English: Books in library (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
“The repetitions of rereading…carry peculiar authority…Repetition generates belief. Rereading, by virtue of its repetitions, can provide its practitioner with the illusion that she has total possession of a text.”
Rereading should not be done to solidify what is already believed about a text. Instead, rereading should be performed to question what is already believed about a text. Healthy skepticism is key to scholarly rereading.
Oedipus and the sphinx. Tondo of an Attic red-figure kylix, 480–470 BC. From Vulci. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
“Collective rereading…is largely responsible…for what we call the literary canon.” (Page 167)
Is collective rereading or collective reperforming responsible for the dramatic canon? Are we fascinated by certain dramatic texts because of the literary experiences they afford or because of the performances they allow us to witness? Certain texts, I’m thinking of Ancient Greek and Roman texts in particular, only survived because of the literary interest they maintained over centuries while not being performed. Has the literary scholar exerted undo influence on the dramatic canon? What would the canon be like if the performance scholar always exerted the most influence?
Burberry (Photo credit: thinkretail)
“The introduction of multimedia is either a threat to the established culture and practices of the museum complex or its opportunity to reinvent itself and ensure its own survival into the twenty-first century” (page 35)
The December 2012 issue of Architectural Digest includes an article entitled “Burberry Reboots,” which announces, “the classic british brand embraces innovative technology and old-world craft at its sprawling new london flagship.” Perhaps answers concerning the museum’s need to adapt to a changing world can be found in the commercial sector. From iPad wielding salespeople to video displays embedded in mirrors that are triggered by radio-frequency ID, the store embraces new technology as a way to present its products to 21st century shoppers. By embracing such technology would the new museum endanger itself to becoming just another commercial enterprise? Does the new museum as ‘cultural capital’ then just tie itself even more fully to actual capital? Or would such new technology simply make the new museum more user-friendly to an already tech-reliant populace?
English: Portrait of Sarah Bernhardt as Hamlet. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
“Photographs would play a central and defining role in the study, dissemination, and appreciation of art.” (Page 23)
How well does this statement relate to the performing arts? Has photography only helped to solidify static images of dramatic figures in the public conscience? Consider a depressed Hamlet dressed in black and holding a skull. Would this stereotype exist without photography? Or, the converse, would a better public consciousness of Hamlet exist without photography?
In his essay, Cavell makes the assumption that all audiences conform to being a silent mass separated by choice from the action of a staged event. However, I would argue that this is a very narrow view of a theatre audience and overlooks the fact that many professional theatres maintain loyal audience bases who have learned patterns of inserting themselves into the action of performance, not just vocally but physically as well. I have in mind two well-established companies (both with 30 plus years of production history) whose audience’s frequently insert themselves into the action. Interestingly, the two audiences appear to react to opposing facets of the staged events: one reacts to the living actors on the stage, while the other is compelled by the characters presented by the living actors. Although Cavell is interested in viewing actor and character as an everpresent conflation, these audiences suggest that the two are distinguishable. In the first, audience members are not afraid to call out encouragement to the actors, treating them as professionals whose work merits acknowledgement; “I just want you to know that you’re doing a fantastic job”, one patron famously called out to an actor mid-scene. At the other company it is not unusual for audience members to cheer on a protagonist, physically joining the hero in the performance area, shouting words of encouragement. It should be pointed out that at neither of these theatres is the audience actively encouraged to join in with the performance. It is a phenomenon arising naturally out of the enacted event. How does an audience who does not conform to Cavell’s conservative notion of separate and silent observers trouble his idea of sharing time but not sharing space? Does such activity point to a perceived audience agency that Cavell overlooks?
“The trouble is, there they [characters] are. The plain fact, the only plain fact, is that we do not go up to them, even that we cannot. – ‘Obviously not. Their existence is fictional.’ – Meaning what? That they are not real? Meaning what? That they are not to be met with in space and time? This means they are not in nature. – The Cavell Reader (p. 148)
At a recent conference, I attended a panel discussion on interactive theater and its various social uses. One of the speakers introduced participants to a project using scripted performance as a way to provide ethics training to emergency room physicians. In the state of Texas, ER doctors are required to undertake such training for 1 hour every year. By one hour, the speaker did not mean one “credit” hour of training, but just one 60 minute period of ethics-based training every 365 days. To assist doctors in fulfilling this minimal obligation, the speaker created a 60 minute accreditation program consisting of a short performance based on real ER events followed by a question and answer session with the actors. The sketch depicts a common emergency room situation involving a family’s decision whether their critically-injured loved one would wish for extreme measures to be used to maintain life and the role of ER doctors in this divisive decision-making process. At the ethics-training sessions, the scene is performed by professional actors who have been given short journal articles and opinion pieces from the popular press that provide background information concerning their respective characters’ opinions surrounding the use of extreme measures to maintain life in life-and-death emergency room situations. Using the information gleaned from these articles, the actors (whose characters range from senior and junior ER physicians to concerned family and friends) respond AS THEIR RESPECTIVE CHARACTERS to questions from the real-life ER doctors. The actors are expected to respond to the doctors’ questions using specific data from the materials they have read and to ignore any personal opinions they may have concerning this topic. The ethics-training session intends to show ER doctors how they might handle such an ethical issue in their daily practice and how they might communicate with each other and with patients’ loved ones under such circumstances. In addition, the session provides an open forum for doctors to confront an issue rarely freely discussed or debated amongst professional peers.
The ethics session discussed here does not have implications solely for the ethical work and training of ER doctors. The session also points to the ethical choices that actors are sometimes forced to make concerning their work. How truly separate are actor and character? Can an actor who has memorized a short role and read a few articles satisfactorily improvise as a doctor or a concerned family member when faced with the real-life doctors who actually have to live this experience? Where might an actor’s personal feelings or life experiences show through? Is it unethical for such feelings or experiences to not be revealed? Perhaps Cavell’s assertion quoted above that ‘we do not go up to’ the characters is a blessing.
“We [the audience] know we cannot approach him [the character], and not because it is not done but because nothing would count as doing it. Put another way, they and we do not occupy the same space; there is no path from my location to his…We do, however, occupy the same time.” – Cavell (Ed. Stephen Mulhall), The Cavell Reader (p. 150)
vs.
“The actor is onstage to communicate the play to the audience. That is the beginning and the end of his and her job. To do so the actor needs a strong voice, superb diction, a supple, well-proportioned body, and a rudimentary understanding of the play. The actor does not need to ‘become’ the character. The phrase, in fact, has no meaning. There is no character. There are only lines upon a page. They are lines of dialogue meant to be said by the actor. When he or she says them simply, in an attempt to achieve an object more or less like that suggested by the author, the audience sees an illusion of a character upon the stage.” –David Mamet, True and False: Heresy and Common Sense for the Actor (p. 9)
Decision: Mamet (Cavell’s oversight of the performer’s corporeal presence undermines his argument, giving Mamet the edge in this bout to define character.)
1908 poster for Giuseppe Verdi’s Aida, performed by the Hippodrome Opera Company, apparently of Cleveland, Ohio.http://images.ulib.csuohio.edu/cdm4/results.php?CISOOP1=exact&CISOFIELD1=subjec&CISOROOT=all&CISOBOX1=Hippodrome+Theater (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
How did the cultural currency attributed to opera get so HIGH? What about it makes it so much more esteemed and untouchable than other performance modes? It combines orchestral music with acting. But so does the All-American Musical, which my parents have no trouble attending. It requires a sizable playing space with frequent spectacular visuals. Yet professional football does too, even throwing in a visual feast for half-time, and no one poo-poos it for being too hoity-toity. Is it because opera is so ‘antique’? Shakespeare and the Ancient Greeks are similarly gilded from age, and lay individuals often profess a fear of attending such performances. Yet these do not garner the same kind of trepidation as monolithic Opera (capital O). Why do we take so much effort to denote opera as a separate special performance category? Why do we so easily step in to evaluate other performance and theater, but suddenly balk at opera?
“Since its birth in the waning years of the sixteenth century, opera has seen the pendulum swing from the primacy of drama or words to the primacy of song or music; from a preference for mythological events to one for historical and even quotidian events; from the predominance of grand spectacle to a preference for dramatic integrity.” –David J. Levin, Unsettling Opera: Staging Mozart, Verdi, Wagner, and Zemlinsky (p. 5)
Disappearance of real person (D. Bowie’s real name) allows us to forget his personal acquaintance with the drag forms which he is stealing for his stage persona. Thus, he (the persona) can be seen as original and free-thinking.
“I see the performer in popular music as defined by three layers: the real person (the performer as human being), the performance persona (the performers’ self-presentation), and the character (a figure portrayed in a song text)” –Philip Auslander, Performing Glam Rock: Gender and Theatricality in Popular Music (p. 4)
“The real person is the dimension of performance to which the audience has the least direct access, since the audience generally infers what performers are like as real people from their performance personae and the characters they portray. Public appearances offstage do not give reliable access to the performer as a real person since it is quite likely that interviews and even casual public appearances are manifestations of the performer’s persona rather than the real person.” (pp. 5-6)
“Before I am accused of promulgating a ‘great man’ theory of glam rock’s development, I hasten to add that communities, not individuals, produce musical genres; if Bowie and Bolan were the only glam rockers, this book would not exist” (p. 42)
Communities create genres – sure, but they are also necessary for creating musical persona!
hoopdedoo 