A Strange Proximity

Stage Presence, Failure, and the Ethics of Attention

Jon Foley Sherman

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317440970
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Médias et arts de la scène
• Subtopic: Théâtre

What happens in the relationship between audience and performer? What

choices are made in the space of performance about how we attend to

others?

A Strange Proximity examines stage presence as key to thinking about

performance and ethics. It is the first phenomenological account of ethics

generated from, rather than applied to, contemporary theatrical productions.

The ethical possibilities of the stage, argues Jon Foley Sherman, rest not

so much in its objects—the performers and the show itself—as in the "how"

of attending to others. A Strange Proximity is a unique perspective on the

implications of attention in performance.

Chapter 1 May I have your attention

DOI: 10.4324/9781315694900-2

Paula and the classic question

And then the Russian Empress Alexandra entered upstage right. The room, both the stage and the brick-walled auditorium, seemed jolted alive. Something was happening. Previously, the actresses playing her daughters had allowed the appearance of assorted furniture and the scenic flats to do the work of conveying where they were—under guard awaiting certain execution by their captors. But when Paula Gruskiewicz as the Tsarina arrived she seemed to bring that situation into the room. The other actresses seemed to sense it, too. Where just the moment before there had been the same beds, chairs, window, and assorted props, now a dank cottage of grungy upholstery leeched danger into the fabric of a family on the verge of extermination. When Gruskiewicz entered, she seemed immediately to invest each inch of the room with threat, discomfort, and constraint.¹

At the time the experience thrilled me, but as the years passed I grew increasingly puzzled by it. Paula's entrance seemed a classic example of stage presence. Things got more interesting with her around. I felt swept up in the world of the play and forgot my previous qualms, forgot myself a little. Nonetheless, something about it never lined up. If asked, I would have said that Paula “had” stage presence. But I began to question what this actually meant. It wasn't that she became more fascinating; it was that she had seemed to make what was happening on stage more interesting without herself occupying the center of my attention. Rather than someone who became the focus of my attention or who excited me, here was someone who changed my relationship to the room and to the other actors; the excitement I felt extended to the stage area and the space between Paula and her surroundings.

My focus on her surroundings indicated a departure from the traditional model of stage presence in which performers, not their surroundings, take focus. In the classic model of stage presence performers are more than— more powerful/interesting/exciting than other people on stage with them and certainly than the attendants imagine themselves to be. Such performers, by definition remarkably different than others, take on proportions larger than their bodies; they tower, they command, fascinate, and compel, and they do so by virtue of something intrinsic to themselves. Such qualities capture attendants and yoke them to the performer as an object of attention. This kind of stage presence is often described in quantitative terms: actors have a lot of it, they have enough of it, they could do with more of it. Movie stars that show up on Broadway stages are frequently assessed in this manner. Here Howard Kissel goes after Julia Roberts: “As mesmerizing as she is onscreen, she has surprisingly little stage presence.” Roberts’ co-star in that production, Bradley Cooper, would later become an A-list Hollywood celebrity and Oscar nominee himself. In the Daily Mail preview article on Cooper's London premiere in the title role of The Elephant Man, columnist Quentin Letts writes:

Stage presence […] perhaps stems in part from a combination of physical beauty and self-confidence. Bradley Cooper certainly has those two things in The Elephant Man, but the paradox with his performance is that he is playing a character who is notoriously ugly.

Tellingly, stage presence is something the actor has, not the character. Actors may be born with it, they may study to acquire more of it, but actors are the ones who have it and “it” is “of” the actors. Which is also to say that in some way it relates to them as persons; “their” stage presence is a function of their specific being placed in front of other beings. Thus this description of two actresses who exchanged roles during the run of the 2013 West End revival of Old Times by Harold Pinter: “No matter which role they play, the inwardly centered Ms Scott Thomas and the more visibly anxious Ms Williams project almost opposite stage presences” (Brantley, “London Theater Journal”). So the classic version of stage presence concerns not simply an excess, but an excess connected to the sense of perceiving something about the performer, a unique truth about the performer magnified by the stage. Curiously, this trait can, over time, “trap” an actor whom critics describe as always playing a version of themselves: after the initial introduction, intoxication can give way to familiarity and impatience. My father enjoyed telling the story of how, over the course of attending several productions starring legendary stage actor Sir Laurence Olivier, he took less and less pleasure in them. He had come to expect carefully detailed performances and Olivier always gave them. For my father, Olivier had normalized astonishment and effectively destroyed it in the process. As Bernhard Waldenfels notes, “a methodologically produced amazement [would] not master wonder but rather abolish it” (“Strangeness, Hospitality, and Enmity” 93).

For there to be something about performers that makes attendants react with fascination and attraction, the quality of themselves that performers exhibit must be singular, impressive, and seemingly unrepeatable. This classic sense of stage presence fits Max Weber's description of charisma as “a certain quality of an individual personality by virtue of which he is set apart from ordinary men and treated as endowed with supernatural, superhuman, or at least specifically exceptional powers or qualities” (358–9). In Weber's definition, charisma operates almost independent of charismatic people—something they have, a quality of their personality, does the work of singling them out. They are the possessors if not the owners of charisma—it eludes their control because it resides in them and not in their actions. Similarly, this understanding of charisma does not grant any agency to people who recognize charismatic people. A quality appears in someone and results in a certain treatment. Those affected do not choose to behave in any particular way, they simply do, and, Weber implies, they are correct to do so.

The idea that an actor has “a” presence to offer on stage has been subject to convincing criticism for some time. Scholars writing about video art, Internet performance, and other forms that involve the heavy use of digital mediating technologies have recognized that a sense of presence may be had in more than one place. The possibility of projecting an actor's—or audience member's—image across multiple locations puts pressure on the idea that stage presence remains strictly local to bodies. For example, in Performing Presence: Between the Live and the Simulated (2011), Gabriella Giannachi and Nick Kaye examine the work of Lynn Hershman Leeson, Gary Hill, and Paul Sermon and find the possibility of presence “across divisions, differences, and multiplications” (241).² Many of these pieces offer “live” performances where performers are separated from each other as well as from the attendants by monitors and screens; Giannachi and Kaye argue that they nonetheless achieve a feeling of proximity, often as a result of rupturing the sense of place. Such performances threaten traditional notions of stage presence that presume it to be a part of the actor. Nonetheless the phenomenon is still done to attendants, if not by the actors then by the technologies of the performance.

Another common model does not require possession or singular location, but action. Sometimes this action concerns temporality: actors “are present,” “in the present,” or “in the moment.” Perhaps by diving into the depths of the present tense actors provide immediate contact between themselves and the world, and thus make direct contact with those in the auditorium. Or perhaps their mastery of time involves the ability to compress the past (rehearsal) and the future (the foregone conclusion of the performance script or score) into the present moment (Erickson, “Tension/ Release and the Production of Time in Performance” 92–3). Achieving stage presence amounts again to a kind of “being present” in which something essential—belonging to the actor or perhaps to time itself—becomes available to attendants. These descriptions convey a dual nature of stage presence: materiality and atemporality. Thus Suzanne Jaeger's claims that to do stage presence or be present, one must be bodily with another while also so embedded in the present as to be freed from the experience of passing time (123, 129).

Acting teachers from Zeami in fifteenth-century Japan to Anne Bogart in twenty-first-century America have elaborated on this version of stage presence by proposing that an actor's interest on stage may be understood in terms of specific techniques related to balance, weight, and tension. At the same time that actors “with” stage presence might exist as a “higher form of being with great spiritual vitality,” there are means of achieving presence that can be taught. The actor can practice these means “through [the] manipulation of space and materials, including his [sic] own body and posture” (Power 49). Phillip B. Zarrilli explores many of these exercises involving breath and movement in his recent work on psychophysical acting, the most recent of which positions his own practice and performances as models of these methods (“An Enactive Approach,” “‘…Presence …,’” “The Actor's Work on Attention”).

All of these renderings of stage presence, whether formulated as a quality, a possession, a state, or an action, obscure a crucial element: the attendants. More precisely, these theories imagine attendants without agency.

Whether stage presence is described as a kind of personal intensity or as a learned practice, the performer occupies a position of power. A cursory observation of the terms used in reference to stage presence reveals the force at play: attendants are “taken,” “compelled,” and “captured” by performers who “are” “magnetic,” “mesmerizing,” and “electric” (Goodall). The name of a 2000 colloquium on “the presence of the actor” makes explicit the violence inherent in these descriptions: Burn the Boards, Shatter the Screen (Farcy and Prédal).³ This violence may yet produce something pleasing, as Erika Fischer-Lichte argues in her accounts of stage presence. All the same, she deploys the language of dominance in exemplary fashion: through a “mastery of certain techniques and practices,” a performer can “occupy and command space” and is capable of exerting “a vice-like grip on [spectators’] attention” (Fischer-Lichte, The Transformative Power of Performance 96, 108, 109). The experience definitively begins with the actions of performers through which “they appear as embodied mind” (99). It is enough to perceive this appearance in order to have one's own experience as an embodied mind. Although part of “the nature of human beings,” this state is elusive, and “the actor who grants us such an experience, rare in everyday life, will quite understandably be celebrated” (Fischer-Lichte, “Appearing as Embodied Mind” 116).

Through submission, chosen or not, the attendants’ wills are shaped by the performers before them. In its neat inversion of Michel Foucault's regulating gaze, the classic model of stage presence conceals the attendants’ participation because it describes something that happens to them. Placing all the action in the performer—or the performance—also forces the hand of anyone analyzing stage presence because it prompts the question of why anyone would submit to the performers. This risks queuing up any number of consoling but over-determined explanations whose packaged responses precede the question itself, for example the unconscious desires, impulses, and transfer of psychoanalysis or the rigorous economic structure of will in Marxism and cultural materialism. These explanations carry the risk— or precisely emphasize the inevitability—of securing the attendants’ lack of agency and enforcing their submission.

Despite efforts to explain it, stage presence has proven remarkably resistant to scholarship. Perhaps because of its inherent involvement with what feels like the unknown and unknowable of human attraction and fascination, stage presence remains or should remain just beyond reach. Hence the French expression for an unnamable charm, “un certain je ne sais quoi.” Literally, “a certain I don't know what,” the phrase indicates that within the inability to articulate an idea there lies an irresistible appeal. It might be that this appeal simply repeats the standardized allure of what cannot be possessed. The failure to explain precisely what it is about someone that appears so peculiarly engaging might also speak to something enduringly mysterious, strange, and fundamental to experience.

Of course, as far as stage presence is concerned, it turns out that you can actually pinpoint the market rate plus $20 convenience fee for basking in the reflected glory of movie stars appearing on stage together. When Ian McKellen's Gogo and Patrick Stewart's Didi embraced each other the first time in the show, the audience responded with appreciative applause and cooing that spoke more to how the attendants imagined the two actors to be “in real life” than to what that embrace meant in the context of yet another star-studded Waiting for Godot.⁴ But the price of admission can't describe how McKellen's Gogo broke my heart when, standing in a hole in the stage, he looked to Didi and croaked, “We are happy … What do we do now, now that we are happy?” To dive into that moment, to describe how the smallest gestures can disorient in the largest ways, means trading in the repeatability of cultural materialism or psychology, the falsifiability demanded by scientific inquiry, and taking up in their place the precision and ambiguity of poetry, of speculation.

Which is where stage presence belongs. What could be more deflating than to conclude that my attention fell to this or that performer because she reminded me of The Virgin, or because as a member of the bourgeoisie I am arranged to consume spectacle, or because the performer enacted a series of bodily shifts to which I as a biped am destined to respond with curiosity, or because the latest science says that human brains operate in such and such a way? These interpretations might explain stage presence, but they do not seem able to describe it, because a successful description of stage presence will leave something to the imagination. One need not wheel out portmanteaux like “energy” or “feeling,” or confine stage presence to an island of cultural luxury as a result. What might be unknowable, thrilling, and astonishing could still be necessary.

As a heightened experience of others, stage presence concerns and foregrounds how I attend to others and what it means to be with other people. It suggests a variety of possible relations between attendants and performers and yet other attendants. My sense of attachment to and distance from others arises amidst these possibilities. Thinking about stage presence means thinking about how attending to some people differently than others, perhaps more than others, transforms all those involved. Thinking about stage presence, then, means thinking about the configuration of responsibility between others and myself. In other words, stage presence is an ethical matter.

It becomes one by posing questions of perception, of how I attend to other people. Locating stage presence in or with the performer pushes towards a particular model of perception in which objects simply are and I take in their manifestations like a recording device. Perception becomes passive, more like reception. And, just like the classic model of stage presence, it happens to the perceiver.

But perception doesn't happen to anyone. It is something people do. It's how people are. Or so phenomenology would have us believe.

A plunge into the world

Phenomenology operates as a poetics of experience. It seeks organizing principles to be sure, but these serve to further open the horizons of perception. Instead of ratifying what is perceived, a poetics of experience describes the strangeness of perception. As such, it offers a model of embodied—and embodying—analysis ideally suited for reflecting on performance.⁵

Phenomenology has since its formalization in the early twentieth century by philosopher Edmund Husserl (1859–1938) insisted on the irreducible connection between understanding the world and experiences of it. Rather than seeking the truth of human experience in abstract concepts, phenomenology has, broadly speaking, argued that corporeal involvement with the world forms the linchpin to understanding that world. For French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1908–1961), this branch of philosophy “is not the reflection of a prior truth, but rather, like art, the actualization of a truth” (Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception lxxxiv).⁶ Phenomenology does not take for granted that “laws” exist to which I might gain access ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Figures
• Acknowledgements
• Preface
• 1 May I have your attention
• 2 Mimicry and the urgency of differences
• 3 A unique phenomenon of distance
• 4 Disorienting
• 5 The ground of ethical failure
• Bibliography
• Index