Performing Arts in Transition

Moving between Media

Susanne Foellmer, Maria Katharina Schmidt, Cornelia Schmitz

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781351330190
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Theatre

Artists especially from dance and performance art as well as opera are involved to an increasing degree in the transfer between different media, not only in their productions but also the events, materials, and documents that surround them. At the same time, the focus on that which remains has become central to any discussion of performance. Performing Arts in Transition explores what takes place in the moments of transition from one medium to another, and from the live performance to that which "survives" it. Case studies from a broad range of interdisciplinary scholars address phenomena such as:

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• The dynamics of transfer between the performing and visual arts.

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• The philosophy and terminologies of transitioning between media.

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• Narratives and counternarratives in historical re-creations.

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• The status of chronology and the document in art scholarship.

This is an essential contribution to a vibrant, multidisciplinary and international field of research emerging at the intersections of performance, visual arts, and media studies.

Chapter 1

Dance, performance, media, transfer

Sketching notions and problems in the field

Susanne Foellmer

On November 14, 2013, the conference entitled Tanz über Gräben. 100 Jahre Le Sacre du Printemps (Dance over Trenches: 100th Anniversary of The Rite of Spring; Berlin, Radialsystem) presents a re-enactment of Mary Wigman’s seminal dance concert Le Sacre du Printemps from 1957. The performance is followed by a discussion between the artists and researchers responsible for re-staging the work (Henrietta Horn, Susan Barnett, and Patricia Stöckemann). Among those who were consulted in the re-staging process was Emma Lew Thomas (sitting in the audience of the performance); she had been one of the dancers in Wigman’s piece.¹ The discussion turns to the practicalities of the reworking: for instance, how was it possible to retrace what had happened on stage when Dore Hoyer, one of the protagonists of the original piece, danced the role of the chosen one (the sacrifice) in the end? Thomas interjects from the gallery with an admission that when she was asked about what she could relay from Hoyer’s dance solo, she could not give a ‘full’ account of what had taken place – she had been dancing with her back to Hoyer during her entire solo. The only thing Thomas was able to communicate to the ‘re-workers’ more than fifty years later were the steps and breathing she had heard during her colleague’s solo.

The short anecdote delineates an aporia at the heart of the question of re-doing performance art and dance.² This has become an ongoing field of artistic investigation for approximately two decades now, through which artists as well as academics have investigated the problem of how to write the history of these purportedly ephemeral art forms.³ The challenges circulate on the apparent gap between documents of past performances, such as photographs, scores or film footage – usually regarded as derivative to the performance itself⁴ – and the seemingly chance circumstances of locating a protagonist of the original event, who would appear to have the authority of personal memory. However, these memories are often also prone to deficiencies and are, at times, unable to keep their promises of delivering the “whole image” (Foellmer 2017: 269–270). Thus, we can say that, due to these shortcomings, living witnesses might in fact be considered on the same level as other bequeathed documents (even though these would not be able to talk back, so to speak). The former serve as media entities – in this case, bodily ones – as mediators capable of transmitting knowledge about a bygone event.

Even more so, such witnesses – considered as corporeal carriers of information – already reveal the mediality⁵ inherent in each medium, which has a double condition. Media transmit something; at the same time, they do not give us all that we want. Thus, media do not serve as uncompromised containers of information. Quite the contrary – in the performing arts, so the hypothesis goes, we are permanently confronted with the medial nature of media themselves: their unruly characteristics, which often reveal media to be open entities. They do not do what they are assumed and supposed to be doing, and they do not serve as frictionless transmitters of information. Performing arts, one could also say, are particularly able to reveal this quality of media, their possible ruptures and dysfunctionalities, and thus to change the image of how we conceive of media in a broader sense.⁶

In the realm of the performing arts, however, the notion of media is understood rather broadly. It focuses not only on media from a more restricted perspective – which might take film or radio as prominent examples of communicating and (possibly) recording and reproducing content – but also on the idea of media in the most literal sense of its singular form, medium: a means of transferring something from one place to another, or from one person to another. In this broad perspective, the notion of media can apply both to language as a means of communication that uses a system of recombination (Wolf 2017: 241), as well as to the body as a transmitter of signs, emotions and, every so often, atmospheres that are not always easy to detect and that can drop out of a hermeneutic framework.

Without being able to comprehensively revisit the complex discussion of the aesthetic implications of such a perspective on media, nor the debates on intermediality in the arts, in this short inaugural chapter, I would like to contour media characteristics as they appear particularly in dance and theatre when it comes to the question of the transfer from one artistic medium to another, or from one art form to another genre.⁷ This will involve some brief reflections of so-called intangible and tangible objects and of the alleged binary nature of ephemerality and durability, of presence and representation. Finally, I aim to highlight the volatile character of media as such, which arises when media are ‘entangled’ in the performing arts.

Media in the performing arts: between transmission and disruption

If we consider media in the performing arts, one could say that theatre can be understood as always already a multi-media set-up.⁸ Apart from the more ‘technical’ character of media such as lighting or video, however, one could ask in what respect a body onstage could be conceived of as a medium. In contrast to a holistic understanding, the body in theatre has always already presented itself as – and been represented in – a double structure, oscillating between materiality and mediality, especially in dance (Foellmer 2014: 446), and between the semiotic body and the corporeal body, for instance in the mode of acting, as Erika Fischer-Lichte argues (2008: 79, 82). Whether dancer or actor, the body is always already both a thinking, sensing and experiencing “subject and object” of the performance (Huschka 2002: 26), a notion that would disturb the Cartesian idea of the body as a mere instrument.

The body can thus be regarded as an ambivalent medium. It is not an exclusive mediator of (in this case theatrical) meaning and is thus able to produce resistance, disturbances or significant surpluses in communication (Foellmer 2014: 446). The idea of the body as a medium also unravels the understanding of media as a mere container and conveyor of information, highlighting its very material quality, as philosopher Sybille Krämer points out in her reflections on the figure of the messenger as a (corporeal) transmitter of contents (Krämer 2015). Neither giving in to a media-positive perspective (media as a trouble-free and ‘invisible’ transmitter of information), nor fully subscribing to McLuhan’s model (Krämer 2015: 27–28), suggesting that “the medium is the message” (McLuhan 2001: 7), she navigates a space between these positions by concentrating on the nature of media as such, and not in terms of its sheer functionality, conceiving of the “medium […] not […] as means or an instrument but rather as a middle and a mediator” (Krämer 2015: 39, emphasis ibid.). The figure of the messenger, then, is a literal ‘middleman,’ someone – or in Krämer’s understanding, some (material) thing – who not only transmits the message but also does so in her/his/its own specific way. Thus, one could say that disruptions or incomplete, distorted and transformed information are the rule rather than the exception. Philosopher Dieter Mersch hence understands media from a “negative” perspective, given the fact that media usually only become present as media in the moment of disturbance and malfunction (Mersch 2004: 75, 83) – the static of a radio when a station’s frequency is not properly adjusted might serve as a ‘classical’ example. The medium reveals itself in its specific, in this case dysfunctional, quality.

Given this apparent volatility of media as far from stable and uncompromised entities, one could claim that these qualities are amplified when a transfer between different media occurs. In relation to media and their changes in the realm of arts, media scholar Jens Schröter questions the ontological status of media as singular, distinctive entities. Adding to the debate on intermediality, he proposes that the very definition of media should centre around the dialectical relation between media and their respective exchanges:⁹ “Do the clearly defined unities we call media and that are characterised by some kind of ‘media-specific materialities’ precede the intermedia relation, or does a sort of primeval intermediality exist that functions conversely as a prerequisite for the possibility of such unities?” (Schröter 2011). Schröter opts for the latter possibility, proposing the theoretical model of “ontological intermediality,” arguing that the specificity of a medium (such as film) primarily lies in its differentiation from another medium (Schröter 2011).

Hence, as an interim résumé, it appears a given that media are always already connected within the transmitted and the transmitter, that they are prone to ‘failures’ in transfer and that they are only to be distinguished from one another when they relate to one another. Performing arts such as theatre and dance, I would further argue, bring forth this rather fragile quality of media: not only do dance movements supposedly ‘disappear’ from a visual grasp once performed on stage, but apparently more ‘stable’ media such as film or photography are also subject to transmission disruption and decay.¹⁰

These assumptions call into question the much debated (but in parts still prevailing) dualism of ephemerality (in the performing arts) and permanence (such as in photographs), and with it the debate about the separation of cultural heritage into the tangible and intangible.¹¹ Assuming that the performing arts are to be situated in the realm of the intangible, dance scholars Hetty Blades, Rosemary E. Kostic Cisneros, and Sarah Whatley imply that the distinction between intangible performances and tangible leftovers is actually a problematic one as it reduces that which remains from performances to a certain idea of material persistence – that is, tangibility – and neglects “[c]onversations, lived experiences, memories and traces of thinking [that] are valuable leftovers in the minds and bodies of the participants” (Blades, Kostic Cisneros and Whatley 2017: 148).¹² Exploring the relation between dance and the museum in recent projects such as that of French choreographer Boris Charmatz, Franz Anton Cramer even identifies an “ontological opacity” that does not allow for an easy, traditional distinction into (museum) artefact and (danced) movement, thus claiming that “immaterial” dance has the same legitimacy to convey “historic evidence” as other (arte)facts (Cramer 2014: 29).¹³ Clarifying the notion of re-enactment in terms of an omnipresent engagement with re-doings, in dance in particular, Mark Franko goes one step further, proposing these distinctions be abandoned altogether in favour of the concept of the “post-ephemeral.” Following Rebecca Schneider’s ideas, he argues that re-enactment “may emphasise the presence of the dancing subject in dialogue with history, but the dancing subject herself is not presented in a ‘before’; the status of the lost past and that of the vanishing present are equally under erasure: a double disappearance is revoked” (Franko 2017: 7).

Addressing dance and archives, theatre scholar Maaike Bleeker continues to assume a resistance of dance against the idea of (material) storage, suggesting a (re)generative, non-material potential as an essential characteristic of dance (Bleeker 2017: 201). Seemingly taking a step back from the abandonment of the material-immaterial binary, however, she makes an intriguing point when addressing digital archives, to which she acknowledges a similar generative potential as dance itself: “digital archives are themselves participants in the production of new objects of knowledge” (Bleeker 2017: 204). This is an important observation, given that media containing digital content, but also films and photographs – as already mentioned – are prone to disintegration. Thus, we can even go one step further and suggest that those allegedly persistent media are undergoing dynamisations similar to those present in dance or performance art. These media could thus be conceived of as themselves ephemeral and, in terms of their capacity to preserve knowledge about the past, as reliable or unreliable as the aforementioned art forms.¹⁴ In this volume, André Lepecki highlights the temporalisation of the material – of matter – by referring to Hélio Oiticica’s art and thought, and Gabriele Brandstetter gives a vivid example of material decay by placing Dieter Roth’s ‘artwork’ Schimmelmuseum (Mould Museum, 1992–2004) into the realm of a volatile conception of history.

We can see, therefore, a set of ontological subversions entailed in the binaries between the performing arts and (their) ‘other’ media, which might be connected ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• About the editors
• Acknowledgements
• List of contributors
• Introduction
• 1 Dance, performance, media, transfer: sketching notions and problems in the field
• Part I Material temporalities
• Part II Displacing the exhibition: between display and performance
• Part III Processes of genre transfer
• Part IV Moving HiStories
• Part V Blurring the document
• Index