuller, Life of Breuer, 288). And what was she eavesdropping
on? What conversation was she seeking to join with her "creeping,"
dancing feet covered in stockings? And what is in that "and so on" after her
brother "catches" her? In the published case history, Breuer notes that one cause
of Anna O.'s symptomatic deafness had its origin in the trauma of being "shaken
angrily by her young brother when he caught her one night listening at the sickroom
door" (Freud and Breuer, Studies on Hysteria, 36).
34. For a discussion of the many errors in Jones's account, see Rachel Bowlby,
"The Happy Event," Paragraph 141 (March 1991): 10o-19; and Hirschmuller, Life of
Breuer, 126-32.
35. Jean Laplanche, Life and Death in Psychoanalysis, trans. Jeffrey Mehlman
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), 67.
36. Ernest Jones, Sigmund Freud: Life and Work (London: Hogarth Press, 1954),
1:246-47.
37. The correspondence and case notes are reproduced in Hirschmuller, Life of
Breuer.
38. Hirschmuller, Life of Breuer, 40.
39. It is possible that there was a miscarriage or a still birth, but I have not
found evidence of it. It is unlikely, however, that Jones would specify the gender
if he were referring to a miscarriage or still birth.
40. The best analysis of femininity and Freudian psychoanalysis I know is
Teresa Brennan's The Interpretation of the Flesh (New York: Routledge, 1992).
41. I am not trying to suggest that the transference and countertransference
played no part in Anna O.'s case history. I am trying to question, however, Freud's
version of it. Breuer, writing in 1907, did say that Anna O.'s case history taught
him a lot: "I learned a very great deal: much that was of scientific value, but something
of practical importance as well-namely that it was impossible for a 'general
practitioner' to treat a case of that kind without bringing his activities and mode
of life completely to an end. I vowed at that time I would not go through such an
ordeal again." Paul Cranefield, "Josef Breuer's Evaluation of his Contribution to
Psychoanalysis," The International Journal of Psychoanalysis 39 (September-October
1958, part V, 1958): 319-22. It certainly seems clear that Breuer's countertransference
was not worked through with Anna O., any more than her transference with
him was successfully analyzed.
42. History of Psychoanalysis, quoted in Bowlby, "The Happy Event," 11.
43. For a fuller treatment of this motivation see Bowlby, "The Happy Event."
44. For full accounts of Bertha Pappenheim's life and work, see Marion A. Kaplan,
The Jewish Feminist Movement in Germany: The Campaigns of the Judischer Frauenbund,
1904-1938 (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1979); Dora Edinger, Bertha
Pappenheim: Freud's Anna O. (Highland Park, Ill.: Congregation Solel, 1968); Lucy
Freeman, The Story of Anna O. (New York: Walker, 1972); and Hirschmuller, Life of
Breuer.
45. Bowlby, "The Happy Event," 13.
IMMOBILE LEGS, STALLED WORDS
455
46. Freud and Breuer, Studies on Hysteria, 114. Part of the reason that Anna O.'s
hysterical pregnancy is so difficult to decipher is because all of the case histories
end so "novelistically."
47. Time and its attendant copyists-narrative and history.
48. Jane Malmo, personal communication, December 1995.
49. Jones, Sigmund Freud, 247.
50. Arlene Croce, "The Spelling of Agon," New Yorker, July 12, 1993, 84.
Performance Studies
When Peggy Phelan speaks of feminine masquerade and mimicry as "attempts
to reproduce what is not there" (see her essay in the "Psychoanalysis"
section), she opens up the beguiling possibility of defining performance
in a way that might satisfy a majority of practitioners in the field of
performance studies. As "restored behavior,"1 "repetition with revision,"2
or "the actualization of a potential,"3 performance is an executed copy of
an original that does not exist, except as a retrospective understanding or
prescient expectation, an implicit compact between the performer and the
spectator, but one subject to renegotiation in a heartbeat. Performance,
broadly construed (and few today would construe performance narrowly),
is the return of an act, but not as itself. Performance remakes and
unmakes mimesis, the venerable doctrine that art imitates life.4 Performance
is "always a doing and a thing done," as Elin Diamond has it: on
the one hand, "embodied acts, in specific sites, witnessed by others
(and/or the watching self)," while on the other, "the completed event
framed in time and space and remembered, misremembered, interpreted,
and passionately revisited across a pre-existing discursive field." In the
time between the doing and the thing done, however, give or take "the
blink of an eye," performance theorists see "what Plato condemned in theatrical
representation-its non-originality-and gesture toward an epistemology
grounded not on the distinction between truthful models and fictional
representations but on different ways of knowing and doing that are
constitutively heterogeneous, contingent, and risky."5 Juxtaposed to performance,
complementing it to a degree, but sharply corrective about what
seems implausibly utopian in it (such as the possibility of revising one's
assigned role in life while engaged in the act of repeating it), is the concept
of performativity. Notably derived by Judith Butler from J. L. Austin's
speech act theory, which foregrounds "performative utterances" that bring
into being the conditions they iterate, such as "I do thee wed," performativity
is defined as a reiteration of norms by the citation of them. With performance,
the performer makes the acts; with performativity, the acts
make the performer: gender, for example, performatively speaking, exists
only in the doing of it (see the "Gender and Sexualities" section). Yet both
performance and performativity reflect the poststructuralist disinclination
457
CRITICAL THEORY AND PERFORMANCE
458
to prop up essences or origins with superannuated notions such as a "core
identity" possessed by the stable individual subject of humanism.
However performance is currently defined, the field of performance
studies since the 198os has developed new theoretical perspectives on a
variety of public events and practices. Indeed, the profusion of research
into different kinds of performance-from Yoruban dance to street carnivals,
from performance art to the practices of everyday life-epitomizes
the interdisciplinary ferment characteristic of the approach of performance
studies. Ambitious in its curiosity about the work of culture as a
totality of relations, it has developed research liaisons with sociology, anthropology,
folklore, communications, media, and technology studies.6 As
investigations of behavior that is repeated, reinstated, or rehearsed for the
purpose of being shown, performance research examines theatrical performances,
sacred and secular rituals, and social displays of many kinds,
from sporting events to shamanism. Terrorist drag, tourist traps, social
work, the space shuttle, blackface minstrelsy in Ghana, and the pelvic
exam have all emerged as representative objects of performance research.7
The field of performance studies is not solely defined, however, by the
multiplicity of its topics or even by its interdisciplinary scope; rather, it is
distinguished by the focus of its practitioners on the phenomenon of
copies without originals.
Richard Schechner's essay in this section, "Invasions Friendly and
Unfriendly: The Dramaturgy of Direct Theater," takes up the mass-media
appropriation of today's globalized street theater, which, as the spontaneous
convergence of carnival and revolt, is what Schechner calls "direct
theater," in descending order of sublimity: Tiananmen Square, the Berlin
Wall, Mardi Gras, spring break at Daytona Beach. Carnival supposedly
turns the world upside down, but, more often in Schechner's reckoning,
the world (or its politically dominant institutions) is turning carnival rightside
up. Schechner writes, "The carnival indefinitely in power is the Terror."
Cultural performances such as carnival lend themselves particularly
well to interpretation by means of ethnographic description, a methodology
developed by cultural anthropologists to represent indigenous societies.
Ethnography literally means "writing culture." Like the cultural anthropologist
Clifford Geertz, ethnographers of performance value "local
knowledge."8 Called "participant observation," their method highlights
the performative self-consciousness of the observer who participates in
the cultural performances of others-others who may hail from across the
street or from across the seas. Schechner writes: "In anthropology, for the
most part, the 'home culture' is Western, the 'other' non-Western. But in
performance studies, the 'other' may be a part of one's own culture (nonWestern
or Western), or even an aspect of one's own behavior." Noting the
potential for ironic ("Brechtian") distance as well as empathic involvement,
Schechner concludes: "In an active way, one performs fieldwork."9
Performing fieldwork, both across the city and across the world, empowers
the late Dwight Conquergood's participant-observer research in
"Performance Theory, Hmong Shamans, and Cultural Politics." Conquer-
PERFORMANCE STUDIES
459
good takes up the suggestion of Victor Turner that the key to understanding
performance is in its "liminality," the state or process of living on the
margins, of crossing boundaries, of literally being on the "threshold" of
culture's inside/outside, which Turner associated particularly with rites
and rituals.1o Borderlands traditionally exist as sites of political contestation,
risk, and risk taking. This fact, which renders the liminal performer
socially vulnerable, also makes the refugee the epitome of the postmodern
condition. Conquergood's knowledge of shamanistic practices derives
from performing his fieldwork in Hmong refugee communities in
Thailand and Chicago. The vulnerability of the shaman (healer) in performance
is not only social but physical, an ordeal representing the rigors of
liminal experience generally. The shaman performs not only to heal the
sick, but also to assert, not without risk to himself, the dignifying perimeters
of his culture in the face of external threats of humiliation from the
dominant social order. Certain similarities appear in the improvisatory
performances of other marginalized subcultures, including those testing
the boundaries of sexual identity (see "Gender and Sexuality") and race
(see "Critical Race Theory").
In the final essay in this section, "Animal Rites: Performing beyond
the Human," Una Chaudhuri tests the boundaries of the human and the
nonhuman, exemplified by what she calls "ecoperformance" in Caryl
Churchill's play Far Away and Rachel Rosenthal's performance piece The
Others. Facing the end of nature in ecological disaster and mass extinctions,
Chaudhuri presents two options for what she calls "the posthuman." One
is the machine, the cyborg (see "Mediatized Cultures"). The other, which
concerns her here, is the animal. She applies the idea of postmodern
shamanic ritual to "Animal Rites," newly emergent practices that "would
engage with, diagnose, and heal the historically complex relationship between
humans and animals." As with the daunting tasks of shamanic healing
described by Conquergood, Chaudhuri's pioneering ecoperformers
have their work cut out for them. One of the many obstacles faced by theorists
trying to rethink animal-human relations-and Chaudhuri cites
Huysmans, Steiner, and Baudrillard among others-is the anthropomorphic
investment that human beings have in animals as performers ("just
like us, but cuter"). Animals are not just there for us; they are there instead
of us, and our love for them as our stand-ins is more terrible than our hate.
The performances she recounts, however, deconstruct those she critiques,
an advantage that results from the instability of performance as a genre.
Even ritual, putatively conservative and formally rigid, shows the efficacy
of sometimes attempting to "reproduce what is not there." As Franz Kafka
puts it in an alluringly personified fable, another version of animal rites:
"Leopards break into the temple and drink the sacrificial chalices dry; this
occurs repeatedly, again and again: finally it can be reckoned on beforehand
and becomes part of the ceremony." Performance needs no transcendent
original to make an event or a practice out of any contingency, from
an efficacious memory to a prescient wish.
J.R.R.
CRITICAL THEORY AND PERFORMANCE
460
NOTES
1. Richard Schechner, in Between Theater and Anthropology (Philadelphia: University
of Pennsylvania Press, 1985), developed a definition of performance as "restored
behavior" or "twice-behaved behavior," by which he actually means behavior
that "is always subject to revision," behavior that must be reinvented the
second time or "the nth time" because it cannot happen exactly the same way
twice, even though in some instances the "constancy of transmission" across
decades or even generations may be "astonishing" (36-37).
2. The African and African American concept of "repetition with revision" is
discussed by Henry Louis Gates, Jr. in The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of Afro-American
Literary Criticism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 63-64, and applied
to performance studies by Margaret Thompson Drewal, Yoruba Ritual: Performers,
Play, Agency (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992), 3-5 and
passim. For a different genealogy of a closely similar idea, "repetition with critical
difference," see Linda Hutcheon, A Theory of Parody: The Teachings of Twentieth-Century
Art Forms (New York: Routledge, 1985) and Drewal, 3 and passim.
3. Ethnolinguist Richard Bauman, in his article "Performance" in the International
Encyclopedia of Communications, ed. Erik Barnouw et al. (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1989), defines performance as the actual execution of action as
opposed to its potential, a meaning that operates in the theatrical performance of
a script, a race car's performance on the test track, or parole's performance of
langue (3:262-66). For a definition of performance based on the idea of surrogation,
where performance offers itself as substitute for something else that preexists
it, see Joseph Roach, Cities of the Dead: Circum-Atlantic Performance (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1996), 3-5. For a critique of the latitudinarian scope of
"performance" in performance studies, see Martin Puchner, "Kenneth Burke: Theater,
Philosophy, and the Limits of Performance," in Theater and Philosophy, ed.
David Krasner and David Saltz (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2006),
41-66.
4. Michael Taussig, Mimesis and Alterity: A Particular History of the Senses (New
York: Routledge, 1993); and Elin Diamond, Unmaking Mimesis: Essays on Feminism
and Theater (New York: Routledge, 1997).
5. Elin Diamond, ed., Performance and Cultural Politics (New York: Routledge,
1996), 1.
6. See Marvin Carlson, Performance: A Critical Introduction (New York: Routledge,
1996).
7. Jose Esteban Mufioz, Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of
Politics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999); Barbara KirshenblattGimblett,
Destination Culture: Tourism, Museums, and Heritage (Berkeley: University
of California Press, 1998); Shannon Jackson, Lines of Activity: Performance, Historiography,
Hull-House Domesticity (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2000);
Jon McKenzie, Perform or Else: From Discipline to Performance (New York: Routledge,
2001); Catherine M. Cole, Ghana's Concert Party Theatre (Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 200ool); Terri Kapsalis, Public Privates: Performing Gynecology
from Both Ends of the Speculum (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1997).
8. Clifford Geertz, Local Knowledge: Further Essays in Interpretive Anthropology
(New York: Basic Books, 1983). For the paradigmatic instance of what Geertz calls
"thick description" of a local cultural performance, see "Deep Play: Notes on a Balinese
Cockfight," in The Interpretation of Cultures (New York: Basic Books, 1973),
412-53•
PERFORMANCE STUDIES
461
9. Richard Schechner, Performance Studies: An Introduction (New York: Routledge,
2002), 2.
so. Victor Turner, The Anthropology of Performance (New York: PAJ Publications,
1987), 25-26.
Invasions Friendly and Unfriendly:
The Dramaturgy of Direct Theater
Richard Schechner
... old authority and truth pretend to be absolute, to have an extratemporal
importance. Therefore, their representatives.., are
gloomily serious.... And thus these personages come to the end of
their role still serious, although their spectators have been laughing
for a long time.
-Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World
The role of the revolutionary is to create theatre which creates a revolutionary
frame of reference. The power to define is the power to
control.... The goal of theatre is to get as many people as possible
to overcome fear by taking action. We create reality wherever we go
by living our fantasies.
-Jerry Rubin, Do It!
What is the relation between "the authorities" and "the people" when the
people occupy public streets, squares, plazas, and buildings? Do carnivals
encourage giddy, drunken, sexy feelings and behavior, or does the very
action of taking spaces, of "liberating" them, make people giddy? Is it accidental
that official displays consist of neat rectangles, countable cohorts,
marching past and under the fixed gaze of the reviewing stand, while unofficial
mass gatherings are vortexed, whirling, full of shifting ups and
downs, multifocused events generating tension between large-scale actions
and many local dramas? And why is it that unofficial gatherings
elicit, permit, or celebrate the erotic, while official displays are so often associated
with the military?
Festivals and carnivals belong to comic theater, comic in desire, even
if sometimes tragic in outcome. When people go into the streets en masse,
they are celebrating life's fertility. They eat, drink, make theater, make
love, enjoy each other's company, put on masks and costumes, erect and
wave banners, and construct effigies not merely to disguise or embellish
their ordinary selves or to flaunt the outrageous but also to act out the
multiplicity each human life is. They protest, often by means of farce and
parody, what is oppressive, ridiculous, and outrageous.
Sometimes street actions bring about change-as in Eastern Europe
in 1989. But mostly such scenes, both celebratory and violent, end with
the old order restored. The old order sponsors a temporary relief from itself.
Obeying strict calendars and confined to designated precincts, carnival
allows the authorities to keep track of such relief while readying the
police. Despite such preparations, rebellions swell to almost musical climaxes
around sacrilized dates-anniversaries of the deaths or funerals of
462
INVASIONS FRIENDLY AND UNFRIENDLY
463
heroes and martyrs or of earlier popular uprisings (as in China) or the
Christmas season and the approach of the New Year (as in Eastern Europe).
To allow people to assemble in the streets is always to flirt with the
possibility of improvised rebellion.
Incipient revolutions are carnivalesque. This is because both revolution
and carnival propose a free space to satisfy desires, especially sexual
and drunken desires, a new time to enact social relations more freely.
People make, costume, and act in ways that are "not me" and almost always
excessive relative to ordinary life. They drink, fuck, loot, burn, riot,
murder, and practice rough justice on those they feel have wronged them.
But, sooner or later, either at a defined moment-when the church bells
ring in Ash Wednesday, when school begins again after spring break,
when a new government is firmly in power-the liminal period ends and
individuals are inserted or reinserted into their (sometimes new, sometimes
old, but always defined) places in society.
Rend Girard argues that "the fundamental purpose of the festival is
to set the stage for a sacrificial act that marks at once the climax and the
termination of the festivities." Festive sacrifice is necessary to inoculate
society against "falling into interminable violence." Roger Caillois goes
further: "In its pure form, the festival must be defined as the paroxysm of
society, purifying and renewing it simultaneously. The paroxysm is not
only its climax from a religious but also from an economic point of view."1
The potlatches of Native Americans on the Pacific coast in the late nineteenth
century are clear examples of what Caillois was talking about. The
public destruction of goods was both a display of wealth and an act of violent
dissipation. After a great potlatch there was nothing left but to get
back to amassing the resources needed to stage another. Unlike the
Roman Saturnalia where a scapegoat slave was sacrificed or the Athenian
theater of Dionysus where actors pretended to suffer and die, potlatchers
gave up the real thing: the material substance of their wealth.
Caillois regarded modern European carnivals "as a sort of moribund
echo of ancient festivals." In modern times the state apparatus guarantees
social solidarity. With rare exceptions today's festivals and carnivals are not
inversions of the social order but mirrors of it. "Lords of Misrule" are not
drawn from the lower or oppressed classes or enabled to rule (even for a
day). But unofficial culture worms its way back into public outdoor spaces.
There is a long history of unofficial performances "taking place" in (seizing
as well as using) locales not architecturally imagined as theaters.2 Over the
past thirty years performance experimenters have used outdoor spaces
courtyards, streets, walls, beaches, lakes, rooftops, plazas, and mountainsides-for
purposes aesthetic, personal, ritualistic, and political. And,
while modern Western dramatists abandoned the public squares of Renaissance
theater for the living room, kitchen, bedroom, motel, and office, the
emerging festival theater repositioned itself in places where public life and
social ritual have traditionally been acted out. Doubtlessly, there has been
a mutually fruitful exchange between art performances and politically
radical symbolic public actions. By the 196os these actions constituted a
Fig. 1. Tiananmen Square, May 17,
1989. The Gate of Heavenly Peace
with Mao's portrait in the background.
Photo: AP/Wide World.
i~ioiii :
distinct liminoid/celebratory/political/theatrical/ritual genre with its
own dramaturgy, mise-en-schne, role enactments, audience participation,
and reception. This theater is ritual because it is efficacious, intending to
produce real effects by means of symbolic causes. It is most theatrical at the
cusp where the street show meets the media, where events are staged for
the camera.
The democracy movement focused in Beijing's Tiananmen Square in
May and June 1989 is a rich example of these exchanges. Tiananmen
Square's one hundred acres can hold hundreds of thousands of people. It
is the symbol of official power, as Red Square had been in the former Soviet
Union or the White House or Capitol is of the United States. Before the
triumph of the Communists in 1949, Tiananmen Square was much smaller.
The focus of power was on Tiananmen Gate, the Gate of Heavenly Peace,
the southern entrance to the Forbidden City (fig. i). "Until China's last dynasty
fell in 1912, it was through this gate that the main axis of the emperor's
power was believed to run, as he sat in his throne hall, facing
south, the force of his presence radiating out across the courtyards. ..
passing through the gate, and so to the great reaches of the countryside beyond
.... During the Cultural Revolution of 1966 [to 1976] the gate, dominated
now by an immense colored portrait of Chairman Mao Zedong, became
a reviewing stand in front of which marched the Red Guards, a
464
Fig. 2. The "Goddess of Democracy
and Freedom" in Tiananmen Square,
May 30, 1989. Photo: AP/Wide
World.iiii
million or more strong."3 Clearly, the creation of Tiananmen Square was
• ~ ~ ~ ~ av .... ..................... .........
intended to refocus ceremonial2that is, theatrical-power from behind
the Forbidden City's walls to the big open space, a more fitting symbol of
what the new order promised. The image of Mao, the new emperor, was
mounted in front, gazing out over the square and from there to all of
China. Power was no longer to radiate from secret forbidden places but to
be displayed for all people to see and share. The nation itself was renamed
the People's Republic of China. And what the students who came to
Tiananmen Square in 1989 demanded, more than anything, was what they
called "transparency"-an openness in government operations corresponding
to the open square that symbolized the new China.
There were precedents for such actions in the dramatic May Fourth
movement of 1919 and in the more recent democracy movements of 1978
and 1986. Joseph Esherick and Jeffrey Wasserstrom argue strongly that the
1989 democracy movement was political theater:
Even when improvising, protesters worked from familiar "scripts"
which gave a common sense of how to behave during a given action,
where and when to march, how to express their demands, and
so forth. Some of these scripts originated in the distant past, emerging
out of traditions of remonstrance and petition stretching back 46
.......................
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the ForbiddenCity's walls.o.the.big op n a......... tig ymolo
bemilndorforapesopg"leosandhreatonfTheananmenuareae
itenedopl'sRepoublicereofhna.Andthatthesetrialpwhfomcameind
TiananmidenuCiy's9wallsetontedgoe se more thninting symbol ofe
wae teanewpreyproe.nTesinagoeenofoprthensespon-wa
mon ote nfopntqargazingyoutlovethe naew ia.fo hr oalo
h.ePwerewasrnoelont o rsuatifomnsecrteframiepacesFbutht
moven ope's1Republinofthina. Aendemocrcy thementsnswofame78
and 1986. Joseph Esherick and Jeffrey Wasserstrom argue strongly that the
1989 democracy movement was political theater:
465
CRITICAL THEORY AND PERFORMANCE
466
millennia. More were derived (consciously or unconsciously) from
the steady stream of student-led mass movements that have taken
place since 1919.4
The struggle in China, before it became violent, was over who would
control the means and style of information. The question became: Would
official culture or the democracy movement write the script? The theatrical
stakes were even higher in May because fortune laid ceremony atop ceremony.
Hu Yaobang died on April 15, close to the anniversary of the May
Fourth movement; Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev was set to arrive in
Beijing on May 15, and the leadership wanted to impress him. The students
also wanted to impress Gorbachev, but with a different show. If Chinese
officials wanted Gorbachev to see an orderly China under their control,
the students wanted him to see a powerful and seething people's
movement akin to those taking place in Eastern Europe and his own country.
On May 15 about eight hundred thousand people gathered in Tiananmen
Square, even as Chinese officials steered Gorbachev around Beijing,
pretending that this vast spectacle at the very core of power was not occurring.
Official public ceremonies were held at the Beijing airport, a nonplace
historically.
Within the overall dramaturgy of the 1989 demonstrations were particular
molecules of theater. Student leader Wuer Kaixi in his May 18 confrontation
with Premier Li Peng put on what Esherick and Wasserstrom
describe as "one of the best acts." Wuer "appeared in his hospital pajamas
[on hunger strike].... He upstaged the Premier by interrupting him at the
very start. And props: later in the session, he dramatically pulled out a
tube inserted into his nose (for oxygen?) in order to make a point. Especially
for the young people in the nationwide television audience, it was an
extraordinarily powerful performance." The dramatic meeting the next
day between hunger-striking students and Communist Party secretary
Zhao Ziyang had the quality of a tragic perepeteia (reversal) and anagnorisis
(recognition). Speaking through tears, Zhao said, "I came too late, I
came too late ... but the problems you raised will eventually be solved."
And, of course, on May 30 the "Goddess of Democracy and Freedom"
made her appearance (fig. 2)-a multivocal figure resembling the Statue of
Liberty, a Bread & Puppet Theatre effigy, a "traditional Bodhisattva,...
[and] the giant statues of Mao that were carried through the square during..,
the sixties."5 Before the goddess the crowds had been sagging, but
she brought many back to the square. Students freely adapted costumes
and slogans from non-Chinese sources, including a banner proclaiming
"We Shall Overcome."
Esherick and Wasserstrom theorize that the struggle in Tiananmen
Square was between official ritual and student theater. But this distinction
is too rigid. As Victor Turner and I have pointed out, the relation between
ritual and theater is dialectical and braided with plenty of entertainment
and social critique in many rituals and with plenty of ritual process in theater.6
The struggle in Tiananmen Square before the entrance of the tanks
INVASIONS FRIENDLY AND UNFRIENDLY
467
was not between rigid ritual and rebellious theater but between two
groups of authors (or authorities), each of whom desired to compose the
script of China's future and each of whom drew on both theater and ritual.
The students took Tiananmen Square, the center stage and ritual focus of
Chinese history, thereby upstaging official culture. When Deng Xiaoping,
Li Peng, and the generals of the People's Liberation Army felt their authority
slipping, they radically shifted the basis of the confrontation from theater
and ritual to military force. But, even after the slaughter of June 3-4,
there were moments of high theater, such as when an unarmed man, his
fate since unknown, stood his ground in front of a column of tanks.
And, despite the orderliness of their demonstrations and the seriousness
of their intentions, the students acted up a carnival. Their mood
of fun, comradeship, irony, and subversion enraged and frightened
China's officialdom. Students camped out willy-nilly, they sang and
danced, they spoke from impromptu "soapboxes," and they granted interviews
to the world press. They unfurled sarcastic, disrespectful banners,
including one depicting hated Premier Li Peng as a pig-snouted
Nazi officer. Even the hunger strike, in which thousands participated, had
the feel of melodrama. The Chinese government called this behavior
"luan," or chaos, a word that in certain of its uses implies dissipation and
drunkenness. The Chinese leadership feared that the virus of luan would
spread: Tiananmen Square is a very bright stage visible all over China.
From the government's point of view, luan acted out in Tiananmen Square
could not be ignored any more than the Nixon administration could, nineteen
years earlier, ignore the ever more carnivalesque anti-Vietnam War
demonstrations invading Washington. Meaningful theatrical luan is a potent
weapon.
From the mid-196os, protests against the Vietnam War and in favor
of what University of California activists in Berkeley called "free speech"
had pitched scores of American campuses into chaos. Much of the theory
underlying these actions was developed by Jerry Rubin and Abbie Hoffman.
By "theater" Rubin and Hoffman clearly meant a lot more than orthodox
drama or even "guerrilla theater." According to Hoffman,
"Drama is anything you can get away with . . . Guerrilla theater is only
a transitional step in the development of total life-actors." Or, as Rubin
put it, "Life is theatre and we are the guerrillas attacking the shrines of
authority.. .. The street is the stage. You are the star of the show and
everything you were once taught is up for grabs." The Yippies, which
Hoffman and Rubin helped to form, emphasized more than the Chinese
the Bakhtinian/Rabelaisian mode.7 In October 1967, a massive demonstration
in Washington, D.C., against the Vietnam War climaxed in an effort
to "exorcise" and "levitate" the Pentagon. I was not alone in pissing
on the Pentagon steps in a gesture of contempt and defiance. In the
spring of 1968, Hoffman, Rubin, and others planned a "Festival of Life"
for the August Democratic Party National Convention in Chicago. The
festival was conceived as both something disruptive to the convention
and constructive of a new way of life. According to an ad in the spring
CRITICAL THEORY AND PERFORMANCE
468
1968 TDR, the festival would feature "guerrilla theatre, a mock convention,
and happenings." All who participated would be provided with
"costumes, paint, and props." Of course, what happened in Chicago's
Grant Park was instead a "police riot."
The violent, the political, the carnivalesque, and the erotic were
linked again in May 1970 after the bombing of Cambodia, an escalation of
the Vietnam War, triggered protests. On May 4-an ironically appropriate
date given what happened in China-the National Guard, called out to repress
a protest at Kent State University in Ohio, shot four students dead.
Schools everywhere went on strike, students marched, and a massive rally
was called for Saturday, May 9, in Washington. But, despite the occasion
a protest against bombing in Cambodia and murder at home-the march
on Washington quickly turned into a carnival. At dawn Nixon, like Zhao,
visited the students, attempting to make peace with them. As he spoke,
some students taunted him with shouts of "Fuck Nixon! Trash Nixon!"
raising garbage can lids with his face embossed on them. The demonstrations
began with speeches reminding the activists of the contingent causes
of their assembling in the nation's capital. But soon, warmed by the sun
and more tuned in to Woodstock Nation than "verbalism," many youths
stripped in the hot sun, smoked dope, made out, and jumped naked into
the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool (fig. 3). The frolic-with its characteristic
whirling choreography, the dispersal of orderly ranks into many
intense and volatile small groups, the show of private pleasures satisfied
in public places-subverted and mocked the neo-Roman monuments and
pretensions of imperialist Washington. Washington that day felt very
much like Beijing in 1989. And, although there was no single massacre as
in Tiananmen Square, the American "big chill" from the mid-197os into the
199os accomplished the same end. Nixon and Agnew were driven from office,
as Deng Xiaoping and Li Peng might be, but social systems do not rest
on one person or even a dozen.
The system of Communist domination of Eastern Europe and the
USSR and the cold war between that system and the North Atlantic alliance
were symbolized by the Berlin Wall. Existing for only twenty-eight
years (1961-89), the 10o3-mile-long wall lacked architectural grace or ornament.
Like the Bastille, it not only symbolized a hated regime and physically
helped preserve it, but also was demolished as soon as that regime
fell. During its twenty-eight years more than five thousand went over,
under, or through the wall-climbing, leaping, ballooning, gliding, tunneling,
and ramming. At least another five thousand were captured, and
191 were killed trying. Ugly and mean, the wall disgusted and attracted
people, including presidents John F. Kennedy and Ronald Reagan, who
used it as a theatrical backdrop for Communist-bashing speeches. Still
others knew it as a tourist "must."
The events leading to the destruction of the wall-and the collapse of
Communism throughout East Europe-are complex. The system was imposed
from without, sustained by military force, and failed to deliver the
material goods people desired. There were many revolts and several major
Fig. 3. Swimming in the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, Washington, D.C.,
May 9, 1970. Photo credit: Fred W. McDarrah.
uprisings crushed by Soviet armies or the clear threat of Soviet intervention.
When in the mid-198os Gorbachev began restructuring the USSR,
Eastern Europeans saw an opportunity, but the actual license for radical
change was not issued until Gorbachev's declaration on October 25, 1989,
that the USSR had no right to interfere in the internal affairs of its Eastern
European neighbors. He may have been driven to this position by events.
The social drama began in the summer of 1989-shortly after the brutal
crushing of the democracy movement in China-when Hungary opened
its border to East Germans. This meant that people who wanted to leave
the German Democratic Republic (GDR) had a way out-and many thousands
took it at rates unequaled since the building of the wall.
Throughout September and October the East German government-led
by one of those who authorized building the wall, seventyseven-year-old
Erich Honecker-shilly-shallied regarding the exodus.
Clearly, the GDR lacked the means to stem the outgoing tide. Meanwhile,
the festival that always accompanies a "revolution from below" had
begun. "A carnival atmosphere greeted the first large convoy of jubilant
East Germans to arrive today in this city [Passau, West Germany] on the
Danube in southeastern Bavaria," reported the New York Times. "Hundreds
of onlookers watched and cheered as five buses unloaded an estimated
700 East Germans who were welcomed with speeches, free balloons,
bananas, beer and soft pretzels.... A similar welcome was given to
East Germans arriving at five tent cities set up by the West German Red
Cross in nearby towns." As if following a Bakhtinian script, headlines in
the New York Times proclaimed: "Exodus Galls East Berlin: Nation's Sovereignty
Seems to Be Mocked."8 But the climax was not yet reached; the
streets of Berlin were still relatively quiet and empty.
Then, as in China earlier in 1989, an important date sparked street
469
CRITICAL THEORY AND PERFORMANCE
470
protests. Friday, October 6, was the GDR's fortieth anniversary. Ordinarily,
one could expect a rectangular parade of military muscle and hardware
in front of and below rigidly saluting generals and commissars
mounted on a viewing stand. As in China that May, globe-hopping Gorbachev
was scheduled to make an appearance, and, as in China, the official
celebration turned sour. "Honecker faces the birthday party," the New
York Times continued, "humiliated, derided, and threatened." Gorbachev
was seized on by both sides, soon becoming a contradictory sign. Addressing
"an elite congregation gathered in the glittering Palace of the Republic...
[he] assailed demands that Moscow dismantle the Berlin wall,"
while earlier many Berliners hailed him with shouts of "Gorby! Gorby!"
a known code for the reforms they were demanding from Honecker's
government.9 On October 9 more than fifty thousand demonstrated in
Leipzig. On October 18 Honecker was replaced by his "protege," fiftytwo-year-old
Egon Krenz, a man who had just paid a praising visit to Li
Peng and Deng Xiaoping.
The East German people replied with more demonstrations. In Dresden
on October 19, fifty thousand staged a silent candlelight march. The
next day several thousand took to the streets of Berlin. People were
openly disrespectful of Krenz. Asked about the new leader,
a retired factory hand, speaking in the pungent accent and mocking
vocabulary of the Berlin working class, nearly exploded with derisive
laughter.... "From him?" he asked with a snort. "After he went
to China to congratulate them for the blood they spilled? After he
rigged our last election? After being the boss of State Security? The
sparrows on the roof wouldn't believe him."10
Ferment was spreading. On October 23 three hundred thousand marched
in Leipzig demanding change, including the legalization of opposition
parties and an independent labor movement. Smaller demonstrations took
place in Berlin, Dresden, Halle, Schwerin, and Magdeburg. The police did
not crack skulls, and people grew bolder. Political debates erupted in the
streets of East Berlin. Meanwhile, big demonstrations were starting in
Prague. Not only were East Germans challenging their leadership, the
once docile press, in print and on TV, were giving open coverage to the
emergent debates.
The big demonstrations grew more and more festive. Three hundred
thousand again marched in Leipzig on October 30. The "old city center
was virtually taken over for three hours by people of every age and from
every walk of life.... The center [was filled] with cheers, jeers, and chants
from all sides."11 On November 2 the East German government dropped
its ban on travel, and thousands crossed into Czechoslovakia on their way
west. On November 7 the East German cabinet resigned, but the politburo-the
core of official power-held fast. By November 8 more than
fifty thousand East Germans a day were streaming from Czechoslovakia
into the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG), where, according to law,
INVASIONS FRIENDLY AND UNFRIENDLY
471
they instantly became citizens. Then, on November 9, the East German
government opened its borders.
Once the announcement was made "a tentative trickle of East Germans
testing the new regulations quickly turned into a jubilant horde,
which joined at the border crossings with crowds of flag-waving, cheering
West Germans. Thousands of Berliners clambered across the wall at the
Brandenburg Gate, passing through the historic arch that for so long had
been inaccessible to Berliners of either side."12 The Brandenburg Gate, like
Beijing's Tiananmen Gate, is heavily symbolic. Erected in 1888-89 at the
western end of the Unter den Linden, soon dubbed Germany's Arc de Triomphe,
the gate celebrates the military prowess of Prussia and the unity
of Germany.
On November 9, in a flash, the Berlin Wall's symbolic value was reversed.
What had been avoided or surpassed became the chosen place of
celebration. Because it had been such a terrifying barrier, it was now
where people acted out how totally things had changed. People couldn't
wait to climb it, sit on it, pop champagne and dance on it, and chip away
souvenir chunks of it (fig. 4). Formerly murderous East German border
guards went out of their way to show how friendly they were. The wall
was a media bonanza. Dominating the front page of the November o10
New York Times was a four-column photograph of "East Berliners dancing
atop the Berlin Wall near the Brandenburg Gate." The same picture, or
others very like it, appeared on front pages around the world. Again and
again television showed people clambering onto and over the wall.
The wall was not "interesting" everywhere along its 10o3-mile route.
The focus was on the segment in front of the Brandenburg Gate or bifurcating
Potsdamer Platz, which, before the wall, was the center of Berlin,
among the busiest intersections in Europe. Just as Tiananmen Square was
the necessary stage for China's democracy movement, so the wall at these
places was where Berliners focused the "unparallelled celebration that
swirled through Berlin day and night." "Cheers, sparkling wine, flowers
and applause greeted the new arrivals . . . At the Brandenburg Gate ...
hundreds of people chanted, 'Gate open! Gate open!'" A middle-aged
East German woman broke through a police cordon to give flowers and a
"vigorous kiss" to a young West German cop as "the crowd roared." "A
festival air seized the entire city. West Berliners lined entry points to greet
East Berliners with champagne, cheers, and hugs. Many restaurants offered
the visitors free food. A television station urged West Berliners to
call in with offers of theater tickets, beds, dinners, or just guided tours."
The popular Hertha soccer team gave away ten thousand free tickets for
its Saturday game. That giddy weekend the West German government
gave every visitor from the east one hundred marks of "greeting money"
for spending in West Berlin's glittering shops. "In an unprecedented step
for a place with the most rigid business hours in Western Europe, West
Berlin banks will be open on both Saturday and Sunday for East Germans
wishing to pick up cash."13 It was only a matter of time before the East
German state collapsed into the arms of the West.
Fig. 4. On the Berlin Wall in front of the Brandenberg Gate, November lo, 1989.
Photo: AP/Wide World.
It could have ended otherwise. Craig R. Whitney reports that "there
was a written order from Honecker for a Chinese solution."14 But the
politburo overrode its aging boss. Once events are in the saddle, the speed
of the reversals is breathtaking. A faltering regime in China suddenly reasserts
itself; a seemingly invincible state in East Germany crumbles like
dust. Hindsight discloses the "inevitability" of events. But "what if"
haunts all such talk. What if the Chinese leadership had not sent in the
army? What if the East Germans had? At what point does a regime lose
control of its military? There are too many variables for anyone to answer
these questions. What can be known is that, when oppressed or angry
people sense a weakening official power, they take to the streets. Their
carnival can last only so long; every Mardi Gras meets its Ash Wednesday.
Whether that Wednesday will see a new order or the return of the old cannot
be known in advance.
China and East Germany in 1989 or the United States in 1970 are examples
of festivals where the outcome was unknown. The excitement of
such social dramas-not unlike what grips whole populations during
some sports matches, especially those like the World Cup, where teams
and nations are closely identified-is rooted in the tension between
known patterns of action, stunning instantaneous surprises, and a pas-
472
INVASIONS FRIENDLY AND UNFRIENDLY
473
sionately desired yet uncertain outcome. At the other extreme are festivals
where written dramas are enacted. Here the excitement derives from immersing
oneself in a known flow of events. One of these festivals, the
Ramlila of Ramnagar, India, offers an intriguing variation on the theme of
the critique of ordinary reality. In most carnivals the revolution is from
below: the underdog, or the top dog disguised as underdog, rules. But in
Ramlila the critique is from above. For a month Ramnagar is the place
where Hindu gods and mythic heroes walk the earth and rule the realm.
The epic story tells of Rama's birth, his boyhood education, his exile,
the kidnapping of his wife, Sita (also a god), his war against the demonking
Ravana, his victory and triumphant return home to his rule as
India's ideal king. During Ramlila, Vibhuti Narain Singh is celebrated by
hundreds of thousands of devoted spectators as the "Maharaja of Banaras,"
representative of Shiva and worshipper of Rama. Never mind that
the maharaja was stripped of both princely title and kingdom shortly
after Indian independence in 1947. The maharaja is the principal spectator
and occasional participant in the reenactment of Rama's life. Spectatorparticipants
regard Ramlila month as time-out from their daily grind.
When the boy actors enact the roles of gods, spectators regard them as divine.
Inversions abound. Ramlila is a time when rich persons dress simply
and eat street food while poor persons dress beyond their means and
enjoy expensive, voluptuous sweets; when the maharaja bows down before
the boy actors feeding them with his own hand; when the barely literate
farmer playing the demon-king Ravana is honored by all; when slick
lawyers and gruff shopkeepers, books in hand, meekly follow the sacred
text word by word. And, of course, the largest inversion of them all: five
Brahmin boys become gods.
For thirty-one days Ramnagar ("Ramatown") is taken over by
Ramlila. The streets, back lanes, and courtyards become theaters. Spectators
dance themselves into delirium worshipping Rama and Sita. Crowds
follow Rama, Sita, and Lakshman into exile; they flood the streets in majestic
processions (fig. 5). The characteristic choreography of Ramlila is a
procession from one place to another where a scene is performed on a
raised stage or within a complex environment of stages, small buildings,
and gardens. Spectators take part in the processions, then gather in front
of the stages or within the theatrical environments. Moving from one place
to another is so important that often one day's lila (performance) will
stop near the end of a scene so that, shortly after the next day's lila begins,
the whole crowd-actors and spectators alike-move off to another
location several kilometers away. In today's Ramlila there is little rebelliousness.
Some spectators identify with Ravana, who they regard as
heroically resistant to domination by the Brahman caste. Politics were
more important at Ramnagar Ramlila's origins in the nineteenth century,
when the performance proclaimed Hindu nationalism against both
British and Mogul authorities.
New Orleans Mardi Gras descends from European pre-Lenten carnivals,
which are the basis for the theorizing of Emile Durkheim, Mikhail
Fig. 5. The maharaja of Bandras's
Dasahara day procession,
from the fort, Ramlila to
Ramnagar, 1981. Photo credit:
Richard Schechner.
Bakhtin, and Victor Turner. By the mid-nineteenth century Mardi Gras had
already become what it is todaya mix of fun, sex, commercial exploita-\\
tion, and hype. As in classic carnivals, inversion of social roles was the
order of the day. Whites dressed as African Americans and blacks as
whites. And, whatever New Orleans offered by way of sex and fun, there
was more of it during Mardi Gras. Mardi Gras remains charged with ludic
double negatives. Socially prominent people pretending to be kings,
queens, and mythic personages ride on glittering but crummy floats throwing
fake jewelry to crowds of "ordinaries" scrambling for souvenirs (and
spending like crazy). The Lords of Misrule are not poor people empowered
for a day but, rather, the representatives of the ruling class pretending to
even greater power and authority. Those in power cannot tolerate even a
temporary surrender of their power. Far from giving the poor or oppressed
free play, or permitting a charivari-like criticism of established norms,
Mardi Gras privileges the already privileged.
Even today the majority of New Orleans African Americans are very
f.\ 1 \ >
~. .
Bakhtpoor, and de faVicto segregation is w By the midely practieenthced. In Mardi Gras blacks
already become what it is today -a mix of fun, sex, commercial exploitaticannotn
atend hype. As white balls (except as serrnivals, inversion o sex chatl roles was the on
ordwhite floats; they walk bWhiteside the floats Africarrying "flambeaux" and blacks laves
whdid before emancips. And, whation. Ther New Orleans offered by wayitique of sexofficial cultuhre n
was more of it during Mardi Gras. Mardi Gras remains charged with ludic
double negatives. Socially prominent people pretending to be kings,
queens, and mythic personages ride on glittering but crummy floats throwing
fake jewelry to crowds of "ordinaries" scrambling for souvenirs (and
spending like crazy). The Lords of Misrule are not poor people empowered
for a day but, rather, the representatives of the ruling class pretending to
even greater power and authority. Those in power cannot tolerate even a
temporary surrender of their power. Far from giving the poor or oppressed
free play, or permitting a charivari-like criticism of established norms,
474
Fig. 6. Louis Armstrong as King
Zulu, Mardi Gras Day, New Orleans,
1949. Courtesy of William Ransom
Hogan Jazz Archive, Tulane University
Library. Photo credit: Dan Perry.
the anticarnival carnival of King Zulu's parade, first organized in 1910 by
a few poor and middle-class blacks. Zulu was a parody of the white parades
enacted by blacks who parodied white racist attitudes toward
blacks. On Mardi Gras day King Zulu followed the final, biggest, and
most prestigious white parade, that of Rex, King of Carnival. While white
parades had defined routes passing in front of reviewing stands loaded
with notables, the Zulus meandered through black neighborhoods or
chased on the heels of Rex. Looking at King Zulu's parade as it was in the
1940s (fig. 6), one can see how it functioned in the Bakhtinian sense-as
popular culture playing out and mocking race relations, expressing the violent
ambivalence with which blacks performed their "place" in New Orleans'
society. Even the name Zulu-in a New Orleans not familiar with
Shaka (not to mention Buthelezi)-carried a racist double message: savage,
African, foreign, and dangerous; yet silly, ridiculous, and primitive.
King Zulu and his court were dressed in "the traditional costume of the
krewe-long black underwear that covered them to wrists and ankles,
grass skirts, and wooly wigs. Faces were blackened and eyes and mouths
were circled with white."15 The blackface was like what black minstrel
show performers were required to wear: a theatrical reinforcing of the social
"blackness" or "negritude" of African Americans.
If Mardi Gras' white elite displaced their identities upwards toward 47
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age, Afrcan, foeign, ad dangerus;.yetsilly,.idiculou,.and.pimitive
King ulu nd hi cout wer dresed i "th tradtionl.cosume.f.th
475
CRITICAL THEORY AND PERFORMANCE
476
royalty, myth, and godhead, whiter than white, the Zulus' identity was
both royal and primitive and blacker than black. King Zulu's court included
a garishly overdressed "Big Shot of Africa" and a "royal witch
doctor" with "a horned headdress and a golden ring in his nose, carrying
a spiked mace." Zulu himself "wore a gold paper crown, dangling earrings,
and strings of gleaming beads about his neck. His mantle was dark
blue velvet trimmed in gold and edged with white rabbit fur. He carried
a jeweled scepter, with which he now and then threatened the small page
boy who kept pulling at his mantle. He also wore a leopard-skin vest."16
More than a little hostility marked the shenanigans of the Zulus. At least
into the mid-196os, when I last saw Mardi Gras, the Zulus acted out the
feelings of many New Orleans African Americans regarding race relations
in "the city that care forgot." King Zulu and his court did not toss baubles;
they hurled coconuts like cannonballs at white spectators.
Today's Zulus are much different from their predecessors. With at
least the appearance of improved race relations, King Zulu has been integrated
into official Mardi Gras (though still regarded by many as a parody).
Zulu's floats are fancier than before, sometimes borrowed from one of the
white parades; the costumes are more dignified, the blackface much less
common. More of the black community's elite is involved. Tellingly, the coconuts
are now handed out rather than pitched. As Zulu became less offensive,
it also lost its double-edged bite. Previously, many African Americans
disparaged the Zulus, feeling "they satirize their own race and do nothing
to uplift it, and many critical Negroes are embarrassed by their antics."17
Nowadays, the Zulus are "whiter," more peaceful, co-opted, and stripped
of their parodic clarity. Instead of introducing an anticarnival into carnival,
the Zulus now participate in the elite masquerade.
An "invented tradition" not at all shy about its consumerist obsession
is Daytona Beach Spring Break Weekend.18 Occurring at the cusp between
winter and spring, taking over a strip of Daytona Beach where the rectangular
motels meet an undulating beach and ocean, encouraging drinking,
carousing, sex, and public display, spring break has the narrative shape of
carnival. In 1963, when sixty-five thousand students first descended on
Daytona, the event inaugurated its reputation for excess. Sex, booze, and
sun brings them south, but the narrative action of spring break is to compete
and consume. Taking 1989 as an example-when four hundred
thousand made the Daytona trip-contests included Twentieth Century
Fox's "best buns," Budweiser's "best male body," DeKuyper Schnapps'
"DeKuypers DeBody Delight," Hawaiian Tropic's "Miss Hawaiian
Tropic," Playboy Ujena's "summerwear bikini," and Caribe Suntan Lotion's
"wet T-shirt," to name just some. Sex, excess, violence, and competition
are linked.
All events are sponsored by brand products. "Dozens of banners for
Caribe suntan lotion, Roffler hair products and other products are strewn
from the balconies, a two-story inflatable Simpatico beer bottle sits near
the pool, a giant inflatable Spuds MacKenzie [Budweiser beer mascot]
watches over outdoor beer kegs, and hot balloons emblazoned with 'Ply-
INVASIONS FRIENDLY AND UNFRIENDLY
477
mouth Sundance' [car] and 'Karate Kid II' [movie] are anchored everywhere."
"In a half-mile stretch along the beach are volleyball games sponsored
by Pontiac, Diet Pepsi, Coppertone, Coors Light, and Plymouth.
The skies drone with airplanes pulling ads, and the beach-on which cars
are allowed-is a parade of mobile billboards." An adman told a reporter
that the idea is to "blanket the hotel-bar complex" (like B-52s blanket
bombing Vietnam or Iraq?). Joanne Lipman, a company executive, said,
"We're not down here for sales, we're down here for image."19
According to this executive, college-age youths are "brand conscious
but not yet brand loyal." Spring break is the time to excite them,
inebriate them, and burn brand names into their minds. The banners in
Tiananmen Square in 1989 and the costumes of King Zulu and his court
in the 1940S were made by participants. But in Daytona whatever is on
display is made elsewhere by others. The students are there only to receive,
cattle to be branded. But do the kids listen? One student told Lipman,
"You don't even notice it because it's everywhere you look." The
sponsors think otherwise. To them it doesn't matter if a student remembers
which brand. The important thing is to learn that the only things
worth owning are brand products. Spring break is a capitalist carnival
initiating and training young upscale Americans in their lifelong roles as
consumers. The scenography of spring break serves its capitalist carnival
functions well. The Daytona police make sure that the revels are confined
to beachfront motels, the streets immediately adjoining them, and
the beach itself. Spring break is squeezed into "the strip"-a long narrow
space, a kind of static parade, easy to police and control. Crowds
are not allowed to mass in big circular groups as they did in Tiananmen
Square, Washington, Leipzig, or Berlin. The beach itself and the airspace
above are treated as billboards saturating the youths with brand name
messages.
In "direct theater" large public spaces are transformed into theaters
where collective reflexivity is performed, fecund and spectacular excesses
displayed. Parades, mass gatherings, street theater, sex, and partying
everything is exaggerated, ritualized, done for show. Masquerading encourages
experimenting with behavior and identity slippage. Rulers or
ruling ideas are either exalted, as at Mardi Gras, spring break, and Ramlila;
challenged, as in Washington in 1970 and China in 1989; or overthrown, as
in Eastern Europe. Ramlila is complex. Worshipped as gods, the boys are
also ordinary people, while the maharaja who witnesses and authorizes
their sacred performance is a former king, who, for the month of the festival,
acts out a recollected royalty.
Official culture wants its festivals to be entertaining. Mardi Gras and
spring break are dizzying, drunk, disorderly, and mystifying-mystifying
because they present official authorities as fairy-tale royalty, buffoons,
clowns, laughing dispensers of free goods, and benign corporate sponsors
of drunken erotic contests. It's the old "bread and circuses" trick. People
have fun. Less so for obligatory mass turnouts such as those that until now
have taken place in Moscow's Red Square marking the anniversary of the
CRITICAL THEORY AND PERFORMANCE
478
Russian Revolution. For whom are these official displays staged? Since the
development of television, the audiences are whomever mass media can
reach. But there is another audience too. The arrogance of the leaders looking
down from reviewing stands is matched by their insecurity (both actual
and imagined). They demand reassurance of their popularity and invincibility.
Each salute given, each tank rolling by as part of neat and obedient
phalanxes, warms the hearts of these leaders, democrats and despots alike.
But when the official leadership is no longer the focus of attention,
no longer in control of the means of producing or controlling public celebrations,
when the power to produce public fun passes into the hands
of ordinary people, events take an unpredictable theatrical turn. Effigies
appear, as do homemade banners and posters; street theater flourishes;
soapbox orators draw cheering crowds. Official leaders are cut down to
size. If they show up, they run the risk of being mocked or chased away as
Li, Zhou, Nixon, and members of the GDR politburo were. Officialdom
provides scripted fun contained within ritual frames, while unofficial festivity
rewrites ritual, dissolving the restrictive frames. The popular street
carnival-demonstration is actually a utopian mimesis whose multifocused,
idealized, heated, magnified, and transparent clarity of consciousness
evaporates once the show is over. Those involved in such festivals of political
desire too often deceive themselves into believing their utopian show
will run forever. It is not only the tanks of Deng Xiaoping that enviously
and with terrible clarity crush the fun but also the longer process, when the
revolution is successful, of postrevolutionary jockeying for power. This
decay of festival into "dirty politics" is what the Chinese students now underground
or in exile have learned, a lesson most American radicals of the
196os and 1970s never studied. Carnival, more than other forms of theater,
can act out a powerful critique of the status quo, but it cannot itself replace
the status quo. For the modern world this much was made clear by Robespierre:
the carnival indefinitely in power is the Terror.
There are several audiences for direct theater: (1) the participants
themselves, (2) journalists, especially television reporters, (3) the mass
spectatorship television enjoys, and (4) high-level decision makers in their
offices or bunkers. These high-level spectators participate in direct theater
for fear of missing the worldwide TV audience. The dramaturgy is further
complicated by the fact that the TV apparatus asks for news to be "made,"
not "found." And the same corporations who underwrite spring break
sponsor TV or own the networks. This means that all programming
news as well as sports, dramas, sitcoms, talk, and game shows-are actually
profit-making entertainments. Television news is not made to be kept
and reshown long after the events it records are over. It is a multilayered,
throwaway flow of images and words combining on-the-spot action with
sophisticated editing and framing procedures to create a narrativized and
ritualized product.
Direct theater is raw material for the universally displayed second
theater, TV news, which includes often improvised responses to the first
theater. Direct theater is reflexive insofar as it is produced for the cameras
INVASIONS FRIENDLY AND UNFRIENDLY
479
and designed to force a response. Events are immediate (being there), mediated
(taking place on the TV screen), and responsive (reactions to what
happens on the screen). Used this way, TV is hot, interactive. The millions
of screens function as a collective forum (though not a free forum). Criticism
of the direct theater is provided not by aestheticians but by "pundits"
and official spokespersons who summarize and explain. Political direct
theater is different from the neocarnival direct theater of Mardi Gras
or spring break. These have been drained of political content, while the
made-for-television (or at least highly "media aware") direct theater is
mainly political. Or, to put it in a slightly different way, the conservative
politics of Mardi Gras and spring break are hidden. Therefore, there is no
"news" coming from them except a feature story buried near the end of a
telecast. Or, if the celebration gets out of hand, an account of how the police
handled the rioting. Social order must be restored; the causes of the
"disturbance" will be "looked into" (so it won't happen again). On the
other hand, the political direct theater of East Europe or China challenges
the status quo, wants to overthrow the state.
The more political the direct theater, the more it is staged as, or ends
in swirls, vortexes of activities moving in spirals and circles with noteasy-to-locate
centers or heads. Multivocal and multifocal, a popular deconstructing
of hierarchy, often blasphemous, irreverent, and obscene,
full of small-scale dramas and guerrilla theater, the direct theater plays to
the roving multiple eyes of many cameras simultaneously ingesting images.
The direct theater is not "about" something so much as it is made
"of" something. It is actual and symbolic, not referential and representational.
Hunger-striking Chinese camped out in Tiananmen Square, Germans
climbing on or chipping away at the wall, or young Americans frolicking
in the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool are performing more than
naked actions. But their symbolic deeds are not imitations played by
named characters who exist within copyrighted fictional narratives authored
by individuals. Real people-from anonymous players to Wuer
Kaixi, Zhao Ziyang, the East German politburo, Berliners, Abbie Hoffman-play
their roles in public and pursue not only Stanislavskian objectives
and through-lines of action but also historical dialectics.
Television produces and reproduces this popular drama, showing
over and over again specific highly theatrical bits (or bytes), what Brecht
would call gests, creating both verfremdungseffekt and a ritual effect. The
layering of contending historifications begins with on-the-spot reporters
interviewing participants, ordinary people as well as leaders. Many of
these "spontaneous" interviews are setups. The material is then laundered
through interpretations and editings-"spin controls." Of course,
direct theater, with its low impact on global politics, such as Mardi Gras
or Ramlila, doesn't need much managing. But, for political direct theater,
participants and viewers alike are told what's going on, how to relate to
it, and what the future holds. The ultimate layers are hidden from view,
taking place in editing rooms and corporate or government offices. TV
news gives the impression of-a performance of-"multivocality." But,
CRITICAL THEORY AND PERFORMANCE
480
just as aesthetic drama projects many voices deployed as characters originating
from a single voice, the playwright's, so television moves in the
opposite direction, knitting the many voices of the streets into a unitary
broadcast.
NOTES
1. Rene Girard, Violence and the Sacred, trans. Patrick Gregory (Baltimore:
Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977), 119-20; Roger Caillois, trans. Meyer
Barash, Man and the Sacred (Glencoe, Ill.: Free Press, 1959), 125.
2. Caillois, Man and the Sacred, 123. For such unofficial performances, see Marvin
Carlson, Places of Performance (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1989);
and Sally Harrison-Pepper, Drawing a Circle in the Square: Street Performing in New
York's Washington Square Park (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1990).
3. Jonathan D. Spence, The Gate of Heavenly Peace (New York: Viking Penguin,
1981), 17-18.
4. Joseph W. Esherick and Jeffrey N. Wasserstrom, "Acting Out Democracy:
Political Theater in Modern China," Journal of Asian Studies 49, no. 4 (1990): 839.
5. Esherick and Wasserstrom, "Acting Out Democracy," 841.
6. See Victor Turner, The Ritual Process (Chicago: Aldine, 1969), and "Liminal
to Liminoid, in Play, Flow, Ritual," in From Ritual to Theatre and Back (New York:
PAJ, 1982), 20-60; and Richard Schechner, "From Ritual to Theatre and Back," Educational
Theatre Journal 26 (1974): 455-82, and Performance Theory (New York:
Routledge, 1988).
7. Abbie Hoffman, Revolution for the Hell of It (New York: Dial Books, 1968),
30, 183; Jerry Rubin, Do It! (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1970), 250. For more
detailed expositions of their views, see these sources and Hoffman, Woodstock Nation
(New York: Vintage, 1969); and Steal This Book (New York: Pirate Editions,
1971). The term Yippie is from the acronym for Youth International Party (YIP)
founded by Rubin, Hoffman, and others. YIP never was intended as a "serious"
political party but as a gadfly. Yippy is taken from Hippy, what the "flower children"
of the 1960s, inhabitants of the Haight-Ashbury section of San Francisco,
were called or called themselves. Hippie was soon applied to many of the "tune in,
turn on, drop out" generation of American youth. Hippie is a diminutive of hip, or
hep, a word from the world of jazz (or crime) first used in the 191os by African
Americans but adopted or adapted by the Beat Generation writers of the 1950s
and meaning someone "in the know." All these terms connote alternative
lifestyles. The 1980s adaptation Yuppie-a Young Upwardly Mobile Professionalis
a parody of the earlier terms, signaling the very opposite in social status.
8. Ferdinand Protzman, "Thousands Swell Trek to the West by East Germans,"
New York Times, September 12, 1989, Al, A14; Serge Schmemann, "Exodus
Galls East Berlin," New York Times, September 14, 1989, A14.
9. Serge Schmemann, "Sour German Birthday," New York Times, October 6,
1989, Al; "Gorbachev Lends Honecker a Hand," New York Times, October 7, 1989,
A5.
10. Henry Kamm, "East Berliners March for Democracy," New York Times, October
22, 1989, Ai6.
11. Serge Schmemann, "Another Big Rally in East Germany," New York Times,
October 31, 1989, A17.
INVASIONS FRIENDLY AND UNFRIENDLY
481
12. Serge Schmemann, "East Germany Opens Frontier to the West," New York
Times, November 1o, 1989, Az.
13. All quoted examples of celebrating are from accounts reported in the New
York Times on November 10-12, 1989.
14. Craig R. Whitney with David Binder and Serge Schmemann, "Party Coup
Turned East German Tide," New York Times, November 19, 1989, A27.
15. Robert Tallant, Mardi Gras (1948; reprint, Gretna, La.: Pelican Publishing,
1976), 232. See also Samuel Kinser, Carnival, American Style: Mardi Gras at New Orleans
and Mobile (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990).
16. Tallant, Mardi Gras, 232-40.
17. Tallant, Mardi Gras, 239.
18. See Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger, eds., The Invention of Tradition
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983); and Richard Schechner,
"Restoration of Behavior," in Between Theater and Anthropology (Philadelphia: University
of Pennsylvania Press, 1985).
19. Joanne Lipman, "Spring Break Sponsors in Florida Find Too Much of a
Good Thing," Wall Street Journal, March 21, 1989, B1, B8.
Performance Theory, Hmong
Shamans, and Cultural Politics
Dwight Conquergood
Shamanism is the oldest technique of theatrical performing.
-Richard Schechner, Ritual, Play, and Performance
In two widely cited essays, "The Sorcerer and His Magic" and "The Effectiveness
of Symbols," Claude Levi-Strauss analyzes in a remarkably performance-sensitive
way the curing practices of North and South American
shamans. He demonstrates the efficacy of these healing performances
through a rigorous and highly original analysis of the mythic underpinnings
and symbolic dimensions of medical practice, "ours" (Western scientists)
as well as "theirs" (Cuna shamans). Through concrete case studies
of shamans, these essays make important contributions to performance
theory.1 Indeed, Richard Schechner draws on Levi-Strauss's subtle discussion
of the skeptic-turned-shaman Quesalid as an exemplar of the epistemological
predicaments and postmodern paradoxes of performance.
"Quesalid did not become a great shaman because he cured his patients,"
Levi-Strauss insists in a deconstructive reversal, "he cured his patients because
he had become a great shaman."2
Unfortunately, the brilliance and deconstructive force of this insight
get lost in Levi-Strauss's structuralist project. The story of Quesalid, the
reluctant shaman, is deeply subversive, contradictory, and potentially
poststructuralist. It relentlessly undermines and confuses the distinction
between the "real" and the "made up," categories that Quesalid, for all his
ontological struggles, can never quite stabilize. At the end of the narrative,
Quesalid comes to accept the reality of his performances as he "carries
on his craft conscientiously, takes pride in his achievements, and
warmly defends the technique of the bloody down against all rival
schools." But Levi-Strauss, who as narrator identified with the early,
doubting Quesalid, admiring "the radical negativism of the free thinker"
and referring to him as "our hero," at this point distances himself from
Quesalid's development as a performer: "He seems to have completely
lost sight of the fallaciousness of the technique which he had so disparaged
at the beginning."3 The word fallaciousness belies Levi-Strauss's sensitive
analysis of the effectiveness of performed myth and symbol for the
patient. Although he can understand with great subtlety how Quesalid
cured his patients through performance, he does not understand how
Quesalid, too, was persuaded by his own performances.
What is missing from L~vi-Strauss's discussion of Quesalid is a performative
appreciation for historical process, how practices cumulatively
interact and develop through time, reconstituting agent and agency and
482
PERFORMANCE THEORY, HMONG SHAMANS, AND CULTURAL POLITICS
483
reconfiguring context. He notes that Quesalid "carries on his craft" but is
surprised when Quesalid's stance and attitudes toward that craft are no
longer the same as they were at "the beginning" of his performance practice.
The structuralist approach blinds him to the ways in which Quesalid
was "carried," caught up, and changed by performing his craft. LeviStrauss
is excellent with the single case study of a performance, such as
the Cuna shaman's song for a woman experiencing difficult childbirth,
but the limitations of his method are revealed when he deals with Quesalid's
performance career over time. At the end of the story Levi-Strauss
is still stuck where Quesalid was at the beginning, in a "fallaciousness"/
foundationalist view of performance technique, but it is clear that Quesalid
has moved on.4
Although I am situating Levi-Strauss's work on shamanism within
performance studies, he did not, connecting shamanism instead to psychoanalysis.
In one passage, however, he explicitly acknowledged the
shaman as performer:
In treating his patient the shaman also offers his audience a performance.
What is this performance? ... we shall say that it always involves
the shaman's enactment of the "call," or the initial crisis
which brought him the revelation of his condition. But we must not
be deceived by the word performance. The shaman does not limit
himself to reproducing or miming certain events. He actually relives
them in all their vividness, originality, and violence.
For all his ambivalence about the word performance, Levi-Strauss powerfully
articulates shamanic practice with performance theory. After this brief
and tantalizing foray into performance theory, he refocuses on psychoanalysis,
proposing that it "can draw confirmation of its validity, as well as
hope of strengthening its theoretical foundations and understanding better
the reasons for its effectiveness, by comparing its methods and goals with
those of its precursors, the shamans and sorcerers." Although Levi-Strauss
respectfully compares these two traditions of healing, shamanism and psychoanalysis,
he treats them hierarchically instead of dialogically. The assymetry
is revealed by casting shamanism in the role of "precursor" to the
modern, "developed" psychoanalysis, a clear example of what James Clifford
calls a "temporal setup" and Johannes Fabian dubs "chronopolitics."5
In order to distance myself from this evolutionist ideology that
would celebrate the primordial, originary nature of shamanism but locate
it before, behind, and subordinate to contemporary performance, I will
draw on ethnographic fieldwork with living, practicing Hmong shamans
whose performances are a vital and contested part of the current refugee
diaspora and struggle for identity. These shamans are not ghostly precursors
or avatars of theater in the West, they are our contemporaries, and
their performances stretch and challenge more than they romantically
confirm received notions about theater and aesthetics or about the boundaries
between performance and politics.
CRITICAL THEORY AND PERFORMANCE
484
In this way I hope to resist the problematic practice of appropriating
premodern and non-Western performances as sources of inspiration or revitalization
for bourgeois theater. This trend resembles the imperialist
practice of "discovering" natural resources in the colonies and shipping
them back to the capital as raw materials for processing and manufacture.
Christopher Innes's Holy Theatre: Ritual and the Avant-Garde charts the romantic
fascination that "primitive ritual" has held for Western theater
practitioners. Unfortunately, the promise of cultural critique, signaled in
the title of the first chapter, "The Politics of Primitivism," is not delivered.
Instead of critiquing the complex interplay between desire and domination
that is inscribed in Western representations of and returns to primitive
ritual, Innes simply reinscribes the imperialist ideology of "primitivism"
that underpins Western practices of domination and exploitation. He refers,
without irony, to the shaman as "the witch doctor."6
In Gone Primitive: Savage Intellects, Modern Lives Marianna Torgovnick
conducts a much more "hard-hitting critique" of the politics of primitivism:
"The tropes and categories through which we view primitive societies
draw lines and establish relations of power between us and them, even as
they presuppose that they mirror us." "The idea of the primitive," she argues,
deploys "a rhetoric of control, in which demeaning colonialist tropes
get modified only slightly over time; and a rhetoric of desire, ultimately
more interesting, which implicates 'us' in the 'them' we try to conceive as
the Other." Michael Taussig, professor of performance studies at New York
University, provides the most sustained and unflinching political critique
of primitivism in his study of the colonialist image of the "wild man," often
figured as the shaman. In Shamanism, Colonialism, and the Wild Man: A Study
in Terror and Healing, he documents with gruesome detail the colonialist
mythology of the primitive that enabled white colonists in South America
both to seek out the shamanic performances of shamans and to torture and
terrorize Indians as savages. He argues: "Going to the Indians for their
healing power and killing them for their wildness are not so far apart. Indeed,
these actions are not only intertwined but are codependent."7
The shamanic performances of Hmong refugees I have been privileged
to witness in Thailand and Chicago are not, I hope to make clear,
timeless relics of prehistoric performance preserved in the cultural deep
freeze of Hmong isolation from modernity in their remote mountaintop
villages in Laos. As William Smalley makes clear, Hmong history has been
a series of adaptations, contacts, and adjustments to other cultures.8
Shamanism is a theatrically sophisticated, complex, and contextually nuanced
performance practice enmeshed in the current cultural politics of
Hmong people struggling to cope with the post-Vietnam War devastation
of refugee upheaval, displacement, dispersal, and domination. Hmong
shamans have more to teach performance theorists about what Clifford
calls "critical cultural politics" than about primal roots of theater. I believe
with Clifford that identity is "conjunctural, not essential," an idea that resonates
with Bakhtin's powerful insight that meaning emerges most richly
through dialogue and encounters, along borders and intersections.9 By
PERFORMANCE THEORY, HMONG SHAMANS, AND CULTURAL POLITICS
485
placing Hmong shamanic performance in metonymic tension with performance
theory, I hope to open more space in cultural studies for an ethnography
of cultural performance that features the politics of performance.
Performative Restorations
Shamanic performance displays on many levels what Schechner in Between
Theater and Anthropology calls "twice-behaved behavior" or "restored behavior,"
the fundamental characteristic, he argues, of all performance. "Restored
behavior," he explains, "is symbolic and reflexive: not empty but loaded behavior
multivocally broadcasting significances. These difficult terms express
a single principle: The self can act in/as another; the social or transindividual
self is a role or set of roles." In concert with the opening up and pluralizing
of identities, performance as restored behavior plays with time:
"Restored behavior offers to both individuals and groups the chance to rebecome
what they once were-or even, and most often, to rebecome what
they never were but wish to have been or wish to become." Emphasizing the
"restoration" qualities of performance encourages "revision," change, and
improvisatory adjustments to contingency: "That's what theater directors,
councils of bishops, master performers, and great shamans do: change performance
scores." In Theatre of the Oppressed Augusto Boal has developed the
revolutionary potential of a restoration, processual view of performance as
a revisioning, reassembling, and reworking of social reality.1o
A Hmong shamanic performance is an intricate assemblage of dynamically
orchestrated image and action. Every performance is loaded
and layered with incandescent palimpsests, multiple exposures, superimposed
doublings. The restoration of behavior occurs simultaneously on at
least four levels: Hmong shamans (1) re-present the patient's affliction, (2)
reenact their own initiatory crisis, (3) relive the myth of Shee Yee ("Siv Yis"
in Hmong), the first shaman, in the context of refugee diaspora and relocation
in the West, (4) reconstitute their displaced tradition of healing
within this contested space of domination and struggle. Although these
multiple restorations are cathected and concurrent, for the purposes of
discussion I will discuss them separately.
Performing the Patient's Affliction
The performing art of the shaman is precarious, strenuous, and intimate.
In Woman, Native, Other, Trinh Minh-ha writes particularly of the intimate
quality of the shaman's performance:
They derive their power from listening to the others and absorbing
daily realities. While they cure, they take into them their patients'
possessions and obsessions and let the latter's illnesses become
theirs. Their actions imply a personal investment. . . . The very
close relationship these healers maintain with their patients remains
the determining factor of the cure.
CRITICAL THEORY AND PERFORMANCE
486
Shamans enter into a dialogical relationship with their patients. The patient
does not become the object of medical treatment but a coperformer
in his or her own healing. Such intimacy leads to vulnerability on the part
of the shaman as much as the patient.
In his life story, I Am a Shaman, published as ethnopoetry, Paja Thao
describes how he and other shamans take on the afflictions of their clients
during ecstatic performance ("shaking"):
When you shake to carry away the bad things with you
You feel heavy
You do not see
You slow down as you climb the steps to the sky
Your speech slows down
You feel tired
You work very hard
So they must pay you a little
THIS IS THE WAY OF CARRYING AWAY AN AFFLICTION12
Thao's performance is both mimetic and appropriative. It is purgative for
his patients because it convincingly mimes their listlessness, depression,
and heaviness of spirit. Like Quesalid, Thao "presents them with their
sickness in a visible and tangible form."13 Through mirroring and thereby
objectifying the diffuse, subjective feelings of the patient, Thao turns them
inside out. The shaman's dramatic performance functions as a condensation
symbol that collects, absorbs, and, most important, displays affliction.
The logic of shamanic performance is that making a spectacle of something
is a strategy for control and subjugation. It is the same logic as Bentham's
panopticon, the relationship between the gaze and power, surveillance
and subordination, discussed at length in Michel Foucault's Discipline and
Punish: it is not so much that seeing is believing as that seeing situates the
observer in a power relationship over that which is watched, inspected,
surveyed. Foucault argued that power that could not be sighted (seen), located
at originary sites, was most insulated from resistance.14
Thao describes vividly the intricate scenography and staging of another
spectacular performance when the shaman "lays down his life on
the ground" to rescue "the soul which sinks deep into the ground." This
depressing malady is a severe and chronic form of soul loss that is imaged
as the soul sinking deep into the ground and falling into a watery abyss.
The shaman's restoration of this condition is a theatrical tour de force:
When you lay down your life on the ground
The people put one big jar of corn on your chest
And one big jar of water
And the top grindstone
And the sick one sits on the grindstone
All pressing down on the chest of the shaman5
PERFORMANCE THEORY, HMONG SHAMANS, AND CULTURAL POLITICS
487
The prostrate shaman, pressed to the ground by this multitiered edifice
of heavy weights, reproduces the debilitating illness and depression
of the patient. The heavy jar of corn pressing down on his chest makes it
difficult to breathe. The heavy jar of water adds to the weight of the big
jar of corn and dramatically symbolizes the watery depths into which the
soul is sinking and drowning. And the top grindstone pressing down on
top of the water jar richly evokes the grinding pressure and crushing effect
of chronic illness. But through the dramatic reversal of performance
the final weight added on top of the grindstone is the patient: "the sick
one sits on the grindstone." A stunning stage picture of weighted-down
inertia and passivity is subtly deconstructed by placing the patient on top
of the grindstone, a position of empowerment, not paralysis. The participatory
staging and environmental scenography not only "set things in the
theatrical sense, they iconosize in the mythic-religious sense."16
This dramatic performance enacts the release from the heaviness of
despair as the patient literally surmounts the weights while the shaman
takes his place underneath. The shaman's performance reassembles and
reconstructs the patient's situation in other ways:
Two men stand at your head and feet striking gongs
And a four-hands pig by your side
Then you shake three times
The sick one sits on top of the water jar
The people carefully steady the water jar while he shakes
If the water splashes on the shaman it is bad
THE WAY OF THE SHAMAN FOR SAVING THE SOUL WHICH SINKS
DEEP INTO THE GROUND IS LIKE THIS
The shamanic performance both reverses the vertical hierarchy and
threatens stasis with movement. It repositions the patient from crushed
underneath to triumphantly astride his problems and converts prone passivity
to active agency. Friends and neighbors must steady the water jar
as the entire structure of weights is destabilized by the powerful shaking
of the shaman: "When he is lying down on the ground / He does not feel
the heavy weights on his chest / Because he has the spirits to help him."1'7
How heartening it must be for the audience, and particularly the sick one
balancing himself on top of the weighted-down shaman, to experience
viscerally the shaman's irrepressible power as he defiantly shakes and
heaves, resisting all that would pull one down and debilitate.
But we are reminded again that the same performance that empowers
the patient exposes the shaman to danger. Substituting himself for the
sick one, the shaman now is vulnerable to the afflictions of the patient,
concretely symbolized by the heavy water jar that he quite literally has
taken on himself: "If the water splashes on the shaman it is bad." Indeed,
the extremity of the shaman's exertions is revealed in the aftermath to this
exhausting performance:
Fig. 1. Masked shaman performs
healing ritual in Chiang Kham
Refugee Camp, Thailand, 1987.
The ring of rattles he grasps
will help him trap runaway
souls. Photo credit: Dwight
Conquergood.
Then the people take the shaman to the altar-bench
He is stiff
The people flex his arms and legs
They spray water from their mouth on him
Then he begins to shake and speak to the spirits
The length of time it takes to recover underscores how taxing the performance
has been for the shaman. Thao explains:
When you lay down your life on the ground
With weights on your chest
You have to stay at home for thirteen days
If someone calls you to shake
You do not go
After thirteen days you can gol8
When shamans perform the affliction of their patient, they are simultaneously
empowered and acutely vulnerable. They embrace death to regenerate
life. To control life-threatening disorder, they release themselves
into an out-of-body trembling ecstasy, an exquisitely controlled chaos.
They hang suspended between earth and heaven, betwixt and between
488
Fig. 2. Elderly shaman with
finger rattles sits on special
shaman's bench-the winged
charger that will carry him
skywards into the spirit worldin
Chiang Kham Refugee Camp,
Thailand, 1987. Photo credit:
Dwight Conquergood.
human and spirit. They are both present and absent. The veil that shadows
their face (figs. I and 2) signifies that they have left the side of reality that
is seen. They are structurally invisible, and yet they fill the room with their
charismatic presence. The shaman's performance deconstructs and reconstructs,
balancing among opposites, reversals, and paradoxes.19
Performing the Initiatory Crisis
In addition to performing the patient's malaise, the shamanic performance
recapitulates the initiatory sickness through which all shamans
derive their healing power. People do not themselves choose to become
a shaman. They are chosen by special spirits who want them to become
shamans by experiencing first an illness that is interpreted by another
shaman as the sign of their calling. As Thao explains,
I became a shaman not because it was my will
But because it was the will of my shaman spirits
The shaman spirits came to me
To make me a shaman
The spirits make you sick
To let you know 48
. ....... . ......... ... . . . ... . :
human and spirit. They are both present and absent. The veil that shadows
their face (figs. s and 2) signifies that they have left the side of reality that
is seen. They are structurally invisible, and yet they fill the room with their
charismatic presence. The shaman's performance deconstructs and reconstructs,
balancing among opposites, reversals, and paradoxes.19
Performing the Initiatory Crisis
In addition to performing the patient's malaise, the shamanic performance
recapitulates the initiatory sickness through which all shamans
derive their healing power. People do not themselves choose to become
a shaman. They are chosen by special spirits who want them to become
shamans by experiencing first an illness that is interpreted by another
shaman as the sign of their calling. As Thao explains,
489
CRITICAL THEORY AND PERFORMANCE
490
That you must be a shaman
It is not for you to choose
And then to do
The way of becoming a shaman
Comes from the spirits
You must follow them
They will make you sick
Until you become a shaman20
The sickness comes from the spirits who will keep calling the chosen
one to become a shaman until he or she starts performing the vocation
by calling on the shamanic spirits to cure the sick. Jacques Lemoine
explains this intricate process: "They [the spirits] will make him sick in a
strange way, with fever, attacks, shivering and pain, until he calls for a
shaman who will diagnose his illness as the vocation." Moreover, the
persistent spirits "will not leave him alone until he starts calling them
regularly."21 When a performing Hmong shaman calls on the spirits to
help cure an afflicted patient, he or she recapitulates and reverses the initiatory
affliction through which these same spirits called him or her to
shamanism. The interplay between sickness, calling, and curing in the
context of shaman and patient is a highly complex set of doublings and
transformations.
For many shamans their intiatory illness is remembered as a harrowing
and profound encounter with the forces of death. An elderly shaman
in Chicago recounted that when he was nineteen years old, he became
gravely ill and was unconscious for ten days. In a dream he saw his soul
travel to the jagged, rocky cliffs then descend to the depths of the earth.
During this time he said his soul learned many things. A shaman came and
divined that he was indeed far gone, that his soul was already at Step Nine
on the Twelve Step ladder ascending from earth to sky. He was laid out on
a table, and the shaman beat the gong and called back his departing soul.
As his soul was called back, he remembered the sensation as feeling "like
a leaf that floats up from the bottom of the lake." As he recounted this part
of the story, he gestured with his hand to mime the upward floating movement
of a fragile leaf.22
When shamans perform, they are highly vulnerable. They conquer
death through dangerous encounters with destructive forces. Accompanied
by a host of helping spirits, the shaman leaves the side of reality that
is seen and journeys into the invisible world of spirits and supernatural
forces. There he or she will search for lost or kidnapped souls, do battle
with evil ogres, and bring back runaway souls. This threshold crossing between
two worlds is, like most transitional experiences, risky and intense.
Because of their acute vulnerability while in trance performance, Hmong
shamans are attended by assistants who help balance their bodies as they
leap back and forth between the altar bench and the ground and act out the
dramatic struggles in the spirit world (figs. 3 and 4). Particularly near the
close of a performance, when the shaman removes the mask, attempts to
Fig. 3. Assistant balances rattle-wielding shaman with arms spread in ecstatic
flight, Ban Vinai Refugee Camp, Thailand, 1985. Photo credit: Dwight
Conquergood.
wind down while assistants lightly slap and massage his or her back
what Schechner calls the "cool-down" phase of performance-one can see
just how strenuous the passage has been. This cool-down phase can be
seen along with vivid footage of shamanic trance performances in the documentary
Between Two Worlds: The Hmong Shaman in America.23 The special
power of the shaman comes from this presence achieved through an absence,
this performative ability to leave one reality, enter and participate
fully within another reality, and then return.
The shaman's interpretive reenactment of his or her initial sickness
in the performance of healing pushes Schechner's idea of performance as
a "restoration of behavior" to performance as "restorative behavior." By
reenacting ("restoring") the experience of critical vulnerability, shamanic
performance becomes charged with restorative power. The shift from
restoration to restorative emphasizes the transformational dynamics of
performance.
Performing the Role of Shee Yee, the First Shaman
At the beginning of all performances, Hmong shamans invoke the name
of Shee Yee, who in Hmong cosmology is the first shaman who delivered
the world from sickness and death and bequeathed to future shamans the
legacy of healing. Many times, in both Thailand and Chicago, I have heard
shamans chant at the opening of their performance, "Shee Yee . . . Shee
Yee." This chant does more than commemorate the name of a powerful
491
Fig. 4. A wife, who is herself an accomplished shaman, "spots" her shaman husband,
who leaps between bench and dirt floor in one of the longhouses of Ban
Vinai Refugee Camp, 1987. Photo credit: Dwight Conquergood.
ancestor. As Charles Johnson makes clear, contemporary shamans actually
stand in for Shee Yee, acting out his role:
Shee Yee is the greatest of Hmong mythical magicians, and the chief
or patron saint of Hmong shamans, with whom they identify themselves
when performing their sacred functions. (Whenever Hmong
shamans go on their ride into the spirit world to search for a lost soul,
they tell the spirits that they are Shee Yee.)
Through this theatrical disguise, they reenact the power and precarious
struggles of the first shaman. The story, for example, of "Shee Yee's battling
evil spirits with his saber is simulated in modern practice by the
shaman, who brandishes a saber during some ceremonies in order to
frighten away evil spirits."24 Contemporary Hmong shamans restore the
behavior of their spiritual mentor and, through this dissembling, achieve
their power. This is a wonderful example of the efficacy of theatricality,
what Victor Turner calls performance as "making, not faking."25
The Hmong example of the story of Shee Yee helps us understand
how the power of a myth is constituted through performance. Anthropologist
Edward Bruner states this point clearly:
It is in the performance of an expression that we re-experience, relive,
re-create, re-tell, re-construct, and re-fashion our culture. The
performance does not release a preexisting meaning that lies dormant
in the text. Rather, the performance itself is constitutive. Meaning
is always in the present, in the here-and-now, not in such past
manifestations as historical origins or the author's intentions. Nor
492
PERFORMANCE THEORY, HMONG SHAMANS, AND CULTURAL POLITICS
493
are there silent texts, because once we attend to the text, giving voice
or expression to it, it becomes a performed text, active and alive.26
When contemporary Hmong shamans perform the role of Shee Yee, they
are reviving and reinterpreting an ancient myth to redress an immediate
crisis of soul loss, attack by evil ogres, or affliction from offended nature
spirits.
Hmong shamanic performance also helps us understand the different
levels on which a myth can be performed. Although a long and fascinating
oral narrative-transcribed and titled by Johnson, "Shee Yee and
the Evil Spirits"-circulates within Hmong culture, the story of Shee Yee
is performed typically through the figural enactments of practicing
shamans. During 1985 I lived in Ban Vinai refugee camp for the Hmong
in Thailand. Although I never came across a storytelling session where
someone recited the Shee Yee myth in verbal form, I was awakened almost
every morning before dawn by the drumming and chanting of
shamans acting out the role of Shee Yee.27
Even though shamans embody and improvise within the role of
Shee Yee, instead of orally reciting the myth of the first shaman, much can
be learned by taking a close look at the verbal narrative. There are multiple
episodes in the story, but I will focus on the central section, where Shee Yee
is pursued by the nine evil spirit brothers, who proclaimed: "If we could
only kill the damned Shee Yee, we would have a better life, and be free to
eat earth people without fear or trouble." Shee Yee eludes and resists the
attacks of the evil spirits through shape shifting and a remarkable series of
transformations. He triumphs over the evil spirits through the arts of performance,
disguise, guile, and deception. Indeed, one of the evil spirit
brothers complains: "Shee Yee is a crooked liar, a mean trickster."28
Outnumbered nine to one, Shee Yee protects himself through multiple
metamorphoses and plural identities. As a tactical response to each renewed
attack, Shee Yee takes on yet another identity: he "took the form of
a water buffalo," then "disguised himself as a cloud," then "turned himself
into a drop of water," then "changed himself into a deer," then "changed
himself into a rat," then "turned himself into a caterpillar," until, finally, he
"disguised himself as a very tiny red ant."29 From water buffalo to very tiny
red ant, from cloud to water droplet-the direction of the transformations
is from big to small, from brute force to the guileful ruse of the weak. His
performative transformations recall the opportunistic tactics of the weak,
described by Michel de Certeau as "'ways of operating': victories of the
'weak' over the 'strong' . . . clever tricks, knowing how to get away with
things, 'hunter's cunning,' maneuvers, polymorphic simulations, joyful
discoveries, poetic as well as warlike." What de Certeau calls the creative
"art of making do" is quite literally an art of performance, the ability to improvise
in everyday life. He describes it performatively as "an art of being
in between," the ability to inhabit "the other's place" but "without taking
it over in its entirety, without being able to keep it at a distance." The multiple
identities and fluid role shiftings of de Certeau's tactical tricksters
CRITICAL THEORY AND PERFORMANCE
494
partake of the identity paradoxes of the performer, described by Schechner
as the "not me" and the "not not me."30 De Certeau is useful for performance
theory because he links theatricality to issues of power and domination
within everyday situations of resistance.
Shee Yee changed himself into the tiny red ant in order to elude an
evil spirit that had changed into a cat in order to catch and eat Shee Yee
when he was in his rat form. All these transformations, beginning with
the water buffalo, had been defensive moves, retreats and dodges from
the stronger powers of the evil spirit brothers. Significantly, it is in his
weakest and tiniest form, the red ant, that Shee Yee switches from a defensive
to an offensive stance: "He quickly and fiercely bit the cat on the testicle."31
This intervention enabled Shee Yee to escape the cat and return
home to his wife. It also marks a structural turning point in the narrative:
Shee Yee turns from passive to active agent and initiates a new transformation
of identity in which he no longer retreats into rat burrows but
emerges slyly on the attack.
His switch from the hunted to the aggressor is marked by a gender
reversal: "Shee Yee changed into a beautiful, well dressed girl, and ... he
pretended to be a young girl."32 This "gender play," to borrow Margaret
Drewal's felicitous term,33 was anicipated when he bit the cat on the testicle.
The evil spirit disguised as the cat was the "kind of evil spirit" that
"is always attracted to nice looking women and tries to seduce them." In
a double role reversal, Shee Yee, dressed as a young woman, aggressively
flirts with the evil spirit seducer, still disguised as a cat, and seductively
disarms and destroys him. Shee Yee then "changed into another girl" and
boldly advanced to the cave that was home to the entire family of evil
spirits. When the evil spirit mother spied Shee Yee approaching, she exclaimed:
"There comes a pretty young girl. My, isn't she beautiful!"34
The scene in the home of the evil spirit family is rich with gender
play, sexual farce, and dramatic irony. Shee Yee disguised as the young
girl announces to the family that s/he has come to marry the eldest son.
The eldest son, it turns out, was the one who had disguised himself as the
lecherous cat that Shee Yee killed. The other brothers, however, found his
battered body, patched him up, and "made him alive again." When he returned
home with a terrible headache, Shee Yee ran to him and, savoring
the irony of the situation, said: "'Oh, darling! Today is the day I have
come here to marry you. I love you very much! ... But when I marry you,
you must not go and fight with Shee Yee any more. I don't want him to
beat your brains out again!' And Shee Yee pretended to cry and cry." The
evil spirit quickly forgot about his headache, "thinking of how he would
soon enjoy going to bed with his new wife, this pretty girl." For most of
this scene, Shee Yee, brilliantly playing the role of "this pretty girl," both
attracts and defers the amorous advances of the evil spirit, insisting all the
while: "I like men a lot" and "You alone will sleep with me" but "Do not
touch me yet."35 Finally, while feigning solicitousness and serving the
family of evil spirits gathered around the dining table, Shee Yee destroys
them with hot boiling pork fat.
PERFORMANCE THEORY, HMONG SHAMANS, AND CULTURAL POLITICS
495
The elaborate constructions and deconstructions of gender enabled
by Shee Yee's gender play are ideologically complex and merit a sustained
analysis from the perspective of feminist critical theory.36 For the purposes
of this essay, the myth clearly features Shee Yee, the first shaman, as
a consummate performer with an extensive repertoire of roles. He fights
against evil and ultimately triumphs with tactics that are "poetic as well
as warlike."37 Of all his many roles and masks, his most developed, sustained,
and artful performance is that of a woman. It is in the role of a
woman that Shee Yee vanquishes the evil spirits. Kenneth Burke argues
that "the profoundest way of symbolizing a change in identity is in the
symbolic change of sex."38 Shee Yee's change of sex, which is structurally
connected in the narrative with his empowerment and triumph, underscores
change, process, and transformation as the vital qualities of performance.
Augusto Boal points to the "enormous efficacy of the transformations"
celebrated in performance: "Theater is change and not simple
presentation of what exists: it is becoming and not being." He argues that
"mimesis" actually means "re-creation." Stephen Tyler argues for a performative,
processual, postmodern theory of representation that privileges
"kinesis" over "mimesis," and Renato Rosaldo privileges cultural
"improvisations" and argues for "putting culture into motion."39 When
Hmong shamans perform today they, like Shee Yee, and as Shee Yee, wage
battle against the forces of death by exploiting the recreative power of performance
to resist closure, undermine oppressive structures, and revision
reality in more life-enhancing ways.
Performing a Displaced Tradition
The fertile idea that performance is restored behavior gets radically politicized
in the context of studying shamanic performance traditions of
Hmong refugees in the West. The Hmong term for "refugees" is neeg tawg
rog ("war-broken people"), or the more evocative phrase tawg tsov tawg
rog ("broken before the tiger, dispersed by the war").40 These words capture
the explosive, shattering heartbreak of displacement from home and
the spirit-numbing anxiety of relocation and exile on the margins of a
dominant culture. In the refugee situation of upheaval and disintegration,
cultural performance, particularly shamanism, has been a powerful resource
for shoring up and restoring Hmong identity. Jacques Lemoine
makes this observation about Hmong refugees resettled in the West: "all
their choices, even their political mistakes, have been dictated by the same
collective urge to preserve Hmong ethnicity.... For they did not come to
our countries only to save their lives, they rather came to save their selves,
that is, their Hmong ethnicity."41
Shamanism takes on new political meanings when performed in a
Chicago apartment, in a culture where a Judeo-Christian ethos combines
with positivist science and the legal system to displace, oppress, and erase
a healing performance practice that entails ecstatic trance, belief in spirits,
and animal sacrifice (figs. 5, 6, and 7). Mary Strine usefully sorts out "the
Fig. 5. Veiled shaman talks to the spirits in front of an altar he has set up inside
his Chicago apartment, 1988. Photo credit: Dwight Conquergood.
act.., and the fact" of performance practice. By the "fact" of performance
she means the political implications of a performance, "the multiple affiliations
that hold the performance text in place as a significant (and signifying)
form of cultural expression."42 Restorations of the act of Hmong
shamanic performance in the West constitute radical distortions of the fact
of shamanic performance. Violently severed from the multiple affiliations
and web of meanings that held shamanic performance significantly in
place in the mountain culture of Southeast Asia, shamanism performed in
a Chicago apartment becomes at best a bizarre figure of ignorance and the
occult, or, at worst, signifies moral transgression (devil worship) or illegal
behavior (butchering of animals within city limits).
The political response to Hmong shamanism in the West has not been
subtle. In his racist book on Hmong refugees, The Yellow Rainmakers: Are
Chemical Weapons Being Used in Southeast Asia? investigative reporter Grant
Evans associated shamanism with "village rumours and superstition" and
used it to brand the Hmong as ignorant peasants steeped in a paleolithic
mentality. The aim of the book is to discredit Hmong allegations of the use
of chemical weapons ("yellow rain") during the Vietnam War. His rhetorical
masterstroke for debunking these persistent Hmong reports of chemical
warfare was to depict them as "shamanism writ large."43
In the spring of 1988, I was invited to attend a meeting of concerned
Hmong leaders and elders in Chicago who had gathered to view a home
video circulating within the U.S. Hmong community. The video consisted
of the oral testimony of a Hmong shaman in Lansing, Michigan, who recounted
how a fundamentalist Christian minister had entered his apartment
with an interpreter and torn down his shaman altar. The minister
then removed the altar along with all the performance equipment-gong,
496
Fig. 6. Unmasked, shaman relaxes on special bench in postperformance repose, Chicago,
1988. Photo credit: Dwight Conquergood.
rattles, divination buffalo horns, joss sticks, spirit paper, and so on-to the
church. The old shaman told of his pain and deep sense of loss, financial
as well as spiritual. The custom-made shaman drums and rattles, for example,
are costly in Laos or Thailand and are almost impossible to replace
in this country. The elderly shaman had carried his cherished equipment
with him when he escaped from Laos and had performed with it in the
refugee camp in Thailand during the years he awaited resettlement in
Michigan. It had taken imagination, effort, and some expense to build the
eight-foot-high altar inside his Lansing apartment. Shamans build a
household altar not just as a mise-en-scene for performance but as the
resting place for their helping spirits during all the time they are not performing.
The Christian minister destroyed property as well as committing
an act of metaphysical violence against the old man. Instead of being intimidated,
the Hmong leaders were angry and had made the video to
protest this aggression and galvanize resistance to forced assimilation.
Within this context of domination, the practice of shamanism becomes
an act of resistance.44 Here are the reflections of Yang Lau, an elderly
Hmong shaman in Milwaukee:
If all of the Hmong were to become Christians we would lose
Hmong culture forever. We Hmong who believe in Hmong culture
still have shamans.... Now I'm very old but I hope my children and
the generation following won't forget Hmong culture. I tell you this
to remember for the future generation.... A long time ago we were
born to have shamans. My grandfather was a shaman and my father
was a shaman also.... I want to pass this on to the future generations
so that they will know about the shaman. This is all I have to say.45
497
Fig. 7. Sacrificed pig is ritually displayed alongside patient (the author), seated behind the
elevated shaman. This shamanic ceremony of soul cleansing and renewal was performed on
the occasion of author's return to Refugee Camp Ban Vinai, Thailand, in the summer of 1987,
where author had lived and conducted ethnographic fieldwork during 1985. Photo credit:
Xiong Houa.
The quietly firm resolve underneath the meditations of this articulate old
man illustrates how "performance as a site of cultural memory" can transcend
nostalgia and become a site of political contestation and struggle.46
In defiance of the hegemonic forces of assimilation, some Hmong
are deploying shamanic performance as a political symbol of cultural resistance.
A number of Hmong cultural societies have sprung up across the
country. The Hmong society in Chicago is called Dab Ohuas (Work of the
Spirit). The Chicago founder of this society features its association with
shamanism: "Without Shee Yee [the first shaman] it is impossible to conduct
Dab Ohuas and without Dab Ohuas Shee Yee has nothing to do." The
Milwaukee branch of Dab Ohuas actually took the name Society of Shee
Yee. It has become incorporated as a nonprofit service organization, and
its logo is the gong of the shaman. The leader of the Chicago Hmong community
named his third son born in this country Shee Yee.
The defamiliarizing effect of wrenching dislocation sharply reveals
the cultural underpinnings that render established performance practices
meaningful by holding them in place and brand others transgressive because
they are out of place, displaced. Displaced traditions are perceived
as disorderly, dangerous, and dirty-filth that collects in the margins. In
Purity and Danger, Mary Douglas argues that "dirt is essentially disorder,"
or "matter out of place." The restoration of a displaced performance tra-
498 dition within a dominant culture intensifies the magnitude of the politics
PERFORMANCE THEORY, HMONG SHAMANS, AND CULTURAL POLITICS
499
of performance. Margaret Drewal defines performance as "re-presentation
with critical difference."47 In the refugee context of re-presenting
shamanic healing performances, the difference is indeed "critical," in the
manifold meanings of that word.
The Other as Performer
Although a potential resource for resistance, the restoration of performance
practices, especially shamanism, in the West renders the Hmong
people vulnerable to discursive displacements in mainstream writings and
publications about them. Reporting, interpreting, and documenting the
Other are constituent moments in "the politics of representation" and control.
Casting subordinate groups as performers of "tribal rites," a pervasive
motif of colonialist discourse, is a primary way of constructing their Otherness.
The image of the Primitive as Performer draws on and expands the
"antitheatrical prejudice" that is deeply seeded in Western culture.48 Associated
with feelings, emotions, and the body, performance-especially
ecstatic and/or divinatory performance-is constructed in opposition to
scientific reason and rational thought. Particularly when linked with
archaic custom and premodern belief, performance is branded as regressive
and transgressive within societies dominated by an evolutionary
ideology of progress and development. Taussig argues that the performance
practices (spells, sorcery, shamanism) condensed in the colonialist
constructions of "magic became a gathering point for Otherness in a series
of racial and class differentiations embedded in the distinctions
made between Church and magic, and science and magic." He further
notes that "shamans are deeply implicated in and constituted by this
colonial construction of determinism's Otherness in which savagery and
racism are tightly knotted."49
Grant Evans constructs the Hmong in The Yellow Rainmakers as superstitious
peasants but then historically contextualizes their irrational behavior
by sweeping them into a long tradition of performing primitives:
All through history there have been outbreaks of mass hysteria-in
the sense of large numbers of people being driven to behave in unusual
antisocial fashion. In the Middle Ages in Europe there were
outbreaks of dancing mania. There was the strange phenomenon of
the Children's Crusade. In pioneer America there were the religious
manifestations of the "Shakers" and the "Holy Rollers."
For Evans, the strange, manic, hysterical, childlike, antisocial, dancing, ecstatically
performing Other is the negative mirror of "We of the west,"
who "pride ourselves on the effectiveness of our application of science to
human affairs."5° Evans's writings about the Hmong epitomize a postcolonialist
rhetoric of domination that positions performance against, beneath,
behind, in opposition to, and as threatening to progress, order, and
enlightenment.
CRITICAL THEORY AND PERFORMANCE
500
This Other as Performer trope has been used against the Hmong
since their early encounters with the West, first with missionaries and
then with the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). Both groups legitimated
their practices of conversion, coercion, and exploitation by constructing
shamanic performance as a spectacle of primitivism. The missionary Isobel
Kuhn, a prolific writer as well as dedicated evangelist, imaginatively
situates Hmong shamanism within a reinforcing context of darkness,
demons, death, and the forest primeval:
It is a rainy, dreary night in a little Miao [sic] village tucked away in
the folds of almost unexplored mountains in North Thailand. From
the thick forest which still closely encircles the little shanties, one
had proof that human beings have only recently hacked out a clearing
from primeval growth. Big jagged stumps jutting up amidst the
shanties, still fresh looking, tell us where they got the materials for
their wooden huts, with their long shaggy grassed roofs. But a
scourge has struck the little settlement and all day long the gong!
gong! of demon exorcism has been going on. Not a house in the village
but is calling on the demons this dismal night.
Kuhn dehumanizes the shaman-performing Hmong by describing an audience
member's response in animalistic imagery: "'Be quiet,' growls her
mate." At the same time she suffuses the scene with romantic sentimentality
and pathos: "the little figure on the mat in the corner moans with
misery, and outside, the wet night drips its tears ceaselessly in soft
splashes."51
Kuhn's scenic blending of romantic exoticism and barbarity-fascination
and repulsion-is mirrored in Journey from Pha Dong, a CIA film
that depicts the recruitment and training for guerrilla warfare of the
Hmong in Laos. The anonymous voice-over narration explains: "This film
is concerned with how a people learn to win a war." Over visual images
of Hmong villagers awkwardly assembling and handling CIA-supplied
weapons, the omniscient narrator comments: "This man has never seen a
modern rifle.... They can get anything apart, but putting it back together
again is something else. The spirits of their ancestors who fought so well
for the Hans might be slightly embarrassed. There is a limit to what they
can learn now; they are taught simple things. They begin with the M-1
rifle. They are difficult to train." This representation of the Hmong as
childlike simpletons and technological primitives is reinforced by spectacular
scenes of performing shamans with ecstatic chanting and animal sacrifice.
Even the educated Yang Pao, anointed by the CIA to lead the
Hmong guerrillas, is described as someone who still "half-believes himself
in the spirits and spells of their animism."52
More recently, the Hmong have entered the discursive space of the
West in newspaper and law journal articles that report their legal difficulties
as refugees contesting assimilation and struggling within a dominant
culture.53 These articles often display shamanic performance as a spectacle
PERFORMANCE THEORY, HMONG SHAMANS, AND CULTURAL POLITICS
501
of Otherness. As an ethnographer who has worked with the Hmong, I was
called to testify as an expert witness for a Hmong friend whose courtroom
trial was sensationalized in the press when he asked the judge if a rooster
could be sacrificed in a divination ceremony to establish his innocence, according
to Hmong forensic practices. The Chicago Tribune made this story
newsworthy by developing the Primitive as Performer motif:
Two Hmong tribesmen from Laos who had wanted their trial to include
the Hmong custom of sacrificing a rooster were convicted in
an ordinary jury trial Wednesday of beating a man during a traffic
dispute.... The Xiongs had asked Judge Michael S. Jordan... to
have a rooster sacrificed in the courtroom and to have drops of the
rooster's blood placed in glasses of water.... The Xiongs suggested
that the complainant and the Xiongs all swear to tell the truth and
then consume the blood and water. Hmong tribesmen believe a person
who lies after this ceremony will soon die and that the rooster
will take the liar's spirit so that the liar can never be reincarnated as
a human.54
This incident, which had enormous consequences for my friend Bravo
Xiong, who received a felony conviction, was discursively staged in the
press with all the titillating details that would both attract and repulse
middle-class readers while underwriting their superiority over the new
immigrants, the "tribesmen": animal sacrifice, blood drinking, unnatural
death, reincarnation (with the suggestive hint of human-animal minglings
in some reincarnations), and latent sexual sadism and kinkiness in
the symbolism of a cock-killing in a public courtroom. This journalistic
representation draws on many of the same fetishistic constructions of
"primitive art."55
The exhibiting of the Hmong, and other ethnic Others, in print and
electronic media as exotic performers is a contemporary response to and
containment of the "problem" of diversity, difference, and demographic
change that is transforming the sociological landscape of contemporary
America. Cultural cohesion (if that ever was achieved) and hegemony are
perceived as threatened by, if not unraveling under, the pressure of large
numbers of refugees and immigrants, many of them from the Third
World, who have entered this country since the repeal of racist quotas in
1965 immigration legislation and the 1980 Refugee Act. This contemporary
staging of the Other as Performer has interesting ideological resonances
with nineteenth-century people shows, and particularly Frank
Hamilton Cushing's remarkable staging of Zuni culture for New England
middle-class and elite audiences when he assembled a troupe from the
pueblos and "brought rich travelling theater eastward in 1882."56 Attention
to the complex cultural politics of performance-as ambivalent front,
slippery site, and shifting intersection of domination and resistance, appropriation
and contestation-promises to invigorate performance theory
by grounding it in praxis.
CRITICAL THEORY AND PERFORMANCE
502
NOTES
1. Claude Levi-Strauss, Structural Anthropology, trans. C. Jacobsen and S. G.
Schoeff (New York: Basic Books, 1963), 167-85, 186-205. Levi-Strauss demonstrates
how to conduct ethnographically sensitive performance analyses of historical
texts. His brilliant performance analysis of the Cuna Shaman's song for a woman
experiencing difficult childbirth (186-97) is based on an archival text, not participant
observation research. Levi-Strauss excavates the dramaturgy embedded in
the text, a kind of textual archaeology of performance practice.
2. Levi-Strauss, Structural Anthropology, 18o; Richard Schechner, Between Theater
and Anthropology (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1985), 121,
125, 130-31.
3. Levi-Strauss, Structural Anthropology, 178. Quesalid learned from other
shamans backstage how to hide a puff of down in his cheek, bite his gums to make
them bleed, then suck from the afflicted place on the patient's body and, through
theatrical sleight of hand, pull out the bloody mess from his mouth and present it
as the palpable evil he had drawn forth from the sick one.
4. Marshall Sahlin's Islands of History (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan
Press, 1985) is an exemplar of cultural studies research at the conjuncture of
ethnography and history. See particularly his discussion of "performative structures,"
a concept that features the creative, constructed, and fluid nature of social
forms. Many anthropologists are now productively combining ethnographic with
historical research methods. See Clifford Geertz, Negara: The Theatre Stare in Nineteenth-Century
Bali (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980); and Smadar
Lavie, The Poetics of Military Occupation: Mzeina Allegories and Bedouin Identity
under Israeli and Egyptian Rule (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California
Press, 1990). Both Geertz's and Lavie's studies explicitly draw on and contribute
to the performance paradigm in cultural studies.
5. Levi-Strauss, Structural Anthropology, 18o-81, 204. On dialogical treatment,
see Mikhail Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, ed. Michael Holquist, trans. Caryl
Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981); James
Clifford, The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-Century Ethnography, Literature, and
Art (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988), 16; and Johannes Fabian, Time
and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object (New York: Columbia University
Press, 1983), 144.
6. Christopher Innes, Holy Theatre: Ritual and the Avant-Garde (New York: Cambridge
University Press, 1981), 16. For postcolonial critiques of the politics of representation,
see Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin, The Empire Writes
Back: Theory and Practice in Post-Colonial Literature (New York: Routledge, 1989);
Michel de Certeau, Heterologies: Discourse on the Other, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 1986); Christopher Miller, Blank Darkness:
Africanist Discourse in French (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985), and
Theories of Africans: Francophone Literature and Anthropology in Africa (Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 1990); V. Y Mudimbe, The Invention of Africa: Gnosis, Philosophy,
and the Order of Knowledge (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988);
Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Pantheon, 1978); and Tzvetan Todorov, The
Conquest of America: The Question of the Other, trans. Richard Howard (New York:
Harper and Row, 1984).
7. Marianna Torgovnick, Gone Primitive: Savage Intellects, Modern Lives
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), ix, 11, 245; Michael Taussig, Shaman-
PERFORMANCE THEORY, HMONG SHAMANS, AND CULTURAL POLITICS
503
ism, Colonialism, and the Wild Man: A Study in Terror and Healing (Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 1987), oo100.
8. William Smalley, "Stages of Hmong Cultural Adaptation," in The Hmong in
Transition, ed. Glenn L. Hendricks, Bruce T. Downing, and Amos S. Deinard (New
York: Center for Migration Studies, 1986).
9. Clifford, Predicament of Culture, 147, 11; Bakhtin, Dialogic Imagination, and
Speech Genres, ed. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist, trans. Venn W. McGee
(Austin: University of Texas Press, 1986), 140.
o10. Schechner, Between Theater and Anthropology, 52, 36-38; Augusto Boal, Theatre
of the Oppressed, trans. Charles A. MacBride and Maria Odila-Leal MacBride
(1979; reprint, New York: Theatre Communications Group, 1985).
11. Trinh Minh-ha, Woman, Native, Other: Writing Postcoloniality and Feminism
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989).
12. Dwight Conquergood and Paja Thao, I Am a Shaman: A Hmong Life Story
with Ethnographic Commentary, trans. Xa Thao (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota,
Center for Urban and Regional Affairs, 1989), 10. Contemporary ethnographers
sensitive to the performance dimensions of verbal art argue that oral narrative
should be transcribed in poetic form instead of prose paragraphs. The
lineation of poetic verse captures better than prose the rhythms and pacing of oral
discourse. See Elizabeth C. Fine, The Folklore Text: From Performance to Print
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984); and Dennis Tedlock, The Spoken
Word and the Work of Interpretation (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press,
1983).
13. Levi-Strauss, Structural Anthropology, 176.
14. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York:
Pantheon Books, 1977).
15. Conquergood and Thao, I Am a Shaman, 8, 7.
16. Schechner, Between Theater and Anthropology, 179.
17. Conquergood and Thao, I Am a Shaman, 7, 8.
18. Conquergood and Thao, I Am a Shaman, 8, 9.
19. This discussion builds on and extends my analysis of shamanic performance
in "The Dramaturgy of Healing," in Conquergood and Thao, I Am a
Shaman, 62-68.
20. Conquergood and Thao, I Am a Shaman, 2.
21. Jacques Lemoine, "Shamanism in the Context of Hmong Resettlement," in
Hendricks, Downing, and Deinard, Hmong in Transition, 341.
22. Conquergood and Thao, I Am a Shaman, 49. See also Joan Halifax, Shamanic
Voices: A Survey of Visionary Narrative (New York: Dutton, 1979).
23. Schechner, Between Theater and Anthropology, 16, 99; Dwight Conquergood
and Taggart Siegel, producers, Between Two Worlds: The Hmong Shaman in America
(video documentary).
24. Charles Johnson, ed., Dab Neeg Hmoob: Myths, Legends and Folktales from the
Hmong of Laos (St. Paul, Minn.: Macalaster College, Department of Linguistics,
1985), 73 (emphasis added), 75.
25. Victor Turner, From Ritual to Theatre: The Human Seriousness of Play (New
York: Performing Arts Journal Publications, 1982), 93; see also Anthropology of Performance
(New York: Performing Arts Journal Publications, 1986).
26. Edward Bruner, "Experience and Its Expressions," in The Anthropology of
Experience, ed. Victor Turner and Edward Bruner (Urbana: University of Illinois
Press, 1986), 11-12.
CRITICAL THEORY AND PERFORMANCE
504
27. Charles Johnson, "Shee Yee and the Evil Spirits," in Johnson, Dab Neeg
Hmoob, 23-59. See Dwight Conquergood, "Health Theatre in a Hmong Refugee
Camp," TDR 32, no. 3 (1988): 174-208.
28. Johnson, "Shee Yee," 38, 45-46.
29. Johnson, "Shee Yee," 39-40.
30. Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven Rendall
(Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1984), xix, 30; Schechner,
Between Theater and Anthropology, 123.
31. Johnson, "Shee Yee," 40.
32. Johnson, "Shee Yee," 41.
33. Margaret Drewal, Yoruba Ritual: Performers, Play, Agency (Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 1992), 172.
34. Johnson, "Shee Yee," 41.
35. Johnson, "Shee Yee," 43, 44.
36. Sue-Ellen Case, Performing Feminisms: Feminist Critical Theory and Theatre
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990). Although I have neither observed
myself nor read reports from other researchers of cross-dressing among
Hmong shamans, transvestism and bisexuality are found commonly in shamanic
traditions in other cultures. See Mircea Eliade, Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy,
trans. Willard R. Trask (New York: Pantheon, 1964), 125, 258, 352. Eliade
states that this "ritual androgyny" is a symbolic way of underscoring the
shaman's role as "intermediary" as well as the "need to abolish polarities" (352).
For two contrasting case studies that explore the problematics of men performing
women, see Joseph Roach's insightful analysis of eighteenth-century castrati,
"Power's Body: The Inscription of Morality as Style," in Interpreting the Theatrical
Past: Essays in the Historiography of Performance, ed. Thomas Postlewait and Bruce
McConachie (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1989), 99-118; and Morris
Meyer's provocative study of transsexuals, "I Dream of Jeannie: Transsexual
Striptease as Scientific Display," TDR 35, no. 1 (1991): 25-42.
37. de Certeau, Politics of Everyday Life, xix.
38. Kenneth Burke, Attitudes toward History, 3d ed. (Berkeley and Los Angeles:
University of California Press, 1984), 211.
39. Boal, Theatre of the Oppressed, 28, 1; Stephen Tyler, The Unspeakable: Discourse,
Dialogue, and Rhetoric in the Postmodern World (Madison: University of Wisconsin
Press, 1987); and Renato Rosaldo, Culture and Truth: The Remaking of Social
Analysis (Boston: Beacon Press, 1989).
40. Jean-Pierre Hassoun and Michel Mignot, "Le terme 'refugie' dans les
langues Hmong et Vietnamienne," Asie du Sud-Est et Monde Insulindien 14 (1983):
7-24.
41. Lemoine, "Shamanism," 337.
42. Mary Strine, "Between Meaning and Representation: Dialogic Aspects of
Interpretation Scholarship," in Renewal and Revision: The Future of Interpretation, ed.
Ted Colson (Denton, Tex.: Omega, 1986), 70.
43. Grant Evans, The Yellow Rainmakers: Are Chemical Weapons Being Used in
Southeast Asia? (London: Verso, 1983), 194, 124.
44. James C. Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts
(New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1990).
45. Conquergood and Thao, I Am a Shaman, 74.
46. For a discussion of Hmong refugees' confrontations with the U.S. legal system,
see Dwight Conquergood, "Roosters, Blood, and Interpretations: Cultural
Domination and Resistance in the Courtroom," in Culture and Communication, ed.
PERFORMANCE THEORY, HMONG SHAMANS, AND CULTURAL POLITICS
505
Edith Slembek (Frankfurt am Main: Verlag fur Interkulterelle Kommunikation,
1991), 149-60.
47. Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and
Taboo (1966; reprint, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1969); and Margaret
Drewal, "The State of Research on Performance in Africa," paper delivered at the
1990 meeting of the African Studies Association, Baltimore.
48. Michael J. Shapiro, The Politics of Representation: Writing Practices in Biography,
Photography, and Policy Analysis (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press,
1988). On "tribal rites," see Michel de Certeau, "Ethnography: Speech, or the Space
of the Other: Jean de Lery," in The Writing of History, trans. Tom Conley (New York:
Columbia University Press, 1988), 209-43; and Jonas Barish, The Antitheatrical Prejudice
(Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1981).
49. Taussig, Shamanism, 465.
50. Evans, Yellow Rainmakers, 181.
51. Both Miao and Meo are racist terms, which are deeply insulting to Hmong
people (Isobel Kuhn, Ascent to the Tribes: Pioneering in North Thailand [1956; reprint,
Singapore: Overseas Missionary Fellowship Books, 1991], 11o).
52. The exact date and circumstances of production of this CIA film are unknown.
Through the Freedom of Information Act, however, the film is available
through the Southeast Asian Refugee Studies Program, Center for Urban and Regional
Affairs, University of Minnesota.
53. See, for example, David Jordan, "Hmong Sentenced to Learn Our Ways,"
Albany Park News, July 5, 1988, 1-2; Mike Royko, "A Fine Opportunity to Learn
Our Culture," Chicago Tribune, July 1, 1988, 3; and Julia Sams, "The Availability of
the 'Cultural Defense' as an Excuse for Criminal Behavior," Georgia Journal of International
and Comparative Law 16 (1986): 335-54, and "The Cultural Defense in the
Criminal Law," Harvard Law Review 99 (1986): 1293-1311.
54. Terry Wilson, "Two Hmong Convicted of Beating Motorist," Chicago Tribune,
May 5, 1988. For a more detailed discussion of this case, see Conquergood,
"Roosters, Blood, and Interpretations."
55. See Sally Price, Primitive Art in Civilized Places (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1989).
56. Curtis M. Hinsley, "Zunis and Brahmins: Cultural Ambivalence in the
Gilded Age," in Romantic Motives: Essays on Anthropological Sensibility, ed. George
W. Stocking, Jr. (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989), 169-207.
Animal Rites: Performing beyond
the Human
Una Chaudhuri
The dividing line between nations may well be invisible; but it is no
less real. How does one cross that line to travel in the nation of
animals? Having traveled in their nation, where lies your allegiance?
What do you become?
-Sy Montgomery
The animal is the sign of all that is taken not-very-seriously in
contemporary culture: the sign of that which doesn't really matter.
-Steven Baker
Caryl Churchill's play Far Away takes the final of its many disorienting
turns when a character blandly declares, "The cats have come in on the
side of the French."1 The concluding scene of the play is a shocking elaboration
of the possibility this line contains: the possibility that the politics of
division and aggression that have defined human history for so long will
finally infect the nonhuman world as well. In the world that results, animals
enter into alliances with human groups, themselves now bizarrely divided
along postnational lines: "Portuguese car salesmen. Russian swimmers.
Thai butchers. Latvian dentists" (36-37). Conflict has become the
defining feature of society, the rule rather than the exception. New reasons
for hatred and new opportunities for alliance abound: "Mallards are not a
good waterbird. They commit rape, and they're on the side of the elephants
and the Koreans. But crocodiles are always in the wrong" (39). In
Far Away, Shakespeare's "universal wolf" seems to be on the prowl. All
creation partakes of division, discord, and violence. Even the weather "is
on the side of the Japanese," and "we are burning the grass that wouldn't
serve" (43).
Churchill's extraordinary vision of an ecocidal free-for-all, in which
nature is violently divided within itself as well as against a violently divided
humanity, has more than a general ecological background. In the
years immediately preceding its appearance, Britain experienced an ecological
and epidemiological disaster of unprecedented proportions. From
1996 onward, the discovery of BSE (bovine spongiform encephalopathy,
popularly known as "mad cow disease") in British cattle caused a national
crisis that was also, in a sense, a crisis of nationalism, of national
identity. The three-year-long European ban on British beef hurt more than
the British economy: given the symbolic status of beef in the construction
of English identity, national pride was deeply wounded as well. And
when four million cows had to be destroyed, it was not just confidence in
Britain's scientific and agricultural institutions that was shaken: the image
506
ANIMAL RITES
507
of the idyllic English countryside, so deeply inscribed in the mythology of
British imperialism, suffered a traumatic blow as well.
Among the thousands of articles and opinions that the BSE crisis
elicited, two strike me as particularly generative for ecocritical inquiry.
That both are from unexpected sources, European philosophers George
Steiner and Jean Baudrillard,2 simply illustrates the fact that ecocriticism
is a matter of new disciplinary alliances and fertile cross-theorizings. In a
BBC interview, Steiner suggested that instead of destroying the infected
cattle far from public view (as was being done), they be "sacrificed" in
huge pyres by the side of main roads and major highways, where people
could experience, firsthand, what was after all an entirely man-made disaster,
a result of the practice of feeding meat by-products to cattle. The
hideously unnatural process that had turned herbivores not only into
meat-eaters but cannibals3 might be ritually-that is performatively-acknowledged
by the spectacle of the burning carcasses. As Alan Bleakley
puts it, Steiner's proposal suggested that our health-our physical, psychological,
and ecological health-may depend on supplementing our
current notions of animal rights with an understanding-and practice
of animal rites.
My subject in this essay is animal representation and performance as
reconceived within postmodernism and ecology. Postmodernism comes to
the animal as it does to other categories that have been "backgrounded"4
by, or altogether excluded from, the dominant discourses of humanism. It
comes to the animal as it has previously come to the lunatic, the child, the
freak, the woman, and the deviant-seeing these as contentiously oppositional
categories rather than as reliably and innocently descriptive ones.
Beyond that, and in a more positive vein, postmodernism comes to the animal
"as a reminder of the limits of human understanding, and also of the
value of working at those limits."5 The emerging figure of this exploration,
which Steven Baker has dubbed "the postmodern animal," is the cultural
product of a post-Cartesian, ecological, and neototemistic6 worldview that
rejects dualist thought and oppositional taxonomies in favor of models
that emphasize complexity and dynamism.
Postmodernism comes to the animal as to a figure capable of inspiring
and guiding a new journey-a postmodern shamanism, if you like
across the ideological borders within which modernism has kept the
human separate from its many "others." While traditional shamans undertook
their spirit travels in the company of animal "familiars," postmodern
travelers favor odd and ungainly beasts, with strange-and
strangely powerful-forms. I invite one such "animal unfamiliar" along
on my journey here: Emily Mayer's Corvus Corium (fig. 1). This imposing
yet oddly melancholic creature articulates-quite literally so-the fundamental
principle of animal rites: the interpenetration of human and nonhuman
animals. Using man-made objects-rusty pipes, an old boot, parts of
a leather saddle, petrified wood-Mayer creates an organic form that both
acknowledges and exceeds its cultural resources. Corvus encapsulates the
difficult yet essential double relation (a relation also captured in the term
Fig. 1. Emily Mayer, Corvus
corium, 1995, leather, steel,
wood, rubber. Courtesy of
the artist.
..
human animal) that is at the heart of ecopolitics and must guide the project
of animal rites. Such rites would be, then, the enactment of the vision that
the sculpture embodies, the vision of a reciprocal animality, binding us to
"the creatures among whom we move and in whom we have our being
as they do in us."7
From the point of view of performance, the idea of a reciprocal animality
operating within and around human experience has received its
most intriguing formulation in French philosopher Gilles Deleuze's notion
of "becoming-animal." One of many transformative "de-territorializations"
of fixed identity that Deleuze proposes, this "becoming" is conceived
as a process that is performative and transactional without being
in any way mimetic. It is a not a matter (as Deleuze says in a famous example)
of imitating a dog, but something much more fluid, aleatory, creative,
temporary, and fleeting:
Not imitating the dog, but putting together its organism with something
other, so that from the composite whole particles will be emitted
that are canine. . . . It goes without saying that this something
other can vary a great deal and can be more or less tied to the animal
in question: it can be the animal's natural diet (the earth and the
worm), it can be its outer relations with other animals (one becomes
a dog in the midst of cats, or a monkey with a horse), it can be a ma-
508
ANIMAL RITES
509
chine or a prosthesis that the human straps about the animal (a muzzle,
reins, etc.), it can be something that really has nothing to do with
the animal in question.
This Deleuzian becoming-animal offers a framework for theorizing animal
rites, beginning with Churchill's bizarre animal act, where the divisions
among the animals themselves, as well as between animals and humans,
require something that goes beyond a traditional dialectics of "self" and
"other."8 By virtue of its emphasis on change and dynamics, Deleuze's
model of becoming-animal also goes beyond the important psychoanalytical
recognition that in all human-animal encounters, invariably, "deep
identifications and violent denegations are acted out."9 Using terms like
"surfaces," "molecular swarms," "folds," and "convections" (borrowed
from "the idioms of chemistry, of Lucretian philosophy, of biology, and
Leibnizian monadology"),0 this model for performing the encounter with
alterity suggests a rethinking of encounter itself, as an event involving not
whole entities but rather facets or zones of various identities. The bizarre divisions
and unlikely alliances of Far Away are an apt image for this notion
of an encounter that is simultaneously fragmenting and conjoining, simultaneously
creating and destroying unities, simultaneously producing continuity
and separation.
The notion of "animal rites," of a new form of ritual performance
that would engage with, diagnose, and heal the historically complex relationship
between humans and other animals would be one answer to the
question posed in a recent special issue of Performance Research: "What
might it mean to practice, think and write theatre beyond the human?"11
Animals are a conduit into those "excluded sites" from which, according
to the emergent discourse of posthumanism, the definition of humanness
is carved.12 But animals, surprisingly, have not been the main focus of recent
explorations beyond the borders of the human: machines have. That
exemplary figure of posthumanism, the cyborg, seems a little more kin to
us than do the living creatures with whom we share both a long history
and an inconveniently essentializing biology. Perhaps it is not so surprising,
after all, that the cyborg is preferred over the animal. Unlike the animal,
whom popular misreadings of evolutionary theory have coded as
hopelessly atavistic, the human-machine hybrid is cheerfully forwardlooking:
"The cyborg has no origin story in the Western sense . . . [It]
would not recognize the Garden of Eden; it is not made of mud and cannot
dream of returning to dust."13 Unfettered by originary nostalgias, the
human-machine offers new fields of play for identity, new liberations
from old discursive formations. The animal, on the other hand, tiresomely
reminds us of a nature that we have quite lost the taste for.
When, how, and why we came by our current aversion to nature have
been subjects of foundational interest to contemporary ecology, generating
numerous eco-etiologies that function as lightning rods for the inherently
complex and controversial nature of the issue.14 From a performance studies
perspective, perhaps the most provocative such formulation is the ironic
CRITICAL THEORY AND PERFORMANCE
510
one offered a century ago in J. K. Huysmans's novel A rebours. Huysmans's
hero holds the following proto-Baudrillardian view of our alienation from
nature:
Nature, he used to say, has had her day; she has finally and utterly
exhausted the patience of sensitive observers by the revolting uniformity
of her landscapes and skyscapes. After all, what platitudinous
limitations she imposes, like a tradesman specializing in a single line
of business; what petty-minded restrictions, like a shopkeeper stocking
one article to the exclusion of all others; what a monotonous store
of meadows and trees, what a commonplace display of mountains
and seas!
In fact, there is not a single one of her inventions, deemed so subtle
and sublime, that human ingenuity cannot manufacture; no
moonlit Forest of Fontainebleau that cannot be reproduced by stage
scenery under floodlighting; no cascade that cannot be imitated to
perfection by hydraulic engineering; no rock that papier-mache cannot
counterfeit; no flower that carefully chosen taffeta and delicately
colored paper cannot match!15
According to this ironic formulation, the roots of our ecological crisis lie
in mimesis, particularly the literalistic mimesis upon which the modern
theater's most successful aesthetic-realism-rests. As technologies of
artificial replication and reproduction generate ever more seductive and
spectacular sound- and color-saturated versions of reality, nature itself recedes
into a drab, inexpressive, and uninteresting silence.
Ironic though it may be in Huysman's original, the idea of ecological
malaise as a pathology of mimesis sustains a model of ecoperformance as
revelation, exposure, and disclosure. The impulse of this model is to pull
back the curtain of artifice behind which nature has been shrouded, to
break the "vast, eerie silence which surrounds our garrulous human subjectivity."16
Rachel Rosenthal's 1984 performance piece The Others is an
ambitious example of this model of ecoperformance; much about it, not
least the fact that it includes forty-two animals, would seem to qualify it
as a promising (and rare) example of animal rites. Before turning to it,
however, I want to invoke another perspective on animals, one that vastly
complicates the powerful fantasy of an art that would "speak for" nature,
that would give voice to the suffering of animals.
Jean Baudrillard reacted to the BSE crisis with a trope even more
surprising than Steiner's: he spoke of revenge. Calling the disease "an act
of terrorism through the virus," he suggested that the cows were reacting
to a history of abuse, to having been "exploited, dismantled, and damaged."
This shocking idea-so like Churchill's shocking characterization
of animals in Far Away-took one long step beyond Baudrillard's earlier
discussion of the discursive role of animals in modernism. The exclusive
ascription of reason to human beings, Baudrillard had previously argued,
was bought at the cost of an active dehumanization of the animal: "ani-
ANIMAL RITES
511
mals were demoted to the status of inhumanity as reason and humanism
progressed."17 Characterizing modernity as a betrayal of "the divine and
sacred nobility" that all previous ages conferred on animals, Baudrillard
had (in one of his most original and important moves) singled out animals
as the only category of "other" that modernity has not succeeded in
rendering discursive. The fundamental fact about animals, says Baudrillard,
the fact that finally accounts for our boundless cruelty toward
them, is that they do not speak. All other "others" have capitulated to the
discursive imperative of modernity:
The mad, once mute, today are heard by everyone; one has found
the grid on which to collect their once absurd and indecipherable
messages. Children speak, to the adult universe they are no longer
those simultaneously strange and insignificant beings-children
signify, they have become significant-not through some sort of liberation
of their speech, but because adult reason has given itself the
most subtle means to avert the threat of their silence. The primitives
also are heard, one seeks them out, one listens to them, they are no
longer beasts.18
For ecoperformance, Baudrillard's crucial insight is that the silence of the
animals dooms them to a paradoxically vociferous fate: since they will not
speak, they are ceaselessly spoken, cast into a variety of discursive registers,
endlessly troped. While rationalism turned them into "beasts of burden,"
and "beasts of consumption," humanism followed up by making
them also "beasts of somatization," forced to carry emotional and psychological
identities wholly invented by-and projected onto them by
people. As literary symbols and metaphors, as pets, as performers, as signifiers
of the wild, as purveyors of wisdom, in fables, in fairy tales, in
nature films, in zoos, in circuses, at fairs, rodeos, fox hunts, dog shows
the animals are forced to perform us, to ceaselessly serenade us with our
own fantasies.19 "I wanna walk like you, talk like you ..."
In the face of such discursive and ideological closure, how might an
ecoperformative project of animal rites proceed? Petroleum, Brecht famously
observed, "resists the five-act form," claiming that "today's catastrophes"
called for new dramatic structures.20 The catastrophe this time is
not economic but ecological, and the formal challenge is not merely one of
replacing linear forms with cyclical ones, but of finding forms that might
help to reconfigure the current relation between the human and the nonhuman.
Rosenthal's performance piece The Others and Churchill's Far
Away do this in different ways, the former theorizing its project amply and
explicitly, the latter employing a modernist minimalism to decidedly postmodern
effect. Both share a commitment to articulating the relations
among animals, both human and others, in all its difficulty, necessity, horror,
and beauty. Like Mayer's Corvus, which literally articulates its animal
form out of man-made objects, the animal rites of Churchill and Rosenthal
variously evoke the mutual implication of human and nonhuman animals,
CRITICAL THEORY AND PERFORMANCE
512
and characterize their relation as a matter of deep structure, delicate linkages,
and complicated connections.
Although The Others and Far Away were published within a year of
each other, they are not contemporaneous works. The Others was created
and performed in the early 198os. It predates Far Away by almost two
decades, a period of time during which the discourse on animals has
grown well beyond the passionate didacticism of the early animal rights
movement and, like ecology as a whole, gained in theoretical sophistication
through increasing dialogues with philosophy, politics, and cultural
studies. This sophistication registers, for example, in the ironic (if not hilarious)
horrors described in Far Away: "[Deer] burst out of parks and
storm down from mountains and terrorize shopping malls.., the fawns
get under the feet of shoppers and send them crashing down escalators,
the young bucks charge the plate glass windows" (39-40). The self-conscious
unsentimentality toward animals in the world of the play is directly
lampooned as a side effect of a pathology of representation now so
widely recognized as to have its own name: Disneyfication.
Harper. Take deer.
Todd. You mean sweet little bambis?
Harper. You mean that ironically?
Todd. I mean it sarcastically.... I know to hate deer. (39-40)
Todd's reference to that most iconic and paradigmatic of Disney's neotenized
animals, Bambi, marks the self-conscious distance between this
play and the anthropomorphic and infantilizing mass-cultural discourse
on animals ("just like us, only cuter"). Churchill's strategy of animal representation
in Far Away proceeds from the recognition that the trivializing
of the animal in contemporary culture may be harder to combat than
overt hatred would be. The play rigorously desentimentalizes animals,
even at the risk of feeding the human sense of distance and disregard that
has brought so many animals to the brink of extinction.
The risks of Far Away become clearer in comparison with the thoroughly
unironic, earnest, proanimal discourse of The Others. The publication
of this piece almost twenty years after it was created attests to the
prophetic nature of Rachel Rosenthal's performance art, which consistently
tackled issues of ecology long before they were taken up in the
other arts.21 Like many of Rosenthal's works, The Others is a lesson on its
subject matter as well as a powerfully expressive and moving performance.
The piece illustrates both the considerable reach as well as the instructive
limitations of the model of ecoperformance as an "un-muting"
of the suppressed nonhuman; indeed it may be that The Others is best read
as a metacritical inquiry into the possibility and problematics of animal
rites: the sheer scope of the piece points to an experimental "trying out"
of various strategies. In formal terms as well as in substance and subject,
The Others is encyclopedic. Every medium and every channel of performance,
every element of the theatrical apparatus is pressed into service to
Fig. 2. Rachel Rosenthal, The Others. Photo by Basia Kenton.
deliver a mountain of information and an ocean of feeling on the subject
of animals. Using dialogue, monologue, song, music, dance, movement,
slides, voice-overs, video, physical movement, stage architecture, technological
devices and-yes-forty-two live animals, Rosenthal embarks
upon an epic missionary performance on behalf of animals.22 The range of
discourses she manages to incorporate makes the work a solid introduction
to the major tenets of the animal rights movement.23
Early in her piece Rosenthal invokes Descartes, identifying (as most
ecologists do) his notorious denigration of animals as one source of present
horrors. Cartesian rationalism is, of course, a standard villain of ecological
thought, as are its medieval and Renaissance precursors. The locus classicus
of the religious betrayal of the natural world is the Genesis story of
man's "dominion" over the animals (Rosenthal quotes Milan Kundera's
famous remark that "of course Genesis was written by a man, not a
horse").24 The tradition of Christian exegesis further supported this betrayal,
as in this often-cited lesson of St. Augustine's: "Christ himself
shows that to refrain from the killing of animals and the destroying of
plants is the height of superstition, for judging that there are no common
rights between us and the beasts and trees, he sent devils into the herd of
swine and with a curse withered the three on which he found no fruit."25
The Renaissance achieved a more systematic debasement of animals by
513
Fig. 3. Rachel Rosenthal, The Others. Photo by Basia Kenton.
means of conceptual hierarchies like the scala naturae and the Great Chain
of Being, as revealed, for example, in the derogatory animal imagery of
Shakespeare's plays.26 All these discourses and many others lie behind the
reality that Rosenthal presents, the horrifying images of animals being tortured
in the name of science and consumerism, the appalling statistics of
the slaughter of animals for meat, for fur, even for entertainment (fig. 2).
As the screen behind her relentlessly presents this terrible "data,"
Rosenthal creates action-image sequences by bringing the factual material
into relation with highly expressive performance, including dance, chanting,
screaming, and violent physical movement and struggle. This is one
way that she actively destabilizes the simple project of "giving voice" to
"the others." Here is one of the several speeches that contain the seeds of
that initial project:
I scream for the broken spirit. I scream for isolation unto madness. I
scream for the paw caught in the jaw that only death can loosen. I
scream for the jail barely larger than the body. I scream for the hissing
skin under the brand, I scream for the eye that burns but cannot
close. (95)
During this speech, a complex stage image develops around Rosenthal
(fig. 3) and comments on her utterance: she speaks from within the or-
514
ANIMAL RITES
chestra pit, which is rigged to move up and down, so that she seems to be
sinking as she speaks. She has been pushed into the pit and is forcibly
kept there by three masked men who hold her down and make bland
Cartesian proclamations: "1. Only man is rational. 2. Only man possesses
language," and so on. The whole action is watched by a group of people
accompanied by animals. Behind all of them-Rosenthal, the masked
men, the moving orchestra pit, the animals, their companions-loom the
projected images of lab animals in steel contraptions, rabbits in traps,
cattle being branded, and so on. This action sequence is followed by others,
equally complex, creating a rigorous scenic discourse in which the
logic of animal rights is contextualized within and countered by memories
of sadism, justifications for cruelty, and elaborate renditions of the
"all too human" excuses for inhumanity: "I'm not a sadist for chrissakes,
I'm not a bad person! I've got mouths to feed. It's nature! They're animals,
don't you see?" (99).
Don't you see? That is the fundamental logic of The Others: by whatever
means possible, the piece concerns itself "with seeing that which it
is not permitted to see, and with getting others to see it."27 The Others locates
its "animal rites" project on the slippery ground between speaking
for animals and recognizing the extent to which they have always been
misspoken:
I was content to let sleeping dogs (toot) lie. But along came this
cocksman (toot). He was as wolf (toot) in sheep's (toot) clothing. He
seemed real looney (toot) about me, and for a while we were lovebirds
(toot) and had a whale (toot) of a time. He was a tiger (toot).
Woke up my pussy (toot), and although he looked like a fat pig
(toot), I lost weight and no longer felt like an old cow (toot). I was
proud as a peacock (toot) and looked so foxy (toot). (96)
In spite of its encyclopedic form and authoritative tone, The Others is ultimately
an experiment, an attempt to discover a performance protocol that
is complicit neither with the nature-aversive hypermimeticism of modern
culture nor with the humanist assumptions that have brought it to the
ecological brink. For all her commitment and desire, Rosenthal does not
cannot-speak for the animals. In attempting to do so, however, she gives
powerful and honest voice to their "others," the human animals who so
resent them, and the reasons for that resentment:
How dare they be beyond morality? ... Beyond theology? ... Beyond
the arduous apprenticeship of good and bad? Beyond the fretful
reconciliation of opposites? What, no history? Who gave them
permission to be whole? We see in them who we once were. And we
deny them, like immigrants who reject the language of their origin.
We dress them in people's clothes and force them to imitate people's
ways so that, by this caricature, we may laugh at them and better
measure the distance that, we hope, separates us from them. (io6)
CRITICAL THEORY AND PERFORMANCE
516
Animals are the victims, then, of an enforced dualistic ideology of distance
and separation, in which "animal" has become the definitional opposite
of "human," instead of its larger context. As such, animals have
been forced to play a part in the construction of those biologisms and
racisms that have naturalized and justified ethnic cleansing from Auschwitz
to Bosnia and beyond.28
From its title onward, Far Away challenges the ideology of distance
by interrupting the main ideological and rhetorical protocols of animal
representation. Churchill's inclusion of animals alongside (rather than instead
of) human beings in the making of apocalypse is unprecedented. It is
a departure from the two major traditions of literary "animalizing," each
of which is thoroughly rooted in an anthropocentric mimesis. Churchill's
animal representation resembles neither the anthropomorphism of animal
fables and Disney films nor the theriomorphism of Orwell's Animal
Farm, Kafka's Metamorphosis, or Ionesco's Rhinoceros. Churchill's animals
are not pawns in a game of human symbolization, nor are they made to
stand for an undifferentiated realm of wildness, a definitional opposite to
the human. Side by side instead of subordinated to human beings, the animals
of Far Away invite us to imaginatively inhabit a world of animal
agency, and thereby to explore the politics of a new mixed relation-of
proximity to yet autonomy from-human beings. Their apparent presence
as autonomous agents in the world of the play,29 and, further, the
striking politicization of their agency locates Far Away at a decisive distance
from the exclusively human world given by modernism.
From the perspective of Baudrillard's insight that in modernism
"animals must be made to say that they are not animals,"30 the animals of
Far Away are remarkably self-nominating. They may do unusual things,
but they do these things as animals, not as human stand-ins. Nor, like most
other nonmetaphorized animals (such as the animals in circuses, zoos,
bullfights, rodeos), is their behavior intended primarily to prove something
flattering about human beings.31 Rather, they act along with yet independently
of, human beings. It is this dual relation-a relation of both continuity
and separation that constitutes Churchill's major insight and
contribution to an ecologically informed, postmodern, and postnational
politics. This politics, articulated through the play's final act-its "animal
act," as it were-explains and illuminates the mysterious events of the
earlier acts, giving them a significance different from the absurdist one
that their content might otherwise suggest.
The first two acts of Far Away present an insidious dystopia, a
Kafkaesque world of a deep structural brutality shrouded in performances
of normalcy. Act 1 begins as an innocent conversation, in which a
woman seems to want to reassure her young niece, Joan, who is staying
with her and having trouble sleeping. "It's the strange bed," she suggests.
The girl demurs, and begins to question the older woman about certain
inexplicable things she has witnessed from her bedroom window. As the
Aunt offers and then retracts a series of increasingly disturbing explanations,
a frightening reality emerges. Gradually, our perception of the scene
Fig. 4. Emily Mayer, Rathat, 2001. Courtesy of the artist.
changes from cozy cottage to hostile outpost where truckloads of people
arrive secretly, are imprisoned, beaten, and then carted off to an uncertain
fate.
In the next act, an older Joan is at work as a hatmaker, as innocuous
a profession as can be imagined. But as Joan converses with her coworker
Todd, it slowly emerges that the hats they are making-each unique, handmade,
and wildly elaborate-are intended for a terrible purpose: to be
worn by prisoners on a kind of "death parade" whose nature and meaning
remains obscure. Some hats, we learn, are singled out as especially artistic
and honored by being preserved in a museum. The others, shockingly, are
"burned with the bodies." Most shocking of all is the characters' conversation:
they worry and complain about their working conditions, showing
no concern for the barbarity to which they are contributing.
In the early critical reaction to Far Away, Kafka was immediately invoked,
as were Pinter and Hitchcock. The sense of mystery and menace
that pervades the play's first two acts suggests an affinity with midcentury
modernist dramas of alienation, stories of the "little man" lost in the vast
machinery of the corrupt state. The politics of that drama, because of their
exclusive focus on the individual, are largely irrelevant to ecoperformance.
By following the "absurdist" first two acts of her play with an "animal
act," in which animal equality and agency is imaginatively realized and
taken for granted, leaving the human protagonists bewildered and powerless,
Churchill reveals the complicity of those dramas of alienation in the
dualistic, distanced, and ecologically disastrous ideologies of modernism.
The animal act of Far Away is a multiplicitous and potential-filled
event in the Deleuzian sense. It is a whole-scale imaginative "becominganimal"
that unleashes untold opportunities for interface and exchange
517
CRITICAL THEORY AND PERFORMANCE
518
with multiple alterities. By drawing the spectator or reader into a world
where animals are no longer mute subordinates, the play raises the fundamental
question of animal rites: "How might one interact with another
whose difference is recognized as an active event, rather than a failure of
plenitude?"32 The first answer to that question, Far Away suggests, is to
abrogate the sentimentalities that mask our disdain for animals. Instead
of "fluffy little darling waterbirds," mallards who "commit rape" (38-39).
Or, to return to the visionary animal art of Emily Mayer: instead of
Mickey Mouse ears, a "rat hat" (fig. 4). On the far side33 of this vision of
animality as a continuum that both includes and exceeds human identity,
lies a posthumanist politics of mutuality and respect. There too, far away
though it may be, lie animal rites worthy of human performance.
NOTES
Chapter epigraphs are from Sy Montgomery, Walking with the Great Apes: Jane
Goodall, Diane Fossey, Birute Galdikas (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1991), 267, and
Steven Baker, Picturing the Beast: Animals, Identity, and Representation (Manchester:
Manchester University Press, 1993), 174.
1. Caryl Churchill, Far Away (New York: Theater Communication Group,
2000), 35. All subsequent citations are given in parentheses.
2. Quoted in Alan Bleakley, The Animalizing Imagination (London: Macmillan,
2000). Bleakley cites Steiner's BBC interview on page 11 and Baudrillard's Liberation
article, "The Revenge of the Cows," on page 10.
3. It is believed that the cattle's immune systems were weakened because they
were fed animal protein. Bleakley quotes a newspaper article that asked: "Why
did we start feeding animals to animals?" adding: "more specifically, why did we
feed animal protein to herbivores?" 4.
4. In her important contextualization of ecology within the philosophical tradition
of dualism, Val Plumwood introduces and defines this term as follows:
"Backgrounding is a complex feature which results from irresoluble conflicts that
the relation of domination creates for the master, for he attempts both to make use
of the other, organizing, relying on and benefiting from the other's services, and
to deny the dependency which this creates." Feminism and the Mastery of Nature
(London: Routledge, 1993), 48.
5. Steve Baker, The Postmodern Animal (London: Reaktion, 2000), 16.
6. "The sense of interconnectedness between nature and culture, between
human and animal, social and religious institutions, which Victorian anthropology
saw as a fascinating error of primitive man, a view that Levi-Strauss in turn
dismissed as an erroneous misreading of primitive protoscience, has been rehabilitated
in Western scholarly thought as an accurate reflection of existential reality:
in this view humankind is part of nature and everything in the universe is connected
with everything else, or so the physicists assure us. Western culture, it
seems, is now in a phase that might be called neototemistic." Roy Willis, ed., Signifying
Animals (London: Unwin Hyman, 1990), introduction, 6.
7. Wendy Wheeler, A New Modernity? Change in Science, Literature, and Politics
(London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1999), 5.
8. For an application of the concept of "becoming-animal" to modern drama,
see Una Chaudhuri, "'AWK!': Extremity, Animality, and the Aesthetic of Awkward-
ANIMAL RITES
519
ness in Tennessee Williams's The Gnadiges Fraulein," in Undiscovered Country: The
Late Plays of Tennessee Williams, ed. Philip Kolin (New York: Peter Lang, 2002).
9. Jennifer Ham and Matthew Senior, eds., Animal Acts: Configuring the
Human in Western History (London: Routledge, 1997), introduction, 2.
10. Tom Conley, "Pantagruel-Animal," in Ham and Senior, Animal Acts, 52.
11. Alan Read, "Editorial: On Animals," in Performance Research 5, no. 2 (200ooo):
111.
12. "The construction of the human is a differential operation that produces
the more and less 'human,' the inhuman, the humanly unthinkable. These excluded
sites come to bound the 'human' as its constituted outside, and to haunt
those boundaries as the persistent possibility of their disruption and rearticulation."
Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of "Sex" (New York:
Routledge, 1993), 8.
13. Donna Haraway, "A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist
Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century," Socialist Review 80 (1985): 68.
14. One of the best-known and most controversial of these is Lynn White, Jr.'s
"The Historical Roots of Our Ecological Crisis," in Science, March 1o, 1967, 1203-7.
15. Joris-Karl Huysmans, Against Nature, trans. Margaret Maulden (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1998).
16. Christopher Mannes, "Nature and Silence," in The Ecocriticism Reader:
Landmarks in Literary Ecology, ed. Cheryll Glotfelty and Harold Fromm (Athens:
University of Georgia Press, 1996), 16.
17. Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, trans. Sheila Faria Glaser (Ann
Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994), 133.
18. Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, 129-41.
19. Cultural studies writings on animals include Susan Davis, Spectacular Nature:
Corporate Culture and Sea World (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California
Press, 1997); Elizabeth A. Lawrence, "Rodeo Horses: The Wild and the
Tame," in Signifying Animals, ed. Roy Willis (London: Unwin Hyman, 1990), 222-
35; Gary Marvin, "Natural Instincts and Cultural Passions: Transformations and
Performances in Foxhunting," Performance Research 5, no. 2 (2000): o108-15; Margaret
J. King, "The Audience in the Wilderness: The Disney Nature Films," Journal
of Popular Film and Television 24 (Summer 1996), 60-68; Baker, Picturing the Beast.
20. Bertolt Brecht, Brecht on Theatre: The Development of an Aesthetic, ed. and
trans. John Willett (New York: Hill and Wang, 1978), 30.
21. See Rachel Rosenthal, Rachel's Brain and Other Storms: The Performance
Scripts of Rachel Rosenthal, with introduction and commentaries by Una Chaudhuri
(London: Continuum, 200ool).
22. Part of the mission was specific, immediate, and successful: many of the
animals featured in the performances were taken from local shelters and were put
up for adoption to the audiences of the shows. All were adopted.
23. A prefatory note to the published script recognizes, as the major sources of
the play's data, two classics of the animal rights movement, Peter Singer's Animal
Liberation (New York: New York Review/Random House, 1975), and Tom Regan's
The Case for Animal Rights (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California
Press, 1983).
24. Rachel Rosenthal, The Others, in Performance Research 5, no. 2 (2000): 94.
Subsequent citations are given in the text.
25. Quoted in John Passmore, Man's Responsibility for Nature (London: Duckworth,
1971).
26. Most of the more than four thousand allusions to animals in Shakespeare's
CRITICAL THEORY AND PERFORMANCE
520
plays are used to express "sensuality, stupidity, or cruelty." Audrey E. Yoder, Animal
Analogy in Shakespeare's Character Portrayal (reprint, New York: AMS, 1947), 62.
27. Baker, Picturing the Beast, 218.
28. There is now a long tradition of thought linking animal abuse with the
Holocaust. Among the most quoted formulations are Theodor Adorno's "Auschwitz
begins wherever someone looks at a slaughterhouse and thinks: they're only
animals," and Isaac Bashevis Singer's chilling phrase "eternal Treblinka" ("In relation
to animals, all people are Nazis; for the animals it is an eternal Treblinka."
"The Letter Writer" in Collected Stories: "Gimple the Fool" to "The Letter Writer"
[New York: Library of America, 2004], 750. See also David Clark, "The Last Kantian
in Nazi Germany: Dwelling with Animals after Levinas," in Ham and Senior,
Animal Acts, 165-98.
29. The mysterious form of the play leaves open the possibility that the description
of the animals' actions is a fantasy on the part of the human speakers, or
a code, or some other counterfactual discourse.
30. Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, 129.
31. For an illuminating account of how an animal act serves to bolster egoistic
cultural accounts of human beings, see Lawrence, "Rodeo Horses."
32. David Williams, "The Right Horse, the Animal Eye-Bartabas and Theatre
Zingaro," Performance Research 5, no. 2 (2000): 29.
33. The pun is intended. Cartoonist Gary Larson's Far Side commentaries on
our relationship to animals are close in spirit to Churchill's vision in Far Away. See
Charles D. Minahen, "Humanimals and Antihumans in Gary Larson's Gallery of
the Absurd," in Ham and Senior, Animal Acts, 231-51.
Mediatized Cultures
Raymond Williams, in "Drama in a Dramatised Society," his oft-cited inaugural
lecture at Cambridge University in 1974, spoke of the pervasive
ways in which the televised experience of what he called "drama" was
then being "built into the rhythms of everyday life."1 On the mediated
construction of quotidian experience, he proved prophetic. The word
media, once properly used as the plural of medium, has since morphed, not
only into a singular noun itself, as in "the media spins the news," but also
into a verb: "to mediatize" is to dramatize people and events by passing
them through the hall of hyperbolic mirrors that is modern mass communication
in the networked world. Williams rather quaintly described this
process of mediatization as a kind of theatrical casting or miscasting on a
revolutionary and world-historic scale, whereby electronically designated
substitutes stand in for pretty much everybody else: "On what is called
the public stage, or in the public eye, improbable but plausible figures
continually appear to represent us."2
Such representations have been of principal interest to scholars in the
fields of cultural studies and critical theory, of which media studies has
emerged as an increasingly significant part. Already in the pretelevision
world of radio and film, Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno had influentially
identified and analyzed the power of what they called "the culture
industry" to substitute representations for reality through the false harmonization
of the particular and the general: "In the culture industry the individual
is an illusion not merely because of the standardization of the
means of production. He is tolerated only so long as his complete identification
with the generality is unquestioned."3 For them the culture industry
under late capitalism was itself a culture. Responding to this emerging
phenomenon in Keywords (1976; rev. ed. 1983) and cautioning that culture
is one the "two or three most complicated words in the English language,"
Williams strove to relate the material productions of culture (institutional
continuities of physical practices such as manufacture) to its signifying or
symbolic systems (such as literature and media).4 But he was writing at
a time when broadcast television was unchallenged as the premiere
medium. Then it still seemed to him remarkable, however increasingly
commonplace, "to watch simulated action, of several recurrent kinds, not
521
CRITICAL THEORY AND PERFORMANCE
522
just occasionally but regularly, for longer than eating and for up to half as
long as work or sleep."5
That was then.
Now culture itself has been mediatized to the point at which the
most frequently quoted authorities see relations between material productions
and signifying systems collapsing into a Matrix-like web of
(dis)simulation. In this brave new world of virtual reality led by computer-generated
simulations and robotic surrogates, everyone is implicated
as spectator and participant simultaneously, awash in the streams
of electronic data that pool into ever-deepening truth-effects. Jean Baudrillard,
for example, argued in Simulations (1975) that postmodern simulation
disguises the fact that originals no longer exist, a condition he
termed "hyperreality."6 Donna Haraway in "A Manifesto for Cyborgs"
(1985) opined that new technologies, including mediated ones, change the
previously understood conditions of what it means to be human: the
word cyborg is a contraction of "cybernetic organism"; in the brave new
worlds it describes, traditional relationships such as those between biology
and gender, for example, alter with each innovation of high-tech
prostheses, producing the cyborg as "a condensed image of both imagination
and material reality."7 More recently, tracking the rise of what he calls
"the performance paradigm" in postindustrial economies, Jon McKenzie,
in Perform or Else (2001), has mapped a new terrain of technological organization
in which the historic notion of "performative presence" has been
transformed by "hypermediation of social production via computer and
information networks."8
In theater and performance studies, these questions have particularly
manifested themselves in an extended but worthwhile debate over
the ontological status of "liveness." Ontology concerns itself with the nature
and relations of being; it is the philosophy of what actually is. In Unmarked:
The Politics of Performance (1993), Peggy Phelan highlights what
she takes to be the nonreproducibility of live performances, an ontological
claim that gives liveness priority over mediated recordings of all kinds in
resisting commodification and capitalist appropriation. For Phelan, the
liveness of performance is predicated on the fact of its disappearance: the
time of performance is always now; it remains behind only in the spectator's
memory of it. She writes: "Performance's only life is in the present.
Performance cannot be saved, recorded, documented, or otherwise participate
in the circulation of representations of representations: once it does
so, it becomes something other than performance."9 Objecting to Phelan's
ontology of performance in Liveness (1999), Philip Auslander sees evermore
permeable boundaries between the live and the mediated (as witnessed
in such phenomena as lip-synching, for instance): "The progressive
diminution of previous distinctions between the live and the
mediatized, in which live events are becoming more and more like mediatized
ones, raises for me the question of whether there really are clear-cut
ontological distinctions between live forms and mediatized ones."10 For
Auslander, the opposite of the live is not the dead, but the mediatized; yet
MEDIATIZED CULTURES
523
Phelan's insistence on the ontological security of the opposition represents
for him a kind of nostalgic revisionism: before the introduction of
prerecorded radio broadcasts, there was no need for a separate conceptual
category of "live performance." Unable to resist commodification, Auslander
concludes, performance succumbs to mediatization or vice-versa;
it hardly matters which comes first, the culture or the industry. Reviewing
the debate between Phelan and Auslander over liveness, Matthew Causey
sees both positions as problematic: "Phelan disregards any effect of technology
on performance and draws a nonnegotiable, essentialist border
between the two media. Auslander's material theory and legalistic argument
overlook the most material aspect of the live, namely death."11 Yet
even in the apparently neutral diction of Causey's intervention, "performance"
has become a medium rather than an event or a behavior.
Philip Auslander leads off this section with "Live from Cyberspace;
or, I Was Sitting at My Computer This Guy Appeared He Thought I Was
a Bot." His title foregrounds what he sees as an ontological shift. Tracing
the earliest uses of the word live in reference to performance, he is led to
the BBC Yearbook of 1934, which distinguishes between live and prerecorded
broadcasts. Because the origin of the sound heard on radio cannot
be seen by those listening to it, Auslander reasons, identifying the status
of the source became necessary for the first time in the history of performance.
This question, which emerged as a question only after advances in
analog recording, gains a new and different urgency with the advent of
digital technologies. These are exemplified in Auslander's thinking by
"chatterbots," speaking machines "programmed to recognize words and
word patterns and to respond with statements that make sense in the context
of what is said to them, though some are capable of initiating conversations."
Chatterbots put into play, not the ontological status of the performance
(live or recorded?), but rather that of the performer (human or
bot?). Auslander provocatively claims that such speaking (and thinking?)
machines "perform live" even though they are not "alive," at least not yet,
if only because they still cannot properly be said to die.
Toward the end of his essay, Auslander quotes one of most frequently
cited aphorisms of Herbert Blau, which hails death as the ontological guarantor
of the liveness of performance: "[The actor] is right there dying in
front of your eyes."12 Responding explicitly to Auslander here in "Virtually
Yours: Presence, Liveness, Lessness," Blau elaborates on his earlier, hauntingly
Beckettian evocation of the peculiar kind of human presence that
mortality best affirms. He begins with the uncanny phenomenon of stage
lights "ghosting" unbidden in the early versions of computerized lighting
controls. This image becomes a metaphor or even an allegory of mediatization,
but the fundamental terms of the comparison are reversed, for Blau
identifies the stubbornly residual ghost light with the human body itself.
The staged body's "lessness," accentuated by the increasing marginality of
the "carnal theater" in comparison with more overtly mediatized spectacles,
backhandedly confirms the body's presence by dramatizing the inexorability
of its disappearance. The theater mediatizes the body too, and it
CRITICAL THEORY AND PERFORMANCE
524
has always done so, making visible to the public eye those otherwise invisible
figures, "improbable but plausible," which "continually appear to represent
us." They remind Blau, as they reminded Williams, that even in the
leading edges of mediatization, "the dematerialized figures are unthinkable
without the bodily presence presumably vanished, nothing occurring
in cyberspace that isn't contingent on that which, seemingly, it made obsolete."
As in Waiting for Godot, something always has to remain behind to remind
us of what's gone missing.
Finally, in nearly the same spectral place where Herbert Blau locates
corporeal "lessness," Sue-Ellen Case finds something more. Pushing off
from Kate Bornstein's performance piece Virtually Yours, which demonstrates
the equivocal but beguiling space for play opened up by virtual
identities, and moving on to waitingforgodot.com, a cyber performance
space, she probes a new medium for the staging of identities. She begins
her quest among the undead: "vampires" suggest but do not exhaust the
possibilities she discovers and predicts, and she finds the most vivacious
conditions of new electronic life flourishing among the recently drained
bodies of cybernetic "avatars." An avatar is traditionally defined as the
embodiment of an idea in a person. In cyber-usage, an avatar is an image
on the screen that seems to represent the user. Case explains that "users
may imagine their own participation within cybersocieties in the form of
these avatars" because through them they can enter "a theatre of masks
without actors." Unlike actors in the carnal theater, their bodies are no
longer their medium, and no one yet knows for sure who or what can reliably
slip through the cracks in corporate cyberspace. Wary of the vested
interests slithering through the same fissures, however, Case closes with
a haunting echo of Donna Haraway's as yet unanswered but still urgent
question: "What kind of politics could embrace partial, contradictory permanently
unclosed constructions of personal and collective selves and
still be ... effective?"13 Whatever politics they might yet prove to be, they
cannot be effective if users sit passively while unbidden "figures" gather
to represent them in the public eye or on the public stage.
J.R.R.
NOTES
1. Raymond Williams, "Drama in a Dramatised Society," in Raymond Williams
on Television, ed. Alan O'Connor (New York: Routledge, 1989), 4.
2. Williams, "Drama in a Dramatised Society," 9.
3. Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, "The Culture Industry: Enlightenment
as Mass Deception," in Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. John Cumming
(New York: Continuum, 1997), 154.
4. Raymond Williams, Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society, rev. ed.
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1983), 87-93.
5. Williams, "Drama in a Dramatised Society," 4.
6. Jean Baudrillard, Simulations, trans. Paul Foss, Paul Patton, and Philip
Beitchman (1975; New York: Semiotext(e), 1983), 1-4.
MEDIATIZED CULTURES
525
7. Donna Haraway, "A Manifesto for Cyborgs: Science, Technology, and Socialist
Feminism in the 1980s" (1985), in Feminism/Postmodernism, ed. Linda
Nicholson (New York: Routledge, 1990), 191.
8. Jon McKenzie, Perform or Else: From Discipline to Performance (New York:
Routledge, 200ool), 42.
9. Peggy Phelan, Unmarked: The Politics of Performance (New York: Routledge,
1993), 146.
10. Philip Auslander, Liveness: Performance in a Mediatized Culture (New York:
Routledge, 1999), 7.
11. Matthew Causey, "Media and Performance," in The Oxford Encyclopedia of
Theatre and Performance (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 2:825.
12. Herbert Blau, Blooded Thought: Occasions of Theatre (New York: Performing
Arts Journal Publications, 1982), 134.
13. Haraway, "A Manifesto for Cyborgs," 199.
Live from Cyberspace, or, I Was Sitting
at My Computer This Guy Appeared
He Thought I Was a Bot
Philip Auslander
The entry for the word live in the Oxford English Dictionary (second edition)
reads: "Of a performance, heard or watched at the time of its occurrence,
as distinguished from one recorded on film, tape, etc." This is a definition
that reflects the necessity of defining the concept in terms of its opposite.
The earliest examples of the use of the word live in reference to performance
cited in the OED come from the mid-193os (1934, to be exact). The
need to define the term live in relation to an opposing concept partly explains
the surprisingly late date of this initial usage: performances could
be perceived as "live" only when there was a way of recording them. But,
since methods of recording sound had existed since the 189os, 1934 is substantially
after the advent of recording technologies. If this word history is
complete (and I assume that if the word live had been applied to performances
in, say, the Middle Ages, the editors of the OED would have found
the references!), it would seem that the advent of recording technologies
was not enough in itself to bring about the formulation of the concept of
liveness. Here, I will address the question of why that took so long to happen,
then go on to examine the implications for liveness of the much more
recent emergence of a particular digital technology.
The answer to the question of why the appearance of recording technologies
was not enough to bring the concept of liveness into being has to
do, I think, with the fact that with the first recording technology, sound
recording, the distinction between live performances and recordings remained
experientially unproblematic. If you put a record on your gramophone
and listened to it, you knew exactly what you were doing and there
was no possibility of mistaking the activity of listening to a record for that
of attending a live performance. As Jacques Attali points out in Noise: The
Political Economy of Music, the earliest forms of sound recording, such as
Edison's cylinder, were intended to serve as secondary adjuncts to live
performance by preserving it.1 As recording technology brought the live
into being, it also respected and reinforced the primacy of existing modes
of performance. Live and recorded performances thus coexisted clearly as
discrete, complementary experiences, necessitating no particular effort to
distinguish them.
It is significant that the earliest use of the word live in relation to performance
listed in the OED has to do with the distinction between live
and recorded sound, but not with the gramophone. The technology necessitating
this usage was radio. This first citation of the word live comes
from the BBC Yearbook for 1934 and iterates the complaint "that recorded
526
LIVE FROM CYBERSPACE
527
material was too liberally used" on the radio. Here, we can glimpse the
beginnings of the historical process by which recorded performances
came to replace live ones, a process I discuss extensively in my book Liveness:
Performance in a Mediatized Culture.2 But radio represented a challenge
to the complementary relationship of live and recorded performances
that went beyond its role in enabling recordings to replace live
performances. Unlike the gramophone, radio does not allow you to see the
sources of the sounds you're hearing; therefore, you can never be sure if
they're live or recorded. Radio's characteristic form of sensory deprivation
crucially undermined the clear-cut distinction between recorded and
live sound. It would seem, then, that the concept of the live was brought
into being not just when it became possible to think in those terms-that is,
when recording technologies such as the gramophone were in place to
serve as a ground against which the figure of the live could be perceived-but
only when it became urgent to do so. The possibility of identifying
certain performances as live came into being with the advent of
recording technologies; the need to make that identification arose as an affective
response specifically to radio, a communications technology that
put the clear opposition of the live and the recorded into a state of crisis.
The response to this crisis was a terminological distinction that attempted
to preserve the formerly clear dichotomy between two modes of performance,
the live and the recorded, a dichotomy that had been so self-evident
up to that point that it did not even need to be named.
I am suggesting that the concept of the live was articulated in relation
to technological change. Recording technology brought the live into
being, but under conditions that permitted a clear distinction between the
existing mode of performance and the new one. The development of
broadcast technology, however, obscured that distinction, and thus subverted
the formerly complementary relationship between live and
recorded modes of performance. The word live was pressed into service
as part of a vocabulary designed to contain this crisis by describing it and
reinstating the former distinction discursively even if it could no longer
be sustained experientially. As a consequence of the circumstances under
which this vocabulary was instated, the distinction between the live and
the recorded was reconceived as one of binary opposition rather than
complementarity.
These ways of conceptualizing the live and the distinction between
the live and recorded or mediatized originated in the era of analog technologies
and persist to the present day; they form the basis of our current
assumptions about liveness. But I will argue here that digital technologies
have reopened these fundamental questions. A new technology has created
a new crisis that may lead to a different understanding of liveness.
To bring the digital dispensation into focus, I will concentrate on the phenomenon
of Internet "chatterbots."
In digital culture, the word bot is a shortened form of the word robot
and refers to computer software that can respond to input and autonomously
execute commands. The most familiar type of bot is probably
CRITICAL THEORY AND PERFORMANCE
528
the search engine-you tell it what to look for, and it goes forth into cyberspace,
seeks, and finds (you hope) what you wanted. It can do this not
because it has access to existing lists of websites that have already been indexed
by keyword but because it is programmed to conduct searches itself.
In other words, if you tell a search engine to find websites about
"liveness," say, it does not simply spit out an existing list of sites that have
been indexed by that term. Rather, the bot itself actually searches the web
electronically, locates sites containing that keyword, and reports back to
you. To translate this function into the terms of an older technology, imagine
a jukebox that contains no records itself but that can actually go out
and scour the world's record stores to bring back ones you may wish to
hear in response to a specific request.
There are many types of bots besides the search engine: warbots,
channelbots, spambots, cancelbots, clonebots, collidebots, floodbots,
gamebots, barbots, eggdrop bots, and modbots, to name but a few. The
type I'd like to discuss here is the chatterbot, sometimes called a chatbot,
a software program designed to engage in conversation. The first and still
best-known chatterbot is Eliza, the program that interrogates the user in
the manner of a Rogerian psychotherapist, developed at MIT in 1966.
Chatterbots typically operate in text-based digital environments, in
which the user types messages to the bot and the bot responds in "typed"
words that appear on the computer screen. Chatterbots are based on research
in natural language processing and are generally programmed to
recognize words and word patterns and to respond with statements that
make sense in the context of what is said to them, though some are also
capable of initiating conversations. The more sophisticated the programming,
the more similar to human discourse the bot's conversation will be.
Since Eliza, many other chatterbots have been created, including the wellknown
Julia, developed around 1990. Andrew Leonard's description of
Julia in Bots: The Origin of New Species gives a sense of the capabilities of
chatterbots:
Dubbed "a hockey-loving ex-librarian with an attitude" by Wired
magazine, Julia has bedazzled would-be suitors .. . Her sense of
humor is well developed. She can keep track. . . of both her own
statements and the responses of the human she might be talking to.
Her database of conversational statements is grouped into nodes
that concentrate on specific topics, such as pets. A clever system of
weighting insures that her tendency to speak about pets automatically
increases or decreases depending on the answers she gets to
certain questions. If the response to her question "Do you have
pets?" is no, the weights on all of the sentence patterns having to do
with pets are automatically lowered. She can purposefully send conversations
off in new directions by randomly injecting statements
such as "people don't own cats".... She even simulates human typing
by including delays between the characters she types and by
spelling words incorrectly.3
LIVE FROM CYBERSPACE
529
The chatterbot phenomenon can be inserted into a historical narrative
very similar to that of recorded sound and radio. Like the first stage
of sound recording, the first stage of the chatterbot was unproblematic because
the new technology's status was unambiguous. Accessing Eliza on
MIT's mainframe computer was much like putting a record on a gramophone,
at least in the sense that there was no ambiguity about where the
words came from: you had chosen to contact Eliza and knew you were
talking to a machine (though there are also important ways in which chatterbots
are different from recordings, which I shall discuss shortly). But
just as the source of sound on the radio is ambiguous, so the source of
computer conversation became ambiguous when chatterbots moved from
mainframe computers onto the Internet. Although you can still choose to
converse with a chatterbot, it is now possible to be engaged in conversation
with one without knowing it. Chatterbots can and do participate in
online chat-rooms and e-mail lists without necessarily being identified as
bots. Again, this situation is analogous to the shifting status of recorded
sound in the historical transition from gramophone to radio. Listening to
a gramophone record was an act of volition on the part of the listener,
who was fully aware of the source of the sound. As long as chatterbots
were confined to mainframe computers and had to be accessed by users,
they were analogous to gramophone records. But online, the source of
chatterbot conversation becomes ambiguous in a way that parallels the
ambiguity of sound on the radio. Radio sounds are not selected directly
by the listener and it is not possible to know whether the sound you hear
emanates live from the broadcast studio or is recorded. Likewise, in an Internet
chat-room or on an e-mail list, you do not necessarily choose to talk
with bots, and it can be impossible to know whether you are conversing
with a human being or a piece of software. As in the case of radio, this ambiguity
results in part from the sensory limitations of the medium. Since
we can neither see nor hear the sources of online chat, chatterbots can be
and are mistaken for human chatters, and vice versa. One of the questions
addressed in an online document entitled "I Chat, Therefore I Am?? An
Introduction to Bots on IRC [Internet Relay Chat]" is "How come people
[in chat rooms] ask me if I'm a bot?" The author advises that if you type
too fast, lurk in the chat room without participating actively in the conversation,
or use too many automated functions in your chat responses,
you may be mistaken for a bot.4
Chatterbots and other types of bot raise many issues, including
questions concerning the potential of artificial intelligence research and
questions of online etiquette and ethics. Here, I want only to consider the
implications of the chatterbot for our understanding of live performance.
The chatterbot may well be the locus at which a new crisis around the
issue of liveness will crystallize, this time in relation to digital technologies.
As I've already suggested, the development of the chatterbot parallels
the development of sound recording and radio that precipitated the
initial crisis leading to the creation of the category of the live itself. The existence
of chatterbots reopens and reframes the question of liveness at a
CRITICAL THEORY AND PERFORMANCE
530
fundamental level. The ambiguity created by chatterbots differs from that
created by radio in one crucial respect. While it is true that you can't know
whether sounds you hear on the radio are produced live or not, you generally
can have confidence in the ultimate source of the performance you
hear. That is, even if you're listening to a recording, there is usually little
doubt that it is a recording of a performance by a human being. The ambiguity
created by radio has to do with the ontology of the performance
(live or recorded), not with the ontological status of the performer (human
or nonhuman). The chatterbot forces the discussion of liveness to be reframed
as a discussion of the ontology of the performer rather than that
of the performance.
So far, I have emphasized some parallels between early chatterbots
and sound recordings, but the differences between chatterbots and
recordings are centrally important to the renewed consideration of liveness
prompted by the chatterbot phenomenon. If we return for a moment
to the OED's definition of live, it becomes evident that chatterbots are live
performers. "Of a performance, heard or watched at the time of its occurrence,
as distinguished from one recorded on film, tape, etc." Chatterbot
performances are certainly live according to this definition. It is important
in this context to stress that chatterbots are not playback devices. Whereas
audio and video players allow us to access performances carried out by
other entities (i.e., the human beings on the recordings) at an earlier time,
chatterbots are themselves performing entities that construct their performances
at the same time as we witness them.
The magnitude of the challenge chatterbots pose to current conceptions
of liveness becomes evident when we consider how both the ontology
and the value of live performance have been construed in performance
theory, which often invokes the performer's materiality and
mortality to describe liveness in existential terms. In Blooded Thought, Herbert
Blau declares dramatically, "In a very strict sense, it is the actor's
mortality which is the actual subject [of any performance], for he is right
there dying in front of your eyes."5 Peggy Phelan echoes some of the same
themes in Mourning Sex: "Live performance and theatre ('art with real
bodies') persist despite an economy of reproduction that makes them
seem illogical and certainly a poor investment.... it may well be that theatre
and performance respond to a psychic need to rehearse for loss, and
especially for death."6
Clearly, performances by bots cannot address these ideas in the
same way as those by human performers. Since bots are virtual entities,
they have no physical presence, no corporeality; they are not dying in
front of our eyes-they are, in fact, immortal. Bots can be destroyed or
taken out of service, but they do not age or die in any biological sense.
They perform live, but they are not alive, at least not in the same way that
organic entities are alive. Performances by bots therefore do not engage
existential issues simply by virtue of the performers' presence, in the way
Blau and Phelan describe human performances. It is crucial to remember,
however, that Blau's and Phelan's respective formulations are directed to-
LIVE FROM CYBERSPACE
531
ward identifying the specificity of live performance by opposing it to performances
conveyed through technologies of cultural reproduction such
as film and video. The quotation from Blau comes from an essay contrasting
theater and film; as the one from Phelan indicates, she is positioning
live performance against an economy she sees as driven by reproduction.
Both emphasize the failing organicism of live human bodies to counterpoint
the way those same bodies are represented through technologies of
cultural reproduction and to emphasize that basic aspect of live performance
stated in the OED definition: live performance is not recorded. Bots
are technological entities, but they constitute a technology of production,
not reproduction. Although chatterbots are programmed and draw their
conversational material from databases, their individual performances
are responsive to the actions of other performers, autonomous, unpredictable,
and improvisational. That is, they perform in the moment.
If, as I've already indicated, the chatterbot does not demand a new
definition of live performance, it does remind us of what is basic to existing
definitions. Returning to the OED one last time, we can see that liveness is
first and foremost a temporal relationship, a relationship of simultaneity:
"Of a performance, heard or watched at the time of its occurrence." The ability
to present performances that can be watched as they occur, or, to switch
to a technological vocabulary, to perform in real time-the heart of the concept
of liveness-is an ability shared by human beings and chatterbots.
The appearance of the Internet chatterbot therefore does not occasion a redefinition
of liveness or a realignment of the conceptual relationship between
live and recorded performances, as did the earlier development of
radio. But what the chatterbot does occasion is considerably more profound:
it undermines the idea that live performance is a specifically human
activity; it subverts the centrality of the live, organic presence of human beings
to the experience of live performance; and it casts into doubt the existential
significance attributed to live performance.
NOTES
1. Jacques Attali, Noise: The Political Economy of Music, trans. Brian Massumi
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985), 90-96.
2. Philip Auslander, Liveness: Performance in a Mediatized Culture (New York:
Routledge, 1999), esp. 23. The present account of the historical emergence of the
live as a conceptual category modifies the discussion in Liveness. See also Attali,
Noise, 85.
3. Andrew Leonard, Bots: The Origin of New Species (San Francisco: HardWired,
1997), 41-42.
4. Heather Peel, "I Chat, Therefore I Am?? An Introduction to Bots on IRC,"
available at http://www.chatcircuit.com/tech/1o/1obots.htm.
5. Herbert Blau, Blooded Thought: Occasions of Theatre (New York: Performing
Arts Journal Publications, 1982), 134.
6. Peggy Phelan, Mourning Sex: Performing Public Memories (New York: Routledge,
1997), 3.
Virtually Yours: Presence,
Liveness, Lessness
Herbert Blau
THE ACTUAL HUMAN BODY BECOMES OF LESS IMPORTANCE
EVERY DAY
-Wyndham Lewis, "The New Egos," in Blast 1
I began to wonder at about this time what one saw when one looked
at anything really looked at anything.
-Gertrude Stein, "Portraits and Repetition"
Little body little block heart beating ash gray only upright. Little
body ash gray locked rigid heart beating face to endlessness.
-Samuel Beckett, "Lessness"
Before the opening of the Beaumont Theater at Lincoln Center in New
York, as we were finishing up the lights for the first preview of Danton's
Death, what was then (in 1965) the world's most advanced switchboard
couldn't quite control the "ghosting" on stage-that is, the trace of lights
after dimming, the aura here or halo there, the stubborn residue of illumination
that wouldn't, for all the electronics, go entirely dark. Designed by
George Izenour, the computerized system was something remarkably
new, though the technology still worked at the time not through the mysteries
of software but-as with the archetypal Colossus, the vacuumtubed
first electronic computer-by means of a quite hefty pack of punch
cards. We shuffled the cards, or read them like tarot, but when the ghosting
persisted, we called Izenour, reputed sage of techno-theater, down
from Yale to see what he could do. That didn't quite solve the problem.
Each time we'd set up the lights and turn them down, he'd look at the luminous
trace that everybody could see and give us a theoretical explanation
as to why it couldn't be. Even then, I had no indisposition to theory,
"But George," I'd say, "look again!" and again he'd look and explain why
it couldn't be, as if we were somehow hallucinating. As it turned out, our
technical director Jose Sevilla managed to operate the switchboard without
the computer, running the entire show-the preview was not cancelled-by
taking the dimmers between his fingers and moving them up
and down the otherwise hapless console with exquisite precision on cue.
The technology was primitive, but the ghosting had disappeared.
Or at least as it was in the lighting. What I'd overlooked then, however,
in the urgencies of the moment, is what remains a crucial distinction
in the ontology of performance, as we think of it now through the media
and the prospects of cyberculture. For once you look in the theater, no less
look again! (as the Furies chant in the Oresteia, seeming to initiate specular-
532
VIRTUALLY YOURS
533
ity as the theater's compulsive tradition), then with or without lighting,
the ghosts are already there, and once the lights are up (over the mountaintops
from Troy or, lights, lights, lights! as on the play within the play,
or in the movement from Plato's Cave to the dialectic of enlightenment,
or even with Clov in Endgame, who sees his light dying), no matter what's
there, or not, it's with the look of being looked at. Which is, in performance,
the anxious datum of "liveness."
As for liveness in the theater, which seemed to be its distinction, that's
been complicated in recent years not merely by the hyperbolic computerization
of Broadway scenic effects, but by widening magnitudes of performance
that seem to be leaving the theater behind. After the carnivals, festivals,
pageants, and ritual forms of other cultures, performance seems to
be moving beyond the ethnographic, with its residuum of the aesthetic,
through technology and corporate management into outer space. I'm not
merely referring to media events circling the globe by satellite transmission,
but in the ever-increasing panoptic vision of performance studies, to
everything from the operations of the Hubble telescope to some nomadic
or dysfunctional rocket in the ionosphere, or some years back, the atomization
of the Challenger, the radiant image of which, played over and over on
television, virtually transfigured disaster as did, in those brain-draining
bursts, the resplendent aureoles of the collapsing towers before they became
a sepulcher. Yet remote from Ground Zero, even spaced out, through
the "strange loop" phenomenon of missile guidance systems, if there is
anything theatricalized, it requires a site of performance; and if the scale is
reduced again, down to what's basic in theater, not the old two boards for
a passion or, for that matter, what Peter Brook had in mind when he said
theater begins with an empty space, luring the actor in.
"There's no such thing as an empty space," said John Cage, "or an
empty time."2 That was the premise of an early essay on experimental
music as the becoming of theater, which "is continually becoming that it
is becoming" (14), which is to say, a space of performance, subject to the
look, which for more than a generation has been, as folded into "the
gaze," the subject of deconstruction. But with the obduracy of the gaze in
mind-and a sense of its gradations, as with presence itself-I've written
elsewhere that in the apparently empty space you don't even need the
actor, the space no longer empty so long as there is someone seeing.3 As
for the semblance of time in space, we may not have been seeing the same,
since the same can never be seen, not in a temporal form, but what Cage
didn't say, looking through music to theater, is that it's the seeming in the
becoming that invites and escapes the look, which in the consciousness of
looking, as at the substance of seeming itself, suffuses time with
thought-which is what theater does, even when troubled by it.
For the liability in the suffusion is a metaphysics of seeming, perpetuating
in appearance the future of illusion. Less disturbed by that than the
theater tends to be-or at least its canonical drama, in its congenital distrust
of theater-the minimalist aesthetic of conceptual art, and the installations
that followed, evolved in theatricality, which for an unregenerate
CRITICAL THEORY AND PERFORMANCE
534
formalist (specifically, Michael Fried) seemed to be the end of art.4 The beginning
of the end could be said to have occurred in that ur-setting of theatricality,
the anechoic chamber at Berkeley, in which, through the absence
of other sound, Cage listened to his nerves and heart, then thought of
himself listening, out of which came the performance, itself canonical
now, of 4 '33" a silence lasting four minutes, thirty-three seconds.
Some years after, there were repercussions of this silence, inflected
visually, in a primitive manifestation of media art: Nam June Paik's prototypical
Fluxus film, made in the early 196os, picking up on Cage's Zen.
Paik's later video installations were, with a sometimes monumental array
of monitors and his usual visual cunning, extravagant displays, baroque,
but back then, if the aesthetic was minimal, it was somewhat out of necessity
because of minimal cost: no actors, no expensive effects, optical or
otherwise, no film stock to edit either. What Paik projected, inside a TV
set, was nothing more than a thousand feet of unprocessed sixteen-millimeter
leader, which ran imagelessly on a screen for thirty minutes, the
effect on the viewer being-if not a sense of malfunction or unreflective
indifference-a participatory impulse.
That was, in any Fluxus event, the performative prospect at least, presumably
canceling the inertia of the passive observer, with consciousness
itself emerging as the sine qua non of performance. As if Baudelaire's boredom,
recycled, had been activated on the screen, the (seeming) tabula rasa
of the illuminated space was, in subsequent viewings, complicated and enlivened,
minuscule as they were, by dust and scratches on the leader stock.
The liveness there, of course, was in the consciousness solicited by those
chance "events," though it's possible to argue that the events themselves
were symptoms of liveness, even in the absence of any human image on
film, just as the "miscellaneous rubbish," the rising and falling lights, the
sounds of inspiration and expiration, and the faint cries, each "instant of
recorded vagitus," convey a more poignant absence-the liveness of it, no
actors there on stage-in the performance of Beckett's Breath.5
On a larger scale, the notion of liveness entered the agenda of performance
theory through film and (even more) the televisual, and the "remediation"
that Philip Auslander has tracked from stage to screen to
stage, and through the recording industry: from the lip-synch scandal of
Milli Vanilli to CDs, DVDs, and back through rock concerts, where the
performance of Madonna, U2, or Eminem, the truth of liveness there, is
determined and authenticated by what's been seen on MTV. If this merely
updates, according to Auslander, what we should have known all along,
"that the live can exist only within an economy of reproduction," what's
all the more true in the technological versatility of the dominion of reproduction,
the fantasy-making apparatus itself, "is that, like liveness itself,
the desire for live experiences is a product of mediatization."6 Meanwhile,
as the vacuum tubes were miniaturized, first by transistors, then integrated
circuits, and afterward silicon chips, with fiber-optic bundles enabling
globalization, it was to be expected that the question of liveness
would extend to virtual reality, as well as to futurological fantasies of a
VIRTUALLY YOURS
digitized human race that, with whatever forms of intelligence in a dematerialized
body, would certainly alter our thinking about the meaning of
presence in liveness.
Until that millenarian day, however, we'll still be contending with
the banalities about "living theater," which attribute to real bodies on a
stage more presence than some of those bodies may actually have in performance,
no less anything like a charismatic wholeness, which this or
that body may appear to have, if nothing more than appearance. Yet, if
there was no point to stressing liveness before the advent of photography
and the phonograph-though even the Festival of Dionysus or a chorus
at Epidaurus was part of an economy of reproduction-the notion of living
theater also has to be historicized. When we used to speak of living
theater, before the insurrection of (what the French call) the Living-with
"polymorphous perverse" bodies proclaiming Paradise Now-what we
had in mind, by contrast, was the appearance of theater on film, though
the incursion of the Living, in the dissidence of the 196os, was also a claim
to liveness as opposed to the dehumanized. And that was a condition just
as possible in the theater as it was on film, or later television, not to mention
the prospect that dehumanization will be, in the apotheosis of virtual
reality, the (im)material condition of liveness. Relieved or distraught by
the absence of presence, relentlessly demystified in theory, some who see
liveness alive and well in the media-which mediatize themselves in remediation-are
essentially making a defense of another kind of presence,
an electronic presence, as we pass to the Internet, where, instead of metaphysics
coming in through the pores, as Freud and Artaud thought, it
comes in, rather, in bytes.
When we think of the age of information, and digital traffic around
the globe, there's a tendency to imagine the networks as a ramification of
the "superhighway" of image culture, or as the hypertrophy of image, its
proliferous reification, from the age of mechanical reproduction (Benjamin)
to the society of the spectacle (Debord), with its investment in, or
investiture of, the precession of simulacra (Baudrillard). But the virtual realities
of information are something else again. While the photographic,
filmic, or televisual image is still attached to the material site of representation
in a legacy of realism (however the image is produced, indexically
or analogically), the substance of the virtual, digitally produced as it is
through the wobble of one and zero, may appear to be three-dimensional,
but in the electroluminescence of the apparency of a stage, there is only an
"empty display,"7 nothing to feel, nothing to touch, only the phosphorescent
presence of what-unlike the object of the camera, however abstracted-was
never there to begin with. In some interactive continuum
of the cyberized space itself, the sensation may be that of a body virtually
there, but that's it, virtual, maybe quickening apprehension in its shimmering
subjunctivity, with a certain charm or enchantment, perhaps, like
an alibi of the spectral wishing it could be more, maybe even mortal, but
with evacuated gravity, never meant to be.
The space is interactive, and the virtual is a lure, but the real agency
CRITICAL THEORY AND PERFORMANCE
536
is the artificial intelligence, the prior programming, that creates the virtual
scene. If, through the resourcefulness of a database, that scene is analogous
to the real, one can be immersed in the analogy, which is cyberspace, without
the visceral sensation of being there, since there is no there there-not
even, as things are, the appearance of it, which is with all its impediments,
however unaccommodated, the vexing thing itself. With all the promise of
digitality, there is also something poignant: the subtext of the virtual is that it
really wants to be real.8 And whatever that may be, the index of its truth-as
with any manifestation in whatever performative mode, across any stylization
or cultural practice, ritualized or mimed, masked or mediated,
even performed with puppets-will always be subject to that wanting, as
the body of information will be referred to the body itself, that body, the
real body, and I don't mean a social construction, no less what they're calling
a bot.
Still, somewhere in all this, there seems to be a new reality, as the
seemingly manipulable but abstracted world of data, supradiaphanous,
immaterial as it is, bears upon life as we've known it, material as it is, and
unlikely to go away, unless the genetic codes are somehow added to the
data, ending life as we've known it in a life without end. Which, however
that may be, may vex us even more-if performance theory survives-by
making liveness moot. Be that as it may, this is certainly a view of the
future that Bertolt Brecht didn't anticipate when, after the bomb on
Hiroshima, he revised his Epic theory in the Short Organum, to take cognizance
of nuclear power, beyond the "petroleum complex," even before
which he had thought, "Some exercise in complex seeing is needed."9 In
the world of feedback loops accelerated by microcomputers, and with cyborgs
on the scene about to take over performance (or even, since queerer
than queer, what is called "performativity"), Brecht's critique of "culinary
theater" would seem to be arrested in history, without any object at all,
since the disappearance of an organic body with conventional subjectivity
makes the culinary a non sequitur: out in cyberspace, nothing to cook and
nothing to eat. But if the audience in the bourgeois theater is there to digest
its dinner, so it might all the more in front of a computer. Still, if
what's programmed there is in a postculinary world, immersed in virtuality,
there's no guarantee whatever that its values are improved by the
data with which, in the absence of anything else, we may identify in performance.
Meanwhile, for cybernauts and cybernerds, and all us foreseeable
cyborgs, there seems to be-except for incompetence on the computer-no
digital equivalent of the Alienation-effect. Which is to say,
we're no better than ever, through all the information, in the complex seeing
we need, when time must have a stop, for a reflective look, wherever
we are in the virtual, at the reality passing by, susceptible to illusion,
maybe nothing but appearance, all the more in the paranoia of a world besieged
by terror, with "weapons of mass destruction" like a refrain on the
evening news.
Even so, when performance occurs at a digital distance, out there in
cyberspace, where power is a function of remote control-in a world in-
VIRTUALLY YOURS
537
conceivable without its image, or in the unstoppable seeming, an obscenity
of image-remoteness itself is the sticking point, hardly reducible to a
Brechtian gestus. As with the smart bombs of the Gulf War or in the Shahi-Kot
Valley after Al Qaeda, in or out of the caves, or even the scandal of
Enron with the shreddings at Anderson, for all we see, we don't see it,
though we may be watching all the time. As opposed to the theater, or
even film, what we have on television is a virtual allegory of the remote.
What we see there, as we move from channel to channel, is the liquidity
of culture, both in the sense of gathered, processed, edited, and collaged
images, screened as they are from the cathode tube, and in the sense of
commodification, with the illusion of liquidity there, the images presumably
at our disposal, the remote like a magic wand or scepter, giving access
to the Imaginary. Yet, for all that imperial remoteness-programs on
and off at will-it's an illusion of power out of hand, a lot more feeble
than fabulous, more like impotency after all. Nobody forces anybody to
watch television, but very few resist, and putting aside what's brainless,
or what we know we've seen before, no matter how new it appears, it's
hard to watch for any length of time without feeling the saturation of apparent
news, the ad nauseam of the commentary, and even if the screen is
small, a frustrating diffusion of thought. Not only in surfing channels, but
in what we do when we watch, the experience is that of modernity in the
Eliotic sense, distracted from distraction by distraction.
In this regard, the mediatizing of culture is not only a matter of how
it is represented, or who represents it, but how that is factored into a virtual
ontology of distraction, which bears upon what we think and how we
see ourselves in time. Or for that matter, out of time, because our sense of
temporality is increasingly preempted by the allure of the televisual, and
with it telepresence,10 which may encounter time in its occurrence, but not
in any perceptible cycle of duration, stasis, motion, or decay. Time on television-where
we rarely see the process of time-is processed, and what
just happened will move instantly into the archive, to be reprocessed,
even images of the past susceptible, as Margaret Morse points out, to a
sort of digital updating or "electronic revision to meet today's expectations,"
so that the grainier black-and-white documentations of the past
are not preserved as access "to flickering shadows in the cave," but are
rather shaped up to the "spatiotemporal and psychic relations [of] the realities
it constitutes."11 Which are, as they now impinge on performance,
realities of distraction.
At the same time, there is a certain tactility in the mediatizing of culture
that has not so much to do, as we tend to think, with the formation
of attitudes or the maneuvering of public opinion-the commentary on
the polling that inevitably determines the polls-but rather with the activity
of perception at the heart of representation; or in reverse, the activity
of representation that forms perception, and therefore, indeed, the way
things are thought. Thus, in the operations of television graphics, as in the
close-ups of a television interview, we may have the sensation of proximity
to an object, seeing it closer-in the case of virtual images, as if they
CRITICAL THEORY AND PERFORMANCE
538
were, in extreme nearness, eliciting our sense of touch, as with fabrics on
home-shopping channels or, in the magic world of the law, sexy legs on
Ally McBeal. If what is called "blue-screen technology" can create virtual
sets that make small-market studios, and their unknown anchor people,
look prime-time, so complex motion design, enhanced by the computer,
makes it possible not only to define but to move around an object in discursive
space, with diverse angles and points of entry, the sort of topology
that defies the burdensome laws of gravity in the cinema as we know it,
no less on the theater's stage. Sometimes the sense of motion is such, in
computerized graphics on the screen, especially in fantasies of outer space
(transposed to selling the Lexus), that the ground of representation itself
seems to be taken from under us. Yet the fantasies of weightlessness are
competing, as they did way back in Ibsen's Lady from the Sea, with the
deadweight actuality of our actual bodies. It may be that virtual worlds
are preparing us psychically for the zero gravity of outer space or some
virtual interior life, but for the time being or, irreversibly, the reality of
being in time, our bodies inhabit a space (even floating out there in a capsule)
that is irreparably down to earth.
In Datek ads or HelloMoto, Motorola's Datamoto, it might seem it
could be reversed, and every now and then we hear that either biogenetics
or some high-tech implant is going to bring it about. Actually, there is
considerable speculation, and some pontification, more or less idealistic,
about the out-of-body promise of digital worlds, and the status of the virtual
in the reality that remains, what-according to theorists from Benjamin
to Baudrillard-may only be a remainder amid the ruins of time.
Given that ruinous context, seeds of history upon the ground, what is virtual
reality? The truth is that, psychically and otherwise, no less realistically,
we know very little about its cultural substance and prospects, its
possibilities for performance, nor its eventual effect on what we take to be
human. And when we advance through electronic culture to this impasse,
we're somewhere beyond the horizon of performance in the media, even
those films they're now trying to make, with actors replaced by the ingenious
animation of digital tech, leaving us with the question: is the increasing
likeness to be thought of as liveness? And by what criteria do we determine
that?
To be sure, it was the escalation of mediatization that appeared to
bring into the theater itself, and to the live bodies there, reflexes and
habits of mind that seemed less natural or organic than mechanically reproduced-not
by some postmodern offshoot of Meyerhold's biomechanics
(which was actually derived from Taylorism) or by some recidivist
sign of passion from the repertoire of Delsarte. If we've long been aware
of the stale predictability of Broadway's assembly line, and of actors repeating
themselves, that was because, as in digital culture, it was possible
to process behavior and homogenize it as code. This is all the more so
today in the precession of simulacra, where it's possible to think of liveness
as playing roles on screen, precoded parts written for us in advance,
so that we're signs of what we appear to be, not even representations but
VIRTUALLY YOURS
539
their merest facsimile. And if this is so, then the actor who appears on
stage is the redundancy of a redundancy, performing an otherness that
only pretends to be, so well known has it been that it can only be rehearsed,
the image of an image of something that, coded to begin with,
has otherwise never been. That, I suppose, is the worst-case scenario. As
for actors repeating themselves, that was in any case to be expected, despite
all versatility, from those who achieve stardom on stage or screen. As
for any appearance in the flesh, whatever the quotient of liveness, it may
of course be augmented, as well as credibilized, by previous celebrity in
the media, which function in visual culture by their long-belabored expertise,
whatever else they may be doing, in commodifying the look-not
quite that of being looked at, in the sense I've been talking about, which
seems brought into being by another liveness, the liveness overlooked,
that of perception itself, as it makes its way through appearance.
If that's not always what it appears to be (or even if it is), that's also
due to perception, which in abrading upon reality also makes it theater.
As if he were enunciating Heisenberg's principle of indeterminacy,
William Blake said that the eye altering alters all. And any way you look
at it, the body on stage is suffused with the vicissitudes of appearance,
which complicate the question of liveness, all the more because you look,
offstage, onstage, with more or less reciprocity during the course of performance-the
irony being here that sometimes less is more. Which is to
say that the quality of liveness, the felt sensation of it, may not necessarily
diminish as it moves from the interactive or participatory to a more contemplative
mode. What mediatizes culture there, beyond any previous accretions,
is the activity of perception, however rigorous or involuntary, or
intently voyeuristic, "lawful espials" or "seeing unseen" (Hamlet 3.1.32-
33), or, with one or another mode of alienating distance, the seeing or unseeing
in an impersonal or clinical look. "Am I as much as... being seen?"
says one of the figures in the urns of Beckett's Play, which wouldn't be as
much of a question-being seen or being seen? (how should the actor say
it? and how much is he being seen? depending on how he says it?)-were
you to see the figure on film.
As we reflect on the difference in being, as Heidegger might have
seen it, from being as being-seen, it would seem that the affectivity of
presence-its liveness, so to speak-might better be thought of, through
the undeniable palpability of its metaphysical absence, as gradations of
presence escaping itself in a sort of microphysics. About which you can
say, as the greatest of dramas do, you can only see so much-even if you
put it on film, or with a video monitor, or by storing it as information in a
computer's memory bank. If the theater, as I said in Take Up the Bodies, "is
the body's long initiation in the mystery of its vanishings,"12 I wouldn't
count on computer memory, ready for instant messaging, to keep track
of where it went, or even to serve for cultural memory, since in the mysteries
of digitization it somehow erases the difference between where we
were and where we are, as well as now and then. There are those, to be
sure, who are hardly disturbed by that, and some of them, who have
CRITICAL THEORY AND PERFORMANCE
540
grown up with or into cyberspace, are developing modes of performance
that have already gone online, like the Creative Outlaw Visionaries or
Law and Order Practitioners or, mobilizing micronetworks for an agitprop
agenda, Ricardo Dominguez and the Electronic Disturbance Theater.
If Dominguez prefers the Internet to the stage because of the subversive
possibilities, on quite another scale, one can imagine computer types
who might indeed prefer the protocols of digital exchange, whether
anonymously or otherwise, to the regimens of performance as we've
known it through the impediments of flesh and blood. One of the capacities
of digitality is not only to speed up exchange across unconscionable
distances, but, as if it were some new outreach of ritual drama, to occult
it once again. It may very well be enticing to a performer who could, in
the theater, only imagine shadows, doubles, and the traces of ghostliness,
to dematerialize online and resurface in code and image in a new Theater
of the World, where liveness came from elsewhere than being born
astride of a grave.
If then, coming back to earth, liveness comes as well with a certain
paranoia, that's because-mediated or remediated as the theater might be,
not only in the recyclings from film or television, but in the infinity of its
repetitions (what drove Artaud mad) from whenever the theater began
there is in all the remediation something irremediable, the disease of time
in a time-serving form. It can be put in various ways, more or less anodyne
or evasive, but there are times when liveness itself is exalted by its most
disheartening truth: it stinks of mortality, which may be the ultimate subtext
of stage fright-no virtual reality that, but ineliminably there, however
disguised, or (as actors may say) made use of in performance, in any case
encroaching on or reshaping presence, and even if it doesn't stink, bringing
us back to what, as reality principle, ghosts us after all. Even on the cybernetic
threshold of a cyborgian age, "we really do die," which is what, in
simple truth, Donna Haraway said when she stopped short on the utopian
prospects and warned against "denying mortality."13
What is, then, the material condition of liveness, its inevitable "lessness,"
will continue to be so until our nanotechnology produces-as K.
Eric Drexler promised when he started manipulating materials that are
utterly out of sight-self-replicating subatomic engines that will not only
remove diseased DNA from our perishing bodies, but also repair our
aging cells, making us (nearly) immortal. Which is not to mention the visions
of robotic bodies of a postbiological age into which, as into computer
memory, we can download the forms of thought and desire that
once went into our drama. As we might have guessed, the media-as in
AT&T's "You Will" campaign4-are encouraging these prospects as
something more than fantasy, not dreamt of in our philosophy, maybe,
but in the more numinous spin-off from Blade Runner, the techno-transcendentalism
or epiphanic redemption of entropy (not to mention social
justice)5 that comes with being Wired. Whatever the liveness dreamt of,
it's not quite that which the newspapers were conscious of in NBC's
prime-time coverage of the Winter Olympics in Utah. The relative reality
VIRTUALLY YOURS
541
there was "live live" (designated "Live" in the upper left corner of the
screen) or "nearly live" (a skeleton, skateboard, or bobsled event that happened,
say, an hour before) or the "live that looks like live, yet is not" (Bob
Costas in the studio chatting with Jim McKay) or the "nonlive, which does
not mean dead, just taped."16 Or, as we've seen it in Afghanistan, on tape,
maybe alive, maybe dead, and if no "Live" up in the corner, maybe a
ticker of news at the bottom, keeping the options alive, or announcing a
vote on Osama bin Laden's liveness, as they've done on CNN.com.
If there is, whatever the vote, something simply obtuse or a bad
puerile joke in that, the suffusion of our reality by the media, live live,
nearly live, nonlive, is such that, even when you turn it off, it seems somehow
to be on, as if there were channels in our heads, which at some devastating
moment of history we might wish would simply go blank. Or
give us a moment's respite. But, as if the media were itself a function of
our manic obsession with image that in its stupefying excess is the matrix
of the real, that isn't meant to be. Nor can we separate the superfetation
of image from the mesmeric redundancy of the noise that passes as information,
which is not what Lionel Trilling once meant by "the hum and
buzz of implication," to which, judiciously, you might turn an attentive
ear. Nor is it even the noise that John Cage talked about, and deployed, as
early as 1937-"The sound of a truck at fifty miles an hour. Static between
the stations. Rain"-about which he said, "Wherever we are what we hear
is mostly noise. When we ignore it, it disturbs us. When we later listen to
it, we find it fascinating." And with electronic control of amplitude and
frequency, it is possible to take "any one of these sounds and to give it
rhythms within or beyond the reach of imagination."17 This is not the
noise we hear on the media every day.
Thus, for all the depth of grief and mourning after the disasters of
September 11, the one inconceivable testament to its unspeakability
would have been, at ground zero of sensation, darkened TV screens and,
for one unmediated day of quiet reflection, no anchors, no talk shows, no
Imus in the Morning or O'Reilly Factor at night, no Leno, no Letterman, no
Crossfire or Hardball, or speaking of liveness, Larry King Live, no profusion
of replays: silence. Which is, perhaps, when history hurts, the only reliable
echo of liveness. That the media, however, saturate culture, both inducing
and preempting what we feel, is by now, even when on their best behavior-the
relief of absent commercials after the towers collapsed-an inarguable
fact of life, as it is of the theater, which even before Pirandello
could no longer think of art imitating life, for life is no longer the referent,
but only life as mediated, as if theatricality were appropriated on its own
terms, as the pure Imaginary. If it's long been apparent that anything that
goes on in our minds, almost every gesture we make, what passes as love
or longing, just about every instinct, has either been determined, foreseen,
programmed, or mimicked by the media, so it seems, too, that in an age
of information virtually everything to be known is out there on the net for
the asking, and with the savvy of software accessible on the computer. Yet
the more we ask, the more demoralized we may be.
CRITICAL THEORY AND PERFORMANCE
542
Meanwhile, the World Wide Web is the global space of performance,
where the notion of living theater seems the merest anachronism, if nothing
more than because the intensities and energies producible (never
mind reproducible) on film, video, CDs and DVDs exceed in their cumulative
affect or outright sensation anything achievable by flesh and blood
on a stage, except insofar as the body's vulnerability, the weak flesh itself,
becomes in its mortality the literal issue. For all the recycling of liveness,
or the remediation (carrying rather insensibly the notion of a remedy), it's
hard to imagine any image on the screen, however violent, lustful, demonic,
barbaric, no less intimate or lyrical, that could match the close-up
effect upon spectators of an actor who, as in the extremities of performance
art-Gina Pane up a ladder of razors, Chris Burden having himself
shot, Fakir Musaphar's self-impalings, Orlan's cosmetic surgeries,
Schwarzkogler's bandaged suffocations, with live wires exposed, on the
edge of suicide (which he eventually did, by throwing himself out of a
window)-actually cuts his wrist or slits another's throat or (as a friend
of mine did) swallows a bottle of pins, or a scene in which the lovemaking
or fucking is not merely simulated, but nakedly there, cock into cunt, right
there before your eyes, not garrulously so as in The Vagina Monologues,
making up for lost time and the carnal by merely talking about it. I've
seen people wince at pictures of Stelarc suspending himself by fishhooks,
as they do with some of the more perilous things on Survivor, or recently
on Fear Factor, when certain minor celebrities were crawled over by
worms, roaches, and snakes. But suppose that were done close up, live, as
in a gallery space or intimate theater, and you were sitting right there.
Never mind the factitious violence as it comes with popcorn-boggling
credibility from Hollywood's editing rooms-if what they apparently do
in "snuff films" were done on a stage there'd be no doubt whatever about
the difference in liveness, dead or alive, to use our president's words about
the evildoer hiding out, no doubt applicable now to those in Kashmir or
Pakistan who beheaded Daniel Pearl. As for the videotape not yet on the
networks (and quite unlikely to be), that would be difficult to see if they
showed it, but imagine it done on a stage, where what's not done may be
done with a valence that, formed as it is by the media (and reducing the
level of sensation), is something else again, like the nothing to be done in
Waiting for Godot that, in its most elemental liveness, cannot not be done.
Which is where, if only with the illusion of the unmediated, the most complex
performance exists.
The issue remains, however, as performance extends beyond theater
or performance art to fashion, politics, pedagogy, corporate management,
polymeric composites, rocket boosters or missile defense, whether the
narrow circumference of a stage, and human presence, can continue to hold
attention in ways the other media can't. For the theater, as already suggested,
is mediatized too, that is, something other than raw experience,
not at all immediate, which in its corporeality we sometimes tend to forget.
The mediatizing of culture was surely ramified and accelerated from
photography and cinema through television to analog/digital technology,
VIRTUALLY YOURS
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but its effect upon performance was already registered before the end of
the nineteenth century, in the preface to Strindberg's Miss Julie, which
went beyond the relatively conservative dramaturgy of naturalism-purporting
to focus on the documentable evidence of an external reality, its
facts and material circumstances-to the multiplicity of "the soul-complex,"
which is something like the Freudian notion of overdetermination,
a subjectivity so estranged that it cannot fit into the inherited conception
of character.
Thus the notion of a "characterless" character. "Instead of the 'readymade,'
in which the bourgeois concept of the immobility of the soul was
transferred to the stage," Strindberg insists on the richness of the soulcomplex,
which-if derived from his conception of Darwinian naturalism-reflects
"an age of transition more compulsively hysterical" than the
one preceding it, while anticipating the age of postmodernism, with its utterly
mediated and deconstructed self, so that when we think of identity as
social construction, it occurs as well as a sort of bricolage: "My souls (characters),"
Strindberg writes in that proleptic preface, "are conglomerates of
past and present cultural phases, bits from books and newspapers, scraps
of humanity, pieces torn from fine clothes and become rags, patched together
as is the human soul."1'8 And one of the patches is from the theater
itself, as it is with the valet Jean, who says, to account for the knowingness
beyond his station, that he's been to the theater often. Unfortunately,
if that brings a certain mediated presence to his pretensions, of the sort
we might acquire today from film or television, it wilts before the voice
of the Count coming down the speaking tube. All through the play, actually,
the tube itself is a presence, as that other tube is today: the medium
is the message, and it's still a message of power.
As we move, however, toward virtual worlds, the claims of the
body to presence-or attributing presence to the body, as confirmation or
affirmation-may appear to be disrupted by the reformative flow of
postlinear devices and systems-fast forward, rewind, stop, eject, play,
and the whole array of recorders, tapes, CDs and CD-ROMs, as well as
the chat rooms and chatterbots on the Internet. And we have seen performance
events with more or less impacted technology that seems to parse
the body, with real-time digitized contours that seem to be floating in infraspace,
as in the work of Matthew Barney, that is, a performance space
of image projectors that may also seem, through computer programming,
to be spuming or liquefied, itself floating or hyperextended, with
its payload of partial bodies, spindrifting to cyberspace. Here, corporeal
identity may appear to warp, reform, dissolve, be refigured there online,
but however the body is thus deconstituted and/or restored, its image
persists through it all, along with-if not there in actuality-the desire to
have it so. If cyberspace itself is the consensual hallucination that is the
consummation of virtual technologies, the hallucinatory consensus extends
to notions of performance disassociated from the mundane gravity
of the corporeal body. But just as cyberspace is unthinkable without the
alphabetic and mathematical system of representation that supports and
CRITICAL THEORY AND PERFORMANCE
544
sustains the logocentricism presumably displaced, so the dematerialized
figures are unthinkable without the bodily presence presumably vanished,
nothing occurring in cyberspace that isn't contingent on that
which, seemingly, it made obsolete.
Whatever the circularity-the looping of liveness through the space
of reproduction-there is no escaping in remediation the reductio ad absurdum,
which is to say, bereft, forlorn, alienated, replicated by technology,
the nevertheless refractory body to which, unavoidably, we refer anything
on a screen, in the ghostliness of three dimensions or in the
wraithlike space of the virtual. That live presence has been devalued in
mediatized culture, and that the degradation of the live has been compensated
for in large-scale live performance, rock concerts, or sporting events,
by "videation" or Diamond Vision and instant replays,19 still leaves us the
lamentable body in its dispossession, and given the scale of the media,
"little body little block heart ash gray only upright," which has been from
whatever beginnings the carnal datum of theater. As to what passes
through liveness when truly alive, no videation or instant replay can ever
get at that, what's there indubitably but invisible, right there before your
eyes. Merely the thought of it is sufficient to make theater, in the scenic
site of the mind, what beats there, as in the incipient madness of King
Lear. Which is not to say that it's realized in the theater as we mostly
know it, or even in performance art. Or that the theater as an institution
will ever again have the presence of the other media in our lives.
It is only to say that there's not much substance to theater that
doesn't occur in the space of indeterminacy between what's tangibly there,
or appears to be, and whatever images of mediatized representation are
there as a supplement to (the absence of) the real. It may be that we'll eventually
encounter some protovirtual version of what Schechner calls
"rasaesthetics," opening up performance to the whole sensorium; as if inspired
by the Natyasastra,20 the technological virtuosity of virtual reality
may, in the desideratum of embracing cultures, eventually program synesthetically
some aromatic and emotional fusion of proprioceptive experience,
bringing it instantly across continents to the entire world. But since
however and wherever the sensorium is expanded-it will still be
occurring in anthropocentric terms, the ancient problems of knowing remain,
with issues of identity and otherness too. And a major question still
to be responded to is the one asked years ago by my KRAKEN group, in a
work called Crooked Eclipses (derived from Shakespeare's sonnets), its initiatory
image of a suspended gaze, mirrored in the moment: "What is your
substance, whereof are you made, / That millions of strange shadows on
you tend?" (Sonnet 53). What, for all the resources, doesn't exist on film or
the electronic media is anything like those shadows, the ghostings, which
exist all the more in performance when-whether or not encroached upon
by filmic or video images with more seeming presence than the bodies on
stage-their presence seems most suspect.
Long before our consciousness of the media, or of mediated consciousness,
this paradox was apparent at the outset of Btichner's Woyzeck,
VIRTUALLY YOURS
which dramatizes what was, in Leipzig in 1821, the equivalent of a media
event: "What a murder! A good, genuine, beautiful murder!" as the Policeman
says at the end about what started as a strange sensation: "Quiet! ...
Can you hear it? Something moving! ... It's moving behind me! Under
me! .. . Listen! Hollow! It's all hollow down there!"21 And so it is in Beckett's
Endgame, when Hamm is pushed by Clov to the wall, something dripping
in his head ("A heart, a heart in my head")22 that, when push comes
to shove, you can never get on film-even the film of Beckett's Endgame.
As for the liveness in that drip, or the hollow, whatever it is that's moving,
it can't be remediated (or, as we used to say, represented) because, moment
by moment, right before your eyes in the becoming of theater (even if you
could hear the heartbeat), it's inevitably something less.
NOTES
1. See Jon McKenzie, Perform or Else: From Discipline to Performance (New York:
Routledge, 200ool).
2. John Cage, "Experimental Music," in Silence: Lectures and Writing (Middletown,
Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1974), 8.
3. Herbert Blau, The Audience (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press,
1990), 218.
4. Michael Fried, "Art and Objecthood," in Minimalist Art: A Critical Anthology,
ed. Gregory Battcock (New York: Dutton, 1968), 116-47. "The success, even the
survival of the arts," Fried wrote in 1967, "has come increasingly to depend on
their ability to defeat theater" (139). While disdaining Cage as well (in quality, relative
to Elliott Carter, no comparison) Fried's animus was directed mainly against
visual artists (Donald Judd, Robert Morris) who were undoing the epiphanic "presentness"
or "single infinitely brief instant" that-for Fried, to this day-is grace
(146-47).
5. Samuel Beckett, "Breath," in Collected Shorter Plays (New York: Grove, 1984),
211.
6. Philip Auslander, Liveness: Performance in a Mediatized Culture (New York:
Routledge, 1999), 54-55.
7. Margaret Morse, Virtualities: Television, Media Art, and Cyberculture (Bloomington:
Indiana University Press, 1998), 196. Of the various books proliferating in
this hyperactive scene, this is the most sophisticated that I've come across-and
the most evocatively written-in its own mediation between what media artists
are doing, from "telematic dreaming" to virtualizing physical space, and the shadowy
means required to do it, the "algorithms and abstract symbols in an imperceptible
realm of data" (5). To negotiate its seemingly endless prospects, cyberculture
demands a lot of imagination, and Morse respects it when it's there, while
keeping a jaundiced eye on its transcendent fictions and not losing sight of those
who, in the globalized here-and-now, still have next to no access to the profusion
of worlds online.
8. Quite recently we've seen the equivalent of this in the universe of video
games, which are deploying their newest technology for an increasing realism,
while warding off abstraction and its arbitrary rules. It may be that the credibilizing
effects are achieved by numerous buttons, triggers, and toggling switches, and
the computer keyboard, but the irony is that the most sophisticated technology, by
CRITICAL THEORY AND PERFORMANCE
546
Xbox or Nintendo today, is drawn upon for games with an animus against technology
or with a sort of primitive reflex, as if before technology, which-in the
regulated intricacy of its puzzling or fantastical worlds-departed too much from
the real, with its muscular sensations or plain old blood and guts.
9. Bertolt Brecht, "The Literarization of the Theater," in Brecht on Theater: The
Development of an Aesthetic, ed. and trans. John Willett (New York: Hill and Wang,
1964), 44.
10. Alice Rayner is especially perceptive on the rhetoric of telepresence that,
promoting it, fails to recognize that it usually occurs in the language of theatricality
("Everywhere and Nowhere: Theater in Cyberspace," in Of Borders and Thresholds:
Theater History, Practice, and Theory, ed. Michal Kobialka [Minneapolis: University
of Minnesota Press, 1999], 278-302). Thus, while the community of
telepresence is all over the place, or could be, in a global culture, the desideratum
is a sense of here and now, the materiality associated with an actual theater space,
which remains just that, a "place for seeing," even when the enveloped space of
wings and flies, and the binary of stage and audience, is amplified or otherwise
transformed by slides, films, video clips, whether for purposes largely scenic or
captionlike, or as a kind of dialectical image-source for the actors or the drama.
Whatever the apparent dispersal of the event, through the media or, prospectively
now, by way of the Internet, most of what presumably occurs in cyberspace is
there with an institutional referent and in the "language of dimensionality" (281).
11. Morse, Virtualities, 110o.
12. Herbert Blau, Take Up the Bodies: Theater at the Vanishing Point (Urbana: University
of Illinois Press, 1982), 299.
13. "Cyborgs at Large: Interview with Donna Haraway," in Technoculture, ed.
Constance Penley and Andrew Ross (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
1991), 16.
14. See Mark Dery, Escape Velocity: Cyberculture at the End of the Century (New
York: Grove, 1996), 11-12.
15. For many artists and social theorists, if sluggishly so in the theater, the
emergence of a global economy, projecting itself on the web, requires a radical and
unprecedented "upheaval in our historical perceptions of society and the subject."
If behavior at local levels has not quite caught up with the revolutionary prospects
of a net-based economy, much of what's happening in the artworld seems to be focused
there. "Net art, from physical local installations to world-wide network
computer games, has become the forum in which many of the emancipatory
hopes of the historical avant-gardes are being rephrased. Web art is a form of art
to which great political hopes are linked." Peter Weibel, "The Project," in net_condition:
art and global media, ed. Weibel and Timothy Druckrey (Cambridge: ZKM
Center for Art and Media/MIT Press, 200ool), 19.
16. Richard Sandomir, "In These 'Live' Olympic Games, It's a Matter of Timing,"
New York Times, February 22, 2002, C2o.
17. Cage, Silence, 3.
18. August Strindberg, preface to Miss Julie, in Strindberg: Five Plays, trans.
Harry G. Carlson (New York: Signet, 1984), 53-54.
19. Auslander, Liveness, 35.
20. Richard Schechner, "Rasaesthetics," Drama Review 45, no. 3 (2001): 27-50.
21. Georg Biichner, Woyzeck, in Complete Plays and Prose, trans. Carl Richard
Mueller (New York: Hill and Wang, 1989), 111, 137-38.
22. Samuel Beckett, Endgame (New York: Grove, 1958), 18.
Dracula's Daughters: In-Corporating
Avatars in Cyberspace
Sue-Ellen Case
In Dracula's Legacy (Draculas Vermichtnis), Friedrich Kittler wittily deploys
the elements in Bram Stoker's Dracula to image the new relations between
women and technology.1 For Kittler, Dracula illustrates the anxieties, possibilities,
and repressive strategies that accompany women's emerging
role in the use of new technologies. Two characters represent a simple bifurcation
of women's roles: Mina Murray, who knows stenography and
the ways of the typewriter, and her friend Lucy Westenra, who is bitten
by the vampire and thus confined by doctors and other men, who scrutinize
her "hysterical" behavior.
Mina Murray figures the secretaries who will transcribe patriarchal
discourse throughout much of the twentieth century, transforming the individual
writing or speaking of men into an objective script that can bind
together the transactions of business and nation.2 She will enter the office,
the workforce, as an adjunct of men, in an unequal relation to their labor,
social standing, and salary. Mina will operate what Kittler, in a German
agglutinate, terms the "discoursemachineweapon" (Diskursmaschinengewehr),
the Remington typewriter, developed and capitalized by the company
that made weapons for the Civil War (29). In the later twentieth century,
Mina would represent not only the women at the keyboard, but also
those women in Third World Special Economic Zones whose labor on the
machine produces its internal parts. They produce the "discourse machine"
that bears the load of First World software designers, who are, for
the most part, men.3 In sum, Mina signifies the gendered production of uneven
power between men and women in the new techno-economy. While
women enable the transmission of the discourse, they do not create it.
Meanwhile, back in the bedroom, Lucy Westenra has been suffering,
or enjoying, nightly visits from Count Dracula. Her perforated body, exhibiting
the tracks of his bites, along with her wanderings, "delusions," and
illicit lust bring her under the scrutiny of doctors and other "rational" men.
They attempt to confine her to the bed, or the divan, where she will serve
as the object of psychoanalytic "truths" of the time concerning hysteria.4
The rational men huddle around her body, which is clothed in a revealing
and suggestive peignoir. Her misbehaving, induced by illicit penetration,
provides a rationale for the men to murder the "foreign" Count Dracula.5
Although it is important to bind these two roles together in order to fully
understand how women have been situated in the world of emerging technologies,
it is Lucy's role that I would like to develop here as the precursor
of the construction of the sign "woman" within the new technologies. Her
perforated body signifies the drive toward increasing interactive relations
547
CRITICAL THEORY AND PERFORMANCE
548
between machinic devices and corporeality. She represents how images of
women's bodies are put to the uses of virtual penetration.
Between the user and the various machines of communication,
analysis, and production, the screen stages their interactivity through
images that have historically represented notions of identity, desire, and
anxiety.6 Software design enables the play of images as functions of interactivity
(the GUI, or graphical user interface). In order to do so, it necessarily
borrows from the lexicon of familiar signs to represent the users and
their actions in the cybersphere. As users find themselves more and more
imbricated in the web of new technologies, an increasing need for some
sign of location, or identity, is needed to locate users' functions. The sign
for "woman" serves to manage this interaction, lending appeal and allure
to the functions. As Kittler reminds us, this woman was first perceived as
that sexy stenotypist who first replicated men's discourse on the machine.
Soon her image began to be produced within the cultural imaginary to
figure the interactive functions with machines as both seductive and
threatening. She appeared as a robot in films like Metropolis, or The Stepford
Wives, which narrativized the need for discipline that her seductive
qualities still required from the men she would serve. The sign system
was up and running in its traditional semiotic production of the sign
"woman," but still required new management of her referents. "Woman"
was securely in the machine, but her referents were not yet fully absorbed
by the new synergies of scientific, corporate, and social technologies.7
"Woman" would need to exit, completely, her referents to the "real"
world in order to successfully marry into cybersociety.
A variety of performance practices stage these relations between
gender codes and the virtual spaces of new media. I have selected a few
examples that trace a trajectory of signification, from the staging of the
sign for woman and machine as a corporeal encounter, to the screening of
the completely virtualized avatar of gender. Hopefully, these few examples
can function as signposts of semiotic switching between the machinic
and the social. As we will see, the referents of gender coding undergo
a complete alteration as the corporate virtual composes its new
cyberspace.
Virtually Yours
The title of Kate Bornstein's performance piece Virtually Yours wittily captures
the inscription of ownership and desire in relations with the virtual.8
Discovered in the light of her computer screen, Bornstein narrates how
she, a transgendered male-to-female lesbian, is struggling with her girlfriend's
decision to become a female-to-male heterosexual. Bornstein
processes how her girlfriend's impending sex reassignment surgery confuses
her own identity, based upon gendered sexual practices. She listens
to a phone message from her girl-soon-to-be-boy-friend, telling her that
she should play the new computer game Virtually Yours. Thus, Bornstein's
body, already perforated by medical technologies as a reconstructed sex,
Fig. 1. Kate Bornstein, Virtually
Yours. Photo credit: Dona
McAdams.
sits before the terminal, where she will play the game of identity,
prompted by the voice on an answering machine. The (stored) object of
Bornstein's desire catalyzes her search for a locational identity in the new
virtual space. The telephone, after all, was the first instrument of virtual
interaction to really penetrate domestic spaces. In "The Telephone and its
Queerness," Ellis Hanson considers various erotic uses of the telephone,
insisting that phone communication is "a mechanism of fantasy and
pleasure," a site of perversions, and erotic behaviors, from the private
cooing of couples, to the completely commercialized performance of
phone sex.9 Hanson insists that through the telephone, "desire makes
brazen its age-old love affair with capital," where these phone-borgs are
"chips in the integrated circuit" that confuse "the conventional distinctions
between human and machine, desire and commerce" (35). In Bornstein's
piece, the phone messages are played on the answering machine,
which, like the computer, was designed to store data. The phone voice,
then, is the site of both the object of desire and the anxiety of being "cut
off." The lover is already a virtual one, whose absent body is being perforated
by surgical operations and hormonal injections.
Following her girlfriend's advice, and in hopes of assuaging her
grief and anxiety, Bornstein engages with the computer game (fig. i), 54
X\ii~ i : : xxxi! ! i~i::i:i::i
k \ :::::::::::::::::::::::: .................................:::::::: ::::::::::::::::::::
g i n : :::: ::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::
sits before the terminal, where she will play the game of identity,
prompted by the voice on an answering machine. The (stored) object of
Bornstein's desire catalyzes her search for a locational identity in the new
virtual space. The telephone, after all, was the first instrument of virtual
interaction to really penetrate domestic spaces. In "The Telephone and its
Queerness," Ellis Hanson considers various erotic uses of the telephone,
insisting that phone communication is "a mechanism of fantasy and
pleasure," a site of perversions, and erotic behaviors, from the private
cooing of couples, to the completely commercialized performance of
phone sex.9 Hanson insists that through the telephone, "desire makes
brazen its age-old love affair with capital," where these phone-borgs are
"chips in the integrated circuit" that confuse "the conventional distinctions
between human and machine, desire and commerce" (35). In Bornstein's
piece, the phone messages are played on the answering machine,
549
CRITICAL THEORY AND PERFORMANCE
550
which promises to act as a kind of cybertherapist. She relates and performs
scenarios of desire as her input into the game and simultaneously
as her "live" performance. She entices her audience to interact with one of
her S-M rituals, which once offered her both erotic pleasure and an identification
that placed her in proximity to her lover. As her scenarios increasingly
complicate the relations among identification, sexual practice,
desire, and loss, the game becomes unable to sort out the symptoms. Unlike
Lucy's rational doctors, who could restrain her through analysis and
cure the symptom by killing the Count, the cybertherapist ultimately suffers
a breakdown of its own identity, asking: "Who am I, when you don't
play the game?"
In one sense, Bornstein performs the triumph of the bodily regime,
something she also displays through her revealing costumes and seductive
play with the audience. Although she performs her location as somewhere
between medical technologies and two virtual systems, the
"live/corporeal" performer still runs the show. In effect, Bornstein "channels"
technology, rather than the reverse. In the terms of S-M, she "tops"
the process of interactivity, suggesting that the corporeal representation of
identificatory processes is still too complex to be entirely situated within
virtual technologies. The "live" still animates the technological, even
though it suffers loss and confusion in the process. Yet to stress only her
triumph over loss would not do service to the delicate balance Bornstein's
piece achieves. She is, literally as well as figuratively, illuminated by the
computer screen-the postmodern Lucy-perforated, but not perishing
from it.
While Bornstein performs the corporeal/virtual splits, uses of
"woman" appear within cyberspace, made to signify its own processes. In
the simplest form, "women" appear as avatars on the computer screen.
For those less familiar with online activity, avatars are images on the
screen that seem to represent the user. Often avatars can be selected at a
particular website, where a variety of images are stored. The more practiced
user might create her own avatar, using a photo, a photomontage, or
a cartoon character as her representative on the screen. Some avatars can
even perform limited movements, while others remain stationary, but
nearly all can be moved around the space of the screen, in varying degrees
of proximity to other avatars. Users may imagine their own participation
within cybersocieties in the form of these avatars.
The term avatar is borrowed from Hindu texts, becoming generally
familiar through the text of the Bhagavad Gita-the first epic story of
avatars.10 In Sanskrit, the term means descent, or a "downcoming." Etymologically,
the term Avatara is formed by the verb tri, meaning to cross
over, or save, with the prefix ava, which means down. Hindu theological
discussions of the appearance of avatars raised issues similar to those that
surround the uses of cyber-avatars today. For example, the eighth-century
philosopher Sankara raised the problem of dualism in the notion of the
avatar. Sankara argues that if Brahma is only One, how can he be twoboth
Brahma and his incarnation, or avatar? Sankara solved this seeming
DRACULA'S DAUGHTERS
551
contradiction by insisting that the manifestation of the god is not a "real"
incarnation, but merely another image within maya-the veil of illusion
(50). The online avatar raises a similar question: is the online avatar a
mask of a "real" user, whose "presence" is, somehow, acting online, or is
it simply a part of a complete simulation-merely another empty cipher
in the veil of cyber-maya?
Jennifer Gonzalez, in her article "The Appended Subject," offers a
useful mediating definition of the avatar, situating it somewhere between
a cyborg, an amalgamation of the corporeal and the virtual, and a complete
substitution. Gonzalez summarizes the general understanding of
the avatar as "an object constituted by electronic elements serving as a
psychic or bodily appendage, an artificial subjectivity that is attached to a
supposed original or unitary being, an online persona understood as
somehow appended to a real person who resides elsewhere, in front of a
keyboard."1 Applying this definition, the avatar offers an identificatory
fantasy of appearance, constructed with elements of fashions in the corporeal
world: industrial logos, Japanese anime, MTV, and comics. Yet no
code is more crucial in configuring the avatar than that of gender. As
avatars represent the user in online chat rooms, the appearance of gender
often determines with whom and how the players will chat. Note that the
operating definition of the avatar still seems to be in relation to the user.
Before moving away from that traditional understanding, a consideration
of an actual online performance might aid in understanding how avatars
function in cybersociety.
Waitingforgodot.com
From the many possible uses of the avatar, I have selected an online
performance entitled waitingforgodot.com for several reasons: first, for its
familiarity of reference to those who study performance; second, because
it represents an actual online performance piece; and finally, because
it is designed to stage some of the issues crucial to this study.
Waitingforgodot.com premiered at the Third Annual Digital Storytelling
Festival in Colorado in September 1997. It was created by Lisa Brenneis
and Adriene Jenik. The performance takes place in a chat room at a site
called The Palace.12 In this space, where avatars roam and users seek
chat-mates, two roundheads appear, reciting their version of some of the
most familiar lines from the play. They do not announce their performance
as such, but, as cyber street-theater, they simply perform in a public
space. In fact, waitingforgodot.com could be perceived as a new kind of
street theater in the cybersphere, erupting in social spaces where people
pass through or hang out. It offers a witty commentary on people hanging
around in chat rooms with nothing to do or say and nowhere to go.
However, as we will see, avatars resemble people, but do not necessarily
represent them.
In Beckett's play, the tramps represent a minimalist, existential version
of Everyman. Beckett's characters are literally Everymen, in a world
Fig. 2. Waitingforgodot.com. © Adriene Jenik and Lisa Brenneis. Digital capture
by Adriene Jenik.
of men, retaining stable gender referents in his play.13 In contrast, waitingforgodot.com
deploys images derived from Pacman video games and
happy-face logos, which seem to suggest unmarked characters. They bear
no markings of gender or "race." Everyperson, then, or better, "Everysignifier,"
is a cartoon image developed by the computer game industry and
corporate ads to signify as neutral and happy. The two floating heads are
literally severed from referents to corporeal existence. Their unmarked
status is part of the strategy of this performance. As is evident in the accompanying
illustration, the "performers" are quite unlike the other
avatars in the chat space. "Palace Princess" offers a scantily-clad female
figure without a head, while Hedge Witch and Jen portray young, hip, seductive
fashions (fig. 2). Those choosing to appear as male offer more
punk or gothic versions of "self," identified as Bloody Razor and Clan
Wolf. They are fully clothed, signaling masculinity through their bold
looks out to the screen, or the tough violence suggested by their names.
Interestingly, in this example, the masculinized avatars are composed of
photos, while the feminized ones are cartoon-type characters. It is important
to remember that this illustration represents an accidental grouping,
merely archiving a moment in a chat room. The avatars, then, reveal a
characteristic array of hypergendered features in their composition.
If we identify the roundheads in waitingforgodot.com as performers,
what does their status imply about the nature of avatars in general? Are
the other avatars in the chat room also performing? Do all avatars function
552
DRACULA'S DAUGHTERS
553
like masks, or only when the user intends to perform? To understand the
avatars as masks would agree with the received notion that they function
as identificatory images for the user. Two sets of problems militate against
this interpretation. The first has to do with traditional assumptions about
the nature of masking and the second with the nature of the online conventions
of representation. First, the definition of character and mask depends
on the associated term of actor, or the indication of some "presence"
behind the mask. Indeed, the sense of a subject as constituted before representation
is what Judith Butler nominates as performance, against her
concept of performativity.14 Lurking behind the mask and the character is
the "actual presence" that has somehow been altered, or represented by
the mask. In other words, the mask depends upon some notion of the
"real," or the "natural" for its function. Nietzsche, in his study of the classical
Greek mask in The Birth of Tragedy, offers a hyper image of the relation
of the mask to the essential that emphasizes these qualities: "The Sophoclean
hero-the Apolline mask[s] ... are the inevitable products of a glance
into the terrible depths of nature: light patches, we might say, to heal the
gaze seared by terrible night."15 For Nietzsche, as for the Hindu scholar
Sankara, the notion of mask and avatar borders on incarnation-the idea
that a god, or some figure of ideality is corporealized in the process of making
theater (51). In the cybersphere, the corporeal resides in the function of
the user, with the avatar serving as her or his virtual mask. Either way, the
sense of avatar as mask points us back to the play of essences, the necessary
stipulation that there is a user, whose "real" self is altered by the
avatar.
Much of the discussion about avatars does presume this relationship
between avatar and user, subjecting the dynamics to a scrutiny of identificatory
processes and masquerade. Utopic visions of a sphere where crossgender
identifications abound, alongside feminist warnings against any
belief in the possibility of "free" play within the gender regime. Yet both
sides would agree that the users are, somehow, performing versions of social
identities and relationships in cyberspace. Anterior notions of "self,"
volition, or agency, and clear, stable attributes of social organization are required
for the backdrop behind this theater of avatars. As I have argued
more fully in The Domain-Matrix, many of these attributes are specific to an
earlier form of capitalism and do not reflect the contemporary, corporate
structuring of social relations.16 Given the corporate, commercial takeover
of what was once considered to be private space and discourse, the referents
of the sign system no longer reside in the kind of natural environment
Nietzsche and traditional studies of the avatar presume. Specifically in this
study of the avatar, the signification of gender, or, as we will see, "race,"
has less to do with promoting an identificatory process between user and
avatar than with promoting the avatar onscreen. In other words, avatars
do not function as masks for users, but as brand names, or logos, competing
in a commercial space.
Returning to those roundheads in waitingforgodot.com, whose function
of Everysignifier is derived from computer games and corporate
CRITICAL THEORY AND PERFORMANCE
554
"happy faces," we can see how the avatar references structures of corporate
branding and even the status of the technology itself. The cartoon
avatar, such as a Disneyfied diva in the chat space, is drawn to resemble
the private body of earlier capital relations, but, in its cartooned abstraction,
signals the corporate reference at its root. The digital diva is a representation
of gender codes used to articulate the interface between that anterior
sense of the private and the live with new, corporate virtual
systems. The diva is the hostess, so to speak, who promotes forms of interaction
that seem familiar and enticing in the new cyberspace. The users
who promote themselves through these avatars, such as Jen or Hedge
Witch, are animating the interface for themselves, seduced and seducing
the users to use the new products of corporate technology.
In one sense, Mark Poster prefigured this notion in his theory of how
something like a subject position appears within a database. Poster notes
that when so much information about a person congeals in the data, a
kind of "double" of the subject actually appears there, but that that subject
is one completely interpellated, or overdetermined by dominant ideologies.17
I want to continue in this line of reasoning, but abandon any notion
of a subject online; instead, I want to draw the relations among avatars on
the screen as interfetish object relations. As data and functions congeal
around an avatar, it acquires the seductive qualities of the fetish. Its seductive
qualities compete for focus with other online objects within the
competitive, commercial relations of the cybersphere.
The cyberworld of interfetish relations is simply one of the final
frontiers in the development of corporate uses of the logo. Rather than
serving users as masks for their identificatory fantasies, avatars actually
function as forms of logos. In her brilliant study No Logo, Naomi Klein offers
a history of the rise of the corporate "branding" that ultimately produced
the logo-centric surround of the new millennium. She notes that
"the first task of branding was to bestow proper names on generic goods,
such as sugar, flour, soap, and cereal . . . Logos were tailored to evoke
familiarity and folksiness."18 Enter Uncle Ben, Aunt Jemima, and Old
Grand Dad, who substituted for rice, flour, and whiskey. As corporate
branding became more sophisticated, actual people began to stand in for
the logo, as well as the more cartoon-characters. By now, we are accustomed
to make a product association with movie stars or sports stars, as
well as talking Chihuahuas and Bart Simpson. The personalized logos signify
products or the conglomerate behind products. Magic Johnson
means Nike and McDonald's can extend its referent through any number
of toys that resemble familiar cartoon characters. Klein further develops
how logos are placed within movies, novels, and other so-called cultural
venues. Situating the logo within civic and cultural spaces spawned what
the Wall Street Journal identified as the "experiential communication" industry,
"the phrase now used to encompass the staging of branded pieces
of corporate performance art" (12). We now have branded hotels, theaters,
theme parks, and even little villages. The brands loop back into their own
worlds through synergies of entertainment and products, creating, as
DRACULA'S DAUGHTERS
Starbucks calls it, "a brand canopy" (148). Brands, Klein argues, "are not
products but ideas, attitudes, values, and experiences . . . the lines between
corporate sponsors and sponsored culture have entirely disappeared"
(30).
Gendered characterizations, particularly those that are sexualized,
have been promoted in this logo culture to create the logo, or in our case
the avatar, as fetish. To reverse Freud's equation, the referents of sexual
practices are made to serve as fetish object of product lines. Jean Kilbourne,
a scholar of advertising, emphasizes that the average person in
the United States is bombarded by three thousand ads per day.19 Kilbourne
notes that many of these ads create what she terms a "synthetic
sexuality"-one that designates a certain body type, gestural system, and
fashion sense as sexy. The referent is not sex; on the contrary, sex is the referent
for the product line, or more, the corporation behind various product
lines. Hyperfeminized avatars, then, circulate among the other logos,
competing for focus and acting out corporate and technological relations
as seductive and even as sexual. Their referent is not the user, but the corporate
logos that comprise the image of the avatar.
Astrid Deuber-Mankowsky has composed a sophisticated treatment
of the avatar of Lara Croft, the protagonist of the computer game Tomb
Raider, that illustrates how the sexified, powerful Lara stands in for corporate,
technological success. In the narrative of the game, Lara appears as
a "white," upper-class, British archaeologist off on adventures in the
Third World. She is scantily clad, but tough, with weapons and martial
arts in her arsenal against the Other. She is viewed from behind, suggesting
that she represents, or works for, the game player. Many feminist
treatments of Lara replicate the traditional focus on the user's identificatory
processes, debating her subject/object status for the mostly male
players, who both desire her and identify with her. Deuber-Mankowsky,
however, argues that Lara Croft functions not as a character, a Spielefigur,
but as a Werbefigur, an ad.20 The composition and function of Lara serves
to perform the imaging power of the thirty-two-bit platform and the 3-D
graphics card. She is the sexy diva that attests to the imaging power of the
Sony PlayStation. In other words, an avatar of a heterosexualized, white
woman offers a ground for the imaging of the new convergence of filmic
and digital possibilities that made the game Tomb Raider popular. Lara
represents the high level of 3-D simulation that the successful upgrading
of the computer platform and graphic card allowed in the construction of
the game. Her whiteness and gender work together to create an alluring
and powerful image of new technologies at work in the world.
Cyber-minstrelsy
Like Lara, the majority of avatars on the net signify "whiteness," or
stereotypical Anglo-American characteristics, yet there are also several
uses for racial and ethnic markers in the logo-centric space. The earlier examples
drawn from the initial stage of "branding," such as Uncle Ben and
CRITICAL THEORY AND PERFORMANCE
556
Aunt Jemima, present two logos based on racial stereotyping and nostalgia
for the "Old South." While today, the image of a "mammy" and a
"house servant" may seem dated in their form of representation, Spike
Lee's film Bamboozled attests to their continuing power of representation
in the late twentieth century. Bamboozled tells the story of a TV executive
who becomes successful by producing a new series called Mantan: The
New Millennium Minstrel Show. A dancing Aunt Jemima, along with a chorus
line of minstrels, helps to make the series a popular success. Lee suggests
that the current enthusiasm for black performance in mass media
entertainment is just another form of the minstrel show, with similar
stereotypes still capable of drawing an enthusiastic audience.
Imagining that we are part of a contemporary sophisticated, urban
audience, or buying public, it would seem that these antique markers of
ethnicity would not produce much allure. Why would a minstrel masking
of race be effective in this time of so-called multicultural social practices?
The answer may lie, in part, in the kind of economic conditions that encourage
such strategies of othering. In both the mid-to-late twentieth century
and the mid-nineteenth century, when minstrel shows were invented,
major shifts in capital investment and labor practices caused high
anxiety in certain sectors of the population. In his book on minstrelsy, Love
and Theft, Eric Lott locates the beginning of minstrel shows in the 184os,
during the depression that followed the panic of 1837.21 According to Lott,
the new consolidation of industrial capital caused high unemployment
among the laboring classes. Lott argues that during industrialization,
these minstrel shows, depicting "happy" slaves singing and dancing on
the porch of the old cotton plantation, played out nostalgia for preindustrial
times (148). But this nostalgia for the time of the "happy old
slave" did not operate through identification with the slave. Remember
that minstrel shows were the product of white entertainers in the northeast,
who portrayed black, slave culture in the "Old South." The blacks
were represented as unruly and uncivilized in their lusting after a good
time. Their unruly behavior served two functions: to render the agrarian
past as less structured and more fun than the new industrialized time,
and to identify unruly behavior as specifically "black." Lott cites reviews
of the minstrel shows that describe a "savage energy," with performers
whose "white eyes [were] rolling in a curious frenzy" (140). He notes that
when these performers cross-dressed as women, they portrayed the black
women as enormous, gorging themselves on food and sex. In this way,
Lott suggests, the minstrel shows displaced anxieties over unemployment
to a performance of racial hierarchies. By encouraging racist and sexist
prejudices, the enjoyment taken in the minstrel show displaced the uneasy
contest among whites for low-level employment in the Northeast
onto contempt for blacks in the "Old South." This form of working-class
entertainment thus consolidated the audience, through their laughter, as
"whites" (137). Further, their masculinity was shored up by the sexist
rhetoric and the portrayal of heterosexual relationships as ones in which
women were subordinate to men.
DRACULA'S DAUGHTERS
Many of the anxieties and solutions to the problems in the 184os
may also be identified within the current digital age. In the digital age,
which arguably began in the 198os with the invention of the Internet, the
"upload" of economic prowess and employment possibilities into the
electronic sphere has caused similar kinds of anxieties among workers.
New firms and new job descriptions are replacing old ones, while many
kinds of companies and forms of employment are disappearing. Skills
with new technologies and software are required for everything from job
skills to personal communication, and entertainment. Economic envy and
fear among white, working-class sectors could be allayed by a form of entertainment
that operates through stereotypes of black masculinity and
white feminine allure. Sex and violence, those two markers of mass entertainment
in the 199os and onward, mask those anxieties through stereotypes
that promise to initiate us into the land of the successful.
Imagining Internet representation as a play of racial stereotypes,
Guillermo G6mez-Pefia and Roberto Sifuentes opened the online "EthnoCyberpunk
Trading Post and Curio Shop on the Electronic Frontier." In
1994, G6mez-Pefa announced that they were going to infiltrate cyberspace
as "cyber-immigrants" or what Gomez-Pefna calls "cyber-wetbacks."
Their "Ethno-Cyberpunk" trading post traded in ethnic identities
both as a gallery installation and on the Internet. Avatars included Cyber
Vato, a "robo gang member"; E1lPostmodern Zorro; and El Cultural Transvestite.
Visitors to the website sent in images, sound, or texts about how
Mexicans, Chicanos, and Native Americans of the 199os should look, behave,
and perform.22 The artists then reproduced these stereotypes to represent
ethnic identities online. In other words, these artists only reproduced
stereotypical notions of how Chicanos and Native Americans seem
to appear, in order to compose their avatars, or the online representatives
of these members of ethnic communities. Displayed within a trading post,
the stereotypes are elements of exchange. Whatever seems to be a referent
to ethnicity is used for its product value.
Once more, Jennifer Gonzalez offers an insight into the construction
of the avatar-this time as racialized. Continuing to operate on the assumption
that avatars represent identificatory fantasies, she notes that the
elements of racial stereotyping seem appealing and without threat because
"Race is understood not to 'matter' . . . in this online domain,"
which claims to be "outside" the economic and juridical systems. She continues,
"The idea of not being oneself is intimately tied to the conditions
of leisure and the activity of consumption."23 Gonzalez concludes: "It is
precisely through an experimentation with cultural and racial fusion and
fragmentation, combined with a lack of attention to social process, a lack
of attention to history.., that a new transcendental, universal, and, above
all, consuming subject is offered as the model of future cyber-citizenship"
(48). Even though she proceeds from a study of the subject, Gonzalez concludes
that the avatar circulates in a special economic zone of privileged
consumption, unmarred by considerations of labor and legal practices.
So it seems that both in this study and in studies that imagine the
CRITICAL THEORY AND PERFORMANCE
558
avatar as a subject, racial and ethnic markers reference little else but market
strategies. Yet to condemn all representations of ethnicity online
would only affirm the Anglo, "white" economy of representation that
controls most of the online figures, bolstering the dominant assumption
that the unmarked space of representation is, indeed, "white." For an imaging
of ethnicity that is funky and playful, rather than the sort deployed
by corporations such as Benetton, we can return to another performance
staged by Adriene Jenik. This time, Jenik uses the screen as a dreamscape,
in which a player may narrate a dream that the others will inhabit and
draw as it proceeds. The dream is called Riverofsalsa.
Riverofsalsa
Catwoman, coded Latina, enters the space. The space, the mise-en-scene,
begins as a generic, unmarked road. Scotty appears in "barrio" wear,
with a boom box. Catwoman narrates her dream, while drawing on the
screen visualizes it. The two avatars meet, a taco is suggested; then, suddenly,
a river of salsa, flowing from the food, overtakes the space and the
characters, immersing them (fig. 3). Ethnicity is marked by the fashion in
clothing, in the actual drawing of Catwoman, in items such as the boom
box, and in the references to a specific ethnic cuisine. Certainly, these are
stereotypical images of ethnic subcultures. Perhaps they fill the formula
that G6mez-Pefia and Sifuentes would identify as trade in the "EthnoCyberpunk
Trading Post."
As Beth Kolko outlines in her discussion of the online site LambdaMOO,
there is a "growing awareness that technology interfaces carry
the power to prescribe representative norms and patterns, constructing a
self-replicating and exclusionary category of 'ideal' user."24 In order to intervene
in the construction of the ideal as "white," Kolko concludes that
the user must somehow force an ethnic marking into the system by choosing
a name with those specific associations, or by linguistic style, or by
ethnic references (216). Kolko's work raises some key questions: how can
we determine when these elements may serve an identificatory function
for the user, who does participate in the Latino subculture, or when are
they simply elements of ethnic fashion? Finally, would it matter whether
the user who was manipulating these signs were actually within the
Latino subculture or not? Isn't the point to "color" the representational
vocabulary of cyberspace?
Closing the Window
As these examples have shown, the interrogation of how signs of gender
and ethnicity operate online reveals less about the status of these codes in
the "real" world than the basic change in the sign system of the cyber. As
the frame of the real recedes from what are called immersive technologies,
so, too, does its power as a referent. Cyberspace stages a theater of masks
without actors, rendering the mask an antique form of the "live" that once
Fig. 3. Riverofsalsa. © Adriene Jenik and Lisa Brenneis. Digital capture by
Adriene Jenik.
presumed the taking on of social and private faces, different from one's
own identity. Hypergendered avatars and the practice of neominstrelsy
reveal a transitional phase, in which evocations of the "real" are still necessary
to manage the new theater of logos. Gender codes are used to signify
the allure and pleasure of new technological capabilities and product
lines, while neominstrelsy masks the globalizing sameness of synergies
with images of difference and diversity. The happy-face logo/avatar registers
the beginning of the transcendence of corporate representation in
cyberspace, in which gender and minstrelsy will no longer be required for
synergies to stage their competitive functions entirely without reference
to social conditions.
However, while the residue of difference still plays in the increasingly
monotone cyberworld, it may provide some small intervention into
the upload of signification. Even if gender and ethnic codes serve only as
fragments of identificatory processes for the ever-distant users, they
might be used to signal the conditions of those who are not invited into
the ranks of the privileged. Unfortunately, at this point, the sign for
"woman" serves pretty much the same function of seductive hostess as in
traditional uses, and ethnic markers seem to signal "hip," "young," and
hypergendered users on the make. But what if users with more activist
agendas began to people cyberspace with the images of the poor, the
weak, and the disenfranchised? What if the body types of the avatars did
not match the requirements of young, thin, toned, Anglo avahunks, or
559
CRITICAL THEORY AND PERFORMANCE
560
digital divas? What if they did not hang around chat rooms, but used
them as sites to organize, to educate, and to radicalize? What if they could
imagine the "discoursemachineweapon," as Kittler called it, as one of the
most powerful tools available for intervention-turning it back onto the
logos who would manage it?
What would it take to make that happen?
NOTES
1. Friedrich Kittler, Draculas Vermachtnis (Leipzig: Reclam Verlag, 199). Elsewhere,
I have argued for the vampire as a figure for appearance of lesbians in the
system of representation. I think the work there amplifies this article's focus on
gender rather than sexual practice. See "Tracking the Vampire," in differences 3, no.
2 (1991): 1-20.
2. Interestingly, Bram Stoker served as secretary to the eminent actor-manager
Henry Irving. The term secretary derives from the Latin "keeper of secrets."
It had a more prestigious connotation for men in the Victorian era, when it suggested
privy knowledge within the realm of public or governmental service. See
The History of the Secretarial Profession on the website of professional secretaries:
www.iaap-hq.org.
3. See Grant Kestler's "Out of Sight Is Out of Mind: The Imaginary Space in
Postindustrial Culture," in Social Text 11, no. 2 (1993): 72-92.
4. Nina Auerbach, in "Magi and Maidens: The Romance of the Victorian
Freud," Critical Inquiry 8 (1981): 290, notes that Bram Stoker took part in the Society
for Psychical Research in 1893, where he became acquainted with the notion
of female hysteria. In the chapter "Victorian Mythmakers," in Woman and the
Demon: The Life of a Victorian Myth (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1982),
15-34, Auerbach suggests that Svengali, from DuMaurier's novel Trilby, inspired
Stoker's Dracula. She compares an illustration of the unconscious Trilby onstage
with the swooning figure of an "hysterical" woman exhibited by Charcot.
5. As we know, this practice persists today, with the taboo of illicit penetration
providing a rationale for the murder of Matthew Shepard, among others.
6. I am indebted to Jeff Nyhoff for this clarification in his sophisticated, yetunpublished
work on performing the interface.
7. For a discussion of the multiple uses of the term technology, see the introduction
to Processed Lives: Gender and Technology in Everyday Life, ed. Jennifer Terry
and Melodie Calvert (New York: Routledge, 1997), 1-19.
8. Kate Bornstein, Virtually Yours, in o solo homo, ed. Holly Hughes and David
Roman (New York: Grove Press, 1998), 229-78. The visual elements of the performance
described here are taken from a video of Virtually Yours performed at
Josie's Juice Bar in San Francisco in 1994.
9. Ellis Hanson, "The Telephone and its Queerness," in Cruising the Performative,
ed. Sue-Ellen Case, Philip Brett, and Susan Leigh Foster (Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 1995), 37.
10. Edward Geoffrey Parrinder, Avatar and Incarnation (New York: Barnes and
Noble, 1970), 19.
11. Jennifer Gonzalez, "The Appended Subject: Race and Identity as Digital
Assemblage," in Race in Cyberspace, ed. Beth E. Kolko, Lisa Nakamura, and Gilbert
B. Rodman (New York: Routledge, 2000), 27-28.
DRACULA'S DAUGHTERS
561
12. For a complete discussion of desktop theater, see Adriene Jenik's "Keyboard
Catharsis and the Making of Roundheads," Drama Review 45, no. 3 (2001):
95-112.
13. On the point of gender, see James Knowlson's Damned to Fame: The Life of
Samuel Beckett (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1996). Beckett "felt very strongly
that the characters in his plays were either male or female and that their sex was
not interchangeable. There were many requests, sometimes fervent personal appeals
made directly to him, for women to be allowed to play the male characters
in Waiting for Godot. Beckett (or his agents) always turned them down, though he
himself showed signs of wilting several times under the intense emotional pressure
that was brought to bear on him" (610).
14. See Judith Butler, "Critically Queer," GLQ 1, no. 1 (1993): 258-308.
15. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy, trans. Shaun Whiteside (New
York: Penguin, 1993), 46.
16. Sue-Ellen Case, The Domain-Matrix: Performing Lesbian at the End of Print
Culture (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996). See, especially, the section
entitled "Bringing Home the Meat," which traces the commodification of social re-
lations.
17. Mark Poster, The Mode of Information (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1990), 97-98.
18. Naomi Klein, No Logo (London: Flamingo, 2000), 6.
19. Ms., December 2000-January 2001, 55
20. Unfortunately for some, Deuber-Mankowsky's monograph is in German:
Lara Croft: Modell, Medium, Cyberheldin; das virtuelle Geschlecht und seine metaphysischen
Tficken (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2001).
21. Eric Lott, Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 137.
22. For further information on this project and its attempt to "brownify" virtual
space, see http://www.telefonica.es/fat/egomez.html.
23. Gonzalez, "The Appended Subject," 45.
24. Beth Kolko, "Erasing @race: Going White in the (Inter)Face," in Kolko,
Nakamura, and Rodman, Race in Cyberspace, 318.
Contributors
Philip Auslander is Professor in the School of Literature, Communication, and Culture at
the Georgia Institute of Technology, where he teaches Performance Studies, Media Studies,
and Popular Music. He is a contributing editor to the U.S.-based TDR: The Journal of Performance
Studies and the Journal of American Drama and Theater, as well as the UK-based Performance
Research. He contributes regularly to these and other journals, and his books include
Presence and Resistance: Postmodernism and Cultural Politics in Contemporary American Performance;
From Acting to Performance: Essays in Modernism and Postmodernism; and Liveness: Performance
in a Mediatized Culture. He received the Callaway Prize for the Best Book in Theatre
or Drama for Liveness. His most recent book is Performing Glam Rock: Gender and Theatricality
in Popular Music. Auslander is the editor of Performance: Critical Concepts, a reference collection
in four volumes and, with Carrie Sandahl, co-editor of Bodies in Commotion: Performance
and Disability. In addition to his scholarly work on performance, Auslander writes art criticism
for ArtForum and other publications.
Rosemarie K. Bank is Professor of Theatre and Coordinator of Graduate Studies at Kent
State University. She has published in Theatre Journal, Nineteenth-Century Theatre, Theatre History
Studies, Essays in Theatre, Theatre Research International, Modern Drama, Journal of Dramatic
Theory and Criticism, Women in American Theatre, Feminist Re-Readings of Modern American
Drama, The American Stage, Performing America, and Of Borders and Thresholds. She is the author
of Theatre Culture in America, 1825-1860 and is currently preparing Staging the Native,
1792-1892. Several times a Fellow of the National Endowment for the Humanities, she was
editor of Theatre Survey from 2000 to 2003.
Herbert Blau is Byron W. and Alice L. Lockwood Professor of the Humanities at the University
of Washington. He has also had a parallel career in the theater, as cofounder and codirector
of The Actor's Workshop of San Francisco, then codirector of the Repertory Theater of
Lincoln Center in New York, and as artistic director of the experimental group KRAKEN, the
groundwork for which was prepared at California Institute of the Arts, of which he was
founding Provost and Dean of the School of Theater and Dance. Among his books are Take
Up the Bodies: Theater at the Vanishing Point; The Audience, To All Appearances: Ideology and Performance;
Nothing in Itself: Complexions of Fashion; Sails of the Herring Fleet: Essays on Beckett;
and The Dubious Spectacle: Extremities of Theater, 1976-2000. He is currently working on As If
An Autobiography.
Marvin Carlson is Sidney E. Cohn Professor of Theatre and Comparative Literature at the
Graduate Center of the City University of New York. He has received the ATHE Career
Achievement Award, the ASTR Distinguished Scholarship Award, the George Jean Nathan
Award for Dramatic Criticism, the Callaway Prize for writing in theater and drama, and is
a Fellow of the American Theatre. In 2005 he received an honorary doctorate from the University
of Athens. He is the founding editor of the journal Western European Stages. He is the
author of over one hundred scholarly articles in the areas of theater history, theater theory,
and dramatic literature, and his work has been translated into thirteen languages. His latest
book is Speaking in Tongues (University of Michigan Press, 2006).
Jim Carmody is Professor of Theatre and Dance at University of California-San Diego. He is
the author of Rereading Moliere and numerous articles, principally dealing with classical and
contemporary French drama. He is particularly interested in the history of mise en scene and
problems of translation. He serves on the editorial board of Le Nouveau Molidriste and was a
member of the inaugural Artistic Committee of Etant Donn&s: The French-American Fund
for the Performing Arts. He was one of the founding editors of TheatreForum and continues
to serve as one of its editors.
563
CONTRIBUTORS
564
Sue-Ellen Case is Professor and Chair of Critical Studies in Theater at UCLA and Director
of the Center for Performance Studies. A past editor of Theatre Journal, she has published
widely in the fields of German theater, feminism and theater, performance theory, and lesbian
critical theory. Her books include Feminism and Theatre and The Domain-Matrix: Performing
Lesbian at the End of Print Culture. She has edited several anthologies of critical
works and play texts. Her most recent book is From Alchemy to Avatar: Performing Science and
the Virtual.
Una Chaudhuri is Professor of English and Drama at New York University. She is the author
of No Man's Stage: A Semiotic Study of Jean Genet's Plays and Staging Place: The Geography of
Modern Drama, editor of Rachel's Brain and Other Storms: The Performance Scripts of Rachel
Rosenthal, and co-editor, with Elinor Fuchs, of the recently published critical anthology
Land/Scape/Theater. She is currently working on a project that explores the intersections of
theater and performance with the emerging field of critical animal studies.
Dwight Conquergood was a respected ethnographer, activist, and filmmaker who worked
with the Hmong community and street gangs of Chicago, as well as with refugees in Thailand
and the Gaza Strip. He was a dedicated teacher, mentor, and academic administrator.
He was Associate Professor and former Chair of the Department of Performance Studies at
Northwestern University, as well as Director of the Center for Interdisciplinary Research in
the Arts. He published (with Paja Thao) I Am a Shaman: A Hmong Life Story with Ethnographic
Commentary and coproduced two award-winning documentaries based on his fieldwork: Between
Two Worlds: The Hmong Shaman in America and The Heart Broken in Half. He published
in leading journals such as TDR and Theatre Journal, where in 2002 he published "Lethal Theatre:
Performance, Punishment, and the Death Penalty." He died in 2004.
Kate Davy is Dean of Arts and Sciences at Bentley College. She is the author of Richard Foreman
and Ontological-Hysteric Theatre and the editor of Richard Foreman: Plays and Manifestos.
Her work has appeared in Performing Arts Journal, Drama Review, Theatre Journal, and Twentieth
Century Literature. She served as theater review editor of Theatre Journal and associate
editor and managing editor of TDR. Her current book project is Born in the WOW Cafe: Making
Lady Dicks and Lesbian Brothers, Remaking Women's Theater.
Elin Diamond is Professor of English at Rutgers University. She is the author of Unmaking
Mimesis: Essays on Feminism and Theater and Pinter's Comic Play and the editor of Performance
and Cultural Politics. Among her many journal publications are essays on seventeenth- and
twentieth-century drama and Freudian, Brechtian, and feminist theory. Her work continues
to explore connections between performance, feminist, and critical theory, using texts from
early modernism through postmodern art. She is currently at work on a book on modernism
and transatlantic performance.
Jill Dolan holds the Zachary T. Scott Chair in Drama in the Department of Theatre and
Dance at the University of Texas at Austin. She is the author of The Feminist Spectator as
Critic, Presence and Desire: Essays on Gender, Sexuality, Performance; Geographies of Learning:
Theory and Practice, Activism and Performance; and Utopia in Performance: Finding Hope at the
Theatre. Her research projects include a critical memoir on lesbian feminism in the United
States and a critical history of queer theater in the United States since the 196os. She coedits,
with David Romain, the Triangulations: Lesbian/Gay/Queer Drama/Theater/Performance
series at the University of Michigan Press. She is the past President of the Women
and Theatre Program of the Association for Theatre in Higher Education (ATHE), and a
past President of ATHE itself. She is former Executive Director of the Center for Lesbian
and Gay Studies at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. Her articles
have been published in Theatre Journal, The Drama Review, Modern Drama, and Theatre Topics,
among other publications. She heads the Performance as Public Practice MA/PhD Program
at UT-Austin.
CONTRIBUTORS
565
Ellen Donkin is Professor of Theatre at Hampshire College in Amherst, Massachusetts. She
has published essays on Bernhardt and Duse (Turn-of-the-Century Women) and on directing
Gertrude Stein (Theatre Three). She published a collection of essays on feminist directing with
Susan Clement entitled Upstaging Big Daddy: Directing Theater as if Gender and Race Matter
and a monograph entitled Getting Into the Act: Women Playwrights in London, 1776-1829. She
co-edited with Tracy Davis a collection of essays entitled Women and Playwriting in Nineteenth
Century Britain. Professor Donkin has completed a play called Mistral.
Harry J. Elam, Jr. is Olive H. Palmer Professor in the Humanities, Robert and Ruth Halperin
University Fellow for Undergraduate Education, Professor and Chair of Drama, Director of
the Institute for Diversity in the Arts, and Director of the Committee on Black Performing
Arts at Stanford University. He is author of Taking it to the Streets: The Social Protest Theater of
Luis Valdez and Amiri Baraka and The Past as Present in the Drama of August Wilson and coeditor
of African American Performance and Theater History: A Critical Reader; Colored Contradictions:
An Anthology of Contemporary African American Drama; The Fire This Time: African American
Plays for the New Millennium; and Black Cultural Traffic: Crossroads in Performance and
Popular Culture. Elam's articles have appeared in American Drama, Modern Drama, Theatre
Journal, and Text and Performance Quarterly, as well as in several critical anthologies and journals
in Poland and Taiwan. He was also editor of Theatre Journal.
Josette F&ral is Professor of Drama at the University of Quebec at Montreal. She is a former
President and Vice President of the International Federation for Theatre Research. Her books
include: Mise en scene et Jeu de l'Acteur (2 vols.), Rencontres avec Ariane Mnouchkine; Trajectoires
de Soleil; and La culture contre l'art. She has also edited Acerca de la teatralidad; Mnouchkine und
das Thedtre du Soleil; L'Ecole du jeu: former ou transmettre; Theatricality; and Les chemins de l'acteur.
Her work has appeared in such journals as TDR, Modern Drama, Discourse, SubStance,
The French Review, and Cahiers de thdatre Jeu. She serves on the editorial boards of SubStance,
Essays in Theatre, Performance Research, and Investigation teatral.
Susan Leigh Foster is Professor of World Arts and Cultures at University of California-Los
Angeles. Choreographer, dancer, and writer, Foster began presenting concerts of her own
work in 1977. Since that time she has created several solo concerts that she has toured in the
United States, Canada, and Europe. She is the author of Reading Dancing: Bodies and Subjects
in Contemporary American Dance; Choreography and Narrative: Ballet's Staging of Story and Desire,
and Dances That Describe Themselves: The Improvised Choreography of Richard Bull. She is
also editor of Choreographing History and Corporealities: Dancing Knowledge, Culture, and
Power.
Jill Lane is Assistant Professor of Spanish and Portuguese at NYU, where she teaches
courses on performance in the Americas in relation to the histories of colonialism, neocolonialism,
and globalization. She is the author of Blackface Cuba, 1840-1895; her next project,
entitled Kodak Moments: Autography and Transnational Corporate Lives 1885-1985, examines the
development of modern autobiographical sensibility through a study of the international
history of Kodak and its key product, amateur photography. She is co-editor with Peggy
Phelan of The Ends of Performance. With Fernando Rosenberg, she is editing a special issue of
e-misferica, the multilingual online journal of the Hemispheric Institute of Performance and
Politics, on "Performance and Law," and she is editing an anthology on Latin American performance
and a volume on performance activist Bill Talen (Reverend Billy). She has been associate
director of the Hemispheric Institute (2005-06) and serves on its advisory board; she
has also served on the executive committee of the American Society of Theatre Research.
Daphne Lei is Assistant Professor of Drama at University of California-Irvine. Her essays on
Asian and Asian American theater, Chinese drama, and intercultural performance have appeared
in The Blackwell Companion to Twentieth Century American Drama, Asian Theatre Journal,
and in Asian American Playwrights: A Bio-Bibliographical Critical Sourcebook. She has recently
published Operatic China: Staging Chinese Identity across the Pacific.
CONTRIBUTORS
566
Bruce McConachie is Director of Graduate Studies in Theatre at the University of Pittsburgh.
A past President of the American Society for Theatre Research, McConachie specializes
in American theater history, theater historiography, and cognitive studies and performance.
His major books include Performance and Cognition: Theatre Studies After the Cognitive
Turn (co-edited with Hart); Theatre Histories: An Introduction (co-authored with Zarrilli,
Williams, and Sorgenfrei); American Theater in the Culture of the Cold War: Producing and Contesting
Containment, 1947-1962; Melodramatic Formations: American Theatre and Society, 1820-
1870; and Interpreting the Theatrical Past (co-edited with Postlewait).
Ann Pellegrini is Associate Professor of Performance Studies and Religious Studies at New
York University. She is the author of Performance Anxieties: Staging Psychoanalysis, Staging
Race and co-author, with Janet R. Jakobsen, of Love the Sin: Sexual Regulation and the Limits of
Religious Tolerance. Her other publications include the co-edited volume Queer Theory and the
Jewish Question. She is currently completing a new book entitled Against Childhood.
Peggy Phelan is the Ann O'Day Maples Chair in the Arts and Professor of Drama at Stanford
University. She is the author of Unmarked: The Politics of Performance; Mourning Sex: Performing
Public Memories; and the survey essays in Art and Feminism and Pipilotti Rist. With the late
Lynda Hart, she co-edited Acting Out: Feminist Performances, and with Jill Lane, she co-edited
The Ends of Performance.
Thomas Postlewait is Professor of Theatre at Ohio State University. He specializes in
British and American theater studies and has published books and essays on both topics.
He wrote the long overview essay on American theater and culture (1865-1945) for volume
two of the Cambridge History of American Theatre. He has an essay on London theater (1895-
1918) in the Cambridge History of British Theatre, volume three. In addition, he contributed
fifteen entries to the Cambridge Guide to American Theatre and fifty-five entries to the Oxford
Encyclopedia of Theatre and Performance.. He has also edited the collected essays of William
Archer on the playwright Henrik Ibsen and authored Prophet of the New Drama: William
Archer and the Ibsen Campaign. He and Bruce McConachie co-edited Interpreting the Theatrical
Past: Essays in the Historiography of Performance. He and Tracy C. Davis have edited a collection
of essays by various scholars entitled Theatricality. Since 1991 he has been general
editor of Studies in Theatre History and Culture, a book series at the University of Iowa
Press.
Janelle Reinelt is Professor of Theater and Performance at University of Warwick, UK. Her
books include After Brecht: British Epic Theatre; Crucibles of Crisis: Performance and Social
Change; The Performance of Power with Sue-Ellen Case; and The Cambridge Companion to Modern
British Women Playwrights with Elaine Aston. Her essays have appeared in Theatre Journal,
Modern Drama, Performance Research, TDR, Contemporary Theatre Review, Theatre Research
International, Theatre Survey, and the Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism. She is President
and past Vice President of the International Federation for Theatre Research, former Vice
President for Research and Publications of the Association for Theatre in Higher Education,
and past editor of Theatre Journal.
Sandra L. Richards is Professor of Theatre, African American, and Performance Studies at
Northwestern University. She has published articles on such African-American playwrights
as Amiri Baraka, Ntozake Shange, August Wilson, and Nigerian dramatists Wole Soyinka,
Bode Sowande, and Zulu Sofola in Theatre Journal, New Theatre Quarterly, Critical Theory and
Performance edited by Reinelt and Roach, and Performance and Performativity, edited by
Parker and Sedgwick. Her full-length study entitled Ancient Songs Set Ablaze: The Theatre of
Femi Osofisan was selected by Choice as one of the outstanding academic publications of 1997.
From 2001 to 2004 she held the Leon Forrest Professorship of African American Studies,
which supported research on the eastern seaboard of the United States, in England, and at
other sites in her project on performances of memory at slave sites in the Black Atlantic.
CONTRIBUTORS
567
Joseph Roach is Charles C. and Dorathea S. Dilley Professor of Theater and English at Yale
University. His books and articles include Cities of the Dead: Circum-Atlantic Performance, The
Player's Passion: Studies in the Science of Acting, and essays in Theatre Journal, Theatre Survey,
The Drama Review, Theatre History Studies, Discourse, Theater, Text and Performance Quarterly,
and others. He has served as Director of Graduate Studies in English and Chair of the Theater
Studies Advisory Committee at Yale. In 2006 he won a Distinguished Achievement
Award from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. His most recent book, It, is forthcoming
from the University of Michigan Press.
David Romain is Professor in the Department of English and the Program in American
Studies and Ethnicity at the University of Southern California. He is the author of Performance
in America: Contemporary U.S. Culture and the Performing Arts and Acts of Intervention:
Performance, Gay Culture, and AIDS. From 1999 to 2003 he served as editor of Theatre Journal.
His most recent book is Performance in America: Contemporary U.S. Culture and the Performing
Arts.
John Rouse is Associate Professor in the Department of Theatre and Dance, University of
California-San Diego. He is the author of Brecht and the West German Theater: The Practice and
Politics of Interpretation and coeditor with James Harding of Not the Other Avant-Garde: The
Transnational Foundations of Avant-Garde Performance. He has written numerous articles on
contemporary German theater. He is an editor of TheatreForum and a past editor of Theatre
Journal.
David Savran is Distinguished Professor of Theater at the Graduate Center of the City University
of New York. His major publications include Breaking the Rules: The Wooster Group; In
Their Own Words: Contemporary American Playwrights; Communists, Cowboys, and Queers: The
Politics of Masculinity in the Work of Arthur Miller and Tennessee Williams; Taking It Like a Man:
White Masculinity, Masochism, and Contemporary American Culture; The Playwright's Voice:
American Dramatists on Memory, Writing, and the Politics of Culture; and A Queer Sort of Materialism:
Recontextualizing American Theatre. He is the editor of the Journal of American Drama
and Theatre, associate editor of Theatre Journal, and former Vice President of the American Society
for Theatre Research.
Richard Schechner is University Professor of Performance Studies at the Tisch School of the
Arts at New York University and editor of TDR: The Journal of Performance Studies. He is the
author of Public Domain; Environmental Theater; The End of Humanism; Performance Theory; Between
Theater and Anthropology; The Future of Ritual; and Performance Studies: An Introduction.
He is also general editor of the Worlds of Performance series published by Routledge.
Bert O. States was Professor of Dramatic Arts at the University of California-Santa Barbara.
His books include Irony in Drama; The Shape of Paradox: An Essay on Waiting for Godot; Great
Reckonings in Little Rooms: On the Phenomenology of Theater; The Pleasure of Play; and Seeing in
the Dark: Reflections on Dreams and Dreaming. His work appeared in many journals including
Theatre Journal, Hudson Review, New Literary History, Modern Drama, Journal of Dramatic Theory
and Criticism, Critical Inquiry, and American Scholar. He died in 2003.
Joanne Tompkins is Associate Professor at University of Queensland. She writes about postcolonial,
multicultural, and intercultural drama and theory; and Australian drama and literature
and Canadian drama. Her books include Post-colonial Drama: Theory, Practice, Politics
with Helen Gilbert, and Women's Intercultural Performance with Julie Holledge. She is editor
of Space and the Geographics of Theatre (special issue of Modern Drama) and Theatre and the
Canadian Imaginary (special issue of Australasian Drama Studies). In addition, she is co-editor
of Modern Drama: Defining the Field and of Modern Drama between 1999 and 2005. She has recently
published Unsettling Space: Contestations in Contemporary Australian Theatre.
CONTRIBUTORS
568
Phillip B. Zarrilli is currently Professor of Performance Practice at the University of Exeter
(UK). He has authored Kathakali Dance-Drama: Where Gods and Demons Come to Play; When the
Body Becomes All Eyes; and edited Acting Reconsidered. He is co-author of Theatre Histories: An
Introduction and is completing a new book/DVD-ROM, The Psychophysical Actor at Work. He
is also internationally known for training actors through Asian martial arts and yoga.
Index
ABCs (American-born Chinese), 139, 158-59, 166
Abhinavagupta, 122
abjection, 138
Aborigines, 68, 73-75
absence, 36n12
absolutizing tendencies, 3o8n1
abstraction, 138, 145
Abyssinia, 55
academics, 156, 168
acculturation, 56, 57
acting: Berliner Ensemble and, 295, 300-304, 307-8;
Brecht and, 295-99, 304-8; interior (soka bhiiva),
123, 125-27; vs. reproduction, 223; Smith and,
181; social change and, 296-300
action: audience and, 179-81, 185; reality checks
and, 188; repetition of, 312-13
active sociology, 265. See also sociology
activism, 311; contexts of, 22on33; race and, 151. See
also social action
Act Like a Man (Vorlicky), 314
actors, 14, 18, 30; agency of, 78; black tourists as,
93; body and, 327; Brecht and, 309n3, 309n4;
dancers and, 111; eroticism and, 329-30; guides
as, 94; historicization and, 265; masks and, 553;
mediatization and, 542; players as, 209-11;
tourism and, 89; tourists as, 92
Acts of Intervention: Performance, Gay Culture, and
AIDS (Roman), 315
Adams, Henry, 225, 239n5
Adams, Herbert Baxter, 233
Adorno, Theodor, 262, 268, 279
Adu-Arhin, Charles, 94
aesthetics, 2, 4, 293n3; congruence of, 126; of
kathakali, 122-25
affirmative action, 137
Africa: African American roots and, 88; castledungeons
of, 69; danz6n and, 148-49, 15o; race
and, 135; slave trade and, 94; as timeless, 102
African Americans: castle-dungeons and, 69;
Columbian Exposition and, 224, 230; dance and,
251; Ghanaians and, 107n58; Harlem Duet and,
68; heritage tourism and, 86; history and, 79-81;
memorialization of castle-dungeons and, 95-98;
museum exhibits and, 98-102; reactions to castledungeons
by, 91-93, 95, 98; roles as tourist and,
89, 95, 10o3; travel to Ghana by, 87; trope of family
and, 88, 89, 95; vs. diaspora Africans, 98
African Canadians, 80-81; Harlem Duet and, 68
African Diaspora, 98, 101
afrocentricity, 184
agency, 4; of actors, 78; narratives and, 99; Native
Americans and, 195; show Indians and, 229, 231;
tourism and, 86. See also subjectivity
agitprop, 269
Ahmad, Aijaz, 270
Aidoo, Ama Ata, 97
AIDS (Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome), 2,
312, 315, 372-89; end of, 372-76; Greenberg and,
381-85, 387-89; Jones and, 377-81, 385-87
Alceste (The Misanthrope), 37, 39-41; classics and,
42-46
alehouses, 207
alienation, 21, 260, 270, 279; defamiliarization and,
300-302; mediatization and, 536-37. See also
Verfremdung
allegory, 79, 198, 211, 214; in A Game at Chess,
203-4
Allemaal Indian (Platel), 51, 57-62; ethics and, 63;
identity and, 62; implications of, 60-62; openness
INDEX
570
animal rights: Churchill and, 506, 509-10, 512; Far
Away and, 506, 515, 517-18; rites and, 507-8, 511,
513-14, 516
Anna O. (Bertha Pappenheim), 435-38; Breuer and,
435, 438-41
Anniversary Waltz (Shaw and Weaver), 336, 340,
342-43
Anowa (Aidoo), 97
Ansah, Kwaw, 102
anthologies, 4, 6nn8-io
Anthropological Building, 195, 226
anthropology, 55, 231; ethnographic displays and,
226; philosophical branch of, 4; racism and, 230
Anthropology Department, 227, 229
anti-Catholicism, 203, 206-7; literature of, 214. See
also Catholic Church
anti-Chinese sentiment, 158, 163. See also under
China
anticolonialism: black Cubans and, 141; Cuban,
138; Cuban public sphere and, 143-44; in Ghana,
99-100oo; performance and, 146; postcolonial studies
and, 67; race and, 151
anti-colonialism: See also colonialism
Antigone (Sophocles), 300
anti-Spanish sentiment, 198, 206-7, 212, 214;
Charles and Buckingham and, 199
antitheatrical prejudice, 229, 230, 244. See also under
theater
anxiety, 73
Apache Indians, 229
apartheid, 72
aporia, 28
Appadurai, Arjun, 50, 52, 54-55, 64n4, 65n12, 252
apparatus, 275-79
"Appended Subject, The" (Gonzalez), 551
apperception, 28. See also perception
Appia, Adolph, 4
appropriateness: kathakali and, 125, 131n50;
Kathakali King Lear and, 121
Arawak Indians, 195, 228
Archer, Robyn, 73
architecture, 248-49; of castle-dungeons, 90, 91, 92;
of Chinatown, 163
archives, 194. See also documents; history
aristocrats, 205
Aristotle: identification and, 405-6
arrangement, 299
Arriz6n, Alicia, 314
Arsinoe (The Misanthrope), 38-39, 44
art: amateur, 167; blackness and, 174; commodification
and, 277; high vs. low, 230;
mechanical reproduction and, 175-77; objects of,
289
Artaud, Antonin, 4, 120
artifacts, 191; absence of, 92-93; ethnological, 226
Art Institute of Chicago, 231
artisans, 293n5; postartisanal production and,
290-91
Arundel, Earl of (Thomas Howard), 205
Aryan race, 136
asafo companies, loo
Asan, Kumaran, 114, 115
Asan, Padmanabhan, 115, 127
Asante (African empire), 89, 99, 103, 107n48
Asians: capital and, 167; Cuba and, 143
assimilation, 138; Indian, 226
Association Keli, 110
A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia
INDEX
571
Baartman, Saartjie, 8o
Bachelard, Gaston, 33, 35
background, 192-93
backlash, in settler colonies, 72, 83n9
Bacon, Francis, 218n10, 218n11
Badiou, Alain, 264
Baker, Houston A., 147, 177
Bakhtin, Mikhail, 93, 484; dialogic play and, 3
Balanchine, George, 432-34, 438, 452
Bald, R. C., 198
ballet: Anna O. and, 435-41; hysteria and, 442-45,
447-50; psychoanalysis and, 432-35, 437; transference
and, 444-48
Bamboozled (film), 139, 182-88, 189n26; cyberspace
and, 556. See also Lee
Bank, Rosemarie, 194-95
Barbra, Eugenio, 4, 13on27
Barfield, Deborah, 88
Barney, Matthew, 543
Barthes, Roland, 14-15, 22, 33-34, 36n20; Mother
Courage and, 3o9n15; "The Death of the Author"
and, 37, 41
Bartlett, Neil, 43, 45, 46, 47n7. See also translation
base/superstructure metaphor, 265, 272, 274, 275,
294nlo; production and, 287-88
Battle of Little Big Horn, 237
Baudelaire, Charles, 34
Baudrillard, Jean, 22, 60; animal rights and, 507-8,
511; technology and, 522, 525
Baxandall, Lee, 269
Bay Area, 156, 162; contemporary Cantonese opera
and, 158-6o; early Cantonese Opera and, 157-58
BBC Yearbook of 1934, 523, 526-30
beats, 298-300, 305
Beckett, Samuel, 551; Waiting for Godot, 524, 542
behavior, 13, 40
Beijing opera, 157, 164. See also Cantonese Opera
being, 27
Belasco, David, 292
Belfast, Lord (Ludovic Chicester), 205, 219n20
Belgium, 53. See also colonialism
Beloved (Morrison), 93
Benjamin, Walter, 22, 175-77, 192-94; Brecht and,
262, 268-70
Bennett, Susan, o108, 110, 120, 133n71
Bent (Sherman), 345
Berliner and Frankfurt Ausgabe (Brecht), 295
Berliner Ensemble: acting in, 295, 300-304, 307-8;
Brecht and, 295-99, 304-8, 309n6; social change
and, 296-300
Berlin Wall, 468-72
Bernstein, Robin, 139
Beuys, Joseph, 270
Beverley, Mrs. (The Gamester), 327-28
Bey, Twilight, 182
Bhabha, Homi K., 50, 52, 56, 59, 63, 68
Bhagavad Gita (Hindu myths), 550
Bhagavata Purana, 110, 129nlo
bhava (internal states), 111, 115, 123, 126-27
Big Black (Bamboozled), 183-84
Billington, Michael, 119
Birmingham School, 276
Birth of Tragedy, The (Nietzsche), 553
black expressive culture, 173
blackface, 137, 142, 146, 151, 174, 183-85; Cuban
nationalism and, 153; danz6n and, 150
Black Knight (A Game at Chess), 199; Gondomar as,
210-11
INDEX
572
Boheme, La (Puccini opera), 273
Bonwire, Ghana, 103
borders: Chinatown and, 168; as interstitial zones,
61
Bornstein, Kate, 548-51
bots, 523, 526-30
boundaries, 458; in Allemaal Indian, 59; of Chinatown,
168; crossing of, 60; ethics and, 63; ethnicity
and, 54; frontier as, 233; national, 50, 81; necessity
of, 63; new nationalisms and, 56; porous,
64; vs. openness, 51
Bourdieu, Pierre, 264-65, 273, 276-77, 279-80;
gender and, 313; historicization and, 276
bourgeoisie, 273; myths and, 33
Bowery Theatre (New York), 291
box office, 278
bracketing, 26, 28-30, 34
Bragdon, Claude, 223
brand-names, 274; direct theater and, 476-77;
virtual reality and, 554-55
Brandt, Noya and Bill, 9-11
break dancers, 254-55
breathing, 253
Brecht: absolutizing tendencies of, 3o8n1; actors
and, 309n6, 309nn3-4; Berliner Ensemble and,
309n6; direct theater and, 478; Palitzsch and, 48,
310onn43; rehearsals and, 309n3, 310n48; representation
and, 346-47
Brecht, Berthold, 4, 22, 29, 33, 38, 265-66; acting
and, 301o-5; apparatus and, 275-77; Brecht on Theater
and, 267n20; dialectics and, 306-8; Marxism
and, 268-72; mediatization and, 536-37; rationality
and, 279-81; social change and, 296-300;
study of, 14
"Brechtian Theory/Feminist Theory" (Diamond),
22
Brecht on Theater: The Development of an Aesthetic
(Willett, ed.), 265, 267n20
Brenneis, Lisa, 551
Brereton, William, 321-22, 324
Breuer, Josef, 436-38; hysteria and, 438-41
Brewer, Mary, 22
Brinsley, Richard, 324
Britain, 90
British Empire, 76
Broadway (New York City), 273, 274
Broadway Theatre (New York), 291
Brook, Peter, 69, 118, 128, 269, 296
Brown, Willie, 166
Browning, Barbara, 147
Bruner, Edward, 87, 492
Buckingham, Duke of (George Villiers), 218n6,
219n20; anti-Spanish entertainment and,
212; court intrigue and, 202; power of, 205-7,
208; Spanish marriage and, 199; as White Duke,
198
Buddhism, 16o
Buffalo Bill's Wild West Road Show, 195, 232, 234-
37, 242n21; scholarship of, 223
Buffalo Bill (William F. Cody), 230, 244n33
Bureau of Indian Affairs, 223, 226, 227, 229, 231,
240n6, 242n18; vs. Buffalo Bill's Wild West, 235
Bush, George H. W., 177, 178
business, 159, 212-13; nonprofit theater and, 37,
264, 274, 278; status of individual and, 287;
women and, 547
butch-femme aesthetic, 22, 287, 289-90; S/M and,
337-40, 344, 347-49, 356, 365
INDEX
573
casting: paratheatrical performance and, 159;
tourism and, 88-89, 94
castle-dungeons, 86-103; absence of artifacts in,
92-93; architecture of, 90-91; as contact zones,
86, 89; as contested term, 103-4; description of,
91-92; guides at, 94-95; history of, 89-90; as
memorials, 95-98; museum exhibits in, 98-102;
reactions to, 91-93, 95; spectator/actors and, 89;
tourism and, 87, 88, 103
cast party: as paratheatrical performance, 159
cathexis, 485
Catholic Church, 198, 211; anti-Catholicism and,
203, 206-7, 214; England and, 199; marriage of
Charles and, 208
Cattrall, Kim, 40-41
Cecil, Robert, 208
celebrations, 199-200
Ce1imine (The Misanthrope), 37-41; classics and,
42-44
cell phones, 252-54
censorship, 200, 201, 212, 218n11; of press, 207
census: in Rwanda, 53
center and periphery, 67, 70, 168
Cezanne, Paul, 35
Chakyar, Ammannur Madhava, 131n50
Chamberlain, John, 216
Chang, Henry, 166
Changeling, The (Middleton and Rowley), 209
chaos, 63
Chaplin, Angela, 73
Chaplin, Charlie, 34
character, 29-31; defects in, 58; epic, 124, 132n60;
identification with, 307; identity of, 78-79; in
kathakali, 111; in Kathakali King Lear, 113-14; language
and, 181; Mother Courage and, 303; multiple
roles of, 78; occurrences between, 297; reactions
of, 304; relationships between, 300-301;
soul and, 543; stock, 142; tragic, 127; women and,
326, 327. See also visam
charity: 159, 16o-61, 167-68, 170on16
Charles, Prince of Wales, 218n6; anti-Spanish entertainment
and, 212; court intrigue and, 202; English
public and, 199-200, 207; marriage and,
198-99, 205, 207, 208; motivations of, 205; Puritans
and, 203; Spanish marriage and, 198-99,
212; as White Knight, 198, 200
Charles II (King of England), 317-18, 329
chatterbots, 523, 526-30
Chatterjee, Partha, 144
Chaudhari, Una, 16, 314
Chemers, Michael, 230
Chesley, Robert, 345-47
Chicago, 173, 186, 194-95; Columbian Exposition
in, 223; museums in, 244n31; Potawatomi and,
228
Chicago Day, 228
Chicago History (Bragdon), 223
Chicago Tribune (newspaper), 230-31
Chicanos, 557
Chicester, Ludovic, 205, 219n20
Chief Twobites, 230-31
Childers, Jane, 63
China, 165-66, 167; history and, 17on21; Open
Door Policy of, 158; theater history and, 169n3,
169n4, 170n24; time and, 161
Chinatown, 156, 163; history of, 158, 162-64; as performance,
139; seniors and, 160-62, 170on16,
17on19; tangential citizens of, 168; virtual, 156-
INDEX
574
Cody, William E, 223, 228, 234-37, 243n29. See also
Buffalo Bill
coevalness, 139
Cogswell, Thomas, 202, 203, 214
Coke, Edward, 206
Cold War, 314
collaboration, 128
collectives, 175
Coloma, Carlos, 194, 200-201, 217n2, 219n16; politics
and, 204, 210, 212, 216
colonialism, 23, 72, 147; British, 183; castledungeons
and, 90; colonists and, 232-33;
cultural politics and, 484, 498-99, 507, 509;
decolonization and, 71, 72; ethnicity and, 53;
Ghana and, 102; internal, 68; museum exhibits
and, 99; neocolonialism and, 68, 101-2; Other
and, 119; postcolonial studies and, 67; precolonial
past and, 87; tourism and, 69, 87. See also
postcolonialism; Third World
Columbian Exposition, 223-38; authenticity and,
237-38; "Buffalo Bill's Wild West" and, 234-36;
"Buffalo Bill's Wild West Road Show" and, 234-
36; as heterotopia, 225, 227, 231, 236, 237; Indian
performers at, 227-31; layout of, 225-27; narratives
of, 194-95; as performance, 224-25, 228;
scholarship on, 223-24; Turner's frontier thesis
and, 231-34
Columbus, Christopher, 195; arrival of, 228
combination companies, 291
comedies, 302; classics and, 38-39
commerce, 231; culture and, 229; theatrical, 212-13
commercialism, 95
commodification, 259, 261-62; art and, 277; tourism
and, 86
communication, 253; experiential, 554-55; movement
and, 251
Communism, 270. See also Marxism
Communist Manifesto (Marx), 266n3
Communist Party, 269
Communists, Cowboys and Queers (Savran), 314
communities: black international, 141; imagination
and, 137, 138. See also utopia
compassion, 247, 254; imperialism and, 256n2
"Compassion" (Jaucourt), 195
compensation, 229
computers, 252
Condell, Henry, 212
Con don, sin don, ayer y hoy (del Monte), 151-53
Congress of Rough Riders of the World, 235, 236,
243n26
connections, 166-67
Connell, R. W., 314
connoisseurs of kathakali, 111, 117, 122, 125, 126
conquest, 223, 242n21. See also frontier
consciousness, iO-11, 17, 27, 31, 35; history of, 196;
psychoanalysis and, 396-98; women and, 328
consumption, 184
contact zones, 86; castle-dungeons as, 95; museums
as, 98, 102
content, 33
contestation, 41
context, 191, 192, 208; empathy and, 252; of A Game
at Chess, 194; A Game at Chess and, 201, 204-5;
historians and, 198; interpretation and, 194;
kinesthetic empathy and, 196; technology and,
253
contextual locations, 208-17; cultural ideologies
and, 215; discourse and, 213-15; historians and,
INDEX
critical theory, 191; "new" style of, 4-5; survey of,
6n9
criticism, anthologies of, 4
critics, 126, 158, 170n11; on Kathakali King Lear, 70,
119-21, 128
critique: performance and, 228; postcolonialism
and, 67
Crocea, Arlene, 380-81
Crossing (de Wet), 68, 71, 77, 79, 81
Cuba: black public sphere and, 141, 143-44;
conservatives vs. liberals in, 149-50; identity
and, 138; independence of, 149-50; performance
and, 142; racial distinctions and, 154n2; radicalized
entertainment and, 137
Cubanidad, 138
Cubanness, 142, 144; danzdn and, 147-50; fraternity
and, 150-51, 153; veladas vs. teatro bufo and, 153
cultural materialists, 23
cultural poetics, 193
cultural studies, 2, 193
cultural tourists, 69
culture, 22, 55, 1o8, 141-42, 165, 224, 231; borders
and, 61; capital and, 278; Chinatown and, 156;
codes and, 118-19, 120, 128; commerce and, 229;
continuity of, lo9; Hmong and, 482-86, 490-94,
497-501; ideologies and, 215; intercultural
contact and, 23; kathakali and, 123; mainstream
of, 328; memory and, 74-75; placement in, 20;
politics and, 220n33; postcolonialism and, 67;
power and, 193; production and, 288-89, 294nlo;
of queers, 273; relationships to, 19; shamanism
and, 487-90, 495-97; sociology of, 276-77; territory
and, 55; United States and, 274; veladas and,
152
Culture and Society (Williams), 276
culture of slander, 207
Cunning, Ronald, 174
Curjel, Hans, 300
curtain look, 114-15
Cushman, Charlotte, 290
cyberspace: body and, 542-45, 553-54, 559; mediatization
and, 536-37, 540-41; representation and,
555-58; women and, 547-52
cyborgs, 252-53, 257n17, 551
D'Aguirre, Pedro, 141-42
daily life, 63; museums and, 226
Daly, Augustin, 292
Daly (Gamester manager), 324
Damayanti (Nala Caritam), 123
dance, 111; Aboriginal, 74; Anna O. and, 435-41; in
Bamboozled, 183, 185; consciousness and, 196;
Cuban, 138, 149; emotion and, 249-50; empathy
and, 245, 251-52; hysteria and, 442-45, 448-51;
identity and, 138; inner mimicry and, 248-49;
psychoanalysis and, 432-35, 437; race and,
257n13; teatro bufo and, 142; technology and, 254;
on tightrope, 247, 248; transference and, 443-47;
universality and, 251. See also danzdn; kathakali
dance critics, 195
dance-drama, 69; aesthetics of, 122-25; appropriateness
and, 131n5o; audience of, 117; description
of, 110-11; epic characters and, 124, 132n60;
experimentation vs. tradition in, 121, 125; theatrical
conventions of, 112-14. See also kathakali;
Kathakali King Lear
danced spirituals, 257n13
dance historians, 192
"Dance" (Jaucourt), 247
dance of death, 183, 185, 189n26
INDEX
576
desire, 17-18; desiring machines and, 400-401;
ridicule and, 317; tourism and, 88; transference
and, 397
determination, 28, 264; historical, 297, 299-300;
overdetermination and, 275, 282n32; social, 307;
social production and, 287-88
determinism, 272, 279
deterritorialization, 51, 64n4, 66n23. See also
territory
Deuber-Mankowsky, Astrid, 555
Devan, P. K., 117
development, 90
de Wet, Reza, 68, 71, 77, 79
Dialectic of Enlightenment (Horkheimer and
Adorno), 279
dialectics, 297-99, 304, 306-8
Diallo, Amadou, 186
dialogic play, 3. See also Bakhtin
Diamond, Elin, 22, 314
diaspora Africans: dispossession and, 93; memorialization
of castle-dungeons and, 97; vs. African
Americans, 98
diasporas, 87-89, 98; Africans and, 87-89; at castledungeons,
95; Chinese, 157; dispossession and,
93; hybridity and, 136; memorialization and, 97;
national identity and, 55; progress narrative and,
99; Rwandan, 56; third space and, 56, 63
Diderot, Denis, 247, 250, 251
difference, 28, 81, 178-79, 182; diaspora Africans
and, 88; empathy and, 251, 252; race and, 81,
178-79, 182; representations of, 77; settler
colonies and, 68; tourism and, 85, 102. See also
race; racism
Digges, West, 321-22
digital technology, 523, 526-30, 535, 538, 540, 542-
43; video and, 189n25
dignity, 88
Dilemma of a Ghost, The (Aidoo), 97
Directorio Central de las Sociedades de Color, 151, 153
directors, 285-86, 292, 293n4, 296-98; interpretations
of, 305-6; methods of, 300
Directors on Directing (Chinoy), 292
direct theater, 457-80; Berlin Wall and, 468-72;
Daytona Beach and, 476-77; Mardi Gras and,
473-76; terror and, 478; Tiananmen Square and,
464-67, 470-71, 479
disassociation, 52-53. See also territory
Disco Project, The (Greenberg), 383, 387
discourse, 192; gesture and, 32-33; political, 213-15
discoursemachineweapon (Diskursmaschinengewehr),
547, 560o
disidentification, 399, 403. See also identification
disinheritance, 191
Disneyification, 236, 243n31, 274, 512, 516, 554. See
also New York City; Times Square
displacement, 49. See also place
distribution, 288
diversity: of spectators, 216
"Divine Standpoint," 28. See also frontality
DJ Surge, 187
documentation, 95. See also tourists
documents, 191-92. See also archives; history
Dolan, Jill, 20, 265, 267n22; gender and, 312, 315
Dollimore, Richard, 23
Domain-Matrix, The (Case), 314, 553
Dominis, Marc Antonio de, 198, 209
donations, 17on18
Donkin, Ellen, 315
INDEX
577
economism, 260-62; Marxism and, 274-75
edict on theater, 200, 218n11
education, 207, 226, 229
efficacy, 175-76
effigies: race and, 137
ego, 396-98
Einfiihlung (character identification), 307
Einzelgeschehnis (individual occurrences), 298
elaboration: kathakali and, 123, 124; Kathakali King
Lear and, 127
Elam, Harry, 139
Elam, Keir, 15-16, 31-32; gender and, 320
"Elect Nation" plays, 211
elements, separation of, 38
Eliante (The Misanthrope), 45
Eliot, T. S., 198
Elisabeth von R. (analysand), 436, 440
elitism, 230, 278; Columbian Exposition and, 225;
in Cuba, 146; interculture and, 1o9; tourism and,
87
Elizabeth (daughter of James I), 199, 205, 215
Elmina castle-dungeon, 86, 87, 89, 90, 91-93, 93;
museum exhibits at, 99, 101; responses to, 95. See
also castle-dungeons
embodiment, 32, 78-79; contemporary, 252, 254. See
also body
emcees, 159
emotion: empathy and, 254; inner mimicry and,
249; Kathakali King Lear and, 12o; movement and,
249-50, 251, 252; reality checks and, 188; social
standing and, 248; spectacle and, 247
empathy, 245-46; class and, 250, 251; contemporary,
252-55; historicization of, 255; identification
and, 247; inner mimicry and, 248-49; kinesthetic,
245-46; narrative and, 247-48, 251; universality
and, 250-51, 252
Empire Writes Back, The: Theory and Practice in PostColonial
Literatures (Ashcroft), 67
enclosure, 56; vs. opening, 49-51, 55-56, 61-62
Encyclopedia (Diderot), 247
engaged witness, 18o, 185, 186, 188
Engels, Friedrich, 274
England, 76, 90; alliance with France, 208; governance
in, 213; mentality and, 215; settler colonies
of, 68; Spanish influence on, 199; theater press of,
119; as white players, 198
Enlightenment, The, 135, 144, 279, 280, 281; sensibilite
and, 250
entertainment, 275; anti-Spanish, 211-12; violence
and, 185. See also apparatus
epic performance, 295
epics: Indian, 110o, 117-18, 129nlo; kathakali and,
124, 132n60o
epochi (bracketing), 26, 28-30, 31, 34
equality, 144; Indians and, 236; racial, 143
eroticism, 329-30; virtual reality and, 55°
Esherick, Joseph, 465-66
Esquimaux Village, 227, 229, 241n9
essence, 31, 32-33, 35
essentialism, 136, 314
ethics, 63; kinesthetic, 254; openness and, 63
ethnicity, 2, 23, 53-56; Aboriginal, 68; as boundary,
54; Chinatown and, 156; Chinese, 16o, 167;
Chinese Americans and, 161; identity and, 62,
136; nation-states and, 54-55; Rwanda and, 53
ethnism, 225
"Ethno-Cyberpunk Trading Post and Curio Shop
on the Electronic Frontier" (G6mez-Pefia and
INDEX
578
familiarization, 26, 35nl, 300-302. See also
alienation
family, 86-88, 89, 95, 103
Fanon, Frantz, 67, 165, 188
Far Away (Churchill), 506, 515, 517-18
Farley, Edward, 56
fascination, 120, 126
Fat Bishop (A Game at Chess), 198, 209, 211
fear, 250
female gaze, 326. See also gaze
female roles, 76; played by men, 115, 130on18
female subject, 325-27
feminism, 2, 13, 20-23, 311-15; books on, 24n29;
British theater and: 317-20, 323-27; hip poetics
and, 15o; phenomenology and, 12n5; representation
and, 339-42, 348-49; revisions of, 328; semiotics
and, 20-23; sexuality and, 334-38, 343-47;
Siddons and: 317-22, 327-30; slavery and, 91;
theater historians and, 191; trauma and, 415-20
Feminism and Theatre (Case), 13
Feminist Theatres in the USA (Canning), 314
Feral, Josette, 12, 17, 21, 23
Ferguson, James, o50, 52, 61, 62
Ferrer, Ada, 151, 155n27
Festival du Theatre des Ameriques, 51
festivals, 473
fetishes, 554-55
Field Museum, 244n31
Fields, Barbara Jeanne, 164
film, 189n25, 548; theorists of, 15
Film Africa, 102
Fine, Ben, 288
Fischer-Lichte, Erika, 11, 23
fistula, 210-11
FOB (fresh off the boat), 161, 162, 166
folklorists, 234
Fool (Kathakali King Lear), 113, 114, 125
Foot out of the Snare, The (Gee), 207
foreign nationals, 224
foreign policy of James I, 199, 204, 208
Foreman, Richard, 270
forensic archaeology, 194, 195
form, 33
formalism, 271
format, 253
Forrest, Edwin, 290
Foster, Susan, 195-96
Foster, Susan Leigh, 5
Foucault, Michel, 192, 195, 224-25, 232, 233, 246,
271; cultural politics and, 486; epistemological
critiques and, 5
fourth wall, 162
fragmentation, 66n16; of new Chinese, 165
framing, 32
France, 13-15, 16, 18; alliance with England, 208;
ancien rigime and, 39; dance critics of, 119; revolution
in, 39, 43; Seventeenth Century and, 37-
38, 43-46
France (Kathakali King Lear), 113, 125
Frankfurt school, 262
fraternidad, 138, 150-53, 155n27
freak shows, 230
Frederick of Bohemia, 199
free trade, 166
French Revolution, 39, 43
Freud, Sigmund, 21, 259, 266n4, 275; Breuer and,
435; hysteria and, 435; Lacan and, 5, 395-400;
sexuality and, 555; trauma and, 414. See also
INDEX
579
danz6n and, 147-50; drag and, 355-59, 365-69;
ideology of, 20; performance of, 75-77; public
sphere and, 145; sympathy and, 255n1;
transgendering and, 548
Gender Trouble and Bodies That Matter (Butler), 313
genealogy, 165-66
generalization, 215
generations, 158-59, 165-66
Genet, Jean, 16
genocide, 51-55; isomorphism and, 65n11; Native
Americans and, 195; in Rwanda, 51-53, 62-63
genres, 2-3; hybridization of, 56-57
gentrification, 279
gentry, 207; as audience, 216
Geographies of Learning (Dolan), 312
George, Henry, 284
Germans, 135
Germany, Palatinate region of, 198
Geronimo, 229
gesellshaftliche (social gestures), 300
gesture, 32-33, 123, 304, 307; Brecht and, 299-302,
304; A Game at Chess and, 21o; mudras and, 111,
119, 120, 123; silent scream as, 303-6; universality
and, 250
Gestus (theatrical gesture), 299-302, 304, 478
Ghana, 94-103; African Americans and, 107n58;
heritage tourism and, 86; history of, 89-90, 98-
101; memorialization of castle-dungeons and,
95-98; museum exhibits and, 99-102; slavery
and, 94, 96-97; as timeless, 1o2; tourism in, 69;
tradition and, 102-3; travel media of, 89. See also
castle-dungeons
Ghana Tourist Board, 89, 104
Ghana TV, 97
ghosts, 77
Gibson, William, 252-53
Gielgud, John, 30
gift shop, 95
Gilbert, Helen, 68
Gilles, Pierre, 120
Gillette, William, 293n5
Gilroy, Paul, 136, 147, 174
Girard, Rend, 463
Giuliani, Rudy, 186, 274
global analysis, 16
globalization, 157, 158, 166, 259, 261; Marxism and,
270, 272, 280; unsettlement and, 82
Globe Theatre, 194, 198
Glover, Savion, 183
Gobineau, Joseph Arthur, 135-36
gold, 89
Gold Rush, 157, 158, 163
gold teeth, 174
G6mez, Juan Gualberto, 143, 150-53
G6mez-Pefia, Guillermo, 23, 166, 557-58
Gondomar, conde de (Diego Sarmiento de Acufia),
218n10; as Black Knight, 199, 210-11, 218n7;
fistula of, 210-11, 221n47; impersonation of, 203;
influence of, 206, 218n8; portrayal of in A Game
at Chess, 200
Goneril (Kathakali King Lear), 112, 114, 116, 120, 125
Gonzalez, Jennifer, 551
Goodheart, Eugene, 27
Goodman Theater, 37, 40, 43
Gopi, Kalamandalam, 110
government, 213; Cantonese opera and, 166; criticism
of, 218n11; English, 213; subversion vs.
control and, 202-3; of United States, 224
INDEX
580
Hegel, G. W. F., 17on21
hegemony, 5, lo7n58, 288, 289, 294nlo; American,
100-101, 230; elitist, 230; Gramsci and, 267n12;
Hmong shamans and, 497, 501; white, 184, 187;
women and, 321
Heidegger, Martin, 27, 35; mediatization and, 539
Heinemann, Margot, 203, 221n53
Helbo, Andre, 14-15, 16, 18
Heminge, John, 212
Henrietta Maria, 208
Henry VIII (king of England), 215
Herbert, Henry, 200, 201-2, 209, 218n11; court
intrigue and, 219n21
heritage tourism, 85-86, 90, 96, 98; cultural, 164,
168; representations of, loo
hermeneutics, 2, 194
heterotopia, 225, 231, 236, 237
Hiawatha, 237
hierarchies, 252
high/low opposition, 278
Hill, Anita, 185
Hinsley, Curtis, 228, 231
Hinton, Laura, 256n12
hip-hop, 174, 255; mainstreaming of, 273
hip poetics, 150o
historicization, 265, 275; Bourdieu and, 276; Brecht
and, 272; culture and, 289; dehistoricization and,
273; empathy and, 255; present and, 73; utopia
and, 281
historiography, 191-96, 217, 315; Marxism and, 264
history, 2, 73-75, 80-82, 98-102, 198, 204; African
Americans and, 79-81; American, 223;
Bamboozled and, 183-84; Buffalo Bill's Wild West
Road Show and, 234, 235-36; China and, 17on21;
dance and, 192; empathy and, 246; feminism
and, 328; Foucault and, 271; frontier and, 232-34;
male gaze and, 33on5; methodologies of, 217;
museum exhibits and, 98-102; narratives and,
224; Ningali and, 73-75; periods of, 215; perspective
and, 71; politics and, 216-17; postcolonialism
and, 71; power and, 193; race and, 135-37,
164; reenactment of, 69; representation of, 79; of
representations of blackness, 173-74; subjectivity
and, 78-79; unsettlement of, 76-77, 81-82. See
also theater history
Hmong, 458, 482-501; cultural politics and, 487-90,
495-97; shamanism and, 482-86, 490-94, 497-501
Hockney, David, 9-11
Hofmeister, Der (Lenz), 300oo, 302, 305, 308
Holland, 221n53
Holles, John, 210, 217n2
Holliday, George, 176, 179. See also King video
Hollywood, 37-39, 43-46, 47n5
Holocaust Memorial Museum (United States), 93
Honzl, Jindrich, 13
horizontal connections, 156, 166, 168
Horkheimer, Max, 262, 279
Horton, Willie, 178
hospitality, 85
Hospital of the Savoy, 199
hosts, 85, 88
Hottentot Venus, 80
House of Commons, 206, 207
House of Lords, 206
Howard family, 206
Howard-Hill, T. H., 203-4, 209
How I Learned to Drive (Vogel), 413-29; Caruth and,
413-15, 420; feminism and, 415-19; incest and,
INDEX
581
gender and, 313, 319, 320; Hmong shamans and,
494, 499; theory of, 265; women and, 328
illusion, 29
Illustrated London News (newspaper), 223
imagination: kathakali and, 124; observers and, 247
imagined communities, 137, 138, 145. See also
utopia
Imagined Communities (Anderson), 144
immigrants, 58, 138; Chinese, 157-58, 161, 163, 164,
165, 167; race and, 178; translocality and, 61. See
also race; racism
imperialism, 67; African diaspora and, 107n58;
compassion and, 256n2; globalization and, 82;
settler colonies and, 71
impersonation, 137, 143, 146-48; as "Cuban," 153;
in A Game at Chess, 210. See also race
impressionism, 26
imprisonment, 205. See also castle-dungeons
incest, 421-24
Inchbald, Elizabeth, 325
incident, 29-30
incorporation, 145-46, 148; of black culture, 153
Inden, Ronald, 119
indetermination, 28
indexes, 20
India: memory and, 122; as the Other, 119
Indian and Minstrel Show, 237
Indians, 226-38; as the American, 238; Buffalo Bill's
Wild West Road Show and, 234-37; Bureau of
Indian Affairs and, 226; frontier and, 223, 232-34,
235; performing at Columbian Exposition, 227-
31; race and, 231; racism and, 230; "the native"
and, 232, 234, 237-38; "villages" and, 227, 229
Indian wars, 235
indigenous peoples, 73; settler colonies and, 72
individualism, 232, 273, 278; absence of, 60; corporations
and, 287
individual occurrences (Einzelgeschehnis), 298
individuals, 62. See also identity
Inequality of Human Races, The (Gobineau), 135-36
inevitability, 263
infectious rhythm, 147
information exchange, 252-53
injustice, 173, 175. See also race
inner mimicry, 195, 248-49, 251, 254
instability of settler colonies, 72
institutions, 289
instrumental reason, 279. See also rationality
integration, 141. See also race
integrity, 128
interconnection, 10o8
intercultural contact, 23
interculture, 109, 118; Kathakali King Lear as, 69,
110, 111, 128; vs. transactions, 49
interdisciplinary approaches, 192
interludes, 214
internal states (bhiiva), 111, 115, 123, 126-27
International Copyright Agreement of 1886, 291
International Theatre Festival (1972), 17
interpellation, 263
interpretation, 191, 193-94; A Game at Chess and,
204
interstitial zones, 61
intertextuality, 193, 211
intimacy, 59, 62
Introduction to the Dance (Martin), 245
intuition, 35
Inuit Indians, 75, 241n9
INDEX
582
Juror #7 (King trials), 177, 182
jurors (King trials), 177, 178, 179
justice, 267n23
Kakum National Forest, 103
Kaladharan, V., 126, 128
Kalidasa, 122
Kaplan, E. Ann, 20
Kaprow, Allan, 270
Kasson, Joy, 244n33
kathakali, 69; actors in, 131n50; aesthetics of,
122-25; appropriateness and, 131n5o;
audience of, 117; description of, 110-11; epic
characters and, 124, 132n60; experimentation
vs. tradition in, 121, 125; theatrical conventions
of, 112-14
Kathakali King Lear (McRuvie), 109-29; appropriateness
and, 132n50; audiences of, 115-16, 118;
European reception of, 118-21; intent of, 111; as
interculture, 69, 128-29; kingliness in, 127-28;
Malayali reception of, 121-25; meaning and, 117;
pathos in, 125-27; performances of, 1o9-1o;
reelaboration of, 112-15
Kattrin (Mother Courage), 305
Kemble, John Phillip, 321-24
kente cloth, 88, 89, 103
Kenyan Mau Mau, 183
Kerala, India, 110; culture of, 128; reception of
Kathakali King Lear in, 121-25, 126-28
Kerala Kalamandalam (Kerala State Arts Academy),
110o, 121-22
Kilbourne, Jean, 555
kinesthetics, 248-49; empathy and, 196; mime and,
248
King, Rodney, 139, 186; riots and, 178-81; trials
and, 177-79; Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992 and, 177,
180-82; video of, 176-77
King Lear (Kathakali King Lear), 112-15, 117, 120;
kingliness of, 127-28; nakedness of, 114, 121;
pathos of, 125-27
King Lear (Shakespeare): adaptation to kathakali of,
110-15
kings, 248
King's Men (Shakespearean company), 194, 198,
200, 201, 202, 285; contributions of, 209-11; profit
and, 212-13; scrivener of, 209
King's Men (Shakespearean theater), 285
King video, 176-77, 179-80, 182, 185, 187
King Zulu, 475-76
kinship, 128
Kirby, Michael, 17
Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, Barbara, 94, 99, 234, 243n25
kitsch, 77
Kittler, Friedrich, 547-48, 560
Klein, Naomi, 554-55
Klu Klux Klan, 179
knowledge, 9-10, 279-80; Brecht and, 275;
embodied, 196, 196n4; Foucault and, 271
knowledge production, 99
Kolko, Beth, 558
Kondo, Dorinne, 181
Korean Americans, 178-79, 181-82
Kott, Jan, 44
Kowsan, Tadeusz, 14, 15, 16, 47n4
Kreamer, Christine, loo, lo7n58
kriol, 75
Kristeva, Julia, 21, 400
Kuhn, Isobel, 499
Kumasi, Ghana, 103
INDEX
583
Lemoine, Jacques, 490, 495
lentrados, 146
lesbians, 22, 311-15; representation and, 339-42,
348-49; sexuality and, 334-38, 343-47
Lesbian Variety Show (Madison, Wisconsin), 340,
347
Les Liaisons Dangereuses (de Laclos), 251
Lettered City (Rama), 146
letters, 166
Levi-Strauss, Claude, 8, 482-83
Lewis, Judith Schneid, 329
liberalism, 271
life group displays, 226, 240n8
Life of Galileo (Brecht), 280-81
lifestyle philosophy, 279
lighting, 523, 532. See also ghosting
liminality, 458, 463-64. See also borders; boundaries
Limon, Jerzy, 202
linguistics, 8, 13-14, 16-17; castle-dungeon guides
and, 94; of "transaction," 49-50. See also semiotics
Lioness Roars, The (opera), 162
literacy, 147; nationalism and, 144
literary critics, 192
literate culture, 147
litter and chair (of Gondomar), 210-11, 221n47
Litterature et spectacle dans leurs rapports esthetiques,
thematiques et simiologiques (Kowsan), 14
live displays, 226, 227-28
liveness: body and, 542-45; masks and, 558-59;
technology and, 526-30, 535, 538-42
live performance, 550
localities, 51; borders and, 61; castle-dungeons and,
94; culture and, 55
local perspective, 43
location, 60, 253; Chinese Americans and, 161
logic, 19-20; empathy and, 249
logos, 554-55, 559
London, 193, 198; anti-Spanish sentiment in, 199-
200; Jacobean, 194; theatricality and, 215
Long Revolution, The (Williams), 276
L6pez, Ana, 148
Lord Mayor's shows, 211-12, 214
Los Angeles, 139, 178
Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD), 176
Los Angeles riots, 178-82, 184. See also race;
racism
Lott, Eric, 556
Louima, Abner, 186
Louis XIII (King of France), 208
Louis XIV (King of France), 38, 40, 42, 47n12, 248
Love and Theft (Lott), 556
Lowe, George, 200, 217n2
Lowe, Lisa, 138, 167
Lucy Westenra (Dracula's Legacy), 547, 550
Ludlam, Charles, 361-62
Lynch, Justine, 383
lynching, 184. See also race; racism
Lyons, James, 269
Lyotard, Jean-Frangois, 1, 4, 17
MacMinn, G. R., 161
mad Tom (Kathakali King Lear), 113
Mahabharata (Brook), 69
Mahabharata (Hindi legends), 118, 128
mainstream culture, 328
Malayalam, 110
Malayalis, 111; as audience to Kathakali King Lear,
121-25, 126-28
male gaze, 21, 318, 329; history and, 330n5. See also
INDEX
584
Marx's Concept of Man (Fromm), 266n5
masculinity, 23, 311-15; of blacks, 175, 178; dignity
and, 323-25, 327-28; male gaze and, 318; race
and, 556. See also males; queer theory
Masculinity Studies and Feminist Theory: New Directions
(Gardiner), 314
masks, 553; signifier/signified and, 559
Mason, Otis, 231
Masque of Owls (Jonson), 212
masques, 211-12
massacres: territorial sovereignty and, 56; of Tutsis
by Hutus, 51-52, 54, 55
mass culture, 274, 278
Master of the Revels, 200, 201, 202, 209, 212
masterpieces, 4
Matanzas, Cuba, 146
materialists, 22, 23
material production, 288
Matthew, Toby, 218n5
Matthews, Washington, 234
Mau Maus (Bamboozled), 183-85, 186-87
Mayer, Emily, 507-8, 517-18
McCarthyism, 271
McConachie, Bruce, 264-65
McCulloch, John R., 284
McRuvie, David, 110o, 128; female roles and,
130mn18; reelaboration of Kathakali King Lear,
111-15; text by, 127
meaning, 8-9, 21, 23, 27; performance and, 116-17
means of production, 285
mechanical reproduction, 175-76, 177
media, 176-77, 247; blackness and, 183
mediatization, 521-45; body and, 542-45; ghosting
and, 523, 532-33; liveness and, 526-30, 535, 538-
42; ontology and, 522, 529-31; technology and,
525, 531-34, 536-40; Williams and, 521, 524
medicine, 192, 257n18
Melrose, Susan, 11
memoirs, 323
memorialization, 78-79; African diaspora and,
107n58; museum exhibits and, 98-102; of slavery,
85-86; slave trade and, 91
memory, 163; Cantonese opera and, 165; ChineseAmericans
and, 161; cultural, 23, 74-75, 196n4;
heritage tourism and, 85-86; history and, 193;
identification and, 92; imagination and, 93;
kathakali and, 122; King Lear and, 127; mediated,
90-91; narrative and, 98-99, 101; racial, 164; slavery
and, 95-96; vertical, 156, 166, 168; Wild West
as, 236. See also history; past
Memphis Public Library, 270
mentality, 203, 215, 220on33
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 7, o10, 29, 35; texts of, 12n4
Messingkauf Dialogues (Brecht), 295
mestizaje, 147, 155n27
metanarratives, 108-9
metaphor, 34
metaphysics, 4
methodologies: of historians, 217
Metropolis (film), 548
Metz, Christian, 15
Mexicans, 557
Meyerhold, Vsevolod, 4
Michelangelo, 29
micronarratives, 63
microstories, 58
Middle Passage, 69
Middlesex, Earl of (Lionel Cranfield), 205, 218n6
INDEX
585
Moliere, 12, 37-41, 43-46; public productions of,
289
money: heritage tourism and, 86
monopolies, 286
Montgomery, Earl of (Philip Herbert), 212
Mooney, Paul, 188
Moore, David Chioni, 82n2, 82n3
Moore, Edward, 325
Moralez Alvarez, Ram6n, 149
morality, 203-4
morality plays, 214
Morgan, Thomas, 226
Morin, Edgar, 50
morphology, 53
Morris, Tom, 119, 126
Morrison, Toni, 93
Mos Def, 184
Moses, L.G., 230, 235
Mother Courage (Brecht), 298, 302-6; Barthes and,
309n15
Mother Courage (Mother Courage), 302-6
mothers, 21
Mots et les Gestes, Les (Helbo), 18
Mouffe, Chantal, 261
Mourning Sex (Phelan), 314
movement: emotion and, 249-50, 251; technology
and, 253
Mr. Beverley (The Gamester), 325
Mukagasana, Yolande, 51, 65n7
Mukafovsky, Jan, 19
multiculturalism, 157, 158, 168, 273
multiplicity: African Americans and, 81
Mufioz, Jose, 399, 403
murder: in Eugenia, 77
Museum and Monuments Board (Ghana), 97
museums, 98-102; in Chicago, 244n31; as contact
zones, 98, 1o2; as entertainment, 226; life group
displays and, 226; surrogation and, 86. See also
specific museums; Smithsonian Institution
music: of Cantonese opera, 158; in Kathakali King
Lear, 126; rap, 174, 187, 254; teatro bufo and, 142.
See also dance; dance-drama; opera
musical theater, 274
musicians, 54; Cantonese opera and, 16o, 171n39
musicologists, 192
Muslims, 184
myth, 33
Mythologies (Barthes), 33
NAACP (National Association for the Advancement
of Colored People), 99, 173
Nadel, Alan, 173
Nala Caritam (Warrier), 123-24
Nala (Nala Caritam), 123, 127
Namboodiri, Madambi Subramaniam, 110
Namboodiri, Nelliyode Vasudevan, 127-28
Namboodiri, P. C., 132n60
Namboodiripad, Vasudevan, 114
Name of the Rose, The (Eco), 19
names, 184, 186, 312
naming ceremony, 10o3
Narada (Nala Caritam), 123
narratives, 55-56, 58, 98-102, 109; binaries and, 224;
of Columbian Exposition, 194-95; conventions
of, 192; dance and, 255; extended, 123, 124;
frontier thesis as, 232; lack of, 93; meaning and,
94; memory and, 85; in Ningali, 74; racial, 178;
sympathy and, 247-48
Natanson, Maurice, 26, 116
INDEX
586
New Millennium Minstrel Show (Bamboozled), 183,
184, 185
news, 176, 179, 181. See also press
New Shreds of the Old Snare (Gee), 207
newspapers, 148; Cuban, 141-42, 143, 148. See also
specific newspapers
New York, 253
New York City, 273-74. See also Broadway; East
Village; Rent; Times Square
New Zealand: conservative backlash in, 83n9;
Eugenia and, 75-76; postcolonialism and, 71; as
settler colony, 68
Nietzsche, Friedrich, 553
Ningali (Lawford), 68, 71, 73-75, 81, 83n12
Nkrumah, Kwame, 101
nobility, 216
No Logo (Klein), 554-55
No Man's Stage (Genet), 16
nonprofit theater, 37, 264, 274, 278
Norris, Christopher, 2
Northampton, Earl of (Henry Howard), 206
nostalgia, 77; frontier and, 233; unsettlement and,
73
Not About AIDS-Dance (Greenberg), 377, 381-82,
384, 388-89
Nottingham, Earl of (Charles Howard), 205, 206
"Noya and Bill Brandt with Self-Portrait" (Hockney
collage), 9-11
Oakland, 162
objective school, 192
objectivity, 65n7
objects, 249-50; kinesthetic response to, 248-49,
256nlo
observers, 247
odors, 91
Office of the Revels, 203, 219n21. See also Master of
the Revels
oldness, 161
Olivier, Laurence, 30
Olympics, 183, 237
Omi, Michael, 164
one-drop rule, 186
One-sixteenth Black (Bamboozled), 186-87, 189n26
Onstage (newsletter), 43-44
ontology: cultural politics and, 482
opening: of space, 60-62; vs. enclosure, 49-51, 55-
56, 61-62
openness: in Allemaal Indian, 57, 59; and ethics, 63;
Rwanda 94 and, 56
opera, 139, 156-68; audience of, 158, 16o, 161-62; as
charity event, 16o-61, 167, 168, 170mn16; generation
and, 158-59, 161, 165-66; Great Star Theater
and, 162-64; history of, 156, 157-58, 165, 168,
169n3, 169n4; horizontal vs. vertical memory
and, 164-68; paratheatrical performance and,
159-60, 161; performers of, 158-59, 165-67; virtual
Chinatown and, 156-57, 160-63, 166, 167-68
Opoku-Agyemang, Kwadwo, 97
oppositional politics, 203
oppression: race and, 178-79; tourism and, 98-99
order: Columbian Exposition and, 225, 228, 239n5
Organization of African Unity, 88
Orientalism (Said), 67
originality: Chinatown and, 163
orthodoxy, 270
Oso, El, 149-50
Othello (Shakespeare), 30, 80, 84n3o, 329
other, 21, 61, 119, 328; colonialism and, 67; compas-
INDEX
587
pattern/randomness, 252, 255
Patterson, Orlando, 184
Pavis, Patrice, 8, 11, 15-16, 23, 32-34, 111
Peabody Museum of American Archaeology and
Ethnology, 225
Peale, Charles Willson, 226
Pearson, Mike, 193-94
pedagogy, 7
Peirce, Charles, 8, 19-20
Pelligrini, Ann, 314
Pembroke, 3rd Earl of (William Herbert), 205,
206, 212, 214, 219n20; court intrigue and, 202,
219n21
penology, 192
Pentagon bombing, 246
perception, 28, 32; audiences and, 116; of objects,
256nlo
Percival, John, 120
percussionists, 120
percussion orchestra, 111
performance analysis, 7-12; historians and, 204;
pedagogy of, 7; reception and, 216; semiotics
and, 11-12, 15-19
"Performance and Theatricality" (Feral), 17
performance sites, 193-94
performance studies, 192; dance and, 245
performance style: of kathakali, 110o-11; narrative
and, 74
performance theory: Hmong and, 482-86, 490-94,
497-501; shamanism and, 487-90, 495-97
performant function, 18
"Performative Acts and Gender Constitution"
(Dolan), 312
performative responses, 177, 178, 185, 188; to reality
checks, 173
performers, 14, 18, 30; agency of, 78; amateur vs.
professional, 167, 171n39; black tourists as, 93; in
Buffalo Bill's Wild West Road Show, 235; contemporary
Amerindian, 236-37; guides as, 94;
historicization and, 265; interior (soka bhaiva), 123,
125-27; in kathakali, 110o-11; players as, 209-11;
popular, 230; as professionals, 229; Smith and,
181; tourists as, 89, 92; vs. reproduction, 223; vs.
spectators, 148
Performing Women: Female Characters, Male Playwrights
and the Modern Stage (Cima), 314
period concepts, 215
periphery and center, 67, 70
permission, 68
perspective: history and, 71, 216-17
pessimistic functionalism, 277-79
Phelan, Peggy, 22, 314
phenomenological reduction, io
phenomenology, 2, 4, 7-10; attitude of, 18; bracketing
and, 26, 28-30, 34; character and, 29-31; feminism
and, 12n5; gesture and, 32-33; Husserl
and, 26-28, 30-32, 34-35; performance analysis
and, 11-12; Shelley and, 26-27, 29, 31, 34
Philip IV (king of Spain), 198, 210
philosophical anthropology, 4
philosophy, 4, 5
photography, 49, 173; Cantonese opera and, 159; as
reality check, 173, 175-76; tourists and, 95,
1o6n32
physicality, 254-55; empathy and, 246, 251
piao xi, 167
Picasso, Pablo, 303
Piedra, Jose, 150
INDEX
588
pornography: representation and, 339-42, 348-49;
sexuality and, 334-38, 343-47
Porter, Ray, 221n44
Portugese, 89-90
position, 68; subject and, 327-28
positivism, 145, 193, 495; theater history and, 192
postcolonialism, 67-70; autocriticism of, 82n2;
compassion and, 256n2; dance theory and, 245,
255n1; Hmong shamans and, 499; intercultural
performance and, 69-70; neocolonialism and, 68,
1o1-2; performance and, 73; race and, 81; settler
colonies and, 71-72, 81-82, 82n3; theater historians
and, 191. See also colonialism
Poster, Mark, 554
Postlewait, Thomas, 194
postmodernism, 27; as condition, 1; critiques of, 2;
Lyotard and, 1, 4; metanarratives and, 108-9
postpositivism, 217
post- prefix, 1, 270, 279; theorists of, 272
poststructuralism, 13, 16-18, 37, 271; Hmong
shamans and, 482
Potawatomi Indians, 228
poverty, 278; dance and, 255; Los Angeles riots
and, 178
power, 193, 277; bodies and, 221n44; castle-dungeon
museums and, loo-1o2; compassion and,
256n2; complexity of, 213; embodied subjectivity
and, 146; empathy and, 246; English court and,
205-6; Foucault and, 271; gender and, 255n1;
history and, 73, 193; insecurity of, 237, 244n33;
racial identities and, 136; will to, 279; women
and, 326
Prague Linguistic Circle, 13-15, 19
Pratt, Mary Louise, 86
praxis (practice), 265
precolonial past, 87
preconscious, 396-98. See also psychoanalysis
pregnancy, 329-30; hysteria and, 447-50; slavery
and, 91. See also slavery
Prempeh I (king of Asante), 99, 107n48
presence, 28; avatars and, 551, 553; co-presence
and, 30; mediatization and, 542
presentism, 285
preservation, 90, 96. See also castle-dungeons;
tourism
press, 180; Cuban, 141-42; danz6n and, 147-48, 150.
See also news
prestige, 167
Price, Leontyne, 188
primitivization, 87
principles, general structural, 4
print, 144-47; vs. performance, 148, 150, 153
printing, 207
prisons, 167. See also castle-dungeons
privacy, 59; in Allemaal Indian vs. Rwanda 94, 62-63;
negation of, 62; public and, 63
Privy Council, 199, 219n20; factions of, 202, 205-6,
208, 213; investigation of A Game at Chess and,
200-201
Problem Like Maria, A: Gender and Sexuality in the
American Musical (Wolf), 314
proceso del Oso, El (Moralez), 149-50
producers, 284-86
production, 260-62, 264, 284-89; analysis of, 16;
base/superstructure metaphor and, 287-88;
costs of, 159-60; culture and, 288-89, 294nlo;
etymology of, 284-87, 293n1; reception and, 110o,
117; relations of, 275. See also Marxism
INDEX
589
Putnam, Frederic Ward, 225-27, 229, 24on6, 241nl4,
244n31
Putu Wijaya, 109
quartos of A Game at Chess, 208-9
Queen Christina (film), 33-34
queerness: culture and, 273
queer theory, 311-15; representation and, 339-42,
348-49; sexuality and, 334-38, 343-47
Quesalid, 482, 486
quotation marks, 1o8, 135
race, 135-39, 141-53, 164-68, 173-88; Asian immigrants
and, 138-39; Bamboozled and, 183-85, 188;
Chinese-Americans and, 156-57, 16o, 164-68,
171n3o; Chinese and, 164, 166; class and, 262; of
color, 151; Cuban performance and, 137-38;
Cuban public sphere and, 143-44; Cuban taxonomy
of, 154n2; cyberspace and, 553, 555-58;
dance and, 257n13; danz6n and, 147-50; Emmett
Till and, 173-76; existence of, 137; fraternity and,
151-53; in Harlem Duet, 79-81; heritage tourism
and, 99; historical conceptions of, 135-36; hybridity
and, 136-37; impersonation of, 87, 182,
186, 187; Los Angeles riots and, 178-82; performances
of nationalism and, 141-42; postcolonialism
and, 71-72; public sphere and, 145, 146, 147;
representations of, 79-81; Rodney King and, 176-
79; settler colonies and, 71; veladas and, 152; violence
and, 139
Race, Sex, and Gender in Contemporary Women's Theater
(Brewer), 22-23
racial formation, 156-57, 16o, 164-68
racial impersonation, 137, 143, 146, 147-48; as
"Cuban," 153
racialization, 87, 182, 186, 187; Chinese, 164, 166; of
Indians, 231
racialized national discourse, 147
racial split, 156-57, 168
racism: Africa and, 88; Chinese Americans and,
158, 164-65; Columbian Exposition and, 223, 225,
229-30, 240n6, 244n32; cyberspace and, 555-58;
effects of, 8o-81; Emmett Till and, 175; Kathakali
King Lear and, 12o; life group displays and,
240n8; Los Angeles riots and, 178; Native Americans
and, 195; neoconservatives and, 137; public
vs. private, 142; racial taxonomy and, 136;
Rodney King and, 179; show Indians and, 235-
36; veladas and, 152
radio, 523, 526-30
Rain-in-the-Face, 231, 242n18
Raleigh, Walter, 218n8
Rama, Angel, 146
Ramanujan, A. K., 124
Ramlila festivals, 473-74
Ranciare, Jacques, 264
Ranke, Leopold von, 192, 193
rap, 174, 183, 184, 187, 254
rape, 94; slavery and, 91
rap group, 183
rappers, 174
rasa, 111, 122, 124; karuna rasa (sorrow/pathos),
126-27
rationalism, 279-81
Ravanna (Ramayana), 124, 132n59
re-action, 68
reader-response criticism, 31
Reading Dancing: Bodies and Subjects in Contemporary
American Dance (Foster), 5n5
realism, 269, 285-86. See also mimesis;
INDEX
590
religion, 204, 205, 215; African Americans and, 93;
Cantonese opera and, 16o; museum exhibits and,
99
Renaissance, 198, 203, 210, 215; writers of, 214
rent: Cantonese opera and, 16o
Rent (Larson play), 264, 273-74, 277-79
repetition, 28, 177, 312-13
replication of King video, 177
reporters: See also newspapers; press
representation, 4-5, 11, 17-18, 22-23, 28, 73; of
African Americans, 79-81; authenticity and, 237;
avatars and, 555-58; blacks and, 173-74, 181,
183-84; Cuban performance and, 142; difference
and, 77; of Emmett Till, 175; of the frontier, 223;
in A Game at Chess, 21o; gender and, 313, 318;
Native Americans and, 195, 231, 238; postcolonialism
and, 67; public, 145; queer theory and,
339-42, 348-49; race and, 139, 153; reality and,
224; real vs., 183-88; royalty and, 220n30;
sexuality and, 334-38, 343-47; slavery and, 91,
93; social utility and, 176; stage, 181; technology
and, 175; theater history and, 191; theory and,
192; women and, 326. See also mimesis; realism;
reality
reproduction, 521-45; body and, 542-45; ghosting
and, 523, 532-33; liveness and, 526-30, 535, 538-
42; ontology and, 522, 529-31; technology and,
525, 531-34, 536-40; Williams and, 521, 524
reproduction vs. acting, 223. See also acting; actors
research: Columbian Exposition and, 225; for
Rwanda 94, 51
resistance, 5; hip-hop and, 255; postcolonial, 73; vs.
authority, 217; vs. centralized power, 205
restaurants, 96-97
Restoration period, 326
reterritorialization, 51, 61, 64n4, 66n18, 66n23; vs.
opening, 5o. See also territory
"Rethinking Brecht" (Reinelt), 22
returnees, African Americans as, 86
reviewers: of Cantonese opera, 170on11; of early
Cantonese opera, 158; of Kathakali King Lear, 126.
See also critics
revisionism, 5, 71; feminism and, 328
revolution, 183-84, 186. See also Bamboozled
revolutions, 462
Reynolds, John, 207, 211
Reynolds, Joshua, 321
rhetorical styles, 213-15
rhythm, 147-50. See also beats; danzdn
Richards, Sandra L., 69
Richelieu, Cardinal, 208
Ricoeur, Paul, 4, 194
rights: Churchill and, 506, 509-10, 512; Far Away
and, 506, 515, 517-18; rites and, 507-8, 511, 513-
14, 516
riots, 139; in Los Angeles, 178-81
rites: Churchill and, 506, 509-10, 512; Far Away
and, 506, 515, 517-18
Rituals of Blood (Patterson), 184
Riverofsalsa (Jenik and Brenneis), 558-59
Roach, Joseph, 23, 147
Roddy, Thomas, 230, 231
Rodgers and Hammerstein formula, 278
Rogin, Michael, 184
Role of the Reader, The (Eco), 19
roles, 62, 77, 78, 79, 109; in kathakali, 111; of tourists,
89
Romin, David, 315
INDEX
591
school systems, 207
science, 135
scientific language, 35
scientific rationality, 279
Scott, H. L., 234
Scott, Thomas, 207, 210, 214, 221n47, 221n53
seance, 77-79
Sears, Djanet, 68-69, 71, 79-81, 84n3o
second generation, 158-59, 161
Second Part of Vox Populi (Scott), 210, 214, 221n47
Sedgwick, Eve, 314; gender and, 313
seduction, 22; danz6n and, 149-50
segmentations of gesture, 32
segregation, 151
self, 4, 26; creation of concept of, 21. See also body;
other
self-abstraction, 145
semiology, 19, 32, 34, 50
semiotics, 2, 5, 7-9, 31, 32, 38; development of, 15-
19; feminism and, 20-23; gender and, 319; local
perspective of, 43; Misanthrope and, 37-38; performance
analysis and, 11-12, 15-19; Saussure
and, 13-15
Semiotics of Theater and Drama, The (Elam), 15
"Semiotics of Theatrical Performance" (Eco), 19
senior citizens, 19, 16o-61, 162, 170nn16
September 11, 2001, 186, 195, 246-47, 253-54,
256n5. See also terrorism; World Trade Center
sermons, 207, 214
sets, 57-58
settler colonies, 68, 71-72, 83n17; performance and,
73; race and, 72, 83n9; unsettlement and, 81-82
Seventeenth Century, 37-38, 43-46, 47n12
sexism, 223, 225
sexuality, 39, 192, 311-15; camp and, 355-59,
365-69; drag and, 360-64; Emmett Till and,
175; exploitation in Crossing and, 78-79; pornography
and, 334-38, 343-47; representation and,
339-42, 348-49, 555-58; social order and, 76;
virtual reality and, 551-54. See also gender; under
queer
Shakespeare, William, 23, 192, 289; folio edition of,
212-13; Kathakali King Lear and, 110o, 119; plays
of, 285; postcolonialism and, 69
Shakespeare Our Contemporary (Kott), 44
shamanism: cultural politics and, 487-90, 495-97;
Hmong and, 482-86, 490-94, 497-501L
Shanks, Michael, 193-94
Shaw, Mary, 318; gender and, 319
Shaw, Peggy, 336, 340, 342-43
Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 26-27, 29, 31, 34, 35n1. See
also poetry
Sheridan (Richard Brinsley), 324-25
Sherman, Martin, 345
Shields, Ronald E., 313
Shimakawa, Karen, 138
Shklovsky, Victor, 26, 35nl
shop owners, 178-79
Short Organon (Brecht), 295, 307-8
show Indians, 195, 227-28; agency of, 229, 231;
Buffalo Bill's Wild West Road Show and, 234-37,
243n29; degradation and, 230; intellectual
performance and, 234; racism and, 235-36
Shubert family, 291, 292
Siddons, Sarah, 315; British theater and: 322-26;
female subject and, 325-27; feminism and: 317-
22, 327-30; male dignity and, 323-25, 327-28
Sieg, Katrin, 265
INDEX
592
social body: contamination of, 147-49; production
of, 145
social context, 23
social evolution, 223
sociality, 51, 261, 263, 276
social justice, 309, 318, 343
social organizations, 213
social relations, 290, 302, 304, 307; cyberspace and,
553; production and, 287-89; sexuality and, 76
social reproduction, 150
social status, 248, 256n8, 278
social taboo, 330
social theory: Marxism and, 276
social unrest: reality checks and, 176
social utility, 176
Society of Stage Directors and Choreographers, 292
sociology: active form of, 265; culture and, 276-77;
historical, 292
Sociology of Culture (Williams), 289
Sociosemiotic Theory of Theatre, A (Alter), 18, 20
Sokolowski, Robert, 36n12
solidarity, 142, 152
solipsism, 26
Sondheim, Stephen, 274
soul, 543
sound, 523, 526-30; of Chinese opera, 158; as memory,
93
soundtracks, 252, 253
South Africa: conservative backlash in, 83n9; in
Crossing, 77, 79; postcolonialism and, 71, 72; as
settler colony, 68
Southampton, Earl of (Henry Wriothesley), 200,
205, 206, 218nlo. See also Shakespeare
souvenirs, 158
Soviet Union, 82n3
Soyinka, Wole, 103
space, 55-62; in Allemaal Indian, 58-60; domestic,
59; enclosure of, 56; frontier and, 233-34; interconnection
of, 55, 61; opening of, 60-62; opening
vs. enclosure and, 49; postmodern, 66n18; public
vs. private, 253, 254, 257n18; virtual, 162-64;
virtual reality and, 533, 535, 541
Spain: anti-Spanish sentiment and, 198-99, 206-7,
212, 214; envoys from, 206-7; visual codes and,
211
Spanish ambassador, 194, 199, 200-201. See also
Coloma; Gondomar
Spanish Armada, 212
specialities, 4
specificity, 246
spectacle, 63; black bodies and, 185; Columbian Exposition
as, 223; in Crossing, 77; emotion and,
247; Kathakali King Lear as, 119-20
"Spectacle as Text, The" (Marinis), 15
spectators, 19, 41-45; Emmett Till funeral and, 173-
74; of A Game at Chess, 216; gender and, 256n12;
reality checks and, 175; tourism and, 89; at
veladas, 152; visual codes and, 210; vs. performers,
148; witnessing vs. action and, 179
Spectres of Marx (Derrida), 268
speech: Cantonese opera and, 159; patterns of, 181;
political, 214
speech/act theory, 4
Spencer, Charles, 119
spirituals, 257n13
Spivak, Gayatri, 68, 261-62, 266n2
sponsorship: of Cantonese opera, 159, 16o-61
Sreedharan, Iyyamgode, 110, 125
INDEX
593
and, 138; object and, 555; performance and, 75;
performance of, 74; print and, 144-45; race and,
137; slave trade and, 91; unsettlement and, 82.
See also agency
subjunctive process, 447
sublimation, 397
subordination, 261
substitution, 17
suburbs vs. Chinatown, 161
Suffolk, 1st Earl of (Thomas Howard), 206
Sullivan, Andrew, 372, 390n1
superego, 396-98
supplementation, 28
surplus value, 260. See also value
surrogation, 93, 95, 10o7n58, 147; museum exhibits
and, 98, 100-102
suspicion, 194
symbolism, 2o; feminism and, 21; lack of, 6o; patterns
and, 16
sympathy, 245, 251; gender and, 255n1, 256n12;
imaginative, 195; Smith on, 247-48. See also
empathy
systemization, 16
taboos, 96-97, 330
Taking It Like a Man (Savran), 314
Tamiris, Helen, 251
tangential citizens, 168
Tartuffe (Moliere), 47n4
Taussig, Michael, 484
taxonomy: racial, 135-37, 138
teatro bufo, 137, 142; Cubanness and, 153; danz6n
and, 149; racist satire and, 151-53
technology, 185, 196, 521-45; avatars and, 547-52;
body and, 542-45, 553-54, 559; cyberspace and,
547-52, 559; empathy and, 252-53; ghosting and,
523, 532-33; liveness and, 526-30, 535, 538-42;
mediatization and, 525, 531-34, 536-40; ontology
and, 522, 529-31; of print, 145; representational,
175; representation and, 555-58; tradition and,
103; Williams and, 521, 524
teeth, gold in, 174
"Telephone and its Queerness, The" (Hanson), 549
television, 176-77, 18o-81, 246, 252-53; direct theater
and, 476-77; virtual reality and, 521, 535
Tempest, The (Shakespeare), 69
tensility, 245
Ten Year's War, 143, 151
Terpsichore, 149
territory, 50, 55; creation of, 64; culture and, 55;
disassociation and, 52-53; nation-states and, 5o,
54-55, 64n4, 65nlo; virtual, 65n9; vs. translocalities,
61. See also borders; boundaries;
reterritorialization
terror, 478
terrorism, 270. See also September 11th
testimony: on Rwandan genocide, 51-52
texts, 192-93, 296, 298; Barthes and, 41; gender and,
319; meaning and, 87; politics and, 208-9
Thao, Paja, 486
Theaterwissenschaft, 192
theater, 191-205; ancient, 191; as an organization,
212-13; celebrations and, 199-200; city as, 254;
context and, 208; conventions of, 158, 162; culture
of, 224, 237; as a frontier zone, 64; history
and, 82, 192-96, 237; memory and, 85; museums
and, 101-2; opening vs. enclosure and, 51;
patrons of, 16o; politics and, 198, 203; scholars of,
64, 201-5, 22on32; self-referential nature of, 49;
INDEX
594
Torgovnik, Maraianna, 484
totality, 294nlo; production and, 287-88
totalization, 259
touring circuit, 291
tourism: 85-89, 94-102; of castle-dungeons, 69;
Chinatown and, 156, 158, 162-64, 168ni; as
export, 94; Ghana and, 85, 95-97, 102-3; to heritage
sites, 85-86, 98; museum exhibits and, 98-
102; the Other and, 87, 102; performance and, 68;
trope of family and, 88, 89, 95; vicarious, 139
tourists, 237; heritage and, 102; identity and, 103;
reaction to castle-dungeons by, 91-93, 95;
re-enactment by, 92; as spectators/actors, 89; as
surrogates, 93
"Toward a Butch-Femme Aesthetic" (Case), 22
Tower of London, 205, 218n8, 218n10o
traces, 191, 193
Trachtenberg, Alan, 223, 244n33
trade, 89
tradition, 3; Cantonese Opera and, 156; discourse
and, 213-14; Ghana and, 102-3; kathakali acting
and, 131n5o; theater and, 211; vs. experimentation,
121, 125
tragedy, 127-28
training: for Cantonese opera, 159; of kathakali
actors, 131n50
transaction, 63-64; as opening, 49-50; performance
and, 56
transcendental signified, 191
transference, 397, 445-49
transformation, 78-79
transgender, 548, 553. See also gender
transgression: representation and, 339-42, 348-49;
sexuality and, 334-38, 343-47
transit communities, 64n4
translation, 44-46. See also Bartlett
translocalities, 61-62
transnational corporations: See also globalization
trans- (prefix), 49-50
transvestites, 68, 75-77, 83n16. See also queer theory
trauma, 413-29; Caruth and, 413-15, 420; feminism
and, 415-19; incest and, 421-24; witness and,
424-29
travel: brochures for, 87; media for, 86, 88-89, 102.
See also tourism
Travel Industry Association of America, 86
trials: King beating and, 177-79; for slander, 207
Triumph of Honour and Industry, The (Middleton),
212
Tri-Valley charity performance, 159, 161
Trombetta, Sergio, 119
tropology, 192, 484
truths, 193
Tsypin, George, 38, 45
Turner, Frederick Jackson, 195, 223, 231-34, 237,
242n21, 242n22; vs. Buffalo Bill's Wild West, 235
Turner, Victor, 458
Tutsis, 55; classification of, 53-54, 65n14; massacre
of Hutus by, 51
Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992 (film), 139, 177, 179-82,
188, 189n18
Tyler, Stephen, 495
Ubersfeld, Anne, 15, 117, 118
uncanny, 72, 73, 83n1o; Australia, 75; performance
as, 73, 78
unconscious: Lacan and, 396-98; women and, 328
undecidability, 1
UNESCO, 69, 90, 96
INDEX
identification and, 247; inner mimicry and, 248-
49; narrative and, 247-48, 251. See also audience;
spectators
villages, 227, 231, 242n18
Villiers, George (Duke of Buckingham), 218n6,
219n20; anti-Spanish entertainment and, 212;
court intrigue and, 202; power of, 205-7, 208;
Spanish marriage and, 199; as White Duke, 198
violence, 91, 139; in Allemaal Indian vs. Rwanda 94,
63; Bamboozled and, 183-88, 189n26; in Crossing,
78; Emmett Till and, 173, 175; ethnic plurality
and, 54-56; Los Angeles riots and, 178-81; racial,
139; representation of, 91; Rodney King and,
176-78; sexuality and, 557
Virtually Yours (Bornstein), 548-51
virtual reality, 156-57, 160-63, 166, 167-68, 521-45;
body and, 542-45, 553-54, 559; cyberspace and,
547-52, 559; ghosting and, 523, 532-33; liveness
and, 526-30, 535, 538-42; ontology and, 522, 529-
31; representation and, 555-58; technology and,
525, 531-34, 536-40; Williams and, 521, 524
visibility, 186
visuality vs. corporeality, 247
vocalists, 111, 120, 125-26
Vogel, Paula, 413-29; Caruth and, 413-15, 420; feminism
and, 415-19; incest and, 421-24; witness
and, 424-29
voice, 252-53
Voies de la creation thatrale, les (publication
series), 15, 47n4
von Ranke, Leopold. See Ranke, Leopold von
Vorlicky, Robert, 314
Vox Populi (Scott), 210, 214, 221n47
vulgar Marxism, 272
Wagner, Richard, 4
Waiting for Godot (Beckett), 524, 542
Waitingforgodot.com, 551-55
Wall Street Journal, The (newspaper), 174
Wambajarri language, 74-75
war, 53
Warner, Michael, 144-45
war (Palatinate), 199, 205-7, 215
Warren and Wood (managers), 290
Warrier, Unnayi, 123-24
Wasserstrom, Jeffrey, 465-66
Watts, Jerry G., 178
Wayburn, Ned, 292
wealth, 97; settler colonies and, 71; tourism and, 87
Wealth of Nations, The (Smith), 284
Weaver, Lois, 336, 340, 342-43
Weber, Carl, 306
web pages, 89, 159
Webster, John, 211-12
Weigel, Helene, 303-5
Wekwerth, Manfred, 299
Wentworth, Thomas, 206
We Set Out Early... Visibility Was Poor (Jones), 379,
385-87
Westernization, 163
Westminster Gazette (newspaper), 284
Wet, Reza de. See de Wet, Reza
we-they dichotomy, 67-68
White, Hayden, 192-93, 196
White, Richard, 223, 232, 234, 236, 237, 242n21
White City, 225, 231; racism and, 229-30
White City (Columbian Exposition), 225
whiteness: cyberspace and, 555-56, 558; of Elmina
castle-dungeon, 90, 92; lynching and, 184; Onesixteenth
Black and, 186-87; postcolonialism
INDEX
596
Woolley, John, 200, 202, 212, 218n7
World Congresses, 225, 231
World Heritage sites (UNESCO), 69, 88, 90
World's Fair, 194. See also Columbian Exposition
World Trade Center, 195, 246-47. See also September
11, 2001
World War I, 76
Worthen, W. B., 133n71
Wounded Knee, 195
writing, 191-92, 196n4; Chinese Americans and, 164
Yee, Leland, 166
Young, Elaine, 181
youth, 66n16
Yucatan, 227, 241n11
Yvette (Mother Courage), 303
Zarrilli, Phillip P., 69
2izek, Slavoj, 263-64, 266n4
zones, 61; castle-dungeons as, 86, 89; frontier as, 63,
64; museums as, 98, 102