The Secret Life of Theater

On the Nature and Function of Theatrical Representation

Brian Kulick

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780429817540
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Theatre

What is the secret DNA of theater? What makes it unique from its sister arts? Why was it invented? Why does it persist? And now, in such an advanced technological age, why do we still feel compelled to return to a mode of expression that was invented over two thousand years ago? These are some of the foundational questions that are asked in this study of theater from its inception to today.

The Secret Life of Theater begins with a look at theater's origins in Ancient Greece. Next, it moves on to examine the history and nature of theater, from Agamenon to Angels in America, through theater's use of stage directions, revealing the many unspoken languages that are employed to communicate with its audiences. Finally, it looks at theater's ever-shifting strategies of engendering fellow-feeling through the use of emotion, allowing the form to become a rare space where one can feel a thought and think a feeling.

In an age when many studies are concerned with the "how" of theater, this work returns us to theatre's essential "why." The Secret Life of Theater suggests that by reframing the question we can re-enchant this unique and ever-vital medium of expression.

Part I

The invention of the outside

On the nature and functions of theater

5

Borges and theater

What the great Argentine poet can tell us about the secret life of theater

I realize that to associate Borges with theater might strike both those who know Borges and those who know theater as something of a misnomer, since neither the poet or the medium seem to have had very much to do with one another. The great twentieth-century Argentine author is known for his poetry, short stories, and essays, rather than any overt interest in the theatrical. During his youth, you would have been more likely to find him at his local cinema than attending a performance at some threadbare theater. We can read a treasure trove of insightful and enthusiastic critiques that Borges wrote on the movies of his day; but with the exception of a handful of random musings on Shakespeare and one intriguing short story, Borges seems to display little passion or even passing interest in the stage. And yet, it is this one story, often translated as Averroes’ Search,¹ where in seven short pages he is able to get to the very heart of the strange nature and functions of the theatrical enterprise. For this reason we will use Borges and his amazing story for our guides as we attempt to understand the inner dynamics of this ancient practice we call theater.

Averroes’ Search has its roots in actual history and concerns the great medieval Islamic philosopher Abulgualid Mohammed Ibn-Ahmed Ibn-Mohammed Ibn-Rushed (who the West, with its impatience for the grandeur of Islamic patronymics, has hastily dubbed Averroes). Borges’ story finds Averroes in his library composing his famous translation of Aristotle’s Poetics. All had been going splendidly, until he comes to two dubious little words that are beyond his comprehension: tragedy and comedy. The reason behind Averroes’ quandary is due to the simple fact that Islam has not yet discovered the art of theater-making. This will not happen for several more centuries; long after Averroes’ initial wrestling with the meaning of tragedy and comedy. The first stirrings of Islamic dramatic imagination will arrive with the advent of Ta’ziyeh—a kind of passion play first performed by Shiite Muslims in Iran. Ta’ziyeh literally means “to mourn” or “to console” and grew out of the ritual observances that surrounded the historic sacrifice of Hussein, the grandson of the Prophet Muhammad.

But, as we said, the advent of such theatrical practice is still centuries away and Borges’ Averroes is at his wits’ end to make sense of these impenetrable terms. We will follow Averroes over the course of the day as he struggles to define these two simple words. Throughout the next 24 hours, fate (or rather, Borges in the guise of our omnipotent narrator) will place before Averroes a sequence of clues that, were the philosopher to take note of them, would help him to unlock the mystery of Aristotle’s nomenclature. The painful irony of our story is, given Averroes’ historic circumstances, he is incapable of comprehending what we can so clearly see. This forms part of Borges’ larger epistemological argument, which we will politely bypass to focus specifically on his clues and what they can tell us about the nature and functions of theatrical expression.

Note

1Jorges Luis Borges, Collected Fiction, translated by Andrew Hurley (Viking Press, 1998), 235–242.

6

Beneath Averroes’ window

Borges’ first clue; the family resemblance of play, ritual, and theater

As Averroes is hard at work trying to decipher the meaning of tragedy and comedy, his mind and eye wander toward the window of his library where he sees in the courtyard several children at play. One is pretending to be a muezzin and chanting, “There is no God but the God.” The second, unfortunate, child is hard at work playing the minaret, which is responsible for holding the muezzin aloft in the air. The final player kneels in the dust like a faithful worshipper. The entire affair does not last long since all want to play the muezzin and none the tower or the congregation.

Here we have one of the most popular assumptions about the origin of theater, that it somehow grows out of the human impulse to play. It is intriguing that of all the games these young children could choose to partake in, they gravitate toward a rather esoteric activity for their collective flight of fancy. It is not exactly what one would expect to be among the top scenarios in their imaginative arsenal. One might think of other more popular moments of make-believe, beginning with, let’s say, a fight to the death with sticks as scimitars, or perhaps the releasing of a jinn from a neglected lamp, or even that age old favorite, the abduction of a girl from the Sultan’s seraglio. No, wonderfully, these youths want to re-enact a variation of the Islamic call to prayer.

The choice of game points to an essential part of Borges’ art. Like dreams, Borges enjoys trafficking in a kind of literary condensation, the nesting of images one inside another. It is this nesting that leads to Borges’ often vertigo-inducing meaning. Think of this as the narrative equivalent of the game of Russian dolls: here we have the doll of children’s play, which contains the doll of ritual, which contains the intimation of the doll of theater. Each concept/image is housed neatly within the other. It is not such a huge leap to move from the idea of children at play, to a community enacting a rite, to an audience assembled before a proscenium arch in anticipation of an impending show. The nesting of images quietly provokes us to ask what similarities, if any, bring these three human activities under the same tent of signification. Let us begin then, with the first “doll.”

Play: a fundamental form of human expenditure

Johan Huizinga, one of the first historians to focus on play and the author of the seminal Homo Ludens, wryly notes that the one common denominator that runs throughout all theories of play is that “play must serve something that is not play.”¹ Roger Caillois, another major thinker on the subject and author of the equally influential Man, Play and Games agrees but points out:

A characteristic of play, in fact, is that it creates no wealth or goods, thus differing from the work of art. At the end of the game, all can start over again at the same point. Nothing has been harvested or manufactured, no masterpiece has been created, no capital has been secured.²

He provocatively concludes that play is pure waste—a waste of time, energy, ingenuity, skill. But it would seem that there is something sublime and necessary about this particular form of human expenditure that can be found in all cultures around the world. Play seems to address the excess or surplus energy that is bound up in the human condition, as well as its desire for release. Huizinga gives play the following working definition:

Summing up the formal characteristics of play we might call it a free activity standing quite outside “ordinary” life as being “not serious”, but at the same time absorbing the player intensely and utterly. It is an activity connected with no material interest, and no profit can be gained from it. It proceeds within its own proper boundaries of time and space according to fixed rules and an orderly manner.³

The first element to note in Huizinga’s concept of play is that it is outside of ordinary life. Play begins with a re-restructuring of time and space; removing us from our familiar quotidian moorings, marking out a territory that separates us from the everyday. This new space can be a chess board, a field, an abandoned lot, or any old patch of pavement marked out by chalk; there is an infinite variety of ways to delineate the space of play. Having done so, the world of immediate wants and appetites recedes, becoming “the outside” of our experience. We are now left to our own imaginary impulses and interests. This shift in space allows for a shift in focus that impacts on our sense of time. The regular flow of time is altered, creating an interlude or intermezzo of sorts. “Clock time” dissolves into “felt time.” Now any given moment can expand or contract in ways that defy our ordinary sense of duration. Time itself can become timeless.

Play flourishes within these new spatial-temporal boundaries. Caillois tells us that there are four fundamental categories of human play: agon (which pits one players strength/skill against another); alea, (where chance is a major factor in the outcome of the game); illynix (when the player is rendered unbalanced or incapacitated and then expected to accomplish a given task); and finally mimesis (which is what Borges’ children are engaged in beneath Averroes’ window). All other types of games, according to Caillois, are re-combinations of these four elemental building blocks of play. For example, when we combine agon with alea we have the dynamics of many card and board games, which require both skill and luck to succeed. Our immediate interest is in the category of mimesis, which, as Borges intimates, feels like the great progenitor of things theatrical. Here the subject makes believe or makes others believe that he is someone other than himself. He forgets, disguises, or temporarily sheds his personality in order to experience the world from another vantage point.

Let us return momentarily to the courtyard beneath Averroes’ window where Borges’ children are still deep in play. Let’s take the child who fancies himself the muezzin. What is happening to him in this moment of mimesis? He always wanted to be a muezzin. To become the one who stops everything with his powerful voice, calling the faithful to prayer. As a child, no one ever listens to him but at this moment, in his imagination, the entire world hears and obeys him. He’s memorized all the words, the inflections, the almost sung/almost spoken melodies, it is all there on display in his impeccable performance. He sings out, full voice, the sound filling the courtyard and ascending toward the heavens. As his voice ascends, so does he. For this brief instant, the boy that no one listens to, the boy who is always shushed, the boy who must always wait his turn—that boy has vanished and he has become the muezzin! But then his fellow playmate, who is impersonating the minaret, loses his footing and our momentary muezzin falls tumbling back into that neglected little boy again.

Huizinga calls this, “The ‘extra-ordinary’ nature of play as it reaches perfection. The disguised or masked individual ‘plays’ another part, another being. He IS another being.”⁴ And so, in the play of mimesis, we find not only time and space shifting, but our very selves as well. Dormant aspects of ourselves or entire new selves can be realized within these new found boundaries. This also has an important social component, for as the self changes, so do the others around it, giving each player a sense of a new horizon of social interaction and potential collaboration. Such interaction engenders the possibility for a new and more cohesive sense of communitas. What Caillois provocatively calls “waste” might actually be the space for the ever-incremental reinvention of the self and re-enchantment of the world. Not that the child or world are instantaneously and irrevocably refigured by play, but some residue of the play-self and play-world follow the child back into real world. The child, according to Huizinga, returns with an image of something different from the known world, “something more beautiful, or more sublime, or more dangerous than what actually is.”⁵ This brings us to the border between play and ritual.

Ritual: that uniquely human endeavor

We will designate ritual as that which encompasses all the circumstances necessary for an encounter with the “numinous” or “sacred.” The mysterious reality that is of a wholly different order than our everyday world. Here the religiously inclined person finds certain key intervals of the day, week, month, and year to leave the profane world aside and return to an alternative sacred reality. This is accomplished through a series of stylized and symbolic repetitions of body (kneeling, dancing, etc.), voice (song/chant) and mind (internalized prayer and meditation). For instance, the children playing in Borges’ first clue are attempting to enact Salat, the Muslim ritual for daily prayer. This act not only depends on an exact sense of timing and directional orientation, but also an equally structured repetition of body actions that includes standing, kneeling, prostrating, and standing again while reciting an intricately inflected prayer from memory.

All of this begins, like play, with the marking off of a consecrated spot that separates the now sacred space from the otherwise profane world. Huizinga notes that from an objective point of view, it is difficult to distinguish the formal differences from playground to sacred ground. Both, according to Huizinga, are temporary worlds dedicated to the performance of an act apart.

With this shift in space comes another shift in time. But the nature of this temporal shift is different from the one experienced during play. Play celebrates the infinity of next; ritual, the forever of now. What we have here are two forms of timelessness with a significantly different emphasis. Thanks to ritual’s formalized use of repetition we are able to reverse Heraclitus’ famous dictum and feel as though we can always step back into the same flowing river of the spirit. Ritual practice creates a cathedral made out of time—one that the believer can return to over and over again with a simple set of symbolically endowed repetitions of his or her body, voice and mind.

Within this consecrated spatial-temporal world we find a multitude of ritual activities. Anthropologist Antony F.C. Wallace⁶ attempts to break these seemingly infinite activities into five basic categories: technological rituals aimed at controlling non-human nature (food supply, rain); therapy rites (curing the injured, exorcizing the possessed); ideology rituals used to shape a group and its values (rites of passage, or even “Sunday Services” that renew social solidarity); salvation rituals to help people cope with personal adversity (shamanic rites, mystic rites, and expiation rites); and last, and perhaps most intriguingly, revitalization rituals created to aide a crisis in society, such as millenarian movements. The ritual participants must submit themselves to these deeper understandings that were discovered by their ancestors. In the process of doing so, they “re-center” themselves, allowing their personal will to be absorbed by divine will. Such a process reconnects the ritual participant with the transcendent, a way of experiencing the reality that is otherwise occluded by the hustle and bustle of the everyday profane world.

Let us imagine for a moment that the boy who has been playing beneath Averroes’ window, the one who wants to be a muezzin, has indeed grown up to obtain such a prestigious post. Now he sits atop a real minaret and calls the city to prayer. Today he has been fighting a cold, his voice is not what it should be, but what can he do? A part of him wishes he were still in bed. He kneels down, just as he has knelt ever since he was a child. He places his head to the tip of the prayer mat, just as his father and his father’s father had done. He intones the words, “Allah Akbar,” just as his son has just learnt and will someday teach his sons. Suddenly he feels the strange sensation of being part of an unending continuum, the thought of which brings sudden tears to his unprepared eyes. He continues the prayer, the words are so simple and yet when placed in this particular order they seem to mean more, to reverberate deep within his chest, as though a long extinguished lamp was suddenly relit, its illumination spreading throughout his body.

Huizinga explains this dynamic in the following fashion:

Something invisible, an in-actual takes beautiful actual, holy form. The participants of these rites are convinced that their action actualizes and effects this definite beautification. It brings about an order of things higher than that in which they customarily live.⁷

He calls this “actualization by representation” and believes that this phenomenon retains the formal characteristics of play. Caillois almost agrees with Huizinga, taking pains to point out: “The sacred and play resemble each other to the degree that they are both opposed to the practical life, but they occupy symmetrical situations in regards to it.” He goes onto explain:

Through the sacred, the source of omnipotence, the worshiper is fulfilled. Confronted by the sacred, he is defenseless, completely at its mercy. In play, the opposite is the case. All is human, invented by man the creator. For this reason, play rests, relaxes, distracts, and causes the dangers, cares, and travails of life to be forgotten. The sacred, on the...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• In praise of not knowing: an introduction
• Part I The invention of the outside: on the nature and functions of theater
• Part II Nine and a half tableaux: theater’s ek-static ability to bring what is hidden into view
• Part III From Sophocles’ urn to Wittgenstein’s box: theater and the engendering of fellow-feeling throughout the ages
• Index